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 WS73 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE essays contained in this book have 
 been published in the columns of the 
 Daily Mail. Though they treat of many 
 subjects, they possess, I hope, that unity, 
 which comes from a settled purpose and 
 a consistent point of view. They rarely 
 touch upon the fierce controversies of the 
 moment. The Toryism, whose principles 
 they would set forth, is the Toryism, not 
 of politics, but of life and letters. 
 
 And never was there a stronger obliga- 
 tion to plead the cause of Toryism than 
 to-day, when nothing is accepted that is 
 not strange, when the most of men believe 
 that salvation is to be sought only in new 
 theories of life. Once upon a time Shelley 
 
 confided to the pages of an inn-album that 
 a 2 v
 
 vi LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 he was an atheist, a democrat, and a 
 philanthropist, and it was easy to forgive 
 the exuberance of his youth. It is less 
 easy to excuse the same boast, when it is 
 made by dullards of middle age, who, 
 in the act of extolling democracy and 
 atheism, hasten to guard their pockets 
 by explaining that their philanthropy is 
 merely vicarious. 
 
 Of the new theories which perplex our 
 land, none is advocated more fiercely than 
 the theory of speed. The whole ingenuity 
 of mankind is spent in the enterprise of 
 moving us as quickly as possible from one 
 place to another. We are obsessed by 
 that form of laborious idleness which 
 America describes as ' hustle.' We have 
 made the means of progress, which should 
 be our slaves, our insolent masters. 
 We are overlooking the plainest of all 
 truths, that it matters not a jot how we 
 travel from York to London. It matters 
 supremely what we do when we get there.
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 In an orgy of movement we neglect the 
 sane lessons of experience, which are of 
 far higher import than 
 
 ' this strange disease of modern life, 
 With its sick hurry, its divided aims.' 
 
 Meanwhile the triumph of mechanical in- 
 genuity blinds us to the many miracles 
 which are about us. We refuse to believe 
 what should be obvious, that the simple 
 life of man is far more wonderful than 
 the cunning artifice of a flying machine. 
 Thus we confuse the values of things, and 
 forget that nothing great was ever achieved 
 save in solitude and tranquillity. 
 
 The age which delights in excess, which 
 tests merit by advertisement, which puts 
 faith in the sanctity of a broken record, 
 holds great men in a paradoxical horror. 
 Above all it hates leadership, because in his 
 democratic envy each man would see him- 
 self king over others. So it is that force 
 of character, grandeur of mind have fallen 
 under the general suspicion. Education
 
 viii LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 is contemned, if it be not reduced to the 
 level of the board-school. And the noble 
 ideal, held up to us for our respect, is that 
 the world of knowledge should be converted 
 into a Trade Union, wherein the fool sets 
 the pace, and the wise man must be 
 restrained, lest he should outstrip the 
 numerically omnipotent rabble. 
 
 Happily the revision of ancient gospels 
 is as vain as the quest of new theories. The 
 triumph of materialism is soon overpast. 
 We are born into a world hoary with age. 
 We inherit the beliefs, the ambitions, the 
 prejudices of many centuries. He, who 
 attempts to solve the problems which 
 confront him, by first principles, must 
 sooner or later be overtaken by disaster. 
 The world is no vacuum, in which experi- 
 ments may be made without danger. The 
 country which encourages the apostles of 
 false progress pays the debt of its reck- 
 lessness to the uttermost farthing. The 
 wisdom of one generation must ever be
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 accounted folly, compared with the wisdom 
 of all time. Even now you may detect the 
 signals of a coming reaction. Some there 
 remain who interpret, justly, the duty of 
 light-bearers, and who will hand on to their 
 successors the lamps, wisely trimmed and 
 tended, which they have received from 
 those who went before. And with their aid 
 once again these truths shall emerge, that 
 the secret of the present, the hope of the 
 future, reside in the past, that the only 
 thread, which can guide us through the 
 labyrinth of this life, is the golden thread 
 of tradition.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 LETTER PAGE 
 
 I. 'CULTIVATE YOUR GARDEN* ... 1 
 
 ii. THE 'HALF-BAKED' .... 9 
 
 III. OF GREAT MEN 17 
 
 iv. THE 'NORMAL' THEATRE ... 25 
 
 V. CELTIC GLAMOUR 33 
 
 VI. THE GAMBLE OF LIFE . . . . 41 
 
 VII. THE END OF THE PRIZE RING . . 49 
 
 VIII. ' STRAITENED CIRCUMSTANCES 57 
 
 IX. WHAT IS HAPPINESS? . . . . 65 
 
 X. GENIUS AND WEALTH . . . . 73 
 
 XL THE DECAY OF COMEDY . . . 81 
 
 XII. OLD AND NEW TRAVELLERS . .89 
 
 XIII. JOHN BULL AND HIS RIVALS . . 97 
 
 xiv. THE NATION'S TREASURES . . .105 
 
 XV. THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE . . 113 
 
 XVI. THE TYRANNY OF GOLF . . . 121 
 
 XVII. THE ANNIHILATION OF SPACE . . 129 
 
 XVIII. A WORLD OF UNREST 137
 
 xii LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 I.KI IKK PAGE 
 
 XIX. STYLE 145 
 
 XX. 'THE IDLE RICH' . ... . 153 
 
 XXI. THE ROMANCE OF LIFE . . .160 
 
 XXII. ACTION AND REACTION . , . 168 
 
 XXIII. THE END OF EDUCATION . . .176 
 
 XXIV. GOSSIP ,185 
 
 XXV. SENTIMENTALISE! AND CRIME . ' . 193 
 
 XXVI. LIBRARIES 201 
 
 XXVII. EXAMINATIONS 209 
 
 XXVIII. FAME '. . 217 
 
 XXIX. THE GAIETY OF NATIONS . . . 225 
 
 XXX. PRACTICAL JOKING . . . .233 
 
 XXXI. ROOKS AND PIGEONS , 241
 
 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 ' CULTIVATE YOUR GARDEN ' 
 
 POLITICS, once said a distinguished states- 
 man, touch only the fringe of life. Beyond 
 the hustings lie many activities, many 
 hopes. In the wide fields of thought and 
 art there are still lost causes to be upheld, 
 there are still hazardous victories to be won. 
 And if we except the honourable and para- 
 mount duty of defence defence of the 
 Empire, defence of the Constitution there 
 is little indeed that politics can accomplish. 
 Each man must save his own soul and 
 guard his own intelligence for himself. The 
 dream of perfectibility, of which sanguine 
 Radicals tell us, is a dream and no more. 
 It is not by Acts of Parliament, but by our 
 own resolution, that we are made happier 
 
 A
 
 and better. The world has not, and never 
 had, any assured hope of progress, a way- 
 ward thing, which, if she condescend to 
 smile, revivifies all about her, but which 
 the wisest politician that ever lived may 
 not coerce. 
 
 Thus it is not upon argument or theory 
 that a community may be firmly based. 
 ' Nature nor the engagement of words,' 
 says Bacon, ' are not so forcible as customs.' 
 Custom and belief, in truth, are the most 
 stable elements of our human life, and he, 
 who, through the medium of politics, would 
 do them violence, proves that he is in- 
 competent to rule either others or himself. 
 It is no less impious to disregard the estab- 
 lished order than to enter into a conflict 
 with Nature, and the best way to serve a 
 country is quietly to respect her traditions. 
 
