POINTS OF VIEW POINTS of By L. F. AUSTIN Edited with a Prefatory Note by CLARENCE ROOK and a Photogravure Portrait LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMVI SECOND EDITION Printed by BALLAKTYVE, HANSOM <5f Co. At the BalUntyne Press PREFATORY NOTE EJIS Frederic Austin was a Londoner -a Londoner of the West End, the theatres, the clubs, the restaurants, the dinner-parties and the periodi- cals. In spite of his Irish parenthood (for he was son of Captain Thomas Austin of Dublin), and in spite of his American nativity (for he was born in Brooklyn on October 9, 1852), he was a Londoner. And whenever he took a holiday in his later years, it was at Brighton, at Ostend some place suggestive of the happy swirl of the pavement that he loved. For just thirty years of his fifty-three he was a Londoner, though the Merchant Taylors' School at Great Crosby, near Liverpool, set him on the way to literature and London. When those thirty years were over he died suddenly appropriately at the Hotel Metro- pole, Brighton in evening dress. So, I think, my friend would have chosen to die suddenly without fuss or turmoil when the banquet of life was over in his proper garb of a gentle- man. . . . During those thirty years L. F. Austin was part and parcel of London. In the early days Prefatory Note he acted as an informal private secretary to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and even then his association with Henry Irving justified him in writing a biography of the actor, though it did not justify him in signing himself anything but Frederic Daly. The association with Irving continued, and the busy actor, called upon for speeches and addresses, usually consulted Austin as to the framing of the picture he was to set before his audience. For Austin gradually developed the ready wit that sets the table in a roar, and for years he was acknow- ledged as one of the best after-dinner speakers in London. His industry and fertility were amazing. Those who knew him only as the writer of "Our Note Book" in the Illustrated London News, as the " Jaques " of " The Passing Mood" in the Daily Chronicle, as the causeur " At Random " of the Sketch^ or as the weekly contributor of " Points of View " to the Man- chester Daily Dispatch^ have no idea of the immense amount of work he poured into the press week by week. For long we shared a room at the Daily Chronicle office, and night by night he wrote a leading article. Almost by accident I learned that night by night he wrote another leading article for a syndicate vi Prefatory Note that supplied the provincial press. In the years during which I knew him well, when we walked and talked together, and shared that room in the newspaper office, his physi- cal life seemed to be bounded by Ludgate Circus on the east, and Hyde Park Corner on the west, though his intellectual sympa- thies took fanciful flights. In the forenoon he would walk to the Reform Club, write and lunch, and write again in the quietest room available. ... A strenuous worker filled with enthusiasm . . . there was never such an en- thusiast as Austin on the brink of a leading article ... a worker who hides his work, as the conjurer does, under an assumption of ease, and that assumption makes the charm of Austin's work. Unfortunately, his work was mainly ephem- eral ; he never had the leisure to write a book since the " Henry Irving " by Frederic Daly, which was published two-and- twenty years ago. But he had his audience, and one night, as we drove westward together from Fleet Street, the underlying seriousness of Austin struck me. I had thrown out a hint as to the number of people who had listened to some preacher of the moment. " Five thousand ! " exclaimed Austin ; " why a million people will read me vii Prefatory Note tomorrow morning, and God forgive me if I've made a mistake ! " Only a small and dainty volume, entitled " At Random," and published some ten years ago, remains the permanent record of Austin's work. This consisted of papers previously published in the Speaker and the Sketch. The preface to that little volume suggests the point of view that his editor and friend has taken. There occurs this passage : " A journalist who has given much of his time to the solemn recitation of facts in un- willing ears, who rattles the bones of statistics over the stones of public opinion, may take his fill now and then of whimsical fantasy by way of recreation." Here we get the real L. F. Austin the essayist of wide information, of large sympa- thies, with humorous eyes and a knowledge of the value of words set one against the other ; the literary conjurer who can toss two con- tradictory statements into the air, spin them, and catch them upon the point of a pen until the eye becomes dizzy with amused delight . . . To many to the publisher of this volume viii Prefatory Note first of all it occurred to demand a reprint of some of those fantastical toyings with the great verities and the little absurdities. The selection now presented is drawn mainly from the Daily Chronicle of London and the Daily Dispatch of Manchester. And the paper which is placed at the end the last, I believe, that he wrote is typical of the man. We talked it over in his chambers in Jermyn Street. He amused me much with his description of gout. I laughed, without suspecting that he was poking fun into the ribs of death. One or two papers have been extracted from the files of the Morning Leader, and the opening article appeared in the North American Review. It was ordered and written in anticipation of Sir Henry Irving's visit to America this year. The proofs were in Austin's room when he was found dead at Brighton. By the time the article was published, Irving and Austin, close friends in life, were together " beyond these voices." It should be added that these papers have, with scarcely an exception, been taken as written. Here and there a word or two must go an allusion that would be unintelligible when the morrow is taking thought of the things of itself. They are journalism, prompted ix Prefatory Note by the impulse and inspiration of the moment. But they are journalism at its best the sugges- tive comment of a sane and humorous man on the day's happening. i CLARENCE ROOK. CONTENTS Page I. SIR HENRY IRVING .... i II. SPARROWGRASS AND SHAKESPEARE . 21 III. JAQUES AND THE BEANSTALK . 28 IV. IN PRAISE OF WINE 35 V. IN PRAISE OF FOOD ... 42 VI. MEAT AND DRINK .... 49 VII. THE DRAMA OF THE LETTER-BOX . 56 VIII. CHEAP FOOD 64 IX. A FAMINE IN BOOKS . . . 71 X. THE INCOME TAX . . . . 78 XL "CLOUDS OF GLORY" ... 85 ; XII. AMERICA AT OXFORD ... 93 XIII. MEN AND MODES . . . .100 XIV. COUNTRY LIFE . . . .108 XV. AT A WOMAN'S CLUB . . . 115 XVI. IN THE FOG 122 XVII. THE PERILS OF CROWDING . . 130 XVIII. LOGIC FOR WOMEN . . .137 XIX. MOTOR CARS AND NERVOUS SYSTEMS 142 XX. Two MILLIONS . . . .149 xi Contents Page XXI. THE WHITE HAT . . .156 XXII. THE AFTER-DINNER SPEECH . 163 XXIII. BRIDGE 170 XXIV. OUR MOTHER TONGUE . . 177 XXV. WELLS OF ENGLISH . . .184 XXVI. As IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING . IQI XXVII. THE ART AND GLORY OF EATING 198 XXVIII. DREAMS 204 XXIX. AMERICAN RETICENCE . . .211 XXX. A RACE-MEETING . . . 218 XXXI. THE ORGAN .... 225 XXXII. M'BONUS 233 XXXIII. THE HOLIDAY MOOD . . . 240 XXXIV. THE ART OF SMALL TALK . . 248 XXXV. AT BRIGHTON . . . .255 XXXVI. DETAINED IN GOUT-LAND . . 261 The Frontispiece Portrait is reproduced from a Photograph by H. WALTER BARNETT. POINTS OF VIEW POINTS of I Sir Henry Irving 1 ONE night last June, the walls of Drury Lane Theatre resounded with such acclamations as that old playhouse has seldom heard in all its history. A solitary figure stood in front of the curtain, listening with a grave smile to the enthusiasm which seemed to have no end. It was Sir Henry Irving taking leave of the Lon- don playgoers on the last night of his season, a season made memorable at every performance by scenes very similar to this. " You are all very young," he said, when the audience would let him speak ; and, indeed, to a veteran actor, near the end of his career, the youth of this vast assemblage must have been singularly gratify- ing. Every night Drury Lane had been thronged with young people. The younger generation had knocked at the doors in a sense quite different from that of Ibsen's famous saying. They had come in thousands, 1 This article was completed by Mr. Austin but a few days before his sudden death, and was written in the expectation that it would be published, as originally intended, on the occasion of the late Sir Henry Irving's projected visit to the United States in 1906. A Points of View not to tell the old actor that his day was done, that his methods were outworn, that he must yield his sceptre to another, but to swear fealty to him, to crown him with fresh laurels, to thunder his praises with passionate emotion. Thus spoke Drury Lane. It carried some of us back to the days when we also were young, when this actor was carving his way to fame, and when we clamoured our best to help him. From 1905 my memory retraced the course of time to 1873, the year when I was first a pittite at the Old Lyceum. How we jammed the pit to see Irving as Eugene Aram ! As a haunted murderer, he had made his great success in " The Bells " : here was another in the same line. In the first act, he was the melancholy wooer of the parson's daughter in the peaceful vicarage ; in the second, the bones of his victim were exhumed, and he shrank from looking on them ; in the third, he con- fessed his crime to the girl in the churchyard, and enacted it over again with tremendous effect. The victim, of course, had been a most unworthy person ; we pittites could see that with half an eye ; the displacement of his bones was a provoking accident, but for which the vicarage romance would have run quite smoothly. Irving threw such passion into the Sir Henry Irving enactment of the murder before the terrified Ruth, that we were thrilled with sympathy. We gloried in being accessories after the fact. Later came " Philip," another haunted- criminal play, wherein a Spanish gentleman of fiery temper shot his brother after much provocation. Over the dead man's face the remorseful Cain reverently drew his cloak, and then stole guiltily away, followed by our vehement plaudits. He who knows not what it is to revel in deeds of blood on the stage, when they are done with distinction, and when the doer carries about with him an abiding sorrow that makes him a romantic figure, has a poor experience of life's pleasures. Philip had not slain his brother after all. That graceless person turned up again, and made love to Philip's wife. Suspicious of some intruder on the premises, the jealous husband ordered the doorway of the room where his brother was in hiding to be walled up, when lo ! a repentant apparition, eager to affirm that a brother's blood had not been shed, or, at any rate, that enough remained to justify a frater- nal embrace. It was not a very good play ; its note was not particularly fresh ; still, the imagination of the actor, his sovereign quality, 3 Points of View presented the idea of the haunted man with undiminished glamour. But what of his future ? Some critics pre- dicted it freely enough, to the indignation of us youngsters in the pit, who glowered at all the bald heads in the stalls, suspecting that every man with no hair to speak of wrote like a cynic in the papers. He was a very good comedian, said those critics of Henry Irving ; witness his Digby Grant in " Two Roses " ; that eccentric old gentleman who supposed that delicacy of feeling could be rewarded with " a little cheque." He was a good melo- dramatic actor ; witness Mathias, and so forth. His Charles I. was not melodrama, to be sure ; the critics did not know exactly what it was ; they admitted, however, that it was a pictur- esque character, full of dignity and tenderness. But we were not to imagine, for one moment, that the actor who had done these things could succeed in the dear old " legitimate." That was reserved for tragedians who belonged to a " school " ; whose style had broadened slowly down from precedent to precedent ; whose elocution rolled on like Byron's ocean ; who had no angularities of deportment, like the ambitious gentleman at the Lyceum ; who gave you Nature in her majestic mood, with 4 Sir Henry Irving an imperious roar and an earth-shaking stamp. These old tragedians loomed chiefly in our fancy and in the annals of the stage, for their school was no longer on the scene. But Phelps was still alive ; the august shade of Macready was not too remote for a critic with a bald head ; and, when the audacious Irving appeared as Richelieu, the sheeted dead, you might say, did squeak and gibber in the London streets. What a " first night " that was in 1873 ! I can still see the bald heads growing crimson. They remembered Richelieu, a very different personage from this presumptuous innovator. We had never seen Richelieu before, but had a triumphant assurance that here was the very man. Excellent figure of the " legitimate," this Cardinal of Bulwer's ! Was ever such wiliness, broad, under-scored, capital-lettered, so plain that owls might see it by day ? But, to be sure, Irving's wiliness was not broad enough for the critics who had memories. Hitherto he had been his own standard ; he was now at grips with the Past. Is it ever easy for the old playgoer to hail the merit of the new actor, playing the familiar parts with unfamiliar method, with new and disturbing insight ? We associate the characters of the drama, the characters that really live, with 5 Points of View some personality of the stage who has made a lasting impress on the imagination. When, at length, Henry Irving came to play Hamlet, it was a far more serious affair than Bulwer. Cradled in melodrama, his ambition aspired to the lawful line of succession in Shakespearian acting, as though he had been born in the purple. It was not so much that he offended the memory of some particular Hamlet. But Hamlet was a classic, shrined in tradition, guarded by the embattled phalanx of the old school. Here was an actor who put life into the revered abstraction, made the heart of its mystery glow with a romantic flame, interpreted the play of intellect and the depth of passion with equal mastery ; and was, in fine, the veritable Hamlet, in his dignity, his melancholy, his humour, his blasting irony, in all that was lovable in his nature. I have seen lots of Hamlets since. I have sat in a theatre where the partisans of the Hamlet then upon the scene, and the partisans of some other Hamlet fortunately absent, have almost come to blows. I have known friend- ships chilled, and hearths made desolate, by the factions of the inky cloak. Anybody may be Othello or Macbeth without breaking up our happy homes; but do you dare, sir, to 6 Sir Henry Irving maintain that the Hamlet you admire is to be mentioned in the same hemisphere with the glorious being who trod the battlements at Elsinore when I was a boy ? Then have at you, sir ! This is why I do not enumerate those other Hamlets. But to my thinking, I have seen only one inspired Hamlet, only one actor who was born Hamlet; the rest have worn the inky cloak and the dejected haviour of the visage ; but none of them could say with conviction: "I know not seems.*' This may stir up anathema in some quarters ; and I should be rather glad if it did, for the present generation is in peril of a declining taste for theatrical controversy. Whenever Irving essayed Shakespeare anew, the battle raged as fiercely as ever. Macbeth, now ah ! the first night of his Macbeth ; that was some- thing like a tourney. There was a little piece before the tragedy ; the queer old custom of prefacing Shakespeare with a farce, as if to fortify our spirits, was not yet dead. None of us had ever seen Macbeth ; and we beheld him now as a murderer, a conscience-stricken ghost-seer, who plucks up his soldierly nerve only in the last act ; in a word, the haunted criminal of the early Irving play. His martial deeds were talked about ; but, until he re- 7 Points of View solved to die with harness on his back, you would never have thought he had the spirit of a warrior. The enemy blasphemed like anything ; they said that Shakespeare never drew such a craven ; Macbeth was a lion- hearted man, who could not have made this pitiful spectacle after Duncan's murder, his knees knocking together with abject fright. Macbeth was an heroic part ; was this the heroic way of playing it ? We had our mis- givings ; it sounded so natural that heroes should be represented heroically. But was that Shakespeare's view ? Heavens ! how we read our Shakespeare, and set what the "bleed- ing sergeant " says of Macbeth's prowess on the battlefield against the deadly insults to his manhood from the lips of his wife ! Irving's conception was right ; and Macbeth, a bloody- minded villain with a turn for poetry and philosophy, and a paralysing dread of ghosts " Take any shape but that ! " must be deposed from his heroic state. Of course, you must not insist too strongly on the meaning of Shakespeare, even when you know what he does mean. Salvini's Othello, who dragged Desdemona about by the hair in the mad frenzy of a jealous animal, was scarcely the Othello of Shakespeare, calm and sacrificial. 8 Sir Henry Irving But he was a prodigy of superb force. Fanny Kemble, when she saw Irving play Shylock, is reported to have said : " If Shakespeare could see this, he would rewrite the part." If the Shylock of the early stage tradition was the Shylock that Shakespeare did see, the comic Jew in a red wig and a false nose, he could not have been very sensitive about the acting of his characters. The dramatist who created Portia and Rosalind, and saw them played by boys, must have been content with strange illusions. The low comedian, as Shylock with red hair, tickled the groundlings, who had not the faintest suspicion that Shakespeare had made out the strongest vindication of the Jews against their persecutors. Did nobody in his day listen to Shylock's fierce irony with an inkling of the truth ? "If you prick us, do we not bleed ? If you wrong us, shall we not revenge ? " The Jewish answer to Christian villainy was to "better the instruction"; hence the famous bond, a pound of Antonio's fair flesh. Perhaps the absurdity of a contract, wherein a subtle and crafty Jew was made to overreach himself so grossly, was the poet's concession to contemporary prejudice. Per- haps it never struck him that no man, least of all Shylock, could imagine that the law of 9 Points of View Venice or any other state would allow him to exact such a forfeit from a debtor. When Portia condescends to come to the point, it is not her silly juggle about the shedding of one drop of blood that determines the cause ; it is the obvious argument that no Jew, under any bond whatever, can be allowed to contrive against the life of a citizen. If cutting a pound of flesh off a gentleman's person is not con- triving against his life, what is it ? Imagine a Duke of Venice to whom this had to be pointed out ! Shakespeare did not care ; he took the story as he found it ; and he had his recompense, perhaps, in the delight with which the populace greeted the discomfiture of the droll comedian with the preposterous nose and the inflamed wig. The trial scene must have been very humorous in those far- off days, when the serio-comic brutality of the Jew was outwitted by a lively boy making believe to be a young woman masquerading as a Junior Counsel of the Padua Bar, and instructing an incredibly ignorant Venetian Magistrate in the elements of law and common sense. The rigours of the fun, I dare say, were mitigated as time went on, when the Jew became less grotesque, and Portia was really a woman, though rather a pompous 10 Sir Henry Irving lady, as pompous as Fanny Kemble herself. With Henry Irving as Shylock, and Ellen Terry as Portia, the course of evolution was complete. It was not in the malignity of his premature triumph that Shylock was great ; it was in the splendour of his ruin, in the pathos of the broken old man tottering from the court. The Victorian playgoer sat in awe at the very moment of the story when the Elizabethan playgoer had burst into rude rejoicing. "The Merchant of Venice" has been the chief monument of twenty brilliant years of Irving's management at the Lyceum. The dear old " legitimate " had a splendid home ; and the friends of its palmy days, who had wept for its decline, began to cheer up a little, although they shook their heads at the scenery. People, it was said, went to the Lyceum to look at the scenery, and not at the acting. Heaven knows what takes some persons to the theatre ; it is certainly not the play. You cannot tell why others buy books ; it is not to read them. But vast numbers who had held aloof from theatres in earlier times flocked to the Lyceum, because they found so much there to gratify an intelligent taste. What Henry Irving did most notably was to bring serious ii Points of View people back to the acted drama. The mind that shaped every detail of a production, and brought the beauty of scenic effect into har- mony with the comedy that was enacted at Venice or Messina, knew the secret of the grand style. Stage-carpenters had erected im- posing structures elsewhere without captivating the public ; but these were structures with no artistic suggestion to give them atmosphere. It was distinction that reigned on the Lyceum stage, not expenditure. You had the life and colour of Bassanio's world, with Shylock's grim dwelling in the Ghetto over the bridge, so strongly in the memory that, in Venice, the whole scene came back to you ; and the bridge itself, with the sculptured faces of a humorously Semitic cast, under which you pass from the Grand Canal, had surely echoed the footsteps of Shylock when he returned to his house to find that Jessica had fled with her Christian lover. Who has walked in Venice without the Lyceum pictures rising in his mind ? I recall those pictures, not on account of any scenic magnificence, but because they live in the imagination together with the noble figures that moved in them ; just as I recall the cuckoo-clock in the simple interior of Dr. Primrose's parsonage, because it reminds me 12 Sir Henry Irving of the old Vicar, one of Irving's most admir- able impersonations, making the inventory of his household gods when misfortune had over- taken him. It is said that, as a manager, Sir Henry did much for the stage, but very little for the modern dramatic author. This is true ; but, in a policy of poetic drama largely Shakespearian, the modern author could not have a conspicuous place. It would have been deeply interesting to see Shakespeare at the Lyceum alternating with a comedy of our own day by Pinero; to see Irving exchange his doublet and hose, or the ecclesiastical robes of a bygone age, for the garments which are worn by dramatic personages who have chambers in the Albany. As a matter of fact, I do not think he appeared in any modern costume on the Lyceum stage more than once in twenty-five years. In a dramatic sense the clothes would have been too small ; he was too big a personality for the English comedy of our day ; he would have looked like the spacious times of Elizabeth cribb'd in a May- fair drawing-room. Poetic dramas of all eras used to pour in at the Lyceum ; a rage for historical char- acters possessed many persons in all ranks of 13 Points of View life ; it was quite a common thing for a man engaged in some humble but exacting avoca- tion to toss off a five-act play in blank verse on the subject of Savonarola, and to intimate that on the Lyceum stage the success of this modest effort was certain. Unknown authors were resolved not to hide their lights under bushels ; but they sent the bushels in, and there was no illumination. One illustrious hand wrote dramatic verse to some purpose. Tennyson's " Queen Mary " and " The Cup " were played at the Lyceum ; and had Tenny- son lived to see the production of " Becket," he would have been a gratified man. Mr. George Meredith tells an amusing story of a walk he took with Tennyson one day, when the bard was very silent and gloomy. They walked several miles, and suddenly Tennyson growled, " Apollodorus says I am not a great poet." This critic was a Scottish divine, and neither his name nor his opinion was of much consequence. Mr. Meredith said something to that effect ; and Tennyson retorted, " But he ought not to say I am not a great poet." That was the entire conversation. Had Apollodorus said that Tennyson was not a great dramatist, he would not have out- raged the heavens. When he thought of the 14 Sir Henry Irving stage in the last months of his life, Tennyson was rather embittered by the failure of that luckless piece, " The Promise of May." " But Irving will do me justice with ' Becket,' " said the poet. Justice was done indeed, and some- thing more. After twelve years Sir Henry has been playing " Becket " again, and the spell of his personality has never been so com- manding. The actor who gave us thrills thirty years ago as the haunted criminal, can do what he wills with us as the mediaeval fanatic and martyr. By the cold reading of history I judge Becket to have been an obstinate bigot, resolute to protect a dissolute clergy against the laws of the realm, prating of " God's honour " when he meant his own authority, and drunk with the power which the Middle Ages gave to the priest who wielded the ban of the Church. You can read Tennyson's drama, and still have that idea of Becket very strongly in your mind. But not when you see Irving in the part ; then the grasping prelate is transfigured ; he is a sublime protagonist in the great conflict of Church and State ; his martyrdom has a beauty of sacrifice which sums up all that the saints endured ; and the accusing voice of history is stilled. The imagination of the 15 Points of View actor has never had a greater triumph ; he seems born to impersonate ecclesiastics, great Princes of the Church in all ages, and country parsons like the Vicar of Wakefield. Then you remember his sinister monarchs, his Richard and Louis, the flamboyant quality of some characters, the delicate detail of others ; such a portrait in miniature as Corporal Brewster, finished to the point where it is just divided by a nicely calculated shade from painful realism. One remembers these figures with some appreciation of their diversity, look- ing back upon the range of art this remarkable personality has compassed. For the actor's calling, Sir Henry Irving has done more than any of his great prede- cessors. None of them ever watched over its interests with his jealous care. He has combated prejudice with so fine a temper, and pursued his art with so true a service, that the public on both sides of the Atlantic has come to rank him high among its worthies ; and people to whom the theatre makes no appeal hold his name in honour. The per- sonal magnetism of any remarkable man is best attested by its influence upon his eminent contemporaries. In Henry Irving's case, it is illustrated through some of the foremost 16 Sir Henry Irving men of his age. The Emperor William, when he met the actor, betrayed a certain prepara- tion for the occasion ; before a word could be said by way of introduction, he launched into an eloquent exposition of Shakespeare, which, I am told, threw a dazzling light on several obscure problems. Mr. Gladstone was attracted in a different way. At one period, when he was not burdened by the cares of office, he was fond of watching the perfor- mances at the Lyceum