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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Idle Ideas in 1905, by Jerome K. Jerome
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Idle Ideas in 1905
+
+
+Author: Jerome K. Jerome
+
+
+
+Release Date: April 21, 2013  [eBook #3140]
+[This file was first posted on December 30, 2000]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IDLE IDEAS IN 1905***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1905 Hurst and Blackett edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                                IDLE IDEAS
+                                 in 1905
+
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                    BY
+
+                             JEROME K. JEROME
+
+                                AUTHOR OF
+
+                          “Three Men in a Boat,”
+                    “Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow,”
+                                   etc.
+
+                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]
+
+                                  LONDON
+                       HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED
+                         182, HIGH HOLBORN, W.C.
+
+                          _All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+    CHAP.                                                         PAGE
+       I.  ARE WE AS INTERESTING AS WE THINK WE ARE?                 1
+      II.  SHOULD WOMEN BE BEAUTIFUL?                               16
+     III.  WHEN IS THE BEST TIME TO BE MERRY?                       29
+      IV.  DO WE LIE A-BED TOO LATE?                                46
+       V.  SHOULD MARRIED MEN PLAY GOLF?                            60
+      VI.  ARE EARLY MARRIAGES A MISTAKE?                           74
+     VII.  DO WRITERS WRITE TOO MUCH?                               89
+    VIII.  SHOULD SOLDIERS BE POLITE?                              105
+      IX.  OUGHT STORIES TO BE TRUE?                               122
+       X.  CREATURES THAT ONE DAY SHALL BE MEN                     141
+      XI.  HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH LITTLE                           158
+     XII.  SHOULD WE SAY WHAT WE THINK, OR THINK WHAT WE           173
+           SAY?
+    XIII.  IS THE AMERICAN HUSBAND MADE ENTIRELY OF STAINED        186
+           GLASS
+     XIV.  DOES THE YOUNG MAN KNOW EVERYTHING WORTH KNOWING?       199
+      XV.  HOW MANY CHARMS HATH MUSIC, WOULD YOU SAY?              213
+     XVI.  THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN!  NEED IT BE SO HEAVY?           225
+    XVII.  WHY DIDN’T HE MARRY THE GIRL?                           238
+   XVIII.  WHAT MRS. WILKINS THOUGHT ABOUT IT                      251
+     XIX.  SHALL WE BE RUINED BY CHINESE CHEAP LABOUR?             264
+      XX.  HOW TO SOLVE THE SERVANT PROBLEM                        278
+     XXI.  WHY WE HATE THE FOREIGNER                               292
+
+
+
+
+ARE WE AS INTERESTING AS WE THINK WE ARE?
+
+
+“CHARMED.  Very hot weather we’ve been having of late—I mean cold.  Let
+me see, I did not quite catch your name just now.  Thank you so much.
+Yes, it is a bit close.”  And a silence falls, neither of us being able
+to think what next to say.
+
+What has happened is this: My host has met me in the doorway, and shaken
+me heartily by the hand.
+
+“So glad you were able to come,” he has said.  “Some friends of mine
+here, very anxious to meet you.”  He has bustled me across the room.
+“Delightful people.  You’ll like them—have read all your books.”
+
+He has brought me up to a stately lady, and has presented me.  We have
+exchanged the customary commonplaces, and she, I feel, is waiting for me
+to say something clever, original and tactful.  And I don’t know whether
+she is Presbyterian or Mormon; a Protectionist or a Free Trader; whether
+she is engaged to be married or has lately been divorced!
+
+A friend of mine adopts the sensible plan of always providing you with a
+short history of the person to whom he is about to lead you.
+
+“I want to introduce you to a Mrs. Jones,” he whispers.  “Clever woman.
+Wrote a book two years ago.  Forget the name of it.  Something about
+twins.  Keep away from sausages.  Father ran a pork shop in the Borough.
+Husband on the Stock Exchange.  Keep off coke.  Unpleasantness about a
+company.  You’ll get on best by sticking to the book.  Lot in it about
+platonic friendship.  Don’t seem to be looking too closely at her.  Has a
+slight squint she tries to hide.”
+
+By this time we have reached the lady, and he introduces me as a friend
+of his who is simply dying to know her.
+
+“Wants to talk about your book,” he explains.  “Disagrees with you
+entirely on the subject of platonic friendship.  Sure you’ll be able to
+convince him.”
+
+It saves us both a deal of trouble.  I start at once on platonic
+friendship, and ask her questions about twins, avoiding sausages and
+coke.  She thinks me an unusually interesting man, and I am less bored
+than otherwise I might be.
+
+I have sometimes thought it would be a serviceable device if, in Society,
+we all of us wore a neat card—pinned, say, upon our back—setting forth
+such information as was necessary; our name legibly written, and how to
+be pronounced; our age (not necessarily in good faith, but for purposes
+of conversation.  Once I seriously hurt a German lady by demanding of her
+information about the Franco-German war.  She looked to me as if she
+could not object to being taken for forty.  It turned out she was
+thirty-seven.  Had I not been an Englishman I might have had to fight a
+duel); our religious and political beliefs; together with a list of the
+subjects we were most at home upon; and a few facts concerning our
+career—sufficient to save the stranger from, what is vulgarly termed
+“putting his foot in it.”  Before making jokes about “Dumping,” or
+discussing the question of Chinese Cheap Labour, one would glance behind
+and note whether one’s companion was ticketed “Whole-hogger,” or
+“Pro-Boer.”  Guests desirous of agreeable partners—an “agreeable person,”
+according to the late Lord Beaconsfield’s definition, being “a person who
+agrees with you”—could make their own selection.
+
+“Excuse me.  Would you mind turning round a minute?  Ah, ‘Wagnerian
+Crank!’  I am afraid we should not get on together. I prefer the Italian
+school.”
+
+Or, “How delightful.  I see you don’t believe in vaccination.  May I take
+you into supper?”
+
+Those, on the other hand, fond of argument would choose a suitable
+opponent.  A master of ceremonies might be provided who would stand in
+the centre of the room and call for partners: “Lady with strong views in
+favour of female franchise wishes to meet gentleman holding the opinions
+of St. Paul.  With view to argument.”
+
+An American lady, a year or two ago, wrote me a letter that did me real
+good: she appreciated my work with so much understanding, criticised it
+with such sympathetic interest.  She added that, when in England the
+summer before, she had been on the point of accepting an invitation to
+meet me; but at the last moment she had changed her mind; she felt so
+sure—she put it pleasantly, but this is what it came to—that in my own
+proper person I should fall short of her expectations.  For my own sake I
+felt sorry she had cried off; it would have been worth something to have
+met so sensible a woman.  An author introduced to people who have read—or
+who say that they have read—his books, feels always like a man taken for
+the first time to be shown to his future wife’s relations.  They are very
+pleasant.  They try to put him at his ease.  But he knows instinctively
+they are disappointed with him.  I remember, when a very young man,
+attending a party at which a famous American humorist was the chief
+guest.  I was standing close behind a lady who was talking to her
+husband.
+
+“He doesn’t look a bit funny,” said the lady.
+
+“Great Scott!” answered her husband.  “How did you expect him to look?
+Did you think he would have a red nose and a patch over one eye?”
+
+“Oh, well, he might look funnier than that, anyhow,” retorted the lady,
+highly dissatisfied.  “It isn’t worth coming for.”
+
+We all know the story of the hostess who, leaning across the table during
+the dessert, requested of the funny man that he would kindly say
+something amusing soon, because the dear children were waiting to go to
+bed.  Children, I suppose, have no use for funny people who don’t choose
+to be funny.  I once invited a friend down to my house for a Saturday to
+Monday.  He is an entertaining man, and before he came I dilated on his
+powers of humour—somewhat foolishly perhaps—in the presence of a certain
+youthful person who resides with me, and who listens when she oughtn’t
+to, and never when she ought.  He happened not to be in a humorous mood
+that evening.  My young relation, after dinner, climbed upon my knee.
+For quite five minutes she sat silent.  Then she whispered:
+
+“Has he said anything funny?”
+
+“Hush.  No, not yet; don’t be silly.”
+
+Five minutes later: “Was that funny?”
+
+“No, of course not.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“Because—can’t you hear?  We are talking about Old Age Pensions.”
+
+“What’s that?”
+
+“Oh, it’s—oh, never mind now.  It isn’t a subject on which one can be
+funny.”
+
+“Then what’s he want to talk about it for?”
+
+She waited for another quarter of an hour.  Then, evidently bored, and
+much to my relief, suggested herself that she might as well go to bed.
+She ran to me the next morning in the garden with an air of triumph.
+
+“He said something so funny last night,” she told me.
+
+“Oh, what was it?” I inquired.  It seemed to me I must have missed it.
+
+“Well, I can’t exactly ’member it,” she explained, “not just at the
+moment.  But it was so funny.  I dreamed it, you know.”
+
+For folks not Lions, but closely related to Lions, introductions must be
+trying ordeals.  You tell them that for years you have been yearning to
+meet them.  You assure them, in a voice trembling with emotion, that this
+is indeed a privilege.  You go on to add that when a boy—
+
+At this point they have to interrupt you to explain that they are not the
+Mr. So-and-So, but only his cousin or his grandfather; and all you can
+think of to say is: “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
+
+I had a nephew who was once the amateur long-distance bicycle champion.
+I have him still, but he is stouter and has come down to a motor car.  In
+sporting circles I was always introduced as “Shorland’s Uncle.”
+Close-cropped young men would gaze at me with rapture; and then inquire:
+“And do you do anything yourself, Mr. Jerome?”
+
+But my case was not so bad as that of a friend of mine, a doctor.  He
+married a leading actress, and was known ever afterwards as “Miss B—’s
+husband.”
+
+At public dinners, where one takes one’s seat for the evening next to
+someone that one possibly has never met before, and is never likely to
+meet again, conversation is difficult and dangerous.  I remember talking
+to a lady at a Vagabond Club dinner.  She asked me during the
+_entree_—with a light laugh, as I afterwards recalled—what I thought,
+candidly, of the last book of a certain celebrated authoress.  I told
+her, and a coldness sprang up between us.  She happened to be the certain
+celebrated authoress; she had changed her place at the last moment so as
+to avoid sitting next to another lady novelist, whom she hated.
+
+One has to shift oneself, sometimes, on these occasions.  A newspaper man
+came up to me last Ninth of November at the Mansion House.
+
+“Would you mind changing seats with me?” he asked.  “It’s a bit awkward.
+They’ve put me next to my first wife.”
+
+I had a troubled evening myself once long ago.  I accompanied a young
+widow lady to a musical At Home, given by a lady who had more
+acquaintances than she knew.  We met the butler at the top of the stairs.
+My friend spoke first:
+
+“Say Mrs. Dash and—”
+
+The butler did not wait for more—he was a youngish man—but shouted out:
+
+“Mr. and Mrs. Dash.”
+
+“My dear! how very quiet you have kept!” cried our hostess delighted.
+“Do let me congratulate you.”
+
+The crush was too great and our hostess too distracted at the moment for
+any explanations.  We were swept away, and both of us spent the remainder
+of the evening feebly protesting our singleness.
+
+If it had happened on the stage it would have taken us the whole play to
+get out of it.  Stage people are not allowed to put things right when
+mistakes are made with their identity.  If the light comedian is
+expecting a plumber, the first man that comes into the drawing-room has
+got to be a plumber.  He is not allowed to point out that he never was a
+plumber; that he doesn’t look like a plumber; that no one not an idiot
+would mistake him for a plumber.  He has got to be shut up in the
+bath-room and have water poured over him, just as if he were a plumber—a
+stage plumber, that is.  Not till right away at the end of the last act
+is he permitted to remark that he happens to be the new curate.
+
+I sat out a play once at which most people laughed.  It made me sad.  A
+dear old lady entered towards the end of the first act.  We knew she was
+the aunt.  Nobody can possibly mistake the stage aunt—except the people
+on the stage.  They, of course, mistook her for a circus rider, and shut
+her up in a cupboard.  It is what cupboards seem to be reserved for on
+the stage.  Nothing is ever put in them excepting the hero’s relations.
+When she wasn’t in the cupboard she was in a clothes basket, or tied up
+in a curtain.  All she need have done was to hold on to something while
+remarking to the hero:
+
+“If you’ll stop shouting and jumping about for just ten seconds, and give
+me a chance to observe that I am your maiden aunt from Devonshire, all
+this tomfoolery can be avoided.”
+
+That would have ended it.  As a matter of fact that did end it five
+minutes past eleven.  It hadn’t occurred to her to say it before.
+
+In real life I never knew but of one case where a man suffered in silence
+unpleasantness he could have ended with a word; and that was the case of
+the late Corney Grain.  He had been engaged to give his entertainment at
+a country house.  The lady was a _nouvelle riche_ of snobbish instincts.
+She left instructions that Corney Grain when he arrived was to dine with
+the servants.  The butler, who knew better, apologised; but Corney was a
+man not easily disconcerted.  He dined well, and after dinner rose and
+addressed the assembled company.
+
+“Well, now, my good friends,” said Corney, “if we have all finished, and
+if you are all agreeable, I shall be pleased to present to you my little
+show.”
+
+The servants cheered.  The piano was dispensed with.  Corney contrived to
+amuse his audience very well for half-an-hour without it.  At ten o’clock
+came down a message: Would Mr. Corney Grain come up into the
+drawing-room.  Corney went.  The company in the drawing-room were
+waiting, seated.
+
+“We are ready, Mr. Grain,” remarked the hostess.
+
+“Ready for what?” demanded Corney.
+
+“For your entertainment,” answered the hostess.
+
+“But I have given it already,” explained Corney; “and my engagement was
+for one performance only.”
+
+“Given it!  Where?  When?”
+
+“An hour ago, downstairs.”
+
+“But this is nonsense,” exclaimed the hostess.
+
+“It seemed to me somewhat unusual,” Corney replied; “but it has always
+been my privilege to dine with the company I am asked to entertain.  I
+took it you had arranged a little treat for the servants.”
+
+And Corney left to catch his train.
+
+Another entertainer told me the following story, although a joke against
+himself.  He and Corney Grain were sharing a cottage on the river.  A man
+called early one morning to discuss affairs, and was talking to Corney in
+the parlour, which was on the ground floor.  The window was open.  The
+other entertainer—the man who told me the story—was dressing in the room
+above.  Thinking he recognised the voice of the visitor below, he leant
+out of his bedroom window to hear better.  He leant too far, and dived
+head foremost into a bed of flowers, his bare legs—and only his bare
+legs—showing through the open window of the parlour.
+
+“Good gracious!” exclaimed the visitor, turning at the moment and seeing
+a pair of wriggling legs above the window sill; “who’s that?”
+
+Corney fixed his eyeglass and strolled to the window.
+
+“Oh, it’s only What’s-his-name,” he explained.  “Wonderful spirits.  Can
+be funny in the morning.”
+
+
+
+
+SHOULD WOMEN BE BEAUTIFUL?
+
+
+PRETTY women are going to have a hard time of it later on.  Hitherto,
+they have had things far too much their own way.  In the future there are
+going to be no pretty girls, for the simple reason there will be no plain
+girls against which to contrast them.  Of late I have done some
+systematic reading of ladies’ papers.  The plain girl submits to a course
+of “treatment.”  In eighteen months she bursts upon Society an
+acknowledged beauty.  And it is all done by kindness.  One girl writes:
+
+“Only a little while ago I used to look at myself in the glass and cry.
+Now I look at myself and laugh.”
+
+The letter is accompanied by two photographs of the young lady.  I should
+have cried myself had I seen her as she was at first.  She was a stumpy,
+flat-headed, squat-nosed, cross-eyed thing.  She did not even look good.
+One virtue she appears to have had, however.  It was faith.  She believed
+what the label said, she did what the label told her.  She is now a tall,
+ravishing young person, her only trouble being, I should say, to know
+what to do with her hair—it reaches to her knees and must be a nuisance
+to her.  She would do better to give some of it away.  Taking this young
+lady as a text, it means that the girl who declines to be a dream of
+loveliness does so out of obstinacy.  What the raw material may be does
+not appear to matter.  Provided no feature is absolutely missing, the
+result is one and the same.
+
+Arrived at years of discretion, the maiden proceeds to choose the style
+of beauty she prefers.  Will she be a Juno, a Venus, or a Helen?  Will
+she have a Grecian nose, or one tip-tilted like the petal of a rose?  Let
+her try the tip-tilted style first.  The professor has an idea it is
+going to be fashionable.  If afterwards she does not like it, there will
+be time to try the Grecian.  It is difficult to decide these points
+without experiment.
+
+Would the lady like a high or a low forehead?  Some ladies like to look
+intelligent.  It is purely a matter of taste.  With the Grecian nose, the
+low broad forehead perhaps goes better.  It is more according to
+precedent.  On the other hand, the high brainy forehead would be more
+original.  It is for the lady herself to select.
+
+We come to the question of eyes.  The lady fancies a delicate blue, not
+too pronounced a colour—one of those useful shades that go with almost
+everything.  At the same time there should be depth and passion.  The
+professor understands exactly the sort of eye the lady means.  But it
+will be expensive.  There is a cheap quality; the professor does not
+recommend it.  True that it passes muster by gaslight, but the sunlight
+shows it up.  It lacks tenderness, and at the price you can hardly expect
+it to contain much hidden meaning.  The professor advises the melting,
+Oh-George-take-me-in-your-arms-and-still-my-foolish-fears brand.  It
+costs a little more, but it pays for itself in the end.
+
+Perhaps it will be best, now the eye has been fixed upon, to discuss the
+question of the hair.  The professor opens his book of patterns.  Maybe
+the lady is of a wilful disposition.  She loves to run laughing through
+the woods during exceptionally rainy weather; or to gallop across the
+downs without a hat, her fair ringlets streaming in the wind, the old
+family coachman panting and expostulating in the rear.  If one may trust
+the popular novel, extremely satisfactory husbands have often been
+secured in this way.  You naturally look at a girl who is walking through
+a wood, laughing heartily apparently for no other reason than because it
+is raining—who rides at stretch gallop without a hat.  If you have
+nothing else to do, you follow her.  It is always on the cards that such
+a girl may do something really amusing before she gets home.  Thus things
+begin.
+
+To a girl of this kind, naturally curly hair is essential.  It must be
+the sort of hair that looks better when it is soaking wet.  The bottle of
+stuff that makes this particular hair to grow may be considered dear, if
+you think merely of the price.  But that is not the way to look at it.
+“What is it going to do for me?”  That is what the girl has got to ask
+herself.  It does not do to spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar, as the
+saying is.  If you are going to be a dashing, wilful beauty, you must
+have the hair for it, or the whole scheme falls to the ground.
+
+Eyebrows and eyelashes, the professor assumes, the lady would like to
+match the hair.  Too much eccentricity the professor does not agree with.
+Nature, after all, is the best guide; neatness combined with taste, that
+is the ideal to be aimed at.  The eyebrows should be almost straight, the
+professor thinks; the eyelashes long and silky, with just the suspicion
+of a curl.  The professor would also suggest a little less cheekbone.
+Cheekbones are being worn low this season.
+
+Will the lady have a dimpled chin, or does she fancy the square-cut jaw?
+Maybe the square-cut jaw and the firm, sweet mouth are more suitable for
+the married woman.  They go well enough with the baby and the tea-urn,
+and the strong, proud man in the background.  For the unmarried girl the
+dimpled chin and the rosebud mouth are, perhaps, on the whole safer.
+Some gentlemen are so nervous of that firm, square jaw.  For the present,
+at all events, let us keep to the rosebud and the dimple.
+
+Complexion!  Well, there is only one complexion worth considering—a
+creamy white, relieved by delicate peach pink.  It goes with everything,
+and is always effective.  Rich olives, striking pallors—yes, you hear of
+these things doing well.  The professor’s experience, however, is that
+for all-round work you will never improve upon the plain white and pink.
+It is less liable to get out of order, and is the easiest at all times to
+renew.
+
+For the figure, the professor recommends something lithe and supple.
+Five foot four is a good height, but that is a point that should be
+discussed first with the dressmaker.  For trains, five foot six is,
+perhaps, preferable.  But for the sporting girl, who has to wear short
+frocks, that height would, of course, be impossible.
+
+The bust and the waist are also points on which the dressmaker should be
+consulted.  Nothing should be done in a hurry.  What is the fashion going
+to be for the next two or three seasons?  There are styles demanding that
+beginning at the neck you should curve out, like a pouter pigeon.  There
+is apparently no difficulty whatever in obtaining this result.  But if
+crinolines, for instance, are likely to come in again!  The lady has only
+to imagine it for herself: the effect might be grotesque, suggestive of a
+walking hour-glass.  So, too, with the waist.  For some fashions it is
+better to have it just a foot from the neck.  At other times it is more
+useful lower down.  The lady will kindly think over these details and let
+the professor know.  While one is about it, one may as well make a sound
+job.
+
+It is all so simple, and, when you come to think of it, really not
+expensive.  Age, apparently, makes no difference.  A woman is as old as
+she looks.  In future, I take it, there will be no ladies over
+five-and-twenty.  Wrinkles!  Why any lady should still persist in wearing
+them is a mystery to me.  With a moderate amount of care any middle-class
+woman could save enough out of the housekeeping money in a month to get
+rid of every one of them.  Grey hair!  Well, of course, if you cling to
+grey hair, there is no more to be said.  But to ladies who would just as
+soon have rich wavy-brown or a delicate shade of gold, I would point out
+that there are one hundred and forty-seven inexpensive lotions on the
+market, any one of which, rubbed gently into the head with a tooth-brush
+(not too hard) just before going to bed will, to use a colloquialism, do
+the trick.
+
+Are you too stout, or are you too thin?  All you have to do is to say
+which, and enclose stamps.  But do not make a mistake and send for the
+wrong recipe.  If you are already too thin, you might in consequence
+suddenly disappear before you found out your mistake.  One very stout
+lady I knew worked at herself for eighteen months and got stouter every
+day.  This discouraged her so much that she gave up trying.  No doubt she
+had made a muddle and had sent for the wrong bottle, but she would not
+listen to further advice.  She said she was tired of the whole thing.
+
+In future years there will be no need for a young man to look about him
+for a wife; he will take the nearest girl, tell her his ideal, and, if
+she really care for him, she will go to the shop and have herself fixed
+up to his pattern.  In certain Eastern countries, I believe, something of
+this kind is done.  A gentleman desirous of adding to his family sends
+round the neighbourhood the weight and size of his favourite wife,
+hinting that if another can be found of the same proportions, there is
+room for her.  Fathers walk round among their daughters, choose the most
+likely specimen, and have her fattened up.  That is their brutal Eastern
+way.  Out West we shall be more delicate.  Match-making mothers will
+probably revive the old confession book.  Eligible bachelors will be
+invited to fill in a page: “Your favourite height in women,” “Your
+favourite measurement round the waist,” “Do you like brunettes or
+blondes?”
+
+The choice will be left to the girls.
+
+“I do think Henry William just too sweet for words,” the maiden of the
+future will murmur to herself.  Gently, coyly, she will draw from him his
+ideal of what a woman should be.  In from six months to a year she will
+burst upon him, the perfect She; height, size, weight, right to a T.  He
+will clasp her in his arms.
+
+“At last,” he will cry, “I have found her, the woman of my dreams.”
+
+And if he does not change his mind, and the bottles do not begin to lose
+their effect, there will be every chance that they will be happy ever
+afterwards.
+
+Might not Science go even further?  Why rest satisfied with making a
+world of merely beautiful women?  Cannot Science, while she is about it,
+make them all good at the same time.  I do not apologise for the
+suggestion.  I used to think all women beautiful and good.  It is their
+own papers that have disillusioned me.  I used to look at this lady or at
+that—shyly, when nobody seemed to be noticing me—and think how fair she
+was, how stately.  Now I only wonder who is her chemist.
+
+They used to tell me, when I was a little boy, that girls were made of
+sugar and spice.  I know better now.  I have read the recipes in the
+Answers to Correspondents.
+
+When I was quite a young man I used to sit in dark corners and listen,
+with swelling heart, while people at the piano told me where little girl
+babies got their wonderful eyes from, of the things they did to them in
+heaven that gave them dimples.  Ah me!  I wish now I had never come
+across those ladies’ papers.  I know the stuff that causes those
+bewitching eyes.  I know the shop where they make those dimples; I have
+passed it and looked in.  I thought they were produced by angels’ kisses,
+but there was not an angel about the place, that I could see.  Perhaps I
+have also been deceived as regards their goodness.  Maybe all women are
+not so perfect as in the popular short story they appear to be.  That is
+why I suggest that Science should proceed still further, and make them
+all as beautiful in mind as she is now able to make them in body.  May we
+not live to see in the advertisement columns of the ladies’ paper of the
+future the portrait of a young girl sulking in a corner—“Before taking
+the lotion!”  The same girl dancing among her little brothers and
+sisters, shedding sunlight through the home—“After the three first
+bottles!”  May we not have the Caudle Mixture: One tablespoonful at
+bed-time guaranteed to make the lady murmur, “Good-night, dear; hope
+you’ll sleep well,” and at once to fall asleep, her lips parted in a
+smile?  Maybe some specialist of the future will advertise Mind Massage:
+“Warranted to remove from the most obstinate subject all traces of
+hatred, envy, and malice.”
+
+And, when Science has done everything possible for women, there might be
+no harm in her turning her attention to us men.  Her idea at present
+seems to be that we men are too beautiful, physically and morally, to
+need improvement.  Personally, there are one or two points about which I
+should like to consult her.
+
+
+
+
+WHEN IS THE BEST TIME TO BE MERRY?
+
+
+THERE is so much I could do to improve things generally in and about
+Europe, if only I had a free hand.  I should not propose any great
+fundamental changes.  These poor people have got used to their own ways;
+it would be unwise to reform them all at once.  But there are many little
+odds and ends that I could do for them, so many of their mistakes I could
+correct for them.  They do not know this.  If they only knew there was a
+man living in their midst willing to take them in hand and arrange things
+for them, how glad they would be.  But the story is always the same.  One
+reads it in the advertisements of the matrimonial column:
+
+“A lady, young, said to be good-looking”—she herself is not sure on the
+point; she feels that possibly she may be prejudiced; she puts before you
+merely the current gossip of the neighbourhood; people say she is
+beautiful; they may be right, they may be wrong: it is not for her to
+decide—“well-educated, of affectionate disposition, possessed of means,
+desires to meet gentleman with a view to matrimony.”
+
+Immediately underneath one reads of a gentleman of twenty-eight, “tall,
+fair, considered agreeable.”  Really the modesty of the matrimonial
+advertiser teaches to us ordinary mortals quite a beautiful lesson.  I
+know instinctively that were anybody to ask me suddenly:
+
+“Do you call yourself an agreeable man?” I should answer promptly:
+
+“An agreeable man!  Of course I’m an agreeable man.  What silly questions
+you do ask!”  If he persisted in arguing the matter, saying:
+
+“But there are people who do not consider you an agreeable man.”  I
+should get angry with him.
+
+“Oh, they think that, do they?” I should say.  “Well, you tell them from
+me, with my compliments, that they are a set of blithering idiots.  Not
+agreeable!  You show me the man who says I’m not agreeable.  I’ll soon
+let him know whether I’m agreeable or not.”
+
+These young men seeking a wife are silent on the subject of their own
+virtues.  Such are for others to discover.  The matrimonial advertiser
+confines himself to a simple statement of fact: “he is considered
+agreeable.”  He is domestically inclined, and in receipt of a good
+income.  He is desirous of meeting a lady of serious disposition, with
+view to matrimony.  If possessed of means—well, it is a trifle hardly
+worth considering one way or the other.  He does not insist upon it; on
+the other hand he does not exclude ladies of means; the main idea is
+matrimony.
+
+It is sad to reflect upon a young lady, said to be good-looking (let us
+say good-looking and be done with it: a neighbourhood does not rise up
+and declare a girl good-looking if she is not good-looking, that is only
+her modest way of putting it), let us say a young lady, good-looking,
+well-educated, of affectionate disposition—it is undeniably sad to
+reflect that such an one, matrimonially inclined, should be compelled to
+have recourse to the columns of a matrimonial journal.  What are the
+young men in the neighbourhood thinking of?  What more do they want?  Is
+it Venus come to life again with ten thousand a year that they are
+waiting for!  It makes me angry with my own sex reading these
+advertisements.  And when one thinks of the girls that do get married!
+
+But life is a mystery.  The fact remains: here is the ideal wife seeking
+in vain for a husband.  And here, immediately underneath—I will not say
+the ideal husband, he may have faults; none of us are perfect, but as men
+go a decided acquisition to any domestic hearth, an agreeable gentleman,
+fond of home life, none of your gad-abouts—calls aloud to the four winds
+for a wife—any sort of a wife, provided she be of a serious disposition.
+In his despair, he has grown indifferent to all other considerations.
+“Is there in this world,” he has said to himself, “one unmarried woman,
+willing to marry me, an agreeable man, in receipt of a good income.”
+Possibly enough this twain have passed one another in the street, have
+sat side by side in the same tram-car, never guessing, each one, that the
+other was the very article of which they were in want to make life
+beautiful.
+
+Mistresses in search of a servant, not so much with the idea of getting
+work out of her, rather with the object of making her happy, advertise on
+one page.  On the opposite page, domestic treasures—disciples of Carlyle,
+apparently, with a passionate love of work for its own sake—are seeking
+situations, not so much with the desire of gain as with the hope of
+finding openings where they may enjoy the luxury of feeling they are
+leading useful lives.  These philanthropic mistresses, these toil-loving
+hand-maidens, have lived side by side in the same town for years, never
+knowing one another.
+
+So it is with these poor European peoples.  They pass me in the street.
+They do not guess that I am ready and willing to take them under my care,
+to teach them common sense with a smattering of intelligence—to be, as
+one might say, a father to them.  They look at me.  There is nothing
+about me to tell them that I know what is good for them better than they
+do themselves.  In the fairy tales the wise man wore a conical hat and a
+long robe with twiddly things all round the edge.  You knew he was a
+clever man.  It avoided the necessity of explanation.  Unfortunately, the
+fashion has gone out.  We wise men have to wear just ordinary clothes.
+Nobody knows we are wise men.  Even when we tell them so, they don’t
+believe it.  This it is that makes our task the more difficult.
+
+One of the first things I should take in hand, were European affairs
+handed over to my control, would be the rearrangement of the Carnival.
+As matters are, the Carnival takes place all over Europe in February.  At
+Nice, in Spain, or in Italy, it may be occasionally possible to feel you
+want to dance about the streets in thin costume during February.  But in
+more northern countries during Carnival time I have seen only one
+sensible masker; he was a man who had got himself up as a diver.  It was
+in Antwerp.  The rain was pouring down in torrents; a cheery, boisterous
+John Bull sort of an east wind was blustering through the streets at the
+rate of fifteen miles an hour.  Pierrots, with frozen hands, were blowing
+blue noses.  An elderly Cupid had borrowed an umbrella from a café and
+was waiting for a tram.  A very little devil was crying with the cold,
+and wiping his eyes with the end of his own tail.  Every doorway was
+crowded with shivering maskers.  The diver alone walked erect, the water
+streaming from him.
+
+February is not the month for open air masquerading.  The “confetti,”
+which has come to be nothing but coloured paper cut into small discs, is
+a sodden mass.  When a lump of it strikes you in the eye, your instinct
+is not to laugh gaily, but to find out the man who threw it and to hit
+him back.  This is not the true spirit of Carnival.  The marvel is that,
+in spite of the almost invariably adverse weather, these Carnivals still
+continue.  In Belgium, where Romanism still remains the dominant
+religion, Carnival maintains itself stronger than elsewhere in Northern
+Europe.
+
+At one small town, Binche, near the French border, it holds uninterrupted
+sway for three days and two nights, during which time the whole of the
+population, swelled by visitors from twenty miles round, shouts, romps,
+eats and drinks and dances.  After which the visitors are packed like
+sardines into railway trains.  They pin their tickets to their coats and
+promptly go to sleep.  At every station the railway officials stumble up
+and down the trains with lanterns.  The last feeble effort of the more
+wakeful reveller, before he adds himself to the heap of snoring humanity
+on the floor of the railway carriage, is to change the tickets of a
+couple of his unconscious companions.  In this way gentlemen for the east
+are dragged out by the legs at junctions, and packed into trains going
+west; while southern fathers are shot out in the chill dawn at lonely
+northern stations, to find themselves greeted with enthusiasm by other
+people’s families.
+
+At Binche, they say—I have not counted them myself—that thirty thousand
+maskers can be seen dancing at the same time.  When they are not dancing
+they are throwing oranges at one another.  The houses board up their
+windows.  The restaurants take down their mirrors and hide away the
+glasses.  If I went masquerading at Binche I should go as a man in
+armour, period Henry the Seventh.
+
+“Doesn’t it hurt,” I asked a lady who had been there, “having oranges
+thrown at you?  Which sort do they use, speaking generally, those fine
+juicy ones—Javas I think you call them—or the little hard brand with
+skins like a nutmeg-grater?  And if both sorts are used indiscriminately,
+which do you personally prefer?”
