x^'^
By the Same Author :
A QUEENSLANDER'S TRAVEL-NOTES,
illustrated from photographs ; is.
OBLATION : Verses ; illustrated by Norman
Lindsay ; 35. 6d,
THE RED PAGAN
To /. F. ARCHIBALD
A. G. Stephens.
THE
RED PAGAN *
SYDNEY:
The Bulletin Newspaper Company, Limited
MCMIV.
The greater part of the contents is reprinted^ with some
alteration, from " The Red Page'' of ''The Bulletin:'
T"3-7 ^^
t
^D3 4>d
a
THE Red Pagan
WHAT is Truth ?" said jesting Pilate — and did
he jest ? — "and would not stay for an answer"
— and did he not stay? The jest and the
haste are Bacon's imagination merely. They
led the poor Nazarene '' prophet " to the judgment-
hall — led him, as one may picture, unwashed and dis-
hevelled, weary for sleep, but with the fever of frenzy
burning in his eyes. And the educated Roman —
fresh and clean from his bed and his bath, leisurely
digesting breakfast, eyeing the other with the large
tolerance of the man of the world, pitying him and
honouring him as one must always honour the sincere
— opposed disciplined intellect to the vaguenesses of
transcendental emotion. " Every one that is of the
Truth heareth my voice," said Jesus.
''What is Truth?" asked Pilate, gently.
And Jesus had no reply.
Did it flash in upon him, gazing at the suave Go-
vernor, that there is no abstract Truth which can be
Jimited and defined ? that one always argues from and
to one's own conception? that this man looking at
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him, the type of another temperament, the embodi-
ment of another race, another civilisation, might have
a creed and canons^ of Truth which he, Jesus, did not
comprehend, could never assimilate, yet none the less
Truth — for Pilate ? Did he realise how slight is any
man's hold upon the Universe ? how little any indivi-
dual can understand of the infinite mass ? how far the
problems set before it surpass the capacity of this
brain of yesterday's growth ?
Or was Jesus merely silent, as we all are silent
— or superficial — in face of a request to reduce the
Abstract to the Concrete at two seconds' notice? in
face of the urbane request for " a Definition " ?
In either case, Jesus was silent — as Pilate might
have been silent had Jesus posed the question. Pilate
waited courteously for the reply that did not come ;
and, hking Jesus all the better because it did not
come, tried hard to save the victim from the mob.
And the mob was a ravening beast, as often.
"What is Literature?'' It is an easier question,
because it refers to a thing that is the creation of the
human mind — that does dwell in a temple made with
hands — that can be corrupted by moth and rust —
that can be weighed and measured, and bought and
sold, and borrowed by women who never return it.
Literature is indeed not a concrete thing, but it cannot
be separated entirely from the concrete. Destroy the
m
What is Literature
books that enshrine it, and you destroy Literature until
another book shall be written. With the burning of
the Alexandrian library Literature was burnt, though
not to death ; and every borrower's thumb-mark on a
beautiful page is a defacement of the beauty of Litera-
ture.
Literature, then — but see what a good dictionary
says —
The collective body of literary productions, em-
bracing the entire results of knowledge and fancy
preserved in writing.
That is good ; but it is not satisfactory. Again —
The class of writings distinguished for beauty
of style or expression, as poetry, essays, or history,
in distinction from scientific treatises and works which
contain positive knowledge ; belles-lettres.
That is better ; but still unhelpful — for, alas ! it begs
the question as a dictionary will. What is beauty of
style or expression ? Will beauty of style or expres-
sion by itself constitute Literature ? It will not.
Close the dictionary: dive into the expanse.
Literature is the human mind's effective mani-
festation in written language.
That is put forward as the best definition attain-
able. For eifective, if you like, read forceful or for-
cible. Everything is in the adjective. Artistic would
be more satisfying in one sense ; but what i s artistic ?
The Red Pagan
— where is your criterion of art or of beauty ? No ;
beauty must be construed in terms of strength — it
is a mode of strength, as heat is a mode of motion.
When you say e-ffective, you do not ehminate the taste-
cavil, the quality-cavil, but you refer it to a quantity-
standard that is more intelligible, more ponderable.
How much, and how many, and for how long,
does a book impress, and move, and thrill? What
active energy does it disengage? What is its equi-
valent in thought-rays? in emotion-volts? What is
its force, its effect? Estimate that, find that, judge
that, and you will know a book's universal value as
Literature.
This standard of force is the ultimate standard.
Tastes differ with individuals, countries, and eras ; but
three and two are five, and twice five are ten, every-
where in the universe.
The scale inevitably adjusts itself. Uncle Tom's
Cabin impressed many, and much ; but for how long ?
Catullus has moved much, and long ; but how many ?
W^e argue that Catullus writes better Literature than
Harriet Stowe — because people of " taste," people of
" culture," people of " learning," prefer Catullus. Well,
if it be so, in the long run Catullus's total force of
achieved impressions will outweigh Harriet Stowe's.
Her work dies ; his lives through the ages. His
mind's " effective manifestation " surpasses hers.
What is Literature
Style is a requisite of Literature ; but what is
style ? Merely an aid to effect. Individual taste may
prefer the florid or the simple ; but florid style or simple
is valuable only in so far as it impresses, gives force.
Having defined Literature as the mind's effective mani-
festation in written language, you can proceed to define
the things that go to make effect, and style is one of
them. But style, and thought, and emotion, and in-
terest, and melody, and picture — these are only
factors in the total. The total is force. In the last
resort Literature must be judged, like everything else,
by the force it develops — the quantity of latent energy
which it makes active.
'' Then one must wait ten thousand years to judge
what is Literature T' Yes ; and longer than that. But
you can make provisional judgments as you go along.
If the literary effect of Mrs. Stowe is at this century-
end equivalent to I0;r, and the literary effect of Catul-
lus is equivalent to only Jx, you can still calculate on
the future and defend your preference of Catullus —
or of Mrs. Stowe. Nobody does, of course ; but that
is the only way to do it which will hold logic-water.
Between any human mind, as agent, and the whole
multitude of human minds, as objects, the sole fixed
standard of measurement possible is a standard of how
much force exerted, on how many, for how long. All
the other standards shift with time, and place, and
individuals, and circumstances.
The Red Pagan
So that, for humanity,
Literature is the human mind's effective manifesta-
tion in written language.
But, for the individual appraiser, there is a standard
much more satisfactory, much more easily applied.
Truth is — what you believe. Literature is — what you
like. Admire the corollary: What I like is Litera-
ture.
IF Bacon were alive nowadays, with the wisdom at-
tributed to him, he would realise that it is not
worth while taking all knowledge for one's pro-
vince — even if all knowledge permitted itself
to be taken. We have reached a truer conception of
the relation of finite to infinite than Bacon had;
though our defaults and our fortunes keep life so far
short of conception. Nothing profits the man who
loses his own world, his only world, since we have
no longer a theological soul to gain or a mythical
heaven to confide in. The happy hunting-grounds are
Here and Now —
" Ahy make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend ;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and— sans end''
The Philosophic Life
Relevancy ? Well, Literature is n*t Life : it is
merely Life*s adjunct. And a well-spent life should
get the fullest value out of every hour, every minute,
every moment. I, for example, do not in the least
desire to be discussing Literature just at present. It
is a beautiful morning, with a zephyr-softened sun, and
I want to Bask out on a Beach. With a Girl. One
of Quinn's beaches and girls, for choice —
" Pink feet and white ankles
On beaches of gold'*
(Omar's bread and wine and verses might be stowed
under a shady rock, each awaitnig its mood.) But
the sun-and-zephyr morning is for me dying, dying —
the unreturning hours hypnotised by Habit, whose
trickling stream of accumulated impressions continu-
ally petrifies more and more brain-cells into reflex life-
in-death; or mortgaged for bread and cheese and
kisses, books and pictures, the hundred cravings that
Thoreau repressed after the method of the savage
who chopped his last toes to get his first boots on.
Yet Thoreau tired of repression. Hermit-life at Wal-
den was heroically beautiful ; — and the hermit-hero
gladly came home again after a couple of years.
Why? "I do not think that I can tell Per-
haps I wanted change. Inhere was a little stagna-
tion, it may be, about two o'clock in the afternoon!'
And, maybe, in spite of the morning and the mood,
8 The Red Pagan
that bask would turn out less pleasant than this task.
Literature is not always as attractive as the ideal
Quinn girl, but it has fewer complications. Even
Goethe found his bask-task rhythm of life falling into
unexpected ruts.
Literature is one road to the Golden Age, one
help to fix the date of the good time traditionally
coming. And the object of existence on this earth
is to have a good time.
The only human way of having a good time is
to get emotions, impressions, sensations — the most
and most varied and most intense sensations that
your brain can give. Every human being tries in-
stinctively to live the most intensely conscious kind
of life that he is capable of living, and to remain
conscious for the longest possible period. If Minerva
sprang full-armed from the cradle, a wise man would
deliberately set himself to improve his brain and its
attached body to the utmost limit of the cosmic and
hereditary tether. He would get his sensations as he
extended his capacity for sensations, but he would
always look forward to the time when his brain would
be as keen and full as he could make it by normal vital
processes.
Then, when his brain was full, he would start to
absorb fully the world of sensations. Joy, grief, plea-
sure, pain, natural beauty, artistic beauty, the satis-
faction of knowledge and the satisfaction of power,
The Philosophic Life
love, fatherhood, peace, war, the light of dawn and
the light of woman's eyes, books and friends, music
and mystery ; — he would welcome them all to the limit
of his power to receive them all, when considered
together with his mortality, his chance of continuing
to receive all in the most intense measure.
Deliberately he would milk the world of
sensations into the bucket of his brain. And delibera-
tely, if he understood that there was an intensity
of sensation that transcended the normal power of his
brain, he would artificially stimulate his brain, count-
ing the cost, and realising that he was giving perhaps
a day of normal life for a moment of life transcendent.
Deliberately, a wise man would know excess and fa-
tigue, intoxication and abstinence — for the pleasure
of knowledge, and for the pleasure of excess and in-
toxication. And his motto would be, not " Never
too much," but " Rarely too much " — " Too much "
accepted with the knowledge of his power to refuse
if he so willed ; " Too much " welcomed because, on
a calculation of chances, " Too much " paid.
Of course many philosophies contradict this phil-
osophy. Yet observe that every philosopher adopts
this philosophy. Disciples may swallow the uni-
verse in a pill of dogma, but the teacher compounds
the pill from tested sensations. Before the sheep
can follow safely, the shepherd must know the path.
Thus we see a long line of prophets, from Buddha to
lo The Red Pagan
Tolstoy, engaged in regenerating the race with the
elderly morals drawn from their unregenerate youth,
and urging the duty of life-renunciation upon men who
have never known the pleasure of life-acceptance.
That is not pretty Nature's way.
" The world was made when a man was born.
He must taste for himself the forbidden springs.
He can never take warning from old-fashioned
things.
He must fight as a boy ; he must drink as a youth.
He wAist kiss, he must love ; he must swear to the
truth
Of the friend of his soul. He must laugh to scorn
The hint of deceit in a woman s eyes
That are clear as the wells of Paradise.
''And so he goes on till the world grows old ;
Till his tongue has grown cautious , his heart has
grown cold ;
Till the smile leaves his mouth and the ring leaves
his laughy
And he shirks the bright headache you ask him to
quaff.
He groivs formal with men, and with women polite,
And distrustful of both when they're out of his
sight.
Then he eats for his palate and drinks for his head,
And loves for his pleasure — and it's time he were
dead,,,:'
The Case of Annie Besant ii
But, instead of dying, he lies down under a bo-
tree or dons a peasant's smock, and distils delusive
wisdom from the dregs of pomps and gaieties that
he can no longer enjoy.
EXPERIENCE teaches ; but only one's own
experience. To gain your gospel you must
earn your gospel. When Mrs. Besant visited
our land Australia, I remember asking her if
she could have accepted Theosophy at the outset of
her public career. She reflected, and doubted, and
opined No ; she had needed struggle : her life had
fed a lamp to light her path.
Ponder the exemplary case of Annie Besant.
To many people she is a puzzle, a paradox. They
contrast the creed she forsook with the creed
she embraced, neo-Materialism with neo-Theo-
sophy ; and they see that the two are absolutely an-
tagonistic, mutually exclusive. Yet here is a woman
who passes from one to the other " somewhat sud-
denly," in Bradlaugh's weighed and guarded phrase ;
almost without a struggle, as it appears to others.
In a moment she turns her mind upside-down,
astounding friends by the ease with which she quits
long-cherished convictions, and becoming immediately
no less ardent and obstinate a champion of her new
12 The Red Pagan
faith than of her old. The fruit of twenty years of
strenuous thought tumbles at a single glance from the
" brilliant eyes " of Madame Blavatsky. Admitting
her honesty, her sanity, how possibly account for a
revolution so radical? But consider. The very vio-
lence of the contradiction between Annie Besant the
Materialist and Annie Besant the Theosophist implies
a close bond of unity. For it is of the essence of
things that likeness breeds opposition, unlikeness ap-
position. Extremes meet ; complexity is nearest sim-
plicity; and the universe rings with the chime of
contraries. Perchance our paradox may sit on the in-
most verge of harmony.
This much is always certain : the factors of such
a problem are simply the every-day factors of action
and re-action between organism and environment. In
the mental world, as in the physical, there is no escape
from the scientific law of necessity. Effect every-
where follows cause ; and with a sufficient knowledge
of principles and conditions we can trace effect or
cause for the finite distance corresponding with finite
capacity. Mrs. Besant a^cted as she did act simply
because, being what she was, subject to the parti-
cular set of influences to which she was subject, she
could not possibly act otherwise. The reasons for her
conduct lie firstly in herself, secondly in her circum-
stances ; and there is no room for any other reasons
whatever. Study of her life should furnish the key
The Case of Annie Besant 13
to her character. Now, her mental Hfe experienced
two great crises : her conversion from Materialism to
Theosophy, and her previous conversion from Chris-
tianity to Materialism. Mrs. Besant's autobiography
and other sources of information yield a wide induc-
tion of facts ; and, applying deductively conclusions
gained in other fields of enquiry, a theory leaps at
once to light. The argument naturally takes syllo-
gistic form.
Here is the major. The bent of man is intellec-
tual; the bent of woman is emotional. This is a
familiar philosophic statement justified by a large
number of special sex-observations, and supported by
common experience. Exceptions are sufficiently ex-
plained on the ground of hermaphroditic race-ances-
try; and Weismann, one of the German naturalists
whose thought and experiments are doing so much to
mould current science, believes that the elements
of both sexes are in every individual, the one class
active, the other passive. Occasionally the predomi-
nance is not marked, and primary characters of one
sex accompany secondary characters of the other in
the same individual. Naturally, sex-generalisations
apply particularly to those individuals in whom sex
is most prominent, and in a lesser degree to those
gathered closer to the median line of difference. But,
generally speaking, though in savagery the sexes seem
almost equally superstitious, as civilisation advances
14 The Red Pagan
the domain of faith becomes more and more clearly
that of woman, and the domain of reason that of man.
Women are everywhere the willing supporters of cleri-
calism, long after men have emancipated themselves
from its sway. They judge intuitively rather than
rationally, arguing to what they wish to be rather
than from what is. In popular language, they are
ruled, not by their brains, but by their hearts.
Annie Besant is essentially a womanly woman. She
would not wear men's clothes, like George Sand ; or
in her own person defy conventional morality, like
George Eliot with Lewes. (The defence of the
Knowlton pamphlet was a matter of principle that her
feminine conscience justified.) Mrs. Besant's mulie-
brity is shown in a hundred things which we are used
to consider manifestations of sex. She has been wife
and mother; she is constitutionally anabolic, with
rounded contours and small bones, needing slight
nourishment ; she is not above little coquetries of dress
or little vanities of nature — as, for instance, her cus-
tom of being photographed in full face because her
face in profile is not remarkable ; '' her voice was ever
soft, gentle, and low — an excellent thing in woman " ;
she is tenacious of life — she suffered more and longer
than Bradlaugh, yet Bradlaugh is dead and she is
alive and well, probably partly because he was man
and she woman ; she is an interpreter, not a creator ;
she has the feminine quality of receptivity in a very
The Case of Annie Besant 15
high degree, and the mascuhne quahty of originahty
in a very low degree — Constance Naden, who had
both, died young, and Mrs. Besant should Hve to be
ninety, though nothing she has written will remain,
and some things that Miss Naden wrote may be im-
perishable, for of such is the law of compensations.
Add to this that, throughout her life — as a school-
girl, praying to a sensuous Christ ; as a mother, fight-
ing with Death for her child ; as a friend, faithful to
the end to Charles Bradlaugh ; as a thinker, yearning
for some fixed basis of faith, some definite hope of
immortality — Mrs. Besant has exemplified always the
altruistic woman, a vessel of love and devotion, never
the egoistic man ; and our minor premiss may fairly
stand as established.
The conclusion comes of itself. Mrs. Besant is
ruled by her emotions, not by her intellect, keen
though it be. Her sixteen years of Materialism were
sixteen years of error, sixteen years of wandering from
her proper path, sixteen years in which her real nature
lay fettered and dormant. Only now is she on her
true line, is she herself. The mystic promises of Theo-
sophy satisfy her latent longings as the hard facts of
Materialism never could satisfy them. Her intellect
protests feebly, but is over-ruled. She has admitted
that her belief in Theosophy is only partly a matter
of intellectual conviction. Nevertheless, she believes
wholly, because belief is a necessity of her nature. All
1 6 The Red Pagan
similar emotional characters make a similar choice.
No half-measures are possible to them. Cardinal
Newman, confronted with the dilemma, " Absolute
Rome or absolute reason," after an agonising struggle
chose Rome, because his emotions dominated his in-
tellect. His brother chose reason, because his in-
tellect dominated his emotions. Once made, the
characteristic choice is final ; and, as in both Cardinal^
Newman and Annie Besant, the intellect is set to
work to justify the dogmas against which it fought.
The process is curious, but perfectly intelligible ; since
it is essential to the peace of the mental force-majority
that the demon doubt be excluded from the citadel of
the Ego.
In Mrs. Besant's case, the years which the material-
istic locust has eaten are easily accounted for. On the
threshold of womanhood she made a most unhappy
marriage with a clergyman who treated her cruelly.
The consequences in mental distress and physical ill-
ness that all but killed her, accentuated her previous
sense of the weakness of the Christian religion, and
for a time completely subverted her nature. Had she
married a man whom she could have loved and esteem-
ed, she would have merged her views in his, sacrificed
her individuality to his welfare, and lost her cavils in
the glow of a deeper, but still orthodox faith. It is
directly to her misery that we owe Mrs. Besant's mag-
nificent Hfe-work. The tortured heart re-acted
The Case of Annie Besant 17
through the burning brain. Yet the edipse of her
inner self would have been but temporary had she
not met Charles Bradlaugh. His influence confirmed
the new bias so decisively that long years passed be-
fore it was gradually lost. Only when Mrs. Besant
had passed middle age did she begin to feel lonely
in her cold, unconsolatory atheism. The longing for
human sympathy, besetting almost all men and women
after youth has vanished, became in her an irresis-
tible craving that philanthropic labour was unable to
satisfy. Her heart regained its supremacy, and cried
loudly for a warmer faith. Comte's " religion of hu-
manity " could not suffice a character abhorrent of
compromise. From unbelief she passed at a bound to
belief. Yet her conversion to Theosophy, though
it appeared sudden, was not the expression of a sud-
den change. It was preceded by a growing conviction
that tlie materialistic philosophy was insufficient ; it
was preceded by the significant espousal of Socialism
— as compared with Individualism, a more altruistic,
more feminine, more emotional creed. And at last
Annie Besant's life-stream, long diverted, took its na-
tural course.
Mrs. Besant has written that she wishes to deserve
this epitaph : She tried to follow Truth. She has de-
^ served it. That the element of truth in Theosophy is
^ overlaid with much fantastic error matters little. It
is all truth to her, and the grandeur of her nature
1 8 The Red Pagan
glorifies her trivial creed. In effect, the intellectual
belief of a good woman is comparatively of slight im-
portance. We do not seek to know the botanical
classification of a flower before enjoying its fragrance.
Heroic spirits like Annie Besant, with all their frail-
ties, are the salt of humanity. They are linked indis-
solubly with every generous deed, with every noble
aspiration. They give courage in the present, and
hope for the future. And here, on this bank and shoal
of time of which alone there is any certitude, we are
proud to yield them honour, whether our destiny be
divinity or dust.
OF course there is no evidence that our destiny
is divine, and little doubt that it is dusty;
but that sentence finished itself with malice
aforethought of Ruskin ; and though I dis-
like it, I like it too well to alter. " Aforethought '' —
or felt rather, as a practised poetaster feels the shadow
of a coming rhyme cast athwart the line he is pen-
ning. Ruskin preferred more artful assonances, in- ,
vented harmonies that purr through his prose like a
bride's snore through a honeymoon ; and when he is '
good, he is very good indeed. But when he is bad
he is horrid. * •
Rhetorical Ruskin 19
By a common fallacy, the obituary notices referred
to Ruskin's death in his eighty-first year as causing
a loss to EngUsh letters — which it plainly did not. It
is Ruskin's works that estabhsh his literary claim;
and these remain uninfluenced by his death, as they
would have been uninfluenced had he lagged another
score of senile years — a superfluous veteran.
Ruskin the man was born rich, and he made a
good and unselfish use of his riches. He was a liberal
patron of art, spent much in hopeless attempts to
create a social Eutopia, and gave, gave, gave to hun-
dreds of men and public institutions that seemed to
him deserving. His head was ajways in the clouds,
like his writings. The best excuse for his dithyrambs
is that he lived them. He was a literary Gladstone,
an aesthetic Whitefield — a vast wave of emotion that
dashed suddenly upon you from a vague expanse, re-
treated, and lost itself in the expanse again. The
wave had no particular intellectual reason or justifi-
cation ; its cause was as obscure as its consequences ;
but it made a furious noise, shone with prismatic
colours in the sunshine, and, in a general way of
speaking, was an impressive natural object. When
the wave fell back, you noticed the ground was a
^little wet.
The patch of moisture left by the Ruskin wave
rapidly drying. Few people nowadays pay intel-
lectual attention to Ruskin. He was a fine emotional
*2o The Red Pagan
force in his day and generation : for emotional people
he is still an emotional force. But intellectually he
does not count : he rarely did count.
How was it possible that Ruskin should count?
He referred everything to the Glory of God. That
was the end of all art, the aim of all human effort.
Ruskin did not know what God is, or the Glory of
God. All that he could do was to marry the Hebrew
Scriptures with a Turner sunset, and decide that the
Glory of God was the offspring. Then he described
the offspring in an ecstasy of sonorous alliterations,
and invited you to worship. You might worship ; but
you were doubtfully convinced Was that the Glory
of God? . . .
The Glory of God was the end, and the Glorifi-
cation of Beauty was a means ; but the Ruskin idea
of Beauty was intellectually as incomprehensible as the
Ruskin idea of God For consider: Ruskin Beauty
is divided into typical beauty and vital beauty. Typi-
cal beauty is that external quality of bodies which
typifies 5ome divine attribute. Vital beauty is the
appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function in living
things. The forms of typical beauty are — (i) In-
finity, the type of divine incomprehensibility. (2)
Unity, the type of divine comprehensiveness. (3)
Repose, the type of divine permanence. (4) Symme-
try, the type of divine justice. (5) Purity, the
type of divine energy. (6) Moderation, the type
Rhetorical Ruskin
of government by law. The forms of vital beauty
are
But that will do. Imaginative gibberish, it
seems? Imaginative gibberish it is. As far as
theories of art were concerned, Ruskin wrote
little but imaginative gibberish. When his
theories did not come in the way he was a
shrewd critic of art, and he was for long
the chief appreciator of art in England The emo-
tion that he felt he could often give. His vision
seems sometimes the inspired vision of a prophet : the
eyes in that head-in-the-clouds saw things that or-
dinary men groped all their lives without perceiving ;
sometimes the angel- wing of Beauty did flash before
Ruskin's eyes, and sometimes he could brilliantly
describe a prismatic feather. But his mind moved in
such a welter of words and images that he is always
best when simplest. Ruskin's simpHcity is the high-
est colour that style can take without degenerating
into a rainbow poster. You must browse over his
books as a horse browses over a meadow, welcoming
what is succulent, and passing many an arid patch and
many a patch too dangerously green and shining.
y Ruskin wrote rhetorically, oratorically : his prose
style is too often in the clouds where his head was.
The energy of it is remarkable ; the beauty of it is
sometimes remarkable ; it is frequently turgid, and its
artifices are monotonous. When a thought can be ex-
The Red Pagan
pressed in two plain words you do not continually
desiderate a glittering fifty. Every intelligent reader
of Ruskin must pine for a diminished torrent and a
greatly-diminished spout.
When Whistler commented in 1878 on the famous
lawsuit Whistler versus Ruskin, he wrote that Ruskin's
writing was art, and his art was unworthy his writ-
ing. Only the latter statement seemed debatable in
1878 : nowadays we should debate both. The Ruskin
wave has spent itself. And if you look closely, you
may perceive that the ground is a little wet.
^r
RUSKIN is an example of extense genius — the
mind's sheet-lightning. For an example of in-
tense genius, take the forked-lightning visions
of Blake, blazing into the darkness of Tom o'
Bedlam.
Genius, in the special sense, is not the spirit that
watched over one's shoulder in ancient days. Not
the individual's inborn faculty. But a type of
mind associated with nervous instability, char-
acterised by exceptional exaltation, capable of intellec-
tual or emotional creation peculiarly high-pitched and
(compared with talent's creation) dazzling. Moreau^s
" neurosis " (quoted by Havelock Ellis) meets the idea.
Moreau regards the genius-neurosis as the synonym of
The Genealogy of Genius 23
exaltation (not trouble or perturbation) of the intellec-
tual faculties. " The word ' neurosis ' would indicate a
particular disposition of the faculties, a disposition still
in part physiological, but overflowing those physiologi-
cal limits." And Moreau presents a genealogical-tree
with genius, insanity, and crime, among its branches ;
the common root being " the hereditary idiosyncratic
nervous state."
Genius represents a fever of the brain — the brain
itself being due to a localised fever or ferment of the
ancestral organism. Every specialisation of function
is accompanied by increased energy in the part special-
ised ; and probably every physiological gain has had a
pathological beginning — since a ferment in one part of
the organism robs the common store of energy. Fan-
cifully, therefore, life is a disease of the universe and
man an evanescent pustule.
Genius is a disease of the pustule. Setting aside
structural and chemical causes, we can consider it in
effect as resulting from an abnormal series of cerebral
vibrations. The abnormality is pathological, because
it is gained at the expense of the life-sustaining forces
of the organism.
You may construe genius-thought in terms of
sound. It is known that the imperfect human ear
hears only a limited class of the universe's sound-
vibrations. When the sound travels too fast, or too
slowly, the ear-drum will not respond to it — or will not
24 The Red Pagan
respond so as to influence the brain. And it is
generally known that there is a difference in the
response of human ears. Some people hear low notes,
and not high ; some hear high and not low. Some
have an aural range in the centre of the ordinary scale,
and hear neither low nor high. Anything less than
about 1 6 vibrations per second, or more than about
38,000, the best of ears misses altogether.
So with minds. It is common to speak of slow
wits, or quick. (xA^stonishing how many deep scientific
truths lie hid in common talk, familiar expressions — the
condensation of humanity's 200,000-year experience.)
And the slowness, or quickness, refers to nothing but
the vibration of disintegrating cerebral atoms. Doubt-
less an idiot's brain vibrates ; but it is slower
than the normal speed — the normal mind Ccinnot hear
it. Doubtless a maniac's vibrates ; but it is faster than
the normal speed — the normal mind cannot hear it.
From this construct your mind-measure or nouso-
meter, as figured. Observe that the notation is arbi-
trary — comparative, not positive ; since we cannot yet
measure the speed of cerebral vibrations. Probably
an exact observation of the phenomena of thought-
transference will supply data.
