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<p>This e-text was prepared by Tom Weiss (tom@iname.com)</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Yet Again
<br><br>
by Max Beerbohm</h1>
<h3>Fifth Edition</h3>
<p>London, Chapman and Hall, Limited, 1909</p>
<p><i> </i></p>
<p><i>Till I gave myself the task of making a little selection
from what I had written since last I formed a book of essays, I
had no notion that I had put, as it were, my eggs into so many
baskets</i>—The Saturday Review, The New Quarterly, The New
Liberal Review, Vanity Fair, The Daily Mail, Literature, The
Traveller, The Pall Mall Magazine, The May Book, The Souvenir
Book of Charing Cross Hospital Bazaar, The Cornhill Magazine,
Harper’s Magazine, and The Anglo-Saxon
Review…<i>Ouf! But the sigh of relief that I heave at the
end of the list is accompanied by a smile of thanks to the
various authorities for letting me use here what they were so
good as to require.</i></p>
<p>M. B.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>CONTENTS</p>
<p>THE FIRE</p>
<p>SEEING PEOPLE OFF</p>
<p>A MEMORY OF A MIDNIGHT EXPRESS</p>
<p>PORRO UNUM…</p>
<p>A CLUB IN RUINS</p>
<p>‘273’</p>
<p>A STUDY IN DEJECTION</p>
<p>A PATHETIC IMPOSTURE</p>
<p>THE DECLINE OF THE GRACES</p>
<p>WHISTLER’S WRITING</p>
<p>ICHABOD</p>
<p>GENERAL ELECTIONS</p>
<p>A PARALLEL</p>
<p>A MORRIS FOR MAY-DAY</p>
<p>THE HOUSE OF COMMONS MANNER</p>
<p>THE NAMING OF STREETS</p>
<p>ON SHAKESPEARE’S BIRTHDAY</p>
<p>A HOME-COMING</p>
<p>‘THE RAGGED REGIMENT’</p>
<p>THE HUMOUR OF THE PUBLIC</p>
<p>DULCEDO JUDICIORUM</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WORDS FOR PICTURES</p>
<p>‘HARLEQUIN’</p>
<p>‘THE GARDEN OF LOVE’</p>
<p>‘ARIANE ET DIONYSE’</p>
<p>‘PETER THE DOMINICAN’</p>
<p>‘L’ OISEAU BLEU’</p>
<p>‘MACBETH AND THE WITCHES’</p>
<p>‘CARLOTTA GRISI’</p>
<p>‘HO-TEI’</p>
<p>‘THE VISIT’</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>THE FIRE</p>
<p>If I were ‘seeing over’ a house, and found in
every room an iron cage let into the wall, and were told by the
caretaker that these cages were for me to keep lions in, I think
I should open my eyes rather wide. Yet nothing seems to me more
natural than a fire in the grate.</p>
<p>Doubtless, when I began to walk, one of my first excursions
was to the fender, that I might gaze more nearly at the live
thing roaring and raging behind it; and I dare say I dimly
wondered by what blessed dispensation this creature was allowed
in a domain so peaceful as my nursery. I do not think I ever
needed to be warned against scaling the fender. I knew by
instinct that the creature within it was dangerous—fiercer
still than the cat which had once strayed into the room and
scratched me for my advances. As I grew older, I ceased to wonder
at the creature’s presence and learned to call it
‘the fire,’ quite lightly. There are so many queer
things in the world that we have no time to go on wondering at
the queerness of the things we see habitually. It is not that
these things are in themselves less queer than they at first
seemed to us. It is that our vision of them has been dimmed. We
are lucky when by some chance we see again, for a fleeting
moment, this thing or that as we saw it when it first came within
our ken. We are in the habit of saying that ‘first
impressions are best,’ and that we must approach every
question ‘with an open mind’; but we shirk the
logical conclusion that we were wiser in our infancy than we are
now. ‘Make yourself even as a little child’ we often
say, but recommending the process on moral rather than on
intellectual grounds, and inwardly preening ourselves all the
while on having ‘put away childish things,’ as though
clarity of vision were not one of them.</p>
<p>I look around the room I am writing in—a pleasant room,
and my own, yet how irresponsive, how smug and lifeless! The
pattern of the wallpaper blamelessly repeats itself from
wainscote to cornice; and the pictures are immobile and
changeless within their glazed frames—faint, flat mimicries
of life. The chairs and tables are just as their carpenter
fashioned them, and stand with stiff obedience just where they
have been posted. On one side of the room, encased in coverings
of cloth and leather, are myriads of words, which to some people,
but not to me, are a fair substitute for human company. All
around me, in fact, are the products of modern civilisation. But
in the whole room there are but three things living: myself, my
dog, and the fire in my grate. And of these lives the third is
very much the most intensely vivid. My dog is descended,
doubtless, from prehistoric wolves; but you could hardly decipher
his pedigree on his mild, domesticated face. My dog is as tame as
his master (in whose veins flows the blood of the old cavemen).
But time has not tamed fire. Fire is as wild a thing as when
Prometheus snatched it from the empyrean. Fire in my grate is as
fierce and terrible a thing as when it was lit by my ancestors,
night after night, at the mouths of their caves, to scare away
the ancestors of my dog. And my dog regards it with the old
wonder and misgiving. Even in his sleep he opens ever and again
one eye to see that we are in no danger. And the fire glowers and
roars through its bars at him with the scorn that a wild beast
must needs have for a tame one. ‘You are free,’ it
rages, ‘and yet you do not spring at that man’s
throat and tear him limb from limb and make a meal of him!
‘and, gazing at me, it licks its red lips; and I, laughing
good-humouredly, rise and give the monster a shovelful of its
proper food, which it leaps at and noisily devours.</p>
<p>Fire is the only one of the elements that inspires awe. We
breathe air, tread earth, bathe in water. Fire alone we approach
with deference. And it is the only one of the elements that is
always alert, always good to watch. We do not see the air we
breathe—except sometimes in London, and who shall say that
the sight is pleasant? We do not see the earth revolving; and the
trees and other vegetables that are put forth by it come up so
slowly that there is no fun in watching them. One is apt to lose
patience with the good earth, and to hanker after a sight of
those multitudinous fires whereover it is, after all, but a thin
and comparatively recent crust. Water, when we get it in the form
of a river, is pleasant to watch for a minute or so, after which
period the regularity of its movement becomes as tedious as
stagnation. It is only a whole seaful of water that can rival
fire in variety and in loveliness. But even the spectacle of sea
at its very best—say in an Atlantic storm—is less
thrilling than the spectacle of one building ablaze. And for the
rest, the sea has its hours of dulness and monotony, even when it
is not wholly calm. Whereas in the grate even a quite little fire
never ceases to be amusing and inspiring until you let it out. As
much fire as would correspond with a handful of earth or a
tumblerful of water is yet a joy to the eyes, and a lively
suggestion of grandeur. The other elements, even as presented in
huge samples, impress us as less august than fire. Fire alone,
according to the legend, was brought down from Heaven: the rest
were here from the dim outset. When we call a thing earthy we
impute cloddishness; by ‘watery’ we imply
insipidness; ‘airy’ is for something trivial.
‘Fiery’ has always a noble significance. It denotes
such things as faith, courage, genius. Earth lies heavy, and air
is void, and water flows down; but flames aspire, flying back
towards the heaven they came from. They typify for us the spirit
of man, as apart from aught that is gross in him. They are the
symbol of purity, of triumph over corruption. Water, air, earth,
can all harbour corruption; but where flames are, or have been,
there is innocence. Our love of fire comes partly, doubtless,
from our natural love of destruction for destruction’s
sake. Fire is savage, and so, even after all these centuries, are
we, at heart. Our civilisation is but as the aforesaid crust that
encloses the old planetary flames. To destroy is still the
strongest instinct of our nature. Nature is still ‘red in
tooth and claw,’ though she has begun to make fine
flourishes with tooth-brush and nail-scissors. Even the mild dog
on my hearth-rug has been known to behave like a wolf to his own
species. Scratch his master and you will find the caveman. But
the scratch must be a sharp one: I am thickly veneered.
Outwardly, I am as gentle as you, gentle reader. And one reason
for our delight in fire is that there is no humbug about flames:
they are frankly, primævally savage. But this is not, I am
glad to say, the sole reason. We have a sense of good and evil. I
do not pretend that it carries us very far. It is but the
tooth-brush and nail-scissors that we flourish. Our innate
instincts, not this acquired sense, are what the world really
hinges on. But this acquired sense is an integral part of our
minds. And we revere fire because we have come to regard it as
especially the foe of evil—as a means for destroying weeds,
not flowers; a destroyer of wicked cities, not of good ones.</p>
<p>The idea of hell, as inculcated in the books given to me when
I was a child, never really frightened me at all. I conceived the
possibility of a hell in which were eternal flames to destroy
every one who had not been good. But a hell whose flames were
eternally impotent to destroy these people, a hell where evil was
to go on writhing yet thriving for ever and ever, seemed to me,
even at that age, too patently absurd to be appalling. Nor indeed
do I think that to the more credulous children in England can the
idea of eternal burning have ever been quite so forbidding as
their nurses meant it to be. Credulity is but a form of
incaution. I, as I have said, never had any wish to play with
fire; but most English children are strongly attracted, and are
much less afraid of fire than of the dark. Eternal darkness, with
a biting east-wind, were to the English fancy a far more fearful
prospect than eternal flames. The notion of these flames arose in
Italy, where heat is no luxury, and shadows are lurked in, and
breezes prayed for. In England the sun, even at its strongest, is
a weak vessel. True, we grumble whenever its radiance is a trifle
less watery than usual. But that is precisely because we are a
people whose nature the sun has not mellowed—a dour people,
like all northerners, ever ready to make the worst of things.
Inwardly, we love the sun, and long for it to come nearer to us,
and to come more often. And it is partly because this craving is
unsatisfied that we cower so fondly over our open hearths. Our
fires are makeshifts for sunshine. Autumn after autumn, ‘we
see the swallows gathering in the sky, and in the osier-isle we
hear their noise,’ and our hearts sink. Happy, selfish
little birds, gathering so lightly to fly whither we cannot
follow you, will you not, this once, forgo the lands of your
desire? ‘Shall not the grief of the old time follow?’
Do winter with us, this once! We will strew all England, every
morning, with bread-crumbs for you, will you but stay and help us
to play at summer! But the delicate cruel rogues pay no heed to
us, skimming sharplier than ever in pursuit of gnats, as the hour
draws near for their long flight over gnatless seas.</p>
<p>Only one swallow have I ever known to relent. It had built its
nest under the eaves of a cottage that belonged to a friend of
mine, a man who loved birds. He had a power of making birds trust
him. They would come at his call, circling round him, perching on
his shoulders, eating from his hand. One of the swallows would
come too, from his nest under the eaves. As the summer wore on,
he grew quite tame. And when summer waned, and the other swallows
flew away, this one lingered, day after day, fluttering dubiously
over the threshold of the cottage. Presently, as the air grew
chilly, he built a new nest for himself, under the mantelpiece in
my friend’s study. And every morning, so soon as the fire
burned brightly, he would flutter down to perch on the fender and
bask in the light and warmth of the coals. But after a few weeks
he began to ail; possibly because the study was a small one, and
he could not get in it the exercise that he needed; more probably
because of the draughts. My friend’s wife, who was very
clever with her needle, made for the swallow a little jacket of
red flannel, and sought to divert his mind by teaching him to
perform a few simple tricks. For a while he seemed to regain his
spirits. But presently he moped more than ever, crouching nearer
than ever to the fire, and, sidelong, blinking dim weak
reproaches at his disappointed master and mistress. One swallow,
as the adage truly says, does not make a summer. So this
one’s mistress hurriedly made for him a little overcoat of
sealskin, wearing which, in a muffled cage, he was personally
conducted by his master straight through to Sicily. There he was
nursed back to health, and liberated on a sunny plain. He never
returned to his English home; but the nest he built under the
mantelpiece is still preserved in case he should come at
last.</p>
<p>When the sun’s rays slant down upon your grate, then the
fire blanches and blenches, cowers, crumbles, and collapses. It
cannot compete with its archetype. It cannot suffice a
sun-steeped swallow, or ripen a plum, or parch the carpet. Yet,
in its modest way, it is to your room what the sun is to the
world; and where, during the greater part of the year, would you
be without it? I do not wonder that the poor, when they have to
choose between fuel and food, choose fuel. Food nourishes the
body; but fuel, warming the body, warms the soul too. I do not
wonder that the hearth has been regarded from time immemorial as
the centre, and used as the symbol, of the home. I like the
social tradition that we must not poke a fire in a friend’s
drawing-room unless our friendship dates back full seven years.
It rests evidently, this tradition, on the sentiment that a fire
is a thing sacred to the members of the household in which it
burns. I dare say the fender has a meaning, as well as a use, and
is as the rail round an altar. In ‘The New Utopia’
these hearths will all have been rased, of course, as
demoralising relics of an age when people went in for privacy and
were not always thinking exclusively about the State. Such heat
as may be needed to prevent us from catching colds (whereby our
vitality would be lowered, and our usefulness to the State
impaired) will be supplied through hot-water pipes
(white-enamelled), the supply being strictly regulated from the
municipal water-works. Or has Mr. Wells arranged that the sun
shall always be shining on us? I have mislaid my copy of the
book. Anyhow, fires and hearths will have to go. Let us make the
most of them while we may.</p>
<p>Personally, though I appreciate the radiance of a family fire,
I give preference to a fire that burns for myself alone. And
dearest of all to me is a fire that burns thus in the house of
another. I find an inalienable magic in my bedroom fire when I am
staying with friends; and it is at bedtime that the spell is
strongest. ‘<i>Good</i> night,’ says my host, shaking
my hand warmly on the threshold; you’ve everything you
want?’ ‘Everything,’ I assure him; ‘good
<i>night</i>.’ ‘Good <i>night</i>.’
‘<i>Good</i> night,’ and I close my door, close my
eyes, heave a long sigh, open my eyes, set down the candle, draw
the armchair close to the fire (<i>my</i> fire), sink down, and
am at peace, with nothing to mar my happiness except the feeling
that it is too good to be true.</p>
<p>At such moments I never see in my fire any likeness to a wild
beast. It roars me as gently as a sucking dove, and is as kind
and cordial as my host and hostess and the other people in the
house. And yet I do not have to say anything to it, I do not have
to make myself agreeable to it. It lavishes its warmth on me,
asking nothing in return. For fifteen mortal hours or so, with
few and brief intervals, I have been making myself agreeable,
saying the right thing, asking the apt question, exhibiting the
proper shade of mild or acute surprise, smiling the appropriate
smile or laughing just so long and just so loud as the occasion
seemed to demand. If I were naturally a brilliant and copious
talker, I suppose that to stay in another’s house would be
no strain on me. I should be able to impose myself on my host and
hostess and their guests without any effort, and at the end of
the day retire quite unfatigued, pleasantly flushed with the
effect of my own magnetism. Alas, there is no question of my
imposing myself. I can repay hospitality only by strict attention
to the humble, arduous process of making myself agreeable. When I
go up to dress for dinner, I have always a strong impulse to go
to bed and sleep off my fatigue; and it is only by exerting all
my will-power that I can array myself for the final labours: to
wit, making myself agreeable to some man or woman for a minute or
two before dinner, to two women during dinner, to men after
dinner, then again to women in the drawing-room, and then once
more to men in the smoking-room. It is a dog’s life. But
one has to have suffered before one gets the full savour out of
joy. And I do not grumble at the price I have to pay for the
sensation of basking, at length, in solitude and the glow of my
own fireside.</p>
<p>Too tired to undress, too tired to think, I am more than
content to watch the noble and ever-changing pageant of the fire.
The finest part of this spectacle is surely when the flames sink,
and gradually the red-gold caverns are revealed, gorgeous,
mysterious, with inmost recesses of white heat. It is often thus
that my fire welcomes me when the long day’s task is done.
After I have gazed long into its depths, I close my eyes to rest
them, opening them again, with a start, whenever a coal shifts
its place, or some belated little tongue of flame spurts forth
with a hiss…. Vaguely I liken myself to the watchman one
sees by night in London, wherever a road is up, huddled
half-awake in his tiny cabin of wood, with a cresset of live coal
before him…. I have come down in the world, and am a
night-watchman, and I find the life as pleasant as I had always
thought it must be, except when I let the fire out, and awake
shivering…. Shivering I awake, in the twilight of dawn.
Ashes, white and grey, some rusty cinders, a crag or so of coal,
are all that is left over from last night’s splendour. Grey
is the lawn beneath my window, and little ghosts of rabbits are
nibbling and hobbling there. But anon the east will be red, and,
ere I wake, the sky will be blue, and the grass quite green
again, and my fire will have arisen from its ashes, a cackling
and comfortable phoenix.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>SEEING PEOPLE OFF</p>
<p>I am not good at it. To do it well seems to me one of the most
difficult things in the world, and probably seems so to you,
too.</p>
<p>To see a friend off from Waterloo to Vauxhall were easy
enough. But we are never called on to perform that small feat. It
is only when a friend is going on a longish journey, and will be
absent for a longish time, that we turn up at the railway
station. The dearer the friend, and the longer the journey, and
the longer the likely absence, the earlier do we turn up, and the
more lamentably do we fail. Our failure is in exact ratio to the
seriousness of the occasion, and to the depth of our feeling.</p>
<p>In a room, or even on a door-step, we can make the farewell
quite worthily. We can express in our faces the genuine sorrow we
feel. Nor do words fail us. There is no awkwardness, no
restraint, on either side. The thread of our intimacy has not
been snapped. The leave-taking is an ideal one. Why not, then,
leave the leave-taking at that? Always, departing friends implore
us not to bother to come to the railway station next morning.