 But, if for a while we forget politics, if 
 we confess that laws are powerless suddenly 
 to convert mankind, we shall understand 
 how greatly it profits us to improve our 
 environment. ' We must cultivate our 
 garden,' said Voltaire's Candide, and no
 
 * CULTIVATE YOUR GARDEN ' 3 
 
 philosopher ever gave a wiser counsel. 
 That is to say, we must do our own work, 
 and turn the light of knowledge upon our 
 own hearts. We must regenerate ourselves 
 before we hope to regenerate others. We 
 must trim our own hedge, we must cut our 
 own lawn, we must grow our own flowers, 
 before we impose our laws of agriculture 
 upon the community ; and if only the 
 whole world had taken to itself this pru- 
 dent advice ' Cultivate your garden ' 
 how pleasant a place it would have been 
 wherein to dwell ! 
 
 That the present age has been an age of 
 political restlessness is not a sign of wisdom 
 or energy. He who is engrossed in politics 
 begins the work of intelligence at the wrong 
 end. Let him first make sure the rudi- 
 ments of knowledge, and all things may 
 be added unto him. After all, a com- 
 munity is but a sum of individuals, and 
 that community will be best able to defend 
 itself, whose individuals have turned their 
 understanding to the sternest account. 
 After the defeat of 1870, a company of
 
 4 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 French writers were discussing the causes 
 of their national failure. ' We have been 
 conquered,' said Renan, ' because we have 
 neglected the teaching of German philo- 
 sophy.' If these words may not be ac- 
 cepted literally, there is a profound truth 
 underlying them which Englishmen would 
 do well to take to heart. 
 
 For no nation will ever keep its supre- 
 macy, which does not scrupulously castigate 
 its taste, and revise its canons of criticism. 
 Political excellence may not be put on or 
 off as a garment. It comes only from a 
 proper appreciation of life and the arts. 
 We need not set about this appreciation in 
 the spirit of priggishness or superiority. 
 We must not follow false ' culture ' as a 
 will-o'-the-wisp. But, if we are to survive 
 as a great people, we can do no less than 
 ask if the life, the plays, the books, the 
 pictures of our choice are worthy the 
 admiration that we lavish upon them. 
 
 At the outset one exception must be 
 made. Against those who can feel no 
 interest in the things of the mind not a
 
 ' CULTIVATE YOUR GARDEN ' 5 
 
 word of reproach should be uttered. No 
 interest is far better than an interest which 
 is not sincere. The intelligence that is un- 
 blotted, like a blank page, may presently 
 have the truths of all time inscribed upon 
 it. The vanity, which affects a knowledge 
 which it has not, deserves neither help nor 
 commiseration. But from those, who as- 
 sume the leadership of the people, we have 
 a right to demand some understanding of 
 the arts which embellish life, of the thoughts 
 which bind together the present and the 
 past. 
 
 How is this demand fulfilled ? We have 
 a stage, which is an anodyne and no more, 
 and which neither France nor Germany 
 would tolerate for a month. Men and 
 women pack our theatres not for any 
 artistic pleasure, which they may obtain, 
 but for the indulgence of primitive emotions 
 or the satisfaction of an imperfect sense of 
 humour. If they see a fool grin through 
 a horse-collar, or witness the antics of a 
 knockabout artiste, they experience such a 
 thrill as can be equalled only by the dis-
 
 6 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 comfiture of a pasteboard villain. And 
 the most of men demand of books the same 
 qualities as they demand of the theatre. 
 They are imbecile, not vicious, in their 
 taste. Their favourite stories correspond 
 to an inherent weakness in their nature, 
 and it is impossible to contemplate the 
 prevailing love of farce or melodrama, of 
 foolish fiction, or of the painted anecdotes 
 which tempt the middle classes within the 
 doors of the Royal Academy, without re- 
 cognising that something is wanting in our 
 national intelligence, that our standards 
 of artistic right and wrong are pitifully 
 debased. 
 
 Nor can we blind our eyes to the fact that 
 these debased standards of taste profoundly 
 affect the common weal. The lessons of 
 history cannot be gainsaid. The times 
 of triumphing intelligence have been the 
 times also of political energy and courage. 
 The age of Elizabeth was the age of the 
 Armada. Drake and Shakespeare lived 
 at the same period and under the same 
 sky. The Englishmen who delighted in our
 
 golden drama were the same men, who beat 
 the Spaniard and ransacked the Americas 
 in search of treasure and adventure. So 
 was it when England, with a supreme 
 effort, crushed the power of Napoleon. 
 William Pitt and the romantic revival 
 grew up side by side. The pomp of Words- 
 worth, the chivalry of Scott, the high 
 romance of Coleridge, matched in their 
 sphere the lofty aims of Pitt, the splendid 
 courage of Nelson and Wellington. What, 
 then, remains for us to do that we may 
 strengthen our national defences and re- 
 vive the pride, which once was ours in arts 
 and arms, in poetry and statecraft ? Men 
 of genius are beyond the reach of our com- 
 mand. They are born to the world in 
 happy moments ; they come and go as 
 they list ; they do their deeds and make 
 their songs naturally, as the birds sing. 
 We cannot tell the time of their coming, 
 nor call them to our aid. The most that 
 we can do and that is much is to recog- 
 nise them when they come. For the rest 
 we can revise our methods of criticism,
 
 8 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 we can learn to reject what is base and 
 foolish, we can see to it that we do not 
 accept a merely popular success as a first 
 proof of merit. And thus shall we bring 
 intelligence to the help of policy. 
 
 Politics touch the fringe of life. If we 
 make ourselves better fitted to guard that 
 fringe, it will not be in vain that, cultivat- 
 ing our garden, we neglect for a while the 
 ampler, busier spaces of the world.
 
 THE ' HALF-BAKED ' 
 
 II 
 
 THE ' HALF-BAKED ' 
 
 ENGLAND to-day is the paradise of the 
 ' half-baked.' Though we speak familiarly 
 of the ' super-man,' the one object of our 
 policy is to encourage his opposite. We 
 do our best to level all men down. To 
 compel the unfit to survive, we employ the 
 vast resources of modern science. We 
 profess so firm a faith in the efficacy of 
 education that, if a boy proves himself 
 incapable of learning anything, we punish 
 him by keeping him at school longer than 
 his fellows. And, when he is old enough 
 to vote, we hail him obsequiously as the 
 last repository of wisdom. 
 
 It is no wonder, then, that they who 
 know not how to hold them would grasp 
 the reins of power. It is no wonder that 
 taste and knowledge are affected by the
 
 10 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 very men who do not understand their 
 meaning. A sanguine temper and a good 
 intention seem to the ' half-baked ' the 
 only essentials of leadership. Without a 
 knowledge of the past or insight into the 
 future, they deem themselves fit for any 
 enterprise because their ears have been 
 tickled by loose talk concerning the people. 
 And in their vanity they forget that failure 
 is criminal. ' Men little think,' wrote 
 Burke, ' how immorally they act in rashly 
 meddling with what they do not under- 
 stand. Their delusive good intention is 
 no sort of excuse for their presumption. 
 Those who truly mean well must be fearful 
 of acting ill.' These words should be 
 written in letters of gold upon every public 
 building. If only they were taken to heart, 
 the world would be spared a great deal of 
 misery and bloodshed. 
 
 They are not taken to heart, and we are 
 compelled to see our Empire endangered 
 that the pride of travelling members 
 of Parliament be not affronted. The 
 encouragement, which has been given
 
 THE 'HALF-BAKED' 11 
 
 by Mr. Keir Hardie and his friends to 
 those who, unable to govern themselves, 
 are unwilling that others should govern, 
 has supported a purposeless sedition in 
 India and in Egypt. Had these ingenious 
 Socialists studied the delicate affairs, upon 
 which they pretend to adjudicate, they 
 would have realised that something more 
 than first principles is necessary for the 
 administration of great dependencies, that 
 you cannot stem the tide of rebellion with 
 a copy-book heading. 
 
