Ex Librii C. K. OGDEN THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES CROSS VIEWS CROSS VIEWS BY WILFRID SCARBOROUGH JACKSON AUTHOR OF "NINE POINTS OF THE LAW" "TRIAL BY MARRIAGE," ETC. LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY TORONTO: BELL fcf COCKBURN. MCMXII Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON 6r> Co. At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh PR 6019 Jl39c To Her Who invariably had the Jirst word in these discussions but has not been allowed the fast, in all love and sympathy. 1C.26127 CONTENTS CHAP. I. TOWN AND COUNTRY II. ALSO A GARDEN III. A WET DAY .... IV. THE LION AND THE UNICORN V. OUR COMMON TONGUE . VI. WOMAN VII. MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE . VIII. JOHN BULL .... IX. THE GAME-PLAYERS X. OVER THE FIRE . . XI. APPEARANCES .... XII. A GENTLEMAN AND A SOLDIER XIII. FACETIOUSNESS . XIV. THE MAN OF THE WORLD XV. A FRIEND TO STAY . XVI. SELFISHNESS AND OTHER VIRTUES CROSS VIEWS TOWN AND COUNTRY I AM glad to think that the position of the Cockney has weakened. His champions are mostly gathered to their fathers, and each generation of them has fallen further from their high estate. Gog and Magog are pasteboard scarecrows. Dr. Johnson tired of life though he never tired of London. The apologetics of Lamb followed the ascendancy of Mitre Court, and latter-day and literary enthusiasts for the town live in lodgings far west of Charing Cross, and their proofs are posted after them into the wilds. The Cockney fades and pales. We of the country have borne his scorn for long enough. The turnip has been offered us for sustenance, and our brains were supposed to conform to our diet. But the country has long been discovered. It is no longer the pic- turesque. The wits have disappeared from town. Clubs are clubs no more. The buff waistcoat of the Mayfair lounger is replaced in the bay-windows by the striped yellow of the bored waiter until the lamps are lit and the reflux of the City-tide fills the great rooms with otherwhere unassociated crowds. There is scarcely " desart enough in Scotland " for all the 3 Cross Views citizens who fly to it, and lions are no longer to be visited at the Tower or bears to be pursued in Fleet Street. The smart set, whether or no a fiction of the associated press, is chiefly exhibited in country houses, and whereas not long since the countryman in town in June avoided the half-crown side of Piccadilly and visited his club in the forenoon, his dust-bedaubed car now halted by the curb affords him a pied-a-terre whence he steps unashamed in tweeds and Burberrys. He carries with him something of his real estate, and is still in such close touch, by speed, with his rural existence, that his condition passes, as a man may cross his doorstep bareheaded to speed a guest without exciting remark. But who now carries his tall hat into the countryside ? It still sets on our brow the mark of its sovereignty on solemn and on some festal occasions, though as far from Pall Mall as Calcutta or Cathay ; but its occasions diminish, and there are none so poor to do it reverence. Mine is laid up in lavender at least it reposes in a bandbox on a high set shelf in Piccadilly, flanked by proud names of terri- torial magnates. I hope it is happy. 1 have made my election, and am of the country. The man whose windows give upon the street may have a wider outlook than has he whose windows command a county ; nevertheless, outlook, in the geo- graphical sense, is not without its parallel effect. The mind has its assimilative and digestive processes even as the body has, and its digestive or ruminating 4 Town and Country periods are well spent on the edge of a noble down, whence the eye is naturally sensible of the curve of this small earth, can see a town smouldering below, an estuary charged with shipping, and the encircling shallows of the great sea dotted with little men in little ships creeping up over the bend of the world or dropping away, spar by spar, down to the deep waters and the Antipodes. Thence I can see the belly and the members of the body-politic sprawl beneath me. I am a part of all that I can see, a cell of that body, a momentarily strayed unit from that pullulating ant-heap down there, and my senses receive a physical stimulus towards realising my place in it all, towards seeing the range and the restrictions, from the universal sun pouring on my head to the similarly strayed emmet at my feet scaling a dizzy height of dandelion for purposes of his own, possibly meditative also. I say I have made my choice ; for I have lived in town also all too long and my repudiation of Cockney impudence was but the generous heat of the convert. I have noticed, though, that his enthusiasm is not always communicable to those born in the faith. They damp down the ardour of the catechumen. They seem to hold that the cold-water cure should be carried further than baptism. Haversedge, whose father lived before him at Landfall Manor house, and has lived there himself for fifty years, has made himself one of my sponsors in the neighbourhood. Except for the even brown of his skin, a weathered 5 Cross Views tint so uniform that one supposes it to extend all over him, he does not carry out my old conception of the countryman. But what is a conception but a makeshift to fill a void ? Ignorance is seldom emptiness. The abhorred vacuum has filled itself with rubbish. When knowledge comes, you see, for in- stance, the Guardsman a rather bookish person with a badly-rolled umbrella ; and the actress a very ragbag with no features or complexion of her own ; and Haver- sedge, a countryman in the flesh, wears ordinarily neither gaiters nor shooting-jacket, and carries minor verse in his pocket in place of corn-samples. A rusty morning suit with tails, and buttoned boots, enclose his person. He is the gentlest of men, and has an illimitable patience in listening. But that, I think, is a country attribute. Too courteous to snub my ill-directed admirations for poppies in the corn, or blackbirds' song in the orchard, he takes up the premises I have rejected, and shakes his head at my denunciations. " You have seen much of London," he says, " and I but little. But how pleasant to run up for a change to one of the healthiest spots in the kingdom. To get away from the smell of manured fields, and ill-kept farmyards. To walk on clean dry pavements uncrossed by the trail of herds of domestic animals. How one enjoys one's first breakfast " " Hang it all, Haversedge," I exclaim. " The fresh eggs, the genuine butter, the certificated milk ; the ready service " 6 Town and Country " Are these things the product of London ? " I ask. " They go there," says Haversedge. " We cannot get them. Then to touch clean linen once more ! I dream sometimes of the laundries of London, and wake up to the grey and ill-rinsed wash of Landfall." "But that can only be carelessness and individual slovenliness," I protest "Of course it is," he says soothingly, " and think of the abundant water in dry seasons, the universal sanitation, the healthy well-kept people, the absence of invalids, all gone to the country." " Well but " I appeal to his intellectual honesty, but he goes on, evoking his visions with raised hand. "The monumental quiet of no-thoroughfares, the beauty of the squares and parks where no trippers scatter papers, and no sacrilegious hands tear and trample the leaves and flowers all day long." " Your paradox is amusing," I reply, " but my confidence is not to be upset." " No paradox," he replies. " You find it matter for rejoicing that the Cockney is leaving town. But the high standard of comfort there has drawn to him the best products of the country. It is an economic transaction of great magnitude, and will take time to adjust. He leaves town, and town, which is the receiving- and sorting-office, still receives his drain upon the country, and has now to dispatch it after him whence it came. Perhaps you buy your groceries, meat, boots, or what not, in the village ? " " As far as I can," I say stoutly. 7 Cross Views "Admirable. But the grocer, the butcher, and the bootmaker do not. That's all. And the quality that comes down is somehow not the quality that goes up. The article must bear the price of the double journey. Country life is more artificial than you suppose. And in the days when it was according to nature those who could afford to went to London." " How comes it that you have stayed here ? " I ask rather sulkily, seeing in my companion one of those unpleasant people who rejoice to point out to you that your house faces east, that you are on clay soil, that breweries in which you are interested are threatened with special taxation and are already down with a run, that you should not have joined the club, where you proudly paid your forty-guinea entrance fee last week after years of waiting, for it is in diffi- culties and all the best members left last year, &c. " For reasons which I trust will induce you to stay here, even if they did not bring you," he replies with his slow smile. " You and I do not weigh the same evidences as little Mrs. Underwing at the Nasturtiums. Do you know her ? She can never make up her mind which she prefers, town or country, and you can't be with her for ten minutes but the question pops up. But the real ground of her indecision is that she has a sister who lives in town, Mrs. Justin Touch." " I know her," I say ; " she has a little red-brick house behind Sloane Street." "She calls it Belgravia at least Mrs. Underwing does." 8 Town and Country " It would like to cross to that side, but as a matter of fact it leans strongly on Harrods'." " Well, never mind. Justin Touch is an average householder in the well-conditioned class that has choice of residence. His wife sees that the servants look after the house, takes care that the nurse takes care of the child " "And looks to her husband to look after himself. I know her." " No doubt. It is hard to see her superiority to Mrs. Underwing. But Mrs. Underwing sees it, and feels it, though openly she denies it. She chooses the better but approves the worse. But you have not her half-dozen good reasons growing out of their clothes every year. Some such reasons appeal to me to some extent, or did ; but her choice is fundamentally different from ours. We don't oppose low rent, fresh air, house and garden room, all the usual country nosegay, to the handiness of the muffin man and the proximity of Buckingham Palace. We want to save our souls alive. I am not about to remark that God made the country. He didn't. Not as we know it. It has been made by hundreds of laborious generations of men who in long-inhabited countries have given the landscape some- thing of what is called quality in painting. But He made man individual and the devil has made him social. He heard God's voice too plainly when he walked in the garden, and has shunned solitude ever since." " One can be very much alone in a city," I object. " A commonplace reflection, I admit." 9 Cross Views " I never object to a commonplace if I am permitted to examine it, and not hurried on to the next. You can feel a desolating loneliness in a city, but the essence of it is contrast. I do not think that the sense of solitude is there. The avenue to every sense positively roars with distraction. Untuned to your surroundings you may easily believe yourself a pariah, and fall to depression, melancholy, and madness. But solitude builds character the soul is not driven in on itself, but flowers and expands. In shallow minds a slight depression touches bed rock. Silly people cannot bear to be melancholy. Distraction is the fatal hindrance to the development of the Cockney soul. If you must live in a city live in a foreign city. Human speech breaks in less when unintelligible." "An English squire who positively prefers foreigners," I cry in despair. Haversedge pursues unmoved. " Have you ever looked for a reason for that modern tendency to change of neighbourhood ? Like many other modern tendencies it is not modern at all, but modern facilities have made it practicable, and the full advantage that is taken of the possibility is modern, and remarkable. Live where you will for ten years and fifty per cent, of your neighbours are come and gone." " Well, what is the reason ? " I ask, for I am already beginning to know that when Haversedge asks a question he is ready to supply the answer. "I believe they are moved by an unacknowledged hope of cheating the undertaker. A few years' resi- 10 Town and Country dence in a country neighbourhood, a few years of still- ness and observation, make the waste of death too perceptible. Every death is the death of an acquaint- ance, in some sense at least, and the knowledge of its certainty becomes, absurdly, a panic fear, and drives the unstable-minded leaseholder to new surroundings, where he does not recognise the recent gaps but starts afresh in a new community. 'It was impossible to stay,' he tells his neighbours, 'the place changed so. I assure you that when I went there first,' &c. And the new neighbourhood smiles sympathetically and starts at once, as it seems to him, to remove to the cemetery, et autres lieux" "I am enjoying my conversation with you im- mensely," I say. " I am indeed happy to enter here under your auspices. You put things in the most pleasant light." Haversedge halts and leans on his stick, absorbing the scene with far-sighted eyes. We have been walking across the fields towards Landfall Manor. His weathered colouring and strong knotted hands supported on the unshod nature-crooked sapling give him, to my amused fancy, no little likeness to an old thorn tree bent from the prevalent winds of many winters, and obstinate to endure as many more. "You are no sojourner here," he says; "you have bought your land, you have built your house, and your philosophy must henceforth be that of the countryman, and not that of the summer visitor. Unless I am mistaken in you, you do not seek II Cross Views distraction in the country ; you would avoid it. Now the Cockney is a man bemused. He lives his life to a band of music. Stillness never invades his soul, the inducer, nay, the compeller of self-formation. In his existence sound and movement fill the void of thought, and distraction is always at his elbow. Remember, we are discussing the leisured choice, and not the tethered worker. Comes sorrow and the Cockney drowns it, comes worry and he can forget it, depres- sion and he can find stimulant, sickness with self or sense of defeat and he can plunge into other men's doings. An enlarged and unvirtuous Podsnap, he puts everything behind him. He faces nothing, he conquers nothing, he wins nothing. He always runs away, and comes up smiling and unscarred. His body has killed its enemy the soul, and lives at peace." " And is even peace to be denied me ? " I ask in terror. " Even peace ! " echoes Haversedge. " Peace is not a premise ; it is the desired conclusion. You have come here to seek it. If you don't run away you will find it before you die. It is expressly excluded from a lease, but it is an implied clause in a settled estate." "Then there is still Hope at the bottom of the deed-box," I say smiling. We have reached the lodge. The coachman's wife flaps a cloth at some scared and scatter-brained chickens, which, deprived thereby even of the sense of direction, the lowest form of conscious intelligence, run through the dusk in all directions. 12 Town and Country "Tell Hurrish, he must wire that bank," says Haversedge, " those chickens are laying the hedge- roots bare this dry season. They scratch, scratch, on that side all day long." Mrs. Hurrish says, " Yes sir," with a mild patience, but I think that Haversedge would have to exercise his turn for listening if I were not with him. " You can't grow a good thorn-hedge in a day," he says to me ; " my father planted that one." " Why," I exclaim in surprise. " I was in the Handyside's garden yesterday, and they have a splendid privet-hedge nearly as high as my head, and they put it in when they came here." u I said thorn," replies Haversedge grimly. " I like to live behind thorn." " I see, I see," I say hastily ; and then again, on reflection, with more intelligence, "I see." Haversedge turns a few steps back with me, and asks whether I have seen much of the people here. We discuss one or two houses. " You will find your situation the usual one. Two or three friends if you are fortunate, a dozen inti- mates, two or three score acquaintances. But you will see them in every stage of their life's experience. Privacy is another fond fancy you must part from, for everything is known in the country. I am not re- ferring particularly to gossip, though that is one of the things well missed in the Capital, but I mean that every small outstanding act and event sufficient to cause general attention at the moment is filed as a 13 Cross Views record in local history, and can always be produced on occasion. Our family histories are well known. Quarrels cannot be concealed, illness and misfortune are patent, and the causes are known and discussed. And in a man's native village, if nowhere else, his sins advance a step towards the light pan passu with his every step up the ladder of fame." "The course of true love is followed and even anticipated, and the happy marriage blossoms amid a concourse of well-wishers or fades in a chorus of com- ment. Persons are not known merely as members of a political party, followers of a branch of sport, ad- herents of a certain church, habitues of a club, or as business figure-heads with whom one deals in stocks and shares. They are known much beyond this. We know how their politics and religion were bred, how their business is thought of, not on 'change, but by their family and friends, and by those who knew the business when the father had it ; after what fashion they live with their wives, how they shape in the hunting-field, how they have borne good and ill times, how they have conducted themselves in personal crises. Our vicar is not a mere incumbent, nor his house a number on a street door. He is one of us, and it behoves him to be one of our best. Our doctor is not a specialist, a man with whom we come in touch only when we are ill. He is everyman's doctor, and his good or evil report may be picked up at every dinner-table. And is it nothing to him that his patients are his own people, not faces that crop up '4 Town and Country in a consulting-room from the world away of the next street ? " 4t It is just as well that I have left my character behind me," I conclude, shaking hands with him. " Don't forget you dine with me to-morrow night," he says. " I have one or two people coming I want you to meet, and you may begin the exhibition of your new self." I walk away along the clipped impenetrable barrier, putting up more of Mrs. Hurrish's strayed leggy chickens from their dust baths, and smile as I think that I am on the right side of old Haversedge's thorn- fence. I like the old fellow much. I wonder lightly what friends the morrow may bring. "Blessed are they that expect nothing for they shall not be dis- appointed." I have never built much expectation on an acquaintance, and look on every friendship as a windfall, and unearned increment. I had always hoped to build my house in an orchard, and to step from my windows on to hummocky turf, or thick, unmown meadow-grass, reckoning a garden a Cockney attribute to a dwelling, and a rus in urbe. But here I am with my hedged-in strip of green, and painful flower-beds. Circumstances have been too strong, and money short. I have not built, moreover, as Haversedge implied, but bought and modified, and the garden is as yet unconverted. But the house I have taken in hand, a plain coat of white has replaced the salmon paint picked out with buff, in which I met it. The sash-windows and the blinds, those heavy- 15 Cross Flews lidded vacant eyes, have been removed, and casement openings, side-shrouded with short curtains, expand or contract their vertical slits of inner dark under the sunshine, like the insinuating inscrutable eyes of a basking cat. I have rebuilt the dining-room, giving the old house a new stomach. Its dyspeptic and queasy little old apparatus is gone in favour of my Chippendale, whose century of elbow polish defies the stains that cling to your French veneer, and makes it the only dining-room furniture there is. Dixi. And I have given it a brain, my library, and I myself will supply its soul, having re-shaped its body. My library is floored and panelled with oak, asking no covering or renewal, not torn from other and older walls, and mourning its loss of caste, but beginning an honest and serviceable career. Bunbury, Rowland- son, and Gillray decorate the uprights and oblongs on the walls, and massed books rise between in tall presses, friendly and unglazed. A great gate-legged table, nearly black it is so much older than its surroundings supports on its eight slender columns my modern folios and quartos the atlases where one goes a-travelling, the dictionaries for visiting, the histories for change of air, and the picture-books when one's legs are tired with their various adventures. Two great arm-chairs face my hearth ; there should be but one in a library. One is mine, but though they are of a pattern, the other I view with dislike. I think a chapter on^Chairs when I regard 16 Town and Country it. Armistead will mostly occupy this one I expect. Armistead is a painter, and tolerates me as well as he can anyone who is not a painter. And I don't mind him much. And I have my retreat, for my house has an attic, a rare feature under the low- pitched wasteful roof of the English builder. A slightly sharper pitch will give you another story, and if the design be touched by some other hand than the builder's the reinforcement of a mansard will make your extra floor the most alluring in the house. A thing so simple yet so seldom attainable. I joy- fully accepted the reversion of two attic bedrooms rejected by my amazing servants, gave them a room to their fancy looking townwards, and demolishing a party-wall, gave myself the range of the whole attic front, commanding twenty miles of Channel through dormer windows from its raftered ceiling and white- washed walls. A noble attic, two bedrooms (Armistead again), library and dining-room. I paid more for my cup- boards in Duke Street, and the view is thrown in. I have the poor taste to be fond of my own company, and in an attic you may live with the aloofness of a Stylite. I have no enthusiasm for humanity. I am eternally interested in its activities, and could live several lives without boredom, but prefer the more admirable evidences of man to his animal accidents. The study of human nature is one of the basest of catch-words in the common mouth, and when I am told that people are so interesting, I can only wish that B 17 Cross Fiews my interest were as easily aroused. I have known a man sitting in a club window to delude himself that he was studying human nature, and it is the invari- able resource of neglected ladies in a ball-room. Consider this tedious and difficult business of lan- guage, our medium of understanding, whose study only removes one further and further from the pigeon- English of daily speech. Take the bare coin of catch-word as it passes from man to man, hold it a moment and turn it over, and you are defrauded. If you are an honest man you cannot pass it on. You receive it eternally, but cannot use it. You are bankrupt in speech. For an example, two are talk- ing politics. People who talk generally talk about things like that. One of them thinks, and goes so far as to say, that a recent war might have been avoided. "Pro-Boer," says the other triumphantly. His opponent does not admire the superscription, but pockets the false piece and returns another stamped " Jingo." And that incident is closed. This rapid and ready exchange of tokens makes for briskness in speech and torpor in thought. If you attack this torpidity of the thought, it is transferred to the speech. Your interlocutor is tongue-tied, and you, my friend, are a bore. Here is a preliminary obstacle to the study of people, who are so inter- esting. The interesting people of Landfall are likely to find me an agreeable neighbour. No. It is the pastime of the omnibus-patron, the 18 Town and Country dodge of the mean man buying a workman's ticket, the excuse of the loiterer, of the crowd-lover, the band-listener, the exhibition-loafer, the keeper of low company, and of the general dullard who can find no resource in himself. The student of human nature develops into that innocent ass the cynic with his cheaply-acquired phrases about men and women and their price, his black-and-white views of society, and his hopeless cecity to the composition of the shaded, complex, mutable, inarticulate, wonderful mass of pos- sibilities he condemns so glibly. The student of human nature can always read character in the face. " I can tell in a moment," he says ; and he does. He will point out to you the ill-nature of the dyspeptic, the evil passions of the bad-complexioned, the innocence of the blue-eyed maiden, the strong will of the prognathous, the in- tellect behind the promontoried brow, the shiftiness in the eyes of the myope, the cheery frankness of the loud-voiced, the misanthropy of the shy, the tendency to drink in the rubicund. All these things are patent to him. No man comes into his presence unrevealed. He knows all this. You sit at home and know nothing. He has been out in the world, and seen hundreds of men and women, on the beach and in the street. He is a student of them, and a reader of character. A man's likes and dislikes are supposed to be eloquent of him, but of a man who likes preserved ginger, solitude, twopenny buses and the works of the late Mr. Samuel Butler, and dislikes rissoles, golf, 19 Cross F'iews cut-flowers, and the Daily Mail^ what do you make ? And if, furthermore, he hates theatres, militarism, and comic papers, and loves his wife, political economy, and the drawings of Mr. Augustus John ? Again, community of tastes is always offered as the basis of friendship. But those who kill pheasants and partridges will seldom associate with slayers of beef and mutton, though they would seem to have not a little in common beyond this. I, alas, am lost in the crowd of humanity. I meet statesmen and warriors, and take them for general dealers and small clothes-men. I see the headpieces of leaders and thinkers on the shoulders of road- navvies. I look for sympathy and friendship behind beetle brows and atrabilious countenances, and flee from the uncharitableness of smiles and the acid of strawberries and cream. The captains and the kings depart, and I had taken them for grocers, and I run to meet the hero or the saint, and grasp the hand of a dissenting minister or other impossible person. It is fortunate indeed, that these guides to character and founts of human knowledge are amongst us, or society would get into an inextricable tangle. The world is rightly severe on people who, ignorantly as I do, or wilfully as some, change labels and turn sign-posts. Let them restrain these erratic motions, correct their distorted vision with the glasses of conformity, and follow the indications furnished so readily by the knowing and astute. 