Always, we are deaf to these entreaties, knowing them to be not
quite sincere. The departing friends would think it very odd of
us if we took them at their word. Besides, they really do want to
see us again. And that wish is heartily reciprocated. We duly
turn up. And then, oh then, what a gulf yawns! We stretch our
arms vainly across it. We have utterly lost touch. We have
nothing at all to say. We gaze at each other as dumb animals gaze
at human beings. We ‘make conversation’—and
<i>such</i> conversation! We know that these are the friends from
whom we parted overnight. They know that we have not altered.
Yet, on the surface, everything is different; and the tension is
such that we only long for the guard to blow his whistle and put
an end to the farce.</p>
<p>On a cold grey morning of last week I duly turned up at
Euston, to see off an old friend who was starting for
America.</p>
<p>Overnight, we had given him a farewell dinner, in which
sadness was well mingled with festivity. Years probably would
elapse before his return. Some of us might never see him again.
Not ignoring the shadow of the future, we gaily celebrated the
past. We were as thankful to have known our guest as we were
grieved to lose him; and both these emotions were made evident.
It was a perfect farewell.</p>
<p>And now, here we were, stiff and self-conscious on the
platform; and, framed in the window of the railway-carriage, was
the face of our friend; but it was as the face of a
stranger—a stranger anxious to please, an appealing
stranger, an awkward stranger. ‘Have you got
everything?’ asked one of us, breaking a silence.
‘Yes, everything,’ said our friend, with a pleasant
nod. ‘Everything,’ he repeated, with the emphasis of
an empty brain. ‘You’ll be able to lunch on the
train,’ said I, though this prophecy had already been made
more than once. ‘Oh yes,’ he said with conviction. He
added that the train went straight through to Liverpool. This
fact seemed to strike us as rather odd. We exchanged glances.
‘Doesn’t it stop at Crewe?’ asked one of us.
‘No,’ said our friend, briefly. He seemed almost
disagreeable. There was a long pause. One of us, with a nod and a
forced smile at the traveller, said ‘Well!’ The nod,
the smile, and the unmeaning monosyllable, were returned
conscientiously. Another pause was broken by one of us with a fit
of coughing. It was an obviously assumed fit, but it served to
pass the time. The bustle of the platform was unabated. There was
no sign of the train’s departure. Release—ours, and
our friend’s—was not yet.</p>
<p>My wandering eye alighted on a rather portly middle-aged man
who was talking earnestly from the platform to a young lady at
the next window but one to ours. His fine profile was vaguely
familiar to me. The young lady was evidently American, and he was
evidently English; otherwise I should have guessed from his
impressive air that he was her father. I wished I could hear what
he was saying. I was sure he was giving the very best advice; and
the strong tenderness of his gaze was really beautiful. He seemed
magnetic, as he poured out his final injunctions. I could feel
something of his magnetism even where I stood. And the magnetism,
like the profile, was vaguely familiar to me. Where had I
experienced it?</p>
<p>In a flash I remembered. The man was Hubert le Ros. But how
changed since last I saw him! That was seven or eight years ago,
in the Strand. He was then (as usual) out of an engagement, and
borrowed half-a-crown. It seemed a privilege to lend anything to
him. He was always magnetic. And why his magnetism had never made
him successful on the London stage was always a mystery to me. He
was an excellent actor, and a man of sober habit. But, like many
others of his kind, Hubert le Ros (I do not, of course, give the
actual name by which he was known) drifted seedily away into the
provinces; and I, like every one else, ceased to remember
him.</p>
<p>It was strange to see him, after all these years, here on the
platform of Euston, looking so prosperous and solid. It was not
only the flesh that he had put on, but also the clothes, that
made him hard to recognise. In the old days, an imitation fur
coat had seemed to be as integral a part of him as were his
ill-shorn lantern jaws. But now his costume was a model of rich
and sombre moderation, drawing, not calling, attention to itself.
He looked like a banker. Any one would have been proud to be seen
off by him.</p>
<p>‘Stand back, please.’ The train was about to
start, and I waved farewell to my friend. Le Ros did not stand
back. He stood clasping in both hands the hands of the young
American. ‘Stand back, sir, please!’ He obeyed, but
quickly darted forward again to whisper some final word. I think
there were tears in her eyes. There certainly were tears in his
when, at length, having watched the train out of sight, he turned
round. He seemed, nevertheless, delighted to see me. He asked me
where I had been hiding all these years; and simultaneously
repaid me the half-crown as though it had been borrowed
yesterday. He linked his arm in mine, and walked me slowly along
the platform, saying with what pleasure he read my dramatic
criticisms every Saturday.</p>
<p>I told him, in return, how much he was missed on the stage.
‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘I never act on the stage
nowadays.’ He laid some emphasis on the word
‘stage,’ and I asked him where, then, he did act.
‘On the platform,’ he answered. ‘You
mean,’ said I, ‘that you recite at concerts?’
He smiled. ‘This,’ he whispered, striking his stick
on the ground, ‘is the platform I mean.’ Had his
mysterious prosperity unhinged him? He looked quite sane. I
begged him to be more explicit.</p>
<p>‘I suppose,’ he said presently, giving me a light
for the cigar which he had offered me, ‘you have been
seeing a friend off?’ I assented. He asked me what I
supposed <i>he</i> had been doing. I said that I had watched him
doing the same thing. ‘No,’ he said gravely.
‘That lady was not a friend of mine. I met her for the
first time this morning, less than half an hour ago,
<i>here</i>,’ and again he struck the platform with his
stick.</p>
<p>I confessed that I was bewildered. He smiled. ‘You
may,’ he said, ‘have heard of the Anglo-American
Social Bureau?’ I had not. He explained to me that of the
thousands of Americans who annually pass through England there
are many hundreds who have no English friends. In the old days
they used to bring letters of introduction. But the English are
so inhospitable that these letters are hardly worth the paper
they are written on. ‘Thus,’ said Le Ros, ‘the
A.A.S.B. supplies a long-felt want. Americans are a sociable
people, and most of them have plenty of money to spend. The
A.A.S.B. supplies them with English friends. Fifty per cent. of
the fees is paid over to the friends. The other fifty is retained
by the A.A.S.B. I am not, alas, a director. If I were, I should
be a very rich man indeed. I am only an employé. But even
so I do very well. I am one of the seers-off.’</p>
<p>Again I asked for enlightenment. ‘Many Americans,’
he said, ‘cannot afford to keep friends in England. But
they can all afford to be seen off. The fee is only five pounds
(twenty-five dollars) for a single traveller; and eight pounds
(forty dollars) for a party of two or more. They send that in to
the Bureau, giving the date of their departure, and a description
by which the seer-off can identify them on the platform. And
then—well, then they are seen off.’</p>
<p>‘But is it worth it?’ I exclaimed. ‘Of
course it is worth it,’ said Le Ros. ‘It prevents
them from feeling "out of it." It earns them the respect of the
guard. It saves them from being despised by their
fellow-passengers—the people who are going to be on the
boat. It gives them a <i>footing</i> for the whole voyage.
Besides, it is a great pleasure in itself. You saw me seeing that
young lady off. Didn’t you think I did it
beautifully?’ ‘Beautifully,’ I admitted.
‘I envied you. There was I—’ ‘Yes, I can
imagine. There were you, shuffling from foot to foot, staring
blankly at your friend, trying to make conversation. I know.
That’s how I used to be myself, before I studied, and went
into the thing professionally. I don’t say I’m
perfect yet. I’m still a martyr to platform fright. A
railway station is the most difficult of all places to act in, as
you have discovered for yourself.’ ‘But,’ I
said with resentment, ‘I wasn’t trying to act. I
really <i>felt</i>.’ ‘So did I, my boy,’ said
Le Ros. ‘You can’t act without feeling. What’s
his name, the Frenchman—Diderot, yes—said you could;
but what did <i>he</i> know about it? Didn’t you see those
tears in my eyes when the train started? I hadn’t forced
them. I tell you I was <i>moved</i>. So were you, I dare say. But
you couldn’t have pumped up a tear to prove it. You
can’t express your feelings. In other words, you
can’t act. At any rate,’ he added kindly, ‘not
in a railway station.’ ‘Teach me!’ I cried. He
looked thoughtfully at me. ‘Well,’ he said at length,
‘the seeing-off season is practically over. Yes, I’ll
give you a course. I have a good many pupils on hand already; but
yes,’ he said, consulting an ornate note-book, ‘I
could give you an hour on Tuesdays and Fridays.’</p>
<p>His terms, I confess, are rather high. But I don’t
grudge the investment.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>A MEMORY OF A MIDNIGHT EXPRESS</p>
<p>Often I have presentiments of evil; but, never having had one
of them fulfilled, I am beginning to ignore them. I find that I
have always walked straight, serenely imprescient, into whatever
trap Fate has laid for me. When I think of any horrible thing
that has befallen me, the horror is intensified by recollection
of its suddenness. ‘But a moment before, I had been quite
happy, quite secure. A moment later—’ I shudder. Why
be thus at Fate’s mercy always, when with a little ordinary
second sight…Yet no! That is the worst of a presentiment:
it never averts evil, it does but unnerve the victim. Best, after
all, to have only false presentiments like mine. Bolts that
cannot be dodged strike us kindliest from the blue.</p>
<p>And so let me be thankful that my sole emotion as I entered an
empty compartment at Holyhead was that craving for sleep which,
after midnight, overwhelms every traveller—especially the
Saxon traveller from tumultuous and quick-witted little Dublin.
Mechanically, comfortably, as I sank into a corner, I rolled my
rug round me, laid my feet against the opposite cushions,
twitched up my coat collar above my ears, twitched down my cap
over my eyes.</p>
<p>It was not the jerk of the starting train that half awoke me,
but the consciousness that some one had flung himself into the
compartment when the train was already in motion. I saw a small
man putting something in the rack—a large black hand-bag.
Through the haze of my sleep I saw him, vaguely resented him. He
had no business to have slammed the door like that, no business
to have jumped into a moving train, no business to put that huge
hand-bag into a rack which was ‘for light baggage
only,’ and no business to be wearing, at this hour and in
this place, a top-hat. These four peevish objections floated
sleepily together round my brain. It was not till the man turned
round, and I met his eye, that I awoke fully—awoke to
danger. I had never seen a murderer, but I knew that the man who
was so steadfastly peering at me now…I shut my eyes. I
tried to think. Could I be dreaming? In books I had read of
people pinching themselves to see whether they were really awake.
But in actual life there never was any doubt on that score. The
great thing was that I should keep all my wits about me.
Everything might depend on presence of mind. Perhaps this
murderer was mad. If you fix a lunatic with your eye…</p>
<p>Screwing up my courage, I fixed the man with my eye. I had
never seen such a horrible little eye as his. It was a sane eye,
too. It radiated a cold and ruthless sanity. It belonged not to a
man who would kill you wantonly, but to one who would not scruple
to kill you for a purpose, and who would do the job quickly and
neatly, and not be found out. Was he physically strong? Though he
looked very wiry, he was little and narrow, like his eyes. He
could not overpower me by force, I thought (and instinctively I
squared my shoulders against the cushions, that he might realise
the impossibility of overpowering me), but I felt he had enough
‘science’ to make me less than a match for him. I
tried to look cunning and determined. I longed for a moustache
like his, to hide my somewhat amiable mouth. I was thankful I
could not see his mouth—could not know the worst of the
face that was staring at me in the lamplight. And yet what could
be worse than his eyes, gleaming from the deep shadow cast by the
brim of his top-hat? What deadlier than that square jaw, with the
bone so sharply delineated under the taut skin?</p>
<p>The train rushed on, noisily swaying through the silence of
the night. I thought of the unseen series of placid landscapes
that we were passing through, of the unconscious cottagers
snoring there in their beds, of the safe people in the next
compartment to mine—to his. Not moving a muscle, we sat
there, we two, watching each other, like two hostile cats. Or
rather, I thought, he watched me as a snake watches a rabbit, and
I, like a rabbit, could not look away. I seemed to hear my heart
beating time to the train. Suddenly my heart was at a standstill,
and the double beat of the train receded faintly. The man was
pointing upwards…I shook my head. He had asked me in a low
voice, whether he should pull the hood across the lamp.</p>
<p>He was standing now with his back turned towards me, pulling
his hand-bag out of the rack. He had a furtive back—the
back of a man who, in his day, had borne many an alias. To this
day I am ashamed that I did not spring up and pinion him, there
and then. Had I possessed one ounce of physical courage, I should
have done so. A coward, I let slip the opportunity. I thought of
the communication-cord, but how could I move to it? He would be
too quick for me. He would be very angry with me. I would sit
quite still and wait. Every moment was a long reprieve to me now.
Something might intervene to save me. There might be a collision
on the line. Perhaps he was a quite harmless man…I caught
his eyes, and shuddered…</p>
<p>His bag was open on his knees. His right hand was groping in
it. (Thank Heaven he had not pulled the hood over the lamp!) I
saw him pull out something—a limp thing, made of black
cloth, not unlike the thing which a dentist places over your
mouth when laughing-gas is to be administered.
‘Laughing-gas, no laughing matter’—the
irrelevant and idiotic embryo of a pun dangled itself for an
instant in my brain. What other horrible thing would come out of
the bag? Perhaps some gleaming instrument?… He closed the
bag with a snap, laid it beside him. He took off his top-hat,
laid that beside him. I was surprised (I know not why) to see
that he was bald. There was a gleaming high light on his bald,
round head. The limp, black thing was a cap, which he slowly
adjusted with both hands, drawing it down over the brow and
behind the ears. It seemed to me as though he were, after all,
hooding the lamp; in my feverish fancy the compartment grew
darker when the orb of his head was hidden. The shadow of another
simile for his action came surging up… He had put on the
cap so gravely, so judicially. Yes, that was it: he had assumed
the black cap, that decent symbol which indemnifies the taker of
a life; and might the Lord have mercy on my soul… Already
he was addressing me… What had he said? I asked him to
repeat it. My voice sounded even further away than his. He
repeated that he thought we had met before. I heard my voice
saying politely, somewhere in the distance, that I thought not.
He suggested that I had been staying at some hotel in Colchester
six years ago. My voice, drawing a little nearer to me, explained
that I had never in my life been at Colchester. He begged my
pardon and hoped no offence would be taken where none had been
meant. My voice, coming right back to its own quarters, reassured
him that of course I had taken no offence at all, adding that I
myself very often mistook one face for another. He replied,
rather inconsequently, that the world was a small place.</p>
<p>Evidently he must have prepared this remark to follow my
expected admission that I <i>had</i> been at that hotel in
Colchester six years ago, and have thought it too striking a
remark to be thrown away. A guileless creature evidently, and not
a criminal at all. Then I reflected that most of the successful
criminals succeed rather through the incomparable guilelessness
of the police than through any devilish cunning in themselves.
Besides, this man looked the very incarnation of ruthless
cunning. Surely, he must but have dissembled. My suspicions of
him resurged. But somehow, I was no longer afraid of him.
Whatever crimes he might have been committing, and be going to
commit, I felt that he meant no harm to me. After all, why should
I have imagined myself to be in danger? Meanwhile, I would try to
draw the man out, pitting my wits against his.</p>
<p>I proceeded to do so. He was very voluble in a quiet way.
Before long I was in possession of all the materials for an
exhaustive biography of him. And the strange thing was that I
could not, with the best will in the world, believe that he was
lying to me. I had never heard a man telling so obviously the
truth. And the truth about any one, however commonplace, must
always be interesting. Indeed, it is the commonplace
truth—the truth of widest application—that is the
most interesting of all truths.</p>
<p>I do not now remember many details of this man’s story;
I remember merely that he was ‘travelling in lace,’
that he had been born at Boulogne (this was the one strange
feature of the narrative), that somebody had once left him
£100 in a will, and that he had a little daughter who was
‘as pretty as a pink.’ But at the time I was
enthralled. Besides, I liked the man immensely. He was a kind and
simple soul, utterly belying his appearance. I wondered how I
ever could have feared him and hated him. Doubtless, the reaction
from my previous state intensified the kindliness of my feelings.
Anyhow, my heart went out to him. I felt that we had known each
other for many years. While he poured out his recollections I
felt that he was an old crony, talking over old days which were
mine as well as his. Little by little, however, the slumber which
he had scared from me came hovering back. My eyelids drooped; my
comments on his stories became few and muffled.
‘There!’ he said, ‘you’re sleepy. I ought
to have thought of that.’ I protested feebly. He insisted
kindly. ‘You go to sleep,’ he said, rising and
drawing the hood over the lamp. It was dawn when I awoke. Some
one in a top-hat was standing over me and saying
‘Euston.’ ‘Euston?’ I repeated.
‘Yes, this is Euston. Good day to you.’ ‘Good
day to you,’ I repeated mechanically, in the grey dawn.</p>
<p>Not till I was driving through the cold empty streets did I
remember the episode of the night, and who it was that had awoken
me. I wished I could see my friend again. It was horrible to
think that perhaps I should never see him again. I had liked him
so much, and he had seemed to like me. I should not have said
that he was a happy man. There was something melancholy about
him. I hoped he would prosper. I had a foreboding that some great
calamity was in store for him, and wished I could avert it. I
thought of his little daughter who was ‘as pretty as a
pink.’ Perhaps Fate was going to strike him through her.
Perhaps when he got home he would find that she was dead. There
were tears in my eyes when I alighted on my doorstep.</p>
<p>Thus, within a little space of time, did I experience two deep
emotions, for neither of which was there any real justification.
