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 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS
 
 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 MEN BOOKS CITIES AR T 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERIC HARRISON 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 I 906 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 Copyright 1906 3y T/^ Macmillan Company
 
 NOTE 
 
 THIS volume v is the reply to frequent appeals to the 
 writer to collect pieces which within the last ten or 
 twenty years have appeared in America and in Reviews 
 and Journals at home. The first was called out 
 by friends in the United States who desired a slight 
 biographical sketch, as it is their custom to expect. 
 It is indeed a chapter from certain Memoirs that 
 the writer intends to retain in manuscript penes se. 
 Various as are the other pieces in subject, and 
 occasional as they were in origin, the author in his old 
 age submits them to his readers as permanent im- 
 pressions left on his mind by a somewhat wide experi- 
 ence. He now arranges in order some reminiscences 
 of the famous men and women he has known, the 
 great books he has studied, the splendid memories of 
 Nature and of Art which he will cherish to the last. 
 He has to thank the courtesy of publishers for per- 
 mission to use pieces which appeared many years ago 
 in America in The Forum, The North American 
 Review, Harper's Magazine ; and at home, in The 
 Fortnightly, Nineteenth Century, and Contemporary 
 Reviews; in The Times, The Dally Chronicle, The 
 Tribune, The Speaker, and some other periodicals. 
 
 HAWK HURST, Oct. 1906.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1. MY MEMORIES. 1837-1890 i 
 
 School Life ....... 5 
 
 Oxford ....... 7 
 
 Education . . . . . . .11 
 
 A Visit to A. Comte . . . -15 
 
 Literary Life . . . . . .16 
 
 Meliorist at last . . . . . .17 
 
 Postscript, 1906 . . . . . 19 
 
 2. THE BURIAL OF TENNYSON. 1892 . . 21 
 
 His Successors . . . . . .24 
 
 His Special Form . . . . .27 
 
 3. THE BURIAL OF RENAN. 1892 ... 30 
 
 4. SIR A. LYALL'S 'TENNYSON.' 1903 . . 33 
 
 5. THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED. 1897 . 50 
 
 6. THE TERCENTENARY OF CROMWELL. 1899 . 58 
 
 7. THE STATUE OF OLIVER CROMWELL. 1899 . 68 
 
 8. THE REMAINS OF OLIVER CROMWELL. 1899 . 76 
 
 9. THE CENTENARY OF GIBBON. 1894 . . 83 
 
 10. THE CARLYLE HOUSE. 1895 .... 97 
 
 11. SCIENTIFIC HISTORY. 1906 .... 104 
 
 vii
 
 viii MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 12. THE NEW MOTLEY. 1896 . . . in 
 
 13. MAINE'S 'ANCIENT LAW' REVISED. 1906 . 118 
 
 14. IMPERIAL MANNERS. 1906 . . . .123 
 
 15. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 1906 . . . .127 
 
 16. ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 1906 .... 132 
 
 17. THACKERAY. 1903 . . . . .137 
 
 18. REMINISCENCES OF GEORGE ELIOT. 1901 . 143 
 
 19. THE COMPLETE RUSKIN. 1906 . . . 161 
 
 20. MAURICE HEWLETT. 1906 . . . .175 
 
 21. IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA. 1901 . . .185 
 
 Chicago . . . . . . .189 
 
 Democracy . . . . , . .193 
 
 The Capitol 201 
 
 Mount Vernon ...... 206 
 
 Problems to be Solved . . . . .209 
 
 22. THE TRUE COSMOPOLIS. 1896 . . .216 
 
 The Renascence . . . ... .220 
 
 Imperialism . . . . . .229 
 
 23. THE REGRETS OF A VETERAN TRAVELLER. 1887 233 
 
 24. THE RIVIERA DI LEVANTE. 1898 . . .250 
 
 Postscript, 1906. . . . . . 259 
 
 25. ECCO LA TOSCANA ! 1904 . . . . 260 
 
 26. A PILGRIMAGE TO LOURDES. 1896 . . 269 
 
 27. L'ESPRIT FRAN^AIS. 1899 .... 276 
 
 28. A WORD FOR ENGLAND. 1898 . . . 277 
 
 29. ON A SCOTCH REPLY. 1898 .... 283 
 
 30. THE SCOTTISH PETITION TO THE QUEEN. 1898 289
 
 CONTENTS ix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 31. IDEAL LONDON. 1898 . . . 295 
 
 Postscript, 1906 . . . .316 
 
 32. Music IN GREAT CITIES. 1898 . . 317 
 
 Postscript, 1906 . . . . . .320 
 
 33. HISTORIC PARIS. 1894 ... . 321 
 
 34. OUR CATHEDRALS. 1895 .... 338 
 
 35. PICTURE EXHIBITIONS. 1888 . . . 345 
 
 36. NUDE STUDIES. 1885 ..... 369 
 
 37. A MORNING IN THE GALLERIES. 1905 . . 376 
 
 38. AT BURLINGTON HOUSE. ANCIENT MASTERS. 1906 391 
 
 39. TOBACCO. 1905 ...... 396 
 
 40. CARD-PLAYING. 1905 . . . . .401 
 
 41. GAME PRESERVING AND BATTUES. 1905 . . 405 
 
 42. *THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH.' AUGUST 1890 . 412 
 
 43. THE JOLLY GIRL. 1882 .... 477 
 
 44. MAN AND THE BRUTES. 1900 . . . 424
 
 MY MEMORIES 
 
 1837-1890 
 
 [The Forum of New York, October 1890, Vol. X., in reply to a 
 request to <write some reminiscences. ~\ 
 
 THOSE of us who are approaching sixty years of 
 age have the good luck, I often think, to bear the 
 memory of a most extraordinary time. We are still 
 young enough, as we fondly flatter ourselves, to hope 
 that we may yet see great changes in the world. 
 And we are old enough to remember what the world 
 was without some of its most familiar institutions, 
 and without what now seem indispensable appliances 
 of life. As a child, I can remember things which are 
 now thought barbarous relics of the past ; and I often 
 wonder how we managed to live without lucifer 
 matches, railways, telegraphs, penny post, or even 
 household suffrage. 
 
 My memory reaches back from 1837 over the 
 whole reign of the Queen, whose fifty-three years of 
 rule have witnessed wonderful things things which 
 have transformed our external life and have deeply 
 modified our inner life. Among my earliest recol- 
 lections is the return home one day of my father with 
 the words, " The King is dead ! " My first definite 
 impression of public life was the coronation of the 
 Queen, of which I witnessed the procession in Palace 
 IE B
 
 2 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Yard at Westminster. There for the first time I 
 began to conceive what living history means ; to 
 think about statesmen, nations, and government. I 
 saw the great Duke and the heroes of Waterloo it 
 was then only three years further off than is Sedan 
 from us now I remember Marshal Soult, and Ester- 
 hazy, and the ambassadors of many kings. There 
 too I first heard the roar of a vast crowd ; and I was 
 told how the Abbey and the Hall at Westminster 
 before me had been the scene of the coronation of 
 a score of kings and queens, and had been built 
 by men who fought in the Crusades and at Crecy 
 and Agincourt. I can recall now, like a series of 
 historical pictures, every separate scene in that long, 
 and to me, a small country child, most wonder-stirring 
 day. 
 
 The American people, spread over an almost bound- 
 less continent, where everything around them is the 
 work of one or two generations, wonder not a little 
 at our slow and old-world English ways. In this 
 small, centralised, densely packed island, we grow up 
 from childhood with the roots of the old order always 
 around us. I was born in the days of rotten boroughs, 
 bribery, and pocket seats ; when noblemen's butlers 
 returned members to Parliament in his lordship's hall. 
 The widow of an M.P. used to frank our letters, and 
 that saved us sometimes eightpence apiece. Omni- 
 buses, cabs, and policemen had just been invented ; but 
 they were still thought new-fangled fads. Post-boys, 
 hackney coaches, and watchmen were still familiar 
 figures of the streets. It was the era of Pickwick. 
 We did without railways. From London to Brighton 
 or to Bath we had to drive ; and if with the same 
 horses, no faster than thirty miles in a day. Ocean 
 steam navigation was an experiment ; our only tele- 
 graph was the wooden semaphore ; there was no fire
 
 MY MEMORIES : 1837-1890 3 
 
 brigade, and our only fire engines were hand pumps ; 
 the water supply came in part from wells ; there were 
 no main sewers, and cesspools existed in great cities. 
 Slavery existed in our colonies and possessions beyond 
 sea, and nearly a million of Negroes were bought and 
 sold in the King's dominions. India was governed by 
 a company of private merchants, who had a monopoly 
 of the trade to China. Men were hanged by the 
 score, and sometimes in chains. Forgery and other 
 felonies were still punishable by death. Southey was 
 our poet laureate, though Scott and Coleridge, 
 Campbell and Lamb, still lived. Landseer and 
 Maclise formed our ideals in art, Bulwer-Lytton was 
 our model in literature, and Count D'Orsay in 
 manners. Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, Mill, 
 Dickens, Thackeray, Darwin, and Gladstone were 
 unknown youths. The memory of the old system 
 was still quite fresh. Many living men could remem- 
 ber Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, and the last 
 war between England and the United States. My 
 own grandfather was born under George II., and 
 my father could remember the victories of Nelson. 
 My mother told anecdotes of Napoleon, which she 
 had from the family of Sir Hudson Lowe, while 
 the Emperor was a prisoner at St. Helena. The 
 brother of Louis XVI. had just ceased to be king of 
 France, and was living at Holyrood, as the ex-King 
 Charles X. Metternich was supreme in Germany, 
 the Czar Nicholas in Russia, and Louis Philippe in 
 France. 
 
 My childhood was thus passed in the great epoch 
 of progress which followed on the break-up of the old 
 absolutism in Europe after 1830. It was also the 
 epoch of the vast material changes which have arisen 
 out of the railway system, ocean steam navigation, the 
 telegraph system and the manifold uses of electricity,
 
 4 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 the cheap postal system, popular literature, the develop- 
 ment of journalism, the enormous expansion of great 
 cities, and the settlement of Australia, South Africa, 
 and of the western continent of America. More 
 especially in England, the period covers the immense 
 succession of reforms which come between the Reform 
 Act of 1832 and the free-trade legislation of 1846. 
 As may be supposed, this series of changes was but 
 dimly understood by a boy. But it gave me a general 
 sense that everything around me was an open question ; 
 that there was no habit of life which we might not 
 expect to see changed. My father, a cautious city 
 man, conservative by instinct and by conviction, shook 
 his head, even while his good sense admitted the 
 improvement. For my part, I liked the new thing ; 
 waited to see what would come next ; and, except that 
 I admired Alcibiades, the Crusaders, and Charles I., had 
 no particular prejudices. Though I lived in a quiet 
 country village, all my real interests were in London, 
 which could be seen across miles of rich open meadows, 
 from the lovely northern hill on which our house 
 stood. A walk from town then would take one into 
 an exquisite rural solitude, unbroken by the roar of 
 the engine, unpolluted by the pall of smoke. My 
 tranquil days were passed in many a leafy copse and 
 sloping glade, beyond which the dome of St. Paul's 
 seemed to hang in the atmosphere of the dim distance, 
 as does that of St. Peter's from the Campagna. In 
 those days it was quite possible to belong to the capital 
 by interest, society, and habits, and yet to dwell in a 
 beautiful country and in a peaceful rural solitude. I 
 have lived to see London increase 150 per cent in 
 population, and 500 per cent in area ; and now I 
 must go forty miles away from it to find the same 
 rustic peace. And, with all our railways, telegraphs, 
 post offices, and newspapers, it is no longer possible to
 
 MY MEMORIES: 1837-1890 5 
 
 dwell in a pure country and yet to belong to a great 
 city. In my boyhood it was. 
 
 SCHOOL LIFE 
 
 At the age of nine I went to reside in London, and 
 for two years was taught in a day school by Joseph 
 King of Maida Hill, the most admirable schoolmaster 
 I have ever known. I began Greek with Homer and 
 Latin with Virgil, the grammars being taught verbally, 
 without books. At the age of eleven I went to King's 
 College School, which I left as second in the school 
 in 1849. My schoolfellows were sons of Charles 
 Dickens, T. Landseer, Richard Lane, Macready, the 
 actor, Lord Westbury, the Chancellor ; afterwards 
 the only son of Edward Irving, and in the sixth form 
 for two years I sat next to Henry Parry Liddon, late 
 Canon of St. Paul's. I was a boy at school when the 
 great movement of 1848 swept over Europe, shook 
 down so many thrones, and opened the era of so many 
 wars of race and of frontier. Cram-full of Livy and 
 Tacitus, Thucydides and Xenophon, Corneille and 
 Schiller, Milton, Byron, and Shelley, at the precise 
 age when youths debate whether despotisms or re- 
 publics are to be preferred, when they write essays on 
 the character of Julius Caesar or Cromwell, compose 
 odes to Liberty and Latin verses on Brutus and 
 Tarquin, we were just ready to be impressed with 
 the tumultuous succession of events which surged 
 across Europe in 1848-49. I delighted to note that 
 Louis Philippe lost his throne on the 24th of February 
 the Rtgifugiumj or day when Rome celebrated the 
 expulsion of her kings. It was a stirring time, when 
 kings, emperors, and popes fled in disguise, when new 
 republics were being proclaimed, when socialism, com-
 
 6 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 munism, and imperialism fought it out in a dozen 
 great cities, when Chartism was thought to be revolu- 
 tionary, and when Bright and Cobden were dangerous 
 demagogues. It was difficult for a youth entering 
 manhood between the years 1848 and 1852 not to be 
 an ardent politician. And, passing my time, as I did, 
 between the whirl of the great city and the studies 
 of the university, I took a lively interest in all the 
 political and social events of that era. I do not 
 remember that I fell into precise party lines or that 
 I formed dogmatic opinions. We were all too full 
 of political theories and classical examples to be mere 
 Tories, Whigs, and Radicals. And we were too 
 much impressed by the burning questions which arose 
 day by day to be satisfied with any abstract politics. 
 London and Oxford corrected each other. Plato and 
 Lord Palmerston taught very different codes of politics. 
 We were interested by both, and by a thousand new 
 events which neither of these masters seemed able to 
 explain. Like most of my companions, I came to 
 the conclusion that society in the middle of the nine- 
 teenth century was an extraordinarily complex thing 
 a thing of intense interest and of profound meaning. 
 Gradually I settled into a deep, lasting, and passionate 
 sympathy with the popular cause everywhere and in 
 all forms. Having no hereditary or acquired prejudices 
 in favour of any class or of any special type of society, 
 I slowly parted with my boyish liking for conquerors, 
 cavaliers, and princesses in distress, and took my side 
 with the cause of oppressed nations and the struggling 
 people. I had seen the Chartist movement in London 
 and had heard great debates in Parliament, and I 
 became a convinced free trader and an ardent nationalist. 
 Aurelio Saffi, the friend of Mazzini and one of his 
 colleagues in the Triumvirate at Rome in 1849, 
 settled at Oxford, and he became my teacher in
 
 MY MEMORIES : 1837-1890 7 
 
 Italian and my close friend. He introduced me to 
 other Italian exiles ; and from them and from Francis 
 Newman, whom I knew later, I received a deep 
 interest in the cause of nations struggling to be free. 
 At the same time I read much French, and knew 
 France and Frenchmen. As a schoolboy, three times 
 I passed my autumn in France ; once, in a French 
 family in Normandy, connected with my own. While 
 living among them, I saw every phase of French 
 provincial life as described by Balzac in the 'forties. 
 This commenced my close familiarity with France, 
 which for forty years I have visited almost without 
 the interruption of a single year. I was three times in 
 France during the reign of Louis Philippe, and again 
 during the second republic, just before the coup d'etat 
 of 1851. The atrocities of that time and the infamies 
 of the empire of 1852 stirred me to the soul. By the 
 time I was twenty-five, I had seen most of the principal 
 cities of France, Germany, and Northern Italy ; I 
 had some knowledge of the language, circumstances, 
 and recent history of all of these countries ; I was a 
 republican by conviction, had a deep enthusiasm for 
 the popular cause throughout Europe, and was inclined 
 to the socialist solution of the great class question. 
 
 OXFORD 
 
 I went up to Oxford from school in 1849 > at a 
 time when the great controversy in theology, which 
 shook the Church and led to the conversion of 
 Cardinal Newman, Cardinal Manning, and many 
 others, was passing into a new phase. Liberalism 
 was in the ascendant, and the dominant type of 
 thought presented to me was Positive rather than 
 Catholic. J. Stuart Mill, George Grote, Arnold and
 
 8 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 his historical school, Carlyle and his political school, 
 Comte and his Positive school, were the influences 
 under which my mind was formed. I was still a 
 student when Kingsley published Alton Locke and 
 Yeast, Ruskin his Modern Painters and Seven Lamps 
 of Architecture, and F. Denison Maurice his Theo- 
 logical Essays. The minds of raw youths are influenced 
 first, not by the great masters of thought, but by the 
 masters of expression and of pathos. I spent six years 
 at Oxford as student, fellow, and tutor. And besides 
 the regular curriculum of the ancient and modern 
 historians and philosophers, I became saturated with 
 Mill's Logic and Political Economy, Grote's History of 
 Greece, the works of Carlyle, the earlier pieces of 
 Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and Miss Martineau, the 
 English classical historians, and Guizot, Michelet, 
 Mazzini, and Quinet. Comte I knew only through 
 G. Lewes, Littre, and Harriet Martineau. 
 
 At the same time I read not a little theology, 
 both orthodox and unorthodox. Cardinal Newman's 
 Parish Sermons, Keble's Christian Tear, Jeremy 
 Taylor, Bishop Butler, Dante, Paradise Lost, and 
 the Bible, were my constant reading, along with 
 Robertson of Brighton, F. D. Maurice, Francis New- 
 man, Theodore Parker, Strauss, Lewes, and the two 
 Martineaus. John Henry Newman, the cardinal, and 
 Francis Newman, the theist, interested me almost 
 equally ; Lewes's History of Philosophy and the Lives 
 of the Saints occupied me alternately ; I hardly ever 
 missed a university sermon or a number of the West- 
 minster Review. Whilst at Oxford, with science and 
 metaphysics I took no serious pains, though I tried 
 to make out what they came to in the end. But 
 almost every phase of theology, every age in history, 
 and every scheme of social and political philosophy, 
 supplied me with matter for thought, and in turn
 
 MY MEMORIES : 1837-1890 9 
 
 commanded my sympathy. I imagine that is a very 
 common form of the Oxford mind, at least it was so 
 in the 'fifties. And if I took the complaint in any 
 unusual mode, it was simply in this that I saw a 
 good deal to respect in all of these different views of 
 the "great problem." 
 
 I was brought up as a High Churchman, my god- 
 father being an intimate ally of Henry Phillpotts, 
 Bishop of Exeter, and he took care to give me a 
 thorough training in orthodox divinity. At school 
 I had been something of a Neo-Catholic, and took 
 the sacrament with a leaning toward transubstantiation. 
 As a student at college, I slowly came to regard the 
 entire scheme of theology as an open question ; and I 
 ultimately left the university, about the age of twenty- 
 four, without assured belief in any form of supernatural 
 doctrine. But as the supernatural died out of my 
 view, the natural took its place, and amply covered 
 the same ground. The change was so gradual, and 
 the growth of one phase of thought out of another 
 was with me so perfectly regular, that I have never 
 been able to fix any definite period of change, nor 
 indeed have I ever been conscious of any real change 
 of mind at all. I have never known any abrupt break 
 in mental attitude ; nor have I ever felt change of 
 belief to involve moral deterioration, loss of peace, or 
 storms of the soul. I never parted with any belief 
 till I had found its complement ; nor did I ever look 
 back with antipathy or contempt on the beliefs which 
 I had outgrown. That which was objective law to 
 me as a youth, has become subjective duty to me as a 
 man. I have found theology to be a fine moral training, 
 when it ceased to be an external dogma. I have at 
 no time of my life lost faith in a supreme Providence, 
 in an immortal soul, and in spiritual life ; but I came 
 to find these much nearer to me on earth than I had
 
 io MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 imagined, much more real, more vivid, and more 
 practical. Superhuman hopes and ecstasies have slowly 
 taken form in my mind as practical duties and indomit- 
 able convictions of a good that is to be. Theology, 
 with its religious machinery and its spiritual consola- 
 tions, has gained a fresh meaning to me, now that I 
 look on it as a mode of moral evolution and not as 
 historical reality. I read the Bible, my Christian 
 mystics and poets still, and with greater pleasure and 
 deeper insight than I did when I was told to believe 
 in thirty-nine articles and to repeat the three creeds 
 and the catechism. 
 
 Happily, both at school and at college, we were 
 left pretty free to learn what we pleased (so that we 
 did really learn), and to cultivate our minds as thinking 
 beings and not as machines. Our teachers succeeded 
 in instilling into our minds a zeal for work and a 
 passion for self-improvement. But neither at school 
 nor at college were we ever put through the mill. I 
 read the classics with delight, so as to enjoy them for 
 themselves, without ever grinding them up into verbal 
 exercises. In history, I believe I had from Richard 
 Congreve the very best of teaching ; for which I am 
 ever grateful. And in philosophy, we were taught to 
 use our own common sense, and not to repeat tags of 
 windy systems. I managed to satisfy my tutors ; but 
 they taught me to read for my mind's sake, and not 
 for the sake of " the schools." I always felt complete 
 indifference to prize-winning in all its forms, and I 
 was happy enough not to be pressed into that silly 
 waste of time by parents, tutors, or friends. I read 
 what I enjoyed, and I enjoyed what I read. Poetry, 
 art, history, politics, and religion gave us unfailing 
 matter for thought and interminable topics of debate. 
 Both at school and at college we passed much of our 
 time like the Athenians in the days of Paul, but I do
 
 MY MEMORIES: 1837-1890 n 
 
 not think it was time ill spent. In my experience, 
 these discussions turned most often on questions of 
 religion, though those of politics, especially of the inter- 
 national order, were nearly as constant. Over social 
 problems we ranged freely, without forming systematic 
 doctrines and without crystallising into any prejudice. 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 I have now an experience of some forty years as 
 student, teacher, and examiner ; and it forces on me 
 a profound conviction that our modern education is 
 hardening into a narrow and debasing mill. Educa- 
 tion is over-driven, over-systematised, monotonous, 
 mechanical. At school and at college, lads and girls 
 are being drilled like German recruits forced into a 
 regulation style of learning, of thinking, and even of 
 writing. They all think the same thing, and it is 
 artificial in all. The round of endless examination 
 reduces education to a professional " cram," where the 
 repetition of given formulas passes for knowledge, and 
 where the accurate memory of some teacher's " tips " 
 takes the place of thought. Education ought to be 
 the art of using the mind and of arranging knowledge ; 
 it is becoming the art of swallowing pellets of special 
 information. The professor mashes up a kind of 
 mental " pemmican," which he rams into the learner's 
 gullet. When the pupil vomits up these pellets, it 
 is called "passing his examination with honours." 
 Teachers and pupils cease to think, to learn, to enjoy, 
 to feel. They become cogs in a huge revolving mill- 
 wheel, which never ceases to grind, and yet never 
 grinds out anything but the dust of chaff. The 
 academic mill, which runs now at high pressure, like 
 a Cunard liner racing home, seldom forms a fresh
 
 12 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 mind. From this curse of modern pedantry, my 
 companions and I were happily saved by the influence 
 of Richard Congreve. 
 
 For the first thirty years or my life I was essentially 
 a learner, but only in part a student of books. Never 
 having been a great reader, and not having acquired 
 the passion of pure study, I cared mainly for men, 
 things, places, and people. As a student, and then a 
 barrister of Lincoln's Inn, I read quite as much history 
 and philosophy as law ; and I tried to correct my 
 defective training in science by following the lectures 
 of Owen, Huxley, Tyndall, Liveing, and others, with 
 the proper text-books and studies in the Museums. In 
 these days we must give ourselves up either to literature 
 or to practical life, if we wish to succeed, and perhaps 
 if we wish to be useful. But I have never been able to 
 give up problems of religion and philosophy for politics, 
 nor yet to drop interest in politics for the sake of 
 books. My interests have always led me to study 
 movements on the spot, and from the lips of those 
 who originate them. In this spirit I have sought to 
 understand the various social and labour questions by 
 personal intercourse with practical men. For some 
 years I worked as a teacher in the Working Men's 
 College, under F. Denison Maurice, along with Tom 
 Hughes and his colleagues. For three years I served 
 on the Trades Union Commission, and then was 
 Secretary to the Digest Commission. I have thus 
 been in close relations with all the leading workmen 
 and with the leading economists of recent times. I 
 have known intimately the principal leaders of the 
 trades unions, of all the labour leagues, and of all the 
 social and co-operative movements of the last thirty 
 years. I have followed up the history of the trade 
 questions and of the labour societies in London and in 
 many provincial and foreign towns. I have attended
 
 MY MEMORIES: 1837-1890 13 
 
 trades -union, co-operative, industrial, international, 
 and socialist congresses, both in England and abroad ; 
 and have visited conferences, committees, and meetings 
 in all parts of the country. A thousand blue-books 
 and treatises on economics would not have taught me 
 what I learned from the Rochdale Pioneers, from 
 trades-union congresses, from strike or union com- 
 mittees, from international congresses, and from men 
 like George Odgers, Allen, Burnett, Applegarth, 
 Howell, Holyoake, Arch, and Burns. Economists 
 who lay down the law on industrial problems, without 
 personal knowledge of a single workman or of a single 
 fact in a workman's life, are like the philosophers in 
 Laputa extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. No 
 political economy is worth a cent if it is not based on 
 personal knowledge ; it is not merely the " dismal 
 science," but it is the pedants' science. 
 
 In the same way, I have always tried to make out 
 political problems by personal intercourse with those 
 who led them. The franchise question, the industrial 
 question, the American civil war, and Home Rule, 
 are not to be understood from newspapers and reports. 
 I went to Italy after the campaign of 1859, at the 
 crisis of the foundation of the Italian kingdom, and 
 had conversations with Mazzini, Garibaldi, Minghetti, 
 Saffi, Poerio, Farini, Pepoli, and many of the men 
 who governed Italy in 1859 and who made the 
 northern kingdom. In the same way, I followed up 
 the history of the third republic in France and the 
 communal insurrection of 1871. I have had conver- 
 sations with Gambetta, with his lieutenants, and with 
 the leaders of many socialist and republican parties. 
 During the great struggle which established the 
 republic in 1877-78, I journeyed through all parts of 
 France, and saw the political leaders of each district. 
 The movements of Germany and of the United States
 
 14 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 I have never had the opportunity to study on the spot ; 
 and I am conscious of the enormous difference between 
 reading newspapers and seeing men. To hunt up 
 and to " interview " men of note is a silly and odious 
 habit of our day. But no study and no books can 
 supply the place of personal intercourse with those 
 who know and those who lead. I am sure whole 
 libraries would not give me what I have gained in 
 converse with Gambetta, Mazzini, Renan, Michelet, 
 Louis Blanc, Tourgenieff, F. Newman, G. H. Lewes, 
 John Bright, J. Stuart Mill, Carlyle, G. Eliot, 
 Ruskin, Cardinal Manning, John Dillon, John Burns, 
 Spencer, Comte, John Morley, and Gladstone. 
 
 On questions political, industrial, and international, 
 I have often addressed the public ; but I have always 
 declined to enter politics as a profession. My business 
 always seemed to me to endeavour to teach. Com- 
 promise is the soul of politics, and personally I loathe 
 compromise. The statesman's duty is to reckon with 
 the opinions of the majority ; and personally I feel 
 scanty respect for the majority, and I cannot bring 
 myself to profess it. For five-and-twenty years my 
 essential business has been to teach the principles of 
 Positivism. Every other aim or occupation has been 
 subsidiary and instrumental to this. The field is large 
 enough for a lifetime ; and it is one which makes 
 impossible any career whatever, either literary, political, 
 practical, or social. I have enlarged to the public on 
 Positivism usque ad nauseam^ and I will not return to 
 it now. To one point only would I refer the pro- 
 longed study and the gradual stages by which I came 
 to adopt it.
 
 MY MEMORIES: 1837-1890 15 
 
 A VISIT TO A. COMTE 
 
 I was quite thirty-five before I fully absorbed the 
 Positive system. I had been a systematic student of 
 it for ten or twelve years before. Comte's system was 
 known to me as an undergraduate, but it was not 
 completely published until I was twenty-five. Before 
 that, I had paid him a visit in Paris, and had had a 
 long and memorable conversation with him. My 
 college tutor, Richard Congreve, a pupil of Dr. Arnold 
 of Rugby, afterward became the first preacher of 
 Positivism in England ; and several of my intimate 
 college friends are now my colleagues at Newton Hall. 
 But none of us adopted Positivism until after we had 
 left Oxford. For my part, the acceptance of the 
 general principles of Auguste Comte has been the 
 result of very long and unremitting study, and it 
 proceeded by a series of marked stages. First his 
 view of history commanded my assent ; then his 
 scheme of education ; next his social Utopia ; then 
 the politics ; after that his general view of philosophy ; 
 and finally the religious scheme in its main features. 
 During the whole of the process, up to the last point, 
 I reserved large portions of the system, to which I felt 
 actual repugnance, or at least confirmed doubt. And 
 during the various stages I kept up lively interest, and 
 no little sympathy, with many kindred, rival, and even 
 antagonistic systems, philosophical and religious. Even 
 now I am regarded by some Comtists pur sang as a 
 profane amateur, a schismatic, and a Gallio. And 
 while cynics outside accuse me of fanaticism, some of 
 my fellow-believers suspect me of heresy.
 
 16 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 LITERARY LIFE 
 
 I hope that I am not expected to say anything 
 about literary methods, habits, or theories. I no more 
 pretend to be a man of letters than I pretend to be a 
 politician. I have even less of the man of letters 
 about me than of the politician. In matters literary, I 
 have but one advice to give. Keep out of literature, 
 at least till you feel ready to burst. Never write a 
 line except out of a sense of duty, or with any other 
 object save that of getting it off your mind. About 
 literature I have nothing to say. I have always felt 
 myself more or less of an amateur. Nor do I remem- 
 ber to have wasted an hour in thinking about style, or 
 about conditions of literary success. As I have sought 
 to teach many things, and have fought hard for many 
 opinions, I have tried to put what I had to say as well 
 as I could. But as I have always some practical 
 object in view, my eagerness keeps me from spending 
 thought over the mode of saying it. Mark Pattison, 
 of Oxford, used to say to a pupil who happens to be 
 now both a brilliant writer and a leading statesman : 
 " My good friend, you are not the stuff of which men 
 of letters are made. You want to make people do 
 something, or you want to teach something ; that is 
 fatal to pure literature." I am afraid that 1 have a 
 dash of the same vice, and something of the Jacobin 
 within me murmurs that " the Republic has no need 
 of men of letters." Once or twice in my life I have 
 taken up the pen in a vein of literary exercise 
 I began this very paper in that mood as a man turns 
 to a game of billiards or to gardening after his day's 
 work. But the demon soon rises, and I find myself 
 in earnest trying to bring men over to our side. It 
 is hopeless to make a man of letters out of a temper
 
 MY MEMORIES : 1837-1890 17 
 
 like that. Literature is art, and the artist should never 
 preach. 
 
 It was lucky for me that I recognised this defect 
 at once ; for the critics have made a dead set at 
 Positivism, and to be known as its advocate is to be 
 turned into the literary world like a dog suspected of 
 rabies. All my formal Positivist teaching is neces- 
 sarily gratuitous ; and as I have had to print and to 
 circulate most of my pieces at my own cost, I have 
 long found literature not so much a profession as an 
 expensive taste. I was nearly thirty before I published 
 anything at all. My first article happened to be on 
 " Essays and Reviews," and I was not so foolish as to 
 attribute the interest it aroused to anything beyond the 
 accident of the subject and the circumstances of the 
 time. I did not pursue literature as a calling. For 
 ten years I occasionally entered into discussions on 
 political, industrial, or philosophical questions, but I 
 did not use my pen professionally. My profession 
 was the law, the practice of which I followed for some 
 fifteen years without great zest and without any 
 ambition. I afterward taught jurisprudence as pro- 
 fessor ; and, having inherited a modest fortune, which 
 I have had no desire to increase, I eventually 
 withdrew to my present occupation of urging on 
 my neighbours opinions which meet, I must admit, 
 with but moderate acceptance. 
 
 MELIORIST AT LAST 
 
 Here ends my confession, which I am told my 
 American readers wish me to make. As they know 
 nothing about me but my name, they have a right to 
 ask me how I came by the bundle of opinions with 
 which I am credited. I have no objection to tell 
 
 c
 
 1 8 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 them, though one cannot do so without an abominable 
 dose of talking about one's self. As I look back over 
 my life, which, though not yet a long one, has been 
 passed in a very critical time, I am struck with this 
 the essential persistence of the social organism in the 
 midst of universal change. Every aspect and appliance 
 of practical life has been transformed within my own 
 memory ; and yet, in all its essential conditions, human 
 life remains the same. Railways, telegraphs, the post, 
 journalism, steamships, electricity, the doubling of the 
 population, and the shrinking of the planet, do not 
 really change society. My children live much as I 
 did fifty years ago. And all these revolutions in the 
 material world but slightly affect the moral and the 
 mental world. On the other hand, the greatest 
 empires, the most rooted institutions, the oldest pre- 
 judices, the most sacred beliefs, crumble almost without 
 warning ; and what was a wild paradox yesterday is a 
 harmless truism to-morrow. I have seen the downfall 
 of so many habits, ideas, laws, and systems of thought, 
 that I can imagine no reform and no new dispensation 
 as beyond our reasonable hope. And yet again, amidst 
 endless, rapid, universal change, I find that the vital 
 essence of things remains. Creeds die ; but not the 
 spiritual life they nourished. Societies suffer revolu- 
 tion ; but the living elements do not greatly vary. 
 Our knowledge enlarges, our formulas change, our 
 methods grow ; but everywhere it is growth, not 
 destruction. What I have witnessed is not really 
 revolution ; it is normal evolution. The cells and 
 germs are forever in perpetual movement. The 
 organism Humanity remains, and lives the life of 
 unbroken sequence.
 
 MY MEMORIES : 1837-1890 19 
 
 POSTSCRIPT, 1906 
 
 The sixteen years that have passed since I set down 
 my experiences for an American public have witnessed 
 memorable changes in our own land and in the world 
 a new reign, many obstinate wars, the recasting 
 of international relations, the new East, the transfor- 
 mation of Russia, the filling up the vacant parts of 
 our planet, the growth of Democracy, and Socialism, 
 and an enormous expansion of Wealth, Trade, and 
 Mechanical inventions. But I see no cause to vary 
 the language with which I closed the foregoing paper. 
 It is still evolution, not social revolution. Dogmas 
 are continually melting away, but the essentials of 
 religious feeling remain healthy and active. And in 
 spite of the appalling bloodshed of some recent wars 
 and the delirious multiplication of armaments, there 
 may be heard deep down in the murmurs of the masses 
 and in the aspirations of the wise, a heart-felt yearning 
 for peace and international friendship. 
 
 As for myself, I am not conscious of having 
 seriously altered my convictions or my habits. It is a 
 curious accident that I can distinctly recall all the 
 leading events and nearly all the famous persons of the 
 sixty-four years of the reign of Queen Victoria, and 
 have witnessed all the State ceremonies from her 
 Coronation to her Burial, as well as the public funerals 
 of the men illustrious in politics, literature, and art. 
 Visits from time to time to Paris, Rome, Berlin, Hol- 
 land, and the United States, and again to Athens, 
 Constantinople, and Egypt, enabled me to enlarge my 
 understanding of public affairs, and to see something 
 of those who administer them. Four years spent at 
 the London County Council gave me some inkling of 
 the difficulties of municipal business. After a service
 
 20 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 of twenty-five years I resigned my tasks as President 
 of the English Positivist Committee, and, being now 
 in my seventy-fifth year, I have for some years past 
 withdrawn from London and live in a quiet country, 
 occupied with my books, my garden, and in stringing 
 together the loose ends of a rather scattered activity. 
 
 I can hardly now claim that detachment from letters, 
 which was true enough in 1890. Since then, having 
 quitted the legal profession, I have published a variety 
 of books, and have even committed myself to what my 
 friends tell me is the senile weakness of a romance and 
 then a tragedy. The habit of writing, like other 
 indulgences, is apt to grow upon one ; and, as I 
 gradually withdrew from active affairs, I did not resist 
 the temptation to give form to occasional thoughts, 
 memories, and fancies. Some few of these I now offer 
 for a leisure hour to the general reader. 
 
 HAWKHURST, 1906.
 
 THE BURIAL OF TENNYSON 
 
 1892 
 
 As the throng which gathered to the funeral of our 
 great poet slowly melted away from the Abbey, the 
 same thought was borne in upon many of us Have 
 we then no poet left in England ? The passing away 
 of a great figure which for two generations has filled 
 the mind and speech of men is always wont to leave 
 this impression of a void. Forty years ago, when 
 Wellington was laid beside Nelson in St. Paul's, 
 Tennyson groaned out : " The last great Englishman 
 is low." And as we left the Laureate alone with his 
 peers in Poets' Corner, there rose to a hundred lips the 
 murmur : " The last English poet is gone ! " It was 
 a natural feeling, an unthinking impulse ; perhaps a 
 blind mistake. 
 
 It is inevitable that we should seek at times like 
 this to compare, to judge, to anticipate the verdict of 
 our posterity. But the impulse should be resisted : it 
 is futile and worse than useless. We are far too near 
 to judge Tennyson truly or even to decide if he has 
 left a successor. The permanent place of a poet 
 depends on his one or two, three or four, grandest 
 bursts, and his inferior work is forgotten. So too the 
 poetry which startles and delights its immediate genera- 
 tion is almost always much weaker than the poetry
 
 22 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 which mellows like wine as generations succeed. It 
 needed for Dante five entire centuries before his real 
 greatness was admitted ; it needed two centuries for 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 It would be strange if English poetry were to close 
 its glorious roll with the name of Tennyson. For 
 three hundred years now our race has never failed to 
 find a fine poet " to stand before the Lord." Shake- 
 speare had done immortal things while Spenser still 
 lived. Ben Jonson survived until the early lyrics of 
 Milton. Dryden was in full career when Paradise 
 Lost was published, and when Dryden died Pope was 
 already "lisping in numbers." Pope survived till 
 Gray was a poet and Cowper a youth ; and with 
 Burns, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, 
 the list comes down to the poet whom we have just 
 buried. In these three centuries, from the Faery 
 Shteen until to-day, the only gap is for the ten years 
 which separate the Rape of the Lock from the death of 
 Dryden. But at Spenser's death, who really knew 
 what Shakespeare was, and at that of Byron and 
 Shelley, who thought of Tennyson as their successor ? 
 
 They who were present at the burial in the Abbey 
 had opened to them, as in a vision, some glimpse down 
 into the depths of the poetry, the persistence, and 
 solemnity of English life into that deep under-current 
 which flows far below our gross and common every- 
 day life. What a flood of memories from ancient 
 history, what a halo of heroism, art, and devotion, 
 consecrate that spot ! A church built in the age of 
 the Crusades, with foundations and memorials, tombs 
 and crypts, that go back to the Saxon kings, in the 
 history of which Agincourt, the Civil Wars, the Re- 
 formation, and the Commonwealth are mere episodes, 
 and wherein even three centuries of a long succession 
 of poets form but the later chapters such a building
 
 THE BURIAL OF TENNYSON 23 
 
 seems to hold the very heart of the English people. 
 Statesmen, artists, churchmen, poets, men of science 
 and men of business, all schools, creeds, and interests, 
 came that day together ; sect, party, and rivalry ceased 
 to divide men all were Englishmen come to do 
 honour to their poet. There was no parade, no 
 eloquence, nothing of unusual show ; no trumpets, 
 helmet, or plume, no " guard of honour " or officials 
 in uniform or robes ; there was no concourse of 
 elaborate music or feats of epideictic oratory. It was 
 the daily service of the Abbey choir, the ordinary 
 burial, with no feature of it uncommon, except the 
 great Union Jack spread out upon the coffin. Not a 
 word was spoken outside the Prayer-Book ; nothing 
 was done which is not done every day when honoured 
 men are buried. Merely this that the vast cathedral 
 and the square in which it stands were filled with silent 
 and eager masses, that around the coffin were gathered 
 men of every type of activity and thought which 
 England holds, that the whole English-speaking race 
 was represented and was deeply stirred. 
 
 In the whole world there is nothing left which in 
 continuity and poetry of association can be put beside 
 a burial in our Abbey. It is doubtful if anything 
 recorded in history ever matched it altogether in the 
 volume and beauty of its impressiveness, or ever before 
 so mysteriously blended the sense of antiquity with the 
 sense of life. For there is nothing artificial, nothing 
 of mere antiquarianism, in the Englishman's love for 
 the Abbey and its sacred dust. The common seaman 
 in Nelson's fleets felt it ; the American citizen feels 
 it more intensely often than the Londoner ; they feel 
 it in their hearts at home in Africa and in Australasia ; 
 to the whole English-speaking people the associations 
 of the Abbey are both profoundly historic and vividly 
 modern. The Abbey suggests to us all three things
 
 24 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 in equal force : the Past, Poetry, Living Work. That 
 is the true strength of England, which to the German 
 is a metaphysical enigma and to the Frenchman seems 
 an amazing paradox that below our eternal money- 
 grabbing and vulgar routine there is a sense among us 
 that the Past and the Future are really one, and that 
 we must be the link between the two. That makes 
 the most material and most conventional of European 
 nations at bottom the most capable of great poetry. 
 
 His SUCCESSORS 
 
 So let. us not despair of one day finding a poet 
 worthy to carry on the torch. It is plain that no one 
 is yet acknowledged as the real equal of Tennyson. 
 But we may have such a one among us even now. 
 Although for three centuries the succession of English 
 poets has never failed, there have been some brief 
 periods when the most discerning eye must have failed 
 to recognise the man. When Dryden died there 
 must have been searchings of heart until the star of 
 Pope rose above the horizon. And when Byron died 
 young, like Keats and Shelley before him, and Cole- 
 ridge, the poet, had long subsided into interminable 
 monologues, neither Campbell, nor Scott, nor Southey, 
 nor even Wordsworth, could be said to hold the poetic 
 field. Wordsworth's, indeed, is a very striking case. 
 His general reputation as a poet was hardly established 
 till more than forty years after his first poems were 
 published, and he was more than seventy before he 
 received any public honour. And it may well be that 
 we are all blind now, and that a new Tennyson, 
 another Shelley or Milton, is in our midst, did we only 
 know it. There is an element of hope perhaps in 
 numbers. The English-speaking race is to-day quite
 
 THE BURIAL OF TENNYSON 25 
 
 three times as numerous as it was at the death of Byron, 
 twelve times as numerous as it was at the death of 
 Dry den, and those who can and who do write verses 
 may be forty or fifty times as many. So the field is 
 vastly larger. 
 
 But, alas ! in poetry numbers count for much 
 less than in elections and other practical affairs. 
 Indeed, in poetry, numbers and genius seem almost 
 to stand in inverse ratios. When Shakespeare pro- 
 duced his plays, there were certainly not half a 
 million persons living who could write pure English ; 
 and when the Iliad was first chanted at a festival, 
 there was no man living who could write his name. 
 There are now at least sixty millions who can write 
 our language, and of these some millions, we may 
 be sure, in public or in secret, compose lines that 
 they fondly believe to be verse. What ! not one 
 prime poet in some million of versifiers ? We do 
 not see him yet ! Neither Tennyson, Hugo, Heine, 
 nor Longfellow has left any recognised equal and 
 successor. 
 
 The strange part of it is that there never was an 
 age when so great a quantity of very excellent verse 
 was produced as in our own. There can be no doubt 
 about it. We have to-day scores of elegant poets and 
 hundreds of volumes of really graceful verse. Of edu- 
 cated men and women, at least one in three could turn 
 out a passable lyric or so, far better than the stuff 
 published as poetry in the age of Pope, or Johnson, or 
 Southey. There are not so many true poets, perhaps, 
 as there were in the lifetime of Spenser and of Shake- 
 speare. But it may be truly said that at no period in 
 the long history of English poetry has it been so free 
 from affectation, mannerism, false taste, and conven- 
 tional commonplace. Since verse began there has 
 never been so high, so pure a level of third-rate verse.
 
 26 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 There are a dozen writers whose exquisite technique 
 makes that of Dryden or Byron look quite careless 
 and that of Pope monotonous, and there are at least 
 a hundred writers who far surpass the imitators of 
 Dryden, Pope, or Byron. 
 
 That perhaps is the ominous side of our high 
 poetic standard. If out of such a mass of graceful 
 verse we find no really great poetry, it would look as 
 if there were something amiss. Can it be that we all 
 think too much of this graceful form that so many 
 can reach ? Is it that we are all, writers and readers 
 alike, under the glamour of a style which is not the 
 less a " fashion " by being subtly harmonious and 
 severely subdued ? As the poet said, " All can raise 
 the flower now, for all have got the seed." Poetry is 
 raised too much now from another's seed, from a 
 single seed, from what is indeed a highly specialised 
 seed. And poetry mayhap has begun to suffer from 
 the maladies which follow upon "breeding in-and-in ": 
 rickety bones, transparent and etiolated skins, ex- 
 quisitely refined impotence. Neither readers nor 
 writers intend it or even know it, but we are all 
 looking for echoes of the Idylls or In Memoriam : it 
 becomes our test and standard ; the poet is afraid to 
 let himself go, lest he be thought Byronic and im- 
 patient of the " slow mechanic exercise " which not 
 only sootheth pain but produces poetry. No age that 
 ever fell under the spell of a style knew it at the time. 
 Their contemporaries could not hear the eternal jingle 
 in the papistic couplet when Pope's imitators produced 
 volumes. People who listened to songs " in the 
 manner of Tom Moore " were deaf to the doggerel of 
 the words. Dryden in his day was the ruin of the 
 poetasters who tried to catch his swing. So was Pope 
 the ruin of his followers : they caught his measured 
 cadence ; they could not catch his wit, his sparkle,
 
 THE BURIAL OF TENNYSON 27 
 
 and his sense. Dr. Johnson latinised the English 
 language for a whole generation. And perhaps the 
 perfections of Tennyson's art are among the causes 
 that we have no perfect poetry. 
 
 His SPECIAL FORM 
 
 Perfection of form is often, nay, is usually, a snare 
 to its own generation. Raffaelle ruined " the school 
 of Raffaelle," and so did Guido ruin the school of 
 Guido. Intense attention to form, especially to a 
 form which is capable of a high degree of imitation, 
 too often leads to insipidity. How common now 
 in the scholastic world is the art of elegant Latin 
 verse ! Our schools and colleges can show thou- 
 sands of "copies" of faultless elegiacs and sonorous 
 hexameters, with fewer flaws than you might pick in 
 Statius and Claudian. But how dull, how lifeless, how 
 artificial are these prize compositions if we read them 
 as poetry ! Faultless, yes ; but we wish the author 
 would now and then break loose into a solecism, and 
 but for ten lines forget Ovid and Virgil. Much of 
 our very graceful, very thoughtful, very virginal 
 poetry is little but " exercises " in English verse 
 composition to the tune, not of Ovid's Tristia^ but of 
 In Memoriam. 
 
 Now, the exquisite jewelry of Tennyson's method, 
 subtle as it is, is imitable up to a certain point, just as 
 Virgil's hexameter is imitable up to a certain point, 
 and for the same reason. Both are the poetry of 
 intense culture, inspired by the worship of form. I 
 take a stanza typical of this art a stanza not sur- 
 passed in melody by any poetry of this century a 
 stanza which is wonderfully prophetic of the poet 
 himself and his enduring influence :
 
 28 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 His memory long will live alone 
 In all our hearts, as mournful light 
 
 That broods above the fallen sun 
 And dwells in heaven half the night. 
 
 That is simply perfect : a noble thought, an exquisite 
 simile, a true and splendid analogy between Nature and 
 Man, the simplicity as of marble, and a music which 
 Shelley only has equalled. Yet it is imitable up to a 
 measure : we can analyse the music, we can mark the 
 gliding labials, the pathetic cadence in the " mournful 
 light " and " dwells in heaven," the largo in " broods 
 above." It is beautiful, but it is imitable, as Milton 
 and Shakespeare are not imitable. Take Milton's 
 
 He must not float upon his watery bier 
 Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, 
 Without the meed of some melodious tear. 
 
 Or again, " that last infirmity of noble mind," or 
 " Laughter holding both his sides," or " thy rapt soul 
 sitting in thine eyes." When Shakespeare says " the 
 multitudinous seas incarnadine," or 
 
 We are such stuff 
 
 As dreams are made on, and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep : 
 
 this is not imitable. Both thought and phrase are 
 incalculable. No other brain could imagine them ; 
 once heard they are indelible, unalterable, unapproach- 
 able. It is not the music which rivets our attention 
 first, but the thought. The form matches the idea, 
 but the idea transcends the form. Poetic form, we 
 are often told, must be "inevitable." True, most 
 true. But poetic thought also must be incalculable. 
 For this reason the greatest poets who clothed incalcu- 
 lable thought in inevitable perfection of form Milton, 
 Shakespeare, Dante, ^Eschylus, Homer never misled
 
 THE BURIAL OF TENNYSON 29 
 
 their generation into imitation, never founded " a 
 school." We shall have a poet worthy to succeed 
 Tennyson when we no longer have Tennyson on the 
 brain : when we are all less absorbed in the technical 
 mastery of the instrument, and are intent on the great 
 human message which the instrument merely trans- 
 mutes into music.
 
 THE BURIAL OF RENAN 
 
 IT was passing strange that France should lose her 
 greatest writer of prose within a few days of the blow 
 by which England lost her greatest writer in verse. 
 And some friends of both were present at the funeral 
 in the Pantheon and in the Abbey. It was an eloquent 
 contrast, suggestive of profound differences in our 
 national idiosyncrasies and condition. The burial of 
 Renan was a great ceremony of state, with military 
 and official pomp, academic and bureaucratic dignity, 
 pageantry, oratory, and public consecration in a civil 
 monument now for the third time wrenched from the 
 Church. The burial of the English poet was a simple 
 and private act of mourning to which a multitude 
 came in spontaneous sympathy. It had no dignity 
 but that which was given it by the place by the 
 historic Past, by Poetry itself, and by at least the 
 pathos of the old faith. France has broken with her 
 Past, with the old religion, and she has no continuous 
 poetic traditions. France is deliberately pushing forth 
 on the ocean to find a New World. Nor has any one 
 of this generation done more to stimulate this move- 
 ment than Ernest Renan. The founders of New 
 Worlds cannot look to robe themselves in all the 
 poetry and solemnities of the Old Worlds, but they 
 may bear within them the Life and the Future. 
 
 Ernest Renan was a consummate master of the 
 3
 
 THE BURIAL OF RENAN 31 
 
 French language ; and masters of language exercise a 
 power in France which is not known to other nations 
 and which is hardly to be understood in some. He 
 was a scholar, a man of learning, a subtle and ingeni- 
 ous critic. With his learning, his versatility, his 
 romantic colouring, and his exquisite grace of form, 
 it would have been singular if he had not acquired 
 great influence. It was, of course, the influence of 
 the critic : the solvent, dispersive, indefinite influence 
 of the man of letters who hints his doubts and hesitates 
 his creed. Renan assuredly had no creed, needed 
 none, and was mentally incapable of conceiving him- 
 self as having a creed. I knew him personally, and 
 have heard him expound his ideas in conversation and 
 in lectures and also in private interviews. I do not 
 believe that there was left in his mind an infinitesimal 
 residuum of dogma, old or new. As the Cambridge 
 scholar said, when he was asked to define his view as 
 to the Third Person in the Trinity, Renan " would 
 not deny that there might be a sort of a something " 
 behind all that he knew and all that interested him so 
 keenly. But for himself, his whole activity of brain 
 was absorbed in the romantic side of history, in the 
 lyrical aspect of religion, in the decorative types of 
 philosophy. 
 
 Ideas of such mordant potency have seldom been 
 clothed in a mantle of more spiritual religiosity of 
 external hue. One can fancy the terror that he once 
 struck into the tender Catholic spirit who for the first 
 time heard these ghastly doubts issue forth, as it were, 
 from a dreamy patristic hagiology. It was as when 
 the Margaret of Faust kneels down in her agony 
 before the image of the Madonna and hears her prayer 
 answered by the strident mockery of Mephistopheles. 
 But the tender Catholic spirit is grown stouter now 
 and is inured to many things. We can see how
 
 32 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Renan, so negative himself, so vague, and so allusive, 
 is leading on to a knowledge more systematic than his 
 own, more positive, more definite and real. He has 
 been an influence in his generation, even though he 
 hardly knew whither he was tending, and though such 
 ignorance or mistiness appeared to him to be the true 
 philosophic nirvana to which only the wise attain. 
 
 We are now in the age of mist. We are becoming 
 very " children of the mist " ; for the one dogma that 
 seems destined to survive is the duty of being undog- 
 matic. We have all learned to say with the poet, 
 "Our little systems have their day" ; with the critic 
 we all believe in " the power, not ourselves, that makes 
 for righteousness." That is comprehensive, large, 
 suggestive. The definite, perhaps the intelligible, is 
 limited : limitations mean narrowness, hardness, slavery, 
 somewhere. " O friends," cries the popular preacher 
 of to-day, be he layman or cleric, "let our spirits be 
 free, let us seek to know, not to decide ; to analyse, 
 not to believe. Away with the system-mongers and 
 the slaves of any 'doxy.' Let us sip truth from every 
 flower and leave the drones to brood over the honey ! " 
 The cultivated mind is becoming incapable of giving 
 final assent to anything definite. It sees something 
 in everything and error only in attempts to give that 
 something a form. Of this philosophy and religion 
 of the Great May-be, Monsieur Ernest Renan is the 
 chief of the apostles ; he is Peter and Paul and Doubt- 
 ing Thomas all in one very charming writer of 
 French prose.
 
 SIR A. LY ALL'S 'TENNYSON' 
 
 1903 
 
 ALTHOUGH ten years have passed since Tennyson's 
 death and half a century since the appearance of some 
 of his best pieces, his latest biographer can claim with 
 truth that he still holds the field in poetry, that none 
 has yet come forth even to challenge his crown. 
 We may take the wisely balanced estimate of his 
 complete works by Sir Alfred Lyall as that which 
 will prove the final and authoritative judgment of 
 the Twentieth Century on the supreme poet of the 
 Victorian Era. 
 
 Sir Alfred is himself a poet of distinction, with more 
 than a tincture of philosophy and scholarship, and, 
 withal, a man whose life has been passed in the 
 government of men. Here, then, we have a judgment 
 of our great poet, at once subtle, sympathetic, and 
 authoritative. Agreeing as it does in substance with 
 the brief sketch that I ventured to put out two years 
 ago, I propose to examine it in detail and to add 
 further criticism of my own. 
 
 As do all judicious men, Lyall seizes at once on 
 the dominant note of Tennyson's poetry his supreme 
 mastery of form, especially in all modes of lyric art. 
 He rightly calls the Laureate "an essentially lyric 
 poet." In speaking of In Memoriam^ he says : " His 
 
 33 D
 
 34 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 sure and never-failing mastery of poetic diction carries 
 him through this long monotone with a high and even 
 flight." I hardly find Lyall's cooler phrases quite 
 warm enough to express the enthusiasm I feel myself 
 for what I have called his "unfaltering truth of form," 
 " his infallible mastery of language " ; " the rhythm, 
 phrasing, and articulation are so entirely faultless, so 
 exquisitely clear, melodious, and sure." No doubt, 
 Lyall uses language much of the same kind. But 
 nothing satisfies me unless we place Tennyson quite 
 alone, unapproachable, in an order by himself, amongst 
 the Victorian poets, if only by virtue of this unique 
 perfection of style. No man honours more than I do 
 the intellectual power of Browning, the serene medita- 
 tions of Arnold. But perfect poetry must be perfect 
 in form. 
 
 Almost the only estimate on which Lyall seems to 
 be open to question is in placing Tennyson's zenith 
 too soon in his career. To rank the early volumes 
 as containing "some of the most exquisite poetry 
 that he ever wrote," so that " The Lady of Shalott " 
 is an " example of his genius at a period when 
 he had brought the form and conception of his 
 poetry up to a point which he never afterwards 
 surpassed," this is surely anticipating things. To 
 tell us that " his genius had reached its zenith 
 fifty years before death extinguished it," that is 
 to say, in 1842 is too hasty a view. It means 
 that neither in form nor - in conception did The 
 Princess, or In Memoriam, or Maud, or the Idylls, 
 rise to a higher level of perfection than "Mariana," 
 "The Lady of Shalott," and "The Palace of Art." 
 Certainly, these lovely lyrics of 1832 and 1842 have 
 abundance of Tennyson's peculiar charm ; and it is 
 to us to-day wonderful that critics and public failed 
 at once to see all that they heralded to come. But
 
 SIR A. LYALL'S 'TENNYSON' 35 
 
 to say that Tennyson therein had reached his zenith, 
 that he never afterward surpassed them, is to do him 
 scant justice. 
 
 " The Lady of Shalott " is indeed an exquisite 
 poem, full of imagination and colour, but the riper and 
 more pathetic " Lancelot and Elaine " is grander in 
 art as well as more powerful in its human realism. 
 And though the versification of the early poem is both 
 subtle and musical, it has weak points such as Tenny- 
 son's more finished poem would avoid. The rhymes 
 are not at all faultless. Even if we allow that license 
 which Tennyson constantly asserts as of "two" 
 rhyming with "true," "barley" with "cheerly"- 
 the license is a fault where it requires a mispronun- 
 ciation of a word according to a cockneyism or a 
 vulgarism. To make "girls" rhyme with "churls" 
 suggests the speech of the streets. We almost expect 
 " gals." I doubt if " holy " is a good rhyme to 
 " wholly," for the two words are identical in sound. 
 Somewhat higher up the rhyme is mere repetition, for 
 "river" rhymes to "river," and also to "mirror," 
 another cockney mispronunciation. 
 
 I am not a convert to the new theory of rhyme, 
 which would make any general similarity of sound 
 a good rhyme. No doubt, to lay down a rule 
 about similar spelling, or "rhyme to the eye," is 
 absurd. Rhyme ought to mean harmony of sound, 
 where the words are correctly pronounced. What 
 I object to, is a homophony obtained by a vulgar 
 enunciation of either word, as " gurl " and " churl," 
 or " lidy " and " tidy." As I noted formerly, 
 Tennyson's "Six Hundred" makes a false rhyme 
 with "blunder'd," thunder'd," "wonder'd," "sun- 
 der'd," because it involves our pronouncing hundred 
 as " hunderd," which only vulgar persons say. 
 Any one who knew how readily the poet could
 
 36 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 slip into rustic dialect can understand how he made 
 the mistake. 
 
 But a close view of " The Lady of Shalott " will 
 show us rhymes and phrases which are certainly short 
 of the " Tennysonian perfection." One doubts if four 
 such rhymes as "early," "barley," "cheerly," "clearly," 
 should be immediately followed by three rhymes so 
 close in sound as "weary," "airy," "fairy." No 
 doubt, the good fellows who towed barges down to 
 Camelot pronounced barley as " bearly " and " weary " 
 as " wairy," but we do not so speak to-day in polite 
 society. Nor does it seem like Tennyson's best to 
 write 
 
 She floated by, 
 . . . between the houses high. 
 
 One cannot imagine an adjective more jejune and 
 childish than "houses high." No! "The Lady of 
 Shalott " is a sweet fantasy, but not to be mentioned 
 in the same breath with " Come into the Garden, 
 Maud," "Tears, Idle Tears," or "Come down, O 
 Maid," " Old Year," " Ring out, Wild Bells." 
 
 Lyall very justly praises the lovely blank verse of 
 the classical romances and the Idylls, and justly rebukes 
 the deaf ears of the orthodox and conventional critics 
 of the old Quarterly who could not hear it ; but he 
 does not note that, in power and majesty, Tennyson 
 never quite reached the level of Paradise Lost^ and some 
 rare bursts of Wordsworth. " Ulysses " and the 
 original "Morte d'Arthur" contain the grandest lines 
 of heroic metre that the Laureate ever wrote. But 
 even these do not reach the diapason of the " mighty- 
 mouth'd inventor of harmonies," with his swelling 
 organ-voice, as when the multitude of angels cast to 
 the ground their crowns of amarant and gold ; and 
 then, taking their golden harps, begin their sacred 
 song with the words :
 
 SIR A. LY ALL'S < TENNYSON' 37 
 
 Thee, Father, first they sung, Omnipotent, 
 Immutable, Immortal, Infinite, 
 Eternal King ; thee, Author of all being, 
 Fountain of Light, thyself invisible. 
 
 This, indeed, is the only English heroic verse which 
 can be set beside Homer. 
 
 It is amusing to read that the poet specially valued 
 himself on his "shortness," and on his inexorable rule 
 of throwing away hundreds of verses that he judged 
 not to be perfect. It is quite true that he suppressed 
 thousands of such lines, and, as the Memoir shows us, 
 with invariable judgment. But as to "shortness," the 
 Works even now comprise some 60,000 lines, more 
 or less at least three times the output of Milton. 
 And the Poems, with few exceptions, would be more 
 effective if they were not so long. Even the " Two 
 Voices" suffers by being in 150 stanzas, when one 
 hundred would be ample for the argument, vague and 
 indecisive as it is. Much the same may be said of 
 Maud^ of the Idylls^ and, lastly, of the historical 
 dramas. The scheme, the intellectual motive, the 
 form of none of them is adequate to sustain such 
 elaboration, so much monotonous detail. The Idylls 
 of the King contain far more lines than Paradise Lost^ 
 which, indeed, would bear being shorter. 
 
 Tennyson would too often paint vignettes upon a 
 canvas which was fit for a cartoon of life-size groups. 
 As Lyall points out, his habit was to paint a picture 
 by elaborating a succession of local features, not by 
 broad strokes. And in conducting an argument, or 
 developing a plot, he sought to obtain his effects by 
 a multiplicity of kindred, but distinct points. The 
 whole was always beautiful and often impressive. 
 But it was at times tedious, and was never the highest 
 form of art. The Homeric and sculptured figures 
 of GEnone, Ulysses, Tithonus, became long-drawn
 
 38 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 subtle romances of love, disappointment, destiny, and 
 ambition, more akin to the modern novel than to 
 classical simplicity. Tennyson, no doubt, was never 
 diffuse in words, and wrote with a cultured brevity 
 and economy of phrase. But he was certainly most 
 profuse in images, ideas, and colours ; and, in arguing 
 a thesis or in narrating a story, he relied on artful 
 elaboration, rather than on the flash, the thunder, of 
 the greatest poets. 
 
 How many stanzas, how many pages, would Tenny- 
 son have filled if he had conceived such an invocation 
 as this : 
 
 Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer 
 
 Before all Temples th* upright heart and pure, 
 
 Instruct me, for Thou know'st : Thou from the first 
 
 Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread 
 
 Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss 
 
 And mad'st it pregnant : what in me is dark 
 
 Illumine, what is low raise and support. 
 
 Hamlet's soliloquy, " To be, or not to be," goes 
 in thirty-two lines, and it contains as much thought 
 as the whole of In Memorlam in 3000 lines, and it is 
 quite as impressive. 
 
 The truth is this. Tennyson phrased each thought 
 with masterly concision. But he framed each picture 
 with a laborious multiplication of touches ; he told 
 his tale with a continuous stream of subtle suggestions, 
 just as Samuel Richardson does in Clarissa ; and he 
 works up a recondite philosophical thesis by piecing 
 together a sorites of ingenious arguments, on no one 
 of which is he willing to rely as conclusive. It is a 
 mode of art singularly popular, but it is not the art of 
 the greatest masters of song. 
 
 An excellent point made by Lyall is the attention 
 he draws to the versatility of the Laureate, even from 
 the first. How any men pretending to be critics
 
 SIR A. LYALL'S 'TENNYSON' 39 
 
 could talk, as the Quarterly men did, about " fantastic 
 shrines" and "baby idols" in speaking of volumes 
 which passed from " Mariana " to " CEnone " and 
 thence to "Morte d' Arthur," "St. Simeon Stylites," 
 "Fatima," "Three Voices," "Locksley Hall," and 
 " The Vision of Sin " this seems strange indeed to 
 us. But, after all these, we have seen the Poet of 
 " Come into the Garden, Maud," produce the " Pass- 
 ing of Arthur," " The Revenge," " Rizpah," " Vast- 
 ness," " The Foresters," and " Becket." Since 
 Shakespeare, no one of our poets, unless it be Byron, 
 has shown anything like the same range of invention 
 and grasp of diverse themes and all modes of the lyre. 
 Lyall is again entirely just in treating In Me.moriam 
 as Tennyson's masterpiece, "of all the continuous 
 poems the longest and the most elaborate." It is, as 
 I said, "one of the triumphs of English poetry," and 
 it would not be easy to name any other poem of such 
 length so faultless in form, so consummate in music 
 and in harmony of tone. Sir Alfred also shows how 
 greatly the success of In Memoriam was due to its 
 "sympathetic affinity with the spiritual aspirations 
 and intellectual dilemmas of the time." Of course, 
 Lyall rejects the curious notion of some Tennysonians, 
 that In Memoriam founded a Theodicy, or religious 
 philosophy of its own. The poet had a too "dubitat- 
 ing temperament," as Lyall phrases it, to found any 
 scheme of philosophy or theology whatever, even if 
 his " musical meditations " had been more definite. 
 " Dogmatic theology had long been losing ground " ; 
 science, he says, had introduced the conception of law 
 in lieu of will or caprice. Tennyson had lived from 
 his Cambridge days in 1828, "in communion with 
 the thought and knowledge of the day." It took a 
 strong hold of his imagination, says Lyall. Down to 
 his latest years, Tennyson was constantly shaken with
 
 40 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 the enigmas of the Universe, the Infinite, Death, the 
 petty and transitory nature of our Earth. As he 
 recognised no authoritative Revelation, Creed, or 
 Church, all this hung over his subtle and brooding 
 soul, and made him almost a pessimist, in spite of his 
 resolute will to " believe where we cannot prove." 
 Such was the tone of the cultured academic mind of 
 the first half of the nineteenth century. Tennyson 
 lived his whole life in this atmosphere, and transfigured 
 its hopes, its doubts, its horror, and its yearnings in a 
 series of exquisite, but depressing, descants. 
 
 Lyall's account of Tennyson's religious position 
 is admirably worked out and quite convincing. He 
 rightly fulfilled " the poet's mission, which is to 
 embody the floating thought of the period." " The 
 poet leads us to a cloudy height ; and though it is 
 not his business to satisfy the strict philosophical 
 inquirer, he offers to all wandering souls a refuge in 
 the faith." Nothing can be put more accurately. 
 And, as Lyall shows, the clouds rather thickened than 
 dispersed with the advancing age of the poet. " The 
 sense of the brevity of human existence and the un- 
 certainty of what may lie beyond, although Tennyson 
 fought against it manfully, did undoubtedly haunt his 
 meditations and depress the spirit of his later inspira- 
 tions." Such pieces as " Despair " and " Vastness " 
 indicate a morbid tone in man's view of life, duty, 
 and religion ; and, with all their sublimity and pathos, 
 they tend to debilitate and unman us. As Lyall says, 
 " they have a tendency to weigh down the main- 
 springs of human activity." " They are beautiful as 
 poetry, but they are neither philosophy nor religion." 
 
 The second chapter of the Memoir shows where 
 and how, at the age of twenty, the poet's intellectual 
 interests grew. At Cambridge, from 1828 to 1830, 
 he lived in the society of the " Apostles," described
 
 SIR A. LYALL'S * TENNYSON' 41 
 
 in Carlyle's Sterling^ the brethren who, as Sterling 
 said, "are waxing daily in religion and radicalism." 
 Arthur Hallam, one of the most brilliant of them, 
 wrote that the spirit of the young society had been 
 created by Frederick Denison Maurice. Maurice had 
 left Cambridge a year or two before ; but he had 
 already begun to exert on young inquiring minds the 
 remarkable influence which he so long retained. 
 With a really beautiful nature and high social aspira- 
 tions, Maurice was, as Ruskin found him, "by nature 
 puzzle-headed and indeed wrong-headed." In spite 
 of this, the poet formed a close friendship with the 
 theologian, made him godfather to his son, and 
 thought that, had he been less obscure to the ordinary 
 mind, he might have taken his place as the foremost 
 thinker among the Churchmen of their time. Church- 
 men of that stamp were certainly of a flabby, incon- 
 clusive order of mind. 
 
 In aesthetic parsonages they grumble at the im- 
 pression Lyall seems to convey that the Laureate's 
 mood was too often inconsequent and gloomy. But 
 such was his frame of mind, and it grew on him with 
 age. The problems of Infinity, Eternity, the brevity 
 and littleness of human life loomed ever darker, and 
 never rested in any complete and final answer. He 
 was ever "in many a subtle question versed," and 
 " ever strove to make it true." But to the last he 
 never quite beat his music out. He faced the spectres 
 of the mind j but he never absolutely laid them. I 
 remember as a young man when first admitted to his 
 company, he turned to me, with that grand assumption 
 which he affected to those with whom he disagreed, 
 saying with a most cadaverous air : " If I thought as 
 you do, I should go and drown myself." I smiled ; 
 for the absurdity as well as the ill manners of such an 
 outburst amused me. I replied quietly, looking, I am
 
 42 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 sure, as cheerful as he looked disconsolate : " No ! 
 Mr. Tennyson, if you thought as I do about Life and 
 Death you would be a happy man ! " Personally, 
 the poet seemed to be even more unsatisfied with his 
 own beliefs than the poems showed. But if they did 
 not tend to peace of mind and energy of action, the 
 pathos and the dreaminess of this habit of thought 
 were the inspiration of much exquisite poetry. Like 
 other people, he mistook his own gift of words for 
 profound thought. 
 
 We shall all agree with Lyall as to the rare charm 
 of the lyrics of Maud^ especially of the songs, which 
 are amongst the most exquisite in all modern poetry. 
 But he points out with a sure hand the essential 
 weakness of the "Monodrama," where violent storms 
 of passion, ecstatic love and happiness, and actual 
 madness have to be told of himself by a single speaker. 
 Maud is a very singular, almost unique, example of a 
 rare type an elaborate and passionate lyric, wherein 
 is rehearsed a romantic and indeed sensational story, 
 such as we expect in a psychologic novel or a rousing 
 melodrama. Lyall dwells enthusiastically on all the 
 beauties of the poem ; but he is forced to admit that 
 the task which the poet had set to himself was beyond 
 the reach of lyric art. 
 
 The Princess is one of the Laureate's delicious 
 masterpieces for which even the least friendly critics 
 have never had anything but praise. It was a theme 
 that gave scope to every one of Tennyson's gifts his 
 fancy, his exquisite sense of beauty both material and 
 moral, his glowing imagination and deep sense of 
 purity, the reign of love, the perfection of Woman. 
 For my part, I always count this poem as Tennyson's 
 most typical triumph, for whilst it gives every opening 
 to his peculiar genius, it has nothing whereof he was 
 other than perfect master. Maud may have structural
 
 SIR A. LYALL'S 'TENNYSON' 43 
 
 defects ; the Idylls of the King are a cross between 
 Idyll and Epic, and are not quite faultless in either 
 sense ; and even In Metnoriam is somewhat long- 
 winded, lugubrious, and unsettling to the general 
 reader. But The Princess has perennial delight for the 
 whole reading world, whilst it satisfies every canon of 
 the most searching criticism. 
 
 No part of Lyall's estimate is more elaborate and 
 more just than the very subtle study he has made of 
 the Idylls of the King. He analyses the sources of 
 their sustained popularity the colour, the imagination, 
 the fine symbolism and the marvellous versatility of 
 the twelve cantos. But he cannot close his mind to 
 the incongruity inevitable in such a scheme the 
 transmuting Malory's magical myths, told in frank 
 mother-tongue, into ethical allegories, psychologic 
 subtleties, and modern delicacy of thought and speech. 
 The Arthurian romance in its original form never was 
 a thing for young ladies to dream over, for ministers 
 to preach about, or for the hierophants of culture to 
 expound in elaborate "keys" and commentaries. As 
 in Maud, as in The Promise of May, in " Vastness " 
 and in "Despair," the poet set himself a task where 
 the conditions of real success were unattainable by any 
 art. The author of these exquisite Pastorals, songs, 
 lyrics, fantasies, medleys, and meditations forced him- 
 self to produce an Epic of 11,000 lines, a crowded 
 stage of heroes, battles, supernatural beings, of passion- 
 ate love and tragic death, all predetermined by a 
 mysterious destiny ; and yet the poet will not put oft" 
 his love of dulcet Pastoral, psychologic analysis, and 
 ethical homily. The result, as Lyall says, is too much 
 of a "splendid anachronism," something in places 
 almost tame and artificial. But it is strangely fascin- 
 ating and deserves its immense popularity with the 
 general public. .
 
 44 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Equally subtle is Lyall's analysis of the Romances, 
 Ballads, and Pastorals. He is enthusiastic over their 
 grace, refinement, fancy, and imagination, whilst 
 recognising that Tennyson's genius was "essentially 
 cultivated and picturesque." This does not accord 
 with the unconscious simplicity of the true ballad or 
 the rustic power of plain speech now and then reached 
 by Burns, Lady Nairne, and by Wordsworth. " The 
 Twa Corbies " and " Edwin and Angelina " are both 
 said to be ballads : but how wide is the gulf between 
 them ! Difficile est proprie communla dicere ; and that 
 camel will get through the eye of the needle after all, 
 before culture and word-painting will ever produce 
 the pathos that rings in the genuine speech of rude 
 men. Tennyson's two " Northern Farmers " are a 
 rare success. But they were enough. The prolonged 
 imitation of mere provincial vulgarisms becomes dull 
 and unpleasing, if carried too far, as does the music of 
 whistling in imitation of the voice or the violin. It is 
 a wonderful trick but soon grows tiresome. Lyall has 
 put this excellently. But it is a pity that he has not 
 said quite enough of " Rizpah." This poem was 
 Tennyson's supreme triumph in the weird, tragic, and 
 ghastly romance. It has true directness, horror, and 
 realism. And, dreadful as it is, it is within the range 
 of poetry, nor has modern poetry done anything 
 grander in that vein. 
 
 It is pleasant to find that Lyall does full justice to 
 the Dramas, especially to the gallant attempt to revive 
 a genuine historical drama, which our new historical 
 precision has made an almost impossible task. The 
 best of Tennyson's Plays have not been properly 
 valued. They inevitably want the grace, music, and 
 glow of the lyrics and idylls and the subtlety of the 
 meditative poems. And Tennyson's genius was 
 lyrical, not dramatic. Accordingly, none of them,
 
 SIR A. LYALL'S 'TENNYSON' 45 
 
 except Becket, succeeded on the stage with a 
 London public eager for very different spectacles. 
 Nor have they in full measure all the charm that the 
 cultured reader finds in the Lyrics. But they have 
 sound qualities of their own, and will doubtless be 
 played to more worthy audiences when a real reform 
 of the theatre has been achieved. In the meantime, 
 they ought to be read by all who care for serious 
 poetry and the idealisation of great historic catas- 
 trophes. 
 
 One regrets that the poet did not take King Alfred 
 for one of his heroes. The scantiness of the historical 
 record would have given ample scope to his imagina- 
 tion, whilst the nobility of the great King and his 
 mission as saviour of the English name would have 
 given fire to the poet's patriotism. After some reflec- 
 tion, he rejected William the Silent as subject for a 
 drama, because he clung tenaciously to English history 
 and legend. Lyall truly remarks on the singular 
 tendency of Tennyson to restrict his subjects to his 
 own country. He confines his vision, except for the 
 antique, to England and even particular parts of 
 England. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, 
 Pope, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, 
 and Browning, are full of interest in other lands. 
 Foreign travel did not inspire Tennyson ; foreign 
 history, legend, and art left him cold ; he rarely 
 alludes even to Scotland or to Ireland. He is the 
 most intensely English of all our poets, unless 
 it be Cowper or Crabbe. That has been Tenny- 
 son's strength. It may hereafter prove to be a 
 weakness. 
 
 Lyall does full justice to Tennyson's command of 
 every type of metrical resource. But he does not 
 seem to complain of that peculiarity of his later manner 
 which at last became a mannerism and even an offence.
 
 46 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 To me the enormously long rhymed lines of his decline 
 are quite intolerable. Lines of sixteen syllables as in 
 " Despair," or of eighteen and even twenty in " Vast- 
 ness," are abortions in English verse ; and that for the 
 sound reason that the English language has an inor- 
 dinate number of consonants in proportion to vowels, 
 and consequently piles up an agglomeration of letters 
 in every long line. No other poetry has ever burdened 
 itself with verses of sixty letters and twenty syllables. 
 Such monstrosities in poetry are not verses but tumours. 
 Hardly any modern language is so ill-fitted for them 
 as is our own. 
 
 Another tendency which grew on the Laureate 
 with years was the constant resort to trochaic metres 
 ( ^-'), and also to three-syllable feet, such as dactyls 
 ( ^^) or anapaests (^^ ). We all enjoyed 
 the "May Queen," "Locksley Hall," the "Light 
 Brigade," and felt the quick, eager, and tripping 
 trochees well fitted for a short ballad. But when it 
 came to dactyls in lines of sixteen and eighteen syllables, 
 when long-winded metaphysical debates were spun 
 out in verses consisting of seven feet and a half, with 
 twenty syllables and sixty letters Tennyson or not 
 the effect is wearisome. The rattle of the three- 
 syllable foot is quite unsuited to philosophical homily. 
 The poet, in his earlier mode, quite felt the futility of 
 English hexameters and pentameters when he wrote 
 in his " Experiments " : 
 
 When was a harsher sound ever heard, ye Muses, in 
 
 England ? 
 When did a frog coarser croak upon our Helicon ? 
 
 Although after the "experiment " of "Boa'dicea," 
 he did not resort to pure hexameters, for which our 
 language is so utterly unfit, he constantly resorted to 
 long lines of octameters full of dactyls, the effect of
 
 SIR A. LY ALL'S 'TENNYSON' 47 
 
 which to our ears is even less pleasing than that of 
 Boadicea." l 
 
 There seems to be very good reason for the more 
 sparing use in English poetry of trochees, dactyls, or 
 anapaests. The excessive quantity of letters in English 
 syllables, as compared with the classical or Latin 
 tongues, causes an English three-syllable foot to bulk 
 larger, both to the ear and to the eye, than does a 
 Greek, Latin, or Italian three-syllable foot. The first 
 line of the Iliad has only eleven consonants ; the first 
 line of the JEneid has nineteen ; the first line of 
 Paradise Lost has twenty-one ; the first line of " Vast- 
 ness " has thirty-one consonants. And they tumble 
 over each other, choke the mouth and disturb the eye. 
 
 A peculiarity of English speech is the tendency to 
 throw back the accent to the antepenultimate syllable, 
 to clip and hurry the pronunciation, and this especially 
 in the more vulgar language. The trochaic and 
 dactylic metres naturally accentuate this tendency ; 
 and, however suited for ballad purposes and for 
 impetuous bursts of emotion, these verses, with the 
 accent on the penultimate and antepenultimate of the 
 foot, are not suited for sustained narration, grave 
 reasoning, and dignity of tone. English heroic verse 
 has always chosen an iambic metre i.e. feet of two 
 syllables, one short and one long, with the stress on 
 the last syllable, not on the first. We could not stand 
 Paradise Lost in a dactylic or ballad metre. 2 
 
 1 The fourth line of " Vastness " scans thus : 
 
 i .__._!. * , _ 5 _ _ 6 _ 
 
 What is it | all but a | trouble of | ants in the | gleam of a | million 
 
 _ 1 _ 1 
 million of | suns | 
 a dactylic octameter catalectic (i.e. cut short). 
 
 2 Suppose it ran in dactyls : 
 
 _i_ _ *. . J _ i _ . 5 _ _6_ 
 
 Man's want of | proper ob | edience and | tasting of | disallowed | apples
 
 48 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Tennyson has shown himself to have consummate 
 mastery of the iambic metres in all their forms, and all 
 his noblest pieces are so cast. The nature of our 
 language and all the traditions of our poetry point to 
 some of the iambic forms as best for all continuous, 
 grave, and stately poems. And this makes it the more 
 unlucky that he so often abandoned them in his later 
 verses for trochaic and dactylic types, indelibly 
 associated with ballads, burlesques, and even nursery 
 rhymes. 1 
 
 We may offer these criticisms without at all im- 
 pugning Tennyson's undoubted claim to be looked on 
 as the supreme poet of the Victorian Era, and one of 
 the chief lyric poets of our English tongue. It is 
 unworthy of him and of ourselves to exalt him to a 
 superhuman pedestal, where it is counted profanity to 
 hint at a weakness or a fault. Like almost all our 
 poets, except Milton, Gray, Coleridge, and Arnold, 
 he published a great deal more than he need have 
 done. Tennyson no doubt published far less of care- 
 less, ill-digested, and poor work than almost any of 
 our poets. All of them, except Milton and Gray, 
 sank at times into bathos unworthy of them. This 
 Tennyson never did. But he published much, in his 
 later career, which is inferior to his best. The future 
 will no doubt be content to remember little more than 
 a half, or even a third, of his immense output. Most 
 of his poems would be more effective if they were only 
 half as long as they are. Again, his best work was all 
 completed in the first thirty years of his very long 
 
 1 The trochaic metre suits : 
 
 " John Gilpin," " The Babes in the Wood," " Three Jolly Huntsmen," 
 and " Lord Bateman." 
 
 Dactylic metre suits : 
 
 _ i _ 3 _ _ 1 _ _ i _ 5_ 
 
 'Tis the | voice of the | sluggard I | heard him com | plain.
 
 SIR A. LY ALL'S 'TENNYSON' 49 
 
 course of active work. But having accepted these 
 provisos, let us make the most of him who was the 
 greatest poet of the last three generations ; let us 
 delight in his grace, soothe our spirit in his music, 
 revel in his fantasies, and honour his noble ideals, his 
 pure imagination, his profound seriousness.
 
 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 
 
 [An address given in 1897, proposing the celebration of the thou- 
 sandth anniversary of Alfred's death. This took place in 
 October i<)oi,<uuhen the Statue was unveiled by Lord Rosebery 
 at Winchester.] 
 
 ON the 26th of October 1901, exactly four years 
 hence, a thousand years will have passed since the death 
 of our greatest King. We are a little overdone with 
 anniversaries, and those not always of the worthiest. 
 But this is no ordinary occasion ; for it will be the 
 thousandth anniversary of him to whom England owes 
 an incalculable debt of gratitude, one whom our best 
 teachers describe as the noblest Englishman recorded 
 in our history. Alfred's name is almost the only one 
 in the long roll of our national worthies which awakens 
 no bitter, no jealous thought, which combines the 
 honour of all ; Alfred represents at once the ancient 
 Monarchy, the army, the navy, the law, the literature, 
 the poetry, the art, the enterprise, the industry, the 
 religion of our race. Neither Welshman, nor Scot, 
 nor Irishman can feel that Alfred's memory has left 
 the trace of a wound for his national pride. No differ- 
 ence of Church arises to separate any who would join 
 to do Alfred honour. No Saint in the Calendar was a 
 more loyal and cherished member of the ancient faith ; 
 and yet no Protestant can imagine a purer and more
 
 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 51 
 
 simple follower of the Gospel. Alfred was a victorious 
 warrior whose victories have left no curses behind 
 them : a King whom no man ever charged with a 
 harsh act : a scholar who never became a pedant : a 
 Saint who knew no superstition : a hero as bold as 
 Launcelot as spotless as Galahad. 
 
 The commemoration of this glorious Founder of 
 our national unity of a man so close to the very roots 
 of the throne, so dear to the sympathies of the people, 
 bound up with all our traditions and institutions, the 
 inspiration of our early literature and language such 
 a commemoration should be a national, not a private, 
 concern. The House of Commons might well vote 
 the cost of a torpedo-boat for the Founder of our 
 maritime power, for him to whom we largely owe it 
 that there exists any England at all. 
 
 If it be done, it should be done royally ; in a form 
 at once magnificent and national. I do not presume 
 to say what form it should take. I trust that, when 
 the time comes, the Government itself will take 
 counsel of the most competent advisers it can find. In 
 my daydreams I have imagined a grand Mausoleum^ 
 dedicated to the memory of Alfred, and in manifold 
 forms of art recording the great events of his life. I 
 use the word -Mausoleum not in the commercial, 
 but in the true, the historic, sense the monument 
 erected to King Mausolus in the fourth century B.C. 
 by the piety of his wife. 
 
 It was one of the triumphs and one of the wonders 
 of the ancient world : and itself exerted a dominant 
 influence over the development of Hellenic art. All 
 visitors to the British Museum are familiar with the 
 fragments of it which time has spared, and have seen 
 the suggestions of its original form over which the 
 learned dispute. It contained colossal statues of the 
 King arid his wife Artemisia still noble even in their
 
 52 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 ruined state a grand monumental edifice, adorned 
 with a multitude of statues, reliefs, friezes, and finials, 
 the least fragment of which is to-day a study and a 
 joy. Now, I do not suggest that we should imitate 
 that or any other monument of antiquity ; but I can 
 imagine the boundless opportunities for great com- 
 memorative art which a monument of this kind 
 presents. 
 
 In my daydreams I have seen rising in some con- 
 spicuous spot in Wessex a shrine in that Byzantine 
 manner which was the dominant architecture of 
 Europe in the age of Alfred the style of the Holy 
 Wisdom of Constantinople, or possibly of that Pantheon 
 at Rome which Alfred knew but in any case, a 
 building wherein could be worked out in marble, in 
 mosaic, in bronze, and in enamel, scenes to recall to 
 us the aspect and events of our Hero's life his terrific 
 combats with the Dane on land and sea, his council- 
 hall, his midnight meditations, his studies, his prayers, 
 his boyish experiences in Rome. 
 
 What a scope for the artist in every form of art is 
 presented by the varied incidents of that crowded life 
 and heroic age, when all costume was noble, all acces- 
 sories picturesque, and manners Homeric in simple 
 nature. It seems to me that any fine works of art 
 should be under a roof, and not exposed to our climate, 
 and that a covered building might contain not only 
 the principal monument, but a Museum to which 
 might be transferred Alfred's Jewel at Oxford and 
 any other genuine relic of his time, with coins, carv- 
 ings, enamels, arms, robes, and any contemporary 
 manuscript and illumination which it was possible to 
 obtain. 
 