 However, we owe it to the intervention 
 of Mr. H. G. Wells that we are permitted 
 to look upon the full-length portrait of a 
 * half-baked ' man. George Meek, 1 who for 
 some twenty years has drawn a bath chair 
 at Eastbourne, is in all respects typical 
 of his class. He is curious, sanguine, and 
 an egoist. It is evident that he believes 
 himself entrusted by Providence with 
 special talents, and he is quick to ascribe 
 what seems to him the failure of those 
 
 1 George Meek, Bath-Chairman. By Himself. With an 
 Introduction by H. G. Wells. London : Constable and Co.
 
 12 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 talents not to his own lack of concentration, 
 but to the political system under which he 
 lives. He is, therefore, a Socialist, and an 
 apostle of ' divine discontent.' He com- 
 plains that he has had to ' struggle in an 
 environment of din, squalor, and vice.' 
 And yet to read his book is to under- 
 stand why it was impossible that he should 
 ever have emerged by his own effort into 
 a cleaner, quieter atmosphere. 
 
 For George Meek is but another victim 
 of that half -knowledge, which is far more 
 disastrous than ignorance. Though he 
 seems to Mr. Wells a miracle of life, he is 
 merely the product of a false system of 
 education. He was nurtured upon wood 
 pulp and printer's ink. If he had never 
 entered a free library, how vastly happier 
 he would have been ! His outlook upon 
 life, his political opinions, are all borrowed 
 from printed books. He has fed his mind 
 upon an unnutritious diet from the begin- 
 ning. When he ought to feel with abso- 
 lute sincerity he falls back upon some 
 hackneyed phrase. The words of others
 
 THE ' HALF-BAKED ' 13 
 
 have so profound an influence upon him 
 that he contradicts the whole intention 
 of his book. ' We attach a great deal too 
 much importance to our individualities,' 
 says he on one page, forgetting that his one 
 purpose in life is to foster his own individu- 
 ality upon the thoughts of others. ' My 
 nature is so complex,' he tells us on another 
 page, and perhaps, if he had not devoted his 
 leisure to the study of all the classics, he 
 would have been able to plumb the depth 
 of his mistake. 
 
 This, in truth, is the tragedy of George 
 Meek and many hundreds of his kind. 
 They believe that they are unique in the 
 experience of the world, and their capacity 
 cannot keep pace with their aspiration. 
 If only they did their work and left litera- 
 ture to others, they would be wiser as well 
 as happier. It is far better to have an 
 intimate knowledge of bath chairs than 
 to have a nodding acquaintance with a 
 translation of Homer. When George Meek 
 discusses literature, as he does on every 
 page of his book, he discusses it in the same
 
 14 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 reckless fashion with which Mr. Keir Hardie 
 discusses foreign policy. Words flow from 
 his pen which have not the remotest touch 
 with his brain. He feels that he must 
 achieve a literary allusion at all costs. 
 The fact that his father and his uncle 
 married sisters recalls the Atridse to his 
 mind, and convinces you at once that he 
 lacks the gifts of imagery and observation. 
 Even when he makes love the habit of 
 print is heavy upon him. He must needs 
 woo the lady not with apples but with 
 Clarions and verses from Omar. 
 
 His criticisms of literature are what we 
 should expect, and are given with an air of 
 finality. I wonder what Mr. Meek would 
 say, if a mere man of letters discoursed to 
 him concerning the proper conduct of bath 
 chairs ? But at any rate Mr. Meek has no 
 fear. He has read Shakespeare's plays 
 three or four times, but ' for the life of him 
 cannot see what there is so out of the way 
 wonderful about him.' He would not. 
 He prefers Homer. I remember another 
 Mr. Meek who thought Homer hopelessly
 
 THE ' HALF-BAKED ' 15 
 
 inferior to Ossian, because he did not 
 understand ' nature,' and one pronounce- 
 ment is as valuable as the other. Then 
 Mr. Meek ' cannot stand Scott or Thackeray 
 anyhow.' George Eliot and Mrs. Hum- 
 phry Ward are more to his taste. For 
 him, indeed, reading is a grave and serious 
 task. He is sick of politics. He just busies 
 himself in the books he is reading * Brown- 
 ing, ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, 
 Lucretius.' What a list ! The most highly 
 trained intellect would suffer from con- 
 gestion if it fed upon such food as this, and 
 I tremble to think what effect this classical 
 orgy has had upon the mind of Meek. 
 
 George Meek himself need not surprise 
 us. He is, as I have said, the victim of a 
 foolish system, and may often be met with 
 in this world, where reading and writing 
 come by Act of Parliament, and where very 
 few are fortunate enough to escape the free 
 library. What is surprising is Mr. Wells' s 
 attitude towards George Meek. Now Mr. 
 Wells tells us in his preface that he ' hates 
 all idealisation,' and he does not see that
 
 16 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 Meek has idealised himself from the first 
 page to the last. Mr. Wells does not like 
 sentimentality. Meek is so severely senti- 
 mental that he looks upon life through the 
 sentiment of others. He illustrates those 
 things, which come to him, not from his own 
 experience but from popular novels, and so 
 enwraps his book in a thick air of unreality. 
 Never does he attain that sincerity, which 
 is born of understanding and concentration. 
 When the cobbler told Apelles that a shoe 
 in his picture wanted a latchet, Apelles 
 listened to his counsel with respect. When 
 the cobbler proceeded to criticise a leg, the 
 painter sent him back to his last. 
 
 ' What are we to do with our Meeks ? ' 
 asks Mr. Wells in a kind of despair. Why 
 should we do anything with them ? Why 
 should they do anything with us ? But, 
 if we must interfere in the business of their 
 lives, let us try to convince them that half- 
 knowledge is a worthless as well as a dan- 
 gerous thing ; that the dilettante, no 
 matter to what class he belong, can expect 
 nothing in this life save disappointment.
 
 OF GREAT MEN 17 
 
 III 
 OF GREAT MEN 
 
 WHEN Mr. Roosevelt, in a speech delivered 
 at Oxford during his famous tour of words, 
 sought for biological analogies in history, 
 he was guilty of a wilful confusion. Be- 
 tween history and biology there is no link, 
 save the link of metaphor. To indulge 
 our fancy, we may illustrate the life of 
 men by the life of beasts, we may detect 
 what looks like a common process in the 
 evolution of species and in the history of 
 human societies. But we speak only in 
 imagery. Mankind is separated from other 
 animals by the very gifts and qualities, to 
 which it owes its character and its activities. 
 In the first place mankind is touched in 
 all that it says and does by the influence of 
 recorded speech. There is set before it the 
 example of all the ages. The poets that
 
 18 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 sang two thousand years ago still sing to- 
 day. Sophocles is a living inspiration. 
 There is neither statesman nor soldier 
 worthy to follow his craft, who does not 
 feel the prick of emulation, when he reads 
 the records of the past. Thus in the realm 
 of mankind the memory of what has been 
 shapes what is. It is not only through our 
 blood that we inherit the courage of our 
 ancestors. The lessons which they taught 
 endure for ever in the printed page. 
 
 And there is another profound difference 
 between man and other animals. Societies 
 do not rise and fall as species evolve by 
 natural processes. They are checked or 
 advanced by great men. In human de- 
 velopment the great man is supreme. The 
 mass is moulded by his will or fired by his 
 ambition. When we speak of the decay 
 of nations, we record only the fact that they 
 have lost their leaders, or that their neigh- 
 bours have been taught by genius a nobler, 
 wiser lesson of life. Mighty heroisms are 
 the work not of men but of man. It was 
 Caesar, not Rome, who conquered Gaul.
 