20 Town and Country Wandering round my library where I am not yet sufficiently acclimatised to settle to a book in the afternoon, the front door bell speaks from the outer world. A bell to me has always something of a panic sound. Release from the summons of the bell I reckon among the immunities of manhood, and the church bell and the school bell frighten me now but in dreams ; but there are all too many bells left to shake the adult mind. I say nothing of bicycle bells, telephone bells, dinner bells, and such wretched scares and interruptions, but how does that bell speak to you that is followed by the cry of " Any more for the shore ? " when, wrapped in triple brass and a reeking tarpaulin, you see, in stoney-eyed despair, your boat torn, shrieking, from the sheltering quay ? The last slow bell, the last of all, I shall not hear, but there is still the wedding-bell. Many a good man has it taken, unawares. Pooh ! Let me keep a stout heart. Some of us win through that danger, and I am still free. But the panic set up by the front- door bell has been very enduring in my case. The call is inevitable, when there is no wife to cover one's retreat retro me Sathanas ! "Jane, I am at home. Show any one in here." It is the vicar, come to see his new parishioner. We shake hands amicably. I hope I am not anti- clerical, but I seldom shake hands with a clergyman without a flying vision of a roped ring and a quick break-away. But this seems a benign old fellow. We fall to talking of the neighbourhood, and he 21 Cross Views informs himself of my antecedents, and of my con- nection with Landfall. Curious, kindly, and a snob of course, he hears with interest of my old friendship with Haversedge, and is more at ease. "An odd fellow, now, Haversedge," he says, laughing, and crossing his knees j " quite a crank you know. You would be surprised to know how few friends he has about here. He is very opinionated, is Haversedge, not to say conceited, though it is hard to see why. He and I were at Oxford together very ancient history, but he was not in what you might call the best set, and I believe he never took his degree. He was a Radical in those days not now oh, no ! he has seen fit to alter all that most of them do but the taint sticks about him somehow. But perhaps I am on dangerous ground I trust that you are a Conservative, Mr. Askew ? " He laughs tolerantly, tolerant to both of us, feeling that even if wrong he has paid me a compliment. I reply that I am no politician, and that I am not offended. " Well, I am glad you are not a Radical," he re- sumes, looking round the room while he picks up his thread again. " Of course, Haversedge is a very old friend of mine, and I would not say a word against him, you may be sure." There is something very feminine about parsons, I reflect. " But I would not be much guided by him in your notions of the neighbourhood, Mr. Askew. A very peculiar fellow, a very tiresome fellow in some 22 Town and Country ways." He has ceased smiling, and seems to see Haversedge before him. The Englishman takes a tolerant view of his clergy- man, and the tolerance is reciprocal. His church is a church of compromise, a fluctuating influence, a parcelled-ofF body of the better public opinion given a habitation and a name and a commutation of tithes. He looks on his clergyman as a rather more decent fellow than himself, if comparatively a weakling. He recognises that he stands for something in the Re- public that is of worth, and apt to be neglected. That he performs an office he himself is too slack or too flippant to attend to, that his job is mortifying and unthankful, and that if unsatisfactory at times, it is not for the clergyman's parishioners to throw stones. He laughs at him behind his back, but willingly allows him his title of reverend; he does not bring him his profaner concerns, and, allowing him his rostrum, does not care to hear his voice beyond its range. The clergyman is not unaware of this, and while he takes his privileges returns the forbearances. And so it comes about that his footing, take it all round, is not assured. He exists on terms of treaty. However good his intentions, he is not accepted as a living spiritual fount. When he comes among his friends, it is as a man who has left his business for the day like other men, and he is expected to show in his person the kind of man his business turns out, and 23 Cross Views the impression that he gives, most times, is that the business is not doing very well. That it is not supporting itself. That he is a figure-head, and that he feels the want of scope and responsibility. Or that he belongs to a fighting profession, and that his enemies will not give him battle. If his service be a State service, how can the State inspire such work as his should be ? If his work draw other inspiration, how can he leave it at the office ? So perhaps he turns to hobbies, and side-issues, and parish-details, that eat the heart out of a good man, and turn a poor one into an old woman. I wonder as these reflections run through my head, and my visitor revives his parish animosities against Haver- sedge, whether Mr. Stather knows these self-question- ings. When you come to think of it, how oddly his appearance sits on his profession this middle-aged gentleman with the gold watch-chain, paying his afternoon calls, and quarrelling with a neighbour's politics. The old type of civil servant who played bilboquet between ten and four, the lately existent commissioned soldier who thought himself underpaid as an ornament, must soon be joined by their old ally. " A man in Haversedge's position," he says, smack- ing his knee, "should set his face against all this this new nonsense this socialism, to use a convenient word." "It is a convenient word," I agree. " The position of a clergyman is difficult at times, Mr. Askew." 24 Town and Country " All the time, I am sure," I hasten to reply. " You are a Churchman, I hope ? " " The Church casts a wide net." " You are right," he says, brightening. " There is room for all who come. But what was I saying ? Yes. A man like Haversedge adds greatly to the difficulties of his vicar. It is uphill work preaching respect for superiors when the chief man in the place has no respect for himself. He panders to the people, Mr. Askew. I cannot express it otherwise. He panders to the Radical element. Though he no longer votes Radical, as I have said, he has the sitting member to stay at Landfall, Boardman. And he countenances dissent in quarters where he has the power to stop it. That sort of thing gets about among the working class and among one's servants, and is most difficult to combat. And naturally it makes the best people furious with him. For, after all, he is a gentleman, and of really old family, and a man of standing and means. Colonel Holme- staple, or Mr. Baumeister, or old Lady Tapley, would shut their doors in Boardman's face. Boardman " He turned disgustedly in his chair. "I suppose you have never met him, then ? " I ask. " One meets him at dinner at Landfall. That is what I complain of." I opened my lips, but closed them again. u But now I shall look forward to meeting you there, Mr. Askew. That must be my excuse for hurrying away. Delightful to see so many books. 25 Cross Views No friends like them, what ? I envy you your leisure. Good-bye ; pray don't let me disturb you." I close the hall door. I had always thought it pleasant to see the door stand open in the country. But I was a visitor in those days. 26 II ALSO A GARDEN MY garden rather perplexes me. I am not quite sure that it is a garden. I have never come across a definition, though garden literature is not lacking. Is it a matter of aspect, contents, and size, would you say ? Must it have a sun-dial, for instance ? If so, mine is none. But mine has a south border, which I believe to be a necessity, where the genius loci and the hora serena flourish for the layman alongside the Primula Himalaica or whatever it may be. This south border is undoubtedly a sine qua non another blossom for you to stick in your buttonhole. There must be a south border, and there must be inhabitants of the garden, under names that define but do not indicate. There is, then, my Visitor to the garden, myself who am the Spectator of the garden, and there is a worker who is best left out of this. How does my garden grow ! It has contents and characters ! As for size, I seem to have read of window gardening, which would exclude mere dimen- sional rules, and certainly we do not measure beauty by the foot. As for size, then, you may " put " on my lawn, but you may not practise your approaching. 27 Cross Views In that the consent of neighbours is involved. You may play diabolo, but not croquet. You may stroll, but scarcely walk. Meditate, but not discuss at least, not loudly. A watering-can more beseems it than a hose. Bacon on Gardens you may read in it, but scarcely the Syha. Tea may be given to an inti- mate, but not entertainment to a party. The crocus coming early finds room, and daffodils can dance in April before the company is gathered, and the season bat son plein ; but the stiff-mannered tulip and, later, the full-petticoated peony are crowded. The flags and St. Joseph lilies stand like sky-scrapers on prohi- bitive ground-rents, and the sun-flowers cannot wring their necks round following the day, anxious as I am to see the feat, for they have no room to turn their heads. My spirits sink again. It is certainly very small. " Look, I come to the test, a tiny garden." Would I have it a garden, though ? Here again my indecision recurs, for gardens are for townsfolk. If I lived in town I would cultivate my garden were it but a window garden, as it likely would be, but why hedge in a rectangle of grass and coloured things when there is a hundred square miles of them across the boundary ? A view is much cheaper than a garden, and beauty comes round in its season without thought for bedding out, cutting down, tying up, and forking in. The child on the beach turns his back to the ocean, digs a 28 Also a Garden little trench with his wooden spade and fills his own particular puddle from which he draws a particular satisfaction his bigger playmate cannot afford him ; but my soul rises above puddles, and rejects spades and heavy watering-pots. I will admire the illimitable view. Nature is a little careless. At times she over- waters her garden, and forgets to water it at others ; but I can cast no stone at her. She raises weeds and flowers ; but there she has my sympathy. I have a tenderness for weeds, and seldom endeavour to repel nature with a fork. Far be from me to scoff at her rather mixed results. If I said anything against her, it would be that she was rather too imitative. If I don't water the geraniums, no more does she. If I water, she follows suit. If, in a live-and-let-live mood, I fail to eradicate a dandelion, she encourages it to become insufferable. If, on the other hand, I check a thrusting young creeper, she slays the poor wretch outright. Put out a stand of chrysanthemums for a breather, and she blows their medusa-locks off their heads ; complain, and for fresh air she substi- tutes thick white ghostly sea-fog, haunted all day and night by complaints of straying ships. But I leave it to her, chiefly. I can't help thinking she must know more about it than I do. The worker in the garden, I notice, confines himself to tidying up after her, and I think he is in the right of it. Shall man, knowing how little time he has to stay, and what inroads, as seen by easy calculation, 29 Cross Views his own toilet makes upon his span of life, give another and a larger fraction of it to shaving his lawns ? Though time and space be annihilated by man's inventions, and anything that escapes be recovered and bottled by Mr. Willett, yet would I not let myself out as barber to my own garden. Let it wear its own aspect. Let nature work her healthy com- petition, and if I have no bolstered exotics flourishing in artificial soil I will walk in a finer show of Bel/is perennis and Leontodon taraxacum than any to be seen at my pragmatical neighbours'. These names are an ornament to my page, and will not be found in any garden-book published these ten years. My walk is rather like the sailor's three steps and overboard, for the chief of my view (I hope I have not deceived you) is the Channel. I remember a morning when the cold white fog stood up against the cliff, curling over here and there, a puff of congealed breath, but for the most part keep- ing without the sharp line of the cliff edge where the sunlight bordered the cloud. In the garden we walked in the sun, and heard the sirens, great and small, give chorus all the morning long like " mongrel, puppy, whelp and hound," for a fleet was enshrouded within a mile of us, waiting to greet a potentate from across Channel. Towards midday the fog settled downwards as heavy snow melts and showed a plain of white under a blue sky. The opposite horn of the bay put up a ridge of warm brown turf, and, packed within the curve, lay the great white mattress of fog, 30 Also a Garden showing a level and falling surface. Its even floor became pitted with dimples, whence issued the hot breath of half a hundred smoke-stacks. Down sank the snow-field and the topmasts of the battle-ships pierced the air, allocating the blowholes ; and as it continued to sink and melt, now a mere sheet, up came funnel and bridge, barbette and bulwark, while through the last thin coverlet the phenomenon of their gradual emergence was played over again by the small fry of destroyers and torpedo-boats on either flank ; when, the last thin veil withdrawn, we beheld His Majesty's Channel Fleet, already turning on its keel disgustedly, for the potentate had slipped through in the obscurity, and it had got a cold in its head for nothing. I don't say this happened because I complained about the chrysanthemums, but give it as a sketch of nature's workings in the vicinity of my garden. If you come to consider the matter, a grass lawn, an evergreen hedge, and a blue sea at the other side of it, will offer you summer whenever the sun shines. Were I a gardener, instead of a spectator of gardens, I should look upon a Golgotha, a place of skulls, a space of inverted flower-pots with a dead stick pro- truding through each lifeless eyehole and strawy cerements wrapped about their clay-cold forms. My unfrozen outlook and undissolving view smiles back merrily winter as summer. A gentleman whose windows looked on to the Atlantic complained that there was nothing between 3 1 Cross Views him and America. He had four thousand miles of turbulent water, and what more he wanted, unless it were the great wall of China or a landing-tax, I cannot imagine. But probably that was not what he meant. He wanted incident, and should have come round the corner, to the left. If you would walk round your native land, fairly, and cutting no corners, you must pass under my hedge. There is no help for you. On my section of that long road you will find an Islander, leisurely sweeping but chiefly gazing seaward, and above the hedge you will see me, also admiring the view. For when my garden has bested me, and the view has the preference, I am there and see the pedestrian go by. He is frequently a foreigner, and if he isn't he is an Overner, as my friend with the broom would call him. You are an Overner. Because you are not an Islander. When you are past, the man with the broom will laugh at you. I shall not. I have more control over my emotions, ridiculous as Overners are. And perhaps a foreigner will follow, at whom we can all laugh. He will probably be a German. It is a Luxusreise to visit the Inse/, and all affluent Germans make it. His wife walks some yards behind him, and he talks back at her over his shoulder. She carries a basket, two umbrellas, and his Havelock, which is another English luxus no longer known to us by that name. French families pass also, pleased, astonishingly pleased with what they see. But let us take courage in this particular. Our side of the 32 Also a Garden Channel has the south aspect, an undeniable pull, and the sun tempts the countryside down to the lip of the sand ; our shores are greener than those opposite, and southerly winds spray the adventurous bluebell and primrose with salt showers, and the sea-anemone and the wood-anemone are almost within the borders of the one garden. The beach-minstrel, a summer- growth I would fain discourage, is to the foreign visitor but a garish outlander, showing a dash of barbarism quite pleasant on a civilised holiday, and for aught I know is accounted "tres snob." And you, if you saw a bathing-machine for the first time on a foreign strand, might you not perhaps fall into ecstasies over such a quaint and practical device that does not leave you to pick your way over long stretches of shingle or pebble, but follows the tides up and down the beaches ? I think it possible that Corrrmonsense would write to his daily paper and denounce the striped tent, were that the native article, and the gazers on the foreshore, and demand the introduction of the admir- able, delightful, private, and picturesque bathing- machine. It would figure largely in the colour-books series, with a violent violet shadow and a very French lady tripping down the ladder, and the bathing- machine horse with his bare-legged rider might cut into the profits of the Volendam types, and enable the sands of Bognor to compete in the Academy with the red roofs of Brittany, and seduce the painters of Fontainebleau. It was born English, the poor bathing- machine, but one day it will be discovered by the c 33 Cross Views wandering Continental some Marco Polo of the race will find it and exploit it, some unborn Manet or Monet found a school on its lines. Meanwhile the pioneers of the entente^ voyagers before Columbus, meet it and rejoice. As for the dinner that meets them at the Royal Promenade Hotel, I can only say that one must shut one's eyes to a certain amount of suffering. The descendants of the survivors will be hardier. And travel should have its hardships, or home would have no attractions. Were every comfort obtainable in France but read M. Octave Mirbeau. It is better that a nation's shortcomings should be pointed out by one of its sons. Out in the bay there are the submarines. Far away you see what appears to be a man walking on the water. Presently he goes under, but leaves his walking-stick, which walks alone, wonderfully, and leaves a thin white trail. And sometimes even the stick disappears, and then two torpedo boats spread a net between them and go a-shrimping for him. This makes me so nervous that I cannot go in to my meals, but stand on one leg mentally offering rewards for his recovery. I remind myself of the gouty old gentleman who, comfortably propped over against a similar outlook, his promontoried foot rising between his vision and the horizon, was discovered frantically waving ships off his inflamed and over-sensitive toe. And sometimes a little tug with a very large red flag will steam across and across the bay, far out, and 34 Also a Garden a cable's length behind her two squares of canvas follow in her wake. Northward, from the green, easy slope of the down rising from the pebble beach three miles away in the opposite curve, there is a long flash, bright as the sunlight, a long gathering whine from the travelling shell, and a column of white water is struck up between the targets : another and another white dash mark its ricochet to the final plunge, and a tremendous roar follows all up, like an oath flung after a stone. " Good sha-at ! " says the Islander, who always has time to watch things of this kind. He is as good a spectator as any man in the world. I am reminded that I am a spectator of gardens. If only one knew the names of things ! I suppose it is because the Garden of Eden came so early in the scheme of things that everything in a garden is so thoroughly christened. Everything that grows has a name and most of them have several. You have the Latin name though have does not imply posses- sion. You have butterflies when you can catch them, and sparrows when you can put salt on their tails you have, I say, the Latin names, and the English names, the local and the poetical names, the wrong names you get by putting faith in seed-labels, and the really astonishing names that come from the gardener. When the res innominate flourish you call them by one or more of these names, and when, again, they don't flourish, you call them quite other names. 35 Cross Views My Visitor in the garden is aggrieved that she and her sisters have not distinguishing scents, even as the flowers. I think they have ; at least but she says that I am ignorant of flowers, and cannot argue from a missing premise. Be that as it may, and over- looking the wanton and ridiculous excess, such an addition would be of dubious advantage. The scent could, clearly, not be individual. It must follow a class name. That there should be a sweet scent for Marys, for instance, we shall all agree. But if Mary did not love Mary ? Or if Mary christened into the tuberose class, let us say, were made faint with too much sweet ? There would be this much good, that the flower-names such as Lily or Violet would be of doubly sweet suggestion, and bring less disillusion in their train, but there would be this much bad, that unappropriated perfumes would be few for Beatrice, Maud, or Juliet, while divine Margaret must plainly go unscented. And there are others who might be considered. If to the barriers of blood, fortune, and mischance, that wreck so many lives in fact and fiction, we were to add congenital perfumes and con- genital aversions, we should reduce the marriage rate beyond any reasonable expectation of a happy ending to the tale. The clinging odour of Nicotiana tabacum has ere now dashed the prospects of its votaries, but there is every likelihood of this delicious and satisfying effluvium, capable too of so many subtle variations and individual strains, capturing the persons of our maidens and ending that particular danger. But I 36 Also a Garden should not like to be tied by irrevocable ties of birth even to the Arcadian mixture, which, in spite of the author's advertised assurance, is not to be enjoyed by ordinary men ; and picture the position of the smoker born into an aristocratic family, but whose means force him to drop the Henry, and adopt the simple Clay. