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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14103 ***
+
+PROSE FANCIES
+
+(SECOND SERIES)
+
+BY
+
+RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
+
+
+
+LONDON: JOHN LANE
+
+CHICAGO: H.S. STONE AND CO.
+
+1896
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MAGGIE LE GALLIENNE
+
+WITH LOVE
+
+  Poor are the gifts of the poet--
+  Nothing but words!
+  The gifts of kings are gold,
+  Silver, and flocks and herds,
+  Garments of strange soft silk,
+  Feathers of wonderful birds,
+  Jewels and precious stones,
+  And horses white as the milk--
+  These are the gifts of kings:
+  But the gifts that the poet brings
+  Are nothing but words.
+
+  Forty thousand words!
+  Take them--a gift of flies!
+  Words that should have been birds,
+  Words that should have been flowers,
+  Words that should have been stars
+  In the eternal skies.
+  Forty thousand words!
+  Forty thousand tears--
+  All out of two sad eyes.
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS                                              PAGE
+
+  A SEVENTH-STORY HEAVEN,                                 1
+  SPRING BY PARCEL POST,                                 20
+  THE GREAT MERRY-GO-ROUND,                              27
+  THE BURIAL OF ROMEO AND JULIET,                        39
+  VARIATIONS UPON WHITEBAIT,                             49
+  THE ANSWER OF THE ROSE,                                58
+  ABOUT THE SECURITIES,                                  67
+  THE BOOM IN YELLOW,                                    79
+  LETTER TO AN UNSUCCESSFUL LITERARY MAN,                90
+  A POET IN THE CITY,                                    98
+  BROWN ROSES,                                          108
+  THE DONKEY THAT LOVED A STAR,                         112
+  ON LOVING ONE'S ENEMIES,                              119
+  THE DRAMATIC ART OF LIFE,                             125
+  THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX,                  135
+  THE FALLACY OF A NATION,                              145
+  THE GREATNESS OF MAN,                                 154
+  DEATH AND TWO FRIENDS,                                171
+  A SEAPORT IN THE MOON,                                187
+
+
+
+
+A SEVENTH-STORY HEAVEN
+
+
+At one end of the city that I love there is a tall, dingy pile of
+offices that has evidently seen more prosperous fortunes. It is not the
+aristocratic end. It is remote from the lordly street of the fine shops
+of the fair women, where in the summer afternoons the gay bank clerks
+parade arm-in-arm in the wake of the tempestuous petticoat. It lies
+aside from the great exchange which looks like a scene from _Romeo and
+Juliet_ in the moonlight, from the town-hall from whose clocked and
+gilded cupola ring sweet chimes at midnight, and whence, throned above
+the city, a golden Britannia, in the sight of all men, is seen visibly
+ruling the waves--while in the square below the death of Nelson is
+played all day in stone, with a frieze of his noble words about the
+pedestal. England expects! What an influence that stirring challenge
+has yet upon the hearts of men may be seen by any one who will study the
+faces of the busy, imaginative cotton-brokers, who, in the thronged and
+humming mornings, sell what they have never seen to a customer they will
+never see.
+
+In fact, the end I mean is just the very opposite end to that. It is the
+end where the cotton that everybody sells and nobody buys _is_ seen,
+piled in great white stacks, or swinging in the air from the necks of
+mighty cranes, cranes that could nip up an elephant with as little ado,
+and set him down on the wharf, with a box on his ugly ears for his
+cowardly trumpeting. It is the end that smells of tar, the domain of the
+harbourmasters, where the sailor finds a 'home,'--not too sweet, and
+where the wild sea is tamed in a maze of granite squares and basins; the
+end where the riggings and buildings rise side by side, and a clerk
+might swing himself out upon the yards from his top-floor desk. Here is
+the Custom House, and the conversation that shines is full of freightage
+and dock dues; here are the shops that sell nothing but oilskins,
+sextants, and parrots, and here the taverns do a mighty trade in rum.
+
+It was in this quarter, for a brief sweet time, that Love and Beauty
+made their strange home, as though a pair of halcyons should choose to
+nest in the masthead of a cattleship. Love and Beauty chose this
+quarter, as, alas! Love and Beauty must choose so many things--for its
+cheapness. Love and Beauty were poor, and office rents in this quarter
+were exceptionally low. But what should Love and Beauty do with an
+office? Love was a poor poet in need of a room for his bed and his
+rhymes, and Beauty was a little blue-eyed girl who loved him.
+
+It was a shabby, forbidding place, gloomy and comfortless as a warehouse
+on the banks of Styx. No one but Love and Beauty would have dared to
+choose it for their home. But Love and Beauty have a great confidence in
+themselves--a confidence curiously supported by history,--and they never
+had a moment's doubt that this place was as good as another for an
+earthly Paradise. So Love signed an agreement for one great room at the
+very top, the very masthead of the building, and Beauty made it pretty
+with muslin curtains, flowers, and dainty makeshifts of furniture, but
+chiefly with the light of her own heavenly face. A stroke of luck coming
+one day to the poet, the lovers, with that extravagance which the poor
+alone have the courage to enjoy, procured a piano on the kind-hearted
+hire-purchase system, a system specially conceived for lovers. Then,
+indeed, for many a wonderful night that room was not only on the seventh
+floor, but in the seventh heaven; and as Beauty would sit at the piano,
+with her long hair flying loose, and her soul like a whirl of starlight
+about her brows, a stranger peering in across the soft lamplight, seeing
+her face, hearing her voice, would deem that the long climb, flight
+after flight of dreary stair, had been appropriately rewarded by a
+glimpse of heaven.
+
+Certainly it must have seemed a strange contrast from the life about and
+below it. The foot of that infernal stair plunged in the warm
+rum-and-thick-twist atmosphere of a sailor's tavern--and 'The Jolly
+Shipmates' was a house of entertainment by no means to be despised.
+Often have I sat there with the poet, drinking the whisky from which
+Scotland takes its name, among wondering sea-boots and sou'-westers, who
+could make nothing of that wild hair and that still wilder talk.
+
+From the kingdom of rum and tar you mounted into a zone of commission
+agents fund shipbrokers, a chill, unoccupied region, in which every
+small office bore the names of half a dozen different firms, and yet
+somehow could not contrive to look busy. Finally came an airy echoing
+landing, a region of empty rooms, which the landlords in vain
+recommended as studios to a city that loved not art. Here dwelt the
+keeper and his kind-hearted little wife, and no one besides save Love
+and Beauty. There was thus a feeling of rarefaction in the atmosphere,
+as though at this height it was only the Alpine flora of humanity that
+could find root and breathing. But once along the bare passage and
+through a certain door, and what a sudden translation it was into a
+gracious world of books and flowers and the peace they always bring.
+
+Once upon a time, in that enchanted past where dwell all the dreams we
+love best, precisely, with loving punctuality, at five in the afternoon,
+a pretty, girlish figure, like Persephone escaping from the shades,
+stole through the rough sailors at the foot of that sordid Jacob's
+ladder and made her way to the little heaven at the top.
+
+I shall not describe her, for the good reason that I cannot. Leonardo,
+ever curious of the beauty that was most strangely exquisite, once in an
+inspired hour painted such a face, a face wrought of the porcelain of
+earth with the art of heaven. But, whoever should paint it, God
+certainly made it--must have been the comment of any one who caught a
+glimpse of that little figure vanishing heavenwards up that stair, like
+an Assumption of Fra Angelico's--that is, any one interested in art and
+angels.
+
+She had not long to wait outside the door she sought, for the poet, who
+had listened all day for the sound, had ears for the whisper of her
+skirts as she came down the corridor, and before she had time to knock
+had already folded her in his arms. The two babes in that thieves' wood
+of commission agents and shipbrokers stood silent together for a
+moment, in the deep security of a kiss such as the richest millionaire
+could never buy--and then they fell to comparing notes of their day's
+work. The poet had had one of his rare good days. He had made no money,
+his post had been even more disappointing than usual,--but he had
+written a poem, the best he had ever written, he said, as he always said
+of his last new thing. He had been burning to read it to somebody all
+afternoon--had with difficulty refrained from reading it to the
+loquacious little keeper's wife as she brought him some coals--so it was
+not to be expected that he should wait a minute before reading it to her
+whom indeed it strove to celebrate. With arms round each other's necks,
+they bent over the table littered with the new-born poem, all blots and
+dashes like the first draft of a composer's score, and the poet, deftly
+picking his way among the erasures and interlineations, read aloud the
+beautiful words--with a full sense of their beauty!--to ears that deemed
+them more beautiful even than they were. The owners of this now valuable
+copyright allow me to irradiate my prose with three of the verses.
+
+'Ah! what,' half-chanted, half-crooned the poet--
+
+  'Ah! what a garden is your hair!--
+    Such treasure as the kings of old,
+    In coffers of the beaten gold,
+  Laid up on earth--and left it there.'
+
+So tender a reference to hair whose beauty others beside the poet had
+loved must needs make a tender interruption--the only kind of
+interruption the poet could have forgiven--and 'Who,' he continued--
+
+  'Who was the artist of your mouth?
+    What master out of old Japan
+    Wrought it so dangerous to man ...'
+
+And here it was but natural that laughter and kisses should once more
+interrupt--
+
+  'Those strange blue jewels of your eyes,
+    Painting the lily of your face,
+    What goldsmith set them in their place--
+  Forget-me-nots of Paradise?
+
+  'And that blest river of your voice,
+    Whose merry silver stirs the rest
+    Of water-lilies in your breast ...'
+
+At last, in spite of more interruptions, the poem came to an
+end--whereupon, of course, the poet immediately read it through once
+more from the beginning, its personal and emotional elements, he felt,
+having been done more justice on a first reading than its artistic
+excellences.
+
+'Why, darling, it is splendid,' was his little sweetheart's comment;
+'you know how happy it makes me to think it was written for me, don't
+you?' And she took his hands and looked up at him with eyes like the
+morning sky.
+
+Romance in poetry is almost exclusively associated with very refined
+ethereal matters, stars and flowers and such like--happily, in actual
+life it is often associated with much humbler objects. Lovers, like
+children, can make their paradises out of the quaintest materials.
+Indeed, our paradises, if we only knew, are always cheap enough; it is
+our hells that are so expensive. Now these lovers--like, if I mistake
+not, many other true lovers before and since--when they were
+particularly happy, when some special piece of good luck had befallen
+them, could think of no better paradise than a little dinner together in
+their seventh-story heaven. 'Ah! wilderness were Paradise enow!'
+
+To-night was obviously such an occasion. But, alas! where was the money
+to come from? They didn't need much--for it is wonderful how happy you
+can be on five shillings, if you only know how. At the same time it is
+difficult to be happy on ninepence--which was the entire fortune of the
+lovers at the moment. Beauty laughingly suggested that her celebrated
+hair might prove worth the price of their dinner. The poet thought a
+pawnbroker might surely be found to advance ten shillings on his
+poem--the original MS. too,--else had they nothing to pawn, save a few
+gold and silver dreams which they couldn't spare. What was to be done?
+Sell some books, of course! It made them shudder to think how many poets
+they had eaten in this fashion. It was sheer cannibalism--but what was
+to be done? Their slender stock of books had been reduced entirely to
+poetry. If there had only been a philosopher or a modern novelist, the
+sacrifice wouldn't have seemed so unnatural. And then Beauty's eyes fell
+upon a very fat informing-looking volume on the poet's desk.
+
+'Wouldn't this do?' she said.
+
+'Why, of course!' he exclaimed; 'the very thing. A new history of
+socialism just sent me for review. Hang the review; we want our dinner,
+don't we, little one? And then I've read the preface, and looked through
+the index--quite enough to make a column of, with a plentiful supply of
+general principles thrown in! Why, of course, there's our dinner for
+certain, dull and indigestible as it looks. It's worth fifty minor poets
+at old Moser's. Come along....'
+
+So off went the happy pair--ah! how much happier was Beauty than ever so
+many fine ladies one knows who have only, so to say, to rub their
+wedding-rings for a banquet to rise out of the ground, with the most
+distinguished guests around the table, champagne of the best, and
+conversation of the worst.
+
+Old Moser found histories of socialism profitable, more profitable
+perhaps than socialism, and he actually gave five-and-sixpence for the
+volume. With the ninepence already in their pockets, you will see that
+they were now possessors of quite a small fortune. Six-and-threepence!
+It wouldn't pay for one's lunch nowadays. Ah! but that is because the
+poor alone know the art of dining.
+
+You needn't wish to be happier and merrier than those two lovers, as
+they gaily hastened to that bright and cosy corner of the town where
+those lovely ham-and-beef shops make glad the faces of the passers-by. O
+those hams with their honest shining faces, polished like mahogany--and
+the man inside so happy all day slicing them with those wonderful long
+knives (which, of course, the superior class of reader has never seen)
+worn away to a veritable thread, a mere wire, but keen as Excalibur.
+Beauty used to calculate in her quaint way how much steel was worn away
+with each pound of ham, and how much therefore went to the sandwich. And
+what an artist was the carver! What a true eye! what a firm, flexible
+wrist! never a shaving of fat too much--he was too great an artist for
+that. Then there were those dear little cream cheeses, and those little
+brown jugs of yellow cream come all the way from Devonshire--you could
+hear the cows lowing across the rich pasture, and hear the milkmaids
+singing and the milk whizzing into the pail, as you looked at them.
+
+And then those perfectly lovely sausages--I beg the reader's pardon! I
+forgot that the very mention of the word smacks of vulgarity. Yet, all
+the same, I venture to think that a secret taste for sausages among the
+upper classes is more widespread than we have any idea of. I confess
+that Beauty and her poet were at first ashamed of admitting their vulgar
+frailty to each other. They needed to know each other very well first.
+Yet there is nothing, when once confessed, that brings two people so
+close as--a taste for sausages.
+
+'You darling!' exclaimed Beauty, with something like tears in her voice,
+when her poet first admitted this touch of nature--and then next moment
+they were in fits of laughter that a common taste for a very 'low' food
+should bring tears to their eyes! But such are the vagaries of love--as
+you will know, if you know anything about it--'vulgar,' no doubt, though
+only the vulgar would so describe them--for it is only vulgarity that
+is always 'refined.'
+
+Then there was the florist's to visit. What beautiful trades some people
+ply! To sell flowers is surely like dealing in fairies. Beautiful must
+grow the hands that wire them, and sweet the flower-girl's every
+thought!
+
+There remained but the wine merchant's, or, had we not better say at
+once, the grocer's, for our lovers could afford no rarer vintages than
+Tintara or the golden burgundy of Australia; and it is wonderful to
+think what a sense of festivity one of those portly colonial flagons
+lent to their little dining-table. Sometimes, I may confide, when they
+wanted to feel very dissipated, and were _very_ rich, they would allow
+themselves a small bottle of Benedictine--and you should have seen
+Beauty's eyes as she luxuriously sipped at her green little liqueur
+glass; for, like most innocent people, she enjoyed to the full the
+delight of feeling occasionally wicked. However, these were rare
+occasions, and this night was not one of them.
+
+Half a pound of black grapes completed their shopping, and then, with
+their arms full of their purchases, they made their way home again, the
+two happiest people in what is, after all, a not unhappy world.
+
+Then came the cooking and the laying of the table. For all her Leonardo
+face, Beauty was a great cook--like all good women, she was as earthly
+in some respects as she was heavenly in others, which I hold to be a
+wise combination--and, indeed, both were excellent cooks; and the poet
+was unrivalled at 'washing up,' which, I may say, is the only skeleton
+at these Bohemian feasts.
+
+You should have seen the gusto with which Beauty pricked those
+sausages--I had better explain to the un-Bohemian reader that to attempt
+to cook a sausage without first pricking it vigorously with a fork, to
+allow for the expansion of its juicy gases, is like trying to smoke a
+cigar without first cutting off the end--and oh! to hear again their
+merry song as they writhed in torment in the hissing pan, like Christian
+martyrs raising hymns of praise from the very core of Smithfield fires.
+
+Meanwhile, the poet would be surpassing himself in the setting-out of
+the little table, cutting up the bread reverently as though it were for
+an altar--as indeed it was,--studying the effect of the dish of
+tomatoes, now at this corner, now at that, arranging the flowers with
+much more care than he arranged the adjectives in his sonnets, and
+making ever so sumptuous an effect with that half a pound of grapes.
+
+And then at last the little feast would begin, with a long grace of eyes
+meeting and hands clasping: true eyes that said, 'How good it is to
+behold you, to be awake together in this dream of life!' true hands that
+said, 'I will hold you fast for ever--not death even shall pluck you
+from my hand, shall loose this bond of you and me'; true eyes, true
+hands, that had immortal meanings far beyond the speech of mortal words.
+
+And it had all come out of that dull history of socialism, and had cost
+little more than a crown! What lovely things can be made out of money!
+Strange to think that a little silver coin of no possible use or beauty
+in itself can be exchanged for so much tangible, beautiful pleasure. A
+piece of money is like a piece of opium, for in it lie locked up the
+most wonderful dreams--if you have only the brains and hearts to dream
+them.
+
+When at last the little feast grew near its end, Love and Beauty would
+smoke their cigarettes together; and it was a favourite trick of theirs
+to lower the lamp a moment, so that they might see the stars rush down
+upon them through the skylight which hung above their table. It gave
+them a sense of great sentinels, far away out in the lonely universe,
+standing guard over them, seemed to say that their love was safe in the
+tender keeping of great forces. They were poor, but then they had the
+stars and the flowers and the great poets for their servants and
+friends; and, best of all, they had each other. Do you call that being
+poor?
+
+And then, in the corner, stood that magical box with the ivory keys,
+whose strings waited ready night and day--strange media through which
+the myriad voices, the inner-sweet thoughts, of the great world-soul
+found speech, messengers of the stars to the heart, and of the heart to
+the stars.
+
+Beauty's songs were very simple. She got little practice, for her poet
+only cared to have her sing over and over again the same sweet songs;
+and perhaps if you had heard her sing 'Ask nothing more of me, sweet,'
+or 'Darby and Joan,' you would have understood his indifference to
+variety.
+
+At last the little feast is quite, quite finished. Beauty has gone home;
+her lover still carries her face in his heart as she waved and waved and
+waved to him from the rattling lighted tramcar; long he sits and sits
+thinking of her, gazing up at those lonely ancient stars; the air is
+still bright with her presence, sweet with her thoughts, warm with her
+kisses, and as he turns to the shut piano, he can still see her white
+hands on the keys and her girlish face raised in an ecstasy--Beata
+Beatrix--above the music.
+
+  'O love, my love! if I no more should see
+  Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
+    Nor image of thine eyes in any spring--
+  How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope
+  The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
+    The wind of Death's imperishable wing!'
+
+And then ... he would throw himself upon his bed, and burst into tears.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  'And they are gone: aye, ages long ago
+  These lovers fled away into the storm.'
+
+That seventh-story heaven once more leads a dull life as the office of a
+ship-chandler, and harsh voices grate the air where Beauty sang. The
+books and the flowers and the lovers' faces are gone for ever. I suppose
+the stars are the same, and perhaps they sometimes look down through
+that roof-window, and wonder what has become of those two lovers who
+used to look up at them so fearlessly long ago.
+
+But friends of mine who believe in God say that He has given His angels
+charge concerning that dingy old seventh-floor heaven, and that, for
+those who have eyes to see, there is no place where a great dream has
+been dreamed that is not thus watched over by the guardian angels of
+memory.
+
+_For M. Le G., 25 September 1895._
+
+
+
+
+SPRING BY PARCEL POST
+
+
+  They've taken all the spring from the country to the town--
+  Like the butter and the eggs, and the milk from the cow....
+
+So began to jig and jingle my thoughts as in my letters and newspapers
+this morning I read, buried alive among the solitary fastnesses of the
+Surrey hills, the last news from town. The news I envied most was that
+spring had already reached London. 'Now,' ran a pretty article on spring
+fashions, 'the sunshine makes bright the streets, and the
+flower-baskets, like huge bouquets, announce the gay arrival of spring.'
+I looked up and out through my hillside window. The black ridge on the
+other side of the valley stood a grim wall of burnt heather against the
+sky--which sky, like the bullets in the nursery rhyme, was made
+unmistakably of lead; a close rain was falling methodically, and,
+generally speaking, the world looked like a soaked mackintosh. It wasn't
+much like the gay arrival of spring, and grimly I mused on the
+advantages of life in town.
+
+Certainly, it did seem hard, I reflected, that town should be ahead of
+us even in such a country matter as spring. Flower-baskets indeed! Why,
+we haven't as much as a daisy for miles around. It is true that on the
+terrace there the crocuses blaze like a street on fire, that the
+primroses thicken into clumps, lying among their green leaves like
+pounds of country butter; it is true that the blue cones of the little
+grape hyacinth are there, quaintly formal as a child's toy-flowers; yes!
+and the big Dutch hyacinths are already shamelessly _enceinte_ with
+their buxom waxen blooms, so fat and fragrant--(one is already delivered
+of a fine blossom. Well, that is a fine baby, to be sure! say the other
+hyacinths, with babes no less bonny under their own green aprons--all
+waiting for the doctor sun). Then among the blue-green blades of the
+narcissus, here and there you see a stem topped with a creamish
+chrysalis-like envelope, from which will soon emerge a beautiful eye,
+rayed round with white wings, looking as though it were meant to fly,
+but remaining rooted--a butterfly on a stalk; while all the beds are
+crowded with indeterminate beak and blade, pushing and elbowing each
+other for a look at the sun, which, however, sulkily declines to look at
+them. It is true there is spring on the terrace, but even so it is
+spring imported from the town--spring bought in Holborn, spring
+delivered free by parcel post; for where would the terrace have been but
+for the city seedsman--that magician who sends you strangely spotted
+beans and mysterious bulbs in shrivelled cerements, weird little
+flower-mummies that suggest centuries of forgotten silence in painted
+Egyptian tombs. This strange and shrivelled thing can surely never live
+again, we say, as we hold it in our hands, seeing not the glowing
+circles of colour, tiny rings of Saturn, packed so carefully inside this
+flower-egg, the folds of green and silver silk wound round and round the
+precious life within.
+
+But, of course, this is all the seedsman's cunning, and no credit to
+Nature; and I repeat, that were it not for railways and the parcel
+post--goodness knows whether we should ever get any spring at all in the
+country! Think of the days when it had to travel down by stage-coach.
+For, left to herself, what is the best Nature can do for you with March
+well on the way? Personally, I find the face of the country practically
+unchanged. It is, to all intents and purposes, the same as it has been
+for the last three or four months--as grim, as unadorned, as bleak, as
+draughty, and generally as comfortless as ever. There isn't a flower to
+be seen, hardly a bird worth listening to, not a tree that is not
+winter-naked, and not a chair to sit down upon. If you want flowers on
+your walks you must bring them with you; songs, you must take a poet
+under your arm; and if you want to rest, lean laboriously on your
+stick--or take your chance of rheumatism.
+
+Of course your specialists, your botanists, your nature-detectives, will
+tell you otherwise. They have surprised a violet in the act of
+blossoming; after long and excited chase have discovered a clump of
+primroses in their wild state; seen one butterfly, heard one cuckoo. But
+as one swallow does not make a summer, it takes more than one cuckoo to
+make a spring. I confess that only yesterday I saw three sulphur
+butterflies, with my own eyes; I admit the catkins, and the
+silver-notched palm; and I am told on good colour-authority that there
+is a lovely purplish bloom, almost like plum-bloom, over certain copses
+in the valley; by taking thought, I have observed the long horizontal
+arms of the beech growing spurred with little forked branches of
+spear-shaped buds, and I see little green nipples pushing out through
+the wolf-coloured rind of the dwarf fir-trees. Spring is arming in
+secret to attack the winter--that is sure enough, but spring in secret
+is no spring for me. I want to see her marching gaily with green
+pennons, and flashing sun-blades, and a good band.
+
+I want butterflies as they have them at the Lyceum--'butterflies all
+white,' 'butterflies all blue,' 'butterflies of gold,' and I should
+particularly fancy 'butterflies all black.' But there, again, you
+see,--you must go to town, within hearing of Mrs. Patrick Campbell's
+_voix d'or_. I want the meadows thickly inlaid with buttercups and
+daisies; I want the trees thick with green leaves, the sky all larks and
+sunshine; I want hawthorn and wild roses--both at once; I want some go,
+some colour, some warmth in the world. Oh, where are the pipes of Pan?
+
+The pipes of Pan are in town, playing at street corners and in the
+centres of crowded circuses, piled high with flower-baskets blazing with
+refulgent flowery masses of white and gold. Here are the flowers you can
+only buy in town; simple flowers enough, but only to be had in town.
+Here are fragrant banks of violets every few yards, conflagrations of
+daffodils at every crossing, and narcissus in scented starry garlands
+for your hair.
+
+You wander through the Strand, or along Regent Street, as through the
+meadows of Enna--sweet scents, sweet sounds, sweet shapes, are all about
+you; the town-butterflies, white, blue, and gold, 'wheel and shine' and
+flutter from shop to shop, suddenly resurgent from their winter
+wardrobes as from a chrysalis; bright eyes flash and flirt along the
+merry, jostling street, while the sun pours out his golden wine
+overhead, splashing it about from gilded domes and bright-faced
+windows--and ever are the voices at the corners and the crossings
+calling out the sweet flower-names of the spring!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But here in the country it is still all rain and iron. I am tired of
+waiting for this slow-moving provincial spring. Let us to the town to
+meet the spring--for:
+
+  They've taken all the spring from the country to the town--
+    Like the butter and the eggs, and the milk from the cow;
+    And if you want a primrose, you write to London now,
+  And if you need a nightingale, well,--Whiteley sends it down.
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT MERRY-GO-ROUND
+
+
+In an age curious of new pleasures, the merry-go-round seems still to
+maintain its ancient popularity. I was the other day the delighted,
+indeed the fascinated, spectator of one in full swing in an old
+Thames-side town. It was a very superior example, with a central musical
+engine of extraordinary splendour, and horses that actually curveted, as
+they swirled maddeningly round to the strains of 'The Man that Broke the
+Bank at Monte Carlo.' How I longed to join the wild riders! But though I
+am a brave man, I confess that to ride a merry-go-round in front of a
+laughter-loving Cockney public is more than I can dare. I had to content
+myself with watching the faces of the riders. I noticed particularly one
+bright-eyed little girl, whose whole passionate young soul seemed to be
+on fire with ecstasy, and for whom it was not difficult to prophesy
+trouble when time should bring her within reach of more dangerous
+excitements. Then there was a stolid little boy, dull and unmoved in
+expression, as though he were in church. Life, one felt sure, would be
+safe enough, and stupid enough, for him; the world would have no music
+to stir or draw him. The fifes would go down the street with a sweet
+sound of marching feet, and the eyes of other men would brighten and
+their blood be all glancing spears and streaming banners, but he would
+remain behind his counter; from the strange hill beyond the town the
+dear, unholy music, so lovely in the ears of other men and maids, would
+call to him in vain, and morning and evening the stars would sing above
+his draper's shop, but he never hear a word.
+
+What particularly struck me was the number of quite grown-up, even
+elderly, people who came and had their pennyworth of horse-exercise. Now
+it was a grave young workman quietly smoking his pipe as he revolved;
+now it was a stout middle-aged woman returning from marketing, on whom
+the Zulu music and the whirling horses laid their irresistible spells.
+Unless ye become as little children!
+
+Is the Kingdom of Heaven really at hand? For, indeed, men and women, and
+perhaps particularly literary men and women, are once more becoming as
+little children in their pleasures.
+
+Seriously, one of the most curious and significant of recent literary
+phenomena is the sudden return of the literary man to physical, and
+so-called 'Philistine,' pleasures and modes of recreation. Perhaps
+Stevenson set the fashion with his canoe and his donkey. But at the
+moment that he was valiantly daring any one to tell him whether there
+was anything better worth doing 'than fooling among boats,' Edward
+Fitzgerald, all unconscious and careless of literary fashions, was
+giving still more practical expression to the physical faith that was in
+him, by going shares in a Lowestoft herring-lugger, and throwing his
+heart as well as his money into the fortunes of its noble skipper
+'Posh.' A literary man _par excellence_, Mr. Lang reproaches his sires
+for his present way of life--
+
+  'Why lay your gipsy freedom down
+  And doom your child to pen and ink?'
+
+and by steady and persistent golfing, and writing about angling and
+cricket, comes as near to the noble savage as is possible to so
+incorrigibly civilised a man. Mr. Henley--that Berserker of the
+pen--sings the sword with a vigour that makes one curious to see him
+using it, and we all know Mr. Kipling's views on the matter. Then Mr.
+Bernard Shaw rides a bicycle!
+
+Those men of letters whose inclinations or opportunities do not lead
+them to these out-of-door, and more or less ferocious, pleasures seek to
+forget themselves at the music-hall, the Aquarium, or the numerous
+Earl's Court exhibitions. They become amateurs of foreign dancing,
+connoisseurs of the trapeze, or they leave their great minds at home and
+go up the Great Wheel. Earl's Court, particularly, is becoming quite a
+modern Vauxhall--Tan-ta-ra-ra! Earl's Court! Earl's Court!--and Mr. Imre
+Kiralfy, with his conceptions and designs, is to our generation what
+Albert Smith was to the age of Dickens and Edmund Yates.
+
+It takes some experience of life to realise how right this is; to
+realise that, after all our fine philosophies and cocksure sciences,
+there is no better answer to the riddle of things than a good game of
+cricket or an exciting spin on one's 'bike.' The real inner significance
+of Earl's Court--Mr. Kiralfy will no doubt be prepared to hear--is the
+failure of science as an answer to life. We give up the riddle, and
+enjoy ourselves with our wiser children. Simple pleasures, no doubt, for
+the profound! But what is simple, and what is profound?
+
+The simple joy we get from 'fooling among boats' on a summer day, the
+thrill of a well-hit ball, the rapture of a skilful dive, are no more
+easy to explain than the more complicated pleasures of literature, or
+art, or religion. And why is it--to come closer to our theme--that the
+round or the whirling have such attraction for us? What is the secret of
+the fascination of the circle? Why is it that the turning of anything,
+be it but a barrel-organ or a phrase, holds one as with an hypnotic
+power? I confess that I can never genuinely pity a knife-grinder,
+however needy. Think of the pleasure of driving that wheel all day, the
+merry chirp of the knife on the stone, and the crisp, bright spray of
+the flying sparks! Why, he does 'what some men dream of all their
+lives'! Wheels of all kinds have the same strange charm; mill-wheels,
+colliery-wheels, spinning-wheels, water-wheels, and wheeling waters:
+there may--who knows?--have been a certain pleasure in being broken on
+the wheel, and, at all events, that hideous punishment is another
+curious example of the fascination of the circle. It would take a whole
+volume to illustrate the prevalence of the circle in external nature, in
+history, and, even more significant, in language. We all know, or think
+we know, that the world is round--
+
+  'This orb--this round
+  Of sight and sound,'
+
+as Mr. Quiller Couch sings--though I remember a porter at school who was
+sure that it was flat, and who used to say that Hamlet's
+
+  'How weary, stale, _flat_, and unprofitable
+  Seem to me all the uses of this _world_!'
+
+was a cryptic reference to Shakespeare's secret belief in his theory.
+Many of the things we love most are round. Is not money, according to
+the proverb, made round that it may go round, and are not the men most
+in demand described as 'all-round men'? Nor are all-round women without
+their admirers. Events, we know, move in a circle, as time moves in
+cycles--though, alas! not on them. The ballet and the bicycle are
+popular forms of the circle, and it is the charm of the essay to be
+'roundabout.'
+
+Again, how is it that that which on a small scale does not impress us at
+all, when on a large scale impresses us so much? What is the secret of
+the impressiveness of size, bulk, height, depth, speed, and mileage?
+Philosophically, a mountain is no more wonderful than a molehill, yet no
+man is knighted for climbing a molehill. One little drop of water and
+one little grain of sand are essentially as wonderful as 'the mighty
+ocean' or 'the beauteous land' to which they contribute. A balloon is
+no more wonderful than an air-bubble, and were you to build an Atlantic
+liner as big as the Isle of Wight it would really be no more remarkable
+than an average steam-launch. Nobody marvels at the speed of a snail,
+yet, given a snail's pace to start with, an express train follows as a
+matter of course. Movement, not the rate of movement, is the mystery.
+Precisely the same materials, the same forces, the same methods, are
+employed in the little as in the big of these examples. Why should mere
+accumulation, reiteration, and magnification make the difference? We may
+ask why? But it does, for all that. If we answer that these mammoth
+multiplications impress us because they are so much bigger, taller,
+fatter, faster, etc., than we are, the question arises--How many times
+bigger than a man must a mountain be before it impresses us? Perhaps the
+problem has already been tackled by the schoolman who pondered how many
+angels could dance on the point of a needle.
+
+However, these and similar first principles, it will readily be seen,
+are far from being irrelevant for the visitor at the Earl's Court
+Exhibition. No doubt they are continually discussed by the thousands who
+daily and nightly throng that very charming dream-world which Mr.
+Kiralfy has built 'midmost the beating' of our 'steely sea.'
+
+To an age that is over-read and over-fed Mr. Kiralfy brings the message:
+'Leave your great minds at home, and go up the Great Wheel!' and I heard
+his voice and obeyed. The sensation is, I should say, something between
+going up in a balloon and being upon shipboard--a sensation compounded,
+maybe, of the creaking of the circular rigging, the pleasure of rising
+in the air, the freshening of the air as you ascend, the strange feeling
+of the earth receding and spreading out beneath you, the curious
+diminution of the people below--to their proper size. You will hear
+original minds all about you comparing them to ants, and it is curious
+to notice the involuntary feeling of contempt that possesses you as you
+watch them. I believe one has a half-defined illusion that we are
+growing greater as they are growing smaller. Ants and flies! ants and
+flies! with here and there a fiery centipede in the shape of a District
+train dashing in and out amongst them. We lose the power of
+understanding their motions, and their throngs and movements do indeed
+seem as purposeless at this height as the hurry-scurrying about an
+anthill. At this height, indeed, one seems to understand how small a
+matter a bank smash may seem to the Almighty; though, as a lady said to
+me--as we clung tightly together in terror 'a-top of the topmost
+bough'--it must be gratifying to see so many churches.
+
+Those who would keep their illusions about the beauty of London had
+better stay below, at least in the daytime, for it makes one's heart
+sink to look on those miles and miles of sordid grey roofs huddled in
+meaningless rows and crescents, just for all the world like a huge
+child's box of wooden bricks waiting to be arranged into some
+intelligible pattern. Of course, this is not London proper. Were the
+Great Wheel set up in Trafalgar Square, one is fain to hope that the
+view from it would be less disheartening--though it might be better not
+to try.
+
+By night, except for the bright oases of the Indian Exhibition, the view
+is little more than a black blank, a great inky plain with faint sparks
+and rows of light here and there, as though the world had been made of
+saltpetre paper, and had lately been set fire to. Were you a traveller
+from Mars you would say that the world was very badly lighted. But, for
+all that, night is the time for the Great Wheel, for the conflagration
+of pleasure at our feet makes us forget the void dark beyond. Then the
+Wheel seems like a great revolving spider's web, with fireflies
+entangled in it at every turn, and the little engine-house at the
+centre, with its two electric lights, seems like the great lord spider,
+with monstrous pearls for his eyes. And, as in the daytime the height
+robs the depth of its significance, strips poor humanity of any
+semblance of impressive or attractive meaning, at night the effect is
+just the reverse. What a fairy-world is this opening out beneath our
+feet, with its golden glowing squares and circles and palaces, with its
+lamplit gardens and pagodas! and who are these gay and beautiful beings
+flitting hither and thither, and passing from one bright garden to
+another on the stream of pleasure? If this many-coloured, passionate
+dream be really human life, let us hasten to be down amongst it once
+more! And, after all, is not this flattering night aspect of the world
+more true than that disheartening countenance of it in the daylight?
+Those golden squares and glowing gardens and flashing waters are, of
+course, an illusion of the magician Kiralfy's, yet what power could the
+illusion have upon us without the realities of beauty and love and
+pleasure it attracts there?
+
+
+
+
+THE BURIAL OF ROMEO AND JULIET
+
+
+One morning of all mornings the citizens of Verona were startled by
+strange news. Tragic forces, to which they had been accustomed to pay
+little heed, had been at work in their city during the dark hours, and
+young Romeo of the Montagues, handsome, devil-may-care lad as they had
+known him, and little Juliet of the Capulets, that madcap, merry, gentle
+young mistress, lay dead, side by side in the church of Santa Maria.
+
+Death! surely they were used to death! and Love, flower of the clove!
+they were used to _love_. But here were love and death, that somehow
+they could not understand. So they hurried in wondering groups to Santa
+Maria, that they might gaze at the dead lovers, and thus perhaps come to
+understand.
+
+Romeo and Juliet lay receiving their guests in the vault of the
+Capulets, with a strange smile of welcome for all who came. And their
+presence-chamber was bright with candles and flowers, and sweet with
+the sweet smell of death. The air that had drunk in their wild words
+and their last long looks of heavenly love still hung about the dark
+corners, as the air where a rose has been holds a little while the
+memory of its breath. Yes! that morning, in that dank but shining
+tomb, you might draw into you the very breath of love. The air you
+breathed had passed through the sweet lungs of Juliet, it had been
+etherealised with her holy passion, and washed clean with her lovely
+words. And now, for a little while yet, it feasted on the fair peace
+of their glad young faces. To-morrow, or the next day, or the next
+week, they would belong to the unvisited treasure-house of the past,
+but now this morning of all mornings, this day that could never come
+again, they still belonged to the real and radiant present.
+
+Flowers there are that bloom but once in a hundred years, but here in
+this tomb had blossomed one of those marvellous flowers that bloom but
+once throughout eternity. Poets and kings in after-times, O men of
+Verona, will yearn to have seen what you look upon to-day. For you, you
+thick and greasy citizens, are chosen out of all time to behold this
+beauty. There were once in the world thousands of men and women who had
+heard the very words of Christ as they fell from His lips, words that we
+may only read. There have been men, actual living, foolish men, who have
+looked on at the valour of Horatius, men who from the crowded banks of
+the Nile have watched the living body of Cleopatra step into her gilded
+barge, men who, standing idle in the streets of Florence, have seen the
+love-light start in the great Dante's eyes, seen his hand move to his
+laden heart, as the little Beatrice passed him by among her maidens.
+Base men of the past, by the indulgent accident of time, have been
+granted to behold these wonders, and now for you, O men of Verona, a
+like wonder has been born.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Romeo and Juliet lay receiving their guests in the vault of the
+Capulets, with a strange smile of welcome for all who came.
+
+It had been an innocent little desire, yet had all the world come
+against it. It had been a simple little desire, yet too strong for all
+the world to break.
+
+Strange this enmity of the world to love, as though men should take arms
+against the song of a bird, or plot against the opening of a flower.
+
+But now, what was this strange homage to a love that a few hours ago had
+no friend in all the daylight, a fearful bliss beneath the secret moon?
+But yesterday a stupid old nurse, a herb-gathering friar, a rascally
+apothecary, had been their only friends, and now was all the world come
+here to do their bidding.
+
+No need to steal again beneath the shade of orchard walls, no need again
+to heed if lark or nightingale sang in the reddening east. For the world
+had grown all warm to love, warm and kind as June to the rose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three days lay Romeo and Juliet receiving their guests in the vault of
+the Capulets, with that strange smile of welcome for all who came.
+Three days the world worshipped the love it could not understand, but
+still came dense and denser throngs to worship. For the news of the
+wonderful flower that had blossomed in Verona had gone far and wide, and
+travellers from distant cities kept pouring in to look at those strange
+young lovers, who had deemed the world well lost so that they might
+leave it together.
+
+Then the governor of the city decreed, as the time drew near when the
+two lovers must be left to their peace, and it was ill that any should
+lose the sight of this marvel, that on the fourth day they should be
+carried through the streets in the eyes of all the people, and then be
+buried together in the vault of the Capulets--for by this burial in the
+same tomb, says the old chronicler who was first honoured with the
+telling of their sweet story, the governor hoped to bring about a peace
+between the Montagues and Capulets, at least for a little while.
+
+Meanwhile, though Verona was a city of many trades and professions, and
+love and death were idle things, yet was there little said of business
+all these days, and little else done but talk of the two lovers, of
+whom, indeed, it was true, as it has seldom been true out of Holy Writ,
+that death was swallowed up in victory. During these days also there
+stole a strange sweetness over the city, as though the very spirit of
+love had nested there, and was filling the air with its soft
+breathing--as when in the first days of spring the birds sing so sweetly
+that broken hearts must hide away, and hard hearts grow a little kind.
+Men once more spoke kindly to their wives, and even coarse faces wore a
+gentle light,--just as sometimes at evening the setting sun will turn to
+tenderness even black rocks and frowning towers.
+
+There were many wild stories afloat about the end of the lovers. Some
+said one way and some another. By some the story went that Romeo was
+already dead before Juliet had awakened from her swoon, but others
+declared that the poison had not worked upon him until Juliet's
+awakening had made him awhile forget that he was to die. There were
+those who professed to know the very words of their wild farewell, and
+in fact there had been several witnesses of Juliet's agony over the body
+of her lord. These had told how first she had raved and clung to him,
+and called him 'Romeo,' 'Sweet Sir Romeo,' 'Husband,' and many
+flower-like names, and had petted him and wooed him to come back. Then
+on a sudden she had cried, God-a-mercy--how cold thou art!' and looked
+at him long and strangely. Then had she grown stern, and anon soft.
+'Canst thou not come back, my love? Then must I follow thee. Not so far
+art thou on the way of death, but that I shall overtake thee, and
+together shall we go to Pluto's realm, and seek a kinder world.'
+
+Thereat she had plunged Romeo's dagger into her side, though some said
+she had stopped her heart's beating by the strong will of her great
+love. Yea--such were the distracted rumours--some averred that at the
+last she had curst Christ and His saints, and called upon Venus, who, it
+was rumoured in awestruck whispers, was being worshipped once more in
+secret corners of the world.
+
+It was strong noon when, on the fourth day, Romeo and Juliet were
+carried through the bright and solemn streets, that the world might be
+saved; saved as ever by the spectacle and the worship of a mysterious
+nobility, [comma added by transcriber] an uncomprehended greatness, a
+beauty which haunts not its daily dreams, lifted up by the humble gaze
+of devout eyes into the empyrean of greater souls, stirred to an
+unfamiliar passion, and fired with glimpses of a strange unworldly
+truth.
+
+In the light of the sun the faces of the two lovers, as they lay amid
+their flowers, seemed to have grown a little weary, but they still wore
+their sweet and royal smile, and their laurelled brows were very white
+and proud.
+
+And in the faces that looked upon them, as they moved slowly by, with
+sweet death music, and the hushed marching of feet, and the wafted odour
+of lilies, there was to be seen strangely blent a great pity for their
+tragedy and a heavenly tenderness for their love. It was like a dream
+passing down the streets of a dream, so deep and tender was the silence,
+for only the hearts of men were speaking; though here and there a girl
+sobbed, or a young man buried his face in his sleeve, and the sternest
+eyes were dashed with the holy water of tears. And with the pity and
+tenderness, who shall say but that in all that silent heart-speech there
+was no little envy of the two who had loved so truly and died in the
+springtide of their love, before the ways of love had grown dusty with
+its summer, or dreary with its autumn, before its dreams had petrified
+into duties, and its passion deadened into use?
+
+'Would it were thou and I,' said many wedded eyes one to the other,
+delusively warm and soft for a moment, but all cold and hard again on
+the morrow.
+
+And maybe some poet would say in his heart--
+
+'If you loved her living, my Romeo, what were your love could you but
+see her dead!' for indeed life has no beauty so wonderful as the beauty
+of death.
+
+And, as in all places and times, there was a base remnant that gaped and
+worshipped not, and in their hearts resented all this distinction paid
+to a nobility they could not recognise, as the like had grumbled when
+Cimabue's Madonna had been carried through the streets in glory. But of
+these there is no need that we should take account, any more than of the
+beasts that moved head down amid the pastures outside the town, knowing
+not of the wonder that was passing within. For the ass will munch his
+thistles though the Son of Man be his rider, nor will the sheep look
+aside from his grazing though Apollo be the herdsman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At length the sacred pageant was ended, gone like the passing of an
+aerial music, and the people went to their homes silent, with haunted
+eyes; while the Earth, which had given this beauty, took it back to
+herself, and one more Persephone of human loveliness was shut within the
+gates of the forgetful grave.
+
+
+
+
+VARIATIONS UPON WHITEBAIT
+
+
+A very Pre-Raphaelite friend of mine came to me one day and said _à
+propos_ of his having designed a very Early English chair: 'After all,
+if one has anything to say one might as well put it into a chair!'
+
+I thought the remark rather delicious, as also his other remark when one
+day in a curiosity-shop we were looking at another chair, which the
+dealer declared to be Norman. My friend seated himself in it very
+gravely, and after softly moving about from side to side, testing it, it
+would appear, by the sensation it imparted to the sitting portion of his
+limbs, he solemnly decided: 'I don't think the _flavour_ of this chair
+is Norman!'
+
+I thought of this Pre-Raphaelite brother as the Sphinx and I were seated
+a few evenings ago at our usual little dinner, in our usual little
+sheltered corner, on the Lover's Gallery of one of the great London
+restaurants. The Sphinx says that there is only one place in Europe
+where one can really dine, but as it is impossible to be always within
+reasonable train service of that Montsalvat of cookery, she consents to
+eat with me--she cannot call it dine--at the restaurant of which I
+speak. I being very simple-minded, untravelled, and unlanguaged, think
+it, in my Cockney heart, a very fine place indeed, with its white marble
+pillars surrounding the spacious peristyle, and flashing with a thousand
+brilliant lights and colours; with its stately cooks, clothed in white
+samite, mystic, wonderful, ranged behind a great altar loaded with big
+silver dishes, and the sacred musicians of the temple ranged behind
+them--while in and out go the waiters, clothed in white and black,
+waiters so good and kind that I am compelled to think of Elijah being
+waited on by angels.
+
+They have such an eye for a romance, too, and really take it personally
+to heart if it should befall that our little table is usurped by others
+that know not love. I like them, too, because they really seem to have
+an eye for the strange beauty and charm of the Sphinx, quite an
+unexpected taste for Botticelli. They ill conceal their envy of my lot,
+and sometimes, in the meditative pauses between the courses, I see them
+romantically reckoning how it might be possible by desperately saving
+up, by prodigious windfalls of tips, from unexampled despatch and
+sweetness in their ministrations, how it might be possible in ten years'
+time, perhaps even in five--the lady would wait five years! and her
+present lover could be artistically poisoned meanwhile!--how it might be
+possible to come and sue for her beautiful hand. Then a harsh British
+cry for 'waiter' comes like a rattle and scares away that beautiful
+dream-bird, though, as the poor dreamer speeds on the quest of roast
+beef for four, you can see it still circling with its wonderful blue
+feathers around his pomatumed head.
+
+Ah, yes, the waiters know that the Sphinx is no ordinary woman. She
+cannot conceal even from them the mystical star of her face, they too
+catch far echoes of the strange music of her brain, they too grow
+dreamy with dropped hints of fragrance from the rose of her wonderful
+heart.
+
+How reverently do they help her doff her little cloak of silk and lace!
+with what a worshipful inclination of the head, as in the presence of a
+deity, do they await her verdict of choice between rival soups--shall it
+be 'clear or thick'? And when she decides on 'thick,' how relieved they
+seem to be, as if--well, some few matters remain undecided in the
+universe, but never mind, this is settled for ever--no more doubts
+possible on one portentous issue, at any rate--Madame will take her soup
+'thick.'
+
+'On such a night' our talk fell upon whitebait.
+
+As the Sphinx's silver fork rustled among the withered silver upon her
+plate, she turned to me and said:
+
+'Have you ever thought what beautiful little things these whitebait
+are?'
+
+'Oh, yes,' I replied, 'they are the daisies of the deep sea, the
+threepenny-pieces of the ocean.'
+
+'You dear!' said the Sphinx, who is alone in the world in thinking me
+awfully clever. 'Go on, say something else, something pretty about
+whitebait--there's a subject for you!'
+
+Then it was that, fortunately, I remembered my Pre-Raphaelite friend,
+and I sententiously remarked: 'Of course, if one has anything to say one
+cannot do better than say it about whitebait.... Well, whitebait....'
+
+But here, providentially, the band of the beef--that is, the band behind
+the beef; that is, the band that nightly hymns the beef (the phrase is
+to be had in three qualities)--struck up the overture from _Tannhäuser_,
+which is not the only music that makes the Sphinx forget my existence;
+and thus, forgetting me, she momentarily forgot the whitebait. But I
+remembered, remembered hard--worked at pretty things, as metal-workers
+punch out their flowers of brass and copper. The music swirled about us
+like golden waves, in which swam myriad whitebait, like showers of tiny
+stars, like falling snow. To me it was one grand processional of
+whitebait, silver ripples upon streams of gold.
+
+The music stopped. The Sphinx turned to me with the soul of Wagner in
+her eyes, and then she turned to the waiter: 'Would it be possible,' she
+said, 'to persuade the bandmaster to play that wonderful thing over
+again?'
+
+The waiter seemed a little doubtful, even for the Sphinx, but he went
+off to the bandmaster with the air of a man who has at last an
+opportunity to show that he can dare all for love. Personally, I have a
+suspicion that he poured his month's savings at the bandmaster's feet,
+and begged him to do this thing for the most wonderful lady in the
+world; or perhaps the bandmaster was really a musician, and his
+musician's heart was touched--lonely there amid the beef--to think that
+there was really some one, invisible though she were to him, some
+shrouded silver presence, up there among the beefeaters, who really
+loved to hear great music. Perhaps it was thus made a night he has never
+forgotten; perhaps it changed the whole course of his life--who knows?
+The sweet reassuring request may have come to him at a moment when, sick
+at heart, he was deciding to abandon real music for ever, and settle
+down amid the beef and the beef-music of Old England.
+
+Well, however it was, the waiter came back radiant with a 'Yes' on every
+shining part of him, and if the _Tannhäuser_ had been played well at
+first, certainly the orchestra surpassed themselves this second time.
+
+When the great jinnee of music had once more swept out of the hall, the
+Sphinx turned with shining eyes to the waiter:
+
+'Take,' she said, 'take these tears to the bandmaster. He has indeed
+earned them.'
+
+'Tears, little one!' I said. 'See how they swim like whitebait in the
+fishpools of your eyes!'
+
+'Oh, yes, the whitebait,' rejoined the Sphinx, glad of a subject to hide
+her emotion. 'Now tell me something nice about them, though the poor
+little things have long since disappeared. Tell me, for instance, how
+they get their beautiful little silver waterproofs?'
+
+'Electric Light of the World,' I said, 'it is like this. While they are
+still quite young and full of dreams, their mother takes them out in
+picnic parties of a billion or so at a time to where the spring moon is
+shining, scattering silver from its purse of pearl far over the wide
+waters,--silver, silver, for every little whitebait that cares to swim
+and pick it up. The mother, who has a contract with some such big
+restaurateur as ours, chooses a convenient area of moonlight, and then
+at a given sign they all turn over on their sides, and bask and bask in
+the rays, little fin pressed lovingly against little fin--for this is
+the happiest time in the young whitebait's life: it is at these
+silvering parties that matches are made and future consignments of
+whitebait arranged for. Well, night after night, they thus lie in the
+moonlight, first on one side, then on the other, till by degrees, tiny
+scale by scale, they have become completely lunar-plated. Ah! how sad
+they are when the end of that happy time has come!'
+
+'And what happens to them after that?' asked the Sphinx.
+
+'One night when the moon is hidden their mother comes to them with
+treacherous wile, and suggests that they should go off on a holiday
+again to seek the moon--the moon that for a moment seems captured by the
+pearl-fishers of the sky. And so off they go merrily, but, alas! no moon
+appears; and presently they are aware of unwieldy bumping presences upon
+the surface of the sea, presences as of huge dolphins; and rough voices
+call across the water, till, scared, the little whitebaits turn home in
+flight--to find themselves somehow meshed in an invisible prison, a net
+as fine and strong as air, into which, O agony! they are presently
+hauled, lovely banks of silver, shining like opened coffers beneath the
+coarse and ragged flares of yellow torches. The rest is silence.'
+
+'What sad little lives! and what a cruel world it is!' said the
+Sphinx--as she crunched with her knife through the body of a lark, that
+but yesterday had been singing in the blue sky. Its spirit sang just
+above our heads as she ate, and the air was thick with the grey ghosts
+of all the whitebait she had eaten that night.
+
+But there were no longer any tears in her eyes.
+
+
+
+
+THE ANSWER OF THE ROSE
+
+
+The Sphinx and I sat in our little box at _Romeo and Juliet_. It was the
+first time she had seen that fairy-tale of passion upon the stage. I had
+seen it played once before--in Paradise. Therefore, I rather trembled to
+see it again in an earthly play-house, and as much as possible kept my
+eyes from the stage. All I knew of the performance--but how much was
+that!--was two lovely voices making love like angels; and when there
+were no words, the music told me what was going on. Love speaks so many
+languages.
+
+One might as well look. It was as clear as moonlight to the tragic eye
+within the heart. The Sphinx was gazing on it all with those eyes that
+will never grow old, neither for years nor tears; but though I seemed to
+be seeing nothing but an advertisement of Paderewski pianos on the
+programme, I saw it--oh, didn't I see it?--all. The house had grown
+dark, and the music low and passionate, and for a moment no one was
+speaking. Only, deep in the thickets of my heart there sang a tragic
+nightingale that, happily, only I could hear; and I said to myself, 'Now
+the young fool is climbing the orchard wall! Yes, there go Benvolio and
+Mercutio calling him; and now,--"he jests at scars who never felt a
+wound"--the other young fool is coming out on to the balcony. God help
+them both! They have no eyes--no eyes--or surely they would see the
+shadow that sings "Love! Love! Love!" like a fountain in the moonlight,
+and then shrinks away to chuckle "Death! Death! Death!" in the
+darkness!'
+
+But, soft, what light from yonder window breaks!
+
+The Sphinx turned to me for sympathy--this time it was the soul of
+Shakespeare in her eyes.
+
+'Yes!' I whispered, 'it is the Opening of the Eternal Rose, sung by the
+Eternal Nightingale!'
+
+She pressed my hand approvingly; and while the lovely voices made their
+heavenly love, I slipped out my silver-bound pocket-book of ivory and
+pressed within it the rose which had just fallen from my lips.
+
+The worst of a great play is that one is so dull between the acts. Wit
+is sacrilege, and sentiment is bathos. Not another rose fell from my
+lips during the performance, though that I minded little, as I was the
+more able to count the pearls that fell from the Sphinx's eyes.
+
+It took quite half a bottle of champagne to pull us up to our usual
+spirits, as we sat at supper at a window where we could see London
+spread out beneath us like a huge black velvet flower, dotted with fiery
+embroideries, sudden flaring stamens, and rows of ant-like fireflies
+moving in slow zig-zag processions along and across its petals.
+
+'How strange it seems,' said the Sphinx, 'to think that for every two of
+those moving double-lights, which we know to be the eyes of hansoms, but
+which seem up here nothing but gold dots in a very barbaric pattern of
+black and gold, there are two human beings, no doubt at this time of
+night two lovers, throbbing with the joy of life, and dreaming, heaven
+knows what dreams!'
+
+'Yes,' I rejoined;' and to them I'm afraid we are even more impersonal.
+From their little Piccadilly coracles our watch-tower in the skies is
+merely a radiant facade of glowing windows, and no one of all who glide
+by realises that the spirited illumination is every bit due to your
+eyes. You have but to close them, and every one will be asking what has
+gone wrong with the electric light.'
+
+A little nonsense is a great healer of the heart, and by means of such
+nonsense as this we grew merry again. And anon we grew sentimental and
+poetic, but--thank heaven! we were no longer tragic.
+
+Presently I had news for the Sphinx. 'The rose-tree that grows in the
+garden of my mind,' I said, 'desires to blossom.'
+
+'May it blossom indeed,' she replied; 'for it has been flowerless all
+this long evening; and bring me a rose fresh with all the dews of
+inspiration--no florist's flower, wired and artificially scented, no
+bloom of yesterday's hard-driven brains.'
+
+'I was only thinking,' I said, '_à propos_ of nightingales and roses,
+that though all the world has heard the song of the nightingale to the
+rose, only the nightingale has heard the answer of the rose. You know
+what I mean?'
+
+'Know what you mean! Of course, that's always easy enough,' retorted the
+Sphinx, who knows well how to be hard on me.
+
+'I'm so glad,' I ventured to thrust back; 'for lucidity is the first
+success of expression: to make others see clearly what we ourselves are
+struggling to see, believe with all their hearts what we are just daring
+to hope, is--well, the religion of a literary man!'
+
+'Yes! it's a pretty idea,' said the Sphinx, once more pressing the rose
+of my thought to her brain; 'and indeed it's more than pretty ...'
+
+'Thank you!' I said humbly.
+
+'Yes, it's _true_--and many a humble little rose will thank you for it.
+For, your nightingale is a self-advertising bird. He never sings a song
+without an eye on the critics, sitting up there in their stalls among
+the stars. He never, or seldom, sings a song for pure love, just
+because he must sing it or die. Indeed, he has a great fear of death,
+unless--you will guarantee him immortality. But the rose, the trusting
+little earth-born rose, that must stay all her life rooted in one spot
+till some nightingale comes to choose her--some nightingale whose song
+maybe has been inspired and perfected by a hundred other roses, which
+are at the moment pot-pourri--ah, the shy bosom-song of the rose ...'
+
+Here the Sphinx paused, and added abruptly--
+
+'Well--there is no nightingale worthy to hear it!'
+
+'It is true,' I agreed, 'O trusting little earth-born rose!'
+
+'Do you know why the rose has thorns?' suddenly asked the Sphinx. Of
+course I knew, but I always respect a joke, particularly when it is but
+half-born--humourists always prefer to deliver themselves--so I shook my
+head.
+
+'To keep off the nightingales, of course,' said the Sphinx, the tone of
+her voice holding in mocking solution the words 'Donkey' and
+'Stupid,'--which I recognised and meekly bore.
+
+'What an excellent idea!' I said. 'I never thought of it before. But
+don't you think it's a little unkind? For, after all, if there were no
+nightingales, one shouldn't hear so much about the rose; and there is
+always the danger that if the rose continues too painfully thorny, the
+nightingale may go off and seek, say, a more accommodating lily.'
+
+'I have no opinion of lilies,' said the Sphinx.
+
+'Nor have I,' I answered soothingly; 'I much prefer roses--but ...
+but....'
+
+'But what?'
+
+'But--well, I much prefer roses. Indeed I do.'
+
+'Rose of the World,' I continued with sentiment, 'draw in your thorns. I
+cannot bear them.'
+
+'Ah!' she answered eagerly, 'that is just it. The nightingale that is
+worthy of the rose will not only bear, but positively love, her thorns.
+It is for that reason she wears them. The thorns of the rose properly
+understood are but the tests of the nightingale. The nightingale that
+is frightened of the thorns is not worthy of the rose--of that you may
+be sure....'
+
+'I am not frightened of the thorns,' I managed to interject.
+
+'Sing then once more,' she cried, 'the Song of the Nightingale.'
+
+And it was thus I sang:--
+
+  O Rose of the World, a nightingale,
+    A Bird of the World, am I,
+  I have loved all the world and sung all the world,
+    But I come to your side to die.
+
+  Tired of the world, as the world of me,
+    I plead for your quiet breast,
+  I have loved all the world and sung all the world--
+    But--where is the nightingale's nest?
+
+  In a hundred gardens I sung the rose,
+    Rose of the World, I confess--
+  But for every rose I have sung before
+    I love you the more, not less.
+
+  Perfect it grew by each rose that died,
+    Each rose that has died for you,
+  The song that I sing--yea, 'tis no new song,
+    It is tried--and so it is true.
+
+  Petal or thorn, yea! I have no care,
+    So that I here abide;
+  Pierce me, my love, or kiss me, my love,
+    But keep me close to your side.
+
+  I know not your kiss from your scorn, my love,
+    Your breast from your thorn, my rose,
+  And if you must kill me, well, kill me, my love!
+    But--say 'twas the death I chose.
+
+'Is it true?' asked the Rose.
+
+'As I am a nightingale,' I replied; and as we bade each other
+good-night, I whispered:
+
+'When may I expect the Answer of the Rose?'
+
+
+
+
+ABOUT THE SECURITIES
+
+
+When I say that my friend Matthew lay dying, I want you so far as
+possible to dissociate the statement from any conventional, and
+certainly from any pictorial, conceptions of death which you may have
+acquired. Death sometimes shows himself one of those impersonal artists
+who conceal their art, and, unless you had been told, you could hardly
+have guessed that Matthew was dying, dying indeed sixty miles an hour,
+dying of consumption, dying because some one else had died four years
+before, dying too of debt.
+
+Connoisseurs, of course, would have understood; at a glance would have
+named the sculptor who was silently chiselling those noble hollows in
+the finely modelled face,--that Pygmalion who turns all flesh to
+stone,--at a glance would have named the painter who was cunningly
+weighting the brows with darkness that the eyes might shine the more
+with an unaccustomed light. Matthew and I had long been students of the
+strange wandering artist, had begun by hating his art (it is ever so
+with an art unfamiliar to us), and had ended by loving it.
+
+'Let us see what the artist has added to the picture since yesterday,'
+said Matthew, signing to me to hand him the mirror.
+
+'H'm,' he murmured, 'he's had one of his lazy days, I'm afraid. He's
+hardly added a touch--just a little heightened the chiaroscuro,
+sharpened the nose a trifle, deepened some little the shadows round the
+eyes....
+
+'O why,' he presently sighed, 'does he not work a little overtime and
+get it done? He's been paid handsomely enough....
+
+'Paid,' he continued, 'by a life that is so much undeveloped gold-mine,
+paid by all my uncashed hopes and dreams....'
+
+'He works fast enough for me, old fellow,' I interrupted; 'there was a
+time, was there not, when he worked too fast for you and me?'
+
+There are moments, for certain people, when such fantastic unreality as
+this is the truest realism. Matthew and I talked like this with our
+brains, because we hadn't the courage to allow our hearts to break in
+upon the conversation. Had I dared to say some real emotional thing,
+what effect would it have had but to set poor tired Matthew a-coughing?
+and it was our aim that he should die with as little to-do as
+practicable. The emotional in such situations is merely the obvious.
+There was no need for either of us to state the elementary feelings of
+our love. I knew that Matthew was going to die, and he knew that--I was
+going to live, and we pitied each other accordingly; though I confess my
+feeling for him was rather one of envy,--when it was not congratulation.
+
+Thus, to tell the truth, we never mentioned 'the hereafter.' I don't
+believe it even occurred to us. Indeed, we spent the few hours that
+remained of our friendship in retailing the latest gathered of those
+good stories with which we had been accustomed to salt our intercourse.
+
+One of Matthew's anecdotes was, no doubt, somewhat suggested by the
+occasion, and I should add that he had always somewhat of an
+ecclesiastical bias--would, I believe, have ended some day as a
+Monsignor, a notable 'Bishop Blougram.'
+
+His story was of an evangelistic preacher who desired to impress his
+congregation with the unmistakable reality of hell-fire. 'You know the
+Black Country, my friends,' he had declaimed,' you have seen it, at
+night, flaring with a thousand furnaces, in the lurid incandescence of
+which myriads of unhappy beings, our fellow-creatures (God forbid!),
+snatch a precarious existence--you have seen them silhouetted against
+the yellow glare, running hither and thither, as it seemed from afar, in
+the very jaws of the awful fire. Have you realised that the burdens with
+which they thus run hither and thither are molten iron, iron to which
+such a stupendous heat has been applied that it has melted, melted as
+though it had been sugar in the sun?--well! returning to hell-fire, let
+me tell you this, that in hell they eat this fiery molten metal for
+ice-cream!--yes! and are glad to get anything so cool.'
+
+It was thus we talked while Matthew lay dying, for why should we not
+talk as we had lived? We both laughed long and heartily over this story;
+perhaps it would have amused us less had Matthew not been dying; and
+then his kind old nurse brought in our lunch. We had both excellent
+appetites, and were far from indifferent to the dainty little meal which
+was to be our last but one together. I brought my table as close to
+Matthew's pillow as was possible, and he stroked my hand with tenderness
+in which there was a touch of gratitude.
+
+'You are not frightened of the bacteria!' he laughed sadly; and then he
+told me, with huge amusement, how a friend (and a true, dear friend for
+all that) had come to see him a day or two before, and had hung over the
+end of the bed to say farewell, daring to approach no nearer, mopping
+his fear-perspiring brows with a handkerchief soaked in 'Eucalyptus'!
+
+'He had brought an anticipatory elegy too,' said my friend, 'written
+against my burial. I wish you'd read it for me,' and he fidgeted for it
+in the nervous manner of the dying. Finding it among his pillows, he
+handed it to me saying, 'You needn't be frightened of it. It is well
+dosed with Eucalyptus.'
+
+We laughed even more over this poem than over our stories, and then we
+discussed the terms of three cremation societies to which, at the
+express request of my friend, I had written a day or two before.
+
+Then having smoked a cigar and drunk a glass of port together (for the
+assured dying are allowed to 'live well'), Matthew grew sleepy, and,
+tucking him beneath the counterpane, I left him, for, after all, he was
+not to die that day.
+
+Circumstances prevented my seeing him again for a week. When I did so,
+entering the room poignantly redolent of the strange sweet odour of
+antiseptics, I saw that the great artist had been busy in my absence.
+Indeed, his work was nearly at an end. Yet to one unfamiliar with his
+methods there was still little to alarm in Matthew's face. In fact, with
+the exception of his brain, and his ice-cold feet, he was alive as ever.
+And even to his brain had come a certain unnatural activity, a life as
+of the grave, a sort of vampire vitality, which would assuredly have
+deceived any who had not known him. He still told his stories, laughed
+and talked with the same unconquerable humour, was in every way alert
+and practical, with this difference, that he had forgotten he was going
+to die, that the world in which he exercised his various faculties was
+another world to that in which, in spite of his delirium, we ate our
+last boiled fowl, drank our last wine, smoked our last cigar together.
+His talk was so convincingly rational, dealt with such unreal matters in
+so every-day a fashion, that you were ready to think that surely it was
+you and not he whose mind was wandering.
+
+'You might reach that pocket-book, and ring for Mrs. Davies,' he would
+say in so casual a way that of course you would ring. On Mrs. Davies's
+appearance he would be fumbling about among the papers in his
+pocket-book, and presently he would say, with a look of frustration that
+went to one's heart--'I've got a ten-pound note somewhere here for you,
+Mrs. Davies, to pay you up till Saturday, but somehow I seem to have
+lost it. Yet it must be somewhere about. Perhaps you'll find it as you
+make the bed in the morning. I'm so sorry to have troubled you....'
+
+And then he would grow tired and doze a little on his pillow.
+
+Suddenly he would be alert again, and with a startling vividness tell me
+strange stories from the dreamland into which he was now passing.
+
+I had promised to see him on Monday, but had been prevented, and had
+wired to him accordingly. This was Tuesday.
+
+'You needn't have troubled to wire,' he said. 'Didn't you know I was in
+London from Saturday to Monday?'
+
+'The doctor and Mrs. Davies didn't know,' he continued with the creepy
+cunning of the dying: 'I managed to slip away to look at a house I think
+of taking--in fact I've taken it. It's in--in--now, where is it? Now
+isn't that silly? I can see it as plain as anything--yet I cannot, for
+the life of me, remember where it is, or the number.... It was somewhere
+St. John's Wood way ... never mind, you must come and see me there, when
+we get in....'
+
+I said he was dying in debt, and thus the heaven that lay about his
+deathbed was one of fantastic Eldorados, sudden colossal legacies, and
+miraculous windfalls.
+
+'I haven't told you,' he said presently, 'of the piece of good luck that
+has befallen me. You are not the only person in luck. I can hardly
+expect you to believe me, it sounds so like the Arabian Nights. However,
+it's true for all that. Well, one of the little sisters was playing in
+the garden a few afternoons ago, making mud-pies or something of that
+sort, and she suddenly scraped up a sovereign. Presently she found two
+or three more, and our curiosity becoming aroused, a turn or two with
+the spade revealed quite a bed of gold; and the end of it was, that on
+further excavating, the whole garden proved to be one mass of
+sovereigns. Sixty thousand pounds we counted ... and then, what do you
+think?--it suddenly melted away....'
+
+He paused for a moment, and continued, more in amusement than regret--
+
+'Yes--the Government got wind of it, and claimed the whole lot as
+treasure-trove!
+
+'But not,' he added slyly, 'before I'd paid off two or three of my
+biggest bills. Yes--and--you'll keep it quiet, of course,--there's
+another lot been discovered in the garden, but we shall take good care
+the Government doesn't get hold of it this time, you bet.'
+
+He told this wild story with such an air of simple conviction that, odd
+as it may seem, one believed every word of it. But the tale of his
+sudden good-fortune was not ended.
+
+'You've heard of old Lord Osterley,' he presently began again. 'Well,
+congratulate me, old man: he has just died and left everything to me.
+You know what a splendid library he had--to think that that will all be
+mine--and that grand old park through which we've so often wandered, you
+and I! Well, we shall need fear no gamekeeper now, and of course, dear
+old fellow, you'll come and live with me--like a prince--and just write
+your own books and say farewell to journalism for ever. Of course I can
+hardly believe it's true yet. It seems too much of a dream, and yet
+there's no doubt about it. I had a letter from my solicitors this
+morning, saying that they were engaged in going through the securities,
+and--and--but the letter's somewhere over there; you might read it. No?
+can't you find it? It's there somewhere about, I know. Never mind, you
+can see it again....' he finished wearily.
+
+'Yes!' he presently said, half to himself, 'it will be a wonderful
+change! a wonderful change!'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At length the time came to say good-bye, a good-bye I knew must be the
+last, for my affairs were taking me so far away from him that I could
+not hope to see him for some days.
+
+'I'm afraid, old man,' I said, 'that I mayn't be able to see you for
+another week.'
+
+'O never mind, old fellow, don't worry about me. I'm much better
+now--and by the time you come again we shall know all about the
+securities.'
+
+The securities! My heart had seemed like a stone, incapable of feeling,
+all those last unreal hours together; but the pathos of that sad phrase,
+so curiously symbolic, suddenly smote it with overwhelming pity, and the
+tears sprang to my eyes for the first time. As I bent over him to kiss
+his poor damp forehead, and press his hand for the last farewell, I
+murmured--
+
+'Yes--dear, dear old friend. We shall know all about the securities....'
+
+
+
+
+THE BOOM IN YELLOW
+
+
+Green must always have a large following among artists and art lovers;
+for, as has been pointed out, an appreciation of it is a sure sign of a
+subtle artistic temperament. There is something not quite good,
+something almost sinister, about it--at least, in its more complex
+forms, though in its simple form, as we find it in outdoor nature, it is
+innocent enough; and, indeed, is it not used in colloquial metaphor as
+an adjective for innocence itself? Innocence has but two colours, white
+or green. But Becky Sharp's eyes also were green, and the green of the
+aesthete does not suggest innocence. There will always be wearers of the
+green carnation; but the popular vogue which green has enjoyed for the
+last ten or fifteen years is probably passing. Even the aesthete himself
+would seem to be growing a little weary of its indefinitely divided
+tones, and to be anxious for a colour sensation somewhat more positive
+than those to be gained from almost imperceptible _nuances_, of green.
+Jaded with over-refinements and super-subtleties, we seem in many
+directions to be harking back to the primary colours of life. Blue,
+crude and unsoftened, and a form of magenta, have recently had a short
+innings; and now the triumph of yellow is imminent. Of course, a love
+for green implies some regard for yellow, and in our so-called aesthetic
+renaissance the sunflower went before the green carnation--which is,
+indeed, the badge of but a small schism of aesthetes, and not worn by
+the great body of the more catholic lovers of beauty.
+
+Yellow is becoming more and more dominant in decoration--in wall-papers,
+and flowers cultivated with decorative intention, such as
+chrysanthemums. And one can easily understand why: seeing that, after
+white, yellow reflects more light than any other colour, and thus
+ministers to the growing preference for light and joyous rooms. A few
+yellow chrysanthemums will make a small room look twice its size, and
+when the sun comes out upon a yellow wall-paper the whole room seems
+suddenly to expand, to open like a flower. When it falls upon the pot of
+yellow chrysanthemums, and sets them ablaze, it seems as though one had
+an angel in the room. Bill-posters are beginning to discover the
+attractive qualities of the colour. Who can ever forget meeting for the
+first time upon a hoarding Mr. Dudley Hardy's wonderful Yellow Girl, the
+pretty advance-guard of _To-Day_? But I suppose the honour of the
+discovery of the colour for advertising purposes rests with Mr. Colman;
+though its recent boom comes from the publishers, and particularly from
+the Bodley Head. _The Yellow Book_ with any other colour would hardly
+have sold as well--the first private edition of Mr. Arthur Benson's
+poems, by the way, came caparisoned in yellow, and with the identical
+name, _Le Cahier Jaune_; and no doubt it was largely its title that made
+the success of _The Yellow Aster_. In literature, indeed, yellow has
+long been the colour of romance. The word 'yellow-back' witnesses its
+close association with fiction; and in France, as we know, it is the
+all but universal custom to bind books in yellow paper. Mr. Heinemann
+and Mr. Unwin have endeavoured to naturalise the custom here; but,
+though in cloth yellow has emphatically 'caught on,' in paper it still
+hangs fire. The ABC Railway Guide is probably the only exception, and
+that, it is to be hoped, is not fiction. Mr. Lang has recently followed
+the fashion with his _Yellow Fairy Book_; and, indeed, one of the best
+known figures in fairydom is yellow--namely, the Yellow Dwarf. Yellow,
+always a prominent Oriental colour, was but lately of peculiar
+significance in the Far East; for were not the sorrows of a certain high
+Chinese official intimately connected with the fatal colour? The Yellow
+Book, the Yellow Aster, the Yellow Jacket!--and the Yellow Fever, like
+'Orion' Home's sunshine, is always with us' somewhere in the world.' The
+same applies also, I suppose, to the Yellow Sea.
+
+Till one comes to think of it, one hardly realises how many important
+and pleasant things in life are yellow. Blue and green, no doubt,
+contract for the colouring of vast departments of the physical world.
+'Blue!' sings Keats, in a fine but too little known sonnet--
+
+  '... 'Tis the life of heaven--the domain
+    Of Cynthia--the wide palace of the sun--
+  The tent of Hesperus, and all his train--
+  The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey, and dun.
+  Blue! 'Tis the life of waters ...
+  Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest green,
+    Married to green in all the sweetest flowers.'
+
+Yellow might retort by quoting Mr. Grant Allen, in his book on _The
+Colour Sense_, to the effect that the blueness of sea and sky is mainly
+poetical illusion or inaccuracy, and that sea and sky are found blue
+only in one experiment out of fourteen. At morning and evening they are
+usually in great part stained golden. Blue certainly has one advantage
+over yellow, in that it has the privilege of colouring some of the
+prettiest eyes in the world. Yellow has a chance only in cases of
+jaundice and liver complaint, and his colour scheme in such cases is
+seldom appreciated. Again, green has the contract for the greater bulk
+of the vegetable life of the globe; but his is a monotonous business,
+like the painting of miles and miles of palings: grass, grass, grass,
+trees, trees, trees, _ad infinitum_; whereas yellow leads a roving,
+versatile life, and is seldom called upon for such monotonous labour.
+The sands of Sahara are probably the only conspicuous instance of yellow
+thus working by the piece. It is in the quality, in the diversity of the
+things it colours, rather than in their mileage or tonnage, that yellow
+is distinguished; though, for that matter, we suppose, the sun is as big
+and heavy as most things, and that is yellow. Of course, when we say
+yellow we include golden, and all varieties of the colour--saffron,
+orange, flaxen, tawny, blonde, topaz, citron, etc.
+
+If the sun may reasonably be described as the most important object in
+the world, surely money is the next. That, as we know, is, in its most
+potent metallic form, yellow also. The 'yellow gold' is a favourite
+phrase in certain forms of poetry; and 'yellow-boys' is a term of
+natural affection among sailors. Following the example of their lord the
+sun, most fires and lights are yellow or golden, and it is only in
+times of danger or superstition that they burn red or blue. And, if
+yellow be denied entrance to beautiful eyes, it enjoys a privilege
+which--except in the case of certain indigo-staining African tribes, who
+cannot be said to count--blue has never claimed: that of colouring
+perhaps the loveliest thing in the world, the hair of woman. Hair is
+naturally golden--unnaturally also. When Browning sings pathetically of
+'dear dead women--with such hair too!' he continues:--
+
+  'What's become of all the _gold_
+  Used to hang and brush their bosoms'--
+
+not 'all the blue' or 'all the brown,' though some of us, it is true,
+are condemned to wear our hair brown or blue-black. But such are only
+unhappy exceptions. Yellow or gold is the rule. The bravest men and the
+fairest women have had golden hair, and, we may add, in reference to
+another distinction of the colour we are celebrating, golden hearts.
+Hair at the present time is doing its best to conform to its normal
+conditions of colour. Numerous instances might be adduced of its
+changing from black to gold, in obedience to chemical law. 'Peroxide of
+hydrogen!' says the cynic. 'Beauty!' says the lover of art.
+
+And it might be argued, in a world of inevitable compromise, that the
+damage done to the physical health and texture of the hair thus playing
+the chameleon may well be overbalanced by the happiness, and consequent
+increased effectiveness, of the person thus dyeing for the sake of
+beauty. Thaumaturgists lay much stress on the mystic influence of
+colours; and who knows but that, if we were only allowed to dye our hair
+what colour we chose, we might be different men and women? Strange
+things are told of women who have dyed their hair the colour of blood or
+of wine, and we know from Christina Rossetti that golden hair is
+negotiable in fairyland--
+
+  '"You have much gold upon your head,"
+  They answered all together:
+    "Buy from us with a golden curl."'
+
+Whether Laura could have done business with the goblin merchantmen with
+an oxidised curl is a difficult point, for fairies have sharp eyes; and,
+though it be impossible for a mortal to tell the real gold from the
+false gold hair, the fairies may be able to do so, and might reject the
+curl as counterfeit.
+
+Again, if in the vegetable world green almost universally colours the
+leaves, yellow has more to do with the flowers. The flowers we love best
+are yellow: the cowslip, the daffodil, the crocus, the buttercup, half
+the daisy, the honeysuckle, and the loveliest rose. Yellow, too, has its
+turn even with the leaves; and what an artist he shows himself when, in
+autumn, he 'lays his fiery finger' upon them, lighting up the forlorn
+woodland with splashes--pure palette-colour of audacious gold! He hangs
+the mulberry with heart-shaped yellow shields--which reminds one of the
+heraldic importance of 'or,'--and he lines the banks of the Seine with
+phantasmal yellow poplars. And other leaves still dearer to the heart
+are yellow likewise; leaves of those sweet old poets whose thoughts seem
+to have turned the pages gold. Let us dream of this: a maid with yellow
+hair, clad in a yellow gown, seated in a yellow room, at the window a
+yellow sunset, in the grate a yellow fire, at her side a yellow
+lamplight, on her knee a Yellow Book. And the letters we love best to
+read--when we dare--are they not yellow too? No doubt some disagreeable
+things are reported of yellow. We have had the yellow-fever, and we have
+had pea-soup. The eyes of lions are said to be yellow, and the ugliest
+cats--the cats that infest one's garden--are always yellow. Some
+medicines are yellow, and no doubt there are many other yellow
+disagreeables; but we prefer to dwell upon the yellow blessings. I had
+almost forgotten that the gayest wines are yellow. Nor has religion
+forgotten yellow. It is to be hoped yellow will not forget religion. The
+sacred robe of the second greatest religion of the world is yellow, 'the
+yellow robe' of the Buddhist friar; and when the sacred harlots of
+Hindustan walk in lovely procession through the streets, they too, like
+the friars, are clad in yellow. Amber is yellow; so is the orange; and
+so were stage-coaches and many dashing things of the old time; and pink
+is yellow by lamplight. But gold-mines, it has been proved, are not so
+yellow as is popularly supposed. Hymen's robe is Miltonically 'saffron,'
+and the dearest petticoat in all literature--not forgetting the
+'tempestuous' garment of Herrick's Julia--was 'yaller.' Yes!--
+
+  ''Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green,
+  An' er name was Supi-yaw-lat, jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen.'
+
+Is it possible to say anything prettier for yellow than that?
+
+
+
+
+LETTER TO AN UNSUCCESSFUL LITERARY MAN
+
+
+My Dear Sir,--I agree with every word you say. You have my entire
+sympathy. The world is indeed hard, hard to the sad--particularly hard
+to the unsuccessful. A sure five hundred a year covers a multitude of
+sorrows. It is ever an ill wind for the shorn lamb. If it be true that
+nothing succeeds like success, it is no less sadly true that nothing
+fails like failure. And when one thinks of it, it is only natural, for
+every failure is an obstruction in the stream of life. Metaphorical
+writers are fond of saying that the successful ride to success on the
+back of the failures. It is true that many rise on stepping-stones of
+their dead relations--but that is because their relations have been
+financial successes. In truth, instead of the failure making the
+fortune of the successful, it is just the reverse. A very successful man
+would be the more successful were it not for the failures--on whom he
+has either to spend his money to support, or his time to advise. The
+strong are said to be impatient towards the weak--and is it to be
+wondered at, in a world where even the strongest need all their
+strength, in a sea where the best swimmer needs all his wind and muscle
+and skill to keep afloat? If success is sometimes 'unfeeling' towards
+failure, failure is often unfair to success. Of course, 'it is He that
+hath made us and not we ourselves,' but that is a text that cuts both
+ways; and when all is said and done, the failure detracts from the force
+in the universe; he is the clog on the wheel of fortune. To say that the
+successful man benefits by the failure of others is as true as it would
+be to say that the ratepayer benefits by the poor-rates. You use the
+word 'charlatan' somewhat profusely of several successful writers, and
+no doubt you are right. But you must remember that it is a favourite
+charge against the gifted and the fortunate. Because we have failed by
+fair means, we are sure the other fellows have succeeded by foul. And,
+moreover, one is apt to forget how much talent is needed to be a
+charlatan. Never look down upon a charlatan. Courage, skill, personal
+force or charm, great knowledge of human nature, dramatic instinct, and
+industry--few charlatans succeed (and no one is called a charlatan till
+he _does_ succeed, be his success as low or high as you please) without
+possessing a majority of these qualities; how many of which--it would be
+interesting to know--do you possess?
+
+Indeed, it would seem to need more gifts to be a rogue than an honest
+man, and there is a sense in which every great man may be described as a
+charlatan--_plus_ greatness; greatness being an almost indefinable
+quality, a quality, at any rate, on which there is a bewildering
+diversity of opinion.
+
+You seem a little cross with publishers and editors. They have not
+proved the distinguished, brilliant, and sympathetic beings you imagined
+them in your boyish dreams. No doubt, publishers and editors enter
+hardly into the kingdom of heaven. But then, you see, they don't care so
+much about that; they are much more interested in the next election at
+certain fashionable clubs. It is really a little hard on them that they
+should suffer from the ignorant misconception of the literary amateur.
+It is only those who have had no dealings with them who would be unfair
+enough to expect publishers or editors to be literary men. They are
+business men--business men _par excellence_--and a good thing, too, for
+their papers and their authors. You lament their mercenary view of life;
+but, judging by your letter, even you are not disposed to regard money
+as the root of all evil.
+
+You cannot understand why you have failed where others have succeeded.
+You have far more Greek than Keats, more history than Scott, and you
+know nineteen languages--ten of them to speak. With so many
+accomplishments, it must indeed be hard to fail--though you do not seem
+to have found it difficult. You have travelled too--have been twice
+round the world, and have a thorough knowledge of the worst hotels.
+Certainly, it is singular. Nevertheless, I must confess that the dullest
+men I have ever met have been professors of history; the worst poets
+have not only known Greek, but French as well; and, generally speaking
+the most tiresome of my acquaintances have more degrees than I have
+Latin to name them in. Alas! it is not experience, or travel, or
+language, but the use we make of them, that makes literary success,
+which, one may add, is particularly dependent--perhaps not
+unnaturally--on the use we make of language. A book may be a book,
+although there is neither Latin nor Greek, nor travel, nor
+experience--in fact 'nothing' in it; and though, like myself, you may
+pay an Oxford professor a thousand a year to correct your proofs, you
+may still miss immortality.
+
+To these intellectual and general equipments you add goodness of heart,
+sincerity of conviction, and martyrdom for your opinions; you are, it
+would seem, like many others of us, the best fellow and greatest man of
+your acquaintance. Permit me to remind you that we are not talking of
+goodness of heart, of strength or beauty of character, but of success,
+which is a thing apart, a fine art in itself.
+
+You confess that you are somewhat unpractical: you expect
+others--hard-worked journalists who never met you--to tell you what to
+read, how to form your style, and how 'to get into the magazines.' You
+are, you say, with something of pride, but a poor business man. That is
+a pity, for nearly every successful literary man of the day, and
+particularly the novelists, are excellent business men. Indeed, the
+history of literature all round has proved that the men who have been
+masters of words have also been masters of things--masters of the facts
+of life for which those words stand. Many writers have mismanaged their
+affairs from idleness and indifference, but few from incapacity. Leigh
+Hunt boasted that he could never master the multiplication-table.
+Perhaps that accounts for his comparative failure as a writer.
+Incompetence in one art is far from being a guarantee of competency in
+another, and a man is all the more likely to make a name if he is able
+to make a living--though, judging from Coleridge, it seems a good plan
+to let another hard-worked man support one's wife and children. On the
+other hand, though business faculty is a great deal, it is not
+everything: for a man may be as punctual and methodical as Southey, and
+yet miss the prize of his high calling, or as generally 'impossible' as
+Blake, and yet win his place among the immortals.
+
+In fact, after all, success in literature has something to do with
+writing. In temporary success, industry and business faculty, and an
+unworked field--be it Scotland, Ireland, or the Isle of Man (any place
+but plain England!)--are the chief factors. For that more lasting
+success which we call fame other qualities are needed, such qualities as
+imagination, fancy, and magic and force in the use of words. Can you
+honestly say, O beloved, though tiresome, correspondent, that these
+great gifts are yours? Judging from your letter--but Heaven forbid that
+I should be unkind! For, need I say I love you with a fellow-feeling? Do
+you think that you are the only unappreciated genius on the planet--not
+to speak of all the other unappreciated geniuses on all the other
+planets? Thank goodness, the postal arrangements with the latter are as
+yet defective! Others there are with hearts as warm, minds as profound,
+and style at least as attractive, who languish in unmerited
+neglect--Miltons inglorious indeed, though far from mute.
+
+Believe me, you are not alone. In fact, there are so many like you that
+it would be quite easy for you to find society without worrying me. And,
+for all of us, there is the consolation that, though we fail as writers,
+we may still succeed as citizens, as husbands and fathers and friends.
+As Whitman would say--because you are not Editor of _The Times_, do you
+give in that you are less than a man? There are poets that have never
+entered into the Bodley Head, and great prose-writers who have never sat
+in an editorial chair. Be satisfied with your heavenly crowns, O you
+whining unsuccessful, and leave to your inferiors the earthly
+five-shilling pieces.
+
+
+
+
+A POET IN THE CITY
+
+
+  'In the midway of this our mortal life,
+  I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.'
+
+I (and when I say I, I must be understood to be speaking dramatically)
+only venture into the City once a year, for the very pleasant purpose of
+drawing that twelve-pound-ten by which the English nation, ever so
+generously sensitive to the necessities, not to say luxuries, of the
+artist, endeavours to express its pride and delight in me. It would be a
+very graceful exercise of gratitude for me here to stop and parenthesise
+the reader on the subject of all that twelve-pound-ten has been to me,
+how it has quite changed the course of my life, given me that
+long-desired opportunity of doing my best work in peace, for which so
+often I vainly sighed in Fleet Street, and even allowed me an indulgence
+in minor luxuries which I could not have dreamed of enjoying before the
+days of that twelve-pound-ten. Now not only peace and plenty, but
+leisure and luxury are mine. There is nothing goes so far as--Government
+money.
+
+Usually on these literally State occasions, I drive up in state, that is
+in a hansom. There is only one other day in the year on which I am so
+splendid, but that is another beautiful story. It, too, is a day and an
+hour too joyous to be approached otherwise than on winged wheels, too
+stately to be approached in merely pedestrian fashion. To go on foot to
+draw one's pension seems a sort of slight on the great nation that does
+one honour, as though a Lord Mayor should make his appearance in the
+procession in his office coat.
+
+So I say it is my custom to go gaily, and withal stately, to meet my
+twelve-pound-ten in a hansom. For many reasons the occasion always seems
+something of an adventure, and I confess I always feel a little excited
+about it--indeed, to tell the truth, a little nervous. As I glide along
+in my state barge (which seems a much more proper and impressive image
+for a hansom than 'gondola,' with its reminiscences of Earl's Court) I
+feel like some fragile country flower torn from its roots, and
+bewilderingly hurried along upon the turbid, swollen stream of London
+life.
+
+The stream glides sweetly with a pleasant trotting tinkle of bells by
+the green parkside of Piccadilly, and sweet is it to hear the sirens
+singing, and to see them combing their gilded locks, on the yellow sands
+of Piccadilly Circus--so called, no doubt, from the number of horses and
+the skill of their drivers. Here are the whirling pools of pleasure,
+merry wheels of laughing waters, where your hansom glides along with a
+golden ease--it is only when you enter the First Cataract of the Strand
+that you become aware of the far-distant terrible roar of the Falls!
+They are yet nearly two miles away, but already, like Niagara, thou
+hearest the sound thereof--the fateful sound of that human Niagara,
+where all the great rivers of London converge: the dark, strong floods
+surging out from the gloomy fastnesses of the East End, the
+quick-running streams from the palaces of the West, the East with its
+wagons, the West with its hansoms, the four winds with their omnibuses,
+the horses and carriages under the earth jetting up their companies of
+grimy passengers, the very air busy with a million errands.
+
+You are in the rapids--metaphorically speaking--as you crawl down
+Cheapside; and here where the Bank of England and the Mansion House rise
+sheer and awful from, shall we say, this boiling caldron, this 'hell' of
+angry meeting waters--Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, Queen Victoria
+Street and Cheapside, each 'running,' again metaphorically, 'like a
+mill-race'--here in this wild maelstrom of human life and human
+conveyances, here is the true 'Niagara in London,' here are the most
+wonderful falls in the world--the London Falls.
+
+'Yes!' I said softly to myself, and I could see the sly sad smile on the
+face of the dead poet, at the thought of whose serene wisdom a silence
+like snow seemed momentarily to cover up the turmoil--'Yes!' I said
+softly, 'there is still the same old crush at the corner of Fenchurch
+Street!'
+
+By this time I had disbursed one of my two annual cab-fares, and was
+standing a little forlorn at that very corner. It was a March afternoon,
+bitter and gloomy; lamps were already popping alight in a desolate way,
+and the east wind whistled mournfully through the ribs of the
+passers-by. A very unflowerlike man was dejectedly calling out
+'daffadowndillies' close by. The sound of the pretty old word, thus
+quaintly spoken, brightened the air better than the electric lights
+which suddenly shot rows of wintry moonlight along the streets. I bought
+a bunch of the poor pinched flowers, and asked the man how he came to
+call them 'daffadowndillies.'
+
+'D'vunshur,' he said, in anything but a Devonshire accent, and then the
+east wind took him and he was gone--doubtless to a neighbouring tavern;
+and no wonder, poor soul! Flowers certainly fall into strange hands here
+in London.
+
+Well, it was nearing four, and if I wanted a grateful country's
+twelve-pound-ten, I must make haste; so presently I found myself in a
+great hall, of which I have no clearer impression than that there were
+soft little lights all about me, and a soft chime of falling gold, like
+the rippling of Pactolus. I have a sort of idea, too, of a great number
+of young men with most beautiful moustaches, playing with golden
+shovels; and as I thus stood among the soft lights and listened to the
+most beautiful sound in the world, I thought that thus must Danæ have
+felt as she stood amid the falling shower. But I took care to see that
+my twelve sovereigns and a half were right number and weight for all
+that.
+
+Once more in the street, I lingered a while to take a last look at the
+Falls. What a masterful alien life it all seemed to me! No single
+personality could hope to stand alone amid all that stress of ponderous,
+bullying forces. Only public companies, and such great impersonalities,
+could hope to hold their own, to swim in such a whirlpool--and even
+they, I had heard it whispered, far away in my quiet starlit garret,
+sometimes went down. 'How,' I cried, 'would--
+
+  '... my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights ...
+  Rush of suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites,'
+
+again quoting poetry. I always quote poetry in the City, as a
+protest--moreover, it clears the air.
+
+The more people buffeted against me the more I felt the crushing sense
+of almost cosmic forces. Everybody was so plainly an atom in a public
+company, a drop of water in a tyrannous stream of human
+energy--companies that cared nothing for their individual atoms, streams
+that cared nothing for their component drops; such atoms and drops, for
+the most part, to be had for thirty shillings a week. These people about
+me seemed no more like individual men and women than individual puffs in
+a mighty rushing wind, or the notes in a great scheme of music, are men
+and women--to the banker so many pens with ears whereon to perch them,
+to the capitalist so many 'hands,' and to the City man generally so many
+'helpless pieces of the game he plays' up there in spidery nooks and
+corners of the City.
+
+As I listened to the throbbing of the great human engines in the
+buildings about me, a rising and a falling there seemed as of those
+great steel-limbed monsters, weird contortionists of metal, that jet up
+and down, and writhe and wrestle this way and that, behind the long
+glass windows of great water-towers, or toil like Vulcan in the bowels
+of mighty ships. An expression of frenzy seems to come up even from the
+dumb tossing steel; sometimes it seems to be shaking great knuckled
+fists at one and brandishing threatening arms, as it strains and sweats
+beneath the lash of the compulsive steam. As one watches it, there seems
+something of human agony about its panic-stricken labours, and something
+like a sense of pity surprises one--a sense of pity that anything in the
+world should have to work like that, even steel, even, as we say,
+senseless steel. What, then, of these great human engine-houses! Will
+the engines always consent to rise and fall, night and day, like that?
+or will there some day be a mighty convulsion, and this blind Samson of
+labour pull down the whole engine-house upon his oppressors? Who knows?
+These are questions for great politicians and thinkers to decide, not
+for a poet, who is too much terrified by such forces to be able calmly
+to estimate and prophesy concerning them.
+
+Yes! if you want to realise Tennyson's picture of 'one poor poet's
+scroll' ruling the world, take your poet's scroll down to Fenchurch
+Street and try it there. Ah, what a powerless little 'private interest'
+seems poetry there, poetry 'whose action is no stronger than a flower.'
+In days of peace it ventures even into the morning papers; but, let only
+a rumour of war be heard, and it vanishes like a dream on doomsday
+morning. A County Council election passeth over it and it is gone.
+
+Yet it was near this very spot that Keats dug up the buried beauty of
+Greece, lying hidden beneath Finsbury Pavement! and in the deserted City
+churches great dramatists lie about us. Maybe I have wronged the
+City--and at this thought I remembered a little bookshop but a few yards
+away, blossoming like a rose right in the heart of the wilderness.
+
+Here, after all, in spite of all my whirlpools and engine-houses, was
+for me the greatest danger in the City. Need I say, therefore, that I
+promptly sought it, hovered about it a moment--and entered? How much of
+that grateful governmental twelve-pound-ten came out alive, I dare not
+tell my dearest friend.
+
+At all events I came out somehow reassured, more rich in faith. There
+was a might of poesy after all. There were words in the little
+yellow-leaved garland, nestling like a bird in my hand, that would
+outlast the bank yonder, and outlive us all. I held it up. How tiny it
+seemed, how frail amid all this stone and iron! A mere flower--a flower
+from the seventeenth century--long-lived for a flower! Yes, an
+_immortelle_.
+
+
+
+
+BROWN ROSES
+
+'Well, I never thought to see this day, sir,' said Gibbs, with something
+like tears in his voice, as he reluctantly plied his scissors upon
+Hyacinth Rondel's distinguished curls.
+
+'Nor I, Gibbs--nor I!' said Rondel sadly, relapsing into silence again,
+with his head meekly bent over the white sheet spread to catch his shorn
+beauty.
+
+'To think of the times, sir, that I have dressed your head,' continued
+Gibbs, whose grief bore so marked an emphasis, 'and to think that after
+to-day ...'
+
+'But you forget, my dear Gibbs, that I shall now be a more constant
+customer than ever!'
+
+'Ah, sir, but that will be different. It will be mere machine-cutting,
+lawn-mowing, steam-reaping, if you understand me; there'll be no
+pleasure in it, no artistic pleasure, I mean.'
+
+'Yes, Gibbs, and you are an artist--I have often told you that.'
+
+'Ah, sir, but I am coming to the conclusion that it is better not to be
+an artist, better to be born just like every one else. In these days one
+suffers too much. Why, sir, I haven't in the whole of my business six
+heads like yours, and I go on cutting all the rest week in and week out,
+just for the pleasure of dressing those six--and now there'll only be
+five.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'It looks like a winding-sheet,' mused Rondel presently, after a long
+silence, broken only by the soft crunch and click of the fatal scissors,
+as they feasted on the beautiful brown silk.
+
+'It do indeed, sir,' said Gibbs, with a shudder, as another little globe
+of golden brown rolled down into Rondel's lap.
+
+'Poor brown roses!' sighed the poet, after another silence; 'they are
+just like brown roses, aren't they, Gibbs?'
+
+'They are indeed, sir!'
+
+'Brown roses scattered over the winding-sheet of one's youth--eh,
+Gibbs?'
+
+'They are indeed, sir.'
+
+'That's rather a pretty image, don't you think, Gibbs?'
+
+'Indeed I do, sir!'
+
+'Well, well, they have bloomed their last; and when Juliet's white hands
+come seeking with their silver fingers, white maidens lost in the brown
+enchanted forest, there will not be a rose left for her to gather.'
+
+'Believe me, sir, I would more gladly have cut off your head than your
+hair--that is, figuratively speaking,' sobbed the artist-in-hair-oils.
+
+'Yes, my head would hardly be missed--you are quite right, Gibbs; but my
+hair! What will they do without it at first nights and private views? It
+was worth five shillings a week to many a poor paragraph-writer. Well, I
+must try and make up for it by my beard!'
+
+'Your beard, sir?' exclaimed Gibbs in horror.
+
+'Yes, Gibbs; for some years I have been a Nazarene--that is, a Nazarite,
+with the top half of my head; now I am going to change about and be a
+Nazarite with the lower. The razor has kissed my cheeks and my chin and
+the fluted column of my throat for the last time.'
+
+'You cannot mean it, sir!' said Gibbs, suspending his murderous task a
+moment.
+
+'It's quite true, Gibbs.'
+
+'Does she wish that too, sir?'
+
+'Yes, that too.'
+
+'Well, sir, I have heard of men making sacrifices for their wives, but
+of all the cruel....'
+
+'Please don't, Gibbs. It does no good. And Mrs. Rondel's motive is a
+good one.'
+
+'Of course, sir, I cannot presume--and yet, if it wouldn't be presuming,
+I should like to know why you are making this great, I may say this
+noble, sacrifice?'
+
+'Well, Gibbs, we're old friends, and I'll tell you some day, but I
+hardly feel up to it to-day.'
+
+'Of course not, sir, of course not--it's only natural,' said Gibbs
+tenderly, while the scissors once more took up the conversation.
+
+
+
+
+THE DONKEY THAT LOVED A STAR
+
+
+'That is how the donkey tells his love!' I said one day, with intent to
+be funny, as the prolonged love-whoop of a distant donkey was heard in
+the land.
+
+'Don't be too ready to laugh at donkeys,' said my friend. 'For,' he
+continued, 'even donkeys have their dreams. Perhaps, indeed, the most
+beautiful dreams are dreamed by donkeys.'
+
+'Indeed,' I said, 'and now that I think of it, I remember to have said
+that most dreamers are donkeys, though I never expected so scientific a
+corroboration of a fleeting jest.'
+
+Now, my friend is an eminent scientist and poet in one, a serious
+combination; and he took my remarks with seriousness at once scientific
+and poetic.
+
+'Yes,' he went on, 'that is where you clever people make a mistake. You
+think that because a donkey has only two vowel-sounds wherewith to
+express his emotions, he has no emotions to express. But let me tell
+you, sir ...'
+
+But here we both burst out laughing--
+
+'You Golden Ass!' I said,'take a munch of these roses; perhaps they will
+restore you.'
+
+'No,' he resumed, 'I am quite serious. I have for many years past made a
+study of donkeys--high-stepping critics call it the study of Human
+Nature--however, it's the same thing--and I must say that the more I
+study them the more I love them. There is nothing so well worth studying
+as the misunderstood, for the very reason that everybody thinks he
+understands it. Now, to take another instance, most people think they
+have said the last word on a goose when they have called it "a
+goose"!--but let me tell you, sir ...'
+
+But here again we burst out laughing--
+
+'Dear goose of the golden eggs,' I said, 'pray leave to discourse on
+geese to-night--though lovely and pleasant would the discourse
+be;--to-night I am all agog for donkeys.'
+
+'So be it,' said my friend,' and if that be so, I cannot do better than
+tell you the story of the donkey that loved a star--keeping for another
+day the no less fascinating story of the goose that loved an angel.'
+
+By this time I was, appropriately, all ears.
+
+'Well,' he once more began, 'there was once a donkey, quite an intimate
+friend of mine--and I have no friend of whom I am prouder--who was
+unpractically fond of looking up at the stars. He could go a whole day
+without thistles, if night would only bring him stars. Of course he
+suffered no little from his fellow-donkeys for this curious passion of
+his. They said well that it did not become him, for indeed it was no
+little laughable to see him gazing so sentimentally at the remote and
+pitiless heavens. Donkeys who belonged to Shakespeare Societies recalled
+the fate of Bottom, the donkey who had loved a fairy; but our donkey
+paid little heed. There is perhaps only one advantage in being a
+donkey--namely, a hide impervious to criticism. In our donkey's case it
+was rather a dream that made him forget his hide--a dream that drew up
+all the sensitiveness from every part, from hoof, and hide, and ears, so
+that all the feeling in his whole body was centred in his eyes and
+brain, and those, as we have said, were centred on a star. He took it
+for granted that his fellows should sneer and kick-out at him--it was
+ever so with genius among the donkeys, and he had very soon grown used
+to these attentions of his brethren, which were powerless to withdraw
+his gaze from the star he loved. For though he loved all the stars, as
+every individual man loves all women, there was one star he loved more
+than any other; and standing one midnight among his thistles, he prayed
+a prayer, a prayer that some day it might be granted him to carry that
+star upon his back--which, he recalled, had been sanctified by the holy
+sign--were it but for ever so short a journey. Just to carry it a little
+way, and then to die. This to him was a dream beyond the dreams of
+donkeys.
+
+'Now, one night,' continued my friend, taking breath for himself and
+me, 'our poor donkey looked up to the sky, and lo! the star was nowhere
+to be seen. He had heard it said that stars sometimes fall. Evidently
+his star had fallen. Fallen! but what if it had fallen upon the earth?
+Being a donkey, the wildest dreams seemed possible to him. And, strange
+as it may seem, there came a day when a poet came to his master and
+bought our donkey to carry his little child. Now, the very first day he
+had her upon his back, the donkey knew that his prayer had been
+answered, and that the little swaddled babe he carried was the star he
+had prayed for. And, indeed, so it was; for so long as donkeys ask no
+more than to fetch and carry for their beloved, they may be sure of
+beauty upon their backs. Now, so long as this little girl that was a
+star remained a little girl, our donkey was happy. For many pretty years
+she would kiss his ugly muzzle and feed his mouth with sugar--and thus
+our donkey's thoughts sweetened day by day, till from a natural
+pessimist he blossomed into a perfectly absurd optimist, and dreamed the
+donkiest of dreams. But, one day, as he carried the girl who was really
+a star through the spring lanes, a young man walked beside her, and
+though our donkey thought very little of his talk--in fact, felt his
+plain "hee-haw" to be worth all its smart chirping and twittering--yet
+it evidently pleased the maiden. It included quite a number of
+vowel-sounds--though, if the maiden had only known, it didn't mean half
+so much as the donkey's plain monotonous declaration.
+
+'Well, our donkey soon began to realise that his dream was nearing its
+end; and, indeed, one day his little mistress came bringing him the
+sweetest of kisses, the very best sugar in the very best shops, but for
+all that our donkey knew that it meant good-bye. It is the charming
+manner of English girls to be at their sweetest when they say good-bye.
+
+'Our dreamer-donkey went into exile as servant to a woodcutter, and his
+life was lenient if dull, for the woodcutter had no sticks to waste upon
+his back; and next day his young mistress who was once a star took a
+pony for her love, whom some time after she discarded for a talented
+hunter, and, one fine day, like many of her sex, she pitched her
+affections upon a man--he too being a talented hunter. To their wedding
+came all the countryside. And with the countryside came the donkey. He
+carried a great bundle of firewood for the servants' hall, and as he
+waited outside, gazing up at his old loves the stars, while his master
+drank deeper and deeper within, he revolved many thoughts. But he is
+only known to have made one remark--in the nature, one may think, of a
+grim jest--
+
+'"After all!" he was heard to say, "she has married a donkey--after
+all!"
+
+'No doubt it was feeble; but then our donkey was growing old and bitter,
+and hope deferred had made him a cynic.'
+
+
+
+
+ON LOVING ONE'S ENEMIES
+
+Like all people who live apart from it, the Founder of the Christian
+religion was possessed of a profound knowledge of the world. As,
+according to the proverb, the woodlander sees nothing of the wood for
+its trees, so those who live in the world know nothing of it. They know
+its gaudy, glittering surface, its Crystal Palace fireworks, and the
+paste-diamonds with which it bedecks itself; they know its music-halls
+and its night clubs, its Piccadillys and its politics, its restaurants
+and its salons; but of the bad--or good?--heart of it all they know
+nothing. In more meanings than one, it takes a saint to catch a sinner;
+and Christ certainly knew as well as saved the sinner.
+
+But none of His precepts show a truer knowledge of life and its
+conditions than His commandment that we should love our enemies. He
+realised--can we doubt?--that, without enemies, the Church He bade His
+followers build could not hope to be established. He knew that the
+spiritual fire He strove to kindle would spread but little, unless the
+four winds of the world blew against it. Well, indeed, may the Christian
+Church love its enemies, for it is they who have made it.
+
+Indeed, for a man, or a cause, that wants to get on, there is nothing
+like a few hearty, zealous enemies. Most of us would never be heard of
+if it were not for our enemies. The unsuccessful man counts up his
+friends, but the successful man numbers his enemies. A friend of mine
+was lamenting, the other day, that he could not find twelve people to
+disbelieve in him. He had been seeking them for years, he sighed, and
+could not get beyond eleven. But, even so, with only eleven he was a
+very successful man. In these kind-hearted days enemies are becoming so
+rare that one has to go out of one's way to make them. The true
+interpretation, therefore, of the easiest of the commandments is--make
+your enemies, and your enemies will make you.
+
+So soon as the armed men begin to spring up in our fields, we may be
+sure that we have not sown in vain.
+
+Properly understood, an enemy is but a negative embodiment of our
+personalities or ideas. He is an involuntary witness to our vitality.
+Much as he despises us, greatly as he may injure us, he is none the less
+a creature of our making. It was we who put into him the breath of his
+malignity, and inspired the activity of his malice. Therefore, with his
+very existence so tremendous a tribute, we can afford to smile at his
+self-conscious disclaimers of our significance. Though he slay us, we
+_made_ him--to 'make an enemy,' is not that the phrase?
+
+Indeed, the fact that he is our enemy is his one _raison d'être_. That
+alone should make us charitable to him. Live and let live. Without us
+our enemy has no occupation, for to hate us is his profession. Think of
+his wives and families!
+
+The friendship of the little for the great is an old-established
+profession; there is but one older--namely, the hatred of the little
+for the great; and, though it is perhaps less officially recognised, it
+is without doubt the more lucrative. It is one of the shortest roads to
+fame. Why is the name of Pontius Pilate an uneasy ghost of history?
+Think what fame it would have meant to be an enemy of Socrates or
+Shakespeare! _Blackwood's Magazine_ and _The Quarterly Review_ only
+survive to-day because they once did their best to strangle the genius
+of Keats and Tennyson. Two or three journals of our own time, by the
+same unfailing method, seek that circulation from posterity which is
+denied them in the present.
+
+This is particularly true in literature, where the literary enemy is as
+organised a tradesman as the literary agent. Like the literary agent, he
+naturally does his best to secure the biggest men. No doubt the time
+will come when the literary cut-throat--shall we call him?--will publish
+dainty little books of testimonials from authors, full of effusive
+gratitude for the manner in which they have been slashed and bludgeoned
+into fame. 'Butcher to Mr. Grant Allen' may then become a familiar
+legend over literary shop-fronts:--
+
+  'Ah! did you stab at Shelley's heart
+    With silly sneer and cruel lie?
+  And Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats,
+    To murder did you nobly try?
+
+  You failed, 'tis true; but what of that?
+    The world remembers still your name--
+  'Tis fame, _for you_, to be the cur
+    That barks behind the heels of Fame.'
+
+Any one who is fortunate enough to have enemies will know that all this
+is far from being fanciful. If one's enemies have any other _raison
+d'être_ beyond the fact of their being our enemies--what is it? They are
+neither beautiful nor clever, wise nor good, famous nor, indeed,
+passably distinguished. Were they any of these, they would not have
+taken to so humble a means of getting their living. Instead of being our
+enemies, they could then have afforded to employ enemies on their own
+account.
+
+Who, indeed, are our enemies? Broadly speaking, they are all those
+people who lack what we possess.
+
+If you are rich, every poor man is necessarily your enemy. If you are
+beautiful, the great democracy of the plain and ugly will mock you in
+the streets. It will be the same with everything you possess. The
+brainless will never forgive you for possessing brains, the weak will
+hate you for your strength, and the evil for your good heart. If you can
+write, all the bad writers are at once your foes. If you can paint, the
+bad painters will talk you down. But more than any talent or charm you
+may possess, the pearl of price for which you will be most bitterly
+hated will be your success. You can be the most wonderful person that
+ever existed, so long as you don't succeed, and nobody will mind. 'It is
+the sunshine,' says some one, 'that brings out the adder.' So powerful,
+indeed, is success that it has been known to turn a friend into a foe.