 OF GREAT MEN 19 
 
 Hamlet was written by Shakespeare, not 
 by the general energy of his contemporaries. 
 Rembrandt put his golden visions upon 
 canvas, not because he was born at the time 
 of Dutch supremacy, but because he was 
 Rembrandt. 
 
 For this reason, then, biological analogies 
 must always be imperfect and mislead- 
 ing. As we look back into the past we 
 discern nothing but a series of individual 
 triumphs. We remember great names and 
 high achievements. Fame, like the courage 
 which begets it, must ever be solitary. It 
 is in solitude that noble schemes are con- 
 ceived, noble works written. What are 
 our own annals but the annals of mighty 
 kings and great captains, of lofty poets and 
 profound philosophers ? William I., and 
 he alone, conquered England. The in- 
 vader, who sent back his ships because if 
 he won his battles he would not need them, 
 and if he lost he would leave his bones on a 
 foreign shore, was born to change the des- 
 tiny of the world. How different would 
 have been the fate of England had it not
 
 20 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 been for our great monarchs, Henry 11., 
 Edward I., and Elizabeth ! And would 
 not the face of our country have been 
 changed, had not the despot Cromwell come 
 to turn back the tide of revolution, and 
 strengthen us in the enjoyment of reason- 
 able liberty ? Thus it is that history dwells 
 in the antipodes of science. Whatever we 
 claim for it, whatever definition we frame 
 for it, we must separate it always from 
 the comparisons of biology. J. R. Green 
 thought it the historian's duty to silence the 
 drum and trumpet of kingship. He would 
 show us the wrong path. For history is 
 nothing more and nothing less than the 
 biographies of great men. 
 
 Never was there a sterner necessity to 
 insist upon this fact than in these days of 
 democracy, when grandeur of any kind 
 is a disgrace, when strength is popularly 
 deemed a vice, and when the State looks 
 with a haunting fear upon superiority. It 
 is a common complaint that the age of 
 great men is past, that the world is sunk 
 in a slough of mediocrity. It would be
 
 OF GREAT MEN 21 
 
 nearer the truth to admit that in the pre- 
 vailing worship of numbers it is increasingly 
 difficult for the great to emerge. There 
 is no longer a career open to the talents, 
 unless the talents will seize the career of 
 revolution. None but a military tyrant 
 would find an easy path to supremacy. 
 And military tyrants are not often born 
 into our drab and serious world. The 
 France of to-day is not pre-eminent. Who 
 would question her pre-eminence if another 
 Napoleon arose in her midst ? But he, if 
 he came, would be forced to fight for a 
 hearing. Truly, the old order is changed. 
 Once the people was glad to acclaim a great 
 man. Now the people demands itself to be 
 flattered by its governors, and will listen 
 to none that is not ready to bow a servile 
 knee to its prevailing will. 
 
 As the people is slow to respect those 
 who serve it, so it is quick to forget the 
 benefits they confer. In our time no man 
 has borne upon him the signs of grandeur 
 so conspicuously as did Cecil Rhodes. His 
 was the simplicity of the great. He valued
 
 22 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 in himself and in others the plain things 
 of life work, courage, and sincerity. He 
 was, moreover, a man of wide vision and 
 far horizons. To him the end was clear, 
 even when the very beginning was veiled 
 from other men's eyes. Romance was in 
 his blood. The schemes which he made for 
 South Africa were grandiose and uniform. 
 When once he had divined the future, he 
 neither looked back nor swerved from the 
 path. The wealth which he acquired he 
 valued only as the instrument of his pur- 
 pose. The story of his northward progress 
 is like a fairy tale. He would pierce the 
 Dark Continent with railways and tele- 
 graphs. He would light up its obscurities 
 with all the resources of science. Nothing 
 in Sir Thomas Fuller's monograph on 
 Rhodes is more intensely characteristic 
 than the pages, in which he sketches the 
 hero's gradual advance. ' The railway is 
 my right hand,' said Rhodes, ' and the 
 telegraph my speech my voice.' And so 
 he conquered the desert, impatient always 
 until he might reach Victoria Falls. ' I
 
 OF GREAT MEN 23 
 
 should like,' he wrote, ' to have the spray 
 of the water over the carriages.' 
 
 The strain of poetry in him did but 
 strengthen his grasp of practical affairs. In 
 early youth he set forth the real ambition 
 of his life. ' I have my own views as to 
 the future of South Africa,' said he, * and 
 I believe in a United States of South Africa, 
 but as a portion of the British Empire.' 
 To this view he was constant until the end. 
 He regretted the mistakes, which he made 
 in common with all great men, because 
 they retarded his purpose. He waited 
 eagerly for the day, when the ' idea of a 
 lunatic ' should pass into * the idea of 
 practical sanity.' Earnestly and without 
 ceasing he preached the same gospel. ' I 
 am working, I tell you,' he said again, ' not 
 only for the union of the country, but for 
 a union of races, and that will come when 
 once a principle of equal rights is accepted 
 for every civilised man south of the Zam- 
 besi.' The union has come, and they take 
 the credit of it who most bitterly attacked 
 Rhodes while he still dominated South
 
 24 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 Africa. But history has a justice, of which 
 politicians know nothing, and history will 
 record that in 1910 the lifelong ambition 
 of Cecil Rhodes was at last satisfied. The 
 union of South Africa, like all great works, 
 is essentially the work of one great man. 
 And England in honouring his memory 
 does honour to herself.
 
 THE ' NORMAL ' THEATRE 25 
 
 IV 
 
 THE ' NORMAL ' THEATRE 
 
 THAT spirit of sentimentality, which we 
 have been told is the weakest prop whereon 
 mankind can lean, is not content to give 
 its poor support to politics. With the 
 pride of an Atlas balancing the world, it 
 would hold upon its broken back the mani- 
 fold activities of art and science. And the 
 worst of it is that he, who takes sentimen- 
 tality for his crutch, stumbles into a morass, 
 where all sense of purpose and proportion 
 is lost, and where pleasure is confused with 
 a doubtful morality. 
 
 Nor is there any province of human 
 energy, upon which the sentimentalist has 
 laid more violent hands, than the province 
 of the theatre. Mr. Granville Barker, for 
 instance, who too often obscures his very 
 rare gift of stage management beneath the
 
 26 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 common ambition of the tub-thumper, has 
 a simple faith in the mission of the stage. 
 He deepens with controversy the impres- 
 sion, given by his plays, that he sees in the 
 beautiful art of the drama a vague oppor- 
 tunity of doing good. He would have the 
 actor and the dramatist share a pulpit 
 between them. He would persuade them 
 to think ardently of the improvement of 
 the race. What they do and say should 
 directly make for righteousness. In brief, 
 Mr. Barker is a ' progressive ' in art, as in 
 politics, and he forgets that for the arts, 
 bound as they are to the past by the in- 
 dissoluble chain of tradition, progress is 
 impossible. 
 
 It may be said in Mr. Barker's favour 
 that he has rigorously practised what he has 
 preached. With Mr. Shaw's aid he has 
 evolved a kind of drama, which is no drama, 
 whose first and last object is to talk, and 
 which has succeeded in nothing so well as 
 in driving sympathetic audiences into the 
 depths of a despondent boredom. That 
 we shall ever again see such ' plays ' put
 
 THE ' NORMAL ' THEATRE 27 
 
 upon the stage as Mr. Barker's Madras 
 House and Mr. Shaw's Misalliance is un- 
 likely. Human patience shrinks from a 
 mechanical debate repeated nightly. We 
 cannot believe in the sincerity of a set of 
 puppets, which mouth indiscriminately the 
 platitudinous paradoxes of those, who pull 
 their strings. But it is characteristic of 
 Mr. Barker, in whom humour was never a 
 dominant quality, that he should describe 
 ' the movement which he is concerned to 
 foster ' as ' the normal drama.' 
 