from a chair in the " wings." One night, when the stage was set for the opera ball in the " Corsican Brothers," his curiosity led him into one of the boxes for spectators in the scene. Up went the curtain ; Mr. Gladstone was at once descried by the pit and greeted with shouts of joy, which caused him hastily to withdraw. This was his first and only appearance in the drama, outside of the dear old "legitimate" at Westminster. The magnetic influence of Irving induced him to give a singular per- formance even there. He took the actor to the House very late one evening, put him under the Gallery, and sat with a grim, im- passive air on the Treasury Bench. Suddenly, without apparent reason, he leaped to his feet, and delivered an impassioned speech, set off 17 B Points of View with all the expressive and dramatic gesture for which he was so famous. The House seemed surprised ; Members looked at one another, and murmured : " What is the old man up to now ? " They thought it was some deep, political game. But, a week or two later, a friend of Irving's, encountering Mr. Gladstone, mentioned the actor's visit to the House, and Gladstone eagerly inquired : " What did he think of my speech ? / made it for him I " Never in the least suggesting the traditional player's manner off the stage, Irving has always impressed most people, I think, by an inde- finable air of authority. A stranger, meeting him for the first time, might take him for an experienced diplomatist, with that sardonic humour which springs from a diplomatic knowledge of human nature. Presently, the observant stranger would detect in him the humorist, with the true humorist's kindly eye for the affections as well as the failings of his species. There has never been in Henry Irving any pose of any sort, but always a fine simplicity ; a quietly impressive suggestion that the head of the dramatic profession took that profession seriously, and exacted on its behalf the respect that was due to his own 18 Sir Henri/ Irving personal character. This may partly explain why he fascinates liberal-minded Bishops, and has a strong following among the junior clergy. Even Nonconformist divines have sat at the Lyceum without attempting to disguise their edification ; and one of them a famous preacher now dead was plainly inspired in his purely dramatic moments by the secular pulpit in Wellington Street. Long before Irving received his knighthood, the late Queen desired to confer that dis- tinction upon him. This was as far back as 1883. He was about to pay his first visit to America ; and the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Coleridge, who presided at a dinner that was given to him by a distinguished company, suggested this as an admirable occasion for announcing the signal mark of the Queen's favour. But, with his characteristically subtle sense of fitness, Irving felt that his first appeal to the American public should be made entirely on his artistic merits, without the shadow of a suggestion that he sought to influence the judgment by such a decora- tion. It was a delicate position ; the favours of the Sovereign cannot be lightly put aside ; but the choice was characteristic of the man. Since then, the American people have given 19 Points of View him many proofs of their warm regard ; and few ambassadors have done more than he to make good-will between the two nations. More than twenty years have passed since he set an unfamiliar foot on the shores which have become so friendly. There have been many changes ; the ranks of the old players are sadly thinned. The melancholy grace of Edwin Booth is a beloved memory ; Jefferson will delight us no more. Who that saw them can forget the brilliant nights at the Lyceum long ago, when Booth and Irving played together in " Othello," and that tragedy was represented with a general excellence such as no man had ever known ? Henry Irving may be called the last of the Old Guard, crossing the ocean once more to bid farewell to the great people who have made him one of themselves for a generation. And when the moment comes for another leave-taking, and we on this side must say our own farewells to him at the close of his public life, they will mingle with echoes of friendship and regret from a throng of American hearts. 20 II Sparrowgrass and Shakespeare SOLOMON (not the philosopher, but the West End fruiterer) attracts me greatly at this season by the glory of his window. If I were to write an Ode on the Intimations of Early Spring, I should address it to Mr. Solomon, for have I not stood in the lingering blasts of winter, and gazed hopefully on his giant asparagus ? Yes, the moment it appears in the window at thirty shillings a bundle I feel the vernal sap pulsat- ing in my veins. What was the song that Becky Sharp used to sing the song of the maiden who explains to an anxious parent how she rejoices with the rose on her balcony, and the bird in the tree, at the coming of Spring ? " And so I laugh and blush, Mamma, And that's the reason why ! " And so I laugh and blush (as well as the native yellow of my complexion will permit) at Mr. Solomon's asparagus. And just as some people study the barometer, and feel cheerful when the glass is rising, so I study that bundle, and note hilariously that the price is falling. For when asparagus is cheap, then is the winter of 21 Points of View our discontent made glorious summer, and all the chills and agues that glowered at us in the doctor's eye, in the deep phials of the apothe- cary buried. Shakespeare appears to have known nothing of asparagus, or I think he would have amended Hamlet's brutal retort to poor Ophelia's remark about the introduction to the play scene : " 'Tis brief, my lord." " As woman's love," says Hamlet a most wanton slander. He should have said : " As the asparagus season." Alas ! from the moment when that bundle of giant asparagus, almost as large as the emblem of authority that was carried by the Roman lictors, dawns on my enraptured vision, to the melancholy dinner-hour when the waiter in- forms me that asparagus is no more, there is a poor span of weeks. Deduct the days when you cannot afford it, and how many remain for the gratification of a taste which makes me hope for his sake, that when Nebuchadnezzar lived on grass, it was what the Cockney kitchen- maids call " sparrowgrass " ? Do not think me the slave of gluttony. My passion for asparagus is chiefly social. Have you considered that it is one of the very few dishes we are permitted by civilisation to eat with our fingers ? (Don't be tempted to use the clippers, for they will 22 Sparrowgrass and Shakespeare make you drop melted butter in your lap !) Yes, when I hold a stick of asparagus suspended in the air, and adjust my mouth at the proper angle to catch the coy but seductive dainty, I feel that I have returned to nature. If Rousseau could behold that spectacle, he would be com- forted by the thought that his philosophy was not wasted. Mr. Solomon's prophetic eye embraces Summer as well as Spring. There are straw- berries in his window at thirty-five shillings a box. I have a misgiving that even to look at them makes one guilty of what Mr. Labou- chere calls " ostentatious expenditure." Even Paula Tanqueray, who liked fruit when it was expensive, might have shrunk from twenty- four strawberries for thirty-five shillings. I fall back on that philosopher renowned in nursery lore as Simple Simon. Like all great minds he has suffered from vulgar misunder- standing. When the pieman asked him for his coin, and he answered, " Indeed, I have not any ! " he spoke, not with fatuity, as the chil- dren are taught to believe, but with well-bred disdain. He was not a zany, but a connoisseur, and it was as absurd to ask for his penny as it would be to ask the reviewers to pay for their review copies. Now, I should like to 23 Points of View explain the case of Simple Simon to Mr. Solomon. JAQUES. Good day, Mr. Solomon. You remember Simple Simon ? MR. S. Yes, he wanted pies for nothing, and never thought of selling them at a hundred per cent, profit. And his name was Simon ! Most unaccountable. JAQUES. I am sorry to find that you take so severely commercial a view of the story. I want you to see it in its truly poetical light. MR. S. (hastily). Afraid I have no time. Won't you try our pipless oranges ? JAQUES. No, thank you. The pipless orange is a mean evasion of moral discipline. MR. S. Or our Cape plums ? JAQUES. There will be more than enough of them in the Budget. But I see you have all the delicacies of the season after next. Are those the strawberries of 1 902 ? MR. S. (with great urbanity}. Not quite. But they are pretty well advanced. JAQUES. And only thirty-five shillings the box. Dear me ! (Eats one.} Let me assure you that the flavour (smacks his lips) is so far advanced (another smack) that one scarcely overtakes it. If I were you I would call this strawberry De Wet. 24 Sparrowgrass and Shakespeare MR. S. (rather curtly}. Excuse me, but it is eighteenpence. JAQUES. My dear Mr. Solomon ! Don't you see I am offering you a considerable .improve- ment on the story of Simple Simon ? I have tasted your ware. I propose a striking name for it, a name that will catch the eye of the ostentatiously extravagant, and make your thirty-five shilling boxes go off like matches. And you ask me for my eighteen pennies ! Indeed, I have not any ! MR. S. (in a tone that suggests illumination]. Well, upon my word ! JAQUES. Yes, I knew you would see it. And let me remind you of Cleopatra's price- less pearl. She dissolved it in a glass of wine, and I dare say it had as much flavour as your strawberry. So there you have another taking name the Cleopatra. Upon my word. Mr. Solomon, I think I have earned that eighteen- pence, to say nothing of the poetry, for which I make no charge. MR. S. (speechless, perhaps with joy], ! ! ! ! Perhaps this imaginary dialogue is a total misapprehension of Mr. Solomon. He may keep those thirty-five shilling boxes simply to give away, as Mr. Carnegie gives away his millions. And this makes me suspect that 25 Points of View Mr. Solomon is only waiting to be asked to establish the endowed theatre. For a moment this week he must have felt the bitter sense of ambition forestalled when he heard that Mr. Carnegie had undertaken that great work. It was a false report, and now the way is clear for Mr. Solomon, who fills his window with the fruits of the earth, to adorn a theatre with the flowers of the mind. Munificent enthus- iasts go about erecting free libraries. Why cannot one of them try the experiment of endowing a theatre purely for the circulation of ideas? Some people think that no good could come of it ; but then many people are sceptical about the utility of the free library. I have an impartial sympathy with all hobbies that have a clear ideal of the public interest, and as I am sure Mr. Solomon is of my opinion, I hope he will not let himself be deterred by mere cavil and idle prophecy. Nor should there be any timidity on the score of " ostentatious expenditure." Mr. Solomon must resist the blandishments of Mr. Sidney Lee, who thinks that Shakespeare ought to be represented, as it were, in his shirt-sleeves. Let us have all the drapery when it is becoming. The last time I saw " Coriolanus," the Roman populace was as little suggestive of wayward 26 Sparrowgrass and 8hakespeare passion as the depressed groups that listen to unknown orators in Hyde Park on Sunday ; and the Roman Senate was like "a party in a parlour, all silent, and all damned." It is a mistake to suppose that when Shakespeare chooses ancient Rome as the scene of a drama, the way to do him reverence is to play it in a sort of classical Little Peddlington. I can understand the contention that it is better to have it that way than not at all ; but there are people who will tell you that Shakespeare's Rome should be left to the imagination, and that any scenic picture of it distracts the studious mind. I wish the man of business who produced his plays at the Globe Theatre, Blackfriars, were at Mr. Solomon's elbow. He would vote for Rome, and not for Little Peddlington. 27 Ill Jaques and the Beanstalk I REGRET that the learned author of " The Theatre in France and England," a treatise that embraces our modest generation as well as antiquity, has given but scanty attention to the English pantomime. He dismisses it in half a page with such information as this: "The mise- en-scene at the Drury Lane Theatre, in London, is magnificent, and in the provinces Bristol is noted for its effective scenery and rich costumes." Not a philosophical word about the development (or degeneration) of panto- mime from the simple fairy tale (with humor- ous trimmings) to the gorgeous miscellany of odds and ends, the dazzling shreds of costume and the purple patches of the music-hall troubadour ! I expected Mr. Charles Hastings to tell me why Harlequin and Columbine no longer give the sanction of poetic grace to scenes of outrage on law and order. Yes, where is the disreputable but delightful Clown of my childhood ? I remember him first in the pantomime of " The Goose with the Golden Eggs," more especially his interview with an egg- merchant whose wares were 28 Jaques and the Beanstalk liberally displayed in baskets. " Did you happen to know the Goose that laid the Golden Eggs ? " said the Clown affably to this tradesman. " I knew her very well. A most respectable old bird until she went into politics. Then she left off laying Golden Eggs, and took to laying eggs for public meetings. Why, you've got a lot of them here. What a handy man you are ! " Then he threw an egg at the policeman, and all the children in the boxes shrieked with joy at the pantomime " rally " that destroyed a great deal of property, to say nothing of moral principles. Why have we been robbed of these delights ? Mr. Hastings does not say ; but one passage in his great work suggests how he might have handled the theme. "From 1850 there was an outburst of Puritanism which relegated the plays of Shakespeare, as an illicit pleasure, to the surburban theatre of Sadler's Wells." This throws a new light on Phelps's enter- prise, and makes me wonder how Charles Kean managed to square the Puritans at the Princess's. Perhaps he was liberal with " orders." Some collector of theatrical curios may possess a faded yellow document on which is inscribed " Admit this party of Puritans to 29 Points of View a private box." But although they might extend such tolerance to illicit pleasure in Shakespeare, how could they endure my Clown's illustration of government by party, the Harlequin's habit of jumping through the shop-fronts of honest tradesmen, the Colum- bine's dainty nonchalance amidst larceny and riot ? If Mr. Hastings will look into this, he may find that another " outburst of Puritan- ism" has swept away the Harlequinade. Serious views as to the education of children have so far prevailed that no upright citizen can permit his family to enjoy the famous interludes with the red-hot poker. Or can it be that Scotland Yard declined to be respon- sible for the safety of our hearths and homes if the Force were held up twice a day in the pantomime season to the derision of babes ? This oversight on the part of Mr. Hastings is all the more singular because he touches some points of our theatrical history that have escaped the general notice. Sir Henry Irving, I fancy, does not remember his attempt to revive the Miracle Play. " Under his direc- tion ' The Gift of Tongues ' was put on the stage in London some few years ago ; but the experiment was a complete failure, and has not been attempted since." Save the erudite 3 Jaques and the Beanstalk Mr. Hastings, who has ever heard of "The Gift of Tongues," and its luckless production by Sir Henry Irving ? How are these graces hid ? The public memory is said to be short ; but this is a case of tabula rasa, or what Lord Rosebery calls a clean slate. Some magic sponge has passed over the public mind, and left not a trace on it of this episode in Sir Henry Irving's career. And yet I do not challenge the accuracy of Mr. Hastings, for I happen to be the only man who remembers a pantomime at Drury Lane entitled "Jack and the Beanstalk, or the Land Where Both Ends Meet." Jack was a spendthrift pursued by writs, and one evening he had the humor- ous idea of planting one of them in the garden. Next day he did not awake till two in the afternoon, for his bedroom was darkened by a gigantic tree, so that he thought he was in the middle of the night. The writ had sprouted in this magical fashion, and as the tree was very convenient for climbing, Jack ate a hasty lunch and started upwards. Thanks to expert sceneshifters, the journey was short, and Jack found himself in a strange country, and in the bustle of a village festival. The dresses of the girls struck him as curiously homely, and he said, " My dears, you are Points of View all very nice, but how in the name of fortune do you come to be dressed like that ? Dowdy isn't the word ! Do get yourselves some new clothes, I beg, and have them made like this." Then he gave a brief sketch of the pantomime finery to which he was accustomed, and the village maidens perceptibly changed colour. They were surprised at him, they said ; more- over, who was going to pay ? " Pay ! " he exclaimed. " Do not use that ill-bred expres- sion. Mention my name to the dressmakers. This is a new country, and my credit will be quite fresh." Here the principal village maiden began to sing, and Jack remarked with greater wonder than ever that she had a charming voice, and knew how to use it. But the song was still more surprising, for it set forth the moral precepts of " The Land Where Both Ends Meet." There you cannot get anything " on tick," and hearts are light at Christmas because no bills fall due. Jack said he had been concerned in many fairy tales, but this was too absurd. What was the good of a Beanstalk if it led to a place where you had to pay your tailor ? But at this point the village maidens danced an allegorical Ballet of Contentment, which was followed by a pageant representing the Lowly Virtues of Cottage 3* Jaques and the Beanstalk Homes, and Jack suffered a visible change of heart. Mr. Hastings will be sorry to hear that this attempt to turn the Drury Lane pantomime into a Miracle Play was not re- warded as it deserved. One custom of antiquity recorded by Mr. Hastings might be revived with a modern application. The Greek drama was often commended to public notice by the levy of an income-tax on the citizens to pay the salaries of the actors. The salaries were some- times reduced by the municipal authorities when a new piece did not prove attractive. This must have complicated the sentiments of some frugal playgoers. Imagine a first- night audience now, torn between the emotion excited by the play and the desire to cut down the income-tax ! I do not suggest that this dilemma would help the cause of dramatic art. But a novel delight might be given to many households if the actor would call for his little account. He would be more welcome than the rate-collector, and quite as dignified. You would be sitting in the study, deep in your new treatise on "Moral Emblems of All Nations," when the neat-handed Phyllis would announce a visitor in a choking voice. " What on earth is the matter with the girl ? " you 33 c Points of View would remark severely. " Please, sir, I'm very sorry, but I I know I shall die ! " Then she would hand you a card, which was not a card but a photograph, disclosing the irresistible features of Mr. Dan Leno ! Hardly had you requested him to be seated when shrieks of joy would be heard from an upper storey, and down would rush the children to greet the genius of pantomime. Fired by this homage, he would improvise a comic sketch, entirely adapted, as the pantomime is not, to the humorous comprehension of child- hood. It would recall the Clown of happier days, and you would almost weep with pleasure to hear your youngest -born shrilly piping, "Oh, Mr. Leno, let's heat the poker!" At first there might be objections to the payment of actors' salaries in this fashion ; but the errands of Mr. Dan Leno would establish him and his profession so firmly in the affections of a multitude of children that the stoutest- hearted grumbler at taxation would succumb. This idea may even suggest to the Chancellor of the Exchequer the expediency of making Mr. Dan Leno a travelling Commissioner of the Inland Revenue. It would save a deal of cor- respondence in the newspapers, not to mention visits of the aggrieved to Somerset House. 34 IV In Praise of Wine IN many households, and in every club, there is always a sceptic who warns you against the wine. " Not a bottle fit to drink," he will say with em- phasis ; and you gather vaguely that, save in one or two cellars belonging to exalted personages who ask him to dinner, there is not a drop of decent wine in the land. This depressing view finds some countenance in the work of an American expert, Mr. Edmund R. Emerson, who has written "The Story of the Vine" (Putnams). Mr. Emerson is by nature an enthusiast. No writer, not even Omar Khayyam or George Meredith, has ex- tolled the Vine with greater fervour. There was a time, says Mr. Emerson, when " super- stition and slander" sought to destroy cham- pagne ; but what can surpass it now " in tingling the torpid blood of the coward, while it stirs like martial music the souls of the brave and heroic," or " in adding a lustre to the charm of beauty, and in imparting to the pale cheek a blush that rivals the eastern sky heralding to the waking west the arrival of the solar god " ? After this outburst we 35 Points of View know pretty well what to expect. We learn that the discovery of the cork was of " in- estimable value to mankind." Without the stimulus of wine where would have been the cul- ture of the Greeks ? Mr. Emerson might have improved upon a famous couplet by writing ' Let laws and learning, arts and commerce, die When all the wine-vats of the world run dry." There is no better rule of health, he tells us, than to drink wine regularly. Do not try it for a week ; give it a lifetime, as the patent medicine-makers say in their advertisements. For one thing, it is an infallible cure for dyspepsia. Doctors are not agreed on that point, but Mr. Emerson cites the legend of the Moselle which cured an ailing bishop, and was called " Doctor " ever afterwards. What gave the Romans strength to conquer the world ? Their taste in wine may send a shudder through a feeble posterity. They drank Falernian, which would probably choke the modern toper. They mixed it with tar, assafoetida, bitumen, aloes, chalk, pepper, wormwood, poppies, and boiled sea -water. This was what the distiller of to-day calls a " blend " ; and your ancient Roman could drink a gallon " at a breath." When he gave 36 In Praise of Wine a toast, a bumper was drunk to every letter of the " toasted person's name." Moreover, in the best houses it was customary to drink from cups of gold, which the guests used to carry away, so that even if they did not relish the host's liquor, they could console them- selves with his family plate. This pleasant hospitality is not practised now, even at the tables of South African millionaires. No wonder the Romans were a virile people ; and if you make a wry face at the boiled sea- water and its companion flavours, remember that there may be worse things to-day in that wineglass which it would not be worth your while to take home, even if you were cordially invited. For Mr. Emerson has to confess that adul- teration, which began before the Christian era, is a deadly blight on the fair fame of the Vine. The wine-grower's cheek ought to wear a blush that rivals the eastern sky. Labels are snares, and the cork, which should be of inestimable value to mankind, is an impostor. Mr. Emer- son weeps to think of the vineyards which are credited with an enormously greater quantity of wine than they can possibly yield. There are brands from the Rhine which are not even German cousins to the grape. An American 37 Points of View consul has solemnly affirmed that all the wines which leave Marseilles for the United States are liquid lies. That famous Moselle which cured the bishop (all he did was to take it regularly and largely) might still make it impossible for an apothecary to earn a livelihood if it had remained untainted by the greed of competi- tion. Mr. Emerson puts in a chronicler as a witness to the average daily consumption of sixteen English quart bottles of Moselle per head in the days when " sickness was very rarely met with," and the people lived for ever, in the pleasant region from which this elixir took its name. How is legislation to smite adulterators when "the public, as a whole, are more or less ignorant as to what constitutes pure wine " ? Does anybody know ? The Romans, with their boiled sea-water, neither knew nor cared. It was the splendid indifference of a conquering race ; but eventu- ally it brought about the Decline and Fall. But for that sea-water, aided by tar and chalk, Mr. Gibbon would not have written his cele- brated history. Is the British Empire going the same road ? Mr. Emerson's remarks about old port are disquieting. It was England that gave port its commanding position in the world ; but except in the first three years of its vogue, 38 In Praise of Wine not a drop of pure port has entered this king- dom ! I dissociate myself from any respon- sibility for this staggering assertion. Old gentlemen in the clubs, who smack their lips over ostensible port, and tell anecdotes of the *47 vintage, must address Mr. Emerson if they feel aggrieved by the statement that even '47 is nothing but brandy. To appreciate it duly you must have the head of the sailor who visited a foreign wine-vault, where he drank a number of vintages unknown to him. " And werry good it was," he said, in recounting each experience ; " and after that we went back to the port, sherry, and other light wines of the country." Upon sherry Mr. Emerson is not so severe. We can fancy him singing, as Mr. Edward Terry used to sing, "I'm off to the bodega for a glass of sherry wine." He is more than respectful to Marsala, which sprang originally from Nelson's estate in Sicily. This should make us exclaim with Dr. Johnson (partially), " Claret for boys, port for men, brandy for heroes, and Marsala for the Navy League ! " But even this cup is dashed from our lips by Mr. Emerson, who assures us that the best wines are nowhere exported. You cannot drink real Tokay unless you are on visiting 39 Points of View terms with the Emperor Francis Joseph. You may drink Chateau Yquem at a fabulous price ; but all the while the cream of that wine is reserved exclusively for French noblemen. You may think it odd that the Italian wines in Italy are not of the first order ; whereas it is not in the least odd, considering that the best wines are consumed by the people who make them. The finest juices of the Johan- nisberg vineyard enliven " the noble families of the district." It is only the " inferior grades " that are sold to the foreigner. This is a galling inequality. Do we not send abroad as good pale ale as we drink at home ? Where is the policy of the " open door " ? Perhaps Mr. Emerson will be accused of exaggeration. We even suspect him of a patriotic motive. America he declares to be the true land of the Vine. Five centuries before Columbus it was discovered by a Norwegian explorer, who called it Vinland. President Jefferson said that cheap wine was essential to national sobriety. Mr. Emerson would like to blend that dictum with the doctrine