+Those, then, who wish to engage a few trusty enemies out of place need
+only advertise among the unsuccessful.
+
+_P.S._--For one service we should be particularly thankful to our
+enemies--they save us so much in stimulants. Their unbelief so helps our
+belief, their negatives make us so positive.
+
+
+
+
+THE DRAMATIC ART OF LIFE
+
+It is a curious truth that, whereas in every other art deliberate choice
+of method and careful calculation of effect are expected from the
+artist, in the greatest and most difficult art of all, the art of life,
+this is not so. In literature, painting, or sculpture you first evolve
+your conception, and then, after long study of it, as it glows and
+shimmers in your imagination, you set about the reverent selection of
+that form which shall be its most truthful incarnation, in words, in
+paint, in marble. Now life, as has been said many times, is an art too.
+Sententious morality from time past has told us that we are each given a
+part to play, evidently implying, with involuntary cynicism, that the
+art of life is--the art of acting.
+
+As with the actor, we are each given a certain dramatic conception for
+the expression of which we have precisely the same artistic
+materials--namely, our own bodies, sometimes including heart and brains.
+One has often heard the complaint of a certain actor that he acts
+himself. On the metaphorical stage of life the complaint and the implied
+demand are just the reverse. How much more interesting life would be if
+only more people had the courage and skill to act themselves, instead of
+abjectly understudying some one else! Of course, there are supers on the
+stage of life as on the real stage. It is proper that these should dress
+and speak and think alike. These one courteously excepts from the
+generalisation that the composer of the play, as Marcus Aurelius calls
+him, has given each of us a certain part to play--that part simply
+oneself: a part, need one say, by no means as easy as it seems; a part
+most difficult to study, and requiring daily rehearsal. So difficult is
+it, indeed, that most people throw up the part, and join the ranks of
+the supers--who, curiously enough, are paid much more handsomely than
+the principals. They enter one of the learned or idle professions, join
+the army or take to trade, and so speedily rid themselves of the irksome
+necessity of being anything more individual than 'the learned counsel,'
+'the learned judge,' 'my lord bishop,' or 'the colonel,' names
+impersonal in application as the dignity of 'Pharaoh,' whereof the name
+and not the man was alone important. Henceforth they are the Church, the
+Law, the Army, the City, or that vaguer profession Society. Entering one
+of these, they become as lost to the really living world as the monk who
+voluntarily surrenders all will and character of his own at the
+threshold of his monastery: bricks in a prison wall, privates in the
+line, peas in a row. But, as I say, these are the parts that pay. For
+playing the others, indeed, you are not paid, but expected to
+pay--dearly.
+
+It is full time we turned to those on whom falls the burden of those
+real parts. Such, when quite young, if they be conscientious artists,
+will carefully consider themselves, their gifts and possibilities, study
+to discover their artistic _raison d'être_ and how best to fulfil it.
+He or she will say: Here am I, a creature of great gifts and exquisite
+sensibilities, drawn by great dreams, and vibrating to great emotions;
+yet this potent and exquisite self is as yet, I know, but unwrought
+material of the perfect work of art it is intended that I should make of
+it--but the marble wherefrom, with patient chisel, I must liberate the
+perfect and triumphant ME! As a poet listening with trembling ear to the
+voice of his inspiration, so I tremulously ask myself--what is the
+divine conception that is to become embodied in me, what is the divine
+meaning of ME? How best shall I express it in look, in word, in deed,
+till my outer self becomes the truthful symbol of my inner self--till,
+in fact, I have successfully placed the best of myself on the outside
+--for others besides myself to see, and know and love?
+
+What is my part, and how am I to play it?
+
+Returning to the latter image, there are two difficulties that beset one
+in playing a part on the stage of life, right at the outset. You are not
+allowed to 'look' it, or 'dress' it! What would an actor think, who,
+asked to play Hamlet, found that he would be expected to play it
+without make-up and in nineteenth-century costume? Yet many of us are in
+a like dilemma with similar parts. Actors and audience must all wear the
+same drab clothes and the same immobile expression. It is in vain you
+protest that you do not really belong to this absurd and vulgar
+nineteenth century, that you have been spirited into it by a cruel
+mistake, that you really belong to mediæval Florence, to Elizabethan,
+Caroline, or at latest Queen Anne England, and that you would like to be
+allowed to look and dress as like it as possible. It is no use; if you
+dare to look or dress like anything but your own tradesmen--and other
+critics--it is at your peril. If you are beautiful, you are expected to
+disguise a fact that is an open insult to every other person you look
+at; and you must, as a general rule, never look, wear, feel, or say what
+everybody else is not also looking, wearing, feeling, or saying.
+
+Thus you get some hint of the difficulty of playing the part of yourself
+on this stage of life.
+
+In these matters of dressing and looking your part musicians seem
+granted an immunity denied to all their fellow-artists. Perhaps it is
+taken for granted that the musician is a fool--the British public is so
+intuitive. Yet it takes the same view of the poet, without allowing him
+a like immunity. And, by the way, what a fine conception of his part had
+Tennyson--of the dignity, the mystery, the picturesqueness of it!
+Tennyson would have felt it an artistic crime to look like his
+publisher; yet what poet is there left us to-day half so
+distinguished-looking as his publisher?
+
+Indeed, curiously enough, among no set of men does the desire to look as
+commonplace as the rest of the world seem so strong as among men of
+letters. Perhaps it is out of consideration for the rest of the world;
+but, whatever the reason, immobility of expression and general
+mediocrity of style are more characteristic of them at present than even
+the military.
+
+It is surely a strange paradox that we should pride ourselves on
+schooling to foolish insensibility, on eliminating from them every mark
+of individual character, the faces that were intended subtly and
+eloquently to image our moods--to look glad when we are glad, sorry when
+we are sorry, angry in anger, and lovely in love.
+
+The impassivity of the modern young man is indeed a weird and wonderful
+thing. Is it a mark to hide from us the appalling sins he none the less
+openly affects? Is it meant to conceal that once in his life he paid a
+wild visit to 'The Empire'--by kind indulgence of the County Council?
+that he once chucked a barmaid under the chin, that he once nearly got
+drunk, that he once spoke to a young lady he did not know--and then ran
+away?
+
+One sighs for the young men of the days of Gautier and Hugo, the young
+men with red waistcoats who made asses of themselves at first nights and
+on the barricades, young men with romance in their hearts and passion in
+their blood, fearlessly sentimental and picturesquely everything.
+
+The lover then was not ashamed that you should catch radiant glimpses of
+his love in his eyes--nay! if you smiled kindly on him, he would take
+you by the arm and insist on your breaking a bottle with him in honour
+of his mistress. Joy and sorrow then wore their appropriate colours,
+according, so to say, to the natural sumptuary laws of the emotions--one
+of which is that the right place for the heart is the sleeve.
+
+It is the duty of those who are great, or to whom great destinies of joy
+or sorrow have been dealt, to wear their distinctions for the world to
+see. It is good for the world, which in its crude way indicates the
+rudiments of this dramatic art of life, when it decrees that the bride
+shall walk radiant in orange blossom, and the mourner sadden our streets
+with black--symbols ever passing before us of the moving vicissitudes of
+life.
+
+The mourner cannot always be sad, or the bride merry; the bride indeed
+sometimes weeps at the altar, and the mourner laughs a savage cynical
+laugh at the grave; but for those moments in which they awhile forget
+parts more important than themselves, the tailor and the dressmaker have
+provided symbolical garments, just as military decorations have been
+provided for heroes without the gift of looking heroic, and sacerdotal
+vestments for the priest, who, like a policeman, is not always on duty.
+
+In playing his part the conscientious artist in life, like any other
+actor, must often seem to feel more than he really feels at a given
+moment, say more than he means. In this he is far from being
+insincere--though he must make up his mind to be accused daily of
+insincerity and affectation. On the contrary, it will be his very
+sincerity that necessitates his make-believe. With his great part ever
+before him in its inspiring completeness, he must be careful to allow no
+merely personal accident of momentary feeling or action to jeopardise
+the general effect. There are moments, for example, when a really true
+lover, owing to such masterful natural facts as indigestion, a cold, or
+extreme sleepiness, is unable to feel all that he knows he really feels.
+To 'tell the truth,' as it is called, under such circumstances, would
+simply be a most dangerous form of lying. There is no duty we owe to
+truth more imperative than that of lying stoutly on occasion--for,
+indeed, there is often no other way of conveying the whole truth than
+by telling the part-lie.
+
+A watchful sincerity to our great conception of ourselves is the first
+and last condition, of our creating that finest work of art--a
+personality; for a personality, like a poet, is not only born but made.
+
+
+
+
+THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX
+
+In an essay on Vauvenargues Mr. John Morley speaks with characteristic
+causticity of those epigrammatists 'who persist in thinking of man and
+woman as two different species,' and who make verbal capital out of the
+fancied distinction in the form of smart epigrams beginning '_Les
+femmes_.' It is one of Shakespeare's cardinal characteristics that _he
+understood woman_. Mr. Meredith's fame as a novelist is largely due to
+the fact that he too _understands women_. The one spot on the sun of
+Robert Louis Stevenson's fame, so we are told, is that he could _never
+draw a woman_. His capacity for drawing men counted for nothing,
+apparently, beside this failure. Evidently the Sphinx has not the face
+of a woman for nothing. That is why no one has read her riddle,
+translated her mystic smile. Yet many people smile mysteriously,
+without any profound meanings behind their smile, with no other reason
+than a desire to mystify. Perhaps the Sphinx smiles to herself just for
+the fun of seeing us take her smile so seriously. And surely women must
+so smile as they hear their psychology so gravely discussed. Of course,
+the superstition is invaluable to them, and it is only natural that they
+should make the most of it. Man is supposed to be a complete ignoramus
+in regard to all the specialised female 'departments'--from the supreme
+mystery of the female heart to the humble domestic mysteries of a
+household. Similarly, men are supposed to have no taste in women's
+dress, yet for whom do women clothe themselves in the rainbow and the
+sea-foam, if not to please men? And was not the high-priest of that
+delicious and fascinating mystery a man--if it be proper to call the
+late M. Worth a man,--as the best cooks are men, and the best waiters?
+
+It would seem to be assumed from all this mystification that men are
+beings clear as daylight, both to themselves and to women. Poor,
+simple, manageable souls, their wants are easily satisfied, their
+psychology--which, it is implied, differs little from their
+physiology--long since mapped out.
+
+It may be so, but it is the opinion of some that men's simplicity is no
+less a fiction than women's mysterious complexity, and that human
+character is made up of much the same qualities in men and women,
+irrespective of a merely rudimentary sexual distinction, which has, of
+course, its proper importance, and which the present writer would be the
+last to wish away. From that quaint distinction of sex springs, of
+course, all that makes life in the smallest degree worth living, from
+great religions to tiny flowers. Love and beauty and poetry;
+Shakespeare's plays, Burne-Jones's pictures, and Wagner's operas--all
+such moving expressions of human life, as science has shown us, spring
+from the all-important fact that 'male and female created He them.'
+
+This everybody knows, and few are fools enough to deny. Many people,
+however, confuse this organic distinction of sex with its time-worn
+conventional symbols; just as religion is commonly confused with its
+external rites and ceremonies. The comparison naturally continues itself
+further; for, as in religion, so soon as some traditional garment of the
+faith has become outworn or otherwise unsuitable, and the proposal is
+made to dispense with or substitute it, an outcry immediately is raised
+that religion itself is in danger--so with sex, no sooner does one or
+the other sex propose to discard its arbitrary conventional
+characteristics, or to supplement them by others borrowed from its
+fellow-sex, than an outcry immediately is raised that sex itself is in
+danger.
+
+Sex--the most potent force in the universe--in danger because women
+wear knickerbockers instead of petticoats, or military men take to
+corsets and cosmetics!
+
+That parallel with religion may be pursued profitably one step further.
+In religion, the conventional test of your faith is not how you live,
+not in your kindness of heart or purity of mind, but how you believe--in
+the Trinity, in the Atonement; and do you turn to the East during the
+recital of the Apostles' Creed? These and such, as every one knows, are
+the vital matters of religion. And it is even so with sex. You are not
+asked for the realities of manliness or womanliness, but for the
+shadows, the arbitrary externalities, the fashions of which change from
+generation to generation.
+
+To be truly womanly you must never wear your hair short; to be truly
+manly you must never wear it long. To be truly womanly you must dress as
+daintily as possible, however uncomfortably; to be truly manly you must
+wear the most hideous gear ever invented by the servility of tailors--a
+strange succession of cylinders from head to heel; cylinder on head,
+cylinder round your body, cylinders on arms and cylinders on legs. To be
+truly womanly you must be shrinking and clinging in manner and trivial
+in conversation; you must have no ideas, and rejoice that you wish for
+none; you must thank Heaven that you have never ridden a bicycle or
+smoked a cigarette; and you must be prepared to do a thousand other
+absurd and ridiculous things. To be truly manly you must be and do the
+opposite of all these things, with this exception--that with you the
+possession of ideas is optional. The finest specimens of British manhood
+are without ideas; but that, I say, is, generally speaking, a matter for
+yourself. It is indeed the only matter in which you have any choice.
+More important matters, such as the cut of your clothes and hair, the
+shape of your face, the length of your moustache and the pattern of your
+cane--all these are very properly regulated for you by laws of fashion,
+which you could never dream of breaking. You may break every moral law
+there is--or rather, was--and still remain a man. You may be a bully, a
+cad, a coward and a fool, in the poor heart and brains of you; but so
+long as you wear the mock regimentals of contemporary manhood, and are
+above all things plain and undistinguished enough, your reputation for
+manhood will be secure. There is nothing so dangerous to a reputation
+for manhood as brains or beauty.
+
+In short, to be a true woman you have only to be pretty and an idiot,
+and to be a true man you have only to be brutal and a fool.
+
+From these misconceptions of manliness and womanliness, these
+superstitions of sex, many curious confusions have come about. They so
+to say, professional differentiation between the sexes had at one time
+gone so far that men were credited with the entire monopoly of a certain
+set of human qualities, and women with the monopoly of a certain other
+set of human qualities; yet every one of these are qualities which one
+would have thought were proper to, and necessary for, all human beings
+alike, male and female.
+
+In a dictionary of a date (1856) when everything on earth and in heaven
+was settled and written in penny cyclopædias and books of deportment, I
+find these delicious definitions--
+
+_Manly_: becoming a man; firm; brave; undaunted; dignified; noble;
+stately; not boyish or womanish.
+
+_Womanly_: becoming a woman; feminine; as _womanly_ behaviour.
+
+Under _Woman_ we find the adjectives--soft, mild, pitiful and flexible,
+kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous, modest.
+
+Who can doubt that the dictionary maker defined and distributed his
+adjectives aright for the year 1856? Since then, however, many alarming
+heresies have taken root in our land, and some are heard to declare that
+both these sets of adjectives apply to men and women alike, and are, in
+fact, necessities of any decent human outfit. Otherwise the conclusion
+is obvious, that no one desirous of the adjective 'manly' must ever
+be--soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, kind, civil, obliging, humane,
+tender, timorous, or modest; and no one desirous of the adjective
+'womanly' be--firm, brave, undaunted, dignified, noble, or stately.
+
+But surely the essentials of 'manliness' and 'womanliness' belong to man
+and woman alike--the externals are purely artistic considerations, and
+subject to the vagaries of fashion. In art no one would think of
+allowing fashion any serious artistic opinion. It is usually the art
+which is out of fashion that is most truly art. Similarly, fashions in
+manliness or womanliness have nothing to do with real manliness or
+womanliness. Moreover, the adjectives 'manly' or 'womanly,' applied to
+works of art, or the artistic surfaces of men and women, are
+irrelevant--that is to say, impertinent. You have no right to ask a
+poem or a picture to look manly or womanly, any more than you have any
+right to ask a man or a woman to look manly or womanly. There is no such
+thing as looking manly or womanly. There is looking beautiful or ugly,
+distinguished or commonplace, individual or insignificant. The one law
+of externals is beauty in all its various manifestations. To ask the sex
+of a beautiful person is as absurd as it would be to ask the publisher
+the sex of a beautiful book. Such questions are for midwives and
+doctors.
+
+It was once the fashion for heroes to shed tears on the smallest
+occasion, and it does not appear that they fought the worse for it; some
+of the firmest, bravest, most undaunted, most dignified, most noble,
+most stately human beings have been women; as some of the softest,
+mildest, most pitiful and flexible, most kind, civil, obliging, humane,
+tender, timorous and modest human beings have been men. Indeed, some of
+the bravest men that ever trod this planet have worn corsets, and it
+needs more courage nowadays for a man to wear his hair long than to
+machine-gun a whole African nation. Moreover, quite the nicest women one
+knows ride bicycles--in the rational costume.
+
+
+
+
+THE FALLACY OF A NATION
+
+It is, I am given to understand, a familiar axiom of mathematics that no
+number of ciphers placed in front of significant units, or tens or
+hundreds of units, adds in the smallest degree to the numerical value of
+those units. The figure one becomes of no more importance however many
+noughts are marshalled in front of it--though, indeed, in the
+mathematics of human nature this is not so. Is not a man or woman
+considered great in proportion to the number of ciphers that walk in
+front of him, from a humble brace of domestics to guards of honour and
+imperial armies?
+
+A parallel profound truth of mathematics is that a nought, however many
+times it be multiplied, remains nought; but again we find the reverse
+obtain in the mathematics of human nature. One might have supposed that
+the result of one nobody multiplied even fifty million times would still
+be nobody. However, such is far from being the case. Fifty million
+nobodies make--a nation. Of course, there is no need for so many. I am
+reckoning as a British subject, and speak of fifty million merely as an
+illustration of the general fact that it is the multiplication of
+nobodies that makes a nation. 'Increase and multiply' was, it will be
+remembered, the recipe for the Jewish nation.
+
+Nobodies of the same colour, tongue, and prejudices have but to
+congregate together in a crowd sufficiently big for other similar crowds
+to recognise them, and then they are given a name of their own, and
+become recognised as a nation--one of the 'Great Powers.'
+
+Beyond those differences in colour, tongue, and prejudices there is
+really no difference between the component units--or rather ciphers--of
+all these several national crowds. You have seen a procession of various
+trades-unions filing toward Hyde Park, each section with its particular
+banner with a strange device: 'The United Guild of Paperhangers,' 'The
+Ancient Order of Plumbers,' and so on. And you may have marvelled to
+notice how alike the members of the various carefully differentiated
+companies were. So to say, they each and all might have been plumbers;
+and you couldn't help feeling that it wouldn't have mattered much if
+some of the paper-hangers had by mistake got walking amongst the
+plumbers, or _vice versa_.
+
+So the great trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word
+'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany'--this with a
+particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in
+front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously
+waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and
+yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called 'England.' Other
+smaller bodies of nobodies, that is, smaller nations, file past with
+humbler tread--though there is really no need for their doing so. For,
+as we have said, they are in every particular like to those haughtier
+nations who take precedence of them. In fact, one or two of them, such
+as Norway and Denmark--were a truer system of human mathematics to
+obtain--are really of more importance than the so-called greater
+nations, in that among their nobodies they include a larger percentage
+of intellectual somebodies.
+
+Remembering that percentage of wise men, the formula of a nation were
+perhaps more truly stated in our first mathematical image. The wise men
+in a nation are as the units with the noughts in front of them. And when
+I say wise men I do not, indeed, mean merely the literary men or the
+artists, but all those somebodies with some real force of character,
+people with brains and hearts, fighters and lovers, saints and thinkers,
+and the patient, industrious workers. Such, if you consider, are really
+no integral part of the nation among which they are cast. They have no
+part in what are grandiloquently called national interests--war,
+politics, and horse-racing to wit. A change of Government leaves them as
+unmoved as an election for the board of guardians. They would as soon
+think of entering Parliament or the County Council, as of yearning to
+manage the gasworks, or to go about with one of those carts bearing the
+legend 'Aldermen and Burgesses of the City of London' conspicuously upon
+its front. Their main concern in political changes is the rise and fall
+of the income-tax, and, be the Cabinet Tory or Liberal, their rate
+papers come in for the same amount. It is likely that national changes
+would affect them but little more. What more would a foreign invasion
+mean than that we should pay our taxes to French, Russian, or German
+officials, instead of to English ones? French and Italians do our
+cooking, Germans manage our music, Jews control our money markets;
+surely it would make little difference to us for France, Russia, or
+Germany to undertake our government. The worst of being conquered by
+Russia would be the necessity of learning Russian; whereas a little
+rubbing up of our French would make us comfortable with France. Besides,
+to be conquered by France would save us crossing the Channel to Paris,
+and then we might hope for cafés in Regent Street, and an emancipated
+literature. As a matter of fact, so-called national interests are merely
+certain private interests on a large scale, the private interests of
+financiers, ambitious politicians, soldiers, and great merchants.
+Broadly speaking, there are no rival nations--there are rival markets;
+and it is its Board of Trade and its Stock Exchange rather than its
+Houses of Parliament that virtually govern a country. Thus one seaport
+goes down and another comes up, industries forsake one country to bless
+another, the military and naval strengths of nations fluctuate this way
+and that; and to those whom these changes affect they are undoubtedly
+important matters--the great capitalist, the soldier, and the
+politician; but to the quiet man at home with his wife, his children,
+his books, and his flowers, to the artist busied with brave translunary
+matters, to the saint with his eyes filled with 'the white radiance of
+eternity,' to the shepherd on the hillside, the milkmaid in love, or the
+angler at his sport--what are these pompous commotions, these busy,
+bustling mimicries of reality? England will be just as good to live in
+though men some day call her France. Let the big busybodies divide her
+amongst them as they like, so that they leave one alone with one's fair
+share of the sky and the grass, and an occasional, not too vociferous,
+nightingale.
+
+The reader will perhaps forgive the hackneyed references to Sir Thomas
+Browne peacefully writing his _Religio Medici_ amid all the commotions
+of the Civil War, and to Gautier calmly correcting the proofs of his new
+poems during the siege of Paris. The milkman goes his rounds amid the
+crash of empires. It is not his business to fight. His business is to
+distribute his milk--as much after half-past seven as may be
+inconvenient. Similarly, the business of the thinker is with his
+thought, the poet with his poetry. It is the business of politicians to
+make national quarrels, and the business of the soldier to fight them.
+But as for the poet--let him correct his proofs, or beware the printer.
+
+The idea, then, of a nation is a grandiloquent fallacy in the interests
+of commerce and ambition, political and military. All the great and
+good, clever and charming people belong to one secret nation, for which
+there is no name unless it be the Chosen People. These are the lost
+tribes of love, art, and religion, lost and swamped amid alien peoples,
+but ever dreaming of a time when they shall meet once more in Jerusalem.
+
+Yet though they are thus aliens, taking and wishing no part in the
+organisation of the 'nations' among which they dwell, this does not
+prevent those nations taking part and credit in them. And whenever a
+brave soldier wins a battle, or an intrepid traveller discovers a new
+land, his particular nation flatters itself, as though it--the million
+nobodies--had done it. With a profound indifference to, indeed an active
+dislike of, art and poetry, there is nothing on which a nation prides
+itself so much as upon its artists and poets, whom, invariably, it
+starves, neglects, and even insults, as long as it is not too silly to
+do so.
+
+Thus the average Englishman talks of Shakespeare--as though he himself
+had written the plays; of India--as though he himself had conquered it.
+And thus grow up such fictions as 'national greatness' and 'public
+opinion.'
+
+For what is 'national greatness' but the glory reflected from the
+memories of a few great individuals? and what is 'public opinion' but
+the blustering echoes of the opinion of a few clever young men on the
+morning papers?
+
+For how can people in themselves little become great by merely
+congregating into a crowd, however large? And surely fools do not become
+wise, or worth listening to, merely by the fact of their banding
+together.
+
+A 'public opinion' on any matter except football, prize-fighting, and
+perhaps cricket, is merely ridiculous--by whatever brutal physical
+powers it may be enforced--ridiculous as a town council's opinion upon
+art; and a nation is merely a big fool with an army.
+
+
+
+
+THE GREATNESS OF MAN
+
+Ignorant, as I inevitably am, dear reader, of your intellectual and
+spiritual upbringing, I can hardly guess whether the title of my article
+will impress you as a platitude or as a paradox. Goodness knows, some
+men and women think quite enough of themselves as it is, and, from a
+certain momentary point of view, there may seem little occasion indeed
+to remind man of his importance.
+
+I refer to your intellectual and spiritual upbringing, because I venture
+to wonder if it was in the least like my own. I was brought up, I
+rejoice to say, in the bosom of an orthodox Puritan family. I was led
+and driven to believe that man was everybody, and that God was
+somebody--and that not merely the Sabbath, but the whole universe, was
+made for man: that the stars were his bedtime candles, and that the sun
+arose to ensure his catching the 8.37 of a morning.
+
+On this belief I acted for many years. Every young man believes that
+there is no god but God, and that he is born to be His prophet--though
+perhaps that belief is not so common nowadays. I am speaking of many
+years ago.
+
+Science, however, has long since changed all that. Those terrible Muses,
+geology, astronomy, and particularly biology, have reduced man to a
+humility which, if in some degree salutary, becomes in its excess highly
+dangerous. Why should one maggot in this great cheese of the world take
+itself more seriously than others? Why dream mightily and do bravely if
+we are but a little higher than the beasts that perish? Nature cares
+nothing about us, and her giant forces laugh at our fancies. The world
+has no such meaning as we thought. Poets and saints, deluded by
+unhealthy imaginations, have misled us, and it is quite likely that the
+wild waves are really saying nothing more important than 'Beecham's
+Pills.'
+
+'Give us a definition of life,' I asked a certain famous scientist and
+philosopher whom I am privileged to call my friend.
+
+'Nothing easier!' he gaily replied. 'Life is a product of solar energy,
+falling upon the carbon compounds, on the outer crust of a particular
+planet, in a particular corner of the solar system.'
+
+'And that,' I said, 'really satisfies you as a definition of life--of
+all the wistful wonder of the world!' And as I spoke I thought of Moses
+with mystically shining face upon the Mount of the Law, of Ezekiel rapt
+in his divine fancies, of Socrates drinking his cup of hemlock, of
+Christ's agony in the garden; the golden faces of the great of the world
+passed as in a dream before me,--soldiers, saints, poets, and lovers. I
+thought of Horatius on the bridge, of the holy and gentle soul of St.
+Francis, of Chatterton in his splendid despair, and in fancy I went with
+the awestruck citizens of Verona to reverently gaze at the bodies of two
+young lovers who had counted the world well lost if they might only
+leave it together.
+
+The carbon compounds!
+
+I took down _Romeo and Juliet_, listened to its passionate spheral
+music, and the carbon compounds have never troubled me again.
+
+Love laughs at the carbon compounds, and a great book, a noble act, a
+beautiful face, make nonsense of such cheap formula for the mystery of
+human life.
+
+Yet this parable of the carbon compounds is a fair sample of all that
+science can tell us when we come to ultimates. We go away from its
+oracles with a mouthful of sounding words, which may seem very
+impressive till we examine their emptiness. What, for example, is all
+this rigmarole about solar energy and the carbon compounds but a more
+pompous way of putting the old scriptural statement that man was made of
+the dust of the ground? To say that God took a handful of dust and
+breathed upon it and it became man, is no harder to realise than that
+solar rays falling upon that dust should produce humanity and all the
+various phantasmagoria of life. If anything, it is more explanatory. It
+leaves us with an inspiring mystery for explanation.
+
+In saying this, I do not forget our debt to science. It has done much
+in clearing our minds of cant, in popularising more systematic thinking,
+and in instituting sounder methods of observation. In some directions it
+has deepened our sense of wonder. It has broadened our conception of the
+universe, though I fear it has been at the expense of narrowing our
+conception of man. With Hamlet it contemptuously says, 'What is this
+quintessence of dust!' It is so impressed by the mileage and tonnage of
+the universe, so abased before the stupendous measurements of the
+cosmos, the appalling infinity and eternity of its space and time, that
+it forgets the marvel of the mind that can grasp all these conceptions,
+forgets, too, that, big and bullying as the forces of nature may be, man
+has been able in a large measure to control, indeed to domesticate,
+them. Surely the original fact of lightning is little more marvellous
+than the power of man to turn it into his errand-boy or his horse, to
+light his rooms with it, and imprison it in pennyworths, like the genius
+in the bottle, in the underground railway. Mere size seems unimpressive
+when we contemplate such an extreme of littleness as say the ant, that
+pin-point of a personality, that mere speck of being, yet including
+within its infinitesimal proportions a clever, busy brain, a soldier, a
+politician, and a merchant. That such and so many faculties should have
+room to operate within that tiny body--there is a marvel before which,
+it seems to me, the billions of miles that keep us from falling into the
+jaws of the sun, and the tonnage of Jupiter, are comparatively
+insignificant and conceivable.
+
+No, we must not allow ourselves to be frightened by the mere size and
+weight of the universe, or be depressed because our immediate genealogy
+is not considered aristocratic. Perhaps, after all, we are sons of God,
+and as Mr. Meredith finely puts it, our life here may still be
+
+  '... a little holding
+  To do a mighty service.'
+
+'Things of a day!' exclaims Pindar. 'What is a man? What is a man not?'
+
+It is good for our Nebuchadnezzars, the kings of the world, and
+conceited, successful people generally, to measure themselves against
+the great powers of the universe, to humble their pride by contemplation
+of the fixed stars; but a too humble attitude toward the Infinite, a too
+constant pondering upon eternity, is not good for us, unless, so to say,
+we can live with them as friends, with the inspiring feeling that,
+little as we may seem, there is that in us which is no less infinite, no
+less cosmic, and that our passions and dreams have, as Mr. William
+Watson puts it, 'a relish of eternity.'
+
+Readers of Amiel's 'Journal' will know what a sterilising, petrifying
+influence his trance-like contemplation of the Infinite had upon his
+life. Amiel was simply hypnotised by the universe, as a man may
+hypnotise himself by gazing fixedly at a star.
+
+Mr. Pater, you will remember, has a remarkable study of a similar
+temperament in his _Imaginary Portraits_. Sebastian van Storck, like
+Amiel, had become hypnotised by the Infinite. It paralysed in him all
+impulse or power 'to be or do any limited thing.'
+
+'For Sebastian, at least,' we read, 'the world and the individual alike
+had been divested of all effective purpose. The most vivid of finite
+objects, the dramatic episodes of Dutch history, the brilliant
+personalities which had found their parts to play in them, that golden
+art, surrounding one with an ideal world, beyond which the real world
+was discernible indeed, but etherealised by the medium through which it
+came to one; all this, for most men so powerful a link to existence,
+only set him on the thought of escape--into a formless and nameless
+infinite world, evenly grey.... Actually proud, at times, of his
+curious, well-reasoned nihilism, he could but regard what is called the
+business of life as no better than a trifling and wearisome delay.'
+
+This mood, once confined to a few mystics is likely to become a common
+one, is already, one imagines, far from infrequent--so the increase of
+suicide would lead us to suppose. Robbed of his hope of a glorious
+immortality, stripped of his spiritual significance, bullied and
+belittled by science on every hand, man not unnaturally begins to feel
+that it is no use taking his life seriously, that, in fact, it betrays a
+lack of humour to do so. While he was a supernatural being, a son of
+God, it was with him a case of _noblesse oblige_; and while he is happy
+and comfortable he doesn't mind giving up the riddle of the world. It is
+only the unhappy that ever really think. But what is he to do when agony
+and despair come upon him, when all that made his life worth living is
+taken from him? How is he to sustain himself? where shall he look for
+his strength or his hope? He looks up at the sky full of stars, but he
+is told that God is not there, that the city of God is long since a
+ruin, and that owls hoot to each other across its moss-grown fanes and
+battlements; he looks down on the earth, full of graves, a vast
+necropolis of once radiant dreams, with the living for its
+phantoms,--and there is no comfort anywhere. Happy is he if some simple
+human duty be at hand, which he may go on doing blindly and
+dumbly--till, perhaps, the light come again. It is difficult to offer
+comfort to such a one. Comfort is cheap, and we know nothing. When life
+holds nothing for our love and delight, it is difficult to explain why
+we should go on living it--except on the assumption that it matters,
+that it is, in some mystical way, supremely important, how we live it,
+and what we make of those joys and sorrows which, say some, are but
+meant as mystical trials and tests.
+
+Sebastian van Storck refused 'to be or do any limited thing,' but the
+answer to his mysticism is to be found in a finer mysticism, that which
+says that there is no limited act or thing, but that the significance,
+as well as the pathos, of eternity is in our smallest joys and sorrows,
+as in our most everyday transactions, and the greatness of God incarnate
+in His humblest child.
+
+This, the old doctrine of the microcosm, seems in certain moments,
+moments one would wish to say, of divination, strangely plain and
+clear--when, in Blake's words, it seems so easy to
+
+  '... see a world in a grain of sand,
+    And a heaven in a wild flower;
+  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
+    And Eternity in an hour.'
+
+Perhaps in the street, an effect of light, a passing face, yes, even the
+plaintive grind of a street organ, some such everyday circumstance,
+affects you suddenly in quite a strange way. It has become
+universalised. It is no longer a detail of the Strand, but a cryptic
+symbol of human life. It has been transfigured into a thing of infinite
+pathos and infinite beauty, and, sad or glad, brings to you an
+inexplicable sense of peace, an unshakable conviction that man is a
+spirit, that his life is indeed of supreme and lovely significance, and
+that his destiny is secure and blessed.
+
+Matthew Arnold, ever sensitive to such spiritual states, has described
+these trance-like visitations in 'The Buried Life'--
+
+  'Only, but this is rare--
+  When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
+  When, jaded with the rush and glare
+  Of the interminable hours,
+  Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
+  When our world-deafen'd ear
+  Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--
+  A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
+  And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again:
+  The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
+  And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
+  A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
+  And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
+  The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
+
+  'And there arrives a lull in the hot race
+  Wherein he doth for ever chase
+  That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
+  An air of coolness plays upon his face,
+  And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
+  And then he thinks he knows
+  The hills where his life rose,
+  And the sea where it goes.'
+
+'To be or do any limited thing'! What indeed, we ask in such hours, is a
+limited thing, when all the humble interests of our daily life are
+palpably big with eternity? Is the first kiss of a great love a limited
+thing? though there is, unhappily, no denying that it comes to an end!
+When a young husband and wife smile across to each other above the sleep
+of their little child--is that a limited thing? When the siren voices of
+the world blend together on the lips of a young poet, and with rapt eyes
+and hot heart he makes a song as of the morning stars--is that a limited
+thing? Are love, and genius, and duty done in the face of death--are
+these limited things? I think not--and man, indeed, knows better.
+
+Greatness is not relative. It is absolute. It is not for man to depress
+himself by measuring himself against the eternities and the immensities
+external to him. What he has to do is to look inward upon himself, to
+fathom the eternities and the immensities in his own heart and brain.
+
+And the more man sees himself forsaken by the universe, the more
+opportunity to vindicate his own greatness. Is there no kind heart
+beating through the scheme of things?--man's heart shall still be kind.
+Will the eternal silence make mock of his dreams and his idealisms,
+laugh coldly at 'the splendid purpose in his eyes'? Well, so be it. His
+dreams and idealisms are none the less noble things, and if the gods do
+thus make mock of mortal joy and pain--let us be grateful that we were
+born mere men.
+
+Moreover, he has one great answer to the universe--the answer of
+courage. He is still Prometheus, and there is no limit to what he can
+bear. Let the vultures of pain rend his heart as they will, he can still
+hiss 'coward' in the face of the Eternal. Nay, he can even laugh at his
+sufferings--thanks to the spirit of humour, that most blessed of
+ministering angels, without which surely the heart of humanity had long
+since broken, by which man is able to look with a comical eye upon
+terrors, as it were taking themselves so seriously, coming with such
+Olympian thunders and lightnings to break the spirit of a mere six foot
+of earth!
+
+But while his courage and his humour are defences of which he cannot be
+disarmed, whatever be the intention of the Eternal, it is by no means
+certain that nature does not mean kindly by man. Perhaps the pain of the
+world is but the rough horseplay of great powers that mean but jest--and
+kill us in it: as though one played at 'tick' with an elephant!
+
+Perhaps, after all,--who knows?--God is love, and His great purpose
+kind.
+
+Surely, when you think of it, the existence in man of the senses of love
+and pity implies the probability of their existence elsewhere in the
+universe too.
+
+  'Into that breast which brings the rose
+  Shall I with shuddering fall.'
+
+So runs the profoundest thought in modern poetry--and need I say it is
+Mr. Meredith's?
+
+As the fragrance and colour of the rose must in some occult way be
+properties of the rude earth from which they are drawn by the sun, may
+not human love also be a kindly property of matter--that mysterious
+life-stuff in which is packed such marvellous potentialities? Evidently
+love must be somewhere in the universe--else it had not got into the
+heart of man; and perhaps pity slides down like an angel in the rays of
+the solar energy, while there is the potential beating of a human heart
+even in the hard crust of the carbon compounds.
+
+I confess that this seems to me no mere fancy, but a really comforting
+speculation. Pain, we say, is inherent in the scheme of the universe;
+but is not love seen to be no less inherent, too?
+
+There must be some soul of beauty to animate the lovely face of the
+world, some soul of goodness to account for its saints. If the gods are
+cruel, it is strange that man should be so kind, and that some pathetic
+spirit of tenderness should seem to stir even in the bosoms of beasts
+and birds.
+
+Meanwhile, we cannot too often insist that, whatever uncertainties there
+be, man has one certainty--himself. Science has really adduced nothing
+essential against his significance. That he is not as big as an Alp, as
+heavy as a star, or as long-lived as an eagle, is nothing against his
+proper importance. Even a nobleman is of more significance in the world
+than his acres, and giants are not proverbial for their intellectual or
+spiritual qualities. The ant is of more importance than the ass, and the
+great eye of a beautiful woman is more significant than the whole clayey
+bulk of Mars.
+
+After all the scientific mockery of the old religious ideal of the
+importance of man, one begins to wonder if his Ptolemaic fancy that he
+was the centre of the universe, and that it was all made for him, is not
+nearer the If truth than the pitiless theories which hardly allow him
+equality with the flea that perishes.
+
+Suppose if, after all, the stars were really meant as his bedtime
+candles, and the sun's purpose in rising is really that he may catch the
+8.37!
+
+For, as Sir Thomas Browne says in his solemn English, 'there is surely a
+piece of Divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and
+owes no homage unto the sun.'
+
+The long winter of materialistic science seems to be breaking up, and
+the old ideals are seen trooping back with something more than their old
+beauty, in the new spiritual spring that seems to be moving in the
+hearts of men.
+
+After all its talk, science has done little more than correct the
+misprints of religion. Essentially, the old spiritualistic and poetic
+theories of life are seen, not merely weakly to satisfy the cravings of
+man's nature, but to be mostly in harmony with certain strange and
+moving facts in his constitution, which the materialists
+unscientifically ignore.
+
+It was important, and has been helpful, to insist that man is an animal,
+but it is still more important to insist that he is a spirit as well. He
+is, so to say, an animal by accident, a spirit by birthright: and,
+however homely his duties may occasionally seem, his life is bathed in
+the light of a sacred transfiguring significance, its smallest acts
+flash with divine meanings, its highest moments are rich with 'the
+pathos of eternity,' and its humblest duties mighty with the
+responsibilities of a god.
+
+
+
+
+DEATH AND TWO FRIENDS
+
+_A DIALOGUE_
+
+(_To the Memory of J.S. and T.C.L._)
+
+PERSONS: SCRIPTOR AND LECTOR.
+
+[This dialogue was written originally as a rejoinder to certain
+criticisms on a book of mine entitled, _The Religion of a Literary
+Man_--_Religio Scriptoris_--hence the names given to the two 'persons.'
+It was written in March 1894, before an event in the writer's life to
+which, erroneously, some have supposed it to refer.]
+
+
+LECTOR. But do you really mean, Scriptor, that you have no desire for
+the life after death?
+
+SCRIPTOR. I never said quite that, Lector, though perhaps I might almost
+have gone so far. What I did say was that we have been accustomed to
+exaggerate its importance to us here and now, that it really matters
+less to us than we imagine.
+
+LECTOR. I see. But you must speak for yourself, Scriptor. I am sure that
+it matters much to many, to most of us. It does, I know, to me.
+
+SCRIPTOR. Less than you think, my dear Lector. Besides, you are really
+too young to know. It is true that, as years go, you are ten years my
+senior, but what of that? You have that vigorous health which is the
+secret of perpetual youth. You have not yet realised decay, not to speak
+of death. The immortality of the soul is a question wide of you, who
+have as yet practically no doubt of the immortality of the body. But
+I--well, it would be melodramatic to say that I face death every day.
+The metaphor applies but to desperate callings and romantic complaints.
+To some Death comes like a footpad, suddenly, and presents his
+pistol--and the smoke that curls upward from his empty barrel is your
+soul.
+
+To another he comes featureless, a stealthily accumulating London fog,
+that slowly, slowly chokes the life out of you, without allowing you the
+consolation of a single picturesque moment, a single grand attitude. For
+you, probably, Death will only come when you die. I have to live with
+him as well. I shall smoulder for years, you will be carried to heaven,
+like Enoch, in a beautiful lightning.
+
+        'A simple child
+    That lightly draws its breath,
+    And feels its life in every limb,
+    What can it know of Death?'
+
+That's you, my dear Lector, for all your forty years.
+
+LECTOR. All the more reason, Scriptor, that you should desire a
+hereafter. You sometimes talk of the work you would do if you were a
+robust Philistine such as I. Would it not be worth while to live
+again, if only to make sure of that _magnum opus_--just to realise
+those dreams that you say are daily escaping you?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Ah! so speaks the energetic man, eager to take the world on
+his shoulders. I know the images of death that please you,
+Lector--such as that great one of Arnold's, about 'the sounding
+labour-house vast of being.'
+
+But, Lector, you who love work so well--have you never heard tell of
+a thing called Rest? Have you never known what it is to be tired, my
+Lector?--not tired at the end of a busy day, but tired in the morning,
+tired in the Memnonian sunlight, when larks and barrel-organs start on
+their blithe insistent rounds. No, the man who is tired of a morning
+sings not music-hall songs in his bedroom as he dashes about in his
+morning bath. But will you never want to go to bed, Lector? Will you
+be always like the children who hate to be sent to bed, and think that
+when they are grown up they will never go to bed at all? Yet in a few
+years' time how glad they are of the stray chance of bed at ten. May
+it not be so with sleep's twin-brother? In our young vigour, driven by
+a hundred buoyant activities, enticed by dream on dream, time seems so
+short for all we think we have to do; but surely when the blood begins
+to thin, and the heart to wax less extravagantly buoyant, when comfort
+croons a kettle-song whose simple spell no sirens of ambition or
+romance can overcome--don't you think that then 'bedtime' will come to
+seem the best hour of the day, and 'Death as welcome as a friend would
+fall'?
+
+LECTOR. But you are no fair judge, Scriptor. You say my health, my
+youth, as you waggishly call it, puts me out of court. Yet surely your
+ill-health and low spirits just as surely vitiate your judgment?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Admitted, so far as my views are the outcome of my
+particular condition. But you forget that the condition I have been
+supposing is not merely particular, but, on the contrary, the most
+general among men. Was it not old age?--which, like youth, is
+independent of years. You may be young beyond your years, I may be old
+in advance of them; but old age does come some time, and with it the
+desire of rest.
+
+LECTOR. But does not old age spend most of its thought in dwelling
+fondly on its lost youth, hanging like a remote sunrise in its
+imagination? Is it not its one yearning desire just to live certain
+hours of its youth over again?--and would the old man not give all he
+possesses for the certainty of being born young again into eternity?
+
+SCRIPTOR. He would give everything--but the certainty of rest. After
+seventy years of ardent life one needs a long sleep to refresh us
+in. Besides, age may not be so sure of the advantages of youth. All is
+not youth that laughs and glitters. Youth has its hopes, which are
+uncertain; but age has its memories, which are sure; youth has its
+passions, but age has its comforts.
+
+LECTOR. Your answers come gay and pat, Scriptor, but your voice
+betrays you. In spite of you, it saddens all your words. Tell me, have
+you ever known what it is actually to lose any one who is dear to you?
+Have you looked on death face to face?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Yes, Lector, I have--but once. It is now about five years
+ago, but the impression of it haunts me to this hour. Perhaps the
+memory is all the keener because it was my one experience. In a world
+where custom stales all things, save Cleopatra, it is all the better
+perhaps not to see even too much of Death, lest we grow familiar with
+him. For instance, doctors and soldiers, who look on him daily, seem
+to lose the sense of his terror--nay, worse, of his tragedy. Maybe it
+is something in his favour, and Death, like others, may only need to
+be known to be loved.
+
+LECTOR. But tell me, Scriptor, of this sad experience, which even now
+it moves you to name; or is the memory too sad to recall?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Sad enough, Lector, but beautiful for all that, beautiful as
+winter. It was winter when she of whom I am thinking died--a winter
+that seemed to make death itself whiter and colder on her marble
+forehead. It is but one sad little story of all the heaped-up sorrow
+of the world; but in it, as in a shell, I seem to hear the murmur of
+all the tides of tears that have surged about the lot of man from the
+beginning.
+
+There were two dear friends of mine whom I used to call the happiest
+lovers in the world. They had loved truly from girlhood and boyhood,
+and after some struggle--for they were not born into that class which
+is denied the luxury of struggle--at length saw a little home bright
+in front of them. And then Jenny, who had been ever bright and strong,
+suddenly and unaccountably fell ill. Like the stroke of a sword, like
+the stride of a giant, Death, to whom they had never given a thought,
+was upon them. It was consumption, and love could only watch and
+pray. Suddenly my friend sent for me, and I saw with my own eyes what
+at a distance it had seemed impossible to believe. As I entered the
+house, with the fresh air still upon me, I spoke confidently, with
+babbling ignorant tongue. 'Wait till you see her face!' was all my
+poor stricken friend could say.
+
+Ah! her face! How can I describe it?  It was much sweeter afterwards,
+but now it was so dark and witchlike, so uncanny, almost wicked, so
+thin and full of inky shadows. She sat up in her bed, a wizened little
+goblin, and laughed a queer, dry, knowing laugh to herself, a laugh
+like the scraping of reeds in a solitary place. A strange black
+weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows, like the 'unwilling
+sleep' of a strong narcotic. She would begin a sentence and let it
+wither away unfinished, and point sadly and almost humorously to her
+straight black hair, clammy as the feathers of a dead bird lying in
+the rain. Her hearing was strangely keen. And yet she did not know,
+was not to know. How was one to talk to her--talk of being well again,
+and books and country walks, when she had so plainly done with all
+these things? How bear up when she, with a half-sad, half-amused
+smile, showed her thin wrists?--how say that they would soon be strong
+and round again?  Ugh! she was already beginning to be different from
+us, already putting off our body-sweet mortality, and putting on the
+fearful garments of death, changing before our eyes from ruddy
+familiar humanity into a being of another element, an element we dread
+as the fish dreads the air. Soon we should not be able to talk to
+her. Soon she would have unlearnt all the sweet grammar of earth. She
+was no longer Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mysteries at which the
+flesh crept. She was going to die.
+
+Have you never looked ahead towards some trial, some physical trial,
+maybe an operation?--for perhaps the pains of the body are the
+keenest, after all--those of the spirit are at least in some part
+metaphor. You look forward with dread, yet it is at last over. It is
+behind you. And have you never thought that so it will be with death
+some day? Poor little Jenny was to face the great operation.
+
+Next time I saw her she was dead. In our hateful English fashion, they
+had shut her up in a dark room, and we had to take candles to see
+her. I shall never forget the moment when my eyes first rested on that
+awful snow-white sheet, so faintly indented by the fragile form
+beneath, lines very fragile, but oh! so hard and cold, like the
+indentations upon frozen snow; never forget my strange unaccountable
+terror when he on one side and I on the other turned down the icy
+sheet from her face. But terror changed to awe and reverence, as her
+face came upon us with its sweet sphinx-like smile. Lying there, with
+a little gold chain round her neck and a chrysanthemum in the bosom of
+her night-gown, there was a curious regality about her, a look as
+though she wore a crown our eyes were unable to see. And while I gazed
+upon her, the sobs of my friend came across the bed, and as he called
+to her I seemed to hear the eternal Orpheus calling for his lost
+Eurydice. Poor lad!--poor maid!  Here, naked and terrible, was all the
+tragedy of the world compressed into an hour, the Medusa-face of life
+that turns the bravest to stone. Surely, I felt, God owed more than He
+could ever repay to these two lovers, whom it had been so easy to
+leave to their simple joys. And from that night to this I can never
+look upon my white bed without seeing afar off the moment when it,
+too, will bear the little figure of her I love best in the world,
+bound for her voyage to the Minotaur Death; just as I never put off my
+clothes at night, and stretch my limbs down among the cool sheets,
+without thinking of the night when I shall put off my clothes for the
+last time and close my eyes for ever.
+
+LECTOR. But, my friend, this is to feel too much; it is morbid.
+
+SCRIPTOR. Morbid! How can one really _feel_ and not be morbid? If one
+be morbid, one can still be brave.
+
+LECTOR. But surely, true-lover as you are, it would be a joy to you to
+think that this terrible parting of death will not be final. We cannot
+love so well without hoping that we may meet our loved ones somewhere
+after death.
+
+SCRIPTOR. Hopes! wishes! desires! What of them? We hope, we _desire_
+all things. Who has not cried for the moon in his time?  But what is
+the use of talking of what we desire? Does life give us all we wish,
+however passionately we wish it, and is Death any more likely to
+listen to the cry of our desires? Of course we _wish it_, wish it with
+a pathetic urgency which is too poignant to bear, and which the wise
+man bravely stifles. It would all be different if we _knew_.
+
+LECTOR. But does not science even, of late, hold out the promise of
+its probability?--and the greatest poets and thinkers have always been
+convinced of its truth.
+
+SCRIPTOR. The promise of a probability!  O my Lector, what a poor
+substitute is that for a certainty! And as for the great men you speak
+of, what does their 'instinctive' assurance amount to but a strong
+sense of their own existence at the moment of writing or speaking?
+Does one of them anywhere assert immortality as a _fact_--a fact of
+which he has his own personal proof and knowledge--a scientific, not
+an imaginative, theological fact? Arguments on the subject are
+naught. It is waste of time to read them; unsupported by fact, they
+are one and all cowardly dreams, a horrible hypocritical clutching at
+that which their writers have not the courage to forgo.
+
+LECTOR. Yet may not a dream be of service to reality, my friend? Is it
+not certain that people are all the better and all the happier for
+this dream, as you call it?--for what seems to me this sustaining
+faith?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Happier? Some people, perhaps, in a lazy, unworthy
+fashion. But 'better'? Well, so long as we believed in 'eternal
+punishment' no doubt people were sometimes terrified into 'goodness'
+by the picture of that dread vista of torment, as no doubt they were
+bribed into it by the companion picture of a green unbounded Paradise;
+but, O my friend, what an unworthy kind of goodness, the mere mask of
+virtue! And now that the Inferno has practically disappeared from our
+theology, the belief in eternal life simply means unlimited cakes and
+ale, for good and evil alike, for all eternity. How such a belief can
+be moralising I fail to understand. To my mind, indeed, far from being
+moralising, this belief in immortality is responsible for no
+inconsiderable portion of the wrong and misery of the world. It is the
+baneful narcotic which has soothed the selfish and the slothful from
+the beginning. It is that unlimited credit which makes the bankrupt.
+It simply gives us all eternity to procrastinate in. Instead of
+manfully eating our peck of dirt here and now, we leave it and all
+such disagreeables to the hereafter.
+
+  'He said, "I believe in Eternal Life,"
+  As he threw his life away--
+      What need to hoard?
+      He could well afford
+  To squander his mortal day.
+  With Eternity his, what need to care?--
+  A sort of immortal millionaire.'
+
+LECTOR. I am glad to be reminded, Scriptor, that you are a poet, for the
+line of your argument had almost made me forget it. One expects other
+views from a poet.
+
+SCRIPTOR. When, my dear Lector, shall we get rid of the silly idea that
+the poet should give us only the ornamental view of life, and rock us to
+sleep, like babies, with pretty lullabies? Is it not possible to make
+_facts_ sing as well as fancies? With all this beautiful world to sing
+of--for beautiful it is, however it be marred; with this wonderful
+life--and wonderful and sweet it is though it is shot through with such
+bitter pain; with such _certainties_ for his theme, we yet beg him to
+sing to us of shadows!
+
+And you talk of 'faith.' 'Faith' truly is what we want, but it is faith
+in the life here, not in the life hereafter. Faith in the life here! Let
+our poets sing us that. And such as would deny it--I would hang them as
+enemies of society.
+
+LECTOR. But, at all events, to keep to our point--you at least _hope_
+for immortality. If Edison, say, were suddenly to discover it for us as
+a scientific certainty, you would welcome the news?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Well, yes and no! Have you seen the 'penny' phonographs in the
+Strand? You should go and have a pennyworth of the mysteries of time and
+space! How long will Edison's latest magic toy survive this
+popularisation, I wonder? For a little moment it awakens the sense of
+wonder in the idly curious, who set the demon tube to their ears; but if
+they make any remarks at all, it is of the cleverness of Mr. Edison,
+the probable profits of the invention--and not a word of the wonder of
+the world! So it would be with the undiscovered country. I was blamed
+the other day as being cheaply smart because I said that if 'one
+traveller returned,' his resurrection would soon be as commonplace as
+the telephone, and that enterprising firms would be interviewing him as
+to the prospects of opening branch establishments in Hades. Yet it is a
+perfectly serious, and, I think, true remark; for who that knows the
+modern man, with his small knowingness, and his utter incapacity for
+reverence, would doubt that were Mr. Edison actually to be the Columbus
+of the Unseen, it would soon be as overrun with gaping tourists as
+Switzerland, and that within a year railway companies would be
+advertising 'Bank-holidays in Eternity'?
+
+No! let us keep the Unseen--or, if it must be discovered, let the key
+thereof be given only to true-lovers and poets.
+
+
+
+
+A SEAPORT IN THE MOON
+
+
+No one is so hopelessly wrong about the stars as the astronomer, and I
+trust that you never pay any attention to his remarks on the moon. He
+knows as much about the moon as a coiffeur knows of the dreams of the
+fair lady whose beautiful neck he makes still more beautiful. There is
+but one opinion upon the moon--namely, our own. And if you think that
+science is thus wronged, reflect a moment upon what science makes of
+things near at hand. Love, it says, is merely a play of pistil and
+stamen, our most fascinating poetry and art is 'degeneration,' and human
+life, generally speaking, is sufficiently explained by the 'carbon
+compounds'--God-a-mercy! If science makes such grotesque blunders about
+radiant matters right under its nose, how can one think of taking its
+opinion upon matters so remote as the stars--or even the moon, which is
+comparatively near at hand?
+
+Science says that the moon is a dead world, a cosmic ship littered with
+the skeletons of its crew, and from which every rat of vitality has long
+since escaped. It is the ghost that rises from its tomb every night, to
+haunt its faithless lover, the world. It is a country of ancient
+silver-mines, unworked for centuries. You may see the gaping mouths of
+the dark old shafts through your telescopes. You may even see the
+rusting pit tackle, the ruinous engine-houses, and the idle pick and
+shovel. Or you may say that it is counterfeit silver, coined to take in
+the young fools who love to gaze upon it. It is, so to speak, a bad
+half-crown.
+
+As you will! but I am of Endymion's belief--and no one was ever more
+intimate with the moon. For me the moon is a country of great seaports,
+whither all the ships of our dreams come home. From all quarters of the
+world, every day of the week, there are ships sailing to the moon. They
+are the ships that sail just when and where you please. You take your
+passage on that condition. And it is ridiculous to think for what a
+trifle the captain will take you on so long a journey. If you want to
+come back, just to take an excursion and no more, just to take a lighted
+look at those coasts of rose and pearl, he will ask no more than a glass
+or two of bright wine--indeed, when the captain is very kind, a flower
+will take you there and back in no time; if you want to stay whole days
+there, but still come back dreamy and strange, you may take a little
+dark root and smoke it in a silver pipe, or you may drink a little phial
+of poppy-juice, and thus you shall find the Land of Heart's Desire; but
+if you are wise and would stay in that land for ever, the terms are even
+easier--a little powder shaken into a phial of water, a little piece of
+lead no bigger than a pea, and a farthing's-worth of explosive fire, and
+thus also you are in the Land of Heart's Desire for ever.
+
+I dreamed last night that I stood on the blustering windy wharf, and the
+dark ship was there. It was impatient, like all of us, to leave the
+world. Its funnels belched black smoke, its engines throbbed against
+the quay like arms that were eager to strike and be done, and a bell
+was beating impatient summons to be gone. The dark captain stood ready
+on the bridge, and he looked into each of our faces as we passed on
+board. 'Is it for the long voyage?' he said. 'Yes! the long voyage,' I
+said--and his stern eyes seemed to soften as I answered.
+
+At last we were all aboard, and in the twinkling of an eye were out of
+sight of land. Yet, once afloat, it seemed as though we should never
+reach our port in the moon--so it seemed to me as I lay awake in my
+little cabin, listening to the patient thud and throb of the great
+screws, beating in the ship's side like a human heart.
+
+Talking with my fellow-voyagers, I was surprised to find that we were
+not all volunteers. Some, in fact, complained pitifully. They had, they
+said, been going about their business a day or two before, and suddenly
+a mysterious captain had laid hold of them, and pressed them to sail
+this unknown sea. Thus, without a word of warning, they had been
+compelled to leave behind them all they held dear. This, one felt, was a
+little hard of the captain; but those of us whose position was exactly
+the reverse, who had friends on the other side, all whose hopes indeed
+were invested there, were too selfishly expectant of port to be severe
+on the captain who was taking us thither.
+
+There were three friends I had especially set out to see: two young
+lovers who had emigrated to those colonies in the moon just after their
+marriage, and there was another. What a surprise it would be to all
+three, for I had written no letter to say I was coming. Indeed, it was
+just a sudden impulse, the pistol-flash of a long desire.
+
+I tried to imagine what the town would be like in which they were now
+living. I asked the captain, and he answered with a sad smile that it
+would be just exactly as I cared to dream it.
+
+'Oh, well then,' I thought, 'I know what it will be like. There shall be
+a great restless, tossing estuary, with Atlantic winds for ever ruffling
+the sails of busy ships, ships coming home with laughter, ships leaving
+home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell. And the shaggy tossing water
+shall be bounded on either bank with high granite walls, and on one
+bank shall be a fretted spire soaring with a jangle of bells, from amid
+a tangle of masts, and underneath the bells and the masts shall go
+streets rising up from the strand, streets full of faces, and sweet with
+the smell of tar and the sea. O captain! will it be morning or night
+when we come to my city? In the morning my city is like a sea-blown
+rose, in the night it is bright as a sailor's star.
+
+'If it be early morning, what shall I do? I shall run to the house in
+which my friends lie in happy sleep, never to be parted again, and kiss
+my hand to their shrouded window; and then I shall run on and on till
+the city is behind and the sweetness of country lanes is about me, and I
+shall gather flowers as I run, from sheer wantonness of joy; and then at
+last, flushed and breathless, I shall stand beneath her window. I shall
+stand and listen, and I shall hear her breathing right through the heavy
+curtains, and the hushed garden and the sleeping house will bid me keep
+silence, but I shall cry a great cry up to the morning star, and say,
+"No, I will not keep silence. Mine is the voice she listens for in her
+sleep. She will wake again for no voice but mine. Dear one, awake, the
+morning of all mornings has come!"'
+
+As I write, the moon looks down at me like a Madonna from the great
+canvas of the sky. She seems beautiful with the beauty of all the eyes
+that have looked up at her, sad with all the tears of all those eyes;
+like a silver bowl brimming with the tears of dead lovers she seems.
+Yes, there are seaports in the moon; there are ships to take us there.
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+Most of the foregoing essays have made a first appearance either in
+_The Yellow Book_, _The Nineteenth Century_, _The Cosmopolitan_, _The
+Westminster Gazette_, or _The Realm_, to the editors of which the writer
+is indebted for kind permission to reprint.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Prose Fancies (Second Series)
+by Richard Le Gallienne
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14103 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14103 ***</div>
+
+<h1>PROSE FANCIES<br>
+(SECOND SERIES)</h1>
+
+<h2>BY<br>
+RICHARD LE GALLIENNE</h2>
+
+
+<h3>LONDON: JOHN LANE<br>
+CHICAGO: H.S. STONE AND CO.<br>
+1896</h3>
+
+<h3>TO<br>
+MAGGIE LE GALLIENNE<br>
+WITH LOVE</h3>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <div class="stanza">
+  <p>Poor are the gifts of the poet&mdash;</p>
+  <p>Nothing but words!</p>
+  <p>The gifts of kings are gold,</p>
+  <p>Silver, and flocks and herds,</p>
+  <p>Garments of strange soft silk,</p>
+  <p>Feathers of wonderful birds,</p>
+  <p>Jewels and precious stones,</p>
+  <p>And horses white as the milk&mdash;</p>
+  <p>These are the gifts of kings:</p>
+  <p>But the gifts that the poet brings</p>
+  <p>Are nothing but words.</p>
+  </div>
+
+  <div class="stanza">
+  <p>Forty thousand words!</p>
+  <p>Take them&mdash;a gift of flies!</p>
+  <p>Words that should have been birds,</p>
+  <p>Words that should have been flowers,</p>
+  <p>Words that should have been stars</p>
+  <p>In the eternal skies.</p>
+  <p>Forty thousand words!</p>
+  <p>Forty thousand tears&mdash;</p>
+  <p>All out of two sad eyes.</p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<div class="contents">
+<a href="#essay01">A SEVENTH-STORY HEAVEN</a><br>
+<a href="#essay02">SPRING BY PARCEL POST</a><br>
+<a href="#essay03">THE GREAT MERRY-GO-ROUND</a><br>
+<a href="#essay04">THE BURIAL OF ROMEO AND JULIET</a><br>
+<a href="#essay05">VARIATIONS UPON WHITEBAIT</a><br>
+<a href="#essay06">THE ANSWER OF THE ROSE</a><br>
+<a href="#essay07">ABOUT THE SECURITIES</a><br>
+<a href="#essay08">THE BOOM IN YELLOW</a><br>
+<a href="#essay09">LETTER TO AN UNSUCCESSFUL LITERARY MAN</a><br>
+<a href="#essay10">A POET IN THE CITY</a><br>
+<a href="#essay11">BROWN ROSES</a><br>
+<a href="#essay12">THE DONKEY THAT LOVED A STAR</a><br>
+<a href="#essay13">ON LOVING ONE'S ENEMIES</a><br>
+<a href="#essay14">THE DRAMATIC ART OF LIFE</a><br>
+<a href="#essay15">THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX</a><br>
+<a href="#essay16">THE FALLACY OF A NATION</a><br>
+<a href="#essay17">THE GREATNESS OF MAN</a><br>
+<a href="#essay18">DEATH AND TWO FRIENDS</a><br>
+<a href="#essay19">A SEAPORT IN THE MOON</a></div>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 001-->
+<h3><a name="essay01">A SEVENTH-STORY HEAVEN</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>At one end of the city that I love there is a tall, dingy pile of
+offices that has evidently seen more prosperous fortunes. It is not the
+aristocratic end. It is remote from the lordly street of the fine shops
+of the fair women, where in the summer afternoons the gay bank clerks
+parade arm-in-arm in the wake of the tempestuous petticoat. It lies
+aside from the great exchange which looks like a scene from <em>Romeo and
+Juliet</em> in the moonlight, from the town-hall from whose clocked and
+gilded cupola ring sweet chimes at midnight, and whence, throned above
+the city, a golden Britannia, in the sight of all men, is seen visibly
+ruling the waves&mdash;while in the square below the death of Nelson is
+played all day in stone, with a frieze of his noble words about the
+pedestal. England expects! What an influence that stirring<!--Page 002--> challenge
+has yet upon the hearts of men may be seen by any one who will study the
+faces of the busy, imaginative cotton-brokers, who, in the thronged and
+humming mornings, sell what they have never seen to a customer they will
+never see.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, the end I mean is just the very opposite end to that. It is the
+end where the cotton that everybody sells and nobody buys <em>is</em> seen,
+piled in great white stacks, or swinging in the air from the necks of
+mighty cranes, cranes that could nip up an elephant with as little ado,
+and set him down on the wharf, with a box on his ugly ears for his
+cowardly trumpeting. It is the end that smells of tar, the domain of the
+harbourmasters, where the sailor finds a 'home,'&mdash;not too sweet, and
+where the wild sea is tamed in a maze of granite squares and basins; the
+end where the riggings and buildings rise side by side, and a clerk
+might swing himself out upon the yards from his top-floor desk. Here is
+the Custom House, and the conversation that shines is full of freightage
+and dock dues; here are the shops that sell nothing but<!--Page 003--> oilskins,
+sextants, and parrots, and here the taverns do a mighty trade in rum.</p>
+
+<p>It was in this quarter, for a brief sweet time, that Love and Beauty
+made their strange home, as though a pair of halcyons should choose to
+nest in the masthead of<!--Page 004--> a cattleship. Love and Beauty chose this
+quarter, as, alas! Love and Beauty must choose so many things&mdash;for its
+cheapness. Love and Beauty were poor, and office rents in this quarter
+were exceptionally low. But what should Love and Beauty do with an
+office? Love was a poor poet in need of a room for his bed and his
+rhymes, and Beauty was a little blue-eyed girl who loved him.</p>
+
+<p>It was a shabby, forbidding place, gloomy and comfortless as a warehouse
+on the banks of Styx. No one but Love and Beauty would have dared to
+choose it for their home. But Love and Beauty have a great confidence in
+themselves&mdash;a confidence curiously supported by history,&mdash;and they never
+had a moment's doubt that this place was as good as another for an
+earthly Paradise. So Love signed an agreement for one great room at the
+very top, the very masthead of the building, and Beauty made it pretty
+with muslin curtains, flowers, and dainty makeshifts of furniture, but
+chiefly with the light of her own heavenly face. A stroke of luck coming
+one day to the poet, the lovers, with that extravagance which the poor
+alone have the courage to enjoy, procured a piano on the kind-hearted
+hire-purchase system, a system specially conceived for lovers. Then,
+indeed, for many a wonderful night that room was not only on the seventh
+floor, but in the seventh heaven; and as Beauty would sit at the piano,
+with her long hair flying loose, and her soul like a whirl of starlight
+about her brows, a stranger peering in across the soft lamplight, seeing
+her face, hearing her voice, would deem that the long climb, flight
+after flight of dreary stair, had been appropriately rewarded by a
+glimpse of heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly it must have seemed a strange contrast from the life about and
+below it. The foot of that infernal stair plunged in the warm
+rum-and-thick-twist atmosphere of a sailor's tavern&mdash;and 'The Jolly
+Shipmates' was a house of entertainment by no means to be despised.
+Often have I sat there with<!--Page 005--> the poet, drinking the whisky from which
+Scotland takes its name, among wondering sea-boots and sou'-westers, who
+could make nothing of that wild hair and that still wilder talk.</p>
+
+<p>From the kingdom of rum and tar you mounted into a zone of commission
+agents fund shipbrokers, a chill, unoccupied region, in which every
+small office bore the names of half a dozen different firms, and yet
+somehow could not contrive to look busy. Finally came an airy echoing
+landing, a region of empty rooms, which the landlords in vain
+recommended as studios to a city that loved not art. Here dwelt the
+keeper and his kind-hearted little wife, and no one besides save Love
+and Beauty. There was thus a feeling of rarefaction in the atmosphere,
+as though at this height it was only the Alpine flora of humanity that
+could find root and breathing. But once along the bare passage and
+through a certain door, and what a sudden translation it was into a
+gracious world of books and flowers and the peace they always bring.</p>
+
+<p>Once upon a time, in that enchanted past<!--Page 006--> where dwell all the dreams we
+love best, precisely, with loving punctuality, at five in the afternoon,
+a pretty, girlish figure, like Persephone escaping from the shades,
+stole through the rough sailors at the foot of that sordid Jacob's
+ladder and made her way to the little heaven at the top.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not describe her, for the good reason that I cannot. Leonardo,
+ever curious of the beauty that was most strangely exquisite, once in an
+inspired hour painted such a face, a face wrought of the porcelain of
+earth with the art of heaven. But, whoever should paint it, God
+certainly made it&mdash;must have been the comment of any one who caught a
+glimpse of that little figure vanishing heavenwards up that stair, like
+an Assumption of Fra Angelico's&mdash;that is, any one interested in art and
+angels.</p>
+
+<p>She had not long to wait outside the door she sought, for the poet, who
+had listened all day for the sound, had ears for the whisper of her
+skirts as she came down the corridor, and before she had time to knock
+had already folded her in his arms. The two babes in that thieves' wood
+of commission agents and<!--Page 007--> shipbrokers stood silent together for a
+moment, in the deep security of a kiss such as the richest millionaire
+could never buy&mdash;and then they fell to comparing notes of their day's
+work. The poet had had one of his rare good days. He had made no money,
+his post had been even more disappointing than usual,&mdash;but he had
+written a poem, the best he had ever written, he said, as he always said
+of his last new thing. He had been burning to read it to somebody all
+afternoon&mdash;had with difficulty refrained from reading it to the
+loquacious little keeper's wife as she brought him some coals&mdash;so it was
+not to be expected that he should wait a minute before reading it to her
+whom indeed it strove to celebrate. With arms round each other's necks,
+they bent over the table littered with the new-born poem, all blots and
+dashes like the first draft of a composer's score, and the poet, deftly
+picking his way among the erasures and interlineations, read aloud the
+beautiful words&mdash;with a full sense of their beauty!&mdash;to ears that deemed
+them more beautiful even than they were. The owners of this now valuable
+copyright allow<!--Page 008--> me to irradiate my prose with three of the verses.</p>
+
+<p>'Ah! what,' half-chanted, half-crooned the poet&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'Ah! what a garden is your hair!&mdash;</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Such treasure as the kings of old,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">In coffers of the beaten gold,</p>
+  <p>Laid up on earth&mdash;and left it there.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>So tender a reference to hair whose beauty others beside the poet had
+loved must needs make a tender interruption&mdash;the only kind of
+interruption the poet could have forgiven&mdash;and 'Who,' he continued&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'Who was the artist of your mouth?</p>
+    <p class="indent1">What master out of old Japan</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Wrought it so dangerous to man ...'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And here it was but natural that laughter and kisses should once more
+interrupt&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <div class="stanza">
+  <p>'Those strange blue jewels of your eyes,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Painting the lily of your face,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">What goldsmith set them in their place&mdash;</p>
+  <p>Forget-me-nots of Paradise?</p>
+  </div>
+
+  <div class="stanza">
+  <p>'And that blest river of your voice,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Whose merry silver stirs the rest</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Of water-lilies in your breast ...'</p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>At last, in spite of more interruptions, the poem came to an
+end&mdash;whereupon, of course, the poet immediately read it through once<!--Page 009-->
+more from the beginning, its personal and emotional elements, he felt,
+having been done more justice on a first reading than its artistic
+excellences.</p>
+
+<p>'Why, darling, it is splendid,' was his little sweetheart's comment;
+'you know how happy it makes me to think it was written for me, don't
+you?' And she took his hands and looked up at him with eyes like the
+morning sky.</p>
+
+<p>Romance in poetry is almost exclusively associated with very refined
+ethereal matters, stars and flowers and such like&mdash;happily, in actual
+life it is often associated with much humbler objects. Lovers, like
+children, can make their paradises out of the quaintest materials.
+Indeed, our paradises, if we only knew, are always cheap enough; it is
+our hells that are so expensive. Now these lovers&mdash;like, if I mistake
+not, many other true lovers before and since&mdash;when they were
+particularly happy, when some special piece of good luck had befallen
+them, could think of no better paradise than a little dinner together in
+their seventh-story heaven. 'Ah! wilderness were Paradise enow!'<!--Page 010--></p>
+
+<p>To-night was obviously such an occasion. But, alas! where was the money
+to come from? They didn't need much&mdash;for it is wonderful how happy you
+can be on five shillings, if you only know how. At the same time it is
+difficult to be happy on ninepence&mdash;which was the entire fortune of the
+lovers at the moment. Beauty laughingly suggested that her celebrated
+hair might prove worth the price of their dinner. The poet thought a
+pawnbroker might surely be found to advance ten shillings on his
+poem&mdash;the original MS. too,&mdash;else had they nothing to pawn, save a few
+gold and silver dreams which they couldn't spare. What was to be done?
+Sell some books, of course! It made them shudder to think how many poets
+they had eaten in this fashion. It was sheer cannibalism&mdash;but what was
+to be done? Their slender stock of books had been reduced entirely to
+poetry. If there had only been a philosopher or a modern novelist, the
+sacrifice wouldn't have seemed so unnatural. And then Beauty's eyes fell
+upon a very fat informing-looking volume on the poet's desk.<!--Page 011--></p>
+
+<p>'Wouldn't this do?' she said.</p>
+
+<p>'Why, of course!' he exclaimed; 'the very thing. A new history of
+socialism just sent me for review. Hang the review; we want our dinner,
+don't we, little one? And then I've read the preface, and looked through
+the index&mdash;quite enough to make a column of, with a plentiful supply of
+general principles thrown in! Why, of course, there's our dinner for
+certain, dull and indigestible as it looks. It's worth fifty minor poets
+at old Moser's. Come along....'</p>
+
+<p>So off went the happy pair&mdash;ah! how much happier was Beauty than ever so
+many fine ladies one knows who have only, so to say, to rub their
+wedding-rings for a banquet to rise out of the ground, with the most
+distinguished guests around the table, champagne of the best, and
+conversation of the worst.</p>
+
+<p>Old Moser found histories of socialism profitable, more profitable
+perhaps than socialism, and he actually gave five-and-sixpence for the
+volume. With the ninepence already in their pockets, you will see that
+they were now possessors of quite a small<!--Page 012--> fortune. Six-and-threepence!
+It wouldn't pay for one's lunch nowadays. Ah! but that is because the
+poor alone know the art of dining.</p>
+
+<p>You needn't wish to be happier and merrier than those two lovers, as
+they gaily hastened to that bright and cosy corner of the town where
+those lovely ham-and-beef shops make glad the faces of the passers-by. O
+those hams with their honest shining faces, polished like mahogany&mdash;and
+the man inside so happy all day slicing them with those wonderful long
+knives (which, of course, the superior class of reader has never seen)
+worn away to a veritable thread, a mere wire, but keen as Excalibur.
+Beauty used to calculate in her quaint way how much steel was worn away
+with each pound of ham, and how much therefore went to the sandwich. And
+what an artist was the carver! What a true eye! what a firm, flexible
+wrist! never a shaving of fat too much&mdash;he was too great an artist for
+that. Then there were those dear little cream cheeses, and those little
+brown jugs of yellow cream come all the way from Devonshire<!--Page 013-->&mdash;you could
+hear the cows lowing across the rich pasture, and hear the milkmaids
+singing and the milk whizzing into the pail, as you looked at them.</p>
+
+<p>And then those perfectly lovely sausages&mdash;I beg the reader's pardon! I
+forgot that the very mention of the word smacks of vulgarity. Yet, all
+the same, I venture to think that a secret taste for sausages among the
+upper classes is more widespread than we have any idea of. I confess
+that Beauty and her poet were at first ashamed of admitting their vulgar
+frailty to each other. They needed to know each other very well first.
+Yet there is nothing, when once confessed, that brings two people so
+close as&mdash;a taste for sausages.</p>
+
+<p>'You darling!' exclaimed Beauty, with something like tears in her voice,
+when her poet first admitted this touch of nature&mdash;and then next moment
+they were in fits of laughter that a common taste for a very 'low' food
+should bring tears to their eyes! But such are the vagaries of love&mdash;as
+you will know, if you know anything about it&mdash;'vulgar,' no doubt, though
+only the vulgar<!--Page 014--> would so describe them&mdash;for it is only vulgarity that
+is always 'refined.'</p>
+
+<p>Then there was the florist's to visit. What beautiful trades some people
+ply! To sell flowers is surely like dealing in fairies. Beautiful must
+grow the hands that wire them, and sweet the flower-girl's every
+thought!</p>
+
+<p>There remained but the wine merchant's, or, had we not better say at
+once, the grocer's, for our lovers could afford no rarer vintages than
+Tintara or the golden burgundy of Australia; and it is wonderful to
+think what a sense of festivity one of those portly colonial flagons
+lent to their little dining-table. Sometimes, I may confide, when they
+wanted to feel very dissipated, and were <em>very</em> rich, they would allow
+themselves a small bottle of Benedictine&mdash;and you should have seen
+Beauty's eyes as she luxuriously sipped at her green little liqueur
+glass; for, like most innocent people, she enjoyed to the full the
+delight of feeling occasionally wicked. However, these were rare
+occasions, and this night was not one of them.</p>
+
+<p>Half a pound of black grapes completed<!--Page 015--> their shopping, and then, with
+their arms full of their purchases, they made their way home again, the
+two happiest people in what is, after all, a not unhappy world.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the cooking and the laying of the table. For all her Leonardo
+face, Beauty was a great cook&mdash;like all good women, she was as earthly
+in some respects as she was heavenly in others, which I hold to be a
+wise combination&mdash;and, indeed, both were excellent cooks; and the poet
+was unrivalled at 'washing up,' which, I may say, is the only skeleton
+at these Bohemian feasts.</p>
+
+<p>You should have seen the gusto with which Beauty pricked those
+sausages&mdash;I had better explain to the un-Bohemian reader that to attempt
+to cook a sausage without first pricking it vigorously with a fork, to
+allow for the expansion of its juicy gases, is like trying to smoke a
+cigar without first cutting off the end&mdash;and oh! to hear again their
+merry song as they writhed in torment in the hissing pan, like Christian
+martyrs raising hymns of praise from the very core of Smithfield fires.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the poet would be surpassing<!--Page 016--> himself in the setting-out of
+the little table, cutting up the bread reverently as though it were for
+an altar&mdash;as indeed it was,&mdash;studying the effect of the dish of
+tomatoes, now at this corner, now at that, arranging the flowers with
+much more care than he arranged the adjectives in his sonnets, and
+making ever so sumptuous an effect with that half a pound of grapes.</p>
+
+<p>And then at last the little feast would begin, with a long grace of eyes
+meeting and hands clasping: true eyes that said, 'How good it is to
+behold you, to be awake together in this dream of life!' true hands that
+said, 'I will hold you fast for ever&mdash;not death even shall pluck you
+from my hand, shall loose this bond of you and me'; true eyes, true
+hands, that had immortal meanings far beyond the speech of mortal words.</p>
+
+<p>And it had all come out of that dull history of socialism, and had cost
+little more than a crown! What lovely things can be made out of money!
+Strange to think that a little silver coin of no possible use or beauty
+in itself can be exchanged for<!--Page 017--> so much tangible, beautiful pleasure. A
+piece of money is like a piece of opium, for in it lie locked up the
+most wonderful dreams&mdash;if you have only the brains and hearts to dream
+them.</p>
+
+<p>When at last the little feast grew near its end, Love and Beauty would
+smoke their cigarettes together; and it was a favourite trick of theirs
+to lower the lamp a moment, so that they might see the stars rush down
+upon them through the skylight which hung above their table. It gave
+them a sense of great sentinels, far away out in the lonely universe,
+standing guard over them, seemed to say that their love was safe in the
+tender keeping of great forces. They were poor, but then they had the
+stars and the flowers and the great poets for their servants and
+friends; and, best of all, they had each other. Do you call that being
+poor?</p>
+
+<p>And then, in the corner, stood that magical box with the ivory keys,
+whose strings waited ready night and day&mdash;strange media through which
+the myriad voices, the inner-sweet thoughts, of the great world-soul
+found speech, messengers of the<!--Page 018--> stars to the heart, and of the heart to
+the stars.</p>
+
+<p>Beauty's songs were very simple. She got little practice, for her poet
+only cared to have her sing over and over again the same sweet songs;
+and perhaps if you had heard her sing 'Ask nothing more of me, sweet,'
+or 'Darby and Joan,' you would have understood his indifference to
+variety.</p>
+
+<p>At last the little feast is quite, quite finished. Beauty has gone home;
+her lover still carries her face in his heart as she waved and waved and
+waved to him from the rattling lighted tramcar; long he sits and sits
+thinking of her, gazing up at those lonely ancient stars; the air is
+still bright with her presence, sweet with her thoughts, warm with her
+kisses, and as he turns to the shut piano, he can still see her white
+hands on the keys and her girlish face raised in an ecstasy&mdash;Beata
+Beatrix&mdash;above the music.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'O love, my love! if I no more should see</p>
+  <p>Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Nor image of thine eyes in any spring&mdash;</p>
+  <p>How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope</p>
+  <p>The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">The wind of Death's imperishable wing!'</p>
+</div><!--Page 019-->
+
+<p>And then ... he would throw himself upon his bed, and burst into tears.</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'And they are gone: aye, ages long ago</p>
+  <p>These lovers fled away into the storm.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>That seventh-story heaven once more leads a dull life as the office of a
+ship-chandler, and harsh voices grate the air where Beauty sang. The
+books and the flowers and the lovers' faces are gone for ever. I suppose
+the stars are the same, and perhaps they sometimes look down through
+that roof-window, and wonder what has become of those two lovers who
+used to look up at them so fearlessly long ago.</p>
+
+<p>But friends of mine who believe in God say that He has given His angels
+charge concerning that dingy old seventh-floor heaven, and that, for
+those who have eyes to see, there is no place where a great dream has
+been dreamed that is not thus watched over by the guardian angels of
+memory.</p>
+
+<p><em>For M. Le G., 25 September 1895.</em></p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 020-->
+<h3><a name="essay02">SPRING BY PARCEL POST</a></h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>They've taken all the spring from the country to the town&mdash;</p>
+  <p>Like the butter and the eggs, and the milk from the cow....</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>So began to jig and jingle my thoughts as in my letters and newspapers
+this morning I read, buried alive among the solitary fastnesses of the
+Surrey hills, the last news from town. The news I envied most was that
+spring had already reached London. 'Now,' ran a pretty article on spring
+fashions, 'the sunshine makes bright the streets, and the
+flower-baskets, like huge bouquets, announce the gay arrival of spring.'
+I looked up and out through my hillside window. The black ridge on the
+other side of the valley stood a grim wall of burnt heather against the
+sky&mdash;which sky, like the bullets in the nursery rhyme, was made
+unmistakably of lead; a<!--Page 021--> close rain was falling methodically, and,
+generally speaking, the world looked like a soaked mackintosh. It wasn't
+much like the gay arrival of spring, and grimly I mused on the
+advantages of life in town.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly, it did seem hard, I reflected, that town should be ahead of
+us even in such a country matter as spring. Flower-baskets indeed! Why,
+we haven't as much as a daisy for miles around. It is true that on the
+terrace there the crocuses blaze like a street on fire, that the
+primroses thicken into clumps, lying among their green leaves like
+pounds of country butter; it is true that the blue cones of the little
+grape hyacinth are there, quaintly formal as a child's toy-flowers; yes!
+and the big Dutch hyacinths are already shamelessly <em>enceinte</em> with
+their buxom waxen blooms, so fat and fragrant&mdash;(one is already delivered
+of a fine blossom. Well, that is a fine baby, to be sure! say the other
+hyacinths, with babes no less bonny under their own green aprons&mdash;all
+waiting for the doctor sun). Then among the blue-green blades of the
+narcissus, here and there you see a stem topped with a creamish<!--Page 022-->
+chrysalis-like envelope, from which will soon emerge a beautiful eye,
+rayed round with white wings, looking as though it were meant to fly,
+but remaining rooted&mdash;a butterfly on a stalk; while all the beds are
+crowded with indeterminate beak and blade, pushing and elbowing each
+other for a look at the sun, which, however, sulkily declines to look at
+them. It is true there is spring on the terrace, but even so it is
+spring imported from the town&mdash;spring bought in Holborn, spring
+delivered free by parcel post; for where would the terrace have been but
+for the city seedsman&mdash;that magician who sends you strangely spotted
+beans and mysterious bulbs in shrivelled cerements, weird little
+flower-mummies that suggest centuries of forgotten silence in painted
+Egyptian tombs. This strange and shrivelled thing can surely never live
+again, we say, as we hold it in our hands, seeing not the glowing
+circles of colour, tiny rings of Saturn, packed so carefully inside this
+flower-egg, the folds of green and silver silk wound round and round the
+precious life within.</p>
+
+<p>But, of course, this is all the seedsman's<!--Page 023--> cunning, and no credit to
+Nature; and I repeat, that were it not for railways and the parcel
+post&mdash;goodness knows whether we should ever get any spring at all in the
+country! Think of the days when it had to travel down by stage-coach.
+For, left to herself, what is the best Nature can do for you with March
+well on the way? Personally, I find the face of the country practically
+unchanged. It is, to all intents and purposes, the same as it has been
+for the last three or four months&mdash;as grim, as unadorned, as bleak, as
+draughty, and generally as comfortless as ever. There isn't a flower to
+be seen, hardly a bird worth listening to, not a tree that is not
+winter-naked, and not a chair to sit down upon. If you want flowers on
+your walks you must bring them with you; songs, you must take a poet
+under your arm; and if you want to rest, lean laboriously on your
+stick&mdash;or take your chance of rheumatism.</p>
+
+<p>Of course your specialists, your botanists, your nature-detectives, will
+tell you otherwise. They have surprised a violet in the act of
+blossoming; after long and excited<!--Page 024--> chase have discovered a clump of
+primroses in their wild state; seen one butterfly, heard one cuckoo. But
+as one swallow does not make a summer, it takes more than one cuckoo to
+make a spring. I confess that only yesterday I saw three sulphur
+butterflies, with my own eyes; I admit the catkins, and the
+silver-notched palm; and I am told on good colour-authority that there
+is a lovely purplish bloom, almost like plum-bloom, over certain copses
+in the valley; by taking thought, I have observed the long horizontal
+arms of the beech growing spurred with little forked branches of
+spear-shaped buds, and I see little green nipples pushing out through
+the wolf-coloured rind of the dwarf fir-trees. Spring is arming in
+secret to attack the winter&mdash;that is sure enough, but spring in secret
+is no spring for me. I want to see her marching gaily with green
+pennons, and flashing sun-blades, and a good band.</p>
+
+<p>I want butterflies as they have them at the Lyceum&mdash;'butterflies all
+white,' 'butterflies all blue,' 'butterflies of gold,' and I should
+particularly fancy 'butterflies all<!--Page 025--> black.' But there, again, you
+see,&mdash;you must go to town, within hearing of Mrs. Patrick Campbell's
+<em>voix d'or</em>. I want the meadows thickly inlaid with buttercups and
+daisies; I want the trees thick with green leaves, the sky all larks and
+sunshine; I want hawthorn and wild roses&mdash;both at once; I want some go,
+some colour, some warmth in the world. Oh, where are the pipes of Pan?</p>
+
+<p>The pipes of Pan are in town, playing at street corners and in the
+centres of crowded circuses, piled high with flower-baskets blazing with
+refulgent flowery masses of white and gold. Here are the flowers you can
+only buy in town; simple flowers enough, but only to be had in town.
+Here are fragrant banks of violets every few yards, conflagrations of
+daffodils at every crossing, and narcissus in scented starry garlands
+for your hair.</p>
+
+<p>You wander through the Strand, or along Regent Street, as through the
+meadows of Enna&mdash;sweet scents, sweet sounds, sweet shapes, are all about
+you; the town-butterflies, white, blue, and gold, 'wheel and shine'<!--Page 026--> and
+flutter from shop to shop, suddenly resurgent from their winter
+wardrobes as from a chrysalis; bright eyes flash and flirt along the
+merry, jostling street, while the sun pours out his golden wine
+overhead, splashing it about from gilded domes and bright-faced
+windows&mdash;and ever are the voices at the corners and the crossings
+calling out the sweet flower-names of the spring!</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>But here in the country it is still all rain and iron. I am tired of
+waiting for this slow-moving provincial spring. Let us to the town to
+meet the spring&mdash;for:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>They've taken all the spring from the country to the town&mdash;</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Like the butter and the eggs, and the milk from the cow;</p>
+    <p class="indent1">And if you want a primrose, you write to London now,</p>
+  <p>And if you need a nightingale, well,&mdash;Whiteley sends it down.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 027-->
+<h3><a name="essay03">THE GREAT MERRY-GO-ROUND</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>In an age curious of new pleasures, the merry-go-round seems still to
+maintain its ancient popularity. I was the other day the delighted,
+indeed the fascinated, spectator of one in full swing in an old
+Thames-side town. It was a very superior example, with a central musical
+engine of extraordinary splendour, and horses that actually curveted, as
+they swirled maddeningly round to the strains of 'The Man that Broke the
+Bank at Monte Carlo.' How I longed to join the wild riders! But though I
+am a brave man, I confess that to ride a merry-go-round in front of a
+laughter-loving Cockney public is more than I can dare. I had to content
+myself with watching the faces of the riders. I noticed particularly one
+bright-eyed little girl, whose whole passionate young<!--Page 028--> soul seemed to be
+on fire with ecstasy, and for whom it was not difficult to prophesy
+trouble when time should bring her within reach of more dangerous
+excitements. Then there was a stolid little boy, dull and unmoved in
+expression, as though he were in church. Life, one felt sure, would be
+safe enough, and stupid enough, for him; the world would have no music
+to stir or draw him. The fifes would go down the street with a sweet
+sound of marching feet, and the eyes of other men would brighten and
+their blood be all glancing spears and streaming banners, but he would
+remain behind his counter; from the strange hill beyond the town the
+dear, unholy music, so lovely in the ears of other men and maids, would
+call to him in vain, and morning and evening the stars would sing above
+his draper's shop, but he never hear a word.</p>
+
+<p>What particularly struck me was the number of quite grown-up, even
+elderly, people who came and had their pennyworth of horse-exercise. Now
+it was a grave young workman quietly smoking his pipe as he revolved;
+now it was a stout middle-<!--Page 029-->aged woman returning from marketing, on whom
+the Zulu music and the whirling horses laid their irresistible spells.
+Unless ye become as little children!</p>
+
+<p>Is the Kingdom of Heaven really at hand? For, indeed, men and women, and
+perhaps particularly literary men and women, are once more becoming as
+little children in their pleasures.</p>
+
+<p>Seriously, one of the most curious and significant of recent literary
+phenomena is the sudden return of the literary man to physical, and
+so-called 'Philistine,' pleasures and modes of recreation. Perhaps
+Stevenson set the fashion with his canoe and his donkey. But at the
+moment that he was valiantly daring any one to tell him whether there
+was anything better worth doing 'than fooling among boats,' Edward
+Fitzgerald, all unconscious and careless of literary fashions, was
+giving still more practical expression to the physical faith that was in
+him, by going shares in a Lowestoft herring-lugger, and throwing his
+heart as well as his money into the fortunes of its noble skipper
+'Posh.' A literary man <em>par excellence</em>, Mr. Lang re<!--Page 030-->proaches his sires
+for his present way of life&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'Why lay your gipsy freedom down</p>
+  <p>And doom your child to pen and ink?'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>and by steady and persistent golfing, and writing about angling and
+cricket, comes as near to the noble savage as is possible to so
+incorrigibly civilised a man. Mr. Henley&mdash;that Berserker of the
+pen&mdash;sings the sword with a vigour that makes one curious to see him
+using it, and we all know Mr. Kipling's views on the matter. Then Mr.
+Bernard Shaw rides a bicycle!</p>
+
+<p>Those men of letters whose inclinations or opportunities do not lead
+them to these out-of-door, and more or less ferocious, pleasures seek to
+forget themselves at the music-hall, the Aquarium, or the numerous
+Earl's Court exhibitions. They become amateurs of foreign dancing,
+connoisseurs of the trapeze, or they leave their great minds at home and
+go up the Great Wheel. Earl's Court, particularly, is becoming quite a
+modern Vauxhall&mdash;Tan-ta-ra-ra! Earl's Court! Earl's Court!&mdash;and Mr. Imre
+Kiralfy, with his con<!--Page 031-->ceptions and designs, is to our generation what
+Albert Smith was to the age of Dickens and Edmund Yates.</p>
+
+<p>It takes some experience of life to realise how right this is; to
+realise that, after all our fine philosophies and cocksure sciences,
+there is no better answer to the riddle of things than a good game of
+cricket or an exciting spin on one's 'bike.' The real inner significance
+of Earl's Court&mdash;Mr. Kiralfy will no doubt be prepared to hear&mdash;is the
+failure of science as an answer to life. We give up the riddle, and
+enjoy ourselves with our wiser children. Simple pleasures, no doubt, for
+the profound! But what is simple, and what is profound?</p>
+
+<p>The simple joy we get from 'fooling among boats' on a summer day, the
+thrill of a well-hit ball, the rapture of a skilful dive, are no more
+easy to explain than the more complicated pleasures of literature, or
+art, or religion. And why is it&mdash;to come closer to our theme&mdash;that the
+round or the whirling have such attraction for us? What is the secret of
+the fascination of the circle? Why is it that the turning of anything,
+be it<!--Page 032--> but a barrel-organ or a phrase, holds one as with an hypnotic
+power? I confess that I can never genuinely pity a knife-grinder,
+however needy. Think of the pleasure of driving that wheel all day, the
+merry chirp of the knife on the stone, and the crisp, bright spray of
+the flying sparks! Why, he does 'what some men dream of all their
+lives'! Wheels of all kinds have the same strange charm; mill-wheels,
+colliery-wheels, spinning-wheels, water-wheels, and wheeling waters:
+there may&mdash;who knows?&mdash;have been a certain pleasure in being broken on
+the wheel, and, at all events, that hideous punishment is another
+curious example of the fascination of the circle. It would take a whole
+volume to illustrate the prevalence of the circle in external nature, in
+history, and, even more significant, in language. We all know, or think
+we know, that the world is round&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'This orb&mdash;this round</p>
+  <p>Of sight and sound,'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>as Mr. Quiller Couch sings&mdash;though I remember a porter at school who was
+sure<!--Page 033--> that it was flat, and who used to say that Hamlet's</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'How weary, stale, <em>flat</em>, and unprofitable</p>
+  <p>Seem to me all the uses of this <em>world</em>!'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>was a cryptic reference to Shakespeare's secret belief in his theory.
+Many of the things we love most are round. Is not money, according to
+the proverb, made round that it may go round, and are not the men most
+in demand described as 'all-round men'? Nor are all-round women without
+their admirers. Events, we know, move in a circle, as time moves in
+cycles&mdash;though, alas! not on them. The ballet and the bicycle are
+popular forms of the circle, and it is the charm of the essay to be
+'roundabout.'</p>
+
+<p>Again, how is it that that which on a small scale does not impress us at
+all, when on a large scale impresses us so much? What is the secret of
+the impressiveness of size, bulk, height, depth, speed, and mileage?
+Philosophically, a mountain is no more wonderful than a molehill, yet no
+man is knighted for climbing a molehill. One little drop of water and
+one little grain of sand are essentially as wonderful as 'the mighty<!--Page 034-->
+ocean' or 'the beauteous land' to which they contribute. A balloon is
+no more wonderful than an air-bubble, and were you to build an Atlantic
+liner as big as the Isle of Wight it would really be no more remarkable
+than an average steam-launch. Nobody marvels at the speed of a snail,
+yet, given a snail's pace to start with, an express train follows as a
+matter of course. Movement, not the rate of movement, is the mystery.
+Precisely the same materials, the same forces, the same methods, are
+employed in the little as in the big of these examples. Why should mere
+accumulation, reiteration, and magnification make the difference? We may
+ask why? But it does, for all that. If we answer that these mammoth
+multiplications impress us because they are so much bigger, taller,
+fatter, faster, etc., than we are, the question arises&mdash;How many times
+bigger than a man must a mountain be before it impresses us? Perhaps the
+problem has already been tackled by the schoolman who pondered how many
+angels could dance on the point of a needle.</p>
+
+<p>However, these and similar first principles,<!--Page 035--> it will readily be seen,
+are far from being irrelevant for the visitor at the Earl's Court
+Exhibition. No doubt they are continually discussed by the thousands who
+daily and nightly throng that very charming dream-world which Mr.
+Kiralfy has built 'midmost the beating' of our 'steely sea.'</p>
+
+<p>To an age that is over-read and over-fed Mr. Kiralfy brings the message:
+'Leave your great minds at home, and go up the Great Wheel!' and I heard
+his voice and obeyed. The sensation is, I should say, something between
+going up in a balloon and being upon shipboard&mdash;a sensation compounded,
+maybe, of the creaking of the circular rigging, the pleasure of rising
+in the air, the freshening of the air as you ascend, the strange feeling
+of the earth receding and spreading out beneath you, the curious
+diminution of the people below&mdash;to their proper size. You will hear
+original minds all about you comparing them to ants, and it is curious
+to notice the involuntary feeling of contempt that possesses you as you
+watch them. I believe one has a half-defined illusion that we are
+growing greater as they<!--Page 036--> are growing smaller. Ants and flies! ants and
+flies! with here and there a fiery centipede in the shape of a District
+train dashing in and out amongst them. We lose the power of
+understanding their motions, and their throngs and movements do indeed
+seem as purposeless at this height as the hurry-scurrying about an
+anthill. At this height, indeed, one seems to understand how small a
+matter a bank smash may seem to the Almighty; though, as a lady said to
+me&mdash;as we clung tightly together in terror 'a-top of the topmost
+bough'&mdash;it must be gratifying to see so many churches.</p>
+
+<p>Those who would keep their illusions about the beauty of London had
+better stay below, at least in the daytime, for it makes one's heart
+sink to look on those miles and miles of sordid grey roofs huddled in
+meaningless rows and crescents, just for all the world like a huge
+child's box of wooden bricks waiting to be arranged into some
+intelligible pattern. Of course, this is not London proper. Were the
+Great Wheel set up in Trafalgar Square, one is fain to hope that the
+view from it would be less dis<!--Page 037-->heartening&mdash;though it might be better not
+to try.</p>
+
+<p>By night, except for the bright oases of the Indian Exhibition, the view
+is little more than a black blank, a great inky plain with faint sparks
+and rows of light here and there, as though the world had been made of
+saltpetre paper, and had lately been set fire to. Were you a traveller
+from Mars you would say that the world was very badly lighted. But, for
+all that, night is the time for the Great Wheel, for the conflagration
+of pleasure at our feet makes us forget the void dark beyond. Then the
+Wheel seems like a great revolving spider's web, with fireflies
+entangled in it at every turn, and the little engine-house at the
+centre, with its two electric lights, seems like the great lord spider,
+with monstrous pearls for his eyes. And, as in the daytime the height
+robs the depth of its significance, strips poor humanity of any
+semblance of impressive or attractive meaning, at night the effect is
+just the reverse. What a fairy-world is this opening out beneath our
+feet, with its golden glowing squares and circles and palaces, with<!--Page 038--> its
+lamplit gardens and pagodas! and who are these gay and beautiful beings
+flitting hither and thither, and passing from one bright garden to
+another on the stream of pleasure? If this many-coloured, passionate
+dream be really human life, let us hasten to be down amongst it once
+more! And, after all, is not this flattering night aspect of the world
+more true than that disheartening countenance of it in the daylight?
+Those golden squares and glowing gardens and flashing waters are, of
+course, an illusion of the magician Kiralfy's, yet what power could the
+illusion have upon us without the realities of beauty and love and
+pleasure it attracts there?</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 039-->
+<h3><a name="essay04">THE BURIAL OF ROMEO AND JULIET</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>One morning of all mornings the citizens of Verona were startled by
+strange news. Tragic forces, to which they had been accustomed to pay
+little heed, had been at work in their city during the dark hours, and
+young Romeo of the Montagues, handsome, devil-may-care lad as they had
+known him, and little Juliet of the Capulets, that madcap, merry, gentle
+young mistress, lay dead, side by side in the church of Santa Maria.</p>
+
+<p>Death! surely they were used to death! and Love, flower of the clove!
+they were used to <em>love</em>. But here were love and death, that somehow
+they could not understand. So they hurried in wondering groups to Santa
+Maria, that they might gaze at the dead lovers, and thus perhaps come to
+understand.</p><!--Page 040-->
+
+<p>Romeo and Juliet lay receiving their guests in the vault of the
+Capulets, with a strange smile of welcome for all who came. And their
+presence-chamber was bright with candles and flowers, and sweet with
+the sweet smell of death. The air that had drunk in their wild words
+and their last long looks of heavenly love still hung about the dark
+corners, as the air where a rose has been holds a little while the
+memory of its breath. Yes! that morning, in that dank but shining
+tomb, you might draw into you the very breath of love. The air you
+breathed had passed through the sweet lungs of Juliet, it had been
+etherealised with her holy passion, and washed clean with her lovely
+words. And now, for a little while yet, it feasted on the fair peace
+of their glad young faces. To-morrow, or the next day, or the next
+week, they would belong to the unvisited treasure-house of the past,
+but now this morning of all mornings, this day that could never come
+again, they still belonged to the real and radiant present.</p>
+
+<p>Flowers there are that bloom but once in a hundred years, but here in
+this tomb had<!--Page 41--> blossomed one of those marvellous flowers that bloom but
+once throughout eternity. Poets and kings in after-times, O men of
+Verona, will yearn to have seen what you look upon to-day. For you, you
+thick and greasy citizens, are chosen out of all time to behold this
+beauty. There were once in the world thousands of men and women who had
+heard the very words of Christ as they fell from His lips, words that we
+may only read. There have been men, actual living, foolish men, who have
+looked on at the valour of Horatius, men who from the crowded banks of
+the Nile have watched the living body of Cleopatra step into her gilded
+barge, men who, standing idle in the streets of Florence, have seen the
+love-light start in the great Dante's eyes, seen his hand move to his
+laden heart, as the little Beatrice passed him by among her maidens.
+Base men of the past, by the indulgent accident of time, have been
+granted to behold these wonders, and now for you, O men of Verona, a
+like wonder has been born.</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>Romeo and Juliet lay receiving their<!--Page 042--> guests in the vault of the
+Capulets, with a strange smile of welcome for all who came.</p>
+
+<p>It had been an innocent little desire, yet had all the world come
+against it. It had been a simple little desire, yet too strong for all
+the world to break.</p>
+
+<p>Strange this enmity of the world to love, as though men should take arms
+against the song of a bird, or plot against the opening of a flower.</p>
+
+<p>But now, what was this strange homage to a love that a few hours ago had
+no friend in all the daylight, a fearful bliss beneath the secret moon?
+But yesterday a stupid old nurse, a herb-gathering friar, a rascally
+apothecary, had been their only friends, and now was all the world come
+here to do their bidding.</p>
+
+<p>No need to steal again beneath the shade of orchard walls, no need again
+to heed if lark or nightingale sang in the reddening east. For the world
+had grown all warm to love, warm and kind as June to the rose.</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>Three days lay Romeo and Juliet receiving their guests in the vault of
+the Capulets,<!--Page 043--> with that strange smile of welcome for all who came.
+Three days the world worshipped the love it could not understand, but
+still came dense and denser throngs to worship. For the news of the
+wonderful flower that had blossomed in Verona had gone far and wide, and
+travellers from distant cities kept pouring in to look at those strange
+young lovers, who had deemed the world well lost so that they might
+leave it together.</p>
+
+<p>Then the governor of the city decreed, as the time drew near when the
+two lovers must be left to their peace, and it was ill that any should
+lose the sight of this marvel, that on the fourth day they should be
+carried through the streets in the eyes of all the people, and then be
+buried together in the vault of the Capulets&mdash;for by this burial in the
+same tomb, says the old chronicler who was first honoured with the
+telling of their sweet story, the governor hoped to bring about a peace
+between the Montagues and Capulets, at least for a little while.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, though Verona was a city of many trades and professions, and
+love and<!--Page 044--> death were idle things, yet was there little said of business
+all these days, and little else done but talk of the two lovers, of
+whom, indeed, it was true, as it has seldom been true out of Holy Writ,
+that death was swallowed up in victory. During these days also there
+stole a strange sweetness over the city, as though the very spirit of
+love had nested there, and was filling the air with its soft
+breathing&mdash;as when in the first days of spring the birds sing so sweetly
+that broken hearts must hide away, and hard hearts grow a little kind.
+Men once more spoke kindly to their wives, and even coarse faces wore a
+gentle light,&mdash;just as sometimes at evening the setting sun will turn to
+tenderness even black rocks and frowning towers.</p>
+
+<p>There were many wild stories afloat about the end of the lovers. Some
+said one way and some another. By some the story went that Romeo was
+already dead before Juliet had awakened from her swoon, but others
+declared that the poison had not worked upon him until Juliet's
+awakening had made him awhile forget that he was to die. There were
+those who professed to know the very<!--Page 045--> words of their wild farewell, and
+in fact there had been several witnesses of Juliet's agony over the body
+of her lord. These had told how first she had raved and clung to him,
+and called him 'Romeo,' 'Sweet Sir Romeo,' 'Husband,' and many
+flower-like names, and had petted him and wooed him to come back. Then
+on a sudden she had cried, God-a-mercy&mdash;how cold thou art!' and looked
+at him long and strangely. Then had she grown stern, and anon soft.
+'Canst thou not come back, my love? Then must I follow thee. Not so far
+art thou on the way of death, but that I shall overtake thee, and
+together shall we go to Pluto's realm, and seek a kinder world.'</p>
+
+<p>Thereat she had plunged Romeo's dagger into her side, though some said
+she had stopped her heart's beating by the strong will of her great
+love. Yea&mdash;such were the distracted rumours&mdash;some averred that at the
+last she had curst Christ and His saints, and called upon Venus, who, it
+was rumoured in awestruck whispers, was being worshipped once more in
+secret corners of the world.</p><!--Page 046-->
+
+<p>It was strong noon when, on the fourth day, Romeo and Juliet were
+carried through the bright and solemn streets, that the world might be
+saved; saved as ever by the spectacle and the worship of a mysterious
+nobility, [comma added by transcriber] an uncomprehended greatness, a
+beauty which haunts not its daily dreams, lifted up by the humble gaze
+of devout eyes into the empyrean of greater souls, stirred to an
+unfamiliar passion, and fired with glimpses of a strange unworldly
+truth.</p>
+
+<p>In the light of the sun the faces of the two lovers, as they lay amid
+their flowers, seemed to have grown a little weary, but they still wore
+their sweet and royal smile, and their laurelled brows were very white
+and proud.</p>
+
+<p>And in the faces that looked upon them, as they moved slowly by, with
+sweet death music, and the hushed marching of feet, and the wafted odour
+of lilies, there was to be seen strangely blent a great pity for their
+tragedy and a heavenly tenderness for their love. It was like a dream
+passing down the streets of a dream, so deep and tender was the silence,
+for only the hearts of men were<!--Page 047--> speaking; though here and there a girl
+sobbed, or a young man buried his face in his sleeve, and the sternest
+eyes were dashed with the holy water of tears. And with the pity and
+tenderness, who shall say but that in all that silent heart-speech there
+was no little envy of the two who had loved so truly and died in the
+springtide of their love, before the ways of love had grown dusty with
+its summer, or dreary with its autumn, before its dreams had petrified
+into duties, and its passion deadened into use?</p>
+
+<p>'Would it were thou and I,' said many wedded eyes one to the other,
+delusively warm and soft for a moment, but all cold and hard again on
+the morrow.</p>
+
+<p>And maybe some poet would say in his heart&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'If you loved her living, my Romeo, what were your love could you but
+see her dead!' for indeed life has no beauty so wonderful as the beauty
+of death.</p>
+
+<p>And, as in all places and times, there was a base remnant that gaped and
+worshipped not, and in their hearts resented all this distinction paid
+to a nobility they could not<!--Page 048--> recognise, as the like had grumbled when
+Cimabue's Madonna had been carried through the streets in glory. But of
+these there is no need that we should take account, any more than of the
+beasts that moved head down amid the pastures outside the town, knowing
+not of the wonder that was passing within. For the ass will munch his
+thistles though the Son of Man be his rider, nor will the sheep look
+aside from his grazing though Apollo be the herdsman.</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>At length the sacred pageant was ended, gone like the passing of an
+aerial music, and the people went to their homes silent, with haunted
+eyes; while the Earth, which had given this beauty, took it back to
+herself, and one more Persephone of human loveliness was shut within the
+gates of the forgetful grave.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 049-->
+<h3><a name="essay05">VARIATIONS UPON WHITEBAIT</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>A very Pre-Raphaelite friend of mine came to me one day and said <em>à
+propos</em> of his having designed a very Early English chair: 'After all,
+if one has anything to say one might as well put it into a chair!'</p>
+
+<p>I thought the remark rather delicious, as also his other remark when one
+day in a curiosity-shop we were looking at another chair, which the
+dealer declared to be Norman. My friend seated himself in it very
+gravely, and after softly moving about from side to side, testing it, it
+would appear, by the sensation it imparted to the sitting portion of his
+limbs, he solemnly decided: 'I don't think the <em>flavour</em> of this chair
+is Norman!'</p>
+
+<p>I thought of this Pre-Raphaelite brother as the Sphinx and I were seated
+a few even<!--Page 050-->ings ago at our usual little dinner, in our usual little
+sheltered corner, on the Lover's Gallery of one of the great London
+restaurants. The Sphinx says that there is only one place in Europe
+where one can really dine, but as it is impossible to be always within
+reasonable train service of that Montsalvat of cookery, she consents to
+eat with me&mdash;she cannot call it dine&mdash;at the restaurant of which I
+speak. I being very simple-minded, untravelled, and unlanguaged, think
+it, in my Cockney heart, a very fine place indeed, with its white marble
+pillars surrounding the spacious peristyle, and flashing with a thousand
+brilliant lights and colours; with its stately cooks, clothed in white
+samite, mystic, wonderful, ranged behind a great altar loaded with big
+silver dishes, and the sacred musicians of the temple ranged behind
+them&mdash;while in and out go the waiters, clothed in white and black,
+waiters so good and kind that I am compelled to think of Elijah being
+waited on by angels.</p>
+
+<p>They have such an eye for a romance, too, and really take it personally
+to heart if it should befall that our little table is usurped<!--Page 051--> by others
+that know not love. I like them, too, because they really seem to have
+an eye for the strange beauty and charm of the Sphinx, quite an
+unexpected taste for Botticelli. They ill conceal their envy of my lot,
+and sometimes, in the meditative pauses between the courses, I see them
+romantically reckoning how it might be possible by desperately saving
+up, by prodigious windfalls of tips, from unexampled despatch and
+sweetness in their ministrations, how it might be possible in ten years'
+time, perhaps even in five&mdash;the lady would wait five years! and her
+present lover could be artistically poisoned meanwhile!&mdash;how it might be
+possible to come and sue for her beautiful hand. Then a harsh British
+cry for 'waiter' comes like a rattle and scares away that beautiful
+dream-bird, though, as the poor dreamer speeds on the quest of roast
+beef for four, you can see it still circling with its wonderful blue
+feathers around his pomatumed head.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, yes, the waiters know that the Sphinx is no ordinary woman. She
+cannot conceal even from them the mystical star of her face, they too
+catch far echoes of the strange<!--Page 052--> music of her brain, they too grow
+dreamy with dropped hints of fragrance from the rose of her wonderful
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>How reverently do they help her doff her little cloak of silk and lace!