+
+“The smart people,” she answered, “they are the same everywhere—they must
+be extravagant—they use the Java orange.  If it hits you in the back I
+prefer the Java orange.  It is more messy than the other, but it does not
+leave you with that curious sensation of having been temporarily stunned.
+Most people, of course, make use of the small hard orange.  If you duck
+in time, and so catch it on the top of your head, it does not hurt so
+much as you would think.  If, however, it hits you on a tender
+place—well, myself, I always find that a little sal volatile, with old
+cognac—half and half, you understand—is about the best thing.  But it
+only happens once a year,” she added.
+
+Nearly every town gives prizes for the best group of maskers.  In some
+cases the first prize amounts to as much as two hundred pounds.  The
+butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers, join together and compete.
+They arrive in wagons, each group with its band.  Free trade is
+encouraged.  Each neighbouring town and village “dumps” its load of
+picturesque merry-makers.
+
+It is in these smaller towns that the spirit of King Carnival finds
+happiest expression.  Almost every third inhabitant takes part in the
+fun.  In Brussels and the larger towns the thing appears ridiculous.  A
+few hundred maskers force their way with difficulty through thousands of
+dull-clad spectators, looking like a Spanish river in the summer time, a
+feeble stream, dribbling through acres of muddy bank.  At Charleroi, the
+centre of the Belgian Black Country, the chief feature of the Carnival is
+the dancing of the children.  A space is specially roped off for them.
+
+If by chance the sun is kind enough to shine, the sight is a pretty one.
+How they love the dressing up and the acting, these small mites!  One
+young hussy—she could hardly have been more than ten—was gotten up as a
+haughty young lady.  Maybe some elder sister had served as a model.  She
+wore a tremendous wig of flaxen hair, a hat that I guarantee would have
+made its mark even at Ascot on the Cup Day, a skirt that trailed two
+yards behind her, a pair of what had once been white kid gloves, and a
+blue silk parasol.  Dignity!  I have seen the offended barmaid, I have
+met the chorus girl—not by appointment, please don’t misunderstand me,
+merely as a spectator—up the river on Sunday.  But never have I witnessed
+in any human being so much hauteur to the pound _avoir-dupois_ as was
+carried through the streets of Charleroi by that small brat.  Companions
+of other days, mere vulgar boys and girls, claimed acquaintance with her.
+She passed them with a stare of such utter disdain that it sent them
+tumbling over one another backwards.  By the time they had recovered
+themselves sufficiently to think of an old tin kettle lying handy in the
+gutter she had turned the corner.
+
+Two miserably clad urchins, unable to scrape together the few _sous_
+necessary for the hire of a rag or two, had nevertheless determined not
+to be altogether out of it.  They had managed to borrow a couple of white
+blouses—not what you would understand by a white blouse, dear Madame, a
+dainty thing of frills and laces, but the coarse white sack the street
+sweeper wears over his clothes.  They had also borrowed a couple of
+brooms.  Ridiculous little objects they looked, the tiny head of each
+showing above the great white shroud as gravely they walked, the one
+behind the other, sweeping the mud into the gutter.  They also were of
+the Carnival, playing at being scavengers.
+
+Another quaint sight I witnessed.  The “serpentin” is a feature of the
+Belgian Carnival.  It is a strip of coloured paper, some dozen yards
+long, perhaps.  You fling it as you would a lassoo, entangling the head
+of some passer-by.  Naturally, the object most aimed at by the Belgian
+youth is the Belgian maiden.  And, naturally also, the maiden who finds
+herself most entangled is the maiden who—to use again the language of the
+matrimonial advertiser—“is considered good-looking.”  The serpentin about
+her head is the “feather in her cap” of the Belgian maiden on Carnival
+Day.  Coming suddenly round the corner I almost ran into a girl.  Her
+back was towards me.  It was a quiet street.  She had half a dozen of
+these serpentins.  Hurriedly, with trembling hands, she was twisting them
+round and round her own head.  I looked at her as I passed.  She flushed
+scarlet.  Poor little snub-nosed pasty-faced woman!  I wish she had not
+seen me.  I could have bought sixpenny-worth, followed her, and tormented
+her with them; while she would have pretended indignation—sought,
+discreetly, to escape from me.
+
+Down South, where the blood flows quicker, King Carnival is, indeed, a
+jolly old soul.  In Munich he reigns for six weeks, the end coming with a
+mad two days revel in the streets.  During the whole of the period, folks
+in ordinary, every-day costume are regarded as curiosities; people wonder
+what they are up to.  From the Grafin to the Dienstmädchen, from the Herr
+Professor to the “Piccolo,” as they term the small artist that answers to
+our page boy, the business of Munich is dancing, somewhere, somehow, in a
+fancy costume.  Every theatre clears away the stage, every café crowds
+its chairs and tables into corners, the very streets are cleared for
+dancing.  Munich goes mad.
+
+Munich is always a little mad.  The maddest ball I ever danced at was in
+Munich.  I went there with a Harvard University professor.  He had been
+told what these balls were like.  Ever seeking knowledge of all things,
+he determined to take the matter up for himself and examine it.  The
+writer also must ever be learning.  I agreed to accompany him.  We had
+not intended to dance.  Our idea was that we could be indulgent
+spectators, regarding from some coign of vantage the antics of the
+foolish crowd.  The professor was clad as became a professor.  Myself, I
+wore a simply-cut frock-coat, with trousering in French grey.  The
+doorkeeper explained to us that this was a costume ball; he was sorry,
+but gentlemen could only be admitted in evening dress or in masquerade.
+
+It was half past one in the morning.  We had sat up late on purpose; we
+had gone without our dinner; we had walked two miles.  The professor
+suggested pinning up the tails of his clerically-cut coat and turning in
+his waistcoat.  The doorkeeper feared it would not be quite the same
+thing.  Besides, my French grey trousers refused to adapt themselves.
+The doorkeeper proposed our hiring a costume—a little speculation of his
+own; gentlemen found it simpler sometimes, especially married gentlemen,
+to hire a costume in this manner, changing back into sober garments
+before returning home.  It reduced the volume of necessary explanation.
+
+“Have you anything, my good man,” said the professor, “anything that
+would effect a complete disguise?”
+
+The doorkeeper had the very thing—a Chinese arrangement, with combined
+mask and wig.  It fitted neatly over the head, and was provided with a
+simple but ingenious piece of mechanism by means of which much could be
+done with the pigtail.  Myself the doorkeeper hid from view under the
+cowl of a Carmelite monk.
+
+“I do hope nobody recognises us,” whispered my friend the professor as we
+entered.
+
+I can only hope sincerely that they did not.  I do not wish to talk about
+myself.  That would be egotism.  But the mystery of the professor
+troubles me to this day.  A grave, earnest gentleman, the father of a
+family, I saw him with my own eyes put that ridiculous pasteboard mask
+over his head.  Later on—a good deal later on—I found myself walking
+again with him through silent star-lit streets.  Where he had been in the
+interval, and who then was the strange creature under the Chinaman’s
+mask, will always remain to me an unsolved problem.
+
+
+
+
+DO WE LIE A-BED TOO LATE?
+
+
+IT was in Paris, many years ago, that I fell by chance into this habit of
+early rising.  My night—by reasons that I need not enter into—had been a
+troubled one.  Tired of the hot bed that gave no sleep, I rose and
+dressed myself, crept down the creaking stairs, experiencing the
+sensations of a burglar new to his profession, unbolted the great door of
+the hotel, and passed out into an unknown, silent city, bathed in a
+mysterious soft light.  Since then, this strange sweet city of the dawn
+has never ceased to call to me.  It may be in London, in Paris again, in
+Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, that I have gone to sleep, but if perchance I
+wake before the returning tide of human life has dimmed its glories with
+the mists and vapours of the noisy day, I know that beyond my window
+blind the fairy city, as I saw it first so many years ago—this city that
+knows no tears, no sorrow, through which there creeps no evil thing; this
+city of quiet vistas, fading into hope; this city of far-off voices
+whispering peace; this city of the dawn that still is young—invites me to
+talk with it awhile before the waking hours drive it before them, and
+with a sigh it passes whence it came.
+
+It is the great city’s one hour of purity, of dignity.  The very
+rag-picker, groping with her filthy hands among the ashes, instead of an
+object of contempt, moves from door to door an accusing Figure, her thin
+soiled garments, her bent body, her scarred face, hideous with the wounds
+of poverty, an eloquent indictment of smug Injustice, sleeping behind its
+deaf shutters.  Yet even into her dim brain has sunk the peace that fills
+for this brief hour the city.  This, too, shall have its end, my sister!
+Men and women were not born to live on the husks that fill the pails
+outside the rich man’s door.  Courage a little while longer, you and
+yours.  Your rheumy eyes once were bright, your thin locks once soft and
+wavy, your poor bent back once straight; and maybe, as they tell you in
+their gilded churches, this bulging sack shall be lifted from your weary
+shoulders, your misshapen limbs be straight again.  You pass not
+altogether unheeded through these empty streets.  Not all the eyes of the
+universe are sleeping.
+
+The little seamstress, hurrying to her early work!  A little later she
+will be one of the foolish crowd, joining in the foolish laughter, in the
+coarse jests of the work-room: but as yet the hot day has not claimed
+her.  The work-room is far beyond, the home of mean cares and sordid
+struggles far behind.  To her, also, in this moment are the sweet
+thoughts of womanhood.  She puts down her bag, rests herself upon a seat.
+If all the day were dawn, this city of the morning always with us!  A
+neighbouring clock chimes forth the hour.  She starts up from her dream
+and hurries on—to the noisy work-room.
+
+A pair of lovers cross the park, holding each other’s hands.  They will
+return later in the day, but there will be another expression in their
+eyes, another meaning in the pressure of their hands.  Now the purity of
+the morning is with them.
+
+Some fat, middle-aged clerk comes puffing into view: his ridiculous
+little figure very podgy.  He stops to take off his hat and mop his bald
+head with his handkerchief: even to him the morning lends romance.  His
+fleshy face changes almost as one looks at him.  One sees again the lad
+with his vague hopes, his absurd ambitions.
+
+There is a statue of Aphrodite in one of the smaller Paris parks.  Twice
+in the same week, without particularly meaning it, I found myself early
+in the morning standing in front of this statue gazing listlessly at it,
+as one does when in dreamy mood; and on both occasions, turning to go, I
+encountered the same man, also gazing at it with, apparently, listless
+eyes.  He was an uninteresting looking man—possibly he thought the same
+of me.  From his dress he might have been a well-to-do tradesman, a minor
+Government official, doctor, or lawyer.  Quite ten years later I paid my
+third visit to the same statue at about the same hour.  This time he was
+there before me.  I was hidden from him by some bushes.  He glanced round
+but did not see me; and then he did a curious thing.  Placing his hands
+on the top of the pedestal, which may have been some seven feet in
+height, he drew himself up, and kissed very gently, almost reverentially,
+the foot of the statue, begrimed though it was with the city’s dirt.  Had
+he been some long-haired student of the Latin Quarter one would not have
+been so astonished.  But he was such a very commonplace, quite
+respectable looking man.  Afterwards he drew a pipe from his pocket,
+carefully filled and lighted it, took his umbrella from the seat where it
+had been lying, and walked away.
+
+Had it been their meeting-place long ago?  Had he been wont to tell her,
+gazing at her with lover’s eyes, how like she was to the statue?  The
+French sculptor has not to consider Mrs. Grundy.  Maybe, the lady,
+raising her eyes, had been confused; perhaps for a moment angry—some
+little milliner or governess, one supposes.  In France the _jeune fille_
+of good family does not meet her lover unattended.  What had happened?
+Or was it but the vagrant fancy of a middle-aged bourgeois seeking in
+imagination the romance that reality so rarely gives us, weaving his love
+dream round his changeless statue?
+
+In one of Ibsen’s bitter comedies the lovers agree to part while they are
+still young, never to see each other in the flesh again.  Into the future
+each will bear away the image of the other, godlike, radiant with the
+glory of youth and love; each will cherish the memory of a loved one who
+shall be beautiful always.  That their parting may not appear such wild
+nonsense as at first it strikes us, Ibsen shows us other lovers who have
+married in the orthodox fashion.  She was all that a mistress should be.
+They speak of her as they first knew her fifteen years ago, when every
+man was at her feet.  He then was a young student, burning with fine
+ideals, with enthusiasm for all the humanities.
+
+They enter.
+
+What did you expect?  Fifteen years have passed—fifteen years of struggle
+with the grim realities.  He is fat and bald.  Eleven children have to be
+provided for.  High ideals will not even pay the bootmaker.  To exist you
+have to fight for mean ends with mean weapons.  And the sweet girl
+heroine!  Now the worried mother of eleven brats!  One rings down the
+curtain amid Satanic laughter.
+
+That is why, for one reason among so many, I love this mystic morning
+light.  It has a strange power of revealing the beauty that is hidden
+from us by the coarser beams of the full day.  These worn men and women,
+grown so foolish looking, so unromantic; these artisans and petty clerks
+plodding to their monotonous day’s work; these dull-eyed women of the
+people on their way to market to haggle over _sous_, to argue and contend
+over paltry handfuls of food.  In this magic morning light the disguising
+body becomes transparent.  They have grown beautiful, not ugly, with the
+years of toil and hardship; these lives, lived so patiently, are
+consecrated to the service of the world.  Joy, hope, pleasure—they have
+done with all such, life for them is over.  Yet they labour, ceaselessly,
+uncomplainingly.  It is for the children.
+
+One morning, near Brussels, I encountered a cart of faggots, drawn by a
+hound so lean that stroking him might have hurt a dainty hand.  I was
+shocked—angry, till I noticed his fellow beast of burden pushing the cart
+from behind.  Such a scarecrow of an old woman!  There was little to
+choose between them.  I walked with them a little way.  She lived near
+Waterloo.  All day she gathered wood in the great forest, and starting at
+three o’clock each morning, the two lean creatures between them dragged
+the cart nine miles to Brussels, returning when they had sold their load.
+With luck she might reckon on a couple of francs.  I asked her if she
+could not find something else to do.
+
+Yes, it was possible, but for the little one, her grandchild.  Folks will
+not employ old women burdened with grandchildren.
+
+You fair, dainty ladies, who would never know it was morning if somebody
+did not enter to pull up the blind and tell you so!  You do well not to
+venture out in this magic morning light.  You would look so plain—almost
+ugly, by the side of these beautiful women.
+
+It is curious the attraction the Church has always possessed for the
+marketing classes.  Christ drove them from the Temple, but still, in
+every continental city, they cluster round its outer walls.  It makes a
+charming picture on a sunny morning, the great cathedral with its massive
+shadow forming the background; splashed about its feet, like a parterre
+of gay flowers around the trunk of some old tree, the women, young girls
+in their many coloured costumes, sitting before their piled-up baskets of
+green vegetables, of shining fruits.
+
+In Brussels the chief market is held on the Grande Place.  The great
+gilded houses have looked down upon much the same scene every morning
+these four hundred years.  In summer time it commences about half-past
+four; by five o’clock it is a roaring hive, the great city round about
+still sleeping.
+
+Here comes the thrifty housewife of the poor, to whom the difference of a
+tenth of a penny in the price of a cabbage is all-important, and the much
+harassed keeper of the petty _pension_.  There are houses in Brussels
+where they will feed you, light you, sleep you, wait on you, for two
+francs a day.  Withered old ladies, ancient governesses, who will teach
+you for forty centimes an hour, gather round these ricketty tables, wolf
+up the thin soup, grumble at the watery coffee, help themselves with
+unladylike greediness to the potato pie.  It must need careful
+housewifery to keep these poor creatures on two francs a day and make a
+profit for yourself.  So “Madame,” the much-grumbled-at, who has gone to
+bed about twelve, rises a little before five, makes her way down with her
+basket.  Thus a few _sous_ may be saved upon the day’s economies.
+
+Sometimes it is a mere child who is the little housekeeper.  One thinks
+that perhaps this early training in the art of haggling may not be good
+for her.  Already there is a hard expression in the childish eyes, mean
+lines about the little mouth.  The finer qualities of humanity are
+expensive luxuries, not to be afforded by the poor.
+
+They overwork their patient dogs, and underfeed them.  During the two
+hours’ market the poor beasts, still fastened to their little “chariots,”
+rest in the open space about the neighbouring Bourse.  They snatch at
+what you throw them; they do not even thank you with a wag of the tail.
+Gratitude!  Politeness!  What mean you?  We have not heard of such.  We
+only work.  Some of them amid all the din lie sleeping between their
+shafts.  Some are licking one another’s sores.  One would they were
+better treated; alas! their owners, likewise, are overworked and
+underfed, housed in kennels no better.  But if the majority in every
+society were not overworked and underfed and meanly housed, why, then the
+minority could not be underworked and overfed and housed luxuriously.
+But this is talk to which no respectable reader can be expected to
+listen.
+
+They are one babel of bargaining, these markets.  The purchaser selects a
+cauliflower.  Fortunately, cauliflowers have no feelings, or probably it
+would burst into tears at the expression with which it is regarded.  It
+is impossible that any lady should desire such a cauliflower.  Still, out
+of mere curiosity, she would know the price—that is, if the owner of the
+cauliflower is not too much ashamed of it to name a price.
+
+The owner of the cauliflower suggests six _sous_.  The thing is too
+ridiculous for argument.  The purchaser breaks into a laugh.
+
+The owner of the cauliflower is stung.  She points out the beauties of
+that cauliflower.  Apparently it is the cauliflower out of all her stock
+she loves the best; a better cauliflower never lived; if there were more
+cauliflowers in the world like this particular cauliflower things might
+be different.  She gives a sketch of the cauliflower’s career, from its
+youth upwards.  Hard enough it will be for her when the hour for parting
+from it comes.  If the other lady has not sufficient knowledge of
+cauliflowers to appreciate it, will she kindly not paw it about, but put
+it down and go away, and never let the owner of the cauliflower see her
+again.
+
+The other lady, more as a friend than as a purchaser, points out the
+cauliflower’s defects.  She wishes well to the owner of the cauliflower,
+and would like to teach her something about her business.  A lady who
+thinks such a cauliflower worth six _sous_ can never hope to succeed as a
+cauliflower vendor.  Has she really taken the trouble to examine the
+cauliflower for herself, or has love made her blind to its shortcomings?
+
+The owner of the cauliflower is too indignant to reply.  She snatches it
+away, appears to be comforting it, replaces it in the basket.  The other
+lady is grieved at human obstinacy and stupidity in general.  If the
+owner of the cauliflower had had any sense she would have asked four
+_sous_.  Eventually business is done at five.
+
+It is the custom everywhere abroad—asking the price of a thing is simply
+opening conversation.  A lady told me that, the first day she began
+housekeeping in Florence, she handed over to a poulterer for a chicken
+the price he had demanded—with protestations that he was losing on the
+transaction, but wanted, for family reasons, apparently, to get rid of
+the chicken.  He stood for half a minute staring at her, and then, being
+an honest sort of man, threw in a pigeon.
+
+Foreign housekeepers starting business in London appear hurt when our
+tradesmen decline to accept half-a-crown for articles marked
+three-and-six.
+
+“Then why mark it only three-and-sixpence?” is the foreign housekeeper’s
+argument.
+
+
+
+
+SHOULD MARRIED MEN PLAY GOLF?
+
+
+THAT we Englishmen attach too much importance to sport goes without
+saying—or, rather, it has been said so often as to have become a
+commonplace.  One of these days some reforming English novelist will
+write a book, showing the evil effects of over-indulgence in sport: the
+neglected business, the ruined home, the slow but sure sapping of the
+brain—what there may have been of it in the beginning—leading to
+semi-imbecility and yearly increasing obesity.
+
+A young couple, I once heard of, went for their honeymoon to Scotland.
+The poor girl did not know he was a golfer (he had wooed and won her
+during a period of idleness enforced by a sprained shoulder), or maybe
+she would have avoided Scotland.  The idea they started with was that of
+a tour.  The second day the man went out for a stroll by himself.  At
+dinner-time he observed, with a far-away look in his eyes, that it seemed
+a pretty spot they had struck, and suggested their staying there another
+day.  The next morning after breakfast he borrowed a club from the hotel
+porter, and remarked that he would take a walk while she finished doing
+her hair.  He said it amused him, swinging a club while he walked.  He
+returned in time for lunch and seemed moody all the afternoon.  He said
+the air suited him, and urged that they should linger yet another day.
+
+She was young and inexperienced, and thought, maybe, it was liver.  She
+had heard much about liver from her father.  The next morning he borrowed
+more clubs, and went out, this time before breakfast, returning to a late
+and not over sociable dinner.  That was the end of their honeymoon so far
+as she was concerned.  He meant well, but the thing had gone too far.
+The vice had entered into his blood, and the smell of the links drove out
+all other considerations.
+
+We are most of us familiar, I take it, with the story of the golfing
+parson, who could not keep from swearing when the balls went wrong.
+
+“Golf and the ministry don’t seem to go together,” his friend told him.
+“Take my advice before it’s too late, and give it up, Tammas.”
+
+A few months later Tammas met his friend again.
+
+“You were right, Jamie,” cried the parson cheerily, “they didna run well
+in harness; golf and the meenistry, I hae followed your advice: I hae
+gi’en it oop.”
+
+“Then what are ye doing with that sack of clubs?” inquired Jamie.
+
+“What am I doing with them?” repeated the puzzled Tammas.  “Why I am
+going to play golf with them.”  A light broke upon him.  “Great Heavens,
+man!” he continued, “ye didna’ think ’twas the golf I’d gi’en oop?”
+
+The Englishman does not understand play.  He makes a life-long labour of
+his sport, and to it sacrifices mind and body.  The health resorts of
+Europe—to paraphrase a famous saying that nobody appears to have
+said—draw half their profits from the playing fields of Eton and
+elsewhere.  In Swiss and German kurhausen enormously fat men bear down
+upon you and explain to you that once they were the champion sprinters or
+the high-jump representatives of their university—men who now hold on to
+the bannisters and groan as they haul themselves upstairs.  Consumptive
+men, between paroxysms of coughing, tell you of the goals they scored
+when they were half-backs or forwards of extraordinary ability.
+Ex-light-weight amateur pugilists, with the figure now of an American
+roll-top desk, butt you into a corner of the billiard-room, and,
+surprised they cannot get as near you as they would desire, whisper to
+you the secret of avoiding the undercut by the swiftness of the backward
+leap.  Broken-down tennis players, one-legged skaters, dropsical
+gentlemen-riders, are to be met with hobbling on crutches along every
+highway of the Engadine.
+
+They are pitiable objects.  Never having learnt to read anything but the
+sporting papers, books are of no use to them.  They never wasted much of
+their youth on thought, and, apparently, have lost the knack of it.  They
+don’t care for art, and Nature only suggests to them the things they can
+no longer do.  The snow-clad mountain reminds them that once they were
+daring tobogannists; the undulating common makes them sad because they
+can no longer handle a golf-club; by the riverside they sit down and tell
+you of the salmon they caught before they caught rheumatic fever; birds
+only make them long for guns; music raises visions of the local
+cricket-match of long ago, enlivened by the local band; a picturesque
+estaminet, with little tables spread out under the vines, recalls bitter
+memories of ping-pong.  One is sorry for them, but their conversation is
+not exhilarating.  The man who has other interests in life beyond sport
+is apt to find their reminiscences monotonous; while to one another they
+do not care to talk.  One gathers that they do not altogether believe one
+another.
+
+The foreigner is taking kindly to our sports; one hopes he will be
+forewarned by our example and not overdo the thing.  At present, one is
+bound to admit, he shows no sign of taking sport too seriously.  Football
+is gaining favour more and more throughout Europe.  But yet the Frenchman
+has not got it out of his head that the _coup_ to practise is kicking the
+ball high into the air and catching it upon his head.  He would rather
+catch the ball upon his head than score a goal.  If he can manœuvre the
+ball away into a corner, kick it up into the air twice running, and each
+time catch it on his head, he does not seem to care what happens after
+that.  Anybody can have the ball; he has had his game and is happy.
+
+They talk of introducing cricket into Belgium; I shall certainly try to
+be present at the opening game.  I am afraid that, until he learns from
+experience, the Belgian fielder will stop cricket balls with his head.
+That the head is the proper thing with which to play ball appears to be
+in his blood.  My head is round, he argues, and hard, just like the ball
+itself; what part of the human frame more fit and proper with which to
+meet and stop a ball.
+
+Golf has not yet caught on, but tennis is firmly established from St.
+Petersburg to Bordeaux.  The German, with the thoroughness characteristic
+of him, is working hard.  University professors, stout majors, rising
+early in the morning, hire boys and practise back-handers and
+half-volleys.  But to the Frenchman, as yet, it is a game.  He plays it
+in a happy, merry fashion, that is shocking to English eyes.
+
+Your partner’s service rather astonishes you.  An occasional yard or so
+beyond the line happens to anyone, but this man’s object appears to be to
+break windows.  You feel you really must remonstrate, when the joyous
+laughter and tumultuous applause of the spectators explain the puzzle to
+you.  He has not been trying to serve; he has been trying to hit a man in
+the next court who is stooping down to tie up his shoe-lace.  With his
+last ball he has succeeded.  He has hit the man in the small of the back,
+and has bowled him over.  The unanimous opinion of the surrounding
+critics is that the ball could not possibly have been better placed.  A
+Doherty has never won greater applause from the crowd.  Even the man who
+has been hit appears pleased; it shows what a Frenchman can do when he
+does take up a game.
+
+But French honour demands revenge.  He forgets his shoe, he forgets his
+game.  He gathers together all the balls that he can find; his balls,
+your balls, anybody’s balls that happen to be handy.  And then commences
+the return match.  At this point it is best to crouch down under shelter
+of the net.  Most of the players round about adopt this plan; the more
+timid make for the club-house, and, finding themselves there, order
+coffee and light up cigarettes.  After a while both players appear to be
+satisfied.  The other players then gather round to claim their balls.
+This makes a good game by itself.  The object is to get as many balls as
+you can, your own and other people’s—for preference other people’s—and
+run off with them round the courts, followed by whooping claimants.
+
+In the course of half-an-hour or so, when everybody is dead beat, the
+game—the original game—is resumed.  You demand the score; your partner
+promptly says it is “forty-fifteen.”  Both your opponents rush up to the
+net, and apparently there is going to be a duel.  It is only a friendly
+altercation; they very much doubt its being “forty-fifteen.”
+“Fifteen-forty” they could believe; they suggest it as a compromise.  The
+discussion is concluded by calling it deuce.  As it is rare for a game to
+proceed without some such incident occurring in the middle of it, the
+score generally is deuce.  This avoids heart-burning; nobody wins a set
+and nobody loses.  The one game generally suffices for the afternoon.
+
+To the earnest player, it is also confusing to miss your partner
+occasionally—to turn round and find that he is talking to a man.  Nobody
+but yourself takes the slightest objection to his absence.  The other
+side appear to regard it as a good opportunity to score.  Five minutes
+later he resumes the game.  His friend comes with him, also the dog of
+his friend.  The dog is welcomed with enthusiasm; all balls are returned
+to the dog.  Until the dog is tired you do not get a look in.  But all
+this will no doubt soon be changed.  There are some excellent French and
+Belgian players; from them their compatriots will gradually learn higher
+ideals.  The Frenchman is young in the game.  As the right conception of
+the game grows upon him, he will also learn to keep the balls lower.
+
+I suppose it is the continental sky.  It is so blue, so beautiful; it
+naturally attracts one.  Anyhow, the fact remains that most tennis
+players on the Continent, whether English or foreign, have a tendency to
+aim the ball direct at Heaven.  At an English club in Switzerland there
+existed in my days a young Englishman who was really a wonderful player.
+To get the ball past him was almost an impossibility.  It was his return
+that was weak.  He only had one stroke; the ball went a hundred feet or
+so into the air and descended in his opponent’s court.  The other man
+would stand watching it, a little speck in the Heavens, growing gradually
+bigger and bigger as it neared the earth.  Newcomers would chatter to
+him, thinking he had detected a balloon or an eagle.  He would wave them
+aside, explain to them that he would talk to them later, after the
+arrival of the ball.  It would fall with a thud at his feet, rise another
+twenty yards or so and again descend.  When it was at the proper height
+he would hit it back over the net, and the next moment it would be
+mounting the sky again.  At tournaments I have seen that young man, with
+tears in his eyes, pleading to be given an umpire.  Every umpire had
+fled.  They hid behind trees, borrowed silk hats and umbrellas and
+pretended they were visitors—any device, however mean, to avoid the task
+of umpiring for that young man.  Provided his opponent did not go to
+sleep or get cramp, one game might last all day.  Anyone could return his
+balls; but, as I have said, to get a ball past him was almost an
+impossibility.  He invariably won; the other man, after an hour or so,
+would get mad and try to lose.  It was his only chance of dinner.
+
+It is a pretty sight, generally speaking, a tennis ground abroad.  The
+women pay more attention to their costumes than do our lady players.  The
+men are usually in spotless white.  The ground is often charmingly
+situated, the club-house picturesque; there is always laughter and
+merriment.  The play may not be so good to watch, but the picture is
+delightful.  I accompanied a man a little while ago to his club on the
+outskirts of Brussels.  The ground was bordered by a wood on one side,
+and surrounded on the other three by _petites fermes_—allotments, as we
+should call them in England, worked by the peasants themselves.
+
+It was a glorious spring afternoon.  The courts were crowded.  The red
+earth and the green grass formed a background against which the women, in
+their new Parisian toilets, under their bright parasols, stood out like
+wondrous bouquets of moving flowers.  The whole atmosphere was a
+delightful mingling of idle gaiety, flirtation, and graceful
+sensuousness.  A modern Watteau would have seized upon the scene with
+avidity.
+
+Just beyond—separated by the almost invisible wire fencing—a group of
+peasants were working in the field.  An old woman and a young girl, with
+ropes about their shoulders, were drawing a harrow, guided by a withered
+old scarecrow of a man.  They paused for a moment at the wire fencing,
+and looked through.  It was an odd contrast; the two worlds divided by
+that wire fencing—so slight, almost invisible.  The girl swept the sweat
+from her face with her hand; the woman pushed back her grey locks
+underneath the handkerchief knotted about her head; the old man
+straightened himself with some difficulty.  So they stood, for perhaps a
+minute, gazing with quiet, passionless faces through that slight fencing,
+that a push from their work-hardened hands might have levelled.
+
+Was there any thought, I wonder, passing through their brains?  The young
+girl—she was a handsome creature in spite of her disfiguring garments.
+The woman—it was a wonderfully fine face: clear, calm eyes, deep-set
+under a square broad brow.  The withered old scarecrow—ever sowing the
+seed in the spring of the fruit that others shall eat.
+
+The old man bent again over the guiding ropes: gave the word.  The team
+moved forward up the hill.  It is Anatole France, I think, who says:
+Society is based upon the patience of the poor.
+
+
+
+
+ARE EARLY MARRIAGES A MISTAKE?
+
+
+I AM chary nowadays of offering counsel in connection with subjects
+concerning which I am not and cannot be an authority.  Long ago I once
+took upon myself to write a paper about babies.  It did not aim to be a
+textbook on the subject.  It did not even claim to exhaust the topic.  I
+was willing that others, coming after me, should continue the
+argument—that is if, upon reflection, they were still of opinion there
+was anything more to be said.  I was pleased with the article.  I went
+out of my way to obtain an early copy of the magazine in which it
+appeared, on purpose to show it to a lady friend of mine.  She was the
+possessor of one or two babies of her own, specimens in no way
+remarkable, though she herself, as was natural enough, did her best to
+boom them.  I thought it might be helpful to her: the views and
+observations, not of a rival fancier, who would be prejudiced, but of an
+intelligent amateur.  I put the magazine into her hands, opened at the
+proper place.
+
+“Read it through carefully and quietly,” I said; “don’t let anything
+distract you.  Have a pencil and a bit of paper ready at your side, and
+note down any points upon which you would like further information.  If
+there is anything you think I have missed out let me know.  It may be
+that here and there you will be disagreeing with me.  If so, do not
+hesitate to mention it, I shall not be angry.  If a demand arises I shall
+very likely issue an enlarged and improved edition of this paper in the
+form of a pamphlet, in which case hints and suggestions that to you may
+appear almost impertinent will be of distinct help to me.”
+
+“I haven’t got a pencil,” she said; “what’s it all about?”
+
+“It’s about babies,” I explained, and I lent her a pencil.
+
+That is another thing I have learnt.  Never lend a pencil to a woman if
+you ever want to see it again.  She has three answers to your request for
+its return.  The first, that she gave it back to you and that you put it
+in your pocket, and that it’s there now, and that if it isn’t it ought to
+be.  The second, that you never lent it to her.  The third, that she
+wishes people would not lend her pencils and then clamour for them back,
+just when she has something else far more important to think about.
+
+“What do you know about babies?” she demanded.
+
+“If you will read the paper,” I replied, “you will see for yourself.
+It’s all there.”