I experienced terror, though there was nothing to be afraid of,
and I experienced sorrow, though there was nothing at all to be
sorry about. And both my terror and my sorrow were, at the time,
overwhelming.</p>
<p>You have no patience with me? Examine yourselves. Examine one
another. In every one of us the deepest emotions are constantly
caused by some absurdly trivial thing, or by nothing at all.
Conversely, the great things in our lives—the true
occasions for wrath, anguish, rapture, what not—very often
leave us quite calm. We never can depend on any right adjustment
of emotion to circumstance. That is one of many reasons which
prevent the philosopher from taking himself and his fellow-beings
quite so seriously as he would wish.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>PORRO UNUM...</p>
<p>By graceful custom, every newcomer to a throne in Europe pays
a round of visits to his neighbours. When King Edward came back
from seeing the Tsar at Reval, his subjects seemed to think that
he had fulfilled the last demand on his civility. That was in the
days of Abdul Hamid. None of us wished the King to visit Turkey.
Turkey is not internationally powerful, nor had Abdul any Guelph
blood in him; and so we were able to assert, by ignoring her and
him, our humanitarianism and passion for liberty, quite safely,
quite politely. Now that Abdul is deposed from ‘his
infernal throne,’ it is taken as a matter of course that
the King will visit his successor. Well, let His Majesty betake
himself and his tact and a full cargo of Victorian Orders to
Constantinople, by all means. But, on the way, nestling in the
very heart of Europe, perfectly civilised and strifeless,
jewelled all over with freedom, is another country which he has
not visited since his accession—a country which, oddly
enough, none but I seems to expect him to visit. Why, I ask,
should Switzerland be cold-shouldered?</p>
<p>I admit she does not appeal to the romantic imagination. She
never has, as a nation, counted for anything. Physically soaring
out of sight, morally and intellectually she has lain low and
said nothing. Not one idea, not one deed, has she to her credit.
All that is worth knowing of her history can be set forth without
compression in a few lines of a guide-book. Her one and only
hero—William Tell—never, as we now know, existed. He
has been proved to be a myth. Also, he is the one and only myth
that Switzerland has managed to create. He exhausted her poor
little stock of imagination. Living as pigmies among the blind
excesses of Nature, living on sufferance there, animalculae, her
sons have been overwhelmed from the outset, have had no chance
whatsoever of development. Even if they had a language of their
own, they would have no literature. Not one painter, not one
musician, have they produced; only couriers, guides, waiters, and
other parasites. A smug, tame, sly, dull, mercenary little race
of men, they exist by and for the alien tripper. They are the
fine flower of commercial civilisation, the shining symbol of
international comity, and have never done anybody any harm. I
cannot imagine why the King should not give them the incomparable
advertisement of a visit.</p>
<p>Not that they are badly in need of advertisement over here.
Every year the British trippers to Switzerland vastly outnumber
the British trippers to any other land—a fact which shows
how little the romantic imagination tells as against cheapness
and comfort of hotels and the notion that a heart strained by
climbing is good for the health. And this fact does but make our
Sovereign’s abstention the more remarkable. Switzerland is
not ‘smart,’ but a King is not the figure-head merely
of his <i>entourage</i>: he is the whole nation’s
figure-head. Switzerland, alone among nations, is a British
institution, and King Edward ought not to snub her. That we
expect him to do so without protest from us, seems to me a rather
grave symptom of flunkeyism.</p>
<p>Fiercely resenting that imputation, you proceed to raise
difficulties. ‘Who,’ you ask, ‘would there be
to receive the King in the name of the Swiss nation?’ I
promptly answer, ‘The President of the Swiss
Republic.’ You did not expect that. You had quite
forgotten, if indeed you had ever heard, that there was any such
person. For the life of you, you could not tell me his name.
Well, his name is not very widely known even in Switzerland. A
friend of mine, who was there lately, tells me that he asked one
Swiss after another what was the name of the President, and that
they all sought refuge in polite astonishment at such ignorance,
and, when pressed for the name, could only screw up their eyes,
snap their fingers, and feverishly declare that they had it on
the tips of their tongues. This is just as it should be. In an
ideal republic there should be no one whose name might not at any
moment slip the memory of his fellows. Some sort of foreman there
must be, for the State’s convenience; but the more obscure
he be, and the more automatic, the better for the ideal of
equality. In the Republics of France and of America the President
is of an extrusive kind. His office has been fashioned on the
monarchic model, and his whole position is anomalous. He has to
try to be ornamental as well as useful, a symbol as well as a
pivot. Obviously, it is absurd to single out one man as a symbol
of the equality of all men. And not less unreasonable is it to
expect him to be inspiring as a patriotic symbol, an incarnation
of his country. Only an anointed king, whose forefathers were
kings too, can be that. In France, where kings have been, no one
can get up the slightest pretence of emotion for the President.
If the President is modest and unassuming, and doesn’t, as
did the late M. Faure, make an ass of himself by behaving in a
kingly manner, he is safe from ridicule: the amused smiles that
follow him are not unkind. But in no case is any one proud of
him. Never does any one see France in him. In America, where no
kings have been, they are able to make a pretence of enthusiasm
for a President. But no real chord of national sentiment is
touched by this eminent gentleman who has no past or future
eminence, who has been shoved forward for a space and will anon
be sent packing in favour of some other upstart. Let some
princeling of a foreign State set foot in America, and lo! all
the inhabitants are tumbling over one another in their desire for
a glimpse of him—a desire which is the natural and pathetic
outcome of their unsatisfied inner craving for a dynasty of their
own. Human nature being what it is, a monarchy is the best
expedient, all the world over. But, given a republic, let the
thing be done thoroughly, let the appearance be well kept up, as
in Switzerland. Let the President be, as there, a furtive
creature and insignificant, not merely coming no man knows
whence, nor merely passing no man knows whither, but existing no
man knows where; and existing not even as a name—except on
the tip of the tongue. National dignity, as well as the
republican ideal, is served better thus. Besides, it is less
trying for the President.</p>
<p>And yet, stronger than all my sense of what is right and
proper is the desire in me that the President of the Swiss
Republic should, just for once, be dragged forth, blinking, from
his burrow in Berne (Berne is the capital of Switzerland), into
the glare of European publicity, and be driven in a landau to the
railway station, there to await the King of England and kiss him
on either cheek when he dismounts from the train, while the
massed orchestras of all the principal hotels play our national
anthem—and also a Swiss national anthem, hastily composed
for the occasion. I want him to entertain the King, that evening,
at a great banquet, whereat His Majesty will have the
President’s wife on his right hand, and will make a brief
but graceful speech in the Swiss language (English, French,
German, and Italian, consecutively) referring to the glorious and
never-to-be-forgotten name of William Tell (embarrassed silence),
and to the vast number of his subjects who annually visit
Switzerland (loud and prolonged cheers). Next morning, let there
be a review of twenty thousand waiters from all parts of the
country, all the head-waiters receiving a modest grade of the
Victorian Order. Later in the day, let the King visit the
National Gallery—a hall filled with picture post-cards of
the most picturesque spots in Switzerland; and thence let him be
conducted to the principal factory of cuckoo-clocks, and, after
some of the clocks have been made to strike, be heard remarking
to the President, with a hearty laugh, that the sound is like
that of the cuckoo. How the second day of the visit would be
filled up, I do not know; I leave that to the President’s
discretion. Before his departure to the frontier, the King will
of course be made honorary manager of one of the principal
hotels.</p>
<p>I hope to be present in Berne during these great days in the
President’s life. But, if anything happen to keep me here,
I shall content myself with the prospect of his visit to London.
I long to see him and his wife driving past, with the proper
escort of Life Guards, under a vista of quadrilingual mottoes,
bowing acknowledgments to us. I wonder what he is like. I picture
him as a small spare man, with a slightly grizzled beard, and
pleasant though shifty eyes behind a pince-nez. I picture him
frock-coated, bowler-hatted, and evidently nervous. His wife I
cannot at all imagine.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>A CLUB IN RUINS</p>
<p>An antique ruin has its privileges. The longer the period of
its crumbling, the more do the owls build their nests in it, the
more do the excursionists munch in it their sandwiches. Thus,
year by year, its fame increases, till it looks back with
contempt on the days when it was a mere upright waterproof. Local
guide-books pander more and more slavishly to its pride;
leader-writers in need of a pathetic metaphor are more and more
frequently supplied by it. If there be any sordid question of
clearing it away to make room for something else, the public
outcry is positively deafening.</p>
<p>Not that we are still under the sway of that peculiar cult
which beset us in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. A
bad poet or painter can no longer reap the reward of genius
merely by turning his attention to ruins under moonlight. Nor
does any one cause to be built in his garden a broken turret, for
the evocation of sensibility in himself and his guests. There
used to be one such turret near the summit of Campden Hill; but
that familiar imposture was rased a year or two ago, no one
protesting. <i>Fuit</i> the frantic factitious sentimentalism for
ruins. On the other hand, the sentiment for them is as strong as
ever it was. Decrepit Carisbrooke and its rivals annually tighten
their hold on Britannia’s heart.</p>
<p>I do not grudge them their success. But the very fact that
they are so successful inclines me to reserve my own personal
sentiment rather for those unwept, unsung ruins which so often
confront me, here and there, in the streets of this aggressive
metropolis. The ruins made, not by Time, but by the ruthless
skill of Labour, the ruins of houses not old enough to be
sacrosanct nor new enough to keep pace with the demands of a
gasping and plethoric community—these are the ruins that
move <i>me</i> to tears. No owls flutter in them. No trippers
lunch in them. In no guide-book or leading-article will you find
them mentioned. Their pathetic interiors gape to the sky and to
the street, but nor gods nor men hold out a hand to save them.
The patterns of bedroom wall-papers, (chosen with what care,
after how long discussion! only a few short years or months ago)
stare out their obvious, piteous appeal to us for mercy. And
their dumb agony is echoed dumbly by the places where doors have
been—doors that lately were tapped at by respectful
knuckles; or the places where staircases have
been—staircases down whose banisters lately slid little
children, laughing. Exposed, humiliated, doomed, the home throws
out a hundred pleas to us. And the Pharisaic community passes by
on the other side of the way, in fear of a falling brick. Down
come the walls of the home, as quickly as pickaxes can send them.
Down they crumble, piecemeal, into the foundations, and are
carted away. Soon other walls will be rising—red-brick
‘residential’ walls, more in harmony with the
Zeitgeist. None but I pays any heed to the ruins. I am their only
friend. Me they attract so irresistibly that I haunt the door of
the hoarding that encloses them, and am frequently mistaken for
the foreman.</p>
<p>A few summers ago, I was watching, with more than usual
emotion, the rasure of a great edifice at a corner of Hanover
Square. There were two reasons why this rasure especially
affected me. I had known the edifice so well, by sight, ever
since I was a small boy, and I had always admired it as a fine
example of that kind of architecture which is the most suitable
to London’s atmosphere. Though I must have passed it
thousands of times, I had never passed without an upward smile of
approval that gaunt and sombre façade, with its long
straight windows, its well-spaced columns, its long straight
coping against the London sky. My eyes deplored that these noble
and familiar things must perish. For sake of what they had
sheltered, my heart deplored that they must perish. The falling
edifice had not been exactly a home. It had been even more than
that. It had been a refuge from many homes. It had been a
club.</p>
<p>Certainly it had not been a particularly distinguished club.
Its demolition could not have been stayed on the plea that
Charles James Fox had squandered his substance in its card-room,
or that Lord Melbourne had loved to doze on the bench in its
hall. Nothing sublime had happened in it. No sublime person had
belonged to it. Persons without the vaguest pretensions to
sublimity had always, I believe, found quick and easy entrance
into it. It had been a large nondescript affair. But (to adapt
Byron) a club’s a club tho’ every one’s in it.
The ceremony of election gives it a <i>cachet</i> which not even
the smartest hotel has. And then there is the note-paper, and
there are the newspapers, and the cigars at wholesale prices, and
the not-to-be-tipped waiters, and other blessings for mankind. If
the members of this club had but migrated to some other building,
taking their effects and their constitution with them, the ruin
would have been pathetic enough. But alas! the outward wreck was
a symbol, a result, of inner dissolution. Through the door of the
hoarding the two pillars of the front door told a sorry tale.
Pasted on either of them was a dingy bill, bearing the sinister
imprimatur of an auctioneer, and offering (in capitals of various
sizes) Bedroom Suites (Walnut and Mahogany), Turkey, Indian and
Wilton Pile Carpets, Two Full-sized Billiard-Tables, a Remington
Type-writer, a Double Door (Fire-Proof), and other objects not
less useful and delightful. The club, then, had gone to smash.
The members had been disbanded, driven out of this Eden by the
fiery sword of the Law, driven back to their homes. Sighing over
the marcescibility of human happiness, I peered between the
pillars into the excavated and chaotic hall. The porter’s
hatch was still there, in the wall. There it was, wondering why
no inquiries were made through it now, or, may be, why it had not
been sold into bondage with the double-door and the rest of the
fixtures. A melancholy relic of past glories! I crossed over to
the other side of the road, and passed my eye over the whole
ruin. The roof, the ceilings, most of the inner walls, had
already fallen. Little remained but the grim, familiar
façade—a thin husk. I noted (that which I had never
noted before) two iron grills in the masonry. Miserable
travesties of usefulness, ventilating the open air! Through the
gaping windows, against the wall of the next building, I saw in
mid-air the greenish Lincrusta Walton of what I guessed to have
been the billiard-room—the billiard-room that had boasted
two full-sized tables. Above it ran a frieze of white and gold.
It was interspersed with flat Corinthian columns. The gilding of
the capitals was very fresh, and glittered gaily under the summer
sunbeams.</p>
<p>And hardly a day of the next autumn and winter passed but I
was drawn back to the ruin by a kind of lugubrious magnetism. The
strangest thing was that the ruin seemed to remain in practically
the same state as when first I had come upon it: the
façade still stood high. This might have been due to the
proverbial laziness of British workmen, but I did not think it
could be. The workmen were always plying their pick-axes, with
apparent gusto and assiduity, along the top of the building;
bricks and plaster were always crashing down into the depths and
sending up clouds of dust. I preferred to think the building
renewed itself, by some magical process, every night. I preferred
to think it was prepared thus to resist its aggressors for so
long a time that in the end there would be an intervention from
other powers. Perhaps from this site no ‘residential’
affair was destined to scrape the sky? Perhaps that saint to whom
the club had dedicated itself would reappear, at length, glorious
equestrian, to slay the dragons who had infested and desecrated
his premises? I wondered whether he would then restore the ruins,
reinstating the club, and setting it for ever on a sound
commercial basis, or would leave them just as they were, a fixed
signal to sensibility.</p>
<p>But, when first I saw the poor façade being pick-axed,
I did not ‘give’ it more than a fortnight. I had no
feeling but of hopeless awe and pity. The workmen on the coping
seemed to me ministers of inexorable Olympus, executing an
Olympian decree. And the building seemed to me a live victim, a
scapegoat suffering sullenly for sins it had not committed. To me
it seemed to be flinching under every rhythmic blow of those
well-wielded weapons, praying for the hour when sunset should
bring it surcease from that daily ordeal. I caught myself nodding
to it—a nod of sympathy, of hortation to endurance.
Immediately, I was ashamed of my lapse into anthropomorphism. I
told myself that my pity ought to be kept for the real men who
had been frequenters of the building, who now were waifs. I
reviewed the gaping, glassless windows through which they had
been wont to watch the human comedy. There they had stood,
puffing their smoke and cracking their jests, and tearing
women’s reputations to shreds.</p>
<p>Not that I, personally, have ever heard a woman’s
reputation torn to shreds in a club window. A constant reader of
lady-novelists, I have always been hoping for this excitement,
but somehow it has never come my way. I am beginning to suspect
that it never will, and am inclined to regard it as a figment.
Such conversation as I have heard in clubs has been always of a
very mild, perfunctory kind. A social club (even though it be a
club with a definite social character) is a collection of
heterogeneous creatures, and its aim is perfect harmony and
good-fellowship. Thus any definite expression of opinion by any
member is regarded as dangerous. The ideal clubman is he who
looks genial and says nothing at all. Most Englishmen find little
difficulty in conforming with this ideal. They belong to a silent
race. Social clubs flourish, therefore, in England. Intelligent
foreigners, seeing them, recognise their charm, and envy us them,
and try to reproduce them at home. But the Continent is too
loquacious. On it social clubs quickly degenerate into
bear-gardens, and the basic ideal of good-fellowship goes by the
board. In Paris, Petersburg, Vienna, the only social clubs that
prosper are those which are devoted to games of
chance—those which induce silence by artificial means. Were
I a foreign visitor, taking cursory glances, I should doubtless
be delighted with the clubs of London. Had I the honour to be an
Englishman, I should doubtless love them. But being a foreign
resident, I am somewhat oppressed by them. I crave in them a
little freedom of speech, even though such freedom were their
ruin. I long for their silence to be broken here and there, even
though such breakage broke them with it. It is not enough for me
to hear a hushed exchange of mild jokes about the weather, or of
comparisons between what the <i>Times</i> says and what the
<i>Standard</i> says. I pine for a little vivacity, a little
boldness, a little variety, a few gestures. A London club, as it
is conducted, seems to me very like a catacomb. It is tolerable
so long as you do not actually belong to it. But when you do
belong to it, when you have outlived the fleeting gratification
at having been elected, when you…but I ought not to have
fallen into the second person plural. You, readers, are free-born
Englishmen. These clubs ‘come natural’ to you. You
love them. To them you slip eagerly from your homes. As for me,
poor alien, had I been a member of the club whose demolition has
been my theme, I should have grieved for it not one whit the more
bitterly. Indeed, my tears would have been a trifle less salt. It
was my detachment that enabled me to be so prodigal of pity.</p>
<p>The poor waifs! Long did I stand, in the sunshine of that day
when first I saw the ruin, wondering and distressed, ruthful,
indignant that such things should be. I forgot on what errand I
had come out. I recalled it. Once or twice I walked away, bent on
its fulfilment. But I could not proceed further than a few yards.