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. No. Colours, flowers, and scents are made various to suit variable woman, and are better unappropriated. I would have no flowers in the house. Children in the nursery, dogs in the yard, flowers in the garden, and women at the polls. But I am a crank, and not one with my kind. Men go out in the autumn with a bag, children with baskets in the spring, and they return rejoicing with their dead ; and woman decks herself, smiling, with fur, feathers, and flowers. The primrose is learning to hide, and her indeter- minate, exquisite face will surely take on more and more the protective colouring of the greenwood, and will avoid being a yellow primrose by the river's brim to anyone, by being green. I keep one or two in my garden. I know their name for one thing, and never treat them as did little Psyche the buttercup. To see freshly-slaughtered masses of perfect growth decaying in swathes on my table gives me no joy. I would as soon shoot a bird as pick a wild flower. The act of meditation is peculiarly attached to gardens. Study is so obviously for indoors that the word has become eponymous. Reflection and con- 37 Cross Views sideration we carry about with us for our daily needs ; speculation is a vain thing, and rumination may be left to ruminants. To ponder or to muse demands, I think, the firelight, but to meditate, a garden. There are who meditate in bed, but this is an abuse. I have felt the initial stages, the interior debate, of an uninviting morning, but I never lapse. I am innately virtuous. I may sin, but cannot wallow in sin, so the morning-long indulgence of meditation in bed is unfamiliar to me. I take this recreation, then, out-of-doors ; even to indulgence perhaps ; but work is the thief of time, and the pursuit of letters an arduous distraction enforcing much idleness. Meditation, of course, is on the past, and, rightly, on an unsuccessful past, for meditation on a prosperous past recalls the ruminant again. The definition of happiness as the contemplation of past pleasure with- out present pain is merely descriptive of a good digestion. The past should be full of storm and hardship, for a garden to be truly a garden must be a harbour of refuge, even if it cannot be a port. I have by me an advertisement of a house to be let for the summer. I cut it out of the Times once, years ago. It is brief yet embracing, and ends in these words : "Ency. Britt. and mall Garden? Now, if it be the effort that counts for something in life, and not the result, surely an Encyclopaedia is a noble thing, and no unfit epitome of human en- 38 Also a Garden deavour ! What a magnificent conception, to enclose all knowledge in a book ! What a lame and impo- tent conclusion, to leave out of it everything that ever man wanted to know ! A great monument, then, this, of human effort and human impotence ; im- pressive as Baalbec, irresponsive as the Sphinx, in- ordinate as the Pyramids, and futile as the Eiffel Tower. My gifted advertiser knew the struggles and the vain pursuits, the baffled quests and Pisgah sights that make up our little span, and the ultimate defeat and philosophic retirement that round it off. Every son of Adam has his double, they say, and when I read that pregnant message that had found me across the desert of print, for one moment I saw myself and the maker of the tender gazing fearfully on each other like the duplicated lovers in Rossetti's water-colour. But, of course, he was really the man who earns .1,000 a year by writing advertisements. You have often heard of him. But what a gift of condensation ! What a lightning summary ! He knew about it all ! He knew the human heart, as he needs must who draws ^1,000 yearly from framing advertisements. He summed it all up, that Master of Phrase. He did not offer "Encyc. Britt. and small study" No. His offer was not to green youth, but to riper age. What he held out to the unheeding crowd was the Encyclo- pedia Brittanica an epitome of vanities and a small garden to meditate it in. I hope some other solitary, and worse-supplied, stretched a weary hand. 39 Cross Views I meditate, then, on my grass plot, and without going further find subject enough. The first thing that strikes me about it is that there is no grass on it. Really, it is scarcely represented. It is green enough after rain, but after a spell of sun it has rather an infinite variety of bronzes. This of course is due to the incursions of wild things. Some one has been letting in the jungle. My predecessor. He must have been a man much of my stamp. The weeds were too many for him, and now he is in Heaven, or in town. Now, I have a neighbour, a cheerful out- door man, not given to meditation at all, but a man of speech and also a man of action, with a hawk-eye for a weed. I find him, of fine afternoons, walking his lawns with a glass bottle in his hand containing a killing acid. The stopper crowns a long sharp needle grooved towards the point to hold the deadly drop, and when the victim is seen for so utterly is the savage subjugated in his domains that a sense of pity arises in the ill-regulated breast and lends to the remnants of a barbaric horde the false colours of the noble red man, of the hunted and oppressed "it is pizen wherever found." My moral reflections are transferred to the lawns of that dutiful Christian, and the dark picture of the enemy sowing tares is overlaid by this of the enthusiastic missioner and exemplary groundsman, my friend with the acid bottle, eradi- cating them. My plot is too far gone. It is too late to mend. It was the fault of the man who let it me. I have 40 Also a Garden other things to do, and the view across the hedge calls me away. That quaint and irregular sonnet of Soulary's runs in my head sometimes. In English it would be something like this, though I should be sorry to submit my rendering to the Jeffreys of the Westminster Gazette : " If I had a rood of ground, hill, or plain, or vale, A little living water, were it runnel, fall, or spring, I would plant an olive-shade, or ash, or willow-veil, There would raise my roof-tree, tiled, or thatched with reed, or ling. In my tree a nest of down, of grass, or woolly trail, Should lure the finch or mavis-song, or sparrow chattering ; Beneath my roof a cradle soft, a mat, or soft-meshed swing, Couch a lovely child for me, ruddy, brown, or pale. I only ask a rood of ground ; this to measure right, I would say me to the child fairest in my sight : ' Up, and from the rising sun take the earliest gleam ; Then, within the line thy shadow casts upon the lawn, Are the bounds of my desire ever more withdrawn.' Happiness beyond hand-reach is but an empty dream." " A little living water " a roc's egg ! I knew a garden once, though, no bigger than what shall I say no bigger than the refuge in Piccadilly Circus (whose fountain water rises at the bidding of a turncock and where flowers are brought in baskets of a morning : or than that court in the Temple whose Cross Views sleepy-sounding patron spring deadened my senses so effectually against the appeal of Themis) a little garden flowering with a storied luxuriance at the foot of the finest down in England, and drawing living water from a tiny cave filled with fern, whence it flowed, an absurd exquisite microcosmical river, two feet wide and six inches deep, with eddies, rapids, finger-tip shallows and wrist-deep pools, cresses, and trout ! The trout were out of proportion that I admit. They were fed too much. If they were refused they jumped out into the garden, knowing full well that they would be put back and comforted with crumbs. Yes, they were too big for the scene, they destroyed the unities : and harassed my infant soul, just as the cannon provided in my day for leaden armies. Now they have it in proportion, for military matters have progressed in the nursery : and in the garden much water has flowed under the rustic bridge that one stepped over, but not on. So much indeed that I dare not revisit my toy-stream. I should be hopelessly out of the picture. A clean brook ! Where may it be found ? I wonder did it ever exist, in the good old times that were so abominably dirty. And if a dripping tap cost twenty shillings and three shillings costs, what would be the water rate for a private-trout stream ? To be in- terested in the answer you must have shares in the New River Company. Did you ever risk penal servitude by scooping fry out of a river in a bucket, and transferring them to an 42 Also a Garden aquarium ? They are so pretty it is worth the risk. In the stream they are no more than tadpoles or shadows, but through glass the tiny, perfect, silvery things have the attraction that models and miniatures never fail to exercise. But they don't flourish on crumbs, and the injury done the gentle angler in their premature death affects the conscientious naturalist. As to birds, the poet, as you see, will take a sparrow. He is not the first, though birds and bird-names are almost as numerous as plants. I knew a man once who was happy for years in the knowledge of one bird. He said he knew the cuckoo by his note. It was a rash faith anyway, for the early cuckoos reported in the papers spring by spring, are wonderfully simu- lated by small country-bred boys, and even, though I fear I shall be scoffed at for saying so, by distant dogs, when heard once in a way. But the man, who knew the cuckoo when he heard him, had a friend who hated him, and who said that there were no consonants in bird language, and that the cuckoo was not a cuckoo but an oo-oo. So the man of one bird, undone, went away on a Polar expedition and lived on penguins for three years ; but the friend, who had determined on his death, said that the penguin wasn't a real bird which was manifestly a falsehood. But the man mourned, and set out to Shepherd's Bush, thinking to find birds there, but there were none. He made his way back eventually, and went on another expedition to Golder's Green, pioneering for a tube railway, and there perished ; and when I say he perished, I mean 43 Cross Views he perished miserably. But his friend rejoiced, for he was a member of the cage-bird society and hated amateurs. But though there is much one must contemn in his conduct, he was probably right about the cuckoo ; and not altogether wrong about the penguin. For though Darwin's story is the better reasoned, that of M. France is the more convincing ; and the penguin moreover, and I have studied him for hours, has that earnest striving towards humanity, that will to be human, that constant and solemn purpose to be upright that, however blown upon the Lamarckian theory may be at the present moment, contrasts most favourably with the careless, degenerate and remi- niscent likeness fitfully displayed in the monkey-house. Personally I am a convinced and practising Dar- winian, but the penguin striving to be a man draws from me an admiration I cannot accord to the ape striving to forget that he is one. I could live with a penguin, and be the better for him, but I could not live with a monkey. The penguin and the monkey are Nature's Jekyll and Hyde. The penguin is a prig, you say, impossibly good, insufferably solemn and earnest, with no sense of humour and no sympathy give me the monkey, you say ? Own at once you have no taste for virtue. For me, I am on the side of the Penguins. I have frequently read the name of a certain Lord No Zoo in the Liberal papers lately, and he is treated to no little contumely and abuse. I have not noticed 44 Also a Garden that the Duke of Bedford and Lord Walsingham and other keepers of Zoos are held up as models to him, but I suppose that that is the implication : and it is surely a reproach to landholders and the super-taxed that with land reserves and revenues at their disposal they keep no big game, but subdue their guns to the unexciting pheasant and the quite occasional beater. " They take thee for thy better, tumid fowl ! " That a man should have woodland, covert, pasture, water and all in a ring fence, and reckon among his family monuments the lapidary inscription on one : Qui dum sub luna agebat Quinquies mille perdrices plumbo confecit varii cibi Centumpondia millies centena millia, &c., and yet be a Lord No Zoo, argues a strange poverty of mind. For he would always have at the disposal of his guns that surplusage of feral life that at Regent's Park is kept down by the unavoidable strait confine- ment, by the " little bit of everything " tendered by visitors (who thus keep within bounds their own infant population), by the harassing of segregated animals at the hands of their keepers anxious for fees and visitors ready to bestow them, by the sharp ferules of sticks and umbrellas, by the military bands on Mondays, and other measures. If the larger carnivores were kept, the education of East Enders undertaken by the 45 Cross Views Fellows of the London Zoo on Sundays, could not be attempted, or would be apt to be too abrupt and violent for modern ideas ; but excursion-aeroplanes might be run and give a bird's-eye view, and the advertisement of an elephant-drive in Goodwood Park might draw like a race-meeting. But the animal that would best become my garden, to return to it, would be a sloth. Sir Thomas Browne, by whom a monosyllable has but to be seen to be rejected, calls him the Lazy of Brasilia. He must have had him in mind when he wrote " Festination may prove Precipitation, Deliberating Delay a wise cunctation, and slowness no slothfulness." For even the Lazy of Brasilia arrives one day ; and one day my garden may be a garden ; who knows ? 46 Ill A WET DAY A WET day is a natural Sabbath. The stillness of its dawn is not cut into by any clash of bells, no stream of feet hastens by to Church, no murmur of returning crowds and unloosed tongues break its middle quiet, but a day-long whisper of water on the roof publishes the universal truce. Man is confined to his dwellings, and a sense of relief breathes from the untrodden soil. A light white mist brings the horizon very near, and muffles the cliff contours and the prominence of trees and roofs, and closes in upon itself the modest personality of my dwelling and small holding, making it all-important among half-invisible surroundings and lost comparisons. To-day it must suffice unto itself, and the solitary and far-sounding footfall of the early tradesman marks all the ministration it will receive. On such a day, if the house be old enough to have a soul, it will stir a little and sigh under the quiet and relaxation of the low heaven, and under cover of the hush memories will revive in old furniture and faded pictures, and dead things exhale from the softened breast of the earth, and re-enter in some 47 Cross Views tenuous and unspeakably remote manner the dim corners of their ancient habitations. There is a quiet unrest within, a charged silence, a peopled emptiness throughout the expectant rooms, and if you give yourself up to the listening mood of the unbroken hours, and entertain the fancies that move with you across the floors and meet you on stairs and in passages, every door that stands ajar, letting a filtered light upon the shadowed landings, seems a mute invitation to some waiting presence. You pause before some cabinet perhaps, where treasures are carefully disposed, those absurd and magpie accumulations which your animistic tendency has endowed, each one, with a semi-sacred indivi- duality ; at times the scales have dropped from your eyes, and you have thought of the caddis-worm in the ditch, cumbered and stuck over with all the rubbish of water and earth ; but to-day every hand that ever handled them before you seems to caress them anew. You stay before some portrait in an upper room, and half idly, half musingly, look on the smiling irre- sponsive face, so like in its moment the face once laid to yours, so terribly unlike because it has never a next moment. The moment that saw the likeness caught saw an aspect you never saw, for it was not bent on you. You were not reflected in the eyes, and that it is that makes the face you love ; and that is the want that makes this a mockery. Your dim reflection glances from the panels of a press, and the time-smoothed oak emphasizes the transi- 48 A Wet Day toriness of your shadow, soon to be one with the shadows of the shades now gathering round its stubborn wood. You hear the rustle of the rain, and the " flowing of all men's tears beneath the sky," and stand in a haunted house, a sceptic and a solitary. Though a wet day is a spiritual Sabbath, I do not find it a day of rest. Happy, then, is the man who has hobbies. It is not a day for reading. That is a refuge when the world is awake and about, but when its noise is stilled I am untuned to reading. I set up a vibration of my own. I cannot work on a wet day. I can work on a Sunday all of me except my digestion, which from old and soured association strikes work like a pious Christian from the first matin bell and but takes up its arrears of business unwillingly on the Monday. But a wet day is perhaps rather a witches' Sabbath, when all unrestful spirits throng the house, and my feet are driven from room to room and my hands to touch everything and hold to nothing. Vague schemes and great-hearted beginnings are born of wet days, magnificent fragments of revisal, noble conceptions of method, to stand anomalously and crumble on their ground plans when the narrow short-sighted round of week-day work begins again. A wet season is not made up of wet days. To think so is a natural mistake on your part, but there could not be a greater. A wet day stands alone, needing, indeed, a dry season, and has other necessary qualifications. It must be windless or the wrong D 49 Cross Views class of ghosts will be evoked ; and should be warm, that the open windows may let in the rising essence of earth, grass, and all wet growing things, and allow you to feast your senses on beautiful Nature at her bath. Did you ever play, when a child, in a hayloft on a wet day ? The charm of it lay purely in the near- ness to the weather, every individual tile close over- head chattering of the wet outside as it slid its drops on to the next below, to be passed on to the bubbling gutter and swell the tide that bore one's fleet of chips and husks from the port of the eave-sheltered doorway to the maelstrom of the far-off drain. The low doors stood perilously open, high above the shining yard where the water ran in little runnels between the bricks, and the close-packed hay and looser sheaves of clean straw and sacks of slippery oats smelt deliciously in the moist air of the summer evening. Below, the horses stamped and clinked their head-chains in their stalls, and looking down the short wide chutes at the back of the loft you could see soft muzzles steadily munching over the mangers, and dribble handfuls of brisk-sounding corn down to them if John were out of the way. The pure joy of that straight wooden ladder and trap-door approach ! Never would I have a staircase in house of mine and I am something of a stylite still. There was a hay-chopper in my loft, forbidden as were the oats, and I don't think I was ever wicked enough to touch the chopper. Rashness never threatened my 50 A Wet Day length of days, and I was seldom bad unless I saw no chance of the devil coming by his own. But there I was not peculiar, I think. If one could keep quiet long enough, among the hay, the house-martins would come and walk on the sheltered ledge on fluffy invisible feet, and play at pushing one another over the drop, a practical joke we none of us tired of. But not even the martins are left me to play with the sparrows have driven them out. I turn with something of a sigh to my books. Read while you are young, yes ; but I am thank- ful that it is not necessary to study cards for one's old age. There are more amusing picture-books than cards, and a catholic taste in illustrations is an introduction to a more live and vivid company than the club card-room provides though it must be confessed that their cult, too, is more costly than that of the philosophers. The price of a Marcus Aurelius will not purchase much of Phil May, and Everyman's library does not run to the works of Grasset or de Monvel ; but folly has always been more costly than wisdom, and beauty more ruinous than either. The bibliophile may read, or not read, his Shakespeare in the first folio, but for 6d. a play you may read him much better ; whereas the more you lay out on a picture or its reproduction the nearer you come to its painter ; and here it is that the worshipper is lured beyond his means. At the same time, viewing the sheaves of sample, supplemental, 51 Cross Views and even commercially-used prints that flutter out from every magazine and book-box, I have often thought that one might possess a penny picture gallery, nay, a gallery of gratis plates, that would beguile the hours of a very long day. Has any hoarder with the space at his disposal ever attempted its formation]? A rope-walk might house all the treasures of the Uffizi, and every hermit in a lighthouse have his own Hermitage. How many passable prints could be had for the price of a Hals or a Velasquez ? I don't believe the money could be spent, they are so cheap. I cannot find it in me to rank the unnamed masters of the earliest woodcuts, or the happily inspired taker of the first niello print, below the cutter of the Buchstaben, or the name of Senefelder below that of Gutenberg, or to think the poor man's gallery a less happy chance of my period than the poor man's library. Illustration has its curiosities, for which I keep a corner. There is the comedy of illustration (which is not the same thing, bien entendu, as the illustration of comedy, though the two may not impossibly be one we have all seen illustrations to Shakespeare's comedies, to go no further, which combined this art and artlessness) and there is the tragedy of illustra- tion, which may be personal as is the common case of the misinterpreted author who cannot persuade even his collaborator to read his text and whose sorrows are but aggravated at times by the weight of the other's reputation ; or as in such case as that of 52 A Wet Day mine in the loss of Cranford^ irrevocably lost to me by early association with drawings I found un- sympathetic ; or which may be general as in the case of fine work thrown away on ephemeral or unworthy publication. This tragedy is well seen where illus- tration has touched its highest in Paris. Of the oddities I collect I showed one the other day to a French painter who, mocking at most men and most things as Parisians do, had a corner in his heart for that great draughtsman Ingres. Some one had sent me a small monograph on the artist, illus- trated from his principal canvases a kind of hand- book we do much better in this country, by the by and there is Thetis implorant Jupiter, imploring with tears, and caressing the god with two right hands ! A German draughtsman of to-day, and a great one, Otto Greiner it is when men are great that the malicious small take pleasure in their occasional lapses has given us Ulysses and the Sirens where the labour- ing oarsmen are seen with bent backs and straining muscles to " smite the sounding furrow " as they urge the vessel beyond the danger of the voices. Small wonder that they put their backs into it, for they pull stern first against the force of the bellying sail, and the helmsman stands behind them. But the purest comedy of illustration in my small collection is supplied by a drawing of William Bell Scott's in an edition of Keats's Hyperion. Saturn is fallen, and the " mammoth-brood " of Titans lies prone among the mountains. The good artist drew the Titans 53 Cross Views and the mountains, but found to his perplexity that he could only command men lying among molehills. What was to be done ? How lend the heroic pro- portions ? I myself, in whom an invincible desire to draw is more than the wisdom of years, under- stand his feelings so well that I can scarcely bear to laugh. But William Bell Scott was not defeated. If he lacked power he did not lack ingenuity. He seized his pencil, and, in the immediate foreground, against the nearest of the sprawling forms, and sniffing at it, as it were, mouse-like, he placed a rhinoceros ! The funniest, tiniest, stuffed rhinoceros that ever came out of a toy zoo but no matter from the rhinoceros you may now argue the Titan, and from the Titans the mountains, and Saturn hobbling up over the now distant horizon on Thea's arm is all but restored to his primal grandeur. An impressionist introduced to us upside down in the pages of our leading art journal was a good stroke in this kind. We may hope not unreasonably that the indignity was not apparent to many ; but I filed the poor man still standing on his head. Among Mr. Sambourne's delightful designs to Kingsley's Water Babies is a superb salmon, a flash of silver and black, swirling past his despised cousin the trout " as for trout, everyone knows what they are" and in the salmon you suddenly see the features once so familiar in every picture-paper of Mr. Gladstone. And some years ago I came across a bookplate, that of an angler, into which the artist 54 A Wet Day had introduced the paraphernalia of the craft, and, wanting a fish, had borrowed Mr. Sambourne's salmon, Gladstone and all ! This drawing within a drawing was constantly practised by that Puckish genius Aubrey Beardsley, whose designs had to be closely edited by admiring but much-tried publishers. An old natural history in many volumes affords me " the front and back-view of a mermaid " drawn and coloured with a daunting and indecent realism, but the unbridled excesses of the old natural history draughtsmen belong to a looser age. No longer do they move the inconstant mind, which receives sterner thrill from the camera-shots of those genuine sportsmen, Messrs. Schillings & Dugmore. Whole volumes have been devoted to the subject of the arrangement of libraries, and subject indexes have been issued with labour and received with ac- clamation, but between ourselves the difficulty of arrangement is great in inverse ratio to the size of the collection. It is comparatively easy for Mr. Hagberg-Wright or Mr. Fortescue to reckon their miles of shelving and their hosts of volumes, and to apportion a furlong to Political Economy, for instance, and two furlongs to Poetry, and so on, and more- over, they have not to think whether they have this book or that. If the book exists they have it, and there's an end on't. I see no trouble in their path. O these sinecurists ! But how to arrange a modest thousand, the picked and re-picked representatives of millions ? Segregation by subject is out of the 55 Cross Views question, where a volume must stand for a literature. Alphabetical order, which first suggests itself to the humble librarian, helps to find but also helps to lose, for where am I to place, or rather, where am I subsequently to find, Boswe/l's Johnson, or Fitz- gerald's Omar ? Should the mighty translators, themselves classic, North, Urquhart, or Florio, lead me to Plutarch, Rabelais and the rest, as seems fitting ; and coming to my illustrated books should not Rowlandson take precedence of Combe, Cruik- shank of Ainsworth, and should Hogarth refer me to Dobson, or Dobson to Hogarth ? Or I rise from the joyful company of some beloved intimate, and my subconscious affection induces me more than likely to deposit Jane Austen under "J.," or "St. Charles " among the saints, as Thackeray did. Then the cold-mannered catalogue only recognising " Lamb, Charles," one fine day one goes to " L " and there is gnashing of teeth. A friend of mine, extremely sensitive in his zesthetic perceptions, arranges his books in masses and shades of colour. He will buy any book that goes in a delicate green, and will hardly have a red book under his roof. His library looks nicer than any I know, and a book out of place interfering with the colour scheme, he can detect it instantly, as I know to my cost. Even a book upside down he will raise his hands at that " even " destroys the balance of his composition, and causes him acute suffering, and the gap left by a volume in use so 56 A Wet Day works upon his nerves that it is as well to read it standing' before the temporary void. He is my oldest and dearest friend, and one cannot handle such a possession too carefully. To his wife I owe the bold dictum " Everything's a book that has batters," i.e. boards. This saying, so roundly contradictory of Lamb's biblia-a-biblia^ comes appropriately enough from the country of Carlyle, as indeed does she ; but the application of it made by her husband would, I think, have worked strongly, though differingly, on both philosophers. Once I thought I had got it. A library, I said, should be arranged by date, say in periods of ten years to a press. This would be most educational, for a visual recollection of your bookshelves would furnish you with a memor'ia technica ; the position of Darwin's Origin, for instance, suggesting all that was doing at the period in art, history, philosophy or what not, recalling Newman's Apologia, Ruskin's Elements, Tennyson's Idylls, Mill's Representative Government, Froude's History, Browning's Dramatis Persona, Thackeray's Virginians, Eliot's Adam Bede, and Mill on the Floss, &c. The remembered sequence of the book presses would afford a chronological survey of letters, and enable one to follow the evolution and growth of individuals and tendencies. Here was an idea a discovery to turn curators green. Press '59- '69 was a huge success ; but the next decade, looking forward, was not so rich, at least not in my library, and when I got to the end of the century I was left 57 Cross Views with that gorgeous book The Way of all Flesh, along with which it was useless to stand anything, for when that meets my eye I always read it again. But in this adventure of buying books though, what vipers may one not take to one's bosom ? The King's English, for instance. Who that has taken it up and seen what asp has come to life in his