of Monroe. Why should Americans drink foreign wines when they have the Catawba, whose grandfather grape grew fat on Californian summers ? The reason is that " a feeling of depreciation," " a spirit of be- 40 In Praise of Wine littlement," prevails among American wine- growers. They are too modest to sell their own wares. Goaded by Mr. Emerson, they will lose this singular shyness, and we shall yet see Mr. Pierpont Morgan turn Catawba into a Trust to exhilarate the world. V In Praise of Food IN a street with which I am very intimate there is, just now, an affecting sight. An ambitious man has opened a new restaurant, absurdly cheap, and quite empty. I pass his window twice or thrice a day, and see the neat white tables that would groan (as the tables used to do in novels when it was romantic to have a large appetite) if a hungry public would give the signal. There stand the waiters, toying with napkins to keep their hands in. Waiters, waiters everywhere, and not a soul to serve ! The bill of fare is in the window, and I notice with a pang that the dinner, which was cheap enough to begin with, is now sixpence cheaper. Within a radius of a hundred yards there must be a dozen restaurants, all alive, all busily filling that vacuum which makes its peremptory call at least four times in the twenty-four hours ; yet nobody seems able to discover this modest table-d'hote that has dropped sixpence in vain appeal to the frugal ! To a man of sensibility, I repeat, it is an affecting sight, and as I pass that window it is with a shrinking from the glance of the neglected speculator indoors, lest his eye should 42 In Praise of Food say quite plainly, " You, at all events, know the truth ; you have witnessed the sacrifice of the sixpence ; and still you have the heart not to come in and dine ! " This reproach would not be quite just, for I have had one meal in the place. It was excel- lent; but the solitude struck a chill inwards, that sadly hampered digestion. Your true Londoner cannot bear to eat alone. He may be a morose feeder, ready to bite the head off the stranger at the adjoining table ; but the presence of that stranger is necessary to his perfect comfort. Half the charm of a restau- rant is the reflection that you would rather die than eat soup as your neighbour does. This is one of the indispensable bonds of society. The restaurant is pre-eminently social, and to be quite contented there you must have com- pany that provokes a slight arching of the eyebrows, or appeals to you as a vision of beauty. Landor said he did not mind dining with one or two people, but a dinner-party was " a barbarous herd." To-day we like to herd in the restaurant, and the desire is not barbarous, but the expression of a civic instinct, for the wisdom of mankind, if it has settled nothing else, has decided that dinner is the communion of souls, whatever reservation you 43 Points of View may privately register as to their manoeuvres with the soup. It is sad and strange that under such con- ditions the art of writing about food should decay. Music you always have at the feast. Tschaikowsky weaves a symphony round your cutlet. There is a grill-room to which I am often beckoned by a violinist with a magical touch and a singular nose. When the toast- master says, " My lords and gentlemen, pray silence for a song," your spirit rises, and takes up a listening attitude on a cloud. Minstrelsy, yes ; but where is literature ? The genial author of" Dinners and Diners," it is true, has achieved a task that I thought beyond any man of his time. He has dined at every restaurant in town, given you a graphic sketch of the repast, astonished you with the moderation of the bill, and wrapt the whole transaction in the verit- able genius of the table. Take his book to one of those restaurants, and see how you fare, not only with the dinner and the bill, but also with the persiflage that the occasion should inspire. But look at the dialogue in current fiction and plays when the characters are eating and drinking ! Mr. Bernard Shaw has written a play about Julius Caesar, who, at an Egyptian feast, after bragging that he discovered the 44 In Praise of Food British oyster, calls for barley-water. Barley- water and oysters ! Why not make Cassar a vegetarian ? A recent novel opens with a dinner-party. The host's champagne, '74 Pom- mery, is much admired, and he states with bald precision that a generous duke sent him three dozen ; whereupon a guest remarks, " How like the duke's princely way ! " That is all they have to say about '74 Pommery. Personally the most abstemious of men, I like the feasts in novels to have a poetical opulence. Let them be, as Polonius warned his son that waistcoats ought not to be, " exprest in fancy." Let the guests discuss them with taste and discernment. A literary journal lately offered a guinea prize for the best snatch of dialogue from an unpublished novel. The successful piece was some foolish love-talk on the balcony. A guinea for a sparkling dialogue about a dinner might have been well bestowed in the true interests of literature. The writer of a manual on con- versation was much derided for pointing out that the menu suggests the most natural topics for table-talk. The fish, for example, should lead the mind to the sea, ships, the British Colonies, and the advantages of emigration. Why drag in the British Colonies ? When 45 Points of View you talk of fish, you ought to consider how it was cooked and eaten by the Romans. Tell your companion (with discretion) what passed at the table of Heliogabalus. Harrow her soul with the story that Bulwer Lytton re- peated in " The Parisians," about the epicure's dog in the siege of Paris. When provisions ran short, the dog was slain by the epicure's friends in league with his cook, and served up at his table in a ragout. He lamented the dog's mysterious disappearance, and sighed, " Ah ! how poor Fido would have enjoyed these bones ! " Mr. Bernard Shaw declares that if literature is to have any vital meaning for the twentieth century, human nature must be rescued from the tyranny of Shakespeare and Thackeray. Not while breath remains in this body to proclaim what cookery owes to literary genius ! The Shakespearean junkettings are a constant joy to the well-regulated mind. True, you do not see old Capulet's " trifling foolish banquet," as he modestly calls it ; but no thoughtful manager ever neglects a procession of lordly dishes to appropriate music during a slight pause in the action. How often have I seen peacocks borne on the head of the well- graced "super"! Do you know what is the 46 In Praise of Food most consummate expression of villainy in all Shakespeare ? It is Don John's remark in " Much Ado," when another " trifling foolish banquet " is in preparation : " Would the cook were of my mind ! " He would have poisoned the whole company ! Compared with Don John, lago is a seraph. When Hamlet taxes Claudius with false promises, he says, " You cannot feed capons so." There is a world of philosophy in that, which Mr. Shaw, as a vegetarian, can never appreciate. In an essay (little read now, I fear) entitled " Memorials of Gormandising," Thackeray describes a Paris dinner in the year 1841. He dines with a friend, chiefly off entree 'die and partridge ; but it is the steak that moves him to rhapsody. "G and I had quarrelled about the soup, but when we began on the steak we looked at each other, and loved each other. We did not speak ; our hearts were too full for that ; but we took a bit, and laid down our forks and looked at each other and understood each other. There were no two individuals on this wide earth no two lovers billing in the shade no mother clasping baby to her heart, more supremely happy than we. Every now and then we had a glass of honest, firm, generous Burgundy, that nobly supported 47 Points of View the meat. As you may fancy, we did not leave a single morsel of the steak ; but when it was done we put bits of bread into the silver dish and wistfully sopped up the gravy." This last performance makes it necessary to add that the feast was held in a private room in a cafe on the boulevard. Even in the year 1841, sopping up the gravy with bits of bread was not, I presume, an ecstasy conducted in public. But we need not dwell on that detail. Let us rather rejoice in the liberty, equality, fraternity, and consummate cookery that breathe throughout the scene. Here is no affected disguise of honest rapture, and although Thackeray lays down debatable pro- positions, such as that " a third-rate Burgundy and a third-rate claret are better than the best," with what a sense of luxurious fulness, spiritual and physical, you rise from his simple story ! It is in itself a banquet for true heart and digestion ; and if I were a millionaire, I should like nothing better than to invite a " barbarous herd " to just such a dinner in that neglected restaurant I spoke of anon, to see the proprietor beam with the first ray of prosperity, and even yes ! even to see the whole company sop up the gravy. 48 VI Meat and Drink IN a little book called " Diet in Relation to Age and Activity," Sir Henry Thompson, hale and hearty at eighty- two, gives us the lessons of his lon- gevity. If it were the habit of mankind to profit by sound advice, most of us would carry this volume in our pockets, meditate upon it as our physiological breviary, and find very little use for doctors. Luckily for the medical profession, Sir Henry Thompson's example demands a renunciation almost as difficult for men in general as monastic vows. Thirty years ago, at the age of fifty-two, he gave up alcohol. For the sake of experiment, five or six years back, he tried the effect of a claret-glass of good wine at dinner every day for two months. Then came back the sick headaches, and pains in the joints, from which he had suffered in early life until he abstained entirely from alcoholic drinks. " Moreover," after his abandonment of alcohol, " the joints gradually lost their stiffness, and ultimately became as supple and mobile as they were in youth, and continue absolutely so to this day." We may tell Sir Henry Thompson that we do 49 D Points of View not suffer from sick headaches ; but how many moderate drinkers of eighty-two, or even sixty- two, are ready to swear that their joints have all the suppleness of youth ? Are old gentle- men willing to ascribe what they call rheu- matism to the habitual though modest glass ? There is so much controversy about alcohol among the medical experts that the moderate drinker plumes himself on the ancient wisdom of the middle course between topers and ab- stainers. On the subject of cakes Calverley's schoolboy had learned that " excruciating aches resulted if we ate too many." For the mode- rate drinker this philosophy comprises cakes and ale, and when the aches come he puts them down to chills. A French writer has collected the opinions of sixty physicians in Paris on the effects of alcohol. Thirty-four affirm that a moderate use, say a bottle of wine a day, is beneficial. Nine will have no compromise with alcohol in any form, and seventeen declare that to the health of most people one bottle a day makes no difference whatever. One doctor declined to hazard any opinion on the plea that the varieties of human physiology are too great to warrant any positive judgment. But Sir Henry Thompson is in a position to speak not only for himself. " It may be fairly said that 5 Meat and Drink one example does not suffice to prove a case. But it is not a single example, and really designates a very large class of active men among all ranks, possessing a more or less similar temperament, of which a type is here described, and it is for such that I have found it so successful." This vision of a shining band of veterans, all as supple as athletes, ought to give pause to many an aged man when he is about to order his evening toddy. But he may say that the zeal of the convert belongs to youngsters of fifty-two. Food, not drink, however, is the burden of Sir Henry Thompson's practical counsel. Half our bodily ills are due to improper eating. It is a common fallacy that, as we grow older, we need more nourishment, " the extra glass of cordial, the superlatively strong extract of food." Sir Henry Thompson draws an alarming picture of the head of the family sinking to decay because his affectionate spouse plies him with dainties he cannot digest, the egg whipped up with sherry, the insidious calfs-foot jelly, the inopportune cup of cocoa. Many a fond wife is slowly doing her lord to death, for all the world as if she were a poisoner in one of Miss Braddon's early novels. She urges him to try patent foods, which are so Points of View "nutritious" that his stomach cannot stand them, and she imagines that even his drinks must have nutriment, forgetting that " the primary object of drink is to satisfy thirst," and that to take milk, for example, with meat is " one of the greatest dietary blunders that can be perpetrated." Even the dentist is an unwitting agent of mischief. He gives you a new set of masticators as efficacious as the originals ; but he does not warn you that the loss of your natural teeth is an indication that the body needs less food than it demanded in your heyday. Your tailor is also in the in- nocent conspiracy, for he congratulates you on the increase of your girth, as if it were the glory of the citizen to cut into a deal of material when he is ordering new clothes. Here, we suspect, Sir Henry Thompson is overdoing the case. Is a man really flattered when he is told that his waist has grown another inch ? " And you, poor deluded victim, are more than half willing to believe that your increasing size is an equivalent to increasing health and strength, especially as your wife emphatically takes that view, and regards your augmenting portliness with ap- proval." Is she sincere ? Or is her approval part of that dissimulation from which women 52 Meat and Drink are not yet freed ? Does the fondest wife, when the husband's broad back is turned, sometimes drop a tear of aesthetic regret because it is so broad ? How much is added to personal dignity by physical bulk is a question on which we should like to take the opinion of the middle classes. Can a thin man rule his household with the moral weight of a stout man ? Sir Henry Thompson does not go into that, but he says that not one stout man in fifty lives to a good old age. "The typical man of eighty or ninety years, still retaining a respectable amount of energy of body and mind, is lean and spare, and lives on slender rations." It does not follow that he must have a hungry look, and be a con- spirator, like Cassius. Very thoughtfully Sir Henry has put his portrait in this volume, and an instructive picture it is of a spare and dignified body, and an alert, but not dangerous brain. Fat men may contemplate it with a passing misgiving. If only they had taken to " slender rations " in time, they might have had, not only the prospect of living as long as Sir Henry Thompson, but also of escaping those confounded ailments which " portliness " is heir to. Will the middle classes take heed ? This 53 Points of View authority addresses to them the reproach of Shylock to Lancelot Gobbo. They are huge feeders. Three-fourths of their diet comes from the animal kingdom. Sir Henry Thomp- son is not a vegetarian, and he banters the vegetarians on their partiality for eggs and milk. But he maintains that three-fourths of our food should be vegetable. Such a dietary must increase the zest for food, especi- ally by expelling from club and restaurant the " penetrating odours of meat cookery." It abolishes the terrible ennui of beef and mutton, and ensures " a lighter and more active brain." This is so revolutionary that some people may suspect a likeness between Sir Henry Thomp- son and Cassius after all. Others may suggest this dietary for the War Office, where mobility of brain is somewhat lacking. There is an undoubted fascination in Sir Henry's portrait of the "light feeder" whose "palate is sensi- tive to mild impressions." " After the meal is over, his wit is fresher, his temper more cheer- ful," and he does not snore in the arm-chair. Dyspepsia is unknown to him, for he eats slowly (remember Mr. Gladstone's habit of biting every piece of meat thirty- two times), and he never drinks till the meal is ended. And what are the " slender rations " ? Eggs 54 Meat and Drink or fish for breakfast, a little tender meat or fowl for luncheon, soup, game, and vegetables for dinner, with farinaceous pudding, and soup and dry toast at bed-time. The middle classes ought to manage all this without becoming emaciated. 55 VII The Drama of the Letter-Box 1 Deputy Postmaster-General of Victoria is my ideal of the official with a feeling heart. It is in his power to retrieve letters from the post, foolish letters written in haste, letters which, if delivered, will sunder young lives, or bring parental hairs in sorrow to the grave. When sufficient cause is shown why he should interpose, he will not allow the mill of routine to grind fond hearts to powder. He has been known to step into a breach that yawned between two lovers an act that might entail alarming encroachments on his time, were it not that breaches of this kind commonly heal themselves. He has befriended a young man of evil habits, who had promised his parents to reform, and had posted to them a most virtuous letter, into which was inadvertently slipped a document of a different character. Severe moralists might say that in the interests of truth, the Deputy Postmaster-General ought not to have interfered. How was he to know that when that reprobate recovered the damn- ing enclosure, he would keep his vow of amendment ? When my Uncle Toby swore, 56 The Drama of the Letter-Box the Recording Angel blotted out the bad word with a tear. But would he have felt justified in extracting from the nearest post- office a letter full of hypocritical pretences of noble sentiments and good deeds ? If our own Postmaster-General were asked to follow the Victorian example, I suppose he would plead abstract morality (a capital sub- ject for Parliamentary debate) or the sanctity of official time. Distressed citizens who wanted their letters back might find Lord London- derry too much occupied with graver matters. But why should he miss such a chance of winning enduring popularity ? Once it was known that he was willing to rescue people who have the trick of posting compromising letters, I believe there would be a large demand for his statuette as a paper-weight. Whenever we sat down to our correspondence, we should look into his benevolent features (cast with a slightly sad expression in terra- cotta) and pick our phrases with unwonted care. There would have to be some decentralisa- tion, of course. It would not be sufficient to empower postmasters all over the country to return letters to the writers. It is not in the sober day or the gentle twilight that we pen those missives which rob us of the heart's 57 Points of View treasure, or lead to actions for slander. It is after midnight that the mood is worst. Have I not seen distracted women wringing their hands in front of insensate pillar-boxes at half-past two ? The postman who makes the three o'clock collection, it is he who should have authority to assuage delirium and reward repentance in the lamp-light of the winter morning, or the rosy flush of the summer dawn. Think what a boon this would be to the dramatist. He seldom dares to create a mis- understanding out of a letter, for although the public will stand some old theatrical devices, it grows restive when the hero comes down to the footlights, and reads the heroine's final farewells, which everybody knows she does not mean. But suppose the dramatist were to take my hint about the pillar-box ? Scene, a London street; time, three A.M. The heroine, in a charming tea-gown, over which she has hastily thrown a valuable Indian shawl, gazes distractedly into the aperture of a pillar-box, and wrings her beautiful hands, one of which has a picturesque inkstain on the forefinger. (The actress may object to this detail ; but the author must point out that it indicates reckless emotion in a manner that will strike 58 The Drama of the Letter-Box home to many bosoms in the pit.) She ex- plains in broken words that a letter of sixteen sheets which will ruin her happiness has gone through the aperture, which preserves a mock- ing indifference. Dawn (by Mr. Hawes Craven) appears gradually behind a steeple. A manly tread is heard ; enter the postman, who pro- ceeds to unlock the pillar-box. She appeals to him ; he shakes his head ; how is he to tell that she will claim the right letter ? " It is large," she says ; " it is sixteen sheets ! " He offers rough consolation. " P'raps he won't read it, mum ! " " Man ! " she cries, " is your stupid obstinacy to wreck my life ! " He is angry. " Stupid, is it ? Not so stupid as you think. Some people I've heard of are fond of prigging other people's postal orders ! " Here, you see, is a truly dramatic situation. Elemental passions are in conflict ; duty is confronted by despair. The church clock strikes the quarter ; the street lamp burns dim. The audience is greatly excited, and even the impassive gentleman who has charge of the orchestral drum gasps for breath. A stately tread is heard, and there enters a tall figure in evening dress. " Lady Charlotte ! " exclaims the stranger, but checks himself, and 59 Points of View is about to pass on with a cold salutation, when she throws herself in front of him, and begs for her sixteen sheets. " Give this lady her letter," he says quietly to the post- man. " I am the Postmaster-General." " I dessay ! " says the postman. " Swell con- federate, you mean ! " More tension ; there's nothing like holding an audience on the rack. Suddenly the heroine's inkstain steals into the pocket of her tea-gown (I don't know whether tea-gowns are made with pockets ; any way this one is), and she brings out the statuette ! (Of course, the critics will say next morning that this is improbable ; but what is more likely than that a distracted woman would rush out of the house at three in the morning with a paper-weight ?) The stranger removes his hat, and with the aid of Mr. Hawcs Craven's dawn, now broad day, discloses a sad expression exactly like the terra-cotta. " Beg pardon, my lord," says the postman humbly, " I thought it was a put-up job for postal orders." " You have done your duty," says the nobleman, but refrains from giving him a sovereign. The pit may not like this, and somebody in the gallery may cry " Shabby ! " But I think the dramatist ought to enforce the principle that duty must 60 The Drama of the Letter-Sox be content with its official wages, especially the wages of a letter-carrier. I need scarcely add that the sixteen sheets were addressed to the Postmaster-General him- self, and that, had they reached him, they would have 'blighted his career at the very least. Thus his intervention at the pillar-box is dramatic in the highest degree. I have dwelt upon this incident because it may be useful to one of those playwrights who are about to solicit Mr. George Alexander's favour through the medium of the Play- goers' Club. Who knows that we may not see Mr. Alexander in the character of the Postmaster-General, and Mr. Tree as the sturdy postman ? If you think the whole idea is too fantastic, let me suggest another reform for the benefit of hasty correspondents. I see a complaint that a too ingenious adver- tiser has inserted a phonograph in a figure which attracts public notice by acclaiming the virtues of some article of the toilette. This device may go rather far. I don't want to meet an automaton on casters, and hear him declare in a hollow voice the name of his bootmaker. But why not put the phono- graph in the pillar-box ? If Lady Charlotte, at three in the morning, as her jewelled but 61 Points of View inkstained hand approaches the aperture, could hear the warning " Don't be rash ; think before you post it ! " I might have to give the touching story of her love-affair quite a different turn. I may as well admit that this article forms part of a considerable work entitled " Hints to Dramatists." Another book, also on the eve of publication, I have called " Wrinkles for Novelists." In a recent novel by an eminent hand I find that a country house party, composed of twenty people, all famous for wit and observation, employs itself in hunting down the secret of an unfortunate married woman who is supposed to have a clandestine affair of the heart. The taste of this proceeding troubles the narrator of the story now and then, for, as he remarks to a friend, " You see it is none of our business." That does not prevent him from pursuing his course of vivisection, and describing with infinite relish how the victim flutters from one man to another in the vain hope of finding shelter. If you want to show your insight into the most subtle issues of social relations, you must "just drop in," like Paul Pry. You won't be so clumsy as Paul, but you will have all his native delicacy. I read a story lately 62 The Drama of the Letter-Sox in which a portrait painter, celebrated for his gift of revealing moral character on canvas, deliberately spoiled the portrait of a financial brigand to spare the feelings of his sitter's daughter. You must not write novels in that spirit. It is a concession to foolish sentiment. VIII Cheap Food A~ f observer of the town, notably within a radius of a quarter of a mile from Piccadilly Circus, must be struck by the growth of restaurants, and their marvellous cheap- ness. They start up every week, as it seems, in quiet streets off the great thoroughfares, and tempt the hungry citizen with a delectable array of courses at a merely nominal charge. There is one street through which I always pass at an accelerated pace, because the invita- tion, " Try Our Shilling Lunch," gives me a sense of personal abasement. I have not tried their shilling lunch, and the only reason is that I fear it would impose too severe a strain upon a judicial temper. I should be divided between the natural desire to appraise it at the value of a shilling, and no more, and a horrible suspicion that I was eating the restaura- teur out of house and home. When the third course was set before me, I should watch him out of the corner of my eye, and see his lips pinched with anxiety. Members of his family would try to look careless in corners of the room, and all the time they would be wondering 64 Cheap Food whether this voracious stranger would eat the whole of the absurdly bounteous meal, or leave anything for them. You remember Lewis Carroll's vision of the banker's clerk, who turned out to be a hippopotamus. " If this should stay to dine," he said, "there won't be much for us." How could I con- sume that shilling lunch if a similar reflection were passing through the minds of those who had provided it ? This is morbid sensitiveness, no doubt ; but I manage to conquer it in a restaurant where the charge is eighteenpence. For this ridicu- lous sum you have a profusion of excellently cooked viands, admirable service, a spacious and cheerfully lighted room, and the smiles of the proprietor. He is a very swarthy man, with intensely black eyes, and in the costume of his country he would look, I am sure, a picturesque brigand. I have not questioned him about his ancestors, but I like to think that they were Sicilian brigands, and that his eighteenpenny lunch is a form of restitution. Many years ago a friend of mine was invited to a shooting party in Sicily. On the evening of his arrival, the host was called from dinner to see a stranger, with whom he transacted business. Then he brought this visitor into 65 E Points of View the dining-room and introduced him to the company. He was a very swarthy man, with intensely black eyes, who drank a glass of wine, saluted everybody gravely, and took his leave. " Gentlemen," said the host, " that is the chief of the local brigands. I have paid him his regular fee, he has made a careful note of you, so your lives will be quite safe to-morrow." " Safe ! " murmured the com- pany. " Oh, yes, it is the custom here. If I had not been able to pay the money down, one or more of you might have been shot." I like to imagine that my host of the restaurant is a descendant of that chief, and that the eighteenpenny lunch is a reparation to civilised society for his grandsire's method of ransom. I imparted this theory to a friend who found me the other day at this economical repast. "Ah!" he exclaimed heartily; "you're a sensible man, Jaques, after all. Like me, you are always looking for a cheaper place to lunch at than the club. Clubs will break up, you may depend, if this restaurant competition is carried much further. A day will come when we shall dine sumptuously for sixpence, and then our club committees will begin to see their mistake." " You don't see your mis- take," I remarked. " You are like the man 66 Cheap Food in Gilbert's play, who, when he proposed to a girl, told her that his ideal in life was to find the nicest dinner for ninepence." " Sixpence," he muttered, eating at a great rate. " Let me tell you," I went on, " that I take this eighteen- penny lunch, which is ridiculous at the price " " Quite right ; not nearly enough of it " " I say ridiculous at the price, for it might as well be given away." " Most true ; why isn't it ? " " I take it that I may play a humble but necessary part in a great drama of atonement." " My gracious ! " he ejaculated, with his fork suspended in the air. " What have you been doing ? " " Look in the padrone s face," I said. " Don't you see that he has had brigandage in his family ? " Then I related the Sicilian story. He stared at the padrone, who at once approached the table, wreathed with smiles, and expressed the hope that we had enjoyed the fare. " Oh, very much so," said this rapacious clubman. " But my friend here thinks that, as you give so much for eighteenpence, you might as well give it for nothing. Yes," he added, struck by an idea; "why not celebrate the Coronation by keeping a free table ? " The padrone considered this proposal for a moment, and then said, with a beautiful gesture of bene- volence, " If the King will pay ! " 67 Points of View The King has already provided at his own cost for a Coronation dinner to half a million of his poorest subjects, and I don't think any further call can be made on his munificence. But are there no public bodies with spirit enough to make arrangements with these restaurants for, let us say, a week's rejoicing ? In a certain street, instead of hurrying on with embarrassed gaze, I might pause, and cheer- fully read this inscription : " To the King's Lieges. Try Our Coronation Lunch and Keep Your Shilling." I could try it without that sense of personal abasement of which I spoke anon. The thought that some spirited public body was paying the piper would be a legiti- mate source of refreshment. Moreover, it would give a romantic air to our municipal procedure. I am not enough of an antiquary to say how long it is since loyal corporations showed their enthusiasm for the crowning and anointing of the Sovereign by spreading good cheer for the populace in the open streets. Probably this custom had its most exhilarating observance at the Restoration. The mind goes fondly back to the times when oxen were roasted whole, and carved in the grand style, when liquor flowed from market-crosses, and no man was so poor as to lack a cup of canary. 