Observe that the nousometer measures only speed
of cerebral vibrations. So it measures intellectual
rank in relation to genius, but it does not measure
intellectual achievement. A high mind may be joined
The Genealogy of Genius
25
NOUSOMETEfl
RABELAIS
By ft- OA/
wACrJ e 15
HCC?0
A/\|l-l-(MS
MAC AUL/\y
Tot. ST o V
W M I T<s/V A/V
G t s e»c(N/
y^. L. GO« OOtJ
Av^. J-O K A I
HAUL. CA/nC
YAW* !«*•«)
/\CTORS
LCVs/
TA LE MT
COMMON
I NTELLI-
GENCE
I o I cc y
C . » iTofvre
SHAK£S PEAt<
H • «=■. W««.i-S
COETHE ^
BUCK L e
i»A»y bCi-Ai^C-
M t- A w so^/
2 C M / L. U6 ^
Tu<?C F/VC V
c Rossrrri
H P-A RKes
Q fCOW N IN C-
EB S/«0 VN//V /Arf©
M AX U. I TT
H. KCN D At_u
r-^ Ai-L AR^Ae
FOLmOKHS
(^^em/K<i-g\
or CEKE6RAL VIBRATIONS.
26 The Red Pagan
easily with a low performance ; since many thmgs
beside genius influence performance: for example —
sex, age, circumstance, bodily constitution and health,
brain convolution, number and kind of memories
available for association of ideas, and so on. The
intellectual achievement of H. G. Wells, for instance,
must be classed far below the intellectual achievement
of Shakespear ; but it is possible to argue that H. G.
Wells exhibits intrinsically the greater genius in the
special sense — that his brain is hotter, that it vibrates
faster, that it emits by flashes intenser light than
Shakespear's brain. Read this paragraph over
again before you criticise the haphazard illustrations
of the nousometer. I will put it another way :
Classification depends on quality, not on quan-
tity of work. A 48,000-mind like Southey's or Trol-
lope's may produce far more than a 68,000-mind like
Chatterton's ; and, by accumulation, Trollope's or
Southey's work may have greater value, as a
hundred shillings are worth more than one sovereign.
But a sovereign is gold, and weight for weight worth
much more than shillings.
Generally speaking, a mind's class is fixed by
heredity, its place in the class by environment
Classification must be based on individual
estimate of results, until we find a means of measuring
creation's reaction-time from stimulus. But it is likely
that most men, at some times, have risen or fallen
The Genealogy of Genius 27
from their ordinary class. (Great wits are sure to
madness near allied, and no partitions do their minds
divide. — Dryden, amended)
A nousometer is in effect a brain-thermometer,
since quicker vibrations mean more heat, and con-
versely. Hence the virtue of Stockton^s pretty tale of
the man who wrote well twice in his life — once in the
dehrium of first love, once in the ecstasy of father-
hood ; for " love is a fever/' Hence, too, the bril-
liant things written by alcohol, opium, and cocaine
— even by tea and coffee : all " stimulants " — i.e.,
things which make heat and hasten vibration or re-
move physical barriers to vibration. Hence the familial
relation of genius with the gout-fever, the phthisis-
fever, and the rest.
Large heads tend to extension, small heads to
intension of genius. But there is no relation between
genius and head-size, since genius results from the
rapid vibration of a particular set, by no means all, of
the brain-atoms. Thus we find genius in music (e.g.,
Paganini, Rubinstein), in sculpture and painting (e.g.,
Michael Angelo), and in all the forms of human
achievement — coincidently, so far as the individual
is concerned, with absolute idiocy in other forms.
Genius implies the abnormal development of one
or more sets of Taculties, the abnormally fast vibra-
tion of one or more series of brain-atoms, at the ex-
2S The Red Pagan
pense of the development and vibration-rate of other
sets.
The mind, Hke the moon, has an unseen side —
the side of the minus vibrations. If we only knew
the poetry and nobility of Bedlam !
Thus genius is disease : its hypertrophy involves
a corresponding atrophy. It is in the van of the
curious evolutionary struggle-up. Death is no-vibra-
tion ; the more conscious-vibrations the more Life ;
everything Hving pants for more Life ; hence the
continual effort for a faster vibration in the brain, the
seat of consciousness. The continual hurling of some
primeval 10,000-vibration ape's brain against its bars,
the effort to think and know, produced a brain with
a capacity in parts for 1 1,000 vibrations — the genius of
his age. He taught others to think and know a little
more and hurl a little harder, and presently 11,000-
vibration brains — first in parts, then in the whole —
became common. By this time the contemporary
ape-genius was trying to get 13,000 vibrations out of
a 12,000-vibration brain, and killing himself in the
effort. But he showed the way up.
Genius is disease because its brain, or part of it,
is worked continually beyond the normal margin of
safety. If it could keep its head cool and its feet
warm and work up to (say) 50,000 vibrations, it might
live in health till ninety — but it would not be genius.
The Genealogy of Genius 29
So when a noble notion comes along, genius straight-
way pumps all the available blood of its body into
a corner of its brain, and takes that noble notion and
moulds it into something nobler still — and its head
is fire, and its feet are ice, and maybe it has cut five
years off its life. This applies not alone to genius.
If any man is content to stay on the vegetable level,
and avoid emotional expenditure, he will probably
live long and die " happy "—and for the sake of life
lose all that makes life worth living. If he does
anything — anything that costs — he shortens his life
by so much. Say you start with 50 units of vitality
transmutable into brain-vibrations. You may spend
25 units every day (regaining them in food and sleep),
keep 25 in reserve, make " a fine old man " of your-
self, and be " nobody " all the time. But if you
want to be " somebody," to create something in any
field of labour, or even to try to create something,
you must spent 35 units in an hour and risk death
or paralysis at age thirty or less. That is the condi-
tion which genius welcomes — because it must: it is
built that way.
To make a genius is as easy — or as difficult —
as making a cheese. You want from one parent a
good-quality blood with plenty of red corpuscles:
from the other a good-quality brain and a touch of
nervous disease. If you desire much and consistent
work you will need a good heart as well, to pump the
30 The Red Pagan
blood continuously to the head ; but for a few flashes
a weak heart and stimulants suffice. The brain need
not be what is called a good all-round brain — one or
two extremely well-marked convolutions are all it
needs. The more good convolutions you have, of
course, the greater your genius (in extension, not ne-
cessarily in intension), but the supply of rich blood
must be assured. The brain-quality is needed for the
storage and reconstruction of impressions ; the blood
is to enrich the atoms, which have to vibrate hard,
and must live well. The effect of the nerve-disease
is to increase the heat that is the vibratory force, or
possibly to refine and attenuate the nervous mole-
cules, so that motion can be more readily communi-
cated. Doubtless, if the universe gives it time,
humanity will go on quickening its normal rate of
brain-vibration till the idiot of A.H. 250,000 (say) is
intellectually level with the genius of to-day. By that
time, geniuses will be propagated by Government in
batches as required to suit the demands of the com-
munity. Genius will never propagate itself.
The Bronte Family 31
FOR illustration of intense genius, take the
Bronte family. The son, Patrick, fell victim to
alcohol ; the surviving daughters were restrain-
ed by their sex from the highest accomplish-
ment — since male stands for individual intensity,
female for racial extension. But the genius-tempera-
ment was characteristically theirs : had they been boys,
with lives not diverted to drink, or crime, or insanity,
their artistic performance would have been imperish-
able.
Balzac^s remarkable story of the Succubus may
display one type of sex-sacrifice. Reverse the pose :
and the story of the Cretan Minotaur and the maidens
will display the other.
Most people know that sex has no place in the
lowest organisms through which, in their own or kin-
dred forms, we trace humanity's ancestry. Sex was
life's happy later-thought ; born, as we imagine, of the
vital principle's constant struggle for intensity. Hence
division in order to increase the shock of union, on the
principle that atoms repelled to an intolerable point
attract. The greater the polarity the stronger the
magnet.
Doubtless sex has advantaged life on its way to
the climax of intensity. Judged by any abstract stan-
dard, it has doubtfully advantaged the average indi-
vidual form of life. So many pleasures: so many
32 The Red Pagan
pangs: and numerator cancels denominator into the
sum as before. The life-result is intrinsically the
same — x always — only it is x raised to humanity's
power.
But whether sex be ill or good for the average
human individual, for the exceptional individual it is
almost always ill. He is pitilessly sacrificed to the
race, her hopes of individual perpetuity to the per-
petuation of the common life. Marriage is literally
and physiologically a prior death — the individual's Cal-
vary for the community's, the race's salvation. The
Succubus still destroys the most brilliant of our youths :
to the Minotaur is still delivered every year a tribute
of the choicest of our maidens. Natural ; and there-
fore well and right from the race's point of view : to
mend, as men have tried, is generally to mar : yet how
many bright aspirations, hopes of progress, mental
triumphs, glorious poems, are trampled under the little
pink feet of the army of babies.
The father of the Bronte family was a lusty Irish-
man, who wrote verses himself. The taint of degene-
racy was in his blood: he showed insane tendencies,
drank, was morbidly cruel to his wife. The story of
the sufferings of that poor creature is one of the
most affecting in literature. She was not strong, yet
she seems to have been normally healthy, and in the
pleasant Cornish sunshine of her birthplace might have
The Bronte Family
33
led a long and happy life. The Rev. Patrick Bronte,
as curate-in-charge of Haworth, took her to a cheer-
less home on the border of a bleak Yorkshire moor,
with a graveyard on two sides of the house, and not
a soul near with whom she could have friendly inter-
course. There he killed her by abuse ; and, after
producing six children in seven years, the tortured
creature died of cancer supervening on physical ex-
haustion. The family were all weak and unhealthy,
and the son was vicious. All were brilliantly clever.
None lived to pass middle-age.
In the intervals of the mother's child-bearing the
Rev. Patrick Bronte threw the babies' coloured shoes
on the fire in a fit of temper, or cut her silk dress into
shreds, or, when he was in a worse rage than usual,
terrified her by firing off the pistol that night and
day he kept constantly by him. " Coldness, neglect,
tyranny, cruelty'* are Wemyss Reid's words for the
conduct of the master ; " habitual dread '' his phrase
for the attitude of the slave. And the clerical brute
actually upbraided her for having so many children !
If the poor creature had turned and shot the Rev.
Patrick Bronte with his own pistol, she would have
done rather less than her duty to herself and her child-
ren and humanity. But she was only a woman, patient
and uncomplaining ; and, as she fades lingeringly out
of existence in the agony of her cancer, we hear her
asking gently now and again to be lifted up in bed that
34 The Red Pagan
she may watch the nurse cleaning the grate — "be-
cause you clean it as we used to clean it in my old home
in Cornwall.'* One feels keenly the want of religious
faith in circumstances like these. It would be such an
irrational consolation to believe in a Deity who would
toast the Rev. Patrick Bronte.
The brutal moral is obvious. To get a genius,
mate a vigorous man, with tainted blood, to a highly-
strung woman — or vice versd — and produce a dozen
children in a dozen years. If half of them live over
puberty, you will certainly have a genius — perhaps
two or three. The more closely you can tauten these
conditions to breaking strain — the more nerve-disease
you can get into your subjects without killing them
too soon — the greater your genius is likely to be.
Maria Branwell (Mrs. Bronte) was married in
1812. She died in 1 821, in her 39th year. The child-
ren were :
Maria, died
1825,
aged II.
Elizabeth ,,
1825
,, 10.
Patrick ,,
1848
M 31-
Emily ,,
1848
„ 30-
Anne ,,
1849
,, 29.
Charlotte ,,
1855
M 39-
What a sacrifice! And the old father, born in 1777,
outlived them all. Truly, his life was nourished on
their blood.
The Bronte Family 35
Clement Shorter's book of Charlotte Bronte and
her Circle, which appears to have been undertaken
partly with the object of whitewashing Charlotte's
father and husband, succeeds in leaving them much
as before. Another object was seemingly to decry
the belief that Charlotte was a woman like the rest —
as in the matter of M. Heger — and to give her the
decent, respectable character suited to the daughter
of one clergyman and the wife of another. The gist
is a numerous collection of unpublished letters, of
which Mrs. Gaskell skimmed the cream.
Shorter's whitewash does not even begin to make
a white mark on Charlotte Bronte's father. It
amounts to an assertion that Mrs. Gaskell took an un-
trustworthy servant's gossip ; that another servant
loved the Rev. Patrick ; and that Charlotte's husband,
the Rev. Arthur Nicholls, speaks highly of him. In a
word. Shorter answers precise, detailed charges with
side-issue generalities — and the charges remain. The
Rev. Arthur also, Shorter says, has been much ma-
ligned. He has been called cold and unsympathetic,
whereas Charlotte herself is in superlatives about his
love and kindness. Here again the answer is incon-
clusive, for feminine self-deception is so common that
we see daily any wife of any husband blind to quali-
ties the very reverse of loveable.
There is no doubt that Charlotte, like her mother,
was a martyr to her sex. But her marriage was more
36 The Red Pagan
merciful: it did not torture her — it killed her plump.
She died nine months afterwards, of an illness connect-
ed with childbirth. Weak by constitution, in fact,
and with such a history of headwork, she was unable
to bear the strain of maternity. This is the penalty
that women pay for extraordinary intellectual power.
In proportion as is diverted to nourish the brain the
blood that maternity demands elsewhere, the result
is sterility, as in the case of George Eliot, or death, as
in the case of Charlotte Bronte. When Charlotte mar-
ried at age thirty-eight she was in fair health, and had
before her perhaps half her career in literature. She
threw away life and fame because she could not re-
sist the importunities of a man whom she states ex-
pressly that she did not love ; and so one of the most
gifted geniuses of her century was sacrificed in en-
deavouring to perform an act of reproduction achieved
a dozen times over by the commonest female clod
among her husband's parishioners.
The Rev. Arthur Nicholls was a substantial
Scotchman — selfish, of cold manners, rather stubborn.
His character commanded respect, but his disposition
did not invite affection. He was not at all the man
of Charlotte's dreams, as she candidly avows. Why,
then, did she marry him? For a complexity of
reasons. In the first place, she was thirty-eight, and
lonely, and heartsick, and tired of the sombre, drink-
ing, pistol-shooting father. In the second place, the
The BroxNte Family 37
Rev. Arthur looked like a sincere lover : he wept, grew
visibly thinner, and would take no refusal. Charlotte
could not help being impressed: surely with such a
man, she thought, if with any, she would find happi-
ness. Perhaps the father^s bitter opposition to the
match helped to bias Charlotte in favour of it. And
finally, she looked forward into the loveless, lonely
future, and — in great ignorance of what marriage
meant, yet with many intellectual misgivings — decided
to take the leap.
There is no reason to think that the Rev. Arthur
treated his wife otherwise than kindly. Like many
others of his type, he was a very decent fellow as long
as he got his own way, and Charlotte gave him his own
way Her head could never have approved of him ;
but her heart began to regard him with affection that
deepened into something like love. The sex-awaken-
ing of a woman of thirty-eight is apt to produce a
passion which, if it be fairly treated, gilds the marital
horizon for some time. As the years pass, the Sleep-
ing Beauties grow more and more inclined to overlook
small personal objections to the Princes who burst
through the hedge of briars. Charlotte's married life
had not time to become unhappy. When illness took
her, her husband made a kind and devoted nurse —
which was quite in character ; and when she died
he returned to keep company with her old father until
the old father died in his turn. Those six years of
38 The Red Pagan
voluntary martyrdom ought to wipe out the memory
of the deficiencies of the Rev. Arthur Nicholls — for
which, in any case, he cannot positively be blamed.
Compare the Bronte novels with Lytton's,
for example, and you get at its keenest the
striking contrast between genius and talent.
Lytton's works are constructed by rule and
measure according to the best principles of
art. They charm and attract, but rarely in-
fluence or stimulate. Charlotte Bronte, the chief of
the three sisters who lived to write, has a much more
limited scope, much less learning and skill ; but her
passionate force is irresistible. Lytton's characters
are merely figures in a picture — correctly drawn, ad-
mirably coloured, and arranged according to the best
theories of proportion and perspective. Charlotte
Bronte's live. They are real personages — we are con-
vinced of it — painted with the writer's life-blood, utter-
ing with stress and pang the thoughts that agitate and
overwhelm her.
These things, among others, are proofs that litera-
ture is made on physiological principles ; and that a
family doctor — who can point to one page, and say,
*' Scrofula!" to another, "Eupepsia!" and to a third,
^* Phthisis !" — should be easily best of literary critics.
Jean Ingelow 39
BUT always, when he deals with women, he will
find his critical basis in their history of satis-
faction or mortification of sex-instincts. Char-
lotte Bronte, Jean Ingelow, George Eliot,
Elizabeth Browning, Christina Rossetti, and the
others: before one considers them as writers
one must consider them as women. You can-
not dissociate their books from their lives. Their
words cannot give the reader half the mean-
ing and emotion that the writers wished to ex-
press : words are poor symbols of breathing humanity.
Literature is a stream from Life's source, a porch of
Life's temple : and fully to appreciate it we must reach
the source and stand within the shrine.
Ob. Jean Ingelow, Poet and Author, aged 77.
It is likely that this other-day's announcement
drew from many readers a mere mild '* Who was
she?" — the utterance of incurious wonder at a name
now little more than a literary memory. When Lau-
reate Tennyson died, indeed, there was found one
lauder of past time who exhorted Lord Salisbury to
remember merit proved and " give the wreath to Inge-
low.'* But the call went echoless. Even in England,
her home, Jean Ingelow has been all but forgotten in
the notoriety of new reputations. Yet the first vo-
lume of the '88 edition of her verses was reprinted
from the twenty-third edition and how many
4P The Red Pagan
of the names so glib upon our lips will be printed in
a third?
Jean Ingelow never married ; and her poems are
her children. She wrote prose also, but her stories are
undistinguished. For good prose — strong, fibrous,
pregnant prose — intellect and knowledge are neces-
sary ; and Jean Ingelow had neither. She was essen-
tially feminine, emotional — a lute with a single string.
" All the secret that many, nay, most women have to
tell, is — / /ove you!' The phrase is Dr. Holmes's ; and
throughout his work the idea recurs continually. He
never ceased grieving at the tragedy of " our dear
sisters, the unloved" — surely the saddest, the most
pitiful of all civilisation's tragedies. And yet, and
yet. . . .
Here are Jean Ingelow's poems — her maiden long-
ings, her mother yearnings, her romance, passion, de-
votion, her very life. " Earthlier happy is the rose dis-
tilled " ; but in distillation is lost how much of the
fragrance that the rose withering on the virgin thorn
may shed to the blessing of humanity ! *' These wo-
men," says Bartle Massey, "they've got no headpieces
to nourish, and so their food runs either to fat or to
brats." Surely George Eliot, of all women, knew bet-
ter than her creature the high-strung woman's alter-
native — she who upon celibacy and sterility built a
pyramid of literary work rarely matched by her sex.
Solid old Bacon certainly knew better. . . " the best
Jean Ingelow 41
works, and of greatest merit for the public, have pro-
ceeded from the unmarried and childless men, which,
both in affection and means, have married and endow-
ed the public. . . . A single life doth well with church-
men, for charity will hardly water the ground where
it must first fill a pool." " Men " — and women.
" Charity " — and virility, muliebrity, vitality — the life-
energy that is talent's staple, genius's sustainer. " A
virtuous woman is a crown to her husband " ; and but
for her husband she might have been a crown to her
generation, country, race. So Jean Ingelow, the po-
tential imbecile-propagator of a dozen sturdy English
pumpkinheads, pressed her lonely breast against the
thorn, and sang thrillingly, and sadly, and very ten-
derly. And it is quite beyond question that she would
have given all her twenty-four editions for one red,
curly, commonplace baby.
Tenderness is the chief characteristic of Jean In-
gelow's matter ; melody, of her style. She is as com-
forting to a woman as Matthew Arnold to a man.
Matthew titillates the intellect and the ear ; Jean, the
ear and the emotions. Positively and absolutely, Mat-
thew Arnold is not a poet of the highest rank ; though
one may read him with more pleasure than one reads
poets of the highest rank. Positively and absolutely,
Jean Ingelow's poems are of second-rate merit, with
lapses to third-rate and beyond. She has consider-
able power over rhyme and rhythm, and occasional
42 The Red Pagan
touches of fine verbal felicity ; but her thought is
generally shallow or weak, and sense is often sacrificed
to sound. Her temptations to a parodist like Calver-
ley were irresistible. Yet even in the youthful and
semi-hysterical " Divided " there were touches of poe-
tic phrase and sentiment that brilliant Calverley
could never compass, Touches like
A little fifing of leaf -hid birds, . . .
Or
He fraySy " Come over I' — / may not follow ;
I cry, " Return " — but he cannot come :
We sfeak, we laugh, but with voices hollow ;
Our hands are hanging, our hearts are numb.
Do those lines concentrate Jean Ingelow^s own life-
tragedy ?
The truth is that minds like Calverley's and Jean
Ingelow's move on different planes, and a dweller on
each seems often unintelligible and absurd from the
other. Calverley glowed with cold intellect — one of
his friends says " he seemed hterally to lighten on a
subject." The expression is crucial ; for Calverley
is to Jean Ingelow as an electric-light to a fire, illumi-
nating where she warms. And, if you choose, you can
talk of " mere illumination " or '* mere warmth," just
as a biased painter speaks of " mere form " or " mere
colour." But it is better to recognise that colour is
good and form is good, that warmth is good and Hght
Jean Ingelow 43
is good, that female is good and male is good — each
in its special way and degree.
Calverley saw things so clearly that he always
found the just word, and expressed precisely what he
felt. Jean Ingelow felt things so strongly that her
sense of words was obscured, and often she suggests
more than she can express. Yet Jean Ingelow was a
poet, and Calverley a very clever writer of verses. He
had the better vision ; but her vision is instinct, and
by dint of feeling keenly she occasionally saw far
more clearly even than he did. The ;i:-rays are invi-
sible, but they penetrate where light-rays cannot.
And,' despite science, when a gouty toe is in the purple
of condition there is no barometer like a gouty toe.
Woman is the fragrant sex ; but she loses her '
fragrance in literature. Anthony Trollope used to
say that even when he was grey and sixty his heart
leapt to the music of a petticoat. It is rare, in turn-
ing over a woman's book, to hear more than the rustle
of the leaves. " Abandon sex !" is the legend over
the gates of the literary Inferno. In life, when Blue-
Stockings competes for male applause with Bright-
Eyes, Bright-Eyes is a romping winner. She takes
the apple from every decent Paris under forty-five, and
from many an indecent Paris over. But in literature
.... there are compensations. You cannot see Bright-
Eyes smiling over her undistributed middle, or pass
bathos when all's unwell in the thrill of a tender fan-
44 The Red Pagan
tap. And Blue-Stockings prims her legs severely, and J
marches to victory in an ail-askew last year's gown 1
with the trimming off one sleeve, and a large stain in :
front where she spilt her coffee that agitated midnight j
when she had the triumphal idea about Goethe. j
Jean Ingelow can no more than other women get |
all her life-fragrance into her literature ; but she gets j
a little. In "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincoln- 1
shire '' there is a melancholy savour, a crooning pathos \
of sound and cadence, that give the true trembling- ;
Madonna's-mouth emotion — ecstasy on the edge of \
utterance. (There is something of the same effect, \
with a stronger vibration, in David's lament ; " O my \
son Absolom, my son, my son Absolom !" — thanks to |
the good luck that gave the most beautiful man in 1
Israel the most beautiful name ; for there is no poetry I
in " O my son Mahershalalhashbaz, my son, my son |
Mahershalalhashbaz !") \
In " The High Tide," " Echo and the Ferry," and ]
" The Letter L " — a third piece rather stronger than |
the other two, and hardly less sweet — Jean Ingelow \
is felt at her best. But there are several poems and ]
a hundred verses and phrases that make her work j
worth knowing and treasuring : as for example — \
Men must die — one dies by day, and near him moans \
his mother ; \
They dig his grave, tread it down, and go from it \
full loth; '
Jean Ingelow 45
And one dies about the midnight, and the wind
moans, and no other.
And the snows give him a burial — and God loves
them both.
The -first hath no advantage — it shall not soothe his
slumber
That a lock of his brown hair his father aye shall
keep ;
For the last, he nothing grudgeth, it shall nought his
quiet cumber
That in a golden mesh of h i s callow eaglets sleep.
(Essentially a stale, easy sentiment ; but where set
more sonorously and forcibly ?)
Grand is the leisure of the earth!
(How many Le Galliennes would it take to compose
an august line like that?)
She gives her happy myriads birth
And after harvest fears not dearths
But goes to sleep in snow-wreaths dim.
Again —
The loo kings onward of the race before
It had a past to make it look behind ;
Its reverent wonder, and its doubting sore,
Its adoration blind.
The thunder of its war-songs, and the glow
Of chants to freedom by the old-world sung;
The sweet love-cadences that long ago
Dropped from the old-world tongue.
46 The Red Pagan
(Listen to the long vowels trumpeting ! Jean Ingelow
had mastered the tone-poet's first-lesson: Consider
the long vowels, how they go ; and notice what a
mean fellow is short-vowelled, swiftly-said Solomon,
shorn of the slow magnificence of " all his glory.")
Here was a man familiar with fair heights
That poets climb. Upon his peace the tears
And troubles of our race deep inroads made,
Yet life was sweet to him, he kept his heart
At home. Who saw his wife, might well have
thought —
'God loves this man. He chose a wife for him —
The true one! sweet eyes, that seem to live,
I know so much of you, tell me the rest !
Eyes full of fatherhood and tender care
For small, young children. ...
And again —
Ecstatic chirp of winged thing, \
Or bubbling of the water-spring, :\
Are sounds that more than silence bring \
Itself and its delightsomeness. \
So on, and on, through the homely old themes of love, \
and life, and death, Jean Ingelow moves, singing her j
life-story better than all but a rare few of us. I com- i
mend her scattered books to the publishers of " select- j
ed editions'' in single volumes. I
How It Is Done
47
THIS seems a good place to complain of wo-
men writers — not that they lack humour : that
is trite; nor that the fights are the weakest
passages of their historical novels: since one
is not expected to read their historical novels ; but —
that they do not make love well, and that they ar-
range death badly.
The male poet loves detail in his amorous cuplets ;
but why is the female, at times quite as amorous, so
much more vague and general in her epithets? It
isn't in character. Woman, the natural observer, who
notes with microscopic eye the minutest triviality of
garb or wearer, must see all the good and bad points
of her lovers : why doesn't she dilate on them in print
as her lovers dilate on hers ? Certainly she does not :
Sappho's Phaon is merely an indistinct lump of love-
liness, while Catullus scrutinises Lesbia's teeth with
the anxiety of a horse-dealer. " A mouth like a Gal-
lic beagle," he says one lady had. Modern Sapphos
are content to describe their heroes as being " beauti-
ful as a young Greek god," and so on ; but they never
specify anything beautiful about him except his
clothes, or his nose, or some such irrelevancy. Even
Mrs. Raggles, of the U.S., whom a U.S. paper praises
for the taste implied in her remark after visiting Eu-
rope\ ''Well, I've seen the Apollo Belvideer an' IVe
seen Raggles, an' gimme Raggles !"— even this ex-
ponent of culture didn't mention wherein lay Raggles's
48 The Red Pagan
preeminence. Yet the most superficial study of Swin-
burne (say) will show any average woman what the
average man prizes her for. You bet that even Hag-
gles, sitting spitting at the stove in an Arizona saloon,
and talking heifer to the boys, would give them a re-
markably definite picture of the excellences of his old
girl. Now, since the literary and poetic Male puts
everything in writing, as it were, why does the ditto
Female play her accepted instincts false in this one
particular? Why doesn't she retaliate, and compen-
sate, and elaborate ? The world is full up and running
over with the poetry of woman's eyes and limbs : one
desires to hear the other side.
Literature, of course, ought to fascinate at the
furthest whisper of a sex-cell union. There is a good
book, and an easy one, waiting to be made with the
title How it is Done; or, Dijferent Ideas on a
Delicate Subject. Agnes Stevens has attempted some-
thing of the kind in How Men Propose; but she is
a wooden chooser of romances, she supplies no sym-
pathetic commentary, and she mixes her authors hor-
ribly. A better compiler would have taken Meredith
(say) as a whole, and distilled the essence of his ex-
quisite love-passages ; then gone to Dickens, and
Thackeray, and Lever, and the rest ; then over the
channel and across the border to Deutschland, and
round to America, and so everywhere — an Ariel
among the blossoms of Love's literary garden. This
How It Is Done 49
isn't the order, to be sure: you must go by periods,
and schools, and nations ; but there waits the book.
Not that the compiler would reap much Austra-
lian harvest. " Rolf Boldrewood " doesn't know in
the least how it is done ; Marcus Clarke doubtless
knew, but he doesn't tell; and even among the wo-
men, Ethel Turner, from whom better things were
expected, merely brings Meg in with an exquisite
flush and dewy eyes after it's all over. Louise Mack
is more intelligent. This is Louise Mack :
He realised that Jean was in his arms, that her head
lay against his breast, and that his safety was of strange
account to her. . . . And he put one hand under
her chin, and turned her face a little, and caught one
brief glimpse of her eyes.