+with what a worshipful inclination of the head, as in the presence of a
+deity, do they await her verdict of choice between rival soups&mdash;shall it
+be 'clear or thick'? And when she decides on 'thick,' how relieved they
+seem to be, as if&mdash;well, some few matters remain undecided in the
+universe, but never mind, this is settled for ever&mdash;no more doubts
+possible on one portentous issue, at any rate&mdash;Madame will take her soup
+'thick.'</p>
+
+<p>'On such a night' our talk fell upon whitebait.</p>
+
+<p>As the Sphinx's silver fork rustled among the withered silver upon her
+plate, she turned to me and said:</p>
+
+<p>'Have you ever thought what beautiful little things these whitebait
+are?'</p>
+
+<p>'Oh, yes,' I replied, 'they are the daisies of the deep sea, the
+threepenny-pieces of the ocean.'</p>
+
+<p>'You dear!' said the Sphinx, who is alone<!--Page 053--> in the world in thinking me
+awfully clever. 'Go on, say something else, something pretty about
+whitebait&mdash;there's a subject for you!'</p>
+
+<p>Then it was that, fortunately, I remembered my Pre-Raphaelite friend,
+and I sententiously remarked: 'Of course, if one has anything to say one
+cannot do better than say it about whitebait.... Well, whitebait....'</p>
+
+<p>But here, providentially, the band of the beef&mdash;that is, the band behind
+the beef; that is, the band that nightly hymns the beef (the phrase is
+to be had in three qualities)&mdash;struck up the overture from <em>Tannhäuser</em>,
+which is not the only music that makes the Sphinx forget my existence;
+and thus, forgetting me, she momentarily forgot the whitebait. But I
+remembered, remembered hard&mdash;worked at pretty things, as metal-workers
+punch out their flowers of brass and copper. The music swirled about us
+like golden waves, in which swam myriad whitebait, like showers of tiny
+stars, like falling snow. To me it was one grand processional of
+whitebait, silver ripples upon streams of gold.</p><!--Page 054-->
+
+<p>The music stopped. The Sphinx turned to me with the soul of Wagner in
+her eyes, and then she turned to the waiter: 'Would it be possible,' she
+said, 'to persuade the bandmaster to play that wonderful thing over
+again?'</p>
+
+<p>The waiter seemed a little doubtful, even for the Sphinx, but he went
+off to the bandmaster with the air of a man who has at last an
+opportunity to show that he can dare all for love. Personally, I have a
+suspicion that he poured his month's savings at the bandmaster's feet,
+and begged him to do this thing for the most wonderful lady in the
+world; or perhaps the bandmaster was really a musician, and his
+musician's heart was touched&mdash;lonely there amid the beef&mdash;to think that
+there was really some one, invisible though she were to him, some
+shrouded silver presence, up there among the beefeaters, who really
+loved to hear great music. Perhaps it was thus made a night he has never
+forgotten; perhaps it changed the whole course of his life&mdash;who knows?
+The sweet reassuring request may have come to him at a moment when, sick
+at<!--Page 055--> heart, he was deciding to abandon real music for ever, and settle
+down amid the beef and the beef-music of Old England.</p>
+
+<p>Well, however it was, the waiter came back radiant with a 'Yes' on every
+shining part of him, and if the <em>Tannhäuser</em> had been played well at
+first, certainly the orchestra surpassed themselves this second time.</p>
+
+<p>When the great jinnee of music had once more swept out of the hall, the
+Sphinx turned with shining eyes to the waiter:</p>
+
+<p>'Take,' she said, 'take these tears to the bandmaster. He has indeed
+earned them.'</p>
+
+<p>'Tears, little one!' I said. 'See how they swim like whitebait in the
+fishpools of your eyes!'</p>
+
+<p>'Oh, yes, the whitebait,' rejoined the Sphinx, glad of a subject to hide
+her emotion. 'Now tell me something nice about them, though the poor
+little things have long since disappeared. Tell me, for instance, how
+they get their beautiful little silver waterproofs?'</p>
+
+<p>'Electric Light of the World,' I said, 'it is like this. While they are
+still quite young<!--Page 056--> and full of dreams, their mother takes them out in
+picnic parties of a billion or so at a time to where the spring moon is
+shining, scattering silver from its purse of pearl far over the wide
+waters,&mdash;silver, silver, for every little whitebait that cares to swim
+and pick it up. The mother, who has a contract with some such big
+restaurateur as ours, chooses a convenient area of moonlight, and then
+at a given sign they all turn over on their sides, and bask and bask in
+the rays, little fin pressed lovingly against little fin&mdash;for this is
+the happiest time in the young whitebait's life: it is at these
+silvering parties that matches are made and future consignments of
+whitebait arranged for. Well, night after night, they thus lie in the
+moonlight, first on one side, then on the other, till by degrees, tiny
+scale by scale, they have become completely lunar-plated. Ah! how sad
+they are when the end of that happy time has come!'</p>
+
+<p>'And what happens to them after that?' asked the Sphinx.</p>
+
+<p>'One night when the moon is hidden their mother comes to them with
+treacherous wile, and suggests that they should go off on a<!--Page 057--> holiday
+again to seek the moon&mdash;the moon that for a moment seems captured by the
+pearl-fishers of the sky. And so off they go merrily, but, alas! no moon
+appears; and presently they are aware of unwieldy bumping presences upon
+the surface of the sea, presences as of huge dolphins; and rough voices
+call across the water, till, scared, the little whitebaits turn home in
+flight&mdash;to find themselves somehow meshed in an invisible prison, a net
+as fine and strong as air, into which, O agony! they are presently
+hauled, lovely banks of silver, shining like opened coffers beneath the
+coarse and ragged flares of yellow torches. The rest is silence.'</p>
+
+<p>'What sad little lives! and what a cruel world it is!' said the
+Sphinx&mdash;as she crunched with her knife through the body of a lark, that
+but yesterday had been singing in the blue sky. Its spirit sang just
+above our heads as she ate, and the air was thick with the grey ghosts
+of all the whitebait she had eaten that night.</p>
+
+<p>But there were no longer any tears in her eyes.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 058-->
+<h3><a name="essay06">THE ANSWER OF THE ROSE</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>The Sphinx and I sat in our little box at <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>. It was the
+first time she had seen that fairy-tale of passion upon the stage. I had
+seen it played once before&mdash;in Paradise. Therefore, I rather trembled to
+see it again in an earthly play-house, and as much as possible kept my
+eyes from the stage. All I knew of the performance&mdash;but how much was
+that!&mdash;was two lovely voices making love like angels; and when there
+were no words, the music told me what was going on. Love speaks so many
+languages.</p>
+
+<p>One might as well look. It was as clear as moonlight to the tragic eye
+within the heart. The Sphinx was gazing on it all with those eyes that
+will never grow old, neither for years nor tears; but though I seemed to
+be seeing nothing but an advertisement of Paderewski pianos on the
+pro<!--Page 059-->gramme, I saw it&mdash;oh, didn't I see it?&mdash;all. The house had grown
+dark, and the music low and passionate, and for a moment no one was
+speaking. Only, deep in the thickets of my heart there sang a tragic
+nightingale that, happily, only I could hear; and I said to myself, 'Now
+the young fool is climbing the orchard wall! Yes, there go Benvolio and
+Mercutio calling him; and now,&mdash;"he jests at scars who never felt a
+wound"&mdash;the other young fool is coming out on to the balcony. God help
+them both! They have no eyes&mdash;no eyes&mdash;or surely they would see the
+shadow that sings "Love! Love! Love!" like a fountain in the moonlight,
+and then shrinks away to chuckle "Death! Death! Death!" in the
+darkness!'</p>
+
+<p>But, soft, what light from yonder window breaks!</p>
+
+<p>The Sphinx turned to me for sympathy&mdash;this time it was the soul of
+Shakespeare in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes!' I whispered, 'it is the Opening of the Eternal Rose, sung by the
+Eternal Nightingale!'</p>
+
+<p>She pressed my hand approvingly; and<!--Page 060--> while the lovely voices made their
+heavenly love, I slipped out my silver-bound pocket-book of ivory and
+pressed within it the rose which had just fallen from my lips.</p>
+
+<p>The worst of a great play is that one is so dull between the acts. Wit
+is sacrilege, and sentiment is bathos. Not another rose fell from my
+lips during the performance, though that I minded little, as I was the
+more able to count the pearls that fell from the Sphinx's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>It took quite half a bottle of champagne to pull us up to our usual
+spirits, as we sat at supper at a window where we could see London
+spread out beneath us like a huge black velvet flower, dotted with fiery
+embroideries, sudden flaring stamens, and rows of ant-like fireflies
+moving in slow zig-zag processions along and across its petals.</p>
+
+<p>'How strange it seems,' said the Sphinx, 'to think that for every two of
+those moving double-lights, which we know to be the eyes of hansoms, but
+which seem up here nothing but gold dots in a very barbaric pattern of
+black and gold, there are two human beings, no doubt at this time of
+night two lovers,<!--Page 061--> throbbing with the joy of life, and dreaming, heaven
+knows what dreams!'</p>
+
+<p>'Yes,' I rejoined;' and to them I'm afraid we are even more impersonal.
+From their little Piccadilly coracles our watch-tower in the skies is
+merely a radiant facade of glowing windows, and no one of all who glide
+by realises that the spirited illumination is every bit due to your
+eyes. You have but to close them, and every one will be asking what has
+gone wrong with the electric light.'</p>
+
+<p>A little nonsense is a great healer of the heart, and by means of such
+nonsense as this we grew merry again. And anon we grew sentimental and
+poetic, but&mdash;thank heaven! we were no longer tragic.</p>
+
+<p>Presently I had news for the Sphinx. 'The rose-tree that grows in the
+garden of my mind,' I said, 'desires to blossom.'</p>
+
+<p>'May it blossom indeed,' she replied; 'for it has been flowerless all
+this long evening; and bring me a rose fresh with all the dews of
+inspiration&mdash;no florist's flower, wired and artificially scented, no
+bloom of yesterday's hard-driven brains.'</p><!--Page 062-->
+
+<p>'I was only thinking,' I said, '<em>à propos</em> of nightingales and roses,
+that though all the world has heard the song of the nightingale to the
+rose, only the nightingale has heard the answer of the rose. You know
+what I mean?'</p>
+
+<p>'Know what you mean! Of course, that's always easy enough,' retorted the
+Sphinx, who knows well how to be hard on me.</p>
+
+<p>'I'm so glad,' I ventured to thrust back; 'for lucidity is the first
+success of expression: to make others see clearly what we ourselves are
+struggling to see, believe with all their hearts what we are just daring
+to hope, is&mdash;well, the religion of a literary man!'</p>
+
+<p>'Yes! it's a pretty idea,' said the Sphinx, once more pressing the rose
+of my thought to her brain; 'and indeed it's more than pretty ...'</p>
+
+<p>'Thank you!' I said humbly.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, it's <em>true</em>&mdash;and many a humble little rose will thank you for it.
+For, your nightingale is a self-advertising bird. He never sings a song<!--Page 063-->
+without an eye on the critics, sitting up there in their stalls among
+the stars. He never, or seldom, sings a song for pure love, just
+because he must sing it or die. Indeed, he has a great fear of death,
+unless&mdash;you will guarantee him immortality. But the rose, the trusting
+little earth-born rose, that must stay all her life rooted in one spot
+till some nightingale comes to choose her&mdash;some nightingale whose song
+maybe has been inspired and perfected by a hundred other roses, which
+are at the moment pot-pourri&mdash;ah, the shy bosom-song of the rose ...'</p>
+
+<p>Here the Sphinx paused, and added abruptly&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Well&mdash;there is no nightingale worthy to hear it!'</p>
+
+<p>'It is true,' I agreed, 'O trusting little earth-born rose!'</p>
+
+<p>'Do you know why the rose has thorns?' suddenly asked the Sphinx. Of
+course I knew, but I always respect a joke, particularly when it is but
+half-born&mdash;humourists always prefer to deliver themselves&mdash;so I shook my
+head.</p>
+
+<p>'To keep off the nightingales, of course,' said the Sphinx, the tone of
+her voice holding in mocking solution the words 'Donkey'<!--Page 064--> and
+'Stupid,'&mdash;which I recognised and meekly bore.</p>
+
+<p>'What an excellent idea!' I said. 'I never thought of it before. But
+don't you think it's a little unkind? For, after all, if there were no
+nightin<!--Page 065-->gales, one shouldn't hear so much about the rose; and there is
+always the danger that if the rose continues too painfully thorny, the
+nightingale may go off and seek, say, a more accommodating lily.'</p>
+
+<p>'I have no opinion of lilies,' said the Sphinx.</p>
+
+<p>'Nor have I,' I answered soothingly; 'I much prefer roses&mdash;but ...
+but....'</p>
+
+<p>'But what?'</p>
+
+<p>'But&mdash;well, I much prefer roses. Indeed I do.'</p>
+
+<p>'Rose of the World,' I continued with sentiment, 'draw in your thorns. I
+cannot bear them.'</p>
+
+<p>'Ah!' she answered eagerly, 'that is just it. The nightingale that is
+worthy of the rose will not only bear, but positively love, her thorns.
+It is for that reason she wears them. The thorns of the rose properly
+understood are but the tests of the nightingale. The nightingale that
+is frightened of the thorns is not worthy of the rose&mdash;of that you may
+be sure....'</p>
+
+<p>'I am not frightened of the thorns,' I managed to interject.</p>
+
+<p>'Sing then once more,' she cried, 'the Song of the Nightingale.'</p>
+
+<p>And it was thus I sang:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>O Rose of the World, a nightingale,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">A Bird of the World, am I,</p>
+  <p>I have loved all the world and sung all the world,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">But I come to your side to die.</p>
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>Tired of the world, as the world of me,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">I plead for your quiet breast,</p>
+  <p>I have loved all the world and sung all the world&mdash;</p>
+    <p class="indent1">But&mdash;where is the nightingale's nest?</p>
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>In a hundred gardens I sung the rose,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Rose of the World, I confess&mdash;</p>
+  <p>But for every rose I have sung before</p>
+    <p class="indent1">I love you the more, not less.</p>
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>Perfect it grew by each rose that died,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Each rose that has died for you,</p>
+  <p>The song that I sing&mdash;yea, 'tis no new song,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">It is tried&mdash;and so it is true.</p>
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>Petal or thorn, yea! I have no care,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">So that I here abide;</p>
+  <p>Pierce me, my love, or kiss me, my love,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">But keep me close to your side.</p>
+ </div><!--Page 066-->
+
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>I know not your kiss from your scorn, my love,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Your breast from your thorn, my rose,</p>
+  <p>And if you must kill me, well, kill me, my love!</p>
+    <p class="indent1">But&mdash;say 'twas the death I chose.</p>
+ </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>'Is it true?' asked the Rose.</p>
+
+<p>'As I am a nightingale,' I replied; and as we bade each other
+good-night, I whispered:</p>
+
+<p>'When may I expect the Answer of the Rose?'</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 067-->
+<h3><a name="essay07">ABOUT THE SECURITIES</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>When I say that my friend Matthew lay dying, I want you so far as
+possible to dissociate the statement from any conventional, and
+certainly from any pictorial, conceptions of death which you may have
+acquired. Death sometimes shows himself one of those impersonal artists
+who conceal their art, and, unless you had been told, you could hardly
+have guessed that Matthew was dying, dying indeed sixty miles an hour,
+dying of consumption, dying because some one else had died four years
+before, dying too of debt.</p>
+
+<p>Connoisseurs, of course, would have understood; at a glance would have
+named the sculptor who was silently chiselling those noble hollows in
+the finely modelled face,&mdash;that Pygmalion who turns all flesh to
+stone,&mdash;at a glance would have named the painter who was cunningly
+weighting the brows with<!--Page 068--> darkness that the eyes might shine the more
+with an unaccustomed light. Matthew and I had long been students of the
+strange wandering artist, had begun by hating his art (it is ever so
+with an art unfamiliar to us), and had ended by loving it.</p>
+
+<p>'Let us see what the artist has added to the picture since yesterday,'
+said Matthew, signing to me to hand him the mirror.</p>
+
+<p>'H'm,' he murmured, 'he's had one of his lazy days, I'm afraid. He's
+hardly added a touch&mdash;just a little heightened the chiaroscuro,
+sharpened the nose a trifle, deepened some little the shadows round the
+eyes....</p>
+
+<p>'O why,' he presently sighed, 'does he not work a little overtime and
+get it done? He's been paid handsomely enough....</p>
+
+<p>'Paid,' he continued, 'by a life that is so much undeveloped gold-mine,
+paid by all my uncashed hopes and dreams....'</p>
+
+<p>'He works fast enough for me, old fellow,' I interrupted; 'there was a
+time, was there not, when he worked too fast for you and me?'</p>
+
+<p>There are moments, for certain people,<!--Page 069--> when such fantastic unreality as
+this is the truest realism. Matthew and I talked like this with our
+brains, because we hadn't the courage to allow our hearts to break in
+upon the conversation. Had I dared to say some real emotional thing,
+what effect would it have had but to set poor tired Matthew a-coughing?
+and it was our aim that he should die with as little to-do as
+practicable. The emotional in such situations is merely the obvious.
+There was no need for either of us to state the elementary feelings of
+our love. I knew that Matthew was going to die, and he knew that&mdash;I was
+going to live, and we pitied each other accordingly; though I confess my
+feeling for him was rather one of envy,&mdash;when it was not congratulation.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, to tell the truth, we never mentioned 'the hereafter.' I don't
+believe it even occurred to us. Indeed, we spent the few hours that
+remained of our friendship in retailing the latest gathered of those
+good stories with which we had been accustomed to salt our intercourse.</p>
+
+<p>One of Matthew's anecdotes was, no doubt, somewhat suggested by the
+occasion,<!--Page 070--> and I should add that he had always somewhat of an
+ecclesiastical bias&mdash;would, I believe, have ended some day as a
+Monsignor, a notable 'Bishop Blougram.'</p>
+
+<p>His story was of an evangelistic preacher who desired to impress his
+congregation with the unmistakable reality of hell-fire. 'You know the
+Black Country, my friends,' he had declaimed,' you have seen it, at
+night, flaring with a thousand furnaces, in the lurid incandescence of
+which myriads of unhappy beings, our fellow-creatures (God forbid!),
+snatch a precarious existence&mdash;you have seen them silhouetted against
+the yellow glare, running hither and thither, as it seemed from afar, in
+the very jaws of the awful fire. Have you realised that the burdens with
+which they thus run hither and thither are molten iron, iron to which
+such a stupendous heat has been applied that it has melted, melted as
+though it had been sugar in the sun?&mdash;well! returning to hell-fire, let
+me tell you this, that in hell they eat this fiery molten metal for
+ice-cream!&mdash;yes! and are glad to get anything so cool.'</p>
+
+<p>It was thus we talked while Matthew lay<!--Page 071--> dying, for why should we not
+talk as we had lived? We both laughed long and heartily over this story;
+perhaps it would have amused us less had Matthew not been dying; and
+then his kind old nurse brought in our lunch. We had both excellent
+appetites, and were far from indifferent to the dainty little meal which
+was to be our last but one together. I brought my table as close to
+Matthew's pillow as was possible, and he stroked my hand with tenderness
+in which there was a touch of gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>'You are not frightened of the bacteria!' he laughed sadly; and then he
+told me, with huge amusement, how a friend (and a true, dear friend for
+all that) had come to see him a day or two before, and had hung over the
+end of the bed to say farewell, daring to approach no nearer, mopping
+his fear-perspiring brows with a handkerchief soaked in 'Eucalyptus'!</p>
+
+<p>'He had brought an anticipatory elegy too,' said my friend, 'written
+against my burial. I wish you'd read it for me,' and he fidgeted for it
+in the nervous manner of the dying. Finding it among his pillows, he
+handed it<!--Page 072--> to me saying, 'You needn't be frightened of it. It is well
+dosed with Eucalyptus.'</p>
+
+<p>We laughed even more over this poem than over our stories, and then we
+discussed the terms of three cremation societies to which, at the
+express request of my friend, I had written a day or two before.</p>
+
+<p>Then having smoked a cigar and drunk a glass of port together (for the
+assured dying are allowed to 'live well'), Matthew grew sleepy, and,
+tucking him beneath the counterpane, I left him, for, after all, he was
+not to die that day.</p>
+
+<p>Circumstances prevented my seeing him again for a week. When I did so,
+entering the room poignantly redolent of the strange sweet odour of
+antiseptics, I saw that the great artist had been busy in my absence.
+Indeed, his work was nearly at an end. Yet to one unfamiliar with his
+methods there was still little to alarm in Matthew's face. In fact, with
+the exception of his brain, and his ice-cold feet, he was alive as ever.
+And even to his brain had come a certain unnatural activity, a life as
+of the grave, a sort of vampire vitality, which would assuredly<!--Page 073--> have
+deceived any who had not known him. He still told his stories, laughed
+and talked with the same unconquerable humour, was in every way alert
+and practical, with this difference, that he had forgotten he was going
+to die, that the world in which he exercised his various faculties was
+another world to that in which, in spite of his delirium, we ate our
+last boiled fowl, drank our last wine, smoked our last cigar together.
+His talk was so convincingly rational, dealt with such unreal matters in
+so every-day a fashion, that you were ready to think that surely it was
+you and not he whose mind was wandering.</p>
+
+<p>'You might reach that pocket-book, and ring for Mrs. Davies,' he would
+say in so casual a way that of course you would ring. On Mrs. Davies's
+appearance he would be fumbling about among the papers in his
+pocket-book, and presently he would say, with a look of frustration that
+went to one's heart&mdash;'I've got a ten-pound note somewhere here for you,
+Mrs. Davies, to pay you up till Saturday, but somehow I seem to have
+lost it. Yet it must be somewhere about. Perhaps you'll find it as you
+make the bed in the<!--Page 074--> morning. I'm so sorry to have troubled you....'</p>
+
+<p>And then he would grow tired and doze a little on his pillow.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he would be alert again, and with a startling vividness tell me
+strange stories from the dreamland into which he was now passing.</p>
+
+<p>I had promised to see him on Monday, but had been prevented, and had
+wired to him accordingly. This was Tuesday.</p>
+
+<p>'You needn't have troubled to wire,' he said. 'Didn't you know I was in
+London from Saturday to Monday?'</p>
+
+<p>'The doctor and Mrs. Davies didn't know,' he continued with the creepy
+cunning of the dying: 'I managed to slip away to look at a house I think
+of taking&mdash;in fact I've taken it. It's in&mdash;in&mdash;now, where is it? Now
+isn't that silly? I can see it as plain as anything&mdash;yet I cannot, for
+the life of me, remember where it is, or the number.... It was somewhere
+St. John's Wood way ... never mind, you must come and see me there, when
+we get in....'</p>
+
+<p>I said he was dying in debt, and thus the<!--Page 075--> heaven that lay about his
+deathbed was one of fantastic Eldorados, sudden colossal legacies, and
+miraculous windfalls.</p>
+
+<p>'I haven't told you,' he said presently, 'of the piece of good luck that
+has befallen me. You are not the only person in luck. I can hardly
+expect you to believe me, it sounds so like the Arabian Nights. However,
+it's true for all that. Well, one of the little sisters was playing in
+the garden a few afternoons ago, making mud-pies or something of that
+sort, and she suddenly scraped up a sovereign. Presently she found two
+or three more, and our curiosity becoming aroused, a turn or two with
+the spade revealed quite a bed of gold; and the end of it was, that on
+further excavating, the whole garden proved to be one mass of
+sovereigns. Sixty thousand pounds we counted ... and then, what do you
+think?&mdash;it suddenly melted away....'</p>
+
+<p>He paused for a moment, and continued, more in amusement than regret&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Yes&mdash;the Government got wind of it, and claimed the whole lot as
+treasure-trove!</p>
+
+<p>'But not,' he added slyly, 'before I'd paid<!--Page 076--> off two or three of my
+biggest bills. Yes&mdash;and&mdash;you'll keep it quiet, of course,&mdash;there's
+another lot been discovered in the garden, but we shall take good care
+the Government doesn't get hold of it this time, you bet.'</p>
+
+<p>He told this wild story with such an air of simple conviction that, odd
+as it may seem, one believed every word of it. But the tale of his
+sudden good-fortune was not ended.</p>
+
+<p>'You've heard of old Lord Osterley,' he presently began again. 'Well,
+congratulate me, old man: he has just died and left everything to me.
+You know what a splendid library he had&mdash;to think that that will all be
+mine&mdash;and that grand old park through which we've so often wandered, you
+and I! Well, we shall need fear no gamekeeper now, and of course, dear
+old fellow, you'll come and live with me&mdash;like a prince&mdash;and just write
+your own books and say farewell to journalism for ever. Of course I can
+hardly believe it's true yet. It seems too much of a dream, and yet
+there's no doubt about it. I had a letter from my solicitors this
+morning, saying that they were engaged in going<!--Page 077--> through the securities,
+and&mdash;and&mdash;but the letter's somewhere over there; you might read it. No?
+can't you find it? It's there somewhere about, I know. Never mind, you
+can see it again....' he finished wearily.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes!' he presently said, half to himself, 'it will be a wonderful
+change! a wonderful change!'</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>At length the time came to say good-bye, a good-bye I knew must be the
+last, for my affairs were taking me so far away from him that I could
+not hope to see him for some days.</p>
+
+<p>'I'm afraid, old man,' I said, 'that I mayn't be able to see you for
+another week.'</p>
+
+<p>'O never mind, old fellow, don't worry about me. I'm much better
+now&mdash;and by the time you come again we shall know all about the
+securities.'</p>
+
+<p>The securities! My heart had seemed like a stone, incapable of feeling,
+all those last unreal hours together; but the pathos of that sad phrase,
+so curiously symbolic, suddenly smote it with overwhelming pity, and the
+tears sprang to my eyes for the first time.<!--Page 078--> As I bent over him to kiss
+his poor damp forehead, and press his hand for the last farewell, I
+murmured&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Yes&mdash;dear, dear old friend. We shall know all about the securities....'</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 079-->
+<h3><a name="essay08">THE BOOM IN YELLOW</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>Green must always have a large following among artists and art lovers;
+for, as has been pointed out, an appreciation of it is a sure sign of a
+subtle artistic temperament. There is something not quite good,
+something almost sinister, about it&mdash;at least, in its more complex
+forms, though in its simple form, as we find it in outdoor nature, it is
+innocent enough; and, indeed, is it not used in colloquial metaphor as
+an adjective for innocence itself? Innocence has but two colours, white
+or green. But Becky Sharp's eyes also were green, and the green of the
+aesthete does not suggest innocence. There will always be wearers of the
+green carnation; but the popular vogue which green has enjoyed for the
+last ten or fifteen years is probably passing. Even the æsthete himself
+would seem to be growing a little weary of<!--Page 080--> its indefinitely divided
+tones, and to be anxious for a colour sensation somewhat more positive
+than those to be gained from almost imperceptible <em>nuances</em>, of green.
+Jaded with over-refinements and super-subtleties, we seem in many
+directions to be harking back to the primary colours of life. Blue,
+crude and unsoftened, and a form of magenta, have recently had a short
+innings; and now the triumph of yellow is imminent. Of course, a love
+for green implies some regard for yellow, and in our so-called aesthetic
+renaissance the sunflower went before the green carnation&mdash;which is,
+indeed, the badge of but a small schism of aesthetes, and not worn by
+the great body of the more catholic lovers of beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Yellow is becoming more and more dominant in decoration&mdash;in wall-papers,
+and flowers cultivated with decorative intention, such as
+chrysanthemums. And one can easily understand why: seeing that, after
+white, yellow reflects more light than any other colour, and thus
+ministers to the growing preference for light and joyous rooms. A few
+yellow chrysanthemums will make a<!--Page 081--> small room look twice its size, and
+when the sun comes out upon a yellow wall-paper the whole room seems
+suddenly to expand, to open like a flower. When it falls upon the pot of
+yellow chrysanthemums, and sets them ablaze, it seems as though one had
+an angel in the room. Bill-posters are beginning to discover the
+attractive qualities of the colour. Who can ever forget meeting for the
+first time upon a hoarding Mr. Dudley Hardy's wonderful Yellow Girl, the
+pretty advance-guard of <em>To-Day</em>? But I suppose the honour of the
+discovery of the colour for advertising purposes rests with Mr. Colman;
+though its recent boom comes from the publishers, and particularly from
+the Bodley Head. <em>The Yellow Book</em> with any other colour would hardly
+have sold as well&mdash;the first private edition of Mr. Arthur Benson's
+poems, by the way, came caparisoned in yellow, and with the identical
+name, <em>Le Cahier Jaune</em>; and no doubt it was largely its title that made
+the success of <em>The Yellow Aster</em>. In literature, indeed, yellow has
+long been the colour of romance. The word 'yellow-back' witnesses its
+close association<!--Page 082--> with fiction; and in France, as we know, it is the
+all but universal custom to bind books in yellow paper. Mr. Heinemann
+and Mr. Unwin have endeavoured to naturalise the custom here; but,
+though in cloth yellow has emphatically 'caught on,' in paper it still
+hangs fire. The ABC Railway Guide is probably the only exception, and
+that, it is to be hoped, is not fiction. Mr. Lang has recently followed
+the fashion with his <em>Yellow Fairy Book</em>; and, indeed, one of the best
+known figures in fairydom is yellow&mdash;namely, the Yellow Dwarf. Yellow,
+always a prominent Oriental colour, was but lately of peculiar
+significance in the Far East; for were not the sorrows of a certain high
+Chinese official intimately connected with the fatal colour? The Yellow
+Book, the Yellow Aster, the Yellow Jacket!&mdash;and the Yellow Fever, like
+'Orion' Home's sunshine, is always with us' somewhere in the world.' The
+same applies also, I suppose, to the Yellow Sea.</p>
+
+<p>Till one comes to think of it, one hardly realises how many important
+and pleasant things in life are yellow. Blue and green,<!--Page 083--> no doubt,
+contract for the colouring of vast departments of the physical world.
+'Blue!' sings Keats, in a fine but too little known sonnet&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'... 'Tis the life of heaven&mdash;the domain</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Of Cynthia&mdash;the wide palace of the sun&mdash;</p>
+  <p>The tent of Hesperus, and all his train&mdash;</p>
+  <p>The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey, and dun.</p>
+  <p>Blue! 'Tis the life of waters ...</p>
+  <p>Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest green,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Married to green in all the sweetest flowers.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Yellow might retort by quoting Mr. Grant Allen, in his book on <em>The
+Colour Sense</em>, to the effect that the blueness of sea and sky is mainly
+poetical illusion or inaccuracy, and that sea and sky are found blue
+only in one experiment out of fourteen. At morning and evening they are
+usually in great part stained golden. Blue certainly has one advantage
+over yellow, in that it has the privilege of colouring some of the
+prettiest eyes in the world. Yellow has a chance only in cases of
+jaundice and liver complaint, and his colour scheme in such cases is
+seldom appreciated. Again, green has the contract for the greater bulk
+of the vegetable life of the globe; but his is a<!--Page 084--> monotonous business,
+like the painting of miles and miles of palings: grass, grass, grass,
+trees, trees, trees, <em>ad infinitum</em>; whereas yellow leads a roving,
+versatile life, and is seldom called upon for such monotonous labour.
+The sands of Sahara are probably the only conspicuous instance of yellow
+thus working by the piece. It is in the quality, in the diversity of the
+things it colours, rather than in their mileage or tonnage, that yellow
+is distinguished; though, for that matter, we suppose, the sun is as big
+and heavy as most things, and that is yellow. Of course, when we say
+yellow we include golden, and all varieties of the colour&mdash;saffron,
+orange, flaxen, tawny, blonde, topaz, citron, etc.</p>
+
+<p>If the sun may reasonably be described as the most important object in
+the world, surely money is the next. That, as we know, is, in its most
+potent metallic form, yellow also. The 'yellow gold' is a favourite
+phrase in certain forms of poetry; and 'yellow-boys' is a term of
+natural affection among sailors. Following the example of their lord the
+sun, most fires and lights are yellow<!--Page 085--> or golden, and it is only in
+times of danger or superstition that they burn red or blue. And, if
+yellow be denied entrance to beautiful eyes, it enjoys a privilege
+which&mdash;except in the case of certain indigo-staining African tribes, who
+cannot be said to count&mdash;blue has never claimed: that of colouring
+perhaps the loveliest thing in the world, the hair of woman. Hair is
+naturally golden&mdash;unnaturally also. When Browning sings pathetically of
+'dear dead women&mdash;with such hair too!' he continues:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'What's become of all the <em>gold</em></p>
+  <p>Used to hang and brush their bosoms'&mdash;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>not 'all the blue' or 'all the brown,' though some of us, it is true,
+are condemned to wear our hair brown or blue-black. But such are only
+unhappy exceptions. Yellow or gold is the rule. The bravest men and the
+fairest women have had golden hair, and, we may add, in reference to
+another distinction of the colour we are celebrating, golden hearts.
+Hair at the present time is doing its best to conform to its normal
+conditions of colour. Numerous instances might be adduced of its
+changing from black to gold, in obedience to<!--Page 086--> chemical law. 'Peroxide of
+hydrogen!' says the cynic. 'Beauty!' says the lover of art.</p>
+
+<p>And it might be argued, in a world of inevitable compromise, that the
+damage done to the physical health and texture of the hair thus playing
+the chameleon may well be overbalanced by the happiness, and consequent
+increased effectiveness, of the person thus dyeing for the sake of
+beauty. Thaumaturgists lay much stress on the mystic influence of
+colours; and who knows but that, if we were only allowed to dye our hair
+what colour we chose, we might be different men and women? Strange
+things are told of women who have dyed their hair the colour of blood or
+of wine, and we know from Christina Rossetti that golden hair is
+negotiable in fairyland&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'"You have much gold upon your head,"</p>
+  <p>They answered all together:</p>
+    <p class="indent1">"Buy from us with a golden curl."'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Whether Laura could have done business with the goblin merchantmen with
+an oxidised curl is a difficult point, for fairies have sharp eyes; and,
+though it be impossible for a mortal to tell the real gold from the
+false<!--Page 087--> gold hair, the fairies may be able to do so, and might reject the
+curl as counterfeit.</p>
+
+<p>Again, if in the vegetable world green almost universally colours the
+leaves, yellow has more to do with the flowers. The flowers we love best
+are yellow: the cowslip, the daffodil, the crocus, the buttercup, half
+the daisy, the honeysuckle, and the loveliest rose. Yellow, too, has its
+turn even with the leaves; and what an artist he shows himself when, in
+autumn, he 'lays his fiery finger' upon them, lighting up the forlorn
+woodland with splashes&mdash;pure palette-colour of audacious gold! He hangs
+the mulberry with heart-shaped yellow shields&mdash;which reminds one of the
+heraldic importance of 'or,'&mdash;and he lines the banks of the Seine with
+phantasmal yellow poplars. And other leaves still dearer to the heart
+are yellow likewise; leaves of those sweet old poets whose thoughts seem
+to have turned the pages gold. Let us dream of this: a maid with yellow
+hair, clad in a yellow gown, seated in a yellow room, at the window a
+yellow sunset, in the grate a yellow fire, at her side a yellow
+lamplight, on her knee a Yellow Book. And the letters<!--Page 088--> we love best to
+read&mdash;when we dare&mdash;are they not yellow too? No doubt some disagreeable
+things are reported of yellow. We have had the yellow-fever, and we have
+had pea-soup. The eyes of lions are said to be yellow, and the ugliest
+cats&mdash;the cats that infest one's garden&mdash;are always yellow. Some
+medicines are yellow, and no doubt there are many other yellow
+disagreeables; but we prefer to dwell upon the yellow blessings. I had
+almost forgotten that the gayest wines are yellow. Nor has religion
+forgotten yellow. It is to be hoped yellow will not forget religion. The
+sacred robe of the second greatest religion of the world is yellow, 'the
+yellow robe' of the Buddhist friar; and when the sacred harlots of
+Hindustan walk in lovely procession through the streets, they too, like
+the friars, are clad in yellow. Amber is yellow; so is the orange; and
+so were stage-coaches and many dashing things of the old time; and pink
+is yellow by lamplight. But gold-mines, it has been proved, are not so
+yellow as is popularly supposed. Hymen's robe is Miltonically 'saffron,'
+and the dearest petti<!--Page 089-->coat in all literature&mdash;not forgetting the
+'tempestuous' garment of Herrick's Julia&mdash;was 'yaller.' Yes!&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>''Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green,</p>
+  <p>An' er name was Supi-yaw-lat, jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Is it possible to say anything prettier for yellow than that?</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 090-->
+<h3><a name="essay09">LETTER TO AN UNSUCCESSFUL LITERARY MAN</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>My Dear Sir,&mdash;I agree with every word you say. You have my entire
+sympathy. The world is indeed hard, hard to the sad&mdash;particularly hard
+to the unsuccessful. A sure five hundred a year covers a multitude of
+sorrows. It is ever an ill wind for the shorn lamb. If it be true that
+nothing succeeds like success, it is no less sadly true that nothing
+fails like failure. And when one thinks of it, it is only natural, for
+every failure is an obstruction in the stream of life. Metaphorical
+writers are fond of saying that the successful ride to success on the
+back of the failures. It is true that many rise on stepping-stones of
+their dead relations&mdash;but that is because their relations have been
+financial successes.<!--Page 091--> In truth, instead of the failure making the
+fortune of the successful, it is just the reverse. A very successful man
+would be the more successful were it not for the failures&mdash;on whom he
+has either to spend his money to support, or his time to advise. The
+strong are said to be impatient towards the weak&mdash;and is it to be
+wondered at, in a world where even the strongest need all their
+strength, in a sea where the best swimmer needs all his wind and muscle
+and skill to keep afloat? If success is sometimes 'unfeeling' towards
+failure, failure is often unfair to success. Of course, 'it is He that
+hath made us and not we ourselves,' but that is a text that cuts both
+ways; and when all is said and done, the failure detracts from the force
+in the universe; he is the clog on the wheel of fortune. To say that the
+successful man benefits by the failure of others is as true as it would
+be to say that the ratepayer benefits by the poor-rates. You use the
+word 'charlatan' somewhat profusely of several successful writers, and
+no doubt you are right. But you must remember that it<!--Page 092--> is a favourite
+charge against the gifted and the fortunate. Because we have failed by
+fair means, we are sure the other fellows have succeeded by foul. And,
+moreover, one is apt to forget how much talent is needed to be a
+charlatan. Never look down upon a charlatan. Courage, skill, personal
+force or charm, great knowledge of human nature, dramatic instinct, and
+industry&mdash;few charlatans succeed (and no one is called a charlatan till
+he <em>does</em> succeed, be his success as low or high as you please) without
+possessing a majority of these qualities; how many of which&mdash;it would be
+interesting to know&mdash;do you possess?</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, it would seem to need more gifts to be a rogue than an honest
+man, and there is a sense in which every great man may be described as a
+charlatan&mdash;<em>plus</em> greatness; greatness being an almost indefinable
+quality, a quality, at any rate, on which there is a bewildering
+diversity of opinion.</p>
+
+<p>You seem a little cross with publishers and editors. They have not
+proved the distinguished, brilliant, and sympathetic beings you imagined
+them in your boyish<!--Page 093--> dreams. No doubt, publishers and editors enter
+hardly into the kingdom of heaven. But then, you see, they don't care so
+much about that; they are much more interested in the next election at
+certain fashionable clubs. It is really a little hard on them that they
+should suffer from the ignorant misconception of the literary amateur.
+It is only those who have had no dealings with them who would be unfair
+enough to expect publishers or editors to be literary men. They are
+business men&mdash;business men <em>par excellence</em>&mdash;and a good thing, too, for
+their papers and their authors. You lament their mercenary view of life;
+but, judging by your letter, even you are not disposed to regard money
+as the root of all evil.</p>
+
+<p>You cannot understand why you have failed where others have succeeded.
+You have far more Greek than Keats, more history than Scott, and you
+know nineteen languages&mdash;ten of them to speak. With so many
+accomplishments, it must indeed be hard to fail&mdash;though you do not seem
+to have found it difficult. You have travelled<!--Page 094--> too&mdash;have been twice
+round the world, and have a thorough knowledge of the worst hotels.
+Certainly, it is singular. Nevertheless, I must confess that the dullest
+men I have ever met have been professors of history; the worst poets
+have not only known Greek, but French as well; and, generally speaking
+the most tiresome of my acquaintances have more degrees than I have
+Latin to name them in. Alas! it is not experience, or travel, or
+language, but the use we make of them, that makes literary success,
+which, one may add, is particularly dependent&mdash;perhaps not
+unnaturally&mdash;on the use we make of language. A book may be a book,
+although there is neither Latin nor Greek, nor travel, nor
+experience&mdash;in fact 'nothing' in it; and though, like myself, you may
+pay an Oxford professor a thousand a year to correct your proofs, you
+may still miss immortality.</p>
+
+<p>To these intellectual and general equipments you add goodness of heart,
+sincerity of conviction, and martyrdom for your opinions; you are, it
+would seem, like many others of us, the best fellow and<!--Page 095--> greatest man of
+your acquaintance. Permit me to remind you that we are not talking of
+goodness of heart, of strength or beauty of character, but of success,
+which is a thing apart, a fine art in itself.</p>
+
+<p>You confess that you are somewhat unpractical: you expect
+others&mdash;hard-worked journalists who never met you&mdash;to tell you what to
+read, how to form your style, and how 'to get into the magazines.' You
+are, you say, with something of pride, but a poor business man. That is
+a pity, for nearly every successful literary man of the day, and
+particularly the novelists, are excellent business men. Indeed, the
+history of literature all round has proved that the men who have been
+masters of words have also been masters of things&mdash;masters of the facts
+of life for which those words stand. Many writers have mismanaged their
+affairs from idleness and indifference, but few from incapacity. Leigh
+Hunt boasted that he could never master the multiplication-table.
+Perhaps that accounts for his comparative failure as a writer.
+Incompetence in one art is far from being a guarantee of competency in
+another, and a<!--Page 096--> man is all the more likely to make a name if he is able
+to make a living&mdash;though, judging from Coleridge, it seems a good plan
+to let another hard-worked man support one's wife and children. On the
+other hand, though business faculty is a great deal, it is not
+everything: for a man may be as punctual and methodical as Southey, and
+yet miss the prize of his high calling, or as generally 'impossible' as
+Blake, and yet win his place among the immortals.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, after all, success in literature has something to do with
+writing. In temporary success, industry and business faculty, and an
+unworked field&mdash;be it Scotland, Ireland, or the Isle of Man (any place
+but plain England!)&mdash;are the chief factors. For that more lasting
+success which we call fame other qualities are needed, such qualities as
+imagination, fancy, and magic and force in the use of words. Can you
+honestly say, O beloved, though tiresome, correspondent, that these
+great gifts are yours? Judging from your letter&mdash;but Heaven forbid that
+I should be unkind! For, need I say I love you with a fellow-feeling? Do
+you think that you<!--Page 097--> are the only unappreciated genius on the planet&mdash;not
+to speak of all the other unappreciated geniuses on all the other
+planets? Thank goodness, the postal arrangements with the latter are as
+yet defective! Others there are with hearts as warm, minds as profound,
+and style at least as attractive, who languish in unmerited
+neglect&mdash;Miltons inglorious indeed, though far from mute.</p>
+
+<p>Believe me, you are not alone. In fact, there are so many like you that
+it would be quite easy for you to find society without worrying me. And,
+for all of us, there is the consolation that, though we fail as writers,
+we may still succeed as citizens, as husbands and fathers and friends.
+As Whitman would say&mdash;because you are not Editor of <em>The Times</em>, do you
+give in that you are less than a man? There are poets that have never
+entered into the Bodley Head, and great prose-writers who have never sat
+in an editorial chair. Be satisfied with your heavenly crowns, O you
+whining unsuccessful, and leave to your inferiors the earthly
+five-shilling pieces.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 098-->
+<h3><a name="essay10">A POET IN THE CITY</a></h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'In the midway of this our mortal life,</p>
+  <p>I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I (and when I say I, I must be understood to be speaking dramatically)
+only venture into the City once a year, for the very pleasant purpose of
+drawing that twelve-pound-ten by which the English nation, ever so
+generously sensitive to the necessities, not to say luxuries, of the
+artist, endeavours to express its pride and delight in me. It would be a
+very graceful exercise of gratitude for me here to stop and parenthesise
+the reader on the subject of all that twelve-pound-ten has been to me,
+how it has quite changed the course of my life, given me that
+long-desired opportunity of doing my best work in peace, for which so
+often I vainly sighed in Fleet Street, and even allowed me an indulgence
+in minor luxuries which I<!--Page 099--> could not have dreamed of enjoying before the
+days of that twelve-pound-ten. Now not only peace and plenty, but
+leisure and luxury are mine. There is nothing goes so far as&mdash;Government
+money.</p>
+
+<p>Usually on these literally State occasions, I drive up in state, that is
+in a hansom. There is only one other day in the year on which I am so
+splendid, but that is another beautiful story. It, too, is a day and an
+hour too joyous to be approached otherwise than on winged wheels, too
+stately to be approached in merely pedestrian fashion. To go on foot to
+draw one's pension seems a sort of slight on the great nation that does
+one honour, as though a Lord Mayor should make his appearance in the
+procession in his office coat.</p>
+
+<p>So I say it is my custom to go gaily, and withal stately, to meet my
+twelve-pound-ten in a hansom. For many reasons the occasion always seems
+something of an adventure, and I confess I always feel a little excited
+about it&mdash;indeed, to tell the truth, a little nervous. As I glide along
+in my state barge (which seems a much more<!--Page 100--> proper and impressive image
+for a hansom than 'gondola,' with its reminiscences of Earl's Court) I
+feel like some fragile country flower torn from its roots, and
+bewilderingly hurried along upon the turbid, swollen stream of London
+life.</p>
+
+<p>The stream glides sweetly with a pleasant trotting tinkle of bells by
+the green parkside of Piccadilly, and sweet is it to hear the sirens
+singing, and to see them combing their gilded locks, on the yellow sands
+of Piccadilly Circus&mdash;so called, no doubt, from the number of horses and
+the skill of their drivers. Here are the whirling pools of pleasure,
+merry wheels of laughing waters, where your hansom glides along with a
+golden ease&mdash;it is only when you enter the First Cataract of the Strand
+that you become aware of the far-distant terrible roar of the Falls!
+They are yet nearly two miles away, but already, like Niagara, thou
+hearest the sound thereof&mdash;the fateful sound of that human Niagara,
+where all the great rivers of London converge: the dark, strong floods
+surging out from the gloomy fastnesses of the East End, the
+quick-running streams from the palaces<!--Page 101--> of the West, the East with its
+wagons, the West with its hansoms, the four winds with their omnibuses,
+the horses and carriages under the earth jetting up their companies of
+grimy passengers, the very air busy with a million errands.</p>
+
+<p>You are in the rapids&mdash;metaphorically speaking&mdash;as you crawl down
+Cheapside; and here where the Bank of England and the Mansion House rise
+sheer and awful from, shall we say, this boiling caldron, this 'hell' of
+angry meeting waters&mdash;Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, Queen Victoria
+Street and Cheapside, each 'running,' again metaphorically, 'like a
+mill-race'&mdash;here in this wild maelstrom of human life and human
+conveyances, here is the true 'Niagara in London,' here are the most
+wonderful falls in the world&mdash;the London Falls.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes!' I said softly to myself, and I could see the sly sad smile on the
+face of the dead poet, at the thought of whose serene wisdom a silence
+like snow seemed momentarily to cover up the turmoil&mdash;'Yes!' I said
+softly, 'there is still the same old crush at the corner of Fenchurch
+Street!'</p><!--Page 102-->
+
+<p>By this time I had disbursed one of my two annual cab-fares, and was
+standing a little forlorn at that very corner. It was a March afternoon,
+bitter and gloomy; lamps were already popping alight in a desolate way,
+and the east wind whistled mournfully through the ribs of the
+passers-by. A very unflowerlike man was dejectedly calling out
+'daffadowndillies' close by. The sound of the pretty old word, thus
+quaintly spoken, brightened the air better than the electric lights
+which suddenly shot rows of wintry moonlight along the streets. I bought
+a bunch of the poor pinched flowers, and asked the man how he came to
+call them 'daffadowndillies.'</p>
+
+<p>'D'vunshur,' he said, in anything but a Devonshire accent, and then the
+east wind took him and he was gone&mdash;doubtless to a neighbouring tavern;
+and no wonder, poor soul! Flowers certainly fall into strange hands here
+in London.</p>
+
+<p>Well, it was nearing four, and if I wanted a grateful country's
+twelve-pound-ten, I must make haste; so presently I found myself in a
+great hall, of which I have no clearer<!--Page 103--> impression than that there were
+soft little lights all about me, and a soft chime of falling gold, like
+the rippling of Pactolus. I have a sort of idea, too, of a great number
+of young men with most beautiful moustaches, playing with golden
+shovels; and as I thus stood among the soft lights and listened to the
+most beautiful sound in the world, I thought that thus must Danæ have
+felt as she stood amid the falling shower. But I took care to see that
+my twelve sovereigns and a half were right number and weight for all
+that.</p>
+
+<p>Once more in the street, I lingered a while to take a last look at the
+Falls. What a masterful alien life it all seemed to me! No single
+personality could hope to stand alone amid all that stress of ponderous,
+bullying forces. Only public companies, and such great impersonalities,
+could hope to hold their own, to swim in such a whirlpool&mdash;and even
+they, I had heard it whispered, far away in my quiet starlit garret,
+sometimes went down. 'How,' I cried, 'would&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'... my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights ...</p>
+  <p>Rush of suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites,'</p>
+</div><!--Page 104-->
+
+<p>again quoting poetry. I always quote poetry in the City, as a
+protest&mdash;moreover, it clears the air.</p>
+
+<p>The more people buffeted against me the more I felt the crushing sense
+of almost cosmic forces. Everybody was so plainly an atom in a public
+company, a drop of water in a tyrannous stream of human
+energy&mdash;companies that cared nothing for their individual atoms, streams
+that cared nothing for their component drops; such atoms and drops, for
+the most part, to be had for thirty shillings a week. These people about
+me seemed no more like individual men and women than individual puffs in
+a mighty rushing wind, or the notes in a great scheme of music, are men
+and women&mdash;to the banker so many pens with ears whereon to perch them,
+to the capitalist so many 'hands,' and to the City man generally so many
+'helpless pieces of the game he plays' up there in spidery nooks and
+corners of the City.</p>
+
+<p>As I listened to the throbbing of the great human engines in the
+buildings about me, a rising and a falling there seemed as of those<!--Page 105-->
+great steel-limbed monsters, weird contortionists of metal, that jet up
+and down, and writhe and wrestle this way and that, behind the long
+glass windows of great water-towers, or toil like Vulcan in the bowels
+of mighty ships. An expression of frenzy seems to come up even from the
+dumb tossing steel; sometimes it seems to be shaking great knuckled
+fists at one and brandishing threatening arms, as it strains and sweats
+beneath the lash of the compulsive steam. As one watches it, there seems
+something of human agony about its panic-stricken labours, and something
+like a sense of pity surprises one&mdash;a sense of pity that anything in the
+world should have to work like that, even steel, even, as we say,
+senseless steel. What, then, of these great human engine-houses! Will
+the engines always consent to rise and fall, night and day, like that?
+or will there some day be a mighty convulsion, and this blind Samson of
+labour pull down the whole engine-house upon his oppressors? Who knows?
+These are questions for great politicians and thinkers to decide, not
+for a poet, who is too much terrified by such<!--Page 106--> forces to be able calmly
+to estimate and prophesy concerning them.</p>
+
+<p>Yes! if you want to realise Tennyson's picture of 'one poor poet's
+scroll' ruling the world, take your poet's scroll down to Fenchurch
+Street and try it there. Ah, what a powerless little 'private interest'
+seems poetry there, poetry 'whose action is no stronger than a flower.'
+In days of peace it ventures even into the morning papers; but, let only
+a rumour of war be heard, and it vanishes like a dream on doomsday
+morning. A County Council election passeth over it and it is gone.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it was near this very spot that Keats dug up the buried beauty of
+Greece, lying hidden beneath Finsbury Pavement! and in the deserted City
+churches great dramatists lie about us. Maybe I have wronged the
+City&mdash;and at this thought I remembered a little bookshop but a few yards
+away, blossoming like a rose right in the heart of the wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>Here, after all, in spite of all my whirlpools and engine-houses, was
+for me the greatest danger in the City. Need I say,<!--Page 107--> therefore, that I
+promptly sought it, hovered about it a moment&mdash;and entered? How much of
+that grateful governmental twelve-pound-ten came out alive, I dare not
+tell my dearest friend.</p>
+
+<p>At all events I came out somehow reassured, more rich in faith. There
+was a might of poesy after all. There were words in the little
+yellow-leaved garland, nestling like a bird in my hand, that would
+outlast the bank yonder, and outlive us all. I held it up. How tiny it
+seemed, how frail amid all this stone and iron! A mere flower&mdash;a flower
+from the seventeenth century&mdash;long-lived for a flower! Yes, an
+<em>immortelle</em>.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 108-->
+<h3><a name="essay11">BROWN ROSES</a></h3>
+
+<p>'Well, I never thought to see this day, sir,' said Gibbs, with something
+like tears in his voice, as he reluctantly plied his scissors upon
+Hyacinth Rondel's distinguished curls.</p>
+
+<p>'Nor I, Gibbs&mdash;nor I!' said Rondel sadly, relapsing into silence again,
+with his head meekly bent over the white sheet spread to catch his shorn
+beauty.</p>
+
+<p>'To think of the times, sir, that I have dressed your head,' continued
+Gibbs, whose grief bore so marked an emphasis, 'and to think that after
+to-day ...'</p>
+
+<p>'But you forget, my dear Gibbs, that I shall now be a more constant
+customer than ever!'</p>
+
+<p>'Ah, sir, but that will be different. It will be mere machine-cutting,
+lawn-mowing, steam-reaping, if you understand me; there'll<!--Page 109--> be no
+pleasure in it, no artistic pleasure, I mean.'</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, Gibbs, and you are an artist&mdash;I have often told you that.'</p>
+
+<p>'Ah, sir, but I am coming to the conclusion that it is better not to be
+an artist, better to be born just like every one else. In these days one
+suffers too much. Why, sir, I haven't in the whole of my business six
+heads like yours, and I go on cutting all the rest week in and week out,
+just for the pleasure of dressing those six&mdash;and now there'll only be
+five.'</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>'It looks like a winding-sheet,' mused Rondel presently, after a long
+silence, broken only by the soft crunch and click of the fatal scissors,
+as they feasted on the beautiful brown silk.</p>
+
+<p>'It do indeed, sir,' said Gibbs, with a shudder, as another little globe
+of golden brown rolled down into Rondel's lap.</p>
+
+<p>'Poor brown roses!' sighed the poet, after another silence; 'they are
+just like brown roses, aren't they, Gibbs?'</p>
+
+<p>'They are indeed, sir!'</p><!--Page 110-->
+
+<p>'Brown roses scattered over the winding-sheet of one's youth&mdash;eh,
+Gibbs?'</p>
+
+<p>'They are indeed, sir.'</p>
+
+<p>'That's rather a pretty image, don't you think, Gibbs?'</p>
+
+<p>'Indeed I do, sir!'</p>
+
+<p>'Well, well, they have bloomed their last; and when Juliet's white hands
+come seeking with their silver fingers, white maidens lost in the brown
+enchanted forest, there will not be a rose left for her to gather.'</p>
+
+<p>'Believe me, sir, I would more gladly have cut off your head than your
+hair&mdash;that is, figuratively speaking,' sobbed the artist-in-hair-oils.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, my head would hardly be missed&mdash;you are quite right, Gibbs; but my
+hair! What will they do without it at first nights and private views? It
+was worth five shillings a week to many a poor paragraph-writer. Well, I
+must try and make up for it by my beard!'</p>
+
+<p>'Your beard, sir?' exclaimed Gibbs in horror.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, Gibbs; for some years I have been a Nazarene&mdash;that is, a Nazarite,
+with the top<!--Page 111--> half of my head; now I am going to change about and be a
+Nazarite with the lower. The razor has kissed my cheeks and my chin and
+the fluted column of my throat for the last time.'</p>
+
+<p>'You cannot mean it, sir!' said Gibbs, suspending his murderous task a
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>'It's quite true, Gibbs.'</p>
+
+<p>'Does she wish that too, sir?'</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, that too.'</p>
+
+<p>'Well, sir, I have heard of men making sacrifices for their wives, but
+of all the cruel....'</p>
+
+<p>'Please don't, Gibbs. It does no good. And Mrs. Rondel's motive is a
+good one.'</p>
+
+<p>'Of course, sir, I cannot presume&mdash;and yet, if it wouldn't be presuming,
+I should like to know why you are making this great, I may say this
+noble, sacrifice?'</p>
+
+<p>'Well, Gibbs, we're old friends, and I'll tell you some day, but I
+hardly feel up to it to-day.'</p>
+
+<p>'Of course not, sir, of course not&mdash;it's only natural,' said Gibbs
+tenderly, while the scissors once more took up the conversation.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 112-->
+<h3><a name="essay12">THE DONKEY THAT LOVED A STAR</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>'That is how the donkey tells his love!' I said one day, with intent to
+be funny, as the prolonged love-whoop of a distant donkey was heard in
+the land.</p>
+
+<p>'Don't be too ready to laugh at donkeys,' said my friend. 'For,' he
+continued, 'even donkeys have their dreams. Perhaps, indeed, the most
+beautiful dreams are dreamed by donkeys.'</p>
+
+<p>'Indeed,' I said, 'and now that I think of it, I remember to have said
+that most dreamers are donkeys, though I never expected so scientific a
+corroboration of a fleeting jest.'</p>
+
+<p>Now, my friend is an eminent scientist and poet in one, a serious
+combination; and he took my remarks with seriousness at once scientific
+and poetic.</p><!--Page 113-->
+
+<p>'Yes,' he went on, 'that is where you clever people make a mistake. You
+think that because a donkey has only two vowel-sounds wherewith to
+express his emotions, he has no emotions to express. But let me tell
+you, sir ...'</p>
+
+<p>But here we both burst out laughing&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'You Golden Ass!' I said,'take a munch of these roses; perhaps they will
+restore you.'</p>
+
+<p>'No,' he resumed, 'I am quite serious. I have for many years past made a
+study of donkeys&mdash;high-stepping critics call it the study of Human
+Nature&mdash;however, it's the same thing&mdash;and I must say that the more I
+study them the more I love them. There is nothing so well worth studying
+as the misunderstood, for the very reason that everybody thinks he
+understands it. Now, to take another instance, most people think they
+have said the last word on a goose when they have called it "a
+goose"!&mdash;but let me tell you, sir ...'</p>
+
+<p>But here again we burst out laughing&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Dear goose of the golden eggs,' I said, 'pray leave to discourse on
+geese to-night<!--Page 114-->&mdash;though lovely and pleasant would the discourse
+be;&mdash;to-night I am all agog for donkeys.'</p>
+
+<p>'So be it,' said my friend,' and if that be so, I cannot do better than
+tell you the story of the donkey that loved a star&mdash;keeping for another
+day the no less fascinating story of the goose that loved an angel.'</p>
+
+<p>By this time I was, appropriately, all ears.</p>
+
+<p>'Well,' he once more began, 'there was once a donkey, quite an intimate
+friend of mine&mdash;and I have no friend of whom I am prouder&mdash;who was
+unpractically fond of looking up at the stars. He could go a whole day
+without thistles, if night would only bring him stars. Of course he
+suffered no little from his fellow-donkeys for this curious passion of
+his. They said well that it did not become him, for indeed it was no
+little laughable to see him gazing so sentimentally at the remote and
+pitiless heavens. Donkeys who belonged to Shakespeare Societies recalled
+the fate of Bottom, the donkey who had loved a fairy; but our donkey
+paid little heed. There is perhaps only one advantage<!--Page 115--> in being a
+donkey&mdash;namely, a hide impervious to criticism. In our donkey's case it
+was rather a dream that made him forget his hide&mdash;a dream that drew up
+all the sensitiveness from every part, from hoof, and hide, and ears, so
+that all the feeling in his whole body was centred in his eyes and
+brain, and those, as we have said, were centred on a star. He took it
+for granted that his fellows should sneer and kick-out at him&mdash;it was
+ever so with genius among the donkeys, and he had very soon grown used
+to these attentions of his brethren, which were powerless to withdraw
+his gaze from the star he loved. For though he loved all the stars, as
+every individual man loves all women, there was one star he loved more
+than any other; and standing one midnight among his thistles, he prayed
+a prayer, a prayer that some day it might be granted him to carry that
+star upon his back&mdash;which, he recalled, had been sanctified by the holy
+sign&mdash;were it but for ever so short a journey. Just to carry it a little
+way, and then to die. This to him was a dream beyond the dreams of
+donkeys.</p>
+
+<p>'Now, one night,' continued my friend,<!--Page 116--> taking breath for himself and
+me, 'our poor donkey looked up to the sky, and lo! the star was nowhere
+to be seen. He had heard it said that stars sometimes fall. Evidently
+his star had fallen. Fallen! but what if it had fallen upon the earth?
+Being a donkey, the wildest dreams seemed possible to him. And, strange
+as it may seem, there came a day when a poet came to his master and
+bought our donkey to carry his little child. Now, the very first day he
+had her upon his back, the donkey knew that his prayer had been
+answered, and that the little swaddled babe he carried was the star he
+had prayed for. And, indeed, so it was; for so long as donkeys ask no
+more than to fetch and carry for their beloved, they may be sure of
+beauty upon their backs. Now, so long as this little girl that was a
+star remained a little girl, our donkey was happy. For many pretty years
+she would kiss his ugly muzzle and feed his mouth with sugar&mdash;and thus
+our donkey's thoughts sweetened day by day, till from a natural
+pessimist he blossomed into a perfectly absurd optimist, and dreamed the
+donkiest of dreams. But, one<!--Page 117--> day, as he carried the girl who was really
+a star through the spring lanes, a young man walked beside her, and
+though our donkey thought very little of his talk&mdash;in fact, felt his
+plain "hee-haw" to be worth all its smart chirping and twittering&mdash;yet
+it evidently pleased the maiden. It included quite a number of
+vowel-sounds&mdash;though, if the maiden had only known, it didn't mean half
+so much as the donkey's plain monotonous declaration.</p>
+
+<p>'Well, our donkey soon began to realise that his dream was nearing its
+end; and, indeed, one day his little mistress came bringing him the
+sweetest of kisses, the very best sugar in the very best shops, but for
+all that our donkey knew that it meant good-bye. It is the charming
+manner of English girls to be at their sweetest when they say good-bye.</p>
+
+<p>'Our dreamer-donkey went into exile as servant to a woodcutter, and his
+life was lenient if dull, for the woodcutter had no sticks to waste upon
+his back; and next day his young mistress who was once a star took a
+pony for her love, whom some time<!--Page 118--> after she discarded for a talented
+hunter, and, one fine day, like many of her sex, she pitched her
+affections upon a man&mdash;he too being a talented hunter. To their wedding
+came all the countryside. And with the countryside came the donkey. He
+carried a great bundle of firewood for the servants' hall, and as he
+waited outside, gazing up at his old loves the stars, while his master
+drank deeper and deeper within, he revolved many thoughts. But he is
+only known to have made one remark&mdash;in the nature, one may think, of a
+grim jest&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'"After all!" he was heard to say, "she has married a donkey&mdash;after
+all!"</p>
+
+<p>'No doubt it was feeble; but then our donkey was growing old and bitter,
+and hope deferred had made him a cynic.'</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 119-->
+<h3><a name="essay13">ON LOVING ONE'S ENEMIES</a></h3>
+
+<p>Like all people who live apart from it, the Founder of the Christian
+religion was possessed of a profound knowledge of the world. As,
+according to the proverb, the woodlander sees nothing of the wood for
+its trees, so those who live in the world know nothing of it. They know
+its gaudy, glittering surface, its Crystal Palace fireworks, and the
+paste-diamonds with which it bedecks itself; they know its music-halls
+and its night clubs, its Piccadillys and its politics, its restaurants
+and its salons; but of the bad&mdash;or good?&mdash;heart of it all they know
+nothing. In more meanings than one, it takes a saint to catch a sinner;
+and Christ certainly knew as well as saved the sinner.</p>
+
+<p>But none of His precepts show a truer knowledge of life and its
+conditions than<!--Page 120--> His commandment that we should love our enemies. He
+realised&mdash;can we doubt?&mdash;that, without enemies, the Church He bade His
+followers build could not hope to be established. He knew that the
+spiritual fire He strove to kindle would spread but little, unless the
+four winds of the world blew against it. Well, indeed, may the Christian
+Church love its enemies, for it is they who have made it.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, for a man, or a cause, that wants to get on, there is nothing
+like a few hearty, zealous enemies. Most of us would never be heard of
+if it were not for our enemies. The unsuccessful man counts up his
+friends, but the successful man numbers his enemies. A friend of mine
+was lamenting, the other day, that he could not find twelve people to
+disbelieve in him. He had been seeking them for years, he sighed, and
+could not get beyond eleven. But, even so, with only eleven he was a
+very successful man. In these kind-hearted days enemies are becoming so
+rare that one has to go out of one's way to make them. The true
+interpretation, therefore, of the easiest of the commandments is<!--Page 121-->&mdash;make
+your enemies, and your enemies will make you.</p>
+
+<p>So soon as the armed men begin to spring up in our fields, we may be
+sure that we have not sown in vain.</p>
+
+<p>Properly understood, an enemy is but a negative embodiment of our
+personalities or ideas. He is an involuntary witness to our vitality.
+Much as he despises us, greatly as he may injure us, he is none the less
+a creature of our making. It was we who put into him the breath of his
+malignity, and inspired the activity of his malice. Therefore, with his
+very existence so tremendous a tribute, we can afford to smile at his
+self-conscious disclaimers of our significance. Though he slay us, we
+<em>made</em> him&mdash;to 'make an enemy,' is not that the phrase?</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, the fact that he is our enemy is his one <em>raison d'être</em>. That
+alone should make us charitable to him. Live and let live. Without us
+our enemy has no occupation, for to hate us is his profession. Think of
+his wives and families!</p>
+
+<p>The friendship of the little for the great is an old-established
+profession; there is but<!--Page 122--> one older&mdash;namely, the hatred of the little
+for the great; and, though it is perhaps less officially recognised, it
+is without doubt the more lucrative. It is one of the shortest roads to
+fame. Why is the name of Pontius Pilate an uneasy ghost of history?
+Think what fame it would have meant to be an enemy of Socrates or
+Shakespeare! <em>Blackwood's Magazine</em> and <em>The Quarterly Review</em> only
+survive to-day because they once did their best to strangle the genius
+of Keats and Tennyson. Two or three journals of our own time, by the
+same unfailing method, seek that circulation from posterity which is
+denied them in the present.</p>
+
+<p>This is particularly true in literature, where the literary enemy is as
+organised a tradesman as the literary agent. Like the literary agent, he
+naturally does his best to secure the biggest men. No doubt the time
+will come when the literary cut-throat&mdash;shall we call him?&mdash;will publish
+dainty little books of testimonials from authors, full of effusive
+gratitude for the manner in which they have been slashed and bludgeoned
+into fame. 'Butcher to Mr. Grant Allen' may then be<!--Page 123-->come a familiar
+legend over literary shop-fronts:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <div class="stanza">
+  <p>'Ah! did you stab at Shelley's heart</p>
+    <p class="indent1">With silly sneer and cruel lie?</p>
+  <p>And Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">To murder did you nobly try?</p>
+  </div>
+
+  <div class="stanza">
+  <p>You failed, 'tis true; but what of that?</p>
+    <p class="indent1">The world remembers still your name&mdash;</p>
+  <p>'Tis fame, <em>for you</em>, to be the cur</p>
+    <p class="indent1">That barks behind the heels of Fame.'</p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Any one who is fortunate enough to have enemies will know that all this
+is far from being fanciful. If one's enemies have any other <em>raison
+d'être</em> beyond the fact of their being our enemies&mdash;what is it? They are
+neither beautiful nor clever, wise nor good, famous nor, indeed,
+passably distinguished. Were they any of these, they would not have
+taken to so humble a means of getting their living. Instead of being our
+enemies, they could then have afforded to employ enemies on their own
+account.</p>
+
+<p>Who, indeed, are our enemies? Broadly speaking, they are all those
+people who lack what we possess.</p>
+
+<p>If you are rich, every poor man is necessarily your enemy. If you are
+beautiful, the<!--Page 124--> great democracy of the plain and ugly will mock you in
+the streets. It will be the same with everything you possess. The
+brainless will never forgive you for possessing brains, the weak will
+hate you for your strength, and the evil for your good heart. If you can
+write, all the bad writers are at once your foes. If you can paint, the
+bad painters will talk you down. But more than any talent or charm you
+may possess, the pearl of price for which you will be most bitterly
+hated will be your success. You can be the most wonderful person that
+ever existed, so long as you don't succeed, and nobody will mind. 'It is
+the sunshine,' says some one, 'that brings out the adder.' So powerful,
+indeed, is success that it has been known to turn a friend into a foe.
+Those, then, who wish to engage a few trusty enemies out of place need
+only advertise among the unsuccessful.</p>
+
+<p><em>P.S.</em>&mdash;For one service we should be particularly thankful to our
+enemies&mdash;they save us so much in stimulants. Their unbelief so helps our
+belief, their negatives make us so positive.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 125-->
+<h3><a name="essay14">THE DRAMATIC ART OF LIFE</a></h3>
+
+<p>It is a curious truth that, whereas in every other art deliberate choice
+of method and careful calculation of effect are expected from the
+artist, in the greatest and most difficult art of all, the art of life,
+this is not so. In literature, painting, or sculpture you first evolve
+your conception, and then, after long study of it, as it glows and
+shimmers in your imagination, you set about the reverent selection of
+that form which shall be its most truthful incarnation, in words, in
+paint, in marble. Now life, as has been said many times, is an art too.
+Sententious morality from time past has told us that we are each given a
+part to play, evidently implying, with involuntary cynicism, that the
+art of life is&mdash;the art of acting.</p>
+
+<p>As with the actor, we are each given a<!--Page 126--> certain dramatic conception for
+the expression of which we have precisely the same artistic
+materials&mdash;namely, our own bodies, sometimes including heart and brains.
+One has often heard the complaint of a certain actor that he acts
+himself. On the metaphorical stage of life the complaint and the implied
+demand are just the reverse. How much more interesting life would be if
+only more people had the courage and skill to act themselves, instead of
+abjectly understudying some one else! Of course, there are supers on the
+stage of life as on the real stage. It is proper that these should dress
+and speak and think alike. These one courteously excepts from the
+generalisation that the composer of the play, as Marcus Aurelius calls
+him, has given each of us a certain part to play&mdash;that part simply
+oneself: a part, need one say, by no means as easy as it seems; a part
+most difficult to study, and requiring daily rehearsal. So difficult is
+it, indeed, that most people throw up the part, and join the ranks of
+the supers&mdash;who, curiously enough, are paid much more handsomely than
+the principals. They enter one<!--Page 127--> of the learned or idle professions, join
+the army or take to trade, and so speedily rid themselves of the irksome
+necessity of being anything more individual than 'the learned counsel,'
+'the learned judge,' 'my lord bishop,' or 'the colonel,' names
+impersonal in application as the dignity of 'Pharaoh,' whereof the name
+and not the man was alone important. Henceforth they are the Church, the
+Law, the Army, the City, or that vaguer profession Society. Entering one
+of these, they become as lost to the really living world as the monk who
+voluntarily surrenders all will and character of his own at the
+threshold of his monastery: bricks in a prison wall, privates in the
+line, peas in a row. But, as I say, these are the parts that pay. For
+playing the others, indeed, you are not paid, but expected to
+pay&mdash;dearly.</p>
+
+<p>It is full time we turned to those on whom falls the burden of those
+real parts. Such, when quite young, if they be conscientious artists,
+will carefully consider themselves, their gifts and possibilities, study
+to discover their artistic <em>raison d'être</em> and how best to<!--Page 128--> fulfil it.
+He or she will say: Here am I, a creature of great gifts and exquisite
+sensibilities, drawn by great dreams, and vibrating to great emotions;
+yet this potent and exquisite self is as yet, I know, but unwrought
+material of the perfect work of art it is intended that I should make of
+it&mdash;but the marble wherefrom, with patient chisel, I must liberate the
+perfect and triumphant ME! As a poet listening with trembling ear to the
+voice of his inspiration, so I tremulously ask myself&mdash;what is the
+divine conception that is to become embodied in me, what is the divine
+meaning of ME? How best shall I express it in look, in word, in deed,
+till my outer self becomes the truthful symbol of my inner self&mdash;till,
+in fact, I have successfully placed the best of myself on the outside
+&mdash;for others besides myself to see, and know and love?</p>
+
+<p>What is my part, and how am I to play it?</p>
+
+<p>Returning to the latter image, there are two difficulties that beset one
+in playing a part on the stage of life, right at the outset. You are not
+allowed to 'look' it, or 'dress' it! What would an actor think, who,
+asked to<!--Page 129--> play Hamlet, found that he would be expected to play it
+without make-up and in nineteenth-century costume? Yet many of us are in
+a like dilemma with similar parts. Actors and audience must all wear the
+same drab clothes and the same immobile expression. It is in vain you
+protest that you do not really belong to this absurd and vulgar
+nineteenth century, that you have been spirited into it by a cruel
+mistake, that you really belong to mediæval Florence, to Elizabethan,
+Caroline, or at latest Queen Anne England, and that you would like to be
+allowed to look and dress as like it as possible. It is no use; if you
+dare to look or dress like anything but your own tradesmen&mdash;and other
+critics&mdash;it is at your peril. If you are beautiful, you are expected to
+disguise a fact that is an open insult to every other person you look
+at; and you must, as a general rule, never look, wear, feel, or say what
+everybody else is not also looking, wearing, feeling, or saying.</p>
+
+<p>Thus you get some hint of the difficulty of playing the part of yourself
+on this stage of life.</p><!--Page 130-->
+
+<p>In these matters of dressing and looking your part musicians seem
+granted an immunity denied to all their fellow-artists. Perhaps it is
+taken for granted that the musician is a fool&mdash;the British public is so
+intuitive. Yet it takes the same view of the poet, without allowing him
+a like immunity. And, by the way, what a fine conception of his part had
+Tennyson&mdash;of the dignity, the mystery, the picturesqueness of it!
+Tennyson would have felt it an artistic crime to look like his
+publisher; yet what poet is there left us to-day half so
+distinguished-looking as his publisher?</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, curiously enough, among no set of men does the desire to look as
+commonplace as the rest of the world seem so strong as among men of
+letters. Perhaps it is out of consideration for the rest of the world;
+but, whatever the reason, immobility of expression and general
+mediocrity of style are more characteristic of them at present than even
+the military.</p>
+
+<p>It is surely a strange paradox that we should pride ourselves on
+schooling to foolish insensibility, on eliminating from them every<!--Page 131--> mark
+of individual character, the faces that were intended subtly and
+eloquently to image our moods&mdash;to look glad when we are glad, sorry when
+we are sorry, angry in anger, and lovely in love.</p>
+
+<p>The impassivity of the modern young man is indeed a weird and wonderful
+thing. Is it a mark to hide from us the appalling sins he none the less
+openly affects? Is it meant to conceal that once in his life he paid a
+wild visit to 'The Empire'&mdash;by kind indulgence of the County Council?
+that he once chucked a barmaid under the chin, that he once nearly got
+drunk, that he once spoke to a young lady he did not know&mdash;and then ran
+away?</p>
+
+<p>One sighs for the young men of the days of Gautier and Hugo, the young
+men with red waistcoats who made asses of themselves at first nights and
+on the barricades, young men with romance in their hearts and passion in
+their blood, fearlessly sentimental and picturesquely everything.</p>
+
+<p>The lover then was not ashamed that you should catch radiant glimpses of
+his love in his eyes&mdash;nay! if you smiled kindly on him,<!--Page 132--> he would take
+you by the arm and insist on your breaking a bottle with him in honour
+of his mistress. Joy and sorrow then wore their appropriate colours,
+according, so to say, to the natural sumptuary laws of the emotions&mdash;one
+of which is that the right place for the heart is the sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>It is the duty of those who are great, or to whom great destinies of joy
+or sorrow have been dealt, to wear their distinctions for the world to
+see. It is good for the world, which in its crude way indicates the
+rudiments of this dramatic art of life, when it decrees that the bride
+shall walk radiant in orange blossom, and the mourner sadden our streets
+with black&mdash;symbols ever passing before us of the moving vicissitudes of
+life.</p>
+
+<p>The mourner cannot always be sad, or the bride merry; the bride indeed
+sometimes weeps at the altar, and the mourner laughs a savage cynical
+laugh at the grave; but for those moments in which they awhile forget
+parts more important than themselves, the tailor and the dressmaker have
+provided symbolical garments, just as military decorations have been
+provided for heroes<!--Page 133--> without the gift of looking heroic, and sacerdotal
+vestments for the priest, who, like a policeman, is not always on duty.</p>
+
+<p>In playing his part the conscientious artist in life, like any other
+actor, must often seem to feel more than he really feels at a given
+moment, say more than he means. In this he is far from being
+insincere&mdash;though he must make up his mind to be accused daily of
+insincerity and affectation. On the contrary, it will be his very
+sincerity that necessitates his make-believe. With his great part ever
+before him in its inspiring completeness, he must be careful to allow no
+merely personal accident of momentary feeling or action to jeopardise
+the general effect. There are moments, for example, when a really true
+lover, owing to such masterful natural facts as indigestion, a cold, or
+extreme sleepiness, is unable to feel all that he knows he really feels.
+To 'tell the truth,' as it is called, under such circumstances, would
+simply be a most dangerous form of lying. There is no duty we owe to
+truth more imperative than that of lying stoutly on occasion&mdash;for,
+indeed, there is often no other way of con<!--Page 134-->veying the whole truth than
+by telling the part-lie.</p>
+
+<p>A watchful sincerity to our great conception of ourselves is the first
+and last condition, of our creating that finest work of art&mdash;a
+personality; for a personality, like a poet, is not only born but made.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 135-->
+<h3><a name="essay15">THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX</a></h3>
+
+<p>In an essay on Vauvenargues Mr. John Morley speaks with characteristic
+causticity of those epigrammatists 'who persist in thinking of man and
+woman as two different species,' and who make verbal capital out of the
+fancied distinction in the form of smart epigrams beginning '<em>Les
+femmes</em>.' It is one of Shakespeare's cardinal characteristics that <em>he
+understood woman</em>. Mr. Meredith's fame as a novelist is largely due to
+the fact that he too <em>understands women</em>. The one spot on the sun of
+Robert Louis Stevenson's fame, so we are told, is that he could <em>never
+draw a woman</em>. His capacity for drawing men counted for nothing,
+apparently, beside this failure. Evidently the Sphinx has not the face
+of a woman for nothing. That is why no one has read her riddle,
+translated<!--Page 136--> her mystic smile. Yet many people smile mysteriously,
+without any profound meanings behind their smile, with no other reason
+than a desire to mystify. Perhaps the Sphinx smiles to herself just for
+the fun of seeing us take her smile so seriously. And surely women must
+so smile as they hear their psychology so gravely discussed. Of course,
+the superstition is invaluable to them, and it is only natural that they
+should make the most of it. Man is supposed to be a complete ignoramus
+in regard to all the specialised female 'departments'&mdash;from the supreme
+mystery of the female heart to the humble domestic mysteries of a
+household. Similarly, men are supposed to have no taste in women's
+dress, yet for whom do women clothe themselves in the rainbow and the
+sea-foam, if not to please men? And was not the high-priest of that
+delicious and fascinating mystery a man&mdash;if it be proper to call the
+late M. Worth a man,&mdash;as the best cooks are men, and the best waiters?</p>
+
+<p>It would seem to be assumed from all this mystification that men are
+beings clear as daylight, both to themselves and to women.<!--Page 1137--> Poor,
+simple, manageable souls, their wants are easily satisfied, their
+psychology&mdash;which, it is implied, differs little from their
+physiology&mdash;long since mapped out.</p>
+
+<p>It may be so, but it is the opinion of some that men's simplicity is no
+less a fiction than women's mysterious complexity, and that human
+character is made up of much the same qualities in men and women,
+irrespective of a merely rudimentary sexual distinction, which has, of
+course, its proper importance, and which the present writer would be the
+last to wish away. From that quaint distinction of sex springs, of
+course, all that makes life in the smallest degree worth living, from
+great religions to tiny flowers. Love and beauty and poetry;
+Shakespeare's plays, Burne-Jones's pictures, and Wagner's operas&mdash;all
+such moving expressions of human life, as science has shown us, spring
+from the all-important fact that 'male and female created He them.'</p>
+
+<p>This everybody knows, and few are fools enough to deny. Many people,
+however, confuse this organic distinction of sex with its time-worn
+conventional symbols; just<!--Page 138--> as religion is commonly confused with its
+external rites and ceremonies. The comparison naturally continues itself
+further; for, as in religion, so soon as some traditional garment of the
+faith has become outworn or otherwise unsuitable, and the proposal is
+made to dispense with or substitute it, an outcry immediately is raised
+that religion itself is in danger&mdash;so with sex, no sooner does one or
+the other sex propose to discard its arbitrary conventional
+characteristics, or to supplement them by others borrowed from its
+fellow-sex, than an outcry immediately is raised that sex itself is in
+danger.</p>
+
+<p>Sex&mdash;the most potent force in the universe&mdash;in danger because women
+wear knickerbockers instead of petticoats, or military men take to
+corsets and cosmetics!</p>
+
+<p>That parallel with religion may be pursued profitably one step further.
+In religion, the conventional test of your faith is not how you live,
+not in your kindness of heart or purity of mind, but how you believe&mdash;in
+the Trinity, in the Atonement; and do you turn to the East during the
+recital of the Apostles' Creed? These and such, as every<!--Page 139--> one knows, are
+the vital matters of religion. And it is even so with sex. You are not
+asked for the realities of manliness or womanliness, but for the
+shadows, the arbitrary externalities, the fashions of which change from
+generation to generation.</p>
+
+<p>To be truly womanly you must never wear your hair short; to be truly
+manly you must never wear it long. To be truly womanly you must dress as
+daintily as possible, however uncomfortably; to be truly manly you must
+wear the most hideous gear ever invented by the servility of tailors&mdash;a
+strange succession of cylinders from head to heel; cylinder on head,
+cylinder round your body, cylinders on arms and cylinders on legs. To be
+truly womanly you must be shrinking and clinging in manner and trivial
+in conversation; you must have no ideas, and rejoice that you wish for
+none; you must thank Heaven that you have never ridden a bicycle or
+smoked a cigarette; and you must be prepared to do a thousand other
+absurd and ridiculous things. To be truly manly you must be and do the
+opposite of all these things, with this exception&mdash;that with you<!--Page 140--> the
+possession of ideas is optional. The finest specimens of British manhood
+are without ideas; but that, I say, is, generally speaking, a matter for
+yourself. It is indeed the only matter in which you have any choice.
+More important matters, such as the cut of your clothes and hair, the
+shape of your face, the length of your moustache and the pattern of your
+cane&mdash;all these are very properly regulated for you by laws of fashion,
+which you could never dream of breaking. You may break every moral law
+there is&mdash;or rather, was&mdash;and still remain a man. You may be a bully, a
+cad, a coward and a fool, in the poor heart and brains of you; but so
+long as you wear the mock regimentals of contemporary manhood, and are
+above all things plain and undistinguished enough, your reputation for
+manhood will be secure. There is nothing so dangerous to a reputation
+for manhood as brains or beauty.</p>
+
+<p>In short, to be a true woman you have only to be pretty and an idiot,
+and to be a true man you have only to be brutal and a fool.</p>
+
+<p>From these misconceptions of manliness<!--Page 141--> and womanliness, these
+superstitions of sex, many curious confusions have come about. They so
+to say, professional differentiation between the sexes had at one time
+gone so far that men were credited with the entire monopoly of a certain
+set of human qualities, and women with the monopoly of a certain other
+set of human qualities; yet every one of these are qualities which one
+would have thought were proper to, and necessary for, all human beings
+alike, male and female.</p>
+
+<p>In a dictionary of a date (1856) when everything on earth and in heaven
+was settled and written in penny cyclopædias and books of deportment, I
+find these delicious definitions&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><em>Manly</em>: becoming a man; firm; brave; undaunted; dignified; noble;
+stately; not boyish or womanish.</p>
+
+<p><em>Womanly</em>: becoming a woman; feminine; as <em>womanly</em> behaviour.</p>
+
+<p>Under <em>Woman</em> we find the adjectives&mdash;soft, mild, pitiful and flexible,
+kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous, modest.</p>
+
+<p>Who can doubt that the dictionary maker defined and distributed his
+adjectives aright<!--Page 142--> for the year 1856? Since then, however, many alarming
+heresies have taken root in our land, and some are heard to declare that
+both these sets of adjectives apply to men and women alike, and are, in
+fact, necessities of any decent human outfit. Otherwise the conclusion
+is obvious, that no one desirous of the adjective 'manly' must ever
+be&mdash;soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, kind, civil, obliging, humane,
+tender, timorous, or modest; and no one desirous of the adjective
+'womanly' be&mdash;firm, brave, undaunted, dignified, noble, or stately.</p>
+
+<p>But surely the essentials of 'manliness' and 'womanliness' belong to man
+and woman alike&mdash;the externals are purely artistic considerations, and
+subject to the vagaries of fashion. In art no one would think of
+allowing fashion any serious artistic opinion. It is usually the art
+which is out of fashion that is most truly art. Similarly, fashions in
+manliness or womanliness have nothing to do with real manliness or
+womanliness. Moreover, the adjectives 'manly' or 'womanly,' applied to
+works of art, or the artistic surfaces of men and women, are<!--Page 143-->
+irrelevant&mdash;that is to say, impertinent. You have no right to ask a
+poem or a picture to look manly or womanly, any more than you have any
+right to ask a man or a woman to look manly or womanly. There is no such
+thing as looking manly or womanly. There is looking beautiful or ugly,
+distinguished or commonplace, individual or insignificant. The one law
+of externals is beauty in all its various manifestations. To ask the sex
+of a beautiful person is as absurd as it would be to ask the publisher
+the sex of a beautiful book. Such questions are for midwives and
+doctors.</p>
+
+<p>It was once the fashion for heroes to shed tears on the smallest
+occasion, and it does not appear that they fought the worse for it; some
+of the firmest, bravest, most undaunted, most dignified, most noble,
+most stately human beings have been women; as some of the softest,
+mildest, most pitiful and flexible, most kind, civil, obliging, humane,
+tender, timorous and modest human beings have been men. Indeed, some of
+the bravest men that ever trod this planet have worn corsets, and it
+needs more courage<!--Page 144--> nowadays for a man to wear his hair long than to
+machine-gun a whole African nation. Moreover, quite the nicest women one
+knows ride bicycles&mdash;in the rational costume.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 145-->
+<h3><a name="essay16">THE FALLACY OF A NATION</a></h3>
+
+<p>It is, I am given to understand, a familiar axiom of mathematics that no
+number of ciphers placed in front of significant units, or tens or
+hundreds of units, adds in the smallest degree to the numerical value of
+those units. The figure one becomes of no more importance however many
+noughts are marshalled in front of it&mdash;though, indeed, in the
+mathematics of human nature this is not so. Is not a man or woman
+considered great in proportion to the number of ciphers that walk in
+front of him, from a humble brace of domestics to guards of honour and
+imperial armies?</p>
+
+<p>A parallel profound truth of mathematics is that a nought, however many
+times it be multiplied, remains nought; but again we find the reverse
+obtain in the mathematics of human nature. One might have supposed<!--Page 146--> that
+the result of one nobody multiplied even fifty million times would still
+be nobody. However, such is far from being the case. Fifty million
+nobodies make&mdash;a nation. Of course, there is no need for so many. I am
+reckoning as a British subject, and speak of fifty million merely as an
+illustration of the general fact that it is the multiplication of
+nobodies that makes a nation. 'Increase and multiply' was, it will be
+remembered, the recipe for the Jewish nation.</p>
+
+<p>Nobodies of the same colour, tongue, and prejudices have but to
+congregate together in a crowd sufficiently big for other similar crowds
+to recognise them, and then they are given a name of their own, and
+become recognised as a nation&mdash;one of the 'Great Powers.'</p>
+
+<p>Beyond those differences in colour, tongue, and prejudices there is
+really no difference between the component units&mdash;or rather ciphers&mdash;of
+all these several national crowds. You have seen a procession of various
+trades-unions filing toward Hyde Park, each section with its particular
+banner with a strange device: 'The United Guild of Paperhangers,'<!--Page 147--> 'The
+Ancient Order of Plumbers,' and so on. And you may have marvelled to
+notice how alike the members of the various carefully differentiated
+companies were. So to say, they each and all might have been plumbers;
+and you couldn't help feeling that it wouldn't have mattered much if
+some of the paper-hangers had by mistake got walking amongst the
+plumbers, or <em>vice versa</em>.</p>
+
+<p>So the great trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word
+'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany'&mdash;this with a
+particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in
+front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously
+waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and
+yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called 'England.' Other
+smaller bodies of nobodies, that is, smaller nations, file past with
+humbler tread&mdash;though there is really no need for their doing so. For,
+as we have said, they are in every particular like to those haughtier
+nations who take precedence of them. In fact, one or two of them, such
+as Norway<!--Page 148--> and Denmark&mdash;were a truer system of human mathematics to
+obtain&mdash;are really of more importance than the so-called greater
+nations, in that among their nobodies they include a larger percentage
+of intellectual somebodies.</p>
+
+<p>Remembering that percentage of wise men, the formula of a nation were
+perhaps more truly stated in our first mathematical image. The wise men
+in a nation are as the units with the noughts in front of them. And when
+I say wise men I do not, indeed, mean merely the literary men or the
+artists, but all those somebodies with some real force of character,
+people with brains and hearts, fighters and lovers, saints and thinkers,
+and the patient, industrious workers. Such, if you consider, are really
+no integral part of the nation among which they are cast. They have no
+part in what are grandiloquently called national interests&mdash;war,
+politics, and horse-racing to wit. A change of Government leaves them as
+unmoved as an election for the board of guardians. They would as soon
+think of entering Parliament or the County Council, as of yearning to
+manage the gasworks, or to go about<!--Page 149--> with one of those carts bearing the
+legend 'Aldermen and Burgesses of the City of London' conspicuously upon
+its front. Their main concern in political changes is the rise and fall
+of the income-tax, and, be the Cabinet Tory or Liberal, their rate
+papers come in for the same amount. It is likely that national changes
+would affect them but little more. What more would a foreign invasion
+mean than that we should pay our taxes to French, Russian, or German
+officials, instead of to English ones? French and Italians do our
+cooking, Germans manage our music, Jews control our money markets;
+surely it would make little difference to us for France, Russia, or
+Germany to undertake our government. The worst of being conquered by
+Russia would be the necessity of learning Russian; whereas a little
+rubbing up of our French would make us comfortable with France. Besides,
+to be conquered by France would save us crossing the Channel to Paris,
+and then we might hope for cafés in Regent Street, and an emancipated
+literature. As a matter of fact, so-called national interests are merely
+certain<!--Page 150--> private interests on a large scale, the private interests of
+financiers, ambitious politicians, soldiers, and great merchants.
+Broadly speaking, there are no rival nations&mdash;there are rival markets;
+and it is its Board of Trade and its Stock Exchange rather than its
+Houses of Parliament that virtually govern a country. Thus one seaport
+goes down and another comes up, industries forsake one country to bless
+another, the military and naval strengths of nations fluctuate this way
+and that; and to those whom these changes affect they are undoubtedly
+important matters&mdash;the great capitalist, the soldier, and the
+politician; but to the quiet man at home with his wife, his children,
+his books, and his flowers, to the artist busied with brave translunary
+matters, to the saint with his eyes filled with 'the white radiance of
+eternity,' to the shepherd on the hillside, the milkmaid in love, or the
+angler at his sport&mdash;what are these pompous commotions, these busy,
+bustling mimicries of reality? England will be just as good to live in
+though men some day call her France. Let the big busybodies divide her
+amongst them<!--Page 151--> as they like, so that they leave one alone with one's fair
+share of the sky and the grass, and an occasional, not too vociferous,
+nightingale.</p>
+
+<p>The reader will perhaps forgive the hackneyed references to Sir Thomas
+Browne peacefully writing his <em>Religio Medici</em> amid all the commotions
+of the Civil War, and to Gautier calmly correcting the proofs of his new
+poems during the siege of Paris. The milkman goes his rounds amid the
+crash of empires. It is not his business to fight. His business is to
+distribute his milk&mdash;as much after half-past seven as may be
+inconvenient. Similarly, the business of the thinker is with his
+thought, the poet with his poetry. It is the business of politicians to
+make national quarrels, and the business of the soldier to fight them.
+But as for the poet&mdash;let him correct his proofs, or beware the printer.</p>
+
+<p>The idea, then, of a nation is a grandiloquent fallacy in the interests
+of commerce and ambition, political and military. All the great and
+good, clever and charming people belong to one secret nation, for which
+there is no name unless it be the Chosen<!--Page 152--> People. These are the lost
+tribes of love, art, and religion, lost and swamped amid alien peoples,
+but ever dreaming of a time when they shall meet once more in Jerusalem.</p>
+
+<p>Yet though they are thus aliens, taking and wishing no part in the
+organisation of the 'nations' among which they dwell, this does not
+prevent those nations taking part and credit in them. And whenever a
+brave soldier wins a battle, or an intrepid traveller discovers a new
+land, his particular nation flatters itself, as though it&mdash;the million
+nobodies&mdash;had done it. With a profound indifference to, indeed an active
+dislike of, art and poetry, there is nothing on which a nation prides
+itself so much as upon its artists and poets, whom, invariably, it
+starves, neglects, and even insults, as long as it is not too silly to
+do so.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the average Englishman talks of Shakespeare&mdash;as though he himself
+had written the plays; of India&mdash;as though he himself had conquered it.
+And thus grow up such fictions as 'national greatness' and 'public
+opinion.'</p>
+
+<p>For what is 'national greatness' but the<!--Page 153--> glory reflected from the
+memories of a few great individuals? and what is 'public opinion' but
+the blustering echoes of the opinion of a few clever young men on the
+morning papers?</p>
+
+<p>For how can people in themselves little become great by merely
+congregating into a crowd, however large? And surely fools do not become
+wise, or worth listening to, merely by the fact of their banding
+together.</p>
+
+<p>A 'public opinion' on any matter except football, prize-fighting, and
+perhaps cricket, is merely ridiculous&mdash;by whatever brutal physical
+powers it may be enforced&mdash;ridiculous as a town council's opinion upon
+art; and a nation is merely a big fool with an army.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 154-->
+<h3><a name="essay17">THE GREATNESS OF MAN</a></h3>
+
+<p>Ignorant, as I inevitably am, dear reader, of your intellectual and
+spiritual upbringing, I can hardly guess whether the title of my article
+will impress you as a platitude or as a paradox. Goodness knows, some
+men and women think quite enough of themselves as it is, and, from a
+certain momentary point of view, there may seem little occasion indeed
+to remind man of his importance.</p>
+
+<p>I refer to your intellectual and spiritual upbringing, because I venture
+to wonder if it was in the least like my own. I was brought up, I
+rejoice to say, in the bosom of an orthodox Puritan family. I was led
+and driven to believe that man was everybody, and that God was
+somebody&mdash;and that not merely the Sabbath, but the whole universe, was
+made for man: that the stars were his bedtime candles, and that the sun<!--Page 155-->
+arose to ensure his catching the 8.37 of a morning.</p>
+
+<p>On this belief I acted for many years. Every young man believes that
+there is no god but God, and that he is born to be His prophet&mdash;though
+perhaps that belief is not so common nowadays. I am speaking of many
+years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Science, however, has long since changed all that. Those terrible Muses,
+geology, astronomy, and particularly biology, have reduced man to a
+humility which, if in some degree salutary, becomes in its excess highly
+dangerous. Why should one maggot in this great cheese of the world take
+itself more seriously than others? Why dream mightily and do bravely if
+we are but a little higher than the beasts that perish? Nature cares
+nothing about us, and her giant forces laugh at our fancies. The world
+has no such meaning as we thought. Poets and saints, deluded by
+unhealthy imaginations, have misled us, and it is quite likely that the
+wild waves are really saying nothing more important than 'Beecham's
+Pills.'</p>
+
+<p>'Give us a definition of life,' I asked a<!--Page 156--> certain famous scientist and
+philosopher whom I am privileged to call my friend.</p>
+
+<p>'Nothing easier!' he gaily replied. 'Life is a product of solar energy,
+falling upon the carbon compounds, on the outer crust of a particular
+planet, in a particular corner of the solar system.'</p>
+
+<p>'And that,' I said, 'really satisfies you as a definition of life&mdash;of
+all the wistful wonder of the world!' And as I spoke I thought of Moses
+with mystically shining face upon the Mount of the Law, of Ezekiel rapt
+in his divine fancies, of Socrates drinking his cup of hemlock, of
+Christ's agony in the garden; the golden faces of the great of the world
+passed as in a dream before me,&mdash;soldiers, saints, poets, and lovers. I
+thought of Horatius on the bridge, of the holy and gentle soul of St.
+Francis, of Chatterton in his splendid despair, and in fancy I went with
+the awestruck citizens of Verona to reverently gaze at the bodies of two
+young lovers who had counted the world well lost if they might only
+leave it together.</p>
+
+<p>The carbon compounds!</p>
+
+<p>I took down <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>, listened<!--Page 157--> to its passionate spheral
+music, and the carbon compounds have never troubled me again.</p>
+
+<p>Love laughs at the carbon compounds, and a great book, a noble act, a
+beautiful face, make nonsense of such cheap formula for the mystery of
+human life.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this parable of the carbon compounds is a fair sample of all that
+science can tell us when we come to ultimates. We go away from its
+oracles with a mouthful of sounding words, which may seem very
+impressive till we examine their emptiness. What, for example, is all
+this rigmarole about solar energy and the carbon compounds but a more
+pompous way of putting the old scriptural statement that man was made of
+the dust of the ground? To say that God took a handful of dust and
+breathed upon it and it became man, is no harder to realise than that
+solar rays falling upon that dust should produce humanity and all the
+various phantasmagoria of life. If anything, it is more explanatory. It
+leaves us with an inspiring mystery for explanation.</p>
+
+<p>In saying this, I do not forget our debt to<!--Page 158--> science. It has done much
+in clearing our minds of cant, in popularising more systematic thinking,
+and in instituting sounder methods of observation. In some directions it
+has deepened our sense of wonder. It has broadened our conception of the
+universe, though I fear it has been at the expense of narrowing our
+conception of man. With Hamlet it contemptuously says, 'What is this
+quintessence of dust!' It is so impressed by the mileage and tonnage of
+the universe, so abased before the stupendous measurements of the
+cosmos, the appalling infinity and eternity of its space and time, that
+it forgets the marvel of the mind that can grasp all these conceptions,
+forgets, too, that, big and bullying as the forces of nature may be, man
+has been able in a large measure to control, indeed to domesticate,
+them. Surely the original fact of lightning is little more marvellous
+than the power of man to turn it into his errand-boy or his horse, to
+light his rooms with it, and imprison it in pennyworths, like the genius
+in the bottle, in the underground railway. Mere size seems unimpressive
+when we contem<!--Page 159-->plate such an extreme of littleness as say the ant, that
+pin-point of a personality, that mere speck of being, yet including
+within its infinitesimal proportions a clever, busy brain, a soldier, a
+politician, and a merchant. That such and so many faculties should have
+room to operate within that tiny body&mdash;there is a marvel before which,
+it seems to me, the billions of miles that keep us from falling into the
+jaws of the sun, and the tonnage of Jupiter, are comparatively
+insignificant and conceivable.</p>
+
+<p>No, we must not allow ourselves to be frightened by the mere size and
+weight of the universe, or be depressed because our immediate genealogy
+is not considered aristocratic. Perhaps, after all, we are sons of God,
+and as Mr. Meredith finely puts it, our life here may still be</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'... a little holding</p>
+  <p>To do a mighty service.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>'Things of a day!' exclaims Pindar. 'What is a man? What is a man not?'</p>
+
+<p>It is good for our Nebuchadnezzars, the kings of the world, and
+conceited, successful people generally, to measure themselves<!--Page 160--> against
+the great powers of the universe, to humble their pride by contemplation
+of the fixed stars; but a too humble attitude toward the Infinite, a too
+constant pondering upon eternity, is not good for us, unless, so to say,
+we can live with them as friends, with the inspiring feeling that,
+little as we may seem, there is that in us which is no less infinite, no
+less cosmic, and that our passions and dreams have, as Mr. William
+Watson puts it, 'a relish of eternity.'</p>
+
+<p>Readers of Amiel's 'Journal' will know what a sterilising, petrifying
+influence his trance-like contemplation of the Infinite had upon his
+life. Amiel was simply hypnotised by the universe, as a man may
+hypnotise himself by gazing fixedly at a star.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Pater, you will remember, has a remarkable study of a similar
+temperament in his <em>Imaginary Portraits</em>. Sebastian van Storck, like
+Amiel, had become hypnotised by the Infinite. It paralysed in him all
+impulse or power 'to be or do any limited thing.'</p>
+
+<p>'For Sebastian, at least,' we read, 'the world and the individual alike
+had been<!--Page 161--> divested of all effective purpose. The most vivid of finite
+objects, the dramatic episodes of Dutch history, the brilliant
+personalities which had found their parts to play in them, that golden
+art, surrounding one with an ideal world, beyond which the real world
+was discernible indeed, but etherealised by the medium through which it
+came to one; all this, for most men so powerful a link to existence,
+only set him on the thought of escape&mdash;into a formless and nameless
+infinite world, evenly grey.... Actually proud, at times, of his
+curious, well-reasoned nihilism, he could but regard what is called the
+business of life as no better than a trifling and wearisome delay.'</p>
+
+<p>This mood, once confined to a few mystics is likely to become a common
+one, is already, one imagines, far from infrequent&mdash;so the increase of
+suicide would lead us to suppose. Robbed of his hope of a glorious
+immortality, stripped of his spiritual significance, bullied and
+belittled by science on every hand, man not unnaturally begins to feel
+that it is no use taking his life seriously, that, in fact, it betrays a
+lack of humour to do so. While<!--Page 162--> he was a supernatural being, a son of
+God, it was with him a case of <em>noblesse oblige</em>; and while he is happy
+and comfortable he doesn't mind giving up the riddle of the world. It is
+only the unhappy that ever really think. But what is he to do when agony
+and despair come upon him, when all that made his life worth living is
+taken from him? How is he to sustain himself? where shall he look for
+his strength or his hope? He looks up at the sky full of stars, but he
+is told that God is not there, that the city of God is long since a
+ruin, and that owls hoot to each other across its moss-grown fanes and
+battlements; he looks down on the earth, full of graves, a vast
+necropolis of once radiant dreams, with the living for its
+phantoms,&mdash;and there is no comfort anywhere. Happy is he if some simple
+human duty be at hand, which he may go on doing blindly and
+dumbly&mdash;till, perhaps, the light come again. It is difficult to offer
+comfort to such a one. Comfort is cheap, and we know nothing. When life
+holds nothing for our love and delight, it is difficult to explain why
+we should go on living it&mdash;except on<!--Page 163--> the assumption that it matters,
+that it is, in some mystical way, supremely important, how we live it,
+and what we make of those joys and sorrows which, say some, are but
+meant as mystical trials and tests.</p>
+
+<p>Sebastian van Storck refused 'to be or do any limited thing,' but the
+answer to his mysticism is to be found in a finer mysticism, that which
+says that there is no limited act or thing, but that the significance,
+as well as the pathos, of eternity is in our smallest joys and sorrows,
+as in our most everyday transactions, and the greatness of God incarnate
+in His humblest child.</p>
+
+<p>This, the old doctrine of the microcosm, seems in certain moments,
+moments one would wish to say, of divination, strangely plain and
+clear&mdash;when, in Blake's words, it seems so easy to</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'... see a world in a grain of sand,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">And a heaven in a wild flower;</p>
+  <p>Hold infinity in the palm of your hand</p>
+    <p class="indent1">And Eternity in an hour.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Perhaps in the street, an effect of light, a passing face, yes, even the
+plaintive grind of a street organ, some such everyday circum<!--Page 164-->stance,
+affects you suddenly in quite a strange way. It has become
+universalised. It is no longer a detail of the Strand, but a cryptic
+symbol of human life. It has been transfigured into a thing of infinite
+pathos and infinite beauty, and, sad or glad, brings to you an
+inexplicable sense of peace, an unshakable conviction that man is a
+spirit, that his life is indeed of supreme and lovely significance, and
+that his destiny is secure and blessed.</p>
+
+<p>Matthew Arnold, ever sensitive to such spiritual states, has described
+these trance-like visitations in 'The Buried Life'&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>'Only, but this is rare&mdash;</p>
+  <p>When a beloved hand is laid in ours,</p>
+  <p>When, jaded with the rush and glare</p>
+  <p>Of the interminable hours,</p>
+  <p>Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,</p>
+  <p>When our world-deafen'd ear</p>
+  <p>Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd&mdash;</p>
+  <p>A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,</p>
+  <p>And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again:</p>
+  <p>The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,</p>
+  <p>And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.</p>
+  <p>A man becomes aware of his life's flow,</p>
+  <p>And hears its winding murmur; and he sees</p>
+  <p>The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.</p>
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>'And there arrives a lull in the hot race</p>
+  <p>Wherein he doth for ever chase</p><!--Page 165-->
+  <p>That flying and elusive shadow, rest.</p>
+  <p>An air of coolness plays upon his face,</p>
+  <p>And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.</p>
+  <p>And then he thinks he knows</p>
+  <p>The hills where his life rose,</p>
+  <p>And the sea where it goes.'</p>
+ </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>'To be or do any limited thing'! What indeed, we ask in such hours, is a
+limited thing, when all the humble interests of our daily life are
+palpably big with eternity? Is the first kiss of a great love a limited
+thing? though there is, unhappily, no denying that it comes to an end!
+When a young husband and wife smile across to each other above the sleep
+of their little child&mdash;is that a limited thing? When the siren voices of
+the world blend together on the lips of a young poet, and with rapt eyes
+and hot heart he makes a song as of the morning stars&mdash;is that a limited
+thing? Are love, and genius, and duty done in the face of death&mdash;are
+these limited things? I think not&mdash;and man, indeed, knows better.</p>
+
+<p>Greatness is not relative. It is absolute. It is not for man to depress
+himself by measuring himself against the eternities and the immensities
+external to him. What he<!--Page 166--> has to do is to look inward upon himself, to
+fathom the eternities and the immensities in his own heart and brain.</p>
+
+<p>And the more man sees himself forsaken by the universe, the more
+opportunity to vindicate his own greatness. Is there no kind heart
+beating through the scheme of things?&mdash;man's heart shall still be kind.