 Or a simpler form would be a colossal statue to be 
 seen afar off on the top of some historic down in a 
 more massive and bolder type of art. And if such a
 
 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 53 
 
 monument were raised in the open air, there is little 
 doubt where it should be placed. I was the other day 
 again in the ancient and famous city of Winchester 
 the royal city of Alfred, where his bones still crumble 
 in their thrice -desecrated tomb I thought fresh 
 efforts should be made to identify the exact spot and 
 I felt how deep a debt lies on Winchester and on 
 England to replace that lost grave at least with a 
 cenotaph and a monument "the tomb," says the 
 Annals, " made of the most precious porphyry marble." 
 How fitly it might stand on the historic Hill which 
 looks down on College, Cathedral, and wall ! 
 
 A Mausoleum which should combine a grand statue 
 of the King with various illustrations of his life and 
 deeds would open great opportunities to several artists 
 in different arts. And it would be a narrow patriotism 
 indeed which limited these artists to our own land. 
 It would dishonour the memory of Alfred to do this. 
 No English ruler has ever been so large-minded in all 
 his interests, so Catholic in his task, so pre-eminently 
 European in his type of mind. Xo him of all men, 
 Art, Learning, Culture were too wide and human to 
 know any local habitation. He sought out for his 
 service, his biographer tells us, Welshmen, Irishmen, 
 Bretons, Franks, Scots, Frisians, and Danes ; " he 
 was munificent towards foreigners of all races " j he 
 sent abroad for teachers, artificers, discoverers, and 
 seamen. It would be a pity if a monument to com- 
 memorate his name were not open to the genius of 
 the civilised world. 
 
 Another thought, indeed, has occurred to me. 
 Our Westminster Abbey is at last crowded to excess, 
 and must very soon cease to be the resting-place of 
 the great men whom the nation delights to honour. 
 We need a new Abbey, a Campo Santo^ where in ages 
 to come the noblest sons of England may be laid (as
 
 54 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 the poet says) "to the noise of the mourning of a 
 mighty nation." It is easy to say that future ages 
 will take care of themselves. But there is one thing 
 that the Future cannot do it cannot create a Past. 
 And what it will want for its Campo Santo, when 
 the venerable Abbey can serve no longer, is a Past. 
 A national Mausoleum of King Alfred may at least 
 suggest a Past a past more ancient than the Abbey 
 of the Edwards and the Henrys it might grow into 
 the nucleus of a national Heroum just as Poets' Corner 
 grew into a sanctuary of art round the tomb of 
 Chaucer in the Abbey. And I can conceive that in 
 ages to come Nelson's famous phrase of, "Victory or 
 Westminster Abbey," might be replaced by the hope 
 of warrior, statesman, or poet to be thought worthy 
 to lie in the Mausoleum of Alfred. 
 
 When the thousandth anniversary of Alfred comes 
 round, we all trust that the royal Lady, the forty-ninth 
 sovereign since Alfred, may be able and willing to 
 give her personal sanction to a national Festival. 
 Modern history has no such sequence of national 
 continuity to present no throne, no institutions, no 
 organic patriotism, no literature of such vast duration 
 and such venerable traditions. And this is a healthy 
 and fruitful form of patriotic feeling. It can offend 
 no man, neither in these islands nor in the Empire, 
 nor abroad in other nations. The little Englander 
 and the greater Englander, the Englishman and the 
 Imperialist, Old England and New England, can unite 
 in honour of the great King who ruled an England 
 far smaller than any little England of to-day, yet 
 whose genius and heroism made it the nucleus the 
 pou sto of all that his descendants ever held in their 
 dominion, of all that his descendant, Her Majesty, 
 holds in dominion at this hour [1897]. The memory 
 of Alfred calls up no thought of Conquest, but the
 
 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 55 
 
 noblest form of Defence, it calls up international 
 sympathies and co-operation, a great civilising and 
 missionary task, it suggests schools, temples, libraries, 
 industries, courts of justice, civic organisation : all the 
 boundless influence of a great brain and a majestic 
 character, be the field of his energy as small as a single 
 province and the materials to his hand of the simplest 
 sort. 
 
 Many other modes of using for ourselves and our 
 children this matchless occasion occur to me, on which 
 to-night I can only touch. There is still needed a 
 perfectly complete and critical edition of every line of 
 the King's authentic writings. We should never 
 forget that Alfred is the Father of English History, 
 the Founder of English prose. He is in the true 
 sense the Father of the History of the English people 
 in a sense more literally true than Herodotus ever 
 was the " Father of History " in that Alfred gave 
 an impulse and form to the English Chronicle^ the 
 oldest national record in modern Europe j and himself 
 wrote or inspired the writing of some of its typical 
 parts. He is the Founder of English prose, in that 
 he not only formed an organic prose, but his influence 
 caused the maintenance of English prose until the 
 Conquest for the time superseded it by Latin and 
 French. No perfect collection of these noble pieces 
 of our scholar King has yet been made : and it would 
 form a worthy task for a company of Scholars to 
 achieve it. 
 
 Nor, again, is there any adequate English biography 
 of our great Hero. After all that has been done by 
 eminent scholars who have given us every authentic 
 fact ascertainable in Alfred's career, there is yet no 
 full and adequate biography of the King by an English 
 hand. The splendid pictures drawn by Green and by 
 Freeman, in more than one work of each, remain after
 
 56 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 all but glowing sketches ; and they are but episodes 
 embedded in voluminous works. And, excellent as 
 is the German work of Dr. Pauli, it is possible to 
 imagine a new biography based on more recent 
 research, and worthy to rank with the masterpieces 
 of English prose. 
 
 Perhaps it is not too late for the Holy See to repair 
 its neglect to place Alfred amongst its canonised 
 Sovereigns. There are already twelve of these in the 
 Calendar, we are told : not one of the twelve was the 
 peer of the Saxon King whom four centuries ago 
 our Henry VI. vainly besought the Pope to canonise. 
 Rome acts always with deliberation. But, after a 
 thousand years, it may yet recognise the holiness of 
 a saint the halo of whose glory will last as long as 
 the Church. 
 
 Some commemoration of the great King there is 
 certain to be in the millenary year 1901. I would 
 raise a voice in hope that it may be at once national 
 and worthy of the nation : that it may not degenerate 
 into a scramble or a farce. It would be an occasion 
 to call for representation of every side of our national 
 life as the pulse from Alfred's mighty heart throbbed 
 into every vein of the nation's organism. Soldiers, 
 sailors, scholars, churchmen, missionaries, teachers, 
 councillors, judges, prelates, artists, craftsmen, dis- 
 coverers chiefs and people all alike might gather 
 to do honour to the royal genius who loved them all, 
 who breathed into them all his own inspiration. I 
 can imagine an assemblage of chosen delegates from 
 our regiments and our fleets, from cathedral, abbey, 
 church, and chapel (without distinction of creed), from 
 universities and schools, from art and science academies, 
 from libraries and institutes, from Parliament and 
 from Government, from courts of justice and from 
 county halls and city councils, from the labourers in
 
 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 57 
 
 town and country all joining around a national 
 monument to our first great Hero. Such military 
 display as was thought right would best be furnished 
 forth by the volunteers and naval reserves in honour 
 of the King who first organised a regular militia at 
 home for the defence of our shores by sea and land 
 whose very name as a warrior spells "Defence not 
 Defiance" Such a national commemoration would 
 be a real festival of industry, art, order, union, peace, 
 and religion. 
 
 No people, in ancient or modern times, ever had a 
 Hero-Founder at once so truly historic, so venerable, 
 and so supremely great. Alfred was more to us than 
 the heroes in antique myths more than Theseus and 
 Solon were to Athens, or Lycurgus to Sparta, or 
 Romulus and Numa were to Rome, more than St. 
 Stephen was to Hungary, or Pelayo and the Cid to 
 Spain, more than Hugh Capet and Jeanne d'Arc were 
 to France, more than William the Silent was to Hol- 
 land nay, almost as much as the Great Charles was 
 to the Franks. 
 
 The life-work of the Great Alfred has had a con- 
 tinuity, an organic development, a moral, intellectual, 
 and spiritual majesty which has no parallel or rival 
 amongst rulers in the annals of mankind. And I 
 cannot doubt that four years hence the English- 
 speaking people will remember him who gave them 
 the precious germs of that which our forefathers have 
 made a thousand years of national life and honour.
 
 THE TERCENTENARY OF 
 CROMWELL 
 
 THREE hundred years have come and gone since the 
 mightiest spirit that ever held command over these 
 three kingdoms came into the world. For two 
 hundred and fifty years the English people who owed 
 him so much (all but a remnant of stalwart men) 
 reviled his memory and ridiculed his life. He was 
 despised and rejected of men. We hid our faces 
 from him. At last, in the latter half-century, a man 
 of genius drove home to the bottom of our conscience 
 as a people, our folly, ingratitude, and shame. Years 
 and years of remorse will hardly suffice to expiate our 
 offence. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle spoke, we may admit, with 
 passion, with something of a prophet's rage and 
 excess. In fifty years we have grown calmer, more 
 judicial, more amply informed of the truth. And 
 recognising as we do the substantial justice of 
 Carlyle's story nay, seeing in many things how even 
 his high estimate may be amplified and coloured 
 we have no temptation to-day to exaggerate qualities 
 or to palliate faults. We are willing to admit the sad 
 and dark side of this vast national epic, as well as the 
 immortal and heroic side we see to-day. We are all 
 no longer under the spell of an advocate's passion. 
 We are penetrated with the conviction of a weighty 
 
 53
 
 TERCENTENARY OF CROMWELL 59 
 
 and unanswerable judgment, all errors weighed and 
 measured out in the issue. And we, the most ardent 
 Oliverians of us all, are no longer battling for Revision 
 of an unjust sentence. We come, like pilgrims, to 
 bow the head in silent meditation at the foot of an 
 empty and desecrated tomb. 
 
 It has taken three hundred years for Englishmen 
 to know what they owe to one of the greatest men 
 their race has produced. It is a wise rule that we 
 should in general observe anniversaries of death rather 
 than of birth, for all public and historic purposes. 
 Birthdays belong to family occasions, and are proper 
 to theological and mystical festivals. Except from 
 the point of view of some miraculous and superhuman 
 birth, the coming into the world of a statesman or 
 poet is a thing of which the public at the time took 
 no note, and which affected nobody and nothing out- 
 side the home itself. The effect of a great life upon 
 fellow-men is only complete and perceptible when the 
 life is closed, and often not till long afterwards. No one 
 outside a plain home in Huntingdon noticed the fact 
 that Elizabeth Cromwell was brought to bed of her 
 fifth child, and for forty years few people supposed 
 that a great event in English history had happened 
 on the 25th of April 1599. But when Oliver, 
 Protector, died, all Britain and Ireland held its breath 
 in hushed expectation and all Europe breathed more 
 freely. It is the end of a great career which concerns 
 nations not the unnoticed birth of a baby who may 
 live to have a great career half a century later. Real 
 centenaries should run with the date of death, not of 
 birth, or we shall all get bored by anniversary com- 
 memorations, as some affected people even now 
 profess to be bored. 
 
 But, as many honest men refuse to postpone the 
 commemoration of Oliver until 1958, and as the first
 
 60 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 statue to him in London is to be raised this year, we 
 need not adjourn our remembrance of a great man 
 to a date which only our children will see. Let us 
 ask ourselves to-day the simple questions In what 
 things was Cromwell a great Englishman ? What 
 is the teaching of his life ? What are the effects he 
 left on the history of England ? 
 
 Oliver Cromwell is by general consent a typical 
 Englishman, having that union of somewhat incon- 
 gruous forces which is to be found in the English 
 people, which has made England English in his 
 courage, in his patience, his self-control, his masterful 
 stubbornness, his pitiless crushing down of opponents 
 when he felt himself to be on the path of duty, his 
 disdain of forms, theories, doctrines, and Utopias, his 
 passion for freedom with personal self- will, his Biblical 
 religion, his sterling honesty of aim and yet great 
 capacity for intrigue, his fierce hold on certain root 
 ideals with a boundless spirit of compromise, oppor- 
 tunism, toleration of all things and all men that he 
 judged to be instrumental to his ends. An eminent 
 historian (himself a descendant of the Protector) tells us 
 to regard him " with all his physical and moral audacity, 
 with all his tenderness and spiritual yearnings, in the 
 world of action what Shakespeare was in the world 
 of thought, the greatest because the most typical 
 Englishman of all time " not a model but a mirror, 
 wherein we may see alike our weakness and our 
 strength. 
 
 The " most typical " of Englishmen is wholly true : 
 as to " the greatest," it is a term rather too strong for 
 those who admit great faults, and perhaps some crimes. 
 It is true that both faults and crimes were essentially 
 those of the age and of the moral standard of the party 
 he led ; and what we most condemn to-day met with 
 nothing but praise from some of the best spirits of the
 
 TERCENTENARY OF CROMWELL 6r 
 
 time. Yet perhaps in "the greatest" of Englishmen 
 we would ask for a career more entirely spotless, and a 
 nature of more heroic beauty. King Alfred, whom 
 Freeman called "the model Englishman," would be 
 more fairly matched with Shakespeare, if we choose to 
 imagine the greatest of our national types, for to King 
 Alfred neither crimes nor faults are imputed. Crom- 
 well is of us, is near to us ; we are living still in the 
 daily influence of his work ; we know every incident 
 of his life, almost every thought of his mind. We feel 
 for him as we feel for our own country, when uncon- 
 sciously, instinctively, often in spite of the pricking of 
 conscience we murmur England ! with all thy faults 
 I love thee still ! We honour Cromwell in spite of 
 his faults j some of us, it may be feared, because of 
 his faults. 
 
 It is as an Englishman that Cromwell must be 
 judged, and it is unreasonable to ask Scots or Irish to 
 join us to-day. Though Cromwell gave Scotland 
 good government for the first time in its history, so 
 that a Scotchman and an enemy writes : " We always 
 reckon those eight years of the usurpation a time of 
 great peace and prosperity " ; though he certainly 
 prepared the way for the ultimate Union the source 
 of Scotland's happiness and glory yet it will not be 
 forgotten that Cromwell conquered Scotland, and ruled 
 it as a conqueror. As to Ireland, Cromwell remorse- 
 lessly carried out the atrocious policy of his age, and of 
 our country. For my part, I never will palliate or 
 condone it. And the "curse of Cromwell" in the 
 mouths of Irishmen will long rest on his memory and 
 on our peace. 
 
 The teaching of Cromwell's life is plain. The 
 silly legend about his ambition and demagogic intrigues 
 has long died away. If ever any English ruler had 
 power forced on him step by step, or ever lived a
 
 62 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 reserved, austere, domestic life till roused by tyranny 
 to play the man as a citizen should, if ever English 
 statesman having absolute power stood clear of personal 
 interests or sordid desires, it was he. As our Hero- 
 King wrote : " You need not be solicitous about 
 power, nor strive after it. If you be wise and good, it 
 will follow you though you should not wish it." The 
 meditations of Alfred upon Power form a key to the 
 career of his successor eight centuries later. Nor let 
 it be forgotten that for the first time in our history, 
 and almost for the last time, morality and religion 
 were the titles for entrance to Oliver's Court, and 
 notorious vice unfitted all men for Oliver's service. 
 His tolerance of honest convictions, his patience under 
 open hostility, his loathing of confirmed profligacy, 
 his contempt for conventional formulas were alike 
 unalterable and boundless. 
 
 As a statesman, the unique merit of Cromwell's 
 government was his genius for administration, for 
 securing efficiency in every department, for selecting 
 the right man for every duty, for recognising and using 
 every kind of capacity in every department. His 
 success in this crowning art of the statesman has 
 perhaps never been equalled in our own history, hardly 
 in that of Europe, unless it be by Richelieu and 
 Frederick the Great. This plain yeoman, who had 
 tilled his farmstead until past forty years, stepped forth 
 into public life, made himself a thorough soldier, 
 created a consummate army, decided a tremendous 
 civil war, conquered two neighbouring kingdoms, 
 guided a national revolution, stemmed it back by 
 organising a solid conservative government, chose as his 
 deputies the most capable soldiers, seamen, governors, 
 diplomatists, financiers, lawyers, ministers, and pub- 
 licists who could be found to serve the Commonwealth ; 
 and in five years he had formed the strongest Govern-
 
 TERCENTENARY OF CROMWELL 63 
 
 ment in Europe, and had made his country the leading 
 Power in the world. 
 
 In what we now call opportunism (that is, the 
 instinct of the statesman to change his tactics under 
 circumstances and to seize the occasion of the hour) 
 Cromwell has rarely been equalled by any man in all 
 recorded history. His note as a born statesman is the 
 union of matchless audacity with inexhaustible wari- 
 ness. No great man so brave and so daring was ever 
 so untiringly prudent and watchful. In his whole 
 career Cromwell never met with a single disaster, 
 either in war or in government. He was never off 
 his guard, was never once caught napping, never 
 relaxed his intense hold on the smallest detail, or 
 allowed a single point to be unguarded. In this he is 
 like Elizabeth, Wellington, or Marlborough, but he 
 surpassed them all in sleepless vigilance and unbroken 
 success. His were not the triumphs of a Napoleon 
 alternating with hideous catastrophes, nor the generous 
 imprudences of a Caesar or a Henry IV. In one of 
 the most complex and arduous careers in history, 
 Cromwell is almost the one great chief who in peace 
 and in war never met with a rebuff which more perfect 
 prudence would have sufficed to avert. 
 
 What permanent results did Cromwell stamp upon 
 the history of England ? In the broadest sense he 
 gave us modern England. Not, of course, alone, but 
 as chief leader in the English Revolution, much as 
 Frederick made modern Prussia, as Nelson won 
 Trafalgar, or as Wellington won Waterloo. Crom- 
 well made modern England with the blood and sweat 
 and heart of the flower of the English people. It is 
 far from clear that without him the finer part of the 
 English people would not have succumbed to the baser 
 part, that the Stuarts would not have founded at last 
 some such monarchy as that of the Louis in France.
 
 64 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Those who understand the inner history of the Civil 
 War know that, down to the battle of Marston, if not 
 down to the New Model, the issue was far from clear 
 and Marston and Naseby were essentially Cromwell's 
 triumphs. And those who understand English history 
 know that the struggle was a long one, that it lasted 
 for at least sixty years from the Long Parliament to 
 the Act of Settlement, that what old Whigs call the 
 " Revolution " was a mere episode and after-glow of 
 the Commonwealth. Modern England begins with 
 the Act of Settlement : this was the direct fruit of the 
 Civil War: and the Civil War might have ended in a 
 Malignant Monarchy but for Oliver Cromwell and 
 his genius as soldier and statesman. 
 
 An exalted Personage once asked a certain historian 
 .to tell him what Cromwell had left of permanent to 
 the nation ? " Well, sir," was the answer, " our most 
 gracious Majesty, and our present Dynasty." This 
 may pass as an after-dinner phrase, but it is not 
 altogether a paradox. We have to look at these 
 problems in a large way and from an ample perspective. 
 The Commonwealth and the Protectorate destroyed 
 the Old Monarchy and the Feudal Constitution, and 
 they opened the ground for all our Liberal Institu- 
 tions. It is true that Stuarts, Monarchy, and Church 
 returned, but only for a space, mere shadows of 
 their ancient form. Look at England as a whole, 
 as it was at the accession of Charles I. and as 
 it was at the accession of Oueen Anne, and note 
 
 *^/ 
 
 the enormous change within those two genera- 
 tions. Monarchy, peerage, parliament, law, justice, 
 finance, toleration, equity, commerce, religion all 
 were transformed, and stood on a wholly new social 
 system. Who, along with the people of England, 
 and their sense of freedom, justice, and truth, had 
 made this possible ? Who but Oliver Cromwell ?
 
 TERCENTENARY OF CROMWELL 65 
 
 Of course, the Protectorate was followed by the 
 Restoration, and most of its direct acts of State were 
 annulled. It is true that Parliamentary Government, 
 as understood by the Whigs, was far from an idea of 
 Cromwell, who contemplated rather the Presidential 
 system of the United States. But, though Cromwell 
 did not found Parliamentary Government, nor religious 
 liberty, nor the legal and administrative system that 
 he prematurely set up, he made all these things 
 possible in the end, little as he foresaw what he was 
 doing. Our subsequent history, no doirbt, was a 
 compromise, and much of it. was as anti-Cromwellian 
 as it could be. But it was Cromwell who, in the 
 evolution of the English nation, made our subsequent 
 history possible. 
 
 The eminent historian quoted above now tells us 
 that Cromwell has left nothing permanent, that not 
 only his institutions, but hrs ideas failed of result, that 
 his negative work lasted, but his positive work vanished. 
 This is an over-statement which, if it were pressed, 
 would be a paradox or a sophism. It is a matter 
 of language. In great revolutions of nations and 
 societies there is no arbitrary distinction between 
 negative and positive results. To destroy for ever 
 an effete political and social system is practically 
 to found a new system. And if new institutions 
 improvised on the cleared ground do not take 
 permanent root, they prepare the way for modified 
 institutions of a kindred sort. It would be easy 
 to show that Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, 
 Richelieu, or Napoleon left no permanent results on 
 history, because their positive work vanished, and 
 their institutions were swept away, or developed in 
 new forms. That Cromwell's " ideas " have failed is 
 manifestly untrue. What, then, mean our eulogies, 
 centenaries, statues, and honours to his memory our
 
 66 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 grateful sense of his hatred of oppression, of persecu- 
 tion, of his zeal for good government, justice, morality, 
 religion in things public as well as private ? Let us 
 not make ourselves blind over the records of institutions 
 and negotiations. The ideas of Cromwell live deep 
 down in the hearts of Englishmen. 
 
 We hear too much of the objection that Cromwell 
 was a soldier and ruled by the sword. He was a 
 civilian not a soldier a citizen by nature, and 
 always a statesman by the summons of the nation, a 
 soldier for a brief spell by dire necessity. Cromwell 
 was forty-three when he first drew a sword, and of the 
 fifty-eight years of his life he spent but nine under 
 arms. Great soldier as he was in the field, he was far 
 less the professional soldier than George Washington, 
 or William the Silent. If we study his whole career 
 after Worcester we see him continually labouring to 
 return to a civil government, and all his ways differ 
 essentially from the ways of a Frederick or a Napoleon, 
 though he held absolute power, and was beset by 
 enemies within and without. The Protectorate, 
 which lasted less than five years, was a constant effort 
 to restore the ravages and calm the passions of civil 
 war. 
 
 We are told again that Cromwell's rule rested 
 wholly on the Army, that it was a military despotism, 
 and that a military despotism was an impossibility in 
 England, doomed to an abhorred collapse. In words, 
 it is true that the Protectorate, like the Long 
 Parliament, rested on armed men, who, perhaps, were at 
 all times a minority of the nation. Neither Parliament 
 nor Protector was any product of manhood suffrage. 
 But the armies of Parliament and Protector were 
 formed of men wholly different in origin and in 
 character from the troops who followed Frederick 
 or Napoleon, or even Wellington or Moltke. The
 
 TERCENTENARY OF CROMWELL 67 
 
 " Ironsides " were ardent politicians, usually religious 
 and political enthusiasts, who held their own Parliament 
 in the camp, a Parliament more able and honest than 
 the Rump at Westminster. The Clarke Papers^ so 
 admirably edited by Mr. C. H. Firth, have shown 
 us what these men were like, and how they affected 
 the State. With all their faults and follies they 
 were the flower of England, and the most genuine 
 politicians of their age. And far into the Restoration 
 the old " Ironsides " were known, up and down the 
 country, as the most trusty, virtuous, and industrious 
 citizens in their villages or towns. Most revolutions 
 are carried through by a minority of enthusiasts. It 
 was so in the Commonwealth. And the larger part 
 of what was brave, pure, and just in England gathered 
 round the great man, who, of all English chiefs since 
 Alfred, was the most brave, the most sincere, the 
 most just, the most devout.
 
 THE STATUE OF OLIVER 
 CROMWELL 
 
 1899 
 
 AT last, after two centuries and a half, London has a 
 statue of the greatest ruler who ever governed the 
 three kingdoms. The hatred of his memory, which 
 so long kept him in exile from the Palace of West- 
 minster, has at length fizzled out in the whining of a 
 handful of Ritualists, Jew financiers, and Jacobites. 
 That Churchmen, the parasites of smart Society, 
 Irishmen, mediaeval aesthetes, and the like should 
 feel sore at honours paid to the great Protector is 
 not unnatural. But they were not expected to sub- 
 scribe to the statue and were not invited to attend 
 the commemoration. They have vented their ill- 
 humour ; and now at last a grand effigy of Oliver 
 stands in the precincts of the ancient Hall, on the 
 gateway of which his mangled head rotted for twenty 
 years. It looks on the Abbey, where the nation en- 
 tombed him with royal honours at the premature end 
 of his short dictatorship. 
 
 To oppose the erection of a statue to Cromwell shows 
 a curious misunderstanding of what such a memorial 
 implies. It does not mean that we approve of all that 
 the man commemorated did in life : much less that all 
 parties and sections of the public approve his career. 
 
 68
 
 STATUE OF OLIVER CROMWELL 69 
 
 If so, there could be no statues of Wellington, Gordon, 
 Jenner, or George III. If warm approval of all the 
 acts of such an one and absolute unanimity were 
 needed, before a statue could be raised, there would be 
 no statues at all, or none but that of Alfred the Great. 
 And, even in his case, uniform admiration seems almost 
 to dull the public interest ; and we perhaps want a few 
 grumblers, as Devil's advocates, even for Alfred. 
 
 But just consider those of whom we have statues in 
 London already : Charles I., James II. James II. ! 
 Richard Cceur de Lion, George IV. four of the worst 
 Kings who ever occupied the throne to say nothing of 
 Francis, Duke of Bedford, Benjamin, Earl of Beacons- 
 field, the Duke of Cumberland, and the Duke of York 
 of the last century. There would be plenty of black 
 balls in the box, if these noble persons were submitted 
 to a public ballot. Nobody asks to have the statue of 
 any of these removed not even that of the miscreant 
 James II., whom Macaulay describes as "a libertine, 
 narrow in understanding, obstinate, harsh, and unfor- 
 giving " one whom the nation drove from the throne 
 in favour of the present Dynasty. There must be a 
 give-and-take in such things. And if the mass of the 
 public can tolerate the sight in bronze of a sinister 
 brute like James II., we have a right to claim a place 
 for one who represents the good side of that great 
 national struggle, whereof James II. was the incarna- 
 tion of the evil side. 
 
 A memorial of Oliver rests on the fact that he was 
 the leader of a movement which transformed the course 
 of English history, and then, for nearly five years, was 
 the paramount ruler of the three kingdoms at an epoch 
 eminent for skilful administration and national power. 
 The most ardent Oliverians do not to-day pretend to 
 justify many things in the Protector's public action, 
 nor do they dream of celebrating him as a perfect
 
 70 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 character. No one now repeats the extravagant 
 hyperboles of Carlyle, whose sardonic idolatry tends 
 rather to stimulate hostility to the memory of Crom- 
 well, not to disarm it. But the reaction against 
 Carlyle's old-Cameronian hero-worship seems to be 
 going too far ; and even some who deeply approve the 
 overthrow of the Stuart absolutism and all that it 
 meant in Church and State, rather minimise the part 
 that Oliver had in the work, and insist on his failure 
 to bring the work to its full completeness. In these 
 days of so much flabby theology and playing with 
 medievalism on one side, of so much conventional 
 liberalism and pedantic specialism on the other side, 
 the occasion is one to insist on the supreme importance 
 of the entire life of Cromwell in the successful evolution 
 of the English people. 
 
 It is now plain that the Stuart absolutism in Church 
 and State could not have been broken down without 
 Civil War. Of that Civil War, one marked by rapid 
 and complete success not elsewhere recorded in modern 
 history, Cromwell was the soul. All the great battles 
 were victories of his, were won by his genius alone 
 when all seemed lost. The conquest of the other two 
 kingdoms was also his sole task. No one now, even of 
 his most bitter opponents, doubts Cromwell's great place 
 as a soldier. But his supreme part in the Civil War 
 was much more than that of a soldier. The organising 
 of a regular army, having consummate discipline and 
 efficiency in all its arms and resources, out of the raw 
 farmers and workmen hastily enlisted, was Cromwell's 
 own achievement, and was perhaps even more decisive 
 than brilliant tactics in the field. But this is to say 
 that, but for Cromwell, the Monarchy and Feudalism 
 might have beaten down the Parliament and people, 
 might have established a retrograde absolutism and a 
 persecuting Church.
 
 STATUE OF OLIVER CROMWELL 71 
 
 But it is as the instrument of a great political and 
 social evolution, much more than as a consummate 
 soldier, that we celebrate Cromwell ; it is as statesman, 
 not as warrior, that he stands to-day at the gateway 
 of Parliament, looking down on the minor politicians 
 in Parliament Square. We are told by some eminent 
 historians of the Protector that his negative or destruc- 
 tive work was invaluable and permanent ; his positive 
 and constructive work was mistaken and evanescent. 
 Part of this statement is a mere matter of language ; 
 part of it is due to the viewing the broad course of 
 English history from a standpoint somewhat too special 
 and narrow. 
 
 What is negative^ what is positive work, in things 
 political and social ? Destructive work, in statesman- 
 ship, provided it be permanent^ is ipso facto constructive, 
 if it enables the new system to form and to grow. As 
 Luther, WicklifFe, Latimerwere primarily destructives 
 in theology, or as Voltaire, Hume, Kant were primarily 
 destructives in metaphysics, though vast constructions 
 have grown up on the ground which they cleared and 
 laid bare, so some of the most mighty founders of 
 political reconstruction left at their deaths nothing 
 permanent except their decisive work of destruction. 
 In societies, to destroy the effete, at the right time, 
 in the right way, and once for //, is to reconstruct. 
 Sulla, Attila, Philip II., Robespierre, and Marat were 
 mere destructives and anarchists, because their destruc- 
 tion was evil, and what they destroyed was destined 
 to revive. But those who sweep away what is 
 destined to perish past any revival, and, after finally 
 preparing the new ground, design a new type of 
 society and show forth an ideal of a better world, 
 these men are constructive statesmen, even though 
 their direct foundations are entirely modified and 
 rebuilt.
 
 72 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charles the Great, Godfrey 
 de Bouillon, Louis XL, William the Silent, effected 
 memorable works of reconstruction. The first three 
 transformed the world and the whole course of civilisa- 
 tion, and the latter three made possible great national 
 reconstruction. And yet the State system, the institu- 
 tions laboriously founded by each of these quickly 
 perished ; and hardly one of them left anything abso- 
 lutely permanent behind him, unless it were the city 
 of Alexandria and the Calendar. If we use terms very 
 strictly, and press things rigidly, the residuum of their 
 entire work may be said to lie in destruction, or nega- 
 tive results. Especially would this be true of William 
 the Silent, whose whole career was one of failure and 
 disappointment ; for, at his murder, almost everything 
 he had toiled to found was crumbling away. And yet 
 after three centuries the nation he created reveres him 
 as its Father, and the British Empire is now fighting 
 on the Orange River in Africa, with the mere offshoot 
 and emigrants from that nation. 
 
 Almost every criticism now urged against the 
 statesmanship of the Protector, might be made with 
 tenfold force against that of William the Silent. 
 William's great scheme of uniting the seventeen pro- 
 vinces utterly failed and for ever, his attempt to 
 harmonise Lutheran and Calvinist, Walloon and Hol- 
 lander, noble and democrat, broke down before his 
 own eyes. He turned from France to England, from 
 England to Germany, from monarchs to people, from 
 Princes to preachers, from magnates to tradesmen. 
 His diplomacy was one long tangle of changes, con- 
 flicting principles, ever-varying combinations, as was 
 that of Henry of Navarre, Mazarin, Cavour, or Bis- 
 marck. The failures, abortive schemes, vacillations, 
 high-handed acts, and arbitrary blunders imputed to 
 the Protector may all be matched in the history of
 
 STATUE OF OLIVER CROMWELL 73 
 
 these statesmen ; and, in the case of William the Silent, 
 they were tenfold as great. And yet the world has 
 long been agreed that William created a nation, and 
 that his negative success has really proved to be a posi- 
 tive success of the first order. 
 
 That destructive statesmanship should be construc- 
 tive in result, requires many important conditions. 
 The destruction must be necessary and timely ; it 
 must be final ; it must prepare a permanent reconstruc- 
 tion. The Protectorate fulfilled all these conditions. 
 Mr. John Morley, in his new and fascinating Life of 
 Cromwell, quotes a sentence of mine wherein I speak 
 of Oliver's success as a constructive statesman. If Mr. 
 Morley will look again at chapter xi. of my little book 
 he will see that his quotation omits the most important 
 phrase in my sentence. I wrote that Oliver was one 
 of the rare order "of constructive and conservative 
 statesmen." By that I meant that a statesman who, 
 after a great revolutionary clearance, stems the current 
 of destruction, conserves and re-establishes order and 
 good government, ipso facto constructs a new and 
 sounder system. After Worcester Cromwell was in 
 supreme authority for exactly seven years, during 
 which his policy was essentially Conservative. As he 
 truly said, the needs of the time were "Healing and 
 Settling." For seven years he did heal and settle in 
 the only way possible, often by arbitrary acts, now and 
 then by unjustifiable acts, constantly trying new 
 methods, but always bent on honest settlement. And 
 this seven years of heroic, but often abortive, striving 
 towards settlement in a conservative, but not a re- 
 actionary sense, made possible the final Settlement, 
 which thirty years later was brought about in the time 
 of the third William of Orange. 
 
 Although many of the Protector's schemes and 
 arrangements disappeared with him and some of them
 
 74 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 before him, they were ultimately succeeded by institu- 
 tions of a similar order and having like purpose, which 
 never could have been founded at all had not Cromwell's 
 reforms and experiments preceded them. Like William 
 the Silent, Cromwell failed at times because he was in 
 advance of his age, especially in the matter of religious 
 equality, official competence, law reform, and the 
 proper spheres of Parliament and Executive. Had 
 Cromwell had his way he would have made the political 
 system of England akin to that of the United States ; 
 and in my opinion it is a pity he did not have his way. 
 But his failure to fall in with the Parliamentary system, 
 which was hardly established for more than a century 
 after his time, was one of those failures for which he 
 is deserving of honour and not of blame. 
 
 It is quite true that his rule as Protector was based 
 on the Army, that much of it was oppressive to the 
 defeated party, that it was unconstitutional, such as 
 could not be permanently established in England. 
 Quite true : but the effectual destruction of the old 
 divine -right Monarchy could not have been made 
 decisive in any other way. Feudalism could not have 
 been crushed by a few defeats in the field. And the 
 mediaeval regime in law, local administration, religious 
 persecution, and arbitrary taxation could not have been 
 broken down without years and years of a military 
 regime based on a different spirit. Marston Moor, 
 Naseby, and Worcester were not enough to transform 
 England from a Feudal Monarchy and semi-Catholic 
 Church into a free Commonwealth and Protestant 
 toleration. It needed the five years of the greatest 
 ruler that England has ever known ; and if the five 
 years had been fifteen it would have been better for us 
 now. The government of Scotland was oppressive ; 
 the conquest of Ireland was atrocious ; the foreign 
 policy of the Protectorate was selfish. But all of
 
 STATUE OF OLIVER CROMWELL 75 
 
 these were involved in the very nature of the English- 
 men of that day. To ask of Cromwell that he should 
 be of different mould was to ask him not to be an 
 Englishman of the seventeenth century, not to be an 
 Englishman at all. At any rate, in all this he did not 
 go counter to the best hopes and aims of the worthiest 
 men of his own time and nation. In his fine address, 
 Lord Rosebery has summed up, in a curiously happy 
 phrase, the essential force of Cromwell's nature. He 
 was truly "a practical mystic, the most terrible and 
 formidable of all combinations." He combined spiritual 
 inspiration with the energy of a mighty man of action.
 
 THE REMAINS OF OLIVER 
 CROMWELL 
 
 1899 
 
 THE munificent gift to the nation of a statue of the 
 great Protector has naturally awakened a new interest 
 in the supposed fragment of his remains ; and, as 
 having given some attention to the matter when pre- 
 paring my little book on Oliver's Life^ I wish to 
 support the very reasonable demand for a serious 
 and official inquiry into the facts. I do not pretend 
 to pronounce any decisive opinion ; nor am I inclined 
 to a hasty or sentimental view of the case. What 
 we ask is a thorough examination with convincing 
 authority, not crude action without adequate in- 
 vestigation. I certainly believe, as was remarked by 
 others, that a strong prima facie case for inquiry 
 exists. Experts of much more weight than laymen 
 can have in such a matter think the same. What I 
 wish to urge is, that now is the time for inquiry, and 
 that it very much concerns the good name of our 
 nation to make it. 
 
 Let us consider what is at stake, supposing that the 
 mummy head is truly that of Oliver himself. Many 
 competent men, some on historical and some on 
 physiological grounds, believe that it is. If so, a 
 really dreadful responsibility lies upon us. Whatever 
 
 76
 
 REMAINS OF OLIVER CROMWELL 77 
 
 view we take of the Civil War and the Usurpation, 
 whatever we hold about Oliver's character and designs, 
 no one doubts that he was de facto ruler of England 
 in a time of glory and power, that his is one of the 
 greatest names in the roll of English history, that he 
 was laid with magnificent ceremony in the Abbey by 
 the de facto Government of these islands. There he 
 lay with official sanction until the Restoration, when 
 one of the most foul and barbarous outrages recorded 
 in our history was perpetrated upon his remains. It 
 was not the action of a mob, it was not done in the 
 fury of revolution or civil war, nor was it the incon- 
 siderate act of irresponsible subordinates. It was 
 deliberately done by Parliament, the Government, and 
 the Crown with every form of loathsome brutality. 
 And in the judgment of many of us it still stands 
 an unatoned stain on our monarchy and our national 
 history. The sickening details of this outrage rise to 
 our gorge when we think of the Restoration and the 
 annals of Westminster. 
 
 The outrage is one almost without example in our 
 history. In France, in the Netherlands, in Germany, 
 the tombs of the great dead have been desecrated by 
 furious mobs in civil and religious insurrections. But 
 our history is happily almost wholly free from that 
 peculiar type of brutality. The one stain on our 
 history of this odious kind is the official and monarchic 
 outrage on the Protector's bones. It would be diffi- 
 cult to find in European history another instance 
 where a monarchy and a Parliament had inflicted in 
 cold blood this vindictive desecration on the ruler 
 who for years had maintained its honour amongst the 
 nations, and had carried its flag to a foremost place 
 in the earth. Suppose that a Spanish Viceroy had 
 desecrated the tomb of William the Silent at Delft, 
 or that a Bourbon Restoration were even yet to
 
 78 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 desecrate the tomb of Napoleon in the Invalides. 
 What would be the feelings of a Dutch patriot, or 
 of a French patriot, if he had good reason to believe 
 that the severed head of William, or that of Napoleon, 
 were this very day to be seen in a box in a country 
 house ? Every Frenchman or any Dutchman, of 
 decent feeling, whatever his religion or his politics, 
 would exclaim in wrath and disgust "In God's 
 name, let us know if this thing can be ! " Now a 
 great many of us think that it is quite possible such 
 a thing really is, with regard to the outraged remains 
 of Oliver, and we think it becomes this nation's honour 
 to find out the truth. 
 
 I have never pretended to offer any conclusive 
 opinion in a difficult problem of the kind ; and I 
 only took up the inquiry with great hesitation and 
 repugnance. The subject is a gruesome and painful 
 one in any case ; and, to those of us who profoundly 
 revere the memory of our great Protector, almost 
 horrible and repulsive. No one with such a sense 
 can witness the uncovering of a relic which, whatever 
 it be, is an appalling sight, without a qualm of divided 
 feeling that, maybe, he is looking at the features of 
 one of the grandest spirits our English soil ever reared 
 or, it may be, on some nameless skull that curiosity 
 or imposture may have invested with interest. In 
 my own case, the very depth of veneration with which 
 I should bow my head before the true remains of the 
 hero made me very loth to admit that so extraordinary 
 a survival of such a relic was possible. I believe that 
 was the feeling of Carlyle, and that he could not bring 
 himself to examine it with patience. 
 
 Gradually, and by a convergent set of testimonies, 
 I have come to think that such a survival is not only 
 possible, but probable. The documentary history of 
 the relic is very far from adequate ; but it is perfectly
 
 REMAINS OF OLIVER CROMWELL 79 
 
 reasonable and consistent so far as it goes. Under 
 the circumstances, a perfectly unbroken and complete 
 history would be, in the highest degree, unlikely to 
 exist. If the head which undoubtedly fell one night 
 from Westminster Hall be still above ground, it would 
 only be preserved in a secret and surreptitious way. 
 The principal evidence I take to be, the obvious corre- 
 spondence of the mummy head with the authentic 
 portraits and busts of Oliver, and especially with the 
 cast taken after death on which Carlyle relied. I 
 have made a study of all these portraits and busts, and 
 I cannot detect one feature or one circumstance 
 wherein the relic fails. The extraordinary combina- 
 tion of incidents is this an embalmed mummy head, 
 corresponding minutely to the portraits and busts of 
 Oliver, severed from the body long after death, and after 
 embalming, fixed upon an ancient halberd head, itself 
 bearing marks of long weathering, and the whole 
 piece with its integuments, hair, bony structure, flesh, 
 and iron spike minutely corresponding to the history 
 of the relic itself extremely probable and consistent. 
 What ingenuity could combine all these elements 
 the head of a mummy resembling Oliver so closely as 
 to convince biologists and sculptors, which had been 
 severed from the body after embalming, and was en- 
 crusted on an antique lance-head ? And to what end 
 was such strange ingenuity directed ? The relic is 
 not for sale, nor on show, nor has it been thrust upon 
 the public notice. For nearly the whole of the 
 century it has been honourably preserved by two 
 families, who regard it as a sacred trust. 
 
 I am very far from asking any one to take my 
 opinion on the matter, which after all only amounts 
 to a prima facie case of strong probability. What we 
 ask for now is an inquiry an authoritative and con- 
 clusive inquiry to place the matter at rest before the
 
 8o MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 statue is set up. It is really a cruel thought that, for 
 aught we know, the grandest head that ever sat on 
 English shoulders may be lying loose in the house of 
 a private owner ; the head, be it remembered, which 
 an English King and Parliament so foully disinterred, 
 cut off, and set up in mockery at the gateway of 
 Parliament. To leave this possibility floating about 
 as a matter of periodical gossip is really to continue 
 and approve the original outrage. 
 
 Now, the inquiry can be made a very simple and 
 easy one. I suggest that a small Commission should 
 be asked to investigate and report to the Home Secre- 
 tary. It so happens that there are many descendants 
 of the Protector amongst our public men, especially 
 in the present Government and party in office. Fore- 
 most stand a late Cabinet Minister, and our most 
 learned living historian. Lord Ripon, the highest in 
 rank of the known descendants of Oliver, would make 
 an admirable chairman ; Mr. S. Rawson Gardiner, 
 another descendant, would, of course, be at his side. 
 Sir John Lubbock, also a descendant, would represent 
 the scientific question ; the Regius Professors of 
 History at Oxford and Cambridge, and certainly Mr. 
 C. H. Firth, as a Cromwellian expert, should be 
 added. There might be a sculptor, say Mr. Thorny- 
 croft, who is preparing the statue, and possibly an 
 expert in craniology and in taxidermy, or the like. 
 All we want is an authoritative opinion from men of 
 varied experience. A month or two of careful sifting 
 of evidence, a few hours of actual inspection, and 
 half a dozen sittings would dispose of the whole affair. 
 And, whatever were the report of the Commission, 
 the matter would be set at rest for ever. 
 
 But in case such a Commission were to report that 
 in their opinion there is sufficient ground to believe 
 the relic to be in truth the outraged head of our great
 
 REMAINS OF OLIVER CROMWELL 81 
 
 Protector, then the Government should address the 
 Dean of Westminster, having obtained the sanction 
 of the Crown, and ask Parliament to efface the 
 atrocious blot upon its annals by formally replacing 
 the surviving fragment of our great Dictator in the 
 very vault where the nation laid him in glory and 
 honour nearly two centuries and a half ago. Long 
 as is the interval, it is not too late to atone for an 
 unparalleled atrocity. And to those whose instinct it 
 is to leave things alone, we would say : In any case 
 the outraged remains of some Englishman still cry 
 out for peaceful burial it may well be the outraged 
 remains of one of the greatest Englishmen our land 
 ever bore. 
 
 The proper resting-place for any remnant of the 
 Protector's bones which chance may have spared is 
 unquestionably the vault in Henry VI I. 's Chapel, 
 where the nation laid him. For years past many of 
 us have visited that solemn corner of the Abbey year 
 by year, and rehearsed the tale of ignominy with 
 yearning for some ultimate reparation of the national 
 crime. Our glorious Abbey, unlike St. Denis or the 
 Pantheon in Paris, has no desecrated tombs but these. 
 And the bitter memories they still awaken in us 
 rise, unbidden and irrepressible, in the midst of the 
 pilgrimages we make to our national burying-place 
 of the mighty dead. 
 
 In the Abbey should be laid in final rest any 
 relic of Oliver that might conceivably be recovered. 
 Another suggestion has been made, which we need 
 not discuss until it is plain that some obstacle could 
 be raised to this obvious reburial, on behalf of the 
 Abbey or the Crown. Some have thought that 
 the relic itself might be embodied in the pedestal 
 or beneath the statue of Oliver, so that the new 
 effigy would be at once monument and actual tomb. 
 
 G
 
 82 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 There is something to be said for the idea ; but it is 
 one which it is needless to discuss. The proper place 
 for the new statue of Oliver would be Charing Cross, 
 and I should like to see the fine statue of Charles I. 
 removed to the neighbourhood of the beautiful banquet- 
 ing hall where he died. Oliver himself should have 
 no connection with Parliament, nor should he stand 
 in its environs at all. He belongs to England, and 
 not to the three kingdoms which our Parliament (at 
 least as yet) claims to represent. Let Oliver stand in 
 Charing Cross hard by the very spot where some of 
 his bravest Ironsides shed their blood.
 
 THE CENTENARY OF GIBBON 
 
 1894 
 
 THE present year is the hundredth anniversary since the 
 death of the greatest of all English historians. Edward 
 Gibbon died in London, in January 1794, in his fifty- 
 seventh year. His reputation has been so perfectly 
 established since the appearance of the first volume of 
 the Decline and Fall in 1776, it has been so unbroken, 
 it is so continuously growing, that there is as little 
 need for any formal commemoration of his achieve- 
 ment as there is for that of Shakespeare or Bacon. 
 And his life was so simple, so transparent, and has 
 been told by himself and by his friends with such 
 ingenuous familiarity, that there would seem to be at 
 first sight no occasion for any further research into his 
 labours, or for any special revival of interest in his 
 memory. 
 
 There are some circumstances, however, of a rather 
 peculiar kind which make it a genuine concern of 
 English literature to ask for some further light, to 
 review what the great historian left at his premature 
 death, and to bring his personality before the world 
 ere the means of so doing shall have been effaced 
 by time. The National Portrait Gallery (which has 
 likenesses of Peg Woffington and of John Wilkes) has 
 no portrait at all of Edward Gibbon. The only 
 
 83
 
 84 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 recognised portraits are in private hands, and not 
 accessible to the public. The house at Putney in 
 which he was born, his house at Lausanne, the house 
 in which he died, in St. James's Street, have all been 
 destroyed. There is no record of him in our great 
 burying-places, not even a bust or a tablet. The 
 bones of Edward Gibbon lie in a vault of a small 
 village church in Sussex, a spot with which, except by 
 friendship, he himself had no kind of connection, and 
 where he was merely an occasional visitor. Not one 
 in a thousand, or in ten thousand, of his ardent 
 admirers has ever stood beside his quiet grave, and 
 few of them, perhaps, could say where his body has 
 found rest. The public at large has never seen either 
 portrait, bust, inscription, manuscript, relic, or any 
 visible memento to recall to them the greatest historian 
 of our language, or to give voice to the honour we all 
 feel for one of the most signal triumphs of our litera- 
 ture. We cannot be said to have erred by any excess 
 of hero-worship in the case of our great historian. 
 
 But there is something more than this, and that of 
 a practical kind. Gibbon died before he had completed 
 his fifty-seventh year. He was not worn out ; his 
 mind had never been in such activity ; he still talked 
 of his being "a good life for ten, twelve, or perhaps 
 twenty years." His great work had been completed 
 more than six years before ; he was still an indefatig- 
 able student, and was preparing his Antiquities of the 
 House of Brunswick. Death suddenly cut short this 
 busy career an end largely due to neglect and im- 
 prudence about a week after his return from his 
 friend's house in Sussex. He made this lifelong friend, 
 John B. Holroyd, Lord Sheffield, his executor, who 
 buried him in the Sheffield mausoleum in the church 
 of Fletching, near East Grinstead in Sussex. Lord 
 Sheffield was the possessor of the well-known portrait
 
 THE CENTENARY OF GIBBON 85 
 
 by Reynolds and that by Warton dated 1774, and 
 stated by Lord Sheffield to be " by far the best likeness 
 of him that exists." Lord Sheffield also had all 
 Gibbon's manuscripts, his memoirs, essays, diaries and 
 journals, materials for the House of Brunswick, and all 
 his other letters. 
 
 As is well known, Lord Sheffield issued two quarto 
 volumes in 1796, containing the historian's miscel- 
 laneous works ; and again, in 1814, he issued a second 
 edition in five octavo volumes, with much additional 
 matter. For what posthumous work of Gibbon's it 
 possesses the world is exclusively indebted to Lord 
 Sheffield, who had also portraits, manuscripts, corre- 
 spondence, and every other relic of the great historian. 
 He discharged his task with great diligence, discretion, 
 and devotion to the memory of his friend. But after 
 the lapse of a hundred years, and the vast increase in 
 the world-wide fame of Edward Gibbon, it seems 
 reasonable to ask that the present generation should 
 have the means of deciding for itself whether his 
 literary executor has omitted nothing which the world 
 would care to have. 
 
 Friendship constant, pure, generous, and warm 
 friendship was the ennobling trait in Gibbon's far 
 from heroic nature ; and it formed the main beauty of 
 his simple life. His love for his aunt, Catherine 
 Porten, for his stepmother, for Deyverdun, for the 
 Neckers, redeems his biography from commonplace. 
 But, above all, his friendship with Lord Sheffield is a 
 landmark in the history of literature in their age. 
 Nothing is more natural or more honourable than 
 Holroyd's devotion to his great friend's memory. He 
 buried him in his own family tomb, carried off all his 
 remains, edited his memoirs and correspondence, and 
 undertook a careful selection of his manuscripts, essays, 
 and materials for publication. Lord Sheffield made
 
 86 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 himself more than the Boswell of Gibbon ; he not 
 only published his Life and remains, but he took 
 effective care that no one else should ever intrude on 
 his own labour of love, or add by one line to the Gibbon 
 literature which he himself judged fit to entrust to the 
 public eye. Such devotion, such zeal, such jealousy 
 for the memory of his illustrious friend, are much to his 
 honour. But now that a century has passed, we may 
 fairly ask to have some review of the execution of this 
 difficult task. 
 
 This is not the case of a great writer having made 
 his own selection of his writings, and forbidding publi- 
 cation of whatever he judged unworthy of his reputa- 
 tion. That veto ought, as a general rule, to be 
 religiously respected though few of us would go so 
 far as to burn the manuscript of the jEneid. The 
 detestable trick of publishing any scrap from a great 
 man's pen that an editor can beg, borrow, or steal 
 should be sternly suppressed. There is nothing of the 
 kind here. Gibbon made no selection, put no veto on 
 any publication. Within twenty hours of his death 
 he talked of living for years, and evidently anticipated 
 a new literary career and the completion of his second 
 great work. The selection made of his remains, the 
 veto upon any further publication, was the sole act of 
 his friend, the first Lord Sheffield ; and it is now a 
 hundred years old. However judicious the choice, 
 however proper the embargo, it cannot be held con- 
 clusive, without fresh examination, by posterity for 
 evermore. Nor can it possibly bind the present 
 representative of the house, who was born long after 
 the death of the first Earl. 
 
 There is a strong, perhaps an unreasonable often 
 it is an unreasoned prejudice against centenary com- 
 memorations in this country. But the practice of 
 other nations, and the growing tendency of the public
 
 THE CENTENARY OF GIBBON 87 
 
 mind, make something of the kind inevitable ; and they 
 certainly have their convenience. The "Services," 
 public officials, Society, and the world in general 
 would greatly miss the suppression of birthdays, 
 jubilees, and anniversaries of royal or public personages 
 and great national events. A centenary is often a 
 convenient occasion for doing some forgotten duty, 
 recalling some fading memory, or repairing some 
 public omission or default. And it is a public default 
 that our national collections contain no likeness of the 
 greatest historian of modern times, that our national 
 monuments contain not a tablet to record his name, 
 that his memory is not kept alive by a single object 
 of any kind in any public place or museum, that not a 
 single living scholar has ever had access to the mass of 
 writings he left, which still remain sealed up in a 
 country house. 
 
 There can be no need at the present day for any 
 new eulogium upon Gibbon's work, nor any doubt as 
 to his true place in the world's abiding literature. As 
 the Athenian orator said : "When one is speaking to 
 those who know, there is no occasion for a long 
 harangue." The late Mr. Cotter Morison who, 
 after so much historical promise, was cut off prema- 
 turely has given us in his admirable Life of Gibbon 
 (The Men of Letters Series, 1878) an estimate of 
 our great historian so just, so mature, so sympathetic, 
 so enthusiastic, that it would be in vain to attempt to 
 add to it. Mr. Morison has stated with decision and 
 weight Gibbon's shortcomings and limitations, as well 
 as his supreme merit. The Decline and Fall is not 
 the work of a philosopher ; it is not altogether 
 scientific history ; it is not without very grave mis- 
 judgments. But it is a consummate work of art ; it 
 unites vast learning with a perfect mastery of lucid 
 narration, superb good sense with unfailing acumen,
 
 88 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 vivacious wit, and brilliant vitality that irradiates the 
 whole enormous field. 
 
 The Decline and Fall is the most perfect book that 
 English prose (outside its fiction) possesses, meaning 
 by book a work perfect in design, totus^ teres^ atque 
 rotundus, symmetrical, complete, final, and executed 
 from beginning to end with the same mastery on one 
 uniform plan. There is no other history extant 
 which can be put beside it, if we reckon all the 
 following qualities and conditions : (i) its immense 
 field, both in extent of area and in epochs of time ; 
 
 (2) its consummate concentration and grasp of view ; 
 
 (3) its amazing range of learning and curious accuracy 
 of detail ; (4) its pomp of movement and splendour of 
 style. There have been before and since more subtle 
 observers and more truly enlightened spirits. There 
 have been historians quite as learned, who have made 
 even fewer errors, and some who have written in a 
 purer form. But no historian has ever combined 
 all Gibbon's supreme gifts. And, accordingly, the 
 Decline and Fall remains the type of the perfect 
 literary history, just as the Zeus of Pheidias remained 
 the type of the father of gods and men. 
 
 As Mr. Cotter Morison has so judiciously explained, 
 Gibbon was the first to give to the world a complete 
 history on the largest scale and with profound original 
 research. And his subject is one so mighty, his 
 scheme so vast, his execution so brilliant, that it still 
 remains in a class by itself as yet unapproached, 
 gaining by the efflux of time rather than losing in 
 value. His true theme is the complex stormy evolu- 
 tion of the modern world out of the ancient world, 
 the terrible and laboured transition from polytheism 
 and slavery to monotheism and free industry. And 
 this is the most critical and protracted transition in 
 the annals of mankind. The geography of his
 
 THE CENTENARY OF GIBBON 89 
 
 subject embraces the old world from the Hebrides 
 to the Indus, from the deserts of Tartary to the 
 mountains of Atlas. His topic is the history of 
 civilisation over thirteen centuries. And this vast 
 canvas is filled without confusion, without effort, 
 without discord, by one glowing, distinct, harmonious 
 composition. 
 
 This is the supreme merit of Edward Gibbon, 
 that he produced the first perfect literary history on 
 a grand scale one which still remains the most 
 perfect we know. The only ancient history which 
 in breadth of subject, epical splendour of imagination 
 and beauty of narration, can be compared with his 
 is the Roman history of Livy, of which, alas, we 
 have only fragments. But we can hardly regard the 
 delightful chansons de gestes of the glorious Augustan 
 improvisatore as history in our sense of the term, for 
 his whole soul turned to rhetorical effect and not to 
 authentic record. But Gibbon fused the pomp and 
 clang of Livy's epic with the conscientious veracity 
 of Caesar's Memoirs. Herodotus has a field as wide 
 almost as Gibbon's, a spirit of inquiry as insatiable, 
 and has painted certain great scenes with an even 
 nobler art. But the Father of History was obviously 
 not equipped with the elaborate historical apparatus 
 of a modern library ; and his ever fresh and fascinat- 
 ing muses do not group into an organic composition 
 of the highest art. Each muse in turn takes up her 
 favourite subject legend, antiquities, voyages and 
 travels, anecdotes, fairy tales, memoirs, and battle 
 scenes but their inexhaustible encyclopaedia does 
 not form one continuous epic. Gibbon has combined 
 the epic unity of Livy with the infinite variety of 
 Herodotus, the vivacity and portraiture of Plutarch, 
 and the punctilious truthfulness of Caesar. He com- 
 bined the minute accuracy and vivid detail of the best
 
 90 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 memoirs with the vast survey and poetic transfiguration 
 peculiar to the highest type of history. And he was 
 the first, and the greatest, of those who have done 
 this. 
 
 The true devotees of Gibbon are the foremost in 
 restraining their admiration within due limits, and 
 in frankly admitting the grave shortcomings of the 
 master. No one has done this more thoroughly than 
 Mr. Morison. He has abundantly shown that 
 Gibbon is in no sense to be judged as a philosophic 
 historian, that he was not a philosopher at all, that 
 he did not penetrate into the deepest truths behind 
 the record of events, that he sadly misjudged some 
 things of prime importance. But in Gibbon's century 
 the philosophy of history was in mere germ, and what 
 are now the commonplaces of every student were 
 truths concealed from them of old time. No one 
 will pretend that Gibbon possessed the profound 
 insight into the human mind of Thucydides, or of 
 Tacitus, of Julius Caesar ; we may add of De 
 Comines, of Bacon, or of Hume. He did not see 
 as deeply behind the veil of the heart and of social 
 movements as any of these. But of all these men, 
 Hume alone wrote history on a really grand canvas, 
 and, as we all know, Hume painted a great historical 
 picture without "studying from the life" at all. He 
 did all that a man of genius and a consummate writer 
 could do with a very cursory knowledge of his facts. 
 But Gibbon, though a great writer, was even greater 
 in research. And though he was not a profound 
 moralist, and wrote before such a science as sociology 
 had been dreamed of, his task was very different from 
 that of keen thinkers who meditate upon men and 
 events of their own age, or on things that passed 
 under the eyes of their own fathers and grandfathers. 
 The writer of history has a very different task from
 
 THE CENTENARY OF GIBBON 91 
 
 that of the writer of annals or memoirs and in many 
 ways a much more difficult task. 
 
 Let us never pretend that Gibbon was a philosopher. 
 Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Leibnitz, 
 Hume, perhaps we may add Vico and Pascal, had yet 
 deeper insight to follow the dynamics of society. 
 Both Montesquieu and Hume, his immediate pre- 
 decessors, stood on a totally superior level as social 
 philosophers. With all their glaring misconceptions, 
 prejudices, and blunders, even Bossuet, Voltaire, 
 Condorcet, and Burke had a clearer vision into social 
 evolution and the grand battle of ideas and manners 
 than ever Gibbon attained in his fifty years of 
 voracious historical study. Nor need we deny that 
 some of Gibbon's own contemporaries wrote history 
 more in the spirit of philosophy. Voltaire, with all 
 his perversity, was an even superior artist, and had a 
 truer sense of the paramount mastery of ideas. And 
 Robertson's State of Europe showed a sounder historical 
 judgment than the Decline and Fall. Robertson's 
 best work preceded Gibbon's by some ten or fifteen 
 years ; Voltaire's and Hume's both by some twenty- 
 five or thirty years. So that Gibbon was certainly 
 not the earliest real historian of the eighteenth 
 century, and he was certainly by no means the most 
 eminent social thinker. Yet, notwithstanding, given 
 all these qualifications, he was the greatest literary 
 historian. 
 
 He was essentially the consummate literary artist 
 who transmutes mountains of exact research into a 
 complex mass, glowing with life in all its parts, and 
 glorious to contemplate as a whole. This is a literary, 
 rather than a philosophical, feat ; and as such it must 
 be judged. Its art is akin to that of the epic poet 
 who works out a grand plot in symmetrical order, 
 with episodes, incidents, digressions, but on a con-
 
 92 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 sistent scheme, with beauty in each part and memor- 
 able form in each line. Now, it is beyond dispute 
 that Gibbon's subject and scheme far transcend in 
 breadth and importance to humanity those of any 
 other historian, even those of Herodotus and Livy, 
 Henri Martin, Grote or Milman, if we put aside such 
 manuals as those of Heeren, Becker, Ranke, and 
 Freeman. This is also beyond doubt, that no 
 historian of ancient or modern times has ever shown 
 the creative and formative imagination triumphing 
 over such transcendent difficulties and working on so 
 grand a scale. Carlyle's French Revolution is perhaps 
 a typical example of this power to infuse exact record 
 with poetic vitality, but Carlyle's masterpiece gives 
 us the story of five, or at most of twenty years, and of 
 one country, or, rather, of one city. Gibbon's epic 
 history is the story of mankind over the planet during 
 thirteen centuries. And Gibbon's story is even more 
 accurate, more brilliant, more organic, more truly a 
 work of art than is Carlyle's. 
 
 And what vigour, what wit, what a clarion ring 
 in every sentence from the first line of the first 
 volume to the closing phrase of the last ! How it 
 holds the attention, how it leaves its imprint on the 
 memory, how it conjures up scenes to the eye. It 
 is like watching some interminable procession, as of 
 a Roman triumph some Caesar returning from his 
 Eastern victories, with warriors of all races, costumes, 
 and colours, and the trophies of barbaric peoples, and 
 the roar of many tribes, strange beasts, the pomp of 
 war, and the spoils of cities. We need not insist that 
 it is a perfect style, or a style without grave limita- 
 tions or defects. It has not the lucid simplicity of 
 Voltaire and of Hume, nor the grace of Addison, nor 
 the pathos of Burke. It is too elaborate, too stiff 
 with jewelry, and too uniform in texture. And
 
 THE CENTENARY OF GIBBON 93 
 
 perhaps these defects have induced the most versatile 
 of living critics to put on record his memorable 
 saying that he did not care for Gibbon except for his 
 Memoirs. This is as if one said that he did not care 
 for Shakespeare except for the Sonnets. 
 
 A famous authority on the beautiful was dis- 
 appointed with the Atlantic ; but we must not take 
 these purists too literally. The Atlantic becomes 
 rather grandiose, and at last somewhat monotonous ; 
 and so, Gibbon's interminable antithesis and unbend- 
 ing majesty do pall upon the constant reader, if he 
 takes in too much at a sitting. But how splendid is 
 the vigour, the point, the precision of the language ; 
 and, with all its faults, how well fitted to rehearse 
 these "strange stories of the deaths of kings," how 
 akin to the theme and to the glowing scheme of 
 the painter's colouring ! It is impossible to hurry 
 through your Gibbon ; you cannot skip ; you cannot 
 take in a description at a glance ; you cannot leave 
 out the adjectives, or jump the second half of a 
 clause. You may take up your Decline and Fall^ of 
 which you can repeat pages by heart ; you may have 
 read it fifteen times, but the sixteenth reading will 
 give you a phrase of which you had not previously 
 caught the full sense, or throw light on something 
 which has long been a puzzle. And how fixed in the 
 memory are the quips and innuendos, the epigrams 
 and the epithets, with which the page coruscates like 
 a piece of jewelry. It may not be a pure style, it is 
 certainly not a model style, but it is one that gives a 
 gorgeous colour to a supremely organic composition. 
 
 Needless, too, now to enlarge on Gibbon's con- 
 scientious research, his wonderful accuracy, and the 
 instinct which carries him sure-footed across the 
 rotten and worthless rubbish whereon he had to 
 tread. " That wonderful man monopolised," says
 
 94 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Freeman, u the historical genius and the historical 
 learning of a whole generation. . . . The encyclo- 
 paedic history of 1300 years, as the grandest of 
 historical designs, carried out alike with wonderful 
 power and with wonderful accuracy, must ever keep 
 its place." This from the most scrupulously accurate 
 of modern historians, who so seldom found anything 
 accurate outside of the Constitutional History of 
 England, is conclusive. The accuracy of Gibbon's 
 work is only equalled by the vast range of his 
 knowledge ; and even this is surpassed by the 
 grandeur of his design and the splendour of his 
 handling. Such accuracy never before went with 
 such brilliancy ; such breadth of conception with 
 such literary art. Thucydides, for all his consummate 
 veracity, is often obscure, trivial, and sometimes 
 tedious. Tacitus, with all his insight into character 
 and mastery of phrase, remains always the Roman 
 noble of cast-iron type and limited world. We no 
 more expect critical exactness from Herodotus or 
 Livy than we do from Homer or Virgil. The great 
 painters of historical events are not supposed to be 
 given to laborious research ; the great memoir- 
 writers are ipso facto confined to their own memory ; 
 and the profound antiquarians are almost invariably 
 dull. But we take down our Gibbon time after 
 time, knowing that we can turn up chapter and verse 
 for every sentence, and yet are stirred and delighted 
 by his pictures, as if it were a familiar poem or a 
 work of fiction. 
 
 This need not debar us from admitting very serious 
 defects in his work. His perverse misconception of 
 Christianity, his cynical depreciation of its noblest 
 chiefs, his incurable taste for scandal, his disbelief in 
 heroism, in popular enthusiasm, in purity, in self- 
 devotion, and his own epicurean, unromantic, aristo-
 
 THE CENTENARY OF GIBBON 95 
 
 cratic habit of mind, very seriously blot his great work 
 and cloud his own memory. Neander, Gfrorer, Von 
 Sybel, Michaud, Lacroix, Guizot, Milman, Michelet, 
 Carlyle, Froude, Freeman, Green, have a far truer 
 conception of the Middle Ages, the Crusades, of 
 Feudalism and its great chiefs, of the Catholic 
 Church and its services to civilisation, than has 
 Gibbon. They are constantly right where he is 
 wrong, and they tell us much of which he is quite un- 
 informed. But, for all that, no one of these excellent 
 men has given us a single work which can compare 
 with the Decline and Fall in breadth, in knowledge, 
 in unity of conception, and in splendour of form. 
 
 Let us, then, in the hundredth year after its 
 author's death, lay a wreath upon his tomb, for we 
 specially need to keep him as a type before us. The 
 age is one of interminable specialism, colossal research, 
 microscopic minuteness of examination ; and our 
 mountains of documents are become very Pelions 
 upon Ossa. All this is right and necessary ; and 
 Gibbon was an accomplished specialist, a glutton of 
 research ; no man so microscopic, so minute, so 
 documentary, in the true sense and in the right way. 
 But then Edward Gibbon was much more. His 
 gigantic accumulation of facts and indomitable ac- 
 curacy were not the ends of his labour but the instru- 
 ments. Research was to him, like grammar or 
 scholarship, not his title to honour, but his raw 
 material for thought and creation. He did not 
 discharge his note-books in a heap like bricks from 
 the brickyard, and leave us to build them up into a 
 house as we pleased. He built us the house, and did 
 not ask us to come into it till it was perfect from 
 foundation to roof- ridge, ornamented, elaborated, 
 habitable, and pleasant to dwell in. His teeming 
 brain disdained the aqueous placidity with which
 
 96 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Bavius flows on through one hundred mild and 
 meandering chapters ; his creative genius abhorred 
 the rough-hewn masses of stone which year by year 
 Masvius unloads upon us from a thousand quarries. 
 When we grow weary of histories which are nothing 
 but undigested note-books or copies from the dullest 
 jottings of some contemporary memoir histories 
 without form, without mind, without imagination, 
 without purpose, without beginning, middle or end 
 when we yearn for a book for a man, an idea within 
 the cover, then, for the tenth or the twentieth time, 
 we take down the Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 Empire^ and we have one of the greatest dramas of 
 human civilisation, rehearsed with the ordered imagina- 
 tion of a poet and the monumental form of a con- 
 summate master of language.
 
 THE CARLYLE HOUSE 
 
 1895 
 
 THE dedication to the public of the house in Chelsea 
 where Thomas Carlyle lived and died marks an on- 
 ward step in our growing habit of reverence for the 
 earthly work amongst us of our mighty dead. So far 
 as I know, this is the first time that London has. so 
 to speak, consecrated an entire house to the memory 
 of one of her worthies. Long ago, the house in which 
 Shakespeare was born has been preserved for the 
 nation, and, indeed, for the civilised world. Recently, 
 the little cottage which sheltered Milton at Chalfont 
 whilst he wrote his last poem has been given to the 
 public. The homes of Scott, of Byron, of Shelley, 
 though in private hands, are the object of many a 
 pilgrimage. But London has hitherto been even 
 more chary than England in general to take note of 
 the habitations and haunts of its famous denizens. 
 How few Londoners have even seen the house in 
 Gough Square where Johnson wrote his Dictionary, 
 or the house in which Dryden died, or the gravestone 
 of Goldsmith in the Temple, or the houses where 
 Dickens and Thackeray wrote. 
 
 But now the friends and admirers of Carlyle have 
 rescued from decay the house in which he toiled, poured 
 forth his soul, and died ; and they have dedicated it 
 97 H
 
 98 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 to the public as a memorial, just as the followers of 
 Auguste Comte have acquired and preserved the house 
 in which he lived and died in Paris. It is a kind of 
 hero-worship not to be undertaken lightly, not to be 
 pushed too far, apt to degenerate into sentimentality, 
 fussiness, cliquism and other trivialities and egoisms. 
 But with Thomas Carlyle we are safe. Our regard 
 for his memory, his home, the portraits, and relics of 
 him is genuine, spontaneous, irrepressible. Chelsea 
 which has been the residence of Sir Thomas More and 
 Locke, of Swift and Steele, and Smollett and Walpole, 
 of Leigh Hunt, Turner, and George Eliot has long 
 been vocal with memories of Thomas Carlyle. There 
 are Carlyle Square, Carlyle Mansions, the statue 
 within a few yards of his home, and now there is a 
 Carlyle House, a public museum, the centre of a 
 general pilgrimage. 
 
 Let no one suppose from the words of qualification, 
 even of reproach, which are so often used about Carlyle 
 by those who reverence him most, that such dissent 
 is incompatible with profound respect. Few of us, 
 indeed, are followers of the gospel of Carlyle if there 
 can be a gospel of any idiosyncrasy so solitary and so 
 fulminant we are not followers, but grateful hearers 
 of his words. We cannot speak of him without 
 breaking out into language that sounds like criticism, 
 because we do not care to swear allegiance to his 
 infallibility. He himself has taught all who care to 
 hear him to be sincere first, to speak out what is in 
 them, and to take orders from none in the free air of 
 personal beliefs. Even as we listened to Mr. Morley's 
 eloquent and wise address, an enthusiast was heard to 
 whisper that the chairman himself seemed at times to 
 take upon him the office of advocatus Diaboli. I have 
 had occasion to speak of Carlyle as an intellectual 
 power in more than one piece, and in each I have
 
 THE CARLYLE HOUSE 99 
 
 been stirred to disclaim, to qualify, to abate very much 
 in the homage it was my purpose to offer. It is the 
 peculiar quality of the great teachers of new truth, 
 especially in the moral and spiritual realm, to awaken 
 what he so truly called the " wrestlings of soul," which 
 go down to the depths of defiance as well as rise to 
 heights of loyalty and trust. All the great inspirers 
 of youth stir these wrestlings. There was no truer 
 prophecy in the Gospel than the words, " I came not 
 to send peace but a sword." And so Carlyle, like 
 all the deeper moralists, sent a sword into modern 
 society, into each hearer's spirit. It pierced him to 
 the quick, and stung him into many a struggle within 
 him which seldom issued in simple discipleship. 
 
 But the dedication to his memory of his home in 
 Chelsea, to be for ever a sort of London cenotaph of 
 his genius, is the season for other thoughts than for 
 " wrestlings of spirits " ; it calls for sweeter and more 
 pious recollections. I was one of those who, without 
 being in any sense intimates or friends, were occasion- 
 ally admitted to his house, and enjoyed the privilege of 
 hearing him talk. In response to sundry messages 
 that he would see me, I called one afternoon in Cheyne 
 Row, and was received with a most gracious and 
 genial courtesy. He made me feel at home at once, 
 and he talked on with a simple and hearty openness of 
 thought, full of drollery, epigram, laughter, and racy 
 deliverance on men and things, with warm kindliness 
 towards his visitor, a manly forgetfulness of himself 
 and his position as acknowledged master in letters, and 
 an utter absence of embarrassment, discontent, or 
 spleen. He rolled forth Latter-Day Pamphlets by the 
 hour together in the very words, with all the nick- 
 names, expletives, and ebullient tropes that were so 
 familiar to us in print, with the full voice, the Dum- 
 fries burr, and the kindling eye which all his friends
 
 ioo MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 recall. It seemed to me the first time that I sat at his 
 fireside and listened to him that it was an illusion. I 
 seemed to be already in the Elysian fields listening to 
 the spirit rather than to the voice of the mighty 
 "Sartor." Could printed essay and spoken words be 
 so absolutely the same ? Was he reciting one of his 
 old pamphlets committed to memory, or was he really 
 speaking impromptu as thoughts passed through his 
 brain ? Was this really Thomas Carlyle, or was it 
 some mysterious personation of the man, made up to 
 represent the Sage, and dramatising his familiar speech ? 
 No ! it was all perfectly spontaneous, frank, and 
 simple ; and the generous old man was simply talking 
 freely to a young man who came to hear him talk. 
 And when, after a most memorable afternoon, he rose 
 to bid me farewell, and conducted me to his staircase 
 with a sweet and stately courtesy, I thought I had 
 rarely seen a more simple and genial dignity. How 
 the fierceness and crabbedness which the Memoirs 
 seem to attribute to much of his earlier life could ever 
 have dwelt in a nature so urbane, so hearty, so sym- 
 pathetic as that which I found in his later years, is 
 more than I can unravel. I have seen, and have 
 spoken with, some strong and famous men with 
 Gambetta, Mazzini, Garibaldi, John S. Mill, Tour- 
 geniefF but I can remember no more intense and 
 impressive personality than that of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 I had seen him in earlier years in public places and in 
 society, walking with Froude and Fitzjames Stephen, 
 or on his historic and " humorous " horse Fritz. I 
 had even seen him receiving with artless gratification, 
 in a great London " crush," the fascinating homage of 
 many a grande dame ("the politest and gracefulest 
 kind of woman," we know the Master pronounced 
 her to be) but it was not till his latest years that I 
 had speech of him in his own house. He once took
 
 THE CARLYLE HOUSE 101 
 
 me as his companion in a walk, and gave me earnest 
 and friendly counsel to betake myself from law to 
 letters a piece of advice which perhaps came too late 
 in my life to be of any service to me. On another 
 occasion I remember calling upon him at the instance 
 of the widow of my dear and honoured friend, Jules 
 Michelet, the historian. Madame Michelet was then 
 labouring, with all the energy of love and sorrow, to 
 raise a marble monument to her husband in Pere la 
 Chaise at Paris, and she was anxious to have the 
 thought and culture of Europe to join in the testimony 
 to the historian-poet of France. I accepted the com- 
 mission with reluctance and doubt ; but Carlyle 
 received the request with readiness, spoke warmly of 
 Michelet as a genuine man, and himself subscribed 
 the sum of five pounds. The gift of these English 
 admirers (amongst whom were also enrolled the names 
 of Charles Darwin, Joseph Chamberlain, and John 
 Morley) was recorded on the beautiful memorial 
 which we see to-day over the grave of the historian in 
 Paris. On this occasion, as on so many others which 
 have come to my notice, the whole nature of Carlyle 
 was inspired by generosity, sympathy, candour, manli- 
 ness genial interest in the young and the struggling 
 ones, ungrudging homage to great character and to 
 true genius. 
 
 It may have been with some surprise that certain 
 younger men heard Mr. Morley, with all his judicial 
 discrimination of Carlyle's powers, speak of him as 
 "the foremost figure in English literature during the 
 greater part of his life." And I have ventured to call 
 him, "by virtue of his original genius and mass of 
 stroke, the literary dictator of Victorian prose." Many 
 of our younger friends are puzzled by such language. 
 What does it mean ? To my mind it means this. 
 Not indeed that Carlyle was ever a critic, an arbiter, a
 
 102 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 model, as Addison was, or as Johnson was, or as Voltaire 
 in France, and Goethe in Germany have been. Mac- 
 aulay, Hallam, or Southey more nearly filled such a part. 
 But the peculiar power of Carlyle was, by his superb 
 independence and the fiery impact of his genius, to 
 kindle a great variety of movements, and wake into 
 life many active minds. The Victorian age has been 
 one of singular activity, and of erratic and adventurous 
 energy. How many forms of this energy owed 
 inspiration to Carlyle ! Ruskin, Froude, Kingsley, 
 the Stephens, Tyndall, were avowed followers of his, 
 whilst we can see the traces of his mind in Tennyson, 
 in Huxley, in Maurice, in Freeman, in John Morley. 
 And if Browning, Arnold, George Eliot, Swinburne, 
 Morris, Symonds, move in a different world from that 
 of "Sartor," they have all been held spellbound at 
 seasons " by the glittering eye " of that ancient 
 Mariner. Of whom else, in the era between Byron 
 and Darwin, can the same be said ? No one would 
 compare Carlyle to Socrates. But as the Sage of 
 Athens used to call his function simply that of the 
 obstetric physician, who enabled those big with ideas 
 to bring them forth into the living air, so Carlyle had 
 something of this same gift that of helping ideas to 
 live and to come forth. Socrates, too, disclaimed any 
 system, any philosophy, any school. But a dozen 
 schools of very different kinds rose out of that ferment 
 of original questioning which the great moralist and 
 insatiable cross-examiner had scattered far and wide in 
 the market-place of thought. 
 
 Carlyle, too, had "his daemon," though what his 
 " daemon " was we know as little as in the case of 
 Socrates. Nor do any two of us agree exactly as to 
 what that daemon revealed to him or to us. But he 
 set us all thinking ; he inspired us with courage ; he 
 taught us to be honest, zealous, truthful, reverent.
 
 THE CARLYLE HOUSE 103 
 
 Alas ! he was in much the very opposite of Socrates, 
 who lived in the world, with the world, a heroic 
 citizen, a soldier, a public counsellor, tolerant, jovial, 
 great-hearted, and indulgent almost to a fault. Carlyle 
 shut himself up with his books in that little home, 
 where his memory is now enshrined, knew nothing of 
 affairs except through books, and was too disdainful of 
 the world outside to sympathise with its troubles or 
 to comprehend its needs. Socrates was a true Sage. 
 Carlyle was preacher, rhapsodist, student. But it will 
 be long before we see his like again.
 
 SCIENTIFIC HISTORY 
 
 1906 
 
 MR. HERBERT PAUL'S most interesting Life of Froude 
 has raised again the unsolved problem of the true 
 method of writing history. As Horace told his friend 
 long ago, it was a business full of peril and chance, 
 like walking over the crust of lava. But in our age 
 its difficulties are greatly increased. Not only has 
 the historian to meet the criticism of rival partisans, 
 but the scientific school and the literary school wage 
 incessant war on each other. And history to-day is 
 being made faster than it can be recorded. As the 
 greatest of historians put it in immortal words, a 
 strictly historical narrative of facts is wont to dis- 
 appoint those who want to be interested. Shall 
 history aim at being "a possession for all time," or 
 shall it seek to be " the success of the hour " ? 
 
 The conspicuous champions of Literary History 
 were, in old days, Livy and Plutarch ; in modern 
 times, Clarendon, Hume, Robertson, Alison, Michelet, 
 Thiers. The scientific historians of our own day 
 hold by Mommsen, Freeman, Stubbs, and Gardiner ; 
 and, we may add, so do the official representatives of 
 history in our Universities such as Bury, Firth, and 
 Oman. By common consent, Gibbon combined 
 Research and Literature as nearly as we are ever 
 destined to see them combined. And Macaulay, 
 
 104
 
 SCIENTIFIC HISTORY 105 
 
 Froude, Carlyle, we may perhaps add Green, have 
 striven to do the same. All four have a multitude of 
 readers and long will have them, owing to their 
 brilliant literary power. The question still is, Can 
 we trust them as we trust Mommsen and Stubbs, 
 Gardiner, Bury, and Firth ? 
 
 Of all the literary historians of our day Froude has 
 been the most fiercely rebuked by the scientific school. 
 And now two warm admirers of his, one English, the 
 other foreign, have given us a studied defence of the 
 Freudian method. Mr. Herbert Paul, in his fascinating 
 Life^ very properly devotes more than a quarter of his 
 book to examining all that can be said for and against 
 the History of England. Froude had " a doctrine to 
 propound, a gospel to preach," says Mr. Paul. And 
 Dr. Sarolea of Brussels, and now of the University of 
 Edinburgh, in an eloquent volume of Essays^ proclaims 
 Froude to be a great historian, the " national historian 
 of England," on the very ground of his passionate 
 prejudices on behalf of persons and institutions. The 
 historian, says Dr. Sarolea, cannot be impartial, for 
 reasons whether of art, morality, or sociology. 
 
 Mr. Paul, as may be expected, takes a much more 
 guarded view. He is eminently aware of the idiosyn- 
 crasy and temptations which coloured Froude's splendid 
 narrative. " His besetting sin was a love of paradox." 
 " He was an advocate, an incomparably brilliant 
 advocate." " He was not a chronicler, but an artist, 
 a moralist, and a man of genius." And all through 
 his vigorous fourth chapter Mr. Paul eloquently 
 describes the spirit which sustained Froude in his 
 immense task, and the devotion with which he 
 pursued it over long years of toil. Mr. Paul does 
 not mince matters as to Froude's defects. " He was 
 an advocate rather than a judge." He gave undue 
 prominence to facts which told for his own cause.
 
 io6 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 It is notorious that he was not always accurate in 
 detail. He set out on his task with a polemical 
 purpose. " Misquotation was too frequent a habit 
 with him." Even when gross errors had been pointed 
 out to him, Froude still left them in his text. All 
 this Mr. Paul admits. 
 
 In an equally vigorous fifth chapter, Mr. Paul 
 squires Froude in his grand joust with Freeman. 
 And Mr. Paul's citations from Freeman's own copy 
 of Froude s History^ with marginal notes, are indeed 
 amusing: "Beast," "vilest brute," "a lie," "may I 
 live to embowel J. A. Froude." It has already been 
 related that when Freeman sat down to attack Froude 
 in a review article he would have played a noisy piece 
 of music which he hated, to give him the needful fit 
 or ill-humour. Mr. Paul does right in showing us 
 the furious prejudice which animated these attacks. 
 But few historians will go with him when he says 
 that, "in patient assiduity of research, Froude was 
 immeasurably Freeman's superior." Mr. Paul has 
 shown ground for hesitating to accept the whole of 
 Freeman's criticism. On the other hand, he has 
 little idea of the extent of Froude's blunders. They 
 may be " mole-hills," as he calls them. But when a 
 meadow ceases to be green, and is turned brown with 
 mole-hills in every square yard, the pasture is sadly to 
 seek for the hungry cattle. 
 
 If Mr. Paul would carefully compare the printed 
 text of any one of Froude's books with the authority 
 which is there cited, he would find a mistranslation, a 
 misquotation, or a variation in almost every sentence. 
 What does he say when Froude tells "an apocryphal 
 anecdote," and adds " there is no reason why it should 
 not continue to be believed " ? What about his 
 " apocryphal " confession of Queen Catherine on her. 
 death-bed which represents her as doing exactly what
 
 SCIENTIFIC HISTORY 107 
 
 she did not do ? What about " the most perfect 
 English history which is to be found in the historical 
 plays of Shakespeare " ? Mr. Froude was a very great 
 writer and almost a great dramatist. But he, too, 
 often studied his original " sources " in the spirit in 
 which Shakespeare studied his Holinshed. He sought 
 to draw out of the dry bones of the chronicles splendid 
 pictures of moving events, the play of great characters, 
 and the clash of contrasted natures and minds. C'est 
 magnifique^ mais ce nest pas Vhistoire. 
 
 Unfortunately, the habit of misquotation, small 
 slips, inadvertent "mole-hills," form not the serious 
 part of the charge against Froude as an historian of 
 authority. Even " mole-hills " cause nasty falls when 
 they inadvertently turn a negative into an affirmative. 
 The real defect of Froude's history is that, as his 
 friends and apologists agree, he made himself the 
 enthusiastic advocate of certain leading judgments 
 upon the Tudor Sovereigns, undertaking on crucial 
 points to reverse the current view and in that task 
 has failed. He has given us some splendid narratives, 
 and many powerful portraits of men and women. 
 He has done much to correct popular judgments, and 
 to qualify the prejudices of partisans against whom he 
 argues. But he has quite failed to satisfy independent 
 minds that Henry was a wise and benevolent states- 
 man ; that the Reformation was the beneficent work 
 of high-minded and godly patriots ; that Mary Stuart 
 was a mere fiend ; that Elizabeth was a heartless 
 tyrant. Freeman's vitriol has, perhaps, rather obscured 
 the true case. As Mr. Paul shows us, Freeman was 
 always violent, and often unjust. But Freeman did 
 not touch the serious charge the essential failure of 
 Froude to reverse accepted conceptions of historic 
 truth. 
 
 What are we to say to Dr. Sarolea's ingenious argu-
 
 io8 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 ment that Froude was our great "national historian," 
 not although but because he was a passionate advocate ? 
 The Edinburgh Professor tells us that the historian 
 cannot be artist, or moralist, or psychologist unless 
 he is an enthusiastic partisan ; that his text will be 
 colourless, his judgments neutral, and his figures 
 dummies. This is going very far beyond Mr. Paul, 
 or any reasonable friend of literature in history. It 
 is to confound the Judge with the advocate. The 
 historian ought, no doubt, to feel a steady flame of 
 enthusiasm for all great spirits, for all just causes 
 not for one but for all. His merit is to be judicial 
 to acquit the innocent with honour, to condemn 
 the guilty without fear. But just because he sits in 
 judgment on all parties alike, and because he has to 
 weigh and test every shred of evidence on both sides 
 equally, so he prostitutes his office, when he shows 
 favour towards any single party, or propounds any 
 partial estimate. Even when Carlyle restored Crom- 
 well to his true place in our history, he seriously 
 impaired his work by fanatical hero-worship. 
 