"Jean, Jean, tell me, tell me. You love me.*'
Her head fell back a little, and all the beauty of her
face was under his gaze, the eyes with a strange new
look in them. The little babyish curls of hair, the pure
soft skin, the tender half-smiling mouth.
" You love me," said Musgrave.
** I didn't know," said Jean childishly. She caught
her breath in a little sob.
** My saint, my saint," he was whispering.
He bent his head nearer, nearer. And then through
the fog two lovers kissed each other for the sweet first
time.
This has very fair cloy for a young author, and
there is more where Jean goes on "kissing his hair,
with her arms round his neck, and his head so close
50 The Red Pagan
against her heart that the Httle paste buttons of her
gown were cutting into his cheek/* Decidedly, Jean
should have pasted on her wall (instead of " Nulla
dies sine linea") "Every gown sine buttons"; also,
" Toujours girl sans bones." There is much to be
said for '* Tadmirable beaute de seize ans, I'expression
angelique de cetage. Tame timide et neuve, qui con-
sacre a I'objet de son choix les premiers sentiments
qu'elle ait jamais eprouves," but, as a rule, Seize-Ans
in Australia is shockingly unpractical and squealy,
and careless how the buttons stick into you. If
N.S.W. Education Department will add another sub-
ject to its girls' High-School curriculum (Jean seems
to have been a High-School girl) I am ready with a
professor. He might be called M. le Professeur des
Petits Soins de S'Amouracher.
Jane Eyre is one of the English heroines who ex-
plain most intelligently how it is done. Jean is
represented as plain and unattractive, but she never-
theless manages to secure three proposals. True that
two are from the same man, and the third from a mis-
sionary who does not love her — still, proposals. Jane
is a most matter-of-fact girl, and occupies page after
page with logical pros and cons before she gives her
final decision. But here is the pith of her first pop:
"Jane, accept me quickly," added Mr. Rochester,
wildly. " Say Edward — [how badly men always want
How It Is Done 51
the girl to say Edward !] —give me my name — Edward
— I will marry you."
** Are you in earnest? — Do you truly love me? —
Do you sincerely wish me to be your wife ?" [This is
the practical kind of girl that our High-Schools should
nourish.]
"I do ; and if an oath is necessary to satisfy you,
I swear it."
*^Then, sir, I will marry you." [Jane's doubts are
banished by the oath — evidently she believes in ^* lovers'
oaths."]
** Edward ! [still harping on the same point] my
little wife ! "
** Dear Edward!" [Ah!]
** Come to me — come to me entirely now," [note the
''now "] said he ; and added, in his deepest tone, speak-
ing in my ear as his cheek was laid on mine, ^* Make
my happiness — I will make yours."
"God pardon me !" he subjoined ere long ; '* and
man meddle not with me : I have her, and will hold her."
" There is no one to meddle, sir. I have no kindred
to interfere."
" No — that is the best of it," he said. [Had Roches-
ter's prescient mind foreboded a mother-in-law ?]
The scene begins, by the way, when Rochester
calls Jane to come and look at a big moth. What an
I aid to love is the fascinating sport of insect-catching !
They discuss the moth for a time — then a nightingale
comes and sings to them — then Jane weeps — then the
I rain falls. They get wet through, which cools their
ardour, and they go to bed It has all happened in
i
52 The Red Pagan
an orchard at the foot of a horse-chestnut tree : time,
twelve o'clock at night. Next morning Jane is inform-
ed " that the great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the
orchard had been struck by lightning in the night, and
half of it split away." No w^onder !
Yet Jane doesn't get married, after all. She is
led to the altar, but the marriage is stopped by a bro-
ther of the mad first wife whom Rochester keeps
locked up. Jane flees, and is protected by a clergy-
man about to go as a missionary to India, " who wants
a wife to be his helpmeet and fellow-labourer." He
does not love Jane — not the least bit in the world ;
in fact, he loves another girl devotedly ; but he thinks
Jane would make the better missionary. He wants
her " as a conductress of Indian schools, and a helper
amongst Indian women." Jane respectfully declines
this thankless billet, and presently gets on with the
old love again. After more argument, and any
amount of unnecessary verbiage, the third proposal
comes along:
** Jane," said Mr. Rochester, ** I want a wife."
**Do you, sir?*'
* ^ Yes ; is it news to you ? "
** Of course ; you said nothing about it before."
** Is it unwelcome news ? '*
**That depends on circumstances, sir — or your
choice."
How It Is Done 53
** Which you shall make for me, Jane. I will abide
by your decision."
** Choose then, sir — her who loves you hesV*
** I will at least choose— ^^^r/ love best Jane,
will you marry me ? "
**Yes, sir." [This promptness is worthy all praise.]
** A poor blind man, whom you will have to lead
about by the hand ? "
**Yes, sir."
**A crippled man, twenty years older than you,
whom you will have to wait on ? "
** Yes, sir."
^* Truly, Jane."
'' Most truly, sir."
** Oh, my darling ! God bless and reward you ! "
Tolerable, tolerable ; yet on reconsideration Jane
seems a little too matter-of-fact. Perhaps a shade
more intoxication is desirable — of the kind that is
made in France. Voici, par exemple : —
La reduction de I'univers k un seul etre, la dila-
tation d'un seul etre jusqu'^ Dieu, voil^ I'amour.
O printemps ! tu es une lettre qui je lui 6cris.
Oh ! etre couchds cote k cote dans le meme tom-
beau la main dans la main, et de temps en temps, dans
les t^n^bres, nous caresser doucement un doigt, cela
suffirait k mon 6ternit6.
S'il n'y avait pas quelqu'un qui aime, le sbleil
s'^teindrait.
These are extracts from the love-letter that Marius
puts under the stone for Cosette, what time I'idylle
54
The Red Pagan
Rue-Plumet lightens for a moment the gloom oiF " Les
Miserables." And then the meeting! Poor Marius
is pale and hungry-looking, and has lost his hat.
Cosette holds on to a tree to keep herself from fall-
ing, while Marius explains himself in an impassioned
oration. " Si vous saviez ! je vous adore, moi.'*
Let one of Mr. Routledge's intelligent trans-
lators continue: —
** Do I offend you ? " said Marius.
^*Oh, my mother ! " said Cosette. ["Que diable
allait-e 1 1 e faire dans cette galore ? "]
And she sank down as if she were dying. He
seized her in his arms, and pressed her to his heart, not
knowing what he did. He supported her while him-
self tottering. He felt as if his head were full of
smoke (!) ; flashes passed between his eyelashes; his ideas
left him, and it seemed to him as if he were accomplish-
ing a religious act, and yet committing a profanation.
[Then there is omitted the little bit that proves Hugo
a Frenchman — Du reste, il n'avait pas le moindre d^sir
de cette femme ravissante dont il sentait la forme
centre sa poitrine — modest translator !]
She took his hand and laid it on her heart ; he felt
his letter there and stammered :
^* You love me then ? "
She answered in so low a voice that it was almost
an inaudible breath :
** Silence ! you know I do."
And she hid her blushing face in the chest [dans le
sein — O humorous translator !] of the proud and
intoxicated young man. He fell on the bench, and she
How It Is Done 55
by his side. They no longer found words, and the
stars were beginning to twinkle. How came it that their
lips met ? How comes it that the birds sing, the snow
melts, the rose opens, May bursts into life, and the
dawn grows white behind the black trees on the
rustUng tops of the hills ? [This is the sort of thing we
want from Australian writers.] One kiss, and that was
all ; both trembled and gazed at each other in the dark-
ness with flashing eyes. [Ah, Victor knew !]
Then they take hands without knowing it, and
de temps en temps le genou de Marius touchait le
genou de Cosette, et tous deux fremissaient, and par
intervalles Cosette begayait une parole — son ame
tremblait a ses levres comme une goutte de rosee a
une fleur. Decidedly, Hugo was a great man. And
by-and-by, when they are about to be parted, Cosette
weeps for more than two hours by the side of Marius
qui songeait ; and finally, " without saying a word,
both fell into each other's arms without noticing that
their lips were joined together, while their upraised
eyes, overflowing with ecstasy, contemplated the
stars." An interesting embrace: readers may prac-
tise it for themselves. Just try : lips joined, and look
at the stars.
j^
56 The Red Pagan
THE other side of the complaint may be but-
tressed by reference to George Eliot. I have
read somewhere that George Eliot was "a
fiery soul/' Perhaps that is the reason she
was never at home in the water. I suspect she could
not swim ; and when the characters in her novels go
boating she is always at sea — even if they are only
sculling on a river.
This is a pity, for she drowns heroes and heroines
with as little compunction as if they were kittens. I
complain that they do not drown naturally. One does
not object to Dunstan Cass, in Silas Marner, walking
into the stone-pit to perish ; although you think that
he, a boy bred in the neighbourhood, should have had
more sense. Nor do I care to dispute about probabili-
ties when Adam Bede finds his father in the Willow
Brook. But these are simple cases, which it would be
hard to bungle if one tried. It is when she attempts
complex drownings that we feel George EHot's de-
ficiencies.
For example, Tito's death in Romola is not well
done. A fine swimmer, as he is said to be, would not
get exhausted in a few minutes. In a river, he could
swim five or possibly ten miles with a warm cur-
rent. Or he could simply drift along. No swimmer
would persevere to exhaustion in such a case. He
would either make for the shore when he grew tired.
George Eliot at Sea 57
or turn on his back and float. If Tito had his mail-
coat on I could understand it, but " he no longer wore
his armour." Of course it is necessary for him to be-
come exhausted, or he would not fall a prey to Bal-
dassarre. But machine-gods should confine themselves
to the land, and not meddle with people in the wa-
ter. I am a pretty fair swimmer myself, and in the
name of Leander, Byron, Cavill, Self and Co., I pro-
test against such unwarrantable catastrophes. Were
Tito alive, he would protest too. If lady novelists
think a fellow gets exhausted after swimming a few
hundred yards in a river, with the stream, lady novehsts
must be taught differently.
Then, as to the fate of Tom and Maggie Tulli-
ver, one's indignation is excusably warm. If Tom
could not manage the boat so as to avoid being stove
in, he should have given the sculls to his sister. I am
positn^e Maggie would have saved both lives, in spite of
the conduct of the floating debris, which is truly ex-
traordinary. To begin with, buildings are not usually
broken into ''huge fragments'' by a slowly-rising flood.
If they float away at all, they float bodily. Nor
do " huge fragments make one wide mass across the
stream." Variations of the current prevent that. And
even supposing that Tom was in the way of a mass
of huge fragments, carried along at a speed of six
miles an hour — a sufficient estimate under the circum-
stances — how was he overtaken when his boat was
58 The Red Pagan
presumably drifting just as fast ? What hindered him
from turning the boat's head and pulling away with
the current ? Or why did he not endeavour to obtain
footing on a " huge fragment " ? Sailors, in a colli-
sion, have leaped upon the bows of an approaching
vessel, or upon an iceberg. The picture in my copy
of The Mill on the Floss shows the approach of a
" huge fragment '' which looks like part of the foun-
dation of a crane. One of Tom's sculls is gone, and
he has stopped pulling. He is standing up in the
boat, a light 15ft. skiff, clasping Maggie in his arms
and waiting for annihilation. What I should do,
in his place, would be to make the skiff fast to a ring-
bolt on the " huge fragment " (there is one convenient
in the picture) and float downstream looking for
something to turn up. No doubt Maggie would have
done this had not her brother flurried her. It is pro-
voking to see two young people drowned so foolishly.
I do not regret Tom much, but Maggie was a girl in
a thousand.
The manner of Grandcourt's taking-off in Daniel
Deronda is equally unsatisfactory. I do not grieve for
Grandcourt any more than for Tom, but he was not
a bad fellow at bottom. There was no cant about
him, at all events ; and Gwendolen is rather worse
off when he goes, since she is torn by remorse, and
Deronda will have nothing to do with her. In any
case, the affair is clumsily managed. I have never
George Ehot at Sea 59
sailed a boat in the Gulf of Genoa, so I do not know
what the wind is like ; but Grandcourt was probably
trying to jibe when a puff came. This would agree with
Gwendolen's statement: "I don't know how it was
— he was turning the sail — there was a gust — he was
struck." The fishermen thought maybe he had been
knocked overboard by the flapping of the sail while
putting about ; but this is hardly likely. If he car-
ried a boom, and handled the boat very carelessly, he
might have been swung overboard, but where was
Gwendolen sitting that she wasn't hit too ? And, even
if the boat jibed, would Grandcourt be " swept over "
without her capsizing ? Then what was he about to
drown so quickly ? Gwendolen was not sure that he
could swim ; but is it probable that an English coun-
try gentleman Hke Grandcourt had never learnt?
Would he be Hkely to take his wife out sailing if he
could not swim ? Deronda thought '* he must have
been seized with cramp," but people do not get cramp
the minute they fall into water ; and even if they do,
and can swim, they keep afloat. Of course I would
like to know what kind of boat Grandcourt hired be-
fore pronouncing a decided opinion ; but the accident
is certainly mysterious.
I do not go so far as to say that George Eliot's
works are entirely spoilt by her failure to appreciate
these considerations ; but, as a swimmer, I would be
much better pleased had Tito floated five or six miles
6o The Red Pagan
down the river, then landed fresh as paint and killed
Baldassarre after a brief struggle ; or if Tom Tulliver
had swum ashore on his back with Maggie on his
arm. They had plenty of time to take off any clothes
that encumbered them ; and Tom, as a miller's son,
who had doubtless bathed in the mill-pool as soon as
he could walk, should have been easily equal to such a
feat. Grandcourt ought to have capsized the boat and
supported Gwendolen in the water till help came,
when her feeKngs towards him would have undergone
a complete change, and they would have Hved hap-
pily together. Of course, we must take our author as
we find her ; but I am astonished that Lewes, with all
his versatility, did not know enough to set his wife
right. One thing is plain; we should, for the sake
of future lady novelists, teach all our girls to swim.
The only alternative is to insist that doomed person-
ages be removed by poison or the cord.
IT would be interesting to traverse the field of fiction
and show the singular force of the death-climax
where the plan permits it to be used. (In pano-
ramic novels, like Vanity Fair or Middlemarch,
^it cannot be used with advantage; and the ending in
such novels, if you consider it separately, is the weak-
est part of the book.) One might refer to the magni-
The Space-God 6i
ficent close of Beauchamp's Career ^ with the picture of
the great Lord Romfrey thundering on that black
river-side where the ideahst threw his Hfe away for an
insignificant bit of mudbank humanity. Then there
is The Story of an African Farm, with worn-out
Waldo sleeping into death — Em bringing him milk
as the chickens climb about him : '' He. will wake soon
and be glad of it " — and the superb clinching sen-
tence, " But the chickens were wiser.'* (This though
Olive Schreiner in her preface repudiates " the stage
method," and professes merely to paint life : her artis-
tic sense impels her to select from life the dramatic
climax which she disavows.) And there is the still
more thrilling crisis of Madame Bovary, where the
impression is intensified by contrast between the
miserable woman on her deathbed and the miserable
woman trolling a gay song beneath the window.
And so on.
Literature is a more or less ideal representation
of life ; and death is the natural and effective Kterary-
climax because it is the natural and effective life-
climax. When the literary artificer stops short of
" death," the reader feels there is still something to be
said. Even children will meet " So they married and
lived happily ever after " with " But how did they
live happily ever after ? and what did they die of ? " —
and adult-age is more exacting. Marriage ends the
movement, but death ends the music ; and the intel-
62 The Red Pagan
ligence, like the ear^ rests unsatisfied with a final \
pause in the middle of the bar. Injudicious workmen j
even go past death — into heaven or hell ; but heaven ;
and hell are anti-climaxes, though useful in humorous \
verse. Serious verse or prose they weaken: the j
average person does not picture them as clearly and 1
inevitably as he pictures death ; and the power'^' of \
an artistic stimulus defiends, of course, upon the i
audience's capacity for response. \
Thus Paterson's comic rhyme of " Old Pardon, the ]
Son of Reprieve,'' closes effectively with a picture of |
Pardon careering round celestial courses ; but Law- ]
son's tragic rhyme of " Marshall's Mate " closes inef- \
fectively by translating the hero to |
..." //lal Loving, Laughing Land where life is \
fresh and clean — j
Where the rivers flow all summer, and- the grass is \
always green y I
The idea is staled, anyway ; and even a good thing
is artistically spoiled by staleness — by the want of
that " continual slight novelty " which divides creation I
from imitation. And the idea is inartistically used \
because it drops the mind more or less abruptly from |
the climax of a strongly-pictured, thoroughly-realised j
* Not the value ; we measure power by the standard j
of actual accomplishment, and value by the standard of \
possible accomplishment.
The Space-God 63
tragedy to the anti-climax of a dimly-realised, rather-
weakly-pictured "pretty ending." Where his tragic
effect is still greater, as in " Out Back," Lawson him-
self can see that taking it to heaven would spoil it : it
is only occasionally that his feminine-elements obscure
his male vision.
Apropos the Bovary ending. There is some-
where in French the story of a woman to whom came
a man who had eaten of the insane Amor-root that
takes the reason prisoner. She stroked his hand
soothingly, and toldi him that she would be a sister to
him, and he might kiss her on the cheek (in the usual
considerate feminine way). When the man went away
and thought it over, he laughed mirthlessly — he had
eaten a good deal of root, and the woman's con-
duct impressed him Hke the ancient story of the Mac-
quarie-street lady who rushed out with a bedroom- jug
to extinguish the Garden Palace fire. In the next
chapter, the man happens to mention that he laughed ;
and the woman is shocked. "You laughed!" she
says. Our point is concealed in the woman's inability
to conceive a depth of tragedy in that laugh. So the
average woman fails to reaHse that the best of what
pathos there is in Fildes's melodramatic picture of The
Widower is brought by contrast between the grief
of the father and elder child and the glee of the
younger children. The feminine mind always w^ants
its moods arranged tidily, like doormats and anti-
64 The Red Pagan
macassars, according to the conventional notion of that
dubious proverb, " A place for everything, and every-
thing in its place/*
For light upon the subject see De Quincey's
essay "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth^' with
the pregnant sentence : " All action in any direction is
best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible
by reaction." Compare Amarinth in The Green Car-
nation, which by no means fails in truth by succeeding
in being paradoxical: "The highest humour often
moves me to tears. . . The highest comedy verges
upon tragedy, just as the keenest edge of tragedy is
often tempered by a subtle humour. Our minds are
shot with moods as a fabric is shot with colours, and
our moods often seem inappropriate. Everything
that is true is inappropriate." . . " I know," said
Reggie Hastings. " That is why I laughed at my
brother's funeral. My grief expressed itself in that
way. People were shocked, of course, but when are
they not shocked ? There is nothing so touching as
the inappropriate." Also, there is Ambrose Bierce's
statement of the converse in " The Damned Thing" :
" Against a sombre background humour shows high
lights. Soldiers in the intervals of battle laugh
easily, and a jest in the death-chamber conquers sur-
prise." And, dozens of similar illustrations of an
interesting and obvious psychical fact — possibly de-
pending on the physical fact that all motion tends to
The Space-God ^ 65
rest, with its corollaries: the greater the speed the
greater the friction ; the higher the pendulum-swing
the nearer to reversal ; the acuter the tension the
closer to snapping-point ; and so on.
There is a place, not for everything, but for
everything you choose to put in a place. Artistically
that place is never the ordinary place, never the place
the feminine mind assigns to everything.
True art is always a Uttle out of plumb. A woman
puts the doormat exactly parallel with the doorstep :
a man kicks it artistically aside. A woman disposes
the antimacassar squarely upon the back of the
chair : a man pulls it comfortably to the seat. Mark
Twain complained vainly of the housemaid who in-
sists upon pushing a chest right back to the wall, so
that the lid w411 not stay up when the chest is opened :
the generation of housemaids defies him, moved by
fixed instinct. And the inevitable place for Whist-
ler's butterfly-signature to his pictures is the last
place the average woman would choose.
Yet one may hope, since the sex is adaptable. In
the things that concern it, it has learned to prefer
hand-made lace to machine-made : doubtless without
understanding that the artistic reason for preference is
the slight irregularity of the hand, as compared with
the stiff monotony of the machine. If man is the
fare sex, woman is the share sex ; and she can be
taught to share our knowledge that " there is no excel-
66 The Red Pagan
lent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the
proportion '' — since Perfect is necessarily imperfect
and the Admirable is always askew. That is why
the Parthenon is crooked ; that is why " intentional
variations from true vertical and horizontal lines exist
in all the best architectural work in all styles." That
is why no good statue is precisely symmetrical, and the
width of the border of old Persian rugs varies on
different sides of the same rug — "to avoid the Evil
Eye."
Odd's even, even's odious : 'tis a lesson most
women need to learn, and many men. When Mahony
painted a conflict of centaurs, he painted the centaurs
at the exact edge of a precipice, and fitly called his
picture To the Bitter End. The undermost centaur
had not an inch of brown heath or barren rock between
his hind-leg and destruction : the situation was strained
till it snapped. Similarly, a Queensland author, poison-
ing a woman in a story some time ago, poisoned her
in the drawing-room and dragged her right against
her child's cot in the bedroom to die — distilling agony
to the dregs. Similarly, one charming picture now or
formerly lent to the Brisbane Art Gallery is called
An Ice-Breaker on the Elbe. (Without knowledge, one
infers that at Spring's advent a powerful bluff-bowed
steamer is set to work to hasten the disintegration of
the floating ice somewhere between Hamburg and
Cuxhaven, and that in the channel she cuts a line of
The Space-God 67
released vessels follows as the relief squadron followed
through the Mountjoy^s breach in the Londonderry
boom.) Ice-floes lie under a lowering sky, with a
dull-red sun shining over the vessel to shimmer won-
derfully down murky depths of foreground. Behind,
one sees dimly the following fleet The impression of
the whole is perfect — it looks like truth, yet truth
finely idealised in colour. But the vessel is geometri-
cally in the middle of the picture, and the sun glows
through the haze geometrically above the middle of
the vessel; and this gives any properly-constituted
mind a feeling of irritation which all the charm of the
work can scarcely conquer. Why ? Because you get
a glimpse of the man behind the work, deliberately
pulling certain strings in order to get certain effects ;
and the human mind is built so that it hates to think
of itself as a marionette on a wire — the thought dis-
solves one's honest pride of independence.
In these instances, the artists are in error. They
show themselves not artists, but mechanics — stage-
carpenters, contriving that the pantomime fairy shall
fly up the precise centre of the stage ; that the side-
scenes shall come forward precisely the same distance
(who hasn't seen an anxious carpenter hitching his
scenes back or forward after the curtain rises, with
the instinct of a careful mother hitching her little girl's
frock straight?). The stage-ideal throughout, indeed,
is in grotesque conformity with the erroneous notion
that order is man's first law. The hero must always
68 The Red Pagan
die in a particular patch of limelight ; slow music must
always lead up to the catastrophe ; in Sheridan's
time, the heroine always went mad in white satin.
Puff, Now Tilburina comes in stark mad in white
satin ?
Sneer, Why in white satin ?
Puff, O Lord, sir — when a heroine goes mad, she
always goes into white satin.
But this conformity with bourgeois conceptions
of fitness is barbarously inartistic. The outre is not
necessarily better, but let us worship the outre rather
than the obvious. The Scriptural chaos must have
been far more attractive than the Scriptural universe
depicted in some old Bibles — as regularly wooden as
a row of skittles. When I visited England a while
ago I stayed a short time with an estimable English
family which always, when eating, cleaned its plates.
(Cleaning one's plate seems to be a well-marked
Enghsh trait.) Being an Australian, I never cleaned
my plate ; and on the third day the head of the family
kindly took me to task. It irritated the excellent
British citizen to see an uncleaned plate on a British
citizen's table. So at some personal inconvenience I
cleaned my plate until the very last meal ; and then
Poe's Imp of the Perverse insisted that I should leave
a spoonful of soup, and a fragment of joint, and a
morsel of pudding, and a heel-tap of ale. I felt m-
stinctively that the farewell was saddened by those
The Label-God 69
uncleaned plates ; and, much to my regret, my rela-
tions with that estimable British family have never
been quite so cordial since. And yet one feels in the
marrow of one's bones that an artist should never clean
his plate.
THERE is beauty in the precise adjustment of
means to ends, the beauty of law fulfilled. The
sufficiency of a logarithm, the finality of a chess-
move, the good carpenter's invisible joint, the
assurance that a pint's a pound: all these and a
thousand kindred things are beautiful with a natural
beauty. But artistic beauty is quite other: Art is
Nature raised to the manth power ; and the course
of evolution is from the geocentric real to the andro-
centric ideal. Our ancestors are friendly enemies:
friends in that they have presented us with their
cravings and satisfactions, enemies in that their gift
is paid for by a loss of individuality, a loss of the
power to develop new cravings and satisfactions for
one's-self. Their mental path was by impression,
through habit, to instinct ; and instinct is a slave.
We desire to move by reason to mastery, abolishing
habit unless habit be proven beneficial. For every
habit is a bond, a concession to the dominating Uni-
verse that in the end destroys the Ego. Since we are
children of the Universe, it pays to barter a portion
70 The Red Pagan
of personal liberty that we may establish a sure title
to the remainder ; but he who barters all is undone.
Because of this necessity for defying a mathe-
matical Universe, artistic humanity goes askew in
Time as in Space. Askewness is one proof of progress,
one example of man's new-creation of the heavens and
the earth. The health of the artist is shown in his
freedom from the disease of punctuality. " A stitch
in time saves nine," and that is why the artist never
saves, since it is better deliberately to make ninety
unnecessary stitches than of compulsion to obey one
proverb. " Be virtuous, and you will be happy," be-
comes " Be happy, and you will be virtuous," — and all
the copy-book moralities that represent the slavish
acceptances of times past turn similarly topsy-turvy.
The artist makes the grand refusal of Prometheus the
Fire-Bringer, and shouts Art and the Man in face of
the gods of routine and labels, zealously puffing to
destroy '* that little, fluttering," temporary " fiam.e one
calls One's-Self."
The label-god is especially to be resisted. George
Moore, following Harry Thurston Peck, was lately dis-
cussing the ominous significance of names. And there
is no mistake about it: we are all what our names
make us. Is not Napoleon as necessarily le Grand
as Albert is the lackadaisically Good — for nothing in
particular ? What man could achieve greatness upon
whom his god-parents thrust the baptismal titles of
The Label-God 71
Reginald Frederick? Do we not owe the inanities of
modern womankind to Maude with an e and Alyce with
a y and Gladys in conjunction with Smith? But what
a treasury of domestic virtue in the plain Jane of our
f oremothers ! what cooking capacity in Susan ! how
Martha swept and scrubbed ! to what majesty might
not Mary aspire! Question: Why are our Miltons
mute and inglorious? Answer: Because they are
named Gerald Augustus instead of plain John. For
what saith the proverb : " GiVE A DOG A BAD NAME,
AND Hang Him ! " His name is the one thing a man
never escapes from. He can change his creed and his
tailor, he can divorce his wife, he can throw away every
atom of flesh and get a complete new body every few
years ; but he cannot drop the consecrated cross of the
christening-font or evade the sinister obsession of the
birth-certificate. Post equitem sedet Eustace Algernon,
and round Clara YsabeFs neck the noose is drawn
every night anew. Vainly the hare doubles in defer-
ence to a legator : Mahound is always at its heels ;
and long after the individual is annihilated his name
may be enjoying tombstone immortality at sixpence a
letter, or ninepence if Old English text be permitted
more tenderly to assuage the ecstasy of Grief.
Deduce the cash value of notoriety in literature.
We are what our names make us, but we are what
other fellows' names make us.
72 The Red Pagan
Men of thought, so-called, are often but the para-
sites of men of action or other men of thought. Jones
makes a name and earns the vulgar scrutiny ; Bones,
as author, or publisher, or bookseller, or journalist,
picks up the biographical, anecdotal crumbs fallen
from the great man's table, and sauces them into an
appetising dish for readers greedy to know even the
fashion in which Jones scratches his leg at contempla-
tive moments. Publicity is the mother of purchasing
patronage, and Jones's publicity is ready-made : his
paragraph advertisements are inserted gratis in all the
papers ; his name metaphorically glares on ten-foot
hoardings throughout the country. So Bones, as
author, saves time and money by hiring the contempo-
rary John L. Sullivan to pass for the writer ot his
book, and win it instant vogue ; or, as publisher, he
wheedles an approving comment from the contempo-
rary Gladstone, and launches his Hterary nonentity at
the tail of a popular political kite ; or, as prudent
pressman, he fawns to the local demigod and diaries
down the demigod's conversational slip-slop aganist
the day of the demigod's death. All interesting ex-
amples of the parasitic method, doubtless justifiable
on low moral grounds as well as on the exalted
grounds of expediency or necessity.