68 Cheap Food I say the imagination plays round such scenes without dwelling harshly either on the quality of the liquor, or on its possible disturbance to the social equilibrium. Romance touches the natural joy of the people with delicate fingers, and even history records no headaches. I fear it would be difficult to revive these ancient revels. The idea of a beer-barrel broached in the street is repugnant to the modern spirit of decorum, and few citizens would have a relish for beer out of the gutter. The old market-cross, with spouting gargoyles, must have been a cheerful sight. At Edin- burgh, I am told, it poured out a merry stream of claret in honour of King Charles, though the claret imported for this festival by careful burgesses may not have been the finest vintage. But where are the gargoyles in London, con- veniently disposed for this public ministration ? The luckless fountain in Piccadilly Circus, which affronts both beauty and utility with a feeble trickle, might fill its neglected basin with juice of a moderately generous grape. Or the grave and statesmanlike personage who has been brought from New York to brew his national cocktails in the American bar at the Criterion, might dedicate the fountain to the triumphs of his art. But the spirit of our 69 Points of View licensing laws is opposed to these efforts to re- create our Merrie England. The Strand might flow with milk and honey without causing a breach of the peace, and Trafalgar Square fountains of ginger-beer might sparkle inno- cently in the sun. But I doubt whether these compromises with the old romance would com- mand any favour. Indeed, an ox roasted whole in the Mile-end Road might be voted vulgar by local opinion. Regretfully, then, we must dismiss the past. But the free restaurant for a week ; does not that idea make philanthropy romantic ? No luxurious feeding, mind ; only the simple and abundant fare which these astonishing aliens provide for next to nothing. I believe that if they had a week's endowment, so that they could serve the public without charge, many a gouty citizen would be converted to frugal habits, and would bless the Coronation as the beginning of a new life. 70 IX A Famine in Books MACAULAY once said that the labour of reading a certain book he had under review was as hard as the labour of thieves on the treadmill. I have always thought that the author, who was horribly cut up on that oc- casion, might have retorted that the treadmill was just what such a reviewer deserved. But I have little heart to-day to invent repartees for authors, seeing that none of them offers me the treadmill or any other form of exercise. Here I sit without a solitary book to review, because the publisher chooses to suspend his business at this time of the year. He has the strange notion that people on their holidays don't need books, whereas it is plain, from the weather reports of all the holiday resorts in Europe, that the new book would be a perfect godsend to the poor soul who is immured indoors the livelong day by rain. However, it is not of his sufferings I am thinking, but of my own. I am not away for a holiday. I want to earn a livelihood by the discreet, luminous, and impartial exposition of the merits and demerits of current literature. But Points of View the bread is taken out of my mouth and out of other mouths which open reproachfully wide whenever I am near them. Pleasant for a father to overhear remarks like these in his well-disciplined household : " Dad hasn't cut up a single book all this week ! " " How do you know ? " " 'Cos mummy says there won't be any jam for a month ! " No jam for these poor innocents ! No pickled author on the sideboard ! It is heartrending. A wag of my acquaintance is fond of liken- ing my honest industry to the behaviour of the wolf in the nursery story. Little Red Riding Hood, he says, pays me a call. She is a novel by a new hand, and has a pretty, timorous, appealing air. " Oh, grandmamma " (she takes me for her grandmother, poor simpleton !), " what very sharp eyes you have got ! " " All the better to read you with, my dear ! " " And oh, grandmamma, what very large teeth ! " " All the better to " ; the rest is panto- mime, which greatly diverts the members of my family. But at this season the Little Red Riding Hoods leave off calling. Or give the allegory a more classic turn. Perseus is out of town, taking the waters at Homburg, or other- wise wasting his time. Andromeda is still in manuscript at her publishers, and the Dragon 72 A Famine in Books (I am the Dragon) snaps his jaws at nothing, a most unremunerative employment. Do you take my drift ? Perseus is the reading public ; Andromeda the romance that he and I have many a tussle over. I don't say the allegory is a perfect fit ; but, at any rate, here's a poor old performing Dragon, neglected and hungry, and all because this is not the Andromeda season ! Surely a scandal that demands the immediate notice of the Society for the Pre- vention of Cruelty to Animals. And I read letters in the daily papers, imploring house- holders not to repair thoughtlessly to the sea- side, leaving the poor cat to starve in the empty mansion ! Yes, if you like, I will put off the airs of the Dragon, and come down to the estate of the harmless, necessary cat. Why should the care- less publisher go out of town without providing a sufficient supply of new books to keep me moderately sleek ? You have often laughed, I dare say, at the two cats in that ingenious poster on the hoardings, one of them in the pride of life and advertisement, and the other a lean, wretched creature, the victim of skim milk. Skim milk, indeed ! But the cat who now addresses you has no milk whatever ! I proposed to my editor last week to review over 73 Points of View again some of the old books of the past season, with especial reference to the ignorant, reckless, and even flagitious manner in which they had been reviewed by other journals. " Skim milk ! " he sneered. I will not repeat the for- cible expletive wrung from me by despair. It caused the editor to turn on his heel. You may have noticed that when the haughty aris- tocrat in the novel has goaded his plebeian but high-spirited adversary to frenzy, he always turns on his heel. It is the mark of cynical breeding, and editors have it to perfection. My suggestion was a very good one. Nothing is so trying to a right-minded reviewer as the distemper of other reviewers. You have put an author in his proper place, and written beneath your handiwork the warning, " Cursed be he who moveth his neighbour's literary landmark ! " and lo ! another reviewer comes along and moves it without compunction. Some weeks ago I praised a novel with judicious heartiness, and straightway there appeared a review elsewhere, condemning the book with- out mercy, especially on the points I had cited for approbation. This reminds me of an in- cident which shows publishers in a new light. I met the publisher of this very novel, and he said, " I don't like it as much as you do. It 74 A Famine in Books is not nearly as interesting to me as your review." I know this anecdote will be received with incredulous scorn ; but it encourages me to believe that a publisher with so fine a mind must have a feeling heart. Why should he not hurry through the press next week a crowd of new books with no particular charm for him, solely that he may have that disinterested en- joyment which he confessed to me ? I see him pondering my notices of these works with an expression of rapt delight. What a lesson in altruism for the whole publishing world ! I had another scheme. Why not review imaginary books ? It has been done. Some renowned dissertations have sprung from this very artifice. A supposititious history of South America would make some lively writing about the customs of the Aztecs. An unreal edition of the works of Mrs. Aphra Behn, with intro- duction and notes by an Oxford professor, would be a capital peg for an essay on com- parative modesty. You will scarcely believe that the scheme was vetoed on the ground that readers would ask for these publications at the libraries and booksellers, and, finding they had no existence, would complain of being hoaxed, and would view with distrust all other judg- ments in the same quarter, even upon such 75 Points of View trivialities as politics and trade. After that I saw nothing for it but to write a letter to Mr. Carnegie. " Your deep interest in literature,'* I said to him, " is shown by your extraordinary bounty. I never open a newspaper without learning that you have endowed another free library, and brought fresh blessings on your name from people who cannot buy books, and would not if they could. Sir, you must be aware that the policy to which you have devoted your life and fortune does not inspire universal esteem. The powerful class of authors dislikes it, and the still more powerful class of publishers regards it with unconcealed animo- sity. But there is another class, not in the best odour with either of these, and therefore deserv- ing of your generous consideration. I allude to reviewers. Their calling is singularly hard, for as they have to exercise impartial judgment they must deny themselves the license of the historian, the soul-flight of the poet, the fan- tasy of the novelist, and the garrulity of the biographer. Thus deprived of the attractions which appeal to most readers, they have to lead laborious lives of uncomplaining virtue. At this season of the year they have no books to review, and their children cry for bread. May I suggest that you should establish a Reviewers' 76 A Famine in Books Sustentation Fund, and endow it with five millions ? The sum may seem rather large, but I must remind you that nobody but your- self is likely to subscribe, not even Mr. Pass- more Edwards, for he has been a newspaper proprietor and editor, and is incapable of taking reviewers at their own valuation. Let me beg you to give this proposal your immediate and favourable attention. It is real philanthropy, and you must excuse me for remarking that your philanthropic zeal has not always been happily directed. P.S. I am willing to act as Secre- tary of the Fund (at a reasonable salary), and to enter upon my duties at once." To this communication, I grieve to add, I have not yet received a reply. 77 X The Income Tax I is about the time when the Chancellor of the Exchequer girds himself for the horrid task of bleeding his helpless victims. I can see him examining his case of instruments with a callous smile. That insinuating blade with a twist and a curl, like a Malay creese, is the income tax. The handle, you will observe, is worn with much usage. It is the operator's favourite weapon ; for it lets out a great deal of innocent blood with a very slight exertion. That slender stiletto, reposing in a velvet corner, is the duty on cigars. Having but a moderate taste for tobacco, I cannot understand why this implement is always used so gingerly. It pro- duces but a crimson drop or two, whereas it might the multitudinous seas incarnadine if it were handled by fearless justice. Let the Chancellor of the Exchequer call me in before he rolls up his sleeves for butchery, and I will show him how to cup the right people. Look across the Channel. The French Chamber has decided that if a man be worth many millions he shall pay half to the coffers of the State. There is said to be a commotion amongst the 78 The Income Tax millionaires, but that moves me not a jot. If I had twenty millions, let us say, I would cheer- fully give the State half, and live frugally on ten. How any reasonable man can want to debate such a proposition passes my compre- hension. The psychology of the Income Tax Com- missioners has a fearsome interest for me. I take them to be kindly-disposed men in the ordinary relations of life. They have their share, no doubt, of the domestic joys, wives who love them, and children eager to walk in their footsteps. Their profession is the pur- suit of truth, the most ennobling pursuit, you might say, if it were not upon the track of your income and mine. Then it becomes a subtle indelicacy. So far as I have observed, no consciousness of this disturbs the repose of the Commissioners. Without a blush they will offer you gentle incentives to pay your income tax several times over by making a return in every district in which you have any visible employment. I dare say this present article will provoke a shower of yellow papers, ending with an assessment of Jaques at some fabulous amount. An American friend of mine, with a domicile in London, had an interview with the Commissioners, who proposed to tax his invest- 79 Points of View ments in the United States. He demurred to this, and after much discussion they waived the claim, but intimated that if he brought any money from America they would assess him on that. " Gentlemen," he said, "you are earnest seekers after the heart of things, and I will not deceive you. Whenever I go home and gather up a pile of dollars, I will cable you the exact figure, so that you can fix it up in a yellow paper, and make the Chancellor of the Ex- chequer a happy man. Yes, gentlemen, I give you the word of an American citizen that I shall not rest quietly in my grave until I have paid the whole cost of the South African war ! " But I am told there is a source of revenue that our Government inquisitors persistently neglect. The banks are said to revel in a wealth of unclaimed balances. A man forgets all about his money in one bank, and opens an account at another. Or he sells his securities, deposits the proceeds with a banker, and then disappears. Years afterwards a trader, blown out of his course in the South Sea islands, lights upon a strange outcast with matted hair, a white man who has forgotten his native speech, all except the words " Bank has got it ! " which he mutters with an uncanny chuckle. Your 80 The Income Tax old-fashioned miser, who led his relatives an exasperating dance by hiding his gold under hearthstones, or in the trunks of trees, was a very poor bungler at a practical joke. As often as not his ghost haunted the spot where the treasure was buried, and then somebody with a sound nervous system came and dug it up. But to leave your fortune in a banker's safe, and then lose your wits in Polynesia, is a refine- ment of eccentricity that puts all the ancients to shame. Still, it is the lapse of memory that is most remarkable. I can never forget my balance at the bank, for the inexorable deduc- tions that make it dwindle are my daily fare of mental arithmetic. The wonder is that the august corporation which is good enough to take charge of it should employ a staff of clerks to post it in their ledgers. I appeal to my suffering brethren who are in the same case. Why should we be taxed to the bone when these wayward sons of fortune leave riches untold without an owner? The Government might take their unclaimed bal- ances and lighten our burdens. Or they might be divided amongst deserving citizens on the principle of awarding the largest proportion to those who can be proved to have given their bankers the greatest trouble with the smallest 81 F Points of View accounts. Amongst this company of estimable veterans I see myself in an honourable and lucra- tive place. My claim is all the more pressing because it has been plain to me for some time that Jaques has a special dignity. I notice that the beautiful ladies who adorn the centre of this Daily Chronicle page are always looking my way. Even when they are just married, and enveloped with their wedding drapery, they forget the bridegrooms, and shyly solicit my approval. This makes me uneasy about my own ward- robe, which is by no means befitting to a man who is honoured by these fair speechless mes- sages. Moreover, I learn from the expert who writes in the Pall Mall Magazine that the "well-dressed man" must spend at least 400 on his original outfit, and ji2O a year in keep- ing it up. True, you can be "reasonably clothed" for ^90 and 50 a year for main- tenance ; but what would those ladies think of me if I stooped to such a compromise? The Pall Mall expert says he knew " a very distinguished man whose wife, being of a frugal mind, bought some cloth, and made him a pair of trousers ; but he became so tired of the constant question as to whether he was trying to introduce the Turkish fashions into London, that he gave the garment to the Hindu cross- 82 The, Income Tax ing-sweeper of St. James's Square." This im- pressive anecdote would deter the most cautious temperament from economy. I abandon my- self to the luxury of imagining that I already possess a fur coat, with Persian lamb collar and cuffs, and mink linings, together with much raiment for display in town and country, in- cluding three pairs of white hunting-breeches, and six pairs of white duck trousers. I have eighteen dress shirts, and as many white silk handkerchiefs, eighteen pairs of black silk half- hose at twelve-and-six a pair, and three suits of silk pyjamas at fifty shillings a suit. I have lots of hats, including an opera hat. Some people think that opera hats have gone out ; but they came back, because " more silk hats were spoilt at a theatre than in church." Ha ! then the opera hat is an economy. Away with it ! I will wear only silk hats at the play. Nay, I will be known as the man who is never seen twice in the same hat. Yes, the opera hat must go, and also the "bowler." It is unsuited to my chevelure, and is surely the most hideous headpiece that ever was invented. My hatter shall make a new hat from my design ; it shall be known as the " Jaques," and be worn by all the brethren who are resolved to have justice from the Exchequer. Points of View A much-respected ecclesiastic once assured me that he came into possession of a valuable fur coat in a singular way. He had done some service to an Oriental people by thrusting their wrongs into the faces of apathetic statesmen. One day he received a letter from a remote part of Asia, begging him to accept a small token of gratitude. Presently there arrived a box of furs, and my friend thought they would be useful for a winter coat. When he took them to the furrier, it occurred to him to ask how much they were worth. The furrier smiled, and said, " I won't tell you what I think they are worth ; but if you wish to sell them, I will give you three hundred pounds." The ecclesiastic was startled, for the Orien- tals he had befriended have a reputation for hard bargains, and not for open-handed senti- ment. He goes about now wrapped in a costly tribute from some unknown Asiatic ; and I wonder whether a little pamphleteering on behalf of a lost tribe of Israel will bring me a similar reward. Can I take up the cause of some down-trodden Persian lamb, and get its grateful wool for nothing ? 8 4 XI "Clauds of Glory" STEVENSON, as Mr. Graham Balfour has just reminded us, had a most retentive memory of his childhood. Everything that concerned himself from the earliest years had for him that romantic interest that is usually reserved for personages in fiction. He attributes this some- where to the imaginative sensitiveness of an only child, and I wonder that this particular branch of inquiry has not been followed up by scientific students of the human mind. It would be interesting to know whether a small dog, supposing it to be the only puppy of its hearth and home, is more introspective than a puppy with the customary number of brothers and sisters. I mention this merely because it seems to be the kind of illustration that would naturally occur to any one who took the subject very seriously as a part of the evolutionary scheme. We read a great deal about eldest sons, especially in relation to the pleasing custom of primogeniture, so characteristic of a civilisation that boasts of securing "equal opportunities for all"; and we also read a great deal about younger sons, 85 Points of View their adventures in the colonies, and their dis- abilities for matrimony of the highest class. But I should like to see only sons form a learned society, so that the " Transactions of the O.S.," published quarterly, might en- lighten us as to the comparative intensity of this preoccupation with childhood's trivial, fond records. From inquiries that I have cautiously prose- cuted I gather that most men are very shy with such early reminiscences. They do not say to you, with a far-away backward light in their eyes, " Ah ! yes. I will tell you a vastly interesting thing that happened on the day I was short-coated." If you ever get that in- formation, it is from a maiden aunt, or from an old family retainer ; and if the story should be told in the man's presence, ten to one he denies it, or professes that it has escaped his memory. A friend of mine took me aside, and said, " You writing fellows have to do strange things for a living, so I suppose your curiosity about my childhood is all in the game of literature and science. If you pledge your word never to reveal my name, I will tell you my earliest recollection. Very well. Looking back I see a ship lying in the docks of some great seaport I think it is New 86 Clouds of Glory York. The shades of evening fall. Over the ship's side steals a very small urchin down the gangway to the quay. He belongs to the vessel in some capacity, I forget what ; the captain may have been his father. He secretes himself in a barrel, containing a deposit of sugar, rich brown sugar. Very late that night, about half-past nine, there is an alarm on the ship ; the crew run hither and thither ; they peer into the dark waters as if expecting to see a drowned body ; a woman wrings her hands. Presently the boatswain spies the barrel ; he looks in ; the boy is snatched up and clasped in his mother's arms. There is rejoicing, there is spanking, there is a dose of rhubarb magnesia. Ugh ! " That man is a K.C., and I shall be greatly astonished if he does not become Lord Chan- cellor. Another friend, high up in the medical profession, remarked when we were discussing this subject, "Have you noticed that I never eat apple-dumpling ? Well, I once ate an apple - dumpling that memory cannot digest. It was at boarding-school, where I had a habit of early rising. While the dormitory was still wrapped in slumber I would dress quietly, omitting the washing, which was too noisy, and wander out into 87 Points of View the garden to watch the mist rolling up from the river. One morning I strayed inadver- tently into the kitchen, and opened a cup- board. A cold apple-dumpling was there. Unused to crime, I hesitated ; but all was quiet ; the mist was still on the river. I listened at the foot of the stairs ; but nothing came down save a gentle snort, most likely from the mathematical master in a dream. I ate that apple-dumpling. A few hours later it was missed. The boys in my dormitory testified to my suspicious habit of rising early. I explained that I wanted to see the mist roll up from the river. The cruel part of it was that I had not really cared for the dumpling, which gave to my love of nature the air of hungry pilfering. After that, whenever I was restless at dawn, a head would pop up and cry, * Hullo ! no dumpling ! ' and promptly the whole room would pounce on my clothes. I never saw the mist roll up again. I never ate dumpling again." You perceive that these memories deal with illicit eating, although, in the doctor's case, there was a higher thought, clogged unhappily by the sceptical materialism that surrounded him. It will be worthy of note, when his biography comes to be written, that through- 88 " Clouds of Glory out his professional life he set his authority against heavy puddings. Thus has he turned the irony of a childish humiliation to the dis- interested service of his species. I know a novelist who, after taking my pledge to con- ceal his identity, admitted that he owed his earliest inspiration to the unconscious weight of three mature ladies in a four-wheeled cab. " I had run an errand for my mother," he said, " and as I was crossing a street, the cab knocked me down, and went over my right leg. Two benevolent strangers picked me up, and took me home in a carriage. On the way I heard one remark that the three old women in the cab could not have weighed together less than six hundred pounds. When the doctor examined my leg, it was found, to the general surprise, not to be broken. I can still see the benevolent strangers look- ing at me respectfully. 