hands, but wished vainly that it had never crossed his path. And here comes a new and diabolically well-done rhyming dictionary scoff not, ungentle reader, it has more uses than you wot of which will not have pork rhyme with forL Since when I have sat around in bitter discouragement and atheistic despair. God knows I don't want to rhyme pork with fork, but what sort of age do we live in when a man can get up and deliver himself of such horrid and blasphemous negation of known truth and first principles and not be torn to pieces ? Nothing is respected now. I have lived to see Euclid flouted, and the doctrine of the conservation of energy blown upon, and now it is unsafe for the poet to sound his dove and love, his moon and coon, without assuring himself first that he is abreast of modern science. To return to my disarranged library, I must own that there is but one method, after all, for such as it my books must be governed by the compelling cir- cumstance of size. The big books must stand on the big shelves, and the small books on the small shelves ; and my little array having passed the Caudine Forks it is useless for them to stand further on order or 58 A Wet Day precedence. And the housemaid cometh whom no man can hinder. What is a book that it is so disliked by the majority ? The average man is bored by a book : the silence, the still attitude, the black lines on the white paper get on his nerves. He may not really quarrel with its substance. Put in dramatic or con- versational form he could possibly spend an evening with it in enjoyment, and if the stage is to be looked upon as a moral factor and an instrument of instruc- tion, and indeed the drama demands some such bean pole to support its tender shoots in this soil, it looks to me as if Messrs. Shaw, Barker and Galsworthy go the right way to work. A minority is bored and dazed by the noise and lights and crowd of a theatre or other company, and even good talk may be spoiled for them by such accompaniments. These are the book lovers, to whom books and study bring a natural atmosphere. The common ground is hard to hit upon, and the well-intentioned are frequently baulked. If you are of a bookish turn but segregated by circumstance from your kind, and associated with other herds where you find it incumbent on you to make the first advances towards communion, you will sometimes have noticed with gratitude a brightening of the eye and a promising response of lips when to the stranger whom you have rather temerariously drawn on to your own ground and endeavoured to engage in the discussion of things written, you mention some name 59 Cross Views you venerate in modern thought. Let N. be an author. You say to yourself, then, here is a kindred spirit. I don't speak of N. to deaf ears. Your hopes are quickly dashed, for your new-found friend waiting patiently for his effect while you develop a cautious enthusiasm for your subject, puts you out of the running with the information " I know N. very well. He is a near neighbour of ours. It is a pity you don't know him. Most interestin' man to talk to, don't you know. Can't say I know his books, but reading's not much in my line." We need not pro- tract the conversation with this gentleman, who is a familiar friend, though I have treated him in the first instance as an acquaintance ; but you here recognise, as you have been forced to do before, perhaps, that personal acquaintance with N. fills him with a sense of superiority to you, who know only his works. It may be that he is full of enthusiasm for the great ; is a lion-hunter, or an autograph-collector, and can die happy, if of the right gender, now that she knows N., or could do so did she know M. But why ? Times are too bad for conversational charity. The original mind gives no alms to needy journalists or diarists, and there is small advantage in meeting the begetter of the flying machine, of X-rays, a new religion, or of the most epoch-making novel these ten years since yesterday's. You will only meet a weary- eyed person who looks rather seedier than his neigh- bours, who is callous to compliments, and politely deaf to questioning. He won't entertain your draw- 60 A Wet Day ing-room or set your table in a roar. He will talk symptoms with you, or rival golf-links, but hero- worshipping youth has no chance against the pretty sister who worships no heroes, but takes scalps as they come. Grasp the substance, my youth, and leave the shadow. The great man is a squeezed lemon. Why should that lie neglected and despised because printed on paper, whose disjointed and fragmentary parts would be treasured as a dinner- table attraction to the great vulgar ? Is not the considered and sus- tained utterance of a man more than his occasional conversation ? Conversation is the life, to most people, and literature is international conversation the intercourse of the best minds put into the best form, talking across all barriers, and beyond boundaries and frontiers. If they cannot enjoy a good talk with Johnson or with Jerome Coignard, they do not like good talk, or to put it more rudely, they prefer noise to wit. Consider the talk in the clubs when what we call a crisis is toward ; that is, when the shifting limelights of the press are concentrated on some particular point of the periphery of the great groaning wheel of things. Is it of investigation on the spot of trained inquirers, the opinions of experts, the assurances of trusted ministers of State, or of authori- tative works of reference ? Does Morley know any- thing of the popular forces, Mahan of sea-power, Cromer of modern Egypt ? I trow not. The in- formation that the clubman gathers and repeats and values is that old Bill Smith of the lOist has heard 61 Cross Views from his son in the Frontier Police that, etc., that Jones, who was formerly Ass. Com. in that district, was told by Browne you remember Busting Browne, who had the N. W . command in the sixties ? that in his opinion, etc. These men are in the know, you are told. " I suppose you got that out of a book," is the answer to your differing views. Only a book ! Why, if a book is only a book, what is a handshake ? Who knows N., an author, the better, his devout readers or his old acquaintance who goes golfing with him ? Maintain the advantage of the latter if you will, but which knowledge is the better worth ? Is it N., in a word, who is worth knowing, or his work ? The student, you will be told, is inhuman. Better an hour of warm human intercourse than years in a musty library. " books, they are not human ; I'd give all mine away for one sweet woman," and no one has the courage to demur. I haven't myself; particularly when the sweet woman is thrown into the balance. But are not books human ? I would make no hopeless plea for the library against the world, but as far as the makers of books are concerned say bookmaker, and there is no doubt about his humanity I maintain certainly that their books are their better part, and that to neglect the public labours of such men and glory in their personal acquaintance, in the possession of their autographs and in a knowledge of their diet and other idiosyn- crasies, is to drop the substance and follow the 62 A Wet Day shadow : it is a misuse of human intercourse and a sterile and trivial pursuit. There was a long paragraph in the Times lately, warning a presumably interested public that the manuscript of a detective story by a popular magazine writer was coming up for sale on such and such a date, and was in danger of passing to America. The person who would give a price for such a manuscript at auction would probably not even rise to reading it in print. And what can be the feelings of the author towards people whom he sees disputing possession of his waste- paper ? For the honour of letters, I hope he does not take the money himself, but lets his housemaid have her vails. For purposes of warm humanity clasp to yourself with hooks of steel the other type of mankind, whose vitality flows from them through no medium of paper, paint, platform oratory, or laboratory research for though I have said let N. be an author, he may obviously be a savant, a statesman, a painter or a financier take the people at your door and about your household. If you would play golf, play with the man whose soul is in golf ; there are many such ; you may play with N. why should the poor devil go round alone ? but do not flatter yourself that you thereby know the man better than another. You only know him in his reactionary aspect. Dingley, nilustre Icrivain, is best known to his readers, and certainly the biographer of Dingley, I 63 Cross Views will parenthetically remark, knew his original in his off time. A well-chosen library is a choice of human souls. It is no museum, no hortus siccus or collection of prepared anatomies, but the real men and women at their best and on their own showing, and not otherwise to be known. You may close Montaigne and desipere with Jones in loco y who is an excellent fellow and greatly your superior in many qualities, but you need not regret that you cannot know Montaigne on the same terms. You might as reasonably wish that Jones should publish three volumes of essays. The foolish and perhaps vicious belief to be com- bated is that an acquaintance with N. is a short cut to his results. There is no short cut to this or to any other knowledge, and you must be a Shakes- peare to know a Shakespeare to your advantage, without you approach him through his works. You cannot usefully associate with the great unless you have great qualities that march with theirs, or at any rate until you have assimilated their gospel. The invariable effect of such familiarity on the inferior and inferiorly equipped mind is one of disappointment, and the hopelessly inferior will privately disparage the apostle ; and perhaps publicly, when he publishes the volume of reminiscences he will found on his great acquaintance of the past. Though as I have said this holds good of many varieties of the eminent, I would particularly emphasize the blighting effect on the enthusiastic humanitarian of intercourse with literary men, which is scarcely 64 A Wet Day human intercourse at all. If it be the bright, busy, human, pulsating personality of the literary world that draws their hearts and gratulatory hands, let them seek the clean and collared young assistants in West End bookshops, who speak quite sprucely of the poets in what passes, with me, for the Oxford accent ; let them associate with enthusiastic publishers whose encomiastics are indeed limited to their own wares, but one mustn't expect all things of all men, and one can always pass on to the next let them join the Authors' Club, where they may meet newspaper proprietors, editors, reviewers, reporters, war corres- pondents, librarians, lexicographers, compilers, cyclo- pasdists, statisticians, bibliophiles, agriculturists, and electrical engineers, or attend literary fund dinners for authors' wives and children, the most deserving class in existence, but never let them have anything to do with men of letters. I have had to do with them, and I know. Next below the company of the great come in order of degeneration, the workers, amateurs, game- players and the potterers. Some do this and some do that, but I have known a man who never did anything at all. On the soberest reflection I cannot modify this statement about him. I knew him long and saw much of him, and he never did anything at all. I will briefly set out one of his days to justify my extraordinary assertion, and with him one day was as a thousand years. He rose at eight, and his toilet took him an hour- E 65 Cross Views and-a-half. An hour was given to his breakfast, not that he was an immoderate eater, but that he ate with an exaggerated deliberation, waiting till his food was cool, and at every meal paused until others had finished a course before he started one, eyeing his neighbours, whether hosts or guests, much as Joe Gargery did Pip when the bread and butter disap- peared "I've been among a many bolters, but I never see your bolting equal yet." After breakfast he put in a quarter of an hour comparing his watch with the hall clock and saying " hullo " to the barometer, and then, ascending to his sitting-room, he sat there until 2 P.M. He did not read the paper, he never opened a book all the years I knew him, he had no hobby, he played no game : he just sat in his room, where, if you entered, you found him sitting in his armchair, whence he would stare with some resent- ment at your entrance. At 2 P.M. he made a second toilet, and at 3 P.M. went out and walked very slowly up to Clubland, where he had several houses of call. There he talked to the members he knew and stared at the members he didn't know. He came home in a 'bus at 6.30, made a third change of attire, sat at the dinner-table till 9.45, then entered the drawing-room, where he slept till the rest of his family withdrew, then, remarking that he had no time all day to glance at the papers, he retired to his own room once more, mixed himself a glass of whisky and water, spread the Times on his knee, and slept till midnight, when he woke, temporarily, and went to bed. 66 A Wet Day This was a man barely past the prime of life, in the soundest health and perfect in every faculty, retired from an active profession in which he had reached rather more than average attainment in a branch not open to fools. He never talked politics ; he never talked shop ; he did not hunt, shoot, ride, golf, play cards but I can't continue the list of things he didn't do, for he never did anything. His was the most singular instance of quiescent vitality I ever encountered, and I could never understand it. He was as dead to the world as a Trappist, and if he heard me say so he would be more surprised, perhaps, than ever he was in his life. Some day yet he must come out with a new universal synthesis of all the philosophies, or make an attempt upon the Constitution. Nature can never be so denied, surely. Meanwhile his portent gathers. In one's later years a most quickening and fruitful source of pleasure is the mastery of another language, for there is no richer province to be conquered than a new literature. It is easier to the cultivator of the written word than to the talker, and a useful way to its attainment is the reading of technical matter in some other tongue than one's own, which is a double good, for the attention cannot afford to wander, nor the eye run quickly down the page, a constant temptation to the practised reader in un- engaging passages. The subject is more slowly and therefore more surely mastered, and one fine day your labours burst into blossom and fruit ; the arid 67 Cross Views tracts are traversed, and you find yourself in the land of plenty and in the company of letters. To read Greek with one's feet in the fender is for the very few, and must, I imagine, introduce to a peak rather than to a province ; but I was never a mountaineer, and am content to look up from the flower-filled valleys ; and to know current tongues would suffice me for more than one lifetime. Cul- tured folk (the word is rather out of date, I know) feed chiefly on the past, and if they do not all travel as far as Greece, they seldom stop short of Italy. English people are particularly given to mediaeval Italian studies, and for one reader of Goethe or Heine, Hugo or Balzac, you will find a dozen Dante circles, and perfervid admirers of Botticelli and Domenichino, who give each syllable of these names a weight of affection and respect. Pious pilgrimage to Firenze, Venezia, or Napoli is undertaken by the quaintest middle-aged ladies, whose night's halt at Paris, en route, fills them with trepidation. The Divina Commedia is their vade mecum, and such names as Anatole France or Sudermann are only less ignored than D'Annunzio or Fogazzaro. Great airy windows, most refreshing and whole- some, are opened into the close atmosphere of the study by science, whose neologisms, however, breed so fast that to keep abreast of the language is as strenuous a pursuit as to keep in touch with its ideas, and the knowledge e.g. that geobios, limnobios, and halobios simply mean land-, shore-, and pond-life, does 68 A Wet Day not come by nature to the science-side student, but only to his classic-side brother, who cares for none of these things. But the greater the pioneer, the smoother the track you are left to follow ; and Darwin is intelligible even if his detractors are not. And when the classics have sent you bedward with some heavy opiate labelled vita brevis or pallida mars, or when thousand-year-old legends of a golden age that was always legendary have left you glad to shut your eyes on to-day, and when the sentimental potterer and weather-bound has taken his ill-earned repose, it is well that there should be some one to wake him in the morning with a message such as I find in The Kingdom of Man : " Let man arise and take possession of his kingdom, the Regnum Hominis foreseen by Francis Bacon. . . . The will to possess and administer this vast territory alone is wanting . . . heir to a magnificent kingdom, he has been finally educated to take posses- sion of his property, and is at length left alone to do his best. He has wilfully abrogated in many important respects the laws of his Mother, Nature, by which the kingdom was hitherto governed ; he is threatened on every hand by dangers and disasters hitherto restrained ; no retreat is possible his only hope is to control, as he knows that he can, the sources of these dangers and disasters. They already make him wince. How long will he sit listening to the fairy tales of his boyhood, and shrink from manhood's task ? " 69 IV THE LION AND THE UNICORN " THE lion and the unicorn fought for the Crown," but that was before history, and the boastful second line is obviously a latter-day invention a leonine verse shall we say, the catch of some rhymster whose jingle has proved more lasting than the temporary settlement it possibly celebrated ; its contradiction is supplied by the present attitude of the ancient foes as supporters of the Crown for which they fought. The Crown stands in stable equilibrium, and the opposing forces, stiffened into conventionally rampant posture, sustain, by their formal opposition, the head of the State. It was not as His Majesty's Govern- ment and His Majesty's Opposition that they started life. Liberal and Conservative they are, or were but yesterday, Whig and Tory the day before, Roundhead and Royalist a little earlier, and King's men and Kingmakers' men once the Crown wobbling violently then until we get back to a day when the Crown was in abeyance pending their dispute. But which is the lion and which the unicorn ? That aggressive and pushing horn, those legs to save their owner in season, seem to indicate offence rather 70 The Li ion and the Unicorn than defiance, and to symbolise the oft-repeated charge and retreat ; and the predatory teeth and hold-fast claws and masterful voice on the other side of the shield the party of have and hold. And the rhyme is an old rhyme, and it is only in recent history that the unicorn has beaten the lion for long. Nursery rhymes enclose some of our oldest lore, chronicle, and social satire, and this old couplet, which may or may not have had a less partial turn in its original form, was probably the fruit of the satirical fancy of some very early non-party man, some mediaeval mugwump, or uncomfortable Bellocian before Mr. Belloc, who, having worse things to fear than the power of a caucus, and heavier than party whips, wrapped his meaning in seeming innocence, and wrote for children, as many a satirist has done since. The Crown has come out of it well, and the fight has long since taken on another meaning, and become a contest for suffrages, and its war-cries dropped to an insinuating assurance that Codlin's the friend, not Short. The lion and the unicorn still fight all round the town, but the town is the arbiter and plum-cake all the prize, and the Crown sits serene and uncommitted, from hope and fear set free. The feral beasts are dead and stuffed, and but their painted signs face each other across the street, rival taverns, clubs, and headquarters of party bosses ; but there are many go-betweens, many who cry a plague on both houses, and those who swear that the liquor is indifferent bad on both sides of the way ; and 7' Cross Views fewer and fewer are found willing to break heads or risk their own sconces in either cause. Even the tavern-keepers, the living representatives of the ancient feud, the leaders who wear the lion's skin and the hide and horn as insignia, walk occasion- ally arm-in-arm to the disgust of their henchmen, and play at ball together when they are tired of playing with words. But far as the controversy has travelled and changed and dwindled, such indifference and agnosticism is as yet sporadic and confined to high places, and the party elements are not yet fused, and pride themselves on their difference in blood. The two strains are still maintained from generation to generation, if not from father to son, and latent and patent antagonism still divides the mass of the town. What are the roots of this prejudice ? What is this seemingly natural and inevitable division that must prolong a warfare whose cause is no longer apparent, whose very leaders weary of it, which hampers progress and promotes a hundred evils, and whose followers and fighters see their sustenance as "white bread or brown," according to the hand which dispenses it ? There is much in the theory of heredity, and the satirist we have just lost hit the mark again with his " little Liberal and little Conservative." There is much virtue in badges and banners, and fighting- cocks are easily urged on when pitted one against another ; but there must be deeper roots than these. We know how easily we all fall into antagonism, 72 The Lion and the Unicorn however mild ; that the difference of any two indivi- duals is a law of nature, and that you can divide men into as many camps as you choose to raise questions ; that mankind may be divided into Big-endians and Little-endians as easily as into civilised and cannibal ; and that if you commonly get out of bed on the right- hand side you cannot go through the morning without meeting some one ready to dispute your preference. Probably the men of the Neanderthal did not suffer such opposition of opinion early in the morning, and the arbitrament of the club would settle the question for the day at least ; but when men agreed to differ they called it civilisation. We are mostly civilised now, as far as that interpretation takes us, but the differences subsist in spite of the agreement. When a few living in proximity can divide over a point or two you have the nucleus of a family ; a few families ranged either side of local questions give us the village community, or peaceful settlement ; and a sufficiency of such neighbouring habitations divided against them- selves and one another could take shape as a tribe or nation, multiplying by division on the fissiparous principle. Religion was a great and early help to its activity ; kinship and inheritance, blood relationship and filial feeling kept up a brisk division of details ; and loyalty, patriotism, the administration of justice, the maintenance of order, the conservation of property, the bond of marriage, and other institutions of the perfect state, ensured a healthy and unending division of lives and ways and a never-failing circulation of 73 Cross Views bad blood, so that it never became stagnant even when blood-letting went out of fashion. Easier facilities of communication, particularly that of ideas set up by the invention of books, and, better still, newspapers, enabled widely-separated individuals to come to each other's moral support, a journal devoted to the spreading of the Big-endian doctrine, for instance, acting like a party cry at a football match when a submerged supporter, by raising his war-whoop, draws friends to his side before his un- popular tenets are trampled out of him by a hostile surrounding. Differences exist ; and variation in the world of ideas is the complement and analogy of those physical variations on which the theory of selection is built up. The individual variation is always there, and with it the potential new species. How many are smothered without propagating we shall never know, but just as a favourable combination of circumstances will enable the locust or carrier-pigeon to devastate half a continent once in a way, so will a new idea falling in season gather adherents hand over fist until the movement spends itself tired, possibly, of so much agreement. The fissiparous process begins again. Society, then, can be divided on any point, however minute and trivial, but the most successful division and the most lasting comes, naturally, of the collection and enouncement of as many differences as can be fitted together without embracing so many as to leave no opposition strong enough to carry on the 74 The Lion and the Unicorn game. A highly complex religion comprising a multi- tude of minor beliefs and observances easily dominates smaller sects which tend to simplify, as they reduce, the number of points on which they base their resistance to their environment. In fact, one protest only makes one protestant. The secret is to find the greatest common factor, and in civil affairs, to which I am trying to confine my attention, the greatest common divisor is the political. The proclamation and advocacy of a simple idea, or the utterance of a simple protest, directly ensures the widest partisanship if the time is ripe for the question, but one detached point of dispute will not last the combatants for long it is either lost or carried ; and the questions that have long divided mankind will be found to have hitched themselves on to other and already existing centres of controversy, and to have taken on a theological or legal or philosophical cast and got themselves incorporated in some already fighting doctrine or heresy. The friends of a new idea, by their association with other disputes, make enemies for it in other camps on hastening to its support. The friends, for instance, of the New Learning were marked men, and the sponsors of science ensured the enmity of the clerics ; and would science frown not at the humble birth of any notion from the College of Cardinals ? This particular quarrel has been enlarged into the great quarrel of the world, each side absorbing more and more of the no-man's-land of hitherto uncontested ground, and 75 Cross ranging