The business of journalism, in particular, is to
whet the edge of circulation on the hone of notoriety.
For journalism does not Hve by lying prostrate before
Thk Label-God 73
Moses and Confucius, or by continually pointing out
the beauties of Herodotus or Livy. Livy and Con-
fucius, as popular dishes, have been " off " for some
time, and the public lack of demand for them is most
enthusiastic — probably because there is a well-founded
impression that they are dead The structure of suc-
cessful journalism is built on the proverb that a living
dog will sell ten times as many papers as a dead lion.
In literature the same rule holds, though literature has
its Napoleonic exceptions. But, generally speaking,
there is no advertisement like Life, though Death
booms your sale for the moment that the living man
is held in memory. Life, not Death, is the successful
log-roller ; for the reason that it is both object and
agent, is itself a log that rolls. Death is a log at rest.
The science of log-rolling is based on the principle of
the rolling stone, which requires considerable force to
move it from rest, and comparatively small force to
keep it in motion. There is always more or less brain
inertia to reckon with. Many people will pass three
fruit-shops displaying grapes at threepence per lb.,
and buy from a fourth ^hop which sells the same
grapes at fourpence : because the repeated stimulus
decides the purchase. Some commercial travellers
think it an advantage to have a man with the same line
of goods canvass a town before them. He awakens
attention, and sets people thinking of possible profit
from handling the goods : then the second man comes
74 The Red Pagan
along and secures the orders. " The brain is to a \
certain extent like a soil in which things must germin- i
ate and ripen before they can produce results." * j
Reason (in the sense of conscious intellectual j
argument) has little to do with the ordinary man*s \
decisions. He is swayed rather by a tide of un- i
conscious suggestions, which rises till it bursts the \
barriers to action. \
The blind ardours and furies of a crowd exhibit a ]
similar absence of argumentative process. A crowd \
has the affectability of a woman, the inconsequence of j
a child, the destructive propensity of a savage. When j
animated by a strong emotion it exerts upon its mem- |
bers a distinct hypnotic influence which sends brains \
toppling like card-houses. Average humanity is i
swayed by instincts and impressed by images. The \
alleged cruelties to Cubans might never have stirred ]
America to war with Spain ; while the sinking of the i
Maine fired the popular imagination and forced the \
Government to war. The annual slaughter of thous- ]
ands of Australian infants through their parents' j
ignorance passes unnoticed by a multitude of persons .
who were profoundly thrilled when three or four babies \
were found in the Makins' back-yard. And does any- |
one believe that the hysterical crowd which watched \
the passage of Transvaal contingents was acquainted \
* From F. Halleck's T/?e Education of the Central j
Nervous System — an inspiring book. \
The Label-God 75
with the causes and objects of the war, or had reason-
ed regarding its ethical right oi< wrong ?
The small power of individual judgment which the
ordinary man acquires deserts him inevitably in emo-
tional crises. Under the pressure of an insistent
image, or the hypnotism of a crowd, he is as effectively
derationalised as if he were made insensible by a blow
on the back of the head. For illustration : Not long
ago The Wide World Magazine feold the effect of
Noise in ending a plague of tree-caterpillars in Eastern
U.S.A. It seems that the caterpillars attack apple,
maple, sugar, and plum trees, and kill them in a year.
They are not to be dislodged by arsenic or kerosene,
and before Mrs. Martin's discovery had to be tediously
picked-off by hand. It was Mrs. Martin who,
blowing a horn to call her husband to dinner, saw with
astonishment that the caterpillars fell from an infested
tree. Then the local band turned out —
** Now, then,*' cried the leader, ** * Auld Lang Syne*
— softly. " As the band slowly breathed forth the Scotch
song, the caterpillars began to move their bodies in per-
fect time to the music. The band played faster ; faster
moved the caterpillars ; and then, ere the last note died
away, they began to fall from the tree by hundreds.
The theory is that the local band and kindred noises
stupefy the caterpillars, whose nervous system has not
been tuned to endurance of gross sound-vibrations :
consequently they shiver to their fall and the final
76 The Red Pagan
fire. And in precisely similar fashion the blare of
military bands, the spectacle of flags waving and men
marching, the insistence on pictorial ideas like that
of "the Empire calling," stupefy the reasoning centres
of the ordinary person with an undeveloped cortex to
his brain. When he hears "Soldiers of the Queen'' he
begins to move his brain in perfect time to the music.
The more it is played, the faster he moves. Then,
like the U.S.A. caterpillar, he " falls off his perch."
CONSIDER, too, the curious periodicity of the
generic mind. It is commonly recognised that
before you can draw a bucketful of water up the
ordinary pump you must pour a dipperful of
water down. Similarly, unless you bribe the ordinary
intellect with an anniversary, you may pump till your
head is tired without getting one responsive idea. Put
a centenary in the slot, and the populace will work.
The peculiarity is plainly an aboriginal trait — the
mark of a juvenile stage of individual and race-develop-
ment. Only savage minds worship anniversaries ; the
civilised affirm for good things " every place a temple,
all seasons summer."
In an intelligent view, a death-centenary would
seem a gruesome celebration, were not the instinct of
its gruesomeness dominated by the more deeply-
The Time-God 77
I
•
rooted instinct of its anniversariness. In an intelligent
view, there is absolutely no- reason why Robert Burns
(for instance) should be specially remembered at the
end of 100 years rather than at the end of loi, or 99,
or 58, or any other arbitrary period of what we call
Time. And further, if Burns (for instance) had really
a message of value, every cultured mind should be per-
meated with it all the time, and in that case the sig-
nificance of anniversaries would be lost altogether,
since every moment would be as significant as every
other.
This follows from the doctrine of association of
ideas. The wiser a man grows, and the more extended
his culture, the larger becomes his stock of concepts,
and the more numerous the connections between them
and the images presented to his mind. Thus, a baby
looking at a flower may perceive that it is red. An un-
cultured man may know that it is red and round and
odorous and is called a rose. Alice adds that it is
good to wear and matches her gown ; Marmaduke
that it costs sixpence at the florist's ; and so on. But
a cultured man knows all that literature has said about
roses ; he reads in the blushing petals the poetry of
humanity, and hears as he gazes the ecstatic song of
the bulbul :
''Sweety ever sweeter, sweetest Love hath been;
Skirin, Shirintar, Shiriniarinr
78 The Red Pagan
And the truly wise man, looking, sees and is reminded
of so much more that, plainly, at the apex of culture
and the extremity of wisdom to which we hope we are
tending, the least mental impression derived from any
source will suffice by association of ideas to call up the
whole thinkable universe from the storehouses of
memory and imagination. So that we are really binding
ourselves to a lower race-standard when we worship
days and times and seasons, and we make a crab-like
and degenerate leap by merely honouring our poets a
hundred years after they die instead of bringing them
into our hearts and living with them and honouring
them every moment.
Not long ago a little buzzing correspondent
wrote: "I am surprised that you have not noticed
the deaths of Walter Besant and Robert Buchanan,
recently cabled on the same day.'' Well, a pleasure
of writing, as of life, consists in always being and doing
the unexpected, in refraining from the expected. Ob-
servance of times and seasons — for meals, or love, or
labour — is unworthy of a man free. We see the brutes
waking at dawn and sleeping at dusk all the year
round — how mechanical ! We see King Billy of Ban-
daroo, our proud autochthonous monarch, with his life
regulated by suns and moons and periodical ritual —
how slavish ! We see primitive agricultural communi-
ties perpetuating the antique observance of Mayday
— how monotonous ! Why, the whole virtue of human
The Time-God 79
evolution is that it brings us power to make Spring in
the brain all the year round, whatever the skies say.
Civilization, that has endeavoured to end the servitude
of bodies, has scarcely begun to emancipate minds.
We need another Wilberforce to preach a new crusade
on behalf of the religious savage, pious one day in
seven ; the official savage, with his regulated holi-
days ; the woman savage, with her fetish of birthdays
and wedding-days, and her annual repetition of a
death-advertisement.
All these things are traditions of ancient slavery —
chain-galls and whip-marks. Often the stick has been
removed, but silly human sheep still jump at the place
where the first sheep jumped. To be joyous
or grievous by the calendar, willy-nilly, what a
degrading surrender of liberty! A man should be
self-poised, judging and deciding his life at every
moment, or (if that seem better) yielding absolutely
to the moment's influence. Mr. Shandy's Saturday
formula satisfied the tidy mind of Mrs. Shandy, no
doubt ; but he should have been thoroughly ashamed
of himself. Yet how many Mr.-Shandys move auto-
matically between hedges of *' principles," along a road
of " duties," taking their pleasure like medicine, by the
clock, and "saving their souls" vv^hen they reach the
Sabbath milepost — as if the "kingdom of God" were
a seven-days bicycle-race. We want new maxims for
better minds. A time for nothing, and nothing in its
8o The Red Pagan
time ; a place for nothing, and nothing in its place.
Are you hungry? — eat! Are you thirsty? — drmk !
Gay ? — rejoice ! Sad ? — grieve ! Refuse Phyllis if
your mood be not Corydon's ; never die before you
are ready. If nothing else had shown the powerful
individuality of Parnell, it would have been shown in
this : that he never made appointments and never
answered letters. In other words, he refused to bind
himself for to-morrow, and he refused to submit his
moods to ahen disturbance. There are few things
more hateful than the necessity of keeping in a cold
mood last week's pledge made in a hot one — so the
wise man never pledges himself. There is nothing
more hateful than the demand that you shall write
letters when you don't want to — so the strong man
never writes them.
In this matter, as in many others, woman is man's
foe. She is essentially a periodic creature, with the
phases of the moon, the ebb and flow of the tides — a
Tuesday-and-Friday recipe, a machine for the eternal
repetition of plum-pudding at Christmas. Her brain
is so impressionable that one act begins a habit — and
every habit is a fetter: partly for this reason woman-
is hereditary slave. A great part of woman's
life is spent in endeavouring to tether more-
individualised man by her habits ; and, for the sake
of peace, he often permits the tie. "It is dinner-time"
— and you must eat ; *'It is bed-time" — and you must
The Time-God 8i
go to sleep ; "It is church-time" — and you follow her
sadly. Trailed in her triumphal march, you are none
the less a victim that your car is garlanded, your chains
gilded Sometimes a man revolts — the Sex declares
him "heartless, unfeeling." Sometimes he disappears
from the procession of habits — it is in my mind that
the authenticated " missing men *' — silently lost from
their places at the workshop, by the fireside, are men
who have suddenly realised the blank monotony of
their lives, their ignoble servitude, and have craved
and craved free air until the closest bonds snapped —
until they shook off at once all the shackles of home
and " business,'' and went forth to submerge their
identity in a new life of freedom. It is the better way
of suicide.
You who read this — You ! — whoever you may be,
wherever you are, pause for a moment and consider
yourself sub specie aeterni: see yourself in the per-
spective of the universe. What life do you lead ?
How many of your acts are done to please yourself ?
how many because the fetish of Habit compels you ?
— because you have deliberately or unconsciously
bound yourself with silken threads that have grown
to ropes, to chains, to a vast burden which you carry
forward day after day until you die. What tame pack-
horses most of us are, plodding under loads of habit !
And life, for most of us, is like a pack-horse road, worn
82 The Red Pagan
in regular hollows where our predecessors have step-
ped, and where we step blindly. Or whim-horse would
be the better metaphor, since the path of the pack-
horse varies : the whim-horse goes in an endless circle.
Next whim-horse you see — the older and blinder the
better — trudging round the track with his head
down, just call him by your own name, and ten to one
he'll answer !
" For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where in the sun's hot eye,
With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning task-work give.
Dreaming of nought beyond their prison-wall,
And as, year after year.
Fresh products of their barren labour fall
From their tired hands^ and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast ;
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are
prest.
Death in their prison reaches them,
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest'^
Of course, there are compensations. We yield
so much liberty to gain so much satisfaction of m-
stincts ; but there is always danger lest the loss be
greater than the gain. What unprofitable burdens You
are carrying, for example ; to what life-wasteful habits
You are slave ! Of course, too, some concession must
The Time-God 83
be made to habit and convention for the sake of peace
and quietness : when in Rome, it usually pays to do
as the Romans do. I remember a second-rate and
half -intoxicated actor delaying me on a midnight kerb-
stone to recount, almost with tears, how for the third
tune he had forgotten his wife's birthday ; though she
always remembered his. "This time I wrote it in a
diary a month beforehand ; I thought of it two days
before, and turned a ring on my finger ; I even wrote
to So-and-So to ring me up on the telephone, and tell
me about it. But I didn't look at my diary ; the ring
slipped round while I was washing ; So-and-So went
out of town. Her birthday was on Monday ; and I
had a little present all ready — and just came across it
to-day — Thursday ! — when I went to the drawer. I'd
have given anything to have remembered. She
doesn't value it half as much now."
That was an emotion creditable to the second-
rate, half -intoxicated actor ; and while our wives
retain their savage reverence for times and seasons it
is possibly better to humour them, trusting gradual
race-progress to bring knowledge that proofs of
affection have at all times the same essential value.
j^
84 The Red Pagan
BUT Besant and Buchanan need not be considered
like our wives. Their places in literature have
been fixed for ten years, or nearly : Death has
not altered them. It is good to flout the Time-
and-Season fetish demanding worship on their behalf,
and to approach by one iota the ideal of Journalism.
For the ideal of Journalism naturally follows the ideal
of Life in abolishing the expected-which-happens.
Before you open any newspaper of to-day, you know
almost precisely what to expect — and you very rarely
receive the pleasure of disappointment. There is the
leading article, saying on the accustomed page the
accustomed thing in the accustomed way. There are
the paragraphs ; there the reports ; there the illus-
trations — everything in regular routine. It is very
stupid ; but readers will have it so. Most readers
are creatures of Habit, glorying in their chains, incap-
able of the mental effort required to break them. If
the place of the dull article were taken by a story or
a poem, their Habit-heavens would fall, — and they
would cease to buy the paper ? Would they ? Well,
no one knows till the experiment is made, and no one
has been bold enough to make the experiment. Per-
chance — who knows? — the journalistic Habit is a
hollow sham, only waiting to be pierced Perchance,
unknown to themselves, readers weary of monotony
are only waiting to throw off their chains and welcome
the unexpected-which-never-happens.
-^
Besant and Buchanan 85 .
When the miUionaire is found ("In the beginning
was a millionaire " will be the first line of the model
paper s gospel) and the model paper is founded, it will
so consistently use its own thinker to do its own think-
ing that the majority of persons who live by fifth-
hand opinions will be irregularly knocked flat by the
wind of its fluttering pages. Irregularly — for the
model newspaper will be movable in space and time :
the milHonaire alone will be fixed That is to say,
when there are no topics and the staff has no ideas
the paper will stop issue until ideas and topics come
along, and even at other times its size will range from a
leaflet to a volume. Further, the model newspaper
will go on circuit like the law-courts. There is rarely
more than one topic of leading national importance on
the carpet at one time, and the model paper will seek
that topic where it may be found, and fall upon it
while it is yet near. The editor and his assistants will
migrate to Melbourne, or Perth, or Hobart — or wher-
ever the topic of the day may be — and be in readiness
to write up the Nocent Waterspout on the spot,
eftsoons as it rises.* And the Time-and-Season God's
lament over modern degeneracy will be loud enough
to be inexpressibly gratifying.
* ^^ Eftsoons the nocent waterspout will rise*' is a re-
markable line from the remarkable *^ poems" written by
a remarkable Australian politician — and published !
86 The Red Pagan
There is this to be said for the buzzing correspon-
dent : that Death is the one Time-post which perforce
must be perpetuated, because it perpetuates itself.
"Why permit it ? " you say. Really, there is no reason,
if somebody can show us a better way of evading the
perpetuity of Life. The choice between Life and
Death is a choice of bad habits, and the answer to
your demurrer is simply, "Why perpetuate Life ?"
And while argument is proceeding Death continues to
be the unescapable season — the "Hitherto hath the
Lord helped us" mark, at which you turn round to put
a full-stop to life-achievement and to consider its worth.
And, striking a mean of fro and con, answer to the
buzzing correspondent was delayed for a term
— to show that; if I do bring tribute to the Time-and-
Season fetish, I bring it of my own free will, in my
own time and season, having duly asserted my
civilised prerogative of staying away.
As to Besant and Buchanan, there is only the
coincidence of Death-days to justify the conjunction.
Besant was an industrious journalist, useful and un-
important The comparative weakness of his novels,
with James Rice away, showed clearly that when fhey
collaborated it was Besant who gathered the sticks and
Rice who lit the fire. For the rest, Besant defended
author against publisher, and possibly carried the
defence to an extreme: it seemed contradictory
that, to produce the novels which paid his income, he
Besant and Buchanan 87
himself relied upon the middleman whom generically
he attacked. He burrowed among the antiquities of
London, too, and lightened the gloom of old brick-
work and fusty records. Perhaps his best work was
work which to-day is rarely read : a series of essays on
French literature, interesting and sometimes acute. A
solid, conscientious, respectable workman, he never
brought a blush to the cheek of modesty, or a flash of
originality to the light of literature.
Buchanan's was a different personality, with
greater power, broader sweep, and higher significance.
His English birth is irrelevant ; his parentage was
Scottish : he was characteristically a strenuous Scot.
Difference of generations and environment did not
prevent him from being as good a type of his nation
as Burns was : indeed, the essential capacity of
Burns was very similar to the essential capacity of
Buchanan. These modern Scots are all ahke. They
have heat without flame ; the True Romance lurks
in their hearts, but never issues from their hps. They
clothe Revolt in Sabbath breeks, remaining both
Radical and Respectable. They are too sane to be
imaginative, too fanciful to be stupid. They woo the
Muse with the uncompromising earnestness of the
Shorter Catechism, and through the fields of gramarye
their bowels move magnificently. They are fine
fellows, and far too shrewd to be poets.
88 The Red Pagan
Buchanan wrote verses, plays, novels, pamphlets,
and a dozen things beside. He brought to his work
a savage energy, a dogged persistence, that made him
formidable ; but memorable work is in another cate-
gory. His literary life was full of apparent contradic-
tions ; the Time-Spirit fought with Heredity over him,
and the battle was drawn. He was both honest and
prejudiced, both manly and mean, both jealous and
unselfish. Disbelieving religion, he clung to it ;
bitterly independent, he accepted a pension ; uxorious
in his life, he professed horror of Rossetti's uxorious
art. And, writing continually, he left httle or nothing
that will be read twenty years from now.
Buchanan's best literary work is in his verse, and
the best quality of his verse is its vigour. He essayed
almost every form, and succeeded in almost every un-
imaginative form. When he would be mystic, as in
The Book of Orm, two lines by a born mystic like
Yeats are worth Buchanan's volume. Through his
Poetical Works you search vainly for anything origi-
nal, vital, distinguished. What you find is a vigorous
intelligence adapting poetical gleams to current themes.
There is no jet, no current ; but a flat expanse of feel-
ing superficially expressed. On the high plane,
Buchanan wrote nothing. On the low plane he wrote
many things excellent in their way, excellent for one
reading, for single publication. A selection of his
work that should include a little of everything he pub-
Malevolent Mummy 89
lished, from Undertones to The New Rome, would be
good to keep on the second-rate shelf. Like his proto-
t3''pe Burns, he was less a poet than a forcible writer
attuned to poetry; but, unlike Burns, he did not
borrow his lyric emotion, and he has little or none of
his own.
THE Space-god, the Label-god, and the Time-god,
as humanly worshipped, add their quota to illus-
trate the power of the Dead Hand of the
ancestral Mummy.
Not long ago an article in The English Illustrated
Magazine stressed the influence of that Dead Hand
upon English journalism. The writer said that the
character of London Times , Standard, Daily News,
Morning Post, and Daily Chronicle is made up of tra-
ditions which succeeding editors and staffs regard as
inviolable. "What have we said before on this sub-
ject ? " was one of John Walter's regular inquiries. And
when The Standard, a few years ago, to the surprise
of its proprietor, its literary editor, and everyone else,
published a leading article depreciating Meredith, it
was privately explained that the article was written
without animus, did not represent anybody's opinion,
but merely continued the judgment passed upon Mere-
go The Red Pagan
dith by The Standard in 1861, soon after the appear-
ance of Richard Fever el!
This faith in the Gospel of Mummy is doubtless
a remnant of that instinct of ancestor-worship fixed in
us by the age-long practice of prehistoric progenitors.
Sunday pilgrims to suburban cemeteries, wandering
happily among the tombstones, are often unstimulated
by affection for a buried relative. Without knowing
it, they are satisfying lingering instinct. " I am so
happy among graves," a woman will say who never
heard of the reverence due to manes. And Maude
Victoria, trysting in the shadow of shapeless statuary,
feels that her lover's pledge is sanctified by the neigh-
bourhood of the Dead. " Eppur si muove ! '' — Maude
Victoria's name is a proof.
Mummy will not prevail, but Mummy is mighty.
Consider the enthusiasm for Shakespear's bones dis-
played by N.S.W. Shakespear society. Shakespear's
bones have undoubted literary value. A man inter-
ested in literature and Shakespear is necessarily
interested in the scrutiny and comparison of Shake-
spear's origins, in ascertaining how dross became gold
in the alchemy of Shakespear's brain. But Mummy is
always persuading his worshippers to neglect the sub-
stance for the shadow, the future for the past. In
finding the legend-root some of us are apt to miss the
poetry-flower. Then, a man should gaze forward, not
back perpetually. Lot's wife was salted: take care
Malevolent Mummy 91
you are not petrified. Even a moderately Chinese de-
votion to great-great-Grandfather may undo you.
Your parents were fine fellows : they made you ; but
look to your children.
And aha! . . . Hope! In some recent N.S.W.
military manoeuvres " the (Australian) Scotchmen " —
not to be targets of opposing marksmen — '^adopted
the precaution of wearing their hirsute tassel at the
rear.'* A fine symbol. Put Scotland behind, put Ire-
land behind, put England behind — not as sources of
inspiration, but as goals of aspiration — and go forward
with Australia!
Generally speaking, it is true that Australians
have no taste for ancient history : they want the novel
note, the momentary impression. Much can be said for
the attitude. " The savage turning in his tomb '* of
each of us demands to be considered critically. It was
reasonable that in his day he should praise past time,
seeing that he had no comprehension of his place in
time coming. But we can follow his bent of ancestor-
worship too far. After all, what have Deeds that
Won the Empire to 'do with us ? What fun or satisfac-
tion, what fuller, keener life, are we going to get out
of them ? They have been written off to last century's
profit and loss account, and concern to-da/s business
no more. " But if they had not been, you would not
be." Fallacious " if " ! They were : we are. " A
living dog is better than a dead lion," says Hebrew
92 The Red Pagan
wisdom. " Carpe diem ! " says Latin wisdom. " Eyes \
front ! — forward, march ! " says Australian wisdom.
This is not a diatribe against knowledge. Know- i
ledge is an excellent thing, to be held in reserve in the
libraries. But most of the knowledge that has been ^
accumulated is useless to you personally. Too many |
facts — or lies — have been accumulated about too many i
people to be overtaken by any one man's acquirement. ■
Since the damnable ( ?) invention of printing '' the mass I
grows more and more of volumes yet to read, of secrets i
still to explore." Why not admit frankly that most are \
not worth reading or exploring ? — for us. " II f aut cul- ;
tiver son jardin," says last week's bridegroom. But |
accumulation is not cultivation. " Faut une bonne a \
tout faire," says last year's. You want a just impres- \
sion of past history and present relations, and details I
don't matter if your mind is a fit engine of acquisition. \
Then, if you need knowledge, you can absorb it at any |
time as a barrister absorbs his brief. Learn, as he does, i
general principles ; and let the particular application \
depend upon the minute's fee. What modernity im- ;
plies is not a brain full of knowledge, but one full of •
indices to knowledge. A dull mind and a memory laden \
with accurate information about Captain Cook are not \
to be preferred to a fresh mind that knows merely i
where to find accurate information about C apt am Cook \
— when wanted Most of us will never want it. It ;
takes us all our time to build a house and dig a well ]
Malevolent Mummy 93
and plant a tree and father a son: the four things
that ancestral wisdom recommended in posterity-
worship.
Turn over pictures of bygone fashions in dress,
and note how strange, even ludicrous, may now appear
the costumes of our grandfathers and grandmothers.
The patches and hoops, the cravats and buckled shoes,
are as quaint to the eye of this generation as this gen-
eration's dress might seem to the eyes of a gentleman
of the court of Queen Anne. La Mode has changed
even since the day of our fathers. But our fathers for
the most part have been content to change with the
mode ; and if here and there one clings to the garb
of his boyhood he doesn't dream of insisting that his
sons shall imitate him. Even when justifying his pref-
erence he will rarely venture to declare all other prefer-
ence unjustifiable.
Fashions in poetry have been almost as numerous
as fashions in dress ; but in poetry the dead hand of
our ancestors is heavy upon us. Nowadays we neither
wear slashed breeches nor write interminable epics
to exalt religious dogma ; but though it is commonly
agreed that good taste may be displayed in trousers,
a considerable body of opinion still holds that only
very bad taste can refuse to recognise Paradise Lost
and Paradise Regained as two of the highest poetical
achievements of the human mind. In reality, accord-
94
The Red Pagan
ing to the standards set by present fashion, there is
little more poetry in the " Paradises " than there was
in Queen Victoria. Milton's epics seem to the
present generation (when it reads them) rather heavy,
and rather faded, and invested with a rather fatiguing
magnificence: and they continue to be revered as
Queen Victoria is revered — not because they are
majestic and musical, but because we have inherited
the tradition of reverence from our fathers, and are
not strong enough to shake it off.
Pray observe that the argument does not decide
whether the present generation is right or wrong ulti-
mately : it urges merely that the present generation is
rather bored by Milton, and that, being rather bored,
it should courageously admit boredom, instead of ex-
alting the bore at the bidding of generations precedmg.
But to successfully fight against prepossessions is
to become a snake which swallows itself entirely and
remains the same snake. So most people run away at
the first encounter. The revised version of the Bible
is practically a dead letter — because pious people
prefer familiar error to strange truth. There is no
place like home, no pie like mother used to make — be-
cause strange places and new pies cannot win a verdict
in a prejudged case. The brain-molecules which hoard
impressions arrange themselves in definite series, and
after a time it is physically as difficult or impossible to
Malevolent Mummy 95
alter the series to suit a new impression as it is to make
water run uphill.
And a prepossession breeds its own justification, or
its further justification. The moment any object is dif-
ferentiated by praise or blame from other objects, that
moment ordinary minds, by dint of focussing attention,
begin to see much more to praise or blame than in
reality exists. Many of the women who adore Mrs.
Brown-Potter are themselves far more deserving of
adoration ; but the public mind has not been lime-
lighted to their beauties. Much of Shakespear is
rubbish which a modern writer would be hooted for
producing; but Shakespear has been canonised by
critical centuries, and the average reader swallows bad
and good with equal rapture. To this day students of
EngHsh style are led by Macaulay's dictum to give
their days and nights to the imitation of Addison,
regardless of the fact that Addison's style seems now-
adays cumbrous, and that many better models of
current usage are writing in the magazines. Here are
you eyeing Meredith for merits that you would pass
unnoticed in a daily paper.
Of the boasted beauties of classic masters in every
branch of art, perhaps half are real : the remainder are
factitious and imaginary, but they pass for real be-
cause of their classical environment. Hundreds of the
beauties extolled in ^Eschylus would by the same com-
mentators be counted commonplace in Jones. Hun-
96 4 The Red Pagan
dreds of the beauties passed over in Smith are in Virgil
called divine, because a reader of Virgil is on the
watch for the divine, and a reader of Smith is not.
Fame is a rolling snowball, says the adage. So the
public, having been taught to admire Kipling, reasons
from the part to the whole with illogical certainty, and
professes to find even Kipling's nonsense glorious ; or
having often heard it repeated that Robbery Under
Arms is one of the best Australian stories, buys The
Sealskin Cloak or My Run Home and conscientiously
reads them under the impression that it is enjoying
itself. And, if it starts with a sufficiently strong pre-
possession, probably it is enjoying itself.