 Hero-worship and anathemas are alike false art as 
 well as shallow policy in history where Te Deum and 
 Commination Services have no place. The historian 
 holds a kind of mimic rehearsal of the Last Judgment, 
 only he has no Recording Angel to tell him the facts 
 truly. When the ghosts and shadows of the dead 
 rise before his sight from the past, he has before him 
 whole generations at once. None are wholly guilty, 
 none are wholly blameless. His task is to weigh 
 each sinner, not as if he were a saint, nor as if he 
 were a devil but to strike the true balance, neither 
 devoid of human sympathy with those who have borne 
 much grief, nor sparing of just indignation with those 
 who have lived to be a curse to their age. But the 
 essence of his task is to judge all equally together
 
 SCIENTIFIC HISTORY 109 
 
 to conceive the whole human panorama in its entirety 
 and its true proportions. 
 
 The supreme task of the Muse of History the 
 incalculable difficulty is to present a broad and 
 glowing picture of a past age in its true proportions. 
 Neither artistic colour nor microscopic accuracy suffices 
 to do this. Literary brilliance is just as inefficient as 
 meticulous research. Both destroy the truth of pro- 
 portion literature by misleading us with false lights, 
 research by overwhelming its canvas with trivial 
 details. 
 
 The problem has never been better stated than by 
 Lucian in his delightful essay, " How to Compose 
 History." The perfect historian, he says, must start 
 with two indispensable qualifications "the one is 
 political insight, the other the faculty of expression." 
 You may acquire the gift of expression, he says, by 
 practice and study. But political insight is a rare 
 gift of nature. It is genius for affairs. The most 
 laborious student of documents without this gift is a 
 tedious pedant. The most brilliant advocacy, apart 
 from political insight, is merely a means of perverting 
 the truth. It is too little understood that no amount 
 of grinding old parchments, collating manuscripts, 
 and piling up facts, will outweigh political flair^ the 
 power of judging men and events with insight. 
 
 The great historian is really an unofficial statesman. 
 This insight of his can hardly be attained except by 
 those who have been conversant with affairs, in close 
 touch with those who rule or who advise rulers. All 
 great historians have been statesmen, or in intimate 
 relations with statesmen, in great times. Thucydides, 
 Polybius, Caesar, Tacitus, de Comines, Machiavelli, 
 Clarendon, Gibbon, Macaulay, Guizot, Thiers all 
 passed large parts of their lives in public life. 
 
 Hear Lucian's test of the great historian. Let
 
 i jo MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 him be fearless, incorruptible, independent, a believer 
 in frankness and veracity ; one who will yield nothing 
 to his likes or dislikes j nor spare any one through 
 pity and good nature j an impartial judge, kind to all, 
 but too kind to none ; not of one nation, but a citizen 
 of the world, owning no hero, no king of men ; in- 
 different to what the public thinks or likes ; bent to 
 set down truly things which befell in fact. Thucy- 
 dides is the eternal model, who wrote, as he says, for 
 all time ; not Herodotus, who enchanted the Greeks 
 at their Festivals by eulogies on their noble selves.
 
 THE NEW MOTLEY 1 
 
 1896 
 
 MESSRS. BELL AND SONS are still energetically pursuing 
 their task of adding to and improving the famous series 
 of Bohn's Libraries, which Thomas Carlyle pronounced 
 to be " the usefullest thing I know." As copyrights 
 expire, Messrs. Bell are constantly adding to the 
 Libraries, in the new and certainly pleasanter form, 
 reprints of standard works which "no gentleman's 
 library should be without." Amongst the latest addi- 
 tions is a reprint of Motley's Dutch Republic^ a book 
 of which it may be said that " no man's reading should 
 be without." And to this edition they have added a 
 biographical introduction by his countryman and 
 friend, Mr. Moncure D. Conway, and a good repro- 
 duction of the portrait of Motley after the picture 
 by Bischop, now the property of the Queen of the 
 Netherlands at The Hague. 
 
 To the hundreds of thousands of men and women 
 who have felt the thrill of a first reading of The Rise 
 of the Dutch Republic^ and to those who rejoiced that 
 the great Republic of the West should be officially 
 represented in England by a typical man of letters of 
 
 1 The Rise of the Dutch Republic. By John Lothrop Motley. A new 
 Edition in three volumes, with a Biographical Introduction by Moncure 
 D. Conway. Bohn's Standard Library. 
 
 Ill
 
 ii2 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 America, it will be a pleasure to see the singularly 
 handsome, intellectual, and refined face of the historian 
 as given in this volume. It is a face little familiar to 
 the general reader ; and, as Motley has now been dead 
 for nearly twenty years, it can be remembered in life 
 by only a limited part of modern society. To those 
 who take up this volume, with its generous notice of 
 the author by his friend Moncure Conway, it is a 
 welcome frontispiece wherein we can see with our 
 eyes the grand brow, the delicate features, and the air 
 of power and resolution in the historian's whole 
 aspect. 
 
 John Lothrop Motley was born in Boston, Mass., 
 in 1814, of an old New England Puritan family, that 
 traced descent to emigrants for conscience' sake, on 
 the one side from the North of Ireland, on the other 
 side from the English Midlands. Mr. Moncure 
 Conway, naturally and very rightly, dwells on the 
 literary life of the historian. Motley was also diplo- 
 matist, politician, and publicist, and for seven years 
 represented his country as Minister in Austria and in 
 England. But in this volume Mr. Conway gives us 
 almost exclusively a picture of the historian ; and this 
 was the only really important side of Motley's whole 
 career. It is the life of an ardent man of letters, 
 dominated by a high ideal of a great historical purpose. 
 This single purpose absorbed his whole life for more 
 than thirty years, until his death in May 1877. His 
 design was to describe from contemporary documents 
 the great struggle for freedom of belief which created 
 a powerful and independent republic in the Nether- 
 lands ; and no man ever devoted his life to study with 
 more industry and patience. 
 
 Motley, Mr. Conway tells us, belonged to that 
 inner circle of culture in New England which pro- 
 duced Emerson, Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
 
 THE NEW MOTLEY 113 
 
 Wendell Phillips, Longfellow, and so many others. 
 He spent four years at Harvard College, 1827-31, and 
 then some four years in Germany and other parts of 
 Europe. At Gottingen he met Prince Bismarck, and 
 they became fellow-students at Berlin, intimate friends 
 and fellow-lodgers, sharing their meals and exercise. 
 This intimacy with the great statesman lasted through- 
 out Motley's life, and must have insensibly reacted on 
 his knowledge of men and affairs. Motley's early 
 studies were somewhat desultory, self-directed, and 
 wholly without academic or early success. Like 
 Gibbon, he was " sent down " by his college. Indeed 
 it is worth noting how very seldom eminent writers 
 of history have been distinguished by youthful or 
 scholastic triumphs. There seems to be some in- 
 stinctive opposition between them and their official 
 teachers. Returning to his native country in 1835 
 he was then in his twenty-second year Motley 
 devoted himself to literature he wrote romances, 
 poems, plays, sketches, essays, articles ; but it must be 
 admitted that the first ten years of his literary activity 
 were attended by no success, and, indeed, produced 
 little to deserve it. 
 
 But the course of these pieces, which turned so 
 largely on the Pilgrim Fathers and their early history, 
 directed Motley, about the age of thirty-three, to the 
 great struggle of the Dutch for freedom in religion and 
 in government. Motley's own account of the way in 
 which the grand subject took possession of his soul 
 may be set beside Gibbon's famous anecdote of the 
 origin of the Decline and Fall in the Church of the 
 Franciscans on the Capitol. " I have not first," said 
 Motley, " made up my mind to write a history, and 
 then cast about to take up a subject : my subject had 
 taken me up, drawn me on, and absorbed me into itself" 
 He was warmly encouraged by Prescott, with whose 
 
 I
 
 ii4 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Philip the Second he had feared to come into unfriendly 
 competition or damaging comparison ; and after some 
 ten years of labour The Rise of the Dutch Republic 
 appeared. He had been incessantly occupied over 
 documents and archives in Holland, Belgium, and 
 Germany. " Whatever may be the result of my 
 labours," he writes to Dr. Holmes in 1853, "nobody 
 can say that I have not worked hard like a brute beast ; 
 but I do not care for the result. The labour is itself 
 its own reward, and all I want. I go day after day to 
 the archives here (in Brussels), as I went all summer at 
 The Hague, studying the old letters and documents of 
 the sixteenth century. Here I remain among my 
 fellow-worms, feeding on those musty mulberry leaves 
 of which we are afterwards to spin our silk. . . . The 
 dead men of the place are my intimate friends. I am 
 at home in my cemetery. With the fellows of the 
 sixteenth century I am on the most familiar terms. 
 Any ghost that ever flits by night across the moonlit 
 square is at once hailed by me as a man and a brother. 
 I call him by his Christian name at once." It is a 
 typical picture of original research 
 
 . . . expertus credes quam gravis iste labor ! 
 
 Mr. Conway gives us an interesting study of the 
 long labours which produced the work, the obstacles 
 that delayed its publication, and the wearisome search 
 for a publisher. It is one of the curiosities of literature 
 that one firm after another rejected'the book, which 
 at last was accepted by John Chapman at the author's 
 expense and risk. Motley thought it hardly worth 
 while to incur the expense of travelling from Vevey to 
 England "to secure a copyright which I could not 
 sell for ^100." It was deposited in the British 
 Museum, Oct. 20, 1855; but six months later Motley 
 writes from Italy that he supposes very few copies
 
 THE NEW MOTLEY 115 
 
 have been sold. His publisher failed soon after, and 
 the receipts do not seem to have been large. As a 
 matter of feet, "77,000 copies were sold in England 
 during the first year of publication." Such are the 
 uncertainties of authorship and the mysterious ways of 
 the trade. 
 
 This is not the place for any new estimate of so 
 well-known a work as Motley's Dutch Republic^ which 
 has long passed into the class of standard histories, 
 such as are the handbooks of all historical study. The 
 latest student in that field, Ruth Putnam, in her 
 William the Silent (two vols., New York, 1895) very 
 truly describes the care with which Motley has been 
 used by all subsequent historians in Europe, and her 
 own admiration "for the untiring industry of his 
 laborious researches, and for the accuracy and skill of 
 his adaptations from the enormous mass of matter that 
 he examined." The forty years that have passed have 
 seen the publication and careful editing of many of 
 those contemporary records which Motley had to 
 study in manuscript. The Memoirs of Pontus Payen, 
 Renon de France, the correspondence of Cardinal 
 Granvelle, the publications of Gachard and Kervyn de 
 Lettenhove, have now enabled us to follow up this 
 period, without our personally "feeding on the mul- 
 berry leaves " in the archives of Brussels and The 
 Hague. But although a vast literature has grown up 
 round the great subject, it can hardly be said that 
 Motley has been corrected on very material points, 
 much less has he been superseded. 
 
 Motley's deficiencies, such as they are, certainly do 
 not lie in any want of industry, thoroughness, or 
 accuracy. All of these he had in a supreme degree. 
 But we can now see that he had a somewhat super- 
 abundant enthusiasm for his favourite heroes and 
 people, and a somewhat deficient strength of philo-
 
 n6 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 sophic insight and calm. He can hardly be ranked 
 with the philosophic historians at all ; and no one has 
 claimed for him the magnificent power of Gibbon to 
 marshal in close array an enormous host of various 
 incidents and events. Motley's eloquence is not 
 always as chaste and simple as is required by our 
 modern taste ; and, though he is almost never tedious, 
 he has given disproportionate bulk to the story of a 
 single generation in so small a corner of Europe. 
 
 More serious defects are these. He has treated the 
 great William of Orange too much as a saint and 
 martyr, and too little as a man of his age. Hero, 
 statesman, mighty chief, and founder, as was William 
 of Nassau, he was a man who was always growing ; a 
 man who used all the resources familiar to his time ; 
 and, like all consummate opportunists, a man who was 
 perpetually foiling his opponents by superior craft and 
 alarming his colleagues by a change of front. He 
 professed in turn three different creeds, and was a 
 member of three successive Churches, without any 
 profound conviction of the minor professions or prac- 
 tices of any one of the three. To Motley he is always 
 too much the spotless ideal and religious enthusiast. 
 Nor does Motley adequately estimate the profound 
 roots of the Catholic reaction in Belgium, or enable 
 us to understand why, and in so short a time after the 
 rule of Alva, the Belgian provinces relapsed to the old 
 faith. We need something more than a partisan of 
 Puritan heroism to explain the revival of Catholicism. 
 I was a short time ago at High Mass on Sunday 
 morning in the Cathedral of Antwerp. As I recalled 
 the tremendous scene of iconoclasm enacted in that 
 very church 330 years ago, so splendidly described by 
 Motley, and then turned to the gorgeous ritual, the 
 noble music, the impassioned sermon, and the vast 
 throng of worshippers, who hour after hour crowded
 
 THE NEW MOTLEY 117 
 
 round the many chapels and altars, knelt before the 
 images, gazed at the glorious pictures, and all the 
 statues, decorations, and symbols of the Catholic faith 
 I asked myself if the New England historian had 
 fully grasped those vast and abiding forces of which 
 Philip and Alva were the satanic incarnation. 
 
 Yet let us not call Motley a New England historian, 
 for he belongs to the Old as much as to the New 
 England. The best years of his life were passed in 
 Europe ; his last home was in England ; he died in 
 England ; he and his wife are buried in England ; he 
 married his daughters in England, and one of them, as 
 all the world knows, is the wife of the leader of Her 
 Majesty's Opposition. Old England divides the fame 
 of Motley with New England, and Englishmen will 
 thank his American fellow-citizen for giving us this 
 timely account of one who will long live amongst the 
 classics of the English tongue.
 
 MAINE'S 'ANCIENT LAW REVISED 
 
 1906 
 
 FORTY-FIVE years after its first publication, and three 
 years after the expiry of the original copyright, the 
 famous book which founded in England the study of 
 Comparative Jurisprudence is about to start on a new 
 life. Ancient Law was published in 1861, and has 
 long grown to be a classical text. But as all classical 
 texts, especially in matters of law and of historical 
 research, soon become more or less antiquated by dis- 
 coveries which they themselves have stimulated and 
 partly suggested, so Ancient Law was of late years 
 tending to be thought superseded by later learning, 
 or disproved by more recent theories. Nothing of 
 the kind was true. But the book certainly had to 
 be brought up to date, and in sundry points it had to 
 be supplemented, explained, corrected, and justified. 
 This has been thoroughly well done by the man of 
 all others most qualified for such a task. Sir Frederick 
 Pollock, by his masterly "Introduction" and "Notes," 
 appended to each of Maine's ten chapters, gives the 
 student all the explanations and corrections he needs, 
 and in fact launches Maine's first and typical work 
 upon a new career for the students of Comparative 
 Jurisprudence at home and abroad. 
 
 I am old enough not only to remember the 
 118
 
 MAINE'S 'ANCIENT LAW REVISED 119 
 
 publication of the book in 1861, but to have attended 
 the course of lectures of which the book consists ; 
 and I was myself the pupil of Sir Henry Maine in 
 Lincoln's Inn in 1857. On the publication of the 
 volume with which I was so familiar, and which I 
 had seen in proof-sheets, I wrote in the Westminster 
 Review of 1 86 1 one of the earliest tributes to the 
 importance of the work, a paper which I know 
 satisfied the author himself. I remained in close 
 friendship with Sir Henry till his too early death in 
 1888; and I am still, with Sir Frederick Pollock, 
 one of his executors and trustees. It is needless now 
 to expatiate on the originality and value of Ancient 
 Law, but I may give from my own memory some 
 account of the part it has played in the development 
 of legal science. 
 
 When Maine first began to lecture at the Temple 
 in 1852, as Professor to the Inns of Court of Roman 
 Law and Jurisprudence, the British ignorance of 
 Roman Law and at any rate of Comparative Juris- 
 prudence was really a unique phenomenon. To the 
 successful case lawyer a "jurist " was a term of 
 reproach, meaning an ignorant impostor. And one 
 of the greatest masters of Real Property learning in 
 Lincoln's Inn would warn his pupils "against that 
 beastly book Justinian," by which he was believed 
 to mean the Institutes, for he had never heard of 
 Digest, Code, or Novels. The days of Selden and 
 Locke were long past, and even the time when 
 English lawyers sometimes followed a course of 
 study at Leyden. Blackstone, perhaps, would be 
 plucked to-day at Oxford for ignorance of the most 
 familiar rules in the Institutes. As to anything 
 like the history of legal ideas, it was hardly thought 
 worthy of notice. Bentham and Austin had brought 
 powers of rare acuteness to the analysis of law ; but
 
 120 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 neither of them had any real historical training, nor, 
 indeed, any historical instincts. And in dealing with 
 the dominant conceptions of sociology all ex hypothesi 
 subject to the law of evolution the acutest logic is a 
 poor substitute for the study of the facts of progressive 
 development. 
 
 It is quite a commonplace with jurists that Maine's 
 Ancient Law opened a new era. In the half-century 
 since Maine began to lecture, the systematic study of 
 the " Corpus Juris " has taken its place in the Inns 
 of Court, in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, 
 and London. Holland, Poste, Roby, Hunter, Bryce, 
 Muirhead, Clark, Goudy, Moyle, Greenidge have 
 worked systematically on this science ; whilst the 
 best works of German and French civilians are 
 ordinary text-books with our students. In the way 
 of the history of legal and social conceptions such 
 English writers as Tylor, Lubbock, M'Lennan, 
 Spencer, Lang, Pollock, Maitland, have removed from 
 English letters the opprobrium of treating English 
 law as something as sacred and as mysterious in origin 
 as the law of Moses. The movement itself was part 
 of the great tidal wave of Evolution which swept over 
 English thought about the middle of the nineteenth 
 century of which Darwin and Spencer were the 
 scientific and philosophical protagonists which pro- 
 duced the school of historical research of Stubbs, 
 Freeman, and Gardiner, the logical school of Mill 
 and Morley, the archaeological school of Frazer and 
 Westermarck. It would be extravagant to pretend 
 that Maine founded these movements but he touched 
 on them all ; and he was certainly the first to give 
 them brilliant literary form. 
 
 In forty -five years, during which some of the 
 acutest minds and some of the most profound scholars 
 in Europe have made a vast body of research in the
 
 MAINE'S 'ANCIENT LAW REVISED 121 
 
 origins of human society and the evolution of social 
 institutions, it was, of course, inevitable that new 
 lights should be thrown on many of the problems 
 discussed in Ancient Law^ and some of its conclusions 
 be qualified and corrected. In this age, which has a 
 superstitious respect for the " latest " telegram and the 
 "newest" book, students were getting uneasy that 
 Maine did not know everything contained in the last 
 monograph issued in Germany, Russia, France, India, 
 or the Colonies, to say nothing of the indefatigable 
 output from American Universities. They can now 
 trust Sir Frederick Pollock, who knows all these, and 
 is in touch with the best scholarship of all these 
 countries, to point out where Maine's language has 
 to be supplemented, qualified, and revised. There 
 are eighteen " Notes " appended to the ten chapters, 
 which, with the " Introduction," make up about one- 
 third of the volume as new matter. Altogether, 
 Ancient Law may now be considered as much a new 
 work as if it had been recently compiled. There has 
 been, of course, no attempt to interpolate Maine's 
 text or to make such a ridiculous hash as the 
 " modernised " Blackstones present, nor is there any 
 pretension in the " Notes " to imitate Maine's 
 brilliant power of casting his apothegms into memor- 
 able phrases. But all debatable points have been 
 discussed with a learning at least as wide as Maine's, 
 and with a bibliography of the subject far more 
 complete than any open to the author a generation 
 ago. 
 
 The main points now noted are these. Maine's 
 incisive language must not be taken in too absolute 
 a way. He somewhat overrated the antiquity of 
 Roman Law, and gave a rather too systematic shape 
 to the XII. Tables. And we must guard against the 
 Continental use of such terms as " written law," and
 
 122 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 remember that English lawyers use it in a different 
 sense. The most important corrections needed are 
 in Maine's third and fourth chapters on the " Law of 
 Nature," where he seems to ignore the extent to 
 which the Civil Law continued to influence mediaeval 
 jurists and churchmen. Nor is he right in his 
 account of the origin of what we call the " Law of 
 Nations." Maine perhaps placed Montesquieu's 
 constructive work higher than modern historians and 
 sociology would do. Nor need we be disturbed by 
 the ebb and flow of the eternal battle waged between 
 enthusiasts for the Patriarchal and the Matriarchal 
 theories, and around the prostrate forms of the archaic 
 brides as to " Early Forms of Marriage." Victory 
 is not yet declared if it ever will be. Maine's 
 dictum as to " Status " and " Contract " may require 
 limitation in terms, but in substance it is as sound as 
 it is luminous. On the whole, recent research rather 
 tends to confirm Maine's judgments, if his words are 
 not pressed too absolutely. And of all writers on 
 these obscure topics he clothes them in the most 
 brilliant literary form.
 
 IMPERIAL MANNERS 
 
 1906 
 
 HISTORY does not repeat itself in periodic cycles, as 
 Vico and the older philosophy of history taught, but 
 it is curious how subtly the dominant ideals of an age 
 are repeated in the current ways and habits of men. 
 The Disraelite and Cecilite age of purple Imperialism, 
 which has happily ended in dust and ashes, has given 
 us some gaudy revivals of Imperial Rome in the first 
 century after Christ. 
 
 Nero is now the fashion. The most brilliant (and, 
 indeed, the most erudite) spectacle ever presented to a 
 London audience takes us to the centre of the Neronian 
 world. The Universities exhaust their learning in 
 vivid pictures of Imperial Society. The elaborate 
 work of Professor Dill of Belfast on Roman Society 
 from Nero to M. Aurelius was followed by the lectures 
 of Dr. Bigg, Canon of Christ Church and Professor 
 of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford. Both books 
 analyse the influence of the new thought and religion 
 of the first century on habits and manners. Oxford 
 has just given us an admirable translation of Lucian 
 the Voltaire, the Swift, the Le Sage of antiquity. 
 
 And on the top of the wave of Neronian fashions there 
 come two editions and translations of Petronius, Nero's 
 "arbiter of elegance," his Beau Brummel, and victim. 
 
 123
 
 124 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 " Trimalchio's Supper- Party," with its Rabelaisian 
 buffoonery, its Swiftian grossness, its Thackerayan 
 Book of Snob s^ has a queer analogy to modern London 
 and Monte Carlo. How near is Petronian Rome to 
 the " smart " London of to-day ! 
 
 Trimalchio to-day is a self-made millionaire, the 
 son not of a slave, but of an honest workman. He 
 began life, not as an aspiring freed-m'an, but as an 
 office boy. He brags of his rough beginnings and of 
 his lavish gifts to public charities and deserving friends. 
 His mansion in Hyde Park or Belgravia is stored with 
 curios which Bond Street dealers assure him to be 
 genuine and rare. He holds tight by the Imperial 
 cause, and parades his zeal for Empire with banquets, 
 illuminations, and royal donations. When he invites 
 you to sup, he tells you there will be wild boar's head 
 from the Campagna, cold pheasant in August, or 
 mangostines in ice from Java. He talks grandly 
 about Nero himself, and is intriguing to get His 
 Majesty to try his preserves. 
 
 The Trimalchio of Petronius boldly introduced to 
 the supper-table his head-huntsman and his Laconian 
 hounds. We do not have gamekeepers and whips in 
 Park Lane. But our own Trimalchios will show 
 you sport in their own county, and they can never 
 cease to talk of it. 
 
 Petronius makes his Trimalchio offer his guests 
 entertainments which are no longer exactly in vogue. 
 The grossness of speech and act, the tomfoolery, the 
 insolence of the Neronian nouveau riche are no 
 longer tolerated. And perhaps Petronius, like Swift, 
 overdoes the caricature. But in substance how like 
 they are ! 
 
 The vulgarity of the adventurer is eternal. The 
 low-bred upstart seeks, by sheer weight of gold, to 
 force himself into the Imperial circles, and, indeed,
 
 IMPERIAL MANNERS 125 
 
 sometimes succeeds in arriving there. He is sur- 
 rounded by cosmopolitan parasites, who own no 
 common race, or tongue, religion, or country. The 
 " Kaffir Circus " are the counterpart of Trimalchio's 
 " Graeculi esurientes." Trimalchio plays at dice over 
 supper. Belgravia plays bridge. The table is loaded 
 with eccentric viands, with bedizened dishes made 
 to imitate Dresden porcelain or Chinese monsters. 
 Trimalchio's wife, Fortunata, was a harridan, as low- 
 born as himself, covered with big jewels, and even 
 more extravagant than her lord. The profusion of 
 exotic plants and flowers was as eagerly sought at 
 Rome as it is in London or Paris. There as here, 
 then as now, in the vulgarian's establishment every- 
 thing was "de trap trap de chases outrl" Objects 
 of art, viands, entertainments, were bought, not 
 because they were good, but because they were 
 difficult to buy. Things were valued, not for what 
 they were, but for what they cost. Art, society, 
 manners, literature were coloured with the same 
 purple glare. 
 
 It should make us shudder to note the sinister 
 analogies of Imperial Rome and Imperial Britain. 
 There is the same wantonness in extravagance, the 
 pretence of art, refinement, and culture, with the 
 real debasement of all of them by vanity and low 
 tastes. Our English tongue gets vulgarised by 
 foreign slang. As Roman society caught up the 
 vernacular of slaves, British conversation gets in- 
 filtrated with costermongers' cant phrases learned in 
 music-hall songs. If Cicero would gasp at Petronius's 
 solecisms, Addison would shrink 'from the "short 
 story " in slum idiom which adorns half our magazines 
 and newspapers. 
 
 A Neronian banquet, such as Mr. Tree provides 
 with such magnificence and such learning, is hardly
 
 126 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 a caricature of some New York festival of flowers, 
 jewels, delicacies, and entertainments. We imitate 
 New York at a distance. Petronius would smile 
 with pity at the poverty of the wildest debauch Park 
 Lane ever imagined. But we shall come to it in 
 time. 
 
 The Imperial " swelled-head " which made Caligula, 
 Nero, and Domitian crazy, ends in a ghastly ruin. The 
 Neronian age was a resplendent and resounding orgy. 
 But underneath the orgy there was growing up a new 
 society, a new faith, a nobler race, a purer life. The 
 first century showed the old world at its worst. But 
 it was the cradle of the new world which was destined 
 to sweep away the old.
 
 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
 
 1906 
 
 IN these days of centenaries hardly enough has been 
 made of the memory of Franklin, who was born in 
 1706, and died at the ripe age of eighty-four, after 
 one of the most extraordinary careers in modern 
 history. He was at once one of the pioneers of 
 scientific discovery and one of the founders of the 
 great Republic of the West. The arch rebel of King 
 George III. was the idol of the Court of Versailles. 
 Saturated with true literature and absorbed in physical 
 science, he was one of the wisest statesmen, and also 
 one of the most creative revolutionists, even of the 
 eighteenth century, rich in subtle statecraft and 
 organic revolution. The fifteenth child of a humble 
 family of New England, Benjamin was born and 
 reared in poverty, and began a stern life of toil as a 
 boy in a printer's workshop. There, and in England, 
 he managed to give himself a sound and varied know- 
 ledge of books, nature, and men. Returning to 
 America, he set up in business as printer, bookseller, 
 publisher, and editor, and in each occupation that he 
 undertook he won wealth, friends, influence, and 
 fame. By the time he had reached the middle of 
 his life this home-spun printer had become the most 
 eminent citizen of his own State, and also a leader 
 
 127
 
 i 2 8 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 of science renowned all over Europe. His " immortal 
 discovery," as a philosopher has called it, by which he 
 founded the modern science of electricity, placed him 
 on such an eminence as was afterwards obtained by 
 the founder of Evolution. Franklin was acknow- 
 ledged in England and in France as one of the great 
 lights of modern science. 
 
 This typical American patriot passed nearly half 
 his life in Europe, a large part of it in England, and 
 was regarded as a great discoverer, as a brilliant man of 
 the world, and also as the Ambassador of a new nation. 
 In the literary world he was the peer of Johnson, 
 Burke, Voltaire, and Turgot ; in the social world 
 he was the friend of statesmen, courtiers, and princes, 
 both at St. James's and at Versailles. The triumph 
 of his political life was the French alliance, which at 
 last enabled the United States to defeat the King and 
 to constitute themselves a 'nation. Returning to the 
 Republic he had so largely assisted to create, he 
 became, with Washington, the organiser of its 
 institutions. In the later years of his long life, 
 with wealth, influence, and honours growing up 
 spontaneously around him, he devoted his practical 
 genius to a series of foundations, academic, scientific, 
 philanthropic, whilst dispersing his own fortune in 
 public and private benevolence. 
 
 From boyhood to old age Franklin remained the 
 same stout and simple citizen ; gracious, social, cool- 
 headed, clear-sighted, fearless, wise. The Greeks 
 had an admirable phrase to describe such a character 
 of complete virtue and cyclopaedic capacity. He was 
 "a man four-square on all sides, himself without 
 defect," or, as our poet puts it, "who stood four- 
 square to all the winds that blow." Even better 
 than to Wellington may we attribute to Franklin the 
 famous lines :
 
 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 129 
 
 Rich in saving common-sense . . . 
 In his simplicity sublime. 
 
 Franklin was, indeed, one of the most complete 
 intelligences and one of the most all-round personal- 
 ities of modern history. It was a character which 
 the eighteenth century specially produced, as in such 
 men as Priestley and Turgot, Condorcet and Burke. 
 But Franklin was far more successful in everything 
 he touched than any of these men, happier in his 
 conditions than any, with a far keener genius for 
 practical affairs, for obtaining permanent results out 
 of intricate entanglement. Plunged as he was from 
 birth to old age in circumstances apparently con- 
 tradictory and hopeless poor, untaught, the official 
 agent of an insurgent race accredited to an obstinate 
 tyrant a man of science harassed with daily dis- 
 tractions and business troubles, he remained the same 
 imperturbable, successful, happy conqueror over all 
 obstacles. 
 
 And one of the paradoxes . of his career is this. 
 The self-taught printer's boy, fighting his way in 
 trade, spending time and money in physical experi- 
 ments and practical adventures, incessantly travelling 
 from America to Europe, and immersed in society, 
 in diplomacy, and in scientific meetings, contrived to 
 acquire a literary gift of singular effectiveness. He 
 wrote on all kinds of subjects his memoirs, essays, 
 letters fill ten stout volumes. Their form is quite 
 unlike the brilliant and elaborate style of contemporary 
 Englishmen. Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon would 
 regard it as trivial. Goldsmith, Hume, Cowper, and 
 Gray would hardly call it "elegant." But it has 
 some of the qualities of Swift j homely, pellucid, easy, 
 incisive. One knows what it means, every word 
 of it. It arrests attention. It " hits the nail on the 
 head " ; it does its work j it makes one think, and, 
 
 K
 
 130 
 
 still more, makes one act. Franklin had not the 
 imaginative genius and pungency of phrase that 
 lighted up the masterpieces of the fierce Dean. But 
 he was a kind of home-spun, practical, benevolent, 
 large-souled Swift- in simplicity of speech, quiet 
 humour, and social observation of men and manners. 
 A really solid, inexhaustible, efficient intellect always, 
 in every circumstance, master of itself, true to itself. 
 
 There has just come to my hands a little volume of 
 Selections from the Writings of B. Franklin^ which 
 may serve to give those who will not read ten octavo 
 volumes a glimpse of Franklin's mind and style. It 
 ranges from homely hints to a young tradesman to 
 physical experiments, the care of health, economics, 
 slavery and the slave trade, the American rebel cause, 
 Imperialism, grammar, reading, ladies' toilettes, foreign 
 manners, and international alliances. Here one may 
 read the letter to the Royal Society explaining the 
 famous "kite experiment" of 1752, which identified 
 lightning with electricity, and gave an electric shock 
 to the thought of Europe. Here is a pleasant causerie 
 on the game of chess ; there a scathing satire on the 
 "Slave trade" in the manner of Swift, which reads 
 to-day like an article on the use of Chinese coolies in 
 the Rand. We are again reminded of Swift in the 
 profoundly wise piece of caustic wit entitled " Rules 
 for reducing a great Empire to a small one." One 
 by one all the acts of folly and oppression committed 
 on the American Colonies by the Georgian rule are 
 laid bare. Paragraph by paragraph these warnings 
 might be addressed to our own transmarine Empire, 
 and I am not sure that some passages might not be 
 put into the mouth of an Irish Nationalist. 
 
 Franklin, though a figure less majestic than 
 Washington, less imaginative than Hamilton, remains 
 the typical Republican citizen ; and if the feeling of
 
 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 131 
 
 his people for him is less that of reverence, it is 
 more that of affection and fellowship. He is more 
 easily understood as a man, and his origin and life are 
 more akin to those of the average man. He will 
 ever be remembered by the noble verse of Turgot, 
 which embodies a grand tribute to the patriot in an 
 exquisite epigram : 
 
 Eripuit caslo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis. 
 
 He wrested the thunderbolt from the heavens and 
 their sceptre from tyrants. What remains of 
 eighteenth - century Philadelphia is to - day almost 
 the only historic and antique flotsam in the United 
 States. And I know no corner of that central pile 
 more pathetic than that where, in the roar and bustle 
 of that vast city, we come upon the lowly cemetery 
 and plain slab, as ordered by his testament, inscribed 
 to "Benjamin and Deborah Franklin, 1790."
 
 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 
 
 1906 
 
 AN English study of Alexander Hamilton, in the 
 domain of thought the main Founder of the United 
 States as a cohesive Commonwealth, was urgently 
 needed. His was one of the finest minds of the 
 eighteenth century. For more than a century the 
 great State he did so much to create has been broaden- 
 ing in the lines which he traced for it, and to the 
 ends which his genius foresaw more truly than all his 
 colleagues. His hurried political pamphlets, which 
 brought order out of chaos at the close of the War of 
 Independence, have taken their place amongst the 
 permanent classics of political science. And yet few 
 Englishmen have ever opened the Federalist ; and 
 many well-read students of history, who know all 
 about his personal scandals and his tragic end, have no 
 very definite convictions as to the share in forming 
 the United States, due to Washington, to Jefferson, 
 Madison, Adams, and to Hamilton. As philosopher, 
 as publicist, as creative genius, Hamilton was far the 
 most important. And it was indeed time that English 
 readers should have the story told them from the 
 English point of view. His own son, Senator Cabot 
 Lodge, and other American writers have amply done 
 him justice. But one fears that standard American 
 
 132
 
 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 133 
 
 works are not assiduously studied in England. Mr. 
 Oliver's work, which is not a biography, but " an essay 
 on American Union," adequately supplies a real want 
 in political history. 
 
 Sir Henry Maine, in his work on Popular Govern- 
 ment^ 1885, devoted the fourth essay to the Constitu- 
 tion of the United States, which he truly called "much 
 the most important political instrument of modern 
 times." And throughout this fourth essay Sir Henry 
 does ample justice to the sagacity and foresight of 
 Hamilton. He quotes Chancellor Kent, who com- 
 pares the Federalist (mainly written by Hamilton) 
 with Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavel, Montesquieu, 
 Milton, Locke, and Burke ; and Maine declares that 
 such praise is not too high. Talleyrand, a diplomatist 
 and a cynic, spoke of Hamilton with enthusiasm, and 
 Guizot praised his political writings as of consummate 
 wisdom and practical sagacity. Mr. Bryce, in his 
 great work on The American Commonwealth, does full 
 justice to Hamilton. Sir George Trevelyan, in his 
 American Revolution, calls Hamilton " the most brilliant 
 and most tragic figure in all the historical gallery of 
 American statesmen." In the new Cambridge Modern 
 History, vol. vii., Professor Bigelow truly describes 
 Hamilton as " the master spirit of the Convention 
 which framed the Constitution of the United States." 
 " A nation was to be created and established, created 
 of jarring commonwealths and established on the 
 highest level of right." The accomplishment of this 
 stupendous task by the dominant character of George 
 Washington and the piercing genius of Alexander 
 Hamilton places both amongst the great creative 
 statesmen of the world. 
 
 Mr. Oliver's book does not profess to be a history 
 or a biography, but " merely an essay on the character 
 and achievements of a man who was the chief figure
 
 i 3 4 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 in a series of striking events." This is perhaps rather 
 too modest a claim. For the years from 1780 to 1796 
 the years when Hamilton first contributed to the 
 task of practical statesmanship down to his drafting 
 Washington's "Farewell Address"- the history of 
 the War and of the Settlement during the two Presi- 
 dencies of Washington is quite adequately sketched. 
 And as to a biography of Hamilton, a living portrait 
 of the man himself is vigorously drawn in the midst of 
 the historical and political chapters. It is quite true 
 that Hamilton and the circumstances of his career are 
 by no means the exclusive subject. Washington, 
 Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, Burr, and other 
 prominent politicians have sections of the book to 
 themselves. And the aims and principles of the 
 various parties Federalists, Democrats, State Rights, 
 Republicans, Patriots, Neutralists so obscure to us 
 at home, are made clear as the story moves. 
 
 This is no doubt the true, perhaps the necessary 
 way of recounting the life-work of Hamilton. He 
 was so closely associated with every phase of the 
 American movement for the twenty years after the 
 virtual close of the war at Yorktown, in 1781, that 
 the life of Hamilton is hardly intelligible unless we 
 read it as part of the history of his country. And his 
 relations with his colleagues in government and with 
 his opponents, rivals, and enemies in controversy and 
 intrigue, are so close and so complex that no true 
 portrait of Hamilton is complete till we have sketches 
 of his contemporaries. On the whole, Mr. Oliver has 
 set Alexander Hamilton in his true place, as next to 
 Washington, the leading founder of the United States 
 the intellectual creator of the great Commonwealth 
 of which George Washington was the typical father 
 and the moral hero. 
 
 Hamilton is the American Burke in his union of
 
 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 135 
 
 literary power with political science. If he falls short 
 of Burke in the majesty of speech and the splendour 
 of many-sided gifts, he was never hurried into the 
 frantic passions and fatal blunders which finally ruined 
 Burke's influence over his age. Hamilton at times 
 exaggerated the dangers he foresaw, was too pessimist 
 and even unjust to the failings he condemned. But 
 on the whole he made no great mistake, and all those 
 ideas for which he struggled with such tenacity and 
 earnestness have in the course of ages come to a 
 triumphant issue. Hamilton, too, reminds us of 
 Burke in the sadness of his personal history, in the 
 poignant disappointments of his career, and in the want 
 of full recognition of his supreme greatness in his life- 
 time. Colleagues whom we now see to have been his 
 inferiors, both morally and intellectually, men repre- 
 senting lower ideals, came to the first place in the 
 State he had created, a seat to which it was quite 
 impossible that he could have been chosen. Even in 
 America Hamilton has hardly been judged with full 
 honour. He was too conservative, too anti-democratic, 
 of too philosophic a temperament, too much the idealist, 
 and too little the demagogue ever to attain the popu- 
 larity which wins the votes of a vast majority. 
 
 The book has a moral somewhat startling, and at 
 the present moment charged with lively interest. The 
 concluding book is occupied with general reflections 
 upon Nationality, Empire, Union, and Sovereignty ; 
 and the problem of welding the thirteen American 
 States into a single Commonwealth is applied to the 
 present-day problem of reconciling the British Con- 
 stitution with our transmarine Empire. Mr. Oliver, 
 if I understand him aright, seems afraid that the British 
 Empire is held together by bonds too loose and unde- 
 fined, and would urge on it the Hamiltonian doctrine 
 of central Sovereignty and resolute Union. He quotes
 
 136 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Washington's maxim: "Influence is not government." 
 He says the tie of affection or kinship is not union. 
 He seems, like Hobbes and Austin, to ask for force as 
 the basis of true union and government. Why, the 
 self-governing Colonies would fly into fifty bits at the 
 mere sound of such a thing. The American Civil 
 War of 1863 would be a flea-bite compared to this. 
 For my part, I quite agree with Washington that 
 " influence is not government," and with Mr. Oliver 
 that sentimental ties are not Union. But the casual 
 conglomeration called the British Empire has nothing 
 else to rest on, and the least attempt to bind it with 
 closer ties would mean immediate and final disruption.
 
 THACKERAY 
 
 1903 
 
 THE appearance of a great contemporary writer's 
 works in various forms, as by the law of copyright his 
 btfoks become, one by one, the property of the public, 
 reminds us that he has now entered into the literary 
 elysium shared only by those who are English Classics. 
 A " Classic " is one who, being dead and gone, is read 
 more freely and with more reverence than ever was 
 done in his lifetime ; one whose rank is settled and 
 acknowledged ; who is found in manifold shapes of 
 type and form, and has a familiar corner in every 
 household. 
 
 Thackeray is eminently a classic. It is safe to 
 predict that no prose writer of the nineteenth century 
 will retain a more steady, even, and general popularity, 
 and be for ages one of the typical facts in the history 
 of English letters. The combination of faultless 
 English, at once pure, nervous, and simple, with wit, 
 humour, insight into the human heart, and perfect 
 command of his own genius and knowledge of its re- 
 sources and its limits this forms a power so rare that 
 the scholar and the "general reader," the philosopher 
 and the man of the world, the literary virtuoso and the 
 novel-trotter can all enjoy it, and will always enjoy it. 
 Thackeray has been dead now nearly forty years ; he
 
 138 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 became famous nearly sixty years ago ; his master- 
 piece is now fifty-five years old ; and his collected 
 works were published thirty-three years ago. 
 
 And now Messrs. Dent and Co. are issuing an 
 edition of his prose works in thirty volumes, each with 
 some ten illustrations, at a modest price, in continua- 
 tion of their standard editions of Old English authors. 
 The form is convenient, the type easy, and the illustra- 
 tions entirely adequate (which in such a case is saying 
 a good deal). Thackeray will go on and will continue 
 long to be read in a dozen different forms. I have 
 read him in the magnificent large octavo edition, with 
 his own illustrations, of 1883-86 (which cost a small 
 fortune), and also in the twelve-volume edition of 
 1871-72, and in many more editions, including the 
 handy contraband of foreign reprinters. And now, as 
 I take up the new issue in thirty volumes, I can hardly 
 get on with this article for dipping into my favourite 
 scenes and wasting my time over passages that I know 
 by heart. He is ever fresh, ever welcome, ever racy 
 dear old Snob." 
 
 As I turn over this issue of thirty volumes of prose 
 and he left us capital ballads, burlesques, and rhym- 
 ing tags as well I am amazed at this huge product of 
 a writer who died at the age of fifty-two. It was also 
 the age of Shakespeare at his death. I do not recall 
 the name of any of our great prose writers, except 
 Henry Fielding and Goldsmith, who died at so early 
 an age. Scott and Dickens, who both worked them- 
 selves to death, reached a somewhat longer term. 
 Some poets, and two rare women novelists, died even 
 younger. But almost all our great prose writers 
 amongst men lived and wrote to a riper age, some of 
 them into a great age, as Hallam, De Quincey, and 
 Carlyle. But Shakespeare, Fielding, Thackeray, all 
 died in middle life, leaving an immense output. I do
 
 THACKERAY 139 
 
 not claim Thackeray as the peer of Shakespeare, nor, 
 indeed, of Fielding. But he has a measure of their 
 supreme qualities of insight into the human heart, their 
 zest for life, their broad outlook at the world, and its 
 strange contrasts of manners, ranks, and characters. 
 
 There is another quality in which I hold Thackeray 
 to be eminent. I mean his sober evenness of work- 
 manship. He is almost never slovenly, or extravagant, 
 or drivelling. He wrote too much, as they all did, and 
 wrote for money, and not for fame or love of his art. 
 He wrote many pieces that are quite below his best 
 and his true form. But even his worst are written in 
 that faultless and racy English of which he was master ; 
 they are never hysterical, bombastic, or farcical ; they 
 are never so nonsensical or so tedious that we cannot 
 read them twice. Now, Fielding poured out volumes 
 of dramatic rubbish j Dickens is insufferably maudlin 
 at times, and too often grossly affected ; Lytton is 
 sometimes ludicrous, and George Eliot is sometimes 
 pedantic ; Trollope gives us stale small beer at times ; 
 Kingsley, Charlotte Bronte can be both coarse and 
 sensational. Even Scott and Shakespeare, Olympians 
 as they are, would rattle off what they knew to be 
 rubbish when the printer's boy or the prompter's boy 
 was waiting for copy. But Thackeray, though he 
 ended at last in some very poor stuff, never flung at 
 us rank balderdash or careless gabble. 
 
 Thackeray is a special favourite of mine, mainly 
 by reason of his consummate flow of effervescing talk, 
 his inexhaustible wit, and never -failing manly good 
 sense. He is the jolly man-of-the- world who sees the 
 follies and pretences of people about him, holds them 
 up to contempt, but is never morose, sardonic, or 
 peevish. I am quite aware of Thackeray's limitations, 
 and I am not about to ignore them. I do not say he 
 is a Fielding or a Scott, nor a Moliere or a Cervantes.
 
 140 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 But I do say that Vanity Fair^ as a comedy of modern 
 society, is the best we have had since Tom Jones ; and, 
 if it be placed on a narrower stage, and inspired with 
 a less generous spirit than Tom Jones^ it may be put 
 beside it, and will live along with it. Thackeray is 
 not an epic poet like Scott ; he has not the deep 
 pathos that Dickens has reached more than once, and 
 Richardson many times ; he has not the noble humanity 
 of Fielding ; he has not the feminine subtlety of Jane 
 Austen or of Charlotte Bronte. He has not the 
 Gargantuan rage of Swift, nor the idyllic charm of 
 Goldsmith. But his prose, as English style, is superior 
 to any other prose of the nineteenth century. His 
 invention is the least spasmodic and uneasy. And he 
 will long stand with Fielding, Richardson, and Scott 
 as one of our four or five standard romancists. 
 
 Years ago, when I tried to make an estimate of 
 Thackeray, I was moved to say that, "of all the 
 Englishmen of his century, he had written the best 
 comedy of manners, the best extravaganza, the best 
 burlesque, the best parody, and the best comic song," 
 and that some of his admirers would add "the best 
 lectures and the best critical essays." This was a 
 parody of Byron's famous eulogy of Sheridan ; and I 
 hold that it had as much justification. Vanity Fair 
 may be really " the best comedy of manners " without 
 being the greatest romance of the century. It has 
 not the epic poetry of Scott's best, nor the rollicking 
 waggery of Dickens at his best ; nor has it the 
 exquisite aroma of Jane Austen's boudoir, nor the 
 intense passion of Jane Eyre's confessions. But as 
 a serious anatomy of social manners in a broad and 
 judicial spirit it has something that none of these have, 
 that nothing has since Tom Jones^ something Shake- 
 spearean in its sane, comprehensive, penetrating survey 
 of human character all round.
 
 THACKERAY 141 
 
 Vanity Fair^ too, stands out again as far the chief 
 masterpiece of Thackeray. For, to my mind, Esmond^ 
 with all its beauties and its wonderful mastery of the 
 style and tone of the eighteenth century, is too artificial. 
 And the New comes and Pendennis^ for all their minor 
 merits, are too much variations upon one key, and 
 have no such power, no such unforgettable characters, 
 as Vanity Fair. This novel also is the only one of all 
 Thackeray's longer romances which has anything that 
 can be called a plot, a drama, and an organic story of 
 action. The plot of Vanity Fair is thin and desultory 
 enough not to be named beside the plots of Tom 
 Jones or Clarissa^ of The Antiquary or of Jane Eyre. 
 But it has something that can be called a drama of 
 incident worked out to a catastrophe. This cannot be 
 fairly said of any other of Thackeray's longer romances. 
 The story of them wanders on in the manner of serials 
 composed from month to month. I doubt if a reader 
 of the Virginians^ of Lovel^ or of Philip could write 
 out from memory a summary of the plot of any of 
 them. 
 
 This leads us to another point that Thackeray is 
 peculiarly at home in his shorter pieces and in detached 
 studies. I always hold the Hoggarty Diamond to be in 
 his best vein. The Snob papers, again, have every one 
 of his qualities in perfection. Few satires, unless it be 
 Don Quixote, Pantagruel, Gil Blas^ and The Barber of 
 Seville^ have ever killed the affectations they attacked 
 and improved public opinion. But the Book of Snobs 
 really killed certain forms of snobbery and reformed 
 social taste. The book has lost much of its interest 
 because it paints to some degree effete types of folly. 
 It was for this that Charlotte Bronte called Thackeray 
 "the first social regenerator of the day." He was 
 hardly that. But, in spite of his turn for painting 
 vulgarity, rascality, meanness, hypocrisy, pretentious-
 
 142 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 ness, base natures, low vices, and pitiful shams, 
 although he is much more at home with a mean 
 character than he is with a noble nature Thackeray 
 is not a cynical mocker at human goodness. He 
 loved the best in human nature. He did not a little 
 to develop it.
 
 REMINISCENCES OF GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 1901 
 
 IT is now some years ago that I ventured to make a 
 prediction that " it will be the duty of the more 
 serious criticism of another generation to revive the 
 reputation of George Eliot as an abiding literary 
 force." And the quality which I especially noted 
 was this, that "she raised the whole art of romance 
 into a higher plane of thought, of culture, and of 
 philosophic grasp." I thought that this "noble aim" 
 of hers was being too much overlooked and I think 
 this is still true in England. Her American admirers 
 have shown more constancy in their affection. 
 
 It is more than forty-one years since I first made her 
 acquaintance, on New Year's Day 1860, at the house 
 of her close friends, Dr. and Mrs. Richard Congreve, at 
 Wandsworth. It was twenty-one years later, almost 
 to a day, that I was one of the mourners who followed 
 her body to the grave in Highgate Cemetery on the 
 29th December 1880. During those twenty -one 
 years I constantly saw her, had much conversation 
 with her on literary and philosophical topics, and 
 received many letters relating to her own writings, and 
 also to her views on art, politics, and religion. Some 
 of these letters have been published by her husband, 
 but the incidents that called them forth are not quite
 
 144 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 evident to the readers of Mr. Cross's Life, and some 
 of the most interesting have not been published at 
 all. I am asked to contribute my own recollections 
 of her conception of life and her methods of work. 
 Having the sanction of those whom she left behind 
 her, I will try, before it is too late, to put down my 
 memories of a friend whom I so profoundly honoured. 
 As I do this, I recall to mind not a few of the most 
 golden days of my past life, and some of the most inspir- 
 ing " banquets " or symposia of high thinking to which 
 it has ever been my fortune to be bidden as a guest. 
 
 How well I remember that New Year's day when 
 I met Mr. and Mrs. Lewes at the dinner-table of Mr. 
 and Mrs. Richard Congreve ! She was then at the 
 age of forty, in the first outburst of her fame as the 
 author of Adam Bede^ and was just finishing the 
 second volume of the Mill on the Floss. She had no 
 friends at Wandsworth except Mr. and Mrs. Richard 
 Congreve, who had made her acquaintance the year 
 before. Mrs. Congreve, she wrote in her journal 
 (May 3, 1859), "was the chief charm of the place 
 to me." Dr. Congreve had retired for some years 
 from his work at Oxford to give himself up to the 
 study and propaganda of the principles of Auguste 
 Comte. He had just published his translation of the 
 Positivist Catechism^ which Mrs. Lewes had already 
 read, whilst George Lewes was occupied with the 
 Politique of Comte. I was a young man, just called 
 to the bar, who had been the pupil and then as tutor 
 was the successor of Richard Congreve at Oxford, but 
 I had written nothing, and was quite unknown to the 
 public. Though we were all more or less interested 
 in Comte, the talk round the table was quite general, 
 and the small party was nothing but a simple gather- 
 ing of intimate friends. 
 
 I listened with lively interest to the words of one
 
 REMINISCENCES OF GEORGE ELIOT 145 
 
 who was already famous, who from the first moment 
 impressed every one with a sense of grave thought, 
 high ideals, and scrupulous courtesy. She had not 
 a grain of self-importance in her manner, and took 
 quite a simple and modest part in the general talk, 
 listening to the brilliant sallies of George Lewes with 
 undisguised delight, respecting Congreve's views as 
 those of a trained historian and scholar, and showing 
 me the kindly welcome of a gracious woman to the 
 friend of her friends. I remember an argument in 
 which she engaged me, wherein I thought, as I 
 still think, she was mistaken. She maintained, 
 apropos of a review of troops she had lately seen, 
 that "the pomp and circumstance of glorious war" 
 was more conspicuous in our day than it was in the 
 Middle Ages. Having some knowledge of mediaeval 
 art, Italian war- paintings, and illuminated Froissarts, I 
 ventured to doubt. The company seemed to think 
 me bold in venturing to differ from her opinion on a 
 matter of local colour. But she did not think so 
 herself; and nothing could be more graceful than 
 the patience with which she listened to my points. 
 
 In the year 1860, at Wandsworth, she was work- 
 ing under severe pressure, having broken with her 
 own family, retaining only one or two women friends, 
 quite unknown to general society. Years afterwards, 
 when she lived in London and at Witley, she had the 
 cultured world at her feet; men and women of rank 
 and reputation crowded her Sunday receptions, and she 
 was surrounded by friends and reverential worshippers 
 of her genius. But she remained still the same quiet, 
 grave, reserved woman that she had been in her retreat 
 and isolation at Wandsworth, always modest in her 
 bearing, almost deferential towards any form of 
 acknowledged reputation, almost morbidly distrustful 
 of herself, and eager to purge out of her soul any 
 
 L
 
 146 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 germ of arrogance and pride that her fame and the 
 court paid to her by men and women of mark could 
 possibly tend to breed. 
 
 It was the foundation of the Fortnightly Review^ 
 in 1865, which brought me into constant association 
 with Mr. Lewes, who was then established in the 
 Priory, Regent's Park. Early in 1865 George Lewes 
 was chosen as its first editor. I contributed in that 
 year four articles to the new organ, and George Eliot 
 wrote in the first number. I was at that time a 
 constant visitor at the Priory, where Herbert Spencer, 
 Thomas Huxley, Anthony Trollope, the Congreves, 
 Deutsch, and Sir Frederic Burton were frequently 
 found. I there learned to estimate at its full value 
 the immense range of George Eliot's reading, both 
 in poetry and in philosophy, the high standard of 
 duty, whether personal or social, that she kept before 
 her own sight and required of others, and the 
 conscientious labour she devoted to her own art. 
 
 George Eliot was occupied on her novel of Felix 
 Holt during 1865 and the first half of 1866; and, as 
 every reader knows, the plot and denouement in the 
 later part of the story turn on an intricate legal 
 imbroglio, whereby an old English family were 
 suddenly dispossessed of their estates which they had 
 held for many generations. She had endeavoured to 
 work out this problem for herself, but found herself 
 involved in hopeless technicalities of law. As is 
 stated by Mr. Cross in the opening of chapter xiii., 
 she had written me the kind letter of January 5, 1866, 
 to invite me to join a party consisting of Herbert 
 Spencer, T. Huxley, and others, and she there 
 imparted to me her difficulties as to the law of entail 
 and the statutes of limitations. She wrote of it in a 
 letter to me of the gth January that she "must go 
 sounding on her dim and perilous way through law-
 
 REMINISCENCES OF GEORGE ELIOT 147 
 
 books amidst agonies of doubt." I offered her text- 
 books, but she preferred to put to me her difficulties 
 in writing. The law case she required to fit her 
 plot in the year 1832 was one which on the first 
 sight of it seemed impossible in the face of the 
 statutes of limitations. She wanted to dispossess a 
 family which had been in peaceable possession of 
 estates for a century. 
 
 This was "the statement of her needs," as she 
 termed it : 
 
 It is required to know the longest possible term of 
 years for the existence of the following conditions : 
 
 1. That an estate, for lack of a direct heir, should have 
 come into the possession of A (or of a series A, A', A" 
 if that were admissible). 
 
 2. That subsequently a claim should have been set up 
 by B, on a valid plea of nearer kinship. 
 
 3. That B should have failed in his suit from inability 
 to prove his identity, over which certain circumstances 
 (already fixed) should have cast a doubt, and should have 
 died soon after. 
 
 4. That B's daughter, being an infant at the time of 
 his death, should have come to years of discretion and 
 have a legal claim on the estate. 
 
 These are the essentials as closely as I can strip them. 
 The last, viz., the legal claim of B's daughter, might be 
 dispensed with, if the adequate stretching of the time is not 
 to be obtained by any formula of conditions. The moral 
 necessities of the situation might be met by the fact of 
 injustice and foul play towards B ; but I should prefer 
 the legal claim, if possible. 
 
 You see, I should be glad of as large a slice of a century 
 as you could give me, but I should be resigned if I could 
 get forty years. 
 
 I was at first inclined to think the case to be 
 impossible, as contrary to the then existing statutes
 
 148 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 of limitations. But I presently fell back on the rare, 
 but not impossible, case of a Base Fee^ under which a 
 settlement might be perfectly valid for the issue of a 
 tenant-in-tail for many generations, but would not 
 bar the rights of the remainder-men. It happened 
 that, before I finally submitted the scheme to George 
 Eliot, I asked the opinion of a colleague at the bar. 
 The man I consulted chanced to be the late Lord 
 Herschell, the ex -Chancellor, who died on a public 
 mission in the United States and who was then a 
 junior barrister. Having his entire concurrence, I 
 carried the scheme to George Eliot, who at once 
 recast her plot, and was enabled to carry back the 
 settlement of the Transome estates not only for forty 
 years, but for more than a century. An attempt was 
 made in a review to throw doubt upon the correctness 
 of the law on which Felix Holt was based ; but an 
 eminent conveyancer of Lincoln's Inn disposed of this 
 criticism in a conclusive answer in the press. 
 
 I have in my possession about sixteen letters written 
 to me in the months from January to May 1866, 
 asking for assistance in legal points relating to Felix 
 Holt, And during that period I had many inter- 
 views with her thereon, and read large portions 
 of the story in MS. and in proof. The letters 
 and my own recollections testify to the indefatigable 
 pains that she took with every point of local colour, 
 her anxiety about scrupulous accuracy of fact, and 
 the often feeble health under which the book was 
 produced. 
 
 I was again consulted on an incidental point 
 of law in the novel of Daniel Deronda. The letter 
 of June I, 1875 (partly printed by Cross, Life^ 
 iii. 258), begged me to come and talk over a point 
 of difficulty. On the day following I received this 
 letter :
 
 REMINISCENCES OF GEORGE ELIOT 149 
 
 June 2, '75. 
 
 DEAR MR. HARRISON Herewith the statement you 
 have kindly allowed me to send. 
 
 It occurs to me that in my brief, fragmentary chat with 
 Mr. Bowen he had gathered Sir H. to be a tenant-in-tail 
 coming of age, so that his Father could make no disposition 
 without his consent. But even then I don't see why he 
 Sir H. should have objected to a settlement in the 
 given sense. Do you ? This question has reference 
 simply to my alarms about apparent improbabilities. 
 Yours thankfully, M. G. LEWES. 
 
 This question referred to the desire of Sir Hugo 
 Mallinger as to the settlement of the estates. She had 
 consulted Charles Bowen, then a junior barrister and 
 afterwards Lord Bowen, Lord of Appeal, but only in 
 casual conversation. She then sent me a statement of 
 the case she needed for the plot, and I forwarded to 
 her the sketch of a possible solution. This satisfied 
 her requirements. She wrote (June 15, 1875) : 
 
 I must write to tell you my joy that on further study 
 of your "document" I find in it precisely the case that 
 will suit the conditions I had already prepared. I mean 
 the case that "Sir H. might ardently desire a particular 
 house and property, locally part of the settled estates or 
 not, to leave to his widow and daughters for their home 
 and residence, etc." Clearly I have a special Providence 
 to whom my gratitude is due, and he is the able con- 
 veyancer who has drawn up said document. We are in 
 the pangs of preparation for starting to-morrow morning. 
 
 Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda were the only 
 novels on which I was consulted, and then simply as 
 to points of law and legal practice. I wrote the 
 " opinion " of the Attorney-General, printed in italics 
 in chapter xxxv. of Felix Holt^ as a guide to the 
 language used in Lincoln's Inn, and she inserted it
 
 150 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 bodily in the book. I remember telling her that I 
 should always boast of having written one sentence 
 that was embodied in English literature. The 
 "opinion" was little more than "common form," 
 and she took kindly my little mot. I need hardly 
 say that I had nothing whatever to do with the com- 
 position or scheme of either of these tales, nor with 
 anything else of her work. I do not think any one 
 else had. Except that she took pains to be accurate 
 as to legal subtleties, as to facts of history, and the 
 Jewish rites in Daniel Deronda, I do not believe she 
 took counsel of any one but of George Lewes. Every- 
 thing she produced was entirely original, both in con- 
 ception and in execution. 
 
 My purpose in this paper is to try to clear up such 
 points as this, and to explain the meaning of some 
 letters of hers printed by Mr. Cross, but of which he 
 could give no elucidation. The very long and beauti- 
 ful letter of August 15, 1866, printed in chapter xiii. 
 of the Life and Letters^ headed " Aesthetic Teaching," 
 is hardly intelligible without some account of the 
 proposal to which it was an answer. During her 
 absence at the German Baths in July of that year I 
 wrote her a long letter to suggest that she might use 
 her great powers of imagination and her deep interest 
 in social questions to describe an ideal state of industrial 
 life. It would present a picture of the relations of 
 all concerned in a great manufacturing industry, under 
 conditions of health, happiness, and beauty, so as to 
 realise the Utopia of regenerated Industry directed by 
 an efficient spiritual force and inspired by the providence 
 of Humanity, as conceived by Auguste Comte. George 
 Eliot had been a careful student of all his works for 
 many years, and through the Congreves she was 
 familiar with every phase of the Positivist ideal, with 
 the general idea of which she had entire sympathy.
 
 REMINISCENCES OF GEORGE ELIOT 151 
 
 I even suggested, as a milieu^ a manufacturing village 
 in a beautiful part of northern France, where the 
 owner of a great factory had reorganised Labour on 
 humane and social lines, himself an ardent republican 
 and ex-socialist, whilst the education and worship of 
 the township were directed by the local physician, 
 who exerted a positive priesthood on a basis of scientific 
 convictions. 
 
 Her long and convincing letter of August 15 was 
 her answer to this proposal. She feared (and no doubt 
 with some reason) that the effort to idealise a social 
 state, consciously imagined as possible only in the 
 future, would want the life and reality that she gave 
 to her modern pictures. She was quite in her element 
 in painting character. She did not shrink from treating 
 a past epoch, as in Romola^ "The Spanish Gypsy," 
 etc. etc. But, as she says in the letter, she was there 
 dealing with only some of the relations, treating of 
 selected characters, not with a form of society with 
 definite moral problems, nor with the panorama of a 
 regenerated type of human life. Furthermore, she 
 adds, her gift for tragic crises would have no scope 
 in the tableau of a glorified world where virtue and 
 happiness reigned. She was no doubt quite right. 
 She shrank from any Utopia in which there was danger 
 that " the picture might lapse into the diagram." But 
 the idea, as she said, continued to rest in her mind. 
 
 The poem of " The Spanish Gypsy " was one 
 result of the conception that was floating in her mind 
 of presenting in a typical scene some of the phases 
 of a religion of Human Duty. Later on she wrote 
 to me : 
 
 Yos, indeed, I not only remember your letter, but have 
 always kept it at hand, and .have read it many times. 
 Within these latter months I have seemed to see in the
 
 152 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 distance a possible poem shaped on your idea. But it 
 -would be better for you to encourage the growth towards 
 realisation in your own mind rather than trust to trans- 
 plantation. 
 
 My own faint conception is that of a frankly Utopian 
 construction, freeing the poet from all local embarrass- 
 ments. Great Epics have always had more or less of this 
 character only the construction has been of the past, not 
 of the future. Write to me Poste Restante, Baden- 
 Baden, within the next fortnight. My head will have got 
 clearer then. CROSS (Life, iii. 51). 
 
 In the beginning of 1867 George Eliot made the 
 memorable journey to Spain, from which she wrote to 
 me the beautiful letter given by Mr. Cross (iii. p. 8). 
 She was then meditating her poem ; and undoubtedly 
 Positivist ethics supplied her with the conception of 
 Zarca. 
 
 The relation of George Eliot towards the ideal of 
 Auguste Comte has been accurately stated by Mr. 
 Cross (vol. iii. 419) as "a limited adherence." "For 
 all Comte's writing she had a feeling of high admira- 
 tion, intense interest, and very deep sympathy." 
 " But the appreciation was thoroughly selective. 
 Parts of his teaching were accepted and other parts 
 rejected." But her letters to me and her conversation 
 showed something more than sympathy, and not a little 
 practical co-operation. Her life-long friendship with 
 Richard Congreve, the recognised leader of English 
 Positivism, began in February 1859, an( ^ continued 
 until her death in December 1880. From that time 
 she read Comte regularly, and was occupied on him 
 during her last illness. The study of him, she wrote 
 in January 1867, "keeps me in a state of enthusiasm 
 through the day a moral glow." " My gratitude 
 increases continually for the illumination Comte has 
 contributed to my life." She subscribed to the foun-
 
 REMINISCENCES OF GEORGE ELIOT 153 
 
 dation of the Positivist School in 1870, of which 
 Richard Congreve remained Director until his death 
 in 1899, and also to the foundation of Newton Hall, 
 of which I have been the President since 1881. And 
 I have many letters from her relating to Positivist 
 writings of my own. An interesting letter is that 
 referring to the attack of Matthew Arnold on Comte. 
 On the publication of my article on " Culture," 
 reprinted in my Choice of Books^ she wrote to me 
 (November 7, 1867) : 
 
 I suppose it is rather superfluous for me, as one of the 
 public, to thank you for your article in the Fortnightly. 
 But le superflu in the matter of expression is chose si neces- 
 saire to us women. It seems to me that you have said the 
 serious things most needful to be said in a good-humoured 
 way, easy for everybody to read. I have not been able 
 to find Matthew Arnold's article again, but I remember 
 enough of it to appreciate the force of your criticism. 
 Only on one point I am unable to see as you do. I don't 
 know how far my impressions have been warped by reading 
 German, but I have regarded the word " Culture " as a 
 verbal equivalent for the highest mental result of past and 
 present influences. Dictionary meanings are liable rapidly 
 to fall short of usage. But I am not maintaining an 
 opinion only stating an impression. My conscience 
 made me a little unhappy after I had been speaking of 
 Browning on Sunday. I ought to have spoken with more 
 of the veneration I feel for him, and to have said that in 
 his best poems and by these I mean a large number I 
 do not find him unintelligible, but only peculiar and 
 original. Take no notice of this letter, or else I shall feel 
 that I have made an unwarrantable inroad on your time. 
 
 The highly characteristic letter of January 15, 1870, 
 printed by Cross (iii. 103-4), was called out by my 
 article on the " Positivist Problem " in the Fortnightly 
 Review of November 1869. In her letter George
 
 154 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Eliot admits that she has "an unreasonable aversion to 
 personal statements " ; she " shrinks from decided 
 Deliverances' on momentous subjects, from the dread 
 of coming to swear by my own deliverances, and 
 sinking into an insistent echo of oneself. That is a 
 horrible destiny and one cannot help seeing that 
 many of the most powerful men fall into it." All 
 this is not very clear without some explanation, which 
 I will try to give. In reply to various criticisms on 
 Comte by Professor Huxley, Matthew Arnold, and 
 Fitzjames Stephen, I attempted to state the general 
 conditions of the philosophical and religious problems 
 as understood by Positivism. At that date, 1869, I 
 did not at all accept Comte's idea of a Religion 
 of Humanity, and as I was believed to do so, being 
 a colleague of Richard Congreve, I thought it 
 right to state that fact in my article. This was not 
 to the liking of Congreve at all, who would have pre- 
 ferred me to keep silence about my personal opinions. 
 And George Eliot, in her sympathy with the Congreves 
 and her morbid horror of confessions of all kinds, was 
 inclined to remonstrate with me for making any 
 reference to my own beliefs. I never saw, nor do I 
 see, any ground for such reticence, but much the 
 contrary, as leading to false impressions. Those who 
 promote unpopular ideas naturally wish for nothing 
 but whole beliefs in all who go with them. But I 
 repudiate such an attitude. In the thirty-two years 
 since 1869 I have come to adopt the Religion of 
 Humanity, though not in the sense of some followers 
 of Comte, who wish to treat his writings as having a 
 sort of verbal inspiration. I have studied his system 
 now for fifty years, and have never allowed those 
 whom I address in public or in private to be in 
 ignorance from time to time as to the form and 
 extent of my adhesion. And I have no disposition
 
 REMINISCENCES OF GEORGE ELIOT 155 
 
 to shrink from "personal deliverances." There are 
 times when they are an indispensable guarantee of 
 good faith. 
 
 Nothing in the shape of a "service" on Positivist 
 lines was attempted in the Positivist chapel for the 
 first years of its foundation. But by degrees the need 
 for the full expression of religious feeling in public and 
 in private made itself felt ; and as our own children 
 grew up from infancy, their mother was called upon 
 to supply some equivalent for family prayer. We 
 consulted George Eliot, who, with her deep sympathy 
 with the inmost emotions of humanity, had so great a 
 gift of poetic expression. The letter of June 14, 
 1877 (given by Cross, Life, iii. 311), was the outcome 
 of this appeal. She there said that she was not able 
 to contribute " to the construction of a liturgy," but 
 that she would keep the subject in mind, and " perhaps 
 it might prompt some perfectly unfettered produc- 
 tions." " O may I join the choir invisible " had been 
 composed in 1867, and was published with "Jubal" 
 in 18745 and it was always regarded as a religious 
 embodiment of the Positivist hope of subjective im- 
 mortality. I continued to urge George Eliot to 
 produce other pieces in prose or in verse with the 
 same devotional feeling. 
 
 In the month of July 1877, we drove over from 
 Sutton Place to Witley, and there had long talks with 
 her on the same subject as we strolled about the heather 
 and the pine woods on those Surrey heights. And I 
 sent her a few passages of the kind, which at first she 
 seemed inclined to look on as inappropriate. On con- 
 sideration, she changed her mind, and wrote to me, 
 December 26, 1877 : 
 
 I have now reread more than once the Prayers we 
 spoke of, and withdraw my remark (made under reserve)
 
 156 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 as not at all applicable. The prayers keep, I think, within 
 the due limit of aspiration and do not pass into beseeching. 
 Certainly, if just the right words could be found 
 what Vauvenargues calls cette splendeur ^expression qui 
 emporte avec die la preuve des grandes pens'ees a ritual 
 might bring more illumination than sermons and lectures. 
 
 The summer of 1878 was partly occupied by 
 George Eliot in writing Theophrastus Such perhaps 
 the only one of her books which was not a success. I 
 have a guilty conscience as to this book, as I may have 
 contributed to induce her to write it. I pointed out 
 to her that our English literature, so rich and splendid 
 in almost every field of poetry and prose, was deficient 
 in those collections of Thoughts which the French 
 call Pensees pregnant apothegms embedded in terse 
 and memorable phrase, which could be remembered 
 like fine lines of poetry, and be cited as readily as a 
 familiar proverb. It seemed to me it seems to me 
 still that she was eminently fitted to produce such a 
 book, "and indeed the Wit and Wisdom of George Eliot 
 was a volume culled from her writings. But Theo- 
 phrastus Such where the queer title came from I 
 know not was not an adequate expression of her 
 powers. She was in very poor health all the time, 
 and George Lewes was then stricken with his last 
 illness. His death delayed publication, and when she 
 read Theophrastus in revise, she had serious thoughts 
 of suppressing it (Cross, iii. 352). Would she had 
 done so ! Her life was ebbing away when it was 
 actually published. 
 
 After the death of George Lewes, November 28, 
 1878, we saw little of George Eliot for some time. 
 " Here I and sorrow sit," she wrote in her diary, 
 January I, 1879 ; and she devoted herself to the 
 publication of his posthumous works, and to found a
 
 REMINISCENCES OF GEORGE ELIOT 157 
 
 studentship in his memory, to be called after his name. 
 This necessitated interviews with friends ; and in the 
 spring she began to see a few intimate callers again. 
 She wrote, April 8, 1879 : 
 
 DEAR FRIENDS Will you come to see me some day ? 
 Though I have been so long without making any sign, my 
 heart has been continually moved with gratitude towards 
 you. 
 
 And on May 25, 1879, she writes : 
 
 T fell ill last week I was in town, and was obliged to 
 leave much undone, else I should have written to you. I 
 have not yet recovered my former level, but I hope soon 
 to do so under country influences. I keep by me two 
 letters, and sometimes reread them when I feel in need 
 of a moral stimulus which is half rebuke, half encourage- 
 ment. 
 
 In May 1879 George Eliot published a work 
 which George Lewes had left in MS. The Study of 
 Psychology^ its Object^ Scope^ and Method. It was an 
 elaborate treatise on the relation of psychology to 
 physiology, and treated in turn the views of Comte, 
 Mill, and Herbert Spencer. Lewes, without entirely 
 agreeing with any of these theories, tends rather to 
 place the science of psychology on the same basis as 
 Comte, whilst denying Comte's doctrine that the 
 Introspective method was wholly illusory. George 
 Eliot sent me a presentation copy of this book, which 
 I read with deep interest. And I made it the basis of 
 a paper I read to the Metaphysical Society on June 10, 
 1879, entitled the "Social Factor in Psychology," 
 which was based on Lewes's chapter iv. I submitted 
 the paper to George Eliot, who sent me the following 
 letter. The term "Factor," by the way, was the 
 word used as headline to chapter iv. of Lewes's 
 book :
 
 158 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 "June 10, '79. 
 
 I am greatly obliged to you for sending me the paper 
 you are to read to-day, and I appreciate it the more highly 
 because your diligence is in contrast with the general 
 sluggishness of readers about any but idle reading. It is 
 melancholy enough that to most of our polite readers the 
 Social Factor in Psychology would be a dull subject. For 
 it is certainly no conceit of ours which pronounces it to 
 be the supremely interesting element in the thinking of 
 our time. 
 
 I confess the word Factor has always been distasteful 
 to me as the name for the grandest of forces. If it were 
 only mathematical I should not mind, but it has many 
 other associated flavours which spoil it for me. 
 
 Once more evermore thanks. Yours most truly, 
 
 M. E. LEWES. 
 
 I trust your whole household is blooming again now. 
 I am a little better. 
 
 The fine letter of April 19, 1880 (printed by 
 Cross, iii. 388), is the last that I received. It was 
 written a few weeks before her marriage to Mr. John 
 Cross, on May 6, and a few months only before her 
 death. In it her warm admiration for Wordsworth 
 comes out very strongly. When she writes, " I think 
 you would find much to suit your purpose in 'The 
 Prelude ' such as, 
 
 There is 
 
 One great society alone on earth : 
 The noble Living and the noble Dead," 
 
 she was referring to my " purpose," which was to find 
 suitable passages of poetry to read as introductions to 
 the courses of Positivist lectures which were then 
 being given. 
 
 It will be noticed how largely George Eliot's 
 thoughts and her correspondence with myself turned
 
 REMINISCENCES OF GEORGE ELIOT 159 
 
 upon the Positivist ideal of an organised Religion of 
 Humanity. This was only natural, inasmuch as I 
 had been introduced to her by Dr. Richard Congreve, 
 and with him I was, during our intimacy, one of the 
 leaders of the Positivist movement, in which she 
 deeply sympathised. We were all anxious to see this 
 sympathy develop into full adhesion, which it never 
 did, and perhaps was never likely to have done. When 
 a separate group was formed, which met in Newton 
 Hall, George Eliot gave to its funds an annual sub- 
 scription, without withdrawing that which she had 
 contributed to an earlier movement. 
 
 But it must not be supposed that she was entirely 
 wrapped up in deep problems of metaphysics and ethics. 
 Far from it ! She was the most courteous and con- 
 siderate of friends, delighting in lively conversation 
 and good-natured gossip. She was an admirable 
 housewife, and very proud of her practical accomplish- 
 ments as a sensible and kindly mistress. She interested 
 herself much in finding a comfortable situation for any 
 young woman whom she judged to be in need of a 
 friend. We have letters she addressed to my wife 
 recommending a girl as a nurse. " I have reason to 
 believe," she wrote, " that her habits of feeling and 
 conduct are much above the average in young women 
 offering themselves for domestic service." The girl 
 in question was leaving her place, as George Eliot 
 suspected, owing to "a cabal against Mary in the 
 kitchen as ' the proud house-maid.' Her underclothing 
 was thought arrogantly good, and her bearing towards 
 the men had a little too much dignity." 
 
 Her zeal to help those who were in trouble was 
 always active. I remember once seeing her spring to 
 her feet, and stretching up her arms with that passion- 
 ate gesture she sometimes would display, she said, 
 " Yes ! the day will come when it will be a natural
 
 160 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 instinct to stretch out a hand to help one who needs 
 support, as automatic and irresistible as it is now to 
 use our hands to keep ourselves from a fall." 
 
 There was much of Dinah Morris that was studied, 
 not from Aunt Samuel Evans, but from the depths of 
 the heart of George Eliot herself.
 
 THE COMPLETE RUSKIN 
 1906 
 
 THE new Library Edition of Ruskin's Works is now 
 before the world j and to every one who values pure 
 English, original genius, and many-sided Art, it must 
 be an inexhaustible mine of study and delight. Let 
 no one suppose that this collection is mere reprint 
 " that we knew it all before " ; that it " gives us 
 nothing new." It gives us much that is new, and 
 it gives us the old under new forms. Though I am 
 myself saturated with the writings of John Ruskin, 
 whom I began to read fifty-six years ago, and though 
 I have read every one of his books as they came out, 
 between 1849 and 1899, I am amazed at the fresh- 
 ness and the richness of this monumental work. 
 What miracles of labour, thought, invention are 
 crowded in these thirty-seven big volumes ! What 
 microscopic delicacy of observation ! What subtlety 
 of hand ! What glowing enthusiasm for beauty, 
 truth, goodness ! It is the perennial fertility of the 
 writer, the encyclopaedic variety of the ideas, which 
 holds me spell-bound. 
 
 Has any English writer poured out such masses of 
 
 pregnant prose, such varied thoughts about nature, 
 
 poetry, art, society, history, religion ? We pass on 
 
 in these volumes from mountains to rivers, to the 
 
 161 M
 
 1 62 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 sea, to the lakes ; to trees, rocks, gems, clouds, 
 sunsets to the buildings of Athens, of Italy, of 
 France, and England antique, mediaeval, renascent ; 
 then to pictures, Giotto and the Primitives, Bellini, 
 Tintoretto, Veronese ; to Claude and Turner, Prout 
 and Millais ; to Phidias, Michael Angelo, Florentine 
 reliefs and medallions j and then to the Dismal Science, 
 Social Economy, a new Heaven and a new Earth. 
 It is an encyclopaedia of homily, criticism, analysis, 
 poetry, and passion. I am not the man to value 
 quantity in lieu of quality. The rare bits we have 
 of Sappho, Vauvenargues, or Lovelace, are worth 
 whole libraries. But when I count up the contents 
 of these thirty-seven volumes of Ruskin to contain 
 some seven or eight millions of words, I confess I am 
 amazed at such productive energy and inexhaustible 
 eloquence. And in all these eight million words in 
 some 18,000 pages there is not one page that any other 
 but Ruskin could have written. 
 
 Though I am fanatico per II Giovanni Ruskin^ 
 as the Venetians say, I am quite alive to his blunders, 
 his nonsense, his delirious loves and hates. Alas ! 
 there are ignorance, babyism, and perversity scattered 
 broadcast, not a little extravagant rhetoric, and some 
 cruel injustice. But withal, what geysers of noble 
 feeling ! What an Ithuriel spear to unmask the 
 lurking toads of falsehood ! What patience ! What 
 subtlety ! What refinement in the drawings ! What 
 a sense of a pure and exquisite spirit pervades these 
 "sermons in stone," as Carlyle said these sermons 
 in colours, in drawings, in landscapes, in cathedrals, 
 in the eternal hills, and in the smoky factories of 
 crowded cities ! These thirty-seven volumes contain 
 enough teaching about buildings to equip a leading 
 authority in Architecture ; enough teaching about 
 Painting to found a school ; enough material to base
 
 THE COMPLETE RUSKIN 163 
 
 a general history of Art ; enough history to give a 
 new reading to the Middle Ages ; enough about 
 Poetry to make a master in criticism ; enough of 
 Economy to create a special type of Socialism ; 
 enough verse to rival an average minor poet ; enough 
 of perfect prose to place him beside Bacon and Burke 
 for his inimitable style. 
 
 And withal, this man so often from boyhood 
 prostrated by physical maladies, and then by despair 
 and cerebral affliction ; who spent years and years 
 in travelling over Europe, in lonely meditation on 
 mountains, moors, lakes, and sea ; who gave up days 
 and nights to schools, classes, and college lectures ; 
 who poured out his thoughts daily to unknown 
 correspondents ; who flung away the whole of his 
 paternal inheritance with lavish, and indeed reckless, 
 generosity found time, as this collection shows us, 
 to produce hundreds of exquisite studies of buildings, 
 landscapes, pictures, statues, and natural objects from 
 Mont Blanc to a boulder or a tuft of grass all of 
 them full of suggestion to the artist and the naturalist, 
 unique in their method, and some few so subtle, so 
 lovely, that they might pass at a first glance for the 
 work of Prout or of Turner. Truly, it is only now 
 when we see in one uniform collection these eighty 
 different works, these 1400 plates, with all the new 
 biographical matter, the diaries, the notes, the letters 
 which serve to elucidate and illumine the text it 
 is only now that we can judge how largely bulks in 
 the glorious Victorian age the name of Ruskin 
 whose publications from 1837 to 1900 exactly cover 
 the whole reign of the late Queen. 
 
 I said there is a great deal that is new in this 
 collection, and what is old is given under new forms 
 and with fresh illustrations. In the first place, there 
 are more than 100 drawings by Ruskin himself
 
 164 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 which have never been published. All students of 
 his work and life have seen many of the originals 
 wonderful in their subtlety and precision, now and 
 then really lovely in cloud and air effects. As an 
 old Alpinist, I make bold to say that no other man 
 has ever drawn the Alps with absolute truth, not even 
 Turner, who idealised and glorified the mountains 
 as he did the rivers, the sea, and the palaces of 
 Venice. Ruskin alone of draughtsmen has drawn the 
 Alps as they are as Tyndall might have drawn them 
 if he had been an artist, as Turner might have drawn 
 them if he had been a geologist. And in this collec- 
 tion we have in one set the whole series, singular in 
 their variety, but all marked with the same intense 
 patience and meticulous pains. Ruskin often declares 
 that he could only copy not compose. But there 
 are some of his larger studies of distant landscapes in 
 France and Switzerland which make one think he 
 might have been a real painter, if he had not chosen 
 to be a Professor of universal Art as he might have 
 been a great Social Reformer, if he had not chosen 
 to be a lonely Prophet in the wilderness. 
 
 But there is much beside the drawings which is 
 new. The nineteenth volume contains no fewer 
 than three unpublished Lectures, which together give 
 the essence of Ruskin teaching on his central idea : 
 the dependence of all great Art on moral and spiritual 
 enthusiasm. It was a noble message, to which his 
 whole life was devoted in some ways, a true message, 
 however much he misunderstood the hard facts of 
 history and overrated his own power to solve one of 
 the most complex problems of social science. Almost 
 every volume yet issued contains matter more or less 
 new even to diligent students of Ruskiniana. And 
 apart from new appendices, the body of extracts from 
 diaries, letters, memoranda, and criticisms give life
 
 THE COMPLETE RUSKIN 165 
 
 and meaning to the essays in the text. But the 
 elaborate introductions to each volume, mainly the 
 work of Mr. E. T. Cook, running at times to 50 
 or 100 close pages, describe the circumstances, in 
 Ruskin's long and chequered life, under which each 
 book, essay, or lecture was produced. This bio- 
 graphical commentary is at times a revelation of a 
 mind one of the most marvellously endowed and 
 certainly one of the most vividly interesting in the 
 whole of the nineteenth century. 
 
 I am a Ruskinian myself but with a difference. 
 There are still people who accept the pure milk of 
 the Ruskinite word, just as there are people who still 
 believe in Christian science or other mysteries. But 
 I am free to confess that John Ruskin, in his long 
 life, his encyclopaedic range of study, his restless search 
 for new ideas, and his deluge of writing, maintained 
 continuously for sixty years, did emit much wild 
 guesswork, some arrant nonsense as he often confessed, 
 and changed his point of view backwards and forwards, 
 as passion, love, indignation, pity, and sorrow moved 
 him. What man of eager spirit and piercing inspira- 
 tion, who for sixty years flung himself into every 
 problem of art, of poetry, of morals, of religion even 
 of science could avoid inconsistencies, contradictions, 
 absurdities, and cruel injustice to those whom he could 
 not understand ? And yet I find fascination in all 
 these outbursts. Nay, more ; even when Ruskin is 
 most wrong, unjust, intolerant, I find food for reflection 
 and care. His view may be one-sided, but it is always 
 the view of a side which has to be taken into account 
 a view which can only be met by thoughts which 
 force us down to the very roots of moral, social, and 
 religious questions. 
 
 Take as an example the famous lecture of 1870 
 on Michael Angelo and Tintoret (vol. xxii. 75-110),
 
 1 66 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 which so " fluttered the Volscians " of the Academies 
 and the art critics. As the world has done now for 
 400 years (the cartoon of the Pisan war was of 1506), 
 I hold by the supreme greatness of Buonarroti myself; 
 and in a little sketch of his life I wrote that " in 
 nobility of character, in sublimity of imagination, 
 and in stupendous achievements, Michael Angelo may 
 rank with the greatest sons of Humanity." And yet 
 I find much that is true, a great deal that is most 
 instructive, in Ruskin's furious onslaught, his de- 
 nunciations of "the ostentatious display of strength 
 and science." How true is his wrath with all "stage 
 decoration," with the fatal effect of the gigantic 
 powers of the master, whose influence, as I said in 
 my sketch, was " disastrous to his contemporary 
 followers." Ruskin's tirade against Michael Angelo 
 is not the whole truth far from it but it has truths 
 which we cannot shut out. How fine are Ruskin's 
 " four essentials of the greatest art " : I, faultless 
 workmanship ; 2, serenity ; 3, the human face first j 
 4, freedom from vice and pain. The famous (or 
 infamous) lecture on Michael Angelo should be read 
 again in vol. xxii., with the notes, criticisms, letters, 
 and personal reminiscences, for the first time included 
 in this series. It forms a typical example of Ruskin's 
 moods, ideas, and 'limitations. We find him therein 
 not so much the student and critic of art, as the per- 
 fervid poet, moralist, preacher, censor morum^ and social 
 reformer. 
 
