'
 
 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY
 
 ESSAYS IN 
 M O D E R N I T Y 
 
 CRITICISMS AND 
 DIALOGUES BY 
 
 FRANC IS ADAMS 
 
 ''3m gaitjtn, guttn, ftyontn." GOETHE. 
 
 LONDON AND NEW YORK 
 
 JOHN LANE 
 THE BODLEY HEAD 
 
 1899
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 TENNYSON I 
 
 DEMOCRACY : A DIALOGUE 41 
 
 THE ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER ... 83 
 
 THE POETRY AND CRITICISM OF MR. SWINBURNE 117 
 
 SOME RECENT NOVELS 143 
 
 SHELLEY 167 
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 185 
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS : A DIALOGUE . . 217
 
 TENNYSON
 
 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 TENNYSON 
 
 THIS attempt to treat a contemporary writer with 
 absolute critical candour will not, it is hoped, be 
 misunderstood. The case is a special one. To the 
 younger generation of us, the position of Tennyson 
 in the realm of English poetry seemed from the first 
 to differ little, if at all, so far as its actuality went, 
 from that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Byron 
 and Shelley and Keats. He presented himself to 
 our youthful imagination as an accomplished fact. 
 The only difference lay in a comparative ignorance 
 of his private life, an ignorance which was by no 
 means ambiguous enough to prove a stumbling- 
 block. It is not too much to say that it has cost 
 many of us far more trouble to arrive at anything 
 like an impartial judgment of Shelley than of 
 Tennyson. Shelley was as much a superstition to 
 us as Byron was to our fathers. They both have 
 the passionately personal element in them, and
 
 4 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 nothing obscures the calm and clear view like that. 
 In the other case this element scarcely existed. 
 There is only one standard by which we can attempt 
 to judge any serious writer, and that is by the 
 highest and best which we know of. The judgment 
 we may hold of Lord Tennyson now may be hope- 
 lessly irreconcilable with that which we held once, 
 if judgment it could be called, and not the blind 
 acceptance of the enthusiasm of the generation that 
 immediately preceded us. But so is our judgment 
 of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Byron and Shelley 
 and Keats. Them also we accepted blindly as such 
 or such or such, and it was not until we had turned 
 back upon those guides and companions of our 
 spiritual pilgrimage, after their power of leadership 
 had been tested by the agony of the first hard stages, 
 that we realised how they were to appear to us for 
 the large remainder of the way. That same realisa- 
 tion came at that same period with regard also to 
 others beside the older ones. The names of these 
 others are the foremost names of our time, and we 
 instinctively recognise the fact that all of them, those 
 who went before and those who followed after, 
 form but one company. They do. They form the 
 company of the Age of Transition. They close the 
 epoch. They pass the lamp of life to the New 
 Race. They pause on the threshold of the New
 
 TENNYSON 5 
 
 World. Fifty years hence this will be plain to all. 
 To-day it is hidden from many, and from none 
 more perhaps than from the victorious children of 
 Yesterday, to whom we owe all the hope and 
 the trust of To-morrow. 
 
 Why, however, should we any longer hesitate to 
 attempt the treatment of the later brood with the 
 same fearless curiosity as the earlier ? The parentage 
 is the same : the habitat the same. Both have 
 fought the good fight and won, each in their special 
 manner. The hour has come in which the keen 
 desire to know and express the truth about them all 
 must be satisfied. They interest, they concern us 
 too deeply for us to palter any longer with half views 
 of them. We shall best show our admiration and 
 reverence for what they have done by resolutely 
 striving to see them not as our fathers saw them 
 not as they saw or see themselves but as they really 
 were and are. 
 
 We too often speak of the poetical movement of 
 the opening of the century as if we did not realise 
 that it consisted of two phases remarkably distinct 
 from one another. The principal writers of the first 
 of these phases survived their successors, and thus 
 helped to confuse the significance of the movement
 
 6 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 in every way. Its beginning and its ending, its 
 causes and its effects, still largely escape us. Four 
 years saw the premature extinction of the three 
 young leaders. Keats died in 1820 ; Shelley in '22 ; 
 Byron in '24. Coleridge and Scott did not follow 
 till '30 and '32, and Wordsworth dragged on up to 
 1850. But we must not forget that all Wordsworth's 
 best work was done before his fortieth year say, in 
 the decade of 1798 to 1808 and the same is even 
 more definitely true of Coleridge. If we except the 
 purely literary criticism of the latter, little, very little 
 that either of them did in their later years counts in 
 any final estimate we may form of them. The fact 
 is that their influence was all this time mostly for 
 evil. The one in the realms of poetry, the other in 
 those of thought, helped only too well to produce a 
 hopeless intellectual lethargy. The young men of 
 intelligence pointed to Coleridge and said : ' Here is 
 a man who admittedly has produced some exquisite 
 poetry, is the very first of literary critics, has a 
 supreme culture ' (as Culture went ^in those days), 
 ' has scaled all the heights and sounded all the 
 depths of philosophic endeavour and he stands 
 there with a shining face and tells you he is ready to 
 die for the Church of England of 1830 ! ' Reaction 
 of this sort was indeed to have the day in every 
 department of the national life for twenty years to
 
 TENNYSON 7 
 
 come, and when the first stirrings of a better state 
 began to agitate the inert mass, they came in the 
 sole shape of popular politics. The realms of poetry 
 and of thought remained almost entirely unaffected. 
 
 Lord Tennyson's first appearance in literature is in 
 the astonishing capacity of the subject of a deliberate 
 criticism by Coleridge. Nothing could show us 
 more clearly the dearth of all excellence than that 
 the first literary critic of his epoch (and we may even 
 go so far as to say both of the epoch that preceded 
 and of that which has followed him) could treat with 
 anything approaching seriousness such a book as the 
 Poems, chiefly Lyrical. 'The misfortune is,' says 
 Coleridge, c that he has begun to write verses without 
 very well understanding what metre is,' and he gives 
 him quite a nice little pedagogic lecture on the way 
 to attain 'a sense of metre.' It had got to this. 
 The only thing you could talk about in a new poet 
 was his mastery or want of mastery of metre. It 
 never occurred to Coleridge to declare that the 
 whole performance was effeminate and factitious. 
 Virility, alas, had passed out of his own bones too 
 long ago for him to notify the fact that it was wanting 
 in any one else's. Opium had helped his facile 
 temperament to relegate reality to the pleasant 
 distance of a dream ; and what fault was it in this 
 young man to start from the point at which he was
 
 8 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 himself leaving off? Thus, then, he spake, and died, 
 while the subject of his criticism passed on to the 
 elaboration of his life-work. 
 
 What impresses one in the poems which Lord 
 Tennyson has since quite justly seen fit to label 
 'Juvenilia,' is just this, that so far as he was con- 
 cerned the movement which preceded him might 
 almost as well never have taken place. Everything 
 that was permanent and progressive in it he rejected. 
 Everything that was temporary and trumpery he 
 assimilated. The sicklier side of the art of Byron, 
 Keats, and Shelley was absolutely to his taste. The 
 audacity and manly scorn of Byron, the high, clear, 
 spiritual note of Keats, the restless, searching 
 lamentation of Shelley, fell unregarded on his ears. 
 Such gifts were either above and beyond him, or 
 they troubled his ' lisping in love's delicious creeds,' 
 whose girlish votaresses sit 'steeped in golden 
 languors,' ' languors of love-deep eyes,' and he would 
 have none of them. His one resolute instinct here 
 is to look nothing in the face. He would make of 
 .ife a pretty play. In after years he devoted ceaseless 
 lima labor to the perfection of this earlier work, but 
 his touch bewrayeth him. It is always felicitous, but 
 the felicity is doomed to inferiority. He has against 
 him the inescapable difference between enamel work 
 and painting; the exquisite artisan never can become
 
 TENNYSON 9 
 
 a sovereign artist because his ideal is on a lower 
 level where realisation is well within reach. Care, 
 taste, 'the graceful tact, the Christian art,' as he 
 calls it, never yet attained to magic. You must look 
 at things with all your eyes before you can hope to 
 render their shapes and beings to us, and this 
 Juvenis will never look at anything longer than will 
 give him its superficial picturesqueness. ' The form, 
 the form,' he says, 'alone is eloquent,' and this is 
 what, just at present, he means by ' the form.' 
 Presently, however, he struck higher, but not yet 
 with a secure flight. 'The Lotus Eaters,' as we 
 have it now, is almost a new poem, and it is praised 
 for its lovely landscape. 
 
 ' A land of streams ! Some like a downward smoke, 
 Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go.' 
 
 Do you call that ' natural magic ' ? Clearly, it is no- 
 thing of the kind. It is the daintily but ever super- 
 ficially picturesque the sort of thing that satisfies 
 the sensitive book-reader who sees this for the first 
 time, and wants to become familiar with it. Or again : 
 in ' A Dream of Fair Women,' where for the first time 
 he succeeds, though only transiently, in attaining to 
 the note of reality, take one of his best descriptions : 
 ' Enormous elm-tree boles did stoop and lean 
 
 Upon the dusky brushwood underneath, 
 Their broad curved branches, fledged with clearest green, 
 
 New from its silken sheath.'
 
 io ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 Fledged with clearest green? How happy, how 
 charmingly apt ! Why, a man who has just begun 
 to be aware that there are such things as art and 
 literature is delighted with it. He does not see the 
 gulf that yawns between it and 
 
 ' Daffodils 
 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty.' 
 
 What, however, the 'Lotus Eaters' really stands 
 for, of course, is the first successful essay of the 
 genuine Tennysonian music. Haifa hundred failures 
 have at last enabled him to 'beat his music out.' 
 Certainly, this counts. Any individual articulation 
 in a poet counts. It is a new contribution to the 
 sum of our literature a fresh note, another rendering 
 of the beauty or the force of things. But in the 
 ' Dream ' he does even better still. There we shall 
 find verse like 
 
 ' I saw, wherever light illumineth, 
 Beauty and anguish walking hand in hand 
 The downward slope to death.' 
 
 He is beginning to look at life as it really presents 
 itself, and to try and render it in speech fit for men 
 to listen to. 
 
 If we turn from the merely technical aspects of 
 his work, the same timid artificiality still meets us at 
 all points. He juggles away everything which he
 
 TENNYSON n 
 
 cannot transmute into the frail and gracious love- 
 liness which feeds his senses. When he erects a 
 Palace of Art and hangs up some paintings of the 
 poets, Shakespeare figures under the semblance of 
 one ' bland and mild.' Tennyson likes him bland 
 and mild : it is so much nicer, you know, than 
 strenuous and heart-sick, and this is his criticism of 
 literature. Dark hours, however, will fall upon all 
 of us, and then there begins the sombre dialogue 
 of ' The Two Voices.' When the dark hour passes, 
 he goes out into the fields, and, as he is feeling 
 considerably better, he is at once aware that ' altho' 
 no tongue can prove, every cloud that spreads above 
 and veileth love, itself is love." And, therefore, he 
 ' marvels how the mind can be brought to anchor by 
 one gloomy thought,' and this is his criticism on life. 
 No thought, no ideas either way : merely the appeal 
 to sensations. Round about him there is much 
 worry and outcry on the part of what he calls ' the 
 people.' They seemed dissatisfied with their lot. 
 They say they are wretched, and they seem to think 
 they ought not to be. Well 
 
 ' Two parties still divide the world, 
 Of those that want and those that have, and still 
 The same old sore breaks out from age to age 
 With much the same result ; ; 
 
 and this is his criticism on the social problem.
 
 12 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 Buonaparte was a ' madman ' whose one thought in 
 life was 'to quell the stubborn hearts of oak,' but 
 ' we taught him lowlier moods we ,' until ' late he 
 learned humility perforce, like those whom Gideon 
 school'd with briars'; and this is his criticism on 
 history. Finally, my friends, these are troublesome 
 days, these days of reform or Chartist agitation, but 
 why should we doubt of the final issue ? This is the 
 land where, 'girt with friends or foes, a man may 
 speak the thing he will ' (so Byron and Shelley found 
 it), and, thanks be to God, it is the land where 
 nobody is influenced by thoughts or ideas ; but our 
 dear old friend, sober-suited Freedom, 'slowly 
 broadens down from precedent o precedent,' till her 
 base is more than pyramidal. The truth to put it 
 shortly, is that if you are only fairly comfortably off, 
 ' the world comes gently to those that are cast in 
 gentle mould,' like our poet ; and what can help us 
 better towards this pleasant preliminary than writing 
 poems which ' everybody ' has to admire as quite too 
 pretty and pathetic ? ' The May Queen ' stands for 
 the first of those resolute bids for popularity which 
 Lord Tennyson has always been careful to reiterate. 
 There are thirty-nine verses in this well-known poem. 
 In twenty-eight of them one of the most perfect little 
 female prigs in all literature takes an even more un- 
 conscionable time in dying than Charles n. The
 
 TENNYSON 13 
 
 nauseating quality of some of the verse is very re- 
 markable. 
 
 ' Nay, nay, you must not weep, nor let your grief be wild, 
 You should not fret for me, mother, you have another child! ' 
 
 The whole edificatory agony is gone through, right 
 down to the pet clergyman of the Adelphi pit. 
 
 ' It seemed so hard at first, mother, to leave the blessed sun, 
 And now it seems so hard to stay, and yet His will be done ! 
 But still I think it can't be long before I find release ; 
 And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of 
 peace. . . . 
 
 He taught me all the mercy, for he showed me all the sin, 
 Now, tho' my lamp was lighted late, there 's One will let me in : 
 Nor would I now be well, mother, again if that could be ; 
 Now my desire is but to pass to Him that died for me. ' 
 
 Which suggests the horrible suspicion that it was 
 ' that good man ' who had made it too hard for the 
 poor thing to stay. 
 
 The conclusion to be drawn from all this seems 
 only too clear. Here we have Tennyson at work as 
 a poet for a whole decade, and, with the exception 
 of a few snatches of fine verse in ' The Lotus Eaters ' 
 and 'A Dream of Fair Women,' he has produced 
 nothing of any permanent interest. It is a notable 
 record, even for a popular poet.
 
 U ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 ii 
 
 Matthew Arnold declared that Lord Tennyson's 
 'decisive appearance dated from 1842,' and we are 
 now indeed arriving at the hour of this 'golden 
 prime.' But that early period of timorous ease had 
 for ever saved his tranquillity. The storm and stress 
 which had buffeted all our true moderns, strewing 
 the shores of the European literature of the nineteenth 
 century with the splendid wrecks of barks that have 
 run but one or two record-breaking voyages, would 
 have sunk this fragile, fairy skiff at its first putting 
 out from port. Three years of what Heine or Musset 
 or Byron or Keats bore would have annihilated 
 Tennyson at any period of his teens or twenties. 
 When the intellectual side of the poetical movement 
 which preceded him, and which, as we have seen, 
 he had so far resisted with the completest success, 
 actually came upon him, he had had time to attain 
 to a considerable amount of robust Philistinism. By 
 the time the later developments of his younger con- 
 temporaries had worked the revolution of Science, 
 and were beginning to work that of Literature, 
 Tennyson was safely in the harbour. He was under- 
 stood to say that he had gone through all this in his 
 time, just as Coleridge had, and was as ready to die 
 for the supposititious Church of ' the Lord Jesus ' as
 
 TENNYSON 15 
 
 the other had been for the actual Evangelical Church 
 of England. What, then, he was now facing was in 
 reality nothing very formidable from the intellectual 
 and critical side. Its danger lay in its hold on his 
 emotions. The amount of sheer thought, of power- 
 ful and fecund ideas, in both of the early phases of 
 the movement was slight. Byron and Shelley speak 
 through the heart and spirit, not through the brain. 
 The social and religious creeds of Coleridge and 
 Wordsworth scarcely count. It was no very aggressive 
 and convincing criticism of life and nature, of Litera- 
 ture, and Art, and Science, which afflicted the 
 Christianising poet of ' In Memoriam.' He admits 
 quite ingenuously at the end that he never really 
 quite meant it all. 
 
 ' Whatever I have said or sung, 
 Some bitter notes my harp would give, 
 Yea, tho' there often seem'd to live 
 
 A contradiction on the tongue, 
 
 Yet Hope had never lost her youth ; 
 
 She did but look thro' dimmer eyes ; 
 
 Or Love but played with gracious lies, 
 Because he felt so fixed in truth. ' 
 
 He reveals, again and again, all his childlike, com- 
 mercial egotism with a perfect simplicity of primal 
 shamelessness. ' Does Job serve God for nought ? ' 
 Let science prove him not to be a little God in 
 his own style, prove him not to have an eternal
 
 16 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 individuality with a claim for perpetual wages ' for 
 having been an honest man 'and what matters 
 science unto men, at least to him ? He would not 
 stay ! ' Oh, no ; the game would not be worth the 
 candle ! He would be a fool, in such a case, not to 
 freely ' take his pastime.' Why, the only thing that 
 prevents him from such creditable moral courses 
 now is the knowledge that his spiritual banking 
 account, whether debit or credit, is an everlasting 
 one, and has got to be worked out satisfactorily 
 sooner or later 'to the uttermost farthing.' How 
 could a nurse in a hospital ' bear with the sights and 
 the loathsome smells of disease' except she had 
 been told on unimpeachable authority that her 
 ministrations to the patients would count just as 
 much as if they had been to the big Banker himself? 
 Tennyson 'wouldn't live' unless he thought that a 
 profit and loss system like this assured us that ' our 
 griefs were our gains.' ' If the wages of virtue,' he 
 exclaims, ' be dust, would she have heart to endure 
 for the life of the worm and the fly ? ' He has not 
 a single idea on the subject ; it is the mere primaeval 
 religious barter of the infantile savage. He knows 
 of no justification for virtue in itself, in the happiness 
 it affords, in the consciousness that our salvation as 
 individuals and as a community lies demonstratively 
 and scientifically on these lines, and on none other.
 
 TENNYSON 17 
 
 How shockingly wanting in knowledge as a thinker 
 and in self-respect as a man ! 
 
 Equally shocking, alas, are the intellectual contrasts 
 in him. At one moment he astonishes us by his 
 insight into the natural world and the laws which 
 govern it, an insight exceedingly rare at the time at 
 which he wrote. Long before ' the struggle for 
 existence and survival of the fittest ' had become a 
 commonplace with all the incoherencies of popular 
 acceptance, Tennyson had asked : 
 
 ' Are God and Nature then at strife, 
 That Nature lends such evil dreams? 
 So careful of the type she seems, 
 So careless of the single life. . . . 
 
 ' " So careful of the type " ? But no, 
 From scarped cliff and quarried stone 
 She cries : "A thousand types are gone, 
 I care for nothing, all shall go. 
 
 ' " Thou makest thine appeal to me : 
 I bring to life, I bring to death : 
 The spirit does but mean the breath : 
 I know no more." ' 
 
 Leopardi never saw things more clearly. ' For 
 nature,' says the Englishman, ' is one with rapine, a 
 harm no preacher can heal.' Yet the next moment, 
 like Paul, he would tell us a mystery. Once upon 
 a time a man was raised from the dead. His name 
 B
 
 i8 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 was Lazarus. He had been dead four days. Where 
 was he ? ' There lives no record of reply,' says the 
 poet, 'which, telling what it was to die, had surely 
 added praise to praise.' What brought about this re- 
 grettable suppressio verit Lazarus 'revealed nothing; 
 he told it not '- 
 
 ' Or something sealed 
 The lips of that Evangelist ! ' 
 
 Can he be serious? He provokes the smile. 
 Does Lord Tennyson still hold to that explanation 
 still in December, '1892? Truly the note of insin- 
 cerity and fatuity is struck so often in 'In Memoriam' 
 that one cannot tell. To begin with, he tried to 
 make a tenth-rate person into an ideal type that 
 should yet remain real, and as a pedestal for this 
 impossible figure he must needs try to give us a 
 statement of what he took to be Christian philosophy 
 revised and amended up to date. We have some 
 literary remains of Arthur Hallam, and can judge 
 of him. His friend tells us he ' had heart affluence 
 in discursive talk from household fountains never 
 dry'; he was the best literary critic of his time, 
 especially of poetry ; he had ' seraphic intellect and 
 force ' as a polemist ; ' impassion'd logic,' and all 
 the graces and charms of the perfected creature. 
 His converse compelled all men, and made the weak
 
 TENNYSON 19 
 
 and wicked strong and good, etc. In a word, 'he 
 bore without abuse the grand old name of gentleman.' 
 Such was the phoenix who proceeded from the loins 
 of ' the judicious Hallam ' ! Talk like this is stupid 
 bete. No one who has perused the literary remains 
 of Arthur Hallam could tolerate it for a moment. 
 It is as bad as Mill's babble about Mrs. Taylor. As 
 for making the poem a contribution to modern 
 thought from the supposititiously Christian stand- 
 point, this was obviously impossible for a man who 
 had never given himself the trouble to seriously 
 think at all. Tennyson had no faculty that way. 
 We have only to consider what Browning did here 
 to see what a terribly bad use the other made of his 
 materials, even such as they were. He ' plays with 
 gracious lies' right through, and, when he is tired 
 of his amusement, falls back without a misgiving on 
 the divine instincts which he holds in common with a 
 hundred per cent, of the blockheads of his age and 
 clime. But what a disgusted impatience he lays in the 
 long run upon every earnest reader who comes to him 
 seeing the green leaves afar off, for refreshment and 
 repose for the teased, o'erlaboured spirit ! He raises 
 conclusion after conclusion of the most disquieting 
 sort to the ' honest doubter,' and then, without laying 
 one of them, or even attempting to do so, repeats his 
 naif premises with an air of charming conviction.
 
 20 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 Oh, it is all right! 'Though Faith and Form be 
 sundered in the night of fear,' you can still hear the 
 sentinels passing the cheery watchword. My friend, 
 you are on the eve of a great victory. You have felt 
 it ; you were born for it (he tells you so in italics). 
 Then, to crown this barefaced sophistication, he 
 remarks with a bland impertinence that he ' trusts he 
 has not wasted breath,' and that he has not ' fought 
 in vain, like Paul, with beasts.' Fought with beasts ? 
 Why, he never was once fifty yards away from his 
 comfortable easy-chair in his cosy study the whole 
 time ! ' In Memoriam ' would be one of the most dis- 
 honest works ever written by a man of ability were it 
 not for a dozen snatches of sweet and true affection 
 which he had in his heart of hearts for his friend. 
 There is little or none of the passion of love, the 
 terrible splendour of desire and renunciation, which 
 aches and flashes in the latter half of Shakespeare's 
 sonnets. Tennyson tells the simple truth when he 
 says of himself: 
 
 ' Mine the love that will not tire, 
 And, born of love, the vague desire 
 That spurs an imitative will.' 
 
 No criticism on him can better his own in that phrase 
 of 'the imitative will.' We have him there, the 
 intellectual side of him, complete. But this is not
 
 TENNYSON 21 
 
 the side on which our final judgment of him in this 
 poem rests. It is the exactly opposite side the 
 emotional side. And here we now enter within the 
 golden gates of pleasure and praise. 
 
 What charming pictures he gives us of the quiet, 
 radiant purity of his love as it takes shape in his 
 sorrow ! A dozen of these are the property of all 
 poetry lovers, and are not needed here as ocular 
 proof. 'Dark house whereby once more I stand' 
 (No. vn.) ; ' Be near me when my light is low ' 
 (No. L.); 'When on my bed the moonlight falls' 
 (No. LXVII.) ; 'Ring out, wild bells' (No. cvi.). 
 Why should I string these pearls together out of 
 those bushels of vacant intellectual 'chaff well 
 meant for grain ' ? That will be some one else's task 
 before thirty years are gone, or, perchance, twenty. 
 
 And this note of sincerity, the true note, the char- 
 acteristic note, the vital note, he attains to now at last 
 in another department of his work in the department 
 of the love-poem. Passion seizes on him. In the 
 actual results, of course, all his faults and limitations 
 still grievously afflict him, and the first poem of power 
 which he wrote ' Locksley Hall ' is disfigured no 
 less as a serious piece of social criticism by the crudest 
 enthusiasms than morally and spiritually by the vin- 
 dictive meanness of the lover gloating over his mistress 
 as she tends her drunken master and ' perishes ' in
 
 22 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 her final 'self-contempt' as an orthodox matcrfamilias. 
 With an amazing want of perception Lord Tennyson, 
 half a century later, tried to paint his hero even 
 blacker than he had already painted him, and in a 
 sequel shows us Amy as a happy saint, and her 
 husband as a model husband ! This is very funny 
 far funnier than ' The Northern Cobbler,' or even our 
 terrible young friend ' The May Queen '; but surely it 
 was not needed. The fact remains that in ' Locksley 
 Hall' he wrote some exceedingly fine verse, and, when 
 he arrived at his more lucid moods, was able to com- 
 pose some love-songs to a woman as perfect in their 
 way as his love-elegiacs to his friend. Here and 
 there 'Maud' reaches to real passion and the perfected 
 expression of it. Her love has made his life ' a per- 
 fumed altar flame.' 'He has walked awake with 
 Truth ' for the first time in his life, and he takes us 
 with him. And the poignant note the tone of the 
 agony of loss, ' deep as first love and wild with all 
 regret ' he has won it at last. And there is more to 
 be said. The advance he makes now is made all 
 along the line. Compare ' Tithonus ' with ' CEnone,' 
 ' Lucretius ' with ' The Palace of Art,' ' The Grand- 
 mother ' and the two ' Northern Farmers ' with (once 
 more, and for the last time) that cruel ' May Queen,' 
 ' The Sailor Boy ' with ' Lady Clara Vere de Vere,' 
 ' Flower in the Crannied Wall ' with ' To J. S.' It is
 
 TENNYSON 23 
 
 all the difference between the amateur and the pro- 
 fessional, the half-hearted dilettante and the serious 
 worker. We have at last reached the point where we 
 have to reckon with him, where we can no longer 
 relegate him to girls and undergraduates, but must 
 face him and what he has done on this line and on 
 that, and consider the claims advanced in his behalf 
 as a representative modern poet. 
 
 in 
 
 Those claims (let it at once be noted) are not now 
 what they were even ten years ago. Men not devoid 
 of the saving grace of intelligence could then be found 
 ready to contend for a place for Tennyson above all 
 the poets of the century. They spoke of him as the 
 supreme mouthpiece of his epoch in the same way 
 as Milton was, as Shakespeare was, as Chaucer was. 
 At this hour one is at least spared the trouble of 
 wasting time on any such vain proposition. Even the 
 veteran survivals of the Tennysonian cult of the 
 seventies and early eighties would now be content to 
 accept an admission of his superiority over his con- 
 temporaries, and of an equality with Wordsworth and 
 Byron and Keats, with Coleridge and Shelley, with 
 Gray and Burns. These at least are the claims that 
 will be considered here, because they are still being
 
 24 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 made, and in all probability will continue to be made 
 for some time to come. 1 
 
 We have seen in 'In Memoriam' some of the poet's 
 efforts to figure as a modern in the domain of what 
 is usually called thought. Let us have samples of 
 his ripest criticism on other aspects. The revolution 
 in Science worked out under the leadership of Darwin, 
 Professor Wallace, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, of Pro- 
 fessors Huxley and Tyndall (to give no other names), 
 is a present fact too solidly obvious to be gainsaid. 
 Some opinion on it is inevitable from a ' representa- 
 tive modern poet.' What has ours to say about it? 
 Little enough, but that little is extremely instructive 
 as showing how far and in what manner he has realised 
 this fact. Sitting pensively on a rock on the seashore, 
 the hero of ' Maud ' sees a pretty sea-shell. ' What is 
 it?' he wonders. Then he adds immediately, 'A 
 learned man could give it a clumsy name.' And so 
 much for learned men. A pious nurse in a hospital 
 (none other than the lady who puts up with the 
 sights and loathsome smells of disease in considera- 
 
 1 One charitably averts one's eyes from the melancholy spectacle 
 of the English critical press at Lord Tennyson's death. Scarcely 
 anything uttered at that time can be taken seriously at all. The 
 frantic competition in eulogy drove the professional writers to 
 utter the most inconceivable absurdities in order to get a hearing 
 and a place in this prodigious ' boom. ' It would have been 
 supremely ludicrous had it not ended with becoming supremely 
 disgusting.
 
 TENNYSON 25 
 
 tion of a big supernal pourboire) knows a bold bad 
 doctor who doubted that ' seeking the Lord Jesus in 
 prayer ' would ' set a broken knee.' He himself puts 
 up with the sights and smells and the rest without any 
 such exceptional future ' perquisites ' as hers ; but to 
 the pious nurse he ' looks so coarse and so red ' that, 
 with her wonderful, sweet, womanly charitableness, 
 she ' could think ' (admirable phrase !) ' he was one of 
 those who would break their jests on the dead, or 
 mangle the living dog that had loved him and fawn'd 
 at his knee drench'd with the hellish oorali.' And 
 so much for men who come ' fresh from the surgery- 
 schools of France and other lands.' A woman's-rights 
 woman, who is also a princess and a genius ('a lovely, 
 lordly creature,' ' fair and strong and terrible,' ' a 
 strange poet-princess with grand imaginations,' 'the 
 flower of womanhood,' etc.), thus again disposes off- 
 hand of this facile subject of vivisection : 
 
 ' Those monstrous males that carve the living hound, 
 And cram him with the fragments of the grave. ' 
 
 And as this is all, absolutely all, that our poet says on 
 these matters, it is to be presumed that this is all he 
 has to say. In his later hour of senile celebrity he has 
 done the thing over again with a virulent energy which 
 is positively amazing. Those myopic stumblings of 
 his manhood seem large and lucid beside the dis- 
 tressing mental collapse, the insane and incoherent
 
 26 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 rhodomontade of so much of 'Sixty Years After.' 
 Unhappily, the same phenomenon is to be noted in 
 a dozen other cases. This hapless caricature of the 
 ' man of science ' has a perfect parallel in the equally 
 hapless caricature of the Frenchman, or of the Dis- 
 senting Minister, or of any other person who lives 
 outside the exiguous pale of Lord Tennyson's anti- 
 quated prejudices of caste and religion. The Church 
 of England clergyman (as we have seen) is the em- 
 bodiment of the mildness and sweet reasonableness 
 of Christ: he is 'that good man.' The Dissenting 
 Minister appears, and appears only, and again and 
 again, as 'heated pulpiteer, not preaching simple 
 Christ to simple men,' who does ' his oily best, 
 dropping the too rough H in hell and heaven, 
 to spread the Word by which himself has thriven.' 
 And France ? what has he to say of France social, 
 artistic, and literary ? Socially, it is the home elect 
 of 'blind hysterics,' of 'revolts, republics, revolutions, 
 most no graver than a schoolboy's barring-out ' in a 
 word, of a 'red fool-fury.' Artistically, it is the pro- 
 ducer of ' poisonous honey,' which somebody or other 
 'stole,' and malignantly attempted to use on the 
 supreme painters of our English Royal Academy, but 
 (it would still seem) without any very marked result. 
 Of French literature it is needless to say any more 
 than that it is all 'wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism,'
 
 TENNYSON 27 
 
 and (somehow or other) manages, while doing so, to 
 go not only ' forward, forward, ay, but backward, 
 downward, too, into the abysm,' thus entirely beating 
 the performance of Mr. Gladstone's proteges, the 
 Gadarene pigs. 
 
 The simple truth is that stuff of this sort is beyond 
 the bounds of patience. Tennyson's negative criti- 
 cism of his age cannot be taken seriously for one 
 moment. It is childish. We turn, therefore, to his 
 affirmative criticism in the hope of finding there, in his 
 efforts at direct creation, something that the mind can 
 at least rest upon. Now, it happens that he has come 
 to the test here in the fullest and most satisfactory 
 manner, to wit, in his creation of King Arthur. 
 
 King Arthur is a crucial case, because he is Lord 
 Tennyson's deliberate attempt to present to us an 
 ideal figure of social manhood. He disclaims, of 
 course, all historical fidelity. This is not the British 
 Arthur of cairns and cromlechs, nor yet he 'of 
 Geoffrey's book, nor he of Malleor's.' This is the 
 King Arthur who is 'like a modern gentleman of 
 stateliest port/ and as a perfected product of 
 modernity is he to be judged. His story is the story 
 of 'Sense at war with Soul.' He is himself ' the fair 
 beginner of a nobler time,' the protagonist of goodness, 
 truth and beauty for each and for all, ' the highest and 
 the most human too.' We are led to understand that
 
 28 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 the hero of 'In Memoriam,' 'the man' the poet 'held 
 as half divine,' had something to do with this present- 
 ment of the l j?os regum,' and in ' dedicating, in con- 
 secrating, with tears,' these idylls to the memory of 
 the late lamented Prince Consort, we are told that 
 ' he held them dear, perchance as finding there un- 
 consciously some image of himself.' All this helps 
 us to realise the better what Lord Tennyson means by 
 a modern gentleman. But there can be little doubt 
 on the subject : his conception is too clearly marked. 
 From the very first, where Arthur is introduced as a 
 candidate for matrimony, he portrays himself with 
 a supreme ingenuousness. Leodogran, the King of 
 Cameliard, had but one child, a daughter 
 'And she was fairest of all flesh on earth.' 
 
 Arthur, with a touching modesty, promptly recognises 
 his predestined bride. ' For,' says he, 
 
 ' Saving I be joined 
 To her that is the fairest under heaven, 
 I seem as nothing in the mighty world, 
 And cannot work my will, nor work my work, 
 Wholly, or make myself in mine own realm 
 Victor and lord. ' 
 
 Accordingly, he procures the lady, assuring her that 
 ' her doom is his,' and that ' let chance what will, he 
 loves her to the death.' In the same heroic and 
 unegotistic spirit, and in almost the same terms, he 
 addresses the man who he feels is ' the mightiest of
 
 TENNYSON 29 
 
 his knights/ and, indeed, every one of them, he 
 'binds with so straight vows to his own self (sic) 
 that it half scares the wits out of them. 
 
 The 'old imperfect tale' of Lord Tennyson's 
 ' Idylls ' needs no analysis here. ' The war of 
 Soul with Sense ' is fought and won and lost in the 
 most charming manner possible all through, and 
 forms the prettiest packet (as Carlyle remarked) of 
 ' superlative lollipops ' known in our time. We are 
 never once allowed to approach reality except with 
 a thousand polite precautions : we never face a single 
 fact of life, as life actually presents itself to men and 
 women to-day, or any other day ; but everything is 
 glossed over and resolved this way or that in abso- 
 lute harmony with the old familiar Tennysonian 
 philosophy so long, at least, as it is humanly 
 possible to do so. Unfortunately, there comes a 
 point in this story, this particular story, where no 
 amount of wriggling can quite save us except at the 
 cost of a spiritual and artistic cowardice of which 
 even 'the gracious tactician, the Christian artist' is 
 afraid from facing a fact, a positive and brutal fact. 
 Arthur, therefore, has to face it and we have to face 
 it with him. Guinevere, this paragon of beauty, is 
 an adulteress, and (what is so distressing) an adul- 
 teress who is found out. Well, an interview between 
 her and her outraged po ise is clearly inevitable.
 