Similarly, though Homer and Dante directly pro-
vide but a small portion of the poetical stimulus whicli
this generation is receiving, it is continually declared
ex cathedra that Homer and Dante are the world's
two greatest poets, while modern writers of verse are
little more than the dust which drifts about their large
historic feet. To argue the question absolutely it would
be necessary to agree upon a definition of poetry. But
such agreem.ent is not necessary to the affirmation that
most Australian readers of verse know and care little
whether Homer and Dante were poets or palmists.
They accept the tradition ; they bow to the printed
name of Dante, and believe that Homer is something
vast and venerable in the verse-line ; but the poetical
areas of their minds are occupied, not with Achilles
Malevolent Mummy 97
or Beatrice, but with the Man from Ironbark or
Blanchelys. Even if you ask of those who may be
supposed to possess cultured or classical taste, you
find they are reading Keats, or Heine, or Robert
Bridges ; if you notice whom they take pains to write
about, it is Browning, or Mallarme, or Arthur Symons.
Dante and Homer are very fine fellows, no doubt ;
but they are on the shelf with the old maids and copy-
right legislation.
What is true of Australia is true of other coun-
tries: people are everywhere occupied especially
with present-day poets, and Dante and Homer re-
ceive far more lip-service than heart-incense. It is
here contended, indeed, that this is to some
extent just and right. Homer was no doubt
a great poet or several great poets in his
time ; but that is not our time. We have other
minds, other tastes, other needs. Homer's beauty and
humanity will always have their value ; but the plain
emotions, the simple scenes, which may be presumed
to have delighted the Greeks of 2700 years ago, are
not the highest poetical boon that modern readers can
desire. Nor, in spite of tragic passion and picturesque
phrasing, are the imaginative vagaries of Dante more
sufficing. According to present lights, the Dante and
Homer of tradition are 50 per cent, genuine poetry and
50 per cent, academic humbug — Brocken-spectres
whose huge apparent bulk terrifies the average person
98 The Red Pagan
because he never stops to scrutinise closely the homely
mortal who casts the shadow. Dante lives partly
indeed because of his merit, but partly also because five
centuries claque for him. His snowball got a good
start in days when snowballs were scarce, and it has
kept on rolling. But the philosophy of the 13th cen-
tury is now exploded, and in so far as it is based on
that philosophy it is time the poetry of the 13th cen-
tury exploded too. The dead hand should be buried.
It can be argued, indeed, that much modern poetry
is essentially a parasitic growth upon the poetry of
Homer and Dante and Milton. Doubtless many trea-
sured ideas and images have been pilfered from their
store. Not only our daws, but our peacocks, often
strut in borrowed feathers. But in whose feathers did
the peacock of antiquity strut ? Homer, it is admitted,
collected the ballads of a generation, probably of an
era : he may have been merely the editor of a ballad
anthology : when all the guesses are sifted we know re-
garding him — nothing. Whatever inspiration Dante
gave his followers, he would certainly have been im-
potent without his predecessors. There is some evi-
dence to support a theory that lacking the basis of
Vondel's Lucifer Milton would never have had a Para-
dise to lose. We all stand on the shoulders of the
Past. But while it is comparatively easy to detect the
plagiarisms of modern writers, the geese plucked to
furnish ancient quills have flown out of sight down the
Malevolent Mummy
99
vista of the centuries. The one thing certain is that
between ancient and modern dishonours are easy.
The worship of names illustrates once more the
force of habit. Homage to " classic " writers is in
most persons partly or wholly automatic. When an
infant learns to walk you see it devoting its whole mind
to taking one step and another. It purses its mouth,
fixes its gaze, wrinkles its forehead. Its elders encou-
rage it by examples which it imitates laboriously. It
works with its whole brain, and every hesitating ad-
vance is a reasoned act. But by degrees the act be-
comes a habit : a reflex path is worn in the cerebrum,
and the automatic centres take charge of the legs.
Upon an impulse from consciousness walking continues
unconsciously. By-and-by even the impulse becomes
unconscious ; the limbs obey a hint so imperceptible
that it passes unrealised. We walk without knowing
it, as (the tag is irresistible) Monsieur Jourdain spoke
prose. Just so the schoolboy, learning from his master
or his text-book that Homer was a great poet, begins
to walk mentally in the path his elders have trod He
no more asks " Why ?" than as an infant he asked why
he should toddle : he imitates the belief as he imitated
the act. As he grows, the first faint impression on his
brain is repeated until he has a fixed idea from which
it is hardly possible to escape. The din of tradition
has left a permanent dint. His mind repeats its lesson
automatically — " Homer is a great poet" And if he
loo The Red Pagan
would unlearn the lesson, he is met by a physical ob-
stacle as real as if he tried to unlearn walking. So, as
a rule, his prepossession triumphs over feeble doubts :
you can no more persuade him to leave off Homer than
to leave off drink or flannel.
Yet there is another side
I WOULD like to see a symbolic picture of " Human
Evolution *' painted by an artist with the skill and
imagination of Max Klinger. To right of the
centre should appear the vivid, sunlit figure of a
man marching — the Man to-day. Behmd him and a
little beneath should be the broadening company of
Shadows from whom he is descended — the parents, the
ancestors, the primitive men — the ape-animals, dog-
animals, swine-animals — all the array of brutes that
succeeded the fish-animals and reptiles — and so down
the scale of hereditary life until the outlines of shape,
clear at first, growing gradually vague, should lose
themselves in gloom of the Beginning. Before him and
a little above should be the company of Shadows to
whom he gives birth — his children, his grandchildren,
his descendants in illimitable generations, expanding
fanwise more and more darkly till they should vanish
in gloom of the End. Around all the sand-glass —
Benevolent Mummy ioi
symbol of the lapse of Time. Below the centre, the
tropical beach where we think Life first may have
begun. Above, the face of supreme Man, Beyond-
Man, Man of the Future, with his mouth of sweetness,
eyes of dream, and brow of power.
[The artist might offer the central Adam an Eve
for mate, but woman is unessential to the conception.
Sex is an evolutionary detail. The woman gives Life
extension, not intensity — makes for perpetuity, not pro-
gress. It is true that many men walk our streets clutch-
ing a stick — a movable tree-bough — a reminiscence of
the ape-ancestor ; * but many more women carry para-
^ The secondary use of the stick for defence does ncft
affect the fact that, as an ornamental companion, it is
usually a badge of weak character, scanty intellectual
acquirement, superficial civilisation. Henry Parkes dis-
dained umbrellas ; but the crooked appendage of the
vacuous English ** Johnnie" is proverbial. The later use
of the bough as a weapon, a club, is seen among the
more primitive, or more vital, races and individuals. The
Irishman's shillelagh thwacks the same broken-skulled
moral as the Australian aboriginal's nulla-nulla. There
are other local examples beside that of George Dibbs,
who presented a ring-gidya stick to the British king. In
the hands of G. Dibbs the stick would typify club-usage ;
in the hands of King Edward it typifies cling-usage —
the transference reversing the process by which the
weapon-symbol of the virile monarch of yore became the
ornamental sceptre of the weakling modern monarch.
I02 The Red Pagan
sols — nearly every woman is uneasy without something
in her hands — some holdfast in case she drop from the
hereditary branch. And the man in the street straight-
ens his spine ; the woman stoops more — she has been
more recently erected from all-fours. Sitting is a con-
cession to the quadruped in both sexes ; but woman is
the sedentary sex. And woman, the wilder animal,
holds more of the wild-animal's vitality: she lives
longer than the man, so that in compensation for stand-
ing up last she lies down last. All this being se-
ductively divagatory, discontinuously episodical, un-
necessarily irrelevant, and ten more long words imply-
ing bad art. Comes of watching local painters sacri-
fice art to idiosyncrasy.]
In European houses where family portraits have
been preserved for generation after generation, the
scion of a historic stock may sometimes trace his own
Hneaments in a pictured ancestral face. Which of us
When war brought peace, the second usage of the stick
became the third usage as a badge of authority or
office — as in an usher's wand, a Speaker's mace. But
through all changes it is the atavistic bough — the ape-
man's heirloom.
" Imperial CcBsar, dead and turned to clay^
May stop a hole to keep the wind away^^^
and the supports of our ancestral forest-home become
the dude's solace, the king's sceptre, the jest of a Mel-
bourne bagnio. For these be evil days.
Benevolent Mummy 103
has not noticed the reproduction by a child of some
trick of gait or gesture not seen in the parents, refer-
able perhaps to a grand-parent, perhaps seen only in a
distant kinsman ? How often, in a family, is there ob-
served some son or daughter with traits dissimilar from
those of all known relatives. The records of breeders
of animals contain instances of individual reversion to
a type that disappeared from the line scores of years
before. Weismann's theory of the germ-plasm explains
these and analogous cases by postulating a halving of
the germ-elements — one set becoming active in the
production of a new body, while the other set is handed
down as a latent force that may become active only
after the passage of generations.
On this theory, every human being holds some
trace, however infinitesimal, of the influence of every
one of his human and other ancestors right to the be-
ginning of Life. Stand, then, before a mirror, and see
the shadowy faces of the Past peering over your
shoulder in an army that would over-fill the earth —
since, even to the time of the Norman conquest, a man
of to-day may count some ninety millions of forbears
who have mixed their blood in his. More, see those
faces peering through you — looking through your
eyes, giving that shape to your forehead, that turn to
your nostril, that line to your lips ; and realise how in-
significant is any single individual in the line of evolu-
tion. So little of himself is his own, to so very, very
I04 The Red Pagan
small an extent is he able to perpetuate the acquire-
ment of his brief life, that the individual has been truly
said to become in the scientific aspect hardly more than
a germ-bearer — one whose function in the universal
process is merely to hand on to another the flame of
existence.
Then consider the apparatus of thought and emo-
tion which reaches a climax in the brain. Just as the
fleshless hands of milHons of ancestors have given to
your hand its slowly-acquired prehensile power, just
as every peripheral organ is an inherited product tardily
won by myriads of beings that once had active life and
are now dissipated in the mouldered dust of ages, so
the central nervous system and its resultant of con-
scious thought are your legacy from long-gone cycles of
centuries. The human infant is an ape with poten-
tialities, the human child a barbarian capable of civil-
isation ; and you, the man — your brain repeats the an-
cestral brain as your body repeats the ancestral body —
it conforms with a type which varies only minutely in
thousands of years. As you think, then, before the
mirror, see the pale wraiths of ancestral thought come
floating from the far past to merge with and alter the
thoughts which your own experience has originated ;
and, once more, at the height of your pride of individu-
ality, be very humble in the presence of that tremen-
dous debt. You are " yourself '' ; but how much
yourself ? or, rather, how inconceivably little !
Benevolent Mummy 105
One theory of the development of ideas suggests
that, in inheriting the ancestral thought-machine, we
inherit also a number of latent ancestral thoughts. That
is, the hereditary brain-cells, though they be composed
of entirely fresh nerve-plasma, are yet arranged after
an ancestral plan beyond our control, and can sponta-
neously generate thoughts in which individual experi-
ence has no part. The theory is but an extension to
conscious thought of a power well-known to reside in
hereditary nerve-cells when automatic impulse is con-
cerned. Conscious individual brain-acquirement, for
example, can have no share in the nerve-control of the
foetal heart. N. S. Shaler, Harvard professor of geo-
logy, who writes of this and kindred subjects in his
book about The Individual^ relates his endeavours to
capture the spontaneous thoughts that seem just to
rise to the level of consciousness — to be always flitting
over the edge of the conscious horizon ; and finds that
one's capacity to think in a way apparently independ-
ent of his own experience can be strengthened and in-
creased by deliberate effort.
Making the befitting literary application, this theory
furnishes interesting explanation of the irresponsible
character of lyric poetry. From the earliest times the
poet has been regarded as " possessed " by some exter-
nal power. In this " possession " the priestess of Apollo
raved, the Italian improvisatore chanted, the Maori to-
hunga writhed and foamed. From the earliest times
io6 The Red Pagan
the poet's chief themes have been love and death, the
beauty of skies and woods and waters,— aboriginal
passions and the natural phenomena familiar from the
human cradle. We know now that the power resides
in the poet's brain, that the poetic ^ possession '* is
mere escape of brain-centres from their normal con-
trol ; and we infer that lyric poetry is essentially the
product of inherited emotion.
Sometimes the escape is conscious, the inheritance
realised. You feel a detachment, a duality in your
brain, as if some primal breath had blown across it.
In our small local sphere, Roderic Quinn tells me that
there are times when his own individuality seems to
sleep ; when he fancies himself standing on a Donegal
cliff under a wild sky, gazing through driving sleet at
the dark Atlantic heaving below ; and strange alien
thoughts come teeming, crowding. Between dreams
and waking Will Ogilvie, bred on the Scottish border,
has imagined himself heading a reivers' band across
the Tweed, and the picture has recurred with a vivid,
an intimate detail that seems never to have been
learnt through his own senses. And Louise Mack says
that " When I write verse I am not conscious of words
— the feeling and the thought are almost dropped on
the paper. The moment I am conscious, think of a
word — the poem is dead, and I stop — can't hear it,
don't feel it. I always write poetry as if it is someone
else's that I 've half-forgotten, and slowly am drawing
Benevolent Mummy 107
down from the recesses of the brain, driven to it by
some tide of feeling."
Thus is justified the belief which Macaulay
reached on other grounds, that civilisation implies the
decay and death of poetry. The more we read, the
more we remember, the less opportunity we give to the
primal ancestor within us to picture the emotions that
he felt when red blood surged through a virgin brain in
the vigorous youth of the race. It has been written
that every savage is a poet, however imperfect his
power of expression. It may soon be written that
every civiHsed man is prosy. Only here and there
some young and vital brain, escaping from the worry
of modern life, the weight of bookish ages, survives to
astonish us with the keen sight, the full emotion, the
glowing picture, born in some prehistoric group of
brain-cells perchance ten thousand years ago.
The moral is that a man should be kind to his an-
cestors now they are old. If you are a Murphy, before
you read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
reflect that the mass of Gibbon's resounding facts may
bury Red Murtagh, the ancient bard, under a weight
which will make it impossible for him to emit one spark
of the fiery inspiration that gladdened the hearts of his
sept. If you are a Macpherson, think that the study
of medicine may murder an Ossian within you. Your
brain is the tomb of your ancestors ; but they have
io8 The Red Pagan
been buried alive — if you listen you may hear them
squeaking. Conceive the array of personal ghosts put-
ting mournful heads out of their nerve-cells when they
wake up along with you each morning, and hear Lah,
the cave-man, remarking to First-up-a-Tree, the ape-
man : " He read a society novel last night ! That was
a barrowful of clods on Johnson. Johnson's dead!''
No ; don't read so many books ; don't acquire so
much experience ; don't worry your overburdened
brain. Go out into the sun and the rain, and let your
ancestors talk to you. Love, fear, hate, curiosity, — all
your most vital emotions, — they share them all. It
may be, if you are a weakling denizen of cities, that
they still feel them more keenly than you can feel with
your little bit of individuality. Reverence old age,
especially your own old age within your brain, because
that typifies the youth of your race, and you can never
be so young and joyous, so young and strong, so young
and loving, as your race has been. It has been said
that to little children belongs the kingdom of Heaven.
It can be more truly said that to little children belongs
the kingdom of Earth. And this is the gospel and the
Law.
JS^
Little Children 109
BUT, once again, Art is other than Life, and often
a stranger at the board. In his book of
Children's Ways Professor Sully reproduces
many scrawls by juvenile artists that unillu-
mined parents must regard with startled curiosity. To
see elevated to scientific rank the random carica-
tures of ante-bedtime infants is 1 And one
cannot say that Sully justifies his ponderous discussion
of the small people's mimicries. The in-aeternum
deductions from four-year-Tommy's A HORS or
seven-year-Cissy's A MAN remain, after much argu-
ment, invisible. Even the temporary interest is strictly
placid and parental.
From an impersonal standpoint, children's art is
less interesting than savage or aboriginal art, because
it lacks that aesthetic quality of which adult-age
generally shows glimmerings. The child's stimulus is
not artistic, but imitative — probably in essence
creative ; based on that desire to make something,
that pleasure in the Ego's handiwork, which branches
in so many directions from the root of race-preservation.
Professor Sully takes his mimes a trifle too seriously.
Over-seriousness, indeed, is the fault of his book, as
himself dimly realises. His heavy style clogs the
nimble heels of his subject. With twice the energy
he could have told four times as much in half the
space. Books should be like rivers, with a free move-
ment to an ultimate sea Or, if they be landlocked
no The Red Pagan
lakes, replacing with the charm of rest the strength
of motion, the eye should range infinitely through
clear depths. And Prof. SuU/s book is like his
mind — muddy — with synthesis swallowed in the cloud
of details.
Nonetheless, he adds together many attractive
items and illustrations — as, for example, in dealing
with the childish imagination. The childish imagina-
tion is a development of the creative instinct pre-
viously referred to ; the same force impels to the
building of myths and brick houses ; in each case the
essence of the pleasure is a constructive emission from
the Ego. And as this creative power lessens, so les-
sens the individual or racial hold on life.
A child's capacity for vitalising inanimate objects
springs from his own superabundant vitality. He can
not only live himself, but can dower trees and stones
with life by a projection of the Ego — just as the
childlike races did in olden time, as we know by their
myths ; just as childlike savages do to-day. Jean
Ingelow relates how, when about three years old —
I had the habit of attributing intelligence not only
to all living creatures, the same amount and kind of
intelligence that I had myself, but even to stones and
manufactured articles. I used to feel how dull it
must be for the pebbles in the causeway to be obliged
to lie still and only see what was round about. When
I walked out with a little basket for putting flowers in
Little Children hi
I used sometimes to pick up a pebble or two and carry
them on to have a change : then, at the farthest point
of the wall, turn them out, not doubting they would be
pleased to have a new view.
In other words, Jean Ingelow read her Ego into
the Universe ; she re-created the Universe in terms
of herself ; and that is what every individual or every
race does in greater or less degree, in proportion as
physical organisation supplies the need and the power.
So the reality of a doll to a little girl, or of a
toy-horse to a little boy — depending partly upon the
individual brain and its stage of development — de-
pends partly, perhaps chiefly, upon the brain's vital
capacity to raise " the imagination " to the required
pitch. And a child can see men and women where an
adult sees chips and shells, partly because the child's
vitality is stronger than the adult's. A child of very
intense vitality does not need even the symbol. The
little girl in William Canton's book cuddled in her
arms a space of empty air where she saw the "invisible
playmate " lie.
Immaturity of the brain may to some extent ac-
count for such feats of the childish imagination. Be-
fore the higher cells have attained full development
and control a child's brain is apt to confuse in-
ternal with external perceptions. The child who,
frightened by the story of a bogey-man, fears to
go to bed in the dark, does actually see the
112 The Red Pagan
bogey-man in the dark. He is not there to adult
eyes ; but he is there to the child^s brain, and
quite conceivably to the child's eyes — since a
child's visual centres, normally ill-regulated, may paint
an apparition on the retina just as the abnormally ill-
regulated centres of an adult can. When William Can-
ton's little girl died, her father, bending over her, saw
for a moment her " invisible playmate " in the flesh,
just as she saw it always. He thought the sight " in-
credible " — it was cerebrally quite simple.
It follows from what has been said that the need
which many people experience for " perfect scenery "
in dramatic representation is partly a sign of lowered
vitality, or possibly of a brain so busy that it has no
surplus vitality to spare for visualising unseen objects.
Yet it is not so long since, for example, the change
of scene from a forest to a street was depicted
on the stage by a mere change of placard from
A Forest to A Street Shakespear's plays were origin-
ally represented on a floor strewn with rushes, the
side walls hung with arras ; a board with Westmins-
ier, Corintky Messina, fixed the scene of the play ; the
audience's imagination did the rest. When a battle
was to be fought, " two armies fly in represented by
swords and bucklers, and then"— asks Sidney in his
Defence of Poesie — " what hard heart will not receive
it for a pitched field?" We are more exacting now-
adays—partly because brain-Hfe has become so com-
Little Children 113
plex that we cannot imagine a forest unless we see
scenery simulating a forest, or an army unless we see
at least several dozen supers ; and partly, also, because
the modern playgoer is not as strong a man, not as
vital a man, as his forefathers, ignorant of tea and
coffee and tobacco, and of all the multifarious strains
and stresses of an age which the other day impelled
one of its victims to the pathetic complaint, " It *s so
horrid to be hurried ! "
And note that the scenery-exacting person is the
complex-brained person who goes to see Irving, not
the simpler-brained man who prefers Chevalier. The
audience that enjoys Shakespear may be said, gene-
rally speaking, to be a more ''educated" audience than
that which attends the music-halls ; and it demands
more in the way of scenery to make the drama real to
its brain. The Merchant of Venice must be mounted
with historic exactitude. But music-hall performers
do turn after different turn before the same "interior" ;
and the spectators never dream of asking that a cos-
ter song shall be sung in a coster environment, or that
an imitation draper s-shop shall be fitted up before
Dan Leno sings " The Shopwalker." The child dis-
penses with costume and scenery ; the music-hall au-
dience is content with costume ; the theatrical audience
demands both costume and scenery. And there is a
corresponding retrogression in vitality of body and
progression in complexity of brain.
114 The Red Pagan
[It would be interesting to argue from this the
place of the Chinese in the vital scale of races. In a
Chinese theatre there is no scenery, no necessity for
scenery, since the vivid Chinese imagination takes as
much as you please for granted. An actor comes before
the audience and says he is a king, walking in the gar-
dens of his palace. That is enough for the audience :
there is the king, there are the gardens, there is the
palace, complete in every detail. The European eye
sees a curiously-bedizened personage fall flop on the
boards, get up again, and walk off o.p. ; the Chinese
eye sees a beautiful damsel, crossed in love, despairing
of life, drown herself in the canal which runs through
her father's estate, and pictures the finding of the
body, the solemn funeral, the grief of the parents, the
remorse of the responsible male, and fifty conse-
quences more or less remote.]
It is a good observation of Prof. Sully's that a
child so easily sees quaint likenesses betv^een objects
because his mind is untroubled by all the complexity
of the objects. A child's fresh brain bases simple
analogies on leading traits — the only traits he recog-
nises ; while adults, hoarding a multitude of impres-
sions, lose vivacity, and lose also power of detaching
single impressions. Thus the idea of parental rela-
tionship, dominant in W. Canton's " W.V.," sent her
mind leaping to the pretty phrase, "Aren't the buds
the trees' little girls ?" — a phrase poetical, almost re-
Little Children 115
condite, to adult-age, but almost matter-of-fact to a
child.
The explanation of nearly all the quaint sayings
of children lies in this reference from their limited
known to the unknown ; we smile to see Infinity's pyra-
mid toppling from such an impossible apex-balance.
Thus one of the first notions of a child, as of a savage,
is that motion implies life. The little girl who offered
a biscuit to a tram is paralleled by the Red Indians
who brought com to the first prairie locomotive. And
doubtless the awe with which Fulton's steamboat was
regarded is kin to a dog's fear of a bone moved by a
string. The immature or incompetent intelligence is
always generalising on insufficient data : from one ana-
logy it argues others, often proceeding to complete re-
semblance. Just why the mind should be so eager
to associate unrelated or correlated ideas is inexpli-
cable: there is no physical or psychical explanation
of the reason of the pleasure we take in discovering
likenesses or differences in concepts or percepts ; but
the pleasure itself is one of the most notable facts of
mental life, especially in children. One guesses dimly,
and sees an adumbration of the universal flux of
things, scattered into moving variety and returning
to identity as to a natural home of rest. But our
inborn rhythm, our need and joy of classification,
account for much of the charm in poetical allusions
to stars as "flowers of the sky,'* or to flowers as "stars
ii6 The Red Pagan
of the earth," or to butterflies as " pansies flying " —
the last a childish analogy.
' A child^s "pitiless logic" arises partly from his
power of subjective concentration. He not only
sees one aspect of a thing to the possible exclusion
of all other aspects ; but temporarily he devotes the
whole mental force to the act of seeing. It is this
singleness of view which accounts for much of the
" unfeelingness " of childhood. Often the child's
mind cannot hold more than one emotion at a time,
and the propositions crowd out the corollaries. Thus
the boy who shouted down the shaft where his bro-
ther had fallen, " Say, Tommy, if you don't ever
come up alive can I have your pup ?" was not neces-
sarily callous or unfraternal. He was simply domi-
nated by the pup-idea to the exclusion of the
brother-idea. Quite conceivably, in another mood, the
same boy would have given all his belongings or his
life to get his brother out. There are cases where the
egoistic sentiment is obviously characteristic, yet it
does not follow that blame can be attached even hypo-
thetically. Utter unselfishness can no more be expect-
ed from the childish brain than looyds. in losecs. can
be expected from childish legs. Prof. Sully quotes
a boy of three who was told by his mother to stay and
mind a baby-sister while she went downstairs. On
going up again some time after she met him on the
stairs. " Being asked why he had left the baby, he
Little Children 117
said there was a bee in the room and he was afraid
he would get stung if he stayed there. His mother
asked him if he wasn't afraid his little sister would
get stung. He said ' Yes/ but added that if he stayed
in the room the bee might sting them both, and then
she would have two to take care of." No charge of
want of sympathy lies against this plausible little self-
seeker. He may fairly plead mental minority. The
child is to be tested by his own standards, not by
adults'.
Possibly, however, the attempt at a scientific ex-
planation of children's ways is itself essentially un-
scientific. It ends with the statement, '' The child
is young" — and understanding of that all-comprehend-
ing youth comes better from examples than from pre-
cepts, from illustrations than from arguments. Prof.
Sully's long chapter on "The Age of Imagination"
adds little to Kenneth Grahame's picture of Harold the
muffin-man, " who day and night went through pas-
sages and up and down staircases, ringing a noiseless
bell and offering phantom muffins to invisible way-
farers. It sounds a poor sort of sport ; and yet — to
pass along busy streets of your own building, for ever
ringing an imaginary bell and offering airy muffins of
your own make to a bustling, thronging crowd of your
own creation !" Or how many books of commentary
on boys' ways is Huck Finn worth ? It is the old con-
troversy — should one see flowers as a botanist or as a
ii8 The Red Pagan ..
poet ? But are botanist and poet mutually exclusive ?
Can one not be a little of both ?
CHILDISH egoism, inconscient, single-minded,
is admirably illustrated by the literary method
of Kipling. The argument may come by way of
Kim; possibly Kipling's best long-story, cer-
tainly the best-finished, completest. Kim opens
tamely ; later you are charmed and absorbed ; and
the book closes with the old effect of brilliancy,
dexterity, et praeterea not very much. Why can-
not Kipling master the architectonics of the
novel? Why are his short-stories so much
more satisfactory, in the way of Art? Because
he was, is, and will be a precocious Indian child, whose
art stopped short in the Gazette office at Lahore, and
who cannot add a man's stature to his boyish cubit.
He can see ; but he cannot combine things seen, can-
not induce and deduce. His clear vision — it is the
child's ; his bright, clean touch — it is the clever school-
boy's ; his fresh, unjaded wonder, his perpetual inter-
est in the spectacle of life — these are the prerogative
of the narrow, undeveloped brain, with energy massed
in a torrent, not spreading in a pool.
Consider the child and the savage (that other
child) seen throughout Kipling's work. Caf tains
Little Children 119
Courageous — a boys* story-book simply. The Jungle
Books — children's familiar stories of animals that talk.
Wee Willie Winkie — stories of children so well re-
membered, therefore so well told. Stalky and Co. —
another boys* story-book. In the short-stories note
the dominance of ghost and soldier — superstition and
war — the things that terrify and enchant the child and
the savage. Love enters rarely, and then less as a
thing felt than as a thing seen. The Light that
Failed missed its mark because KipHng lacks syn-
thetic power ; he could see the great motive, but not
in its proportions and relations. All Kipling's longer
prose has that panoramic effect — the effect of a suc-
cession of isolated impressions, detached objects ; and
it is so that a child-savage sees life : he cannot fuse
and deduce. And in Kipling's verse and shorter prose :
the fondness for machinery — what is it but Budge's
yearning " to see the wheels go wound " ? The dis-
proportionate stress on the Flag of England, the con-
tempt for other flags : what are these but the tribal
traditions of the savage ? And so on.
Now take Kim — a story for boys, a panorama of
India. We can like it because we are all children of a
larger growth, as Kipling is a child of arrested growth.