I halted, looked over my shoulder, was drawn back to the spot,
drawn by the crude, insistent anthem of the pick-axes. The sun
slanted towards Notting Hill. Still I loitered,
spellbound… I was aware of some one at my side, some one
asking me a question. ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.
The stranger was a tall man, bronzed and bearded. He repeated his
question. In answer, I pointed silently to the ruin.
‘<i>That?</i>’ he gasped. He stared vacantly. I saw
that his face had become pale under its sunburn. He looked from
the ruin to me. ‘You’re not joking with me?’ he
said thickly. I assured him that I was not. I assured him that
this was indeed the club to which he had asked to be directed.
‘But,’ he stammered,
‘but—but—’ ‘You were a
member?’ I suggested. ‘I <i>am</i> a member,’
he cried. ‘And what’s more, I’m going to write
to the Committee.’ I suggested that there was one fatal
objection to such a course. I spoke to him calmly, soothed him
with words of reason, elicited from him, little by little, his
sad story. It appeared that he had been a member of the club for
ten years, but had never (except once, as a guest) been inside
it. He had been elected on the very day on which (by compulsion
of his father) he set sail for Australia. He was a mere boy at
the time. Bitterly he hated leaving old England; nor did he ever
find the life of a squatter congenial. The one thing which
enabled him to endure those ten years of unpleasant exile was the
knowledge that he was a member of a London club. Year by year, it
was a keen pleasure to him to send his annual subscription. It
kept him in touch with civilisation, in touch with Home. He loved
to know that when, at length, he found himself once again in the
city of his birth he would have a firm foothold on sociability.
The friends of his youth might die, or might forget him. But, as
member of a club, he would find substitutes for them in less than
no time. Herding bullocks, all day long, on the arid plains of
Central Australia, he used to keep up his spirits by thinking of
that first whisky-and-soda which he would order from a respectful
waiter as he entered his club. All night long, wrapped in his
blanket beneath the stars, he used to dream of that drink to
come, that first symbol of an unlost grip on civilisation…
He had arrived in London this very afternoon. Depositing his
luggage at an hotel, he had come straight to his club. ‘And
now…’ He filled up his aposiopesis with an uncouth
gesture, signifying ‘I may as well get back to
Australia.’</p>
<p>I was on the point of offering to take him to my own club and
give him his first whisky-and-soda therein. But I refrained. The
sight of an extant club might have maddened the man. It certainly
was very hard for him, to have belonged to a club for ten years,
to have loved it so passionately from such a distance, and then
to find himself destined never to cross its threshold. Why, after
all, should he not cross its threshold? I asked him if he would
like to. ‘What,’ he growled, ‘would be the
good?’ I appealed, not in vain, to the imaginative side of
his nature. I went to the door of the hoarding, and explained
matters to the foreman; and presently, nodding to me solemnly, he
passed with the foreman through the gap between the doorposts. I
saw him crossing the excavated hall, crossing it along a plank,
slowly and cautiously. His attitude was very like
Blondin’s, but it had a certain tragic dignity which
Blondin’s lacked. And that was the last I saw of him. I
hailed a cab and drove away. What became of the poor fellow I do
not know. Often as I returned to the ruin, and long as I loitered
by it, him I never saw again. Perhaps he really did go straight
back to Australia. Or perhaps he induced the workmen to bury him
alive in the foundations. His fate, whatever it was, haunts
me.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>‘273’</p>
<p>This is an age of prescriptions. Morning after morning, from
the back-page of your newspaper, quick and uncostly cures for
every human ill thrust themselves wildly on you. The age of
miracles is not past. But I would raise no false hopes of myself.
I am no thaumaturgist. Do you awake with a sinking sensation in
the stomach? Have you lost the power of assimilating food? Are
you oppressed with an indescribable lassitude? Can you no longer
follow the simplest train of thought? Are you troubled throughout
the night with a hacking cough? Are you—in fine, are you
but a tissue of all the most painful symptoms of all the most
malignant maladies ancient and modern? If so, skip this essay,
and try Somebody’s Elixir. The cure that I offer is but a
cure for overwrought nerves—a substitute for the ordinary
‘rest-cure.’ Nor is it absurdly cheap. Nor is it
instant. It will take a week or so of your time. But then, the
‘rest-cure’ takes at least a month. The scale of
payment for board and lodging may be, per diem, hardly lower than
in the ‘rest-cure’; but you will save all but a pound
or so of the very heavy fees that you would have to pay to your
doctor and your nurse (or nurses). And certainly, my cure is the
more pleasant of the two. My patient does not have to cease from
life. He is not undressed and tucked into bed and forbidden to
stir hand or foot during his whole term. He is not forbidden to
receive letters, or to read books, or to look on any face but his
nurse’s (or nurses’). Nor, above all, is he condemned
to the loathsome necessity of eating so much food as to make him
dread the sight of food. Doubtless, the grim, inexorable process
of the ‘rest-cure’ is very good for him who is strong
enough and brave enough to bear it, and rich enough to pay for
it. I address myself to the frailer, cowardlier, needier man.
Instead of ceasing from life, and entering purgatory, he need but
essay a variation in life. He need but go and stay by himself in
one of those vast modern hotels which abound along the South and
East coasts.</p>
<p>You are disappointed? All simple ideas are disappointing. And
all good cures spring from simple ideas.</p>
<p>The right method of treating overwrought nerves is to get the
patient away from himself—to make a new man of him; and
this trick can be done only by switching him off from his usual
environment, his usual habits. The ordinary rest-cure, by its
very harshness, intensifies a man’s personality at first,
drives him miserably within himself; and only by its long
duration does it gradually wear him down and build him up anew.
There is no harshness in the vast hotels which I have
recommended. You may eat there as little as you like, especially
if you are <i>en pension</i>. Letters may be forwarded to you
there; though, unless your case is a very mild one, I would
advise you not to leave your address at home. There are
reading-rooms where you can see all the newspapers; though I
advise you to ignore them. You suffer under no sense of tyranny.
And yet, no sooner have you signed your name in the
visitors’ book, and had your bedroom allotted to you, than
you feel that you have surrendered yourself irrepleviably. It is
not necessary to this illusion that you should pass under an
assumed name, unless you happen to be a very eminent actor, or
cricketer, or other idol of the nation, whose presence would
flutter the young persons at the bureau. If your nervous
breakdown be (as it more likely is) due to merely intellectual
distinction, these young persons will mete out to you no more
than the bright callous civility which they mete out impartially
to all (but those few) who come before them. To them you will be
a number, and to yourself you will have suddenly become a
number—the number graven on the huge brass label that
depends clanking from the key put into the hand of the summoned
chambermaid. You are merely (let us say) 273.</p>
<p>Up you go in the lift, realising, as for the first time, your
insignificance in infinity, and rather proud to be even a number.
You recognise your double on the door that has been unlocked for
you. No prisoner, clapped into his cell, could feel less
personal, less important. A notice on the wall, politely
requesting you to leave your key at the bureau (as though you
were strong enough or capacious enough to carry it about with
you) comes as a pleasant reminder of your freedom. You remember
joyously that you are even free from yourself. You have begun a
new life, have forgotten the old. This mantelpiece, so strangely
and brightly bare of photographs or ‘knickknacks,’ is
meaning in its meaninglessness. And these blank, fresh walls,
that you have never seen, and that never were seen by any one
whom you know…their pattern is of poppies and mandragora,
surely. Poppies and mandragora are woven, too, on the brand-new
Axminster beneath your elastic step. ‘Come in!’ A
porter bears in your trunk, deposits it on a trestle at the foot
of the bed, unstraps it, leaves you alone with it. It seems to be
trying to remind you of something or other. You do not listen.
You laugh as you open it. You know that if you examined these
shirts you would find them marked ‘273.’ Before
dressing for dinner, you take a hot bath. There are patent taps,
some for fresh water, others for sea water. You hesitate. Yet you
know that whichever you touch will effuse but the water of Lethe,
after all. You dress before your fire. The coals have burnt now
to a lovely glow. Once and again, you eye them suspiciously. But
no, there are no faces in them. All’s well.</p>
<p>Sleek and fresh, you sit down to dinner in the ‘Grande
Salle à Manger.’ Graven on your wine-glasses,
emblazoned on your soup-plate, are the armorial bearings of the
company that shelters you. The College of Arms might sneer at
them, be down on them, but to you they are a joy, in their grand
lack of links with history. They are a sympathetic symbol of your
own newness, your own impersonality. You glance down the endless
menu. It has been composed for a community. None of your
favourite dishes (you once had favourite dishes) appears in it,
thank heaven! You will work your way through it, steadily,
unquestioningly, gladly, with a communal palate. And the wine?
All wines are alike here, surely. You scour the list vaguely, and
order a pint of 273. Your eye roves over the adjacent tables.</p>
<p>You behold a galaxy of folk evidently born, like yourself,
anew. Some, like yourself, are solitary. Others are with wives,
with children—but with new wives, new children. The
associations of home have been forgotten, even though
home’s actual appendages be here. The members of the little
domestic circles are using company manners. They are actually
making conversation, ‘breaking the ice.’ They are new
here to one another. They are new to themselves. How much newer
to you! You cannot ‘place’ them. That paterfamilias
with the red moustache—is he a soldier, a solicitor, a
stockbroker, what? You play vaguely, vainly, at the game of
attributions, while the little orchestra in yonder bower of
artificial palm-trees plays new, or seemingly new, cake-walks.
Who are they, these minstrels in the shadow? They seem not to be
the Red Hungarians, nor the Blue, nor the Hungarians of any other
colour of the spectrum. You set them down as the Colourless
Hungarians, and resume your study of the tables. They fascinate
you, these your fellow-diners. You fascinate them, doubtless.
They, doubtless, are cudgelling their brains to
‘spot’ <i>your</i> state in life—<i>your</i>
past, which now has escaped you. Next day, some of them are gone;
and you miss them, almost bitterly. But others succeed them, not
less detached and enigmatic than they. You must never speak to
one of them. You must never lapse into those casual acquaintances
of the ‘lounge’ or the smoking-room. Nor is it hard
to avoid them. No Englishman, how gregarious and garrulous
soever, will dare address another Englishman in whose eye is no
spark of invitation. There must be no such spark in yours.
Silence is part of the cure for you, and a very important part.
It is mainly through unaccustomed silence that your nerves are
made trim again. Usually, you are giving out in talk all that you
receive through your senses of perception. Keep silence now. Its
gold will accumulate in you at compound interest. You will
realise the joy of being full of reflections and ideas. You will
begin to hoard them proudly, like a miser. You will gloat over
your own cleverness—you, who but a few days since, were
feeling so stupid. Solitude in a crowd, silence among
chatterboxes—these are the best ministers to a mind
diseased. And with the restoration of the mind, the body will be
restored too. You, who were physically so limp and pallid, will
be a ruddy Hercules now. And when, at the moment of departure,
you pass through the hall, shyly distributing to the servants
that largesse which is so slight in comparison with what your
doctor and nurse (or nurses) would have levied on you, you will
feel that you are more than fit to resume that burden of
personality whereunder you had sunk. You will be victoriously
yourself again.</p>
<p>Yet I think you will look back a little wistfully on the
period of your obliteration. People—for people are very
nice, really, most of them—will tell you that they have
missed you. You will reply that you did not miss yourself. And
you will go the more strenuously to your work and pleasure, so as
to have the sooner an excuse for a good riddance.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>A STUDY IN DEJECTION</p>
<p>Riderless the horse was, and with none to hold his bridle. But
he waited patiently, submissively, there where I saw him, at the
shabby corner of a certain shabby little street in Chelsea.
‘My beautiful, my beautiful, thou standest meekly
by,’ sang Mrs. Norton of her Arab steed, ‘with thy
proudly-arched and glossy neck, thy dark and fiery eye.’
Catching the eye of this other horse, I saw that such fire as
might once have blazed there had long smouldered away. Chestnut
though he was, he had no mettle. His chestnut coat was all dull
and rough, unkempt as that of an inferior cab-horse. Of his once
luxuriant mane there were but a few poor tufts now. His saddle
was torn and weather-stained. The one stirrup that dangled
therefrom was red with rust.</p>
<p>I never saw in any creature a look of such unutterable
dejection. Dejection, in the most literal sense of the word,
indeed was his. He had been cast down. He had fallen from higher
and happier things. With his ‘arched neck,’ and with
other points which not neglect nor ill-usage could rob of their
old grace, he had kept something of his fallen day about him. In
the window of the little shop outside which he stood were things
that seemed to match him—things appealing to the sense that
he appealed to. A tarnished French mirror, a strip of faded
carpet, some rows of battered, tattered books, a few cups and
saucers that had erst been riveted and erst been dusted—all
these, in a gallimaufry of other languid odds and ends, seen
through this mud-splashed window, silently echoed the silent
misery of the horse. They were remembering Zion. They had been
beautiful once, and expensive, and well cared for, and admired,
and coveted. And now…</p>
<p><i>They</i> had, at least, the consolation of being indoors.
Public laughing-stock though they were, they had a barrier of
glass between themselves and the irreverent world. To be warm and
dry, too, was something. Piteous, they could yet afford to pity
the horse. He was more ludicrously, more painfully, misplaced
than they. A real blood-horse that has done his work is rightly
left in the open air—turned out into some sweet meadow or
paddock. It would be cruel to make him spend his declining years
inside a house, where no grass is. Is it less cruel that a fine
old rocking-horse should be thrust from the nursery out into the
open air, upon the pavement?</p>
<p>Perhaps some child had just given the horse a contemptuous
shove in passing. For he was rocking gently when I chanced to see
him. Nor did he cease to rock, with a slight creak upon the
pavement, so long as I watched him. A particularly black and
bitter north wind was blowing round the corner of the street.
Perhaps it was this that kept the horse in motion. Boreas
himself, invisible to my mortal eyes, may have been astride the
saddle, lashing the tired old horse to this futile activity. But
no, I think rather that the poor thing was rocking of his own
accord, rocking to attract my attention. He saw in me a possible
purchaser. He wanted to show me that he was still sound in wind
and limb. Had I a small son at home? If so, here was the very
mount for him. None of your frisky, showy, first-hand young
brutes, on which no fond parent ought to risk his
offspring’s bones; but a sound, steady-going, well-mannered
old hack with never a spark of vice in him! Such was the message
that I read in the glassy eye fixed on me. The nostril of faded
scarlet seemed for a moment to dilate and quiver. At last, at
last, was some one going to inquire his price?</p>
<p>Once upon a time, in a far-off fashionable toy-shop, his price
had been prohibitive; and he, the central attraction behind the
gleaming shop-window, had plumed himself on his expensiveness. He
had been in no hurry to be bought. It had seemed to him a good
thing to stand there motionless, majestic, day after day, far
beyond the reach of average purses, and having in his mien
something of the frigid nobility of the horses on the Parthenon
frieze, with nothing at all of their unreality. A coat of real
chestnut hair, glossy, glorious! From end to end of the Parthenon
frieze not one of the horses had that. From end to end of the
toy-shop that exhibited him not one of the horses was thus
graced. Their flanks were mere wood, painted white, with
arbitrary blotches of grey here and there. Miserable creatures!
It was difficult to believe that they had souls. No wonder they
were cheap, and ‘went off,’ as the shopman said, so
quickly, whilst <i>he</i> stayed grandly on, cynosure of eyes
that dared not hope for him. Into bondage they went off, those
others, and would be worked to death, doubtless, by brutal little
boys.</p>
<p>When, one fine day, a lady was actually not shocked by the
price demanded for him, his pride was hurt. And when, that
evening, he was packed in brown paper and hoisted to the roof of
a four-wheeler, he faced the future fiercely. Who was this lady
that her child should dare bestride him? With a biblical
‘ha, ha,’ he vowed that the child should not stay
long in saddle: he must be thrown—badly—even though
it <i>was</i> his seventh birthday. But this wicked intention
vanished while the child danced around him in joy and wonder.
Never yet had so many compliments been showered on him. Here,
surely, was more the manner of a slave than of a master. And how
lightly the child rode him, with never a tug or a kick! And oh,
how splendid it was to be flying thus through the air! Horses
were made to be ridden; and he had never before savoured the true
joy of life, for he had never known his own strength and
fleetness. Forward! Backward! Faster, faster! To floor! To
ceiling! Regiments of leaden soldiers watched his wild career.
Noah’s quiet sedentary beasts gaped up at him in
wonderment—as tiny to him as the gaping cows in the fields
are to you when you pass by in an express train. This was life
indeed! He remembered Katafalto—remembered Eclipse and the
rest nowhere. Aye, thought he, and even thus must Black Bess have
rejoiced along the road to York. And Bucephalus, skimming under
Alexander the plains of Asia, must have had just this glorious
sense of freedom. Only less so! Not Pegasus himself can have
flown more swiftly. Pegasus, at last, became a constellation in
the sky. ‘Some day,’ reflected the rocking-horse,
when the ride was over, ‘I, too, shall die; and five stars
will appear on the nursery ceiling.’</p>
<p>Alas for the vanity of equine ambition! I wonder by what
stages this poor beast came down in the world. Did the little
boy’s father go bankrupt, leaving it to be sold in a
‘lot’ with the other toys? Or was it merely given
away, when the little boy grew up, to a poor but procreative
relation, who anon became poorer? I should like to think that it
had been mourned. But I fear that whatever mourning there may
have been for it must have been long ago discarded. The creature
did not look as if it had been ridden in any recent decade. It
looked as if it had almost abandoned the hope of ever being
ridden again. It was but hoping against hope now, as it stood
rocking there in the bleak twilight. Bright warm nurseries were
for younger, happier horses. Still it went on rocking, to show me
that it <i>could</i> rock.</p>
<p>The more sentimental a man is, the less is he helpful; the
more loth is he to cancel the cause of his emotion. I did not buy
the horse.</p>
<p>A few days later, passing that way, I wished to renew my
emotion; but lo! the horse was gone. Had some finer person than I
bought it?—towed it to the haven where it would be?