 30 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 Arthur, too, has got to come to the test at last, and 
 we are to see what a modern gentleman, a modern 
 English Christian gentleman, has to say under these 
 circumstances to his convicted and humiliated wife. 
 Of course we all know what a modern English navvy 
 would do. He would put on his biggest pair of 
 boots (if, peradventure, he had a choice of this sort) 
 and kick and jump upon the abandoned woman. 
 But it will be very different with Arthur. Let us 
 see what happens. The wretched creature has fled 
 to cover at a 'holy house at Almesbury.' Thither 
 her husband presently follows her, and in a long 
 gallery in the nunnery finds her seated alone. At 
 his approach she falls prone from her seat, 'and 
 grovels with her face against the floor,' covering it 
 from him with her arms and hair. Then Arthur, 
 who has halted, and stands contemplating her, 
 presently begins to 'denounce judgment.' He asks 
 her if this is indeed she, ' the child of one he 
 honour'd, and who was happy,' but is now 'dead 
 before her shame.' The word 'child' catching 
 his attention, he proceeds to remind her that she 
 is barren, or, if not barren, then the parent of only 
 sword and fire. (Kick number one.) Why, it is 
 she who has been the means of losing him 'his 
 right arm, the mightiest of his knights,' Lancelot, 
 with whom he has just been fighting a pretty state
 
 TENNYSON 31 
 
 of affairs. (Kick number two.) But see what a 
 fine nature he has : he bears her no malice for it. 
 No one shall hurt her. ' Fear not : thou shalt be 
 guarded till my death.' Afterwards, of course, she 
 must not reckon on him, and he wants to remind her 
 that he is most likely going to die very shortly in 
 this struggle, and why should he desire it otherwise ? 
 ' She has not made his Jife so sweet to him that 
 he, the King, should greatly care to live.' The 
 truth is that she has ' spoilt the purpose of his life.' 
 (Kick number three.) The thing is done and can- 
 not be undone, one would think, and there can be 
 no possible use in going over it all again. But not 
 so thinks Arthur. His idea is to explain it all to 
 her carefully, very, very carefully, so that she shall 
 realise what a supreme and perfect wretch she is, 
 and this he does (so he says) ' even for her sake 
 And so he starts off. Heaven forbid that we shou d 
 follow him over the seventy-one lines of pitiless 
 blank verse wherein he points his moral and adorns 
 his tale to his own and Lord Tennyson's satisfaction. 
 During the course of this appalling apologia pro vita 
 sua, he takes occasion to yet again impress upon 
 her the fact of the impracticability of a future for him- 
 self where, whatever he did, he 'should evermore 
 be vexed with her,' and the broken-spirited woman 
 now responds to this last application of his knightly
 
 32 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 toe by ' creeping an inch nearer and laying her hands 
 upon his feet.' Instantly he seems to perceive his 
 opportunity for a few final inflictions which she shall 
 be sore with for many a day. Do not think, he says, 
 that I came here on purpose to kick you in this way : 
 he did not come to ' urge her crime/ or ' curse ' her. 
 Why, his vast pity for her in that painfully horizontal 
 attitude ' almost makes him die,' seeing that it causes 
 her to lay ' her golden head, his pride in other summers, 
 at his feet ' in the dirt and dust. It is merely that 
 he'd been weighing her heart with another heart 
 (which shall be nameless) his heart which was ' too 
 wholly true to dream untruth in thee.' In a word, 
 he 'forgives her as Eternal God forgives.' Then he 
 is ready for business, and it is with a sublime unction 
 that he proceeds to inform her that he can't kiss her 
 (her lips are Lancelot's), can't even touch her, for her 
 hand is flesh, and his flesh, his too too unsolid and 
 unmeltable flesh, as he looks down on her ' polluted ' 
 flesh, cries out, ' I loathe thee ! ' For she must 
 never forget, you see, that he was ' ever virgin save 
 for her.' However, if she purifies herself, and 
 macerates herself, and recognises sufficiently that 
 ' he is her husband, not a smaller soul, not Lancelot 
 nor another,' then perhaps God may allow her to 
 shake hands with him in heaven, and (it may even 
 be) to kiss him ; but henceforth it is all over : she
 
 TENNYSON 33 
 
 really mustn't have any illusions about that. He 
 'will never come here again, never lie by her side.' 
 And then, while she keeps on steadily 'grovelling, 
 Arthur blesses her, and stalks out with a face 'as 
 an angel's,' and disappears in due course into the 
 night. 
 
 But this is not all. This hateful scene, the most 
 revolting exhibition of false sentiment and fiendish 
 cruelty in all literature, has still a climax. The 
 woman is to be plunged into the same abysm of 
 besotted degradation as the man. She is to accept 
 ' the judgment ' he has ' denounced,' and gloat over 
 it! She is to wail that 'he forgave her, and she 
 could not speak,' that ' his mercy choked her ' ; she 
 is to renounce her ' false voluptuous pride,' and all 
 her love for Lancelot, and recognise in this squalid 
 and inhuman prig 'the highest and most human,' 
 whose love ('I must not scorn myself: he loves me 
 still : let no one dream but that he loves me still ') is 
 to regenerate her life ! ' We needs,' she declares 
 
 ' We needs must love the highest when we see it, 
 Not Lancelot nor another ! ' 
 
 Comment seems impossible. All that one can 
 
 say is that the writer who could deliberately paint 
 
 such a character as Arthur as the Arthur of this 
 
 culminant Idyll of Guinevere and present it to us 
 
 c
 
 34 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 as his ideal of modern gentleness and modern man- 
 hood, never (unfortunately for us, and most un- 
 fortunately for himself) had the remotest conception 
 of what gentleness meant, or what manhood meant. 
 It is to be added that nothing more essentially un- 
 modern, more false to every notion we possess of 
 true morality and true justice, has been written in 
 our time, and perhaps in any time. 
 
 IV 
 
 Into the ' sunless gulfs ' of Lord Tennyson's drama- 
 turgic it is happily not necessary to descend. No 
 one has taken them seriously except Lord Tenny- 
 son; and every one has wondered what on earth 
 urged him on to such desperate courses. He had 
 not the slightest gift for characterisation. In his 
 narrative and lyric work he had not succeeded in 
 animating one single original figure with the un- 
 mistakable gift of individuality. His best work in this 
 direction had been done in such pieces as 'Lucretius,' 
 'Ulysses,' 'The Dream of Fair Women,' where (to 
 use Arnold's phrase) 'the subject-matter had been 
 found for him.' The figures in his plays labour under 
 the added disadvantage of his complete inability to 
 write dramatic blank verse. What shall be said of 
 stuff like this when gravely produced by a man of
 
 TENNYSON 
 
 reputation ? (It is a soliloquy from a play that might 
 have been written by a Christian Evidence lecturer 
 smitten with the letch for literary ' high falutin ') 
 
 ' This author, with his charm of simple style 
 And close dialectic, all but proving man 
 An automatic series of sensations, 
 Has often numb'd me into apathy 
 Against the unpleasant jolts of this rough road 
 That breaks off short into the abysses made me 
 A Quietist, taking all things easily.' 
 
 The spectacle is too painful. We cannot discuss 
 such an artistic aberration in such a man. We must 
 ' look and pass ' to the summary of the results we have 
 laboriously arrived at elsewhere, and to the final con- 
 sideration of any other aspects of the poet's work 
 which have yet to be entertained. 
 
 Well, the simple truth is that, taken as a whole, 
 the poetical work of Lord Tennyson contains an 
 amount of destructible matter which, in the im- 
 memorial phrase, is quite shocking. The ship still 
 holds together. It has stateliness, it has beauty, 
 especially as it drifts to leeward in the sunset glow 
 of the poet's life. But the winds and waves of time 
 have no reverence for water-logged and rudderless 
 barks. A wreck is imminent, and it is our business 
 to see who and what may yet be saved of the crew 
 and cargo. Matthew Arnold performed a duty of 
 pious praise when he gave us, in his book of selec-
 
 36 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 tions from the poetry of Wordsworth, the fruits of 
 some such labour. It showed us just how much 
 material really went to the production of a lasting 
 poetic name. Thirty or forty years hence the 
 Matthew Arnold of the day will present to his 
 public a similar volume of Tennyson, but it will 
 be a slim one. At one fell swoop he, too, will have 
 cut out nine-tenths of that portion of the poet's 
 work on which perchance he most prided himself 
 when alive. Tennyson's direct criticism on his age, 
 on its social phase, on its religious phase, on its 
 intellectual phase, will then appear to his critic as 
 of just the same value as Wordsworth's now appears 
 to us ; and that is, candidly, nil. All the conscious 
 efforts of c an imitative will ' to grapple with large 
 issues will then appear as a failure, and a grievous 
 failure only too obviously foredoomed. A hundred 
 facts of milieu will have put this beyond question. 
 Every one will realise then that incoherently melo- 
 dious bluster is the appointed form of expression for 
 a timid and sensuous nature struggling hard to be 
 courageous and self-secure. 
 
 A dozen short but charming extracts from 'In 
 Memoriam ' will give us the human elements of 
 a story of youthful friendship ended too soon, a 
 vision of 'love as pure and bright as phosphor.' 
 Another dozen from ' Maud ' will show the passion of
 
 TENNYSON 37 
 
 the same soul for a woman's heart. All the foolish 
 exaggeration, the sentimental pose, the confused 
 mental endeavours of the one; all the 'hysterical 
 mock-disease ' of the other, the ghastly want of 
 thought, the absurd misuse of the realities of life, 
 will have disappeared, and the happy reader will 
 thrill to the delicate melodies and the jewelled hues 
 of the verse, marvels of sound and sight. Then he 
 will understand what this man has really accomplished 
 for the language in which he wrote how all his end- 
 less patience wedded to his ' inmost horticultural art ' 
 strove to lift the level of our poetical achievement one 
 plane higher, so that after him the loose and reckless 
 syllabifications of a Byron and a Scott should seem 
 impossible. He will know nothing of the finikin 
 amateur, the half-hearted dilettante who again and 
 again has irritated and disgusted his fathers. He will 
 see this star, this little sparkling star, clear of all 
 obscuring vapours, in its serene and appointed orbit. 
 Turning from the batch of delightful excerpts 
 (another dozen can be found even in the ' Idylls of 
 the King '), he will confront unbroken poems, such as 
 c The Lotus Eaters,' and ' A Dream of Fair Women,' 
 happily overrating them as the first outcomes of the 
 post-' Juvenilia ' period. Thence a small gallery of 
 lovely products will lead him to the lesser neo-Greek 
 and neo-Roman masterpieces, and in ' The Princess '
 
 38 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 maybe, he will also envisage what will still for a while 
 remain a whole. There he will find the one figure 
 of larger mould which the poet all but succeeded in 
 animating, a woman's; and he will muse on the 
 parallel of Virgil's ' Dido,' dwelling on the one piece 
 of splendid blank verse, verse as apulse with dra- 
 matic power and passion as the dying Phoenician's, 
 which flames and shrills on Ida's lips, denouncing 
 the male intruders on ' her female field.' Then, too, 
 perhaps he will have some haunting sense of the 
 contemporary and personal applicability of Joubert's 
 criticism on Racine as ' le Virgile des ignorants ' 
 ' the Virgil of the ill-educated.' 
 Yet he will find passages of real stateliness : 
 
 ' We give you welcome not without redound 
 Of use and glory to yourselves ye come, 
 The firstfruits of the stranger after-time 
 And that full voice which circles round the grave 
 Will rank you nobly mingled up with me. ' 
 
 Little enough of blank verse of this quality has been 
 written in our time, and there are parts of 'The 
 Passing of Arthur ' which strike a note still higher. 
 ' Why not a summer's as a winter's tale ? ' this 
 favoured scion of the new century may ask, unaware 
 that the decision lies not with himself, but with his 
 still more favoured descendant, to whom the whole 
 subject-matter of ' The Princess ' may seem but the
 
 TENNYSON 39 
 
 merest temporary vanity and antique vexation of spirit. 
 But even in the later utterances of the muse there 
 will still be found some that are admirable for a new 
 and more concentrated force, for a truer, a more 
 genuine note of natural piety. No ballad in our 
 language is more redolent than 'The Revenge' of 
 that heroic obstinacy which has made our race the 
 stupid conqueror of half the earth. None can deny 
 our poet his passionate cult of England. 
 
 The grotesque immorality of his conscious efforts 
 after religious edification has already afflicted us. 
 Only when he forgets himself and all his doctrinal 
 ' teachings ' does he reach to the sincerity of true 
 spiritual devotion. On such occasions, too unfre- 
 quent though they be, his success is unmistakable. 
 Take as a supreme sample the poet's 'last 1 word' 
 ' Crossing the Bar ' one of the loveliest of Christian 
 lyrics. I need not quote it. We all have it by heart. 
 It is here that once more we find him at his truest 
 and highest and best here where we see him in his 
 old age, standing with the same simplicity, the same 
 sincerity of sorrow and trust as he stood ' in the 
 valley of Cauteret,' or ' in the garden of Swainston,' 
 dreaming of the three men he had loved ' with a love 
 that ever will be ' 
 
 ' And his voice is low as from other worlds, and his eyes 
 are sweet.'
 
 DEMOCRACY 
 
 A DIALOGUE
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 
 
 HE sat with his friend's letter in his hand, now 
 looking at it and realising its phrases, now losing 
 sight of the firm, clear, ' winged words,' in his 
 dreamy and tender memories of their ancient friend- 
 ship. 
 
 They had not met for seven years. And in those 
 seven years it seemed that for both of them their 
 souls had renewed themselves as completely as their 
 bodies. Now they stood utterly apart. Once then 
 they had stood so close. He had had but two inti- 
 mate personal relationships with men in all his life, 
 and they had both exerted great influence on him. 
 One of them had passed almost away ; the other still 
 affected him powerfully. One was that of his old 
 schoolfellow, Jack Daniel; the other was that of 
 Charlie Goulburn, a young Irish- American ' Labour 
 leader.' He had loved them both and admired them 
 both, though in very different ways. He was not aware
 
 44 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 of it, but the lines on which he at last prepared to 
 answer Daniel's cordial and even affectionate invita- 
 tion to come and visit him were laid down more or 
 less under the direct influence of the conscience of 
 the other friend far away. 
 
 He wrote at first slowly and with effort, tearing up 
 more than one false start, but at last his actual feeling 
 became clear to him, and the pen raced. 
 
 'My dear Daniel,' he said, 'your letter gave me 
 great pleasure. It brought back the full flood-tide 
 of the memories of our boyhood and youth together. 
 You cannot think how vividly some of our last 
 nocturnal walks and talks still present themselves 
 to me. I can still see us and hear us as we wandered 
 about on that peerless summer's night through 
 St. John's Wood (do you remember ?), and stood 
 and watched the dawn break from the upper ground 
 by Primrose Hill. And again, that night down at 
 Ventnor, when we went off for our winter holiday, 
 how the downs were covered with a thin cloak of 
 white snow, glistening faintly in the faint light of 
 the crescent moon and the myriad stars ; and then 
 how we tramped all along the shore of the much- 
 resounding sea to Luccombe Chine, and came back 
 in the glorious dawn through the Landslip. 
 
 ' Ah ! those were careless and delightful days, such 
 as neither you (I expect) nor I shall ever quite regain.
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 45 
 
 We seemed to be very close together then, and yet 
 I can see now how far away from one another we were 
 in reality. When we parted that pouring rainy night 
 in Edgware Road I could have cried. You meant 
 very much to me then I thought, everything. 
 Brought up as I had been, a passionate believer in 
 my caste, proud of my ancestral name, a ruthless 
 young Tory, with no redeeming feature but his 
 equally passionate belief in the creed of Noblesse 
 oblige, you came to me as a sort of liberator from 
 ideas, fine enough once perhaps, but now effete and 
 harmful. You transformed my silly pride by teaching 
 me the rights of others to work out their own salva- 
 tion. You made me doubt and deny the heaven- 
 born certainty of the mission of my caste to "lead." 
 You showed me the physiological absurdity of " high 
 birth," and the ridicule of taking mere social 
 observances seriously. And all this (and how much 
 more !) without a hard or cruel word, merely with 
 gentleness, tact, and the indirect influence of your 
 beautiful, kind, and serene personality. How was it, 
 then, that, six months after my arrival in the States, 
 I had ceased to write to you and you to me? that 
 in twelve months we had lost all trace of one another ? 
 that in a few years I had grown to believe that all 
 the actual product of our friendship was the sweet- 
 ness of the intercourse of two young souls ? Whether
 
 46 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 it was quite the same with you, I cannot, of course, 
 be sure, but it seems likely enough. I had nothing 
 to teach you absolutely nothing. You never took 
 Capital and its interests and obligations seriously. 
 The fact of your father's immense wealth, and the 
 little army of workpeople dependent on him, seemed 
 to have little or no effect upon you. How dis- 
 interested you were in your philosophic considera- 
 tion of everything ! True, that in those days your 
 elder brother was being trained for the management 
 of the mills and factories, and you proposed to lead 
 the life of the cultured dilettante ; but your 
 Liberalism your Radicalism I might almost say 
 your Socialism (for as such I now recognise at least 
 portions of your criticisms on the Fact Established) 
 often called in question the very existence of the 
 whole thing ; and so I received it. 
 
 ' How is all this changed to-day ! Four years ago, 
 in the midst of desperate organising work in Chicago 
 as a Labour agent or, in your current parlance, I 
 suppose, a " paid agitator " I suddenly heard your 
 name. The Christian name accompanying it could 
 leave me in little doubt that it was my old friend who 
 had stamped out, with an utterly ruthless energy, per- 
 haps the most justifiable strike against the tyrannous 
 iniquity of a capitalistic house (I mean your father 
 and brother) that had occurred in England within
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 47 
 
 the memory of man. By degrees I obtained more 
 and more information on the subject, and it ended 
 at last in convincing me of a horrible view of you. 
 I remember well the evening when I first received 
 the unescapable proof of this. Daniel, I went up 
 into my wretched little bedroom in the icy loneliness 
 of that cruel winter's night, with the blizzard lashing 
 the rickety, trembling house, and lay on my face and 
 sobbed (for I could not cry) over all thafdear, sweet 
 past of ours, and then rose, with my teeth clenched, 
 and a murderous hatred and scorn of you burning 
 like white-hot iron within me. It was long and long 
 before that passed, and something like the kindly 
 human tolerance we ultimately owe to all who are 
 made of this frail flesh of ours came to me, for you. 
 You see I am just the same vehement, passionate 
 "partisan" that I always was, save, perhaps, that 
 now I have lost the steady self-control which my 
 training as an aristocrat gave me, and this I sometimes 
 regret a little ; for though it was based on the hateful 
 sense of superiority over others, still, in this duel to 
 the death of the possessors and the dispossessed, it 
 is an instrument of very great value. Yes, I have 
 grown to loathe and hate and despise my order ; but 
 believe me that, if it is possible, I despise and hate 
 and loathe even more the order below it the 
 Middle class, the Shopkeepers ; and this is the one
 
 48 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 ground of contact between my past and my present. 
 Let me say at least this for my order. There are 
 still men and women in it ready to admit the New 
 Light, and to sacrifice themselves for it. Show to 
 them the iniquity of their former privilege, and they 
 will, many of them, voluntarily renounce it all, and 
 throw in their lot with the exploited sufferers. Abuse 
 the eighteenth-century French aristocrats as you 
 please, but under Louis xvi. they were, many of 
 them, noble and unselfish to a pitch unheard-of in 
 any other dominant class in all history. But your 
 Middle class your Shopkeepers ? Never, never ! 
 At all costs, save sheer "funk," they must have their 
 pound (and somebody else's half-pound) of flesh. 
 Oh, I have not lived seven years in the States 
 without realising that the English landlord is an 
 angel of reasonableness and mercy beside the 
 American capitalist ; and what is the American 
 capitalist but the apotheosis of the Mercator Im- 
 peratort I have more hopes (small though they be) 
 of our English gentlemen than of our English pluto- 
 crats, and of these last, you, my one time friend, 
 have made yourself one of the most famous. Do 
 you know the reputation you have among the 
 workmen of the period? For such reputations are 
 international now, and the Labour leader of Chicago 
 or Sydney listens to the story of the capitalistic
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 49 
 
 leader of London, or Paris, or Berlin. You are 
 more hated and more feared than any one employer 
 in England ; and this is the man without whose aid 
 and guidance I should, in all human probability, 
 to-day be the titled master of vast landed possessions, 
 a waster of farms in the interests of game preserves, 
 an expeller of men, women, and children for the 
 sake of hares, partridges, and grouse. 
 
 ' My friend (I still call you so, just as I still speak 
 to you with absolute candour, for the sake of the 
 memory of the old time), what should we gain by 
 seeing one another now, and making, as perhaps we 
 should make, the effort to renew the ancient inter- 
 course ? Let me recall to you the fact that the very 
 palace (for so I am told it is) from which your letter 
 came to me calls up the most hideous memories. 
 Was it not at the courtyard gates of Felixstowe that 
 a deputation of starving women, with starving children 
 in their arms and at their milkless breasts, came to 
 you at the bitter close of the strike, and told you 
 that, if their husbands could not be taken on again, 
 death stared them in the face ? How could I 
 approach those gates, and pass through them, and 
 enter your house as your guest as your friend ? 
 
 ' No, Daniel, no ! Our paths lie in contrary 
 directions, and must to the end. A chance gave 
 you the means of writing to me. You took it, and 
 
 D
 
 50 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 for what you wrote I thank you. It was like a voice 
 coming from the happiest period of my life. I 
 answer you the only way that seems to me worthy 
 of our old relationship, so true, so pure, so noble. 
 Do not think me harsh and Pharisaical. I do not 
 judge you no, not for a minute. God knows I 
 have had temptations enough in these years of dark 
 and desperate combat, and there have been times 
 when I came near to yielding. For to me, too, 
 beauty and knowledge are very dear art and music, 
 literature and science. I too would " fain occupy 
 myself with the abiding." But that, I think, can 
 never be. That must be for our children's children, 
 if even for them. But whenever it be, provided only 
 that it be not for a handful of them not for a 
 few no, nor even for many of them, but for all 
 then I should indeed be content ! Oh, it is worth 
 fighting and dying a thousand times to possess such 
 a hope ! 
 
 ' My friend, once more, your hand for the last 
 
 time. Good-bye. 
 
 'GERALD HASTINGS.' 
 
 Later in the next afternoon, sitting alone in the 
 Russell Square boarding-house, in his bare and com- 
 fortless room, and thoroughly wearied out by a hard
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 51 
 
 day's work, Hastings was suddenly aroused by a 
 knock at the door, and informed by the servant- 
 maid that a gentleman had come to see him, and 
 was waiting downstairs. He followed her heedlessly 
 to the drawing-room, where the gaunt and infrequent 
 furniture looked more than ordinarily characterless 
 and dingy in the one flaring gas-jet that she had 
 evidently just lit. He expected some of his pro- 
 pagandist friends he did not, in that dreary humour, 
 care to guess which. He found himself face to face 
 with Jack Daniel. 
 
 For some moments they stood and looked at one 
 another, motionless and in silence, each recognising 
 how much, and yet (in some way) how little, the 
 other had changed; and then Hastings heaved a 
 deep sigh, and turned his head away. 
 
 'Gerald, old man,' said the well-known voice, 
 with just the old musical inflection, ' can't you 
 trust me ? ' 
 
 Hastings looked at him quickly. 
 
 The soft, intensely black hair waved round the 
 olive-hued face with its soft, intensely black eyes, 
 full of a kindly, fearless, and simple sincerity, just as 
 of old. The smiling self-security of the beautifully 
 moulded lips and chin was not hid by the slight 
 dark moustache. The physical charm of him, that 
 something which had captivated the English pagan
 
 52 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 aristocrat schoolboy from the very moment when 
 he first saw him that something, too, of the 
 picturesque and oriental element in the habitually 
 calm, yet intensely resolute nature of the swarthy 
 Northerner ; it was singular how at this moment 
 'the full flood-tide' (as he had said) of all these 
 memories, the sweet and sane physical magnetism, 
 with its spiritual counterpart of serene and perfect 
 sincerity, touched with passion and mystery, caught 
 and overwhelmed him, making him, despite himself, 
 love and believe in his friend once more. 
 
 A minute later they were seated side by side on 
 the faded and torturous sofa, talking like two school- 
 boys, Daniel's arm resting lightly on the other's 
 shoulder. 
 
 1 Now, Gerald,' he said, ' I want you to come right 
 off with me. We will get down home in time for 
 dinner, and then we will talk up in a starry turret 
 till the dawn breaks, just as we used to do, and tell 
 one another everything we have been doing and 
 thinking and suffering all these seven years.' 
 
 After a short struggle with an already more than 
 half-hearted reluctance, Daniel had his wish ; led 
 him down to the open carriage that was waiting at 
 the door ; put him into it ; got in himself, and they 
 drove off rapidly together. 
 
 ' We have time,' said he, ' to drive all the way.
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 53 
 
 We shall be in the fields and lanes in an hour, 
 crossing over into the sunset, and we shall feel the 
 purity and beauty of things breathe full in our faces 
 again.' 
 
 'And so,' said Hastings a little dreamily, 'you 
 are married. Have you any children ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, three ; two boys and a girl, though (happily) 
 the girl comes in the middle in point of order.' 
 
 ' Talk to me,' murmured Hastings ; ' tell me about 
 yourself. Do you know what I feel,' he added, 
 with vague, sad eyes regarding the stream of foot- 
 passengers, ' as I sit here in this luxurious carriage, 
 and watch the pale and piteous faces ? Oh, you will 
 have much, very much, to explain to me ! ' 
 
 ' Dear man, do you already repent that you trusted 
 me?' 
 
 'No, no. I trust you; indeed I do. But it is 
 hard. Perhaps some of those women in shawls there 
 . . .' The vision of the lugubrious procession to the 
 gate of Felixstowe rose before him. 
 
 ' Oh, talk to me ! ' he said quickly. ' Tell me all 
 about yourself! What did you do when I left 
 England ? Who is your wife ? Is she beautiful ? 
 Was it she who made you believe in the Established 
 Fact and fight for it ? Weak women can do it to 
 the strongest men, just as the fragile ground-creeper 
 grows to strangle the giant tropical tree, and blooms
 
 54 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 in a wealth of poisonous honeyed blossom in its 
 dying top before both fall in a common ruin.' 
 
 There was a pause. 
 
 Then Daniel said : ' I will try and tell you what 
 you want to know, which seems to be the outline of 
 my life since we parted. What underlies this the 
 spiritual struggle in the dark before I could win my 
 way to any light we can speak of another time ; 
 to-night, if you like, when we are alone.' 
 
 The carriage, drawn by its two thoroughbreds, 
 passed swiftly along by unfrequented streets, and 
 the roar of the London traffic died away into a con- 
 tinuous murmur, still loud, but not loud enough to 
 muffle the clear, melodious voice of the speaker. 
 
 ' You remember,' he said, ' that I wrote one or two 
 letters to you at the ranche in Texas, telling you how 
 Oxford impressed me, and I fancy that even then 
 that is, before I had been there more than a month 
 I felt I could not put up with much more of it. 
 It was so obviously merely a continuation of Harrow, 
 and I wanted something fresh and new. I wished 
 to face life as a whole by touching it at many points, 
 and Oxford to-day is at best the clever synopsis of 
 academic futility. My father, chiefly owing to my 
 mother, who had always a blind confidence in me, 
 and to the lethargy consequent on growing ill-health, 
 let me have my own way. I left at the end of the
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 55 
 
 second term, and went to study in Paris. There, a 
 few months later, I lost sight of you. A letter to 
 you at the ranche was returned to me, with the 
 intelligence that you had gone away and left no 
 address ; and it was, I see, just about that time that 
 I discovered I was becoming as hopelessly restless 
 and dissatisfied as I had been at Oxford. Renan 
 was a great personal disappointment to me. A 
 teacher of spirituality and an ideal philosophy was 
 visibly ending an old age of universal disillusionment 
 in gourmandise, and his ironically epicurean remorse 
 (I mean his remorse for not having been an ironical 
 epicure) was not to my taste. Thus, presently, I 
 found myself in Jena, seeking out Ernst Hackel, as 
 a sort of moral tonic for a relaxed soul. But there, 
 too, I soon found the old disgust, the old unrest. 
 Hackel's limitations are fearful. A scientific Philis- 
 tine with genius, who speaks of France as a frivolous 
 abode of barbarism, and is training up mobs of 
 blatant young tow-heads in the full fervour of this 
 outrageous creed of second-rate Teutonic Chauvinism, 
 could not satisfy me long. Then I went off to Italy 
 and Sicily with a dear little Jew antiquarian, a Herr 
 Doctor of Jena, and helped him to get together 
 materials for a monograph on the Saracens in Europe, 
 till the old restlessness came upon me once again 
 not this time in the shape of a personal disgust (it
 
 56 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 was quite the contrary) ; but I felt as if I were some- 
 how blindly and unconsciously wasting myself in 
 side-issues, and that the one great subject of my time 
 the genuine Zeitgeist was escaping me. This 
 made me very discontented, and the more so as I for 
 long and long utterly failed to diagnose my disease.' 
 
 He paused, and Hastings listened to him with 
 growing interest. 
 
 ' Suddenly I seemed for the first time in my life to 
 adequately realise myself, and I cannot tell you what 
 joy my discovery gave me. The social problem was 
 the one great subject of my time. It was the one 
 question that entirely deserved and imperiously 
 claimed a solution. Literature, art, and science were 
 all good and to be pursued with all our strength ; but 
 what, as it were, gave the keynote to them all was the 
 social problem. Men are, and always must be, the 
 one supremely important subject to man men as 
 they live and move and have their being in this actual 
 earth of ours at any given moment. The old solu- 
 tions were as any clear-eyed and intelligent person 
 could see utterly inadequate. What was the new 
 solution ? Was there a new solution ? ' 
 
 Once more he paused. 
 
 ' It is strange,' said Hastings, ' how closely, so far, 
 we both developed together.' 
 
 'Before this, as you know, I had dabbled in
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 57 
 
 Sociology, as I had dabbled in literature, art, and 
 science, though without idea or method. Now I 
 determined to set about it in earnest. And, as in all 
 forms of the acquirement of knowledge two things 
 are necessary namely, thought and experience, and 
 those come to mean good books and seeing things 
 with your own eyes I determined that I would go 
 into the East End of London, and still more the 
 South, to study my question on the spot. Well, I 
 had soon the very best opportunities. The religious 
 people the Salvation Army, and our own Church of 
 England mission workers received me cordially; 
 and so, after a little suspicion, did the more or less 
 secularising Socialists and Labour propagandists. 
 For I was ready with both hard work and hard cash 
 (up to a reasonable extent), and the combination is 
 too powerful an one to be long resisted. That was 
 five years ago, and I stopped at it for a year without 
 the break of a day, and should have stopped probably 
 for twice as long but for a series of unexpected 
 events.' 
 
 ' Yes ? ' said Hastings. 
 
 ' My father, mother, and brother all died within a 
 few months. The first death I was prepared for; 
 perhaps, even, for the second (for my mother had 
 recently suffered from a severe illness, and she was 
 deeply attached to my father); but my brother's
 
 58 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 death and that means the manner and accompanying 
 circumstances of it administered to me what was in 
 very reality a rude shock. I knew very little about 
 him. We had seemed from our earliest childhood 
 to have little or nothing in common, and each had 
 gone his own way. Lately he had married, and his 
 wife had died in childbed, the baby succumbing also. 
 For the last five or six years he had practically 
 managed the whole of the Daniel business, and I had 
 not been a soldier, and perhaps I may say a captain, 
 in the Labour army without being well aware how 
 roughly and rigorously he had done it. A severe and 
 neglected cold suddenly developed into violent con- 
 gestion of the lungs, and a telegram under his name 
 summoned me without delay to his bedside. What 
 followed was beyond expression pitiful. The poor 
 fellow, in his fear that he might be beyond words 
 when I arrived, had dictated a letter to me. The 
 moment I entered, the nurse, at his nervously eager 
 command, read it aloud to me in his presence. It 
 was a passionate appeal to my sense of duty as a man, 
 and my sense of pride as a Daniel, to abjure my lazy 
 and cowardly dilettantism to take on the manage- 
 ment of the business, and to preserve it to our name. 
 I was the last of the Daniels. He could not believe 
 I would let one of the first names in the commerce 
 of England a name known with honour wherever
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 59 
 
 the English flag floated be extinguished, or (what 
 was as bad) pass into the use and abuse of strangers. 
 Then he began to speak. Neither doctor nor nurse 
 could stop him. He had only a few hours to live, 
 and nothing but his terrific will-power kept him from 
 lapsing into unconsciousness. Many thoughts passed 
 through my mind. I had now arrived at certain dis- 
 tinct conclusions concerning the social problem 
 conclusions of which I was, however, still somewhat 
 doubtful. Six months ago three months ago I 
 should have called myself in practice an out-and-out 
 Labour man, and in theory an out-and-out Socialist. 
 Now I felt that I could not do so with any real 
 sincerity. I still felt that I was both the one and 
 the other, but I knew that my interpretation of the 
 words would be very different from that of nine out 
 of ten, of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a 
 thousand, of my comrades. Meantime, my brother's 
 quavering, husky voice went on, abjuring and pleading 
 to my ears, as the devouring seriousness of his death- 
 struck gaze enthralled my eyes. His insensate pride 
 in our name struck me, of course, as antiquated and 
 absurd, but I felt the pathos of the man's agonising 
 soul, and I am inclined to think that it was just this 
 little extraneous human impulse which tilted the 
 balance. All at once I lifted his hand and said to 
 him, slowly and deliberately, that I would take the
 
 60 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 business and devote my life to the successful carrying 
 of it on. He gripped me tight with his sharp and 
 bony fingers, smiled, nodded, sighed heavily, half 
 closing his eyes, and was gone ! ' 
 
 Once more he paused, and as they rolled on down 
 the country road, their faces faintly lit with the red 
 sunset, he seemed again to live in that singular and 
 significant scene. 
 
 ' Well ? ' said Hastings softly. 
 
 Daniel sighed. 
 
 ' A fortnight later,' he said, ' I received intelligence 
 from the manager of our largest mills of what he 
 called an ultimatum from the men. It was equivalent 
 to a demand for a 10 per cent, rise in wages of the 
 whole of the rank and file, a ten hours' day, and the 
 reform of many abuses of "discipline." I had, 
 indeed, no idea of what was really going on around 
 me till next morning, when a Pall Mall Gazette 
 interviewer waited on me with a copy of the last 
 evening's paper, and a request to be permitted to ask 
 a few questions. First, I read the paper. The per- 
 sonal remarks were all passably correct. I learned 
 subsequently who supplied them. It was one of my 
 Labour friends, who owed me everything pretty well 
 but his existence.' (He smiled, amused.) 'And so, 
 in the main, as far as I was aware, were the facts 
 concerning the " abuses " in the Daniel mills. They
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 61 
 
 were all admirably worked up on the usual sensational 
 lines, and I realised like a flash that I was, indeed, 
 as my friend the interviewer assured me, the " man 
 of the moment ! " " What will he do with it? An 
 East End Socialist Leader succeeds to the mastery of 
 15,000 workmen! The Fortunes of the Daniels/" 
 and so on. It was very funny. Then the inter- 
 viewer set on to me : Were the stories of the " abuses " 
 in the Daniel mills true? I believed so. I was 
 going to see. What should I do ? I could not tell. 
 I was going to see. Had I no definite plan ? I had 
 not. I was going to see. And nothing else did he 
 get from me.' 
 
 Hastings nodded, his brows slightly contracted. 
 
 1 Well ? ' he said. 
 
 ' Of one thing I was resolved. I would do nothing 
 off-hand or in haste. I went myself straight away to 
 Morven, where the trouble had come to a head, and 
 interviewed the manager at length. Then I inter- 
 viewed a deputation of the men. Then I tried to 
 interview some of the workmen and workwomen 
 separately. The state of excitement in the mill 
 indeed, in all our mills was (I saw at once) intense. 
 I think the workpeople had a vague idea that there 
 was about to be a scramble for the Daniel millions, 
 and that they all had a right to be in it. In three 
 days I was facing at first a suspicious and then a savage
 
 62 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 opposition. Suddenly I was given a week's notice to 
 accede to the men's demands, or there would be a 
 general strike. On the top of this, three of my old 
 London friends Labour leaders came down, and 
 at once sought me out. I put the matter clearly 
 before them. They began by demurring a little, 
 asking why I didn't accede to the men's demands 
 before, instead of after, my investigation ; but ulti- 
 mately agreed to do their best to avoid the strike ; 
 and late the next night I was told I should be given 
 a fortnight, but that, at the end of that time, I must 
 meet the Union (it was an Union now) or take 
 the consequences. One of the three ambassadors 
 told me bluntly that there was nothing else to do but 
 capitulate. He had never seen men more resolute 
 and solid, and public opinion was steadily backing 
 them. Meantime the Press had let me drop some- 
 what, stirring foreign events having happened unex- 
 pectedly ; but Tory, Liberal, and Radical newspapers 
 all alike took the same tone of cynical expectation, 
 and in my inmost heart I felt that they would not, 
 from their own point of view, be disappointed.' 
 
 'Ah?' said Hastings. 
 
