THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 "STARLIGHT THROUGH THE THATCH." 
 
 A NOVEL. 
 
 "The author is an artist. He has made his characters live 
 and speak. He has all the style and polish of an excellent 
 writer.... Quick humour and keen sympathy." 
 
 Saturday Review. 
 
 a 
 
 Shows a command of humour and pathos.... A power 
 of original observation and presentment." 
 
 The Athenaum. 
 
 "'All that is best of dark and bright'.,.. The story is 
 extremely fascinating." 
 
 The Worla. 
 
 "Harum-scarum Irish adventure, pathos, and kindliness." 
 
 Spectator. 
 
 "The pictures have been evidently and faithfully drawn 
 direct from life. An interesting story and a yet more in- 
 teresting study of ideals and ideas. 1 " 
 
 Truth. 
 
 "The author understands the Irish temperament, appreciates 
 its humour and pathos, and, what is better, knows how to 
 convey that temperament to his readers." 
 
 Star. 
 
 "A large amount of dramatic incident. ... a racy, humorous 
 vein that is thoroughly refreshing." 
 
 Catliolic Times 
 
LITERARY LONDON 
 ITS LIGHTS & COMEDIES 
 
 BY 
 
 W. P. RYAN 
 
Printed J>y BIXGER DUOS 
 
 110, St. Slirtto-s Lane, London W. C. 
 
 at their Workt in Anuterdur*. 
 
LITERARY LONDON 
 
 ITS LIGHTS & COMEDIES 
 
 BY 
 
 W. P. RYAN 
 
 LEONARD SMITHERS 
 
 ROYAL ARCADE LONDON W 
 
 1898 
 
035 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 The Great Young Man and the New Style of Literary 
 
 History 9 
 
 Yellow Memories Max 27 
 
 The Devil and a Modern Knight Errant 33 
 
 A Lunar Elopement: the Key to Allen Gaunt's De- 
 fection 40 
 
 British Barbara 42 
 
 The Flight from the Caineyard 49 
 
 Caine I Ever and Always Caine 58 
 
 The New Doom of Narcissus (sometimes styled 
 
 Richard) . ., 65 
 
 A Daily Termagant Sensation 74 
 
 Authors I cannot take seriously 80 
 
 The Great Macleod Mystery 101 
 
 Gale's own Mixture: a Find for the Autolycus of 
 
 Nineteenth Century Criticism 105 
 
 The Passing of the Poets 109 
 
 A Word with the Evening Papers 129 
 
 Mainly for Mr. Birrell 141 
 
 A Coming Crisis : Why the Earth stood still 151 
 
 Sparrow- Worship in Literature : a Coming Boom 157 
 
 The Lover of Miss Lucifer Lexicon ., 161 
 
THE GREAT YOUNG MAN 
 
 AND THE NEW STYLE OF 
 
 LITERARY HISTORY 
 
 The great young man is very much with us in "lite- 
 rature" just now. I have tried to keep pace with the 
 sundry manifestations of his intellect, with the things 
 in his person and property which set the admiring crowd 
 of paragraphists about him to prompt and persistent 
 pencilling. In my moments of daring energy I have 
 had thoughts of preparing what I might call "A Small 
 Fry 'Cyclopaedia," the full and faithful record of the 
 works, appetites, pastimes, idiosyncrasies, and attitudes 
 of our great young men. These things sprawl across 
 the small-talk journals and are laid as with a trowel 
 on the papers whose forte is interviewing. It seems to 
 me that such momentous matters should be reduced 
 to some system, and the wildering wealth of delectable 
 data about our great young men set in handy order for 
 reference by an interested posterity. 
 
 We find, for example, that one eminent young man 
 has a keen taste for duck-eggs, that another plays light 
 fantastic tricks with his tooth pick the while he enlight- 
 ens the interviewer on the progress of the species since 
 
he published his "Passion of a Potboiler," in 1 896. The 
 inspiration of a third is never really quickened till he 
 has had his morning's dish of mushrooms, and a fourth 
 cannot possibly preserve his standard of realism if per- 
 adventure there is an undarned spot in his seagreen 
 stockings. Now, all this will be as intricate as the Cat- 
 acombs or the labyrinths of Egypt to posterity, if 
 doled out in the haphazard and promiscuous manner 
 we have seen every day. We, who have the privilege of 
 living in an age when our great young men are so graci- 
 ously communicative, should make some effort to tabu- 
 late and systematise their revealings. My projected 
 "Small Fry 'Cyclopaedia" would be an effort in this 
 direction. 
 
 I must admit, of course that many of the personalities 
 I have in my mind's eye could not be adequately de- 
 scribed as Small Fry. We should hunt out, for the pur- 
 pose of covering them, some medium term. I would 
 not insult them by saying that they are small fry even 
 compared with Shakespeare or Mr. Bernard Shaw. * 
 But the reader will understand the principle I am in- 
 sisting upon ; the principle that it is a holy and whole- 
 
 * The man who became a dramatist to amuse himself 
 on his own showing, and a demagogue to amuse other 
 people. A great-hearted Celtic sentimentalist who tries to 
 check the overwhelming flow of his sentiment by applications 
 of vegetarianism and cynicism, which superficial observers 
 mistake for his real faith and self. While chastening himself 
 he confuses the issue and the understanding of his contem- 
 poraries by a too tantalising desire to chasten other people. 
 He is best known in the roles of Puck turned Fabian, or 
 Puck turned dramatic critic. 
 
 10 
 
some thought to snap up and enshrine jealously in some 
 permanent form for posterity, the intimate, matutinal, 
 decorative and kindred details of which the younger 
 litterateurs are so generous in our time. Never was 
 there an age when Literature was so communicative ; 
 whether at the supper-table, in the smoking-room, the 
 surgery, the bathroom or the back yard. Too soon if 
 we treasure not these engaging revelations it may grow 
 Shy : for tender is the green plant of its confidence. 
 
 For a few years to come I and the labourers like me 
 need not concern ourselves with anything beyond col- 
 lecting and recording ; systematizing will come later. 
 The plan is simplicity itself. We have only to set the 
 younger school in alphabetical order in our colossal 
 commonplace books, and jot down their little essays 
 about themselves or the character-sketches by their 
 friends from day to day. Let me take a few supreme 
 examples at random : 
 
 Morrison (Arthur}. A young man of the great Hen- 
 ley School who interviewed a local parson and swept 
 out a reeking little slum for material on which he la- 
 boured many days, and evolved a grim though present- 
 able book called "A Child of the Jago." It showed con- 
 siderable restraint and a very tolerable measure of "art, 
 and though adding no vital or finished character to con- 
 temporary literature, and giving an erroneous impres- 
 sion of the East End as a whole, was yet a fairly credit- 
 able performance. It met many bitter enemies who in- 
 sisted on regarding it as a contemporary classic, and 
 
 II 
 
shouting down and pelting with stones any other 
 would-be pioneer who approached within measurable 
 distance of any slum to the North or South of the 
 Thames. While they stood guard there, Mr. Morrison 
 retired to Loughton where he "stays quietly," delight- 
 ing in "pottering about," according to his historian, Mr. 
 Clarence Rook, * and collecting Japanese prints. Mr. 
 Rook writes with becoming solemnity about Mr Morri- 
 son's "method of work." "He does not sit at a desk, 
 dipping a meditative pen in ink." Oh, no! "He curls 
 himself into the most comfortable chair he can find, 
 and writes with a pencil slowly, steadily, certainly." How 
 the mind is fascinated by that picture of awful reso- 
 lution, perseverance, fate ! It has almost the inevitable- 
 ness of Greek tragedy ! "On the first page of the man- 
 uscript there are a few erasures and corrections." God 
 wot! 
 
 There is a further story that the wood of the pencil 
 must be of Kentish manufacture, the pointing must 
 have been done by a gold-hafted knife held in the un- 
 trembling hand of a golden-haired maiden fed on rose- 
 leaves and love-songs for a twelve-month and a day ; 
 and the end must be as fine as one of Mr. Le Gallienne's 
 fancies. This, however, is regarded by some biogra- 
 phers as not absolutely authoritative. 
 
 Pemberton (Max). I had scanned some pleasant and 
 eminently readable stories by Mr. Pemberton, but it 
 
 * In the Chicago Chap Book. 
 
 12 
 
was Mr. Coulson Kernahan who first brought me the 
 full vision of his martial and prancing genius. To be 
 sure, it was in the American Bookman (May '97) and 
 Mr Kernahan was writing in the language understand- 
 ed of the American Eagle, laughing in his sleeve no 
 doubt at the open-mouthed wonder with which that 
 easily duped bird took in the whole. Brain-dazzling at 
 any rate was the tale of the right awful extent of Mr. 
 Pemberton's performances. Mr. Pemberton has been 
 "magnificently mendacious" and "mendaciously magni- 
 ficent." Reading him was "like riding in a hansom cab 
 behind a run-away horse." His stories "left his public 
 agape with imbecile amazement." (How aptly this de- 
 scribed the great American public suffering from the 
 Trilby craze!) He rode "abreast with Jules Verne on 
 the high road of fame." Tiien he "suddenly turned 
 bridle" clear the way, ye rabble, and God preserve us 
 all ! but, lo ! the development was not so desperate as 
 we feared ; we merely heard the clatter of his good steed 
 in the company of Dr. Conan Doyle. No one was hurt. 
 We hear later (anent a book of a different character) 
 of "the absinthe of pure Pemberton undiluted by facts," 
 but a subsequent cup ("Christine of the Hills") we are 
 now putting to our lips "has been filled from the well of 
 truth." (So that, after many days to reset the old pro- 
 verb, you can bring the runaway cab-horse to the well, 
 and he can make you drink !) Again we learn that the 
 great charm of the thing is its freshness. Surely, sure- 
 ly! Does Mr Kernahan suppose that water from the 
 well of truth, per the Great Pemberton Water Com- 
 
 13 
 
pany, could be other than fresh? Why, in that event, 
 imagine the deputations to the Mr. Chaplin of Liter- 
 ature ! * Finally Mr. Kernahan grows sternly critical, 
 and takes Mr. Pemberton to task on more than one 
 point, but altogether though the metaphors are ap- 
 plied to different books the cynic might sing the sit- 
 uation thus : 
 
 "What's all the bloomin' row about?" said Coulson on 
 
 parade. 
 "It's Pemberton broke out again," the colour- sergeant 
 
 said. 
 
 "The 'cab-horse' to the 'well of truth' is bolting, I'm 
 
 afraid, 
 
 "And Jules Verne's green with envy all the morning. 
 
 "And Weyman feels a wee man now, and Hope's forlorn 
 
 and low, 
 "But Sherlock Doyle from Hindhead hies to see the 
 
 gallant show. 
 "The heart wild beats in Levett- Yeats and Haggard's 
 
 soul's aglow, 
 "For the 'cab-horse' seems to kick the stars of morning. 
 
 "How fares the fiery charger now?" said Coulson on 
 
 parade, 
 "Like twenty tartars to a plough!" the colour-sergeant 
 
 said, 
 "But gods! he stops! he droops! he drops! -he slumbers 
 
 in the shade! 
 "Someone's read him Miss Corelli in the morning!" 
 
 Wells (H. 6?.). A young novelist and genius of Wor- 
 cester Park, Surrey. He has brought the microbe, the 
 
 * Sometimes Sir Walter Besant, sometimes the literary 
 editor of the Daily Chronicle. 
 
 14 
 
Martian, and sundry parboiled scientific things into ro- 
 mance. His pleasant, frankly youthful cock-sureness 
 on various occasions indicates that he is of Henleyite 
 training. Rude critics who refuse to take their opinions 
 from Henleyite reviewers insist that he is merely a man 
 of one book. He has hammocks in his garden for inter- 
 viewers. He likes croquet. He has a "diffident way 
 which is infinitely alarming" * ; he calls his books poor, 
 describes the first things which come into one's mind as 
 "Slush," and with a deprecating wave of the hand in- 
 sinuates that altogether he has penned no more than a 
 paltry three hundred thousand words, less, he adds, 
 than one of Dickens' novels. Who could find it in his 
 heart to murmur that, mayhap, in other essentials, too, 
 Dickens' novel has the upper hand? Mr. Wells has 
 a keen taste in churchwardens, and smokes only Mar- 
 tian-cum-Moonshine tobacco (The Bashful Brand) 
 Mr. Wells thinks there is no doubt that the public feels 
 more interested in a man's work if he goes about in, 
 say, a pair of bright scarlet breeches. Mr. Wells has 
 not got quite so far as the scarlet breeches. But he 
 sometimes adopts a Panama Straw Hat When he dons 
 that Panama Straw Hat (six seven-eighths, or there- 
 abouts) there is something so supremely bland about 
 him that the mere sight of him would soothe and reas- 
 sure the stricken soul of Mr. L. F. Austin on the his- 
 toric occasion when he thought Mr. Wells' Martian in- 
 
 Vide To-Day. 
 
 15 
 
vaders were playing the devil's tattoo on his handle- 
 bars as he cycled in the dusk through Weybridge. (Any 
 reader who has forgotten the story may expect to come 
 up with it again in a new edition of "At Random"). 
 
 In still more social moments he bends to "Certain 
 Personal Matters," and a homely beauty wraps him as 
 he discourses on the domestic coal-scuttle, wife-finding, 
 and the proper dietary of authors. At such a time one 
 feels that we require the counterpart of Mr. Yeats' "Shy 
 One" : 
 
 She carries in the dishes 
 And she lays them in a row 
 
 To an Isle in the Water 
 With her I would go! 
 
 We seem to hear the Spirit of Femininity singing : 
 
 He carries in the scuttle 
 
 And he makes the cinders glow 
 
 While Passion's roaring bellows 
 Within my heart doth blow 
 
 To red Mars, or any stars, 
 With him I would go ! 
 
 It were too bad if Mr. Kernahan, able and good-na- 
 tured, the interpreter of Mr. Pemberton, and the author 
 of "A Dead Man's Diary," "God and the Ant," "Sorrow 
 and Song," and other works, should not also have found 
 his historian. Mr. "Archibald Cromwell" is the man. 
 One gathers from Mr. "Cromwell" * that Mr. Kerna- 
 
 * In the Windsor Magazine. 
 
 16 
 
ban is happy as the day is long. He is an optimist and 
 an enthusiast. He has a home by the sea, he thinks 
 birds are praiseworthy poets, and politics a bore He 
 retains a boyish impulsiveness though he suggests the 
 military man. "His sympathy with the poor and unfortu- 
 nate is only restricted when organ-grinders are con- 
 cerned. He walks fast, talks fast, and writes fast, but 
 lives slowly, preferring the serenity of home to ' the hur- 
 rying delight ' of publicity." He is happy perhaps 
 in his historian. 
 
 The Kailyarders. Kailyard lore is a very Klondike 
 in itself. You will learn one day how Mr. Crockett uses 
 two specially-constructed 100 type-writers (simultane- 
 ously?) and talks to a roomful of people the while he 
 writes out his stories. This of course explains at once 
 to many minds certain hitherto inexplicable features 
 of his fiction. Another day as you hear with blank dis- 
 may that a body of youthful Scottish writers is meet- 
 ing in solemn convention in Glasgow, and you shudder 
 at the terrible thought of another relay of Kailyarders, 
 you find the author of "The Raiders" thus addressing 
 the braw laddies: 
 
 "Ere long you will be calling 'Fore' to the poor 
 "slow-coaches of professional writers ahead of you, cum- 
 "berers of the green, larry-lag-behinds in the race of 
 "letters. Well, when that comes to pass, we will touch 
 "our caps with what grace we may and let you pass. 
 "Go on and prosper. I have found no better motto for 
 
 17 
 
"the encouragement of a writer's own heart in his task, 
 "than the old Aberdonian College one : 
 
 "They say! 
 
 " What say they ? 
 
 "Let them say, 
 
 "Faithfully yours, 
 S. R. Crockett" 
 
 On sober reflection you hope they will hurry up. The 
 change must needs be for the better. You hear the 
 next week or so from Mr. Crockett's own lips that every 
 morning, summer and winter, he has had his cold tub 
 and is ready to begin work by half past four. * At the 
 dawn "everything seems possible" to him, even the writ- 
 ing of Southern English, and at sunrise he "shares in 
 the sense of being newly born." The new-born one can 
 "think better when the birds are getting up than later." 
 "The birds and I are great friends." The simplicity of 
 both parties to the contract is surely on a par. Brought 
 up strictly, Mr. Crockett, dear little soul, was "a lonely 
 child," but he found "vast amusement in telling my- 
 self stories." Posterity, the cynics think, may elect that 
 in the matter of an audience his last state shall be worse 
 than his first "Four miles across the moors I had to 
 walk to school, escorted by a well-beloved dog" surely 
 a symbol, a foreshadowing of the British Weekly! 
 "and as I journeyed, the stories wove themselves in my 
 
 * Vide Black and White, wherein this and the ensuing 
 confidences of Mr. Crockett appeared. 
 
 18 
 
brain. Then I told them to my school-fellows, and if 
 they refused to laugh at my humour I often fell upon 
 them and smote them." Poor little sufferers, they were 
 no better than the grown generation that succeeded ; 
 but you see that thus early the Kailyard method of ex- 
 tending popularity was in the budding, if not the blow- 
 ing. Hear Mr. Crockett further: 
 
 "Apropos of telling stories, I remember once taking 
 "a boy out in a boat with me on the loch, one fearfully 
 "black night, and relating to him a ghastly tale which 
 "I had concocted for the purpose. I worked up a fabric 
 "of horrors, upon which he hung with bated breath, 
 "and eyes starting in the darkness. At the climax I 
 "gave vent to a blood-curdling yell, which completely 
 "upset my audience, and nearly upset the boat, for he 
 "leaped up, and would have fallen into the water had I 
 "not caught him, conscience-stricken in the moment of 
 "my success." 
 
 Barring the sensitive conscience, the Crockett meth- 
 od does not seem to have undergone much change since 
 those dear old days. 
 
 Ian Maclaren and J. M. Barrie are no match for the 
 great Raider in the art of reading his history in the na- 
 tion's eyes. They are shy enough to hide behind their 
 books, but the "worth a guinea a box" air hangs about 
 Mr. Crockett like a garment when he walks abroad or 
 unburdens himself at home to the interviewer. Major 
 Pond, Transatlantic lecture agent, whose first subject 
 was Eliza, revolted wife of Brigham Young, and whose 
 eye is unerring for any species of poseur, so appreci- 
 
 2* 
 
ated Mr. Crockett's pre-eminence in the Kailyard, and 
 the picturesque appeal he makes to the literary gallery 
 generally, that having failed to come to terms with Mr. 
 Hall Caine, he went northwards to St. Andrews, where 
 the great Kailyarder was on golfing bent, and pursued 
 him with his kodak for a full mile of the course. His 
 snapshots must certainly "lick creation" and beat 
 Barnum beyond the Atlantic ; which could never be the 
 case were the subjects from plain Barrie or mild Macla- 
 ren. 
 
 Hocking (Silas), Perhaps the worst thing posterity 
 can say about Mr. Barrie is that he made copy of his 
 mother. For one fearful season we lay in dread that 
 his example was to be copied far and wide a veritable 
 boom in mothers. Mr. Silas K. Hocking, who would 
 figure considerably in my 'Cyclopaedia, was early in 
 the field. Who did not shudder at his ominous decla- 
 ration in the Temple Magazine, after he had enlarged 
 on the greatness of Mr. Barrie's deed, and the preva- 
 lence of Margaret Ogilvys in England? 
 
 "I knew one such mother, knew her intimately. Her 
 "face was the first I saw in the morning, the last I saw 
 "at night. Her hands were strong when mine were 
 "weak, and clear her eyes of faith when mine had not 
 "begun to see. Among the nobler mothers of the world 
 "she deserves a foremost place." 
 
 We had heard about the men who would peep and 
 botanise upon their mothers' graves. We were not 
 quite sure that their attitude was not preferable to this 
 new extreme of maudlin mammiolatry. However, the 
 
 20 
 
day of literary mammiolatry was not to be just yet Mr. 
 Hocking merely went home to Hampstead and carried 
 on his mild-mannered rivalry with the genius of the 
 Rev. E. P. Roe of America in a novel, "In Spite of 
 Fate," which moved a provincial critic to the raptur- 
 ous profession of faith: "Should Mr. Hocking write 
 no more, his niche in English literature is now filled.'' 
 Please, Mr. Hocking, take the critic at his word ! 
 
 Upward (Allen"). Of Mr. Allen Upward I should have 
 myriad things to write in my projected volume. Mr. 
 Upward likes to see life from divergent points. He is 
 a man who can do several things well. In the morning 
 it is almost a toss-up with him whether he shall take to 
 his yacht, fight the Turks, turn out a thousand lines in 
 rhyme, pursue the law, drop into politics, take up his- 
 itory, lift the veil from the secrets of European courts. 
 Yachting, oratory, the law, politics, after-dinner speak- 
 ing, history, playwriting, are his crack subjects. Now 
 that I think of it, the weaving of fiction must be added 
 to the list. The average man might give this the first 
 or only place, but the average man little knows Mr. Up- 
 ward. Over his pleasant city chambers he might put 
 the truthful and appropriate announcement : "Dramas, 
 novels, epics, speeches, ghost-stories, and jokes done or 
 repaired while you wait. All orders executed with the 
 utmost neatness and despatch. Mens Conscia recti." He 
 is the promptest, most level-headed, most business-spir- 
 ited, least inspired man (he laughs at the idea of inspi- 
 ration) in the whole literary profession. 
 
 21 
 
The Henleyites. The proceedings of Mr. Henley 
 and his "school" would be well within my province, 
 and would affort me some piquant and pleasant di- 
 versions. The longer we live the more curious speci- 
 mens do we chance upon of young men who would fain 
 look immeasurably older than their years, who talk as 
 we might talk of the Elizabethans, of the National Ob- 
 server and the magnificent times when a certain bril- 
 liant and burly iconoclast was Cock of the Old Walk. 
 They are sometimes puzzling contradictions. If the 
 Master has taught them any abiding lesson it is surely 
 to break the peace in the literary world on all occa- 
 sions ; yet, they cannot shake away their dallying 
 youth, and they are not always alert to the fact that the 
 England of our time is a supremely different England 
 from what it was up to ten o'clock the morning the 
 "Song of the Sword" was published. They cannot shake 
 off their ingenuous youth and its giddy suggestions, 
 and some few of them cannot overcome an innate taste 
 for the airy-fairy and the daintily bloodless. Hence, in 
 social life, the Panama Straw Hat of Mr. Wells, the 
 Curl-Me-In-My- Chair indulgences of Mr. Morrison, 
 and in the literary world the "Make-Believe" rosewater 
 of Mr. H. D. Lowry. These feather-bed lapses so soon 
 after the Revolution are painfully abnormal, if not pos- 
 itively depressing. There are times when one asks 
 one's self, if, apart from that "Hades of an Epic" smack 
 for Sir Lewis Morris, the National Observer may not 
 have gone to press in vain. Yet when all is said and 
 done, the Henley period has left us Mr. Charles 
 
 22 
 
Whibley ("The Yellow Dwarf"*) and the Essay on 
 Burns. 
 
 Frederic (Harold). Mr. Harold Frederic, late of 
 Utica, N. Y., now of the National Liberal Club and the 
 Daily Chronicle, novelist, reporter, mirror to America 
 of Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceana, biographer of the 
 German Emperor, and expected author of the Com- 
 plete Index to the Angelic Attributes of Mr. T. M. 
 Healy, would also take a large section of my volume. 
 And these are only a few meagre specimens of the 
 things which would fill my 'Cyclopaedia. New parts 
 would be issued weekly or monthly, with ever-new de- 
 tails supplied by the industrious purveyors of Sybil 
 and oracular intelligence, Mr. Clarence Rook, Mr. A. H. 
 Lawrence, and the unconquerable Mrs. Sarah Tooley. 
 And every month nay, every day, new worlds of 
 thought and things would be arising on which our 
 lions could declare themselves, open their hearts, and 
 unbosom their souls. We would learn to-day how much 
 Mr. Hall Caine weighed the day he began. "The Christ- 
 ian," and how much he weighed when, with tear- 
 dimmed eye, he wrote "The End," and thanked Hea- 
 ven ; to-morrow he would be free to tell us whether the 
 daily food of the "Colossal novelist" should contain an 
 undue proportion of starchy or fatty materials. Mr. 
 Shorter might be induced to reveal whether beans or 
 
 * Mr. Whibley's association with tho Yellow Book links 
 directly of course those supreme outcomes of our dying cen- 
 tury, the Henley and Beardsley periods. 
 
 23 
 
peas are the more conducive to perseverance on the 
 lines of Bronte research ; Mr. Crockett might describe 
 the sensation of golfing under the Transatlantic snap- 
 shot ; Mr. Fred. Whishaw, who, his admirers say, has re- 
 leased us from the painful necessity of depending on a 
 mere Tolstoi or Turgenieff for our impressions of Rus- 
 sia, and who shook his head gravely and told one of Mr. 
 Jerome's young men that trouble between England 
 and the land of the Czar is simply not to be thought of 
 Mr. Whishaw might unbosom himself on the ideal die- 
 tary of a Foreign Minister who wanted to keep in a pa- 
 tient mood with the land of the Steppes. Mr. W. W. 
 Jacobs, the smart young Civil Servant who gives us 
 pleasant bits of fairly interesting barge life in the leisure 
 snatched from St Martins-le- Grand, and unendurably 
 trite things about humour in general and his childhood 
 in particular through the medium of interviews, would 
 probably oblige us with an occasional bulletin regard- 
 ing those seven tomatoes and that large cucumber 
 which one of our standard interviewers has assured us 
 form the distinction and delight of the young author's 
 garden. 
 
 Truly the possibilities of this ever-growing 'Cyclopas- 
 dia are entrancing and marvellous. 
 
 One or two disappointments for the curious inquirer 
 it were bound to possess. It would know nothing, or 
 next to nothing, of the Dreamer of the Ghetto. Mr. 
 Zangwill stands alone. The spirit of Literature may go 
 to Kilburn, the paragraphist does not. Aloof from the 
 potent cliques and the great coteries, unloved of Fleet 
 
 24 
 
Street, distrusted of Worcester Park, Mr. Zangwill is 
 fain to content himself with the comedies and tragedies 
 of the Ghetto, with looking humanity full in the face, 
 and in the heart, and obstinately going whither his 
 artistic sense may lead him. He is Without Prejudice. 
 But he is a literary wag withal. Haply paragraphic 
 neglect has made him reckless. We all remember the 
 big book he gave us with the title I have just quoted ; 
 a book in which he was not altogether deferential to 
 our great young men. Yet was it a sort of whimsical 
 reflection of himself. Though it left the reader at times 
 with a stunned lost sense, as if he had found himself 
 after many days in an opulent, interminable pantech- 
 nicon, yet under the cumbrous burden and the odds 
 and ends piled sky-high, a strenuous, broad shouldered, 
 whimsical, seeing nature ambled along and cared for 
 nobody. Yet was he a poet and a romancist ; pausing 
 awhile as he had a vision of "Eternal Beauty wandering 
 on her way" ; pensive as he detected the thoughts too 
 deep for tears. One felt that by-and-by, when, after 
 these careless, go-as-you-please excursions, he wended 
 him homeward to his study, and the deliberate artistic 
 mood came upon him, he would have the wherewithal 
 to pen lasting things. 
 