 There is an arrogance in this claim to be 
 'normal' which might be pathetic, if it 
 were not ludicrous. Only the very greatest 
 neither transcend nor fall below the norm. 
 Sophocles was normal, Shakespeare was 
 normal, Moliere was normal. Abnormality 
 is the very essence of Messrs. Shaw and 
 Barker. They are resolved to separate 
 themselves from their predecessors, to 
 shock the Philistine, to outrage the con- 
 ventions of theatrical art. But in their 
 quest after originality they follow the wrong 
 path. To be eccentric is not to be original,
 
 28 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 and enterprises are not estimable merely 
 because they have not been attempted 
 before. 
 
 The claim that they are normal is not 
 the only claim, which Mr. Barker makes for 
 the plays of himself and his school. He 
 sees in them also an illustration of what he 
 calls the Puritan element of drama. Here 
 we have a clear and definite contradiction. 
 There is, there can be, no * Puritan element ' 
 in the theatre. Puritanism and the stage 
 are old, irreconcilable enemies. The mere 
 trick of mimicry, the art of personation, 
 are, and have always been, offensive to 
 the narrow spirit of austerity. The con- 
 demnation of Philip Stubbes, the arch- 
 Puritan, uttered in 1583, despite its folly, 
 might be repeated in good faith to-day by 
 Stubbes's descendants. ' Who can call 
 him a just man,' asks Stubbes, * who plays 
 the part of a dissembling hypocrite ? Who 
 can call him a straight-dealing man who 
 playeth a cozener's trick ? Away, there- 
 fore, with this so infamous an art ! For 
 go they never so brave, yet are they
 
 THE ' NORMAL ' THEATRE 29 
 
 counted and taken but for beggars. And 
 is it not true ? Live they not upon begging 
 of everyone that comes ? Are they not 
 taken by the laws of the zealous for rogues 
 and vagabonds ? I speak of such as travel 
 the countries with plays and interludes, 
 making an occupation of it, and ought so 
 to be punished, if they had their deserts.' 
 Such is the unchanged, unchanging view 
 held by the Puritans of the stage. No 
 dramatist, no player, can find any comfort 
 in it. And when we hear Mr. Barker ap- 
 plauding the Puritan element of his craft, 
 we understand how far he has strayed from 
 his right profession, that the pulpit and 
 not the stage is his proper place. With 
 the best will in the world, he will never 
 make them concordant. 
 
 However, Mr. Barker is not wholly opti- 
 mistic. He sees clearly enough, as well 
 he might, that the theatre is beset with 
 many sins. What hope is there for a 
 country, which accepts musical comedy as 
 something better than a money-making 
 machine, which, even at its best, is content
 
 30 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 to speak a dialect which bears no relation- 
 ship to the language of literature, and which 
 at all times would flatter the eye rather 
 than the mind ? Mr. Barker detects in 
 himself and his friends the best hope of 
 regeneration. I would that I shared his 
 sanguine temper. In the meantime, like 
 a true ' progressive,' he is as ready with 
 his remedies as a quack with his medicines. 
 He demands, first of all, the abolition of 
 the censorship in the name of Puritanism 
 a paradox, truly, whose absurdity the 
 patient investigation of a Committee of 
 both Houses has abundantly demonstrated. 
 For all the other ills, to which the stage 
 is subject, Mr. Barker would prescribe a 
 national theatre, and the fact that he pre- 
 scribes it is one of the many strong argu- 
 ments that can be adduced against it. A 
 national theatre has, of itself, no merit. 
 It will prosper or fail according as we have 
 good or evil things to put in it. The house 
 of Moliere has been a triumphant success, 
 because it was the home of whatever was 
 best in the twin arts of acting and the
 
 THE ' NORMAL ' THEATRE 31 
 
 drama. It enshrined a tradition, which 
 it has piously cherished for more than two 
 centuries. Mr. Barker would set the cart 
 before the horse. Having no school of 
 acting, we should, if we followed his sug- 
 gestion, establish a national theatre upon 
 nothing, and then hope for the best. What 
 Mr. Barker would do with it we know well 
 enough. He would dedicate it to the pro- 
 duction of ' normal plays ' ; he would bid 
 it ring with the eloquence of discourse; 
 he would darken it with the tedium of 
 superfluous debates. 
 
 The longest discourses, the most earnest 
 theories, cannot change the truth that the 
 theatre is a pleasure-house. We go there 
 for our delight, to indulge our sense of art, 
 not to pick up the lessons of a trite morality. 
 Mr. Barker, indeed, is as far from the 
 artistry of the stage as the purveyor of 
 musical comedy. We prize the inapposite 
 preacher as little as we prize the antic 
 buffoon. We refuse to put new duties 
 upon the theatre at the bidding of ' pro- 
 gress.' The drama must grow in accord
 
 32 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 with its history and its traditions. It can 
 achieve success only by the wise treatment 
 of its materials. It must forget the lesson 
 taught industriously for half a misguided 
 century that it is nothing better than a 
 clothes-peg. Four trestles, four boards, two 
 actors, and a passion may still suffice for 
 our pleasure. There is still an exquisite 
 beauty in perfect diction, in words written 
 by a poet, not to be read, but to be heard. 
 Here, then, is the dramatist's path of safety 
 to follow always the behests of his art, 
 and to remember that he is at his worst 
 when he tries most zealously to ' do good.'
 
 CELTIC GLAMOUR 33 
 
 CELTIC GLAMOUR 
 
 OF late years we have heard much eloquent 
 speech concerning the glamour of the Celts. 
 Whatever is rare and noble in the English 
 character imagination, courage, wit, and 
 humour has been amiably ascribed to a 
 secret, mysterious influence called Celtic. 
 Should any hero be brave enough to leave 
 the well-worn track, in life or letters, he 
 is instantly hailed as of Celtic origin. Many 
 years ago, when the artist of ' The Briar 
 Rose ' was still among us, one of the elect, 
 who inaugurated this strange cult, took a 
 public delight in the reflection that ' the 
 greatest living painter bore the good old 
 Celtic name of Jones.' And as the word 
 ' Celt ' has stood for every kind of genius, 
 so it has been assumed to imply all gener- 
 ous extravagance of thought or speech.
 
 34 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 When Mr. Lloyd George strays to Lime- 
 house, and with a flood of eloquence pours 
 obloquy upon a very respectable class, he 
 is easily excused on the mere ground of 
 Celtic fervour. It is in the same spirit that 
 those corners of Great Britain, which obstin- 
 ately return Radical members of Parlia- 
 ment, are said to belong to the Celtic fringe. 
 In brief, the word ' Celtic ' has become for 
 many a mere expletive of applause. It is 
 the converse of that homely dissyllable, 
 which is heard from the lips of the British 
 working-man at every street corner. And 
 the one word has just as much, and just 
 as little, meaning as the other. 
 
 A strong feeling of race underlies the 
 Celtic superstition, and it is therefore 
 unfortunate that the adroit champions of 
 the Celts have not been at the pains to 
 discover who and what these benefactors 
 of humankind really were. The cham- 
 pions too easily descried in them a pure 
 reflection of themselves. They imagined 
 a race, such as they thought their own 
 to be, of small, dark men, ardent and im-
 
 CELTIC GLAMOUR 35 
 
 pulsive. They saw epitomised in them all 
 the virtues of humankind. And in con- 
 stant opposition they pictured a tribe of 
 large, sluggish, foolish persons, who had 
 usurped a power which they knew not how 
 to wield, and who regarded with an unsym- 
 pathetic contempt all differing from them 
 in type and temper. It was a pleasant 
 theory of life, and soothing to the pride 
 of those, who put it forward. One fatal 
 objection should hinder its acceptance : it 
 finds no jot of support in the history of 
 Europe. 
 