 ' I began my investigation,' proceeded Daniel 
 calmly, 'and in the teeth of much opposition, working 
 day and night, carried it through, my three Labour 
 friends sardonically " assisting " me. At the end, I
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 63 
 
 had three clear days in which to mature my proposals, 
 and I insisted on being left absolutely alone. I knew 
 what a momentous decision I was about to make. 
 Several times, I will admit, I felt inclined to throw 
 up my hands and let the men have their own way in 
 everything. For it was utterly clear to me that they 
 meant fight, and savage fight, on any other con- 
 tingency. Might not these latest Socialistic conclu- 
 sions of mine be wrong, and my old practical theory 
 of letting the unions practically administer things in 
 their own fashion be right ? It was a long and severe 
 struggle, and it might have ended either way. But 
 a new event decided it beyond all question. A 
 threatening deputation broke in on me. This was 
 too much. I came down to the great meeting with 
 my proposals, based absolutely on the new and not 
 on the old conclusions. I had often spoken before 
 in public during the last year in London, but this 
 was obviously something quite beyond all that, and 
 I was prepared for violence. Yet I felt strangely 
 dreamy and lethargic. I suppose I was tired out 
 with the storm and stress of the work. The silence 
 when I rose was acute almost painful. I could see 
 nobody. It was not till I was well on in my speech, 
 and the tempest was gathering, that I rapidly regained 
 my self-master)', and all the faces came out as clearly 
 as in the noontide sun. I began by taking the abuses
 
 6 4 j ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 in "discipline" chiefly fines for being late and 
 talking and "fooling" during work-hours. Many I 
 abolished ; others I reduced to merely nominal sums, 
 even for the old wages received. A low, strong 
 buzzing, distinctly favourable in character, greeted 
 me at the conclusion of the list. Then came the 
 question of salaries. All the overseers leaped up 50 
 per cent., a few 70 or 80 per cent. All the skilled 
 workmen, the industrial specialists, leaped up in the 
 same way from 30 to 60 per cent. Everything that 
 implied the higher type of work, brain-work, the 
 exercise of thought, judgment, and originality, par- 
 ticipated in the rapid rise. Then, without waiting, I 
 took the unskilled, or almost unskilled, workmen and 
 workwomen. I should pay men and women who did 
 the same work precisely the same wages, I said, and 
 I ranked off the divisions before I stated the rise I 
 was prepared to give. At the most it was 7 or 8 per 
 cent. ; at the least it was 4 or 5. At this there was a 
 terrible pause, and then the commotion began. I 
 asked for silence, and began to speak of the improve- 
 ments in the general conditions of the workpeople 
 which I contemplated houses, schools, libraries, a 
 park, baths, and so on. The uproar kept growing 
 and growing. I still persevered, at moments domi- 
 nating it, and spoke of a system of pensions. A loud 
 voice called : " Pensions be d d ! We want higher
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 65 
 
 wages." That finished it. In ten minutes yells for 
 the strike arose. My London friends gathered round 
 me, shouting and gesticulating their remonstrances. 
 I merely shrugged my shoulders, folded up my papers, 
 and went out. It was folly to stop.' 
 
 1 And on that you fought ? ' asked Hastings. 
 
 ' Well, not quite on that. There were many inter- 
 views, and I was ready night or day to listen and talk 
 with any of them ; but I knew quite well it was use- 
 less. The temper of the men was for war, and war 
 they would have. To put it shortly, the Daniel 
 workmen desired three things : the first was to have 
 a grab at the Daniel millions; the second was, if 
 possible, to turn themselves into permanent aristocrats 
 of labour ; the third was to pay the rank and file of 
 labour 50 per cent, higher wages, in proportion to the 
 value of the work done, than the captains and colonels. 
 In other words, they intended to sacrifice skill to 
 strength, brain to body, the higher type to the lower. 
 To concede the first two things meant commercial 
 collapse ; to concede the last meant the denial of my 
 conviction of what will prove the ruin, social as well 
 as commercial, not only of England, but of all our 
 civilisation to pander to the fatal vice which seems 
 to me to be inherent in all forms of practical Socialism. 
 Wherefore, on this issue I was ready to fight them, if 
 needs be, to the bitter end.' 
 
 E
 
 66 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 1 And you fought and won ? ' 
 
 ' And I fought and won ! ' 
 
 Hastings dropped his face moodily. 
 
 ' I do not understand your issue clearly,' he said. 
 ' It seems to me pedantic, and to inflict all that suffer- 
 ing for pedantry was surely criminal.' 
 
 ' Let us discuss the question in the abstract,' said 
 Daniel, 'up in our starry turret after dinner. For 
 here we are at the avenue, and the avenue, not being 
 a "palatial" one, will lead us home in a minute or two.' 
 
 in 
 
 Some hours later, the two men were lying in easy 
 wicker lounges before one of the bay-windows of the 
 northern turret. The faint glimmer of a single shaded 
 taper left visible the glory of the clear and star-studded 
 night beyond, and, as Hastings said, gave faintly the 
 suggestion of the huge, dark surface of the revolving 
 earth-ball, which seemed to be dipping down over the 
 far eastern horizon, while they followed it towards the 
 line of the swiftly gliding dawnlight. 
 
 'You are happy here,' he said suddenly, after a 
 long pause; 'or you seem so. With such a wife, such 
 children, such a home, and a life-work which satisfies 
 your conscience, I might think of you once more in 
 the same cowardly spirit as I did as a lad, as of one
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 67 
 
 to be envied. I have never seen another man or 
 woman of whom I had anything approaching such a 
 thought. I may have envied this or that possession 
 of theirs, but themselves never, and it is only my 
 cowardice that ever envied you. Jack,' he added, 
 turning his head quickly, 'tell me truly and sincerely, 
 as from man to man, from soul to soul, does your 
 life-work satisfy your conscience ? Do you in your 
 clearest and serenest hours of insight and reason, the 
 inspired moments when no self-deception stands erect 
 and unabashed before one's conscious eyes, do you 
 really believe in the social course you pursued and 
 are, I suppose, pursuing ? ' 
 
 ' Dear man,' said Daniel, softly stretching out and 
 putting his hand on the arm of his friend, which rested 
 on the arm of the chair, ' I can only answer you that 
 four years' experience of the results of the social ideas 
 which I have, either rightly or wrongly, conceived 
 four years' careful observation from within and with- 
 out (You would smile at my mysterious disguises 
 and aliases. I have worked months on end in my 
 own factories, and those of other employers, unknown 
 to any one but my wife.) have all the more and 
 more convinced me that humanity at the present 
 moment is menaced with a most terrible danger. It 
 is not anarchy, it is not the " slavery " of which the 
 Individualists are so afraid at least it is not in the
 
 68 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 shape of which they conceive it and their cure is 
 worse than the disease. The instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion in humanity may be trusted to save us from the 
 suicide of either a red-rampant State Socialism or 
 unrestricted competition; but there is something, as 
 I take it, in which this instinct cannot be trusted, 
 and that is universal and triumphant ignorance, and 
 after ignorance, corruption and sloth.' 
 
 He put down his cigarette in the little tray on the 
 smoking-table at his side. 
 
 ' I have told you,' he said, ' that when I had been 
 six months in the London slums, I had become simply 
 an out-and-out Socialist and Labour man. Socialism 
 was the ideal ; Labour organisation, first in unions 
 and then as a political party, the practical means at 
 hand with which to forward the .realisation of this 
 ideal. It was not pity alone for the suffering of those 
 people that produced this in me. I knew that in some 
 respects their life was little more piteous than that of 
 the lower and even of the central middle-class above 
 them. In other respects I knew that the masses were 
 absolutely better off. Their existence, if they have 
 health and strength, is often less hopelessly dull and 
 sbullessly corrupt. They have at least blood in their 
 veins, not mud, and their life is the wild life of animals, 
 with wild animal pleasures and pains ; not the slow 
 corroding cark and care and secret viciousness which
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 69 
 
 so often reduce the struggling shopman below the level 
 of even a healthy bestiality. Pity indeed played its 
 part in me the more actively that I had no idea of 
 another world than this in which these hapless ones 
 should be compensated by a dispensation of the grim 
 justice Jesus meted out in the parable of Dives and 
 Lazarus. Dives in his lifetime receives his good 
 things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things ; but 
 by and by Lazarus is to be comforted, and Dives in 
 anguish. If I could only have discovered pity/ 
 proceeded Daniel, 'on which to found Socialism, then 
 I should have regretfully realised that Socialism was a 
 dream. But when justice showed me that it also, in 
 its strictest shape, was an integral part of this basis, 
 the matter entered a new phase. I need not, I expect, 
 tell you about this in any detail,' he said ; ' you know 
 the scientific basis of Socialism as well as I do.' 
 
 ' I am not sure of that,' said Hastings. ' Let us 
 come to some agreement on that before you go 
 further; for it is important. To me Capital is simply 
 withheld wages a formula as absolute in its way as 
 the main formula of Evolution. More and more, as 
 it seems to me, is it becoming clear to us all that, in 
 the domain of social science, Karl Marx's definition 
 of Capital holds precisely the same place as Darwin's 
 definition of Natural Evolution in the domain of 
 science. When well-known writers on social topics,
 
 70 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 following John Stuart Mill and the rococo political 
 economists, discourse concerning the eternal divisi- 
 bility of Capital and Labour, they talk as Cuvier 
 did of the eternal immutability of species. One 
 shrugs one's shoulders, and discusses something else. 
 Is this what you mean by the scientific basis of 
 Socialism ? ' 
 
 'Yes, though I should not put it quite in that way.' 
 
 c And you no longer cherish that amazing blunder 
 of those from whom we should least expect it; of 
 those who gravely assure us that civilisation does not, 
 by the mere legal inheritance of wealth, paralyse the 
 great law of natural and sexual selection. This was 
 an obvious fact to the slow and sure biological in- 
 telligence of Darwin. The non-appreciation of it 
 seems to me an amazing stultification in some of his 
 fellows, who are indisputably dowered with far swifter 
 and more abstract intellects. Science can find no 
 excuse for civilisation in Nature, and surely Herbert 
 Spencer's whole attack on State intervention, because 
 it is based on opposing the struggle for existence and 
 survival of the fittest, is one of the funniest samples 
 of a distressing mental obliquity.' 
 
 ' Once more, yes,' said Daniel; 'though, once more, 
 not quite as I should put it.' 
 
 ' You would put it more politely for Spencer ? ' 
 
 Daniel smiled.
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 71 
 
 'Probably,' he said; 'but I should try to avoid 
 some slight confusion of thought which seems to me 
 either expressed or implied in your dogmatised 
 polemic. However, that is unimportant. On the 
 main point we are clearly at one, which is that In- 
 dividualism has not a leg to stand upon when it 
 defends civilisation, as we know it, against Socialism, 
 as we prognosticate it, by alleging that the one is 
 " natural " and contains the great natural force of 
 evolution as the dominant factor ; while the other is 
 "artificial," and means the sway of dissolution, degrada- 
 tion, and final death. Thus far, we had apparently 
 developed along pretty much the same lines, and I 
 suppose the next question that presented itself to me 
 was the next that presented itself to you too. Granted, 
 the condition of the masses is pitiful ; granted, it can 
 be proved to be based on robbery and exploitation, 
 and is therefore radically iniquitous, what can justify 
 this hideous inhuman sacrifice ? Clearly only one 
 thing : the impossibility of abolishing it, except at the 
 cost of the ruin of the whole community. If only 
 30 per cent., if only 20 per cent. 15, 10 nay, even 
 5 per cent. can be lifted up to anything approaching 
 a humanly worthy existence, then the 70, 80, 85, 90 
 nay, even the 95 must, more or less, continue to 
 be virtually sacrificed.' 
 
 Hastings was looking at him askance.
 
 72 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 ' And so you persuaded yourself in favour of the 
 virtual sacrifice ? Oh ! ' he burst out, laughing 
 drily 'the modern Annas talks just the reverse of 
 the old one. Culture has taught him that it is better 
 a nation should perish than that one alleged great man 
 should be brought to nought. It was some such 
 rotten gospel of reaction that Thomas Carlyle, the 
 Scots peasant, who ratted on his order like many 
 another flarvenu, commercial or philosophic, furbished 
 up, here in England, in the interests of his aristocrat 
 patrons, under the Brummagem shape of what he 
 denominates hero-worship damn him ! ' 
 
 Daniel laughed in turn, but almost to himself, at 
 his friend's savage outburst. 
 
 ' A devout person,' he said, ' was confidentially 
 telling me the other day that he was quite sure 
 Thomas was eternally damned already. However, 
 you are mistaken as to my powers of self-persuasion 
 in this matter. The great god Expediency did not 
 win my worship on that point. I had the contrary 
 idea. It seemed to me that the danger of the ruin 
 of humanity lay far more clearly in the other direction. 
 No, my friend, I concluded altogether in favour of 
 the attempt to abolish the sacrifice. Moloch, even 
 in his latest revised and amended shape, seems to 
 me somewhat out of date.' 
 
 Hastings answered nothing, merely raising his
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 73 
 
 eyebrows, and bending his head a little. He thought 
 he had been trapped. 
 
 ' This,' proceeded Daniel calmly, wishful to dispel 
 his friend's annoyance, 'this was more or less my 
 state of mind at the end of the first six months of 
 my social " Lehrjahr," and there, owing to circum- 
 stances, my direct conscious and scientific pursuit of 
 the subject (if I may so call it) suddenly ceased. The 
 results of my " Wander jahr," or rather "Wander- 
 jahre," came pouring in upon me like a flood. It 
 was not so much in the shape of the facts and 
 experiences of my work, though these also played 
 their part. It was rather as a sort of " Dichtung und 
 Wahrheit " (since I am using Goethe's phraseology) 
 of all my human dreams, my human hopes and 
 aspirations during those ambiguous years. Socialism 
 had become to me a practical creed, based on justice 
 and to be erected with science. It now became to 
 me a religion, with all the poetry of an incalculable 
 future, which, as I take it, is the simple verifiable 
 meaning of what the orthodox people call "heaven."' 
 
 He paused a moment. 
 
 'I am not,' he said, 'going to expatiate on this 
 now, for it does not concern our subject. I merely 
 mention the fact of this irruption of a portion of my 
 life, the use and significance of which I had before 
 then utterly failed to perceive, and which I had,
 
 74 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 indeed, come to look upon as a more or less un- 
 justifiable waste of myself. I mention it now to 
 account in a measure for the nebulous condition of 
 what I have called my latest socialistic conclusions. 
 If I had not been occupied with thought and dream 
 and vision concerning the far future of the race, I 
 should not have been distracted to the extent to 
 which, as it seems to me now, I certainly was, with 
 regard to the path the race must inevitably take if 
 that far future is ever to be realised. Yes,' he went 
 on, unconsciously failing in his purpose of speaking 
 only of the actual subject, and undergoing the sweet, 
 irresistible charm which we all find in our favourite 
 day-dreams ; ' yes, if that craving for an immortality 
 of happiness, for a continuous existence of freedom 
 from the cruel combat which Nature delights in, is 
 ever to be satisfied, it can only be by the very best 
 combinations of human intelligence and skill. All 
 creatures own that craving. The birds that build 
 their nests long dumbly, even as we weary humans 
 long articulately, for a city that hath foundations. 
 Watching under the microscope the lowest organisms 
 known to us, I have felt the thrill of pity for these 
 infinitesimal atoms of life which would fain, they too, 
 live and move and have a being. In the chemist's 
 bowls and crucibles I have recognised that the 
 wrestlings of the warring elements prefigured, if they
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 75 
 
 did not anticipate, the actual nisus of organic life. 
 And how has Nature always achieved the death and 
 destruction of all she creates ? First and chiefly, by 
 the needs of hunger, which inevitably make her 
 children either preyers or prey, which make them all 
 the enemies of other forms of life, and threefold the 
 enemies of their own. Some have limited, or striven 
 to limit, by their combinations the horrible ferocity 
 of this. Men, for their part, starting from simple 
 aggregations, have advanced to civilised cities, 
 nations, races. But we have always failed, just as 
 the others have always failed, in every grade of 
 organic life and being, because we never could make 
 our combination at once complete enough within, 
 and powerful enough without. China alone, by a 
 crude but resolute effort after an unscientific State 
 Socialism, has shown the world something of what 
 can be done in the way of racial perpetuity, which 
 is the power of organised racial homogeneity. With 
 us Assyria waxes and wanes before Babylon; Babylon 
 is lost in Persia ; Persia goes down before Greece ; 
 Greece before the conqueror of Carthage; Rome 
 before the Goths. The weary, heart-sick tale of the 
 ignorant human spider, continuously spinning his 
 continuously ruined web, goes on from age to age, 
 and sardonic and savage Nature, still unsated, con- 
 templates our insane and fratricidal strife, never more
 
 76 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 fratricidal and insane than at this very hour. She 
 ruins us through our stupidity. As the capitalistic 
 monopolist, in this her true incarnation, exploits the 
 masses of humanity by merely letting them compete 
 among themselves ; so Nature exploits cities, nations, 
 and races. The ultimate crisis for humanity lies 
 clearly in the hour when the globe shall become 
 uninhabitable. As the moon is, so shall the earth 
 be. Did the cities, nations, and races of the moon 
 go on competing among themselves to the end? 
 Did they see the beauty of Nature's delusive and 
 fleshly smile on fecund land and sea slowly transform 
 itself into the mocking grin of the hideous skeleton 
 of dry, lightless, and heatless death? And did no 
 suspicion of the trick that had been played on them 
 ever cross their minds? Or did the intellectual 
 'elite of that hapless stock feel, or even realise and 
 recognise it ; but, powerless to control the ineptitude 
 of their fellows, sigh over the " infinita vanitd del 
 tutto" and steal away to die? Does that same fate 
 await usj Or may we some day discover not only 
 the secret of life and of actual physical immortality, 
 but learn how to arrest the cooling of the earth, or, 
 if that be impossible (though to science all things 
 are possible), migrate to another planet ? Who can 
 say ? who can say ? ' 
 
 He paused, looking out into the far and all but
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 77 
 
 cloudless east, where the first glimmerings of the 
 approaching dawn expanded imperceptibly. 
 
 ' That,' he said, ' is one's thought one's dream 
 one's vision ; the ideal, the heaven of the race, and 
 its realisation, is possible possible through develop- 
 ments of ever-increasing beauty, and force, and 
 wonder. Who shall say No ? But one thing is 
 certain : the human problem must be settled first. 
 The danger of the ruined web must be permanently 
 averted. Every faculty of man must be bent to the 
 great work. We must have all mankind to choose 
 from. Food and clothing and housing, refuge from 
 sickness and old age, must be an axiom of human 
 existence. The need for individual selfishness must 
 disappear in that of the race. All energy must go 
 out in the training of the spiritual and mental 
 faculties. Only from a superb rank and file can we 
 hope for a superb army from which we can choose 
 our saviours. We have but one single foe Nature 
 the deadliest foe of all, the foe which can be 
 conquered only by intelligence, and enslaved only 
 by comprehension, and which can hold no other 
 place but that of either victor or vanquished, master 
 or servant. Nothing that runs counter to the final 
 settlement of this, the one vital problem of humanity, 
 is to be tolerated. If we cannot read her riddle 
 aright, our Sphinx will surely devour us, just as she.
 
 78 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 has devoured all the others. Let us bring but one 
 test to every question to every effort after social 
 progress and organisation to every law, or would-be 
 law, the blind-worm politicians and propagandists 
 present to us : civilisation as a spiritual and mental 
 unity in infinite variety, but ever as a unity, based 
 on the scientific enslavement of Nature. Two 
 things the cult, at all costs and all hazards, of 
 intelligence, and the cult, at all hazards and all costs, 
 of the physical satisfaction of the individual ; and of 
 these two, if they clash, as ignorance and greed 
 perpetually make them clash, then the first, first ! ' 
 
 'No,' said Hastings softly: 'the second I still 
 feel that. The second.' 
 
 Daniel smiled faintly, looking before him. 
 
 'The second,' he said, 'stands absolutely to win. 
 Nothing in the long-run can stop it. But the first 
 stands possibly, and even probably, to lose. The 
 dominant forces are against it.' 
 
 Hastings was silent. 
 
 'Such, at least, were the results of my latest 
 conclusions,' said Daniel, still looking before him. 
 ' Labour is already for Labour alone, and it will be 
 more and more so, I think not less and less. Oh ! 
 we pity Labour we pity the masses we pity the 
 rank and file. But what is that pitifulness of theirs 
 beside the tragedy of the men of intelligence, the
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 79 
 
 poets, painters, musicians, sculptors, the writers of 
 talent and genius, the scientists, the inventors, the 
 discoverers? Do you say Labour is exploited? 
 Heavens ! if Labour is exploited 5 per cent., talent 
 and genius are exploited 50 and 500. It is brains 
 we want it is brains which alone can save us, 
 which alone can help us to solve the deadly 
 riddle of the Sphinx. With brains, I say, all things 
 are possible ; without them, little or nothing that is 
 of permanent use. Suppose to-morrow every man 
 was paid the just value of his work. Who, do you 
 suppose, would gain ? Whose would be the sudden 
 rises of 100 and 1000 per cent. ? Why, it is the 
 story of the Morven strike again. Give the masses 
 7 or 8 per cent, increase of their present wage, and 
 you do them utter and absolute justice. Give the 
 men of talent and genius their increase of 50 and 
 500 per cent., and humanity is still their debtor. 
 Labour already shows us, wherever it is yet powerful 
 enough to have anything like a free hand, what it 
 really desires ; and the civilisation which it rules will 
 be a hell of mediocrity, pullulating into corruption 
 and decadence at best a China, at worst an easy 
 prey for the first incursion of a more vigorous stock. 
 It will not advance us one step towards the true 
 civilisation, not to say towards the resolution of the 
 great human problem. Already the Labour men
 
 8o ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 decree that none but a Labour man shall stand by 
 them. Do you guess what that means ? It means 
 that the masses are to " exploit " talent and genius 
 to-morrow, just as the classes "exploit" them to-day, 
 for the profit and pleasure of the "exploiters"; and 
 once more the weary, heart-sick web shall be spun 
 by the stupid spider, and Nature shall sit, savage 
 and sardonic, enthroned on our bones, and drinking 
 our blood from her cups of gold, while Time in the 
 grey depths of space waits in his lethargic stupor till 
 she too falls prone in an everlasting oblivion.' 
 
 There was a long pause, that grew into a silence, 
 before Hastings heaved a sigh and rose slowly to his 
 feet. 
 
 ' Jack,' he said sadly, standing gazing at the now 
 ever-broadening and intensifying dawnlight, ' I asked 
 you to tell me truly and sincerely, as from man to 
 man, from soul to soul, whether your life-work 
 satisfied your conscience. Let me speak to you now 
 as I desired you to speak to me, and as I believe 
 you did speak as you have just spoken. Do I feel 
 that the cause for which I have struggled and lived, 
 and for which I shall, in all human probability, yet 
 die do I, any more than you, feel, in my heart of 
 hearts and mind of minds, that it will equal our 
 hope and faith in it ? I cannot answer, Yes. That 
 cause, I too feel sure, will win it is bound to win
 
 DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE 81 
 
 because it stands for a newer and truer social idea 
 than that which combats it. Christianity, with all 
 its faults, limitations, and even vices, conquered the 
 Paganism of Greece and Rome, which was far from 
 being without its goodnesses, splendours, and virtues, 
 for just that reason ; and thus Socialism will conquer 
 Civilisation. Yes, I feel it I know it. It may take 
 a hundred years two three four five hundred 
 years. It will conquer in the end. But that it will 
 do all we all even / hope and trust for in it ah ! 
 that is another thing. Jack, let me tell you all. I 
 know, I think, the forces that are really driving us 
 forward, as well as you do, perhaps better. I know 
 which of them will become more and more the 
 dominant forces that must mould and fashion the 
 organised life of humanity in the near future. And 
 there are moments there have been, and doubtless 
 there will be again when I have been glad that I 
 have lived now, in the dark and doubtful hours of 
 the night, rather than in the full flood-tide of ex- 
 ultant day. That is all I have to tell you only a 
 bad dream, perhaps a nightmare. I am very thank- 
 ful for death.' 
 
 Daniel's arm was round his shoulders. 
 
 'Dear man,' he murmured, 'be thankful also for 
 love.' 
 
 Hastings flung up his face.
 
 82 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 ' Oh no ! ' he cried ; ' I don't falter ; I don't repent 
 I, with the narrow ideals and the bewildered 
 vision of a desperate hope and a despairing faith. 
 Onward, onward, and upward ! Who am I ? What 
 am I? What does it matter? The idea is the 
 greatest of our time the hope the most superb, the 
 faith the most intense. That is enough for me.' 
 
 Then suddenly : 
 
 ' Look ! ' he said, stretching out his hand, his eyes 
 lit, his mouth smiling. 
 
 At one steady impulse the sun had surged above 
 the clear horizon line, and soared, huge, round, 
 blazing, and glorious, into the thrilling blue of the 
 heavens. 
 
 They stood together in silence, regarding his 
 splendour.
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 
 
 IT was inevitable that sooner or later some one 
 should make a systematic effort, in the interests (say) 
 of literature and art, to exploit India and the Anglo- 
 Indian life. England has awakened at last to the 
 astonishing fact of her world-wide Empire, and has 
 now an ever-growing curiosity concerning her great 
 possessions outre mer. The writer who can ' explain, 
 in a vivid and plausible manner, the social conditions 
 of India, Australia, Canada, and South Africa who 
 can show, even approximately, how people there live, 
 move, and have their being, is assured of at least a 
 vogue. Several vogues of this sort have already been 
 won on more or less inadequate grounds : have been 
 won, and lost, and the cry is still, They come ! From 
 among them all, so far, one writer alone, led on to 
 fortune on this flood-tide in the affairs of men, has 
 consciously and deliberately aimed high; taken his 
 work seriously, and attempted to add something to 
 the vast store of our English literature. The spectacle 
 of a writer of fiction who is also a man of letters, and 
 
 85
 
 86 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 not merely a helpless caterer for the circulating 
 libraries and the railway bookstalls, is unfortunately 
 as rare among us as it is frequent among our French 
 friends. Literature and Art are organised in France, 
 and have prestige and power. In England they are 
 impotent and utterly at the mercy of Philistine and 
 imperfectly educated newspaper men, who, professed 
 caterers for the ignorant and stupid cravings of the 
 average English person, male and female (and 
 especially female), foist upon us painters, poets, 
 novelists, and musicians of the most hopeless 
 mediocrity. In France this sort of thing is im- 
 possible. Such efforts would only provoke a smile. 
 People would say to you when you were taking 
 seriously a poet (for instance) like Mr. Lewis Morris 
 or Sir Edwin Arnold, or a novelist like Mr. Besant 
 or Mr. Haggard, ' Why, you must be joking ! These 
 gentlemen are not writers are not artists at all. 
 Surely you know that what they concern themselves 
 with is the nourishment of the babes and sucklings 
 who have to be provided with pap somehow ; but 
 serious workers, contributors to critical and creative 
 thought a//ez/' It seems something to be at last 
 able to go to our French friends, and say, 'Well, 
 here at any rate we have a young Englishman who 
 has won a remarkable vogue, and for all that is a 
 serious worker, is a contributor to critical and creative
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 87 
 
 thought, is an artist, is a writer' to be able to go 
 and say this, and to advance reasons for our belief 
 in it of sufficient cogency to extort, perhaps, from 
 our friends a genuine assent. If for this alone, we 
 ought to be grateful to Mr. Rudyard Kipling, our 
 Anglo-Indian story-teller. 
 
 From the very beginning, Mr. Kipling struck a 
 strong and solemn personal note. To his first 
 booklet, Soldiers Three, a collection of seven ' stories 
 of barrack-room life,' and designed to ' illustrate ' 
 one of 'the four main features of Anglo-Indian life,' 
 viz. the military, he attached the following sombre, 
 proud, and yet pitiful envoi : 
 
 1 And they were stronger hands than mine 
 
 That digged the ruby from the earth 
 More cunning brains that made it worth 
 The large desire of a king ; 
 And bolder hearts that thro' the brine 
 Went down the Perfect Pearl to bring. 
 
 ' Lo, I have wrought in common clay 
 
 Rude figures of a rough-hewn race ; 
 For Pearls strew not the market-place 
 In this my town of banishment 
 Where with the shifting dust I play, 
 And eat the bread of Discontent.
 
 88 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 * Yet is there life in that I make, 
 
 Thou who knowest, turn and see, 
 As Thou hast power over me, 
 
 So have I power over these, 
 Because I wrought them for Thy sake, 
 And breathed in them mine agonies. 
 
 ' Small mirth was in the making. Now 
 
 1 lift the cloth that clokes the clay, 
 And, wearied, at thy feet I lay 
 
 My wares, ere I go forth to sell. 
 The long bazar will praise but Thou 
 Heart of my heart, have I done well ? ' 
 
 Certainly three of these tales constituted some- 
 thing very like a revelation not only of one of ' the 
 four main features of Anglo-Indian life,' but also 
 of a new writer of considerable force and originality. 
 Nothing like either 'The Big Drunk Draf or 'With 
 the Main Guard ' had been presented to the reading 
 public before, and the praise of the long bazar was 
 justifiable enough. But as a gallery of characters, 
 as manifest fictional creations, the success of the 
 book is not great. Indeed, here right at the very 
 start, one of the weakest sides of all Mr. Kipling's 
 work is just the want of this very gift, on the assured 
 possession of which he seems to pique himself. 
 His characterisation is never excellent; often it is 
 mediocre ; sometimes it is abominable. He cannot 
 escape from his own subjectivity. Never was work 
 more acutely personal than his. Never did a writer
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 89 
 
 consciously or unconsciously insist with such pas- 
 sionate persistence on the special form of milieu 
 which has given him what he feels to be (so far, at 
 least) the dominant factor in his view of things. 
 And this is why, in nine cases out of ten, his dramatis 
 persona melt away so rapidly in the memory, leaving 
 us with nothing but the impression of an admirably 
 piquant and clever delineation. He has probably 
 spent more time and trouble over his ' Soldiers Three,' 
 Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, than over any 
 other of the characters of his tales; yet Mulvaney 
 alone is recognisable as anything approaching an 
 organic creation. Mr. Kipling sacrifices everything 
 to his mordant individuality. Mulvaney, the drunken, 
 pugnacious, loquacious, kindly Irish ruffian of the 
 old school, will tell you how ' Brazenose walked into 
 the gang wid his sword, like Diarmid uv the Gowlden 
 Collar,' and will not mention the name of the Queen 
 in ordinary conversation without devoutly invoking 
 upon her the blessing of the Creator! Ortheris, 
 the little vulgar rascal of a cockney, urges his com- 
 rade on to an adventure with the quotation : 
 
 ' Go forth, return in glory, 
 
 To Clusium's royal 'ome : 
 And round these bloomin' temples 'ang 
 The bloomin' shields o' Rome.' 
 
 And, when he is rebuked for loquacity under trial,
 
 90 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 inquires : ' D' you stop your parrit screamin' of a 'ot 
 day when the cage is a-cookin' 'is pore little pink 
 toes orf?' Similarly a regimental carpenter likens 
 the splitting open of a boat to ' a cock-eyed Chinese 
 lotus,' or a London street-girl entreats : ' But cou 
 couldn't you take and live with me till Miss Right 
 comes along ? I 'm only Miss Wrong, I know, but 
 I 'd,' etc. etc. Well, I respectfully submit that the 
 speaker here is Mr. Rudyard Kipling, not Mulvaney, 
 nor Ortheris, nor another. Instances of this sort 
 of utterly inartistic insertion of little bits of Mr. 
 Rudyard Kipling into Mr. Rudyard Kipling's 'rude 
 figures of a rough-hewn race ' are very plentiful, and 
 are certainly not edifying samples of the way he 
 shows his godlike ' power over these.' But how, 
 when taken from the larger point of view, this defect 
 limits the value of his criticism of the main features 
 of Anglo-Indian life, which he designs to ' illustrate ' ! 
 To-day we are all full of eagerness and curiosity to 
 know of what sort our short-service soldiers are. Mr. 
 Kipling dedicates his booklet to 'that very strong 
 man, T. Atkins,' who is surely the very person in 
 question. But what does he tell us about him ? 
 Little or nothing. It is the old long-service man 
 who is his game. Into the mouth of Mulvaney, 
 who gives us most of the military criticism, is put 
 the ancient and stock abuse of the short-service
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 91 
 
 system, backed up with the stock and ancient chau- 
 vinism about the glory and gain of the good old 
 gentleman officer, all of the olden time, the indi- 
 vidual with the courage of a mastiff and the brains 
 of a rabbit. The poor old Irishman in his degrada- 
 tion is even made to consolingly kick himself with 
 the reflection that, if he could have kept out of one 
 big drink a month, he would have been an honorary 
 lieutenant by this time, ' a nuisince to my betthers, 
 a laughin'-shtock to my equils, an' a curse to meself.' 
 And thus we settle the modern military question, 
 incidentally throwing in a few jeers at Lord Wolseley 
 as a drawing-room man, who doesn't know his busi- 
 ness. With what heartfelt rapture, on the other 
 hand, do we approach the sacred exhibitions of the 
 Old Style ! Take the first toast at the mess, which 
 is the same as Mulvaney's loyal conversational prayer. 
 'That Sacrament of the Mess,' says Mr. Kipling 
 solemnly and deliberately in his own person, c never 
 grows old and never ceases to bring a lump into 
 the throat of the listener, be he by sea or by land. 
 Dirkovitch' [a mere unregenerate Cossack] 'rose 
 with his " brothers glorious," but he did not under- 
 stand. No one but an officer' [the italics are mine] 
 ' can tell what that means ; and the bulk,' etc. etc. 
 Now, what I want to know is this : Does Mr. Rud- 
 yard Kipling, in his most calm and disillusionised
 
 92 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 hours, in the dead unhappy night, and when the rain 
 is on the roof, seriously believe in this sort of thing ? 
 There are other excesses to which the sightless 
 tradition of the old hide-bound Jingoistic, Anglo- 
 Indian officialism leads Mr. Kipling, but they are 
 excusable and even defensible. It is only abject 
 silliness which can be neither defended nor excused. 
 None the less, he carries some of these excesses to 
 considerable length. Dickie, the most gentle and 
 lovable of his male characters, blind, and going to 
 his death, 'stretches himself on the floor' [of a 
 carriage in an armed train at Suakim] 'wild with 
 delight at the sounds and the smells ' of the machine- 
 gun, pouring out lead through its five noses upon 
 hapless Arabs, fighting for their freedom in their 
 native land. ' " God is very good I never thought 
 I 'd hear this again. Give 'em hell, men ! oh, give 
 'em hell ! " he cried.' 
 
 The exceeding goodness of God in relation to 
 Englishmen and 'niggers' seems always to consist 
 in the opportunity and ability of the former to give 
 the latter 'hell.' Never once in his tales does Mr. 
 Kipling appear to be aware that these same miserable 
 aliens may have a point of view of their own they 
 also. There is always the tacit assumption of the 
 fact that they are made merely to be fought with, 
 conquered, and ruled. I am not quarrelling with
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 93 
 
 this genial and enlightened manner of treating the 
 ' inferior races.' I am only saying that in the case 
 of Mr. Rudyard Kipling it makes one feel how much 
 less interesting and valuable his criticism on the 
 Indian people is than it might be. 
 
 Pieces of his description of fighting have been 
 spoken of as unique. Wonderful as was his first 
 effort in this direction, the ' jam ' in ' the gut betune 
 two hills, as black as a bucket an' as thin as a gurl's 
 waist/ where the Pathans waited, ' like rats in a pit,' 
 for the onslaught of the two regiments, one of which 
 (the Black Tyrone) ' had seen their dead ' wonder- 
 fully as this was presented in the Mulvaney brogue, 
 when Mr. Kipling trusted to himself alone he did 
 better and achieved a masterpiece. ' The Drums of 
 the Fore and Aft ' is one of those performances which 
 are apt to reduce criticism to the mere tribute 
 of a respectful admiration. It is absolutely and 
 thoroughly well done. It ' explains ' everybody and 
 everything. We follow the raw-recruited regiment 
 step by step in the process of its demoralisation. 
 We feel the approach of the inevitable catastrophe. 
 Equally clear is the demonstration of the personal 
 incident of the two little drummer-boys, who are 
 to be on this occasion the chance gods from the 
 machine. It all passes before us like a piece of 
 illuminated life. And with what dramatic power
 
 94 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 is it all gathered together and swept forward to the 
 culminating scene, where the two lads step out from 
 the rocks with drum and fife, c and the old tune of 
 the old Line shrills and rattles.' Then from the 
 purely descriptive writing which follows, take a 
 specimen like this : ' The English were not running. 
 They were hacking and hewing and stabbing. . . . 
 The Fore and Aft held their fire till one bullet 
 could drive through five or six men, and the front 
 of the Afghan force gave on the volley. They then 
 selected their men, and slew them with deep gasps 
 and short hacking coughs, and groanings of leather 
 belts against strained bodies.' Scarcely less fine is 
 the charge of the Lancers, which 'detached the 
 enemy from his base as a sponge is torn from a 
 rock, and left him ringed about with fire in that 
 pitiless plain. And as a sponge is chased round 
 the bath-tub by the hand of the bather, so were the 
 Afghans chased.' Whenever Mr. Kipling touches 
 on a battle-scene, especially a melee, he writes with 
 this absolute mastery of it all. It is real pictorial 
 magic. The charge of Arabs on the square on the 
 Nile bank (The Light that Failed, chap, ii.) is too 
 long for full quotation here, and too good to be 
 mutilated; but the following may be taken as a 
 sample of the way in which he can render a personal 
 incident in such surroundings. It is from a tale in
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 95 
 
 his last book, Life's Handicap, ' The Mutiny of the 
 Mavericks,' which is for the most part a bad piece 
 of special pleading, but which ends with this 
 admirable portrayal of the madness of a coward : 
 ' Dan and Horse Egan kept themselves in the neigh- 
 bourhood of Mulcahy. Twice the man would have 
 bolted back in the confusion. Twice he was heaved, 
 kicked, and shouldered back again into the un- 
 paintable inferno of a hotly contested charge. At 
 the end, the panic excess of his fear drove him into 
 madness beyond all human courage. His eyes 
 staring at nothing, his mouth open and frothing, 
 and breathing as one in a cold bath, he went forward 
 demented, while Dan toiled after him. The charge 
 checked at a high mud-wall. It was Mulcahy who 
 scrambled up tooth and nail and hurled down among 
 the bayonets the amazed Afghan who barred his way. 
 It was Mulcahy, keeping to the straight line of the 
 rabid dog, who led a collection of ardent souls at a 
 newly unmasked battery and flung himself on the 
 muzzle of a gun, as his companions danced among 
 the gunners. It was Mulcahy who ran wildly on 
 from that battery into the open plain, where the 
 enemy were retiring in sullen groups. His hands 
 were empty, he had lost helmet and belt, and he 
 was bleeding from a wound in the neck. . . . Dan 
 and Horse Egan, panting and distressed, had thrown
 
 96 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 themselves down upon the ground by the captured 
 guns, when they noticed Mulcahy's charge. . . . The 
 last of a hurrying crowd of Afghans turned at the 
 noise of shod feet behind him, and shifted his knife 
 ready to hand. This, he saw, was no time to take 
 prisoners. Mulcahy tore on, sobbing ; the straight- 
 held blade went home through the defenceless 
 breast, and the body pitched forward almost before 
 a shot from Dan's rifle brought down the slayer. 
 The two Irishmen went out to bring in their dead.' 
 