'Six hundred pounds, plus the weight of the cab ! ' they exclaimed, ' This lad's bones must be made of uncommon stuff.' Then they congratulated my mother, who smiled proudly through her tears." Here he paused, and I said, " Very interest- ing ; but, as you have not developed into a Sandow, what is the point of the anecdote ? " 89 Points of View " Oh, the impatience of journalism ! " said he. " You don't give a man time to unfold his story according to the rules of art." He turned on his heel, and walked away, and I tried in vain to connect the heavy old ladies and the marvellous leg with the beginning of that talent which delights a multitudinous public with legends of blood and blackmail. Next day we met again, and he resumed quite cheerfully, " Short story in two parts. Part Two. My mother, as the kind reader may not have forgotten, was proud of her boy. But the expression of her face was soon changed to terror. My leg had swollen enormously ; it was the leg of Daniel Lam- bert. Observe the quaint felicity of this image. Lambert, if I remember rightly, weighed over forty stone, and that was about the fighting weight of the three old ladies who had done me this unpremeditated wrong. But it was not the size of my leg that appalled my anxious mother. I had fallen into an uneasy slumber, and was awakened by a prick- ing sensation in the monstrous limb. My eyes started from my head, for they fell upon a scene at which the stoutest heart might have blenched." "Cheek," I corrected; "hearts don't blench." " Very well," he said. "That's 90 Clouds of Glory" the reviewer all over ! Good morning." You may not believe it, but I had to ask him to lunch to get the rest of the narrative. " Part Three," he continued after his third glass of port. " My mother and I were pale as death, but the doctor did not seem to mind. On my leg were three black palpitating things, gorging my blood. They dropped off, one after the other, leaving a thin red trickle. Three thin red trickles ! Leeches," he added solemnly. " Now you know what turned my mind, even in the golden glow of boyhood, to the darker side of life." Here are three typical cases of reminis- cence, not without value to a judgment upon character and opportunity. But the men who told me these stories under pressure would never dream of telling them in general society. The personal experiences they like to relate are sophisticated, full of what they suppose to be ripe wisdom. Moreover, for most of us our childhood is another existence, by- gone and forgotten. Here and there a sensitive temperament has preserved impres- sions of that embryonic stage, calls up scenes at will, analyses, a little morbidly perhaps, characteristics which had their germs in the well-remembered sensations of the child. 91 Points of View Sometimes this is simply a melancholy review ; sometimes it is a discipline. But considering that the child is always father to the man, there is a widespread unconsciousness of the paternity. 92 XII America at Oxford MANY years ago I had a school- mate who went to Oxford. He is now an ornament of the Church, a man of broad views, who gives his parishioners vigorous fillips of common sense. Weather-beaten souls (with eminent names), tossed from spire to spire by variable winds of doctrine, sit under him often, as if they found his pulpit a comforting light- house. But such is the perversity of the secular mind, or if you like the phrase better, such is the tenacity of the trivial which, for some of us, is a substitute for a more useful memory, that whenever I listen to him discoursing on the pitfalls of modern life, I murmur reproach- fully, " Oh yes, my dear fellow, but you never warned me against that ' cup ' ! " Thereby hangs a tale which carries me back to the time when I paid him a visit at Oxford, and, in the common room of his college, helped him to consume a modest supply of a comfortable ale called " archdeacon," which, I have no doubt such is the power of Oxford tradition is still performing archidiaconal functions. Not at that does memory point a querulous finger. 93 Points of View It was the mysterious " cup," my friend, brewed for the luncheon you gave to a party of which I was the humblest member. Beauty was there with her mother matre pulchrd filia pulchrior, as one undergraduate remarked with academic propriety. A taste for letters was naturally con- spicuous at your table. Would that we had drunk nothing but the Pierian spring ! For some demon was in that " cup." It stood, I remember, in the middle of the table, in a large glass vessel, of chaste design. Its tint was amber ; in its lucent depths there lurked green foliage, symbol of the vine. You see I am moved to blank verse by the thought of it. You had the pleasant fantasy to send it round and round the board as a loving bowl, which we grasped with both hands in turn ; and when Beauty put it to her lips, at least one person in the company wanted to quote " Or leave but a kiss within the cup, And I'll not ask for wine," but was quelled by the maternal eye. Ah ! had there been only kisses in that "cup"! To what malevolent sprite did you confide the brewing ? Suddenly a mist enveloped the table, and when it had cleared away, Beauty and her mamma had vanished. You were in 94 America at Oxford the midst of a deeply interesting anecdote of the Master of your college when this obscurity came over us. Alas! the tale was never finished, and instead of the burst of discreet merriment, which would have been its due, there came the gasping question, " What, in heaven's name, is it made of?" as several haggard men sat star- ing at the witches' caldron which had undone the decorous feast. This sad adventure came back to me when I was at Oxford the other day, and chanced to make the acquaintance of an American family. At this season Oxford is given over to Ameri- cans, who take placid possession, as they do of Stratford-on-Avon, making the stray English visitor feel that he is an interloper. They are not millionaires. You do not meet Mr. Pier- pont Morgan in the cloisters. Mr. Carnegie, who is fond of telling American youth that reading novels in free libraries is an excellent use of their time, but that the ancient classics can tell them nothing save the crimes and follies of Greek and Roman savages well, you don't run against Mr. Carnegie at Oxford. But there is more than a sprinkling of the people Mr. W. D. Howells describes so admir- ably the Americans who are not bursting with new inventions or with projects for buying the 95 Points of View universe. They are simple enough to be im- pressed by the age of our institutions, and in the shadow of the college towers they are not troubled about the pace or the price of things. They look like gentle strangers from a some- what arid climate, to whom you can safely tell that old story about the rolling and watering of the green sward in the college " quad." Indeed, I tried it on my American family with perfect impunity. "Yes," I said, "one of your compatriots asked a gardener how he made the grass so green, and he answered, 1 Well, we lays it down about the Middle Ages, and we sows it, and looks at it a bit, and the Wars of the Roses comes along, and Old Noll ; but they don't make no difference, for we goes on a-rollin' and a-waterin' until we get it just as green as you see.' ' They laughed at this in a most comforting way. Some Americans you meet give you the idea that their country manufactures all the jokes for home consumption, and exports the surplus. But my new acquaintances had that freshness of mind which perceives the under- lying gravity of our humour the depth of the roots, so to speak, whence springs the spreading chestnut-tree. Charmed with such simplicity, to which one might have quoted 96 America at Oxford " Evangeline " without running the risk of being told that it was " a back number," I accompanied them on the river, and guided them up the little tributary stream that runs by the tower of Magdalen. Term was over, but here and there was still a studious youth curled up in a punt under a tree, pondering some classic tome with knitted brows. I ex- plained that this was the custom of the place, a rigid law, indeed, which had never been broken save by a rash undergraduate, who brought a fair damsel one day to destroy the academic peace. She persisted in mismanaging his punt, making it circle in the narrow stream, until her graceful figure and her large eyes drew all the students out of the groves to " bump " the punt solely for the pleasure of apologising to this attractive intruder. "A shocking scene," I added, " which greatly agitated the University ; but such is the force of tradition in Oxford that no enactment was needed to prevent a repetition of this incident. The spirit of culture overcame that passing weakness. Even the rash undergraduate grew to be a recluse. At one time he had set the flippant example of naming punts after the heroines of the lighter poets. When you saw him reclining in a craft called Who is Sylvia ? 97 G Points of View you were not surprised to note that he was reading a newspaper rather pink in colour. But he re-christened his boat Minerva, and I don't think that during term there is anything more feminine on the river." During this improving discourse the Ameri- can paterfamilias looked thoughtfully at his son, a boy of fourteen, who blushed under his father's gaze, as American boys still blush in the novels of Mr. Howells. His sister rallied him gently, and then said to me, " He just colours up because he knows what poppa is thinking about. Poppa wants to put him under that tree with a good, solid book, and make sure that he don't look up when any girl comes along, and makes a punt go round and round, and every boy's head go round with it ! " " That's what I shall expect of him when he comes here," said his father gravely. "He's young," I remarked; "you are looking ahead." " We Americans always look ahead," he retorted. It was the first touch of national spirit I noticed in him. "When he has had a course at Yale, I expect him to win a Rhodes scholarship in our State, and come to Oxford. Nothing is overlooked, Mr. Jaques. I have even chosen the college he is to enter." When I heard its name I had 98 America at Oxford a sudden misgiving. Perhaps I turned a little pale, for he said, " Have you anything to say against it ? Isn't it as good as the others ? " The boy looked at me anxiously, and a shade of mistrust came into his sister's eyes. " Ex- cellent college," I stammered. " It sends the cream of English youth into all the professions, especially the Church. The archdeacon is par- ticularly good and not too strong." " But I don't want to be an archdeacon," said the boy. " No career for archdeacons in our State," said his father. I explained that " archdeacon " was the college ale, and told them what Sydney Smith said about archidiaconal functions, and they laughed joyously. Bless the simplicity which can still laugh at Sydney Smith ! But oh, my boyhood's friend, you who warn me from the pulpit against pitfalls, what am I to say to these simple Americans about that " cup " ? How can I let the lad go to your college without arming him against the perils lurking in a large glass vessel, of chaste design ? Nobody believes in magic potions now. Love philtres are scoffed at. But don't tell me there was nothing uncanny in that smiling liquor which played such havoc with our wits. 99 XIII Men and Modes NO man, I take it, is a hero to his tailor. As may have been in the picturesque times when Horace Walpole sat down to breakfast in partridge-coloured silk hose ; for man used to ruffle it then in finery which made him a redoubtable rival of woman in the feminine arts. He loved colours, and had the courage to wear them. As late as the Reform Bill he was still leading the fashions ; and it was what D'Orsay wore that took the public eye, not the drapery of the reigning beauty. Disraeli made an indelible impression on a contemporary chronicler as " the man in the green trousers." Dickens was heroic in a fancy waistcoat, running over with gold chains. Nobody dreamed of the coming era when the sceptre of fashion would be yielded absolutely to woman, and men would be content to dress with a sheeplike and unobtrusive monotony. Why, it is within living memory that young bucks swaggered down Piccadilly in check trousers of a pattern which provoked the joyous comment of the street-boy. Who dares to wear them now? Save for a sprightly 100 Men and Modes waistcoat here and there, we are all clad in such sad-coloured raiment that a Puritan of Cromwell's time, if he came to life again, would think the reign of the Latter- Day Saints had indeed begun. I hope he would not stay long enough to discover his error. Now all this makes a melancholy show for any tailor with taste and initiative. I see that the organ of his enterprising trade as- cribes our poor spirit to " the modesty of the average man." This deplorable weakness hin- ders the adoption of some happy suggestions. For instance, it is proposed that for evening dress we should sparkle, like Dizzy, in green trousers, or plum, or crimson. A crimson suit now would go uncommonly well with black eyes and a swarthy complexion. Are you fair, my young friend ? Does a boyish pink still mantle on your cheek in moments of emotion ? Then pale blue is your tint for evening wear. For myself I fancy plum ; it would give a rich but gentle flush to a complexion which is a trifle autumnal. What say you, O comrades of the Middle Age ? Does not this idea revive in your jealous bosoms some hope of cutting a dash in the shining eyes which wander over us at present as in- 101 Points of View differently as if we were pillar - boxes or policemen ? Shall not each of us say : " I do mistake my person all this while ; Upon my life, she finds, although I cannot, Myself to be a marvellous proper man. I'll be at charges for a looking-glass, And entertain some score or two of tailors, To study fashions to adorn my body " ? To wit, the plum-coloured suit, or the ver- milion, or the silver-grey ! And what holds us back when such a prospect to the impulsive ardour gives the charge? Nothing but "the modesty of the average man " ! An observant woman has made the shrewd remark that if men were more careful of their dress they might develop the national char- acter. They might be more adaptive in their commercial methods, more alert and novel in their exports. Surely, there were more ideas in circulation when men wore green trousers ! That everlasting black coat at dinner ; what does it typify but a spiritless acquiescence in the humdrum ? Minds are reduced to one pattern ; we are as much alike as the houses in Gower Street. Every citizen is expected to carry an umbrella, and is deemed eccentric when he takes his neighbour's. The really original man never has an umbrella. Dizzy 102 Men and Modes never had an umbrella. " When it comes on to rain," he explained, " I take shelter under the umbrella of the first pretty woman I see." Who has the courage now for such impudence, or the genius to make it agreeable ? What services might we not render to our country to literature, science, and the arts if we broke up this desperate sameness of garb, and radiated in divers colours ! Don't talk to me about "the modesty of the average man " ! That can be overcome by organisa- tion. I do not undertake to appear at an evening party, or to sit in Mr. George Alex- ander's stalls, in my suit of softly glowing plum without a little backing. We must form a brotherhood ; it might be called the Prismatic League ; and the members should be sworn never to dine in the plain black garments of an effete generation. When this became known, hostesses would be eager to invite the Prismatics for the sake of the novelty; and then we should be enabled to spread our civilising message. Of course, a reform of this character would run some initial risk of misconception. In a crush of arriving guests in the hall, you might overhear something like this : " I had no idea that our host kept so many pampered menials." 103 Points of View 11 And all in different liveries, too ! But some of them must be strangers. There's a foot- man over there in scarlet." " The Royal livery! The King's here!" "Pooh! That fellow must be one of the musicians the Red Manchurian Band. Wonder whether he plays the tom-tom or the sackbut." He looks moderately civilised ; let's ask him." There- upon an inquiring youth, with a bland smile, accosts you : " Speak English ? " " Cer- tainly." "That's all right. Going to give us your native wood-notes wild, eh ? What's the national instrument of Manchuria reed or brass ? " " Can't say ; but you would do very well as a tinkling cymbal." " Hullo ! " says the bland youth. " Don't you belong to the Red Manchurian Band ? " " Certainly not. I am a member of the Prismatic League ! " Such a misunderstanding might retard the movement for a short time. It would be still more embarrassing to be mobbed by nocturnal roysterers, and arrested by the police as the cause of the disturbance. Imagine an interview next morning with Mr. Plowden, who avows in his book that he has a severe eye for people with "abnormal ears." What would he say to the dishevelled but innocent Leaguer in evening green ? Mr. Plowden : 104 Men and Modes " What is the meaning of this masquer- ade ? " The Leaguer : " No masquerade, I assure you. I was going peacefully home last night after a dinner-party " Mr. Plow- den : " Were they all dressed like you ? " The Leaguer (impressively) : " By no means ! That would be quite contrary to the principles of the League. Some of us were in red, some in yellow. My friend Jaques, in his favourite plum, looked perfectly " Mr. Plowden: "Is this a League of Mad Hatters or Crazy Tailors?" It is always difficult to reason with a magis- trate ; but when so much is at stake the attempt must be made. The Leaguer : " Will you permit me to explain, sir? I am a member of the Prismatic League ; and it is our cardinal principle that for evening dress we shall choose all the colours of the rainbow." Mr. Plowden (looking at his Clerk, and tap- ping his forehead) : " Dear me ! Very sad case ! " The Leaguer (with dignity) : " You are quite mistaken, Mr. Plowden. All our members are as sane as I am." (Voice at the back of the court : " I tell yer my 'usband was worse than that. 'E used to crawl on the roof in his shirt and mew ! ") The Leaguer (persuasively) : " The object of the League, Mr. Plowden, ought to appeal especially to 105 Points of View you." Mr. Plowden (with gentle forbear- ance) : " Indeed ! " The Leaguer : " Yes, sir. You say in your excellent book that the police- magistrate cannot impress the public as he ought because he wears no distinguishing mark of his judicial office. Now if you were dressed like me " (Great laughter. Mr. Plowden shakes his head, and murmurs, " Poor fellow!") The Leaguer : " Of course, sir, I mention that only by way of respectful illustration, and not to excite that mirth in your court which you so much deplore. Briefly, my case is this : the Prismatics have banded themselves together to break the monotony of evening dress, and so impart to the national character that variety, and that original impulse, which in these days of foreign competition it sorely needs. Last night I was dining for this great purpose " Mr. Plowden : " Never mind ; that will do now. You are remanded for medical in- quiries." This incident, with its ramifications, including leading articles in all the papers, and a contribution by Sir James Crichton-Brown to the British Medical Journal, would wrap the cause in gloom for a while. But we should not be discouraged, and we should refuse the invitation to appear at the leading music-halls for enormous salaries. 106 Men and Modes I foresee a time when the movement will be triumphant, and will take its place in the chronicles of fashion which eclipses the first- night notices of a new play. " In a brilliant audience," I shall read with complacency, " the men's costumes, as usual, far surpassed the toilettes of the ladies in brilliancy and audacity of design. That great social reformer, Jaques, it is true, wore his characteristic and historical plum. But Mr. Plowden was the observed of all observers in his judicial robes green slashed with yellow, and capriciously picked out with crimson." 107 XIV Country Life I HAVE a friend, a distinguished writer, who has lately surprised me by a sudden and seemingly incurable passion for the country. Town I imagined to be his life-blood ; and as for nature, I should have thought there was enough of that for a man who lived within bird-call of Kensington Gardens. But he has lately taken a house in Surrey, and there I found him dispensing bread, and an allocution dimly suggestive of St. Francis, to an assemblage of hungry birds on the lawn. "My dears," said he, "this person who has just arrived is a sad illustra- tion of what I have been telling you about the canker-worm of life in cities. You need not hop ; it is not a nice worm ; it is a bitterly unprofitable worm from which you would turn with a shudder. My friend here, in the pride of his blindness, thinks I am having a mighty dull time, and he is going to amuse me with flotsam and jetsam from the Dead Sea gaiety of London. He will sneer in his bland way at the calm of this beautiful garden, and at you, my little parishioners, to whose temporal wants I delight to minister, whilst you teach 108 Country Life me how much the human pastor may learn from the feathered laity. Yes, he will laugh at us ; but we have our laughter too, wiser and deeper, for out of his own newspapers we can confound his boasted philosophy ! " Here he diverged to the columns of a journal, and read to me some official statistics about the alarming growth of urban popula- tion. " My dear Jaques," he proceeded, " don't you see that if this goes on there won't be elbow-room in London ? It is no use clamouring for wider streets ; all these millions of human beings will choke your new avenues. When I took my last walk in Piccadilly, I saw a despairing notice to pedestrians, jutting from a lamp-post : ' Keep to the Right.' Imagine that emblem of order in the rapids of Niagara ! Now what is the plain duty of the citizen ? Manifestly to reduce the congested mass by living in the country. Sir, I am a pioneer. You come down from town with your ineffable air of being up-to-date, never suspecting that you are lagging miserably behind the wisdom even of statistics. And you smile don't contradict me I say you smile in a patronising way on my rural contentment, although I have done you a service by yielding to you my dwindling 109 Points of View share of the London pavement ! " At this point a servant appeared with a fresh loaf, which was promptly broken and scattered among the birds. "That's the fourth loaf this morning," remarked the pioneer's wife thoughtfully. " Our baker is baking himself to death. The seedsman is out of bird-seed, and has sent to town for a sack. He has also sent for goldfinches from Seven Dials. He says that since we came the local industries have fairly hummed." My friend took a few animated strides. "Mark," he said, "what one can do with a resolute purpose to revive the prosperity of the agricultural districts." " But why keep goldfinches ? " I asked respectfully. " Because canaries have no character," he answered. " Besides, I have a scheme for winning the confidence of all these wild creatures that you see. It would never occur to you." " Salt on their tails," I murmured. " When I have trained the goldfinches," he continued, ignor- ing the interruption, " to eat out of my hand, the sight will tame the others." "With a handful of crumbs you can make the intimate acquaintance of any sparrow in Kensington Gardens," I said. "Pooh! man. You know as little of bird-life as the people who write no Country Life books on ornithology. There are no wild birds in Kensington Gardens. The place is an enervating aviary, for the birds are brought up there without their natural enemies. Pam- pered puppets of nursemaids and children, they have never known the stimulating perils of freedom. You might as well study the birds that sing on the stage in a woodland scene in Shakespeare." " He spends a whole morning watching our birds through an opera-glass," remarked his wife. " I have watched nightin- gales through an opera-glass," I said. " In the 'Country Girl' at Daly's " "Look at those chaffinches," my host broke in. "The same pair honour my wife's ' At Home ' every day. I feel as if I had pronounced the bene- diction on their nuptials, and I would swear in any court to their conjugal fidelity. I knew a case in which a little acid was dropped on the feathers of two chaffinches, leaving a crimson spot on each. They were never seen apart." " With such a brand of publicity," I suggested, " they would scarcely venture." Here the servant brought a large plate of toast. " Too much bread, you know," ex- plained my hostess, " is rather gouty ; so we distribute toast, and escape the task of tying up in Points of View inflamed claws with red flannel." " And thus miss an opportunity of fostering another local industry. But toast seems to demand a deal of pecking," I added, as the chaffinches retired baffled from a huge slice. "What about beak- ache ? " " Your ignorance of birds, my dear chap," put in the host, " is truly urban. You will be wondering next how these birds can eat so much. Pray consider the muscular energy needed to sustain them on the wing and keep up the flow of song." "Think of the tits," said his wife, " and their perpetual tittering." " Prima donnas, I have heard, require copious supplies of stout and oysters." " Well, imagine what they would require if they had wings." My friend took a few more strides, and peered into a tree. " If you were an observant man, Jaques," he said, "you would see papa blackbird now giving young master blackbird a lesson in piping. How many ornithologists can tell you that when the young blackbird is turned out of the parental nest to shift for himself he will come back at the end of a year and receive this tuition from his father? The domestic affections of birds offer a lesson which is wasted on man." " And the cuckoo " I began. "The cuckoo," said he, "is a freak. 