Likelier, it had but been relegated to some mirky recess of the
shop… I hope it has room to rock there.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>A PATHETIC IMPOSTURE</p>
<p>Lord Rosebery once annoyed the Press by declaring that his
ideal newspaper was one which should give its news without
comment. Doubtless he was thinking of the commonweal. Yet a plea
for no comments might be made, with equal force, in behalf of the
commentators themselves. Occupations that are injurious to the
persons engaged in them ought not to be encouraged. The writing
of ‘leaders’ and ‘notes’ is one of these
occupations. The practice of it, more than of any other, depends
on, and fosters hypocrisy, worst of vices. In a sense, every kind
of writing is hypocritical. It has to be done with an air of
gusto, though no one ever yet enjoyed the act of writing. Even a
man with a specific gift for writing, with much to express, with
perfect freedom in choice of subject and manner of expression,
with indefinite leisure, does not write with real gusto. But in
him the pretence is justified: he has enjoyed thinking out his
subject, he will delight in his work when it is done. Very
different is the pretence of one who writes at top-speed, on a
set subject, what he <i>thinks</i> the editor <i>thinks</i> the
proprietor <i>thinks</i> the public thinks nice. If he happen to
have a talent for writing, his work will be but the more painful,
and his hypocrisy the greater. The chances are, though, that the
talent has already been sucked out of him by Journalism, that
vampire. To her, too, he will have forfeited any fervour he may
have had, any learning, any gaiety. How can he, the jaded
interpreter, hold any opinion, feel any enthusiasm?—without
leisure, keep his mind in cultivation?—be sprightly to
order, at unearthly hours in a whir-r-ring office? To order! Yes,
sprightliness is compulsory there; so are weightiness, and
fervour, and erudition. He must seem to abound in these
advantages, or another man will take his place. He must disguise
himself at all costs. But disguises are not easy to make; they
require time and care, which he cannot afford. So he must snatch
up ready-made disguises—unhook them, rather. He must know
all the cant-phrases, the cant-references. There are very, very
many of them, and belike it is hard to keep them all at
one’s finger-tips. But, at least, there is no difficulty in
collecting them. Plod through the ‘leaders’ and
‘notes’ in half-a-dozen of the daily papers, and you
will bag whole coveys of them.</p>
<p>Most of the morning papers still devote much space to the
old-fashioned kind of ‘leader,’ in which the pretence
is of weightiness, rather than of fervour, sprightliness, or
erudition. The effect of weightiness is obtained simply by a
stupendous disproportion of language to sense. The longest and
most emphatic words are used for the simplest and most trivial
statements, and they are always so elaborately qualified as to
leave the reader with a vague impression that a very difficult
matter, which he himself cannot make head or tail of, has been
dealt with in a very judicial and exemplary manner.</p>
<p>A leader-writer would not, for instance, say—</p>
<p><i>Lord Rosebery has made a paradox.</i></p>
<p>He would say:—</p>
<p><i>Lord Rosebery</i></p>
<p><i>whether intentionally or otherwise, we leave our readers to
decide,</i></p>
<p>or, <i>with seeming conviction,</i></p>
<p>or, <i>doubtless giving rein to the playful humour which is
characteristic of him,</i></p>
<p><i>has</i></p>
<p><i>expressed a sentiment,</i></p>
<p>or, <i>taken on himself to enunciate a theory,</i></p>
<p>or, <i>made himself responsible for a dictum,</i></p>
<p><i>which,</i></p>
<p><i>we venture to assert,</i></p>
<p>or, <i>we have little hesitation in declaring,</i></p>
<p>or, <i>we may be pardoned for thinking,</i></p>
<p>or, <i>we may say without fear of contradiction,</i></p>
<p><i>is</i></p>
<p><i>nearly akin to</i></p>
<p>or, <i>not very far removed from</i></p>
<p><i>the paradoxical.</i></p>
<p>But I will not examine further the trick of
weightiness—it takes up too much of my space. Besides,
these long ‘leaders’ are a mere survival, and will
soon disappear altogether. The ‘notes’ are the
characteristic feature of the modern newspaper, and it is in them
that the modern journalist displays his fervour, sprightliness,
and erudition. ‘Note’-writing, like chess, has
certain recognised openings, <i>e.g.</i>:—</p>
<p><i>There is no new thing under the sun.</i></p>
<p><i>It is always the unexpected that happens.</i></p>
<p><i>Nature, as we know, abhors a vacuum.</i></p>
<p><i>The late Lord Coleridge once electrified his court by
inquiring ‘Who is Connie Gilchrist?’</i></p>
<p>And here are some favourite methods of conclusion:—</p>
<p><i>A mad world, my masters!</i></p>
<p><i>’Tis true ’tis pity, and pity ’tis
’tis true.</i></p>
<p><i>There is much virtue in that ‘if.’</i></p>
<p><i>But that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another
story.</i></p>
<p><i>Si non è vero, etc.</i></p>
<p>or (lighter style)</p>
<p><i>We fancy we recognise here the hand of Mr. Benjamin
Trovato.</i></p>
<p>Not less inevitable are such parallelisms as:—</p>
<p><i>Like Topsy, perhaps it ‘growed.’</i></p>
<p><i>Like the late Lord Beaconsfield on a famous occasion,
‘on the side of the angels.’</i></p>
<p><i>Like Brer Rabbit, ‘To lie low and say
nuffin.’</i></p>
<p><i>Like Oliver Twist, ‘To ask for more.’</i></p>
<p><i>Like Sam Weller’s knowledge of</i> <i>London,
‘extensive and peculiar.’</i></p>
<p><i>Like Napoleon, a believer in ‘the big
battalions.’</i></p>
<p>Nor let us forget Pyrrhic victory, Parthian dart, and Homeric
laughter; <i>quos deus vult</i> and <i>nil de mortuis;</i> Sturm
und Drang; masterly inactivity, unctuous rectitude, mute
inglorious Miltons, and damned good-natured friends; the sword of
Damocles, the thin edge of the wedge, the long arm of
coincidence, and the soul of goodness in things evil;
Hobson’s choice, Frankenstein’s monster,
Macaulay’s schoolboy, Lord Burleigh’s nod, Sir Boyle
Roche’s bird, Mahomed’s coffin, and Davy
Jones’s locker.</p>
<p>A melancholy catalogue, is it not? But it is less melancholy
for you who read it here, than for them whose existence depends
on it, who draw from it a desperate means of seeming to
accomplish what is impossible. And yet these are the men who
shrank in horror from Lord Rosebery’s merciful idea. They
ought to be saved despite themselves. Might not a short Act of
Parliament be passed, making all comment in daily newspapers
illegal? In a way, of course, it would be hard on the
commentators. Having lost the power of independent thought,
having sunk into a state of chronic dulness, apathy and
insincerity, they could hardly, be expected to succeed in any of
the ordinary ways of life. They could not compete with their
fellow-creatures; no door but would be bolted if they knocked on
it. What would become of them? Probably they would have to perish
in what they would call ‘what the late Lord Goschen would
have called "splendid isolation."’ But such an end were
sweeter, I suggest to them, than the life they are leading.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>THE DECLINE OF THE GRACES</p>
<p>Have you read <i>The Young Lady’s Book</i>? You have had
plenty of time to do so, for it was published in 1829. It was
described by the two anonymous Gentlewomen who compiled it as
‘A Manual for Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and
Pursuits.’ You wonder they had nothing better to think of?
You suspect them of having been triflers? They were not, believe
me. They were careful to explain, at the outset, that the Virtues
of Character were what a young lady should most assiduously
cultivate. They, in their day, labouring under the shadow of the
eighteenth century, had somehow in themselves that high moral
fervour which marks the opening of the twentieth century, and is
said to have come in with Mr. George Bernard Shaw. But, unlike
us, they were not concerned wholly with the inward and spiritual
side of life. They cared for the material surface, too. They were
learned in the frills and furbelows of things. They gave, indeed,
a whole chapter to ‘Embroidery.’ Another they gave to
‘Archery,’ another to ‘The Aviary,’
another to ‘The Escrutoire.’ Young ladies do not now
keep birds, nor shoot with bow and arrow; but they do still, in
some measure, write letters; and so, for sake of historical
comparison, let me give you a glance at ‘The
Escrutoire.’ It is not light reading.</p>
<p>‘For careless scrawls ye boast of no pretence;</p>
<p>Fair Russell wrote, as well as spoke, with sense.’</p>
<p>Thus is the chapter headed, with a delightful little wood
engraving of ‘Fair Russell,’ looking pre-eminently
sensible, at her desk, to prepare the reader for the imminent
welter of rules for ‘decorous composition.’ Not that
pedantry is approved. ‘Ease and simplicity, an even flow of
unlaboured diction, and an artless arrangement of obvious
sentiments’ is the ideal to be striven for. ‘A
metaphor may be used with advantage’ by any young lady, but
only ‘if it occur naturally.’ And ‘allusions
are elegant,’ but only ‘when introduced with ease,
and when they are well understood by those to whom they are
addressed.’ ‘An antithesis renders a passage
piquant’; but the dire results of a too-frequent indulgence
in it are relentlessly set forth. Pages and pages are devoted to
a minute survey of the pit-falls of punctuation. But when the
young lady of that period had skirted all these, and had observed
all the manifold rules of caligraphy that were here laid down for
her, she was not, even then, out of the wood. Very special stress
was laid on ‘the use of the seal.’ Bitter scorn was
poured on young ladies who misused the seal. ‘It is a habit
of some to thrust the wax into the flame of the candle, and the
moment a morsel of it is melted, to daub it on the paper; and
when an unsightly mass is gathered together, to pass the seal
over the tongue with ridiculous haste—press it with all the
strength which the sealing party possesses—and the result
is, an impression which raises a blush on her cheek.’</p>
<p>Well! The young ladies of that day were ever expected to
exhibit sensibility, and used to blush, just as they wept or
fainted, for very slight causes. Their tears and their swoons did
not necessarily betoken much grief or agitation; nor did a rush
of colour to the cheek mean necessarily that they were
overwhelmed with shame. To exhibit various emotions in the
drawing-room was one of the Elegant Exercises in which these
young ladies were drilled thoroughly. And their habit of
simulation was so rooted in sense of duty that it merged into
sincerity. If a young lady did not swoon at the breakfast-table
when her Papa read aloud from <i>The Times</i> that the Duke of
Wellington was suffering from a slight chill, the chances were
that she would swoon quite unaffectedly when she realised her
omission. Even so, we may be sure that a young lady whose cheek
burned not at sight of the letter she had sealed
untidily—‘unworthily’ the Manual calls
it—would anon be blushing for her shamelessness. Such a
thing as the blurring of the family crest, or as the pollution of
the profile of Pallas Athene with the smoke of the taper, was
hardly, indeed, one of those ‘very slight causes’ to
which I have referred. The Georgian young lady was imbued through
and through with the sense that it was her duty to be gracefully
efficient in whatsoever she set her hand to. To the young lady of
to-day, belike, she will seem accordingly ridiculous—seem
poor-spirited, and a pettifogger. True, she set her hand to no
grandiose tasks. She was not allowed to become a hospital nurse,
for example, or an actress. The young lady of to-day, when she
hears in herself a ‘vocation’ for tending the sick,
would willingly, without an instant’s preparation, assume
responsibility for the lives of a whole ward at St.
Thomas’s. This responsibility is not, however, thrust on
her. She has to submit to a long and tedious course of training
before she may do so much as smooth a pillow. The boards of the
theatre are less jealously hedged in than those of the hospital.
If our young lady have a wealthy father, and retain her
schoolroom faculty for learning poetry by heart, there is no
power on earth to prevent her from making her début,
somewhere, as Juliet—if she be so inclined; and such is
usually her inclination. That her voice is untrained, that she
cannot scan blank-verse, that she cannot gesticulate with grace
and propriety, nor move with propriety and grace across the
stage, matters not a little bit—to our young lady.
‘Feeling,’ she will say, ‘is everything’;
and, of course, she, at the age of eighteen, has more feeling
than Juliet, that ‘flapper,’ could have had. All
those other things—those little technical
tricks—‘can be picked up,’ or ‘will
come.’ But no; I misrepresent our young lady. If she be
conscious that there are such tricks to be played, she despises
them. When, later, she finds the need to learn them, she still
despises them. It seems to her ridiculous that one should not
speak and comport oneself as artlessly on the stage as one does
off it. The notion of speaking or comporting oneself with
conscious art in real life would seem to her quite monstrous. It
would puzzle her as much as her grandmother would have been
puzzled by the contrary notion.</p>
<p>Personally, I range myself on the grandmother’s side. I
take my stand shoulder to shoulder with the Graces. On the banner
that I wave is embroidered a device of prunes and prisms.</p>
<p>I am no blind fanatic, however. I admit that artlessness is a
charming idea. I admit that it is sometimes charming as a
reality. I applaud it (all the more heartily because it is rare)
in children. But then, children, like the young of all animals
whatsoever, have a natural grace. As a rule, they begin to show
it in their third year, and to lose it in their ninth. Within
that span of six years they can be charming without intention;
and their so frequent failure in charm is due to their voluntary
or enforced imitation of the ways of their elders. In Georgian
and Early Victorian days the imitation was always enforced.
Grown-up people had good manners, and wished to see them
reflected in the young. Nowadays, the imitation is always
voluntary. Grown-up people have no manners at all; whereas they
certainly have a very keen taste for the intrinsic charm of
children. They wish children to be perfectly natural. That is
(æsthetically at least) an admirable wish. My complaint
against these grown-up people is, that they themselves, whom time
has robbed of their natural grace as surely as it robs the other
animals, are content to be perfectly natural. This contentment I
deplore, and am keen to disturb.</p>
<p>I except from my indictment any young lady who may read these
words. I will assume that she differs from the rest of the human
race, and has not, never had, anything to learn in the art of
conversing prettily, of entering or leaving a room or a vehicle
gracefully, of writing appropriate letters, <i>et patati et
patata.</i> I will assume that all these accomplishments came
naturally to her. She will now be in a mood to accept my
proposition that of her contemporaries none seems to have been so
lucky as herself. She will agree with me that other girls need
training. She will not deny that grace in the little affairs of
life is a thing which has to be learned. Some girls have a far
greater aptitude for learning it than others; but, with one
exception, no girls have it in them from the outset. It is a not
less complicated thing than is the art of acting, or of nursing
the sick, and needs for the acquirement of it a not less
laborious preparation.</p>
<p>Is it worth the trouble? Certainly the trouble is not taken.
The ‘finishing school,’ wherein young ladies were
taught to be graceful, is a thing of the past. It must have been
a dismal place; but the dismalness of it—the strain of
it—was the measure of its indispensability. There I beg the
question. Is grace itself indispensable? Certainly, it has been
dispensed with. It isn’t reckoned with. To sit perfectly
mute ‘in company,’ or to chatter on at the top of
one’s voice; to shriek with laughter; to fling oneself into
a room and dash oneself out of it; to collapse on chairs or
sofas; to sprawl across tables; to slam doors; to write, without
punctuation, notes that only an expert in handwriting could read,
and only an expert in mis-spelling could understand; to hustle,
to bounce, to go straight ahead—to be, let us say,
perfectly natural in the midst of an artificial civilisation, is
an ideal which the young ladies of to-day are neither publicly
nor privately discouraged from cherishing. The word
‘cherishing’ implies a softness of which they are not
guilty. I hasten to substitute ‘pursuing.’ If these
young ladies were not in the aforesaid midst of an artificial
civilisation, I should be the last to discourage their pursuit.
If they were Amazons, for example, spending their lives beneath
the sky, in tilth of stubborn fields, and in armed conflict with
fierce men, it would be unreasonable to expect of them any
sacrifice to the Graces. But they are exposed to no such
hardships. They have a really very comfortable sort of life. They
are not expected to be useful. (I am writing all the time, of
course, about the young ladies in the affluent classes.) And it
seems to me that they, in payment of their debt to Fate, ought to
occupy the time that is on their hands by becoming ornamental,
and increasing the world’s store of beauty. In a sense,
certainly, they are ornamental. It is a strange fact, and an
ironic, that they spend quite five times the annual amount that
was spent by their grandmothers on personal adornment. If they
can afford it, well and good: let us have no sumptuary law. But
plenty of pretty dresses will not suffice. Pretty manners are
needed with them, and are prettier than they.</p>
<p>I had forgotten men. Every defect that I had noted in the
modern young woman is not less notable in the modern young man.
Briefly, he is a boor. If it is true that ‘manners makyth
man,’ one doubts whether the British race can be
perpetuated. The young Englishman of to-day is inferior to
savages and to beasts of the field in that they are eager to show
themselves in an agreeable and seductive light to the females of
their kind, whilst he regards any such effort as beneath his
dignity. Not that he cultivates dignity in demeanour. He merely
slouches. Unlike his feminine counterpart, he lets his raiment
match his manners. Observe him any afternoon, as he passes down
Piccadilly, sullenly, with his shoulders humped, and his hat
clapped to the back of his head, and his cigarette dangling
almost vertically from his lips. It seems only appropriate that
his hat is a billy-cock, and his shirt a flannel one, and that
his boots are brown ones. Thus attired, he is on his way to pay a
visit of ceremony to some house at which he has recently dined.