 Perhaps he may get along after all without the para- 
 graphists. He has never a hammock in his garden at 
 Kilburn should the interviewers grow kindly ; but fail- 
 ing this the fateful question arises : Be there any via 
 media to popularity and posterity ? 
 
 I am sorry also to see Mr. Arthur Symons in such 
 
 25 
 
slight favour with the new order of literary historians. 
 In his case, perhaps, his poetry has done something to 
 frighten them. I remember a note in Mr. Mallock's 
 (late) British Review to the effect that Mr. Symons re- 
 minded the writer of a drunken man whose lips voiced 
 beautiful music. Mr. Symons does not dress up or live 
 up to the ideal either of Mr. Mallock's critic or the Man 
 in the Street. As you meet the young poet, critic, ex- 
 editor of the Savoy, in his peaceful haunt in the Temple, 
 you laugh at the absurdity of the Mallock simile. For 
 he is compact of gentleness, culture, and that gracious 
 thing, charm. It seems strangely incongruous that he 
 could think of decadance. Only, if by chance you raise 
 the question, he will give you a forcible and interest- 
 ing defence of one's right to give any mood or emotion 
 artistic expression. But that is another story. Critical, 
 cultured, poetical, courageous and sensitive to most 
 modern moods, remaining an interesting personality 
 who can do a number of things well, one wonders if he 
 may also realise the hope of the observers who believe 
 that he can do one or two things memorably. Ap- 
 parently the new style of literary historians will not 
 help him. Fountain Court is as alien to them as Kil- 
 burn. It is bad, it is distressing. Yet, remembering also 
 Box Hill and Putney Hill, with the ignored authors of 
 "Richard Feverel" and "Atalanta In Calydon" we take 
 heart of grace after all. 
 
YELLOW MEMORIES MAX 
 
 Old men recall with vivid memory the fierce new in- 
 tellectual sensation which came with the publication of 
 Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads" or "Songs Before 
 Sunrise." With something of a similar thrill do we of 
 these lonesome latter years re-live that aeon of vehe- 
 ment decadence when Mr. Lane and his literary Lilli- 
 putians marched across our stage. ^Eon of Aubrey 
 Beardsley and Sister Egerton and the Yellow Book! 
 One looks back to it all in the background of history 
 as to a weird winter when wild and shrieking shapes 
 came down from the desolate hills through the mists, 
 and mocked us through the windows, looking in on our 
 waning study fires, the while unaccountable gray dogs 
 were howling in the distance! O myths, and mists, 
 and marvels of the Beardsley period ! 
 
 And it came to pass that after many days of Yellow 
 melancholy, the organ of the initiated, the never enough- 
 to-be-immortalised Yellow Book sowed its wild oats 
 as it were and took a villa in Streatham. Or we might 
 change the metaphor and say that it was no longer a 
 
 27 
 
lurid comet of literature ; it walked on the plain earth 
 sedately and soberly ; moving no more to the music of 
 "key-note" or she-note, looking neither to the right 
 where Miss Modernity flaunted her flag nor to the left 
 where Mr. Aubrey Beardsley groped through gaunt 
 plantasies suggestive sometimes of an artistic Don 
 Quixote waking up from a night-mare wherein he had 
 tilted at innumerable weird windmills. It had grown 
 serious and respectable, and it had taken to Litera- 
 ture! Lovers of the abnormal were sad. "There was 
 nothing like it," they said, "in the dear, fantastic, ut- 
 terly-utter stage that is now no more." They prophe- 
 sied poor times the deepest of "slumps" for it, believ- 
 ing that respectability could never prosper. And gra- 
 dually the music of "key-note" and she-note grew sub- 
 dued, its heart failed it, and the foe called it ordinary 
 as old boots. The Philistine dubbed it "a yellow halo 
 hovering round decay." 
 
 In November '97 we learned at long last that its 
 career as an illustrated quarterly was over, that if it ever 
 appeared again, the nature and system of the literary 
 contents would not be as of old. The announcement 
 marked the last dripping drop of a spent literary cur- 
 rent which had theatened once upon a time to become 
 a very deluge. Then indeed could the world say that 
 the Beardsley period was at rest for ever. Yet haply 
 not at rest Perchance it still groans uneasily and paws 
 the air of eternal night with long, lean, tortuous hands 
 
 28 
 
in the might-mare limbo to which time has consigned it 
 
 Alack ! Alack ! 
 
 * * 
 * 
 
 Max Beerbohm is the most interesting survival 
 the Survival of the Fittest from the Beardsley period. 
 Cynics indeed are wont to trace him with some sem- 
 blance of reason to a yet earlier one ! Max was born 
 on August 24th, 1872. Curiously enough, it is not on 
 record that there were any special portents in the hea- 
 vens that year. The solar system gave no extra thrill. 
 Comets were not about, and seers have left no stories 
 of alarming and inexplicable visions. But after all, 
 destiny and the gods are calm ; it is man, mere man, 
 who makes a pother o'er his triumphs. Nature could 
 afford to hold her peace about one of her masterpieces. 
 So there were no unusual signs and wonders in the land 
 that fateful August, 1872. Yes, there was one. There 
 was the baby Beardsley. Mr. John Lane, the biblio- 
 grapher of Max, (his minor role is publishing) has 
 searched the files of the Times in our own decade. 
 Lo! he found that on the day Master Max was born 
 there had appeared in its columns the following an- 
 nouncement : 
 
 "On Wednesday, the 2ist August, at Brighton, the 
 wife of V. P. Beardsley, Esq., of a son." 
 
 The antiquaries had stupidly ignored the fact that 
 the same week saw the entrance into our mundane 
 sphere of two such reformers as Aubrey Beardsley and 
 Max Beerbohm! From 1872 to 1894, when the latter 
 
 29 
 
found his pride of place in the Yellow Book, there is 
 little to be said about the world, except that it wit- 
 nessed the education of Master Max at Charterhouse, 
 where he is still remembered for his Latin verses, and 
 at Merton, where he matriculated in 1 890. He did not 
 devote all his time to educational tedium, for he began 
 the revolutionising of modern literature by contri- 
 butions to the Clown. 
 
 The publication of his "Works" differentiated the 
 year 1 896 from others since the glacial period or there- 
 abouts. Funny people said the book was hopelessly 
 "young," that the author was a pleasant fop, a cultured 
 dandy, with the semblance of a child's artlessness. 
 Others hinted that he had sold his soul to the polite 
 follies, that his intellectual pose was unutterably lan- 
 guid, that he looked at life with a simper, that he sniffed 
 very gracefully. Yet to say that the time was coarse 
 and his nose was dainty is almost to sum up the "i gth 
 century. And what delectable truths he taught us in 
 his grave old infantile way! How smartly he has cut 
 the faddish face of his Age with the little green twig 
 of his satire ! How blithe he has been on "Dandies and 
 Dandies," how neat on the expressiveness of dandiacal 
 costume ! How Mr. Hall Caine must have opened his 
 deep Manx eyes on learning that seeing him was read- 
 ing his soul, that his flowing, formless cloak is like one 
 of his own novels, twenty-five editions latent in the 
 folds of it, that melodrama crouches on the brim of his 
 sombrero, that his tie is a Publisher's Announcement, 
 his boots are copyright, that in his bands he holds the 
 
 30 
 
staff of the Family Herald. As for Mr. Clement Scott 
 poor inclemently treated Clement of a later phase of 
 his Saturday Review period well, he may simply be 
 remembered in history as Max's principal butt ! 
 
 Yet consider how much of our latter day literary life 
 is bound up with those twin towers of sentiment, Mr. 
 Caine and Mr. Clement Scott Nor Bovril nor the best 
 advertised brand of Cocoa has had more influence in 
 the shaping of modern England. Our infant seer's out- 
 look would have been practically catholic had he also 
 sighted Mr. George R. Sims. Man of the Bull Dogs, 
 Man of the Trotting Ponies ; of the Liver ; the Hair 
 Restorer ; the good old Adelphi Drama, the Lights of 
 Home, Mary Jane's Loves, and "Christmas Day in the 
 Workhouse." Homer of the Whitechapel Road and 
 Shakespeare of the Slums! You never entirely realize 
 the appalling pity which underlies the East End till 
 you come to grasp the fact that to its poorer hundreds 
 of thousands, the knowledge of the graces of literature, 
 of "sweetness and light," and the music of the spheres 
 comes faint and filtered through the ballads of Dago- 
 net! 
 
 Passing to the general age, the seeing eye of Max 
 was not impressed. He warned us that we were living 
 a decadent life, nothing but feebleness in us. "We have 
 our societies for the prevention of this and the pro- 
 motion of that, and the propagation of the other, 
 because there are no individuals left among us. Our 
 sexes are nearly assimilate... We are born into a 
 poor weak age. We are not strong enough to be 
 
 31 
 
wicked, and the Non-conformist Conscience makes 
 cowards of us all." 
 
 His worst enemies admit that the elaborate artificia- 
 lity of Master Beerbohm's intellectual get-up is interest- 
 ing, that even his foolish things he says well. In truth a 
 cynical seer and polished Punch, he is a pleasant insti- 
 tution even when the things and atmosphere of the 
 Beardsley period, which explain and in some degree 
 excuse him, have passed away. There is a classic touch 
 in his foppery. He can be a refined, sly-lisping Apa- 
 mantus. Quaint are his modicums of wit when he waits 
 for inspiration. I recant the opinion I expressed when 
 I was a younger and I fear less balanced critic. "His real 
 hope lies in being a man, absurd though the suggestion 
 seems. Some great influence may yet take him by the 
 ears, and shake a man out of the ridiculous make-up 
 and tout ensemble of his artificiality." No, I believe 
 now that his cap and bells are his raison fietre. Judg- 
 ing by some of his latter-day utterances, to be sure I 
 should say that the cap needs a little brushing, the 
 bells just a little tuning. But these are slight details. 
 Let Polite Folly still wrap him round, saying with all 
 the fervour of Titania to Bottom : 
 
 So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle 
 Gently entwist; the female ivy so 
 Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. 
 O, how I love thee, how I dote on thee! 
 
THE DEVIL AND A MODERN 
 KNIGHT ERRANT 
 
 Once on a time the most fiery entity in the literary 
 life of London was the poet-playwright-controversional- 
 ist, Lithobolia * Buchanan, who never lost an opportu- 
 nity of proclaiming that "Nowadays in Hell and Lon- 
 don, Truth methinks is sorely needed" He scattered 
 the Truth periodically in showers of large live coals 
 over the latter city, coals so very "live" indeed that one 
 might be pardoned for supposing they had just been do- 
 ing duty in the other region. He proclaimed from the 
 housetops how much he "loathed the foul materialistic 
 serpent that surrounds the world." In earlier years 
 most judicious critics will admit that he displayed a 
 fair spiritual equipment. The divinity that shapes our 
 ends had found full often his ardent poetical worship. 
 But his spirituality had passed through strange traits. 
 It fought and almost shattered itself against a host of 
 sturdy and distorting things. A fine mind seemed to 
 become warped, to flame with stark unreason, though 
 displaying at times a brave sense of human pity and 
 
 Lilhobolia, the stone-throwing spirit. 
 
 33 
 
brotherly zeal. He lashed those who failed to accept 
 his guidance, to worship as he worshipped ; to timid 
 Christians he became the embodiment of a new and 
 collossal intellectual Inquisition. 
 
 Then apparently he cooled and quietened The fiery 
 furnace of his controversial nature never attained white 
 heat He started a book-shop in Soho, and something 
 of the stolidity that doth hedge a shopkeeper brought 
 its distressing sense and heaviness on even him. Had 
 he been a Greek, he would probably like Empedocles 
 have leaped into a volcano ; being a Scotchman, on fail- 
 ing in the fight with his age, he opened a shop. He grew 
 local and damped with the wistfulness of Suburbia, if 
 still unafraid. And mark you, a smouldering volcano 
 in a drab municipality is a sad sight ; sad as an old 
 war-horse yoked to a milk-cart We associate it to the 
 end with ^Etna and Empire, with heighth and width 
 and glory ; it pains us to behold it parochial. It is as 
 if the Daily Chronicle were to sink into weary old age 
 as the Clerkenwell News again, with Mr. Massingham 
 pleading pathetically for the reform of local sewers, 
 and Mr. Norman confining his international energies 
 to audiences with local lamp-lighters, to say nothing 
 of canvassing for small advertisements in his spare time 
 or doing turns at the "case." 
 
 The settling down of our poet-playwright-controvers- 
 ialist was nevertheless a sore puzzle to certain minds of 
 our literary London. Perhaps to those minds the fol- 
 lowing plain, unvarnished chronicle may afford some 
 assistance in their difficulty. It concerns the year while 
 
 34 
 
our friend was still a man of terrible and persistent 
 dogmatism, still laying down the law in thunder to his 
 age, still cursing it and consigning it to many unpro- 
 fitable and unpleasant places. The words "Super- 
 stition," "Shibboleth," "Humbug," were still burning 
 on his lips. He railed at the Average Man and the 
 very hint of a Common or Received Opinion was gall 
 to him. 
 
 Lithobolia one unlucky day filled his head with the 
 thought that the Devil was a fine fellow. He forthwith 
 
 O 
 
 started a fierce propaganda whose aim was to give the 
 Devil his due. He was convinced that the Devil had 
 been maligned from the earliest ages, but that still 
 gallant gentleman that he was he persisted, in season 
 and out of season, slander, libel, and contumely notwith- 
 standing, in trying to help and comfort man in man's 
 own despite. The Devil, not the Dog, was the Friend of 
 Man. To be sure some mean critics said that his Devil 
 was a mere bogey man. He was glibly eloquent and 
 vaporous they added. As he talked, spectres fashioned 
 of London fog sat in judgment, as it were, on the ma- 
 jestic star-spheres. The village idiot playing emperor 
 was indeed a sight no more ridiculous than the new 
 Satan on himself. But Lithobolia was true to his Devil. 
 The misunderstanding began long ago in the Gar- 
 den of Eden, said ,Lithobolia. The Devil was really 
 a vegetarian, and vegetarianism and its joys and 
 beauties he sought to preach to Mother Eve. The epi- 
 sode of the forbidden fruit was merely his first practical 
 lesson to her in the ways of honest, go-ahead vegetarian- 
 
 35 
 
 3* 
 
ism. Had Eve and Adam been true to his teaching, 
 had they followed up his vegetarian advising, had the 
 world followed in their wake, the human race had grown 
 up sane, strong and conquering, instead of developing 
 into the mean, shrunken, shrivelled, neurotic and idiotic 
 exhibition which we found it "But I and the Devil will 
 cure it," he cried, as he clenched his fists. 
 
 For their own vile purposes the early anti-vegeta- 
 rians, he went, on to say, had deliberately and of malice 
 aforethought misrepresented the Devil's action in the 
 Garden of Eden. They obscured the question by the 
 introduction of a number of nonsensical and irrelevant 
 side issues. Furthermore, quoth he, they piled up fear- 
 some traditions about the Devil's excursions earthward, 
 and about the internal affairs of his far-off dominions. 
 They pictured a hell of fire and brimstone where legion 
 wretches writhed and gasped through all the ages. 
 Even John Milton, sane and sturdy in some things, was 
 no better than the common man in certain of his pic- 
 tures of the place of penal fire. 
 
 "Penal fires indeed!" said Lithobolia scornfully. 
 "Half of hell or what you call hell is a delightful place 
 where good vegetarians go when they die, where they 
 feed everlastingly on immortal cabbages, on sacred 
 cauliflowers, on transcending mushrooms, on indescrib- 
 able Scotch Kail. The other half of hell is simply the 
 scene where these entrancing things are cooked and I 
 admit, of course, that in such a quarter there is a good 
 deal of smoke and flame. The fires are made from all 
 sorts of ugly materials from damned and unrighteous 
 
 36 
 
publishers, from reviewers for the evening papers, from 
 dramatic critics of the Ibsen cult!" 
 
 "Yes," continued Lithobolia, as he harangued the 
 multitude, "such is hell ; a fair and joyous place. I 
 would go there. " 
 
 And presently there was a wild cry of "Pity you 
 don't!" 
 
 "I cannot yet retire to such comfortable quarters,'' 
 he rejoined, "I have to remain here and make the worth 
 and ways of the Devil clear. I have to bring back this 
 benighted age to a true love for the Devil and vegeta- 
 rianism." 
 
 He went forth with many pamphlets on the Devil's 
 behalf, printed and published at his own expense, and 
 advocating his pet theory in words of flaming passion 
 and noble wrath. "The Devil's Due Library," which he 
 promptly issued, divided the world into two irreconcil- 
 able camps. People spoke of the "New Reformation," 
 Lithobolia's "Moral Renaissance," "The Great Human 
 Devil-Cure," and such delectable things. The earth 
 for decades after was a place of intellectual tornadoes. 
 
 At last Lithobolia took the notion to drop down to 
 the Devil's own world and see how the agitation was 
 affecting parties there. 
 
 To his amazement, when he came to the door of the 
 nether world he found an ominous calm over everything. 
 Charred pillars, blackened ruins, smoke-coloured frag- 
 ments of dismal walls and halls met his gaze on every 
 hand. But no devil of any sort or shape was apparent 
 Lithobolia was befogged. 
 
 37 
 
Presently an impish-looking youth ambled up. He 
 chuckled when he saw the visitor. 
 
 "Hello !" said the imp, "come down at last ! Didn't 
 you hear that hell's been burned out?" 
 
 "Go along," said Lithobolia, but his tone had lost 
 its earthly ring and positiveness. 
 
 "Fact !" said the imp. "Of course when you began to 
 write in defence of the Devil, we sent the tip to our 
 London agent who bought up for us every spare copy 
 of the book that explains the tremendous sale, you 
 know. We thought we'd have pleasant afternoon read- 
 ings." 
 
 "And then?" 
 
 "The volumes were so fiery, so full of heat, that when 
 we got them in here, what with the other flames, what 
 with " 
 
 "Go on," said Lithobolia, impatiently. 
 
 "They took fire, they blazed, and blazed, and blazed, 
 till they burnt the bally place out, devils and all" 
 
 "And how did you escape?" 
 
 "Oh, I had been a printer's devil in the office where 
 some of your controversial works were set up. I could 
 stand anything. Besides I'd been a salamander in a 
 previous life." 
 
 Then a great darkness fell. When Lithobolia groped 
 out of it he found himself on earth. He rubbed his eyes. 
 "Was it a dream?" said he. 
 
 Never again was he his old fiery self. 
 
 Indeed when he wrote his religious novel, "The Rev. 
 Annabel Lee," he startled the world by ignoring his 
 
 38 
 
own brave, independent publishing business in Soho 
 and going back to the ordinary publishing sphere and 
 channels. Mr. Pearson found grace in his eyes ! Happy 
 was Lithobolia in the land of the Philistines ! Frater- 
 nise would he in soft-eyed fondness with those who 
 trim "The rush-lights of Clapham !" Thus comes it to 
 pass as the Prophet foretold, that the cow and the bear 
 now feed, and their young ones lie down together. 
 
 Of his subsequent career there is nothing to be said, 
 except that his "Ballad of Mary the Mother" increased 
 our pity for him. 
 
 39 
 
A LUNAR ELOPEMENT: 
 
 THE KEY TO ALLEN GAUNT'S- 
 
 DEFECTION 
 
 A joy has gone out of life let me hope only tem- 
 porarily. The Women Who etc. play fantastic tricks 
 before high literature no more. The wise grave man 
 who left the realms of science to make revolting petti- 
 coats articulate gives no sign in secluded Haslemere 
 that he is true to the mad, bad revolutionary faith of 
 the mid-nineties Good heavens ! how distant the pe- 
 riod seems ! When he speaks he only adds insult to in- 
 jury by offering us guide-books to the Continent! * 
 Guide-books to mere mundane places when the Eman- 
 cipated Skirt and the Palpitating Petticoat would fain 
 be shown the way to new wonderlands of Did and 
 Didn't! 
 
 Even Mr. Hardy has not kept the new faith. We 
 have been pained by the recent intelligence that, wearied 
 of a public which misunderstood his late phase, he was 
 going back disappointed and chastened in spirit to 
 
 * For the volume on "The Evolution of the Idea of God," 
 his labours began years ago. 
 
 4 
 
the fiction of his earlier manner. Tess and Jude are to 
 be buried so to speak Under the (New) Greenwood 
 Tree. By the way, in the summer of the year of grace 
 '97, he rested for a period by the lake of Geneva. One 
 wonders if "clear, placid Leman" had had anything to 
 do with his decision. We all know how it made passion- 
 tossed Byron wish to exchange "earth's troubled waters" 
 for a "purer spring." 
 
 In the pure, placid lakelet of Leman 
 Peers Thomas who told us of Tess; 
 
 What sees he down deep? Is't the demon 
 Of Damseldom's doom and distress? 
 
 Hush! he cries: "Silky sins of the sexes 
 
 Problem quaint Wessex thought queer 
 O View that grim Grundy's soul vexes 
 
 1 bury ye here. 
 
 "O pure, placid lakelet of Leman, 
 
 contrast to Jude and his Jills! 
 When I gaze to be goody as Weyman 
 
 Is the Hope that my hardened soul fills. 
 Though for Woman's New Wails I've wept 
 oceans 
 
 1 bid ye good-bye for ye vex: 
 Madding Crowd of the maudlin emotions, 
 
 O sweet, sinning Sex!" 
 
 Some there be who will tell us that they knew Mr. 
 Hardy to be merely a temporary convert. But they ex- 
 pected permanent faith and unceasing activity from 
 the Great Heart of Haslemere. What has dimmed his 
 light and depressed his enthusiasm? I do not profess 
 to know the whole secret, but let me unfold to you the 
 
 41 
 
inner significance of the tragedy of the last book he 
 penned for the Cause. Here it is in his own fashion : 
 
 BRITISH BARBARA 
 
 My name is Allen Gaunt, and all men ought to know 
 by this time that I have a mission to my age. What 
 I shall do or say next no man knows not even myself ; 
 but of this you may be sure, that even in fiction I shall 
 say nothing contrary to my own profound beliefs. You 
 may also rest assured that whatever I say will deal di- 
 rectly or indirectly with the marriage question (Alas ! 
 the assurance has not been justified), as I long since 
 patented my right, my exclusive right, to the making 
 of sensational discoveries anent that no longer delicate 
 topic. I have had sometimes to abstain from saying 
 many things I did think ; when I wished to purvey 
 strong meat for men, I was compelled to provide a very 
 inferior article for folk that were not men. But in the 
 Polar Star series, to be published at the Ungodly Head, 
 Fie-Go Street, I shall change all that. This is the first 
 story of the series, and deals with my own affairs. In 
 further books I shall be still more at home, for therein 
 I shall deal with the affairs of other people. This is my 
 preface. 
 
 Now let me tell you in my usual blunt way about my- 
 self and British Barbara. 
 
 Barbara was the only one who really saw the full 
 point and significance of my last great work, "The 
 
 42 
 
Woman Who Chid." It came under Barbara's notice 
 in a singular way. She was employed as an assistant 
 by an old woman who kept a sweet-stuff shop in Cam- 
 benvell, and for wrapping purposes her mistress had 
 bought several copies from a waste-paper dealer. Bar- 
 bara had been an assiduous reader of halfpenny novel- 
 ettes, and she was first attracted to the "The Woman 
 Who Chid" by its remarkable similarity in style to her 
 favourites. She read it and was charmed. Next day 
 she sought me out, came into my study unannounced, 
 just as I was cudgelling my brain for a sensational new 
 idea about womankind. She flung herself into my arms 
 and said, "Love, I come to you from the depths of Cam- 
 berwell. Often therein I have sighed for my soul's 
 mate, and lo ! I have found him in you. I am the em- 
 bodiment of The Woman Who Chid.' " 
 
 I liked the impulsiveness, the candour, the uncon- 
 ventionality of the dear girl. I thought that I had not 
 lived in vain, for, wonder of wonders, had not my teach- 
 ings borne fruit in Camberwell ? 
 
 I said dreamily and fondly, "I am yours, pretty bird." 
 This was our nuptial ceremony. 
 
 Then came the supreme question. Where was the 
 spot, the charmed corner of earth, whereon we could 
 lead our truest lives? A vast deal depended on our 
 decision ; all the elect would look to us for light and 
 leading. It behoved us to do something ultra-extra- 
 ordinary. I own I couldn't satisfactorily settle the mat- 
 ter, for novel-writing had begun to tell on my once in- 
 ventive brain. But Barbara was equal to the occasion. 
 
 43 
 
"Dear," she said, "the solution is very simple. For 
 us the highest altitude of earth is the only possible 
 station. I believe that Mount Everest, of the Hima- 
 laya Range, is the highest point in the known world. 
 There we must go. The spot, I understand, is sacred 
 to Theosophic associations. Our home will be on its 
 veriest pinnacle. There, darling, you will write your 
 great novels ; and while you wrestle with your superfine 
 problems the mountain goats will be my playmates." 
 
 "Done," I said delightedly. 
 
 I need not go into the details of our voyage to the 
 East and the first novel month we had on the apex of 
 Everest. I must hurry on to the crowning tragedy. 
 
 After a month my own Barbara grew cold to me. It 
 was not easy to be warm on the top of Everest under 
 the best of circumstances, but so far the heat of our 
 matrimonial discussions had kept things pretty hot. 
 Now, however, Barbara never heeded me whatever I 
 said. I grew alarmed : I could not write a word ; I be- 
 gan to fear I would soon be forgotten. 
 
 One night on coming out of my tent on Everest's 
 top, I heard a pair of most loving voices in converse. 
 My heart almost ceased to beat when I detected the 
 familiar notes of my Barbara. The other actor in the 
 little drama was now, you'd never guess. It was the 
 moon, the sly sober moon ! How the pair blushed when 
 they saw me ! The moon said a confused Good-night, 
 and hurried skyward. I caught Barbara by the shoul- 
 der and shook her. 
 
 "Hands off!" she cried. "Whatever are you a-doin' 
 
 44 
 
of? Don't you know that the moon is a respectable 
 woman. Besides, she's my nearest neighbour now, and 
 I must be civil to her." 
 
 I was staggered. Certainly the moon was always 
 regarded as a well-behaved female. I had wronged 
 my dear one, though I can't say I ever cared greatly 
 for respectable females, as my stories show plainly 
 enough. 
 
 Still, her trysts with the moon became far too many 
 for my taste or my peace. At last I determined to have 
 competent opinion on the subject. I went down into 
 Tibet and consulted the head Mahatma. I found him 
 a little moody, for business was dull with him. Even his 
 correspondence with Mrs. Besant was now a very ir- 
 regular affair; and the defection of Herbert Burrows 
 and others he described as "a fair knockout" 
 
 "Ya!" he said, when he heard my story. "The moon 
 a female indeed! That fiction has been of life-long 
 use to the same moon, for it has prevented the suspic- 
 ions of many a wronged husband, I can tell you. The 
 moon is a sly old dodger, and I'd advise you to keep 
 an eye on him." 
 
 I hurried home. It was late when I arrived. There 
 wasn't a sign of the moon in the sky. No wonder. When 
 I got to my tent there he was, repeating to Barbara a 
 lot of the amatory sonnet stuff that old poets had ad- 
 dressed to himself under the delusion that he was what 
 he wasn't. 
 
 Wild with rage, I took up the MS. of my latest novel, 
 and hurled it full in his face. But the nimble old dog 
 
 45 
 
dodged it. Then he shot one of his wicked beams at 
 me. Moonstruck, I fell helplessly under the table. 
 
 I crawled to my feet, as he scampered off with Bar- 
 bara. "I suppose," I cried, "you'll say you're off to the 
 twenty-sixth century." 
 