+
+She flicked over the pages contemptuously.
+
+“There doesn’t seem much of it?” she retorted.
+
+“It is condensed,” I pointed out to her.
+
+“I am glad it is short.  All right, I’ll read it,” she agreed.
+
+I thought my presence might disturb her, so went out into the garden.  I
+wanted her to get the full benefit of it.  I crept back now and again to
+peep through the open window.  She did not seem to be making many notes.
+But I heard her making little noises to herself.  When I saw she had
+reached the last page, I re-entered the room.
+
+“Well?” I said.
+
+“Is it meant to be funny,” she demanded, “or is it intended to be taken
+seriously?”
+
+“There may be flashes of humour here and there—”
+
+She did not wait for me to finish.
+
+“Because if it’s meant to be funny,” she said, “I don’t think it is at
+all funny.  And if it is intended to be serious, there’s one thing very
+clear, and that is that you are not a mother.”
+
+With the unerring instinct of the born critic she had divined my one weak
+point.  Other objections raised against me I could have met.  But that
+one stinging reproach was unanswerable.  It has made me, as I have
+explained, chary of tendering advice on matters outside my own department
+of life.  Otherwise, every year, about Valentine’s day, there is much
+that I should like to say to my good friends the birds.  I want to put it
+to them seriously.  Is not the month of February just a little too early?
+Of course, their answer would be the same as in the case of my motherly
+friend.
+
+“Oh, what do you know about it? you are not a bird.”
+
+I know I am not a bird, but that is the very reason why they should
+listen to me.  I bring a fresh mind to bear upon the subject.  I am not
+tied down by bird convention.  February, my dear friends—in these
+northern climes of ours at all events—is much too early.  You have to
+build in a high wind, and nothing, believe me, tries a lady’s temper more
+than being blown about.  Nature is nature, and womenfolk, my dear sirs,
+are the same all the world over, whether they be birds or whether they be
+human.  I am an older person than most of you, and I speak with the
+weight of experience.
+
+If I were going to build a house with my wife, I should not choose a
+season of the year when the bricks and planks and things were liable to
+be torn out of her hand, her skirts blown over her head, and she left
+clinging for dear life to a scaffolding pole.  I know the feminine biped
+and, you take it from me, that is not her notion of a honeymoon.  In
+April or May, the sun shining, the air balmy—when, after carrying up to
+her a load or two of bricks, and a hod or two of mortar, we could knock
+off work for a few minutes without fear of the whole house being swept
+away into the next street—could sit side by side on the top of a wall,
+our legs dangling down, and peck and morsel together; after which I could
+whistle a bit to her—then housebuilding might be a pleasure.
+
+The swallows are wisest; June is their idea, and a very good idea, too.
+In a mountain village in the Tyrol, early one summer, I had the
+opportunity of watching very closely the building of a swallow’s nest.
+After coffee, the first morning, I stepped out from the great, cool, dark
+passage of the wirtschaft into the blazing sunlight, and, for no
+particular reason, pulled-to the massive door behind me.  While filling
+my pipe, a swallow almost brushed by me, then wheeled round again, and
+took up a position on the fence only a few yards from me.  He was
+carrying what to him was an exceptionally large and heavy brick.  He put
+it down beside him on the fence, and called out something which I could
+not understand.  I did not move.  He got quite excited and said some
+more.  It was undoubtable he was addressing me—nobody else was by.  I
+judged from his tone that he was getting cross with me.  At this point my
+travelling companion, his toilet unfinished, put his head out of the
+window just above me.
+
+“Such an odd thing,” he called down to me.  “I never noticed it last
+night.  A pair of swallows are building a nest here in the hall.  You’ve
+got to be careful you don’t mistake it for a hat-peg.  The old lady says
+they have built there regularly for the last three years.”
+
+Then it came to me what it was the gentleman had been saying to me: “I
+say, sir, you with the bit of wood in your mouth, you have been and shut
+the door and I can’t get in.”
+
+Now, with the key in my possession, it was so clear and understandable, I
+really forgot for the moment he was only a bird.
+
+“I beg your pardon,” I replied, “I had no idea.  Such an extraordinary
+place to build a nest.”
+
+I opened the door for him, and, taking up his brick again, he entered,
+and I followed him in.  There was a deal of talk.
+
+“He shut the door,” I heard him say, “Chap there, sucking the bit of
+wood.  Thought I was never going to get in.”
+
+“I know,” was the answer; “it has been so dark in here, if you’ll believe
+me, I’ve hardly been able to see what I’ve been doing.”
+
+“Fine brick, isn’t it?  Where will you have it?”
+
+Observing me sitting there, they lowered their voices.  Evidently she
+wanted him to put the brick down and leave her to think.  She was not
+quite sure where she would have it.  He, on the other hand, was sure he
+had found the right place for it.  He pointed it out to her and explained
+his views.  Other birds quarrel a good deal during nest building, but
+swallows are the gentlest of little people.  She let him put it where he
+wanted to, and he kissed her and ran out.  She cocked her eye after him,
+watched till he was out of sight, then deftly and quickly slipped it out
+and fixed it the other side of the door.
+
+“Poor dears” (I could see it in the toss of her head); “they will think
+they know best; it is just as well not to argue with them.”
+
+Every summer I suffer much from indignation.  I love to watch the
+swallows building.  They build beneath the eaves outside my study window.
+Such cheerful little chatter-boxes they are.  Long after sunset, when all
+the other birds are sleeping, the swallows still are chattering softly.
+It sounds as if they were telling one another some pretty story, and
+often I am sure there must be humour in it, for every now and then one
+hears a little twittering laugh.  I delight in having them there, so
+close to me.  The fancy comes to me that one day, when my brain has grown
+more cunning, I, too, listening in the twilight, shall hear the stories
+that they tell.
+
+One or two phrases already I have come to understand: “Once upon a
+time”—“Long, long ago”—“In a strange, far-off land.”  I hear these words
+so constantly, I am sure I have them right.  I call it “Swallow Street,”
+this row of six or seven nests.  Two or three, like villas in their own
+grounds, stand alone, and others are semi-detached.  It makes me angry
+that the sparrows will come and steal them.  The sparrows will hang about
+deliberately waiting for a pair of swallows to finish their nest, and
+then, with a brutal laugh that makes my blood boil, drive the swallows
+away and take possession of it.  And the swallows are so wonderfully
+patient.
+
+“Never mind, old girl,” says Tommy Swallow, after the first big cry is
+over, to Jenny Swallow, “let’s try again.”
+
+And half an hour later, full of fresh plans, they are choosing another
+likely site, chattering cheerfully once more.  I watched the building of
+a particular nest for nearly a fortnight one year; and when, after two or
+three days’ absence, I returned and found a pair of sparrows comfortably
+encsonced therein, I just felt mad.  I saw Mrs. Sparrow looking out.
+Maybe my anger was working upon my imagination, but it seemed to me that
+she nodded to me:
+
+“Nice little house, ain’t it?  What I call well built.”
+
+Mr. Sparrow then flew up with a gaudy feather, dyed blue, which belonged
+to me.  I recognised it.  It had come out of the brush with which the
+girl breaks the china ornaments in our drawing-room.  At any other time I
+should have been glad to see him flying off with the whole thing, handle
+included.  But now I felt the theft of that one feather as an added
+injury.  Mrs. Sparrow chirped with delight at sight of the gaudy
+monstrosity.  Having got the house cheap, they were going to spend their
+small amount of energy upon internal decoration.  That was their idea
+clearly, a “Liberty interior.”  She looked more like a Cockney sparrow
+than a country one—had been born and bred in Regent Street, no doubt.
+
+“There is not much justice in this world,” said I to myself; “but there’s
+going to be some introduced into this business—that is, if I can find a
+ladder.”
+
+I did find a ladder, and fortunately it was long enough.  Mr. and Mrs.
+Sparrow were out when I arrived, possibly on the hunt for cheap photo
+frames and Japanese fans.  I did not want to make a mess.  I removed the
+house neatly into a dust-pan, and wiped the street clear of every trace
+of it.  I had just put back the ladder when Mrs. Sparrow returned with a
+piece of pink cotton-wool in her mouth.  That was her idea of a colour
+scheme: apple-blossom pink and Reckitt’s blue side by side.  She dropped
+her wool and sat on the waterspout, and tried to understand things.
+
+“Number one, number two, number four; where the blazes”—sparrows are
+essentially common, and the women are as bad as the men—“is number
+three?”
+
+Mr. Sparrow came up from behind, over the roof.  He was carrying a piece
+of yellow-fluff, part of a lamp-shade, as far as I could judge.
+
+“Move yourself,” he said, “what’s the sense of sitting there in the
+rain?”
+
+“I went out just for a moment,” replied Mrs. Sparrow; “I could not have
+been gone, no, not a couple of minutes.  When I came back—”
+
+“Oh, get indoors,” said Mr. Sparrow, “talk about it there.”
+
+“It’s what I’m telling you,” continued Mrs. Sparrow, “if you would only
+listen.  There isn’t any door, there isn’t any house—”
+
+“Isn’t any—” Mr. Sparrow, holding on to the rim of the spout, turned
+himself topsy-turvy and surveyed the street.  From where I was standing
+behind the laurel bushes I could see nothing but his back.
+
+He stood up again, looking angry and flushed.
+
+“What have you done with the house?  Can’t I turn my back a minute—”
+
+“I ain’t done nothing with it.  As I keep on telling you, I had only just
+gone—”
+
+“Oh, bother where you had gone.  Where’s the darned house gone? that’s
+what I want to know.”
+
+They looked at one another.  If ever astonishment was expressed in the
+attitude of a bird it was told by the tails of those two sparrows.  They
+whispered wickedly together.  The idea occurred to them that by force or
+cunning they might perhaps obtain possession of one of the other nests.
+But all the other nests were occupied, and even gentle Jenny Swallow,
+once in her own home with the children round about her, is not to be
+trifled with.  Mr. Sparrow called at number two, put his head in at the
+door, and then returned to the waterspout.
+
+“Lady says we don’t live there,” he explained to Mrs. Sparrow.  There was
+silence for a while.
+
+“Not what I call a classy street,” commented Mrs. Sparrow.
+
+“If it were not for that terrible tired feeling of mine,” said Mr.
+Sparrow, “blame if I wouldn’t build a house of my own.”
+
+“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Sparrow, “—I have heard it said that a little bit of
+work, now and then, does you good.”
+
+“All sorts of wild ideas about in the air nowadays,” said Mr. Sparrow,
+“it don’t do to listen to everybody.”
+
+“And it don’t do to sit still and do nothing neither,” snapped Mrs.
+Sparrow.  “I don’t want to have to forget I’m a lady, but—well, any man
+who was a man would see things for himself.”
+
+“Why did I every marry?” retorted Mr. Sparrow.
+
+They flew away together, quarrelling.
+
+
+
+
+DO WRITERS WRITE TOO MUCH?
+
+
+ON a newspaper placard, the other day, I saw announced a new novel by a
+celebrated author.  I bought a copy of the paper, and turned eagerly to
+the last page.  I was disappointed to find that I had missed the first
+six chapters.  The story had commenced the previous Saturday; this was
+Friday.  I say I was disappointed and so I was, at first.  But my
+disappointment did not last long.  The bright and intelligent sub-editor,
+according to the custom now in vogue, had provided me with a short
+synopsis of those first six chapters, so that without the trouble of
+reading them I knew what they were all about.
+
+“The first instalment,” I learned, “introduces the reader to a brilliant
+and distinguished company, assembled in the drawing-room of Lady Mary’s
+maisonette in Park Street.  Much smart talk is indulged in.”
+
+I know that “smart talk” so well.  Had I not been lucky enough to miss
+that first chapter I should have had to listen to it once again.
+Possibly, here and there, it might have been new to me, but it would have
+read, I know, so very like the old.  A dear, sweet white-haired lady of
+my acquaintance is never surprised at anything that happens.
+
+“Something very much of the same kind occurred,” she will remember, “one
+winter when we were staying in Brighton.  Only on that occasion the man’s
+name, I think, was Robinson.”
+
+We do not live new stories—nor write them either.  The man’s name in the
+old story was Robinson, we alter it to Jones.  It happened, in the old
+forgotten tale, at Brighton, in the winter time; we change it to
+Eastbourne, in the spring.  It is new and original—to those who have not
+heard “something very like it” once before.
+
+“Much smart talk is indulged in,” so the sub-editor has explained.  There
+is absolutely no need to ask for more than that.  There is a Duchess who
+says improper things.  Once she used to shock me.  But I know her now.
+She is really a nice woman; she doesn’t mean them.  And when the heroine
+is in trouble, towards the middle of the book, she is just as amusing on
+the side of virtue.  Then there is a younger lady whose speciality is
+proverbs.  Apparently whenever she hears a proverb she writes it down and
+studies it with the idea of seeing into how many different forms it can
+be twisted.  It looks clever; as a matter of fact, it is extremely easy.
+
+_Be virtuous and you will be happy_.
+
+She jots down all the possible variations: _Be virtuous and you will be
+unhappy_.
+
+“Too simple that one,” she tells herself.  _Be virtuous and your friends
+will be happy if you are not_.
+
+“Better, but not wicked enough.  Let us think again.  _Be happy and
+people will jump to the conclusion that you are virtuous_.
+
+“That’s good, I’ll try that one at to-morrow’s party.”
+
+She is a painstaking lady.  One feels that, better advised, she might
+have been of use in the world.
+
+There is likewise a disgraceful old Peer who tells naughty stories, but
+who is good at heart; and one person so very rude that the wonder is who
+invited him.
+
+Occasionally a slangy girl is included, and a clergyman, who takes the
+heroine aside and talks sense to her, flavoured with epigram.  All these
+people chatter a mixture of Lord Chesterfield and Oliver Wendell Holmes,
+of Heine, Voltaire, Madame de Stael, and the late lamented H. J. Byron.
+“How they do it beats me,” as I once overheard at a music hall a stout
+lady confess to her friend while witnessing the performance of a clever
+troup, styling themselves “The Boneless Wonders of the Universe.”
+
+The synopsis added that: “Ursula Bart, a charming and unsophisticated
+young American girl possessed of an elusive expression makes her first
+acquaintance with London society.”
+
+Here you have a week’s unnecessary work on the part of the author boiled
+down to its essentials.  She was young.  One hardly expects an elderly
+heroine.  The “young” might have been dispensed with, especially seeing
+it is told us that she was a girl.  But maybe this is carping.  There are
+young girls and old girls.  Perhaps it is as well to have it in black and
+white; she was young.  She was an American young girl.  There is but one
+American young girl in English fiction.  We know by heart the
+unconventional things that she will do, the startlingly original things
+that she will say, the fresh illuminating thoughts that will come to her
+as, clad in a loose robe of some soft clinging stuff, she sits before the
+fire, in the solitude of her own room.
+
+To complete her she had an “elusive expression.”  The days when we used
+to catalogue the heroine’s “points” are past.  Formerly it was possible.
+A man wrote perhaps some half-a-dozen novels during the whole course of
+his career.  He could have a dark girl for the first, a light girl for
+the second, sketch a merry little wench for the third, and draw you
+something stately for the fourth.  For the remaining two he could go
+abroad.  Nowadays, when a man turns out a novel and six short stories
+once a year, description has to be dispensed with.  It is not the
+writer’s fault.  There is not sufficient variety in the sex.  We used to
+introduce her thus:
+
+“Imagine to yourself, dear reader, an exquisite and gracious creature of
+five feet three.  Her golden hair of that peculiar shade”—here would
+follow directions enabling the reader to work it out for himself.  He was
+to pour some particular wine into some particular sort of glass, and wave
+it about before some particular sort of a light.  Or he was to get up at
+five o’clock on a March morning and go into a wood.  In this way he could
+satisfy himself as to the particular shade of gold the heroine’s hair
+might happen to be.  If he were a careless or lazy reader he could save
+himself time and trouble by taking the author’s word for it.  Many of
+them did.
+
+“Her eyes!”  They were invariably deep and liquid.  They had to be pretty
+deep to hold all the odds and ends that were hidden in them; sunlight and
+shadow, mischief, unsuspected possibilities, assorted emotions, strange
+wild yearnings.  Anything we didn’t know where else to put we said was
+hidden in her eyes.
+
+“Her nose!”  You could have made it for yourself out of a pen’orth of
+putty after reading our description of it.
+
+“Her forehead!”  It was always “low and broad.”  I don’t know why it was
+always low.  Maybe because the intellectual heroine was not then popular.
+For the matter of that I doubt if she be really popular now.  The
+brainless doll, one fears, will continue for many years to come to be
+man’s ideal woman—and woman’s ideal of herself for precisely the same
+period, one may be sure.
+
+“Her chin!”  A less degree of variety was permissible in her chin.  It
+had to be at an angle suggestive of piquancy, and it had to contain at
+least the suspicion of a dimple.
+
+To properly understand her complexion you were expected to provide
+yourself with a collection of assorted fruits and flowers.  There are
+seasons in the year when it must have been difficult for the
+conscientious reader to have made sure of her complexion.  Possibly it
+was for this purpose that wax flowers and fruit, carefully kept from the
+dust under glass cases, were common objects in former times upon the
+tables of the cultured.
+
+Nowadays we content ourselves—and our readers also, I am inclined to
+think—with dashing her off in a few bold strokes.  We say that whenever
+she entered a room there came to one dreams of an old world garden, the
+sound of far-off bells.  Or that her presence brought with it the scent
+of hollyhocks and thyme.  As a matter of fact I don’t think hollyhocks do
+smell.  It is a small point; about such we do not trouble ourselves.  In
+the case of the homely type of girl I don’t see why we should not borrow
+Mr. Pickwick’s expression, and define her by saying that in some subtle
+way she always contrived to suggest an odour of chops and tomato sauce.
+
+If we desire to be exact we mention, as this particular author seems to
+have done, that she had an “elusive expression,” or a penetrating
+fragrance.  Or we say that she moved, the centre of an indefinable
+nuance.
+
+But it is not policy to bind oneself too closely to detail.  A wise
+friend of mine, who knows his business, describes his hero invariably in
+the vaguest terms.  He will not even tell you whether the man is tall or
+short, clean shaven or bearded.
+
+“Make the fellow nice,” is his advice.  “Let every woman reader picture
+him to herself as her particular man.  Then everything he says and does
+becomes of importance to her.  She is careful not to miss a word.”
+
+For the same reason he sees to it that his heroine has a bit of every
+girl in her.  Generally speaking, she is a cross between Romola and Dora
+Copperfield.  His novels command enormous sales.  The women say he draws
+a man to the life, but does not seem to know much about women.  The men
+like his women, but think his men stupid.
+
+Of another famous author no woman of my acquaintance is able to speak too
+highly.  They tell me his knowledge of their sex is simply marvellous,
+his insight, his understanding of them almost uncanny.  Thinking it might
+prove useful, I made an exhaustive study of his books.  I noticed that
+his women were without exception brilliant charming creatures possessed
+of the wit of a Lady Wortlay Montagu, combined with the wisdom of a
+George Eliot.  They were not all of them good women, but all of them were
+clever and all of them were fascinating.  I came to the conclusion that
+his lady critics were correct: he did understand women.  But to return to
+our synopsis.
+
+The second chapter, it appeared, transported us to Yorkshire where:
+“Basil Longleat, a typical young Englishman, lately home from college,
+resides with his widowed mother and two sisters.  They are a delightful
+family.”
+
+What a world of trouble to both writer and to reader is here saved.  “A
+typical young Englishman!”  The author probably wrote five pages,
+elaborating.  The five words of the sub-editor present him to me more
+vividly.  I see him positively glistening from the effects of soap and
+water.  I see his clear blue eye; his fair crisp locks, the natural
+curliness of which annoys him personally, though alluring to everybody
+else; his frank winning smile.  He is “lately home from college.”  That
+tells me that he is a first-class cricketer; a first-class oar; that as a
+half-back he is incomparable; that he swims like Captain Webb; is in the
+first rank of tennis players; that his half-volley at ping-pong has never
+been stopped.  It doesn’t tell me much about his brain power.  The
+description of him as a “typical young Englishman” suggests more
+information on this particular point.  One assumes that the American girl
+with the elusive expression is going to have sufficient for both.
+
+“They are a delightful family.”  The sub-editor does not say so, but I
+imagine the two sisters are likewise typical young Englishwomen.  They
+ride and shoot and cook and make their own dresses, have common sense and
+love a joke.
+
+The third chapter is “taken up with the humours of a local cricket
+match.”
+
+Thank you, Mr. Sub-editor.  I feel I owe you gratitude.
+
+In the fourth, Ursula Bart (I was beginning to get anxious about her)
+turns up again.  She is staying at the useful Lady Mary’s place in
+Yorkshire.  She meets Basil by accident one morning while riding alone.
+That is the advantage of having an American girl for your heroine.  Like
+the British army: it goes anywhere and does anything.
+
+In chapter five Basil and Ursula meet again; this time at a picnic.  The
+sub-editor does not wish to repeat himself, otherwise he possibly would
+have summed up chapter five by saying it was “taken up with the humours
+of the usual picnic.”
+
+In chapter six something happens:
+
+“Basil, returning home in the twilight, comes across Ursula Bart, in a
+lonely point of the moor, talking earnestly to a rough-looking stranger.
+His approach over the soft turf being unnoticed, he cannot help
+overhearing Ursula’s parting words to the forbidding-looking stranger: ‘I
+must see you again!  To-morrow night at half-past nine!  In the gateway
+of the ruined abbey!’  Who is he?  And why must Ursula see him again at
+such an hour, in such a spot?”
+
+So here, at cost of reading twenty lines, I am landed, so to speak, at
+the beginning of the seventh chapter.  Why don’t I set to work to read
+it?  The sub-editor has spoiled me.
+
+“You read it,” I want to say to him.  “Tell me to-morrow morning what it
+is all about.  Who was this bounder?  Why should Ursula want to see him
+again?  Why choose a draughty place?  Why half-past nine o’clock at
+night, which must have been an awkward time for both of them—likely to
+lead to talk?  Why should I wade though this seventh chapter of three
+columns and a half?  It’s your work.  What are you paid for?”
+
+My fear is lest this sort of thing shall lead to a demand on the part of
+the public for condensed novels.  What busy man is going to spend a week
+of evenings reading a book when a nice kind sub-editor is prepared in
+five minutes to tell him what it is all about!
+
+Then there will come a day—I feel it—when the business-like Editor will
+say to himself: “What in thunder is the sense of my paying one man to
+write a story of sixty thousand words and another man to read it and tell
+it again in sixteen hundred!”
+
+We shall be expected to write our novels in chapters not exceeding twenty
+words.  Our short stories will be reduced to the formula: “Little boy.
+Pair of skates.  Broken ice, Heaven’s gates.”  Formerly an author,
+commissioned to supply a child’s tragedy of this genre for a Christmas
+number, would have spun it out into five thousand words.  Personally, I
+should have commenced the previous spring—given the reader the summer and
+autumn to get accustomed to the boy.  He would have been a good boy; the
+sort of boy that makes a bee-line for the thinnest ice.  He would have
+lived in a cottage.  I could have spread that cottage over two pages; the
+things that grew in the garden, the view from the front door.  You would
+have known that boy before I had done with him—felt you had known him all
+your life.  His quaint sayings, his childish thoughts, his great longings
+would have been impressed upon you.  The father might have had a dash of
+humour in him, the mother’s early girlhood would have lent itself to
+pretty writing.  For the ice we would have had a mysterious lake in the
+wood, said to be haunted.  The boy would have loved o’ twilights to stand
+upon its margin.  He would have heard strange voices calling to him.  You
+would have felt the thing was coming.
+
+So much might have been done.  When I think of that plot wasted in nine
+words it makes me positively angry.
+
+And what is to become of us writers if this is to be the new fashion in
+literature?  We are paid by the length of our manuscript at rates from
+half-a-crown a thousand words, and upwards.  In the case of fellows like
+Doyle and Kipling I am told it runs into pounds.  How are we to live on
+novels the serial rights of which to most of us will work out at four and
+nine-pence.
+
+It can’t be done.  It is no good telling me you can see no reason why we
+should live.  That is no answer.  I’m talking plain business.
+
+And what about book-rights?  Who is going to buy novels of three pages?
+They will have to be printed as leaflets and sold at a penny a dozen.
+Marie Corelli and Hall Caine—if all I hear about them is true—will
+possibly make their ten or twelve shillings a week.  But what about the
+rest of us?  This thing is worrying me.
+
+
+
+
+SHOULD SOLDIERS BE POLITE?
+
+
+MY desire was once to pass a peaceful and pleasant winter in Brussels,
+attending to my work, improving my mind.  Brussels is a bright and
+cheerful town, and I think I could have succeeded had it not been for the
+Belgian Army.  The Belgian Army would follow me about and worry me.
+Judging of it from my own experience, I should say it was a good army.
+Napoleon laid it down as an axiom that your enemy never ought to be
+permitted to get away from you—never ought to be allowed to feel, even
+for a moment, that he had shaken you off.  What tactics the Belgian Army
+might adopt under other conditions I am unable to say, but against me
+personally that was the plan of campaign it determined upon and carried
+out with a success that was astonishing, even to myself.
+
+I found it utterly impossible to escape from the Belgian Army.  I made a
+point of choosing the quietest and most unlikely streets, I chose all
+hours—early in the morning, in the afternoon, late in the evening.  There
+were moments of wild exaltation when I imagined I had given it the slip.
+I could not see it anywhere, I could not hear it.
+
+“Now,” said I to myself, “now for five minutes’ peace and quiet.”
+
+I had been doing it injustice: it had been working round me.  Approaching
+the next corner, I would hear the tattoo of its drum.  Before I had gone
+another quarter of a mile it would be in full pursuit of me.  I would
+jump upon a tram, and travel for miles.  Then, thinking I had shaken it
+off, I would alight and proceed upon my walk.  Five minutes later another
+detachment would be upon my heels.  I would slink home, the Belgian Army
+pursuing me with its exultant tattoo.  Vanquished, shamed, my insular
+pride for ever vanished, I would creep up into my room and close the
+door.  The victorious Belgian Army would then march back to barracks.
+
+If only it had followed me with a band: I like a band.  I can loaf
+against a post, listening to a band with anyone.  I should not have
+minded so much had it come after me with a band.  But the Belgian Army,
+apparently, doesn’t run to a band.  It has nothing but this drum.  It has
+not even a real drum—not what I call a drum.  It is a little boy’s drum,
+the sort of thing I used to play myself at one time, until people took it
+away from me, and threatened that if they heard it once again that day
+they would break it over my own head.  It is cowardly going up and down,
+playing a drum of this sort, when there is nobody to stop you.  The man
+would not dare to do it if his mother was about.  He does not even play
+it.  He walks along tapping it with a little stick.  There’s no tune,
+there’s no sense in it.  He does not even keep time.  I used to think at
+first, hearing it in the distance, that it was the work of some young
+gamin who ought to be at school, or making himself useful taking the baby
+out in the perambulator: and I would draw back into dark doorways,
+determined, as he came by, to dart out and pull his ear for him.  To my
+astonishment—for the first week—I learnt it was the Belgian Army, getting
+itself accustomed, one supposes, to the horrors of war.  It had the
+effect of making me a peace-at-any-price man.
+
+They tell me these armies are necessary to preserve the tranquility of
+Europe.  For myself, I should be willing to run the risk of an occasional
+row.  Cannot someone tell them they are out of date, with their bits of
+feathers and their odds and ends of ironmongery—grown men that cannot be
+sent out for a walk unless accompanied by a couple of nursemen, blowing a
+tin whistle and tapping a drum out of a toy shop to keep them in order
+and prevent their running about: one might think they were chickens.  A
+herd of soldiers with their pots and pans and parcels, and all their
+deadly things tied on to them, prancing about in time to a tune, makes me
+think always of the White Knight that Alice met in Wonderland.  I take it
+that for practical purposes—to fight for your country, or to fight for
+somebody else’s country, which is, generally speaking, more popular—the
+thing essential is that a certain proportion of the populace should be
+able to shoot straight with a gun.  How standing in a line and turning
+out your toes is going to assist you, under modern conditions of warfare,
+is one of the many things my intellect is incapable of grasping.
+
+In mediæval days, when men fought hand to hand, there must have been
+advantage in combined and precise movement.  When armies were mere iron
+machines, the simple endeavour of each being to push the other off the
+earth, then the striking simultaneously with a thousand arms was part of
+the game.  Now, when we shoot from behind cover with smokeless powder,
+brain not brute force—individual sense not combined solidity is surely
+the result to be aimed at.  Cannot somebody, as I have suggested, explain
+to the military man that the proper place for the drill sergeant nowadays
+is under a glass case in some museum of antiquities?
+
+I lived once near the Hyde Park barracks, and saw much of the drill
+sergeant’s method.  Generally speaking, he is a stout man with the walk
+of an egotistical pigeon.  His voice is one of the most extraordinary
+things in nature: if you can distinguish it from the bark of a dog, you
+are clever.  They tell me that the privates, after a little practice,
+can—which gives one a higher opinion of their intelligence than otherwise
+one might form.  But myself I doubt even this statement.  I was the owner
+of a fine retriever dog about the time of which I am speaking, and
+sometimes he and I would amuse ourselves by watching Mr. Sergeant
+exercising his squad.  One morning he had been shouting out the usual
+“Whough, whough, whough!” for about ten minutes, and all had hitherto
+gone well.  Suddenly, and evidently to his intense astonishment, the
+squad turned their backs upon him and commenced to walk towards the
+Serpentine.
+
+“Halt!” yelled the sergeant, the instant his amazed indignation permitted
+him to speak, which fortunately happened in time to save the detachment
+from a watery grave.
+
+The squad halted.
+
+“Who the thunder, and the blazes, and other things told you to do that?”
+
+The squad looked bewildered, but said nothing, and were brought back to
+the place where they were before.  A minute later precisely the same
+thing occurred again.  I really thought the sergeant would burst.  I was
+preparing to hasten to the barracks for medical aid.  But the paroxysm
+passed.  Calling upon the combined forces of heaven and hell to sustain
+him in his trouble, he requested his squad, as man to man, to inform him
+of the reason why to all appearance they were dispensing with his
+services and drilling themselves.
+
+At this moment “Columbus” barked again, and the explanation came to him.
+
+“Please go away, sir,” he requested me.  “How can I exercise my men with
+that dog of yours interfering every five minutes?”
+
+It was not only on that occasion.  It happened at other times.  The dog
+seemed to understand and take a pleasure in it.  Sometimes meeting a
+soldier, walking with his sweetheart, Columbus, from behind my legs,
+would bark suddenly.  Immediately the man would let go the girl and
+proceed, involuntarily, to perform military tricks.
+
+The War Office authorities accused me of having trained the dog.  I had
+not trained him: that was his natural voice.  I suggested to the War
+Office authorities that instead of quarrelling with my dog for talking
+his own language, they should train their sergeants to use English.
+
+They would not see it.  Unpleasantness was in the air, and, living where
+I did at the time, I thought it best to part with Columbus.  I could see
+what the War Office was driving at, and I did not desire that
+responsibility for the inefficiency of the British Army should be laid at
+my door.
+
+Some twenty years ago we, in London, were passing through a riotous
+period, and a call was made to law-abiding citizens to enrol themselves
+as special constables.  I was young, and the hope of trouble appealed to
+me more than it does now.  In company with some five or six hundred other
+more or less respectable citizens, I found myself one Sunday morning in
+the drill yard of the Albany Barracks.  It was the opinion of the
+authorities that we could guard our homes and protect our wives and
+children better if first of all we learned to roll our “eyes right” or
+left at the given word of command, and to walk with our thumbs stuck out.
+Accordingly a drill sergeant was appointed to instruct us on these
+points.  He came out of the canteen, wiping his mouth and flicking his
+leg, according to rule, with the regulation cane.  But, as he approached
+us, his expression changed.  We were stout, pompous-looking gentlemen,
+the majority of us, in frock coats and silk hats.  The sergeant was a man
+with a sense of the fitness of things.  The idea of shouting and swearing
+at us fell from him: and that gone there seemed to be no happy medium
+left to him.  The stiffness departed from his back.  He met us with a
+defferential attitude, and spoke to us in the language of social
+intercourse.
+
+“Good morning, gentlemen,” said the sergeant.
+
+“Good morning,” we replied: and there was a pause.
+
+The sergeant fidgetted upon his feet.  We waited.
+
+“Well, now, gentlemen,” said the sergeant, with a pleasant smile, “what
+do you say to falling in?”
+
+We agreed to fall in.  He showed us how to do it.  He cast a critical eye
+along the back of our rear line.
+
+“A little further forward, number three, if you don’t mind, sir,” he
+suggested.
+
+Number three, who was an important-looking gentleman, stepped forward.
+
+The sergeant cast his critical eye along the front of the first line.
+
+“A little further back, if you don’t mind, sir,” he suggested, addressing
+the third gentleman from the end.
+
+“Can’t,” explained the third gentleman, “much as I can do to keep where I
+am.”