No; that is the sort of visit he never pays. (I must confess I
don’t myself.) But one remembers the time when no
self-respecting youth would have shown himself in Piccadilly
without the vesture appropriate to that august highway. Nowadays
there is no care for appearances. Comfort is the one aim. Any
care for appearances is regarded rather as a sign of effeminacy.
Yet never, in any other age of the world’s history, has it
been regarded so. Indeed, elaborate dressing used to be deemed by
philosophers an outcome of the sex-instinct. It was supposed that
men dressed themselves finely in order to attract the admiration
of women, just as peacocks spread their plumage with a similar
purpose. Nor do I jettison the old theory. The declension of
masculine attire in England began soon after the time when
statistics were beginning to show the great numerical
preponderance of women over men; and is it fanciful to trace the
one fact to the other? Surely not. I do not say that either sex
is attracted to the other by elaborate attire. But I believe that
each sex, consciously or unconsciously, uses this elaboration for
this very purpose. Thus the over-dressed girl of to-day and the
ill-dressed youth are but symbols of the balance of our
population. The one is pleading, the other scorning. ‘Take
me!’ is the message borne by the furs and the pearls and
the old lace. ‘I’ll see about that when I’ve
had a look round!’ is the not pretty answer conveyed by the
billy-cock and the flannel shirt.</p>
<p>I dare say that fine manners, like fine clothes, are one of
the stratagems of sex. This theory squares at once with the
modern young man’s lack of manners. But how about the
modern young woman’s not less obvious lack? Well, the
theory will square with that, too. The modern young woman’s
gracelessness may be due to her conviction that men like a girl
to be thoroughly natural. She knows that they have a very high
opinion of themselves; and what, thinks she, more natural than
that they should esteem her in proportion to her power of
reproducing the qualities that are most salient in themselves?
Men, she perceives, are clumsy, and talk loud, and have no
drawing-room accomplishments, and are rude; and she proceeds to
model herself on them. Let us not blame her. Let us blame rather
her parents or guardians, who, though they well know that a
masculine girl attracts no man, leave her to the devices of her
own inexperience. Girls ought not to be allowed, as they are, to
run wild. So soon as they have lost the natural grace of
childhood, they should be initiated into that course of
artificial training through which their grandmothers passed
before them, and in virtue of which their grandmothers were
pleasing. This will not, of course, ensure husbands for them all;
but it will certainly tend to increase the number of marriages.
Nor is it primarily for that sociological reason that I plead for
a return to the old system of education. I plead for it, first
and last, on æsthetic grounds. Let the Graces be cultivated
for their own sweet sake.</p>
<p>The difficulty is how to begin. The mothers of the rising
generation were brought up in the unregenerate way. Their scraps
of oral tradition will need to be supplemented by much research.
I advise them to start their quest by reading <i>The Young
Lady’s Book.</i> Exactly the right spirit is therein
enshrined, though of the substance there is much that could not
be well applied to our own day. That chapter on ‘The
Escrutoire,’ for example, belongs to a day that cannot be
recalled. We can get rid of bad manners, but we cannot substitute
the Sedan-chair for the motor-car; and the penny post, with
telephones and telegrams, has, in our own beautiful phrase,
‘come to stay,’ and has elbowed the art of
letter-writing irrevocably from among us. But notes are still
written; and there is no reason why they should not be written
well. Has the mantle of those anonymous gentlewomen who wrote
<i>The Young Lady’s Book</i> fallen on no one? Will no one
revise that ‘Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and
Pursuits,’ adapting it to present needs?… A few
hints as to Deportment in the Motor-Car; the exact Angle whereat
to hold the Receiver of a Telephone, and the exact Key wherein to
pitch the Voice; the Conduct of a Cigarette… I see a wide
and golden vista.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WHISTLER’S WRITING</p>
<p>No book-lover, I. Give me an uninterrupted view of my
fellow-creatures. The most tedious of them pleases me better than
the best book. You see, I admit that some of them are tedious. I
do not deem alien from myself nothing that is human: I
discriminate my fellow-creatures according to their contents. And
in that respect I am not more different in my way from the true
humanitarian than from the true bibliophile in his. To him the
content of a book matters not at all. He loves books because they
are books, and discriminates them only by the irrelevant standard
of their rarity. A rare book is not less dear to him because it
is unreadable, even as to the snob a dull duke is as good as a
bright one. Indeed, why should he bother about readableness? He
doesn’t want to read. ‘Uncut edges’ for him,
when he can get them; and, even when he can’t, the notion
of reading a rare edition would seem to him quite uncouth and
preposterous The aforesaid snob would as soon question His Grace
about the state of His Grace’s soul. I, on the other hand,
whenever human company is denied me, have often a desire to read.
Reading, I prefer cut edges, because a paper-knife is one of the
things that have the gift of invisibility whenever they are
wanted; and because one’s thumb, in prising open the pages,
so often affects the text. Many volumes have I thus mutilated,
and I hope that in the sale-rooms of a sentimental posterity they
may fetch higher prices than their duly uncut duplicates. So long
as my thumb tatters merely the margin, I am quite equanimous. If
I were reading a First Folio Shakespeare by my fireside, and if
the matchbox were ever so little beyond my reach, I vow I would
light my cigarette with a spill made from the margin of whatever
page I were reading. I am neat, scrupulously neat, in regard to
the things I care about; but a book, as a book, is not one of
these things.</p>
<p>Of course, a book may happen to be in itself a beautiful
object. Such a book I treat tenderly, as one would a flower. And
such a book is, in its brown-papered boards, whereon gleam little
gilt italics and a little gilt butterfly, Whistler’s
<i>Gentle Art of Making Enemies.</i> It happens to be also a book
which I have read again and again—a book that has often
travelled with me. Yet its cover is as fresh as when first, some
twelve years since, it came into my possession. A flower freshly
plucked, one would say—a brown-and-yellow flower, with a
little gilt butterfly fluttering over it. And its inner petals,
its delicately proportioned pages, are as white and undishevelled
as though they never had been opened. The book lies open before
me, as I write. I must be careful of my pen’s transit from
inkpot to MS.</p>
<p>Yet, I know, many worthy folk would like the book blotted out
of existence. These are they who understand and love the art of
painting, but neither love nor understand writing as an art. For
them <i>The Gentle Art of Making Enemies</i> is but something
unworthy of a great man. Certainly, it is a thing incongruous
with a great hero. And for most people it is painful not to
regard a great man as also a great hero; hence all the efforts to
explain away the moral characteristics deducible from <i>The
Gentle Art of Making Enemies,</i> and to prove that Whistler,
beneath a prickly surface, was saturated through and through with
the quintessence of the Sermon on the Mount.</p>
<p>Well! hero-worship is a very good thing. It is a wholesome
exercise which we ought all to take, now and again. Only, let us
not strain ourselves by overdoing it. Let us not indulge in it
too constantly. Let hero-worship be reserved for heroes. And
there was nothing heroic about Whistler, except his unfaltering
devotion to his own ideals in art. No saint was he, and none
would have been more annoyed than he by canonisation; would he
were here to play, as he would have played incomparably, the
devil’s advocate! So far as he possessed the Christian
virtues, his faith was in himself, his hope was for the
immortality of his own works, and his charity was for the defects
in those works. He is known to have been an affectionate son, an
affectionate husband; but, for the rest, all the tenderness in
him seems to have been absorbed into his love for such things in
nature as were expressible through terms of his own art. As a man
in relation to his fellow-men, he cannot, from any purely
Christian standpoint, be applauded. He was inordinately vain and
cantankerous. Enemies, as he has wittily implied, were a
necessity to his nature; and he seems to have valued friendship
(a thing never really valuable, in itself, to a really vain man)
as just the needful foundation for future enmity. Quarrelling and
picking quarrels, he went his way through life blithely. Most of
these quarrels were quite trivial and tedious. In the ordinary
way, they would have been forgotten long ago, as the trivial and
tedious details in the lives of other great men are forgotten.
But Whistler was great not merely in painting, not merely as a
wit and dandy in social life. He had, also, an extraordinary
talent for writing. He was a born writer. He wrote, in his way,
perfectly; and his way was his own, and the secret of it has died
with him. Thus, conducting them through the Post Office, he has
conducted his squabbles to immortality.</p>
<p>Immortality is a big word. I do not mean by it that so long as
this globe shall endure, the majority of the crawlers round it
will spend the greater part of their time in reading <i>The
Gentle Art of Making Enemies.</i> Even the pre-eminently immortal
works of Shakespeare are read very little. The average of time
devoted to them by Englishmen cannot (even though one assess Mr.
Frank Harris at eight hours per diem, and Mr. Sidney Lee at
twenty-four) tot up to more than a small fraction of a second in
a lifetime reckoned by the Psalmist’s limit. When I dub
Whistler an immortal writer, I do but mean that so long as there
are a few people interested in the subtler ramifications of
English prose as an art-form, so long will there be a few
constantly-recurring readers of <i>The Gentle Art.</i></p>
<p>There are in England, at this moment, a few people to whom
prose appeals as an art; but none of them, I think, has yet done
justice to Whistler’s prose. None has taken it with the
seriousness it deserves. I am not surprised. When a man can
express himself through two media, people tend to take him
lightly in his use of the medium to which he devotes the lesser
time and energy, even though he use that medium not less
admirably than the other, and even though they themselves care
about it more than they care about the other. Perhaps this very
preference in them creates a prejudice against the man who does
not share it, and so makes them sceptical of his power. Anyhow,
if Disraeli had been unable to express himself through the medium
of political life, Disraeli’s novels would long ago have
had the due which the expert is just beginning to give them. Had
Rossetti not been primarily a poet, the expert in painting would
have acquired long ago his present penetration into the peculiar
value of Rossetti’s painting. Likewise, if Whistler had
never painted a picture, and, even so, had written no more than
he actually did write, this essay in appreciation would have been
forestalled again and again. As it is, I am a sort of herald.
And, however loudly I shall blow my trumpet, not many people will
believe my message. For many years to come, it will be the
fashion among literary critics to pooh-pooh Whistler, the writer,
as an amateur. For Whistler was primarily a painter—not
less than was Rossetti primarily a poet, and Disraeli a
statesman. And he will not live down quicklier than they the
taunt of amateurishness in his secondary art. Nevertheless, I
will, for my own pleasure, blow the trumpet.</p>
<p>I grant you, Whistler was an amateur. But you do not dispose
of a man by proving him to be an amateur. On the contrary, an
amateur with real innate talent may do, must do, more exquisite
work than he could do if he were a professional. His very
ignorance and tentativeness may be, must be, a means of especial
grace. Not knowing ‘how to do things,’ having no
ready-made and ready-working apparatus, and being in constant
fear of failure, he has to grope always in the recesses of his
own soul for the best way to express his soul’s meaning. He
has to shift for himself, and to do his very best. Consequently,
his work has a more personal and fresher quality, and a more
exquisite ‘finish,’ than that of a professional,
howsoever finely endowed. All of the much that we admire in
Walter Pater’s prose comes of the lucky chance that he was
an amateur, and never knew his business. Had Fate thrown him out
of Oxford upon the world, the world would have been the richer
for the prose of another John Addington Symonds, and would have
forfeited Walter Pater’s prose. In other words, we should
have lost a half-crown and found a shilling. Had Fate withdrawn
from Whistler his vision for form and colour, leaving him only
his taste for words and phrases and cadences, Whistler would have
settled solidly down to the art of writing, and would have
mastered it, and, mastering it, have lost that especial quality
which the Muse grants only to them who approach her timidly,
bashfully, as suitors.</p>
<p>Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps Whistler would never, in any case,
have acquired the professional touch in writing. For we know that
he never acquired it in the art to which he dedicated all but the
surplus of his energy. Compare him with the other painters of his
day. He was a child in comparison with them. They, with sure
science, solved roughly and readily problems of modelling and
drawing and what not that he never dared to meddle with. It has
often been said that his art was an art of evasion. But the
reason of the evasion was reverence. He kept himself reverently
at a distance. He knew how much he could not do, nor was he ever
confident even of the things that he could do; and these things,
therefore, he did superlatively well, having to grope for the
means in the recesses of his soul. The particular quality of
exquisiteness and freshness that gives to all his work, whether
on canvas or on stone or on copper, a distinction from and above
any contemporary work, and makes it dearer to our eyes and
hearts, is a quality that came to him because he was an amateur,
and that abided with him because he never ceased to be an
amateur. He was a master through his lack of mastery. In the art
of writing, too, he was a master through his lack of mastery.
There is an almost exact parallel between the two sides of his
genius. Nothing could be more absurd than the general view of him
as a masterly professional on the one side and a trifling amateur
on the other. He was, certainly, a painter who wrote; but, by the
slightest movement of Fate’s little finger, he might have
been a writer who painted, and this essay have been written not
by me from my standpoint, but by some painter, eager to suggest
that Whistler’s painting was a quite serious thing.</p>
<p>Yes, that painting and that writing are marvellously akin; and
such differences as you will see in them are superficial merely.
I spoke of Whistler’s vanity in life, and I spoke of his
timidity and reverence in art. That contradiction is itself
merely superficial. Bob Acres was timid, but he was also vain.
His swagger was not an empty assumption to cloak his fears; he
really did regard himself as a masterful and dare-devil fellow,
except when he was actually fighting. Similarly, except when he
was at his work, Whistler, doubtless, really did think of himself
as a brilliant effortless butterfly. The pose was, doubtless a
quite sincere one, a necessary reaction of feeling. Well, in his
writing he displays to us his vanity; whilst in his Painting we
discern only his reverence. In his writing, too, he displays his
harshness—swoops hither and thither a butterfly equipped
with sharp little beak and talons; whereas in his painting we are
conscious only of his caressing sense of beauty. But look from
the writer, as shown by himself, to the means by which himself is
shown. You will find that for words as for colour-tones he has
the same reverent care, and for phrases as for forms the same
caressing sense of beauty.
Fastidiousness—‘daintiness,’ as he would have
said—dandyishness, as we might well say: by just that which
marks him as a painter is he marked as a writer too. His meaning
was ever ferocious; but his method, how delicate and tender! The
portrait of his mother, whom he loved, was not wrought with a
more loving hand than were his portraits of Mr. Harry Quilter for
<i>The World</i>.</p>
<p>His style never falters. The silhouette of no sentence is ever
blurred. Every sentence is ringing with a clear vocal cadence.
There, after all, in that vocal quality, is the chief test of
good writing. Writing, as a means of expression, has to compete
with talking. The talker need not rely wholly on what he says. He
has the help of his mobile face and hands, and of his voice, with
its various inflexions and its variable pace, whereby he may
insinuate fine shades of meaning, qualifying or strengthening at
will, and clothing naked words with colour, and making dead words
live. But the writer? He can express a certain amount through his
handwriting, if he write in a properly elastic way. But his
writing is not printed in facsimile. It is printed in cold,
mechanical, monotonous type. For his every effect he must rely
wholly on the words that he chooses, and on the order in which he
ranges them, and on his choice among the few hard-and-fast
symbols of punctuation. He must so use those slender means that
they shall express all that he himself can express through his
voice and face and hands, or all that he <i>would</i> thus
express if he were a good talker. Usually, the good talker is a
dead failure when he tries to express himself in writing. For
that matter, so is the bad talker. But the bad talker has the
better chance of success, inasmuch as the inexpressiveness of his
voice and face and hands will have sharpened his scent for words
and phrases that shall in themselves convey such meanings as he
has to express. Whistler was that rare phenomenon, the good
talker who could write as well as he talked. Read any page of
<i>The Gentle Art of Making Enemies</i>, and you will hear a
voice in it, and see a face in it, and see gestures in it. And
none of these is quite like any other known to you. It matters
not that you never knew Whistler, never even set eyes on him. You
see him and know him here. The voice drawls slowly, quickening to
a kind of snap at the end of every sentence, and sometimes rising
to a sudden screech of laughter; and, all the while, the fine
fierce eyes of the talker are flashing out at you, and his long
nervous fingers are tracing extravagant arabesques in the air.
No! you need never have seen Whistler to know what he was like.