 "No," he laughed, "We're only going for a holiday 
 to St. Tibbs' Eve." And then he kissed Barbara and 
 shot another beam at me. 
 
 And, doubly moonstruck, you can imagine my mis- 
 ery in the world. 
 
 Once in the summer of a later year, the Great 
 Heart reappeared for a moment in what we may call 
 that delectable little country pleasure garden so 
 jealously and daintily preserved from the vulgar, and 
 let out to the would-be-considered true and trusty 
 worshippers of Omar Khayyam. There they retire once 
 a year and affect to bring the spirit and atmosphere 
 of the serene, pleasure-loving Persian philosopher to 
 one patch at least of England's conventional soil. It 
 was there our author paid tribute to the Master with 
 an assumed abandon meant to convey the assurance that 
 he was as delightfully "revolted" as ever. He sang : 
 
 "No saint and no sot was our Omar, I wis, 
 
 But a singer, serene, philosophic; 
 For Philosophy mellows her mouth to a kiss 
 
 With each step that she takes toward the tropic. 
 Pale gold is the grain in the vats of the north; 
 
 Lush purple thy grape, Algeciras; 
 And the creed that is cold by the mists of the Forth 
 
 Glows pink in the gardens of Shiraz." 
 
 46 
 
But like all English Omar Khayyamism, it was easy 
 make-believe. L. F. Austin, Henry Norman, and the 
 rest of them must have felt that it was as hollow in 
 reality as their own. Fancy those eminently respect- 
 able gentlemen translating the Master's ethics into their 
 lives ! Why, they would tremble from their top hats to 
 their patent leather boots at the sight of the singing girl. 
 Even Mr. Norman's imperialism is not wide enough 
 to take in all the Persian spirit. Omar worship is de- 
 lightful, naive, a sweet butterfly-chase in an idle hour 
 and a summer field ; but as deep as a lady's taste for 
 some shade of chiffon, as permanent as the passion for 
 perfumed baths! 
 
 Apropos of Omar, and Mr. Le Gallienne's paraphrase 
 toying with the Persian spirit (we might say that here 
 it suggested a saucy maiden trying in her sweet girl- 
 ish devilry to preach piquant immoralities to her maid- 
 en aunt, and there it set the old Persian pagan to 
 nice music, made his worldly-wisdom dainty, and gave 
 us the occasional impression that he was out sunning 
 himself in a prettily-frilled cycling costume), our hero 
 distinguished himself by one or two bursts of vehement 
 championship of his young poet-friend, whom with 
 brothers Watson and Davidson he grouped apart and 
 crowned as the three living poets of the first order. No 
 wonder that we find in journals of the period the delect- 
 able intelligence that somewhere or other Professor 
 Allen Gaunt's Great Literary Show has arrived : that 
 the Professor will compass the most wonderful illusion 
 within the provence of mortal man : he will look like 
 
 47 
 
a Critic! that there's a Marvellous Transformation 
 Scene : where the Tiny Heliconian Triplets, Watson, 
 Le Gallienne, Davidson, after one pat of his hand on 
 each head, will stand forth Poets of the First Order! 
 Finally, we read that in reponse to the usual encore, the 
 Professor will revive his famous old piece of spectacular 
 splendour : The Modern Amazon jumping through a 
 Wedding Ring ! Well might those old announcements 
 finish : Walk in, gentlemen, walk in ! 
 
 48 
 
THE FLIGHT FROM THE 
 CAIN E YARD 
 
 "Better be a coward for five minutes, than be dead 
 all the rest of your life," said a witness during the course 
 of the Parnell Commission^ Some such thought ran 
 through my own mind on the morning of the pth of 
 August, 1 897 ; but in order to preserve my life I meant 
 to be a coward for at least a fortnight. I am writing for 
 a generation on whose brain the gth of August 1897 is 
 branded as it were in letters of blood and fire, and ill 
 it would become me to do more than glance in passing 
 at the momentous nature of that date in human annals ; 
 yet I cannot help wondering if posterity in or about 
 A. D. 2097 will realise the emotion which passed 
 through England that never-to-be-forgotten day when 
 Mf. Heinemann launched his five times ten thousand 
 copies of Hall Caine's "Christian" upon the world ; when 
 all London was the Caineyard for the nonce, and a 
 thrill which might be felt passed through this age-old 
 earth from the top of her snow-white Himalayan cap to 
 the innermost point of her axis. 
 
 I at least was a coward for the time. In hot haste I 
 arranged to fly from the Caineyard. It is my daily 
 
 49 
 
duty in a certain haunt not a thousand miles from Fleet 
 Street to guide or help literary opinion in a small way ; 
 but that morning of mornings I had vanished from the 
 post of duty and, in Stevensonian phrase, "the bright 
 face of danger." My office confreres entirely failed to 
 understand during that first week in August why I made 
 so sudden a decision to finish work for the nonce and 
 prepare for a spell of holiday-taking from the Satur- 
 day which was the 7th of the month. When I said, in 
 sundry sudden fits of exultation, and sundry sudden 
 fits of what seemed maliciousness, "I shall be in North 
 Devon on Monday," they were sorely puzzled, and fi- 
 nally, I believe, began to doubt my sanity. Yet it was 
 all a) deep laid scheme ; it was all of malice aforethought 
 Just as Mr. Heinemann was sending out those 50,000 
 copies, I was speeding in a South- Western train towards 
 the peaceful dells, the insinuating lanes, and the shy, 
 elusive runlets of North Devon, leaving my literary 
 comrades to their fate. 
 
 And lo ! to this day I am peacefully ignorant of "the 
 unheard-of business in London," that famous, long- 
 waited-for Monday morning. Nothing troubled me per- 
 sonally beyond a slight crush at Waterloo. I know not 
 how the trumpets sounded and resounded in the Caine- 
 yard To save my life I could not say if Mr. Heinemann 
 ate an extra rasher for breakfast in honour of the mighty 
 event ; I am ignorant as to the number of Manx cats 
 which on the tiles of Greeba Castle the previous mid- 
 night joined in a wild glee-chorus! : "Now we shan't 
 be long!" It has not been even revealed to me if the 
 
 50 
 
Daily Newt critic wrote "Thank God!" at the end of 
 his review. When Caine booms are abroad, whom the 
 Gods love have their holidays. Thus may life be toler- 
 able, though the male Corelli takes the floor ! 
 
 At Barnstaple I left the border-line of sophisticated 
 civilization, and as I caught the coach for Lynton and 
 its fair sister Lynmouth, I knew that unless fate 
 played me some nasty trick I had really escaped the 
 deep-mouthed heavy bay of the Caineyard blood 
 hounds. The metaphor perhaps needs some excusing, 
 but my imagination was in an excited state that day. 
 I thought, as I sat me on the box seat, and the con- 
 ductor's bugle mimicked, as it were, what was going 
 on in distant London, how vain is the effort to bar the 
 path of the truly "colossal" novelist. It was hardly three 
 years since I had imagined that Professor Saintsbury 
 had crushed Mr. Hall Caine for ever by the declara- 
 tion that he was scarcely the equal of Mrs. Radcliffe ; 
 that he had just managed to hit the prevailing senti- 
 ment of his time with all its "vague compound of im- 
 perfectly digested philosophical and ethical theory with 
 cheap altruistic sympathies." He belonged to a school 
 which "almost always rants," said the professor in final 
 callousness. The coach-wheels which now dragged hea- 
 vily up a steep hill-road of Devonshire seemed to grate 
 "Caine ! Caine ! Caine !" as if in mockery of that tart 
 declaration, and a train bearing down the Great West- 
 ern line seemed to roar with the voice and volume of the 
 "boom" in the London it had left four or five hours be- 
 fore. 
 
Now, the gods are in exile, the dryads, the graces, 
 and even the fairies are gone or going, but we have 
 still to thank the fates that leave us a goodly share of 
 coaching in the West and South-West. (Alas! even 
 here the trail of the light railway is already being laid.) 
 That long afternoon drive with genial Devonians, up 
 hill and down dale, had an old-world sense and charm. 
 The latter part of the journey through the Lyn val- 
 ley, by sheer hills crowned with luxuriant greenery, 
 with the river singing, but often hid, in the foliage be- 
 low was a veritable charm. It was twilight as we 
 braved the last big hill at Lynton which John Ridd, 
 you will remember, was anxious to escape when he 
 took his uncle to the Doone valley and it was deep 
 dusk before I was able to take a stroll round Lynton 
 itself and on to the sea. By that time everyone seemed 
 abed, or, at least, they were not abroad, and Lynton's 
 streets such as they were apparently led nowhere. 
 The exhausted earth had gone early to rest after the 
 strain of the fifty thousand copies of "The Christian." 
 
 I was puzzled. I had been positively assured fhat two 
 towns, called Lynton and Lynmouth, lay somewhere 
 thereabouts. Indeed I had actually come upon bits of 
 them myself. I pursued a dim-lighted, lonely patch of 
 street up a hill, and forward saw a house or two at the 
 end of a pleasant path leading seaward. On another 
 hill, a white house it was really an hotel stood 
 out from the foliage and seemed to touch the 
 clouds. I followed the intricate, winding lanes along 
 cliff and hillside, but seemed as far as ever from the 
 
ocean, whose genial voice I heard below. In the dusk- 
 light, tempered by a modest, ghostly gas-lamp, I got the 
 sense of a lovely, unspoiled, deserted place, touched 
 to life on high Lynton at least by a bracing breeze, 
 not so shrill, indeed, but quite as pleasant as the coach- 
 driver's bugle. But by what irony was this named a 
 hoiday resort? I recalled Keats's picture "of the place 
 where "sat grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone." Like 
 the character in Tennyson. 
 
 "I seemed to move in old memorial tilts, 
 And doing battle with forgotten ghosts, 
 To dream myself the shadow of a dream." 
 
 Often I looked towards the sky that baffling night 
 and asked myself if in sober verity the Caineyard it- 
 self might be no more than "such stuff as dreams are 
 made of." 
 
 In the morning I really discovered Lynton, and go- 
 ing downward by zigzag, leafy laneways glistening af- 
 ter a matin shower as yet I scorned the cliff railway 
 I also discovered Lynmouth and the shining sea, spread- 
 ing its gallant breast to the mellowed coastline of Wales. 
 My first thought was that it was all good for the con- 
 templative spirit ; that if the hermits of old desired any- 
 thing more solemn one must marvel what manner of 
 men they could be. As for either town or overgrown 
 village of itself it is unimportant But the hills, the 
 cliffs, the trees, the greenery, the rocks, the Lyn river, 
 the glens, the lanes winding here, there, and every- 
 where, the views of the sea from so many lovely points 
 high and low, the quaint, zigzag street-lines truly they 
 
 53 
 
made a provincial Elysium. Lynmouth was the first 
 seaside spot that kept my interest alive and had not 
 shown all its sights in twenty-four hours. The solitude 
 was remarkable. Lynmouth, with its sleepy charm, mak- 
 ing one eventually almost an aesthetic Rip Van Win- 
 kle, was that first day occupied chiefly by myself and 
 copies of "Lorna Doone." And "The Christian" was 
 known of no man ! 
 
 Myself and Mr. Blackmore's novels continued to be 
 the chief inhabitants of Lynmouth during the succeed- 
 ing days of my stay. It is a marvel to me that the poets 
 and other ostensible devotees of solitude have not made 
 a hermitage of Lynmouth. They could burrow out 
 delightful little cells in the hills on either side of the 
 bay if I may call it a bay or a little interlacing of 
 the branches and shrubs on the great and lonely sides 
 of the Lyn glen should make them ideal "houses." A 
 little fishing daily in the Lyn itself, from the town to- 
 wards Watersmeet or the Doone valley, would easily 
 supply them with the necessaries of life unless they 
 have grown luxurious in their tastes. If so, a little De- 
 vonshire cream or honey, to be had for little or nothing 
 in any quiet neighbouring restaurant, should not only 
 satisfy, but carry them back in thought to the am- 
 brosial days of the gods upon high Olympus. 
 
 In wilder moods they might saunter round the North 
 Walk, running sheer above the sea, to the famous 
 Valley of Rocks, with the Devil's Cheese-knife and the 
 sundry things that shadowed the imagination of the 
 plain yet fanciful John Ridd during that visit to the 
 
 54 
 
wise, if vehement, Mother Meldrum. Talking of poets, 
 we know that Coleridge and Wordsworth used to re- 
 fresh the inner man at an inn in Lynmouth. With that 
 knowledge I really begin to understand some of the 
 languid, ineffective moods of Coleridge. The hills by 
 Lynmouth draw round one subtly, instilling into one's 
 spirit an unearthly restfulness. After a few hours by 
 its waters I had a vague sense of having dozed 
 there in dreamy unconcern for half a century. When 
 that feeling grew pronounced, I took the precaution 
 of ascending either by the cliff railway which recalls 
 Sir George Newnes or the ever-fascinating laneways 
 to Lynton on the height The breeze there was gener- 
 ally sufficient to rouse me to a sense of my past life and 
 my distant relations. Still, as the hours grew, or idly 
 dreamed away, I could not get rid of the feeling that I 
 was rapidly becoming Lynmouth's Oldest Inhabitant. 
 Unconsciously I assumed a paternal air towards every- 
 thing. 
 
 I have mentioned that, apart from myself, the chief 
 inhabitants of Lynmouth were copies of "Lorna 
 Doone." The overpopulation in that respect would 
 have scandalized Malthus. In one shop-window I 
 counted sixteen copies, while bundles lay by the door, 
 on trunks, on counters, under chairs, in soap-boxes, and 
 among odds and ends of crockery. "Lorna Doone" 
 seemed equally at home amid fishing-tackle, fish, fruit, 
 photographs, flowers, ironmongery, and beans. I never 
 saw anyone buy a copy of it in all North Devon I 
 suppose everybody had read it a dozen times but 
 
 55 
 
everyone seemed to deem it a duty to give the great 
 local classic a generous show. It is supposed to be as 
 good as clotted cream almost to a Devonian. It is cer- 
 tainly a good deal more in evidence in North Devon. 
 I wonder if even Hall himself is similarly close to the 
 heart of the little Manx nation. 
 
 I took the classic with me in my various tours from 
 Lynmouth to the choicest spots of the "Lorna Doone" 
 country. It was borne in upon me more and more that 
 John Ridd's story was as closely in touch with the 
 spirit of Devon as was John's simple nature with the 
 still life of his home region. There is a growing pleas- 
 ure as we see unfolded his close intimacy with the most 
 retiring and unconsidered things of the abundant na- 
 tural world about him. He will talk of a little runnel 
 with more reverence than might a young knight of old 
 of his ladye. The secrets of moss and tiny blades of 
 grass and elusive streamlets many Devonshire stream- 
 lets may be called elusive he seems to know. His 
 progress with his story is leisurely indeed more lei- 
 surely than that of the patient ass of his county but 
 I judge that this leisurely way is characteristic of his 
 people. Among those up-and-down dales, over the 
 cliffs and hills, and by the luxuriant, much-appealing 
 foliage of this fairest of shires, it is hard to picture 
 swift movement as normal or probable. Glen and crag, 
 foliage and watermeet, lay gentle hands on one, de- 
 taining one in spite of one's self. Humour here would 
 be out of place in any pronounced or hilarious form ; 
 but we can see a natural fitness in the subdued variety 
 
 56 
 
of the article offered by John Ridd. We cannot be 
 so patient when his extreme naturalness degenerates 
 once in a while into slight coarseness. But Nature, 
 may-hap, in her most beautiful and bountiful mani- 
 festations, cannot preserve us from some betrayals of 
 animalism. 
 
 Yes, now and then I shook off the sleepy balm of 
 Lynmouth lovely, lonely, zigzag, unpretending Lyn- 
 mouth and trod the hills, the by-paths, the loitering 
 glens, the "brambly wildernesses" to fair spots of John 
 Ridd's regions. I think I liked the long, devious Lyn 
 glen the best, with its singing river wooed and guarded 
 by unstinted greenery, and the sheer hills on either 
 hand, shutting out man's sounding cities and the things 
 that live a day. Nature is sacramental here the great 
 Mother Confessor that heareth many confessions. Those 
 charming hills struck the lonely spectator below with 
 some sense of their being, in sooth, "the army of un- 
 alterable law," even as (in Mr. Meredith's fine sonnet) 
 the rank on rank of the stars struck Prince Lucifer that 
 night he left his dark dominion, and his scars were 
 pricked "with memory of that old revolt from Awe." 
 Only that in this case the sense brought idyllic peace 
 and a new wave of charm. Leaving fair Lynmouth to 
 its slumbering delight, and high Lynton to its more 
 breezy wakefulness, I had a curious sense of passing, 
 not from a casual world-forgotten holiday haunt of a 
 few days, but from an unspoiled nook where some of 
 the happiest years of life had ebbed idly. 
 
 I feared the Caineyard no more. 
 
 57 
 
CAINE! EVER AND ALWAYS 
 CAINE! 
 
 The historian of nineteenth century literature will 
 be as hard set to describe Mr. Hall Caine's life and mo- 
 mentum in the days succeeding "the Christian's" issue 
 as he will be to describe that Scylla-cum-Charybdis 
 tome itself. It is not too much to say that for many a 
 trying day after that storm-charged gth of August 
 Hall Caine was the only man in England. As the wide 
 walls of Rome in a famous epoch encompassed but one 
 man, so the mighty Manxman seemed to expand as 
 day succeeded day till with one foot on the little Manx 
 strand the other might be said to rest by the German 
 ocean, the corresponding fist thereto ready on the slight- 
 est provocation to stretch across the water and shake 
 in the face of William II. himself. Or if the reader 
 craves a less earthly metaphor, we might say that Hall 
 Caine was the harvest moon in the English sky, and 
 the faithful Robert Sherard (his literary factotum and 
 interviewer-in-ordinary) a little star that twinkled 
 obediently and proudly in its wake. Even Mr. Stead, 
 who said that "the Christian's" hero was a failure as a 
 Christian and not much of a success as anything else 
 
 58 
 
(Et tu Brute!) was an ordinary and unconsidered in- 
 dividual for once. 
 
 Oh, the days of the Sherard dancing, 
 
 Nice and neat to the Caineyard tune, 
 Oh, for one of those hours of madness, * 
 
 Gone alas! like the "boom" too soon! 
 When the "pars" began to gather 
 
 For the papers noon and night, 
 And the "Christian" orders startled 
 
 Heinemann's heart with a wild delight. 
 Oh the times of the Sherard dancing! 
 
 When the Manxman set the tune, 
 And the cats on the tiles of Greeba 
 
 Chimed in answer under the moon! 
 
 And oh! the interviews and the proclamations! 
 The world knows that a misunderstanding arose as to 
 the Master's exact words to Sherard at the historic 
 Daily News interview, so it was understood that in all 
 succeeding ones expert reporters were stationed at Mr. 
 Caine's feet, on his right hand and on his left, on the 
 hearth-rug, on the door-mat, and at each of the four 
 corners of the room, to take down the words as they 
 fell from his lips, and thus guard against the recurrence 
 of trouble or of trifling with history. It is also averred 
 that the task of comparing notes after each interview 
 was another "colossal undertaking," and that when it 
 was over, the great novelist mopped his brow and wired 
 to Mr. Heinemann : "This is an unheard-of business 
 in Greeba Castle." 
 
 1 In the ecstatic sense of course. 
 
 59 
 
With only one typical episode of that memorable 
 period may we dwell a little before passing from it for 
 ever. The Master unbosomed his soul in the Human- 
 itarian in the pessimistic wane of October. Let pos- 
 terity note that his summer exuberance was still royal 
 and riotous. He still conveyed his revealings to us of 
 the lower earth through the medium of the faithful and 
 worshipping disciple, Sherard Robert the wonder- 
 eyed and the dutiful. There was a portrait of the great 
 man facing the article. His legs were crossed and the 
 forefinger of his marbly-white left hand tipped the 
 boot of his right foot in awesome suggestiveness. 
 What mystic symbolism was implied we knew not, 
 but our fears were distressing. Marbly cold was the 
 white face of his thoughtfulness, as Fiona Macleod 
 might say : and his eyes had all the seeming of a 
 wizard that was dreaming. They seemed to look 
 on the old world going up in fire and the human race 
 turned to spectres passing away to limitless outlands of 
 night and wrath, while Greeba Castle alone stood 
 where it dfd. Yea, we had not had such a thrill since 
 the heyday of the Beardsley period. 
 
 And how shall I, with this sober, halting pen of mine, 
 make plain to anxious readers the thoughts that breath- 
 ed and the words that burned when the author of "The 
 Christian" opened his heart to the author of "The 
 White Slaves of England" ? They went at once to co- 
 lossal altitudes to study the great passions. Monsters 
 these seem to me, but as tame white sheep of the fold 
 were they in the eyes of the great Manx Shepherd. 
 
 60 
 
There were only about half-a-dozen stories alto- 
 gether, we were told, in which the great passions are 
 at play. (How many, by the way, had Mr. Hall Caine 
 already written ?) Perhaps the greatest of them all was 
 the primal human story the expulsion of Adam and 
 Eve from Eden. Reading between the lines we detected 
 a terrible suggestion that Mr. Caine would retell it in 
 a later realistic novel. "The highest aim of the novelist 
 is to tell the old stories in the environment of his own 
 time." And then, said the Master and posterity can 
 fancy the thrilling flash in his eyes and the resonant re- 
 velation in his tones: "Don't banish the moral nude 
 from fiction under the impression you are thereby 
 banishing immorality." Yea, the head of Sherard bent 
 and his pencil trembled in a responsive inspiration that 
 recalled Mr. Morrison's at Loughton. 
 
 The Master went on to declare how wise people cried 
 "Melodrama" at the works of nearly every writer who 
 is alive, how in that sense "Hamlet" is an Adelphi pro- 
 duction, "Othello" a Whitechapel murder put on the 
 stage ; how he was absolutely opposed to the marriage 
 of convenience ; how it was very likely that drink 
 would be the subject of his next novel ; how he had 
 a very deep sympathy with the better part of the 
 Woman Movement ; how he was sorry to think the influ- 
 ence of the Ibsen movement not altogether for the best 
 -"It will be thought in the future that Ibsen was a 
 mad poet who imagined he was a man of the world" 
 how, finally, amongst workers there was no impurity 
 rampant 
 
 61 
 
It may be that cold-hearted people can see no new 
 or striking message here ; that they take as mean a view 
 of Mr. Caine's social theories as did Mr. Saintsbury of 
 his literary archievements. But to be great is to be 
 misunderstood. Posterity will do him justice a hun- 
 dred-fold. Posterity, too, will overlook the fact that 
 Conan Doyle protested in the Daily Chronicle against 
 his methods as a Boomster. 
 
 The end of this portion of his life-story was an- 
 nounced in the wane of the year, when, colossal soul 
 that he was, yet his health gave way, and he was order- 
 ed four months' complete independence from booming 
 and all other species of intellectual pursuits. The Great 
 Christian went to Rome, and Byron's line : 
 
 O Rome, my country! City of the Soul 
 
 came instinctively to our lips. How Mr. Sherard would 
 pass the winter in the Master's absence seemed a 
 pathetic intellectual problem. We pictured him sit- 
 ting isolated in that lonely courtyard at the back of 
 the Author's Club, refusing to be comforted. He was 
 sad to our mind's eye as Ovid or Dante in exile. We 
 were all wrong. Like a certain cocoa, life to him was 
 "grateful and comforting" even then. Indeed the quota- 
 tion, as the reader will see, is singularly apt under the 
 circumstances. Just as the Master had set sail we took 
 up our new monthly magazines, and forth there flut- 
 tered a certain fly-leaf. It was a cocoa advertisement 
 bill, and it gave us our latest glimpse of the literary 
 work of Mr. Sherard. His portrait was in the corner. 
 
 62 
 
In it he had the bland smile and the chubby air which 
 come to all men, it seems, just after the cocoa-sipping 
 stage. Mr. Sherard we read had found 's cocoa "the 
 very best," and "a real boon to literary men." When he 
 was travelling the previous year, "Collecting materials 
 for my book 'The white slaves of England' (Ah!) to 
 many thousands I suggested such a beverage as yours. ' 
 Since when, presumably, they "have used no other." 
 Yes, that was the man who a month earlier was making 
 the worth and the ways of Hall Caine crystal-clear to all 
 men! 
 
 WHITE SLAVES. 
 
 (With apologies to Mr. Kipling.) 
 
 Where run your booms, O trimmer 
 
 Of Caine 1 s red Christian lamp ? 
 Think not it is in Greeba, 
 
 These doleful days and damp. 
 The White- Slave Ocean Horses 
 
 Bear Hall far far from home 
 The potent Pope of Manxland 
 
 Health-questing goes to Rome! 
 
 Wlids cast the spell upon you, 
 
 Now Caine has set you free ? 
 What drink is on your table? 
 
 The best of drinks that be! 
 'Twixt tepid draughts and burning 
 
 O, puzzled was my brain; 
 But now I've sipped Blank's Cocoa, 
 
 I'll never doubt again ! 
 
 63 
 
What service have you paid them 
 
 Who made it hot and strong? 
 To boom their boon I sent them 
 
 A glowing note along. 
 And now it flies on fly-leaves 
 
 From Pole to Pole that fall 
 And say how slave the " White Slaves" f 
 
 Blank's Brand has cured them all ! 
 
 6 4 
 
THE NEW DOOM OF NARCISSUS 
 (SOMETIMES STYLED RICHARD) 
 
 There was a fall of white marble in Richard's soul. 
 The morning post had brought no letter from Pauline. 
 He sighed, and turned with an elfin sigh to the bric-a- 
 brac of his heart, but in all the pieces his Arabian- 
 Nights' eyes saw nothing at the moment that he could 
 utilise for Bodley belles lettres. "Love for ever com- 
 pletes the world," he said mechanically, holding up his 
 pocket mirror with one hand, and with the other bring- 
 ing his gold-backed hair-brush to bear on the creamy 
 waves of his curls. "Love for ever completes the world ; 
 but Pauline is slow. Dear Pauline! Shall I ever see 
 her again?" 
 
 Pauline was the latest of the Golden Girls. He had 
 loved her now for two days, seventeen hours, and fif- 
 teen minutes. "Long, O absent rose of my heart, are 
 the cycles of love," he murmured as he lowered the hair- 
 brush, and the glint of its back of gold went forth like 
 the sheen of Cupid's arrows through the window to lose 
 itself, he said, in one bubble of passion on the morn- 
 ing sunbeams' bosom beyond the Surrey downs. It got 
 
 65 
 
no farther than the yard, where it died on the breast of 
 a dilatory telegraph messenger. 
 
 The boy brought the telegram which told that Pau- 
 line was dead Richard's sonnet on the dear little 
 Bacchantes on her stocking (which he had stolen) had 
 proved too much for her. The telegram said so, albeit 
 gently. With a poignant iambic moan for lost love and 
 wounded vanity Richard turned him over on his couch, 
 and casting one last fond look into the pocket mirror 
 in his trembling hand, he died. 
 
 Then some one wrote (a la Mr. Norman Gale) : 
 
 Come, Golden Girls, don't cry! 
 E'en Dickies have to die; 
 
 For Love's a frisky fellow 
 
 Who rarely stays to mellow. 
 Some lusty, log-rolled swain 
 Will pinch your cheeks again, 
 Send sweetly-scented notes, 
 And steal your petticoats, 
 When these fresh tears are dry 
 Come, Golden Girls, don't cry! 
 Such grief is all-my-eye. 
 