 He himself regarded his lectures as the most careful 
 and important part of his life-work. The energy and 
 labour he gave to his museum and his art collections 
 are perfectly amazing. His first professorship at 
 Oxford dated from 1870-78. These years were 
 " the busiest period of his busy life." He delivered 
 eleven courses of lectures at Oxford. He wrote guide-
 
 THE COMPLETE RUSKIN 167 
 
 books, works on botany, geology, drawing ; he started 
 a library of standard literature ; he catalogued and 
 annotated his art collection ; he founded a museum 
 at Sheffield ; he engaged in a series of social experi- 
 ments ; he founded the Company of St. George ; he 
 wrote incessantly to newspapers ; he issued that 
 wonderful medley called Fors Clavigera month by 
 month. That it all ended in a dreadful brain collapse 
 is not wonderful. It is a subject of wonder that he 
 ever recovered the lucidity and activity of his powers 
 at all. But it is not at all wonderful if, in the course 
 of production, so miscellaneous and so passionate, he 
 was hurried into many false judgments, and laid down 
 the law in many things, of which he could have no 
 really scientific knowledge. And yet in all this 
 torrent of poetry, homily, keen vision, and rapturous 
 enthusiasm, there are for some of us imperishable charms 
 and exquisite sympathies with beauty and goodness. 
 
 These volumes of lectures, read with the mass of 
 illustrations printed and pictorial, the notes and letters 
 made public for the first time in this series, display 
 the man, Ruskin, in more living reality than do his 
 greater works. They explain much that is latent in 
 Modern Painters and in The Stones of Venice^ often 
 qualifying and correcting his earlier judgments. All 
 through his long life, from the childhood when he 
 wrote poetry at nine, till he finished Prceterita just 
 before his death, Ruskin was perpetually learning, as 
 Michael Angelo said of himself, ancora impara. His 
 theme was the whole world of art, of nature, of 
 history, of man, of earth, of sky : and none of these 
 could present a problem which he did not burst to 
 solve. Often, as we know, he egregiously failed to 
 solve them. But how suggestive, how fascinating, 
 often how wonderful were his guesses, his insight, his 
 intense earnestness of soul !
 
 i68 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 When it comes to me to find myself unable to 
 work and but faintly to enjoy sights of the world and 
 to read anything new, as I saw him in the last years 
 of his life, in his study, softly gazing at Coniston Old 
 Man, as he sat in a bower of roses, and turning over 
 a volume of pictures, I think I would wish to have 
 these thirty-seven volumes of the Library Ruskin by 
 my side, and gently read a favourite passage here and 
 there, or turn from one lovely drawing to another, 
 trying to recall a past vision of beauty. 
 
 It is the inexhaustible prodigality of this collection 
 of thoughts and suggestions which ever strikes me 
 with fresh wonder. It may sound a wild paradox, 
 but I ask myself if any other of our famous men of 
 genius, since Shakespeare, has poured out such a world 
 of original fancies about everything visible in Nature, 
 or in the handiwork of Man, about the literature of 
 the ancient and the modern poets, about the regenera- 
 tion of society, the inner meaning of religion, about 
 the duties of man, the prerogatives of woman, the 
 training of children, the dignity of Labour in the 
 indomitable search of that Sangreal of the true knight 
 * a new Heaven and a new Earth. 
 
 Mr. Cook's introductions will be found to have 
 singular interest for all lovers of the Professor, enriched 
 with many private letters of his, entries in diaries, 
 personal and biographical pictures from intimate friends, 
 and a vivid presentment of his Ijfe at Coniston, as those 
 who know it will bear witness. Surely no genius of 
 the Victorian age, hardly Carlyle or Tennyson, has ever 
 been revealed to us so faithfully and so lovingly, in 
 every detail of his life, and mind, and inmost feeling. 
 And assure'dly no English writer, unless it be Shake- 
 speare himself, has ever had his writings edited, anno- 
 tated, and illustrated with such zeal, labour, and ample 
 knowledge.
 
 THE COMPLETE RUSKIN 169 
 
 A volume which will have special interest for 
 Ruskinian students will be the unpublished lectures 
 given at Oxford in 1874 "The ./Esthetic and 
 Mathematic Schools of Art in Florence." The eight 
 lectures were thus classified : I. The ./Esthetic Schools 
 of 1300 : Arnolfo, Cimabue, Giotto (the lecture on 
 Giotto being incorporated in the " Mornings in 
 Florence" and " The Shepherd's Tower"). II. The 
 Mathematic Schools of 1400 Brunelleschi, Quercia, 
 Ghiberti. III. The Christian Romantic Schools of 
 1500 Angelico, Botticelli. This section is illus- 
 trated by twelve drawings and photogravures. These 
 lectures contained some of Ruskin's most vigorous and 
 characteristic thoughts. He was himself pleased with 
 them, and he tells us that the lecture on Arnolfo was 
 considered the best he had ever given in Oxford. 
 Twelve lectures were written, he says, in six weeks 
 " from hand to mouth." They were delivered to a 
 great extent extempore from notes. And for that 
 reason they were not published, and now are only 
 recovered from a rough MS.^ with the assistance of 
 the notes taken by Mr. Wedderburn artd others. 
 Though they still remain fragmentary, this only adds 
 to their lifelike form and effect. As we read them we 
 seem to hear the eager, masterful, irrepressible tone of 
 the speaker as he poured out his passionate ideas and 
 glanced from grave to gay, from poetry to science, 
 from morals to religion. 
 
 The analysis of Florentine Art into the three 
 schools aesthetic, mathematic,. and romantic, typified 
 respectively in Giotto, Michael Angelo,and Bott'icelli 
 goes down to the roots of Ruskin's whole conception 
 of Art and of Society, and with him Art and Society 
 were indissolubly bound together. The distinction 
 between Imagination and Science, between spiritual 
 ideals and accomplished knowledge, between Angelico
 
 1 70 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 and Buonarroti, is profoundly instructive, and explains 
 much in Ruskin's darkest sayings, his rapture in the 
 archaic limitations of Cimabue, and his indignation 
 with the academic megalomania of Michael Angelo. 
 Nothing has injured Ruskin's credit with students of 
 Art more than his violent repudiation of Michael Angelo 
 as a supreme type. In these lectures one sees more 
 clearly what Ruskin meant, and why, recognising as 
 he does the unapproachable power and knowledge of 
 the mighty sculptor, he turns from the man who defies 
 all the Christian spiritualities and revolts the Catholic 
 graces. But this judgment assumes that no power and 
 no knowledge, no tragic intensity or inimitable skill 
 of hand, can outweigh a want of spiritual convictions. 
 At Oxford this assumption thirty years ago might pass 
 unchallenged. But to those who have parted with the 
 spiritual convictions of Cimabue and Angelico, the 
 tirades of the Professor are sounding brass. Half of 
 Ruskin's doctrines and precepts about Art rest upon 
 his own very fervid and quite personal beliefs as to 
 things social and religious. And, as his beliefs were in 
 constant flux, and not quite intelligible at all times, his 
 Art judgment is open to eternal controversy. To 
 accept him as final arbiter in Art we must accept him 
 as infallible master in theology and in sociology. The 
 judicious accept him as an inspiration, but not as a 
 judge. And yet, how rich in suggestion and in light 
 are even his most daring paradoxes and fantasies ! 
 
 Nothing can be more instructive than all these 
 volumes contain about Giotto. The force of Ruskin's 
 artistic instincts leads him direct to understand the 
 great Florentine who united profound intellect to 
 exquisite sense of beauty. Buonarroti had the intel- 
 lect, though less sane and less lucid. Angelico and 
 Botticelli had the sense of beauty, but not the brain 
 power. At first sight Giotto would not seem to
 
 THE COMPLETE RUSKIN 171 
 
 satisfy Ruskin's ideal ; and in this book we learn that 
 he did not satisfy it at first sight. But at last Giotto is 
 felt to be supreme in all but such technical knowledge 
 as was impossible in the age of Dante. As I pointed 
 out in 1902, Ruskin has taught us to "rank Giotto as 
 one of the greatest forces in the entire history of art." 
 These "Mornings in Florence," these views of the 
 Campanile, justify even such language of admiration. 
 We know it is disputed how much Giotto did for the 
 Campanile. If he did not conceive its form, and the 
 motifs of the reliefs round its base, there must have 
 been two Giottos in Florence. 
 
 The Complete Works of John Ruskin will ever be 
 read, as the Sixth Article tells us the Apocrypha are 
 read, for example and instruction, yet not so as to 
 establish any doctrine. They may never become 
 " canonical " books, and yet how beautiful, how wise, 
 how illuminating they are ! 
 
 For my own part, I am free to confess that with 
 all the means I have had for understanding Ruskin's 
 temperament and methods, I have gained a new 
 insight from the material here collected for the first 
 time. Although I knew him and heard him during 
 the last forty years of his life, had read, as I fondly 
 supposed, all that he had ever written, and had myself 
 compiled a biography, I have learnt much in the new 
 volume. 
 
 The chief interest of the new biographical matter 
 lies in the fresh light thrown by it on the very painful 
 and obscure part of Ruskin's life from 1874 to 1877. 
 It was the period of his worst illness and greatest 
 moral trial. As his editor tells us, "The work is 
 broken, scattered, incomplete, and marked by irrita- 
 bility of tone." He truly says " the fire now becomes 
 fitful and feverish." As Carlyle wrote, a little earlier : 
 " He has fallen into thick, quiet despair again on the
 
 172 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 personal question ; and meant all the more to go 
 ahead with fire and sword upon the universal one." 
 He was suffering personal disappointment. In 1875 
 he wrote : " The woman I hoped would have been 
 my wife is dying." She died in May, having steadily 
 refused to see him. The death deeply affected 
 Ruskin's mind and nature, and coloured with gloom 
 and mysticism his whole after-career. How it shook 
 and over-shadowed his mind, how strangely it worked 
 itself into his art studies and his inmost musings and 
 fantasies, can be learned, I think, most faithfully and 
 at first hand from the letters and impressions now 
 given to the world. 
 
 These years were a period of great but restless 
 activity. The " great fountain of sorrow," he wrote, 
 "can never ebb away. Meanwhile I live in the outside 
 of me and can still work." He did work at Oxford 
 Lectures, the Drawing School, St. George's Company, 
 Fors Clavigera^ month by month, the Guide to Venice, 
 and other undertakings. And we now learn how 
 deeply at this time Ruskin became interested in vague 
 forms of spiritualism and hypochondria, which floated 
 about his mind, giving it no rest, but rather, as he 
 said, a "quite terrible languor." The effects of this 
 sorrow, malady, and mysticism combined, more or 
 less darkened the rest of his life, and clouded the 
 balance of his thoughts. I can now better understand 
 the tone of mind which induced his denunciation of 
 Darwin, Mill, Spencer, Miss Cobbe, Liberals, and 
 Agnostics, and his appeal to me, which led to our 
 controversy in 1876. When I wrote the reply 
 reprinted in my Choice of Books I had no idea of the 
 morbid condition of his mind or of the causes of his 
 affliction, though his private letters to me betrayed a 
 strange excitability. Ruskin's writing after the year 
 1874 was never quite the same thing, until perhaps
 
 THE COMPLETE RUSKIN 173 
 
 in the calm of Pmterita (1885-89). We may 
 enter more fully into his state of mind by reading 
 the forty pages of Introduction that Mr. Cook has 
 compiled. It is a fascinating chapter in the psychology 
 of genius. The way in which Saint Ursula and Rose 
 La Touche are blended into a sort of Dantesque Vision 
 is a strange episode in a many-sided nature. 
 
 The elaborate study of Giotto's frescoes at Padua 
 belong to 1853 and 1860. I believe no sounder or 
 more illuminating art criticism was ever composed. 
 We may even say that truly right understanding of 
 Italian Primitive Art dates from this epoch, for 
 Englishmen at least, and largely by means of Ruskin. 
 Giotto, we now know, was one of the profoundest 
 men of genius whom the modern world produced. 
 His pre-eminence was obscured to our grandfathers 
 by the technical ignorance inevitable in his age. 
 No one has ever explained so well as Ruskin why 
 Giotto's artistic imagination should in no respect suffer 
 by his defects in manipulation and scientific training. 
 " Giotto was not one of the most accomplished 
 painters, but he was one of the greatest men who 
 ever lived," cries our Professor in his enthusiasm. 
 These frescoes do not teach us drawing, but they 
 expound to us "the history of the human mind." 
 The whole power of Giotto's work rests on "pure 
 Colour, noble Form, noble Thought." Giotto made 
 no attempt to give complete details, nor any laborious 
 realism. His was "a symbolical art which addresses 
 the imagination, not the realist art which supersedes 
 it." The entire series of these studies of Giotto 
 forms a masterly type of fine art judgment and analysis. 
 
 The Guide to the Academy at Venice (of 1877) and 
 St. Mark's Rest (of 1884) nave ^en, and long will 
 be, the handbooks of innumerable travellers. But the 
 copious notes of the editors and the plates in the new
 
 174 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 edition will force most readers of the original manuals 
 to look at them again. One of the most interesting 
 studies in St. Mark's Rest is the subtle analysis of 
 Carpaccio's works, and of these the most new and 
 ingenious is the mystical meaning of the symbolical 
 St. Jerome. Here we have Ruskin with his lynx-eye, 
 his subtlety, his love of symbolism, and his mediaeval 
 passion. The St. Jerome is a typical example of the 
 way in which the early Venetians could blend intense 
 realism, the most precise representation of minute facts 
 as they saw them, with an enthusiastic idealism of 
 spiritual mysteries. 
 
 As we read and enjoy Ruskin's rhapsodies over the 
 faithful precision with which Giotto and Carpaccio 
 saw with the mind's eye miracles and transfigurations 
 exactly as scripture and legend recorded them, and 
 when he raves at Raphael and Michael Angelo, who 
 use these scriptures and legends merely as the texts 
 whereon they could dilate on their own delight in all 
 forms of human nature and of earthly grace careless 
 of the words of evangelist or father the question 
 arises in the mind : Why were Raphael and Michael 
 Angelo and the men of the New Learning bound by 
 any literalism of Holy Writ ? They were painters, 
 whose business it was to show us noble men and 
 lovely women in picturesque and moving incidents. 
 They were not the handicraftsmen of monks, bidden 
 to produce illustrations of homilies and sermons. 
 Michael Angelo did not take the Last Judgment 
 seriously in the vein of the Book of Revelation. Nor 
 do we to-day. Nor, for that matter, did Ruskin him- 
 self. Giotto's Bible at Padua is most impressive Art 
 but it is Primitive Art. Its profound interest is 
 historical not theological, not religious. Or if it 
 teach us religion, it is the religion of human nature 
 and of human genius.
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 1906 
 
 TEN years have passed since a new writer came forward 
 in English letters with a vein of his own so subtle that, 
 for the moment, it delighted the thoughtful rather than 
 the casual reader, who is slow to accept any unfamiliar 
 note. But in these few years the wider public has 
 learnt that, amongst the two or three living prose 
 writers of the first rank stands Maurice Hewlett, who 
 in a decade has given them, almost year by year, a 
 series of romances of rare imagination and power. In 
 the quality of fantastic idealism, indeed, he remains 
 alone without a rival. Now that novels tend to 
 become coloured photographs of commonplace life, the 
 gift of exuberant imagination is as precious as it is rare. 
 And when to inexhaustible fancy is added the charm 
 of curious felicity of form, we all feel that something 
 has been done to redeem our literature of to-day from 
 the charge of monotonous mediocrity and patient 
 copying of obvious fact. 
 
 Even yet, amidst the brilliant success of these 
 romances, the world has hardly recognised how rare a 
 gift is that of -Hewlett ; and even his early admirers do 
 not always grasp the sum total of his original creations. 
 I am only too conscious that in points of substance, as 
 well as of form, I am not the best fitted to do him
 
 176 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 justice, for my own pursuits lead me to historical facts, 
 social and ethical problems ; whilst in language, my 
 taste is ever for the plain and direct words, such as the 
 average man can grasp. As this essay is an attempt to 
 explain Hewlett, not to praise him, I shall not hesitate 
 to say squarely where I cannot go with him in matters 
 of ethic and in mannerism of phrase admitting that 
 prose can never be an adequate measure of any poetry 
 least of all of the poetry of imagery, fancy, and 
 mysticism. But, bound over to prose realism as I am, 
 and by temperament alien to all innuendo, euphuism, 
 and forms of trope, I am carried away by the fantastic 
 magic of these masques, fairy tales, and chansons de 
 geste^ whilst, in spite of my cooler judgment, I am 
 charmed by the artful mosaic of word-painting and 
 word-conundrums with which each page dances and 
 scintillates. 
 
 The peculiar note of fantastic idealism (in which I 
 make bold to say Hewlett has no living rival) was struck 
 in his first romance; and the Forest Lovers (1898) 
 still remains the typical Hewlett. Later books show 
 historical insight, brilliant colour, subtle psychology, a 
 wider grasp of human life, of the genius of various 
 epochs and races. But the fantastic imagery, the 
 sympathy between man and nature, the wild passion 
 of adventure all glow in the dissolving fairy scenes 
 of Morgraunt Forest ; and these same qualities run 
 through the whole series of these " Gestes." This is 
 their proper title, as Ben Jonson says : 
 
 The gestes of kings, great captains, and sad wars. 
 
 Rather, perhaps, they are romances of adventure, as 
 Chaucer has it : 
 
 The halle was al ful, I wis, 
 Of hem that writen olde gestes.
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 177 
 
 Hewlett's books, even his historical and topo- 
 graphical pieces, are " olde gestes " that is, romances 
 in prose as to form, but in essence poetry, as were the 
 Decameron or the Morte Darthur. 
 
 These " Gestes " of his have . often an ideal world 
 of their own, wholly unconscious of time, place, or 
 reality. They have no known country, take place 
 in no recorded age, and are not bound by laws of 
 material nature or crude common sense. You might 
 as well ask when and where the Nibelungs came to 
 King Etzel's land search museums of archaeology 
 for Cinderella's slipper and show us in ruins the 
 castle of Uther Pendragon. The overture to the 
 Forest Lovers sounds the dominant note. "My 
 story," says our Troubadour, " will take you into 
 times and spaces alike rude and uncivil. Blood will 
 be spilt, virgins suffer distresses j the horn will sound 
 through woodland glades ; dogs, wolves, deer, and 
 men, Beauty and the Beasts will tumble each other, 
 seeking life or death with their proper tools. There 
 should be mad work, not devoid of entertainment." 
 Yes ! In these tales there is almost always " mad 
 work," but it is never "devoid of entertainment." 
 
 The author of these "masques," "extravaganzas," 
 " visions," or allegories begs us " not to ask him what 
 it all means, or what the moral of it is." "Leave 
 everything to me," he says. So we do. We would 
 as lief ask him to explain Isoult la Desirous as we 
 would ask Spenser what were the other six virtues, 
 and what became of them, or in what order of 
 Mammalia the Blatant Beast was classed. We do 
 not cross-examine poets. As Browning said, "God 
 knows what I meant ! " 
 
 The Forest Lovers was the first of his books I saw, 
 and I still think it his true type. It was the rapid im- 
 provising of an omnivorous reader of poems, romances, 
 
 N
 
 178 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 old ballads ; Provencal " Chansons " ; " Fabliaux," 
 French, German, Italian ; Decameronic " Novelle " ; 
 Orlandic epics; sagas, folk-songs; Spenser's Faerie 
 hieene^ and Sidney's Arcadia. It was more mediaeval 
 than Elizabethan ; more Italian than English ; more 
 redolent of Malory and Ariosto than of Spenser and 
 Tasso. He calls out in his first lines " blood will 
 be spilt " ; " there will be mad work " : 
 
 Le donne, i cavalier, 1' arme, gli amori, 
 Le cortesie, 1' audaci imprese io canto. 
 
 Our Maurice must have a foreign strain in his pedigree. 
 There is a touch of the diavolo incarnato in this Inglese 
 Italianato, with his " mad work," his taste for " bloody 
 work." 
 
 What we are to make of Pan and the Toung 
 Shepherd (of the same year 1898), I will not venture 
 to say. This is clearly poetry, a masque, an extrava- 
 ganza, or what not something made out of echoes of 
 Aristophanes and Ben Jonson. As we see it as a 
 play, we try to solve its mysteries, but anything less 
 dramatic can hardly be conceived as the book stands. 
 The Dramatis Persona are the great god Pan, who 
 talks like a tipsy tramp, seven immortal daughters of 
 earth, Aglae and her sisters, who sing Shelleyan stanzas, 
 shepherds and carters with Greek names: Geron, 
 Teucer, Mopsus, who talk north -country brogue 
 "Gi' us a snack, wenches ; this Piphany Eve." The 
 wench calls Pan "gaffer," "jail- bird," "rope- ripe 
 villain," "old knave." She boxes his ears as an "old 
 gallus-bird," when Pan makes rustic love, but she is 
 ready to marry him at last, as Parson "Sir Topas 
 would christianise a he-goat." And the masque ends 
 in a carol with the true country-side ring. What it 
 all means, in what vein of ideas this medley of Hellenic 
 myth, plough-boy roystering, and moorland witchery
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 179 
 
 took form in verse and drama we need not inquire. 
 The old shepherd believes not in God, but " in sheep, 
 and a bulging stocking 'gainst the rheumatics." The 
 young Shepherd believes in the seven sisters- trees by 
 the tarn : who sing o' nights. The immortal and 
 arboreal sisters do sing thus : 
 
 We ride at our will o'er the bonny wild moor, 
 Air is our fee, and the deep brake our demesne. 
 
 The god Pan falls in love " with the sinew and tan 
 of a country wench," who cuffs him soundly. And 
 the yokels chaff him in true ale-house style. We do 
 not often get such a medley of old and new, ethereal and 
 coarse ; but the Renascence often made it so, and loved 
 it so. Nor can I deny that the thing has in it poetry, 
 humour, learning, mother earth, and human nature. 
 
 If the Forest Lovers and Pan have no possible date 
 or local colour, this cannot be said of the later tales, 
 some of which, like the Little Novels of Italy ^ Richard^ 
 Queen's ^uair^ and the Fool Errant^ are dated to a 
 year, or a decade, and have very vivid and exact 
 painting both of place and race. One of the inter- 
 esting gifts of this writer is his power to take us first 
 into a fairy world full of goblins, wonders, and 
 mysteries, and then to whirl us into scenes alive with 
 the historical fidelity of Macaulay or Carlyle. And 
 these two worlds are never far apart. The vein of 
 weird fantasy and historical realism runs through all 
 the tales. The yokels who heckle the god Pan 
 over their ale might have come out of Thomas 
 Hardy's Wessex. Brother Bon-Accord in Morgraunt 
 tells another Canterbury Tale in perfect good faith. 
 When Hewlett leaves fairies, sorceresses, and knights- 
 errant, he can be as grim and sanguinary as the 
 Nibelungen Lied or the Elizabethan dramatists. He 
 calls his hearers round him, crying :
 
 180 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground 
 And tell sad stories of the death of kings : 
 How some have been deposed, some slain in war, 
 Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed : 
 Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd. 
 
 The fierce passions and catastrophes of kings and 
 queens, lords and ladies, captains, dare-devil swords- 
 men, lovely beggar-maids whom King Cophetua raises 
 to a throne and generally strangles these are the 
 puppets of the show. They are almost all from the 
 south ; Italians, Provencals, or French usually living 
 in Italy itself never in our own England in any 
 modern era. Hewlett is ever Inglese italianato^ even if 
 he is painting an English man or woman. 
 
 His special field is Italian life in the age of the 
 Renascence. He has painted its beauty, its intense 
 life, its poetry, its delirium of lust and blood, with 
 a colour and a glow that we hardly get from the 
 laborious learning of Symonds, Sismondi, and Burck- 
 hardt all together. It has the fascinating vitality of 
 Cellini's Memoirs. I take the Little Novels of Italy 
 to be as true a tableau of the quattrocento as an oil 
 painting by Pinturicchio or a fresco by Signorelli. 
 Indeed, I hold the "Madonna of the Peach Tree" to 
 be as perfect a short story as we have had in our time. 
 Its local colouring charms all who love Verona and 
 have lingered in the moonlight round the tombs of the 
 Scalas, or chaffered for fruit in the market-place. It 
 has humour, poetry, pathos, mystery, imaginative 
 history, and a pure humanity. In Hewlett's gallery of 
 portraits I remember no woman so sweet as the lowly 
 Vanna Dardicozzo, nor do I know a more finished 
 tale in contemporary romance. 
 
 Hewlett knows Italy, and its story from Dante 
 down to Tasso and Alfieri, as hardly another English- 
 man since Symonds does. Each Italian city and
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 181 
 
 province, nay, each castle, cathedral, or palace, seems to 
 him to have its own history, temperament, patriotism. 
 Each kindles in him a new dominant note. Verona, 
 Padua, Romagna, Pistoja, Ferrara, are to him as 
 different as Oxford, York, and Edinburgh to us. 
 Each has its proper record. The tyranny of the 
 Despot, the intrigues of Monks, the affectation of 
 Academics, the ruffianism of the Condottieri, the 
 conceits of the Sonneteer, the pomp of the Palace 
 furnish in turn the themes of a novel which may be 
 far too gruesome to suit the lovers in the Decameron, 
 but which paints to the life the times of Sforzas, 
 Baglionis, and Borgias. 
 
 There was so much of historical insight, antiquarian 
 realism, in Hewlett's earlier legends that it was in- 
 evitable but that he should set himself the task of 
 reproducing an elaborate picture of a past epoch. 
 This he has done twice on a great scale with, perhaps, 
 over-much elaboration. I said so much about Richard 
 Tea-and-Nay when it first appeared (Fortnightly 
 Review, January 1901) that I need not discuss it again. 
 Five years have only deepened my conviction that it is 
 a fine and original romance in the great style. It is 
 a true historical picture of a wonderful epoch, with 
 archaeological realism, with learning sound and wide, 
 and insight into the nature of its typical men and 
 women. As I said, "such historic imagination, such 
 glowing colour, such crashing speed, set forth in such 
 pregnant form, carry us away." It pictures to us the 
 wild times, and the wilder heroes of the twelfth 
 century, with more living force than we find in con- 
 temporary chronicles, or in " standard " histories. It 
 makes us understand the glamour which for seven 
 centuries has hung round the memory of the Lion- 
 Heart, in spite of the savage vices with which sober 
 history has stamped him.
 
 1 82 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 I need not enlarge on matters wherein I could not 
 follow the method employed the incessant change of 
 scene, country, type of society, manners, and religion ; 
 the fantastic improbabilities in the action ; the bewil- 
 dering adventures of knights-errant, troubadours, and 
 disguised damsels. Nor am I a convert to all the 
 archaisms, conceits, and tropes which make some 
 passages as hard to read as a chorus of ./Eschylus. 
 Much as I enjoy quaint old words, the toothsome 
 phrase, the classicalisms, medievalisms, italianisms, 
 which bestar the page (it is a catching trick of speech !), 
 I draw the line at such Osricism as an altar lamp 
 " that hinted at the Son of God," " flying flags " for 
 blushing ; the "sun putting the air to the sword," e.g. 
 a hot day. Not only are these forced conundrums of 
 speech impertinent in a long narrative, but they disturb 
 the attention from the story, and make it halt and 
 limp. 
 
 The second great historical novel, The Queen's 
 j^W/r, has the same features as the Richard the 
 same historical elaboration, the same vivid realism, the 
 same ingenuity of phrase. I shall say less about it, 
 for it is less to my taste, perhaps because Mary Stuart 
 has always been to me an odious minx, interesting 
 only in the moment of her death. The story seems 
 to me more complicated, crowded, and bewildering 
 than that of Richard whilst the age is far less 
 romantic, and the persons far more coarse. The 
 Hewlettisms of phrase, if rather less profuse, are not so 
 much in keeping as they seem in the chronicle of 
 Abbot Milo. The story of the Queen of Scots has 
 had a splendid success with the public, and if I find 
 her less romantic than Richard it is my own fault. 
 But Hewlett is at his best in the Middle Ages and the 
 Italian Renascence. His imagination is so singularly 
 hot and fanciful that the banality of modern life repels
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 183 
 
 him. For that reason I wish the fascinating adven- 
 tures of the Fool Errant had befallen an ancestor of 
 Francis Strelley in 1521 rather than a young squire in 
 1721. The Georgian age, even in Italy, had but a 
 languid turn for extravagant peregrinations ; and there 
 is incongruity in an English gentleman of the times 
 of Swift leading the life of Benvenuto Cellini. But 
 all the same, no living Englishman could have 
 painted such a Fool as Francis or such a Queen as 
 Mary. 
 
 Now that I am in a warning mood, I would advise 
 him to stick to the age of Plantagenets, the Cinque- 
 centists, and the Humanists to indulge his genius for 
 the legendary and fantastic to produce " Fabliaux " 
 rather than histories. His short stories are perfect : 
 his simpler style inimitable. In romantic colouring of 
 Italian Humanism he has no living rival even if he 
 ever had an equal. He should choose no canvas of an 
 encyclopaedic scale no world-history, no panorama of 
 whole epochs. Some day he will give us the picture 
 of an adorable woman, who is neither' a beggar-maid 
 bred in a hovel, nor a high-born dame who defies all 
 the decencies of her station. It has become almost a 
 mannerism of our troubadour that his heroines are 
 starvelings in rags, who follow the hero about like lap- 
 dogs, and are never happy till their lover brutalises 
 them. It is then discovered that these Cinderellas 
 and Griseldas are noble ladies ready to die for "their 
 masters." 
 
 His theme is ever spasmodic Love and homicidal 
 Death as conceived in the Italian Renascence. It is 
 high time to give us some less passionate and less 
 sanguinary scenes. The Hypnerotomachia of the 
 fifteenth century alarms too many readers in the 
 twentieth. Mudie's subscribers must have books that 
 they can read without a dictionary, and will not ask
 
 1 84 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 for books of which the very titles puzzle them. They 
 read him with avidity, as it is. But how few of them 
 know that English literature has now a writer who 
 may yet reach a place in the front rank of that 
 illustrious band which for five centuries has carried on 
 the torch from age to age.
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 
 
 1901 
 
 IF you would fully grasp all that the geographical 
 conditions of the American continent imply, you 
 should cross the Atlantic in its winter gales, and 
 travel far to the west with the thermometer sinking 
 down towards zero. No imagination can bring 
 home to you this vast isolation and this boundless 
 expanse, until, for some eight days, you have watched 
 your great ship as it ploughs across these inexhaustible 
 waters at the rate of a South-Eastern Railway train, 
 seeing nothing but waves, clouds and sky, so that the 
 lonely monotony of this enormous ocean seems to try 
 the nerves at last. And then, when the express train 
 thunders on, day and night, across the Allegheny 
 mountains to the west, a journey that would suffice 
 to cross Europe just brings you over but a moiety of 
 the space that divides the Atlantic from the Pacific. 
 
 Make this voyage and try to conceive what it 
 must mean to the ordinary emigrant rather than to 
 the luxurious tourist, and you will begin to under- 
 stand how far outside of Europe is this American 
 continent ; how completely it offers a new life, a 
 fresh start, a world detached, on a virgin soil un- 
 encumbered with our antique civilisation and its 
 burdens. Again, make this westward journey by 
 185
 
 1 86 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 rail, and watch how the emigrant has to make it, 
 and you feel an awakening sense of the boundless area, 
 the inexhaustible resources, the infinite varieties of 
 the transatlantic hemisphere, which for practical pur- 
 poses has only just begun to take its place in these 
 latter days in the secular life of humanity as a 
 whole. 
 
 America is detached from Europe by a gulf which, 
 however trivial it seems to the summer tourist in his 
 luxurious state-room and saloon, has been a veritable 
 "middle passage" to millions and millions of 
 American citizens and their parents a gulf which 
 the " Upper Ten thousand " cross backwards and 
 forwards as we go to Paris or Rome, but which 
 seventy millions of American citizens never cross or 
 recross. To them our Europe is a far-away world, 
 of which but faint echoes reach them, which they 
 will never see more, which can never directly touch 
 their lives ; whilst the vast expanses and inexhaustible 
 resources of their own continent are brought home 
 to them, day by day, in a thousand practical and 
 visible ways. 
 
 And yet the paradox strikes my mind that 
 American life, such as a passing visitor finds it in 
 the great cities, is essentially the same as our own ; 
 that, in spite of the geographical isolation and the 
 physical conditions, the citizen of the United States 
 is at heart much the same man as the subject of 
 King Edward ; that life is the same, mutatis mutandis ; 
 that the intellectual, social, and religious tone is 
 nearly identical ; that the proverbial differences we 
 hear of have been absurdly exaggerated. Put aside 
 trivial peculiarities of language, manners, habit or 
 climate, admit a certain air of Paris in New York, 
 and a certain European tone in Washington and 
 these only concern small sections in both cities for
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 187 
 
 my part I noticed no radical difference between 
 Americans and Englishmen. Physically, they are 
 the same race, with the same strength, energy, and 
 beauty ; except for superficial things, they live the 
 same lives, have the same interests, aims, and 
 standards of opinion j and in literature, science, art 
 and philosophy, the Atlantic is no more a barrier 
 between our two peoples than is St. George's Channel 
 or the Tweed in the British Isles. The citizen of 
 the United States seems to me very much what the 
 citizen of the United Kingdom is only rather more 
 accentuated. The differences are really on the 
 surface, or in mere form. 
 
 I do not forget all that we are told about the vast 
 proportion of non-American people in the United 
 States : that New York and Chicago contain " more 
 Germans than any city but Berlin, more Irishmen 
 than Dublin, more Italians than Venice, more 
 Scandinavians than Stockholm, and " (they some- 
 times add) "more sinners than any place on earth." 
 Statistics give us the facts, and of course there is no 
 sort of doubt about the immense degree in which the 
 States are peopled by a race of foreign birth or origin. 
 In the eastern slums of New York, in the yards and 
 docks of the great cities, one sees them by myriads : 
 Germans, Irish, Italians, Swedes, Russians, Orientals, 
 and negroes. But those who direct the State, who 
 administer the cities, control the legislatures, the 
 financiers, merchants, professors, journalists, men of 
 letters those whom I met in society were nearly 
 all of American birth, and all of marked American 
 type. I rarely heard a foreign accent or saw a foreign 
 countenance. The American world is practically 
 " run " by genuine Americans. Foreigners are more 
 en evidence in London or Manchester, it seemed to 
 me, than they are in New York, Philadelphia, or
 
 1 88 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Boston. The reason is that foreigners are not so 
 easily assimilated here. 
 
 It is my own impression (of course, I can pretend 
 to nothing but an impression at a first glance) that in 
 spite of the vast proportion of immigrant population, 
 the language, character, habits of native Americans 
 rapidly absorb and incorporate all foreign elements. 
 In the second or third generation all exotic differences 
 are merged. In one sense the United States seemed 
 to me more homogeneous than the United Kingdom. 
 There is no State, city, or large area which has a 
 distinct race of its own, as Ireland, Wales, and 
 Scotland have, and of course there is nothing analogous 
 to the diverse nationalities of the British Empire. 
 From Long Island to San Francisco, from Florida 
 Bay to Vancouver's Island, there is one dominant race 
 and civilisation, one language, one type of law, one 
 sense of nationality. That race, that nationality, is 
 American to the core. And the consciousness of its 
 vast expansion and collective force fills the mind of 
 American citizens, as nothing can do to this degree 
 in the nations of western Europe. 
 
 Vast expansion, collective force, inexhaustible energy 
 these are the impressions forced on the visitor, beyond 
 all that he could have conceived or had expected to 
 find. It is borne in on him that he has come, not so 
 much to another nation as to a new continent, in- 
 habited by a people soon to be more numerous than 
 any two of the greater nations of western Europe, 
 having within their own limits every climate and 
 product between the Tropics and the Pole, with 
 natural resources superior to those of all Europe put 
 together, and an almost boundless field for development 
 in the future. Europeans, being in touch with the 
 eastern seaboard, do not easily grasp the idea how fast 
 the population, wealth, and energy of the United
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 189 
 
 States are ever sweeping to the west. It is an amus- 
 ing " catch " when one is told that the central point 
 of population of the United States is now at Indiana- 
 polis, nearly a thousand miles west of Boston ; that 
 the geographical centre of the United States since the 
 acquisition of Alaska is now west of San Francisco. 
 It is [1901] long since an Eastern State man has been 
 elected President, and we are told that there will never 
 be another. The political centre of gravity is now 
 said to lie in the Mississippi Valley. And the destined 
 metropolis of the United States will soon be Chicago 
 or St. Louis. Chicago, with its unlimited area for 
 expansion north, west, and south, and its marvellous 
 site on the vast inland seas, may prove to be, in a 
 generation, the largest, richest, and most powerful 
 city in the world. 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 Chicago, to which I was invited to give the annual 
 address in commemoration of George Washington, 
 was the first city in the United States in which I 
 sojourned ; and it naturally interested me much. It 
 did so, amongst other things, because I am older than 
 the city itself. At my own birth, I learn, it was a 
 village in a swamp with 100 inhabitants, and I heard 
 of a man now living who has killed bear on the site of 
 the Central Lake Park. Although it is said to extend 
 over a space of some thirty miles, it has vast edifices 
 of twenty stories, and its banks, offices, public build- 
 ings and halls show a lavish profusion of marbles, 
 granite, and carved stone. It is not a beautiful city, 
 though it has great natural opportunities on its level 
 lake shore ; and perhaps, as whole streets have been 
 bodily raised upwards by machinery many feet, it is 
 conceivable that it may be made a fine city in time.
 
 190 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Chicago struck me as being somewhat unfairly 
 condemned as devoted to nothing but Mammon and 
 pork. Certainly, during my visit, I heard of nothing 
 but the progress of education, university endowments, 
 people's institutes, libraries, museums, art schools, 
 workmen's model dwellings and farms, literary culture, 
 and scientific foundations. I saw there one of the 
 best equipped and most vigorous art schools in 
 America, one of the best Toynbee Hall settlements 
 in the world, and perhaps the most rapidly developed 
 university in existence. My friends of the Union 
 League, themselves men of business proud of their 
 city, strongly urged me to dispense with the usual 
 visit to the grain elevators and the stockyards, where 
 hogs and oxen are slaughtered by millions and con- 
 signed to Europe, but to spend my time in inspecting 
 libraries, schools, and museums. No city in the world 
 can show such enormous endowments for educational, 
 scientific, and charitable purposes lavished within ten 
 years, and still unlimited in supply. 
 
 In a country like the United States, where every 
 principal city is struggling to become the first, and 
 every second-rate town is struggling to reach the front 
 rank, there is much jealousy between the competing 
 cities. And Chicago, the youngest of the great 
 cities of the world, is the butt of the wits of 
 New York and Washington. I was, no doubt, 
 fortunate in the conditions under which I saw 
 it, but the impression left on my mind was that the 
 citizens of Chicago were bringing their extraordinary 
 enterprise to bear quite as much on social, intel- 
 lectual, and artistic interests as they confessedly do 
 on grain, ham, steel, and lumber. They will have 
 to dispel and outlive the evil character their food 
 " rings " and syndicates have acquired, if they are 
 to hold their own in the future of civilisation. For
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 191 
 
 the manifest destiny of Chicago is to be the heart of 
 the American continent. 
 
 For energy, audacity, and enterprise, the Chicago 
 people are famous even in the Western States of 
 America. "When I come to London," said a leading 
 man of business, " I find your bankers and merchants 
 stroll into their offices between ten and eleven in the 
 morning. I am at my desk at seven," said he, 
 "and by noon I have completed fifty transactions by 
 telephone." Telegrams, in fact, are no longer up to 
 date in the United States, and few busy men ever use 
 a pen except to sign their names. They do not even 
 dictate their letters. They speak into a phonograph, 
 and have their message type-written from the instru- 
 ment. Life in the States is one perpetual whirl of 
 telephones, telesemes, phonographs, electric bells, motors, 
 lifts, and automatic instruments. To me such a life 
 would not be worth living, and the mere sight of it is 
 incompatible with continuous thought. But business 
 seems to be done in that way. And I did not learn 
 that the percentage of suicide or insanity was very 
 seriously increased by these truly maddening inventions. 
 
 No competent observer can doubt that in wealth, 
 manufactures, material progress of all kinds, the 
 United States, in a very few years, must hold the first 
 place in the world without dispute. Its population 
 will soon double that of any nation of western Europe. 
 That population will have an education second only 
 to that of Germany and Switzerland, and superior to 
 that of any other European nation. The natural 
 resources of their country exceed those of all Europe 
 put together. Their energy exceeds that of the 
 British ; their intelligence is hardly second to that of 
 Germany and France. And their social and political 
 system is more favourable to material development 
 than any other society ever devised by man. This
 
 192 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS . 
 
 extraordinary combination of national and social 
 qualities, with vast numbers and unbounded physical 
 resources, cannot fail to give America the undisputed 
 lead in all material things. It is a curious instance of 
 the power of national egotism that Europe fails to 
 grasp this truth that Germans, with their wretchedly 
 poor country, narrow seaboard, and scanty rivers, ports, 
 and minerals, still aspire to the first place ; that 
 Frenchmen fail to see how their passion for art, rest, 
 and home has handicapped them in the race for 
 supremacy in things material ; that Britons, in their 
 narrow island and their comfortable traditions, will 
 not recognise that the industrial prizes must ultimately 
 go to numbers, national unity, physical resources, 
 geographical oppor.tunities, trained intelligence, and 
 restless ambition. 
 
 Enormous material triumphs obviously have their 
 moral and intellectual evils. And one is constantly 
 led to fancy some parallels between modern America 
 and old Rome at the close of the Republic and the 
 rise of the Empire. The sudden possession of vast 
 areas to be exploited, the control of enormous masses 
 of skilled workers, the rapid acquisition of all the 
 resources the world can offer by men bred in hard 
 work and having unbounded energy and ambition 
 these are common to the Rome of Cicero and Julius, 
 and to the United States of Grover Cleveland and 
 William M'Kinley. Paradox as it sounds, I was 
 constantly reminded of the old stories of Crassus, 
 Lucullus, and the Caesars when I saw the lavish pro- 
 fusion of marbles, carvings, and mosaics in public 
 and private buildings so many a portlcus metata 
 decempedis the wanton luxury which seems inspired 
 by a mania of rapidly squandering the riches that have 
 been so rapidly acquired. Wealth is acquired in 
 Europe by slow stages and usually in more than one
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 193 
 
 generation. In America it comes in a few years to 
 men whose boyhood was usually passed in hardship 
 or severe effort. The sudden mastery of enormous 
 sources of power is the peculiar fact of American 
 society and its special form of temptation. It is 
 often said, " From shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves needs 
 only three generations." Such power is not seldom 
 used well, generously, and with public spirit. Very 
 often it is used ill, with vulgarity, cruelty, folly, and 
 selfishness. In any case, it knows nothing of the 
 social conventions, habits, and traditions which, for 
 good and for evil, control the use of wealth in modern 
 Europe. 
 
 DEMOCRACY 
 
 The characteristic note of the United States is to 
 be found in this freedom of the individual the carriers 
 ouverte aux talents in a sense which is unknown to 
 Europeans and can hardly be conceived by them. 
 Every one of these seventy millions at least of 
 whites has an "equal chance " in life. A first-rate 
 education, comfort, and " betterment " are within the 
 reach of every youth and girl of average capacity and 
 industry. Most of the men eminent in business, 
 politics, or literature began life by " teaching school." 
 Every messenger boy or machine-hand may be an 
 embryo President of the United States, of a railroad, 
 or a bank, a powerful journalist, or a millionaire. 
 Every lad seems conscious that this is open to him, 
 and most of them live and work as if they meant to 
 try for this end. Every girl at a type- desk or a 
 telegraph office may live to reside in Fifth Avenue, 
 or who knows ? in the White House. And the 
 ease with which the youth and girl adapt themselves 
 to new careers and wider functions is one of the
 
 i 9 4 MEMORIES AND .THOUGHTS 
 
 wonders of American life. Europe, even France, is 
 organised more or less on the caste system, where only 
 the rare exceptions pass from one social rank or office 
 to another from time to time. America is the only 
 land on earth where caste has never had a footing, nor 
 has left a trace. But this (be it said) is true of the 
 white race alone. 
 
 Rare as the prizes are, though the chances are 
 millions to one against the winning, the possibility is 
 ever before man, woman, and child. And this 
 infinitesimal chance, this not absolutely impossible 
 hope, colours life in the New World ; so that, in spite 
 of all the slum horrors of New York and Chicago, 
 and all the industrial pressure of this furious com- 
 petition, populist agitation, and anarchist outbreaks, 
 the proletariat of Europe has good ground for looking 
 to the United States as the paradise of Labour. New 
 York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Philadelphia may 
 swarm with the disinherited of other continents, but 
 the standard of material well-being in the United 
 States for highly-trained artisans reaches a far higher 
 point than has ever yet been attained by the labouring 
 mass of civilised men. 
 
 The ease with which men can pass from one 
 locality to another, from one climate to another, from 
 one business to another, the entire absence of social 
 barriers or class distinctions, the abundant means of 
 technical and scientific education, leave it open to 
 each man and woman to make their own lives. 
 The vast continent, with its varieties of climate and 
 soil, produces almost everything except champagne, 
 diamonds, and ancient buildings. With New York 
 and San Francisco, the two grandest natural ports in 
 the world, open to the ships of the Atlantic and the 
 Pacific, with Chicago or St. Louis as the centre of 
 traffic, the clearing-house of this boundless trade, the
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 195 
 
 material prosperity of the American continent must 
 reach in the twentieth century a height of which the 
 nineteen centuries before it never dreamed. When 
 the Englishman talks about the evils of Protection and 
 the benefits of Free Trade, he is reminded that the 
 United States occupies a continent self-sufficing, except 
 for a few luxuries, which has its own Free Trade on a 
 gigantic scale, over an area far larger than all Western 
 Europe. It seems impertinent to lecture men about 
 their neglect of Free Trade, when in their own 
 country they can travel in every direction thousands 
 of miles without ever meeting a Customs frontier. 
 They insist that they are the greatest Free Trade 
 people on earth. 
 
 Of course, for the American citizen and the 
 thoughtful visitor, the real problem is whether this 
 vast prosperity, this boundless future of theirs, rests 
 upon an equal expansion in the social, intellectual, and 
 moral sphere. They would be bold critics who should 
 maintain it, and few thinking men in the United 
 States do so without qualifications and misgivings. 
 As to the universal diffusion of education, the energy 
 which is thrown into it, and the wealth lavished on it 
 from sources public and private, no doubt can exist. 
 Universities, richly endowed, exist by scores, colleges 
 by many hundreds, in every part of the Union. Art 
 schools, training colleges, technical schools, laboratories, 
 polytechnics, and libraries are met with in every thriving 
 town. The impression left on my mind is that the 
 whole educational machinery must be at least tenfold 
 that of the United Kingdom. That open to women 
 must be at least twentyfold greater than with us, and 
 it is rapidly advancing to meet that of men, both in 
 numbers and in quality. Nor can I resist the im- 
 pression that the education in all grades is less per- 
 functory, amateurish, and casual than is too often our
 
 196 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 own experience at home. The libraries, laboratories, 
 museums, and gymnasia of the best universities and 
 colleges are models of equipment and organisation. 
 The "pious founder" has long died out in Europe. 
 He is alive in America, and seems to possess some 
 magic source of inexhaustible munificence. 
 
 Libraries, of course, are not learning ; museums 
 and laboratories are not knowledge ; much less is an 
 enormous reading public literature. And, however 
 much libraries may be crowded with readers, however 
 spacious and lavish are the mountings of technical 
 schools, and though seventy millions of articulate men 
 and women can pass the seventh standard of a board 
 school, the question of the fruit of all this remains to 
 be answered. The passing visitor to the United States 
 forms his own impression as to the bulk and the diffusion 
 of the instruments of education ; but he is in no better 
 position than any one else to measure the product. 
 The sight of such a vast apparatus of education, such 
 demand for education, and that emphatically by both 
 sexes, must create a profound impression. The Cooper 
 Institute of New York, one of the earliest of these 
 popular endowments, still managed and developed by 
 three generations of the family descended from its 
 venerable founder, the Jeremy Bentham of New York, 
 is a typical example of a people's palace where science, 
 art, and literature are offered absolutely free to all 
 comers. But what is the result ? Few Americans 
 pretend that, with all the immense diffusion of ele- 
 mentary knowledge of science in the United States, 
 the higher science is quite abreast of that of Europe. 
 Of scholarship, in the technical sense of the word, in 
 spite of the vast numbers of "graduates," the same 
 thing may be said. And no one pretends that 
 American literature rivals that of France in its finer 
 forms or indeed that of England.
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 197 
 
 The reason for this is not obscure, and it is hardly 
 covered by the ordinary suggestion that the American 
 people are absorbed in the pursuit of gain and material 
 improvement. However much this may react on the 
 intellectual world, the numbers of the American 
 people are so great that numerically, if not proportion- 
 ately, those who are devoted to science, art, and 
 literature are at least as many as they are in England. 
 The vast development of material interest is rather a 
 stimulus to the pursuit of science than a hindrance, 
 as the vast multiplication of books is a stimulus to 
 authorship. But why suppose that a general interest 
 in practical science conduces to high scientific culture, 
 or that millions of readers tend to foster a pure taste 
 in letters ? The contrary result would be natural. 
 Practical mechanics is not the same thing as scientific 
 genius. And the wider the reading public becomes, 
 the lower is the average of literary culture. 
 
 But other things combine to the same result. The 
 absence of any capital city, any acknowledged literary 
 centre, in a country of vast area with scattered towns, 
 the want of a large society exclusively occupied with 
 culture and forming a world of its own, the uniformity 
 of American life, and the little scope it gives to the 
 refined ease and the graceful dolce far nlente of European 
 beaux mondes^ all these have something to do with a 
 low average of lettered genius. 
 
 The lighter American literature has little of the 
 charm and sparkle that mark the best writing of 
 France, because, apart from national gifts of esprit^ 
 American society does not lend itself to the daily 
 practice of polished conversation. After all, it is con- 
 versation^ the spoken thought of groups of men and 
 women in familiar and easy intercourse, which gives 
 the aroma of literature to written ideas. And where 
 the arts of conversation have but a moderate scope
 
 198 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 and value, the literature will be solid but seldom 
 brilliant. 
 
 But all these conditions, if they tend in the same 
 direction, are perhaps of minor importance. The 
 essential point is that literature of a high order is the 
 product of long tradition and of a definite social 
 environment. Millions of readers do not make it, 
 nor myriads of writers, though they read the same 
 books and use the same language and think the same 
 thoughts. A distinctive literature is the typical ex- 
 pression of some organised society, cultivated by long 
 user and moulded on accepted standards. It would 
 be as unreasonable to look for a formed and classical 
 style in a young, inorganic, and fluid society, however 
 large it may be and however voracious of printed 
 matter, as to look in such a land for Westminster 
 Abbeys and Windsor Castles. America will no doubt 
 in the centuries to come produce a national literature 
 of its own, when it has had time to create a typical 
 society of its own, and intellectual traditions of its own. 
 
 Literature, politics, manners and habits, all bear the 
 same impress of the dominant idea of American society 
 the sense of equality. It has its great side, its con- 
 spicuous advantages, and it has also its limitations and 
 its weakness. It struck me that the sense of equality 
 is far more national and universal in America than it 
 is in France, for all the paeans to equality that the 
 French pour forth and their fierce protestations to 
 claim it. " Liberty, equality, and fraternity " is not 
 inscribed on public edifices in the United States, 
 because no American citizen or, rather, no white 
 citizen can conceive of anything else. The shoe- 
 black shakes hands with the President, and (in the 
 absence of a Pullman) travels in the same car with the 
 millionaire. The millionaire has a very restricted 
 household of servants, and they are more or less his
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 199 
 
 masters, because the true-born American will not 
 accept domestic service on any wages, and the Irish 
 " helps " are the despair of the housekeeper. The 
 owner of a splendid mansion has to ascend ten steps to 
 his own door, because all Americans, and even Irish 
 helps, decline to live in rooms below the level of the 
 street. Thus the ground floor belongs to the domestic 
 "auxiliaries." The middle-class American citizen 
 has to black his own boots or walk out to a blacking 
 stand, because white American citizens will not perform 
 so menial an office. All this has its fine side, though 
 perhaps the reaction from European servility is carried 
 to needless lengths. Is it natural, they say, that a lad 
 who may live to be a senator or a President, to found 
 a university, or to control a railroad, should black 
 another citizen's boots ? Should a cookmaid who 
 may live to drive her own carriage in Central Park 
 put up with a cellar-kitchen below the level of the 
 street ? Every soldier of Napoleon carried a marshal's 
 baton in his knapsack. And every American citizen 
 has a Fortunatus' cap in his pocket, if he only knew 
 how to fit it on his head. And this he is perpetually 
 trying to do. 
 
 But this ingrained sense of the absolute equality of 
 all white citizens reacts on all things. The Congress- 
 man is, at Washington, a successful politician ; but, 
 outside Congress, he is one of seventy millions. A 
 senator, a cabinet minister, or a President, is merely a 
 prominent citizen raised by ballot from the ranks, to 
 return to the ranks when his term of office is up. 
 The reaction from the divine right and hereditary 
 privileges of the monarchies and aristocracies of Europe 
 has led to slipshod habits in public affairs which 
 scandalise the Old World and go much deeper than 
 mere outsides. 
 
 Men who manage affairs of state in their shirt-sleeves
 
 200 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 are too apt to take a rough and ready view of life and 
 of that which is becoming and right. The dominant 
 social maxim seems to be caveat emptor. The para- 
 mount political maxim is quod populus vult Deus vult, 
 or it may be populus vult declpi, et decipiatur. As Mr. 
 Bryce has so well said, the sense of noblesse oblige, which 
 still survives in Europe as a force constraining men in 
 high office or in great social position, has hardly any 
 equivalent in American life. The want of command- 
 ing social influence by men of great reputation and 
 acknowledged standing makes itself felt in national 
 and municipal affairs, in manners, in business, and in 
 literature. A certain French philosopher who comes 
 to England is wont to say at once, " You have an 
 organised society ; our society is inorganic, and no 
 class or group exercises any social influence." All 
 this has its bad side as well as its good side. So, in 
 crossing the Atlantic, the observer finds that he has 
 left a world more or less "organised" for good or for 
 ill, and has come to a society which, for good or for 
 evil, is organised only as a huge electoral machine. 
 Public men in America are commonly accused of 
 accepting the moral standards of the mass and of tamely 
 yielding to the voice of majorities. Their excuse is 
 that their fellow-citizens would resent their setting up 
 superior standards of their own, and flatly refuse to 
 accept any leadership from them. Where in England 
 a man of ambition is constantly aiming to gain "influ- 
 ence," and is constantly considering " what is due to 
 his own position," in America he has little need to 
 consider anything but what will satisfy the electors, 
 and what is the average conscience of the larger 
 number. He has no " position " to maintain.
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 201 
 
 THE CAPITOL 
 
 The ceremony of the Inauguration of the President 
 and Vice- President at Washington on the 4th of 
 March is, indeed, a characteristic and suggestive func- 
 tion. I had the good fortune to witness it this year 
 [1901] under the most favourable conditions, and I 
 was deeply impressed with all it represented. It 
 summed up the vast extent and power of the United 
 States, its absolute democracy, the simplicity, ease, and 
 homeliness of its government, its contempt of forms, 
 its entire confidence in itself and perfect satisfaction 
 with its own ways. In the grand Capitol of the noble 
 city of Washington, than which no finer edifice or 
 city exists in the Old World, were gathered the men 
 chosen by the adult citizens of a nation of some 
 seventy millions, scattered over a vast continent. The 
 President, Vice-President, senators, and representatives 
 elected on this enormous ballot, entrusted with this 
 stupendous power and wealth, sate indistinguishable 
 from the ordinary citizens around them clerks, secre- 
 taries, journalists, and casual friends, who were crowded 
 pell-mell on the floor of the Senate House itself. 
 
 To this miscellaneous body, which might be any 
 average county council or borough board, there entered 
 a long file of ambassadors and Ministers in all the finery 
 of European and Oriental courts ; uniforms blazing 
 with gold lace, plumes, velvet or fur, swords, sabres, 
 and helmets; the Austro- Hungarian magnate, the 
 stately ambassadors of Great Britain, Germany, France, 
 and Russia, in their court uniforms, stars, crosses, and 
 ribbons; Mr. Wu Ting-fang, the accomplished 
 Minister of China, in his buttoned head-dress and em- 
 broidered silks ; the Japanese Minister, in European 
 court uniform ; the envoys of the smaller Powers of
 
 202 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Europe, and then the diplomatists of the South Ameri- 
 can and Central American and West Indian States ; 
 black men, brown men, whity-brown men, in various 
 gaudy uniforms ; the Minister of the Sultan in his 
 fez, those of Siam and Korea in their national dress 
 more than thirty in all, in every colour, adornment, 
 and style representing men of every race, from every 
 part of the planet. 
 
 This brilliant and motley group may be seen at St. 
 Stephen's, or at the functions of Berlin and St. Peters- 
 burg, where it is only a natural part of similar bravery 
 and feudal splendour. But here, in a hall crowded 
 with sober citizens in broadcloth, without a star, a 
 ribbon, or a sword between them, the effect was almost 
 comic. Siam, Korea, Hungary, and Portugal as gay 
 as butterflies ! M'Kinley and Roosevelt matter-of-fact 
 civilians, as if they were Chairman and Vice-Chairman 
 of the London County Council ! And around them 
 were the chosen delegates of the great Republic, jostled 
 in their own hall by pressmen, secretaries, and curious 
 strangers like myself. The shirt-sleeve theory of 
 government could hardly go farther, and, perhaps, need 
 not go quite so far. My own republican soul was 
 stirred when I set myself to think which of the two 
 forms would prevail in the centuries to come. I 
 thought first of the Roman Senate (according to the 
 old myth), sitting immovable as statues in their white 
 togas, when the Gauls of Brennus, in their torques 
 and war-paint, dashed into the Senate House ; and then 
 I began to think, Were these quiet citizens seated 
 there to see a comic opera at the Savoy Theatre ? 
 
 Not that the representatives of the Republic are 
 wanting in personal bearing. The President sate 
 through the ceremonies with placid dignity, his fine 
 features, in their stern repose, looking like a bronze 
 figure of the Elder Brutus or Cato the Censor. At a
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 203 
 
 personal reception in the White House Mr. M'Kinley 
 will show as much grace and courtesy of demeanour 
 as any Sovereign by divine right, and his smile and his 
 voice are pronounced (not only by women) to be 
 perfectly winning. The diplomatists of Europe agree 
 in assuring us that nothing can exceed the tact and 
 " correctness " which distinguish Mr. Hay, the accom- 
 plished Secretary of State. It is true that Congress- 
 men (in their shirt-sleeves) have not that repose of 
 manner which marks the caste of Vere de Vere. But 
 the men who are charged to speak in the name of the 
 State will usually be found to rise to the occasion with 
 that facility which enables every genuine American to 
 adapt himself to play a new part, and to fulfil an un- 
 accustomed duty. 
 
 It is no easy task to combine the conduct of vast 
 interests, the representation of enormous power with 
 the ultra-democratic traditions of the absolute equality 
 of all citizens. No sooner had the President summoned 
 before him the splendiferous envoys of the whole world, 
 than he passed out to the historic steps of the Capitol, 
 to pronounce his Inaugural Address. As I stood near 
 him and listened to the clear and keenly -balanced 
 sentences, which the cables and telegraphs of the 
 civilised world were carrying to expectant nations, I 
 noticed how the crowd, a few feet only below him, 
 was a miscellaneous gathering from the streets, like a 
 knot in the Park listening to a Salvation preacher or a 
 socialist orator on a Sunday, negroes and lads not the 
 least vociferous in their applause, whilst on a platform 
 fifty yards off there were mounted a dozen batteries of 
 photographers, from kodaks to life-size lenses. The 
 American public man even the private man and 
 woman has always to reckon with the man in the 
 street, journalists, and kodaks. 
 
 It is needless to point the moral of the difference
 
 204 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 between the Inaugural Address of a President, delivered 
 in the open air to a miscellaneous crowd, and the 
 speech of an European Sovereign opening Parliament. 
 The one is an elaborate State paper, spoken by a citizen 
 in frock-coat to a mob of his fellow-citizens in the 
 street ; the other is usually conventional platitudes, 
 pronounced in a gorgeous palace with a scene of 
 mediaeval pageantry. It is the contrast between the 
 monarchical survival and Republican realism. Kodaks, 
 mobs, and vociferous negroes are not a necessary part 
 of the government of a State. But the Presidential 
 address from the steps of the Capitol is certainly more 
 like that of Pericles on the Pnyx, or of Scipio and 
 Marius on the Rostra, than our House of Lords ; and 
 it is conceivable that it may prove more agreeable to 
 the practice of future republics in the ages to come. 
 The President of the United States expounds his policy 
 in a reasoned argument to all citizens who choose to 
 hear him. The European monarch performs a tradi- 
 tional ceremonial to a crowd of stage courtiers who 
 possess office without power and honour without 
 responsibility. 
 
 The White House, as the executive mansion is 
 called, is interesting for its historic associations, which 
 exactly cover the nineteenth century, with its portraits 
 and reminiscences of Presidents and statesmen, and its 
 characteristic simplicity and modest appointments. It 
 is not a convenient residence for a President with such 
 great responsibilities. But, as a term of residence is 
 usually so short, and the associations of the house are 
 so rich, it would be a pity to change it for a pretentious 
 modern palace. In the meantime the quiet old 
 mansion, merely a fine Georgian country house in a 
 pleasant park, serves to remind the American citizen 
 of the democratic origin of his Chief Magistrate, who 
 is certainly not yet an emperor. The White House
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 205 
 
 was a residence suitable for men like Jefferson, Lincoln, 
 and Grant ; and it seems a not unfitting office for 
 their successors. 
 
 The Capitol at Washington struck me as being the 
 most effective mass of public buildings in the world, 
 especially when viewed at some distance, and from the 
 park in which it stands. I am well aware of certain 
 constructive defects which have been insisted on by 
 Fergusson and other critics ; and no one pretends that 
 it is a perfect design of the highest order either in 
 originality or style. It will have one day to be entirely 
 refaced with white stone. But as an effective public 
 edifice of a grandiose kind, I doubt if any capital city 
 can show its equal. This is largely due to the admir- 
 able proportions of its central dome group, which I 
 hold to be, from the pictorial point of view, more suc- 
 cessful than those of St. Peter's, the Cathedral of 
 Florence, Agia Sophia, St. Isaac's, the Pantheon, St. 
 Paul's, or the new Cathedral of Berlin. But the 
 unique effect is still more due to the magnificent site 
 which the Capitol at Washington enjoys. I have no 
 hesitation in saying that the site of the Capitol is the 
 noblest in the world, if we exclude that of the 
 Parthenon in its pristine glory. Neither Rome nor 
 Constantinople, nor Florence, nor Paris, nor Berlin, 
 nor London possesses any central eminence with broad 
 open spaces on all sides, crowned by a vast pile covering 
 nearly four acres and rising to a height of nearly three 
 hundred feet, which seems to dominate the whole city. 
 Washington is the only capital city which has this 
 colossal centre or crown. And Londoners can imagine 
 the effect if their St. Paul's stood in an open park 
 reaching from the Temple to Finsbury Circus, and 
 the great creation of Wren were dazzling white 
 marble, and soared into an atmosphere of sunny light. 
 
 Washington, the youngest capital city of the world,
 
 206 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 bids fair to become, before the twentieth century is 
 ended, the most beautiful and certainly the most com- 
 modious. It is the only capital which has been laid 
 out from the first entirely on modern lines, with 
 organic unity of plan, unencumbered with any antique 
 limitations and confusions. The spacious avenues, 
 intersected by very broad streets, all lined with maple 
 and elm, and radiating from a multitude of ''circles," 
 its numerous parks and squares, with fountains, monu- 
 ments, and equestrian statues at each available junction, 
 its semi-tropical climate, for it is in the latitude of 
 Lisbon and Palermo, its freedom from the disfigure- 
 ments of smoke, trade, and manufactures, its singular 
 form of government under a State autocracy without 
 any municipal representation, give it unique oppor- 
 tunities to develop. As yet it is but half completed, 
 owing to local difficulties as to rights of property ; and 
 it still has the air of an artificial experiment in city 
 architecture. But within two or three generations, 
 when its vacant sites are filled up, and public buildings, 
 monuments, and statues continue to be raised with all 
 the wealth, resources, and energy of the Republic, if 
 the artists of the future can be restrained within the 
 limits of good sense and fine taste, Washington may 
 look more like the Rome of the Antonines than any 
 city of the old world. 
 
 MOUNT VERNON 
 
 Of all that I saw in America, I look back with 
 most emotion to my visit to Mount Vernon, the home 
 and burial-place of George Washington. I saw it on 
 a lovely spring day, amidst thousands of pilgrims, in 
 the Inauguration week. On a finely-wooded bluff, 
 rising above the grand Potomac river, stands the plain
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 207 
 
 but spacious wooden house of the Founder of the 
 Republic. It has been preserved and partly restored 
 with perfect taste, the original furniture, pictures, and 
 ornaments supplemented by fit contemporary pieces. 
 It enables one perfectly to conjure up an image of the 
 homely, large, and generous life of the President before 
 the war called him to the field, and after he had retired 
 from all cares of state. We fancy him sitting under 
 the spacious eastern portico, with its eight tall columns, 
 looking out over the broad landscape of forest and river, 
 or lying in his last sleep in the simple bed, with its 
 dimity coverlet, and then laid to rest in the rural tomb 
 below the house, which he ordered himself, and in 
 which his descendants have insisted on keeping his 
 remains. General Grant lies beside the Hudson at 
 New York, in a magnificent mausoleum palpably 
 imitated from the tomb of Napoleon in the Invalides. 
 How infinitely more fitting and more touching is the 
 Spartan simplicity of Washington's burial-place an 
 austere cell within his own ancestral ground ; yet not 
 a morning's drive from the splendid capital which the 
 nation has named after its heroic founder how much 
 more fitting and more touching is this than is the 
 pompous mausoleum to which they have carried the 
 bones of the tyrant who ruined France ! It has been 
 frequently attempted to remove from Mount Vernon, 
 his home, the sarcophagus in which Washington lies, 
 in order to place it under the dome of the Capitol. 
 But as yet it has been wisely decided to do nothing 
 which can impair the unique legend which has gathered 
 round the memory of the western Cincinnatus. 
 
 In a country so flagrantly new as America, with 
 every town and building striving to show its intense 
 modernity, the few remnants even of eighteenth- 
 century antiquity have a rare charm and a special 
 value. They awaken an interest far beyond that of
 
 208 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 their actual beauty or quaintness, for they represent 
 the only history of a country which has grown to be 
 so vast and so different. Such relics as Mount Vernon, 
 Independence Hall and Carpenter's Hall at Phila- 
 delphia, the Common of Boston, the Green at New- 
 haven, and a few bits at Baltimore and old New York 
 may still attract a traveller sated with the most 
 picturesque corners of Europe. The history of the 
 American soil is a very short record. But, such as it 
 is, the American people seem very keen to cherish it 
 in perpetuity. If the preservation of Mount Vernon 
 and of Independence Hall as national monuments is 
 the finest example of this, the most amusing instance 
 is the rescue of the wooden cottage of Betsy Ross in 
 Arch Street, Philadelphia, where the original "star- 
 spangled banner" was constructed in 1777 and 
 approved by General Washington. 
 
 Few Englishmen seem to know the history of the 
 "Stars and Stripes." In its original form it was a 
 not ungainly device, adapted from the undoubted 
 arms of the English family of Washington. These 
 were : argent^ two bars gules^ on a chief azure three 
 mullets [stars] of the first [argent]. When the thirteen 
 States of the Union resolved to adapt a national flag 
 from the ancestral coat of their chief, this became 
 " barry of thirteen, gules and argent^ on a chief azure 
 thirteen mullets of the second arranged in circlet." 
 But when the other States were added, the "stars" 
 began to be increased, until to-day the flag displays, 
 on a canton azure^ forty-five mullets argent in 
 monotonous rows. Nothing more artless, confused, 
 and unheraldic can be conceived. 
 
 An unlucky question was once put to me by a 
 patriot, whether the " Star-spangled banner " was not 
 beautiful as a work of art. I was obliged to answer that, 
 with all my veneration for the banner of the Republic,
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 209 
 
 in my humble judgment it was (heraldically speaking) 
 both awkward and ugly, unbalanced, undecipherable, 
 and mechanical. It may be well to distinguish the 
 Republican emblem from the feudal heraldry of the 
 Old World, but it is a pity that the invention of 
 the New World could not have devised an emblem 
 with some claim to be clearly read and to look 
 graceful. The thirteen bars^ or stripes, have now 
 lost their significance, and might in time disappear. 
 A plain field, semee of " stars," would not be unsightly 
 nor too difficult to distinguish. Forty-five mullets on 
 a canton (i.e. a corner) in six regular rows are not 
 easily visible at all, and, when perceived, are hardly 
 elegant. 
 
 PROBLEMS TO BE SOLVED 
 
 America is making violent efforts to evolve a 
 national architecture ; but as yet it has produced little 
 but miscellaneous imitations of European types and 
 some wonderful constructive devices. A walk along 
 the Broadway and Fifth Avenue of New York leaves 
 the impression of an extraordinary medley of in- 
 congruous styles, highly ingenious adaptations, admir- 
 able artistic workmanship, triumphs of mechanics, the 
 lavish use of splendid materials, and an architectural 
 pot pourrl which almost rivals the Rue des Nations at 
 the Paris exhibition of 1900. There are some 
 excellent copies of European buildings, such as the 
 Giralda of Seville, Venetian palaces, Chateaux from 
 Touraine, Palladian loggie^ and here and there a 
 German schloss. There are some beautiful revivals 
 of fine art, such as the thirteenth-century Gothic of 
 St. Patrick's, the Italian palaces of the Metropolitan 
 and University Clubs, the Renaissance palaces of 
 the Vanderbilts. Facing the Central Park, each 
 
 P
 
 210 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 millionaire seems to have commissioned his architect 
 to build him a mansion of any ancient style from 
 Byzantine to the last French Empire, provided only 
 it was in contrast to the style of his neighbours. So 
 commissioned, the artist has lavished skilful carving, 
 singular ingenuity, and noble material in stone, 
 marble, and mosaic. Many of these are interesting 
 experiments and some are beautiful ; but the general 
 effect of such rampant eclecticism is rather bewildering. 
 
 In constructive novelties the American builder is 
 consummate. Amongst these are the Brobding- 
 nagian piles of twenty stories, the substitution of lifts 
 for staircases, the construction of edifices of steel, 
 the profuse use of stone and marble as ornaments 
 rather than as material, the multiplication of baths, 
 heating apparatus, electric and other mechanical 
 devices, and the intensely modern and up-to-date 
 contrivances which put to shame the clumsy con- 
 servatism of the Old World. Nothing in Europe 
 since the fall of old Rome and Byzantium, not even 
 Genoa in its prime, has equalled the lavish use of 
 magnificent marble columns, granite blocks, and 
 ornamental stone as we see it to-day in the United 
 States. The Illinois Trust Bank of Chicago a vast 
 marble palace is, I suppose, the most sumptuous and 
 one of the most beautiful commercial edifices in the 
 world, and its safety deposit vaults are among the 
 sights of that city magically opening as with an 
 " Open Sesame." 
 
 The reckless use of precious marbles seems to 
 threaten exhaustion of the quarries, but one is assured 
 that they are ample for all demands. Why more use 
 is not made in Europe of the magnificent marbles of 
 America is not very obvious. But we certainly 
 might easily adopt some of the constructive devices 
 of their builders. Not, one trusts, the outrageous
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 211 
 
 towers of Babel, in twenty or twenty-four floors and 
 five hundred rooms, built of steel, and faced with 
 granite as a veneer, which are seen in New York 
 and Chicago, and hopelessly disfigure both cities. If 
 these became general, the streets would become dark 
 and windy canons, and human nature would call out 
 for their suppression. But the British architect has 
 much to learn from modern American builders. In 
 matters of construction, contrivance, the free use of 
 new kinds of stone and wood, of plumbing, heating, 
 and the minor arts of fitting, the belated European in 
 America feels himself a Rip Van Winkle, whirled 
 into a new century and a later civilisation. 
 
 As to the two burning problems of American 
 society the Labour question, and the Negro question 
 it would be idle for a passing tourist to pretend to 
 an opinion of his own. Certainly, there is not visible 
 in the United States, even in the slums of New 
 York, Chicago, or Philadelphia, anything approaching 
 the acuteness and extent of the destitution to be seen 
 in London, Liverpool, or Glasgow. The slums of 
 American cities are filled, it is true, with the waifs 
 and strays, failures and outcasts from Europe, and are 
 not of native American origin. But those who have 
 made a comparative study of the life of the poor 
 assure us that nowhere in the United States are the 
 general conditions of the workman so threatening 
 as they are too often in Europe, and the evils are 
 certainly less difficult to cure. An influx of cosmo- 
 politan misery has filled America with embarrassing 
 problems, but the enormous resources of its continent, 
 and the vast opportunities which its development 
 affords, give Industry a free hand such as is elsewhere 
 impossible and unknown. 
 
 The future of the Negro has always seemed to us 
 in Europe the gravest of all American problems. And
 
 212 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 though I saw nothing to justify the extravagant 
 stories we are told as to race antipathy and the 
 ostracism of the negro, I was surprised and shocked 
 to hear from men of great cultivation and humanity 
 such sweeping condemnation of the negro race, such 
 cool indifference to the continual reports of barbarous 
 lynchings which appear almost daily in the public 
 prints, and that in other than old Slave States. I 
 should come to look on the race problem as incapable 
 of any satisfactory solution were it not for such 
 examples as that of Tuskagee and similar foundations. 
 The life of Booker Washington, as told in his auto- 
 biography called Up from Slavery^ is one of the most 
 wonderful of our age. The story of the success in 
 the education of the Negro achieved by this ex-slave, 
 one of the most remarkable of living men, and by the 
 white and coloured friends by whom he was assisted, 
 may serve to convince us that the negro problem may 
 yet find a happy end. 
 
 About the prodigious luxury, extravagance, and 
 money-making of the United States, of which we 
 hear so much, a passing visitor has no right to 
 dogmatise. America is a very rich country, where 
 everything but raw material is very dear, where 
 fortunes are made very rapidly, and where the scale 
 of everything is raised in proportion. The sudden 
 acquisition of wealth is more often the result of the 
 vast numbers of those who deal in any market or buy 
 any commodity, rather than of any abnormal develop- 
 ment of the acquisitive instinct. The railroad, or 
 corn, or oil "boss" becomes a multi-millionaire in a 
 decade owing to the colossal scale of the railroad, 
 corn, and oil trades. There are perhaps more rich 
 men in America than there are in Europe, but then 
 there are not so many poor men. There are costly 
 mansions in New York city, though none on the
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA 213 
 
 scale of Stafford House, Bridgewater House, and Dor- 
 chester House. And there are no such royal palaces 
 as Arundel Castle, Castle Howard, Longleat, and 
 Mentmore. American millionaires do not own 
 spacious parks, racing-studs, and deer-forests, nor are 
 they surrounded by armies of tenants, dependents, 
 servants, and equipages as are described in Lot hair. 
 They roll up fortunes, often automatically, owing to 
 the wealth and numbers of the population in which 
 their capital operates. And they lavish their rapid 
 gains sometimes in houses, paintings, yachts, and 
 banquets, and not seldom in schools, observatories, 
 and museums. But I saw nothing to suggest that 
 wealth in America is worse acquired or worse applied 
 than it is in Europe. 
 
 I must repeat that I am giving nothing but the 
 first impressions of a passing visitor who spent two 
 months in the United States for the first time in his 
 life. Though I had special opportunities to see from 
 the central point the official world, the universities, the 
 literary and the commercial society, I am well aware 
 that I brought away nothing more than the thumb- 
 nail sketches of an impressionist. But my impression 
 is that the accounts we too often get of American 
 life are ridiculous exaggerations. English journalism 
 distorts and magnifies the caricatures it presents, just 
 as American journalism distorts and magnifies the 
 traits of English life. 
 
 There are, no doubt, vices, blots, follies, and social 
 diseases on both sides of the Atlantic, but the pro- 
 portion these bear to the nation is grossly overstated 
 by sensational literature. As to the worship of the 
 " Almighty Dollar," I neither saw it nor heard of it ; 
 hardly as much as we do at home. I may say the 
 same as to official corruption and political intrigue. 
 Congress, ministers, magistrates in the United States
 
 214 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 seemed to me to be a good deal of the same stuff as 
 parliaments, cabinets, and judges with us. There are 
 a few good journals ; but the average Press seemed to 
 me dull, trivial, provincial, and harmless, however 
 insipid. The yellow Press, the brutal and gutter 
 Press, I never saw nor heard of, nor did I meet any 
 one who read it. New York, of course, has the 
 vices of great cities, but they are not visible to the 
 eye, and they are a drop in the ocean of the American 
 people. Even the passing tourist must note the 
 entire freedom of American towns from the indecencies 
 that are paraded in European cities. The youngest 
 girls go about the streets of New York alone ; and 
 a lady travels unattended from San Francisco to 
 Washington. I received a deep impression that in 
 America the relations of the sexes are in a state far 
 more sound and pure than they are in the Old 
 World ; that the original feeling of the Pilgrim 
 Fathers about woman and about man has sufficed to 
 colour the mental and moral atmosphere, and to give 
 all sexual problems a new and clear field to develop 
 in normal ways. 
 
 I close my impressions with a sense that the New 
 World offers a great field, both moral and intellectual, to 
 the peaceful development of an industrial society ; that 
 this society is in the main sound, honest, and whole- 
 some ; that vast numbers and the passion of equality 
 tend to low averages in thought, in manners, and in 
 public opinion, which the zeal of the devoted minority 
 tends gradually to raise to higher planes of thought and 
 conduct ; that manners, if more boisterous, are more 
 hearty than with us, and, if less refined, are free from 
 some conventional morgue and hypocrisy ; that in 
 casting off many of the bonds of European tradition 
 and feudal survivals, the American democracy has cast 
 off also much of the aesthetic and moral inheritance
 
 215 
 
 left in the Old World ; that the zeal for learning, 
 justice, and humanity lies so deep in the American 
 heart that it will in the end solve the two grave 
 problems which face the future of their citizens the 
 eternal struggle between capital and labour the gulf 
 between people of colour and the people of European 
 blood.
 
 THE TRUE COSMOPOLIS 
 
 1896 
 
 THOUGHTFUL and patriotic men in all parts of Europe 
 and America have welcomed various attempts to found 
 some inter-communion of ideas between the nations of 
 the West. All the chief tongues of Europe and all 
 the leading minds of both continents may one day 
 find a common ground for interchange of thought. 
 Italian and Spanish are closely akin. As to Russia, 
 so few of us read the Russian language, and educated 
 Russians themselves read and write the chief European 
 languages so freely, that they are always at home. 
 The Hollander, the Dane, the Scandinavian, are usually 
 familiar with German, French, or English if not 
 with all three. And much the same is true of the 
 cultured world of South-Eastern Europe. For practical 
 purposes, then, an ideal COSMOPOLIS should from time 
 to time unite the five chief languages of Western 
 Europe. 
 
 There have been found some to doubt if there is 
 any room or need for an international organ in these 
 days of incessant travel and rapid diffusion over the 
 civilised world of everything produced by the press, 
 whether permanent or fugitive. Of course, in this 
 age of telegraphs, accelerated post, " trains rapides," 
 "trains express," and the myriad-tongued journalism 
 
 216
 
 THE TRUE COSMOPOLIS 217 
 
 that circulates in every village, we know more of what 
 is being done and said in European countries than 
 our ancestors knew. Do we understand each other as 
 well, do we feel the same joy in the art, literature, 
 movements, and aspirations of foreign nations as was 
 common enough in the age of Shakespeare, or the age 
 of Voltaire, or of Hume, or of Goethe ? It is no 
 paradox to say that we do not. We hear about our 
 neighbours far more than ever. We have less sympathy 
 with foreign thought, we have far less of the Cosmo- 
 politan genius than was common in the most fertile 
 epochs of the human mind. 
 
 One need not go back to the Middle Ages, when 
 there was a learned language, a religion, a church, a 
 system of education common to Europe, so that all 
 men of superior culture were citizens of an intellectual 
 commonwealth apart from any national distinctions. 
 The great Universities had their " nations " who 
 sometimes proceeded to contests even keener than our 
 own inter- University "Sports"; but the superior 
 minds could pass from one school to another and find 
 themselves perfectly at home, irrespective of country. 
 Let us recall for a moment what the University of 
 Paris contained when the famous Dr. Sigier taught in 
 the Rue du Fouarre^ and a haggard Italian exile from 
 Florence, whom we call Dante, listened to his lectures. 
 When Albert the Great, Aquinas, John of Salisbury, 
 Alighieri, Roger Bacon, Alexander of Hales, Ockham, 
 Bonaventura, Raymond Lully, met, taught, or ex- 
 changed ideas, no man dreamed of asking if the 
 professor or the pupil were German, or French, or 
 English, or Italian, or Spaniard. That was a detail as 
 unimportant as his native county or his local patois. 
 
 They all talked and wrote in Latin, pronouncing it 
 in the same way, and they accepted one type of culture, 
 regarding their civil allegiance to any sovereign lord
 
 218 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 at home as subordinate to their spiritual allegiance 
 to Church and School. And so, when Petrarch left 
 Florence for the valley of the Rhone or the valley of 
 the Po ; or when Chaucer travelled in Italy and came 
 home with the glow of the Decameron colouring his 
 soul ; or when Froissart travelled from castle to abbey 
 round Europe, and was at home in every hall amongst 
 knights, ladies, squires, and men-at-arms, wherever 
 chivalry was a bond of intimacy, from the Grampians 
 to the Pyrenees and the Apennines j when the 
 Troubadours in Western or Meistersingers in Central 
 Europe were welcomed in every barony ; when the 
 same Romances, the same Legends, the same Miracle 
 Plays enchanted the audiences throughout all Europe 
 in hall, town, abbey, or court there was a fellowship 
 of Thought and of Art that we have lost to-day. 
 
 We know very well that all this is dead and buried, 
 and we know why it is gone, and that none but a few 
 codini and Jesuits want to restore it. But we need 
 not accentuate the national jealousies which make 
 such an inter-citizenship impossible to-day. It was a 
 vast gain to intellectual progress, to philosophy, and 
 to art, to have a common language intelligible and 
 familiar to all educated men. A great jurist remarked 
 recently that the crucial difficulty in the way of a 
 Code of English Law lay in the want of a strict legal 
 tongue, and in the indistinct and various senses with 
 which the same phrase was used in English decisions 
 and commentaries. This is true of philosophy, of 
 theology, of art amongst us now, especially for the 
 English and the Teutonic races. A common language 
 to-day is impossible, if for no other reason than that each 
 of the great nations of Europe thinks its own national 
 tongue ought to prevail, and in any case declines to 
 admit the primacy of any other tongue. So we learn 
 to read each others' languages, though we suffer
 
 THE TRUE COSMOPOLIS 219 
 
 grievously from wanting the precision and scientific 
 terminology of Latin. Anyway, the cosmopolitan 
 citizenship of the Mediaeval University is gone for 
 ever, for the same reasons that Mediaeval Churchman- 
 ship and manners are gone. We cannot help it, and 
 we cannot have it back. Since the age of Louis XI. 
 and Charles V., the Emperor, we have been settling 
 into national^ and not European lines, and in the 
 present age more than ever. The enormous increase 
 of inter-communication due to steam, electricity, rail- 
 ways, and the press, does not at all counterbalance the 
 great increase of national pride, jealousy, and self- 
 assertion fanned by patriotic dreams of Empire, 
 Victory, and Leadership of the World. This is the 
 ideal Culture of our martial and aggressive age, and it 
 is ex hypothesi a national and not an European culture. 
 Then let such of us as do not care to be for ever 
 bowing down the knee in the Temple of Nike Apteros, 
 or of the Athene Pandemos of our own national tribe, 
 offer up a prayer from time to time before the altar of 
 the true and general Athene, Goddess of Wisdom and 
 of healthy Knowledge, above all tribes or tongues. We 
 are as true patriots as any : we will suffer no man's 
 hand to be raised against our Fatherland, nor endure a 
 word against its honour. But there is something more 
 than Fatherland and wider than Patriotism. The 
 supreme development of Humanity in all forms of 
 civilisation needs the joint co-operation of many coun- 
 tries, and would languish under any narrow type of 
 national self-sufficiency. The civilisation of Europe 
 was assuredly not made by one nation, and it cannot 
 be developed by one nation alone. It knows nothing 
 of nations, of national tongues, of national schools. In 
 one department of thought this is abundantly recog- 
 nised. The physical sciences are European. A 
 Darwin, a Helmholtz, a Pasteur, are of all nations, all
 
 220 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 schools, all languages. With the moral sciences, with 
 philosophy, with politics, with criticism, with art, it is 
 far otherwise. We have a philosophy far too local in 
 its language and in its methods and aims ; a theology 
 and an ethic which are full of mere tribal antagonisms ; 
 a literature, an art, a romance which are often so hide- 
 bound in sectional and not human conventions and 
 interests that they are either unintelligible, insipid, 
 or grotesque to readers belonging to some other party, 
 school, or sect, and seem to come from another race 
 familiar with different types. 
 
 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 When the Mediaeval Church, language, education, 
 had passed away, there arose a new general movement 
 of ideas ; the Renascence of the sixteenth century, 
 which is so absurdly known by the French form of its 
 name, though it was Italian in origin and European in 
 result. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were 
 saturated with Italian romance. Marlowe and Faustus^ 
 Spenser and Ariosto, Rabelais and Cervantes, remind 
 us how far into modern times extended the freemasonry 
 of the common genius of Europe. Benvenuto Cellini, 
 the very much spoilt child of the Renascence, was as 
 free of every great house in Europe as a German fiddler 
 or an American globe-trotter is to-day. No doubt 
 Shakespeare knew far less of Italian than an average 
 girl in a high school, and even Erasmus or the Admir- 
 able Crichton nay, Milton himself were infants in 
 cosmopolitan information when compared with Doctor 
 Garnett or the editors of The Athenceum and the Revue 
 des Deux Mondes. That is a very different thing. 
 We are crammed with special erudition. We have 
 on our library tables the Transactions of a hundred
 
 THE TRUE COSMOPOLIS 221 
 
 learned associations in eight or ten different languages. 
 But I doubt if any living man to-day, whatever his 
 genius or his learning, feels within his veins the throb 
 of the European life-blood as did Shakespeare or 
 Rubens, Cellini, Columbus, or Raleigh. 
 