 ' Description,' said Byron, in his riper time, when 
 he had begun to understand himself a little, 'descrip- 
 tion is my forte.' 
 
 It is also Mr. Rudyard Kipling's. 
 
 ii 
 
 The second of the four main features of the Anglo- 
 Indian life is the domestic, and Mr. Kipling chooses 
 The Story of the Gadsbys as his typical illustration of 
 it. The difference, however, between the ' domestic ' 
 and the last of the four, which he calls the ' social ' 
 feature, is slight, and the latter term is quite com- 
 prehensive enough for the two. Here, indeed, 
 he is on his special ground. Here his critical 
 limitations do not come into play; his pet pre- 
 judices and theories are unaffected, and he sets 
 himself to render Anglo-Indian 'society' as seen
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 97 
 
 and felt from within as well as from without, with 
 an unimpeachable disinterestedness. The Story of 
 the Gadsbys showed, in at least one scene of that 
 dramatised 'tale without a plot' ('The Tents of 
 Kedar '), a really remarkable gift of dialogue. It was 
 true drawing-room comedy of a high order, and indeed 
 throughout the whole of the piece the talking and 
 gesturing of the puppets were undeniably actual. 
 In the Soldiers Three there was a piece of first-rate 
 dialogue (' The Solid Muldoon,' pp. 45, 46, the talk 
 between Mulvaney and Annie Bragin) ; but it is 
 obviously one thing to write two pages of conver- 
 sation and quite another to write eighty. The 
 characters chosen for analysis, however, are on a 
 rather low plane, and prove tedious when treated 
 at such length. Seven pages of the silly delirium 
 of a silly girl are rather too large an instalment of 
 predetermined pathos on one note, coming on th6 
 top of two even larger and more monotonous in- 
 stalments of honeymooning and conjugal 'tiffing.' 
 An obviously much-experienced I.C.S. man of his has 
 a happy phrase for the Anglo-Indian ' society ' ladies, 
 married or single. He calls them ' fire-balloons,' and 
 every type of ' fire-balloon,' from the empty-headed 
 little girl aforesaid (whose maiden experience so 
 soon corroborates the touching aphorism of her 
 maiden friend that 'being kissed by a man who 
 
 G
 
 98 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 didn't wax his moustache was like eating an egg 
 without salt '), through the savage man-exploiting Mrs. 
 Reiver, up to Mrs. Hawksbee, ' the most wonderful 
 woman in India,' every one of them he treats with 
 a loving, patient, and elaborate detail. Some of 
 them are not worth it, ' the most wonderful woman 
 in India' among them (he dedicates Plain Tales 
 from the Hills, with a mild fatuity, ' to the wittiest 
 woman in India,' who must run that terrible Mrs. 
 Hawksbee close); but others are drawn with the 
 hand of a master, and are among his most living 
 creations. The same is to be said of many of the 
 men. 
 
 Here, then, we have at last the Anglo-Indian 
 'society' life of to-day, and we see it from every 
 side. Duty and red-tape tempered by picnics and 
 adultery it is a singular spectacle. But we are to 
 ascribe much, very much, to the climate. Simla 
 holds 'the only existence in this desolate land 
 worth the living.' For the rest, it is six months 
 purgatory and six months hell. ' One of the many 
 curses of our life in India is the want of atmosphere 
 in the painter's sense. There are no half-tints worth 
 noticing. Men stand out all crude and raw, with 
 nothing to tone them down, and nothing to scale 
 them against.' For instance, we speak of 'all the 
 pleasures of a quiet English wooing, quite different
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 99 
 
 from the brazen businesses of the East, when half 
 the community stand back and bet on the result, 
 and the other half wonder what Mrs. So-and-so will 
 say to it.' Thus Minnie Threegan competes success- 
 fully with her ' poor, dear mamma ' (who is not pre- 
 cisely a widow) for Mr. Gadsby, who, in his turn, 
 throws over Mrs. Herriott (also apparently not a 
 widow to any alarming extent) in order to enter 
 into the matrimonial 'garden of Eden.' Out of the 
 six tales specially designed to ' illustrate ' the 'social ' 
 feature, five are based, some more, some less, on the 
 Seventh Commandment. In the way of short stories 
 Mr. Kipling has done nothing better than the three 
 central ones 'At the Pit's Mouth,' 'A Wayside 
 Comedy,' and ' The Hill of Illusion'; the last contain- 
 ing the most admirably sustained piece of dialogue he 
 has yet written. The other side to the picture of the 
 reckless, light-hearted revelry of the Hills is to be 
 found in the doggedly heroic work of, at any rate, 
 the male portion of these people down in the Plains. 
 Picnics, rides and drives, with garden-parties and 
 promenades, are suddenly forgotten in a scene like 
 this: 'The atmosphere within was only 104, as 
 the thermometer bore witness, and heavy with the 
 foul smell of badly trimmed kerosene lamps; and 
 this stench, combined with that of native tobacco, 
 baked brick, and dried earth, sends the heart of
 
 ioo ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 many a strong man down to his boots, for it is the 
 smell of the Great Indian Empire when she turns 
 herself for six months into a house of torment.' 
 The temper induced by this sort of thing, when 
 mixed up well with fever and finally flavoured with 
 cholera ad libitum, is scarcely likely to be lamblike. 
 
 'It's an insult to the intelligence of the Deity,' 
 observes one of the sufferers, 'to pretend we're 
 anything but tortured rebels.' Who shall be sur- 
 prised, then, that when the tortured rebels go away 
 for a holiday to ' the only existence in this desolate 
 land worth the living,' they are devotees of the 
 gospel of eating, drinking, and being merry, for 
 only too obvious reasons? At the bad times this 
 same gospel leads to astonishing effects in the way 
 of kindliness and self-sacrifice. A savage Stoicism 
 holds all things cheap, even death. ' Bah ! how 
 these Christians funk death ! ' It is the grim and 
 contemptuous jeer of the eternal heathen, whose 
 heart says to him with a fraternal candour, ' Dust 
 thou art, and to dust thou shalt return, and what 
 on earth does it matter?' Yet what a depth of 
 passion and emotion lies in these Stoics, and how 
 paltry and factitious all other men seem beside them 
 children babbling of the moon or cowards sucking 
 at their spiritual opium pipes to drug their 'funk' 
 into ' faith ' ! Mr. Kipling loves his heathens with
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 101 
 
 all his heart, and even the silliest of his 'fire- 
 balloons ' seeks not succour ' from on high ' in the 
 troubles and agonies of 'life's handicap.' As for 
 his men, they have all more or less of the nature 
 of the eternal barbarian, the atavistic impulse of 
 ruthless action which lies so deeply and so in- 
 eradicably in almost all of us, under the thin veneer 
 of our civilised refinement and 'good manners.' 
 Speaking of his Dickie, he calls it the 'go-fever, 
 which is more real than many doctor's diseases, 
 waking and raging, urging him, who loved Maisie 
 beyond anything in the world, to go away and taste 
 the old, hot, unregenerate life again to scuffle, 
 swear, gamble, and live light loves with his fellows ; 
 to take ship and know the sea once more, and by 
 her beget pictures ; to talk to Binat among the sands 
 of Port Said, while Yellow Tina mixed the drinks,' 
 and so on. Very little respect or care has he, there- 
 fore, for those who shout to us perpetually, ' Great 
 is the Respectability of the English people ! ' ' Oh, 
 you rabbit hutches ! ' cries out Dickie, in the black 
 hour of his poverty in London, ' do you know what 
 you've got to do later on? You have to supply 
 me with men-servants and maid-servants' here he 
 smacked his lips 'and the particular treasure of 
 kings. Meantime I'll get clothes and boots, and 
 presently I will return and trample on you.' Strange,
 
 102 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 passing strange, that in the throat of men who talk 
 like this a lump should rise, ' be they by sea or by 
 land,' at the mystic formula which sums up the cult 
 of the Sovereign who doesn't rule. Yet such, it 
 appears, are we English, a 'peculiar people' in all 
 conscience. Nor is even the saving grace of humour 
 denied to our Anglo-Indian story-teller, to temper 
 the foolisher aspects of that bilious and fiery jingoism 
 of the devasted and terrible clime. The preface to 
 Lifts Handicap is a delicious proof of this, and 
 paragraphs, sentences, and phrases that have the 
 true piquant flavour are rarely to seek. Yet his 
 touch is never certain. His false characterisation 
 has its parallel in false criticism, sometimes merely 
 the smart superficialities of the imperfectly educated 
 journalist (to whom culture stands for nothing more 
 than ' culchaw ') : at other times quite shocking tributes 
 of respect and admiration to tenth-rate personages. 
 Mr. Kipling knows little beyond modern English 
 prose. The secret of the art and literature of the 
 great Continental peoples is hid from him. He is 
 too young, and he has lived too hard, not to be con- 
 siderably in the dark about himself. How else is 
 one to explain the insertion of work absolutely vile 
 and detestable in his latest book? The sacra fames 
 auri might explain its composition ; but it is another 
 thing in the full flood-tide of your vogue, with name,
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 103 
 
 and fame, and fortune all at your hand, to write in 
 this way of your work : 
 
 ' The depth and dream of my desire, 
 The bitter paths wherein I stray, 
 Thou knowest Who hast made the fire, 
 Thou knowest Who hast made the clay. 
 
 ' One stone the more swings to her place 
 In that dread Temple of Thy worth 
 It is enough that thro' Thy grace 
 I saw nought common on Thy earth. 
 
 ' Take not that vision from my ken ; 
 Oh, whatso'er may spoil or speed, 
 Help me to need no aid from men 
 That I may help such men as need ! ' 
 
 to write like this, and then to present to us such un- 
 speakably mediocre and wretched stuff as ' The Lang 
 Men o' Larut ' or ' Namgay Doola ' ! ' Under any cir- 
 cumstances, remember,' says the sagacious Dickie, in 
 his final character as the pictorial journalist in the 
 heyday of his London vogue, ' four-fifths of every- 
 body's work must be bad. But the remnant is worth 
 the trouble for its own sake.' Very true : but is this 
 any reason that a man who can give us such a 
 splendid sample of story-telling as ' The Courting of 
 Dinah Shadd,' or touch the very spring of the 
 lacrinuR rerum in the piteous narrative of ' The Man 
 Who Was,' should proceed to inflict on us work 
 which even the most sympathetic criticism can only 
 designate as beneath contempt ? Mr. Kipling asks too
 
 104 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 much of his most devoted admirers when he leaves 
 them to try and justify the existence of 'Namgay 
 Doola,' and ' The Lang Men o' Larut, and ' The 
 Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney.' Balzac could 
 not afford to sign his name to such rubbish. For 
 Mr. Rudyard Kipling to do so is to send snakes to 
 strangle his reputation in its cradle. 
 
 HI 
 
 ' In India,' he says, speaking in his proper person, 
 'you really see humanity raw, brown, naked 
 humanity with nothing between it and the blazing 
 sky, and only the used-up, over-handled earth under 
 foot.' One of the results of the overwhelming 
 nature of this fact is that, at any rate in any close 
 consideration of the ' native feature,' you are soon 
 driven to take refuge in ' simpler theories ' than those 
 current among the benighted English home officials. 
 Herein, of course, is the great difference between these 
 and the Anglo-Indian officials. The latter have ever 
 treated the ' native feature ' from the ' simpler theory ' 
 point of view. Hence the stupendous success of our 
 Indian administration, as an administration, from the 
 days of Clive to those of Lord Lytton and onwards. 
 Our sympathetic comprehension of the races we have 
 ruled, our intimate knowledge and appreciation of
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 105 
 
 their religious and social feelings : all this is due to 
 the ' simpler theories ' of our Anglo-Indian officials, 
 civil and military. The events of the year 1857 were 
 the crowning proof of it. In that year we simplified 
 even these simpler theories into the one simplest 
 theory of all. ' We gave 'em hell ' to an extent that 
 they have never forgotten, and Mr. Kipling smiles 
 knowingly over the still active native prejudice against 
 being blown away from the mouths of cannons. 
 The foolish person in search of a little disinterested 
 information about things may find the so-called 
 Indian Mutiny an unexplained historical phenome- 
 non, and eagerly hope for some enlightenment on the 
 subject from a writer of indisputable talent who is 
 ' illustrating ' the ' native feature.' He will get little 
 or none from Mr. Kipling. Firstly, he will find the 
 scantiest mention of, or even allusion to, the social 
 movements of the natives. They are viewed merely 
 (as we have seen) in the light of a huge mass of raw, 
 brown, naked humanity to be manipulated by the 
 civil and military officials for the arcane purposes of 
 the Great Indian Empire, or by the inspired amateur 
 detective (Strickland is Mr. Kipling's name for him) 
 as material for his dexterous energy and sagacity, or 
 by the male portion of the Anglo-Indians as a happy 
 hunting-ground for more or less animating, if mono- 
 tonous, sexual experiences ' without benefit of clergy.'
 
 io6 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 We see the officials perpetually hustling the childlike 
 natives about all over the country. We see Strick- 
 land, or somebody else, not quite so clever perhaps, 
 but still far too clever for childlike natives, 
 perpetually exposing their villainies. We see rows 
 of Anglo-Indian bachelors of all sorts (some the 
 most commonplace sorts) inspiring dark-eyed little 
 native girls with doglike adorations. But that is all, 
 or almost all, and it is scarcely a workable statement 
 of the great Indian equation, even from the ' simpler 
 theory ' point of view. 
 
 There is in these narratives all the ability of the 
 thoroughly good story-teller we know, here and there 
 bits of excellent dialogue (the final scene in 'The 
 Sending of Dana Da,' for example), the same 
 exquisite little descriptive cameos, the same rapid 
 and piquant dogmatism one has nothing less to 
 praise here than in the tales of the ' military ' feature, 
 but unhappily also nothing more. Now and then 
 vivid touches seem to bring us into contact with 
 the peculiar and essential nature of the more active 
 members of the alien races, and we realise for a 
 moment something of the qualities in them which 
 have made history; but how rare and partial such 
 glimpses are ! Thus Mr. Kipling shows us the Afghan 
 Amir in his Court, and ' the long tail of feudal chiefs, 
 men of blood, fed and cowed with blood.' But such
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 107 
 
 things are not his game. It is the little personal 
 experiences and the ' begetting of pictures ' from the 
 same that he is keen for. This is what interests and 
 absorbs him. ' If I were Job ten times over,' says 
 one of his characters in the most unnatural manner 
 for the character, and in the most natural manner 
 for Mr. Rudyard Kipling, ' I should be so interested 
 in what was going to happen next that I'd stay in 
 and watch.' And he makes his Mrs. Hawksbee 
 repeat the sentiment. 'Colour, light, and motion,' 
 he says elsewhere with his own voice, ' without which 
 no man has much pleasure in living.' He loves the 
 demonstrative instinct of the Oriental. ' You can- 
 not explain things to the Oriental. You must show.' 
 He has in him, too, the Oriental love of story-telling 
 for its own sake ; and even their superstition strikes 
 a responsive chord in him. ' I have lived long enough 
 in this India,' he says, ' to know that it is best to know 
 nothing ' ; and on the force of this he mars a little 
 masterpiece like ' The Courting of Dinah Shadd ' 
 with a large allowance of second-rate second-sight 
 prediction, which is all fulfilled to the letter. I 
 cannot tell whether it is simply due to the benumbing 
 chill of incredulity, but his deliberately supernatural 
 tales, from 'The Phantom Rickshaw' downwards, 
 impress me as distinct failures. On the other hand, 
 when he deals in natural horror (take ' At the Pit's
 
 io8 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 Mouth ' as a sample, or ' The Other Man ') I often 
 find him admirable. 
 
 But do not let me seem to strike with too great 
 insistence the note of depreciation and disappoint- 
 ment. That would be to be unjust as well as 
 ungracious. The best Mr. Kipling has to give he 
 gives, and the best of that best is veritably good, and 
 what more should we ask of him? Nowhere in 
 his more elaborate efforts to delineate child-life (and 
 some of them are something rather like successes) 
 does he give us so perfect a piece of work as the 
 little child-idyl called 'The Story of Muhammad 
 Din ' : nowhere does his gift of natural horror find 
 more artistically harrowing expression than in ' The 
 Gate of the Hundred Sorrows,' or in ' Bubbling Well 
 Road ' : nowhere does he paint the ' ewig Weibliche ' 
 with a more liquid depth of simple love than in 
 'Lispeth' or 'Beyond the Pale.' And all of these 
 are stories that illustrate the ' native ' feature. 
 
 There is one obvious quality in all literary work 
 without which the name or fame of a writer has no 
 possible chance of survival, and that is the literary 
 quality. Its manifestations are many, far more diverse, 
 indeed, than jejune critics like Matthew Arnold will 
 admit. Arnold loved to quote a line of Sophokles 
 above a line of Homer, a line of Dante below a line 
 of Shakespeare, and to assure us that these were all
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 109 
 
 perfect samples of 'style.' The fact is, that of 
 style in the sense known to Sophokles or Milton, 
 Shakespeare and Homer had little, and Dante had 
 less. Shakespeare achieves his unique effects through 
 a verbal magic unequalled in the world's literature. 
 No man ever created such lines and phrases. Dante 
 (to take his case alone) wins by something quite 
 different by a sheer and simple sincerity of outlook. 
 He watches, and watches, and watches, till he sees 
 things before him with an actuality that burns 
 achingly into his sight, and what he sees he puts 
 down simply as he sees it ; but style in the sense of 
 Sophokles, verbal magic in the sense of Shakespeare, 
 he has little or none of either. 
 
 Our business here is obviously with things on a 
 smaller scale, but the same line of judgment must be 
 held as with those of the largest. No one can claim 
 for Mr. Kipling the possession of a real prose style, 
 or, indeed, of anything approaching to it. He cannot 
 even, at least in this respect, for a moment be placed 
 beside his French contemporaries and fellow-story- 
 tellers Maupassant and Bourget, let alone the great 
 names of French and English prose. Such style, qud, 
 style, as he has is mere journalistic smartness, and he 
 never begins to do good work till he has consciously 
 forgotten all about it, and has set himself down to 
 paint his ' pictures ' or express his emotions as he
 
 no ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 best may. Neither has he that sheer and simple 
 sincerity of outlook, that patient and relentless realism 
 which (for example) lifts the best work of Zola so high. 
 His youth and ardour, worked to white-heat by the 
 Indian climate and his hard life, have intensified his 
 individualism to such a pitch that he cannot get out 
 of himself cannot render any one or any thing 
 objectively. The types he hates he caricatures, and 
 mingles up men, and women, and children with pup- 
 pets tricked out in semblance of the same, with a 
 splendid want of discrimination. What side, then, 
 of this precious, this indispensable quality does he 
 possess as the ' Open, Sesame ' of the years to come, 
 where newspaper ' boomers ' cease from troubling and 
 serious workers are at rest ? The reply can happily 
 be given without much hesitation. Beyond all 
 question (to put it in the particular form) he has the 
 gift both of the happy simile and of the happy phrase. 
 ' You pass through big still deodar forests, and under 
 big still cliffs, and over big still grass-downs swelling 
 like a woman's breasts ; and the wind across the grass, 
 and the rain among the deodars says, " Hush hush 
 hush.'" A touch of verbal trickery here, and 
 Nature is rendered purely in the focus of the specta- 
 tor's subjectivity, but how well she is rendered ! Or, 
 again, 'A large, low moon turned the tops of the 
 spear-grass to silver, and the stunted camel-thorn-
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER in 
 
 bushes and sour tamarisks into the likeness of 
 trooping devils. The smell of the sun had not left 
 the earth, and little aimless winds, blowing across 
 the rose-gardens to the southward, brought the scent 
 of dried roses and water.' He is almost as keen 
 a connoisseur of scents and smells as M. Guy 
 de Maupassant himself. He realises their powers. 
 Several such samples have been given already. Here 
 are the Himalayas from the nasal point of view : 
 ' The monkeys sang sorrowfully to each other as they 
 hunted for dry roots in the fern-wreathed trees, and 
 the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen 
 villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, 
 dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That 
 is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it 
 creeps into the blood of a man, that man will, at the 
 last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die.' 
 Admirable, indeed, are these little descriptive cameos 
 which he strews broadcast. Sometimes they are en- 
 closed in two or three lines. ' The witchery of the 
 dawn turned the grey river-reaches to purple, gold, 
 and opal : and it was as though the lumbering barge 
 crept across the splendour of a new Heaven.' Again 
 he achieves the same result in one single epithet. 
 ' The drinking earth ' three words to describe the 
 drought-laden Indian land under the heavy, unceas- 
 ing downpour of the longed-for, welcome rains.
 
 ii2 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 ' Nothing save the spikes of the rain without and the 
 smell of the drinking earth in my nostrils.' Verbal 
 magic of this sort is of the poet : it is thrown out 
 whole, so to say, not constructed. Or take this : 
 'There was nothing but grass everywhere, and it 
 was impossible to see two yards in any direction. 
 The grass-stems held the heat exactly as boiler-tubes 
 do.' No more : not another word. Veritably in 
 Art the part is ever greater than the whole. But it 
 follows that when he deliberately sets himself down 
 to exploit this supreme gift of his, he succeeds but 
 moderately. ' The City of Dreadful Night ' may be 
 taken as a good example. It is excellent better-class 
 journalism, and all the third-rate { word-painters ' are in 
 raptures over it ; but (alas !) it is not the third-rate, nor 
 the second-rate, nor even the first-rate ' word-painters ' 
 who precisely know what they are talking about, 
 let alone what people twenty years hence will talk 
 about. Yet (alas ! once more) for how much do they 
 and their wrong-headed praise and undiscriminating 
 enthusiasm count in the creation of vogues ! Must 
 a man ever owe three-fourths of his temporary suc- 
 cess to his defects and limitations ? Smartness and 
 superficiality, Jingoism and aggressive cocksure- 
 ness, rococo fictional types and overloaded pseudo- 
 prose, how much too much have these helped to 
 make the name of our young Anglo-Indian story-
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 113 
 
 teller familiar to the readers of the English-speaking 
 race all over the earth ! 
 
 Grant to him, however, as we surely must, the 
 possession of verbal magic, of this striking aspect of 
 our precious and indispensable literary quality, and 
 add to it such gifts as have been enumerated in our 
 short review of his work, and surely the case for 
 taking it and its creator seriously has been well made 
 out. On the other hand, we must not for a moment 
 lose sight of the fact with which we started in our 
 consideration of his claims to a permanent literary 
 position. We are dealing with things on a scale 
 which can only be called small, and his limitations, 
 his aberrations, are very real and very grave. The 
 time is past when a writer of talent could win such 
 a position, even for a generation, by the most nimble 
 and vivid variations of a ' criticism of life ' adapted 
 to the use of the nursery or the schoolroom. Loud- 
 tongued, fractious, and numerous though it still is, 
 the Noble Army of Blockheads no longer exercises 
 that perfect tyranny it did fifteen or twenty years ago. 
 It is yet able to dispense the loaves and fishes, but 
 its judgments, overwhelming though they be for a 
 short time, are being perpetually upset by the small 
 but evergrowing section of the public that begins in 
 Art and Literature to know its right hand from its 
 left. It will not be long before people come to tell 
 H
 
 ii4 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 Mr. Kipling that they are sick to death of his 
 continual efforts to galvanise his most puppetlike 
 puppets into the dreary semblance of life. 'No 
 more Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, an you love 
 us ! No more Mrs. Hawksbee, and Strickland, and 
 Mrs. What 's-her-name ! They are only visible and 
 palpable object-lessons of your inability to create 
 characters ! ' Mr. Kipling is young and full of 
 vigour : what are we left to infer from the undeniable 
 fact that the ascending force in his work is very 
 slight? Nay, we might even question its existence. 
 His work has not gone on improving in his successive 
 efforts. He has never excelled ' The Big Drunk Draf,' 
 or ' The Drums of the Fore and Aft,' or ' At the Pit's 
 Mouth,' or 'Gemini,' each in its special style, and 
 these (if I do not mistake) are all from his earlier 
 period. There is nothing in any degree better 
 shall I say there is nothing in any degree so good ? 
 in the whole collection of stories gathered up in 
 Plain Tales from the Hills and Life's Handicap, 
 Any attempt to classify Mr. Kipling, to give him a 
 place, and his true place, in our modern fiction, 
 would be premature. Hope (which, according to 
 the Latin phrase, is ' the expectation of good ') clings 
 to this saving clause. But after his next book will 
 this still be so ? What should we make of another 
 huge slice of ' The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney '
 
 AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER 115 
 
 style of thing, and ' Namgay Doola,' and ' The Lang 
 Men o' Larut ' ? 
 
 But, once more, let me not seem to strike the 
 unjust and ungracious note of depreciation and 
 disappointment, especially at the close. We should 
 be thankful for what we have got ; but, if we chiefly 
 show our thankfulness by energetically asking for 
 more, let us not fall under the suspicion of want of 
 generosity. The case, we say, for taking Mr. Kipling 
 seriously has surely been made out beyond cavil. 
 His vogue may pass it seems passing somewhat 
 already ; but, at least, we shall not be able to declare 
 of it, as of so many of its fellows and, indeed, of 
 some which seem at this hour to stand above all 
 such changes and chances that it was won on such 
 inadequate grounds that a total extinction and 
 oblivion were, in mercy to the vileness of the English 
 artistic taste, its most expedient as well as its worthiest 
 fate. That can never be said of the man who could 
 describe Anglo-Indian society as in 'At the Pit's 
 Mouth,' who could tell a story like ' The Courting of 
 Dinah Shadd,' who could do a piece of such splendid 
 analytical and dramatic work as c The Drums of the 
 Fore and Aft.'
 
 THE POETRY AND CRITICISM OF 
 MR. SWINBURNE
 
 THE POETRY AND CRITICISM OF 
 MR. SWINBURNE 
 
 'ATALANTA IN CALYDON' 'POEMS AND BALLADS,' 
 FIRST SERIES ESSAY ON BLAKE 
 
 MR. SWINBURNE'S poetical career really opens with 
 the production of Atalanta in Calydon. In Chastel- 
 ard was to be found the luxuriant, the over-luxuriant, 
 promise of lyric and epic, but not of dramatic, power. 
 It is true that Atalanta is modelled on the Greek and 
 not on the English drama, and that the two dramas 
 are so different in character, that a complete com- 
 parison is wellnigh outside the limits of technical 
 art. At the same time the dramatic spirit, the 
 intense feeling of perfect parts in a perfect whole, is 
 to be found as much, if not more, in the Agamemnon 
 than in the King Lear. The music in the one case 
 is simple, in the other complex, but the motif is 
 identical. This dramatic spirit is felt but faintly in 
 not only Chastelard and Atalanta, but all Mr. 
 Swinburne's plays. They have not got it, they have 
 
 119
 
 120 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 got the effort after it, and in Atalanta the effort is 
 strenuous ; but effort is not achievement, and never 
 will be. Follow up Mr. Swinburne's dramatic work 
 to its culmination, and what do we find ? Bothwell, 
 the apotheosis of prolixity, the most tiresome alleged 
 'masterpiece' of the time. How to describe it? 
 How to give it a place ? How not to admit that it 
 is nothing but a vast piece of perverted ingenuity ? 
 a poetical Great Eastern that is only good for 
 splitting up into match-wood ? Mr. Swinburne calls 
 it a 'drame epique,' and with this label round its 
 neck let it float away, a gorgeous cripple, into the 
 realm of forgetfulness. 
 
 On Chastelard and Atalanta followed the Poems 
 and Ballads, and on the Poems and Ballads followed 
 the Notes thereon; and the lines on which Mr. 
 Swinburne's work was to run were laid down. The 
 Poems and Ballads are a wonderful and extensive 
 insistence on the over-luxuriant promise of his lyric 
 power. There is not one truly satisfactory poem in 
 the book. It is the production of a ' marvellous 
 boy,' but that is all. Mr. Swinburne from the start 
 was cursed with a fatal facility. One of his early 
 critics, the Morning Star, congratulated him on 
 ' writing French chansons ' in Chastelard, ' of which 
 Chastelard or Ronsard might have been proud.' Alas ! 
 Mr. Swinburne had the gift of writing a good many
 
 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 121 
 
 other sorts of poems, of which their respective 
 originals might, as the Morning Star would doubt- 
 less assert if it did not happen just at present to be 
 'shining in death, the Evening Star among the 
 departed' might be proud. Those ladies, for 
 instance, of whose virtue Boccaccio is so careful to 
 assure us (for their innocent little tales had resulted, 
 it seems, in a nickname for him which was not 
 altogether a pleasant one), if permitted to listen with 
 understanding ears, might indeed have been surprised 
 to hear how skilfully yet another of their ballads was 
 'blown with boy's mouth in a reed,' pulled in a 
 northern and Puritanic clime and after so many 
 hundred years. But we should not seem to dis- 
 parage this gift of Mr. Swinburne's. It has its value, 
 but not a value great enough to justify the prominence 
 assigned to it in his first collection of poems. Here 
 it is often little short of a trick, and often altogether 
 an affectation. Now, how good and excellent a thing 
 it is, brethren, to have a ' Masque of Queen Bersabe,' 
 a real 'miracle play,' accurate even to this charm- 
 ingly verbal extent : 
 
 ' He shut his two keen eye'n fast 
 And suddenly woxe big and brast 
 E're one should tell to nine. ' 
 
 The transition to phraseology like the following has,
 
 122 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 however, not quite so 'fiery a fidelity,' as Mr. 
 Swinburne says, to historical truth : 
 
 ' I am the Queen of Lesbians, 
 My love, that had no part in man's, 
 Was sweeter than all shape of sweet. ' 
 
 And so on. To tell the truth, it reads rather more 
 like an adapted extract from a poem called ' Anactoria,' 
 where the fidelity of historical truth is also not as 
 fiery as it might be. Nor is this trick the sole one 
 here. There is the detestable trick of pure word-play, 
 from the thraldom of which Mr. Swinburne has never 
 quite freed himself. Did he not write the Sesttna in 
 the second series of Poems and Ballads, stans pede 
 in uno, in the presence of at least three credible 
 witnesses ? 
 
 There is not a truly satisfactory poem in the book. 
 It might easily be retorted that no one claimed that 
 there was : that this is in reality only a first book, 
 and that it is foolish to be emphatic about it. All 
 this would be true enough if one were not ready to 
 follow up Mr. Swinburne's lyric work and point out 
 that, of the vast number of his poems, those which 
 are truly satisfactory can be counted on the fingers, 
 and perhaps on the fingers of one hand. It is all, or 
 almost all, over-luxuriant promise and over-luxuriant 
 fulfilment. There are verses and snatches in this 
 first book that are lovely beyond words ; but a verse
 
 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 123 
 
 or a snatch does not make a poem. Take four lines 
 like these : 
 
 ' Alas, but surely where the hills grow deep, 
 Or where the wild ways of the sea are steep, 
 
 Or in strange places somewhere there is death, 
 And on death's face the scattered hair of sleep. ' 
 
 Or the opening verse of 'A Leave-taking,' or of 
 'Itylus,' or of ' Fragoletta,' or of 'A Match,' or one 
 or two of the verses in memory of Landor : all are of 
 the purest note we have none purer but all are, as 
 it were, throttled by their surroundings. Hugo's 
 Muse reminded Heine of a pretty woman with 
 two left hands : Mr. Swinburne's has four, and they 
 all pile up materials at once ! He justly calls 
 his first book a 'revel of rhymes.' But unhappily 
 the revel has continued. 'Laus Veneris,' the 
 poem from which the first quotation is taken, has 
 a hundred and six verses ! Heine would have done 
 it in under fifty. But Heine makes ornaments of 
 his gold, while Mr. Swinburne uses it all up for 
 goldbeater's skin. Let us pass for a moment to the 
 book which contains Mr. Swinburne's highest lyrical 
 efforts Songs before Sunrise. The 'Halt before 
 Rome ' has forty-six verses : twenty-three, or even 
 eleven, would have done. ' Before a Crucifix ' might 
 have found full expression in sixteen verses instead 
 of thirty-three. In the second series of the Poems
 
 i2 4 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 and Ballads he reaches his zenith in pure style and 
 execution. But ' In the Bay ' has forty verses instead 
 of the quite sufficient twenty. His want of mastery 
 over style, in Schiller's sense of the knowledge not 
 of what to write but of what to omit, is simply dread- 
 ful. He seems to think that he will achieve immor- 
 tality as, we are told on such excellent authority, the 
 heathen thought to achieve a divine hearing, by 
 much speaking. What a fundamental ignoring (for 
 in his case it cannot quite be called ignorance) of 
 the Art to which his life has been devoted ! The 
 world is full of experience, and very weary, and the 
 sole vice for which it has no tolerance is the vice of 
 tiresomeness. This is its one condemnation. Be 
 tiresome, and your chance of survival is as the 
 writer of a song, a snatch, a line. For tiresomeness 
 is the everyday word for the factitious and the 
 untrue, and neither perverted skill nor bungling shall 
 endure. 
 
 It is, then, just this particular epithet, tiresome, 
 that has to be applied to so much of Mr. Swinburne's 
 work. Take a poem like 'Anactoria'; the alleged 
 evolution of which he has himself been at pains to 
 point out in his Notes on Poems and Ballads. In 
 reality this evolution is quite fanciful. The whole 
 poem is one long, sterile insistence. The most re- 
 markable fact about it is that a man of real power
 
 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 125 
 
 could be found who should sit down at the poetical 
 piano and play a few chords so many, many times 
 in succession. Young men and women, enamoured 
 of the last waltz or patter song, will do this sort of 
 thing and escape alive, but that is only because 
 centuries of purposeless torture and death have 
 taught us the supreme value of patience. Further- 
 more, speaking of ' Anactoria ' and that poor Sappho 
 whose 'supreme head of song' Mr. Swinburne has 
 ' vexed ' so endlessly in both poetry and prose, one 
 has to notice that his poetical insistence has not the 
 effect of emphasis but quite the reverse. In poetry, 
 if anywhere, the part is greater than the whole. An 
 extract from ' Anactoria ' and its fellow-sinners (and 
 what extracts one can make !) is worth more than the 
 poem in its entirety, which is all but unreadable. 
 Indeed, from no writer of our time can such appetising 
 extracts be made as from Mr. Swinburne. If he 
 were to be judged by these alone, his place would be 
 with our highest ; but the memory of a man's beauty 
 is not perpetuated by the fact that he had a superb 
 knuckle or an irreproachable calf. 
 
 It is the same with Mr. Swinburne's criticism, so 
 inchoate and unsatisfactory as a whole. When he 
 begins to generalise he is lost. So long as he con- 
 fines himself to individual poems with which he is in 
 accord, he is more than worth listening to; but let
 
 i 2 6 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 him touch on individual poems with which he is 
 not, and still more on personal comparisons, and we 
 shall get nothing further from him than the rhodo- 
 montade of his loves and hates. In this first section 
 we have only to deal with his first outburst, although 
 it is possible enough that, chronologically speaking, 
 this outburst does not exist within any well-defined 
 limits. None the less his work, as it seems, can be 
 divided off into three parts, each with its fairly dis- 
 tinctive and specialised quality. 
 