 The Celts are in no sense secret or mys- 
 terious. They were a race of men perfectly 
 familiar to the ancients. Julius Caesar 
 himself has left us a clear record of their 
 characteristics. The pure Celt was a man 
 of large stature, with fair hair and blue 
 eyes. He was of a dominant spirit, and was 
 always seeking an outlet for his energies 
 in the discovery of new lands and fresh 
 pastures. He travelled south and east. 
 He peopled France. In Caesar's time he 
 was to be found in Britain. But, like
 
 36 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 many another masterful man like the 
 Norman in Ireland, for instance he pres- 
 ently died out or became merged in the race 
 which he had conquered. What he was 
 then, and what he did, the anthropologists 
 have revealed. He was neither dark nor 
 small ; and for the heroes of the Radical 
 Press we must find a new name, a new race. 
 Nor need there be much doubt concerning 
 their origin. They are, indeed, still ' the 
 shy traffickers, the dark Iberians,' for 
 whom on the beach Matthew Arnold's grave 
 Tyrian trader ' undid his corded bales.' 
 
 Shy traffickers they were then ; shy 
 traffickers they are to-day. And in their 
 Iberian blood they have preserved the 
 faiths and fancies of the ancient world. 
 That they are not always eager to fight 
 the common battle of life is at once their 
 genius and their charm. That some of them 
 disdain the success, which seems essen- 
 tial to their practical neighbours, is their 
 good fortune and part of the strength of 
 Great Britain. But they are not the only 
 strength, the only genius of England.
 
 CELTIC GLAMOUR 37 
 
 Matthew Arnold, who described them 
 marvellously well in his verse, did more 
 in his prose than any other writer to 
 obscure the truth. He may even be called 
 the begetter of the Celtic superstition. 
 For having named them Celts, who are 
 not, he proceeded to use the word ' Celtic ' 
 as a stick wherewith to castigate our 
 English pride. He invented a character 
 of dull energy, which he dubbed English, 
 and whenever he detected any other quality 
 in an Englishman, he declared that it was 
 ' not English,' and must be tracked down 
 to the influence of a Celtic ancestor. 
 
 Now, this method of reasoning is the most 
 dangerous of all methods. There is no ex- 
 cuse for inventing an imaginary standard, 
 and then excluding all who do not seem to 
 conform to it. This is the method of Pro- 
 crustes, who stretched those, who were too 
 short, and lopped those who were too long 
 for the compass of his tyrannical bed. If 
 you would arrive at a character of the 
 English you may do so only by a wide 
 and honest comparison of Englishmen.
 
 38 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 From this comparison it would be mani- 
 festly unfair to exclude the great masters 
 of deed and speech. When Matthew 
 Arnold declares that Shakespeare's ' open- 
 ness and flexibility of spirit ' are not 
 English, that Addison's ' moderation and 
 delicacy ' are not English, the best answer 
 is that these qualities are English, precisely 
 because Shakespeare and Addison, with 
 others of their compatriots, possessed them. 
 We all know that the English nation is 
 inextricably composed of many foreign, 
 even discordant, elements. To this variety 
 of origin it owes its strength and intelli- 
 gence. The result of the amalgam is an 
 Englishman, and it is only a part of our 
 conspiracy to underrate our country that 
 the word ' Celtic ' has so long been used as 
 a kind of scourge. The argument would 
 be baseless, even if all the literary genius 
 of England were found in what we may 
 call the Iberian fringe. It is not found 
 in this fringe. Shakespeare, our peculiar 
 glory, came from the heart of England. 
 And the Iberians, who protest that he was
 
 CELTIC GLAMOUR 39 
 
 a Celt, are as far from the truth as the 
 German professors, who asseverate that 
 he was an estrayed Teuton. Chaucer and 
 Milton acknowledged London for their 
 home. The splendour of their achieve- 
 ment is shared by the whole of Britain, 
 and England shall not be deprived of their 
 grandeur at the bidding of a philosopher, 
 who composed a work concerning Celtic 
 literature, and troubled not to discover 
 who were the Celts and whence they came. 
 So deeply has this poison of contempt 
 for their own country permeated the veins 
 of some Englishmen that in an essay 
 once published by an ardent member of 
 Parliament the great men of our country 
 were rigidly excluded from consideration 
 as the mere accidents of chance. Shelley 
 and Nelson were boldly added to the 
 list of those who were 'un-English.' If 
 the writer meant they were un-English, 
 in the sense that they differ from the 
 average citizen, he might claim some 
 sense for his argument. The truth is, all 
 great men, whether French or English,
 
 40 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 Russian or Italian, surpass the average. 
 That is the essence of grandeur. They are 
 not un-English or un-French because they 
 surpass it. And we alone of all peoples 
 employ our ingenuity to explain away, by 
 some tortuous theory of race, what should 
 be our pride. We do not hear of French- 
 men, who declare that Moliere was un- 
 French. The Russians take delight in the 
 genius of Dostoievsky and Tolstoi without 
 arguing that they possess gifts, to which 
 their nationality does not entitle them. 
 Yet no country has a better right to boast 
 of her men of genius than England. In 
 oratory, as in poetry, she alone can match 
 the mastery of Greece. She has held her 
 own in statesmanship as on the field of 
 battle. And we shall show a better sense 
 of patriotism, if we accept in proud humility 
 the grandeur of our country, and waste no 
 ingenuity in inquiring fruitlessly whether 
 this triumph or that of style or of courage 
 was attained by the fair-haired, blue-eyed 
 Celt, or by the shy trafficker, the dark 
 Iberian, his friendly rival in arms and arts.
 
 THE GAMBLE OF LIFE 41 
 
 VI 
 
 THE GAMBLE OF LIFE 
 
 IT is the tendency of the present age to 
 leave nothing to the gamble of life. Our 
 rulers profess a simple and touching faith 
 in the efficacy of legislation. The active 
 philanthropist is sure that, if only his 
 opinions are put upon paper and drafted 
 into an Act of Parliament, the State will 
 be saved. The people, whose sacred will, 
 we are told, shall always and in all places 
 prevail, may not be trusted to govern its 
 own household or to educate its own 
 children. The Government's inspector 
 must follow it assiduously from the cradle 
 to the grave. Only the type and character 
 of our citizens have hitherto been the off- 
 spring of chance, and, if a law placed upon 
 the Statute Book can eliminate this chance, 
 Englishmen will not be permitted in the
 
 42 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 future to assume any character or type, 
 that is not imposed upon them by Act of 
 Parliament. 
 
 Unhappily, some ingenious person has 
 whispered the word ' heredity ' into the 
 ears of hopeful legislators, and the path 
 to wisdom and sobriety lies clear before 
 them. They will carry the responsibility, 
 which they pretend for the welfare of the 
 children, fed, clothed, and educated at the 
 public expense, a step farther back. They 
 will control their breed ; they will see to 
 it that they come of sturdy, sober parents ; 
 in brief, they will conclude a ' full dress 
 debate ' in the House of Commons with 
 a benevolent Bill, and henceforth there 
 shall be no weaklings born in the British 
 Isles. 
 