 Before we follow the fortunes of Richard's spirit it 
 is necessary to point out that the conditions of intel- 
 lectual fame and of literary life altogether had become 
 revolutionised at this stage of the world's history. To 
 be a creative artist was quite a secondary considera- 
 tion. The great point was to be "discovered" for some 
 intellectual eccentricity, or happy pose, or supreme 
 quality of imitativeness, or amazing freak of intense 
 and inconstant amativeness. On rare occasions the 
 
 66 
 
possession of a modicum of talent served the same pur- 
 pose. The reign of the literary "discoverer" had become 
 universal and unquestioned. First of all, Richard had 
 found in the poets of the day a "composite Shakes- 
 peare" : truer to their time than Avon's Swan, and 
 possessing to the radiant seeing eye of the ideal log- 
 roller a something love-some and moon-sweet which 
 Stratford's William had never boasted even in Anne 
 Hathaway's eye in their courting days. Richard's neigh- 
 bour, Mr. Grant Allen, had prided himself more than 
 Autumn sportman prides his bag of partridges on 
 his remarkable "first-sighting" of genius in unlikely 
 and unlovely places. Mr. George Moore, when 
 he could lift a gloating eye on the literary in- 
 iquities of Stevenson, had been similarly felicitous. 
 Mr. William Archer, even in the thick of the fight for 
 Ibsen, had sometimes found a moment's time to pause 
 and shout across to his age that So-and-So should be 
 booked forthwith (par grande vitesse) for the Immortal 
 Isles. Mr. Lang, when no Celt nor Max Muller annoyed 
 him, had his own uncanny discoveries. Mr. F. W. 
 Robinson, expert investigators say, has never obtained 
 his due as an unfailing and felicitous authority in that 
 same Augustan Era of genius-exploration. Dr. Nicoll 
 and the Daily Chronicle were at one stage so lucky in 
 similar supreme lines that the question of the hour was 
 where to find places in an over-crowded continent for 
 their geniuses. Mr. T. P. O'Connor's "discoveries" were 
 also manifold, but they were mostly of a peculiar femi- 
 nine type, and were not always taken seriously, some 
 
 67 
 
 5 
 
allowance being made for Mr. O'Connor's susceptible 
 and most sensitive gallantry. 
 
 Amongst them all, the "discoveries" of Richard stood 
 out quaint and amazing. They shone with alarming 
 regularity in his weekly reviews for a luminous evening 
 paper of London. One day he welcomed the author 
 of "The Laughter of The Stars" as a master of frolic- 
 some pleonasm unexcelled since Shakespeare ; the 
 next occasion his voice was a prose fancy of pathos 
 compact as he saluted a new bard whose ruth suggested 
 the materialising of all the tears ever shed of Mr. Stead ; 
 as he hailed yet another a sonneteer who had that 
 glistening and palpable definiteness which the age 
 had seen hitherto only in the theosophic lectures of 
 Mrs. Annie Besant his voice might be mistaken for 
 the answer of the rose to the nightingale. 
 
 It came to pass as may well be expected that Rich- 
 ard's rivals in this art of intellectual "first-sighting" 
 led him a troublous and dangerous time. Their pro- 
 nouncements were as clanking armour when knight 
 meets knight ; Richard's were as the flutter of frilled 
 petticoats, and therefore his views were sweeter to an 
 age that had been swathed in Mr. O'Connor's suggestive 
 Books of the Week and the later fiction of Mr. Hardy. 
 
 The rival "discoverers" were driven by the force of 
 circumstances to start literary journals of their own to 
 carry on the war upon a colossal scale, to uphold their 
 own several discoveries, and to curb the pride of such 
 men as Mr. Hall Caine who were daily discovering 
 themselves, or something more strenuous, more colos- 
 
 68 
 
sal, more subtly but gratuitously advertisable in them- 
 selves. All the traditions of the ensuing decade are of 
 war and flame, the raging of fiery tongues, the flash- 
 ing of sword-pens in the world. In old museums spec- 
 imens of the paper's advertisement columns, and 
 broken pieces of their delivery carts are still preserved. 
 Very quaint is the antique wording : "Greatest Literary 
 
 Discovery in the Universe." "Sighted at first glance 
 more True Poets than any other Daily Paper." "Read 
 the Blazer for the latest true Pilgrims to Parnassus." 
 "Special Discovery Experts In All Parts Of The 
 Globe." "Bow-Wow found out the Genius of Weeriwale 
 six minutes earlier than any other Contemporary." 
 "The Frills of a Golden Girl's Petticoat given away 
 with Every Copy of the Star-spangled Poseur." And 
 so on and so on. 
 
 Duels, lawsuits and the clashes of many-phased con- 
 flicts smote the land Nobody read much literature, 
 few looked deeper than the cover of the latest volume 
 printed, but almost everyone was a furious partisan of 
 one discoverer or another. Special policemen were 
 necessary on the farthing tram-cars to the suburbs to 
 prevent portly and usually mild-mannered old gentle- 
 men from tearing one another to pieces in support of 
 
 their favourite papers and pretenders. Even Barry 
 Pain was afraid to consider the question other than 
 seriously. The assurance companies of the period issued 
 special notices declaring that nothing would be paid to 
 the next-of-kin of assured who met their deaths in con- 
 flicts arising out of questions of literary discovery. 
 
 69 
 
Finally on a genius-exploration-syndicate-deal Mr. 
 Hooley cleared a quarter of a million more money then 
 he realised in the old days with Bovril. 
 
 Over weird and cloud-shadowed wastes had gone 
 the released Richard. He thought of the over-praised 
 line of Davidson's : "The waste, raw land where dole- 
 ful suburbs thrive." "Only rose of my heart," said he, 
 dropping unconsciously into the earthly jargon, "there 
 are no suburbs." He sighed in vain for a suggestion of 
 the Arabian Nights. There wasn't a piece of chiffon 
 between him and the horizon. He was alone with a 
 great terror. Some wondrous, incomprehensible force 
 sent him on and on through the seemingly illimitable 
 dusk. The solitude was appalling ; the sense of spirit- 
 ual vacuum he did not mind so much. The presence 
 even of Mr. Henley or Frank Danby would have been 
 a welcome break to the horrid spell. He would almost 
 listen without weariness to Mr. Jerome on Lord Salis- 
 bury. 
 
 He thought he had travelled for an aeon, when sud- 
 denly he was brought to a standstill on the verge of 
 the slow-lapping waves of an eerie ocean. 
 
 "O rose of my heart," he sighed with delicate deliber- 
 ation, "is Pauline or is Nicolette beyond? And what 
 does the morning star say to the moon ?" 
 
 Mechanically he felt for his pocket-mirror, but that 
 had been stored away with the days that were no more. 
 
 On and on with the great terror he wandered again 
 the same mysterious force sent him over the waters. 
 
 70 
 
He stopped on a wild shore at last. He thought he had 
 reached the home haunt of weirdness. 
 
 "I am as marble in flame," he murmured. "May there 
 ever be a coquettish moon again, and a life with a mys- 
 tical aspect of completeness ? O sea, hast thou heard of 
 the Twelve Golden-Haired Bar-maids?" 
 
 In another moment dark shapes and strange voices 
 were about him. Then the dusk was lightened, for a 
 cold white moon had arisen on the sea. It was so chaste 
 that he did not look at it a second time. 
 
 A spirit came up. 
 
 "Richard," it said in a tone of infinite pity and pathos, 
 "here are the legion disembodied spirits of the poets 
 you discovered and log-rolled on your earth-world in 
 your mortal life-time. Altogether they will chant their 
 poems in your ears every poem of any kind or grade 
 or metre which on earth they wrote and for ever you 
 must listen." 
 
 "For ever!" wailed Richard as the great terror smote 
 him and the chaste irresponsiveness of the moonlight 
 hurt him. 
 
 "For ever! For ever!" replied the spirit, as the legion 
 shapes gathered round. 
 
 Richard lay down on the dreary shore and moaned 
 the moan of the lost 
 
 He rose as the shapes had begun their appalling re- 
 citation. For the first time, on the hill rising statelily 
 and gradual in front of him he noticed a troop of en- 
 trancing woman forms, dancing to and fro and fairer 
 than Aphrodite on the old Hellenic seas. Lolling nigh 
 
 n 
 
them were two pleasant sinners whom he instinctively 
 recognised as Omar Khayyam and Edward Fitzgerald. 
 
 "O roses of my soul, though sans paradises of chif- 
 fon," he exclaimed as he fixed his gaze on the woman 
 troop, "may I ever draw near yon immortal consumma- 
 tion of all blisses? For they in sooth are the Golden 
 Girls of All Girls." 
 
 "They are indeed the Golden Girls of All Girls," 
 said the spirit above the din of the recitations, "but it 
 is fated that you can never draw nearer." 
 
 The soul of Richard cried in iambic agony to the 
 stars. The spirit was unmoved. 
 
 "Can you furnish me with a large-paper copy of my 
 paraphrase of Omar?" asked Richard when he re- 
 covered ; "do not say it is unknown in the everlasting 
 realms, for has it not the hall-mark of Grant Allen, 
 and was it not published by his nephew ? I think the 
 lines 
 
 He sins no sins but gentle drunkenness, 
 Warm-hearthed mirth, and kind " 
 
 were emongst the neatest I ever did." 
 
 "The gods have no store-house for waste-paper," 
 said the spirit briefly. 
 
 "May I even have a pocket-mirror and a gold-backed 
 hair-brush?" moaned Richard in a soft slow metre. 
 
 "Never," said the spirit above the still wilder din, 
 "and your face shall be on dusty' days even as Paul Dun- 
 bar's poetry, and your locks shall be as Walt Whitman's 
 philosophy. Even in the sight of yon Golden Girls of 
 
 72 
 
All Girls you must be what the Celts call a holy show : 
 in other words as ugly as the literary morality of George 
 Egerton." 
 
 The ghastly din of the recitations drowned the 
 agony of Richard's lost cry. 
 
A "DAILY TERMAGANT 
 SENSATION 
 
 The editor of the Daily Termagant closed the door 
 of his private room, as he bade his assistant editor take 
 the vacant chair that stood opposite his own. The editor 
 of the Daily Termagant was in a very reckless humour 
 indeed. 
 
 "Can you suggest one likely plan that shall save the 
 paper from the ruin that stares it in the face ?" he asked 
 drily, when the assistant had seated himself. 
 
 "I cannot, I am sorry to say," said the latter hope- 
 lessly. "You wouldn't listen to my suggestion that we 
 should have a series of 'The Beauties of Marie Corelli' 
 by Eric Mackay ; 'Easy Lessons in Blague' by G. B. 
 Burgin you also tabooed ; you wouldn't even have Mr. 
 Sladen's autobiography, and now he's gone and boiled 
 it down for 'Who's Who.' I have worked you know 
 how I have worked you know how our staff has 
 worked. Our efforts have availed nothing. No one has 
 any idea now that will stem the tide of bad luck." 
 
 "Don't be too sure," said the editor. 
 
 "Then again," went on the assistant, "you refused 
 
those papers by that Vagabond Club man, called 'How 
 the Modern Author Dines ; What he eats, and What 
 he would like to eat ; what the Doctors say he might 
 and might not eat ; what he will eat and what he won't 
 eat in the next century, and why ; the influence of 
 starchy foods on the progress of the sex-novel.' And 
 so on. Why, with such a topic every author in the land 
 would strike in and the boom would be amazing. When 
 in doubt, play dinners, I say. Look at the Vagabonds, 
 look at the Authors' Club! Feuds and pen-hatchets 
 are buried under the table. The war-drum throbs no 
 longer when the dinner-bell has sounded; and the 
 battle-flags are furled at the unfolding of Literature's 
 perennial flag of truce, the table-napkin." 
 
 The editor stroked his beard, and the flash in his 
 handsome eyes made his pale but fine face look its best. 
 
 "We have been too brilliant and adventurous, Brown," 
 he went on, "immeasurably too brilliant We should 
 have written like the lady novelists, or have been im- 
 pertinent and vulgar. Fine writing is wholly out of 
 place to-day. And I have no faith in the Club of the 
 Lord of Sladen any more than in the Sword of the 
 Lord of Henley. But I'm not going to be cynical. 
 Only a sensational move will save us now, and I'm go- 
 ing to make it You may tell the whole staff that I shall 
 require none of them to-morrow morning." 
 
 "Revolution, indeed!" said Brown. "Do you mean, 
 Mr. Smythven that you can turn out a whole evening 
 paper by yourself?" 
 
 "Nothing of the kind." 
 
 75 
 
"Then do you mean to suspend publication to- 
 morrow? In that case..." 
 
 "The second edition will appear as usual at eleven 
 o'clock to-morrow. Most of the matter will, I hope, be 
 got through to-night, though. Not a line will I write. 
 My dear Brown, the next issue of the Termagant will 
 be the people's paper, written and edited by the Man 
 in the Street. This is our last chance. I'm having sen- 
 sational posters got out ; I'm sending displayed adver- 
 tisements to all the big morning papers. And I'm try- 
 ing to lug in a Buddhist motto or two from Sir Edwin 
 Arnold. They always make English people laugh, for 
 some inscrutable reason. Yes, the people's paper, 
 written and edited by the Man in the Street and his 
 brethren, will save us, or nothing will. My own im- 
 pression is that it will make a tremendous sensation." 
 
 "I confess that I don't quite follow the idea," said 
 Brown. 
 
 "Now, for many months," said Smythven, quietly, 
 "I have been studying the letters and suggestions of 
 a group that at first I thought persistent and intoler- 
 able bores. There's the score of different creatures who 
 know how to manage the paper better than one's self ; 
 there's the amiable gentleman who has a mystic griev- 
 ance against the Lord Chancellor ; there's the genius 
 who wants to regulate the law as to omnibus tickets ; 
 there's the sinner who sends you suggestions for im- 
 proving on the whole scheme of the universe; the 
 Camberwell tailor who has written an epic on the Last 
 Judgment from an unorthodox point of view ; there's 
 
 76 
 
the young lady who knows everything, has a bowing 
 acquaintance at least with everyone's cupboard ske- 
 leton, and so dearly wants to write your society column. 
 You have heard of them all. 
 
 "Well, I'll telegraph to everyone of them at once. 
 They'll come to the office to-night. They'll have pens, 
 ink, paper, and drinks. They can write what they like, 
 and be hanged to them. It will all go in just as they 
 write it Also, Brown, you'll go put into the City, and, 
 shrewd judge of men as you are, you'll pick out the 
 neatest type of what we understand as the Man in the 
 Street Bring him here, too. He'll drink as he likes, 
 and write as he likes. Twill all be printed. If there's 
 too much stuff, they must decide amongst themselves 
 what had better go out" 
 
 A little of the chief's quixotic fever caught Brown. 
 A quarter of an hour later he was busy furthering the 
 arrangements for the mad scheme. 
 
 At daylight next morning the assistant-editor 
 knocked at the door of the editor's room. Smythven 
 and the young lady who knew everything were en- 
 gaged in an animated conversation. They had been 
 subtly attracted to each other from the first, and their 
 discourse on journalism and genius, affinities and news- 
 paper perfection, had sounded very delicious keys (to 
 them) as the hours went on, and the Man in the Street 
 and his strangely-gathered brethren prepared the mat- 
 ter for the paper upstairs. 
 
 "It will be the most fearful and wonderful production 
 
 77 
 
on which the eye of man ever rested," said Brown. "The 
 drinking, writing, clash, and clamour upstairs is not 
 surpassed by anything out of Bedlam. I've just glanced 
 through the epic poet's copy, the button-hole reformer's 
 copy, and the copy of the man who advances seventy - 
 five reasons why England is going to the dogs, and I 
 assure you that the gods had never such food for 
 laughter." 
 
 The editor scarcely heard. The look of dreamy ro- 
 mance sweetened in his eyes as he looked across the 
 table at the young lady who knew everything. How 
 modest and bewitching the tender light in her young 
 eyes! 
 
 At that moment the sounds of appalling commotion 
 came from the upper regions. Cries answered cries, 
 bodies fell heavily to the floor, chairs and tables were 
 heard to crash, and Bedlam seemed to have turned and 
 set to rend itself to pieces. The assistant-editor hurried 
 away. 
 
 In a quarter of an hour he re-appeared. His face was 
 white. 
 
 "We have had tragic work," he said. "They wrote too 
 much copy, and the general opinion was that the epic 
 poet should curtail his work by sixty cantos, and that 
 the reformer of the human race should knock ninety 
 sentences out of his peroration. They both objected, 
 and a fearful fight took place. They are all wounded, 
 and the Man in the Street is dead !" 
 
 "Good gracious !" cried the startled editor. "I'll cer- 
 tainly be held responsible for the trouble and the tra- 
 
 78 
 
gedy. I must fly this cursed spot. Bella," he said, turn- 
 ing to the young lady who knew everything, "Bella, 
 you will fly with me?" 
 
 She glanced shyly at the jewels he had given her, 
 blushed, and thought a moment. 
 
 "I cannot," she said, in her dear, demure way. "You 
 see, my husband is expecting me. Of my three husbands 
 he has proved the kindest, and I hate to desert him." 
 
 Smythven swept from the room with a curse. The 
 police entered a minute later, and took possession of 
 the office. The Termagant never appeared again. 
 
 A double number of To -Day appeared the follow- 
 ing week. Mrs. Sarah Tooley described therein her 
 interview with the young lady who knew everything. 
 The facts she recorded of that memorable night in the 
 Daily Termagant sanctum became the talk of London. 
 They afforded Mr. Barry Pain a god-send in the shape 
 of a new impulse for his "Smoking Room" philosophy 
 and for fully six months he worked it for all it was 
 worth, till the faces of his readers grew Black and White 
 by turns. As the cynical were wont to say : 
 
 And Pain repeats himself in many ways 
 Lest one bad jokelet should escape the world. 
 
AUTHORS I CANNOT TAKE 
 SERIOUSLY 
 
 There is of course the colossal instance of Miss Co- 
 relli with her somewhat undisciplined mind, her ca- 
 pacity to make tempests of the trivial, her hysteria 
 anent the commonplace, and her parboiled soulfulness. 
 But for all her insistence on the privacy of her per- 
 sonality and her sometime stormy protestations of 
 shyness she has been so insistently before us for years 
 that even the intellectual have come to accept her in 
 that curious, unquestioning, half-unheeding way in 
 which some people accept a village beldame and others 
 the Daily Telegraph. We may go further and admit 
 that her sentimentality has been as a Mother Seigel's 
 Syrup to many a literary hypochondriac, that her cha- 
 racters have had in certain emotional and critically 
 unintelligent quarters an educational and quickening 
 influence second only to Madame Tussaud's. She has 
 sounded a warmer whoop than the War-Cry s in spirit- 
 ually forlorn backrooms and boarding-houses ; she has 
 carried a message, a sentimental sal volatile to many 
 a yearning domestic and Higher Harriet in that stage 
 when the Family Herald had begun to pall. In a vague, 
 
 80 
 
stupid way, large tracts of Maida Vale and Brixton have 
 accepted her as an inspired female ; a Joan of Arc on 
 a tram-car. For these things, not without good in their 
 way in a commonplace world the charitable historian 
 has no heart to lay bare the Great Show of her quasi- 
 literary absurdities. Besides they are long and life is 
 fleeting. 
 
 Miss Corelli's half-brother, Mr. Eric Mackay, 
 once kindly spoken of for the "Love-Letters of a Violin- 
 ist" has added to the gaiety of nations by solemn tilts 
 at brother minor-poets, by interfering once in a way 
 with Silomo's or William Watson's settlements of the 
 Eastern question, by the quaint fashion in which he 
 prepared the way for Mr. Swinburne to take him gently 
 by the ears and drop him over a precipice ; and finally 
 by the unconscious humour of his own ambitious poetry. 
 He shouts well. One can picture him as the good-na- 
 tured, impetuous man in the street who throws up his 
 hat with many a bold hurrah for England. This were 
 well if he did it on gala days as a private citizen, but 
 the freak of calling the Muses and the world to cele- 
 brate it and see it in a book shows a peculiarly defec- 
 tive sense of the eternal fitness of things. It has been 
 unkindly hinted that in his tempest-tongued telling of 
 the Empire's glories, and when his eye rolled most in 
 fine frenzy, he still kept a modest corner of it on the 
 Laureateship ; and in any case wounded must have 
 been his faithful spirit when the doubtful gift went to 
 mere Mr. Alfred Austin of Swinford Old Manor, where, 
 
 81 
 
as naive interviewers have told us, a well-fed cow will 
 look up in wonder when the literary paragraphist ap- 
 pears; Mr. Alfred Austin on whose reputation Dr. 
 Jameson unconsciously made a most damaging and 
 damning raid ; Mr. Austin whose place in poetry was 
 dubious even before that sad event ; Mr. Austin who 
 sings of the obvious and cannot impart a consecrating 
 touch to it ; Mr. Austin a patch of whose "Garden" 
 (dewless as he tells us under the dense oak in the most 
 generous night) might be said to be typical of too much 
 of his literary art Yea, it was sad that in the filling of 
 the office graced by Pye and Gibber, Mr. Mackay, what- 
 ever his private feelings, should have been ignored. 
 Was it in vain that he sang tempest songs for Eng- 
 land, and scarified other bards? 
 
 Shall I, the hero of a thousand shouts 
 For tip-top England, to the background go? 
 
 Shall I be meek and modest, I whose flouts 
 Hare maddened Swinburne? Why, High Heavens! No!! 
 
 Sing ho! the day of Eric! England needs 
 
 Not whining singers but a man of storm. 
 Shut up, ye little winds among the reeds! 
 
 How dare ye whine the day 7 feel in form? 
 
 There is a very cannon in my throat 1 ! ! 
 
 And wild 'twill boom for England. And the sea 
 And all the lands shall shudder at the note 
 
 That thrills with tip-top England's destiny. 
 
 The very gods shall quake before I'm done, 
 The "minors" shrink into their shivering shoes. 
 
 England e'en yet may fling her brave-tongued son 
 The Laureateship, that darling of my muse! 
 
 82 
 
I often wondered how Mr. Percy Fitzgerald could 
 continue, as the years rose and fell, with his novels, his 
 travel-tales, his autobiographies, his stage-lore, his Bos- 
 wells, his Lambs, his lectures, and so on, ad lib. Thirty 
 novels, twenty-five biographies, five autobiographies, 
 a dozen stage-books, and Heaven only knows how many 
 other things! Yet never morning wanes to evening 
 that he seems otherwise than in the blithe beginning of 
 his labours ! Yet never morning waned to evening but 
 some hardy bookmaking idea occurred to him. I have 
 sometimes said to myself, in amazement at his energy : 
 "There's the ideal man to place in charge of the stone 
 of Sisyphus !" A picture of Mr. Fitzgerald appeared 
 some time ago in one of Mr. Shorter's publications. 
 Never since have I wondered at his labours. The like- 
 ness seemed to explain everything. There was a grim- 
 weird-glory-of-going-on air about it which fascinated 
 one : it suggested a sort of combined re-incarnation of 
 the Ancient Mariner and Ulysses. He held us with a 
 glittering eye which yet appeared to gaze into an eerie 
 sunset region where the sun is always on the point of 
 setting yet never sets. It is my solemn conviction that 
 Mr. Fitzgerald will never die, and will never cease 
 bookmaking. 
 
 One day in the nineties Mr. I. Zangwill went lectur- 
 ing in Glasgow in the gaiety of his heart Amongst 
 his adventures in that fateful period was the introduc- 
 tion to a young University man with a taste for meta- 
 physics and Mr. Meredith. The young man had written 
 
 83 
 
a paper in which the Dreamer of the Ghetto detected 
 uncommon power, and he said so. Mr. Zangwill was 
 not conscious, perhaps, just then of the deep responsi- 
 bility of the act But the day came when that young 
 man, who elected to be known in the literary world as 
 "Benjamin Swift," published a book called "Nancy 
 Noon," and we all knew the worst. We had scarcely 
 recovered from the volume when Dr. Robertson Nicoll 
 published Mr. Swift's life and times and portrait in the 
 Bookman, and to the Hampstead Set and many beyond 
 this their second, next-to-native Heath, was borne the 
 great truth that another Brither Scot had "arrived." 
 
 I am afraid that I can give you little or no idea of 
 the nature and purpose of this strange book in the space 
 at my disposal. I should require this whole volume for 
 the patient unravelling and the intelligible explanation 
 of the turtuous life-threads that mingled, knotted, 
 twisted, danced and played hide-and-seek in the story. 
 And after all, my efforts would be in a measure vain. 
 I feel that intelligible and matter-of-fact explanation 
 would be a brazen insult to Mr. Swift's extravaganza- 
 loving folk. I might as well try to explain sunbeams 
 playing leap-frog down the Egyptian labyrinths, or the 
 Courts of Puck and Titania making merry in the Cata- 
 combs. As for the tricks of language in the volume, the 
 madness of March hares were bourgeois decorum in 
 comparison. 
 
 Believe me, Mr. Swift put character enough and to 
 spare into his book, and he has power also to spare, 
 while for somersaults of expression you might confi- 
 
 84 
 
dently back him in any international linguistic Olym- 
 piad. My wonder is how he carries the mountain of af- 
 fectation that the gods or ill-fortune have given him. 
 Meredith, Meredith, thy disciples are more than we 
 can bear. 
 
 The heroine goes out in Mr. Swift's second chapter 
 to meet her lover on the moors in the songfulness of 
 the glorious May morning. She fancies she hears his 
 "Holloa," and "she has a stifled feeling at her throat." 
 But, bless you, that is nothing. 
 
 "Ah me, the world's old roomy heart will find a place 
 "for them, and its imagination will envisage this scene. 
 "For the old loves of the old universes are all represented 
 "here, the everlasting life of them and antique pathos. 
 "Doubtless, also, there will be a more eager concern 
 "when it becomes known that both he and she are pos- 
 "sessed of a certain height of physical splendour that 
 "has come to them through the generations. The apes 
 "must surely be considered to have been working to 
 "some purpose. For he who is standing at the top and 
 "stamping the ground because of impatience is tall and 
 "Titanic enough, altogether a man, it seems nearer, 
 "perhaps, the thirties than the twenties, but with the 
 "mystery of youth, like a diaphanous cloud upon him. 
 "Also he is dressed, I think, in some seemly hunting 
 "suit. And she? The withered birch branches are 
 "crackling under her feet as she ascends. And is that 
 "her red kerchief down among the trees?" 
 
 " 'Here comes the lady ! Oh, so light a foot 
 'Shall ne'er wear out the everlasting flint.' 
 
 85 
 
"She is merely seventeen, the wonder of the village, 
 "whose band of adorers will run to Earth's end to do 
 "her hest: Nan herself. Her foot is already on the 
 "moor. The sea is rolling eastward there ; and it is 
 "really a marvellous hour. And these are the children 
 "of the Old, Old one, representatives of elemental 
 "causes, children of a strange destiny. It is enough that 
 "the dawn is shattering the night for them, and that 
 "they are both vibrating with the unmistakable pulse 
 "and vibration of rudimentary emotions." 
 