 Two powers have perpetually struggled for him, 
 self-abandonment and self-restraint, and this struggle 
 has been carried into every branch of it. What is 
 most admirable in Atalanta is just this the effort 
 after artistic self-restraint. He joins a perception of 
 yEschylus and Euripides to a perception of Sophokles, 
 of Sophokles who ' saw life steadily and saw it whole.' 
 In the same way his criticism then felt the (to him) 
 sanitary influence of Matthew Arnold, and the ' haute 
 critique qui part d y enthousiasme' of the author of 
 William Shakespeare was not despotic. What has 
 just been called Mr. Swinburne's first outburst is 
 that portion of his work which we have already been 
 considering, its final poetical and critical outcomes 
 being the first Poems and Ballads and the essay 
 on Blake. From this we pass to the second part, 
 where the better influences of his temperament bear
 
 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 127 
 
 fruit, and all, or almost all, of his best work is to 
 be found. 
 
 ii 
 
 ' SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE ' ' POEMS AND BALLADS, 
 SECOND SERIES' 'ESSAYS AND STUDIES' 
 
 The Songs before Sunrise have been spoken of 
 as Mr. Swinburne's highest lyrical achievement, and 
 the second Poems and Ballads as his highest achieve- 
 ment in pure style and execution. His highest 
 achievement in criticism is indisputably the Essays 
 and Studies. But in all of them we are soon forced 
 to feel the disquieting element of the transitional. 
 He will not rest and give completion to his work. 
 He is the Prodigal Son of our poets. If he has 
 thrown away a pound to-day, why, what more does 
 that mean than that he will throw away a hundred 
 to-morrow ? And with all this is the recurrent per- 
 ception of the beauty of scholarship. Mr. William 
 Rossetti speaks once of his friend's ' usual exquisite 
 tact of diction, corresponding to a clear intellectual 
 perception,' and calls him 'a perfect Hellenist.' This 
 is what Mr. Swinburne likes. He protests over and 
 over again that he is 'a student,' nay, a 'rational 
 student. 5 It is quite comic ! If it were not that the 
 problematical joke about the Revue des deux Mondes
 
 128 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 reviewers remained the sole piece of fun that is to 
 be found in his writings, one would suppose that his 
 protests of spiritual super-sanity in his last attacks on 
 Matthew Arnold 1 were not serious. And yet he really 
 does perceive the beauty and strength of scholarship, 
 and in some of these essays we find an effort after 
 their perfection which is strenuous and almost 
 successful. The essays on Byron, Coleridge, and 
 Ford are the only criticisms of his that give the 
 impression of anything like harmonious wholes. 
 Those on Rossetti and Arnold are, in some ways, a 
 step forward, but a step that is less sure. When we 
 get to the review of UAnn'ee Terrible we have reached 
 the connecting link between the second part of his 
 work and the last. The self-abandonment has begun. 
 'These divers waifs of tentative criticism,' he says, 
 with an oblique look at lost harmonious wholes. 
 ' The one object,' he says again, ' which gives to this 
 book whatever it may have of unity, is the study of 
 art in its imaginative aspects.' Yet the book is a note- 
 worthy one. It is full of scraps of really valuable 
 criticism. And more. The intuition which as early 
 as '67 saw that Arnold 'if justly judged must be 
 judged by his verse and not by his prose ' was a fine 
 one. The remark is somewhat excessive. Arnold, 
 for good or for evil, is to be judged by both ; but, in 
 1 Essays and Studies, 2nd edition, p. 170.
 
 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 129 
 
 the face of a really extraordinary insistence on all sides 
 that the prose was all and the poetry next to nothing, 
 it says something for the critical intuition of the man 
 who could flatly deny this. This judgment on Arnold 
 is not taken as a solitary example. Mr. Swinburne 
 has rarely failed to recognise high fellow-workmen, 
 and his recognition has been followed by praise, if 
 sometimes forced, almost always generous. In his 
 pet affections as in his pet aversions (to have spoken 
 ill of the former is at once and for ever to make a 
 man one of the latter) he has been extreme ; but/on 
 the whole he has been loyal to his perception of high 
 fellow-work, if not of high fellow-workers, and that, 
 for a man of letters, is something nay, it is much. 
 Let us take some samples of his criticism of indi- 
 vidual poems. 
 
 Here is Arnold's little poem, 'Requiescat.' 'With- 
 out show of beauty or any thought or fancy, it leaves 
 long upon the ear an impression of simple, of earnest, 
 of weary melody wound up into a sense of rest.' 
 How admirable ! Again : Rossetti's ' song of the sea- 
 beach, called " Even So," which dies out with a 
 suppressed sigh like the last breath or heart-beat of 
 a yearning, weak-winged wind.' (There is a little 
 touch of ' preciousness ' here, but that is nothing.) 
 And critical scraps like these are to be found passim. 
 Add, then, that same unerring intuition which recog- 
 i
 
 130 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 nised and bore unflinching witness to the high work 
 of contemporary men not yet properly recognised 
 Hugo and Arnold as poets, and Rossetti and Morris 
 (to speak only of this book of Essays and Studies] 
 and we must be ready to admit the debt of gratitude 
 we owe to him for his powerful and fearless exposition. 
 Turn now to the accompanying poetical work the 
 recent Poems and Ballads and the Songs before 
 Sunrise. Enough, and perhaps more than enough, 
 has been said of the faulty elements in them. But 
 no work of Mr. Swinburne's is as satisfactory as this ; 
 to no work can we return again and again with equal 
 pleasure. 'A Forsaken Garden,' despite a memory 
 of the poetical method of Browning, has already won 
 its place as a possession of all poetry readers, and 
 that is a fact of more significance than the superfine 
 young critics are wont to admit. Browning, again, 
 has a finger in ' At a Month's End,' and the poem is 
 over long ; but it is not tiresome, and that allows one 
 to see that it is fine. ' A Wasted Vigil ' appears as 
 the best expression of one of Mr. Swinburne's not 
 too numerous poetical moods, which he is only too 
 frequently repeating, and is fine also. But when we 
 get to ' Ave atque Vale,' we get to something very 
 like that rara avis in terris a masterpiece. What a 
 fortunate hour was that in which the essentials in him 
 all met together and, calmed by death, spoke with
 
 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 131 
 
 sincerity ! Mr. Swinburne has praised ' Thyrsis ' 
 generously and well, and here he has written its 
 fellow. Forgetting an occasional verbal flaw, this 
 poem passes into the company of Lycidas. The 
 reasons why Mr. Swjnburne's masterpiece should 
 be found in an elegy, and in an elegy on Charles 
 Baudelaire, are not far enough to seek to need ex- 
 pressing here. It suffices to remark that the poem is 
 (let us, then, say it) flawless, perfect, and that its 
 equals in our time are to be counted on the fingers 
 of one hand. Our modern paganism has found its 
 final expression, if not of life, then of death. Our 
 Catullus has journeyed over many lands and seas, 
 dark with doubt and despair, to tell us of whatsoever 
 of good and sweet death has for us, death that is 
 and death that will be. 
 
 ' Nous reconnaissons, courbes vers la terre, 
 Que c'est la splendeur de ta face austere 
 Qui dore la nuit de nos longs malheurs ; 
 Que la vie ailee aux mille couleurs, 
 
 Dont tu n'es que 1'ame, 
 Refait par tes mains les pres et les fleurs, 
 
 La rose et la femme.' 
 
 It is Gautier, it is Baudelaire himself, transfigured, 
 passing from the shadow of life and death into the 
 sunshine of perpetuity, that speak to us in their own 
 tongue this sweet and magnificent trust ! 
 
 And there are other poems in this book which, if
 
 i 3 2 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 they do not reach to the high level of this one, are 
 yet distinctly admirable. Such are the verses c In 
 Memory of Barry Cornwall,' 'Inferiae,' 'A Ballad of 
 Francois Villon,' 'Song,' 'Choriambics,' 'At Parting,' 
 and the 'Dedication.' But even in these the old 
 complaint has to be made of want of artistic self- 
 restraint, want of the sense of perfect parts in a 
 perfect whole. There is scarcely a poem in the book 
 from which some lovely or splendid snatch of song 
 cannot be taken, but the nucleus inspiration is so 
 often lost in a side-play of colour, scent, and sound. 
 Take 'A Ballad of Dreamland,' for instance: the first 
 verse so beautiful, the others all beaten out, till high 
 pleasure is swallowed up in vague disappointment. 
 The translations from Villon are excellent. But the 
 fatal facility comes out in the French and Latin 
 poetry and the sonnets. It is the fashion at present 
 to praise Mr. Swinburne's sonnets, but they are not 
 the real thing. They are brilliant and hard, intense 
 and artificial, mere tours de force, without genuine 
 vitality or permanence. And the same must be said 
 of almost all his French efforts. He declares once of 
 Gautier that 'sa parole de marbre et d'or avail le son.' 
 Something of the same sort of thing has happened 
 here. Charming, however, is such verse as that 
 'Ad Catullum,' and sweet such verse as this from the 
 ' Nocturne ' :
 
 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 133 
 
 ' La nuit ecoute et se penche sur 1'onde 
 Pour y cueillir rien qu'un souffle d'amour ; 
 Pas de lueur, pas de musique au monde, 
 Pas de sommeil pour moi ni de sejour. 
 O mere, 6 nuit, de ta source profonde 
 Verse-nous, verse enfin 1'oubli du jour.' 
 
 Is there any French poet who would be ashamed to 
 sign it? 
 
 When we come to the Songs before Sunrise we 
 come to what Mr. Swinburne evidently looks upon 
 as an important spiritual development in himself. In 
 a Prelude which is often as singularly suggestive of the 
 letter as of the spirit of Arnold's wonderful 'New 
 Sirens,' he draws attention to this. The sincerity 
 and inevitability of the development are rather pro- 
 blematical. ' Love's passion is played out, let us 
 then take to the passion of politics,' is the burden of 
 it. But how, Mr. Swinburne would say, can you be 
 troubling about the sincerity or inevitability of the 
 thing when it is expressed to you in music such as 
 this is ? But Mr. Swinburne, with his pretty theory 
 that 'the excellence of verse justifies its injustice,' 
 loses sight of the fact that the spiritual element enters 
 into the very texture of its actual expression, and, if 
 this spiritual element is wanting in a certain quality, 
 the actual expression of it will be wanting also. 
 When, and only when, in Mr. Swinburne his essential 
 qualities all meet together and, made clear by some
 
 134 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 absorbing cause, speak with simplicity, is the result 
 something like a masterpiece, a poem flawless in 
 detail, perfect in conception. It wants all this to 
 restrain his vagabond imagination. Then, too, in 
 poetry such as most of these songs are, he has the 
 temptation of his imperfect sense of melody. Here, 
 more than anywhere else, he makes apparent the gift 
 which as a worker he has done so much to give to 
 our poetry movement, rapidity, speed ; and here, 
 too, more than anywhere else, is apparent the want 
 of both delicacy and variety in his music. His sense 
 of regular rhythms and metres is splendid ; his sense 
 of melody was never even remarkable. His blank 
 verse is often brilliant, never sovereign. He must 
 have a brass-band or nothing. Then there is his 
 alliterative trick, which ends in positive disgust. 
 Could parody go further than a line like 
 
 ' Spy, smirk, scoff, snap, snort, snivel, snarl and sneer ' ? 
 
 Or, to take an example from the Songs, how ineffec- 
 tive are lines like this : 
 
 ' Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear ' ! 
 
 It is something very like balderdash. 
 
 There is still more to say. Mr. Swinburne's 
 democracy has not the genuine ring. The trail of 
 the amateur-enthusiast is over it all. What demo- 
 cracy is, what it means, and what it wants, is wholly
 
 outside his view, as indeed it is, with perhaps one or 
 two exceptions, outside the view of every well-known 
 writer of our time. Indeed, this pseudo-democracy, 
 this apotheosis by light-headed schoolboys of the 
 ' People, the gray-grown, speechless Christ,' is, unless 
 viewed as a merely poetical exercise, rather disgust- 
 ing. It is one thing to sing of Socialism, the 
 Socialism of the Italian Unionists, of the French 
 Anti-Imperialists, of the Russian Nihilists : these 
 are for the most part men and women of education, 
 or, in the usual terms, gentlemen and ladies; and 
 the enthusiastic lady or gentleman poet can enter 
 into their point of view ; but it is quite another thing 
 to sing of the peasants and mechanics, labourers and 
 trades-unionists, whose aims, whether for ultimate 
 good or evil, are not in the least grasped and under- 
 stood. This makes it that, of the democracy sung 
 of in these Songs, only that part which has to do 
 with the individuals who are not real democrats can 
 for a moment be viewed seriously. 
 
 Let us now take a glance at the Songs themselves. 
 Everywhere in them will be found and to a really 
 remarkable extent evidences of the old, the irre- 
 pressible, the fatal facility. The poverty of thought 
 in them is terrible. Take such a poem as the 
 ' Hymn of Man.' Not all the prodigality of music 
 and imagery in it can hide the want of real, not to
 
 136 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 say sovereign, thought. It is brilliant, it is ingenious, 
 but it is not great. Again, take ' Hertha,' a poem 
 which has some superb snatches in it : the same 
 remark has to be made. Professor Clifford, indeed, 
 eager to show that the mathematical mind could 
 appreciate the fine flow of poesy, took the thing au 
 pied de la lettre and discoursed on its 'cosmic 
 emotion.' Perhaps it was encouragement from some 
 such unexpected source that induced Mr. Swinburne 
 to say to himself, ' Go to, I will also write a poem 
 on " Genesis," ' and the precious poem on ' Genesis ' 
 was the result. It would be interesting to have the 
 opinion of the fiery but grim scientific realist, Herr 
 Hackel, upon its scientific value Herr Hackel, who 
 has knocked together the heads of poet and teleologist 
 with an admirable impartiality. He could not have 
 a finer example of ' the painter in glowing colours 
 of the wonderful mystery ' to be derived from a few 
 popular scientific text-books than our English poet. 
 He has very few ideas, and those he does to death, 
 sometimes amazingly so. For instance, there is his 
 ceaseless phrase, ' spirit of sense.' It or its equiva- 
 lent occurs at least four times in the Songs, three 
 times in the second Poems and Ballads, five times 
 in the Essays and Studies, and elsewhere. The 
 origin of it is Shakespeare's Troilus, the Keats of 
 Shakespeare (according to Mr. Swinburne) ; and Lord
 
 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 137 
 
 Tennyson has it too in the shape of ' sense and soul,' 
 and Mr. Browning as ' spirit-sense,' as probably every 
 poet in some shape or other. To Mr. Swinburne it 
 gives an explanation of all individual psychology. 
 
 What a relief it is to turn from clever, ' vamped- 
 up,' and improperly digested work like this to such 
 pure and lovely poems as 'The Pilgrims' or the 
 ' Dedication to Mazzini ' ! Perhaps no more gorgeous 
 and ringing burst of passionate song is to be found 
 in our literature than the last sixteen verses of the 
 'Mater Triumphalis.' Take verse like this as an 
 example of the genuine political sincerity ('The 
 Halt before Rome ') : 
 
 ' Surely the day is on our side, 
 
 And heaven and the sacred sun ; 
 Surely the stars and the bright 
 Immemorial inscrutable night ' ; 
 
 or the song-burst of the three verses further on, 
 beginning 'The blind and the people in prison.' 
 The poem, however, has rather poor stuff in it (the 
 seven verses beginning 'Whose hand is stretched 
 forth upon her ? '), and is too long, which is really 
 irritating where parts are so fine. The opening of 
 the ' Quia multum amavit,' a poem of the same order 
 but a better example, has a varied music too rare in 
 this master of regular and rhymed rhythms and only 
 regular and rhymed rhythms. Everywhere there are
 
 138 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 fine lines and snatches of songs sweet or impassioned 
 (the first two verses of ' To Walt Whitman in 
 America,' or the first verse of ' The Oblation,' for 
 instance, or others from the 'Mater Dolorosa' or 
 ' A Marching Song '). The studied work, set pieces 
 like 'Siena' and 'Tiresias,' have in them the taint 
 of over-deliberation, a taint curiously demonstrable 
 by the exceedingly fine extracts that can (as usual) 
 be made from both. This is once more a case of 
 the extract giving too high a notion of the whole. 
 
 Verse like 
 
 ' . . . Her palace stands 
 In the mid city, where the strong 
 Bells turn the sunset air to song, 
 And the towers throng,' 
 
 is very lovely. The quiet insight that we feel in 
 much of the monologue of ' Tiresias ' is as pleasant 
 as it is unexpected. Here and there it is like Keats, 
 the Keats of Hyperion : 
 
 4 1 am as Time's self in mine own wearied mind.' 
 Or again, with a richer and more individual colour : 
 
 * Ye forces without form and viewless powers 
 That have the keys of all our years in hold, 
 That prophesy too late with tongues of gold, 
 In a strange speech whose words are perished hours.' 
 
 One is set wondering whether verse like this will not 
 after all be able to carry on such a poem unshattered 
 down the stream of time. The final poems have
 
 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 139 
 
 several of high quality. Such are 'An Appeal,' or 
 the first ten stanzas of the 'Epilogue,' which have 
 loveliness loveliness coloured and animated with 
 'the patience of passion.' 
 
 in 
 
 SUBSEQUENT WORK 
 
 It is not necessary to criticise in detail the third 
 portion, the subsequent work of Mr. Swinburne. 
 There is positively no sign in it of any new develop- 
 ment except for the worse. Indeed, if we omit that 
 slight tendency to greater excellence in workmanship 
 which marks the second period, there has been, as 
 we see, no new development from the beginning. 
 He began as a 'marvellous boy,' just as his master, 
 'our sovereign poet,' 'our supreme poet,' 'the great 
 tragic and prophetic poet of our age,' and so on, 
 began as a 'sublime infant.' The 'sublime infant' 
 died a ' sublime infant ' at the mature age of eighty 
 odd ; and the ' marvellous boy ' is no less a ' mar- 
 vellous boy ' as the author of A Century of Roundels 
 than of the first Poems and Ballads. Verily, these 
 men have the unreflective gift of perpetual youth, an 
 enviable gift indeed in a time which is nothing if 
 not repressed and broken with the weight of analytical 
 age. Mr. Swinburne's freedom from the restraint of
 
 i 4 o ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 anything but his own personality has rapidly increased 
 with years. For, being one of these happy souls to 
 whom thought is not a necessity but rather a nuisance, 
 he has grown less and less to care for such an absurd 
 thing as balance. His ravenous emotions have made 
 an end of him at last. Like his master, he has 
 caught up a few poor ideas from here and there, and 
 used them as a peg on which to hang the gorgeous 
 vesture of his work, and been satisfied. Writers of 
 ' leaders ' in our newspapers understand this operation 
 best, perhaps ; but the poets have often run them 
 close. 
 
 What, then, remains of value in the man's work ? 
 Just those parts of it, we say, of which he probably 
 takes least heed a line, a snatch, a verse, a song, 
 scarcely any of them containing the qualities on 
 which he would insist as his most peculiar excellence. 
 
 To have to repeat all this in detail, in considering 
 his later work, would be as wearisome as it would be 
 stupid. It would also be both ungrateful and ungra- 
 cious. The fortunate hours have come less and less 
 frequently with the poet as success and authority have 
 loosened the bonds of self-restraint, until at last he 
 has gone far towards turning his lyre into a barrel- 
 organ. One puts down a book like A Midsummer's 
 Holiday or the Sisters with the weary sense that 
 there was little reason any of it should have been
 
 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 141 
 
 written, and none at all that it should have been 
 published. It is far pleasanter, and indeed juster, 
 to look back upon what is really satisfactory in the 
 work of this erratic, factitious, passionate, myopic, 
 but most real poet of ours, the inspired schoolboy 
 of Parnassus. 
 
 Let us recall the power and fearlessness of his 
 exposition ; the instinct which has so often put its 
 finger onto vague artistic notions floating about in 
 the critical atmosphere, and made their actual truths 
 perceptible to us all ; the special scraps of criticism 
 really valuable. Let us recall the snatches of incom- 
 parable song, the wonders and splendours of rushing 
 rhyme, the incomparable, gorgeous glimpses of face 
 and form which we have had in our progress through 
 the tropical jungle of his poetry. Then let us pause 
 a moment in front of the shrine of a masterpiece ! 
 that rarest of terrestrial gifts, dipping our fingers in 
 the holy shell, bending our heads to the wonderful 
 image of Life and Death and Beauty which has 
 made the three names of Baudelaire and Swinburne 
 and Immortality sound as one.
 
 SOME RECENT NOVELS
 
 SOME RECENT NOVELS 
 
 IN the domain of what is loosely called Literature, 
 each decade has its special samples of a noisy 
 popular success, or of a half-success only less noisy. 
 They come and go these plagues of time, as bliss- 
 fully unaware of their predecessors as of their 
 followers, large and small, poorly clad and richly 
 clad, of every size and description, crowding to their 
 doom. The same shouts of enthusiastic welcome 
 which greeted the appearance of the chartered mud- 
 gods of yesterday greet those of to-day, and will 
 greet those of to-morrow. Is there nobody to say 
 that all this has happened again and again, and will 
 yet happen again and again, just because the average 
 readers who do not think, and the average readers 
 who think a little, all require momentary mouthpieces 
 for the brains or want of brains that is in them ? 
 
 Take first the noisy popular successes of the day, 
 beginning with a lady. Mrs. Humphry Ward 
 started with Robert Elsmere, and she has proceeded 
 with David Grieve. Since Daniel Deronda, has the 
 
 K
 
 146 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 dreadful mind of woman succeeded in constructing 
 such an appalling automaton of a female prig in 
 black coat and breeches as Robert Elsmere ? How 
 abject is its failure as a creation, as a character, as a 
 recognisable human being! How utterly tiresome 
 and tenth-rate as an embodiment of any species of 
 sublunary ' thought ' ! Whence, then, the astonishing 
 success of the book? From the simplest causes. 
 Here you have expressed for you the respectable 
 religious liberalism of the hour. And it is absolutely 
 and completely revised and amended up to date and 
 not a day (not an hour) over nothing inserted, 
 nothing left out, which could shock or fail to attract 
 the good masquerading Philistines and Philistinesses 
 who work our woe. It is charitably to be added 
 that some of the sub-characters, especially the 
 women, are realised a little more adequately ; and 
 then there is a piquant platonic love intrigue, 
 intensified by the base alloy of personal caricature. 
 For, after all, it was Mrs. Ward's first actual book, 
 and under all the intellectual flummery of her 
 hapless ' theology ' lay the gift of clever, partial, and 
 spiteful observation which is the heritage of the 
 everlasting daughter of Eve. In her second book 
 she found her little personal store all but exhausted ; 
 she was urged on by the cheering coteries to a higher 
 flight, and the results all round were disastrous.
 
 SOME RECENT NOVELS 147 
 
 Was it, for example, indeed totally unconscious, the 
 audacious paraphrase of Marie Bashkirtseff and her 
 journal which constitutes the whole working material 
 of the only passably interesting section of this 
 wearisome compilation ? But why should one ask ? 
 The whole book is nothing but a rifacimento of other 
 and better books. Here it is Wuthering Heights, 
 here it is George Eliot, here it is somebody else. 
 To read it, is like drinking glass after glass of water 
 stale and stained with the rinsings of many wines. 
 In a few years the salt and turbid tide of British 
 religious liberalism will have advanced a little, and 
 then Robert Elsmere will be forgotten in the rapture 
 of some other equally mediocre book which more or 
 less expresses that little, and the general stupidity of 
 existence will in no wise be diminished. Wuthering 
 Heights, however, will still be to the good, and 
 (though in a considerably lesser measure) so will 
 Marie Bashkirtseff, and therein lies all the consolation 
 possible to the disinterested friend of Literature, and 
 his species. 
 
 Equally simple are the causes of the success of 
 Mr. Hall Caine, whom we may take as another 
 variant of the same species, and equally inevitable is 
 his imminent doom. The spectacle is pathetic as 
 well as absurd, because the unhappy man apparently 
 looks upon himself and his work seriously He does
 
 148 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 not know that his vogue is the mere sum total of the 
 appreciation of thousands of imbeciles at a given 
 moment of their development, and that he has only 
 got to live a few years to see that development pass 
 into a new phase wherein he will have no place. 
 Yet what a chance he had, in all that huge and 
 untouched mass of local colour afforded by 'the 
 little Manx nation ' ! One thinks of what Tolstoi 
 has done, with regard to the old life of the Caucasus, 
 with a fraction of the amount. And all, absolutely 
 all that Mr. Caine could make of it was to produce 
 dead characters moving in dead scenes, the ghastly 
 old fictional types, tricked out with the apparatus 
 of pseudo-' sagas,' pseudo-' prose-poems,' and heaven 
 knows what not, with just enough pretension about 
 the method to make countless shoals of silly people, 
 tinged with the current claptrap culture of the hour, 
 think they were indulging in something intellectually 
 superior. With open mouths they read the author's 
 thanks to Mr. Brown, member of the Manx Legis- 
 lature, for valuable information concerning the 
 amorous proclivities of the Manx cats ; or saw how 
 Rabbi Jones was dragged in to guarantee the burial 
 customs of the sausage-sellers of the Sahara; or 
 learned that Herr Robinson had courageously read 
 all the proof-sheets of the New Saga and had escaped 
 alive to tell the tale. But how, in this year of grace
 
 SOME RECENT NOVELS 149 
 
 1892, when we still have Mr. Gladstone and the 
 critically poverty-stricken with us, this sort of thing 
 still takes ! 
 
 Let us have samples of Mr. Caine's actual work. 
 Here is a glimpse of the heroine of a book which, as 
 he declares, 'is less novel than romance and less 
 romance than poem ' : 
 
 ' After that night, Naomi's shyness of speech dropped away 
 from her, and what was left was only a sweet, maidenly 
 unconsciousness of all faults and failings, with a soft and 
 playful lisp that ran in and out among the simple words that 
 fell from her lips, like a young squirrel among the fallen leaves 
 of autumn. ' 
 
 The more one reads and reflects on this passage 
 and on the hundred similar gems of description 
 which can be found in any of his novels, the more 
 wonderful and absolute appears his mastery over 
 that unctuous, fatuous, idiotic, pseudo-poetic ' high- 
 falutin ' which is the despair of his rivals in popular 
 bathetical pathos. 
 
 Now let us see how Mr. Caine's men and women 
 live and move and have their being in the enchanted 
 realms of his art. Almost any passage taken at 
 random will do. Here is one : 
 
 ' That same day the poor black boy bade farewell to Israel 
 and Naomi. He was leaving them for ever, and he was 
 broken-hearted. Israel was his father, Naomi was his sister, 
 and never again should he set his eyes on either. But in the 
 pride of his perilous mission he bore himself bravely.
 
 150 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 ' "Well, good night," he said, taking Naomi's hand, but not 
 looking into her blind face. 
 
 * " Good night," she answered, and then, after a moment, 
 she flung her arms about his neck, and kissed him. 
 
 ' He laughed lightly, and turned to Israel. 
 
 ' "Good night, father," he said, in a shrill voice. 
 
 ' "A safe journey to you, my son," said Israel, "and may 
 you do all my errands." 
 
 ' " God burn my great-grandfather if I do not" said AH 
 stoutly. 
 
 ' But with that word of his country his brave daring at length 
 broke down, and drawing Israel aside, that Naomi might not 
 hear, he whispered, sobbing and stammering, " When when 
 I am gone, don't don't tell her that I was black." 
 
 ' Then, in an instant, he fled away. 
 
 "'In peace ! " cried Israel after him ; " in peace ! my brave 
 boy, simple, noble, loyal heart. " ' 
 
 Comment seems impossible. All one can do is to 
 read aloud, in a low and reverent tone, a passage like 
 this from the pages of the Westminster Review : 
 
 ' Mr. Hall Caine's novels afford evidence of a pronounced 
 individuality of genius, which is calculated to count as a potent 
 factor. Mr. Caine is essentially a romanticist. His romance 
 is the romance of reality. He combines moral sanity with 
 imaginative fervour, truth of emotion with strength of passion, 
 and thus succeeds in that combination of the familiar with the 
 unfamiliar, that blending of the commonplace with the un- 
 common, which must ever remain the essence of romantic 
 achievement' 
 
 Viewed in this light, what a gigantic coup is that 
 phrase about the ' soft and playful lisp that ran in 
 and out among the simple words that fell from her
 
 SOME RECENT NOVELS 151 
 
 red lips, like a young squirrel among the fallen leaves 
 of autumn ' ! 
 
 Of one of Mr. Caine's novels, however, The 
 Deemster, it is impossible for me to speak otherwise 
 than with gratitude. I have not yet read it all, but 
 I carry it about with me from place to place in this 
 sunny, dusty, rainy, draughty, malodorous Riviera, 
 where the exiled invalids of England dissipate their 
 pessimistical winters. The Deemster broke up one 
 of the most persistent attacks of insomnia that I 
 have ever experienced. Through it I enjoyed night 
 after night of sound and refreshing slumber. I let 
 my stock of sulphonal tablets run out with a reckless 
 unconcern. What did it matter? I had The 
 Deemster. But this, I am aware, is a merely 
 personal view of the matter, and we must mournfully 
 admit that to our disinterested friend of Literature, 
 and his species, there is no consolation possible for 
 the literary existence of Mr. Hall Caine. 
 
 Yet even when one passes from this merely 
 factitious and transitional branch of English fiction 
 to the exiguous domain of better and more serious 
 work, one is met too often with the barrenest results. 
 The noisy popular success stands usually as an 
 aching minus quantity, but the only less noisy half- 
 success gives us again and again little more than 
 zero. Sadly we perceive that it really amounts to
 
 152 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 the same thing to the same wearisome and obvious 
 category of historical repetition. At the same time, 
 no one who considers, side by side, the fiction of 
 France and England, but must be struck with the 
 fact that the waste of good average second-grade 
 work is infinitely greater with us than with them. 
 The French prose-writers of the lower line attain to 
 results so incomparably more satisfactory than their 
 English fellows. The reason is obvious : there need 
 be no affectation of a search for it. The conditions 
 under which the French writer works are in almost 
 every respect more favourable. Firstly, he inherits 
 the tradition of a genuine prose style. Matthew 
 Arnold sneered at France as famed in all great arts 
 but supreme in none ; but does not prose count as a 
 great art ? Perhaps at the present moment there is 
 none greater, and where shall we seek for prose to 
 compare with that of France ? At about the same 
 period as the English poet was paraphrasing his own 
 emaciate prose into his even more emaciate early 
 sonnets, M. Renan was saying : ' La langue frangaise 
 est puritaine : on ne fait pas de conditions avec elle.' 
 (' The French language is Puritanic : you cannot 
 inflict conditions upon it.') Alas ! in England the 
 only thing that was not Puritanic was the English 
 language, and it lay as helpless for any one to inflict 
 conditions upon it in the nineteenth century as it
 
 SOME RECENT NOVELS 153 
 
 had done in the sixteenth. Shakespeare worked it 
 to his will, at times with a divine success, at times 
 with deplorable failure. Carlyle did the same, only 
 that the failure was the rule and the success was the 
 exception, and many smaller men have gone and done 
 likewise, each in his own fashion. For our literature 
 still more or less (and how much more than less !) 
 remains in the condition described in the Book of 
 Judges, and each man does that which is right in his 
 own eyes. 'On est libre,' continued M. Renan, { de 
 ne pas 1'ecrire [la langue franchise] ; mais des qu'on 
 entreprend cette tache difficile, il faut passer les 
 mains liees sous les fourches caudines du dictionnaire 
 autorise et de la grammaire que 1'usage a consacree.' 
 (' You need not write it if you do not wish ; but from 
 the moment that you undertake this difficult task, it 
 is necessary to pass with bound hands under the 
 Caudine forks of the authorised vocabulary and of 
 the grammar sanctioned by custom.') And this holds 
 as good to-day, four decades later, as it did then, 
 despite the scornful rejection of style by the extremists 
 who gather round the dusty and tattered banner still 
 held desperately aloft by M. Zola. Thus, then, do 
 we start handicapped beside the third-rate, yea, and 
 the tenth-rate, of our fellows in France. But this is 
 only the first of their advantages. They have others 
 all but as great and as precious. They have known
 
 154 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 how to keep the Philistines and the Philistinesses in 
 their place the shopkeepers and the women ! And 
 what an unspeakable liberation lies there ! To leave 
 to all these good imbeciles their Hector Malots and 
 their George Ohnets et hoc genus omne, and never to 
 hear of them except in Gaza and Ascalon and Joppa 
 and the other demesnes of Dagon, where no sensible 
 person ever goes ! No eternal babble from the 
 housetops of Jerusalem about the high art of Mr. 
 Caine, or the dialectic power of Mrs. Humphry 
 Ward, or the wonderful plots of some other heaven- 
 sent genius ; no hopeless bewilderment of every 
 young writer of ability by the ubiquitous bellowing 
 of a criticism that is beneath contempt ! Imagine 
 what this would mean to us here in England ! 
 
 Let us take two examples of our story-tellers of 
 ability prose- writers of the inferior class men who, 
 under the better circumstances of a more critical 
 audience, would have in all probability achieved 
 something complete and durable. At the present 
 moment ' everybody ' is reading either The Little 
 Minister or Tess of the Z>' Urbervilles. Mr. Hardy 
 has been before the public for a not inconsiderable 
 period, and has doubtless reached the weary stage of 
 a hopeless fatality in such matters ; but Mr. Barrie 
 is still young at the work, and it is not pleasant to 
 think that he has yet given us his best. For it is at
 
 SOME RECENT NOVELS 155 
 
 once to be admitted that in A Window in Thrums 
 he not only broke new ground, but wrote a book 
 portions of which can fitly be considered as literature. 
 Of the twenty-two episodes, each in its particular 
 chapter, which compose this picture of a township 
 of poverty-stricken Scotch weavers, quite half are 
 done excellently ; one or two are little masterpieces. 
 There is nothing great about his way of doing it. 
 The secret of showing the reflection of the stars in 
 the puddles, in Dostoieffsky's fine phrase, is hidden 
 from him. The moment he tries to bring in Nature, 
 the parent of the vast inanimate forces which, whether 
 we know it or not, influence us all so profoundly in 
 our moods, our humours, our very temperaments, he 
 fails completely. If Pierre Loti gives us a picture of 
 the Breton fisher-folk, he makes us feel and under- 
 stand how they are all as much the growth of the 
 place, the climate, the seasons, as the animals and 
 birds, the flowers and grasses. All this escapes Mr. 
 Barrie. He has only seen, and can only render, 
 what is directly obvious to the myopic gaze of 
 everyday love. He gives all the soulless pettiness, 
 the ravenous snobbery, of these poor people. He 
 gives also their sombre, inarticulate passions of 
 affection and endurance, but nothing more. They 
 remain isolated, baseless, suspended in mid-air, so to 
 say. To him, men and women are merely ' pilgrims
 
 156 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 and strangers ' of the earth not children, not organic 
 products of it. His limitations, therefore, are severe, 
 but their very severity gives him at his best a pungent 
 force that enables us to see with our proper eyes 
 some of his men and women, not, indeed, as they 
 really are, but as they appear to him, and, in a 
 manner, to themselves. Jess and Hendry, Jamie 
 and Leeby these actually live for him, and he has 
 succeeded in making them live for us. Some of the 
 others are failures. Haggart, the humourist, for 
 example, is a dreadful failure. He ends with becoming 
 intolerable, not because humourists are not frequently 
 intolerable (and especially Scotch humourists), but 
 because Mr. Barrie has not in the least succeeded in 
 realising the character he would fain portray. The 
 three chapters assigned to this conventional puppet 
 are utterly below the level of the others in every way. 
 So far for his first book. After the Window in 
 Thrums, with such admirable work in it in different 
 styles as 'Dead this Twenty Years' (chapter vi.), 
 'A Cloak with Beads' (chapter viii.), and 'Leeby 
 and Jamie' (chapter xviii.), which gave something 
 very like a harmonious totality of impression, Mr. 
 Barrie, like the rest of them, was apparently smitten 
 with 'the last infirmity of noble mind,' as that 
 infirmity takes shape before the lower type of 
 literary purveyor, and decided to write a full-blown
 
 SOME RECENT NOVELS 157 
 
 novel. The Little Minister is that full-blown novel, 
 and it is an effort over which any true friend of 
 Mr. Barrie's should weep. What a perfect, what a 
 grotesque mishap it is ! The book is an irremediable 
 failure because it is utterly wrong as a whole. What 
 a mere circus caricature is the central personage, 
 that inhuman ' Egyptian woman ' ! Has Mr. Barrie 
 indeed never read Carmen ? Or did it happen that, 
 in some dripping and dingy Scotch town, a be- 
 draggled company of strolling singers played some 
 mournful malversion of the opera of Louis Bizet? 
 And was Mr. Barrie there, and did it strike him that 
 he could take the glancing figure f of the Spanish 
 gipsy girl and put her to better local use with an 
 Auld Licht ministerial prig and a mass of local 
 colour? Surely he could not have read Prosper 
 Merimee's novel and dared to exploit, and ruin in 
 the exploitation, its delicious heroine ? The book is 
 absurd because its main feature is absurd. All that 
 it contains of any value whatever is to be found in 
 the touches of the Thrums life in the style of the 
 Window, To all appearance Mr. Barrie's vein of 
 ore is a thin one a very thin one ; and can he 
 congratulate himself on the compensating fact that 
 it is passably pure ? 
 