The boy-'' hero," Kim, is a boy all through : there are
no Passions in the book ; and motley India passes
before us in a succession of pictures, just as Kim passes
before us in a succession of episodes. There is in the
I20 The Red Pagan
book no inevitable continuity, no vital rotundity : any
chapter could be lopped off and replaced by a few tag-
words without bringing sense of loss. That is the
way in which the child-Kipling sees Life — as a series
of disconnected impressions. And the essence of Art
is to unite impressions in the Whole of Life — to say
why, to show whither. For the rest: Kipling's
notion of the Indian Secret Service is attractively dis-
played (he has a child's love of the cabalistic Secret).
The Babu is a marvel, though his contrasts are forced ;
he wants sub-tones and side-aspects, but Kipling does
not deal in these ; a child does not see them.
Kipling's affirmation of his *' right of plagiary " re-
presents the child's rudimentary notion of fair dealing.
Yet the argument against plagiary is clear. It is com-
mon to hear literary theft defended because many
great authors have stolen ; though plainly, if theft
be a crime, the number or celebrity of the criminals
makes no difference in its turpitude. One is asked
whether it is not better to borrow and improve than
not to borrow and not to improve ; and one answers.
Certainly, if the debt be acknowledged and paid.
Ethically, in literature and other fields, it is not better
to steal and improve, than not to steal and not to im-
prove. Cellini must not steal my nugget to make a
statue. Kipling must not steal my little ewe-lamb,
feed it and shear it, and call it his sheep.
Kipling Curiously Considered 121
Before Art, Justice. A rnan who sweats his brain
has just as much right to the credit and profit of his
labour as a man who sweats his body. The man who
steals the work of another*s brain is just as contemp-
tible a thief as the man who steals the work of
another's hands.
When one man sows, and ploughs, and reaps, the
racial instinct affirms it unjust for another to seize his
crop — no matter whether his implements are the pro-
duct of others' invention, no matter whether the theft
is turned to beneficent uses. There is strict analogy
between the case of the husbandman, in that respect,
and the case of the writer.
The racial instinct of justice declines to believe
that, because robbers formerly flourished, and the fruit
of the husbandman's labour was frequently stolen by
others more powerful, therefore robbery should be
abetted and legalised to-day. No precedent justifies
an essential injustice.
The writer's claim to the fruit of his labour is not
the less valid to-day because Shakespear stole three
hundred years ago.
The ideas of Shakespear's day were in many res-
pects barbarous. In Shakespear's day, a writer stole
freely. True. And in Shakespear's day il. per head
was paid for the discovery of witches, who were hanged
duly. We have improved upon Shakespear's day in
both respects.
122 The Red Pagan
But barbarous conceptions still linger. Within
the last few years Irish peasants at Clonmel murdered
an old woman as a witch. Within the last few months
voices from Sydney and Melbourne Universities have
defended Kipling's plagiarism.
Let us stamp out those barbarous conceptions.
Civilised law, based on the racial sense of justice,
now upholds an author's property in his original work
for forty-two years, and defends him from piracy.
Some writers have contended that, where copyright is
clear, the writer's title to his property should be as
permanent as a title to any other kind of property.
The fact that Shakespear and Moliere took other
people's property where they found it, does not appear
to have had weight with the enactors of international
copyright.
Thus the opinion of international jurists supports
the racial sense of justice. And the influence of the
best modern writers is thrown against plagiary. It
is the man with nothing to lose who denounces Pro-
perty. It is usually the writer with nothing to lose
who denounces property in writings.
Again: because of Art, Justice.
The best economical incentive to industry is this :
that a man shall receive the reward of his labour.
The best incentive to artistic creation is this : that
the artist shall receive the credit and profit of his art.
In a community of thieves, industry decays. In a
community of plagiarists, Art decays.
Kipling Curiously Considered 123
" Stop thief ! '' Justice cries it. Art echoes it.
'^ut Kiphng's notion of literary honesty is quite
other ; for he writes :
" When ' Omer smote 'is bloomhi lyre,
He 'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea ;
An what he thought 'e might require,
*E went an' took — the same as me I *'
There you have, in Kiphng's own words, Kiphng's
own idea of his writer's privilege. He has reahsed the
commonplace that no man works for himself or by
himself. We all build our palaces or hovels with the
materials which other men have collected ; and the
most we can hope to do is to bring a little, a very little,
that our own hands have felled from the unexplored
forest or dug from the virgin mine. Originality comes
chiefly in the use of the tools and materials, in the
shaping and plan of the edifice.
But there are three ways of dealing with our debt
to predecessors. We can acknowledge the debt ; we
can ignore it ; or we can repudiate it outright. The
first way is honest; the last way is knavish; the
middle way is the way of compromise with conscience
so as to get all possible credit at the least possible cost
of principle.
It is the middle way that Kipling has chosen. His
fine talent, his splendid industry, would not by them-
selves have raised the pile of excellent work that stands
124 '^"^ ^^^ Pagan
to his profit and reputation. Kipling has reaHsed that
to be exploiter pays better than to be inventor ; and he
has become a capitalist of other men's brains, develop-
ing facts and ideas that would be for the most part
useless without his intelligent control. But the labour-
ers get no share of the profit of Kipling's industry —
possibly they do not deserve a share, seeing that they
contribute so little to make the product marketable ;
and the whole credit of the enterprise goes to Kipling.
For answer to objectors, there is printed with Kip-
ling's work the frank declaration, the cynical confes-
sion, that has just been quoted.
Kiphng's way is open to thousands of men who
have so far mastered the technic of their art that they
can take a vital idea, pass it through their own minds,
and so transform it with their own language that it
appears positively new, only the indispensable kernel
being borrowed. If a man with Daley's skill in rhymes
chose to go to Elizabethan song-books and poetry-
books, he would find hundreds of bright fancies, quaint
conceptions, that need only re-writing with the art at
his disposal in order to be modernised and re-vitalised.
There are scores of paragraphs in newspapers every
week, contributed by obscure seers, that require only
Conrad's or Hewlett's labour to become brilliant short
stories. But it is a good thing for Literature that
there are few writers as unscrupulous as Kipling. The
unwritten literary law, based upon majority-ideas oi
Kipling Curiously Considered
125
honesty, says that you shall not deliberately take
another man's proper work as your own without giving
that other credit for his transferred value, in his indi-
vidual degree.
Doubtless Kipling has exceptional talent for this
business of literary assimilation ; and his own roots
also blossom in his work. He can fairly claim that,
but for his seeing eye, his ready hand, many of the
flowers that he has gathered would have wasted their
sweetness, or never would have bloomed at all. His
quick recognition of " points " of phrase, or rhythm, or
colour, or plot, is perhaps his most excellent faculty.
When Kipling wrote "Bill *Awkins" —
''*As anybody seen Bill 'Awkins? "
" Now 'ow in the devil would I know? "
''' E's taken my girl out walkin\
An I've got to tell 'im so —
Gawd — bless — 'im I
I've got to tell 'im so " —
New Orleans people said at once it was modelled on a
familiar negro ditty :
" Hab any d yd seen my Lulu ? "
" How in de debbil would you know her? "
" / 'd know her by her apurn-strings
W her shoe-strings a-hangin' on de -fio\
Go I — darn — her !
'iV* her shoe-strings a-hangin' on de iioT
126 The Red Pagan
But the New Orleans ditty had only a local audience,
Kipling*s an international. And of the thousands who
admired the vernacular force of "Bill *Awkins*' only
a comparative two or three knew that its vigour was
bom in some humble negro brain on the banks of
Mississippi.
Kipling prend son bien ou il le trouve, and as he
has read more than most men, and travelled much
more than most, no single brain can track him to all
his sources. But when he wrote " Recessional," the cry
was instant that he had borrowed the germ-idea from
Cardinal Newman*s " England." Comparison will
show that he borrowed a good deal more than the
germ. Here is Newman's verse : —
ENGLAND.
Tyre of the West, and glorying in the name
More than in Faith's pure fame!
trust not crafty fort nor rock renowned
Earn\d upon hostile ground ;
Wielding Trade's master-keys^ at thy proud will
To lock or loose its waters, England! trust not still.
Dread thine own power! Since haughty Babel's
prime
High towers have been man's crime.
Since her hoar age, when the huge moat lay bare.
Strongholds have been men's snare.
Kipling Curiously Considered 127
Thy nest is in the crags ; ah, refuge frail!
Mad counsel in its hour, or traitors, will prevail.
He who scann 'd Sodom for His righteous men
Still spares thee for thy ten ;
But, should rash tongues the Bride of Heaven defy^
He will not pass thee by ;
For, as earth's kings welcome their spotless guest,
So gives He them by turn, to suffer or be blest.
Let any skilled verse-writer throw Newman's
ideas into the metre of these verses accredited to
Francis Quarles — "^
Lord God of Gods, before whose throne
Stand storms and fire, what shall we
Return to Heaven that is our own.
When all the world belongs to thee?
We have no offering to impart
But praises and a wounded heart.
* In a letter from P. McM. Glynn, Adelaide. — But
Kipling may have found his model in the Eiigland and
Bengal: and other Poems of D. L. Richardson, an
Anglo-Indian of the last generation. Richardson's book
contains a version of ** A Khoond War Lyric" addressed
** To Laha Pennoo, the God of War," which commences:
Great God of Battles I Oh, forgive
(For thou our wants a?id weakness sa2U,)
If we so long have seenied to live
Regardless of thy glorious law ;
Our herds were few, our fields were bare,
Our bravest warriors bowed with care,,.
The Red Pagan
Great God, whose kingdom hath no end, \
Into zvhose secrets none can dive, \
Whose mercy none can apprehend, \
Whose justice none can feel, and live, — \
What my dull heart cannot aspire \
To know, Lord, teach me to admire \
add a few phrases of his own, a few familiar tags ; and
if he does not get the following, with the topic of \
a British naval review for a text, he will get something
very like it — ]
RECESSIONAL. \
God of our fathers, known of old, \
Lord of our far-flung battle-line — 1
Beneath whose awful hand we hold |
Dominion over palm and pine — \
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, \
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies, j
The captains and the Kings depart ; j
Still stands thine ancient sacrifce, \
An humble and a contrite heart. \
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, \
Lest we forget — lest we forget! \
Far-called our navies melt away — !
On dune and headland sinks the fire; ]
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday J
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! \
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, \
Lest we forget — lest we forget! ... t
Kipling Curiously Considered 129
And so on. Seemingly Kipling took emotion and atti-
tude from Newman, metre from Quarles, the line
Dominion over palm and pine from Emerson,* and
the rest from his memory and the daily newspapers.
Is it any wonder that (as it has been printed) he flung
*' Recessional " into the waste-basket ? Give Kipling
all credit for being the only man to see the " Reces-
sional " chance, and the only man to take it, the only
man to fake it : he is an artisan who knows his busi-
ness. But, on the weakness of " Recessional," to call
Kipling a supreme artist, and to hail his product as
belonging to the highest class of original art— that is
indeed a confusion of categories into which only the
ignorant and uncritical can fall.
Nowadays everything that Kipling publishes is
to be read with suspicion to the sound of " 'Omer s
bloomin' lyre.'' In 1899, the Siegel-Cooper Em-
ployees' Association, of New York, asked Kipling for
a piece of verse to put on a social programme. There
was sent to them this version of a piece from Barrack-
Room Ballads (p. 157) " with a very cordial note from
the poet's wife " :
* And I will swim the ancient sea
To float my child to victory,
And grant to dwellers with the pine
Dominion o'er the palm and vine,
— WOODNOTES, ii.
130 The Red Pagan
Love and Death once ceased their strife
At the Tavern of Man's Life,
Called for wine and threw, alas!
Each his quiver on the grass.
When the bout was o'er they found
Mingled arrows strewed the ground:
Hastily they gathered then
Each the loves and lives of men.
Ahy the fateful dawn deceived!
Mingled arrows each one sheaved ;
Death's dread armoury was stored
With the shafts he most abhorred ;
Love's light quiver groaned beneath
Venom-headed darts of death.
Save yCy maidens! This is why
Old men love while young men die.^
Unluckily, while the N.Y. society was still being
congratulated on its autograph copy and its good for-
tune, some bookworm claimed to have turned up these
lines in the work of Richard Flecknoe, a third-rate
English poet and dramatist in the reign of Charles II.
Love and Death d tK way once meeting.
Having passed a friendly greeting,
Sleep their weary eye-lids closing.
Lay them down, themselves reposing;
* The episode is reported in The Criterion^ New
York, February, 1899.
Kipling Curiously Considered 131
When this fortune did befall 'em,
Which after did so rmich appal 'em ;
Love, whom divers cares molested,
Could not sleep, but while Death rested,
All in haste away he posts him:
But his haste full dearly costs him ;
For it chanced, that going to sleeping.
Both had given their darts in keeping
Unto Night ; who (Error's mother)
Blindly knowing not tK one from tK other.
Gave Love Death 's and ne'er perceived it.
Whilst as blindly Love received it ;
Since which time, their darts confounding.
Love now kills instead of wounding ;
Death, our hearts with sweetness filing.
Gently wounds, instead of killing.
New York journals appealed to Kipling for an
explanation why he had passed off these verses
without a hint of debt to Flecknoe ; but the oracle,
having spoken once, was mute. Oracles are usually
sparing of their words ; and Kipling presumably con-
tented himself with winking — same as 'Omer.
The plagiarism here is in quite a different cate-
gory from the adaptation of Ernest Seton-Thompson's
method in Kipling's Jungle Books, or from the imita-
tion of the cadences and mannerisms of Whittier's
" Barbara Frietchie " in Kipling's " Ballad of the King's
Jest." In these cases Kipling takes no more than a
writer's privilege : he is indebted for inspiration, but
132 The Red Pagan
the invention is his own. In his versification (in " The
Flowers") of D. Macdonald's description of coastal
Victoria, he takes a writer's privilege rather too
freely ; though such reproductions of another's vision
may be defended on the grounds of changed mode
and added virtue.
Kipling's '' omniscience " astounds commonplace
readers no less than his versatility : he is so wonder-
fully "crammed." As The Pall Mall Gazette sang: —
The secrets of the sea are his ; the mysteries of Ind^
He knows minutely every way in which mankind has
sinned ;
He has by heart the lightships 'twixt the Goodwins
and the Cape,
The language of the elephant , the ethics of the ape ;
He knows the slang of Silver Street, the horrors of
Lahore,
And how the man-seal breasts the waves that buffet
Labrador^ ...
He knows each fijie gradation 'twixt the General and
the sub.,
The terms employed by Atkins when they -fling him
from a pub.;
He knows an Ekka ponys points, the leper s drear
abode.
The seamy side of Simla, the flaring Mile End road ;
He knows the Devil's tone to souls too pitiful to damn.
He knows the taste of every regimental mess in
''cham'\'
Kipling Curiously Considered 133
He knows enough to annotate the Bible verse by verse,
And how to draw the shekels from the British public's
purse
Or seems to know. For it is a remarkable thing
that KipHng's local reference scarcely ever passes
muster with the local resident ; his technical jargon
scarcely ever rings truly to the technical expert.
Kipling's description of every place most impresses
the people who do not live there ; his use of trade
terms appears wonderful to the men in every other
trade. He sketches Australia in a few lines^ and
Ernest Favenc comments on his inaccuracy ; he pic-
tures a painter at work, and D. H. Souter objects to
his phrasing. The inexplicable jumble of " The
Young Queen/' with its misapplied " Kaikouras," is a
case in point. How could it be otherwise? how
expect the swift Kipling method to be also sure ? For,
as Bedford wrote of Kipling, crudely but racily :
/ put on my specs in Port Phillip, and I spat on
Sydney Quay,
For Vm the bloke that hits it in once — no serving my
time for me!
And I cleaned my nails over Brisbane, and I sneezed
for an hour at Perth,
And then I caine home on the English mail and I
wrote of the Big Wide Earth.
Kipling knows a great deal, especially about India
and about Painting — as shown in the Indian stories
134 The Red Pagan
and in The Light that Failed; but his knowledge
even of Painting and of India is superficial, and in
some other things he does not go even surface-deep.
The allegation that the Indian work was revised by
J. Lock wood Kipling, and that The Light that Failed
was overseen by Sir Edward Poynter, may or
may not be correct ; but undoubtedly much of Kip-
ling's other work is in glaring need of such skilled
revision by a man who knows the subject through and
through.
For Australian cavils are paralleled everywhere.
When Kipling published his story of " An Unqualified
Pilot " on the Hughli river. The Englishman, Calcutta,
smote him hip and thigh to show that India alone was
too vast for Kipling to know, and pilloried some score
of conspicuous errors in fact and inference. " Mr.
Kipling," said the writer, " has very evidently primed
himself by reading the article on the Hughli in
Hunie/s Gazetteer ; but he is too careless to transcribe
the simplest statement correctly." When he published
Captains Courageous everybody was amazed at the
book's verisimilitude to the life of the cod-fishers —
everybody but the cod-fishers. One of their mouth-
pieces pointed out to The Bookman (N.Y.) that " to
anyone who is used to sniff salt water the production
smells of the lamp ; and he has ruined the talk." The
composition of his crew was criticised ; and, as for the
kellick in the hands of a boy out on the Banks — " I
Kipling Curiously Considered 135
don*t know what one could do wdth it out there," said
a cod-fisher ; " I suppose Kipling saw it on shore at
Gloucester."
Similarly, this is how the American railroad story
— " *oc7 " — strikes an American railroad man ij^he
Argonaut y August 16, 1897): —
Mr, Kipling is a keen observer, and writes pretty
good American for an outsider ; but if he had spent a
night in a roundhouse with his ears open he would
never have used ** loco " for locomotive, or have omitted
the familiar " engine " altogether ; he would not have
said ** bogie " when he meant ** truck " ; he would not
have allowed a parlor-car to be hitched to a suburban
commuter's train ** ahead of the caboose"; he would
not have made his engines speak of themselves as
** Americans " (in the sense of pattern), or painted his
hero pea-green with a red ** buffer-bar."
Further, no American writer would use as a simile
for brilliancy ** a fireman's helmet in a street parade,**
as few of his countrymen have ever seen a fireman in a
metallic head-covering such as is worn in London.
I suppose it *s all right to strengthen a situation by
omitting the guard-rail from an eighty-foot bridge— it
gives a pleasant, breezy, western, get-there-or-bust,
nigger-on-the-safety-valve movement ; and maybe it 's
good fiction to bring about the catastrophe with a
hundred-pound piglet who ** rolled right under the
pilot " and thereby caused the ** bogies ** to lift ; but on
plain, every-day railroads there is a guard-rail at every
open culvert, and even the illustrations to Mr. Kipling's
story admit cow-catchers.
136 The Red Pagan
I've learned a good deal about India from \
Rudyard ; but when I read his Yankee stories I wonder \
if, perhaps, I have n't learned some things that are n't i
so. \
That is v^hat most readers fail to wonder. The i
engineer who finds fault with the catalogue of machin- \
ery in "Mc Andrews' Hymn" sees as little wrong with \
Stalky and Co. as English public-school masters may \
see with " McAndrews' Hymn/' We can all under- 1
stand a caricature of our own profession ; but the cari- j
cature of another man's profession, when vigorously \
made, is apt to be taken for truth. T. E. Page, Master \
at Charterhouse, told The Bookman (Lond.) that " as 1
a record of ordinary school life " Stalky and Co, " is a ;
gross and absolute travesty of facts." But '* A Farm- \
er's Son," writing to Literature (December 31, 1898), J
did not notice the school characters of Stalky and Co. : i
he complained that Kipling had misused the term
"milk-fever" ; that manure is not manipulated with a
two-pronged, long-handled " pitchfork," but with a
three-or-four-pronged, short-handled, dung-fork ; and
that farm-labourers, used to cattle, would not run from
them in a panic as represented by Kipling.
Similarly, the American reader who notices the
parody of Emerson's "Brahma" in Kipling's "An
American," may ignore the parody of " The Wife of
Usher's Well " that a Scottish reader notices in " The
Sea Wife." The Indian officer who finds fault with
Kipling Curiously Considered 137
minute details of Kipling's soldier stories may be sup-
posed to take the nautical Kipling for gospel — not
knowing that in the " Ballad of Paul Jones " Kipling
" introduces a ship of a rating till then unknown to
the navies of the world — a seventy-three." Or that
in the ** Clampherdown " ballad Kipling makes a battle-
ship **open fire at seven miles" on a light cruiser,
armed with the most awful little Hotchkiss gun, with
which the cruiser walloped the battleship, and then the
battleship's crew, as she was going down, stepped
aboard the cruiser, which was grinding against the
battleship^s side, and the cruiser's company all lay down
and died of astonishment ; and then, without being in
the least affected by the big battleship's suction, the
cruiser sheered off, defying all the laws of physics as
she had defied those of the universe, to say nothing of
the naval regulations.
For that is criticism by a naval officer who possibly
believes that Mulvaney, Learoyd, and Ortheris are
correct to the last atom of pipeclay.
Remains to say that, in spite of all, Kipling is for
the greater part an original observer, an original
writer; that some of his verses will linger long, and
that some of his stories are imperishable ; and that,
because his work is so good, and some of it is in its
way so great, it is all the more pity that he should be-
come official pander to " the baser military and com-
mercial spirit " ; all the more pity that his writmgs
138 The Red Pagan
should be marked by so many lapses of taste and exe- \
cution, of truth and honesty. This note of some of \
Kipling's shortcomings is written to assist in " putting i
him where he belongs/' and to serve as counterblast to \
the adulation of the mob. That he should be praised \
as one of the most forcible writers of the last century, \
in prose and in verse, is no less his desert ; though his |
verse is rarely poetry, and often his prose is merely |
vigorous journalese, i
KIPLING'S childish love of novelty, his childish
interest in the last picture of the passing show,
have greatly aided his commercial success.
F. P. Dunne satirises admirably Kipling*s apti-
tude to meet a momentary topic with a new set of
verses, a temporary fashion with a new book. Modern
readers are as eager for novelty as Paul's Athenians
were : and why should they not be eager ?
Years ago I shared a railway compartment for a
couple of hours .with William Bede Dalley — one of
the most cultivated intelligences that Australia has
nourished. The talk fell on books. Dalley said
that, looking back over his life, he could plainly trace
successive periods of intellectual development — just as,
looking at the side of a cliffy one can sometimes dis-
tinguish the succession of superposed geological
New Books and Blue Books 139
strata. Fiction was his first love in literature — he was
a glutton of novels when a boy. Then he drifted into
poetry, and from poetry into history, and from history
into science, and from science onward to philosophy.
"And now?'' "Now," said Delley, "I enjoy liter-
ature in all its manifestations. But if there is one
class of books I prefer to another, I think it must be "
— with a flashing smile — " why, New Books ! "
There is no disputing the seduction of New Books
for AustraHans. The " new " books are always " out "
at the libraries, and one may keep an *'old" book
thrice as long ; while to every well-regulated metro-
politan bookshop is attached a staff of customers who
know the weekly European mail-day better than the
paid employees, and can calculate to a nicety the time
when the cold chisel will creak musically into the tops
of the precious cases behind the counter. Then and
there they cluster like ants round a honeycomb, happy
to be permitted to hold the hammer. " It is their
hour," as Pinero puts it. " There is only one hour in
a bookman's week," says the Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith
— " one supreme hour. His poor life is like the arch
of a crescent : so many days lead up to that hour, so
many weary days decline from it. No matter what he
mav- strive for, there is a moment when the Case Mail
taps him upon the shoulder and says, ' Man, this hour
is the best that Literature has to spare you.' It
may come to him in calm or in tempest, lighted by the
140 The Red Pagan
steady radiance of Frederic Harrison, or by the glitter
of the evil stars of Marie Corelli ; but however it
comes, be it good or evil, it is his hour — let him
dwell upon every second of it ! "
Doubtless Dalley and Pinero knew what they
were talking about. In the gloss and crackle of new
books there is a bewitching beaute du diable that will
stir literary blood in spite of all the maxims of experi-
ence. You have been stirred by it before : you know
it won't last: you half turn away to the time-tested
second-hand shelf: then the leaves flutter as some
curious Columbus-customer peers between the uncut
pages, and your heart flutters too — you are undone.
Poor little bird, once more in the coils of the serpent !
and . . . how delightful it is ! in spite of right-think-
ing Emerson, with his
Rule I.— Never read any book that is not a year
old—
a rule which he himself was not too careful to keep.
And the best of it is that all the booksellers advertise
that *' customers are not pressed to buy." They don't
care for your money, but they like you to be an orna-
mental presence in the shop, and lean picturesquely
against the shelves, and add a certain tone and dis-
tinction to the rows of classics. The booksellers' own
special newspapers are continually urging the back-
ward subscriber to dare to be a Daniel — better than a
Daniel ! — and try and make an attractive little den for
New Books and Blue Books 141
literary lions to come and pick their horrid little bones
in. " And d — n the sales ! " said one vigorous organ
recently. So the New-Book lover glows to think
himself a knight bravely spurring his hobby to the as-
sistance of some bookshopping damn-sell in distress.
It is the world-old instinct of the Earth turning
gladly to the kiss of the Sun, of Earth-animals leaping
from their wintry torpor to rejoice in the Spring : for
New Books are the Spring of Literature.
The other staple of bookselling industry is Blue
Books. They say that the best-read volume in Maori-
land's Parliamentary Library is a French one. This
seems strange, since the culture-standard of Maori-
land's Parliament is moderate only. But the volume's
joyous peculiarity is to contain a number of passages
so " darkly, deeply, beautifully blue," even for France,
that in order to avoid a governmental onslaught they
had to be printed in a foreign language, and the bene-
volent compilers chose English. And this is how the
hair comes out of Maoriland's Parliamentary cocoa-
nuts.
Of course, members of Parliament are supposed
to have eaten of the Fruit, of the Tree, of the Know-
ledge, of Good and Evil. Libraries " for the general "
are more rigorously weeded. When the excellent cata-
logue of the library of Rockhampton School of Arts
reaches Zola, for example, you are directed to The
142 The Red Pagan
Downfall, Dr. Pascal, Fruit fulness. Honour of the
Army, Lourdes, Paris, Rome, and Truth; and the
catalogue ends abruptly. No naughty Nana, no Pot-
Bouille, no reference to les Rougon-Macquart. But
Lourdes, and Truth, and the rest did not sell well in
Australia. It is sad, but it is so.
Yet a few years ago, when you had to purchase
Zola Hke Sunday drinks, with precaution, the Sydney
booksellers could n*t keep Zola on their shelves. There
was one shop in particular that made a small fortune
out of L 'Assommoir. But if a stranger went and asked
for it, the manager scanned him closely and said he
didn't know — they might have it — they would see —
would he leave the money and his address? Then
the stranger would go home, and at midnight a packet
with five seals, seven wrappings, and several ounces of
string tied round it in complicated knots, would be
left mysteriously in a flower-pot in his garden ; and
in the morning, warned by an anonymous letter, the
purchaser would get the packet and disentangle the
book and open it at the description of the fight in
the laundry, and be happy all the day.
It is sad, but it is no longer so. We have gained
sense and lost pruriency; though Australia is still
wedded to parochial ways of thought, and " the back-
blocks " still exhibit a preference for Blue Books.
Farmers and selectors, as a rule, are poor patrons
of literature ; and a Sydney bookseller used to tell
New Books and Blue Books 143
how in his young days of ideals and enthusiasm he
partly imported, partly compiled an immense manual
of agriculture specially adjusted to Australian con-
ditions of weather and crops, and humped it labor-
iously into the back-blocks. And the representative
Australian farmer would dubiously turn over the pages
which showed him with many illustrations how he
could rise to fortune in three good seasons, while hold-
ing his own in the three bad seasons and the three
half-and-half seasons intervening, and would groan as
he closed the volume that times were too hard — he
really couldn't afford it. Then, when the disap-
pointed agent had packed up, and was turning away
to curse the representative Australian farmer in his
incomings and his outgoings, and his downsittings and
his uprisings, and his ensilage and his fodder
and his sheep, the r.A.f.'s eye would suddenly
brighten with an idea, and he would lean over to
whisper hoarsely, * Say, mister, hain't yer got hany-
thing blue? What's thishyer "Maria the Monk" I
hear them talkin' about? I wouldn' mind givin' ten
bob for somethin' real spicy." So the book-man labor-
iously humped his ideals and his enthusiasm and his
whole art and practice of Australian agriculture back
to Sydney, and sold them for waste paper ; and im-
ported tons of Maria Monk and Boccaccio and Plain
Blue Talk and the rest ; and on his next visit, to the
backblocks the representative Australian farmer would
144 The Red Pagan
ride forty miles after him on the chance of securing
"one of them books with pictures of women hke yer
sold to Bill *Arris at the Nine-Mile Scrub."