+
+The sergeant cast his critical eye between the lines.
+
+“Ah,” said the sergeant, “a little full-chested, some of us.  We will
+make the distance another foot, if you please, gentlemen.”
+
+In pleasant manner, like to this, the drill proceeded.
+
+“Now then, gentlemen, shall we try a little walk?  Quick march!  Thank
+you, gentlemen.  Sorry to trouble you, but it may be necessary to
+run—forward I mean, of course..  So if you really do not mind, we will
+now do the double quick.  Halt!  And if next time you can keep a little
+more in line—it has a more imposing appearance, if you understand me.
+The breathing comes with practice.”
+
+If the thing must be done at all, why should it not be done in this way?
+Why should not the sergeant address the new recruits politely:
+
+“Now then, you young chaps, are you all ready?  Don’t hurry yourselves:
+no need to make hard work of what should be a pleasure to all of us.
+That’s right, that’s very good indeed—considering you are only novices.
+But there is still something to be desired in your attitude, Private
+Bully-boy.  You will excuse my being personal, but are you knock-kneed
+naturally?  Or could you, with an effort, do you think, contrive to give
+yourself less the appearance of a marionette whose strings have become
+loose?  Thank you, that is better.  These little things appear trivial, I
+know, but, after all, we may as well try and look our best—
+
+“Don’t you like your boots, Private Montmorency?  Oh, I beg your pardon.
+I thought from the way you were bending down and looking at them that
+perhaps their appearance was dissatisfying to you.  My mistake.
+
+“Are you suffering from indigestion, my poor fellow?  Shall I get you a
+little brandy?  It isn’t indigestion.  Then what’s the matter with it?
+Why are you trying to hide it?  It’s nothing to be ashamed of.  We’ve all
+got one.  Let it come forward man.  Let’s see it.”
+
+Having succeeded, with a few such kindly words, in getting his line into
+order, he would proceed to recommend healthy exercise.
+
+“Shoulder arms!  Good, gentlemen, very good for a beginning.  Yet still,
+if I may be critical, not perfect.  There is more in this thing than you
+might imagine, gentlemen.  May I point out to Private Henry Thompson that
+a musket carried across the shoulder at right angles is apt to
+inconvenience the gentleman behind.  Even from the point of view of his
+own comfort, I feel sure that Private Thompson would do better to follow
+the usual custom in this matter.
+
+“I would also suggest to Private St. Leonard that we are not here to
+practice the art of balancing a heavy musket on the outstretched palm of
+the hand.  Private St. Leonard’s performance with the musket is decidedly
+clever.  But it is not war.
+
+“Believe me, gentlemen, this thing has been carefully worked out, and no
+improvement is likely to result from individual effort.  Let our idea be
+uniformity.  It is monotonous, but it is safe.  Now, then, gentlemen,
+once again.”
+
+The drill yard would be converted into a source of innocent delight to
+thousands.  “Officer and gentleman” would become a phrase of meaning.  I
+present the idea, for what it may be worth, with my compliments, to Pall
+Mall.
+
+The fault of the military man is that he studies too much, reads too much
+history, is over reflective.  If, instead, he would look about him more
+he would notice that things are changing.  Someone has told the British
+military man that Waterloo was won upon the playing fields of Eton.  So
+he goes to Eton and plays.  One of these days he will be called upon to
+fight another Waterloo: and afterwards—when it is too late—they will
+explain to him that it was won not upon the play field but in the class
+room.
+
+From the mound on the old Waterloo plain one can form a notion of what
+battles, under former conditions, must have been.  The other battlefields
+of Europe are rapidly disappearing: useful Dutch cabbages, as Carlyle
+would have pointed out with justifiable satisfaction, hiding the theatre
+of man’s childish folly.  You find, generally speaking, cobblers happily
+employed in cobbling shoes, women gossipping cheerfully over the washtub
+on the spot where a hundred years ago, according to the guide-book, a
+thousand men dressed in blue and a thousand men dressed in red rushed
+together like quarrelsome fox-terriers, and worried each other to death.
+
+But the field of Waterloo is little changed.  The guide, whose
+grandfather was present at the battle—quite an extraordinary number of
+grandfathers must have fought at Waterloo: there must have been whole
+regiments composed of grandfathers—can point out to you the ground across
+which every charge was delivered, can show you every ridge, still
+existing, behind which the infantry crouched.  The whole business was
+began and finished within a space little larger than a square mile.  One
+can understand the advantage then to be derived from the perfect moving
+of the military machine; the uses of the echelon, the purposes of the
+linked battalion, the manipulation of centre, left wing and right wing.
+Then it may have been worth while—if war be ever worth the while—which
+grown men of sense are beginning to doubt—to waste two years of a
+soldier’s training, teaching him the goose-step.  In the twentieth
+century, teaching soldiers the evolutions of the Thirty Years’ War is
+about as sensible as it would be loading our iron-clads with canvas.
+
+I followed once a company of Volunteers across Blackfriars Bridge on
+their way from Southwark to the Temple.  At the bottom of Ludgate Hill
+the commanding officer, a young but conscientious gentleman, ordered
+“Left wheel!”  At once the vanguard turned down a narrow alley—I forget
+its name—which would have led the troop into the purlieus of Whitefriars,
+where, in all probability, they would have been lost for ever.  The whole
+company had to be halted, right-about-faced, and retired a hundred yards.
+Then the order “Quick march!” was given.  The vanguard shot across
+Ludgate Circus, and were making for the Meat Market.
+
+At this point that young commanding officer gave up being a military man
+and talked sense.
+
+“Not that way,” he shouted: “up Fleet Street and through Middle Temple
+Lane.”
+
+Then without further trouble the army of the future went upon its way.
+
+
+
+
+OUGHT STORIES TO BE TRUE?
+
+
+THERE was once upon a time a charming young lady, possessed of much
+taste, who was asked by her anxious parent, the years passing and family
+expenditure not decreasing, which of the numerous and eligible young men
+then paying court to her she liked the best.  She replied, that was her
+difficulty; she could not make up her mind which she liked the best.
+They were all so nice.  She could not possibly select one to the
+exclusion of all the others.  What she would have liked would have been
+to marry the lot; but that, she presumed, was impracticable.
+
+I feel I resemble that young lady, not so much in charm and beauty as in
+indecision of mind, when the question is that of my favourite author or
+my favourite book.  It is as if one were asked one’s favourite food.
+There are times when one fancies an egg with one’s tea.  On other
+occasions one dreams of a kipper.  To-day one clamours for lobsters.
+To-morrow one feels one never wishes to see a lobster again.  One
+determines to settle down, for a time, to a diet of bread and milk and
+rice pudding.  Asked suddenly to say whether I preferred ices to soup, or
+beef-steak to caviare, I should be completely nonplussed.
+
+There may be readers who care for only one literary diet.  I am a person
+of gross appetites, requiring many authors to satisfy me.  There are
+moods when the savage strength of the Bronte sisters is companionable to
+me.  One rejoices in the unrelieved gloom of “Wuthering Heights,” as in
+the lowering skies of a stormy autumn.  Perhaps part of the marvel of the
+book comes from the knowledge that the authoress was a slight, delicate
+young girl.  One wonders what her future work would have been, had she
+lived to gain a wider experience of life; or was it well for her fame
+that nature took the pen so soon from her hand?  Her suppressed vehemence
+may have been better suited to those tangled Yorkshire byways than to the
+more open, cultivated fields of life.
+
+There is not much similarity between the two books, yet when recalling
+Emily Bronte my thoughts always run on to Olive Schreiner.  Here, again,
+was a young girl with the voice of a strong man.  Olive Schreiner, more
+fortunate, has lived; but I doubt if she will ever write a book that will
+remind us of her first.  “The Story of an African Farm” is not a work to
+be repeated.  We have advanced in literature of late.  I can well
+remember the storm of indignation with which the “African Farm” was
+received by Mrs. Grundy and her then numerous, but now happily
+diminishing, school.  It was a book that was to be kept from the hands of
+every young man and woman.  But the hands of the young men and women
+stretched out and grasped it, to their help.  It is a curious idea, this
+of Mrs. Grundy’s, that the young man and woman must never think—that all
+literature that does anything more than echo the conventions must be
+hidden away.
+
+Then there are times when I love to gallop through history on Sir
+Walter’s broomstick.  At other hours it is pleasant to sit in converse
+with wise George Eliot.  From her garden terrace I look down on Loamshire
+and its commonplace people; while in her quiet, deep voice she tells me
+of the hidden hearts that beat and throb beneath these velveteen jackets
+and lace falls.
+
+Who can help loving Thackeray, wittiest, gentlest of men, in spite of the
+faint suspicion of snobbishness that clings to him?  There is something
+pathetic in the good man’s horror of this snobbishness, to which he
+himself was a victim.  May it not have been an affectation, born
+unconsciously of self-consciousness?  His heroes and heroines must needs
+be all fine folk, fit company for lady and gentlemen readers.  To him the
+livery was too often the man.  Under his stuffed calves even _Jeames de
+la Pluche_ himself stood upon the legs of a man, but Thackeray could
+never see deeper than the silk stockings.  Thackeray lived and died in
+Clubland.  One feels that the world was bounded for him by Temple Bar on
+the east and Park Lane on the west; but what there was good in Clubland
+he showed us, and for the sake of the great gentlemen and sweet ladies
+that his kindly eyes found in that narrow region, not too overpeopled
+with great gentlemen and sweet women, let us honour him.
+
+“Tom Jones,” “Peregrine Pickle,” and “Tristram Shandy” are books a man is
+the better for reading, if he read them wisely.  They teach him that
+literature, to be a living force, must deal with all sides of life, and
+that little help comes to us from that silly pretence of ours that we are
+perfect in all things, leading perfect lives, that only the villain of
+the story ever deviates from the path of rectitude.
+
+This is a point that needs to be considered by both the makers and the
+buyers of stories.  If literature is to be regarded solely as the
+amusement of an idle hour, then the less relationship it has to life the
+better.  Looking into a truthful mirror of nature we are compelled to
+think; and when thought comes in at the window self-satisfaction goes out
+by the door.  Should a novel or play call us to ponder upon the problems
+of existence, or lure us from the dusty high road of the world, for a
+while, into the pleasant meadows of dreamland?  If only the latter, then
+let our heroes and our heroines be not what men and women are, but what
+they should be.  Let Angelina be always spotless and Edwin always true.
+Let virtue ever triumph over villainy in the last chapter; and let us
+assume that the marriage service answers all the questions of the Sphinx.
+
+Very pleasant are these fairy tales where the prince is always brave and
+handsome; where the princess is always the best and most beautiful
+princess that ever lived; where one knows the wicked people at a glance
+by their ugliness and ill-temper, mistakes being thus rendered
+impossible; where the good fairies are, by nature, more powerful than the
+bad; where gloomy paths lead ever to fair palaces; where the dragon is
+ever vanquished; and where well-behaved husbands and wives can rely upon
+living happily ever afterwards.  “The world is too much with us, late and
+soon.”  It is wise to slip away from it at times to fairyland.  But,
+alas, we cannot live in fairyland, and knowledge of its geography is of
+little help to us on our return to the rugged country of reality.
+
+Are not both branches of literature needful?  By all means let us dream,
+on midsummer nights, of fond lovers led through devious paths to
+happiness by Puck; of virtuous dukes—one finds such in fairyland; of fate
+subdued by faith and gentleness.  But may we not also, in our more
+serious humours, find satisfaction in thinking with Hamlet or Coriolanus?
+May not both Dickens and Zola have their booths in Vanity Fair?  If
+literature is to be a help to us, as well as a pastime, it must deal with
+the ugly as well as with the beautiful; it must show us ourselves, not as
+we wish to appear, but as we know ourselves to be.  Man has been
+described as a animal with aspirations reaching up to Heaven and
+instincts rooted—elsewhere.  Is literature to flatter him, or reveal him
+to himself?
+
+Of living writers it is not safe, I suppose, to speak except, perhaps, of
+those who have been with us so long that we have come to forget they are
+not of the past.  Has justice ever been done to Ouida’s undoubted genius
+by our shallow school of criticism, always very clever in discovering
+faults as obvious as pimples on a fine face?  Her guardsmen “toy” with
+their food.  Her horses win the Derby three years running.  Her wicked
+women throw guinea peaches from the windows of the Star and Garter into
+the Thames at Richmond.  The distance being about three hundred and fifty
+yards, it is a good throw.  Well, well, books are not made worth reading
+by the absence of absurdities.  Ouida possesses strength, tenderness,
+truth, passion; and these be qualities in a writer capable of carrying
+many more faults than Ouida is burdened with.  But that is the method of
+our little criticism.  It views an artist as Gulliver saw the Brobdingnag
+ladies.  It is too small to see them in their entirety: a mole or a wart
+absorbs all its vision.
+
+Why was not George Gissing more widely read?  If faithfulness to life
+were the key to literary success, Gissing’s sales would have been counted
+by the million instead of by the hundred.
+
+Have Mark Twain’s literary qualities, apart altogether from his humour,
+been recognised in literary circles as they ought to have been? “Huck
+Finn” would be a great work were there not a laugh in it from cover to
+cover.  Among the Indians and some other savage tribes the fact that a
+member of the community has lost one of his senses makes greatly to his
+advantage; he is then regarded as a superior person.  So among a school
+of Anglo-Saxon readers, it is necessary to a man, if he would gain
+literary credit, that he should lack the sense of humour.  One or two
+curious modern examples occur to me of literary success secured chiefly
+by this failing.
+
+All these authors are my favourites; but such catholic taste is held
+nowadays to be no taste.  One is told that if one loves Shakespeare, one
+must of necessity hate Ibsen; that one cannot appreciate Wagner and
+tolerate Beethoven; that if we admit any merit in Dore, we are incapable
+of understanding Whistler.  How can I say which is my favourite novel?  I
+can only ask myself which lives clearest in my memory, which is the book
+I run to more often than to another in that pleasant half hour before the
+dinner-bell, when, with all apologies to good Mr. Smiles, it is useless
+to think of work.
+
+I find, on examination, that my “David Copperfield” is more dilapidated
+than any other novel upon my shelves.  As I turn its dog-eared pages,
+reading the familiar headlines “Mr. Micawber in difficulties,” “Mr.
+Micawber in prison,” “I fall in love with Dora,” “Mr. Barkis goes out
+with the tide,” “My child wife,” “Traddles in a nest of roses”—pages of
+my own life recur to me; so many of my sorrows, so many of my joys are
+woven in my mind with this chapter or the other.  That day—how well I
+remember it when I read of “David’s” wooing, but Dora’s death I was
+careful to skip.  Poor, pretty little Mrs. Copperfield at the gate,
+holding up her baby in her arms, is always associated in my memory with a
+child’s cry, long listened for.  I found the book, face downwards on a
+chair, weeks afterwards, not moved from where I had hastily laid it.
+
+Old friends, all of you, how many times have I not slipped away from my
+worries into your pleasant company!  Peggotty, you dear soul, the sight
+of your kind eyes is so good to me.  Our mutual friend, Mr. Charles
+Dickens, is prone, we know, just ever so slightly to gush.  Good fellow
+that he is, he can see no flaw in those he loves, but you, dear lady, if
+you will permit me to call you by a name much abused, he has drawn in
+true colours.  I know you well, with your big heart, your quick temper,
+your homely, human ways of thought.  You yourself will never guess your
+worth—how much the world is better for such as you!  You think of
+yourself as of a commonplace person, useful only for the making of
+pastry, the darning of stockings, and if a man—not a young man, with only
+dim half-opened eyes, but a man whom life had made keen to see the beauty
+that lies hidden beneath plain faces—were to kneel and kiss your red,
+coarse hand, you would be much astonished.  But he would be a wise man,
+Peggotty, knowing what things a man should take carelessly, and for what
+things he should thank God, who has fashioned fairness in many forms.
+
+Mr. Wilkins Micawber, and you, most excellent of faithful wives, Mrs.
+Emma Micawber, to you I also raise my hat.  How often has the example of
+your philosophy saved me, when I, likewise, have suffered under the
+temporary pressure of pecuniary liabilities; when the sun of my
+prosperity, too, has sunk beneath the dark horizon of the world—in short,
+when I, also, have found myself in a tight corner.  I have asked myself
+what would the Micawbers have done in my place.  And I have answered
+myself.  They would have sat down to a dish of lamb’s fry, cooked and
+breaded by the deft hands of Emma, followed by a brew of punch, concocted
+by the beaming Wilkins, and have forgotten all their troubles, for the
+time being.  Whereupon, seeing first that sufficient small change was in
+my pocket, I have entered the nearest restaurant, and have treated myself
+to a repast of such sumptuousness as the aforesaid small change would
+command, emerging from that restaurant stronger and more fit for battle.
+And lo! the sun of my prosperity has peeped at me from over the clouds
+with a sly wink, as if to say “Cheer up; I am only round the corner.”
+
+Cheery, elastic Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, how would half the world face
+their fate but by the help of a kindly, shallow nature such as yours?  I
+love to think that your sorrows can be drowned in nothing more harmful
+than a bowl of punch.  Here’s to you, Emma, and to you, Wilkins, and to
+the twins!
+
+May you and such childlike folk trip lightly over the stones upon your
+path!  May something ever turn up for you, my dears!  May the rain of
+life ever fall as April showers upon your simple bald head, Micawber!
+
+And you, sweet Dora, let me confess I love you, though sensible friends
+deem you foolish.  Ah, silly Dora, fashioned by wise Mother Nature who
+knows that weakness and helplessness are as a talisman calling forth
+strength and tenderness in man, trouble yourself not unduly about the
+oysters and the underdone mutton, little woman.  Good plain cooks at
+twenty pounds a year will see to these things for us.  Your work is to
+teach us gentleness and kindness.  Lay your foolish curls just here,
+child.  It is from such as you we learn wisdom.  Foolish wise folk sneer
+at you.  Foolish wise folk would pull up the laughing lilies, the
+needless roses from the garden, would plant in their places only useful,
+wholesome cabbage.  But the gardener, knowing better, plants the silly,
+short-lived flowers, foolish wise folk asking for what purpose.
+
+Gallant Traddles, of the strong heart and the unruly hair; Sophy, dearest
+of girls; Betsy Trotwood, with your gentlemanly manners and your woman’s
+heart, you have come to me in shabby rooms, making the dismal place seem
+bright.  In dark hours your kindly faces have looked out at me from the
+shadows, your kindly voices have cheered me.
+
+Little Em’ly and Agnes, it may be my bad taste, but I cannot share my
+friend Dickens’ enthusiasm for them.  Dickens’ good women are all too
+good for human nature’s daily food.  Esther Summerson, Florence Dombey,
+Little Nell—you have no faults to love you by.
+
+Scott’s women were likewise mere illuminated texts.  Scott only drew one
+live heroine—Catherine Seton.  His other women were merely the prizes the
+hero had to win in the end, like the sucking pig or the leg of mutton for
+which the yokel climbs the greasy pole.  That Dickens could draw a woman
+to some likeness he proved by Bella Wilfer, and Estella in “Great
+Expectations.”  But real women have never been popular in fiction.  Men
+readers prefer the false, and women readers object to the truth.
+
+From an artistic point of view, “David Copperfield” is undoubtedly
+Dickens’ best work.  Its humour is less boisterous; its pathos less
+highly coloured.
+
+One of Leech’s pictures represents a cab-man calmly sleeping in the
+gutter.
+
+“Oh, poor dear, he’s ill,” says a tender-hearted lady in the crowd.
+“Ill!” retorts a male bystander indignantly, “Ill! ’E’s ’ad too much of
+what I ain’t ’ad enough of.”
+
+Dickens suffered from too little of what some of us have too much
+of—criticism.  His work met with too little resistance to call forth his
+powers.  Too often his pathos sinks to bathos, and this not from want of
+skill, but from want of care.  It is difficult to believe that the
+popular writer who allowed his sentimentality—or rather the public’s
+sentimentality—to run away with him in such scenes as the death of Paul
+Dombey and Little Nell was the artist who painted the death of Sidney
+Carton and of Barkis, the willing.  The death of Barkis, next to the
+passing of Colonel Newcome, is, to my thinking, one of the most perfect
+pieces of pathos in English literature.  No very deep emotion is
+concerned.  He is a commonplace old man, clinging foolishly to a
+commonplace box.  His simple wife and the old boatmen stand by, waiting
+calmly for the end.  There is no straining after effect.  One feels death
+enter, dignifying all things; and touched by that hand, foolish old
+Barkis grows great.
+
+In Uriah Heap and Mrs. Gummidge, Dickens draws types rather than
+characters.  Pecksniff, Podsnap, Dolly Varden, Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Gamp,
+Mark Tapley, Turveydrop, Mrs. Jellyby—these are not characters; they are
+human characteristics personified.
+
+We have to go back to Shakespeare to find a writer who, through fiction,
+has so enriched the thought of the people.  Admit all Dickens’ faults
+twice over, we still have one of the greatest writers of modern times.
+Such people as these creations of Dickens never lived, says your little
+critic.  Nor was Prometheus, type of the spirit of man, nor was Niobe,
+mother of all mothers, a truthful picture of the citizen one was likely
+to meet often during a morning’s stroll through Athens.  Nor grew there
+ever a wood like to the Forest of Arden, though every Rosalind and
+Orlando knows the path to glades having much resemblance thereto.
+
+Steerforth, upon whom Dickens evidently prided himself, I must confess,
+never laid hold of me.  He is a melodramatic young man.  The worst I
+could have wished him would have been that he should marry Rose Dartle
+and live with his mother.  It would have served him right for being so
+attractive.  Old Peggotty and Ham are, of course, impossible.  One must
+accept them also as types.  These Brothers Cheeryble, these Kits, Joe
+Gargeries, Boffins, Garlands, John Peerybingles, we will accept as types
+of the goodness that is in men—though in real life the amount of virtue
+that Dickens often wastes upon a single individual would by more
+economically minded nature, be made to serve for fifty.
+
+To sum up, “David Copperfield” is a plain tale, simply told; and such are
+all books that live.  Eccentricities of style, artistic trickery, may
+please the critic of a day, but literature is a story that interests us,
+boys and girls, men and women.  It is a sad book; and that, again, gives
+it an added charm in these sad later days.  Humanity is nearing its old
+age, and we have come to love sadness, as the friend who has been longest
+with us.  In the young days of our vigour we were merry.  With Ulysses’
+boatmen, we took alike the sunshine and the thunder with frolic welcome.
+The red blood flowed in our veins, and we laughed, and our tales were of
+strength and hope.  Now we sit like old men, watching faces in the fire;
+and the stories that we love are sad stories—like the stories we
+ourselves have lived.
+
+
+
+
+CREATURES THAT ONE DAY SHALL BE MEN.
+
+
+I OUGHT to like Russia better than I do, if only for the sake of the many
+good friends I am proud to possess amongst the Russians.  A large square
+photograph I keep always on my mantel-piece; it helps me to maintain my
+head at that degree of distention necessary for the performance of all
+literary work.  It presents in the centre a neatly-written address in
+excellent English that I frankly confess I am never tired of reading,
+around which are ranged some hundreds of names I am quite unable to read,
+but which, in spite of their strange lettering, I know to be the names of
+good Russian men and women to whom, a year or two ago, occurred the
+kindly idea of sending me as a Christmas card this message of
+encouragement.  The individual Russian is one of the most charming
+creatures living.  If he like you he does not hesitate to let you know
+it; not only by every action possible, but, by what perhaps is just as
+useful in this grey old world, by generous, impulsive speech.
+
+We Anglo-Saxons are apt to pride ourselves upon being undemonstrative.
+Max Adeler tells the tale of a boy who was sent out by his father to
+fetch wood.  The boy took the opportunity of disappearing and did not
+show his face again beneath the paternal roof for over twenty years.
+Then one evening, a smiling, well-dressed stranger entered to the old
+couple, and announced himself as their long-lost child, returned at last.
+
+“Well, you haven’t hurried yourself,” grumbled the old man, “and blarm me
+if now you haven’t forgotten the wood.”
+
+I was lunching with an Englishman in a London restaurant one day.  A man
+entered and took his seat at a table near by.  Glancing round, and
+meeting my friend’s eyes, he smiled and nodded.
+
+“Excuse me a minute,” said my friend, “I must just speak to my
+brother—haven’t seen him for over five years.”
+
+He finished his soup and leisurely wiped his moustache before strolling
+across and shaking hands.  They talked for a while.  Then my friend
+returned to me.
+
+“Never thought to see him again,” observed my friend, “he was one of the
+garrison of that place in Africa—what’s the name of it?—that the Mahdi
+attacked.  Only three of them escaped.  Always was a lucky beggar, Jim.”
+
+“But wouldn’t you like to talk to him some more?” I suggested; “I can see
+you any time about this little business of ours.”
+
+“Oh, that’s all right,” he answered, “we have just fixed it up—shall be
+seeing him again to-morrow.”
+
+I thought of this scene one evening while dining with some Russian
+friends in a St. Petersburg Hotel.  One of the party had not seen his
+second cousin, a mining engineer, for nearly eighteen months.  They sat
+opposite to one another, and a dozen times at least during the course of
+the dinner one of them would jump up from his chair, and run round to
+embrace the other.  They would throw their arms about one another,
+kissing one another on both cheeks, and then sit down again, with moist
+eyes.  Their behaviour among their fellow countrymen excited no
+astonishment whatever.
+
+But the Russians’s anger is as quick and vehement as his love.  On
+another occasion I was supping with friends in one of the chief
+restaurants on the Nevsky.  Two gentlemen at an adjoining table, who up
+till the previous moment had been engaged in amicable conversation,
+suddenly sprang to their feet, and “went for” one another.  One man
+secured the water-bottle, which he promptly broke over the other’s head.
+His opponent chose for his weapon a heavy mahogany chair, and leaping
+back for the purpose of securing a good swing, lurched against my
+hostess.
+
+“Do please be careful,” said the lady.
+
+“A thousand pardons, madame,” returned the stranger, from whom blood and
+water were streaming in equal copiousness; and taking the utmost care to
+avoid interfering with our comfort, he succeeded adroitly in flooring his
+antagonist by a well-directed blow.
+
+A policeman appeared upon the scene.  He did not attempt to interfere,
+but running out into the street communicated the glad tidings to another
+policeman.
+
+“This is going to cost them a pretty penny,” observed my host, who was
+calmly continuing his supper; “why couldn’t they wait?”
+
+It did cost them a pretty penny.  Some half a dozen policemen were round
+about before as many minutes had elapsed, and each one claimed his bribe.
+Then they wished both combatants good-night, and trooped out evidently in
+great good humour and the two gentlemen, with wet napkins round their
+heads, sat down again, and laughter and amicable conversation flowed
+freely as before.
+
+They strike the stranger as a childlike people, but you are possessed
+with a haunting sense of ugly traits beneath.  The workers—slaves it
+would be almost more correct to call them—allow themselves to be
+exploited with the uncomplaining patience of intelligent animals.  Yet
+every educated Russian you talk to on the subject knows that revolution
+is coming.
+
+But he talks to you about it with the door shut, for no man in Russia can
+be sure that his own servants are not police spies.  I was discussing
+politics with a Russian official one evening in his study when his old
+housekeeper entered the room—a soft-eyed grey-haired woman who had been
+in his service over eight years, and whose position in the household was
+almost that of a friend.  He stopped abruptly and changed the
+conversation.  So soon as the door was closed behind her again, he
+explained himself.
+
+“It is better to chat upon such matters when one is quite alone,” he
+laughed.
+
+“But surely you can trust her,” I said, “She appears to be devoted to you
+all.”
+
+“It is safer to trust no one,” he answered.  And then he continued from
+the point where we had been interrupted.
+
+“It is gathering,” he said; “there are times when I almost smell blood in
+the air.  I am an old man and may escape it, but my children will have to
+suffer—suffer as children must for the sins of their fathers.  We have
+made brute beasts of the people, and as brute beasts they will come upon
+us, cruel, and undiscriminating; right and wrong indifferently going down
+before them.  But it has to be.  It is needed.”
+
+It is a mistake to speak of the Russian classes opposing to all progress
+a dead wall of selfishness.  The history of Russia will be the history of
+the French Revolution over again, but with this difference: that the
+educated classes, the thinkers, who are pushing forward the dumb masses
+are doing so with their eyes open.  There will be no Maribeau, no Danton
+to be appalled at a people’s ingratitude.  The men who are to-day working
+for revolution in Russia number among their ranks statesmen, soldiers,
+delicately-nurtured women, rich landowners, prosperous tradesmen,
+students familiar with the lessons of history.  They have no
+misconceptions concerning the blind Monster into which they are breathing
+life.  He will crush them, they know it; but with them he will crush the
+injustice and stupidity they have grown to hate more than they love
+themselves.
+
+The Russian peasant, when he rises, will prove more terrible, more
+pitiless than were the men of 1790.  He is less intelligent, more brutal.
+They sing a wild, sad song, these Russian cattle, the while they work.
+They sing it in chorus on the quays while hauling the cargo, they sing it
+in the factory, they chant on the weary, endless steppes, reaping the
+corn they may not eat.  It is of the good time their masters are having,
+of the feastings and the merrymakings, of the laughter of the children,
+of the kisses of the lovers.
+
+But the last line of every verse is the same.  When you ask a Russian to
+translate it for you he shrugs his shoulders.
+
+“Oh, it means,” he says, “that their time will also come—some day.”
+
+It is a pathetic, haunting refrain.  They sing it in the drawing-rooms of
+Moscow and St. Petersburg, and somehow the light talk and laughter die
+away, and a hush, like a chill breath, enters by the closed door and
+passes through.  It is a curious song, like the wailing of a tired wind,
+and one day it will sweep over the land heralding terror.
+
+A Scotsman I met in Russia told me that when he first came out to act as
+manager of a large factory in St. Petersburg, belonging to his Scottish
+employers, he unwittingly made a mistake the first week when paying his
+workpeople.  By a miscalculation of the Russian money he paid the men,
+each one, nearly a rouble short.  He discovered his error before the
+following Saturday, and then put the matter right.  The men accepted his
+explanation with perfect composure and without any comment whatever.  The
+thing astonished him.
+
+“But you must have known I was paying you short,” he said to one of them.
+“Why didn’t you tell me of it?”
+
+“Oh,” answered the man, “we thought you were putting it in your own
+pocket and then if we had complained it would have meant dismissal for
+us.  No one would have taken our word against yours.”
+
+Corruption appears to be so general throughout the whole of Russia that
+all classes have come to accept it as part of the established order of
+things.  A friend gave me a little dog to bring away with me.  It was a
+valuable animal, and I wished to keep it with me.  It is strictly
+forbidden to take dogs into railway carriages.  The list of the pains and
+penalties for doing so frightened me considerably.
+
+“Oh, that will be all right,” my friend assured me; “have a few roubles
+loose in your pocket.”
+
+I tipped the station master and I tipped the guard, and started pleased
+with myself.  But I had not anticipated what was in store for me.  The
+news that an Englishman with a dog in a basket and roubles in his pocket
+was coming must have been telegraphed all down the line.  At almost every
+stopping-place some enormous official, wearing generally a sword and a
+helmet, boarded the train.  At first these fellows terrified me.  I took
+them for field-marshals at least.
+
+Visions of Siberia crossed my mind.  Anxious and trembling, I gave the
+first one a gold piece.  He shook me warmly by the hand—I thought he was
+going to kiss me.  If I had offered him my cheek I am sure he would have
+done so.  With the next one I felt less apprehensive.  For a couple of
+roubles he blessed me, so I gathered; and, commending me to the care of
+the Almighty, departed.  Before I had reached the German frontier, I was
+giving away the equivalent of English sixpences to men with the dress and
+carriage of major-generals; and to see their faces brighten up and to
+receive their heartfelt benediction was well worth the money.
+
+But to the man without roubles in his pocket, Russian officialdom is not
+so gracious.  By the expenditure of a few more coins I got my dog through
+the Customs without trouble, and had leisure to look about me.  A
+miserable object was being badgered by half a dozen men in uniform, and
+he—his lean face puckered up into a snarl—was returning them snappish
+answers; the whole scene suggested some half-starved mongrel being
+worried by school-boys.  A slight informality had been discovered in his
+passport, so a fellow traveller with whom I had made friends informed me.
+He had no roubles in his pocket, and in consequence they were sending him
+back to St. Petersburg—some eighteen hours’ journey—in a wagon that in
+England would not be employed for the transport of oxen.
+
+It seemed a good joke to Russian officialdom; they would drop in every
+now and then, look at him as he sat crouched in a corner of the
+waiting-room, and pass out again, laughing.  The snarl had died from his
+face; a dull, listless indifference had taken its place—the look one sees
+on the face of a beaten dog, after the beating is over, when it is lying
+very still, its great eyes staring into nothingness, and one wonders
+whether it is thinking.
+
+The Russian worker reads no newspaper, has no club, yet all things seem
+to be known to him.  There is a prison on the banks of the Neva, in St.