 They "had come out to fight love's everlasting 
 battle, no matter what weather may fall. As if love 
 will stand aside for even the traffic of the stars." The 
 hero "shot terrible grapeshot of desire from his eyes!" 
 also a fusillade of tormented emotions. Matters were 
 apparently a little mixed, too, for the heroine was 
 struggling in the mysteries of love, which happened 
 to be a thicket. "She is caught in the thicket of it, 
 and hears the snarling of the dogs, and is afraid." By 
 and bye, in response to some assertion of her lover's, 
 the cries "Never," with a flush on her face and a smile 
 of unbelief. And what happens then ? Hear her histor- 
 ian : "And at the word the grey-haired Everlasting 
 Ironies ogled at each other." We thank thee, Scot, for 
 giving us the phrase. You get this on the seventeenth 
 page. And many a queer leap and turn of life and 
 letters you get before the two hundred and ninetieth, 
 where the author fills in his address which was then 
 "Monte Oliveto, Siena," and writes "The End." 
 
 Mr. Swift called his second book "The Tormentor." 
 
 86 
 
Presumably he thought -of the title too late to bestow 
 it on the first. This second volume possessed some 
 eccentric brilliancy and an easy, elated habit of epi- 
 gram. The epigrams occasionally appeared to grow 
 tipsy. The characters were essays which in some subtle 
 way were shot through a mould that made them look 
 on the outside like human beings. Thus moulded they 
 played their parts sometimes in electrical, sometimes 
 in cometary fashion. Most of them were shot into an 
 ice-field by way of finish. 
 
 Mr. L. F. Austin does not wish us to take him 
 seriously. Mr. Austin poses as a very minor poet in 
 prose. He carries good humour, real and artificial, to 
 fearful and wonderful extremes. In fact he is doggedly 
 facetious. He is perpetually digging things in general 
 and things in particular in the ribs, and politely asking 
 them to laugh. Apparently nothing in the universe 
 would be uninviting to his frolicsome knuckles 
 nothing from a pantechnicon to a comet. He is the 
 weekly humourist of Mr. Shorter's Sketch. Mr. 
 Shorter, who has made the Brontes his own, looked 
 lovingly after Victorian literature, and made moment- 
 ous literary alliances with the living. Not the least 
 momentous is that with Mr. Austin. To be sure with 
 L. F. A. you have a subtle feeling that somehow you 
 are getting humour on the hire system. He is a man of 
 uncanny surprises, too. He asks you to-day to con- 
 sider the beauties of Max Beerbohm, next week he 
 is cycling through Weybridge, and the Martian in- 
 
 87 
 
vaders of Mr. Wells's fancy are hot and heavy on his 
 handle bars ; seven days later he belabours us with 
 proofs that Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was beyond 
 doubt a vegetarian. His little jokes and free-hearted 
 fancies he also devoutly treasures up, and succumbs 
 after seven years or so to the demon of republication, 
 showering the lot upon us again with wicked chort- 
 lings to himself. The author of "At Random" is Irish- 
 American, but he has been tamed in London. On the 
 whole he has been a quiet benefactor to his time. 
 During the absence of Mr. Norman he has been assist- 
 ant editor of the Daily Chronicle, but few of his jokes 
 have been so serious as that He would never make 
 the mistake of Robert Barr, ex-Detroit editor, Indian 
 chief, and humourist, the mistake of giving us the 
 mild-cured blood-and-thunder of "Revenge" or a strike 
 novel with a purpose, such as "The Mutable Many." 
 Mr. Austin is more consistent 
 
 Mr. Douglas Sladen is to my mind one of the most 
 entertaining of all the figures which are in any wise 
 potent with one of the Great Powers into which book- 
 making London is divided. I know that by certain 
 flippant critics his "Who's Who" is not taken either 
 soberly or gravely ; and the style of his Literary 
 World reviewing, the trend of his "Dining Out" con- 
 fidences in the Queen, are not always reverentially re- 
 garded. Yet Mr. Sladen's place is apart, is unique ; 
 and though he makes something of a humorous appeal 
 to the slightly cynical student of our literary London, 
 
 88 
 
he is one of its most special products, a personality 
 that simply cannot be ignored. None is keener than 
 he on the festive side and significance of Literature. 
 His "At Homes" have soothed long regions of book- 
 making Suburbia, have warmed the cockles of the in- 
 nermost sanctuary of its heart. Furthermore has he 
 not done in his reviewing a more than great-hearted 
 justice to the novelists who are dear to it ? Those no- 
 velists have been called mediocrities, but mediocrities 
 want human sympathy as well as most people, and 
 since his return to London after his Melbourne profes- 
 sorship, his Japanese and sundry Oriental wander- 
 ings, a soft-eyed, broadly human kindliness and 
 charity to intellectual mediocrities have been one of 
 the high notes of Mr. Sladen's career. He has gathered 
 a fold of them into his quaint compilation "Who's 
 Who," where, along with the dates on which they hon- 
 oured the earth by being born into it, the dates of 
 their novels, their marrying and giving in marriage, 
 he has religiously recorded the names and natures of 
 their playthings. This bears us in sight of his raison 
 d'etre in Letters. That his subjects brought back the 
 Hellenic or Elizabethan spirit is of less interest in his 
 eyes than the kindly truth that some one or other 
 of them has a fancy for the surreptitious collec- 
 tion of the neighbours' coat-tail buttons. That they 
 admire Maeterlinck, that they follow Tolstoi, is no- 
 thing ; an assurance that they like onions or play leap- 
 frog is heavenly music to his ears ; similarly in his 
 capacities of joint secretary of the New Vagabonds', 
 
 89 
 
and honorary secretary of the Authors' Club, he stud- 
 ies with an almost pathetic solicitude the conditions of 
 the Palate, and the daily developments of the appe- 
 tites of Literature. Now the reader understands him : 
 play and feast are his notes. He has felt the pulse, 
 as it were, studied the teeth, and gravely regarded the 
 tongue of the modern author in a manner so unique 
 that we fear it must die with him, or become mere 
 charlatanry through incompetent and unworthy imi- 
 tators. In an age whose great thinkers were led to 
 put forth the parrot-cry of a return to nature, he has 
 not been afraid to stand out and bid our authors on 
 the contrary to be of ,good cheer (in a dual sense), to 
 come away from their fields, and folds, and retire- 
 ments, to hie them to Whitehall Court, and be devot- 
 ees for ever of the new faith of literary clubsomeness. 
 To see one enjoying a beefsteak or honouring a 
 toast with him, or facing his colleague Mr. Brown 
 Burgin over an apple dumpling, would bring a light 
 to his eye and a warm flush to his inner man, when the 
 interpretation of Wessex or the creation of Sherlock 
 Holmes would leave him cold. Nor are even these 
 things the entire traits that mark him out from the 
 thousand-fold book makers in our latterday London. 
 He is the epic-hearted, seven-souled champion of liter- 
 ary damseldom and womanhood, an intellectual Laun- 
 celot to whom every bookish wench, or waif in petti- 
 coats is a Genevieve. Has he not written of the "sine- 
 wy" way in which some of them tell stories? Has he 
 not also written 
 
 90 
 
"In an age in which women are marching to the 
 "front in the battle of life, no longer at a hysterical 
 "double quick-time, but with calm, dogged persistence, 
 "it is pleasant to see so many of them in the front 
 "rank of the literary battalion. Not to mention those 
 "who have long since won their spurs, like Mrs. Hum- 
 "phry Ward and Mrs. Burnett, we have strong women 
 "writers who are still quite young. * " (Gallantry ! Gal- 
 lantry !) 
 
 What graceful, felicitous phrasing ! as if Romeo were 
 the critic and Juliet the leading novelist in the array! 
 What puzzles one a little, though, is the necessity for 
 the "spurs" in connection with the marching battalions. 
 
 O Sladen, Sladen! our delight, 
 
 Who like a fairy bland and bright, 
 
 Dost move through mazy fields of style, 
 
 A-sowing wisdom all the while. 
 
 Hast thou thy flowery graces won 
 
 In forests 'neath the Austral sun? 
 
 Thy softer charms were found perhaps, 
 
 In old days with the gentle Japs, 
 
 The flavoured wit thou bring'st us home 
 
 Despair of Burgin and Jerome ! 
 
 We somehow seem to understand; 
 
 What puzzles is the wonderland 
 
 On Earthly or on lunar ground 
 
 Where thou thy metaphors hast found. 
 
 O Siaden, Sladen I our delight, 
 
 In mercy speak and set us right! 
 
 When Mr. Stead stopped Borderland "for the pre- 
 sent" : pulled down the blinds of his great Psychic man- 
 
 In the Literary World. 
 
 91 
 
sion, as it were, and the question of the day was the fu- 
 ture of "Julia," and men were asking if there was one 
 supreme individual amongst them whom it was meet 
 that she should still make the medium of her revealings, 
 the thoughts of many turned instinctively to Mr. Sla- 
 den, the Champion and interpreter of the "spurred" and 
 "dogged" onward-marching battalions of the fair sex. 
 This thought for a sea'ston broke the poignancy of our 
 sorrow for the loss of our beloved and uncanny quar- 
 terly. But for it indeed we would have felt in that 
 doom-packed time as if we were looking at once on the 
 going of the Gods from Olympus, the death-bed of the 
 Graces, the Collapse of the Renaissance, and the grey, 
 grim ashes of the cremated Beardsley period ! 
 
 As a further example I am almost afraid that we must 
 set that readable story-teller and honest-minded critical 
 observer, Mr. David Christie Murray, amongst the 
 authors who make direct appeal to our sense of hu- 
 mour. He positively meant, I fear, all that he said in 
 his book "My Contemporaries in Fiction." It seems a 
 wild remark to make, but the discussion that succeeded 
 the volume's publication leaves little or no doubt that 
 Mr. Murray really took his "Contemporaries" in that 
 sober, earnest way he pretended ! 
 
 It was not elaborate irony, it was not colossal make- 
 believe. Serious ! judicially serious ! What an extraordi- 
 nary thing! What an erring attitude! Mr. Christie 
 Murray was not as wise as a namesake. 
 
 The shrewd publisher, Mr. John Murray, expressed 
 
 92 
 
the wish some time ago, that for the next few years or 
 so there should be a cessation of book-writing. Unlike 
 Mr. Christie, Mr. John Murray was hardly serious, but 
 in his facetiousness lay wisdom and a kernel of great 
 truth. To take the contemporary book-world in its own 
 grave way is to misunderstand its position. Literature 
 positively wants a long holiday ; criticism needs time 
 and means for meditation ; both crave the mountain 
 breezes, the bracing, songful comradeship of the sea ; 
 the exaltation of spirit, the enlargement of horizon which 
 the ideal holiday of soul as well as of body brings. 
 Truly here were silence golden. The Chosen People let 
 the land lie fallow at certain periods ; even the Chosen 
 People of literature to say nothing of the neighbour- 
 ing Gentiles might treat similarly the regions of 
 imagination and all art. Men and things in the book- 
 world are most lamentably "run 'down," and we should 
 not treat them as if they were riotously robust 
 
 The question will have to be faced in all gravity 
 some day. Cultured and intelligent people must surely 
 grow tired of the volumes of ever lower and lower vi- 
 tality, ever narrowing art, which are in courtesy or ig- 
 norance styled the "Books of the Season." They will 
 make out a list of those of the world's great books of 
 which so far they know no more than the names and 
 with the generality of people how formidable is such 
 a list ! they will allot a few years to "pulling up" with 
 those classics, and then, soothed, uplifted, freshened in 
 spirit and widened in mind, they will think of asking if 
 any contemporary has got anything immortal to say. 
 
 93 
 
Meanwhile the publishers noting the "spirit of the 
 time," will practically have ceased to publish anything 
 new ; they will tell the ambitious young man and the 
 ardent young woman with manuscripts that "really the 
 only market is for the Charing Cross edition of 'Epic- 
 tetus,' the Mark-Lane 'Homer,' the Blackfriars 'Virgil,' 
 the Fleet Street 'Dante,' and the rest of them. Before 
 half-a-dozen of the Silent Years are over the multitude 
 of those ambitious young men and women will be doing 
 useful work with the steam-roller, and the sewing-ma- 
 chine ; with collar-dressing, with sub-editing police- 
 court reports ; with market-gardening, and teaching 
 biology to evening classes. By the end of the period 
 of Golden Silence a young man or woman with a ma- 
 nuscript in Paternoster Row must needs be as strange 
 as Macaulay's New Zealander. There will then be a 
 chance for the rise and the quiet consideration of the 
 genuine litterateur. 
 
 Assuredly such a happy time must bloom in some 
 far, fair century forward. We cannot go on at the pre- 
 sent rate of almost machine-making prose and verse, 
 of flat, thin-spreading, air-beating criticism. Our minds 
 rebel at the daily strain and the resulting dulness. We 
 write and read a hundred books a month, at the lowest ; 
 we have read them at our burdened tables while the 
 Spring blossoms burgeoned, and the Summer sang to 
 the seas and lands, and the cloistral woodland aisles of 
 Autumn grew sadder and dimmer, and Winter laughed 
 wild and shrilly in the face of Time, and Nature had 
 her myriad appeals and messages which we heeded not 
 
 94 - 
 
no, we stood "with blinded eyesight poring over 
 miserable books" ; muffled for us the music of the 
 spheres. And lo ! on our tables lie another hundred, and 
 another Grace in his heyday cannot make centuries 
 like the publishers' messenger. And the difference be- 
 tween the new hundred and the hundred volumes we 
 reviewed last month J:o man may tell. 
 
 Yet, withal, we must candidly admit of course that if 
 the creative spirit is denied to the vast majority of those 
 in our midst who have assumed the masques and airs 
 of litterateurs, they possess in many instance^ most di- 
 verting and unconsciously engaging traits. Though it 
 knows not, the sides of literary London are splitting 
 with laughter-moving material. Even a few great fig- 
 ures have been affected in an amazing degree by the 
 peculiarities of their age, and losing awhile their intel- 
 lectual sanity and severity, have played the fool agree- 
 ably. It is well worth while, even in an age that deems 
 itself serious beyond all telling an age that has de- 
 ceived so experienced a traveller as Mr. Christie Mur- 
 ray to lay down our classics for a span, and go out 
 amongst the fancy fair of the freaks and try our luck 
 at shooting literary folly as it flies. If we look with the 
 right vision we cannot fail to see a whimsical rally, the 
 Absurd putting on the airs of Art, Art putting on airs 
 of the Absurd, the Non-essential walking as if it owned 
 the earth and had cheated time into giving it a lease in 
 perpetua, the Ephemeral solemnly making out and en- 
 dowing its gifts upon Posterity. But to take them se- 
 riously not this journey, thanks! 
 
 95 
 
I cannot take Mrs. Sarah Grand seriously as a novel- 
 ist In publishing this statement, perhaps, I have gone 
 far towards blasting my literary career, for I fear I have 
 greatly offended that great, good woman, Mrs. Sarah 
 Tooley. Mrs. Tooley in all probability will go down 
 the immediate ages as the biographer of royalty, but 
 in distant aeons she will surely shine out essentially, 
 and it may be solely, as the interpreter of Mrs. Grand. 
 Personally I can never forget that day in the dying '97 
 when it was announced to the world at large that Mrs. 
 Tooley had had with Mrs. Grand "an important and 
 deeply interesting interview." Verily my pen trembles 
 as I recall that momentous proclamation. These su- 
 preme women had met! "The Heavenly Twins" (new 
 series) had shaken hands and talked it might even be 
 their lips had touched! My sole wonder was simply 
 that earth did not burst into one universal coat of blush- 
 ing blossoms for joy of the moment and the meeting. 
 
 A little later I read "The Beth Book." A few hund- 
 red pages of its full five hundred have absolutely no 
 connection with story-telling of any kind or character. 
 Mrs. Grand has thought earnestly, though perhaps to 
 no very great purpose, on a number of questions affect- 
 ing the upbringing of girls, the training of the young 
 idea, and the general condition and status of women 
 in the modern world She nags in a most inartistic way, 
 but much though I dislike her method, I see, of course, 
 the justice of a number of her not very original or 
 graphically put pleas for womankind ; and I have no 
 idea of setting myself to controvert her theories on the 
 
 96 
 
subject of child-management But on the question of 
 the number of pages which may justly be devoted to 
 the subject in a novel I fancy I would differ directly 
 and utterly from the lady. Mr. De Vere has said that 
 poetry refuses to take up more philosophy than it can 
 hold in solution, and surely something similar may be 
 said concerning literature and the ethics of the nursery. 
 
 Mrs. Grand is concerned with two generations, and 
 she follows Beth, her heroine, from her birthday through 
 her infancy, childhood, school days, love affairs, such as 
 they were, married unhappiness, revolution, and efforts 
 in literature with tireless particularity. Of course a 
 thoughtful woman dealing with so sensitive a heroine 
 must needs be interesting at some stages. This is her 
 summary of Beth, who was born in the north of Ireland, 
 and was a coastguard officer's daughter : 
 
 "Beth was a fine instrument, sensitive to a touch, 
 "and considering the way she was handled, it would 
 "have been a wonder if discordant effects had not been 
 "produced upon her. Hers was a nature with a wide 
 "range. It is probable that every conceivable impulse 
 "was latent in her, every possibility of good or evil." 
 Think of that! 
 
 The infantile and girlish progress of Beth in Ireland 
 and Britain is detailed to very tedium. "She had a 
 great aversion to bread and butter at one time." She 
 duly discovered that there are two halfpennies in a 
 penny. "She got a penny on Saturday, promptly spent 
 it in sweets, and by Monday she wanted more." Really ! 
 Of such detail the early chapters are compact. Through 
 
mortal page on mortal page of them one is expected to 
 travel. The trivial succeeds the ordinary till the heart 
 cries. It is as if one stood on the platform at Ludgate 
 Hill waiting for one's train to the green, human country, 
 and was forced for a whole hour to wait and watch the 
 passage of lumbering goods trains and intolerable coal- 
 trucks. As for the style in those pages, it is sometimes 
 ingenuous and sometimes curiously amateurish. 
 
 Decidedly a great deal of the matter in the book 
 should have been put into a volume on the proper rear- 
 ing and development of children, a second one on the 
 management of girls, and a third one on questions af- 
 fecting the woman of more mature age. Or much of 
 the early portions might have been utilised in a series 
 of Jectures to an audience of mothers. Mrs. Grand 
 strikes one as well equipped for the rather positive 
 though perhaps unduly detailed opening of a discussion 
 at such a meeting. Probably the other mothers present 
 would have a good deal to say in opposition to her. But 
 at any rate in such a place the matter would receive ap- 
 propriate attention. Jumbling the material together as 
 we find it here, and calling it a novel, is a further illus- 
 tration of that amateurish idea of literature which meets 
 one so often in the book. The sympathetic governance 
 of the children's room, or young ladies' academy, is an 
 admirable thing, but it is a poor equipment for the 
 literary world. To be sure Mrs. Grand puts some childish 
 fancies very well, and asks naive questions about the 
 mind and the universe. But these are hardly enough. 
 
 In succeeding pages there are many womanly recol- 
 
 98 
 
lections, affecting enough and natural in their way, but 
 certainly not touched by any illuminating art. Alto- 
 gether, Mrs. Grand takes a long time to make Beth in- 
 teresting ; even then she goes on adding, fingering, 
 and rearranging bits of character, pieces of peculiarity, 
 glimpses of mood, like a collection of bric-a-brac. We 
 see far too little play of real human drama. Mrs. Grand 
 is well-meaning, but her method is laborious. As she 
 pursues it the Muses take sal volatile, and the Graces 
 go to sleep. 
 
 Humorous poetry of a dry and delicate kind per- 
 meated the work of Mr. Stephen Crane in his Green 
 Badge of Courage period. In the eventful year '97, he 
 discovered Ireland. He looked up to Queenstown on 
 her high terraces and found her eminently contemplat- 
 ive. Staring always at the coming and the going of 
 great ships she sat Her business was to witness. From 
 her pride of place one could almost hear the voice of 
 the western world, he said, and see the other millions. 
 Hence Ireland here had a strange broad quality, a kind 
 of egotism of vision (O Sage! O Sage!), as if from 
 their hills her people could comprehend the gestures 
 of a man in Denver. Because they were Irish, and be- 
 cause of this pinnacled position Mr. Crane discovered 
 that they assimilated like lightning. When a stranger 
 hove in sight they had a little accurate opinion, a mental 
 snapshot, which was a perfect bit of machinery. We had 
 heard of the "cloudy and lightning genius of the Gael," 
 J but "assimilate like lightning" was surely the artist's 
 touch ! 
 
 99 
 
Mr. Crane went inland and discovered the Irish po- 
 liceman. This Irish policeman was clothed in a light 
 that never was on land or sea. His helmet flashed in 
 more lights than Don Quixote ever saw in the barber's 
 basin. Mr. Crane's Irish constable was a poetical, pen- 
 sive, almost intangible personage who held no discourse 
 with plain-clothes Pat and was unloved of Irish girls. 
 Apparently if he talked it was merely "to fill up the 
 blanks in life" Mr. Yeats may have taught him Mae- 
 terlinck! Certainly his soul was like a star and dwelt 
 apart He was in Mr. Crane's version such a figure 
 as we might expect John Keats to set in one of those 
 
 Magic casements opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn. 
 
 What a difference it might make in the relations of 
 the two countries it we could only have Mr. Crane in 
 Dublin Castle as Chief Secretary! 
 
 Mr. Leslie Stephen is a cultured and judicious critic, 
 but at times he says happy things whose quaintness 
 might well make old Saturn shake his sides. One day 
 he stirs the envy of Barry Pain and Max Beerbohm by 
 the solemn statement that Pascal was a sincere, an 
 humble, and even an abject believer, precisely because 
 he was a thorough-going sceptic. Another he discourses 
 persuasively on the influence of fatness upon poetry, 
 with illustrations from Shelley and Byron. These things 
 are not to be enlarged upon in clumsy language. We 
 enjoy them like the enlivening sunshine, thanking the 
 gods for gifts so fresh in an age of prose and dullards. 
 
 100 
 
THE GREAT MACLEOD MYSTERY 
 
 Fiona Macleod wrote of the Hebrides, and the first 
 effect on the southern temperament was fascination. 
 "The Sin-Eater" and "The Washer of The Ford" were 
 of tragedy and glamour compact ; they had a species 
 of magic which some critics imbibed like wine. Fated 
 ground seemed lona and those wistful, spell-struck 
 outer isles, with their tragic traditions, their blem" of 
 music, romance, horror and mystery. Still later her 
 lyrics, "From the Hills of Dream," though the lyric 
 appeared scarcely spacious enough for her talent, and 
 lacked the atmosphere of mist and enchantment which 
 in the wider world of the best of her stories was made 
 memorable her lyrics often were quick with beauty : 
 beauty of moon-white shoon, of the fairy-footed grasses, 
 of the shadows and spells of the moor-side. With un- 
 common art she even imparted a spirituality to a few 
 milking-songs. To the beauty of romantic passion and 
 the mournful beauty of woman's tragedies she also 
 gave some striking, irregular song in which we still 
 deemed something lacking. Somethng, too, in her 
 poetry at times looked a mere beautiful juggling with 
 mystical phrases, yet the former melody haunted her 
 
 IOI 
 
lips even when she had apparently no care to be intel- 
 ligible. It might be reasoned that she was at such times 
 like a woman of genius who carried the most ordinary 
 woman's whims and caprices into her poetry. It could 
 laso be said that a little less of the influence of Walt 
 Whitman to say nothing of Mr. Meredith in his more 
 tantalising modes upon her wild Celtic power would 
 be eminently desirable. 
 
 Thus far the voice of, let us say, criticism. A season 
 came when London awoke to the fact that it knew not 
 Fiona Macleod as it knew the great authors of the hour. 
 Her appetites were a sealed book to it ; the colour of 
 her hair was more mysterious than any Northland mys- 
 tery. A wild, almost Hebridean, hunger passed here and 
 there through the literary world, a hunger for a feast 
 of fact, even with a little that might be fancy-bred, con- 
 cerning her stature, her wardrobe, her next-door 
 neighbours and the desire of her eyes. The paragraph- 
 ists were for once dumb oracles; : a thing unprecedented 
 in our all-revealing age. 
 
 Then elusive whispers stirred the land. Fiona 
 Macleod was William Sharp ; Fiona Macleod was Wil- 
 liam Butler Yeats ; one confident but perhaps waggish 
 voice murmured "T. P. O'Connor',, thereby associating 
 one further irony with the name of the bland and wist- 
 ful Irishman who in middle age came to damn the four- 
 pound loaf and glorify the neurotic woman. For many 
 days and seasons the whole secret was a worry and a 
 source of marvel in Fleet Street Witness this plaint 
 in a literary quarter of an evening paper, a plaint which 
 
 1 02 
 
seems to voice the spirit of a day when an interesting, 
 yet to some minds almost tragical, announcemnt was 
 sent forth : 
 
 "Another development of the great Macleod mystery ! 
 "The Lady Fiona of lona is now said to be married, and 
 "the hopes of certain imaginative young enthusiasts of 
 "the Celtic Renaissance are dashed to earth. Whether 
 "the young lady (for the adjective we will brave the or- 
 "deal by fire, water, or KaJyard dialect) should be de- 
 "scribed as Mrs. Macleod, or whether she was origin- 
 "ally a Miss Fiona Macleod, and is now a Mrs. Mac 
 "Somebody Else, we know not. The whole business is 
 "as mazy as that old dance tune, 'Miss Macleod's 
 "Reel," and we appeal to the shade of Sherlock Holmes 
 "to help us out" 
 
 A resulting tragedy deserves at least an attempt in 
 song 1 : 
 
 THE BARD'S TRAGEDY 
 
 A Bard there was, and he twanged his lyre 
 (While prosing were you and I!) 
 To a book and petticoat and pen of fire 
 (With a mythic mamma, a nameless sire). 
 But the Bard he called her his Heart's Desire 
 (And Petrick Geddes* looked sly!) 
 
 O the dreams -we waste, and the reams we waste, 
 And the moon-struck love we planned ! 
 All offered to one who never could know, 
 Being either a matron whose pulse beat slow, 
 Or a Shade on Sana's strand! 
 
 * It is hardly necessary to say that Professor Geddes is 
 the Celtic publisher and pioneer in North Britain. The Lady 
 Fiona ttie was one of his bright particular stars. 
 
 103 
 
His stamps he spent, and the reams he wrote 
 
 Were full of his weird love's cry. 
 
 A mystery fenced his Fair like a moat 
 
 But a bard possessing the Celtic "note" 
 
 Must follow a Shadowy Petticoat 
 
 (Till the end of the world is nigh !) 
 
 O the flesh he lost! O his soul love- tossed! 
 O the jump from the bridge he planned I 
 When his dear Fiona some ruffian wrote 
 Was but William Sharp in a petticoat, 
 Or Yeats back from Fairyland! 
 
 But his foolish head he longed to hide 
 
 When a scribe that spurned a lie, 
 
 Proclaimed that his Love had been long a bride 
 
 (That her husband's eye was wakeful and wide!) 
 
 Gad! some of him laughed, but the most of him cried 
 
 (And he lay on his couch to die !) 
 
 But it isn't the loss, and it isn't the cross 
 
 Now burns like a Bodley brand. 
 
 It's coming to know that no publishing friend 
 
 Will print or pay for the lays h penned 
 
 To his Love on lona's strand. 
 