 In spite of all the national and religious wars of the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, philosophy at any 
 rate managed to be neither national nor sectarian, and 
 Bruno, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Grotius, and 
 Leibnitz rose into the empyrean of an European point 
 of view. The intellectual commerce between Voltaire 
 and his eminent countrymen, with England on the 
 one hand and Germany on the other hand, is one of 
 the great landmarks in the history of modern progress. 
 Trace the way in which the ideas of Hume, Gibbon, 
 Adam Smith, and Bentham were received in France ; 
 the effect upon England of the ideas of Montesquieu, 
 of Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Buffon ; the union 
 between Germany and Italy accomplished by Winckel- 
 mann, Lessing, and Goethe ; the effect upon Italy 
 and Greece of Byron and his fellow-enthusiasts ; the 
 effect upon Europe in general of Newton, of Pascal, of 
 Kant, of Vico, of Leibnitz, of Hegel, of Comte and 
 we must admit that, with infinitely less knowledge of 
 each others' books and discoveries, our forefathers in 
 great epochs of human progress had a greater effective 
 communion of ideas, a greater intellectual solidarity than 
 we see to-day in Europe. 
 
 One department of thought we must certainly 
 except from this judgment that of the exact and 
 physical sciences. The European influence of a 
 Darwin, a Helmholtz, a Pasteur is in its way almost 
 equal to that of a Newton, a Leibnitz, a Lagrange. 
 Physical science has now no native country, and the 
 true European communion of ideas is paramount in 
 that sphere of thought. There may be rivalry of
 
 222 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 persons, of schools, of methods in physical science ; 
 this is at times most shamefully noisy and bitter ; but 
 there is practically in physical science, no antagonism 
 of nationality. The solidarity of work is almost per- 
 fect. Every man of exact science is bound to read the 
 principal European tongues, and to follow the records 
 of advance in all the chief European Transactions, 
 The Rontgen rays of physical science pierce the 
 boundaries of nations as easily as they pass through the 
 flesh of the hand or a wooden box. Exact science has 
 gained enormously by the diffusion of books, papers, 
 and instruments, and all the cosmopolitan appliances 
 of the Press. This alone of all the departments of 
 modern thought has won great success from our 
 material civilisation, and yet has lost nothing by our 
 national rivalries. 
 
 Now, why is it that in philosophy, in the moral 
 and social sciences, in art, we fail to find the same 
 solidarity, the same European consensus of thought ? 
 The answer is plain. Philosophy, moral and social 
 science, even art, touch our pride, our passions, our 
 ideals of life in a manner that exact science does not. 
 Exact science, with its dry light, does not stir emotions, 
 disturb habits of conduct and standards of judgment, 
 appeal to national ambitions or foibles. The discovery 
 of the cholera bacillus or the geography of Mars cannot 
 possibly kindle the fires of theological and political 
 animosity. But a new theory of the Synoptic Gospels, 
 an original view in the philosophy of Economics, a 
 history of the French Revolution, or of Europe in the 
 Nineteenth Century, instantly appeals either to odium 
 theologicwn, to the claims of the Churches and the 
 hopes of their rivals, to the perennial war between 
 Labour and Capital, or to the rancour of parties and 
 the glorification of national triumphs. Take Mr. 
 Ruskin to the Salon in Paris, and show him the colossal
 
 THE TRUE COSMOPOLIS 223 
 
 " Massacres," " Slave Markets," " Temptations of St. 
 Anthony," and similar canvasses with acres of gore 
 and nudity, and we should have him deliver a prophetic 
 homily worthy of Jeremiah at the Court of Jehoiakim. 
 Ask Mr. Lecky to write us a review of Karl Marx, or 
 the Bishop of Peterborough to write the history of 
 the Papacy during the last half-century, or beg the 
 Academic Francaise to explain why they did not elect 
 M. Zola we should then have something that would 
 be highly entertaining, but would not tend to consoli- 
 date opinions in any European eirenicon of the higher 
 criticism. We think, we teach, we write, we paint 
 too much on sectional lines ; and in our very philosophy, 
 our history, our art, we are thinking first of our 
 national Flag, and only secondly of the vanguard of 
 human civilisation. 
 
 There can be as little doubt that this is so to-day, 
 in a measure which some fortunate ages have been 
 without, as there can be doubt to what it may be 
 ascribed as a cause. The tremendous national wars 
 that have been waged in Europe in the last forty-three 
 years were on a scale more vast than anything known 
 in Europe except in the age of Napoleon. It is true 
 that most of these wars have been comparatively short. 
 But they have called to arms so large a proportion of 
 the entire population ; they have led to such vast 
 material efforts and changes ; they have caused such 
 intense spasms of patriotism and humiliation down to 
 the very depths of the national feeling, that they have 
 affected the temper of the nations of Europe perhaps 
 in a degree hardly ever before known. The fact of 
 war is far the least part of the phenomenon. The 
 wars have not been long ; and even the material losses 
 and ravages of war have been replaced in five or ten 
 years at the most. But they have led, even in time 
 of unbroken peace and entente cordiale^ to such huge
 
 224 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 and increasing armaments, they have stimulated 
 national ambitions so fiercely, and they have so 
 deeply infected the minds of all citizens alike with 
 ideas of national aggrandisement or defence as the 
 primary concern of a patriot, that they have inevitably 
 tended to accentuate the national point of view and 
 to weaken the European consensus of ideas always, 
 as I have said, with the exception of physical science. 
 
 I am old enough to remember the time when 
 influential schools of opinion and eminent men in 
 England were deeply influenced by French thought, 
 especially in things social, historical, political, and 
 critical. They were the days of Guizot, De 
 Tocqueville, Hugo, and Sainte Beuve. In those 
 days there still was a similar movement in France 
 towards England, and many men of great mark were 
 foolishly nicknamed " Anglomanes." I remember 
 dear old M. Barthelemy St. Hilaire telling me in 
 1895 the last year of his long life that he now stood 
 alone in his desire for cordial relations and common 
 sympathies between our two peoples. In the time 
 when Bismarck was carving, not the map of Europe, 
 but his fellow-students' cheeks and noses, there were 
 " Gallomanes " in the Fatherland, where now no 
 German can eat his dinner with a menu in French. 
 Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans of course still 
 read each others' books ; correspond, meet, and discuss 
 as much as ever, and perhaps more. But the English- 
 man who is in admiring sympathy with French ideas, 
 or the Frenchman who loves to steep his spirit in 
 German ideas, or the German who is " Gallomane " 
 or "Anglomane," or the educated Englishman, or 
 Frenchman, or German whose intellectual Alma Mater 
 is the "Cosmopolis" of European thought is, I 
 firmly believe, far more rare than ever he was. 
 
 This is not the place to suggest any doubts as to
 
 THE TRUE COSMOPOLIS 225 
 
 the necessity for our mighty armaments on land and 
 sea ; and I for one claim to be as fervent a patriot as 
 any of my neighbours. To pretend to be " Cos- 
 mopolitan," and superior to Country, is a puerile 
 affectation for which I have neither sympathy nor 
 mercy. As a Nationalist by conviction, I hold that 
 Governments and States cannot be too entirely national 
 for all political purposes, or too absolutely capable of 
 defending their own nationality. But the interests of 
 intellectual Progress are not confined within any 
 boundaries of nation, and will assuredly be atrophied 
 by any such narrow limitations. It deeply concerns 
 all those who have at heart the true interests of intel- 
 lectual Progress -to strive to counteract the tendencies 
 towards national jealousy and depreciation fomented 
 by an age of gigantic preparations for war and the 
 passion for commercial and political supremacy. Our 
 knowledge of the literature of Europe, and our elaborate 
 study of the last new work of the foreign press, have 
 too much of the character expressed by the old saying 
 that " Familiarity breeds contempt." We need some- 
 what more of that sacred light of sympathy which 
 inspired Diderot, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, and 
 made them more than Frenchmen ; which inspired 
 Locke, Hume, and Gibbon, and made them more 
 than Englishmen ; which inspired Leibnitz, Lessing, 
 and Goethe, and made them more than Germans. 
 
 It is true that very great mistakes were made in 
 former ages by hollow or premature enthusiasms, and 
 we do not wish to have them repeated. We want 
 no "Anglomanes" nor " Gallomanes," nor "Inglesi 
 Italianati," nor Teutonic "Welt-Geist" of any kind. 
 The spurious and spasmodic fashion which suddenly 
 discovers in another country a man of genius or a new 
 school of thought or art is a very short-lived thing ; it 
 does nothing but harm to the country whence it is 
 
 Q
 
 226 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 imported as to the country which adopts it. Ibsen, 
 Tolstoi, and Zola are undoubtedly men of genius ; 
 but their reputation would be both more solid and 
 more enduring if they had not been acclaimed by 
 fanatical schools of followers as the evangelists of some 
 new gospel that was to revolutionise human art. 
 Ibsen suffers from his Ibsenites, Zola from his Zolaists, 
 and Tolstoi from Tolstoyans. 
 
 We are often told that the wonderful development 
 of travel in these days is a sovereign specific to make 
 people of different nations understand each other better, 
 and that the multiplication of railways, telegraphs, 
 excursion tours, and postal facilities must end in 
 establishing a family feeling the true solidarity and 
 fraternity of peoples. It is a pleasing hope ; but after 
 a generation of Cooke's and Gaze's and other tourist 
 companies, after " World Exhibitions " and " Cos- 
 mopolitan Fairs " in every capital of the East and 
 the West, and a series of the " Greatest Shows on 
 Earth" in every ambitious town of Europe and 
 America, the jaded excursionist comes home rather to 
 grumble than to praise ; and, somewhat poorer both 
 in purse and good nature, he is just in the mood to 
 increase his armaments at home. The American 
 globe-trotter who bragged that, in his voyage round 
 the Mediterranean, "he had given seven hours to the 
 Eternal City," brought away but few new ideas as 
 to the Quirinal or the Vatican. And the English 
 millionaire who reminded his courier " that they must 
 not leave Rome without seeing the Colosseum " did 
 not really assimilate much of the true genius of Italy. 
 
 It is no paradox to maintain that the great labour 
 and slow course of travel in former ages really promoted 
 a more thorough and intimate knowledge of the coun- 
 try and the people where the traveller as distinct 
 from the tourist chose to wend his way. Travelling
 
 THE TRUE COSMOPOLIS 227 
 
 went out with railways. We are all tourists now, and 
 tourists who come home with tales of the chef at 
 the "Metropole" and the rifling of one's boxes on 
 those Mediterranean lines. When Dante and Chaucer, 
 Froissart or Cellini, travelled in Europe, they had a 
 far harder task \ but they really lived amongst the 
 people they visited. Milton travelled only once in 
 Italy, and Voltaire came only once to England ; and 
 Goethe, Byron, and Shelley never saw a tenth part of 
 the countries that any Oxford tutor scampers across in 
 a few vacations. But these men took time, took pains, 
 found means to be admitted into the societies they 
 met, and lived long enough in each place to saturate 
 themselves with its spirit. Nowadays we have jour- 
 nalists, diplomats, book-makers (in both senses of the 
 word), miscellaneous men -about- town, who live in 
 railway trains, like the stokers or the guards, and who 
 know as much of the countries they " travel in " as 
 if they had crossed them in balloons, getting up 
 " Baedeker " as they sailed along. 
 
 When we read an old book of real " travels," such 
 as Goethe's Italian Journey, or Gibbon's Memoir of 
 my Life, or even, of our own age, those exquisite 
 pictures of foreign life in Ruskin's Praterita and his 
 Modern Painters or Stones of Venice, we see how the 
 incessant whirl of locomotion that we absurdly call 
 " travelling " has actually robbed us of all real inter- 
 course with foreign nations. Parcels forwarded by the 
 post do not " travel." An active man of means and 
 leisure (some of them even without either means or 
 leisure) will make twenty, thirty, or forty "tours 
 abroad " of a month or two at a time, yet he will know 
 less of other nations at the end of his life than if, with 
 fit introductions, he had spent one six months rationally 
 in any European centre. He will know less ; but 
 what is worse, he will come back with feelings more
 
 228 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 akin to antipathy than sympathy a more violent Jingo 
 than he went forth. He has seen enough to despise, 
 to pity, or to dislike. He has not seen enough to 
 know, to understand, to enjoy. He likes mountains, 
 pictures, promenades, and casinos. " He never took 
 to the queer ways of the natives \ " 
 
 We have just been celebrating (with trumpets 
 attuned to a somewhat minor key) the Jubilee of Free 
 Trade ; and the rare foreign Abdiels, still faithful to 
 that great economic cause, have crossed the Channel 
 to record their loyalty to the faith. Rational English- 
 men are as staunch to the creed as ever. But they 
 mournfully admit that they stand alone. They have, 
 with pain, to confess how strange were the illusions 
 that floated before Richard Cobden and his fellow- 
 apostles when they looked to an increase in trade rela- 
 tions as certain to reduce armaments and diminish 
 international animosities. It was a dream from the 
 ivory gate. Commerce, trade, and international inter- 
 course have been multiplied threefold ; but they have 
 brought neither Free Trade nor Peace into the world. 
 Yet by all the rules of logic, of common sense, and 
 of obvious interests, they should have brought both. 
 Cobden and Bright were right in their facts and 
 correct in their reasoning. Free Trade is our true 
 interest the true interest of all settled peoples. And 
 common material interests infallibly favour a policy of 
 peace and of friendship. It is as certain and universal 
 as the Law of Gravitation. Yet the predicted result 
 did not follow. 
 
 Cobden and Bright and the apostles of Free Trade 
 did not foresee no man could foresee other and 
 stronger forces which neutralised the influence of 
 material interests and overrode the communion of 
 business relations. Charles Kingsley, and some men 
 of greater genius, have gravely informed us that the
 
 THE TRUE COSMOPOLIS 229 
 
 Law of Gravitation is at times "suspended " by some 
 occult power that desires to impress us. The advent 
 of Free Trade and its beneficial issue in a millennium 
 of Peace was not indeed "suspended," but it really was 
 adjourned by the direct operation of a higher and 
 stronger law. That law was the passion of national 
 ascendancy and the glory of military triumphs. Man- 
 kind are governed more by their passions, sentiments, 
 traditions, than by their interests and even their well- 
 being. The great cause of International Free Trade, 
 the far greater cause of International Sympathy, has 
 been postponed into the centuries to come by a 
 recrudescence of the warlike energies and the fierce 
 race for primacy amongst the nations. The interests 
 of Trade are even become the bar to Peace, the 
 stimulus to War. 
 
 IMPERIALISM 
 
 It would be a long story to trace the rise, growth, 
 and culmination of this mighty power over a period 
 now of some fifty years, till it led to a renewal of 
 European wars after a long peace of nearly forty years. 
 The revival of material prosperity that the era of Free 
 Trade opened did not a little to stimulate the growth 
 of military and national ambition. The revolutionary 
 upheaval of 1848-49 was at bottom the uprising of 
 wealth and of labour against the worm-eaten absolut- 
 isms of Europe. Free Trade, no doubt, saved England 
 from the violent struggles which went round Europe. 
 The monarchies, the aristocracies, the governments of 
 the Continent made a desperate rally, and entirely 
 recast their civil and military organisation. The arts, 
 and even the engines and machinery of war by land 
 and sea, took a fresh departure soon after the revolu- 
 tionary epoch and the reorganisation of governments
 
 230 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 and armaments which was represented by the Third 
 Empire in France. Rifled guns, breech-loading guns, 
 large and small, the concentration of armies by railways, 
 rapid " mobilisation," steamships of battle, armoured 
 vessels, the marine screw-propeller, big cannon, shell 
 projectiles, machine guns, and all the scientific appli- 
 ances of modern fortresses and modern ships of war, 
 began to be in use soon after this epoch. Those of us 
 who can remember Brown Bess^ the old solid column 
 of attack, men-of-war propelled by sails, having seventy- 
 four guns muzzle -loading with round shot, these 
 have seen, as compared with the armies and fleets of 
 to-day, perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most 
 sudden, change in the arts of war that the world has 
 ever witnessed, at any rate since the introduction of 
 gunpowder. A single first-rate ship to-day would sink 
 in an hour the entire fleet commanded in the Crimean 
 War by Napier or Lord Lyons, and Napier and Lyons 
 would be less able to command such a ship than the 
 lowest lieutenant in the navy. 
 
 From the middle of the nineteenth century the 
 reorganisation of civil administration and the adop- 
 tion of modern scientific methods went on nearly 
 as fast, so that at the date of the Crimean War the 
 Powers of Western Europe, with Italy added to their 
 circle, found themselves in possession of vast organised 
 forces, military, marine, and civil, which had been 
 rusting in store, as it were, for the long peace of 
 forty years from the fall of the First Napoleon. The 
 command of such tremendous armies, fleets, and 
 budgets, and the knitting up of the nerves of national 
 cohesion everywhere, roused new ambitions and led 
 to distant adventures. The formidable mutiny and 
 resettlement of India, the opening of Burmah, China, 
 and Japan to Western arms and commerce, gave a 
 warlike turn to commercial enterprise. The revival
 
 231 
 
 of Imperialism and the splendid armies of France led 
 directly to the war with Austria and kindled the 
 natural jealousies and ambition of Prussia. The 
 Danish war, the Austrian war, the French war, 
 followed in the next decade. And throughout the 
 generation that succeeded the Franco-German war 
 of 1870-1871 the nations of Europe have been 
 industriously augmenting their already tremendous 
 military resources, whilst fiercely competing in a 
 race with each other, half military, half commercial, 
 to extend their Empires and their markets in Asia, in 
 Africa, and in the seas of both Hemispheres. It is 
 little cause for wonder, then, if, in the array of such 
 rival forces, the cause of Free Trade stagnates, the 
 cause of International Friendship wanes. 
 
 The key to all rational estimate of European, and 
 even domestic politics, is to recognise that the 
 dominant factor in politics to-day is the passion of 
 national self-assertion, the struggle for national 
 primacy. For right or for wrong, the great nations 
 were all resolved to make themselves, without more 
 delay, as big as they can be made ; as formidable, as 
 extensive, as rich as science or energy can make 
 them ; or at least to tolerate no other nation bigger 
 than themselves. For this they are ready to sacrifice 
 everything at home or abroad their traditions, their 
 safety, their credit, and almost their honour. This, 
 and this alone, has planted in England the most 
 powerful Conservative Government ever seen in our 
 age. This has made the Republic in France frantic- 
 ally acclaim the fleets and servants of a despotic 
 Tsar. This has made Prussia aspire to be a great 
 naval power a great African power. This has 
 made Italy the enemy of France, Austria the friend 
 of the Turk, and Russia the indifferent witness to the 
 massacre of Armenian Christians. The private seeker
 
 232 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 of fortune may say, Rem^ quocunque modo rem. The 
 cry of the Nations is rather, "Empire, at whatever 
 cost, at whatever risk, by whatever folly ! " 
 
 There are, therefore, deep down in the heart of 
 the great nations of Europe, overwhelming national 
 tendencies which foster international jealousies and 
 neutralise cordial relations, even in matters of in- 
 tellect and taste. Physical science alone, with its 
 appeal to material fact, is exempt from the effect of 
 prejudice. The moral sciences, opinions, art, are far 
 too liable to suffer from the contamination of political 
 rivalry. And it behoves all those who (apart from 
 the strife of politics) devote their lives to the moral 
 sciences, to history, philosophy, criticism, or art, to 
 clear their own field, their own minds, from the 
 narrow prejudices of national chauvinism. Philosophy, 
 social and moral science, the pursuit of truth, the 
 creation of the beautiful, have no exclusive country ; 
 and they are often conspicuously fostered in the 
 smallest countries, as far removed as possible from the 
 roar of big capitals and the passions of dominant 
 empires. How many of the best minds, how much 
 of the immortal work of the world, came from solitary 
 retreats into which no passion of national vainglory 
 and jealousy was suffered to enter. Dante, Petrarch, 
 Tasso, Byron, Shelley, were exiles, or sojourners in 
 homes not their own. Erasmus, Descartes, Hobbes, 
 Locke, Diderot, Voltaire, Priestley, Gibbon, did much 
 of their best work in foreign lands or in distant retreats. 
 The philosopher, the historian, the poet, the romancer, 
 the artist, need always to have before them an ideal of 
 the best the best that ever has been the best that they 
 can give. And this best never is, never can be, in a 
 narrow sense, national. This is the true COSMOPOLIS !
 
 THE REGRETS OF A VETERAN 
 TRAVELLER 
 
 1887 
 
 WE are wont to smile over the fantastic but ex- 
 quisite egoism with which Mr. Ruskin in Presterlta 
 records his boyish reminiscences of travel ; but to any 
 one who can remember what Europe was some forty 
 years ago there come similar hours of despondency and 
 keen regret. Railways, telegraphs, and circular tours 
 in twenty days have opened to the million the wonders 
 of foreign parts. But have they not sown broadcast 
 disfigurement, vulgarity, stupidity, demoralisation ? 
 Europe is changed indeed since the unprogressive 
 forties ! Is it all for the better ? I have no theories, 
 no parable to take up, as Mr. Ruskin has ; nor do 1 
 doubt that Watt, Stephenson, and Wheatstone were 
 benefactors of mankind. But as I sit here, penned 
 in my Alpine nest by a snowstorm, a few vain regrets 
 will thrust themselves on the mind. 
 
 It is a moral change no less than a material change. 
 True, one goes by steam in place of coach or boat ; 
 and lovers of the beautiful and the characteristic may 
 well regret all that they lose thereby. But this loss 
 is not a moral evil, nor is it compulsory. Mr. Ruskin 
 can still drive (if it pleases him) in his own carriage 
 from Calais to Venice. I go myself not unwillingly 
 
 233
 
 234 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 by rail ; even though I can remember how delight- 
 fully one used to drive by the high road into Rouen, 
 Geneva, Milan, or Florence. Ah ! for the crack of 
 the whip as one galloped down those Norman glades 
 that shelve into the Seine, and for the sight of the 
 sun rising in gorgeous wrath over the chain of Mont 
 Blanc, as we toiled up the crest of the Jura in the 
 twilight ; for the white oxen who tugged as leaders 
 up the steep slopes of the Apennines, and the chat 
 with the village gossips at each post station ; the mid- 
 day halt, where one dived into castle, church, or 
 old courtyard, the postillion lore of many countries, 
 the chaffering for some local trifle, the queer but not 
 untoothsome supper, the antique furniture of the 
 salon^ the early walk before the horses were harnessed, 
 the local colour at every turn from morn till night 
 it is all gone. And we are carried now to Geneva or 
 Milan like a box of game from Aberdeen to London. 
 But there are changes far more profound. 
 
 Those who remember Europe before the Third 
 Empire and the great wars of the last five-and-thirty 
 years know how deeply the outward intercourse of 
 nations has been altered by all that has happened since 
 '48. The Englishman who travelled then did not 
 feel himself as in a mere time of truce in the midst of 
 a war of races. The frenchman was chatty, gay, 
 outwardly courteous to all, and inwardly full of 
 bright views of himself and his great nation. The 
 German gave himself no airs, being perfectly happy 
 if he could save some thalers by his superior informa- 
 tion, and willing at all times to impart to all he met 
 his inexhaustible stores of erudition and original views 
 on things human and divine. The Italian was not 
 a traveller. But the Italian or the Russian, if 
 we met him, was the easiest and most versatile of 
 travelling companions. Time was when travellers
 
 REGRETS OF A TRAVELLER 235 
 
 who supped at the same table could talk quite 
 naturally to each other in any language that served 
 best, when Englishmen did not stare at their country- 
 men much as undergraduates stare at "an out-college 
 man " ; when Frenchmen and Germans discussed the 
 beauties of the Rhine, and when it was not an 
 impertinence to address to a stranger a remark about 
 the weather. All that is over. Wars, annexations, 
 revolutions, race jealousies, railways, circular tours, 
 Harry and Betsy Jane, have made an end of that. 
 We consort with those of our own nation only, and 
 with much hesitation and doubt even with them. 
 Germans, Frenchmen, English, Russians, or Italians 
 take their pleasure sadly in foreign parts, and in strict 
 national lines. There are English, German, and 
 French resorts ; English, German, and French hotels 
 in the same place ; English, German, and French 
 tables in the same room. You may see English, 
 German, and French families pass many weeks 
 together in the same house, eat thrice a day at the 
 same table, and sit for hours in the same salons with- 
 out ever exchanging a chance word. This is not 
 from want of a common language ; for, as we all 
 know, Germans are usually as much at home in our 
 language as in any other, and most people who travel 
 habitually speak at least some French. No, it is 
 national and political jealousy, a deep consciousness 
 that neither sympathy nor fair judgment exists any 
 longer between the nations of Europe. Forty years 
 ago an Englishman, a German, a Frenchman, and a 
 Russian, who passed twelve hours together in the 
 same carriage or inn, were rather willing than other- 
 wise to exchange a few impressions. And such to 
 this day is the tone of the average American. While 
 all his European contemporaries have good reasons 
 for keeping their own counsel, our American fellow-
 
 236 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 traveller is as good-tempered as ever ; affable, self- 
 satisfied, and buoyantly at home. He has no disasters 
 in wars or in diplomacy to forget, no pretensions to 
 assert, and no enemies to fear. He has annexed no 
 provinces, paid no milliards^ fought no battles except 
 with his own dear brothers at home ; he is building 
 no fortresses, forging no guns, nor running amuck 
 through the Press of Europe. He is perfectly satisfied 
 with his own national position, nor does he doubt a 
 moment that any one can misunderstand it. He is 
 consequently as completely at his ease with foreigners 
 of every nation as a rational traveller ought to be, and 
 as forty years ago an English traveller used to be ; 
 and, as far as his meagre linguistic attainments carry 
 him, he is, nationally and socially, open to converse 
 with all whom he meets. 
 
 It is hardly in human nature to expect such ease 
 from a Frenchman. Sedan, Metz, Strasburg, and 
 milliards are eternally on his soul ; revolutions, 
 communes, proscriptions, and party animosities make 
 him as silent with his own nation as with others. 
 Political causes have led to a singular change. The 
 average Frenchman has lost his manners, and with 
 his manners his liveliness, his happy opinion of himself, 
 and his flow of speech. Out of his own set or party 
 he is morose, taciturn, uneasy, and ill-bred. Hazard 
 a few words about the weather, and his second 
 sentence will relate to the fogs of London (of which 
 he has read in his pet feuilleton) ; ask him to pass you 
 the mustard, and he will inquire if the favourite dish 
 of the English is still raw beef. If a German sits 
 down at the same table, you are almost glad to 
 observe that the knives and forks abroad are so blunt. 
 In short, the Frenchman conducts himself generally 
 like a man who has been declared a defaulter at his 
 club. The consequence is that the Frenchman abroad
 
 REGRETS OF A TRAVELLER 237 
 
 is too often a melancholy, silent, uncompanionable 
 man. 
 
 The German abroad is almost as reserved as the 
 Frenchman ; but it is not, at any rate, from wounded 
 pride. He is aware that by many he is not loved, 
 and he gently enjoys the sensation. He is quite sure 
 that intellectually, materially, and artistically he 
 stands before all the nations on earth, and, as he 
 knows that his claims are beyond dispute, he needs no 
 pretensions of his to assert them. The inexplicable 
 verve of the Frenchman, the versatile energy of the 
 Englishman, are very well in their way, but as 
 nations they are both second-rate. If they decline 
 to associate with him on this understanding he 
 declines to associate at all. The war with France 
 and the reconstitution of the German social economy 
 have produced a great change in German society. 
 The German middle class is no longer poor, and not 
 at all disposed to put up with anything second best. 
 It is more enterprising, more lavish, more cultivated 
 than the corresponding class in France j and if not 
 quite so numerous, or. so wealthy, or so restless as 
 that of England, it has far more real education, taste, 
 and industry. 
 
 The Germans, therefore, with their newly-acquired 
 wealth, their skill and general enterprise, are in 
 neutral countries like the Alps almost the rivals in 
 travel of the English. They spend nearly as much, 
 they are almost as numerous, they have everything 
 almost as good, and they are far more really accom- 
 plished travellers. It must be admitted that their 
 manners are not yet equal to their essential culture. 
 The German of the higher class is poor, he travels 
 little, and he does not form the manners of the 
 mercantile and professional class. The middle-class 
 Englishman, whose horror is the knife to the mouth,
 
 238 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 the spittoon in the salon^ and sundry eccentricities of 
 habit and dress, is too often disposed to undervalue 
 his German fellow-traveller, though in knowledge, 
 culture, and just self-respect the German is much his 
 superior. Now the middle-class German is far too 
 acute not to feel that, in refinement of manner and 
 person, both he and she have still something to learn, 
 but as a member of the nation which leads the van 
 of European civilisation he and she are far too proud 
 to acknowledge it. On the other hand, the English- 
 man of the middle class, who is apt to take the con- 
 ventional habits of his own aristocracy for real good 
 breeding, very much exaggerates such superiority in 
 refinement as he may happen to possess with respect 
 to his German neighbour. Wealth, power, know- 
 ledge of all sorts the German knows that he has. He 
 is not at all disposed to be snubbed by living man or 
 woman, nor in any place or way will he now be 
 relegated to the second class. The Englishman too 
 often has silly schoolboy prejudices about what he 
 calls " Continental habits," sometimes things perfectly 
 innocent and natural in themselves. Very properly, 
 Continentals decline to recognise the schoolboy 
 standard of manners, and the general code of what 
 is, and what is not, "swagger." Hence comes it that 
 travelling is very much less sociable and cheerful than 
 it was. Germans, French, and English practically 
 hold no intercourse. The Frenchman's tongue is 
 tied ; the German no longer instructs us with his 
 vast erudition and complacent affability ; the English- 
 man no longer comports himself as if every one were 
 glad to meet him, and as if it were every one's duty 
 to answer his questions and supply his wants. 
 Frenchmen, Germans, and English live side by side 
 in the same house, walk in the same paths, lounge in 
 the same verandah, and sit round the same fire as
 
 REGRETS OF A TRAVELLER 239 
 
 though utterly unconscious of the presence of each 
 other, without betraying by a word, look, or gesture 
 that they observe fellow - creatures around them. 
 When we travel now we all put " invisible caps " in 
 our bags, caps which make, not us invisible to others, 
 but all our fellow-travellers invisible to us. At any 
 rate, all persons of different nationality are not in 
 focus at all. We walk, talk, eat, and drink as if they 
 were mere Banquo's ghosts, invisible to the company 
 generally. A British peer at a racecourse could not 
 seem more absolutely unconscious of the presence 
 of his fellow-beings. 
 
 The Italian used to be, if one met him out of 
 Italy, the prince of travelling companions. He was 
 usually a very superior type of his nation, and his 
 urbanity, grace, and sweetness of temper were a 
 constant consolation and charm. The better speci- 
 mens of Italian gentlemen are still, perhaps, the most 
 agreeable of the European races. But one may have 
 too much of a good thing ; and the hordes of Italian 
 middle class who now pour across the Alps are not 
 always beautiful or good. The great Alpine railway 
 tunnels have opened a new world to the untravelled 
 millions of Northern Italy. No people in Europe 
 have felt the opening more certainly, as none are so 
 close to it ; and week after week the middle classes 
 of Milan, Genoa, Turin, Lombardy, and Piedmont 
 pour across the Alpine passes and through the tunnels 
 by tens of thousands. The districts bordering on the 
 great Alpine railways are now the main haunts of 
 Italian villeggiatura^ and the neighbourhood of 
 Lucerne and St. Gothard is an Italian summer colony. 
 It could hardly be expected that, with such a vast 
 increase in numbers, Italy could maintain the high 
 standard of the Italian traveller of old. Italianissimo^ 
 as I always profess myself, I confess that I am a little
 
 240 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 tried by the vacuous garrulity of these Milanese 
 burghers, their taste for colour in costume, now, 
 alas ! descended to the level of a Jamaica negress, 
 and the vapid insouciance of man, woman, and 
 child. As on the deck of the Lucerne steam- 
 boats, amid scenes perhaps the most exquisite and 
 sublime in Europe, I listen to the eternal grass- 
 hopper's chirrup of these bulbous, plain, black-eyed 
 signorine^ perpetually sucking caramels and lozenges, 
 with their oleaginous mamma, a bundle of ill-assorted 
 chiffons^ their obese papa with a big bad cigar in his 
 blackened teeth, and the faineant young men with 
 gewgaw jewelry, vile tobacco, and almost every 
 accessory of a tourist, except books, information, 
 enthusiasm, and interest, I confess I wonder if the 
 " Administration of Italian Railways " have really 
 benefited their countrymen by organising "no less 
 than fifty-one circular tours." But these Milanese 
 and Turinese happy families, if they carry little out 
 of the Alps either in mind or body, do no more harm 
 that the grasshoppers ; and one can only trust that 
 here and there in their crowds there yet lingers the 
 charming Italian fellow-traveller of our youth, with 
 far finer manner than the Frenchman, far more grace 
 than the German, and far more repose than the 
 Englishman, who was not without enthusiasm, know- 
 ledge, and energy, all infused with a certain sym- 
 pathetic sweetness which was his own peculiar note. 
 
 And our own dear countrymen, have they, in 
 these thirty or forty years, gained as much intellectu- 
 ally and morally as they certainly have in material 
 opportunity ? Let us trust so. Foreign, and especi- 
 ally Alpine, touring has become a highly organised 
 institution, brought to perfection by everything that 
 administrative genius, capital, and science can give. 
 Steam, electricity, human energy and ambition can
 
 REGRETS OF A TRAVELLER 241 
 
 hardly add another touch to the mechanism of travel. 
 The development of the circular tour system, of the 
 pension system, of the coupon system, the patience and 
 genius which now transport all the joys of Scar- 
 borough, Trouville, or Homburg up to the snow level, 
 have indeed transformed the Continent to the tourist. 
 Morally, we Britons plant the British flag on every 
 peak and pass ; and wherever the Union Jack floats 
 there we place the cardinal British institutions tea, 
 tubs, sanitary appliances, lawn tennis, and churches ; 
 all of them excellent things in season. But the 
 missionary zeal of our people is not always according 
 to knowledge and discretion. We are now planting 
 also in these foreign pensions that other English 
 institution, of which we are so justly proud our 
 beautiful family life. Thousands of charming British 
 children now make gay the foreign pension with their 
 innocent prattle and engaging frolics. But a word in 
 season to the judicious parent. The pension^ comfort" 
 able as it is, is not absolutely home ; the foreign 
 visitors who surround us there, though by a fiction 
 of international comity invisible to each other, really 
 have human eyes and ears. The innocence of youth 
 is but too apt to mistake conventional fictions for 
 facts ; and encouraged by the social attitude of their 
 elders, the children and youth of both sexes are ready 
 to treat the pension as their own particular home, and 
 themselves as its sole inmates. They romp, shout, 
 giggle, sing, and indulge in every sweet domestic 
 gambol with as much spirit as if they were really in 
 the dear old rectory or grange in Loamshire nay, 
 they add an extra touch of abandon and dash to their 
 romps. A family party who have been a week or 
 two in a pension are apt to take themselves to be the 
 little masters and mistresses of the whole establish- 
 ment, and any recent arrivals as mere intruders. 
 
 R
 
 242 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 They "go on,", as children say, not wholly un- 
 conscious perhaps of our presence, but sweetly 
 indifferent to our observant eyes. In these Alpine 
 chalets the floors are mere decks and the chambers 
 simple cabins. Every giggle, scream, or laugh is 
 audible from stem to stern, and the whole house rings 
 with these young voices and the merry thumps of 
 those young limbs. A particularly engaging family 
 of girls lodged exactly over my head would play 
 leapfrog with their brothers every morning from 
 5 to 7 A.M. and every evening from 9 to 1 1 P.M. 
 with many a shriek of delight and much rough-and- 
 tumble tussling, like a scrimmage "at the wall." 
 Perhaps it a little shortened our night's rest ; some 
 of us had just arrived straight from London ; others 
 were busy with letters j and some were to start at 
 daybreak. But what mattered it so long as the sweet 
 things had a good romp and a loud laugh ? And 
 then how engaging it is to hear them chuckling 
 and screaming till the salon de lecture rings with 
 their innocent mirth, or to watch them purloin the 
 English newspapers for papa and mamma, and to 
 listen to them by the hour strumming their exercises 
 in B flat or variations on the " Carnival de Venise." 
 And such is the artless confidence of childhood, such 
 its naive unconsciousness, that these dear babes will 
 rattle off their simple waltzes and marches in presence 
 of a score of Germans, of whom each third man and 
 woman is a trained musician. I confess that, when 
 after some hours of this schoolroom banging of the 
 keys the piano is at last free, and I have heard a 
 German virtuoso sit down, and with a few subtle 
 touches of a master-hand, even on that ill-used pension 
 instrument, remind us of what music really is, I feel 
 some patriotic shame at this practice of carrying the 
 whole schoolroom abroad.
 
 REGRETS OF A TRAVELLER 243 
 
 And how refreshing it is to see our British lads 
 stalking about with their ice-axes like conquerors in a 
 subject race, for all the world looking like young 
 Goths at Rome in one of the colossal historical 
 tableaux in the Paris Salon, or the Varangians at 
 Byzantium in Count Robert of Paris. What lofty 
 scorn gleams from their young calves for man, woman, 
 and child not British by birth, and for every man who 
 has never carried an ice-axe. The bowler in the great 
 school match is not a more superb sight at Lord's nor 
 the stroke of a winning eight at Henley. In this 
 matter of ice-axes perhaps the glorious practice of 
 glacier-walking is being a little discredited. An 
 English lad nowadays can no more venture to be seen 
 in Switzerland without an axe than he could show at 
 Henley without flannels, or at Cowes without his deck 
 shoes and yachting cap. But of the thousands of 
 striplings who now carry about these cumbrous and 
 murderous- looking weapons not all know how to use 
 them properly, and perhaps not one in three has ever 
 seriously tried them. Those who have tried it know 
 well that it takes no little practice before the axe is 
 anything but a danger and a nuisance to the young 
 climber. There is, we may be sure, a certain amount 
 of u swagger " about this ice-axe shop. Mere lads call 
 themselves " mountaineers " and chatter about " aretes " 
 and " couloirs " as if they were each Melchior Anderegg 
 or Christian Aimer. At evening and in bad weather 
 they stalk and lounge about the hotel terrace, moody, 
 terrible, and statuesque as " Red Shirt " and " Yellow 
 Tail " at the Wild West camp. They speak to none 
 but to other young braves, with whom they perpetually 
 mutter dark things about bad places, bergschrunds^ and 
 cutting the record by seventeen minutes. To call 
 raw lads out for a month's walk " mountaineers " is a 
 misuse of terms. The instinctive foothold on rock or
 
 244 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 ice acquired by real mountaineers is the education of a 
 lifetime begun in childhood. Not one Englishman in 
 fifty ever attains to it, even after long training j but 
 not one in a hundred comes near to it without a good 
 season or two. Real skill on a glacier or a peak, such 
 as every decent guide possesses, is only acquired now 
 and then by an Englishman after long years of labour 
 and practice. A good many English climbers come 
 in time to be nearly as steady as a third-rate " porter." 
 But the mere beginner, who sees a bad arete for the 
 first time, is about as helpful as a "sleeping-bag." 
 Nay, he is no more a " mountaineer " than his own 
 boots are. Good guides and stout porters take him 
 up peaks and passes fairly well, and usually bring him 
 safely down. An average healthy English lad, with 
 his four limbs well exercised, a sound constitution, a 
 perfectly steady head, and the nerve and handiness 
 which most English lads have got, can usually be 
 trained in a season or two to go safely over most places 
 with a good guide to lead and another good guide in 
 rear. It is a glorious and healthful exercise, by all 
 means to be encouraged. But to call them " moun- 
 taineers " is an abuse of terms. The common cowherd 
 boy on the pastures is an expert in comparison to 
 them, and they would break down in a few hours if 
 they tried to do the work of their own porters. The 
 mountaineer's instinct on rock and ice is an art quite 
 as subtle and complex as the art of the seaman or the 
 horseman. From the nature of the case an ordinary 
 English lad cannot have made, in his season or two, 
 more than a score or so of difficult ice expeditions. 
 To call oneself a mountaineer on the strength of 
 twenty days' practice is as ludicrous as it would be to 
 call oneself a seaman after a month's yachting in the 
 Channel, or to call oneself a horseman after twenty or 
 thirty mounts in one's whole life. How would our
 
 REGRETS OF A TRAVELLER 245 
 
 tennis-players and cricketers smile at a young French- 
 man who wished to enter himself in a county match 
 because " he had practised for six weeks last season at 
 Wimbledon or Lord's." Punch once gave us a portrait 
 of the foreign sportsman who had never caught a fox, 
 " but would try, mon ami^ would try." I think of it as 
 I see some of our young heroes crossing the Channel 
 with unsullied axe to face a glacier peak for the first 
 time in their lives and to try if they also are not 
 mountaineers. 
 
 A very melancholy abuse of a splendid pastime is 
 the common practice of forcing the pace. Climbing 
 mountains is perhaps of all forms of exercise the one 
 most closely associated with the sublime impressions of 
 nature, and with majestic and inspiring ideas. To 
 degrade it to mere muscular exercise, like boating on 
 the Cam, or running on the measured track, is the part 
 of a simpleton. Morally, poetically, and intellectually 
 a great Alpine expedition stands far above all other 
 forms of athletic enterprise. To think about " cutting 
 the record " is to show that one has no soul for any 
 but its lowest and most animal accompaniments. If 
 we go on thus we shall have gate-money and handi- 
 caps introduced into this most noble of pastimes. The 
 young athlete who is sweating upon a snow slope in 
 hopes of beating " Tomkins's time " has not a glance 
 for one of the noblest visions this earth contains. On 
 the summit of his peak he is gasping for breath, or else 
 he is fretting to be back at the hut ten minutes before 
 Brown. It is a wretched affair to waste poetry, 
 beauty, and nature in a common race which is far 
 more in place at Lillie Bridge racing-ground. In the 
 glorious days of old, when we carried our axes and did 
 our passes and peaks, we took our own time, stayed as 
 long as we could see anything, and drained to the last 
 drop the cup of inspiration which the Witch of the
 
 246 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Alps holds forth to him who seeks her humbly on her 
 topmost throne. But it is only now, as I potter about 
 slowly with a walking-stick, and no expeditions or 
 passes more, to the infinite contempt of my young ice- 
 axe friends it is only now, in the late autumn of my 
 travelling life, that I come to see all the infinite glories 
 of these Alpine crests, the untrodden regions of poetry 
 that yet lie round them to be known, the mystery of 
 these heaven-descending veils of cloud and mist, the 
 majesty of these towering masses, the unfolding drama 
 which is played round us night and day of man and 
 nature, for ever in contrast, for ever at war, for ever in 
 alliance. 
 
 Another wonderful development of the pension 
 system is the vast multiplication of English churches. 
 Forty years ago there were English churches in some 
 principal towns, and an impromptu service was often 
 arranged for a clergyman who chanced to be present 
 on a Sunday morning. Now the chapel or church is 
 almost as much a requisite of an hotel as a table d'hote. 
 Nay, every mountain chalet inn pretends to its "chapel" 
 and its "chaplain." It is very natural that English 
 tourists should desire a regular service on Sunday ; and 
 no one could blame Church people for seeking to 
 secure it. But, like all other things, this laudable 
 desire has its own dangers of being spoiled by over- 
 organisation. The congregations do not always re- 
 member the very peculiar conditions under which they 
 exist. They are not a real " congregation " at all 
 they have no corporate existence, no local duties or 
 interests, no social cohesion, no poor, no charities, no 
 parish. They are mere chance visitors, unknown to 
 each other, and with no common sentiment or interest. 
 The "chaplain" is not a real priest of a real parish. He 
 is merely a tourist out for a holiday, who gets his board 
 and lodging for his Sunday services. He knows nothing
 
 REGRETS OF A TRAVELLER 247 
 
 of his flock, has no parochial duties, no poor to help, 
 and no local interests. Any attempt to plant a sort of 
 quasi- congregational system, any tendency of the 
 " chaplain " to regard the hotel and its inmates as the 
 parish of which he is the spiritual pastor, any effort on 
 the part of the habitues and pemionnaires to make 
 themselves a society for the guarantee of moral and 
 religious order in the pension^ would rest upon a 
 thoroughly false basis and lead to nothing but dis- 
 appointment. It is to be hoped that the bishops who 
 license these chapels make stringent inquiries as to the 
 feeling of the people among whom they are placed. 
 To the natives and to the civil and spiritual authorities 
 of the country these chapels are too often centres of 
 schism and heresy, and not seldom are symbols of 
 bitterness and offence. The irritation of the local 
 churches and congregations is often stifled by the 
 eagerness of the landlord to secure British custom. 
 But we must hope that the bishops in licensing these 
 prima facie schismatical chapels will carefully remove 
 every cause of offence, and will satisfy themselves that 
 they do nothing to add a new anti-Christian feud. At 
 all times congregation and chaplain should remember 
 that they exist on sufferance, and that their raison d'etre 
 is peculiar. They ought certainly to be centres of 
 good works and charity to the poor and to the parish 
 in which they stand, and in all things seek the good 
 will of the Churches against which their mere existence 
 is a protest. It would carry orie very far if one tried 
 to explain how it comes that the Church of England 
 alone of all religious bodies in Europe fills almost every 
 village on the Continent and crowns every Alp with 
 its own rite and place of worship. Tourists of all 
 other nations can exist without their national service. 
 Catholics in a Protestant canton, Americans in Europe, 
 Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Orthodox Greeks wor-
 
 248 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 ship God in their own way without special chapels. 
 But where there is an English pension there beside it is 
 an English church. Is it that we English are the 
 only religious people in Europe ? 
 
 In things spiritual and things temporal alike our 
 modern mania abroad is to carry with us our own life, 
 instead of accepting that which we find on the spot. 
 The generation which planted London-on-the-Sea is 
 succeeded by the generation which has planted Paris- 
 on-the-Alps, Paris-on-the-Riviera, and Paris-on-the- 
 Bay-of-Naples. Long lines of mules file up the Alps, 
 carrying Saratoga trunks and cases of Veuve-Clicquot 
 to the level of the eternal snows. In every little village 
 inn we expect to be supplied with five courses at the 
 table d'hote tinned salmon, bottled peas, preserved 
 soups, and all the other horrors of the dear-and-nasty 
 sham Paris menu. It was pleasant of old, when one 
 reached a mountain chalet after a day's walk, to see 
 how the good-humoured host welcomed one to his 
 quaint salon^ with pictures of Napoleon, Tell, and 
 Winkelried, and his wife prepared a potage bonne femme^ 
 a kalbsbraten with potatoes, a mehl-speise^ or the like, 
 and a bottle of vtn du pays. One touched at those 
 moments on the native life of the place, one tasted the 
 local fare, and saw the homes of the people. It is all 
 over now. At 7000 feet above the sea, or in some 
 village of 500 thrifty peasants, we sit down in Grand 
 Hotels to a dinner which is a poor imitation of the 
 Palais Royal cuisine. What is the good of these 
 mirrors, gilt cornices, and plated centre-pieces, filled 
 with paste-board flowers, on the top of a mountain, or 
 in a valley swept twice a year by avalanches ? What 
 mortal can care for cotelettes d'agneau a la jardiniere 
 when he knows that lamb, sauce, vegetables, cook, and 
 dish are all sent in by contract from a foreign country 
 hundreds of miles off? After a month of foreign
 
 REGRETS OF A TRAVELLER 249 
 
 hotels we sicken of tinned vegetables, bottled sauces, 
 packed meat, spurious wines, canned fruits, gaudy 
 mentis^ and the whole apparatus of pretending to mimic 
 the Cafe Riche on the tops of the Alps or the shores 
 of the Mediterranean. We were far better off when 
 we had to put up every now and then with the over- 
 dose of oil of the Italian albergo or the rough-and-ready 
 roast veal of the Swiss gasthaus. Nowadays it is the 
 horrid sameness of one bad standard which haunts us 
 from Calais to Palermo. Ccelutn non vitam mutant qui 
 trans mare currunt. We go abroad, but we travel no 
 longer. We see nothing really of the people among 
 whom we sojourn. We never touch their lives. 
 They are not even our caterers or our servants. We 
 lodge in sham Grand Hotels, we take our meals of 
 sham Paris dishes, our food is a foreign import, we are 
 served by sham French waiters, and supplied by sham 
 French cooks. Everything we touch, or see, or eat is 
 a horrid kind of patent " notion " for making a thing 
 look what it is not. And all this fraud, pretence, and 
 artificiality in the midst of scenes the most lovely and 
 sublime which earth contains, among a people who 
 can barely keep off hunger, cold, and want by incessant 
 labour and unsparing self-denial. In a month or two 
 we shall have returned home to the weary round of 
 our cfitelettes a la financiere, and these frugal peasants 
 will be battling for life with the elements and their 
 ungenial soil, huddled in dark and fetid huts, watching 
 the rare visits of the sun above their gorge, fearing the 
 avalanche and the storm, wending through the wreaths 
 of snow to the village mass, wearing out their hard, 
 dull, dark lives, which we travellers no longer care to 
 touch even with the tips of our fingers.
 
 THE RIVIERA DI LEVANTE 
 
 1898 
 
 I OFTEN wonder how people of taste and sense can 
 continue to crowd into the Frenchified, vulgarised,- 
 and stuffy western end of the Riviera, when they can 
 find health, beauty, and quiet in the Riviera east 
 of Genoa, from which I write a few stray notes. It 
 is true that, on this side, there are no spots so warm 
 and sheltered as are many to be found between Nice 
 and San Remo. Nor are there the promenades, 
 hotels, gardens, and villas of Cannes, Monte Carlo, 
 and Menton. Invalids and votaries of society and 
 fashion keep strictly to the brilliant modern Baise, 
 which within the last forty years has spread itself 
 out from the Gulf of La Napoule to the Capo Verde 
 that screens San Remo. Those who have delicate 
 lungs, or who cannot live without the luxuries of 
 Paris and the gaieties of New York, naturally keep 
 westward of the Green Headland. But some people 
 are rather bored by Metropole Caravanserais of the 
 latest pattern, and find no charm in cosmopolitan 
 gamblers and bedizened mondaines from all parts of 
 the world, rolling along dusty boulevards in showy 
 barouches. We can see all this in the season in the 
 Champs Elysees, and it brings us no abiding joy. 
 Those who have sound lungs, good legs, and an eye 
 
 250
 
 THE RIVIERA DI LEV ANTE 251 
 
 for history and art should seek a little rest and enjoy- 
 ment in the true Italian* Riviera, east of Genoa, 
 which is still what Italy was in the days of our grand- 
 fathers picturesque, historic, old-world, sunny, and 
 natural. 
 
 Forty or fifty years ago, before the great trans- 
 formation took place on the French Riviera, when 
 Nizza, Villafranca, and Mentone were antique Italian 
 towns, and when it was one of the eccentricities of 
 Lord Brougham to like Cannes, all that seaboard 
 was a delightful land. Only a hundred years ago 
 Arthur Young had trouble to get an old woman and 
 a donkey to carry his portmanteau from Cannes to 
 Antibes. I can myself remember Cannes in 1853, 
 a small fishing village with a quiet beach, and 
 Mentone, a walled town with mediaeval gates and a 
 castle, a few humble villas, and the old Posta to give 
 supper to any passing traveller. It was one of the 
 loveliest bits of Italy, and the road from Nizza to 
 Genoa was one long procession for four days of 
 glorious scenery, historic remnants, Italian colour, and 
 picturesque ports. From the Estrelles to San Remo 
 this has all been ruined by the horde of northern 
 barbarians who have made it a sort of Trouville, 
 Brighton, or Biarritz, with American hotels and 
 Parisian boulevards on every headland and bay. First 
 came the half-underground railway, a long tunnel 
 with lucid intervals, which destroyed the road, by 
 blocking up its finest views and making it practically 
 useless. Then miles of unsightly caravanserais, high 
 walls, pompous villas, and Parisian grandes rues^ 
 crushed out every trace of Italy, of history, and 
 pictorial charm. No vulgarity of modern luxury can 
 wholly destroy the loveliness of the country itself; 
 and there are still to be found some bits round 
 Menton, Bordighera, and San Remo where the old
 
 252 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Italian charm survives. But these have to be sought 
 out and detached from the sea of pompous common- 
 place, as it is understood by the smart managers of 
 French and American hotels. 
 
 Those who care to know what the Riviera was 
 once must come east of Genoa ; where, though 
 something of the same process is beginning, the old 
 Italian character is still to be seen. I quite admit 
 that forty years ago the road from Nice to Bordighera 
 was the most beautiful and romantic in Italy, perhaps 
 in Europe. Since that coast has been Frenchified 
 and Americanised, it is so no more. The seaboard 
 from Nervi to Sestri di Levante (or, to put narrower 
 limits, from Camogli to Chiavari) has now taken the 
 first rank. I have known Italy now for five-and- 
 forty years, and have seen every part of it from 
 Bellinzona to Syracuse. But I know no district 
 which in natural loveliness, variety, and Italian local 
 colouring surpasses the country which lies round the 
 promontory of Porto Fino say that between Camogli 
 and Zoagli. Here are no " Metropoles " and " Con- 
 tinentals," with " electric lights, lifts, and 600 beds," 
 no circular boulevards, clubs, concerts, or races. But, 
 in a rocky seaboard clothed with profuse vegetation 
 and rising up into fine mountains, one finds a 
 succession of quaint old-world Italian ports and 
 townships, strewn with remnants of antiquity, 
 Roman, Saracenic, Mediaeval and Renascence, every 
 hamlet glowing with colour and luxuriant vegetation, 
 winding streets with arcades, loggias, and sanctuaries 
 at every turn, Genoese forts and Lombard campanili, 
 and all the picturesque confusion and luscious glow of 
 an ancient Italian town that has hardly changed for 
 a century or two. 
 
 The contrast between the climate of Menton or 
 San Remo and that of the Eastern Riviera is some-
 
 THE RIVIERA DI LEVANTE 253 
 
 thing extraordinary. Pulmonary cases are, of course, 
 more safe in the west. Yet for an active man in 
 good health almost every "health resort" between 
 Saint Raphael and Alassio has a somewhat enervating 
 effect. But the hillsides between Genoa and Spezia, 
 though much more open to cold winds, have a 
 thoroughly bracing air. I have walked over the 
 Highlands and the Alps, and I know almost every part 
 of the coast from the Estrelles to Spezia ; but no air 
 that I have ever tried surpasses in its dry briskness 
 the winter climate of the rocky promontories that 
 abut on the great Porto Fino headland. The climate 
 in good seasons has the double quality of singular 
 dryness with perfect lucidity and buoyancy. It has 
 that elastic effervescent tone which is so common on 
 the Grampians and the Alps, combined with entire 
 absence of moisture and a far more blazing and 
 continuous sun. Those who know the top of a 
 snow mountain in a hot summer noon have ex- 
 perienced the same union of radiant heat with cool 
 draughts of pellucid air. And for an active man in 
 sound health this combination of sunlight and ozone 
 is not only the most health-giving of all climates, but 
 one of the balmiest sensations that Nature offers to 
 the human frame. 
 
 From Porto Maurizio round to Spezia a distance 
 of nearly 130 miles the Italian Riviera exists still, 
 not seriously modernised by the fin de s'lecle^ but as 
 it was seen by " Doctor Antonio," by Ruskin, Byron, 
 and Shelley, and our forefathers in the last century. It 
 has the Italian colour, the free-and-easy, disorderly, 
 picturesque grouping of outline, still innocent of 
 modern " improvements " and the geometric archi- 
 tecture of the grande rue. The irregular narrow 
 streets, with no two houses of the same shape, height, 
 or colour ; the portici, or arcades, with their mediaeval
 
 254 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 columns and dark cellarage ; the frescoes on the walls, 
 the shrines and pictures of saints at every corner, lit 
 with lamps and decorated with flowers ; the chapels, 
 belfries, piazze, palazzi, and loggie ; the balconies 
 and terraces, adorned with aloes, myrtle, roses, 
 oranges, and cactus ; the brown fisherfolk in red 
 berette, the bare-legged vendors of maccaroni and 
 fruit all that makes Italy so dear to the painter and 
 the man of taste may still be found at its best in this 
 Eastern Riviera. The cosmopolitan luxury which wor- 
 ships at Monte Carlo has practically improved away 
 all this in the Western Riviera between Cannes and 
 San Remo. 
 
 ' The broad and lofty headland of Porto Fino is far 
 the most important promontory between Nice and 
 Spezia ; it stands many miles due south into the sea, 
 and, with the headland beyond Sestri, about ten or 
 twelves miles to the east, it forms a bay which has 
 much the look of a lake. The scenery both east and 
 west of Porto Fino has thus very much the sky out- 
 line of the fiords of Norway, or the western coast of 
 Scotland, not that of the open sea, as seen from 
 Monaco or Cap Martin. And, as the larger bays are 
 broken with a series of innumerable coves, the variety 
 of view is endless. Nor does any heavy sea, even in 
 tempestuous weather, break into these sheltered nooks. 
 There are few weeks, even in winter, when it is not 
 perfectly easy to boat about Porto Fino, but when 
 boating would be quite impracticable between Monaco 
 and San Remo. The famous Dolphin Harbour, which 
 gives its ancient name to the lofty promontory, still 
 confers a special character on the Riviera around it, 
 by varying the scenery, forming a vast natural break- 
 water, and multiplying the points of access both by 
 land and water. 
 
 In the extreme cove at the end of the eastern bay
 
 THE RIVIERA DI LEV ANTE 255 
 
 lies Rapallo, once a walled republic with an ancient 
 history, which is pronounced by Mr. Augustus Hare 
 now to be " incontestably by far the most beautiful 
 place on either Riviera. It is thoroughly Italian in 
 the character of its campaniles, cypresses, and little 
 rocky bays. Its natives are kind, civil, and respect- 
 able. Its walks are inexhaustible." Every word of 
 this description is strictly accurate. In the town, 
 and in the walks and drives within an hour or two 
 around it, are certainly to be found the most interest- 
 ing and lovely views on the entire Riviera, since the 
 ruin of the French side after annexation. The old 
 road from Nice to Mentone doubtless once surpassed 
 it, with the " Trophy " of Augustus, Eza, and 
 mediaeval Monaco ; but the charm of that wonderful 
 district has been boulevarded and casinoed out of all 
 memory ; and the genius loci has fled before the 
 horde of unclean punters and the painted fribbles who 
 represent the upper crust of Europe. 
 
 Jam pridem in Tiberim Syrius defluxit Orontes. 
 
 East of Genoa, as we approach towards Tuscany 
 and Rome, the historic record is more deeply graven 
 on rock, city, and tower, and it has been far less 
 obliterated and disfigured by the rage of vulgar luxury 
 and display. Here, for more than 2000 years, a long 
 succession of ages have left the marks of their civilisa- 
 tion, their religion, and their art ; and there are few 
 out of all those twenty centuries which have not left 
 visible traces. All along the coast we come on 
 continual fragments of the Roman Via Aurelia, 
 which was the highway from Rome to the Rhone. 
 The lines of this long and important road, with here 
 and there a bit of bridge, of embankment, of pave- 
 ment, are continually cropping up, often for only a few 
 yards, sometimes for half a mile or more.
 
 256 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 The great road was kept up all through the Middle 
 Ages, and it may be said never to have been abandoned 
 even for a century since the first construction. The 
 configuration of the seaboard, where mountains leave 
 hardly a ledge of ground between them and the sea, 
 made it practically impossible to change its course, 
 or to make a new road, as was the case with so many 
 of the Roman roads in other parts of Europe. The 
 necessities of the day compelled many repairs and 
 renewals. And he would be a bold man who could 
 assign precise dates to these antique and foot-worn 
 fragments of black limestone and marble. But for 
 essential purposes the patches of old road which 
 are seen so often are the actual remnants of the 
 memorable track, along which for 2000 years have 
 tramped consuls, cohorts, and armies of Rome, 
 Spaniards, Gauls, and Britons to the Eternal City, 
 pilgrims from the Far West to the tombs of the 
 Apostles, the Northern invaders of Italy, Lombards, 
 Saracens, Byzantines, and Normans, Petrarch and 
 Dante, and the wayfarers from Provence to Tuscany 
 all through the Middle Ages, and so on throughout 
 the French and Italian wars down to the age of 
 Napoleon. The noble road from Nice to Spezia, 
 along which we used to travel in the present century, 
 until the amphibious railroad in turn superseded it, 
 made havoc of the old Aurelian road of Roman and 
 mediaeval times, has crushed out much of it, and has 
 thrust more of it into olive grounds and vineyards out 
 of sight. But here and there bits of it crop up still. 
 Oh that those black stones could speak, and tell us 
 what they have seen. 
 
 All round the headland of Porto Fino the rocks are 
 studded with remains of Genoese towers, which have 
 defied Saracens, Pisans, and Normans, and almost every 
 bay in the last 2000 years must have been the scene
 
 THE RIVIERA DI LEV ANTE 257 
 
 of a sea-fight, a raid of pirates, or a border tussle. 
 The most picturesque of these forts is that which 
 defends Rapallo on the east, which " still has its 
 dungeons and its prisoners and guards. The ancient 
 republic of Rapallo has left some remnants of its 
 mediaeval structure even in the busy, cheerful, and 
 orderly little port into which it has shrunk. Frag- 
 ments of the city gate, transformed into a rococo 
 sanctuary, the base of the old Palazzo Publico, 
 monasteries and nunneries, an old palace or two, the 
 arcades with the earliest pointed arch, and four 
 campanili of renascence style, which, however horrific 
 to the' whole Seven Lamps of Architecture, make up 
 a group that only Turner could paint. Over the 
 portal of the principal church is a long inscription of 
 the sixteenth century, recording the finding of an 
 older inscription, which records the conversion of the 
 people in the first century, and the founding of the 
 church on the site of a temple of Pallas. The in- 
 scription, like most of such things, can as little be held 
 worthy of a place in a genuine Corpus Inscriptionum 
 as we can believe that the great Carthaginian led his 
 army over " Hannibal's Bridge," a mile orF, though 
 they serve to suggest to a simple and imaginative 
 people the vast layers of antiquity upon which their 
 lives are cast. 
 
 Every mile or two on this historic ground may 
 be found traces of the growth and battles of nations, 
 creeds, and rival civilisations. Hill-forts built by 
 Romans when they garrisoned their Chitrals and Ali 
 Musjids to curb the Afridis of old Liguria rocky 
 fastnesses which sought to stem the Lombard in- 
 vaders mountain strongholds wherein the scared 
 population of the seaboard took refuge on the sight 
 of Saracen and Turkish pirates the arsenals of petty 
 republics which fought first against Genoa and then
 
 258 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 as members of the Genoese Empire. Again, it is 
 some ancient monastery or hospice, sanatorium or 
 refuge, of an order of monks, mendicant or military 
 some secluded convent of early Lombardic structure 
 in a woody glen now and then a fragment of quaint 
 Byzantine work or the pilgrimage sanctuary on a 
 mountain spur that commemorates a gracious visit 
 of the Mother of God. And on each commanding 
 point a rococo Jesuit church in the debased manner 
 of the seventeenth century, or a palace of a Genoese 
 noble, built in the days of Rubens and Vandyke. Of 
 all these remnants of past glory and strife none can 
 compare in pathos with the ancient cloister of San 
 Fruttuoso, where lie in their solemn sarcophagi 
 centuries of Dorias, facing the city they served, 
 surrounded by the waters they were wont to sweep, 
 and guarded by tremendous precipices, deep in the 
 recesses of a wooded glen. 
 
 Here around Genoa, itself one of the grandest and 
 most fascinating cities of Europe, are spread out in 
 one of the richest and loveliest landscapes in the 
 world a series of historic remnants which suggest a 
 thousand memories and a crowd of problems yet 
 unsolved. And though the monumental record of 
 the Riviera is almost continuous from palaeolithic 
 times to Victor Emmanuel, there is no confusion or 
 discord in it ; nor has it yet been submerged by 
 modern hotels, villas, and boulevards. The only inns 
 are old-fashioned houses of a century or two ago. 
 The people are hardy, laborious, courteous, and 
 honest. What vital religion survives in Italy may be 
 seen here at its best. Cleanliness, comfort, and 
 decency are the rule and not the exception. It 
 knows not the penury of Lombard rice grounds, the 
 horrors of Sicilian mines, nor the mendicity and 
 thievery of the Neapolitan slums. Poor as is all kind of
 
 THE RIVIERA DI LEVANTE 259 
 
 classical music in Italy, one feels that the gift of vocal 
 melody is still not dead, but dormant and hibernating 
 in the mass of the people. And however vulgar are 
 the more pretentious forms of Italian art, and garish 
 as is the modern taste with its bourgeois thirst for 
 colour still, one can see that of the Western nations 
 of Europe, the soil of Italy is yet the true and natural 
 nidus of fruitful and spontaneous Art. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT, 1906 
 
 Alas ! alas ! this corner, too, of old Italy is going 
 the way of all else that was lovely, sacred, and historic 
 in Europe. American Grand Hotels, Monte Carlo 
 villas, Parisian boulevards have already invaded this 
 peaceful retreat of our old age ; and I am told that 
 my own praises of it have helped to swell the incursion 
 of our Northern barbarians. And now that new 
 disease, the pestilent motoritis^ has begun to make the 
 Riviera di Levante as foul, as noisy, and as dusty as is 
 the Riviera di Ponente at the height of its orgies.
 
 ECCO LA TOSCANA! 
 
 1904 
 
 A FASCINATING book has just appeared which has 
 stirred in me a thousand memories of pleasure, such as 
 can be but little known to men and women of the 
 present generation. The delights of the old Italian 
 vettura as a method of travelling are an experience 
 only possessed by those who are far past middle life. 
 Yet Mr. Maurice Hewlett, in his new book, The Road 
 in Tuscany^- though not a veteran, has given us a set 
 of vivid pictures of what real travelling was before rail- 
 roads, trams, Metropole hotels, and Mr. Cook's tours 
 had modernised, barbarised, and cockneyfied Central 
 Italy. In a delicious passage in one of his sweetest 
 books (Prcsterita, ch. vi.) John Ruskin describes the 
 joys of travelling by road exactly seventy years ago : 
 in the glorious times before "the poor modern slaves 
 and simpletons let themselves be dragged like cattle, or 
 felled timber, through the countries they imagine 
 themselves visiting." 
 
 Sono ancW io vetturino. At least I have descended 
 upon Italy along every one of the great Alpine roads 
 have driven along the Riviera from Cannes to Spezia 
 
 1 The Road in Tuscany . a Commentary. By Maurice 
 Hewlett. 2 vols., 8vo, profusely illustrated by Joseph Pennell. 
 London : Macmillan and Co. 2 is. 
 
 260
 
 ECCO LA TOSCANA ! 261 
 
 long before the railway blocked out the view from the 
 road when Cannes was a sleepy fishing village, Men- 
 tone a machicolated, gated, and walled city with a 
 mediaeval castle, and Genoa the most romantic of sea- 
 ports. I have driven over the Simplon to Milan and 
 thence to Verona ; from Bologna to Florence ; from 
 Parma to Ravenna ; from Leghorn to Rome, across 
 that weird Maremma. Ah ! it was fifty years ago and 
 more before you were born or thought of, my friend 
 Maurice and yet you have brought back to me the 
 full sense of glorious exaltation in the Italian travel by 
 road trasumanar significar per verba non si porrla. 
 
 I remember how a dear old lady said to me when I 
 was about to start on the most memorable tour of my 
 whole life, "Take care," she said, "to go by road. 
 There is no happiness in life to compare with an Italian 
 vettura^ drawn by four horses, and the one you love 
 best by your side ! " I was more modest in my 
 equipage. But I remember, as we crossed the Simplon 
 and opened on the valley of Domo D'Ossola, how our 
 vetturino sprang up on his box, cracked his whip, and 
 shouted " Ecco r Italia ! " 
 
 I had thought the supreme joy of the Italian vettura, 
 as Ruskin says, that which was "virtually one's home," 
 day after day, was an irrecoverable sensation, to be 
 reckoned with the few memories which only threescore 
 years and ten can give such as those other memories, 
 to have heard in their prime Rachel, Grisi, and 
 Lablache ; to have read David Gopperfield and Vanity 
 Fair month by month in their early shilling numbers ; 
 to have seen the British fleet under sails ; to have seen 
 French cathedrals yet unrestored ; and Rome as it was 
 seen by Byron, as it was drawn by Piranesi. Yet 
 Maurice Hewlett now shows us how, if we care and 
 are not "pressed for time," nor slaves to Baedeker or 
 Cook, we may see Tuscany still in the way that Milton
 
 262 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 and Goethe, Rogers and Turner, Shelley and Ruskin, 
 saw it : when men travelled to see the country and the 
 people, and were not shot like luggage through tunnels 
 from one museum to another, from one Grand Hotel 
 to the next, with hardly anything to remind them that 
 they had quitted Charing Cross. There are the 
 Tuscan roads, the hill villages, the towns of the plain, 
 the vetture still more likely now with two horses than 
 four or five but the vetturino is there, the Tuscan 
 folk are there still. And Maurice Hewlett will show 
 you how to find them. 
 
 Hewlett has some special qualifications for a book 
 like this. Ten years ago he published his first books 
 upon Tuscany. Ever since he has been a close student 
 of Italian history, poetry, art, topography, and national 
 character. And he is one of the first living masters of 
 the entire Dantesque cycle in all its breadth and its 
 depth. He calls his book The Road. It is a whim of 
 Maurice to give us conceits on his title-page, and 
 sometimes, I fear, inside as well. But there is a great 
 deal more than the Road in this book. First, there is 
 history not drum and trumpet or Heralds' College 
 history but the memories which have moulded races, 
 families, cities, and lands. Then there is very acute 
 and searching race history, what they call anthropology 
 or demology, ingenious musing upon local and generic 
 types, often, we fancy, too ingenious and fine-spun, as 
 the demology of local types usually becomes. Then 
 there is topographical realism about what you see and 
 do and hear on the road, as you may find it in Horace 
 Walpole, Boswell, Eustace, and Laurence Sterne. 
 
 Our "carriage-gentleman" has the same horror of 
 railroads as Ruskin himself. Pierre Loti wrote an 
 elaborate book about India from Benares to Ceylon 
 without having met a trace of anything British. And 
 Maurice Hewlett trots leisurely along the highways
 
 ECCO LA TOSCANA ! 263 
 
 and byways of Italy, from Ventimiglia to Orbetello, 
 without once having seen or heard of a railroad in those 
 parts. This is how some of us saw Italy fifty years 
 ago. But it can be done to-day " in the mind's eye," 
 Maurizio ! Dante and the Dantesque legend meets us 
 in almost every page. Though he rails at museums, 
 galleries, and art critics in general, Hewlett has a good 
 deal to say about pictures, statues, tombs, and more about 
 baptistries, campanili, and cloisters. But the essential 
 aim of the book is to paint for us the roads, the way- 
 side humours, the hostelries, the calvaries, the gardens, 
 the rivers, bridges, castles, and abbeys, the old-world 
 stories of romance and crime, the garrulous peasants, 
 and the bathycolpous glaucopid Tuscan girls who make 
 our roadster amorous and poetic. What is the authority 
 for giving to Dante's Beatrice green eyes ? The only 
 green-eyed charmer we ever heard of was Becky Sharp 
 in Vanity Fair. But by these green eyes hangs a tale. 
 Hewlett seizes, reiterates, and illustrates that which 
 is no doubt the true key of Italian character, the real 
 explanation of Italian history the fierce local patriotism, 
 that flame of pride, jealousy, egoism, that politico, del 
 campanile, which from the age of Boethius to that of 
 Pio X. has coloured the art, the manners, the language, 
 and the annals of the Peninsula. No observer has ever 
 gone more truly home to the intense burgher jealousy 
 of the Italian townsman than does Hewlett. And I 
 know no other witness who can testify to the same 
 municipal pride in a petty hill village, and in the wards 
 of a decaying city. Few travellers can tell such 
 experiences in centres so small and insignificant. We 
 all know how the possession of a single picture made 
 one ward of Florence to be called the Gay Borough. 
 I remember the scorn of the true Trasteverini for the 
 populace of the Left Bank, in days before modern 
 Rome had again become a new colluvies gentium. And
 
 264 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 I have heard a Syracusan, proud of his ruins, call the 
 people of Palermo quei Saraceni. But few of us have 
 witnessed the feuds of Siena between Giraffa and the 
 Goose : the Snail and the Dragon. But then few of 
 us have ever known Livia, " The most vividly beautiful 
 girl I have ever seen," says this enthusiast after beauty, 
 whose effect " was that of a moonlight night, compact 
 as that is, of ivory pallors and velvet darks, at once 
 clear and cold, severe and calm." This is poetic but 
 vague : all about a girl in the streets of Siena, who 
 may have been clear and calm, but was certainly neither 
 cold nor severe, who had no hat, white stockings with 
 loose slippers, a green skirt, and green eyes. Well ! 
 if she had green eyes, I should not care a fig for her 
 myself. And Dante's Beatrice, I know, had dark eyes 
 not green. 
 
 The history in this book is continuous and masterly. 
 It is history of the right sort the unlocking of social 
 and intellectual movements, the unearthing the roots 
 of that which we can see to-day, that compound of 
 languor and passion ; of love of beauty and tolerance 
 of squalor ; that intellectual subtlety and that proneness 
 to grovel in the petty, the childish, and the mean. 
 How often Hewlett's tales of mediaeval Tuscany 
 remind us of Greek life in our old classics, of the 
 scuffles between rival towns in Thucydides, the wild 
 games in Aristophanes, the religious festivals, the 
 materialist worship, the local deities, the poetry, the 
 fissiparous and dispersive genius, the restlessness and 
 the sloth, the desperate burgher passion, the incapacity 
 for national cohesion. 
 
 The appendices resume in a more regular and con- 
 tinuous form the flashes of historical insight which 
 scintillate along every page of Hewlett's book, touching 
 as with deep sunset glow the ruined tower, the smoke- 
 stained and bedaubed tomb of a saint, the mediaeval
 
 ECCO LA TOSCANA ! 265 
 
 ioj the gloomy and ordurous lane in a rotting 
 hill town. In smaller type at the end of the chapter 
 it has pleased our author to paint many an episode of 
 the old times, and here and there a new " Little Novel 
 of Italy." Especially to be noted are the following : 
 the history of Florence, of Siena, of Arezzo ; the 
 biographies of Castruccio Castracane, of Ser Martino 
 and Donna Berta, types of the mediaeval tyrant and 
 the Florentine burgher. But it is not history as we 
 find it in Guicciardini, Sismondi, Roscoe, Ranke, 
 Symonds, or Creighton. It is history according to 
 Maurice Hewlett, which is a different thing, a singu- 
 larly idiosyncratic thing, very fascinating and very 
 edifying I find it. 
 
 The distinctive and rare note of this book is its 
 intensely personal point of view. No writer, unless it 
 be Ruskin, has ever taken us to a country, so bent on 
 making us see what he sees, knowing what he knows, 
 enjoying what he enjoys, scorning what he scorns. 
 The two volumes are saturated with personal tastes, 
 fancies, dreams, loves, and whimsies. That is what a 
 book of travel ought to be, as were the Sentimental 
 Journey^ Child e Harold^ Corinne^ Relsebilde^ Pr&terita. 
 Else we had better have a mere gazetteer or Herr 
 Baedeker's truly exact, careful, and useful handbooks. It 
 is all very well to sneer at Baedeker ; but I am certain 
 that Hewlett has carried a red book at some time or 
 other. I can remember the days before Baedeker, and 
 how many a sight we missed, how much time we lost 
 for want of knowing distances, times, and where to 
 find the key. It is this personal note in every line of 
 this book which makes it so delightful to read so 
 troublesome to " review." He puzzles his critics, just 
 as Ruskin did. They "don't know where to have 
 him." Exactly so ! It is not a history of Tuscany ; 
 nor a guide-book to Tuscany ; nor a Tuscan romance ;
 
 266 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 nor a study of Tuscan art j it is simply Maurice 
 Hewlett in Tuscany. 
 
 This personal note reaches its acme in the two 
 chapters, " The World is a Garden " and " Thoughts 
 in Church," devoted to the passionate humanism of 
 the quattrocento and to the gross paganism in the wor- 
 ship of the Renascence and ever since. Why Hewlett 
 should go out of his way to describe the Renascence 
 as " the theory that the world is a garden " we will 
 not inquire. The Renascence is simply Humanism 
 i.e. the sense, or the discovery, that the proper business 
 of mankind is man ; the essential knowledge is to 
 know himself and the world in which he finds himself; 
 the true aim of human life is to make the best of man 
 and of the world. That is a perfectly reasonable creed, 
 leading, by its emancipating force, to glorious results, 
 and ending, for want of a true philosophy and an 
 adequate faith, in horrible corruptions. But why use 
 the weak French term Renaissance for a movement 
 which was essentially European, but began in Italy, 
 and was promulgated by Italians ? Years ago I insisted 
 that Renascence is the proper term nearer to the Italian 
 origin, and free from the suggestion of outlandish, 
 petty, and affected meaning which a French word 
 implies. 
 
 It is a welcome relief to find this book almost free 
 from the excessive Hewlettism that modern variant 
 of euphuism of which we were getting somewhat 
 weary. The intensely vivid and pictorial speech which 
 has made him one of the very first prose writers of this 
 age is now being mellowed and refined. Nothing is 
 lost in brilliancy by softening the more violent tropes. 
 Santa Maria Novella has a facade " bitingly personal " ; 
 San Michele is "a church of delirium"; Orvieto is 
 " naked " ; Siena is " a tiger-moth swooning on a rock." 
 How a church can bite, can swoon, strip, and go mad.,
 
 ECCO LA TOSCANA! 267 
 
 we have to imagine. I know these venerable fanes 
 pretty well ; but I never saw them at these gambols, 
 nor do I see the analogy between one of the vastest 
 cathedrals in Italy and a moth. They were all rather 
 unsuccessful attempts of Italians to acclimatise an 
 architecture for which they had no real genius. And 
 so, I gather, does Hewlett think. But where does the 
 mad dog or the tiger-moth come in ? My dear 
 Maurice, if you would only be a little less cryptic, 
 you would be the finest writer of English prose of 
 this age. 
 
 One of the most charming most important 
 chapters is the last, " The Heart of the Country." It 
 is concerned with the folk songs, the people's poetry, 
 still as pure, as native, as pathetic as ever. The 
 people's poetry of Tuscany is not only one of the most 
 beautiful forms of living art, but by its union of delicacy 
 and tenderness it is one of the most piercing revelations 
 of national character. Alone it serves to redeem the 
 taint of so much blood, lust, treachery, affectation, 
 meanness, which stain Italian annals and manners. 
 These rispetti 1 have known and loved ever since I 
 first read Dante with Aurelio Saffi once Triumvir in 
 Rome, in the year 1850. Hewlett is right in finding 
 in this truly indigenous poetry " the heart of the 
 country." 
 
 One must not overlook the wonderful realism and 
 vitality of the illustrations by Joseph Pennell. Their 
 profusion illumines and explains almost every page. 
 Every aspect of Tuscany is recorded here cities, towers, 
 churches, roads, rivers, bridges, gardens, villas, foliage, 
 landscapes, ruins, lanes, and porticoes. I know not 
 which to admire most, the refined pen-and-ink sketches 
 of buildings, gardens, and hill-crests, or the powerful 
 chalk drawings of vaulted interiors and sombre alleys. 
 They have the gift of truly depicting the architecture,
 
 268 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 a gift which so few painters, not even Turner, chose 
 to cultivate, which they leave to scientific architects 
 such as Ruskin. To my eye, these drawings, with all 
 their photographic truth of form, too often magnify 
 the scale, by Prout's artifice of diminishing the figures 
 which measure the buildings. But on the whole they 
 reproduce Tuscan sights with marvellous truth and 
 force.
 
 A PILGRIMAGE TO LOURDES 
 
 1896 
 
 AFTER my visit in last September to Paris and to 
 Monsieur Laffitte at Cadillac, I went on to Pau to 
 perform a pilgrimage at the birthplace and ancestral 
 home of Henri IV. ; and thence to Lourdes, which I 
 saw on two occasions during the autumn pilgrimages. 
 A visit to Lourdes is very much to be recommended 
 to those who care to understand France of to-day and 
 Catholicism as it is. I cannot pretend to have studied 
 the matter very deeply I do not believe that there is 
 anything deep to study. I give my impressions of a 
 coup tfceil for what they may be worth premising 
 only that I have known the French peasant for fifty 
 years, and I think I am entirely clear of any Protestant 
 or anti-Catholic bias. 
 
 Any one who goes to Lourdes expecting to see 
 anything like what M. Zola saw, or, at least, what 
 he paints in his sensational book, will be rudely dis- 
 illusioned. I saw no trains loaded with the sick and 
 the dying, the halt and the blind, the ecstatic and the 
 paralytic : I saw no spasmodic emotion, and heard no 
 agonising prayers and hymns. The priests and monks, 
 the "sisters" and "mothers" of whom there were 
 thousands, were very much the same quiet and 
 businesslike people we see in any Catholic country, 
 269
 
 270 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 or even in the Isle of Thanet or round Arundel in 
 Sussex. The great mass of the " pilgrims " were 
 ordinary holiday-makers in their best suits, enjoying a 
 few days' trip in a lovely country, and steadily working 
 round the various devotional functions with entire 
 satisfaction, with a determination to do it all thoroughly, 
 and see all that was to be seen, and hear all that was 
 to be heard. 
 
 I do not at all mean that there were no sick, no 
 lame, no excitement, no ecstatic prostrations, no 
 church-going, no hymn-singing. The various churches 
 were crammed ; the services were continual ; the 
 congregations heartily and reverently joined. But the 
 sight-seeing, the booths, the shows of the fair were 
 quite as well attended ; the picnics were as gay and 
 as many as the booths ; and the prevailing air was that 
 of a Bank-holiday crowd enjoying a very pretty scene 
 in an exquisite spot. Some sick, halt, and afflicted I 
 saw, but they were rare exceptions. Out of 20,000 
 happy and healthy people whom I noticed, I could not 
 count more than ten visibly marked with disease, and 
 about as many who could not walk without crutches 
 or help. Out of some thousand or so seated in quiet 
 meditation round the grotto of the Madonna, but two 
 or three behaved otherwise than as reverent persons 
 ordinarily behave in Church. One group interested 
 me much. 
 
 Two brothers and two sisters all in deep mourning, 
 the girls very young in a paroxysm of distress and 
 spiritual exaltation, flung themselves on the pavement, 
 fervently praying with arms extended in the form of a 
 cross, until the exhausted body fell forward prostrate in 
 the dust which they kissed with passionate veneration. 
 The worshippers round the grotto, bright with a gilt 
 image of Mary, but itself blackened with the smoke 
 of a thousand candles, and hung round with votive
 
 A PILGRIMAGE TO LOURDES 271 
 
 offerings, seemed like ordinary worshippers in any 
 Catholic church. Nearly a thousand crutches were 
 hung upon the miracle -haunted rock, which the 
 resident physician assured a friend of mine to his 
 certain knowledge were the crutches of lame persons 
 who had been healed at the grotto. We visited the 
 sacred spots and duly drank of the healing water, in 
 spite of a somewhat sinister smell of carbolic round 
 the well. Some pilgrims duly bathed in the bath 
 where "swimming was strictly forbidden " and one 
 young girl, ecstatically declaring herself healed as she 
 came out, was fervently kissed by those present in 
 spite of her dripping gown. 
 
 It was a delightful scene. Lourdes itself is a spot 
 exquisitely beautiful, standing at the mouth of two 
 grand valleys which run up to the Pyrenean mountains, 
 and crowned by the donjon keep of an ancient feudal 
 castle. The rushing Gave, in two lucent torrents, 
 sweeps round the precipitous rocks on which stand 
 village and churches ; and all round are fine hills 
 clothed with green pasture and woods, and topped 
 with craggy pinnacles. Beyond the grotto are delicious 
 avenues of shady chestnut trees beside the swift river, 
 with grassy banks and mossy knolls, wherein were 
 hundreds of picnic parties, who having done the round 
 of churches and holy places were refreshing themselves 
 with wine and cold meat. The whole town and the 
 country round it were bright and gay with summer 
 visitors and pleasure parties. The streets were lined 
 with thousands of shops, booths, open-air stands and 
 sheds for the sale of relics, mementoes, images, models 
 of the grotto and the churches, copies of the Madonna, 
 rosaries, photographs of Bernadette, and all the myriad 
 trumpery of a religious fair. I am bound to say that 
 more tasteless trash was never collected together. I 
 looked with a sinking heart in vain for a single article
 
 272 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 that was other than mere conventional and machine- 
 made rubbish ; and I could not help remembering 
 that our word tawdry comes from the cheap finery 
 that used to be bought at the fair of St. Etheldreda. 
 A fair the whole thing was. Hotels, eating-houses, 
 wine- shops, drinking -gardens and saloons, lodging- 
 houses, stalls for confectionery or various viands and 
 drinks, itinerant vendors, toys, panoramas, dioramas, 
 vehicles, landaus, omnibuses and bath-chairs crowded 
 the streets and lanes. The whole scene was like 
 Margate or Brighton on Whit Monday, though very 
 much prettier and not quite so rowdy. I see nothing 
 to blame in this. If 20,000 hardworking men and 
 women are taken to a mountain village for forty-eight 
 hours, they must eat and drink and be housed. They 
 can't be in church or grotto the whole time. They 
 will naturally need to be occupied and amused, and 
 they will wish to carry home some trifling record of 
 their visit. 
 
 Protestants to whom religion means silent com- 
 muning of the Soul with its Maker, are wont to 
 treat scenes like this as somewhat profane, or, at 
 least, unspiritual. But Catholics, we know, take a 
 much more genial, sociable, spectacular, and all-in-the- 
 day's work conception of religion as they certainly 
 did in the Ages of Faith. The scene at Lourdes 
 recalled to me the mediaeval pilgrimages and sacred 
 fairs at which trade, society, amusement, art, and 
 literature made up quite half of the attraction. So it 
 is with the pilgrimages to Benares, and so it was with 
 the festival at Olympia. The dioramas, panoramas, 
 shows, and trinkets at Lourdes vividly reproduce the 
 miracle-plays, the gaieties, gossip, and fairings of 
 Canterbury, Reims, Loretto, or Rome. The interest 
 of Lourdes lies in a spontaneous revival of a mediaeval 
 pilgrimage of course without the heroic enthusiasm
 
 A PILGRIMAGE TO LOURDES 273 
 
 and unreasoning passion of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem 
 or Rome in the eleventh century, but far less worldly 
 and unholy than pilgrimages were wont to be about 
 the sixteenth century. 
 