+Petersburg.  They say such things are done with now, but up till very
+recently there existed a small cell therein, below the level of the ice,
+and prisoners placed there would be found missing a day or two
+afterwards, nothing ever again known of them, except, perhaps, to the
+fishes of the Baltic.  They talk of such like things among themselves:
+the sleigh-drivers round their charcoal fire, the field-workers going and
+coming in the grey dawn, the factory workers, their whispers deadened by
+the rattle of the looms.
+
+I was searching for a house in Brussels some winters ago, and there was
+one I was sent to in a small street leading out of the Avenue Louise.  It
+was poorly furnished, but rich in pictures, large and small.  They
+covered the walls of every room.
+
+“These pictures,” explained to me the landlady, an old, haggard-looking
+woman, “will not be left, I am taking them with me to London.  They are
+all the work of my husband.  He is arranging an exhibition.”
+
+The friend who had sent me had told me the woman was a widow, who had
+been living in Brussels eking out a precarious existence as a
+lodging-house keeper for the last ten years.
+
+“You have married again?” I questioned her.
+
+The woman smiled.
+
+“Not again.  I was married eighteen years ago in Russia.  My husband was
+transported to Siberia a few days after we were married, and I have never
+seen him since.”
+
+“I should have followed him,” she added, “only every year we thought he
+was going to be set free.”
+
+“He is really free now?” I asked.
+
+“Yes,” she answered.  “They set him free last week.  He will join me in
+London.  We shall be able to finish our honeymoon.”
+
+She smiled, revealing to me that once she had been a girl.
+
+I read in the English papers of the exhibition in London.  It was said
+the artist showed much promise.  So possibly a career may at last be
+opening out for him.
+
+Nature has made life hard to Russian rich and poor alike.  To the banks
+of the Neva, with its ague and influenza-bestowing fogs and mists, one
+imagines that the Devil himself must have guided Peter the Great.
+
+“Show me in all my dominions the most hopelessly unattractive site on
+which to build a city,” Peter must have prayed; and the Devil having
+discovered the site on which St. Petersburg now stands, must have
+returned to his master in high good feather.
+
+“I think, my dear Peter, I have found you something really unique.  It is
+a pestilent swamp to which a mighty river brings bitter blasts and
+marrow-chilling fogs, while during the brief summer time the wind will
+bring you sand.  In this way you will combine the disadvantages of the
+North Pole with those of the desert of Sahara.”
+
+In the winter time the Russians light their great stoves, and doubly
+barricade their doors and windows; and in this atmosphere, like to that
+of a greenhouse, many of their women will pass six months, never
+venturing out of doors.  Even the men only go out at intervals.  Every
+office, every shop is an oven.  Men of forty have white hair and
+parchment faces; and the women are old at thirty.  The farm labourers,
+during the few summer months, work almost entirely without sleep.  They
+leave that for the winter, when they shut themselves up like dormice in
+their hovels, their store of food and vodka buried underneath the floor.
+For days together they sleep, then wake and dig, then sleep again.
+
+The Russian party lasts all night.  In an adjoining room are beds and
+couches; half a dozen guests are always sleeping.  An hour contents them,
+then they rejoin the company, and other guests take their places.  The
+Russian eats when he feels so disposed; the table is always spread, the
+guests come and go.  Once a year there is a great feast in Moscow.  The
+Russian merchant and his friends sit down early in the day, and a sort of
+thick, sweet pancake is served up hot.  The feast continues for many
+hours, and the ambition of the Russian merchant is to eat more than his
+neighbour.  Fifty or sixty of these hot cakes a man will consume at a
+sitting, and a dozen funerals in Moscow is often the result.
+
+An uncivilised people, we call them in our lordly way, but they are
+young.  Russian history is not yet three hundred years old.  They will
+see us out, I am inclined to think.  Their energy, their
+intelligence—when these show above the groundwork—are monstrous.  I have
+known a Russian learn Chinese within six months.  English! they learn it
+while you are talking to them.  The children play at chess and study the
+violin for their own amusement.
+
+The world will be glad of Russia—when she has put her house in order.
+
+
+
+
+HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH LITTLE.
+
+
+FOLKS suffering from Jingoism, Spreadeagleism, Chauvinism—all such like
+isms, to whatever country they belong—would be well advised to take a
+tour in Holland.  It is the idea of the moment that size spells
+happiness.  The bigger the country the better one is for living there.
+The happiest Frenchman cannot possibly be as happy as the most wretched
+Britisher, for the reason that Britain owns many more thousands of square
+miles than France possesses.  The Swiss peasant, compared with the
+Russian serf, must, when he looks at the map of Europe and Asia, feel
+himself to be a miserable creature.  The reason that everybody in America
+is happy and good is to be explained by the fact that America has an area
+equal to that of the entire moon.  The American citizen who has backed
+the wrong horse, missed his train and lost his bag, remembers this and
+feels bucked up again.
+
+According to this argument, fishes should be the happiest of mortals, the
+sea consisting—at least, so says my atlas: I have not measured it
+myself—of a hundred and forty-four millions of square miles.  But, maybe,
+the sea is also divided in ways we wot not of.  Possibly the sardine who
+lives near the Brittainy coast is sad and discontented because the
+Norwegian sardine is the proud inhabitant of a larger sea.  Perhaps that
+is why he has left the Brittainy coast.  Ashamed of being a Brittainy
+sardine, he has emigrated to Norway, has become a naturalized Norwegian
+sardine, and is himself again.
+
+The happy Londoner on foggy days can warm himself with the reflection
+that the sun never sets on the British Empire.  He does not often see the
+sun, but that is a mere detail.  He regards himself as the owner of the
+sun; the sun begins his little day in the British Empire, ends his little
+day in the British Empire: for all practical purposes the sun is part of
+the British Empire.  Foolish people in other countries sit underneath it
+and feel warm, but that is only their ignorance.  They do not know it is
+a British possession; if they did they would feel cold.
+
+My views on this subject are, I know, heretical.  I cannot get it into my
+unpatriotic head that size is the only thing worth worrying about.  In
+England, when I venture to express my out-of-date opinions, I am called a
+Little Englander.  It fretted me at first; I was becoming a mere shadow.
+But by now I have got used to it.  It would be the same, I feel, wherever
+I went.  In New York I should be a Little American; in Constantinople a
+Little Turk.  But I wanted to talk about Holland.  A holiday in Holland
+serves as a corrective to exaggerated Imperialistic notions.
+
+There are no poor in Holland.  They may be an unhappy people, knowing
+what a little country it is they live in; but, if so, they hide the fact.
+To all seeming, the Dutch peasant, smoking his great pipe, is as much a
+man as the Whitechapel hawker or the moocher of the Paris boulevard.  I
+saw a beggar once in Holland—in the townlet of Enkhuisen.  Crowds were
+hurrying up from the side streets to have a look at him; the idea at
+first seemed to be that he was doing it for a bet.  He turned out to be a
+Portuguese.  They offered him work in the docks—until he could get
+something better to do—at wages equal in English money to about ten
+shillings a day.  I inquired about him on my way back, and was told he
+had borrowed a couple of forms from the foreman and had left by the
+evening train.  It is not the country for the loafer.
+
+In Holland work is easily found; this takes away the charm of looking for
+it.  A farm labourer in Holland lives in a brick-built house of six
+rooms, which generally belongs to him, with an acre or so of ground, and
+only eats meat once a day.  The rest of his time he fills up on eggs and
+chicken and cheese and beer.  But you rarely hear him grumble.  His wife
+and daughter may be seen on Sundays wearing gold and silver jewellery
+worth from fifty to one hundred pounds, and there is generally enough old
+delft and pewter in the house to start a local museum anywhere outside
+Holland.  On high days and holidays, of which in Holland there are
+plenty, the average Dutch _vrouw_ would be well worth running away with.
+The Dutch peasant girl has no need of an illustrated journal once a week
+to tell her what the fashion is; she has it in the portrait of her
+mother, or of her grandmother, hanging over the glittering chimney-piece.
+
+When the Dutchwoman builds a dress she builds it to last; it descends
+from mother to daughter, but it is made of sound material in the
+beginning.  A lady friend of mine thought the Dutch costume would serve
+well for a fancy-dress ball, so set about buying one, but abandoned the
+notion on learning what it would cost her.  A Dutch girl in her Sunday
+clothes must be worth fifty pounds before you come to ornaments.  In
+certain provinces she wears a close-fitting helmet, made either of solid
+silver or of solid gold.  The Dutch gallant, before making himself known,
+walks on tiptoe a little while behind the Loved One, and looks at himself
+in her head-dress just to make sure that his hat is on straight and his
+front curl just where it ought to be.
+
+In most other European countries national costume is dying out.  The
+slop-shop is year by year extending its hideous trade.  But the country
+of Rubens and Rembrandt, of Teniers and Gerard Dow, remains still true to
+art.  The picture post-card does not exaggerate.  The men in those
+wondrous baggy knickerbockers, from the pockets of which you sometimes
+see a couple of chicken’s heads protruding; in gaudy coloured shirts, in
+worsted hose and mighty sabots, smoking their great pipes—the women in
+their petticoats of many hues, in gorgeously embroidered vest, in
+chemisette of dazzling white, crowned with a halo of many frills,
+glittering in gold and silver—are not the creatures of an artist’s fancy.
+You meet them in their thousands on holiday afternoons, walking gravely
+arm in arm, flirting with sober Dutch stolidity.
+
+On colder days the women wear bright-coloured capes made of fine spun
+silk, from underneath the ample folds of which you sometimes hear a
+little cry; and sometimes a little hooded head peeps out, regards with
+preternatural thoughtfulness the toy-like world without, then dives back
+into shelter.  As for the children—women in miniature, the single
+difference in dress being the gay pinafore—you can only say of them that
+they look like Dutch dolls.  But such plump, contented, cheerful little
+dolls!  You remember the hollow-eyed, pale-faced dolls you see swarming
+in the great, big and therefore should be happy countries, and wish that
+mere land surface were of less importance to our statesmen and our able
+editors, and the happiness and well-being of the mere human items worth a
+little more of their thought.
+
+The Dutch peasant lives surrounded by canals, and reaches his cottage
+across a drawbridge.  I suppose it is in the blood of the Dutch child not
+to tumble into a canal, and the Dutch mother never appears to anticipate
+such possibility.  One can imagine the average English mother trying to
+bring up a family in a house surrounded by canals.  She would never have
+a minute’s peace until the children were in bed.  But then the mere sight
+of a canal to the English child suggests the delights of a sudden and
+unexpected bath.  I put it to a Dutchman once.  Did the Dutch child by
+any chance ever fall into a canal?
+
+“Yes,” he replied, “cases have been known.”
+
+“Don’t you do anything for it?” I enquired.
+
+“Oh, yes,” he answered, “we haul them out again.”
+
+“But what I mean is,” I explained, “don’t you do anything to prevent
+their falling in—to save them from falling in again?”
+
+“Yes,” he answered, “we spank ’em.”
+
+There is always a wind in Holland; it comes from over the sea.  There is
+nothing to stay its progress.  It leaps the low dykes and sweeps with a
+shriek across the sad, soft dunes, and thinks it is going to have a good
+time and play havoc in the land.  But the Dutchman laughs behind his
+great pipe as it comes to him shouting and roaring.  “Welcome, my hearty,
+welcome,” he chuckles, “come blustering and bragging; the bigger you are
+the better I like you.”  And when it is once in the land, behind the
+long, straight dykes, behind the waving line of sandy dunes, he seizes
+hold of it, and will not let it go till it has done its tale of work.
+
+The wind is the Dutchman’s; servant before he lets it loose again it has
+turned ten thousand mills, has pumped the water and sawn the wood, has
+lighted the town and worked the loom, and forged the iron, and driven the
+great, slow, silent wherry, and played with the children in the garden.
+It is a sober wind when it gets back to sea, worn and weary, leaving the
+Dutchman laughing behind his everlasting pipe.  There are canals in
+Holland down which you pass as though a field of wind-blown corn; a soft,
+low, rustling murmur ever in your ears.  It is the ceaseless whirl of the
+great mill sails.  Far out at sea the winds are as foolish savages,
+fighting, shrieking, tearing—purposeless.  Here, in the street of mills,
+it is a civilized wind, crooning softly while it labours.
+
+What charms one in Holland is the neatness and cleanliness of all about
+one.  Maybe to the Dutchman there are drawbacks.  In a Dutch household
+life must be one long spring-cleaning.  No milk-pail is considered fit
+that cannot just as well be used for a looking-glass.  The great brass
+pans, hanging under the pent house roof outside the cottage door, flash
+like burnished gold.  You could eat your dinner off the red-tiled floor,
+but that the deal table, scrubbed to the colour of cream cheese, is more
+convenient.  By each threshold stands a row of empty sabots, and
+woe-betide the Dutchman who would dream of crossing it in anything but
+his stockinged feet.
+
+There is a fashion in sabots.  Every spring they are freshly painted.
+One district fancies an orange yellow, another a red, a third white,
+suggesting purity and innocence.  Members of the Smart Set indulge in
+ornamentation; a frieze in pink, a star upon the toe.  Walking in sabots
+is not as easy as it looks.  Attempting to run in sabots I do not
+recommend to the beginner.
+
+“How do you run in sabots?” I asked a Dutchman once.  I had been
+experimenting, and had hurt myself.
+
+“We don’t run,” answered the Dutchman.
+
+And observation has proved to me he was right.  The Dutch boy, when he
+runs, puts them for preference on his hands, and hits other Dutch boys
+over the head with them as he passes.
+
+The roads in Holland, straight and level, and shaded all the way with
+trees, look, from the railway-carriage window, as if they would be good
+for cycling; but this is a delusion.  I crossed in the boat from Harwich
+once, with a well-known black and white artist, and an equally well-known
+and highly respected humorist.  They had their bicycles with them,
+intending to tour Holland.  I met them a fortnight later in Delft, or,
+rather, I met their remains.  I was horrified at first.  I thought it was
+drink.  They could not stand still, they could not sit still, they
+trembled and shook in every limb, their teeth chattered when they tried
+to talk.  The humorist hadn’t a joke left in him.  The artist could not
+have drawn his own salary; he would have dropped it on the way to his
+pocket.  The Dutch roads are paved their entire length with cobbles—big,
+round cobbles, over which your bicycle leaps and springs and plunges.
+
+If you would see Holland outside the big towns a smattering of Dutch is
+necessary.  If you know German there is not much difficulty.  Dutch—I
+speak as an amateur—appears to be very bad German mis-pronounced.
+Myself, I find my German goes well in Holland, even better than in
+Germany.  The Anglo-Saxon should not attempt the Dutch G.  It is hopeless
+to think of succeeding, and the attempt has been known to produce
+internal rupture.  The Dutchman appears to keep his G in his stomach, and
+to haul it up when wanted.  Myself, I find the ordinary G, preceded by a
+hiccough and followed by a sob, the nearest I can get to it.  But they
+tell me it is not quite right, yet.
+
+One needs to save up beforehand if one desires to spend any length of
+time in Holland.  One talks of dear old England, but the dearest land in
+all the world is little Holland.  The florin there is equal to the franc
+in France and to the shilling in England.  They tell you that cigars are
+cheap in Holland.  A cheap Dutch cigar will last you a day.  It is not
+until you have forgotten the taste of it that you feel you ever want to
+smoke again.  I knew a man who reckoned that he had saved hundreds of
+pounds by smoking Dutch cigars for a month steadily.  It was years before
+he again ventured on tobacco.
+
+Watching building operations in Holland brings home to you forcibly, what
+previously you have regarded as a meaningless formula—namely, that the
+country is built upon piles.  A dozen feet below the level of the street
+one sees the labourers working in fishermen’s boots up to their knees in
+water, driving the great wooden blocks into the mud.  Many of the older
+houses slope forward at such an angle that you almost fear to pass
+beneath them.  I should be as nervous as a kitten, living in one of the
+upper storeys.  But the Dutchman leans out of a window that is hanging
+above the street six feet beyond the perpendicular, and smokes
+contentedly.
+
+They have a merry custom in Holland of keeping the railway time twenty
+minutes ahead of the town time—or is it twenty minutes behind?  I never
+can remember when I’m there, and I am not sure now.  The Dutchman himself
+never knows.
+
+“You’ve plenty of time,” he says
+
+“But the train goes at ten,” you say; “the station is a mile away, and it
+is now half-past nine.”
+
+“Yes, but that means ten-twenty,” he answers, “you have nearly an hour.”
+
+Five minutes later he taps you on the shoulder.
+
+“My mistake, it’s twenty to ten.  I was thinking it was the other way
+about.”
+
+Another argues with him that his first idea was right.  They work it out
+by scientific methods.  Meanwhile you have dived into a cab.  The result
+is always the same: you are either forty minutes too soon, or you have
+missed the train by twenty minutes.  A Dutch platform is always crowded
+with women explaining volubly to their husbands either that there was not
+any need to have hurried, or else that the thing would have been to have
+started half an hour before they did, the man in both cases being, of
+course, to blame.  The men walk up and down and swear.
+
+The idea has been suggested that the railway time and the town time
+should be made to conform.  The argument against the idea is that if it
+were carried out there would be nothing left to put the Dutchman out and
+worry him.
+
+
+
+
+SHOULD WE SAY WHAT WE THINK, OR THINK WHAT WE SAY?
+
+
+A MAD friend of mine will have it that the characteristic of the age is
+Make-Believe.  He argues that all social intercourse is founded on
+make-believe.  A servant enters to say that Mr. and Mrs. Bore are in the
+drawing-room.
+
+“Oh, damn!” says the man.
+
+“Hush!” says the woman.  “Shut the door, Susan.  How often am I to tell
+you never to leave the door open?”
+
+The man creeps upstairs on tiptoe and shuts himself in his study.  The
+woman does things before a looking-glass, waits till she feels she is
+sufficiently mistress of herself not to show her feelings, and then
+enters the drawing-room with outstretched hands and the look of one
+welcoming an angel’s visit.  She says how delighted she is to see the
+Bores—how good it was of them to come.  Why did they not bring more Bores
+with them?  Where is naughty Bore junior?  Why does he never come to see
+her now?  She will have to be really angry with him.  And sweet little
+Flossie Bore?  Too young to pay calls!  Nonsense.  An “At Home” day is
+not worth having where all the Bores are not.
+
+The Bores, who had hoped that she was out—who have only called because
+the etiquette book told them that they must call at least four times in
+the season, explain how they have been trying and trying to come.
+
+“This afternoon,” recounts Mrs. Bore, “we were determined to come.
+‘John, dear,’ I said this morning, ‘I shall go and see dear Mrs. Bounder
+this afternoon, no matter what happens.’”
+
+The idea conveyed is that the Prince of Wales, on calling at the Bores,
+was told that he could not come in.  He might call again in the evening
+or come some other day.
+
+That afternoon the Bores were going to enjoy themselves in their own way;
+they were going to see Mrs. Bounder.
+
+“And how is Mr. Bounder?” demands Mrs. Bore.
+
+Mrs. Bounder remains mute for a moment, straining her ears.  She can hear
+him creeping past the door on his way downstairs.  She hears the front
+door softly opened and closed-to.  She wakes, as from a dream.  She has
+been thinking of the sorrow that will fall on Bounder when he returns
+home later and learns what he has missed.
+
+And thus it is, not only with the Bores and Bounders, but even with us
+who are not Bores or Bounders.  Society in all ranks is founded on the
+make-believe that everybody is charming; that we are delighted to see
+everybody; that everybody is delighted to see us; that it is so good of
+everybody to come; that we are desolate at the thought that they really
+must go now.
+
+Which would we rather do—stop and finish our cigar or hasten into the
+drawing-room to hear Miss Screecher sing?  Can you ask us?  We tumble
+over each other in our hurry.  Miss Screecher would really rather not
+sing; but if we insist—We do insist.  Miss Screecher, with pretty
+reluctance, consents.  We are careful not to look at one another.  We sit
+with our eyes fixed on the ceiling.  Miss Screecher finishes, and rises.
+
+“But it was so short,” we say, so soon as we can be heard above the
+applause.  Is Miss Screecher quite sure that was the whole of it?  Or has
+she been playing tricks upon us, the naughty lady, defrauding us of a
+verse?  Miss Screecher assures us that the fault is the composer’s.  But
+she knows another.  At this hint, our faces lighten again with gladness.
+We clamour for more.
+
+Our host’s wine is always the most extraordinary we have ever tasted.
+No, not another glass; we dare not—doctor’s orders, very strict.  Our
+host’s cigar!  We did not know they made such cigars in this workaday
+world.  No, we really could not smoke another.  Well, if he will be so
+pressing, may we put it in our pocket?  The truth is, we are not used to
+high smoking.  Our hostess’s coffee!  Would she confide to us her secret?
+The baby!  We hardly trust ourselves to speak.  The usual baby—we have
+seen it.  As a rule, to be candid, we never could detect much beauty in
+babies—have always held the usual gush about them to be insincere.  But
+this baby!  We are almost on the point of asking them where they got it.
+It is just the kind we wanted for ourselves.  Little Janet’s recitation:
+“A Visit to the Dentist!”  Hitherto the amateur reciter has not appealed
+to us.  But this is genius, surely.  She ought to be trained for the
+stage.  Her mother does not altogether approve of the stage.  We plead
+for the stage—that it may not be deprived of such talent.
+
+Every bride is beautiful.  Every bride looks charming in a simple costume
+of—for further particulars see local papers.  Every marriage is a cause
+for universal rejoicing.  With our wine-glass in our hand we picture the
+ideal life we know to be in store for them.  How can it be otherwise?
+She, the daughter of her mother.  (Cheers.)  He—well, we all know him.
+(More cheers.)  Also involuntary guffaw from ill-regulated young man at
+end of table, promptly suppressed.
+
+We carry our make-believe even into our religion.  We sit in church, and
+in voices swelling with pride, mention to the Almighty, at stated
+intervals, that we are miserable worms—that there is no good in us.  This
+sort of thing, we gather, is expected of us; it does us no harm, and is
+supposed to please.
+
+We make-believe that every woman is good, that every man is honest—until
+they insist on forcing us, against our will, to observe that they are
+not.  Then we become very angry with them, and explain to them that they,
+being sinners, are not folk fit to mix with us perfect people.  Our
+grief, when our rich aunt dies, is hardly to be borne.  Drapers make
+fortunes, helping us to express feebly our desolation.  Our only
+consolation is that she has gone to a better world.
+
+Everybody goes to a better world when they have got all they can out of
+this one.
+
+We stand around the open grave and tell each other so.  The clergyman is
+so assured of it that, to save time, they have written out the formula
+for him and had it printed in a little book.  As a child it used to
+surprise me—this fact that everybody went to heaven.  Thinking of all the
+people that had died, I pictured the place overcrowded.  Almost I felt
+sorry for the Devil, nobody ever coming his way, so to speak.  I saw him
+in imagination, a lonely old gentleman, sitting at his gate day after
+day, hoping against hope, muttering to himself maybe that it hardly
+seemed worth while, from his point of view, keeping the show open.  An
+old nurse whom I once took into my confidence was sure, if I continued
+talking in this sort of way, that he would get me anyhow.  I must have
+been an evil-hearted youngster.  The thought of how he would welcome me,
+the only human being that he had seen for years, had a certain
+fascination for me; for once in my existence I should be made a fuss
+about.
+
+At every public meeting the chief speaker is always “a jolly good
+fellow.”  The man from Mars, reading our newspapers, would be convinced
+that every Member of Parliament was a jovial, kindly, high-hearted,
+generous-souled saint, with just sufficient humanity in him to prevent
+the angels from carrying him off bodily.  Do not the entire audience,
+moved by one common impulse, declare him three times running, and in
+stentorian voice, to be this “jolly good fellow”?  So say all of them.
+We have always listened with the most intense pleasure to the brilliant
+speech of our friend who has just sat down.  When you thought we were
+yawning, we were drinking in his eloquence, open-mouthed.
+
+The higher one ascends in the social scale, the wider becomes this
+necessary base of make-believe.  When anything sad happens to a very big
+person, the lesser people round about him hardly care to go on living.
+Seeing that the world is somewhat overstocked with persons of importance,
+and that something or another generally is happening to them, one wonders
+sometimes how it is the world continues to exist.
+
+Once upon a time there occurred an illness to a certain good and great
+man.  I read in my daily paper that the whole nation was plunged in
+grief.  People dining in public restaurants, on being told the news by
+the waiter, dropped their heads upon the table and sobbed.  Strangers,
+meeting in the street, flung their arms about one another and cried like
+little children.  I was abroad at the time, but on the point of returning
+home.  I almost felt ashamed to go.  I looked at myself in the glass, and
+was shocked at my own appearance: it was that of a man who had not been
+in trouble for weeks.  I felt that to burst upon this grief-stricken
+nation with a countenance such as mine would be to add to their sorrow.
+It was borne in upon me that I must have a shallow, egotistical nature.
+I had had luck with a play in America, and for the life of me I could not
+look grief-stricken.  There were moments when, if I was not keeping a
+watch over myself, I found myself whistling.
+
+Had it been possible I would have remained abroad till some stroke of
+ill-fortune had rendered me more in tune with my fellow-countrymen.  But
+business was pressing.  The first man I talked to on Dover pier was a
+Customs House official.  You might have thought sorrow would have made
+him indifferent to a mere matter of forty-eight cigars.  Instead of
+which, he appeared quite pleased when he found them.  He demanded
+three-and-fourpence, and chuckled when he got it.  On Dover platform a
+little girl laughed because a lady dropped a handbox on a dog; but then
+children are always callous—or, perhaps, she had not heard the news.
+
+What astonished me most, however, was to find in the railway carriage a
+respectable looking man reading a comic journal.  True, he did not laugh
+much: he had got decency enough for that; but what was a grief-stricken
+citizen doing with a comic journal, anyhow?  Before I had been in London
+an hour I had come to the conclusion that we English must be a people of
+wonderful self-control.  The day before, according to the newspapers, the
+whole country was in serious danger of pining away and dying of a broken
+heart.  In one day the nation had pulled itself together.  “We have cried
+all day,” they had said to themselves, “we have cried all night.  It does
+not seem to have done much good.  Now let us once again take up the
+burden of life.”  Some of them—I noticed it in the hotel dining-room that
+evening—were taking quite kindly to their food again.
+
+We make believe about quite serious things.  In war, each country’s
+soldiers are always the most courageous in the world.  The other
+country’s soldiers are always treacherous and tricky; that is why they
+sometimes win.  Literature is the art of make-believe.
+
+“Now all of you sit round and throw your pennies in the cap,” says the
+author, “and I will pretend that there lives in Bayswater a young lady
+named Angelina, who is the most beautiful young lady that ever existed.
+And in Notting Hill, we will pretend, there resides a young man named
+Edwin, who is in love with Angelina.”
+
+And then, there being sufficient pennies in the cap, the author starts
+away, and pretends that Angelina thought this and said that, and that
+Edwin did all sorts of wonderful things.  We know he is making it all up
+as he goes along.  We know he is making up just what he thinks will
+please us.  He, on the other hand, has to make-believe that he is doing
+it because he cannot help it, he being an artist.  But we know well
+enough that, were we to stop throwing the pennies into the cap, he would
+find out precious soon that he could.
+
+The theatrical manager bangs his drum.
+
+“Walk up! walk up!” he cries, “we are going to pretend that Mrs. Johnson
+is a princess, and old man Johnson is going to pretend to be a pirate.
+Walk up, walk up, and be in time!”
+
+So Mrs. Johnson, pretending to be a princess, comes out of a wobbly thing
+that we agree to pretend is a castle; and old man Johnson, pretending to
+be a pirate, is pushed up and down on another wobbly thing that we agree
+to pretend is the ocean.  Mrs. Johnson pretends to be in love with him,
+which we know she is not.  And Johnson pretends to be a very terrible
+person; and Mrs. Johnson pretends, till eleven o’clock, to believe it.
+And we pay prices, varying from a shilling to half-a-sovereign, to sit
+for two hours and listen to them.
+
+But as I explained at the beginning, my friend is a mad sort of person.
+
+
+
+
+IS THE AMERICAN HUSBAND MADE ENTIRELY OF STAINED GLASS.
+
+
+I AM glad I am not an American husband.  At first sight this may appear a
+remark uncomplimentary to the American wife.  It is nothing of the sort.
+It is the other way about.  We, in Europe, have plenty of opportunity of
+judging the American wife.  In America you hear of the American wife, you
+are told stories about the American wife, you see her portrait in the
+illustrated journals.  By searching under the heading “Foreign
+Intelligence,” you can find out what she is doing.  But here in Europe we
+know her, meet her face to face, talk to her, flirt with her.  She is
+charming, delightful.  That is why I say I am glad I am not an American
+husband.  If the American husband only knew how nice was the American
+wife, he would sell his business and come over here, where now and then
+he could see her.
+
+Years ago, when I first began to travel about Europe, I argued to myself
+that America must be a deadly place to live in.  How sad it is, I thought
+to myself, to meet thus, wherever one goes, American widows by the
+thousand.  In one narrow by-street of Dresden I calculated fourteen
+American mothers, possessing nine-and-twenty American children, and not a
+father among them—not a single husband among the whole fourteen.  I
+pictured fourteen lonely graves, scattered over the United States.  I saw
+as in a vision those fourteen head-stones of best material, hand-carved,
+recording the virtues of those fourteen dead and buried husbands.
+
+Odd, thought I to myself, decidedly odd.  These American husbands, they
+must be a delicate type of humanity.  The wonder is their mothers ever
+reared them.  They marry fine girls, the majority of them; two or three
+sweet children are born to them, and after that there appears to be no
+further use for them, as far as this world is concerned.  Can nothing be
+done to strengthen their constitutions?  Would a tonic be of any help to
+them?  Not the customary tonic, I don’t mean, the sort of tonic merely
+intended to make gouty old gentlemen feel they want to buy a hoop, but
+the sort of tonic for which it was claimed that three drops poured upon a
+ham sandwich and the thing would begin to squeak.
+
+It struck me as pathetic, the picture of these American widows leaving
+their native land, coming over in shiploads to spend the rest of their
+blighted lives in exile.  The mere thought of America, I took it, had for
+ever become to them distasteful.  The ground that once his feet had
+pressed!  The old familiar places once lighted by his smile!  Everything
+in America would remind them of him.  Snatching their babes to their
+heaving bosoms they would leave the country where lay buried all the joy
+of their lives, seek in the retirement of Paris, Florence or Vienna,
+oblivion of the past.
+
+Also, it struck me as beautiful, the noble resignation with which they
+bore their grief, hiding their sorrow from the indifferent stranger.
+Some widows make a fuss, go about for weeks looking gloomy and depressed,
+making not the slightest effort to be merry.  These fourteen widows—I
+knew them personally, all of them, I lived in the same street—what a
+brave show of cheerfulness they put on!  What a lesson to the common or
+European widow, the humpy type of widow!  One could spend whole days in
+their company—I had done it—commencing quite early in the morning with a
+sleighing excursion, finishing up quite late in the evening with a little
+supper party, followed by an impromptu dance; and never detect from their
+outward manner that they were not thoroughly enjoying themselves.
+
+From the mothers I turned my admiring eyes towards the children.  This is
+the secret of American success, said I to myself; this high-spirited
+courage, this Spartan contempt for suffering.  Look at them! the gallant
+little men and women.  Who would think that they had lost a father?  Why,
+I have seen a British child more upset at losing sixpence.
+
+Talking to a little girl one day, I enquired of her concerning the health
+of her father.  The next moment I could have bitten my tongue out,
+remembering that there wasn’t such a thing as a father—not an American
+father—in the whole street.  She did not burst into tears as they do in
+the story-books.  She said:
+
+“He is quite well, thank you,” simply, pathetically, just like that.
+
+“I am sure of it,” I replied with fervour, “well and happy as he deserves
+to be, and one day you will find him again; you will go to him.”
+
+“Ah, yes,” she answered, a shining light, it seemed to me, upon her fair
+young face.  “Momma says she is getting just a bit tired of this
+one-horse sort of place.  She is quite looking forward to seeing him
+again.”
+
+It touched me very deeply: this weary woman, tired of her long
+bereavement, actually looking forward to the fearsome passage leading to
+where her loved one waited for her in a better land.
+
+For one bright breezy creature I grew to feel a real regard.  All the
+months that I had known her, seen her almost daily, never once had I
+heard a single cry of pain escape her lips, never once had I heard her
+cursing fate.  Of the many who called upon her in her charming flat, not
+one had ever, to my knowledge, offered her consolation or condolence.  It
+seemed to me cruel, callous.  The over-burdened heart, finding no outlet
+for its imprisoned grief, finding no sympathetic ear into which to pour
+its tale of woe, breaks, we are told; anyhow, it isn’t good for it.  I
+decided—no one else seeming keen—that I would supply that sympathetic
+ear.  The very next time I found myself alone with her I introduced the
+subject.
+
+“You have been living here in Dresden a long time, have you not?” I
+asked.
+
+“About five years,” she answered, “on and off.”
+
+“And all alone,” I commented, with a sigh intended to invite to
+confidence.