 His next volume will probably be the decisive one 
 of his work. No one would wish to limit its scope.
 
 158 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 If he can fill a larger canvas, a more animated scene, 
 than the Window, then he should do it ; but let him 
 pause and realise critically what such a departure 
 means. Is he properly equipped for it ? He cannot 
 afford no writer can afford to be in the dark 
 about himself to the extent he was, and probably is, 
 concerning the Minister. Ah, if only he could be 
 forbidden to write anything more for several years, 
 and set upon a course of study of the best modern 
 French fiction ! He might learn his limitations. 
 He might even learn to make the failures of his past 
 the successes of his future. What a revelation such 
 a book as the Pecheur d'Islande should be to any one 
 who wished to handle such a subject as that of 
 which Mr. Barrie had an exiguous conception in the 
 Minister ! What an explanation of his own cata- 
 strophe ! what a course of instruction as to the true 
 lines on which the last infirmity of noble mind 
 should lead (if lead it must) the author of A Window 
 in Thrums ! 
 
 It is quite different with Mr. Hardy and Tess of 
 the. UUrberuilles. The central conception of the 
 book, the main feature, seems right enough, but it 
 has not been seized strongly, and the story, like all 
 Mr. Hardy's stories, alternately hurries or flags. 
 Parts are good enough as renderings of human and 
 natural life to make one more than astonished at the
 
 SOME RECENT NOVELS 159 
 
 not unfrequent lapses into the cheapest conventional 
 style of the average popular novelist. What can 
 one make of a piece of writing like this, where the 
 most flagrant puppets for the time-being usurp the 
 parts of what he has taught us to feel as something 
 like human characters ? 
 
 (The Durbeyfield family is discussing a recent 
 visit of Mr. D'Urberville.) 
 
 ' Her mother hastened to explain, smiles breaking from 
 every inch of her person. . . . 
 
 ' " Mr. D'Urberville says you must be a good girl, if you are 
 at all as you appear ; he knows you must be worth your weight 
 in gold. He is very much interested in 'ee truth to tell." . . . 
 
 ' " It is very good of him to think that," she murmured ; 
 ' ' and if I was quite sure how it would be living there, I would 
 go in a moment." 
 
 ' " He is a mighty handsome man ! " 
 
 ' " I don't think so," said Tess coldly. 
 
 ' " Well, there 's your chance, whether or no ; and I 'm sure 
 he wears a beautiful diamond ring." 
 
 '"Yes," said little Abraham brightly, from the window- 
 bench; " and I seed it ! And it did twinkle when he put his 
 hand up to his mistarshers. Mother, why did our noble relation 
 keep on putting his hand up to his mistarshers ? " ' 
 
 And so on, in the same vile and detestable fashion. 
 
 But his dramatic aberrations lead him into blunders 
 more serious still. To say nothing of the impro- 
 bability of four milkmaids, all sleeping in one room, 
 and all hopelessly in love with one blameless prig of 
 an amateur gentleman farmer, what a shocking want
 
 160 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 of the sense of both humour and variety does he 
 show in creating such a situation ! It is scarcely 
 to be wondered at that these imaginary dairymaids 
 soon begin to talk as never dairymaids talked on 
 earth. One of them has caught another kissing the 
 shade of the prig's mouth against the wall, and as 
 the three are standing that night ' in a group, in their 
 night-gowns, bare-footed at the window,' amorously 
 regarding the beloved one below, Miss Retty Priddle 
 candidly states the fact. 
 
 ' A rosy spot came into the middle of Izz Huett's cheek. 
 
 4 "Well, there "s no harm in it," she declared, with attempted 
 coolness. "And if I be in love with him, so is Retty too ; 
 and so be you, Marian, come to that." 
 
 ' Marian's full face could not blush past its chronic pinkness. 
 
 '"I?" she said; "what a tale! Ah, there he is again! 
 Dear eyes dear face dear Mr. Clare !" 
 
 ' " There you 've owned it ! " 
 
 '"So have you so have we all," said Marian. ... "I 
 would just marry him to-morrow." 
 
 ' "So would I and more," murmured Izz Huett. 
 
 ' "And I too," whispered the more timid Retty.' 
 
 'At this,' observes Mr. Hardy ingenuously, 'the 
 listener [Miss Tess Durbeyfield] grew warm ' ; and 
 although she is also in her night-gown, though not at 
 the window, it is no wonder. 
 
 ' "We can't all marry him," said Izz. 
 
 ' " We shan't, either of us ; which is worse still," said the 
 eldest. " There he is again ! " 
 
 ' And all three blew him a silent kiss.'
 
 SOME RECENT NOVELS 161 
 
 Nothing more fatuous than this has been done by 
 any writer of anything approaching ability in our 
 time, and it is as false in characterisation as it is 
 absurd in conception. Even Mr. Hall Caine rarely 
 sinks lower. The same weakness drives Mr. Hardy 
 to mar the evanescent reality of Tess herself. He 
 will make her talk sometimes as the author of Far 
 from the Madding Crowd or The Woodlanders is 
 often wont to write. Her lover presses upon her a 
 course of study in history ; but she refuses. 
 
 ' Because what 's the use of learning that I am one of a long 
 row only finding out that there is set down in some old book 
 somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her 
 part ? making me sad, that 's all. The best is not to remember 
 that your nature and your past doings have been just like 
 thousands and thousands, and that your coming life and 
 doings '11 be like thousands and thousands. ... I shouldn't 
 mind learning why the sun shines on the just and the unjust 
 alike, but that is what books will not tell me.' 
 
 Tess, it is true, as Mr. Hardy continually remarks, 
 had passed her sixth standard ; but even agricultural 
 girls of the sixth standard are scarcely yet credible 
 with a ' criticism of life ' of this calibre. It is terrible 
 to see a story-teller so unaware of what constitutes 
 the one possible charm of his chief figure. Imagine 
 Goethe making Marguerite talk like that ! And it is 
 not that Mr. Hardy is not at times able to render 
 character. D'Urberville, for instance, in the first 
 L
 
 162 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 two parts is recognisably drawn from the life; but 
 that does not prevent a shadowy masquerade of this 
 vicious brute appearing for a short period later on 
 as a ranting preacher. It is not that vicious brutes 
 may not become ranting preachers they may, and 
 do; but that this particular vicious brute of Mr. 
 Hardy's, thanks to the want of energy in his realisa- 
 tion, does nothing of the kind. 
 
 One artistic gift Mr. Hardy has which rarely 
 seems to desert him, and that is what Henri Beyle 
 calls so aptly foriginalit'e de lieu. His people are at 
 one with his places, a single harmonious growth of 
 spiritual and natural circumstance; and this, the 
 true artistic 'charity,' covers, or helps to cover, a 
 multitude of sins. Here it is permitted us to praise 
 him fully and almost unreservedly. The best ex- 
 amples of his landscape reach high indeed, as high 
 as anything of the kind now done among us. Let 
 us even go further, and say that no one has rendered 
 certain aspects of English scenery with such soft, 
 clear perfection of touch as he has that no one has 
 produced anything approaching it for years. What 
 else but this extraordinary gift renders credible and 
 even poignantly real the final wanderings of the two 
 lovers world-weary and doomed ? (The murder, of 
 course, like most of his would-be dramatic work, is 
 absurd.) The love-nest in the empty, furnished
 
 SOME RECENT NOVELS 163 
 
 home of strangers, an incident superficially so im- 
 probable, is made only less actual than the weird 
 journey to Stonehenge, and Tess's sacrificial sleep 
 on the altar-stone. After all, the book has in it the 
 sob of the earth's suffering, ' the sense of tears in 
 mortal things,' the vain struggle of the human heart 
 against unjust fatality ; and of how many books, not 
 to say of how many novels, that appear in this 
 England in a generation can one say so much ? in 
 this England where the novel has become the 
 helpless prey of the Philistine and the Philistiness 
 where the only variation possible on the banalities of 
 an ignorant and abject conventionality seems to be 
 fantastic revels in the English tongue, and the literary 
 woe and abomination alluded to by more than one 
 of the prophets. 
 
 Yet one cannot for a moment hesitate in one's 
 recognition of the fact that Mr. Hardy's novel is not 
 a success is a failure. It is too faulty to pass. 
 The gaps that represent bad work are too large and 
 too frequent. One has no desire to come back to 
 it. A second reading leaves a lower estimate of it 
 than the first, and a third is not possible. There is 
 the immense pity of it ! The artistic blemishes 
 which were in Mr. Hardy's early books might, and 
 in all probability would, have been eradicated if from 
 the beginning he had had to face anything like
 
 i6 4 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 genuine criticism, anything like a genuinely critical 
 public. But, as it was, he was praised for his bad 
 work and blamed for his good,, until the faculty of 
 distinction in him became hopelessly blurred and 
 bewildered. The grotesque worthlessness of the 
 criticism which he, like all the rest of us, received 
 and receives in the ravenous and whirling columns 
 of the Press, he must soon have learned to rate at its 
 true value for a serious writer. But the critical effort 
 (and that comes to mean the effort in what may be 
 called comparative culture) which still alone can 
 prove the salvation of such an one among ourselves, 
 this, alas, he has not made. The result is that his 
 most ambitious work work which should have 
 proved a masterpiece and which contains the ele- 
 ments of a masterpiece has absolutely missed its 
 aim and falls away. ' This sort cometh not out 
 save by prayer and fasting.' 
 
 Yes, truly there are moments in which one does 
 not realise how supremely rare anything really 
 admirable is. At such moments one is prone to 
 regret that the man who had painted a pig perfectly 
 had not expended his energy on the painting of a 
 man, as if perfectly painted pigs were so common ! 
 Why, it is just the reverse, and the producer of such 
 is not to be worried by our bootless desires that he 
 should be something else than what he is. Many
 
 SOME RECENT NOVELS 165 
 
 are called, few are chosen, and, like Peter, we must 
 not dub common or unclean any really fine sample 
 of anything that lives. Art also is justified of all her 
 children, and if only one can produce something 
 which proves one's parentage, there is no more to 
 say. For the masterpieces, of each and every size 
 and description, alone of human things baffle for 
 any space the vain shadow in which we walk and 
 disquiet ourselves in vain, seeing that they confer 
 something which is a permanent pleasure and en- 
 richment of our lives.
 
 SHELLEY
 
 SHELLEY 
 
 IT says something for, at least, the vitality of Shelley 
 that he is the only personage of his time over whom 
 intelligent and candid men still see fit to lose their 
 tempers. He was born a hundred years ago this 4th 
 of August 1892, and he has been dead just seventy 
 years this 8th of July, and Shelleyans and Anti- 
 Shelleyans are standing at this hour with hostile 
 faces over against one another, both prepared to 
 talk vehement nonsense on the slightest provocation. 
 No such phenomenon is to be seen with regard to 
 his contemporaries to Wordsworth or Coleridge, 
 to Keats or even Byron. They are accepted now 
 or denied, intelligently or stupidly; but the denial 
 and the acceptance are both more or less moderate : 
 they arouse no passions. In the case of Shelley, 
 it is true, the claims advanced are irreconcilable 
 with the accusations levelled. The one asks all ; the 
 others not only will give nothing, but even go so 
 far as to allege an aching minus quantity. Shelley 
 is a great man; Shelley is an inspired imbecile. 
 Shelley is a modern Christ ; Shelley is a wretch. 
 
 169
 
 170 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 And lastly, there is the amiably silly effort after 
 reconciliation which takes the shape of 'poor dear 
 Shelley.' 
 
 All this is very strange to the new generation. 
 Why this disquietude about Shelley? He is no 
 more to us than any one else. We want to get out 
 of him just what there is to be got ; nothing more, 
 nothing less. We have no interest in making him 
 seem other than he is. We do not want to assault 
 him ; he does not block the way. We do not want 
 to worship him ; he does not appeal to us sufficiently. 
 Why, then, should we v take sides over his love affairs 
 with Harriet Westbrook and Mary Godwin ? Both 
 the girls were quite uninteresting and unimportant 
 in themselves. All they showed was Shelley's capa- 
 city for making a fool of himself over women. But 
 nobody now comes to blows over Byron's separation 
 from his wife, because everybody sees that it was 
 the very best thing that could have happened to 
 him. We take the affair merely as a factor in the 
 formation of his life and character. Why cannot 
 we do the same with Shelley ? 
 
 This necessity for swallowing or rejecting people 
 in the bulk is a survival of a period totally uncritical, 
 and we should protest against it. The greatest men 
 have the most grave limitations. They have the 
 limitations of their time, the limitations of their
 
 SHELLEY 171 
 
 temperaments. How can it be otherwise? There 
 is room for plenty of destructive criticism on them 
 all, before we have passed through the empty thunder 
 and spectacular lightning, and can hear 'the still 
 small voice' that is the clear and eternal note of 
 the Godhead. Since we speak of Shelley, let us 
 speak of him with absolute simplicity and candour. 
 He can afford to be spoken of in that way ; indeed, 
 no other way is worth the attempting, and surely, 
 if he were alive and one of us, he himself would be 
 the first to agree to this. 
 
 It is absurd to claim for him any great practical 
 abilities. His ignorance of life and living was ex- 
 treme. His personal relations make up one long 
 list of grotesque misconceptions. He was, in the 
 obvious sense of the word, a visionary, and his 
 violent antagonisms were far more caused by his 
 disgust with the contact of reality than by any 
 genuine appreciation of the relative values of good 
 and evil. He made no sane and conscious effort 
 to understand things. He did not know how to 
 strike injustice in its weakest part, or how best to 
 help on the downtrodden. He wasted three-fourths 
 of his energy on side-issues. He was always taking 
 seriously the wrong people and the wrong ideas. 
 He held Harriet Westbrook for a victim of social 
 oppression, whereas she was merely the average
 
 172 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 pretty girl in search of ' bread-and-cheese and kisses.' 
 He accepted Mary Godwin as a sort of female seraph, 
 and this essentially vulgar - souled, small-minded, 
 sentimental poseuse exploited him fifty times more 
 ruthlessly than the poor little Methodist. This did 
 not in the least prevent him from a still wilder, if 
 only momentary, aberration over the lovely nullity 
 of Emilia Viviani, the attitudinising Italian girl from 
 whom he was inveigled by the envious Mary, reso- 
 lute to retain the monopoly of exploitation which 
 she had won by the ruin of a better woman than 
 herself. Intellectually or sexually it makes little 
 difference which Shelley was the born child of 
 illusion. To the very last he looked upon Godwin 
 Godwin, the most sordid of mediocrities as a 
 great thinker, and his conception of Byron as a 
 supreme artist is one of the gems of criticism. 
 Shelley's true brother is Blake, the inspired Cockney. 
 For both were visionaries and little else. Blake 
 remained one to the close of a long career. Shelley 
 died at thirty, having just discovered in Jane Wil- 
 liams, the wife of a friend of his and another ordinary 
 good-looking Englishwoman (with a baby), a final 
 incarnation of ' the woman's soul,' which (teste Goethe, 
 of all men in the world) 'draws us upwards.' 
 
 It is when one comes to compare the visionary 
 of this limited calibre with the visionary on the
 
 SHELLEY 173 
 
 higher plane that one realises how, and why, the 
 claims made in behalf of the personal greatness of 
 the Shelleys or the Blakes are so untenable. Jeanne 
 d'Arc was a visionary, but that did not in the 
 least prevent her from being a shrewd and sensible 
 young woman, wonderfully in touch with the actu- 
 alities of things. She knew what life and living 
 meant, which is to say that she knew what men and 
 women were like, and this was why she was able 
 not only to achieve so much herself, but also to 
 remain one of the perpetually inspiring figures of 
 history. Shelley achieved little or nothing, even in 
 his own small circle, and his personal blunders were 
 the cause of catastrophe after catastrophe. Once 
 and once only do we see him at his truest, at his 
 best, and that is in the charming pages of Tre- 
 lawny's Records^ where we have him alone. Left to 
 himself, or to the society of the one or two who 
 understood him, he lived the free life of the happy, 
 melodious, childlike dreamer who is master of his 
 dreams. The moment he came into contact with 
 the more or less everyday man or woman, the trouble 
 began. He had a most liberal supply of good 
 intentions, of course. As Keats sardonically observed 
 of him, he had 'his quota of good qualities.' But 
 he never saw any one or any thing as they really were, 
 and all the while he piqued himself on a deeper and
 
 174 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 intenser comprehension of them, shoving them on 
 to the rack of his imaginary conceptions, and vehe- 
 mently essaying to stretch them out to ideal propor- 
 tions. When they shouted and struggled, he was 
 indignant, or, in the hour of subsequent dejection, 
 confessed with a sorrowful ingenuousness that his 
 ' passion for reforming the world ' did not somehow 
 seem to work well. In darker hours still he craved 
 for the final peace of extinction. Wilder ' passions 
 for reforming the world ' than ever Shelley had have 
 reformed the world more than once, but they have 
 done so because they were allied to a profound sense 
 of the nature of men and women, of the meaning 
 of life and living. Zoroaster, Gautama, Jesus, Mo- 
 hammed the list can be enlarged at will. 
 
 Shelley died, we have noted, only seventy years 
 ago, and already the symbolism which he used in 
 his attempted ' criticism of life ' is effete. It was, as 
 it were, so largely journalism, so little literature ; so 
 largely mistaken and superficial subjects, so little a 
 powerful utilisation of the permanent materials of 
 life. To put it shortly, he was passably wanting in 
 brains, and he did not make up for it by any great 
 force of intuition. And then he did not in his heart 
 really care much about what are optimistically termed 
 his ' ideas.' His revolutionary enthusiasm never went 
 very deep. Of course he thought it did. For his
 
 SHELLEY 175 
 
 sensitiveness was acute, and whatever breeze blew 
 on the wires produced music. If these ideas had 
 been a dominant passion in him, he would have 
 found the patience and strength requisite for some- 
 thing like a real apprehension of the social problem. 
 He would have illuminated it at least partially, and 
 he has illuminated it in no wise. Nothing he said of 
 it is of any importance ; little of any interest. His 
 sole contribution here is his complete fearlessness, 
 the fearlessness of the dream-drugged fanatic who 
 believes he cannot be killed by infidel bullets. ' Give 
 us the truth, whatever it is,' he exclaims once, and 
 it is usual to call this sort of thing the passion for 
 truth. But it is not : it is the passion of the intoxi- 
 cation of courage. No one can deny Shelley courage. 
 He would go anywhere, and face anything. You had 
 only to persuade him that some of those horrid 
 people who defiled and destroyed his dreams were 
 in front of him, and he was ready to risk his life in 
 trying to get at them ; and nothing was easier than 
 to persuade him. A little laudanum would do it ; 
 a little spiteful talk would do it. He was at the 
 mercy of every fool or knave, male or female and 
 especially female. There was no calculating on him, 
 and the worst feature of all in him was that he was 
 always sincere, always in earnest. Some such char- 
 acter, perchance, was John, the beloved disciple,
 
 176 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 also called Boanerges ; and in the hands of a Master 
 whose wisdom and tact were consummate, John 
 doubtless did peerless service. Shelley was unlucky 
 enough never to meet a master. Those he took for 
 such were men like Godwin, and, in a measure, Byron 
 the one a vagabond charlatan, the other a mere 
 superb ffau-Degen, as the Germans say, a glorified 
 swashbuckler on the right side. Shelley was forced 
 to stand by himself, forced to attempt all alone the 
 feat of ' scaling the Alps,' in the picturesque phrase 
 of Carlyle, who opined that the would-be climber's 
 general existence must have been 'haggard.' Car- 
 lyle was mistaken. Sometimes it was, but often it 
 was not, and sometimes it was happy beyond words. 
 Shelley, in his Italian woods, on his Italian rivers 
 and shores, is the one revelation of pure, uncon- 
 scious, lyric happiness granted us from the life of 
 his contemporaries. 
 
 As in every case, his strength and his weakness 
 went hand in hand. That acute sensitiveness of 
 his made him susceptible to the whisper of ' the 
 prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things 
 to come ' to an extent that was remarkable for its 
 discoveries and its errors. Wordsworth, in his heavy 
 way, Coleridge, in his effusive way, had been excited 
 in their youth by the 'bliss' of the revolutionary 
 dawn in France. Wordsworth was hopelessly doomed
 
 SHELLEY 177 
 
 to respectability from the start, and Coleridge was 
 too cowardly and faithless to accept deeds of blood. 
 Besides, their real cares lay elsewhere Wordsworth 
 in his c pedlar poems ' and the appalling edifice of 
 his teleological orthodoxy ; Coleridge in his criticism, 
 in his golden lyrics, in the philosophic balloons, the 
 sending off of which diverted his last years of collapse. 
 Keats, like Gallio, cared for none of these things. 
 Byron, on the other hand, knew thoroughly well 
 how badly beaten was the cause of liberty and pro- 
 gress. He knew what the Tory Government of 
 England meant ; what the Holy Alliance Govern- 
 ment of Europe meant. Circumstances drove him 
 into the opposition, and the old berserker fury came 
 upon him. He fought for the sake of fighting, to 
 ease his heart and mind, and he felt vaguely that in 
 the long-run the stupid and corrupt conquerors must 
 be beaten ; but that was all. It would never be in 
 his time. Waterloo had settled all that. Shelley, 
 in his complete ignorance of the conditions of the 
 struggle, thought that things might recommence at 
 any moment. Therefore he sang with a divine 
 optimism of revolts in the clouds, utterly undisturbed 
 in his conviction of the approaching triumph of the 
 ideas which he found interesting and animating. 
 1 The necessity of Atheism ' the necessity of incest 
 the necessity of a vegetable diet, everything was a
 
 178 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 ' necessity ' which happened at the moment to have 
 hold of him. Then, when things did not commence 
 nor show the slightest sign of commencing, he fell 
 into the blackest pessimism, and only roused himself 
 from it to indulge in versified fairy-tales, where he 
 could manipulate everything according to his fantasy. 
 He was right and he was wrong, therefore : nearer the 
 truth than Wordsworth and Coleridge, further away 
 than Byron and (on his own special side) than Keats. 
 It was the same with his efforts after a social circle. 
 Matthew Arnold has drawn a justly derisive picture of 
 Shelley's associates (' What a set ! what a life ! ' and 
 so on), but concludes with making one of his unctuous 
 personal appeals to Cardinal Newman as a witness 
 in favour of better things elsewhere. This is that 
 Cardinal Newman of whom Carlyle remarked that he 
 had ' no more brains than a rabbit ' ; and it is unlikely 
 that Carlyle would have contented himself with even 
 such criticism of the members of Newman's 'set.' 
 Shelley's ' set ' may have been this or that, and his 
 'life' may have been that or this, but at least he 
 continually sought for a society that had in it a 
 stream of ideas, that had an outlook on to the future, 
 that could animate and sustain his creative and 
 critical faculties ; and he would have found nothing 
 of the sort with the Wordsworths or the Southeys 
 or the Coleridges, any more than years later with
 
 SHELLEY 179 
 
 the pitiful company of the Puseys and Newmans and 
 Kebles. He found Byron, however, who, with all 
 his dreadful limitations, was the one great man then 
 alive in England ; and he appreciated all that was 
 best, not only in Wordsworth and Coleridge, but 
 also in Keats. No other man of his time had a 
 taste so catholic. He could not help feeling what- 
 ever was new and true. None of the others, except 
 Keats, had a tithe of his receptivity, a tithe of his 
 sincerity. Keats advised him to ' curb his magnani- 
 mity and become more of an artist,' and the advice 
 was the best he could have had. Goethe could not 
 have diagnosed his case more infallibly, or have 
 prescribed a more certain cure for his disease. But 
 Shelley, like the rest of us, could only be what he 
 was, the circumstances being unhappy. What he 
 might have become it is impossible to say and idle 
 to speculate. Our sole concern is with what he was. 
 Towards the close he showed signs of a sounder 
 power of estimation ; but what did it amount to ? 
 He was going off on the tack of the scholarly recluse, 
 complicated by the old wild outbursts, and who is more 
 ignorant of life than the scholar, and especially the 
 sensitive scholar? He was so easily drawn into 
 adventures of a sort that was fatal to him. The 
 Gambas and Emilia Viviani Williams and Mrs. 
 Williams revolutionary skirmishes and rapt Platonics
 
 i8o ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 Mediterranean yachting and his neighbour's wife ; 
 it was all of a piece. He knew no more about 
 managing a boat than he did about managing him- 
 self or other people, and the last of his catastrophes 
 settled the business for ever. And yet he had a dis- 
 tinct faculty for coming back on himself, and, though 
 his turning his experiences of all sorts to artistic use 
 was only an unconscious instinct, still the instinct 
 certainly existed. But he could not curb his mag- 
 nanimity; he could not become more of an artist. 
 When he had exploited his emotions it was always to 
 find that they had also exploited him, and he turned 
 away at once with a shudder from his expression of 
 them as from ' a part of him already dead.' There 
 lies the essential insincerity of his sincerity. Only 
 an inspired amateur could have fooled himself every 
 time in the way Shelley did, and found nothing but 
 an empty husk for after-use. 
 
 Byron's glory is this : that at the darkest hour 
 which the cause of liberty and progress has known 
 in the century, when the furtherance of that cause 
 was utterly hopeless in the domain of action, he 
 asserted it with irresistible power in the domain of 
 literature. The sword was shattered : Byron seized 
 the pen. Defeat and disaster were everywhere : he 
 rallied the scattered ranks, and, in a mad assault on 
 the conquerors, checked their ruthless pursuit and
 
 SHELLEY 181 
 
 saved the future. And he did this not for one 
 country or another, but for all Europe. What France 
 owed and owes him she can never repay. He lifted 
 her from the dust. Italy's debt to him is, if possible, 
 a greater one. But why should one specialise? 
 Civilisation must refuse to forget the honour due to 
 the man who, at the crisis of life and c death, im- 
 periously declared for life, and struggle, and the 
 claim of victory. Shelley at this crisis did nothing 
 could do nothing. He had no readers, no public. 
 Byron was an English lord, an English aristocrat, 
 and the start this gave him in the race was then 
 enormous. Europe, lying under the feet of English 
 Toryism and the Holy Alliance, suddenly saw an 
 English noble strike blow after blow at its oppressors. 
 Even Wellington, the sacred peace-monger of the 
 world, was not safe. Byron bemocked his nose ! 
 The death of an English king was celebrated by an 
 English Laureate in incredibly fulsome style, and no 
 one dared open lips to ridicule or reject. History 
 will yet have to tell us what it meant at such a 
 moment as this to see that Laureate swept away 
 in a fiery torrent of wit and mockery and scorn. 
 Nothing can get over the fact that Byron, at the 
 direst time of need, did the actual work and a 
 tremendous piece of work it was which threw back 
 the advancing tide of tyranny and kept our hope
 
 i8 2 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 alive. Shelley's influence did not at that time count 
 at all. He could not have lifted a straw off the ground. 
 Later on, when the panic was over when the process 
 of reorganisation was begun his purer personality 
 began to act. But it is not as a pioneer of the Cause, 
 as a protagonist of liberty and progress, that he can 
 be put beside Byron, not to say in front of him. 
 
 What final claim, then, can we make for Shelley ? 
 What shall we give as the lasting result of his life 
 and labours ? Firstly and chiefly the purity of his 
 personality. No other man of his time was so 
 disinterested, none other so ingenuous. He loved 
 the light and continually sought for it, fearing 
 nothing, with one heart and with one face for all. 
 His courage was peerless. His curiosity was un- 
 bounded. He had no respect for anything or for 
 any one except such as he conceived they were able 
 to justify. Superstition had no place in him. 
 Selfishness, meanness, ignobility were unknown to 
 him. His generosity was of the sort which instan- 
 taneously forgives everything to the vanquished. 
 The woe he would have dealt out was for the 
 conquerors alone. Finally, his capacity for happiness, 
 for childlike trustfulness and love, was immense. 
 Left to himself, he was as one of the kingdom of 
 heaven. Ah, truly we do well to blame him for his 
 faults, excellently well, we commonplace people of
 
 SHELLEY 183 
 
 the hour, we children of this world, wiser in our day 
 and generation, seeing that the shapes of folly or 
 sin which these faults took upon themselves were 
 due to none but us. Child that he was, and child 
 of light, we wrinkled denizens of the darkness vexed 
 and tortured him with our unendurable egotisms, 
 our hateful exigencies. But now we know him better. 
 Life is life, and, in the terrible struggle of our kind, 
 benefactors and malefactors must be judged can 
 alone be judged by the strict rules of the game. 
 We cannot call him great ; but is it nothing to say 
 of his spirit that it was lovely ? We cannot take his 
 larger labours seriously : they are not lasting con- 
 tributions to our exiguous store of deathless achieve- 
 ment; but is it nothing to say that the vision of 
 this radiant and lovely soul in its halcyon hours has 
 filled us again and again with a new sense of the 
 beauty and value of life ? Is it nothing to say that 
 a handful of his lyrics gives us a delicate music, a 
 subtle perfume, that are too rare and too exquisite for 
 either us or those who come after us ever to forget ? 
 
 Music, -when soft -voices die, 
 
 Vibrates in the memory ; 
 
 Odours, when sweet violets sicken, 
 
 Live within the sense they quicken ; 
 
 Rose-leaves, when the rose is dead, 
 
 Are heaped for the beloved's bed: 
 
 And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, 
 
 Love itself shall slumber on.
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 
 
 THE actual work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling as a writer 
 of verse divides itself in the most obvious way into 
 two parts his first book of verse and his second 
 book of verse, Departmental Ditties and Barrack- 
 Room Ballads. Further developments in this work 
 are possible, and even probable, but at present it 
 surely suffices, for the inevitably partial purposes of 
 contemporary criticism, that these two books mark, 
 and mark clearly, twq distinct ages of effort and 
 achievement. 
 
 i 
 
 ' DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES AND OTHER VERSES ' 
 
 Mr. Kipling seems to have small belief in what the 
 old-fashioned authors used to call the intelligent 
 reader. At any rate, he would seem to consider that 
 either an explanatory 'prelude' or 'envoi,' or occasion- 
 ally both, are desirable adjuncts to every book. Some- 
 times his prelude will be an unmistakable finger-post, 
 inscribed legibly for the perusal of all. Then, if he 
 indulges in an envoi, we shall find him speaking 
 
 187
 
 i88 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 with intense and personal passion to the esoteric 
 alone, or else veiling himself even from them in a 
 vague mysteriousness of allusion. He is well within 
 his rights, of course, in all these things as well 
 within his rights as are his critics within theirs when 
 they frankly accept his revelations of his own indi- 
 vidual existence as an appreciable element in the 
 production of his work. 
 
 In the Departmental Ditties, his self-explanations 
 take the shape of a preliminary finger-post for public 
 inspection, and of a final communication, airily 
 inscribed, 'To whom it may concern,' but so dis- 
 creetly worded withal that it is fair to raise against it 
 the accusation of a somewhat unwarranted obscurity. 
 When he published his first short volume of stories, 
 Soldiers Three, he wrote for it an envoi that disclosed 
 unexpected depths of feeling. It was evident that he 
 took his work very seriously. He spoke of the 
 obscure agony of its production, there in the town 
 of his banishment 
 
 ' Where with the shifting dust I play, 
 And eat the bread of Discontent.' 
 
 He spoke of his sense of having achieved the power 
 of creation over his dramatis persona, these 'rude 
 figures of a rough-hewn race.' He spoke of his 
 certainty of the praise of ' the long bazar,' and lastly
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 189 
 
 he spoke of his final doubt of having in reality ' done 
 well.' This temper is admirable, but it is not always 
 that one can indulge in it. As an introduction to 
 these ' ditties,' wherein at least he still faces the foot- 
 lights of his well-beloved Anglo-India, he declares : 
 
 ' I have written the tale of our life 
 For a sheltered people's mirth, 
 In jesting guise but ye are wise, 
 And ye know what the jest is worth. ' 
 
 It is a feast of patter-songs, dispensed to the twang 
 of the banjo in the bibulous atmosphere of the post- 
 prandial smoke-concert, that he presents to us here. 
 Rarely shall we listen to chords struck in the minor 
 key. More rarely still to the stirring vibrations of 
 the march movement. Yet he cannot rise from his 
 chair and retire without telling us as it were, casually, 
 quietly, and with shy, downward glances that there 
 are other instruments of the Muses besides the banjo 
 on which he can, and will, he trusts, yet perform for 
 us. Therefore (though not for the world would he 
 have us derange our ease), ' to whom it may concern ' 
 be it known that he is well aware that the smoke is 
 dying upon the altar, that the flowers are decaying, 
 and that the goddess has flown away. None the less, 
 here, in this his town of banishment, where the 
 amusement is rather too suggestive of man's latter 
 end, and the diet is strictly limited, we still continue
 
 190 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 to pile up the sacrifice on the stone, whereon fresh 
 wreaths are laid. 
 
 1 For, it may be, if still we sing, 
 
 And tend the Shrine, 
 Some Deity on wandering wing 
 
 May there incline ; 
 And, finding all in order meet, 
 Stay while we worship at her feet.' 
 
 The temper, then, in which we are called to view 
 the Departmental Ditties is made quite clear by their 
 author. But he goes even further, and, in a ' general 
 summary,' gives us the very text of his jesting dis- 
 courses. ' The artless songs I sing,' he remarks, 
 
 ' Do not deal with anything 
 
 New or never said before. 
 As it was in the beginning, 
 Is to-day official sinning, 
 And shall be for evermore. ' 
 
 And vers de societe on Anglo-Indian ' official sin- 
 ning,' in the hands of Mr. Kipling, mean for the most 
 part, as was to be expected, more or less discreet 
 variations on the ever-fertile subject of adultery. At 
 the same time, in the forty-nine poems which make 
 up the book, it is gratifying to note that this subject 
 does not hold quite the same proportion that it did 
 in the volume of tales wherein he 'illustrated' the 
 ' social feature,' and gave five ' illustrations ' (it may
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 191 
 
 be remembered) out of six to the professional im- 
 pugners of the Seventh Commandment. 
 
 Over a third of these poems are good of their kind, 
 light, bright, and readable, but there are only too 
 many which fall to the lugubrious level of the popular 
 ' funny ' verse of the hour stuff like nine out of ten 
 of the Bab Ballads and ' comic annuals,' the source, 
 doubtless, of much innocent pleasure to the domesti- 
 cated commercial clerk, and the suburban young 
 ladies who have lived and loved ; but not alarmingly 
 interesting to any one else. No original note is struck. 
 Indeed, it would be a marvel if there were as great 
 a marvel as if a new form of barrel-organ suddenly 
 discoursed a new form of music to us in the jaded 
 fever of the London streets. No form of writing no, 
 not the Three-Volume Novel itself has been more 
 exploited than the Occasional Verse. It is hackneyed 
 beyond redemption. Not even continuous efforts 
 after local colour and the obstinate use of technical 
 terms can get Mr. Kipling out of the vicious circle. 
 A paraphrase of Poe ('The Raven' for choice) is 
 inevitable under such circumstances, and here we 
 have it at full length. So is a paraphrase of Brown- 
 ing's blank verse, when Mr. Kipling wants to try his 
 hand at what he takes to be poetical characterisation ; 
 and Tennyson, and models even more hapless, will 
 be requisitioned for efforts at the narrative idyllic.
 
 i 9 2 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 The obligations to Poe are not only obvious but 
 conscious, but there is no sign in the other cases of 
 anything more than the former quality. They seem 
 rather to be samples of that dreadful and slovenly 
 receptivity which is the curse of the clever journalist 
 in every department of his work. Thus does Lord 
 Dufferin address Lord Lansdowne : 
 
 ' So here 's your Empire. No more mine then ? Good. 
 We '11 clear the Aides and khitmatgars away. 
 (You '11 know that fat old fellow with the knife 
 He keeps the Name Book, talks in English, too, 
 And almost thinks himself the Government. ) 
 O Truth, Truth, Truth ! Forgive me, you 're so young.' 
 