 The pilgrims had come from every part of France, 
 almost of Europe from the farthest coast of Brittany, 
 from the seafaring people of Normandy, Belgium, and 
 Holland, from the plains of Lombardy, and the 
 mountains of Auvergne, from the Basque seaboard, 
 and the valleys of Northern Spain. Huge caravans in 
 four heavy trains came from Tours and the Loire ; 
 others from Lyons and the Rhone ; others from 
 Toulouse, Carcassonne and the Mediterranean coast. 
 Fishermen, shepherds, ploughmen, vine-dressers, with 
 the miscellaneous crowds of towns big and small. 
 Nineteen out of twenty were peasants, most of them 
 from very rude districts ; and not one man and 
 woman in a hundred seemed to belong to the cultivated 
 classes. It was the most motley, picturesque, and old- 
 world gathering I ever beheld, even in Italy or the 
 Tyrol of thirty years ago. 
 
 The three memorial churches were crowded to 
 suffocation, and the various functions were continued 
 hour by hour. Each excursion party had its own 
 hours ; sometimes the church was reserved for men, 
 sometimes for women ; at other times for all comers 
 alike. The worshippers showed great zeal and 
 devoutness ; and the hymns and chants were shouted 
 out from a thousand throats with pious but unmusical 
 energy. Every fourth or fifth man or woman seemed 
 to have some ecclesiastical function, or to belong to 
 some sacerdotal or monastic order ; and all the parties 
 and groups were carefully piloted by religious guides. 
 
 The pilgrimage to Lourdes has now become an 
 institution of a very mixed kind organised on business 
 and professional lines, and naturally becoming more 
 
 T
 
 274 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 and more a summer holiday. To a great extent it is 
 a gigantic Cook's Tour, admirably managed and 
 carried on with immense energy by cures and devout 
 persons in every corner of France. We have seen 
 our Anglican canons and priests get up successful 
 religious holiday-tours and turn their clerical societies 
 into excursion agencies. The French priesthood has 
 done this on a far larger scale. From every corner 
 of France they send up excursion trains of parishioners, 
 whom the railways convey at fabulously low rates, 
 and whom the canny Bearnais are delighted to house, 
 feed, and supply. The Bishop of Tarbes has poured 
 a veritable Pactolus through his simple diocese with 
 the usual results ; and the Lourdes pilgrimage has 
 now become one of the biggest excursion businesses 
 on record. 
 
 But it is far from being even yet a mere Crystal 
 Palace or Margate at holiday time. It has given an 
 immense stimulus to Catholic ceremonial throughout 
 France ; and it has been a real fillip to the Church. 
 It is evidently quite spontaneous and has worked up 
 from below. The higher ecclesiastical authorities did 
 their best to damp it down, and for nearly twenty years 
 they succeeded in doing so. The present generation 
 has seen in France a recrudescence of theological 
 ardour, and it has forced the Church to give official 
 sanction to the pilgrim business at Lourdes. Those 
 who fancy France to be utterly Voltairean would be 
 rudely undeceived if they saw Lourdes. At least half 
 the excursionists are visibly believers ; and the fisher- 
 men of Brittany and Belgium and the herdsmen of the 
 Cevennes and the Pyrenees are fervent and devoted 
 Churchmen. About half of the excursionists are no 
 doubt ordinary holiday trippers, most of them having 
 no objection to wear an emblem or to listen to a 
 mass. Here and there are scattered a few fanatical
 
 A PILGRIMAGE TO LOURDES 275 
 
 pilgrims who expect to be cured or who believe in a 
 cure. And here and there are a few tourists on cycles 
 or a few curious observers as I was myself. Altogether, 
 I came away with the impression that a pilgrimage 
 to Lourdes was a sight from which one might learn 
 many things, both of the past and the present ; and 
 that he who thinks the Catholic Church to be 
 decrepit or the Catholic Faith to be moribund in 
 France is very much in error. As to one half, Lourdes 
 is a glorified Cook's excursion office for rural France. 
 As to the other half, it is a very solid and thriving 
 phase of the revived Catholic Church.
 
 L'ESPRIT FRANCJAIS 
 
 [Reply to a request from the Gaulois of Paris to classify the writers 
 test express the French esprit.] 
 
 LONDRES, Janvier 1899. 
 
 MONSIEUR En recevant votre gracieuse invitation 
 je rponds a la question : Quels sont les ecrivains 
 du passe qui ont le mieux exprime le vrai esprit 
 francais ? Je m'amuse a compiler une Academic de 
 trente " Immortels" veritables, ranges en trois decades. 
 Les auteurs du premier ordre sont deja couronnes par 
 le jugement des siecles, et 1'opinion e*clairee en Angle- 
 terre est en pleine harmonic avec celle de la France. 
 
 I 
 
 i. Moliere. 2. Voltaire. 3. Corneille. 4. 
 Racine. 5. Rabelais. 6. Buffbn. 7. Bossuet. 8. 
 Montesquieu. 9. Diderot. 10. Pascal. 
 
 II 
 
 i. Fabliaux du Moyen-Age. 2. Froissart. 3. 
 Montaigne. 4. Vauvenargues. 5. F6nelon. 6. 
 Madame de SeVigne". 7. La Fontaine. 8. Le 
 Sage. 9. Rousseau. 10. Balzac. 
 
 Ill 
 
 i. Victor Hugo. 2. BeVanger. 3. Due de Saint- 
 Simon. 4. P.-L. Courrier. 5. A. de Musset. 6. 
 George Sand. 7. Th^ophile Gautier. 8. Alexandre 
 Dumas pere. 9. Sainte-Beuve. 10. Jules Michelet. 
 
 Agreez, Monsieur, mes meilleures salutations. 
 
 FREDERIC HARRISON. 
 276
 
 A WORD FOR ENGLAND 
 
 1898 
 
 As a real patriot, I grieve to see how the ancient and 
 beloved name of my Fatherland is being driven out of 
 use by the incessant advance of Imperial ideas. A 
 politician nowadays hardly ventures to speak of his own 
 country by its historic name. When Mr. Morley, or 
 Sir William Harcourt, or Mr. Asquith true English- 
 men if any men are go down to address their con- 
 stituents, they are corrected by an angry roar if they 
 chance to speak of England or of Englishmen. And 
 they hasten to apologise to the electors who send them 
 to Parliament for the slip of the tongue which led them 
 into the blunder of calling our country "England," 
 and of referring with pride to the deeds of our country- 
 men by the style of " Englishmen." It has come then 
 to this. It is a " slip of the tongue " a " blunder " 
 to speak of our country by the name which it has made 
 glorious for a thousand years, or to call oneself a 
 countryman of Cromwell, Shakespeare, Elizabeth, the 
 Henrys, the Edwards, of Harold, of Alfred. One of 
 the curious results of the late schism has been the 
 driving of Liberal politicians out of England, with the 
 melancholy consequence that they are warned off 
 calling themselves Englishmen at all. Lord Rosebery, 
 Sir H. Campbell -Bannerman, and Mr. Bryce, were 
 277
 
 278 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 brought up as Scots, in the habit of calling themselves 
 "Britons"; though why Home- Rulers should call 
 the United Kingdom " Britain," I fail to see. One 
 always expects Scots to call themselves " Britons," if 
 they cannot well say " Scots." They can hardly apply 
 the term " Briton " to Nelson and Wellington, to the 
 two Pitts, to Walpole, Cromwell, and Wolsey. If 
 they think it finer to talk of " Britain " rather than 
 England, they must do so. They cannot help being 
 Scots, as Dr. Johnson said. I should think the term 
 "Scot" was better than "Briton," if they must assert 
 the race tradition. But I very much object to their 
 forcing us to drop the venerable name of " England," 
 and the proud title of " Englishmen." England is my 
 native land, and the name is good enough for me. 
 Irishmen and Scots can call themselves what they like. 
 So may Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and 
 Rhodesians. But, in spite of all temptations to belong 
 to these mighty nations, I remain an Englishman. I 
 am proud of the name and of its 1300 years of record. 
 And I pity the Englishman who is ready to drop it, 
 like a Smith or a Brown who has inherited a family 
 estate, and takes on a name which suggests broader 
 acres and more baronial pretensions. 
 
 What are we, citizens of no mean country, to call 
 ourselves, if we give up the style of Englishmen ? I 
 object most positively to " Briton." I am not willing 
 to call my native land " Britain." Why " Briton " 
 and " Britain " ? These terms are wrong on every 
 ground whether of history, of constitutional right, of 
 language, or of justice. They deliberately exclude 
 Ireland and Irishmen. They are even used in order 
 to exclude Ireland and Irishmen. The style 
 " England " no more excludes Ireland than it excludes 
 Scotland, or Canada, or Australia. The use of the 
 style "Great Britain" a truly silly and almost comic
 
 A WORD FOR ENGLAND 279 
 
 compound name of our small island was invented to 
 appease the jealousy of Scots when they accepted the 
 Union. And it was acquiesced in by Englishmen in a 
 spirit of good-nature and almost as a joke. It was used 
 in diplomacy, in Georgian poetry, and in tall kinds of 
 rhetoric. But we Englishmen never seriously took to 
 "Britain" great or small in the stress of life. 
 Nelson would have scorned to signal " Great Britain 
 expects every man to do his duty." The poet never 
 said " Britain, with all thy faults I love thee well ! " 
 Let us imagine the bathos of correcting the "slips of 
 tongue " in the Laureate's " Ode to Wellington." 
 Try this : " The last great Briton is low." " For this 
 is Britain's greatest son." If the Wesleys were Irish, 
 this would be ridiculous. But " Englishman " and 
 "England" may properly describe every subject of our 
 Oueen, and every part of her dominions. 
 
 Ever since the Union of Ireland, through the whole 
 of this century, the use of the style " Britain " to 
 describe the United Kingdom has been a misnomer. 
 It has been bad in law, false in history, unjust to one 
 of the three nations, and utterly anomalous in any point 
 of view. Scots have insisted on it, because it gratifies 
 Scotch pride and snubs Irish pride. It is a real offence 
 in a politician, whether he be Home-Ruler or Unionist, 
 to allow Scotch pawkiness to jockey both England and 
 Ireland out of the running. One cannot say whether 
 Home -Rulers or Unionists are the greater sinners 
 against their own principles, when they use the terms 
 "Britain" and "Britons," though they mean the 
 United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 
 and all the subjects of Her Majesty. "Britain," 
 which is supposed to include both Wales and Scotland, 
 most distinctly shuts out Ireland ; and every time they 
 use the term " Britain " to denote the Three Kingdoms, 
 politicians are giving fresh offence and just offence
 
 280 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 to Irishmen, and justify the claim for a full recognition 
 of Irish nationality. If English Home-Rulers do this, 
 they are plainly minimising the claim of Ireland to be 
 an equal member of the composite State. If Unionists 
 do this, they are treating as a nullity the Act of Union 
 with Ireland. Irishmen may very fairly say " Whilst 
 politicians, whether Liberal or Conservative, combine 
 to ignore Ireland in speaking of the United Kingdom, 
 we shall continue to cry out that Ireland is treated 
 as a dependency, and not as a constituent part of the 
 Crown ! " There is no answer to this. And it is a 
 great deal more than an accident of speech. It is too 
 true that not a few of those who talk about Britain, 
 when they mean the United Kingdom, deliberately 
 choose to give a prerogative vote to England and 
 Scotland. But that Mr. A. J. Balfour, or Mr. John 
 Morley, should talk of " Britain " when they mean 
 the Queen's Realm, is enough to make the blood of a 
 patriotic Irishman tingle in his veins. , 
 
 It makes my blood tingle, as a patriotic Englishman, 
 when I see the silly, unhistoric, and bombastic term 
 " Briton " supplanting the ancient and grand name of 
 " Englishman." All that is truly great in our poetry, 
 in our history, in our language, and our household 
 words centres in "England." England is the home 
 of our Monarchy, our Parliament, our Government. 
 In England is the centre of finance, commerce, army, 
 navy, art, and literature, almost as much as Paris is 
 the centre of France, far more than Prussia is the 
 centre of Germany, or Rome the centre of Italy. I 
 do not assert that this fact is enough to compel other 
 nations under the Crown to accept " England " as their 
 common title, if they refuse to do so. But it shows 
 how absurdly inadequate is " Britain " to give that 
 common title. If "England" is to be tabooed, what 
 are we going to call our country ? It is ridiculous to
 
 A WORD FOR ENGLAND 281 
 
 say "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and 
 Ireland," every time we wish to describe the Queen's 
 Realm. It is a pitiful case for a people if they cannot 
 agree upon a handy name for their own Fatherland. 
 Frenchmen can speak of France, Germans of Germany, 
 Italians of Italy, Russians of Russia. It is a sound 
 and noble form of national pride. Are we to be 
 forbidden to speak of " England," or else to be driven 
 to the cumbrous periphrasis of the " United Kingdom, 
 and so forth " ? Germany, Italy, and Russia are made 
 up of many composite states and nationalities, having 
 different histories, habits, and even dialects and laws. 
 But they can all consent to be known by the common 
 style of Germany, Italy, or Russia. If the subjects 
 of our Queen cannot accept a common style, there 
 must be something ominously wrong in our aggregate 
 realm. 
 
 Even if we could use in practice the preposterous 
 sentence which is the legal and formal style of the 
 Three Kingdoms, what about England over the 
 ocean ? We have lately been told how important and 
 vast a part of the whole nation is Canada, Australia, 
 South Africa, and scores of lands in both hemispheres. 
 Great Britain is a speck on the vast area of the lands 
 which acknowledge Victoria. Why are these little 
 islands to give their name to the huge congeries of 
 lands and peoples which obey our Queen? If Scots 
 cannot accept " England " as the national style, just as 
 Welshmen have done, and Canadians and Australians 
 have done, by what right can Scots force on Canadians, 
 Australians, and the rest a new-fangled name which 
 exclusively belongs to these islands ? The hundred 
 nations, races, and tongues which formed the Roman 
 Empire, all called themselves Romans, and were proud 
 of that name. It was a perpetual source of strength. 
 Even Byzantine Greeks for ten centuries called them-
 
 282 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 selves Romans, and Mussulmans still call Constantinople 
 "Roum." That was a real Empire, and a signal 
 example of a national nucleus giving its historic name 
 to a composite realm. If our Empire refuses to do 
 the same, I shall doubt its reality and its vitality. 
 There is in Europe a very ominous type. The 
 subjects of the Emperor who sits so uneasily in Vienna 
 refuse to call themselves "Austrians." The Dual 
 Monarchy has no common name. And publicists are 
 now discussing "the breaking-up of the Austrian 
 Empire." An empire, to which its own subjects 
 cannot agree to give a national name, is not in a 
 sound and abiding state. 
 
 Of course the Imperialists of the Forward school 
 desire to sink "England" in "Empire." But what 
 is the national name of this Empire to be ? Why 
 British any more than Pictish or Jutish ? It is a thing 
 like Napoleon's Empire or that of Philip II., an 
 accident, a passing anomaly. How does one feel a 
 common patriotism with Klondike and Mashonaland ? 
 England has had a thousand years of organic life and 
 glorious record. The Empire of Pathans, Klondikes, 
 Mashonalands, and Ugandas is a thing of yesterday. 
 Who can say where it will be to-morrow ? I want 
 something more definite, more organic, more per- 
 manent to satisfy my ideas of a Fatherland. I have 
 that in England, in my birthright as Englishman. I 
 will let no Scot, no Australian, no Rhodesian swagger 
 me out of that name Who says " Little England " ? 
 I say Great England. It is great enough for me, and 
 for all true Englishmen,
 
 ON A SCOTCH REPLY 
 
 1898 
 
 ON returning from Italy I have been amused to learn 
 that a sect of Scotch patriots have taken seriously to 
 heart a little plea for England which I shot off home- 
 wards one day when I felt unusually exhilarated by 
 the glow of the Southern Sun. I was indulging in a 
 gentle jest at some of my Sassenach friends ; but the 
 last thing I expected was to be charged with want of 
 sympathy for Scottish nationality. It has always 
 nlled me with the liveliest interest and affection. I 
 am myself Scottis ipsis Scottior, Ever since, as a 
 schoolboy fifty years ago, I spent some months in the 
 Highlands and every part of Scotland, I have felt the 
 most hearty enthusiasm for Scottish history, poetry, 
 nature, and traditions ; I know every corner of 
 Scotland, I have dear Scottish friends, and have entire 
 faith in the indestructibility of Scottish nationality. 
 If blood had anything to do with sentiments, it so 
 happens that I am anything but a mere "Saxon 
 churl." On the father's side I descend from Angles 
 of the Midlands : by women I happen to have Welsh, 
 Irish, and Scotch blood in my veins. I am a nationalist 
 pur sang. And the Positivist Review in which I wrote 
 is in a special sense the advocate of true nationalist 
 patriotism ; and its Editor, Professor Beesly, like my- 
 283
 
 284 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 self, is continually insisting that Patriotism is one of 
 the first of public virtues, and that real patriotism must 
 be national, local, and historic. My "Word for 
 England " was a protest against swamping our ancient 
 fatherland in a congeries of boundless tracts without 
 any national cohesion. And one might as well call 
 Mr. Chamberlain a "Little Englander" as think me 
 to be afflicted with any English arrogance. 
 
 I fear that it was imprudent on my part to drop 
 a little friendly banter into a discussion which arouses 
 such heat, but of course there is a very serious and 
 complicated question underlying the point which I 
 raised, perhaps in too light a heart. The constant 
 use of the name " Britain," I said, is ending in robbing 
 us of the name of " England." But, quite apart from 
 that, " Britain," as now used, is both inaccurate and 
 inadequate. It is inaccurate because it displaces the 
 legal, official, and constitutional title of these realms. 
 And it is inadequate because it ignores and not 
 seldom purposely ignores the other constituent 
 nations and peoples of the Queen's dominions. I 
 am the last man living to wish to force on these 
 nations and peoples the style of " Englishman " and 
 " England," if they object to it. But in like manner 
 I protest against forcing on them the style of " Briton " 
 and " Britain." I should have thought that my 
 " Word for England " would entirely appeal to such 
 hearty Scots as the Reverend David Macrae and his 
 friends. We both plead that England should be 
 English and Scotland should be Scottish. I have the 
 warmest sympathy with these excellent patriots in 
 their gallant efforts to keep alive the sentiment of 
 Scottish nationality, Scottish individuality, and Scottish 
 sentiment. Our cause is the same. But when they 
 seek to sink both Scotland and England in " Britain," 
 when they wish to swamp this island in traditions of
 
 ON A SCOTCH REPLY 285 
 
 mere savages, when they clamour to impose this bar- 
 barous style on the English-speaking subjects of our 
 Queen all over the globe then I say that national 
 patriotism is carrying them too far into what is both 
 offensive and absurd. 
 
 I have seen the use of " Britain " defended by 
 arguments which are false in history, bad in law, 
 wrong in philosophy, and ridiculous in common-sense. 
 It is said that by Treaty and Act of Parliament this 
 Realm is properly described as " Great Britain." 
 That is untrue. It was true from A.D. 1707 until 
 1801. Since 1801, the proper title of this Realm is 
 the " United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland." 
 That is by Article i of the Act of Union, 39 & 40 
 Geo. III. c. 67. For ninety-eight years this latter 
 style has been the legal title of Her Majesty's dominion. 
 The style " Great Britain " had a shorter currency, 
 and it was legally surrendered by the Scottish repre- 
 sentatives in the two Houses at the Union with 
 Ireland. Having by the Act of Union with Ireland 
 in 1801 surrendered the title assumed in the Act of 
 Union with Scotland in 1707, the Scottish people 
 have no claim whatever to impose the obsolete style 
 on England and on Ireland. Those who appeal to 
 international Treaties and Acts of Parliament are 
 flagrantly defying the last Treaty and Act which is 
 still in full vigour. The people of Wessex or Strath- 
 clyde might as well appeal to their ancient history, 
 and ask us to tear up the latest great Constitutional 
 settlement. 
 
 It is said that " Great Britain " includes Ireland. 
 That is untrue. Every single article of the Act of 
 Union with Ireland (1800) speaks of the "United 
 Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland," of the 
 t; Parliament of the United Kingdom," of his 
 "Majesty's subjects in Ireland" and his "Majesty's
 
 286 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 subjects in Great Britain." In no single article does 
 this Act use the term " Great Britain " to include 
 Ireland. And the Act of Union with Scotland, 1706, 
 in no single article uses " Great Britain " to include 
 Ireland. The Act 9 Anne, c. 6, speaks of "exports 
 from Great Britain into Ireland." The official title 
 of the Sovereign after the union with Scotland was 
 "Oueen (or King) of Great Britain, France, and 
 Ireland." Ever since the union with Ireland in 
 1801, it has been "King (or Queen) of the United 
 Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland." It may be 
 said that this is official, legal, constitutional language. 
 But the plea for " Great Britain " is itself official, 
 legal, and constitutional, or rather it pretends to be. 
 If we turn to scientific nomenclature we may read in 
 Dr. Murray's New Dictionary that " Britain " is the 
 proper name for "the whole island containing England, 
 Wales, and Scotland with their dependencies." 
 Neither in law nor in correct language does " Great 
 Britain " include Ireland. And my point is that it 
 is too often used to exclude Ireland. 
 
 We have been told that the ancients included 
 Ireland in " Britain." That is untrue. The Greeks 
 and the Romans called Ireland lerne and Hibernia ; 
 and the whole current of ancient geography limited 
 " Britain " to our own island and often opposed it to 
 Caledonia, as any one can see who will turn to Sir E. 
 Bunbury's History of Ancient Geography or W. Smith's 
 Dictionary of Geography. But the true question is, 
 not what style is used by the Greeks and Romans, by 
 poets, or in popular talk, but what is the legal, official, 
 and Parliamentary title of our country. Most certainly 
 it is not " Britain " nor " Great Britain," for which 
 there is no basis except in loose habits of speech. To 
 appeal to Treaties and to Acts of Parliament is absurd, 
 for they tell the other way. By what Treaty, by
 
 ON A SCOTCH REPLY 287 
 
 what Act, by what international or public agreement 
 did Englishmen, Welshmen, Scots, and Irishmen ever 
 agree that the formal style of their country should be 
 " Britain," or agree to call themselves " Britons " ? 
 Yet the Petitioners talk of Treaties, Acts, and 
 Rights ! 
 
 What is so laughable is that this appeal to formal 
 styles, rights, and laws comes from those who are 
 habitually violating all these at once. Mr. Macrae 
 says that " the proper title of the United Kingdom is 
 Britain." He might just as well say that "the proper 
 title of Edinburgh is 4 Auld Reekie.' " The proper 
 title of the United Kingdom is stated in 39 & 40 
 Geo. III. c. 67, and it is not " Britain." Even before 
 that Act, from 1707 until 1801, it was not " Britain " 
 but " Great Britain," and these sticklers for official 
 titles should not clip the Queen's English. If we are 
 always to speak by the card and any equivocation in 
 national titles is to undo us, we ought to talk of the 
 "Great British Army," which our foreign rivals 
 would find rather comical, and always refer to Mr. 
 Balfour as the " Leader of the House of Commons of 
 the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland." 
 That is a mouthful, but it is strictly official, and 
 these gentlemen appeal to Acts of Parliament. If it 
 is to be a matter of loose talk, who made the term 
 " British " the " proper title " ? We Englishmen, 
 Welshmen, and Irishmen have never agreed to it ; 
 and even Scots, if they insist on using it, ought to 
 say " Great British," and not British. They can use 
 any cant nickname they like, but " British " to my 
 ear is a silly nickname. It suggests painted savages, 
 scythed chariots, and Queen Boadicea. 
 
 Happily, the mass of sensible Scots in 1800 con- 
 sented to surrender the term " Great Britain," or 
 rather to merge it in a new title, the legal and official
 
 288 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS . ... 
 
 authority of which is unimpeachable. Unluckily, 
 that legal title is rather awkward and cumbrous for 
 ordinary use. It is no doubt true that a convenient 
 common name for our vast Empire is rather a want, 
 and my object when I first wrote was to point this 
 out. Whether all the peoples within it across the 
 seas can agree to call it " English," as all our neigh- 
 bours do and will do, I am not greatly concerned. 
 But with the most lively sympathy for Scottish nation- 
 ality, and hearty approval of its patriotic champions, 
 I cannot consent to their forcing on us Englishmen 
 and on all the many millions of subjects of our Oueen 
 the term " British," which to my ear connotes some- 
 thing barbarous, something tribal and local, and which 
 at times has an almost comic suggestion.
 
 THE SCOTTISH PETITION TO THE 
 QUEEN 
 
 1898 
 
 I HAVE been favoured with sundry copies of a Petition 
 to the Queen from her Scottish subjects, dated I3th 
 November last, signed by David Macrae and others. 
 I had not previously heard of this document nor of its 
 signatories ; but as I suppose the first name to it is 
 that of the reverend gentleman who has recently 
 mistaken a few words of my own in so curious a way, 
 I venture to submit to him some remarks thereon. 
 I need not repeat that with the wish of patriotic 
 Scotsmen to cherish their ancient nationality, to 
 be extremely jealous that the historic name and 
 individuality of Scotland should not be merged and 
 smothered in any other nationality and name, I am 
 in most hearty sympathy. And my simple " Word 
 for England " was put forth in a kindred sense ; and, 
 without wishing to impose the name of England on 
 others, I asked merely that it should not be merged 
 and smothered by Englishmen at home. 
 
 The Petition to the Queen relates to a formal 
 title as defined by public law, and consequently must 
 be worthless if it be itself inaccurate and loose in its 
 own language and references. Now English publicists 
 are amazed to find how little this Petition corresponds 
 
 280 u
 
 290 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 with the legal learning, the precision, the common 
 sense which we always expect from public men in 
 Scotland. The Petition asserts that in 1707 the 
 official title of the Sovereign and the Realm was 
 changed by law, and was settled for ever ; and it 
 prays that this official title may now be strictly 
 observed. It calmly ignores the notorious fact that 
 in 1 80 1 by the same law, and in the same constitutional 
 way, the official title of the Sovereign and the Realm 
 was again changed by law and was settled for ever in 
 a new way. Do the Petitioners mean to tell us that 
 the Act of Union of 1801 was mere waste-paper? 
 They demand the revival of an official title which 
 was superseded 98 years ago, and pray for the abroga- 
 tion of that title which has never been challenged 
 during the present century ? Queen Anne is dead : 
 and a good many things have happened since so that 
 the Titles and Acts of Her Sacred Majesty have been 
 somewhat amended and modified. 
 
 The first sentence of the Petition professes to cite 
 the Union of 1707. I turn to the Revised Statutes 
 (2nd edition, 1888) i. 787, for we have nothing to do 
 with Preliminaries and Treaties : the Act of Union 
 of 1707, as amended and now in force, to the under- 
 standing of a lawyer, governs the whole, and, so for 
 as official titles extend, is final and decisive. Now, I 
 find that the first sentence of the Petition is a slovenly 
 arid quite inaccurate paraphrase of the First Article 
 of the Act of Union of 1707. That Act was amended 
 and modified so far as the official title of the Sovereign 
 and the Realm is concerned by the Act of Union of 
 1 80 1. I have both Acts and the Petition before me 
 as I write. And I assert that the Petition wholly 
 ignores the later Act and wholly misquotes the earlier 
 Act. It is a pity that, in approaching the Throne on 
 so solemn an occasion, the reverend gentleman and
 
 SCOTCH PETITION TO THE QUEEN 291 
 
 his friends could not have secured the help of that 
 accurate learning and scrupulous precision for which 
 Scottish jurisprudence is justly famous. 
 
 The petitioners are wont to claim the Act of 
 Union of 1707 for the official use of the term 
 " Britain " and " British." It so happens that the 
 Act, even supposing that it had not been superseded 
 on this head by the Act of 1801, does not once 
 contain the term " British " from beginning to end, 
 nor does it use the term " Britain " apart from " Great 
 Britain." "Oh, but," they say, "we use the terms 
 4 Britain ' and ' British ' for short in everyday speech, 
 and every one knows what we mean ! " Yes, but 
 the Petition is not dealing with short names or every- 
 day speech, but with formal titles as strictly defined 
 by constitutional law. That is just the slipshod way 
 in which the whole Petition is drawn. It cites an 
 Act of Parliament without noticing another Act by 
 which it was modified and superseded ; and it mis- 
 quotes the language of the Act itself, though the sole 
 point in dispute is a matter of strict language. 
 
 I come to a point on which I will try to be 
 serious, though it is too funny for words. The 
 Petition as sent to me bears on the cover a grand 
 woodcut that professes to be a new and improved 
 version of the Royal Coat of Arms and so forth. I 
 am no herald, but I have had, in pursuit of history, 
 to dabble a little in that abstruse science. Anything 
 more comic than this work of art I never saw. It 
 blazons "over all, on an Inescutcheon of Pretence," 
 the Arms of Hanover ! Prodigious ! as Dominie 
 Sampson would shout. Do the Petitioners assert that 
 Her Majesty is now Queen of Hanover ? Have they 
 not heard that, from June 1837, the Arms of Hanover 
 were (very naturally) removed from the Royal Shield ? 
 Do they pretend that our Sovereign is to this day a
 
 292 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 feudatory of the German Emperor, or a Pretender to 
 the Crown of Hanover ? What do they mean ? Do 
 they know the elementary rule of Heraldry that all 
 minor titles are merged in Royalty, and that no 
 subordinate arms can be quartered or mingled with 
 Arms of Dominion ? And these sticklers for Heraldic 
 titles perpetrate a blunder which makes the very 
 Unicorn turn round and grin "like a Cheshire cat" ! 
 
 I come to the chief point of the whole Coat as 
 amended, on which I confess that I tread as if incedens 
 per ignes suppositosl. mean the grand coat of Scotland 
 <?r, the lion rampant gules^ within a double tressure 
 flory counter-flory of the last. I have such genuine 
 admiration for this beautiful creation of the herald's 
 art, and such a fascination for its historic traditions, 
 that I would not seem to smile at that noble beast, 
 caged as he is in a double tressure flory counter-flory. 
 But what on earth do the Petitioners mean by 
 doubling this royal carnivore, by setting him in the 
 first and fourth quarters, and by kicking the poor, 
 half-starved lions of England into a back seat in the 
 second quarter ? No doubt it is meant to assert that 
 Scotland is the " predominant partner " in the United 
 Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. I shall not 
 attempt to dispute it. But heraldry in the art of 
 quartering has to deal with legal inheritances and not 
 with the wealth, acreage, or achievements of families. 
 What then is meant by the claim of the double Lion 
 rampant gules ? And what is meant by setting the 
 Scottish Unicorn as dexter supporter and banishing to 
 the sinister side the English lion, who looks grumpy 
 enough ? One can only suppose, from the herald's 
 point of view, that it means that the Sovereign 
 represents primarily and directly a Scottish family, 
 and tacks on the coats of her English and Irish 
 inheritances as subordinate quarterings.
 
 SCOTCH PETITION TO THE QUEEN 293 
 
 Was there ever such childish nonsense in a school- 
 boy's caricature ? Does it mean that Her Majesty 
 represents the House of Stuart and not the House of 
 Hanover ? Let the Reverend David Macrae take care. 
 He is dabbling in treason. Does he mean to lead the 
 Clan Macrae again to Derby ? Does he mean to 
 chuck over the Act of Settlement as well as the Act 
 of Union with Ireland ? Is this Petition another 
 phase of that tomfoolery about the rightful heir to the 
 throne being a foreign Prince who claims Stuart 
 descent ? The throne of these realms is settled upon 
 the descendants of the Electress Sophia. The Electress 
 Sophia was the daughter of the King of Bohemia, and 
 the wife of the Elector of Hanover. She was not a 
 Stuart, except in blood, as were scores of men and 
 women. In law, in heraldry, and in common sense, 
 a woman who marries, and certainly one who marries 
 a foreign prince, cannot represent the family from 
 which she descends, but only the family into which she 
 marries. The Electress Sophia was not, legally and 
 heraldically, a Stuart, either by birth or by marriage. 
 The Crown has been settled on her descendants, and 
 consequently is not settled on a Stuart. 
 
 Supposing that she had been a Stuart by birth, 
 would that make Queen Victoria a Stuart, or chief of 
 the House of Stuart ? How came James Stuart to 
 have any claim to the throne of England ? Well, 
 because his great-grandmother was a Tudor daughter 
 of Henry VII., and descended from Plantagenets, 
 Kings of England. The throne of these islands has 
 descended since the Conquest to one House after 
 another through married women, who on entering a 
 new House have entered a new family and borne a 
 new name. The same devolution which took the 
 royal title to the Scottish Stuarts, took it from them 
 to the Hanoverian House (vulgarly called Guelph)
 
 294 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 just as the Scottish Stuarts took it through women 
 from Welsh Tudors, and they from English Plan- 
 tagenets, and they from Normans and Angevins. 
 There is therefore not the smallest reason to pretend 
 that Her Majesty represents Stuarts or any Scottish 
 family more than she represents Welsh Tudors, or 
 English Plantagenets, Normans and Angevins. By 
 descent she traces her family through them all ; but 
 by law and the constitution she represents the House 
 of Hanover. And if Mr. Macrae attempts to dispute 
 it, he may end yet, like some of his Highland cousins, 
 on Tower Hill. 
 
 They died for Scotland, true to the memories of 
 that ancient kingdom. He will die for " Britain," and 
 with his last gasp will forswear the land of his fathers, 
 and claim allegiance to a lot of painted savages. We 
 are the true patriots. We stand up for England and 
 its ancient name and glorious memories. I am sorry 
 to learn that Scotsmen can be found who wish to sink 
 Scotland and its grand traditions in a style which is 
 too often used in the way of swagger or the way of 
 mockery.
 
 IDEAL LONDON 
 
 ADDRESS GIVEN AT LONDON UNIVERSITY, 1898 
 
 Now that you have heard so much of London in the 
 past and in the present, of London a thousand years 
 ago, and of London and its new County Council, of 
 the art, the science, the poetry, the schools, the 
 churches of London, I am bidden to speak to you of 
 " Ideal London," which I understand is London as 
 it might be, as it should be, as it shall be. 
 
 Neither the subject nor the title of this lecture is of 
 my choosing, but I willingly accept the task. And 
 I can imagine that some of you may be saying 
 Ideal London is an impossible London ; an unpractical, 
 unreal, visionary thing ; of no use to man or woman ; 
 an idle day-dream, which need not be intruded on 
 serious students and laborious research. Do not be 
 too sure of that. An ideal is a standard at which we 
 aim, the hope of things not seen, that which we yearn 
 to make ourselves and our lives, for the things we see 
 are temporal (saith the Apostle), the things not seen are 
 eternal. Without ideals we grow into fossils, drones, 
 brutes. What is the good of study, what is the need 
 of research, unless it be to know, in order to improve, 
 to leave the world better than we found it, to attain 
 to a true and well-grounded progress ? And can there 
 be progress unless we see clearly some goal at which 
 we ought to arrive, however slow be our course, how- 
 
 295
 
 296 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 ever laborious the study with which we prepare it and 
 forecast it. As the poet says : 
 
 We live by admiration, hope, and love. 
 
 Morality, religion are based on ideals. Without ideals 
 there would be no hope, and without hope, neither re- 
 ligion, nor aspiration, nor energy, nor good work. A true 
 ideal is no dream, no idle fantasy. It is the justifica- 
 tion of study, and the motive of all useful endeavour. 
 
 If I am asked to speak of London as it might be, 
 my only claim to occupy your attention may be that 
 London is my birthplace, and for nearly sixty years 
 has been my home ; that I have watched the growth 
 and rebuilding of London for two generations, whilst 
 it has increased its area four or five times and its popu- 
 lation two or three times. I have seen the rise of the 
 Houses of Parliament, the Royal Exchange, the 
 National Gallery, the British Museum, the whole of 
 the new towns at Paddington, Kensington, Chelsea, 
 and Maida and Netting Hills, the covering with houses 
 of the vast area west of Belgrave Square and the Edg- 
 ware Road and the area north of the Euston Road. I 
 have seen begun the embankment of the Thames and 
 the whole of the railway system out of London. My 
 memory of London goes back to the time of the first 
 epoch of policemen, omnibuses, and cabs, to a time 
 when Tyburnia, Chelsea, and South Kensington were 
 market-gardens, when there was not a single railroad 
 out of London, no penny post or telegraph, when no 
 man or woman in working-clothes was admitted into 
 Kensington Gardens, and when the people were still 
 buried in city churches and in urban graveyards. May 
 I add that for some years I worked hard in the service 
 of the government of London, as a member of the first 
 and second County Councils, an experience which 
 brought home to me the incessant needs of London
 
 IDEAL LONDON 297 
 
 reorganisation and the enormous difficulties which in 
 practice it has to overcome ? I come before you, 
 therefore, as a rather " old London hand," who knows 
 something of the greatest city on this earth, who longs 
 to see it live up to its marvellous history, and one, too, 
 who knows something of the practical difficulties that 
 beset its reform. 
 
 Now, in speaking to you of Ideal London, or rather 
 of London as it might be made, I shall keep within 
 the limits of practical statesmanship and possible reform. 
 I put aside any fancy picture of an unsubstantial city 
 in the air what the Greek dramatist called a Cloud- 
 cuckoo-land. I know something of the difficulties 
 which await the Municipal Reformer difficulties of 
 the legislature, of finance, of vested interests, of law, 
 of opinion, of habit, and indifference. I know these 
 obstacles, and I shall not pretend to ignore them. But 
 I am not bound by limits of time, or by the legislation 
 of this or that Parliament, the prejudices of the present 
 generation, or the tone and customs of to-day, no, nor 
 of to-morrow. London is far older than the Empire, 
 or the monarchy, or the constitution, or the Church, 
 or our actual stage of civilisation in any form and I 
 think it will outlive them all. And Ideal London is not 
 to be " cribb'd, cabin'd, and confin'd " within this or 
 that generation, this or that habit of life, this or that 
 social organisation. It should be a city that develops 
 all that ever was good in city life, and all that we can 
 imagine to belong to pure and perfect citizenship. 
 
 It is the weak side of modern civilisation that it has 
 failed to carry on some of the fine elements of city life 
 as known to the ancient and mediaeval world ; and, of 
 all Europeans, we English of to-day take the least pride 
 in our cities, and receive from them the least of 
 inspiration and culture. The historic cities of the 
 world Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Byzantium sum
 
 298 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 up entire epochs of civilisation in themselves. To the 
 ancients, the very idea of a nation, with a national 
 system of life, implied a mother-city as its home and 
 type. And in the modern world the citizens of 
 Florence, Venice, Paris, Seville, Bern, Nuremberg, 
 Cologne, and Ghent have all had far deeper sympathy 
 with their native cities than the Londoner has with 
 his city, at least within the last two or three centuries 
 of its life. This is a definite loss to London and to 
 England. For if we truly estimate the indispensable 
 need to a nation of a great capital worthy of itself, as a 
 seat of its highest culture, energy, organisation, and 
 capacity for the multiform sides of civic organism, we 
 shall see that England and the British race is all the 
 poorer in that it still fails to inspire the Englishman 
 with that sense of sympathy, pride, and example which 
 Rome gave to the Roman world and which Paris gives 
 to the French and the whole Latin race. 
 
 To the poor countryman London is too often a 
 place where he may get bare life, variety, and cheap 
 amusement. To the rich countryman it is a place 
 where he goes to buy all things that money can 
 furnish ; where Vanity Fair lasts for some three 
 months ; and from which he rushes off when his 
 purchases are made, and when the Fair is over. To 
 the dull provincial it is a place where he hopes to pick 
 up " the last thing out " in the peculiar vernacular 
 he affects. To the ambitious man of business and the 
 aspiring professional it is a place where toil and energy 
 and skill may enable him to make a fortune, and in 
 old age to retire to a rural retreat with an adequate 
 "pile." And the city suffers, both within and with- 
 out, from these unworthy aims ; and it has the aspect 
 of a place which is valued mainly as a market, an 
 exchange, a warehouse, an office, and a playground. 
 It was not thus that Athens, Rome, Florence, and
 
 IDEAL LONDON 299 
 
 Venice were looked on by their citizens nor was 
 London so looked on in the age of Norman and 
 Plantagenet, of Tudors and Stuarts. 
 
 Now "Ideal London," to which I personally 
 conduct you, covers in buildings barely one-third of 
 the London we know a city which measures on an 
 average some ten miles across, and covers 120 square 
 miles of houses, with streets which end on end would 
 reach straight across Europe, from the centre of which 
 you must walk for many hours before you can see a 
 green field this is not a city, but a wilderness of 
 houses. It is an old saying that "one cannot see the 
 forest for the trees." So we may say, " in London we 
 cannot see the city for the houses." City life is im- 
 possible for a crowd of four or five millions of people, 
 and with a hundred square miles of buildings. The 
 city of Edward I.'s time, the legal "city," still occupied 
 about one square mile ; and twenty or thirty such 
 cities is surely the utmost possible area for continuous 
 buildings to cover if true life is to be lived within them. 
 No inventions in locomotion, trams, railways, or 
 bicycles can do away with legs and feet for ordinary 
 use. And, until science has invented wings to fly with, 
 or seven-leagued boots to jump with, men, women, 
 and children will have to walk on their ten toes. And, 
 unless their ten toes can carry them in an hour out 
 into the open, where they may hear the lark, and smell 
 the hay, and feel the open sky above them the town 
 is no city ; it is a prison. 
 
 So I hold that the London that is to be will not 
 exceed two million of inhabitants, and would be a 
 happier city if it did not exceed one million, and if its 
 area was less than one-third of what it is to-day. You 
 may ask me, what arbitrary limits are there to put 
 bounds to a city ? I reply, the arbitrary limits are 
 those which Creation has imposed on ordinary men and
 
 300 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 women who cannot comfortably walk more than three 
 miles in an hour, not more than three hours at a stretch, 
 and children, old and delicate persons, not half of that. 
 Whilst our size is limited to some five or six feet, and 
 our powers of physical exertion to a few hours out of 
 the twenty-four, any ideal city life for men must be 
 limited by the physical conditions of human nature ; 
 and if men are to live in cities with the highest con- 
 ditions of civic life, those cities must be controlled by 
 limits of numbers and area. 
 
 You may ask me by what means can so vast a 
 change be effected. And I answer that this involves a 
 big set of practical problems which neither time nor 
 my own powers enable me to deal with. I am not 
 here to enter on a series of political and economic 
 problems, nor have I a patented body of devices, bills, 
 and projects to effect such change. As I said at the 
 outset, an " Ideal " is not bound by time, nor by the 
 legislation, prejudices, habits of to-day. It is bound 
 only by the possibilities of human nature and the wide 
 laws of English civilisation. All I maintain is, that 
 this change is possible, practicable, within the con- 
 ditions of modern civilised habits. The population of 
 London at the opening of this century was under one 
 million. At my birth it did not exceed a million and 
 a half. At that date its area was barely one quarter of 
 what it is to-day. Why need I think these limits are 
 impossible in the future ? Such cities as Rome, 
 Athens, Milan, Marseilles, Lyons, Paris, and London 
 have lived through enormous changes in their popula- 
 tion and their area in some cases exceeding changes 
 of increase by tenfold and of decrease to one-tenth. 
 Why need we regard as hopeless in an unknown 
 future a state of things which existed in London at 
 my own lifetime ? 
 
 Those who have studied the topography and history
 
 IDEAL LONDON 301 
 
 of such cities as Paris, London, Rome, Constantinople, 
 Chicago, Vienna, Alexandria, and Cairo those who 
 can remember, as I can, the London, the Paris, the 
 Rome, the Florence, of some forty or even fifty years 
 ago can hardly see what bounds need be placed on 
 the physical transformation of great cities under 
 adequate efforts. We have witnessed the densest 
 hives of the mediaeval cities of London, Paris, Rome, 
 and Florence swept away to make magnificent avenues 
 or vast open sites, or huge palaces, or public structures. 
 We have seen in London and elsewhere over-crowded 
 centres rapidly depleted, and straggling quarters of 
 small houses replaced by vast blocks of aggregate 
 tenements. This radical series of changes the 
 emptying of the old effete cores of our cities and the 
 gathering of the population into immense blocks of 
 tenements is going on at a great pace, and is already 
 beginning to transform London. I am no lover of 
 the "flat" system in itself; I am a warm lover of the 
 old private house system as the normal home of a 
 family. But I see this that if millions of persons 
 insist on living together in a city, and if they are to 
 live there in a high state of civilised life, some form 
 of the tenement system must be adopted. It is 
 universal in all great European and American cities, 
 and it is unavoidable in all great cities unless they are 
 to grow to unmanageable bulk. It is being done here 
 rapidly. I am far from saying that our actual tene- 
 ments are what they should be London, indeed, has 
 no " ideal " tenements. I do not like tenements ; I 
 regret the necessity. But if persons will live in a city 
 of some millions and desire to live a civilised life, to 
 the tenement system they must come. Those who 
 cannot endure a tenement life must be content with 
 the country, and with smaller towns. As it is, nine- 
 tenths of the dwellers in London do to-day live in
 
 302 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 tenements only the lodgings they have are in small, 
 rotten, ill-kept, unwholesome, old houses. On an 
 average there are ten persons to a house, whilst there 
 might well be fifty or a hundred. Ideal London will 
 give the mass of its citizens spacious, airy, lofty, clean, 
 and healthy blocks, provided with common baths, 
 kitchens, lifts, libraries, play-rooms, sick-rooms, and 
 even mortuaries. All that the few now provide for 
 themselves in their private mansions will be available 
 for the many by the aid of wise co-operation. 
 
 London properly housed on a scientific system of 
 tenements would occupy one-third or one-quarter of 
 the area now loosely covered with small houses. And 
 this would give an enormous area of new room for 
 gardens, parks, boulevards, and playgrounds, even if 
 the population continued to exceed four millions of 
 souls. But the causes which within this century have 
 raised the population from one to four or five millions, 
 and the area of buildings from 5 square miles to 
 1 2O square miles, are really temporary and incidental. 
 Political, economic, and international changes will 
 react in another way within measurable time ; and if 
 this fabulous and unnatural growth has taken place in 
 a single century, it will need but a few centuries to 
 undo it. I wholly repudiate the dismal forecast that 
 London is to go on increasing in size and numbers at 
 the rate of the last fifty years ; I will not believe 
 Mother Shipton's prophecy that Hampstead Heath is 
 to be the centre of London, or that its population at 
 the end of the next century is to be ten millions of 
 souls. But if its population is to be even two or 
 three millions, and these are to live a human life, the 
 present parks, avenues, and open places ought at least 
 to be doubled or trebled. With a park, a playground, 
 and a great open ground within one mile at 
 most of every citizen's home, civic life of a high
 
 IDEAL LONDON 303 
 
 order is possible. Without these things it is im- 
 possible. 
 
 We have done much in the way of parks within 
 twenty years j but it is only a corner of what we have 
 to do. In the four or five miles of dreary streets 
 which separate Regent's Park from Victoria Park, and 
 in those four or five miles of blackened streets which 
 separate Battersea Park from Rotherhithe, there is a 
 cruel want of fresh air, trees, greenery, and free space. 
 One of the greatest of all wants is good playgrounds, 
 I mean such turf and space as are to be seen at Lord's 
 and at the Oval. A city is not habitable by highly 
 civilised men unless it can offer adequate playgrounds 
 to men, children, and young women within an easy 
 walk of their own homes. The last few years have 
 witnessed a great move in that direction, and what 
 has already been done in Battersea, Regent's, and 
 Victoria Parks, as well as the more outlying greens, 
 is enough to show what we can do. But we do not 
 half use our actual opportunities. No man values 
 more than I do the peace and freedom of Kensington 
 Gardens, few men resort to it more. But I still 
 demand that in all the Royal parks and all possible 
 public spaces there should be regularly opened play- 
 grounds, with proper regulations and conditions to 
 keep the youth of our citizens in health until such 
 time at least as it shall be possible to provide even 
 better playgrounds within a mile or two of every 
 man's doorstep. A city fails to fulfil its functions 
 completely unless it has as much fresh air as Edinburgh, 
 and playgrounds, walks, and gardens as plentiful and 
 close at hand as Oxford or Cambridge. 
 
 In those good days the Thames will again run as 
 clear and fresh as it does now at Henley, and it will 
 be, as of old, the great highway of passage from east 
 to west. The bridges over it and the tunnels under
 
 304 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 it will be just double of what they are now, and the 
 railway viaducts and termini which disfigure it will 
 be suitably treated. The embankment, finely wooded, 
 will be carried along both sides of the river for the 
 whole length of the city ; and where it is necessary to 
 have wharves for unloading, these will be carried into 
 docks, whilst leaving the embankment clear for traffic, 
 and our noble river at London will be as much in 
 use for healthy exercises by men and women as the 
 Thames is to-day at Richmond and Maidenhead. No 
 doubt we shall be carried up and down the river in 
 electric launches not in smoky, noisome, puffing, and 
 snorting steamboats. Steam engines of all kinds will 
 be excluded from the City power being obtained 
 from electric and other non-infecting sources. I need 
 hardly say that in the good time to come no smoke 
 will pollute the air and ruin the vegetation of London. 
 That some millions of house chimneys and ten 
 thousand factory chimneys should be suffered to pour 
 out into the pure air of heaven their poisonous fumes, 
 so that we are all to be choked with soot, our flowers 
 and shrubs stunted, our public buildings, statues, and 
 carvings begrimed with a sulphurous deposit this to 
 our descendants will seem an abomination and a public 
 crime, to be sternly suppressed by law and opinion. 
 They will hardly believe what they read in history 
 that such things were in the nineteenth century. It 
 will seem to them as strange as it does to us when we 
 read that our savage ancestors ate their dinners with 
 their fingers, wore sheepskin clothes for a lifetime, and 
 went to bed between foul rugs, without any clothes 
 at all. 
 
 No doubt the reformers of those days were asked 
 with sneers how the people were to procure so many 
 forks and nightgowns, just as we are asked to-day 
 how we are going to abolish smoking chimneys. Our
 
 IDEAL LONDON 305 
 
 answer is that it can be done it can be done by 
 science, labour, economy, and public opinion. And 
 therefore it must be done, and the sooner the better. 
 When we stand on the Capitol or the Pincian Hill at 
 Rome, or look down over Florence from the Boboli 
 Terrace ; when we survey Paris from Notre Dame, 
 or Genoa from the Church of Carignans ; when we 
 see how glorious and happy is the look of a smokeless 
 city in a bright sky, how refreshing are the terraces, 
 housetops, and balconies bright with flowers and laid 
 out with summer arbours and garden retreats it 
 makes one boil with indignation to think that in our 
 own cities at home neither house gardens nor arbours 
 are possible, from the gross indifference with which 
 we suffer preventible nuisances to choke us. 
 
 In the good time coming rivers of pure mountain 
 water will be carried into London by gigantic 
 aqueducts, as at ancient Rome. We shall no longer 
 run the risk of poison from polluted drains, or of a 
 water famine from the shrinking of a petty river. 
 Our water-supply will come from inexhaustible lakes 
 and reservoirs. Ancient Rome, with its fourteen 
 aqueducts, is the true type ; it has never yet been 
 surpassed, or even equalled. Already some northern 
 cities are fairly supplied in a similar way. It would 
 have been done for London long ago, but for 
 commercial self-interest, political intrigue, and ad- 
 ministrative jealousy and confusion. It is a blot on 
 our modern civilisation that the water-supply of 
 London is still so scanty, so impure, so uncertain, and 
 so dear. 
 
 In the good time coming we shall not buy water 
 of money-making speculators any more than we now 
 buy fresh air, or a ticket for Hyde Park, or a pass 
 across London Bridge. Water, like air, highways, 
 and parks, is a prime necessity of civilised life, and it 
 
 x
 
 306 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 is the business of the State to supply it to citizens 
 freely, in absolute purity and unlimited abundance. 
 I can remember a time when several bridges over 
 the Thames exacted tolls, and when London was 
 surrounded with turnpikes. It sounds incredible to 
 us that our fathers could endure such a drag on 
 civilisation. And it will sound incredible to our 
 descendants that we suffered water to be bought and 
 sold and haggled for in the market. We must go 
 back to the standard of Rome with free and unlimited 
 water, with baths and public wash-houses in every 
 main thoroughfare. 
 
 Pure water, unlimited in quantity, accessible to all, 
 fresh air, spacious highways, ample recreation grounds 
 these things are a necessity of health, and the health 
 of the citizens is a primary public concern. It has 
 been the pride of the last half-century that vast sanitary 
 reform has been accomplished. And the proof of it 
 is found in the diminishing death-rate of most great 
 cities, and in the highest degree of London. There 
 are cities in Europe to-day where the death-rate is 
 double that of London nay, where it is three times 
 what the death-rate of London has been for whole 
 months within the last year. The normal death-rate 
 of Cairo is nearly three times that of London ; 80,000 
 lives per annum at least are saved in London which 
 would be sacrificed but for the advance of sanitary 
 science and municipal reform. But we are only at 
 the beginning of our task. The rate in London may 
 now be said to be brought well below 20 per 1000. 
 In the good time to come it will be brought down to 
 10. At this moment there are squares and terraces 
 in the West where the rate is not so high as this. 
 The death-rate of Derby this very week is under 10. 
 And to this ideal limit it must be brought before 
 sanitary reform has said its last word.
 
 IDEAL LONDON 307 
 
 That word will not be said until every sewer is as 
 free from poisonous gas and deadly ferments as a 
 scullery sink in a well-found house, until the suspicion 
 of preventible infection and contagion is entirely 
 removed, until the infants of the poor are no more 
 destroyed by unintentional infanticide than are the 
 infants of the rich, until birth, measles, whooping- 
 cough, and scarlatina have ceased to decimate the 
 homes of the careless, the ignorant, and the indigent. 
 As it is, at least a quarter of our present death-rate is 
 due to conditions which if those responsible were not 
 so helpless and so ignorant would amount to man- 
 slaughter and even murder. And perhaps a fifth of 
 the death-rate over and above this is due to conditions 
 which are distinctly preventible by science and by 
 organisation. In the good time to come the 50,000 
 or 60,000 lives we slaughter annually in London 
 alone by our stupidity and mismanagement will be 
 told by our descendants as an abnormal barbarism such 
 as caused the Plague and the Black Death of old. 
 
 I am speaking, I trust you will believe, by no 
 means at random and by a vague guess, but from long 
 and careful comparison of various statistics. I will 
 give you one striking example. Rome, having be- 
 come the capital of Italy, set about a vigorous reform 
 of its sanitary condition. Now, the climate around 
 Rome is one of the most dangerous and uncertain in 
 Europe, and the physical conditions of Rome, except 
 for its grand water supply, offer many peculiar diffi- 
 culties. Yet in twenty years Rome has reduced its 
 death-rate by one- third, in spite of doubling its 
 population. In 100 years the death-rate of London 
 has been reduced by one-half, in spite of its enormous 
 increase. Within the last ten years the deaths in 
 many great cities of North Europe, even under the 
 very difficult conditions of such countries as Holland
 
 3 o8 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 and Belgium, have been reduced by 10 and 20 per 
 cent. It is a question entirely of science, organisa- 
 tion, education. There are spots even now where a 
 death-rate of 8 per thousand has been known. 
 London, when it has a clean Thames and abundant 
 and pure water, will be naturally one of the healthiest 
 places in Europe. Why should its death-rate be 18 
 instead of 8 ? For no reason but for bad government, 
 ignorance, and indifference, public as well as private. 
 
 The problem of health will take a foremost place 
 in the municipal organisation of the future ; and a 
 large part of the problem concerns the treatment of 
 disease and death. The hospitals of Ideal London 
 will not be imposing palaces, filling the best sites and 
 endangering the health of the city. All that is a 
 mediaeval tradition, maintained for the convenience of 
 the doctors in large practice, and with the advertising 
 aim of being always in public view. Small accident 
 and emergency wards will be multiplied at convenient 
 spots. But the great standing hospitals will be 
 removed to airy suburbs, reached by special rail and 
 tram lines with ambulance cars of wonderful ingenuity, 
 the hospitals themselves being constantly disinfected, 
 pulled to pieces, and rebuilt, so as at last to get rid of 
 hospital pyaemia and the melancholy death-rate of our 
 actual clumsy pest-houses. 
 
 The disposal of the dead is an even more urgent 
 problem. I am old enough to remember the dark 
 ages when the population of London was interred in 
 graveyards within the City itself. One of my 
 memories as a child was that of occasional residence 
 in a house which actually abutted on such a burial- 
 ground, and my leisure hours were much absorbed in 
 watching the funerals hour by hour. I am one of 
 those who survived this atrocious custom, which still 
 endangers the health of our city, and for generations
 
 IDEAL LONDON 309 
 
 to come will continue to be a source of infection. 
 Some fifty years ago the intra-mural graveyards were 
 closed and the suburban cemeteries were formed. 
 But, alas ! they are suburban no longer. The ever- 
 advancing city has begun to encircle them, and they 
 are again becoming a new source of infection and 
 nuisance. They are driving us to more and more 
 outlying cemeteries, which can only be reached by 
 a long railway journey, and are to all of us difficult 
 to visit. 
 
 The result is this. A city which requires its 
 80,000 interments year by year is compelled to bury 
 its dead either in cemeteries, over -crowded and 
 practically within the city of the living, or else in 
 cemeteries so far from its city that each funeral 
 involves a fatiguing and costly journey, and visits to 
 the tomb of the departed loved ones become rare or 
 impracticable. If the population of London continues 
 to increase it will soon need year by year 100,000 
 burials equal to the whole population of famous 
 cities in old times. Where can these be disposed of 
 with safety, so as not to be put away from us for 
 ever, and that only after a wearisome and expensive 
 travel ? In this dilemma I do not doubt that London 
 will largely return to the ancient and honoured 
 practice of cremation. Cremation affords to the 
 living absolute protection from infection and poison ; 
 to the survivors it spares them the horrible associa- 
 tions of the decaying remains ; it solves the problem 
 which awaits us the appalling accumulation of some 
 millions of corpses in one city in each decade ; and it 
 enables the family to place the inurned ashes of those 
 they cherish in a church, or in a cloister, or in a city 
 graveyard, or in any spot, above ground or under 
 ground, public or private, close at hand, and yet 
 entirely void of offence, where the sacred remains
 
 310 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 may be visited from time to time with perfect ease 
 and peace. It is too much forgotten that cremation 
 is a scientific process for preparing the remains of the 
 dead for such permanent disposal as we please to 
 select, and whether by interment or not. The 
 calcined residuum of the body is no longer a horror 
 and pollution to the living, but may be preserved for 
 ages either in a visible urn in some consecrated spot, or 
 buried in a grave or vault precisely like a coffin. All 
 the sacred associations of the tomb, all the genius loci of 
 the grave are retained when the purified ashes are 
 shrined in their urn and set up in monument or 
 niche. So in my visions Isee the London that is to 
 be filled with mausoleums and chapels and cloisters, 
 wherein the dust of generations will lie in perfect 
 peace yet in the midst of the living, far from all 
 possible danger or offence, yet always before their 
 sight and present to their memory, be it in some 
 consecrated urn, or beneath the sod in their midst, or 
 underneath the pavement that is trodden by genera- 
 tions to come. 
 
 The problem of reorganising London has taken a 
 new phase since the division into sixty parliamentary 
 boroughs. London is being gradually broken up into 
 manageable parts, each of which is a large and rich 
 municipality with its own administration and local 
 institutions and buildings. Some of these, such as 
 Battersea, Chelsea, Poplar, and Westminster, are 
 beginning to show real municipal life. The move- 
 ment is still in formation. But it opens a vision of 
 the future when, with an adequate central govern- 
 ment and a real unity of London as a whole, its 
 component parts may have their own local institutions, 
 life, and character j their own halls, libraries, schools, 
 museums, playgrounds, parks, and public centres, so 
 that the life of a great city may be offered to all
 
 IDEAL LONDON 311 
 
 citizens within a mile of their own homes and within 
 reach of their own influence. 
 
 The London that is to be, if, indeed, it is to 
 remain with a population counted by millions, will 
 be an aggregate of many cities, each equal in area to 
 Nottingham or Edinburgh, and each possessing a 
 complete city organisation of its own, but all uniting 
 in one central civic constitution. The great arteries 
 of communication will be broad and stately boulevards, 
 without the artificial monotony of the new avenues 
 in Paris, and without the makeshift meanness of 
 Shaftesbury Avenue and the Charing Cross Road. 
 The traveller who lingers with delight round the 
 Hotel de Ville and the Fountain of the Innocents in 
 Paris ; in the Via Balbi and round San Lorenzo at 
 Genoa ; in the old Piazzas of Florence and Venice ; 
 who strolls along the Corso at Rome, feels his heart 
 sink within him as he returns to the biggest and 
 richest city of the world, and marks how grimy, and 
 filthy, and inconvenient are the streets and open 
 spaces and public buildings of London. Neither 
 breadth, nor dignity, nor permanence, nor self- 
 respect (to say nothing of art and beauty) seem ever 
 to have suggested themselves to the tasteless tradesmen 
 who (we suppose) ordered from ignorant carpenters 
 the cheapest and commonest sort of road or hall which 
 contractors could erect. But it is not to last for 
 ever. Ideal London will far surpass actual Paris in 
 natural conditions, and I think in free play of thought 
 and aim. The race which built the Abbey, and 
 Westminster Hall, St. Paul's, the Banqueting Hall, 
 and laid out Piccadilly and the parks cannot be wholly 
 incapable of a noble building. Even now the energy 
 and individuality of our character is asserting itself 
 through the pall of convention and frivolity which, 
 since the Reformation and the civil wars, has afflicted
 
 312 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 us as a nation. London has magnificent opportunities, 
 and carries within it the germs of noble art. The 
 Ideal London of our dreams nay, of our descendants 
 will be one of the noblest cities of Europe, a model 
 of health fulness, dignity, and convenience. 
 
 We want no Haussmanns and emperors here to 
 drive uniform boulevards or rectangular squares 
 through the old City, on the plan of a chess-board or 
 a figure in geometry. The mechanical planning of a 
 city, so dear to Transatlantic fancy and to the vanity 
 of an autocrat in Europe, does not fall in with English 
 habits and our secular traditions. I hope that the 
 historic streets of London will ever be maintained, 
 and the associations of the Strand, Ludgate Hill, 
 Charing Cross, Bishopsgate and Aldgate, Holborn 
 and Piccadilly may live for centuries yet. I incline 
 to think that it is as well that Wren's magnificent, 
 but too geometric and revolutionary, scheme for 
 rebuilding London after the Fire was never carried 
 out. It was magnificent, but it was not practical. It 
 was not practical, in that it would have swept away 
 the history and traditions of London, just as the history 
 and traditions of the old City of Paris in the Island 
 have been swept away by the Imperial demolitions. 
 No ! let us keep the history and the traditions of 
 London, even at the cost of some irregularity, narrow- 
 ness, and inconveniences in the old streets, retaining 
 infinite variety in the form and style of the buildings 
 along them. Tradition and variety in an ancient city 
 outweigh all the regularity and symmetry of modern 
 reconstruction. 
 
 If any one desires to see what has been done of 
 late years, and what it was hoped to do in London 
 improvements, let him study an important new work 
 issued by the London County Council, and prepared 
 by Mr. Percy Edwards, the able clerk of the Improve-
 
 IDEAL LONDON 313 
 
 ments Committee. They will see what Wren desired 
 to make of London in 1666, what London was in 
 1855, what it is to-day, and all the changes made in it 
 these forty-three years. It is a record of many im- 
 provements, not a few blunders, many fine schemes 
 ruined by a cheese-paring economy, by political conflicts, 
 by interested intrigues, by local jealousies, stupidity, 
 bad taste, and lethargy. But, as we study that record 
 of the edility of London for forty-three years, we need 
 not despair of the London that is to be. 
 
 We shall not destroy the old historic lines and 
 landmarks of London, which, as an organised city, has 
 an unbroken record of a thousand years since Alfred 
 rebuilt it after rescuing it from the Danes. We shall 
 not sweep away the great lines and landmarks of 
 mediaeval London ; but the hopelessly rotten and 
 festering slums of the old crowded areas will have to be 
 purified and rebuilt, and the inhabitants replaced in 
 airy and commodious dwellings, at least half of them 
 in fresh and healthy suburbs. But the old lines and 
 lanes of mediaeval London are hopelessly congested and 
 need a vigorous treatment. We shall not abolish 
 Fleet Street and the Strand, Cornhill, Gracechurch 
 Street, Holborn, and Chancery Lane ; but we shall 
 add on new lines of communication that will relieve 
 the arterial traffic. The heavy traffic of merchandise, 
 stores, and plant passing across London, or along it 
 from line to line, will be carried by deep electric rail- 
 ways underground, and also some light conveyance 
 will be effected by new aerostatic modes of transit. 
 It will be considered ridiculous to send machinery, 
 coals, or heavy goods by the ordinary streets, which 
 will be immensely relieved by the almost universal 
 adoption of automobile cars in place of horse-carriages. 
 I do not mean the horrid, stinking, rattling motor-cars 
 we see to-day, but beautiful and elegant vehicles,
 
 3 14 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 which will run quietly and silently by mechanical 
 power. The main needs of London are easy and open 
 avenues of communication from north to south, and 
 across the Thames from Middlesex to Surrey. These 
 in the good times to come will be doubled or trebled, 
 partly by new bridges across our noble river and partly 
 by sub-aqueous tunnels, fit alike for rail, horse, and 
 foot traffic. Especially there will be adequate avenues 
 from the main northern, or Middlesex, railway termini 
 to the main termini on the south, or Surrey side. Of 
 these the proposed street from Holborn to the Strand 
 (the most urgent of all the London problems) will 
 form but a part. It is a most cheering and curious 
 fact that this indispensable improvement can now be 
 carried out, when treated on lines sufficiently bold and 
 thorough, at a positive profit to the ratepayer, and 
 without any ultimate expense to him at all. This also 
 was done when Northumberland Avenue was made. 
 And these examples prove that a wise and bold improve- 
 ment in our city is a commercial success, and not a 
 burden to the public purse. The great triumph of 
 war, said the Conqueror, is to make war support itself. 
 And the triumph of the City aedile, who wars on decay 
 and obstruction, is so to make his improvements that, 
 whilst they immensely promote the health and comfort 
 of the citizen, they shall actually fill his budget instead 
 of laying on him burdens. 
 
 In the good days to come, then, our Ideal London, 
 our glorious city of Alfred and the Conqueror, of 
 Chaucer and Milton, of Inigo Jones and Wren, of 
 Johnson and Goldsmith, of Dickens and Lamb and 
 Thackeray, will be as bright and gay, as full of foliage 
 and flowers, fountains and statues, as Paris or Florence, 
 but without the monotony and the conventional 
 boulevard-driving which ruined Paris and have begun 
 to ruin both Florence and Rome. Our vast city will
 
 IDEAL LONDON 315 
 
 then raise up its towers and steeples into a sky as 
 bright and pure as that of Richmond Park. Coal 
 smoke will be abolished as an intolerable nuisance, 
 as unpardonable as a cess-pit or an open sewer. And 
 I dream in my dreams that Science in the good days 
 to come will invent a new tobacco, which, whilst 
 appeasing the craving of the smoker, will not be 
 poisonous and offensive to those about him. In these 
 days we should need no smoking cars in the trains, 
 and could even sit on the garden seat of an omnibus 
 without the risk of being choked by a very foul pipe. 
 It would be ridiculous, if we abolish the nuisance of 
 chimneys, that we should retain the still more noxious 
 effluvia of the pipe. Women, who, I suppose, in 
 those days will form the working majority of Parlia- 
 ment, if not of the Ministry, will, no doubt, in good 
 time see to all this. 
 
 Be this as it may, in the good time to come our 
 city will be as pleasant to live in as is Oxford or 
 Leamington or Bath to-day. The Tower of London, 
 the most impressive and most venerable civic building 
 in Europe, will be cleared and freed from intrusive 
 and dangerous lodgers, and will be occupied only by 
 a military guard. Wren's glorious temple at St. 
 Paul's will rise, white and majestic as the St. Peter's of 
 Michael Angelo, and much more beautiful, thrusting 
 its radiant colonnade and dome into a blue sky, where 
 the golden cross will glitter in the pure air like the 
 spires of Chichester and Salisbury to-day. The pile 
 of shops and ignoble warehouses around it will have 
 disappeared like a bad dream, and the great Cathedral 
 will stand in a vast open space, approached on four 
 sides by stately avenues. So with the British Museum 
 and our few other fine buildings. 
 
 The silver Thames, without a trace of sewage or 
 of mud, will flow brightly between its double line of
 
 316 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 embankments, covered with shady trees and adorned 
 with statues and fountains. The vast concave curve 
 of the Middlesex side of the River, from Chelsea to 
 the Tower, will give scope to new and varied forms 
 of architectural development. The old intra- mural 
 graveyards will serve as sites for lovely cloisters 
 wherein will rest in graceful urns the ashes of the 
 City ancestors. And around the venerable Abbey 
 when its thousandth anniversary comes to pass in the 
 twenty- third century will be a new consecrated 
 temple of peace, reconciliation, and honour, where a 
 grateful people will enshrine the remains of the great 
 dead ones whom it resolves to bury " to the noise of 
 the mourning of a mighty nation." 
 
 POSTSCRIPT, 1906 
 
 In these last eight years not a little has been done 
 on the long upward march towards an Ideal London 
 a good deal too in the lines adumbrated above. 
 Sanitation in all its forms, water-supply, parks, 
 museums, libraries, playgrounds, open spaces, arterial 
 new streets, flats and tenement lodgings, removal of 
 hospitals schools prisons, mechanical locomotives, 
 smoke abatement, cremation all are beginning to 
 stir in the dry bones of old-world London.
 
 MUSIC IN GREAT CITIES 
 
 1898 
 
 ONE of the leading features of the reorganisation of 
 London, as I can conceive it in the future, will be the 
 formation of permanent centres of musical culture. 
 Music is the most social, the most affecting, the 
 purest of the arts ; the one most deeply connected 
 with the moral side of civilisation. It stands alone 
 in the arts as hardly capable of being distorted to 
 minister to luxury, evil, or ostentation. One can 
 hardly imagine vicious music, or purse-proud music, or 
 selfish music. It is by its very nature social, emotional, 
 and humanising. Hence I hold music to be the art 
 which specially concerns all social reformers and popular 
 teachers. And, as we have pointed out to Mr. Ruskin 
 and the aesthetic pessimists, these latter ages cannot 
 be called deficient in art, since they have immensely 
 magnified the most human of all the arts of sense. 
 
 I am no musician, and do not pretend to say a 
 word about music as an art. But, as one who delights 
 in music, and who has long sought to bring out its 
 social and civilising mission, I have been very much 
 struck with the fact that music is dependent in a 
 curious degree on the material conditions of our civic 
 life. Pictures, statues, poems, can be sent about and 
 multiplied in various forms ad infinitum. The poorest 
 home can contain a Shakespeare, a cast, or an 
 engraving. A great cathedral may impress the spirit 
 of millions, even as they walk to their business under
 
 3i8 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 its shadow. But music of a high kind, though it 
 knows no limitations of country, age, or material 
 though it is free of time, space, and matter does need 
 trained powers of execution, the combination of 
 suitable hearers and performers, and above all, a place 
 exactly corresponding to the kind of art performed. 
 
 Music is peculiarly dependent, both for its artistic 
 and social value, on the material conditions of social 
 organisation. Tt needs three things : ( i ) highly 
 trained executants ; (2) a permanent and duly-trained 
 audience; (3) a place of performance, convenient to 
 the audience, and suitable to the artistic conditions. 
 
 Now London easily gives us the first. But by its 
 enormous inorganic bulk it makes the second condition 
 very rare and difficult. And strangely enough, in 
 spite of its wealth and energy, perhaps by reason of its 
 wealth and energy, it does not give us the third. I 
 have been from my youth a diligent attendant at many 
 of our best series of concerts ; and in days when I had 
 more leisure, I made great sacrifices and underwent 
 great trouble to do so. But the huge floating mobs 
 of London, and the rage of " undertakers " to collect 
 mobs, have almost driven me out and make me nearly 
 hopeless. I have watched scores of times how all 
 serious music and all serious artists have to educate 
 their audience gradually by a long and conscientious 
 work of cultivation. A great musician has, I hold, 
 more to do to train his audience than to train his 
 orchestra. No audience can become worthy to listen 
 to great music fitly performed unless it is a permanent 
 and painstaking audience ; unless it labours honestly 
 to understand the master and his interpreters. And it 
 is just this permanence and this self-educating spirit 
 that the floating mob of London chokes. Just as the 
 audience is pulling itself together and becoming fit to 
 be played to, the series of concerts becomes fashionable,
 
 MUSIC IN GREAT CITIES 319 
 
 or the season begins ; the mob breaks in, and all goes 
 wrong. How delightful the day concerts used to 
 be till fine people took them up, and till the balls 
 began. Who can listen to a chaconne whilst a bare- 
 shouldered dowager and her three daughters are 
 hurrying past one to the first dance ! No, a permanent 
 self-respecting, art-respecting audience must consist of 
 quiet people, living within a moderate distance of each 
 other and of the concert-hall. And this we cannot 
 have till London is grouped into smaller social units. 
 
 Besides, London with all its wealth and size does 
 not give us suitable concert-halls. They are all either 
 too big, ill-shaped for musical purposes, inconveniently 
 placed, or repulsively like a schoolroom. I cannot call 
 to mind one concert-hall in London which does not 
 sin in one or other of these four conditions. To ask 
 us to listen to a great violin in company with 3000 
 others (some of them talking German, American, or 
 Cockney ; some of them hurrying out to a " crush ") 
 is mere torment. No, I will no longer go to hear 
 the finest violin solo on earth with more than four or 
 five hundred of my fellow- beings ; and I should 
 greatly prefer three hundred. To give what is 
 facetiously called " a concert " in a Colosseum which 
 holds fifteen thousand people is an impertinence. 
 Time was when I never missed an oratorio. But I 
 have never heard one yet, in an arena which seems 
 designed for a bull-fight or a hippodrome. And much 
 as I honour Mr. Manns, I cannot now spend a day in 
 going to Sydenham in order to hear three pieces, the 
 utmost that I care for at the same sitting. There is 
 not one perfect concert-hall in London. The 
 and the - - are only fit for public meetings ; the 
 
 will do for a symphony, but it is too big for a 
 solo or a quartet. The - - is pretty ; but its proper 
 purpose is a fancy ball. In the - - and the
 
 320 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 one can hear a quartet to advantage ; but then they 
 look like a class-room in a Board-school, and the seats 
 are as bad as a third-class box on the South-Eastern 
 Railway. The ideal concert- hall should hold 500 
 persons comfortably j it should be within an easy walk 
 of their homes ; it should have ample passages, exits, 
 cloak-rooms, artists' and committee-rooms ; it should 
 have pure air, cool temperature, no gas, no noise, and 
 no suggestions either of Mohawk Minstrels or fried 
 fish. Lastly, it should be beautiful : architecture, 
 decoration, and fittings should' be of an art worthy to % 
 invite us to the high art we meet to cultivate. London 
 has no such concert-hall ; and it is a burning shame. 
 
 Mobs, money-seeking managers, fashionable people, 
 and the wilderness of a city that we live in, make all 
 this as yet impossible. Musical art, more than other 
 art, needs an organised social life, within permanent and 
 moderate limits. Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, the 
 Crystal Palace, and other provincial centres teach us 
 the same lesson. Even in Germany, where the capitals 
 are not so vast and inorganic as London, the true life of 
 music is in the lesser towns. Music absolutely needs an 
 organised civic society, neither too vast nor too petty. 
 For the Rubinsteins, Joachims, Pattis, and Reeveses, 
 for the highest typical examples of what voice and 
 hand can reach in art, whole populations and conti- 
 nents may be ransacked for an audience. But the 
 blubbery immensity of London adds nothing, even to 
 them. The great social and civilising uses of music can 
 be built up but slowly out of many local centres of art. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT, 1906 
 
 Things, they say, are even worse now. The very 
 Minstrels and fish are gone. London prefers to have 
 its music while it is eating.
 
 HISTORIC PARIS 
 
 1894 
 
 OF all the millions of visitors who throng into Paris, 
 how few attempt to learn anything about the history 
 of the venerable city, which they treat as if it were a 
 summer watering-place or a fashionable lounge. 
 These very same people, when they go on to Venice, 
 Florence, or Rome, devote themselves with zeal to 
 the ancient buildings, to the historical associations, 
 and to the local art of these beautiful remnants of 
 antiquity. At least, the more cultivated section of 
 travellers ransack the churches, dive into ruins, listen 
 to learned disquisitions, and profess for a time quite a 
 passion for antiquarian research, and for any fragment 
 of historic survival which their guides, ciceroni, and 
 books of travel can point out. There is for Paris no 
 Ruskin, no Browning, no Lanciani or Hawthorne. 
 
 Yet Paris was a famous and cultivated city ages 
 before Venice ; its history is far richer and older and 
 more instructive than that of Florence ; it has more 
 remnants of mediaeval art, and even a deeper mediaeval 
 interest than Rome itself. And if we search for them 
 we may find in it historical associations that may vie 
 with those of any city in the world except Rome and 
 Constantinople j and even its antiquarian and artistic 
 remains are seldom equalled or surpassed. At Rome, 
 321 y
 
 322 
 
 Florence, or Venice, the tourist talks of old churches,, 
 palaces, and remains : at Paris he gives himself up to 
 the boulevards, the theatres, shops, and races. The 
 profoundly instructive history, the profuse antiquarian 
 remains of the great city, are forgotten carent quia 
 vate sacra. 
 
 No doubt there is fascination on the boulevards ; 
 and the miles of luxurious places that the Vanity Fair 
 of Europe offers to the pilgrim form a huge screen 
 behind which the busy pleasure-seeker has no inclina- 
 tion to penetrate. He stares at Notre Dame and the 
 Sainte Chapelle, plods through the long gallery of the 
 Louvre, sees the tomb of Napoleon and Versailles, and 
 is then ready for the Bois, the opera, or Durand. But 
 any cultivated traveller, who chose to make a study of 
 Paris with the same historical interest and love of art 
 that he takes to the cities of Italy, would find 
 inexhaustible material for thought. The minor 
 historical remains of Paris do not lie so much en 
 evidence as the Ducal Palace, the Palazzo Vecchio, or 
 the Coliseum, and no one pretends that any of them 
 have the charm and eternal interest of these. But 
 they are easy enough to find, and not very difficult to 
 disentangle from later accretions. On the other hand, 
 the books, drawings, and illustrations, by the help of 
 which they may be studied, are more complete and 
 numerous than they are for any other city but Rome. 
 It is true that old Paris is not so imposing a city as 
 old Rome. It has suffered much more mutilation, 
 disfigurement, and modernisation than old Venice or 
 old Florence. But then it is a much more accessible 
 and familiar place : and, Rome and Constantinople 
 apart, its historical associations are second to none in 
 Europe. 
 
 It is worth noting that Paris is now, in 1894, at 
 last complete and practically uniform as a city, and
 
 HISTORIC PARIS 323 
 
 this can hardly be said of it at any moment before, in 
 all the four hundred years since Louis XII. Down 
 to the reign of this gallant king, Paris remained very 
 much what it had been since Charles V. and the 
 English wars, a vast feudal fortress with walls, moats, 
 gate-towers, and drawbridges, immense castles within 
 the city having lofty machicolated towers, narrow, 
 winding, gloomy lanes, and one or two bridges 
 crowded with wooden houses. There were two or 
 three enormous royal castles, on the scale and in the 
 general plan of the Tower of London, an almost 
 countless number of beautiful Gothic churches, 
 chapels, and oratories, one moderate-sized open place, 
 the Place de Greve, and two or three very small and 
 irregular open spaces, such as the Parvis de Notre 
 Dame or the Place Maubert, some cemeteries, 
 markets, and fountains, of a kind to make the sanitary 
 reformer shudder, in the most densely crowded 
 quarters ; and then, all over the packed area within 
 the walls, rose huge fortresses of great lords, and 
 monastic domains, each covering many acres with 
 gardens, cemeteries, halls, and sick-houses, all strongly 
 defended by crenellated towers, portcullis, and bartizan. 
 A miniature city of the kind may still be seen entire 
 in some of the remote mountain districts of Italy and 
 Germany. 
 
 But about the time of Louis XII., and early in the 
 sixteenth century, the Renascence arose, and architec- 
 ture and all the habits and arts of modern life began 
 to take the place of the mediaeval life. Castles were 
 transmuted into palaces, towers and battlemented walls 
 began to fall, the Italian taste for terraces, colonnades, 
 domes, and square courts slowly drove out the Gothic 
 fortress, and first the Hotel de-Ville, then the original 
 part of the Louvre, then the Tuileries, then the 
 Luxembourg, arose in the course of a century ; until,
 
 324 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 in the middle of the seventeenth century, Louis XIV., 
 the great destroyer, builder, transformer of Paris, began 
 to make the city something like what it was within 
 the memory of living men. But during the two 
 hundred years that separate Francois I. from Louis 
 XIV. the transformation went on very gradually, 
 so that even when Henri IV. had completed his 
 work on the Louvre and the Tuileries, lofty feudal 
 towers still frowned down on Palladian palaces, and 
 gigantic mediaeval convents or fortresses crowded out 
 the new streets, the Italian hotels, and even the royal 
 mansions. 
 
 For three centuries the battle raged between the 
 old castellated buildings and the modern palatial style, 
 and the result was a strange and unsightly confusion. 
 By the end of the last century Paris had almost 
 acquired a modern aspect, but Louis XVI., and then 
 Napoleon, and after him the Restoration, undertook 
 new works on a vast scale, which none of them ever 
 completed. The second Empire, in 1852, began the 
 most gigantic and ruthless schemes of transformation 
 ever attempted in any great city. Mighty boulevards 
 were driven backwards and forwards from barrier to 
 barrier ; whole quarters of the old city were cleared ; 
 and Haussmann ruled supreme, like Satan in Pande- 
 monium, thirsting for new worlds to conquer, and 
 resolute to storm Heaven itself. The Empire fell in 
 the great war of 1870, whilst many of these ambitious 
 schemes were half-finished, and whilst Paris was still 
 covered with the dust of the insatiable demolisseur. 
 
 After the war of 1870 came the Commune and 
 second Siege of Paris in 1871 ; and in this perished 
 Tuileries Palace, Hotel de Ville, many ministries and 
 public buildings, with "whole streets and blocks of 
 houses. The havoc of 1871, and the gigantic 
 schemes bequeathed to the Republic by the Empire,
 
 HISTORIC PARIS 325 
 
 have only just now been made good, after some 
 twenty- three years of incessant work. Few new 
 schemes of reconstruction have been undertaken by 
 the Republic, which has had enough to do to repair 
 the ravages of civil war and to complete the grandiose 
 avenues of Haussmann. The result is that Paris at 
 last looks like a city finished by its builders and built 
 on an organic, consistent, harmonious, and modern 
 scheme. For some four hundred years it has always 
 looked more or less like a city in the act of building, 
 or in course of transformation. 
 
 Those who will go and look at M. Hoffbauer's 
 ingenious panoramic picture of Paris, as it appeared in 
 1588, now in the Musee Carnavalet, and will study 
 his other drawings there, or in his great work, Paris 
 a trovers les ages^ who will follow out the series of 
 contemporary views of old Paris from the sixteenth 
 to the nineteenth centuries, now in the Municipal 
 Museum, may easily get a clear idea of this prolonged 
 and extraordinary process of transformation, by which, 
 throughout Europe, the cities of the mediaeval world 
 very slowly, and bit by bit, arrayed themselves in the 
 forms and arts of the modern world. This study must 
 have peculiar interest for American travellers, because 
 their own continent presents them with hardly any 
 examples of this process. Their magnificent cities 
 have been built direct from the prairie with modern 
 conceptions of art and of life, and with no other 
 conceptions. But in Europe this very laborious and 
 complex evolution has required four stormy centuries 
 to work through. Now it is true that the mediaeval 
 plan, type, and architecture are not so visible in Paris 
 as in London, Rouen, Cologne, Prague, or Florence ; 
 yet in Paris the modernisation of the mediaeval plan 
 has been far more trenchant and is more instructive to 
 the Transatlantic student.
 
 326 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 To the antiquarian it is painful to reflect how 
 many beautiful and historic remnants of old Paris have 
 been swept away within living memory, or at least 
 within the present century. The two Empires have 
 been perhaps the most cruel enemies of mediaeval 
 architecture. In M. Guilhermy's pleasant book, 
 Itin&raire Archeologique de Paris^ 1855, there is a plan 
 of Paris showing the ancient monuments by Roguet, 
 in which some two hundred buildings, anterior to 
 Louis XIV., are marked. How many of these have 
 disappeared: a large proportion of them since 1852! 
 The new Boulevard St. Germain is a magnificent 
 thoroughfare ; so is the Boulevard St. Michel, and the 
 Rue Monge, and the Rue de 1'Ecole de Medecine, but 
 what a holocaust of old churches, and convents, 
 historic colleges, refectories, halls, towers, and gate- 
 ways has been made in the forming them ! What 
 exquisite traceries of the thirteenth century, what 
 pathetic ruins of statues and portals have been carted 
 away to make a Boulevard de Sebastopol, a Rue de 
 Rivoli, and the new edifices in the island cite \ 
 In my own memory, St. Jean, St. Benoit, the 
 Bernardins, the College de Beauvais, have gone, and 
 the tower of St Jacques, and the facade of Notre 
 Dame, have been " restored " out of all knowledge. 
 It is quite true that Paris required new streets, new 
 halls, new colleges, hospitals, barracks, and open 
 spaces. These had to be ; but it must be admitted 
 that the dtmolisseur has been a little rough and 
 unsympathetic. 
 