+Will the eternal silence make mock of his dreams and his idealisms,
+laugh coldly at 'the splendid purpose in his eyes'? Well, so be it. His
+dreams and idealisms are none the less noble things, and if the gods do
+thus make mock of mortal joy and pain&mdash;let us be grateful that we were
+born mere men.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, he has one great answer to the universe&mdash;the answer of
+courage. He is still Prometheus, and there is no limit to what he can
+bear. Let the vultures of pain rend his heart as they will, he can still
+hiss 'coward' in the face of the Eternal. Nay, he can even laugh at his
+sufferings&mdash;thanks to the spirit of humour, that most blessed of
+ministering angels, without which surely the heart of humanity had long
+since broken, by<!--Page 167--> which man is able to look with a comical eye upon
+terrors, as it were taking themselves so seriously, coming with such
+Olympian thunders and lightnings to break the spirit of a mere six foot
+of earth!</p>
+
+<p>But while his courage and his humour are defences of which he cannot be
+disarmed, whatever be the intention of the Eternal, it is by no means
+certain that nature does not mean kindly by man. Perhaps the pain of the
+world is but the rough horseplay of great powers that mean but jest&mdash;and
+kill us in it: as though one played at 'tick' with an elephant!</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, after all,&mdash;who knows?&mdash;God is love, and His great purpose
+kind.</p>
+
+<p>Surely, when you think of it, the existence in man of the senses of love
+and pity implies the probability of their existence elsewhere in the
+universe too.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'Into that breast which brings the rose</p>
+  <p>Shall I with shuddering fall.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>So runs the profoundest thought in modern poetry&mdash;and need I say it is
+Mr. Meredith's?</p>
+
+<p>As the fragrance and colour of the rose must in some occult way be
+properties of<!--Page 168--> the rude earth from which they are drawn by the sun, may
+not human love also be a kindly property of matter&mdash;that mysterious
+life-stuff in which is packed such marvellous potentialities? Evidently
+love must be somewhere in the universe&mdash;else it had not got into the
+heart of man; and perhaps pity slides down like an angel in the rays of
+the solar energy, while there is the potential beating of a human heart
+even in the hard crust of the carbon compounds.</p>
+
+<p>I confess that this seems to me no mere fancy, but a really comforting
+speculation. Pain, we say, is inherent in the scheme of the universe;
+but is not love seen to be no less inherent, too?</p>
+
+<p>There must be some soul of beauty to animate the lovely face of the
+world, some soul of goodness to account for its saints. If the gods are
+cruel, it is strange that man should be so kind, and that some pathetic
+spirit of tenderness should seem to stir even in the bosoms of beasts
+and birds.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, we cannot too often insist that, whatever uncertainties there
+be, man has one certainty&mdash;himself. Science has<!--Page 169--> really adduced nothing
+essential against his significance. That he is not as big as an Alp, as
+heavy as a star, or as long-lived as an eagle, is nothing against his
+proper importance. Even a nobleman is of more significance in the world
+than his acres, and giants are not proverbial for their intellectual or
+spiritual qualities. The ant is of more importance than the ass, and the
+great eye of a beautiful woman is more significant than the whole clayey
+bulk of Mars.</p>
+
+<p>After all the scientific mockery of the old religious ideal of the
+importance of man, one begins to wonder if his Ptolemaic fancy that he
+was the centre of the universe, and that it was all made for him, is not
+nearer the If truth than the pitiless theories which hardly allow him
+equality with the flea that perishes.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose if, after all, the stars were really meant as his bedtime
+candles, and the sun's purpose in rising is really that he may catch the
+8.37!</p>
+
+<p>For, as Sir Thomas Browne says in his solemn English, 'there is surely a
+piece of Divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and
+owes no homage unto the sun.'</p><!--Page 170-->
+
+<p>The long winter of materialistic science seems to be breaking up, and
+the old ideals are seen trooping back with something more than their old
+beauty, in the new spiritual spring that seems to be moving in the
+hearts of men.</p>
+
+<p>After all its talk, science has done little more than correct the
+misprints of religion. Essentially, the old spiritualistic and poetic
+theories of life are seen, not merely weakly to satisfy the cravings of
+man's nature, but to be mostly in harmony with certain strange and
+moving facts in his constitution, which the materialists
+unscientifically ignore.</p>
+
+<p>It was important, and has been helpful, to insist that man is an animal,
+but it is still more important to insist that he is a spirit as well. He
+is, so to say, an animal by accident, a spirit by birthright: and,
+however homely his duties may occasionally seem, his life is bathed in
+the light of a sacred transfiguring significance, its smallest acts
+flash with divine meanings, its highest moments are rich with 'the
+pathos of eternity,' and its humblest duties mighty with the
+responsibilities of a god.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 171-->
+<h3><a name="essay18">DEATH AND TWO FRIENDS</a></h3>
+
+<h4><em>A DIALOGUE</em><br>
+(<em>To the Memory of J.S. and T.C.L.</em>)</h4>
+
+<h4>PERSONS: SCRIPTOR AND LECTOR.</h4>
+
+<p>[This dialogue was written originally as a rejoinder to certain
+criticisms on a book of mine entitled, <em>The Religion of a Literary
+Man</em>&mdash;<em>Religio Scriptoris</em>&mdash;hence the names given to the two 'persons.'
+It was written in March 1894, before an event in the writer's life to
+which, erroneously, some have supposed it to refer.]</p>
+
+
+<p>LECTOR. But do you really mean, Scriptor, that you have no desire for
+the life after death?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. I never said quite that, Lector, though perhaps I might almost
+have gone so far. What I did say was that we have been accustomed to
+exaggerate its importance to us here and now, that it really matters
+less to us than we imagine.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. I see. But you must speak for yourself, Scriptor. I am sure that
+it matters<!--Page 172--> much to many, to most of us. It does, I know, to me.</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Less than you think, my dear Lector. Besides, you are really
+too young to know. It is true that, as years go, you are ten years my
+senior, but what of that? You have that vigorous health which is the
+secret of perpetual youth. You have not yet realised decay, not to speak
+of death. The immortality of the soul is a question wide of you, who
+have as yet practically no doubt of the immortality of the body. But
+I&mdash;well, it would be melodramatic to say that I face death every day.
+The metaphor applies but to desperate callings and romantic complaints.
+To some Death comes like a footpad, suddenly, and presents his
+pistol&mdash;and the smoke that curls upward from his empty barrel is your
+soul.</p>
+
+<p>To another he comes featureless, a stealthily accumulating London fog,
+that slowly, slowly chokes the life out of you, without allowing you the
+consolation of a single picturesque moment, a single grand attitude. For
+you, probably, Death will only come when you die. I have to live with
+him as well. I<!--Page 173--> shall smoulder for years, you will be carried to heaven,
+like Enoch, in a beautiful lightning.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+      <p class="indent3">'A simple child</p>
+  <p>That lightly draws its breath,</p>
+  <p>And feels its life in every limb,</p>
+  <p>What can it know of Death?'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>That's you, my dear Lector, for all your forty years.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. All the more reason, Scriptor, that you should desire a
+hereafter. You sometimes talk of the work you would do if you were a
+robust Philistine such as I. Would it not be worth while to live
+again, if only to make sure of that <em>magnum opus</em>&mdash;just to realise
+those dreams that you say are daily escaping you?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Ah! so speaks the energetic man, eager to take the world on
+his shoulders. I know the images of death that please you,
+Lector&mdash;such as that great one of Arnold's, about 'the sounding
+labour-house vast of being.'</p>
+
+<p>But, Lector, you who love work so well&mdash;have you never heard tell of
+a thing called Rest? Have you never known what it is to be tired, my
+Lector?&mdash;not tired at the end<!--Page 174--> of a busy day, but tired in the morning,
+tired in the Memnonian sunlight, when larks and barrel-organs start on
+their blithe insistent rounds. No, the man who is tired of a morning
+sings not music-hall songs in his bedroom as he dashes about in his
+morning bath. But will you never want to go to bed, Lector? Will you
+be always like the children who hate to be sent to bed, and think that
+when they are grown up they will never go to bed at all? Yet in a few
+years' time how glad they are of the stray chance of bed at ten. May
+it not be so with sleep's twin-brother? In our young vigour, driven by
+a hundred buoyant activities, enticed by dream on dream, time seems so
+short for all we think we have to do; but surely when the blood begins
+to thin, and the heart to wax less extravagantly buoyant, when comfort
+croons a kettle-song whose simple spell no sirens of ambition or
+romance can overcome&mdash;don't you think that then 'bedtime' will come to
+seem the best hour of the day, and 'Death as welcome as a friend would
+fall'?</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But you are no fair judge, Scrip<!--Page 175-->tor. You say my health, my
+youth, as you waggishly call it, puts me out of court. Yet surely your
+ill-health and low spirits just as surely vitiate your judgment?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Admitted, so far as my views are the outcome of my
+particular condition. But you forget that the condition I have been
+supposing is not merely particular, but, on the contrary, the most
+general among men. Was it not old age?&mdash;which, like youth, is
+independent of years. You may be young beyond your years, I may be old
+in advance of them; but old age does come some time, and with it the
+desire of rest.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But does not old age spend most of its thought in dwelling
+fondly on its lost youth, hanging like a remote sunrise in its
+imagination? Is it not its one yearning desire just to live certain
+hours of its youth over again?&mdash;and would the old man not give all he
+possesses for the certainty of being born young again into eternity?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. He would give everything&mdash;but the certainty of rest. After
+seventy years of ardent life one needs a long sleep to refresh us
+in. Besides, age may not be so<!--Page 176--> sure of the advantages of youth. All is
+not youth that laughs and glitters. Youth has its hopes, which are
+uncertain; but age has its memories, which are sure; youth has its
+passions, but age has its comforts.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. Your answers come gay and pat, Scriptor, but your voice
+betrays you. In spite of you, it saddens all your words. Tell me, have
+you ever known what it is actually to lose any one who is dear to you?
+Have you looked on death face to face?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Yes, Lector, I have&mdash;but once. It is now about five years
+ago, but the impression of it haunts me to this hour. Perhaps the
+memory is all the keener because it was my one experience. In a world
+where custom stales all things, save Cleopatra, it is all the better
+perhaps not to see even too much of Death, lest we grow familiar with
+him. For instance, doctors and soldiers, who look on him daily, seem
+to lose the sense of his terror&mdash;nay, worse, of his tragedy. Maybe it
+is something in his favour, and Death, like others, may only need to
+be known to be loved.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But tell me, Scriptor, of this sad experience, which even now
+it moves you to<!--Page 177--> name; or is the memory too sad to recall?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Sad enough, Lector, but beautiful for all that, beautiful as
+winter. It was winter when she of whom I am thinking died&mdash;a winter
+that seemed to make death itself whiter and colder on her marble
+forehead. It is but one sad little story of all the heaped-up sorrow
+of the world; but in it, as in a shell, I seem to hear the murmur of
+all the tides of tears that have surged about the lot of man from the
+beginning.</p>
+
+<p>There were two dear friends of mine whom I used to call the happiest
+lovers in the world. They had loved truly from girlhood and boyhood,
+and after some struggle&mdash;for they were not born into that class which
+is denied the luxury of struggle&mdash;at length saw a little home bright
+in front of them. And then Jenny, who had been ever bright and strong,
+suddenly and unaccountably fell ill. Like the stroke of a sword, like
+the stride of a giant, Death, to whom they had never given a thought,
+was upon them. It was consumption, and love could only watch and
+pray. Suddenly my<!--Page 178--> friend sent for me, and I saw with my own eyes what
+at a distance it had seemed impossible to believe. As I entered the
+house, with the fresh air still upon me, I spoke confidently, with
+babbling ignorant tongue. 'Wait till you see her face!' was all my
+poor stricken friend could say.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! her face! How can I describe it?  It was much sweeter afterwards,
+but now it was so dark and witchlike, so uncanny, almost wicked, so
+thin and full of inky shadows. She sat up in her bed, a wizened little
+goblin, and laughed a queer, dry, knowing laugh to herself, a laugh
+like the scraping of reeds in a solitary place. A strange black
+weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows, like the 'unwilling
+sleep' of a strong narcotic. She would begin a sentence and let it
+wither away unfinished, and point sadly and almost humorously to her
+straight black hair, clammy as the feathers of a dead bird lying in
+the rain. Her hearing was strangely keen. And yet she did not know,
+was not to know. How was one to talk to her&mdash;talk of being well again,
+and books and country walks, when she had so<!--Page 179--> plainly done with all
+these things? How bear up when she, with a half-sad, half-amused
+smile, showed her thin wrists?&mdash;how say that they would soon be strong
+and round again?  Ugh! she was already beginning to be different from
+us, already putting off our body-sweet mortality, and putting on the
+fearful garments of death, changing before our eyes from ruddy
+familiar humanity into a being of another element, an element we dread
+as the fish dreads the air. Soon we should not be able to talk to
+her. Soon she would have unlearnt all the sweet grammar of earth. She
+was no longer Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mysteries at which the
+flesh crept. She was going to die.</p>
+
+<p>Have you never looked ahead towards some trial, some physical trial,
+maybe an operation?&mdash;for perhaps the pains of the body are the
+keenest, after all&mdash;those of the spirit are at least in some part
+metaphor. You look forward with dread, yet it is at last over. It is
+behind you. And have you never thought that so it will be with death
+some day? Poor little Jenny was to face the great operation.</p><!--Page 180-->
+
+<p>Next time I saw her she was dead. In our hateful English fashion, they
+had shut her up in a dark room, and we had to take candles to see
+her. I shall never forget the moment when my eyes first rested on that
+awful snow-white sheet, so faintly indented by the fragile form
+beneath, lines very fragile, but oh! so hard and cold, like the
+indentations upon frozen snow; never forget my strange unaccountable
+terror when he on one side and I on the other turned down the icy
+sheet from her face. But terror changed to awe and reverence, as her
+face came upon us with its sweet sphinx-like smile. Lying there, with
+a little gold chain round her neck and a chrysanthemum in the bosom of
+her night-gown, there was a curious regality about her, a look as
+though she wore a crown our eyes were unable to see. And while I gazed
+upon her, the sobs of my friend came across the bed, and as he called
+to her I seemed to hear the eternal Orpheus calling for his lost
+Eurydice. Poor lad!&mdash;poor maid!  Here, naked and terrible, was all the
+tragedy of the world compressed into an hour, the Medusa-face of life
+that turns the bravest<!--Page 181--> to stone. Surely, I felt, God owed more than He
+could ever repay to these two lovers, whom it had been so easy to
+leave to their simple joys. And from that night to this I can never
+look upon my white bed without seeing afar off the moment when it,
+too, will bear the little figure of her I love best in the world,
+bound for her voyage to the Minotaur Death; just as I never put off my
+clothes at night, and stretch my limbs down among the cool sheets,
+without thinking of the night when I shall put off my clothes for the
+last time and close my eyes for ever.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But, my friend, this is to feel too much; it is morbid.</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Morbid! How can one really <em>feel</em> and not be morbid? If one
+be morbid, one can still be brave.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But surely, true-lover as you are, it would be a joy to you to
+think that this terrible parting of death will not be final. We cannot
+love so well without hoping that we may meet our loved ones somewhere
+after death.</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Hopes! wishes! desires! What of them? We hope, we <em>desire</em>
+all things.<!--Page 182--> Who has not cried for the moon in his time?  But what is
+the use of talking of what we desire? Does life give us all we wish,
+however passionately we wish it, and is Death any more likely to
+listen to the cry of our desires? Of course we <em>wish it</em>, wish it with
+a pathetic urgency which is too poignant to bear, and which the wise
+man bravely stifles. It would all be different if we <em>knew</em>.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But does not science even, of late, hold out the promise of
+its probability?&mdash;and the greatest poets and thinkers have always been
+convinced of its truth.</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. The promise of a probability!  O my Lector, what a poor
+substitute is that for a certainty! And as for the great men you speak
+of, what does their 'instinctive' assurance amount to but a strong
+sense of their own existence at the moment of writing or speaking?
+Does one of them anywhere assert immortality as a <em>fact</em>&mdash;a fact of
+which he has his own personal proof and knowledge&mdash;a scientific, not
+an imaginative, theological fact? Arguments on the subject are
+naught. It is waste of time to read them; unsupported by fact,<!--Page 183--> they
+are one and all cowardly dreams, a horrible hypocritical clutching at
+that which their writers have not the courage to forgo.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. Yet may not a dream be of service to reality, my friend? Is it
+not certain that people are all the better and all the happier for
+this dream, as you call it?&mdash;for what seems to me this sustaining
+faith?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Happier? Some people, perhaps, in a lazy, unworthy
+fashion. But 'better'? Well, so long as we believed in 'eternal
+punishment' no doubt people were sometimes terrified into 'goodness'
+by the picture of that dread vista of torment, as no doubt they were
+bribed into it by the companion picture of a green unbounded Paradise;
+but, O my friend, what an unworthy kind of goodness, the mere mask of
+virtue! And now that the Inferno has practically disappeared from our
+theology, the belief in eternal life simply means unlimited cakes and
+ale, for good and evil alike, for all eternity. How such a belief can
+be moralising I fail to understand. To my mind, indeed, far from being
+moralising, this belief in immortality is responsible<!--Page 184--> for no
+inconsiderable portion of the wrong and misery of the world. It is the
+baneful narcotic which has soothed the selfish and the slothful from
+the beginning. It is that unlimited credit which makes the bankrupt.
+It simply gives us all eternity to procrastinate in. Instead of
+manfully eating our peck of dirt here and now, we leave it and all
+such disagreeables to the hereafter.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'He said, "I believe in Eternal Life,"</p>
+  <p>As he threw his life away&mdash;</p>
+      <p class="indent3">What need to hoard?</p>
+      <p class="indent3">He could well afford</p>
+  <p>To squander his mortal day.</p>
+  <p>With Eternity his, what need to care?&mdash;</p>
+  <p>A sort of immortal millionaire.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>LECTOR. I am glad to be reminded, Scriptor, that you are a poet, for the
+line of your argument had almost made me forget it. One expects other
+views from a poet.</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. When, my dear Lector, shall we get rid of the silly idea that
+the poet should give us only the ornamental view of life, and rock us to
+sleep, like babies, with pretty lullabies? Is it not possible to make
+<em>facts</em> sing as well as fancies? With all this beautiful world to sing
+of&mdash;for beautiful it<!--Page 185--> is, however it be marred; with this wonderful
+life&mdash;and wonderful and sweet it is though it is shot through with such
+bitter pain; with such <em>certainties</em> for his theme, we yet beg him to
+sing to us of shadows!</p>
+
+<p>And you talk of 'faith.' 'Faith' truly is what we want, but it is faith
+in the life here, not in the life hereafter. Faith in the life here! Let
+our poets sing us that. And such as would deny it&mdash;I would hang them as
+enemies of society.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But, at all events, to keep to our point&mdash;you at least <em>hope</em>
+for immortality. If Edison, say, were suddenly to discover it for us as
+a scientific certainty, you would welcome the news?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Well, yes and no! Have you seen the 'penny' phonographs in the
+Strand? You should go and have a pennyworth of the mysteries of time and
+space! How long will Edison's latest magic toy survive this
+popularisation, I wonder? For a little moment it awakens the sense of
+wonder in the idly curious, who set the demon tube to their ears; but if
+they make any remarks at all, it is of the cleverness of Mr. Edison,<!--Page 186-->
+the probable profits of the invention&mdash;and not a word of the wonder of
+the world! So it would be with the undiscovered country. I was blamed
+the other day as being cheaply smart because I said that if 'one
+traveller returned,' his resurrection would soon be as commonplace as
+the telephone, and that enterprising firms would be interviewing him as
+to the prospects of opening branch establishments in Hades. Yet it is a
+perfectly serious, and, I think, true remark; for who that knows the
+modern man, with his small knowingness, and his utter incapacity for
+reverence, would doubt that were Mr. Edison actually to be the Columbus
+of the Unseen, it would soon be as overrun with gaping tourists as
+Switzerland, and that within a year railway companies would be
+advertising 'Bank-holidays in Eternity'?</p>
+
+<p>No! let us keep the Unseen&mdash;or, if it must be discovered, let the key
+thereof be given only to true-lovers and poets.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 187-->
+<h3><a name="essay19">A SEAPORT IN THE MOON</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>No one is so hopelessly wrong about the stars as the astronomer, and I
+trust that you never pay any attention to his remarks on the moon. He
+knows as much about the moon as a coiffeur knows of the dreams of the
+fair lady whose beautiful neck he makes still more beautiful. There is
+but one opinion upon<!--Page 188--> the moon&mdash;namely, our own. And if you think that
+science is thus wronged, reflect a moment upon what science makes of
+things near at hand. Love, it says, is merely a play of pistil and
+stamen, our most fascinating poetry and art is 'degeneration,' and human
+life, generally speaking, is sufficiently explained by the 'carbon
+compounds'&mdash;God-a-mercy! If science makes such grotesque blunders about
+radiant matters right under its nose, how can one think of taking its
+opinion upon matters so remote as the stars&mdash;or even the moon, which is
+comparatively near at hand?</p>
+
+<p>Science says that the moon is a dead world, a cosmic ship littered with
+the skeletons of its crew, and from which every rat of vitality has long
+since escaped. It is the ghost that rises from its tomb every night, to
+haunt its faithless lover, the world. It is a country of ancient
+silver-mines, unworked for centuries. You may see the gaping mouths of
+the dark old shafts through your telescopes. You may even see the
+rusting pit tackle, the ruinous engine-houses, and the idle pick and
+shovel. Or you may say that it is counterfeit silver, coined to take in
+the young fools who love to gaze upon it. It is, so to speak, a bad
+half-crown.</p>
+
+<p>As you will! but I am of Endymion's belief&mdash;and no one was ever more
+intimate with the moon. For me the moon is a country of great seaports,
+whither all the ships of our dreams come home. From all quarters of the
+world, every day of the week, there are ships sailing to the moon. They
+are the ships that sail just when and where you please. You take your
+passage on that<!--Page 189--> condition. And it is ridiculous to think for what a
+trifle the captain will take you on so long a journey. If you want to
+come back, just to take an excursion and no more, just to take a lighted
+look at those coasts of rose and pearl, he will ask no more than a glass
+or two of bright wine&mdash;indeed, when the captain is very kind, a flower
+will take you there and back in no time; if you want to stay whole days
+there, but still come back dreamy and strange, you may take a little
+dark root and smoke it in a silver pipe, or you may drink a little phial
+of poppy-juice, and thus you shall find the Land of Heart's Desire; but
+if you are wise and would stay in that land for ever, the terms are even
+easier&mdash;a little powder shaken into a phial of water, a little piece of
+lead no bigger than a pea, and a farthing's-worth of explosive fire, and
+thus also you are in the Land of Heart's Desire for ever.</p>
+
+<p>I dreamed last night that I stood on the blustering windy wharf, and the
+dark ship was there. It was impatient, like all of us, to leave the
+world. Its funnels belched black smoke, its engines throbbed against<!--Page 190-->
+the quay like arms that were eager to strike and be done, and a bell
+was beating impatient summons to be gone. The dark captain stood ready
+on the bridge, and he looked into each of our faces as we passed on
+board. 'Is it for the long voyage?' he said. 'Yes! the long voyage,' I
+said&mdash;and his stern eyes seemed to soften as I answered.</p>
+
+<p>At last we were all aboard, and in the twinkling of an eye were out of
+sight of land. Yet, once afloat, it seemed as though we should never
+reach our port in the moon&mdash;so it seemed to me as I lay awake in my
+little cabin, listening to the patient thud and throb of the great
+screws, beating in the ship's side like a human heart.</p>
+
+<p>Talking with my fellow-voyagers, I was surprised to find that we were
+not all volunteers. Some, in fact, complained pitifully. They had, they
+said, been going about their business a day or two before, and suddenly
+a mysterious captain had laid hold of them, and pressed them to sail
+this unknown sea. Thus, without a word of warning, they had been
+compelled to leave behind them all they held dear. This, one felt, was a
+little hard of<!--Page 191--> the captain; but those of us whose position was exactly
+the reverse, who had friends on the other side, all whose hopes indeed
+were invested there, were too selfishly expectant of port to be severe
+on the captain who was taking us thither.</p>
+
+<p>There were three friends I had especially set out to see: two young
+lovers who had emigrated to those colonies in the moon just after their
+marriage, and there was another. What a surprise it would be to all
+three, for I had written no letter to say I was coming. Indeed, it was
+just a sudden impulse, the pistol-flash of a long desire.</p>
+
+<p>I tried to imagine what the town would be like in which they were now
+living. I asked the captain, and he answered with a sad smile that it
+would be just exactly as I cared to dream it.</p>
+
+<p>'Oh, well then,' I thought, 'I know what it will be like. There shall be
+a great restless, tossing estuary, with Atlantic winds for ever ruffling
+the sails of busy ships, ships coming home with laughter, ships leaving
+home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell. And the shaggy tossing water
+shall be bounded on<!--Page 192--> either bank with high granite walls, and on one
+bank shall be a fretted spire soaring with a jangle of bells, from amid
+a tangle of masts, and underneath the bells and the masts shall go
+streets rising up from the strand, streets full of faces, and sweet with
+the smell of tar and the sea. O captain! will it be morning or night
+when we come to my city? In the morning my city is like a sea-blown
+rose, in the night it is bright as a sailor's star.</p>
+
+<p>'If it be early morning, what shall I do? I shall run to the house in
+which my friends lie in happy sleep, never to be parted again, and kiss
+my hand to their shrouded window; and then I shall run on and on till
+the city is behind and the sweetness of country lanes is about me, and I
+shall gather flowers as I run, from sheer wantonness of joy; and then at
+last, flushed and breathless, I shall stand beneath her window. I shall
+stand and listen, and I shall hear her breathing right through the heavy
+curtains, and the hushed garden and the sleeping house will bid me keep
+silence, but I shall cry a great cry up to the morning star, and say,
+"No, I will not<!--Page 193--> keep silence. Mine is the voice she listens for in her
+sleep. She will wake again for no voice but mine. Dear one, awake, the
+morning of all mornings has come!"'</p>
+
+<p>As I write, the moon looks down at me like a Madonna from the great
+canvas of the sky. She seems beautiful with the beauty of all the eyes
+that have looked up at her, sad with all the tears of all those eyes;
+like a silver bowl brimming with the tears of dead lovers she seems.
+Yes, there are seaports in the moon; there are ships to take us there.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+
+
+<p>Most of the foregoing essays have made a first appearance either in
+<em>The Yellow Book</em>, <em>The Nineteenth Century</em>, <em>The Cosmopolitan</em>, <em>The
+Westminster Gazette</em>, or <em>The Realm</em>, to the editors of which the writer
+is indebted for kind permission to reprint.</p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14103 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #14103 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14103)
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+Project Gutenberg's Prose Fancies (Second Series), by Richard Le Gallienne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
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+
+Title: Prose Fancies (Second Series)
+
+Author: Richard Le Gallienne
+
+Release Date: November 20, 2004 [EBook #14103]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROSE FANCIES (SECOND SERIES) ***
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+Produced by Brendan Lane, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
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+
+
+PROSE FANCIES
+
+(SECOND SERIES)
+
+BY
+
+RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
+
+
+
+LONDON: JOHN LANE
+
+CHICAGO: H.S. STONE AND CO.
+
+1896
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MAGGIE LE GALLIENNE
+
+WITH LOVE
+
+  Poor are the gifts of the poet--
+  Nothing but words!
+  The gifts of kings are gold,
+  Silver, and flocks and herds,
+  Garments of strange soft silk,
+  Feathers of wonderful birds,
+  Jewels and precious stones,
+  And horses white as the milk--
+  These are the gifts of kings:
+  But the gifts that the poet brings
+  Are nothing but words.
+
+  Forty thousand words!
+  Take them--a gift of flies!
+  Words that should have been birds,
+  Words that should have been flowers,
+  Words that should have been stars
+  In the eternal skies.
+  Forty thousand words!
+  Forty thousand tears--
+  All out of two sad eyes.
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS                                              PAGE
+
+  A SEVENTH-STORY HEAVEN,                                 1
+  SPRING BY PARCEL POST,                                 20
+  THE GREAT MERRY-GO-ROUND,                              27
+  THE BURIAL OF ROMEO AND JULIET,                        39
+  VARIATIONS UPON WHITEBAIT,                             49
+  THE ANSWER OF THE ROSE,                                58
+  ABOUT THE SECURITIES,                                  67
+  THE BOOM IN YELLOW,                                    79
+  LETTER TO AN UNSUCCESSFUL LITERARY MAN,                90
+  A POET IN THE CITY,                                    98
+  BROWN ROSES,                                          108
+  THE DONKEY THAT LOVED A STAR,                         112
+  ON LOVING ONE'S ENEMIES,                              119
+  THE DRAMATIC ART OF LIFE,                             125
+  THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX,                  135
+  THE FALLACY OF A NATION,                              145
+  THE GREATNESS OF MAN,                                 154
+  DEATH AND TWO FRIENDS,                                171
+  A SEAPORT IN THE MOON,                                187
+
+
+
+
+A SEVENTH-STORY HEAVEN
+
+
+At one end of the city that I love there is a tall, dingy pile of
+offices that has evidently seen more prosperous fortunes. It is not the
+aristocratic end. It is remote from the lordly street of the fine shops
+of the fair women, where in the summer afternoons the gay bank clerks
+parade arm-in-arm in the wake of the tempestuous petticoat. It lies
+aside from the great exchange which looks like a scene from _Romeo and
+Juliet_ in the moonlight, from the town-hall from whose clocked and
+gilded cupola ring sweet chimes at midnight, and whence, throned above
+the city, a golden Britannia, in the sight of all men, is seen visibly
+ruling the waves--while in the square below the death of Nelson is
+played all day in stone, with a frieze of his noble words about the
+pedestal. England expects! What an influence that stirring challenge
+has yet upon the hearts of men may be seen by any one who will study the
+faces of the busy, imaginative cotton-brokers, who, in the thronged and
+humming mornings, sell what they have never seen to a customer they will
+never see.
+
+In fact, the end I mean is just the very opposite end to that. It is the
+end where the cotton that everybody sells and nobody buys _is_ seen,
+piled in great white stacks, or swinging in the air from the necks of
+mighty cranes, cranes that could nip up an elephant with as little ado,
+and set him down on the wharf, with a box on his ugly ears for his
+cowardly trumpeting. It is the end that smells of tar, the domain of the
+harbourmasters, where the sailor finds a 'home,'--not too sweet, and
+where the wild sea is tamed in a maze of granite squares and basins; the
+end where the riggings and buildings rise side by side, and a clerk
+might swing himself out upon the yards from his top-floor desk. Here is
+the Custom House, and the conversation that shines is full of freightage
+and dock dues; here are the shops that sell nothing but oilskins,
+sextants, and parrots, and here the taverns do a mighty trade in rum.
+
+It was in this quarter, for a brief sweet time, that Love and Beauty
+made their strange home, as though a pair of halcyons should choose to
+nest in the masthead of a cattleship. Love and Beauty chose this
+quarter, as, alas! Love and Beauty must choose so many things--for its
+cheapness. Love and Beauty were poor, and office rents in this quarter
+were exceptionally low. But what should Love and Beauty do with an
+office? Love was a poor poet in need of a room for his bed and his
+rhymes, and Beauty was a little blue-eyed girl who loved him.
+
+It was a shabby, forbidding place, gloomy and comfortless as a warehouse
+on the banks of Styx. No one but Love and Beauty would have dared to
+choose it for their home. But Love and Beauty have a great confidence in
+themselves--a confidence curiously supported by history,--and they never
+had a moment's doubt that this place was as good as another for an
+earthly Paradise. So Love signed an agreement for one great room at the
+very top, the very masthead of the building, and Beauty made it pretty
+with muslin curtains, flowers, and dainty makeshifts of furniture, but
+chiefly with the light of her own heavenly face. A stroke of luck coming
+one day to the poet, the lovers, with that extravagance which the poor
+alone have the courage to enjoy, procured a piano on the kind-hearted
+hire-purchase system, a system specially conceived for lovers. Then,
+indeed, for many a wonderful night that room was not only on the seventh
+floor, but in the seventh heaven; and as Beauty would sit at the piano,
+with her long hair flying loose, and her soul like a whirl of starlight
+about her brows, a stranger peering in across the soft lamplight, seeing
+her face, hearing her voice, would deem that the long climb, flight
+after flight of dreary stair, had been appropriately rewarded by a
+glimpse of heaven.
+
+Certainly it must have seemed a strange contrast from the life about and
+below it. The foot of that infernal stair plunged in the warm
+rum-and-thick-twist atmosphere of a sailor's tavern--and 'The Jolly
+Shipmates' was a house of entertainment by no means to be despised.
+Often have I sat there with the poet, drinking the whisky from which
+Scotland takes its name, among wondering sea-boots and sou'-westers, who
+could make nothing of that wild hair and that still wilder talk.
+
+From the kingdom of rum and tar you mounted into a zone of commission
+agents fund shipbrokers, a chill, unoccupied region, in which every
+small office bore the names of half a dozen different firms, and yet
+somehow could not contrive to look busy. Finally came an airy echoing
+landing, a region of empty rooms, which the landlords in vain
+recommended as studios to a city that loved not art. Here dwelt the
+keeper and his kind-hearted little wife, and no one besides save Love
+and Beauty. There was thus a feeling of rarefaction in the atmosphere,
+as though at this height it was only the Alpine flora of humanity that
+could find root and breathing. But once along the bare passage and
+through a certain door, and what a sudden translation it was into a
+gracious world of books and flowers and the peace they always bring.
+
+Once upon a time, in that enchanted past where dwell all the dreams we
+love best, precisely, with loving punctuality, at five in the afternoon,
+a pretty, girlish figure, like Persephone escaping from the shades,
+stole through the rough sailors at the foot of that sordid Jacob's
+ladder and made her way to the little heaven at the top.
+
+I shall not describe her, for the good reason that I cannot. Leonardo,
+ever curious of the beauty that was most strangely exquisite, once in an
+inspired hour painted such a face, a face wrought of the porcelain of
+earth with the art of heaven. But, whoever should paint it, God
+certainly made it--must have been the comment of any one who caught a
+glimpse of that little figure vanishing heavenwards up that stair, like
+an Assumption of Fra Angelico's--that is, any one interested in art and
+angels.
+
+She had not long to wait outside the door she sought, for the poet, who
+had listened all day for the sound, had ears for the whisper of her
+skirts as she came down the corridor, and before she had time to knock
+had already folded her in his arms. The two babes in that thieves' wood
+of commission agents and shipbrokers stood silent together for a
+moment, in the deep security of a kiss such as the richest millionaire
+could never buy--and then they fell to comparing notes of their day's
+work. The poet had had one of his rare good days. He had made no money,
+his post had been even more disappointing than usual,--but he had
+written a poem, the best he had ever written, he said, as he always said
+of his last new thing. He had been burning to read it to somebody all
+afternoon--had with difficulty refrained from reading it to the
+loquacious little keeper's wife as she brought him some coals--so it was
+not to be expected that he should wait a minute before reading it to her
+whom indeed it strove to celebrate. With arms round each other's necks,
+they bent over the table littered with the new-born poem, all blots and
+dashes like the first draft of a composer's score, and the poet, deftly
+picking his way among the erasures and interlineations, read aloud the
+beautiful words--with a full sense of their beauty!--to ears that deemed
+them more beautiful even than they were. The owners of this now valuable
+copyright allow me to irradiate my prose with three of the verses.
+
+'Ah! what,' half-chanted, half-crooned the poet--
+
+  'Ah! what a garden is your hair!--
+    Such treasure as the kings of old,
+    In coffers of the beaten gold,
+  Laid up on earth--and left it there.'
+
+So tender a reference to hair whose beauty others beside the poet had
+loved must needs make a tender interruption--the only kind of
+interruption the poet could have forgiven--and 'Who,' he continued--
+
+  'Who was the artist of your mouth?
+    What master out of old Japan
+    Wrought it so dangerous to man ...'
+
+And here it was but natural that laughter and kisses should once more
+interrupt--
+
+  'Those strange blue jewels of your eyes,
+    Painting the lily of your face,
+    What goldsmith set them in their place--
+  Forget-me-nots of Paradise?
+
+  'And that blest river of your voice,
+    Whose merry silver stirs the rest
+    Of water-lilies in your breast ...'
+
+At last, in spite of more interruptions, the poem came to an
+end--whereupon, of course, the poet immediately read it through once
+more from the beginning, its personal and emotional elements, he felt,
+having been done more justice on a first reading than its artistic
+excellences.
+
+'Why, darling, it is splendid,' was his little sweetheart's comment;
+'you know how happy it makes me to think it was written for me, don't
+you?' And she took his hands and looked up at him with eyes like the
+morning sky.
+
+Romance in poetry is almost exclusively associated with very refined
+ethereal matters, stars and flowers and such like--happily, in actual
+life it is often associated with much humbler objects. Lovers, like
+children, can make their paradises out of the quaintest materials.
+Indeed, our paradises, if we only knew, are always cheap enough; it is
+our hells that are so expensive. Now these lovers--like, if I mistake
+not, many other true lovers before and since--when they were
+particularly happy, when some special piece of good luck had befallen
+them, could think of no better paradise than a little dinner together in
+their seventh-story heaven. 'Ah! wilderness were Paradise enow!'
+
+To-night was obviously such an occasion. But, alas! where was the money
+to come from? They didn't need much--for it is wonderful how happy you
+can be on five shillings, if you only know how. At the same time it is
+difficult to be happy on ninepence--which was the entire fortune of the
+lovers at the moment. Beauty laughingly suggested that her celebrated
+hair might prove worth the price of their dinner. The poet thought a
+pawnbroker might surely be found to advance ten shillings on his
+poem--the original MS. too,--else had they nothing to pawn, save a few
+gold and silver dreams which they couldn't spare. What was to be done?
+Sell some books, of course! It made them shudder to think how many poets
+they had eaten in this fashion. It was sheer cannibalism--but what was
+to be done? Their slender stock of books had been reduced entirely to
+poetry. If there had only been a philosopher or a modern novelist, the
+sacrifice wouldn't have seemed so unnatural. And then Beauty's eyes fell
+upon a very fat informing-looking volume on the poet's desk.
+
+'Wouldn't this do?' she said.
+
+'Why, of course!' he exclaimed; 'the very thing. A new history of
+socialism just sent me for review. Hang the review; we want our dinner,
+don't we, little one? And then I've read the preface, and looked through
+the index--quite enough to make a column of, with a plentiful supply of
+general principles thrown in! Why, of course, there's our dinner for
+certain, dull and indigestible as it looks. It's worth fifty minor poets
+at old Moser's. Come along....'
+
+So off went the happy pair--ah! how much happier was Beauty than ever so
+many fine ladies one knows who have only, so to say, to rub their
+wedding-rings for a banquet to rise out of the ground, with the most
+distinguished guests around the table, champagne of the best, and
+conversation of the worst.
+
+Old Moser found histories of socialism profitable, more profitable
+perhaps than socialism, and he actually gave five-and-sixpence for the
+volume. With the ninepence already in their pockets, you will see that
+they were now possessors of quite a small fortune. Six-and-threepence!
+It wouldn't pay for one's lunch nowadays. Ah! but that is because the
+poor alone know the art of dining.
+
+You needn't wish to be happier and merrier than those two lovers, as
+they gaily hastened to that bright and cosy corner of the town where
+those lovely ham-and-beef shops make glad the faces of the passers-by. O
+those hams with their honest shining faces, polished like mahogany--and
+the man inside so happy all day slicing them with those wonderful long
+knives (which, of course, the superior class of reader has never seen)
+worn away to a veritable thread, a mere wire, but keen as Excalibur.
+Beauty used to calculate in her quaint way how much steel was worn away
+with each pound of ham, and how much therefore went to the sandwich. And
+what an artist was the carver! What a true eye! what a firm, flexible
+wrist! never a shaving of fat too much--he was too great an artist for
+that. Then there were those dear little cream cheeses, and those little
+brown jugs of yellow cream come all the way from Devonshire--you could
+hear the cows lowing across the rich pasture, and hear the milkmaids
+singing and the milk whizzing into the pail, as you looked at them.
+
+And then those perfectly lovely sausages--I beg the reader's pardon! I
+forgot that the very mention of the word smacks of vulgarity. Yet, all
+the same, I venture to think that a secret taste for sausages among the
+upper classes is more widespread than we have any idea of. I confess
+that Beauty and her poet were at first ashamed of admitting their vulgar
+frailty to each other. They needed to know each other very well first.
+Yet there is nothing, when once confessed, that brings two people so
+close as--a taste for sausages.
+
+'You darling!' exclaimed Beauty, with something like tears in her voice,
+when her poet first admitted this touch of nature--and then next moment
+they were in fits of laughter that a common taste for a very 'low' food
+should bring tears to their eyes! But such are the vagaries of love--as
+you will know, if you know anything about it--'vulgar,' no doubt, though
+only the vulgar would so describe them--for it is only vulgarity that
+is always 'refined.'
+
+Then there was the florist's to visit. What beautiful trades some people
+ply! To sell flowers is surely like dealing in fairies. Beautiful must
+grow the hands that wire them, and sweet the flower-girl's every
+thought!
+
+There remained but the wine merchant's, or, had we not better say at
+once, the grocer's, for our lovers could afford no rarer vintages than
+Tintara or the golden burgundy of Australia; and it is wonderful to
+think what a sense of festivity one of those portly colonial flagons
+lent to their little dining-table. Sometimes, I may confide, when they
+wanted to feel very dissipated, and were _very_ rich, they would allow
+themselves a small bottle of Benedictine--and you should have seen
+Beauty's eyes as she luxuriously sipped at her green little liqueur
+glass; for, like most innocent people, she enjoyed to the full the
+delight of feeling occasionally wicked. However, these were rare
+occasions, and this night was not one of them.
+
+Half a pound of black grapes completed their shopping, and then, with
+their arms full of their purchases, they made their way home again, the
+two happiest people in what is, after all, a not unhappy world.
+
+Then came the cooking and the laying of the table. For all her Leonardo
+face, Beauty was a great cook--like all good women, she was as earthly
+in some respects as she was heavenly in others, which I hold to be a
+wise combination--and, indeed, both were excellent cooks; and the poet
+was unrivalled at 'washing up,' which, I may say, is the only skeleton
+at these Bohemian feasts.
+
+You should have seen the gusto with which Beauty pricked those
+sausages--I had better explain to the un-Bohemian reader that to attempt
+to cook a sausage without first pricking it vigorously with a fork, to
+allow for the expansion of its juicy gases, is like trying to smoke a
+cigar without first cutting off the end--and oh! to hear again their
+merry song as they writhed in torment in the hissing pan, like Christian
+martyrs raising hymns of praise from the very core of Smithfield fires.
+
+Meanwhile, the poet would be surpassing himself in the setting-out of
+the little table, cutting up the bread reverently as though it were for
+an altar--as indeed it was,--studying the effect of the dish of
+tomatoes, now at this corner, now at that, arranging the flowers with
+much more care than he arranged the adjectives in his sonnets, and
+making ever so sumptuous an effect with that half a pound of grapes.
+
+And then at last the little feast would begin, with a long grace of eyes
+meeting and hands clasping: true eyes that said, 'How good it is to
+behold you, to be awake together in this dream of life!' true hands that
+said, 'I will hold you fast for ever--not death even shall pluck you
+from my hand, shall loose this bond of you and me'; true eyes, true
+hands, that had immortal meanings far beyond the speech of mortal words.
+
+And it had all come out of that dull history of socialism, and had cost
+little more than a crown! What lovely things can be made out of money!
+Strange to think that a little silver coin of no possible use or beauty
+in itself can be exchanged for so much tangible, beautiful pleasure. A
+piece of money is like a piece of opium, for in it lie locked up the
+most wonderful dreams--if you have only the brains and hearts to dream
+them.
+
+When at last the little feast grew near its end, Love and Beauty would
+smoke their cigarettes together; and it was a favourite trick of theirs
+to lower the lamp a moment, so that they might see the stars rush down
+upon them through the skylight which hung above their table. It gave
+them a sense of great sentinels, far away out in the lonely universe,
+standing guard over them, seemed to say that their love was safe in the
+tender keeping of great forces. They were poor, but then they had the
+stars and the flowers and the great poets for their servants and
+friends; and, best of all, they had each other. Do you call that being
+poor?
+
+And then, in the corner, stood that magical box with the ivory keys,
+whose strings waited ready night and day--strange media through which
+the myriad voices, the inner-sweet thoughts, of the great world-soul
+found speech, messengers of the stars to the heart, and of the heart to
+the stars.
+
+Beauty's songs were very simple. She got little practice, for her poet
+only cared to have her sing over and over again the same sweet songs;
+and perhaps if you had heard her sing 'Ask nothing more of me, sweet,'
+or 'Darby and Joan,' you would have understood his indifference to
+variety.
+
+At last the little feast is quite, quite finished. Beauty has gone home;
+her lover still carries her face in his heart as she waved and waved and
+waved to him from the rattling lighted tramcar; long he sits and sits
+thinking of her, gazing up at those lonely ancient stars; the air is
+still bright with her presence, sweet with her thoughts, warm with her
+kisses, and as he turns to the shut piano, he can still see her white
+hands on the keys and her girlish face raised in an ecstasy--Beata
+Beatrix--above the music.
+
+  'O love, my love! if I no more should see
+  Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
+    Nor image of thine eyes in any spring--
+  How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope
+  The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
+    The wind of Death's imperishable wing!'
+
+And then ... he would throw himself upon his bed, and burst into tears.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  'And they are gone: aye, ages long ago
+  These lovers fled away into the storm.'
+
+That seventh-story heaven once more leads a dull life as the office of a
+ship-chandler, and harsh voices grate the air where Beauty sang. The
+books and the flowers and the lovers' faces are gone for ever. I suppose
+the stars are the same, and perhaps they sometimes look down through
+that roof-window, and wonder what has become of those two lovers who
+used to look up at them so fearlessly long ago.
+
+But friends of mine who believe in God say that He has given His angels
+charge concerning that dingy old seventh-floor heaven, and that, for
+those who have eyes to see, there is no place where a great dream has
+been dreamed that is not thus watched over by the guardian angels of
+memory.
+
+_For M. Le G., 25 September 1895._
+
+
+
+
+SPRING BY PARCEL POST
+
+
+  They've taken all the spring from the country to the town--
+  Like the butter and the eggs, and the milk from the cow....
+
+So began to jig and jingle my thoughts as in my letters and newspapers
+this morning I read, buried alive among the solitary fastnesses of the
+Surrey hills, the last news from town. The news I envied most was that
+spring had already reached London. 'Now,' ran a pretty article on spring
+fashions, 'the sunshine makes bright the streets, and the
+flower-baskets, like huge bouquets, announce the gay arrival of spring.'
+I looked up and out through my hillside window. The black ridge on the
+other side of the valley stood a grim wall of burnt heather against the
+sky--which sky, like the bullets in the nursery rhyme, was made
+unmistakably of lead; a close rain was falling methodically, and,
+generally speaking, the world looked like a soaked mackintosh. It wasn't
+much like the gay arrival of spring, and grimly I mused on the
+advantages of life in town.
+
+Certainly, it did seem hard, I reflected, that town should be ahead of
+us even in such a country matter as spring. Flower-baskets indeed! Why,
+we haven't as much as a daisy for miles around. It is true that on the
+terrace there the crocuses blaze like a street on fire, that the
+primroses thicken into clumps, lying among their green leaves like
+pounds of country butter; it is true that the blue cones of the little
+grape hyacinth are there, quaintly formal as a child's toy-flowers; yes!
+and the big Dutch hyacinths are already shamelessly _enceinte_ with
+their buxom waxen blooms, so fat and fragrant--(one is already delivered
+of a fine blossom. Well, that is a fine baby, to be sure! say the other
+hyacinths, with babes no less bonny under their own green aprons--all
+waiting for the doctor sun). Then among the blue-green blades of the
+narcissus, here and there you see a stem topped with a creamish
+chrysalis-like envelope, from which will soon emerge a beautiful eye,
+rayed round with white wings, looking as though it were meant to fly,
+but remaining rooted--a butterfly on a stalk; while all the beds are
+crowded with indeterminate beak and blade, pushing and elbowing each
+other for a look at the sun, which, however, sulkily declines to look at
+them. It is true there is spring on the terrace, but even so it is
+spring imported from the town--spring bought in Holborn, spring
+delivered free by parcel post; for where would the terrace have been but
+for the city seedsman--that magician who sends you strangely spotted
+beans and mysterious bulbs in shrivelled cerements, weird little
+flower-mummies that suggest centuries of forgotten silence in painted
+Egyptian tombs. This strange and shrivelled thing can surely never live
+again, we say, as we hold it in our hands, seeing not the glowing
+circles of colour, tiny rings of Saturn, packed so carefully inside this
+flower-egg, the folds of green and silver silk wound round and round the
+precious life within.
+
+But, of course, this is all the seedsman's cunning, and no credit to
+Nature; and I repeat, that were it not for railways and the parcel
+post--goodness knows whether we should ever get any spring at all in the
+country! Think of the days when it had to travel down by stage-coach.
+For, left to herself, what is the best Nature can do for you with March
+well on the way? Personally, I find the face of the country practically
+unchanged. It is, to all intents and purposes, the same as it has been
+for the last three or four months--as grim, as unadorned, as bleak, as
+draughty, and generally as comfortless as ever. There isn't a flower to
+be seen, hardly a bird worth listening to, not a tree that is not
+winter-naked, and not a chair to sit down upon. If you want flowers on
+your walks you must bring them with you; songs, you must take a poet
+under your arm; and if you want to rest, lean laboriously on your
+stick--or take your chance of rheumatism.
+
+Of course your specialists, your botanists, your nature-detectives, will
+tell you otherwise. They have surprised a violet in the act of
+blossoming; after long and excited chase have discovered a clump of
+primroses in their wild state; seen one butterfly, heard one cuckoo. But
+as one swallow does not make a summer, it takes more than one cuckoo to
+make a spring. I confess that only yesterday I saw three sulphur
+butterflies, with my own eyes; I admit the catkins, and the
+silver-notched palm; and I am told on good colour-authority that there
+is a lovely purplish bloom, almost like plum-bloom, over certain copses
+in the valley; by taking thought, I have observed the long horizontal
+arms of the beech growing spurred with little forked branches of
+spear-shaped buds, and I see little green nipples pushing out through
+the wolf-coloured rind of the dwarf fir-trees. Spring is arming in
+secret to attack the winter--that is sure enough, but spring in secret
+is no spring for me. I want to see her marching gaily with green
+pennons, and flashing sun-blades, and a good band.
+
+I want butterflies as they have them at the Lyceum--'butterflies all
+white,' 'butterflies all blue,' 'butterflies of gold,' and I should
+particularly fancy 'butterflies all black.' But there, again, you
+see,--you must go to town, within hearing of Mrs. Patrick Campbell's
+_voix d'or_. I want the meadows thickly inlaid with buttercups and
+daisies; I want the trees thick with green leaves, the sky all larks and
+sunshine; I want hawthorn and wild roses--both at once; I want some go,
+some colour, some warmth in the world. Oh, where are the pipes of Pan?
+
+The pipes of Pan are in town, playing at street corners and in the
+centres of crowded circuses, piled high with flower-baskets blazing with
+refulgent flowery masses of white and gold. Here are the flowers you can
+only buy in town; simple flowers enough, but only to be had in town.
+Here are fragrant banks of violets every few yards, conflagrations of
+daffodils at every crossing, and narcissus in scented starry garlands
+for your hair.
+
+You wander through the Strand, or along Regent Street, as through the
+meadows of Enna--sweet scents, sweet sounds, sweet shapes, are all about
+you; the town-butterflies, white, blue, and gold, 'wheel and shine' and
+flutter from shop to shop, suddenly resurgent from their winter
+wardrobes as from a chrysalis; bright eyes flash and flirt along the
+merry, jostling street, while the sun pours out his golden wine
+overhead, splashing it about from gilded domes and bright-faced
+windows--and ever are the voices at the corners and the crossings
+calling out the sweet flower-names of the spring!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But here in the country it is still all rain and iron. I am tired of
+waiting for this slow-moving provincial spring. Let us to the town to
+meet the spring--for:
+
+  They've taken all the spring from the country to the town--
+    Like the butter and the eggs, and the milk from the cow;
+    And if you want a primrose, you write to London now,
+  And if you need a nightingale, well,--Whiteley sends it down.
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT MERRY-GO-ROUND
+
+
+In an age curious of new pleasures, the merry-go-round seems still to
+maintain its ancient popularity. I was the other day the delighted,
+indeed the fascinated, spectator of one in full swing in an old
+Thames-side town. It was a very superior example, with a central musical
+engine of extraordinary splendour, and horses that actually curveted, as
+they swirled maddeningly round to the strains of 'The Man that Broke the
+Bank at Monte Carlo.' How I longed to join the wild riders! But though I
+am a brave man, I confess that to ride a merry-go-round in front of a
+laughter-loving Cockney public is more than I can dare. I had to content
+myself with watching the faces of the riders. I noticed particularly one
+bright-eyed little girl, whose whole passionate young soul seemed to be
+on fire with ecstasy, and for whom it was not difficult to prophesy
+trouble when time should bring her within reach of more dangerous
+excitements. Then there was a stolid little boy, dull and unmoved in
+expression, as though he were in church. Life, one felt sure, would be
+safe enough, and stupid enough, for him; the world would have no music
+to stir or draw him. The fifes would go down the street with a sweet
+sound of marching feet, and the eyes of other men would brighten and
+their blood be all glancing spears and streaming banners, but he would
+remain behind his counter; from the strange hill beyond the town the
+dear, unholy music, so lovely in the ears of other men and maids, would
+call to him in vain, and morning and evening the stars would sing above
+his draper's shop, but he never hear a word.
+
+What particularly struck me was the number of quite grown-up, even
+elderly, people who came and had their pennyworth of horse-exercise. Now
+it was a grave young workman quietly smoking his pipe as he revolved;
+now it was a stout middle-aged woman returning from marketing, on whom
+the Zulu music and the whirling horses laid their irresistible spells.
+Unless ye become as little children!
+
+Is the Kingdom of Heaven really at hand? For, indeed, men and women, and
+perhaps particularly literary men and women, are once more becoming as
+little children in their pleasures.
+
+Seriously, one of the most curious and significant of recent literary
+phenomena is the sudden return of the literary man to physical, and
+so-called 'Philistine,' pleasures and modes of recreation. Perhaps
+Stevenson set the fashion with his canoe and his donkey. But at the
+moment that he was valiantly daring any one to tell him whether there
+was anything better worth doing 'than fooling among boats,' Edward
+Fitzgerald, all unconscious and careless of literary fashions, was
+giving still more practical expression to the physical faith that was in
+him, by going shares in a Lowestoft herring-lugger, and throwing his
+heart as well as his money into the fortunes of its noble skipper
+'Posh.' A literary man _par excellence_, Mr. Lang reproaches his sires
+for his present way of life--
+
+  'Why lay your gipsy freedom down
+  And doom your child to pen and ink?'
+
+and by steady and persistent golfing, and writing about angling and
+cricket, comes as near to the noble savage as is possible to so
+incorrigibly civilised a man. Mr. Henley--that Berserker of the
+pen--sings the sword with a vigour that makes one curious to see him
+using it, and we all know Mr. Kipling's views on the matter. Then Mr.
+Bernard Shaw rides a bicycle!
+
+Those men of letters whose inclinations or opportunities do not lead
+them to these out-of-door, and more or less ferocious, pleasures seek to
+forget themselves at the music-hall, the Aquarium, or the numerous
+Earl's Court exhibitions. They become amateurs of foreign dancing,
+connoisseurs of the trapeze, or they leave their great minds at home and
+go up the Great Wheel. Earl's Court, particularly, is becoming quite a
+modern Vauxhall--Tan-ta-ra-ra! Earl's Court! Earl's Court!--and Mr. Imre
+Kiralfy, with his conceptions and designs, is to our generation what
+Albert Smith was to the age of Dickens and Edmund Yates.
+
+It takes some experience of life to realise how right this is; to
+realise that, after all our fine philosophies and cocksure sciences,
+there is no better answer to the riddle of things than a good game of
+cricket or an exciting spin on one's 'bike.' The real inner significance
+of Earl's Court--Mr. Kiralfy will no doubt be prepared to hear--is the
+failure of science as an answer to life. We give up the riddle, and
+enjoy ourselves with our wiser children. Simple pleasures, no doubt, for
+the profound! But what is simple, and what is profound?
+
+The simple joy we get from 'fooling among boats' on a summer day, the
+thrill of a well-hit ball, the rapture of a skilful dive, are no more
+easy to explain than the more complicated pleasures of literature, or
+art, or religion. And why is it--to come closer to our theme--that the
+round or the whirling have such attraction for us? What is the secret of
+the fascination of the circle? Why is it that the turning of anything,
+be it but a barrel-organ or a phrase, holds one as with an hypnotic
+power? I confess that I can never genuinely pity a knife-grinder,
+however needy. Think of the pleasure of driving that wheel all day, the
+merry chirp of the knife on the stone, and the crisp, bright spray of
+the flying sparks! Why, he does 'what some men dream of all their
+lives'! Wheels of all kinds have the same strange charm; mill-wheels,
+colliery-wheels, spinning-wheels, water-wheels, and wheeling waters:
+there may--who knows?--have been a certain pleasure in being broken on
+the wheel, and, at all events, that hideous punishment is another
+curious example of the fascination of the circle. It would take a whole
+volume to illustrate the prevalence of the circle in external nature, in
+history, and, even more significant, in language. We all know, or think
+we know, that the world is round--
+
+  'This orb--this round
+  Of sight and sound,'
+
+as Mr. Quiller Couch sings--though I remember a porter at school who was
+sure that it was flat, and who used to say that Hamlet's
+
+  'How weary, stale, _flat_, and unprofitable
+  Seem to me all the uses of this _world_!'
+
+was a cryptic reference to Shakespeare's secret belief in his theory.
+Many of the things we love most are round. Is not money, according to
+the proverb, made round that it may go round, and are not the men most
+in demand described as 'all-round men'? Nor are all-round women without
+their admirers. Events, we know, move in a circle, as time moves in
+cycles--though, alas! not on them. The ballet and the bicycle are
+popular forms of the circle, and it is the charm of the essay to be
+'roundabout.'
+
+Again, how is it that that which on a small scale does not impress us at
+all, when on a large scale impresses us so much? What is the secret of
+the impressiveness of size, bulk, height, depth, speed, and mileage?
+Philosophically, a mountain is no more wonderful than a molehill, yet no
+man is knighted for climbing a molehill. One little drop of water and
+one little grain of sand are essentially as wonderful as 'the mighty
+ocean' or 'the beauteous land' to which they contribute. A balloon is
+no more wonderful than an air-bubble, and were you to build an Atlantic
+liner as big as the Isle of Wight it would really be no more remarkable
+than an average steam-launch. Nobody marvels at the speed of a snail,
+yet, given a snail's pace to start with, an express train follows as a
+matter of course. Movement, not the rate of movement, is the mystery.
+Precisely the same materials, the same forces, the same methods, are
+employed in the little as in the big of these examples. Why should mere
+accumulation, reiteration, and magnification make the difference? We may
+ask why? But it does, for all that. If we answer that these mammoth
+multiplications impress us because they are so much bigger, taller,
+fatter, faster, etc., than we are, the question arises--How many times
+bigger than a man must a mountain be before it impresses us? Perhaps the
+problem has already been tackled by the schoolman who pondered how many
+angels could dance on the point of a needle.
+
+However, these and similar first principles, it will readily be seen,
+are far from being irrelevant for the visitor at the Earl's Court
+Exhibition. No doubt they are continually discussed by the thousands who
+daily and nightly throng that very charming dream-world which Mr.
+Kiralfy has built 'midmost the beating' of our 'steely sea.'
+
+To an age that is over-read and over-fed Mr. Kiralfy brings the message:
+'Leave your great minds at home, and go up the Great Wheel!' and I heard
+his voice and obeyed. The sensation is, I should say, something between
+going up in a balloon and being upon shipboard--a sensation compounded,
+maybe, of the creaking of the circular rigging, the pleasure of rising
+in the air, the freshening of the air as you ascend, the strange feeling
+of the earth receding and spreading out beneath you, the curious
+diminution of the people below--to their proper size. You will hear
+original minds all about you comparing them to ants, and it is curious
+to notice the involuntary feeling of contempt that possesses you as you
+watch them. I believe one has a half-defined illusion that we are
+growing greater as they are growing smaller. Ants and flies! ants and
+flies! with here and there a fiery centipede in the shape of a District
+train dashing in and out amongst them. We lose the power of
+understanding their motions, and their throngs and movements do indeed
+seem as purposeless at this height as the hurry-scurrying about an
+anthill. At this height, indeed, one seems to understand how small a
+matter a bank smash may seem to the Almighty; though, as a lady said to
+me--as we clung tightly together in terror 'a-top of the topmost
+bough'--it must be gratifying to see so many churches.
+
+Those who would keep their illusions about the beauty of London had
+better stay below, at least in the daytime, for it makes one's heart
+sink to look on those miles and miles of sordid grey roofs huddled in
+meaningless rows and crescents, just for all the world like a huge
+child's box of wooden bricks waiting to be arranged into some
+intelligible pattern. Of course, this is not London proper. Were the
+Great Wheel set up in Trafalgar Square, one is fain to hope that the
+view from it would be less disheartening--though it might be better not
+to try.
+
+By night, except for the bright oases of the Indian Exhibition, the view
+is little more than a black blank, a great inky plain with faint sparks
+and rows of light here and there, as though the world had been made of
+saltpetre paper, and had lately been set fire to. Were you a traveller
+from Mars you would say that the world was very badly lighted. But, for
+all that, night is the time for the Great Wheel, for the conflagration
+of pleasure at our feet makes us forget the void dark beyond. Then the
+Wheel seems like a great revolving spider's web, with fireflies
+entangled in it at every turn, and the little engine-house at the
+centre, with its two electric lights, seems like the great lord spider,
+with monstrous pearls for his eyes. And, as in the daytime the height
+robs the depth of its significance, strips poor humanity of any
+semblance of impressive or attractive meaning, at night the effect is
+just the reverse. What a fairy-world is this opening out beneath our
+feet, with its golden glowing squares and circles and palaces, with its
+lamplit gardens and pagodas! and who are these gay and beautiful beings
+flitting hither and thither, and passing from one bright garden to
+another on the stream of pleasure? If this many-coloured, passionate
+dream be really human life, let us hasten to be down amongst it once
+more! And, after all, is not this flattering night aspect of the world
+more true than that disheartening countenance of it in the daylight?
+Those golden squares and glowing gardens and flashing waters are, of
+course, an illusion of the magician Kiralfy's, yet what power could the
+illusion have upon us without the realities of beauty and love and
+pleasure it attracts there?
+
+
+
+
+THE BURIAL OF ROMEO AND JULIET
+
+
+One morning of all mornings the citizens of Verona were startled by
+strange news. Tragic forces, to which they had been accustomed to pay
+little heed, had been at work in their city during the dark hours, and
+young Romeo of the Montagues, handsome, devil-may-care lad as they had
+known him, and little Juliet of the Capulets, that madcap, merry, gentle
+young mistress, lay dead, side by side in the church of Santa Maria.
+
+Death! surely they were used to death! and Love, flower of the clove!
+they were used to _love_. But here were love and death, that somehow
+they could not understand. So they hurried in wondering groups to Santa
+Maria, that they might gaze at the dead lovers, and thus perhaps come to
+understand.
+
+Romeo and Juliet lay receiving their guests in the vault of the
+Capulets, with a strange smile of welcome for all who came. And their
+presence-chamber was bright with candles and flowers, and sweet with
+the sweet smell of death. The air that had drunk in their wild words
+and their last long looks of heavenly love still hung about the dark
+corners, as the air where a rose has been holds a little while the
+memory of its breath. Yes! that morning, in that dank but shining
+tomb, you might draw into you the very breath of love. The air you
+breathed had passed through the sweet lungs of Juliet, it had been
+etherealised with her holy passion, and washed clean with her lovely
+words. And now, for a little while yet, it feasted on the fair peace
+of their glad young faces. To-morrow, or the next day, or the next
+week, they would belong to the unvisited treasure-house of the past,
+but now this morning of all mornings, this day that could never come
+again, they still belonged to the real and radiant present.
+
+Flowers there are that bloom but once in a hundred years, but here in
+this tomb had blossomed one of those marvellous flowers that bloom but
+once throughout eternity. Poets and kings in after-times, O men of
+Verona, will yearn to have seen what you look upon to-day. For you, you
+thick and greasy citizens, are chosen out of all time to behold this
+beauty. There were once in the world thousands of men and women who had
+heard the very words of Christ as they fell from His lips, words that we
+may only read. There have been men, actual living, foolish men, who have
+looked on at the valour of Horatius, men who from the crowded banks of
+the Nile have watched the living body of Cleopatra step into her gilded
+barge, men who, standing idle in the streets of Florence, have seen the
+love-light start in the great Dante's eyes, seen his hand move to his
+laden heart, as the little Beatrice passed him by among her maidens.
+Base men of the past, by the indulgent accident of time, have been
+granted to behold these wonders, and now for you, O men of Verona, a
+like wonder has been born.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Romeo and Juliet lay receiving their guests in the vault of the
+Capulets, with a strange smile of welcome for all who came.
+
+It had been an innocent little desire, yet had all the world come
+against it. It had been a simple little desire, yet too strong for all
+the world to break.
+
+Strange this enmity of the world to love, as though men should take arms
+against the song of a bird, or plot against the opening of a flower.
+
+But now, what was this strange homage to a love that a few hours ago had
+no friend in all the daylight, a fearful bliss beneath the secret moon?
+But yesterday a stupid old nurse, a herb-gathering friar, a rascally
+apothecary, had been their only friends, and now was all the world come
+here to do their bidding.
+
+No need to steal again beneath the shade of orchard walls, no need again
+to heed if lark or nightingale sang in the reddening east. For the world
+had grown all warm to love, warm and kind as June to the rose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three days lay Romeo and Juliet receiving their guests in the vault of
+the Capulets, with that strange smile of welcome for all who came.
+Three days the world worshipped the love it could not understand, but
+still came dense and denser throngs to worship. For the news of the
+wonderful flower that had blossomed in Verona had gone far and wide, and
+travellers from distant cities kept pouring in to look at those strange
+young lovers, who had deemed the world well lost so that they might
+leave it together.
+
+Then the governor of the city decreed, as the time drew near when the
+two lovers must be left to their peace, and it was ill that any should
+lose the sight of this marvel, that on the fourth day they should be
+carried through the streets in the eyes of all the people, and then be
+buried together in the vault of the Capulets--for by this burial in the
+same tomb, says the old chronicler who was first honoured with the
+telling of their sweet story, the governor hoped to bring about a peace
+between the Montagues and Capulets, at least for a little while.
+
+Meanwhile, though Verona was a city of many trades and professions, and
+love and death were idle things, yet was there little said of business
+all these days, and little else done but talk of the two lovers, of
+whom, indeed, it was true, as it has seldom been true out of Holy Writ,
+that death was swallowed up in victory. During these days also there
+stole a strange sweetness over the city, as though the very spirit of
+love had nested there, and was filling the air with its soft
+breathing--as when in the first days of spring the birds sing so sweetly
+that broken hearts must hide away, and hard hearts grow a little kind.
+Men once more spoke kindly to their wives, and even coarse faces wore a
+gentle light,--just as sometimes at evening the setting sun will turn to
+tenderness even black rocks and frowning towers.
+
+There were many wild stories afloat about the end of the lovers. Some
+said one way and some another. By some the story went that Romeo was
+already dead before Juliet had awakened from her swoon, but others
+declared that the poison had not worked upon him until Juliet's
+awakening had made him awhile forget that he was to die. There were
+those who professed to know the very words of their wild farewell, and
+in fact there had been several witnesses of Juliet's agony over the body
+of her lord. These had told how first she had raved and clung to him,
+and called him 'Romeo,' 'Sweet Sir Romeo,' 'Husband,' and many
+flower-like names, and had petted him and wooed him to come back. Then
+on a sudden she had cried, God-a-mercy--how cold thou art!' and looked
+at him long and strangely. Then had she grown stern, and anon soft.
+'Canst thou not come back, my love? Then must I follow thee. Not so far
+art thou on the way of death, but that I shall overtake thee, and
+together shall we go to Pluto's realm, and seek a kinder world.'
+
+Thereat she had plunged Romeo's dagger into her side, though some said
+she had stopped her heart's beating by the strong will of her great
+love. Yea--such were the distracted rumours--some averred that at the
+last she had curst Christ and His saints, and called upon Venus, who, it
+was rumoured in awestruck whispers, was being worshipped once more in
+secret corners of the world.
+
+It was strong noon when, on the fourth day, Romeo and Juliet were
+carried through the bright and solemn streets, that the world might be
+saved; saved as ever by the spectacle and the worship of a mysterious
+nobility, [comma added by transcriber] an uncomprehended greatness, a
+beauty which haunts not its daily dreams, lifted up by the humble gaze
+of devout eyes into the empyrean of greater souls, stirred to an
+unfamiliar passion, and fired with glimpses of a strange unworldly
+truth.
+
+In the light of the sun the faces of the two lovers, as they lay amid
+their flowers, seemed to have grown a little weary, but they still wore
+their sweet and royal smile, and their laurelled brows were very white
+and proud.
+
+And in the faces that looked upon them, as they moved slowly by, with
+sweet death music, and the hushed marching of feet, and the wafted odour
+of lilies, there was to be seen strangely blent a great pity for their
+tragedy and a heavenly tenderness for their love. It was like a dream
+passing down the streets of a dream, so deep and tender was the silence,
+for only the hearts of men were speaking; though here and there a girl
+sobbed, or a young man buried his face in his sleeve, and the sternest
+eyes were dashed with the holy water of tears. And with the pity and
+tenderness, who shall say but that in all that silent heart-speech there
+was no little envy of the two who had loved so truly and died in the
+springtide of their love, before the ways of love had grown dusty with
+its summer, or dreary with its autumn, before its dreams had petrified
+into duties, and its passion deadened into use?
+
+'Would it were thou and I,' said many wedded eyes one to the other,
+delusively warm and soft for a moment, but all cold and hard again on
+the morrow.
+
+And maybe some poet would say in his heart--
+
+'If you loved her living, my Romeo, what were your love could you but
+see her dead!' for indeed life has no beauty so wonderful as the beauty
+of death.
+
+And, as in all places and times, there was a base remnant that gaped and
+worshipped not, and in their hearts resented all this distinction paid
+to a nobility they could not recognise, as the like had grumbled when
+Cimabue's Madonna had been carried through the streets in glory. But of
+these there is no need that we should take account, any more than of the
+beasts that moved head down amid the pastures outside the town, knowing
+not of the wonder that was passing within. For the ass will munch his
+thistles though the Son of Man be his rider, nor will the sheep look
+aside from his grazing though Apollo be the herdsman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At length the sacred pageant was ended, gone like the passing of an
+aerial music, and the people went to their homes silent, with haunted
+eyes; while the Earth, which had given this beauty, took it back to
+herself, and one more Persephone of human loveliness was shut within the
+gates of the forgetful grave.
+
+
+
+
+VARIATIONS UPON WHITEBAIT
+
+
+A very Pre-Raphaelite friend of mine came to me one day and said _à
+propos_ of his having designed a very Early English chair: 'After all,
+if one has anything to say one might as well put it into a chair!'
+
+I thought the remark rather delicious, as also his other remark when one
+day in a curiosity-shop we were looking at another chair, which the
+dealer declared to be Norman. My friend seated himself in it very
+gravely, and after softly moving about from side to side, testing it, it
+would appear, by the sensation it imparted to the sitting portion of his
+limbs, he solemnly decided: 'I don't think the _flavour_ of this chair
+is Norman!'
+
+I thought of this Pre-Raphaelite brother as the Sphinx and I were seated
+a few evenings ago at our usual little dinner, in our usual little
+sheltered corner, on the Lover's Gallery of one of the great London
+restaurants. The Sphinx says that there is only one place in Europe
+where one can really dine, but as it is impossible to be always within
+reasonable train service of that Montsalvat of cookery, she consents to
+eat with me--she cannot call it dine--at the restaurant of which I
+speak. I being very simple-minded, untravelled, and unlanguaged, think
+it, in my Cockney heart, a very fine place indeed, with its white marble
+pillars surrounding the spacious peristyle, and flashing with a thousand
+brilliant lights and colours; with its stately cooks, clothed in white
+samite, mystic, wonderful, ranged behind a great altar loaded with big
+silver dishes, and the sacred musicians of the temple ranged behind
+them--while in and out go the waiters, clothed in white and black,
+waiters so good and kind that I am compelled to think of Elijah being
+waited on by angels.
+
+They have such an eye for a romance, too, and really take it personally
+to heart if it should befall that our little table is usurped by others
+that know not love. I like them, too, because they really seem to have
+an eye for the strange beauty and charm of the Sphinx, quite an
+unexpected taste for Botticelli. They ill conceal their envy of my lot,
+and sometimes, in the meditative pauses between the courses, I see them
+romantically reckoning how it might be possible by desperately saving
+up, by prodigious windfalls of tips, from unexampled despatch and
+sweetness in their ministrations, how it might be possible in ten years'
+time, perhaps even in five--the lady would wait five years! and her
+present lover could be artistically poisoned meanwhile!--how it might be
+possible to come and sue for her beautiful hand. Then a harsh British
+cry for 'waiter' comes like a rattle and scares away that beautiful
+dream-bird, though, as the poor dreamer speeds on the quest of roast
+beef for four, you can see it still circling with its wonderful blue
+feathers around his pomatumed head.
+
+Ah, yes, the waiters know that the Sphinx is no ordinary woman. She
+cannot conceal even from them the mystical star of her face, they too
+catch far echoes of the strange music of her brain, they too grow
+dreamy with dropped hints of fragrance from the rose of her wonderful
+heart.
+
+How reverently do they help her doff her little cloak of silk and lace!
+with what a worshipful inclination of the head, as in the presence of a
+deity, do they await her verdict of choice between rival soups--shall it
+be 'clear or thick'? And when she decides on 'thick,' how relieved they
+seem to be, as if--well, some few matters remain undecided in the
+universe, but never mind, this is settled for ever--no more doubts
+possible on one portentous issue, at any rate--Madame will take her soup
+'thick.'
+
+'On such a night' our talk fell upon whitebait.
+
+As the Sphinx's silver fork rustled among the withered silver upon her
+plate, she turned to me and said:
+
+'Have you ever thought what beautiful little things these whitebait
+are?'
+
+'Oh, yes,' I replied, 'they are the daisies of the deep sea, the
+threepenny-pieces of the ocean.'
+
+'You dear!' said the Sphinx, who is alone in the world in thinking me
+awfully clever. 'Go on, say something else, something pretty about
+whitebait--there's a subject for you!'
+
+Then it was that, fortunately, I remembered my Pre-Raphaelite friend,
+and I sententiously remarked: 'Of course, if one has anything to say one
+cannot do better than say it about whitebait.... Well, whitebait....'
+
+But here, providentially, the band of the beef--that is, the band behind
+the beef; that is, the band that nightly hymns the beef (the phrase is
+to be had in three qualities)--struck up the overture from _Tannhäuser_,
+which is not the only music that makes the Sphinx forget my existence;
+and thus, forgetting me, she momentarily forgot the whitebait. But I
+remembered, remembered hard--worked at pretty things, as metal-workers
+punch out their flowers of brass and copper. The music swirled about us
+like golden waves, in which swam myriad whitebait, like showers of tiny
+stars, like falling snow. To me it was one grand processional of
+whitebait, silver ripples upon streams of gold.
+
+The music stopped. The Sphinx turned to me with the soul of Wagner in
+her eyes, and then she turned to the waiter: 'Would it be possible,' she
+said, 'to persuade the bandmaster to play that wonderful thing over
+again?'
+
+The waiter seemed a little doubtful, even for the Sphinx, but he went
+off to the bandmaster with the air of a man who has at last an
+opportunity to show that he can dare all for love. Personally, I have a
+suspicion that he poured his month's savings at the bandmaster's feet,
+and begged him to do this thing for the most wonderful lady in the
+world; or perhaps the bandmaster was really a musician, and his
+musician's heart was touched--lonely there amid the beef--to think that
+there was really some one, invisible though she were to him, some
+shrouded silver presence, up there among the beefeaters, who really
+loved to hear great music. Perhaps it was thus made a night he has never
+forgotten; perhaps it changed the whole course of his life--who knows?
+The sweet reassuring request may have come to him at a moment when, sick
+at heart, he was deciding to abandon real music for ever, and settle
+down amid the beef and the beef-music of Old England.
+
+Well, however it was, the waiter came back radiant with a 'Yes' on every
+shining part of him, and if the _Tannhäuser_ had been played well at
+first, certainly the orchestra surpassed themselves this second time.
+
+When the great jinnee of music had once more swept out of the hall, the
+Sphinx turned with shining eyes to the waiter:
+
+'Take,' she said, 'take these tears to the bandmaster. He has indeed
+earned them.'
+
+'Tears, little one!' I said. 'See how they swim like whitebait in the
+fishpools of your eyes!'
+
+'Oh, yes, the whitebait,' rejoined the Sphinx, glad of a subject to hide
+her emotion. 'Now tell me something nice about them, though the poor
+little things have long since disappeared. Tell me, for instance, how
+they get their beautiful little silver waterproofs?'
+
+'Electric Light of the World,' I said, 'it is like this. While they are
+still quite young and full of dreams, their mother takes them out in
+picnic parties of a billion or so at a time to where the spring moon is
+shining, scattering silver from its purse of pearl far over the wide
+waters,--silver, silver, for every little whitebait that cares to swim
+and pick it up. The mother, who has a contract with some such big
+restaurateur as ours, chooses a convenient area of moonlight, and then
+at a given sign they all turn over on their sides, and bask and bask in
+the rays, little fin pressed lovingly against little fin--for this is
+the happiest time in the young whitebait's life: it is at these
+silvering parties that matches are made and future consignments of
+whitebait arranged for. Well, night after night, they thus lie in the
+moonlight, first on one side, then on the other, till by degrees, tiny
+scale by scale, they have become completely lunar-plated. Ah! how sad
+they are when the end of that happy time has come!'
+
+'And what happens to them after that?' asked the Sphinx.
+
+'One night when the moon is hidden their mother comes to them with
+treacherous wile, and suggests that they should go off on a holiday
+again to seek the moon--the moon that for a moment seems captured by the
+pearl-fishers of the sky. And so off they go merrily, but, alas! no moon
+appears; and presently they are aware of unwieldy bumping presences upon
+the surface of the sea, presences as of huge dolphins; and rough voices
+call across the water, till, scared, the little whitebaits turn home in
+flight--to find themselves somehow meshed in an invisible prison, a net
+as fine and strong as air, into which, O agony! they are presently
+hauled, lovely banks of silver, shining like opened coffers beneath the
+coarse and ragged flares of yellow torches. The rest is silence.'
+
+'What sad little lives! and what a cruel world it is!' said the
+Sphinx--as she crunched with her knife through the body of a lark, that
+but yesterday had been singing in the blue sky. Its spirit sang just
+above our heads as she ate, and the air was thick with the grey ghosts
+of all the whitebait she had eaten that night.
+
+But there were no longer any tears in her eyes.
+
+
+
+
+THE ANSWER OF THE ROSE
+
+
+The Sphinx and I sat in our little box at _Romeo and Juliet_. It was the
+first time she had seen that fairy-tale of passion upon the stage. I had
+seen it played once before--in Paradise. Therefore, I rather trembled to
+see it again in an earthly play-house, and as much as possible kept my
+eyes from the stage. All I knew of the performance--but how much was
+that!--was two lovely voices making love like angels; and when there
+were no words, the music told me what was going on. Love speaks so many
+languages.
+
+One might as well look. It was as clear as moonlight to the tragic eye
+within the heart. The Sphinx was gazing on it all with those eyes that
+will never grow old, neither for years nor tears; but though I seemed to
+be seeing nothing but an advertisement of Paderewski pianos on the
+programme, I saw it--oh, didn't I see it?--all. The house had grown
+dark, and the music low and passionate, and for a moment no one was
+speaking. Only, deep in the thickets of my heart there sang a tragic
+nightingale that, happily, only I could hear; and I said to myself, 'Now
+the young fool is climbing the orchard wall! Yes, there go Benvolio and
+Mercutio calling him; and now,--"he jests at scars who never felt a
+wound"--the other young fool is coming out on to the balcony. God help
+them both! They have no eyes--no eyes--or surely they would see the
+shadow that sings "Love! Love! Love!" like a fountain in the moonlight,
+and then shrinks away to chuckle "Death! Death! Death!" in the
+darkness!'
+
+But, soft, what light from yonder window breaks!
+
+The Sphinx turned to me for sympathy--this time it was the soul of
+Shakespeare in her eyes.
+
+'Yes!' I whispered, 'it is the Opening of the Eternal Rose, sung by the
+Eternal Nightingale!'
+
+She pressed my hand approvingly; and while the lovely voices made their
+heavenly love, I slipped out my silver-bound pocket-book of ivory and
+pressed within it the rose which had just fallen from my lips.
+
+The worst of a great play is that one is so dull between the acts. Wit
+is sacrilege, and sentiment is bathos. Not another rose fell from my
+lips during the performance, though that I minded little, as I was the
+more able to count the pearls that fell from the Sphinx's eyes.
+
+It took quite half a bottle of champagne to pull us up to our usual
+spirits, as we sat at supper at a window where we could see London
+spread out beneath us like a huge black velvet flower, dotted with fiery
+embroideries, sudden flaring stamens, and rows of ant-like fireflies
+moving in slow zig-zag processions along and across its petals.
+
+'How strange it seems,' said the Sphinx, 'to think that for every two of
+those moving double-lights, which we know to be the eyes of hansoms, but
+which seem up here nothing but gold dots in a very barbaric pattern of
+black and gold, there are two human beings, no doubt at this time of
+night two lovers, throbbing with the joy of life, and dreaming, heaven
+knows what dreams!'
+
+'Yes,' I rejoined;' and to them I'm afraid we are even more impersonal.
+From their little Piccadilly coracles our watch-tower in the skies is
+merely a radiant facade of glowing windows, and no one of all who glide
+by realises that the spirited illumination is every bit due to your
+eyes. You have but to close them, and every one will be asking what has
+gone wrong with the electric light.'
+
+A little nonsense is a great healer of the heart, and by means of such
+nonsense as this we grew merry again. And anon we grew sentimental and
+poetic, but--thank heaven! we were no longer tragic.
+
+Presently I had news for the Sphinx. 'The rose-tree that grows in the
+garden of my mind,' I said, 'desires to blossom.'
+
+'May it blossom indeed,' she replied; 'for it has been flowerless all
+this long evening; and bring me a rose fresh with all the dews of
+inspiration--no florist's flower, wired and artificially scented, no
+bloom of yesterday's hard-driven brains.'
+
+'I was only thinking,' I said, '_à propos_ of nightingales and roses,
+that though all the world has heard the song of the nightingale to the
+rose, only the nightingale has heard the answer of the rose. You know
+what I mean?'
+
+'Know what you mean! Of course, that's always easy enough,' retorted the
+Sphinx, who knows well how to be hard on me.
+
+'I'm so glad,' I ventured to thrust back; 'for lucidity is the first
+success of expression: to make others see clearly what we ourselves are
+struggling to see, believe with all their hearts what we are just daring
+to hope, is--well, the religion of a literary man!'
+
+'Yes! it's a pretty idea,' said the Sphinx, once more pressing the rose
+of my thought to her brain; 'and indeed it's more than pretty ...'
+
+'Thank you!' I said humbly.
+
+'Yes, it's _true_--and many a humble little rose will thank you for it.
+For, your nightingale is a self-advertising bird. He never sings a song
+without an eye on the critics, sitting up there in their stalls among
+the stars. He never, or seldom, sings a song for pure love, just
+because he must sing it or die. Indeed, he has a great fear of death,
+unless--you will guarantee him immortality. But the rose, the trusting
+little earth-born rose, that must stay all her life rooted in one spot
+till some nightingale comes to choose her--some nightingale whose song
+maybe has been inspired and perfected by a hundred other roses, which
+are at the moment pot-pourri--ah, the shy bosom-song of the rose ...'
+
+Here the Sphinx paused, and added abruptly--
+
+'Well--there is no nightingale worthy to hear it!'
+
+'It is true,' I agreed, 'O trusting little earth-born rose!'
+
+'Do you know why the rose has thorns?' suddenly asked the Sphinx. Of
+course I knew, but I always respect a joke, particularly when it is but
+half-born--humourists always prefer to deliver themselves--so I shook my
+head.
+
+'To keep off the nightingales, of course,' said the Sphinx, the tone of
+her voice holding in mocking solution the words 'Donkey' and
+'Stupid,'--which I recognised and meekly bore.
+
+'What an excellent idea!' I said. 'I never thought of it before. But
+don't you think it's a little unkind? For, after all, if there were no
+nightingales, one shouldn't hear so much about the rose; and there is
+always the danger that if the rose continues too painfully thorny, the
+nightingale may go off and seek, say, a more accommodating lily.'
+
+'I have no opinion of lilies,' said the Sphinx.
+
+'Nor have I,' I answered soothingly; 'I much prefer roses--but ...
+but....'
+
+'But what?'
+
+'But--well, I much prefer roses. Indeed I do.'
+
+'Rose of the World,' I continued with sentiment, 'draw in your thorns. I
+cannot bear them.'
+
+'Ah!' she answered eagerly, 'that is just it. The nightingale that is
+worthy of the rose will not only bear, but positively love, her thorns.
+It is for that reason she wears them. The thorns of the rose properly
+understood are but the tests of the nightingale. The nightingale that
+is frightened of the thorns is not worthy of the rose--of that you may
+be sure....'
+
+'I am not frightened of the thorns,' I managed to interject.
+
+'Sing then once more,' she cried, 'the Song of the Nightingale.'
+
+And it was thus I sang:--
+
+  O Rose of the World, a nightingale,
+    A Bird of the World, am I,
+  I have loved all the world and sung all the world,
+    But I come to your side to die.
+
+  Tired of the world, as the world of me,
+    I plead for your quiet breast,
+  I have loved all the world and sung all the world--
+    But--where is the nightingale's nest?
+
+  In a hundred gardens I sung the rose,
+    Rose of the World, I confess--
+  But for every rose I have sung before
+    I love you the more, not less.
+
+  Perfect it grew by each rose that died,
+    Each rose that has died for you,
+  The song that I sing--yea, 'tis no new song,
+    It is tried--and so it is true.
+
+  Petal or thorn, yea! I have no care,
+    So that I here abide;
+  Pierce me, my love, or kiss me, my love,
+    But keep me close to your side.
+
+  I know not your kiss from your scorn, my love,
+    Your breast from your thorn, my rose,
+  And if you must kill me, well, kill me, my love!
+    But--say 'twas the death I chose.
+
+'Is it true?' asked the Rose.
+
+'As I am a nightingale,' I replied; and as we bade each other
+good-night, I whispered:
+
+'When may I expect the Answer of the Rose?'
+
+
+
+
+ABOUT THE SECURITIES
+
+
+When I say that my friend Matthew lay dying, I want you so far as
+possible to dissociate the statement from any conventional, and
+certainly from any pictorial, conceptions of death which you may have
+acquired. Death sometimes shows himself one of those impersonal artists
+who conceal their art, and, unless you had been told, you could hardly
+have guessed that Matthew was dying, dying indeed sixty miles an hour,
+dying of consumption, dying because some one else had died four years
+before, dying too of debt.
+
+Connoisseurs, of course, would have understood; at a glance would have
+named the sculptor who was silently chiselling those noble hollows in
+the finely modelled face,--that Pygmalion who turns all flesh to
+stone,--at a glance would have named the painter who was cunningly
+weighting the brows with darkness that the eyes might shine the more
+with an unaccustomed light. Matthew and I had long been students of the
+strange wandering artist, had begun by hating his art (it is ever so
+with an art unfamiliar to us), and had ended by loving it.
+
+'Let us see what the artist has added to the picture since yesterday,'
+said Matthew, signing to me to hand him the mirror.
+
+'H'm,' he murmured, 'he's had one of his lazy days, I'm afraid. He's
+hardly added a touch--just a little heightened the chiaroscuro,
+sharpened the nose a trifle, deepened some little the shadows round the
+eyes....
+
+'O why,' he presently sighed, 'does he not work a little overtime and
+get it done? He's been paid handsomely enough....
+
+'Paid,' he continued, 'by a life that is so much undeveloped gold-mine,
+paid by all my uncashed hopes and dreams....'
+
+'He works fast enough for me, old fellow,' I interrupted; 'there was a
+time, was there not, when he worked too fast for you and me?'
+
+There are moments, for certain people, when such fantastic unreality as
+this is the truest realism. Matthew and I talked like this with our
+brains, because we hadn't the courage to allow our hearts to break in
+upon the conversation. Had I dared to say some real emotional thing,
+what effect would it have had but to set poor tired Matthew a-coughing?
+and it was our aim that he should die with as little to-do as
+practicable. The emotional in such situations is merely the obvious.
+There was no need for either of us to state the elementary feelings of
+our love. I knew that Matthew was going to die, and he knew that--I was
+going to live, and we pitied each other accordingly; though I confess my
+feeling for him was rather one of envy,--when it was not congratulation.
+
+Thus, to tell the truth, we never mentioned 'the hereafter.' I don't
+believe it even occurred to us. Indeed, we spent the few hours that
+remained of our friendship in retailing the latest gathered of those
+good stories with which we had been accustomed to salt our intercourse.
+
+One of Matthew's anecdotes was, no doubt, somewhat suggested by the
+occasion, and I should add that he had always somewhat of an
+ecclesiastical bias--would, I believe, have ended some day as a
+Monsignor, a notable 'Bishop Blougram.'
+
+His story was of an evangelistic preacher who desired to impress his
+congregation with the unmistakable reality of hell-fire. 'You know the
+Black Country, my friends,' he had declaimed,' you have seen it, at
+night, flaring with a thousand furnaces, in the lurid incandescence of
+which myriads of unhappy beings, our fellow-creatures (God forbid!),
+snatch a precarious existence--you have seen them silhouetted against
+the yellow glare, running hither and thither, as it seemed from afar, in
+the very jaws of the awful fire. Have you realised that the burdens with
+which they thus run hither and thither are molten iron, iron to which
+such a stupendous heat has been applied that it has melted, melted as
+though it had been sugar in the sun?--well! returning to hell-fire, let
+me tell you this, that in hell they eat this fiery molten metal for
+ice-cream!--yes! and are glad to get anything so cool.'
+
+It was thus we talked while Matthew lay dying, for why should we not
+talk as we had lived? We both laughed long and heartily over this story;
+perhaps it would have amused us less had Matthew not been dying; and
+then his kind old nurse brought in our lunch. We had both excellent
+appetites, and were far from indifferent to the dainty little meal which
+was to be our last but one together. I brought my table as close to
+Matthew's pillow as was possible, and he stroked my hand with tenderness
+in which there was a touch of gratitude.
+
+'You are not frightened of the bacteria!' he laughed sadly; and then he
+told me, with huge amusement, how a friend (and a true, dear friend for
+all that) had come to see him a day or two before, and had hung over the
+end of the bed to say farewell, daring to approach no nearer, mopping
+his fear-perspiring brows with a handkerchief soaked in 'Eucalyptus'!
+
+'He had brought an anticipatory elegy too,' said my friend, 'written
+against my burial. I wish you'd read it for me,' and he fidgeted for it
+in the nervous manner of the dying. Finding it among his pillows, he
+handed it to me saying, 'You needn't be frightened of it. It is well
+dosed with Eucalyptus.'
+
+We laughed even more over this poem than over our stories, and then we
+discussed the terms of three cremation societies to which, at the
+express request of my friend, I had written a day or two before.
+
+Then having smoked a cigar and drunk a glass of port together (for the
+assured dying are allowed to 'live well'), Matthew grew sleepy, and,
+tucking him beneath the counterpane, I left him, for, after all, he was
+not to die that day.
+
+Circumstances prevented my seeing him again for a week. When I did so,
+entering the room poignantly redolent of the strange sweet odour of
+antiseptics, I saw that the great artist had been busy in my absence.
+Indeed, his work was nearly at an end. Yet to one unfamiliar with his
+methods there was still little to alarm in Matthew's face. In fact, with
+the exception of his brain, and his ice-cold feet, he was alive as ever.
+And even to his brain had come a certain unnatural activity, a life as
+of the grave, a sort of vampire vitality, which would assuredly have
+deceived any who had not known him. He still told his stories, laughed
+and talked with the same unconquerable humour, was in every way alert
+and practical, with this difference, that he had forgotten he was going
+to die, that the world in which he exercised his various faculties was
+another world to that in which, in spite of his delirium, we ate our
+last boiled fowl, drank our last wine, smoked our last cigar together.
+His talk was so convincingly rational, dealt with such unreal matters in
+so every-day a fashion, that you were ready to think that surely it was
+you and not he whose mind was wandering.
+
+'You might reach that pocket-book, and ring for Mrs. Davies,' he would
+say in so casual a way that of course you would ring. On Mrs. Davies's
+appearance he would be fumbling about among the papers in his
+pocket-book, and presently he would say, with a look of frustration that
+went to one's heart--'I've got a ten-pound note somewhere here for you,
+Mrs. Davies, to pay you up till Saturday, but somehow I seem to have
+lost it. Yet it must be somewhere about. Perhaps you'll find it as you
+make the bed in the morning. I'm so sorry to have troubled you....'
+
+And then he would grow tired and doze a little on his pillow.
+
+Suddenly he would be alert again, and with a startling vividness tell me
+strange stories from the dreamland into which he was now passing.
+
+I had promised to see him on Monday, but had been prevented, and had
+wired to him accordingly. This was Tuesday.
+
+'You needn't have troubled to wire,' he said. 'Didn't you know I was in
+London from Saturday to Monday?'
+
+'The doctor and Mrs. Davies didn't know,' he continued with the creepy
+cunning of the dying: 'I managed to slip away to look at a house I think
+of taking--in fact I've taken it. It's in--in--now, where is it? Now
+isn't that silly? I can see it as plain as anything--yet I cannot, for
+the life of me, remember where it is, or the number.... It was somewhere
+St. John's Wood way ... never mind, you must come and see me there, when
+we get in....'
+
+I said he was dying in debt, and thus the heaven that lay about his
+deathbed was one of fantastic Eldorados, sudden colossal legacies, and
+miraculous windfalls.
+
+'I haven't told you,' he said presently, 'of the piece of good luck that
+has befallen me. You are not the only person in luck. I can hardly
+expect you to believe me, it sounds so like the Arabian Nights. However,
+it's true for all that. Well, one of the little sisters was playing in
+the garden a few afternoons ago, making mud-pies or something of that
+sort, and she suddenly scraped up a sovereign. Presently she found two
+or three more, and our curiosity becoming aroused, a turn or two with
+the spade revealed quite a bed of gold; and the end of it was, that on
+further excavating, the whole garden proved to be one mass of
+sovereigns. Sixty thousand pounds we counted ... and then, what do you
+think?--it suddenly melted away....'
+
+He paused for a moment, and continued, more in amusement than regret--
+
+'Yes--the Government got wind of it, and claimed the whole lot as
+treasure-trove!
+
+'But not,' he added slyly, 'before I'd paid off two or three of my
+biggest bills. Yes--and--you'll keep it quiet, of course,--there's
+another lot been discovered in the garden, but we shall take good care
+the Government doesn't get hold of it this time, you bet.'
+
+He told this wild story with such an air of simple conviction that, odd
+as it may seem, one believed every word of it. But the tale of his
+sudden good-fortune was not ended.
+
+'You've heard of old Lord Osterley,' he presently began again. 'Well,
+congratulate me, old man: he has just died and left everything to me.
+You know what a splendid library he had--to think that that will all be
+mine--and that grand old park through which we've so often wandered, you
+and I! Well, we shall need fear no gamekeeper now, and of course, dear
+old fellow, you'll come and live with me--like a prince--and just write
+your own books and say farewell to journalism for ever. Of course I can
+hardly believe it's true yet. It seems too much of a dream, and yet
+there's no doubt about it. I had a letter from my solicitors this
+morning, saying that they were engaged in going through the securities,
+and--and--but the letter's somewhere over there; you might read it. No?
+can't you find it? It's there somewhere about, I know. Never mind, you
+can see it again....' he finished wearily.
+
+'Yes!' he presently said, half to himself, 'it will be a wonderful
+change! a wonderful change!'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At length the time came to say good-bye, a good-bye I knew must be the
+last, for my affairs were taking me so far away from him that I could
+not hope to see him for some days.
+
+'I'm afraid, old man,' I said, 'that I mayn't be able to see you for
+another week.'
+
+'O never mind, old fellow, don't worry about me. I'm much better
+now--and by the time you come again we shall know all about the
+securities.'
+
+The securities! My heart had seemed like a stone, incapable of feeling,
+all those last unreal hours together; but the pathos of that sad phrase,
+so curiously symbolic, suddenly smote it with overwhelming pity, and the
+tears sprang to my eyes for the first time. As I bent over him to kiss
+his poor damp forehead, and press his hand for the last farewell, I
+murmured--
+
+'Yes--dear, dear old friend. We shall know all about the securities....'
+
+
+
+
+THE BOOM IN YELLOW
+
+
+Green must always have a large following among artists and art lovers;
+for, as has been pointed out, an appreciation of it is a sure sign of a
+subtle artistic temperament. There is something not quite good,
+something almost sinister, about it--at least, in its more complex
+forms, though in its simple form, as we find it in outdoor nature, it is
+innocent enough; and, indeed, is it not used in colloquial metaphor as
+an adjective for innocence itself? Innocence has but two colours, white
+or green. But Becky Sharp's eyes also were green, and the green of the
+aesthete does not suggest innocence. There will always be wearers of the
+green carnation; but the popular vogue which green has enjoyed for the
+last ten or fifteen years is probably passing. Even the aesthete himself
+would seem to be growing a little weary of its indefinitely divided
+tones, and to be anxious for a colour sensation somewhat more positive
+than those to be gained from almost imperceptible _nuances_, of green.
+Jaded with over-refinements and super-subtleties, we seem in many
+directions to be harking back to the primary colours of life. Blue,
+crude and unsoftened, and a form of magenta, have recently had a short
+innings; and now the triumph of yellow is imminent. Of course, a love
+for green implies some regard for yellow, and in our so-called aesthetic
+renaissance the sunflower went before the green carnation--which is,
+indeed, the badge of but a small schism of aesthetes, and not worn by
+the great body of the more catholic lovers of beauty.
+
+Yellow is becoming more and more dominant in decoration--in wall-papers,
+and flowers cultivated with decorative intention, such as
+chrysanthemums. And one can easily understand why: seeing that, after
+white, yellow reflects more light than any other colour, and thus
+ministers to the growing preference for light and joyous rooms. A few
+yellow chrysanthemums will make a small room look twice its size, and
+when the sun comes out upon a yellow wall-paper the whole room seems
+suddenly to expand, to open like a flower. When it falls upon the pot of
+yellow chrysanthemums, and sets them ablaze, it seems as though one had
+an angel in the room. Bill-posters are beginning to discover the
+attractive qualities of the colour. Who can ever forget meeting for the
+first time upon a hoarding Mr. Dudley Hardy's wonderful Yellow Girl, the
+pretty advance-guard of _To-Day_? But I suppose the honour of the
+discovery of the colour for advertising purposes rests with Mr. Colman;
+though its recent boom comes from the publishers, and particularly from
+the Bodley Head. _The Yellow Book_ with any other colour would hardly
+have sold as well--the first private edition of Mr. Arthur Benson's
+poems, by the way, came caparisoned in yellow, and with the identical
+name, _Le Cahier Jaune_; and no doubt it was largely its title that made
+the success of _The Yellow Aster_. In literature, indeed, yellow has
+long been the colour of romance. The word 'yellow-back' witnesses its
+close association with fiction; and in France, as we know, it is the
+all but universal custom to bind books in yellow paper. Mr. Heinemann
+and Mr. Unwin have endeavoured to naturalise the custom here; but,
+though in cloth yellow has emphatically 'caught on,' in paper it still
+hangs fire. The ABC Railway Guide is probably the only exception, and
+that, it is to be hoped, is not fiction. Mr. Lang has recently followed
+the fashion with his _Yellow Fairy Book_; and, indeed, one of the best
+known figures in fairydom is yellow--namely, the Yellow Dwarf. Yellow,
+always a prominent Oriental colour, was but lately of peculiar
+significance in the Far East; for were not the sorrows of a certain high
+Chinese official intimately connected with the fatal colour? The Yellow
+Book, the Yellow Aster, the Yellow Jacket!--and the Yellow Fever, like
+'Orion' Home's sunshine, is always with us' somewhere in the world.' The
+same applies also, I suppose, to the Yellow Sea.
+
+Till one comes to think of it, one hardly realises how many important
+and pleasant things in life are yellow. Blue and green, no doubt,
+contract for the colouring of vast departments of the physical world.
+'Blue!' sings Keats, in a fine but too little known sonnet--
+
+  '... 'Tis the life of heaven--the domain
+    Of Cynthia--the wide palace of the sun--
+  The tent of Hesperus, and all his train--
+  The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey, and dun.
+  Blue! 'Tis the life of waters ...
+  Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest green,
+    Married to green in all the sweetest flowers.'
+
+Yellow might retort by quoting Mr. Grant Allen, in his book on _The
+Colour Sense_, to the effect that the blueness of sea and sky is mainly
+poetical illusion or inaccuracy, and that sea and sky are found blue
+only in one experiment out of fourteen. At morning and evening they are
+usually in great part stained golden. Blue certainly has one advantage
+over yellow, in that it has the privilege of colouring some of the
+prettiest eyes in the world. Yellow has a chance only in cases of
+jaundice and liver complaint, and his colour scheme in such cases is
+seldom appreciated. Again, green has the contract for the greater bulk
+of the vegetable life of the globe; but his is a monotonous business,
+like the painting of miles and miles of palings: grass, grass, grass,
+trees, trees, trees, _ad infinitum_; whereas yellow leads a roving,
+versatile life, and is seldom called upon for such monotonous labour.
+The sands of Sahara are probably the only conspicuous instance of yellow
+thus working by the piece. It is in the quality, in the diversity of the
+things it colours, rather than in their mileage or tonnage, that yellow
+is distinguished; though, for that matter, we suppose, the sun is as big
+and heavy as most things, and that is yellow. Of course, when we say
+yellow we include golden, and all varieties of the colour--saffron,
+orange, flaxen, tawny, blonde, topaz, citron, etc.
+
+If the sun may reasonably be described as the most important object in
+the world, surely money is the next. That, as we know, is, in its most
+potent metallic form, yellow also. The 'yellow gold' is a favourite
+phrase in certain forms of poetry; and 'yellow-boys' is a term of
+natural affection among sailors. Following the example of their lord the
+sun, most fires and lights are yellow or golden, and it is only in
+times of danger or superstition that they burn red or blue. And, if
+yellow be denied entrance to beautiful eyes, it enjoys a privilege
+which--except in the case of certain indigo-staining African tribes, who
+cannot be said to count--blue has never claimed: that of colouring
+perhaps the loveliest thing in the world, the hair of woman. Hair is
+naturally golden--unnaturally also. When Browning sings pathetically of
+'dear dead women--with such hair too!' he continues:--
+
+  'What's become of all the _gold_
+  Used to hang and brush their bosoms'--
+
+not 'all the blue' or 'all the brown,' though some of us, it is true,
+are condemned to wear our hair brown or blue-black. But such are only
+unhappy exceptions. Yellow or gold is the rule. The bravest men and the
+fairest women have had golden hair, and, we may add, in reference to
+another distinction of the colour we are celebrating, golden hearts.
+Hair at the present time is doing its best to conform to its normal
+conditions of colour. Numerous instances might be adduced of its
+changing from black to gold, in obedience to chemical law. 'Peroxide of
+hydrogen!' says the cynic. 'Beauty!' says the lover of art.
+
+And it might be argued, in a world of inevitable compromise, that the
+damage done to the physical health and texture of the hair thus playing
+the chameleon may well be overbalanced by the happiness, and consequent
+increased effectiveness, of the person thus dyeing for the sake of
+beauty. Thaumaturgists lay much stress on the mystic influence of
+colours; and who knows but that, if we were only allowed to dye our hair
+what colour we chose, we might be different men and women? Strange
+things are told of women who have dyed their hair the colour of blood or
+of wine, and we know from Christina Rossetti that golden hair is
+negotiable in fairyland--
+
+  '"You have much gold upon your head,"
+  They answered all together:
+    "Buy from us with a golden curl."'
+
+Whether Laura could have done business with the goblin merchantmen with
+an oxidised curl is a difficult point, for fairies have sharp eyes; and,
+though it be impossible for a mortal to tell the real gold from the
+false gold hair, the fairies may be able to do so, and might reject the
+curl as counterfeit.
+
+Again, if in the vegetable world green almost universally colours the
+leaves, yellow has more to do with the flowers. The flowers we love best
+are yellow: the cowslip, the daffodil, the crocus, the buttercup, half
+the daisy, the honeysuckle, and the loveliest rose. Yellow, too, has its
+turn even with the leaves; and what an artist he shows himself when, in
+autumn, he 'lays his fiery finger' upon them, lighting up the forlorn
+woodland with splashes--pure palette-colour of audacious gold! He hangs
+the mulberry with heart-shaped yellow shields--which reminds one of the
+heraldic importance of 'or,'--and he lines the banks of the Seine with
+phantasmal yellow poplars. And other leaves still dearer to the heart
+are yellow likewise; leaves of those sweet old poets whose thoughts seem
+to have turned the pages gold. Let us dream of this: a maid with yellow
+hair, clad in a yellow gown, seated in a yellow room, at the window a
+yellow sunset, in the grate a yellow fire, at her side a yellow
+lamplight, on her knee a Yellow Book. And the letters we love best to
+read--when we dare--are they not yellow too? No doubt some disagreeable
+things are reported of yellow. We have had the yellow-fever, and we have
+had pea-soup. The eyes of lions are said to be yellow, and the ugliest
+cats--the cats that infest one's garden--are always yellow. Some
+medicines are yellow, and no doubt there are many other yellow
+disagreeables; but we prefer to dwell upon the yellow blessings. I had
+almost forgotten that the gayest wines are yellow. Nor has religion
+forgotten yellow. It is to be hoped yellow will not forget religion. The
+sacred robe of the second greatest religion of the world is yellow, 'the
+yellow robe' of the Buddhist friar; and when the sacred harlots of
+Hindustan walk in lovely procession through the streets, they too, like
+the friars, are clad in yellow. Amber is yellow; so is the orange; and
+so were stage-coaches and many dashing things of the old time; and pink
+is yellow by lamplight. But gold-mines, it has been proved, are not so
+yellow as is popularly supposed. Hymen's robe is Miltonically 'saffron,'
+and the dearest petticoat in all literature--not forgetting the
+'tempestuous' garment of Herrick's Julia--was 'yaller.' Yes!--
+
+  ''Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green,
+  An' er name was Supi-yaw-lat, jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen.'
+
+Is it possible to say anything prettier for yellow than that?
+
+
+
+
+LETTER TO AN UNSUCCESSFUL LITERARY MAN
+
+
+My Dear Sir,--I agree with every word you say. You have my entire
+sympathy. The world is indeed hard, hard to the sad--particularly hard
+to the unsuccessful. A sure five hundred a year covers a multitude of
+sorrows. It is ever an ill wind for the shorn lamb. If it be true that
+nothing succeeds like success, it is no less sadly true that nothing
+fails like failure. And when one thinks of it, it is only natural, for
+every failure is an obstruction in the stream of life. Metaphorical
+writers are fond of saying that the successful ride to success on the
+back of the failures. It is true that many rise on stepping-stones of
+their dead relations--but that is because their relations have been
+financial successes. In truth, instead of the failure making the
+fortune of the successful, it is just the reverse. A very successful man
+would be the more successful were it not for the failures--on whom he
+has either to spend his money to support, or his time to advise. The
+strong are said to be impatient towards the weak--and is it to be
+wondered at, in a world where even the strongest need all their
+strength, in a sea where the best swimmer needs all his wind and muscle
+and skill to keep afloat? If success is sometimes 'unfeeling' towards
+failure, failure is often unfair to success. Of course, 'it is He that
+hath made us and not we ourselves,' but that is a text that cuts both
+ways; and when all is said and done, the failure detracts from the force
+in the universe; he is the clog on the wheel of fortune. To say that the
+successful man benefits by the failure of others is as true as it would
+be to say that the ratepayer benefits by the poor-rates. You use the
+word 'charlatan' somewhat profusely of several successful writers, and
+no doubt you are right. But you must remember that it is a favourite
+charge against the gifted and the fortunate. Because we have failed by
+fair means, we are sure the other fellows have succeeded by foul. And,
+moreover, one is apt to forget how much talent is needed to be a
+charlatan. Never look down upon a charlatan. Courage, skill, personal
+force or charm, great knowledge of human nature, dramatic instinct, and
+industry--few charlatans succeed (and no one is called a charlatan till
+he _does_ succeed, be his success as low or high as you please) without
+possessing a majority of these qualities; how many of which--it would be
+interesting to know--do you possess?
+
+Indeed, it would seem to need more gifts to be a rogue than an honest
+man, and there is a sense in which every great man may be described as a
+charlatan--_plus_ greatness; greatness being an almost indefinable
+quality, a quality, at any rate, on which there is a bewildering
+diversity of opinion.
+
+You seem a little cross with publishers and editors. They have not
+proved the distinguished, brilliant, and sympathetic beings you imagined
+them in your boyish dreams. No doubt, publishers and editors enter
+hardly into the kingdom of heaven. But then, you see, they don't care so
+much about that; they are much more interested in the next election at
+certain fashionable clubs. It is really a little hard on them that they
+should suffer from the ignorant misconception of the literary amateur.
+It is only those who have had no dealings with them who would be unfair
+enough to expect publishers or editors to be literary men. They are
+business men--business men _par excellence_--and a good thing, too, for
+their papers and their authors. You lament their mercenary view of life;
+but, judging by your letter, even you are not disposed to regard money
+as the root of all evil.
+
+You cannot understand why you have failed where others have succeeded.
+You have far more Greek than Keats, more history than Scott, and you
+know nineteen languages--ten of them to speak. With so many
+accomplishments, it must indeed be hard to fail--though you do not seem
+to have found it difficult. You have travelled too--have been twice
+round the world, and have a thorough knowledge of the worst hotels.
+Certainly, it is singular. Nevertheless, I must confess that the dullest
+men I have ever met have been professors of history; the worst poets
+have not only known Greek, but French as well; and, generally speaking
+the most tiresome of my acquaintances have more degrees than I have
+Latin to name them in. Alas! it is not experience, or travel, or
+language, but the use we make of them, that makes literary success,
+which, one may add, is particularly dependent--perhaps not
+unnaturally--on the use we make of language. A book may be a book,
+although there is neither Latin nor Greek, nor travel, nor
+experience--in fact 'nothing' in it; and though, like myself, you may
+pay an Oxford professor a thousand a year to correct your proofs, you
+may still miss immortality.
+
+To these intellectual and general equipments you add goodness of heart,
+sincerity of conviction, and martyrdom for your opinions; you are, it
+would seem, like many others of us, the best fellow and greatest man of
+your acquaintance. Permit me to remind you that we are not talking of
+goodness of heart, of strength or beauty of character, but of success,
+which is a thing apart, a fine art in itself.
+
+You confess that you are somewhat unpractical: you expect
+others--hard-worked journalists who never met you--to tell you what to
+read, how to form your style, and how 'to get into the magazines.' You
+are, you say, with something of pride, but a poor business man. That is
+a pity, for nearly every successful literary man of the day, and
+particularly the novelists, are excellent business men. Indeed, the
+history of literature all round has proved that the men who have been
+masters of words have also been masters of things--masters of the facts
+of life for which those words stand. Many writers have mismanaged their
+affairs from idleness and indifference, but few from incapacity. Leigh
+Hunt boasted that he could never master the multiplication-table.
+Perhaps that accounts for his comparative failure as a writer.