THAT bookseller*s experience is another illustra-
tion of the dominance of primitive instincts in
the country. Those instincts play a larger part
in the country than in the cities, since agricul-
tural bush-environment not only fails, as a rule, to
stimulate the complex tastes that we associate with
civilised life, but gives no opportunity for indulging
such tastes when formed. And an unexercised
"taste," like an unexercised limb, quickly atrophies
and becomes useless. Many of the poorer bush agri-
culturists are reduced by their environment almost to
the level of savages ; and their promiscuous relation-
ships shock a city moralist. He calls these " deprav-
ity," but there is more reason for calling them " neces-
sity." The city moraHst, if he has not wine in his
cellar, or ale in his cupboard, certainly has a public-
house at his corner. The " immoral " bushman is
possibly twenty miles or more from a public-house —
where the liquor is never examined by a Government
inspector ; and when maize is a shilling a bushel he
doesn't often visit that public-house. The city moral-
ist has schools for his children, a church for his wife.
Men on the Land 145
a theatre for himself ; parks to walk in and libraries
to read in ; music, and picture-galleries, and pleasant
scenery, and agreeable social intercourse ; a suburban
residence with gas and water laid on, and dainty food,
and a white cloth on his table, and flowers, and slip-
pers, and sheets, and many of the other things that
help to make life tolerable.
The " immoral " bushman has few or none of
these, but he has twenty acres of " clearing " studded
with innumerable stumps which he looks forward to
digging out in his spare time — and the average city
moralist would be a raging and blasphemous heathen
long before he had dug out two stumps. Also, the
bushman has a creek half-a-mile away with a muddy
pool and memories of dead bullocks in it, and he has
a leaky bucket in which he painfully carries water
from the creek, and he has tweed trousers with fifteen
seats in them laid one on top of the other, and boots
which he has made of raw calfskin, and a hut with
a bark roof kept down by huge stones that bulge it
perceptibly and keep the casual stranger awake at
night wondering when they are going to fall through
on top of him. Further, the bushman has children
neatly dressed in oatmeal-bags, and a horse so thin
that he cuts the harness, and occasionally he takes his
gate off its hinges — if he is rich enough to have a
gate — and drives three-inch nails through it, and at-
taches it to the thin horse, and starts out to " do a bit
146 The Red Pagan
o' harrowin'," while the oatmeal-bags toddle enthusi-
astically behind. And if you are dining with him
he may offer you some " goanna," which he recom-
mends as being nice and white, like fish — if it i s a bit
tough ; or a little stewed wallaby ; or even a slice of
mutton, if there is a squatter near enough to borrow
sheep from on dark evenings. And he has economi-
cal damper as heavy as the puddings boiled by North
Sea fishermen between two dishes lashed together, so
that they may swell in the stomach and keep you
comfortably full for forty hours at a stretch. And he
has heat, and flies, and scrub — and when he tires of
these he has more heat, and more flies, and more scrub
— and so on to what seems hke eternity. And he has
— the creature that he calls his wife. She is his
theatre, his picture-gallery, his restaurant, his new
novel, his pleasant musical evening, and a lot of other
city relaxations — all rolled into one.*
The monotonous misery of this picture is realised
to the full — with greater or less variety of detail — by
hundreds of back-blocks families in New South
Wales, in Queensland, and in Victoria — probably in
the other Australian provinces also. The city moralist
shudders at the sinister crimes that at intervals are re-
ported from the bush, shocking our courts of justice.
* For the phrasing of this page I am greatly in-
debted to the bright young Australian editor of New
South Wales Agricultural Gazette — W. H. Clarke.
Men on the Land
147
Place city moralists for ten years in the environment
of the desolate bush, and how many of them would act
differently ?
Some time ago J. A. Andrews, the Gentle Anar-
chist, now deceased — an enthusiast whose personality,
life, and end led one to see what reception a new Jesus
would meet from a modern generation — was drawn to
ponder these things, and straightway resolved to ex-
ploit the revolution obviously slumbering among the
mallee cockies. But after a fortnight's mission and
starvation he had not persuaded one cockie to awake
or arise, so returned despondently to Melbourne and
journalism.
Andrews failed in the most important article of
rhetoric; he did not identify himself with his audi-
ence — did not put himself in their place ; he had not
learnt the advocate's rule of giving the jury not good
arguments, sound arguments, but arguments that will
tell. His comparison of country misery and city
luxury fell flat, for many of the cockies had forgotten
or knew nothing of such luxury — could not effectively
comprehend it. To them their own state was the
normal state. That Andy Jones killed a bullock every
month, and Susy Martin had tea twice a day — there,
to the poorer cockie and his wife, was a magnificence
they could understand, an ideal they could strive for.
But libraries, picture-galleries — of what use were
those ?
148 The Red Pagan
It is exalting, inspiring, to see to what heights
the human mind can rise, to mark how it stretches and
expands till its generalisations reach infinity, and how
it still hungers onward through the territory of know-
ledge unexplored. But it is weird and terrifying to see
how the human mind shrivels and contracts when the
sunlight of stimulating environment does not call its
rootlets out and up. Now, like the tent in the Arabian
tale, it is great enough to house an army ; anon it is
so small that the palm of your hand will hide it. Con-
ceivably a man of middle age, disillusioned of the
world, yet richly endowed with memories of years of
social intercourse and action, might find in the vast
solitudes of the Australian bush, in its splendid silences,
in its seasonal changes and elemental strifes, an intel-
lectual stimulant unique in potency, an intellectual
peace in which he could concentrate and develop
the best of himself to an extent impossible m the
hurry and worry of a city, continually draining nerve-
force, as an octopus-sucker drains blood, from a hun-
dred tiny pin-pricks. But the ordinary "selector,"
uneducated, scarcely stirred by refining influences of
arts or letters, with his energy often exhausted day
after day by severe muscular labour, goes into the bush
as into a mental tomb. The loneliness, the monotony,
the round of mean and dispiriting tasks, the eternal
pressure of sordid trifles — these things poison hope
and aspiration at the source.
Men on the Land 149
A bushman kills the snakes on his " selection " ;
but there is a snake which avenges them all — the
"selection" itself. He may come to it bright in face and
weak in body. His body grows ; his muscles
strengthen ; his hands are hard and knotty ; but his
face becomes vacant, expressionless — he is mentally
inert. The " selection '' is twined round his throat,
stopping the flow of blood to his brain. The pressure
tightens — tightens : presently the man is dead. Then,
it is likely, he puts a piece of crape round his hat.
There are whole bush communities in the N.S.W. agri-
cultural districts where the male residents wear crape
habitual!" constantly. It is a trade-mark, Hke the
butcher's blue apron. A stranger asks, surprised,
" Has there been an epidemic ? " Not so ; these men
mourn as by a kind of dumb instinct. The Bush has
strangled their souls.
The women do not wear crape in this fashion?
Why? Their tragedy is as deep: have they less
imagination to realise it ? The daughter of the squatter,
or small stock-raiser, seems for a time more alive than
the son to the palpitations of the universe. But, as
far as my observation extends, in the poorer agricul-
tural communities the women live almost contentedly
in their — well, with the picture of a struggling selec-
tor's home before you, you might say " sty." Many
bush women lead you to believe it is no mere legend
which declares that, in some neighbourhoods, when a
150 The Red Pagan
stray lover from another district woos and wins a girl,
she has to be blindfolded to get her, on the train.
But the agricultural youth has for a brief period
gleams that might almost be called poetic. He has
even his " wanderjahre " of a month or two in the great
city of his province. Insurance-canvassers or sewing-
machine agents driving along a lonely bush track to a
township not infrequently meet a lanky, hard-fea-
tured, slab-sided son of Australia returning to his
father's " selection " ten or twenty miles further on. He
wears a soft hat, a new slop suit, and an uncommuni-
cative expression ; and says "Good-day !'^ stolidly,
without a hint of the exultation within him. Yet every
kookaburra is chattering of his glory ; every wallaby
along the track is an amazed spectator of his prowess ;
the sun glints down through the branches, and the
breeze blows, and the gum-leaves eddy and whirl —
all to swell a triumph greater than Pompey ever dreamt
of. " Er hat seine wanderjahre vollendet " ; and is
returning home with his concertina wrapped in his
spotted handkerchief. To-morrow the news will fly
like lightning round the district — " Billy Smith's back
again ! " — and next Sunday after dinner, with the
spotted handkerchief tied gallantly round his neck,
Billy will sit on the big log near the gate and make
music for a mass-levy of neighbours, while he tells of
the adventures that befell him in the great city, where
lots of the houses have rooms that you do nothing but
wash yourself in.
Men on the Land 151
It is quite safe to wager that at this moment there
are pacing along scores of lonely bush tracks scores of
Australian youths filled with pride and vain-glory, and
anticipations of how they will "take down*' the
boaster who came home last year. And every one of
those youths is tenderly carrying a concertina
wrapped in a spotted handkerchief. Here is his
tribute to Music and Art — his response to the sweet
influences of sound and colour — and here probably is
represented the climax reached by his aesthetic
impulses ere they are stifled in marriage and the
monotony of the bush. What pathos! what tragedy!
Between isolated Man and Nature in the bush there
is perpetual warfare. You must either dominate or
be dominated Not one in ten thousand lonely selec-
tors can avoid being forced into the familiar agricul-
tural stupor. Australian shearers, who travel much ;
Australian miners, who often travel more ; are fre-
quently compared with Australian agriculturists m
point of intelligence, and to the disadvantage of the
agriculturists. Put shearers and miners on selections,
give them the same horizon to look at, similar trees to
cut down, and different cows to get out of the same bog
from one year s end to the other, and their superior
intelligence will evaporate like morning mist. Of
all the cries that are cried to Australian Governments
there is none with more force than this : " Help the
farmer! favour the selector! for Australia's sake
152 The Red Pagan
make the cockle's life more tolerable ! " If there are
subsidies going, subsidise his roads and let him brush
his rust off by friction against his neighbour ; if there
are endowments to spare, endow travelling lecturers,
and teachers, and singers, and reciters, and strolling
players — anything to lift him out of the slough of
mental stagnation. For the men and women who are
fighting the Bush need all the help and all the sym-
pathy that the less plucky or more fortunate inhabi-
tants of the towns can give them — pioneers, as they
are, who are fertilising the desert with their lives.
WRITING in an English magazine some years
ago, a son of Daniel O'Connell told how he
was struck by the fact that the universal
adoration of Irishmen never seemed to stimu-
late his father to personal vanity or to disturb his
equanimity. To his son's question how this might
be, O'Connell answered simply, " I pray very often."
Nor is it likely that the answer was suggested by a
mere rehgious pose. O'Connell's hereditary piety was
sufficiently intensified by life-long habit to make
sincere prayer both natural and necessary. And doubt-
less his character was strengthened by the religious
faith which to him meant so much — and to Austra-
lians, on the whole, so little.
A Word for Australia 153
For even the clerical party is forced to admit that
every year religion and religious observances have less
hold upon Australia, and exercise less influence upon
the development of the national character. Our
fathers brought with them the religious habit as
they brought other habits of elder nations in older
lands. And upon religion, as upon everything
else, the spirit of Australia — that undefined, in-
definable resultant of earth, and air, and con-
ditions of climate and life — has seized ; modifying,
altering, increasing, or altogether destroying. In the
case of religious belief the tendency is clearly to des-
truction — partly, no doubt, because with the spread of
mental enlightenment the tendency is everywhere to
decay of faith in outworn creeds ; but partly also, it
seems, because the Australian environment is un-
favourable to the growth of religion, and because there
is in the developing Australian character a sceptical
and utilitarian spirit that values the present hour and
refuses to sacrifice the present for any visionary future
lacking a rational guarantee.
O'Connell prayed, and was benefited by prayer,
because prayer belonged to his temperament — he was
fitted to pray. Doubtless there are still in Europe
many similar individuals in whom heredity has not yet
been ousted by the progress of thought. But, except
as adherents of O'Connell's creed, or among women —
with minds more slowly moving, there are very few
154 The Red Pagan
of his temperament in Australia. In the rehgious
sense, probably nineteen-twentieths of Australiaas
are heathen. In this country the rudiments of re-
ligious faith have been uprooted or were never rooted ;
we cannot, if we would, derive from daily prayer
O'Connell's daily stimulus and solace. Our fathers
went regularly to church and chapel as a matter of
conscience, and were none the worse for it ; we go
chiefly as a matter of custom, and axe none the better
for it in any vital sense ; most of us do not go at all.
The holy Sabbath, degenerated to the formal Sunday,
has become the weekly holiday in city and bush. Be-
yond the perfunctory observances associated with it,
the day is meaningless : it has lost for us the essen-
tially sacred character which it had for O'Connell —
which it still has for men of O'Connell's temperament.
No one who knows Australia can doubt that these
statements are generally true. Our fathers, or their
fathers, or some of them, had the kernel of religion :
we in Australia have httle more than the husk, and
we shall have less and less of the husk as the years
go by.
The loss of religion is not a thing to deplore, yet
it may seem sometimes a thing to regret. With
Emerson,
" / like a priest, I like a cowl,
I love a prophet of the soul :
And on my heart monastic aisles
A Word for Australia 155
Fall like sweet strains or -pensive smiles :
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that coivled churchman be!'
The downfall of geocentric philosophy necessarily im-
plies the ruin of geocentric religions. If their relics
linger for a thousand years or five thousand, that is
little more than a moment in the probable history of
the human race ; and assuredly humanity will find a
rational stick to replace the irrational crutch.
Our present difficulty, and it is not AustraHa's
difficulty alone, is that for many people the influence
of reason upon character is not yet so potent as has
been the influence of faith.
" We stand between two worlds^ one deady
The other powerless to be born!'
We have lost religion, and we have not yet adapted
ourselves to the loss. Like a drunkard suddenly de-
prived of his dram, we are ill at ease, unready for
emergencies. Whether religion did or did not do more
harm than good is a profitless question. The religious
stage was one stage in human evolution, as natural as
the irreligious stage that is superseding it. Religion
gave to all men what they were in their day and
generation fitted to receive. To the weak it was an
opiate or a maddening draught, but ' to the strong a
magnificent stimulant. In many of the most memo-
rable episodes of history it infused into the veins of
156 The Red Pagan
nations a courage and a strength that we have not yet
quite attained without it. For the Covenanters, for
the Puritans, for the httle Dutch republic fighting for
its life against overwhelming Spain as for that other
little Dutch republic recently fighting for its life
against overwhelming Britain, it edged the sword of
patriotism and sharpened the pike of liberty. Lack-
ing religion, one cannot but think that some of the
most inspiring national contests and resistances of
the past would not have been continued quite so
strenuously or quite so long. Horatius fought all the
better for the ashes of his fathers because he had a
sincere reverence for the temples of his gods.
And here in Australia, we have no temples, no
ashes worth the name. We have still to make the
history and create the legendary associations that
are such a powerful binding force in national life. The
Murray to Australians is still only a geographical
label ; but think what the Thames means to an
Englishman! Think how Nelson was nerved by the
thought of Westminster Abbey ; of how his sailors
were nerved by the signal " England expects . . ." !
What a mass of record and tradition, of song and
story, of memorable life and love and death, presses
behind that England! Australia is meaningless by
comparison, lacking the inspiration of the past. But
is it not possible to catch meaning and mspiration
from the future ? Is it not better to be of those who
A Word for Australia 157
make St. Crispin's day worthy remembrance than of
those who look back to remember it? This country
has still for us few hallowed associations ; but if we
choose it may have them for our children. If we are
not History's legatees, it is because we have the
chance to be History's founders and stablishers. And,
even already, there are many who see in this vast
virgin land a brooding charm not to be exchanged
for England's chequered story. There is even
already a nostalgia for the breadth of the bush
and the breath of the gums that yields noth-
ing in intensity to the nostalgia for the green turf and
the hawthorn-buds in pleasant Warwickshire lanes.
Even already, how few Australians would exchange
for England's glowing national sunset — or if you will,
her splendid noon — our own intimate and fragrant
dawn ?
It is the duty and should be the pride of every
father and mother and teacher of Australian children
to intensify the natural love of Australia, and to point
out in how many ways Australia is eminently worthy
to be loved — both the actual land and the national
ideal. Good and evil are mingled everywhere ; but
there is no land with more beautiful aspects than
Austraha, no ideal with greater potentialities of human
achievement and human happiness. Australia may
never be a great country ; yet it will be the fault of
the people, not of the land, if it is not one of the best
I $8 The Red Pagan
countries in the world to live in and die in — given that
we are free from foreign aggression until we are able
to resist foreign aggression.
*' But you have no great rivers." Well, there
have been great nations without great rivers, as there
have been great rivers without great nations. Prob-
ably, if the Eastern Dividing Chain could be bodily
shifted five hundred miles westward, extending the
coastal rainfall to the interior, and sending a score of
considerable rivers and their tributaries tumbling to
the sea, Australian development would be easier and
Australian prosperity more assured. Practicably,
were Lake Eyre connected with Lake Torrens, Lake
Torrens with Spencer Gulf, and the ocean restored to
its old home in the central basin of Australia, the
clouds evaporated from a vast inland sea might rise
to increase the interior rainfall and permanently miti-
gate the severity of summer climate. But, leaving the
impossible and the dubious, what is the measure of
national greatness ? A vast population or an extended
empire does not necessarily make a great nation.
" The great city," says Whitman, " is the city with
the greatest man or woman " ; and the great country
is not that one where millions of people toil squalidly
in order that comparatively few may live in idleness
and luxury. With a bare ten thousand families, or
less, Australia might still be the greatest country in
the world, if only every individual had the opportunity
A Word for Australia 159
of living the best and most enlightened life that was
possible to him — of fulfilling to the utmost his capa-
cities for development and happiness.
It is the false standard of " greatness '* that viti-
ates many published inferences from the decreasing
Australian birth-rate. The European nations de-
sire to increase their birth-rate because they
are military nations, and because every son
is a potential soldier, every daughter the poten-
tial mother of a soldier. And, until our numbers
are such that we can defy attack, similar rea-
sons have weight in Australia also. But they are
not the only reasons that have weight. One may point
out that, in the struggle for national ideals, the
quality-standard is by far the most important, national
existence being once assured. There is no national
profit in the multiplication of children destined to live
and die miserably. And the decreasing Australian
birth-rate might be as much the token of a wise re-
straint as of a weakening national vitality. Probably
it is not ; but it might be. We have little occasion
for anxiety if the criminal aggregation of the people
in the coastal cities were ended. It is in the cities,
not in the bush, that the national fibre is being in a
hundred ways slackened and destroyed. No one, ac-
quainted with the every-day heroism displayed by our
agricultural and pastoral and mining pioneers, can
have the least doubt of the stability of the nation if
i6o The Red Pagan
the Men On The Land are helped and encouraged as
they deserve to be helped and encouraged — as it is
imperatively necessary for the future of Australia that
they should be helped and encouraged.
The making of Australia proceeds, according to
the previous argument, without the binding influence
of religion. All the more reason, then, to encourage
the growth of nascent patriotic sentiment, and to pay
attention to the development of individual character.
Patriotism may have little or no logical warrant, but
while it remains a natural instinct it justifies itself.
Yet the future of Australia depends in the last resort
neither upon the lessening religious force nor upon the
increasing patriotic force : it rests upon the character
of Australia's inhabitants. If it be the pride of every
Australian boy to become a better man than his
father, of every Australian girl to become a better
woman than her mother, of every Australian father
and mother to rear children better than themselves,
both the individual and the nation will surely have
their reward.
As of old, it is a Vates Sacer that we need.
Wherefore
j0^
The Crown of Gum Leaves i6i
THE little iron-grey man stood at the door of his
hostel, calmly eyeing the distance. He looked
toward Alice Springs, and nothing was
visible but the stony floor of the desert, shim-
mering under a sky of brilliant blue. Here and there
a clump of ragged mulgas dotted the expanse ; the
Mitchell-grass left by the rains had been scorched to
dry roots. He moved inside to consider finally the
preparations that She had ordered. In the larger
room the massive table filled nearly the whole of the
space. Around it, on three sides, chairs were ranged
so closely that there was scarcely room to walk be-
tween them ; and at the head, on a dais raised slight-
ly above the floor, stood a chair alone. In such a
place, these chairs were remarkable ; for each was
carved from a solid block of wood, and their gro-
tesque ornamentation seemed to embody the oddest
vagaries of aboriginal fancy. Except for the table
and the chairs, the room was empty, and the stone
walls were uncoloured and bare. The little man sur-
veyed anew the disposition of the chairs, found noth-
ing to alter, and returned to the door. It was not yet
ten o'clock, and She had told him to prepare all for
Her peculiar hour of noon. He filled his pipe and
waited calmly.
A stranger — and all white men were strangers in
that district in the heart of Australia— would have
wondered to see a stone house, solidly built, standing
1 62 The Red Pagan
so far in the desert. It was away from all roads, and
even away from the central telegraph line. No wheel-
tracks were seen near it ; no path led from it in any
direction. Seemingly none but wandering aboriginals
could have taken advantage of its shelter. Yet there
it stood under the fierce sun, in the unbroken silence ;
and a sign that seemed to mark it as a hostel swung
from a projecting beam above the door. Upon one
side of the sign was written, in red letters, the word
Riot!
Upon the other side was written, in black letters, the
word
Rest
Beneath the sign the little iron-grey man smoked
calmly.
The second pipe was half-finished when his at-
tentive eye perceived upon the eastern horizon a blurr-
ed patch that seemed to be detaching itself from the
blurred clumps of distant mulga. He watched with
calm interest : it was a year since he had seen a white
face. The patch quickly defined itself and took
shape as a figure on horse-back, that presently trot-
ted up to the door and asked for Scotch whisky. The
Httle iron-grey man surveyed the visitor calmly. He
was a small, boyish fellow, with a good-natured ex-
pression — his face told nothing in particular beyond
good-nature ; and he rode an old gray horse that look-
ed as if it had been hungry for several years.
The Crown of Gum Leaves 163
" I suppose this is the place ? " he asked, with a
light smile.
The little iron-grey man took his pipe from his
mouth. " This is the place."
" And what about the whisky ?"
" There is nothing but mulga rum ; you're wel-
come to that."
The visitor dismounted, and the gray horse imme-
diately lay down and made noises suggestive of hun-
ger. His rider patted him kindly, and followed the
little iron-grey man inside to the smaller room, where
a row of wooden vats stood behind a carved wooden
counter. The little man filled a glass with a fluid
that shone with the deep, intense blue of the sky with-
out.
" And this is mulga rum ?"
" Ay ; distilled from the sap of the mulga."
The visitor tasted it. " Funny flavour ?" he
smiled.
" The best flavour," said the little iron-grey man.
The visitor drank, and presently asked for an-
other glass. The little iron-grey man shook his head.
** Better not !" he said, and went outside.
" Hold on ! I haven't paid you."
The httle iron-grey man took no notice. He
was watching the arrival of two travellers on foot.
"Now we'll have an explanation of the
mystery !" said the leader of the two, a shortish fel-
164 The Red Pagan
low with a freckled face framed in rusty-brown hair.
" Are you the proprietor of this caravanserai ?
Hullo ! You here !" He shook hands with the first tra-
veller without pausing in his question.
The little iron-grey man nodded.
" Then can you tell me why I and my friend here
have suddenly felt an irresistible impulse to come to
this outlandish place — why we simply had to come —
couldn't keep our feet away from it? — and can you
tell us, further, who paid our fares and smoothed away
the obstacles of the journey? — and can you tell us,
finally, why we both had a premonition that we must
bring a poem in our pockets ?"
The little iron-grey man paused in re-filling his
pipe. "You will know later," he said, calmly.
"You haven't sampled the rum yet!" said the
first traveller, with his genial smile.
" Rum ! Good God ! where is it ! Come along !'*
He hurried inside, followed by his mate, a tall, silen-
tious person with a long head and eyes of faded blue.
"Well, this is rum!" He held the glass admir-
ingly to the light and sniffed the pervasive odour.
He tasted it. "Rum! It is nectar — pure nectar!
This is the drink that Ganymede gives to the Gods.
And as we are the Gods, you" — he took off his" hat
and bowed magnificently to the little iron-grey man —
" must be Ganymede !" He looked round triumphant-
ly to mark his effect — drank — smacked his lips — and
The Crown of Gum Leaves 165
threw out commandingly the arm that held the glass.
" Another glass, Ganymede !'*
" Bet " commenced the little iron-grey man,
and checked himself, looking at his guest. He re-
filled the glasses. '' It's good, isn't it," said the tall
man tentatively, resting himself loosely on the counter.
" Good !" The rusty-brown traveller flung out
his arms with a gesture of sweeping disdain. "Good!
Here is the best liquor in all the earth — in all the
earth! — and a far better liquor than they have wit
to concoct in Heaven — and this man says it's good!
Good! My God!" But seeing that there was no
longer an audience (for the little iron-grey man had
returned to the door), he dropped his voice and re-
marked meditatively, "I wonder what we're here for?
There are more of them outside."
Indeed, travellers were now^ fast arriving. The
first was a talHsh, thinnish fellow on foot, with a sun-
ken visage lighted by soft, dark eyes. He slouched
up to the door with, " Well, chaps, I see you're all
here !" — and was immediately beckoned to the coun-
ter by the rusty-brown man, who had already taken
charge of the gathering and was playing the part of
host with practised ease.
The next came ambling up on a good horse. He
was a muscular fellow, clean-shaven, with an anxious
brow ; and he threw half -nods all round as he recog-
nised the company. Followed him a stoutish young
1 66 The Red Pagan
man with a florid complexion and a fine dome of skull.
He padded leisurely to the door, looking enquiringly
around, but with the self-conscious expression of one
who is master of his fate and adept in any symbol
under cover of which the Universe may hide. Then
followed a tribe of others wearing various aspects — all
of them (with exception of a lad of seventeen who
walked w^ith the air of meditative seventy) being in
turn introduced to the sapphire mulga-essence behind
the carved counter.
It was now nearly noon. The little iron-grey man
cast a decisive glance at the sun, put his pipe in his
pocket, closed the door, and calmly motioned the com-
pany into the larger room. No sooner were they
seated than the reason of their presence seemed to be-
come manifest simultaneously to them all.
" Oh, that's it, is it," said the anxious-browed
horseman. " Then "
*' Allow me!" interposed the rusty-brown travel-
ler, rising in his seat with the importance of a master
of ceremonies, and moving toward the unoccupied
chair at the head of the table. The little iron-grey
man, standing beside it, shook his head calmly. " Oh,
very well — no matter — I can speak just as well where
I am. Gentlemen ! — We are met here, as I understand,
at the invitation of the Genius of Australia " — he bow-
ed graciously toward the empty chair — " to decide
which of our number shall be hailed and acclaimed
as Poet Laureate of this magnificent continent."
The Crown of Gum Leaves 167
He paused. In the space upon the table direct-
ly in front of the vacant chair, there had become sud-
denly visible a wreath of gum-leaves. No one had
placed it there ; it simply manifested itself, hke a
Mahatma's letter arriving from imknown heights of
space. All eyes turned to it ; even the elderly lad of
seventeen regarded it with mild curiosity. At the same
moment there was a rustling of silken garments as if
some person had occupied the chair at the head of the
table ; and all were conscious of a new Presence in the
room — a Presence intensely vital, splendidly im-
perious, distinctly feminine. The little iron-grey man
bent in an attitude of worship.
After a moment the speaker continued, in a
lower voice : "We are here, gentlemen, I say, to decide
which of our number shall be called — er — Laureate
of Australia ; and I doubt not that you have been im-
pelled to bring — er — as I have, some — er — testi-
monial of your title to this high and honourable office.
I gather that it is the wish of the — er — exalted Per-
sonage whom I now understand to be present '* — he
looked inquiringly at the Chair — " that these testimo-
nials shall now be read, and my own I will proceed to
read to you. Possibly, when I have finished" — he
gazed invitingly at the wreath of gum-leaves — " it may
be thought — er — unnecessary to go any further." He
looked round with an air of illumination, and con-
tinued : " It has this moment been made known to
1 68 The Red Pagan
me, gentlemen, at the will of our gracious Hostess " —
he bowed patronisingly to the Chair — " and, doubtless,
to you also, that should my — er — that should any of
our poor compositions seem to Her worthy, that
wreath of gum-leaves which we see before us will of
its own motion ascend to crown the brow of the Lau-
reate. Well, then,"— he smoothed his hair—'' ahem !"
AMARANTH.
"J^HE days rise up in argent fride.
The nights are steeped in purple dreams,
But not for me the radiant tide,
And not for me the poppied streams.