 104 
 
GALE'S OWN MIXTURE: 
 
 A FIND FOR THE AUTOLYCUS 
 
 OF NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 CRITICISM 
 
 Mr. Norman Gale plays cricket and football, I have 
 learnt from his daily biographers, and Mr. Le Gal- 
 lienne and others have assured us that he has written 
 some of the bright particular poetry of his epoch. I 
 have never seen Mr. Gale at cricket or football, and, 
 exhaustive though my researches have been in contem- 
 porary literature, I have unfortunately missed that work 
 of his which could be called poetry. I am, therefore, 
 unable to say anything about him in what are, perhaps, 
 his. greatest roles ; but I have followed with delighted 
 interest some of his boyish gambols in what he no 
 doubt deems the field of criticism. In the Literary 
 World an organ popularly supposed to be concerned 
 with literary criticism, to say nothing of the quaint in- 
 tellectual confidences of Mr. Douglas Sladen he has 
 dealt with Mr. Morley Roberts's "Maurice Ouain. * " 
 
 * This is of course an 1897 volume of Mr. Morley Roberts 
 ex-miner, traveller, story-teller, and member of the Authors' 
 Club. 
 
 105 
 
and the sight out-Rugbys Rugby (pardon the present 
 tense I cannot escape it the whole scene is so viv- 
 idly before me). It is criticism of the whoop and yell, 
 the triumphant "goal," and the flying football. It im- 
 parts into belles lettres the delightful boyish; tame- 
 savagery of the sporting field. As one studies Mr. Gale 
 in his bounds and leaps and springs, one is tempted 
 to cry with the wild character in Lever : "Clear the 
 way for the Royal Bengal Tiger." 
 
 Mr. Gale begins with a fine burst : 
 
 "Mr. Roberts flatly refuses to allow bystanders to 
 "note with an unperturbed mind the fluctuations of those 
 "scales which on one side contain the hero of this novel, 
 "and on the other no less a person, or sprite, than Lon- 
 don's Bad Angel Mr. Morley Roberts, sometimes 
 "with a spring, sometimes with a hop, and sometimes 
 "with a jump, keeps on perplexing the measurement 
 "by flopping in to the balance which holds the Bad 
 "Angel." 
 
 Graceful, is it not ? And luminous ? 
 
 We discover, furthermore, that the hero, "strangely 
 depleted of bread and cheese energies," was concern- 
 ed to "hide his talents in a napkin." And then I 
 beseech the teader to brace himself for aboriginal 
 things : 
 
 "The author has attempted to surround his whim- 
 "sical, moody, savage puppet with an atmosphere deriv- 
 "ed from an amalgamation of most that is gross, cor- 
 "rupt, and barbaric in London. The idea is good ; the 
 "coupling is a triumphant success whenever Mr. Mor- 
 
 106 
 
"ley Roberts is content to play the part of a discreet 
 "chorus, but when he puts on Maurice Ouain's trousers 
 "and necktie, and utters for himself what should have 
 "proceeded direct from the lips of his creature, we be- 
 "gin to perceive that the writer is guilty of assault and 
 "battery upon our sense of artistic proportion." 
 
 I think all this should have had artistic illustration : 
 the mind recurs instinctively to the author of "Pre- 
 historic Peeps." 
 
 The evolution of the "moody puppet," the reader 
 will have noted, is singularly interesting. In the "scales" 
 and the society of London's Bad Angel there is an at- 
 tempt to "surround" him with a barbaric atmosphere. 
 The "coupling"( ! ! !) of the puppet and the atmos- 
 phere is a success when Mr. Roberts plays the part 
 of a "discreet chorus"(!) (As if Mr. Santley and his 
 pupils were to conduct a concert while they grappled 
 with Chatham and Dover cattle-trucks !) ; but all's a 
 muddle when he puts on the puppet's trousers and 
 necktie, and starts talking. In faith I cannot wonder. 
 There has been no more delightfully delicate blend 
 of metaphor since Addison wrote : 
 
 "I bridle in my struggling Muse with pain 
 That longs to launch into a bolder strain." 
 
 And Addison had nothing of our terrific modern 
 strenuousness ! 
 
 But in "Gale's Own Mixture" there are other ele- 
 ments. I must quote a little further from this buoyant, 
 boyish review : 
 
 "Suffice it to say that whoever may nurse in his 
 
 107 
 
"breast an unlimited love for our capital will surely 
 "experience an astounding attack of the staggers, 
 "while, with eyes unconsciously apeing the gooseberry, 
 "he reads the knock-me-down sentences to be found 
 "'scattered among the pages of 'Maurice Quain.' " 
 
 The moody atmosphere-coupled puppet subse- 
 quently went out in a boat on the river, became a 
 "fisher of woman/' and was troubled about "the housing 
 of his catch." I am really afraid to proceed further. 
 Those quick changes and amazing developments are 
 too much for me. I have an uneasy feeling that some- 
 body or other turns into an ape or a dragon of the 
 prime before the end is reached. If the Muses had 
 been visiting Mr. Gale before he wrote this "criticism" 
 they must have gone direct from a ladies' I beg 
 pardon, goddesses' athletic tournament on Olympus, 
 a tournament which ended in a scrimmage, and wherein 
 all things got mixed. 
 
 1 08 
 
THE PASSING OF THE POETS 
 
 I once ventured to suggest that the prevalence of 
 minor song in our day "like a whole sea overhead," 
 in Browning phrase might be in sooth a sure sign of 
 the Millennium. The cynics, no doubt, will treat the 
 suggestion as sarcasm. Yet it could be honestly de- 
 fended. We might reason this way : The world has 
 grown many degrees sweeter and more musicful of 
 late years ; a wonderful change has come over the 
 spirit of her dream, and the indices of that change 
 are the despised minor lyrists. If the course of song 
 continues to grow for the next hundred years -as it 
 has grown within the past decade there can be few 
 save lyrical and sweetening influences in the universe. 
 "The old world has gone up in fire," says Natty Cramp 
 to his frightened mother in Mr. Justin McCarthy's 
 "Dear Lady Disdain." Who knows but that flowing 
 minstrelsy, not fire, will be the new regenerating ele- 
 ment that some fair day to come the old earth will 
 glide into the perfect new in a flood of entrancing 
 song ? Minor poetry may have a far deeper significance 
 than the critics have attributed to it so far. Q. E. D. 
 We may bid Mr. Traill be of good cheer on his lonely, 
 frost-bitten high peak of Literature. 
 
 109 
 
I am a few years older now than when I made the 
 suggestion, and I have lost faith in my theory. I fear 
 me that the most optimistic seeker after poetry cannot 
 grow enthusiastic over its main tendencies nowadays. 
 Mr. Traill's discovery of sixty several personages who 
 spoke the language of poetry is as elusive as a New 
 Atlantis or Mr. Yeats' Celtic Paradise, and it is to be 
 feared provokes little else than hollow or good-hu- 
 moured laughter amongst the serious or critical-minded 
 at this time of day. One's spirit, the bitter-minded say, 
 must have shrivelled overmuch if it can rest satisfied 
 many moments over the slow fires represented by the 
 poetical souls of at least forty of Mr. Traill's sixty. Mr. 
 Stopford Brooke's contention that our men of verse for 
 the most part are merely people who are keeping alive 
 the habit of poetry seems much nearer honest criticism, 
 criticism which frankly faces the truth, which recognises 
 that in the world of song, as elsewhere, the body with- 
 out the spirit is dead. 
 
 Poetry, to be sure, is illustrating few of the violences, 
 revolts, robust crudities that have or had place recently 
 in prose. Marie Corellis are far to seek in it There is 
 therein little washing of the soul in the gaze of all men 
 and hanging it out to dry like clothes on a clothes-line. 
 There is more artistic reticence amongst the poets than 
 amongst their brethren in prose. Much of this unfor- 
 tunately is explainable on no better ground than that 
 of low vitality ; that is to say, low spiritual vitality- 
 vocal vitality is not so scarce. Yes, the spirit for the most 
 part has gone, or is going, out of English poetry. The 
 
 no 
 
strong singers have sung their best, and those who pipe 
 now that the greater voices are failing have not spirit- 
 uality, vision, inspiration, realisation of life sufficient to 
 lead them to large utterances and large effects. Skill of 
 form and skilful echoing of old habit, the clever imitat- 
 ive song they possess and offer, but new temperaments, 
 new reaches of spirit and imagination, new artistic sur- 
 prises they have them not 
 
 The strong singers have sung their best. Mr. Swin- 
 burne, Mr. Aubrey De Vere, Mr. Meredith, Mr. Bucha- 
 nan, Mr. Austin Dobson, Mrs. Meynell, Mr. Watts-Dun- 
 ton, the work by which the just will judge them 
 seems as far back with the past as the work of Rossetti, 
 William Morris, and Tennyson. The Devils Case may 
 go to the curiosities of literature, and the Tale of Balen 
 is but an aftermath, meagre beside the Poems and 
 Ballads and The Songs before Sunrise. 
 
 Almost all along the line there is a painful tendency 
 to narrowing ways, to intellectual shrinking. Spiritual- 
 mindedness and visionary power are becoming farther 
 and farther to seek in the latter-day muse. This is large- 
 ly explained, of course, by the fact that a number of 
 more or less accomplished people who have none of the 
 poet's inborn gifts and inspiration, who have acquired 
 only the tricks and forms of singing, try to juggle with 
 the art of poetry. The gods from their far-off Olympus 
 have charged our modern atmosphere with a sort of in- 
 tellectual electricity, and all who are more or less sen- 
 sitive to such influences have been deflected to song or 
 story by its currents. If one individual were dowered 
 
 in 
 
with all he might possibly be a genius, but the modicum 
 each possesses under present circumstances rather tends 
 to make him ridiculous, all the more so, if he puts on 
 airs of immortality, as some of us are wont to do. A 
 little inspiration is a dangerous thing. To use a more 
 homely and, perhaps, a truer metaphor than that of the 
 intellectual electricity, it may be said that a huge num- 
 ber of us are simply literary socialists. We have scant 
 belief in, we have scant respect for, private property in 
 literature. The ideas of the ages near and far, we re- 
 gard as a sort of common fund from which all may take, 
 simply dressing up in our own petty way that portion 
 which we are pleased to draw from the great central 
 store. 
 
 Certain poets seem to have been frightened from 
 their first path, or chilled upon it by the coldness, pre- 
 occupation, materialism, and decadence of the age. 
 Others, who have tried to be the singers of decadence, 
 to pat and pet it in all its moods and emotions, have be- 
 come unreal, or sorry, or cheap and nasty. One grows 
 tired of their pipings about mean sins and timid inde- 
 cencies. We agree with Max that they are not strong 
 enough to be wicked. One need not be a "canting 
 moralist" to despise them. One forgave Mr. Swinburne 
 much of his early erotic extravagance and glamour of 
 exuberant passion for the sake of his high-sweeping po- 
 etry ; but when we drop after many palling stages this 
 low-toned decade to Mr. Wratislaw's Orchids, and the 
 musical melancholy with which Mr. Dowson recalls his 
 "old passion" (though we give Mr. Dowson credit for 
 
 112 
 
a few more than promising verses), well we are tired 
 that is all. 
 
 "And thou, sweet Poetry! thou loveliest maid, 
 Still first to fly where sensual joys invade." 
 
 Goldsmith was right apparently. 
 
 Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, in a much discussed article 
 some time back, gave eight writers, if I remember 
 rightly, as typical of latter-day poetical art. With a 
 touch that would be Shawesque were it ironical, he sub- 
 sequently dubbed them a composite Shakespeare. 
 These were Mr. Davidson, Mr. Watson, Mr. Francis 
 Thompson, Mr. W. B. Yeats, Mr. Arthur Symons, Mr. 
 Kipling, Mr. Norman Gale, and Mr. Alfred Hayes. Ob- 
 viously we must add Mr. Le Gallienne himself. Does 
 not the list show at a glance the "wonderful" nature of 
 our time of song? The plaintive bleating of midland 
 sheep in the quiet evening is often suggested by 
 the verse of Mr. Hayes in the Vale of Arden. Mr. Gale 
 has become as thin and mechanical as Mr. Kipling and 
 Mr. Davidson in their least interesting moods. 
 
 I hope it is not blasphemy to assert that Mr. Kipling 
 and Mr. Davidson have uninteresting moods, for in 
 many respects they are greater than even our great 
 young men. They know more about the Everlasting 
 Hills than Canon Farrar or Dr. Parker. Mr. Davidson's 
 old habit of taking his worst characters to Heaven, and 
 making God set them in the high places, all questions 
 of the Decalogue being superseded for a homily of Mr. 
 Davidson's making, is still with him in all its force in 
 
those hours when he is not engaged in the desperate 
 effort to whip his humanity out of its dour suburban 
 pessimism into cheeriness. Mr. Kipling, in such devel- 
 opments as "The Last Chantey," or when he is free for 
 the nonce from the exacting duties of his poetical Co- 
 lonial Secretaryship takes a kindred high hand The 
 initial idea is a fine one, founded on the momentous 
 saying, "And there was no more sea" : 
 
 Thus said the Lord in the vault above the Cherubim, 
 Calling to the angels and the souls in their degree, 
 
 "Lo! Earth has passed away 
 
 On the smoke of Judgment Day; 
 That Our Word may be established, shall we gather up 
 
 the sea?" 
 
 No poet need ask a larger or sublimer subject for his 
 song than that which here meets Mr. Kipling. The fact 
 that he thought of it, and the further fact of certain 
 lines in it, form a triumphant answer to critics who re- 
 fuse to take him seriously, or who shake their heads 
 over him as the established poetical superstition of the 
 Man in the Street. But the treatment of the idea is un- 
 worthy of a poet of a spacious imaginative gift and that 
 spiritual-mindedness without which the great poet does 
 not exist Thus, Judas and Paul having spoken to God, 
 we have this strange turn : 
 
 Then said the souls of the gentlemen adventurers - 
 Fettered wrist to bar for all red iniquity; 
 
 "Ho! we revel in our chains 
 
 O'er the sorrow that was Spain's, 
 Heave or sink it, leave or drink it, we were masters of 
 
 the seal" 
 
 114 
 
Apart from the pert vulgarity of the concluding line, 
 it argues a "little" idea of the conditions of things on 
 the Judgment Day to represent a band of poor spirits 
 hurling at the Father of the Universe a pitiful render- 
 ing of a nineteenth-century Navy League motto. At- 
 titudes like this show how lacking is Mr. Kipling still 
 in some of the higher poet's essentials ; how he is apt 
 to stumble when he leaves off idealising and poetising 
 Tommy Atkins, and looks inward on his own vision 
 and imaginative equipment 
 
 Perhaps the very generous reader will think that a 
 few casual attitudes from Mr. Davidson and Mr. Kip- 
 ling are insufficient to justify any real charge of that 
 small ungodliness or God-belittling spirit in which Mr. 
 Buchanan is the chief latterday reveller. Somehow, 
 the matter seems to me to lie deeper than that generous 
 reader thinks, and concerns us chiefly for, of course, 
 a man's religion is none of our business because it in- 
 dicates not only a want of vision, but a remoteness 
 from the great and moving realities of life. Mr. Kipling 
 and Mr. Davidson, standing apart from the world, are 
 not greatly enough equipped to depend on their own 
 innate resources, and as time passes we seem to detect 
 in them a spiritual shrivelling and narrowing, which ex- 
 plains some of their insufficiency and weakness, though 
 this is accompanied in Mr. Kipling's case by a tremend- 
 ous bodily and vocal vitality. With this state of things 
 God gradually becomes a minor personage ; if the 
 reader will pardon the apparent profanity, a mere Ce- 
 lestial representative of John Davidson and Rudyard 
 
Kipling who treat the archangels with an immeasurably 
 smaller share of consideration than Mr. Archer would 
 accord to a rival interpreter of Ibsen. It is wrong to 
 ascribe their attitude towards Providence as kindred to 
 that of Mr. Swinburne, who, in the moods of revolution 
 and tempest-music which gave us "Songs Before Sun- 
 rise," declared that God was played out. That was one 
 outcome of the furious extravagance of a brilliant mind ; 
 of a soul whose genius was running in a lava-tide. The 
 other which we have been considering is the outcome of 
 a much poorer state of being. "But," cries the indignant 
 reader, "have not all our great critics exhausted the 
 language in their laudations of Mr. Kipling's amazing 
 vitality ?" Precisely, my friend ; but I am dealing with 
 spiritual as distinguished from vocal, bodily, and other 
 species of vitality. 
 
 But let us come close to Mr. Kipling. Do we not 
 find that he is giving something to Imperialism which 
 was meant for mankind? He fasihions very bold and 
 resonant stanzas ; he brings his clenched fist down as 
 he shouts forth fine national sentiments which the Aver- 
 age Man will vigorously applaud and immediately for- 
 get Some of this well-stamped, strong-thumped song- 
 fashioning is as mechanical as barrel-churning ; as to 
 finding artistic beauty within it, a large imaginative soul 
 beyond it, one might as well expect to find violets 
 blossoming on a blacksmith's anvil. It is good, bluff, 
 straight-flung poetry for the "Ordinary Person," it will 
 nerve him at his work, and on his platform, and by his 
 bar ; it will make him a better, though a more insular, 
 
 116 
 
fellow ; but it will hardly blow the dust from any long- 
 closed chamber of his spirit. (Some of it, by the way, 
 cannot be understood by the Man in the Street, and at 
 bottom it is so trite that no one else can appreciate it.) 
 It is good vociferous poetry for its day and its genera- 
 tion ; but it requires no great gift of prophecy to say 
 that the time will come when it must needs be as effete 
 as the Corn Law rhymes or last year's reviews. In other 
 moods Mr. Kipling sings with equal verve of power and 
 force ; the might-is-right theory in sounding verse. A 
 fine, though rough and long-winded example in "The 
 Seven Seas" is "Me. Andrew's Hymn," wherein the 
 dour Scotch engineer, who says little and thinks much, 
 sings the Song of Steam. The romance and miracle of 
 ship and train Mr. Kipling sings gallantly once in a 
 while. Indeed, Force, Imperial England, and Romance, 
 are the guiding themes to which he gives his heart 
 and often heartening, though now and then raw and 
 rugged utterance and occasionally rather obscure ut- 
 terance. In such pieces as "The Cast Rhyme of True 
 Thomas," and the poem about English Flowers in his 
 latest volume Mr. Kipling looks into his real spiritual 
 land, passing down a golden vista where the Man in the 
 Street will hardly follow him. Such a departure proves 
 to me that Mr. Kipling has an artist sense which he has 
 but slightly developed and for which he gets little credit, 
 that he is a poet who could write of the revealing heart 
 of things as well as indulge in the whoop-and-drum- 
 beat exhibitions, and the melodious-cum-mordajdlnt glo- 
 rification of tame savagery and rude strength which 
 
 117 
 
have made his name and fame with the Man in the 
 Street 
 
 Yes, we get all too little of that better, artistic Kip- 
 ling. He has been subjected to a good deal of spoiling 
 of late years and seems to take to it kindly and unsus- 
 piciously. Some time ago we found he was to figure 
 in the costly, limited, elaborate "complete" edition with 
 which the interprising publisher endeavours to give a 
 classic air to the contemporary author, the "complete 
 edition" which seems to be the Literary Earth-Heaven 
 of the great young man. Mr. Meredith certainly, Mr. 
 Hardy possibly, may deserve, and can stand, that sort 
 of thing. One smiles when such an honour is accorded 
 to Mr. Barrie, knowing that it will be taken seriously 
 in no literary centre beyond the Bookman Office ; but 
 in Mr. Kipling's case it may well set one's teeth on edge. 
 Mr. Kipling is so young yet, in some respects so intel- 
 lectually raw, in certain others so really dubious ! The 
 thoughtful critic cannot regard him otherwise than as 
 a young man with much of his way to make, and with 
 much of his way in doubt A "complete edition" of his 
 books, as if setting his own seal on the idea that his per- 
 manent work is done, and that his place henceforward 
 is the slippered ease of the fireside, has altogether a 
 comical significance. If this is not the idea ; if author 
 and publisher really believe that, come what may here- 
 after, he has already done enough to warrant the costly 
 and sedate tomes which denote in some minds the "con- 
 temporary classic," then the lack of humour and critical 
 acumen is lamentable. 
 
 118 
 
Give Mr. Kipling fair play, set him doing his best, 
 and he illustrates skill, insight, grip of realities, and 
 bold promise. Years ago, in the "Departmental Ditties," 
 with all that was fortuitous and flimsy therein, the sing- 
 er showed a genuine sense of the essentials and fine 
 loyalties as well as the ironies of life. People who ex- 
 pressed surprise at the note in the '97 Jubilee "Reces- 
 sional" had apparently forgotten, or had missed, his '87 
 Jubilee warning for such it was "What the People 
 Said." The jubilations and congratulations were to him 
 "The voice of the wind of an hour." 
 
 Then, far and near as the twilight drew, 
 
 Hissed up to the sorrowful dark 
 Great serpents, blazing, of red and blue, 
 That rose and faded, and rose anew, 
 
 That the Land might wonder and mark. 
 
 "To day is a day of days," they said, 
 
 "Make merry, O People all!" 
 And the Ploughman listened and bowed his head: 
 
 "To day and to-morrow, God's will," he said, 
 
 As he trimmed the lamps on the -wall. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 And the Ploughman settled the share 
 
 More deep in the sun-dried clod: 
 
 "Mogul, Mahratta, and Mlech from the North 
 And White Queen over the Seas 
 
 God raiseth them up and driveth them forth 
 
 As the dust of the ploughshare flies in the breeze ; 
 
 But the wheat and the cattle are all my care, 
 And the rest is the will of God." 
 
 IIQ 
 
Now this is a true note, just as "Recessional" is ; an 
 implied reproof to much of the vain vaunting and glo- 
 rification of material externals of which Mr. Kipling 
 himself has been laureate-in-ordinary on many occa- 
 sions since. But just as it heartened us, we learned of 
 that painful comicality of a "complete edition." May he 
 find grace! It were a literary tragedy that the pos- 
 sessor of Mr. Kipling's virility and individuality should 
 be led by the claptrap critic and the Man in the Street 
 to content himself with Navy League rhymes and other 
 manner of necessarily temporal and ephemeral things, 
 too many of them appealing not to the spirit in us, but 
 the tame savage. He must take care that the conclud- 
 ing sorrow of his "Merchantmen" may not come to 
 have an expressive personal significance. 
 
 Let go, let go the anchor 
 
 Now shamed at heart are we 
 To bring so poor a cargo home 
 
 Who had for gift the sea! 
 Let slip the great bow anchor; 
 
 Now fools were we and blind 
 The worst we took with utter toil, 
 
 The best we left behind! 
 
 Mr. Davidson is apparently in a sort of transition 
 stage. Beyond the want already mentioned in his work 
 the only salient thing to be said about his late offerings, 
 such as "New Ballads," is that they number very few 
 which at all continue the better traditions of his sing- 
 ing. That shrivelling, half -living sense before indicated, 
 strikes us with an uneasy feeling through the rest The 
 dim, aloof, semi-vital air of the suburbs glides coldly a- 
 
 120 
 
cross it. In the good poems and the middling poems one 
 can see that Mr. Davidson is well-meaning, that his lines 
 are straight, that his heart feels honestly, that he is on 
 the side of love, the finer, healthier senses, that his eyes 
 are set toward the Golden Age. Still, his general work 
 does not suggest the poet who has fully found himself, 
 or who is in the way of going far. It has no great sponta- 
 neous well-springs of emotion, no artistic surprises, no 
 impressive imaginative background. He drives his heart 
 and his poetic impulses into a few strong things, and 
 then he simmers slow. Sometimes one cannot feel quite 
 sure whether the explanation is that he has large capa- 
 cities unused yet, and is not quite decided as to his next 
 departure, or that vision and spirit have done quite as 
 much as they can be relied on to do at any rate, till 
 some new influences, some plunges into the heart of 
 more vitalising life have flooded them with a new rich- 
 ness. Thus, although the few things indicated are real 
 themes for praise, and make for betterment and light, 
 the general quality is by no means reassuring as regards 
 Mr. Davidson's poetical future. 
 
 The talent of Mr. Symons is undeniable ; however 
 he may trail poetry through the music-hall, he has the 
 sensitive gift and grace of the singer ; as Walter Pater 
 saw he is "a poet with something to say ; " but in that 
 musical, indiscreet, yet delicate art of his he is some- 
 what unequal, and his poetical mission still is unful- 
 filled, incomplete, not without a sense of uncertainty. 
 Sometimes his art strikes us as artistry proceeding in 
 its accomplished way without a fundamental basis of 
 
 121 
 
genuine vitality and compelling passion : but at other 
 times passion takes wistful and beautiful guises in his 
 verse. 
 
 Mr. Watson is still more of a manner than a mind 
 "The Purple East," perhaps, apart more of the philo- 
 sophical critic than the poet Some of his work is not 
 so much poetry as a poet's talk about poetry, more of 
 it just what a true singer might say when the great pas- 
 sion was gone and only the afterglow was with him. 
 Yet more suggests evening's coolness, fading of light 
 and fire, and melancholy ; not the great, chastening 
 melancholy of the masters, but a melancholy which is 
 earth-cold. With all his well-carven work, his dignified, 
 polished, scholarly mould, his ability to drop with little 
 effort into the language of poetry, his power to dignify 
 triteness of thought by an almost classic expression, he 
 does not usually afford the impression of one who pos- 
 sesses a strong fount of intellectual vitality. His opu- 
 lence is rather of the outer habiliments than of the ani- 
 mating essence, the soul, of poetry. 
 
 Mr. Yeats has lately toyed a little with the decadents, 
 and I hope has found that this would never do. He has 
 a sweet, wizard lyric gift, a delicate sense of beauty, 
 glamour abounding. His genius to be sure is more like 
 a haunting Isle of Voices than a comprehensible world. 
 The passing winds wake him to eerie, charming music, 
 but the English nature cannot grasp him as a substan- 
 tial presence, a thing with views, appetites, a code of 
 philosophy ; he is to it a disembodied spirit, and Mother 
 Albion does not care for disembodied spirits. If Mr. 
 
 122 
 
Yeats could go into Parliament, or edit The Daily 
 Chronicle, or launch a newspaper syndicate, he would 
 be a much larger figure to his age. But happily that is 
 impossible ; and so he remains an undisturbed, serene, 
 haunting singer for the few. 
 
 Mr. Yeats' faults are chiefly the tendency in his quest 
 for strange beauty to treat truth as a minor considera- 
 tion ; to use the fairy and sheogue symbols overmuch, 
 and often in his pursuit to look upon the ground and 
 into the clay a little too intently. It is comprehensible, 
 but the idealising of the weak worm, the field-mouse, 
 and the rats by the oatmeal bin is not always interest- 
 ing. In "the poor foolish things that live a day," it is 
 well to see the vision of "Eternal Beauty wandering on 
 her way," but mayhap even one of the truest of our 
 poets may carry his theory of mouse-magnificence 
 rather too far. 
 
 Mr. Yeats' song has at any rate the air of inevitable- 
 ness. With a number of his contemporaries, on the 
 other hand, you feel that their singing is more or less 
 accidental, the result of passing coquetries and experi- 
 ments in one life-phase or another, rather than the out- 
 come of the deep, unsounding, unchanging nature. Pa- 
 gans, pessimists, decadents, cynics, satirists, they are 
 to-day, but it is easily felt and seen that they may be 
 something else to-morrow. Dealing with the tendencies 
 of latterday poetry, and making these gentlemen the 
 basis of the study and the verdict, would be taking them 
 too seriously, and trusting on very shifty premises into 
 the bargain. All we may say is that they keep to nar- 
 
 123 
 
row ways and limited spheres, that they essay many 
 small parts of life but never a coherent view of the 
 whole ; that they seldom see much beyond the extern- 
 als of things, that the body rather than the soul is their 
 province ; that they lack staying power, and seldom or 
 never expand ; that they are rather Life's slaves than 
 vital, plastic, creative artists who can mould Life to 
 their will. They reach Olympus, scale the heavens, ride 
 the chariot of the sun, and hear the music of the spheres 
 no more ; they ride on 'buses, and are drear with the 
 sense of drab-environed streets. Some know no more 
 of the world than Clapham or Bloomsbury : when they 
 go abroad they carry Clapham and Bloomsbury with 
 them ; they see the outer world with city and suburban 
 eyes, and when they return it is still with Clapham and 
 Bloomsbury, and nothing more. 
 