+Incompetence in one art is far from being a guarantee of competency in
+another, and a man is all the more likely to make a name if he is able
+to make a living--though, judging from Coleridge, it seems a good plan
+to let another hard-worked man support one's wife and children. On the
+other hand, though business faculty is a great deal, it is not
+everything: for a man may be as punctual and methodical as Southey, and
+yet miss the prize of his high calling, or as generally 'impossible' as
+Blake, and yet win his place among the immortals.
+
+In fact, after all, success in literature has something to do with
+writing. In temporary success, industry and business faculty, and an
+unworked field--be it Scotland, Ireland, or the Isle of Man (any place
+but plain England!)--are the chief factors. For that more lasting
+success which we call fame other qualities are needed, such qualities as
+imagination, fancy, and magic and force in the use of words. Can you
+honestly say, O beloved, though tiresome, correspondent, that these
+great gifts are yours? Judging from your letter--but Heaven forbid that
+I should be unkind! For, need I say I love you with a fellow-feeling? Do
+you think that you are the only unappreciated genius on the planet--not
+to speak of all the other unappreciated geniuses on all the other
+planets? Thank goodness, the postal arrangements with the latter are as
+yet defective! Others there are with hearts as warm, minds as profound,
+and style at least as attractive, who languish in unmerited
+neglect--Miltons inglorious indeed, though far from mute.
+
+Believe me, you are not alone. In fact, there are so many like you that
+it would be quite easy for you to find society without worrying me. And,
+for all of us, there is the consolation that, though we fail as writers,
+we may still succeed as citizens, as husbands and fathers and friends.
+As Whitman would say--because you are not Editor of _The Times_, do you
+give in that you are less than a man? There are poets that have never
+entered into the Bodley Head, and great prose-writers who have never sat
+in an editorial chair. Be satisfied with your heavenly crowns, O you
+whining unsuccessful, and leave to your inferiors the earthly
+five-shilling pieces.
+
+
+
+
+A POET IN THE CITY
+
+
+  'In the midway of this our mortal life,
+  I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.'
+
+I (and when I say I, I must be understood to be speaking dramatically)
+only venture into the City once a year, for the very pleasant purpose of
+drawing that twelve-pound-ten by which the English nation, ever so
+generously sensitive to the necessities, not to say luxuries, of the
+artist, endeavours to express its pride and delight in me. It would be a
+very graceful exercise of gratitude for me here to stop and parenthesise
+the reader on the subject of all that twelve-pound-ten has been to me,
+how it has quite changed the course of my life, given me that
+long-desired opportunity of doing my best work in peace, for which so
+often I vainly sighed in Fleet Street, and even allowed me an indulgence
+in minor luxuries which I could not have dreamed of enjoying before the
+days of that twelve-pound-ten. Now not only peace and plenty, but
+leisure and luxury are mine. There is nothing goes so far as--Government
+money.
+
+Usually on these literally State occasions, I drive up in state, that is
+in a hansom. There is only one other day in the year on which I am so
+splendid, but that is another beautiful story. It, too, is a day and an
+hour too joyous to be approached otherwise than on winged wheels, too
+stately to be approached in merely pedestrian fashion. To go on foot to
+draw one's pension seems a sort of slight on the great nation that does
+one honour, as though a Lord Mayor should make his appearance in the
+procession in his office coat.
+
+So I say it is my custom to go gaily, and withal stately, to meet my
+twelve-pound-ten in a hansom. For many reasons the occasion always seems
+something of an adventure, and I confess I always feel a little excited
+about it--indeed, to tell the truth, a little nervous. As I glide along
+in my state barge (which seems a much more proper and impressive image
+for a hansom than 'gondola,' with its reminiscences of Earl's Court) I
+feel like some fragile country flower torn from its roots, and
+bewilderingly hurried along upon the turbid, swollen stream of London
+life.
+
+The stream glides sweetly with a pleasant trotting tinkle of bells by
+the green parkside of Piccadilly, and sweet is it to hear the sirens
+singing, and to see them combing their gilded locks, on the yellow sands
+of Piccadilly Circus--so called, no doubt, from the number of horses and
+the skill of their drivers. Here are the whirling pools of pleasure,
+merry wheels of laughing waters, where your hansom glides along with a
+golden ease--it is only when you enter the First Cataract of the Strand
+that you become aware of the far-distant terrible roar of the Falls!
+They are yet nearly two miles away, but already, like Niagara, thou
+hearest the sound thereof--the fateful sound of that human Niagara,
+where all the great rivers of London converge: the dark, strong floods
+surging out from the gloomy fastnesses of the East End, the
+quick-running streams from the palaces of the West, the East with its
+wagons, the West with its hansoms, the four winds with their omnibuses,
+the horses and carriages under the earth jetting up their companies of
+grimy passengers, the very air busy with a million errands.
+
+You are in the rapids--metaphorically speaking--as you crawl down
+Cheapside; and here where the Bank of England and the Mansion House rise
+sheer and awful from, shall we say, this boiling caldron, this 'hell' of
+angry meeting waters--Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, Queen Victoria
+Street and Cheapside, each 'running,' again metaphorically, 'like a
+mill-race'--here in this wild maelstrom of human life and human
+conveyances, here is the true 'Niagara in London,' here are the most
+wonderful falls in the world--the London Falls.
+
+'Yes!' I said softly to myself, and I could see the sly sad smile on the
+face of the dead poet, at the thought of whose serene wisdom a silence
+like snow seemed momentarily to cover up the turmoil--'Yes!' I said
+softly, 'there is still the same old crush at the corner of Fenchurch
+Street!'
+
+By this time I had disbursed one of my two annual cab-fares, and was
+standing a little forlorn at that very corner. It was a March afternoon,
+bitter and gloomy; lamps were already popping alight in a desolate way,
+and the east wind whistled mournfully through the ribs of the
+passers-by. A very unflowerlike man was dejectedly calling out
+'daffadowndillies' close by. The sound of the pretty old word, thus
+quaintly spoken, brightened the air better than the electric lights
+which suddenly shot rows of wintry moonlight along the streets. I bought
+a bunch of the poor pinched flowers, and asked the man how he came to
+call them 'daffadowndillies.'
+
+'D'vunshur,' he said, in anything but a Devonshire accent, and then the
+east wind took him and he was gone--doubtless to a neighbouring tavern;
+and no wonder, poor soul! Flowers certainly fall into strange hands here
+in London.
+
+Well, it was nearing four, and if I wanted a grateful country's
+twelve-pound-ten, I must make haste; so presently I found myself in a
+great hall, of which I have no clearer impression than that there were
+soft little lights all about me, and a soft chime of falling gold, like
+the rippling of Pactolus. I have a sort of idea, too, of a great number
+of young men with most beautiful moustaches, playing with golden
+shovels; and as I thus stood among the soft lights and listened to the
+most beautiful sound in the world, I thought that thus must Danæ have
+felt as she stood amid the falling shower. But I took care to see that
+my twelve sovereigns and a half were right number and weight for all
+that.
+
+Once more in the street, I lingered a while to take a last look at the
+Falls. What a masterful alien life it all seemed to me! No single
+personality could hope to stand alone amid all that stress of ponderous,
+bullying forces. Only public companies, and such great impersonalities,
+could hope to hold their own, to swim in such a whirlpool--and even
+they, I had heard it whispered, far away in my quiet starlit garret,
+sometimes went down. 'How,' I cried, 'would--
+
+  '... my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights ...
+  Rush of suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites,'
+
+again quoting poetry. I always quote poetry in the City, as a
+protest--moreover, it clears the air.
+
+The more people buffeted against me the more I felt the crushing sense
+of almost cosmic forces. Everybody was so plainly an atom in a public
+company, a drop of water in a tyrannous stream of human
+energy--companies that cared nothing for their individual atoms, streams
+that cared nothing for their component drops; such atoms and drops, for
+the most part, to be had for thirty shillings a week. These people about
+me seemed no more like individual men and women than individual puffs in
+a mighty rushing wind, or the notes in a great scheme of music, are men
+and women--to the banker so many pens with ears whereon to perch them,
+to the capitalist so many 'hands,' and to the City man generally so many
+'helpless pieces of the game he plays' up there in spidery nooks and
+corners of the City.
+
+As I listened to the throbbing of the great human engines in the
+buildings about me, a rising and a falling there seemed as of those
+great steel-limbed monsters, weird contortionists of metal, that jet up
+and down, and writhe and wrestle this way and that, behind the long
+glass windows of great water-towers, or toil like Vulcan in the bowels
+of mighty ships. An expression of frenzy seems to come up even from the
+dumb tossing steel; sometimes it seems to be shaking great knuckled
+fists at one and brandishing threatening arms, as it strains and sweats
+beneath the lash of the compulsive steam. As one watches it, there seems
+something of human agony about its panic-stricken labours, and something
+like a sense of pity surprises one--a sense of pity that anything in the
+world should have to work like that, even steel, even, as we say,
+senseless steel. What, then, of these great human engine-houses! Will
+the engines always consent to rise and fall, night and day, like that?
+or will there some day be a mighty convulsion, and this blind Samson of
+labour pull down the whole engine-house upon his oppressors? Who knows?
+These are questions for great politicians and thinkers to decide, not
+for a poet, who is too much terrified by such forces to be able calmly
+to estimate and prophesy concerning them.
+
+Yes! if you want to realise Tennyson's picture of 'one poor poet's
+scroll' ruling the world, take your poet's scroll down to Fenchurch
+Street and try it there. Ah, what a powerless little 'private interest'
+seems poetry there, poetry 'whose action is no stronger than a flower.'
+In days of peace it ventures even into the morning papers; but, let only
+a rumour of war be heard, and it vanishes like a dream on doomsday
+morning. A County Council election passeth over it and it is gone.
+
+Yet it was near this very spot that Keats dug up the buried beauty of
+Greece, lying hidden beneath Finsbury Pavement! and in the deserted City
+churches great dramatists lie about us. Maybe I have wronged the
+City--and at this thought I remembered a little bookshop but a few yards
+away, blossoming like a rose right in the heart of the wilderness.
+
+Here, after all, in spite of all my whirlpools and engine-houses, was
+for me the greatest danger in the City. Need I say, therefore, that I
+promptly sought it, hovered about it a moment--and entered? How much of
+that grateful governmental twelve-pound-ten came out alive, I dare not
+tell my dearest friend.
+
+At all events I came out somehow reassured, more rich in faith. There
+was a might of poesy after all. There were words in the little
+yellow-leaved garland, nestling like a bird in my hand, that would
+outlast the bank yonder, and outlive us all. I held it up. How tiny it
+seemed, how frail amid all this stone and iron! A mere flower--a flower
+from the seventeenth century--long-lived for a flower! Yes, an
+_immortelle_.
+
+
+
+
+BROWN ROSES
+
+'Well, I never thought to see this day, sir,' said Gibbs, with something
+like tears in his voice, as he reluctantly plied his scissors upon
+Hyacinth Rondel's distinguished curls.
+
+'Nor I, Gibbs--nor I!' said Rondel sadly, relapsing into silence again,
+with his head meekly bent over the white sheet spread to catch his shorn
+beauty.
+
+'To think of the times, sir, that I have dressed your head,' continued
+Gibbs, whose grief bore so marked an emphasis, 'and to think that after
+to-day ...'
+
+'But you forget, my dear Gibbs, that I shall now be a more constant
+customer than ever!'
+
+'Ah, sir, but that will be different. It will be mere machine-cutting,
+lawn-mowing, steam-reaping, if you understand me; there'll be no
+pleasure in it, no artistic pleasure, I mean.'
+
+'Yes, Gibbs, and you are an artist--I have often told you that.'
+
+'Ah, sir, but I am coming to the conclusion that it is better not to be
+an artist, better to be born just like every one else. In these days one
+suffers too much. Why, sir, I haven't in the whole of my business six
+heads like yours, and I go on cutting all the rest week in and week out,
+just for the pleasure of dressing those six--and now there'll only be
+five.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'It looks like a winding-sheet,' mused Rondel presently, after a long
+silence, broken only by the soft crunch and click of the fatal scissors,
+as they feasted on the beautiful brown silk.
+
+'It do indeed, sir,' said Gibbs, with a shudder, as another little globe
+of golden brown rolled down into Rondel's lap.
+
+'Poor brown roses!' sighed the poet, after another silence; 'they are
+just like brown roses, aren't they, Gibbs?'
+
+'They are indeed, sir!'
+
+'Brown roses scattered over the winding-sheet of one's youth--eh,
+Gibbs?'
+
+'They are indeed, sir.'
+
+'That's rather a pretty image, don't you think, Gibbs?'
+
+'Indeed I do, sir!'
+
+'Well, well, they have bloomed their last; and when Juliet's white hands
+come seeking with their silver fingers, white maidens lost in the brown
+enchanted forest, there will not be a rose left for her to gather.'
+
+'Believe me, sir, I would more gladly have cut off your head than your
+hair--that is, figuratively speaking,' sobbed the artist-in-hair-oils.
+
+'Yes, my head would hardly be missed--you are quite right, Gibbs; but my
+hair! What will they do without it at first nights and private views? It
+was worth five shillings a week to many a poor paragraph-writer. Well, I
+must try and make up for it by my beard!'
+
+'Your beard, sir?' exclaimed Gibbs in horror.
+
+'Yes, Gibbs; for some years I have been a Nazarene--that is, a Nazarite,
+with the top half of my head; now I am going to change about and be a
+Nazarite with the lower. The razor has kissed my cheeks and my chin and
+the fluted column of my throat for the last time.'
+
+'You cannot mean it, sir!' said Gibbs, suspending his murderous task a
+moment.
+
+'It's quite true, Gibbs.'
+
+'Does she wish that too, sir?'
+
+'Yes, that too.'
+
+'Well, sir, I have heard of men making sacrifices for their wives, but
+of all the cruel....'
+
+'Please don't, Gibbs. It does no good. And Mrs. Rondel's motive is a
+good one.'
+
+'Of course, sir, I cannot presume--and yet, if it wouldn't be presuming,
+I should like to know why you are making this great, I may say this
+noble, sacrifice?'
+
+'Well, Gibbs, we're old friends, and I'll tell you some day, but I
+hardly feel up to it to-day.'
+
+'Of course not, sir, of course not--it's only natural,' said Gibbs
+tenderly, while the scissors once more took up the conversation.
+
+
+
+
+THE DONKEY THAT LOVED A STAR
+
+
+'That is how the donkey tells his love!' I said one day, with intent to
+be funny, as the prolonged love-whoop of a distant donkey was heard in
+the land.
+
+'Don't be too ready to laugh at donkeys,' said my friend. 'For,' he
+continued, 'even donkeys have their dreams. Perhaps, indeed, the most
+beautiful dreams are dreamed by donkeys.'
+
+'Indeed,' I said, 'and now that I think of it, I remember to have said
+that most dreamers are donkeys, though I never expected so scientific a
+corroboration of a fleeting jest.'
+
+Now, my friend is an eminent scientist and poet in one, a serious
+combination; and he took my remarks with seriousness at once scientific
+and poetic.
+
+'Yes,' he went on, 'that is where you clever people make a mistake. You
+think that because a donkey has only two vowel-sounds wherewith to
+express his emotions, he has no emotions to express. But let me tell
+you, sir ...'
+
+But here we both burst out laughing--
+
+'You Golden Ass!' I said,'take a munch of these roses; perhaps they will
+restore you.'
+
+'No,' he resumed, 'I am quite serious. I have for many years past made a
+study of donkeys--high-stepping critics call it the study of Human
+Nature--however, it's the same thing--and I must say that the more I
+study them the more I love them. There is nothing so well worth studying
+as the misunderstood, for the very reason that everybody thinks he
+understands it. Now, to take another instance, most people think they
+have said the last word on a goose when they have called it "a
+goose"!--but let me tell you, sir ...'
+
+But here again we burst out laughing--
+
+'Dear goose of the golden eggs,' I said, 'pray leave to discourse on
+geese to-night--though lovely and pleasant would the discourse
+be;--to-night I am all agog for donkeys.'
+
+'So be it,' said my friend,' and if that be so, I cannot do better than
+tell you the story of the donkey that loved a star--keeping for another
+day the no less fascinating story of the goose that loved an angel.'
+
+By this time I was, appropriately, all ears.
+
+'Well,' he once more began, 'there was once a donkey, quite an intimate
+friend of mine--and I have no friend of whom I am prouder--who was
+unpractically fond of looking up at the stars. He could go a whole day
+without thistles, if night would only bring him stars. Of course he
+suffered no little from his fellow-donkeys for this curious passion of
+his. They said well that it did not become him, for indeed it was no
+little laughable to see him gazing so sentimentally at the remote and
+pitiless heavens. Donkeys who belonged to Shakespeare Societies recalled
+the fate of Bottom, the donkey who had loved a fairy; but our donkey
+paid little heed. There is perhaps only one advantage in being a
+donkey--namely, a hide impervious to criticism. In our donkey's case it
+was rather a dream that made him forget his hide--a dream that drew up
+all the sensitiveness from every part, from hoof, and hide, and ears, so
+that all the feeling in his whole body was centred in his eyes and
+brain, and those, as we have said, were centred on a star. He took it
+for granted that his fellows should sneer and kick-out at him--it was
+ever so with genius among the donkeys, and he had very soon grown used
+to these attentions of his brethren, which were powerless to withdraw
+his gaze from the star he loved. For though he loved all the stars, as
+every individual man loves all women, there was one star he loved more
+than any other; and standing one midnight among his thistles, he prayed
+a prayer, a prayer that some day it might be granted him to carry that
+star upon his back--which, he recalled, had been sanctified by the holy
+sign--were it but for ever so short a journey. Just to carry it a little
+way, and then to die. This to him was a dream beyond the dreams of
+donkeys.
+
+'Now, one night,' continued my friend, taking breath for himself and
+me, 'our poor donkey looked up to the sky, and lo! the star was nowhere
+to be seen. He had heard it said that stars sometimes fall. Evidently
+his star had fallen. Fallen! but what if it had fallen upon the earth?
+Being a donkey, the wildest dreams seemed possible to him. And, strange
+as it may seem, there came a day when a poet came to his master and
+bought our donkey to carry his little child. Now, the very first day he
+had her upon his back, the donkey knew that his prayer had been
+answered, and that the little swaddled babe he carried was the star he
+had prayed for. And, indeed, so it was; for so long as donkeys ask no
+more than to fetch and carry for their beloved, they may be sure of
+beauty upon their backs. Now, so long as this little girl that was a
+star remained a little girl, our donkey was happy. For many pretty years
+she would kiss his ugly muzzle and feed his mouth with sugar--and thus
+our donkey's thoughts sweetened day by day, till from a natural
+pessimist he blossomed into a perfectly absurd optimist, and dreamed the
+donkiest of dreams. But, one day, as he carried the girl who was really
+a star through the spring lanes, a young man walked beside her, and
+though our donkey thought very little of his talk--in fact, felt his
+plain "hee-haw" to be worth all its smart chirping and twittering--yet
+it evidently pleased the maiden. It included quite a number of
+vowel-sounds--though, if the maiden had only known, it didn't mean half
+so much as the donkey's plain monotonous declaration.
+
+'Well, our donkey soon began to realise that his dream was nearing its
+end; and, indeed, one day his little mistress came bringing him the
+sweetest of kisses, the very best sugar in the very best shops, but for
+all that our donkey knew that it meant good-bye. It is the charming
+manner of English girls to be at their sweetest when they say good-bye.
+
+'Our dreamer-donkey went into exile as servant to a woodcutter, and his
+life was lenient if dull, for the woodcutter had no sticks to waste upon
+his back; and next day his young mistress who was once a star took a
+pony for her love, whom some time after she discarded for a talented
+hunter, and, one fine day, like many of her sex, she pitched her
+affections upon a man--he too being a talented hunter. To their wedding
+came all the countryside. And with the countryside came the donkey. He
+carried a great bundle of firewood for the servants' hall, and as he
+waited outside, gazing up at his old loves the stars, while his master
+drank deeper and deeper within, he revolved many thoughts. But he is
+only known to have made one remark--in the nature, one may think, of a
+grim jest--
+
+'"After all!" he was heard to say, "she has married a donkey--after
+all!"
+
+'No doubt it was feeble; but then our donkey was growing old and bitter,
+and hope deferred had made him a cynic.'
+
+
+
+
+ON LOVING ONE'S ENEMIES
+
+Like all people who live apart from it, the Founder of the Christian
+religion was possessed of a profound knowledge of the world. As,
+according to the proverb, the woodlander sees nothing of the wood for
+its trees, so those who live in the world know nothing of it. They know
+its gaudy, glittering surface, its Crystal Palace fireworks, and the
+paste-diamonds with which it bedecks itself; they know its music-halls
+and its night clubs, its Piccadillys and its politics, its restaurants
+and its salons; but of the bad--or good?--heart of it all they know
+nothing. In more meanings than one, it takes a saint to catch a sinner;
+and Christ certainly knew as well as saved the sinner.
+
+But none of His precepts show a truer knowledge of life and its
+conditions than His commandment that we should love our enemies. He
+realised--can we doubt?--that, without enemies, the Church He bade His
+followers build could not hope to be established. He knew that the
+spiritual fire He strove to kindle would spread but little, unless the
+four winds of the world blew against it. Well, indeed, may the Christian
+Church love its enemies, for it is they who have made it.
+
+Indeed, for a man, or a cause, that wants to get on, there is nothing
+like a few hearty, zealous enemies. Most of us would never be heard of
+if it were not for our enemies. The unsuccessful man counts up his
+friends, but the successful man numbers his enemies. A friend of mine
+was lamenting, the other day, that he could not find twelve people to
+disbelieve in him. He had been seeking them for years, he sighed, and
+could not get beyond eleven. But, even so, with only eleven he was a
+very successful man. In these kind-hearted days enemies are becoming so
+rare that one has to go out of one's way to make them. The true
+interpretation, therefore, of the easiest of the commandments is--make
+your enemies, and your enemies will make you.
+
+So soon as the armed men begin to spring up in our fields, we may be
+sure that we have not sown in vain.
+
+Properly understood, an enemy is but a negative embodiment of our
+personalities or ideas. He is an involuntary witness to our vitality.
+Much as he despises us, greatly as he may injure us, he is none the less
+a creature of our making. It was we who put into him the breath of his
+malignity, and inspired the activity of his malice. Therefore, with his
+very existence so tremendous a tribute, we can afford to smile at his
+self-conscious disclaimers of our significance. Though he slay us, we
+_made_ him--to 'make an enemy,' is not that the phrase?
+
+Indeed, the fact that he is our enemy is his one _raison d'être_. That
+alone should make us charitable to him. Live and let live. Without us
+our enemy has no occupation, for to hate us is his profession. Think of
+his wives and families!
+
+The friendship of the little for the great is an old-established
+profession; there is but one older--namely, the hatred of the little
+for the great; and, though it is perhaps less officially recognised, it
+is without doubt the more lucrative. It is one of the shortest roads to
+fame. Why is the name of Pontius Pilate an uneasy ghost of history?
+Think what fame it would have meant to be an enemy of Socrates or
+Shakespeare! _Blackwood's Magazine_ and _The Quarterly Review_ only
+survive to-day because they once did their best to strangle the genius
+of Keats and Tennyson. Two or three journals of our own time, by the
+same unfailing method, seek that circulation from posterity which is
+denied them in the present.
+
+This is particularly true in literature, where the literary enemy is as
+organised a tradesman as the literary agent. Like the literary agent, he
+naturally does his best to secure the biggest men. No doubt the time
+will come when the literary cut-throat--shall we call him?--will publish
+dainty little books of testimonials from authors, full of effusive
+gratitude for the manner in which they have been slashed and bludgeoned
+into fame. 'Butcher to Mr. Grant Allen' may then become a familiar
+legend over literary shop-fronts:--
+
+  'Ah! did you stab at Shelley's heart
+    With silly sneer and cruel lie?
+  And Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats,
+    To murder did you nobly try?
+
+  You failed, 'tis true; but what of that?
+    The world remembers still your name--
+  'Tis fame, _for you_, to be the cur
+    That barks behind the heels of Fame.'
+
+Any one who is fortunate enough to have enemies will know that all this
+is far from being fanciful. If one's enemies have any other _raison
+d'être_ beyond the fact of their being our enemies--what is it? They are
+neither beautiful nor clever, wise nor good, famous nor, indeed,
+passably distinguished. Were they any of these, they would not have
+taken to so humble a means of getting their living. Instead of being our
+enemies, they could then have afforded to employ enemies on their own
+account.
+
+Who, indeed, are our enemies? Broadly speaking, they are all those
+people who lack what we possess.
+
+If you are rich, every poor man is necessarily your enemy. If you are
+beautiful, the great democracy of the plain and ugly will mock you in
+the streets. It will be the same with everything you possess. The
+brainless will never forgive you for possessing brains, the weak will
+hate you for your strength, and the evil for your good heart. If you can
+write, all the bad writers are at once your foes. If you can paint, the
+bad painters will talk you down. But more than any talent or charm you
+may possess, the pearl of price for which you will be most bitterly
+hated will be your success. You can be the most wonderful person that
+ever existed, so long as you don't succeed, and nobody will mind. 'It is
+the sunshine,' says some one, 'that brings out the adder.' So powerful,
+indeed, is success that it has been known to turn a friend into a foe.
+Those, then, who wish to engage a few trusty enemies out of place need
+only advertise among the unsuccessful.
+
+_P.S._--For one service we should be particularly thankful to our
+enemies--they save us so much in stimulants. Their unbelief so helps our
+belief, their negatives make us so positive.
+
+
+
+
+THE DRAMATIC ART OF LIFE
+
+It is a curious truth that, whereas in every other art deliberate choice
+of method and careful calculation of effect are expected from the
+artist, in the greatest and most difficult art of all, the art of life,
+this is not so. In literature, painting, or sculpture you first evolve
+your conception, and then, after long study of it, as it glows and
+shimmers in your imagination, you set about the reverent selection of
+that form which shall be its most truthful incarnation, in words, in
+paint, in marble. Now life, as has been said many times, is an art too.
+Sententious morality from time past has told us that we are each given a
+part to play, evidently implying, with involuntary cynicism, that the
+art of life is--the art of acting.
+
+As with the actor, we are each given a certain dramatic conception for
+the expression of which we have precisely the same artistic
+materials--namely, our own bodies, sometimes including heart and brains.
+One has often heard the complaint of a certain actor that he acts
+himself. On the metaphorical stage of life the complaint and the implied
+demand are just the reverse. How much more interesting life would be if
+only more people had the courage and skill to act themselves, instead of
+abjectly understudying some one else! Of course, there are supers on the
+stage of life as on the real stage. It is proper that these should dress
+and speak and think alike. These one courteously excepts from the
+generalisation that the composer of the play, as Marcus Aurelius calls
+him, has given each of us a certain part to play--that part simply
+oneself: a part, need one say, by no means as easy as it seems; a part
+most difficult to study, and requiring daily rehearsal. So difficult is
+it, indeed, that most people throw up the part, and join the ranks of
+the supers--who, curiously enough, are paid much more handsomely than
+the principals. They enter one of the learned or idle professions, join
+the army or take to trade, and so speedily rid themselves of the irksome
+necessity of being anything more individual than 'the learned counsel,'
+'the learned judge,' 'my lord bishop,' or 'the colonel,' names
+impersonal in application as the dignity of 'Pharaoh,' whereof the name
+and not the man was alone important. Henceforth they are the Church, the
+Law, the Army, the City, or that vaguer profession Society. Entering one
+of these, they become as lost to the really living world as the monk who
+voluntarily surrenders all will and character of his own at the
+threshold of his monastery: bricks in a prison wall, privates in the
+line, peas in a row. But, as I say, these are the parts that pay. For
+playing the others, indeed, you are not paid, but expected to
+pay--dearly.
+
+It is full time we turned to those on whom falls the burden of those
+real parts. Such, when quite young, if they be conscientious artists,
+will carefully consider themselves, their gifts and possibilities, study
+to discover their artistic _raison d'être_ and how best to fulfil it.
+He or she will say: Here am I, a creature of great gifts and exquisite
+sensibilities, drawn by great dreams, and vibrating to great emotions;
+yet this potent and exquisite self is as yet, I know, but unwrought
+material of the perfect work of art it is intended that I should make of
+it--but the marble wherefrom, with patient chisel, I must liberate the
+perfect and triumphant ME! As a poet listening with trembling ear to the
+voice of his inspiration, so I tremulously ask myself--what is the
+divine conception that is to become embodied in me, what is the divine
+meaning of ME? How best shall I express it in look, in word, in deed,
+till my outer self becomes the truthful symbol of my inner self--till,
+in fact, I have successfully placed the best of myself on the outside
+--for others besides myself to see, and know and love?
+
+What is my part, and how am I to play it?
+
+Returning to the latter image, there are two difficulties that beset one
+in playing a part on the stage of life, right at the outset. You are not
+allowed to 'look' it, or 'dress' it! What would an actor think, who,
+asked to play Hamlet, found that he would be expected to play it
+without make-up and in nineteenth-century costume? Yet many of us are in
+a like dilemma with similar parts. Actors and audience must all wear the
+same drab clothes and the same immobile expression. It is in vain you
+protest that you do not really belong to this absurd and vulgar
+nineteenth century, that you have been spirited into it by a cruel
+mistake, that you really belong to mediæval Florence, to Elizabethan,
+Caroline, or at latest Queen Anne England, and that you would like to be
+allowed to look and dress as like it as possible. It is no use; if you
+dare to look or dress like anything but your own tradesmen--and other
+critics--it is at your peril. If you are beautiful, you are expected to
+disguise a fact that is an open insult to every other person you look
+at; and you must, as a general rule, never look, wear, feel, or say what
+everybody else is not also looking, wearing, feeling, or saying.
+
+Thus you get some hint of the difficulty of playing the part of yourself
+on this stage of life.
+
+In these matters of dressing and looking your part musicians seem
+granted an immunity denied to all their fellow-artists. Perhaps it is
+taken for granted that the musician is a fool--the British public is so
+intuitive. Yet it takes the same view of the poet, without allowing him
+a like immunity. And, by the way, what a fine conception of his part had
+Tennyson--of the dignity, the mystery, the picturesqueness of it!
+Tennyson would have felt it an artistic crime to look like his
+publisher; yet what poet is there left us to-day half so
+distinguished-looking as his publisher?
+
+Indeed, curiously enough, among no set of men does the desire to look as
+commonplace as the rest of the world seem so strong as among men of
+letters. Perhaps it is out of consideration for the rest of the world;
+but, whatever the reason, immobility of expression and general
+mediocrity of style are more characteristic of them at present than even
+the military.
+
+It is surely a strange paradox that we should pride ourselves on
+schooling to foolish insensibility, on eliminating from them every mark
+of individual character, the faces that were intended subtly and
+eloquently to image our moods--to look glad when we are glad, sorry when
+we are sorry, angry in anger, and lovely in love.
+
+The impassivity of the modern young man is indeed a weird and wonderful
+thing. Is it a mark to hide from us the appalling sins he none the less
+openly affects? Is it meant to conceal that once in his life he paid a
+wild visit to 'The Empire'--by kind indulgence of the County Council?
+that he once chucked a barmaid under the chin, that he once nearly got
+drunk, that he once spoke to a young lady he did not know--and then ran
+away?
+
+One sighs for the young men of the days of Gautier and Hugo, the young
+men with red waistcoats who made asses of themselves at first nights and
+on the barricades, young men with romance in their hearts and passion in
+their blood, fearlessly sentimental and picturesquely everything.
+
+The lover then was not ashamed that you should catch radiant glimpses of
+his love in his eyes--nay! if you smiled kindly on him, he would take
+you by the arm and insist on your breaking a bottle with him in honour
+of his mistress. Joy and sorrow then wore their appropriate colours,
+according, so to say, to the natural sumptuary laws of the emotions--one
+of which is that the right place for the heart is the sleeve.
+
+It is the duty of those who are great, or to whom great destinies of joy
+or sorrow have been dealt, to wear their distinctions for the world to
+see. It is good for the world, which in its crude way indicates the
+rudiments of this dramatic art of life, when it decrees that the bride
+shall walk radiant in orange blossom, and the mourner sadden our streets
+with black--symbols ever passing before us of the moving vicissitudes of
+life.
+
+The mourner cannot always be sad, or the bride merry; the bride indeed
+sometimes weeps at the altar, and the mourner laughs a savage cynical
+laugh at the grave; but for those moments in which they awhile forget
+parts more important than themselves, the tailor and the dressmaker have
+provided symbolical garments, just as military decorations have been
+provided for heroes without the gift of looking heroic, and sacerdotal
+vestments for the priest, who, like a policeman, is not always on duty.
+
+In playing his part the conscientious artist in life, like any other
+actor, must often seem to feel more than he really feels at a given
+moment, say more than he means. In this he is far from being
+insincere--though he must make up his mind to be accused daily of
+insincerity and affectation. On the contrary, it will be his very
+sincerity that necessitates his make-believe. With his great part ever
+before him in its inspiring completeness, he must be careful to allow no
+merely personal accident of momentary feeling or action to jeopardise
+the general effect. There are moments, for example, when a really true
+lover, owing to such masterful natural facts as indigestion, a cold, or
+extreme sleepiness, is unable to feel all that he knows he really feels.
+To 'tell the truth,' as it is called, under such circumstances, would
+simply be a most dangerous form of lying. There is no duty we owe to
+truth more imperative than that of lying stoutly on occasion--for,
+indeed, there is often no other way of conveying the whole truth than
+by telling the part-lie.
+
+A watchful sincerity to our great conception of ourselves is the first
+and last condition, of our creating that finest work of art--a
+personality; for a personality, like a poet, is not only born but made.
+
+
+
+
+THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX
+
+In an essay on Vauvenargues Mr. John Morley speaks with characteristic
+causticity of those epigrammatists 'who persist in thinking of man and
+woman as two different species,' and who make verbal capital out of the
+fancied distinction in the form of smart epigrams beginning '_Les
+femmes_.' It is one of Shakespeare's cardinal characteristics that _he
+understood woman_. Mr. Meredith's fame as a novelist is largely due to
+the fact that he too _understands women_. The one spot on the sun of
+Robert Louis Stevenson's fame, so we are told, is that he could _never
+draw a woman_. His capacity for drawing men counted for nothing,
+apparently, beside this failure. Evidently the Sphinx has not the face
+of a woman for nothing. That is why no one has read her riddle,
+translated her mystic smile. Yet many people smile mysteriously,
+without any profound meanings behind their smile, with no other reason
+than a desire to mystify. Perhaps the Sphinx smiles to herself just for
+the fun of seeing us take her smile so seriously. And surely women must
+so smile as they hear their psychology so gravely discussed. Of course,
+the superstition is invaluable to them, and it is only natural that they
+should make the most of it. Man is supposed to be a complete ignoramus
+in regard to all the specialised female 'departments'--from the supreme
+mystery of the female heart to the humble domestic mysteries of a
+household. Similarly, men are supposed to have no taste in women's
+dress, yet for whom do women clothe themselves in the rainbow and the
+sea-foam, if not to please men? And was not the high-priest of that
+delicious and fascinating mystery a man--if it be proper to call the
+late M. Worth a man,--as the best cooks are men, and the best waiters?
+
+It would seem to be assumed from all this mystification that men are
+beings clear as daylight, both to themselves and to women. Poor,
+simple, manageable souls, their wants are easily satisfied, their
+psychology--which, it is implied, differs little from their
+physiology--long since mapped out.
+
+It may be so, but it is the opinion of some that men's simplicity is no
+less a fiction than women's mysterious complexity, and that human
+character is made up of much the same qualities in men and women,
+irrespective of a merely rudimentary sexual distinction, which has, of
+course, its proper importance, and which the present writer would be the
+last to wish away. From that quaint distinction of sex springs, of
+course, all that makes life in the smallest degree worth living, from
+great religions to tiny flowers. Love and beauty and poetry;
+Shakespeare's plays, Burne-Jones's pictures, and Wagner's operas--all
+such moving expressions of human life, as science has shown us, spring
+from the all-important fact that 'male and female created He them.'
+
+This everybody knows, and few are fools enough to deny. Many people,
+however, confuse this organic distinction of sex with its time-worn
+conventional symbols; just as religion is commonly confused with its
+external rites and ceremonies. The comparison naturally continues itself
+further; for, as in religion, so soon as some traditional garment of the
+faith has become outworn or otherwise unsuitable, and the proposal is
+made to dispense with or substitute it, an outcry immediately is raised
+that religion itself is in danger--so with sex, no sooner does one or
+the other sex propose to discard its arbitrary conventional
+characteristics, or to supplement them by others borrowed from its
+fellow-sex, than an outcry immediately is raised that sex itself is in
+danger.
+
+Sex--the most potent force in the universe--in danger because women
+wear knickerbockers instead of petticoats, or military men take to
+corsets and cosmetics!
+
+That parallel with religion may be pursued profitably one step further.
+In religion, the conventional test of your faith is not how you live,
+not in your kindness of heart or purity of mind, but how you believe--in
+the Trinity, in the Atonement; and do you turn to the East during the
+recital of the Apostles' Creed? These and such, as every one knows, are
+the vital matters of religion. And it is even so with sex. You are not
+asked for the realities of manliness or womanliness, but for the
+shadows, the arbitrary externalities, the fashions of which change from
+generation to generation.
+
+To be truly womanly you must never wear your hair short; to be truly
+manly you must never wear it long. To be truly womanly you must dress as
+daintily as possible, however uncomfortably; to be truly manly you must
+wear the most hideous gear ever invented by the servility of tailors--a
+strange succession of cylinders from head to heel; cylinder on head,
+cylinder round your body, cylinders on arms and cylinders on legs. To be
+truly womanly you must be shrinking and clinging in manner and trivial
+in conversation; you must have no ideas, and rejoice that you wish for
+none; you must thank Heaven that you have never ridden a bicycle or
+smoked a cigarette; and you must be prepared to do a thousand other
+absurd and ridiculous things. To be truly manly you must be and do the
+opposite of all these things, with this exception--that with you the
+possession of ideas is optional. The finest specimens of British manhood
+are without ideas; but that, I say, is, generally speaking, a matter for
+yourself. It is indeed the only matter in which you have any choice.
+More important matters, such as the cut of your clothes and hair, the
+shape of your face, the length of your moustache and the pattern of your
+cane--all these are very properly regulated for you by laws of fashion,
+which you could never dream of breaking. You may break every moral law
+there is--or rather, was--and still remain a man. You may be a bully, a
+cad, a coward and a fool, in the poor heart and brains of you; but so
+long as you wear the mock regimentals of contemporary manhood, and are
+above all things plain and undistinguished enough, your reputation for
+manhood will be secure. There is nothing so dangerous to a reputation
+for manhood as brains or beauty.
+
+In short, to be a true woman you have only to be pretty and an idiot,
+and to be a true man you have only to be brutal and a fool.
+
+From these misconceptions of manliness and womanliness, these
+superstitions of sex, many curious confusions have come about. They so
+to say, professional differentiation between the sexes had at one time
+gone so far that men were credited with the entire monopoly of a certain
+set of human qualities, and women with the monopoly of a certain other
+set of human qualities; yet every one of these are qualities which one
+would have thought were proper to, and necessary for, all human beings
+alike, male and female.
+
+In a dictionary of a date (1856) when everything on earth and in heaven
+was settled and written in penny cyclopædias and books of deportment, I
+find these delicious definitions--
+
+_Manly_: becoming a man; firm; brave; undaunted; dignified; noble;
+stately; not boyish or womanish.
+
+_Womanly_: becoming a woman; feminine; as _womanly_ behaviour.
+
+Under _Woman_ we find the adjectives--soft, mild, pitiful and flexible,
+kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous, modest.
+
+Who can doubt that the dictionary maker defined and distributed his
+adjectives aright for the year 1856? Since then, however, many alarming
+heresies have taken root in our land, and some are heard to declare that
+both these sets of adjectives apply to men and women alike, and are, in
+fact, necessities of any decent human outfit. Otherwise the conclusion
+is obvious, that no one desirous of the adjective 'manly' must ever
+be--soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, kind, civil, obliging, humane,
+tender, timorous, or modest; and no one desirous of the adjective
+'womanly' be--firm, brave, undaunted, dignified, noble, or stately.
+
+But surely the essentials of 'manliness' and 'womanliness' belong to man
+and woman alike--the externals are purely artistic considerations, and
+subject to the vagaries of fashion. In art no one would think of
+allowing fashion any serious artistic opinion. It is usually the art
+which is out of fashion that is most truly art. Similarly, fashions in
+manliness or womanliness have nothing to do with real manliness or
+womanliness. Moreover, the adjectives 'manly' or 'womanly,' applied to
+works of art, or the artistic surfaces of men and women, are
+irrelevant--that is to say, impertinent. You have no right to ask a
+poem or a picture to look manly or womanly, any more than you have any
+right to ask a man or a woman to look manly or womanly. There is no such
+thing as looking manly or womanly. There is looking beautiful or ugly,
+distinguished or commonplace, individual or insignificant. The one law
+of externals is beauty in all its various manifestations. To ask the sex
+of a beautiful person is as absurd as it would be to ask the publisher
+the sex of a beautiful book. Such questions are for midwives and
+doctors.
+
+It was once the fashion for heroes to shed tears on the smallest
+occasion, and it does not appear that they fought the worse for it; some
+of the firmest, bravest, most undaunted, most dignified, most noble,
+most stately human beings have been women; as some of the softest,
+mildest, most pitiful and flexible, most kind, civil, obliging, humane,
+tender, timorous and modest human beings have been men. Indeed, some of
+the bravest men that ever trod this planet have worn corsets, and it
+needs more courage nowadays for a man to wear his hair long than to
+machine-gun a whole African nation. Moreover, quite the nicest women one
+knows ride bicycles--in the rational costume.
+
+
+
+
+THE FALLACY OF A NATION
+
+It is, I am given to understand, a familiar axiom of mathematics that no
+number of ciphers placed in front of significant units, or tens or
+hundreds of units, adds in the smallest degree to the numerical value of
+those units. The figure one becomes of no more importance however many
+noughts are marshalled in front of it--though, indeed, in the
+mathematics of human nature this is not so. Is not a man or woman
+considered great in proportion to the number of ciphers that walk in
+front of him, from a humble brace of domestics to guards of honour and
+imperial armies?
+
+A parallel profound truth of mathematics is that a nought, however many
+times it be multiplied, remains nought; but again we find the reverse
+obtain in the mathematics of human nature. One might have supposed that
+the result of one nobody multiplied even fifty million times would still
+be nobody. However, such is far from being the case. Fifty million
+nobodies make--a nation. Of course, there is no need for so many. I am
+reckoning as a British subject, and speak of fifty million merely as an
+illustration of the general fact that it is the multiplication of
+nobodies that makes a nation. 'Increase and multiply' was, it will be
+remembered, the recipe for the Jewish nation.
+
+Nobodies of the same colour, tongue, and prejudices have but to
+congregate together in a crowd sufficiently big for other similar crowds
+to recognise them, and then they are given a name of their own, and
+become recognised as a nation--one of the 'Great Powers.'
+
+Beyond those differences in colour, tongue, and prejudices there is
+really no difference between the component units--or rather ciphers--of
+all these several national crowds. You have seen a procession of various
+trades-unions filing toward Hyde Park, each section with its particular
+banner with a strange device: 'The United Guild of Paperhangers,' 'The
+Ancient Order of Plumbers,' and so on. And you may have marvelled to
+notice how alike the members of the various carefully differentiated
+companies were. So to say, they each and all might have been plumbers;
+and you couldn't help feeling that it wouldn't have mattered much if
+some of the paper-hangers had by mistake got walking amongst the
+plumbers, or _vice versa_.
+
+So the great trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word
+'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany'--this with a
+particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in
+front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously
+waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and
+yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called 'England.' Other
+smaller bodies of nobodies, that is, smaller nations, file past with
+humbler tread--though there is really no need for their doing so. For,
+as we have said, they are in every particular like to those haughtier
+nations who take precedence of them. In fact, one or two of them, such
+as Norway and Denmark--were a truer system of human mathematics to
+obtain--are really of more importance than the so-called greater
+nations, in that among their nobodies they include a larger percentage
+of intellectual somebodies.
+
+Remembering that percentage of wise men, the formula of a nation were
+perhaps more truly stated in our first mathematical image. The wise men
+in a nation are as the units with the noughts in front of them. And when
+I say wise men I do not, indeed, mean merely the literary men or the
+artists, but all those somebodies with some real force of character,
+people with brains and hearts, fighters and lovers, saints and thinkers,
+and the patient, industrious workers. Such, if you consider, are really
+no integral part of the nation among which they are cast. They have no
+part in what are grandiloquently called national interests--war,
+politics, and horse-racing to wit. A change of Government leaves them as
+unmoved as an election for the board of guardians. They would as soon
+think of entering Parliament or the County Council, as of yearning to
+manage the gasworks, or to go about with one of those carts bearing the
+legend 'Aldermen and Burgesses of the City of London' conspicuously upon
+its front. Their main concern in political changes is the rise and fall
+of the income-tax, and, be the Cabinet Tory or Liberal, their rate
+papers come in for the same amount. It is likely that national changes
+would affect them but little more. What more would a foreign invasion
+mean than that we should pay our taxes to French, Russian, or German
+officials, instead of to English ones? French and Italians do our
+cooking, Germans manage our music, Jews control our money markets;
+surely it would make little difference to us for France, Russia, or
+Germany to undertake our government. The worst of being conquered by
+Russia would be the necessity of learning Russian; whereas a little
+rubbing up of our French would make us comfortable with France. Besides,
+to be conquered by France would save us crossing the Channel to Paris,
+and then we might hope for cafés in Regent Street, and an emancipated
+literature. As a matter of fact, so-called national interests are merely
+certain private interests on a large scale, the private interests of
+financiers, ambitious politicians, soldiers, and great merchants.
+Broadly speaking, there are no rival nations--there are rival markets;
+and it is its Board of Trade and its Stock Exchange rather than its
+Houses of Parliament that virtually govern a country. Thus one seaport
+goes down and another comes up, industries forsake one country to bless
+another, the military and naval strengths of nations fluctuate this way
+and that; and to those whom these changes affect they are undoubtedly
+important matters--the great capitalist, the soldier, and the
+politician; but to the quiet man at home with his wife, his children,
+his books, and his flowers, to the artist busied with brave translunary
+matters, to the saint with his eyes filled with 'the white radiance of
+eternity,' to the shepherd on the hillside, the milkmaid in love, or the
+angler at his sport--what are these pompous commotions, these busy,
+bustling mimicries of reality? England will be just as good to live in
+though men some day call her France. Let the big busybodies divide her
+amongst them as they like, so that they leave one alone with one's fair
+share of the sky and the grass, and an occasional, not too vociferous,
+nightingale.
+
+The reader will perhaps forgive the hackneyed references to Sir Thomas
+Browne peacefully writing his _Religio Medici_ amid all the commotions
+of the Civil War, and to Gautier calmly correcting the proofs of his new
+poems during the siege of Paris. The milkman goes his rounds amid the
+crash of empires. It is not his business to fight. His business is to
+distribute his milk--as much after half-past seven as may be
+inconvenient. Similarly, the business of the thinker is with his
+thought, the poet with his poetry. It is the business of politicians to
+make national quarrels, and the business of the soldier to fight them.
+But as for the poet--let him correct his proofs, or beware the printer.
+
+The idea, then, of a nation is a grandiloquent fallacy in the interests
+of commerce and ambition, political and military. All the great and
+good, clever and charming people belong to one secret nation, for which
+there is no name unless it be the Chosen People. These are the lost
+tribes of love, art, and religion, lost and swamped amid alien peoples,
+but ever dreaming of a time when they shall meet once more in Jerusalem.
+
+Yet though they are thus aliens, taking and wishing no part in the
+organisation of the 'nations' among which they dwell, this does not
+prevent those nations taking part and credit in them. And whenever a
+brave soldier wins a battle, or an intrepid traveller discovers a new
+land, his particular nation flatters itself, as though it--the million
+nobodies--had done it. With a profound indifference to, indeed an active
+dislike of, art and poetry, there is nothing on which a nation prides
+itself so much as upon its artists and poets, whom, invariably, it
+starves, neglects, and even insults, as long as it is not too silly to
+do so.
+
+Thus the average Englishman talks of Shakespeare--as though he himself
+had written the plays; of India--as though he himself had conquered it.
+And thus grow up such fictions as 'national greatness' and 'public
+opinion.'
+
+For what is 'national greatness' but the glory reflected from the
+memories of a few great individuals? and what is 'public opinion' but
+the blustering echoes of the opinion of a few clever young men on the
+morning papers?
+
+For how can people in themselves little become great by merely
+congregating into a crowd, however large? And surely fools do not become
+wise, or worth listening to, merely by the fact of their banding
+together.
+
+A 'public opinion' on any matter except football, prize-fighting, and
+perhaps cricket, is merely ridiculous--by whatever brutal physical
+powers it may be enforced--ridiculous as a town council's opinion upon
+art; and a nation is merely a big fool with an army.
+
+
+
+
+THE GREATNESS OF MAN
+
+Ignorant, as I inevitably am, dear reader, of your intellectual and
+spiritual upbringing, I can hardly guess whether the title of my article
+will impress you as a platitude or as a paradox. Goodness knows, some
+men and women think quite enough of themselves as it is, and, from a
+certain momentary point of view, there may seem little occasion indeed
+to remind man of his importance.
+
+I refer to your intellectual and spiritual upbringing, because I venture
+to wonder if it was in the least like my own. I was brought up, I
+rejoice to say, in the bosom of an orthodox Puritan family. I was led
+and driven to believe that man was everybody, and that God was
+somebody--and that not merely the Sabbath, but the whole universe, was
+made for man: that the stars were his bedtime candles, and that the sun
+arose to ensure his catching the 8.37 of a morning.
+
+On this belief I acted for many years. Every young man believes that
+there is no god but God, and that he is born to be His prophet--though
+perhaps that belief is not so common nowadays. I am speaking of many
+years ago.
+
+Science, however, has long since changed all that. Those terrible Muses,
+geology, astronomy, and particularly biology, have reduced man to a
+humility which, if in some degree salutary, becomes in its excess highly
+dangerous. Why should one maggot in this great cheese of the world take
+itself more seriously than others? Why dream mightily and do bravely if
+we are but a little higher than the beasts that perish? Nature cares
+nothing about us, and her giant forces laugh at our fancies. The world
+has no such meaning as we thought. Poets and saints, deluded by
+unhealthy imaginations, have misled us, and it is quite likely that the
+wild waves are really saying nothing more important than 'Beecham's
+Pills.'
+
+'Give us a definition of life,' I asked a certain famous scientist and
+philosopher whom I am privileged to call my friend.
+
+'Nothing easier!' he gaily replied. 'Life is a product of solar energy,
+falling upon the carbon compounds, on the outer crust of a particular
+planet, in a particular corner of the solar system.'
+
+'And that,' I said, 'really satisfies you as a definition of life--of
+all the wistful wonder of the world!' And as I spoke I thought of Moses
+with mystically shining face upon the Mount of the Law, of Ezekiel rapt
+in his divine fancies, of Socrates drinking his cup of hemlock, of
+Christ's agony in the garden; the golden faces of the great of the world
+passed as in a dream before me,--soldiers, saints, poets, and lovers. I
+thought of Horatius on the bridge, of the holy and gentle soul of St.
+Francis, of Chatterton in his splendid despair, and in fancy I went with
+the awestruck citizens of Verona to reverently gaze at the bodies of two
+young lovers who had counted the world well lost if they might only
+leave it together.
+
+The carbon compounds!
+
+I took down _Romeo and Juliet_, listened to its passionate spheral
+music, and the carbon compounds have never troubled me again.
+
+Love laughs at the carbon compounds, and a great book, a noble act, a
+beautiful face, make nonsense of such cheap formula for the mystery of
+human life.
+
+Yet this parable of the carbon compounds is a fair sample of all that
+science can tell us when we come to ultimates. We go away from its
+oracles with a mouthful of sounding words, which may seem very
+impressive till we examine their emptiness. What, for example, is all
+this rigmarole about solar energy and the carbon compounds but a more
+pompous way of putting the old scriptural statement that man was made of
+the dust of the ground? To say that God took a handful of dust and
+breathed upon it and it became man, is no harder to realise than that
+solar rays falling upon that dust should produce humanity and all the
+various phantasmagoria of life. If anything, it is more explanatory. It
+leaves us with an inspiring mystery for explanation.
+
+In saying this, I do not forget our debt to science. It has done much
+in clearing our minds of cant, in popularising more systematic thinking,
+and in instituting sounder methods of observation. In some directions it
+has deepened our sense of wonder. It has broadened our conception of the
+universe, though I fear it has been at the expense of narrowing our
+conception of man. With Hamlet it contemptuously says, 'What is this
+quintessence of dust!' It is so impressed by the mileage and tonnage of
+the universe, so abased before the stupendous measurements of the
+cosmos, the appalling infinity and eternity of its space and time, that
+it forgets the marvel of the mind that can grasp all these conceptions,
+forgets, too, that, big and bullying as the forces of nature may be, man
+has been able in a large measure to control, indeed to domesticate,
+them. Surely the original fact of lightning is little more marvellous
+than the power of man to turn it into his errand-boy or his horse, to
+light his rooms with it, and imprison it in pennyworths, like the genius
+in the bottle, in the underground railway. Mere size seems unimpressive
+when we contemplate such an extreme of littleness as say the ant, that
+pin-point of a personality, that mere speck of being, yet including
+within its infinitesimal proportions a clever, busy brain, a soldier, a
+politician, and a merchant. That such and so many faculties should have
+room to operate within that tiny body--there is a marvel before which,
+it seems to me, the billions of miles that keep us from falling into the
+jaws of the sun, and the tonnage of Jupiter, are comparatively
+insignificant and conceivable.
+
+No, we must not allow ourselves to be frightened by the mere size and
+weight of the universe, or be depressed because our immediate genealogy
+is not considered aristocratic. Perhaps, after all, we are sons of God,
+and as Mr. Meredith finely puts it, our life here may still be
+
+  '... a little holding
+  To do a mighty service.'
+
+'Things of a day!' exclaims Pindar. 'What is a man? What is a man not?'
+
+It is good for our Nebuchadnezzars, the kings of the world, and
+conceited, successful people generally, to measure themselves against
+the great powers of the universe, to humble their pride by contemplation
+of the fixed stars; but a too humble attitude toward the Infinite, a too
+constant pondering upon eternity, is not good for us, unless, so to say,
+we can live with them as friends, with the inspiring feeling that,
+little as we may seem, there is that in us which is no less infinite, no
+less cosmic, and that our passions and dreams have, as Mr. William
+Watson puts it, 'a relish of eternity.'
+
+Readers of Amiel's 'Journal' will know what a sterilising, petrifying
+influence his trance-like contemplation of the Infinite had upon his
+life. Amiel was simply hypnotised by the universe, as a man may
+hypnotise himself by gazing fixedly at a star.
+
+Mr. Pater, you will remember, has a remarkable study of a similar
+temperament in his _Imaginary Portraits_. Sebastian van Storck, like
+Amiel, had become hypnotised by the Infinite. It paralysed in him all
+impulse or power 'to be or do any limited thing.'
+
+'For Sebastian, at least,' we read, 'the world and the individual alike
+had been divested of all effective purpose. The most vivid of finite
+objects, the dramatic episodes of Dutch history, the brilliant
+personalities which had found their parts to play in them, that golden
+art, surrounding one with an ideal world, beyond which the real world
+was discernible indeed, but etherealised by the medium through which it
+came to one; all this, for most men so powerful a link to existence,
+only set him on the thought of escape--into a formless and nameless
+infinite world, evenly grey.... Actually proud, at times, of his
+curious, well-reasoned nihilism, he could but regard what is called the
+business of life as no better than a trifling and wearisome delay.'
+
+This mood, once confined to a few mystics is likely to become a common
+one, is already, one imagines, far from infrequent--so the increase of
+suicide would lead us to suppose. Robbed of his hope of a glorious
+immortality, stripped of his spiritual significance, bullied and
+belittled by science on every hand, man not unnaturally begins to feel
+that it is no use taking his life seriously, that, in fact, it betrays a
+lack of humour to do so. While he was a supernatural being, a son of
+God, it was with him a case of _noblesse oblige_; and while he is happy
+and comfortable he doesn't mind giving up the riddle of the world. It is
+only the unhappy that ever really think. But what is he to do when agony
+and despair come upon him, when all that made his life worth living is
+taken from him? How is he to sustain himself? where shall he look for
+his strength or his hope? He looks up at the sky full of stars, but he
+is told that God is not there, that the city of God is long since a
+ruin, and that owls hoot to each other across its moss-grown fanes and
+battlements; he looks down on the earth, full of graves, a vast
+necropolis of once radiant dreams, with the living for its
+phantoms,--and there is no comfort anywhere. Happy is he if some simple
+human duty be at hand, which he may go on doing blindly and
+dumbly--till, perhaps, the light come again. It is difficult to offer
+comfort to such a one. Comfort is cheap, and we know nothing. When life
+holds nothing for our love and delight, it is difficult to explain why
+we should go on living it--except on the assumption that it matters,
+that it is, in some mystical way, supremely important, how we live it,
+and what we make of those joys and sorrows which, say some, are but
+meant as mystical trials and tests.
+
+Sebastian van Storck refused 'to be or do any limited thing,' but the
+answer to his mysticism is to be found in a finer mysticism, that which
+says that there is no limited act or thing, but that the significance,
+as well as the pathos, of eternity is in our smallest joys and sorrows,
+as in our most everyday transactions, and the greatness of God incarnate
+in His humblest child.
+
+This, the old doctrine of the microcosm, seems in certain moments,
+moments one would wish to say, of divination, strangely plain and
+clear--when, in Blake's words, it seems so easy to
+
+  '... see a world in a grain of sand,
+    And a heaven in a wild flower;
+  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
+    And Eternity in an hour.'
+
+Perhaps in the street, an effect of light, a passing face, yes, even the
+plaintive grind of a street organ, some such everyday circumstance,
+affects you suddenly in quite a strange way. It has become
+universalised. It is no longer a detail of the Strand, but a cryptic
+symbol of human life. It has been transfigured into a thing of infinite
+pathos and infinite beauty, and, sad or glad, brings to you an
+inexplicable sense of peace, an unshakable conviction that man is a
+spirit, that his life is indeed of supreme and lovely significance, and
+that his destiny is secure and blessed.
+
+Matthew Arnold, ever sensitive to such spiritual states, has described
+these trance-like visitations in 'The Buried Life'--
+
+  'Only, but this is rare--
+  When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
+  When, jaded with the rush and glare
+  Of the interminable hours,
+  Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
+  When our world-deafen'd ear
+  Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--
+  A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
+  And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again:
+  The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
+  And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
+  A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
+  And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
+  The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
+
+  'And there arrives a lull in the hot race
+  Wherein he doth for ever chase
+  That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
+  An air of coolness plays upon his face,
+  And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
+  And then he thinks he knows
+  The hills where his life rose,
+  And the sea where it goes.'
+
+'To be or do any limited thing'! What indeed, we ask in such hours, is a
+limited thing, when all the humble interests of our daily life are
+palpably big with eternity? Is the first kiss of a great love a limited
+thing? though there is, unhappily, no denying that it comes to an end!
+When a young husband and wife smile across to each other above the sleep
+of their little child--is that a limited thing? When the siren voices of
+the world blend together on the lips of a young poet, and with rapt eyes
+and hot heart he makes a song as of the morning stars--is that a limited
+thing? Are love, and genius, and duty done in the face of death--are
+these limited things? I think not--and man, indeed, knows better.
+
+Greatness is not relative. It is absolute. It is not for man to depress
+himself by measuring himself against the eternities and the immensities
+external to him. What he has to do is to look inward upon himself, to
+fathom the eternities and the immensities in his own heart and brain.
+
+And the more man sees himself forsaken by the universe, the more
+opportunity to vindicate his own greatness. Is there no kind heart
+beating through the scheme of things?--man's heart shall still be kind.
+Will the eternal silence make mock of his dreams and his idealisms,
+laugh coldly at 'the splendid purpose in his eyes'? Well, so be it. His
+dreams and idealisms are none the less noble things, and if the gods do
+thus make mock of mortal joy and pain--let us be grateful that we were
+born mere men.
+
+Moreover, he has one great answer to the universe--the answer of
+courage. He is still Prometheus, and there is no limit to what he can
+bear. Let the vultures of pain rend his heart as they will, he can still
+hiss 'coward' in the face of the Eternal. Nay, he can even laugh at his
+sufferings--thanks to the spirit of humour, that most blessed of
+ministering angels, without which surely the heart of humanity had long
+since broken, by which man is able to look with a comical eye upon
+terrors, as it were taking themselves so seriously, coming with such
+Olympian thunders and lightnings to break the spirit of a mere six foot
+of earth!
+
+But while his courage and his humour are defences of which he cannot be
+disarmed, whatever be the intention of the Eternal, it is by no means
+certain that nature does not mean kindly by man. Perhaps the pain of the
+world is but the rough horseplay of great powers that mean but jest--and
+kill us in it: as though one played at 'tick' with an elephant!
+
+Perhaps, after all,--who knows?--God is love, and His great purpose
+kind.
+
+Surely, when you think of it, the existence in man of the senses of love
+and pity implies the probability of their existence elsewhere in the
+universe too.
+
+  'Into that breast which brings the rose
+  Shall I with shuddering fall.'
+
+So runs the profoundest thought in modern poetry--and need I say it is
+Mr. Meredith's?
+
+As the fragrance and colour of the rose must in some occult way be
+properties of the rude earth from which they are drawn by the sun, may
+not human love also be a kindly property of matter--that mysterious
+life-stuff in which is packed such marvellous potentialities? Evidently
+love must be somewhere in the universe--else it had not got into the
+heart of man; and perhaps pity slides down like an angel in the rays of
+the solar energy, while there is the potential beating of a human heart
+even in the hard crust of the carbon compounds.
+
+I confess that this seems to me no mere fancy, but a really comforting
+speculation. Pain, we say, is inherent in the scheme of the universe;
+but is not love seen to be no less inherent, too?
+
+There must be some soul of beauty to animate the lovely face of the
+world, some soul of goodness to account for its saints. If the gods are
+cruel, it is strange that man should be so kind, and that some pathetic
+spirit of tenderness should seem to stir even in the bosoms of beasts
+and birds.
+
+Meanwhile, we cannot too often insist that, whatever uncertainties there
+be, man has one certainty--himself. Science has really adduced nothing
+essential against his significance. That he is not as big as an Alp, as
+heavy as a star, or as long-lived as an eagle, is nothing against his
+proper importance. Even a nobleman is of more significance in the world
+than his acres, and giants are not proverbial for their intellectual or
+spiritual qualities. The ant is of more importance than the ass, and the
+great eye of a beautiful woman is more significant than the whole clayey
+bulk of Mars.
+
+After all the scientific mockery of the old religious ideal of the
+importance of man, one begins to wonder if his Ptolemaic fancy that he
+was the centre of the universe, and that it was all made for him, is not
+nearer the If truth than the pitiless theories which hardly allow him
+equality with the flea that perishes.
+
+Suppose if, after all, the stars were really meant as his bedtime
+candles, and the sun's purpose in rising is really that he may catch the
+8.37!
+
+For, as Sir Thomas Browne says in his solemn English, 'there is surely a
+piece of Divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and
+owes no homage unto the sun.'
+
+The long winter of materialistic science seems to be breaking up, and
+the old ideals are seen trooping back with something more than their old
+beauty, in the new spiritual spring that seems to be moving in the
+hearts of men.
+
+After all its talk, science has done little more than correct the
+misprints of religion. Essentially, the old spiritualistic and poetic
+theories of life are seen, not merely weakly to satisfy the cravings of
+man's nature, but to be mostly in harmony with certain strange and
+moving facts in his constitution, which the materialists
+unscientifically ignore.
+
+It was important, and has been helpful, to insist that man is an animal,
+but it is still more important to insist that he is a spirit as well. He
+is, so to say, an animal by accident, a spirit by birthright: and,
+however homely his duties may occasionally seem, his life is bathed in
+the light of a sacred transfiguring significance, its smallest acts
+flash with divine meanings, its highest moments are rich with 'the
+pathos of eternity,' and its humblest duties mighty with the
+responsibilities of a god.
+
+
+
+
+DEATH AND TWO FRIENDS
+
+_A DIALOGUE_
+
+(_To the Memory of J.S. and T.C.L._)
+
+PERSONS: SCRIPTOR AND LECTOR.
+
+[This dialogue was written originally as a rejoinder to certain
+criticisms on a book of mine entitled, _The Religion of a Literary
+Man_--_Religio Scriptoris_--hence the names given to the two 'persons.'
+It was written in March 1894, before an event in the writer's life to
+which, erroneously, some have supposed it to refer.]
+
+
+LECTOR. But do you really mean, Scriptor, that you have no desire for
+the life after death?
+
+SCRIPTOR. I never said quite that, Lector, though perhaps I might almost
+have gone so far. What I did say was that we have been accustomed to
+exaggerate its importance to us here and now, that it really matters
+less to us than we imagine.
+
+LECTOR. I see. But you must speak for yourself, Scriptor. I am sure that
+it matters much to many, to most of us. It does, I know, to me.
+
+SCRIPTOR. Less than you think, my dear Lector. Besides, you are really
+too young to know. It is true that, as years go, you are ten years my
+senior, but what of that? You have that vigorous health which is the
+secret of perpetual youth. You have not yet realised decay, not to speak
+of death. The immortality of the soul is a question wide of you, who
+have as yet practically no doubt of the immortality of the body. But
+I--well, it would be melodramatic to say that I face death every day.
+The metaphor applies but to desperate callings and romantic complaints.
+To some Death comes like a footpad, suddenly, and presents his
+pistol--and the smoke that curls upward from his empty barrel is your
+soul.
+
+To another he comes featureless, a stealthily accumulating London fog,
+that slowly, slowly chokes the life out of you, without allowing you the
+consolation of a single picturesque moment, a single grand attitude. For
+you, probably, Death will only come when you die. I have to live with
+him as well. I shall smoulder for years, you will be carried to heaven,
+like Enoch, in a beautiful lightning.
+
+        'A simple child
+    That lightly draws its breath,
+    And feels its life in every limb,
+    What can it know of Death?'
+
+That's you, my dear Lector, for all your forty years.
+
+LECTOR. All the more reason, Scriptor, that you should desire a
+hereafter. You sometimes talk of the work you would do if you were a
+robust Philistine such as I. Would it not be worth while to live
+again, if only to make sure of that _magnum opus_--just to realise
+those dreams that you say are daily escaping you?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Ah! so speaks the energetic man, eager to take the world on
+his shoulders. I know the images of death that please you,
+Lector--such as that great one of Arnold's, about 'the sounding
+labour-house vast of being.'
+
+But, Lector, you who love work so well--have you never heard tell of
+a thing called Rest? Have you never known what it is to be tired, my
+Lector?--not tired at the end of a busy day, but tired in the morning,
+tired in the Memnonian sunlight, when larks and barrel-organs start on
+their blithe insistent rounds. No, the man who is tired of a morning
+sings not music-hall songs in his bedroom as he dashes about in his
+morning bath. But will you never want to go to bed, Lector? Will you
+be always like the children who hate to be sent to bed, and think that
+when they are grown up they will never go to bed at all? Yet in a few
+years' time how glad they are of the stray chance of bed at ten. May
+it not be so with sleep's twin-brother? In our young vigour, driven by
+a hundred buoyant activities, enticed by dream on dream, time seems so
+short for all we think we have to do; but surely when the blood begins
+to thin, and the heart to wax less extravagantly buoyant, when comfort
+croons a kettle-song whose simple spell no sirens of ambition or
+romance can overcome--don't you think that then 'bedtime' will come to
+seem the best hour of the day, and 'Death as welcome as a friend would
+fall'?
+
+LECTOR. But you are no fair judge, Scriptor. You say my health, my
+youth, as you waggishly call it, puts me out of court. Yet surely your
+ill-health and low spirits just as surely vitiate your judgment?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Admitted, so far as my views are the outcome of my
+particular condition. But you forget that the condition I have been
+supposing is not merely particular, but, on the contrary, the most
+general among men. Was it not old age?--which, like youth, is
+independent of years. You may be young beyond your years, I may be old
+in advance of them; but old age does come some time, and with it the
+desire of rest.
+
+LECTOR. But does not old age spend most of its thought in dwelling
+fondly on its lost youth, hanging like a remote sunrise in its
+imagination? Is it not its one yearning desire just to live certain
+hours of its youth over again?--and would the old man not give all he
+possesses for the certainty of being born young again into eternity?
+
+SCRIPTOR. He would give everything--but the certainty of rest. After
+seventy years of ardent life one needs a long sleep to refresh us
+in. Besides, age may not be so sure of the advantages of youth. All is
+not youth that laughs and glitters. Youth has its hopes, which are
+uncertain; but age has its memories, which are sure; youth has its
+passions, but age has its comforts.
+
+LECTOR. Your answers come gay and pat, Scriptor, but your voice
+betrays you. In spite of you, it saddens all your words. Tell me, have
+you ever known what it is actually to lose any one who is dear to you?
+Have you looked on death face to face?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Yes, Lector, I have--but once. It is now about five years
+ago, but the impression of it haunts me to this hour. Perhaps the
+memory is all the keener because it was my one experience. In a world
+where custom stales all things, save Cleopatra, it is all the better
+perhaps not to see even too much of Death, lest we grow familiar with
+him. For instance, doctors and soldiers, who look on him daily, seem
+to lose the sense of his terror--nay, worse, of his tragedy. Maybe it
+is something in his favour, and Death, like others, may only need to
+be known to be loved.
+
+LECTOR. But tell me, Scriptor, of this sad experience, which even now
+it moves you to name; or is the memory too sad to recall?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Sad enough, Lector, but beautiful for all that, beautiful as
+winter. It was winter when she of whom I am thinking died--a winter
+that seemed to make death itself whiter and colder on her marble
+forehead. It is but one sad little story of all the heaped-up sorrow
+of the world; but in it, as in a shell, I seem to hear the murmur of
+all the tides of tears that have surged about the lot of man from the
+beginning.
+
+There were two dear friends of mine whom I used to call the happiest
+lovers in the world. They had loved truly from girlhood and boyhood,
+and after some struggle--for they were not born into that class which
+is denied the luxury of struggle--at length saw a little home bright
+in front of them. And then Jenny, who had been ever bright and strong,
+suddenly and unaccountably fell ill. Like the stroke of a sword, like
+the stride of a giant, Death, to whom they had never given a thought,
+was upon them. It was consumption, and love could only watch and
+pray. Suddenly my friend sent for me, and I saw with my own eyes what
+at a distance it had seemed impossible to believe. As I entered the
+house, with the fresh air still upon me, I spoke confidently, with
+babbling ignorant tongue. 'Wait till you see her face!' was all my
+poor stricken friend could say.
+
+Ah! her face! How can I describe it?  It was much sweeter afterwards,
+but now it was so dark and witchlike, so uncanny, almost wicked, so
+thin and full of inky shadows. She sat up in her bed, a wizened little
+goblin, and laughed a queer, dry, knowing laugh to herself, a laugh
+like the scraping of reeds in a solitary place. A strange black
+weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows, like the 'unwilling
+sleep' of a strong narcotic. She would begin a sentence and let it
+wither away unfinished, and point sadly and almost humorously to her
+straight black hair, clammy as the feathers of a dead bird lying in
+the rain. Her hearing was strangely keen. And yet she did not know,
+was not to know. How was one to talk to her--talk of being well again,
+and books and country walks, when she had so plainly done with all
+these things? How bear up when she, with a half-sad, half-amused
+smile, showed her thin wrists?--how say that they would soon be strong
+and round again?  Ugh! she was already beginning to be different from
+us, already putting off our body-sweet mortality, and putting on the
+fearful garments of death, changing before our eyes from ruddy
+familiar humanity into a being of another element, an element we dread
+as the fish dreads the air. Soon we should not be able to talk to
+her. Soon she would have unlearnt all the sweet grammar of earth. She
+was no longer Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mysteries at which the
+flesh crept. She was going to die.
+
+Have you never looked ahead towards some trial, some physical trial,
+maybe an operation?--for perhaps the pains of the body are the
+keenest, after all--those of the spirit are at least in some part
+metaphor. You look forward with dread, yet it is at last over. It is
+behind you. And have you never thought that so it will be with death
+some day? Poor little Jenny was to face the great operation.
+
+Next time I saw her she was dead. In our hateful English fashion, they
+had shut her up in a dark room, and we had to take candles to see
+her. I shall never forget the moment when my eyes first rested on that
+awful snow-white sheet, so faintly indented by the fragile form
+beneath, lines very fragile, but oh! so hard and cold, like the
+indentations upon frozen snow; never forget my strange unaccountable
+terror when he on one side and I on the other turned down the icy
+sheet from her face. But terror changed to awe and reverence, as her
+face came upon us with its sweet sphinx-like smile. Lying there, with
+a little gold chain round her neck and a chrysanthemum in the bosom of
+her night-gown, there was a curious regality about her, a look as
+though she wore a crown our eyes were unable to see. And while I gazed
+upon her, the sobs of my friend came across the bed, and as he called
+to her I seemed to hear the eternal Orpheus calling for his lost
+Eurydice. Poor lad!--poor maid!  Here, naked and terrible, was all the
+tragedy of the world compressed into an hour, the Medusa-face of life
+that turns the bravest to stone. Surely, I felt, God owed more than He
+could ever repay to these two lovers, whom it had been so easy to
+leave to their simple joys. And from that night to this I can never
+look upon my white bed without seeing afar off the moment when it,
+too, will bear the little figure of her I love best in the world,
+bound for her voyage to the Minotaur Death; just as I never put off my
+clothes at night, and stretch my limbs down among the cool sheets,
+without thinking of the night when I shall put off my clothes for the
+last time and close my eyes for ever.
+
+LECTOR. But, my friend, this is to feel too much; it is morbid.
+
+SCRIPTOR. Morbid! How can one really _feel_ and not be morbid? If one
+be morbid, one can still be brave.
+
+LECTOR. But surely, true-lover as you are, it would be a joy to you to
+think that this terrible parting of death will not be final. We cannot
+love so well without hoping that we may meet our loved ones somewhere
+after death.
+
+SCRIPTOR. Hopes! wishes! desires! What of them? We hope, we _desire_
+all things. Who has not cried for the moon in his time?  But what is
+the use of talking of what we desire? Does life give us all we wish,
+however passionately we wish it, and is Death any more likely to
+listen to the cry of our desires? Of course we _wish it_, wish it with
+a pathetic urgency which is too poignant to bear, and which the wise
+man bravely stifles. It would all be different if we _knew_.
+
+LECTOR. But does not science even, of late, hold out the promise of
+its probability?--and the greatest poets and thinkers have always been
+convinced of its truth.
+
+SCRIPTOR. The promise of a probability!  O my Lector, what a poor
+substitute is that for a certainty! And as for the great men you speak
+of, what does their 'instinctive' assurance amount to but a strong
+sense of their own existence at the moment of writing or speaking?
+Does one of them anywhere assert immortality as a _fact_--a fact of
+which he has his own personal proof and knowledge--a scientific, not
+an imaginative, theological fact? Arguments on the subject are
+naught. It is waste of time to read them; unsupported by fact, they
+are one and all cowardly dreams, a horrible hypocritical clutching at
+that which their writers have not the courage to forgo.
+
+LECTOR. Yet may not a dream be of service to reality, my friend? Is it
+not certain that people are all the better and all the happier for
+this dream, as you call it?--for what seems to me this sustaining
+faith?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Happier? Some people, perhaps, in a lazy, unworthy
+fashion. But 'better'? Well, so long as we believed in 'eternal
+punishment' no doubt people were sometimes terrified into 'goodness'
+by the picture of that dread vista of torment, as no doubt they were
+bribed into it by the companion picture of a green unbounded Paradise;
+but, O my friend, what an unworthy kind of goodness, the mere mask of
+virtue! And now that the Inferno has practically disappeared from our
+theology, the belief in eternal life simply means unlimited cakes and
+ale, for good and evil alike, for all eternity. How such a belief can
+be moralising I fail to understand. To my mind, indeed, far from being
+moralising, this belief in immortality is responsible for no
+inconsiderable portion of the wrong and misery of the world. It is the
+baneful narcotic which has soothed the selfish and the slothful from
+the beginning. It is that unlimited credit which makes the bankrupt.
+It simply gives us all eternity to procrastinate in. Instead of
+manfully eating our peck of dirt here and now, we leave it and all
+such disagreeables to the hereafter.
+
+  'He said, "I believe in Eternal Life,"
+  As he threw his life away--
+      What need to hoard?
+      He could well afford
+  To squander his mortal day.
+  With Eternity his, what need to care?--
+  A sort of immortal millionaire.'
+
+LECTOR. I am glad to be reminded, Scriptor, that you are a poet, for the
+line of your argument had almost made me forget it. One expects other
+views from a poet.
+
+SCRIPTOR. When, my dear Lector, shall we get rid of the silly idea that
+the poet should give us only the ornamental view of life, and rock us to
+sleep, like babies, with pretty lullabies? Is it not possible to make
+_facts_ sing as well as fancies? With all this beautiful world to sing
+of--for beautiful it is, however it be marred; with this wonderful
+life--and wonderful and sweet it is though it is shot through with such
+bitter pain; with such _certainties_ for his theme, we yet beg him to
+sing to us of shadows!
+
+And you talk of 'faith.' 'Faith' truly is what we want, but it is faith
+in the life here, not in the life hereafter. Faith in the life here! Let
+our poets sing us that. And such as would deny it--I would hang them as
+enemies of society.
+
+LECTOR. But, at all events, to keep to our point--you at least _hope_
+for immortality. If Edison, say, were suddenly to discover it for us as
+a scientific certainty, you would welcome the news?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Well, yes and no! Have you seen the 'penny' phonographs in the
+Strand? You should go and have a pennyworth of the mysteries of time and
+space! How long will Edison's latest magic toy survive this
+popularisation, I wonder? For a little moment it awakens the sense of
+wonder in the idly curious, who set the demon tube to their ears; but if
+they make any remarks at all, it is of the cleverness of Mr. Edison,
+the probable profits of the invention--and not a word of the wonder of
+the world! So it would be with the undiscovered country. I was blamed
+the other day as being cheaply smart because I said that if 'one
+traveller returned,' his resurrection would soon be as commonplace as
+the telephone, and that enterprising firms would be interviewing him as
+to the prospects of opening branch establishments in Hades. Yet it is a
+perfectly serious, and, I think, true remark; for who that knows the
+modern man, with his small knowingness, and his utter incapacity for
+reverence, would doubt that were Mr. Edison actually to be the Columbus
+of the Unseen, it would soon be as overrun with gaping tourists as
+Switzerland, and that within a year railway companies would be
+advertising 'Bank-holidays in Eternity'?
+
+No! let us keep the Unseen--or, if it must be discovered, let the key
+thereof be given only to true-lovers and poets.
+
+
+
+
+A SEAPORT IN THE MOON
+
+
+No one is so hopelessly wrong about the stars as the astronomer, and I
+trust that you never pay any attention to his remarks on the moon. He
+knows as much about the moon as a coiffeur knows of the dreams of the
+fair lady whose beautiful neck he makes still more beautiful. There is
+but one opinion upon the moon--namely, our own. And if you think that
+science is thus wronged, reflect a moment upon what science makes of
+things near at hand. Love, it says, is merely a play of pistil and
+stamen, our most fascinating poetry and art is 'degeneration,' and human
+life, generally speaking, is sufficiently explained by the 'carbon
+compounds'--God-a-mercy! If science makes such grotesque blunders about
+radiant matters right under its nose, how can one think of taking its
+opinion upon matters so remote as the stars--or even the moon, which is
+comparatively near at hand?
+
+Science says that the moon is a dead world, a cosmic ship littered with
+the skeletons of its crew, and from which every rat of vitality has long
+since escaped. It is the ghost that rises from its tomb every night, to
+haunt its faithless lover, the world. It is a country of ancient
+silver-mines, unworked for centuries. You may see the gaping mouths of
+the dark old shafts through your telescopes. You may even see the
+rusting pit tackle, the ruinous engine-houses, and the idle pick and
+shovel. Or you may say that it is counterfeit silver, coined to take in
+the young fools who love to gaze upon it. It is, so to speak, a bad
+half-crown.
+
+As you will! but I am of Endymion's belief--and no one was ever more
+intimate with the moon. For me the moon is a country of great seaports,
+whither all the ships of our dreams come home. From all quarters of the
+world, every day of the week, there are ships sailing to the moon. They
+are the ships that sail just when and where you please. You take your
+passage on that condition. And it is ridiculous to think for what a
+trifle the captain will take you on so long a journey. If you want to
+come back, just to take an excursion and no more, just to take a lighted
+look at those coasts of rose and pearl, he will ask no more than a glass
+or two of bright wine--indeed, when the captain is very kind, a flower
+will take you there and back in no time; if you want to stay whole days
+there, but still come back dreamy and strange, you may take a little
+dark root and smoke it in a silver pipe, or you may drink a little phial
+of poppy-juice, and thus you shall find the Land of Heart's Desire; but
+if you are wise and would stay in that land for ever, the terms are even
+easier--a little powder shaken into a phial of water, a little piece of
+lead no bigger than a pea, and a farthing's-worth of explosive fire, and
+thus also you are in the Land of Heart's Desire for ever.
+
+I dreamed last night that I stood on the blustering windy wharf, and the
+dark ship was there. It was impatient, like all of us, to leave the
+world. Its funnels belched black smoke, its engines throbbed against
+the quay like arms that were eager to strike and be done, and a bell
+was beating impatient summons to be gone. The dark captain stood ready
+on the bridge, and he looked into each of our faces as we passed on
+board. 'Is it for the long voyage?' he said. 'Yes! the long voyage,' I
+said--and his stern eyes seemed to soften as I answered.
+
+At last we were all aboard, and in the twinkling of an eye were out of
+sight of land. Yet, once afloat, it seemed as though we should never
+reach our port in the moon--so it seemed to me as I lay awake in my
+little cabin, listening to the patient thud and throb of the great
+screws, beating in the ship's side like a human heart.
+
+Talking with my fellow-voyagers, I was surprised to find that we were
+not all volunteers. Some, in fact, complained pitifully. They had, they
+said, been going about their business a day or two before, and suddenly
+a mysterious captain had laid hold of them, and pressed them to sail
+this unknown sea. Thus, without a word of warning, they had been
+compelled to leave behind them all they held dear. This, one felt, was a
+little hard of the captain; but those of us whose position was exactly
+the reverse, who had friends on the other side, all whose hopes indeed
+were invested there, were too selfishly expectant of port to be severe
+on the captain who was taking us thither.
+
+There were three friends I had especially set out to see: two young
+lovers who had emigrated to those colonies in the moon just after their
+marriage, and there was another. What a surprise it would be to all
+three, for I had written no letter to say I was coming. Indeed, it was
+just a sudden impulse, the pistol-flash of a long desire.
+
+I tried to imagine what the town would be like in which they were now
+living. I asked the captain, and he answered with a sad smile that it
+would be just exactly as I cared to dream it.
+
+'Oh, well then,' I thought, 'I know what it will be like. There shall be
+a great restless, tossing estuary, with Atlantic winds for ever ruffling
+the sails of busy ships, ships coming home with laughter, ships leaving
+home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell. And the shaggy tossing water
+shall be bounded on either bank with high granite walls, and on one
+bank shall be a fretted spire soaring with a jangle of bells, from amid
+a tangle of masts, and underneath the bells and the masts shall go
+streets rising up from the strand, streets full of faces, and sweet with
+the smell of tar and the sea. O captain! will it be morning or night
+when we come to my city? In the morning my city is like a sea-blown
+rose, in the night it is bright as a sailor's star.
+
+'If it be early morning, what shall I do? I shall run to the house in
+which my friends lie in happy sleep, never to be parted again, and kiss
+my hand to their shrouded window; and then I shall run on and on till
+the city is behind and the sweetness of country lanes is about me, and I
+shall gather flowers as I run, from sheer wantonness of joy; and then at
+last, flushed and breathless, I shall stand beneath her window. I shall
+stand and listen, and I shall hear her breathing right through the heavy
+curtains, and the hushed garden and the sleeping house will bid me keep
+silence, but I shall cry a great cry up to the morning star, and say,
+"No, I will not keep silence. Mine is the voice she listens for in her
+sleep. She will wake again for no voice but mine. Dear one, awake, the
+morning of all mornings has come!"'
+
+As I write, the moon looks down at me like a Madonna from the great
+canvas of the sky. She seems beautiful with the beauty of all the eyes
+that have looked up at her, sad with all the tears of all those eyes;
+like a silver bowl brimming with the tears of dead lovers she seems.
+Yes, there are seaports in the moon; there are ships to take us there.
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+Most of the foregoing essays have made a first appearance either in
+_The Yellow Book_, _The Nineteenth Century_, _The Cosmopolitan_, _The
+Westminster Gazette_, or _The Realm_, to the editors of which the writer
+is indebted for kind permission to reprint.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Prose Fancies (Second Series)
+by Richard Le Gallienne
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROSE FANCIES (SECOND SERIES) ***
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+<title>Prose Fancies (Second Series) by Richard Le Gallienne</title>
+<style type="text/css">
+    /*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
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+    .poem p           {margin: 0; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
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+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Prose Fancies (Second Series), by Richard Le Gallienne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Prose Fancies (Second Series)
+
+Author: Richard Le Gallienne
+
+Release Date: November 20, 2004 [EBook #14103]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROSE FANCIES (SECOND SERIES) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brendan Lane, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h1>PROSE FANCIES<br>
+(SECOND SERIES)</h1>
+
+<h2>BY<br>
+RICHARD LE GALLIENNE</h2>
+
+
+<h3>LONDON: JOHN LANE<br>
+CHICAGO: H.S. STONE AND CO.<br>
+1896</h3>
+
+<h3>TO<br>
+MAGGIE LE GALLIENNE<br>
+WITH LOVE</h3>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <div class="stanza">
+  <p>Poor are the gifts of the poet&mdash;</p>
+  <p>Nothing but words!</p>
+  <p>The gifts of kings are gold,</p>
+  <p>Silver, and flocks and herds,</p>
+  <p>Garments of strange soft silk,</p>
+  <p>Feathers of wonderful birds,</p>
+  <p>Jewels and precious stones,</p>
+  <p>And horses white as the milk&mdash;</p>
+  <p>These are the gifts of kings:</p>
+  <p>But the gifts that the poet brings</p>
+  <p>Are nothing but words.</p>
+  </div>
+
+  <div class="stanza">
+  <p>Forty thousand words!</p>
+  <p>Take them&mdash;a gift of flies!</p>
+  <p>Words that should have been birds,</p>
+  <p>Words that should have been flowers,</p>
+  <p>Words that should have been stars</p>
+  <p>In the eternal skies.</p>
+  <p>Forty thousand words!</p>
+  <p>Forty thousand tears&mdash;</p>
+  <p>All out of two sad eyes.</p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<div class="contents">
+<a href="#essay01">A SEVENTH-STORY HEAVEN</a><br>
+<a href="#essay02">SPRING BY PARCEL POST</a><br>
+<a href="#essay03">THE GREAT MERRY-GO-ROUND</a><br>
+<a href="#essay04">THE BURIAL OF ROMEO AND JULIET</a><br>
+<a href="#essay05">VARIATIONS UPON WHITEBAIT</a><br>
+<a href="#essay06">THE ANSWER OF THE ROSE</a><br>
+<a href="#essay07">ABOUT THE SECURITIES</a><br>
+<a href="#essay08">THE BOOM IN YELLOW</a><br>
+<a href="#essay09">LETTER TO AN UNSUCCESSFUL LITERARY MAN</a><br>
+<a href="#essay10">A POET IN THE CITY</a><br>
+<a href="#essay11">BROWN ROSES</a><br>
+<a href="#essay12">THE DONKEY THAT LOVED A STAR</a><br>
+<a href="#essay13">ON LOVING ONE'S ENEMIES</a><br>
+<a href="#essay14">THE DRAMATIC ART OF LIFE</a><br>
+<a href="#essay15">THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX</a><br>
+<a href="#essay16">THE FALLACY OF A NATION</a><br>
+<a href="#essay17">THE GREATNESS OF MAN</a><br>
+<a href="#essay18">DEATH AND TWO FRIENDS</a><br>
+<a href="#essay19">A SEAPORT IN THE MOON</a></div>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 001-->
+<h3><a name="essay01">A SEVENTH-STORY HEAVEN</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>At one end of the city that I love there is a tall, dingy pile of
+offices that has evidently seen more prosperous fortunes. It is not the
+aristocratic end. It is remote from the lordly street of the fine shops
+of the fair women, where in the summer afternoons the gay bank clerks
+parade arm-in-arm in the wake of the tempestuous petticoat. It lies
+aside from the great exchange which looks like a scene from <em>Romeo and
+Juliet</em> in the moonlight, from the town-hall from whose clocked and
+gilded cupola ring sweet chimes at midnight, and whence, throned above
+the city, a golden Britannia, in the sight of all men, is seen visibly
+ruling the waves&mdash;while in the square below the death of Nelson is
+played all day in stone, with a frieze of his noble words about the
+pedestal. England expects! What an influence that stirring<!--Page 002--> challenge
+has yet upon the hearts of men may be seen by any one who will study the
+faces of the busy, imaginative cotton-brokers, who, in the thronged and
+humming mornings, sell what they have never seen to a customer they will
+never see.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, the end I mean is just the very opposite end to that. It is the
+end where the cotton that everybody sells and nobody buys <em>is</em> seen,
+piled in great white stacks, or swinging in the air from the necks of
+mighty cranes, cranes that could nip up an elephant with as little ado,
+and set him down on the wharf, with a box on his ugly ears for his
+cowardly trumpeting. It is the end that smells of tar, the domain of the
+harbourmasters, where the sailor finds a 'home,'&mdash;not too sweet, and
+where the wild sea is tamed in a maze of granite squares and basins; the
+end where the riggings and buildings rise side by side, and a clerk
+might swing himself out upon the yards from his top-floor desk. Here is
+the Custom House, and the conversation that shines is full of freightage
+and dock dues; here are the shops that sell nothing but<!--Page 003--> oilskins,
+sextants, and parrots, and here the taverns do a mighty trade in rum.</p>
+
+<p>It was in this quarter, for a brief sweet time, that Love and Beauty
+made their strange home, as though a pair of halcyons should choose to
+nest in the masthead of<!--Page 004--> a cattleship. Love and Beauty chose this
+quarter, as, alas! Love and Beauty must choose so many things&mdash;for its
+cheapness. Love and Beauty were poor, and office rents in this quarter
+were exceptionally low. But what should Love and Beauty do with an
+office? Love was a poor poet in need of a room for his bed and his
+rhymes, and Beauty was a little blue-eyed girl who loved him.</p>
+
+<p>It was a shabby, forbidding place, gloomy and comfortless as a warehouse
+on the banks of Styx. No one but Love and Beauty would have dared to
+choose it for their home. But Love and Beauty have a great confidence in
+themselves&mdash;a confidence curiously supported by history,&mdash;and they never
+had a moment's doubt that this place was as good as another for an
+earthly Paradise. So Love signed an agreement for one great room at the
+very top, the very masthead of the building, and Beauty made it pretty
+with muslin curtains, flowers, and dainty makeshifts of furniture, but
+chiefly with the light of her own heavenly face. A stroke of luck coming
+one day to the poet, the lovers, with that extravagance which the poor
+alone have the courage to enjoy, procured a piano on the kind-hearted
+hire-purchase system, a system specially conceived for lovers. Then,
+indeed, for many a wonderful night that room was not only on the seventh
+floor, but in the seventh heaven; and as Beauty would sit at the piano,
+with her long hair flying loose, and her soul like a whirl of starlight
+about her brows, a stranger peering in across the soft lamplight, seeing
+her face, hearing her voice, would deem that the long climb, flight
+after flight of dreary stair, had been appropriately rewarded by a
+glimpse of heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly it must have seemed a strange contrast from the life about and
+below it. The foot of that infernal stair plunged in the warm
+rum-and-thick-twist atmosphere of a sailor's tavern&mdash;and 'The Jolly
+Shipmates' was a house of entertainment by no means to be despised.
+Often have I sat there with<!--Page 005--> the poet, drinking the whisky from which
+Scotland takes its name, among wondering sea-boots and sou'-westers, who
+could make nothing of that wild hair and that still wilder talk.</p>
+
+<p>From the kingdom of rum and tar you mounted into a zone of commission
+agents fund shipbrokers, a chill, unoccupied region, in which every
+small office bore the names of half a dozen different firms, and yet
+somehow could not contrive to look busy. Finally came an airy echoing
+landing, a region of empty rooms, which the landlords in vain
+recommended as studios to a city that loved not art. Here dwelt the
+keeper and his kind-hearted little wife, and no one besides save Love
+and Beauty. There was thus a feeling of rarefaction in the atmosphere,
+as though at this height it was only the Alpine flora of humanity that
+could find root and breathing. But once along the bare passage and
+through a certain door, and what a sudden translation it was into a
+gracious world of books and flowers and the peace they always bring.</p>
+
+<p>Once upon a time, in that enchanted past<!--Page 006--> where dwell all the dreams we
+love best, precisely, with loving punctuality, at five in the afternoon,
+a pretty, girlish figure, like Persephone escaping from the shades,
+stole through the rough sailors at the foot of that sordid Jacob's
+ladder and made her way to the little heaven at the top.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not describe her, for the good reason that I cannot. Leonardo,
+ever curious of the beauty that was most strangely exquisite, once in an
+inspired hour painted such a face, a face wrought of the porcelain of
+earth with the art of heaven. But, whoever should paint it, God
+certainly made it&mdash;must have been the comment of any one who caught a
+glimpse of that little figure vanishing heavenwards up that stair, like
+an Assumption of Fra Angelico's&mdash;that is, any one interested in art and
+angels.</p>
+
+<p>She had not long to wait outside the door she sought, for the poet, who
+had listened all day for the sound, had ears for the whisper of her
+skirts as she came down the corridor, and before she had time to knock
+had already folded her in his arms. The two babes in that thieves' wood
+of commission agents and<!--Page 007--> shipbrokers stood silent together for a
+moment, in the deep security of a kiss such as the richest millionaire
+could never buy&mdash;and then they fell to comparing notes of their day's
+work. The poet had had one of his rare good days. He had made no money,
+his post had been even more disappointing than usual,&mdash;but he had
+written a poem, the best he had ever written, he said, as he always said
+of his last new thing. He had been burning to read it to somebody all
+afternoon&mdash;had with difficulty refrained from reading it to the
+loquacious little keeper's wife as she brought him some coals&mdash;so it was
+not to be expected that he should wait a minute before reading it to her
+whom indeed it strove to celebrate. With arms round each other's necks,
+they bent over the table littered with the new-born poem, all blots and
+dashes like the first draft of a composer's score, and the poet, deftly
+picking his way among the erasures and interlineations, read aloud the
+beautiful words&mdash;with a full sense of their beauty!&mdash;to ears that deemed
+them more beautiful even than they were. The owners of this now valuable
+copyright allow<!--Page 008--> me to irradiate my prose with three of the verses.</p>
+
+<p>'Ah! what,' half-chanted, half-crooned the poet&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'Ah! what a garden is your hair!&mdash;</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Such treasure as the kings of old,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">In coffers of the beaten gold,</p>
+  <p>Laid up on earth&mdash;and left it there.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>So tender a reference to hair whose beauty others beside the poet had
+loved must needs make a tender interruption&mdash;the only kind of
+interruption the poet could have forgiven&mdash;and 'Who,' he continued&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'Who was the artist of your mouth?</p>
+    <p class="indent1">What master out of old Japan</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Wrought it so dangerous to man ...'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And here it was but natural that laughter and kisses should once more
+interrupt&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <div class="stanza">
+  <p>'Those strange blue jewels of your eyes,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Painting the lily of your face,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">What goldsmith set them in their place&mdash;</p>
+  <p>Forget-me-nots of Paradise?</p>
+  </div>
+
+  <div class="stanza">
+  <p>'And that blest river of your voice,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Whose merry silver stirs the rest</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Of water-lilies in your breast ...'</p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>At last, in spite of more interruptions, the poem came to an
+end&mdash;whereupon, of course, the poet immediately read it through once<!--Page 009-->
+more from the beginning, its personal and emotional elements, he felt,
+having been done more justice on a first reading than its artistic
+excellences.</p>
+
+<p>'Why, darling, it is splendid,' was his little sweetheart's comment;
+'you know how happy it makes me to think it was written for me, don't
+you?' And she took his hands and looked up at him with eyes like the
+morning sky.</p>
+
+<p>Romance in poetry is almost exclusively associated with very refined
+ethereal matters, stars and flowers and such like&mdash;happily, in actual
+life it is often associated with much humbler objects. Lovers, like
+children, can make their paradises out of the quaintest materials.
+Indeed, our paradises, if we only knew, are always cheap enough; it is
+our hells that are so expensive. Now these lovers&mdash;like, if I mistake
+not, many other true lovers before and since&mdash;when they were
+particularly happy, when some special piece of good luck had befallen
+them, could think of no better paradise than a little dinner together in
+their seventh-story heaven. 'Ah! wilderness were Paradise enow!'<!--Page 010--></p>
+
+<p>To-night was obviously such an occasion. But, alas! where was the money
+to come from? They didn't need much&mdash;for it is wonderful how happy you
+can be on five shillings, if you only know how. At the same time it is
+difficult to be happy on ninepence&mdash;which was the entire fortune of the
+lovers at the moment. Beauty laughingly suggested that her celebrated
+hair might prove worth the price of their dinner. The poet thought a
+pawnbroker might surely be found to advance ten shillings on his
+poem&mdash;the original MS. too,&mdash;else had they nothing to pawn, save a few
+gold and silver dreams which they couldn't spare. What was to be done?
+Sell some books, of course! It made them shudder to think how many poets
+they had eaten in this fashion. It was sheer cannibalism&mdash;but what was
+to be done? Their slender stock of books had been reduced entirely to
+poetry. If there had only been a philosopher or a modern novelist, the
+sacrifice wouldn't have seemed so unnatural. And then Beauty's eyes fell
+upon a very fat informing-looking volume on the poet's desk.<!--Page 011--></p>
+
+<p>'Wouldn't this do?' she said.</p>
+
+<p>'Why, of course!' he exclaimed; 'the very thing. A new history of
+socialism just sent me for review. Hang the review; we want our dinner,
+don't we, little one? And then I've read the preface, and looked through
+the index&mdash;quite enough to make a column of, with a plentiful supply of
+general principles thrown in! Why, of course, there's our dinner for
+certain, dull and indigestible as it looks. It's worth fifty minor poets
+at old Moser's. Come along....'</p>
+
+<p>So off went the happy pair&mdash;ah! how much happier was Beauty than ever so
+many fine ladies one knows who have only, so to say, to rub their
+wedding-rings for a banquet to rise out of the ground, with the most
+distinguished guests around the table, champagne of the best, and
+conversation of the worst.</p>
+
+<p>Old Moser found histories of socialism profitable, more profitable
+perhaps than socialism, and he actually gave five-and-sixpence for the
+volume. With the ninepence already in their pockets, you will see that
+they were now possessors of quite a small<!--Page 012--> fortune. Six-and-threepence!
+It wouldn't pay for one's lunch nowadays. Ah! but that is because the
+poor alone know the art of dining.</p>
+
+<p>You needn't wish to be happier and merrier than those two lovers, as
+they gaily hastened to that bright and cosy corner of the town where
+those lovely ham-and-beef shops make glad the faces of the passers-by. O
+those hams with their honest shining faces, polished like mahogany&mdash;and
+the man inside so happy all day slicing them with those wonderful long
+knives (which, of course, the superior class of reader has never seen)
+worn away to a veritable thread, a mere wire, but keen as Excalibur.
+Beauty used to calculate in her quaint way how much steel was worn away
+with each pound of ham, and how much therefore went to the sandwich. And
+what an artist was the carver! What a true eye! what a firm, flexible
+wrist! never a shaving of fat too much&mdash;he was too great an artist for
+that. Then there were those dear little cream cheeses, and those little
+brown jugs of yellow cream come all the way from Devonshire<!--Page 013-->&mdash;you could
+hear the cows lowing across the rich pasture, and hear the milkmaids
+singing and the milk whizzing into the pail, as you looked at them.</p>
+
+<p>And then those perfectly lovely sausages&mdash;I beg the reader's pardon! I
+forgot that the very mention of the word smacks of vulgarity. Yet, all
+the same, I venture to think that a secret taste for sausages among the
+upper classes is more widespread than we have any idea of. I confess
+that Beauty and her poet were at first ashamed of admitting their vulgar
+frailty to each other. They needed to know each other very well first.
+Yet there is nothing, when once confessed, that brings two people so
+close as&mdash;a taste for sausages.</p>
+
+<p>'You darling!' exclaimed Beauty, with something like tears in her voice,
+when her poet first admitted this touch of nature&mdash;and then next moment
+they were in fits of laughter that a common taste for a very 'low' food
+should bring tears to their eyes! But such are the vagaries of love&mdash;as
+you will know, if you know anything about it&mdash;'vulgar,' no doubt, though
+only the vulgar<!--Page 014--> would so describe them&mdash;for it is only vulgarity that
+is always 'refined.'</p>
+
+<p>Then there was the florist's to visit. What beautiful trades some people
+ply! To sell flowers is surely like dealing in fairies. Beautiful must
+grow the hands that wire them, and sweet the flower-girl's every
+thought!</p>
+
+<p>There remained but the wine merchant's, or, had we not better say at
+once, the grocer's, for our lovers could afford no rarer vintages than
+Tintara or the golden burgundy of Australia; and it is wonderful to
+think what a sense of festivity one of those portly colonial flagons
+lent to their little dining-table. Sometimes, I may confide, when they
+wanted to feel very dissipated, and were <em>very</em> rich, they would allow
+themselves a small bottle of Benedictine&mdash;and you should have seen
+Beauty's eyes as she luxuriously sipped at her green little liqueur
+glass; for, like most innocent people, she enjoyed to the full the
+delight of feeling occasionally wicked. However, these were rare
+occasions, and this night was not one of them.</p>
+
+<p>Half a pound of black grapes completed<!--Page 015--> their shopping, and then, with
+their arms full of their purchases, they made their way home again, the
+two happiest people in what is, after all, a not unhappy world.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the cooking and the laying of the table. For all her Leonardo
+face, Beauty was a great cook&mdash;like all good women, she was as earthly
+in some respects as she was heavenly in others, which I hold to be a
+wise combination&mdash;and, indeed, both were excellent cooks; and the poet
+was unrivalled at 'washing up,' which, I may say, is the only skeleton
+at these Bohemian feasts.</p>
+
+<p>You should have seen the gusto with which Beauty pricked those
+sausages&mdash;I had better explain to the un-Bohemian reader that to attempt
+to cook a sausage without first pricking it vigorously with a fork, to
+allow for the expansion of its juicy gases, is like trying to smoke a
+cigar without first cutting off the end&mdash;and oh! to hear again their
+merry song as they writhed in torment in the hissing pan, like Christian
+martyrs raising hymns of praise from the very core of Smithfield fires.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the poet would be surpassing<!--Page 016--> himself in the setting-out of
+the little table, cutting up the bread reverently as though it were for
+an altar&mdash;as indeed it was,&mdash;studying the effect of the dish of
+tomatoes, now at this corner, now at that, arranging the flowers with
+much more care than he arranged the adjectives in his sonnets, and
+making ever so sumptuous an effect with that half a pound of grapes.</p>
+
+<p>And then at last the little feast would begin, with a long grace of eyes
+meeting and hands clasping: true eyes that said, 'How good it is to
+behold you, to be awake together in this dream of life!' true hands that
+said, 'I will hold you fast for ever&mdash;not death even shall pluck you
+from my hand, shall loose this bond of you and me'; true eyes, true
+hands, that had immortal meanings far beyond the speech of mortal words.</p>
+
+<p>And it had all come out of that dull history of socialism, and had cost
+little more than a crown! What lovely things can be made out of money!
+Strange to think that a little silver coin of no possible use or beauty
+in itself can be exchanged for<!--Page 017--> so much tangible, beautiful pleasure. A
+piece of money is like a piece of opium, for in it lie locked up the
+most wonderful dreams&mdash;if you have only the brains and hearts to dream
+them.</p>
+
+<p>When at last the little feast grew near its end, Love and Beauty would
+smoke their cigarettes together; and it was a favourite trick of theirs
+to lower the lamp a moment, so that they might see the stars rush down
+upon them through the skylight which hung above their table. It gave
+them a sense of great sentinels, far away out in the lonely universe,
+standing guard over them, seemed to say that their love was safe in the
+tender keeping of great forces. They were poor, but then they had the
+stars and the flowers and the great poets for their servants and
+friends; and, best of all, they had each other. Do you call that being
+poor?</p>
+
+<p>And then, in the corner, stood that magical box with the ivory keys,
+whose strings waited ready night and day&mdash;strange media through which
+the myriad voices, the inner-sweet thoughts, of the great world-soul
+found speech, messengers of the<!--Page 018--> stars to the heart, and of the heart to
+the stars.</p>
+
+<p>Beauty's songs were very simple. She got little practice, for her poet
+only cared to have her sing over and over again the same sweet songs;
+and perhaps if you had heard her sing 'Ask nothing more of me, sweet,'
+or 'Darby and Joan,' you would have understood his indifference to
+variety.</p>
+
+<p>At last the little feast is quite, quite finished. Beauty has gone home;
+her lover still carries her face in his heart as she waved and waved and
+waved to him from the rattling lighted tramcar; long he sits and sits
+thinking of her, gazing up at those lonely ancient stars; the air is
+still bright with her presence, sweet with her thoughts, warm with her
+kisses, and as he turns to the shut piano, he can still see her white
+hands on the keys and her girlish face raised in an ecstasy&mdash;Beata
+Beatrix&mdash;above the music.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'O love, my love! if I no more should see</p>
+  <p>Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Nor image of thine eyes in any spring&mdash;</p>
+  <p>How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope</p>
+  <p>The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">The wind of Death's imperishable wing!'</p>
+</div><!--Page 019-->
+
+<p>And then ... he would throw himself upon his bed, and burst into tears.</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'And they are gone: aye, ages long ago</p>
+  <p>These lovers fled away into the storm.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>That seventh-story heaven once more leads a dull life as the office of a
+ship-chandler, and harsh voices grate the air where Beauty sang. The
+books and the flowers and the lovers' faces are gone for ever. I suppose
+the stars are the same, and perhaps they sometimes look down through
+that roof-window, and wonder what has become of those two lovers who
+used to look up at them so fearlessly long ago.</p>
+
+<p>But friends of mine who believe in God say that He has given His angels
+charge concerning that dingy old seventh-floor heaven, and that, for
+those who have eyes to see, there is no place where a great dream has
+been dreamed that is not thus watched over by the guardian angels of
+memory.</p>
+
+<p><em>For M. Le G., 25 September 1895.</em></p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 020-->
+<h3><a name="essay02">SPRING BY PARCEL POST</a></h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>They've taken all the spring from the country to the town&mdash;</p>
+  <p>Like the butter and the eggs, and the milk from the cow....</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>So began to jig and jingle my thoughts as in my letters and newspapers
+this morning I read, buried alive among the solitary fastnesses of the
+Surrey hills, the last news from town. The news I envied most was that
+spring had already reached London. 'Now,' ran a pretty article on spring
+fashions, 'the sunshine makes bright the streets, and the
+flower-baskets, like huge bouquets, announce the gay arrival of spring.'
+I looked up and out through my hillside window. The black ridge on the
+other side of the valley stood a grim wall of burnt heather against the
+sky&mdash;which sky, like the bullets in the nursery rhyme, was made
+unmistakably of lead; a<!--Page 021--> close rain was falling methodically, and,
+generally speaking, the world looked like a soaked mackintosh. It wasn't
+much like the gay arrival of spring, and grimly I mused on the
+advantages of life in town.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly, it did seem hard, I reflected, that town should be ahead of
+us even in such a country matter as spring. Flower-baskets indeed! Why,
+we haven't as much as a daisy for miles around. It is true that on the
+terrace there the crocuses blaze like a street on fire, that the
+primroses thicken into clumps, lying among their green leaves like
+pounds of country butter; it is true that the blue cones of the little
+grape hyacinth are there, quaintly formal as a child's toy-flowers; yes!
+and the big Dutch hyacinths are already shamelessly <em>enceinte</em> with
+their buxom waxen blooms, so fat and fragrant&mdash;(one is already delivered
+of a fine blossom. Well, that is a fine baby, to be sure! say the other
+hyacinths, with babes no less bonny under their own green aprons&mdash;all
+waiting for the doctor sun). Then among the blue-green blades of the
+narcissus, here and there you see a stem topped with a creamish<!--Page 022-->
+chrysalis-like envelope, from which will soon emerge a beautiful eye,
+rayed round with white wings, looking as though it were meant to fly,
+but remaining rooted&mdash;a butterfly on a stalk; while all the beds are
+crowded with indeterminate beak and blade, pushing and elbowing each
+other for a look at the sun, which, however, sulkily declines to look at
+them. It is true there is spring on the terrace, but even so it is
+spring imported from the town&mdash;spring bought in Holborn, spring
+delivered free by parcel post; for where would the terrace have been but
+for the city seedsman&mdash;that magician who sends you strangely spotted
+beans and mysterious bulbs in shrivelled cerements, weird little
+flower-mummies that suggest centuries of forgotten silence in painted
+Egyptian tombs. This strange and shrivelled thing can surely never live
+again, we say, as we hold it in our hands, seeing not the glowing
+circles of colour, tiny rings of Saturn, packed so carefully inside this
+flower-egg, the folds of green and silver silk wound round and round the
+precious life within.</p>
+
+<p>But, of course, this is all the seedsman's<!--Page 023--> cunning, and no credit to
+Nature; and I repeat, that were it not for railways and the parcel
+post&mdash;goodness knows whether we should ever get any spring at all in the
+country! Think of the days when it had to travel down by stage-coach.