+
+“Well, hardly alone,” she corrected me, while a look of patient
+resignation added dignity to her piquant features.  “You see, there are
+the dear children always round about me, during the holidays.”
+
+“Besides,” she added, “the people here are real kind to me; they hardly
+ever let me feel myself alone.  We make up little parties, you know,
+picnics and excursions.  And then, of course, there is the Opera and the
+Symphony Concerts, and the subscription dances.  The dear old king has
+been doing a good deal this winter, too; and I must say the Embassy folks
+have been most thoughtful, so far as I am concerned.  No, it would not be
+right for me to complain of loneliness, not now that I have got to know a
+few people, as it were.”
+
+“But don’t you miss your husband?” I suggested.
+
+A cloud passed over her usually sunny face.  “Oh, please don’t talk of
+him,” she said, “it makes me feel real sad, thinking about him.”
+
+But having commenced, I was determined that my sympathy should not be
+left to waste.
+
+“What did he die of?” I asked.
+
+She gave me a look the pathos of which I shall never forget.
+
+“Say, young man,” she cried, “are you trying to break it to me gently?
+Because if so, I’d rather you told me straight out.  What did he die of?”
+
+“Then isn’t he dead?” I asked, “I mean so far as you know.”
+
+“Never heard a word about his being dead till you started the idea,” she
+retorted.  “So far as I know he’s alive and well.”
+
+I said that I was sorry.  I went on to explain that I did not mean I was
+sorry to hear that in all probability he was alive and well.  What I
+meant was I was sorry I had introduced a painful subject.
+
+“What’s a painful subject?”
+
+“Why, your husband,” I replied.
+
+“But why should you call him a painful subject?”
+
+I had an idea she was getting angry with me.  She did not say so.  I
+gathered it.  But I had to explain myself somehow.
+
+“Well,” I answered, “I take it, you didn’t get on well together, and I am
+sure it must have been his fault.”
+
+“Now look here,” she said, “don’t you breathe a word against my husband
+or we shall quarrel.  A nicer, dearer fellow never lived.”
+
+“Then what did you divorce him for?” I asked.  It was impertinent, it was
+unjustifiable.  My excuse is that the mystery surrounding the American
+husband had been worrying me for months.  Here had I stumbled upon the
+opportunity of solving it.  Instinctively I clung to my advantage.
+
+“There hasn’t been any divorce,” she said.  “There isn’t going to be any
+divorce.  You’ll make me cross in another minute.”
+
+But I was becoming reckless.  “He is not dead.  You are not divorced from
+him.  Where is he?” I demanded with some heat.
+
+“Where is he?” she replied, astonished.  “Where should he be?  At home,
+of course.”
+
+I looked around the luxuriously-furnished room with its air of cosy
+comfort, of substantial restfulness.
+
+“What home?” I asked.
+
+“What home!  Why, our home, in Detroit.”
+
+“What is he doing there?”  I had become so much in earnest that my voice
+had assumed unconsciously an authoritative tone.  Presumably, it
+hypnotised her, for she answered my questions as though she had been in
+the witness-box.
+
+“How do I know?  How can I possibly tell you what he is doing?  What do
+people usually do at home?”
+
+“Answer the questions, madam, don’t ask them.  What are you doing here?
+Quite truthfully, if you please.”  My eyes were fixed upon her.
+
+“Enjoying myself.  He likes me to enjoy myself.  Besides, I am educating
+the children.”
+
+“You mean they are here at boarding-school while you are gadding about.
+What is wrong with American education?  When did you see your husband
+last?”
+
+“Last?  Let me see.  No, last Christmas I was in Berlin.  It must have
+been the Christmas before, I think.”
+
+“If he is the dear kind fellow you say he is, how is it you haven’t seen
+him for two years?”
+
+“Because, as I tell you, he is at home, in Detroit.  How can I see him
+when I am here in Dresden and he is in Detroit?  You do ask foolish
+questions.  He means to try and come over in the summer, if he can spare
+the time, and then, of course—
+
+“Answer my questions, please.  I’ve spoken to you once about it.  Do you
+think you are performing your duty as a wife, enjoying yourself in
+Dresden and Berlin while your husband is working hard in Detroit?”
+
+“He was quite willing for me to come.  The American husband is a good
+fellow who likes his wife to enjoy herself.”
+
+“I am not asking for your views on the American husband.  I am asking
+your views on the American wife—on yourself.  The American husband
+appears to be a sort of stained-glass saint, and you American wives are
+imposing upon him.  It is doing you no good, and it won’t go on for ever.
+There will come a day when the American husband will wake up to the fact
+he is making a fool of himself, and by over-indulgence, over-devotion,
+turning the American woman into a heartless, selfish creature.  What sort
+of a home do you think it is in Detroit, with you and the children over
+here?  Tell me, is the American husband made entirely of driven snow,
+with blood distilled from moonbeams, or is he composed of the ordinary
+ingredients?  Because, if the latter, you take my advice and get back
+home.  I take it that in America, proper, there are millions of real
+homes where the woman does her duty and plays the game.  But also it is
+quite clear there are thousands of homes in America, mere echoing rooms,
+where the man walks by himself, his wife and children scattered over
+Europe.  It isn’t going to work, it isn’t right that it should work.”
+
+“You take the advice of a sincere friend.  Pack up—you and the
+children—and get home.”
+
+I left.  It was growing late.  I felt it was time to leave.  Whether she
+took my counsel I cannot say.  I only know that there still remain in
+Europe a goodly number of American wives to whom it is applicable.
+
+
+
+
+DOES THE YOUNG MAN KNOW EVERYTHING WORTH KNOWING?
+
+
+I AM told that American professors are “mourning the lack of ideals” at
+Columbia University—possibly also at other universities scattered through
+the United States.  If it be any consolation to these mourning American
+professors, I can assure them that they do not mourn alone.  I live not
+far from Oxford, and enjoy the advantage of occasionally listening to the
+jeremiads of English University professors.  More than once a German
+professor has done me the honour to employ me as an object on which to
+sharpen his English.  He also has mourned similar lack of ideals at
+Heidelberg, at Bonn.  Youth is youth all the world over; it has its own
+ideals; they are not those of the University professor.  The explanation
+is tolerably simple.  Youth is young, and the University professor,
+generally speaking, is middle-aged.
+
+I can sympathise with the mourning professor.  I, in my time, have
+suffered like despair.  I remember the day so well; it was my twelfth
+birthday.  I recall the unholy joy with which I reflected that for the
+future my unfortunate parents would be called upon to pay for me full
+railway fare; it marked a decided step towards manhood.  I was now in my
+teens.  That very afternoon there came to visit us a relative of ours.
+She brought with her three small children: a girl, aged six; a precious,
+golden-haired thing in a lace collar that called itself a boy, aged five;
+and a third still smaller creature, it might have been male, it might
+have been female; I could not have told you at the time, I cannot tell
+you now.  This collection of atoms was handed over to me.
+
+“Now, show yourself a man,” said my dear mother, “remember you are in
+your teens.  Take them out for a walk and amuse them; and mind nothing
+happens to them.”
+
+To the children themselves their own mother gave instructions that they
+were to do everything that I told them, and not to tear their clothes or
+make themselves untidy.  These directions, even to myself, at the time,
+appeared contradictory.  But I said nothing.  And out into the wilds the
+four of us departed.
+
+I was an only child.  My own infancy had passed from my memory.  To me,
+at twelve, the ideas of six were as incomprehensible as are those of
+twenty to the University professor of forty.  I wanted to be a pirate.
+Round the corner and across the road building operations were in
+progress.  Planks and poles lay ready to one’s hand.  Nature, in the
+neighbourhood, had placed conveniently a shallow pond.  It was Saturday
+afternoon.  The nearest public-house was a mile away.  Immunity from
+interference by the British workman was thus assured.  It occurred to me
+that by placing my three depressed looking relatives on one raft,
+attacking them myself from another, taking the eldest girl’s sixpence
+away from her, disabling their raft, and leaving them to drift without a
+rudder, innocent amusement would be provided for half an hour at least.
+
+They did not want to play at pirates.  At first sight of the pond the
+thing that called itself a boy began to cry.  The six-year-old lady said
+she did not like the smell of it.  Not even after I had explained the
+game to them were they any the more enthusiastic for it.
+
+I proposed Red Indians.  They could go to sleep in the unfinished
+building upon a sack of lime, I would creep up through the grass, set
+fire to the house, and dance round it, whooping and waving my tomahawk,
+watching with fiendish delight the frantic but futile efforts of the
+palefaces to escape their doom.
+
+It did not “catch on”—not even that.  The precious thing in the lace
+collar began to cry again.  The creature concerning whom I could not have
+told you whether it was male or female made no attempt at argument, but
+started to run; it seemed to have taken a dislike to this particular
+field.  It stumbled over a scaffolding pole, and then it also began to
+cry.  What could one do to amuse such people?  I left it to them to
+propose something.  They thought they would like to play at “Mothers”—not
+in this field, but in some other field.
+
+The eldest girl would be mother.  The other two would represent her
+children.  They had been taken suddenly ill.  “Waterworks,” as I had
+christened him, was to hold his hands to his middle and groan.  His face
+brightened up at the suggestion.  The nondescript had the toothache.  It
+took up its part without a moment’s hesitation, and set to work to
+scream.  I could be the doctor and look at their tongues.
+
+That was their “ideal” game.  As I have said, remembering that afternoon,
+I can sympathise with the University professor mourning the absence of
+University ideals in youth.  Possibly at six my own ideal game may have
+been “Mothers.”  Looking back from the pile of birthdays upon which I now
+stand, it occurs to me that very probably it was.  But from the
+perspective of twelve, the reflection that there were beings in the world
+who could find recreation in such fooling saddened me.
+
+Eight years later, his father not being able to afford the time, I
+conducted Master “Waterworks,” now a healthy, uninteresting, gawky lad,
+to a school in Switzerland.  It was my first Continental trip.  I should
+have enjoyed it better had he not been with me.  He thought Paris a
+“beastly hole.”  He did not share my admiration for the Frenchwoman; he
+even thought her badly dressed.
+
+“Why she’s so tied up, she can’t walk straight,” was the only impression
+she left upon him.
+
+We changed the subject; it irritated me to hear him talk.  The beautiful
+Juno-like creatures we came across further on in Germany, he said were
+too fat.  He wanted to see them run.  I found him utterly soulless.
+
+To expect a boy to love learning and culture is like expecting him to
+prefer old vintage claret to gooseberry wine.  Culture for the majority
+is an acquired taste.  Speaking personally, I am entirely in agreement
+with the University professor.  I find knowledge, prompting to
+observation and leading to reflection, the most satisfactory luggage with
+which a traveller through life can provide himself.  I would that I had
+more of it.  To be able to enjoy a picture is of more advantage than to
+be able to buy it.
+
+All that the University professor can urge in favour of idealism I am
+prepared to endorse.  But then I am—let us say, thirty-nine.  At fourteen
+my candid opinion was that he was talking “rot.”  I looked at the old
+gentleman himself—a narrow-chested, spectacled old gentleman, who lived
+up a by street.  He did not seem to have much fun of any sort.  It was
+not my ideal.  He told me things had been written in a language called
+Greek that I should enjoy reading, but I had not even read all Captain
+Marryat.  There were tales by Sir Walter Scott and “Jack Harkaway’s
+Schooldays!”  I felt I could wait a while.  There was a chap called
+Aristophanes who had written comedies, satirising the political
+institutions of a country that had disappeared two thousand years ago.  I
+say, without shame, Drury Lane pantomime and Barnum’s Circus called to me
+more strongly.
+
+Wishing to give the old gentleman a chance, I dipped into translations.
+Some of these old fellows were not as bad as I had imagined them.  A
+party named Homer had written some really interesting stuff.  Here and
+there, maybe, he was a bit long-winded, but, taking him as a whole, there
+was “go” in him.  There was another of them—Ovid was his name.  He could
+tell a story, Ovid could.  He had imagination.  He was almost as good as
+“Robinson Crusoe.”  I thought it would please my professor, telling him
+that I was reading these, his favourite authors.
+
+“Reading them!” he cried, “but you don’t know Greek or Latin.”
+
+“But I know English,” I answered; “they have all been translated into
+English.  You never told me that!”
+
+It appeared it was not the same thing.  There were subtle delicacies of
+diction bound to escape even the best translator.  These subtle
+delicacies of diction I could enjoy only by devoting the next seven or
+eight years of my life to the study of Greek and Latin.  It will grieve
+the University professor to hear it, but the enjoyment of those subtle
+delicacies of diction did not appear to me—I was only fourteen at the
+time, please remember—to be worth the time and trouble.
+
+The boy is materially inclined—the mourning American professor has
+discovered it.  I did not want to be an idealist living up a back street.
+I wanted to live in the biggest house in the best street of the town.  I
+wanted to ride a horse, wear a fur coat, and have as much to eat and
+drink as ever I liked.  I wanted to marry the most beautiful woman in the
+world, to have my name in the newspaper, and to know that everybody was
+envying me.
+
+Mourn over it, my dear professor, as you will—that is the ideal of youth;
+and, so long as human nature remains what it is, will continue to be so.
+It is a materialistic ideal—a sordid ideal.  Maybe it is necessary.
+Maybe the world would not move much if the young men started thinking too
+early.  They want to be rich, so they fling themselves frenziedly into
+the struggle.  They build the towns, and make the railway tracks, hew
+down the forests, dig the ore out of the ground.  There comes a day when
+it is borne in upon them that trying to get rich is a poor sort of
+game—that there is only one thing more tiresome than being a millionaire,
+and that is trying to be a millionaire.  But, meanwhile, the world has
+got its work done.
+
+The American professor fears that the artistic development of America
+leaves much to be desired.  I fear the artistic development of most
+countries leaves much to be desired.  Why the Athenians themselves
+sandwiched their drama between wrestling competitions and boxing bouts.
+The plays of Sophocles, or Euripides, were given as “side shows.”  The
+chief items of the fair were the games and races.  Besides, America is
+still a young man.  It has been busy “getting on in the world.”  It has
+not yet quite finished.  Yet there are signs that young America is
+approaching the thirty-nines.  He is finding a little time, a little
+money to spare for art.  One can almost hear young America—not quite so
+young as he was—saying to Mrs. Europe as he enters and closes the shop
+door:
+
+“Well, ma’am, here I am, and maybe you’ll be glad to hear I’ve a little
+money to spend.  Yes, ma’am, I’ve fixed things all right across the
+water; we shan’t starve.  So now, ma’am, you and I can have a chat
+concerning this art I’ve been hearing so much about.  Let’s have a look
+at it, ma’am, trot it out, and don’t you be afraid of putting a fair
+price upon it.”
+
+I am inclined to think that Mrs. Europe has not hesitated to put a good
+price upon the art she has sold to Uncle Sam.  I am afraid Mrs. Europe
+has occasionally “unloaded” on Uncle Sam.  I talked to a certain dealer
+one afternoon, now many years ago, at the Uwantit Club.
+
+“What is the next picture likely to be missing?” I asked him in the
+course of general conversation.
+
+“Thome little thing of Hoppner’th, if it mutht be,” he replied with
+confidence.
+
+“Hoppner,” I murmured, “I seem to have heard the name.”
+
+“Yeth; you’ll hear it a bit oftener during the next eighteen month or
+tho.  You take care you don’t get tired of hearing it, thath all,” he
+laughed.  “Yeth,” he continued, thoughtfully, “Reynoldth ith played out.
+Nothing much to be made of Gainthborough, either.  Dealing in that lot
+now, why, it’th like keeping a potht offith.  Hoppner’th the coming man.”
+
+“You’ve been buying Hoppners up cheap,” I suggested.
+
+“Between uth,” he answered, “yeth, I think we’ve got them all.  Maybe a
+few more.  I don’t think we’ve mithed any.”
+
+“You will sell them for more than you gave for them,” I hinted.
+
+“You’re thmart,” he answered, regarding me admiringly, “you thee through
+everything you do.”
+
+“How do you work it?” I asked him.  There is a time in the day when he is
+confidential.  “Here is this man, Hoppner.  I take it that you have
+bought him up at an average of a hundred pounds a picture, and that at
+that price most owners were fairly glad to sell.  Few folks outside the
+art schools have ever heard of him.  I bet that at the present moment
+there isn’t one art critic who could spell his name without reference to
+a dictionary.  In eighteen months you will be selling him for anything
+from one thousand to ten thousand pounds.  How is it done?”
+
+“How ith everything done that’th done well?” he answered.  “By earnetht
+effort.”  He hitched his chair nearer to me, “I get a chap—one of your
+thort of chapth—he writ’th an article about Hoppner.  I get another to
+anthwer him.  Before I’ve done there’ll be a hundred articleth about
+Hoppner—hith life, hith early thruggie, anecdo’th about hith wife.  Then
+a Hoppner will be thold at public auchtion for a thouthand guineath.”
+
+“But how can you be certain it will fetch a thousand guineas?” I
+interrupted.
+
+“I happen to know the man whoth going to buy it.”  He winked, and I
+understood.
+
+“A fortnight later there will be a thale of half-a-dothen, and the prithe
+will be gone up by that time.”
+
+“And after that?” I said.
+
+“After that,” he replied, rising, “the American millionaire!  He’ll jutht
+be waiting on the door-thtep for the thale-room to open.”
+
+“If by any chance I come across a Hoppner?” I said, laughing, as I turned
+to go.
+
+“Don’t you hold on to it too long, that’th all,” was his advice.
+
+
+
+
+HOW MANY CHARMS HATH MUSIC, WOULD YOU SAY?
+
+
+THE argument of the late Herr Wagner was that grand opera—the music
+drama, as he called it—included, and therefore did away with the
+necessity for—all other arts.  Music in all its branches, of course, it
+provides: so much I will concede to the late Herr Wagner.  There are
+times, I confess, when my musical yearnings might shock the late Herr
+Wagner—times when I feel unequal to following three distinct themes at
+one and the same instant.
+
+“Listen,” whispers the Wagnerian enthusiast to me, “the cornet has now
+the Brunnhilda motive.”  It seems to me, in my then state of depravity,
+as if the cornet had even more than this the matter with him.
+
+“The second violins,” continues the Wagnerian enthusiast, “are carrying
+on the Wotan theme.”  That they are carrying on goes without saying: the
+players’ faces are streaming with perspiration.
+
+“The brass,” explains my friend—his object is to cultivate my ear—“is
+accompanying the singers.”  I should have said drowning them.  There are
+occasions when I can rave about Wagner with the best of them.  High class
+moods come to all of us.  The difference between the really high-class
+man and us commonplace, workaday men is the difference between, say, the
+eagle and the barnyard chicken.  I am the barnyard chicken.  I have my
+wings.  There are ecstatic moments when I feel I want to spurn the sordid
+earth and soar into the realms of art.  I do fly a little, but my body is
+heavy, and I only get as far as the fence.  After a while I find it
+lonesome on the fence, and I hop down again among my fellows.
+
+Listening to Wagner, during such temporary Philistinic mood, my sense of
+fair play is outraged.  A lone, lorn woman stands upon the stage trying
+to make herself heard.  She has to do this sort of thing for her living;
+maybe an invalid mother, younger brothers and sisters are dependent upon
+her.  One hundred and forty men, all armed with powerful instruments,
+well-organised, and most of them looking well-fed, combine to make it
+impossible for a single note of that poor woman’s voice to be heard above
+their din.  I see her standing there, opening and shutting her mouth,
+getting redder and redder in the face.  She is singing, one feels sure of
+it; one could hear her if only those one hundred and forty men would ease
+up for a minute.  She makes one mighty, supreme effort; above the banging
+of the drums, the blare of the trumpets, the shrieking of the strings,
+that last despairing note is distinctly heard.
+
+She has won, but the victory has cost her dear.  She sinks down fainting
+on the stage and is carried off by supers.  Chivalrous indignation has
+made it difficult for me to keep my seat watching the unequal contest.
+My instinct was to leap the barrier, hurl the bald-headed chief of her
+enemies from his high chair, and lay about me with the trombone or the
+clarionet—whichever might have come the easier to my snatch.
+
+“You cowardly lot of bullies,” I have wanted to cry, “are you not ashamed
+of yourselves?  A hundred and forty of you against one, and that one a
+still beautiful and, comparatively speaking, young lady.  Be quiet for a
+minute—can’t you?  Give the poor girl a chance.”
+
+A lady of my acquaintance says that sitting out a Wagnerian opera seems
+to her like listening to a singer accompanied by four orchestras playing
+different tunes at the same time.  As I have said, there are times when
+Wagner carries me along with him, when I exult in the crash and whirl of
+his contending harmonies.  But, alas! there are those other moods—those
+after dinner moods—when my desire is for something distinctly resembling
+a tune.  Still, there are other composers of grand opera besides Wagner.
+I grant to the late Herr Wagner, that, in so far as music is concerned,
+opera can supply us with all we can need.
+
+But it was also Wagner’s argument that grand opera could supply us with
+acting, and there I am compelled to disagree with him.  Wagner thought
+that the arts of acting and singing could be combined.  I have seen
+artists the great man has trained himself.  As singers they left nothing
+to be desired, but the acting in grand opera has never yet impressed me.
+Wagner never succeeded in avoiding the operatic convention and nobody
+else ever will.  When the operatic lover meets his sweetheart he puts her
+in a corner and, turning his back upon her, comes down to the footlights
+and tells the audience how he adores her.  When he has finished, he, in
+his turn, retires into the corner, and she comes down and tells the
+audience that she is simply mad about him.
+
+Overcome with joy at finding she really cares for him, he comes down
+right and says that this is the happiest moment of his life; and she
+stands left, twelve feet away from him, and has the presentiment that all
+this sort of thing is much too good to last.  They go off together,
+backwards, side by side.  If there is any love-making, such as I
+understand by the term, it is done “off.”  This is not my idea of acting.
+But I do not see how you are going to substitute for it anything more
+natural.  When you are singing at the top of your voice, you don’t want a
+heavy woman hanging round your neck.  When you are killing a man and
+warbling about it at the same time, you don’t want him fooling around you
+defending himself.  You want him to have a little reasonable patience,
+and to wait in his proper place till you have finished, telling him, or
+rather telling the crowd, how much you hate and despise him.
+
+When the proper time comes, and if he is where you expect to find him
+while thinking of your upper C, you will hit him lightly on the shoulder
+with your sword, and then he can die to his own particular tune.  If you
+have been severely wounded in battle, or in any other sort of row, and
+have got to sing a long ballad before you finally expire, you don’t want
+to have to think how a man would really behave who knew he had only got a
+few minutes to live and was feeling bad about it.  The chances are that
+he would not want to sing at all.  The woman who really loved him would
+not encourage him to sing.  She would want him to keep quiet while she
+moved herself about a bit, in case there was anything that could be done
+for him.
+
+If a mob is climbing the stairs thirsting for your blood, you do not want
+to stand upright with your arms stretched out, a good eighteen inches
+from the door, while you go over at some length the varied incidents
+leading up to the annoyance.  If your desire were to act naturally you
+would push against that door for all you were worth, and yell for
+somebody to bring you a chest of drawers and a bedstead, and things like
+that, to pile up against it.  If you were a king, and were giving a
+party, you would not want your guests to fix you up at the other end of
+the room and leave you there, with nobody to talk to but your own wife,
+while they turned their backs upon you, and had a long and complicated
+dance all to themselves.  You would want to be in it; you would want to
+let them know that you were king.
+
+In acting, all these little points have to be considered.  In opera,
+everything is rightly sacrificed to musical necessity.  I have seen the
+young, enthusiastic opera-singer who thought that he or she could act and
+sing at the same time.  The experienced artist takes the centre of the
+stage and husbands his resources.  Whether he is supposed to be indignant
+because somebody has killed his mother, or cheerful because he is going
+out to fight his country’s foes, who are only waiting until he has
+finished singing to attack the town, he leaves it to the composer to make
+clear.
+
+Also it was Herr Wagner’s idea that the back cloth would leave the
+opera-goer indifferent to the picture gallery.  The castle on the rock,
+accessible only by balloon, in which every window lights up
+simultaneously and instantaneously, one minute after sunset, while the
+full moon is rushing up the sky at the pace of a champion comet—that
+wonderful sea that suddenly opens and swallows up the ship—those
+snow-clad mountains, over which the shadow of the hero passes like a
+threatening cloud—the grand old chateau, trembling in the wind—what need,
+will ask the opera-goer of the future, of your Turners and your Corots,
+when, for prices ranging from a shilling upwards, we can have a dozen
+pictures such as these rolled up and down before us every evening?
+
+But perhaps the most daring hope of all was the dream that came to Herr
+Wagner that his opera singers, his grouped choruses, would eventually
+satisfy the craving of the public for high class statuary.  I am not
+quite sure the general public does care for statuary.  I do not know
+whether the idea has ever occurred to the Anarchist, but, were I myself
+organising secret committee meetings for unholy purposes, I should invite
+my comrades to meet in that section of the local museum devoted to
+statuary.  I can conceive of no place where we should be freer from
+prying eyes and listening ears.  A select few, however, do appreciate
+statuary; and such, I am inclined to think, will not be weaned from their
+passion by the contemplation of the opera singer in his or her various
+quaint costumes.
+
+And even if the tenor always satisfied our ideal of Apollo, and the
+soprano were always as sylph-like as she is described in the libretto,
+even then I should doubt the average operatic chorus being regarded by
+the _connoisseur_ as a cheap and pleasant substitute for a bas relief
+from the Elgin marbles.  The great thing required of that operatic chorus
+is experience.  The young and giddy-pated the chorus master has no use
+for.  The sober, honest, industrious lady or gentleman, with a knowledge
+of music is very properly his ideal.
+
+What I admire about the chorus chiefly is its unity.  The whole village
+dresses exactly alike.  In wicked, worldly villages there is rivalry,
+leading to heartburn and jealously.  One lady comes out suddenly, on,
+say, a Bank Holiday, in a fetching blue that conquers every male heart.
+Next holiday her rival cuts her out with a green hat.  In the operatic
+village it must be that the girls gather together beforehand to arrange
+this thing.  There is probably a meeting called.
+
+“The dear Count’s wedding,” announces the chairwoman, “you will all be
+pleased to hear, has been fixed for the fourteenth, at eleven o’clock in
+the morning.  The entire village will be assembled at ten-thirty to await
+the return of the bridal _cortège_ from the church, and offer its
+felicitations.  Married ladies, will, of course, come accompanied by
+their husbands.  Unmarried ladies must each bring a male partner as near
+their own height as possible.  Fortunately, in this village the number of
+males is exactly equal to that of females, so that the picture need not
+be spoiled.  The children will organise themselves into an independent
+body and will group themselves picturesquely.  It has been thought
+advisable,” continues the chairwoman, “that the village should meet the
+dear Count and his bride at some spot not too far removed from the local
+alehouse.  The costume to be worn by the ladies will consist of a short
+pink skirt terminating at the knees and ornamented with festoons of
+flowers; above will be worn a bolero in mauve silk without sleeves and
+cut _décolleté_.  The shoes should be of yellow satin over flesh-coloured
+stockings.  Ladies who are ‘out’ will wear pearl necklaces, and a simple
+device in emeralds to decorate the hair.  Thank God, we can all of us
+afford it, and provided the weather holds up and nothing unexpected
+happens—he is not what I call a lucky man, our Count, and it is always as
+well to be prepared for possibilities—well, I think we may look forward
+to a really pleasant day.”
+
+It cannot be done, Herr Wagner, believe me.  You cannot substitute the
+music drama for all the arts combined.  The object to be aimed at by the
+wise composer should be to make us, while listening to his music,
+forgetful of all remaining artistic considerations.
+
+
+
+
+THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN!  NEED IT BE SO HEAVY?
+
+
+IT is a delightful stroll on a sunny summer morning from the Hague to the
+Huis ten Bosch, the little “house in the wood,” built for Princess
+Amalia, widow of Stadtholter Frederick Henry, under whom Holland escaped
+finally from the bondage of her foes and entered into the promised land
+of Liberty.  Leaving the quiet streets, the tree-bordered canals, with
+their creeping barges, you pass through a pleasant park, where the
+soft-eyed deer press round you, hurt and indignant if you have brought
+nothing in your pocket—not even a piece of sugar—to offer them.  It is
+not that they are grasping—it is the want of attention that wounds them.
+
+“I thought he was a gentleman,” they seem to be saying to one another, if
+you glance back, “he looked like a gentleman.”
+
+Their mild eyes haunt you; on the next occasion you do not forget.  The
+Park merges into the forest; you go by winding ways till you reach the
+trim Dutch garden, moat-encircled, in the centre of which stands the prim
+old-fashioned villa, which, to the simple Dutchman, appears a palace.
+The _concierge_, an old soldier, bows low to you and introduces you to
+his wife—a stately, white-haired dame, who talks most languages a little,
+so far as relates to all things within and appertaining to this tiny
+palace of the wood.  To things without, beyond the wood, her powers of
+conversation do not extend: apparently such matters do not interest her.
+
+She conducts you to the Chinese Room; the sun streams through the
+windows, illuminating the wondrous golden dragons standing out in bold
+relief from the burnished lacquer work, decorating still further with
+light and shade the delicate silk embroideries thin taper hands have
+woven with infinite pains.  The walls are hung with rice paper, depicting
+the conventional scenes of the conventional Chinese life.
+
+You find your thoughts wandering.  These grotesque figures, these
+caricatures of humanity!  A comical creature, surely, this Chinaman, the
+pantaloon of civilization.  How useful he has been to us for our farces,
+our comic operas!  This yellow baby, in his ample pinafore, who lived
+thousands of years ago, who has now passed into this strange second
+childhood.
+
+But is he dying—or does the life of a nation wake again, as after sleep?
+Is he this droll, harmless thing he here depicts himself?  And if not?
+Suppose fresh sap be stirring through his three hundred millions?  We
+thought he was so very dead; we thought the time had come to cut him up
+and divide him, the only danger being lest we should quarrel over his
+carcase among ourselves.
+
+Suppose it turns out as the fable of the woodcutter and the bear?  The
+woodcutter found the bear lying in the forest.  At first he was much
+frightened, but the bear lay remarkably still.  So the woodman crept
+nearer, ventured to kick the bear—very gently, ready to run if need be.
+Surely the bear was dead!  And parts of a bear are good to eat, and
+bearskin to poor woodfolk on cold winter nights is grateful.  So the
+woodman drew his knife and commenced the necessary preliminaries.  But
+the bear was not dead.
+
+If the Chinaman be not dead?  If the cutting-up process has only served
+to waken him?  In a little time from now we shall know.
+
+From the Chinese Room the white-haired dame leads us to the Japanese
+Room.  Had gentle-looking Princess Amalia some vague foreshadowing of the
+future in her mind when she planned these two rooms leading into one
+another?  The Japanese decorations are more grotesque, the designs less
+cheerfully comical than those of cousin Chinaman.  These monstrous,
+mis-shapen wrestlers, these patient-looking gods, with their inscrutable
+eyes!  Was it always there, or is it only by the light of present events
+that one reads into the fantastic fancies of the artist working long ago
+in the doorway of his paper house, a meaning that has hitherto escaped
+us?
+
+But the chief attraction of the Huis ten Bosch is the gorgeous Orange
+Saloon, lighted by a cupola, fifty feet above the floor, the walls one
+blaze of pictures, chiefly of the gorgeous Jordaen school—“The Defeat of
+the Vices,” “Time Vanquishing Slander”—mostly allegorical, in praise of
+all the virtues, in praise of enlightenment and progress.  Aptly enough
+in a room so decorated, here was held the famous Peace Congress that
+closed the last century.  One can hardly avoid smiling as one thinks of
+the solemn conclave of grandees assembled to proclaim the popularity of
+Peace.
+
+It was in the autumn of the same year that Europe decided upon the
+dividing-up of China, that soldiers were instructed by Christian monarchs
+to massacre men, women and children, the idea being to impress upon the
+Heathen Chinee the superior civilization of the white man.  The Boer war
+followed almost immediately.  Since when the white man has been pretty
+busy all over the world with his “expeditions” and his “missions.”  The
+world is undoubtedly growing more refined.  We do not care for ugly
+words.  Even the burglar refers airily to the “little job” he has on
+hand.  You would think he had found work in the country.  I should not be
+surprised to learn that he says a prayer before starting, telegraphs home
+to his anxious wife the next morning that his task has been crowned with
+blessing.
+
+Until the far-off date of Universal Brotherhood war will continue.
+Matters considered unimportant by both parties will—with a mighty
+flourish of trumpets—be referred to arbitration.  I was talking of a
+famous financier a while ago with a man who had been his secretary.
+Amongst other anecdotes, he told me of a certain agreement about which
+dispute had arisen.  The famous financier took the paper into his own
+hands and made a few swift calculations.
+
+“Let it go,” he concluded, “it is only a thousand pounds at the outside.
+May as well be honest.”
+
+Concerning a dead fisherman or two, concerning boundaries through
+unproductive mountain ranges we shall arbitrate and feel virtuous.  For
+gold mines and good pasture lands, mixed up with a little honour to give
+respectability to the business, we shall fight it out, as previously.