under its standard the new generations of ideas and their development bred in the acquired regions, so that the novice in the seminary is shown from an upper window vast tracts of hostile territory where he may never venture unarmed, and every little scientist born into a world of inquiry recognises clericalism as the enemy, and is trained to seize up his lethal microscope and scalpel when he hears that religion is abroad. The nets are cast wider and wider, and ban and arriere-ban of connoted ideas, deductions, and sympathies swell the opposing armies ; and since nature's abhorrence of a vacuum is scarcely more pronounced than society's abhorrence of the unsocial habit of indifference, few are left who will not engage under either banner. " Who is not with me is against me," cry the one side. "The luke- warm I will spew out of my mouth." While the other contemptuously lumps the unconvinced with the ignorant. The Churches embrace, or claim to embrace, or include in spite of themselves, or are driven to include, the fanatic, the mystic, the superstitious, the unlettered, the revivalist, the spiritualist, the simple, the saint, and the visionary, as well as all that great multitude of weary and oppressed who but support this unjustly ordered and painful life in the hope of a better, and in the belief of an ultimate purpose ; and ranged against them stand the materialist, the scoffer, the dry-as-dust, the anatomist, the logician, the sensualist, and all that order of mind that will 76 The Lion and the Unicorn not accept authority or believe in anything it cannot verify in the laboratory all scraped together willy- nilly in the same fashion. Theirs also is the horn of the unicorn, and his latter-day elevation to a fighting equality with the lion of dogma. That the Liberal party in politics, with all its tag-rag of Independents, is kindred with the liberal party of ideas, and the Conservatives with the ad- herents of revelation and submission to pastors, is an obvious contention ; but it has so become from the force of association, the impossibility of an un- related standing, the truth that one quarrel makes many, and that only the welding of many quarrels into one will enable the quarrel to stand and assure to society that constant and steady circulation of affected blood necessary to prevent stagnation and slow poison. A liberal principle standing alone and unrelated, could such a thing be conceived, and swallowed and assimilated by an unsuspicious Con- servative ; a stray and unclassified dogma finding its way into the digestive system of a greedy Rationalist ; would tend to alter and ultimately to destroy the two organisms, and what the process would result in if indefinitely continued may be figured by imagining the carnivora converted to vegetable food, and fish inured to mountain air. Creation would lose its characteristics, and reversion to primordial types be a mere matter of time. Error cannot stand alone but can truth ? And what is truth, said jesting Pilate. Your doxy and 77 Cross Views my doxy must seek their food where they can find it, like other living things, and will assimilate, grow, and multiply as long as nature keeps them supplied ; but their grand feature is that they are social and not individualistic, and flourish by alliance, not by independence. An idea may have a disruptive force, it may be urged, and indeed it commonly has, but it is the function of the master-mind, of the leaders who guide and engineer the main issues, jealously to watch the division created by the explosion of a new idea and to claim the larger moiety each for his own. When reformations occur and revolutions break out, the enemies of established things are jubilant, but many of the pieces fall back within the old lines, and the forces of reaction do not suffer so greatly as at first appears. Action and re- action are the waves that smooth over the scars of such earthquakes, and gain and loss are, in the end, not so unevenly shared. In mundane affairs social politics now show the greater activity and react more fiercely to the agency of new ideas. Religion was once all in all, " the lion beat the unicorn all round the town," but rationalism has now won the solid ground even though the aerial warfare is still proceeding, and the material welfare of mankind has now taken the front place in human councils ; but with the growing importance of terres- trial matters and of the domestic economy of our earthly home we find the old cleavage or a similar one spreading between opposing parties in the State, and 78 The Lion and the Unicorn nothing can get itself done without the vivifying element of dispute, and dispute, and here is the point, organised, recruited, and disciplined to the highest pitch. A man does not fight to best advantage for his own hand, and the principle that union is strength is only second in antiquity to that of self-preservation, and alliance into groups was followed by alliance of groups until the alliance of nations practically divides Europe into two ; and the same utilisation of all possible sources of strength, given the inevitable and necessary cleavage of personal opinion, divides each State into the main parties under Conservative or Liberal, Republican or Democratic, Progressive and Reactionary colours. Variety of opinion is co-exten- sive with the population ; there is alliance for and against, and the answer to the given problem of finding the common principle that will embrace the greatest possible number is only to be arrived at by delving deep into the nature of man, by finding the mainsprings of his conduct, by recognising the factors that divide him against himself that urge or restrain him, that give him hope or fear, drive him forth or keep him at home, make him social or hold him individual. You must find the watershed of the great currents if you would control their flow. Just as a great stream it is the oldest of similes gathers volume from all sorts of contributories, still or running, which had quite other sources than its own, so do the mainstreams of active principles receive and sweep up adherents whose support must be explained by 79 Cross Views having recourse to the whole philosophy of human nature, and many influences be adduced to understand the presence of saints among unbelievers, atheists among churchmen, rich men among socialists, poor men supporting capitalism, pugnacious men com- bating militarism, radical squires, conservative pro- letarians, and masses of inert and uninterested voters yet voting one way or the other. But there must be a mainstream to gather the tributaries, and there must be a dominant principle, passion, characteristic, vice, virtue, or disease, in each breast which will carry everything else along either furiously or sluggishly. There must be a watershed, and down one side or the other the current will flow. Would you know why a man is a Liberal rather than a Conservative, a Christian rather than a Rationalist, an Anarchist or an Autocratist, you must go back to the beginning and inquire why Adam's hesitation ended in his eating the apple rather than in refusing it. Adam began life a Conservative and acquiescing in an Autocratic regime, and ended as an inquirer and a rebel, reversing the order in which these states of mind generally occur among his descendants ; but then he started life in comfort and ended it in hardship. However, that is only his individual story. But did we know the why of it we should be wiser than we are. One son of Adam has leisure or recurrence of respite sufficient to enable him to wake to the wonder and beauty of the universe, to ponder the underlying mystery, its possible symbolisms, its justification by 80 The Lion and the Unicorn an ultimate purpose, the which he may await or abide in comparative patience by reason of his com- parative well-being. He will not refuse the assump- tion that all is for the best, "on earth the broken arc, in Heaven the perfect round." His moderate comfort gives play to his jesthetic faculties, he admires old constituted things, dwells on the storied past, which he sees as a succession of Kings and Queens, pageants, story of wars, interesting customs and institutions ; he lends his support to ancient monu- ments and quaint survivals that do not inconvenience him, leans back on long-established orders, religious principles, laws, and methods, and hopes things will last his time. He is born and bred among others of his kind, people who have a small holding on this earth, who derive from families and factions who in recent times have taken a hand in some civic struggle against change and upheaval ; his caste, clan, or party, have drawn lines of demarcation against others of differing ways of life and thought ; by volition or drift or force of circumstance, they tend to certain lines of life and professions which require or defend or explain or deal in the status quo> and demand its continuance for their existence ; and a thousand sub- sidiary influences and dependent beliefs have swelled their ranks. What is the common principle ? What name at least shall serve ? Such a name has been found, and the word Conservative crystallises the fluid mass, bonds and stiffens it with unity, and makes it a power in the State. Forced into opposition and F 81 Cross Views hardened into a parallel community of force is the mass that toils from necessity and without leisure to consider the purpose, who are dully aware of cruelty and ugliness in the scheme of things, who in their rare moments of respite see that the world is not good enough, and raise their heads to listen to those who speak of the attainable Kingdom of Man rather than of the overlong-promised Kingdom of God ; who decry the selfishness of property, the waste and bar- barism of surviving conditions, the hideousness of mediaevalism ; who preach " the beacon-bright re- public far-off sighted," and cry to them to attack all who stand in the ancient ways. A thousand temperamental antagonisms in either party are amalga- mated by the larger purpose, and a thousand natural ties broken between them. The agreements must give way to the differences that the quarrel may be sustained, and the minor individual struggle be sub- ordinated to the more effective social warfare whose banners, battles, and results all men can see and judge. The mass must not simmer : it must boil. Evolution has become conscious, and we run its forces into narrow channels that we may be aware of its motion and may jog the universe by lending an impetus to the next generation by launching it on a smoother incline. Union makes strength, and society must be dragooned into putting its heavy shoulder to the work. And so a man, and presently a woman, is born a little Liberal or a little Conservative, and all unaware 82 The Lion and the Unicorn of the vast drag-net enclosing all his horizon, of the bias of his own birth and upbringing, his tempera- mental tendencies and the pull exercised by his very digestive organs, votes for or against a Parliament Bill in the full and happy belief that he judges it on its merits. But there is one thing that we can all see, and that is that the issue has been narrowed for us into for or against. It is not an opinion that is wanted but our vote. The elector may spin a coin if he be bewildered, or he may abstain if he perceive and resent the ordering of his affairs, but if he act he must hang on to the tail of the unicorn or on to the tail of the lion. The wise acknowledge the position, dine together and laugh in company ; another minority sulks apart : but the great mass rage angrily over against each other even as they are intended to do, and so the Crown is supported by its conventionally absurd and ramping monsters. Superior persons may rise superior to party and creed, but their security in aloofness depends on the regimentation of humbler organisms ; you may be a spectator at a football match, but you may not be a spectator in a riot. The best feature of great organised systems of quarrel in Church and State when fairly evenly balanced is the tolerance enforced by respect for the allied strength behind the unit of opinion. In the mass much is explained which goes unexplained in the individual, and a name and a uniform relegates a dissenter in a given circle to a 83 Cross Views recognised mass of opinion without. Instead of de- stroying one another in detail, we postpone hostilities to great occasions and to battlefields assigned them, where the spectator may back his mild fancy and the indifferent stay at home. Much is explained by the massing of congenial minds and the enunciation of general principles. Individual persecution ceases when idiosyncrasy is found to be but a personal expression of a wide belief. Differences of developing character in the family circle which end by falling into line with one or other of the national divisions find themselves within the comparative peace and tolerance of stated differences in public life, and the quarrel is not pur- sued in detail. Henceforth the family unites on points of agreement, and, referring their antagonisms to the all-embracing cause, shrug off their animosities with the one word, and save them for plain occasions and the Armageddon of a general election. The imaginative, unsettled, theoretical, irreverent, imprac- ticable, untidy, argumentative member of the house- hold is no longer howked at, snubbed, restrained, and repressed, nor the solid, conventional, well-groomed, worshipping, practical dissenter in another kind worried, ridiculed, and driven. Each has joined hands with superior powers, and his vices are seen as the reputed virtues of a half world. Emancipation bills are passed, alternative legislation of parties is respected and left on the statute books. No doubt it is the unicorn who makes the running. I have maligned 84 The Lion and the Unicorn the use of his long legs. He has come a long journey and still has far to go. History itself is the history of the unicorn's forward progress, and equally the history of the retreat of the lion. The unicorn never retreats, though often checked. The lion never gains ground, but often gives it. The forward party is often reduced to marking time, and that for long enough to strain their patience, but behind their lines is the long tract of the enemies' country, won long since, and the tract still held by them will be theirs to-morrow. They could lose no land, for they are landless. One party had everything to gain, the other everything to lose. Retaliation wears itself out, and the direct simplicity of mutual destruction weakens into the rarer and more subtle process of mutual con- version. The vivifying agent of disagreement is active as ever, but its varieties are co-ordinated, marshalled, and disciplined ; the distinctive uniforms of the hostile party proclaim their leadership and cause, from the extreme right of the line to the extreme left ; but when not so marshalled for battle the units can intermingle and go about their private affairs each bearing the noli me tangere of his cloth, and Liberal and Conservative, Progressive and Re- actionary, Catholic and Protestant, lie down together with sheathed swords. This clearing of the ground, these great camps of armed neutrality, this mutual respect for differences must be allowed, then, to be a great improvement on the old cut-throat existence and kill-at-sight methods, but though it bears all the 85 Cross Views smiling promise of law and order and offers the efficiency of scientific procedure, it contains the grave evils of repressed individualism, as great armaments maintained, as allowed and avowed, for defensive purposes, are but half-way on the road to peace, though their terror maintains it from day to day. These great defensive alliances allow the heretic to breathe ; he need not even join either camp, but unless he do he can have no active existence. The political independent can refrain from voting, but if he wish to have a voice in determining his affairs he must vote blue or buff with all it entails. Otherwise he cannot register his opinion, but only express it ; he has a right to his own judgment, but cannot make it effective, for he is only allowed a voice on condition of taking the oath. He is a sparrow on the house-top, a voice crying in the wilderness. The franc-tireur gets no mercy in war and no hearing in politics. And the independent is barred in politics perhaps because he is not to be tolerated in war, for the shadow of militarism rests upon party warfare while it has taken its discipline thence ; and when peace is assured without armaments men will perhaps be allowed to vote according to their convictions. It was the under- lying danger as much as the inefficiency of internecine struggle that created state armies, so the latent threat of national armaments helps to enforce discipline in politics. When pure conflict of opinion is all the con- flict the world has to fear, then the independent may be enfranchised, and the lion lie down with the unicorn. 86 The Lion and the Unicorn We can all see the strength that accrues from many thinking as one, but are apt to overlook the weakening and impoverishment of the contributors to the common stock, for it is plain that many do not and cannot think as one without each divests himself of much or something that will not fit into the common creed. He cannot conform without losing something of himself, and time and association will supply this loss with new fibre drawn from the regu- lation diet. This is very well seen in the case of the man with backbone enough to revolt against a party measure, and vote blue instead of buff. The blues receive his support with acclamation, the buffs pursue him with abuse and derision. His new en- vironment infuses more blue into his composition, and buff colour becomes less assimilable. He cannot remain buff with a blue spot ; circumstances are too strong for him. If he is so strong a man that he can withstand them, both parties cast him out and he ceases to exist as an active agent. An independent party is an absurdity carrying its own contradiction, but more and more independents protest yearly against this dragooning of their consciences, and so far make common cause ; but so ingrained in society is the principle of alliance, discipline, and submission for the attainment of ends, that ridicule is excited by the spectacle of a body of men disputing on a matter which they are supposed to have at heart. If they cannot even agree among themselves they are clearly absurd and negligible, and a protest or a criticism 87 Cross Views from an honest adherent draws triumphant laughter from better-drilled opponents glorying in the indi- vidual weakness that produces general strength. A depressing and to some almost paralysing outcome of this narrowing and canalising of activity into two streams, is the stultifying of the faculty of choice ; for choice reduced to this or that, and under this or that including all shades of opinion of the one hue, inclines thinking men to despair of the utility of such choice, and to see themselves reduced to the level of those who cry heads or tails on it. Under such a system what would adult suffrage and the enfranchisement of women effect by doubling the number of voters ? That the supporters of one colour should number ten millions instead of five millions, and give it a majority of two millions instead of one million, would react in no manner whatever on its councils, and reveal no iota more of the constituent elements of the republic. It is this consideration that above all increases the indifference of the electorate to the whole business. Pending an alternative to the party machine, which the recent whittling away of old and picturesque portions has merely exposed in all its ugly and un- sympathetic nakedness of hard opportunism, one may emphasize the palliation that fortunately exists, and impress on the swelling numbers of disillusioned voters the duty and importance of abstention from either pledge. If it be unpracticable that proposed measures should be submitted to an independently minded House of Representatives, if there must be two 88 The Lion and the Unicorn dominant parties each purged of any sympathy with opposing ideas, if, in short, it is necessary to the working of the existing machine that the warring elements in human nature should be distilled into separate alembics, then it becomes imperative that there should be a third factor in the State, of suffi- cient strength to ensure that the Conservatism and Liberalism of the nation, both natural, necessary, and mutually dependent as are flesh and blood, appetite and digestion, work and sleep, though artificially divorced for purposes of demonstration, be absorbed in alternate doses. Nothing could ultimately be as fatal to the State as the perpetuation of a Conservative regime, save the indefinite continuance of an unchecked Liberalism. If that is not a commonplace of thought it is hard to say what is, and yet it is vigorously denied in practice by two men out of three. The swing of the pendulum is the salvation of the com- munity, and the party of non-party can at least preach the right motive of the swing, nor leave it to the irregular and spasmodic escapement of popular weariness or enthusiasm. The ship of State is a fine old simile, and even in an age of engineering I hope you still see it as a sailing ship. And the man at the wheel is not the Minister of the day. The ministerial party, the driving power, is, justly, the wind that urges the ship against the waves of opposition, and thus submitted to two forces she takes a middle course according to the law of the parallelogram of forces. 89 Cross Views The man at the helm, without whom she must broach to or fall away, now eases her and now puts her nose into it. The wind tears at him, the waves beat him, but did he not " wobble " that helm, you were better in an orange-boat with a crew of Dagos. For the man at the wheel is the Wobbler ! Yea, a man and a Mugwump ! And the moral is that whether Lion or Unicorn assail, fear not, but whack them both over the rump. They want it. 90 OUR COMMON TONGUE OUR common tongue ! What a striding petitio principii is made by that common phrase, and what a fallacy it embraces ! Of which, if the thousand disputatious commentators of our common Shakespeare do not give sufficient warning, the scars of History earned in the religious wars waged round our common Bible should stand as evidence to every man who takes into his mouth the Word of God as rendered to His chosen people by their authorised Translators and Revisers. A common tongue ! Why, the three hundred classified tongues and the three thousand variants have sprung from the impossibility of a common tongue, and every son of Adam struggling to express his individual differentiation contributes to the diversity. And yet there is none so lowly but he will lightly set out to the exposition of Genesis, the identification of Mr. W. H., Clause 14 of the Education Act, or of his neighbour's duty. Your fluent expounder of these matters is hard to stop when he is under way, so let us try and trip him up at the outset, give him pause in the first sentence. Let us meet him on the step of his 91 Cross dwelling, emerging strong, brushed, and shining, at ten o'clock in the morning, ready to clothe the nakedest idea in the newest assortment of dictionary patterns. " How do you do ? " says he, " a fine morning," and his impatient umbrella already hails the Bloomsbury omnibus. Not so fast, Mr. Silver- tongue, we would have a word with thee, but that word must be significant. " What do you mean " (and as we slide this trenchant blade from our ex- pository instrument-case our ruddy friend falters and pales) " what do you mean by * a fine morning ? ' ' The poet murmuring, elate with Spring, "Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye," encounters, let us say, his landlord, the master builder, whose forty-pound villas, numbers one to nine, alternate, stand, newly grown as the daffodils, on the south side of Ladysmith Road, and tenanted by the better and more fortunate class of poets ; while numbers two to ten push their way skyward on the opposite side, breaking the mould like " the yellow ground flame of the crocus." " A fine day," says the builder, good-naturedly, congratulating himself on the good drying weather. The poet heartily assents, but his landlord might have remarked buono giorno, and the poet o-hay-o, for all the understanding that passed. " A fine day," says the sportsman, buying a cigar light, and hopes that the "stinking violets" won't 92 Our Common Tongue spoil the scent. "A fine day," sighs the umbrella merchant, and hopes that one swallow will not make a summer. The pleased excursionist presses the fine day on the notice of the burnt-up farmer, but the simple greeting finds no sympathetic response. " How do you do ? " asks the valetudinarian, inter- ested in regime. " How do you do ? " asks the doctor, interested in symptoms. " How do you do ? " is what the acquaintance wants to know, who cares nothing for your symptoms or treatment, but knows you as a face at the club, and a fourth at the bridge-table. And now, Mr. Dealer in words, what do you mean, once more, when you say " How do you do, a fine day ? " But let the poor man catch his 'bus. He cannot answer. Dine out, and without quarrelling in the ante- room where these two poor little coins pass from hand to hand until dinner is announced (I never talk about anything but the weather before dinner, do you ? One must economise one's material) examine the next piece of the medium of exchange that comes from your neighbour on the right. Unless it be a City dinner where the first remark is always the reminder that it is an occasion when you may and should have a second go of soup ; or a dinner where the vintages figure on the menu to the exclusion, as the subtle reader will apprehend, of any such question 93 Cross Views and questioner, you will be asked " Don't you love the theatre ? " Dry and Forty will probably reply to Sweet Seven- teen that he does not care to turn out of an evening. They use the same word, they may mention the same playhouse, but there is confusion of tongues. " No," says Forty, "I didn't care about the Trumpets of Sennacherib" and remembers with disrelish the in- different performance of twaddling commonplace. His neighbour conjures up a presentment of passions by supermen, flooded more than by limelight with the flush of newness and fever of youthful enthusiasm, and is chilled by this indifference to all that the magic word theatre says to her