 There are exceptions. One young singer has come 
 before us of late whose outlook is larger, and whose 
 sympathies are deeper. Mr. Stephen Phillips one day 
 sang, however unequally, the epic hopelessness of Ha- 
 des, and on other days the larger Hades of monoton- 
 ous modernity, with its murder of spirit and feeling. 
 And a world tired of narrow grooves, and limited, feeble 
 songs, has given him its meed of praise very heartily. 
 Mr. A. E. Housman, with his kindly and pensive se- 
 quence of trills called A Shropshire Lad, bore us back 
 by homely country ways to simplicity and a region of 
 the heart, and we were grateful. In an age of much in- 
 dividuality and rich creativeness, Mr. Housman would 
 mayhap receive little attention, though he would please 
 
 124 
 
any who noted him. In our blase, bourgeois period he 
 is a distinct possession. 
 
 Apart from these, and little recked of by the complex 
 contemporary world, Mr. Bridges goes in staid dignity, 
 restoring and imparting a sense of majesty to an art 
 that has much need of it. Mr. Lionel Johnson follows 
 with a grave, solemn, austere, and academic spirit, whose 
 stately grace is softened once in a while by a lyrical, 
 Celtic current, and a sudden wistful longing for the 
 green, glowing world in the distance beyond University 
 ways and cathedral aisles. Such singers, though the 
 additions they have made to original poetry are not 
 great so far, yet have done something to keep poetry 
 dignified and reverend, lofty as the masters left it, 
 worthy of an age which had seen Newman and Pater, 
 Patmore and De Vere, and their kindred. Mr. Francis 
 Thompson, with all his inequalities, has done something 
 similar, though fitfully, unevenly, at times violently. 
 Spiritual and imaginative opulence Mr. Thompson pos- 
 sesses ; it over-runs his pages, as in Sister Songs, like a 
 lava tide, producing havoc of form and some unprofit- 
 ableness of thought, casting around confusing ashes of 
 sentiment and barren blocks and boulders of words. Yet 
 warm and heartening is the tide of emotion, though 
 the artistic result has often a post-volcanic appearance. 
 A flippant lady wrote the other day an excusable story 
 of two or three men who taught a dog to understand 
 print and by a neat arrangement to write out his im- 
 pressions. He grew intellectually haughty, but died in 
 a fit of depression and chagrin because Mr. Thomp- 
 
 125 
 
son's poems were beyond him. That I fear is the phi- 
 listine's and the average man's attitude. I do not know 
 that this clever dog would have fared much better with 
 Mr. Thompson's "New Poems," for though therein 
 sweet fancies fall in the brief chances of coherent sim- 
 plicity, his muse is still for the most part violent : mete- 
 oric, acrobatic, and garrulous in turns. The visionary 
 power, the spiritual excitement are abundant, but the 
 deriyative young poet of these poems who is (so fond 
 of "sporting with the tresses of the sun," who "dares my 
 hand to lay on the thunder in its snorting," to whom 
 day is "a dedicated priest," twilight "a violet-cassocked 
 acolyte," the sun a roaring lion this young poet is 
 often a trial. He seems to have steeped the uncouth and 
 obsolete side of the English language in a Vesuvius, 
 and as it cools he hurls the words like stones or threshed 
 grain on his pages. His imagination with its vast, ec- 
 centric wings is stunning, fantastic, terrible, and might- 
 ily artificial in turns. Yet we must gratefully acknow- 
 ledge his casual approaches towards sweetness. Some 
 day the gods may train and simplify his power for a 
 mere earthly use ; he has made passes at the sun, moon, 
 and stars, and danced about them to a wild chorus long 
 enough. 
 
 But Mr. Thompson is not intellectually his own mas- 
 ter altogether. Is he not of the fold of Mrs. Meynell? 
 And to the minds of all in that fold an intellectual di- 
 vinity doth hedge Mrs. Meynell. She can do no literary 
 or critical wrong. Young men and young women of her 
 sphere speak about her in much the same way as loyal 
 
 126 
 
Britons spoke of the Queen in the height of the Jubilee 
 period. They move in an all-golden afternoon of poetry, 
 an afternoon whose atmosphere and "colour of life" are 
 altogether reflective of the mind and outlook of the 
 gifted authoress of "Preludes." They have re-arranged 
 the ethics of old chivalry to suit modern conditions, 
 and they are all valiant pen-folk ready and eager to do 
 the behests and spread the law of Her who is supreme 
 arbitress on any question of English poetry. They were 
 in no wise shaken in their deference even by her 
 "Flower of the Mind" anthology and the transcending 
 positiveness with which she set herself to "gather no- 
 thing that does not over-pass a certain boundary-line of 
 genius," declaring in effect : Know all men by these 
 presents the popular English poetry of the eighteenth 
 century is to all intents and purposes wiped out. Be it 
 therefore enacted by and with the consent of Mr. Fran- 
 cis Thompson, the Academy staff, and all others within 
 the Meynell Privy Council assembled that with slight 
 exceptions the period from Dryden to Burns is null and 
 void, and of no further interest to the devotees of En- 
 glish poetry. One gets really anxious as to what period 
 Mrs. Meynell and her school may next decide on and 
 mark out for demolition. 
 
 Returning to our direct track we meet Mr. Henley 
 with his vehement fervour ; and amongst others be- 
 tween us and the undistinguished mass there is the clas- 
 sic-cum-Celtic Dr. Todhunter, who should be remem- 
 bered for Helena in Troas and The Banshee and other 
 Poems, and the voluminous but not uniform Professor 
 
 127 
 
Savage Armstrong. Mrs. Shorter's humanised spells 
 and mystical pathos are a more recent but a clear gain. 
 Mr. Binyon's softer felicities appeal to others, but seem 
 unduly well regarded. 
 
 But still, very little of all this is vital enough to go 
 down the centuries, little of it is strong enough to serve 
 its time, to change or guide any current of contempo- 
 rary thought and life. Some of it is drab-made and 
 meanly formed, more of it skilful imitation ; the best 
 and sweetest of it little better than pleasance-places 
 between the Peaks of Song. No ; it is not a sign of the 
 Millennium. 
 
 128 
 
A WORD WITH THE EVENING 
 PAPERS 
 
 Mr. Birrell's disappointment is with the morning pa- 
 pers ; mine is with those of the evening. There are 
 many reasons for our serious if not our pretentious atti- 
 tude towards life and things, towards South Africa, 
 Westminster, the North Pole, and the Monroe Doctrine 
 in our train and tram interludes between breakfast and 
 business. We consciously or unconsciously look to our 
 great dailies to sustain us in our sense that we own the 
 earth, and that wisdom will die with us ; and to do them 
 justice, we seldom look in vain. By the evening and 
 our return all the old frets and disillusious have beat 
 the air and trounced the earth, twisted our nerves, and 
 glowered at us through our city fogs. Then, oh then, 
 accursed be the papers that take things seriously. A 
 little fun at such hours is the saving salt of life. Apart 
 from all this, a hundred comedies, a hundred eccentric- 
 ities and amusing flashes of character have leaped to 
 life amid the squalid damnation of the police-courta 
 Half Shakespeare's plays have been played unconsci- 
 ously in dock and witness box ; yet our journals that 
 should pulse and scintillate with feeling, frolic, and co- 
 
 129 
 
medy, are content to leave the whole with the recital of 
 what "sub-constable XYZ deposed" as to the behaviour 
 and record of "the prisoner," and the "blank shillings" 
 or "blank days" which the "learned magistrate" imposed 
 upon the offender. In paltry detail, in shipshod verbiage, 
 in awkward and unrevealing description our daily trag- 
 edies and humours are dulled and deadened ; London 
 is belied, daubed where she should be painted, her his- 
 tory left unwritten ; the heavy trail of the police-court 
 reporter lying ugly and prone on material meet for art- 
 ist and poet Cow's amble and shuffle through brooks 
 of gleaming life where the nymphs and graces should 
 disport themselves. 
 
 I have by me a few random stories from the daily re- 
 velations of London life in the police and the County 
 Courts ; and I put it seriously to our evening papers 
 whether it is not high time that they should revolution- 
 ize their method of representing these things. Gentle- 
 men of the press, this is the artist's province ; you 
 might effect a profound difference in London's mind 
 and thought, you might create a new note in literature 
 by seeing that the treatment accorded to it is proper. 
 You might but let me try in my own way to illustrate 
 the new order in your news columns. 
 
 I find first of all a detailed and rather ineffective 
 story, the pith of which is that William , Stockbroker, 
 made a slight mistake on his way home to South Nor- 
 wood. He was found lying in the mud at Sufferance 
 Wharf, Lambeth, when the tide was out He explained 
 that he thought it was a railway station, and he was 
 
 130 
 
waiting for the next train. At the local court the fine 
 was 2Os. Now I submit that the following is the better 
 way to put William's tragedy : 
 
 In the inns on the highway and by-way 
 
 Full flagons he drained at a draught, 
 "My life-path will ne'er be a dry way," 
 
 Said William, and loudly he laughed. 
 And the deeds that he did in his drinking 
 
 Were dire, but they utterly dwarf 
 'Mid the things that befell him on sinking 
 
 In Sufferance Wharf. 
 
 He came and he mused on the bank low; 
 
 The tide had gone far to the sea 
 He came, and he saw, and he sank low: 
 
 "O soft bed of roses!" said he. 
 "Each rose of the rose-dreaming poet 
 
 'Mid these was a poor, paltry bud 
 O apex of bliss, now I know it" 
 
 And he rolled in the mud. 
 
 Then he dreamed that he sat in a station 
 
 Whose portals of pure gold were wrought. 
 He rose, and in sweet agitation 
 
 The next train to Norwood he sought. 
 Dream-porters, dream-clerks were around him, 
 
 But never a word they would speak 
 Said the mud-ridden William, "Confound them ! 
 
 'Tis like their d cheek." 
 
 But I shorten the song of his sorrow 
 
 The watchman who roped him to land, 
 The p'liceman, the fine on the morrow, 
 
 Are items you'll all understand. 
 Now though sober as judge is in story 
 
 And pledged to be steady and good, 
 Ah ! he misses the glamour and glory 
 
 Of that hour in the mud. 
 
 9* 
 
Robert Helmsley claimed damages at the Bow 
 County Court for injuries sustained in a raid made upon 
 him by one of Robert Frost's cows as he crossed the 
 peaceful fields of Leytonstone. He drew an ominous 
 picture of this cow with her strange and stern mien. 
 The defence was that Mr. Helmsley's fears had run 
 away with him, and that in his riot of apprehension 
 he fell into the adjacent ditch while the cow looked 
 stolidly on, or wonderingly like the well-fed cow in the 
 poet Laureate's garden. Judgment for the defendant 
 
 O her looks were as grim as grim could be, 
 
 And her eyes were sad and stern, 
 And a gleam of the cow-world's gaiety 
 
 She never seemed to learn. 
 From all other cows that Bob Frost kept 
 
 In the fields of Leytonstone, 
 She stood apart as the long years crept 
 
 As the weird cow-sphinx she was known! 
 
 And the seers that came and the seers that went 
 
 Were appalled at her Gorgon-eyes. 
 "She looks on man with a fell intent 
 
 Keep far all ye who are wise!" 
 And a legend grew with the creeping years 
 
 That the cow was a demon dire, 
 That at night she raced all around the spheres 
 
 Upon feet of Inferno fire ! 
 
 And the dreamy eve that Bob Helmsley came 
 
 She looked so hard at him 
 That into the ditch fell his quivering frame, 
 
 And the sight of his eyes grew dim. 
 And he dreamed that the cow came with demon horn 
 
 And lifced him high in air 
 Till he touched thj moon and the stars of morn ! 
 
 He awoke cow and ditch were there! 
 
 132 
 
And he went to the County Court of Bow 
 
 Where the sly judge laughed at his moan, 
 And said: "Those stories are all so-so 
 
 Of that cow of Leytonstone." 
 Bob Helmsley groaned as he went away 
 
 Full many a weary groan, 
 And he cursed, and he'll curse to his dying day 
 
 That cow of Leytonstone! 
 
 The next is a record of the days when The Woman 
 Who Would and The Woman Who Wouldn't were 
 agitating London. The heat wave also was intolerable 
 in the physical world. A young man appeared before 
 the Thames Court magistrate, and pleaded that his 
 young wife had refused to live with him. Since the 
 wedding, seven weeks previously, she had locked her- 
 self in her room when he was "about," till that morning 
 when she disappeared altogether. Failing Victoria 
 Cross, the author of "Paula," "The Woman Who 
 Didn't," and such hare-brained heroines, the average 
 editor might rest satisfied, perhaps,with this treatment 
 of the situation : 
 
 A fair and dainty youth was he, yet grief was on his 
 
 brow. 
 He moaned "Great Thames Court magistrate, despair's 
 
 my portion now. 
 Romance is dead and joy is lost, and all great London 
 
 seems 
 A blacker haunt than Dante saw in his infernal dreams." 
 
 "Hush," cried the Thames Court magistrate, "be brave 
 
 and face the worst. 
 The heat will surely end ere long, and snow-storms o'er 
 
 us burst." 
 Then frenzied was the young man's laugh. "The heat, 
 
 forsooth," said he. 
 "I fear it not, however hot, 'tis love that tortures me. 
 
 '33 
 
"I won for wife a bonny lass. But seven weeks ago 
 Did she a bride stand by my side in spotless robes of 
 
 snow. 
 
 All nature sang our wedding song in myriad melodies: 
 I heard it in the traffic's roar, and in the murmuring 
 
 breeze. 
 
 "But ghostly was the change that came as soon as night 
 
 loomed down : 
 My love grew darker than the dark, her fair face all 
 
 a-frown. 
 She jeered at love, at me she sneered, then left me 
 
 haughtily, 
 And sweeping to her room above, she swiftly turned 
 
 the key. 
 
 "And since that hour at me and man she's never ceased 
 
 to rail. 
 And now she's gone and won't return; and that's my 
 
 sorry tale." 
 
 "She's New as any Bodley Belle," the magnate cried in 
 
 awe, 
 And then he told the weeping youth that no redress he 
 
 saw; 
 For all these wild-souled Decadents are far beyond the 
 
 law. 
 
 At Shoreditch County Court William Bloggs sued 
 Emma Black, a widow, for compensation for evening 
 jobs at gardening. Emma pathetically contended how 
 she understood he was working all the time out of pure 
 friendship, on which understanding she had feasted him 
 and his wife with -tea, shrimps and other dainties. His 
 action was the sorest tragedy of her life. In fact Pathos 
 
 134 
 
came with wan, woe-wasted eyes through her story of 
 friendship overshadowed and man's duplicity and self- 
 ishness. She had to pay all the same. 
 
 Said Emma Black to William Bloggs, "How could you 
 
 ask a fee 
 
 For all that pretty gardening you did of late for me? 
 You came as friend, you worked as friend, with heart 
 
 and right good will 
 And ne'er I thought, dear heart, you'd send that wicked 
 
 little bill. 
 
 "You know you brought your wife each day. I gave you 
 tea and jam ; 
 
 I gave you shrimps and muffins, too; for generous I am. 
 
 With feast and toil each dulcet eve passed gloriously 
 away. 
 
 Then, William Bloggs, I'd ne'er believe I'd see this bill- 
 black day." 
 
 'Twas at the Shoreditch County Court her sobbing tale 
 
 was told, 
 And though she was a widow lone the judge's heart 
 
 was cold. 
 For all her teas and all her tears, she must pay William 
 
 Bloggs. 
 O world! these unromantic years, You're going to the 
 
 dogs! 
 
 Rose Howe, a fair young laundress of Kennington, 
 set a fire alarm a-going at night for the sake of a "lark." 
 Her "lark" cost her 403. next day at Lambeth. Surely 
 her airy abandon, her devotion to the songful impulse 
 
 135 
 
within her, deserve a laureate. She was really realis- 
 ing herself, as Ibsen would say : 
 
 O sing the hour, the brooding hour, when Kennington 
 
 was dark; 
 And Rosie Howe, the laundress fair, went out upon a 
 
 "lark." 
 
 "Of all the birds," said Rosie Howe, "that charm the 
 
 East or West, 
 My little 'lark' that sings at night is brightest still and 
 
 best. 
 And sweetly in my airy heart it's made its little nest." 
 
 And then she pulled the fire alarm, and weird the deep 
 
 bell rang. 
 "Oh! did you hear my little 'lark'? How very sweet it 
 
 sang?" 
 
 "I heard it," said the constable, slow on his midnight beat. 
 "I have no doubt the magistrate will think it very sweet." 
 
 And Mr. Denman said the fine would forty shillings be. 
 And Rosio.'s little "lark" no more will thrill in melodee. 
 
 Lizzie Butler was uproarious at Christmas-tide, 
 and made a sad picture in the West London dock. She 
 pleaded the kindly, over-powering effects of the season. 
 A whole drama is here too subtle for the reporter's 
 paragraph : 
 
 "O, Lizzie Butler, of Porten road, 
 
 Your eyes are blacker than Nature's black. 
 
 And your face, that in old days with roses glowed. 
 
 Is drawn and wintry, alack! alack! 
 
 136 
 
"And the p'liceman tells me," said Mr. Lane, 
 While all ears were strained in West London Court, 
 "That drink has muddled your once bright brain, 
 That you've awful notions of play and sport. 
 
 "That you startled Hammersmith peaceful place! 
 When the night was late and the stars were deep. 
 That O, Lizzie, blush for the dire disgrace 
 You broke that poor constable's midnight sleep." 
 
 Then Lizzie spake: "I had cause, sweet cause. 
 My heart was stirred with a strange, sweet pain. 
 For my oldest sweetheart was Santa Claus, 
 And I drank for joy that he comes again." 
 
 "O, Go! Go! Go!" said the magistrate, 
 "We punish not love in this court of ours ; 
 'Tis wilful, wayward, but always great 
 The sweetest power of all Nature's powers." 
 
 The next story is of the tragic ending of girlhood's 
 trust : and man is not the deceiver this time : 
 
 'Twas in a model dwelling 
 
 In blissful Felix-street, 
 Maud Chidgey with Ciss Druey dwelt 
 
 And all their days were sweet. 
 They told each other tenderly, 
 
 While each to each was true, 
 They'd ask no other love in life, 
 
 Whatever swains might woo. 
 
 Maud Chidgey kissed Cisa Druey's lips, 
 
 And said, "You little dear, 
 You're more to me than any swain 
 
 In all earth's sordid sphere." 
 
 T37 
 
Ciss Druey dreamed the live-long night, 
 
 Of Maud the fond and true 
 And thought if Maud e'er left her sight, 
 
 Now much she'd pine and rue. 
 
 Yet Maud is gone, and Cissy's eyes 
 
 Show not a tear to-day. 
 The prison gates have on her closed, 
 
 Yet Cissy's heart is gay. 
 And oft she cries: "Old Maud, you were 
 
 The horridest of things, 
 To say you loved me, then to steal 
 
 My three bright, lovely rings!" 
 
 Our next item is a foreign one, but of course our 
 method is not for London only. This tale is of a truth 
 stranger than fiction in the Punjab. A one-eyed, bald- 
 headed ancient loved and won (he thought) a bonny 
 lass of Ferozepore. All was ready ; the marriage pro- 
 cession started, but the fear overshadowed the proces- 
 sionists that at the last moment the bride's parents (who 
 had not yet seen him) would refuse their consent to her 
 union with so unprepossessing a bridegoom. The one- 
 eyed man bethought him of a plan. He persuaded a 
 comely barber's boy to don his gala clothes, and per- 
 sonate the happy man of the occasion. 
 
 This was done, the marriage passed happily over, 
 the party returned home, the ancient thanked the 
 youth for his services, and smilingly turned to bear 
 away his loved one. But the youthful barber smiled 
 in return, and absolutely refused to part with the maiden. 
 All the entreaties of the ancient were in vain. A suit for 
 
 138 
 
the recovery of the bride was filed against the youth. He 
 laughed, having a shrewd suspicion that all the facts 
 (including the fair one herseif) were in his favour. 
 
 THE ANCIENT'S PLAINT 
 
 Though I've but one eye in my pate uncouth, 
 
 I still can plainly see 
 'Twas a paltry trick, O Punjab youth, 
 
 The trick you've tried on me. 
 
 'Twas a mean, mean trick, Punjab lad, 
 On a poor bald man to play 
 To keep the bride that he all but had 
 To cheer life's waning day. 
 
 sweet she smiled in the morning mild 
 'Neath the bonny Indian sky, 
 
 As I passed to church, with no thought of the lurch 
 I'd be left in by-and-bye. 
 
 1 thought it hard on the marriage morn 
 She should stand by a fright like me, 
 
 "So lad of grace, you can take my place 
 For the nonce," I said, "He! he!" 
 
 "And when all is o'er to Ferozepore 
 
 She'll come to my home and me, 
 And I'll prove so kind she'll never mind 
 
 How bald my sconce may be." 
 
 But the knot once tied, with you by her side, 
 
 You snapped your fingers all, 
 And with smile and scoff you bore her off, 
 
 And left me in sorrow's thrall. 
 
 And I curse all day while serene and gay 
 
 Your life with the lass goes by; 
 The blazing fire of my natural ire 
 
 Is wasting my other eye. 
 
 139 
 
In Cupid's court but scoff and sport 
 
 I've proved for the gods and thee; 
 But a suit at law O fudge! pshaw! 
 
 My bride is lost for me. 
 
 I need not pursue the illustration of this method of 
 interpreting the home and foreign tidings of the day. 
 Thus briefly and plainly set forward I trust that it 
 speaks for itself. 
 
 140 
 
MAINLY FOR MR. BIRRELL 
 
 I tell this story to prove to Mr. Birrell that newspa- 
 pers are even worse than he thought them. Journalists 
 made a sad set on him because in the "quiet season," or 
 thereabouts, in the year of grace '97, he made grace- 
 ful fun of their pretensions. Yet cross-grained indeed 
 must be the man who grows nasty when Mr. Birrell 
 birrelleth. That the thing is possible at all shows how 
 badly out of order are our fin-du-siecle nerves : what 
 miserable stuff Eas returned with some of our receding 
 brain-waves. 
 
 Perhaps the man who invented the not unhappy 
 term "Birrelling" has helped to do some wrong to the 
 modest author of "Obiter Dicta." "Birrelling" suggests 
 lightness and graceful irresponsibility, pleasant thin- 
 ness, charming but ephemeral tinklings. It is in that 
 acceptation, which will be found a not uncommon one, 
 an injustice to Mr. Birrell. In one of his own phrases, 
 his thoughts and essays are indeed "light and graceful, 
 but it would be unjust to call them slender." A sense of 
 widening horizons he brings. "Something of the cool- 
 Hi 
 
ing of falling water, something of the music of rustling 
 trees," many pretty keys of playfulness, a sane, shrewd, 
 worldly-wise, yet reverential outlook ; the capacity to 
 see the inherent manliness and beauty and hope of 
 things, yet the spirit to see and delightfully expose the 
 comedy or crudeness of their sometime exteriors all 
 these he shows. A cultured man, a book-lover, a book- 
 connoisseur, his garb has not a speck of library dust, 
 his eyes none of the blurred, limited vision of the book- 
 worm. He has the child's interest in the tender, weak, 
 and lowly things abroad in nature, the man's manly in- 
 terest in the panorama of the hills and fields, the philo- 
 sopher's and Christian's interest in the broad, ever- vary- 
 ing, intense, and sometimes terrible ocean of human 
 progress. He has grappled with big and solemn pro- 
 blems, but in his setting forth of his conclusions his 
 charm and instinctive gentleness seldom desert him, 
 while his young and refreshing playfulness often peeps 
 in. The best of democrats, because cultured, unselfish, 
 and healthy, he is at home with the man of the world, 
 the theologian, and the scholar, though to be sure, in 
 some of his moods and modes he no more than nibbles 
 at his subject, if I may be pardoned the phrase. But 
 this is carrying us too far from the evening papers and 
 Radford's tragedy. 
 
 It seemed a happy hour in the life of Radford. Yet 
 everyone else in the dingy editorial rooms of the 
 Gloaming was sorry sorry that after twenty years' 
 service Radford was going. Radford indeed, had been 
 "g m g" for years, but circumstances had turned up to 
 
 142 
 
prevent the great severance. But now the time had 
 come when he fully believed he could devote his life to 
 romance and the deferred high purpose of two decades. 
 
 Radford's had been a curious history. Twenty years 
 before, he had come up, a blithe youth of eighteen, from 
 a corner of East Anglia, eager-hearted, and confident 
 that he would win a name as a novelist He had written 
 the first chapter of "The Strange Adventures of Miss 
 Kilkins," and before the end of the first volume there 
 were to be amazing developments. But while writing 
 Radf ord must live, and he blessed the chance that threw 
 in his way at the outset a post as reporter on the 
 Gloaming. Was not journalism the kindred field to 
 literature, if not literature itself? From his reporting 
 duties to his study and his beloved MS. would be just 
 a pleasant transition. He would be an English Gautier. 
 Yes, he had begun well. 
 
 In the long years Radford had well, disappoint- 
 ments. His stories of murders, fires, inquests, burglaries, 
 revelations at the Old Bailey, were not the best aids to 
 the style he desired A poignant Hardy (of the earlier 
 manner) set amid the flavour of primroses, someone had 
 called a little MS. he brought to London at the outset 
 Soon it would have seemed a ghastly jest And then 
 he was always in a hurry. Hurry ! Why, a lost spirit 
 doomed to a perpetual rush from one quarter of the 
 globe to another were not less certain of peace than he. 
 To "write up" a club raid in Aldgate, a street fight in 
 Chelsea, to hurry away to Netting Hill to secure a bet- 
 ter story of the afternoon murder and suicide than the 
 
 H3 
 
rival paper might compass these were ordinary items 
 of the everyday struggle. When he turned home to his 
 Peckham lodgings he reviewed the situation with piti- 
 ful feelings. Every night he reverently took down his 
 MS. of the first chapter of "Miss Kilkins," but in such 
 a state of fatigue that he could not add a sentence that 
 satisfied him. 
 
 He would have thrown up the work but for that early 
 romance that dazzled him, and hold him ever after 
 his love for Hettie Ferguson. The prospect of married 
 life made him timorous. He could not run risks ; he 
 wanted a certainty for Hettie's sake. 
 
 Queer developments ensued for Radford. His career 
 as a novelist was still his golden ideal ; but only an ideal 
 as year succeeded year. He had "still to toil for a com- 
 petence for the end when he could prudently marry 
 Hettie. Intolerably long it was in coming. 
 
 Meanwhile he often outdid his rivals ; achieved 
 "scoops," in reporting parlance, every week of the year. 
 Give him a hint that anything particular was happen- 
 ing, and he was aflame till he had got to the heart of 
 it He made a big fortune for the Gloaming, and grad- 
 ually a little one for himself. 
 