 And so on. Then a turn of Tennyson : 
 
 4 Imprimis he was " broke." Thereafter left 
 His reg-i-ment and, later, took to drink ; 
 Then, having lost the bal-ance of his friends, 
 "Went Fantee" joined the people*?/" the land, 
 Turned three parts Mus-salman and one Hindu, 
 And lived among the Gauri vill-a-gers. ' 
 
 And so on again. Trying, however, as is a second- 
 rate literary mannerism at second-hand, done in one's 
 salad days, it is as nothing compared to the solemn 
 repetition of the same offence in a worse form in the 
 hour of one's golden prime. There may be nothing 
 more tiresome in any of Browning's galvanised 
 monologues, and nothing more vapid in any of Lord 
 Tennyson's pseudo-idyls, than these two detestable
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 193 
 
 paraphrases ; but then Departmental Ditties is a small 
 matter even to their author, and it would indeed be a 
 waste of shot to demolish them in detail even to this 
 extent. But the remarkable thing is that in the 
 Barrack-Room Ballads we shall meet paraphrases, 
 if possible, even more detestable still. There Mr. 
 Kipling actually goes back on himself to produce 
 verse of this sort in a piece called ' Evarra and his 
 Gods': 
 
 ' Because the city gave him 0/"her gold, 
 Because the caravans brought turquoises, 
 Because his life was sheltered by the King, 
 So that no man should maim him, none should steal, 
 Or break his rest with babble in the streets 
 When he was weary after toil, he made 
 An image 0/"his God in gold and pearl,' 
 
 and so on. It is, I know, a harsh and severe thing 
 to say, but none the less it is certainly true that not 
 even Sir Edwin Arnold ever wrote viler blank verse 
 than that. Nor does this singular example of critical 
 incapacity on the part of our balladist stand alone. 
 Here is the opening of another piece, ' The Sacrifice 
 of Er-Heb,' also one of Mr. Kipling's latest efforts : 
 
 'Er-Heb beyond the Hills of Ao-Safai 
 Bears witness to the truth, and Ao-Safai 
 Hath told the men of Gorukh. Thence the tale 
 Comes westward o'er the peaks of In-di-a.' 
 
 We shall find no conscious and critical development 
 
 N
 
 i 9 4 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 in this man. He begins as a journalist of genius, and 
 as a journalist of genius he seems fated to end. 
 ' Culture ' stands to the author of Life's Handicap as 
 it did to the author of Soldiers Three, merely as 'cul- 
 chaw.' In Barrack-Room Ballads we shall learn 
 that 'art' is a mere barren device of the sardonic 
 Satan, which is, at any rate, some change on Depart- 
 mental Ditties, where we shall not find it at all. And 
 as a practical comment on this, we have a regular 
 tiara of gems like 
 
 ' Thence the tale 
 Comes westward o'er the peaks of In-di-a ' ! 
 
 It was the same with his fiction. 'Krishna Mulvaney' 
 heads the list of his last volume, and the ' Lang Men 
 o' Larut ' turns up naked and unashamed among its 
 wedding guests. On this occasion the matter is one 
 chiefly of technique. But technique, we know, is 
 something more, far more, than a trick of hand, and 
 in other cases we can be sure that we shall find the 
 crying want of it manifesting itself in a writer's 
 essential qualities of spirit and intellect. 
 
 Over a third of these ditties are good of their kind, 
 light, bright, and readable, the verse which in the 
 hours of our teased weariness of work it is pleasant 
 and sometimes not altogether unprofitable to have 
 at hand. One sample will suffice a sample of the
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 195 
 
 better sort the 'Legend of the Foreign Office,' 
 which explains why Rustum Beg, the Rajah of 
 Kolazai, loves ' simpkin ' (Anglice, champagne) and 
 brandy, squanders his revenues, and vexes a Govern- 
 ment which is tender and kind, and ' also but this 
 is a detail blind.' 
 
 ' Rustum Beg of Kolazai slightly backward native state 
 Lusted for a C.S.I. so began to sanitate. 
 Built a Gaol and Hospital nearly built a city drain 
 Till his faithful subjects all thought their ruler was insane. 
 
 ' Strange departures made he then yea, Departments stranger 
 
 still, 
 
 Half a dozen Englishmen helped the Rajah with a will, 
 Talked of noble aims and high, hinted of a future fine 
 For the State of Kolazai, on a strictly Western line. 
 
 ' Rajah Rustum held his peace ; lowered octroi dues a half; 
 Organised a State Police ; purified the Civil Staff : 
 Settled cess and tax afresh in a very liberal way ; 
 Cut temptations of the flesh also cut the Bukhshi's pay ; 
 
 ' Roused his Secretariat to a fine Mahratta fury, 
 By a Hookum hinting at supervision of dasturi 
 Turned the State of Kolazai very nearly upside down ; 
 When the end of May was nigh waited his achievements' 
 crown. 
 
 ' Then the Birthday Honours came. Sad to state and sad to 
 
 see, 
 Stood against the Rajah's name nothing more than C.I.E. ! 
 
 Things were lively for a week in the State of Kolazai. 
 Even now the people speak of that time regretfully.
 
 196 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 c How he disendowed the Gaol stopped at once the city 
 
 drain ; 
 
 Turned to beauty fair and frail got his senses back again ; 
 Doubled taxes, cesses, all ; cleared away each new-built 
 
 thana\ 
 Turned the two-lakh Hospital into a superb zenana ; 
 
 ' Heaped upon the Bukhshi Sahib wealth and honours mani- 
 fold ; 
 
 Clad himself in Eastern garb squeezed his people as of old : 
 Happy, happy Kolazai ! never more will Rustum Beg 
 Play to catch the Viceroy's eye. He prefers the " simpkin " 
 Peg-' 
 
 A few samples of the wisdom, which either is or 
 is not the product of more or less extensive ex- 
 perience of Anglo-India, may be given as completing 
 the picture. They come to us under the guise of 
 ' certain maxims of Hafiz.' 
 
 Thus does the Mohammedan poet and sage re- 
 mark with a kindly charity on the ways of infidel 
 officials, civil or military : 
 
 ' Yea, though a Kafir die, to him is remitted Jehannum 
 If he borrowed in life from a native at sixty per cent, per 
 annum.' 
 
 Hafiz has his own opinions as to the true nature 
 of the foreign raj : 
 
 ' Who are the rulers of Ind to whom shall we bow the knee ? 
 Make your peace with the women, and men will make you 
 L.G.' 
 
 Yet let us beware of one of the methods in vogue 
 for achieving this purpose :
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 197 
 
 ' As the thriftless gold of the babul, 1 so is the gold that we 
 
 spend 
 
 On a Derby sweep, or our neighbour's wife, or the horse we 
 buy from a friend.' 
 
 The equine business on the banks of the Indus 
 and the Ganges is even worse, it would appear, than 
 that which concerns the female of our species : 
 
 ' The ways of a man with a maid be strange, yet simple and 
 
 tame 
 
 To the ways of a man with a horse, when selling or racing 
 that same. ' 
 
 All of which tends to produce in us a certain large 
 and philosophic tolerance. Thus : 
 
 ' If he play, being young and unskilful, for shekels of silver 
 
 and gold, 
 
 Take his money, my son, praising Allah. The kid was 
 ordained to be sold.' 
 
 Yet the deeper note is not altogether absent 
 the deeper note which tells us of that India with 
 which Mr. Kipling has done more than any one else 
 to make us familiar : 
 
 ' Hard her service, poor her payment, 
 She in ancient tattered raiment 
 India, she the grim Stepmother of our kind.' 
 
 Indeed, it is with the one strong enunciation of this 
 
 1 The babul is the jungle mimosa, and has a bright yellow 
 blossom.
 
 198 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 note in the whole book that he sees fit to close. 
 'The Galley Slave,' the last of the ditties, comes 
 very near being a splendid poem. It has eight or 
 nine verses, which can be quoted as the most power- 
 ful expression of the heart and soul of the true Anglo- 
 India which has yet been sung or said for the in- 
 struction of ' a sheltered people.' 
 
 ' Oh, gallant was our galley, from her carven steering-wheel 
 To her figure-head of silver and her beak of hammered steel ; 
 The leg-bar chafed the ankle and we gasped for cooler air, 
 But no galley in the water with our galley could compare. 
 
 1 Our bulkheads bulged with cotton and our masts were 
 
 stepped in gold 
 
 We ran a mighty merchandise of niggers in the hold ; 
 The white foam spun behind us, and the black shark swam 
 
 below, 
 As we gripped the kicking sweep-head and we made that 
 
 galley go. 
 
 ' It was merry in the galley ; for we revelled now and then 
 If they wore us down like cattle, faith, we fought and loved 
 
 like men ! 
 As we snatched her thro' the water, so we snatched a minute's 
 
 bliss, 
 And the mutter of the dying never spoiled the lover's kiss. . . . 
 
 ' Bear witness, once my comrades, what a hard-bit gang were 
 
 we 
 
 The servants of the sweep-head, but the masters of the sea ! 
 By the hands that drove her forward as she plunged and 
 
 yawed and sheered, 
 Woman, man, or God, or devil, was there anything we 
 
 feared ?
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 199 
 
 'Was it storm? Our fathers faced it, and a wilder never 
 
 blew ; 
 Earth that waited for the wreckage watched the galley 
 
 struggle through. 
 Burning noon or choking midnight, sickness, sorrow, parting, 
 
 death ? 
 Nay, our very babes would mock you had they time for idle 
 
 breath. . . . 
 
 ' Yet they talk of times and seasons and of woe the years bring 
 
 forth, 
 Of our galley swamped and shattered in the rollers of the 
 
 North. 
 When the niggers break the hatches and the decks are gay 
 
 with gore, 
 And a craven-hearted pilot crams her crashing on the shore. 
 
 ' She will need no half-mast signal, minute-gun, or rocket- 
 flare ; 
 
 When the cry for help goes seaward, she will find her servants 
 there. 
 
 Battered chain-gangs of the orlop, grizzled drafts of years 
 gone by, 
 
 To the bench that broke their manhood they shall lash 
 themselves and die. 
 
 ' Hale and crippled, young and aged, paid, deserted, shipped 
 
 away 
 
 Palace, cot, and lazaretto shall make up the tale that day, 
 When the skies are black above them and the decks ablaze 
 
 beneath, 
 And the top-men clear the raffle with their clasp-knives in 
 
 their teeth.' 
 
 The two finest lines here, the first couplet of the 
 fifth verse, are followed by two that are feeble beyond 
 expression, and make one doubt of everything ; yet
 
 200 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 not unreasonably might a man who could write the 
 whole piece as it stands tell us that he felt he was 
 yet destined to perform on other instruments of the 
 Muses beside the banjo not unreasonably might 
 he still sing and tend the deserted Shrine, in the 
 hope that 
 
 ' Some deity on wandering wing 
 
 Might there incline, 
 And, finding all in order meet, 
 Stay while he worshipped at her feet. ' 
 
 II 
 c BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS AND OTHER VERSES ' 
 
 On the Departmental Ditties followed much in 
 the life of their author which counted for an ex- 
 traordinary stimulus and expansion, and which must 
 be taken into account in any estimate of his later 
 work. It is given to the experience of few writers 
 to awake and find themselves famous. Those who 
 achieve fame achieve it for the most part slowly 
 and with effort, and are too sick of the thing to care 
 much for it when they have got it. Mr. Kipling, 
 after the sojourn of a few years in his town of 
 banishment, was suddenly called upon to shake off 
 the shifting dust wherewith he played, and cast away 
 the bread of discontent wherewith he balked his 
 hunger, for a residence in metropolitan haunts of
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 201 
 
 ease, with all the fun of the fair and the fat morsels 
 thereof thrown in with liberal hand. His vogue was 
 the most universal one of our time. His popular 
 limitations were plentiful enough, his cheap effects 
 were glaring enough, to win him the applause of the 
 intellectual groundlings, the noisy, imperious 'pit' 
 of our contemporary theatre of art. Yet his achieve- 
 ment was so real and striking, his contribution to 
 literature was so undeniable, that no one possessed 
 of candour and intelligence could refuse to take him 
 seriously. He had revealed to us, if partially and 
 askew, still with singular power and vividness, what 
 Anglo-India meant what the life of the Anglo- 
 Indian civil servant and soldier meant ; and he had 
 lifted the short story, as an expression of thought 
 and emotion, a whole plane higher than he had 
 found it. In return for this, not only did he receive 
 the golden wages of an enthusiastic appreciation, but 
 the passionate and general instinct repaid his revela- 
 tion to us of broader and more animating horizons 
 by the revelation of himself to himself. The cry 
 was, ' Tell us of India tell us of our redcoats ! You 
 can will must ! ' A year ago, in reviewing his 
 tales, I was complaining of the injustice of the dedi- 
 cation of Soldiers Three to 'that very strong man, 
 T. Atkins,' whereas there was little or nothing of 
 T. Atkins in the book, but merely the old long-service
 
 202 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 man, concerning whom it is written : ' Ichabod, or, 
 the glory is departed.' And I pleaded for the 
 disappearance of Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, 
 the d'Artagnan, Aramis, and Porthos of a later day, 
 who had provided good sport for us all at times, 
 but were now visibly fallen into the sere and yellow 
 leaf. I cannot flatter myself that my humble protest 
 and plea could have any effect upon a self-sufficiency 
 so magnificent as that of Mr. Kipling, especially 
 in the face of the chorus of reckless and indis- 
 criminate praise lavished upon him all round ; but 
 there can happily be no mistake on this occasion as 
 to the justice of his second dedication to 'T. A.' 
 For the first time our ' sheltered people ' has heard 
 something approaching an adequate statement of the 
 point of view of the ' poor beggars in red ' who have 
 bought us ' half of creation with the sword and the 
 flame, and have salted it down with their bones.' 
 That is the significance of the Barrack-Room Ballads 
 as regards the general public. They are a statement 
 of Tommy's case as powerful and convincing as it is 
 passionate and sincere. This may not be the real 
 Tommy in his totality. Mr. Kipling, with com- 
 mendable modesty, leaves that to the decision of 
 Tommy himself, who alone can tell him if what he 
 has written is ' true.' But there can be no mistake 
 about the fact that this is at least the Wahrheit
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 203 
 
 und Dichtung the truth and the poetry of Tommy, 
 and to have added this to a like achievement con- 
 cerning Anglo-India, and a certain portion of India, 
 is a record of which any man under thirty might 
 well be proud. The Barrack-Room Ballads have 
 caught on, as the Americans say, even more de- 
 cisively than the Anglo-Indian stories, and they 
 have already had an ample, perhaps too ample a 
 measure of justice done to them. In one way 
 they are Mr. Kipling's most genuine personal ex- 
 pression. He threw away the scabbard when he 
 wrote them, and came to the test with those of us 
 who had complained that his earlier work was as 
 good as his latest, and that the bolt seemed shot. 
 Certainly the result proves that, whether or not 
 the bolt was shot in his prose, it was not in his 
 verse, and it is freely to be admitted that he has 
 not only turned back upon himself and put his 
 ancient speech to fresh rhyme and rhythm, but has 
 also struck out notes entirely new. There is only 
 one word for the Ballads, viewed from the calmer 
 point of view of criticism, and that is ' taking.' They 
 are wonderfully and tremendously taking. The very 
 cockney canaillerie of the dialect in which Tommy 
 is made to express himself has the true contagion of 
 the best music-hall patter song of the hour. The 
 question that arises, of course, is : ' But is this
 
 204 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 product good enough, strong enough, verifiable 
 enough to last?' No single ballad has had such 
 a furore of success as ' Fuzzy-Wuzzy.' A snatch, a 
 line here and there, seems already to have passed 
 into our daily speech, but has it passed permanently? 
 Is not the hour close at hand in which we shall all be 
 hopelessly sick of 
 
 1 'E 's a daisy, 'e 's a ducky, 'e 's a lamb ! 
 'E 's a injia-rubber idiot on the spree '? 
 
 or of 
 
 ' We never got a ha'porth's change of 'im : 
 
 'E squatted in the scrub an' 'ocked our 'orses, 
 'E cut our sentries up at Sua/fczVw, 
 An' 'e played the cat an' banjo with our forces ' ? 
 
 Doggerel, clever doggerel, attractive doggerel, but 
 doggerel so much above the best of the music-hall as 
 to win it a time-honoured place inspired doggerel, in 
 a word ? Ah, that is less certain ! The more often 
 one reads these Ballads, the thinner and thinner 
 appear the worst of them, the more and more dubious 
 all but one or two of the very best ; and as for the 
 ' other verses,' the twenty poems that follow them up, 
 there are some of them so appallingly bad that they 
 paralyse all efforts at consideration. When you have 
 taken out three or four, the others are simply non- 
 existent. The drop in Mr. Kipling is always straight 
 from the stars into the puddles. He has no middle
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 205 
 
 place, no gradual process of descent. And yet this 
 is not quite so, for at least half a dozen instances 
 could be quoted of his success at spoiling good work 
 by flaws in workmanship, or by his uncertainty of 
 touch. But then his uncertainty of touch is per- 
 petual. It is rarely that he is quite sure how he is 
 working, that he entirely transfuses his material. 
 Take his use of allegory. Could anything be more 
 stupidly and annoyingly obscure than 'The Three 
 Captains ' ? The whole matter treated of was quite 
 ephemeral, and one may almost say quite personal. 
 He makes an elaborate allegory of it where his letch 
 for technical terms runs riot. Even in the ' Galley 
 Slave,' his one success in this style, he cannot help 
 trying to show us how well up he is in nautical 
 phraseology, as if in an allegory any pressure of the 
 symbolism were not the most obvious futility. Of 
 course, when he attempts direct portrayal, he doses 
 us with his peculiar pedantries to the top of his bent. 
 The Bolivar doesn't drift seven days and seven 
 nights merely : she drifts to the Start, because every- 
 body ought to know that the Start is a bit of local 
 colour. Her ' coal and fo'c'sle are short ' ; her ' bulk- 
 heads fly ' ; she ' hogs ' and ' sags ' and ' races ' ; the 
 seas pound at her c strake ' ; the Lord, it is hoped, 
 has ' his thumb on the plummer-block,' and so on. 
 Clever, isn't it? But (as Mr. Kipling says the devil
 
 206 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 keeps inquiring), ' Is it art ? ' To tell the simple truth, 
 it reads rather more like juvenile vanity. Or, again, 
 there is the equal uncertainty of touch which afflicts 
 him when he attempts to write with an assured 
 poetical diction. The ' Ballad of East and West ' is 
 such an attempt, and it is the least like a failure of 
 them all. ('The English Flag' is a remarkable 
 instance of how he can fail when he really makes up 
 his mind to show us that he is a master of style qua 
 style.) It is, indeed, curious to note how he can 
 write, even in work that has stirred him, galvanised 
 conventionalism side by side with the most vivid and 
 actual realism. Yet he does it again and again. 
 The magnanimous Afghan of this Ballad, for instance, 
 'whistles his only son,' who, like unto the good 
 young only sons of all the robber chiefs in our more 
 or less pseudo-literature, and also unto our old, old 
 poetic friend the eagle or the hawk or the falcon, or 
 any other member of the genus raptor, ' drops from 
 the mountain crest.' Then Mr. Kipling suddenly 
 looks at him as he is, and describes him in one 
 admirable line like this : 
 
 ' He trod the ling like a buck in spring, and he looked like a 
 lance at rest.' 
 
 Fancy that being the line that follows and rhymes 
 with the venerable crest-dropping business ! It is
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 207 
 
 almost as bad as the terrible second couplet in the 
 fifth stanza of the 'Galley Slave.' 
 
 So much, then, for the outer shape taken by his 
 limitations. The shape they take in the essential 
 qualities of his spirit and intellect is far more dis- 
 concerting, because in his happier moments, with 
 thought and emotion at the white-heat, he again and 
 again transcends his tricks of inferior workmanship ; 
 but it is, indeed, rarely that he ever quite transcends 
 his tricks of clap-trap sentiment. ' Gunga Din ' is 
 one of the very finest of the Ballads ; it is not too 
 much to say of it that it comes very near being a 
 little masterpiece of its kind. He gives the picture 
 of the ' regimental bhisti,' the devoted ' limpin' lump 
 of brick-dust,' who ' didn't seem to know the use of 
 fear' in his thankless duty of water-carrier to the 
 men, fighting or wounded, on the march, or in camp, 
 or under fire. The particular Tommy who tells the 
 story relates how, when he dropped behind the fight, 
 ' with a bullet where his belt-plate should 'a' been,' 
 it was the inevitable Gunga Din who spied him first, 
 lifted up his head, plugged his wound, gave him a 
 drink, and finally carried him away to a dooli. At 
 this point a bullet comes and drills Gunga Din 
 clean; but, none the less, he puts Tommy safe 
 inside, and, just before rendering up the ghost, 
 ' " / 'ope you liked your drink* sez Gunga Din ' !
 
 208 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 Could a falser note have been struck ? Of course, 
 Gunga Din never said anything of the kind. It was 
 Mr. Rudyard Kipling who said it, because it was 
 one of those superficially smart things which he and 
 his friends, the groundlings, cannot resist. Again 
 and again he does it. The fat Babu Harendra sends 
 ' the head of a Burman dacoit chief in a packet to an 
 English officer who had, in a moment of baffled 
 impotence, promised 'a hundred' for it; and this 
 is the way the Babu Harendra Mukerji opens his 
 letter : 
 
 ' Dear Sir, I have honour to send, as you said, 
 For final approval (see under) Boh's Head.' 
 
 Of course, that ' for final approval (see under) ' was 
 never written by the Babu. The real writer was aut 
 Kipling aut diabolus. Now, what is the good of 
 giving an intensely realistic picture, crammed with 
 technical terms and concentrated characterisation, 
 to end it up with a piece of burlesque like this ? 
 
 But false characterisation in his art is, unhappily, 
 only too well matched with inconsequence in his 
 criticism. The same unscrupulousness which causes 
 him to indulge in cheap wit at the expense of the 
 sincerity of his dramatis persona, causes him to 
 indulge in antiquated sentimental clap-trap at the 
 expense of his own. There was, from Mr. Kipling's
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 209 
 
 point of view, a quite sufficiently scathing denunciation 
 to be made out of the Irish M.P.'s who were ' cleared ' 
 by the Times Commission, without pandering to the 
 'gods' of the Orange gallery. As it is, the whole 
 poem he devotes to the subject rings false from first 
 line to last. Not even the most resolute anti-Home 
 Ruler can believe that a picture of Ireland, where 
 1 the widow's curse is on the house ' of the Irish M.P., 
 c and the dead are at his door,' is quite a complete 
 one. What a pretty task for an honest and intelligent 
 man in this year of grace to glorify the Irish absentee 
 landlord by painting the 'patriotic' brutes and 
 hypocrites he has brought into existence considerably 
 blacker than painted devils ! Can it indeed be Mr. 
 Kipling who writes : 
 
 ' " The charge is old "? as old as Cain as fresh as yesterday ; 
 Old as the Ten Commandments have ye talked these laws 
 away ? ' 
 
 Mr. Kipling, the ' illustrator ' of Anglo-Indian social 
 life, with five out of the six 'illustrations' based 
 on breakage of the Seventh Commandment Mr. 
 Kipling, the enthusiastic mouthpiece of the indivi- 
 dual who prays : 
 
 ' Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the 
 
 worst, 
 
 Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can 
 raise a thirst ' ?
 
 2io ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 Again, every parvenu has a right to take his new 
 social gods au grand s'erieux^ but one does not, 
 somehow, expect a man of genius to outdo even 
 the most abject of them at their forms of worship. 
 Mr. Kipling thinks the earth has produced nothing 
 to equal a 'gentleman,' and he is within his rights in 
 thinking so. For our old friend the gentleman is a 
 really nice fellow, of course, as the average sensual 
 man slightly idealised was to be expected to be ; yet 
 even the gentleman nowadays does not quite mistake 
 himself for an archangel. But our poetical young 
 parvenu does. He tells in sounding numbers of the 
 earth's heroic workers : 
 
 ' Gods, for they knew the heart of men ; men, for they stooped 
 to fame ' ; 
 
 and in his ecstatic contemplation of them (unlike the 
 Irish M.P.'s in this particular, but like Mr. Rudyard 
 Kipling, they are adepts in ' God's law,' including 
 presumably the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, and 
 most of the Catechism), he beholds them having a 
 real good time in heaven, 'hanging with the reck- 
 less Seraphim on the reins of red-maned stars,' and 
 so on. Then we have the culmination. God the 
 Father appears : 
 
 ' And ofttimes cometh our wise Lord God, master of every trade, 
 And tells them tales of His daily toil, of Edens newly made ; 
 A nd they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid' \
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 211 
 
 There is only one word for that last line : it is 
 stupendous. Those gentlemen archangels preclude 
 anything but an amazed silence. Comment is im- 
 possible beyond the simple enunciation of the fact 
 that they belong to literature to the literature of 
 Southey's vision of the apotheosis of George in. 
 
 But let us turn from the painful spectacle of such 
 aberrations on the part of a man who has done so 
 much better than this in every way. 
 
 Adam Lindsay Gordon was a poet of an altogether 
 larger and broader calibre than Mr. Kipling, but the 
 parallel between them has more than one interesting 
 and suggestive feature. Both as a workman and as 
 a critic of life a certain instinct preserved the Anglo- 
 Australian from the grosser faults of the Anglo- 
 Indian. Gordon could only use rhymed rhythms, 
 but he knew it, and shunned, by a rigid adherence 
 to his own special domain, such horrors as Mr. 
 Kipling has achieved in his blank verse. The want 
 of delicacy of music, of melodious lyric, in Gordon is 
 indisputable, but at least he does not thrust it upon 
 us by offensive efforts. Mr. Kipling is, as a rule, 
 most at home when he is using a stanza to which 
 he can mark time with his heels, and the modern 
 'jingle' ballad has assuredly its justification. But 
 what justification is there for verse, the time of which 
 the hapless versifier has had to mark on his fingers ?
 
 212 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 In a poem like 'Route Marchin" he gives us the 
 very tramp of the negro camp-ditties a form of 
 poetical rhythm which has yet to have justice done to 
 it by our writers. But when he essays the lighter 
 note, how terrible are his mishaps ! Gordon, again, 
 had pretty much the same general view of life that 
 the other has, but, being simply a gentleman by birth 
 and breeding, he never ranted and raved like a 
 frenzied parvenu concerning the superhuman virtues 
 and glories of caste. It is when we put two such 
 men side by side, as it is just to do and profitable 
 to do, that we see clearly the fatal limitations and 
 defects which relegate the one not only to the more 
 ephemeral but to the lower place. Little, very little, 
 of Mr. Kipling's poetry has the element of per- 
 manency in it. Rarely, very rarely, does he forge 
 ahead and win the race with ease. Life's handicap, 
 the handicap of temperament and surroundings, is 
 too heavy for him. He contributes no appreciable 
 body of work. It is mostly tour de force, excellently 
 brilliant, delightfully clever, 'monstrously taking, 1 
 but it does not wear it does not wear as twenty or 
 thirty per cent, of Gordon's work wears. It has 
 come like a meteor, to pass : not like a star, to stay. 
 Yet not for a moment would I seem to undervalue 
 the charm and satisfaction of the best poems the 
 best snatches. Once, and once only, as it seems to
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 213 
 
 me, does he pass beyond the limits of poetic phases 
 and fashions, and attain the goal of desire. Other 
 poems have their obvious advantages over 'Mandalay,' 
 but no other, unless I am much mistaken, can chal- 
 lenge criticism on all its points and challenge it with 
 such success as this. I have given no sample of his 
 powerful impressionist doggerel. ' Fuzzy- Wuzzy ' and 
 'Screw-Guns,' 'Gunga Din' and 'Oonts,' 'Snarley- 
 Yow ' and ' The Young British Soldier,' are in every- 
 body's mouth. Let me give part of a poem where, 
 for once, his song is instinct with the lyral cry, with 
 the note of ' the tears of things,' the eternal voice of 
 human regret : 
 
 ' By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea, 
 There 's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me ; 
 For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say : 
 ' ' Come you back, you British soldier ; come you back to 
 
 Mandalay ! " 
 
 Come you back to Mandalay, 
 Where the old Flotilla lay : 
 Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to 
 
 Mandalay ? 
 
 On the road to Mandalay, 
 Where the flyin'-fishes play, 
 
 An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost 
 the Bay ! 
 
 ' 'Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green, 
 An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat, jes' the same as Theebaw's 
 
 Queen, 
 
 An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot, 
 An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot :
 
 2i4 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 Bloomin' idol made o' mud 
 
 Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd 
 
 Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed 'er where 
 
 she stud ! 
 On the road to Mandalay . . . 
 
 ' I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones, 
 An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones ; 
 Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand, 
 An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand ? 
 Beefy face an' grubby 'and 
 Law ! wot do they understand ? 
 
 I 've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land ! 
 On the road to Mandalay . . . 
 
 ' Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the 
 
 worst, 
 Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can 
 
 raise a thirst ; 
 
 For the temple-bells are callin', an' it 's there that I would be 
 By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea ; 
 On the road to Mandalay, 
 Where the old Flotilla lay, 
 With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to 
 
 Mandalay ! 
 
 O the road to Mandalay, 
 Where the flyin'-fishes play, 
 
 An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost 
 the Bay ! ' 
 
 A hundred years hence some appreciative and 
 inquiring person may be searching in the British 
 Museum for any other work done by the man who 
 wrote 'Mandalay.' 
 
 Truly like unto angels' visits are the books which
 
 MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE 215 
 
 come to us as a sudden and sheer delight; and the 
 reason is simple. For what in reality is rarer than 
 freshness wedded to sincerity and strength at one 
 with beauty ? But few and far between as are such 
 visitants from the mighty realm of the past, from the 
 meagre realm of the present they come with an 
 infrequency that is hateful, if indeed one might 
 almost say they come at all. Let us not, therefore, 
 be inveigled into forgetfulness of the fact of those 
 first rapturous moments in any estimate we form of 
 any writer who has been able to bestow them, seeing 
 that, things being equal, this power has assuredly its 
 justification for the critic's praise. And some such 
 memento laudis is what I would fain affix here to my 
 effort to speak, as adequately as I have been able, 
 of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's verse, because the first 
 perusal of the splendid score of his Barrack-Room 
 Ballads gave me the keenest pleasure I have had in 
 reading a book of poetry for several years. The 
 second part of the volume, containing the ' Other 
 Verses,' which, in his wisdom (or in the necessity of 
 providing sufficient material for a seemly crown octavo 
 at six shillings, or in the intention of a compromise 
 between the two), he has seen fit to add, soon 
 checked that pleasure, and presently chilled it to 
 the bone. The rapturous moments of sheer and 
 sudden delight, alas ! were ended. A few days later
 
 216 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 the Departmental Ditties (also supplemented, as we 
 have seen, by a liberal supply of ' Other Verses,' 
 good, bad, and indifferent) arrived to remove the 
 last effects of that chill by the creation of the sense 
 of perspective ; and now it appears to me no longer 
 strange that the man who wrote c Fuzzy- Wuzzy,' 
 ' Gunga Din,' and ' Mandalay,' wrote also ' Evarra 
 and his Gods' and 'The Sacrifice of Er-Heb' 
 (candour urges me to confess that I have not yet 
 been able to read this poem in its entirety) and 
 'The Explanation,' any more than it should be 
 strange that the same man should have given us, 
 with (apparently) a serious face, f The Drums of the 
 Fore and Aft,' ' At the Pit's Mouth,' ' The Courting 
 of Dinah Shadd,' as well as 'The Incarnation of 
 Krishna Mulvaney,' 'Namgay Doola,' and 'The 
 Lang Men o' Larut.'
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 
 
 A DIALOGUE
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 
 
 A DIALOGUE 
 
 WILSON rose and, quietly opening the door, passed 
 into the bedroom of his friend. 
 
 Randal in his dressing-gown lay stretched upon 
 the sofa by the open window, half-asleep, half-awake, 
 enjoying the last delicious sensations of the siesta. 
 
 Outside was the eternal panorama of the Mediter- 
 ranean, glaucous and glassily wreathing under the 
 stifling heat of a cloudy sun. Here and there its 
 semi-circular monotony was broken by the red-tiled 
 roofs of the houses, which seemed to be undergoing 
 some imperfect process of fumigation as the eddies 
 of the fitful breeze lifted and dispersed the fine and 
 foul-smelling dust of the streets and promenades. A 
 bird sang wearily but persistently in one of the dingy 
 trees of the hotel garden, and a canary, in a cage in 
 a neighbouring apartment, burst every now and then 
 into ear-ringing and emulous song two burthens at 
 such an hour worse than the biblical grasshopper. 
 Finally, a young Italian girl, with a monkey and a 
 
 219
 
 220 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 brazen and cracked falsetto, had just concluded a 
 dirgelike ditty, and gone her weary way. 
 
 This had decided Wilson. 
 
 Now he drew a chair close beside his friend, who 
 lay drowsily regarding him. 
 
 'Look here,' he said, 'this is getting on to my 
 nerves. I want to go out and away into some fresh 
 air. Do you care to come ? ' 
 
 ' Go out ? ' murmured Randal, ' get away ? Why, 
 it's ten times worse in the town, or down on the 
 Boulevard de la Croisette, or in a boat.' 
 
 ' Let us take a carriage and drive up on to one of 
 the hills. If there is a breeze anywhere, it will be 
 there. And then we can lie down under the pines, 
 and smoke till the heat passes, and it 's time to come 
 back to dinner.' 
 
 'We shall be cooked alive in the roads getting 
 there.' 
 
 'We'll have a cab with an awning.' 
 
 Randal stretched himself. 
 
 'Be it so,' he said. 'Milton was wrong. It is 
 good-nature, not ambition, which is really the last 
 infirmity of noble mind, and in no way is good- 
 nature better exemplified than in letting other people 
 look after you. No doubt you are right, and it will 
 be much pleasanter up in the pine-woods. You are 
 still young enough, Allan, to think things out. All
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 221 
 
 the same, I shall have no gratitude if it is so, and, if 
 we experience any discomfort, I shall blame you to 
 the very best of my ability.' 
 
 Wilson rose. 
 
 ' I will order the cab,' he said, ' while you wash, 
 and in ten minutes we '11 be away.' 
 
 'And truly,' reflected Randal, as he took off his 
 dressing-gown and prepared to sponge his face and 
 head, ' Cannes in the latter half of April begins to be 
 a mistake especially if you don't know how to 
 profit by the siesta, and perceive that the straw- 
 berries have no real flavour.' 
 
 His prophecy, however, as to the culinary perils 
 of the roads had but a half-fulfilment. 
 
 The meteorological change, that had been prepar- 
 ing itself during the last hour or more, now began 
 to operate markedly. 
 
 The clouds were in movement, lifting and drifting 
 slowly to the west, as the south-east breeze came 
 tripping along the coast. The sea took deeper 
 colour from the unencumbered sky, losing its sinister 
 pallors. The tree-tops, stiffened pine and plumy 
 eucalyptus, swayed and rustled. Life seemed astir 
 again, and, though in the streets that were swept by 
 the rising breeze the dust soared in sheets, the two 
 friends were soon mounting the northering zig-zags 
 beyond its reach. They passed on through terraced
 
 olive-gardens and fruit-orchards, cool with the running 
 waters of the old stone conduits, and then by the 
 verge of woody gorges, the cleft and rocky sides of 
 the road sparkling with mica, or coloured with 
 masses of red sandstone, pierced here and there 
 with a vein of marble or spar. Cannes lay below 
 and behind them, only seen by glimpses at the 
 turnings through the moving foliage, with the islands 
 of Lerins, St. Marguerite, and St. Honorat, working 
 round to the west, the white-walled houses shining in 
 the stream of sunlight. 
 
 They mounted in silence, till suddenly the driver 
 turned in his seat to point across the flat, low-lying 
 plain before them to the west. It stretched, ruddy and 
 monotonous, back from the blue semi-circle of the bay 
 to the line of serrated hills that shut out the horizon. 
 Rectilineal lines of plane-trees, geometric avenues, 
 hedged about the environs of a village. 
 
 'That is Bocca, monsieur,' he said to Wilson; 
 'and those hills are the Estrel and the Paveron.' 
 
 Wilson acknowledged the value and interest of 
 the information, and the driver once more gave 
 himself up to the onomatopreic encouragement of his 
 nags. Randal had for some time said nothing ; for 
 the volumes of the free fresh air dilating his lungs 
 were giving him considerable physical pleasure, and 
 pleasure (more especially his own) was one of the
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 223 
 
 few (the very few) things he held as sacred. Rare 
 and short-lived are its visits. The chiefest wisdom 
 of life is to make the most of them. 
 
 But the driver was encouraged to further speech. 
 
 Once more he suddenly turned in his seat, and 
 pointing apparently to some spot between the 
 avenues and the distant hills, he announced that 
 a hermit lived down there. 
 
 Wilson was amused, and asked for particulars, 
 which were readily given. 
 
 'But perhaps,' said the little man, 'monsieur is 
 a Protestant? Each one has his special form of 
 religion.' 
 
 'No,' said Wilson. 'They are all interesting.' 
 
 The driver turned back again in puzzled silence, 
 and they went on once more up the zig-zag. 
 
 ' Why,' growled Randal, ' did you say that ? You 
 know that no form of religion interests us in the 
 least. It is all an indistinguishable hash of effete 
 symbolism and more or less degraded superstition.' 
 
 ' Yet certain forms of it still satisfy human souls.' 
 
 ' Only the lower types. What is stimulating those 
 few, who are worth talking about and who still remain 
 within the religious pale, is either the intellectual 
 exercise of the new critical and historical methods, 
 or else the democratic and socialistic aspects of the 
 Founder's early teaching, both of them brought into
 
 224 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 being by modern and secular movements from with- 
 out. Culture and Socialism are transmuting every- 
 thing, but, for Heaven's sake, let us have them at first 
 hand. Spare us the noble army of tinkers.' 
 