imagination. We will not labour his point of view ; no doubt he ought to be ashamed of it ; but what is there in common in the tongue they speak ? After dinner he draws up his chair to his host's, and the circulation of the port suggests the Licensing Bill. To one a heavy blow has been dealt to intemperance and all that it implies to his experience and views of social welfare to another depreciation of securities he has put his and others' trust in. They dispute, but they are scarcely in the same arena. Each man with the simple faith of a Quixote battles with the foes of his brain, not with his opponent, and mows down swathes of bitter grudges, carving the ambient air, ineffectual and un- scathed. There is probably very little disagreement in the world. There is only misunderstanding. But it answers just as well. 94 Our Common Tongue The just word bringeth joy to the finder. To the headmaster of a preparatory school, seated in his study, there entered once upon a time two very small boys, obviously pushed in from behind, for the door closed after them without help from their unwilling hands. They announced falteringly that they were a deputa- tion from the school which begged to suggest (I think) fruit tart and cream on Sundays, instead of rice and prunes, a diet of which they were heartily sick. The Doctor (his name was Grimstone, of course) rose with a horrid politeness and opened the door for them once more. "Inform the school," he said, " that I return them their ambassadors uninjured" And sitting down to his desk again with a well- founded confidence in the finality of the message, he wrote to the stores for another hundredweight of rice and a small bottle of prunes. The cases of dual personality set forth in solemn medical treatises, and eagerly seized on by enterpris- ing novelists, possibly have their key in the half- understanding that passes for knowledge of our fellows, for when we say that we understand such a one we mean at best that we understand half of him ; recog- nise that facet of his character which we touch. We often hear the shocked complaint " I never thought he would do such a thing." But if the outraged friend's own hidden half had been consulted, there would have been less cause for surprise. We cry hypocrite on a man who says this and does that. " Let him be one thing or the other," says Mr. Commonplace : " I 95 Cross Views hate a man who preaches virtue, but is no better than I am." The serious and high-minded celibate relaxes after dinner : he lifts a veil, and Commonplace sniggers. "Told you he was a hypocrite," he says. But are there no moments in his own existence when he feels the stirring of something higher ? Does he never seek, stammeringly, to affirm some principle alien to his daily conduct ? If so, he is equally a hypocrite. At long intervals he lifts the veil from his face, as the other man from his lower nature. The veil were better transferred. We study, some of us, foreign languages, that misunderstanding may be pursued to its limits, but few there are who study their mother-tongue, to give expression every chance. It can afford the neglect of none. Most people have a dim perception that something more than a knowledge of his language is required before we can understand a foreigner. They see a further difference in his " ways." But this warning indication fades between compatriots whose ways are one, and disappears altogether when persons are bred and live under the same roof, so that family quarrels are the most irremediable of any. I under- stand my family, so I know they are wrong. And nowhere is the warning to beware uncharted rocks so needful as between man and woman who are more diverse and mutually incomprehensible than Papuan and Esquimaux. One reason for woman's facility in speech is that she does not know the names of things. The very 96 Our Common Tongue lack that hampers a man enables her to trip it lightly. Her vocabulary being very small it is at her fingers' ends, and the fewness of her wants in this one particular give her the initial advantage also in foreign languages, for when we go abroad we depend on our wives who have " learnt " French. Chose and machin cover a lot of ground, and their wants being mainly concrete they can always point to what they desire. Woman uses her tongue with a facility denied to man, but it is the most futile of all her pleasures. I verily believe that if she were dumb we should under- stand her better, and if she were deaf she would understand us no less than she does. Speech is simply no medium of communication between man and woman. Between man and man it serves certain practical utilitarian ends ; anything beyond that at- tempted by it ends in a deadlock only to be loosed by blows. But between the sexes I really do not see the use of it. I believe marriage should always be between foreigners, and all dictionaries destroyed. This would break down international barriers, and remove the occasions of private differences. A word and a blow, we say proverbially. No word no blow, then. You argue a point with a woman. She will gain her point, or die in the attempt, but she does not want to keep it. Words never yet brought man and woman together, nor kept them united. A certain man had triumphed over his wife in argument. She said : " My dear, if you were not so logical G 97 Cross Views perhaps you would not be so silly." He treasured the reply, for he was a wise man and was only logical in his off moments. You cannot argue a woman into loving you, but it is well to remember that you can argue her out of it : that " Wommen desiren have sovereynetee As wel over her housbond as hir love And for to been in maistrie hym above," we may read as meaning that she distinctly demands concession as the tribute of love, and that when she asks for the unreasonable thing she has this reason on her side : that she does not want the thing, but the tribute of its concession ; offer the tribute, and she will touch and remit. Save your breath and you shall always have porridge to cool. Men, submit yourselves to your wives, and you shall enjoy the stalled ox and no dissension therewith. Why am I not married, that I might put my precepts into practice ? I met the nicest little woman the other night at Landfall, where I was dining with Haversedge. I became aware of Mrs. Passavent as soon as I entered the room. She was of the type, though a diverse type enough, towards which attention insensibly focuses, and in that small company where there was scarcely a subordinate point to arrest the attention, she made her effect instantaneously. A woman not afraid of dress, evidently. Who could submit herself to the hands of an authority, Our Common Tongue nor botch the work of an artist with any fallacious touch from the amateur palette. An artist in per- ception, and a work of art in effect. A handsome woman, yes. A charming woman, certainly. With a humour in the mouth more often seen on plainer faces. But not a face to be defined. Beauty of form expresses itself at once. Charm, being of the soul, only grows definite on knowledge. Give this woman the five minutes' start once claimed by the plainest of men, and she would not have much to fear. Such was my opening judgment, as I listened for a minute or two to my host, and looked at Mrs. Passavent. I have often noticed when I have passed some time confined in a small company, whether on board ship, in a country house, or in the one hotel of some quiet resort, how unneedful is actual beauty to the woman who would have the momentary ascendancy. It is merely necessary that she should be best looking present. Every day will strengthen the spell, but when the circle is suddenly enlarged, the ship reaches port, or your seaside community is overwhelmed by a fe"te that fills the little place, one rubs one's eyes ! What was the matter with one ? How could one have followed with a sore attention the every move- ment of that quite second-rate and dowdy young woman ? Landfall has a small horizon. It holds its pretty faces, and here was one that was pre-eminent. Over what enlarged area would it hold its own ? I prided 99 Cross Views myself on my detachment, as I called up my experience and matched her against its background. The image toned, but would not be subdued. Her charm was not local or temporary, I said to myself. And your personal equation in this ? Ridiculous, I replied to myself. I have never seen the woman till this evening. She is nothing to me. Liar! When you argue with yourself and can't get a civil reply, you can only turn away. Naturally I turned to Mrs. Passavent. It was after dinner. She was turning over some music with Haversedge's niece. " One's music gets so fearfully untidy," Miss Haver- sedge was saying, as she rose with flushed face from research in an oak chest. " I cannot find that wretched piece." "My dear Miss Haversedge, I implore you not to trouble about it any more," said Mrs. Passavent. " It isn't worth while." " There is only one remedy," said I, " for the malignant resistance of things that hampers one's finest moments." " Tell it us for pity's sake," asked Miss Haversedge, patting her hair. " Unfortunately it is not to be come by," I replied. "But that is the essence of a true remedy," said Mrs. Passavent. " What is yours ? " " To keep a nigger. How energetic and productive one would become ! I would spare no pains to my nigger. He should read and remember everything of the dullest and most indispensable. He should write 100 Our Common Tongue rapidly and legibly, and his summing should be un- impeachable. He should fix my fleeting thoughts in round-hand, verify my quotations, keep accounts, write to my relatives, follow me round with the ash- tray, tidy the music, and in all things become the perfect man. Some West Coast officials, they say, irritable with fever, pay a nigger to beat him ; and some beat him without paying him ; but I would only beat him for his good, when he was lazy, and remiss in any of the virtues I have mapped out for him. I would make a splendid nigger of him. Sitting still I could see him perfected like so many schemes. Why haven't I a nigger or a master ? But are you not going to play to us ? " I said, for she was moving away from the piano. "Is it the music that is wanting ? " " No. It is the nigger," she said, smiling maliciously. " Had I a nigger, he should sing you songs of Nubia, Mr. Askew." " I would go down on my knees and rummage that chest " "I have done it already," said Miss Haversedge fretfully, "and I shouldn't mind beating some one myself." I followed Mrs. Passavent with supplication, but she shook her pretty head. " I don't like your reading of the dual personality theory, Mr. Askew," she said. " You would separate all that is admirable in your composition and drive it into a fellow-being with a stick. No. You needn't smile so ruefully. My 101 Cross Views reflection is that this pleasing scheme of yours has been worked on women for ages." ! ! " Yes. Perhaps the worst injury you have done us has been that you have set us on a pedestal, attributed all the virtues to us, and punished us cruelly when we failed. And kept all the vices to yourselves, with your usual selfishness. Now, Mr. Askew, the nigger is in full revolt ! Say what you can." Her eyes laughed at me, but there was an extra touch of colour a little high set on her face, and the pearls in her ears quivered. She was half sitting on the end of a big couch, one arm stretched out supporting her, white, slim, and nervous in the lampglow, and her face, in shadow, absorbed the reflected light into her dancing eyes. I had said something, then, to vex her, probably at the dinner-table, and she had saved the grudge. I was consternated. Was she a feminist ? I made a stammering recovery, and protested piteously against the turn she had given to the talk. " Even so," I said, " look what we have made of you. If you are indeed the work of our hands, do we not reverence our idol ? " I was conscious of arguing in a circle. "But if the idol prefers not to be an idol ? If it thinks fetich a nearer word, seeing that it is flung down and cast out if its worshippers don't get their desires. Have we not * hands, organs . . . senses, affections, passions ? If you pinch us, do we not bleed? . . . If you wrong us shall we not revenge ?" 102 Our Common Tongue " And do you not ? You are tearing me now for some offence of which I am unconscious." " Ah ! The unconsciousness is the offence ! Sit down by me once more, Mr. Askew, before you go, and I will read you a lecture ! " She slipped into the corner of the big couch with slow and graceful rustle and subsidence, nor feared the sophist's juggling eyes I bent upon her. She closed her own for a delicious second, and smiled before she began : " The feminist loves an audience," she said, " but there must be no heckling.'* I swore it, but Miss Haversedge had joined her uncle. " You men," began Mrs. Passavent, with great seriousness, "say commonly either that woman has all she wants, or that she doesn't know what she wants. It may be she wants so much that she doesn't know where to begin, or it may be she has all that man wants her to have. But if you could clear your minds of cant " she paused for the protest I was under oath not to utter, and then continued with enjoyment " you would recognise that she knows her wants very clearly, and that it is just what you don't want her to have. She wants an equal moral code and judgment." It was not what I had expected. "You must give her the chance of equal vices, if her virtue is to be anything worth. She is so penalised that she has no free will. Denial of free will is the death of the conscience, is it not ? Then let her sins bring her the same retribution and no 103 Cross Fiews more, that his bring to man, and her virtue will shine for the first time. You men," and she pointed at me with her fan, "protest that goodness is too delicate a jewel for you to handle. You are too base, you say, with odious mock humility, and you shift the care of it on to the womdn, and woe betide her if she lose it ! It is not for fallible creatures like you, you say, and you go off chuckling to your clubs. The poor woman, equally fallible, but with the threat of irreversible punishment hanging over her, guards the home and the treasure. And wonderfully she guards it." She dropped her lids. "For she is a timorous creature." " I protest ! " I exclaimed. " No, I don't care. I will not have woman so traduced." " I am glad I have moved you ! " she said glee- fully. "For you cannot deny that so long as an unequal punishment guards it, her virtue cannot be stated. Women's morality, so far, is man's con- venience." " You have practised this," I said spitefully. " You speak admirably." " You are glad enough to take woman's weapons when she takes yours," she said with a nod. " Nature's ways cannot be altered. A woman knows that better than a man, for there is more that she would like to alter. But creeds and systems can pass, and woman wants her freedom. The franchise is a detail." She paused for defence and defiance, but I was more sad than pugnacious. 104 Our Common Tongue "I am sorry to think it such a Jekyll and Hyde business," I began. " Exactly ! " she said, delightedly. " Hyde en- joyed himself thoroughly. And poor Jekyll Do you not understand me ? " " I hope not " I began ponderously, but she cut me short. " You think you are open to argument, but take refuge in preaching ! Please say instead that you think my emancipation might shed a perfume on the violet ? Say something nice before we part." "I know what the poet thought," I replied, as I took her hand in mine and said good-night. Now here was a woman talking most ridiculous nonsense. Naturally it fell on deaf ears, and had I used a man's superior powers of reasoning to lay before her the masculine and right view, it would, I have little doubt, have proved as ineffectual. Mention morality to a woman and she says you preach. To the harem with her ! The Turks are right. I have read that in China, where everything that the Emperor says takes precedence of everything else, his replies to memorials appear before the documents to which they relate. You piece them together afterwards as best you can. But what relation has an answer to a question in any land ? Would it matter if Ministerial replies were published on the Monday, and the questions that evoked them on the 105 Cross Views Tuesday ? In a court of law, where it is an estab- lished belief that all questions can be answered by yes or no, when the counsel insists "answer me, Sir, yes or no," and the witness has sworn to tell the whole truth and nothing else, one feels that some word of compromise is wanting the blessed word Mesopo- tamia, for instance. Do you understand the nature of an oath ? Yes or no, Sir ? Are you a moral man ? Yes or no, Sir ? Did you break the plaintiff's heart ? Yes or no, Sir ? None of your subterfuges here. I hope counsel are as much married as other men. I should like to hear one say : " Do you or do you not know that I detest boiled mutton ? Answer me at once, yes or no, Madam ! " He couldn't appeal to the Court for protection. It is a pretty sport to tie a man up with an oath and loose a trained advocate on him whose bread and butter depends on making him commit perjury. Lawyers in Parliament draft the laws, and they are so many that they can pass the laws ; lawyers outside administer the laws, exploit the laws and live by the laws. They have made themselves irremovable, and constituted themselves the highest Court of Appeal. And all for the abuse of words. If the world lasts long enough to see the natural end of all existing institutions, the last it will see fade is the Law the Science of Disagreement. 106 Our Common Tongue The first stone of Babel was laid when Eve's voice broke on Adam's ear. Perhaps earlier, for when God walked with Adam in the garden, Adam certainly did not take His mind. Had the angel with the flaming sword been visible before the Fall, Adam, we may be pretty certain, would have remained upright. The sword speaks plainer than the word. Start any topic in a mixed company and we are all relegated to Babel, and the basis of disagreement is non-agreement on terms. General conversation is impossible except on banalities, and particular con- versation is apt to become a lecture to an auditor, though the roles are likely to be wrongly assigned, for mistaken manners ordain that the instructed shall generally hold his peace before the simple. For the fool does not know that he is a bore. Differing vocabulary, or want of vocabulary, ignor- ance of etymology, of syntax, of any grounding in logic, catch-words, sloppy-mindedness, lack of educa- tion shutting off whatever reference to authority, method, or even illustration, bog the whole company in a morass of misapprehension. The loud pitch, too, of general conversation in unintellectual gatherings is a plain instance of sound taking the place of sense. It is of course unnecessary, for when many people are talking in a place which is not quite common ground, where everyone does not know everyone, during the entr'acte at a theatre, for instance, hundreds can talk and be heard without a voice being raised : but at a table or in a room 107 Cross Views where each shouts against each, the voice is strained and the ear wearied. It springs from the notion that noise is gay ; from the savage love of din. A con- versazione is voted dull, because the majority prefer the niggers. Discussion should proceed like a game of chess, piece replying to piece put forward ; an argument aptly used, reinforced by knowledge, backed by authority and tending towards a point, should move as a piece moves on its proper squares, reinforced by its fellows and powers behind and on either flank, towards the opponent's king. But when the opponent does not know the moves, revives the slain, dashes into trebly commanded positions and disputes his capture, only heat and weariness can come of such a game, and wisdom is put to its final use, the endur- ance of folly. The more a man studies the science of meaning the more it inclines him to hold his tongue. He knows he can express his own meaning but rarely, and must suffer those who have no meaning to express ; and do it. And hardest of all perhaps, those well-intentioned fatty degenerates who seek to blanket the bright flame of discussion with such manufactured wads and stuff-goods as " perhaps there is something in it," or again, " I think too much of it a mistake," or strike down one's nerveless arms with such ex- pressions as " You say so " or " I don't see that at all." Learn, O timorous cotton-heads, to whom divine argument is a wrangle, and halfway to a quarrel, to 108 Our Common Tongue be stifled as soon as it breaks out, that, of your pro- position which is possibly spiritualism, or if not is certainly Christian science, as of the proposition that there are mutton chops for dinner (and nut cutlets for yours), there cannot be " something in it." If there are mutton chops there is everything in it, if no chops, there is nothing in it except the devil, for cheese and biscuits are as ciphers, standing alone. And so of your spooks. One spook, spiritualism ; no spook, no spiritualism. And as for you, Madam, who " think too much of this a mistake," here is an occasion when you may justly excuse yourself from thinking, and state the fine certainty without fear of contradiction. 109 VI WOMAN WHAT is a woman's philosophy of life ? A thousand writers have answered the question to their own satis- faction, and almost every man who has formed any philosophy of his own takes it for granted that it is bi- sexual in origin and application : but such a premise is in itself unphilosophical. For on reflection he must own, I think, that his philosophy is masculine in origin and that in applying it to the woman the misfit that ensues causes him an endless perplexity. Has woman ever expressed herself ever painted the man as she sees him ever dramatised her own tragedy and comedy of life ever found her utterance in song that can soar on equal pinions in the glorious chorus of poets or founded a religion to suit her needs, created a literature to educate her own mind and instruct the man, governed a state for women, preached her gospel or left her rule of life in any form ? What, after all, do we know about her ; and of those who have celebrated her and of those who have analysed her, which have done her the greater wrong ? With what eyes does she see the age-long celebration of the eternal feminine ? Does its homage no Woman console her for her lack of self-expression ? Does she laugh at the analysts, or is she gratified by their attempts at expounding her to herself? Her ways are well nigh as inscrutable as those of Providence, which theologians interpret in divers ways and without authority. Juliet, Portia, Margaret, Beatrice, are men's celebrations and renderings of the feminine, and the unidealistic mind has given us a hundred more materialised portraits, but what confirmation have we from the subject, for subject in that sense she remains, for she is not self-expository nor does she turn the mirror or the scalpel on her partner. She remains a sphinx, supplying an eternal riddle, nor puzzles herself, apparently, over the corresponding complexity of the sex that dominates hers. Our theologies, arts, philosophies, politics, are man- made, and the woman who lifts her gaze from the hearth, who steps from out the swept and garnished circle of her little realm, having no children tugging at her skirts, and with a mind-hunger unsatisfied with spoon-food, must feel, one thinks, when she enters these roaring marts made by and for generations of male workers and thinkers, much as that modern type the female clerk must feel when she first takes up her post in the city not that the effort is beyond her powers altogether, not that the life, strenuous and ill- paid as it may be, is too much for her frailer strength or inimical finally to her sex, but that the whole organism of the business from dawn to dark, from Cheapside to Aldgate, from finance to chandlery, from HI Cross Views manager to out-porter, from office to bodega, from Mansion House speech to Stock Exchange slang, is a male organism, old, complex, far-stretching and pro- pagated without help of woman. It is this a-sexual formation of their hive which daunts the female worker and makes the path hard for the poor little pioneers. It makes it necessary for them to go to work, so to speak, in trousers and a hard hat. Trousers and hard hats are not ethically connected with finance or the wool-exchange, but custom has made them so. At present she can only gain ad- mission to the stronghold by donning a male disguise, but when the Nova Solyma is run by men and women and half the control is hers, she will doff that ill- becoming khaki of warfare and reappear in an en- hanced beauty in a reborn city. But underlying the hard daily necessities is a broader and deeper hunger that drives us all, and of the food that supplies it we ask does it nourish woman, and can she develop her full faculties on it if it is primarily a male diet ? She has been the inspiration of poets, dramatists, painters, sculptors, musicians, from the beginning, the text of moralists, and philosophers, and essayists, the prize of warriors, the prime trophy of the hunter's lodge in whatever shape he has taken in every age. She has been the goddess of the oldest religion on earth, but we have no revelation. You look across your fireplace and there sits an inarticulate mystery, the beautiful and passive object of man's activities, 112 Woman the centre of his interest since his race began. You approach the study of this mystery and all the written word from papyrus to the daily paper is full of her as she has appeared to men. You idealise her and all the poets come to your aid. You materialise her and all romantic and amorous literature feeds your flame. You shun her and the moralists and theologians ap- prove you. You admire, and the fine arts expand in mile-long galleries of exquisite and varied presentments all down the centuries. Whatever your mood, some man has felt it before you and offers his record to strengthen your fancy. But she she never speaks and has never spoken. She has her being in a universe bounded by masculine spirits of good and evil and from her time-long prison or pleasure-house she has never let us know what she thinks of her keeper. The boy enters on puberty and wakes simul- taneously to the ten thousand histories of love felt by man before him, from the Canticles to the sorrows of Werther, from