 It is an idle occupation for the aesthetic foreigner 
 to grumble when he knows nothing of the practical 
 necessities and the every-day facts which are thrust 
 into the face of the inhabitant. A much more 
 sensible line is open to the tourist to-day, if he will 
 try and find out for himself what still remains to be
 
 HISTORIC PARIS 327 
 
 seen. Not one traveller in a hundred ever goes near 
 the beautiful Hotel Carnavalet or has explored all the 
 vaults, traceries, and columns of the Conciergerie, or 
 has unearthed that curious and noble fragment of the 
 twelfth century, the Church of St. Julien le Pauvre, 
 formerly attached to the Hotel Dieu, and now buried 
 in some back streets. It may compare with the 
 Chapel of St. John in our Tower of London, though 
 it is somewhat later in date. Few care to search for 
 the Hotel de Sens, and the old staircase and tower of 
 the Hotel de Bourgogne. Fragments of two famous 
 convents remain embedded in modern structures. 
 The Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, in the Rue 
 St. Martin, occupies the site of the venerable and vast 
 abbey of St. Martin des Champs ; and it has incor- 
 porated within its immense range of buildings both 
 the church and the Refectory of the Abbey, beautiful 
 remains of the best thirteenth century work. And so 
 the Refectory of the Cordeliers monks, the scene of 
 the Cordelier Club in the Revolution, which has rung 
 with the big voice of Danton and the eager periods of 
 Camille Desmoulins, is still visible as the Musee 
 Dupuytren, attached to the Ecole de Medecine. Its 
 gruesome contents need not deter men from visiting 
 one of the most interesting historical remains in Paris. 
 A real history of the city of Paris would prove to 
 be one of the most instructive episodes to which the 
 student of manners and art in Europe from the time 
 of the Crusades could possibly devote his attention. 
 And although some cities in Italy present more vivid 
 and fascinating periods or examples, there is perhaps 
 no other city in Europe where the continuity of modern 
 civilisation for at least seven centuries can be traced 
 so fully in its visible record. From the time of Louis 
 the Stout, A.D. 1 1 08, Paris has been the rich and 
 powerful metropolis of a rich and enlarging State ;
 
 328 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 and from that day to this there is hardly a single 
 decade which has not left some fragment or other of 
 its work for our eyes. The history of each of its 
 great foundations, civil and ecclesiastical, would fill a 
 volume, and indeed almost every one of them has had 
 many volumes devoted to its gradual development, 
 final disappearance or transformation to modern uses. 
 
 The history of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, from 
 the laying of the first stone by Pope Alexander III., 
 in the age of our Henry II. and Becket, down to the 
 final "restoration" by M. Viollet-le-Duc, and the 
 history of all its annexes and dependences^ Archeveche, 
 Hotel Dieu, together with an exact account of all its 
 carvings, glass, reliefs, etc., etc., would be a history of 
 art in itself. The same would be true if one followed 
 out the history of the foundations of St. Germain des 
 Pres, of St. Victor, of St. Martin des Champs, of the 
 Temple, and of St. Genevieve. Two or three of these 
 enormous domains would together occupy a space equal 
 to the whole area of the original cite. They contained 
 magnificent churches, halls, libraries, refectories, and 
 other buildings, and down to the last century were 
 more or less in a state of fair preservation or active 
 existence. Of them all it seems that St. Victor, on 
 the site of the Halle aux Vins, and the Temple, on 
 the site of the square of that name, have entirely 
 disappeared. But of the others interesting parts still 
 remain. Of the eleven great abbeys and twenty 
 minor convents which Paris still had at the Revolution 
 none remain complete, and the great majority have 
 left nothing but names for the new streets. 
 
 It would be no less instructive to follow up the 
 history of the great civil edifices, the Hotel de Ville, 
 the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Hotel de Cluny, the 
 Luxembourg, the Palais Royal, the Palais de Justice. 
 Of these, of course the most notable are the trans-
 
 HISTORIC PARIS 329 
 
 formation and gradual enlargement of the Hotel de 
 Ville, the Louvre and Tuileries, and the Palais de 
 Justice, including in that the Conciergerie and all the 
 subordinate buildings of the old Palace of the Kings, 
 which occupied the western end of the original island 
 cite. The learning, the ingenuity, the art which 
 have gone to build up the Hotel de Ville of to-day 
 out of the exquisite pavilion that was designed under 
 Franfois I., form a real chapter in the history of 
 European architecture; as the story of the Town Hall 
 for nearly four centuries is the heart of the history 
 of Paris. But even this is surpassed by the history 
 of the Louvre and its final consolidation with the 
 Tuileries, an operation of which the difficulties were 
 much less successfully overcome. The entire mass of 
 buildings, the most elaborate and ambitious of modern 
 construction in Europe, is an extraordinary tour de 
 force which provokes incessant study, even when it 
 fails to satisfy very critical examination. 
 
 Those of us who can remember Paris before the 
 second Empire of 1852 have seen not a few quarters 
 of the city much in the state in which they were at 
 the Revolution, and even in the days of the Grand 
 Monarque. The sky-line was infinitely broken and 
 varied, instead of being a geometric and uniform line 
 of cornice, as we now for the most part observe it. 
 And the streets had a frontage- line as irregular as 
 the sky-line ; they went meandering about or gently 
 swaying to and fro, in a highly picturesque and 
 inconvenient way. There was hardly a single street 
 with a strictly geometric straight line in all Paris 
 down to the first Empire. Now the ground plan of 
 Paris looks as if an autocrat had laid it out in equal 
 parallelograms from an open plain. What old Paris 
 was down to the end of the last century we may 
 gather from bits of Silvestre, Chastillon, Meryon,
 
 330 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Martial, Gavarni, and others ; but not much of it 
 can still be seen extant. 
 
 If the curious traveller would follow up the Rue 
 St. Denis or the Rue St. Martin, two of the oldest 
 streets in Europe, from their intersection by the Rue 
 de Rivoli to the circular boulevard, where they are 
 terminated by the Porte St. Denis and the Porte 
 St. Martin respectively, he would get some idea of the 
 look of Paris at the Revolution of 1789. The grand 
 new Boulevard de Sebastopol, one of Haussmann's 
 boldest, and perhaps most useful, creations, opens a 
 vast thoroughfare between the old streets of St. Denis 
 and St. Martin, and by diverting the traffic, has no 
 doubt prevented or delayed their transformation. 
 Hence these two streets, which date from the earliest 
 age of the city, have partially retained their original 
 lines, when they were country lanes through woods 
 and meadows, and to some extent they keep their old 
 sky-line and faade. There are corners in them still 
 where the old street aspect of Paris may be seen 
 almost intact. And the student of antiquities who 
 cared to follow up the remnants of these mediaeval 
 thoroughfares in the spirit in which he explores the 
 canals of Venice and the vicoli of Florence, who would 
 trace back the history of St. Jacques and St. Merri, 
 St. Leu, St. Nicolas des Champs, the Place des 
 Innocents, and the vast convent of St. Martin, all of 
 which he would meet in his walk, would have a most 
 suggestive insight into the mediaeval state of the city. 
 And it would be well to add to the walk by following 
 up such streets as those of Rue Vieille du Temple, 
 Rue des Francs Bourgeois, and its collateral streets, 
 with the Hotels Barbette, de Bethune, de Soubise, and 
 Carnavalet, ending with the old Place Royale. A 
 few days thus spent, with adequate histories such 
 as those of Guilhermy, Fournier, Viollet-le-Duc,
 
 HISTORIC PARIS 331 
 
 Dulaure, Hamerton, Lacroix, Hoffbauer, or the 
 popular guides of Miss Beale, Hare, or Joanne, would 
 be rewarded by pleasure and instruction. 
 
 Xo the thoughtful traveller the question is continu- 
 ally presenting itself, if the wonderful transformation 
 which Paris has undergone in three centuries, and 
 especially in the last half of the present century, has 
 been a success on the balance of loss and gain ; if it 
 might have been better done ; if it could not have 
 been done without such evident signs of autocratic 
 imperialism and gigantic jobbery. The enthusiastic 
 admirers of Paris as it is, and the irreconcilable 
 mourners over Paris as it was, are alike somewhat 
 unreasonable. One need hardly waste a thought upon 
 the triflers to whom the great city is a mere centre of 
 luxury, excitement, and pleasure, given up to clothes, 
 food, and spectacles. But the superior spirits whom 
 the modernisation of Paris in the present century 
 afflicts or disgusts are hardly less open to a charge of 
 impracticable pedantry. The Revolution found Paris 
 as unwholesome, as inconvenient, as ill-ordered, as 
 obsolete, as inorganic a survival from mediaeval confu- 
 sion as any city in Europe. It boasts to-day that it is 
 the most brilliant, the best ordered, the most artistic 
 city of men, and one of the most sanitary and con- 
 venient for civilised life. And no reasonable man 
 can deny that the substantial part of this boast is just. 
 
 The primary business of great cities is to be centres 
 where masses of men can live healthy and pleasant 
 lives, where their day's work can be carried on with 
 the minimum of waste and friction, and where their 
 spirits may be constantly stirred by grand and en- 
 nobling monuments. Now a mediaeval city, though 
 crowded with beautiful and impressive objects at every 
 corner, was charged with disease, discomfort, and 
 impediments. It choked and oppressed men's daily
 
 332 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 life to such a point that, about the sixteenth century, 
 a violent reaction against the mediaeval type set in. 
 And when this began the civil and religious institu- 
 tions of the Middle Ages had fallen into decay, had 
 ceased to be of use or to command respect, whilst 
 their ruins or their disfigured carcases encumbered the 
 ground. The Monarchy led the way in the revolt 
 and the inauguration of the new city ; and the 
 Revolution and the Empire added to the work of 
 destruction and renovation with tremendous rapidity 
 and resistless force. If modern Frenchmen were to 
 live in Paris, to feel at home in it, to love it, then the 
 transformation must take place. And one cannot 
 deny that it has been done with consummate energy, 
 skill, and artistic invention. 
 
 But a city which deliberately effaces its own past, 
 which mutilates its ancient masterpieces, and carts 
 away exquisite works of art wholesale, which is filled 
 with hatred, not only of what is unwholesome and 
 troublesome, but of what is venerable and ancient, is 
 committing suicide of its own noblest traditions. It 
 is sacrificing the most powerful influences it possesses 
 to kindle that sense of its own dignity and love for its 
 own history, which is really the basis of all civic 
 patriotism. A great city which has no past must do 
 its best to look modern. But an ancient city which 
 deliberately seeks to appear as if it had not known 
 more than two generations of inhabitants is depriving 
 itself of its own noblest title to respect. Now, too 
 much of modern Paris looks as if its principal object 
 had been to hide away old Paris, as some mischievous 
 remnant of the Anc'ien Regime^ unworthy to exist in 
 the nineteenth century. It is true that Notre Dame, 
 the Sainte Chapelle, St. Germain, and a few remnants 
 of Gothic art have been " restored." But one of the 
 leading ideas of the Haussmannic renovation has
 
 HISTORIC PARIS 333 
 
 evidently been this to produce the effect of a bran- 
 new city as completely "up to date" and with as little 
 of the antique about it as San Francisco or Chicago. 
 
 It cannot be denied that, however gay, airy, spacious, 
 and convenient are the new boulevards, they have been 
 immensely overdone in numbers, and are now become 
 a new source of monotony in themselves. We see 
 that, at last, boulevard -constructing became a trade: 
 these vast avenues were made first and foremost for 
 speculative builders, enterprising tradesmen, and am- 
 bitious architects. It is not so much that Paris 
 needed the boulevards, as that certain syndicates 
 thirsted for the job. Assuming that such main 
 arteries as the Boulevards de Sebastopol and St. 
 Michel, such streets as the R. de Rivoli, 4 Septembre, 
 and Turbigo were indispensable, it does not appear 
 certain that the Boulevards Haussmann or St. Germain 
 were inevitable, or even the latest of all, the Avenue 
 de 1'OpeYa. These streets are convenient, of course, 
 very "handsome," and profitable to those who knew 
 how to profit by them ; but the question is whether 
 they were worth the enormous burdens on the city 
 budget, the tremendous disturbance and destruction 
 involved, and the wholesale demolition of interesting 
 old structures which could never be replaced. As the 
 royal and imperial palaces of Paris bear on them 
 indelible marks of autocratic tyranny and pride, so the 
 new municipal works of the city too often betray their 
 origin in the syndicates of the Bourse and Municipal 
 Council. 
 
 It seems to be a natural law that an evil moral 
 taint in the constructors of great buildings or great 
 cities shows itself on the face of them for ever, just as 
 it is impossible to study the facade of a mediaeval 
 cathedral without seeing by what devout spirits and 
 by what faithful and honest labour it was raised.
 
 334 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 The domineering and inflated temper of a great 
 autocrat breaks out in the monotony and rigidity of 
 his palaces, and in his manifest desire to display power 
 rather than life, and vastness rather than beauty. 
 The palace of a tyrant is made to look like an inter- 
 minable line of troops in uniform mechanically dressed 
 for a review. The master of big battalions must have 
 a big palace, and then a bigger palace, a copy and an 
 extension of the former one. If his predecessor built 
 a beautiful palace he must crush it with something 
 that dwarfs and overpowers it, for is he not an even 
 grander potentate than the " grand mcnarque " de- 
 ceased ? The Louvre is a perfect study in stone of 
 moral degeneration on the throne. Franfois I., who, 
 with all his faults, loved France and loved beauty, 
 began the Italianised Louvre of Pierre Lescot : it is 
 one of the most lovely conceptions of the Renascence, 
 and has no superior of its order in Europe. We see 
 it in the south-western angle of the inner quadrangle. 
 The inner quadrangle was not completed for more 
 than a hundred years each king caring more for 
 power than he did for art, and adding a less and less 
 beautiful piece ; until at last, under Louis XIV., the 
 exquisite design of the early Renascence has sunk into 
 a dull and pompous classicalism. 
 
 But the crown of false taste was placed when, in 
 1665, Louis XIV. was seduced by the ingenious 
 amateur, Dr. Perrault, to reface the Louvre of Levau, 
 and to set up the huge sham screen, known as the 
 famous Colonnade, on the eastern facade facing St. 
 Germain 1'Auxerrois. Its twenty -eight immense 
 Corinthian columns, carrying nothing but a common 
 balustrade, are a monument of imbecile pomp. Directly 
 the trained eye perceives that this vast and stately 
 facade consists of two parallel faces within a few feet 
 of each other, the mind turns from such a senseless
 
 HISTORIC PARIS 335 
 
 parade of magnificence. It is quite true that the 
 facade is itself very imposing, well-proportioned, and 
 certain to impress itself as noble on those who do not 
 perceive its fraudulent construction. It was just the 
 thing to inflame the imagination of the brilliant young 
 Roi-Soleil: it debauched the courtly taste and ruined 
 the architecture of Paris. It was more or less imitated 
 in the grand public offices flanking the Rue Royale, 
 which face the Place de la Concorde. Thenceforward 
 splendour took the place of grace ; and interminable 
 orders of columns and windows in long regiments 
 took the place of art. 
 
 The first Empire, which had a genius of its own, 
 and even an imitated art that at times was pleasing 
 and usually intellectual, adopted and even exaggerated 
 the passion of the Grand Monarque for the grandiose 
 and the uniform. And the second Empire, which 
 had more ambition than genius, and more brilliancy 
 than taste, adopted and even exaggerated the designs 
 of the first Napoleon but alas ! without the refined 
 learning and the massive dignity which marked his 
 best work. Louis, accordingly, mauled about the old 
 Louvre and set up some singularly ingenious but 
 rather inartistic adjuncts to the Tuileries. He made 
 the disastrous mistake of prolonging the Rue de 
 Rivoli with a monotonous rigidity which has positively 
 discredited French taste in the eyes of all Europe. 
 He insisted on sweeping away the old citl of the 
 island, in order to make sites for the enormous barrack 
 and the vast hospital neither of which would be 
 required on that particular spot by a wisely organised 
 Government. 
 
 Nor did Louis stop here ; for his courtly, clerical, 
 and Bourse influences drove him to turn the Cathedral 
 of Notre Dame into a detached show, standing by 
 itself in a bare clearing, to set up more boulevards,
 
 336 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 more monotonous Rues de Rivoli in every part, and 
 to gut the interesting old quarter of the University, 
 the Schools, and Colleges, teeming with historical 
 associations and mediaeval relics, in order to make it 
 as close a copy of the Boulevard des Italiens as it was 
 possible to produce on the south side of the Seine. 
 Even more than all the sovereigns of France, from 
 Louis XIV. downwards, Louis Napoleon seemed bent 
 on hiding away or carting away the ancient Paris, and 
 turning the whole of the vast and venerable city into 
 a monotonous copy of the Anglo-American quarter 
 round the Madeleine and the Grand Opera. 
 
 The Republic succeeded in 1870 to a number of 
 unfinished schemes and to the awful ravages of civil 
 war. And, after almost a quarter of a century of 
 indefatigable effort, it has at length brought the 
 reorganisation of the city to a practical close and has 
 repaired the ruin of the two sieges. Happily, the 
 Republic, with such fearful trials and cruel lessons, 
 has had no desire to plan new schemes for eviscerating 
 the city, and has had other things to do instead of 
 building pompous palaces. It has wisely declined to 
 rebuild the Tuileries, and has made perhaps the best 
 that it could have made of the vast constructions that 
 connected Louvre and Tuileries. In spite of the 
 ambitious and offensive failure in the midst the noisy 
 monument to a great patriot who deserved something 
 nobler the palatial pile has not been surpassed in 
 modern Europe ; and by consent of the world the 
 spacious area between the Champs-Elyses and the 
 Pont Neuf contains the most brilliant city prospect 
 in Northern Europe. But the glory of the Republic 
 is the renewed Hotel de Ville, the most beautiful 
 building that has been raised in Paris since the original 
 Louvre of Pierre Lescot. The trade of the building 
 speculator and the mania of a despotic uniformity have
 
 HISTORIC PARIS 337 
 
 now received a death-blow. The ingenuity and 
 artistic instinct of France are acquiring again a free 
 hand ; the Revolutionary hatred of antiquity is dying 
 out, and the historic spirit is enlarging its scope. 
 When the Eiffel folly has come down, and the 
 mesquinerie and chlnoherie of sundry big works of the 
 fin de siecle has been replaced, Paris may face the 
 twentieth century with the proud consciousness not 
 only of being the most brilliant and pleasant of cities, 
 but also that she bears on her the record of twenty 
 memorable centuries of the Past.
 
 OUR CATHEDRALS 
 
 1895 
 
 I SHOULD like to support the plea for some national 
 control over local Restoration Committees by my own 
 reminiscences of French cathedrals and the cruel 
 mangling they have suffered in the last forty-five 
 years. I am old enough to remember some of the 
 noblest of them before the advent of Napoleon III. in 
 1851. One of the disasters of the Third Empire was 
 the buying the support of the Church by enabling it 
 to " restore " the cathedrals and churches of the Middle 
 Ages. The result has been to ruin, disguise, and 
 travesty almost every fragment of the thirteenth and 
 fourteenth century work throughout France. To 
 those who knew the great cathedrals of PVance, before 
 the murderous hand of the restorer had been at work 
 on them, they look like that ghastly picture of Murillo 
 "St. Bonaventura writing the Memoirs of St. 
 Francis after his own death." The Seraphic Doctor 
 is a corpse, who sits stiffly in his chair, holding the 
 pen in his blue-cold fingers and tracing the words 
 with his mummy-like limbs. The seraphic churches 
 of mediaeval France are to-day such corpses, " restored " 
 to life for a space, and pretending to be alive with a 
 rigid mockery of health. Men might as well drag 
 from their graves Robert de Luzarches and Pierre de 
 
 338
 
 OUR CATHEDRALS 339 
 
 Montereau and show us their skeletons adorned with 
 brand-new robes designed by a learned antiquarian as 
 present to us their churches transformed into modern 
 machine-cut stone. 
 
 I can remember the profound impression produced 
 on me as a school-boy when I first saw the great 
 buildings of Rouen and the churches and castles of 
 Normandy and along the Seine in the distant days of 
 Louis Philippe fifty years ago. What the cathedral 
 of Rouen was then may be faintly imagined by those 
 who know the fragments of it which Ruskin drew for 
 his "Seven Lamps." It was a mountain of crumbling 
 and pathetic imagery which perhaps in all those 
 centuries had never looked so truly grand and produced 
 so deep an impression. Time and decay had amal- 
 gamated the styles and harmonised all that was incon- 
 gruous or corrupt. One after another almost every 
 great church in the pointed style throughout France 
 has undergone the same transformation, until now it 
 is rather their skeletons or their mummies which 
 remain, and not the living work of the great mediaeval 
 artists. 
 
 No man now dreams of "restoring" i.e. repaint- 
 ing a famous picture, or an antique statue, or the lost 
 books of a great poem ; nor of bringing the Twelfth 
 Mass up to date. Nobody proposes to "restore" the 
 Parthenon, or to put a new nose on the Sphinx, or new 
 arms to the Melian Aphrodite, and it would be absurd 
 to talk of " restoring " the Colosseum with strict 
 attention to the Flavian " period," or the Pantheon 
 according to the canons of Vitruvius. But a church 
 is considered fair game for all ecclesiastical personages 
 of aesthetic proclivities, and every type of local busy- 
 body, " munificent donor," or archaeological prig. 
 They revel in it. They fall upon the poor crumbling 
 ruin like vultures on a dying camel in the desert.
 
 340 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 They form rival committees and bitter cliques about 
 it ; they wrangle, sneer, and foam at the mouth in 
 savage pamphlets and letters to the Press. We know 
 how all aesthetic persons of leisure and culture interpret 
 the great motto de gustibus non est disputandum ; 
 and we all know that there are no controversies so 
 ferocious as those of the odium theologicum. But the 
 " restoration " of a church combines the ferocity of 
 the aesthete with that of the theologian, and the poor 
 corpus vile of mediaeval sculpture has to suffer the 
 knives of a double army of vivisectionists. 
 
 The Church cannot be safely entrusted with the 
 sole care of the great remnants of mediaeval architecture. 
 The clergy are their most dangerous destroyers. And 
 the example of France, where the Church has had a 
 free hand, is really decisive. Not, of course, that 
 clergymen are either indifferent to the state of their 
 churches, or have any wish to injure them. Quite 
 the contrary. It is that trap de zele which is so mis- 
 chievous in diplomacy and in archaeology. The 
 clergy very naturally wish to see their churches look 
 smart, new, zealously cared for, and handsomely 
 furnished. To the clergy the church is a place for 
 daily worship, preaching, and teaching, and it is as 
 natural for the rector to like a " bright " church as to 
 like a bright rectory house and garden. But to the 
 mass of the public these ancient churches are primarily 
 public monuments, sacred relics, national glories ; and 
 it is of infinitely more moment to the great public to 
 preserve their ancient sanctity in its original truth 
 (even in decay) than it is to have them warm, comfort- 
 able, bright, and spick-and-span. The clergy, in their 
 natural and almost excusable zeal to show the people 
 that Anglicanism is very much alive, active, cultured, 
 and up-to-date, have really ruined and mauled almost 
 every fine old church in this country with their con-
 
 OUR CATHEDRALS 341 
 
 tractors' machine mason work, their horrid Birmingham 
 mediaevalisms, and all the intensely-pointed (and silly) 
 gimcrackery which is thought to bring down the 
 peculiar blessing of Heaven. 
 
 The rectors and munificent squires have ruined our 
 churches. But the Dean and Chapter have not yet 
 ruined our cathedrals or not all of them. And I see 
 no chance of saving our English cathedrals from the 
 catholic vandalism which has ruined the French, 
 except by placing them under a national administration 
 with strictly limited funds, and legislative restriction 
 to preserve^ but never to restore^ to shore up buildings 
 which are actually falling, to replace plain stone where 
 it is inevitable, but never under any pretext to copy, 
 imitate, or modify ornamental work. That is to say, 
 to keep old work of all kinds from falling to pieces if 
 possible, but never to try and replace old carving by 
 new, or make a mediaeval edifice look as if it had been 
 finished in our own generation. 
 
 As to replacing old figures by new, they might as 
 well tell us that the plaster cast of the " Hermes " of 
 Praxiteles in the British Museum is quite as good a 
 statue as the original at Olympia I dare say they will 
 tell us that it is better, for it is not so dingy, and 
 altogether "smarter." I have no doubt that a servant- 
 girl going out for her Sunday walk with her young 
 man thinks herself much " smarter " in Mr. Whiteley's 
 clean net veil at nfd. than she would be in her 
 mistress's real Venice point collar which has been 
 exhibited at the New Gallery, and looks "as if it had 
 been dipped in coffee," says Mary Jane. And perhaps 
 the parsons think their new church looks " smarter " 
 than anything the fourteenth century could turn out 
 especially as they have got to pay for their last 
 "spring cleaning." 
 
 But I have a practical suggestion to make. When
 
 342 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 an old building gets shaky call in an engineer not an 
 architect. Let no architect offer an opinion, touch 
 it, or come near it. An architect will naturally want 
 to renew. We don't want any renewing we want 
 preservation. An architect will have " taste," " ideas 
 of beauty," and, above all, theories about " epochs " 
 and " styles." Now we don't want taste or epochs or 
 styles not even if the eminent F.R.LB.A. were Sir 
 Christopher Wren, Ictinus, and Anthemius of Tralles 
 all in one. We want nothing but the building as it 
 is, the stones as they are, the carvings as time has left 
 them scarred, blurred, worn to mere blocks it may 
 be, but the original stones as ages have made them. 
 All we want is to keep them together, to prop them 
 up, to prevent their falling nothing else. This is 
 often an exceedingly difficult job, requiring all the 
 delicacy of an American dentist saving an old tooth, 
 and all the ingenuity that goes to make a railway- 
 bridge. But it is the task of the Engineer, not of the 
 Architect. 
 
 It is not a question of Art ; it is a question of 
 mechanical skill. An artist is out of place ; is worse 
 than de trap ; he is the most dangerous man you could 
 consult. He wants to be trying "variations" on the 
 old blocks, just as ambitious fiddlers want to show off 
 their own variations on the Carnival de Venise. I re- 
 member a famous poet, who could often use strong 
 language, noticing how a beautiful English girl, just 
 arrived in Florence, was stared at by a notorious old 
 flower-woman, whose reputation for intrigue was evil. 
 " Why ! " cried our poet, " she looks at the girl as a 
 butcher stares at a calf! " Well, I say, the architect 
 who respects himself looks at a Gothic building in bad 
 repair "as a butcher stares at a calf." He is quite 
 right ; his trade is butchering, and to serve the gentry 
 with the best new meat. He sees all the mistakes
 
 OUR CATHEDRALS 343 
 
 made by Wren or Gibbs two centuries ago ; he knows 
 what the old thirteenth-century masonry really meant 
 or ought to have meant. And as he gazes wistfully 
 at the beautiful old wreck he sees what lovely veal 
 the calf will make. 
 
 There is no paradox in my maxim that the work 
 is that of an engineer, that an artist is out of place. 
 It is not an affair of art it is an affair of mechanics, it 
 we honestly mean conservation not renovation. 
 Take any kindred matter. Suppose that Nelson's 
 coat were tumbling to pieces should we give it to a 
 Court tailor to " renovate," or to a mere workman to 
 darn ? If we gave it to a Court tailor, he would 
 furbish it up with new facings and fresh gold lace, as 
 if it were going to be worn at the next levee. If we 
 heard that Domesday Book were falling to fragments, 
 should we hand it over to Lord Acton to repair, with 
 instructions "to bring it up to date," or would the 
 sacred leaves be handed over to a mere palaeographic 
 expert ? If Raffaelle's cartoons were coming to bits 
 in strips and rents, should we call in Sir Everett Millais 
 and beg him to repaint the damaged parts ? No ; we 
 should send for a picture -cleaner, and tell him he 
 would be crucified if he dared to add a brushful of 
 fresh colour. 
 
 Ah, we cannot crucify Deans and Chapters, and 
 Restoration Committees ! As Sydney Smith said, they 
 have neither souls to be damned, nor (worse luck to 
 them) anything that we can kick. We cannot crucify, 
 nor damn, nor kick them, except in a metaphorical 
 and Pickwickian sense. But we still have the privilege 
 of every freeborn Briton to summon them to stop in 
 their career of vulgarity, ignorance, and outrage. 
 There is one infallible test. If, when an ancient 
 monument, delivered into their mercy, needs repair, 
 they call in an engineer to do what is mechanically
 
 344 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 inevitable, they mean preservation and they mean 
 right. If they call in an architect, an artist, or any one 
 with " taste," or esthetic views, they mean renovation 
 and they mean wrong. Half of the repairs of our 
 old cathedrals are needed underground ; perhaps two- 
 thirds of it. Architects are not wanted underground. 
 Engineers are and engineers are the only people to 
 be trusted for repairs above ground. Call in the ablest 
 engineers we have, the men who build Forth Bridges 
 and Blackwall Tunnels, and limit them strictly to 
 preservation of the old, with absolute veto on adding 
 anything new. Let us avoid architects, artists, and 
 aesthetes as the very Devil. "Some demon whispers 
 Dean, now show your taste ! "
 
 PICTURE EXHIBITIONS 
 
 1888 
 
 IN spring-time we are all much occupied with galleries, 
 exhibitions, and high art in many forms ; and we hear 
 incessant discourse, from men and women more or less 
 competent to direct our taste, as to the merits of 
 painters, schools, and styles, as to good and bad 
 technique^ as to the true and the false, the " precious " 
 and the " foul " in art. I sometimes ask myself, a 
 plain layman who presumes not to have an opinion 
 in these difficult matters, whether we reflect enough 
 upon the limits, sphere, and subjects of painting, on 
 the relations of painting to life, to thought, to religion ; 
 whether our painters are as clear as they ought to be 
 on these great antecedent problems : What can be 
 painted, what ought to be the end of a picture, what, 
 in great ages of art, did the artist regard as his 
 business and function ? 
 
 Is it clear, to begin with, that the custom of 
 holding Exhibitions of paintings really tends to the 
 advancement of art ? With very few exceptions, all 
 modern pictures are painted on the assumption that 
 they will be, or may be, ultimately exhibited. An 
 immense number of modern works seem painted solely 
 in order to be exhibited : and one hopes at the close of 
 the Exhibition they are at once painted out. We are 
 
 345
 
 346 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 so familiar with the institution of art exhibitions that 
 we take them to be as necessary to the painter's 
 art as his canvas and brush. And we seldom reflect 
 that in no great epoch of art were Exhibitions ever 
 imagined. 
 
 Can we conceive of Pheidias and Lysippus, Zeuxis 
 and Apelles carting their works into a gallery, as the 
 month of April came round, and all the young aes- 
 thetes in town, in new cheiton and chlamys, noisily 
 criticising the folds of "Nike's" drapery, the curves 
 of " Ilissus' " ribs, the soft limbs of " Aphrodite," and 
 the proud glances of " Athene " ? Fancy Giotto, 
 Angelico, Bellini, and Giorgione closely crammed 
 into long galleries, numbered 3785 and so forth, and 
 catalogued with little snippets from Dante, Petrarch, 
 and Boccaccio ! And did ingenious youths in the 
 Gazetta di Firenze, or the Giornale dl Roma, publish 
 vehement attacks or insidious puffs of the School 
 that each affected ? Was the " Sposalizio " skied by 
 the Hanging Committee; was the "Madonna di 
 San Sisto " jammed between a " Storm at Sea " and 
 a " Portrait of a Gentleman " ? Were Titian's 
 " Assumption " and Tintoretto's " Paradiso " ever 
 rejected by the Academy of Venice as unsuited for 
 exhibition and difficult to hang ? 
 
 A picture, like every work of visual art, is, or 
 ought to be, designed to fill some suitable space and 
 to be seen with harmonious surroundings. An altar- 
 piece has to fill and dignify a chapel. A battle-piece 
 may be in place in a public hall. A portrait, according 
 to its scale and style, may suit an ancestral corridor 
 or a domestic parlour. A vignette from the "West 
 Coast " or " Kittens at Play " may give sweetness and 
 light to the cottage boudoir. But an A'nnual Exhi- 
 bition is almost the only spot conceivable where no 
 picture ever can be in its place, where the local
 
 PICTURE EXHIBITIONS 347 
 
 environment of every picture is turned upside down, 
 where every note in the gamut of art is sounded in 
 discord. Suppose an Exhibition of musical instruments 
 where from eight till dusk the makers continuously 
 played on their own instruments such airs as each 
 thought best to bring out the tone of the piece ! To 
 one who had studied painting only in the Campo 
 Santo of Pisa, in the Arena Chapel, in Santa Maria 
 Novella and Santa Croce, in the Sistine and the 
 Vatican, in the School of San Rocco and the Doge's 
 Palace, to be thrust into a modern exhibition and told 
 to judge the works there, would seem as strange and 
 as painful as to be asked to judge of musical instruments 
 when all were being played upon together in the same 
 room but with different airs. 
 
 How vastly does genius loci, the placing and the 
 setting of a picture, deepen the impression, when we 
 gaze on the portraits of Titian, Veronese, and Tintor- 
 etto in the Doge's Palace, or on the Vandykes in the 
 Genoese palaces, or on the prophets and Sibyls who 
 keep eternal watch in the vaults of the Sistine, or on 
 the " Mantegna " in San Zenone, or the last rays of 
 the " Cenacolo " in the Refectory of San Lorenzo ! 
 How utterly different are Pisano's " Pulpit " or 
 Michael Angelo's "Notte," or Ghiberti's "Gates," 
 as we see them in Pisa or in San Lorenzo or the 
 Baptistery, and as we see them in the Crystal Palace 
 at Sydenham, or the South Kensington Museum ! 
 And yet year by year we cram side by side, as close as 
 frames can be set, in a wild pot-pourri of pictorial 
 discord, Holy Virgins, washerwomen, rapes of the 
 Sabines, scenes from Pickwick, Ledas, Dr. Johnson 
 with Boswell, and Lord Mayors in robes of office. 
 And on the first Monday in May we rush to Burling- 
 ton House and expect to find new Titians and 
 Raphaels cheek by jowl with a crowd of works which
 
 348 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 deliberately aim at the kind of success attained by a 
 popular music-hall song or a penny dreadful. 
 
 No really great picture can be seen in an Exhi- 
 bition, and the greater the picture the more it loses. 
 Nearly all pictures are nowadays painted with a view 
 to possible exhibition. But some are not ; and we 
 all know how much in these very rare instances the 
 painter gains. A large part of Rossetti's reputation 
 was no doubt due to the fact that he never exhibited ; 
 and promiscuous exhibitions of his works, even in the 
 absence of discordant surroundings, have hardly en- 
 hanced his peculiar vogue. Those who have seen 
 the pensive fancies of Burne- Jones or Leighton's 
 bright visions of Greek poetry in the studios or 
 saloons where they are at home, or for which they 
 were designed, can hardly believe that they are the 
 same works when they are seen jammed into a gallery 
 between a portrait of" His Royal Highness and an 
 " arrangement in ultra-marine." We might as well 
 expect to find Andromache, Phryne, and Galatea 
 looking natural, goddess -like, and Greek if they 
 mixed with the public on a crowded Saturday afternoon. 
 
 But it is more the moral effect on the painter's 
 mind than the discordant effect on his exhibited work 
 which is the real evil of Exhibitions. Some painters 
 are strong enough and honest enough to withstand 
 temptation. But the tempter is always at work. An 
 Exhibition is necessarily more or less a competition, 
 and a competition where for the most part the 
 conspicuous alone catches the public eye. // faut 
 sauter aux yeux y and that in the eyes of the silly, the 
 careless, the vulgar, in order to be popular. And the 
 painter who never becomes popular runs great risk of 
 ceasing to paint at all. The diapason tends always to 
 grow higher, and unless an air is given at concert 
 pitch, and something more, it is in danger of sounding
 
 PICTURE EXHIBITIONS 349 
 
 somewhat flat. Every device that colour, size, form, 
 title, subject, frame, can give to attract the eye, has 
 been exhausted by the ingenious painter, and not 
 always by the worst. No man who respects his art 
 stoops to such an artifice, and the honourable artist 
 rejects it with scorn. But it is unworthy of us to 
 subject men to competition with such degraded rivals, 
 and to expect that we can make new Titians and 
 Raphaels by a process which, like that of Exhibitions, 
 smothers the great qualities by discordant surroundings 
 and stimulates the activity of the vulgar qualities. 
 
 In far other modes were works of art "exhibited " 
 to the public in all great ages of art. They were 
 shown in the studio in which they were produced, or 
 in the place for which they were designed ; in the 
 first to the few whom the artist chose to admit, in the 
 second on the public and ceremonial completion of 
 the work. Were Pheidias' Athene of the Parthenon, 
 the gods and heroes of the pediments, and the Pana- 
 thenaic procession, Centaurs and Lapithae, sent about 
 from gallery to gallery, and jammed between "Scenes 
 from Aristophanes," "Geese on a Common," and a 
 presentation portrait of the Right Worshipful the 
 Archon Basileus ? When the chryselephantine Athene 
 was finally set up in her Parthenon a great festival was 
 made, and the citizens, magistrates, and priests, with 
 youths and maidens in procession, went up to the 
 Acropolis and gazed on the Goddess ; and there, 
 amidst hymns, sacrifices, and solemn offerings, the 
 whole city rejoiced and wondered at the marvellous 
 handiwork of the god -like sculptor. And when 
 Cimabue had finished his "Madonna" all Florence 
 attended the ceremony wherewith it was set up above 
 the altar as we see it still ; and Florence that day kept 
 holiday as at the Feast of the Annunciation. And 
 when Raphael lay dead in state, his "Transfiguration"
 
 350 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 stood above the bier ; and all Rome came and gazed 
 in wonder and reverence at the dead painter and at 
 his last work on earth. Such were Art Exhibitions 
 in the great ages of art. 
 
 This brings us to what is really the key of the 
 matter. The discordant hubbub of modern Picture 
 Exhibitions is the least part of the evil. It is the 
 divorce of art from the highest religious, social, 
 intellectual movement of the age which is the root of 
 decadence in art. It is the substitution of democratic 
 license and personal caprice for grand traditions and 
 loyal service in the larger forces of life. Here is the 
 root of feebleness, far more than in deficient training, 
 crude technique^ and picture Barnums. In all great 
 epochs of art the painter frankly accepted certain great 
 canons of religious, social, or artistic convention. He 
 thoroughly felt his art to be the expression of the 
 religious, social, and intellectual movement of his time. 
 He took it to be his business to give to that movement 
 colour and form. His art was not at all self-sufficing 
 and detached. It was simply one of the artistic modes 
 of expressing what was deepest and most commanding 
 in the spiritual world. The painter was the servant ; 
 the free, willing, creative servant, but the servant of" 
 the priest, the thinker, the poet and the statesman. 
 Pericles, Ictinus,and Pheidias laboured at the Parthenon 
 in one common conception : a work by Leucippus, 
 Polycleitus, or Zeuxis was an affair of State : a great 
 statesman of Rome, it was supposed, identified his 
 name with the Pantheon, one of the most original 
 conceptions in the history of art. Giotto worked in 
 the Arena Chapel under the eye of Dante, and ap- 
 parently under his inspiration. Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, 
 and Mantegna lived on the topmost wave of one of the 
 most wonderful outbursts of the human intellect. 
 Leonardo and Michael Angelo were two of its
 
 PICTURE EXHIBITIONS 351 
 
 mightiest forces, even had neither ever touched a 
 pencil. Raphael, Benvenuto, Titian, Velasquez, Jean 
 Goujon, Rubens, Reynolds were the intimates and 
 the equals of all that their ages possessed of brain, of 
 knowledge, of force. 
 
 Painting, which is a secondary and not a primary 
 form of human skill, cannot sever itself from power, 
 from religion, from thought, without becoming at 
 once feeble and wayward. The note of too much of 
 modern painting is to be at once silly and bizarre. It 
 has flung off all guides, teachers, and traditions ; 
 repudiates any sort of connection with religion, 
 thought, or rule ; decides everything out of its own 
 head ; and regards everything and anything a proper 
 subject for a picture, from the Day of Judgment to a 
 mushroom. Individual whims, any crude hobby, is 
 thought to be quite enough to enable a man to choose 
 a good subject for a painting, and to emancipate him 
 from the conventions which condemned Raphael to 
 eternal " Madonnas," Titian to perpetual " Europas," 
 " Ariadnes," and " Aphrodites," and Murillo to 
 innumerable cherubs. The modern painter holds 
 himself to be as absolutely free to invent his own 
 subject, to improvise his own canons of art, to humour 
 his own fancy, as Mr. Gilbert when he makes a new 
 burlesque, or Mr. Rider Haggard when he sketches a 
 new novel. 
 
 But a picture is not a novel ; for the painter's art 
 is immeasurably less fertile and elastic than the written 
 art of the poet or romancer. No genius can enable 
 the painter to compete with the story-teller in versa- 
 tility, in subtlety, in profusion and continuity of effect. 
 The painter has his own resources in vividness, in 
 colour, in harmony, in suddenness and unity of his 
 blow on the imagination it may be also in beauty. 
 But of course he buys these resources at the price that
 
 352 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 he cannot, by the conditions of his art, touch anything 
 but what is seen, that he is rigorously limited to one 
 moment of time, that he cannot possibly impart anything 
 which is not known, that he can never explain, never 
 continue a story, tell nothing which it requires words to 
 tell, and by the very instrument he uses he is forbidden, 
 except in partial and exceptional ways, to touch the 
 loathsome, the horrible, and the spasmodic. 
 
 These obvious truisms are trampled under foot in 
 our modern Exhibitions, where half the figure subjects 
 are painted novelettes, whereas these conditions were 
 strictly respected in all great ages of art. The 
 necessity for respecting them, and the instinctive 
 sense that the painter's art is a corollary of larger 
 forms of human power, and not a substantive and 
 self-sufficing force, compelled the painter, in all great 
 ages of art, to limit himself to a definite range of 
 subjects, to follow loyally the current ideals in religion, 
 in poetry, and in manners, to use perfectly simple 
 and familiar motifs, to shun whims, conundrums, 
 eccentricities and fantasias, very seldom indeed to be 
 comic, and almost never to be disgusting. The 
 great painters painted only a few score of subjects 
 absolutely familiar to all who saw them and these 
 almost without exception grand, ennobling, obvious 
 types of religious, mythological, and social ideals. 
 Nine-tenths of the painter's aim was, as it should be, 
 beauty. 
 
 Nowadays a large part of the modern Exhibition 
 seems to have no other end but to raise a laugh, to 
 invent a rebus, to puzzle, to disgust, or, mainly in 
 France, to excite the animal taste for blood and lust. 
 When we walk through a gallery of fine old masters, 
 we need no catalogue to describe to us the subjects. 
 We do not require to read half a page from Boswell's 
 Johnson or Macaulay's History of England, it may be
 
 PICTURE EXHIBITIONS 353 
 
 from Coventry Patmore or Ouida, before we can 
 conceive what it all means. No ancient master 
 would have tried to paint Shelley's Skylark or Swin- 
 burne's Songs before Sunrise. In the whole gallery of 
 old masters there are perhaps not more than a score 
 of different subjects, and all of these obvious to every 
 eye at a glance. Titian and Holbein painted portraits 
 as their sitters were, and did not turn them into ladies 
 and gentlemen dressed up for a fancy ball. Although 
 the subjects are so few, so obvious, so conventional, 
 there is no monotony. All looks noble, solemn, 
 beautiful ; for the aim of the painter then was to 
 show how much beauty could be shed over the old 
 ideals of faith, poetry, and manners. 
 
 It is quite true that the old ideals in faith, poetry, 
 and manners have proved insufficient. They have 
 failed us ; and we must make new ones. No sensible 
 man wishes to recall them ; nor does he wish to bind 
 art again in limits so narrow. Three centuries ago 
 modern Europe got rid of its old standards. The 
 faith which inspired Madonnas and Saints, the poetry 
 which was limited to a crude mythology and a few 
 romances, the manners which were essentially based 
 on aristocratic display, indolence, battle, and luxury, 
 were too narrow, too shallow, and too anti-social to 
 be permanent. Art, like modern civilisation, has 
 cast them off. And it is idle to dream that they can 
 ever return. 
 
 But it does not follow at all, because the old ideals 
 and sources of art are gone, that painting is to have 
 no ideals, no sources, no guide : that every painter is 
 to be a law to himself; and that every hobby, every 
 accident of any painter's life, can equally supply a 
 subject for a picture. What has happened is this. 
 So far as modern art is concerned, religion has almost 
 disappeared ; every tradition of great art has been 
 
 2 A
 
 354 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 wiped out ; and the old subordination of painting to 
 intellect and poetry is put aside. The reign of 
 universal democracy has set in for painting with 
 greater virulence even than in politics and in manners. 
 Painters, apparently by their fondness for the Stuarts, 
 Marie Antoinette, and the Royal Family, ought, one 
 would think, to be Tories and loyalists. But in the 
 practice of their art they recognise the wildest licence 
 of individual judgment, the entire equality of all men 
 to lay down the law in art, and the trenchant abolition 
 of every great and historic tradition. 
 
 In all great ages of art the artist's subject was 
 expected to conform to given conditions. It must 
 be simple, familiar, noble, traditional, and beautiful. 
 Nowadays it is too often enigmatical, eccentric, mean, 
 whimsical, or disgusting. Pheidias and the great 
 Greeks represented the gods and heroes of whom 
 Homer sang, the great memories of national history, 
 the beings in whom centred the worship, reverence, 
 and admiration of men, the loveliest women known to 
 the city, the finest champions in the games. Raphael 
 and his fellows painted the great types of religious 
 adoration, the familiar mythologies, great men and 
 great events in history. But in all cases, whether 
 the subject was sacred or secular, old or new, it 
 was always simple, familiar, noble, traditional, and 
 beautiful. Nowadays a painter seems to consider that 
 his business is to invent something absolutely new, if 
 possible queer, accidental, personal, comic, namby- 
 pamby, or bizarre. He seems to imagine that his 
 duty is to compose a mild original sonnet, a snippety 
 original novel, or a watery anecdote, grave or gay. 
 Now painters are not poets, romancers, nor literary 
 craftsmen. The result is that, when they try to 
 paint sonnets, stories, or essays, the work is, intel- 
 lectually, too often on a level of that which goes into
 
 PICTURE EXHIBITIONS 355 
 
 the columns of a county newspaper, and is headed 
 " Our Poets' Corner," and " Curious or Entertaining." 
 How can painters suppose that cultivated men and 
 women care for their japes, their puns, their snippings 
 from stale Elegant Extracts^ or for their own poetical 
 and moral maunderings on canvas ? A painter who 
 invents a new subject is almost certain to insert some- 
 thing that is either silly or bizarre. Almost all the 
 anecdotes which fill half a page of the Academy 
 catalogues, as subjects of so-called historical pictures, 
 scandal about Queen Elizabeth, the gallantries of 
 some Stuart prince (understanding gallantry in all its 
 various senses), the oddities of Swift, Johnson, or 
 Walter Scott, anecdotes of the Reign of Terror, etc., 
 are either quite unauthentic or utterly trivial ; nay, 
 not seldom they are grossly libellous and horribly 
 mean. So long as a subject offers a medium for 
 sheeny stuffs, quaint costume, and Wardour Street 
 bric-a-brac^ none seems to be too silly, too scurrilous, 
 or too petty for some painters. It is not the 
 business of painters to become very minor poets and 
 tenth-rate serial novelists. They have, as we say, to 
 paint the simple, the familiar, the noble, the traditional, 
 the beautiful so as to put new beauty into the old 
 types of our deepest adoration, love, reverence, and 
 delight. Their business is to add glow, intensity, 
 charm, to what is best in the faith, in the memory, in 
 the intellect of their age : not to puzzle, to startle, 
 much less to sicken us. 
 
 It is the honour of our older Academicians steadily 
 to uphold the great traditions of the noble style, as to 
 the subjects proper for painting. First and foremost 
 in this matter comes Leighton himself. And in 
 nothing does his culture, taste, and training in the 
 great schools tell more than in the example he sets his 
 contemporaries as to the field, limits, and aim of their
 
 356 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 art. Never was this shown more finely than in the 
 subject of the first picture with which he came upon 
 the world, "The Procession at Florence" to escort 
 Cimabue's Madonna to Santa Maria Novella. Here 
 was an almost perfect subject for a modern painter. 
 It was simple, obvious, noble, and beautiful. Though 
 the idea was new, it presented a touching and dignified 
 incident in the history of art, in a form familiar and 
 interesting to all cultivated people. It was like a 
 chapter out of Modern Painters in colour and form. 
 I confine myself strictly to the subject, to the painter's 
 motifo and do not touch upon any point in the execu- 
 tion. As a subject it was perfect. For some forty 
 years he has continued to present a series of subjects, 
 almost equally happy Greek, mythological, or 
 historical but all simple, familiar, noble, traditional, 
 and beautiful. To understand such pictures as the 
 "Daphnephoria," Phryne," " Cimon," or the Hemi- 
 cycle " at Kensington, it is not necessary to read a 
 page out of some historian, or to consult Dictionaries 
 of Antiquities. Every cultivated man at once re- 
 cognises the subject, and sees at a glance that it is 
 simple, impressive, beautiful. So, too, the Andromache 
 is equally happy in its subject. Every cultivated man, 
 without reading the lines from the Iliad^ can recognise 
 the incident ; can see its beauty, its pathos, its tragic 
 and lyric dignity ; and so he is drawn on to study in 
 detail the Hellenicism, the refinement of knowledge 
 and taste, the subtle convolutions of grace, with which 
 the painter illustrates the poet. We are dealing now 
 solely with the subject of a painting. And here surely 
 is the painter's art seeking to express the grandest 
 poetry, in high and pure traditional types. 
 
 So, too, Mr. Watts has maintained a noble choice 
 of subject in the grand and true vein of the old schools. 
 In his Dawn," Death," Love," " Hope," " Faith,"
 
 PICTURE EXHIBITIONS 357 
 
 and like symbolical fancies, he is usually within the 
 limits of the simple and the intelligible. At times he, 
 too, wanders off into the abstruse and the fantastic 
 never into that of the trivial or the repulsive. A poet 
 may be mystical, obscure, even wild for a space ; but 
 a painter cannot be so without infinite risk. The 
 definiteness, the fixity, the simplicity of his instrument 
 bind him. No man less than Michael Angelo can 
 venture to be Apocalyptic ; nor can painter born of 
 woman be mystical without ceasing to be intelligible ; 
 and an unintelligible picture is a rebus. 
 
 These sound traditions as to subject for the most 
 part are sufficiently preserved by such men as Mr. 
 Poynter, Mr. Armitage, Mr. Long, Mr. Richmond 
 to mention no others. For the most part the subjects 
 they paint are simple, familiar, dignified, and beautiful. 
 So far as Mr. Long shows a tendency to plunge into 
 learned antiquities, and oddities of archaeology, needing, 
 to explain them, long passages from Diodorus Siculus 
 apparently his favourite author so far he is leaving 
 the ground of familiar and simple art. Of Mr. Alma- 
 Tadema and Sir John Millais a few words must be said. 
 Sir John is only on rare occasions a painter of historical 
 and imaginative incidents ; and his greatest admirers 
 will hardly think that he best displays in them his 
 wonderful gifts as a painter. A man who tries to 
 write the chapters of a novel on a canvas three feet by 
 two is on perilous ground. The " Huguenot," the 
 " Order for Release " achieved that feat. It may be 
 doubted if the " Fireman " and some others did not 
 overstep the line. The business of a painter is not to 
 tell a thrilling story, or to paint spasms we cannot 
 bear thrilling moments eternally prolonged in one 
 strain. His business is to present a subject which is 
 simple, familiar, noble, and beautiful. 
 
 Still less can it be the business of a painter elabor-
 
 358 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 ately, lovingly, and learnedly to paint a childish 
 practical joke. From the point of view of subject and 
 motif^ Mr. Alma-Tadema's " Heliogabalus," in spite of 
 its pictorial skill, is itself a bad joke. The subject 
 has every vice that a subject can have. It is at once 
 silly, bizarre^ incomprehensible, whimsical, and mean. 
 It is bad enough to commemorate at all one of the 
 most pitiful animals whom accident ever thrust into a 
 throne ; but to choose a childish anecdote out of some 
 chronique scabreuse^ and one which it is physically im- 
 possible to paint, is really to sin against art and sense. 
 This is all the more to be regretted because Mr. Alma- 
 Tadema's astonishing powers as a painter have been 
 long united with real learning, singular instinct for 
 antique life, and a delightful zest for the aroma of 
 classical ages. Mr. Alma-Tadema is one of the few 
 living men who can don the cheiton and the toga with 
 the air of a true ancient. But he has too often shown 
 a dangerous turn for archaeological eccentricities, and 
 trivial bypaths and alleys of the antique world ; when, 
 with all his mastery of hand and stores of knowledge, 
 his business is to show us its temples, palaces, life, and 
 thought, its power, its splendour, its beauty it may be its 
 vices and its weakness, but not its tricks and tomfooleries. 
 No painter in any age has ever shown more loyal 
 regard for noble traditions in selecting his subjects 
 than has Mr. Burne- Jones. A certain field of 
 romantic mythology he has made all his own the 
 old tales of Hellas conceived in the spirit of a Renais- 
 sance mystic. Burne-Jones' studio, full of a long 
 mythological series, looks as if Sir Thomas Malory had 
 made us a volume of Greek myths, " translated out of 
 the Greke boke." These solemn fugues on the 
 theme of " Penseroso " are simple, noble, traditional, 
 and beautiful. It is a question if they are familiar, if 
 they do not verge on the mystical, if they are not at
 
 PICTURE EXHIBITIONS 359 
 
 times occult and cryptogrammic. A man who dwells 
 so much alone in a dreamland of his own is necessarily 
 appealing to a select audience. And it has been 
 Burne-Jones' noble aim through life to pray ever for 
 "audience fit, though few." As to Rossetti, he with- 
 drew into a dreamland infinitely less accessible to the 
 public, a dreamland almost confined to one great poet 
 and to one set of types. It required a special study in 
 itself to know what Rossetti was dreaming about at 
 all. No painter ever took such pains to dream for 
 himself, by himself, and within himself alone. To 
 the poet and Rossetti was certainly a poet the 
 claim is legitimate enough. But a painter, as he quits 
 the simple and the familiar, is making for the enig- 
 matical and the artificial. And in any case he is 
 deliberately restricting the power of his work to a 
 special circle of cognoscenti and illuminati. 
 
 It is of course in the Salon at Paris that conspicuous 
 examples are seen of the modern craving for new and 
 startling subjects. Not that there is any real " French 
 school," as some persons fancy. For the Salon 
 contains examples of fifty schools, the works of painters 
 from almost every civilised nation, representing a 
 score of very different ideals of art. But in the Salon, 
 with the audacity, licence, versatility, and power it 
 collects, are seen examples of the best and worst types 
 of modern aim in art. Humanity, pathos, imagina- 
 tion, tenderness, bestiality, lust, ferocity, impudence, 
 and tomfoolery jostle each other in the fierce struggle 
 to attract the notice of the public. All is wild 
 democratic licence. Filth, disease, death, carnage, 
 torture, prurient prying into things which decency 
 and self-respect keep covered, the secrets of the dis- 
 secting-room, of the consulting-room, of the studio, 
 of the dressing-room, of the slums and the sewers, 
 form the inspiration of pictures equally with devotion,
 
 360 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 poetry, sympathy, and dignity. Every man rights for 
 his own hand, paints in his own method, chooses his 
 own subject, and tells his own story. And the result 
 is an unimaginable pot-pourri. Huge canvases seem 
 designed solely on the principle so well understood by 
 the vendors of " Pears' soap." They are not pictures, 
 but gigantic posters^ to let the world know that there 
 is such a painter as M. Tel much at your service. 
 No human being could buy, much less live beside, 
 these enormities. And the greater the enormity, the 
 more is the public forced to stare. 
 
 Of all infamies on canvas I ever saw the worst is 
 "The Maniac." Here, in a bare room, with every 
 sign of a recent struggle, the furniture smashed to 
 fragments, stove, mirror, chairs, door, and crockery in 
 bits, on the edge of a deal table, sits, in his shirt, a 
 wretched maniac, grinning in ghastly triumph. At 
 his feet lies extended, in a pool of blood, with clothes 
 torn to shreds, the dead body of a woman, common, 
 coarse, and prosaic. Even had the picture power and 
 terror, which it has not, it would be loathsome. But 
 the cold, hard, dry, photographic presentment of a 
 vulgar madman committing a brutal murder is as foul a 
 subject as ever painter imagined. Zolaism is indeed 
 rampant in art when this is possible. But in literature 
 even a ghastly murder does not stand out in such 
 visible crude brutality. And no one is obliged to read 
 Zola unless he deliberately choose. To expose on a 
 life-size canvas to the public gaze Zolaism in its 
 crudest shape is an offence against civilisation, which 
 every decent man and woman ought to treat as an 
 unpardonable outrage. 
 
 Or what shall we say to a "Rape in the Stone 
 Age," by Jamin ? Here a sort of naked Polyphemus 
 has seized and is carrying off a nude, very white studio 
 model, who is posed as the female of the Stone Age.
 
 PICTURE EXHIBITIONS 361 
 
 In her fury this elegant nymph has rammed her 
 thumb into Polyphemus' right eye, which she is just 
 gouging out. Polyphemus, howling with pain, 
 clutches the graceful girl in his huge fist, and is just 
 crushing in her ribs, she yelling in agony. To them 
 comes Polyphemus No. 2, a sort of Porte St. Martin 
 torturer ; who, seizing his rival behind, is garotting 
 him by strangling him round the throat. Conceive 
 the man who shall purchase this work of art, and sit 
 down to dinner daily in presence of the last yells of 
 palaeolithic man and pre-metallic woman. 
 
 A new motif for art has also been discovered in 
 death, disease, and lechery, treated in its most prosaic, 
 photographic, and vulgar side. Some dozen corpses 
 laid out with candles, wreaths, and satin pillows, a 
 surgeon examining a girl's bared chest, the painter's 
 model playing pranks without any clothing, everything 
 put on to canvas which Zola puts into print. One 
 picture indeed is a melancholy sight, for it has power, 
 skill, even pathos of a certain kind : on a long, stiff 
 bench, in the ante-room of a hospital, sit a row of 
 women, waiting for their turn to be admitted disease 
 in all its shapes stamped on their faces and forms. All 
 of them are dull, commonplace, colourless, and weary. 
 No one of them tells her story ; no ray of grace, 
 cheerfulness, or imagination lights the composition. 
 No canvas can tell such a story. They sit there tired, 
 faint, and sickly and that is all. It is a simple study 
 of disease of disease apparently hopeless ; for not a 
 touch is there to show us humanity, goodness, science, 
 or love. There is not even tragedy ; for the poor 
 creatures are simply a-weary, without dignity, without 
 strength to suffer even with each other. It is a bald 
 study of disease. But disease is not a subject for the 
 painter's skill. Such is the truly infernal influence of 
 Zola upon modern art.
 
 362 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Happily amidst these horrors start up, like flowers 
 blooming among the grinning skulls of a charnel- 
 house, here and there a noble subject nobly conceived. 
 Cheek by jowl with bestialities such as "L'esclave 
 blanche," "Elle ralait en sanglots sourds . . .," "Le 
 repos du modele," "Turpe senilis amor," "The Duel 
 between Women," etc. etc., stand such fine concep- 
 tions as Detaille's " Dream," J. Lefebvre's " Orphan 
 Girl with her Grandmother at Prayer," Humbert's 
 " Three Stages of Motherhood," Bouguereau's " First 
 Death Abel," Henner's "Saint Sebastian," Aime 
 Ferret's "Golden Wedding," Hubert's "Nameless 
 Heroes." We are dealing now with these pictures, 
 as throughout this paper with all pictures, solely from 
 the point of view of their subject, as it might be 
 understood from description and a rough sketch. 
 The composition, colour, execution, and the like belong 
 to another field. But these, with some splendid 
 portraits and excellent landscapes, are enough to prove 
 that modern art has yet before it a great future, when 
 it shall have cleared itself from filth, bombast, putre- 
 faction and gore ; and shall have settled the primary 
 problem What can be painted, what cannot be 
 painted, and what is the painter's function ? 
 
 The resources open to modern art can be no better 
 seen than in the scheme of Detaille's "Dream." A 
 regiment in mid campaign is bivouacked by night on 
 the open field, in the first streaks of the dawn which 
 are to bring in a few hours the day of battle, glory, 
 and death. Young and old, veteran and conscript, 
 officer and soldier, lie stretched in long lines beside 
 their piled arms watchfulness, hope, eagerness, anxiety, 
 indifference, bull -dog courage, and young ambition 
 seem to quiver over the upturned faces and the 
 prostrate limbs. Dimly in the driving clouds over- 
 head may be traced a dreamlike and cloudy army in
 
 PICTURE EXHIBITIONS 363 
 
 the air, the ghost or vision of some imperial host, 
 with eagles and arms waving mistily in the sky, filling 
 the heavens with the weird and silent clang of the 
 charge, the rally, and the crash of the heroes of the 
 Grande Armee. Now here is a motif wholly new and 
 inconceivable by ancient master, which yet is simple, 
 obvious, imaginative, noble, and solemn. Here for 
 once is a subject wholly within the reach of the 
 painter and yet full of modern poetry. All things are 
 yet possible to an art which can so strike forth a new 
 and noble strain. 
 
 J. Lefebvre's solemn and fine picture of the aged 
 "Widow with her Orphan Grandchild in Church," 
 and Humbert's "Mother in Three Ages," belong to 
 a school in which the French are still almost supreme 
 the majestic simple pathos of the humblest, saddest 
 life without elegances, without weakness, without 
 puerile sentimentalism ; not without a certain severe 
 and restrained beauty, but with no trace of concession 
 to prettiness. In this form of massive tenderness, in 
 this profound simplicity of the human, the Salon stands 
 forth unrivalled. And yet why, alas ! in so rare an 
 example ? How in the same gallery with works so 
 nobly conceived, beside such exquisite refinement as 
 we see in Bouguereau's " Bather," and Henner's 
 " Daphne," such grand landscape subjects as J. Breton's 
 "Shepherd's Star," such pure and touching scenes of 
 peasant life, such verve everywhere, such knowledge 
 of antiquity, of the East and the South, such invention, 
 such diabolical cleverness and enterprise, how there 
 can be painted year by year monstrous grotesques, 
 rampant idiocies, satanic obscenities, huge follies, such 
 as "St. Denis," calmly walking along a high road 
 with his decapitated head in his hands, bleeding down 
 his headless trunk, to the terror of the very dull 
 peasants at work, the "Titans tumbling out of Heaven,"
 
 364 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 " The Milky Way " (or " Milk Street," as the official 
 catalogue Englishes it), "Pluto and Proserpine," 
 abominations like " The Minotaur in the Labyrinth," 
 and the like this is indeed barely intelligible. Perhaps 
 Maignan's " Voices of the Tocsin " may be said to 
 touch the border-line. In a mediaeval belfry we see a 
 huge bell swinging madly in the alarum ; burning 
 roofs, smoke, and flame in the streets below. And, 
 as the vast bell roars out its awakening peal, weird 
 forms of terror, havoc, despair, courage, hate, and 
 death, whirl -like vultures through the air, clutching 
 and tearing the bell-ropes in their mad dance, and 
 rocking the very tower to its foundations in their fury. 
 It is a strange Victor Hugoish conception, not with- 
 out grandeur and poetry ; pairitable perhaps by an 
 artist who combined in himself Michael Angelo, 
 Tintoretto, and Turner. As it is, though in one way 
 still a striking picture, it is too much of a "salmi of 
 frogs' legs," as they said of Correggio's famous dome 
 at Parma. It is plain that at the root of modern art 
 lies the primary question : which is this. All canons, 
 and limits, and subjects, of the painter, as understood 
 of old, being gone, what new canons, what new limits, 
 and what new subjects can we find to replace them ? 
 
 Now this is not an artist's problem, or at least not 
 a problem for the artist to solve alone. It is a 
 problem for the best philosophy and judgment of our 
 age. It is for the best brains amongst us to settle 
 some practical canons of the limits of the art of 
 painting, to indicate the barrier between paintable and 
 unpaintable things, to tell us, and to tell our painters, 
 what is their relation to religion, to poetry, to thought. 
 Our art critics have perhaps too much neglected this 
 all-important field. They have been too apt to repeat 
 the technical jargon of the studios, and to omit the 
 primary question, What can the painter paint ? Mr.
 
 PICTURE EXHIBITIONS 365 
 
 Ruskin, who in so many wonderful ways has rekindled 
 the torch of art for our whole Victorian age, in 
 architecture, in painting, even in dress, nay, almost in 
 literature, has done much to weaken the control of 
 good sense over the subjects of art. Intent on his 
 central idea of good work, he lavishes extravagant 
 praise on mere enfantillage^ goes into raptures over a 
 baby and white kitten, systematically dwells on the 
 painted surface, and not the painted mind. Indeed, 
 almost the one thing about which he rarely utters a 
 word is the human form in reality, nine-tenths of 
 the highest art. Following him, the art-mentors of 
 our time will discourse largely about schemes of 
 colour, truth in a brocade, and successful impasto^ 
 but they have little to say about that which precedes 
 all these and governs the whole how should the 
 painter choose his subject ? If the prevailing vices of 
 the foreign schools are lewdness and bombast, the 
 prevailing vices of the English schools are triviality and 
 vulgarity. Our English painters, with some splendid 
 exceptions, do not seem to live sufficiently with the 
 higher intelligence of the time, seem to be inadequately 
 cultivated as men, and have little access to the best 
 religious and poetic standards of our age. 
 
 It is the object of these pages to invite some 
 competent authority to clear the ground of this 
 question. In the meantime, if a simple member of 
 the shilling public may offer a suggestion at all, the 
 following points are submitted as a rough and tentative 
 sketch. Exhibitions of paintings in crowded galleries 
 are a real incubus on art ; they swamp the merits of 
 the good and stimulate the faults of the worse. The 
 twelve rooms at Burlington House, which have more 
 than 2000 works, cannot properly show more than 
 200 ; indeed, 100 would be a far wiser limit. And 
 even 100 would be strangely and cruelly out of place
 
 366 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 in any mere gallery, if they were works of real 
 imagination and power. All pictures should be 
 exhibited under a simple title : every word of poetry, 
 extract, Diodorus Siculus, Macaulay's History, puns, 
 sentiments, and ejaculations, should be strictly for- 
 bidden, as at Paris. Picture galleries are not comic 
 annuals, nor are they Methodist pulpits, and fun of all 
 sorts, literary dribble, and sermonising are horribly 
 out of place in a picture. Next, Art Academies are 
 not International Exhibitions ; and we do not want 
 Japanneries, Colinderies, and laborious costumeries 
 from foreign lands thrust upon us simply to prove 
 how well the painter has got up his lesson. Still less 
 are Art Academies schools for impressing on the 
 public mind Layard's Nineveh, Smith's Dictionary of 
 Antiquities, Rawlinson's Herodotus, and all the learning 
 of the Egyptians, the Ninevites, and Phenicians. 
 The business of painting is to vivify and beautify 
 what we do know, and not to cram into us a know- 
 ledge of facts which we do not know. The business 
 of the painter is not to compose small romances, but 
 to clothe with life and grace the sights and conceptions 
 which are familiar to us. It is not the function of 
 art to produce a photographic resemblance of the 
 common, simply that men may say, " It is almost as 
 good as a photograph." It is not the duty of the 
 painter to put into elaborate form what is uncommon, 
 droll, and unintelligible ; he has to put into permanent 
 shape the beautiful, the noble, the suggestive. 
 
 The nineteenth -century mania for Exhibitions 
 seems to blind the painter, the critic, the public to 
 some of the simplest truisms in the philosophy of art. 
 A picture, by the nature of the case, is always en 
 evidence in the place where it is, acquires or creates a 
 certain genius loci, and becomes therefore part of the 
 instinctive life of those who dwell in its presence.
 
 PICTURE EXHIBITIONS 367 
 
 We cannot shut up a picture and put it away in our 
 shelves as we do a book ; we cannot play it over again 
 as the mood takes us, just as we can with a piece of 
 music. There it stands for ever opposite to us like a 
 Palace or Cathedral, continually reiterating the same 
 impression. For this reason, drollery, riddles, anec- 
 dotes, novelettes, sentimentalities on canvas, are so 
 horribly irritating. Does the painter of "Two of a 
 Pair," "Her Favourite Flower," "How happy I could 
 be with either," "Sterne and the Dead Jackass," 
 " Bugs in a Rug," " Satan addressing the Fallen 
 Spirits in Pandemonium," "The Drunkard's Home," 
 " Pharaoh's Daughter at Five o'clock Tea " do the 
 authors of' these very quaint, moral, tearful, or learned 
 compositions ever ask themselves this question 
 " When the Exhibition is over, will the buyer like 
 to sit down day by day and listen to the same jest, the 
 same story, the same bit of sapient morality, or curious 
 bit of learning ? " A slight tale, a good anecdote, an 
 odd incident, are all very well once in a way ; in a 
 book, over the dinner-table, in an idle hour. But to 
 have them eternally dinned into us is maddening. 
 " Evil communications corrupt good manners " is a 
 grand and true saying. But who could bear to have 
 it always staring at one over the fireplace, or shouted 
 into our ears by the public bellman ? Falstaff himself 
 would drive one crazy, if we had to listen to Henry 
 IV. every time we took a seat at the dinner-table. If 
 a comic picture is good art, why not a comic building, 
 a droll town-hall, a laughable palace, with " surprise " 
 windows and doors, and a labyrinth or " maze " in the 
 basement ? And, if the queer and the sentimental be 
 the weakness of our English friends, what shall we say 
 to the French painter who eternises on canvas some 
 rhodomontade fat for an anarchist orator, or a double 
 entendre that would cause a blush at a cafe chantant ?
 
 368 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 A silly, tedious, vicious picture is infinitely worse than 
 a silly, tedious, vicious song. The song, if it chance 
 to pollute or weary our ears, is gone in an hour, and 
 never need offend us again. The picture, like the 
 poor, we have always with us for ever jesting, 
 weeping, moralising, it may be screaming or blasphem- 
 ing, on the one monotonous note. 
 
 Perpetual picture exhibitions, picture competitions, 
 and the gabble about "art for art," are making us 
 forget these simple, eternal truths. In all great ages 
 of art the painter was guided by the poet, the thinker, 
 the spiritual and temporal chiefs of the society he 
 lived in. In all great ages of art, the painter was 
 guided by serious canons in his choice of subject ; and 
 his work was an affair of religious and public concern. 
 In no great age of art were there ever art competitions 
 or May picture-hunts. The painter felt that he had 
 to dignify, beautify, purify human life, to give form 
 and colour to the deepest ideals of his time. His 
 subjects were made for him by an organised public 
 opinion, expressed and enforced by the best minds of 
 the age. And his subjects were always simple, familiar, 
 noble, traditional, and beautiful.
 
 NUDE STUDIES 
 
 1885 
 
 THIS question raises some of the most subtle problems 
 in manners and in art, the difficulties of which 
 have hardly yet been grasped by public controversy. 
 Much is due to the prejudices of well-meaning but 
 uncultured people, in whose name the " British 
 Matron " is privileged to talk nonsense. But she 
 will hardly be convinced by such crude pleas for " the 
 natural" as those of a "British Girl"; and the 
 petulant retorts of the art world do not quite satisfy 
 the thoughtful mind. I venture to think that the 
 outcries of worthy ignorant women deserve respectful 
 attention and some sincere attempt to put this matter 
 on a sounder footing. And I perceive a tendency in 
 modern art to assert its liberty in a violent way and to 
 claim what, by canons of true art, is illegitimate 
 ground. 
 
 It is certain that in this matter of clothes there 
 may be found in art, on the stage, and in society cases 
 of licence which are bad by deliberate intention. It 
 is the duty of high art to clear itself of any such 
 miserable association, and it is the task of morality to 
 place the canons of purity on a rational and sure 
 foundation. Because, in the matter of the draped and 
 the undraped there is a very real abuse, it does not 
 369 2 B
 
 370 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 follow that all modes of the undraped are bad ; neither 
 does it follow that all modes are good. Let me try, if 
 it be possible, to make the matter clear in language 
 fitting pueris virginibusque. 
 
 What is it that constitutes decency in dress ? 
 Clearly nothing but habit ; the custom of the par- 
 ticular society or subject-matter concerned in 
 ordinary language, convention. This seems strange 
 to some people ; but it is most certainly true that 
 there is no absolute rule as to what drapery is or is 
 not decent. Even in the same society the conditions 
 vary enormously. Use and custom alone determine 
 the becoming. A Turkish lady is shocked if a 
 strange man sees her without a yashmak and a 
 monstrous bundle of wraps. So conventional is this 
 covering of the face that a Mussulman peasant woman 
 surprised in the field will often veil it with her only 
 petticoat. Travellers tell us that a well-bred African 
 woman blushes to be seen for the first time in clothes. 
 The unusual use of clothing appears to her scarcely 
 decent. Custom, habit, and convention decide the 
 matter among ourselves. A pure cottage girl in 
 Connemara, who sleeps in a room with men and 
 never owned stockings, would feel uneasy in the ball 
 dress of a princess. The princess would almost suffer 
 death rather than share her cottage for a week. If 
 the daughters of Leonidas went to a Drawing Room 
 at Buckingham Palace in their Spartan tunics they 
 would probably cause as great a flutter as they would 
 feel themselves. No one would expect a hospital 
 nurse to do what hundreds of innocent girls do in a 
 pantomime ; but the danseuse, again, would hardly 
 submit to the unsparing revelations of a surgical ward. 
 Honi soit is the sole and paramount rule ; but then 
 this depends on certain conventional practices being 
 respected.
 
 NUDE STUDIES 371 
 
 Now, is it a custom of civilised society to admit 
 in art an absence of drapery which would now be 
 intolerable in life ? Most certainly it is ; the practice 
 of the best men, of the purest genius, agreeing with 
 the good sense of the cultivated world, has sanctioned 
 it for centuries in ancient and in modern times. But, 
 just as certainly, it is sanctioned under definite con- 
 ventional terms. The true question is, Have these 
 conventional terms been uniformly respected by 
 modern art ? I venture to think they have not been 
 perfectly observed ; and it is on this ground that I 
 wish to speak. The terms upon which the undraped 
 is a noble subject of art are these (i) a manifest 
 appeal to the love of beauty, and not to appetite ; (2) 
 an ideal presentation, and not a literal transcript of 
 individual fact ; a generalisation in the imagination, 
 and not a photographic record of the particular ; (3) 
 the observance of certain special artistic conventions 
 as old as Praxiteles. 
 
 The representation of the bare limbs and skin of 
 man is not only a worthy subject of art, but is im- 
 measurably above any other form of art whatever. 
 Not only is the human form and complexion the most 
 exquisitely lovely thing in nature, but the subtle diffi- 
 culties of painting it are so great, and the delight 
 which it gives us when successful is so intense, that 
 every other kind of art is distinctly humbler in aim. 
 Much of the irritation which a " study " produces in 
 the ignorant is due to the fact that the noble painting 
 of the form is an almost extinct art. If we compare 
 a gallery of ancient masters with Burlington House 
 we shall see in the ancients infinitely more careful 
 painting of the flesh. I do not mean that we see so 
 many Venuses, Eves, and nymphs, but we see figures 
 partly undraped, an arm or a foot absolutely true and 
 living, the blood coursing beneath the quivering skin,
 
 372 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 the glow of health and purity with inimitable life 
 before our eyes. The difference is this : In a 
 modern gallery, with half-a-dozen adventurous 
 "studies," the like of which are not to be found in 
 the National Gallery or the Louvre from end to end, 
 we have a waxy, conventional painting of the skin 
 wherever an arm, a bust, or a foot protrudes from 
 those masses of " Liberty " costumes whereon the 
 serious attention of the painter is bestowed. There 
 seem hardly ten men in England who can draw the 
 figure, and not one who can paint flesh, with entire 
 mastery. Now, it needs a veritable master to paint a 
 Venus or a Phryne emerging from the bath. Even 
 the President himself dipped his magnificent creature 
 in walnut juice ; and Mr. Poynter's bather is a fine, 
 firm, true, but not a magnificent creature. A Venus, 
 an Eve, or a bather of life size is like an epic poem 
 it is either a sublime success, or nothing. Would 
 that we saw in our galleries more of that marvellous 
 texture and modelling of limb which, if it reach its 
 highest point in Titian's Venus of the Tribune and 
 his Flora, is perpetually present in a St. Sebastian or a 
 Bacchus, in the portrait of a Venetian lady, or it may 
 be in the feet of a Madonna in glory. 
 
 Perhaps our painters would educate the public 
 better if they devoted themselves to the more constant 
 painting of the form, and presented it in somewhat 
 less ambitious modes. When a man can paint feet 
 and hands like Raphael, or the bust like Titian, or 
 the limbs of a Sebastian like Francia, he may adventure 
 on a tour de force of bathers and dancers ; but he had 
 better wait till then. And always let him remember 
 his limits of " ideal beauty " and " conventional 
 practice." It is laughable enough to see a poor, dear 
 old " goody " supposing that painters present the form 
 as they see it. It is nearly as laughable to see a young
 
 NUDE STUDIES 373 
 
 girl supposing there is no harm in anything " natural." 
 Why, my dear " goody " and my dear young lady, if 
 painters were photographers and not painters, neither 
 you nor any decent man or woman could stay in 
 Burlington House ten minutes. But I am far from 
 clear that our painters are quite as careful as they 
 might be to observe the conditions of " ideal beauty " 
 and "conventional practice." Abroad it is perfectly 
 certain that neither condition is respected. The 
 Haidees, Nanas, " le modele qui se gratte " of a French 
 Salon deliberately violate every one of the three canons 
 of true art. And much work of the Van Beers and 
 their school belongs to the class of art against which a 
 late Lord Chancellor directed a useful Act. In the 
 face of such tendencies in modern art it is the duty of 
 all honourable men who love art truly to reject the 
 smallest concession to the accursed thing. 
 
 Convention, and convention alone, is the measure 
 of the decent where motive and intention are perfectly 
 pure. Neither painters nor critics recognise this quite 
 as patiently as they should. An artist, burning often 
 with pure love of his art, defies the conventions, and 
 he outrages worthy people. It is quite true that 
 conventions may need to be altered ; but they must 
 be altered slowly and by imperceptible degrees, or 
 morality itself will suffer. It is also true that the 
 ignorant and the inexperienced are often shocked by 
 habits which to the experienced are mere conventions. 
 A modest person who had been brought up by a 
 Quaker aunt, and had never been in a ballroom, a 
 theatre, or a picture gallery, would be pained by what 
 to persons quite as modest, who were familiar with 
 them, would seem innocent and proper conventions. 
 Hence when an artist introduces a new practice he 
 does it at his own peril. Consummate art will 
 probably justify him ; but, as the conventions of
 
 374 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 artistic morality are not his to make, but are the 
 product of society itself and public opinion, his novelty 
 may justly offend ; and not the ignorant alone, for 
 wantonly to offend the ignorant is justly to offend the 
 wise. 
 
 It was the practice of the great masters to paint 
 the male form quite as much as the female, to resort 
 to the wholly undraped very sparingly, and rarely to 
 paint a picture at all without the most exquisite 
 modelling of some uncovered limbs. Under the 
 baneful influence of the French Salon our painters 
 are forsaking these time-honoured habits. The male 
 torso is wholly out of fashion, though there are some 
 who hold that Adam was hardly inferior to Eve in 
 beauty. The hands, neck, and uncovered limbs in 
 subject-pieces are daily becoming more and more 
 accessories. The undraped pieces are always "studies," 
 and usually simple baigneuses. Did he of " the silver- 
 pointed pencil " paint " studies " on canvas ? Did the 
 greatest master of flesh-painting that ever lived occupy 
 his time with a succession of baigneuses ? I trow the 
 Ariadne in Trafalgar Square is worth a wilderness of 
 " studies " ; it belongs to a wholly different domain 
 of art. 
 
 There is one specific convention on which I must 
 be precise, however reserved be the words I shall use. 
 From Giotto down to Ingres I venture to assert that 
 the mysteries of the form were never displayed in 
 painting as definitely as they were in Greek sculpture. 
 I know nearly every gallery in Europe, and I cannot 
 recall a single work of a grand scale and of the best 
 time in which this is done. The art of the painter 
 was lavished in bathing the undraped form with a 
 subtle reserve of shadow, girdle, or tress. Even when 
 such mighty masters of flesh tones as Titian, Correggio, 
 or Rubens revelled in the full luxuriance of their
 
 NUDE STUDIES 375 
 
 imagination, in the Venus of the Tribune, of the 
 National Gallery, or in the Judgment of Paris, they 
 respected this condition. Within a generation the 
 French school have rejected it. They treated the 
 form in painting as the Greeks treated it in sculpture, 
 and a nymph stood forth on canvas in the statuesque 
 simplicity of a marble Venus. I believe that the first 
 picture of European repute in which this was done 
 was the exquisite "Source" of Ingres. The virginal 
 purity of that ethereal creation created a new type in 
 art, which in the hands of weaker men violated the 
 old conventions while it attempted to introduce a new 
 one. The reserve which Titian had obtained by 
 purely pictorial resources the new school of Ingres 
 sought by exaggerating the convention of the Greek 
 sculptors. I take the Diadumene, a masterly, a pure 
 "study," but in its flesh tints not a very beautiful 
 work, and I compare it with the Venus of the 
 Tribune. Now the Venus, besides being beautiful 
 beyond the dreams of poetry, is as absolutely true as 
 it is mysterious in its grace. The Diadumene is not 
 mysterious at all, and yet is not real. Realism carried 
 to that point, and yet blurred by a convention violent 
 in itself and comparatively new in the art of painting, 
 has a weak spot somewhere. When painters attempt 
 violently to alter recognised conventions they will 
 cause irritation in the public. Convention is the 
 prosody of art. And while the ignorant must be 
 taught to accept convention, the artists must learn to 
 respect it.
 
 A MORNING IN THE GALLERIES 
 
 1905 
 
 Now that I have retired to a quiet life in a beautiful 
 country I am occupied with Nature more than with 
 Art ; and it is only with a wrench that I can leave 
 the roses and lilies for the smoke of town. But, as I 
 do not wish to fall quite out of the modern movement, 
 I take a look in now and then at the May shows, and 
 had asked my friend Van Dyke, one of the young 
 lions of the New Gallery, to point out what was best 
 to be seen. He took me straight up to the Lycidas^ 
 the great sensation of the year, "There," said he, 
 eagerly, " there is true Art. What a noble form ! 
 What a grand pose ! What subtle grace in those 
 curves of the leg ! What dignity in those uplifted 
 arms ! It might be the young athlete who sat to 
 Pheidias for the Parthenon metopes. And those old 
 Philistines at Burlington House made a 'record' in 
 stupidity when they rejected actually rejected one 
 of the purest masterpieces of our time ! " 
 
 " But is it beautiful ? " I asked in my innocence. 
 
 " Beautiful ? " he said quite warmly, " we don't go 
 in for beauty nowadays. We want truth, not beauty. 
 Art has nothing to do with beauty. The aim of Art 
 is to be real. If you want to see a real spinal column, 
 an honest iliac muscle, a genuine biceps, and all ten 
 
 376
 
 A MORNING IN THE GALLERIES 377 
 
 tendons of the extensor frankly displayed, there you 
 have them." 
 
 "Well!" I said, humbly, "I am no anatomist, 
 and I daresay this is all as it looks on the dissecting 
 table. But what puzzles me are those ten ringers 
 all held up in a row. What does it mean ? Is 
 Lycidas a Neapolitan lazzarone playing at mora ? 
 What is the story ? " 
 
 " Oh ! " said he, " a great piece of truth in Art 
 does not need any story. It is its own meaning. 
 Perhaps Lycidas is what the Boers call a Hands-upper ; 
 he seems to be saying c Don't shoot, I give in.' He 
 looks rather down on his luck, as if he has had enough. 
 But see how truly Greek is the vitality of those limbs ! 
 How daring is the realism of those tendons ! How 
 defiant of conventions is the frankness of the pose ! " 
 
 " Thank you," I said, " for your lesson in Art. If 
 I had come here alone 1 should have taken it for a 
 scraggy youth in an ungainly attitude a sort of 
 naked man ' Friday,' startled by the footprints of 
 cannibals on the shore." 
 
 As I spoke we were joined by an old friend of my 
 own, a certain Sir Visto, rather a testy amateur of the 
 old school, who had seen all the galleries in Europe 
 and often dined with the R.A.'s. 
 
 " You call that scare-crow Art ? " he said. "Why, 
 it is a mere cast from a very ill-shapen pugilist. And 
 the attitude is only fit for a Fiji Islander's wooden 
 idol." 
 
 " My young friend here," I said, " has been telling 
 me of the magnificent modelling of the back, the ribs, 
 and the thighs. Isn't there great merit in the way 
 these muscles stand out clean and taut ? " 
 
 " Well ? " said Visto, " I grant him there is good 
 modelling in the trunk. The pectoral muscles are 
 well marked, and the scapula shows power, crude as
 
 378 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 it looks. But just look at those saucers above the 
 collar-bones. The arms are those of an Egyptian 
 mummy, and can anything be more spidery than 
 those skinny thighs and calves ? " 
 
 "Truth, fact, realism," cried Van Dyke with 
 warmth. " Lycidas is not intended to be pretty. He 
 is not one of your androgynous hermaphrodites, but a 
 man in fighting condition, trained to the last ounce, 
 and no girls' fancy man." 
 
 " Oh ! I grant you he is a man, plain enough and 
 no mistake ; he would serve on a stand for a lesson in 
 anatomy at a hospital." 
 
 " Is not that the highest praise ? " asked Van 
 Dyke. " He is meant to teach, to display, to exhibit 
 fact, not to be a type of prettiness." 
 
 "Oh ! dear no ! he is a type of ugliness. He is a 
 mere cast, or facsimile, of an emaciated bruiser, with 
 his four limbs stuck apart like a child's doll undressed. 
 Look at his flat splay feet, the corns on his long toes, 
 and the bunion of the right foot joint. Look at him 
 from behind, and you will see a big letter W stuck 
 upon a pair of tongs." 
 
 " Well ! " said Van Dyke rather peevishly, " we 
 have happily got rid of the conventional Pyramid in a 
 work of sculpture, and all the stale nonsense about 
 symmetry in composition, a right arm to balance a 
 left leg, and the centre of gravity to fall in the middle 
 of the base." 
 
 " I grant you," said Visto, " there is neither 
 symmetry, nor balance, nor centre of gravity about 
 Lycidas. I was always taught that the first condition 
 of a statue is, that it has to be viewed all round in 
 every position. It should have at least eight character- 
 istic points of view and all eight ought to be at once 
 impressive and graceful. But in Lycidas all points of 
 view are equally ugly, ungainly, and unmeaning."
 
 A MORNING IN THE GALLERIES 379 
 
 "Ugly, ungainly, as you please," cried Van Dyke, 
 "but true to fact. Art needs no meaning. It does 
 not mean anything, except ' So it is / see it so ! ' : 
 
 " Ho ! ho ! " laughed Visto, " truth, fact, realism ! 
 How does Lycidas stand ? You know, dear boy, that 
 it is only a doll, a wax model, with wooden supports 
 inside. Lycidas could not be executed in marble, or 
 even in bronze, or any permanent material. It is only 
 that it is a patchwork of wood and wax that he can 
 stand steady on his big feet. I suppose that is why 
 they are made so long and ugly. Show me a work of 
 Pheidias, Polyclitus, Lysippus, Praxiteles, or Agasias 
 marble or bronze where a whole figure stands un- 
 supported on its feet alone. Look at any Apollo, 
 Aphrodite, Hermes, the Diadumenos, Doryphoros, 
 Apoxyomenos, Niobid, Artemis, Satyr, Antinous, 
 Heracles they all have leg supports, or they would 
 not stand. Why, even the ' Borghese warrior ' of the 
 Louvre, with its outstretched legs apart, has to rest 
 upon a tree stump. Your Lycidas may look more 
 natural, just because it is a doll a toy. Talk about 
 truth. It is a fraud ; a thing stuck together to look 
 like bronze, when we all know it could not be really 
 made in bronze at all." 
 