+War being thus inevitable, the humane man will rejoice that by one of
+those brilliant discoveries, so simple when they are explained, war in
+the future is going to be rendered equally satisfactory to victor and to
+vanquished.
+
+In by-elections, as a witty writer has pointed out, there are no
+defeats—only victories and moral victories.  The idea seems to have
+caught on.  War in the future is evidently going to be conducted on the
+same understanding.  Once upon a time, from a far-off land, a certain
+general telegraphed home congratulating his Government that the enemy had
+shown no inclination whatever to prevent his running away.  The whole
+country rejoiced.
+
+“Why, they never even tried to stop him,” citizens, meeting other
+citizens in the street, told each other.  “Ah, they’ve had enough of him.
+I bet they are only too glad to get rid of him.  Why, they say he ran for
+miles without seeing a trace of the foe.”
+
+The enemy’s general, on the other hand, also wrote home congratulating
+his Government.  In this way the same battle can be mafficked over by
+both parties.  Contentment is the great secret of happiness.  Everything
+happens for the best, if only you look at it the right way.  That is
+going to be the argument.  The general of the future will telegraph to
+headquarters that he is pleased to be able to inform His Majesty that the
+enemy, having broken down all opposition, has succeeded in crossing the
+frontier and is now well on his way to His Majesty’s capital.
+
+“I am luring him on,” he will add, “as fast as I can.  At our present
+rate of progress, I am in hopes of bringing him home by the tenth.”
+
+Lest foolish civilian sort of people should wonder whereabouts lies the
+cause for rejoicing, the military man will condescend to explain.  The
+enemy is being enticed farther and farther from his base.  The defeated
+general—who is not really defeated, who is only artful, and who appears
+to be running away, is not really running away at all.  On the contrary,
+he is running home—bringing, as he explains, the enemy with him.
+
+If I remember rightly—it is long since I played it—there is a parlour
+game entitled “Puss in the Corner.”  You beckon another player to you
+with your finger.  “Puss, puss!” you cry.  Thereupon he has to leave his
+chair—his “base,” as the military man would term it—and try to get to you
+without anything happening to him.
+
+War in the future is going to be Puss in the Corner on a bigger scale.
+You lure your enemy away from his base.  If all goes well—if he does not
+see the trap that is being laid for him—why, then, almost before he knows
+it, he finds himself in your capital.  That finishes the game.  You find
+out what it is he really wants.  Provided it is something within reason,
+and you happen to have it handy, you give it to him.  He goes home
+crowing, and you, on your side, laugh when you think how cleverly you
+succeeded in luring him away from his base.
+
+There is a bright side to all things.  The gentleman charged with the
+defence of a fortress will meet the other gentleman who has captured it
+and shake hands with him mid the ruins.
+
+“So here you are at last!” he will explain.  “Why didn’t you come before?
+We have been waiting for you.”
+
+And he will send off dispatches felicitating his chief on having got that
+fortress off their hands, together with all the worry and expense it has
+been to them.  When prisoners are taken you will console yourself with
+the reflection that the cost of feeding them for the future will have to
+be borne by the enemy.  Captured cannon you will watch being trailed away
+with a sigh of relief.
+
+“Confounded heavy things!” you will say to yourself.  “Thank goodness
+I’ve got rid of them.  Let him have the fun of dragging them about these
+ghastly roads.  See how he likes the job!”
+
+War is a ridiculous method of settling disputes.  Anything that can tend
+to make its ridiculous aspect more apparent is to be welcomed.  The new
+school of military dispatch-writers may succeed in turning even the
+laughter of the mob against it.
+
+The present trouble in the East would never have occurred but for the
+white man’s enthusiasm for bearing other people’s burdens.  What we call
+the yellow danger is the fear that the yellow man may before long request
+us, so far as he is concerned, to put his particular burden down.  It may
+occur to him that, seeing it is his property, he would just as soon carry
+it himself.  A London policeman told me a story the other day that struck
+him as an example of Cockney humour under trying circumstances.  But it
+may also serve as a fable.  From a lonely street in the neighbourhood of
+Covent Garden, early one morning, the constable heard cries of “Stop
+thief!” shouted in a childish treble.  He arrived on the scene just in
+time to collar a young hooligan, who, having snatched a basket of fruit
+from a small lad—a greengrocer’s errand boy, as it turned out—was, with
+it, making tracks.  The greengrocer’s boy, between panting and tears,
+delivered his accusation.  The hooligan regarded him with an expression
+of amazed indignation.
+
+“What d’yer mean, stealing it?” exclaimed Mr. Hooligan.  “Why, I was
+carrying it for yer!”
+
+The white man has got into the way of “carrying” other people’s burdens,
+and now it looks as if the yellow man were going to object to our
+carrying his any further.  Maybe he is going to get nasty, and insist on
+carrying it himself.  We call this “the yellow danger.”
+
+A friend of mine—he is a man who in the street walks into lamp-posts, and
+apologises—sees rising from the East the dawn of a new day in the world’s
+history.  The yellow danger is to him a golden hope.  He sees a race long
+stagnant, stretching its giant limbs with the first vague movements of
+returning life.  He is a poor sort of patriot; he calls himself, I
+suppose, a white man, yet he shamelessly confesses he would rather see
+Asia’s millions rise from the ruins of their ancient civilization to take
+their part in the future of humanity, than that half the population of
+the globe should remain bound in savagery for the pleasure and the profit
+of his own particular species.
+
+He even goes so far as to think that the white man may have something to
+learn.  The world has belonged to him now for some thousands of years.
+Has he done all with it that could have been done?  Are his ideals the
+last word?
+
+Not what the yellow man has absorbed from Europe, but what he is going to
+give Europe it is that interests my friend.  He is watching the birth of
+a new force—an influence as yet unknown.  He clings to the fond belief
+that new ideas, new formulæ, to replace the old worn shibboleths, may,
+during these thousands of years, have been developing in those keen
+brains that behind the impressive yellow mask have been working so long
+in silence and in mystery.
+
+
+
+
+WHY DIDN’T HE MARRY THE GIRL?
+
+
+WHAT is wrong with marriage, anyhow?  I find myself pondering this
+question so often, when reading high-class literature.  I put it to
+myself again the other evening, during a performance of Faust.  Why could
+not Faust have married the girl?  I would not have married her myself for
+any consideration whatsoever; but that is not the argument.  Faust,
+apparently, could not see anything amiss with her.  Both of them were mad
+about each other.  Yet the idea of a quiet, unostentatious marriage with
+a week’s honeymoon, say, in Vienna, followed by a neat little cottage
+_orné_, not too far from Nürnberg, so that their friends could have come
+out to them, never seems to have occurred to either of them.
+
+There could have been a garden.  Marguerite might have kept chickens and
+a cow.  That sort of girl, brought up to hard work and by no means too
+well educated, is all the better for having something to do.  Later, with
+the gradual arrival of the family, a good, all-round woman might have
+been hired in to assist.  Faust, of course, would have had his study and
+got to work again; that would have kept him out of further mischief.  The
+idea that a brainy man, his age, was going to be happy with nothing to do
+all day but fool round a petticoat was ridiculous from the beginning.
+Valentine—a good fellow, Valentine, with nice ideas—would have spent his
+Saturdays to Monday with them.  Over a pipe and a glass of wine, he and
+Faust would have discussed the local politics.
+
+He would have danced the children on his knee, have told them tales about
+the war—taught the eldest boy to shoot.  Faust, with a practical man like
+Valentine to help him, would probably have invented a new gun.  Valentine
+would have got it taken up.
+
+Things might have come of it.  Sybil, in course of time, would have
+married and settled down—perhaps have taken a little house near to them.
+He and Marguerite would have joked—when Mrs. Sybil was not around—about
+his early infatuation.  The old mother would have toddled over from
+Nürnberg—not too often, just for the day.
+
+The picture grows upon one the more one thinks of it.  Why did it never
+occur to them?  There would have been a bit of a bother with the Old Man.
+I can imagine Mephistopheles being upset about it, thinking himself
+swindled.  Of course, if that was the reason—if Faust said to himself:
+
+“I should like to marry the girl, but I won’t do it; it would not be fair
+to the Old Man; he has been to a lot of trouble working this thing up; in
+common gratitude I cannot turn round now and behave like a decent,
+sensible man; it would not be playing the game”—if this was the way Faust
+looked at the matter there is nothing more to be said.  Indeed, it shows
+him in rather a fine light—noble, if quixotic.
+
+If, on the other hand, he looked at the question from the point of view
+of himself and the girl, I think the thing might have been managed.  All
+one had to do in those days when one wanted to get rid of the Devil was
+to show him a sword hilt.  Faust and Marguerite could have slipped into a
+church one morning, and have kept him out of the way with a sword hilt
+till the ceremony was through.  They might have hired a small boy:
+
+“You see the gentleman in red?  Well, he wants us and we don’t want him.
+That is the only difference between us.  Now, you take this sword, and
+when you see him coming show him the hilt.  Don’t hurt him; just show him
+the sword and shake your head.  He will understand.”
+
+The old gentleman’s expression, when subsequently Faust presented him to
+Marguerite, would have been interesting:
+
+“Allow me, my wife.  My dear, a—a friend of mine.  You may remember
+meeting him that night at your aunt’s.”
+
+As I have said, there would have been ructions; but I do not myself see
+what could have been done.  There was nothing in the bond to the effect
+that Faust should not marry, so far as we are told.  The Old Man had a
+sense of humour.  My own opinion is that, after getting over the first
+annoyance, he himself would have seen the joke.  I can even picture him
+looking in now and again on Mr. and Mrs. Faust.  The children would be
+hurried off to bed.  There would be, for a while, an atmosphere of
+constraint.
+
+But the Old Man had a way with him.  He would have told one or two
+stories at which Marguerite would have blushed, at which Faust would have
+grinned.  I can see the old fellow occasionally joining the homely social
+board.  The children, awed at first, would have sat silent, with staring
+eyes.  But, as I have said, the Old Man had a way with him.  Why should
+he not have reformed?  The good woman’s unconsciously exerted
+influence—the sweet childish prattle!  One hears of such things.  Might
+he not have come to be known as “Nunkie”?
+
+Myself—I believe I have already mentioned it—I would not have married
+Marguerite.  She is not my ideal of a good girl.  I never liked the way
+she deceived her mother.  And that aunt of hers!  Well, a nice girl would
+not have been friends with such a woman.  She did not behave at all too
+well to Sybil, either.  It is clear to me that she led the boy on.  And
+what was she doing with that box of jewels, anyhow?  She was not a fool.
+She could not have gone every day to that fountain, chatted with those
+girl friends of hers, and learnt nothing.  She must have known that
+people don’t go leaving twenty thousand pounds’ worth of jewels about on
+doorsteps as part of a round game.  Her own instinct, if she had been a
+good girl, would have told her to leave the thing alone.
+
+I don’t believe in these innocent people who do not know what they are
+doing half their time.  Ask any London magistrate what he thinks of the
+lady who explains that she picked up the diamond brooch:—
+
+“Not meaning, of course, your Worship, to take it.  I would not do such a
+thing.  It just happened this way, your Worship.  I was standing as you
+might say here, and not seeing anyone about in the shop I opened the case
+and took it out, thinking as perhaps it might belong to someone; and then
+this gentleman here, as I had not noticed before, comes up quite suddenly
+and says; ‘You come along with me,’ he says.  ‘What for,’ I says, ‘when I
+don’t even know you?’ I says.  ‘For stealing,’ he says.  ‘Well, that’s a
+hard word to use to a lady,’ I says; ‘I don’t know what you mean, I’m
+sure.’”
+
+And if she had put them all on, not thinking, what would a really nice
+girl have done when the gentleman came up and assured her they were hers?
+She would have been thirty seconds taking them off and flinging them back
+into the box.
+
+“Thank you,” she would have said, “I’ll trouble you to leave this garden
+as quickly as you entered it and take them with you.  I’m not that sort
+of girl.”
+
+Marguerite clings to the jewels, and accepts the young man’s arm for a
+moonlight promenade.  And when it does enter into her innocent head that
+he and she have walked that shady garden long enough, what does she do
+when she has said good-bye and shut the door?  She opens the ground-floor
+window and begins to sing!
+
+Maybe I am not poetical, but I do like justice.  When other girls do
+these sort of things they get called names.  I cannot see why this
+particular girl should be held up as an ideal.  She kills her mother.
+According to her own account this was an accident.  It is not an original
+line of defence, and we are not allowed to hear the evidence for the
+prosecution.  She also kills her baby.  You are not to blame her for
+that, because at the time she was feeling poorly.  I don’t see why this
+girl should have a special line of angels to take her up to heaven.
+There must have been decent, hard-working women in Nürnburg more entitled
+to the ticket.
+
+Why is it that all these years we have been content to accept Marguerite
+as a type of innocence and virtue?  The explanation is, I suppose, that
+Goethe wrote at a time when it was the convention to regard all women as
+good.  Anything in petticoats was virtuous.  If she did wrong it was
+always somebody else’s fault.  _Cherchez la femme_ was a later notion.
+In the days of Goethe it was always _Cherchez l’homme_.  It was the man’s
+fault.  It was the devil’s fault.  It was anybody’s fault you liked, but
+not her’s.
+
+The convention has not yet died out.  I was reading the other day a most
+interesting book by a brilliant American authoress.  Seeing I live far
+away from the lady’s haunts, I venture to mention names.  I am speaking
+of “Patience Sparhawk,” by Gertrude Atherton.  I take this book because
+it is typical of a large body of fiction.  Miss Sparhawk lives a troubled
+life: it puzzles her.  She asks herself what is wrong.  Her own idea is
+that it is civilisation.
+
+If it is not civilisation, then it is the American man or Nature—or
+Democracy.  Miss Sparhawk marries the wrong man.  Later on she gets
+engaged to another wrong man.  In the end we are left to believe she is
+about to be married to the right man.  I should be better satisfied if I
+could hear Miss Sparhawk talking six months after that last marriage.
+But if a mistake has again been made I am confident that, in Miss
+Sparhawk’s opinion, the fault will not be Miss Sparhawk’s.  The argument
+is always the same: Miss Sparhawk, being a lady, can do no wrong.
+
+If Miss Sparhawk cared to listen to me for five minutes, I feel I could
+put her right on this point.
+
+“It is quite true, my dear girl,” I should say to her, “something is
+wrong—very wrong.  But it is not the American man.  Never you mind the
+American man: you leave him to worry out his own salvation.  You are not
+the girl to put him right, even where he is wrong.  And it is not
+civilisation.  Civilisation has a deal to answer for, I admit: don’t you
+load it up with this additional trouble.  The thing that is wrong in this
+case of yours—if you will forgive my saying so—is you.  You make a fool
+of yourself; you marry a man who is a mere animal because he appeals to
+your animal instincts.  Then, like the lady who cried out ‘Alack, I’ve
+married a black,’ you appeal to heaven against the injustice of being
+mated with a clown.  You are not a nice girl, either in your ideas or in
+your behaviour.  I don’t blame you for it; you did not make yourself.
+But when you set to work to attract all that is lowest in man, why be so
+astonished at your own success?  There are plenty of shocking American
+men, I agree.  One meets the class even outside America.  But nice
+American girls will tell you that there are also nice American men.
+There is an old proverb about birds of a feather.  Next time you find
+yourself in the company of a shocking American man, you just ask yourself
+how he got there, and how it is he seems to be feeling at home.  You
+learn self-control.  Get it out of your head that you are the centre of
+the universe, and grasp the idea that a petticoat is not a halo, and you
+will find civilisation not half as wrong as you thought it.”
+
+I know what Miss Sparhawk’s reply would be.
+
+“You say all this to me—to me, a lady?  Great Heavens!  What has become
+of chivalry?”
+
+A Frenchman was once put on trial for murdering his father and mother.
+He confessed his guilt, but begged for mercy on the plea that he was an
+orphan.  Chivalry was founded on the assumption that woman was worthy to
+be worshipped.  The modern woman’s notion is that when she does wrong she
+ought to be excused by chivalrous man because she is a lady.
+
+I like the naughty heroine; we all of us do.  The early Victorian
+heroine—the angel in a white frock, was a bore.  We knew exactly what she
+was going to do—the right thing.  We did not even have to ask ourselves,
+“What will she think is the right thing to do under the circumstances?”
+It was always the conventional right thing.  You could have put it to a
+Sunday school and have got the answer every time.  The heroine with
+passions, instincts, emotions, is to be welcomed.  But I want her to
+grasp the fact that after all she is only one of us.  I should like her
+better if, instead of demanding:
+
+“What is wrong in civilisation?  What is the world coming to?” and so
+forth, she would occasionally say to herself:
+
+“Guess I’ve made a fool of myself this time.  I do feel that ’shamed of
+myself.”
+
+She would not lose by it.  We should respect her all the more.
+
+
+
+
+WHAT MRS. WILKINS THOUGHT ABOUT IT.
+
+
+LAST year, travelling on the Underground Railway, I met a man; he was one
+of the saddest-looking men I had seen for years.  I used to know him well
+in the old days when we were journalists together.  I asked him, in a
+sympathetic tone, how things were going with him.  I expected his
+response would be a flood of tears, and that in the end I should have to
+fork out a fiver.  To my astonishment, his answer was that things were
+going exceedingly well with him.  I did not want to say to him bluntly:
+
+“Then what has happened to you to make you look like a mute at a
+temperance funeral?” I said:
+
+“And how are all at home?”
+
+I thought that if the trouble lay there he would take the opportunity.
+It brightened him somewhat, the necessity of replying to the question.
+It appeared that his wife was in the best of health.
+
+“You remember her,” he continued with a smile; “wonderful spirits, always
+cheerful, nothing seems to put her out, not even—”
+
+He ended the sentence abruptly with a sigh.
+
+His mother-in-law, I learned from further talk with him, had died since I
+had last met him, and had left them a comfortable addition to their
+income.  His eldest daughter was engaged to be married.
+
+“It is entirely a love match,” he explained, “and he is such a dear, good
+fellow, that I should not have made any objection even had he been poor.
+But, of course, as it is, I am naturally all the more content.”
+
+His eldest boy, having won the Mottle Scholarship, was going up to
+Cambridge in the Autumn.  His own health, he told me, had greatly
+improved; and a novel he had written in his leisure time promised to be
+one of the successes of the season.  Then it was that I spoke plainly.
+
+“If I am opening a wound too painful to be touched,” I said, “tell me.
+If, on the contrary, it is an ordinary sort of trouble upon which the
+sympathy of a fellow worker may fall as balm, let me hear it.”
+
+“So far as I am concerned,” he replied, “I should be glad to tell you.
+Speaking about it does me good, and may lead—so I am always in hopes—to
+an idea.  But, for your own sake, if you take my advice, you will not
+press me.”
+
+“How can it affect me?” I asked, “it is nothing to do with me, is it?”
+
+“It need have nothing to do with you,” he answered, “if you are sensible
+enough to keep out of it.  If I tell you: from this time onward it will
+be your trouble also.  Anyhow, that is what has happened in four other
+separate cases.  If you like to be the fifth and complete the half dozen
+of us, you are welcome.  But remember I have warned you.”
+
+“What has it done to the other five?” I demanded.
+
+“It has changed them from cheerful, companionable persons into gloomy
+one-idead bores,” he told me.  “They think of but one thing, they talk of
+but one thing, they dream of but one thing.  Instead of getting over it,
+as time goes on, it takes possession of them more and more.  There are
+men, of course, who would be unaffected by it—who could shake it off.  I
+warn you in particular against it, because, in spite of all that is said,
+I am convinced you have a sense of humour; and that being so, it will lay
+hold of you.  It will plague you night and day.  You see what it has made
+of me!  Three months ago a lady interviewer described me as of a sunny
+temperament.  If you know your own business you will get out at the next
+station.”
+
+I wish now I had followed his advice.  As it was, I allowed my curiosity
+to take possession of me, and begged him to explain.  And he did so.
+
+“It was just about Christmas time,” he said.  “We were discussing the
+Drury Lane Pantomime—some three or four of us—in the smoking room of the
+Devonshire Club, and young Gold said he thought it would prove a mistake,
+the introduction of a subject like the Fiscal question into the story of
+Humpty Dumpty.  The two things, so far as he could see, had nothing to do
+with one another.  He added that he entertained a real regard for Mr. Dan
+Leno, whom he had once met on a steamboat, but that there were other
+topics upon which he would prefer to seek that gentleman’s guidance.
+Nettleship, on the other hand, declared that he had no sympathy with the
+argument that artists should never intrude upon public affairs.  The
+actor was a fellow citizen with the rest of us.  He said that, whether
+one agreed with their conclusions or not, one must admit that the nation
+owed a debt of gratitude to Mrs. Brown Potter and to Miss Olga Nethersole
+for giving to it the benefit of their convictions.  He had talked to both
+ladies in private on the subject and was convinced they knew as much
+about it as did most people.
+
+“Burnside, who was one of the party, contended that if sides were to be
+taken, a pantomime should surely advocate the Free-Food Cause, seeing it
+was a form of entertainment supposed to appeal primarily to the tastes of
+the Little Englander.  Then I came into the discussion.
+
+“‘The Fiscal question,’ I said, ‘is on everybody’s tongue.  Such being
+the case, it is fit and proper it should be referred to in our annual
+pantomime, which has come to be regarded as a review of the year’s
+doings.  But it should not have been dealt with from the political
+standpoint.  The proper attitude to have assumed towards it was that of
+innocent raillery, free from all trace of partisanship.’
+
+“Old Johnson had strolled up and was standing behind us.
+
+“‘The very thing I have been trying to get hold of for weeks,’ he said—‘a
+bright, amusing _resumé_ of the whole problem that should give offence to
+neither side.  You know our paper,’ he continued; ‘we steer clear of
+politics, but, at the same time, try to be up-to-date; it is not always
+easy.  The treatment of the subject, on the lines you suggest, is just
+what we require.  I do wish you would write me something.’
+
+“He is a good old sort, Johnson; it seemed an easy thing.  I said I
+would.  Since that time I have been thinking how to do it.  As a matter
+of fact, I have not thought of much else.  Maybe you can suggest
+something.”
+
+I was feeling in a good working mood the next morning.
+
+“Pilson,” said I to myself, “shall have the benefit of this.  He does not
+need anything boisterously funny.  A few playfully witty remarks on the
+subject will be the ideal.”
+
+I lit a pipe and sat down to think.  At half-past twelve, having to write
+some letters before going out to lunch, I dismissed the Fiscal question
+from my mind.
+
+But not for long.  It worried me all the afternoon.  I thought, maybe,
+something would come to me in the evening.  I wasted all that evening,
+and I wasted all the following morning.  Everything has its amusing side,
+I told myself.  One turns out comic stories about funerals, about
+weddings.  Hardly a misfortune that can happen to mankind but has
+produced its comic literature.  An American friend of mine once took a
+contract from the Editor of an Insurance Journal to write four humorous
+stories; one was to deal with an earthquake, the second with a cyclone,
+the third with a flood, and the fourth with a thunderstorm.  And more
+amusing stories I have never read.  What is the matter with the Fiscal
+question?
+
+I myself have written lightly on Bime-metallism.  Home Rule we used to be
+merry over in the eighties.  I remember one delightful evening at the
+Codgers’ Hall.  It would have been more delightful still, but for a
+raw-boned Irishman, who rose towards eleven o’clock and requested to be
+informed if any other speaker was wishful to make any more jokes on the
+subject of Ould Ireland; because, if so, the raw-boned gentleman was
+prepared to save time by waiting and dealing with them altogether.  But
+if not, then—so the raw-boned gentleman announced—his intention was to go
+for the last speaker and the last speaker but two at once and without
+further warning.
+
+No other humourist rising, the raw-boned gentleman proceeded to make good
+his threat, with the result that the fun degenerated somewhat.  Even on
+the Boer War we used to whisper jokes to one another in quiet places.  In
+this Fiscal question there must be fun.  Where is it?
+
+For days I thought of little else.  My laundress—as we call them in the
+Temple—noticed my trouble.
+
+“Mrs. Wilkins,” I confessed, “I am trying to think of something
+innocently amusing to say on the Fiscal question.”
+
+“I’ve ’eard about it,” she said, “but I don’t ’ave much time to read the
+papers.  They want to make us pay more for our food, don’t they?”
+
+“For some of it,” I explained.  “But, then, we shall pay less for other
+things, so that really we shan’t be paying more at all.”
+
+“There don’t seem much in it, either way,” was Mrs. Wilkins’ opinion.
+
+“Just so,” I agreed, “that is the advantage of the system.  It will cost
+nobody anything, and will result in everybody being better off.”
+
+“The pity is,” said Mrs. Wilkins “that pity nobody ever thought of it
+before.”
+
+“The whole trouble hitherto,” I explained, “has been the foreigner.”
+
+“Ah,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “I never ’eard much good of ’em, though they do
+say the Almighty ’as a use for almost everything.”
+
+“These foreigners,” I continued, “these Germans and Americans, they dump
+things on us, you know.”
+
+“What’s that?” demanded Mrs. Wilkins.
+
+“What’s dump?  Well, it’s dumping, you know.  You take things, and you
+dump them down.”
+
+“But what things?  ’Ow do they do it?” asked Mrs. Wilkins.
+
+“Why, all sorts of things: pig iron, bacon, door-mats—everything.  They
+bring them over here—in ships, you understand—and then, if you please,
+just dump them down upon our shores.”
+
+“You don’t mean surely to tell me that they just throw them out and leave
+them there?” queried Mrs. Wilkins.
+
+“Of course not,” I replied; “when I say they dump these things upon our
+shores, that is a figure of speech.  What I mean is they sell them to
+us.”
+
+“But why do we buy them if we don’t want them?” asked Mrs. Wilkins;
+“we’re not bound to buy them, are we?”
+
+“It is their artfulness,” I explained, “these Germans and Americans, and
+the others; they are all just as bad as one another—they insist on
+selling us these things at less price than they cost to make.”
+
+“It seems a bit silly of them, don’t it?” thought Mrs. Wilkins.  “I
+suppose being foreigners, poor things, they ain’t naturally got much
+sense.”
+
+“It does seem silly of them, if you look at it that way,” I admitted,
+“but what we have got to consider is, the injury it is doing us.”
+
+“Don’t see ’ow it can do us much ’arm,” argued Mrs. Wilkins; “seems a bit
+of luck so far as we are concerned.  There’s a few more things they’d be
+welcome to dump round my way.”
+
+“I don’t seem to be putting this thing quite in the right light to you,
+Mrs. Wilkins,” I confessed.  “It is a long argument, and you might not be
+able to follow it; but you must take it as a fact now generally admitted
+that the cheaper you buy things the sooner your money goes.  By allowing
+the foreigner to sell us all these things at about half the cost price,
+he is getting richer every day, and we are getting poorer.  Unless we, as
+a country, insist on paying at least twenty per cent. more for everything
+we want, it is calculated that in a very few years England won’t have a
+penny left.”
+
+“Sounds a bit topsy turvy,” suggested Mrs. Wilkins.
+
+“It may sound so,” I answered, “but I fear there can be no doubt of it.
+The Board of Trade Returns would seem to prove it conclusively.”
+
+“Well, God be praised, we’ve found it out in time,” ejaculated Mrs.
+Wilkins piously.
+
+“It is a matter of congratulation,” I agreed; “the difficulty is that a
+good many other people say that far from being ruined, we are doing very
+well indeed, and are growing richer every year.”
+
+“But ’ow can they say that,” argued Mrs. Wilkins, “when, as you tell me,
+those Trade Returns prove just the opposite?”
+
+“Well, they say the same, Mrs. Wilkins, that the Board of Trade Returns
+prove just the opposite.”
+
+“Well, they can’t both be right,” said Mrs. Wilkins.
+
+“You would be surprised, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, “how many things can be
+proved from Board of Trade Returns!”
+
+But I have not yet thought of that article for Pilson.
+
+
+
+
+SHALL WE BE RUINED BY CHINESE CHEAP LABOUR?
+
+
+“WHAT is all this talk I ’ear about the Chinese?” said Mrs. Wilkins to me
+the other morning.  We generally indulge in a little chat while Mrs.
+Wilkins is laying the breakfast-table.  Letters and newspapers do not
+arrive in my part of the Temple much before nine.  From half-past eight
+to nine I am rather glad of Mrs. Wilkins.  “They ’ave been up to some of
+their tricks again, ’aven’t they?”
+
+“The foreigner, Mrs. Wilkins,” I replied, “whether he be Chinee or any
+other he, is always up to tricks.  Was not England specially prepared by
+an all-wise Providence to frustrate these knavish tricks?  Which of such
+particular tricks may you be referring to at the moment, Mrs. Wilkins?”
+
+“Well, ’e’s comin’ over ’ere—isn’t he, sir? to take the work out of our
+mouths, as it were.”
+
+“Well, not exactly over here, to England, Mrs. Wilkins,” I explained.
+“He has been introduced into Africa to work in the mines there.”
+
+“It’s a funny thing,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “but to ’ear the way some of
+them talk in our block, you might run away with the notion—that is, if
+you didn’t know ’em—that work was their only joy.  I said to one of ’em,
+the other evening—a man as calls ’isself a brass finisher, though, Lord
+knows, the only brass ’e ever finishes is what ’is poor wife earns and
+isn’t quick enough to ’ide away from ’im—well, whatever ’appens, I says,
+it will be clever of ’em if they take away much work from you.  It made
+them all laugh, that did,” added Mrs. Wilkins, with a touch of pardonable
+pride.
+
+“Ah,” continued the good lady, “it’s surprising ’ow contented they can be
+with a little, some of ’em.  Give ’em a ’ard-working woman to look after
+them, and a day out once a week with a procession of the unemployed, they
+don’t ask for nothing more.  There’s that beauty my poor sister Jane was
+fool enough to marry.  Serves ’er right, as I used to tell ’er at first,
+till there didn’t seem any more need to rub it into ’er.  She’d ’ad one
+good ’usband.  It wouldn’t ’ave been fair for ’er to ’ave ’ad another,
+even if there’d been a chance of it, seeing the few of ’em there is to go
+round among so many.  But it’s always the same with us widows: if we
+’appen to ’ave been lucky the first time, we put it down to our own
+judgment—think we can’t ever make a mistake; and if we draw a wrong ’un,
+as the saying is, we argue as if it was the duty of Providence to make it
+up to us the second time.  Why, I’d a been making a fool of myself three
+years ago if ’e ’adn’t been good-natured enough to call one afternoon
+when I was out, and ’ook it off with two pounds eight in the best teapot
+that I ’ad been soft enough to talk to ’im about: and never let me set
+eyes on ’im again.  God bless ’im!  ’E’s one of the born-tireds, ’e is,
+as poor Jane might ’ave seen for ’erself, if she ’ad only looked at ’im,
+instead of listening to ’im.
+
+“But that’s courtship all the world over—old and young alike, so far as
+I’ve been able to see it,” was the opinion of Mrs. Wilkins.  “The man’s
+all eyes and the woman all ears.  They don’t seem to ’ave any other
+senses left ’em.  I ran against ’im the other night, on my way ’ome, at
+the corner of Gray’s Inn Road.  There was the usual crowd watching a pack
+of them Italians laying down the asphalt in ’Olborn, and ’e was among
+’em.  ’E ’ad secured the only lamp-post, and was leaning agen it.
+
+“’Ullo,’ I says, ‘glad to see you ’aven’t lost your job.  Nothin’ like
+stickin’ to it, when you’ve dropped into somethin’ that really suits
+you.’
+
+“‘What do you mean, Martha?’ ’e says.  ’E’s not one of what I call your
+smart sort.  It takes a bit of sarcasm to get through ’is ’ead.
+
+“‘Well,’ I says, ‘you’re still on the old track, I see, looking for work.
+Take care you don’t ’ave an accident one of these days and run up agen it
+before you’ve got time to get out of its way.’
+
+“‘It’s these miserable foreigners,’ ’e says.  ‘Look at ’em,’ ’e says.
+
+“‘There’s enough of you doing that,’ I says.  ‘I’ve got my room to put
+straight and three hours needlework to do before I can get to bed.  But
+don’t let me ’inder you.  You might forget what work was like, if you
+didn’t take an opportunity of watching it now and then.’
+
+“‘They come over ’ere,’ ’e says, ‘and take the work away from us chaps.’
+
+“‘Ah,’ I says, ‘poor things, perhaps they ain’t married.’
+
+“‘Lazy devils! ’e says.  ‘Look at ’em, smoking cigarettes.  I could do
+that sort of work.  There’s nothing in it.  It don’t take ’eathen
+foreigners to dab a bit of tar about a road.’
+
+“‘Yes,’ I says, ‘you always could do anybody else’s work but your own.’
+
+“‘I can’t find it, Martha,’ ’e says.
+
+“‘No,’ I says, ‘and you never will in the sort of places you go looking
+for it.  They don’t ’ang it out on lamp-posts, and they don’t leave it
+about at the street corners.  Go ’ome,’ I says, ‘and turn the mangle for
+your poor wife.  That’s big enough for you to find, even in the dark.’