+For, left to herself, what is the best Nature can do for you with March
+well on the way? Personally, I find the face of the country practically
+unchanged. It is, to all intents and purposes, the same as it has been
+for the last three or four months&mdash;as grim, as unadorned, as bleak, as
+draughty, and generally as comfortless as ever. There isn't a flower to
+be seen, hardly a bird worth listening to, not a tree that is not
+winter-naked, and not a chair to sit down upon. If you want flowers on
+your walks you must bring them with you; songs, you must take a poet
+under your arm; and if you want to rest, lean laboriously on your
+stick&mdash;or take your chance of rheumatism.</p>
+
+<p>Of course your specialists, your botanists, your nature-detectives, will
+tell you otherwise. They have surprised a violet in the act of
+blossoming; after long and excited<!--Page 024--> chase have discovered a clump of
+primroses in their wild state; seen one butterfly, heard one cuckoo. But
+as one swallow does not make a summer, it takes more than one cuckoo to
+make a spring. I confess that only yesterday I saw three sulphur
+butterflies, with my own eyes; I admit the catkins, and the
+silver-notched palm; and I am told on good colour-authority that there
+is a lovely purplish bloom, almost like plum-bloom, over certain copses
+in the valley; by taking thought, I have observed the long horizontal
+arms of the beech growing spurred with little forked branches of
+spear-shaped buds, and I see little green nipples pushing out through
+the wolf-coloured rind of the dwarf fir-trees. Spring is arming in
+secret to attack the winter&mdash;that is sure enough, but spring in secret
+is no spring for me. I want to see her marching gaily with green
+pennons, and flashing sun-blades, and a good band.</p>
+
+<p>I want butterflies as they have them at the Lyceum&mdash;'butterflies all
+white,' 'butterflies all blue,' 'butterflies of gold,' and I should
+particularly fancy 'butterflies all<!--Page 025--> black.' But there, again, you
+see,&mdash;you must go to town, within hearing of Mrs. Patrick Campbell's
+<em>voix d'or</em>. I want the meadows thickly inlaid with buttercups and
+daisies; I want the trees thick with green leaves, the sky all larks and
+sunshine; I want hawthorn and wild roses&mdash;both at once; I want some go,
+some colour, some warmth in the world. Oh, where are the pipes of Pan?</p>
+
+<p>The pipes of Pan are in town, playing at street corners and in the
+centres of crowded circuses, piled high with flower-baskets blazing with
+refulgent flowery masses of white and gold. Here are the flowers you can
+only buy in town; simple flowers enough, but only to be had in town.
+Here are fragrant banks of violets every few yards, conflagrations of
+daffodils at every crossing, and narcissus in scented starry garlands
+for your hair.</p>
+
+<p>You wander through the Strand, or along Regent Street, as through the
+meadows of Enna&mdash;sweet scents, sweet sounds, sweet shapes, are all about
+you; the town-butterflies, white, blue, and gold, 'wheel and shine'<!--Page 026--> and
+flutter from shop to shop, suddenly resurgent from their winter
+wardrobes as from a chrysalis; bright eyes flash and flirt along the
+merry, jostling street, while the sun pours out his golden wine
+overhead, splashing it about from gilded domes and bright-faced
+windows&mdash;and ever are the voices at the corners and the crossings
+calling out the sweet flower-names of the spring!</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>But here in the country it is still all rain and iron. I am tired of
+waiting for this slow-moving provincial spring. Let us to the town to
+meet the spring&mdash;for:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>They've taken all the spring from the country to the town&mdash;</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Like the butter and the eggs, and the milk from the cow;</p>
+    <p class="indent1">And if you want a primrose, you write to London now,</p>
+  <p>And if you need a nightingale, well,&mdash;Whiteley sends it down.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 027-->
+<h3><a name="essay03">THE GREAT MERRY-GO-ROUND</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>In an age curious of new pleasures, the merry-go-round seems still to
+maintain its ancient popularity. I was the other day the delighted,
+indeed the fascinated, spectator of one in full swing in an old
+Thames-side town. It was a very superior example, with a central musical
+engine of extraordinary splendour, and horses that actually curveted, as
+they swirled maddeningly round to the strains of 'The Man that Broke the
+Bank at Monte Carlo.' How I longed to join the wild riders! But though I
+am a brave man, I confess that to ride a merry-go-round in front of a
+laughter-loving Cockney public is more than I can dare. I had to content
+myself with watching the faces of the riders. I noticed particularly one
+bright-eyed little girl, whose whole passionate young<!--Page 028--> soul seemed to be
+on fire with ecstasy, and for whom it was not difficult to prophesy
+trouble when time should bring her within reach of more dangerous
+excitements. Then there was a stolid little boy, dull and unmoved in
+expression, as though he were in church. Life, one felt sure, would be
+safe enough, and stupid enough, for him; the world would have no music
+to stir or draw him. The fifes would go down the street with a sweet
+sound of marching feet, and the eyes of other men would brighten and
+their blood be all glancing spears and streaming banners, but he would
+remain behind his counter; from the strange hill beyond the town the
+dear, unholy music, so lovely in the ears of other men and maids, would
+call to him in vain, and morning and evening the stars would sing above
+his draper's shop, but he never hear a word.</p>
+
+<p>What particularly struck me was the number of quite grown-up, even
+elderly, people who came and had their pennyworth of horse-exercise. Now
+it was a grave young workman quietly smoking his pipe as he revolved;
+now it was a stout middle-<!--Page 029-->aged woman returning from marketing, on whom
+the Zulu music and the whirling horses laid their irresistible spells.
+Unless ye become as little children!</p>
+
+<p>Is the Kingdom of Heaven really at hand? For, indeed, men and women, and
+perhaps particularly literary men and women, are once more becoming as
+little children in their pleasures.</p>
+
+<p>Seriously, one of the most curious and significant of recent literary
+phenomena is the sudden return of the literary man to physical, and
+so-called 'Philistine,' pleasures and modes of recreation. Perhaps
+Stevenson set the fashion with his canoe and his donkey. But at the
+moment that he was valiantly daring any one to tell him whether there
+was anything better worth doing 'than fooling among boats,' Edward
+Fitzgerald, all unconscious and careless of literary fashions, was
+giving still more practical expression to the physical faith that was in
+him, by going shares in a Lowestoft herring-lugger, and throwing his
+heart as well as his money into the fortunes of its noble skipper
+'Posh.' A literary man <em>par excellence</em>, Mr. Lang re<!--Page 030-->proaches his sires
+for his present way of life&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'Why lay your gipsy freedom down</p>
+  <p>And doom your child to pen and ink?'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>and by steady and persistent golfing, and writing about angling and
+cricket, comes as near to the noble savage as is possible to so
+incorrigibly civilised a man. Mr. Henley&mdash;that Berserker of the
+pen&mdash;sings the sword with a vigour that makes one curious to see him
+using it, and we all know Mr. Kipling's views on the matter. Then Mr.
+Bernard Shaw rides a bicycle!</p>
+
+<p>Those men of letters whose inclinations or opportunities do not lead
+them to these out-of-door, and more or less ferocious, pleasures seek to
+forget themselves at the music-hall, the Aquarium, or the numerous
+Earl's Court exhibitions. They become amateurs of foreign dancing,
+connoisseurs of the trapeze, or they leave their great minds at home and
+go up the Great Wheel. Earl's Court, particularly, is becoming quite a
+modern Vauxhall&mdash;Tan-ta-ra-ra! Earl's Court! Earl's Court!&mdash;and Mr. Imre
+Kiralfy, with his con<!--Page 031-->ceptions and designs, is to our generation what
+Albert Smith was to the age of Dickens and Edmund Yates.</p>
+
+<p>It takes some experience of life to realise how right this is; to
+realise that, after all our fine philosophies and cocksure sciences,
+there is no better answer to the riddle of things than a good game of
+cricket or an exciting spin on one's 'bike.' The real inner significance
+of Earl's Court&mdash;Mr. Kiralfy will no doubt be prepared to hear&mdash;is the
+failure of science as an answer to life. We give up the riddle, and
+enjoy ourselves with our wiser children. Simple pleasures, no doubt, for
+the profound! But what is simple, and what is profound?</p>
+
+<p>The simple joy we get from 'fooling among boats' on a summer day, the
+thrill of a well-hit ball, the rapture of a skilful dive, are no more
+easy to explain than the more complicated pleasures of literature, or
+art, or religion. And why is it&mdash;to come closer to our theme&mdash;that the
+round or the whirling have such attraction for us? What is the secret of
+the fascination of the circle? Why is it that the turning of anything,
+be it<!--Page 032--> but a barrel-organ or a phrase, holds one as with an hypnotic
+power? I confess that I can never genuinely pity a knife-grinder,
+however needy. Think of the pleasure of driving that wheel all day, the
+merry chirp of the knife on the stone, and the crisp, bright spray of
+the flying sparks! Why, he does 'what some men dream of all their
+lives'! Wheels of all kinds have the same strange charm; mill-wheels,
+colliery-wheels, spinning-wheels, water-wheels, and wheeling waters:
+there may&mdash;who knows?&mdash;have been a certain pleasure in being broken on
+the wheel, and, at all events, that hideous punishment is another
+curious example of the fascination of the circle. It would take a whole
+volume to illustrate the prevalence of the circle in external nature, in
+history, and, even more significant, in language. We all know, or think
+we know, that the world is round&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'This orb&mdash;this round</p>
+  <p>Of sight and sound,'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>as Mr. Quiller Couch sings&mdash;though I remember a porter at school who was
+sure<!--Page 033--> that it was flat, and who used to say that Hamlet's</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'How weary, stale, <em>flat</em>, and unprofitable</p>
+  <p>Seem to me all the uses of this <em>world</em>!'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>was a cryptic reference to Shakespeare's secret belief in his theory.
+Many of the things we love most are round. Is not money, according to
+the proverb, made round that it may go round, and are not the men most
+in demand described as 'all-round men'? Nor are all-round women without
+their admirers. Events, we know, move in a circle, as time moves in
+cycles&mdash;though, alas! not on them. The ballet and the bicycle are
+popular forms of the circle, and it is the charm of the essay to be
+'roundabout.'</p>
+
+<p>Again, how is it that that which on a small scale does not impress us at
+all, when on a large scale impresses us so much? What is the secret of
+the impressiveness of size, bulk, height, depth, speed, and mileage?
+Philosophically, a mountain is no more wonderful than a molehill, yet no
+man is knighted for climbing a molehill. One little drop of water and
+one little grain of sand are essentially as wonderful as 'the mighty<!--Page 034-->
+ocean' or 'the beauteous land' to which they contribute. A balloon is
+no more wonderful than an air-bubble, and were you to build an Atlantic
+liner as big as the Isle of Wight it would really be no more remarkable
+than an average steam-launch. Nobody marvels at the speed of a snail,
+yet, given a snail's pace to start with, an express train follows as a
+matter of course. Movement, not the rate of movement, is the mystery.
+Precisely the same materials, the same forces, the same methods, are
+employed in the little as in the big of these examples. Why should mere
+accumulation, reiteration, and magnification make the difference? We may
+ask why? But it does, for all that. If we answer that these mammoth
+multiplications impress us because they are so much bigger, taller,
+fatter, faster, etc., than we are, the question arises&mdash;How many times
+bigger than a man must a mountain be before it impresses us? Perhaps the
+problem has already been tackled by the schoolman who pondered how many
+angels could dance on the point of a needle.</p>
+
+<p>However, these and similar first principles,<!--Page 035--> it will readily be seen,
+are far from being irrelevant for the visitor at the Earl's Court
+Exhibition. No doubt they are continually discussed by the thousands who
+daily and nightly throng that very charming dream-world which Mr.
+Kiralfy has built 'midmost the beating' of our 'steely sea.'</p>
+
+<p>To an age that is over-read and over-fed Mr. Kiralfy brings the message:
+'Leave your great minds at home, and go up the Great Wheel!' and I heard
+his voice and obeyed. The sensation is, I should say, something between
+going up in a balloon and being upon shipboard&mdash;a sensation compounded,
+maybe, of the creaking of the circular rigging, the pleasure of rising
+in the air, the freshening of the air as you ascend, the strange feeling
+of the earth receding and spreading out beneath you, the curious
+diminution of the people below&mdash;to their proper size. You will hear
+original minds all about you comparing them to ants, and it is curious
+to notice the involuntary feeling of contempt that possesses you as you
+watch them. I believe one has a half-defined illusion that we are
+growing greater as they<!--Page 036--> are growing smaller. Ants and flies! ants and
+flies! with here and there a fiery centipede in the shape of a District
+train dashing in and out amongst them. We lose the power of
+understanding their motions, and their throngs and movements do indeed
+seem as purposeless at this height as the hurry-scurrying about an
+anthill. At this height, indeed, one seems to understand how small a
+matter a bank smash may seem to the Almighty; though, as a lady said to
+me&mdash;as we clung tightly together in terror 'a-top of the topmost
+bough'&mdash;it must be gratifying to see so many churches.</p>
+
+<p>Those who would keep their illusions about the beauty of London had
+better stay below, at least in the daytime, for it makes one's heart
+sink to look on those miles and miles of sordid grey roofs huddled in
+meaningless rows and crescents, just for all the world like a huge
+child's box of wooden bricks waiting to be arranged into some
+intelligible pattern. Of course, this is not London proper. Were the
+Great Wheel set up in Trafalgar Square, one is fain to hope that the
+view from it would be less dis<!--Page 037-->heartening&mdash;though it might be better not
+to try.</p>
+
+<p>By night, except for the bright oases of the Indian Exhibition, the view
+is little more than a black blank, a great inky plain with faint sparks
+and rows of light here and there, as though the world had been made of
+saltpetre paper, and had lately been set fire to. Were you a traveller
+from Mars you would say that the world was very badly lighted. But, for
+all that, night is the time for the Great Wheel, for the conflagration
+of pleasure at our feet makes us forget the void dark beyond. Then the
+Wheel seems like a great revolving spider's web, with fireflies
+entangled in it at every turn, and the little engine-house at the
+centre, with its two electric lights, seems like the great lord spider,
+with monstrous pearls for his eyes. And, as in the daytime the height
+robs the depth of its significance, strips poor humanity of any
+semblance of impressive or attractive meaning, at night the effect is
+just the reverse. What a fairy-world is this opening out beneath our
+feet, with its golden glowing squares and circles and palaces, with<!--Page 038--> its
+lamplit gardens and pagodas! and who are these gay and beautiful beings
+flitting hither and thither, and passing from one bright garden to
+another on the stream of pleasure? If this many-coloured, passionate
+dream be really human life, let us hasten to be down amongst it once
+more! And, after all, is not this flattering night aspect of the world
+more true than that disheartening countenance of it in the daylight?
+Those golden squares and glowing gardens and flashing waters are, of
+course, an illusion of the magician Kiralfy's, yet what power could the
+illusion have upon us without the realities of beauty and love and
+pleasure it attracts there?</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 039-->
+<h3><a name="essay04">THE BURIAL OF ROMEO AND JULIET</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>One morning of all mornings the citizens of Verona were startled by
+strange news. Tragic forces, to which they had been accustomed to pay
+little heed, had been at work in their city during the dark hours, and
+young Romeo of the Montagues, handsome, devil-may-care lad as they had
+known him, and little Juliet of the Capulets, that madcap, merry, gentle
+young mistress, lay dead, side by side in the church of Santa Maria.</p>
+
+<p>Death! surely they were used to death! and Love, flower of the clove!
+they were used to <em>love</em>. But here were love and death, that somehow
+they could not understand. So they hurried in wondering groups to Santa
+Maria, that they might gaze at the dead lovers, and thus perhaps come to
+understand.</p><!--Page 040-->
+
+<p>Romeo and Juliet lay receiving their guests in the vault of the
+Capulets, with a strange smile of welcome for all who came. And their
+presence-chamber was bright with candles and flowers, and sweet with
+the sweet smell of death. The air that had drunk in their wild words
+and their last long looks of heavenly love still hung about the dark
+corners, as the air where a rose has been holds a little while the
+memory of its breath. Yes! that morning, in that dank but shining
+tomb, you might draw into you the very breath of love. The air you
+breathed had passed through the sweet lungs of Juliet, it had been
+etherealised with her holy passion, and washed clean with her lovely
+words. And now, for a little while yet, it feasted on the fair peace
+of their glad young faces. To-morrow, or the next day, or the next
+week, they would belong to the unvisited treasure-house of the past,
+but now this morning of all mornings, this day that could never come
+again, they still belonged to the real and radiant present.</p>
+
+<p>Flowers there are that bloom but once in a hundred years, but here in
+this tomb had<!--Page 41--> blossomed one of those marvellous flowers that bloom but
+once throughout eternity. Poets and kings in after-times, O men of
+Verona, will yearn to have seen what you look upon to-day. For you, you
+thick and greasy citizens, are chosen out of all time to behold this
+beauty. There were once in the world thousands of men and women who had
+heard the very words of Christ as they fell from His lips, words that we
+may only read. There have been men, actual living, foolish men, who have
+looked on at the valour of Horatius, men who from the crowded banks of
+the Nile have watched the living body of Cleopatra step into her gilded
+barge, men who, standing idle in the streets of Florence, have seen the
+love-light start in the great Dante's eyes, seen his hand move to his
+laden heart, as the little Beatrice passed him by among her maidens.
+Base men of the past, by the indulgent accident of time, have been
+granted to behold these wonders, and now for you, O men of Verona, a
+like wonder has been born.</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>Romeo and Juliet lay receiving their<!--Page 042--> guests in the vault of the
+Capulets, with a strange smile of welcome for all who came.</p>
+
+<p>It had been an innocent little desire, yet had all the world come
+against it. It had been a simple little desire, yet too strong for all
+the world to break.</p>
+
+<p>Strange this enmity of the world to love, as though men should take arms
+against the song of a bird, or plot against the opening of a flower.</p>
+
+<p>But now, what was this strange homage to a love that a few hours ago had
+no friend in all the daylight, a fearful bliss beneath the secret moon?
+But yesterday a stupid old nurse, a herb-gathering friar, a rascally
+apothecary, had been their only friends, and now was all the world come
+here to do their bidding.</p>
+
+<p>No need to steal again beneath the shade of orchard walls, no need again
+to heed if lark or nightingale sang in the reddening east. For the world
+had grown all warm to love, warm and kind as June to the rose.</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>Three days lay Romeo and Juliet receiving their guests in the vault of
+the Capulets,<!--Page 043--> with that strange smile of welcome for all who came.
+Three days the world worshipped the love it could not understand, but
+still came dense and denser throngs to worship. For the news of the
+wonderful flower that had blossomed in Verona had gone far and wide, and
+travellers from distant cities kept pouring in to look at those strange
+young lovers, who had deemed the world well lost so that they might
+leave it together.</p>
+
+<p>Then the governor of the city decreed, as the time drew near when the
+two lovers must be left to their peace, and it was ill that any should
+lose the sight of this marvel, that on the fourth day they should be
+carried through the streets in the eyes of all the people, and then be
+buried together in the vault of the Capulets&mdash;for by this burial in the
+same tomb, says the old chronicler who was first honoured with the
+telling of their sweet story, the governor hoped to bring about a peace
+between the Montagues and Capulets, at least for a little while.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, though Verona was a city of many trades and professions, and
+love and<!--Page 044--> death were idle things, yet was there little said of business
+all these days, and little else done but talk of the two lovers, of
+whom, indeed, it was true, as it has seldom been true out of Holy Writ,
+that death was swallowed up in victory. During these days also there
+stole a strange sweetness over the city, as though the very spirit of
+love had nested there, and was filling the air with its soft
+breathing&mdash;as when in the first days of spring the birds sing so sweetly
+that broken hearts must hide away, and hard hearts grow a little kind.
+Men once more spoke kindly to their wives, and even coarse faces wore a
+gentle light,&mdash;just as sometimes at evening the setting sun will turn to
+tenderness even black rocks and frowning towers.</p>
+
+<p>There were many wild stories afloat about the end of the lovers. Some
+said one way and some another. By some the story went that Romeo was
+already dead before Juliet had awakened from her swoon, but others
+declared that the poison had not worked upon him until Juliet's
+awakening had made him awhile forget that he was to die. There were
+those who professed to know the very<!--Page 045--> words of their wild farewell, and
+in fact there had been several witnesses of Juliet's agony over the body
+of her lord. These had told how first she had raved and clung to him,
+and called him 'Romeo,' 'Sweet Sir Romeo,' 'Husband,' and many
+flower-like names, and had petted him and wooed him to come back. Then
+on a sudden she had cried, God-a-mercy&mdash;how cold thou art!' and looked
+at him long and strangely. Then had she grown stern, and anon soft.
+'Canst thou not come back, my love? Then must I follow thee. Not so far
+art thou on the way of death, but that I shall overtake thee, and
+together shall we go to Pluto's realm, and seek a kinder world.'</p>
+
+<p>Thereat she had plunged Romeo's dagger into her side, though some said
+she had stopped her heart's beating by the strong will of her great
+love. Yea&mdash;such were the distracted rumours&mdash;some averred that at the
+last she had curst Christ and His saints, and called upon Venus, who, it
+was rumoured in awestruck whispers, was being worshipped once more in
+secret corners of the world.</p><!--Page 046-->
+
+<p>It was strong noon when, on the fourth day, Romeo and Juliet were
+carried through the bright and solemn streets, that the world might be
+saved; saved as ever by the spectacle and the worship of a mysterious
+nobility, [comma added by transcriber] an uncomprehended greatness, a
+beauty which haunts not its daily dreams, lifted up by the humble gaze
+of devout eyes into the empyrean of greater souls, stirred to an
+unfamiliar passion, and fired with glimpses of a strange unworldly
+truth.</p>
+
+<p>In the light of the sun the faces of the two lovers, as they lay amid
+their flowers, seemed to have grown a little weary, but they still wore
+their sweet and royal smile, and their laurelled brows were very white
+and proud.</p>
+
+<p>And in the faces that looked upon them, as they moved slowly by, with
+sweet death music, and the hushed marching of feet, and the wafted odour
+of lilies, there was to be seen strangely blent a great pity for their
+tragedy and a heavenly tenderness for their love. It was like a dream
+passing down the streets of a dream, so deep and tender was the silence,
+for only the hearts of men were<!--Page 047--> speaking; though here and there a girl
+sobbed, or a young man buried his face in his sleeve, and the sternest
+eyes were dashed with the holy water of tears. And with the pity and
+tenderness, who shall say but that in all that silent heart-speech there
+was no little envy of the two who had loved so truly and died in the
+springtide of their love, before the ways of love had grown dusty with
+its summer, or dreary with its autumn, before its dreams had petrified
+into duties, and its passion deadened into use?</p>
+
+<p>'Would it were thou and I,' said many wedded eyes one to the other,
+delusively warm and soft for a moment, but all cold and hard again on
+the morrow.</p>
+
+<p>And maybe some poet would say in his heart&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'If you loved her living, my Romeo, what were your love could you but
+see her dead!' for indeed life has no beauty so wonderful as the beauty
+of death.</p>
+
+<p>And, as in all places and times, there was a base remnant that gaped and
+worshipped not, and in their hearts resented all this distinction paid
+to a nobility they could not<!--Page 048--> recognise, as the like had grumbled when
+Cimabue's Madonna had been carried through the streets in glory. But of
+these there is no need that we should take account, any more than of the
+beasts that moved head down amid the pastures outside the town, knowing
+not of the wonder that was passing within. For the ass will munch his
+thistles though the Son of Man be his rider, nor will the sheep look
+aside from his grazing though Apollo be the herdsman.</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>At length the sacred pageant was ended, gone like the passing of an
+aerial music, and the people went to their homes silent, with haunted
+eyes; while the Earth, which had given this beauty, took it back to
+herself, and one more Persephone of human loveliness was shut within the
+gates of the forgetful grave.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 049-->
+<h3><a name="essay05">VARIATIONS UPON WHITEBAIT</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>A very Pre-Raphaelite friend of mine came to me one day and said <em>à
+propos</em> of his having designed a very Early English chair: 'After all,
+if one has anything to say one might as well put it into a chair!'</p>
+
+<p>I thought the remark rather delicious, as also his other remark when one
+day in a curiosity-shop we were looking at another chair, which the
+dealer declared to be Norman. My friend seated himself in it very
+gravely, and after softly moving about from side to side, testing it, it
+would appear, by the sensation it imparted to the sitting portion of his
+limbs, he solemnly decided: 'I don't think the <em>flavour</em> of this chair
+is Norman!'</p>
+
+<p>I thought of this Pre-Raphaelite brother as the Sphinx and I were seated
+a few even<!--Page 050-->ings ago at our usual little dinner, in our usual little
+sheltered corner, on the Lover's Gallery of one of the great London
+restaurants. The Sphinx says that there is only one place in Europe
+where one can really dine, but as it is impossible to be always within
+reasonable train service of that Montsalvat of cookery, she consents to
+eat with me&mdash;she cannot call it dine&mdash;at the restaurant of which I
+speak. I being very simple-minded, untravelled, and unlanguaged, think
+it, in my Cockney heart, a very fine place indeed, with its white marble
+pillars surrounding the spacious peristyle, and flashing with a thousand
+brilliant lights and colours; with its stately cooks, clothed in white
+samite, mystic, wonderful, ranged behind a great altar loaded with big
+silver dishes, and the sacred musicians of the temple ranged behind
+them&mdash;while in and out go the waiters, clothed in white and black,
+waiters so good and kind that I am compelled to think of Elijah being
+waited on by angels.</p>
+
+<p>They have such an eye for a romance, too, and really take it personally
+to heart if it should befall that our little table is usurped<!--Page 051--> by others
+that know not love. I like them, too, because they really seem to have
+an eye for the strange beauty and charm of the Sphinx, quite an
+unexpected taste for Botticelli. They ill conceal their envy of my lot,
+and sometimes, in the meditative pauses between the courses, I see them
+romantically reckoning how it might be possible by desperately saving
+up, by prodigious windfalls of tips, from unexampled despatch and
+sweetness in their ministrations, how it might be possible in ten years'
+time, perhaps even in five&mdash;the lady would wait five years! and her
+present lover could be artistically poisoned meanwhile!&mdash;how it might be
+possible to come and sue for her beautiful hand. Then a harsh British
+cry for 'waiter' comes like a rattle and scares away that beautiful
+dream-bird, though, as the poor dreamer speeds on the quest of roast
+beef for four, you can see it still circling with its wonderful blue
+feathers around his pomatumed head.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, yes, the waiters know that the Sphinx is no ordinary woman. She
+cannot conceal even from them the mystical star of her face, they too
+catch far echoes of the strange<!--Page 052--> music of her brain, they too grow
+dreamy with dropped hints of fragrance from the rose of her wonderful
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>How reverently do they help her doff her little cloak of silk and lace!
+with what a worshipful inclination of the head, as in the presence of a
+deity, do they await her verdict of choice between rival soups&mdash;shall it
+be 'clear or thick'? And when she decides on 'thick,' how relieved they
+seem to be, as if&mdash;well, some few matters remain undecided in the
+universe, but never mind, this is settled for ever&mdash;no more doubts
+possible on one portentous issue, at any rate&mdash;Madame will take her soup
+'thick.'</p>
+
+<p>'On such a night' our talk fell upon whitebait.</p>
+
+<p>As the Sphinx's silver fork rustled among the withered silver upon her
+plate, she turned to me and said:</p>
+
+<p>'Have you ever thought what beautiful little things these whitebait
+are?'</p>
+
+<p>'Oh, yes,' I replied, 'they are the daisies of the deep sea, the
+threepenny-pieces of the ocean.'</p>
+
+<p>'You dear!' said the Sphinx, who is alone<!--Page 053--> in the world in thinking me
+awfully clever. 'Go on, say something else, something pretty about
+whitebait&mdash;there's a subject for you!'</p>
+
+<p>Then it was that, fortunately, I remembered my Pre-Raphaelite friend,
+and I sententiously remarked: 'Of course, if one has anything to say one
+cannot do better than say it about whitebait.... Well, whitebait....'</p>
+
+<p>But here, providentially, the band of the beef&mdash;that is, the band behind
+the beef; that is, the band that nightly hymns the beef (the phrase is
+to be had in three qualities)&mdash;struck up the overture from <em>Tannhäuser</em>,
+which is not the only music that makes the Sphinx forget my existence;
+and thus, forgetting me, she momentarily forgot the whitebait. But I
+remembered, remembered hard&mdash;worked at pretty things, as metal-workers
+punch out their flowers of brass and copper. The music swirled about us
+like golden waves, in which swam myriad whitebait, like showers of tiny
+stars, like falling snow. To me it was one grand processional of
+whitebait, silver ripples upon streams of gold.</p><!--Page 054-->
+
+<p>The music stopped. The Sphinx turned to me with the soul of Wagner in
+her eyes, and then she turned to the waiter: 'Would it be possible,' she
+said, 'to persuade the bandmaster to play that wonderful thing over
+again?'</p>
+
+<p>The waiter seemed a little doubtful, even for the Sphinx, but he went
+off to the bandmaster with the air of a man who has at last an
+opportunity to show that he can dare all for love. Personally, I have a
+suspicion that he poured his month's savings at the bandmaster's feet,
+and begged him to do this thing for the most wonderful lady in the
+world; or perhaps the bandmaster was really a musician, and his
+musician's heart was touched&mdash;lonely there amid the beef&mdash;to think that
+there was really some one, invisible though she were to him, some
+shrouded silver presence, up there among the beefeaters, who really
+loved to hear great music. Perhaps it was thus made a night he has never
+forgotten; perhaps it changed the whole course of his life&mdash;who knows?
+The sweet reassuring request may have come to him at a moment when, sick
+at<!--Page 055--> heart, he was deciding to abandon real music for ever, and settle
+down amid the beef and the beef-music of Old England.</p>
+
+<p>Well, however it was, the waiter came back radiant with a 'Yes' on every
+shining part of him, and if the <em>Tannhäuser</em> had been played well at
+first, certainly the orchestra surpassed themselves this second time.</p>
+
+<p>When the great jinnee of music had once more swept out of the hall, the
+Sphinx turned with shining eyes to the waiter:</p>
+
+<p>'Take,' she said, 'take these tears to the bandmaster. He has indeed
+earned them.'</p>
+
+<p>'Tears, little one!' I said. 'See how they swim like whitebait in the
+fishpools of your eyes!'</p>
+
+<p>'Oh, yes, the whitebait,' rejoined the Sphinx, glad of a subject to hide
+her emotion. 'Now tell me something nice about them, though the poor
+little things have long since disappeared. Tell me, for instance, how
+they get their beautiful little silver waterproofs?'</p>
+
+<p>'Electric Light of the World,' I said, 'it is like this. While they are
+still quite young<!--Page 056--> and full of dreams, their mother takes them out in
+picnic parties of a billion or so at a time to where the spring moon is
+shining, scattering silver from its purse of pearl far over the wide
+waters,&mdash;silver, silver, for every little whitebait that cares to swim
+and pick it up. The mother, who has a contract with some such big
+restaurateur as ours, chooses a convenient area of moonlight, and then
+at a given sign they all turn over on their sides, and bask and bask in
+the rays, little fin pressed lovingly against little fin&mdash;for this is
+the happiest time in the young whitebait's life: it is at these
+silvering parties that matches are made and future consignments of
+whitebait arranged for. Well, night after night, they thus lie in the
+moonlight, first on one side, then on the other, till by degrees, tiny
+scale by scale, they have become completely lunar-plated. Ah! how sad
+they are when the end of that happy time has come!'</p>
+
+<p>'And what happens to them after that?' asked the Sphinx.</p>
+
+<p>'One night when the moon is hidden their mother comes to them with
+treacherous wile, and suggests that they should go off on a<!--Page 057--> holiday
+again to seek the moon&mdash;the moon that for a moment seems captured by the
+pearl-fishers of the sky. And so off they go merrily, but, alas! no moon
+appears; and presently they are aware of unwieldy bumping presences upon
+the surface of the sea, presences as of huge dolphins; and rough voices
+call across the water, till, scared, the little whitebaits turn home in
+flight&mdash;to find themselves somehow meshed in an invisible prison, a net
+as fine and strong as air, into which, O agony! they are presently
+hauled, lovely banks of silver, shining like opened coffers beneath the
+coarse and ragged flares of yellow torches. The rest is silence.'</p>
+
+<p>'What sad little lives! and what a cruel world it is!' said the
+Sphinx&mdash;as she crunched with her knife through the body of a lark, that
+but yesterday had been singing in the blue sky. Its spirit sang just
+above our heads as she ate, and the air was thick with the grey ghosts
+of all the whitebait she had eaten that night.</p>
+
+<p>But there were no longer any tears in her eyes.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 058-->
+<h3><a name="essay06">THE ANSWER OF THE ROSE</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>The Sphinx and I sat in our little box at <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>. It was the
+first time she had seen that fairy-tale of passion upon the stage. I had
+seen it played once before&mdash;in Paradise. Therefore, I rather trembled to
+see it again in an earthly play-house, and as much as possible kept my
+eyes from the stage. All I knew of the performance&mdash;but how much was
+that!&mdash;was two lovely voices making love like angels; and when there
+were no words, the music told me what was going on. Love speaks so many
+languages.</p>
+
+<p>One might as well look. It was as clear as moonlight to the tragic eye
+within the heart. The Sphinx was gazing on it all with those eyes that
+will never grow old, neither for years nor tears; but though I seemed to
+be seeing nothing but an advertisement of Paderewski pianos on the
+pro<!--Page 059-->gramme, I saw it&mdash;oh, didn't I see it?&mdash;all. The house had grown
+dark, and the music low and passionate, and for a moment no one was
+speaking. Only, deep in the thickets of my heart there sang a tragic
+nightingale that, happily, only I could hear; and I said to myself, 'Now
+the young fool is climbing the orchard wall! Yes, there go Benvolio and
+Mercutio calling him; and now,&mdash;"he jests at scars who never felt a
+wound"&mdash;the other young fool is coming out on to the balcony. God help
+them both! They have no eyes&mdash;no eyes&mdash;or surely they would see the
+shadow that sings "Love! Love! Love!" like a fountain in the moonlight,
+and then shrinks away to chuckle "Death! Death! Death!" in the
+darkness!'</p>
+
+<p>But, soft, what light from yonder window breaks!</p>
+
+<p>The Sphinx turned to me for sympathy&mdash;this time it was the soul of
+Shakespeare in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes!' I whispered, 'it is the Opening of the Eternal Rose, sung by the
+Eternal Nightingale!'</p>
+
+<p>She pressed my hand approvingly; and<!--Page 060--> while the lovely voices made their
+heavenly love, I slipped out my silver-bound pocket-book of ivory and
+pressed within it the rose which had just fallen from my lips.</p>
+
+<p>The worst of a great play is that one is so dull between the acts. Wit
+is sacrilege, and sentiment is bathos. Not another rose fell from my
+lips during the performance, though that I minded little, as I was the
+more able to count the pearls that fell from the Sphinx's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>It took quite half a bottle of champagne to pull us up to our usual
+spirits, as we sat at supper at a window where we could see London
+spread out beneath us like a huge black velvet flower, dotted with fiery
+embroideries, sudden flaring stamens, and rows of ant-like fireflies
+moving in slow zig-zag processions along and across its petals.</p>
+
+<p>'How strange it seems,' said the Sphinx, 'to think that for every two of
+those moving double-lights, which we know to be the eyes of hansoms, but
+which seem up here nothing but gold dots in a very barbaric pattern of
+black and gold, there are two human beings, no doubt at this time of
+night two lovers,<!--Page 061--> throbbing with the joy of life, and dreaming, heaven
+knows what dreams!'</p>
+
+<p>'Yes,' I rejoined;' and to them I'm afraid we are even more impersonal.
+From their little Piccadilly coracles our watch-tower in the skies is
+merely a radiant facade of glowing windows, and no one of all who glide
+by realises that the spirited illumination is every bit due to your
+eyes. You have but to close them, and every one will be asking what has
+gone wrong with the electric light.'</p>
+
+<p>A little nonsense is a great healer of the heart, and by means of such
+nonsense as this we grew merry again. And anon we grew sentimental and
+poetic, but&mdash;thank heaven! we were no longer tragic.</p>
+
+<p>Presently I had news for the Sphinx. 'The rose-tree that grows in the
+garden of my mind,' I said, 'desires to blossom.'</p>
+
+<p>'May it blossom indeed,' she replied; 'for it has been flowerless all
+this long evening; and bring me a rose fresh with all the dews of
+inspiration&mdash;no florist's flower, wired and artificially scented, no
+bloom of yesterday's hard-driven brains.'</p><!--Page 062-->
+
+<p>'I was only thinking,' I said, '<em>à propos</em> of nightingales and roses,
+that though all the world has heard the song of the nightingale to the
+rose, only the nightingale has heard the answer of the rose. You know
+what I mean?'</p>
+
+<p>'Know what you mean! Of course, that's always easy enough,' retorted the
+Sphinx, who knows well how to be hard on me.</p>
+
+<p>'I'm so glad,' I ventured to thrust back; 'for lucidity is the first
+success of expression: to make others see clearly what we ourselves are
+struggling to see, believe with all their hearts what we are just daring
+to hope, is&mdash;well, the religion of a literary man!'</p>
+
+<p>'Yes! it's a pretty idea,' said the Sphinx, once more pressing the rose
+of my thought to her brain; 'and indeed it's more than pretty ...'</p>
+
+<p>'Thank you!' I said humbly.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, it's <em>true</em>&mdash;and many a humble little rose will thank you for it.
+For, your nightingale is a self-advertising bird. He never sings a song<!--Page 063-->
+without an eye on the critics, sitting up there in their stalls among
+the stars. He never, or seldom, sings a song for pure love, just
+because he must sing it or die. Indeed, he has a great fear of death,
+unless&mdash;you will guarantee him immortality. But the rose, the trusting
+little earth-born rose, that must stay all her life rooted in one spot
+till some nightingale comes to choose her&mdash;some nightingale whose song
+maybe has been inspired and perfected by a hundred other roses, which
+are at the moment pot-pourri&mdash;ah, the shy bosom-song of the rose ...'</p>
+
+<p>Here the Sphinx paused, and added abruptly&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Well&mdash;there is no nightingale worthy to hear it!'</p>
+
+<p>'It is true,' I agreed, 'O trusting little earth-born rose!'</p>
+
+<p>'Do you know why the rose has thorns?' suddenly asked the Sphinx. Of
+course I knew, but I always respect a joke, particularly when it is but
+half-born&mdash;humourists always prefer to deliver themselves&mdash;so I shook my
+head.</p>
+
+<p>'To keep off the nightingales, of course,' said the Sphinx, the tone of
+her voice holding in mocking solution the words 'Donkey'<!--Page 064--> and
+'Stupid,'&mdash;which I recognised and meekly bore.</p>
+
+<p>'What an excellent idea!' I said. 'I never thought of it before. But
+don't you think it's a little unkind? For, after all, if there were no
+nightin<!--Page 065-->gales, one shouldn't hear so much about the rose; and there is
+always the danger that if the rose continues too painfully thorny, the
+nightingale may go off and seek, say, a more accommodating lily.'</p>
+
+<p>'I have no opinion of lilies,' said the Sphinx.</p>
+
+<p>'Nor have I,' I answered soothingly; 'I much prefer roses&mdash;but ...
+but....'</p>
+
+<p>'But what?'</p>
+
+<p>'But&mdash;well, I much prefer roses. Indeed I do.'</p>
+
+<p>'Rose of the World,' I continued with sentiment, 'draw in your thorns. I
+cannot bear them.'</p>
+
+<p>'Ah!' she answered eagerly, 'that is just it. The nightingale that is
+worthy of the rose will not only bear, but positively love, her thorns.
+It is for that reason she wears them. The thorns of the rose properly
+understood are but the tests of the nightingale. The nightingale that
+is frightened of the thorns is not worthy of the rose&mdash;of that you may
+be sure....'</p>
+
+<p>'I am not frightened of the thorns,' I managed to interject.</p>
+
+<p>'Sing then once more,' she cried, 'the Song of the Nightingale.'</p>
+
+<p>And it was thus I sang:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>O Rose of the World, a nightingale,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">A Bird of the World, am I,</p>
+  <p>I have loved all the world and sung all the world,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">But I come to your side to die.</p>
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>Tired of the world, as the world of me,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">I plead for your quiet breast,</p>
+  <p>I have loved all the world and sung all the world&mdash;</p>
+    <p class="indent1">But&mdash;where is the nightingale's nest?</p>
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>In a hundred gardens I sung the rose,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Rose of the World, I confess&mdash;</p>
+  <p>But for every rose I have sung before</p>
+    <p class="indent1">I love you the more, not less.</p>
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>Perfect it grew by each rose that died,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Each rose that has died for you,</p>
+  <p>The song that I sing&mdash;yea, 'tis no new song,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">It is tried&mdash;and so it is true.</p>
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>Petal or thorn, yea! I have no care,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">So that I here abide;</p>
+  <p>Pierce me, my love, or kiss me, my love,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">But keep me close to your side.</p>
+ </div><!--Page 066-->
+
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>I know not your kiss from your scorn, my love,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Your breast from your thorn, my rose,</p>
+  <p>And if you must kill me, well, kill me, my love!</p>
+    <p class="indent1">But&mdash;say 'twas the death I chose.</p>
+ </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>'Is it true?' asked the Rose.</p>
+
+<p>'As I am a nightingale,' I replied; and as we bade each other
+good-night, I whispered:</p>
+
+<p>'When may I expect the Answer of the Rose?'</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 067-->
+<h3><a name="essay07">ABOUT THE SECURITIES</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>When I say that my friend Matthew lay dying, I want you so far as
+possible to dissociate the statement from any conventional, and
+certainly from any pictorial, conceptions of death which you may have
+acquired. Death sometimes shows himself one of those impersonal artists
+who conceal their art, and, unless you had been told, you could hardly
+have guessed that Matthew was dying, dying indeed sixty miles an hour,
+dying of consumption, dying because some one else had died four years
+before, dying too of debt.</p>
+
+<p>Connoisseurs, of course, would have understood; at a glance would have
+named the sculptor who was silently chiselling those noble hollows in
+the finely modelled face,&mdash;that Pygmalion who turns all flesh to
+stone,&mdash;at a glance would have named the painter who was cunningly
+weighting the brows with<!--Page 068--> darkness that the eyes might shine the more
+with an unaccustomed light. Matthew and I had long been students of the
+strange wandering artist, had begun by hating his art (it is ever so
+with an art unfamiliar to us), and had ended by loving it.</p>
+
+<p>'Let us see what the artist has added to the picture since yesterday,'
+said Matthew, signing to me to hand him the mirror.</p>
+
+<p>'H'm,' he murmured, 'he's had one of his lazy days, I'm afraid. He's
+hardly added a touch&mdash;just a little heightened the chiaroscuro,
+sharpened the nose a trifle, deepened some little the shadows round the
+eyes....</p>
+
+<p>'O why,' he presently sighed, 'does he not work a little overtime and
+get it done? He's been paid handsomely enough....</p>
+
+<p>'Paid,' he continued, 'by a life that is so much undeveloped gold-mine,
+paid by all my uncashed hopes and dreams....'</p>
+
+<p>'He works fast enough for me, old fellow,' I interrupted; 'there was a
+time, was there not, when he worked too fast for you and me?'</p>
+
+<p>There are moments, for certain people,<!--Page 069--> when such fantastic unreality as
+this is the truest realism. Matthew and I talked like this with our
+brains, because we hadn't the courage to allow our hearts to break in
+upon the conversation. Had I dared to say some real emotional thing,
+what effect would it have had but to set poor tired Matthew a-coughing?
+and it was our aim that he should die with as little to-do as
+practicable. The emotional in such situations is merely the obvious.
+There was no need for either of us to state the elementary feelings of
+our love. I knew that Matthew was going to die, and he knew that&mdash;I was
+going to live, and we pitied each other accordingly; though I confess my
+feeling for him was rather one of envy,&mdash;when it was not congratulation.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, to tell the truth, we never mentioned 'the hereafter.' I don't
+believe it even occurred to us. Indeed, we spent the few hours that
+remained of our friendship in retailing the latest gathered of those
+good stories with which we had been accustomed to salt our intercourse.</p>
+
+<p>One of Matthew's anecdotes was, no doubt, somewhat suggested by the
+occasion,<!--Page 070--> and I should add that he had always somewhat of an
+ecclesiastical bias&mdash;would, I believe, have ended some day as a
+Monsignor, a notable 'Bishop Blougram.'</p>
+
+<p>His story was of an evangelistic preacher who desired to impress his
+congregation with the unmistakable reality of hell-fire. 'You know the
+Black Country, my friends,' he had declaimed,' you have seen it, at
+night, flaring with a thousand furnaces, in the lurid incandescence of
+which myriads of unhappy beings, our fellow-creatures (God forbid!),
+snatch a precarious existence&mdash;you have seen them silhouetted against
+the yellow glare, running hither and thither, as it seemed from afar, in
+the very jaws of the awful fire. Have you realised that the burdens with
+which they thus run hither and thither are molten iron, iron to which
+such a stupendous heat has been applied that it has melted, melted as
+though it had been sugar in the sun?&mdash;well! returning to hell-fire, let
+me tell you this, that in hell they eat this fiery molten metal for
+ice-cream!&mdash;yes! and are glad to get anything so cool.'</p>
+
+<p>It was thus we talked while Matthew lay<!--Page 071--> dying, for why should we not
+talk as we had lived? We both laughed long and heartily over this story;
+perhaps it would have amused us less had Matthew not been dying; and
+then his kind old nurse brought in our lunch. We had both excellent
+appetites, and were far from indifferent to the dainty little meal which
+was to be our last but one together. I brought my table as close to
+Matthew's pillow as was possible, and he stroked my hand with tenderness
+in which there was a touch of gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>'You are not frightened of the bacteria!' he laughed sadly; and then he
+told me, with huge amusement, how a friend (and a true, dear friend for
+all that) had come to see him a day or two before, and had hung over the
+end of the bed to say farewell, daring to approach no nearer, mopping
+his fear-perspiring brows with a handkerchief soaked in 'Eucalyptus'!</p>
+
+<p>'He had brought an anticipatory elegy too,' said my friend, 'written
+against my burial. I wish you'd read it for me,' and he fidgeted for it
+in the nervous manner of the dying. Finding it among his pillows, he
+handed it<!--Page 072--> to me saying, 'You needn't be frightened of it. It is well
+dosed with Eucalyptus.'</p>
+
+<p>We laughed even more over this poem than over our stories, and then we
+discussed the terms of three cremation societies to which, at the
+express request of my friend, I had written a day or two before.</p>
+
+<p>Then having smoked a cigar and drunk a glass of port together (for the
+assured dying are allowed to 'live well'), Matthew grew sleepy, and,
+tucking him beneath the counterpane, I left him, for, after all, he was
+not to die that day.</p>
+
+<p>Circumstances prevented my seeing him again for a week. When I did so,
+entering the room poignantly redolent of the strange sweet odour of
+antiseptics, I saw that the great artist had been busy in my absence.
+Indeed, his work was nearly at an end. Yet to one unfamiliar with his
+methods there was still little to alarm in Matthew's face. In fact, with
+the exception of his brain, and his ice-cold feet, he was alive as ever.
+And even to his brain had come a certain unnatural activity, a life as
+of the grave, a sort of vampire vitality, which would assuredly<!--Page 073--> have
+deceived any who had not known him. He still told his stories, laughed
+and talked with the same unconquerable humour, was in every way alert
+and practical, with this difference, that he had forgotten he was going
+to die, that the world in which he exercised his various faculties was
+another world to that in which, in spite of his delirium, we ate our
+last boiled fowl, drank our last wine, smoked our last cigar together.
+His talk was so convincingly rational, dealt with such unreal matters in
+so every-day a fashion, that you were ready to think that surely it was
+you and not he whose mind was wandering.</p>
+
+<p>'You might reach that pocket-book, and ring for Mrs. Davies,' he would
+say in so casual a way that of course you would ring. On Mrs. Davies's
+appearance he would be fumbling about among the papers in his
+pocket-book, and presently he would say, with a look of frustration that
+went to one's heart&mdash;'I've got a ten-pound note somewhere here for you,
+Mrs. Davies, to pay you up till Saturday, but somehow I seem to have
+lost it. Yet it must be somewhere about. Perhaps you'll find it as you
+make the bed in the<!--Page 074--> morning. I'm so sorry to have troubled you....'</p>
+
+<p>And then he would grow tired and doze a little on his pillow.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he would be alert again, and with a startling vividness tell me
+strange stories from the dreamland into which he was now passing.</p>
+
+<p>I had promised to see him on Monday, but had been prevented, and had
+wired to him accordingly. This was Tuesday.</p>
+
+<p>'You needn't have troubled to wire,' he said. 'Didn't you know I was in
+London from Saturday to Monday?'</p>
+
+<p>'The doctor and Mrs. Davies didn't know,' he continued with the creepy
+cunning of the dying: 'I managed to slip away to look at a house I think
+of taking&mdash;in fact I've taken it. It's in&mdash;in&mdash;now, where is it? Now
+isn't that silly? I can see it as plain as anything&mdash;yet I cannot, for
+the life of me, remember where it is, or the number.... It was somewhere
+St. John's Wood way ... never mind, you must come and see me there, when
+we get in....'</p>
+
+<p>I said he was dying in debt, and thus the<!--Page 075--> heaven that lay about his
+deathbed was one of fantastic Eldorados, sudden colossal legacies, and
+miraculous windfalls.</p>
+
+<p>'I haven't told you,' he said presently, 'of the piece of good luck that
+has befallen me. You are not the only person in luck. I can hardly
+expect you to believe me, it sounds so like the Arabian Nights. However,
+it's true for all that. Well, one of the little sisters was playing in
+the garden a few afternoons ago, making mud-pies or something of that
+sort, and she suddenly scraped up a sovereign. Presently she found two
+or three more, and our curiosity becoming aroused, a turn or two with
+the spade revealed quite a bed of gold; and the end of it was, that on
+further excavating, the whole garden proved to be one mass of
+sovereigns. Sixty thousand pounds we counted ... and then, what do you
+think?&mdash;it suddenly melted away....'</p>
+
+<p>He paused for a moment, and continued, more in amusement than regret&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Yes&mdash;the Government got wind of it, and claimed the whole lot as
+treasure-trove!</p>
+
+<p>'But not,' he added slyly, 'before I'd paid<!--Page 076--> off two or three of my
+biggest bills. Yes&mdash;and&mdash;you'll keep it quiet, of course,&mdash;there's
+another lot been discovered in the garden, but we shall take good care
+the Government doesn't get hold of it this time, you bet.'</p>
+
+<p>He told this wild story with such an air of simple conviction that, odd
+as it may seem, one believed every word of it. But the tale of his
+sudden good-fortune was not ended.</p>
+
+<p>'You've heard of old Lord Osterley,' he presently began again. 'Well,
+congratulate me, old man: he has just died and left everything to me.
+You know what a splendid library he had&mdash;to think that that will all be
+mine&mdash;and that grand old park through which we've so often wandered, you
+and I! Well, we shall need fear no gamekeeper now, and of course, dear
+old fellow, you'll come and live with me&mdash;like a prince&mdash;and just write
+your own books and say farewell to journalism for ever. Of course I can
+hardly believe it's true yet. It seems too much of a dream, and yet
+there's no doubt about it. I had a letter from my solicitors this
+morning, saying that they were engaged in going<!--Page 077--> through the securities,
+and&mdash;and&mdash;but the letter's somewhere over there; you might read it. No?
+can't you find it? It's there somewhere about, I know. Never mind, you
+can see it again....' he finished wearily.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes!' he presently said, half to himself, 'it will be a wonderful
+change! a wonderful change!'</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>At length the time came to say good-bye, a good-bye I knew must be the
+last, for my affairs were taking me so far away from him that I could
+not hope to see him for some days.</p>
+
+<p>'I'm afraid, old man,' I said, 'that I mayn't be able to see you for
+another week.'</p>
+
+<p>'O never mind, old fellow, don't worry about me. I'm much better
+now&mdash;and by the time you come again we shall know all about the
+securities.'</p>
+
+<p>The securities! My heart had seemed like a stone, incapable of feeling,
+all those last unreal hours together; but the pathos of that sad phrase,
+so curiously symbolic, suddenly smote it with overwhelming pity, and the
+tears sprang to my eyes for the first time.<!--Page 078--> As I bent over him to kiss
+his poor damp forehead, and press his hand for the last farewell, I
+murmured&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Yes&mdash;dear, dear old friend. We shall know all about the securities....'</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 079-->
+<h3><a name="essay08">THE BOOM IN YELLOW</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>Green must always have a large following among artists and art lovers;
+for, as has been pointed out, an appreciation of it is a sure sign of a
+subtle artistic temperament. There is something not quite good,
+something almost sinister, about it&mdash;at least, in its more complex
+forms, though in its simple form, as we find it in outdoor nature, it is
+innocent enough; and, indeed, is it not used in colloquial metaphor as
+an adjective for innocence itself? Innocence has but two colours, white
+or green. But Becky Sharp's eyes also were green, and the green of the
+aesthete does not suggest innocence. There will always be wearers of the
+green carnation; but the popular vogue which green has enjoyed for the
+last ten or fifteen years is probably passing. Even the æsthete himself
+would seem to be growing a little weary of<!--Page 080--> its indefinitely divided
+tones, and to be anxious for a colour sensation somewhat more positive
+than those to be gained from almost imperceptible <em>nuances</em>, of green.
+Jaded with over-refinements and super-subtleties, we seem in many
+directions to be harking back to the primary colours of life. Blue,
+crude and unsoftened, and a form of magenta, have recently had a short
+innings; and now the triumph of yellow is imminent. Of course, a love
+for green implies some regard for yellow, and in our so-called aesthetic
+renaissance the sunflower went before the green carnation&mdash;which is,
+indeed, the badge of but a small schism of aesthetes, and not worn by
+the great body of the more catholic lovers of beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Yellow is becoming more and more dominant in decoration&mdash;in wall-papers,
+and flowers cultivated with decorative intention, such as
+chrysanthemums. And one can easily understand why: seeing that, after
+white, yellow reflects more light than any other colour, and thus
+ministers to the growing preference for light and joyous rooms. A few
+yellow chrysanthemums will make a<!--Page 081--> small room look twice its size, and
+when the sun comes out upon a yellow wall-paper the whole room seems
+suddenly to expand, to open like a flower. When it falls upon the pot of
+yellow chrysanthemums, and sets them ablaze, it seems as though one had
+an angel in the room. Bill-posters are beginning to discover the
+attractive qualities of the colour. Who can ever forget meeting for the
+first time upon a hoarding Mr. Dudley Hardy's wonderful Yellow Girl, the
+pretty advance-guard of <em>To-Day</em>? But I suppose the honour of the
+discovery of the colour for advertising purposes rests with Mr. Colman;
+though its recent boom comes from the publishers, and particularly from
+the Bodley Head. <em>The Yellow Book</em> with any other colour would hardly
+have sold as well&mdash;the first private edition of Mr. Arthur Benson's
+poems, by the way, came caparisoned in yellow, and with the identical
+name, <em>Le Cahier Jaune</em>; and no doubt it was largely its title that made
+the success of <em>The Yellow Aster</em>. In literature, indeed, yellow has
+long been the colour of romance. The word 'yellow-back' witnesses its
+close association<!--Page 082--> with fiction; and in France, as we know, it is the
+all but universal custom to bind books in yellow paper. Mr. Heinemann
+and Mr. Unwin have endeavoured to naturalise the custom here; but,
+though in cloth yellow has emphatically 'caught on,' in paper it still
+hangs fire. The ABC Railway Guide is probably the only exception, and
+that, it is to be hoped, is not fiction. Mr. Lang has recently followed
+the fashion with his <em>Yellow Fairy Book</em>; and, indeed, one of the best
+known figures in fairydom is yellow&mdash;namely, the Yellow Dwarf. Yellow,
+always a prominent Oriental colour, was but lately of peculiar
+significance in the Far East; for were not the sorrows of a certain high
+Chinese official intimately connected with the fatal colour? The Yellow
+Book, the Yellow Aster, the Yellow Jacket!&mdash;and the Yellow Fever, like
+'Orion' Home's sunshine, is always with us' somewhere in the world.' The
+same applies also, I suppose, to the Yellow Sea.</p>
+
+<p>Till one comes to think of it, one hardly realises how many important
+and pleasant things in life are yellow. Blue and green,<!--Page 083--> no doubt,
+contract for the colouring of vast departments of the physical world.
+'Blue!' sings Keats, in a fine but too little known sonnet&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'... 'Tis the life of heaven&mdash;the domain</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Of Cynthia&mdash;the wide palace of the sun&mdash;</p>
+  <p>The tent of Hesperus, and all his train&mdash;</p>
+  <p>The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey, and dun.</p>
+  <p>Blue! 'Tis the life of waters ...</p>
+  <p>Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest green,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">Married to green in all the sweetest flowers.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Yellow might retort by quoting Mr. Grant Allen, in his book on <em>The
+Colour Sense</em>, to the effect that the blueness of sea and sky is mainly
+poetical illusion or inaccuracy, and that sea and sky are found blue
+only in one experiment out of fourteen. At morning and evening they are
+usually in great part stained golden. Blue certainly has one advantage
+over yellow, in that it has the privilege of colouring some of the
+prettiest eyes in the world. Yellow has a chance only in cases of
+jaundice and liver complaint, and his colour scheme in such cases is
+seldom appreciated. Again, green has the contract for the greater bulk
+of the vegetable life of the globe; but his is a<!--Page 084--> monotonous business,
+like the painting of miles and miles of palings: grass, grass, grass,
+trees, trees, trees, <em>ad infinitum</em>; whereas yellow leads a roving,
+versatile life, and is seldom called upon for such monotonous labour.
+The sands of Sahara are probably the only conspicuous instance of yellow
+thus working by the piece. It is in the quality, in the diversity of the
+things it colours, rather than in their mileage or tonnage, that yellow
+is distinguished; though, for that matter, we suppose, the sun is as big
+and heavy as most things, and that is yellow. Of course, when we say
+yellow we include golden, and all varieties of the colour&mdash;saffron,
+orange, flaxen, tawny, blonde, topaz, citron, etc.</p>
+
+<p>If the sun may reasonably be described as the most important object in
+the world, surely money is the next. That, as we know, is, in its most
+potent metallic form, yellow also. The 'yellow gold' is a favourite
+phrase in certain forms of poetry; and 'yellow-boys' is a term of
+natural affection among sailors. Following the example of their lord the
+sun, most fires and lights are yellow<!--Page 085--> or golden, and it is only in
+times of danger or superstition that they burn red or blue. And, if
+yellow be denied entrance to beautiful eyes, it enjoys a privilege
+which&mdash;except in the case of certain indigo-staining African tribes, who
+cannot be said to count&mdash;blue has never claimed: that of colouring
+perhaps the loveliest thing in the world, the hair of woman. Hair is
+naturally golden&mdash;unnaturally also. When Browning sings pathetically of
+'dear dead women&mdash;with such hair too!' he continues:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'What's become of all the <em>gold</em></p>
+  <p>Used to hang and brush their bosoms'&mdash;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>not 'all the blue' or 'all the brown,' though some of us, it is true,
+are condemned to wear our hair brown or blue-black. But such are only
+unhappy exceptions. Yellow or gold is the rule. The bravest men and the
+fairest women have had golden hair, and, we may add, in reference to
+another distinction of the colour we are celebrating, golden hearts.
+Hair at the present time is doing its best to conform to its normal
+conditions of colour. Numerous instances might be adduced of its
+changing from black to gold, in obedience to<!--Page 086--> chemical law. 'Peroxide of
+hydrogen!' says the cynic. 'Beauty!' says the lover of art.</p>
+
+<p>And it might be argued, in a world of inevitable compromise, that the
+damage done to the physical health and texture of the hair thus playing
+the chameleon may well be overbalanced by the happiness, and consequent
+increased effectiveness, of the person thus dyeing for the sake of
+beauty. Thaumaturgists lay much stress on the mystic influence of
+colours; and who knows but that, if we were only allowed to dye our hair
+what colour we chose, we might be different men and women? Strange
+things are told of women who have dyed their hair the colour of blood or
+of wine, and we know from Christina Rossetti that golden hair is
+negotiable in fairyland&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'"You have much gold upon your head,"</p>
+  <p>They answered all together:</p>
+    <p class="indent1">"Buy from us with a golden curl."'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Whether Laura could have done business with the goblin merchantmen with
+an oxidised curl is a difficult point, for fairies have sharp eyes; and,
+though it be impossible for a mortal to tell the real gold from the
+false<!--Page 087--> gold hair, the fairies may be able to do so, and might reject the
+curl as counterfeit.</p>
+
+<p>Again, if in the vegetable world green almost universally colours the
+leaves, yellow has more to do with the flowers. The flowers we love best
+are yellow: the cowslip, the daffodil, the crocus, the buttercup, half
+the daisy, the honeysuckle, and the loveliest rose. Yellow, too, has its
+turn even with the leaves; and what an artist he shows himself when, in
+autumn, he 'lays his fiery finger' upon them, lighting up the forlorn
+woodland with splashes&mdash;pure palette-colour of audacious gold! He hangs
+the mulberry with heart-shaped yellow shields&mdash;which reminds one of the
+heraldic importance of 'or,'&mdash;and he lines the banks of the Seine with
+phantasmal yellow poplars. And other leaves still dearer to the heart
+are yellow likewise; leaves of those sweet old poets whose thoughts seem
+to have turned the pages gold. Let us dream of this: a maid with yellow
+hair, clad in a yellow gown, seated in a yellow room, at the window a
+yellow sunset, in the grate a yellow fire, at her side a yellow
+lamplight, on her knee a Yellow Book. And the letters<!--Page 088--> we love best to
+read&mdash;when we dare&mdash;are they not yellow too? No doubt some disagreeable
+things are reported of yellow. We have had the yellow-fever, and we have
+had pea-soup. The eyes of lions are said to be yellow, and the ugliest
+cats&mdash;the cats that infest one's garden&mdash;are always yellow. Some
+medicines are yellow, and no doubt there are many other yellow
+disagreeables; but we prefer to dwell upon the yellow blessings. I had
+almost forgotten that the gayest wines are yellow. Nor has religion
+forgotten yellow. It is to be hoped yellow will not forget religion. The
+sacred robe of the second greatest religion of the world is yellow, 'the
+yellow robe' of the Buddhist friar; and when the sacred harlots of
+Hindustan walk in lovely procession through the streets, they too, like
+the friars, are clad in yellow. Amber is yellow; so is the orange; and
+so were stage-coaches and many dashing things of the old time; and pink
+is yellow by lamplight. But gold-mines, it has been proved, are not so
+yellow as is popularly supposed. Hymen's robe is Miltonically 'saffron,'
+and the dearest petti<!--Page 089-->coat in all literature&mdash;not forgetting the
+'tempestuous' garment of Herrick's Julia&mdash;was 'yaller.' Yes!&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>''Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green,</p>
+  <p>An' er name was Supi-yaw-lat, jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Is it possible to say anything prettier for yellow than that?</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 090-->
+<h3><a name="essay09">LETTER TO AN UNSUCCESSFUL LITERARY MAN</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>My Dear Sir,&mdash;I agree with every word you say. You have my entire
+sympathy. The world is indeed hard, hard to the sad&mdash;particularly hard
+to the unsuccessful. A sure five hundred a year covers a multitude of
+sorrows. It is ever an ill wind for the shorn lamb. If it be true that
+nothing succeeds like success, it is no less sadly true that nothing
+fails like failure. And when one thinks of it, it is only natural, for
+every failure is an obstruction in the stream of life. Metaphorical
+writers are fond of saying that the successful ride to success on the
+back of the failures. It is true that many rise on stepping-stones of
+their dead relations&mdash;but that is because their relations have been
+financial successes.<!--Page 091--> In truth, instead of the failure making the
+fortune of the successful, it is just the reverse. A very successful man
+would be the more successful were it not for the failures&mdash;on whom he
+has either to spend his money to support, or his time to advise. The
+strong are said to be impatient towards the weak&mdash;and is it to be
+wondered at, in a world where even the strongest need all their
+strength, in a sea where the best swimmer needs all his wind and muscle
+and skill to keep afloat? If success is sometimes 'unfeeling' towards
+failure, failure is often unfair to success. Of course, 'it is He that
+hath made us and not we ourselves,' but that is a text that cuts both
+ways; and when all is said and done, the failure detracts from the force
+in the universe; he is the clog on the wheel of fortune. To say that the
+successful man benefits by the failure of others is as true as it would
+be to say that the ratepayer benefits by the poor-rates. You use the
+word 'charlatan' somewhat profusely of several successful writers, and
+no doubt you are right. But you must remember that it<!--Page 092--> is a favourite
+charge against the gifted and the fortunate. Because we have failed by
+fair means, we are sure the other fellows have succeeded by foul. And,
+moreover, one is apt to forget how much talent is needed to be a
+charlatan. Never look down upon a charlatan. Courage, skill, personal
+force or charm, great knowledge of human nature, dramatic instinct, and
+industry&mdash;few charlatans succeed (and no one is called a charlatan till
+he <em>does</em> succeed, be his success as low or high as you please) without
+possessing a majority of these qualities; how many of which&mdash;it would be
+interesting to know&mdash;do you possess?</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, it would seem to need more gifts to be a rogue than an honest
+man, and there is a sense in which every great man may be described as a
+charlatan&mdash;<em>plus</em> greatness; greatness being an almost indefinable
+quality, a quality, at any rate, on which there is a bewildering
+diversity of opinion.</p>
+
+<p>You seem a little cross with publishers and editors. They have not
+proved the distinguished, brilliant, and sympathetic beings you imagined
+them in your boyish<!--Page 093--> dreams. No doubt, publishers and editors enter
+hardly into the kingdom of heaven. But then, you see, they don't care so
+much about that; they are much more interested in the next election at
+certain fashionable clubs. It is really a little hard on them that they
+should suffer from the ignorant misconception of the literary amateur.
+It is only those who have had no dealings with them who would be unfair
+enough to expect publishers or editors to be literary men. They are
+business men&mdash;business men <em>par excellence</em>&mdash;and a good thing, too, for
+their papers and their authors. You lament their mercenary view of life;
+but, judging by your letter, even you are not disposed to regard money
+as the root of all evil.</p>
+
+<p>You cannot understand why you have failed where others have succeeded.
+You have far more Greek than Keats, more history than Scott, and you
+know nineteen languages&mdash;ten of them to speak. With so many
+accomplishments, it must indeed be hard to fail&mdash;though you do not seem
+to have found it difficult. You have travelled<!--Page 094--> too&mdash;have been twice
+round the world, and have a thorough knowledge of the worst hotels.
+Certainly, it is singular. Nevertheless, I must confess that the dullest
+men I have ever met have been professors of history; the worst poets
+have not only known Greek, but French as well; and, generally speaking
+the most tiresome of my acquaintances have more degrees than I have
+Latin to name them in. Alas! it is not experience, or travel, or
+language, but the use we make of them, that makes literary success,
+which, one may add, is particularly dependent&mdash;perhaps not
+unnaturally&mdash;on the use we make of language. A book may be a book,
+although there is neither Latin nor Greek, nor travel, nor
+experience&mdash;in fact 'nothing' in it; and though, like myself, you may
+pay an Oxford professor a thousand a year to correct your proofs, you
+may still miss immortality.</p>
+
+<p>To these intellectual and general equipments you add goodness of heart,
+sincerity of conviction, and martyrdom for your opinions; you are, it
+would seem, like many others of us, the best fellow and<!--Page 095--> greatest man of
+your acquaintance. Permit me to remind you that we are not talking of
+goodness of heart, of strength or beauty of character, but of success,
+which is a thing apart, a fine art in itself.</p>
+
+<p>You confess that you are somewhat unpractical: you expect
+others&mdash;hard-worked journalists who never met you&mdash;to tell you what to
+read, how to form your style, and how 'to get into the magazines.' You
+are, you say, with something of pride, but a poor business man. That is
+a pity, for nearly every successful literary man of the day, and
+particularly the novelists, are excellent business men. Indeed, the
+history of literature all round has proved that the men who have been
+masters of words have also been masters of things&mdash;masters of the facts
+of life for which those words stand. Many writers have mismanaged their
+affairs from idleness and indifference, but few from incapacity. Leigh
+Hunt boasted that he could never master the multiplication-table.
+Perhaps that accounts for his comparative failure as a writer.
+Incompetence in one art is far from being a guarantee of competency in
+another, and a<!--Page 096--> man is all the more likely to make a name if he is able
+to make a living&mdash;though, judging from Coleridge, it seems a good plan
+to let another hard-worked man support one's wife and children. On the
+other hand, though business faculty is a great deal, it is not
+everything: for a man may be as punctual and methodical as Southey, and
+yet miss the prize of his high calling, or as generally 'impossible' as
+Blake, and yet win his place among the immortals.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, after all, success in literature has something to do with
+writing. In temporary success, industry and business faculty, and an
+unworked field&mdash;be it Scotland, Ireland, or the Isle of Man (any place
+but plain England!)&mdash;are the chief factors. For that more lasting
+success which we call fame other qualities are needed, such qualities as
+imagination, fancy, and magic and force in the use of words. Can you
+honestly say, O beloved, though tiresome, correspondent, that these
+great gifts are yours? Judging from your letter&mdash;but Heaven forbid that
+I should be unkind! For, need I say I love you with a fellow-feeling? Do
+you think that you<!--Page 097--> are the only unappreciated genius on the planet&mdash;not
+to speak of all the other unappreciated geniuses on all the other
+planets? Thank goodness, the postal arrangements with the latter are as
+yet defective! Others there are with hearts as warm, minds as profound,
+and style at least as attractive, who languish in unmerited
+neglect&mdash;Miltons inglorious indeed, though far from mute.</p>
+
+<p>Believe me, you are not alone. In fact, there are so many like you that
+it would be quite easy for you to find society without worrying me. And,
+for all of us, there is the consolation that, though we fail as writers,
+we may still succeed as citizens, as husbands and fathers and friends.
+As Whitman would say&mdash;because you are not Editor of <em>The Times</em>, do you
+give in that you are less than a man? There are poets that have never
+entered into the Bodley Head, and great prose-writers who have never sat
+in an editorial chair. Be satisfied with your heavenly crowns, O you
+whining unsuccessful, and leave to your inferiors the earthly
+five-shilling pieces.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 098-->
+<h3><a name="essay10">A POET IN THE CITY</a></h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'In the midway of this our mortal life,</p>
+  <p>I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I (and when I say I, I must be understood to be speaking dramatically)
+only venture into the City once a year, for the very pleasant purpose of
+drawing that twelve-pound-ten by which the English nation, ever so
+generously sensitive to the necessities, not to say luxuries, of the
+artist, endeavours to express its pride and delight in me. It would be a
+very graceful exercise of gratitude for me here to stop and parenthesise
+the reader on the subject of all that twelve-pound-ten has been to me,
+how it has quite changed the course of my life, given me that
+long-desired opportunity of doing my best work in peace, for which so
+often I vainly sighed in Fleet Street, and even allowed me an indulgence
+in minor luxuries which I<!--Page 099--> could not have dreamed of enjoying before the
+days of that twelve-pound-ten. Now not only peace and plenty, but
+leisure and luxury are mine. There is nothing goes so far as&mdash;Government
+money.</p>
+
+<p>Usually on these literally State occasions, I drive up in state, that is
+in a hansom. There is only one other day in the year on which I am so
+splendid, but that is another beautiful story. It, too, is a day and an
+hour too joyous to be approached otherwise than on winged wheels, too
+stately to be approached in merely pedestrian fashion. To go on foot to
+draw one's pension seems a sort of slight on the great nation that does
+one honour, as though a Lord Mayor should make his appearance in the
+procession in his office coat.</p>
+
+<p>So I say it is my custom to go gaily, and withal stately, to meet my
+twelve-pound-ten in a hansom. For many reasons the occasion always seems
+something of an adventure, and I confess I always feel a little excited
+about it&mdash;indeed, to tell the truth, a little nervous. As I glide along
+in my state barge (which seems a much more<!--Page 100--> proper and impressive image
+for a hansom than 'gondola,' with its reminiscences of Earl's Court) I
+feel like some fragile country flower torn from its roots, and
+bewilderingly hurried along upon the turbid, swollen stream of London
+life.</p>
+
+<p>The stream glides sweetly with a pleasant trotting tinkle of bells by
+the green parkside of Piccadilly, and sweet is it to hear the sirens
+singing, and to see them combing their gilded locks, on the yellow sands
+of Piccadilly Circus&mdash;so called, no doubt, from the number of horses and
+the skill of their drivers. Here are the whirling pools of pleasure,
+merry wheels of laughing waters, where your hansom glides along with a
+golden ease&mdash;it is only when you enter the First Cataract of the Strand
+that you become aware of the far-distant terrible roar of the Falls!
+They are yet nearly two miles away, but already, like Niagara, thou
+hearest the sound thereof&mdash;the fateful sound of that human Niagara,
+where all the great rivers of London converge: the dark, strong floods
+surging out from the gloomy fastnesses of the East End, the
+quick-running streams from the palaces<!--Page 101--> of the West, the East with its
+wagons, the West with its hansoms, the four winds with their omnibuses,
+the horses and carriages under the earth jetting up their companies of
+grimy passengers, the very air busy with a million errands.</p>
+
+<p>You are in the rapids&mdash;metaphorically speaking&mdash;as you crawl down
+Cheapside; and here where the Bank of England and the Mansion House rise
+sheer and awful from, shall we say, this boiling caldron, this 'hell' of
+angry meeting waters&mdash;Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, Queen Victoria
+Street and Cheapside, each 'running,' again metaphorically, 'like a
+mill-race'&mdash;here in this wild maelstrom of human life and human
+conveyances, here is the true 'Niagara in London,' here are the most
+wonderful falls in the world&mdash;the London Falls.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes!' I said softly to myself, and I could see the sly sad smile on the
+face of the dead poet, at the thought of whose serene wisdom a silence
+like snow seemed momentarily to cover up the turmoil&mdash;'Yes!' I said
+softly, 'there is still the same old crush at the corner of Fenchurch
+Street!'</p><!--Page 102-->
+
+<p>By this time I had disbursed one of my two annual cab-fares, and was
+standing a little forlorn at that very corner. It was a March afternoon,
+bitter and gloomy; lamps were already popping alight in a desolate way,
+and the east wind whistled mournfully through the ribs of the
+passers-by. A very unflowerlike man was dejectedly calling out
+'daffadowndillies' close by. The sound of the pretty old word, thus
+quaintly spoken, brightened the air better than the electric lights
+which suddenly shot rows of wintry moonlight along the streets. I bought
+a bunch of the poor pinched flowers, and asked the man how he came to
+call them 'daffadowndillies.'</p>
+
+<p>'D'vunshur,' he said, in anything but a Devonshire accent, and then the
+east wind took him and he was gone&mdash;doubtless to a neighbouring tavern;
+and no wonder, poor soul! Flowers certainly fall into strange hands here
+in London.</p>
+
+<p>Well, it was nearing four, and if I wanted a grateful country's
+twelve-pound-ten, I must make haste; so presently I found myself in a
+great hall, of which I have no clearer<!--Page 103--> impression than that there were
+soft little lights all about me, and a soft chime of falling gold, like
+the rippling of Pactolus. I have a sort of idea, too, of a great number
+of young men with most beautiful moustaches, playing with golden
+shovels; and as I thus stood among the soft lights and listened to the
+most beautiful sound in the world, I thought that thus must Danæ have
+felt as she stood amid the falling shower. But I took care to see that
+my twelve sovereigns and a half were right number and weight for all
+that.</p>
+
+<p>Once more in the street, I lingered a while to take a last look at the
+Falls. What a masterful alien life it all seemed to me! No single
+personality could hope to stand alone amid all that stress of ponderous,
+bullying forces. Only public companies, and such great impersonalities,
+could hope to hold their own, to swim in such a whirlpool&mdash;and even
+they, I had heard it whispered, far away in my quiet starlit garret,
+sometimes went down. 'How,' I cried, 'would&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'... my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights ...</p>
+  <p>Rush of suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites,'</p>
+</div><!--Page 104-->
+
+<p>again quoting poetry. I always quote poetry in the City, as a
+protest&mdash;moreover, it clears the air.</p>
+
+<p>The more people buffeted against me the more I felt the crushing sense
+of almost cosmic forces. Everybody was so plainly an atom in a public
+company, a drop of water in a tyrannous stream of human
+energy&mdash;companies that cared nothing for their individual atoms, streams
+that cared nothing for their component drops; such atoms and drops, for
+the most part, to be had for thirty shillings a week. These people about
+me seemed no more like individual men and women than individual puffs in
+a mighty rushing wind, or the notes in a great scheme of music, are men
+and women&mdash;to the banker so many pens with ears whereon to perch them,
+to the capitalist so many 'hands,' and to the City man generally so many
+'helpless pieces of the game he plays' up there in spidery nooks and
+corners of the City.</p>
+
+<p>As I listened to the throbbing of the great human engines in the
+buildings about me, a rising and a falling there seemed as of those<!--Page 105-->
+great steel-limbed monsters, weird contortionists of metal, that jet up
+and down, and writhe and wrestle this way and that, behind the long
+glass windows of great water-towers, or toil like Vulcan in the bowels
+of mighty ships. An expression of frenzy seems to come up even from the
+dumb tossing steel; sometimes it seems to be shaking great knuckled
+fists at one and brandishing threatening arms, as it strains and sweats
+beneath the lash of the compulsive steam. As one watches it, there seems
+something of human agony about its panic-stricken labours, and something
+like a sense of pity surprises one&mdash;a sense of pity that anything in the
+world should have to work like that, even steel, even, as we say,
+senseless steel. What, then, of these great human engine-houses! Will
+the engines always consent to rise and fall, night and day, like that?
+or will there some day be a mighty convulsion, and this blind Samson of
+labour pull down the whole engine-house upon his oppressors? Who knows?
+These are questions for great politicians and thinkers to decide, not
+for a poet, who is too much terrified by such<!--Page 106--> forces to be able calmly
+to estimate and prophesy concerning them.</p>
+
+<p>Yes! if you want to realise Tennyson's picture of 'one poor poet's
+scroll' ruling the world, take your poet's scroll down to Fenchurch
+Street and try it there. Ah, what a powerless little 'private interest'
+seems poetry there, poetry 'whose action is no stronger than a flower.'
+In days of peace it ventures even into the morning papers; but, let only
+a rumour of war be heard, and it vanishes like a dream on doomsday
+morning. A County Council election passeth over it and it is gone.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it was near this very spot that Keats dug up the buried beauty of
+Greece, lying hidden beneath Finsbury Pavement! and in the deserted City
+churches great dramatists lie about us. Maybe I have wronged the
+City&mdash;and at this thought I remembered a little bookshop but a few yards
+away, blossoming like a rose right in the heart of the wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>Here, after all, in spite of all my whirlpools and engine-houses, was
+for me the greatest danger in the City. Need I say,<!--Page 107--> therefore, that I
+promptly sought it, hovered about it a moment&mdash;and entered? How much of
+that grateful governmental twelve-pound-ten came out alive, I dare not
+tell my dearest friend.</p>
+
+<p>At all events I came out somehow reassured, more rich in faith. There
+was a might of poesy after all. There were words in the little
+yellow-leaved garland, nestling like a bird in my hand, that would
+outlast the bank yonder, and outlive us all. I held it up. How tiny it
+seemed, how frail amid all this stone and iron! A mere flower&mdash;a flower
+from the seventeenth century&mdash;long-lived for a flower! Yes, an
+<em>immortelle</em>.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 108-->
+<h3><a name="essay11">BROWN ROSES</a></h3>
+
+<p>'Well, I never thought to see this day, sir,' said Gibbs, with something
+like tears in his voice, as he reluctantly plied his scissors upon
+Hyacinth Rondel's distinguished curls.</p>
+
+<p>'Nor I, Gibbs&mdash;nor I!' said Rondel sadly, relapsing into silence again,
+with his head meekly bent over the white sheet spread to catch his shorn
+beauty.</p>
+
+<p>'To think of the times, sir, that I have dressed your head,' continued
+Gibbs, whose grief bore so marked an emphasis, 'and to think that after
+to-day ...'</p>
+
+<p>'But you forget, my dear Gibbs, that I shall now be a more constant
+customer than ever!'</p>
+
+<p>'Ah, sir, but that will be different. It will be mere machine-cutting,
+lawn-mowing, steam-reaping, if you understand me; there'll<!--Page 109--> be no
+pleasure in it, no artistic pleasure, I mean.'</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, Gibbs, and you are an artist&mdash;I have often told you that.'</p>
+
+<p>'Ah, sir, but I am coming to the conclusion that it is better not to be
+an artist, better to be born just like every one else. In these days one
+suffers too much. Why, sir, I haven't in the whole of my business six
+heads like yours, and I go on cutting all the rest week in and week out,
+just for the pleasure of dressing those six&mdash;and now there'll only be
+five.'</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>'It looks like a winding-sheet,' mused Rondel presently, after a long
+silence, broken only by the soft crunch and click of the fatal scissors,
+as they feasted on the beautiful brown silk.</p>
+
+<p>'It do indeed, sir,' said Gibbs, with a shudder, as another little globe
+of golden brown rolled down into Rondel's lap.</p>
+
+<p>'Poor brown roses!' sighed the poet, after another silence; 'they are
+just like brown roses, aren't they, Gibbs?'</p>
+
+<p>'They are indeed, sir!'</p><!--Page 110-->
+
+<p>'Brown roses scattered over the winding-sheet of one's youth&mdash;eh,
+Gibbs?'</p>
+
+<p>'They are indeed, sir.'</p>
+
+<p>'That's rather a pretty image, don't you think, Gibbs?'</p>
+
+<p>'Indeed I do, sir!'</p>
+
+<p>'Well, well, they have bloomed their last; and when Juliet's white hands
+come seeking with their silver fingers, white maidens lost in the brown
+enchanted forest, there will not be a rose left for her to gather.'</p>
+
+<p>'Believe me, sir, I would more gladly have cut off your head than your
+hair&mdash;that is, figuratively speaking,' sobbed the artist-in-hair-oils.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, my head would hardly be missed&mdash;you are quite right, Gibbs; but my
+hair! What will they do without it at first nights and private views? It
+was worth five shillings a week to many a poor paragraph-writer. Well, I
+must try and make up for it by my beard!'</p>
+
+<p>'Your beard, sir?' exclaimed Gibbs in horror.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, Gibbs; for some years I have been a Nazarene&mdash;that is, a Nazarite,
+with the top<!--Page 111--> half of my head; now I am going to change about and be a
+Nazarite with the lower. The razor has kissed my cheeks and my chin and
+the fluted column of my throat for the last time.'</p>
+
+<p>'You cannot mean it, sir!' said Gibbs, suspending his murderous task a
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>'It's quite true, Gibbs.'</p>
+
+<p>'Does she wish that too, sir?'</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, that too.'</p>
+
+<p>'Well, sir, I have heard of men making sacrifices for their wives, but
+of all the cruel....'</p>
+
+<p>'Please don't, Gibbs. It does no good. And Mrs. Rondel's motive is a
+good one.'</p>
+
+<p>'Of course, sir, I cannot presume&mdash;and yet, if it wouldn't be presuming,
+I should like to know why you are making this great, I may say this
+noble, sacrifice?'</p>
+
+<p>'Well, Gibbs, we're old friends, and I'll tell you some day, but I
+hardly feel up to it to-day.'</p>
+
+<p>'Of course not, sir, of course not&mdash;it's only natural,' said Gibbs
+tenderly, while the scissors once more took up the conversation.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 112-->
+<h3><a name="essay12">THE DONKEY THAT LOVED A STAR</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>'That is how the donkey tells his love!' I said one day, with intent to
+be funny, as the prolonged love-whoop of a distant donkey was heard in
+the land.</p>
+
+<p>'Don't be too ready to laugh at donkeys,' said my friend. 'For,' he
+continued, 'even donkeys have their dreams. Perhaps, indeed, the most
+beautiful dreams are dreamed by donkeys.'</p>
+
+<p>'Indeed,' I said, 'and now that I think of it, I remember to have said
+that most dreamers are donkeys, though I never expected so scientific a
+corroboration of a fleeting jest.'</p>
+
+<p>Now, my friend is an eminent scientist and poet in one, a serious
+combination; and he took my remarks with seriousness at once scientific
+and poetic.</p><!--Page 113-->
+
+<p>'Yes,' he went on, 'that is where you clever people make a mistake. You
+think that because a donkey has only two vowel-sounds wherewith to
+express his emotions, he has no emotions to express. But let me tell
+you, sir ...'</p>
+
+<p>But here we both burst out laughing&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'You Golden Ass!' I said,'take a munch of these roses; perhaps they will
+restore you.'</p>
+
+<p>'No,' he resumed, 'I am quite serious. I have for many years past made a
+study of donkeys&mdash;high-stepping critics call it the study of Human
+Nature&mdash;however, it's the same thing&mdash;and I must say that the more I
+study them the more I love them. There is nothing so well worth studying
+as the misunderstood, for the very reason that everybody thinks he
+understands it. Now, to take another instance, most people think they
+have said the last word on a goose when they have called it "a
+goose"!&mdash;but let me tell you, sir ...'</p>
+
+<p>But here again we burst out laughing&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Dear goose of the golden eggs,' I said, 'pray leave to discourse on
+geese to-night<!--Page 114-->&mdash;though lovely and pleasant would the discourse
+be;&mdash;to-night I am all agog for donkeys.'</p>
+
+<p>'So be it,' said my friend,' and if that be so, I cannot do better than
+tell you the story of the donkey that loved a star&mdash;keeping for another
+day the no less fascinating story of the goose that loved an angel.'</p>
+
+<p>By this time I was, appropriately, all ears.</p>
+
+<p>'Well,' he once more began, 'there was once a donkey, quite an intimate
+friend of mine&mdash;and I have no friend of whom I am prouder&mdash;who was
+unpractically fond of looking up at the stars. He could go a whole day
+without thistles, if night would only bring him stars. Of course he
+suffered no little from his fellow-donkeys for this curious passion of
+his. They said well that it did not become him, for indeed it was no
+little laughable to see him gazing so sentimentally at the remote and
+pitiless heavens. Donkeys who belonged to Shakespeare Societies recalled
+the fate of Bottom, the donkey who had loved a fairy; but our donkey
+paid little heed. There is perhaps only one advantage<!--Page 115--> in being a
+donkey&mdash;namely, a hide impervious to criticism. In our donkey's case it
+was rather a dream that made him forget his hide&mdash;a dream that drew up
+all the sensitiveness from every part, from hoof, and hide, and ears, so
+that all the feeling in his whole body was centred in his eyes and
+brain, and those, as we have said, were centred on a star. He took it
+for granted that his fellows should sneer and kick-out at him&mdash;it was
+ever so with genius among the donkeys, and he had very soon grown used
+to these attentions of his brethren, which were powerless to withdraw
+his gaze from the star he loved. For though he loved all the stars, as
+every individual man loves all women, there was one star he loved more
+than any other; and standing one midnight among his thistles, he prayed
+a prayer, a prayer that some day it might be granted him to carry that
+star upon his back&mdash;which, he recalled, had been sanctified by the holy
+sign&mdash;were it but for ever so short a journey. Just to carry it a little
+way, and then to die. This to him was a dream beyond the dreams of
+donkeys.</p>
+
+<p>'Now, one night,' continued my friend,<!--Page 116--> taking breath for himself and
+me, 'our poor donkey looked up to the sky, and lo! the star was nowhere
+to be seen. He had heard it said that stars sometimes fall. Evidently
+his star had fallen. Fallen! but what if it had fallen upon the earth?
+Being a donkey, the wildest dreams seemed possible to him. And, strange
+as it may seem, there came a day when a poet came to his master and
+bought our donkey to carry his little child. Now, the very first day he
+had her upon his back, the donkey knew that his prayer had been
+answered, and that the little swaddled babe he carried was the star he
+had prayed for. And, indeed, so it was; for so long as donkeys ask no
+more than to fetch and carry for their beloved, they may be sure of
+beauty upon their backs. Now, so long as this little girl that was a
+star remained a little girl, our donkey was happy. For many pretty years
+she would kiss his ugly muzzle and feed his mouth with sugar&mdash;and thus
+our donkey's thoughts sweetened day by day, till from a natural
+pessimist he blossomed into a perfectly absurd optimist, and dreamed the
+donkiest of dreams. But, one<!--Page 117--> day, as he carried the girl who was really
+a star through the spring lanes, a young man walked beside her, and
+though our donkey thought very little of his talk&mdash;in fact, felt his
+plain "hee-haw" to be worth all its smart chirping and twittering&mdash;yet
+it evidently pleased the maiden. It included quite a number of
+vowel-sounds&mdash;though, if the maiden had only known, it didn't mean half
+so much as the donkey's plain monotonous declaration.</p>
+
+<p>'Well, our donkey soon began to realise that his dream was nearing its
+end; and, indeed, one day his little mistress came bringing him the
+sweetest of kisses, the very best sugar in the very best shops, but for
+all that our donkey knew that it meant good-bye. It is the charming
+manner of English girls to be at their sweetest when they say good-bye.</p>
+
+<p>'Our dreamer-donkey went into exile as servant to a woodcutter, and his
+life was lenient if dull, for the woodcutter had no sticks to waste upon
+his back; and next day his young mistress who was once a star took a
+pony for her love, whom some time<!--Page 118--> after she discarded for a talented
+hunter, and, one fine day, like many of her sex, she pitched her
+affections upon a man&mdash;he too being a talented hunter. To their wedding
+came all the countryside. And with the countryside came the donkey. He
+carried a great bundle of firewood for the servants' hall, and as he
+waited outside, gazing up at his old loves the stars, while his master
+drank deeper and deeper within, he revolved many thoughts. But he is
+only known to have made one remark&mdash;in the nature, one may think, of a
+grim jest&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'"After all!" he was heard to say, "she has married a donkey&mdash;after
+all!"</p>
+
+<p>'No doubt it was feeble; but then our donkey was growing old and bitter,
+and hope deferred had made him a cynic.'</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 119-->
+<h3><a name="essay13">ON LOVING ONE'S ENEMIES</a></h3>
+
+<p>Like all people who live apart from it, the Founder of the Christian
+religion was possessed of a profound knowledge of the world. As,
+according to the proverb, the woodlander sees nothing of the wood for
+its trees, so those who live in the world know nothing of it. They know
+its gaudy, glittering surface, its Crystal Palace fireworks, and the
+paste-diamonds with which it bedecks itself; they know its music-halls
+and its night clubs, its Piccadillys and its politics, its restaurants
+and its salons; but of the bad&mdash;or good?&mdash;heart of it all they know
+nothing. In more meanings than one, it takes a saint to catch a sinner;
+and Christ certainly knew as well as saved the sinner.</p>
+
+<p>But none of His precepts show a truer knowledge of life and its
+conditions than<!--Page 120--> His commandment that we should love our enemies. He
+realised&mdash;can we doubt?&mdash;that, without enemies, the Church He bade His
+followers build could not hope to be established. He knew that the
+spiritual fire He strove to kindle would spread but little, unless the
+four winds of the world blew against it. Well, indeed, may the Christian
+Church love its enemies, for it is they who have made it.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, for a man, or a cause, that wants to get on, there is nothing
+like a few hearty, zealous enemies. Most of us would never be heard of
+if it were not for our enemies. The unsuccessful man counts up his
+friends, but the successful man numbers his enemies. A friend of mine
+was lamenting, the other day, that he could not find twelve people to
+disbelieve in him. He had been seeking them for years, he sighed, and
+could not get beyond eleven. But, even so, with only eleven he was a
+very successful man. In these kind-hearted days enemies are becoming so
+rare that one has to go out of one's way to make them. The true
+interpretation, therefore, of the easiest of the commandments is<!--Page 121-->&mdash;make
+your enemies, and your enemies will make you.</p>
+
+<p>So soon as the armed men begin to spring up in our fields, we may be
+sure that we have not sown in vain.</p>
+
+<p>Properly understood, an enemy is but a negative embodiment of our
+personalities or ideas. He is an involuntary witness to our vitality.
+Much as he despises us, greatly as he may injure us, he is none the less
+a creature of our making. It was we who put into him the breath of his
+malignity, and inspired the activity of his malice. Therefore, with his
+very existence so tremendous a tribute, we can afford to smile at his
+self-conscious disclaimers of our significance. Though he slay us, we
+<em>made</em> him&mdash;to 'make an enemy,' is not that the phrase?</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, the fact that he is our enemy is his one <em>raison d'être</em>. That
+alone should make us charitable to him. Live and let live. Without us
+our enemy has no occupation, for to hate us is his profession. Think of
+his wives and families!</p>
+
+<p>The friendship of the little for the great is an old-established
+profession; there is but<!--Page 122--> one older&mdash;namely, the hatred of the little
+for the great; and, though it is perhaps less officially recognised, it
+is without doubt the more lucrative. It is one of the shortest roads to
+fame. Why is the name of Pontius Pilate an uneasy ghost of history?
+Think what fame it would have meant to be an enemy of Socrates or
+Shakespeare! <em>Blackwood's Magazine</em> and <em>The Quarterly Review</em> only
+survive to-day because they once did their best to strangle the genius
+of Keats and Tennyson. Two or three journals of our own time, by the
+same unfailing method, seek that circulation from posterity which is
+denied them in the present.</p>
+
+<p>This is particularly true in literature, where the literary enemy is as
+organised a tradesman as the literary agent. Like the literary agent, he
+naturally does his best to secure the biggest men. No doubt the time
+will come when the literary cut-throat&mdash;shall we call him?&mdash;will publish
+dainty little books of testimonials from authors, full of effusive
+gratitude for the manner in which they have been slashed and bludgeoned
+into fame. 'Butcher to Mr. Grant Allen' may then be<!--Page 123-->come a familiar
+legend over literary shop-fronts:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <div class="stanza">
+  <p>'Ah! did you stab at Shelley's heart</p>
+    <p class="indent1">With silly sneer and cruel lie?</p>
+  <p>And Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">To murder did you nobly try?</p>
+  </div>
+
+  <div class="stanza">
+  <p>You failed, 'tis true; but what of that?</p>
+    <p class="indent1">The world remembers still your name&mdash;</p>
+  <p>'Tis fame, <em>for you</em>, to be the cur</p>
+    <p class="indent1">That barks behind the heels of Fame.'</p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Any one who is fortunate enough to have enemies will know that all this
+is far from being fanciful. If one's enemies have any other <em>raison
+d'être</em> beyond the fact of their being our enemies&mdash;what is it? They are
+neither beautiful nor clever, wise nor good, famous nor, indeed,
+passably distinguished. Were they any of these, they would not have
+taken to so humble a means of getting their living. Instead of being our
+enemies, they could then have afforded to employ enemies on their own
+account.</p>
+
+<p>Who, indeed, are our enemies? Broadly speaking, they are all those
+people who lack what we possess.</p>
+
+<p>If you are rich, every poor man is necessarily your enemy. If you are
+beautiful, the<!--Page 124--> great democracy of the plain and ugly will mock you in
+the streets. It will be the same with everything you possess. The
+brainless will never forgive you for possessing brains, the weak will
+hate you for your strength, and the evil for your good heart. If you can
+write, all the bad writers are at once your foes. If you can paint, the
+bad painters will talk you down. But more than any talent or charm you
+may possess, the pearl of price for which you will be most bitterly
+hated will be your success. You can be the most wonderful person that
+ever existed, so long as you don't succeed, and nobody will mind. 'It is
+the sunshine,' says some one, 'that brings out the adder.' So powerful,
+indeed, is success that it has been known to turn a friend into a foe.
+Those, then, who wish to engage a few trusty enemies out of place need
+only advertise among the unsuccessful.</p>
+
+<p><em>P.S.</em>&mdash;For one service we should be particularly thankful to our
+enemies&mdash;they save us so much in stimulants. Their unbelief so helps our
+belief, their negatives make us so positive.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 125-->
+<h3><a name="essay14">THE DRAMATIC ART OF LIFE</a></h3>
+
+<p>It is a curious truth that, whereas in every other art deliberate choice
+of method and careful calculation of effect are expected from the
+artist, in the greatest and most difficult art of all, the art of life,
+this is not so. In literature, painting, or sculpture you first evolve
+your conception, and then, after long study of it, as it glows and
+shimmers in your imagination, you set about the reverent selection of
+that form which shall be its most truthful incarnation, in words, in
+paint, in marble. Now life, as has been said many times, is an art too.
+Sententious morality from time past has told us that we are each given a
+part to play, evidently implying, with involuntary cynicism, that the
+art of life is&mdash;the art of acting.</p>
+
+<p>As with the actor, we are each given a<!--Page 126--> certain dramatic conception for
+the expression of which we have precisely the same artistic
+materials&mdash;namely, our own bodies, sometimes including heart and brains.
+One has often heard the complaint of a certain actor that he acts
+himself. On the metaphorical stage of life the complaint and the implied
+demand are just the reverse. How much more interesting life would be if
+only more people had the courage and skill to act themselves, instead of
+abjectly understudying some one else! Of course, there are supers on the
+stage of life as on the real stage. It is proper that these should dress
+and speak and think alike. These one courteously excepts from the
+generalisation that the composer of the play, as Marcus Aurelius calls
+him, has given each of us a certain part to play&mdash;that part simply
+oneself: a part, need one say, by no means as easy as it seems; a part
+most difficult to study, and requiring daily rehearsal. So difficult is
+it, indeed, that most people throw up the part, and join the ranks of
+the supers&mdash;who, curiously enough, are paid much more handsomely than
+the principals. They enter one<!--Page 127--> of the learned or idle professions, join
+the army or take to trade, and so speedily rid themselves of the irksome
+necessity of being anything more individual than 'the learned counsel,'
+'the learned judge,' 'my lord bishop,' or 'the colonel,' names
+impersonal in application as the dignity of 'Pharaoh,' whereof the name
+and not the man was alone important. Henceforth they are the Church, the
+Law, the Army, the City, or that vaguer profession Society. Entering one
+of these, they become as lost to the really living world as the monk who
+voluntarily surrenders all will and character of his own at the
+threshold of his monastery: bricks in a prison wall, privates in the
+line, peas in a row. But, as I say, these are the parts that pay. For
+playing the others, indeed, you are not paid, but expected to
+pay&mdash;dearly.</p>
+
+<p>It is full time we turned to those on whom falls the burden of those
+real parts. Such, when quite young, if they be conscientious artists,
+will carefully consider themselves, their gifts and possibilities, study
+to discover their artistic <em>raison d'être</em> and how best to<!--Page 128--> fulfil it.
+He or she will say: Here am I, a creature of great gifts and exquisite
+sensibilities, drawn by great dreams, and vibrating to great emotions;
+yet this potent and exquisite self is as yet, I know, but unwrought
+material of the perfect work of art it is intended that I should make of
+it&mdash;but the marble wherefrom, with patient chisel, I must liberate the
+perfect and triumphant ME! As a poet listening with trembling ear to the
+voice of his inspiration, so I tremulously ask myself&mdash;what is the
+divine conception that is to become embodied in me, what is the divine
+meaning of ME? How best shall I express it in look, in word, in deed,
+till my outer self becomes the truthful symbol of my inner self&mdash;till,
+in fact, I have successfully placed the best of myself on the outside
+&mdash;for others besides myself to see, and know and love?</p>
+
+<p>What is my part, and how am I to play it?</p>
+
+<p>Returning to the latter image, there are two difficulties that beset one
+in playing a part on the stage of life, right at the outset. You are not
+allowed to 'look' it, or 'dress' it! What would an actor think, who,
+asked to<!--Page 129--> play Hamlet, found that he would be expected to play it
+without make-up and in nineteenth-century costume? Yet many of us are in
+a like dilemma with similar parts. Actors and audience must all wear the
+same drab clothes and the same immobile expression. It is in vain you
+protest that you do not really belong to this absurd and vulgar
+nineteenth century, that you have been spirited into it by a cruel
+mistake, that you really belong to mediæval Florence, to Elizabethan,
+Caroline, or at latest Queen Anne England, and that you would like to be
+allowed to look and dress as like it as possible. It is no use; if you
+dare to look or dress like anything but your own tradesmen&mdash;and other
+critics&mdash;it is at your peril. If you are beautiful, you are expected to
+disguise a fact that is an open insult to every other person you look
+at; and you must, as a general rule, never look, wear, feel, or say what
+everybody else is not also looking, wearing, feeling, or saying.</p>
+
+<p>Thus you get some hint of the difficulty of playing the part of yourself
+on this stage of life.</p><!--Page 130-->
+
+<p>In these matters of dressing and looking your part musicians seem
+granted an immunity denied to all their fellow-artists. Perhaps it is
+taken for granted that the musician is a fool&mdash;the British public is so
+intuitive. Yet it takes the same view of the poet, without allowing him
+a like immunity. And, by the way, what a fine conception of his part had
+Tennyson&mdash;of the dignity, the mystery, the picturesqueness of it!
+Tennyson would have felt it an artistic crime to look like his
+publisher; yet what poet is there left us to-day half so
+distinguished-looking as his publisher?</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, curiously enough, among no set of men does the desire to look as
+commonplace as the rest of the world seem so strong as among men of
+letters. Perhaps it is out of consideration for the rest of the world;
+but, whatever the reason, immobility of expression and general
+mediocrity of style are more characteristic of them at present than even
+the military.</p>
+
+<p>It is surely a strange paradox that we should pride ourselves on
+schooling to foolish insensibility, on eliminating from them every<!--Page 131--> mark
+of individual character, the faces that were intended subtly and
+eloquently to image our moods&mdash;to look glad when we are glad, sorry when
+we are sorry, angry in anger, and lovely in love.</p>
+
+<p>The impassivity of the modern young man is indeed a weird and wonderful
+thing. Is it a mark to hide from us the appalling sins he none the less
+openly affects? Is it meant to conceal that once in his life he paid a
+wild visit to 'The Empire'&mdash;by kind indulgence of the County Council?
+that he once chucked a barmaid under the chin, that he once nearly got
+drunk, that he once spoke to a young lady he did not know&mdash;and then ran
+away?</p>
+
+<p>One sighs for the young men of the days of Gautier and Hugo, the young
+men with red waistcoats who made asses of themselves at first nights and
+on the barricades, young men with romance in their hearts and passion in
+their blood, fearlessly sentimental and picturesquely everything.</p>
+
+<p>The lover then was not ashamed that you should catch radiant glimpses of
+his love in his eyes&mdash;nay! if you smiled kindly on him,<!--Page 132--> he would take
+you by the arm and insist on your breaking a bottle with him in honour
+of his mistress. Joy and sorrow then wore their appropriate colours,
+according, so to say, to the natural sumptuary laws of the emotions&mdash;one
+of which is that the right place for the heart is the sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>It is the duty of those who are great, or to whom great destinies of joy
+or sorrow have been dealt, to wear their distinctions for the world to
+see. It is good for the world, which in its crude way indicates the
+rudiments of this dramatic art of life, when it decrees that the bride
+shall walk radiant in orange blossom, and the mourner sadden our streets
+with black&mdash;symbols ever passing before us of the moving vicissitudes of
+life.</p>
+
+<p>The mourner cannot always be sad, or the bride merry; the bride indeed
+sometimes weeps at the altar, and the mourner laughs a savage cynical
+laugh at the grave; but for those moments in which they awhile forget
+parts more important than themselves, the tailor and the dressmaker have
+provided symbolical garments, just as military decorations have been
+provided for heroes<!--Page 133--> without the gift of looking heroic, and sacerdotal
+vestments for the priest, who, like a policeman, is not always on duty.</p>
+
+<p>In playing his part the conscientious artist in life, like any other
+actor, must often seem to feel more than he really feels at a given
+moment, say more than he means. In this he is far from being
+insincere&mdash;though he must make up his mind to be accused daily of
+insincerity and affectation. On the contrary, it will be his very
+sincerity that necessitates his make-believe. With his great part ever
+before him in its inspiring completeness, he must be careful to allow no
+merely personal accident of momentary feeling or action to jeopardise
+the general effect. There are moments, for example, when a really true
+lover, owing to such masterful natural facts as indigestion, a cold, or
+extreme sleepiness, is unable to feel all that he knows he really feels.
+To 'tell the truth,' as it is called, under such circumstances, would
+simply be a most dangerous form of lying. There is no duty we owe to
+truth more imperative than that of lying stoutly on occasion&mdash;for,
+indeed, there is often no other way of con<!--Page 134-->veying the whole truth than
+by telling the part-lie.</p>
+
+<p>A watchful sincerity to our great conception of ourselves is the first
+and last condition, of our creating that finest work of art&mdash;a
+personality; for a personality, like a poet, is not only born but made.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 135-->
+<h3><a name="essay15">THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX</a></h3>
+
+<p>In an essay on Vauvenargues Mr. John Morley speaks with characteristic
+causticity of those epigrammatists 'who persist in thinking of man and
+woman as two different species,' and who make verbal capital out of the
+fancied distinction in the form of smart epigrams beginning '<em>Les
+femmes</em>.' It is one of Shakespeare's cardinal characteristics that <em>he
+understood woman</em>. Mr. Meredith's fame as a novelist is largely due to
+the fact that he too <em>understands women</em>. The one spot on the sun of
+Robert Louis Stevenson's fame, so we are told, is that he could <em>never
+draw a woman</em>. His capacity for drawing men counted for nothing,
+apparently, beside this failure. Evidently the Sphinx has not the face
+of a woman for nothing. That is why no one has read her riddle,
+translated<!--Page 136--> her mystic smile. Yet many people smile mysteriously,
+without any profound meanings behind their smile, with no other reason
+than a desire to mystify. Perhaps the Sphinx smiles to herself just for
+the fun of seeing us take her smile so seriously. And surely women must
+so smile as they hear their psychology so gravely discussed. Of course,
+the superstition is invaluable to them, and it is only natural that they
+should make the most of it. Man is supposed to be a complete ignoramus
+in regard to all the specialised female 'departments'&mdash;from the supreme
+mystery of the female heart to the humble domestic mysteries of a
+household. Similarly, men are supposed to have no taste in women's
+dress, yet for whom do women clothe themselves in the rainbow and the
+sea-foam, if not to please men? And was not the high-priest of that
+delicious and fascinating mystery a man&mdash;if it be proper to call the
+late M. Worth a man,&mdash;as the best cooks are men, and the best waiters?</p>
+
+<p>It would seem to be assumed from all this mystification that men are
+beings clear as daylight, both to themselves and to women.<!--Page 1137--> Poor,
+simple, manageable souls, their wants are easily satisfied, their
+psychology&mdash;which, it is implied, differs little from their
+physiology&mdash;long since mapped out.</p>
+
+<p>It may be so, but it is the opinion of some that men's simplicity is no
+less a fiction than women's mysterious complexity, and that human
+character is made up of much the same qualities in men and women,
+irrespective of a merely rudimentary sexual distinction, which has, of
+course, its proper importance, and which the present writer would be the
+last to wish away. From that quaint distinction of sex springs, of
+course, all that makes life in the smallest degree worth living, from
+great religions to tiny flowers. Love and beauty and poetry;
+Shakespeare's plays, Burne-Jones's pictures, and Wagner's operas&mdash;all
+such moving expressions of human life, as science has shown us, spring
+from the all-important fact that 'male and female created He them.'</p>
+
+<p>This everybody knows, and few are fools enough to deny. Many people,
+however, confuse this organic distinction of sex with its time-worn
+conventional symbols; just<!--Page 138--> as religion is commonly confused with its
+external rites and ceremonies. The comparison naturally continues itself
+further; for, as in religion, so soon as some traditional garment of the
+faith has become outworn or otherwise unsuitable, and the proposal is
+made to dispense with or substitute it, an outcry immediately is raised
+that religion itself is in danger&mdash;so with sex, no sooner does one or
+the other sex propose to discard its arbitrary conventional
+characteristics, or to supplement them by others borrowed from its
+fellow-sex, than an outcry immediately is raised that sex itself is in
+danger.</p>
+
+<p>Sex&mdash;the most potent force in the universe&mdash;in danger because women
+wear knickerbockers instead of petticoats, or military men take to
+corsets and cosmetics!</p>
+
+<p>That parallel with religion may be pursued profitably one step further.
+In religion, the conventional test of your faith is not how you live,
+not in your kindness of heart or purity of mind, but how you believe&mdash;in
+the Trinity, in the Atonement; and do you turn to the East during the
+recital of the Apostles' Creed? These and such, as every<!--Page 139--> one knows, are
+the vital matters of religion. And it is even so with sex. You are not
+asked for the realities of manliness or womanliness, but for the
+shadows, the arbitrary externalities, the fashions of which change from
+generation to generation.</p>
+
+<p>To be truly womanly you must never wear your hair short; to be truly
+manly you must never wear it long. To be truly womanly you must dress as
+daintily as possible, however uncomfortably; to be truly manly you must
+wear the most hideous gear ever invented by the servility of tailors&mdash;a
+strange succession of cylinders from head to heel; cylinder on head,
+cylinder round your body, cylinders on arms and cylinders on legs. To be
+truly womanly you must be shrinking and clinging in manner and trivial
+in conversation; you must have no ideas, and rejoice that you wish for
+none; you must thank Heaven that you have never ridden a bicycle or
+smoked a cigarette; and you must be prepared to do a thousand other
+absurd and ridiculous things. To be truly manly you must be and do the
+opposite of all these things, with this exception&mdash;that with you<!--Page 140--> the
+possession of ideas is optional. The finest specimens of British manhood
+are without ideas; but that, I say, is, generally speaking, a matter for
+yourself. It is indeed the only matter in which you have any choice.