 It is the men of science who have shown 
 the way. Mendelism, the last favourite 
 of learning, will lead, we are told, straight 
 to the millennium. Now the importance 
 of Mendel's discovery cannot be overrated. 
 It did something more than prove why the 
 dwarf pea, half-bred of a tall ancestor,
 
 THE GAMBLE OF LIFE 43 
 
 breeds true to dwarfness. It enabled the 
 horticulturist to ' fix the type.' By its aid 
 the offspring of rusty wheat has been taught 
 to resist disease. But with these triumphs 
 Mendelians are not content. As they have 
 conquered the flowers of the field, so they 
 would conquer the whole realm of nature. 
 They would even lay their cold and 
 scientific hands upon the race of men. 
 As forty years ago Huxley and Tyndall, 
 travelling beyond their sphere, would im- 
 prove the morals of men as well as enlighten 
 their minds, so the Mendelians, tired of 
 their gardens, bright with sweet peas, would 
 fix the type of human kind. Better teach- 
 ing and better sanitation, says one of the 
 most distinguished of their number, are but 
 palliatives. ' Education is to the man 
 what manure is to the pea.' The man is 
 all the better for it ; the son profits not a 
 jot by his father's learning. If the progress 
 of the race is to be permanent, it must 
 depend not upon education but upon 
 breeding. Mendelism, in short, must come 
 to the rescue.
 
 44 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 A pleasant dream, truly, of human per- 
 fectibility ! And what a chance for the 
 fashionable bureaucracy ! We can imagine 
 a new Department, presided over by an 
 intelligent Minister, guarding assiduously 
 the Temple of Marriage. The Minister will 
 be aided in his pious endeavours by a band 
 of bright young Mendelians as numerous 
 and as comfortably paid as Mr. Lloyd 
 George's valuers. He will endow maternity, 
 on the stern condition that the women of 
 England mate as he tells them. And thus, 
 by treating men and women as sweet peas, 
 he will presently be able to ' fix the type.' 
 In other words, he will make precisely the 
 kind of voter that he wants, and as, of 
 course, this Minister of ours will be a sound 
 Radical, our fancy easily depicts the kind 
 of type at which his ambition will aim. 
 It will be a man, restless, questioning, 
 eager for change, whose sanguine eye looks 
 out upon reform from beneath a lofty, 
 polished forehead. And when this estim- 
 able being, like the dwarf pea (Pisum 
 sativum), always breeds true, then the
 
 THE GAMBLE OF LIFE 45 
 
 victory of Radicalism will be complete. 
 Elections will become a farce, and the 
 Whigs will be tenants of our Government, 
 not for life, but for eternity. 
 
 Only one danger would threaten these 
 political Mendelians. For the ' fixation of 
 type ' several generations are necessary, 
 and, were the Radical supremacy untimely 
 disturbed, the excellent work which they 
 had accomplished might be suddenly un- 
 done. A Tory Minister might be resolved 
 upon another type. He might see in the 
 sanguine hero of his opponent a constant 
 menace to the State, and where the 
 Radical had insisted upon ' the recessive 
 dwarf ' he might prefer ' the dominant tall.' 
 And thus by one ill-omened decision the 
 work of years might be destroyed, and 
 the English race might presently revert 
 to the unclassified good and evil, which 
 dominated England before the coming of 
 Mendelism. 
 
 It is but a dream. And, if for a moment 
 we regard seriously the ambition of those 
 who would apply to the human race the
 
 46 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 methods of the back garden, it is because a 
 professor of biology has shown us the way. 
 The objections to the plan are many and 
 insuperable. Even if a tyrannical Govern- 
 ment decreed to make experiments in com- 
 pulsory marriages, several generations must 
 live and die, as I have said, before the 
 results were made manifest. And the type 
 of patience, which would leave to posterity 
 the profit of its self-denial, has not been and 
 never will be fixed. Our inclinations are 
 still our own. We shall delight in or suffer 
 by them, as destiny decrees, with a good 
 heart and without complaint. Nor shall 
 we ever leave to a Mendelian Government 
 the intimate duty of refusal and selection. 
 In brief, men and women are not peas, 
 either sweet or edible. The complexity of 
 their nature is such as to defy the wisdom 
 of the most profoundly erudite and bene- 
 volent despot. We carry in us the seed 
 of all our ancestors. The unions, which 
 seem to promise best for the benefit of the 
 world, are too often the bitterest disap- 
 pointments. When, in Shakespeare's play,
 
 THE GAMBLE OF LIFE 47 
 
 Henry v. was to espouse Katharine of 
 France, he imagined a son who should go to 
 Constantinople, and take the Turk by the 
 beard. And fate gave them Henry vi., a 
 gentle, studious monarch, who founded 
 colleges, and was driven to the battlefield 
 in his own despite. Then in a country 
 rectory is born the hero of Trafalgar, who, 
 with the courage of genius, destroys the 
 French fleet and changes the history of his 
 country. Truly, heredity is supreme over 
 all, but it is a mystery which the mind of 
 man cannot pierce, a force which human 
 ingenuity cannot control. 
 
 Nor, we hope, would human ingenuity 
 control it even if it could. There is no 
 ambition, which the wise should less will- 
 ingly cherish, than the ambition to ' fix 
 the type ' of human kind. The very 
 essence of its strength and beauty is indi- 
 viduality, which is divergence. Equality 
 is a nightmare, which haunts us only in 
 our moments of acutest misery. And no 
 better method of attaining it has yet been 
 suggested than the method of a bureau-
 
 48 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 cracy, which in the interest of sanity and 
 strength should interfere, if it could, 
 with the natural, unseen laws of heredity. 
 How should its knowledge ever be suffi- 
 cient ? 
 
 There remains the gamble of life, in- 
 finitely preferable to the tinkerings of 
 science. It may give us here and there, 
 the criminal and the drunkard. What 
 matters it, when it gives us also the man 
 of genius ? Gladly, in the hope of the 
 profit, will we face the loss, content only 
 if the highest achievement of the race be 
 not a foolish mediocrity. And as for law 
 and the sciences, let them remain secure 
 within their own provinces, and may their 
 professors remember that, as no man was 
 ever made wise by Act of Parliament, so 
 science best regards its own end when it 
 is content to deal with facts and to leave 
 ' brilliant generalisations ' to the charlatan.
 
 THE END OF THE PRIZE RING 49 
 
 VII 
 THE END OF THE PRIZE RING 
 
 THE extravagant burlesque of an ancient 
 prize fight enacted in America, when John- 
 son and Jeffries met, does not reflect, even 
 dimly, the glories of our English ring. An 
 orgy of greed and arrogance, it displayed 
 all those qualities, which the bruisers 
 of England most heartily despised. The 
 heroes, for whom a purse of twenty-five 
 golden guineas was sufficient reward, put 
 their honour before their profit, and were 
 content if they might retire, when hand 
 and eye had lost their speed, to the voluble 
 comfort of a public-house. Were Cribb 
 and Belcher, Randall and Tom Spring per- 
 mitted to revisit the upper air, what would 
 they think of the eager speculation to 
 which Johnson and Jeffries have willingly 
 surrendered ? The prize money, which 
 
 D
 
 50 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 a hundred of them could not bear away, 
 the rights in ' moving pictures,' the blatant 
 appearances at music halls these were the 
 true excuse and purpose of the spectacle 
 in California. And we can but vaguely 
 surmise in what terms they would have 
 been described by the pugilists of old, who 
 pitched their stakes and roped their rings 
 in the fair meadows of England. 
 