112 Country Life You should observe the true paterfamilias of the foliage when he is commanded by his spouse to sit on the eggs in her brief absence. He catches your eye, and tries to hide his crest, pretending to be a hen. Mamma returns, scolds him for his clumsiness, and resumes her place in a grand maternal way, while he sits deferentially on a twig and pacifies her with a trill. It is a family picture that might soften the most callous heart." We were now joined by a neighbour with a wistful eye, who is no novice in the country, and I was struck by the relish with which he narrated capital anecdotes of town life, lapsing into impassive silence when my friend made a fresh excursion into the habits of birds. We were soon deep in reminiscences of the theatre, and of wayward figures in society. In driving from the station I had noticed the new post- office, and my flyman had informed me that, a stingy Government having refused to bear the whole cost of the building, a benevolent duchess had subscribed the balance. " Quite true," said the neighbour, " and to crown the obligation she might sit on a stool and sell stamps." " Heavens ! " said my host with a gesture of disdain. " Don't talk as if you were craving for a fashionable bazaar in the "3 H Points of View Botanical Gardens. See ! Here's a starling. He brings luck. ' Now I must tell you of the starling ; He really is a perfect darling : When you're feeling weak and ill He comes and soothes you with his bill.' Tell us about your beautiful green snake," he added, turning to the neighbour. " Ah ! yes," responded the other wearily. " My youngster had a green snake, which was sent from town in a box. He thought it would fascinate frogs, and possibly swallow them. But the day of its arrival it crept into my wife's work- basket and was found dead with a reel of cotton in its jaws. We buried it with funeral rites. If you come to my place I'll show you the grave." The pastimes of the country seem to me a little sombre. I hinted this to my friend's wife, and she said, " Not for the birds and the animals. For a week or two after we came, all the domestic pets of our landlord, who had moved out for us, called regularly at tea-time, especially the Angora cat, which preferred cream to milk. You have seen how contented the birds are. And I don't think the sports are sombre for the baker and the seedsman." 114 XV A t a Woman's Club \ I HAVE been forced to tell Olivia that I cannot take tea at her club any more. This is a considerable privation to me, for Olivia is at her best about five o'clock, and whips the cream of the beau monde with vivacious art. I do not say that the beau monde belongs conspicuously to Olivia's club, which is the haunt of ladies in the learned profession, chiefly the feminine branches of journalism. But journalism is a dairy which supplies you with the cream of things in general, and this, as I have said, is daintily whipped by Olivia, whose skill is well known to the readers of various ladies' papers. Un- happily, it is the only cream that appears at tea-time. That is the burden of my woe, though not the worst of it. To speak plain truth, the tea at Olivia's club is the worst that ever flowed from the spout of earthen- ware. Mounting the staircase, as I have told her, I feel like Socrates going to his hemlock- " Shall I be funny now, or shall we have tea first ? " I remarked on the last occasion, as we exchanged greetings. " If you are impatient to begin, my dear man," said Olivia, " pray "5 Points of View do." " Don't you know it is a quotation ? I must be apt and illusive ; that is my business. Nothing like keeping your hand in. The quotation is from the Pantaloon in Barrie's play. Shall I be funny now, or " "Pantaloon!" echoed Olivia. "Why I thought you were Socrates." " They are much of a muchness in my case," I explained. "The most jovial Pantaloon would find it difficult to be funny after tea in this club ; and Socrates, after his hemlock, you remember, was not gay." That was how the breeze came on to blow rather stiffly. "Let us be serious," I said. " It is amazing to me that you can sit down to tea without cream " " Cream," in- terrupted Olivia, " is a luxury that should be banished from the simple life. Besides, it spoils the flavour of my tea." "Anything that spoilt the flavour of that," I suggested, " would be a public benefit, if I may speak with the manly frankness of a guest. But it is not only you whose life is at stake. At a moderate computation there must be two hundred women at this moment drinking this sinister fluid. They swarm here every after- noon. Why, if men thronged a club as women throng yours, we should have a civil war. A man joins a club on the understanding 116 At a Woman's Club that the other members will be there inter- mittently. To be there always we would vote an indecent abuse of the rules." I may remark here that, when animated, I have a Celtic habit of waving the right hand. " Do you know," broke in Olivia at this point, " when I watch your taper fingers describing graceful curves, I always think of a butterfly, and wish I had a net to catch it ! " At this there was a distinct movement among the two hundred tea-drinkers an unmistakable ripple of amusement. "Oh yes!" Olivia went on. " They're all listening. How can they help it when you make yourself a public orator ? Besides, they like to hear a man descanting on the selfishness of men's clubs. With you a club seems to be a place where you expect to find half-a-dozen people to glare at. Come, now ! Women are the only good fellows after all ! Here we flock together to be sociable, and when you speak we follow with fascinated interest the motions of your beautiful hand. Shall I give you another cup of tea ? " "Another cup!" I repeated. "Do you know that in my club this tea would be flung in the teeth of the committee? Do you know you could guy a man with one of these crumpets ? " " I haven't succeeded 117 Points of View to-day," remarked Olivia demurely. " There's something in the management of a woman's club," I proceeded, "which makes for martyr- dom. You have not asked me to lunch, by the way ! " " Oh ! " she cried, " if you're as eloquent as this at tea, what would you be at lunch ? And at dinner ! But I'll tell you what you can do for us. You shall talk these noble sentiments into a gramophone, and I'll keep it going all the evening ! " " This irrelevant persiflage, madam, does not deceive me," I said. " Do you poison your- selves for love ? " " Inquisitor i " murmured Olivia, with her eyes cast down. " Or is it only a pose ? Must you be saints in your injuries, even when you injure yourselves with your own meals ? Now, in a man's club we do not make a virtue of courting dyspepsia. An offended member writes some plain words to the committee, or backs his bill with suit- able epithets. Here a waitress hands you a wretched little slip of paper with no room to write anything, even if you had the courage. At my club we have just appointed a vigilance committee to overhaul the kitchen, and if necessary, to send up the head of the cook on a lordly dish. Oh yes ! if a man's club is to be carried on we must show the pitiless 118 At a Woman's Club spirit of the feudal barons, who used to nail the ears of a careless varlet to the door. But ours is a humanitarian age, and, of course, we should compensate his widow and orphans. You ought to try our resolute policy here. The minion who made the horrible brew in this teapot ought to be summoned to your presence and admonished with hatpins. The scars would remind her of her duty." Here I paused and nibbled fiercely at a piece of cake. " You must not suppose," I went on, " that I cherish any personal grievance because the tea you gave me is unspeakably bad. As a philosopher, I have a natural desire for social improvement. Now, why should women's clubs be so completely differ- entiated from men's clubs ? In our friend H. G. Wells' s Utopia women's dress, he says, is not so extravagantly differentiated from men's dress as we see it in this imperfect age. For instance, that very smart hat you are wearing to-day would never do in Utopia. Women don't wear hats there except to keep the sun off." There was another mirthful undulation of the two hundred. " Yes, and any woman who persists in wearing flounces and fallals, laces, and feathers keeps them for the entertainment of her domestic circle, and 119 Points of View seldom ventures to exhibit them to the public eye." " What a lot of callers she must have!" said Olivia. " Don't you see the men crowd- ing to her club at tea-time?" "Ah!" I retorted triumphantly, " but in Utopia the woman's club won't be differentiated from the man's club by its infernal tea." "In Utopia," rejoined Olivia, "the woman's club will be managed by you and Mr. Wells, no doubt. That is what you are driving at, dear philosopher. I have listened to your tirade with the patience of an angel ; but what it comes to is simply this that you cannot grasp the idea of a club where all the thought is not about eating and drinking. In a man's club you talk of nothing else, and you call the eternal subject politics, and the interests of the nation ! I assure you that here we get through an entire day without saying a word about our victuals. That is our blessed differentiation from you ! " There was something like a suppressed cheer from those tea-drinkers. They rejoiced in the discomfiture of man. Ha ! they didn't know I was going to write this article. At Olivia's club, let me tell you, there's a billiard-room ; and when two ladies play a game of a hundred up it lasts about a fortnight ! You see I am I2O At a Woman's Club dipping my pen in what Marie Corelli calls the " secret fount of gall " ; only it isn't secret, but quite shameless. For Olivia's defence of the billiards bless you, she would defend anything feminine ! you had better consult those ladies' papers wherein she sparkles every week. 121 XVI In the Fog 1 is, I am told, a sprightly nobleman now in a crack regi- ment who once volunteered for the public service in a singular capacity. He went up for examination by the authorities who select the London cab- men. Before you can take out a license to drive a cab you have to satisfy those discerning persons that you know your way about town, and are not hopelessly unfamiliar with the management of horses. This nobleman dis- played a surprising knowledge of London. The byways of Mile End were as clear to him as the pleasant vales of Kensington, and he drove one of the examiners in his hansom down the steps below the Duke of York's Column and up again, to the great delight of the bystanders. The examiner was a little put out (he is said to have uttered unseemly cries during the journey), and when he alighted he gasped, " Do you expect to get your license after this behaviour ? " " Well, I'm not very keen about it," said the sprightly nobleman, " but I wanted to show you that I can manage a horse. Suppose you were lost in a fog, 122. In the Fog and your cab went sliding down these steps, wouldn't you like your cabby to know how to land you safely ? " The examiner was not conciliated when the nobleman explained that he had no desire to drive a cab for a livelihood, but wanted to be ready in emergency to pop a tipsy or bewildered cabman inside the hansom and take the reins himself. I was reminded of this example of public spirit by an incident in the fog which has enveloped us for a whole week. A cabman, trying to turn a corner where there was none, made his horse dance mournfully on the side- walk, and a nervous lady in the cab remon- strated with her companion. " George," she said, " I am sure this man has never driven a horse before." " Likely enough," said George. " On a foggy night, I believe, they always put on a new hand. It gives him practice." " Don't be stupid ! " said the lady severely. " Why can't you drive ? " " Neglected education, my dear. And even if I could, how would you like to have the cab- man here beside you ? When I turned him off his perch, we couldn't leave him in the street, you know." " I would rather have him beside me than you. He, at any rate, would be sym- pathetic and respectful ! " " No, he wouldn't. 123 Points of View He would say that I had never driven a horse before, and he would probably swear." " At you. I mean he would be sympathetic and respectful to me." "Do you mean to say it would make no difference to you if a cabman swore at your husband ? " " It might, if you drove badly. Then I should suspect that you deserved it." " Thank you. Perhaps you wish I were the cabman instead of him ! " " Oh, if I thought you would know the busi- ness, I should be enchanted ! " Now, if George had qualified himself to drive a cab, and had braced his nerve with that exercise on the Duke of York's staircase, all this bitterness might have been avoided. His wife (a woman of spirit, as you perceive) would have been proud of him ; and the story would have made George the hero of dinner- parties for a whole season. I tried to be a hero once on the strength of having saved a cabman's life. He was driving me in a fog, when the horse's belly-band and one of the reins broke simultaneously. I leaped out and stood aghast on the pavement, while the horse went round in a circle until the cabman shouted, " Catch 'old of 'er 'ead ! " It was a horrid moment ; the animal loomed grimly through the fog ; with rigid arm outstretched 124 In the Fog I made a lucky clutch. The cabman got down, and in a voice of emotion said, " You've saved my life. Another moment and she'd 'ave been off into the traffic." I believe he spoke sincerely, but I wish I had given him my address and requested him to send me a written certificate. That story has never been a success. Whenever I reach the first climax in this style : " Half-way between two lamp- posts, just where the fog was blackest, I heard the belly-band and one of the reins snap like pistol-shots, and in a flash I saw myself in an ambulance and a good-looking nurse at the foot of my hospital-bed ; but in the next flash I was out of that cab, and safe and sound on my feet " I say that when I reach that point there is an expression of chilly incredulity on the faces of the company. A friend took me aside on one occasion, and said, in a kindly way, "You had better tone that down, old chap. The belly-band may snap, or the rein, but not both. And leave out the pistol-shots and the hospital-nurse." This does not deter me from relating another adventure. One morning this week, about one o'clock, I was passing the National Gallery, when I noticed two dim figures in the dense fog, a tall man and a boy. The tall man said, 125 Points of View " Pardon me, but if you are going in the direction of Shaftesbury Avenue you may be of service to my young friend here, who tells me that he is in search of that thoroughfare. I am but a poor guide, for I have been in the East for many years, and to-night I have been dining with an old friend at a fashionable hotel, the Hummums, and upon my word, in this fog, I am just as much astray as this young gentleman." I looked at him closely in a faint lamplight, and saw a kindly brown face that seemed oddly familiar. His clothes had an ancient cut, and he carried a light malacca cane. "This is the National Gal- lery," I remarked, " and we are in Trafalgar Square." " The National Gallery ! " he ex- claimed. " I hope my young friend, whose acquaintance I made but a minute ago, will give some of his leisure hours to that great collection of masters. Nothing trains the mind, sir, like pictures. They soften much the manners, as the old Latin author says. But Trafalgar Square, I fear, does not exer- cise that refining influence on the people. I have read of demonstrations, sir, of rude defi- ance of authority." " That seldom happens now," I said. " During your absence abroad, London has been visited by such heavy and 126 In the Fog prolonged fogs that when the people wanted to demonstrate in Trafalgar Square they could not find it. So when the fog lifted, and the processions were tired out, they found them- selves at some spot with placid associations, like Pinner." He seemed pleased with this political de- velopment, and I continued : " Besides, there is very little now to demonstrate about. Since these fogs settled down upon us we have pretty nearly solved the social problem. Poor people soon acquired the habit of wandering from their homes, and losing themselves in the almost perpetual night. The papers an- nounced one day that a number of persons who had gathered on the doorstep of a member of the aristocracy, rang the bell and requested shelter. The footman was disposed to pack them off with rough words ; but the master came out and invited the whole party to supper. His friends said afterwards that a succession of dull dinner-parties had unhinged his mind, and he said that his new guests were vastly more original and amusing than the old. Whether his example was good or bad, it worked something like a revolution. The poor made a practice of assembling at the doors of the nobility, whose curiosity was 127 Points of View stimulated by the remarkable collection of Whitechapel anecdotes with which the first nobleman's visitors had enriched him. It be- came the fashion to ask the poor to dinner, and they gradually took free quarters in the West End, until the distinction between poverty and wealth was almost nominal. I undertake to say that you might ring at any Belgravian mansion to-night, and be shown into the best spare bedroom, while the cook would cheerfully rise from his couch to prepare a hot repast." " I rejoice to hear it," said the stranger. " For myself I care nothing. But I think that such a lodging as you mention would be of benefit to our young friend, who would thus have an opportunity of mixing with people of breeding. Why go to Shaftesbury Avenue, my boy, if " The boy broke into a shriek of laughter. " Why, he's a-kiddin' of you, gov'nor," said this amiable urchin. " He's one of them newspaper chaps as makes folks like you believe anything. I ain't been a printer's devil without knowing the likes o' him ! " " You have amused yourself, sir, at my expense," said the stranger quietly. " So this is now the mission of the Press. How different from 128 In the Fog the days of my friends Mr. Warrington and Mr. Pendennis ! Quantum mutatus ab illo ! " He swung his cane and vanished in the fog, and I believe he was the ghost of Thomas Newcome. 129 XVII The Perils of Crowding Eus consider the Crowd a good Bank Holiday subject. Some years ago an ingenious Frenchman wrote a treatise on the psychology of the Crowd. His theory was that, when people congregate, they will behave collectively in a manner in which they would not behave individually. Not an unreasonable theory, when you reflect that people gathered in the London streets will cheer the King of Spain, whereas one solitary person in a street would probably be too bashful to lift his voice. But it is often the fate of philosophical theories to grow out of all proportion to common sense. This is what has happened to the Crowd : it has be- come a monster. Doctrinaires have made it so terrifying that I am afraid to sit down to dinner when the company numbers, let us say, a baker's dozen. Sir Martin Conway, who has an amazing article in the Nineteenth Century entitled "Is Parliament a Mere Crowd ? " tells us gravely that to be quite rational a crowd should not consist of more than nine persons. Above that number it becomes dangerous. I have 130 The Perils of Crowding met people who refused to dine with thirteen at table. The other evening a friend of mine who came late to dinner, and was told by way of jest that there were thirteen of us, turned pale, started from his chair, and said he would go home. His wife was ill, and he would not risk the omen. With some difficulty we proved to him by infallible arithmetic that we were only ten. But we ought to have known that the number ten was as damning as thirteen. Let us put our shocking state in the words of Sir Martin Conway, " A Crowd is a creature devoid of religion, devoid of human morals, ungoverned by reason, the victim of every kind of sentiment and sentimentality, puffed up with pride, and belongs in the scale of living creatures to the realm, not of men, but of beasts." That's the sort of dinner-party we were ! Ten innocent citizens, who had gathered for a modest feast, and (as we thought) a flow of soul, was transformed by worse than Circean magic into beasts that lack discourse of reason ! When I was a lad there was a popular ditty about the " Ten Little Nigger Boys," whose numbers were gradually and sadly diminished. " Ten little nigger boys going out to dine One had a " Points of View Dear me ! I forget what calamity befell him, but it reduced the party to nine. This was long before that ingenious Frenchman wrote his treatise ; and so we used to sing with mistaken sorrow how persistent misfortune reduced the number to eight, and so on, until "there were none." Blessed none! Those little negro boys didn't know, and we didn't know, that as they faded away they ceased to be the irreligious, inhuman, sentimental, con- ceited, and beastly crowd, and rose in the spiritual scale to angelic bliss. Paterfamilias, when he counts his brood at breakfast after reading this column, may re- mark to his wife in an agitated tone, " My dear, there are eleven of us ! " " Yes, John, and why not ? " she will say placidly, with a fond glance at her youngest and chubbiest. " Certainly, my dear," John will respond ; " but, according to the Daily Dispatch, Sir Martin Conway would call us a crowd, in- human, irreligious " "What!!!" Mrs. John will cry, snatching the paper from his trembling hand. Pray be calm, gentle reader. Sir Martin is good enough to say that his theory does not apply to the family. Your eleven darlings are never of one mind and temper. Little Jane cultivates her individuality 132 The Perils of Crowding by pinching little Gerald. When you hear screams from the nursery you can say with a sigh of relief: " My children are not victims of every kind of sentiment ! " The philosopher says nothing about schools, and I wonder whether the Crowd in the play- ground offers any guarantee of religion and humanity. But when the boys go out into the world, then it is all up with them. Think of the Crowd at cricket two elevens and a concourse of spectators ! Think of the various public bodies which must debase the man who joins them ; literary and scientific societies, municipal councils, the House of Commons ! When he deals with the Parliamentary Crowd, Sir Martin hurls the thunderbolts of a Hebrew prophet. Are you aware that in providing for great public ceremonials coronations to wit Parliament takes care to grab the best seats ? This is because it is a Crowd, puffed up with pride. " There is no earthly reason why Parliament should be any better housed than a board school." And look at that stately pile at Westminster, with its Clock Tower and Big Ben ! What would the Board of Education say if the local authorities were to give every elementary school a taller tower and a Bigger Ben ? Have you ever reflected Points of View that it is the "crowd-dignity" of M.P.'s which " leads them to declare that, as repre- senting the country, they must be gloriously entertained," this " crowd-dignity " being the kind of sentimentality that naturally springs from a lack of human morals ? If you have ever dined at the House of Commons, you will know what to think of committees, especially the Kitchen Committee, and their glorious entertainments. Why, in old memoirs you will read how eminent Parliamentarians consumed enormous quantities of port while waiting for divisions ; how in the House itself, Joseph Hume would eat eighteen oranges in the course of a single speech, while his fellow- members sprawled on the benches cracking filberts. And all this because they were a Crowd ! The Parliamentary Crowd, being " an amor- phous creature without a brain," it has to get its thinking done by a council called a Cabinet. But you must go further back a moment ; the constituencies are Crowds, amor- phous creatures with no brains, and they elect " the amorphous Parliament," so you behold in the present Cabinet the political thinking apparatus of the whole nation. But the Cabinet, numbering nineteen or so instead of The Perils of Crowding nine, is itself a Crowd, as amorphous as the rest ; so the inner camarilla say Mr. Balfour, Mr. Akers-Douglas, and Lord Halsbury supply us all with thought. When one of them makes a speech you know that you are getting water straight from the main. The quaintest thing is that the House-Crowd sometimes upsets the Cabinet-Crowd, or the Nation-Crowd makes a clean sweep of both. If the world had only known the nature of Crowds ages ago, say about the time of Simon de Montfort, would Parliaments have come into existence ? Apparently Sir Martin Conway thinks not ; but there is a still greater problem. If, before society began, when man was still boasting the life of the blessed Individualist, and avoiding such entanglements as commit- tees, conversaziones, and tea-meetings if he could have then foreseen to what debase- ment a gregarious instinct might lead, would he not have remained a free and independent cave-dweller, and so have preserved his reason, morals, and religion ? Well, well ! This speculative retrospect doesn't help us much. What are we to do now ? If you can detach yourself from the Crowd, you may write like Sir Martin Conway, compared with whom Diogenes was a flighty Points of View optimist and Timon a humanitarian. You may say that the Crowd is "a mean creature of low habits, untrustworthy, incapable of settled opinions, passionate, and of sickly sentimentality." Yes, but even Diogenes lived in a tub, and you probably live in a club. Sir Martin Conway, a famous moun- taineer, dwells, I presume, on a peak in the Andes, far from the madding crowd and its contagion. But the Club-Crowd ; I feel it pressing on me now, even as I write " devoid of all the higher intelligences that are present in the individual brain." O my individual brain I know it is going ! 