 But here I thought the discussion was getting 
 rather warm, for this sally had knocked Van Dyke 
 out of time. So I proposed that we should all walk 
 round to Piccadilry and see what the R.A.s had to 
 show us. 
 
 "We have got rid of all these antiquated conventions 
 about Greek types," muttered Van Dyke doggedly ; 
 " what matters what Lysippus and Praxiteles did ? 
 Art is free, and makes its own laws as it grows with 
 new ideas and younger men." 
 
 " Stay for five minutes," cried Visto, " and have a 
 look at a bit of real Art, in that group named Venus
 
 380 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 at her Toilette with Cupid. Now there is beauty, 
 grace, symmetry, truth all together. It has the subtle 
 secret of the Renascence, the joy of life, ideal charm ! " 
 
 "Ah ! " I said, " by the Grand Old Man of Italian 
 art, who has done more to keep alive the flame of 
 Tuscan glory than any living amateur. It is a 
 wonderful tour de force ; but Michael Angelo and 
 Titian continued to work to an even greater age. 
 Art is the most vivifying force in Nature, and makes 
 the healthy and the happy old ever young ! " 
 
 "Yes!" said Visto, "my old friend, Wemyss, I 
 remember, was the contemporary of John Ruskin at 
 Christ Church, and he is still carrying on some of the 
 best traditions of art judgment, which Ruskin has 
 long ceased to inspire. But let me tell you that the 
 Venus here is not only an astonishing tour de force, but 
 is in itself a fine, pure, and original composition, 
 harmoniously conceived ; lovely in all its parts, and 
 as a whole." 
 
 " Oh ! I grant you it is pretty, refined ; well, say, 
 beautiful, if you like," grumbled Van Dyke, " for those 
 who care for beauty in Art. I daresay it reminds 
 people of the old artists' idea about grace and that 
 sort of thing." 
 
 " Can anything be more useful to-day than such a 
 reminder ? " asked Visto. 
 
 "Come to Burlington House," said I, "and as we 
 walk along, Van Dyke shall tell us why these young 
 fellows make such a dead set at Beauty, and why they 
 will have it that the business of Art is to hold up the 
 mirror to ugliness, to portray nothing that is not 
 common, queer, or even grotesque." 
 
 " Why ! " broke out Van Dyke, " we are all sick 
 of these tea-tray prettinesses of 'The Thames at 
 Dawn,' c Pine Woods at Sunset,' c Meadows in May,' 
 'June Blossoms,' and all the namby-pamby goddesses,
 
 A MORNING IN THE GALLERIES 381 
 
 nymphs, c blue eyes ' and c golden locks,' which are 
 very well on a bonbon box for a girl, but disgust 
 grown men in a picture gallery. Art should be real, 
 not conventional ; and of all things the most fatal to 
 Art is rhat which pleases the eye. The painter has 
 to show people what they never saw and never could 
 see what he sees, and as he sees it. It does not matter 
 what it is a brick wall, a blind beggar, a hog, a 
 dunghill all are equally the subject of Art, when the 
 artist has looked at them till his soul has grown into 
 them, and they have grown into his soul. The new 
 rule is Paint just what you see, but take care that 
 it is what nobody sees but yourself, and what nobody 
 could like if he did see it. The business of Art is to 
 shake up your Philistines, your Bottles, and Mrs. 
 Grundys out of their humdrum lives, to teach them 
 how queer and how nasty the world can be, and often is." 
 
 " You want us all to go c slumming ' in a picture 
 gallery ? " said Visto. " You can't all be Bernard Shaws, 
 my dear boy, and paint paradoxes and dirt all day long. 
 Is there no alternative between weak prettiness and 
 coarse realism ? Because some painters are finikin, 
 some babyish, and some academic, is High Art to be 
 limited to ditchwater and rags ? If we are sick of 
 strawberry cream and truffles, we don't want to be 
 stuffed with garlic and tripe." 
 
 "It does not matter what you paint," said Van 
 Dyke, " the only thing that matters is, how you paint. 
 A picture is not intended to please ought not to 
 please the person looking at it. It is intended to show 
 what clever things the painter could do with his 
 brush. Brush-work is the beginning, middle and end 
 of a picture. If a picture interests the public by its 
 subject, or is beautiful as an object to view, so far it 
 draws off attention from the cleverness of the painter, 
 and thereby ceases to be sincere Art."
 
 382 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 " One would think a painter was an acrobat," said 
 Visto, "and his only aim was to show you what 
 astonishing tricks he could play with his fingers. For 
 my part, I don't care, as the old Duke used to say, 
 1 a twopenny d n ' for a painter's tricks. What I 
 want is a beautiful work and fine imagination." 
 
 "Imagination!" said Van Dyke. "We don't 
 want to imagine things. We want to reproduce them 
 show them just as we see them. Imagination is 
 the ruin of Art ! We painters have to make things 
 look just as they are." 
 
 " Why, that is what photographers have to do ! 
 And they beat you realists hollow at it ! Is a Kodak 
 snap-shot of a kitchenmaid taken in my backyard, 
 Art ? It certainly reproduces faithfully the look of a 
 very commonplace object." 
 
 " It would be Art if the painter could make the 
 backyard as absolutely true to fact as the photograph, 
 adding colour, chiaroscuro, and tone. Let him get 
 his * values ' right and all is right ! " 
 
 "Surely," I murmured, "it would be a dull piece 
 to hang over one's dinner-table." 
 
 "This cursed photography," Sir Visto broke in, 
 "has been the death of Art. It has shown artists 
 how infinitely subtle and various are the facts in the 
 simplest and commonest object. A bootmaker puts 
 his own ugly mug on his trade card. Soaps, cigars, 
 whiskies, and corsets, drench us with photographs till 
 life has become a sort of revolving panorama of 
 commonplace, crudely realised in all its naked 
 vulgarity and dulness. We live in a photographic 
 inferno ; and now Art thinks it chic to be equally 
 literal and tedious." 
 
 By this time we had reached Burlington House, 
 and I hoped to have a less lively debate. Sir Visto 
 took us straight into the large room and stood before
 
 A MORNING IN THE GALLERIES 383 
 
 The Finding of Moses^ by Sir L. Alma-Tadema. 
 "There," said he, "is a fine subject finely treated. 
 We want no catalogue to tell us what it represents. 
 Any one who has ever read or heard of the delightful 
 idyll in 2nd of Exodus sees at once that it is 
 Pharaoh's daughter returning from the bath, and 
 bringing the baby in his ark. The composition, the 
 local colouring, the archaic c properties ' and costumes, 
 are all those of a master. How ridiculous it was of 
 Ruskin to tell us Alma-Tadema always painted 
 twilight ! Is not this sunlight, and sunlight in 
 Egypt A fine picture ! a fine conception ! " 
 
 " It has too much beauty, elegance, and harmony 
 for me," growled Van Dyke. " Why are all the girls 
 so pretty, and so fair of skin ? There is nothing 
 prehistoric, barbaric, cruel, ghastly about the scene 
 nothing to remind you of the ferocious edict of 
 Pharaoh and the leader who was one day to drown 
 him in the Red Sea. I admit it is beautiful, if that is 
 what you want. It is too smooth, too refined, too 
 idyllic for me." 
 
 " Well ! " I said, " the story is an Idyll, you know. 
 Pharaoh's daughter was a gracious Princess, not a 
 bloodthirsty tyrant, and Moses at four months had not 
 grown to be the Prophet of Israel. The Plagues of 
 Egypt had not yet begun. And we may imagine an 
 Idyll if we please by way of contrast." 
 
 " Imagination is the foe of truth," said he. 
 
 Sir Visto then led us up to the President's Cup 
 of Tantalus^ which he called on us to admire. 
 " Poynter," he said, " is always graceful, learned, 
 correct, classical " 
 
 "Conventional " interrupted Van Dyke. 
 
 "See how thoughtfully every detail is studied," 
 said Visto, not noticing his young friend, "the 
 drawing firm, true, natural ; the composition
 
 384 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 subtle ; the whole atmosphere one of harmony and 
 charm." 
 
 "Why does the child in the transparent shift 
 stretch up on her toes when it is plain she can't reach 
 the other's hand by twelve inches at least ? And why 
 doesn't the long girl, in the dark robe with a palm- 
 branch fan, step down to the fountain herself?" 
 grumbled Van Dyke. 
 
 "My dear boy," said I, "you might as well ask 
 why did Keats see charm in a ' Grecian urn,' you 
 don't forget how it ends, do you ? 
 
 Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all 
 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 
 
 " I can see neither beauty nor truth," said the 
 painter, " in these Hebes, Ariadnes, Nymphs, Sapphos, 
 Pindars, and other machine-made Hellenisms which 
 the Academy seems to encourage. They are crude 
 'academies,' as the French say, and the local colour 
 and staging is cheap enough." 
 
 " Good work too often leads to poor imitation," I 
 suggested, "as we saw with Raphael himself; but 
 weak copies do not spoil the value of a true master's 
 work." 
 
 " Come, now, let us look at the portraits," said I, 
 " we shall not be troubled about ideals there." 
 
 " I don't know that," said Van Dyke ; " some of 
 these smart women look as if their portraits had been 
 commissioned, not by their husbands, but by their 
 dressmakers as trade advertisements to puff their 
 c creations.' " 
 
 " There is a portrait, indeed," cried Sir Visto 
 with enthusiasm, taking us to Sargent's Signior Garcia^ 
 power, truth, character, in every line. That is a 
 portrait which Velasquez might have owned." 
 
 " Agreed, agreed, we shan't quarrel over that," said
 
 A MORNING IN THE GALLERIES 385 
 
 Van Dyke ; " Sargent is the one man to-day who 
 dominates both Academy and New Gallery at once, 
 the man who unites mastery of his brush to originality 
 of conception for sheer skill of hand he is matchless 
 and unerring." 
 
 " A really great painter," said Visto, " when he 
 chooses, and does not play tricks, or is not poking fun 
 at his sitters." 
 
 " When does he not choose ? " asked the painter. 
 
 "When he dashes off a satin gown in an hour, and 
 flings in a lace furbelow with three dabs of his brush." 
 
 " And if he does," retorted the painter, " who 
 could do it as well in a week's work ? Besides, the 
 gown and the furbelow have to be looked at at least 
 fifty feet away." 
 
 "That is scene-painting, not portraiture," said 
 Visto ; " I quite agree that he has a marvellous gift of 
 technique^ but why does he dab his shadows in with 
 vermilion, and why are his women rouged on the lips ? 
 Hung on a gallery wall twenty yards off, the effect is 
 brilliant, but I call it a trick, when you look close into 
 the handling." 
 
 " You don't mean to say that he makes game of 
 his own sitter ? " I asked quite simply. 
 
 " Well ! " said Visto, " you remember the old 
 dealer with the thick red lips and the dog putting out 
 his tongue to mimic his master. And see how he 
 bedizens his other multi-millionaire sitters as if he 
 said with his tongue in his cheek what figures of 
 fun they are ! But just come across to the grand 
 Blenheim group." 
 
 " Surely," I said, " that is a superb piece for a great 
 historic palace. It reminds me of the Vandykes at 
 Genoa. What a grandiose group ! The mighty 
 Marlbrook, with the conquered banners of lilies and 
 his descendants to the tenth generation. What life 
 
 2,c
 
 386 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 in the two boys, in the spaniels ; what bravura in the 
 whole composition ! " 
 
 " Oh ! bravura indeed," said Van Dyke, " perhaps 
 a trifle overdone, rather too pompously majestic." 
 
 " Why do you say making game of his sitters ? " 
 I asked simply. 
 
 "Well," said Sir Visto, "you see that, by the 
 artifice of placing the Duchess on the step and the 
 Duke below it, the impression is produced that she is 
 about ten inches taller than her husband. I have not 
 the honour of their acquaintance, but I doubt if the 
 difference is as much as that. The Duke seems rather 
 embarrassed by the weight of his robes, and the beauti- 
 ful head of her Grace is stuck upon an elongated neck 
 which reminds one of the new saurian, Diplodocus 
 Carnegii" 
 
 " Yes ! " said Van Dyke, " he has the defects 
 of his qualities. He can't resist a sensation j and the 
 millionaires with their big prices are leading him to 
 scamp it. But when he tries his best, as in his c Mrs. 
 Raphael,' he is as serious as Rembrandt himself." 
 
 " It's a fatal snare to a painter to become the rage 
 in the smart world," said I, "especially when the 
 smart world is vulgar and tasteless. Even Vandyke 
 and Reynolds had too many sitters, though their sitters 
 had beauty, manners, and refinement." 
 
 "The worst of it is," said Visto, "that Sargent, 
 like every man of original genius and splendid success, 
 is teaching two or three other good men to imitate his 
 bravura and his scene-painting legerdemain. Sargent 
 can make a satin gown dazzling bright with fifteen 
 sweeps of a thick brush. But when other men try to 
 do it, they seem to be using a mop or a broom." 
 
 " He is the greatest master of portrait we have had 
 since Millais stormed the town," said Van Dyke, " and 
 has an even subtler eye for character."
 
 A MORNING IN THE GALLERIES 387 
 
 " Yes ? " said Visto ; " but the genius he has for 
 characteristic points is so keen that it betrays him now 
 and then to make an actual caricature I daresay quite 
 unconsciously. He sees a trait in a sitter's face or 
 figure, and in his eagerness to catch it he makes it 
 almost ridiculous." 
 
 " Come and look at the Burghers of Landsberg" . 
 said I ; " there is a solid piece of work indeed. Look 
 at it across the Central Hall, and you might fancy at 
 a first glance the R.A.'s were sitting in council. One 
 feels that there are the very Bavarian citizens, simple, 
 serious, thoughtful men of business full of character, 
 and composed with skill and truth. It is no bad 
 revival of the old Dutch Corporation groups to be seen 
 at Haarlem, the Hague, and Amsterdam. It is a real 
 success in a difficult subject." 
 
 " Not much of the ideal, not quite high art," said 
 the Connoisseur. 
 
 "The ideal be d d," laughed the painter; "the 
 Von has scored this time. All his portraits are first- 
 rate. A good many of the old gang seem to have 
 been waked up. Why, old Leader has broken out in 
 a new place ; and, after fifty years of Surrey pine- 
 woods and commons, silvery Thames, and such sereni- 
 ties, he has found his way to the coast and the crags of 
 the Cornish bays." 
 
 " A very good way it is," I added ; " I know the 
 cove well ; and it has never been painted with greater 
 truth and force. I rejoice to see a veteran, who has 
 been too often undervalued, turn in his old age to a 
 grand subject like the cliffs of Cornwall in a breezy 
 sea." 
 
 And so we wandered through the galleries, each of 
 us throwing in a word from time to time. 
 
 " How tedious it must be for those poor royalties," 
 I said, " to have to stand year after year for official
 
 388 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 portraits whilst the artist is piling on velvet robes, 
 gold lace, ribbons, garters, crosses, sword-tassels, and 
 jack-boots ! It's just making tailors' dummies and 
 modistes' blocks of the poor things. How they must 
 hate it ! but royaute oblige" 
 
 " There's a fine thing, indeed," said Visto, " what 
 life, manliness, vigour, and breezy air," taking us 
 up to Furse's cub-hunting group ; " what a loss 
 to art ! " 
 
 Heu, miserande puer, si qua fata aspera rumpas, 
 Tu Marcellus eris ! 
 
 " Yes ! indeed, a cruel loss," we all said. 
 
 "There are some good portraits, too, as well as 
 Sargent's!" said Visto, "Ouless, Shannon, Cope, 
 Solomon, Fildes, Dicksee, and other less-known men. 
 But the only man who can hold it with the great 
 Frenchmen of to-day is plainly Sargent, and let us 
 trust he will not spoil the rest." 
 
 " He won't spoil Ouless," said I ; "he is as steady, 
 and solid, and thorough as ever." 
 
 Nor did we neglect the ladies. Lady Butler, true 
 and vigorous as always ; Lucy Kemp- Welch, with her 
 inimitable feeling for a horse, and the rest. 
 
 " One of the most striking facts in modern art," I 
 said, " is the immense addition of women as painters. 
 I can remember in the 'forties, or even in the 'fifties, 
 no woman exhibited an oil picture. You will now 
 see every third name is that of a woman, and in the 
 water-colours they have it all to themselves. Why is 
 Lady Butler not R.A., I wonder ! " 
 
 " Perhaps she declines the honour," said the young 
 rebel. 
 
 Some of us lingered beside the Peter Grahams, the 
 David Murrays, the H. W. B. Davis, MacWhirters, 
 Arnesly Browns, Alfred Easts, and the quiet English
 
 A MORNING IN THE GALLERIES 389 
 
 rural bits which are not behind their usual form. But 
 Van Dyke was all for Stanhope Forbes, La Thangue, 
 and Clausen. 
 
 "All good men, and sound, pure, manly work," 
 said Visto ; " but you need not suppose that this is 
 the last word in modern art, dear boy. A picture has 
 not only to be painted well, it must be a thing that 
 is worth painting interesting, original, beautiful, 
 imaginative. As Tennyson said, you might write a 
 very correct Wordsworthian line A Mister Wilkinson, 
 a clergyman but this is not poetry. An old man 
 with sticks, a sailor boy in a boat, a girl feeding a 
 bird, are honest facts, which you may honestly paint 
 but they don't make a picture. Millet's Angelus 
 has gone round the world, because it is more than an 
 old peasant and his wife. It is a solemn and pathetic 
 poem. To make a work of art something more than 
 'values' is wanted." 
 
 " It seems to me that the essential point to insist 
 upon nowadays is the subject of a work of art," said I. 
 " Many of these subjects that one can see on a road or 
 a farm any day may be worth painting in small, on a 
 canvas 16 x 10 inches. When it comes to life-size, 
 on a canvas 60 x 48 inches, as a great gallery work, it 
 is taking it all too seriously. Everything you see, 
 painted as you see it, true to nature in lights, values, 
 and surfaces, may be an honest piece of handiwork, 
 but it is not art. Your ' Mister Wilkinsons,' in or 
 out of the pulpit, bore us. Your beggar-boys, and 
 sheep-cots, and sandhills may be perfectly true, but 
 utterly tedious. Unless you can show us some 
 memorable thing, some impressive trait in your 
 beggar, your sheep, or your sand, we do not want you 
 to labour the matter further. And then, how sadly 
 the habit of exhibitions reacts upon the painter. He 
 thinks what will amuse the summer visitor, not what
 
 390 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 will rejoice the heart to be upon our walls. One of 
 the cleverest pictures of the year, which attracts a 
 crowd all day by its admirable life, its ingenious 
 telling a complex story, by its intense 'modernity,' 
 as the slang goes, would hardly be a pleasant work to 
 hang over one's dinner-table, on so large a scale, to be 
 looked at day after day, day and night. One's guests 
 would ask, as they sat down to dinner 'Well ! who 
 is she ? ' And there would be whispers all round. 
 The curse of exhibitions is that they encourage 
 painters to labour out silly japes of their own, 
 incidents picked out of Tit-bits^ to attract mammas by 
 some baby nonsense, and to attract girls by mawkish 
 sentiment. There will always be a lot of poor stuff 
 whilst painters think only of their palettes, and not of 
 their minds ; whilst they get their ideas out of trashy 
 novels, comic plays, and watery poems. Painters 
 want cultivated brains as well as nimble fingers. 
 Come, let us walk round the National Gallery before 
 we go to luncheon."
 
 AT BURLINGTON HOUSE 
 
 ANCIENT MASTERS 
 1906 
 
 As I stroll round the pictures shown winter after 
 winter by the Royal Academy, many questions hard 
 to solve are wont to rise in my mind. Why is a visit 
 to these galleries in January " a thing of beauty " a 
 joy for the hour, if not " for ever " whilst the visit 
 in May, however exciting, amusing, tantalising, is 
 always a bit of a scramble, leaving one at dinner-time 
 with a slight sense of fatigue, of rattle, of discord 
 too often of disappointment ? In January I go home 
 soothed and fresh, as if I had been listening to a 
 symphony of Mozart. In May I struggle into 
 Piccadilly with a feeling as if I had been stunned by 
 a new piece of Brahms which I could not half follow, 
 or had been to an overcrowded room where every one 
 talked in a loud voice together, and I had missed 
 those I wished to hear. If any one could answer these 
 questions, he would throw some light on the mystery 
 of modern Art its aims, its defects, its future. 
 
 It cannot be simply that in the winter we find 
 Old Masters and in the spring we have the Living, 
 who are not all Masters. This year, with nearly a 
 hundred painters, I do not see more than five or six
 
 392 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 real Old Masters. No ! This year we have the 
 English school ! for, except Frank Hals, even those 
 foreign born almost belong to us. The show includes 
 scores of good men of our own generation some, 
 indeed, whom we have quite lately buried and 
 mourned. And there are very few pictures more 
 than 150 years old. Yet, withal, there is an air of 
 mellowness, of sobriety, of tone, about the collection 
 which will be sadly to seek in May next. 
 
 Of course, the painters admitted are all men 
 eminent in their time, and many of the pictures here 
 are first-rate examples of their powers. But, allowing 
 for all that in their favour, the charm of the gallery 
 lies in the sense of its recalling the great traditions 
 of art, in a tone of harmony and quiet mastery, in a 
 sense of the ideal. There is less of the machine, of 
 advertising sensationalism, of those grotesque novelties, 
 which will set our teeth on edge in May. As I am 
 no expert, and as I go to the galleries to enjoy myself, 
 not to detect spurious names in the catalogue, I am 
 not going to criticise this or that picture, but simply 
 note down a few thoughts. No one can look at the 
 Reynoldses and the Gainsboroughs without feeling 
 how powerful and how inspiring was still the tradition 
 of Titian, Rubens, and Van Dyck in all that century. 
 The love of colour, of nature, of harmonious tone, 
 was their passion not the mania for astonishing us 
 with something new and bizarre. These were the 
 men who said when dying they were "going to 
 Heaven, and Van Dyck was of the company ! " 
 They were not afraid to be numbered in the great 
 family of ancient masters. Nor can one see Reynolds' 
 "Venus and Piping Boy," Gainsborough's landscapes, 
 and Turner's incredible " Venus and Adonis," without 
 feeling that at least down to the Victorian era the art 
 of painting, like dress and manners, rested on a basis
 
 AT BURLINGTON HOUSE 393 
 
 of tradition and "form." No doubt both Reynolds 
 and Turner had better have left Venus and Cupids 
 alone. It was not their line, and they could do much 
 better things. But the hold over their souls of 
 Titian, and what Mat Arnold would call the Grand 
 Style, enabled them to put ideal beauty into their best 
 work. Nowadays, of course, the aim is to be common- 
 place, realistic, photographic, if you are to be "con- 
 vincing " to the man in the street and the woman at 
 the " Private View." You can't play it too low down 
 in the democratic Go-as-you-please. I think I prefer 
 even an echo of Titian and Rubens. 
 
 No doubt the Old Boys had the great advantage 
 of noble sitters for their portraits. The dress, at any 
 rate of men, gave them opportunities denied to Watts 
 and Millais. Van Dyck and Lely, Reynolds and 
 Gainsborough printed grands seigneurs and grandes 
 dames^ who did not come to their studios dressed as 
 gamekeepers or as actresses in a Paris fashion plate. 
 Hands, it is said, " went out with ruffles," and perhaps 
 the quiet dignity of heads went out with Court dress 
 and hair powder. When Reynolds and Raeburn 
 painted a soldier they made us look at his eyes and 
 mouth, not at his shiny boots, epaulettes, and stars 
 and garters. Whether gallant generals can have 
 grown less manly to look at than they were in the 
 eighteenth century, whether fine ladies now veil the 
 fire of their eyes and the witchery of their smiles so 
 as not to distract our attention from the creations of 
 Worth and Paquin which they bid us admire, I will 
 not pretend to decide. But somehow the formal 
 clothes of old Queen Charlotte's Court seem to give a 
 noble air to beautiful women better than the iridescent 
 satins and the multi-millionaire jewelry with which 
 our professional beauties and our American peeresses 
 amaze the groundlings as they stare at the walls
 
 394 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 of Burlington House in the flowery month of 
 May. 
 
 I called Turner's " Adonis " incredible ; and so it 
 is. Here is a large picture, five feet by four, with an 
 adipose Venus, a boyish Adonis, Cupids, dogs, and a 
 leafy landscape, in flagrant imitation of Titian, but 
 signed by "J. M. W. Turner." As you walk across 
 the room from a distance you might think it a Titian. 
 Ruskin always said that Turner could paint figures if 
 he wished. And though this is certainly not a Titian, 
 I think the nudities are as good as Etty's, and as a 
 picture I much prefer it to the " Homeric Dance." 
 We knew that Turner in his early days imitated 
 Claude, Poussin, Vandervelde, Cuyp, and some others. 
 Here he is trying his hand at a Titian. And so did 
 Reynolds in his "Venus and Boy," as perhaps did 
 Van Dyck in his " St. Sebastian." Alas ! that is 
 the sad thing with our English school. They are 
 always imitating some one. And even the so-called 
 Pre-Raphaelites, whose troubled story has been told 
 us by Mr. Holman Hunt, just promoted to dear old 
 Watts' O.M., they started with ideas about "the 
 Primitives," whom they did not half understand, and 
 certainly did not really follow. 
 
 Half the delight of these ancient masters lies in 
 the memories they stir in us. One versed in the 
 family histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
 centuries sees on every side in this gallery the grand- 
 sires and grandmothers of countless persons whom he 
 may meet to-day. How quaint are the two lovely 
 Stanhope children, whom many living can remember 
 as old men. What a crowd of reminiscences rise 
 up before the Reynoldses, Gainsboroughs, Hogarths, 
 Romneys, Raeburns, Hoppners ! Who can forget 
 the cruel tragedy of Gainsborough's bright young girl, 
 Martha Ray ? How strange to be reminded of a man
 
 AT BURLINGTON HOUSE 395 
 
 who was officer in King George's army, a clergyman, 
 a rake, and a murderer ! How singular to see a 
 picture by one who was a beneficed parson and also a 
 Royal Academician ! How many men have been 
 "The Reverend - , R.A." ? What lessons of 
 labour and learning in the eighty drawings by Watts ! 
 What classical refinement, what scholarship, what 
 grace in Leighton's " Cleoboulos and Cleobouline "- 
 " too waxy and mawkish," you say ? Ah ! well ! but 
 how lovely in line, how pure in ideal. "Caviare to 
 the general," perhaps. Can the " general " pronounce 
 the girl's name aright, I wonder ? But a grand subject 
 for a picture, as Leighton's subjects always were. 
 And then to see the Rossetti and Burne-Jones imagin- 
 ings all in a line, like lovely phantoms of unearthly, 
 bloodless, supernatural beings, found more often in 
 poetry than in canvas. Go again and again, and try 
 to think it out !
 
 TOBACCO 
 
 1905 
 
 WHEN the other day The Young Man begged me 
 to say how I had managed to retain my health and 
 powers of work to what he called my advanced age, 
 my reason was imprimis, by avoiding tobacco in all its 
 forms. I was quite serious, for I am a determined 
 Misonicotinist ; one of the few men of the world who 
 have never touched the filthy weed in their lives j one 
 who looks on smoking as a disease, to be shunned on 
 grounds moral, social, aesthetic, medical, and sexual. 
 The weed was first introduced into Europe at the 
 Court of one of the most infamous women in an age 
 of poisoners. In an old book of the time of Charles L, 
 I find tobacco described as " the spirits' Incubus, that 
 begets many ugly and deformed phantasies in the brain." 
 Nicotine is described by chemists as "highly poisonous, 
 forming acrid and pungent salts." I would not have 
 it supposed that my aversion to tobacco is solely due, or 
 even mainly due, to its deleterious effect upon health. 
 A sour friend of mine grumbles that it does not kill 
 its votaries fast enough. Nor do I protest against 
 excess in smoking merely. I protest against tobacco 
 altogether as a nasty appetite, hardly worthy of a 
 gentleman. 
 
 I sometimes tell my young friends that smoking is 
 
 396
 
 TOBACCO 397 
 
 the only vice that inevitably annoys and injures the 
 innocent neighbour. A man may be as vicious, as 
 coarse, as gluttonous, as drunken as he likes to be, but 
 he does no harm to others who do not choose to share 
 his orgies. But your smoker infects every one near 
 him with the reek of his personal indulgence, and 
 pollutes every place he enters with his stale fumes. 
 The habitual smoker habitually stinks. His clothes, 
 his hair, his breath, are tainted ; to some nostrils, quite 
 sickening. The newspaper, the book, the letter he 
 has touched have the malodorous taint. Woollen 
 clothes, curtains, carpets, retain the stench for days ; and 
 stale tobacco fume is disgusting even to your habitual 
 smoker. That it nauseates women and children, and 
 not a few men, does not at all trouble your smoker. 
 He finds it a source of pride and distinction. It is the 
 only occasion on which men, otherwise well bred, care 
 to obtrude themselves on general society when in a 
 state that makes them personally offensive. A gentle- 
 man, who from violent exertion was bathed in sweat, 
 would not calmly seat himself in a lady's drawing-room 
 till he had taken a bath and changed his shirt ; nor, if 
 in the hunting field he had been pitched into a fetid 
 ditch, would he sit down in his filthy state. But when 
 the men "join the ladies " after a dinner-party, when 
 at the theatre the bell rings up the third act, the 
 drawing-room and the stalls reek with stale fumes. It 
 is merely an insolent convention to pretend that people 
 who do not smoke themselves do not dislike the stale 
 fumes. To many women, and to some men, they are 
 the most repulsive of all stinks. 
 
 The stock excuse for this licence to be offensive to 
 others is the cowardly reply that it is "commonly done." 
 In the eighteenth century it was " common enough " 
 to be drunk in public. In the seventeenth century 
 it was bon ton to be debauched. Tournaments, bear-
 
 398 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 baiting, cock-fighting, prize-fights, masquerades, street- 
 brawls, and other brutalities, once common and affected 
 by gentlemen, have been condemned by our improved 
 sense of decency, and have ceased to be fashionable. 
 " Fashion " has been answerable for almost every vice 
 and for many abominations. The test is not what 
 smart people do, but what is due to others, and what is 
 fitting for a gentleman. The question to be asked is, 
 by what title do you gratify a corporeal appetite in a 
 way that makes you offensive to people you come 
 near ? A cross old man in a non-smoking railway 
 carriage was rudely addressed by some young sparks, 
 as they lit their cigars : " You don't object to our 
 smoking, sir?" "Oh !" said he, "you won't object 
 to my vomiting ? " Spitting in public, snuff, and 
 sundry brutalities of the kind, are slowly dying out 
 under improved standards of social decorum. But one 
 appetite, it seems, has leave to be indulged in mixed 
 society, whatever the personal nausea produced by it 
 in others. 
 
 The stock excuses that " everybody does it," that it 
 is a "settled habit," are not true. Mr. Gladstone 
 never smoked, and no one ever smoked in his presence. 
 The same thing is true, I believe, of the late Lord 
 Salisbury, and many very eminent men. At one of 
 the most beautiful castles in these islands smoking is 
 allowed to a " house party " only in a remote smoking- 
 room. In my young days, gentlemen never smoked 
 tobacco at a dinner-table, in a theatre, at a ball, in any 
 drawing-room, or, indeed, in public at all. Any such 
 thing would have been treated as an outrage which 
 ladies would resent. Nowadays, the dinner is hardly 
 swallowed before the rooms are heavy with smoke ; 
 the party is broken up ; after a few minutes of formality 
 the sexes are kept separate. At a house party in the 
 country, at the theatre, even at a ball, the craving for
 
 TOBACCO 399 
 
 nicotine poison divides the men from the women, the 
 moment that freedom can be obtained with decency. 
 Tobacco has destroyed the society of the sexes, more 
 than ever alcohol did in the days of our great-grand- 
 fathers. It has corrupted and undermined even life in 
 the family as well. Brothers and sisters, cousins and 
 relatives of both sexes, may dwell under the same 
 roof. They meet at meals, but before the repast is 
 over, the sons and their male companions are itching 
 to be off. They slink into their own quarters. The 
 sisters and girls gossip, knit, play waltzes or bridge, 
 talk chiffons or small scandal and pretend that they 
 like it so. 
 
 I am not going to say anything about the injury 
 to health caused by tobacco. More men, to my 
 knowledge, have died of nicotine than have died of 
 drink. Over and over again I have seen young 
 fellows troubled with heart and throat ailments from 
 indulging in cigarettes. I knew a very eminent man 
 who could not eat his dinner without smoking a 
 cigarette between each course, and who fell asleep in 
 bed with a lighted cigarette between his teeth. 
 Naturally he died of it young. One of the most 
 famous throat specialists told me that quite half the 
 cancerous cases he treated were caused, or aggravated, 
 by tobacco. He was himself an inveterate smoker, 
 and spoke with a big Havannah in his mouth. He, 
 too, died soon afterwards of the same complaint. 
 
 You will say these are cases of excessive smoking, 
 and prove nothing as to moderate use of tobacco. 
 Quite true ; but my complaint is about the anti-social, 
 anti- feminine, anti- human habit of smoking. It 
 disgusts nearly all women, and hurts not a few men. 
 When I have been forced to sit in a cloud of rancid 
 tobacco for hours, I have had a headache for twenty- 
 four hours, and my clothes offend me for forty-eight
 
 400 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 hours more. If men crave for the stimulus, let them 
 take care to have it in private, and so as not to infect 
 others. If fellows must smoke, let them retire into a 
 remote smoking-den ; wash, be shampooed, and change 
 all their clothes, before they dare to mix in general 
 society. 
 
 Of course, the smoking tribe will call me a 
 milksop, an old " crank," with abnormal olfactories, 
 and so forth. Well ! I remember when I was a bowler 
 to our eleven of " Non-smokers," we won in an 
 innings ; and no wonder. That is fifty-five years 
 ago, but I can bowl a good ball still. I have been a 
 member of the Alpine Club and two famous smoking 
 clubs ; and I founded one of them not to smoke, but 
 to talk. I have been about in London society and in 
 London clubs any time these fifty years. So far from 
 being abnormal in my sense of smell, I will not deny 
 that the scent of a very fine Havannah in the open air 
 on a frosty night, smoked by a pleasant friend a few 
 yards ofF me, is not so offensive. It is the nasty 
 cigarette, the stinking pipe, the rotten garbage of 
 cheap stuff, the stale, clammy reek where smoke has 
 been every night, which is intolerable. If I am a 
 " crank," I can only say that fifty years ago gentle- 
 men, as a rule, must have been " cranks," for they 
 used to regard a man who habitually smoked every- 
 where and anywhere, in mixed society, and in associa- 
 tion with ladies, as a dirty brute. As to women 
 smoking, I cannot bring myself to speak. I cannot 
 get over the feeling that they do not as they should 
 do. I will just end with the words of two illustrious 
 men. William Morris wrote : " Tobacco seems to 
 me a more dangerous intoxicant than liquors." John 
 Ruskin scorns the men " who would put the filth of 
 tobacco into the first breeze of a May morning." 
 Yes ! and into the golden curls of a child.
 
 CARD-PLAYING 
 
 1905 
 
 THOUGH I detest the sight of cards, I am well aware 
 that the habit of card-playing does not offend and 
 injure the innocent bystander as the habit of smoking 
 tobacco does. I do not call it a vice, unless it ends in 
 reckless gambling, which it often does. But it is an 
 anti-social, debilitating form of folly, which encourages 
 mean kinds of excitement. "Jeune homme," said 
 that decrepit scoundrel, Talleyrand, to a young man 
 who declined to play with him, "quelle triste veiellesse 
 vous vous preparez ! " The old age of Talleyrand 
 and of all such hoary sinners could not be anything 
 but triste. Cards may have enabled him to forget his 
 evil ways, but opium would have done better. " Life 
 would be tolerable," said a great and good man, " if it 
 were not for its amusements." He was no doubt 
 thinking mainly of cards which bored him. Cards 
 bore me, the sight of them, the sight of men and 
 women playing cards bores me. The long gasping 
 silences bore me. The clatter when they count the 
 points, the quarrels, the snarls, the sneers, the chuckles, 
 the "Why did you lead that spade ? " "I knew you 
 had the ace ! " Can any jabber be more wearisome, 
 more inane ? Men and women, who are too dull to 
 take pleasure in talk, too ignorant to read, too lazy to 
 401 2 D
 
 402 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 dance, deaf to music, blind to art, unable to keep 
 awake, betake them to cards, as peasants in Italy make 
 night hideous with incessant mora. 
 
 The noodles who brag that smoking is manly, like 
 shopboys over their first penny smoke, tell us that 
 cards are sociable and promote friendly intercourse. 
 It is just the contrary. Cards strangle society, and 
 are the death of any graceful amusement, be it talk, 
 music, play-acting, dancing, or charades. They will 
 say I am an old curmudgeon, and so on. Not at all ! 
 I am a particularly sociable fellow, who can always 
 make myself at home in any company, be it a London 
 crush, or a Pall Mall club, a big country house, or a 
 village inn, a garden party, or a farmer's "ordinary." 
 Homo sum, etc. etc. At college I played whist, 
 "Boston," as we named bridge, and Van John, like 
 anybody else, though I always found it poor fun. My 
 father and his brothers and sisters were first-rate 
 whist-players. I knew an old couple who sat half the 
 night playing "double-dummy " together, and quarrel- 
 ling over it like butcher's dogs. They were both 
 very clever, very rich, with society at their call. But 
 they were so soaked in cards that they could not read 
 even a newspaper ; they had nothing to say to one 
 another or to any one else ; they had no interest in 
 anything on earth, except the " odd trick " and " my 
 last trump." When they shall hear the Last Trump, 
 what sort of figure will they cut ? The old Puritans 
 and Quakers firmly believed that Satan had invented 
 cards. I firmly believe there are people, who if they 
 were offered their choice of going to heaven to sing 
 hymns, or going to hell where cards are allowed, 
 would follow the game, even if they had to play 
 dummy with little devils. 
 
 Of course, my tirade against cards is called out by 
 the modern mania for Bridge. A family game of
 
 CARD- PLAYING 403 
 
 whist or Vingt-et-Un is silly, but I cannot call it vice, 
 hardly a nuisance, if it is not incessant and too irritat- 
 ing. But "Bridge" has become a public nuisance. 
 It is poisoning society, desolating homes, and corrupt- 
 ing women. Drawing-rooms, where a graceful woman 
 gave you five-o'clock tea, have become gloomy gambling 
 hells. House parties have become intolerable to those 
 who are not bitten with the fashionable tarantula. 
 Women of cultivation, who have lived in the best 
 society, will not accept invitations to dinner until they 
 know they are not to be asked to sit down to Bridge. 
 Many a man and woman leaves a country house with 
 the sense that they have been bored and plundered. 
 Horrid tales reach us of the straits to which girls have 
 been put when some old harridan has got them to sit 
 down to a game. What happened to Elizabeth at the 
 country places she visited is by no means fiction, but 
 revolting fact. I have heard a real grande dame of the 
 old school say to a mother "My dear, let me warn 
 you, never you let your daughter go to a smart country 
 house." " Bridge " has become a vice as rampant as 
 ever was loo in the days of Lord Hervey and Bubb 
 Doddington. 
 
 A great many men and women hate Bridge, as 
 many do not like tobacco. They are dragged into 
 both, against their tastes, because it is "the thing," 
 what "they all do now." Some women pretend to 
 like a cigarette, because they fondly trust it will 
 recommend them to men. In the old days such 
 women affected a love of drink, as in our days they 
 haunt the paddock and the betting ring. They little 
 know what their male companions think of them. 
 Both tobacco and cards are new habits, the " fashion 
 of the day " quite recent, a craze grown up in living 
 memory. I can remember the day when smoking 
 was the exception not the rule, and never indulged
 
 404 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 in public, and in the society of ladies. I have said all 
 this, because it seems to me a typical instance of the 
 curse of our age conventional habits. The modern 
 craze to do " what fellows do," to wear the latest 
 pattern of shirt collar, to vote the ticket of the " best 
 people " which means the richest or the most showy 
 people " to do the right thing," all this has become 
 the sole religion of the shallow, commonplace man 
 "in our street," or "in the next villa," the whole 
 duty of man to the average man and woman of the 
 comfortable class. When men and women will have 
 the spirit to live their own lives, and not to copy the 
 lives, or rather the ways, of their neighbours, they will 
 not think it manly to pester their neighbours with 
 the foul odours of their own appetites, or to ruin 
 society by forcing their friends to take a hand in their 
 own sordid games.
 
 GAME PRESERVING AND BATTUES 
 
 1905 
 
 I AM all for active exercise in the air, in the open 
 country as far as possible, the wilder the better. I 
 have been a rider nearly all my life, and was once 
 caught in the hunting field by Anthony Trollope, 
 who seemed to think it very funny to meet me there. 
 I have been a mountaineer and have done the principal 
 peaks and passes of the Alps. I know the Pyrennees, 
 the Apennines, and the mountains of Tyrol and of 
 Greece. I have often climbed Ben Nevis, Ben 
 Lomond, Helvellyn, Snowdon, and have tramped any 
 time these sixty years over the finest moors in 
 England, Wales, and Scotland ; nor did I ever feel a 
 more glorious sense of life than when this last autumn 
 I was taking my solitary rambles over the deer forests 
 of Ross-shire and Skye. And withal, knowing more 
 of mountains, moors, and forests than most professed 
 sportsmen, I make bold to say that "game-preserv- 
 ing," as now practised in England, is a social nuisance 
 and a public curse, and that " battue-shooting," as now 
 developed, is a stupid, idle, snobbish form of sport. 
 The man who delivers himself over to shooting as the 
 end of life becomes a tiresome boor, intellectually 
 below the head game-keeper, a lump of brutal selfish- 
 ness and vulgar swagger. He knows nothing really 
 
 405
 
 406 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 of Nature : the glories of the country are lost to him : 
 he is blind to them ; he is unworthy of enjoying them, 
 even if he had senses to perceive them. 
 
 Now, I am neither vegetarian nor humanitarian. 
 I can enjoy the leg of a pheasant or half a grouse. I 
 am sometimes called a Jacobin, which is a shame ; for 
 I am a stout Conservative in many things. I see that 
 life is being taken all round us, and indeed has to be 
 taken in self-defence. I see a painful necessity for a 
 lethal chamber for the superfluous or unnecessary 
 quadruped, and I sometimes feel sorry there is no 
 lethal chamber for the unnecessary biped. I am no 
 mawkish sentimentalist. If my horse had broken his 
 leg and there was no one to save him or to kill him, 
 I could put the pistol to his brain myself. Or I 
 could cut a lamb's throat, if meat must be had and 
 no butcher could be got. A man has to do such 
 things, just as in battle he has to use his weapon. 
 But as to amusing myself by wantonly killing an 
 exquisite bird such as a pheasant, or a noble beast such 
 as an antlered stag I should prefer to lose my own 
 little finger. It won't do to tell me I don't know 
 what "sport" is. I have been out on the glaciers 
 with chamois-hunters and have seen more chamois on 
 rock and snow than half the sportsmen of Norfolk. 
 I have been with the hunt of wild deer in Fontaine- 
 bleau Forest. I have lived for many years in Surrey, 
 Sussex, and Kent surrounded by big preserves : the 
 pheasants troop across my lawn here all day long (I 
 prefer them to peacocks) and all my life my holidays 
 have been passed in the moors, woods, and hills. And 
 I say your modern battue is a vulgar and ignoble 
 butchery and as for a " big drive " being the type of 
 country enjoyment, I say it is the ruin of the country, 
 and the occupation of those who know nothing of the 
 country.
 
 GAME PRESERVING AND BATTUES 407 
 
 No one ever hears a confirmed battue-man show 
 the smallest interest in the country as Nature. He is 
 blind to its loveliness ; deaf to the endless chirp, call, 
 and notes of the songsters, the "moan of doves in 
 immemorial elms," the sough of the pine wood ; he 
 has no scent for the fragrance of earth, and bank, and 
 heath. He drowns the wild thyme with tobacco 
 smoke the only songster he cares for is the croak 
 and screech of the pheasant. All he wants are plenty 
 of stolen eggs and a crack place in the firing line. 
 For this he pays in bank-notes, and swaggers about it 
 at his club for a week. When you meet him at a 
 country house or even at a town dinner-party, he can 
 talk of nothing but his last " bag " " Sir George can 
 show you better sport than Lord S." and when he 
 dies, the only truthful epitaph that could be graven on 
 his tomb is that of Graf von Zahdarm's in Sartor 
 Resartus, "quinquies mille perdrices plumbo confecit." 
 An evening spent with Sir George's game-keeper would 
 be more amusing and far more instructive. He does 
 know something about the secrets of nature and the 
 ways of animals. He rears hundreds for every one he 
 kills, and whatever he kills is in the way of trade and 
 not for amusement. To a man who really loves 
 nature, sucks in its infinite forms at every pore of his 
 body, and watches it hour by hour and night and day, 
 what is called "sport" is a vulgar disturbance, as if 
 fellows handed round bottled stout whilst we were 
 trying to listen to a symphony of Beethoven. Few 
 sportsmen have seen as many moors as I have, for I 
 have been on the tramp for sixty years. But nothing 
 would induce me to carry a gun, or anything but a 
 good stick, possibly a map and a field-glass; nor 
 would I lie half the morning concealed behind a peat 
 bank as if I were a gypsy tinker. 
 
 There is no room in this little crowded island for
 
 408 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 extensive " preserves," which are the ruin of agriculture 
 and the source of endless social mischiefs. Woods 
 swarming with birds close to a great town breed 
 poachers. The country lad who takes to poaching, 
 would not dream of stealing ducks off a pond, or hens 
 from a farmyard. He is the fine " young blood " of 
 the place, who has a taste for a gentlemanly amuse- 
 ment. The rotten system of county magistracies 
 rests much on the game interest. Farming law, and 
 the practice of leasing land, is built up on game 
 questions. English rural society with all its old 
 feudal restrictions and divisions has been evolved out 
 of the innocent bird. He has avenged the massacre 
 of his race by ruining British agriculture. Partridge 
 shooting over dogs in the old way was a simple thing, 
 and when the population of our island was one fourth 
 what it is to-day harmless enough, however vapid. 
 But nowadays, with hundreds of thousands of rich 
 men ready to spend any money to be " in the fashion," 
 it is found more profitable in many counties to leave 
 large tracts of lands more or less in a state of nature 
 than to cultivate them in a regular way. Forestry is 
 an unknown art. The woods are best left in their 
 native tangle. Pheasants grow constantly in price, 
 and timber falls. High-class farmers with capital will 
 not take your game conditions. So farms go to the 
 thriftless and more squeezable tenants ; and if these 
 are defaulters and have to quit, the birds stay on, all 
 the more, if the land lies waste. 
 
 The idea that landlords shoot on their own lands is 
 an old-world convention. The great proportion of 
 "preserves" are let to outsiders, like furnished houses 
 in Brighton or Belgravia during the season. The 
 outsiders are men with money, usually from a big 
 trading centre. The demand for "shootings" grows 
 like that for motor-cars, as the luxury of the rich and
 
 GAME PRESERVING AND BATTUES 409 
 
 a passport to "society." The Kaffir millionaire, the 
 Colonial boss, who wants to offer to royalty a bag of 
 5000 per week, will give sums that run into six figures 
 for a first-class shooting property. From him down- 
 wards, to the syndicates of sporting butchers and smart 
 bill-brokers, there is an unlimited market for sporting 
 rents. Distressed owners have discovered not gold 
 mines on their estates but game, which, one way 
 with another, will bring in better returns than low- 
 class farms. So that in large tracts of English land, 
 and still more in Scotch land, agriculture goes out of 
 fashion and game takes its place. In the home 
 counties, one may see miles of land quickly sinking 
 into prairie condition, where the profits of wild things 
 exceed those of laborious cultivation. The woods 
 drop into swampy thickets ; forestry costs money and 
 disturbs the game : hedge-rows and fences are left to 
 decay in gaps and fragments ; gates, barns, and byres 
 are suffered to rot. The syndicate of tradesmen from 
 town pays regularly, and does not ask for new drain- 
 age works, repairs, and reductions, as troublesome 
 farmers are fond of doing. 
 
 I have seen an estate where two or three small 
 houses with suitable gardens are let to respectable 
 tenants retired soldiers and professional men, who 
 keep their own places trimly cared for. But 
 thousands of acres round them have been allowed to 
 go waste for years, being leased for "sport" to a 
 syndicate from the City. The woods are pathless 
 jungles overgrown with brushwood and worthless. 
 The pastures are masses of thistles, brambles, gorse 
 and dock-weed, wherein thickets of young saplings 
 have sown themselves and are forming little copses of 
 their own. Ant-heaps weighing many cwts. stud the 
 soil and afford ample food for the birds. Miles of 
 fencing, hedge-rows, and hurdling are going to wrack
 
 410 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 and ruin, and no longer would enclose a cow or a 
 sheep, even if the pasture allowed them to feed. The 
 casuals who are called the beaters break in wherever 
 it suits them : so big gaps and broken gates invite the 
 tramp or the gypsy to come along night and day for 
 anything he can pick up. The unlucky tenants who 
 have taken farms and residences on the property find 
 their holding covered with thistle-down, overrun with 
 rabbits, birds, vermin of every kind with which the 
 lands round them swarm. No care can keep their 
 gardens and meadows in good order in the neighbour- 
 hood of such a plague. No wonder the "landed 
 interest is distressed." 
 
 We need not fear that the means of healthy 
 exercise are cut off, if this small island ever ceases to 
 be a collection of shooting-boxes. The world is still 
 wide enough for big game for those who crave for it. 
 There is good sport and dangerous too in the 
 Rockies and Africa is a big continent and far from 
 exhausted. Let us encourage these gentry who 
 cannot live without killing to take a turn at tigers. 
 I don't mean in a howdah on an elephant which is 
 not a very noble sport but real tiger-hunting on 
 foot, or killing leopard from a tree. That they tell 
 me is exciting and far from easy. But there is a form 
 of sport which might really be practised with great 
 benefit to the community, and would call out great 
 qualities in the hunter. India and many other parts 
 of the East, as of South America, suffer continually 
 from venomous snakes and other reptiles. A man 
 who could bring home 1000 skins of rattle-snakes 
 would really have something to boast of. Good sport 
 may still be had with the larger saurians though it is 
 a beggarly game to lie on a bank and shoot a crocodile 
 asleep with an explosive bullet. All that need be said 
 is this. There are still upon this planet masses of
 
 GAME PRESERVING AND BATTUES 411 
 
 powerful and very noxious creatures whose numbers 
 it would be a service to mankind to reduce. And the 
 reducing them, without taking the unfair advantage 
 of modern fire-arms, would be a real test of skill and 
 pluck. 
 
 The world is wide enough for fifty forms of active 
 exertion, with or without special risks, if that is all 
 that is wanted. Even our island has room for plenty 
 of healthy sport, which can be indulged in without 
 ruining the country and without outrageous expense. 
 The fashionable craze for drives and battues is vulgar 
 swagger to air one's purse and one's fine friends. 
 There is neither active exercise nor enjoyment of 
 nature in waiting on a seat about a damp cover for 
 hours till the beaters have done their task. The 
 " true sportsman " is the last man in the world to 
 notice the loveliness of the land or to care for it if he 
 did. If he says "he cares for a day's shooting because 
 it takes him on to the moors," he might as well say he 
 loves going to Church because it lets him see some 
 new pretty faces ! When I tramp over a Westmor- 
 land moor, or a Ross-shire deer-forest, I go alone with 
 a stout stick and a field-glass ; my course is directed 
 by the heights whence I get the most glorious views ; 
 what I hunt is a mountain burn to its rock fall or its 
 head spring ; I can watch the grouse, or the peewit, 
 or the heron, hour after hour without any wish to 
 kill : the black-nosed ram, the Highland cattle, or the 
 antlered stag, are alike a sight of joy and freshness. 
 I would as soon kill any one of the three. Or if I 
 had to spare one, it should be the buck.
 
 'THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH' 
 
 AUGUST 1890 
 
 I AM amused (as I often am at this season) by the 
 ebullitions of the enthusiastic sportsman over the 
 return of " The Glorious Twelfth " the Feast of 
 Saint Grouse who has superseded all the saints in 
 the British calendar. Hear the other side of the 
 matter from one who loves the moors much too well 
 to carry a gun when he walks over them. I have 
 known the moors and the mountains for more than 
 fifty years j and I think few people have ever drawn 
 from them more health, happiness, and abiding 
 memories of beauty and peace. Ever since I was a 
 boy I have loved the heather and the wild fowl, and 
 the deer, and all feathered and furred things. Scores 
 and scores of times I have spent days in watching the 
 antlered bucks, and have traced the chamois in the 
 Alps as they troop down to drink ; I have heard the 
 grouse swirl up from almost every moor in Scotland, 
 from the Cheviots to Skye and from Arran to Dun- 
 robin. I have seen, perhaps, as much of the hills as 
 most sportsmen ; but I never thought it would add to 
 my enjoyment of them to kill anything. To us who 
 really love the moors for their loveliness and pathetic 
 rest, and their solitary simplicity, all this noisy 
 swagger about killing birds is mere cant. As "the 
 
 412
 
 'THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH' 413 
 
 Twelfth " comes round we know that our peaceful 
 and lovely hills are being stormed by a crowd of 
 people who care nothing for nature, and whose talk 
 is of bags, and gillies, and luncheons. The effect is 
 as if, when we are taking a quiet walk in some 
 beloved nook in a well -known forest, we stumble 
 suddenly on a holiday party making picnic, and our 
 choice haunt is become like a corner of " the hill " 
 on a Derby Day. Some years ago I took my wife 
 and boys to visit a beautiful historic ruin which 
 poetry, art, and a long chain of glorious reminiscences 
 have made a place of pilgrimage to all who speak the 
 English language. As ill-luck would have it, that 
 very day and spot had been chosen for their annual 
 picnic by 2000 " trippers " on pleasure bent. They 
 seemed to be enjoying themselves ; and, as far as 
 nigger minstrelsy, steam roundabouts, and donkey- 
 races could give enjoyment, I trust they had it. But 
 we had little. For a short space we tried to admire 
 the magnificent ashlar masonry of the Donjon, the 
 exquisite tracery of the chapel windows, and to recall 
 the passages of our great writers which lingered in our 
 memory. But it was not to be. And I recommend 
 all who visit those venerable ruins of the piety of our 
 forefathers to avoid anniversaries dedicated to the 
 outing of the tripper. 
 
 I will not enter on the big question of game and 
 " sport," in other words, the slaughtering of harmless 
 animals for amusement. So long as I am not 
 expected to join I shall not interfere with the amuse- 
 ments of others. Personally, if I were compelled to 
 kill something, I would rather shoot a broken-down 
 cab-horse than a buck or a pheasant. I should at 
 least feel that I had put a poor thing out of its misery, 
 and that I had not wantonly destroyed a beautiful 
 creature. But on that wide topic I will not enlarge.
 
 4H MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 If persons assure us that they are never really happy 
 unless when they are killing something, we must take 
 their word for it. What I complain of is, that they 
 should pretend their killing to be mere love of 
 nature, or that " sport " adds a fresh charm to the 
 glory of the hills. On the contrary, many of us 
 look on it as a stupid, noisy, vulgar desecration 
 of hill and moor, of loch and fell. Those who 
 really enjoy them love them for themselves, and 
 not for the " bag " and the " drive " and the 
 champagne luncheons and the company of gillies in 
 kilt and tartan. All that apparatus of the deer-forest 
 and the paraphernalia of sport can be hired by any 
 cockney with money in Pall Mall and Bond Street ; 
 these things are no more a proof of taste or of spirit 
 than are powdered footmen or a coach and fine team. 
 People who find all these costly appendages necessary 
 to enable them to enjoy a walk over a moor, do not 
 really enjoy the moor either with them or without 
 them. They might just as well tell us that they 
 only enjoy pictures when they are waltzing or 
 dancing a cotillon in the gallery, or that to enjoy 
 music you must be free to promenade in the concert- 
 room and chat with your friends. 
 
 The last time I went down to Perthshire I took 
 care to go in June. What will you do when you get 
 there ? my friends said ; there is nothing to kill. 
 No, I told them, that is why I am going now ; I am 
 going to see the moors. And they thought that sheer 
 midsummer madness. Would that sportsmen could 
 have seen the late snow on the caps of Ben More and 
 Schiehallion, as they rose in the distance over the 
 moors of Breadalbane, and heard the call of the 
 curlews, and watched the white gulls fishing in the 
 reaches of the Tay, or seen the blaze of gold from 
 gorse and broom on Murthly moor, or listened to the
 
 'THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH' 415 
 
 roar of the Tummel and the Bran in spate. The 
 Highlands in June are full of glory and of peace. 
 The glens are resplendent with blossom and leaf; the 
 burns are bursting with their springtide floods ; the 
 moors are one broad home of calm and abounding life. 
 And it is all one's own ; it is all nature's, and theirs 
 who love nature, beauty, and natural life. Those 
 sportsmen who pant for the freedom of the hillside 
 are talking scandal in Hyde Park or sweltering in 
 stuffy ball-rooms. Bond Street tradesmen are puffing 
 their patent guns, boots, luncheon luxuries, and 
 wonderful inventions to enable ladies and gentlemen 
 to turn Sutherlandshire into Mayfair. The year 
 draws on ; half the summer is gone ; the Minister, 
 for the seventeenth time, really does hope that the 
 House will rise next week. The sacred day arrives, 
 and all peace and beauty are gone. Gangs of smart 
 people pour over the country of Rob Roy, with Hyde 
 Park barouches and Belgravian footmen. Lord's, 
 Hurlingham, Henley, and Ascot are played over 
 again amid the heather and the tarns. A compound 
 essence of Monte Carlo, Wiesbaden, and Royat is 
 dished up on the desolate solitudes of the Grampians. 
 It's all "awfully jolly," very smart indeed, and every- 
 thing is really the last thing out. The Glorious 
 Twelfth has come back. 
 
 We who love the mountains for themselves, and 
 the grouse, the deer, and the salmon, as the natural 
 inmates of the mountains and the lochs, look with 
 mixed feelings on all this hullabaloo about killing 
 animals as Society's Bank Holiday trip. One is 
 pleased that any fellow -mortal should be pleased ; 
 and we are not disturbed if they who live to kill 
 regard all who enjoy the moor without killing as 
 milksops. But to any mountaineer accustomed to the 
 peaks and passes of the Oberland or the Bernina, these
 
 416 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 feats of the grouse-killer do not seem quite so heroic. 
 To a traveller who has sought for beauty, and drank in 
 health on a thousand hillsides throughout Europe, it 
 seems a bit of cockney swagger to turn the Highlands 
 into one big Hurlingham where the killing of birds 
 is the excuse for gowns, luncheon baskets, and pony 
 phaetons. When a short Act is passed making it 
 penal to kill a vertebrate animal except in the way of 
 trade, it will be possible to enjoy the hills, the moors, 
 forests, and copses of this beautiful island all the year 
 round. Till that day arrives, let those who love the 
 Highlands go there before the " Glorious Twelfth of 
 August " comes round.
 
 THE JOLLY GIRL 
 
 1882 
 
 I WAS not a little confused the other day by the 
 question of a brilliant French lady, who knows 
 English homes to the core, "What has come to your 
 girls of late ?" said she. "The ravissante Miss, who 
 used to be our idol, has taken to cigarettes and New- 
 market coats." I begged her not to take so seriously 
 the passing whims of fashion. I urged that our girls 
 are as beautiful as ever, and in this callisthenic age 
 both healthier in body and freer in mind. "I say 
 nothing against their looks and their spirits," said she ; 
 " the hunting and boating and tennis for which you 
 all seem to live, will, I daresay, improve their figures, 
 if it does not ruin their health. What I cannot 
 endure in a girl is a taste for the ways of men, and 
 not of the best men what your Charivari calls the 
 awfully jolly girl." My national pride was wounded 
 by this, for I had always believed that if there was 
 anything of which England possessed the secret, it 
 was how to produce the English girl. Long had I 
 dreamed of "the not impossible she" ; and years and 
 years ago I had wooed and won her at last. Can it 
 be true, methought, that we are breeding a kind of 
 girl of whom such things can be said ? This new and 
 engaging freedom of theirs, is it all as it should be ? 
 417 2E
 
 4i 8 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 I fell a-thinking about our new manners and resolved 
 to use my eyes. The philosophy of clothes is 
 complete ; and no philosophic mind overlooks the 
 subtle correlations of clothes and soul. Nor am I 
 hard to please in the fashions of the day. I often 
 think I see some of the creations of Reynolds and 
 Romney step down from the frame and move amongst 
 us all glowing with life. Nay, I have only a good- 
 natured smile for those passionate figures in faded 
 green who give couleur locale to the " private view." 
 The beauty of dress, I protest, is no longer an extinct 
 art. But what are we to say to the clothes of the 
 jolly girl ? An epicene slip of a thing does she love 
 to make of herself ! At fifty yards off you would 
 think she was still in the school-room ; the slim Kate 
 Greenaway costume-bebe suggests the playground and a 
 game of romps. No ! she has seen twenty, and has 
 had her offers. Were I a marrying man I should 
 wait, I think, till she grew to be more like a woman. 
 A style of the day, which I find even harder to 
 bear than that of the grown-up baby, is the lady's 
 version of the horsey youth. She has borrowed his 
 billycock hat, his dog's-ear collar, his knowing breast- 
 pocket, his gloves, his buttons, and his boots. Her 
 hair is cut short, like a curly boy's ; her jacket is 
 made by a London tailor ; Newmarket has given its 
 fiat to her horseman's overcoat ; and the flower in the 
 button-hole is the last word of Piccadilly. Nor let 
 us forget the whip, for no family that respects itself 
 can live without collies all over the place. And a girl 
 of this persuasion could as little be seen without her 
 dog -whip as a Guardsman without a button -hole. 
 She has contrived, too, to spoil what I take to be as 
 pleasant a sight as the animated world affords a fine 
 woman sitting well on a fine horse. The poetry of 
 motion is dismally turned into prose by the habit cut
 
 THE JOLLY GIRL 419 
 
 square at the ankle, the visible trousers and jockey 
 boots. The theory is, as we all know, that the fair 
 rider in Rotten Row is fresh from a run across 
 country. The melancholy fact is that she has some- 
 what the look of a stable-boy who has thrown on a 
 skirt. My French friend is so far right ; it is difficult, 
 indeed, to think of this female Tally-ho as entirely a 
 thing of beauty. The women who copy the ways of 
 men at best succeed in resembling boys. The special 
 habits and interests of men, their athletic and sporting 
 tastes, their melancholy experience of what is called 
 " life," can no more be appropriated by a girl than our 
 topboots and riding-breeches. She only approaches 
 that unnatural monster, the boy who is aping a man. 
 I am not so old or such a misanthrope but that I find 
 myself at times amongst young people at a dance or a 
 garden party. I see a handsome young fellow from 
 Aldershot talking to a fine girl, the picture of youth 
 and grace. "They are flirting, I hope, as they 
 should," says a match-making old thing. Flirting ! 
 my dear lady ; he has been telling her about that 
 awfully jolly run with the Ouorn, don't you know. 
 And now she is asking him with an anxious look if it 
 is really true that No. 7 is not fit. For an hour, as I 
 sat within hearing on the bench, she has patiently 
 committed to memory the merits of barrack after 
 barrack and station after station a form of feminine 
 curiosity which he has but languidly satisfied, though 
 he has no other topic with which to entertain her. 
 " Aldershot," says he, " is such an awfully jolly place, 
 don't you know." " Is it really ? " says she, with 
 feeling. " I mean," says he, " such a jolly place to 
 get away from." And she knows who is bound to 
 win the mile race unless Jigger Mowbray can stand 
 the training, which is not to be thought of, don't you 
 know. And so they go on, from mere habit, talking
 
 420 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 the talk of the smoking-room, or so much of it as can 
 be dribbled into the ears of a pure young girl. By 
 all that is sacred, I glow with shame when I see a 
 beautiful woman thus put off her sex, when she 
 certainly can never put on ours. 
 
 What are they to gain, these favourites of the 
 regiment and the hunt, that they thus humble them- 
 selves, that they so disfigure and weary themselves in 
 laboriously ceasing to be women ? It is not husbands, 
 assuredly, they are seeking. Our young friend from 
 Aldershot does not trouble himself to flirt with girls ; 
 he has not the remotest idea of marriage ; nor, indeed, 
 has his fair partner, at least with the like of him. 
 She is not thinking of fascinating him at all ; would, 
 indeed, that she were ! Marriage is an affair of 
 carriages and horses ; for these she must look to older 
 men, and she does not like older men. No ! she is 
 only filling her appointed part, the awfully jolly girl, 
 which her society expects her to be. Dolly and 
 Darling, Judy and Jo, have to do it, and so must she. 
 And so the poor child waits wearily in cold or rain, 
 through the interminable "sports," whilst hairy men 
 with bare legs pant round and round the ring ; and 
 she sits in a cloud of tobacco through the endless 
 cricket-match ; nor does she blench if she chance to 
 be spattered with blood and feathers at Hurlingham. 
 And all these long hours she has to listen to the 
 wonderful story, how the bay mare threw a splint, 
 how Tubby Talbot won the cup, and what came of 
 the row at the Rag and Famish. She is indeed weary 
 of it all ; but she will never be a jolly girl if she 
 cannot bear it. I wonder if she knows how little 
 men really care for this strange receptivity of hers. 
 To the young fellow this girl with her manly 
 acquirements just so far ceases to be woman without 
 advancing a step towards man. She listens to him as
 
 THE JOLLY GIRL 421 
 
 the fag at school listens to the big fellow in the boat 
 or the eleven. It is pleasant to him that the young 
 'un wears skirts and has lips even ruddier than a fag. 
 It is pleasant to him ; but not wholly to us elders and 
 fathers. And then the young one is not really a boy, 
 in the way to be a man. The soft hands will never 
 hold bat or oar in earnest. Thus the talk goes loung- 
 ing on in that hollow way, much as we catch it across 
 a railway bar. The tones are perhaps more polite ; 
 but can any one say that the sense is better ? 
 
 I do not set up for a moralist ; it is no business of 
 mine to preach about frivolity and vice. My only 
 philosophy is to think nothing human as alien to me. 
 When I was a young fellow, if youths and maidens 
 met, silly as might be the talk, there was always a 
 lurking idea that we were still in the presence of 
 women. Girls in my time expected us to treat them 
 on the assumption that they were women, or that 
 they very soon would be. If you could not entertain 
 them, as women all the world over love to be enter- 
 tained, they turned to one another and amused them- 
 selves. When we sat with a sweet young thing in 
 the verandah as the band played the last notes of 
 " Kathleen Mavourneen " we had something, I vow, 
 to talk about beside cricket averages, the club cigars, 
 and the right cut of a bulldog's ears. And as we 
 never saw cigarettes in the lips of our partners, it 
 never occurred to us to smoke between the dances. 
 
 I have no turn for satire ; but I love to watch our 
 social moods and to trace them to their causes and 
 effects. And perhaps we may note three things at 
 least which have led to the changes we see. I suppose 
 the work began with that wave of athleticism which 
 of late has swept over the land, turning the heads of 
 not a few lads and importing some laughable customs j 
 but, if its effect upon men was more or less manly and
 
 422 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 wholesome, its effect indirectly on women was perhaps 
 a more doubtful gain. When the gymnastic idol was 
 set up, and the muscular type of virtue became the 
 whole duty of man, there were found English girls to 
 suppose it the whole dUty of woman. Physically, it 
 may be, it strengthened those whom it did not 
 slaughter outright. But as the girl could after all 
 only join in the new worship as a proselyte of the 
 gate, she fell into the social position of the "lower 
 school " at a cricket match. The jolly girl, in fact, 
 became a fag. When athletics are the business of 
 life, the tone of society is naturally set by men. Was 
 not a second cause at work in the triumphs of the 
 famous American beauty ? This fascinating being, I 
 doubt not, on her own side of the Atlantic has planted 
 the germs of new feminine epochs. There was nothing 
 of the playground or hunt about her ; her important 
 discovery was the freedom of her sex. It may be 
 doubted if our ancient system on this side of the 
 ocean is duly prepared for such dash, such originality, 
 such angelic self-possession. The type, however 
 brilliant, is a perilous one to adopt. For the American 
 girl, who so startles us at home, has her own traditions 
 and habits. When she shook from her airy skirts the 
 conventions of the Old World, she founded the conven- 
 tions of the New. At home she reigns still, and imposes 
 her law on men, concerning herself but little about mess- 
 rooms and gun-clubs. Young ladies, you who think 
 of adopting her adorable freedom of manner, be sure 
 that you also adopt her shrewd and original spirit. 
 
 A word, too, as to another thing. It has been 
 thought the happiness of this kingdom that its throne 
 is girt about by a princely family, of high spirit and 
 singular popularity. Wherever our golden youth 
 most loves to congregate, there do we find our 
 princes in their midst. And the ideal of life which
 
 THE JOLLY GIRL 423 
 
 these Royal soldiers and sailors have impressed on 
 our modern society, is an ideal perhaps more easily 
 attained by men than it ever can be by women. So 
 tremendous, indeed, is the pace in the new Imperial 
 sweepstakes that only the most jolly of their sex can 
 expect to attain a place. But be the causes three or 
 three hundred the result is a curious social inversion. 
 The relative place of men and women is reversed in 
 this rapid and dazzling world. Of old, the idea was 
 that in things social the woman was mistress, queen, 
 and leader. Men, in her presence, were to study her 
 tastes and submit to her law. If they could not exist 
 without tobacco they might go elsewhere ; if they 
 wanted to be killing something, to a shooting party ; 
 and the matches discussed in a drawing-room had 
 nothing to do with Lord's. 
 
 One is curious to know how these young bloods 
 and subalterns regard the women who have got by 
 heart their mess gossip, who have betting-books on 
 the garrison sports, and will sit half the day to see 
 pigeons mangled. Is such an one a girl we care to 
 think of as wife, as the mother of the children to be, 
 as all that woman should be and is in the world ? I 
 can imagine nothing more ruinous to womanly nature 
 than the ways and the talk of a rather precocious lad. 
 Is there not a bloom upon an English girl of the best 
 old type that the camp and cricket-ground will hardly 
 improve ? Purity, simplicity, health, courage, grace, 
 and goodness, attended, like the good fairy, to bless 
 her birth. Do mothers or fathers imagine that the 
 winners of cups and sweepstakes have better gifts to 
 impart ? I can remember what a keen old lady said 
 once to a mother who was mourning her lot in having 
 no daughter " Be thankful, my dear, you have none. 
 In these days, who knows ? she might have turned 
 out a jolly girl ! "
 
 MAN AND THE BRUTES 
 
 1900 
 
 [Address to the Humanitarian League.] 
 
 IT was with all the more pleasure that I accepted your 
 invitation to speak on the relations of Man to the 
 Lower Animals, because I feel that sound views about 
 them go to the very root of a right understanding of 
 Humanity itself, and are of vital importance to the 
 future of our own race. We cannot understand, or 
 respect, or rightly educate Mankind, until we come 
 to understand, to respect, and to do our duty by the 
 Animal kind. And our whole ethical system, I will 
 add, must be undermined, perverted, poisoned, if we 
 cannot learn to put the relations of Man to the Lower 
 Animals on a healthy, scientific, social, and religious 
 basis. To me, human nature is unintelligible apart 
 from a right conception of animal nature in the sum ; 
 human duty involves and includes duty towards the 
 animal kingdom, of which we are only a part ; and 
 religion, as I understand it, implies religious reverence 
 and a sense of religious sympathy with the vast animal 
 world, of which we are the head. 
 
 I do not admit any contrast between Man and 
 Animals. Man is an Animal, and only the first 
 amongst the Animals, and that in no absolute sense. 
 
 424
 
 MAN AND THE BRUTES 425 
 
 I do not know what the Rights of Man are much 
 less shall I talk about the Rights of Animals. The 
 only moral Right of Man that I recognise is the Right 
 to do his Duty. And the only Rights of Animals 
 that I know are the Mutual Duties of Man and the 
 Lower Animals. 
 
 I had better come to the point at once, even at the 
 risk of paining some who hear me, by saying that I 
 regard man's morality towards the Lower Animals 
 to be a vital, and indeed fundamental part of his 
 morality towards his fellowmen. I refuse to treat it 
 as an extra, an appendix, or finishing touch super- 
 added to our ethical creed. I do so, because I do not 
 know what Ethics can mean, if it be not the due 
 ordering of our own complex nature (a large and 
 indispensable part of which is animal] towards the 
 vast organic world in which we find ourselves. Of 
 that organic world, the Animal Kingdom is the pre- 
 dominant part, as Man is only the predominant 
 member of the Animal Kingdom. That is, Man 
 does not differ from Animals, in the same way that 
 Animals differ from Vegetables, or Vegetables differ 
 from Minerals or Rocks. Zoologically speaking, he 
 is classed amongst Primates^ as one of the highest 
 order of mammals. His physical, moral, intellectual, 
 and therefore his spiritual, nature does not organically 
 differ in kind from those of the highest mammals. It 
 differs only in degree, and by a vast hereditary and 
 secular evolution. And it does not differ in degree 
 absolutely and invariably. 
 
 Scientific Ethics are founded upon analysis of man's 
 composite qualities affective, practical, intellectual 
 and that harmony between all these and the organic 
 and inorganic world that environs us, which is best 
 fitted to secure the full development of our whole 
 nature. I know no other basis for Ethics but this.
 
 426 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Well ! I say the higher mammals share with us, in 
 some perceptible degree, the various qualities qualities 
 of feeling, of action, of intelligence. They share all 
 of these qualities in some degree, and some of them 
 in a very high degree. And not only do the higher 
 mammals show them, but even some of the lower 
 mammals, even all vertebrates, show germs of these 
 qualities nay, some of them are occasionally trace- 
 able here and there in the invertebrate world. 
 
 Consider what are the essential instincts or pro- 
 pensities of man. They are the instincts of (i) 
 Nutrition, (2) Sex, (3) Parenthood, (4) Destruction, 
 (5) Construction, (6) Love of Power, (7) Love of 
 Praise, (8) Attachment, (9) Reverence, (10) Kindness 
 or Love. No one denies that all these instincts are 
 found in a marked degree in some or other of the 
 lower animals. Obviously all brutes have the instincts 
 of nutrition, sex, maternity, destruction. Many, of 
 course, have these qualities in far more energetic forms 
 than man. No one denies that some animals show 
 constructive instincts, love of power, and of praise 
 beavers, birds, ants, bees have the first ; elephants, 
 dogs, and monkeys certainly have the other two. As 
 to attachment, dogs often show it in a degree even 
 rare in man. Of reverence we can say the same. 
 Most domestic animals show the last kindness, good- 
 ness, love. Most of the nobler mammals show germs 
 of all our moral characteristics. 
 
 As to man's qualities of character : ( I ) Courage, 
 (2) Cautiousness, (3) Resolution, brutes have them 
 all. Many animals are as brave as man, so that the 
 natural man calls himself as brave as a lion, or a 
 leopard, or a game-cock, or an eagle. Dogs, horses, 
 foxes, elephants, rats, swallows, and trout, are exces- 
 sively wary in danger, and most of the same animals, 
 especially dogs, cats, foxes, pigs, and elephants exhibit
 
 MAN AND THE BRUTES 427 
 
 wonderful resolution, perseverance, and the will not 
 to be beaten. It is only in the intellectual qualities 
 that doubt can exist. No one denies the powers of 
 observation of such brutes as dogs, cats, foxes, monkeys, 
 and elephants. Powers of abstraction, reflection, 
 generalisation, are often denied to brutes. But all of 
 these can be found distinctly marked in some dogs, 
 monkeys, and elephants. They have shown faint 
 germs of the power to count, to reason, to classify. 
 And no one denies to brutes the power of expression 
 by gesture, by mimicry, and by sounds. 
 
 Here, then, we have all the affective, active, and 
 intellectual qualities of man traceable in other mammals, 
 although of course the higher qualities are only trace- 
 able in germ, and no mammal exhibits anything like 
 the completeness and due co-ordination of qualities 
 found in man. Not only are all the qualities of man 
 traceable in brutes, but all the institutions and habits 
 consequent on these qualities are traceable in brutes 
 that is, in faint germ, in a few species, or in rare 
 specimens of the species. Brutes have a marked and 
 sometimes a beautiful family life ; they are capable of 
 tribal life ; monkeys, beavers, bees, and ants, are 
 capable of organised activities and industries. Many 
 brutes provide for a distant future ; many amuse them- 
 selves in play ; many are highly inquisitive ; many 
 are exceedingly sociable and communicative. I believe 
 that some tribes of apes and some dogs can talk, at 
 least can communicate ideas and wants. Some have 
 instituted systems of education ; and we can even 
 trace the germs of conscience and of worship. 
 
 The result of all this is, that the lower animals are 
 not separated from us by any absolute gulf, but are our 
 feebler, undeveloped, younger brothers, as it were ; 
 below us in degree, in development, in education, in 
 educable capacity, but not below us absolutely in kind.
 
 428 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 Some very rare examples of animals are superior in 
 intellect to some very degraded human beings ; some 
 depraved men are much more brutal than some brutes. 
 Neither morally, nor intellectually, nor by character 
 are men as far above dogs as dogs are above reptiles or 
 fishes. In some of the lower stages of civilisation, to 
 a great extent in Southern Europe to-day, man 
 regards himself as absolute Lord and Master of the 
 whole world round him, and he lumps the organic and 
 inorganic kingdoms in one, and considers himself 
 entitled to treat all " brutes " with the same absolute 
 authority and want of sympathy that he shows to a 
 forest of trees or a mine of coal. He claims the right 
 to cut, carve, burn all alike mineral, wood, or beast. 
 None of these, he says, have souls. Non sono Crhtiani 
 says the Neapolitan driver. 
 
 No rational Ethic or general philosophy can be 
 built upon such a huge and monstrous sophism. Truly 
 considered, the highest mammals, certainly what we 
 call the domestic animals, form a part of Humanity, or 
 are an appendix to Humanity, are the willing slaves or 
 camp-followers of Humanity, and are its auxiliaries in 
 the colossal task of ruling, improving, and utilising 
 the vast world external to man man's organic and 
 inorganic environment and kingdom. These noble 
 brutes share man's glorious duty, and they immensely 
 aid his triumphs over Nature, for, without them, many 
 of his best creations would be paralysed or impossible. 
 These noble brutes share too in his moral qualities, 
 and not seldom they set him most beautiful examples 
 which nothing human but the tenderest mother and 
 the most heroic martyr can display. The best of the 
 brutes most familiar to us, most useful to us, most dear 
 to us, were it only a pet bird, form a part of our 
 household, are members of our homes, are inmates of 
 our family, and they occupy such a place as the wisest
 
 MAN AND THE BRUTES 429 
 
 of the Greek philosophers assigned to the slave in the 
 ancient world. There can be no State, they said, 
 without Family, and no Family without Slaves. We 
 may say, far more truly, there can be no Humanity, 
 in the highest sense, without the Brutes, and no real 
 Humanity that has not in part incorporated the noblest 
 and most serviceable of the animal friends and help- 
 mates of Man. 
 
 Some of the earliest and most splendid triumphs of 
 human civilisation turned on the subjugation, civilisa- 
 tion, domestication, of the brutes. Until man had 
 secured the dog, the cat, the ox and the cow, the 
 horse and the ass, the cock and the pigeon, the sheep 
 and the pig, the goat and the deer, the camel and the 
 elephant his final kingdom of this earth was not 
 secure. Imagine man absolutely cut off from the 
 service and help of all of these animals, that is, that 
 they are all wild beasts we see him at once reduced 
 to the level of the Australian bushman. * 
 
 Our relation to the animals, at least to the nobler 
 mammals, does not form an appendix to our human 
 morality, much less does it form a distinct branch of 
 Ethics, or an independent morality by itself. No ! 
 it is part and parcel of our human morality, and is 
 inwoven with it and inseparable from it. Our duties 
 towards our lower helpmates form part of our duties 
 towards our fellow-beings. The highest <c brutes " are 
 our fellow-beings. Man can only regard himself as 
 the advance guard, or as the commanding officer and 
 leader of a vast army of living, sentient, and moral 
 beings, whose natural function is to use, improve, and 
 make the best of this wondrous and complex earth. 
 
 Not, of course, that this indivisible human morality 
 requires us to treat in the same way all animals, even 
 all domestic animals, or to treat any in the same way 
 as we treat men. Therein lies the sophism and the
 
 430 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 distorted view of some excellent people who forbid 
 man to do anything to a cow or a sheep that he does 
 not feel it right to do to his neighbour. In that case 
 he may not eat an egg, nor drink a cup of milk, which 
 involves killing or stinting the poor calf; nor could 
 he shear a sheep to make his coat, and leave the poor 
 wether to shiver ; nor could he geld a horse or a bull, 
 in which case the usefulness of the equine and bovine 
 races would be reduced to a minimum, and involve 
 much sacrifice of human life. Nor, indeed, could he 
 drown a kitten or a mouse, in which case mankind 
 would soon have to retreat to another planet. Human 
 morality does not require us to treat an infant in arms 
 as we treat our grown-up sons, or to treat a child as 
 we treat husband or wife, father or mother, or a Red 
 Indian as we treat a fellow-citizen, or to behave to a 
 rude Hottentot exactly as we behave to a cultivated 
 Frenchman or German. All that scientific and 
 humane morality teaches and demands is to deal with 
 the sentient, and in part the sympathetic, animal 
 world as the living instruments, and to a great extent 
 as the conscious allies, of Humanity, in its vast and 
 arduous task of developing its own highest nature, and 
 also the fair planet whereon its life is cast and its 
 mighty destiny has to be evolved. 
 
 This view of humane Ethics in relation to the 
 lower animals involves an immense body of derivative 
 details and practical applications, on which it is im- 
 possible to enter on this occasion. Every one of 
 them implies for its right treatment a great mass of 
 special knowledge and of very cautious deduction 
 from facts. What I regret, is to see how often 
 violent doctrines are preached, and furious invectives 
 are launched without knowledge, without care, and 
 with complete indifference to any coherent philosophy 
 or science. I do not intend to imitate such hasty
 
 MAN AND THE BRUTES 431 
 
 decision of intricate details, or such vehement con- 
 clusions from crude and unproven hypotheses. I 
 came here to speak on Ethical principles, and I keep 
 to this general issue. 
 
 Humane and scientific morality involves our re- 
 garding ourselves as akin to the whole animal world, 
 and as fellow- workers with the higher animals and 
 the domesticated species in the common task of 
 developing on the planet the noblest type of animal 
 life. That noblest type is not exclusively human life 
 in any absolute sense. Man, in his vast secular 
 evolution, has incorporated a portion of the lower 
 world so inextricably with himself, that it would be 
 impossible to separate them, or even to replace the 
 animals in their native condition. Man has trans- 
 formed the physical shape, the habits, the needs, the 
 moral and emotional nature of many animals in a 
 manner so irrevocable and to a degree so marvellous, 
 that they could not be put back to their natural state. 
 To do so, would be to degrade their, and to ruin our 
 civilisation. 
 
 Does this humane and scientific morality absolutely 
 debar us from doing anything to destroy life, to maim, 
 or give pain to brutes, even to the higher brutes, to 
 the domesticated animals ? Certainly not ! To lay 
 down such an absolute rule would be to put an end to 
 the domestic species, and thus to the civilisation of 
 animals, their sympathy and alliance with Man ; and 
 furthermore to throw man back into the lowest 
 savagery. Civilisation has been slowly built up after 
 secular and terrific combat with the other animal races. 
 It is even possible that Man has only just won the 
 long battle by the skin of his teeth or the joints of 
 his hand, and has crushed and kept down some species 
 that were once his dangerous rivals. In any case, it 
 is certain that Man's victory has involved enormous
 
 432 MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 
 
 slaughter, incessant combat, and incalculable and 
 indescribable agony. 
 
 The maintenance and the development of human 
 civilisation and in human civilisation is involved 
 animal civilisation inevitably requires a continuance 
 of combat, the perpetuation of enormous slaughter, 
 the infliction of much unavoidable pain. It is the lot 
 of Humanity, and we have no talisman to exempt the 
 lower animals, not even those which serve us, much 
 less those which war against us, plague us, or destroy 
 us. Countless animal species useless to Man, and 
 alas ! not a few useful to Man, have disappeared from 
 the Planet in the long warfare between Man and 
 Brute ; and, doubtless, many troublesome and noxious 
 species will have to disappear in the future. Nature 
 means one vast whirlpool of war, death, and agony 
 and Man, who did not create it, and cannot control it, 
 is powerless to vary this law. 
 
 What we can do, what we are bound to do, is to 
 reduce to a minimum this inevitable pain, to stop all 
 needless slaughter, to avoid waste, and wanton in- 
 difference to suffering. What death and pain we 
 inflict must be in strict accord with the necessities 
 of civilisation, and to the ultimate protection and 
 amelioration of the vanguard of the animal world as a 
 whole, of which Man is only the guardian. Above 
 all, if we deal out death and suffering to the animal 
 world around us, it behoves us to test our souls most 
 keenly, that there lurk therein no trace of enjoyment 
 in the infliction, no brutal insensibility to our action, 
 no wanton curiosity, no diabolical passion of vanity or 
 ambition. This is to turn into a curse one of man's 
 noblest prerogatives and duties. 
 
 There is no space here to deal with all the practical 
 questions that flow from these principles questions 
 enormously complicated and subtle questions of food,
 
 MAN AND THE BRUTES 433 
 
 clothing, labour, science, and amusement. I reserve 
 them all ; each of them is big enough and difficult 
 enough to occupy a separate lecture, or rather a whole 
 work, a night of discussion we may say a lifetime. 
 And I will only ask you, in conclusion, to consider 
 how greatly the best poetry and thought of the world 
 has been strengthened and inspired by due sense of 
 the claims of brutes, the sympathy and intellect of 
 animals, and Man's communion with the animals 
 from Homer's noble picture of Ulysses and his dog 
 Argus to Cowper's hares, and Burns's field-mouse, and 
 Matthew Arnold's pets : all the legends about the 
 Animal World from /Esop to Kipling all the fine 
 lessons of our literature from Chaucer to Walter Scott. 
 
 THE END 
 
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