the ravings of the lover of Laura to the ravings of the lover of Maud. How does the woman open her eyes to these things ? A thousand writers are ready to tell you, but all of them are men. All the noble women of Fiction are, after all, fiction, and created by men. And if Man is a horrid fact, Woman is, perhaps, a pleasing fiction. Religion wakes in the man, and his struggles and inspirations are reflected in the countless systems and convulsions that have compelled men before him. How did they strike women ? Politics have been his H 113 Cross Views ancient game and she has looked on. War answers to strong impulses in his temperament. Here indeed she has cried out, but who has listened ? Consider the brotherhood of men in schools and universities, and its preachers, teachers, orators, generals, and leaders who find audience and response and obedience. Where are the gatherings of women ? What solidarity or communion have they known, what women do they sit under, learn from, applaud, follow, obey ? The history they learn is the history of men. What man has done man can do, but can history move a woman's soul ? Not as it is written, anyway, for they use the same text-book. Every pulse, desire, and necessity in man has its exposition there, to which we may turn for edification, but every woman child comes into a virgin world, a primaeval jungle where, even as the pioneer's wife is dependent on him for aid in her natural curse, no woman's hand is stretched to aid, no woman's mind has made a clearing, or set up a landmark. No woman has painted man for her, but what is more terrible, no woman has painted woman for her. No female philosophy instructs her, no gynocracy offers pro- tection, no prophetess has founded a creed for her, no woman-poet expressed her, no priestess ministers to her. Silent she bears the raptures of the great lovers of literature, or of the pursuers of a legion of Chloes, Lalages, and Phyllindas. Sometimes a part is written for her, but whether she feels it we never know. 114 Woman With unmoved gaze she stands before Venus of the Louvre, La Belle Joconde, the Madonnas of Raphael. Unfired she reads the exploits of crusaders, giant- killers, conquerors, and heroes. Uncomprehending she hears of the march of progress, through the suc- cessive ages of stone, bronze, iron, and steel. She only sees that they grow harder and harder for her to make her mark on. It is easily argued that woman has made wars, pulled the strings of government, lent her cloak to religious movements, patronised the liberal arts, and in individual instances, no doubt, she has done these things, but on the whole when we ascribe these influences to her, we mean that she has smiled and that man has wrought. Again, to say as I have said that she has never expressed herself in word or action is obviously a too sweeping statement, but set against the overwhelming mass of male activities hers may go for nothing, and that the names of her champions occur so readily to mind is proof of their conspicuous fewness j but of them only it is a most noteworthy thing only the queens and the saints are on a par with man's greatest. However, if it be indubitable, as some think, that man has had the doing of everything in the past, it is as indubitable that woman wants to do something in the future. Still addressing ourselves to that minute but important percentage of the part of the western world whose common bond is the printed word, and not pretending to predicate anything of the great mass of humanity that recognises no movement save that of "5 Cross Views an army on the march, we may say that woman is developing an individuality, and were the world's ac- tivities not organised on exclusively masculine lines, her renaissance would be more apparent than it is. At present in descending into the arena she must, as the phrase goes, take the rough and tumble of it, but that rough and tumble is the way of the ring because she has not hitherto entered it. A woman may well shrink from the Stock Exchange, but Stock Exchange manners are only an unfortunate accident of the business of exchanging stock they are not of its essence. The woman who would be a doctor has to face the medical student, but might he not be tamed ? The thought of a woman on the hustings fills us with disgust, but it is the manners of elections that should disgust, and not the manner of woman. Professional ways and business habits are brutal or grubby or attended with the consumption of liquor or conducted with slang and obscenity because the ground is closed to woman, and so long as the half of all our cities is re- served for men only, the city of the future, the clean, shining, gracious place foretold by optimists, will never be. Why, the smoking room, that foul, smelling old den with its greasy chairs and lurking spittoon, is dis- appearing now that woman has nearly made good her equal claim to the divine weed, and the delightful " living-room " unites the married couple. It is her work. He could have continued in his "froust." She has weaned him from his after-dinner potations, lured him from the smoking-room, invites him to her 116 Woman club, and before he knows what is happening the trumpet will have sounded before the walls of club- land, and he will no longer be dining alone in a surrounding of black coats. She has won his leisure, as we all see, plays his games, shares his sport, travel, and adventure, and now she is guiding herself to share his work. More power to her ! Politics are never practical politics until they come about, and things are only contrary to nature until that lady adapts herself, and a very adaptable person she is, as every student of evolution knows. For instance, it is contrary to nature that a solicitor should be a woman. In defiance of this postulate let a solicitor be a woman. It will not be denied that she could pass an examination. She opens an office. Stubbs, Stubbs & Chowder on the door-post is expanded on the letter-paper to Miss Edith Stubbs, Miss Alice Stubbs, Mrs. Cholmondeley Chowder (Divorce and Admiralty). The door knocker is brightened, window-boxes take the place of wire gauze, a house- maid is introduced to Finsbury, and documents may be examined without a smother of dirt and soot, the partners secure the first word with eminent counsel, clients call for the pleasure of the interview (6*. and 8 house he is passing. It is addressed " To You," and on reading it he discovers that he is requested to meet the writer in the garden ol the house at 10 o'clock that night. In a spirit of knight-errantry, he decides to do BO, and learns that the writer a young girl is kept practically in prison by her father, because o! her affection for a man of whom he does not approTe. The chiTalry of Galahad Jones plunges him into many difficulties, and leads to some rery awkward and extremely amusing situations. A TOUCH OF FANTASY. Crown 8vo. 6/- A Romance For Those who are Lucky Enough to Wear Glasses. BY GIRO ALYI. THE SAINT'S PROGRESS; A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/- Translated from the Italian of Giro Alvi by Mary Gibson. *,* Signor Giro Alvi ha* written a long and most sympathetic novel dealing with the life of one of the noblest spirits of the Christian Church who was perhaps the most extraordinary man of his age The somewhat dissolute early life of the founder of the Franciscan Order is deftly outlined, the young man's innate goodness of heart and kindly disposition being clearly apparent even in the midst of his ostentatious gaiety and sudden impulses. BY W. M. ARDAGH. THE MAGADA. Crown 8vo. 6/- Pall Mall QazttU" ' The Magada ' is a store-house of rare and curious learn- ing ... it is a well-written and picturesque story of high adrenture and deed* of derring-do." Obstrvtr " The book has admirably caught the spirit of romance." Daily Chronicle " ' The Magada ' is a fine and finely told story, and we congratulate Mr. Ardagh." THE KNIGHTLY YEARS. Crown 8vo. 6/- *,* In " The Knightly Years ' the author of " The Magada " takes us back once more to the Canary Islands in the days of Isabella the Catholic. The tale deals with the aftermath of conquests, when " the first use the islanders made of their newly-acquired moral code was to apply it to their rulers." The hero of th story is the body-servant of the profligate Governor of Gomera, whose lore affairs become painfully involved with those of his master. In the course of his many adventures we come across Queen Isabella herself, the woman to whom every man was loyal save her own husband; and countless Spanish worthies, seamen, soldiers, governors and priests, all real men, the makers of Empire four hundred years ago. The book abounds in quaint sayings both of Spaniard and native, while the love- making of the simple young hero and his child-wile weaves a pretty thread of romance through the stirring tale of adventure. JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY ALLEN ARNOT. THE DEMPSEY DIAMONDS; A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/- *,* This is the story oi the secret transference ol a fortune; and the scene is laid mainly in two old houses in two Scottish Tillage*, one on the east coast, one buried in midland woods. The tale i* ot the old alow days ot twenty yean ago before the tyranny oi speed began, but it is swayed throughout and borne to its close by the same swift passions that sway the stories of men and women to-day, and will sway them till the end oi time. BY GERARD BENDALL. PROGRESS OF MRS. CRIPPS-MIDDLEMORE. Cr. 8vo. 6/- Author of Mrs. Jones's Bonnet," " The Old Home," etc. *,* This book deals with the vagaries of a middle-class family suddenly enriched. The progress of Mrs. Cripps-Middlemore is under the direction ol various ecclesiastics, each revered and beloved, from small shopkeeping and dissent to papacy and the peerage. The clever precocious children of the family attempt to emulate in the higher spheres ol literature and art the lemarkable financial success oi the capable father. Mr. Cripps-Middlemore's greatest success is that he carries his family with him. He entertains lavishly at his marble palace at Hampstead. " He was in many respects a generous, just, honourable and sincere man. Hii ancillary adventures I consider unfortunate," is the Rev. Moore Curtis' delightfully phrased post-mortem tribute. Mr. Bendall has a wicked wit which, with his ability to assume the attitude of the interested looker-on almost amounting to inspiration, stamps him as a humourist. BY PAUL BERTRAM THE SHADOW OF POWER. Third Thousand. Crown 8vo. 6/- *,* This is a Romance of the days when the Duke of Alva held the Netherlands fast in his iron grasp, and the power of King and Church oast its shadow over the land, sometimes over those even who were chosen to uphold it. There was DO hope of progress and the most enlightened could only smile grimly, sceptically upon the errors ol the age. Such also was the man whose story is here told; proud, daring, ruthless, like all the lieutenants ol the great Duke yet lifted by bis education above the blind fanaticism of his time, seeking truth and freedom, like his great contemporary the Prince of Orange. The publisher claims for " The Shadow of Power " that it is one oi the most powerful historical romances ever submitted to him. Timei " Few readers have taken up ' The Shadow of Power ' and come face to face with Don Jaimie de Jorquera, will lay it down or refuse him a hearing until the book and his adventures come to an end." Daily Mail" This is a book that cuts deep into nature and experience. We commend it most heartily to discerning readers, and hope it may take its place with the best historical novels." BY HORACE BLEACKLEY. A GENTLEMAN OF THE ROAD. Crown 8vo. 6/- Author of " Ladies Fair and Frail," etc. * As the title implies, this is a very gallant novel: an eighteenth century story of abductions, lonely inns, highwaymen and hangmen. Two men are in love with Margaret Crofton: Colonel Thomley, an old villain, and Dick Maynard, who is as youthful as he is virtuous. Thornley nearly succeeds in compelling Margaret to marry him, for he has in his possession a document sadly incriminating to her father. Maynard settles Thornley, but himself in his turn is " up against it." He is arrested for complicity in the highway thefts of a glad but graceless young ruffian. Both are sentenced to death, but a great effort is made to get them reprieved. It would be a pity to divulge the climax cunningly contrived by Mr. Bleackley, save to say that the book ends in a scene of breathless interest before the Tyburn gallows. JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY H. F. PREYOST BATTERSBY. THE LAST RESORT. Crown 8vo. 6/- BY EX-LIEUTENANT BILSE. LIFE IN A GARRISON TOWN. Crown 8vo. 6/- Also in Paper Cover i/- net. The suppressed German Novel. With a preface written by the author whilst in London, and an introduction by Arnold White. Truth" The disgraceful exposures of the book were expressly admitted to be true by the Minister of War in the Reichstag. What the book will probably suggest to you is. that German militarism is cutting its own throat, and will on day oe hoist with its own petard." BY SHELLAND BRADLEY. ADVENTURES OF AN A.D.C. Crown 8vo. 6/- Westmintttr Gazette " . . . makes better and more entertaining reeding than nine out of every ten novels c-f the day. . . . Those who know nothing about Anglo-Indian social life will be as well entertained by this story as those who know everything about it." Timts" Full of delightful humour." BY EYELYN BRENTWOOD. HECTOR GRAEME. Third Thousand Crown 8vo. 6/- ** The outstanding feature of "Hector Graeme" is the convincing picture it gives of military life in India and South Africa, written by one who is thoroughly acquainted with it. Hector Graeme is not the great soldier of fiction, usuaMy depicted by novelists, but a rather unpopular officer in the English army who is given to strange fits of unconsciousness, during which he shows extraordinary psychic powers. He is a man as ambitious as he is unscrupulous, with the desire but not the abHity to become a Napoleon. The subject matter of the Btory is unusual and the atmosphere thoroughly convincing. Morning Leader" Provides much excitement and straightforward pleasure. A remarkable exception to the usual boring novels about military life." BY JAMES BRYCE THE STORY OF A PLOUGHBOY. An Autobiography. Crown 8vo. 6/ ." As will be seen from the title of its parts" The Farm," " The Mansion," " The Cottage "the characters whose passions and interests make the plot of this story are drawn from the households of the Labourer, the Farmer and the Squire; the book is therefore an attempt to present country life in all its important aspects. In this, again, it differs from all other novels of the soil in our own or perhaps in any language: its author writes not from book-knowledge or hearsay or even observation, but from experience. He has lived what he describes, and under the power of his icalism readers will feel that they are not so much glancing over printed pages as mixing with living men and women. But the story has interest for others than the ordinary novel-reader. It appeals as strongly to the many earnest minds that are now concerned with the questions of Land and Industrial Reform. To such ita very faithfulness to life will suggest answer* startling, perhaps, but certainly arresting. JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY DANIEL CHAUCER. THE SIMPLE LIFE, LIMITED. Crown 8vo. 6/- This norel has a Tery decided quality of satire which is inspired by the conTentions of the unconventional. Eridently Mr. Ohaucer knows the Simple Life from the inside, and his reflection* will both amuse and amaze those who know it only from casual allusions. Many well-known figures will be recognized, though not in all cases under their proper names, and, as in the case of Mr. Mallock's " New Republic," Society will be busy dotting the " i's " and crossing the " t's." THE NEW HUMPTY DUMPTY Crown 8vo. 6/- BY GILBERT K. CHESTERTON. THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL. Crown 8vo. 6/- With 6 Illustrations by W. Graham Robertson. Daily Mail " Mr. Chesterton, as our laughing philosopher, is at his best in this delightful fantasy." Wextminatfr Gaztttf " It is undeniably cleyer. It scintillates that is exactly the right word with bright and epigrammatic observations, and it is written throughout with undoubted literary skill." BY PARKER H. FILLIMORE THE YOUNG IDEA; A Neighbourhood. Crown 8vo. 6/- Author of " The Hickory Limb." With Illustrations by Rosa Cecil O'Niel. BY RICHARD GARNETT. THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS AND OTHER STORIES Crown 8vo. Third Edition. 6/- Daily Chronicl" A. subtle compound of philosophy and irony. Let the reader take these stories as pure fun lirely incident and droll character and he will be agreeably surprised to find how stimulating they are." Timet " Here is learning In plenty, drawn from all ages and rnest languages, but of dryness or dulness not a sentence. The book bubbles with laughter. . . . His sense of humour has a wide range." BY A. R. GORING THOMAS. MRS. GRAMERCY PARK. Crown 8vo. 6/- World " In the language of the heroine herself, this, her story, is delightfully ' bright and cute.' " Observtr " Fresh and amusing." THE LASS WITH THE DELICATE AIR. Crown 8vo. 6/- ,* In his new novel Mr. Goring-Thomas relates the history of a young girl whose beautiful face is a mask that allures. R< und the history of " The Lass with the Delicate Air " is woren the story oi the Hicks family. Mrs. Hicks keeps a lodg'ng house in Chelsea, and baa theatrical ambitions. The author has keen powers of observation and a faculty of "getting inside a woman's mind "; and the same witty dialogue that was so commented upon in " Mrs. Gramercy-Park " is again seen in the new work. The scene of the book is laid partly in London and partly in Paris. JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY A. R. GORING TEOTAAS-continued WAYWARD FEET. Crown 8vo. 6/- *,* This book is a departure on the part of Mr. Caring-Thomas, and is a brilliant piece of work. The scene of the book alternates between St. Wnlpny- surmer, a mediaeval fortified town in the Pas-de-Calais, and Paris. The two heroines Toinette Moreau and J*an Dombray, both come from St. Wnlphy and both go to Paris. Their histories contrive a sharp contrast: one being by character sweet, yielding and affectionate, while the other is combative, rebellions and intellectual. The character drawing, as in Mr. Goring-Thomas' other books, is notably clear and interesting. His already celebrated wit, his original humour, and insight into character again illuminate his latest book. The history of Joan Dombray, especially, is a strong, original, and striking piece of work. BY HENRY HARLAND. THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF BOX. Crown 8vo. 6/- Illustrated by G. C. Wilmhurst. i6sth. Thousand. Acod> my-" The drawings are all excellent in style and really illustrative of the tale." Saturday Review" Wholly delightful." Pall Mall Gazette" Dainty and delicious." Timet " A book among a thousand." Spectator " A charming romance." MY FRIEND PROSPERO. Crown 8vo. Third Edition. 6/- Timei " There is no denying the charm of the work, the delicacy and Iragrancy of the style, the sunny play of the dialogue, the vivacity ol the wit, and the graceful flight of the fancy." World " The reading f it is a pleasure mre and unalloyed." THE LADY PARAMOUNT. Crown 8vo. ssth Thousand. 6/- Time " A fantastic, delightful lore-idyll." Spectator" A roseate romance without a crumpled rose leaf." Daily Mail-" Charming, dainty, delightful." COMEDIES AND ERRORS. Crown 8vo. Third Edition. 6/- Mr. HENRY JAMES, in Fortnightly Krrieic" Mr. Harland bag clearly thought oat a form. . . . He has mastered a method and learned how to paint. . . . Hi* art is all alive with felicities and delicacies." GREY ROSES. Crown 8vo. Fourth Edition. 3/6 net Daily Telegraph" ' Grey Roses ' are entitled to rank among the choicest Bowers of the realms of romance." Spectator" Really delightful. ' Castles near Spain ' is as near perfection as it could well be." Daily Chronicle " Charming stories, simple, full ol treshnew." MADEMOISELLE MISS. Crown 8vo. Third Edition. 3/6 Speaker" All through the book we are pleased and entertained." Bookman" An interesting collection of early work. In it may be noted the undoubted delicacy and strength of Mr. Harland'a manner." BY CROSBY HEATH. HENRIETTA TAKING NOTES. Crown 8vo. 6/- *** Henrietta is the eleven year old daughter of a dramatic critic, who, with her delightful younger brother, Cyrus, are worthy of a place beside " Helen's Babies " or " Elizabeth's Children." They cause the " Olympians " many anxious and anguished momenta, yet their pranks are forgiven because of the endearing charm of their generous natures. Miss Heath writes of children with the skill that oomes oi a thorough understanding of the child mind. BY MURIEL HINE. HALF IN EARNEST. Crown 8vo. 6/- ** Derrick Kilmarney, the secretary ol a famus politician, is a young man with the disposition to take the best that life offers him, and shirk the respon- sibilities. He falls in lore with a girl, but shudders at the idea of the bondage of marriage. His lore is emancipated, unfettered. He is ambitious, politically, allows himself to become entangled with his chief's wife, and is too indolent to break with her even in, justice to the girl he loves. Eventually there comes a time when all the threads hare to be gathered together, when lore has to be weighed with ambition, and in Kilmarney's ease the denouement is unexpected and startling. EARTH. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 6/- *,* Muriel Hine's previous novel " Half in Earnest " achieved a considerable success, " Earth " seems likely to achieve a greater. The story deals with the awakening of a pure young girl to the realities of life and what they mean. With a proper understanding of human nature oome-s sympathy : to know all is to pardon all. " Earth " is a society novel with a society atmosphere that is convincing. BY ADELAIDE HOLT. THE VALLEY OF REGRET. Crown 8vo. 6/- *,* Betty Feverell'a childhood is full t paths. For the best reason in the world she is unable to capture the sympathy of her supposed father, and runs away to make an imprudent marriage with a very charming but rather weak young man who is addicted to " drink." Fastidious to a degree, this failing does not seem to spoil the gentleness and refinement of his disposition, until, enraged by an insult to bia v.ife, he kills a man in a fit of alcoholic frenzy. With her husband sentenced to penal servitude for seven years, the problem of Betty's life is full of difficulty. After five years a second man, John Earle, wins her love, knowing little or nothing of the obstacles in the way of its fulfilment. Finally, news arrive* that the convict will return in a few weeks, and the story ends suddenly and unexpectedly. This is a delightful novel. It has incident and freshness; and the directness of the style gives the book a remarka-bly artistic impression of life. BY MRS. JOHN LANE. KITWYK. Crown 8vo. 6/- A Story with numerous illustrations by HOWARD PYLE ALBERT STERNER and GEORGE WHARTON EDWARDS. Timii " Mrs. Lane has succeeded to admiration, and chiefly by reason ol being so much interested in her theme that she makes no conscious effort to please. . . . Everyone who seeks to be diverted will read ' Kitwyk ' for its obvious qualities ol entertainment." JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY MRS. JOHN LANE continued. THE CHAMPAGNE STANDARD. Crown 8vo. 6/- Morniny Pott" The author's champion* overflows with witty sayings too numerous to cite." Pail Mall Gazttti" Mrs. Lane's paper* on oar social manners and foible* are the moat entertaining, the kindest and the truest that hare been offered us for a long time. . . . The book shows an airy philosophy that will render it ol service to the social student." ACCORDING TO MARIA. Crown 8vo. 6/- Daily Chronicli " Thia delightful norel, sparkling with humour. . . . Maria's world is real. . . . Mrs. Lane is remarkably true to life in that world. . . . Maria is priceless, and Mrs. Lane is a satirist whose life may be indefatigably joyous in satiric art. For her eyes harvest the little absurdities, and her hand makes sheares of them. . . . Thackeray might hare made such sheaves if he had been a woman." BALTHASAR AND OTHER STORIES. Crown 8vo. 6/- Translated by Mrs. JOHN LANE from the French of Anatole France Daily Graphic" The original charm and distinction ot the author's style has survived the difficult ordeal of appearing in another language. . . .' The Cure's Mignonette ' is as perfect in itself as some little delicate flower." TALK O' THE TOWN. Crown 8vo. 6/- % Mrs. John Lane's new book " Talk of the Town " is on the same lines as " The Champagne Standard," that sparkling and brilliantly witty study of English and American life, and has the delightful and refreshing humour we hare a right to expect of the author of " According to Maria," and that power of observation and keen insight into everyday life which made " The Champagne Standard " one of the most successful and one ol the most quoted books of its season, both in England and America." BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. THE QUEST OF THE GOLDEN GIRL. Cr. 8vo. 6/- Fifteenth Edition. Mr. MAX BEBBBOHM, in Diily Mail" Mr. Le Gallienne's gentle, high spirits, and his sympathy with existence is exhibited here. . . . His poetry, like his humour, suffuses the whole book and gives a charm to the most prosaic object* and incidents of life. . . . The whole book is delightful, for this reason, that no one else could hare written a book of the same kind." THE ROMANCE OF ZION CHAPEL. Crown 8vo. 6/- Second Edition. Si. Jamet't Gazittf" Mr. Le Gallienne's masterpiece." Timts " Extremely clever and pathetic. As for sentiment Dickens might have been justly proud of poor Jenny's lingering death, and readers whose hearts have the mastery over their heads will certainly weep over it." JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY W. J. LOCKE. DERELICTS. Crown 8vo. 6/- Daily Chronicle " Mr. Locke telU his story in a Tory true, very moving, and Tery noble book. It anyone can read the last chapter with dry eyes we shall be surprised. ' Derelicts ' is an impressive and important book." Morning Pst " Mr. Locke's clever novel. One oi the most effective stories that have appeared {or some time past." IDOLS. Crown 8vo. 6/- Daily Telegraph" A brilliantly written and eminently readable book." Daily Hail" One of the most distinguished novels oi the present book season." Punch " The Baron strongly recommends Mr. W. J. Locke's ' Idols ' to all novel readers. It is well written. No time is wasted in superfluous descriptions; there is no fine writing ior fine writing's sake, but the story will absorb the reader. ... It is a novel that, once taken up, cannot willingly be put down until finished." A STUDY IN SHADOWS. Crown 8vo. 6/- Daily Chronicle" Mr. Locke has achieved a distinct success In this novel. He has struck many emotional chords and struck them all with a firm sure hand." Athtncr.nm" The character-drawing is distinctly good. All the personages etand well defined with strongly marked individualities." THE WHITE DOVE. Crown 8vo. 6/- Timt-i " An interesting story, lull ol dramatic scenes." Horning Post" An interesting ttory. The characters are strongly conceived and vividly presented, and the dramatic moments are powerfully realised." THE USURPER. Crown 8vo. 6/- World " This quite uncommon novel." Spectator" Character and plot are most Ingeniously wrought, and the concln- sion, when it comes, is fully satisfying." Timtt " An impressive romance." THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE. Cr. 8vo. 3/6 AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA. Crown 8vo. 6/- Daily Chronicle" The heroine of this clever story attracts our interest. . . . She is a clever and subtle study. . . . We congratulate Mr. Locke." Horning Post" A cleverly written tale . . . the author's pictures of Bohemian life are bright and graphic." WHERE LOVE IS. Crown 8vo. 6/- Mr. JAMES DOUGLAS, in Star" I do not olten praise a book with this exultant gusto, but it gave me so much spiritual stimulus and moral pleasure that I feel bound to snatch the additional deligut oi commending it to those readers who long for a novel that is a piece ot literature as well a* a piece of life." Standard " A brilliant piece ol work." Tinut" The author has the true gift; his people are alive." THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE. Cr. 8vo. 6/- Mr. C. K. SHORTER, in Sphtrt" A book which has Just delighted my neart." Truth" Mr. Locke's new novel is one ol the best artistic pieces ol work I have met with for many a day." Daily Chronicle" Mr. Locke succeeds, indeed, in every crisis of this most original story." 