 'But what does one gain by severing one's kinship 
 with these people? Many of them have beautiful 
 souls.' 
 
 ' Now let us begin the praise of good-looking and 
 devout women ! Tell me that their timid and lovely 
 twaddle had its inspiration. Take oif your hat to 
 their pure faith. It helps the world so immensely 
 just now to go through life believing \nfack and the 
 Beanstalk and the Seven Champions of Christendom, 
 Kneel before their faithful purity. We all know that 
 it means keeping game-preserves for the use of select 
 parties, Mohammed's heaven on earth for the well- 
 to-do gentlemen who are tired of adventures. A 
 plentiful want of brains and a few lesser maladies 
 in a chronic condition will conduct almost any man 
 into the honeyed haunts of that dupery before he is 
 forty. I am on the way there myself. But you 
 are still a young man who dreams dreams and piques 
 himself on being sincere.' 
 
 'Your bitterness,' said Wilson, 'carries you, as it 
 seems to me, as far away from the truth as your 
 indifference. For you generalise indiscriminately in 
 both. No, Ned ; talk like that will not go down.
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 225 
 
 You are merely exercising your privilege of blame, 
 and don't want to be taken seriously. You said the 
 other day that you liked the piquancy of the contrast 
 between the ante- and post-prandial humours, just as 
 you did the alternations of the languor and ferocity 
 of the tropics ; but perseverance and the search for 
 the middle humour are the gifts of the temperate 
 zones of the West and the North. Why do you 
 want to disintegrate us? There is no firmer foun- 
 dation for anything like happiness than the com- 
 prehension of one's fellows. When you cannot 
 understand the look in their eyes, you feel like a 
 mournful pilgrim in an alien country. A glance, a 
 smile, that makes a man articulate to you and you 
 to him, strikes a note of pleasure in you, and makes 
 the world the habitat of intelligence.' 
 
 ' In theory. In practice I find the banality of the 
 smiles and glances only disgusts and wearies me. 
 There is nothing new. The essential want of variety 
 in things is ghastly. Why, when I skim through a 
 photograph album full of unknown people, do I feel 
 I have met them all and been bored by them all ? 
 Here and there, once in a hundred pages, a sweet 
 face suddenly strikes me, or a strong face. For a 
 few moments it interests me. I even think of it 
 afterwards. Two days later I return to it. Surely I 
 dreamed ! It is just as commonplace, as common 
 p
 
 226 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 as the others ! There are at any given moment in 
 the world a hundred persons at most who are worth 
 seeing and talking to for more than once. You can 
 talk to almost any one once to a few twice; to 
 almost no one three times. If it were not for the 
 perpetual arrival of new events, we should draw 
 knives on one another and smite under the fifth 
 rib. But luckily something is always happening. 
 That is what saves us.' 
 
 The other was silent. 
 
 ' Why don't you confute me ? ' asked Randal. 
 
 ' Because you are merely restating your disillu- 
 sioned ind vidualism. I remember (that hermit of 
 the drivers oddly enough recalls it co me) once 
 hearing you adopt a phrase, which was also a theory 
 of life, of Henri Beyle's, and giving in your savage 
 adherence to it. La chasse au bonheur the hunt for 
 happiness, that is the story of each of us from hour 
 to hour, from day to day, from year to year. We 
 rise in the morning equipped tant Men que mal with 
 the implements for the capture of the game, and 
 we return in the evening to eat and sleep, having 
 failed or succeeded. The Jagd-lust takes a hundred 
 thousand shapes ; the Jagd-ordnung varies perpetu- 
 ally. We cover it all up with innumerable lies and 
 self-deceptions ; but there, in one word, is the simple, 
 brutal truth concerning the life of each and every
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 227 
 
 living person and thing la chasse au bonheur the 
 hunt for happiness.' 
 
 'And I still give in my adherence, savage or 
 otherwise, to that theory of life.' 
 
 ' It has grave defects.' 
 
 'Let us have some of them.' 
 
 ' Well, firstly, like all formulae it is far too narrow. 
 When you try to explain the earth as it is man as 
 he is civilisation as it is, by any formula whatever, 
 you have to leave out nearly half of the facts. The 
 celebrated theory of the struggle for existence and sur- 
 vival of the fittest, for instance, leads us into the most 
 hopeless errors unless we perpetually remember that 
 the word " fittest " has here no ethical sense what- 
 ever, and merely means fittest under any given set 
 of circumstances. The lower type may be the fittest, 
 and among parasites we see that it is so. But even 
 when we have realised this, which nine evolutionists 
 out of ten practically do not, we are still far away 
 from our comfortable and complete little 'Open 
 Sesame' for the big treasure-cave of life. The 
 complexity of things eludes us. The struggle for 
 existence has continually to be applied altruistically. 
 The individual often perishes to save, or try to save 
 not itself but another individual, or a few other 
 individuals, or many, for the sake of some idea, 
 sometimes of a character almost wholly abstract.
 
 228 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 Do you leave all this out of account in your 
 explanation of things ? What a delusion ! Why, 
 you are just the same pedant as the ideological 
 theologian, only on the other side.' 
 
 'But in every case every action is merely a step 
 in the chasse au bonheur. Beyle's definition beats 
 Darwin's. For Beyle's has no exceptions. That 
 is all.' 
 
 ' Do you believe that ? Does all human action, 
 or even all animal action, seem to you explicable as 
 effort, conscious or unconscious, after happiness ? I 
 give you the most generous interpretation, but, when 
 you have used it to the full, do you still hold that 
 the hunt in some shape or other is the unfailing 
 motive ? ' 
 
 ' Accepting your gift of the most generous inter- 
 pretation, I do.' 
 
 ' Well, I suppose the battle will centre round the 
 word " unconscious." Your theory seems to me to 
 contain in solution the venerable fallacy of free-will. 
 You suppose both men and animals far more 
 deliberately set to a goal than I think they are. 
 You call the goal happiness, and that is a very clever 
 way of putting it. It is more than clever; it is 
 illuminative. But your claim for it is surely too 
 large. Granted that a considerable number a very 
 considerable number of our efforts, thoughts, words,
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 229 
 
 and actions can justly be described as consciously 
 or unconsciously making for happiness, are there not 
 still a great many which are either quite automatic 
 and purposeless, or else done under an exterior 
 constraint over which we have no control, which 
 consciously or unconsciously, or both, we would 
 rightly or wrongly fain not do, which it makes us 
 unhappy to do, and yet which the pressure brought 
 to bear upon us from without compels us to do ? ' 
 
 Randal reflected a moment. 
 
 ' Those automatic and purposeless actions,' he said, 
 ' I won't give up to you, because, if they don't make 
 for happiness now, they once did, or were intended 
 to do, either in ourselves or in our ancestors.' 
 
 Wilson smiled. 
 
 'You are giving them up to me right off,' he said. 
 ' Our ancestors ! our ancestors make us do this or 
 that ! And what on earth have our ancestors to do 
 with our hunt for happiness? No more than our 
 friends and relations, and the community generally, 
 which also makes us do that and this, whether it 
 concerns us or not.' 
 
 'You are a devil,' growled Randal. 'You think 
 things out. Thank God ! I never did. If I had, I 
 should have laundered all my poetry the way you 
 have laundered most of your painting. Art should 
 be simple and sensuous, as even the theologico-idealist
 
 230 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 Milton saw. I never did a better thing in my life 
 than carry you off from London for a long holiday. 
 That last picture of yours was all infernalised alle- 
 gory, which comes directly of thinking things out.' 
 
 The driver drew up. They were on the top 
 plateau of the Croix des Gardes. 
 
 'But,' said Wilson, laughing, 'that is only the 
 beginning of my criticism on your theory.' 
 
 ' If,' said the driver, ' the gentlemen would alight 
 here and mount by there ' (pointing to a path) ' on to 
 the top of the hill, they would see something very 
 fine.' 
 
 ' I '11 give you the second part,' said Wilson, getting 
 out, 'from the top of the hill in front of the some- 
 thing very fine.' 
 
 ' By the Lord, no ! ' said Randal. ' If I climb up 
 the side of that roof, it is in search of happiness, not 
 of your criticism on my theory of it.' 
 
 The path was rough, the vagabond windings of 
 the tracks of successive pilgrims of the picturesque, 
 and they mounted slowly. The western side of the 
 hill was protected from the breeze, and the sun beat 
 upon it with force, raising up the perfume of the 
 fallen pine-needles in hot gusts. The underwood 
 was mostly broom, brilliantly lit with fresh and 
 yellow blossom. At last they emerged on the hill- 
 top, a flat and open space with a pile of dark stone
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 231 
 
 on the seaward edge, surmounted by a rude pillar 
 on which a plain iron cross stood out against the 
 sky. On the roughly hewn stone seat at the base 
 a young girl lay back with a book in her lap. 
 
 As the two men came forward, their eyes crossed 
 hers. 
 
 She had been looking to the south-east towards 
 the fortification of St. Marguerite, but now she 
 turned her head and gazed at them with a simple 
 and inquiring directness. 
 
 Randal glanced impatiently aside, confident of the 
 disgusting fact of having stumbled on one of the un- 
 married of his countrywomen, but Wilson had been 
 attracted and cast some interrogative glances. 
 
 She was small and badly dressed, in a style that 
 was unknown to him (differing somehow from the 
 English, American, or any foreign type which he had 
 remarked), with an ugly face, colourless, but plastic, 
 earnest, and intelligent, the one beauty of which 
 were the rather large eyes of a dark brown, with 
 their peculiar expression of an eager yet gentle and 
 rather reflective curiosity. 
 
 She took up her book and moved her dress, and 
 then herself a little, so that they might sit down on 
 the seat, if they wished to. 
 
 Wilson raised his hat and said in French 
 
 ' Please, do not disturb yourself, mademoiselle.'
 
 232 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 1 But not in the least, monsieur,' she replied, with 
 an accent which was as unknown to him as her 
 toilette. 
 
 They were exchanging a few casual remarks, when 
 Randal, who had turned away, joined them with 
 amused eyes. 
 
 'There is an inscription,' he said; 'do you see 
 it, there on the pillar ? Some devout and beautiful 
 biblical phrase about that cross. This grove on 
 the top of a hill would have quite a pagan feeling 
 if it weren't for that cross, and then the inscription ! 
 Together they save it.' 
 
 The girl looked at him gravely, as if uncertain 
 whether he was in earnest or not, and made a face. 
 
 ' The inscription,' she said, in her quaint French, 
 ' tells us that this pillar is so many hundred metres 
 above the level of the sea.' 
 
 Randal began laughing, and the other two followed 
 suit. 
 
 The blue sky and waters the sunny breeze the 
 pine-clad summit the rude pile of stone like the 
 remains of an antique altar the pillar the iron 
 cross, and the inscription of the exact height above 
 the sea, his sense of humour suddenly supplied the 
 comment. 
 
 ' " O dix-neuvieme siecle, dix-neuvieme siecle ! " ' 
 he quoted ; ' Beyle's cry for ever returns to me at all
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 233 
 
 the solemn moments of our civilised life. Surely 
 this is typical. Tell me, mademoiselle,' he said, 
 with a rapid change to seriousness, 'what induced 
 you to climb up the hill ? Was it an obscure feeling, 
 inherited from our pagan ancestors, which moved 
 you to seek a hill-top ? Or was it merely the idea 
 of getting some fresh air, or peradventure a charm- 
 ing view ? ' 
 
 'Neither the one nor the other, monsieur,' she 
 replied as seriously, never taking her eyes off him 
 while he spoke. ' It was because I had been reading 
 Maupassant's Sur I'Eau, which, as without doubt 
 you may know, is an account of a voyage in his 
 little yacht the Bel Ami; and from here, I was told, 
 I could see most of the places which he describes.' 
 
 'All the same,' he murmured, looking down, 'it 
 was the hunt for happiness.' 
 
 'On the part of Maupassant?' she asked. 'Oh, 
 but yes ! Only, after a little, he tires of all the 
 beauty and the solitude which he so desires, and goes 
 back where do you think ? To Monte Carlo ! ' 
 
 'And from thence," he said, 'to to a private 
 lunatic asylum,' he added in English. 'The hunt 
 ended badly.' 
 
 At that moment a voice the voice of a girl 
 was heard calling a name, and then a sentence, in 
 a language unknown to both the men.
 
 234 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 'That is my sister,' the other said, smiling and 
 rising, 'who is calling me. They are going down. 
 Good-day, gentlemen.' 
 
 They both saluted, and stood watching her as she 
 crossed the clearing and disappeared through the 
 underwood by a path on the opposite side. 
 
 'Didn't I tell you,' said Randal, 'that the per- 
 petual arrival of new events saves us? That girl's 
 grimace over the cross and the inscription has put 
 me into a good humour. And she went precisely 
 in the nick of time. There was nothing in her 
 nothing, nothing ! Three more minutes, and our 
 plummets would have been rattling on the shallow 
 bottom of her poor little soul, and she would have 
 left us disconsolate. Now we shall both of us talk 
 with an animated inconsistency (and that means talk 
 well), and when you are next by yourself you '11 be 
 able to think about her for a quarter of an hour or 
 so, and exaggerate her possibilities. Very likely she 
 was a Dane, or a Swede, or a Norwegian, and that 
 permits you to look upon her as a problematical 
 heroine of Ibsen's. Your vice of thinking things 
 out will take you even so far as that.' 
 
 Wilson was silent a moment. Then he said : 
 
 ' How truly, in the actual application of his theory 
 of life, is your temper identical with Beyle's ! Beyle, 
 of course, is a Liberal a French Liberal of 1830;
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 235 
 
 and he believes (so he says) in all the Liberal 
 machinery of the hour the Charter, the Free Press, 
 and so on. He even tries to persuade us that he 
 is interested in it. But in reality it utterly wearies 
 and disgusts him, and all he cares for in his heart 
 is aristocratic individualism, which is the aristocracy 
 of intellect, and the most ruthless of them all. La 
 carriere ouverte aux talens, Napoleon calls it, when 
 he wants to make it specious and palatable; but 
 when he gives forth the brutal truth of his brutal 
 mind concerning the mass of humanity (which has no 
 talents), he calls it simply cliair a canon. Food for 
 the engine that permits genius to despotise over the 
 humiliated millions that is the fate the aristocratic 
 individualist, the individualist of intellect, believes 
 to be the best possible in this worst of possible 
 worlds. Perhaps he is correct. There is a lot to 
 be said in favour of the theory. But whether for 
 right or wrong, for failure or success, we are trying 
 for something different, and we have no more danger- 
 ous foe than him who appeals to the apparently 
 reasonable impatience and despair of men. Well, 
 Beyle's chasse au bonheur is the same theory, or, 
 rather, it comes to the same theory when Beyle puts 
 it into practice. The chance of such stupendous 
 success as Napoleon's, or of any stupendous success, 
 is possible to only a very few of us. What remains
 
 236 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 is the carrying-out in the Napoleonic temper, each on 
 the little stage of his own life, of the same idea. For 
 me, Beyle is summed up in two ways in his own life 
 and direct personal criticism, and in his masterpiece, 
 Le Rouge et k JVot'r, one (I agree) of the few com- 
 pletely charming novels of the century, and it is all 
 an illustration of what he really means by la chasse au 
 bonheur. It is based on the contempt of the average 
 man and woman, and, indeed, of all humanity. 
 Every thing and every one are useful only in so far as 
 they supply the material for thrilling and victorious 
 emotion to the man of talent. Very short work, 
 therefore, does he make of the tiresome Liberal 
 machinery, which he cannot see is the first step in 
 the slow and painful process of educating the com- 
 munity in the art of self-government. To him it is 
 merely the hateful process of blague and hypocrisy, 
 which prevents the man of talent from his rapid 
 arrival at success. Later on, consciously or un- 
 consciously, he cast all his nominal beliefs to the 
 winds, and showed us, in the Chartreuse de Parnte, 
 where his real beliefs really led him namely, to a 
 complete preference for the despotic regime in which 
 the man of talent has, by his very nature, a far greater 
 chance of realising himself, if only in the shape of 
 passionate love-intrigue, than in the modern political 
 and civil community. The nightmare of Beyle's hours
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 237 
 
 of thought is furnished by a consideration of what life 
 and living mean in Puritan and commercial England, 
 and still more in commercial and Puritan America. 
 No one, of course, sees the ghastly aspects of the 
 modern Anglo-Saxon civilisation, which is imposing 
 itself on the world, more acutely than he does. That 
 is the great value and use of him, and of those like 
 him. But the ideal tendency which underlies it all 
 is completely hidden from him. It seemed to him an 
 end, a conclusion, a final state, a hell of pretence and 
 ennui. To us it appears rather as a purgatory, the 
 meaning and consolation of which we find in the 
 vague glimmers of auroral paradise which flash down 
 upon the spectacle of our weariness and woe.' 
 
 ' And so/ said Randal, ' you utterly repudiate the 
 hunt for happiness on the recognised lines of freedom 
 and hope for the man of talent? You are landing 
 yourself in a pretty quagmire of played-out asceticism 
 and sociologic jargon.' 
 
 'Not as we conceive of it, either for the man of 
 talent or for the average man without either for what 
 one may call utility in the block or for beauty in the 
 block, either for Commerce or for Art, or so at least 
 it appears to me. Beyle's creed at the present moment 
 has the all but undivided allegiance of the artists. We 
 inscribe in letters of gold over the portal of Art, the 
 command to eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow
 
 238 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 we die, carefully explaining, it is true, that this is to 
 be interpreted in the most refined and catholic sense. 
 Who has preached such charming sermons from this 
 purely hedonistic text as the alleged idealist Renan ? 
 And Goethe is our great and patron saint. All the 
 artists poets, painters, musicians, writers believe 
 in the hunt for happiness more or less in the temper 
 of Beyle. Rossetti writes an indignant sonnet against 
 the Tsar-slayers, and celebrates in a vehement ode the 
 reactionary peace "wrought" by the ice-bound Toryism 
 of Wellington. They all, in their hearts, cling passion- 
 ately to individualism to the chance given to the 
 man of talent, the fox in the well, to utilise the stupid 
 horns of the average goat as the means of egress into 
 the sunlight. They have no faith in the kindly social 
 impulse, in the evolution of imbeciles, in the higher 
 combinations of the race; and perhaps they are right: 
 time alone will show. All I say is that we are trying 
 for something different, not altogether because we 
 believe in our own theory of life as good and eventu- 
 ally practicable, but because we see that the other 
 theory has been tried in the history of the world again 
 and again, often with magnificent results, but always 
 with the appalling sacrifice of eighty per cent, of the 
 community to the claims of an ignorant and miser- 
 able servitude; always with final failure to achieve 
 anything like permanency and success.'
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 239 
 
 Randal grinned drily, while the other went on : 
 
 ' Your chasse au bonheur in an individual, based as 
 it is on cruelty and egotism, ends inevitably in disgust 
 and isolation, in disillusionment, hatred, and despair. 
 As it is with an individual, so is it with a community, 
 a nation, a race, a civilisation. The hero of Le Rouge 
 et le Noir finishes on the guillotine, and, though his 
 tragic fate is, half of it, an indictment of his time, yet 
 the other half is certainly an indictment of himself. 
 But how infinitely preferable is this to the last state 
 of the hero of the Chartreuse de Parme, with his 
 cynical acceptance of the baseness and bestiality that 
 form the foundation of civic slavery !' 
 
 They had crossed the open space and taken their 
 places almost unconsciously in a little glade that had 
 an outlook towards the west, Randal lying at half- 
 length, the other seated. 
 
 Now there was a pause. 
 
 ' You know,' said Randal, ' I cannot argue. Your 
 eloquence pleases and convinces me, as eloquence 
 always does. My own never failed of that effect, till 
 I was well past thirty. Then the vanity of conviction 
 struck me like all the other vanities, and I gave up 
 talking to try to prove or disprove anything. There- 
 fore I will answer you in your own non-eloquent style, 
 which I feel to be so much more disconcerting, and 
 remark that in these matters it is mostly an affair of
 
 2 4 o ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 temperament. It pleases serene natures, with a streak 
 of enthusiasm in them, such as yours, to set out on 
 the hunt in company with a crowd. You look on their 
 stupidities with a kindly eye ; you insist on treating 
 them as being better than they are, et cetera, et cetera, 
 et cetera : I need not fill in the picture. You love, in 
 a word, to juggle away the aching sense of the soul's 
 solitude by a perpetual give and take with others. My 
 nature is different. I am atrabilious, I suppose, and 
 find a sort of savage pleasure (I thank you for the 
 word) in the full admittance of the fact of our fatal 
 isolation. Do what we may, we remain individuals. 
 The soul is never more lonely than when it seems 
 most lost in others. And I am an individualist by 
 instinct as well as by persuasion. The element, 
 therefore, of cruelty enters into all I do. Oh, I know 
 it ! It did not need the gentle look of your eyes, my 
 friend, to tell me that I was "cruel" to that poor 
 little chit of a girl just now cruel because utterly 
 careless of how what I said affected her to whom I 
 only spoke for a few moments. The blind and un- 
 scrupulous assertion, then, of my own individuality 
 has been my one guiding impulse, and never more 
 so than when masquerading in the angel garb of self- 
 effacement? I admit it to the full. In reality I have 
 always hated life. I hate it now more than ever, 
 because now I know that my hatred is justified by
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 241 
 
 the facts. I have lost the faculty of dreaming. I can 
 cheat myself no more ; that is all. We have trained 
 ourselves, at least we are told so, to look upon even 
 moderate drunkenness as a vice, but at heart we have 
 a humorous toleration for the peccant convivialist, 
 and it is only for the secret drinker that every one 
 reserves his genuinely righteous wrath. Well, I am 
 a secret drinker, or, at most, I have one companion 
 of my sombre orgy. When I drink in company, I 
 despise them all, and they instinctively feel repulsion 
 to me. I never remember when it was not so. My 
 impulses of love and admiration therefore have gone 
 out to those who I felt were of my species. The 
 brigand, the ruffian, alone appeals to me personally. 
 I prefer Benvenuto Cellini to Francis of Assisi, and 
 Dick Turpin to John Howard the philanthropist. If 
 I had been a modern French writer, I would sooner 
 have written Le Rouge et le Noir than all the novels 
 of Balzac and Zola, so completely do I feel my youth 
 expressed in Julien Sorel. Possibly I should like to 
 be different. But it is the sheerest folly to speculate. 
 Life justifies the individualist the poor devil you 
 have been jumping upon as " the man of talent " 
 quite as much as the socialist. I venture to believe 
 that a large proportion of humanity is made up of 
 secret drinkers, in some shape or other, and that 
 proportion would reach to the half, I dare say, of the 
 Q
 
 242 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 more intelligent. Individualistic civilisations, you 
 confess, have had magnificent results, but have 
 always failed, you declare, to achieve anything like 
 permanency or success. Have socialistic civilisations 
 achieved even the magnificent results, to say nothing 
 of the permanency or success? Napoleon's France 
 went to pieces in a superbly insane effort to assert 
 itself in actual dominancy over all Europe, but at 
 least it lived fully and intensely. Would the slow- 
 rotting dissolution of a community bred upon panem 
 et drcenses have been better ? ' 
 
 ' There have been no socialistic civilisations,' said 
 Wilson. 
 
 ' Oh, listen to him ! ' cried Randal. ' Listen to the 
 ingenuous young man ! He imagines that modern 
 industrial socialism is unique, and hasn't occurred a 
 hundred times in history already ! He imagines that 
 when it has satisfied the physical needs of all, it will 
 continue to lead a strenuous intellectual life, in order 
 to make us all into young gods and goddesses, and 
 not into devotees of skittles and beer and tea and 
 scandal ! No, in the new civilisation of socialism, 
 my friends, human nature will be completely changed. 
 For we are at last about to realise the kingdom of 
 heaven on earth, my friends, and attune the souls of 
 the masses to the pitch of cherubim and seraphim, 
 while all the individualising infants shall be treated
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 243 
 
 in foundling asylums as pitiful samples of a vicious 
 atavism.' 
 
 Wilson made no reply, looking in front of him. 
 
 ' Now,' said Randal, ' I am once more waiting to 
 be confuted.' 
 
 ' I can't confute you. Perhaps you are right. Who 
 knows ? No one can see more than a few steps 
 ahead. We all have the hopeless sadness of our 
 limitations, and it is easy to destroy the little nest 
 of trust which, like to frail and migrant birds, we 
 construct with dreams of downy fledglings, eager for 
 the skies.' 
 
 There was a long silence. 
 
 Then Randal said gently : 
 
 * You make me remind myself of the brutal, heed- 
 less schoolboy who has just wrecked such a nest, from 
 the sheer wanton sense of his brutal heedlessness. 
 Forgive me ! ' And he extended his left hand. 
 
 Wilson took it with his right and pressed it. 
 
 'It is nothing,' he said, 'for, again, perhaps you 
 are wrong. Who knows ? ' 
 
 The silence fell upon them once more. 
 
 It was Randal who broke it, saying : 
 
 ' How we dawdle and delay in our projects on Italy ! 
 I almost feel as if we should not summon enough 
 resolution to get there after all.' 
 
 ' Once or twice,' murmured Wilson, still looking in
 
 244 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 front of him, ' I have wondered a little at my apathy. 
 Truly Italy seems little enough to me now, and once 
 it seemed so much ! I used to feel that I should 
 never be able to express myself with adequacy 
 in my painting until I had lived in Florence or 
 Rome.' 
 
 ' This phase is passing,' said Randal. ' In Goethe's 
 time, and Byron's, and Shelley's, Italy meant a 
 species of mental liberation, and it still seems to 
 mean so to the Scandinavian races. Ibsen's young 
 men and women feel this. Italy stands to them as 
 the incarnation of the joie de vivre. But we others 
 French, English, and Germans, and even the 
 Americans begin to realise that modernity holds 
 something greater and more actual than either the 
 Mediaeval or Renascence Art of "the land that 
 consoled Europe for the loss of Greece." Italy as 
 an ideal is completely played out, and nobody 
 realises it more acutely than the Italians. It was 
 a fine instinct which kept your Rossetti at home, 
 even if the same instinct took other shapes not 
 sanctioned by the approval of our young and social- 
 istic poet-painters. There he could live in the Italy 
 of his imagination. Though, I dare say,' he added, 
 returning on his thought, ' sloth and chloral greatly 
 assisted.' 
 
 ' Perhaps you are right,' mused Wilson. ' Perhaps
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 245 
 
 the phase is passing. It is certain that at this 
 moment I could turn my back on Italy without 
 regret. Six years ago I should have held such a 
 temper impossible. Spain attracts me more.' 
 
 ' My dear fellow,' said Randal, ' at thirty, let me 
 repeat, the taste for lollipops deserts us, and we find 
 them no longer endurable, except, perhaps, in the 
 shape of acid drops. Italian music wearies me to 
 death. The lovely nullity of the Italian women's 
 faces is only the same thing in another shape. It 
 makes you feel brutal. Spain is still pungent. Its 
 popular music makes you vibrate and shiver, or fills 
 your eyes with inexplicable tears. I found after a 
 little that I even grew to like their country cuisine 
 their rotten cheese and blood-curdling wine, their 
 greasy oils and onions. I am devoted to onions : 
 you know it. And that devotion dates from my first 
 winter in Southern Spain. Let us change our minds : 
 leave Florence and Venice, Rome and Naples, to 
 their own worn-out devices, and creep along by the 
 coast railway round the feet of the Pyrenees into 
 Gerona. We can get from there right down as far 
 as Alicant that's half-way to Gibraltar, and from 
 there we could go to Madrid and return by the 
 north ; or, if you like, we could hold on a hundred 
 miles or so past Alicant to Lorca, the terminus, and 
 then make our way along the coast again, under the
 
 246 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 Sierra Nevada, to Malaga, and from there by rail to 
 Sevilla, Cordova, and the whole business.' 
 
 'A regular campaign in the hunt for happiness,' 
 said Wilson, smiling. 
 
 ' Well, yes ; and what better weapons are there to 
 go out with than movement and variety ? ' 
 
 ' Solvitur ambulando ? We shall not bring down 
 our game there any more than here. But we may, 
 perhaps, get nearer to it, and even have a few long 
 shots. I agree.' 
 
 ' The truth is,' said Randal, ' that Italy is a mistake 
 for both of us. I went there once with a woman I 
 loved, who is dead. You planned to go there once 
 with a woman you loved, who is also dead. Yours 
 was the better fate, because the illusion of your 
 problematical happiness still remains with you. For 
 me it exists no longer. Alas ! ' he sighed. ' women 
 are bad travelling companions. At every step they 
 betray the appalling conventionality of their outlook. 
 They see nothing, because they know nothing, 
 observe nothing, recognise nothing. Their only 
 originality lies in the forms of their passion. All 
 the rest is mere decorative accessory the mise en 
 scene for love-making or for the social farce. And 
 the worst is, that if you cannot persuade them to 
 hold their tongues, you also will see nothing of what 
 passes before you. Italy has very little to say to you
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 247 
 
 and me just at present, and it has this melancholy 
 association for both of us. To each it would recall 
 the happiest and most protracted dream of his life ; 
 and in your case there would be the added regret 
 . . .' He paused. 'Why are you smiling?' he 
 asked. 
 
 ' I was thinking the poor little chit of a girl had 
 had her revenge on us after all.' 
 
 'How?' 
 
 ' By prescribing for us the tendency of our 
 thoughts.' 
 
 Randal shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 'Perhaps,' he said. 'Yes, that is about all they 
 can do for us profitably, at least.' 
 
 'Perhaps,' murmured the other. 'The breeze 
 seems to be falling as quickly as it rose,' he added. 
 ' How still the country is ! The heat has passed 
 away. What an impression of tranquillity, of repose, 
 of peace ! ' 
 
 ' Only an impression, alas ! ' 
 
 'Only an impression, true; but surely it means 
 something.' 
 
 ' Does it ? That is just the question. The ruthless 
 struggle of nature does not stop one moment under 
 that deceptive veil of truce. These trees and plants, 
 these flowers and grasses, are more intent on their 
 own survival and the slaughter of their fellows in
 
 248 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 such an expansive hour as this, than when wind and 
 rain are lashing them. What preyer spares the prey 
 because of the divine beauty of the quiet and the 
 hush ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, it is illusion, I know ; everything is illusion. 
 There is only one certainty.' 
 
 It was Randal's turn to smile. 
 
 'Then you don't believe,' he said, 
 
 ' that death must be 
 Like all the rest, a mockery ' ? 
 
 Wilson shook his head. 
 
 ' Not in the least,' he said. ' If it is not the 
 extinction of the ego, then it is nothing, and that is 
 the one the great desideratum.' 
 
 ' Of the conscious ego, you mean ? ' 
 
 'Yes, of the conscious ego.' 
 
 ' But isn't it almost as hateful to think that, by the 
 law of the conservation of energy, our entities I 
 mean the whole sum-total of us, body and soul are 
 perpetually jumbled up, created, dispersed, re-created, 
 and re-dispersed for ever ? Death as annihilation is 
 just as much an illusion as anything else.' 
 
 ' Not so far as the conscious ego is concerned, and 
 not even altogether so far as the unconscious ego. 
 I never could understand the application which you 
 make of the law of the conservation of energy. We 
 are far from being able to assert that matter is eternal.
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 249 
 
 We know nothing about it. All we know is that there 
 is a perpetual and prodigious expenditure of energy 
 going on, the vast bulk of which is, so far as we can 
 see, absolute waste. Of the heat which the earth 
 actually receives from the sun, of the earth's own 
 heat, enormous quantities are radiating into space 
 every moment, and are, at least so far as we are 
 concerned, to all appearances, completely lost. The 
 time is conceivable, if it is not actually realisable, in 
 which the earth will be like the moon in which the 
 sun will be like the moon. What will have come to 
 the energy which they have given off? Who can 
 say? This idea of the everlasting potpourri of 
 animate and inanimate life on the earth is an ex- 
 aggerated, if it is not quite a false one. Not only 
 does the conscious ego become extinguished, but the 
 unconscious elements of us suffer very little or 
 nothing of the unending transmigrations (to use the 
 old word) which seem to some minds so horrible. I 
 retain unimpaired my belief in Death. It is the one 
 certainty the one need the one consolation. This 
 is the love of Nature, that the same peace awaits 
 us all.' 
 
 ' Ah ! ' said Randal. ' Now I have the philosophic 
 and metaphysical basis of an aborted poem of yours 
 which I picked up in your studio a few months ago. 
 It was in a little black, glazy notebook on the table
 
 250 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 by the screen. You had only written a few lines, 
 and then given it up ; but one of those lines had the 
 power to haunt me. It was this : " O beautiful and 
 beneficent Death /" ' 
 
 Wilson sat in silence, looking out across the scene 
 at their feet. 
 
 A train, running westward towards the dark-blue, 
 vaporous hills and the setting sun, glided slowly 
 away, throwing up a large white plume of smoke, 
 from the greenery that surrounded the village out 
 into the flat, sun-deep, and open plain. It skirted 
 the rippling curve of the bay, so small an object in 
 that vast natural arena, but so restless, so active, 
 vanquishing time and distance. Presently it would 
 pass into the dark tunnel of the hills, and for the 
 moment the lovely and illusive repose of heaven and 
 earth and sea would lie on all things. The bright 
 yellow blossoms of the broom scarcely shivered. 
 The scent of the pines seemed fainter than when 
 it mounted in the gusts of heat radiated from the 
 earth ; but it was omnipresent. Not a bird's note 
 from the tree-tops. The quiet was complete. No ; 
 one could just hear, far down below, rising and 
 falling, the intermittent sound of a voice singing 
 snatches of a Franco-Italian street-song the driver, 
 perhaps, humming tunes to himself in the fresh 
 pleasure of the growing cool.
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 251 
 
 There was a long silence, and then Randal slowly 
 rose, saying : 
 
 'Well, my friend, if it is in that temper that we 
 set out for our last hunt for happiness, I think that 
 we may be said to carry the game with us. Ah, 
 truly,' he went on, as they turned back and looked 
 once more out eastward across the red-roofed town, 
 the bright islands, the promontories, the foam-fringed 
 bays, and the blue expanse of the Mediterranean 
 ' ah, truly, that is exactly what we get (I had almost 
 said all we get, erring profanely), that guerdon of 
 eternal peace, and you are right to invest it with 
 warm and human attributes. It shows, I say, that 
 you are still on the right side of thirty ; but I, who 
 am only just on the right side of forty, and who (may 
 I say it?) militavi non sine gloria as a praiser of 
 Pantheism and the final repose of the ego, have quite 
 failed to find poetic expression for my later views. 
 You know how utterly dry my spring has run. I 
 have not written a personal poem this decade. I 
 am smitten with impotence. I feel as acutely, or 
 almost as acutely, as ever I did; but why repeat 
 myself? I have lost all interest in my own sensations, 
 and almost all interest in other people's. Only my 
 knowledge of life has kept me from some desperate 
 and insane enthusiasm such as Socialism or Toryism. 
 Often I am in danger of that sombre rage, that sceva
 
 252 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY 
 
 indignatio, against human stupidity and injustice 
 which slowly maddened men of talent so diverse 
 as Swift and Flaubert, as Ruskin and Maupassant. 
 I ought to form a fit disciple for your creed of the 
 beauty and beneficence of Death. But I do not. I 
 remain at heart cold and indifferent. I agree with 
 you entirely as to the facts. I, too, feel the certainty, 
 the need, the consolation ; but death still remains to 
 me a puzzling and disagreeable process, like the 
 unknown manipulations of an unreliable dentist. I 
 hate pain, and I have no confidence in the dexterity 
 of the tooth-extractor. In a word, I am a coward ; 
 and though I have survived all those whom I loved 
 (love in any intensive sense is more impossible to 
 me now than ever it was, so to say) indeed, though I 
 have survived myself, I still live on, and have no de- 
 sire to die. I have had that desire ; but it passed, as 
 most things pass, without becoming chronic. But why 
 do I trouble you with my vain and egoist visions? 
 Once more, forgive an old and worn-out huntsman of 
 the foolish hunt for happiness. I will admit that I wish 
 at times I had been accidentally shot by some one 
 else or by myself. It would have been better for 
 me. Ah, the women I have loved ! the men I have 
 loved ! Ah, beautiful and beneficent Death ! ' 
 
 Looking at his face for a moment, Wilson saw 
 that the eyes were full of tears.
 
 THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS 253 
 
 Randal turned abruptly, and they went stepping 
 slowly down the winding path through the yellow- 
 blossomed broom and among the pine-trees, down 
 to the carriage-road, where the driver still occasionally 
 hummed snatches of his patois street-songs. And as 
 they went, Randal murmured again to himself, but 
 so softly that his friend did not hear him : 
 
 ' O beautiful and beneficent Death ! ' 
 
 Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press
 
 41385