+More important matters, such as the cut of your clothes and hair, the
+shape of your face, the length of your moustache and the pattern of your
+cane&mdash;all these are very properly regulated for you by laws of fashion,
+which you could never dream of breaking. You may break every moral law
+there is&mdash;or rather, was&mdash;and still remain a man. You may be a bully, a
+cad, a coward and a fool, in the poor heart and brains of you; but so
+long as you wear the mock regimentals of contemporary manhood, and are
+above all things plain and undistinguished enough, your reputation for
+manhood will be secure. There is nothing so dangerous to a reputation
+for manhood as brains or beauty.</p>
+
+<p>In short, to be a true woman you have only to be pretty and an idiot,
+and to be a true man you have only to be brutal and a fool.</p>
+
+<p>From these misconceptions of manliness<!--Page 141--> and womanliness, these
+superstitions of sex, many curious confusions have come about. They so
+to say, professional differentiation between the sexes had at one time
+gone so far that men were credited with the entire monopoly of a certain
+set of human qualities, and women with the monopoly of a certain other
+set of human qualities; yet every one of these are qualities which one
+would have thought were proper to, and necessary for, all human beings
+alike, male and female.</p>
+
+<p>In a dictionary of a date (1856) when everything on earth and in heaven
+was settled and written in penny cyclopædias and books of deportment, I
+find these delicious definitions&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><em>Manly</em>: becoming a man; firm; brave; undaunted; dignified; noble;
+stately; not boyish or womanish.</p>
+
+<p><em>Womanly</em>: becoming a woman; feminine; as <em>womanly</em> behaviour.</p>
+
+<p>Under <em>Woman</em> we find the adjectives&mdash;soft, mild, pitiful and flexible,
+kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous, modest.</p>
+
+<p>Who can doubt that the dictionary maker defined and distributed his
+adjectives aright<!--Page 142--> for the year 1856? Since then, however, many alarming
+heresies have taken root in our land, and some are heard to declare that
+both these sets of adjectives apply to men and women alike, and are, in
+fact, necessities of any decent human outfit. Otherwise the conclusion
+is obvious, that no one desirous of the adjective 'manly' must ever
+be&mdash;soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, kind, civil, obliging, humane,
+tender, timorous, or modest; and no one desirous of the adjective
+'womanly' be&mdash;firm, brave, undaunted, dignified, noble, or stately.</p>
+
+<p>But surely the essentials of 'manliness' and 'womanliness' belong to man
+and woman alike&mdash;the externals are purely artistic considerations, and
+subject to the vagaries of fashion. In art no one would think of
+allowing fashion any serious artistic opinion. It is usually the art
+which is out of fashion that is most truly art. Similarly, fashions in
+manliness or womanliness have nothing to do with real manliness or
+womanliness. Moreover, the adjectives 'manly' or 'womanly,' applied to
+works of art, or the artistic surfaces of men and women, are<!--Page 143-->
+irrelevant&mdash;that is to say, impertinent. You have no right to ask a
+poem or a picture to look manly or womanly, any more than you have any
+right to ask a man or a woman to look manly or womanly. There is no such
+thing as looking manly or womanly. There is looking beautiful or ugly,
+distinguished or commonplace, individual or insignificant. The one law
+of externals is beauty in all its various manifestations. To ask the sex
+of a beautiful person is as absurd as it would be to ask the publisher
+the sex of a beautiful book. Such questions are for midwives and
+doctors.</p>
+
+<p>It was once the fashion for heroes to shed tears on the smallest
+occasion, and it does not appear that they fought the worse for it; some
+of the firmest, bravest, most undaunted, most dignified, most noble,
+most stately human beings have been women; as some of the softest,
+mildest, most pitiful and flexible, most kind, civil, obliging, humane,
+tender, timorous and modest human beings have been men. Indeed, some of
+the bravest men that ever trod this planet have worn corsets, and it
+needs more courage<!--Page 144--> nowadays for a man to wear his hair long than to
+machine-gun a whole African nation. Moreover, quite the nicest women one
+knows ride bicycles&mdash;in the rational costume.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 145-->
+<h3><a name="essay16">THE FALLACY OF A NATION</a></h3>
+
+<p>It is, I am given to understand, a familiar axiom of mathematics that no
+number of ciphers placed in front of significant units, or tens or
+hundreds of units, adds in the smallest degree to the numerical value of
+those units. The figure one becomes of no more importance however many
+noughts are marshalled in front of it&mdash;though, indeed, in the
+mathematics of human nature this is not so. Is not a man or woman
+considered great in proportion to the number of ciphers that walk in
+front of him, from a humble brace of domestics to guards of honour and
+imperial armies?</p>
+
+<p>A parallel profound truth of mathematics is that a nought, however many
+times it be multiplied, remains nought; but again we find the reverse
+obtain in the mathematics of human nature. One might have supposed<!--Page 146--> that
+the result of one nobody multiplied even fifty million times would still
+be nobody. However, such is far from being the case. Fifty million
+nobodies make&mdash;a nation. Of course, there is no need for so many. I am
+reckoning as a British subject, and speak of fifty million merely as an
+illustration of the general fact that it is the multiplication of
+nobodies that makes a nation. 'Increase and multiply' was, it will be
+remembered, the recipe for the Jewish nation.</p>
+
+<p>Nobodies of the same colour, tongue, and prejudices have but to
+congregate together in a crowd sufficiently big for other similar crowds
+to recognise them, and then they are given a name of their own, and
+become recognised as a nation&mdash;one of the 'Great Powers.'</p>
+
+<p>Beyond those differences in colour, tongue, and prejudices there is
+really no difference between the component units&mdash;or rather ciphers&mdash;of
+all these several national crowds. You have seen a procession of various
+trades-unions filing toward Hyde Park, each section with its particular
+banner with a strange device: 'The United Guild of Paperhangers,'<!--Page 147--> 'The
+Ancient Order of Plumbers,' and so on. And you may have marvelled to
+notice how alike the members of the various carefully differentiated
+companies were. So to say, they each and all might have been plumbers;
+and you couldn't help feeling that it wouldn't have mattered much if
+some of the paper-hangers had by mistake got walking amongst the
+plumbers, or <em>vice versa</em>.</p>
+
+<p>So the great trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word
+'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany'&mdash;this with a
+particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in
+front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously
+waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and
+yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called 'England.' Other
+smaller bodies of nobodies, that is, smaller nations, file past with
+humbler tread&mdash;though there is really no need for their doing so. For,
+as we have said, they are in every particular like to those haughtier
+nations who take precedence of them. In fact, one or two of them, such
+as Norway<!--Page 148--> and Denmark&mdash;were a truer system of human mathematics to
+obtain&mdash;are really of more importance than the so-called greater
+nations, in that among their nobodies they include a larger percentage
+of intellectual somebodies.</p>
+
+<p>Remembering that percentage of wise men, the formula of a nation were
+perhaps more truly stated in our first mathematical image. The wise men
+in a nation are as the units with the noughts in front of them. And when
+I say wise men I do not, indeed, mean merely the literary men or the
+artists, but all those somebodies with some real force of character,
+people with brains and hearts, fighters and lovers, saints and thinkers,
+and the patient, industrious workers. Such, if you consider, are really
+no integral part of the nation among which they are cast. They have no
+part in what are grandiloquently called national interests&mdash;war,
+politics, and horse-racing to wit. A change of Government leaves them as
+unmoved as an election for the board of guardians. They would as soon
+think of entering Parliament or the County Council, as of yearning to
+manage the gasworks, or to go about<!--Page 149--> with one of those carts bearing the
+legend 'Aldermen and Burgesses of the City of London' conspicuously upon
+its front. Their main concern in political changes is the rise and fall
+of the income-tax, and, be the Cabinet Tory or Liberal, their rate
+papers come in for the same amount. It is likely that national changes
+would affect them but little more. What more would a foreign invasion
+mean than that we should pay our taxes to French, Russian, or German
+officials, instead of to English ones? French and Italians do our
+cooking, Germans manage our music, Jews control our money markets;
+surely it would make little difference to us for France, Russia, or
+Germany to undertake our government. The worst of being conquered by
+Russia would be the necessity of learning Russian; whereas a little
+rubbing up of our French would make us comfortable with France. Besides,
+to be conquered by France would save us crossing the Channel to Paris,
+and then we might hope for cafés in Regent Street, and an emancipated
+literature. As a matter of fact, so-called national interests are merely
+certain<!--Page 150--> private interests on a large scale, the private interests of
+financiers, ambitious politicians, soldiers, and great merchants.
+Broadly speaking, there are no rival nations&mdash;there are rival markets;
+and it is its Board of Trade and its Stock Exchange rather than its
+Houses of Parliament that virtually govern a country. Thus one seaport
+goes down and another comes up, industries forsake one country to bless
+another, the military and naval strengths of nations fluctuate this way
+and that; and to those whom these changes affect they are undoubtedly
+important matters&mdash;the great capitalist, the soldier, and the
+politician; but to the quiet man at home with his wife, his children,
+his books, and his flowers, to the artist busied with brave translunary
+matters, to the saint with his eyes filled with 'the white radiance of
+eternity,' to the shepherd on the hillside, the milkmaid in love, or the
+angler at his sport&mdash;what are these pompous commotions, these busy,
+bustling mimicries of reality? England will be just as good to live in
+though men some day call her France. Let the big busybodies divide her
+amongst them<!--Page 151--> as they like, so that they leave one alone with one's fair
+share of the sky and the grass, and an occasional, not too vociferous,
+nightingale.</p>
+
+<p>The reader will perhaps forgive the hackneyed references to Sir Thomas
+Browne peacefully writing his <em>Religio Medici</em> amid all the commotions
+of the Civil War, and to Gautier calmly correcting the proofs of his new
+poems during the siege of Paris. The milkman goes his rounds amid the
+crash of empires. It is not his business to fight. His business is to
+distribute his milk&mdash;as much after half-past seven as may be
+inconvenient. Similarly, the business of the thinker is with his
+thought, the poet with his poetry. It is the business of politicians to
+make national quarrels, and the business of the soldier to fight them.
+But as for the poet&mdash;let him correct his proofs, or beware the printer.</p>
+
+<p>The idea, then, of a nation is a grandiloquent fallacy in the interests
+of commerce and ambition, political and military. All the great and
+good, clever and charming people belong to one secret nation, for which
+there is no name unless it be the Chosen<!--Page 152--> People. These are the lost
+tribes of love, art, and religion, lost and swamped amid alien peoples,
+but ever dreaming of a time when they shall meet once more in Jerusalem.</p>
+
+<p>Yet though they are thus aliens, taking and wishing no part in the
+organisation of the 'nations' among which they dwell, this does not
+prevent those nations taking part and credit in them. And whenever a
+brave soldier wins a battle, or an intrepid traveller discovers a new
+land, his particular nation flatters itself, as though it&mdash;the million
+nobodies&mdash;had done it. With a profound indifference to, indeed an active
+dislike of, art and poetry, there is nothing on which a nation prides
+itself so much as upon its artists and poets, whom, invariably, it
+starves, neglects, and even insults, as long as it is not too silly to
+do so.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the average Englishman talks of Shakespeare&mdash;as though he himself
+had written the plays; of India&mdash;as though he himself had conquered it.
+And thus grow up such fictions as 'national greatness' and 'public
+opinion.'</p>
+
+<p>For what is 'national greatness' but the<!--Page 153--> glory reflected from the
+memories of a few great individuals? and what is 'public opinion' but
+the blustering echoes of the opinion of a few clever young men on the
+morning papers?</p>
+
+<p>For how can people in themselves little become great by merely
+congregating into a crowd, however large? And surely fools do not become
+wise, or worth listening to, merely by the fact of their banding
+together.</p>
+
+<p>A 'public opinion' on any matter except football, prize-fighting, and
+perhaps cricket, is merely ridiculous&mdash;by whatever brutal physical
+powers it may be enforced&mdash;ridiculous as a town council's opinion upon
+art; and a nation is merely a big fool with an army.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 154-->
+<h3><a name="essay17">THE GREATNESS OF MAN</a></h3>
+
+<p>Ignorant, as I inevitably am, dear reader, of your intellectual and
+spiritual upbringing, I can hardly guess whether the title of my article
+will impress you as a platitude or as a paradox. Goodness knows, some
+men and women think quite enough of themselves as it is, and, from a
+certain momentary point of view, there may seem little occasion indeed
+to remind man of his importance.</p>
+
+<p>I refer to your intellectual and spiritual upbringing, because I venture
+to wonder if it was in the least like my own. I was brought up, I
+rejoice to say, in the bosom of an orthodox Puritan family. I was led
+and driven to believe that man was everybody, and that God was
+somebody&mdash;and that not merely the Sabbath, but the whole universe, was
+made for man: that the stars were his bedtime candles, and that the sun<!--Page 155-->
+arose to ensure his catching the 8.37 of a morning.</p>
+
+<p>On this belief I acted for many years. Every young man believes that
+there is no god but God, and that he is born to be His prophet&mdash;though
+perhaps that belief is not so common nowadays. I am speaking of many
+years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Science, however, has long since changed all that. Those terrible Muses,
+geology, astronomy, and particularly biology, have reduced man to a
+humility which, if in some degree salutary, becomes in its excess highly
+dangerous. Why should one maggot in this great cheese of the world take
+itself more seriously than others? Why dream mightily and do bravely if
+we are but a little higher than the beasts that perish? Nature cares
+nothing about us, and her giant forces laugh at our fancies. The world
+has no such meaning as we thought. Poets and saints, deluded by
+unhealthy imaginations, have misled us, and it is quite likely that the
+wild waves are really saying nothing more important than 'Beecham's
+Pills.'</p>
+
+<p>'Give us a definition of life,' I asked a<!--Page 156--> certain famous scientist and
+philosopher whom I am privileged to call my friend.</p>
+
+<p>'Nothing easier!' he gaily replied. 'Life is a product of solar energy,
+falling upon the carbon compounds, on the outer crust of a particular
+planet, in a particular corner of the solar system.'</p>
+
+<p>'And that,' I said, 'really satisfies you as a definition of life&mdash;of
+all the wistful wonder of the world!' And as I spoke I thought of Moses
+with mystically shining face upon the Mount of the Law, of Ezekiel rapt
+in his divine fancies, of Socrates drinking his cup of hemlock, of
+Christ's agony in the garden; the golden faces of the great of the world
+passed as in a dream before me,&mdash;soldiers, saints, poets, and lovers. I
+thought of Horatius on the bridge, of the holy and gentle soul of St.
+Francis, of Chatterton in his splendid despair, and in fancy I went with
+the awestruck citizens of Verona to reverently gaze at the bodies of two
+young lovers who had counted the world well lost if they might only
+leave it together.</p>
+
+<p>The carbon compounds!</p>
+
+<p>I took down <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>, listened<!--Page 157--> to its passionate spheral
+music, and the carbon compounds have never troubled me again.</p>
+
+<p>Love laughs at the carbon compounds, and a great book, a noble act, a
+beautiful face, make nonsense of such cheap formula for the mystery of
+human life.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this parable of the carbon compounds is a fair sample of all that
+science can tell us when we come to ultimates. We go away from its
+oracles with a mouthful of sounding words, which may seem very
+impressive till we examine their emptiness. What, for example, is all
+this rigmarole about solar energy and the carbon compounds but a more
+pompous way of putting the old scriptural statement that man was made of
+the dust of the ground? To say that God took a handful of dust and
+breathed upon it and it became man, is no harder to realise than that
+solar rays falling upon that dust should produce humanity and all the
+various phantasmagoria of life. If anything, it is more explanatory. It
+leaves us with an inspiring mystery for explanation.</p>
+
+<p>In saying this, I do not forget our debt to<!--Page 158--> science. It has done much
+in clearing our minds of cant, in popularising more systematic thinking,
+and in instituting sounder methods of observation. In some directions it
+has deepened our sense of wonder. It has broadened our conception of the
+universe, though I fear it has been at the expense of narrowing our
+conception of man. With Hamlet it contemptuously says, 'What is this
+quintessence of dust!' It is so impressed by the mileage and tonnage of
+the universe, so abased before the stupendous measurements of the
+cosmos, the appalling infinity and eternity of its space and time, that
+it forgets the marvel of the mind that can grasp all these conceptions,
+forgets, too, that, big and bullying as the forces of nature may be, man
+has been able in a large measure to control, indeed to domesticate,
+them. Surely the original fact of lightning is little more marvellous
+than the power of man to turn it into his errand-boy or his horse, to
+light his rooms with it, and imprison it in pennyworths, like the genius
+in the bottle, in the underground railway. Mere size seems unimpressive
+when we contem<!--Page 159-->plate such an extreme of littleness as say the ant, that
+pin-point of a personality, that mere speck of being, yet including
+within its infinitesimal proportions a clever, busy brain, a soldier, a
+politician, and a merchant. That such and so many faculties should have
+room to operate within that tiny body&mdash;there is a marvel before which,
+it seems to me, the billions of miles that keep us from falling into the
+jaws of the sun, and the tonnage of Jupiter, are comparatively
+insignificant and conceivable.</p>
+
+<p>No, we must not allow ourselves to be frightened by the mere size and
+weight of the universe, or be depressed because our immediate genealogy
+is not considered aristocratic. Perhaps, after all, we are sons of God,
+and as Mr. Meredith finely puts it, our life here may still be</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'... a little holding</p>
+  <p>To do a mighty service.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>'Things of a day!' exclaims Pindar. 'What is a man? What is a man not?'</p>
+
+<p>It is good for our Nebuchadnezzars, the kings of the world, and
+conceited, successful people generally, to measure themselves<!--Page 160--> against
+the great powers of the universe, to humble their pride by contemplation
+of the fixed stars; but a too humble attitude toward the Infinite, a too
+constant pondering upon eternity, is not good for us, unless, so to say,
+we can live with them as friends, with the inspiring feeling that,
+little as we may seem, there is that in us which is no less infinite, no
+less cosmic, and that our passions and dreams have, as Mr. William
+Watson puts it, 'a relish of eternity.'</p>
+
+<p>Readers of Amiel's 'Journal' will know what a sterilising, petrifying
+influence his trance-like contemplation of the Infinite had upon his
+life. Amiel was simply hypnotised by the universe, as a man may
+hypnotise himself by gazing fixedly at a star.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Pater, you will remember, has a remarkable study of a similar
+temperament in his <em>Imaginary Portraits</em>. Sebastian van Storck, like
+Amiel, had become hypnotised by the Infinite. It paralysed in him all
+impulse or power 'to be or do any limited thing.'</p>
+
+<p>'For Sebastian, at least,' we read, 'the world and the individual alike
+had been<!--Page 161--> divested of all effective purpose. The most vivid of finite
+objects, the dramatic episodes of Dutch history, the brilliant
+personalities which had found their parts to play in them, that golden
+art, surrounding one with an ideal world, beyond which the real world
+was discernible indeed, but etherealised by the medium through which it
+came to one; all this, for most men so powerful a link to existence,
+only set him on the thought of escape&mdash;into a formless and nameless
+infinite world, evenly grey.... Actually proud, at times, of his
+curious, well-reasoned nihilism, he could but regard what is called the
+business of life as no better than a trifling and wearisome delay.'</p>
+
+<p>This mood, once confined to a few mystics is likely to become a common
+one, is already, one imagines, far from infrequent&mdash;so the increase of
+suicide would lead us to suppose. Robbed of his hope of a glorious
+immortality, stripped of his spiritual significance, bullied and
+belittled by science on every hand, man not unnaturally begins to feel
+that it is no use taking his life seriously, that, in fact, it betrays a
+lack of humour to do so. While<!--Page 162--> he was a supernatural being, a son of
+God, it was with him a case of <em>noblesse oblige</em>; and while he is happy
+and comfortable he doesn't mind giving up the riddle of the world. It is
+only the unhappy that ever really think. But what is he to do when agony
+and despair come upon him, when all that made his life worth living is
+taken from him? How is he to sustain himself? where shall he look for
+his strength or his hope? He looks up at the sky full of stars, but he
+is told that God is not there, that the city of God is long since a
+ruin, and that owls hoot to each other across its moss-grown fanes and
+battlements; he looks down on the earth, full of graves, a vast
+necropolis of once radiant dreams, with the living for its
+phantoms,&mdash;and there is no comfort anywhere. Happy is he if some simple
+human duty be at hand, which he may go on doing blindly and
+dumbly&mdash;till, perhaps, the light come again. It is difficult to offer
+comfort to such a one. Comfort is cheap, and we know nothing. When life
+holds nothing for our love and delight, it is difficult to explain why
+we should go on living it&mdash;except on<!--Page 163--> the assumption that it matters,
+that it is, in some mystical way, supremely important, how we live it,
+and what we make of those joys and sorrows which, say some, are but
+meant as mystical trials and tests.</p>
+
+<p>Sebastian van Storck refused 'to be or do any limited thing,' but the
+answer to his mysticism is to be found in a finer mysticism, that which
+says that there is no limited act or thing, but that the significance,
+as well as the pathos, of eternity is in our smallest joys and sorrows,
+as in our most everyday transactions, and the greatness of God incarnate
+in His humblest child.</p>
+
+<p>This, the old doctrine of the microcosm, seems in certain moments,
+moments one would wish to say, of divination, strangely plain and
+clear&mdash;when, in Blake's words, it seems so easy to</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'... see a world in a grain of sand,</p>
+    <p class="indent1">And a heaven in a wild flower;</p>
+  <p>Hold infinity in the palm of your hand</p>
+    <p class="indent1">And Eternity in an hour.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Perhaps in the street, an effect of light, a passing face, yes, even the
+plaintive grind of a street organ, some such everyday circum<!--Page 164-->stance,
+affects you suddenly in quite a strange way. It has become
+universalised. It is no longer a detail of the Strand, but a cryptic
+symbol of human life. It has been transfigured into a thing of infinite
+pathos and infinite beauty, and, sad or glad, brings to you an
+inexplicable sense of peace, an unshakable conviction that man is a
+spirit, that his life is indeed of supreme and lovely significance, and
+that his destiny is secure and blessed.</p>
+
+<p>Matthew Arnold, ever sensitive to such spiritual states, has described
+these trance-like visitations in 'The Buried Life'&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>'Only, but this is rare&mdash;</p>
+  <p>When a beloved hand is laid in ours,</p>
+  <p>When, jaded with the rush and glare</p>
+  <p>Of the interminable hours,</p>
+  <p>Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,</p>
+  <p>When our world-deafen'd ear</p>
+  <p>Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd&mdash;</p>
+  <p>A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,</p>
+  <p>And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again:</p>
+  <p>The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,</p>
+  <p>And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.</p>
+  <p>A man becomes aware of his life's flow,</p>
+  <p>And hears its winding murmur; and he sees</p>
+  <p>The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.</p>
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="stanza">
+  <p>'And there arrives a lull in the hot race</p>
+  <p>Wherein he doth for ever chase</p><!--Page 165-->
+  <p>That flying and elusive shadow, rest.</p>
+  <p>An air of coolness plays upon his face,</p>
+  <p>And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.</p>
+  <p>And then he thinks he knows</p>
+  <p>The hills where his life rose,</p>
+  <p>And the sea where it goes.'</p>
+ </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>'To be or do any limited thing'! What indeed, we ask in such hours, is a
+limited thing, when all the humble interests of our daily life are
+palpably big with eternity? Is the first kiss of a great love a limited
+thing? though there is, unhappily, no denying that it comes to an end!
+When a young husband and wife smile across to each other above the sleep
+of their little child&mdash;is that a limited thing? When the siren voices of
+the world blend together on the lips of a young poet, and with rapt eyes
+and hot heart he makes a song as of the morning stars&mdash;is that a limited
+thing? Are love, and genius, and duty done in the face of death&mdash;are
+these limited things? I think not&mdash;and man, indeed, knows better.</p>
+
+<p>Greatness is not relative. It is absolute. It is not for man to depress
+himself by measuring himself against the eternities and the immensities
+external to him. What he<!--Page 166--> has to do is to look inward upon himself, to
+fathom the eternities and the immensities in his own heart and brain.</p>
+
+<p>And the more man sees himself forsaken by the universe, the more
+opportunity to vindicate his own greatness. Is there no kind heart
+beating through the scheme of things?&mdash;man's heart shall still be kind.
+Will the eternal silence make mock of his dreams and his idealisms,
+laugh coldly at 'the splendid purpose in his eyes'? Well, so be it. His
+dreams and idealisms are none the less noble things, and if the gods do
+thus make mock of mortal joy and pain&mdash;let us be grateful that we were
+born mere men.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, he has one great answer to the universe&mdash;the answer of
+courage. He is still Prometheus, and there is no limit to what he can
+bear. Let the vultures of pain rend his heart as they will, he can still
+hiss 'coward' in the face of the Eternal. Nay, he can even laugh at his
+sufferings&mdash;thanks to the spirit of humour, that most blessed of
+ministering angels, without which surely the heart of humanity had long
+since broken, by<!--Page 167--> which man is able to look with a comical eye upon
+terrors, as it were taking themselves so seriously, coming with such
+Olympian thunders and lightnings to break the spirit of a mere six foot
+of earth!</p>
+
+<p>But while his courage and his humour are defences of which he cannot be
+disarmed, whatever be the intention of the Eternal, it is by no means
+certain that nature does not mean kindly by man. Perhaps the pain of the
+world is but the rough horseplay of great powers that mean but jest&mdash;and
+kill us in it: as though one played at 'tick' with an elephant!</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, after all,&mdash;who knows?&mdash;God is love, and His great purpose
+kind.</p>
+
+<p>Surely, when you think of it, the existence in man of the senses of love
+and pity implies the probability of their existence elsewhere in the
+universe too.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'Into that breast which brings the rose</p>
+  <p>Shall I with shuddering fall.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>So runs the profoundest thought in modern poetry&mdash;and need I say it is
+Mr. Meredith's?</p>
+
+<p>As the fragrance and colour of the rose must in some occult way be
+properties of<!--Page 168--> the rude earth from which they are drawn by the sun, may
+not human love also be a kindly property of matter&mdash;that mysterious
+life-stuff in which is packed such marvellous potentialities? Evidently
+love must be somewhere in the universe&mdash;else it had not got into the
+heart of man; and perhaps pity slides down like an angel in the rays of
+the solar energy, while there is the potential beating of a human heart
+even in the hard crust of the carbon compounds.</p>
+
+<p>I confess that this seems to me no mere fancy, but a really comforting
+speculation. Pain, we say, is inherent in the scheme of the universe;
+but is not love seen to be no less inherent, too?</p>
+
+<p>There must be some soul of beauty to animate the lovely face of the
+world, some soul of goodness to account for its saints. If the gods are
+cruel, it is strange that man should be so kind, and that some pathetic
+spirit of tenderness should seem to stir even in the bosoms of beasts
+and birds.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, we cannot too often insist that, whatever uncertainties there
+be, man has one certainty&mdash;himself. Science has<!--Page 169--> really adduced nothing
+essential against his significance. That he is not as big as an Alp, as
+heavy as a star, or as long-lived as an eagle, is nothing against his
+proper importance. Even a nobleman is of more significance in the world
+than his acres, and giants are not proverbial for their intellectual or
+spiritual qualities. The ant is of more importance than the ass, and the
+great eye of a beautiful woman is more significant than the whole clayey
+bulk of Mars.</p>
+
+<p>After all the scientific mockery of the old religious ideal of the
+importance of man, one begins to wonder if his Ptolemaic fancy that he
+was the centre of the universe, and that it was all made for him, is not
+nearer the If truth than the pitiless theories which hardly allow him
+equality with the flea that perishes.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose if, after all, the stars were really meant as his bedtime
+candles, and the sun's purpose in rising is really that he may catch the
+8.37!</p>
+
+<p>For, as Sir Thomas Browne says in his solemn English, 'there is surely a
+piece of Divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and
+owes no homage unto the sun.'</p><!--Page 170-->
+
+<p>The long winter of materialistic science seems to be breaking up, and
+the old ideals are seen trooping back with something more than their old
+beauty, in the new spiritual spring that seems to be moving in the
+hearts of men.</p>
+
+<p>After all its talk, science has done little more than correct the
+misprints of religion. Essentially, the old spiritualistic and poetic
+theories of life are seen, not merely weakly to satisfy the cravings of
+man's nature, but to be mostly in harmony with certain strange and
+moving facts in his constitution, which the materialists
+unscientifically ignore.</p>
+
+<p>It was important, and has been helpful, to insist that man is an animal,
+but it is still more important to insist that he is a spirit as well. He
+is, so to say, an animal by accident, a spirit by birthright: and,
+however homely his duties may occasionally seem, his life is bathed in
+the light of a sacred transfiguring significance, its smallest acts
+flash with divine meanings, its highest moments are rich with 'the
+pathos of eternity,' and its humblest duties mighty with the
+responsibilities of a god.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 171-->
+<h3><a name="essay18">DEATH AND TWO FRIENDS</a></h3>
+
+<h4><em>A DIALOGUE</em><br>
+(<em>To the Memory of J.S. and T.C.L.</em>)</h4>
+
+<h4>PERSONS: SCRIPTOR AND LECTOR.</h4>
+
+<p>[This dialogue was written originally as a rejoinder to certain
+criticisms on a book of mine entitled, <em>The Religion of a Literary
+Man</em>&mdash;<em>Religio Scriptoris</em>&mdash;hence the names given to the two 'persons.'
+It was written in March 1894, before an event in the writer's life to
+which, erroneously, some have supposed it to refer.]</p>
+
+
+<p>LECTOR. But do you really mean, Scriptor, that you have no desire for
+the life after death?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. I never said quite that, Lector, though perhaps I might almost
+have gone so far. What I did say was that we have been accustomed to
+exaggerate its importance to us here and now, that it really matters
+less to us than we imagine.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. I see. But you must speak for yourself, Scriptor. I am sure that
+it matters<!--Page 172--> much to many, to most of us. It does, I know, to me.</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Less than you think, my dear Lector. Besides, you are really
+too young to know. It is true that, as years go, you are ten years my
+senior, but what of that? You have that vigorous health which is the
+secret of perpetual youth. You have not yet realised decay, not to speak
+of death. The immortality of the soul is a question wide of you, who
+have as yet practically no doubt of the immortality of the body. But
+I&mdash;well, it would be melodramatic to say that I face death every day.
+The metaphor applies but to desperate callings and romantic complaints.
+To some Death comes like a footpad, suddenly, and presents his
+pistol&mdash;and the smoke that curls upward from his empty barrel is your
+soul.</p>
+
+<p>To another he comes featureless, a stealthily accumulating London fog,
+that slowly, slowly chokes the life out of you, without allowing you the
+consolation of a single picturesque moment, a single grand attitude. For
+you, probably, Death will only come when you die. I have to live with
+him as well. I<!--Page 173--> shall smoulder for years, you will be carried to heaven,
+like Enoch, in a beautiful lightning.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+      <p class="indent3">'A simple child</p>
+  <p>That lightly draws its breath,</p>
+  <p>And feels its life in every limb,</p>
+  <p>What can it know of Death?'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>That's you, my dear Lector, for all your forty years.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. All the more reason, Scriptor, that you should desire a
+hereafter. You sometimes talk of the work you would do if you were a
+robust Philistine such as I. Would it not be worth while to live
+again, if only to make sure of that <em>magnum opus</em>&mdash;just to realise
+those dreams that you say are daily escaping you?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Ah! so speaks the energetic man, eager to take the world on
+his shoulders. I know the images of death that please you,
+Lector&mdash;such as that great one of Arnold's, about 'the sounding
+labour-house vast of being.'</p>
+
+<p>But, Lector, you who love work so well&mdash;have you never heard tell of
+a thing called Rest? Have you never known what it is to be tired, my
+Lector?&mdash;not tired at the end<!--Page 174--> of a busy day, but tired in the morning,
+tired in the Memnonian sunlight, when larks and barrel-organs start on
+their blithe insistent rounds. No, the man who is tired of a morning
+sings not music-hall songs in his bedroom as he dashes about in his
+morning bath. But will you never want to go to bed, Lector? Will you
+be always like the children who hate to be sent to bed, and think that
+when they are grown up they will never go to bed at all? Yet in a few
+years' time how glad they are of the stray chance of bed at ten. May
+it not be so with sleep's twin-brother? In our young vigour, driven by
+a hundred buoyant activities, enticed by dream on dream, time seems so
+short for all we think we have to do; but surely when the blood begins
+to thin, and the heart to wax less extravagantly buoyant, when comfort
+croons a kettle-song whose simple spell no sirens of ambition or
+romance can overcome&mdash;don't you think that then 'bedtime' will come to
+seem the best hour of the day, and 'Death as welcome as a friend would
+fall'?</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But you are no fair judge, Scrip<!--Page 175-->tor. You say my health, my
+youth, as you waggishly call it, puts me out of court. Yet surely your
+ill-health and low spirits just as surely vitiate your judgment?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Admitted, so far as my views are the outcome of my
+particular condition. But you forget that the condition I have been
+supposing is not merely particular, but, on the contrary, the most
+general among men. Was it not old age?&mdash;which, like youth, is
+independent of years. You may be young beyond your years, I may be old
+in advance of them; but old age does come some time, and with it the
+desire of rest.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But does not old age spend most of its thought in dwelling
+fondly on its lost youth, hanging like a remote sunrise in its
+imagination? Is it not its one yearning desire just to live certain
+hours of its youth over again?&mdash;and would the old man not give all he
+possesses for the certainty of being born young again into eternity?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. He would give everything&mdash;but the certainty of rest. After
+seventy years of ardent life one needs a long sleep to refresh us
+in. Besides, age may not be so<!--Page 176--> sure of the advantages of youth. All is
+not youth that laughs and glitters. Youth has its hopes, which are
+uncertain; but age has its memories, which are sure; youth has its
+passions, but age has its comforts.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. Your answers come gay and pat, Scriptor, but your voice
+betrays you. In spite of you, it saddens all your words. Tell me, have
+you ever known what it is actually to lose any one who is dear to you?
+Have you looked on death face to face?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Yes, Lector, I have&mdash;but once. It is now about five years
+ago, but the impression of it haunts me to this hour. Perhaps the
+memory is all the keener because it was my one experience. In a world
+where custom stales all things, save Cleopatra, it is all the better
+perhaps not to see even too much of Death, lest we grow familiar with
+him. For instance, doctors and soldiers, who look on him daily, seem
+to lose the sense of his terror&mdash;nay, worse, of his tragedy. Maybe it
+is something in his favour, and Death, like others, may only need to
+be known to be loved.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But tell me, Scriptor, of this sad experience, which even now
+it moves you to<!--Page 177--> name; or is the memory too sad to recall?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Sad enough, Lector, but beautiful for all that, beautiful as
+winter. It was winter when she of whom I am thinking died&mdash;a winter
+that seemed to make death itself whiter and colder on her marble
+forehead. It is but one sad little story of all the heaped-up sorrow
+of the world; but in it, as in a shell, I seem to hear the murmur of
+all the tides of tears that have surged about the lot of man from the
+beginning.</p>
+
+<p>There were two dear friends of mine whom I used to call the happiest
+lovers in the world. They had loved truly from girlhood and boyhood,
+and after some struggle&mdash;for they were not born into that class which
+is denied the luxury of struggle&mdash;at length saw a little home bright
+in front of them. And then Jenny, who had been ever bright and strong,
+suddenly and unaccountably fell ill. Like the stroke of a sword, like
+the stride of a giant, Death, to whom they had never given a thought,
+was upon them. It was consumption, and love could only watch and
+pray. Suddenly my<!--Page 178--> friend sent for me, and I saw with my own eyes what
+at a distance it had seemed impossible to believe. As I entered the
+house, with the fresh air still upon me, I spoke confidently, with
+babbling ignorant tongue. 'Wait till you see her face!' was all my
+poor stricken friend could say.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! her face! How can I describe it?  It was much sweeter afterwards,
+but now it was so dark and witchlike, so uncanny, almost wicked, so
+thin and full of inky shadows. She sat up in her bed, a wizened little
+goblin, and laughed a queer, dry, knowing laugh to herself, a laugh
+like the scraping of reeds in a solitary place. A strange black
+weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows, like the 'unwilling
+sleep' of a strong narcotic. She would begin a sentence and let it
+wither away unfinished, and point sadly and almost humorously to her
+straight black hair, clammy as the feathers of a dead bird lying in
+the rain. Her hearing was strangely keen. And yet she did not know,
+was not to know. How was one to talk to her&mdash;talk of being well again,
+and books and country walks, when she had so<!--Page 179--> plainly done with all
+these things? How bear up when she, with a half-sad, half-amused
+smile, showed her thin wrists?&mdash;how say that they would soon be strong
+and round again?  Ugh! she was already beginning to be different from
+us, already putting off our body-sweet mortality, and putting on the
+fearful garments of death, changing before our eyes from ruddy
+familiar humanity into a being of another element, an element we dread
+as the fish dreads the air. Soon we should not be able to talk to
+her. Soon she would have unlearnt all the sweet grammar of earth. She
+was no longer Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mysteries at which the
+flesh crept. She was going to die.</p>
+
+<p>Have you never looked ahead towards some trial, some physical trial,
+maybe an operation?&mdash;for perhaps the pains of the body are the
+keenest, after all&mdash;those of the spirit are at least in some part
+metaphor. You look forward with dread, yet it is at last over. It is
+behind you. And have you never thought that so it will be with death
+some day? Poor little Jenny was to face the great operation.</p><!--Page 180-->
+
+<p>Next time I saw her she was dead. In our hateful English fashion, they
+had shut her up in a dark room, and we had to take candles to see
+her. I shall never forget the moment when my eyes first rested on that
+awful snow-white sheet, so faintly indented by the fragile form
+beneath, lines very fragile, but oh! so hard and cold, like the
+indentations upon frozen snow; never forget my strange unaccountable
+terror when he on one side and I on the other turned down the icy
+sheet from her face. But terror changed to awe and reverence, as her
+face came upon us with its sweet sphinx-like smile. Lying there, with
+a little gold chain round her neck and a chrysanthemum in the bosom of
+her night-gown, there was a curious regality about her, a look as
+though she wore a crown our eyes were unable to see. And while I gazed
+upon her, the sobs of my friend came across the bed, and as he called
+to her I seemed to hear the eternal Orpheus calling for his lost
+Eurydice. Poor lad!&mdash;poor maid!  Here, naked and terrible, was all the
+tragedy of the world compressed into an hour, the Medusa-face of life
+that turns the bravest<!--Page 181--> to stone. Surely, I felt, God owed more than He
+could ever repay to these two lovers, whom it had been so easy to
+leave to their simple joys. And from that night to this I can never
+look upon my white bed without seeing afar off the moment when it,
+too, will bear the little figure of her I love best in the world,
+bound for her voyage to the Minotaur Death; just as I never put off my
+clothes at night, and stretch my limbs down among the cool sheets,
+without thinking of the night when I shall put off my clothes for the
+last time and close my eyes for ever.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But, my friend, this is to feel too much; it is morbid.</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Morbid! How can one really <em>feel</em> and not be morbid? If one
+be morbid, one can still be brave.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But surely, true-lover as you are, it would be a joy to you to
+think that this terrible parting of death will not be final. We cannot
+love so well without hoping that we may meet our loved ones somewhere
+after death.</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Hopes! wishes! desires! What of them? We hope, we <em>desire</em>
+all things.<!--Page 182--> Who has not cried for the moon in his time?  But what is
+the use of talking of what we desire? Does life give us all we wish,
+however passionately we wish it, and is Death any more likely to
+listen to the cry of our desires? Of course we <em>wish it</em>, wish it with
+a pathetic urgency which is too poignant to bear, and which the wise
+man bravely stifles. It would all be different if we <em>knew</em>.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But does not science even, of late, hold out the promise of
+its probability?&mdash;and the greatest poets and thinkers have always been
+convinced of its truth.</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. The promise of a probability!  O my Lector, what a poor
+substitute is that for a certainty! And as for the great men you speak
+of, what does their 'instinctive' assurance amount to but a strong
+sense of their own existence at the moment of writing or speaking?
+Does one of them anywhere assert immortality as a <em>fact</em>&mdash;a fact of
+which he has his own personal proof and knowledge&mdash;a scientific, not
+an imaginative, theological fact? Arguments on the subject are
+naught. It is waste of time to read them; unsupported by fact,<!--Page 183--> they
+are one and all cowardly dreams, a horrible hypocritical clutching at
+that which their writers have not the courage to forgo.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. Yet may not a dream be of service to reality, my friend? Is it
+not certain that people are all the better and all the happier for
+this dream, as you call it?&mdash;for what seems to me this sustaining
+faith?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Happier? Some people, perhaps, in a lazy, unworthy
+fashion. But 'better'? Well, so long as we believed in 'eternal
+punishment' no doubt people were sometimes terrified into 'goodness'
+by the picture of that dread vista of torment, as no doubt they were
+bribed into it by the companion picture of a green unbounded Paradise;
+but, O my friend, what an unworthy kind of goodness, the mere mask of
+virtue! And now that the Inferno has practically disappeared from our
+theology, the belief in eternal life simply means unlimited cakes and
+ale, for good and evil alike, for all eternity. How such a belief can
+be moralising I fail to understand. To my mind, indeed, far from being
+moralising, this belief in immortality is responsible<!--Page 184--> for no
+inconsiderable portion of the wrong and misery of the world. It is the
+baneful narcotic which has soothed the selfish and the slothful from
+the beginning. It is that unlimited credit which makes the bankrupt.
+It simply gives us all eternity to procrastinate in. Instead of
+manfully eating our peck of dirt here and now, we leave it and all
+such disagreeables to the hereafter.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>'He said, "I believe in Eternal Life,"</p>
+  <p>As he threw his life away&mdash;</p>
+      <p class="indent3">What need to hoard?</p>
+      <p class="indent3">He could well afford</p>
+  <p>To squander his mortal day.</p>
+  <p>With Eternity his, what need to care?&mdash;</p>
+  <p>A sort of immortal millionaire.'</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>LECTOR. I am glad to be reminded, Scriptor, that you are a poet, for the
+line of your argument had almost made me forget it. One expects other
+views from a poet.</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. When, my dear Lector, shall we get rid of the silly idea that
+the poet should give us only the ornamental view of life, and rock us to
+sleep, like babies, with pretty lullabies? Is it not possible to make
+<em>facts</em> sing as well as fancies? With all this beautiful world to sing
+of&mdash;for beautiful it<!--Page 185--> is, however it be marred; with this wonderful
+life&mdash;and wonderful and sweet it is though it is shot through with such
+bitter pain; with such <em>certainties</em> for his theme, we yet beg him to
+sing to us of shadows!</p>
+
+<p>And you talk of 'faith.' 'Faith' truly is what we want, but it is faith
+in the life here, not in the life hereafter. Faith in the life here! Let
+our poets sing us that. And such as would deny it&mdash;I would hang them as
+enemies of society.</p>
+
+<p>LECTOR. But, at all events, to keep to our point&mdash;you at least <em>hope</em>
+for immortality. If Edison, say, were suddenly to discover it for us as
+a scientific certainty, you would welcome the news?</p>
+
+<p>SCRIPTOR. Well, yes and no! Have you seen the 'penny' phonographs in the
+Strand? You should go and have a pennyworth of the mysteries of time and
+space! How long will Edison's latest magic toy survive this
+popularisation, I wonder? For a little moment it awakens the sense of
+wonder in the idly curious, who set the demon tube to their ears; but if
+they make any remarks at all, it is of the cleverness of Mr. Edison,<!--Page 186-->
+the probable profits of the invention&mdash;and not a word of the wonder of
+the world! So it would be with the undiscovered country. I was blamed
+the other day as being cheaply smart because I said that if 'one
+traveller returned,' his resurrection would soon be as commonplace as
+the telephone, and that enterprising firms would be interviewing him as
+to the prospects of opening branch establishments in Hades. Yet it is a
+perfectly serious, and, I think, true remark; for who that knows the
+modern man, with his small knowingness, and his utter incapacity for
+reverence, would doubt that were Mr. Edison actually to be the Columbus
+of the Unseen, it would soon be as overrun with gaping tourists as
+Switzerland, and that within a year railway companies would be
+advertising 'Bank-holidays in Eternity'?</p>
+
+<p>No! let us keep the Unseen&mdash;or, if it must be discovered, let the key
+thereof be given only to true-lovers and poets.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<!--Page 187-->
+<h3><a name="essay19">A SEAPORT IN THE MOON</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>No one is so hopelessly wrong about the stars as the astronomer, and I
+trust that you never pay any attention to his remarks on the moon. He
+knows as much about the moon as a coiffeur knows of the dreams of the
+fair lady whose beautiful neck he makes still more beautiful. There is
+but one opinion upon<!--Page 188--> the moon&mdash;namely, our own. And if you think that
+science is thus wronged, reflect a moment upon what science makes of
+things near at hand. Love, it says, is merely a play of pistil and
+stamen, our most fascinating poetry and art is 'degeneration,' and human
+life, generally speaking, is sufficiently explained by the 'carbon
+compounds'&mdash;God-a-mercy! If science makes such grotesque blunders about
+radiant matters right under its nose, how can one think of taking its
+opinion upon matters so remote as the stars&mdash;or even the moon, which is
+comparatively near at hand?</p>
+
+<p>Science says that the moon is a dead world, a cosmic ship littered with
+the skeletons of its crew, and from which every rat of vitality has long
+since escaped. It is the ghost that rises from its tomb every night, to
+haunt its faithless lover, the world. It is a country of ancient
+silver-mines, unworked for centuries. You may see the gaping mouths of
+the dark old shafts through your telescopes. You may even see the
+rusting pit tackle, the ruinous engine-houses, and the idle pick and
+shovel. Or you may say that it is counterfeit silver, coined to take in
+the young fools who love to gaze upon it. It is, so to speak, a bad
+half-crown.</p>
+
+<p>As you will! but I am of Endymion's belief&mdash;and no one was ever more
+intimate with the moon. For me the moon is a country of great seaports,
+whither all the ships of our dreams come home. From all quarters of the
+world, every day of the week, there are ships sailing to the moon. They
+are the ships that sail just when and where you please. You take your
+passage on that<!--Page 189--> condition. And it is ridiculous to think for what a
+trifle the captain will take you on so long a journey. If you want to
+come back, just to take an excursion and no more, just to take a lighted
+look at those coasts of rose and pearl, he will ask no more than a glass
+or two of bright wine&mdash;indeed, when the captain is very kind, a flower
+will take you there and back in no time; if you want to stay whole days
+there, but still come back dreamy and strange, you may take a little
+dark root and smoke it in a silver pipe, or you may drink a little phial
+of poppy-juice, and thus you shall find the Land of Heart's Desire; but
+if you are wise and would stay in that land for ever, the terms are even
+easier&mdash;a little powder shaken into a phial of water, a little piece of
+lead no bigger than a pea, and a farthing's-worth of explosive fire, and
+thus also you are in the Land of Heart's Desire for ever.</p>
+
+<p>I dreamed last night that I stood on the blustering windy wharf, and the
+dark ship was there. It was impatient, like all of us, to leave the
+world. Its funnels belched black smoke, its engines throbbed against<!--Page 190-->
+the quay like arms that were eager to strike and be done, and a bell
+was beating impatient summons to be gone. The dark captain stood ready
+on the bridge, and he looked into each of our faces as we passed on
+board. 'Is it for the long voyage?' he said. 'Yes! the long voyage,' I
+said&mdash;and his stern eyes seemed to soften as I answered.</p>
+
+<p>At last we were all aboard, and in the twinkling of an eye were out of
+sight of land. Yet, once afloat, it seemed as though we should never
+reach our port in the moon&mdash;so it seemed to me as I lay awake in my
+little cabin, listening to the patient thud and throb of the great
+screws, beating in the ship's side like a human heart.</p>
+
+<p>Talking with my fellow-voyagers, I was surprised to find that we were
+not all volunteers. Some, in fact, complained pitifully. They had, they
+said, been going about their business a day or two before, and suddenly
+a mysterious captain had laid hold of them, and pressed them to sail
+this unknown sea. Thus, without a word of warning, they had been
+compelled to leave behind them all they held dear. This, one felt, was a
+little hard of<!--Page 191--> the captain; but those of us whose position was exactly
+the reverse, who had friends on the other side, all whose hopes indeed
+were invested there, were too selfishly expectant of port to be severe
+on the captain who was taking us thither.</p>
+
+<p>There were three friends I had especially set out to see: two young
+lovers who had emigrated to those colonies in the moon just after their
+marriage, and there was another. What a surprise it would be to all
+three, for I had written no letter to say I was coming. Indeed, it was
+just a sudden impulse, the pistol-flash of a long desire.</p>
+
+<p>I tried to imagine what the town would be like in which they were now
+living. I asked the captain, and he answered with a sad smile that it
+would be just exactly as I cared to dream it.</p>
+
+<p>'Oh, well then,' I thought, 'I know what it will be like. There shall be
+a great restless, tossing estuary, with Atlantic winds for ever ruffling
+the sails of busy ships, ships coming home with laughter, ships leaving
+home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell. And the shaggy tossing water
+shall be bounded on<!--Page 192--> either bank with high granite walls, and on one
+bank shall be a fretted spire soaring with a jangle of bells, from amid
+a tangle of masts, and underneath the bells and the masts shall go
+streets rising up from the strand, streets full of faces, and sweet with
+the smell of tar and the sea. O captain! will it be morning or night
+when we come to my city? In the morning my city is like a sea-blown
+rose, in the night it is bright as a sailor's star.</p>
+
+<p>'If it be early morning, what shall I do? I shall run to the house in
+which my friends lie in happy sleep, never to be parted again, and kiss
+my hand to their shrouded window; and then I shall run on and on till
+the city is behind and the sweetness of country lanes is about me, and I
+shall gather flowers as I run, from sheer wantonness of joy; and then at
+last, flushed and breathless, I shall stand beneath her window. I shall
+stand and listen, and I shall hear her breathing right through the heavy
+curtains, and the hushed garden and the sleeping house will bid me keep
+silence, but I shall cry a great cry up to the morning star, and say,
+"No, I will not<!--Page 193--> keep silence. Mine is the voice she listens for in her
+sleep. She will wake again for no voice but mine. Dear one, awake, the
+morning of all mornings has come!"'</p>
+
+<p>As I write, the moon looks down at me like a Madonna from the great
+canvas of the sky. She seems beautiful with the beauty of all the eyes
+that have looked up at her, sad with all the tears of all those eyes;
+like a silver bowl brimming with the tears of dead lovers she seems.
+Yes, there are seaports in the moon; there are ships to take us there.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+
+
+<p>Most of the foregoing essays have made a first appearance either in
+<em>The Yellow Book</em>, <em>The Nineteenth Century</em>, <em>The Cosmopolitan</em>, <em>The
+Westminster Gazette</em>, or <em>The Realm</em>, to the editors of which the writer
+is indebted for kind permission to reprint.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Prose Fancies (Second Series)
+by Richard Le Gallienne
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Prose Fancies (Second Series), by Richard Le Gallienne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Prose Fancies (Second Series)
+
+Author: Richard Le Gallienne
+
+Release Date: November 20, 2004 [EBook #14103]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROSE FANCIES (SECOND SERIES) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brendan Lane, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PROSE FANCIES
+
+(SECOND SERIES)
+
+BY
+
+RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
+
+
+
+LONDON: JOHN LANE
+
+CHICAGO: H.S. STONE AND CO.
+
+1896
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MAGGIE LE GALLIENNE
+
+WITH LOVE
+
+  Poor are the gifts of the poet--
+  Nothing but words!
+  The gifts of kings are gold,
+  Silver, and flocks and herds,
+  Garments of strange soft silk,
+  Feathers of wonderful birds,
+  Jewels and precious stones,
+  And horses white as the milk--
+  These are the gifts of kings:
+  But the gifts that the poet brings
+  Are nothing but words.
+
+  Forty thousand words!
+  Take them--a gift of flies!
+  Words that should have been birds,
+  Words that should have been flowers,
+  Words that should have been stars
+  In the eternal skies.
+  Forty thousand words!
+  Forty thousand tears--
+  All out of two sad eyes.
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS                                              PAGE
+
+  A SEVENTH-STORY HEAVEN,                                 1
+  SPRING BY PARCEL POST,                                 20
+  THE GREAT MERRY-GO-ROUND,                              27
+  THE BURIAL OF ROMEO AND JULIET,                        39
+  VARIATIONS UPON WHITEBAIT,                             49
+  THE ANSWER OF THE ROSE,                                58
+  ABOUT THE SECURITIES,                                  67
+  THE BOOM IN YELLOW,                                    79
+  LETTER TO AN UNSUCCESSFUL LITERARY MAN,                90
+  A POET IN THE CITY,                                    98
+  BROWN ROSES,                                          108
+  THE DONKEY THAT LOVED A STAR,                         112
+  ON LOVING ONE'S ENEMIES,                              119
+  THE DRAMATIC ART OF LIFE,                             125
+  THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX,                  135
+  THE FALLACY OF A NATION,                              145
+  THE GREATNESS OF MAN,                                 154
+  DEATH AND TWO FRIENDS,                                171
+  A SEAPORT IN THE MOON,                                187
+
+
+
+
+A SEVENTH-STORY HEAVEN
+
+
+At one end of the city that I love there is a tall, dingy pile of
+offices that has evidently seen more prosperous fortunes. It is not the
+aristocratic end. It is remote from the lordly street of the fine shops
+of the fair women, where in the summer afternoons the gay bank clerks
+parade arm-in-arm in the wake of the tempestuous petticoat. It lies
+aside from the great exchange which looks like a scene from _Romeo and
+Juliet_ in the moonlight, from the town-hall from whose clocked and
+gilded cupola ring sweet chimes at midnight, and whence, throned above
+the city, a golden Britannia, in the sight of all men, is seen visibly
+ruling the waves--while in the square below the death of Nelson is
+played all day in stone, with a frieze of his noble words about the
+pedestal. England expects! What an influence that stirring challenge
+has yet upon the hearts of men may be seen by any one who will study the
+faces of the busy, imaginative cotton-brokers, who, in the thronged and
+humming mornings, sell what they have never seen to a customer they will
+never see.
+
+In fact, the end I mean is just the very opposite end to that. It is the
+end where the cotton that everybody sells and nobody buys _is_ seen,
+piled in great white stacks, or swinging in the air from the necks of
+mighty cranes, cranes that could nip up an elephant with as little ado,
+and set him down on the wharf, with a box on his ugly ears for his
+cowardly trumpeting. It is the end that smells of tar, the domain of the
+harbourmasters, where the sailor finds a 'home,'--not too sweet, and
+where the wild sea is tamed in a maze of granite squares and basins; the
+end where the riggings and buildings rise side by side, and a clerk
+might swing himself out upon the yards from his top-floor desk. Here is
+the Custom House, and the conversation that shines is full of freightage
+and dock dues; here are the shops that sell nothing but oilskins,
+sextants, and parrots, and here the taverns do a mighty trade in rum.
+
+It was in this quarter, for a brief sweet time, that Love and Beauty
+made their strange home, as though a pair of halcyons should choose to
+nest in the masthead of a cattleship. Love and Beauty chose this
+quarter, as, alas! Love and Beauty must choose so many things--for its
+cheapness. Love and Beauty were poor, and office rents in this quarter
+were exceptionally low. But what should Love and Beauty do with an
+office? Love was a poor poet in need of a room for his bed and his
+rhymes, and Beauty was a little blue-eyed girl who loved him.
+
+It was a shabby, forbidding place, gloomy and comfortless as a warehouse
+on the banks of Styx. No one but Love and Beauty would have dared to
+choose it for their home. But Love and Beauty have a great confidence in
+themselves--a confidence curiously supported by history,--and they never
+had a moment's doubt that this place was as good as another for an
+earthly Paradise. So Love signed an agreement for one great room at the
+very top, the very masthead of the building, and Beauty made it pretty
+with muslin curtains, flowers, and dainty makeshifts of furniture, but
+chiefly with the light of her own heavenly face. A stroke of luck coming
+one day to the poet, the lovers, with that extravagance which the poor
+alone have the courage to enjoy, procured a piano on the kind-hearted
+hire-purchase system, a system specially conceived for lovers. Then,
+indeed, for many a wonderful night that room was not only on the seventh
+floor, but in the seventh heaven; and as Beauty would sit at the piano,
+with her long hair flying loose, and her soul like a whirl of starlight
+about her brows, a stranger peering in across the soft lamplight, seeing
+her face, hearing her voice, would deem that the long climb, flight
+after flight of dreary stair, had been appropriately rewarded by a
+glimpse of heaven.
+
+Certainly it must have seemed a strange contrast from the life about and
+below it. The foot of that infernal stair plunged in the warm
+rum-and-thick-twist atmosphere of a sailor's tavern--and 'The Jolly
+Shipmates' was a house of entertainment by no means to be despised.
+Often have I sat there with the poet, drinking the whisky from which
+Scotland takes its name, among wondering sea-boots and sou'-westers, who
+could make nothing of that wild hair and that still wilder talk.
+
+From the kingdom of rum and tar you mounted into a zone of commission
+agents fund shipbrokers, a chill, unoccupied region, in which every
+small office bore the names of half a dozen different firms, and yet
+somehow could not contrive to look busy. Finally came an airy echoing
+landing, a region of empty rooms, which the landlords in vain
+recommended as studios to a city that loved not art. Here dwelt the
+keeper and his kind-hearted little wife, and no one besides save Love
+and Beauty. There was thus a feeling of rarefaction in the atmosphere,
+as though at this height it was only the Alpine flora of humanity that
+could find root and breathing. But once along the bare passage and
+through a certain door, and what a sudden translation it was into a
+gracious world of books and flowers and the peace they always bring.
+
+Once upon a time, in that enchanted past where dwell all the dreams we
+love best, precisely, with loving punctuality, at five in the afternoon,
+a pretty, girlish figure, like Persephone escaping from the shades,
+stole through the rough sailors at the foot of that sordid Jacob's
+ladder and made her way to the little heaven at the top.
+
+I shall not describe her, for the good reason that I cannot. Leonardo,
+ever curious of the beauty that was most strangely exquisite, once in an
+inspired hour painted such a face, a face wrought of the porcelain of
+earth with the art of heaven. But, whoever should paint it, God
+certainly made it--must have been the comment of any one who caught a
+glimpse of that little figure vanishing heavenwards up that stair, like
+an Assumption of Fra Angelico's--that is, any one interested in art and
+angels.
+
+She had not long to wait outside the door she sought, for the poet, who
+had listened all day for the sound, had ears for the whisper of her
+skirts as she came down the corridor, and before she had time to knock
+had already folded her in his arms. The two babes in that thieves' wood
+of commission agents and shipbrokers stood silent together for a
+moment, in the deep security of a kiss such as the richest millionaire
+could never buy--and then they fell to comparing notes of their day's
+work. The poet had had one of his rare good days. He had made no money,
+his post had been even more disappointing than usual,--but he had
+written a poem, the best he had ever written, he said, as he always said
+of his last new thing. He had been burning to read it to somebody all
+afternoon--had with difficulty refrained from reading it to the
+loquacious little keeper's wife as she brought him some coals--so it was
+not to be expected that he should wait a minute before reading it to her
+whom indeed it strove to celebrate. With arms round each other's necks,
+they bent over the table littered with the new-born poem, all blots and
+dashes like the first draft of a composer's score, and the poet, deftly
+picking his way among the erasures and interlineations, read aloud the
+beautiful words--with a full sense of their beauty!--to ears that deemed
+them more beautiful even than they were. The owners of this now valuable
+copyright allow me to irradiate my prose with three of the verses.
+
+'Ah! what,' half-chanted, half-crooned the poet--
+
+  'Ah! what a garden is your hair!--
+    Such treasure as the kings of old,
+    In coffers of the beaten gold,
+  Laid up on earth--and left it there.'
+
+So tender a reference to hair whose beauty others beside the poet had
+loved must needs make a tender interruption--the only kind of
+interruption the poet could have forgiven--and 'Who,' he continued--
+
+  'Who was the artist of your mouth?
+    What master out of old Japan
+    Wrought it so dangerous to man ...'
+
+And here it was but natural that laughter and kisses should once more
+interrupt--
+
+  'Those strange blue jewels of your eyes,
+    Painting the lily of your face,
+    What goldsmith set them in their place--
+  Forget-me-nots of Paradise?
+
+  'And that blest river of your voice,
+    Whose merry silver stirs the rest
+    Of water-lilies in your breast ...'
+
+At last, in spite of more interruptions, the poem came to an
+end--whereupon, of course, the poet immediately read it through once
+more from the beginning, its personal and emotional elements, he felt,
+having been done more justice on a first reading than its artistic
+excellences.
+
+'Why, darling, it is splendid,' was his little sweetheart's comment;
+'you know how happy it makes me to think it was written for me, don't
+you?' And she took his hands and looked up at him with eyes like the
+morning sky.
+
+Romance in poetry is almost exclusively associated with very refined
+ethereal matters, stars and flowers and such like--happily, in actual
+life it is often associated with much humbler objects. Lovers, like
+children, can make their paradises out of the quaintest materials.
+Indeed, our paradises, if we only knew, are always cheap enough; it is
+our hells that are so expensive. Now these lovers--like, if I mistake
+not, many other true lovers before and since--when they were
+particularly happy, when some special piece of good luck had befallen
+them, could think of no better paradise than a little dinner together in
+their seventh-story heaven. 'Ah! wilderness were Paradise enow!'
+
+To-night was obviously such an occasion. But, alas! where was the money
+to come from? They didn't need much--for it is wonderful how happy you
+can be on five shillings, if you only know how. At the same time it is
+difficult to be happy on ninepence--which was the entire fortune of the
+lovers at the moment. Beauty laughingly suggested that her celebrated
+hair might prove worth the price of their dinner. The poet thought a
+pawnbroker might surely be found to advance ten shillings on his
+poem--the original MS. too,--else had they nothing to pawn, save a few
+gold and silver dreams which they couldn't spare. What was to be done?
+Sell some books, of course! It made them shudder to think how many poets
+they had eaten in this fashion. It was sheer cannibalism--but what was
+to be done? Their slender stock of books had been reduced entirely to
+poetry. If there had only been a philosopher or a modern novelist, the
+sacrifice wouldn't have seemed so unnatural. And then Beauty's eyes fell
+upon a very fat informing-looking volume on the poet's desk.
+
+'Wouldn't this do?' she said.
+
+'Why, of course!' he exclaimed; 'the very thing. A new history of
+socialism just sent me for review. Hang the review; we want our dinner,
+don't we, little one? And then I've read the preface, and looked through
+the index--quite enough to make a column of, with a plentiful supply of
+general principles thrown in! Why, of course, there's our dinner for
+certain, dull and indigestible as it looks. It's worth fifty minor poets
+at old Moser's. Come along....'
+
+So off went the happy pair--ah! how much happier was Beauty than ever so
+many fine ladies one knows who have only, so to say, to rub their
+wedding-rings for a banquet to rise out of the ground, with the most
+distinguished guests around the table, champagne of the best, and
+conversation of the worst.
+
+Old Moser found histories of socialism profitable, more profitable
+perhaps than socialism, and he actually gave five-and-sixpence for the
+volume. With the ninepence already in their pockets, you will see that
+they were now possessors of quite a small fortune. Six-and-threepence!
+It wouldn't pay for one's lunch nowadays. Ah! but that is because the
+poor alone know the art of dining.
+
+You needn't wish to be happier and merrier than those two lovers, as
+they gaily hastened to that bright and cosy corner of the town where
+those lovely ham-and-beef shops make glad the faces of the passers-by. O
+those hams with their honest shining faces, polished like mahogany--and
+the man inside so happy all day slicing them with those wonderful long
+knives (which, of course, the superior class of reader has never seen)
+worn away to a veritable thread, a mere wire, but keen as Excalibur.
+Beauty used to calculate in her quaint way how much steel was worn away
+with each pound of ham, and how much therefore went to the sandwich. And
+what an artist was the carver! What a true eye! what a firm, flexible
+wrist! never a shaving of fat too much--he was too great an artist for
+that. Then there were those dear little cream cheeses, and those little
+brown jugs of yellow cream come all the way from Devonshire--you could
+hear the cows lowing across the rich pasture, and hear the milkmaids
+singing and the milk whizzing into the pail, as you looked at them.
+
+And then those perfectly lovely sausages--I beg the reader's pardon! I
+forgot that the very mention of the word smacks of vulgarity. Yet, all
+the same, I venture to think that a secret taste for sausages among the
+upper classes is more widespread than we have any idea of. I confess
+that Beauty and her poet were at first ashamed of admitting their vulgar
+frailty to each other. They needed to know each other very well first.
+Yet there is nothing, when once confessed, that brings two people so
+close as--a taste for sausages.
+
+'You darling!' exclaimed Beauty, with something like tears in her voice,
+when her poet first admitted this touch of nature--and then next moment
+they were in fits of laughter that a common taste for a very 'low' food
+should bring tears to their eyes! But such are the vagaries of love--as
+you will know, if you know anything about it--'vulgar,' no doubt, though
+only the vulgar would so describe them--for it is only vulgarity that
+is always 'refined.'
+
+Then there was the florist's to visit. What beautiful trades some people
+ply! To sell flowers is surely like dealing in fairies. Beautiful must
+grow the hands that wire them, and sweet the flower-girl's every
+thought!
+
+There remained but the wine merchant's, or, had we not better say at
+once, the grocer's, for our lovers could afford no rarer vintages than
+Tintara or the golden burgundy of Australia; and it is wonderful to
+think what a sense of festivity one of those portly colonial flagons
+lent to their little dining-table. Sometimes, I may confide, when they
+wanted to feel very dissipated, and were _very_ rich, they would allow
+themselves a small bottle of Benedictine--and you should have seen
+Beauty's eyes as she luxuriously sipped at her green little liqueur
+glass; for, like most innocent people, she enjoyed to the full the
+delight of feeling occasionally wicked. However, these were rare
+occasions, and this night was not one of them.
+
+Half a pound of black grapes completed their shopping, and then, with
+their arms full of their purchases, they made their way home again, the
+two happiest people in what is, after all, a not unhappy world.
+
+Then came the cooking and the laying of the table. For all her Leonardo
+face, Beauty was a great cook--like all good women, she was as earthly
+in some respects as she was heavenly in others, which I hold to be a
+wise combination--and, indeed, both were excellent cooks; and the poet
+was unrivalled at 'washing up,' which, I may say, is the only skeleton
+at these Bohemian feasts.
+
+You should have seen the gusto with which Beauty pricked those
+sausages--I had better explain to the un-Bohemian reader that to attempt
+to cook a sausage without first pricking it vigorously with a fork, to
+allow for the expansion of its juicy gases, is like trying to smoke a
+cigar without first cutting off the end--and oh! to hear again their
+merry song as they writhed in torment in the hissing pan, like Christian
+martyrs raising hymns of praise from the very core of Smithfield fires.
+
+Meanwhile, the poet would be surpassing himself in the setting-out of
+the little table, cutting up the bread reverently as though it were for
+an altar--as indeed it was,--studying the effect of the dish of
+tomatoes, now at this corner, now at that, arranging the flowers with
+much more care than he arranged the adjectives in his sonnets, and
+making ever so sumptuous an effect with that half a pound of grapes.
+
+And then at last the little feast would begin, with a long grace of eyes
+meeting and hands clasping: true eyes that said, 'How good it is to
+behold you, to be awake together in this dream of life!' true hands that
+said, 'I will hold you fast for ever--not death even shall pluck you
+from my hand, shall loose this bond of you and me'; true eyes, true
+hands, that had immortal meanings far beyond the speech of mortal words.
+
+And it had all come out of that dull history of socialism, and had cost
+little more than a crown! What lovely things can be made out of money!
+Strange to think that a little silver coin of no possible use or beauty
+in itself can be exchanged for so much tangible, beautiful pleasure. A
+piece of money is like a piece of opium, for in it lie locked up the
+most wonderful dreams--if you have only the brains and hearts to dream
+them.
+
+When at last the little feast grew near its end, Love and Beauty would
+smoke their cigarettes together; and it was a favourite trick of theirs
+to lower the lamp a moment, so that they might see the stars rush down
+upon them through the skylight which hung above their table. It gave
+them a sense of great sentinels, far away out in the lonely universe,
+standing guard over them, seemed to say that their love was safe in the
+tender keeping of great forces. They were poor, but then they had the
+stars and the flowers and the great poets for their servants and
+friends; and, best of all, they had each other. Do you call that being
+poor?
+
+And then, in the corner, stood that magical box with the ivory keys,
+whose strings waited ready night and day--strange media through which
+the myriad voices, the inner-sweet thoughts, of the great world-soul
+found speech, messengers of the stars to the heart, and of the heart to
+the stars.
+
+Beauty's songs were very simple. She got little practice, for her poet
+only cared to have her sing over and over again the same sweet songs;
+and perhaps if you had heard her sing 'Ask nothing more of me, sweet,'
+or 'Darby and Joan,' you would have understood his indifference to
+variety.
+
+At last the little feast is quite, quite finished. Beauty has gone home;
+her lover still carries her face in his heart as she waved and waved and
+waved to him from the rattling lighted tramcar; long he sits and sits
+thinking of her, gazing up at those lonely ancient stars; the air is
+still bright with her presence, sweet with her thoughts, warm with her
+kisses, and as he turns to the shut piano, he can still see her white
+hands on the keys and her girlish face raised in an ecstasy--Beata
+Beatrix--above the music.
+
+  'O love, my love! if I no more should see
+  Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
+    Nor image of thine eyes in any spring--
+  How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope
+  The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
+    The wind of Death's imperishable wing!'
+
+And then ... he would throw himself upon his bed, and burst into tears.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  'And they are gone: aye, ages long ago
+  These lovers fled away into the storm.'
+
+That seventh-story heaven once more leads a dull life as the office of a
+ship-chandler, and harsh voices grate the air where Beauty sang. The
+books and the flowers and the lovers' faces are gone for ever. I suppose
+the stars are the same, and perhaps they sometimes look down through
+that roof-window, and wonder what has become of those two lovers who
+used to look up at them so fearlessly long ago.
+
+But friends of mine who believe in God say that He has given His angels
+charge concerning that dingy old seventh-floor heaven, and that, for
+those who have eyes to see, there is no place where a great dream has
+been dreamed that is not thus watched over by the guardian angels of
+memory.
+
+_For M. Le G., 25 September 1895._
+
+
+
+
+SPRING BY PARCEL POST
+
+
+  They've taken all the spring from the country to the town--
+  Like the butter and the eggs, and the milk from the cow....
+
+So began to jig and jingle my thoughts as in my letters and newspapers
+this morning I read, buried alive among the solitary fastnesses of the
+Surrey hills, the last news from town. The news I envied most was that
+spring had already reached London. 'Now,' ran a pretty article on spring
+fashions, 'the sunshine makes bright the streets, and the
+flower-baskets, like huge bouquets, announce the gay arrival of spring.'
+I looked up and out through my hillside window. The black ridge on the
+other side of the valley stood a grim wall of burnt heather against the
+sky--which sky, like the bullets in the nursery rhyme, was made
+unmistakably of lead; a close rain was falling methodically, and,
+generally speaking, the world looked like a soaked mackintosh. It wasn't
+much like the gay arrival of spring, and grimly I mused on the
+advantages of life in town.
+
+Certainly, it did seem hard, I reflected, that town should be ahead of
+us even in such a country matter as spring. Flower-baskets indeed! Why,
+we haven't as much as a daisy for miles around. It is true that on the
+terrace there the crocuses blaze like a street on fire, that the
+primroses thicken into clumps, lying among their green leaves like
+pounds of country butter; it is true that the blue cones of the little
+grape hyacinth are there, quaintly formal as a child's toy-flowers; yes!
+and the big Dutch hyacinths are already shamelessly _enceinte_ with
+their buxom waxen blooms, so fat and fragrant--(one is already delivered
+of a fine blossom. Well, that is a fine baby, to be sure! say the other
+hyacinths, with babes no less bonny under their own green aprons--all
+waiting for the doctor sun). Then among the blue-green blades of the
+narcissus, here and there you see a stem topped with a creamish
+chrysalis-like envelope, from which will soon emerge a beautiful eye,
+rayed round with white wings, looking as though it were meant to fly,
+but remaining rooted--a butterfly on a stalk; while all the beds are
+crowded with indeterminate beak and blade, pushing and elbowing each
+other for a look at the sun, which, however, sulkily declines to look at
+them. It is true there is spring on the terrace, but even so it is
+spring imported from the town--spring bought in Holborn, spring
+delivered free by parcel post; for where would the terrace have been but
+for the city seedsman--that magician who sends you strangely spotted
+beans and mysterious bulbs in shrivelled cerements, weird little
+flower-mummies that suggest centuries of forgotten silence in painted
+Egyptian tombs. This strange and shrivelled thing can surely never live
+again, we say, as we hold it in our hands, seeing not the glowing
+circles of colour, tiny rings of Saturn, packed so carefully inside this
+flower-egg, the folds of green and silver silk wound round and round the
+precious life within.
+
+But, of course, this is all the seedsman's cunning, and no credit to
+Nature; and I repeat, that were it not for railways and the parcel
+post--goodness knows whether we should ever get any spring at all in the
+country! Think of the days when it had to travel down by stage-coach.
+For, left to herself, what is the best Nature can do for you with March
+well on the way? Personally, I find the face of the country practically
+unchanged. It is, to all intents and purposes, the same as it has been
+for the last three or four months--as grim, as unadorned, as bleak, as
+draughty, and generally as comfortless as ever. There isn't a flower to
+be seen, hardly a bird worth listening to, not a tree that is not
+winter-naked, and not a chair to sit down upon. If you want flowers on
+your walks you must bring them with you; songs, you must take a poet
+under your arm; and if you want to rest, lean laboriously on your
+stick--or take your chance of rheumatism.
+
+Of course your specialists, your botanists, your nature-detectives, will
+tell you otherwise. They have surprised a violet in the act of
+blossoming; after long and excited chase have discovered a clump of
+primroses in their wild state; seen one butterfly, heard one cuckoo. But
+as one swallow does not make a summer, it takes more than one cuckoo to
+make a spring. I confess that only yesterday I saw three sulphur
+butterflies, with my own eyes; I admit the catkins, and the
+silver-notched palm; and I am told on good colour-authority that there
+is a lovely purplish bloom, almost like plum-bloom, over certain copses
+in the valley; by taking thought, I have observed the long horizontal
+arms of the beech growing spurred with little forked branches of
+spear-shaped buds, and I see little green nipples pushing out through
+the wolf-coloured rind of the dwarf fir-trees. Spring is arming in
+secret to attack the winter--that is sure enough, but spring in secret
+is no spring for me. I want to see her marching gaily with green
+pennons, and flashing sun-blades, and a good band.
+
+I want butterflies as they have them at the Lyceum--'butterflies all
+white,' 'butterflies all blue,' 'butterflies of gold,' and I should
+particularly fancy 'butterflies all black.' But there, again, you
+see,--you must go to town, within hearing of Mrs. Patrick Campbell's
+_voix d'or_. I want the meadows thickly inlaid with buttercups and
+daisies; I want the trees thick with green leaves, the sky all larks and
+sunshine; I want hawthorn and wild roses--both at once; I want some go,
+some colour, some warmth in the world. Oh, where are the pipes of Pan?
+
+The pipes of Pan are in town, playing at street corners and in the
+centres of crowded circuses, piled high with flower-baskets blazing with
+refulgent flowery masses of white and gold. Here are the flowers you can
+only buy in town; simple flowers enough, but only to be had in town.
+Here are fragrant banks of violets every few yards, conflagrations of
+daffodils at every crossing, and narcissus in scented starry garlands
+for your hair.
+
+You wander through the Strand, or along Regent Street, as through the
+meadows of Enna--sweet scents, sweet sounds, sweet shapes, are all about
+you; the town-butterflies, white, blue, and gold, 'wheel and shine' and
+flutter from shop to shop, suddenly resurgent from their winter
+wardrobes as from a chrysalis; bright eyes flash and flirt along the
+merry, jostling street, while the sun pours out his golden wine
+overhead, splashing it about from gilded domes and bright-faced
+windows--and ever are the voices at the corners and the crossings
+calling out the sweet flower-names of the spring!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But here in the country it is still all rain and iron. I am tired of
+waiting for this slow-moving provincial spring. Let us to the town to
+meet the spring--for:
+
+  They've taken all the spring from the country to the town--
+    Like the butter and the eggs, and the milk from the cow;
+    And if you want a primrose, you write to London now,
+  And if you need a nightingale, well,--Whiteley sends it down.
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT MERRY-GO-ROUND
+
+
+In an age curious of new pleasures, the merry-go-round seems still to
+maintain its ancient popularity. I was the other day the delighted,
+indeed the fascinated, spectator of one in full swing in an old
+Thames-side town. It was a very superior example, with a central musical
+engine of extraordinary splendour, and horses that actually curveted, as
+they swirled maddeningly round to the strains of 'The Man that Broke the
+Bank at Monte Carlo.' How I longed to join the wild riders! But though I
+am a brave man, I confess that to ride a merry-go-round in front of a
+laughter-loving Cockney public is more than I can dare. I had to content
+myself with watching the faces of the riders. I noticed particularly one
+bright-eyed little girl, whose whole passionate young soul seemed to be
+on fire with ecstasy, and for whom it was not difficult to prophesy
+trouble when time should bring her within reach of more dangerous
+excitements. Then there was a stolid little boy, dull and unmoved in
+expression, as though he were in church. Life, one felt sure, would be
+safe enough, and stupid enough, for him; the world would have no music
+to stir or draw him. The fifes would go down the street with a sweet
+sound of marching feet, and the eyes of other men would brighten and
+their blood be all glancing spears and streaming banners, but he would
+remain behind his counter; from the strange hill beyond the town the
+dear, unholy music, so lovely in the ears of other men and maids, would
+call to him in vain, and morning and evening the stars would sing above
+his draper's shop, but he never hear a word.
+
+What particularly struck me was the number of quite grown-up, even
+elderly, people who came and had their pennyworth of horse-exercise. Now
+it was a grave young workman quietly smoking his pipe as he revolved;
+now it was a stout middle-aged woman returning from marketing, on whom
+the Zulu music and the whirling horses laid their irresistible spells.
+Unless ye become as little children!
+
+Is the Kingdom of Heaven really at hand? For, indeed, men and women, and
+perhaps particularly literary men and women, are once more becoming as
+little children in their pleasures.
+
+Seriously, one of the most curious and significant of recent literary
+phenomena is the sudden return of the literary man to physical, and
+so-called 'Philistine,' pleasures and modes of recreation. Perhaps
+Stevenson set the fashion with his canoe and his donkey. But at the
+moment that he was valiantly daring any one to tell him whether there
+was anything better worth doing 'than fooling among boats,' Edward
+Fitzgerald, all unconscious and careless of literary fashions, was
+giving still more practical expression to the physical faith that was in
+him, by going shares in a Lowestoft herring-lugger, and throwing his
+heart as well as his money into the fortunes of its noble skipper
+'Posh.' A literary man _par excellence_, Mr. Lang reproaches his sires
+for his present way of life--
+
+  'Why lay your gipsy freedom down
+  And doom your child to pen and ink?'
+
+and by steady and persistent golfing, and writing about angling and
+cricket, comes as near to the noble savage as is possible to so
+incorrigibly civilised a man. Mr. Henley--that Berserker of the
+pen--sings the sword with a vigour that makes one curious to see him
+using it, and we all know Mr. Kipling's views on the matter. Then Mr.
+Bernard Shaw rides a bicycle!
+
+Those men of letters whose inclinations or opportunities do not lead
+them to these out-of-door, and more or less ferocious, pleasures seek to
+forget themselves at the music-hall, the Aquarium, or the numerous
+Earl's Court exhibitions. They become amateurs of foreign dancing,
+connoisseurs of the trapeze, or they leave their great minds at home and
+go up the Great Wheel. Earl's Court, particularly, is becoming quite a
+modern Vauxhall--Tan-ta-ra-ra! Earl's Court! Earl's Court!--and Mr. Imre
+Kiralfy, with his conceptions and designs, is to our generation what
+Albert Smith was to the age of Dickens and Edmund Yates.
+
+It takes some experience of life to realise how right this is; to
+realise that, after all our fine philosophies and cocksure sciences,
+there is no better answer to the riddle of things than a good game of
+cricket or an exciting spin on one's 'bike.' The real inner significance
+of Earl's Court--Mr. Kiralfy will no doubt be prepared to hear--is the
+failure of science as an answer to life. We give up the riddle, and
+enjoy ourselves with our wiser children. Simple pleasures, no doubt, for
+the profound! But what is simple, and what is profound?
+
+The simple joy we get from 'fooling among boats' on a summer day, the
+thrill of a well-hit ball, the rapture of a skilful dive, are no more
+easy to explain than the more complicated pleasures of literature, or
+art, or religion. And why is it--to come closer to our theme--that the
+round or the whirling have such attraction for us? What is the secret of
+the fascination of the circle? Why is it that the turning of anything,
+be it but a barrel-organ or a phrase, holds one as with an hypnotic
+power? I confess that I can never genuinely pity a knife-grinder,
+however needy. Think of the pleasure of driving that wheel all day, the
+merry chirp of the knife on the stone, and the crisp, bright spray of
+the flying sparks! Why, he does 'what some men dream of all their
+lives'! Wheels of all kinds have the same strange charm; mill-wheels,
+colliery-wheels, spinning-wheels, water-wheels, and wheeling waters:
+there may--who knows?--have been a certain pleasure in being broken on
+the wheel, and, at all events, that hideous punishment is another
+curious example of the fascination of the circle. It would take a whole
+volume to illustrate the prevalence of the circle in external nature, in
+history, and, even more significant, in language. We all know, or think
+we know, that the world is round--
+
+  'This orb--this round
+  Of sight and sound,'
+
+as Mr. Quiller Couch sings--though I remember a porter at school who was
+sure that it was flat, and who used to say that Hamlet's
+
+  'How weary, stale, _flat_, and unprofitable
+  Seem to me all the uses of this _world_!'
+
+was a cryptic reference to Shakespeare's secret belief in his theory.
+Many of the things we love most are round. Is not money, according to
+the proverb, made round that it may go round, and are not the men most
+in demand described as 'all-round men'? Nor are all-round women without
+their admirers. Events, we know, move in a circle, as time moves in
+cycles--though, alas! not on them. The ballet and the bicycle are
+popular forms of the circle, and it is the charm of the essay to be
+'roundabout.'
+
+Again, how is it that that which on a small scale does not impress us at
+all, when on a large scale impresses us so much? What is the secret of
+the impressiveness of size, bulk, height, depth, speed, and mileage?
+Philosophically, a mountain is no more wonderful than a molehill, yet no
+man is knighted for climbing a molehill. One little drop of water and
+one little grain of sand are essentially as wonderful as 'the mighty
+ocean' or 'the beauteous land' to which they contribute. A balloon is
+no more wonderful than an air-bubble, and were you to build an Atlantic
+liner as big as the Isle of Wight it would really be no more remarkable
+than an average steam-launch. Nobody marvels at the speed of a snail,
+yet, given a snail's pace to start with, an express train follows as a
+matter of course. Movement, not the rate of movement, is the mystery.
+Precisely the same materials, the same forces, the same methods, are
+employed in the little as in the big of these examples. Why should mere
+accumulation, reiteration, and magnification make the difference? We may
+ask why? But it does, for all that. If we answer that these mammoth
+multiplications impress us because they are so much bigger, taller,
+fatter, faster, etc., than we are, the question arises--How many times
+bigger than a man must a mountain be before it impresses us? Perhaps the
+problem has already been tackled by the schoolman who pondered how many
+angels could dance on the point of a needle.
+
+However, these and similar first principles, it will readily be seen,
+are far from being irrelevant for the visitor at the Earl's Court
+Exhibition. No doubt they are continually discussed by the thousands who
+daily and nightly throng that very charming dream-world which Mr.
+Kiralfy has built 'midmost the beating' of our 'steely sea.'
+
+To an age that is over-read and over-fed Mr. Kiralfy brings the message:
+'Leave your great minds at home, and go up the Great Wheel!' and I heard
+his voice and obeyed. The sensation is, I should say, something between
+going up in a balloon and being upon shipboard--a sensation compounded,
+maybe, of the creaking of the circular rigging, the pleasure of rising
+in the air, the freshening of the air as you ascend, the strange feeling
+of the earth receding and spreading out beneath you, the curious
+diminution of the people below--to their proper size. You will hear
+original minds all about you comparing them to ants, and it is curious
+to notice the involuntary feeling of contempt that possesses you as you
+watch them. I believe one has a half-defined illusion that we are
+growing greater as they are growing smaller. Ants and flies! ants and
+flies! with here and there a fiery centipede in the shape of a District
+train dashing in and out amongst them. We lose the power of
+understanding their motions, and their throngs and movements do indeed
+seem as purposeless at this height as the hurry-scurrying about an
+anthill. At this height, indeed, one seems to understand how small a
+matter a bank smash may seem to the Almighty; though, as a lady said to
+me--as we clung tightly together in terror 'a-top of the topmost
+bough'--it must be gratifying to see so many churches.
+
+Those who would keep their illusions about the beauty of London had
+better stay below, at least in the daytime, for it makes one's heart
+sink to look on those miles and miles of sordid grey roofs huddled in
+meaningless rows and crescents, just for all the world like a huge
+child's box of wooden bricks waiting to be arranged into some
+intelligible pattern. Of course, this is not London proper. Were the
+Great Wheel set up in Trafalgar Square, one is fain to hope that the
+view from it would be less disheartening--though it might be better not
+to try.
+
+By night, except for the bright oases of the Indian Exhibition, the view
+is little more than a black blank, a great inky plain with faint sparks
+and rows of light here and there, as though the world had been made of
+saltpetre paper, and had lately been set fire to. Were you a traveller
+from Mars you would say that the world was very badly lighted. But, for
+all that, night is the time for the Great Wheel, for the conflagration
+of pleasure at our feet makes us forget the void dark beyond. Then the
+Wheel seems like a great revolving spider's web, with fireflies
+entangled in it at every turn, and the little engine-house at the
+centre, with its two electric lights, seems like the great lord spider,
+with monstrous pearls for his eyes. And, as in the daytime the height
+robs the depth of its significance, strips poor humanity of any
+semblance of impressive or attractive meaning, at night the effect is
+just the reverse. What a fairy-world is this opening out beneath our
+feet, with its golden glowing squares and circles and palaces, with its
+lamplit gardens and pagodas! and who are these gay and beautiful beings
+flitting hither and thither, and passing from one bright garden to
+another on the stream of pleasure? If this many-coloured, passionate
+dream be really human life, let us hasten to be down amongst it once
+more! And, after all, is not this flattering night aspect of the world
+more true than that disheartening countenance of it in the daylight?
+Those golden squares and glowing gardens and flashing waters are, of
+course, an illusion of the magician Kiralfy's, yet what power could the
+illusion have upon us without the realities of beauty and love and
+pleasure it attracts there?
+
+
+
+
+THE BURIAL OF ROMEO AND JULIET
+
+
+One morning of all mornings the citizens of Verona were startled by
+strange news. Tragic forces, to which they had been accustomed to pay
+little heed, had been at work in their city during the dark hours, and
+young Romeo of the Montagues, handsome, devil-may-care lad as they had
+known him, and little Juliet of the Capulets, that madcap, merry, gentle
+young mistress, lay dead, side by side in the church of Santa Maria.
+
+Death! surely they were used to death! and Love, flower of the clove!
+they were used to _love_. But here were love and death, that somehow
+they could not understand. So they hurried in wondering groups to Santa
+Maria, that they might gaze at the dead lovers, and thus perhaps come to
+understand.
+
+Romeo and Juliet lay receiving their guests in the vault of the
+Capulets, with a strange smile of welcome for all who came. And their
+presence-chamber was bright with candles and flowers, and sweet with
+the sweet smell of death. The air that had drunk in their wild words
+and their last long looks of heavenly love still hung about the dark
+corners, as the air where a rose has been holds a little while the
+memory of its breath. Yes! that morning, in that dank but shining
+tomb, you might draw into you the very breath of love. The air you
+breathed had passed through the sweet lungs of Juliet, it had been
+etherealised with her holy passion, and washed clean with her lovely
+words. And now, for a little while yet, it feasted on the fair peace
+of their glad young faces. To-morrow, or the next day, or the next
+week, they would belong to the unvisited treasure-house of the past,
+but now this morning of all mornings, this day that could never come
+again, they still belonged to the real and radiant present.
+
+Flowers there are that bloom but once in a hundred years, but here in
+this tomb had blossomed one of those marvellous flowers that bloom but
+once throughout eternity. Poets and kings in after-times, O men of
+Verona, will yearn to have seen what you look upon to-day. For you, you
+thick and greasy citizens, are chosen out of all time to behold this
+beauty. There were once in the world thousands of men and women who had
+heard the very words of Christ as they fell from His lips, words that we
+may only read. There have been men, actual living, foolish men, who have
+looked on at the valour of Horatius, men who from the crowded banks of
+the Nile have watched the living body of Cleopatra step into her gilded
+barge, men who, standing idle in the streets of Florence, have seen the
+love-light start in the great Dante's eyes, seen his hand move to his
+laden heart, as the little Beatrice passed him by among her maidens.
+Base men of the past, by the indulgent accident of time, have been
+granted to behold these wonders, and now for you, O men of Verona, a
+like wonder has been born.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Romeo and Juliet lay receiving their guests in the vault of the
+Capulets, with a strange smile of welcome for all who came.
+
+It had been an innocent little desire, yet had all the world come
+against it. It had been a simple little desire, yet too strong for all
+the world to break.
+
+Strange this enmity of the world to love, as though men should take arms
+against the song of a bird, or plot against the opening of a flower.
+
+But now, what was this strange homage to a love that a few hours ago had
+no friend in all the daylight, a fearful bliss beneath the secret moon?
+But yesterday a stupid old nurse, a herb-gathering friar, a rascally
+apothecary, had been their only friends, and now was all the world come
+here to do their bidding.
+
+No need to steal again beneath the shade of orchard walls, no need again
+to heed if lark or nightingale sang in the reddening east. For the world
+had grown all warm to love, warm and kind as June to the rose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three days lay Romeo and Juliet receiving their guests in the vault of
+the Capulets, with that strange smile of welcome for all who came.
+Three days the world worshipped the love it could not understand, but
+still came dense and denser throngs to worship. For the news of the
+wonderful flower that had blossomed in Verona had gone far and wide, and
+travellers from distant cities kept pouring in to look at those strange
+young lovers, who had deemed the world well lost so that they might
+leave it together.
+
+Then the governor of the city decreed, as the time drew near when the
+two lovers must be left to their peace, and it was ill that any should
+lose the sight of this marvel, that on the fourth day they should be
+carried through the streets in the eyes of all the people, and then be
+buried together in the vault of the Capulets--for by this burial in the
+same tomb, says the old chronicler who was first honoured with the
+telling of their sweet story, the governor hoped to bring about a peace
+between the Montagues and Capulets, at least for a little while.
+
+Meanwhile, though Verona was a city of many trades and professions, and
+love and death were idle things, yet was there little said of business
+all these days, and little else done but talk of the two lovers, of
+whom, indeed, it was true, as it has seldom been true out of Holy Writ,
+that death was swallowed up in victory. During these days also there
+stole a strange sweetness over the city, as though the very spirit of
+love had nested there, and was filling the air with its soft
+breathing--as when in the first days of spring the birds sing so sweetly
+that broken hearts must hide away, and hard hearts grow a little kind.
+Men once more spoke kindly to their wives, and even coarse faces wore a
+gentle light,--just as sometimes at evening the setting sun will turn to
+tenderness even black rocks and frowning towers.
+
+There were many wild stories afloat about the end of the lovers. Some
+said one way and some another. By some the story went that Romeo was
+already dead before Juliet had awakened from her swoon, but others
+declared that the poison had not worked upon him until Juliet's
+awakening had made him awhile forget that he was to die. There were
+those who professed to know the very words of their wild farewell, and
+in fact there had been several witnesses of Juliet's agony over the body
+of her lord. These had told how first she had raved and clung to him,
+and called him 'Romeo,' 'Sweet Sir Romeo,' 'Husband,' and many
+flower-like names, and had petted him and wooed him to come back. Then
+on a sudden she had cried, God-a-mercy--how cold thou art!' and looked
+at him long and strangely. Then had she grown stern, and anon soft.
+'Canst thou not come back, my love? Then must I follow thee. Not so far
+art thou on the way of death, but that I shall overtake thee, and
+together shall we go to Pluto's realm, and seek a kinder world.'
+
+Thereat she had plunged Romeo's dagger into her side, though some said
+she had stopped her heart's beating by the strong will of her great
+love. Yea--such were the distracted rumours--some averred that at the
+last she had curst Christ and His saints, and called upon Venus, who, it
+was rumoured in awestruck whispers, was being worshipped once more in
+secret corners of the world.
+
+It was strong noon when, on the fourth day, Romeo and Juliet were
+carried through the bright and solemn streets, that the world might be
+saved; saved as ever by the spectacle and the worship of a mysterious
+nobility, [comma added by transcriber] an uncomprehended greatness, a
+beauty which haunts not its daily dreams, lifted up by the humble gaze
+of devout eyes into the empyrean of greater souls, stirred to an
+unfamiliar passion, and fired with glimpses of a strange unworldly
+truth.
+
+In the light of the sun the faces of the two lovers, as they lay amid
+their flowers, seemed to have grown a little weary, but they still wore
+their sweet and royal smile, and their laurelled brows were very white
+and proud.
+
+And in the faces that looked upon them, as they moved slowly by, with
+sweet death music, and the hushed marching of feet, and the wafted odour
+of lilies, there was to be seen strangely blent a great pity for their
+tragedy and a heavenly tenderness for their love. It was like a dream
+passing down the streets of a dream, so deep and tender was the silence,
+for only the hearts of men were speaking; though here and there a girl
+sobbed, or a young man buried his face in his sleeve, and the sternest
+eyes were dashed with the holy water of tears. And with the pity and
+tenderness, who shall say but that in all that silent heart-speech there
+was no little envy of the two who had loved so truly and died in the
+springtide of their love, before the ways of love had grown dusty with
+its summer, or dreary with its autumn, before its dreams had petrified
+into duties, and its passion deadened into use?
+
+'Would it were thou and I,' said many wedded eyes one to the other,
+delusively warm and soft for a moment, but all cold and hard again on
+the morrow.
+
+And maybe some poet would say in his heart--
+
+'If you loved her living, my Romeo, what were your love could you but
+see her dead!' for indeed life has no beauty so wonderful as the beauty
+of death.
+
+And, as in all places and times, there was a base remnant that gaped and
+worshipped not, and in their hearts resented all this distinction paid
+to a nobility they could not recognise, as the like had grumbled when
+Cimabue's Madonna had been carried through the streets in glory. But of
+these there is no need that we should take account, any more than of the
+beasts that moved head down amid the pastures outside the town, knowing
+not of the wonder that was passing within. For the ass will munch his
+thistles though the Son of Man be his rider, nor will the sheep look
+aside from his grazing though Apollo be the herdsman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At length the sacred pageant was ended, gone like the passing of an
+aerial music, and the people went to their homes silent, with haunted
+eyes; while the Earth, which had given this beauty, took it back to
+herself, and one more Persephone of human loveliness was shut within the
+gates of the forgetful grave.
+
+
+
+
+VARIATIONS UPON WHITEBAIT
+
+
+A very Pre-Raphaelite friend of mine came to me one day and said _a
+propos_ of his having designed a very Early English chair: 'After all,
+if one has anything to say one might as well put it into a chair!'
+
+I thought the remark rather delicious, as also his other remark when one
+day in a curiosity-shop we were looking at another chair, which the
+dealer declared to be Norman. My friend seated himself in it very
+gravely, and after softly moving about from side to side, testing it, it
+would appear, by the sensation it imparted to the sitting portion of his
+limbs, he solemnly decided: 'I don't think the _flavour_ of this chair
+is Norman!'
+
+I thought of this Pre-Raphaelite brother as the Sphinx and I were seated
+a few evenings ago at our usual little dinner, in our usual little
+sheltered corner, on the Lover's Gallery of one of the great London
+restaurants. The Sphinx says that there is only one place in Europe
+where one can really dine, but as it is impossible to be always within
+reasonable train service of that Montsalvat of cookery, she consents to
+eat with me--she cannot call it dine--at the restaurant of which I
+speak. I being very simple-minded, untravelled, and unlanguaged, think
+it, in my Cockney heart, a very fine place indeed, with its white marble
+pillars surrounding the spacious peristyle, and flashing with a thousand
+brilliant lights and colours; with its stately cooks, clothed in white
+samite, mystic, wonderful, ranged behind a great altar loaded with big
+silver dishes, and the sacred musicians of the temple ranged behind
+them--while in and out go the waiters, clothed in white and black,
+waiters so good and kind that I am compelled to think of Elijah being
+waited on by angels.
+
+They have such an eye for a romance, too, and really take it personally
+to heart if it should befall that our little table is usurped by others
+that know not love. I like them, too, because they really seem to have
+an eye for the strange beauty and charm of the Sphinx, quite an
+unexpected taste for Botticelli. They ill conceal their envy of my lot,
+and sometimes, in the meditative pauses between the courses, I see them
+romantically reckoning how it might be possible by desperately saving
+up, by prodigious windfalls of tips, from unexampled despatch and
+sweetness in their ministrations, how it might be possible in ten years'
+time, perhaps even in five--the lady would wait five years! and her
+present lover could be artistically poisoned meanwhile!--how it might be
+possible to come and sue for her beautiful hand. Then a harsh British
+cry for 'waiter' comes like a rattle and scares away that beautiful
+dream-bird, though, as the poor dreamer speeds on the quest of roast
+beef for four, you can see it still circling with its wonderful blue
+feathers around his pomatumed head.
+
+Ah, yes, the waiters know that the Sphinx is no ordinary woman. She
+cannot conceal even from them the mystical star of her face, they too
+catch far echoes of the strange music of her brain, they too grow
+dreamy with dropped hints of fragrance from the rose of her wonderful
+heart.
+
+How reverently do they help her doff her little cloak of silk and lace!
+with what a worshipful inclination of the head, as in the presence of a
+deity, do they await her verdict of choice between rival soups--shall it
+be 'clear or thick'? And when she decides on 'thick,' how relieved they
+seem to be, as if--well, some few matters remain undecided in the
+universe, but never mind, this is settled for ever--no more doubts
+possible on one portentous issue, at any rate--Madame will take her soup
+'thick.'
+
+'On such a night' our talk fell upon whitebait.
+
+As the Sphinx's silver fork rustled among the withered silver upon her
+plate, she turned to me and said:
+
+'Have you ever thought what beautiful little things these whitebait
+are?'
+
+'Oh, yes,' I replied, 'they are the daisies of the deep sea, the
+threepenny-pieces of the ocean.'
+
+'You dear!' said the Sphinx, who is alone in the world in thinking me
+awfully clever. 'Go on, say something else, something pretty about
+whitebait--there's a subject for you!'
+
+Then it was that, fortunately, I remembered my Pre-Raphaelite friend,
+and I sententiously remarked: 'Of course, if one has anything to say one
+cannot do better than say it about whitebait.... Well, whitebait....'
+
+But here, providentially, the band of the beef--that is, the band behind
+the beef; that is, the band that nightly hymns the beef (the phrase is
+to be had in three qualities)--struck up the overture from _Tannhaeuser_,
+which is not the only music that makes the Sphinx forget my existence;
+and thus, forgetting me, she momentarily forgot the whitebait. But I
+remembered, remembered hard--worked at pretty things, as metal-workers
+punch out their flowers of brass and copper. The music swirled about us
+like golden waves, in which swam myriad whitebait, like showers of tiny
+stars, like falling snow. To me it was one grand processional of
+whitebait, silver ripples upon streams of gold.
+
+The music stopped. The Sphinx turned to me with the soul of Wagner in
+her eyes, and then she turned to the waiter: 'Would it be possible,' she
+said, 'to persuade the bandmaster to play that wonderful thing over
+again?'
+
+The waiter seemed a little doubtful, even for the Sphinx, but he went
+off to the bandmaster with the air of a man who has at last an
+opportunity to show that he can dare all for love. Personally, I have a
+suspicion that he poured his month's savings at the bandmaster's feet,
+and begged him to do this thing for the most wonderful lady in the
+world; or perhaps the bandmaster was really a musician, and his
+musician's heart was touched--lonely there amid the beef--to think that
+there was really some one, invisible though she were to him, some
+shrouded silver presence, up there among the beefeaters, who really
+loved to hear great music. Perhaps it was thus made a night he has never
+forgotten; perhaps it changed the whole course of his life--who knows?
+The sweet reassuring request may have come to him at a moment when, sick
+at heart, he was deciding to abandon real music for ever, and settle
+down amid the beef and the beef-music of Old England.
+
+Well, however it was, the waiter came back radiant with a 'Yes' on every
+shining part of him, and if the _Tannhaeuser_ had been played well at
+first, certainly the orchestra surpassed themselves this second time.
+
+When the great jinnee of music had once more swept out of the hall, the
+Sphinx turned with shining eyes to the waiter:
+
+'Take,' she said, 'take these tears to the bandmaster. He has indeed
+earned them.'
+
+'Tears, little one!' I said. 'See how they swim like whitebait in the
+fishpools of your eyes!'
+
+'Oh, yes, the whitebait,' rejoined the Sphinx, glad of a subject to hide
+her emotion. 'Now tell me something nice about them, though the poor
+little things have long since disappeared. Tell me, for instance, how
+they get their beautiful little silver waterproofs?'
+
+'Electric Light of the World,' I said, 'it is like this. While they are
+still quite young and full of dreams, their mother takes them out in
+picnic parties of a billion or so at a time to where the spring moon is
+shining, scattering silver from its purse of pearl far over the wide
+waters,--silver, silver, for every little whitebait that cares to swim
+and pick it up. The mother, who has a contract with some such big
+restaurateur as ours, chooses a convenient area of moonlight, and then
+at a given sign they all turn over on their sides, and bask and bask in
+the rays, little fin pressed lovingly against little fin--for this is
+the happiest time in the young whitebait's life: it is at these
+silvering parties that matches are made and future consignments of
+whitebait arranged for. Well, night after night, they thus lie in the
+moonlight, first on one side, then on the other, till by degrees, tiny
+scale by scale, they have become completely lunar-plated. Ah! how sad
+they are when the end of that happy time has come!'
+
+'And what happens to them after that?' asked the Sphinx.
+
+'One night when the moon is hidden their mother comes to them with
+treacherous wile, and suggests that they should go off on a holiday
+again to seek the moon--the moon that for a moment seems captured by the
+pearl-fishers of the sky. And so off they go merrily, but, alas! no moon
+appears; and presently they are aware of unwieldy bumping presences upon
+the surface of the sea, presences as of huge dolphins; and rough voices
+call across the water, till, scared, the little whitebaits turn home in
+flight--to find themselves somehow meshed in an invisible prison, a net
+as fine and strong as air, into which, O agony! they are presently
+hauled, lovely banks of silver, shining like opened coffers beneath the
+coarse and ragged flares of yellow torches. The rest is silence.'
+
+'What sad little lives! and what a cruel world it is!' said the
+Sphinx--as she crunched with her knife through the body of a lark, that
+but yesterday had been singing in the blue sky. Its spirit sang just
+above our heads as she ate, and the air was thick with the grey ghosts
+of all the whitebait she had eaten that night.
+
+But there were no longer any tears in her eyes.
+
+
+
+
+THE ANSWER OF THE ROSE
+
+
+The Sphinx and I sat in our little box at _Romeo and Juliet_. It was the
+first time she had seen that fairy-tale of passion upon the stage. I had
+seen it played once before--in Paradise. Therefore, I rather trembled to
+see it again in an earthly play-house, and as much as possible kept my
+eyes from the stage. All I knew of the performance--but how much was
+that!--was two lovely voices making love like angels; and when there
+were no words, the music told me what was going on. Love speaks so many
+languages.
+
+One might as well look. It was as clear as moonlight to the tragic eye
+within the heart. The Sphinx was gazing on it all with those eyes that
+will never grow old, neither for years nor tears; but though I seemed to
+be seeing nothing but an advertisement of Paderewski pianos on the
+programme, I saw it--oh, didn't I see it?--all. The house had grown
+dark, and the music low and passionate, and for a moment no one was
+speaking. Only, deep in the thickets of my heart there sang a tragic
+nightingale that, happily, only I could hear; and I said to myself, 'Now
+the young fool is climbing the orchard wall! Yes, there go Benvolio and
+Mercutio calling him; and now,--"he jests at scars who never felt a
+wound"--the other young fool is coming out on to the balcony. God help
+them both! They have no eyes--no eyes--or surely they would see the
+shadow that sings "Love! Love! Love!" like a fountain in the moonlight,
+and then shrinks away to chuckle "Death! Death! Death!" in the
+darkness!'
+
+But, soft, what light from yonder window breaks!
+
+The Sphinx turned to me for sympathy--this time it was the soul of
+Shakespeare in her eyes.
+
+'Yes!' I whispered, 'it is the Opening of the Eternal Rose, sung by the
+Eternal Nightingale!'
+
+She pressed my hand approvingly; and while the lovely voices made their
+heavenly love, I slipped out my silver-bound pocket-book of ivory and
+pressed within it the rose which had just fallen from my lips.
+
+The worst of a great play is that one is so dull between the acts. Wit
+is sacrilege, and sentiment is bathos. Not another rose fell from my
+lips during the performance, though that I minded little, as I was the
+more able to count the pearls that fell from the Sphinx's eyes.
+
+It took quite half a bottle of champagne to pull us up to our usual
+spirits, as we sat at supper at a window where we could see London
+spread out beneath us like a huge black velvet flower, dotted with fiery
+embroideries, sudden flaring stamens, and rows of ant-like fireflies
+moving in slow zig-zag processions along and across its petals.
+
+'How strange it seems,' said the Sphinx, 'to think that for every two of
+those moving double-lights, which we know to be the eyes of hansoms, but
+which seem up here nothing but gold dots in a very barbaric pattern of
+black and gold, there are two human beings, no doubt at this time of
+night two lovers, throbbing with the joy of life, and dreaming, heaven
+knows what dreams!'
+
+'Yes,' I rejoined;' and to them I'm afraid we are even more impersonal.
+From their little Piccadilly coracles our watch-tower in the skies is
+merely a radiant facade of glowing windows, and no one of all who glide
+by realises that the spirited illumination is every bit due to your
+eyes. You have but to close them, and every one will be asking what has
+gone wrong with the electric light.'
+
+A little nonsense is a great healer of the heart, and by means of such
+nonsense as this we grew merry again. And anon we grew sentimental and
+poetic, but--thank heaven! we were no longer tragic.
+
+Presently I had news for the Sphinx. 'The rose-tree that grows in the
+garden of my mind,' I said, 'desires to blossom.'
+
+'May it blossom indeed,' she replied; 'for it has been flowerless all
+this long evening; and bring me a rose fresh with all the dews of
+inspiration--no florist's flower, wired and artificially scented, no
+bloom of yesterday's hard-driven brains.'
+
+'I was only thinking,' I said, '_a propos_ of nightingales and roses,
+that though all the world has heard the song of the nightingale to the
+rose, only the nightingale has heard the answer of the rose. You know
+what I mean?'
+
+'Know what you mean! Of course, that's always easy enough,' retorted the
+Sphinx, who knows well how to be hard on me.
+
+'I'm so glad,' I ventured to thrust back; 'for lucidity is the first
+success of expression: to make others see clearly what we ourselves are
+struggling to see, believe with all their hearts what we are just daring
+to hope, is--well, the religion of a literary man!'
+
+'Yes! it's a pretty idea,' said the Sphinx, once more pressing the rose
+of my thought to her brain; 'and indeed it's more than pretty ...'
+
+'Thank you!' I said humbly.
+
+'Yes, it's _true_--and many a humble little rose will thank you for it.
+For, your nightingale is a self-advertising bird. He never sings a song
+without an eye on the critics, sitting up there in their stalls among
+the stars. He never, or seldom, sings a song for pure love, just
+because he must sing it or die. Indeed, he has a great fear of death,
+unless--you will guarantee him immortality. But the rose, the trusting
+little earth-born rose, that must stay all her life rooted in one spot
+till some nightingale comes to choose her--some nightingale whose song
+maybe has been inspired and perfected by a hundred other roses, which
+are at the moment pot-pourri--ah, the shy bosom-song of the rose ...'
+
+Here the Sphinx paused, and added abruptly--
+
+'Well--there is no nightingale worthy to hear it!'
+
+'It is true,' I agreed, 'O trusting little earth-born rose!'
+
+'Do you know why the rose has thorns?' suddenly asked the Sphinx. Of
+course I knew, but I always respect a joke, particularly when it is but
+half-born--humourists always prefer to deliver themselves--so I shook my
+head.
+
+'To keep off the nightingales, of course,' said the Sphinx, the tone of
+her voice holding in mocking solution the words 'Donkey' and
+'Stupid,'--which I recognised and meekly bore.
+
+'What an excellent idea!' I said. 'I never thought of it before. But
+don't you think it's a little unkind? For, after all, if there were no
+nightingales, one shouldn't hear so much about the rose; and there is
+always the danger that if the rose continues too painfully thorny, the
+nightingale may go off and seek, say, a more accommodating lily.'
+
+'I have no opinion of lilies,' said the Sphinx.
+
+'Nor have I,' I answered soothingly; 'I much prefer roses--but ...
+but....'
+
+'But what?'
+
+'But--well, I much prefer roses. Indeed I do.'
+
+'Rose of the World,' I continued with sentiment, 'draw in your thorns. I
+cannot bear them.'
+
+'Ah!' she answered eagerly, 'that is just it. The nightingale that is
+worthy of the rose will not only bear, but positively love, her thorns.
+It is for that reason she wears them. The thorns of the rose properly
+understood are but the tests of the nightingale. The nightingale that
+is frightened of the thorns is not worthy of the rose--of that you may
+be sure....'
+
+'I am not frightened of the thorns,' I managed to interject.
+
+'Sing then once more,' she cried, 'the Song of the Nightingale.'
+
+And it was thus I sang:--
+
+  O Rose of the World, a nightingale,
+    A Bird of the World, am I,
+  I have loved all the world and sung all the world,
+    But I come to your side to die.
+
+  Tired of the world, as the world of me,
+    I plead for your quiet breast,
+  I have loved all the world and sung all the world--
+    But--where is the nightingale's nest?
+
+  In a hundred gardens I sung the rose,
+    Rose of the World, I confess--
+  But for every rose I have sung before
+    I love you the more, not less.
+
+  Perfect it grew by each rose that died,
+    Each rose that has died for you,
+  The song that I sing--yea, 'tis no new song,
+    It is tried--and so it is true.
+
+  Petal or thorn, yea! I have no care,
+    So that I here abide;
+  Pierce me, my love, or kiss me, my love,
+    But keep me close to your side.
+
+  I know not your kiss from your scorn, my love,
+    Your breast from your thorn, my rose,
+  And if you must kill me, well, kill me, my love!
+    But--say 'twas the death I chose.
+
+'Is it true?' asked the Rose.
+
+'As I am a nightingale,' I replied; and as we bade each other
+good-night, I whispered:
+
+'When may I expect the Answer of the Rose?'