8 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY W. J. LOCKE continued. THE BELOVED VAGABOND. Crown 8vo. 6/- Truth" Certainly it is the moat brilliant piece of work Mr. Locke has done. ' Evening Standard" Mr. Locke can hardly tail to write beautifully. He has not tailed now." SIMON THE JESTER. Crown 8vo. 6/- *.* The central figure oi Mr. Locke's new corel is one Simon de Gez, If .P., who baring met life -with a gay and serene philosophy is suddenly called upon to face Death. This he does gallantly and jests at Death until he di scorers to big confusion that Destiny is a greater jester than he. Erentually by surrendering his claims he attains salration. The heroine is Lola Brandt, an ex-trainer ol animals, and an important figure in the story is a dwarf, Professor Anastasius Papadopouloe, who has a troupe ol performing cats. The scene oi the norel is laid in London and Algiers. THE GLORY OF CLEMENTINA WING. Crown 8vo. 6/- Obferver " Mr. Locke's best. . . . Clementina Wing and Dr. Quixtus are the two most adorable characters that Mr. Locke has ever brought together in holy wedlock. The phrases are Locke's most debonairly witty." THE JOYOUS ADVENTURES OF ARISTIDE PUJOL. 6/- BY LAURA BOGUE LUFFMAN. A QUESTION OF LATITUDE. Crown 8vo. 6/- ,* The author ot " A Question of Latitude " takes an English girl from the oomtortable statelinesa oi a country house in the Old Country, and places her in a rough and ready enrironment in Australia. The girl finds her standard of Talues undergoing a change. She learns to distinguish between English snobbery and Colonial simplicity and manliness, she also learns how to wash up dishes, and that Australia is not all kangaroos and giant cricketers. The atmosphere oi the story is conrincing, and there are many rirkl pictures ol Melbourne life. The book depicts Australia as it really is, its strength and its weakness, its refinement and its rnlLailty. BY A. NEIL LYONS. ARTHUR'S. Crown 8vo. 6/- Timtt " Not only a rery entertaining and amusing work, but a rery kindiy and tolerant work also. Incidentally the work is a mirror ot a phase of the low London life oi to-day as true as certain oi Hogarth's transcripts in the eighteenth century, and far more tender." Punch. " Mr. Neil Lyons seems to get right at the heart ol things, and I confess to a real admiration lor this philosopher ot the coffee-stall." SIXPENNY PIECES. Crown 8vo. 6/- Pall Mall Gazett*" It is pure, fast, sheer life, salted with a sense ot humour." Evening Standard" ' Sixpenny Pieces ' is as good as ' Arthur's,' and that to saying a great deal. A book full of laughter and tears and hits innumerable that one feels impelled to read aloud. ' Sixpenny Pieces ' would be very bard indeed to beat," JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY A. NEIL LYONS continued COTTAGE PIE. Crown 8vo. 6/- * Mr. Lyons' former books dealt with Eait London characters. Now h draws the rarying types oi a small country community. The humour o! the whole is enforced, inimitable, and there i* the underlying note ot tragedy nerer wholly absent Lrom the Urea o! the poorer classes. W. J. LOCKE, in Out/oofc " . . . That book of beauty, truth, and artistry." EDWIN PUOH, in Outlook " I hare nerer missed an opportunity to express my admiration for his inimitable talent." CHRONICLES OF CLARA. Crown 8vo. 6/- BY ALLAN McAULAY. THE EAGLE'S NEST, Crown 8vo. 6/- Athtnatum " We should describe the book as a brilliant tour d fore*. . . . The story is spirited and interesting. The lore interest also is excellent and pathetic." Sptetator" This is one oi thoee illuminating and stimulating romances which set people reading history." BEGGARS AND SORNERS. Crown 8vo. 6/- **" Beggars and Sorners " is a norel which deals with what may be called the back-wash of the " Forty Fire." It commemorates the debdclf of a great romance, and in describing the lires, the struggles, the make-shifts, the intrigues and the crimes of a small circle oi Jacobite exiles in Holland between the years 1745 and 1750, it strires to show the pathos of history while rerealing its seamy side. The characters are imaginary (with one important exception) ; they hare imaginary names and commit imaginary actions, for the story is not confined to, but only founded on, fact. If some readers of Jacobite history find among their number some old friends with new taces, this need not detract from the interest ot others to whom all the characters are new actors in a drama drawn from the noreliit's fancy. To English readers it may hare to be explained what the word Sorner means but the story makes this sufficiently plain. The noTel is of a lighter character than those preriously written by this author, and is not without sensational elements. In spite of adrerae circumstances, grim characters, and all the sorrows of a lost cause, it oontrires to end happily. The scene is laid in Amsterdam. BY KARIN MICHAELIS. THE DANGEROUS AGE. Crown 8vo. 3/6 net Translated from the Danish. This book has been: (1) Sold to the extent ot 100 editions in 6 months in Germany. (2) Translated into 11 languages. (3) Translated into French by the great MABCEL PEKVOST, who says in his introduction to the English Edition " It is the feminine soul, and the feminine soul of all thai is rerealed in these extraordinary documents. Here indeed is a strange book." ELSIE LINDTNER. A Sequel. Crown 8vo. 3/6 net JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY IRENE MILLER. SEKHET. Crown 8vo. 6/- ** Sekhet deals with that topic of unwearying interest to readers ol romance the adventures and straggles of an exquisitely lovely woman upon whom the hand ot Fate ii laid heavily. From the days ol her beautiful girlhood when her Guardian himself proves her tempter, Erarne has good reason to believe herself one of victims of " Sekhet," the ancient Egyptian Goddess ol Love and Cruelty. Even though the main theme of this story is the tragic outcome of a too passionate love, portions ol Frame's experiences, such as those with the bogus Theatrical manager, are full of humour, and throughout there is a relieving lightness of touch in the writing. The book grows in interest as it proceeds, and the final portion a long duel between Evarne and the evil genius ol her life is dramatic in the extreme. The result remains uncertain till the last page ox two, and though decidedly ghastly U entirely original and unforeseen. BY HECTOR H. MUNRO (Saki) THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVIS. Crown 8vo. 6/- Author of "Reginald," A NEW HUMOURIST. *' Gloria is an embodiment of the Modern Man in his moat frivolous, cynical, mischief-loving vein. He moves through, or inspires, a series of congenial adventures in the world of country-house and restaurant lite. The chronicle of his sayings and misdoings form a feast ot wit and humour that will convince many that it is no longer necessary to go abroad for our humourists. BY LOUIS N. PARKER POMANDER WALK. Crown 8vo. 6/- Author of "Rosemary," etc. With numerous Illustrations by J. Scott Williams. .Novelised by the author of the delightful play of the eame name, which hat met with so much success both in England and the United States. A picture ol one ol the quaint ont-ol-the-way corners of London ol the olden times. The volume contains a tinted frontispiece and title page, and numerous other charming illustrations. BY JOHN PARKINSON. OTHER LAWS. Crown 8vo. 6/- , This book is distinctly the outcome of the latest " intellectual " movement in novel-writing. The hero, Hawkins, is an African explorer. During a holiday in England he falls in love with and captivates Caroline Blackwood, a woman of strong personality. Circumstances prevent him from entering upon a formal engagement, and he departs again for Africa, without proposing marriage. Caroline and Hawkins correspond fitfully for some time; but then a startling combination of events causes Hawkins to penetrate further and further into the interior; a native village is burned, and a report, based apparently upon fact, is circulated of his death. Not until seven months have elapsed is be able to return to England. He finds Caroline married to a man who has lound her money useful. Here the story, strong and moving throughout, moves steadily to the close, describing delicately and analytically the soul conflict of a man and a woman, sundered and separata, with a yearning for each other's lore. JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY F. INGLIS POWELL. THE SNAKE. Crown 8vo. 6/- *,* For countless generations the soul of Peasant ladi* has been steeped in weird, fantastic superstitions, some grotesque, some loathsome, all strangely fascinating. Though the main theme ol this story U the unhappy lore of a beautiful, evil woman, and the brutal frankness with which she writes of her uncontrolled passions in her diary, yet the whole tale hinges on some of the most gruesome superstitions of the East. This book should appeal to all who take an interest in the strange beliefs not of the educated classes but of the simple- minded and ignorant peasants of Behar. BY F. J. RANDALL. LOVE AND THE IRONMONGER. Crown 8vo. 6/- Daily Telegraph" Since the gay days when Mr. F. Anstey was writing his inimitable series of humourous novels, we can recall no book of purely farcical imagination so full of excellent entertainment as this first effort of Mr. F. J. Randall. ' Lore and the Ironmonger ' is certain to be a success." Timrg " As diverting a comedy of errors as the reader is likely to meet with for a considerable time." Mr. CLEMENT SHORTER, in The Sphtrt" I thank the author for a delightful hour's amusement." THE BERMONDSEY TWIN. Crown 8vo. 6/- ** A humourous story of the reappearance ol a twin brother, who is supposed to be dead. Prosperous, respected, and well satisfied with himtelf, a suburban tradesman is contemplating matrimony and the realisation of his ambitions, when the twin brother appears. He is thrown into a state of panic, for not only is hi- fortune thus reduced by half and his marriage prospects endangered, but the twin is to all appearance a disreputable character, whose existence threatens to mar the tradesman's respectability. The good man's attempts to hide this undesirable brother make amusing reading, and the pranks of the unwelcome twin serve to complicate matters, for the brothers are so much alike as to be easily mistaken one for the other. The new arrival is really a man oi integrity, his depravity being assumed as a joke. Having played the farce out he is about to " confess," when the tables are turned upon him by accident, and he is forced to pay heavily for his fun in a series oi humiliating adventures. BY HUGH DE SELINCOURT. A FAIR HOUSE. Crown 8vo. 6/- Author of "A Boy's Marriage," "The Way Things Happen," "The Strongest Plume." *,* The outstanding idea oi Mr. Hugh de S&incourt's new novel U the possibility of absolute love and confidence between father and daughter. It is the main thread of the story and all the incidents are subordinated to it. The book falls naturally into three sections. The first opens with the birth of the daughter and the death ol the mother, the father's utter despair, until an idea comes to him, to make the child his masterpiece and to see how much one human being can mean to another. The second deals with the growth of the child from five to fifteen. In the third, the girl becomes a woman. Her first experience of love is unhappy and threatens to destroy the confidence between father and daughter. But she is enabled to throw herself heart and soul into stage-work, and in the excitement oi work she finds herself again. And the end of the book leaves her with the knowledge that one love does not necessarily displace another, and that a second, happier love has only strengthened the bond between her father and herself. 12 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY ESSEX SMITH WIND ON THE HEATH. Crown 8vo. 6/- *.* No paragraph or descriptive note can give an idea ol Miss Essex Smith's story. It depends upon style, psychology, woodland atmosphere, and more than anything else upon originality ol outlook. It will make a direct appeal to that public that has a taste ior the unusual. There is underlying it a tone ol passion, the passion ol a fantastic Richard Jefferies. BY HERMANN SUDERMANN. THE MASTERPIECE (Das Hohe Lied). Crown 8vo. 6/- A new Translation by Beatrice Marshall. *,* The first English translation ol this work, published under the title el " The Song ol Songs," proved to be too American for the taste ol the British public, and was eventually dropped. Bat it was felt that the work was too great au one not to be represented in the English language, and accordingly this entirely new translation has been made, which it is hoped will fairly represent the wonderful original without unduly offending the susceptibilities ol the British public. In this colossal novel, Sndermann has made a searching and masterly study ol feminine frailty. The character and career ol LUy Czepanck are depicted with such pitiless power and unerring psychological insight, that the portrait would be almost intolerable in its realism, if it were not lor its touches ol humour and tenderness. In these pages too may be lound some ol Sudermann's most characteristic and charming passages descriptire ol country life, while his pictures ol Berlin Society in ail its phases, the glimpses he gives us into what goes on beneath the tinsel, spick and span surface oi the great modern capital are drawn with Tolstoyan rigour and colour. THE INDIAN LILY and other Stories. Crown 8vo. 6/- Translated by Ludwig- Lewisohn, M.A. *,* A series ol characteristic stories by the great German Master which exhibit his art in every phase. Sudermann is chiefly known in this country as a writer of novels and ol plays, but this volume will place him in a new light for English readers as a writer of short stories ol the first rank. In tact he may with justice be termed the German Maupassant. BY MARCELLE TINAYRE. THE SHADOW OF LOVE. Crown 8vo. 6/- Translated from the French by A. R. Allinson, M.A. ** Ol the newer French novelists Marcelle Tinayre is perhaps the best known. Her work has been crowned by the French Academy, and she possesses a very large public in Europe and in America. The story deals with a girl's love and a heroic sacrifice dictated by love. " The Shadow ol Love " is a book ol extraordinary power, uncompromising in its delineation ol certain hard, some might say repulsive facts of life, yet instinct all through with an exquisitely tender and beautiful passion ol human interest and human sympathy. BY GEORGE YANE. THE LIFTED LATCH: A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/- *.* " The Lilted Latch " is a story of strong situations. The hero is the son ol an Italian attachg and a girl ol whose frailty he takes advantage. The mother decides to hide her shame by handing the child over to a foster-mother together with a sum of money for its maintenance. When the boy grows up be becomes by a curious sequence of events and circumstances reunited to his parents, and a series ol plots and counterplots follow. The scene is set principally in diplomatic circles in Rome. 13 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY GEORGE V ARE continued THE CHIMERA. Crown 8vo, 6/- ^7"Tn this book we meet some Sicilians of old lineage and considerable wealth settled in a, gloomy manor in England. The family consists ol an aged and parti; demented Princess, obsessed by a monomania lor revenge, her grandson, an attach^ of the Italian Embassy to the Court ol St. James, and his ball sister, a fascinating, winning, wayward and fickle creature. This girl captures the heart of Lord Drury whose father murdered the Principe Baldas&are di Monreale son of the old Princess. The contrast between these Southerners and their English neighbours is strongly accentuated. Lion Sforza and his half sister Donna Giacinta are no mere puppeti with Italian names; they give the reader the impression of being people the author has met and drawn from life. The tragedy in which they are involved strikes one as inevitable. Poor Lord Drury, in his utter inexperience, has taken a beautiful chimaera for reality and starts in the pursuit of happiness when it was all the time within his grasp. The lore-interest never flags to the last page when the hero's troubles come to an end. The glimpses of diplomatic circles in London are obviously not written by an outsider. BY CLARA YIEBIG. ABSOLUTION. Crown 8vo. 6/- Timei " There is considerable strength in ' Absolution.' . . . As a realistic study the story has much merit." Daily Teltgraph" The tale is powerfully told . . . the tale will prove absorbing with ite minute characterisation and real passion." OUR DAILY BREAD. Crown 8vo. 6/- Athenceum " The story is not only of great human interest, but also extremely valuable as a study of the conditions in which a large section of the poorer classes and small tradespeople of German cities spend their lives. Clara Viebig manipu- lates her material with extraordinary vigour. . . . Her characters are alive." BY H. B. MARRIOTT WATSON. THE TOMBOY AND OTHERS. Crown 8vo. 3/6 net Author of "Galloping Dick." BY H. G. WELLS. A NEW MACHIAVELLI. Crown 8vo. 6/- * The N*w Machiavelli is the longest, most carefully and elaborately constructed and most ambitious novel that Mr. Wells has yet written. It combines much of the breadth and variety of Tono-Bungay with that concentrated unity of effect which makes Love and Mr. Ltwisham, artistically, his most satisfactory work. It has the autobiographical form which he has already used BO effectively in Tono-Bungay, but this time the hero who surveys and experiences the vicissitudes of our modern world is not a commercial adventurer but a Trinity man, who directs very great ambitions and abilities to political ends, who is wrecked in mid-career and driven into exile by a passionate love adventure. From his retirement in Italy he reviews and discusses his broken life. The story he tells opens amidst suburban surroundings, and the first book gives a series of vivid impressions and criticisms of English public school and university life. Thenoe, after an episode in Staffordshire, it passes to the world of Westminster and the country house. The narrator recounts his relations with the varying groups and forces in contemporary parliamentary life and political journalism in London, and the growth and changes in his own opinion until the emotions of his passionate entanglement sweep the story away to its sombre and touching conclusion. In addition to the full-length portraits of Margaret, the neglected wife perhaps ..-<> finest of Mr. Wells's feminine creations Isabel Rivers, and Remington, there are scores of sharply differentiated characters, sketched and vignetted : Remington the father, Britten, the intriguing Baileys, the members of the Pentagram Circle, Codger the typical don, and Mr. Eves ham the Conservative leader. It is a book to read and read again, and an enduring picture of contemporary English conditions. 14 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY MARGARET WESTRUP. ELIZABETH'S CHILDREN. Crown 8vo. 6/- Daily Teltgraph" The book is charming . . . the author . . . has a delicate fanciful touch, a charming imagination . . . ekillully suggests character and moods ... is bright and -witty, and writes about children with exquisite know- ledge and sympathy." HELEN ALLISTON. Crown 8vo. 6/- Pall Mall Oazett" The book has TiTacity, fluency, colour, more than a touch of poetry and passion. . . . We shall look forward with interest to future work by the author oi ' Helen AllUton.' " THE YOUNG O'BRIENS. Crown 8vo. 6/- Saturday Ririfw" Delightful . . . the author treats them (the Young O'Briens) very skilfully." PHYLLIS IN MIDDLEWYCH. Crown 8vo. 6/- *,* It is some years since " Elizabeth's Children " -was published and immediately ran through edition after edition. In her new book the author shows that same sympathetic touch and sure knowledge of the real child that stamped " Elizabeth's Children " as a live book. The doings and misdoings of Phyllis are told with understanding and with humorous and deft touches the little idioeyncracies oi the Middlewichites are admirably hit off. ELIZABETH IN RETREAT. Crown 8vo. 6/- BY EDITH WHERRY. THE RED LANTERN : Being the Story of the Goddess of the Red Light. Crown 8vo. 6/- *,* The most exciting novel of recent years. It deals with the Rebellion in China and i of extraordinary anticipation. Sun Yat Sen is vividly depicted under the name of Sam Wang in Miss Edith Wherry's startling novel. BY IDA WILD. ZOE THE DANCER. Crown 8vo. 6/- ** The scene of the story is laid in Brussels, where Zoe, little more than a child, shows her remarkable aptitude for dancing. Her wonderful yellow hair secures for her a position in a hairdresser's window to the constant delight of the good citizens. Chance leads to her adoption of dancing as a profession. The book is full oi comedy and tragedy, and yet it is the charm and originality oi the telling which holds the reader throughout. IS JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION BY M. P. WILLCOCKS. WIDDICOMBE. Crown 8vo. 6/- Evening standard " Wonderfully alive and pulsating with a curious lervour which brings round the reader the very atmosphere which the author describee. ... A fine, rather unusual novel. . . . There are some striking studies ot women." Truth" A first novel ot most unusual promise." Quetn " An unusually deter book." THE WINGLESS VICTORY. Crown 8vo. 6/- Timel " Such books are worth keeping on the shelves even by the classics, for they are painted in colours that do not lade." Daily Tilegraph" A novel ol such power aa should win lor its author a position in the front rank of contemporary writers ol fiction." A MAN OF GENIUS. Crown 8vo. 6/- Daily Tlgraph" ' Widdioombe ' was good, and ' The Wingless Victory ' was perhaps better, but in ' A Man ol Genius ' the author has given, us something that should assure her place in the front rank ol our liring novelists. In this latest novel there ia so much ol character, so much ol incident, and to its writing has gone so much insight and observation that it is not easy to praise it without seeming exaggeration." Punch" There is no excuse tor not reading ' A Man ol Genius ' and making a short stay in the ' serenth Devon ol delight.' " Glob*" Exquisite." THE WAY UP. Crown 8vo. 6/- Daily Mail " It is admirably done. . . . Eminently worth reading, lull ol extremely clever characterisation, ol sharp and picturesque contrasts in personality ... a merciless exhibition oi almost all the lollies known as modern thought.'' WINGS OF DESIRE. Crown 8vo. 6/- ** When the curtain goes up on " Wings ol Desire " it is to show Simon Bodinar dancing a horn-pipe in a seaman's Mission Hall. For Simon, the Ulysces of the novel, is in one sense the motive power oi a tale which carries its chief characters Irom the Narrows oi the Dart to the South ol South America, to a lonely core in the Straits ol Magellan. It is Bodinar's doggerel rhyme, " OH Diego Ramires, where the Ilde-lonos roar, There's gold, there's gold, there's gold galore," that draws the men ol the story Southward-ho. For " Wings ol Desire " is in frame-work the tale ol a treasure-hunt, while in subject it is a study ol the character interactions ol a group ol ultra-modern people people prepared to bring each social law to the bar oi reason and there try it for what it is worth. This, ol course, brings them up against the most hotly contested question ol to-day- marriage and diTorce. " Wings ot Desire " written in 1911, the year among other things ol the Dirorce Commission, puts the case ol Archer Bellow, norelist and poseur, and ol Sara his wife, the graTe-eyed woman who stoops, not to conquer, but to save. Or so she thinks. The unconventional cutting of the knot many will probably call by a harsher name. But the book is a human instance, not a dogma. It ends with a question. The answer, the verdict, is with the reader; an answer, a verdict, which will differ according to whether bis eyes are turned backward into the past or forward into the future. 16 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. Form L9-50m-9,'60(B3610s4)444 HERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 000864493 2 PR 6019 J139c