136 XVIII Logic for Women 1 MISS CONSTANCE JONES is Principal of Girton College, and her Primer exposes the fallacy that women are incapable of logic. At Girton, it is clear, Major Premiss is not mistaken for a gentleman in the King's uniform ; and although Syllogisms have their Moods, these are not of the feminine variety. All the Moods have technical names, and one of them is Barbara ; but even Barbara shows signs of severe mental training. The " Syllogism in Barbara " does not lead a Girton girl to reason thus : John is a monster ; all men are like John ; all men are monsters. We have known pessimism generated in a feminine mind by a process not unlike this. But Barbara does not need a little judicious petting on the part of John to recover her spirits, and her faith in mankind. She does not concern herself with John at all. In the Primer of Miss Constance Jones she operates in this manner : All opposed to fiscal reform are too conservative ; all Radicals are opposed to 1 " Primer of Logic," by E. Constance Jones. London, Murray, is. 6d. 137 Points of View fiscal reform ; all Radicals are too conservative. It is not an expression of political opinion, but an illustration of Premisses that justify the Conclusion. No ; Barbara is not an insidious Tariff Reformer ; she is simply a Figure ; and a Figure in logic has nothing to do with small waists. Many admirable women have scoffed at logic. They have treated it as a masculine attribute, and have shown that woman has no use for it. If she can conceive by swift intuition what man can master only by a laborious process of reasoning, of what service to her would be a logical mind ? But is man entitled to claim logic as his natural inheritance ? How many of us can affirm that our minds work syste- matically according to the technical apparatus of the Girton Primer ? Are we all ready to detect the Fallacy of Amphibology, wherein we have " an ambiguity of construction which allows of a plurality of interpretations " ? Why, this very Fallacy of Amphibology (though nobody knows it by that highly re- spectable name) is the life and soul of our Parliamentary system. Without it the House of Commons would be reduced to silence. There is only one man there who shows it up, and that is the Speaker. But imagine a 138 Logic for Women Minister answering a question without the help of Amphibology ! A man may acquire a certain breadth of mind from his contact with the world, but to call him a logical being is gross exaggeration. All his personal feelings are at war with the Girton Primer. He is not a disembodied Figure like Barbara, but a creature of passions and prejudices, which cannot be eliminated from his nature. He attaches himself to a party, and his party shouts its war-cries with- out the slightest regard for Syllogisms. He upholds the religious dogmas in which he was born, and what has logic to do with them ? Looking back on the history of mankind, will anybody say that logic has played more than an infinitesimal part in it? Sentiment often a vastly misdirected sentiment has played a prodigious part ; and we, in whom a particular sentiment has weakened with the lapse of ages, may smile at the follies of our ancestors, in whom it was dominant ; but our own contri- bution to the sum of wisdom will be equally diverting to those who come after us. For this reason the historical student at Girton, convinced by her reading that human nature is incurably illogical, may be tempted to smile at the Primer of Miss Constance Jones. i39 Points of View What is the use of Syllogisms which carefully avoid actualities ? There was a period in the history of our currency when a ten-shilling piece was called an angel. So a specious Syl- logism may be constructed thus : All women are angels ; all angels are worth ten shillings apiece ; all women are worth ten shillings. This is not the mood of Barbara, needless to say. She would scorn to attribute angelic qualities to all women, although some eminent men have done it without a blush. That all women are angels is a poetical figment ; to reduce them to the value of ten shillings is sordid pessimism. Both the pessimism and the figment are interesting ; and the logic which entertains neither is not. Nothing in life has any real hold upon us except its fallacies. You find a proof of this in the one human touch of the Girton Primer. "Jevons says that Jeremy Bentham was so much afraid of being misled by the Fallacy of Accent that he used to employ a person to read to him who had a particularly monoton- ous way of reading." Poor old Jeremy ! He wanted to guard his precious intellect against the cajolery of the human voice. Rob the orator of his persuasive music ; rob woman of her tearful accents ; strip humanity 140 Logic for Women of every fascinating irrelevance ; banish the fallacious promptings we draw from Nature with every breath ; and then you may have a race of beings fitted to conduct their affairs in accordance with the Girton Primer. Does no misgiving cross the mind of Miss Constance Jones when she contemplates the figure of Jeremy Bentham listening to a voice without a soul ? Could there be a greater fallacy than his assumption that, in his own mind, he was distilling what he heard into pure reason, un- affected by personal bias ? Let the Girton girl, who despairs of reasoning as dispassionately as Barbara in her Mood, take heart. The Primer of Miss Constance Jones can be quite safely neglected for the more humane ministrations of that accomplished scholar. 141 XIX Motor Cars and Nervous Sys- tems I HAVE no prejudice against motor cars, but I have a nervous system. It received a shock some years ago, when a friend of mine, who keeps a perfect stud of motor cars, drove me from London to Broad- stairs one Bank Holiday. It seemed to me that it was London, London all the way ; streets thronged with children, who might at any moment be reduced to pulp, and with accusing witnesses of our behaviour in a car which had the crushing dignity of a Pickford van. When we came to any open country, we scoured it " scoured the plain " is the classic phrase, I think although, to judge from the dusty expression we left behind us, the plain was none the cleaner for the operation. There was at times a sensation of not touching earth at all, but of ploughing air ; a thrilling sensa- tion which approached delirium. It was useful in a way, for it has enabled me to understand ever since why the motorist, however cautious, when his car is on a bit of unfrequented road, feels the imperious need of letting her go. America is the land of popular phrases, which 142 Motor Cars and Nervous Systems spring heaven knows whence, and mean heaven knows what. I remember a season when the popular phrase in every American city was, " Let her go, Gallagher ! " Who Gallagher was, who or what she was, and why he ought to let her go, I asked in vain. I asked American statesmen, philosophers, and jour- nalists, and they didn't know. Nobody knows to this day. But on the way to Broadstairs I gave a crazy shout " Let her go, Gallagher ! " feeling that Gallagher must be the other name of Phoebus Apollo, who used to drive the horses of the sun, but is now the chauffeur of that celestial Panhard. Since then my nervous system has been shy of Gallagher. Electric broughams that glide about the town with a gentle hum (the cabmen call them " 'ummin' birds," meaning to be de- risive ; but it is really a poetical compliment) are entirely to my taste. I'd own one if I could afford it. When I see electric broughams waiting at the portals of the mighty the portals which have blossomed out in awnings and other symptoms of the evening party I think how delightful it must be to the ladies who will be whisked home in the early morn- ing with a sound as of bees beginning the day's employment how delightful to know that Points of View they are not keeping horses standing in the chill air ! If I owned an electric brougham, and had been invited to that evening party, I should not be able to resist the humanitarian impulse to say to some lady whose horses were waiting : " What a blessing it will be for the poor horse when he is no longer kept out of his nice warm stable ; when science has done away with him and his stable, and set up a garage instead ! " So you see that any observations of my nervous system that may seem unfriendly to motor cars in general are not prompted by envy. Envy, I am grieved to note, is freely attri- buted by some motorists to critics who say that the natural human craving for speed should be restrained by law. I can produce two reputable witnesses to swear that my ner- vous system has declined their frequent invi- tations to another spin with Gallagher. They are devoted to motor cars with a tender solici- tude which other men bestow on wives and families. They cannot understand how any man can take, as I do, the view that high- ways even the unfrequented bits are not meant for the untrammelled energies of loco- motives and engine-drivers. But they do not suspect me of coveting their blessed engines. There is something pathetic in the motorist's 144. Motor Cars and Nervous Systems belief that if he has a car capable of a high speed he ought to enjoy it. He clings to that unfrequented bit of road where he can " let her go " as if it were created for him. What use is it to anybody else ? The pedestrian cannot appreciate it, with his three or four miles an hour. The cyclist is not worthy of it, for he may be fagged and listless. A four- in-hand cannot do it justice, for the coachman must be careful of his horses. And when it comes to pace, what are even wild horses com- pared with wilder motors ? Yes, that unfre- quented stretch of high-road belongs to the motorist, whose use of it should be left to his unfettered discretion ; and yet there is a terrific fuss about the legal limit of speed whenever he avails himself of his sovereign prerogative. Nervous systems are appalled by the very sight of him. Police lie in ambush to catch his number. Cyclists with red flags warn him of the lurking foe, much as certain small fish are said to warn certain big fish, prowling in the deep. So the motorist who wants to scour the plain at the speed of an express train, whenever he thinks proper, re- gards himself as a poor hunted creature, and the law as an instrument of oppression, which is a disgrace to a free country. MS K Points of View I note that Mr. Scott Montagu, who is a man of sense, is projecting a corporation of motorists, to be called " The Considerate Driv- ing League." He tells his brother-motorists this week that " public indignation is again rising strongly against, not the use, but the abuse, of roads by motor cars " ; that members of Parliament are beset by furious constituents ; and that if the Motor Car Act should be re- newed next year the penalties may be doubled and the speed halved. That seems very likely indeed. As it is, many local authorities are demanding that in their areas the speed should be reduced to ten miles an hour. Evidently they are not in the mood to make over those unfrequented bits of highway for the motorists to sport with. Mr. Scott Montagu has drawn up some " Maxims " for his league. Members are required to " drive slowly through towns and villages, when approaching cross roads or turning corners, when passing schools, cottages, and churches, on dusty or muddy roads when passing cyclists and pedestrians, when entering a main road from a side road. These and other directions in the same spirit are admir- able indeed. But are not some of them very like counsels of perfection ? When you are tasting the first fine, careless rapture of a spin 146 Motor Cars and Nervous Systems with Gallagher, are you in the humour to check him at every corner and cross road ? Will a cottage or two cool your ardour, or even a church ? Are you going to drive slowly past every pedestrian because the road happens to be dusty ? Where is it anything but dusty, if you are scouring it ? " Always assume," says Mr. Scott Montagu, " that it is your business, not the other man's, to avoid danger." Well, if the members of the Considerate Driving League can act up to such instructions, they will present one of the most remarkable spec- tacles of discipline that human nature has seen. But these " Maxims " do testify to the up- rising of the nervous systems. They show a recognition of the fact that the public will not tolerate the caprices of excessive speed. When the law fixes a limit, and the motorist claims the right to disregard that limit under conditions chosen by himself, he is in danger of provoking the Legislature to fix another limit of a far more peremptory kind. It may be necessary to prohibit the sale and use of motor cars above a certain capacity. When no car can travel faster than twenty miles an hour, the police need not lurk in ditches, and the little fish will not render that charming service to J47 Points of View the big fish. When I put this contingency to my motorists, who cherish their cars with a love passing the love of woman, they turn pale with emotion. They see their hearts' delight sacrificed by a ruthless despotism. They assure me earnestly that if so monstrous a law should be enacted they will never drive a motor car again. They predict the ruin of a great and growing industry and the downfall of England ! Well, my nervous system tells me that twenty miles or even less would serve all reasonable purposes of business and sport, even on the bits of road which could be warranted free from cottagers or other obstacles to the impetuous Gallagher. People who want more had better make a motoring tour in Central Asia. If they prefer to stay in this populous isle, let them gratify their love of speed by taking express trains, which are controlled by " Maxims " less stringent than Mr. Scott Montagu's and more feasible. 148 XX Two Millions IF you came suddenly into possession of two millions sterling, what would be your state of mind ? We have all imagined the irruption of a million into our humdrum, hand-to-mouth existence ; how we should be as simple as ever in our tastes ; affable to early friends ; sympathetic to organised charity, without turning a deaf ear to private woe ; generous patrons of arts and letters, without a craving to build free libraries. With the possession of a bare million you could not emulate the educa- tional zeal of Mr. Carnegie. But upon the elderly dame who sweeps a certain cross- ing, and was found one day engrossed in a romance called "A Young Lady of Quality," I should like, were I a millionaire, to settle for life a subscription to Mudie's. Our present inquiry, however, relates to the contingency of two millions. Do you suppose that such affluence would simply mean a proportionate enlargement of ease, a mere doubling of the opportunities set forth above, the endowment, for example, of two crossing- sweepers with a life interest in the sacred fount 149 Points of View of current fiction ? Or are you prepared for the obligation which the ever-progressive con- science of the age has inspired an American statesman to fix upon the possession of two millions, making it a landmark in the history of morals ? The American statesman has brought in a Bill which defines the limit of honesty in opulence. He says that to own more than two millions sterling is not decent. You may have something like seventy thousand a year and be a welcome figure in society ; but if you have as much again you ought to be shunned. If I understand the American statesman, he would penalise this excess on the principle of our new law for the cor- rection of habitual topers. Any citizen con- victed of owning more than ten million dollars should be put on the Black List, and excluded for three years from Wall Street and other marts of industry. Does not this throw a cloud, my friend, over our little fantasy of sudden wealth ? If you became possessed of those millions, you would be in constant dread lest they should increase and multiply. In- stead of giving away money as cheerfully and methodically as Mr. Carnegie, you would plunge into a career of indiscriminate phil- Two Millions anthropy. The newspapers would hint that your reckless benefactions were pauperising the poorer classes. You would not have a moment free from hypochondria. At a certain restaurant I often see a gloomy stranger dining by himself. There was a great commotion on the telephone one even- ing ; somebody had urgent need of him. " Not here," was the response ; " he always goes to bed at half-past ten." " Strange habit," I remarked to the waiter. " Yes," he said. " That is a very wealthy man." Behold your fate when your investments swell beyond the pale of decency. To bed at ten- thirty to hide your shame ! Depend upon it, the American statesman has observed a growing sensitiveness among the opulent, a desire for drastic legislation. Mr. Henry James, studying American society with a detached mind in Europe, has perceived the sensitiveness. In his novel, " The Wings ' D of a Dove," there is an American girl, Milly Theale, who has inherited vast riches. Failing to induce an Englishman to share this burden, she dies of it. To the discerning eye this is poor Milly's tragedy : the dove is crushed by her immoral millions. She leaves some of them to the Englishman in her will ; but Points of View he, too, is so sensitive that he will have none of them. Oddly enough, Mr. W. D. Howells, usually alive to moral lessons, misses this one altogether in his dissertation in the North American Review on Mr. Henry James's art. Milly, says Mr. Howells, is a " lovely impalpability," and " New Yorkish in the very essences that are least associable with the superficial notion of New York." She is the " distilled and wandering fragrance " of that city. Moreover, she has " a Bostonian quality, with the element of conscious worth eliminated and purified as essentially of ped- antry as of commerciality." Such analysis ought to reveal the truth to Mr. Howells ; but the subtlest pulsation of the inpalpable is hidden from him, and he ascribes Milly's refinement to " conditions of illimitable ease, of having had everything that one could wish to have " ; in short, of all that excess above ten million dollars which preys upon the poor girl's mind, and hastens her doom. American society has other fragrances, not all distilled from repugnance to the over- growth of dross. Mark Twain tells us that the Christian Science Trust is amassing dollars at such a rate that within thirty years it ought to be the wealthiest corporation in the world. Two Millions Mrs. Baker Eddy, founder of the Trust, is not a "lovely impalpability," but a woman of business. " The Trust gives nothing away; everything it has is for sale. And the terms are cash ; and not only cash, but cash in advance. Its god is Mrs. Eddy first, then the Dollar." The headquarters of the Trust are at Boston, and the element of con- scious worth is not eliminated. It has a college, where the student is taught Christian Science for the modest charge of sixty pounds the course of seven lessons. Mark Twain anticipates that by 1930 the Trust will rule the Republic by the force of votes and a boundless exchequer. Mrs. Eddy is already held by her adherents to be divinely inspired. After her death she will be an object of public worship ; and pilgrimages to her tomb will be enormously lucrative to her executors. The Trust does not waste money on charities. Any disciple who may be perplexed by this branch of Mrs. Eddy's economy is reassured in these terms : " We must have faith in Our Mother, and rest content in the conviction that, whatever She does with the money, it is in accordance with orders from Heaven." This process, Mark Twain calculates, should make the resources of the Trust in thirty Points of View years about a billion dollars ; and if a billion means, as some arithmeticians say, a thousand millions, the Trust will have a capital of two hundred millions sterling, without any of the misgivings that would haunt you and me if a paltry couple of millions should descend upon each of us. This is not one of Mark Twain's jokes. Mrs. Eddy, he says, has a million adherents now, all possessed by the belief that Christian Science relieves the elect not merely from bodily ills, but also from "frets, fears, vexa- tions, bitterness, and all sorts of imagination- propagated maladies and pains." The world is filled with sunshine, and the heart with gladness. If you suffer from melancholy, you send for the Christian Science student who has taken his lessons at sixty pounds the course of seven ; he utters an incantation, and straightway you imagine that all is well. It does not appear that the incantation will bring material comfort, if you are in poverty ; but it will make you regard poverty as a delusion, like toothache or sciatica. " If Christian Science," says Mark Twain, " with this stupendous equipment and final salvation added cannot win half the Christian globe, I must be badly mistaken in the make-up of '54 Two Millions the human race." Half the Christian globe, lighter-hearted than Mark Tapley, persuaded that want is a baffled nightmare, bereavement a joy, that life is not a walking shadow but a song this is itself a forecast which does Mark Twain's imagination considerable credit. Perhaps the Trust already regards him with smiling assurance as more than half converted. But why did Mr. Henry James sacrifice Milly, the lovely and impalpable, when she might have given her superfluous dollars to the Trust, and spread her dovelike wings in the Bostonian atmosphere of conscious worth ? And why need you and I sit mournfully in the shadow of the American statesman's Bill ? If the Trust is going to administer the Re- public in the year 1930, the millionaires may as well be cured of hypochondria at once. Mark Twain hints not obscurely that Mrs. Eddy's principles will triumph in Great Britain. Then why not let fortune have her own way ? You can reconcile yourself to those two millions sterling, and a possible increment, without subscribing a farthing to the Trust. And instead of going to bed at half-past ten, you can hear the chimes at midnight in a modestly cheerful company. XXI The White Hat I REMEMBER wearing a tall White Hat a great many years ago, because in that golden age every man wore a White Hat in summer time. It was the period when trousers of a black and white check pattern rather a large check, too were considered " high-toned," as the Americans say, in league with the frock coat. About that time I possessed, but was afraid to wear, a pair of check trousers, made out of a shawl (you know the striking patterns of old-fashioned shawls) which had belonged to a thrifty aunt. She, good soul, thought she was doing me a service in days when there was little money to spend on trifles, and I had not the heart to say that trousers of such an origin would scarcely commend themselves to the public eye, except in some remote parts of Scotland. As a matter of fact, the public eye nearly started out of the public head at the sight of them. Rude little street boys seemed to think those trousers had been made for their special joy. Worse still, charming damsels whom one naturally desired to impress, arched their eyebrows, and mur- mured, " Well, I never ! " So I was glad to 156 The White Hat dispose of those checks to a friend who was then in a solicitor's office, and he wore them with great intrepidity. To-day he is one of the most eminent of King's Counsel ; he repre- sents a great constituency in the House of Commons ; and he is tolerably certain to end as Lord Chancellor. Sometimes I think that my aunt and I were the architects of his fortunes. Why did the White Hat decline from its proud eminence and almost disappear from the haunts of men, save, perhaps, TattersalFs and the Turf? A few old gentlemen continued to wear it here and there ; it imparted a pleasantly rakish air to advancing years ; but young men, for the most part, gave it up. Some of them may have been deterred (as I was in that affair of my aunt's translated shawl) by the rude little street boys, who were not yet subdued by compulsory elementary education. I have seen a timid youth, escorting his sister or his cousin, greatly embarrassed by the shrill cry of " Who stole the donkey ? The man in the White Hat ! " How well I remember hearing him on one occasion eagerly assuring his com- panions that he had not stolen the donkey, and was, indeed, quite incapable of stealing donkeys! Moreover, he pointed out that if he had com- mitted this felonious act, he would naturally Points of View do his best to efface all trace of it by wearing a black hat. But the sting of the street boy's gibe would not be drawn by logic. He was equally disconcerting when he inquired, with an air of great eagerness : " Who's your hatter ? " It was evident that if you had tried to counter this sally by giving him the desired information, he would have responded gravely, " Thank you, I shall lose no time in ordering a tile like yours ! " I suppose that the board schools quelled the spirit of inquiry or directed it into other channels. When the street boy went to school and learned sums and dates, his appetite for knowledge was satiated, and he had no longer that burning wish to make your hatter's ac- quaintance. When I hear people complain about the ill-effects of the board school educa- tion on the manners of the young, I contrast the average town urchin of to-day with an earlier generation, and wonder how this tame, spiritless atom can be called rude ! You seldom hear his voice ; he seems almost to have lost the art of whistling. When I think of the street boys I used to know, who shouted with immense relish the refrain of a popular ballad " So let the world jog along as it will, I'll be free and easy still," 158 The White Hat I see that the boys of the present time, with all the vivacity crushed out of them by the educational machine, do not even know what ease and freedom mean. Yes ; but this may be the very reason why the White Hat is beginning to bloom again. It cometh up as a flower, timidly, as if not quite sure that the nipping blast of juvenile ridicule is over. It is said that the highest personage in the realm is striving to encourage the nervous blossom. There is a story of a distinguished man who went to his hatter's to buy a new silk hat for the garden party at Windsor. "Let me recommend the White Hat," said the smiling tradesman. The dis- tinguished man, who has a taste for literature, drily observed : " Ah ! I remember now that in 'Alice in Wonderland' the Mad Hatter wears a White Hat." " Sir," said the trades- man with dignity, " let me tell you that at the garden party a White Hat will be worn by the highest personage in the realm." " Good heavens ! " exclaimed the distinguished man uneasily, " if what you say be true my remark savours of ' " High treason," said the hatter grimly. " But I will not inform against you. And now what do you say to a White Hat ? " The troubled customer bought it Points of View hastily and repaired to Windsor. He strolled through the Castle grounds, and saw many of his friends, but there was not a White Hat amongst them. "Hullo!" said they, " where did you get that hat ? " " Don't be vulgar," said he. " Vulgar," said they, rather nettled, " we have asked you a civil question " " Oh yes, of course ! And your civil question is a line from a stupid comic song, and what's more, it is out of date, like you and your black silk hat ! " A ripple of mirth fluttered through the historic trees. "Out of date!" echoed the gleeful crowd. " Why, man, no White Hat has been seen at Windsor since George the Fourth. And his was a beaver." A spasm of misgiving shot through that distinguished man. " So was the Mad Hatter's ! " he said to himself. But there was nothing for it but to keep a bold face. " Just you wait," he said to the crowd, " until you see the highest personage in the realm. If he is not wearing a White Hat, I'll stand new black hats for the lot of you." " Agreed ! " they cried joyously. " But if you are wrong, you'll stand me White Hats for the next ten years," he went on, secretly annoyed at his own bravado. They concurred with rapture. News of this extra- 160 The White Hat ordinary wager ran through the garden party, and everybody said that the distinguished man had seen his best days, and was evidently going in the top storey. But suddenly the band struck up the National Anthem, and the highest personage in the realm appeared on the scene ; and with him was the next highest personage in the line of succession ; and lo ! they were both wearing White Hats ! "By Jove ! " murmured the distinguished man under his breath, " my hatter is not mad after all ! " But to the crowd who surrounded him, and overwhelmed him with congratulations, he merely said, " Ah ! you see ! " And they all agreed that his best days were only just be- ginning. Now, I am assured on excellent authority (as we say in the newspapers) that this was the origin of the present revival ; but I meet one man after another, who says, " Pooh ! If you were not so decidedly unobservant you would have noticed that I have worn a White Hat these two seasons. Why, man, I started the fashion ! " I met a popular dramatist, and said to him : " Hallo ! You in a White Hat ! " " My dear fellow," he replied, " it was new for my daughter's wedding last year. And pray observe that it isn't your commonplace 161 L Points of View White, but a delicate shade of grey, and I have had this new grey suit made to match it." " I see you like a big black band." " * Butcher's mourning,' they call it in the trade. I don't know why." When I related this to an emi- nent dramatic critic his comment was charac- teristic. " He means his own trade. That mourning is for his last play, which I had the pleasure of cutting up ! " I have a friend who has come out strong in a tall cream-coloured hat, which harmonises with his rather saturnine beauty. It is clear that the White Hat does not suit every man. I am expecting a fulminator in the Times from Mr. Bernard Shaw against the attempt to im- pose this formula upon a masculine community which ought to express itself in a stimulating variety of hats. Mr. Shaw has denounced our evening dress, especially the artificially whitened shirt, which, he says, is " seriously unclean." In his eyes the White Hat may be no better than a soiled dove. I am not without hopes that he will start a propagandist mission and visit the principal towns of England in a Green Hat. If he will I shall be with him, hat and soul. Erin-go-bragh ! 