+
+
+
+
+ABOUT THE SECURITIES
+
+
+When I say that my friend Matthew lay dying, I want you so far as
+possible to dissociate the statement from any conventional, and
+certainly from any pictorial, conceptions of death which you may have
+acquired. Death sometimes shows himself one of those impersonal artists
+who conceal their art, and, unless you had been told, you could hardly
+have guessed that Matthew was dying, dying indeed sixty miles an hour,
+dying of consumption, dying because some one else had died four years
+before, dying too of debt.
+
+Connoisseurs, of course, would have understood; at a glance would have
+named the sculptor who was silently chiselling those noble hollows in
+the finely modelled face,--that Pygmalion who turns all flesh to
+stone,--at a glance would have named the painter who was cunningly
+weighting the brows with darkness that the eyes might shine the more
+with an unaccustomed light. Matthew and I had long been students of the
+strange wandering artist, had begun by hating his art (it is ever so
+with an art unfamiliar to us), and had ended by loving it.
+
+'Let us see what the artist has added to the picture since yesterday,'
+said Matthew, signing to me to hand him the mirror.
+
+'H'm,' he murmured, 'he's had one of his lazy days, I'm afraid. He's
+hardly added a touch--just a little heightened the chiaroscuro,
+sharpened the nose a trifle, deepened some little the shadows round the
+eyes....
+
+'O why,' he presently sighed, 'does he not work a little overtime and
+get it done? He's been paid handsomely enough....
+
+'Paid,' he continued, 'by a life that is so much undeveloped gold-mine,
+paid by all my uncashed hopes and dreams....'
+
+'He works fast enough for me, old fellow,' I interrupted; 'there was a
+time, was there not, when he worked too fast for you and me?'
+
+There are moments, for certain people, when such fantastic unreality as
+this is the truest realism. Matthew and I talked like this with our
+brains, because we hadn't the courage to allow our hearts to break in
+upon the conversation. Had I dared to say some real emotional thing,
+what effect would it have had but to set poor tired Matthew a-coughing?
+and it was our aim that he should die with as little to-do as
+practicable. The emotional in such situations is merely the obvious.
+There was no need for either of us to state the elementary feelings of
+our love. I knew that Matthew was going to die, and he knew that--I was
+going to live, and we pitied each other accordingly; though I confess my
+feeling for him was rather one of envy,--when it was not congratulation.
+
+Thus, to tell the truth, we never mentioned 'the hereafter.' I don't
+believe it even occurred to us. Indeed, we spent the few hours that
+remained of our friendship in retailing the latest gathered of those
+good stories with which we had been accustomed to salt our intercourse.
+
+One of Matthew's anecdotes was, no doubt, somewhat suggested by the
+occasion, and I should add that he had always somewhat of an
+ecclesiastical bias--would, I believe, have ended some day as a
+Monsignor, a notable 'Bishop Blougram.'
+
+His story was of an evangelistic preacher who desired to impress his
+congregation with the unmistakable reality of hell-fire. 'You know the
+Black Country, my friends,' he had declaimed,' you have seen it, at
+night, flaring with a thousand furnaces, in the lurid incandescence of
+which myriads of unhappy beings, our fellow-creatures (God forbid!),
+snatch a precarious existence--you have seen them silhouetted against
+the yellow glare, running hither and thither, as it seemed from afar, in
+the very jaws of the awful fire. Have you realised that the burdens with
+which they thus run hither and thither are molten iron, iron to which
+such a stupendous heat has been applied that it has melted, melted as
+though it had been sugar in the sun?--well! returning to hell-fire, let
+me tell you this, that in hell they eat this fiery molten metal for
+ice-cream!--yes! and are glad to get anything so cool.'
+
+It was thus we talked while Matthew lay dying, for why should we not
+talk as we had lived? We both laughed long and heartily over this story;
+perhaps it would have amused us less had Matthew not been dying; and
+then his kind old nurse brought in our lunch. We had both excellent
+appetites, and were far from indifferent to the dainty little meal which
+was to be our last but one together. I brought my table as close to
+Matthew's pillow as was possible, and he stroked my hand with tenderness
+in which there was a touch of gratitude.
+
+'You are not frightened of the bacteria!' he laughed sadly; and then he
+told me, with huge amusement, how a friend (and a true, dear friend for
+all that) had come to see him a day or two before, and had hung over the
+end of the bed to say farewell, daring to approach no nearer, mopping
+his fear-perspiring brows with a handkerchief soaked in 'Eucalyptus'!
+
+'He had brought an anticipatory elegy too,' said my friend, 'written
+against my burial. I wish you'd read it for me,' and he fidgeted for it
+in the nervous manner of the dying. Finding it among his pillows, he
+handed it to me saying, 'You needn't be frightened of it. It is well
+dosed with Eucalyptus.'
+
+We laughed even more over this poem than over our stories, and then we
+discussed the terms of three cremation societies to which, at the
+express request of my friend, I had written a day or two before.
+
+Then having smoked a cigar and drunk a glass of port together (for the
+assured dying are allowed to 'live well'), Matthew grew sleepy, and,
+tucking him beneath the counterpane, I left him, for, after all, he was
+not to die that day.
+
+Circumstances prevented my seeing him again for a week. When I did so,
+entering the room poignantly redolent of the strange sweet odour of
+antiseptics, I saw that the great artist had been busy in my absence.
+Indeed, his work was nearly at an end. Yet to one unfamiliar with his
+methods there was still little to alarm in Matthew's face. In fact, with
+the exception of his brain, and his ice-cold feet, he was alive as ever.
+And even to his brain had come a certain unnatural activity, a life as
+of the grave, a sort of vampire vitality, which would assuredly have
+deceived any who had not known him. He still told his stories, laughed
+and talked with the same unconquerable humour, was in every way alert
+and practical, with this difference, that he had forgotten he was going
+to die, that the world in which he exercised his various faculties was
+another world to that in which, in spite of his delirium, we ate our
+last boiled fowl, drank our last wine, smoked our last cigar together.
+His talk was so convincingly rational, dealt with such unreal matters in
+so every-day a fashion, that you were ready to think that surely it was
+you and not he whose mind was wandering.
+
+'You might reach that pocket-book, and ring for Mrs. Davies,' he would
+say in so casual a way that of course you would ring. On Mrs. Davies's
+appearance he would be fumbling about among the papers in his
+pocket-book, and presently he would say, with a look of frustration that
+went to one's heart--'I've got a ten-pound note somewhere here for you,
+Mrs. Davies, to pay you up till Saturday, but somehow I seem to have
+lost it. Yet it must be somewhere about. Perhaps you'll find it as you
+make the bed in the morning. I'm so sorry to have troubled you....'
+
+And then he would grow tired and doze a little on his pillow.
+
+Suddenly he would be alert again, and with a startling vividness tell me
+strange stories from the dreamland into which he was now passing.
+
+I had promised to see him on Monday, but had been prevented, and had
+wired to him accordingly. This was Tuesday.
+
+'You needn't have troubled to wire,' he said. 'Didn't you know I was in
+London from Saturday to Monday?'
+
+'The doctor and Mrs. Davies didn't know,' he continued with the creepy
+cunning of the dying: 'I managed to slip away to look at a house I think
+of taking--in fact I've taken it. It's in--in--now, where is it? Now
+isn't that silly? I can see it as plain as anything--yet I cannot, for
+the life of me, remember where it is, or the number.... It was somewhere
+St. John's Wood way ... never mind, you must come and see me there, when
+we get in....'
+
+I said he was dying in debt, and thus the heaven that lay about his
+deathbed was one of fantastic Eldorados, sudden colossal legacies, and
+miraculous windfalls.
+
+'I haven't told you,' he said presently, 'of the piece of good luck that
+has befallen me. You are not the only person in luck. I can hardly
+expect you to believe me, it sounds so like the Arabian Nights. However,
+it's true for all that. Well, one of the little sisters was playing in
+the garden a few afternoons ago, making mud-pies or something of that
+sort, and she suddenly scraped up a sovereign. Presently she found two
+or three more, and our curiosity becoming aroused, a turn or two with
+the spade revealed quite a bed of gold; and the end of it was, that on
+further excavating, the whole garden proved to be one mass of
+sovereigns. Sixty thousand pounds we counted ... and then, what do you
+think?--it suddenly melted away....'
+
+He paused for a moment, and continued, more in amusement than regret--
+
+'Yes--the Government got wind of it, and claimed the whole lot as
+treasure-trove!
+
+'But not,' he added slyly, 'before I'd paid off two or three of my
+biggest bills. Yes--and--you'll keep it quiet, of course,--there's
+another lot been discovered in the garden, but we shall take good care
+the Government doesn't get hold of it this time, you bet.'
+
+He told this wild story with such an air of simple conviction that, odd
+as it may seem, one believed every word of it. But the tale of his
+sudden good-fortune was not ended.
+
+'You've heard of old Lord Osterley,' he presently began again. 'Well,
+congratulate me, old man: he has just died and left everything to me.
+You know what a splendid library he had--to think that that will all be
+mine--and that grand old park through which we've so often wandered, you
+and I! Well, we shall need fear no gamekeeper now, and of course, dear
+old fellow, you'll come and live with me--like a prince--and just write
+your own books and say farewell to journalism for ever. Of course I can
+hardly believe it's true yet. It seems too much of a dream, and yet
+there's no doubt about it. I had a letter from my solicitors this
+morning, saying that they were engaged in going through the securities,
+and--and--but the letter's somewhere over there; you might read it. No?
+can't you find it? It's there somewhere about, I know. Never mind, you
+can see it again....' he finished wearily.
+
+'Yes!' he presently said, half to himself, 'it will be a wonderful
+change! a wonderful change!'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At length the time came to say good-bye, a good-bye I knew must be the
+last, for my affairs were taking me so far away from him that I could
+not hope to see him for some days.
+
+'I'm afraid, old man,' I said, 'that I mayn't be able to see you for
+another week.'
+
+'O never mind, old fellow, don't worry about me. I'm much better
+now--and by the time you come again we shall know all about the
+securities.'
+
+The securities! My heart had seemed like a stone, incapable of feeling,
+all those last unreal hours together; but the pathos of that sad phrase,
+so curiously symbolic, suddenly smote it with overwhelming pity, and the
+tears sprang to my eyes for the first time. As I bent over him to kiss
+his poor damp forehead, and press his hand for the last farewell, I
+murmured--
+
+'Yes--dear, dear old friend. We shall know all about the securities....'
+
+
+
+
+THE BOOM IN YELLOW
+
+
+Green must always have a large following among artists and art lovers;
+for, as has been pointed out, an appreciation of it is a sure sign of a
+subtle artistic temperament. There is something not quite good,
+something almost sinister, about it--at least, in its more complex
+forms, though in its simple form, as we find it in outdoor nature, it is
+innocent enough; and, indeed, is it not used in colloquial metaphor as
+an adjective for innocence itself? Innocence has but two colours, white
+or green. But Becky Sharp's eyes also were green, and the green of the
+aesthete does not suggest innocence. There will always be wearers of the
+green carnation; but the popular vogue which green has enjoyed for the
+last ten or fifteen years is probably passing. Even the aesthete himself
+would seem to be growing a little weary of its indefinitely divided
+tones, and to be anxious for a colour sensation somewhat more positive
+than those to be gained from almost imperceptible _nuances_, of green.
+Jaded with over-refinements and super-subtleties, we seem in many
+directions to be harking back to the primary colours of life. Blue,
+crude and unsoftened, and a form of magenta, have recently had a short
+innings; and now the triumph of yellow is imminent. Of course, a love
+for green implies some regard for yellow, and in our so-called aesthetic
+renaissance the sunflower went before the green carnation--which is,
+indeed, the badge of but a small schism of aesthetes, and not worn by
+the great body of the more catholic lovers of beauty.
+
+Yellow is becoming more and more dominant in decoration--in wall-papers,
+and flowers cultivated with decorative intention, such as
+chrysanthemums. And one can easily understand why: seeing that, after
+white, yellow reflects more light than any other colour, and thus
+ministers to the growing preference for light and joyous rooms. A few
+yellow chrysanthemums will make a small room look twice its size, and
+when the sun comes out upon a yellow wall-paper the whole room seems
+suddenly to expand, to open like a flower. When it falls upon the pot of
+yellow chrysanthemums, and sets them ablaze, it seems as though one had
+an angel in the room. Bill-posters are beginning to discover the
+attractive qualities of the colour. Who can ever forget meeting for the
+first time upon a hoarding Mr. Dudley Hardy's wonderful Yellow Girl, the
+pretty advance-guard of _To-Day_? But I suppose the honour of the
+discovery of the colour for advertising purposes rests with Mr. Colman;
+though its recent boom comes from the publishers, and particularly from
+the Bodley Head. _The Yellow Book_ with any other colour would hardly
+have sold as well--the first private edition of Mr. Arthur Benson's
+poems, by the way, came caparisoned in yellow, and with the identical
+name, _Le Cahier Jaune_; and no doubt it was largely its title that made
+the success of _The Yellow Aster_. In literature, indeed, yellow has
+long been the colour of romance. The word 'yellow-back' witnesses its
+close association with fiction; and in France, as we know, it is the
+all but universal custom to bind books in yellow paper. Mr. Heinemann
+and Mr. Unwin have endeavoured to naturalise the custom here; but,
+though in cloth yellow has emphatically 'caught on,' in paper it still
+hangs fire. The ABC Railway Guide is probably the only exception, and
+that, it is to be hoped, is not fiction. Mr. Lang has recently followed
+the fashion with his _Yellow Fairy Book_; and, indeed, one of the best
+known figures in fairydom is yellow--namely, the Yellow Dwarf. Yellow,
+always a prominent Oriental colour, was but lately of peculiar
+significance in the Far East; for were not the sorrows of a certain high
+Chinese official intimately connected with the fatal colour? The Yellow
+Book, the Yellow Aster, the Yellow Jacket!--and the Yellow Fever, like
+'Orion' Home's sunshine, is always with us' somewhere in the world.' The
+same applies also, I suppose, to the Yellow Sea.
+
+Till one comes to think of it, one hardly realises how many important
+and pleasant things in life are yellow. Blue and green, no doubt,
+contract for the colouring of vast departments of the physical world.
+'Blue!' sings Keats, in a fine but too little known sonnet--
+
+  '... 'Tis the life of heaven--the domain
+    Of Cynthia--the wide palace of the sun--
+  The tent of Hesperus, and all his train--
+  The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey, and dun.
+  Blue! 'Tis the life of waters ...
+  Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest green,
+    Married to green in all the sweetest flowers.'
+
+Yellow might retort by quoting Mr. Grant Allen, in his book on _The
+Colour Sense_, to the effect that the blueness of sea and sky is mainly
+poetical illusion or inaccuracy, and that sea and sky are found blue
+only in one experiment out of fourteen. At morning and evening they are
+usually in great part stained golden. Blue certainly has one advantage
+over yellow, in that it has the privilege of colouring some of the
+prettiest eyes in the world. Yellow has a chance only in cases of
+jaundice and liver complaint, and his colour scheme in such cases is
+seldom appreciated. Again, green has the contract for the greater bulk
+of the vegetable life of the globe; but his is a monotonous business,
+like the painting of miles and miles of palings: grass, grass, grass,
+trees, trees, trees, _ad infinitum_; whereas yellow leads a roving,
+versatile life, and is seldom called upon for such monotonous labour.
+The sands of Sahara are probably the only conspicuous instance of yellow
+thus working by the piece. It is in the quality, in the diversity of the
+things it colours, rather than in their mileage or tonnage, that yellow
+is distinguished; though, for that matter, we suppose, the sun is as big
+and heavy as most things, and that is yellow. Of course, when we say
+yellow we include golden, and all varieties of the colour--saffron,
+orange, flaxen, tawny, blonde, topaz, citron, etc.
+
+If the sun may reasonably be described as the most important object in
+the world, surely money is the next. That, as we know, is, in its most
+potent metallic form, yellow also. The 'yellow gold' is a favourite
+phrase in certain forms of poetry; and 'yellow-boys' is a term of
+natural affection among sailors. Following the example of their lord the
+sun, most fires and lights are yellow or golden, and it is only in
+times of danger or superstition that they burn red or blue. And, if
+yellow be denied entrance to beautiful eyes, it enjoys a privilege
+which--except in the case of certain indigo-staining African tribes, who
+cannot be said to count--blue has never claimed: that of colouring
+perhaps the loveliest thing in the world, the hair of woman. Hair is
+naturally golden--unnaturally also. When Browning sings pathetically of
+'dear dead women--with such hair too!' he continues:--
+
+  'What's become of all the _gold_
+  Used to hang and brush their bosoms'--
+
+not 'all the blue' or 'all the brown,' though some of us, it is true,
+are condemned to wear our hair brown or blue-black. But such are only
+unhappy exceptions. Yellow or gold is the rule. The bravest men and the
+fairest women have had golden hair, and, we may add, in reference to
+another distinction of the colour we are celebrating, golden hearts.
+Hair at the present time is doing its best to conform to its normal
+conditions of colour. Numerous instances might be adduced of its
+changing from black to gold, in obedience to chemical law. 'Peroxide of
+hydrogen!' says the cynic. 'Beauty!' says the lover of art.
+
+And it might be argued, in a world of inevitable compromise, that the
+damage done to the physical health and texture of the hair thus playing
+the chameleon may well be overbalanced by the happiness, and consequent
+increased effectiveness, of the person thus dyeing for the sake of
+beauty. Thaumaturgists lay much stress on the mystic influence of
+colours; and who knows but that, if we were only allowed to dye our hair
+what colour we chose, we might be different men and women? Strange
+things are told of women who have dyed their hair the colour of blood or
+of wine, and we know from Christina Rossetti that golden hair is
+negotiable in fairyland--
+
+  '"You have much gold upon your head,"
+  They answered all together:
+    "Buy from us with a golden curl."'
+
+Whether Laura could have done business with the goblin merchantmen with
+an oxidised curl is a difficult point, for fairies have sharp eyes; and,
+though it be impossible for a mortal to tell the real gold from the
+false gold hair, the fairies may be able to do so, and might reject the
+curl as counterfeit.
+
+Again, if in the vegetable world green almost universally colours the
+leaves, yellow has more to do with the flowers. The flowers we love best
+are yellow: the cowslip, the daffodil, the crocus, the buttercup, half
+the daisy, the honeysuckle, and the loveliest rose. Yellow, too, has its
+turn even with the leaves; and what an artist he shows himself when, in
+autumn, he 'lays his fiery finger' upon them, lighting up the forlorn
+woodland with splashes--pure palette-colour of audacious gold! He hangs
+the mulberry with heart-shaped yellow shields--which reminds one of the
+heraldic importance of 'or,'--and he lines the banks of the Seine with
+phantasmal yellow poplars. And other leaves still dearer to the heart
+are yellow likewise; leaves of those sweet old poets whose thoughts seem
+to have turned the pages gold. Let us dream of this: a maid with yellow
+hair, clad in a yellow gown, seated in a yellow room, at the window a
+yellow sunset, in the grate a yellow fire, at her side a yellow
+lamplight, on her knee a Yellow Book. And the letters we love best to
+read--when we dare--are they not yellow too? No doubt some disagreeable
+things are reported of yellow. We have had the yellow-fever, and we have
+had pea-soup. The eyes of lions are said to be yellow, and the ugliest
+cats--the cats that infest one's garden--are always yellow. Some
+medicines are yellow, and no doubt there are many other yellow
+disagreeables; but we prefer to dwell upon the yellow blessings. I had
+almost forgotten that the gayest wines are yellow. Nor has religion
+forgotten yellow. It is to be hoped yellow will not forget religion. The
+sacred robe of the second greatest religion of the world is yellow, 'the
+yellow robe' of the Buddhist friar; and when the sacred harlots of
+Hindustan walk in lovely procession through the streets, they too, like
+the friars, are clad in yellow. Amber is yellow; so is the orange; and
+so were stage-coaches and many dashing things of the old time; and pink
+is yellow by lamplight. But gold-mines, it has been proved, are not so
+yellow as is popularly supposed. Hymen's robe is Miltonically 'saffron,'
+and the dearest petticoat in all literature--not forgetting the
+'tempestuous' garment of Herrick's Julia--was 'yaller.' Yes!--
+
+  ''Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green,
+  An' er name was Supi-yaw-lat, jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen.'
+
+Is it possible to say anything prettier for yellow than that?
+
+
+
+
+LETTER TO AN UNSUCCESSFUL LITERARY MAN
+
+
+My Dear Sir,--I agree with every word you say. You have my entire
+sympathy. The world is indeed hard, hard to the sad--particularly hard
+to the unsuccessful. A sure five hundred a year covers a multitude of
+sorrows. It is ever an ill wind for the shorn lamb. If it be true that
+nothing succeeds like success, it is no less sadly true that nothing
+fails like failure. And when one thinks of it, it is only natural, for
+every failure is an obstruction in the stream of life. Metaphorical
+writers are fond of saying that the successful ride to success on the
+back of the failures. It is true that many rise on stepping-stones of
+their dead relations--but that is because their relations have been
+financial successes. In truth, instead of the failure making the
+fortune of the successful, it is just the reverse. A very successful man
+would be the more successful were it not for the failures--on whom he
+has either to spend his money to support, or his time to advise. The
+strong are said to be impatient towards the weak--and is it to be
+wondered at, in a world where even the strongest need all their
+strength, in a sea where the best swimmer needs all his wind and muscle
+and skill to keep afloat? If success is sometimes 'unfeeling' towards
+failure, failure is often unfair to success. Of course, 'it is He that
+hath made us and not we ourselves,' but that is a text that cuts both
+ways; and when all is said and done, the failure detracts from the force
+in the universe; he is the clog on the wheel of fortune. To say that the
+successful man benefits by the failure of others is as true as it would
+be to say that the ratepayer benefits by the poor-rates. You use the
+word 'charlatan' somewhat profusely of several successful writers, and
+no doubt you are right. But you must remember that it is a favourite
+charge against the gifted and the fortunate. Because we have failed by
+fair means, we are sure the other fellows have succeeded by foul. And,
+moreover, one is apt to forget how much talent is needed to be a
+charlatan. Never look down upon a charlatan. Courage, skill, personal
+force or charm, great knowledge of human nature, dramatic instinct, and
+industry--few charlatans succeed (and no one is called a charlatan till
+he _does_ succeed, be his success as low or high as you please) without
+possessing a majority of these qualities; how many of which--it would be
+interesting to know--do you possess?
+
+Indeed, it would seem to need more gifts to be a rogue than an honest
+man, and there is a sense in which every great man may be described as a
+charlatan--_plus_ greatness; greatness being an almost indefinable
+quality, a quality, at any rate, on which there is a bewildering
+diversity of opinion.
+
+You seem a little cross with publishers and editors. They have not
+proved the distinguished, brilliant, and sympathetic beings you imagined
+them in your boyish dreams. No doubt, publishers and editors enter
+hardly into the kingdom of heaven. But then, you see, they don't care so
+much about that; they are much more interested in the next election at
+certain fashionable clubs. It is really a little hard on them that they
+should suffer from the ignorant misconception of the literary amateur.
+It is only those who have had no dealings with them who would be unfair
+enough to expect publishers or editors to be literary men. They are
+business men--business men _par excellence_--and a good thing, too, for
+their papers and their authors. You lament their mercenary view of life;
+but, judging by your letter, even you are not disposed to regard money
+as the root of all evil.
+
+You cannot understand why you have failed where others have succeeded.
+You have far more Greek than Keats, more history than Scott, and you
+know nineteen languages--ten of them to speak. With so many
+accomplishments, it must indeed be hard to fail--though you do not seem
+to have found it difficult. You have travelled too--have been twice
+round the world, and have a thorough knowledge of the worst hotels.
+Certainly, it is singular. Nevertheless, I must confess that the dullest
+men I have ever met have been professors of history; the worst poets
+have not only known Greek, but French as well; and, generally speaking
+the most tiresome of my acquaintances have more degrees than I have
+Latin to name them in. Alas! it is not experience, or travel, or
+language, but the use we make of them, that makes literary success,
+which, one may add, is particularly dependent--perhaps not
+unnaturally--on the use we make of language. A book may be a book,
+although there is neither Latin nor Greek, nor travel, nor
+experience--in fact 'nothing' in it; and though, like myself, you may
+pay an Oxford professor a thousand a year to correct your proofs, you
+may still miss immortality.
+
+To these intellectual and general equipments you add goodness of heart,
+sincerity of conviction, and martyrdom for your opinions; you are, it
+would seem, like many others of us, the best fellow and greatest man of
+your acquaintance. Permit me to remind you that we are not talking of
+goodness of heart, of strength or beauty of character, but of success,
+which is a thing apart, a fine art in itself.
+
+You confess that you are somewhat unpractical: you expect
+others--hard-worked journalists who never met you--to tell you what to
+read, how to form your style, and how 'to get into the magazines.' You
+are, you say, with something of pride, but a poor business man. That is
+a pity, for nearly every successful literary man of the day, and
+particularly the novelists, are excellent business men. Indeed, the
+history of literature all round has proved that the men who have been
+masters of words have also been masters of things--masters of the facts
+of life for which those words stand. Many writers have mismanaged their
+affairs from idleness and indifference, but few from incapacity. Leigh
+Hunt boasted that he could never master the multiplication-table.
+Perhaps that accounts for his comparative failure as a writer.
+Incompetence in one art is far from being a guarantee of competency in
+another, and a man is all the more likely to make a name if he is able
+to make a living--though, judging from Coleridge, it seems a good plan
+to let another hard-worked man support one's wife and children. On the
+other hand, though business faculty is a great deal, it is not
+everything: for a man may be as punctual and methodical as Southey, and
+yet miss the prize of his high calling, or as generally 'impossible' as
+Blake, and yet win his place among the immortals.
+
+In fact, after all, success in literature has something to do with
+writing. In temporary success, industry and business faculty, and an
+unworked field--be it Scotland, Ireland, or the Isle of Man (any place
+but plain England!)--are the chief factors. For that more lasting
+success which we call fame other qualities are needed, such qualities as
+imagination, fancy, and magic and force in the use of words. Can you
+honestly say, O beloved, though tiresome, correspondent, that these
+great gifts are yours? Judging from your letter--but Heaven forbid that
+I should be unkind! For, need I say I love you with a fellow-feeling? Do
+you think that you are the only unappreciated genius on the planet--not
+to speak of all the other unappreciated geniuses on all the other
+planets? Thank goodness, the postal arrangements with the latter are as
+yet defective! Others there are with hearts as warm, minds as profound,
+and style at least as attractive, who languish in unmerited
+neglect--Miltons inglorious indeed, though far from mute.
+
+Believe me, you are not alone. In fact, there are so many like you that
+it would be quite easy for you to find society without worrying me. And,
+for all of us, there is the consolation that, though we fail as writers,
+we may still succeed as citizens, as husbands and fathers and friends.
+As Whitman would say--because you are not Editor of _The Times_, do you
+give in that you are less than a man? There are poets that have never
+entered into the Bodley Head, and great prose-writers who have never sat
+in an editorial chair. Be satisfied with your heavenly crowns, O you
+whining unsuccessful, and leave to your inferiors the earthly
+five-shilling pieces.
+
+
+
+
+A POET IN THE CITY
+
+
+  'In the midway of this our mortal life,
+  I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.'
+
+I (and when I say I, I must be understood to be speaking dramatically)
+only venture into the City once a year, for the very pleasant purpose of
+drawing that twelve-pound-ten by which the English nation, ever so
+generously sensitive to the necessities, not to say luxuries, of the
+artist, endeavours to express its pride and delight in me. It would be a
+very graceful exercise of gratitude for me here to stop and parenthesise
+the reader on the subject of all that twelve-pound-ten has been to me,
+how it has quite changed the course of my life, given me that
+long-desired opportunity of doing my best work in peace, for which so
+often I vainly sighed in Fleet Street, and even allowed me an indulgence
+in minor luxuries which I could not have dreamed of enjoying before the
+days of that twelve-pound-ten. Now not only peace and plenty, but
+leisure and luxury are mine. There is nothing goes so far as--Government
+money.
+
+Usually on these literally State occasions, I drive up in state, that is
+in a hansom. There is only one other day in the year on which I am so
+splendid, but that is another beautiful story. It, too, is a day and an
+hour too joyous to be approached otherwise than on winged wheels, too
+stately to be approached in merely pedestrian fashion. To go on foot to
+draw one's pension seems a sort of slight on the great nation that does
+one honour, as though a Lord Mayor should make his appearance in the
+procession in his office coat.
+
+So I say it is my custom to go gaily, and withal stately, to meet my
+twelve-pound-ten in a hansom. For many reasons the occasion always seems
+something of an adventure, and I confess I always feel a little excited
+about it--indeed, to tell the truth, a little nervous. As I glide along
+in my state barge (which seems a much more proper and impressive image
+for a hansom than 'gondola,' with its reminiscences of Earl's Court) I
+feel like some fragile country flower torn from its roots, and
+bewilderingly hurried along upon the turbid, swollen stream of London
+life.
+
+The stream glides sweetly with a pleasant trotting tinkle of bells by
+the green parkside of Piccadilly, and sweet is it to hear the sirens
+singing, and to see them combing their gilded locks, on the yellow sands
+of Piccadilly Circus--so called, no doubt, from the number of horses and
+the skill of their drivers. Here are the whirling pools of pleasure,
+merry wheels of laughing waters, where your hansom glides along with a
+golden ease--it is only when you enter the First Cataract of the Strand
+that you become aware of the far-distant terrible roar of the Falls!
+They are yet nearly two miles away, but already, like Niagara, thou
+hearest the sound thereof--the fateful sound of that human Niagara,
+where all the great rivers of London converge: the dark, strong floods
+surging out from the gloomy fastnesses of the East End, the
+quick-running streams from the palaces of the West, the East with its
+wagons, the West with its hansoms, the four winds with their omnibuses,
+the horses and carriages under the earth jetting up their companies of
+grimy passengers, the very air busy with a million errands.
+
+You are in the rapids--metaphorically speaking--as you crawl down
+Cheapside; and here where the Bank of England and the Mansion House rise
+sheer and awful from, shall we say, this boiling caldron, this 'hell' of
+angry meeting waters--Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, Queen Victoria
+Street and Cheapside, each 'running,' again metaphorically, 'like a
+mill-race'--here in this wild maelstrom of human life and human
+conveyances, here is the true 'Niagara in London,' here are the most
+wonderful falls in the world--the London Falls.
+
+'Yes!' I said softly to myself, and I could see the sly sad smile on the
+face of the dead poet, at the thought of whose serene wisdom a silence
+like snow seemed momentarily to cover up the turmoil--'Yes!' I said
+softly, 'there is still the same old crush at the corner of Fenchurch
+Street!'
+
+By this time I had disbursed one of my two annual cab-fares, and was
+standing a little forlorn at that very corner. It was a March afternoon,
+bitter and gloomy; lamps were already popping alight in a desolate way,
+and the east wind whistled mournfully through the ribs of the
+passers-by. A very unflowerlike man was dejectedly calling out
+'daffadowndillies' close by. The sound of the pretty old word, thus
+quaintly spoken, brightened the air better than the electric lights
+which suddenly shot rows of wintry moonlight along the streets. I bought
+a bunch of the poor pinched flowers, and asked the man how he came to
+call them 'daffadowndillies.'
+
+'D'vunshur,' he said, in anything but a Devonshire accent, and then the
+east wind took him and he was gone--doubtless to a neighbouring tavern;
+and no wonder, poor soul! Flowers certainly fall into strange hands here
+in London.
+
+Well, it was nearing four, and if I wanted a grateful country's
+twelve-pound-ten, I must make haste; so presently I found myself in a
+great hall, of which I have no clearer impression than that there were
+soft little lights all about me, and a soft chime of falling gold, like
+the rippling of Pactolus. I have a sort of idea, too, of a great number
+of young men with most beautiful moustaches, playing with golden
+shovels; and as I thus stood among the soft lights and listened to the
+most beautiful sound in the world, I thought that thus must Danae have
+felt as she stood amid the falling shower. But I took care to see that
+my twelve sovereigns and a half were right number and weight for all
+that.
+
+Once more in the street, I lingered a while to take a last look at the
+Falls. What a masterful alien life it all seemed to me! No single
+personality could hope to stand alone amid all that stress of ponderous,
+bullying forces. Only public companies, and such great impersonalities,
+could hope to hold their own, to swim in such a whirlpool--and even
+they, I had heard it whispered, far away in my quiet starlit garret,
+sometimes went down. 'How,' I cried, 'would--
+
+  '... my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights ...
+  Rush of suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites,'
+
+again quoting poetry. I always quote poetry in the City, as a
+protest--moreover, it clears the air.
+
+The more people buffeted against me the more I felt the crushing sense
+of almost cosmic forces. Everybody was so plainly an atom in a public
+company, a drop of water in a tyrannous stream of human
+energy--companies that cared nothing for their individual atoms, streams
+that cared nothing for their component drops; such atoms and drops, for
+the most part, to be had for thirty shillings a week. These people about
+me seemed no more like individual men and women than individual puffs in
+a mighty rushing wind, or the notes in a great scheme of music, are men
+and women--to the banker so many pens with ears whereon to perch them,
+to the capitalist so many 'hands,' and to the City man generally so many
+'helpless pieces of the game he plays' up there in spidery nooks and
+corners of the City.
+
+As I listened to the throbbing of the great human engines in the
+buildings about me, a rising and a falling there seemed as of those
+great steel-limbed monsters, weird contortionists of metal, that jet up
+and down, and writhe and wrestle this way and that, behind the long
+glass windows of great water-towers, or toil like Vulcan in the bowels
+of mighty ships. An expression of frenzy seems to come up even from the
+dumb tossing steel; sometimes it seems to be shaking great knuckled
+fists at one and brandishing threatening arms, as it strains and sweats
+beneath the lash of the compulsive steam. As one watches it, there seems
+something of human agony about its panic-stricken labours, and something
+like a sense of pity surprises one--a sense of pity that anything in the
+world should have to work like that, even steel, even, as we say,
+senseless steel. What, then, of these great human engine-houses! Will
+the engines always consent to rise and fall, night and day, like that?
+or will there some day be a mighty convulsion, and this blind Samson of
+labour pull down the whole engine-house upon his oppressors? Who knows?
+These are questions for great politicians and thinkers to decide, not
+for a poet, who is too much terrified by such forces to be able calmly
+to estimate and prophesy concerning them.
+
+Yes! if you want to realise Tennyson's picture of 'one poor poet's
+scroll' ruling the world, take your poet's scroll down to Fenchurch
+Street and try it there. Ah, what a powerless little 'private interest'
+seems poetry there, poetry 'whose action is no stronger than a flower.'
+In days of peace it ventures even into the morning papers; but, let only
+a rumour of war be heard, and it vanishes like a dream on doomsday
+morning. A County Council election passeth over it and it is gone.
+
+Yet it was near this very spot that Keats dug up the buried beauty of
+Greece, lying hidden beneath Finsbury Pavement! and in the deserted City
+churches great dramatists lie about us. Maybe I have wronged the
+City--and at this thought I remembered a little bookshop but a few yards
+away, blossoming like a rose right in the heart of the wilderness.
+
+Here, after all, in spite of all my whirlpools and engine-houses, was
+for me the greatest danger in the City. Need I say, therefore, that I
+promptly sought it, hovered about it a moment--and entered? How much of
+that grateful governmental twelve-pound-ten came out alive, I dare not
+tell my dearest friend.
+
+At all events I came out somehow reassured, more rich in faith. There
+was a might of poesy after all. There were words in the little
+yellow-leaved garland, nestling like a bird in my hand, that would
+outlast the bank yonder, and outlive us all. I held it up. How tiny it
+seemed, how frail amid all this stone and iron! A mere flower--a flower
+from the seventeenth century--long-lived for a flower! Yes, an
+_immortelle_.
+
+
+
+
+BROWN ROSES
+
+'Well, I never thought to see this day, sir,' said Gibbs, with something
+like tears in his voice, as he reluctantly plied his scissors upon
+Hyacinth Rondel's distinguished curls.
+
+'Nor I, Gibbs--nor I!' said Rondel sadly, relapsing into silence again,
+with his head meekly bent over the white sheet spread to catch his shorn
+beauty.
+
+'To think of the times, sir, that I have dressed your head,' continued
+Gibbs, whose grief bore so marked an emphasis, 'and to think that after
+to-day ...'
+
+'But you forget, my dear Gibbs, that I shall now be a more constant
+customer than ever!'
+
+'Ah, sir, but that will be different. It will be mere machine-cutting,
+lawn-mowing, steam-reaping, if you understand me; there'll be no
+pleasure in it, no artistic pleasure, I mean.'
+
+'Yes, Gibbs, and you are an artist--I have often told you that.'
+
+'Ah, sir, but I am coming to the conclusion that it is better not to be
+an artist, better to be born just like every one else. In these days one
+suffers too much. Why, sir, I haven't in the whole of my business six
+heads like yours, and I go on cutting all the rest week in and week out,
+just for the pleasure of dressing those six--and now there'll only be
+five.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'It looks like a winding-sheet,' mused Rondel presently, after a long
+silence, broken only by the soft crunch and click of the fatal scissors,
+as they feasted on the beautiful brown silk.
+
+'It do indeed, sir,' said Gibbs, with a shudder, as another little globe
+of golden brown rolled down into Rondel's lap.
+
+'Poor brown roses!' sighed the poet, after another silence; 'they are
+just like brown roses, aren't they, Gibbs?'
+
+'They are indeed, sir!'
+
+'Brown roses scattered over the winding-sheet of one's youth--eh,
+Gibbs?'
+
+'They are indeed, sir.'
+
+'That's rather a pretty image, don't you think, Gibbs?'
+
+'Indeed I do, sir!'
+
+'Well, well, they have bloomed their last; and when Juliet's white hands
+come seeking with their silver fingers, white maidens lost in the brown
+enchanted forest, there will not be a rose left for her to gather.'
+
+'Believe me, sir, I would more gladly have cut off your head than your
+hair--that is, figuratively speaking,' sobbed the artist-in-hair-oils.
+
+'Yes, my head would hardly be missed--you are quite right, Gibbs; but my
+hair! What will they do without it at first nights and private views? It
+was worth five shillings a week to many a poor paragraph-writer. Well, I
+must try and make up for it by my beard!'
+
+'Your beard, sir?' exclaimed Gibbs in horror.
+
+'Yes, Gibbs; for some years I have been a Nazarene--that is, a Nazarite,
+with the top half of my head; now I am going to change about and be a
+Nazarite with the lower. The razor has kissed my cheeks and my chin and
+the fluted column of my throat for the last time.'
+
+'You cannot mean it, sir!' said Gibbs, suspending his murderous task a
+moment.
+
+'It's quite true, Gibbs.'
+
+'Does she wish that too, sir?'
+
+'Yes, that too.'
+
+'Well, sir, I have heard of men making sacrifices for their wives, but
+of all the cruel....'
+
+'Please don't, Gibbs. It does no good. And Mrs. Rondel's motive is a
+good one.'
+
+'Of course, sir, I cannot presume--and yet, if it wouldn't be presuming,
+I should like to know why you are making this great, I may say this
+noble, sacrifice?'
+
+'Well, Gibbs, we're old friends, and I'll tell you some day, but I
+hardly feel up to it to-day.'
+
+'Of course not, sir, of course not--it's only natural,' said Gibbs
+tenderly, while the scissors once more took up the conversation.
+
+
+
+
+THE DONKEY THAT LOVED A STAR
+
+
+'That is how the donkey tells his love!' I said one day, with intent to
+be funny, as the prolonged love-whoop of a distant donkey was heard in
+the land.
+
+'Don't be too ready to laugh at donkeys,' said my friend. 'For,' he
+continued, 'even donkeys have their dreams. Perhaps, indeed, the most
+beautiful dreams are dreamed by donkeys.'
+
+'Indeed,' I said, 'and now that I think of it, I remember to have said
+that most dreamers are donkeys, though I never expected so scientific a
+corroboration of a fleeting jest.'
+
+Now, my friend is an eminent scientist and poet in one, a serious
+combination; and he took my remarks with seriousness at once scientific
+and poetic.
+
+'Yes,' he went on, 'that is where you clever people make a mistake. You
+think that because a donkey has only two vowel-sounds wherewith to
+express his emotions, he has no emotions to express. But let me tell
+you, sir ...'
+
+But here we both burst out laughing--
+
+'You Golden Ass!' I said,'take a munch of these roses; perhaps they will
+restore you.'
+
+'No,' he resumed, 'I am quite serious. I have for many years past made a
+study of donkeys--high-stepping critics call it the study of Human
+Nature--however, it's the same thing--and I must say that the more I
+study them the more I love them. There is nothing so well worth studying
+as the misunderstood, for the very reason that everybody thinks he
+understands it. Now, to take another instance, most people think they
+have said the last word on a goose when they have called it "a
+goose"!--but let me tell you, sir ...'
+
+But here again we burst out laughing--
+
+'Dear goose of the golden eggs,' I said, 'pray leave to discourse on
+geese to-night--though lovely and pleasant would the discourse
+be;--to-night I am all agog for donkeys.'
+
+'So be it,' said my friend,' and if that be so, I cannot do better than
+tell you the story of the donkey that loved a star--keeping for another
+day the no less fascinating story of the goose that loved an angel.'
+
+By this time I was, appropriately, all ears.
+
+'Well,' he once more began, 'there was once a donkey, quite an intimate
+friend of mine--and I have no friend of whom I am prouder--who was
+unpractically fond of looking up at the stars. He could go a whole day
+without thistles, if night would only bring him stars. Of course he
+suffered no little from his fellow-donkeys for this curious passion of
+his. They said well that it did not become him, for indeed it was no
+little laughable to see him gazing so sentimentally at the remote and
+pitiless heavens. Donkeys who belonged to Shakespeare Societies recalled
+the fate of Bottom, the donkey who had loved a fairy; but our donkey
+paid little heed. There is perhaps only one advantage in being a
+donkey--namely, a hide impervious to criticism. In our donkey's case it
+was rather a dream that made him forget his hide--a dream that drew up
+all the sensitiveness from every part, from hoof, and hide, and ears, so
+that all the feeling in his whole body was centred in his eyes and
+brain, and those, as we have said, were centred on a star. He took it
+for granted that his fellows should sneer and kick-out at him--it was
+ever so with genius among the donkeys, and he had very soon grown used
+to these attentions of his brethren, which were powerless to withdraw
+his gaze from the star he loved. For though he loved all the stars, as
+every individual man loves all women, there was one star he loved more
+than any other; and standing one midnight among his thistles, he prayed
+a prayer, a prayer that some day it might be granted him to carry that
+star upon his back--which, he recalled, had been sanctified by the holy
+sign--were it but for ever so short a journey. Just to carry it a little
+way, and then to die. This to him was a dream beyond the dreams of
+donkeys.
+
+'Now, one night,' continued my friend, taking breath for himself and
+me, 'our poor donkey looked up to the sky, and lo! the star was nowhere
+to be seen. He had heard it said that stars sometimes fall. Evidently
+his star had fallen. Fallen! but what if it had fallen upon the earth?
+Being a donkey, the wildest dreams seemed possible to him. And, strange
+as it may seem, there came a day when a poet came to his master and
+bought our donkey to carry his little child. Now, the very first day he
+had her upon his back, the donkey knew that his prayer had been
+answered, and that the little swaddled babe he carried was the star he
+had prayed for. And, indeed, so it was; for so long as donkeys ask no
+more than to fetch and carry for their beloved, they may be sure of
+beauty upon their backs. Now, so long as this little girl that was a
+star remained a little girl, our donkey was happy. For many pretty years
+she would kiss his ugly muzzle and feed his mouth with sugar--and thus
+our donkey's thoughts sweetened day by day, till from a natural
+pessimist he blossomed into a perfectly absurd optimist, and dreamed the
+donkiest of dreams. But, one day, as he carried the girl who was really
+a star through the spring lanes, a young man walked beside her, and
+though our donkey thought very little of his talk--in fact, felt his
+plain "hee-haw" to be worth all its smart chirping and twittering--yet
+it evidently pleased the maiden. It included quite a number of
+vowel-sounds--though, if the maiden had only known, it didn't mean half
+so much as the donkey's plain monotonous declaration.
+
+'Well, our donkey soon began to realise that his dream was nearing its
+end; and, indeed, one day his little mistress came bringing him the
+sweetest of kisses, the very best sugar in the very best shops, but for
+all that our donkey knew that it meant good-bye. It is the charming
+manner of English girls to be at their sweetest when they say good-bye.
+
+'Our dreamer-donkey went into exile as servant to a woodcutter, and his
+life was lenient if dull, for the woodcutter had no sticks to waste upon
+his back; and next day his young mistress who was once a star took a
+pony for her love, whom some time after she discarded for a talented
+hunter, and, one fine day, like many of her sex, she pitched her
+affections upon a man--he too being a talented hunter. To their wedding
+came all the countryside. And with the countryside came the donkey. He
+carried a great bundle of firewood for the servants' hall, and as he
+waited outside, gazing up at his old loves the stars, while his master
+drank deeper and deeper within, he revolved many thoughts. But he is
+only known to have made one remark--in the nature, one may think, of a
+grim jest--
+
+'"After all!" he was heard to say, "she has married a donkey--after
+all!"
+
+'No doubt it was feeble; but then our donkey was growing old and bitter,
+and hope deferred had made him a cynic.'
+
+
+
+
+ON LOVING ONE'S ENEMIES
+
+Like all people who live apart from it, the Founder of the Christian
+religion was possessed of a profound knowledge of the world. As,
+according to the proverb, the woodlander sees nothing of the wood for
+its trees, so those who live in the world know nothing of it. They know
+its gaudy, glittering surface, its Crystal Palace fireworks, and the
+paste-diamonds with which it bedecks itself; they know its music-halls
+and its night clubs, its Piccadillys and its politics, its restaurants
+and its salons; but of the bad--or good?--heart of it all they know
+nothing. In more meanings than one, it takes a saint to catch a sinner;
+and Christ certainly knew as well as saved the sinner.
+
+But none of His precepts show a truer knowledge of life and its
+conditions than His commandment that we should love our enemies. He
+realised--can we doubt?--that, without enemies, the Church He bade His
+followers build could not hope to be established. He knew that the
+spiritual fire He strove to kindle would spread but little, unless the
+four winds of the world blew against it. Well, indeed, may the Christian
+Church love its enemies, for it is they who have made it.
+
+Indeed, for a man, or a cause, that wants to get on, there is nothing
+like a few hearty, zealous enemies. Most of us would never be heard of
+if it were not for our enemies. The unsuccessful man counts up his
+friends, but the successful man numbers his enemies. A friend of mine
+was lamenting, the other day, that he could not find twelve people to
+disbelieve in him. He had been seeking them for years, he sighed, and
+could not get beyond eleven. But, even so, with only eleven he was a
+very successful man. In these kind-hearted days enemies are becoming so
+rare that one has to go out of one's way to make them. The true
+interpretation, therefore, of the easiest of the commandments is--make
+your enemies, and your enemies will make you.
+
+So soon as the armed men begin to spring up in our fields, we may be
+sure that we have not sown in vain.
+
+Properly understood, an enemy is but a negative embodiment of our
+personalities or ideas. He is an involuntary witness to our vitality.
+Much as he despises us, greatly as he may injure us, he is none the less
+a creature of our making. It was we who put into him the breath of his
+malignity, and inspired the activity of his malice. Therefore, with his
+very existence so tremendous a tribute, we can afford to smile at his
+self-conscious disclaimers of our significance. Though he slay us, we
+_made_ him--to 'make an enemy,' is not that the phrase?
+
+Indeed, the fact that he is our enemy is his one _raison d'etre_. That
+alone should make us charitable to him. Live and let live. Without us
+our enemy has no occupation, for to hate us is his profession. Think of
+his wives and families!
+
+The friendship of the little for the great is an old-established
+profession; there is but one older--namely, the hatred of the little
+for the great; and, though it is perhaps less officially recognised, it
+is without doubt the more lucrative. It is one of the shortest roads to
+fame. Why is the name of Pontius Pilate an uneasy ghost of history?
+Think what fame it would have meant to be an enemy of Socrates or
+Shakespeare! _Blackwood's Magazine_ and _The Quarterly Review_ only
+survive to-day because they once did their best to strangle the genius
+of Keats and Tennyson. Two or three journals of our own time, by the
+same unfailing method, seek that circulation from posterity which is
+denied them in the present.
+
+This is particularly true in literature, where the literary enemy is as
+organised a tradesman as the literary agent. Like the literary agent, he
+naturally does his best to secure the biggest men. No doubt the time
+will come when the literary cut-throat--shall we call him?--will publish
+dainty little books of testimonials from authors, full of effusive
+gratitude for the manner in which they have been slashed and bludgeoned
+into fame. 'Butcher to Mr. Grant Allen' may then become a familiar
+legend over literary shop-fronts:--
+
+  'Ah! did you stab at Shelley's heart
+    With silly sneer and cruel lie?
+  And Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats,
+    To murder did you nobly try?
+
+  You failed, 'tis true; but what of that?
+    The world remembers still your name--
+  'Tis fame, _for you_, to be the cur
+    That barks behind the heels of Fame.'
+
+Any one who is fortunate enough to have enemies will know that all this
+is far from being fanciful. If one's enemies have any other _raison
+d'etre_ beyond the fact of their being our enemies--what is it? They are
+neither beautiful nor clever, wise nor good, famous nor, indeed,
+passably distinguished. Were they any of these, they would not have
+taken to so humble a means of getting their living. Instead of being our
+enemies, they could then have afforded to employ enemies on their own
+account.
+
+Who, indeed, are our enemies? Broadly speaking, they are all those
+people who lack what we possess.
+
+If you are rich, every poor man is necessarily your enemy. If you are
+beautiful, the great democracy of the plain and ugly will mock you in
+the streets. It will be the same with everything you possess. The
+brainless will never forgive you for possessing brains, the weak will
+hate you for your strength, and the evil for your good heart. If you can
+write, all the bad writers are at once your foes. If you can paint, the
+bad painters will talk you down. But more than any talent or charm you
+may possess, the pearl of price for which you will be most bitterly
+hated will be your success. You can be the most wonderful person that
+ever existed, so long as you don't succeed, and nobody will mind. 'It is
+the sunshine,' says some one, 'that brings out the adder.' So powerful,
+indeed, is success that it has been known to turn a friend into a foe.
+Those, then, who wish to engage a few trusty enemies out of place need
+only advertise among the unsuccessful.
+
+_P.S._--For one service we should be particularly thankful to our
+enemies--they save us so much in stimulants. Their unbelief so helps our
+belief, their negatives make us so positive.
+
+
+
+
+THE DRAMATIC ART OF LIFE
+
+It is a curious truth that, whereas in every other art deliberate choice
+of method and careful calculation of effect are expected from the
+artist, in the greatest and most difficult art of all, the art of life,
+this is not so. In literature, painting, or sculpture you first evolve
+your conception, and then, after long study of it, as it glows and
+shimmers in your imagination, you set about the reverent selection of
+that form which shall be its most truthful incarnation, in words, in
+paint, in marble. Now life, as has been said many times, is an art too.
+Sententious morality from time past has told us that we are each given a
+part to play, evidently implying, with involuntary cynicism, that the
+art of life is--the art of acting.
+
+As with the actor, we are each given a certain dramatic conception for
+the expression of which we have precisely the same artistic
+materials--namely, our own bodies, sometimes including heart and brains.
+One has often heard the complaint of a certain actor that he acts
+himself. On the metaphorical stage of life the complaint and the implied
+demand are just the reverse. How much more interesting life would be if
+only more people had the courage and skill to act themselves, instead of
+abjectly understudying some one else! Of course, there are supers on the
+stage of life as on the real stage. It is proper that these should dress
+and speak and think alike. These one courteously excepts from the
+generalisation that the composer of the play, as Marcus Aurelius calls
+him, has given each of us a certain part to play--that part simply
+oneself: a part, need one say, by no means as easy as it seems; a part
+most difficult to study, and requiring daily rehearsal. So difficult is
+it, indeed, that most people throw up the part, and join the ranks of
+the supers--who, curiously enough, are paid much more handsomely than
+the principals. They enter one of the learned or idle professions, join
+the army or take to trade, and so speedily rid themselves of the irksome
+necessity of being anything more individual than 'the learned counsel,'
+'the learned judge,' 'my lord bishop,' or 'the colonel,' names
+impersonal in application as the dignity of 'Pharaoh,' whereof the name
+and not the man was alone important. Henceforth they are the Church, the
+Law, the Army, the City, or that vaguer profession Society. Entering one
+of these, they become as lost to the really living world as the monk who
+voluntarily surrenders all will and character of his own at the
+threshold of his monastery: bricks in a prison wall, privates in the
+line, peas in a row. But, as I say, these are the parts that pay. For
+playing the others, indeed, you are not paid, but expected to
+pay--dearly.
+
+It is full time we turned to those on whom falls the burden of those
+real parts. Such, when quite young, if they be conscientious artists,
+will carefully consider themselves, their gifts and possibilities, study
+to discover their artistic _raison d'etre_ and how best to fulfil it.
+He or she will say: Here am I, a creature of great gifts and exquisite
+sensibilities, drawn by great dreams, and vibrating to great emotions;
+yet this potent and exquisite self is as yet, I know, but unwrought
+material of the perfect work of art it is intended that I should make of
+it--but the marble wherefrom, with patient chisel, I must liberate the
+perfect and triumphant ME! As a poet listening with trembling ear to the
+voice of his inspiration, so I tremulously ask myself--what is the
+divine conception that is to become embodied in me, what is the divine
+meaning of ME? How best shall I express it in look, in word, in deed,
+till my outer self becomes the truthful symbol of my inner self--till,
+in fact, I have successfully placed the best of myself on the outside
+--for others besides myself to see, and know and love?
+
+What is my part, and how am I to play it?
+
+Returning to the latter image, there are two difficulties that beset one
+in playing a part on the stage of life, right at the outset. You are not
+allowed to 'look' it, or 'dress' it! What would an actor think, who,
+asked to play Hamlet, found that he would be expected to play it
+without make-up and in nineteenth-century costume? Yet many of us are in
+a like dilemma with similar parts. Actors and audience must all wear the
+same drab clothes and the same immobile expression. It is in vain you
+protest that you do not really belong to this absurd and vulgar
+nineteenth century, that you have been spirited into it by a cruel
+mistake, that you really belong to mediaeval Florence, to Elizabethan,
+Caroline, or at latest Queen Anne England, and that you would like to be
+allowed to look and dress as like it as possible. It is no use; if you
+dare to look or dress like anything but your own tradesmen--and other
+critics--it is at your peril. If you are beautiful, you are expected to
+disguise a fact that is an open insult to every other person you look
+at; and you must, as a general rule, never look, wear, feel, or say what
+everybody else is not also looking, wearing, feeling, or saying.
+
+Thus you get some hint of the difficulty of playing the part of yourself
+on this stage of life.
+
+In these matters of dressing and looking your part musicians seem
+granted an immunity denied to all their fellow-artists. Perhaps it is
+taken for granted that the musician is a fool--the British public is so
+intuitive. Yet it takes the same view of the poet, without allowing him
+a like immunity. And, by the way, what a fine conception of his part had
+Tennyson--of the dignity, the mystery, the picturesqueness of it!
+Tennyson would have felt it an artistic crime to look like his
+publisher; yet what poet is there left us to-day half so
+distinguished-looking as his publisher?
+
+Indeed, curiously enough, among no set of men does the desire to look as
+commonplace as the rest of the world seem so strong as among men of
+letters. Perhaps it is out of consideration for the rest of the world;
+but, whatever the reason, immobility of expression and general
+mediocrity of style are more characteristic of them at present than even
+the military.
+
+It is surely a strange paradox that we should pride ourselves on
+schooling to foolish insensibility, on eliminating from them every mark
+of individual character, the faces that were intended subtly and
+eloquently to image our moods--to look glad when we are glad, sorry when
+we are sorry, angry in anger, and lovely in love.
+
+The impassivity of the modern young man is indeed a weird and wonderful
+thing. Is it a mark to hide from us the appalling sins he none the less
+openly affects? Is it meant to conceal that once in his life he paid a
+wild visit to 'The Empire'--by kind indulgence of the County Council?
+that he once chucked a barmaid under the chin, that he once nearly got
+drunk, that he once spoke to a young lady he did not know--and then ran
+away?
+
+One sighs for the young men of the days of Gautier and Hugo, the young
+men with red waistcoats who made asses of themselves at first nights and
+on the barricades, young men with romance in their hearts and passion in
+their blood, fearlessly sentimental and picturesquely everything.
+
+The lover then was not ashamed that you should catch radiant glimpses of
+his love in his eyes--nay! if you smiled kindly on him, he would take
+you by the arm and insist on your breaking a bottle with him in honour
+of his mistress. Joy and sorrow then wore their appropriate colours,
+according, so to say, to the natural sumptuary laws of the emotions--one
+of which is that the right place for the heart is the sleeve.
+
+It is the duty of those who are great, or to whom great destinies of joy
+or sorrow have been dealt, to wear their distinctions for the world to
+see. It is good for the world, which in its crude way indicates the
+rudiments of this dramatic art of life, when it decrees that the bride
+shall walk radiant in orange blossom, and the mourner sadden our streets
+with black--symbols ever passing before us of the moving vicissitudes of
+life.
+
+The mourner cannot always be sad, or the bride merry; the bride indeed
+sometimes weeps at the altar, and the mourner laughs a savage cynical
+laugh at the grave; but for those moments in which they awhile forget
+parts more important than themselves, the tailor and the dressmaker have
+provided symbolical garments, just as military decorations have been
+provided for heroes without the gift of looking heroic, and sacerdotal
+vestments for the priest, who, like a policeman, is not always on duty.
+
+In playing his part the conscientious artist in life, like any other
+actor, must often seem to feel more than he really feels at a given
+moment, say more than he means. In this he is far from being
+insincere--though he must make up his mind to be accused daily of
+insincerity and affectation. On the contrary, it will be his very
+sincerity that necessitates his make-believe. With his great part ever
+before him in its inspiring completeness, he must be careful to allow no
+merely personal accident of momentary feeling or action to jeopardise
+the general effect. There are moments, for example, when a really true
+lover, owing to such masterful natural facts as indigestion, a cold, or
+extreme sleepiness, is unable to feel all that he knows he really feels.
+To 'tell the truth,' as it is called, under such circumstances, would
+simply be a most dangerous form of lying. There is no duty we owe to
+truth more imperative than that of lying stoutly on occasion--for,
+indeed, there is often no other way of conveying the whole truth than
+by telling the part-lie.
+
+A watchful sincerity to our great conception of ourselves is the first
+and last condition, of our creating that finest work of art--a
+personality; for a personality, like a poet, is not only born but made.
+
+
+
+
+THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX
+
+In an essay on Vauvenargues Mr. John Morley speaks with characteristic
+causticity of those epigrammatists 'who persist in thinking of man and
+woman as two different species,' and who make verbal capital out of the
+fancied distinction in the form of smart epigrams beginning '_Les
+femmes_.' It is one of Shakespeare's cardinal characteristics that _he
+understood woman_. Mr. Meredith's fame as a novelist is largely due to
+the fact that he too _understands women_. The one spot on the sun of
+Robert Louis Stevenson's fame, so we are told, is that he could _never
+draw a woman_. His capacity for drawing men counted for nothing,
+apparently, beside this failure. Evidently the Sphinx has not the face
+of a woman for nothing. That is why no one has read her riddle,
+translated her mystic smile. Yet many people smile mysteriously,
+without any profound meanings behind their smile, with no other reason
+than a desire to mystify. Perhaps the Sphinx smiles to herself just for
+the fun of seeing us take her smile so seriously. And surely women must
+so smile as they hear their psychology so gravely discussed. Of course,
+the superstition is invaluable to them, and it is only natural that they
+should make the most of it. Man is supposed to be a complete ignoramus
+in regard to all the specialised female 'departments'--from the supreme
+mystery of the female heart to the humble domestic mysteries of a
+household. Similarly, men are supposed to have no taste in women's
+dress, yet for whom do women clothe themselves in the rainbow and the
+sea-foam, if not to please men? And was not the high-priest of that
+delicious and fascinating mystery a man--if it be proper to call the
+late M. Worth a man,--as the best cooks are men, and the best waiters?
+
+It would seem to be assumed from all this mystification that men are
+beings clear as daylight, both to themselves and to women. Poor,
+simple, manageable souls, their wants are easily satisfied, their
+psychology--which, it is implied, differs little from their
+physiology--long since mapped out.
+
+It may be so, but it is the opinion of some that men's simplicity is no
+less a fiction than women's mysterious complexity, and that human
+character is made up of much the same qualities in men and women,
+irrespective of a merely rudimentary sexual distinction, which has, of
+course, its proper importance, and which the present writer would be the
+last to wish away. From that quaint distinction of sex springs, of
+course, all that makes life in the smallest degree worth living, from
+great religions to tiny flowers. Love and beauty and poetry;
+Shakespeare's plays, Burne-Jones's pictures, and Wagner's operas--all
+such moving expressions of human life, as science has shown us, spring
+from the all-important fact that 'male and female created He them.'
+
+This everybody knows, and few are fools enough to deny. Many people,
+however, confuse this organic distinction of sex with its time-worn
+conventional symbols; just as religion is commonly confused with its
+external rites and ceremonies. The comparison naturally continues itself
+further; for, as in religion, so soon as some traditional garment of the
+faith has become outworn or otherwise unsuitable, and the proposal is
+made to dispense with or substitute it, an outcry immediately is raised
+that religion itself is in danger--so with sex, no sooner does one or
+the other sex propose to discard its arbitrary conventional
+characteristics, or to supplement them by others borrowed from its
+fellow-sex, than an outcry immediately is raised that sex itself is in
+danger.
+
+Sex--the most potent force in the universe--in danger because women
+wear knickerbockers instead of petticoats, or military men take to
+corsets and cosmetics!
+
+That parallel with religion may be pursued profitably one step further.
+In religion, the conventional test of your faith is not how you live,
+not in your kindness of heart or purity of mind, but how you believe--in
+the Trinity, in the Atonement; and do you turn to the East during the
+recital of the Apostles' Creed? These and such, as every one knows, are
+the vital matters of religion. And it is even so with sex. You are not
+asked for the realities of manliness or womanliness, but for the
+shadows, the arbitrary externalities, the fashions of which change from
+generation to generation.
+
+To be truly womanly you must never wear your hair short; to be truly
+manly you must never wear it long. To be truly womanly you must dress as
+daintily as possible, however uncomfortably; to be truly manly you must
+wear the most hideous gear ever invented by the servility of tailors--a
+strange succession of cylinders from head to heel; cylinder on head,
+cylinder round your body, cylinders on arms and cylinders on legs. To be
+truly womanly you must be shrinking and clinging in manner and trivial
+in conversation; you must have no ideas, and rejoice that you wish for
+none; you must thank Heaven that you have never ridden a bicycle or
+smoked a cigarette; and you must be prepared to do a thousand other
+absurd and ridiculous things. To be truly manly you must be and do the
+opposite of all these things, with this exception--that with you the
+possession of ideas is optional. The finest specimens of British manhood
+are without ideas; but that, I say, is, generally speaking, a matter for
+yourself. It is indeed the only matter in which you have any choice.
+More important matters, such as the cut of your clothes and hair, the
+shape of your face, the length of your moustache and the pattern of your
+cane--all these are very properly regulated for you by laws of fashion,
+which you could never dream of breaking. You may break every moral law
+there is--or rather, was--and still remain a man. You may be a bully, a
+cad, a coward and a fool, in the poor heart and brains of you; but so
+long as you wear the mock regimentals of contemporary manhood, and are
+above all things plain and undistinguished enough, your reputation for
+manhood will be secure. There is nothing so dangerous to a reputation
+for manhood as brains or beauty.
+
+In short, to be a true woman you have only to be pretty and an idiot,
+and to be a true man you have only to be brutal and a fool.
+
+From these misconceptions of manliness and womanliness, these
+superstitions of sex, many curious confusions have come about. They so
+to say, professional differentiation between the sexes had at one time
+gone so far that men were credited with the entire monopoly of a certain
+set of human qualities, and women with the monopoly of a certain other
+set of human qualities; yet every one of these are qualities which one
+would have thought were proper to, and necessary for, all human beings
+alike, male and female.
+
+In a dictionary of a date (1856) when everything on earth and in heaven
+was settled and written in penny cyclopaedias and books of deportment, I
+find these delicious definitions--
+
+_Manly_: becoming a man; firm; brave; undaunted; dignified; noble;
+stately; not boyish or womanish.
+
+_Womanly_: becoming a woman; feminine; as _womanly_ behaviour.
+
+Under _Woman_ we find the adjectives--soft, mild, pitiful and flexible,
+kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous, modest.
+
+Who can doubt that the dictionary maker defined and distributed his
+adjectives aright for the year 1856? Since then, however, many alarming
+heresies have taken root in our land, and some are heard to declare that
+both these sets of adjectives apply to men and women alike, and are, in
+fact, necessities of any decent human outfit. Otherwise the conclusion
+is obvious, that no one desirous of the adjective 'manly' must ever
+be--soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, kind, civil, obliging, humane,
+tender, timorous, or modest; and no one desirous of the adjective
+'womanly' be--firm, brave, undaunted, dignified, noble, or stately.
+
+But surely the essentials of 'manliness' and 'womanliness' belong to man
+and woman alike--the externals are purely artistic considerations, and
+subject to the vagaries of fashion. In art no one would think of
+allowing fashion any serious artistic opinion. It is usually the art
+which is out of fashion that is most truly art. Similarly, fashions in
+manliness or womanliness have nothing to do with real manliness or
+womanliness. Moreover, the adjectives 'manly' or 'womanly,' applied to
+works of art, or the artistic surfaces of men and women, are
+irrelevant--that is to say, impertinent. You have no right to ask a
+poem or a picture to look manly or womanly, any more than you have any
+right to ask a man or a woman to look manly or womanly. There is no such
+thing as looking manly or womanly. There is looking beautiful or ugly,
+distinguished or commonplace, individual or insignificant. The one law
+of externals is beauty in all its various manifestations. To ask the sex
+of a beautiful person is as absurd as it would be to ask the publisher
+the sex of a beautiful book. Such questions are for midwives and
+doctors.
+
+It was once the fashion for heroes to shed tears on the smallest
+occasion, and it does not appear that they fought the worse for it; some
+of the firmest, bravest, most undaunted, most dignified, most noble,
+most stately human beings have been women; as some of the softest,
+mildest, most pitiful and flexible, most kind, civil, obliging, humane,
+tender, timorous and modest human beings have been men. Indeed, some of
+the bravest men that ever trod this planet have worn corsets, and it
+needs more courage nowadays for a man to wear his hair long than to
+machine-gun a whole African nation. Moreover, quite the nicest women one
+knows ride bicycles--in the rational costume.
+
+
+
+
+THE FALLACY OF A NATION
+
+It is, I am given to understand, a familiar axiom of mathematics that no
+number of ciphers placed in front of significant units, or tens or
+hundreds of units, adds in the smallest degree to the numerical value of
+those units. The figure one becomes of no more importance however many
+noughts are marshalled in front of it--though, indeed, in the
+mathematics of human nature this is not so. Is not a man or woman
+considered great in proportion to the number of ciphers that walk in
+front of him, from a humble brace of domestics to guards of honour and
+imperial armies?
+
+A parallel profound truth of mathematics is that a nought, however many
+times it be multiplied, remains nought; but again we find the reverse
+obtain in the mathematics of human nature. One might have supposed that
+the result of one nobody multiplied even fifty million times would still
+be nobody. However, such is far from being the case. Fifty million
+nobodies make--a nation. Of course, there is no need for so many. I am
+reckoning as a British subject, and speak of fifty million merely as an
+illustration of the general fact that it is the multiplication of
+nobodies that makes a nation. 'Increase and multiply' was, it will be
+remembered, the recipe for the Jewish nation.
+
+Nobodies of the same colour, tongue, and prejudices have but to
+congregate together in a crowd sufficiently big for other similar crowds
+to recognise them, and then they are given a name of their own, and
+become recognised as a nation--one of the 'Great Powers.'
+
+Beyond those differences in colour, tongue, and prejudices there is
+really no difference between the component units--or rather ciphers--of
+all these several national crowds. You have seen a procession of various
+trades-unions filing toward Hyde Park, each section with its particular
+banner with a strange device: 'The United Guild of Paperhangers,' 'The
+Ancient Order of Plumbers,' and so on. And you may have marvelled to
+notice how alike the members of the various carefully differentiated
+companies were. So to say, they each and all might have been plumbers;
+and you couldn't help feeling that it wouldn't have mattered much if
+some of the paper-hangers had by mistake got walking amongst the
+plumbers, or _vice versa_.
+
+So the great trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word
+'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany'--this with a
+particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in
+front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously
+waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and
+yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called 'England.' Other
+smaller bodies of nobodies, that is, smaller nations, file past with
+humbler tread--though there is really no need for their doing so. For,
+as we have said, they are in every particular like to those haughtier
+nations who take precedence of them. In fact, one or two of them, such
+as Norway and Denmark--were a truer system of human mathematics to
+obtain--are really of more importance than the so-called greater
+nations, in that among their nobodies they include a larger percentage
+of intellectual somebodies.
+
+Remembering that percentage of wise men, the formula of a nation were
+perhaps more truly stated in our first mathematical image. The wise men
+in a nation are as the units with the noughts in front of them. And when
+I say wise men I do not, indeed, mean merely the literary men or the
+artists, but all those somebodies with some real force of character,
+people with brains and hearts, fighters and lovers, saints and thinkers,
+and the patient, industrious workers. Such, if you consider, are really
+no integral part of the nation among which they are cast. They have no
+part in what are grandiloquently called national interests--war,
+politics, and horse-racing to wit. A change of Government leaves them as
+unmoved as an election for the board of guardians. They would as soon
+think of entering Parliament or the County Council, as of yearning to
+manage the gasworks, or to go about with one of those carts bearing the
+legend 'Aldermen and Burgesses of the City of London' conspicuously upon
+its front. Their main concern in political changes is the rise and fall
+of the income-tax, and, be the Cabinet Tory or Liberal, their rate
+papers come in for the same amount. It is likely that national changes
+would affect them but little more. What more would a foreign invasion
+mean than that we should pay our taxes to French, Russian, or German
+officials, instead of to English ones? French and Italians do our
+cooking, Germans manage our music, Jews control our money markets;
+surely it would make little difference to us for France, Russia, or
+Germany to undertake our government. The worst of being conquered by
+Russia would be the necessity of learning Russian; whereas a little
+rubbing up of our French would make us comfortable with France. Besides,
+to be conquered by France would save us crossing the Channel to Paris,
+and then we might hope for cafes in Regent Street, and an emancipated
+literature. As a matter of fact, so-called national interests are merely
+certain private interests on a large scale, the private interests of
+financiers, ambitious politicians, soldiers, and great merchants.
+Broadly speaking, there are no rival nations--there are rival markets;
+and it is its Board of Trade and its Stock Exchange rather than its
+Houses of Parliament that virtually govern a country. Thus one seaport
+goes down and another comes up, industries forsake one country to bless
+another, the military and naval strengths of nations fluctuate this way
+and that; and to those whom these changes affect they are undoubtedly
+important matters--the great capitalist, the soldier, and the
+politician; but to the quiet man at home with his wife, his children,
+his books, and his flowers, to the artist busied with brave translunary
+matters, to the saint with his eyes filled with 'the white radiance of
+eternity,' to the shepherd on the hillside, the milkmaid in love, or the
+angler at his sport--what are these pompous commotions, these busy,
+bustling mimicries of reality? England will be just as good to live in
+though men some day call her France. Let the big busybodies divide her
+amongst them as they like, so that they leave one alone with one's fair
+share of the sky and the grass, and an occasional, not too vociferous,
+nightingale.
+
+The reader will perhaps forgive the hackneyed references to Sir Thomas
+Browne peacefully writing his _Religio Medici_ amid all the commotions
+of the Civil War, and to Gautier calmly correcting the proofs of his new
+poems during the siege of Paris. The milkman goes his rounds amid the
+crash of empires. It is not his business to fight. His business is to
+distribute his milk--as much after half-past seven as may be
+inconvenient. Similarly, the business of the thinker is with his
+thought, the poet with his poetry. It is the business of politicians to
+make national quarrels, and the business of the soldier to fight them.
+But as for the poet--let him correct his proofs, or beware the printer.
+
+The idea, then, of a nation is a grandiloquent fallacy in the interests
+of commerce and ambition, political and military. All the great and
+good, clever and charming people belong to one secret nation, for which
+there is no name unless it be the Chosen People. These are the lost
+tribes of love, art, and religion, lost and swamped amid alien peoples,
+but ever dreaming of a time when they shall meet once more in Jerusalem.
+
+Yet though they are thus aliens, taking and wishing no part in the
+organisation of the 'nations' among which they dwell, this does not
+prevent those nations taking part and credit in them. And whenever a
+brave soldier wins a battle, or an intrepid traveller discovers a new
+land, his particular nation flatters itself, as though it--the million
+nobodies--had done it. With a profound indifference to, indeed an active
+dislike of, art and poetry, there is nothing on which a nation prides
+itself so much as upon its artists and poets, whom, invariably, it
+starves, neglects, and even insults, as long as it is not too silly to
+do so.
+
+Thus the average Englishman talks of Shakespeare--as though he himself
+had written the plays; of India--as though he himself had conquered it.
+And thus grow up such fictions as 'national greatness' and 'public
+opinion.'
+
+For what is 'national greatness' but the glory reflected from the
+memories of a few great individuals? and what is 'public opinion' but
+the blustering echoes of the opinion of a few clever young men on the
+morning papers?
+
+For how can people in themselves little become great by merely
+congregating into a crowd, however large? And surely fools do not become
+wise, or worth listening to, merely by the fact of their banding
+together.
+
+A 'public opinion' on any matter except football, prize-fighting, and
+perhaps cricket, is merely ridiculous--by whatever brutal physical
+powers it may be enforced--ridiculous as a town council's opinion upon
+art; and a nation is merely a big fool with an army.
+
+
+
+
+THE GREATNESS OF MAN
+
+Ignorant, as I inevitably am, dear reader, of your intellectual and
+spiritual upbringing, I can hardly guess whether the title of my article
+will impress you as a platitude or as a paradox. Goodness knows, some
+men and women think quite enough of themselves as it is, and, from a
+certain momentary point of view, there may seem little occasion indeed
+to remind man of his importance.
+
+I refer to your intellectual and spiritual upbringing, because I venture
+to wonder if it was in the least like my own. I was brought up, I
+rejoice to say, in the bosom of an orthodox Puritan family. I was led
+and driven to believe that man was everybody, and that God was
+somebody--and that not merely the Sabbath, but the whole universe, was
+made for man: that the stars were his bedtime candles, and that the sun
+arose to ensure his catching the 8.37 of a morning.
+
+On this belief I acted for many years. Every young man believes that
+there is no god but God, and that he is born to be His prophet--though
+perhaps that belief is not so common nowadays. I am speaking of many
+years ago.
+
+Science, however, has long since changed all that. Those terrible Muses,
+geology, astronomy, and particularly biology, have reduced man to a
+humility which, if in some degree salutary, becomes in its excess highly
+dangerous. Why should one maggot in this great cheese of the world take
+itself more seriously than others? Why dream mightily and do bravely if
+we are but a little higher than the beasts that perish? Nature cares
+nothing about us, and her giant forces laugh at our fancies. The world
+has no such meaning as we thought. Poets and saints, deluded by
+unhealthy imaginations, have misled us, and it is quite likely that the
+wild waves are really saying nothing more important than 'Beecham's
+Pills.'
+
+'Give us a definition of life,' I asked a certain famous scientist and
+philosopher whom I am privileged to call my friend.
+
+'Nothing easier!' he gaily replied. 'Life is a product of solar energy,
+falling upon the carbon compounds, on the outer crust of a particular
+planet, in a particular corner of the solar system.'
+
+'And that,' I said, 'really satisfies you as a definition of life--of
+all the wistful wonder of the world!' And as I spoke I thought of Moses
+with mystically shining face upon the Mount of the Law, of Ezekiel rapt
+in his divine fancies, of Socrates drinking his cup of hemlock, of
+Christ's agony in the garden; the golden faces of the great of the world
+passed as in a dream before me,--soldiers, saints, poets, and lovers. I
+thought of Horatius on the bridge, of the holy and gentle soul of St.
+Francis, of Chatterton in his splendid despair, and in fancy I went with
+the awestruck citizens of Verona to reverently gaze at the bodies of two
+young lovers who had counted the world well lost if they might only
+leave it together.
+
+The carbon compounds!
+
+I took down _Romeo and Juliet_, listened to its passionate spheral
+music, and the carbon compounds have never troubled me again.
+
+Love laughs at the carbon compounds, and a great book, a noble act, a
+beautiful face, make nonsense of such cheap formula for the mystery of
+human life.
+
+Yet this parable of the carbon compounds is a fair sample of all that
+science can tell us when we come to ultimates. We go away from its
+oracles with a mouthful of sounding words, which may seem very
+impressive till we examine their emptiness. What, for example, is all
+this rigmarole about solar energy and the carbon compounds but a more
+pompous way of putting the old scriptural statement that man was made of
+the dust of the ground? To say that God took a handful of dust and
+breathed upon it and it became man, is no harder to realise than that
+solar rays falling upon that dust should produce humanity and all the
+various phantasmagoria of life. If anything, it is more explanatory. It
+leaves us with an inspiring mystery for explanation.
+
+In saying this, I do not forget our debt to science. It has done much
+in clearing our minds of cant, in popularising more systematic thinking,
+and in instituting sounder methods of observation. In some directions it
+has deepened our sense of wonder. It has broadened our conception of the
+universe, though I fear it has been at the expense of narrowing our
+conception of man. With Hamlet it contemptuously says, 'What is this
+quintessence of dust!' It is so impressed by the mileage and tonnage of
+the universe, so abased before the stupendous measurements of the
+cosmos, the appalling infinity and eternity of its space and time, that
+it forgets the marvel of the mind that can grasp all these conceptions,
+forgets, too, that, big and bullying as the forces of nature may be, man
+has been able in a large measure to control, indeed to domesticate,
+them. Surely the original fact of lightning is little more marvellous
+than the power of man to turn it into his errand-boy or his horse, to
+light his rooms with it, and imprison it in pennyworths, like the genius
+in the bottle, in the underground railway. Mere size seems unimpressive
+when we contemplate such an extreme of littleness as say the ant, that
+pin-point of a personality, that mere speck of being, yet including
+within its infinitesimal proportions a clever, busy brain, a soldier, a
+politician, and a merchant. That such and so many faculties should have
+room to operate within that tiny body--there is a marvel before which,
+it seems to me, the billions of miles that keep us from falling into the
+jaws of the sun, and the tonnage of Jupiter, are comparatively
+insignificant and conceivable.
+
+No, we must not allow ourselves to be frightened by the mere size and
+weight of the universe, or be depressed because our immediate genealogy
+is not considered aristocratic. Perhaps, after all, we are sons of God,
+and as Mr. Meredith finely puts it, our life here may still be
+
+  '... a little holding
+  To do a mighty service.'
+
+'Things of a day!' exclaims Pindar. 'What is a man? What is a man not?'
+
+It is good for our Nebuchadnezzars, the kings of the world, and
+conceited, successful people generally, to measure themselves against
+the great powers of the universe, to humble their pride by contemplation
+of the fixed stars; but a too humble attitude toward the Infinite, a too
+constant pondering upon eternity, is not good for us, unless, so to say,
+we can live with them as friends, with the inspiring feeling that,
+little as we may seem, there is that in us which is no less infinite, no
+less cosmic, and that our passions and dreams have, as Mr. William
+Watson puts it, 'a relish of eternity.'
+
+Readers of Amiel's 'Journal' will know what a sterilising, petrifying
+influence his trance-like contemplation of the Infinite had upon his
+life. Amiel was simply hypnotised by the universe, as a man may
+hypnotise himself by gazing fixedly at a star.
+
+Mr. Pater, you will remember, has a remarkable study of a similar
+temperament in his _Imaginary Portraits_. Sebastian van Storck, like
+Amiel, had become hypnotised by the Infinite. It paralysed in him all
+impulse or power 'to be or do any limited thing.'
+
+'For Sebastian, at least,' we read, 'the world and the individual alike
+had been divested of all effective purpose. The most vivid of finite
+objects, the dramatic episodes of Dutch history, the brilliant
+personalities which had found their parts to play in them, that golden
+art, surrounding one with an ideal world, beyond which the real world
+was discernible indeed, but etherealised by the medium through which it
+came to one; all this, for most men so powerful a link to existence,
+only set him on the thought of escape--into a formless and nameless
+infinite world, evenly grey.... Actually proud, at times, of his
+curious, well-reasoned nihilism, he could but regard what is called the
+business of life as no better than a trifling and wearisome delay.'
+
+This mood, once confined to a few mystics is likely to become a common
+one, is already, one imagines, far from infrequent--so the increase of
+suicide would lead us to suppose. Robbed of his hope of a glorious
+immortality, stripped of his spiritual significance, bullied and
+belittled by science on every hand, man not unnaturally begins to feel
+that it is no use taking his life seriously, that, in fact, it betrays a
+lack of humour to do so. While he was a supernatural being, a son of
+God, it was with him a case of _noblesse oblige_; and while he is happy
+and comfortable he doesn't mind giving up the riddle of the world. It is
+only the unhappy that ever really think. But what is he to do when agony
+and despair come upon him, when all that made his life worth living is
+taken from him? How is he to sustain himself? where shall he look for
+his strength or his hope? He looks up at the sky full of stars, but he
+is told that God is not there, that the city of God is long since a
+ruin, and that owls hoot to each other across its moss-grown fanes and
+battlements; he looks down on the earth, full of graves, a vast
+necropolis of once radiant dreams, with the living for its
+phantoms,--and there is no comfort anywhere. Happy is he if some simple
+human duty be at hand, which he may go on doing blindly and
+dumbly--till, perhaps, the light come again. It is difficult to offer
+comfort to such a one. Comfort is cheap, and we know nothing. When life
+holds nothing for our love and delight, it is difficult to explain why
+we should go on living it--except on the assumption that it matters,
+that it is, in some mystical way, supremely important, how we live it,
+and what we make of those joys and sorrows which, say some, are but
+meant as mystical trials and tests.
+
+Sebastian van Storck refused 'to be or do any limited thing,' but the
+answer to his mysticism is to be found in a finer mysticism, that which
+says that there is no limited act or thing, but that the significance,
+as well as the pathos, of eternity is in our smallest joys and sorrows,
+as in our most everyday transactions, and the greatness of God incarnate
+in His humblest child.
+
+This, the old doctrine of the microcosm, seems in certain moments,
+moments one would wish to say, of divination, strangely plain and
+clear--when, in Blake's words, it seems so easy to
+
+  '... see a world in a grain of sand,
+    And a heaven in a wild flower;
+  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
+    And Eternity in an hour.'
+
+Perhaps in the street, an effect of light, a passing face, yes, even the
+plaintive grind of a street organ, some such everyday circumstance,
+affects you suddenly in quite a strange way. It has become
+universalised. It is no longer a detail of the Strand, but a cryptic
+symbol of human life. It has been transfigured into a thing of infinite
+pathos and infinite beauty, and, sad or glad, brings to you an
+inexplicable sense of peace, an unshakable conviction that man is a
+spirit, that his life is indeed of supreme and lovely significance, and
+that his destiny is secure and blessed.
+
+Matthew Arnold, ever sensitive to such spiritual states, has described
+these trance-like visitations in 'The Buried Life'--
+
+  'Only, but this is rare--
+  When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
+  When, jaded with the rush and glare
+  Of the interminable hours,
+  Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
+  When our world-deafen'd ear
+  Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--
+  A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
+  And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again:
+  The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
+  And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
+  A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
+  And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
+  The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
+
+  'And there arrives a lull in the hot race
+  Wherein he doth for ever chase
+  That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
+  An air of coolness plays upon his face,
+  And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
+  And then he thinks he knows
+  The hills where his life rose,
+  And the sea where it goes.'
+
+'To be or do any limited thing'! What indeed, we ask in such hours, is a
+limited thing, when all the humble interests of our daily life are
+palpably big with eternity? Is the first kiss of a great love a limited
+thing? though there is, unhappily, no denying that it comes to an end!
+When a young husband and wife smile across to each other above the sleep
+of their little child--is that a limited thing? When the siren voices of
+the world blend together on the lips of a young poet, and with rapt eyes
+and hot heart he makes a song as of the morning stars--is that a limited
+thing? Are love, and genius, and duty done in the face of death--are
+these limited things? I think not--and man, indeed, knows better.
+
+Greatness is not relative. It is absolute. It is not for man to depress
+himself by measuring himself against the eternities and the immensities
+external to him. What he has to do is to look inward upon himself, to
+fathom the eternities and the immensities in his own heart and brain.
+
+And the more man sees himself forsaken by the universe, the more
+opportunity to vindicate his own greatness. Is there no kind heart
+beating through the scheme of things?--man's heart shall still be kind.
+Will the eternal silence make mock of his dreams and his idealisms,
+laugh coldly at 'the splendid purpose in his eyes'? Well, so be it. His
+dreams and idealisms are none the less noble things, and if the gods do
+thus make mock of mortal joy and pain--let us be grateful that we were
+born mere men.
+
+Moreover, he has one great answer to the universe--the answer of
+courage. He is still Prometheus, and there is no limit to what he can
+bear. Let the vultures of pain rend his heart as they will, he can still
+hiss 'coward' in the face of the Eternal. Nay, he can even laugh at his
+sufferings--thanks to the spirit of humour, that most blessed of
+ministering angels, without which surely the heart of humanity had long
+since broken, by which man is able to look with a comical eye upon
+terrors, as it were taking themselves so seriously, coming with such
+Olympian thunders and lightnings to break the spirit of a mere six foot
+of earth!
+
+But while his courage and his humour are defences of which he cannot be
+disarmed, whatever be the intention of the Eternal, it is by no means
+certain that nature does not mean kindly by man. Perhaps the pain of the
+world is but the rough horseplay of great powers that mean but jest--and
+kill us in it: as though one played at 'tick' with an elephant!
+
+Perhaps, after all,--who knows?--God is love, and His great purpose
+kind.
+
+Surely, when you think of it, the existence in man of the senses of love
+and pity implies the probability of their existence elsewhere in the
+universe too.
+
+  'Into that breast which brings the rose
+  Shall I with shuddering fall.'
+
+So runs the profoundest thought in modern poetry--and need I say it is
+Mr. Meredith's?
+
+As the fragrance and colour of the rose must in some occult way be
+properties of the rude earth from which they are drawn by the sun, may
+not human love also be a kindly property of matter--that mysterious
+life-stuff in which is packed such marvellous potentialities? Evidently
+love must be somewhere in the universe--else it had not got into the
+heart of man; and perhaps pity slides down like an angel in the rays of
+the solar energy, while there is the potential beating of a human heart
+even in the hard crust of the carbon compounds.
+
+I confess that this seems to me no mere fancy, but a really comforting
+speculation. Pain, we say, is inherent in the scheme of the universe;
+but is not love seen to be no less inherent, too?
+
+There must be some soul of beauty to animate the lovely face of the
+world, some soul of goodness to account for its saints. If the gods are
+cruel, it is strange that man should be so kind, and that some pathetic
+spirit of tenderness should seem to stir even in the bosoms of beasts
+and birds.
+
+Meanwhile, we cannot too often insist that, whatever uncertainties there
+be, man has one certainty--himself. Science has really adduced nothing
+essential against his significance. That he is not as big as an Alp, as
+heavy as a star, or as long-lived as an eagle, is nothing against his
+proper importance. Even a nobleman is of more significance in the world
+than his acres, and giants are not proverbial for their intellectual or
+spiritual qualities. The ant is of more importance than the ass, and the
+great eye of a beautiful woman is more significant than the whole clayey
+bulk of Mars.
+
+After all the scientific mockery of the old religious ideal of the
+importance of man, one begins to wonder if his Ptolemaic fancy that he
+was the centre of the universe, and that it was all made for him, is not
+nearer the If truth than the pitiless theories which hardly allow him
+equality with the flea that perishes.
+
+Suppose if, after all, the stars were really meant as his bedtime
+candles, and the sun's purpose in rising is really that he may catch the
+8.37!
+
+For, as Sir Thomas Browne says in his solemn English, 'there is surely a
+piece of Divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and
+owes no homage unto the sun.'
+
+The long winter of materialistic science seems to be breaking up, and
+the old ideals are seen trooping back with something more than their old
+beauty, in the new spiritual spring that seems to be moving in the
+hearts of men.
+
+After all its talk, science has done little more than correct the
+misprints of religion. Essentially, the old spiritualistic and poetic
+theories of life are seen, not merely weakly to satisfy the cravings of
+man's nature, but to be mostly in harmony with certain strange and
+moving facts in his constitution, which the materialists
+unscientifically ignore.
+
+It was important, and has been helpful, to insist that man is an animal,
+but it is still more important to insist that he is a spirit as well. He
+is, so to say, an animal by accident, a spirit by birthright: and,
+however homely his duties may occasionally seem, his life is bathed in
+the light of a sacred transfiguring significance, its smallest acts
+flash with divine meanings, its highest moments are rich with 'the
+pathos of eternity,' and its humblest duties mighty with the
+responsibilities of a god.
+
+
+
+
+DEATH AND TWO FRIENDS
+
+_A DIALOGUE_
+
+(_To the Memory of J.S. and T.C.L._)
+
+PERSONS: SCRIPTOR AND LECTOR.
+
+[This dialogue was written originally as a rejoinder to certain
+criticisms on a book of mine entitled, _The Religion of a Literary
+Man_--_Religio Scriptoris_--hence the names given to the two 'persons.'
+It was written in March 1894, before an event in the writer's life to
+which, erroneously, some have supposed it to refer.]
+
+
+LECTOR. But do you really mean, Scriptor, that you have no desire for
+the life after death?
+
+SCRIPTOR. I never said quite that, Lector, though perhaps I might almost
+have gone so far. What I did say was that we have been accustomed to
+exaggerate its importance to us here and now, that it really matters
+less to us than we imagine.
+
+LECTOR. I see. But you must speak for yourself, Scriptor. I am sure that
+it matters much to many, to most of us. It does, I know, to me.
+
+SCRIPTOR. Less than you think, my dear Lector. Besides, you are really
+too young to know. It is true that, as years go, you are ten years my
+senior, but what of that? You have that vigorous health which is the
+secret of perpetual youth. You have not yet realised decay, not to speak
+of death. The immortality of the soul is a question wide of you, who
+have as yet practically no doubt of the immortality of the body. But
+I--well, it would be melodramatic to say that I face death every day.
+The metaphor applies but to desperate callings and romantic complaints.
+To some Death comes like a footpad, suddenly, and presents his
+pistol--and the smoke that curls upward from his empty barrel is your
+soul.
+
+To another he comes featureless, a stealthily accumulating London fog,
+that slowly, slowly chokes the life out of you, without allowing you the
+consolation of a single picturesque moment, a single grand attitude. For
+you, probably, Death will only come when you die. I have to live with
+him as well. I shall smoulder for years, you will be carried to heaven,
+like Enoch, in a beautiful lightning.
+
+        'A simple child
+    That lightly draws its breath,
+    And feels its life in every limb,
+    What can it know of Death?'
+
+That's you, my dear Lector, for all your forty years.
+
+LECTOR. All the more reason, Scriptor, that you should desire a
+hereafter. You sometimes talk of the work you would do if you were a
+robust Philistine such as I. Would it not be worth while to live
+again, if only to make sure of that _magnum opus_--just to realise
+those dreams that you say are daily escaping you?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Ah! so speaks the energetic man, eager to take the world on
+his shoulders. I know the images of death that please you,
+Lector--such as that great one of Arnold's, about 'the sounding
+labour-house vast of being.'
+
+But, Lector, you who love work so well--have you never heard tell of
+a thing called Rest? Have you never known what it is to be tired, my
+Lector?--not tired at the end of a busy day, but tired in the morning,
+tired in the Memnonian sunlight, when larks and barrel-organs start on
+their blithe insistent rounds. No, the man who is tired of a morning
+sings not music-hall songs in his bedroom as he dashes about in his
+morning bath. But will you never want to go to bed, Lector? Will you
+be always like the children who hate to be sent to bed, and think that
+when they are grown up they will never go to bed at all? Yet in a few
+years' time how glad they are of the stray chance of bed at ten. May
+it not be so with sleep's twin-brother? In our young vigour, driven by
+a hundred buoyant activities, enticed by dream on dream, time seems so
+short for all we think we have to do; but surely when the blood begins
+to thin, and the heart to wax less extravagantly buoyant, when comfort
+croons a kettle-song whose simple spell no sirens of ambition or
+romance can overcome--don't you think that then 'bedtime' will come to
+seem the best hour of the day, and 'Death as welcome as a friend would
+fall'?
+
+LECTOR. But you are no fair judge, Scriptor. You say my health, my
+youth, as you waggishly call it, puts me out of court. Yet surely your
+ill-health and low spirits just as surely vitiate your judgment?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Admitted, so far as my views are the outcome of my
+particular condition. But you forget that the condition I have been
+supposing is not merely particular, but, on the contrary, the most
+general among men. Was it not old age?--which, like youth, is
+independent of years. You may be young beyond your years, I may be old
+in advance of them; but old age does come some time, and with it the
+desire of rest.
+
+LECTOR. But does not old age spend most of its thought in dwelling
+fondly on its lost youth, hanging like a remote sunrise in its
+imagination? Is it not its one yearning desire just to live certain
+hours of its youth over again?--and would the old man not give all he
+possesses for the certainty of being born young again into eternity?
+
+SCRIPTOR. He would give everything--but the certainty of rest. After
+seventy years of ardent life one needs a long sleep to refresh us
+in. Besides, age may not be so sure of the advantages of youth. All is
+not youth that laughs and glitters. Youth has its hopes, which are
+uncertain; but age has its memories, which are sure; youth has its
+passions, but age has its comforts.
+
+LECTOR. Your answers come gay and pat, Scriptor, but your voice
+betrays you. In spite of you, it saddens all your words. Tell me, have
+you ever known what it is actually to lose any one who is dear to you?
+Have you looked on death face to face?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Yes, Lector, I have--but once. It is now about five years
+ago, but the impression of it haunts me to this hour. Perhaps the
+memory is all the keener because it was my one experience. In a world
+where custom stales all things, save Cleopatra, it is all the better
+perhaps not to see even too much of Death, lest we grow familiar with
+him. For instance, doctors and soldiers, who look on him daily, seem
+to lose the sense of his terror--nay, worse, of his tragedy. Maybe it
+is something in his favour, and Death, like others, may only need to
+be known to be loved.
+
+LECTOR. But tell me, Scriptor, of this sad experience, which even now
+it moves you to name; or is the memory too sad to recall?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Sad enough, Lector, but beautiful for all that, beautiful as
+winter. It was winter when she of whom I am thinking died--a winter
+that seemed to make death itself whiter and colder on her marble
+forehead. It is but one sad little story of all the heaped-up sorrow
+of the world; but in it, as in a shell, I seem to hear the murmur of
+all the tides of tears that have surged about the lot of man from the
+beginning.
+
+There were two dear friends of mine whom I used to call the happiest
+lovers in the world. They had loved truly from girlhood and boyhood,
+and after some struggle--for they were not born into that class which
+is denied the luxury of struggle--at length saw a little home bright
+in front of them. And then Jenny, who had been ever bright and strong,
+suddenly and unaccountably fell ill. Like the stroke of a sword, like
+the stride of a giant, Death, to whom they had never given a thought,
+was upon them. It was consumption, and love could only watch and
+pray. Suddenly my friend sent for me, and I saw with my own eyes what
+at a distance it had seemed impossible to believe. As I entered the
+house, with the fresh air still upon me, I spoke confidently, with
+babbling ignorant tongue. 'Wait till you see her face!' was all my
+poor stricken friend could say.
+
+Ah! her face! How can I describe it?  It was much sweeter afterwards,
+but now it was so dark and witchlike, so uncanny, almost wicked, so
+thin and full of inky shadows. She sat up in her bed, a wizened little
+goblin, and laughed a queer, dry, knowing laugh to herself, a laugh
+like the scraping of reeds in a solitary place. A strange black
+weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows, like the 'unwilling
+sleep' of a strong narcotic. She would begin a sentence and let it
+wither away unfinished, and point sadly and almost humorously to her
+straight black hair, clammy as the feathers of a dead bird lying in
+the rain. Her hearing was strangely keen. And yet she did not know,
+was not to know. How was one to talk to her--talk of being well again,
+and books and country walks, when she had so plainly done with all
+these things? How bear up when she, with a half-sad, half-amused
+smile, showed her thin wrists?--how say that they would soon be strong
+and round again?  Ugh! she was already beginning to be different from
+us, already putting off our body-sweet mortality, and putting on the
+fearful garments of death, changing before our eyes from ruddy
+familiar humanity into a being of another element, an element we dread
+as the fish dreads the air. Soon we should not be able to talk to
+her. Soon she would have unlearnt all the sweet grammar of earth. She
+was no longer Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mysteries at which the
+flesh crept. She was going to die.
+
+Have you never looked ahead towards some trial, some physical trial,
+maybe an operation?--for perhaps the pains of the body are the
+keenest, after all--those of the spirit are at least in some part
+metaphor. You look forward with dread, yet it is at last over. It is
+behind you. And have you never thought that so it will be with death
+some day? Poor little Jenny was to face the great operation.
+
+Next time I saw her she was dead. In our hateful English fashion, they
+had shut her up in a dark room, and we had to take candles to see
+her. I shall never forget the moment when my eyes first rested on that
+awful snow-white sheet, so faintly indented by the fragile form
+beneath, lines very fragile, but oh! so hard and cold, like the
+indentations upon frozen snow; never forget my strange unaccountable
+terror when he on one side and I on the other turned down the icy
+sheet from her face. But terror changed to awe and reverence, as her
+face came upon us with its sweet sphinx-like smile. Lying there, with
+a little gold chain round her neck and a chrysanthemum in the bosom of
+her night-gown, there was a curious regality about her, a look as
+though she wore a crown our eyes were unable to see. And while I gazed
+upon her, the sobs of my friend came across the bed, and as he called
+to her I seemed to hear the eternal Orpheus calling for his lost
+Eurydice. Poor lad!--poor maid!  Here, naked and terrible, was all the
+tragedy of the world compressed into an hour, the Medusa-face of life
+that turns the bravest to stone. Surely, I felt, God owed more than He
+could ever repay to these two lovers, whom it had been so easy to
+leave to their simple joys. And from that night to this I can never
+look upon my white bed without seeing afar off the moment when it,
+too, will bear the little figure of her I love best in the world,
+bound for her voyage to the Minotaur Death; just as I never put off my
+clothes at night, and stretch my limbs down among the cool sheets,
+without thinking of the night when I shall put off my clothes for the
+last time and close my eyes for ever.
+
+LECTOR. But, my friend, this is to feel too much; it is morbid.
+
+SCRIPTOR. Morbid! How can one really _feel_ and not be morbid? If one
+be morbid, one can still be brave.
+
+LECTOR. But surely, true-lover as you are, it would be a joy to you to
+think that this terrible parting of death will not be final. We cannot
+love so well without hoping that we may meet our loved ones somewhere
+after death.
+
+SCRIPTOR. Hopes! wishes! desires! What of them? We hope, we _desire_
+all things. Who has not cried for the moon in his time?  But what is
+the use of talking of what we desire? Does life give us all we wish,
+however passionately we wish it, and is Death any more likely to
+listen to the cry of our desires? Of course we _wish it_, wish it with
+a pathetic urgency which is too poignant to bear, and which the wise
+man bravely stifles. It would all be different if we _knew_.
+
+LECTOR. But does not science even, of late, hold out the promise of
+its probability?--and the greatest poets and thinkers have always been
+convinced of its truth.
+
+SCRIPTOR. The promise of a probability!  O my Lector, what a poor
+substitute is that for a certainty! And as for the great men you speak
+of, what does their 'instinctive' assurance amount to but a strong
+sense of their own existence at the moment of writing or speaking?
+Does one of them anywhere assert immortality as a _fact_--a fact of
+which he has his own personal proof and knowledge--a scientific, not
+an imaginative, theological fact? Arguments on the subject are
+naught. It is waste of time to read them; unsupported by fact, they
+are one and all cowardly dreams, a horrible hypocritical clutching at
+that which their writers have not the courage to forgo.
+
+LECTOR. Yet may not a dream be of service to reality, my friend? Is it
+not certain that people are all the better and all the happier for
+this dream, as you call it?--for what seems to me this sustaining
+faith?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Happier? Some people, perhaps, in a lazy, unworthy
+fashion. But 'better'? Well, so long as we believed in 'eternal
+punishment' no doubt people were sometimes terrified into 'goodness'
+by the picture of that dread vista of torment, as no doubt they were
+bribed into it by the companion picture of a green unbounded Paradise;
+but, O my friend, what an unworthy kind of goodness, the mere mask of
+virtue! And now that the Inferno has practically disappeared from our
+theology, the belief in eternal life simply means unlimited cakes and
+ale, for good and evil alike, for all eternity. How such a belief can
+be moralising I fail to understand. To my mind, indeed, far from being
+moralising, this belief in immortality is responsible for no
+inconsiderable portion of the wrong and misery of the world. It is the
+baneful narcotic which has soothed the selfish and the slothful from
+the beginning. It is that unlimited credit which makes the bankrupt.
+It simply gives us all eternity to procrastinate in. Instead of
+manfully eating our peck of dirt here and now, we leave it and all
+such disagreeables to the hereafter.
+
+  'He said, "I believe in Eternal Life,"
+  As he threw his life away--
+      What need to hoard?
+      He could well afford
+  To squander his mortal day.
+  With Eternity his, what need to care?--
+  A sort of immortal millionaire.'
+
+LECTOR. I am glad to be reminded, Scriptor, that you are a poet, for the
+line of your argument had almost made me forget it. One expects other
+views from a poet.
+
+SCRIPTOR. When, my dear Lector, shall we get rid of the silly idea that
+the poet should give us only the ornamental view of life, and rock us to
+sleep, like babies, with pretty lullabies? Is it not possible to make
+_facts_ sing as well as fancies? With all this beautiful world to sing
+of--for beautiful it is, however it be marred; with this wonderful
+life--and wonderful and sweet it is though it is shot through with such
+bitter pain; with such _certainties_ for his theme, we yet beg him to
+sing to us of shadows!
+
+And you talk of 'faith.' 'Faith' truly is what we want, but it is faith
+in the life here, not in the life hereafter. Faith in the life here! Let
+our poets sing us that. And such as would deny it--I would hang them as
+enemies of society.
+
+LECTOR. But, at all events, to keep to our point--you at least _hope_
+for immortality. If Edison, say, were suddenly to discover it for us as
+a scientific certainty, you would welcome the news?
+
+SCRIPTOR. Well, yes and no! Have you seen the 'penny' phonographs in the
+Strand? You should go and have a pennyworth of the mysteries of time and
+space! How long will Edison's latest magic toy survive this
+popularisation, I wonder? For a little moment it awakens the sense of
+wonder in the idly curious, who set the demon tube to their ears; but if
+they make any remarks at all, it is of the cleverness of Mr. Edison,
+the probable profits of the invention--and not a word of the wonder of
+the world! So it would be with the undiscovered country. I was blamed
+the other day as being cheaply smart because I said that if 'one
+traveller returned,' his resurrection would soon be as commonplace as
+the telephone, and that enterprising firms would be interviewing him as
+to the prospects of opening branch establishments in Hades. Yet it is a
+perfectly serious, and, I think, true remark; for who that knows the
+modern man, with his small knowingness, and his utter incapacity for
+reverence, would doubt that were Mr. Edison actually to be the Columbus
+of the Unseen, it would soon be as overrun with gaping tourists as
+Switzerland, and that within a year railway companies would be
+advertising 'Bank-holidays in Eternity'?
+
+No! let us keep the Unseen--or, if it must be discovered, let the key
+thereof be given only to true-lovers and poets.
+
+
+
+
+A SEAPORT IN THE MOON
+
+
+No one is so hopelessly wrong about the stars as the astronomer, and I
+trust that you never pay any attention to his remarks on the moon. He
+knows as much about the moon as a coiffeur knows of the dreams of the
+fair lady whose beautiful neck he makes still more beautiful. There is
+but one opinion upon the moon--namely, our own. And if you think that
+science is thus wronged, reflect a moment upon what science makes of
+things near at hand. Love, it says, is merely a play of pistil and
+stamen, our most fascinating poetry and art is 'degeneration,' and human
+life, generally speaking, is sufficiently explained by the 'carbon
+compounds'--God-a-mercy! If science makes such grotesque blunders about
+radiant matters right under its nose, how can one think of taking its
+opinion upon matters so remote as the stars--or even the moon, which is
+comparatively near at hand?
+
+Science says that the moon is a dead world, a cosmic ship littered with
+the skeletons of its crew, and from which every rat of vitality has long
+since escaped. It is the ghost that rises from its tomb every night, to
+haunt its faithless lover, the world. It is a country of ancient
+silver-mines, unworked for centuries. You may see the gaping mouths of
+the dark old shafts through your telescopes. You may even see the
+rusting pit tackle, the ruinous engine-houses, and the idle pick and
+shovel. Or you may say that it is counterfeit silver, coined to take in
+the young fools who love to gaze upon it. It is, so to speak, a bad
+half-crown.
+
+As you will! but I am of Endymion's belief--and no one was ever more
+intimate with the moon. For me the moon is a country of great seaports,
+whither all the ships of our dreams come home. From all quarters of the
+world, every day of the week, there are ships sailing to the moon. They
+are the ships that sail just when and where you please. You take your
+passage on that condition. And it is ridiculous to think for what a
+trifle the captain will take you on so long a journey. If you want to
+come back, just to take an excursion and no more, just to take a lighted
+look at those coasts of rose and pearl, he will ask no more than a glass
+or two of bright wine--indeed, when the captain is very kind, a flower
+will take you there and back in no time; if you want to stay whole days
+there, but still come back dreamy and strange, you may take a little
+dark root and smoke it in a silver pipe, or you may drink a little phial
+of poppy-juice, and thus you shall find the Land of Heart's Desire; but
+if you are wise and would stay in that land for ever, the terms are even
+easier--a little powder shaken into a phial of water, a little piece of
+lead no bigger than a pea, and a farthing's-worth of explosive fire, and
+thus also you are in the Land of Heart's Desire for ever.
+
+I dreamed last night that I stood on the blustering windy wharf, and the
+dark ship was there. It was impatient, like all of us, to leave the
+world. Its funnels belched black smoke, its engines throbbed against
+the quay like arms that were eager to strike and be done, and a bell
+was beating impatient summons to be gone. The dark captain stood ready
+on the bridge, and he looked into each of our faces as we passed on
+board. 'Is it for the long voyage?' he said. 'Yes! the long voyage,' I
+said--and his stern eyes seemed to soften as I answered.
+
+At last we were all aboard, and in the twinkling of an eye were out of
+sight of land. Yet, once afloat, it seemed as though we should never
+reach our port in the moon--so it seemed to me as I lay awake in my
+little cabin, listening to the patient thud and throb of the great
+screws, beating in the ship's side like a human heart.
+
+Talking with my fellow-voyagers, I was surprised to find that we were
+not all volunteers. Some, in fact, complained pitifully. They had, they
+said, been going about their business a day or two before, and suddenly
+a mysterious captain had laid hold of them, and pressed them to sail
+this unknown sea. Thus, without a word of warning, they had been
+compelled to leave behind them all they held dear. This, one felt, was a
+little hard of the captain; but those of us whose position was exactly
+the reverse, who had friends on the other side, all whose hopes indeed
+were invested there, were too selfishly expectant of port to be severe
+on the captain who was taking us thither.
+
+There were three friends I had especially set out to see: two young
+lovers who had emigrated to those colonies in the moon just after their
+marriage, and there was another. What a surprise it would be to all
+three, for I had written no letter to say I was coming. Indeed, it was
+just a sudden impulse, the pistol-flash of a long desire.
+
+I tried to imagine what the town would be like in which they were now
+living. I asked the captain, and he answered with a sad smile that it
+would be just exactly as I cared to dream it.
+
+'Oh, well then,' I thought, 'I know what it will be like. There shall be
+a great restless, tossing estuary, with Atlantic winds for ever ruffling
+the sails of busy ships, ships coming home with laughter, ships leaving
+home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell. And the shaggy tossing water
+shall be bounded on either bank with high granite walls, and on one
+bank shall be a fretted spire soaring with a jangle of bells, from amid
+a tangle of masts, and underneath the bells and the masts shall go
+streets rising up from the strand, streets full of faces, and sweet with
+the smell of tar and the sea. O captain! will it be morning or night
+when we come to my city? In the morning my city is like a sea-blown
+rose, in the night it is bright as a sailor's star.
+
+'If it be early morning, what shall I do? I shall run to the house in
+which my friends lie in happy sleep, never to be parted again, and kiss
+my hand to their shrouded window; and then I shall run on and on till
+the city is behind and the sweetness of country lanes is about me, and I
+shall gather flowers as I run, from sheer wantonness of joy; and then at
+last, flushed and breathless, I shall stand beneath her window. I shall
+stand and listen, and I shall hear her breathing right through the heavy
+curtains, and the hushed garden and the sleeping house will bid me keep
+silence, but I shall cry a great cry up to the morning star, and say,
+"No, I will not keep silence. Mine is the voice she listens for in her
+sleep. She will wake again for no voice but mine. Dear one, awake, the
+morning of all mornings has come!"'
+
+As I write, the moon looks down at me like a Madonna from the great
+canvas of the sky. She seems beautiful with the beauty of all the eyes
+that have looked up at her, sad with all the tears of all those eyes;
+like a silver bowl brimming with the tears of dead lovers she seems.
+Yes, there are seaports in the moon; there are ships to take us there.
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+Most of the foregoing essays have made a first appearance either in
+_The Yellow Book_, _The Nineteenth Century_, _The Cosmopolitan_, _The
+Westminster Gazette_, or _The Realm_, to the editors of which the writer
+is indebted for kind permission to reprint.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Prose Fancies (Second Series)
+by Richard Le Gallienne
+
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