He projected through printed words the clean-cut image and
clear-ringing echo of himself. He was a born writer, achieving
perfection through pains which must have been infinite for that
we see at first sight no trace of them at all.</p>
<p>Like himself, necessarily, his style was cosmopolitan and
eccentric. It comprised Americanisms and Cockneyisms and Parisian
<i>argot</i>, with constant reminiscences of the authorised
version of the Old Testament, and with chips off Molière,
and with shreds and tags of what-not snatched from a
hundred-and-one queer corners. It was, in fact, an Autolycine
style. It was a style of the maddest motley, but of motley so
deftly cut and fitted to the figure, and worn with such an air,
as to become a gracious harmony for all beholders.</p>
<p>After all, what matters is not so much the vocabulary as the
manner in which the vocabulary is used. Whistler never failed to
find right words, and the right cadence for a dignified meaning,
when dignity was his aim. ‘And when the evening mist
clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor
buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys
become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night,
and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before
us…’ That is as perfect, in its dim and delicate
beauty, as any of his painted ‘nocturnes.’ But his
aim was more often to pour ridicule and contempt. And herein the
weirdness of his natural vocabulary and the patchiness of his
reading were of very real value to him. Take the opening words of
his letter to Tom Taylor: ‘Dead for a ducat, dead! my dear
Tom: and the rattle has reached me by post. <i>Sans rancune,</i>
say you? Bah! you scream unkind threats and die
badly…’ And another letter to the same unfortunate
man: ‘Why, my dear old Tom, I never <i>was</i> serious with
you, even when you were among us. Indeed, I killed you quite, as
who should say, without seriousness, "A rat! A rat!" you know,
rather cursorily…’ There the very lack of coherence
in the style, as of a man gasping and choking with laughter,
drives the insults home with a horrible precision. Notice the
technical skill in the placing of ‘you know, rather
cursorily’ at the end of the sentence. Whistler was full of
such tricks—tricks that could never have been played by
him, could never have occurred to him, had he acquired the
professional touch And not a letter in the book but has some such
little sharp felicity of cadence or construction.</p>
<p>The letters, of course, are the best thing in the book, and
the best of the letters are the briefest. An exquisite talent
like Whistler’s, whether in painting or in writing, is
always at its best on a small scale. On a large scale it strays
and is distressed. Thus the ‘Ten o’Clock,’ from
which I took that passage about the evening mist and the
riverside, does not leave me with a sense of artistic
satisfaction. It lacks structure. It is not a roundly conceived
whole: it is but a row of fragments. Were it otherwise, Whistler
could never have written so perfectly the little letters. For no
man who can finely grasp a big theme can play exquisitely round a
little one.</p>
<p>Nor can any man who excels in scoffing at his fellows excel
also in taking abstract subjects seriously. Certainly, the little
letters are Whistler’s passport among the elect of
literature. Luckily, I can judge them without prejudice. Whether
in this or that case Whistler was in the right or in the wrong is
not a question which troubles me at all. I read the letters
simply from the literary standpoint. As controversial essays,
certainly, they were often in very bad taste. An urchin
scribbling insults upon somebody’s garden-wall would not go
further than Whistler often went. Whistler’s mode of
controversy reminds me, in another sense, of the writing on the
wall. They who were so foolish as to oppose him really did have
their souls required of them. After an encounter with him they
never again were quite the same men in the eyes of their fellows.
Whistler’s insults always stuck—stuck and spread
round the insulted, who found themselves at length encased in
them, like flies in amber.</p>
<p>You may shed a tear over the flies, if you will. For myself, I
am content to laud the amber.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>ICHABOD</p>
<p>It is not cast from any obvious mould of sentiment. It is not
a memorial urn, nor a ruined tower, nor any of those things which
he who runs may weep over. Though not less really deplorable than
they, it needs, I am well aware, some sort of explanation to
enable my reader to mourn with me. For it is merely a
hat-box.</p>
<p>It is nothing but that—an ordinary affair of pig-skin,
with a brass lock. As I write, it stands on a table near me. It
is of the kind that accommodates two hats, one above the other.
It has had many tenants, and is sun-tanned, rain-soiled, scarred
and dented by collision with trucks and what not other
accessories to the moving scenes through which it has been
bandied. Yes! it has known the stress of many journeys; yet has
it never (you would say, seeing it) received its baptism of
paste: it has not one label on it. And there, indeed, is the
tragedy that I shall unfold.</p>
<p>For many years this hat-box had been my travelling companion,
and was, but a few days since, a dear record of all the big and
little journeys I had made. It was much more to me than a mere
receptacle for hats. It was my one collection, my collection of
labels. Well! last week its lock was broken. I sent it to the
trunk-makers, telling them to take the greatest care of it. It
came back yesterday. The idiots, the accursed idots! had
carefully removed every label from its surface. I wrote to
them—it matters not what I said. My fury has burnt itself
out. I have reached the stage of craving general sympathy. So I
have sat down to write, in the shadow of a tower which stands
bleak, bare, prosaic, all the ivy of its years stripped from it;
in the shadow of an urn commemorating nothing.</p>
<p>I think that every one who is or ever has been a collector
will pity me in this dark hour of mine. In other words, I think
that nearly every one will pity me. For few are they who have
not, at some time, come under the spell of the collecting spirit
and known the joy of accumulating specimens of something or
other. The instinct has its corner, surely, in every breast. Of
course, hobby-horses are of many different breeds; but all their
riders belong to one great cavalcade, and when they know that one
of their company has had his steed shot under him, they will not
ride on without a backward glance of sympathy. Lest my fall be
unnoted by them, I write this essay. I want that glance.</p>
<p>Do not, reader, suspect that because I am choosing my words
nicely, and playing with metaphor, and putting my commas in their
proper places, my sorrow is not really and truly poignant. I
write elaborately, for that is my habit, and habits are less
easily broken than hearts. I could no more ‘dash off’
this my <i>cri de cœur</i> than I could an elegy on a
broomstick I had never seen. Therefore, reader, bear with me,
despite my sable plumes and purple; and weep with me, though my
prose be, like those verses which Mr. Beamish wrote over
Chloë’s grave, ‘of a character to cool
emotion.’ For indeed my anguish is very real. The
collection I had amassed so carefully, during so many years, the
collection I loved and revelled in, has been obliterated, swept
away, destroyed utterly by a pair of ruthless, impious,
well-meaning, idiotic, unseen hands. It cannot be restored to me.
Nothing can compensate me for it gone. It was part and parcel of
my life.</p>
<p>Orchids, jade, majolica, wines, mezzotints, old silver, first
editions, harps, copes, hookahs, cameos, enamels, black-letter
folios, scarabaei—such things are beautiful and fascinating
in themselves. Railway-labels are not, I admit. For the most
part, they are crudely coloured, crudely printed, without sense
of margin or spacing; in fact, quite worthless as designs. No one
would be a connoisseur in them. No one could be tempted to make a
general collection of them. My own collection of them was
strictly personal: I wanted none that was not a symbol of some
journey made by myself, even as the hunter of big game cares not
to possess the tusks, and the hunter of women covets not the
photographs, of other people’s victims. My collection was
one of those which result from man’s tendency to preserve
some obvious record of his pleasures—the points he has
scored in the game. To Nimrod, his tusks; to Lothario, his
photographs; to me (who cut no dash in either of those veneries,
and am not greedy enough to preserve <i>menus</i> nor silly
enough to preserve press-cuttings, but do delight in travelling
from place to place), my railway-labels. Had nomady been my
business, had I been a commercial traveller or a King’s
Messenger, such labels would have held for me no charming
significance. But I am only by instinct a nomad. I have a tether,
known as the four-mile radius. To slip it is for me always an
event, an excitement. To come to a new place, to awaken in a
strange bed, to be among strangers! To have dispelled, as by
sudden magic, the old environment! It is on the scoring of such
points as these that I preen myself, and my memory is always
ringing the ‘changes’ I have had, complacently, as a
man jingles silver in his pocket. The noise of a great terminus
is no jar to me. It is music. I prick up my ears to it, and paw
the platform. Dear to me as the bugle-note to any war-horse, as
the first twittering of the birds in the hedgerows to the
light-sleeping vagabond, that cry of ‘Take your seats
please!’ or—better still—‘<i>En
voiture!</i>’ or ‘<i>Partenza!</i>’ Had I the
knack of rhyme, I would write a sonnet-sequence of the journey to
Newhaven or Dover—a sonnet for every station one does not
stop at. I await that poet who shall worthily celebrate the iron
road. There is one who describes, with accuracy and gusto, the
insides of engines; but he will not do at all. I look for
another, who shall show us the heart of the passenger, the
exhilaration of travelling by day, the exhilaration and romance
and self-importance of travelling by night.</p>
<p>‘Paris!’ How it thrills me when, on a night in
spring, in the hustle and glare of Victoria, that label is
slapped upon my hat-box! Here, standing in the very heart of
London, I am by one sweep of a paste-brush transported instantly
into that white-grey city across the sea. To all intents and
purposes I am in Paris already. Strange, that the porter does not
say, ‘V’là, M’sieu’!’
Strange, that the evening papers I buy at the bookstall are
printed in the English language. Strange, that London still holds
my body, when a corduroyed magician has whisked my soul verily
into Paris. The engine is hissing as I hurry my body along the
platform, eager to reunite it with my soul… Over the windy
quay the stars are shining as I pass down the gangway, hat-box in
hand. They twinkle brightly over the deck I am now
pacing—amused, may be, at my excitement. The machinery
grunts and creaks. The little boat quakes in the excruciating
throes of its departure. At last!… One by one, the stars
take their last look at me, and the sky grows pale, and the sea
blanches mysteriously with it. Through the delicate cold air of
the dawn, across the grey waves of the sea, the outlines of
Dieppe grow and grow. The quay is lined with its blue-bloused
throng. These porters are as excited by us as though they were
the aborigines of some unknown island. (And yet, are they not
here, at this hour, in these circumstances, every day of their
lives?) These gestures! These voices, hoarse with passion! The
dear music of <i>French</i>, rippling up clear for me through all
this hoarse confusion of its utterance, and making me
happy!… I drink my cup of steaming coffee—true
coffee!—and devour more than one roll. At the tables around
me, pale and dishevelled from the night, sit the people whom I
saw—years ago!—at Charing Cross. How they have
changed! The coffee sends a glow throughout my body. I am
fulfilled with a sense of material well-being. The queer ethereal
exaltation of the dawn has vanished. I climb up into the train,
and dispose myself in the dun-cushioned <i>coupé.</i>
‘Chemins de Fer de l’Ouest’ is perforated on
the white antimacassars. Familiar and strange inscription! I
murmur its impressive iambs over and over again. They become the
refrain to which the train vibrates on its way. I smoke
cigarettes, a little drowsily gazing out of the window at the
undulating French scenery that flies past me, at the silver
poplars. Row after slanted row of these incomparably gracious
trees flies past me, their foliage shimmering in the unawoken
landscape Soon I shall be rattling over the cobbles of unawoken
Paris, through the wide white-grey streets with their unopened
jalousies. And when, later, I awake in the unnatural little
bedroom of walnut-wood and crimson velvet, in the bed whose
curtains are white with that whiteness which Paris alone can give
to linen, a Parisian sun will be glittering for me in a Parisian
sky.</p>
<p>Yes! In my whole collection the Paris specimens were dearest
to me, meant most to me, I think. But there was none that had not
some tendrils on sentiment. All of them I prized, more or less.
Of the Aberdeen specimens I was immensely fond. Who can resist
the thought of that express by which, night after night, England
is torn up its centre? I love well that cab-drive in the chill
autumnal night through the desert of Bloomsbury, the dead leaves
rustling round the horse’s hoofs as we gallop through the
Squares. Ah, I shall be across the Border before these doorsteps
are cleaned, before the coming of the milk-carts. Anon, I descry
the cavernous open jaws of Euston. The monster swallows me, and
soon I am being digested into Scotland. I sit ensconced in a
corner of a compartment. The collar of my ulster is above my
ears, my cap is pulled over my eyes, my feet are on a hot-water
tin, and my rug snugly envelops most of me. Sleeping-cars are for
the strange beings who love not the act of travelling. Them I
should spurn even if I could not sleep a wink in an ordinary
compartment. I would liefer forfeit sleep than the consciousness
of travelling. But it happens that I, in an ordinary compartment,
am blest both with the sleep and with the consciousness, all
through the long night. To be asleep and to <i>know</i> that you
are sleeping, and to know, too, that even as you sleep you are
being borne away through darkness into distance—that,
surely, is to go two better than Endymion. Surely, nothing is
more mysteriously delightful than this joint consciousness of
sleep and movement. Pitiable they to whom it is denied. All
through the night the vibration of the train keeps one-third of
me awake, while the other two parts of me profoundly slumber.
Whenever the train stops, and the vibration ceases, then the
one-third of me falls asleep, and the other two parts stir. I am
awake just enough to hear the hollow-echoing cry of
‘Crewe’ or ‘York,’ and to blink up at the
green-hooded lamp in the ceiling. May be, I raise a corner of the
blind, and see through the steam-dim window the mysterious, empty
station. A solitary porter shuffles along the platform. Yonder,
those are the lights of the refreshment room, where, all night
long, a barmaid is keeping her lonely vigil over the beer-handles
and the Bath-buns in glass cases. I see long rows of glimmering
milk-cans, and wonder drowsily whether they contain forty modern
thieves. The engine snorts angrily in the benighted silence. Far
away is the faint, familiar sound—<i>clink-clank</i>,
<i>clink-clank</i>—of the man who tests the couplings.
Nearer and nearer the sound comes. It passes, recedes It is
rather melancholy…. A whistle, a jerk, and the two waking
parts of me are asleep again, while the third wakes up to mount
guard over them, and keeps me deliciously aware of the rhythmic
dream they are dreaming about the hot bath and the clean linen,
and the lovely breakfast that I am to have at Aberdeen; and of
the Scotch air, crisp and keen, that is to escort me, later along
the Deeside.</p>
<p>Little journeys, as along the Deeside, have a charm of their
own. Little journeys from London to places up the river, or to
places on the coast of Kent—journeys so brief that you
lunch at one end and have tea at the other—I love them all,
and loved the labels that recalled them to me. But the labels of
long journeys, of course, took precedence in my heart. Here and
there on my hat-box were labels that recalled to me long journeys
in which frontiers were crossed at dead of night—dim
memories of small, crazy stations where I shivered half-awake,
and was sleepily conscious of a strange tongue and strange
uniforms, of my jingling bunch of keys, of ruthless arms diving
into the nethermost recesses of my trunks, of suspicious grunts
and glances, and of grudging hieroglyphics chalked on the slammed
lids. These were things more or less painful and resented in the
moment of experience, yet even then fraught with a delicious
glamour. I suffered, but gladly. In the night, when all things
are mysteriously magnified, I have never crossed a frontier
without feeling some of the pride of conquest. And, indeed, were
these conquests mere illusions? Was I not actually extending the
frontiers of my mind, adding new territories to it? Every crossed
frontier, every crossed sea, meant for me a definite
success—an expansion and enrichment of my soul. When, after
seven days and nights of sea traversed, I caught my first glimpse
of Sandy Hook, was there <i>no</i> comparison between Columbus
and myself? To see what one has not seen before, is not that
almost as good as to see what no one has ever seen?</p>
<p>Romance, exhilaration, self-importance these are what my
labels symbolised and recalled to me. That lost collection was a
running record of all my happiest hours; a focus, a monument, a
diary. It was my humble Odyssey, wrought in coloured paper on
pig-skin, and the one work I never, never was weary of. If the
distinguished Ithacan had travelled with a hat-box, how finely
and minutely Homer would have described it—its depth and
girth, its cunningly fashioned lock and fair lining withal! And
in how interminable a torrent of hexameters would he have
catalogued all the labels on it, including those attractive views
of the Hôtel Circe, the Hôtel Calypso, and other
high-class resorts. Yet no! Had such a hat-box existed and had it
been preserved in his day, Homer would have seen in it a
sufficient record, a better record than even he could make, of
Odysseus’ wanderings. We should have had nothing from him
but the Iliad. I, certainly never felt any need of commemorating
my journeys till my labels were lost to me. And I am conscious
how poor and chill is the substitute.</p>
<p>My collection like most collections, began imperceptibly. A
man does not say to himself, ‘I am going to collect’
this thing or that. True, the schoolboy says so; but his are not,
in the true sense of the word, collections. He seeks no set
autobiographic symbols, for boys never look back—there is
too little to look back on, too much in front. Nor have the
objects of his collection any intrinsic charm for him. He starts
a collection merely that he may have a plausible excuse for doing
something he ought not to do. He goes in for birds’ eggs
merely that he may be allowed to risk his bones and tear his
clothes in climbing; for butterflies, that he may be encouraged
to poison and impale; for stamps…really, I do not know why
he, why any sane creature goes in for stamps. It follows that he
has no real love of his collection and soon abandons it for
something else. The sincere collector, how different! His hobby
has a solid basis of personal preference. Some one gives him
(say) a piece of jade. He admires it. He sees another piece in a
shop, and buys it; later, he buys another. He does not regard
these pieces of jade as distinct from the rest of his
possessions; he has no idea of collecting jade. It is not till he
has acquired several other pieces that he ceases to regard them
as mere items in the decoration of his room, and gives them a
little table, or a tray of a cabinet, all to themselves. How well
they look there! How they intensify one another! He really must
get some one to give him that little pedestalled Cupid which he
saw yesterday in Wardour Street. Thus awakes in him, quite
gradually, the spirit of the collector. Or take the case of one
whose collection is not of beautiful things, but of
autobiographic symbols: take the case of the glutton. He will
have pocketed many <i>menus</i> before it occurs to him to
arrange them in an album. Even so, it was not until a fair number
of labels had been pasted on my hat-box that I saw them as
souvenirs, and determined that in future my hat-box should always
travel with me and so commemorate my every darling escape.</p>
<p>In the path of every collector are strewn obstacles of one
kind or another; which, to overleap, is part of the fun. As a
collector of labels I had my pleasant difficulties. On any
much-belabelled piece of baggage the porter always pastes the new
label over that which looks most recent; else the thing might
miss its destination. Now, paste dries before the end of the
briefest journey; and one of my canons was that, though two
labels might overlap, none must efface the inscription of
another. On the other hand, I did not wish to lose my hat-box,
for this would have entailed inquiries, and descriptions, and
telegraphing up the line, and all manner of agitation. What,
then, was I to do? I might have taken my hat-box with me in the
carriage? That, indeed, is what I always did. But, unless a thing
is to go in the van, it receives no label at all. So I had to use
a mild stratagem. ‘Yes,’ I would say,
‘everything in the van!’ The labels would be duly
affixed. ‘Oh,’ I would cry, seizing the hat-box
quickly, ‘I forgot. I want this with me in the
carriage.’ (I learned to seize it quickly, because some
porters are such martinets that they will whisk the label off and
confiscate it.) Then, when the man was not looking, I would
remove the label from the place he had chosen for it and press it
on some unoccupied part of the surface. You cannot think how much
I enjoyed these manœuvres. There was the moral pleasure of
having both outwitted a railway company and secured another
specimen for my collection; and there was the physical pleasure
of making a limp slip of paper stick to a hard
substance—that simple pleasure which appeals to all of us
and is, perhaps, the missing explanation of philately. Pressed
for time, I could not, of course, have played my trick. Nor could
I have done so—it would have seemed heartless—if any
one had come to see me off and be agitated at parting. Therefore,
I was always very careful to arrive in good time for my train,
and to insist that all farewells should be made on my own
doorstep.</p>
<p>Only in one case did I break the rule that no label must be
obliterated by another. It is a long story; but I propose to tell
it. You must know that I loved my labels not only for the
meanings they conveyed to me, but also, more than a little, for
the effect they produced on other people. Travelling in a
compartment, with my hat-box beside me, I enjoyed the silent
interest which my labels aroused in my fellow-passengers. If the
compartment was so full that my hat-box had to be relegated to
the rack, I would always, in the course of the journey, take it
down and unlock it, and pretend to be looking for something I had
put into it. It pleased me to see from beneath my eyelids the
respectful wonder and envy evoked by it. Of course, there was no
suspicion that the labels were a carefully formed collection;
they were taken as the wild-flowers of an exquisite restlessness,
of an unrestricted range in life. Many of them signified
beautiful or famous places. There was one point at which Oxford,
Newmarket, and Assisi converged, and I was always careful to
shift my hat-box round in such a way that this purple patch
should be lost on none of my fellow-passengers. The many other
labels, English or alien, they, too, gave their hints of a life
spent in fastidious freedom, hints that I had seen and was seeing
all that is best to be seen of men and cities and country-houses.