The cynic years have brought no calm;
No glory dazzles through the haze ;
In vain I seek the ancient balm,
In vain the light of other days.
Then Youth flung largesse to the winds
That brought new gifts from every clime,
And perfect Love attuned our minds,
And Beauty consecrated Tiine.
And hand-in-hand we wandered through
A dim, delicious orchard-close,
Where many a lovely 'flower blew
In fragrance to out -vie the Rose,
Who -flaunted splendour all around
As never since the ivorld began,
Save in the enchanted Persian ground
Of sweet-voiced Saadis Gulistan.
The Crown of Gum Leaves 169
Yet when you stayed to -pluck a flower
High-destined to a happier lot :
" Yon rose will not outlive the hour,
And even fades forget-me-not I'
You said ; " but when this day has flown,
That you may aye remember me
Through life, and death, and all, your own —
Take amaranth, and rosemary!^
And in that shining Aidenn there
Our dreams made music all the day,
With viol, lute, and dulcimer
We watched them pass in brave array.
Then you were Queen of Phantasy,
And I was King of Fair Romance:
To us the courtiers bent the knee,
For us the minstrel and the dance.
Our throne was one great amethyst
Shapen and carved with cunning arts,
The footstools that our suppliants kissed
Were opals shot with fiery darts.
The arras of our presence-hall.
Woven by looms of far Cathay,
Bade Death and Life in worship fall —
So dark its shades, its hues so gay.
And pages, slashed and furbelowed.
Sported with scarlet shoulder-knots
Where musical, sweet waters flowed
From sculptured founts and hidden grots;
170 The Red Pagan
And Love and Joy, with hurrying feet, i
Presided over all our hours, \
Till came a gust of wintry sleet, j
And birds were mute, and drooped the flowers. . . ^
And nozv, alas! in exile old^ \
From that fond empire fallen low, j
I mourn the days of rose-and-gold, \
The halcyon prime of long ago. \
I knoiv not where your spirit faes, \
In what dark realm for succour craves, \
Or if in lost Atlantis sighs ]
And wanders far beneath the waves, \
Or if in some Hesperides \
Where blessed souls, divinely pure, • ^
Beneath the golden-fruited trees j
Walk in a peace for ever sure; — \
But wheresoever you may be, J
/ pray that God may give me grace i
One day in far eternity \
To gaze a moment on your face. |
Come then the torment and the pain! \
Come then the tempest of the soul! %_
I shall be bathed in bliss again \
Till Time shall wither like a scroll. \
For sweet Adonis' festival
The Greeks of old a garden grew,
Where lettuce twined with fennel tall.
But never came a slip of rue ;
The Crown of Gum Leaves 171
For when the short-lived feast was o'er
The faded wreaths were thrown away,
And why remember, why deplore
(They said) the joys of Yesterday?
/, toOy grew for the feast of Life
Within my heart a garden rare,
Where Love and Fame, in friendly strife.
And every pleasing flower had share.
The rose and regal hollyhock,
Blue lavender and lily, too,
I tended — and the Fates made mock,
For ah! their roots were all in You.
I zvatched them one by one depart,
And of them all remains to me
This fadeless blossom of my heart.
The amaranth of Memory.
The rusty-brown traveller closed in a cadence of
ecstasy, with an expectant eye on the wreath of gum-
leaves. There was a little sigh from the Chair, fol-
lowed by a movement of impatience, and the wreath
did not move. '' Oh, very well, then !" He sat
down noisily, and scowled as he pushed his manuscript
about on the table. The little iron-grey attendant
nodded to the wiry horseman, who commenced rather
nervously : —
172 The Red Pagan
THE HONOUR OF THE DISTRICT.
J-TE was a noble Englishman — a-travelling round \
the earth \
To cure a growing tendency to gout — \
Or so he said ; and ten portmanteaux guaranteed his j
birth, \
But the Cooma District couldn't make him out. \
For he turned up at Kiandra, when the carnival \
zvas on, \
And he won the champion snowshoe-race with ease ; \
The local heroes hung their heads and said, when he \
had gone, \
'Twas plain the gout had never reached his knees! 1
His name was something-Chobnondeley ; he was very \
wide-awake; \
And all the girls admired his Alpine hat ; — \
But, you see, it was the honour of the district was at ]
stake, I
And they couldn't let him travel off with that. I
He was heard of next at J indabyne, duck-shooting \
in the spring, '\
And he killed his birds without a single miss ; \
And the veteran finda sportsmen, who ''preferred a \
lively wing',' \
Opened eyes and muttered, " What the gout is this?" j
He was asked to Adaminaby, to see some shearing \
done \
(He grew fonder of the district every day), I
The Crown of Gum Leaves 173
And the boys all looked delighted when he said that,
jtist for fun,
He would shear a few to drive the gout away.
So they chose a heavy wether, with a real mountain
'fleece,
And they showed him how he ought to hold the shears
(The points away) and how to fluck the wool
(like plucking geese), —
And they stood around prepared with cheerful jeers.
But the stranger gripped the wether like a workman
with his knees.
And his stroke was swift and clean— a ringer s clip ;
He had finished that big wether in five minutes, if
you please!
And had pinked as if the boss was at his hip.
He said he felt that nothing helped like shearing for
the gout,
And he kept the pickers going all the day ;
The ringer had shorn eighty-five, when Chobnondeley,
with a shotit
Marked ''Ninety!'' — (and the bell rang) — ''Wool
away /"
But he said, of course with practice he would really
get up speed :
The thing was to make sheep obey your eye ;
In love, and war, and sport, and work, an English-
man could lead
If he only once made up his mind to try.
174 The Red Pagan
But the boys were very sulky ^ for they had fit a reply,
And they put their heads together what to do,
When suddenly Wild Donegan jumps up and slaps
his thigh:
" By Hokey! lads, we'll see the beggar through!
We'll have a little steeplechase, a sweet three mile
or so,
And set the course down Nungar mountain side;
We'll make a jolly day of it, and ask the girls below.
And we'll' string my noble Johnny on to ride f'
A deputation went at once to state the little plan,
And the Englishman was willing — for, of course,
Though he wasn't any horsanan, he believed that any
man
With good English blood could sit upon a horse.
The day came round, and such a crowd was never seen
before, —
From every station round, from every town.
From Tumut, Gilmore, Adelong, they rallied by the
score ]
To see the noble Englishman put doivn. \
They gave him a young brumby that was only ridden
twice^ i
But he managed to stick on through all the chaff ; \
And then the starter called them, and they cantered in \
a trice, j
While the girls picked places ready for the laugh. \
The Crown of Gum Leaves 175
The start was up among the clouds that hid the
mountain top,
And the riders all seemed dropping on your head ;
You'd think that once they tumbled they would surely
never stop
Till they landed in the rocky streamlet -bed.
They came down helter-skelter, and the stones -flew in
their wake;
And they risked their necks, quite careless of a fall.
For they knezv the tarnished honour of the district was
at stake —
But the Englishman rode straightest of them all!
He brought his mount in lengths ahead, a- tremble and
a-foam;
When the others straggled after in a tail,
He was talking to the girls about the hunting leaps
''at home'' —
Forty feet of ditch beyond a nine- foot rail!
He feared he had done badly — since he saw they
looked askance^
But he wished he had his Shetland pony there
He had ridden when a youngster — that he might have
had a chance
To show the girls what Englishmen could dare!
And the boys of Adaminaby, with faces long and
glum,
Loosed bridles and rode silently away :
17^ The Red Pagan
They felt too sick for cursing, but they wished in
Kingdom Come
The Johnny who had beaten them that day.
But jolly Jeanie Mackie was with indignation full,
And she gathered all the girls together there :
Says she, " The boys have failed to get this Johnny by
the wool,
So we girls will try and catch him by the hair.
He put them down quite easily — no wonder that they
frown I —
But the honour of the district is at stake ;
And there's one thing, girls, I wager that he never will
put down —
And that's a slice of Tumut Christmas-cake T
Now, the Tumut cake is famous over all the country-
sidCy
For the recipe is never known to fail :
*Twas invented by a bushranger to welcome home his
bridCy
And they hanged him for the crime in Wagga gaol.
It is tougher than the hair-ball that you -find inside a
cow,
And the currants break your teeth off when you bite:
There was no one ever heard of who could eat a slice,
they vow,
And a single crumb will turn a stranger white.
So they set to work and made it, and they mixed it
double strength.
For the treacle using glue, to take no chance ;
The Crown of Gum Leaves 177
They baked it for a week or more, and when 'twas
done at length
They invited all the district to a dance.
The noble Englishman came first ; his dancing zvas
renowned ;
He put all the local steppers in the shade ;
And he held the girls so deftly that they never
touched the ground^
But flew like birds — no matter what they weighed.
So they felt a little sorry when the supper-bell rang '
out,
And even Jeanie's voice commenced to shake
When she said, " Oh, Mister Cholmondeley, you are
hungry now, no doubt.
Won't you try a slice of Tumut Christmas-cake! "
But he simply said " With pleasure!'' Lord! that
man had pluck in stacks !
And she passed him a great slice upon a plate
{They'd, chopped at it for half-an-hour, until they
broke the axe)
And all the people gathered round to wait.
They saw it was the real thing, as black as night
inside.
With a tricky sugar icing, pink and white;
And strong men gasped and shuddered, and the women
nearly cried,
As the Englishman prepared to take a bite.
178 The Red Pagan
He took it, and it held his jaws as -firmly as a vice ;
But the courage of the dogged British race
Rose within him, and he stiffened all his muscles to
the slice.
And he ate it without stirring from his place)
But hardly had he finished when he gave a fearful
yell,
And leapt in air eleven feet or more ;
He writhed, and squirmed, and fought, and tore, and
wriggled where he felly
And his horrid groaning noises shook the floor.
They almost felt remorseful as they watched the
wreck he made^
So they lifted him and put him in a bed ;
And all the girls stood round him with their hand-
kerchiefs displayed.
And when the spasms had left him, thus he said:
''Here die I an Englishman, who loved his country
well,
And my enemies I honestly forgive ;
But there's no man born of woman, and no devil out
of hell,
Who could eat a slice of Tumut cake and live! "
So he died, as was expected, and the people all agreed
It was right the district honour so to save;
And his funeral was elegant as any man could need.
And three parsons were discoursing at his grave.
The Crown of Gum Leaves 179
And the boys all threw a clod tifon the coffin — just for
lucky
And the girls sowed weeping willows for his sake ;
Though bonnie J eanie Mackie lost her fride and lost
her f lucky
And cried at home as if her heart would break.
They got a Sydney tombstone upy with all his names
in full
{There were nine beside the Cholmondeley) — and a
text ;
For they knew a noble Englishman is pure merino
WOOly
And they didn^t want his mother to be vexed.
So the job was neatly finished ; every man his shilling
gavcy
For the honour of the district was at stake;
And they tell the stranger proudly : " He was bravest
of the brave;
But we put him down — ivith Tumut Christmas-
cake! "
There was a sound from the Chair as of a half-
suppressed laugh — a laugh deliciously toned ; but the
wreath did not move. The tall, fair traveller, who
several times had half -risen from his seat, seized the
occasion, and chanted these lines in a voice that seem-
ed to roll from dark caverns of memory.
i8o The Red Pagan
THE SOUTHERLY. j
The City lay a-sivelter in the heat I
That tarnished all her -flowery diadem, \
And quieted her clamorous wheels of Trade^ ]
Till even lovers moved on lagging feet, \
And, drooping like sad lilies on the stem, \
The little children hushed their flay, and sought the \
blessed shade. \
\
A watcher on the City's tallest spire \
Saw through the pallid haze that seemed a shroud
The ghastly human hive, and heard below \
Strange sounds come piercing through the mantle \
dire — |
A stricken man that raved and shrieked aloud, ■
A girl's hysteric laugh, a tortured infanfs wail of \
woe. I
I
The watcher turned him where the brooding South, |
Urging her black battalions, closer crept, |
Threatening like some great dragon of the skies, i
Till sudden through the streets that parched with j
drouth j
There came a Wind, a Lion-Wind that leapt, \
Roaring, and clutched the City's throat, and fiercely ^
took her prize. 1
And he who cast the stormy horoscope \
Beheld the veil dissolve in gusty waves, j
And hearkened to the Whirlwind Voice that pealed I
The Crown of Gum Leaves i8i
'' Arise! I bring you peace and living hope,
Balm for the sick, and rest that labour craves,
And cool sea-blessings : rise a queen, and be for
beauty healed! "
Then She that lay beneath the shroud awoke.
With every icy breath renewing life,
And through her streets with luring eyes ashine
The maidens passed, while happy laughter broke
From litten windows, and old Joy was rife,
And men praised God for love and strength, fair
women and red wine.
He delivered the last line with impressive unction ;
but the gum-leaves only shivered slightly, as if a
breeze had passed over them. The little iron-grey man
nodded to the first-comer, who rose with an apologetic
smile.
'' I'm afraid mine isn't of very much account," he
said ; " but of course I don't take myself very
seriously, and I'd never dream of expecting any such
honour as that which is proposed for one of the others,
who I'm sure are all very much better than I am."
This modesty being greeted with encouraging cries of
" Go on ! " — and a marked wave of sympathy proceed-
ing from the Chair — the speaker was emboldened to
read the following : —
1 82 The Red Pagan
BEAUTY'S A-FLOWER!
^HE Sim goes down in glory,
The long day's toil is done:
'T is time to tell the story
That waits for set of sun.
Gray Ronald whinnies waiting ;
The good horse knows his task ;
For Night's the time for mating^
And Love has but to ask.
So mount in haste, fond lover !
And o'er the plain away ;
There's fifteen miles to cover ^
And back by break of day.
Through cabbage-gums a-blossom
In Springtide's lavish dower :
With million-creaming bosom
The grey Bush is a-flower!
Then up the rocky ridges.
Along the silent creek
Where spiders build their bridges
And ghostly curlews shriek ;
Till, swift as Love's own shallop,
We skirt the timber dead
And settle for the gallop —
The fence a mile ahead.
The Crown of Gum Leaves 183
What fence would stop a lover
With Beauty waiting there!
So off . . , and up . . . and over!
With half-a-yard to spare.
Was ever good horse bolder!
What reck though Fortune lower :
The foam-buds gem his shoulder —
Gray Ronald is a-flower !
A miUi and then I wander
The garden path I know :
See! in her window yonder
The try sting light burns low.
Hushy voice! what need of token?
Hushy heart! her pledge is true:
Such faith was never broken ;
She's yours, and all for you. . .
A footstep patters lightly,
A face upturns to mine,
A snowdrift breast heaves whitely
And misty blue eyes shine:
0, Love it is Life's noon-light
And this Love's day and hour —
Her lips meet mine in moonlight.
And Beauty is a-flower!
"You're out of it!" cheerfully remarked the
rusty-brown traveller, who had recovered his natural
good-humour. " Who 's next ? "
184 The Red Pagan ]
" I believe I am next," said the traveller with the \
Jovian brow, rising rather ponderously. j
''Excuse me!" said another who had listened |
hitherto with some air of discontent, while moving \
uneasily on his chair. ^
" Oh, certainly ! " chuckled his rival, and plumped ]
down again.
The impatient poet cleajred his throat and began : j
I
IN THE DAYS WHEN THE BEER WAS \
STRONG. I
y^HE earth goes round with a weary sob, and our \
lives are sad and pale, \
And half of the heroes are out of a job, and half '"
by the heels in jail ; :i
The same old crank with the sa^ne old kink we meet \
in the same dull throng — i
And a bloke can't drink as he used to drink in the \
days when the beer was strong, %
I
When the North brewed liquor that stung like Death, |
and the East and the West did too, \
And the Golden Beer of Elizabeth brought the Golden \
Age anew ; \
When Spain was thrashed by a malt-bred horde that \
conquered the French in song, \
And all the world was drunk as a lord in the days |
when the beer was strong. \
The Crown of Gum Leaves 185
'Twas honest stingo and honest food — in the days of
the Lovely Thirst —
When me7t were coopers and casks were good — and
yet they were forced to burst.
The blokes would follow you like a lamb if you
shouted for aides-de-camf —
Ah, Beer was a noble oriflamme in the days when the
beer was strong!
They tried to drink as a freeman should — they were
happier men than we^
With ale that hummed for years in the zvood and
never begat D.T,
'Twas a tankard big as a bucket then, and swigging
in turn, ding-dong,
And they held their breath till they bottomed like men
in the days when the beer was strong.
We drink like women, and feed as such — the coats of
our stomachs ive guard —
Where scarcely the rum o.p. could touch, the spawn of
a pump bites hard ;
Though tea and the cowardly cocoa-nib the life of the
cur prolong,
Men pledged each other and told no fib in the days
when the beer zvas strong.
Think of it all — of the liquor you miss! Study the
dregs in your glass!
Study the past! And answer this : Is Beer AS GoOD
AS IT Was ?
1 86 The Red Pagan
The coal-tar slop and the strychnine hop have done us i
a crimson wrong: \
No matter who fell it were better to drop as they did \
when the beer was strong. \
With its dull, brown taste of a threepenny bar the \
dreary beer goes dozvn : \
Is this the result of the Maori war? — is this Aus- \
tralia's crown? \
Is this the sequel of Southward Ho? of the New- J
Chum's cheerful song? \
The heart of the rebel makes answer ''No! We'll \
fight till the beer grows strong!'' \
Our beer shall yet be a better beer — for the State shall \
start to brew^ '\
With lashings of malt, and hops not queer, and white- )
grown sugar too. j
The road to Freedom is round by the Vat! Hurry \
and come along! j
Sons of the Drinkers! Vote for that! Vote till the \
beer grows strong! ^
ill
Before the last line had ceased to sound, the \
ponderous bard was on his feet and ready. \
"You might give it time," snapped the rusty- \
brown traveller, with his eyes on the wreath.
" Oh, by all means," replied the other with a bene- ]
volent smile, " but it seemed to me there was question \
of giving it eternity." \
"To understand your piece, I presume?" sweet- j
ly retorted the objector. S
The Crown of Gum Leaves 187
" Gentlemen ! Gentlemen ! This is not seemly,"
interposed the little iron-grey man ; and order be-
ing restored, the dignified traveller regarded the as-
sembly blandly, fingered his manuscript, and pro-
ceeded
" The piece that I am now about to read to you,
Madam " — he addressed the Chair with formaHty —
"may be considered somewhat difficult of apprehen-
sion ; but that is a quality which it shares in common
with everything that represents the triumph of re-
fined taste as opposed to that of the gross herd — ' la
multitude vile,' as Baudelaire fitly describes them. I
admit, however, that it is not designed to be ingested
in the process of oral recitation. I purpose, therefore,
adding some slight gloss or commentary that may aid
in the explication of the theme. I may add," he con-
tinued, letting his glance fall with severity upon the
rusty-brown traveller, who had snorted audibly, " that
as my poem is divided into eighteen sections, each
section containing six stanzas, I shall be grateful for
complete silence " — he paused for emphasis — " during
the delivery. To commence, then. The title of the
piece is
THE SOUL OF THE SEER.
" Perhaps I should explain that a title is really an
excrescence; since, a poem, like a poet, is born in a
perfect shape, without any tag or label whatever.
Still, I have decided to give titles for the present (with-
1 88 The Red Pagan
out extra charge) as a concession to the ignorance of
the populace. Without further preface, then :
THE SOUL OF THE SEER.
" I may say that I beheve a poet may be fitly
hkened to a spider, and my own internal store seems
to me to yield an endless thread of verse. My first
section has been drawn through a Mexican cigar, but
I can just as readily draw through ice. The symbol
will be found equally as glutinous in the one case as in
the other. Resuming, therefore:
THE SOUL OF THE SEER.
" It occurs to me that, with this introductory piece,
I should explain my method. I write poems that are
to all appearance intelligent, if not intelligible, and I
spread an obvious significance in decorative language,
much as a peacock spreads his tail. But behind this
exoteric meaning I shall conceal an esoteric meaning
which adepts will discover, and which is the real justi-
fication of the poem. The common mob will see me,
as it were, fishing for trout in a peculiar river (to use
a Shakespearean symbol literally), but the elect will
recognise that I am catching the Secret of Life in the
abyss of the Universe. It will always be open to dis-
cussion how much of the Secret I catch, since each of
my pupils, even among the elect, will receive only that
portion of my message which he is fitted to receive.
But this remainder of doubt is a consequence of the
The Crown of Gum Leaves 189
inadequate means of expression supplied by language,
and is not necessarily to be deprecated. Qua
Symbolic Poet, I find that I can pose most conveni-
ently as a Veiled Mokanna, after the fashion of that
Hakem ben Haschem of whom we read in d'Herbelot's
account contributed to La Bibliotheque Orientale : for
the reason that, if I be at times obscure, we shall have a
preliminary presumption that the fault lies with minds
too gross to pierce my lustrous mystery. I shall en-
deavour, when possible, to begin with an easy line,
thus :
the matin stroke inaudible expireS
'' I regret that I cannot vocally represent the effect
that I attain by transferring to the end of the line of
verse the capital letter printed usually at the begin-
ning: this being one of the especial eccentricities by
which I desire to be distinguished. Since, however,
I have entered upon an explanation, I may as well
add that my first section represents apparently the at-
titude and emotions of a man who stands under a
shower-bath and soaps himself all over before he
discovers that the water has been turned off. This
symbolises to me the dream of an idealist who has
swathed his life in aspirations toward the divine pu-
rity of Heaven, and who wakens in the grave to the
sensation of worms crawling upon him and the reali-
sation that he is beginning a career in Purgatory. In
I go The Red Pagan
this way I leap from the individual to the general, ac-
cording to the accepted doctrine of Art, leaving to
my disciples (when I gain them) the duty of withdraw-
ing each the symbol particular to himself. To com-
mence, therefore:
THE SOUL OF THE SEER.
the matin stroke inaudible expireS
winging to caverns murk'd of silent sounD :
steals sinister the cohort of desireS
where prison' d in voluptuous profounD
slumbrous obscurities (0 whither flY ,
ye shapes august!) I vision' d overturN
yawning the daisied coverlet awrY
till victor in, the aeon-strife I burN
with vast resolve jetted from starry heights
He paused. "You have of course perceived.
Madam, that I am working on two planes or platforms
at once. On the lower platform I have set-off the
alarm clock in the same phrase by which (on the higher
platform) I have blown Gabriel's trump. My obvious
subject has turned over in bed in a line that contains
plain hints of Resurrection morning. I may be par-
doned for asking attention to more subtle touches —
especially to those which you cannot see. — My next
verse is more difficult : it is unwise to make the Sym-
bolic path too easy, for the egotism of disciples who
have overcome all obstacles is apt to lead them to
flP*'
The Crown of Gum Leaves 191
fancy themselves as great as the Master — a contin-
gency carefully to be avoided. Continuing : —
with vast resolve jetted fro^n starry heights
zvhose white magni-ficence derides the duN
iiichoate melancholy anchoriteS
brood in Diogenes^ dark malisoN
'' Perhaps I should hint (on the lower platform)
that Diogenes lived in an empty tub ; but I deem it
unjust to this audience to interpret further: in tuas
manus, Domina!
from labyrinthine chrysalis the cluE
spars alabaster writhing in reversE
of cold lustration : saponaceous gluE
adheres that choral heaven can abstersE.
" I admit that this verse is not up to my Symbolic
level: it is too simple: the next verse atones. It is
my object to show you, not poetry in the making, but
Poetry in the matrix, purged of grosser particles.
but sudden twining anguished tentacleS
seize loath despairing sinuositY :
drouth-banished, dephlegmated pinnacUS
stand starkly-arefied monstrositY.
the mast's frm, delicate assault to skieS
ah, shipwreck-shattered ! fails not more than hE
whose shivering soul resigns the high emprisE,
shrouded a-squirm in crackling agonY.
192 The Red Pagan
" Here ends the first section of my poem, and I
doubt not you will agree with me that it is worthy
to be called sublime. The more you study it, the more
you will see in it: it will take you many years to un-
derstand it fully, and then you will not be certain that
you understand it in the least. My second section is
symbolically somewhat more complex. I here deve-
lop an idea formulated by the Master — I need scarcely
say that I allude to N. S. Stephane Mallarme. Thus
I commence:
O Blue! O Blue! Blue! Blue! BluE !
He paused All eyes, and ears, were turned to
the Chair. Yes, there it came again — a sound scarcely
breathed, softly modulated ; yet a snore, a distinct,
unmistakeable Snore!
A hot-tempered poet rose, stuttering : '' B-b-but
this is m-m-monstrous ! I haven't read m-m-mine
yet!'*
'' Nor I !" " Nor me !" " We haven't read ours !"
cried fourteen poets in chorus.
Everybody rose and gesticulated with the ex-
ception of the traveller whose reading had been in-
terrupted. He seated himself with the expression of
Eugene Aram in the condemned cell, and gazed into
Space. The hubbub grew around him. The rusty-
brown traveller, vociferating, "Listen to me!" was
powerless to quell the tumult. The little iron-grey
man appeared perplexed, but calm.
The Crown of Gum Leaves 193
Suddenly there was silence. As mysteriously
as She had come, they felt the Presence vanish. For
a moment they were awed. Then a poet rose to his
opportunity. " I have not yet read mine/^ he explain-
ed ; '' but mine is undoubtedly the best. Therefore
" And he stretched over the table and grasped
the wreath of gum-leaves.
That is, he grasped the space where the wreath
had been. For, even as he touched it, it disappeared
beneath his fingers : seemingly it had melted into air.
There remained — a single leaf.
Instantly the poets nearer to the leaf threw them-
selves upon it. Those farther from the leaf threw
themselves upon the poets. There was combat and a
scuffle. Loud voices affirmed superiority; louder
voices denied. Several poets on the outskirts of the
struggling mass commenced to read their pieces to
each other. Then the little iron-grey man perceived
it was time to act.
Upon his hint several left the room. The others
he collared and took in turn to the door, kicking
them forth calmly, but not unskilfully. When all
were out, he closed the door.
No sooner had a poet reached the open air than
he tottered and fell, and slept instantly where he fell.
Not one who had partaken of the mulga rum escaped
its potent stupor. The youthful antique alone re-
mained erect, gazing pensively at the prone forms
that strewed the earth around him. While light
194 The Red Pagan
remained, he busied himself in inditing a poem des-
criptive of the scene. When the light failed, he chose
the plump and dignified traveller for a pillow, and
slept deliberatively. Above him, in the newly-risen
breeze of evening, the sign of the hostel creaked back-
ward and forward between its legends of RiOT and
Rest— Riot, and Rest. And the vast wings of
Night drooped over all.
When the travellers woke at daylight, dishevelled
but buoyant, they stared round in surprise. They lay,
or sat, or stood, among the stones of the desert. The
hostel had vanished. The more curious searched for
its site, but found no trace that a building had stood
where they remembered it. Then — was Yesterday
a dream ? No ; for an ambient odour of mulga rum
still remained like a blessing upon the spot. " The
rum at least was real," muttered the rusty-brown tra-
veller regretfully.
It was fortunate that some of them had sand-
wiches in their pockets ; and they remembered having
passed a waterhole not far away. Gradually they
made their way back to civilisation. Nobody yet
wears the crown of gum -leaves.
But the leaf remains in the possession of the
poet with the best right to it.
The End.
m
^
// is reg7xtted that at p. y^ (footitote) The Education of the
Central Nervous System, by R. P. Halleck, was accredited to
F. Halleck by my ^^ automatic mind,^^ familiar with Fitz- Greene
Halleck' s vigorous verses.
^
CONTENTS.
What Is Literature ?
The Philosophic Life
The Case Of Annie Besant
Rhetorical Ruskin
The Genealogy Of Genius
The Bronte Family
Jean Ingelow ....
How It Is Done
George Eliot at Sea
The Space-God
The Label-God ....
The Time-God
Besant And Buchanan
Malevolent Mummy .
Benevolent Mummy .
Little Children
Kipling Curiously Considered .
New Books And Blue Books
Men On The Land
A Word For Australia
The Crown Of Gum Leaves
Page
I
6
II
i8
22
31
39
47
56
60
69
76
84
89
100
109
118
138
144
152
161
Copyright, ig04. — Finished printing 26th July, 1904, for publi-^
cation ist August^ 1^04. — W7n. Bi'oohs <sf Co., Ltd., Printers,
Sydney. — Edition 0/2,000 copies in paper at js. 6d. ; 200 in cloth, gilt \
top, at 6s. ; total, 2,200 copies.
THE BULLETIN LBRARY
Edited by A. G. Stephens.
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