162 XXII The After-Dinner Speech SIR FRANCIS BERTIE, our Ambas- sador in Paris, has made a bold innovation. At the banquet of the British Chambers of Commerce, when his health was drunk, he rose and " bowed his acknowledgments." The company were taken aback. A silent Ambassador at a public dinner: who had ever heard of such a paradox ? I remember a feast given by a literary club, with the Persian Minister in London as the chief guest. The club was devoted to Omar Khayyam, and one of the members was ready to toast the guest with quotations from Omar and Hafiz in the original. But he had no luck, for the Minister, having eaten his dinner, unfolded his overcoat and like the Arabs silently stole away. That affair is an "Asian mystery" to this hour. Perhaps Sir Francis Bertie had heard of it, and thought it an ex- cellent example. Why should Ambassadors imperil diplomacy by making after-dinner speeches ? Mr. Choate makes them in abund- ance ; but, then, American diplomacy is noted for its frankness. It is only in Europe and Asia that diplomatic secrets have to be guarded. 163 Points of View Perhaps Sir Francis was guarding them when he " bowed his acknowledgments." There is another hypothesis, which brings me to the serious point of this article. After- dinner speaking is a special and peculiar art. You may hold the House of Commons en- tranced by the hour ; you may keep a public meeting hanging on your lightest word. Yet after dinner you may bore your audience to death, or make a slip which moves them to fatal mirth. This singular phenomenon im- pressed itself on me early in youth. When but a lad I was present at a municipal banquet given to Charles Dickens in a city not far from Manchester. I did not take my little porringer and eat my dinner there, as Words- worth would say ; but I sat in the gallery and heard the speeches. What do I remember ? Simply the dreadful thing that happened to the gentleman who proposed the toast of " The Ladies." He was a very clever, very fluent barrister, who had distinguished him- self mightily in the Courts. But when he proposed this toast he made that fatal slip. " Speaking for the ladies," he said, " and for myself as one of them " There was a titter, and I caught a gleam from Dickens's wonderful eyes. He responded to the toast, 164 The After-Dinner Speech and began thus : " The learned lady who has just sat down " Well, the shout that stormed through the hall still rings in my ears. Perhaps that clever barrister is now a judge ; but I wonder whether the lesson he received on that memorable night made him reticent after dinner. Is he careful now to " bow his acknowledgments " ? As for boring our audiences with the best intentions, how many offenders have I known ! Men of parts, mind you, none of your in- audible worthies, county magnates and the like, who remain long on their legs, extolling " The Army, Navy, and Reserve Forces." No ; I am thinking of poets, statesmen, scholars, novelists, and colonial governors. I remember a poet, one of the most brilliant men of his generation, who responded for "The Drama/' and bored us with the argument that the theatre was no place for the public. It should be the private sanctuary of the dramatist, who would give away boxes and stalls to his enlightened friends. We thought this was a joke at first ; but it was a thesis, and threatened to consume the night. Now, Britons never, never will be slaves to the after-dinner bore. We put him down by banging plates with the handles of forks. It is sometimes a brutal thing, but 165 Points of View then I remember another poet, a lovable being from America, who lost himself entirely in a monologue. I believe he had forgotten all about us, and thought he was alone on an Alpine peak, like Manfred. The pathetic look that came into his eyes when he under- stood that we were executing him as a bore I shall never forget. I have known a popular novelist, at a dinner in his honour, drive the company to the fork-handles. That incident was not without humour. Another novelist of my acquaint- ance had the unhappy idea that the art of after-dinner speaking consists in saying any- thing that comes into your head, and keeping everybody waiting until it does come. One of his pauses was interrupted by somebody with this quotation " It cometh not, we said ; We are weary, weary, weary, We would we were in bed." You will scarcely believe it, but that novelist accused me of having spoiled his oration. I remember a Spanish scholar, who mistook a dinner-table for an institute, where one listens patiently to lectures ; also a colonial governor, who seemed to think we were a legislative assembly, and that he was opening the session. 166 The After-Dinner Speech He braved the fork-handles right gallantly, but I have never been certain whether this was the dauntless spirit of the haughty pro-Consul, or whether he had got the speech by rote, and had to go on until he ran down, like a clock. How are these misadventures to be avoided ? What is the art of after-dinner speaking ? I should say, in the first place, that it is the art of pleasing. Remember that for about ten or fifteen minutes you have to tickle the fancy of people who have dined. You are a showman a cut or two, maybe, above the gentleman who entertains the company with a " humor- ous sketch," and who is sometimes rather a dangerous rival, by the way ; still, you are a showman. You must calculate your effects with the utmost nicety, and make them with such a spontaneous air that although nobody really supposes them to be improvised, you can sometimes create the illusion that they are. You must have the whole bag of tricks carefully sorted before you sit down to dinner, and yet you must be able to fashion a fresh one out of something in the conversation, or a hint from a previous speaker, and fix it neatly in its proper place. The occasion of the dinner and the people who will be there furnish you beforehand with a theme which 167 Points of View must not resemble anybody else's theme. You must know by sympathetic instinct that it will surprise and charm. Surprise, indeed, is the secret of the composition : to arrest atten- tion with the opening sentences, and then keep curiosity at full stretch until you reach your grand disclosure, throwing in dramatic "asides," and artfully provoking interruptions which you know exactly how to meet : this is the show. " Phew ! " you may say. " What a business ! Who is going to take all that trouble?" Very few do take it. The art of after-dinner speaking has no commercial value. Lecturers are paid ; preachers are paid ; demagogues get their little account ; but the consummate artist who makes fifteen minutes sparkle after dinner finds no cheque under his plate. " It's the deuce of a job," he said to me, as we walked away from one of his triumphs. " You see, it is on my mind for days. I prepare it in the street mostly. When you notice motor cars pulled up short, and policemen wildly waving their arms, you may guess that I have thought of a capital phrase in the middle of a crossing. Then I spout it twenty times over in my bed- room. Then, if one's nerves are not quite the ticket, there's the risk of dropping a sentence 168 The After-Dinner Speech and upsetting the whole blessed caboodle. Oh, it's the deuce of a job, and all the reward is the art of it ! " He looked with wistful rap- ture at the stars. I wonder whether he will retire from the profession one day and be content, like Sir Francis Bertie, to " bow his acknowledgments ! " 169 XXIII Bridge I POINTED out to him, in one of the journals which expound the mind of women, the passage which had tickled my fancy. Something of the kind I had read before ; that women no longer crave for the society of man ; that they make agree- able coteries without his help ; that they carry on animated conversations, in which he and his concerns play no part ; that he is an overrated adjunct of civilisation ; and that, speaking broadly, he has been found out. "You, as a squire of dames," I said to my friend, " can tell me whether this is an omen or only a bit of feminine bluff. Is it the periodical dressing down that man deserves, or is it a genuine development of sociology which calls for serious notice from Mr. Herbert Spencer ? Is it a solemn warning, in short, or only a new finesse of coquetry ? Does woman sing the old song to us with plaintive meaning ' I don't want to play in your yard, I won't love you any more ' ? Or does she ? " " My dear Jaques," he broke in, " you are the complacent sentimen- 170 Bridge talist who always asks a string of silly questions. And you take it for granted that woman has no real interest apart from man, and that when she starts off at a tangent she can be brought back with an indulgent smile, and a little sugar." " You mistake me," I returned with dignity. " This is a genuine inquiry, and I am soliciting a few statistics." "A few fiddlesticks!" he retorted. " Let me show you the shallowness of your philosophy about women. A year or two ago it was said that the craze for bridge would soon pass, because women could not go on sitting day and night in comparative silence. No game of cards could kill the love of gossip. And yet, at this moment, there are houses where gossip is never heard, where all the talk at dinner turns on cards " " And a spade is called a spade with innocent freedom ! " "You have not grasped the situation," he continued. " Imagine a dinner-party where you are the only guest who does not play, and to whom the terminology of bridge has no more meaning than the theology of Tibet. It is an excellent dinner, but you notice that it is uncomfortably hurried. When you turn to your neighbour, a too dexterous servant whisks away your plate. When you linger 171 Points of View over some toothsome dainty, you are soon aware that the rest of the company are watching you with cold surprise. You explain to your companion, with a delicately facetious air, that you are no gourmet, but really this is a capital dinner; and she remarks that dinners now- adays are such a waste of time when the green card-tables are waiting in the drawing-room ! " " But your celebrated fund of topical anec- dote ! " I asked, " what becomes of that ? " " Bridge has killed anecdote ; the women don't want to hear it." " Nonsense," I said. " ' The ladies of St. James's wear satin on their backs, They sit all night at ombre with candles made of wax.' When women did that they lived in the most gossiping age that we know. If ombre did not still their tongues, why should bridge ? And why were you asked to that dinner-party if not to tell your stories, constantly recruited from the best sources ? " " With your un- progressive mind, my dear Jacques," he an- swered, " you naturally forget that ombre was an eighteenth-century game, and we are now in the twentieth century. I can only tell you that when we repaired to the green tables which were waiting in the drawing-room, a religious hush fell upon the scene. When an hour had 172 Bridge passed, and nobody had spoken ten words, I put in one of my liveliest yarns. There was not a smile. I doubt whether they had heard me, but at the end they all rose simultaneously, walked round the tables with a rapt, ecstatic air, and then sat down again, as if they had performed some necessary rite." " Changing seats for luck," I suggested. "A common trick with gamblers." " Much you know about it," said he contemptuously. " When they broke up, one of the women had won a shilling, and had not uttered a syllable for four hours. She put the shilling in her purse with reverence, and her face shone with a spiritual ardour. I may as well tell you she is a girl I am uncommonly fond of, and that all this time she was simply unconscious of my existence." " But you were asked to the party to meet her, I suppose?" "The reason appeared in all its moral beauty next day, when my hostess sent an urgent message that she wanted to see me. When I arrived, she said, ' I want to talk to you seriously about dear Julia, who has told me that you wish to marry her. The sweet child is one of us, but alas ! I fear you can never be. Your presence at our little gather- ing last night was meant to be a test, and you sadly disappointed me. You talked at dinner Points of View about worldly things the theatre and import duties ; and when we were deep in bridge, you actually told a story ! ' I murmured my con- trition, and expressed the hope that she had not seen the point. ' Heaven forbid,' said she, ' and I am sure dear Julia never saw it ; but her partner did, for he has written to me this morn- ing to say that it was a most disturbing element, and that he hopes he shall never meet you again. Now, please forgive me if I speak to you very plainly. Julia tells me that you dislike bridge, and that you have refused to learn it, and I can easily understand why. You are a born story- teller, and the whole object of story-telling is to gratify the taste for scandal, a base element of human nature, with which the bridge-player is at war. You must have some good qualities, or dear Julia would not think as much of you as she does ; but you cannot enter into the communion of bridge, and therefore you cannot make her really happy. How could she marry a man who would always be telling her stories about import duties and the theatre ? ' " Now," added my friend, " you may have some idea of the new feminine movement of this century." " But you don't mean to tell me," I said, " that you have acquiesced in this interference with your love affair ? Don't you Bridge suspect there is some game besides bridge at that house ? What about the lady's partner, who was so upset by the point of your anecdote ?" " Oh, he's old enough to be Julia's great-grandfather. It is astonishing how bridge keeps these old buffers alive when they are dead to everything else. I believe that, in some family vaults, the skeletons sit up every night with the cards, and it's a rule of propriety not to rattle their bones ! But I am trying to divert Julia's mind now by taking her out in a fast motor car. When I am driving forty miles an hour, and avoiding market-carts and village geese, it is no time for telling her stories. The fines are troublesome, but I have nearly persuaded her that a honeymoon in a motor would be a beautiful calm with a little dust, but no gossip ! " When I saw him again, a few weeks after this instructive conversation, he handed me a letter. " I'm done, after all ! " he said. " She's married the great-grandfather." "Your motor car was lovely," she wrote, " and to go miles and miles without a sound but the startled quack of the village goose was so peaceful ! But when I learned that under the new Bill you would be liable to three months' imprison- ment without the option of a fine, I saw to Points of View what an awful scandal our honeymoon might give rise. Just think what people would say, and how much you would have to say when you come out of gaol ! I love you, but I must not run that risk. Only my beloved bridge gives me rest, and to-morrow morning I shall marry the best bridge-player in London ! Best for me, and best for you. You need not go to prison now ! " 176 XXIV Our Mother Tongue PROFESSOR Brander Matthews, of Columbia University, is good enough to report from time to time upon the " healthy develop- ment of our mother tongue." He has an article in Harper s Magazine upon the proper use of foreign words. Our mother tongue cannot do without the foreigner. He is as needful as the food supply, and you cannot prohibit him like bounty-fed sugar. " Why not speak English ? " asks Mr. Matthews, who shows us how to naturalise the foreigner by giving him an English plural, or taking him out of the italics which mark him as an alien. Thus encore is French, but encore is English. The enthusiast who shouts " En- core ! " after a favourite song little thinks how much he owes to France. What did he shout before this useful importation ? The French enthusiast, by the way, cries ".fiw/" when he wants the song again. To an English ear it sounds like " Beast ! " which may be the reason why our mother tongue has not made it one of the family. But how could the great heart of the people throb responsive to the 177 M Points of View universal sentiment of the music-hall without au revoir? "Say au revoir, but not good- bye ! " warbled many a golden-haired songstress a few seasons ago. Here was the triumphant alien, italics and all. Even Professor Brander Matthews would scarcely venture to turn au revoir into " See you later " ! Chaperon is our very own now, and you wonder how Mrs. Grundy managed without it. When the Earl of Southdown complained to Mrs. Rawdon Crawley that, during his visits to the little house in Mayfair, Miss Briggs never left the room, he described the faithful Briggs as a watch-dog. Watch-dog is a crude expression. Chaperon is delicately suggestive of guardianship. " Our British kin," complains Mr. Matthews, "seems to be inclined to prefer the French costumier over the simple English costumer ; and they like to call a wig-maker a perruquier just as they have lately taken to speaking of a napkin as a serviette" And yet if Mr. Matthews will consult any memorable London playbill, he will read beneath the list of characters the plain, severe English legend, " Wigs by Clark- son." There is a story of a famous actor who was visited in his dressing-room at the theatre one evening by a famous singer. The singer, 178 Our Mother Tongue who had been invited to see the actor's per- formance, did not like it, and wondered how he was to avoid the subject. After several desperate excursions, he saw the actor's wig put upon its block. " Capital wig ! " he exclaimed with enthusiasm. " Glad there's something you like ! " growled the actor. Serviette, says Mr. Matthews, is "a freak of nomenclature so widespread in the British Isles that the homely napkin-ring is now beginning to be vendable as a serviette-ring." Dwellers in boarding-houses where the table- napkin in its ring is the boon companion of the bottle which prolongs itself like the widow's cruse is this true ? Music-hall singers still like to be called artistes; the actor's rile is apparently more distinguished than his part ; and a comic actress acquires a dainty exotic grace when you call her a comedienne. Perhaps such words cling to our theatrical parlance because we have not yet left off taking plays from the French. Mr. Matthews calls upon us to write technic instead of technique, and revery instead of reverie. This is asking too much ; but many readers will feel a glow of sympathy with the critic who says, " There is no reason why we should take pleasure in describing a young 179 Points of View man engaged to be married as a fiance" The word grates upon the sense of fitness because it belongs to a set of marriage customs quite foreign to ours. If the man is a fiance, the girl ought to have a dot. But what would you call him ? Not Susan's betrothed, for that term is usually feminine ; moreover, it has an air of old-fashioned sentiment quite un- suited to modern speech. There is a rank of society in which he would be joyously hailed as Susan's young man ; in a rank above that he would be Susan's intended. Neither of these expressions may commend itself to a still higher circle of refinement. Then what is our mother tongue to do ? Mr. Matthews is not helpful, and I am forced to suggest that we should borrow from the French again. Why not Susan's " future " ? " Mon futur," says the French damsel when she in- dicates the fortunate man. The word may not come from the Faubourg St. Germain ; but somehow it makes Susan's lack of dot less conspicuous. Mr. Matthews would have us get rid of the pedantry of classic plurals, and boldly say appendixes and indexes instead of appendices and indices. Surely nobody says indices, but most of us say memoranda, and not memor- 180 Our Mother Tongue andums, though we say formulas, and not formulas. Our mother tongue is too skittish to be bound by any rule of assimilation. Even Mr. Matthews does not insist upon phenomenons. I should like to direct his attention to the editor of Harper s Magazine, who is more in need of reproof than his "British kin." The readers of Harper's are apprised that a new novel will shortly begin in that periodical. " In this wonderful historical romance of the days of the Spanish Armada, deepened by a pervading psychological interest, the author has not only entered upon a higher field of imaginative fiction than in her previous novels, but seems, if that were possible, to have transcended herself." As an advertise- ment this is pretty full-blooded, and ought to appeal to the editor's colleague, Mr. Howells, whose taste for historical romance is well known. " It is not great names," proceeds the oracle, " as measured by pheno- menal sales, but the quality of the work, that impresses readers." Is Mr. Matthews im- pressed by an editor who uses " phenomenal " in the sense of wonderful ? Mr. Vincent Crummies had a daughter, who was known as the " Infant Phenomenon," a title supposed by her papa to indicate a prodigy. Mr. 181 Points of View Matthews knows better. Will he impress upon the editor of Harper's that there is a graver peril to our mother tongue in that magazine than the coming of the Spanish Armada ? He is fond of dwelling on the advantages of the " short cut," on " simplifications which will be bitterly opposed in the future by the ultra-conservative, just as the simplifications already adopted were opposed in the past by the linguistic Tories of the preceding cen- turies." Are we "linguistic Tories" if we decline to write crisises as the plural of crisis ? Mr. Matthews admits that the word has an " unpleasant hissing," but dismisses that as a pedantic objection. He does not see that he is neglecting his " short cut " for a longer word. He wants to say bacilluses instead of bacilli, and taunts the people who, " if they dared, would like to write omnibi." I should like to write omnibi, but it is too late. I acquiesce gracefully in the use of omnibuses, but rather than yield to 'buses I will shed the last drop of my blood. That is a personal eccentricity, no doubt ; but as Mr. Matthews expects our " sturdy common sense " to choose the forms of speech which are "the least roundabout and the most 182 OUT Mother Tongue direct," what have we to do with bacilluses ? I remember a dissertation of his, in which it was argued that we should legitimise the ungrammatical phrase " he don't," because it is a shorter cut than "he doesn't." Perhaps Mr. Matthews has lectured at Columbia University on the felicitous embellishment of our mother tongue by the celebrated song, " 'E dunno where 'e are." It is a pleasing illustration of one of his principles ; but how does it harmonise with crisises ? Of all the " linguistic Tories," the most strenuous was Miss Rhoda Broughton, in the years when she denied to her nonchalant heroines the ordinary contractions in colloquial use. " It threatens to rain, does not it ? " said Nancy and Joan and Hester, who were by no means prim in other respects. Our mother tongue refused to be trained by these charming young pedagogues. A few years ago some fashionable ladies invented a dialect which carried the theory of " simplifications " very far. I heard one of them say that " the dimpy was divvy," and this, when translated, meant that a certain dinner-party was divine. After this, Mr. Matthews and his bacilluses are "ultra-conservative" indeed. 183 XXV Wells of English MR. H. G. WELLS, who would have the English-speaking peoples all speak exactly alike one ac- cent, one idiom, one intonation must be disturbed by Professor Lounsbury, of Yale, who continues in Harpers Magazine those researches to which I have already adverted. Mr. Lounsbury, being a professor, has a native bias towards authority; but he admits that English pronunciation is a per- petual civil war. The peace of households is destroyed by the vain efforts of seniors to correct the speech of juniors in accordance with the family dictionary, or some supposed standard of usage. A distinguished friend of mine, who has probably addressed to the public ear more words than any man living, arched his expressive eyebrows lately when I used the word "inexplicable" with the accent on the "plic." He asked me why, and I said it was my humour. " Better change it," he re- marked drily, "or people will smile." "Let 'em smile," I answered defiantly. What is there to smile at ? When you say " inexpres- sible" you put the accent on the "press"; 184 Wells of English when " inconsolable " you linger mournfully on the " so." If a thing is " indisputable," it gets its emphasis from the third and not the second syllable. Why utter a word, as Professor Lounsbury says, as if you were " giving the impression that part of it has been swallowed " ? Put the accent on the "ex" in this very word "inexplicable," and you seem to be taking a pill with uneasiness. " There is no authority at all for such a course," says the professor. Smiling, indeed, is out of place. When the lady who is wooed in Mr. Chevalier's ballad answers " Yus," you are diverted by her Cockney ignorance. If she answered " Yis," you would smile all the same. Permit me to tell you that, in the politest of centuries, the eighteenth, " Yes " was extremely vulgar. You have smiled, no doubt, at the street- urchin who, on the chance of your bounty, enacts a compendious drama at your door on the 5th of November. He approaches with great respect a martial hero who is leaning on a wooden sword. " My lord," says he, " the duke is wownded," and you go off in a burst of ignorant merriment. " Wownded," according to classic authority, is perfectly correct. There used to be a turmoil in the 185 Points of View pit over John Philip Kemble's pronunciation of certain words. He pronounced " aches," for instance, as if they were " aitches," and the pittites who preferred, like Calverley's school- boy, to rhyme the word with cakes, because " excruciating aches resulted when we ate too many," disputed noisily with the actor. In ruder times than ours a man was not even allowed to pronounce his own name as he thought fit. There is the historic case of Angus Reach, who did not like to rhyme with peach, and called himself " Ree-ak." At dinner on one occasion he was put down by Thackeray, who said, " Mr. Ree-ak, I'll trouble you for a pee-ak." But if my name were Reach I would go to the rack rather than surrender my right to call myself what I pleased. Professor Lounsbury, I am glad to say, will have none of this intolerance. He relates the anecdote of the poet Rogers, who held that nobody should "contemplate" save with the accent on the "tern." "The now fashionable pronunciation of certain words," said Rogers, " is to me at least offensive. * C