I was respected, accordingly, and envied. And I had keen delight
in this ill-gotten homage. A despicable delight, you say? But is
not yours, too, a fallen nature? The love of impressing strangers
falsely, is it not implanted in all of us? To be sure, it is an
inevitable outcome of the conditions in which we exist. It is a
result of the struggle for life. Happiness, as you know, is our
aim in life; we are all struggling to be happy. And, alas! for
every one of us, it is the things he does not possess which seem
to him most desirable, most conducive to happiness. For instance,
the poor nobleman covets wealth, because wealth would bring him
comfort, whereas the <i>nouveau riche</i> covets a pedigree,
because a pedigree would make him <i>of</i> what he is merely in.
The rich nobleman who is an invalid covets health, on the
assumption that health would enable him to enjoy his wealth and
position. The rich, robust nobleman hankers after an intellect.
The rich, robust, intellectual nobleman is (be sure of it) as
discontented, somehow, as the rest of them. No man possesses all
he wants. No man is ever quite happy. But, by producing an
impression that he <i>has</i> what he wants—in fact, by
‘bluffing’—a man can gain some of the
advantages that he would gain by really having it. Thus, the poor
nobleman can, by concealing his ‘balance’ and keeping
up appearances, coax more or less unlimited credit from his
tradesman. The <i>nouveau riche</i>, by concealing his origin and
trafficking with the College of Heralds, can intercept some of
the homage paid to high birth. And (though the rich nobleman who
is an invalid can make no tangible gain by pretending to be
robust, since robustness is an advantage only from within) the
rich, robust nobleman can, by employing a clever private
secretary to write public speeches and magazine articles for him,
intercept some of the homage which is paid to intellect.</p>
<p>These are but a few typical cases, taken at random from a
small area. But consider the human race at large, and you will
find that ‘bluffing’ is indeed one of the natural
functions of the human animal. Every man pretends to have what
(not having it) he covets, in order that he may gain some of the
advantages of having it. And thus it comes that he makes his
pretence, also, by force of habit, when there is nothing tangible
to be gained by it. The poor nobleman wishes to be thought rich
even by people who will not benefit him in their delusion; and
the <i>nouveau riche</i> likes to be thought well-born even by
people who set no store on good birth; and so forth. But
pretences, whether they be an end or a means, cannot be made
successfully among our intimate friends. These wretches know all
about us—have seen through us long ago. With them we are,
accordingly, quite natural. That is why we find their company so
restful. Among acquaintances the pretence is worth making. But
those who know anything at all about us are apt to find us out.
That is why we find acquaintances such a nuisance. Among perfect
strangers, who know nothing at all about us, we start with a
clean slate. If our pretence do not come off, we have only
ourselves to blame. And so we ‘bluff’ these
strangers, blithely, for all we are worth, whether there be
anything to gain or nothing. We all do it. Let us despise
ourselves for doing it, but not one another. By which I mean,
reader, do not be hard on me for making a show of my labels in
railway-carriages. After all, the question is whether a man
‘bluff’ well or ill. If he brag vulgarly before his
strangers, away with him! by all means. He does not know how to
play the game. He is a failure. But, if he convey subtly (and,
therefore, successfully) the fine impression he wishes to convey,
then you should stifle your wrath, and try to pick up a few
hints. When I saw my fellow-passengers eyeing my hat-box, I did
not, of course, say aloud to them, ‘Yes, mine is a
delightful life! Any amount of money, any amount of leisure! And,
what’s more, I know how to make the best use of them
both!’ Had I done so, they would have immediately seen
through me as an impostor. But I did nothing of the sort. I let
my labels proclaim distinction for me, quietly, in their own way.
And they made their proclamation with immense success. But there
came among them, in course of time, one label that would not
harmonise with them. Came, at length, one label that did me
actual discredit. I happened to have had influenza, and my doctor
had ordered me to make my convalescence in a place which,
according to him, was better than any other for my particular
condition. He had ordered me to Ramsgate, and to Ramsgate I had
gone. A label on my hat-box duly testified to my obedience. At
the time, I had thought nothing of it. But, in subsequent
journeys, I noticed that my hat-box did not make its old effect,
somehow. My fellow-passengers looked at it, were interested in
it; but I had a subtle sense that they were not reverencing me as
of yore. Something was the matter. I was not long in tracing what
it was. The discord struck by Ramsgate was the more disastrous
because, in my heedlessness, I had placed that ignoble label
within an inch of my <i>point d’appui</i>—the trinity
of Oxford, Newmarket and Assisi. What was I to do? I could not
explain to my fellow-passengers, as I have explained to you, my
reason for Ramsgate. So long as the label was there, I had to
rest under the hideous suspicion of having gone there for
pleasure, gone of my own free will. I did rest under it during
the next two or three journeys. But the injustice of my position
maddened me. At length, a too obvious sneer on the face of a
fellow-passenger steeled me to a resolve that I would, for once,
break my rule against obliteration. On the return journey, I
obliterated Ramsgate with the new label, leaving visible merely
the final TE, which could hardly compromise me.</p>
<p><i>Steterunt</i> those two letters because I was loth to
destroy what was, primarily, a symbol for myself: I wished to
remember Ramsgate, even though I had to keep it secret. Only in a
secondary, accidental way was my collection meant for the public
eye. Else, I should not have hesitated to deck the hat-box with
procured symbols of Seville, Simla, St. Petersburg and other
places which I had not (and would have liked to be supposed to
have) visited. But my collection was, first of all, a private
autobiography, a record of my scores of Fate; and thus positively
to falsify it would have been for me as impossible as cheating at
‘Patience.’ From that to which I would not add I
hated to subtract anything—even Ramsgate. After all,
Ramsgate was not London; to have been in it was a kind of score.
Besides, it had restored me to health. I had no right to rase it
utterly.</p>
<p>But such <i>tendresse</i> was not my sole reason for sparing
those two letters. Already I was reaching that stage where the
collector loves his specimens not for their single sakes, but as
units in the sum-total. To every collector comes, at last, a time
when he does but value his collection—how shall I
say?—collectively. He who goes in for beautiful things
begins, at last, to value his every acquisition not for its
beauty, but because it enhances the worth of the rest. Likewise,
he who goes in for autobiographic symbols begins, at last, to
care not for the symbolism of another event in his life, but for
the addition to the objects already there. He begins to value
every event less for its own sake than because it swells his
collection. Thus there came for me a time when I looked forward
to a journey less because it meant movement and change for myself
than because it meant another label for my hat-box. A strange
state to fall into? Yes, collecting is a mania, a form of
madness. And it is the most pleasant form of madness in the whole
world. It can bring us nearer to real happiness than can any form
of sanity. The normal, eclectic man is never happy, because he is
always craving something of another kind than what he has got.
The collector, in his mad concentration, wants only more and more
of what he has got already; and what he has got already he
cherishes with a passionate joy. I cherished my gallimaufry of
rainbow-coloured labels almost as passionately as the miser his
hoard of gold. Why do we call the collector of current coin a
miser? Wretched? He? True, he denies himself all the reputed
pleasures of life; but does he not do so of his own accord,
gladly? He sacrifices everything to his mania; but that merely
proves how intense his mania is. In that the nature of his
collection cuts him off from all else, he is the perfect type of
the collector. He is above all other collectors. And he is the
truly happiest of them all. It is only when, by some merciless
stroke of Fate, he is robbed of his hoard, that he becomes
wretched. Then, certainly, he suffers. He suffers proportionately
to his joy. He is smitten with sorrow more awful than any sorrow
to be conceived by the sane. I whose rainbow-coloured hoard has
been swept from me, seem to taste the full savour of his
anguish.</p>
<p>I sit here thinking of the misers who, in life or in fiction,
have been despoiled. Three only do I remember: Melanippus of
Sicyon, Pierre Baudouin of Limoux, Silas Marner. Melanippus died
of a broken heart. Pierre Baudouin hanged himself. The case of
Silas Marner is more cheerful. He, coming into his cottage one
night, saw by the dim light of the hearth, that which seemed to
be his gold restored, but was really nothing but the golden curls
of a little child, whom he was destined to rear under his own
roof, finding in her more than solace for his bereavement. But
then, he was a character in fiction: the other two really
existed. What happened to him will not happen to me. Even if
little children with rainbow-coloured hair were so common that
one of them might possibly be left on my hearth-rug, I know well
that I should not feel recompensed by it, even if it grew up to
be as fascinating a paragon as Eppie herself. Had Silas Marner
really existed (nay! even had George Eliot created him in her
maturity) neither would he have felt recompensed. Far likelier,
he would have been turned to stone, in the first instance, as was
poor Niobe when the divine arrows destroyed that unique
collection on which she had lavished so many years. Or, may be,
had he been a very strong man, he would have found a bitter joy
in saving up for a new hoard. Like Carlyle, when the MS. of his
masterpiece was burned by the housemaid of John Stuart Mill, he
might have begun all over again, and builded a still nobler
monument on the tragic ashes.</p>
<p>That is a fine, heartening example! I will be strong enough to
follow it. I will forget all else. I will begin all over again.
There stands my hat-box! Its glory is departed, but I vow that a
greater glory awaits it. Bleak, bare and prosaic it is now,
but—ten years hence! Its career, like that of the Imperial
statesman in the moment of his downfall, ‘is only just
beginning.’</p>
<p>There is a true Anglo-Saxon ring in this conclusion. May it
appease whomever my tears have been making angry.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>GENERAL ELECTIONS</p>
<p>I admire detachment. I commend a serene indifference to
hubbub. I like Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Balzac,
Darwin, and other sages, for having been so concentrated on this
or that eternal verity in art or science or philosophy, that they
paid no heed to alarums and excursions which were sweeping all
other folk off their feet. It is with some shame that I haunt the
tape-machine whenever a General Election is going on.</p>
<p>Of politics I know nothing. My mind is quite open on the
subject of fiscal reform, and quite empty; and the void is not an
aching one: I have no desire to fill it. The idea of the British
Empire leaves me quite cold. If this or that subject race threw
off our yoke, I should feel less vexation than if one comma were
misplaced in the printing of this essay. The only feeling that
our Colonies inspire in me is a determination not to visit them.
Socialism neither affrights nor attracts me—or, rather, it
has both these effects equally. When I think of poverty and
misery crushing the greater part of humanity, and most of all
when I hear of some specific case of distress, I become a
socialist indeed. But I am not less an artist than a human being,
and when I think of Demos, that chin-bearded god, flushed with
victory, crowned with leaflets of the Social Democratic League,
quaffing temperance beverages in a world all drab; when I think
of model lodging-houses in St. James’s Park, and trams
running round and round St. James’s Square—the mighty
fallen, and the lowly swollen, and, in Elysium, the shade of
Matthew Arnold shedding tears on the shoulder of a shade so
different as George Brummell’s—tears, idle tears, at
sight of the Barbarians, whom he had mocked and loved, now
annihilated by those others whom he had mocked and hated; when
such previsions as these come surging up in me, I do deem myself
well content with the present state of things, dishonourable
though it is. As to socialism, then, you see, my mind is evenly
divided. It is with no political bias that I go and hover around
the tape-machine. My interest in General Elections is a merely
‘sporting’ interest. I do not mean that I lay bets. A
bad fairy decreed over my cradle that I should lose every bet
that I might make; and, in course of time, I abandoned a practice
which took away from coming events the pleasing element of
uncertainty. ‘A merely dramatic interest’ is less
equivocal, and more accurate.</p>
<p>‘This,’ you say, ‘is rank incivism.’ I
assume readily that you are an ardent believer in one political
party or another, and that, having studied thoroughly all the
questions at issue, you could give cogent reasons for all the
burning faith that is in you. But how about your friends and
acquaintances? How many of them can cope with you in discussion?
How many of them show even a desire to cope with you? Travel, I
beg you, on the Underground Railway, or in a Tube. Such places
are supposed to engender in their passengers a taste for
political controversy. Yet how very elementary are such arguments
as you will hear there! It is obvious that these gentlemen know
and care very little about ‘burning questions.’ What
they do know and care about is the purely personal side of
politics. They have their likes and their dislikes for a few
picturesque and outstanding figures. These they will attack or
defend with fervour. But you will be lucky if you overhear any
serious discussion of policy. Emerge from the nether world. Range
over the whole community—from the costermonger who says
‘Good Old Winston!’ to the fashionable woman who says
‘I do think Mr. Balfour is <i>rather</i>
wonderful!’—and you will find the same plentiful lack
of interest in the impersonal side of polities. You will find
that almost every one is interested in politics only as a
personal conflict between certain interesting men—as a
drama, in fact. Frown not, then, on me alone.</p>
<p>Whenever a General Election occurs, the conflict becomes
sharper and more obvious—the play more exciting—the
audience more tense. The stage is crowded with supernumeraries,
not interesting in themselves, but adding a new interest to the
merely personal interest. There is the stronger
‘side,’ here the weaker, ranged against each other.
Which will be vanquished? It rests with the audience to decide.
And, as human nature is human nature, of course the audience
decides that the weaker side shall be victorious. That is what
politicians call ‘the swing of the pendulum.’ They
believe that the country is alienated by the blunders of the
Government, and is disappointed by the unfulfilment of promises,
and is anxious for other methods of policy. Bless them! the
country hardly noticed their blunders, has quite forgotten their
promises, and cannot distinguish between one set of methods and
another. When the man in the street sees two other men in the
street fighting, he doesn’t care to know the cause of the
combat: he simply wants the smaller man to punish the bigger, and
to punish him with all possible severity. When a party with a
large majority appeals to the country, its appeal falls,
necessarily, on deaf ears. Some years ago there happened an
exception to this rule. But then the circumstances were
exceptional. A small nation was fighting a big nation, and, as
the big nation happened to be yourselves, your sympathy was
transferred to the big nation. As the little party was suspected
of favouring the little nation, your sympathy was transferred
likewise to the big party. Barring ‘khaki,’ sympathy
takes its usual course in General Elections. The bigger the
initial majority, the bigger the collapse. It is not enough that
Goliath shall fall: he must bite the dust, and bite plenty of it.
It is not enough that David shall have done what he set out to
do: a throne must be found for this young man. Away with the
giant’s body! Hail, King David!</p>
<p>I should like to think that chivalry was the sole motive of
our zeal. I am afraid that the mere craving for excitement has
something to do with it. Pelion has never been piled on Ossa; and
no really useful purpose could be served by the superimposition.
But we should like to see the thing done. It would appeal to our
sense of the grandiose—our hankering after the unlimited.
When the man of science shows us a drop of water in a test-tube,
and tells us that this tiny drop contains more than fifteen
billions of infusoria, we are subtly gratified, and cherish a
secret hope that the number of infusoria is <i>very much</i> more
than fifteen billions. In the same way, we hope that the number
of seats gained by the winning party will be even greater
to-morrow than it is to-day. ‘We are sweeping the
country,’ exclaims (say) the professed Liberal; and at the
word ‘sweeping’ there is in his eyes a gleam that no
mere party feeling could have lit there. It is a gleam that comes
from the very depths of his soul—a reflection of the innate
human passion for breaking records, or seeing them broken, no
matter how or why. ‘Yes,’ says the professed Tory,
‘you certainly are sweeping the country.’ He tries to
put a note of despondency into his voice; but hark how he rolls
the word ‘sweeping’ over his tongue! He, too, though
he may not admit it, is longing to creep into the smoking-room of
the National Liberal Club and feast his eyes on the blazing
galaxy of red seals affixed to the announcements of the polling.
He turns to his evening paper, and reads again the list of
ex-Cabinet ministers who have been unseated. He feels, in his
heart of hearts, what fun it would be if they had all been
unseated. He grudges the exceptions. For political bias is one
thing; human nature another.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>A PARALLEL</p>
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