 So, at last, he saw his way to marrying Hettie, to re- 
 tiring from the Gloaming, to devoting himself to that 
 long deferred work of fiction. And now, as he said 
 "good-bye," he could hardly realise that his wedding 
 was three days hence, that his literary career would be- 
 gin as the honeymoon ended. Radford was ungovern- 
 ably happy. In leisure moments he glowed over the 
 
 144 
 
first MS. of "Miss Kilkins." In the solemn nights he 
 kissed it reverently. 
 
 Radford and his pretty but somewhat sad-faced \vife 
 were standing on the evening of their wedding-day on 
 the platform of the suburban station whence they would 
 depart for the south and the honeymoon. Somehow they 
 seemed overpensive for newly-wedded folk, and Rad- 
 ford was plainly unrestful. 
 
 Suddenly, as the train approached, there was a wild 
 cry in one of the streets below. A heavy fall, and a 
 woman's voice shrieked "Murder!" Mrs. Radford 
 shuddered. But now the train was alongside the plat- 
 form. "We will go in here, dear," she said. 
 
 But, lo ! Radford was not at her side. He must have 
 been pushed apart, she thought, in the struggle of the 
 crowd. But now nearly everyone had either taken seats 
 or turned to the exit-door, yet Radford was nowhere 
 to be seen. Puzzled, she ran from carriage to carriage. 
 There was still no trace of him ! The train steamed out of 
 the station. Mrs. Radford was left alone ..... 
 
 Radford came back with an excited look on his face. 
 "Quite a scoop," he cried. "When I heard the woman's 
 cry I knew there was a story in it I got it all from 
 the landlady while the police were seeing to Mrs. Hud- 
 son. The villain has cut his own throat. Jealousy was 
 the cause of the crime. I've wired it all to the Gloam- 
 ing. What! you've been crying? Good Heavens! is 
 the train gone ? Well, well, we must go to the Hotel 
 until to-morrow." . . . 
 
 Radford and his wife got separated at Blackfriars. 
 
 10 
 
A fire was raging on the Surrey side, and crowds were 
 hurrying across the bridge. Instinctively Radford ran. 
 Then he cursed his thoughtlessness, for he could not 
 find trace or tidings of his wife. The quest lasted for 
 hours. At last he hurried to the Hotel Mrs. Radford 
 was standing patiently, but wearily, near the door in 
 the chilly night 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 The honeymoon had been over some months, as 
 Radford, pallid and fretful, hurried one day to his old 
 friend, Gilgan, the publisher. 
 
 "Gilgan,' said he, in a ghostly tone, "I'm a cursed 
 man. The one dream of my life has been a quiet time 
 when I could write the novel that I planned twenty 
 years ago. But the quiet kills me. I can't endure it I 
 can't write. I've grown old in reporting fever, and 
 there's no rest for me. I've tried to mend matters by 
 putting a terrible fire in the second chapter, a murder 
 in the third, an abduction in the fourth, an Old Bailey 
 trial in the fifth, a Newgate execution in the sixth. But 
 it won't do, for it isn't art. Now, perhaps, I could ar- 
 range matters with you. You agree to publish it fair 
 terms, you know I to have the MS. ready by an 
 early date. Being tied down to the thing, I must get 
 through it. Otherwise I can't ; and I'll go to mad Yes, 
 Gilgan, I'll go mad." 
 
 He told Gilgan the plot, and described the charac- 
 ters. 
 
 146 
 
"Would never do," said Gilgan. "School and style 
 of twenty years ago. No money in it now. Nobody 
 would review it or read it. Mr. Crockett might just 
 as well try to write like Mrs. Radcliffe." 
 
 Radford groaned. "Gilgan, I'll go mad," he cried. 
 "Never despair!" said Gilgan. "Write me a little 
 novel of this character" he entered into a long ex- 
 planation "bring in a Scotch character or two. Your 
 wife is Scotch, and you can easily manage it. She can 
 translate your plain English into Kailyard as you go 
 along. That's what pays best nowadays, unless you can 
 manage a Big Drink Story." 
 
 The would-be author was dubious. 
 A month later Radford called again. He was like 
 a spectre. 
 
 "The task is hopeless," he cried "I can write of 
 nothing but fires, murders, and inquests. My life is 
 ruined." 
 
 That self-same night, as a wild storm raged 
 
 over South London, Radford woke up from a troubled 
 sleep. As he rubbed his eyes, an appalling lightning- 
 flash seemed to glow in the very street "What a fire!" 
 he cried, as he dashed to the window and opened it 
 "I'm first on the scene again. First, by Jove, first!" 
 
 The next moment he had crashed to the pavement 
 The following day he died 
 
 A sad theme, and it is hardly meet to suggest sad- 
 ness in connection with the author for whom I have 
 written it So in the hope of winning the reader to 
 
 147 
 
 10* 
 
a lighter humour I transcribe the particulars here of 
 a "Dream of Mr. Birrell," the first of a series to be 
 named "Authors I Have not Seen." At the outset I 
 dealt with his literary personality : this is the vision of 
 his personal significance. 
 
 Here, then is the Dream's burden : 
 
 Mr. Birrell's individuality is timidly, yet definitely, 
 proclaimed in his clothes. They are "cut saucy," to use 
 an East-end phrase. They are smart, they suggest 
 thoughts of something dapper, and they are a little 
 too short for him. Yet somehow even the Tailor and 
 Cutter cou.ld not call them inartistic. They are neither 
 new nor old ; they are like a mellow volume whose 
 age one never thinks of inquiring into. They may not 
 have been carefully planned, but if not, then they are 
 a happy accident The fact remains that though they 
 suit him they are still a little too short for him. Hence 
 when he stands on a platform he is always metaphor- 
 ically standing on a platform one gets the impression 
 that he is an angel without his wings. 
 
 It does not mean that he has lost his wings, but, 
 getting separated from his company of fellow-angels, 
 he has taken them off, put them under his waistcoat, 
 and has resolved, till he gets caught, and re-robed and 
 re-winged, to make a little flippant sport for mortals. 
 From time to time as he utters his mots he glances 
 sideways and a little timidly over his shoulders, fearing 
 the arrival of his captors. Sometimes he feels that at 
 last they are close at hand, and he grows angelically 
 serious, says deep things with his eyes on the ground, 
 
 148 
 
as if in all innocence and solemnity he were cultivat- 
 ing a mission to set mortals in the way they should 
 go. In any case he knows his captors must shortly find 
 him, so he hurries through his remarks. So many pert 
 things come into mind that they crush one another, 
 and it is difficult to get them out. He stammers, and 
 it would seem that along with uttering dainty flip- 
 pancies he is chewing small toothsome nuts to make 
 him feel at home and comfortable. 
 
 He affects manners of playful maidenhood, and 
 would like to feel shy and blush, but he cannot manage 
 it. He tries again, but it's no use, and this upsets him 
 slightly. By this time he has realised that the human 
 outlook is vastly different from his, and that a num- 
 ber of things which are natural to him somewhat puzzle, 
 perplex, or even irritate his audience. The temptation 
 to rile them grows. He riles them a little more. He 
 sees a dozen sides, of which they know nothing, to 
 earthly questions, and he turns these round with a 
 Puck-like alertness. All the time he is making dry little 
 smiles dance in the corners of his eyes. 
 
 He soon gets tired of it all, and simmers slow and 
 looks meek. He works in a witty thing about the 
 decadence of the cabbage-plant, the aesthetic side of 
 the mangold-wurtzel, or the influence of mustard on 
 the genius of Robert Browning. He tries lightest per- 
 siflage and homely commonplace, yet auditors don't 
 understand him, and he wonders why they take the 
 one and the other so gratefully and unsuspiciously 
 from Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr. George R. Sims. 
 
 149 
 
Then he remembers his angelic origin and pardons 
 them. 
 
 Still they have put him rather in a cranky mood, 
 and he is roused to do a queer thing. He goes off 
 and proffers a contribution to the Speaker, and the 
 irony of the thing is that Sir Wemyss Reid, who has 
 inveighed so seriously against the "bumptious snippet," 
 accepts" it in good faith. Yet knowing Sir Wemyss's 
 weakness Mr. Birrell has deliberately palmed off a 
 lot of "bumptious snippets" in his contribution. Indeed, 
 all his neatest things, mixed up in articles long or short 
 are "bumptious snippets." But he has disguised them 
 so daintily that Sir Wemyss and half the world never 
 find out the trick. And he, who is a wag, shakes the 
 wings inside his waistcoat and laughs. 
 
 150 
 
A COMING CRISIS 
 
 WHY THE EARTH STOOD STILL 
 
 The Sun surveyed his solar realm in an angry mood 
 one morning towards the close of the summer of 19 . 
 The Moon had been on duty the previous night, and 
 now looked down in a sober, melancholy, and utterly 
 pessimistic mood on the drab-coloured earth. The Sun 
 called loudly three or four times to her Moonship, but 
 she took no notice. 
 
 "Helloa!" exclaimed the Sun, this time fairly bel- 
 lowing across the ethereal expanse. His voice was like 
 the first peal of a morning thunderstorm. The Moon 
 barely raised her eyebrows. A budding astronomer in 
 the suburbs, fortunately the only one of his kind awake, 
 prepared a long letter on the phenomenon for his fa- 
 vourite morning paper. 
 
 Again the Sun spoke, and this time the Moon an- 
 swered. The ensuing dialogue may be described as a 
 talk in thunder. 
 
 "What is the matter with that earth of yours?" 
 shouted the Sun. "I haven't had time to attend closely 
 
to its internal affairs of late. Uranus has tried to get 
 off the track, and has kept me busy breaking him in. 
 And the new planet beyond Neptune is a mad-headed 
 youngster entirely, and comet tactics are more in his 
 line. Besides, the attempt to close half the public- 
 houses in Jupiter has almost caused a revolution there. 
 So my hands have been pretty full." 
 
 "Well, you should have tried coercion," said the 
 Moon. "As for the earth, I don't know what to make 
 of it Time was when I had some influence over it." 
 
 "The poets used to be very fond of you," said the Sun 
 slyly. 
 
 "Ay," said the Moon, somewhat sorrowfully. "They 
 were a little extravagant in their praises from time to 
 time, but they were sincere. Now they don't bother 
 about me. They lilt to the New Woman and the 
 other absurdities that have come up like mushrooms in 
 the British Isles." 
 
 "To tell the truth," said the Sun, "I don't know very 
 much about the progress of things in that little planet 
 at all. It has grown stupid within the last century or so. 
 I only know that it seems very difficult to turn it on its 
 axis of late. Some days it almost stands stock still, and 
 a block in the solar traffic has seemed imminent." 
 
 "I've noticed it myself," said the Moon. "Maybe the 
 axis is getting rusty." 
 
 "Not a bit of it," replied the Sun, "'tisn't quite a 
 hundred years since I had a new one put in. Some ter- 
 ribly heavy bodies must have fallen on the planet lately." 
 
 This was only the first of many anxious colloquies 
 
 152 
 
held between the Sun and Moon in after days. Mean- 
 while the earth's affairs were getting more and more 
 unmanageable. Once or twice it seemed as if there 
 were absolutely no chance of turning it on its axis within 
 the regulaton time. It stood a dull, inert mass in space, 
 The stars that knew its old fair mien and its merry 
 minstrelsy were sad upon their aerial thrones. It was 
 suggested to the Sun that he should move it altogether 
 out of the solar system, and place it in the Home for 
 Disabled Planets. 
 
 His spirit messengers brought him reports one morn- 
 ing on reading which he promptly made up his mind. 
 "How stupid of us all not to have solved the mystery 
 before," said he. 
 
 It came to pass that on a certain afternoon London 
 was quite deserted. Londoners, in their pre-occupied 
 state, never paused to think how it had all been man- 
 agecl, but managed it was. The whole inhabitants of 
 the city had gathered to the Crystal Palace grounds and 
 the neighbourhood. Strange performances had been 
 announced by strange visitors to the city, but the fact 
 that a billiard handicap, a social purity discussion, a 
 horse-race, a dog-fight, a meeting of the Vagabonds' 
 Club, and a New Woman's Congress were coming off 
 in the vicinity would have practically sufficed to clear 
 the city. 
 
 As evening advanced dread noises were heard over 
 the heart of the city, clouds gathered, winds rose, and 
 there seemed imminent a combination of the twin ter- 
 
 153 
 
rors of a solar eclipse and a tornado. Furies howled in 
 the air, and the faces of the distant Londoners blanched 
 with terror. The voices of doom seemed in the world. 
 
 A troop of spirits congregated near Charing Cross. 
 The scene was surpassingly weird They paused for 
 awhile. 
 
 ' Tis. time the collectors were here," said the chief 
 spirit 
 
 "Ah, but the loads they have to bring are heavy," 
 said another. 
 
 As the scene grew darker a number of other spirits 
 trooped in, heavily laden with sundry articles whose 
 heaviness crushed and pained them, spirits though they 
 were. The chief spirit looked on sadly as the various 
 loads were dropped before him. "Unfortunate land! 
 Deluded people," he muttered. At length the whole 
 articles were unloaded, and a startling pile they made. 
 The chief spirit glanced down the list : 
 
 50,000 copies Hall Caine's Christian (ist Edition). 
 
 20,000 (2nd Edition). 
 
 The Works of Marie Corelli. 
 
 "The Beauties of Marie Corelli." (Edited by Annie Mackay). 
 
 The Logs rolled by Le Gallienne & Co. 
 
 i Poet Laureate. 
 
 1,000,000,000,000 volumes of the New Humour. 
 
 The Fabian Essays. 
 
 The international pronouncements of Mr. Jerome K. Jerome. 
 
 The Literature ot the Kailyard. 
 
 I copy New Irish Library. 
 
 100,000 "Precipitated" Mahatma letters lent by Mrs. Besant. 
 
 200 spooks by Mr. Stead. 
 
 The Independent Theatre. 
 
 154 
 
Mr. Clement Scott's articles in the Daily Telegraph. 
 The Expresses on the Chatham & Dover Railway. 
 The Influence of Madame Blavatsky. 
 Mr. Lane's Decadents. 
 The Bookman's "New Writers." 
 
 Crumbs from a Prince's serviette. Collected by Mrs. B-ll-c 
 L-wnd-1-c. 
 
 "Brother spirits," said the chief, "what a sad proof 
 have we here of human degeneracy! No wonder the 
 poor encumbered planet could not move. We have been 
 through the whole solar system, and heavier, more 
 deadening material, we have never met. You're sure 
 there are no more of these things abroad ?" 
 
 "Not another," was the answer. 
 
 "Under the 'logs'," said one spirit, "we met a sad 
 sight The bodies of a dozen log-rollers were crushed 
 to pieces. It was worse* than the old story of the stone of 
 Sisyphus. The gods, I suppose, got sickened at last, 
 and crushed the poor fellows under the last load of logs 
 they had devised. I am rather sorry for Richard Le 
 Gallienne, but as for others " 
 
 "Let us burn these sad things to ashes," broke in the 
 chief spirit. 
 
 It was easier said than done. They tried all sorts of 
 fiery contrivances, but the articles would not ignite. 
 Dull smoke puffed up in clouds, fitful little gleams 
 flashed out, but still in a dreary, lightless mass stood 
 the medley. 
 
 "Ah!" cried the chief spirit suddenly, "fetch one of 
 Robert Buchanan's old controversies in the Chronicle 
 
 155 
 
or Telegraph. They're the most heated and heating 
 things I know of." 
 
 Soon the scene was weirder. The pile was in a blaze. 
 The spirit of each article leaped to blazing life in the 
 conflagration and as the last mass turned to ashes went 
 howling away to distant lands of night and doom. The 
 earth once more was able to revolve peacefully and 
 easily on her axis. The horrified Londoners came up 
 from the Palace and all turned over new leaves. 
 
 156 
 
SPARROW-WORSHIP IN 
 LITERATURE 
 
 (A COMING BOOM) 
 
 "Well, I'm damned!" twittered the old Temple spar- 
 row. 
 
 "Sir!" said his better half, indignantly, rousing her- 
 self from a peculiarly moody mood, glancing first at her 
 mate, and then shrugging her shoulders as her attention 
 was attracted to the drip of the rain underneath. 
 
 "Pardon me, my "dear," he said. "I was stupidly un- 
 conscious of your presence for a moment ; I heard some- 
 thing to-day of a revival of an old grievance of ours a 
 silly popular display of interest in our neighbours, the 
 Temple pigeons. The question you know crops up 
 from time to time, when the pigeons are threatened with 
 extermination by the Temple authorities. The public 
 awake to the significance and historic associations of 
 the pigeons and write letters to the Daily Telegraph. 
 It has happened more than once in our own day. I am 
 not so young as I once 1 was nay, I am no longer young, 
 save in your affections and in your mind's eye, my 
 queen but I cannot remember the great B. P. getting 
 
 157 
 
excited over anything so trivial, I don't even except 
 Miss Corelli's portrait. 
 
 "Strange, my ownest own," said his better half, "I was 
 pondering on the same topic. 'Tis high time that the 
 boom were on again. But you seem to treat it rather 
 jauntily." 
 
 "And by all the wigs and gowns, why should you be 
 wounded over it, my treasure ? Don't you see its side- 
 splitting points, my rose-lovely twitterer." 
 
 "But consider," she said, while her eyes softened at 
 his flattery, "consider the nice things that have been 
 said in past years, and will be said again of these inane 
 and brainless pigeons the foolish, milk-and-water 
 creatures who don't know their own minds an hour, 
 who are as chicken-hearted as anything in London, 
 and whose gait and general deportment are subjects of 
 standing worry and disgust to the eyes of any species 
 of femininity. And " 
 
 "But, my own 
 
 "Pardon me, my love, I am excited, and I must say 
 my say. Not satisfied with praising and pleading for 
 these mopish and perfectly horrid pigeons, the people 
 will go out of their way to ridicule us us, my dear! 
 They call us noisy vagabonds, and refer with wither- 
 ing scorn to some of our free-and-easy Bohemian ha- 
 bits." 
 
 Her mate chuckled. 
 
 "Don't trouble yourself, my sensitive pet," he said. 
 "People who use the language you describe are only 
 a few hare-brained idealists and romanticists. And I, 
 
 158 
 
who have read the signs of the times, have often told 
 you that the reign of such folk is over. The world, you 
 know, is veering more and more to the realistic. And 
 in the life, ways, and principles (if I may so call them) 
 of the sparrow, there is much, very much, my sweet, that 
 must appeal to the realist" 
 
 "I am afraid you are a mere airy theorist," said his 
 better half, in an incredulous tone. 
 
 "Ah, you are not convinced, my charming one. You 
 feminines fix your eyes so insistently on small points 
 that you entirely lose the sense of great issues. But 
 let me leave the big issues and tendencies and come to 
 individual and isolated things that you can readily un- 
 derstand. In our own day haven't we witnessed the 
 white-washing of every historical blackguard and block- 
 head that you can think of? Nowadays the historian 
 considers himself blessed if he can find a still unwhite- 
 washed or unhonoured historical blackguard or nonen- 
 tity. Why, I have heard that somebody has written a 
 book in praise of Satan Montgomery you know your 
 Macaulay, of course. Do you imagine that in an age 
 of such tendencies, the sparrow, with all his bold, 
 breezy, brazen, and racy characteristics, will be left 
 long without his enthusiastic admirers and interpreters ? 
 My dear, the day of sparrow-worship is coming. The 
 mere pigeon will be simply laughed at." 
 
 "That certainly is a promising view," the better half 
 said, somewhat hopefully. 
 
 "To be sure it is. We sparrows are bluff and British, 
 when all is said and done. We smack of the rude seas. 
 
 159 
 
We have the Beerbohm note, without perhaps the Becr- 
 bohm polish. We twitter what we think. As a new 
 Tennyson might say : 
 
 It was our ancient privilege, my birds, 
 
 To fling whate'er we felt unfearing into twitters. 
 
 So much for our noise. As to other habits of ours, such 
 tactics have been immortalised for all time by that fel- 
 low Wordsworth, who talks of the good old rule, the 
 simple plan. 
 
 That they may take who have the power, 
 And they may keep who can. 
 
 Do you follow me, my fons et origo of love ?" 
 
 "I wish you wouldn't talk that way," she said, very 
 crossly. "You know, you wild fellow, that I wasn't your 
 first love." 
 
 After this it took a good deal of coaxing and com- 
 pliments to bring her to her usual self. Then they 
 turned to the pigeon-sparrow question again. Finally, 
 they adjourned the discussion, after heartily congratulat- 
 ing themselves that one sad joke formerly put upon the 
 pigeon world had not been offered to them. No one 
 had suggested as the Daily Graphic had once on a 
 time in connection with the pigeons that Norman Gale 
 should appeal to public sympathy with a poem in their 
 behalf! 
 
 "For which relief much thanks," they twittered. 
 
 160 
 
THE LOVER OF MISS LUCIFER 
 LEXICON 
 
 Dashem was brilliant, whimsical, and wayward 
 Dashem was a figure, a personality in the suburbs. 
 Dashem had an independent income, and that in the 
 eyes of suburban mammas covered a multitude of ec- 
 centricities and mental vagaries. 
 
 Dashem overflowed with ideas. He knew he had a 
 mission in the world, but, somehow, it kept in the vague 
 region of intangible things, and the would-be missionary 
 was unhappy. He never could endure the Idea of think- 
 ing or working upon any line that any human being 
 though great as Moses or Shakespeare (I beg Mr. 
 Shaw's pardon) had tried before him. He admitted 
 that after all the ages during which our planet-folk have 
 been making experiments it would be no easy matter 
 to strike upon an unmistakably new line. Aubrey 
 Beardsley, Sherlock Holmes, and the lady-novelists 
 had brought the world to expect so much ! But he was 
 certain that, sooner or later, he would strike upon the 
 Amazing Novelty. Humanity wanted an absolutely 
 new impulse. One day he told a select few of us that 
 he felt sure he was on the track of that impulse at last 
 
 161 
 
 11 
 
He began to see solar systems where before were the 
 merest nebulae. He grew strangely excited. 
 
 He told us later on, in a whisper almost awe-striking, 
 that the idea was ripening fast. That was on the occa- 
 sion of Lady Camberwell's never-to-be-forgotten "At 
 Home," the occasion of his introduction to Miss Lucifer 
 Lexicon, who had just startled London by her literary 
 masterpiece, "Guesses at the Nature and Appearance 
 of Extinct Masculinity ; a study of A. D. 3995." Miss 
 Lucifer was an early type of that perfect woman to be 
 evolved after many painful centuries of a developing 
 womankind trained and spoon-fed by generations of 
 George Egertons, Sarah Grands, Dr. Arabella Kenealys, 
 Frank Danbys, Mrs. Sarah Tooleys, and sundry such 
 varying sorts. 
 
 -Strange to relate, Dashem, who previously had been 
 anything but a lover of feminine society, spent most of 
 his time henceforward in the company of the fair Miss 
 Lucifer. He assured us cynics, however, that his great 
 idea was swiftly advancing towards fruition. He had 
 practically completed the quaint creed that was to give 
 permanent vitality to mankind. Miss Lucifer, he added, 
 was an invaluable helper. 
 
 London soon learned some of Dashem's plans. The 
 new creed was to be preached in a new evening journal 
 which would be a very miracle as a record-breaker. The 
 paper, type, matter, colour, arrangements were to be 
 sensationally different from anything which London 
 had hitherto seen. The whole would be a departure 
 that would take not only the city's breath, but the city's 
 
 162 
 
fogs away. Sir George Newnes would refuse to be com- 
 forted in Lynton and there would be no more high 
 crowing in the House of Harmsworth. 
 
 Dashem despised the idea of an ordinary editorial 
 office. He and Miss Lucifer had invented a patent 
 balloon, which in the summer weather would float 
 gracefully over the city, and therein, with the peaceful 
 clouds as their companions, they could dream, plan, 
 write, and edit, undisturbed by the noisy trials to which 
 common journalistic flesh was heir. Their copy would 
 be forwarded from time to time per a minor balloon, or 
 else an ingenious aerial telephone, to the palace in the 
 West-end where their printing and publishing would 
 be done amidst scenes and sights sufficient to recall 
 Oriental magnificence. If, haply, they grew tired of the 
 balloon, there was a golden caravansary, to fall back 
 upon. This would be driven from pretty haunt to pretty- 
 haunt in the neighbourhood of the great city, as the 
 unique editors thought and wrote. In this way an ever- 
 freshening impulse would be given to their fancies, an 
 ever-brightening novelty to their outlook, in striking 
 contrast to the stagnation and dreariness and discon- 
 tent of Fleet-street. 
 
 The eve of the first issue had come. All was ready 
 for the morrow's triumphal and epoch-making entry 
 into the journalistic world. Dashem and Miss Lucifer 
 were seated in the beautiful balloon, which sailed like 
 a spirit through the dreamful ether, far, far above the 
 prosy world Miss Lucifer was penning one of her fa- 
 mous epistles, and was lost in thought. A lamp, golden 
 
 163 
 
 11* 
 
and bejewelled, stood on the pretty table beside her. 
 Dashem stood a little distance away, looking down now 
 and then to the far dim city beneath him. For a man 
 whose life's triumph was so near he seemed unaccount- 
 ably moody. He was several times on the point of 
 speaking, but he checked himself. At length Miss Lu- 
 cifer concluded her epistle, she sealed the missive, de- 
 spatched it per the patent waiting balloon at her elbow, 
 smiled one of her superior smiles, then raised her eye- 
 brows in surprise at the pained looks of Dashem. Her 
 eyebrows, by the way, were expressive of a terrible 
 strength. They seemed to tell of new femininity, anti- 
 masculinity, stop-at-nothingness growing bolder with 
 the days. New Women swore by them. Men trembled 
 when they bristled. 
 
 "Why so sad, Bertie?" cried Miss Lucifer, with un- 
 mistakable impatience in her tone. "I thought you had 
 broken for ever with these common failings and feelings 
 of humanity." 
 
 "Alas!" said Dashem, "in this my triumph time, I 
 blush to confess that one base weakness of Old Human- 
 ity has overpowered me. Frown not, Miss Lucifer. The 
 gods have mocked me in this regard. I am passion's 
 slave. Miss Lucifer I am in love. And such is the trick 
 of fate that thou, O utterly-revolted one, art the object 
 of my love." 
 
 New Woman though she was, Miss Lucifer could not 
 speak for fair astonishment for the next five minutes. 
 Dashem took advantage of the peace to plead a word 
 in his own cause. 
 
 164 
 
"Silence, weak slave!" cried Miss Lucifer, as she 
 jumped to her feet in supreme indignation. As she 
 leaped upward, wild with anger, her arm struck the 
 golden lamp beside her. A noise as of thunder, leaping 
 fire, then confusion, chaos ! Balloon, Dashem, Miss Lu- 
 cifer were caught in the one fierce flame that now shot 
 a lurid, hissing, deadly light through the ether and the 
 evening. 
 
 Only a few ashes reached the earth. That was all 
 that was left to a waiting world of the great journalistic 
 pioneers. Their disciples gathered the ashes up de- 
 voutly, and enshrined them in a rich shrine. Then 
 mournfully they went out to their now lonely and de- 
 solate life-ways, sad as the New Humourists that Au- 
 tumn morning when they heard of the Passing of Je- 
 rome from To-Day. 
 
 THE END 
 
 165 
 
[Some of the matter in "The Great Young Man," "The 
 Flight From the Caineyard," and certain other papers, has 
 been used on the literary page of The Sun, a few other pages 
 in the Weekly Sun, and yet a few more in The Senate. Much 
 even of this matter has been re-written, and sundry additions 
 have been made to it, so with many of its sentiments it 
 might not be quite fair to identify the hospitable publications 
 in question.] 
 
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