+
+“Looking for work!” snorted Mrs. Wilkins with contempt; “we women never
+’ave much difficulty in finding it, I’ve noticed.  There are times when I
+feel I could do with losing it for a day.”
+
+“But what did he reply, Mrs. Wilkins,” I asked; “your brass-finishing
+friend, who was holding forth on the subject of Chinese cheap labour.”
+Mrs. Wilkins as a conversationalist is not easily kept to the point.  I
+was curious to know what the working classes were thinking on the
+subject.
+
+“Oh, that,” replied Mrs. Wilkins, “’e did not say nothing.  ’E ain’t the
+sort that’s got much to say in an argument.  ’E belongs to the crowd that
+’angs about at the back, and does the shouting.  But there was another of
+’em, a young fellow as I feels sorry for, with a wife and three small
+children, who ’asn’t ’ad much luck for the last six months; and that
+through no fault of ’is own, I should say, from the look of ’im.  ‘I was
+a fool,’ says ’e, ‘when I chucked a good situation and went out to the
+war.  They told me I was going to fight for equal rights for all white
+men.  I thought they meant that all of us were going to ’ave a better
+chance, and it seemed worth making a bit of sacrifice for, that did.  I
+should be glad if they would give me a job in their mines that would
+enable me to feed my wife and children.  That’s all I ask them for!’”
+
+“It is a difficult problem, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said.  “According to the
+mine owners—”
+
+“Ah,” said Mrs. Wilkins.  “They don’t seem to be exactly what you’d call
+popular, them mine owners, do they?  Daresay they’re not as bad as
+they’re painted.”
+
+“Some people, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, “paint them very black.  There are
+those who hold that the South African mine-owner is not a man at all, but
+a kind of pantomime demon.  You take Goliath, the whale that swallowed
+Jonah, a selection from the least respectable citizens of Sodom and
+Gomorrah at their worst, Bluebeard, Bloody Queen Mary, Guy Fawkes, and
+the sea-serpent—or, rather, you take the most objectionable attributes of
+all these various personages, and mix them up together.  The result is
+the South African mine-owner, a monster who would willingly promote a
+company for the putting on the market of a new meat extract, prepared
+exclusively from new-born infants, provided the scheme promised a fair
+and reasonable opportunity of fleecing the widow and orphan.”
+
+“I’ve ’eard they’re a bad lot,” said Mrs. Wilkins.  “But we’re most of us
+that, if we listen to what other people say about us.”
+
+“Quite so, Mrs. Wilkins,” I agreed.  “One never arrives at the truth by
+listening to one side only.  On the other hand, for example, there are
+those who stoutly maintain that the South African mine-owner is a kind of
+spiritual creature, all heart and sentiment, who, against his own will,
+has been, so to speak, dumped down upon this earth as the result of
+over-production up above of the higher class of archangel.  The stock of
+archangels of superior finish exceeds the heavenly demand; the surplus
+has been dropped down into South Africa and has taken to mine owning.  It
+is not that these celestial visitors of German sounding nomenclature care
+themselves about the gold.  Their only desire is, during this earthly
+pilgrimage of theirs, to benefit the human race.  Nothing can be obtained
+in this world without money—”
+
+“That’s true,” said Mrs. Wilkins, with a sigh.
+
+“For gold, everything can be obtained.  The aim of the mine-owning
+archangel is to provide the world with gold.  Why should the world
+trouble to grow things and make things?  ‘Let us,’ say these archangels,
+temporarily dwelling in South Africa, ‘dig up and distribute to the world
+plenty of gold, then the world can buy whatever it wants, and be happy.’
+
+“There may be a flaw in the argument, Mrs. Wilkins,” I allowed.  “I am
+not presenting it to you as the last word upon the subject.  I am merely
+quoting the view of the South African mine-owner, feeling himself a much
+misunderstood benefactor of mankind.”
+
+“I expect,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “they are just the ordinary sort of
+Christian, like the rest of us, anxious to do the best they can for
+themselves, and not too particular as to doing other people in the
+process.”
+
+“I am inclined to think, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, “that you are not very
+far from the truth.  A friend of mine, a year ago, was very bitter on
+this subject of Chinese cheap labour.  A little later there died a
+distant relative of his who left him twenty thousand South African mining
+shares.  He thinks now that to object to the Chinese is narrow-minded,
+illiberal, and against all religious teaching.  He has bought an abridged
+edition of Confucius, and tells me that there is much that is ennobling
+in Chinese morality.  Indeed, I gather from him that the introduction of
+the Chinese into South Africa will be the saving of that country.  The
+noble Chinese will afford an object lesson to the poor white man,
+displaying to him the virtues of sobriety, thrift, and humility.  I also
+gather that it will be of inestimable benefit to the noble Chinee
+himself.  The Christian missionary will get hold of him in bulk, so to
+speak, and imbue him with the higher theology.  It appears to be one of
+those rare cases where everybody is benefited at the expense of nobody.
+It is always a pity to let these rare opportunities slip by.”
+
+“Well,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “I’ve nothin’ to say agen the Chinaman, as a
+Chinaman.  As to ’is being a ’eathen, well, throwin’ stones at a church,
+as the sayin’ is, don’t make a Christian of you.  There’s Christians I’ve
+met as couldn’t do themselves much ’arm by changing their religion; and
+as to cleanliness, well, I’ve never met but one, and ’e was a
+washerwoman, and I’d rather ’ave sat next to ’im in a third-class
+carriage on a Bank ’Oliday than next to some of ’em.
+
+“Seems to me,” continued Mrs. Wilkins, “we’ve got into the ’abit of
+talkin’ a bit too much about other people’s dirt.  The London atmosphere
+ain’t nat’rally a dry-cleanin’ process in itself, but there’s a goodish
+few as seem to think it is.  One comes across Freeborn Britons ’ere and
+there as I’d be sorry to scrub clean for a shillin’ and find my own
+soap.”
+
+“It is a universal failing, Mrs. Wilkins,” I explained.  “If you talk to
+a travelled Frenchman, he contrasts to his own satisfaction the Paris
+_ouvrier_ in his blue blouse with the appearance of the London labourer.”
+
+“I daresay they’re all right according to their lights,” said Mrs.
+Wilkins, “but it does seem a bit wrong that if our own chaps are willin’
+and anxious to work, after all they’ve done, too, in the way of getting
+the mines for us, they shouldn’t be allowed the job.”
+
+“Again, Mrs. Wilkins, it is difficult to arrive at a just conclusion,” I
+said.  “The mine-owner, according to his enemies, hates the British
+workman with the natural instinct that evil creatures feel towards the
+noble and virtuous.  He will go to trouble and expense merely to spite
+the British workman, to keep him out of South Africa.  According to his
+friends, the mine-owner sets his face against the idea of white labour
+for two reasons.  First and foremost, it is not nice work; the mine-owner
+hates the thought of his beloved white brother toiling in the mines.  It
+is not right that the noble white man should demean himself by such work.
+Secondly, white labour is too expensive.  If for digging gold men had to
+be paid anything like the same prices they are paid for digging coal, the
+mines could not be worked.  The world would lose the gold that the
+mine-owner is anxious to bestow upon it.
+
+“The mine-owner, following his own inclinations, would take a little
+farm, grow potatoes, and live a beautiful life—perhaps write a little
+poetry.  A slave to sense of duty, he is chained to the philanthropic
+work of gold-mining.  If we hamper him and worry him the danger is that
+he will get angry with us—possibly he will order his fiery chariot and
+return to where he came from.”
+
+“Well, ’e can’t take the gold with him, wherever ’e goes to?” argued Mrs.
+Wilkins.
+
+“You talk, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, “as if the gold were of more value to
+the world than is the mine-owner.”
+
+“Well, isn’t it?” demanded Mrs. Wilkins.
+
+“It’s a new idea, Mrs. Wilkins,” I answered; “it wants thinking out.”
+
+
+
+
+HOW TO SOLVE THE SERVANT PROBLEM.
+
+
+“I AM glad to see, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, “that the Women’s Domestic
+Guild of America has succeeded in solving the servant girl problem—none
+too soon, one might almost say.”
+
+“Ah,” said Mrs. Wilkins, as she took the cover off the bacon and gave an
+extra polish to the mustard-pot with her apron, “they are clever people
+over there; leastways, so I’ve always ’eard.”
+
+“This, their latest, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, “I am inclined to regard as
+their greatest triumph.  My hope is that the Women’s Domestic Guild of
+America, when it has finished with the United States and Canada, will,
+perhaps, see its way to establishing a branch in England.  There are
+ladies of my acquaintance who would welcome, I feel sure, any really
+satisfactory solution of the problem.”
+
+“Well, good luck to it, is all I say,” responded Mrs. Wilkins, “and if it
+makes all the gals contented with their places, and all the mistresses
+satisfied with what they’ve got and ’appy in their minds, why, God bless
+it, say I.”
+
+“The mistake hitherto,” I said, “from what I read, appears to have been
+that the right servant was not sent to the right place.  What the Women’s
+Domestic Guild of America proposes to do is to find the right servant for
+the right place.  You see the difference, don’t you, Mrs. Wilkins?”
+
+“That’s the secret,” agreed Mrs. Wilkins.  “They don’t anticipate any
+difficulty in getting the right sort of gal, I take it?”
+
+“I gather not, Mrs. Wilkins,” I replied.
+
+Mrs. Wilkins is of a pessimistic turn of mind.
+
+“I am not so sure about it,” she said; “the Almighty don’t seem to ’ave
+made too many of that sort.  Unless these American ladies that you speak
+of are going to start a factory of their own.  I am afraid there is
+disappointment in store for them.”
+
+“Don’t throw cold water on the idea before it is fairly started, Mrs.
+Wilkins,” I pleaded.
+
+“Well, sir,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “I ’ave been a gal myself in service; and
+in my time I‘ve ’ad a few mistresses of my own, and I’ve ’eard a good
+deal about others.  There are ladies and ladies, as you may know, sir,
+and some of them, if they aren’t exactly angels, are about as near to it
+as can be looked for in this climate, and they are not the ones that do
+most of the complaining.  But, as for the average mistress—well it ain’t
+a gal she wants, it’s a plaster image, without any natural innards—a sort
+of thing as ain’t ’uman, and ain’t to be found in ’uman nature.  And then
+she’d grumble at it, if it didn’t ’appen to be able to be in two places
+at once.”
+
+“You fear that the standard for that ‘right girl’ is likely to be set a
+trifle too high Mrs. Wilkins,” I suggested.
+
+“That ‘right gal,’ according to the notions of some of ’em,” retorted
+Mrs. Wilkins, “’er place ain’t down ’ere among us mere mortals; ’er place
+is up in ’eaven with a ’arp and a golden crown.  There’s my niece, Emma,
+I don’t say she is a saint, but a better ’earted, ’arder working gal, at
+twenty pounds a year, you don’t expect to find, unless maybe you’re a
+natural born fool that can’t ’elp yourself.  She wanted a place.  She ’ad
+been ’ome for nearly six months, nursing ’er old father, as ’ad been down
+all the winter with rheumatic fever; and ’ard-put to it she was for a few
+clothes.  You ’ear ’em talk about gals as insists on an hour a day for
+practising the piano, and the right to invite their young man to spend
+the evening with them in the drawing-room.  Perhaps it is meant to be
+funny; I ain’t come across that type of gal myself, outside the pictures
+in the comic papers; and I’ll never believe, till I see ’er myself, that
+anybody else ’as.  They sent ’er from the registry office to a lady at
+Clapton.
+
+“‘I ’ope you are good at getting up early in the morning?’ says the lady,
+‘I like a gal as rises cheerfully to ’er work.’
+
+“‘Well, ma’am,’ says Emma, ‘I can’t say as I’ve got a passion for it.
+But it’s one of those things that ’as to be done, and I guess I’ve learnt
+the trick.’
+
+“‘I’m a great believer in early rising,’ says my lady; ‘in the morning,
+one is always fresher for one’s work; my ’usband and the younger children
+breakfast at ’arf past seven; myself and my eldest daughter ’ave our
+breakfest in bed at eight.’
+
+“‘That’ll be all right, ma’am,’ says Emma.
+
+“‘And I ’ope,’ says the lady, ‘you are of an amiable disposition.  Some
+gals when you ring the bell come up looking so disagreeable, one almost
+wishes one didn’t want them.’
+
+“‘Well, it ain’t a thing,’ explains Emma, ‘as makes you want to burst out
+laughing, ’earing the bell go off for the twentieth time, and ’aving
+suddenly to put down your work at, perhaps, a critical moment.  Some
+ladies don’t seem able to reach down their ’at for themselves.’
+
+“‘I ’ope you are not impertinent,’ says the lady; ‘if there’s one thing
+that I object to in a servant it is impertinence.’
+
+“‘We none of us like being answered back,’ says Emma, ‘more particularly
+when we are in the wrong.  But I know my place ma’am, and I shan’t give
+you no lip.  It always leads to less trouble, I find, keeping your mouth
+shut, rather than opening it.’
+
+“‘Are you fond of children,’ asks my lady.
+
+“‘It depends upon the children,’ says Emma; ‘there are some I ’ave ’ad to
+do with as made the day seem pleasanter, and I’ve come across others as I
+could ’ave parted from at any moment without tears.’
+
+“‘I like a gal,’ says the lady, ‘who is naturally fond of children, it
+shows a good character.’
+
+“‘How many of them are there?’ says Emma.
+
+“‘Four of them,’ answers my lady, ‘but you won’t ’ave much to do except
+with the two youngest.  The great thing with young children is to
+surround them with good examples.  Are you a Christian?’ asks my lady.
+
+“‘That’s what I’m generally called,’ says Emma.
+
+“‘Every other Sunday evening out is my rule,’ says the lady, ‘but of
+course I shall expect you to go to church.’
+
+“‘Do you mean in my time, ma’am,’ says Emma, ‘or in yours.’
+
+“‘I mean on your evening of course,’ says my lady.  ‘’Ow else could you
+go?’
+
+“‘Well, ma’am,’ says Emma, ‘I like to see my people now and then.’
+
+“‘There are better things,’ says my lady, ‘than seeing what you call your
+people, and I should not care to take a girl into my ’ouse as put ’er
+pleasure before ’er religion.  You are not engaged, I ’ope?’
+
+“‘Walking out, ma’am, do you mean?’ says Emma.  ‘No, ma’am, there is
+nobody I’ve got in my mind—not just at present.’
+
+“‘I never will take a gal,’ explains my lady, ‘who is engaged.  I find it
+distracts ’er attention from ’er work.  And I must insist if you come to
+me,’ continues my lady, ‘that you get yourself another ’at and jacket.
+If there is one thing I object to in a servant it is a disposition to
+cheap finery.’
+
+“’Er own daughter was sitting there beside ’er with ’alf a dozen silver
+bangles on ’er wrist, and a sort of thing ’anging around ’er neck, as,
+’ad it been real, would ’ave been worth perhaps a thousand pounds.  But
+Emma wanted a job, so she kept ’er thoughts to ’erself.
+
+“‘I can put these things by and get myself something else,’ she says, ‘if
+you don’t mind, ma’am, advancing me something out of my first three
+months’ wages.  I’m afraid my account at the bank is a bit overdrawn.’
+
+“The lady whispered something to ’er daughter.  ‘I am afraid, on thinking
+it over,’ she says, ‘that you won’t suit, after all.  You don’t look
+serious enough.  I feel sure, from the way you do your ’air,’ says my
+lady, ‘there’s a frivolous side to your nature.’
+
+“So Emma came away, and was not, on the whole, too sorry.”
+
+“But do they get servants to come to them, this type of mistress, do you
+think, Mrs. Wilkins?” I asked.
+
+“They get them all right,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “and if it’s a decent gal,
+it makes a bad gal of ’er, that ever afterwards looks upon every mistress
+as ’er enemy, and acts accordingly.  And if she ain’t a naturally good
+gal, it makes ’er worse, and then you ’ear what awful things gals are.  I
+don’t say it’s an easy problem,” continued Mrs. Wilkins, “it’s just like
+marriages.  The good mistress gets ’old of the bad servant, and the bad
+mistress, as often as not is lucky.”
+
+“But how is it,” I argued, “that in hotels, for instance, the service is
+excellent, and the girls, generally speaking, seem contented?  The work
+is hard, and the wages not much better, if as good.”
+
+“Ah,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “you ’ave ’it the right nail on the ’ead, there,
+sir.  They go into the ’otels and work like niggers, knowing that if a
+single thing goes wrong they will be bully-ragged and sworn at till they
+don’t know whether they are standing on their ’ead or their ’eels.  But
+they ’ave their hours; the gal knows when ’er work is done, and when the
+clock strikes she is a ’uman being once again.  She ’as got that moment
+to look forward to all day, and it keeps ’er going.  In private service
+there’s no moment in the day to ’ope for.  If the lady is reasonable she
+ain’t overworked; but no ’ow can she ever feel she is her own mistress,
+free to come and go, to wear ’er bit of finery, to ’ave ’er bit of fun.
+She works from six in the morning till eleven or twelve at night, and
+then she only goes to bed provided she ain’t wanted.  She don’t belong to
+’erself at all; it’s that that irritates them.”
+
+“I see your point, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, “and, of course, in a house
+where two or three servants were kept some such plan might easily be
+arranged.  The girl who commenced work at six o’clock in the morning
+might consider herself free at six o’clock in the evening.  What she did
+with herself, how she dressed herself in her own time, would be her
+affair.  What church the clerk or the workman belongs to, what company he
+keeps, is no concern of the firm.  In such matters, mistresses, I am
+inclined to think, saddle themselves with a responsibility for which
+there is no need.  If the girl behaves herself while in the house, and
+does her work, there the contract ends.  The mistress who thinks it her
+duty to combine the _rôles_ of employer and of maiden aunt is naturally
+resented.  The next month the girl might change her hours from twelve to
+twelve, and her fellow-servant could enjoy the six a.m. to six p.m.
+shift.  But how do you propose to deal, Mrs. Wilkins, with the smaller
+_menage_, that employs only one servant?”
+
+“Well, sir,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “it seems to me simple enough.  Ladies
+talk pretty about the dignity of labour, and are never tired of pointing
+out why gals should prefer domestic service to all other kinds of work.
+Suppose they practise what they preach.  In the ’ouse, where there’s only
+the master and the mistress, and, say a couple of small children, let the
+lady take her turn.  After all, it’s only her duty, same as the office or
+the shop is the man’s.  Where, on the other ’and, there are biggish boys
+and gals about the place, well it wouldn’t do them any ’arm to be taught
+to play a little less, and to look after themselves a little more.  It’s
+just arranging things—that’s all that’s wanted.”
+
+“You remind me of a family I once knew, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said; “it
+consisted of the usual father and mother, and of five sad, healthy girls.
+They kept two servants—or, rather, they never kept any servants; they
+lived always looking for servants, breaking their hearts over servants,
+packing servants off at a moment’s notice, standing disconsolately
+looking after servants who had packed themselves off at a moment’s
+notice, wondering generally what the world was coming too.  It occurred
+to me at the time, that without much trouble, they could have lived a
+peaceful life without servants.  The eldest girl was learning
+painting—and seemed unable to learn anything else.  It was poor sort of
+painting; she noticed it herself.  But she seemed to think that, if she
+talked a lot about it, and thought of nothing else, that somehow it would
+all come right.  The second girl played the violin.  She played it from
+early morning till late evening, and friends fell away from them.  There
+wasn’t a spark of talent in the family, but they all had a notion that a
+vague longing to be admired was just the same as genius.
+
+“Another daughter fancied she would like to be an actress, and screamed
+all day in the attic.  The fourth wrote poetry on a typewriter, and
+wondered why nobody seemed to want it; while the fifth one suffered from
+a weird belief that smearing wood with a red-hot sort of poker was a
+thing worth doing for its own sake.  All of them seemed willing enough to
+work, provided only that it was work of no use to any living soul.  With
+a little sense, and the occasional assistance of a charwoman, they could
+have led a merrier life.”
+
+“If I was giving away secrets,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “I’d say to the
+mistresses: ‘Show yourselves able to be independent.’  It’s because the
+gals know that the mistresses can’t do without them that they sometimes
+gives themselves airs.”
+
+
+
+
+WHY WE HATE THE FOREIGNER.
+
+
+The advantage that the foreigner possesses over the Englishman is that he
+is born good.  He does not have to try to be good, as we do.  He does not
+have to start the New Year with the resolution to be good, and succeed,
+bar accidents, in being so till the middle of January.  He is just good
+all the year round.  When a foreigner is told to mount or descend from a
+tram on the near side, it does not occur to him that it would be humanly
+possible to secure egress from or ingress to that tram from the off side.
+
+In Brussels once I witnessed a daring attempt by a lawless foreigner to
+enter a tram from the wrong side.  The gate was open: he was standing
+close beside it.  A line of traffic was in his way: to have got round to
+the right side of that tram would have meant missing it.  He entered when
+the conductor was not looking, and took his seat.  The astonishment of
+the conductor on finding him there was immense.  How did he get there?
+The conductor had been watching the proper entrance, and the man had not
+passed him.  Later, the true explanation suggested itself to the
+conductor, but for a while he hesitated to accuse a fellow human being of
+such crime.
+
+He appealed to the passenger himself.  Was his presence to be accounted
+for by miracle or by sin?  The passenger confessed.  It was more in
+sorrow than in anger that the conductor requested him at once to leave.
+This tram was going to be kept respectable.  The passenger proved
+refractory, a halt was called, and the gendarmerie appealed to.  After
+the manner of policemen, they sprang, as it were, from the ground, and
+formed up behind an imposing officer, whom I took to be the sergeant.  At
+first the sergeant could hardly believe the conductor’s statement.  Even
+then, had the passenger asserted that he had entered by the proper
+entrance, his word would have been taken.  Much easier to the foreign
+official mind would it have been to believe that the conductor had been
+stricken with temporary blindness, than that man born of woman would have
+deliberately done anything expressly forbidden by a printed notice.
+
+Myself, in his case, I should have lied and got the trouble over.  But he
+was a proud man, or had not much sense—one of the two, and so held fast
+to the truth.  It was pointed out to him that he must descend immediately
+and wait for the next tram.  Other gendarmes were arriving from every
+quarter: resistance in the circumstances seemed hopeless.  He said he
+would get down.  He made to descend this time by the proper gate, but
+that was not justice.  He had mounted the wrong side, he must alight on
+the wrong side.  Accordingly, he was put out amongst the traffic, after
+which the conductor preached a sermon from the centre of the tram on the
+danger of ascents and descents conducted from the wrong quarter.
+
+There is a law throughout Germany—an excellent law it is: I would we had
+it in England—that nobody may scatter paper about the street.  An English
+military friend told me that, one day in Dresden, unacquainted with this
+rule, he tore a long letter he had been reading into some fifty fragments
+and threw them behind him.  A policeman stopped him and explained to him
+quite politely the law upon the subject.  My military friend agreed that
+it was a very good law, thanked the man for his information, and said
+that for the future he would bear it in mind.  That, as the policeman
+pointed out, would make things right enough for the future, but meanwhile
+it was necessary to deal with the past—with the fifty or so pieces of
+paper lying scattered about the road and pavement.
+
+My military friend, with a pleasant laugh, confessed he did not see what
+was to be done.  The policeman, more imaginative, saw a way out.  It was
+that my military friend should set to work and pick up those fifty scraps
+of paper.  He is an English General on the Retired List, and of imposing
+appearance: his manner on occasion is haughty.  He did not see himself on
+his hands and knees in the chief street of Dresden, in the middle of the
+afternoon, picking up paper.
+
+The German policeman himself admitted that the situation was awkward.  If
+the English General could not accept it there happened to be an
+alternative.  It was that the English General should accompany the
+policeman through the streets, followed by the usual crowd, to the
+nearest prison, some three miles off.  It being now four o’clock in the
+afternoon, they would probably find the judge departed.  But the most
+comfortable thing possible in prison cells should be allotted to him, and
+the policeman had little doubt that the General, having paid his fine of
+forty marks, would find himself a free man again in time for lunch the
+following day.  The general suggested hiring a boy to pick up the paper.
+The policeman referred to the wording of the law, and found that this
+would not be permitted.
+
+“I thought the matter out,” my friend told me, “imagining all the
+possible alternatives, including that of knocking the fellow down and
+making a bolt, and came to the conclusion that his first suggestion
+would, on the whole, result in the least discomfort.  But I had no idea
+that picking up small scraps of thin paper off greasy stones was the
+business that I found it!  It took me nearly ten minutes, and afforded
+amusement, I calculate, to over a thousand people.  But it is a good law,
+mind you: all I wish is that I had known it beforehand.”
+
+On one occasion I accompanied an American lady to a German Opera House.
+The taking-off of hats in the German Schausspielhaus is obligatory, and
+again I would it were so in England.  But the American lady is accustomed
+to disregard rules made by mere man.  She explained to the doorkeeper
+that she was going to wear her hat.  He, on his side, explained to her
+that she was not: they were both a bit short with one another.  I took
+the opportunity to turn aside and buy a programme: the fewer people there
+are mixed up in an argument, I always think, the better.
+
+My companion explained quite frankly to the doorkeeper that it did not
+matter what he said, she was not going to take any notice of him.  He did
+not look a talkative man at any time, and, maybe, this announcement
+further discouraged him.  In any case, he made no attempt to answer.  All
+he did was to stand in the centre of the doorway with a far-away look in
+his eyes.  The doorway was some four feet wide: he was about three feet
+six across, and weighed about twenty stone.  As I explained, I was busy
+buying a programme, and when I returned my friend had her hat in her
+hand, and was digging pins into it: I think she was trying to make
+believe it was the heart of the doorkeeper.  She did not want to listen
+to the opera, she wanted to talk all the time about that doorkeeper, but
+the people round us would not even let her do that.
+
+She has spent three winters in Germany since then.  Now when she feels
+like passing through a door that is standing wide open just in front of
+her, and which leads to just the place she wants to get to, and an
+official shakes his head at her, and explains that she must not, but must
+go up two flights of stairs and along a corridor and down another flight
+of stairs, and so get to her place that way, she apologises for her error
+and trots off looking ashamed of herself.
+
+Continental Governments have trained their citizens to perfection.
+Obedience is the Continent’s first law.  The story that is told of a
+Spanish king who was nearly drowned because the particular official whose
+duty it was to dive in after Spanish kings when they tumbled out of boats
+happened to be dead, and his successor had not yet been appointed, I can
+quite believe.  On the Continental railways if you ride second class with
+a first-class ticket you render yourself liable to imprisonment.  What
+the penalty is for riding first with a second-class ticket I cannot
+say—probably death, though a friend of mine came very near on one
+occasion to finding out.
+
+All would have gone well with him if he had not been so darned honest.
+He is one of those men who pride themselves on being honest.  I believe
+he takes a positive pleasure in being honest.  He had purchased a
+second-class ticket for a station up a mountain, but meeting, by chance
+on the platform, a lady acquaintance, had gone with her into a
+first-class apartment.  On arriving at the journey’s end he explained to
+the collector what he had done, and, with his purse in his hand, demanded
+to know the difference.  They took him into a room and locked the door.
+They wrote out his confession and read it over to him, and made him sign
+it, and then they sent for a policeman.
+
+The policeman cross-examined him for about a quarter of an hour.  They
+did not believe the story about the lady.  Where was the lady?  He did
+not know.  They searched the neighbourhood for her, but could not find
+her.  He suggested—what turned out to be the truth—that, tired of
+loitering about the station, she had gone up the mountain.  An Anarchist
+outrage had occurred in the neighbouring town some months before.  The
+policeman suggested searching for bombs.  Fortunately, a Cook’s agent,
+returning with a party of tourists, arrived upon the scene, and took it
+upon himself to explain in delicate language that my friend was a bit of
+an ass and could not tell first class from second.  It was the red
+cushions that had deceived my friend: he thought it was first class, as a
+matter of fact it was second class.
+
+Everybody breathed again.  The confession was torn up amid universal joy:
+and then the fool of a ticket collector wanted to know about the lady—who
+must have travelled in a second-class compartment with a first-class
+ticket.  It looked as if a bad time were in store for her on her return
+to the station.
+
+But the admirable representative of Cook was again equal to the occasion.
+He explained that my friend was also a bit of a liar.  When he said he
+had travelled with this lady he was merely boasting.  He would like to
+have travelled with her, that was all he meant, only his German was
+shaky.  Joy once more entered upon the scene.  My friend’s character
+appeared to be re-established.  He was not the abandoned wretch for whom
+they had taken him—only, apparently, a wandering idiot.  Such an one the
+German official could respect.  At the expense of such an one the German
+official even consented to drink beer.
+
+Not only the foreign man, woman and child, but the foreign dog is born
+good.  In England, if you happen to be the possessor of a dog, much of
+your time is taken up dragging him out of fights, quarrelling with the
+possessor of the other dog as to which began it, explaining to irate
+elderly ladies that he did not kill the cat, that the cat must have died
+of heart disease while running across the road, assuring disbelieving
+game-keepers that he is not your dog, that you have not the faintest
+notion whose dog he is.  With the foreign dog, life is a peaceful
+proceeding.  When the foreign dog sees a row, tears spring to his eyes:
+he hastens on and tries to find a policeman.  When the foreign dog sees a
+cat in a hurry, he stands aside to allow her to pass.  They dress the
+foreign dog—some of them—in a little coat, with a pocket for his
+handkerchief, and put shoes on his feet.  They have not given him a
+hat—not yet.  When they do, he will contrive by some means or another to
+raise it politely when he meets a cat he thinks he knows.
+
+One morning, in a Continental city, I came across a disturbance—it might
+be more correct to say the disturbance came across me: it swept down upon
+me, enveloped me before I knew that I was in it.  A fox-terrier it was,
+belonging to a very young lady—it was when the disturbance was to a
+certain extent over that we discovered he belonged to this young lady.
+She arrived towards the end of the disturbance, very much out of breath:
+she had been running for a mile, poor girl, and shouting most of the way.
+When she looked round and saw all the things that had happened, and had
+had other things that she had missed explained to her, she burst into
+tears.  An English owner of that fox-terrier would have given one look
+round and then have jumped upon the nearest tram going anywhere.  But, as
+I have said, the foreigner is born good.  I left her giving her name and
+address to seven different people.
+
+But it was about the dog I wished to speak more particularly.  He had
+commenced innocently enough, trying to catch a sparrow.  Nothing delights
+a sparrow more than being chased by a dog.  A dozen times he thought he
+had the sparrow.  Then another dog had got in his way.  I don’t know what
+they call this breed of dog, but abroad it is popular: it has no tail and
+looks like a pig—when things are going well with it.  This particular
+specimen, when I saw him, looked more like part of a doormat.  The
+fox-terrier had seized it by the scruff of the neck and had rolled it
+over into the gutter just in front of a motor cycle.  Its owner, a large
+lady, had darted out to save it, and had collided with the motor cyclist.
+The large lady had been thrown some half a dozen yards against an Italian
+boy carrying a tray load of plaster images.
+
+I have seen a good deal of trouble in my life, but never one yet that did
+not have an Italian image-vendor somehow or other mixed up in it.  Where
+these boys hide in times of peace is a mystery.  The chance of being
+upset brings them out as sunshine brings out flies.  The motor cycle had
+dashed into a little milk-cart and had spread it out neatly in the middle
+of the tram lines.  The tram traffic looked like being stopped for a
+quarter of an hour; but the idea of every approaching tram driver
+appeared to be that if he rang his bell with sufficient vigor this
+seeming obstruction would fade away and disappear.
+
+In an English town all this would not have attracted much attention.
+Somebody would have explained that a dog was the original cause, and the
+whole series of events would have appeared ordinary and natural.  Upon
+these foreigners the fear descended that the Almighty, for some reason,
+was angry with them.  A policeman ran to catch the dog.
+
+The delighted dog rushed backwards, barking furiously, and tried to throw
+up paving stones with its hind legs.  That frightened a nursemaid who was
+wheeling a perambulator, and then it was that I entered into the
+proceedings.  Seated on the edge of the pavement, with a perambulator on
+one side of me and a howling baby on the other, I told that dog what I
+thought of him.
+
+Forgetful that I was in a foreign land—that he might not understand me—I
+told it him in English, I told it him at length, I told it very loud and
+clear.  He stood a yard in front of me, listening to me with an
+expression of ecstatic joy I have never before or since seen equalled on
+any face, human or canine.  He drank it in as though it had been music
+from Paradise.
+
+“Where have I heard that song before?” he seemed to be saying to himself,
+“the old familiar language they used to talk to me when I was young?”
+
+He approached nearer to me; there were almost tears in his eyes when I
+had finished.
+
+“Say it again!” he seemed to be asking of me.  “Oh! say it all over
+again, the dear old English oaths and curses that in this God-forsaken
+land I never hoped to hear again.”
+
+I learnt from the young lady that he was an English-born fox-terrier.
+That explained everything.  The foreign dog does not do this sort of
+thing.  The foreigner is born good: that is why we hate him.
+
+
+
+
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