 The passion for dollars, in exchange for 
 which black man and white sold their 
 valour, is not pleasant to contemplate. 
 Far more distasteful is the spirit of arro- 
 gance, in which the whole contest was 
 enwrapped. Both men were brave and 
 noisy with their tongues, though they 
 followed a craft, which, above all, en- 
 joins silence. For many weeks they 
 boasted of their prowess in the Press. 
 Jeffries pronounced himself the champion 
 of the white race, and deemed it not 
 effrontery to assume, unasked, so tremen- 
 dous a responsibility. Johnson of the 
 golden teeth, in happy nonchalance, was 
 sure that he is the greatest man on earth,
 
 THE END OF THE PRIZE RING 51 
 
 and chattered of his strength and courage 
 even in the ring. Now the true hero pre- 
 fers deeds to words, and the vanity of the 
 American bruisers is the measure of their 
 degeneracy. When, nearly a century ago, 
 Hazlitt went down by the Bath Mail to 
 see Bill Neate face the Gasman he was 
 inspired to a gentle homily. ' Modesty,' 
 said he, ' should accompany the fancy as 
 its shadow. The best men were always 
 the best behaved. Jem Belcher, the Game 
 Chicken, were civil, silent men. So is 
 Cribb, so is Tom Belcher, the most elegant 
 of sparrers, and not a man for everyone 
 to take by the nose.' Johnson and Jeffries 
 erred on the side neither of silence nor 
 civility, and it would be a shame upon the 
 past to permit their names to stand in the 
 roll of fame. 
 
 The art and science of self-defence 
 are one of the many links, which bind 
 ancient Greece and modern England. On 
 the banks of the Ilissus, as on the banks 
 of the Thames, the golden crown was 
 won by fisticuffs. And in Greece, as in
 
 52 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 England, poets celebrated the ring in 
 immortal verse, historians recorded the 
 triumphs of their champions in lofty prose. 
 If Pindar has the best of it in verse, the 
 English writers of prose are infinitely 
 superior to the discreet Pausanias and 
 the other Greeks, who reported the 
 brave deeds of triumphing athletes. And 
 there was a good reason for our superiority. 
 For fifty years the prize ring was an in- 
 timate part of English life and English 
 literature. The ' Flights of the Fancy ' 
 aroused a universal enthusiasm, in which 
 the sordid element of money claimed no 
 part. There were no large gates, there 
 were no heavy purses. England looked 
 with pride upon her bruisers, because 
 they were living examples of fair play 
 and physical endurance. Such men as 
 Belcher and Cribb, Spring and Painter 
 and Oliver became national heroes, whose 
 courage and restraint were held up to the 
 young as models worthy of imitation. 
 When Wellington declared that the Battle 
 of Waterloo was won on the playing fields
 
 THE END OF THE PRIZE RING 53 
 
 of Eton, he referred, of course, to the fights 
 which there took place with the bare 
 knuckles, and it was generally believed, 
 not without reason, that it was the spirit 
 fostered by the ring which enabled England 
 to persist victoriously in the war with 
 France. Borrow, deploring in 1851 the 
 death of pugilism, assigned his sorrow to 
 its proper cause. 'All I have to say is,' 
 thus he wrote ' that the French still 
 live on the other side of the water, and are 
 still casting their eyes hitherward.' 
 
 Thus pugilism grew into a sport, in which 
 all classes of society professed an interest. 
 Poets and soldiers, bishops and statesmen 
 were not ashamed to be seen at the ring- 
 side. Keats himself, who tolerated nothing 
 that was ugly, witnessed the famous fight 
 which took place on Crawley Down between 
 Randall and Turner. And John Hamilton 
 Reynolds, Keats's friend, celebrated the 
 skill and courage of the victor, Randall, 
 the famous Nonpareil, in an imperishable 
 sonnet. ' Good with both hands, and only 
 ten stone four.' You will seek in vain a
 
 54 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 nobler tribute than this to an unvanquished 
 hero. 
 
 And who does not remember Byron's 
 friendship for his 'corporeal pastor and 
 master,' John Jackson ? Or the interest 
 which the Iron Duke and Lord Grey, Castle- 
 reagh and Windham took in the art of self- 
 defence ? The oratory of the early nine- 
 teenth century is eloquent with pugilistic 
 metaphor, and the actors went to the same 
 school as the orators, with even better re- 
 sults. The compliment which Kean paid the 
 ring is the highest of all. ' When Mr. Kean ' 
 it is Hazlitt who writes ' was so much 
 praised for the action of Richard, where 
 he stands, after his sword is wrested from 
 him, with his hands stretched out, "as if 
 his will could not be disarmed, and the 
 very phantoms of his despair had withering 
 power," he said he borrowed it from seeing 
 the last efforts of Painter in his fight 
 with Oliver.' The rhapsodists, in prose 
 and verse, followed the same path as the 
 actors. After Hazlitt came Borrow, whose 
 eulogy of Tom Spring is familiar to all:
 
 THE END OF THE PRIZE RING 55 
 
 ' Hail to thee, six-foot Englishman of the 
 brown eye, worthy to have carried a six- 
 foot bow at Flodden.' That is the proper 
 spirit of adulation, nor is it excessive. Who 
 will deny Tom Spring a place in the great 
 line of tradition ? 
 
 The pitiful exhibition of rancour and 
 vulgarity, made in America, will not find 
 its rhapsodist. No Hazlitt, no Borrow 
 will celebrate a battle, which was witnessed 
 by none that had not first been searched, 
 lest perchance he carried in his pocket a 
 missile of death. This negation of sport 
 will tempt only to farce or satire. The 
 contest was never for a moment a living 
 contest. It was brought about only by 
 vaunting advertisement. And the one 
 lesson that it taught is that the time and 
 season for pugilism are gone, like the flower 
 of the grass, and will not come again into 
 the world. 
 
 In brief, the prize ring is dead and it is 
 as well. The real battles of the future will 
 not be battles of brute force and hand-to- 
 hand encounter. They will not be inspired
 
 56 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 to victory by the spirit of the ring. The 
 understanding of firearms, the scientific 
 management of machinery, which they 
 demand, will not be bettered by a know- 
 ledge of fisticuffs. War and athleticism 
 are for ever divorced. The mob of be- 
 capped spectators, who shout themselves 
 hoarse at football matches, will always be 
 useless for defence until they are compelled 
 to undergo the training, which they regard 
 as below the dignity of freeborn voters. 
 To-day we need soldiers, not sportsmen, if 
 we are to survive in the competition of 
 nations. Euripides set the truth to the 
 music of his verse two thousand years 
 ago: 
 
 Will they meet in fight with quoits in hand, 
 Or in the press of shields drive forth the foeman 
 By force of fisticuffs from hearth and home ? 
 Such follies are forgotten face to face 
 With steel. 
 
 Indeed they are, and we may contem- 
 plate the final extinction of pugilism with 
 equanimity.
 
 ' STRAITENED CIRCUMSTANCES ' 57 
 
 VIII 
 
 ' STRAITENED CIRCUMSTANCES ' 
 
 ' HE who gives quickly gives twice,' says 
 the old proverb, to which might be added 
 as a corollary : * He who gives ungraciously 
 gives not at all.' And it is in a spirit of 
 ungraciousness that the British Govern- 
 ment interprets its obligation of genero- 
 sity. The list of pensions, granted year by 
 year to distinguished men, their widows, 
 and their daughters reminds us that the 
 Treasury is determined to render its favours, 
 which are none too great, as humiliating 
 as possible. Beggars, alas ! cannot be 
 choosers. They must take the kicks with 
 the ha'pence, and pocket the affront im- 
 posed by a penurious Government with 
 what cheerfulness they can command. 
 
 The sum usually set aside for those who 
 have served their country in peace and
 
 58 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 war, or have benefited their kind by the 
 profitless crafts of art, science, and litera- 
 ture, amounts to no more than 25,000. 
 Compared with what is lavished on old-age 
 pensions, this sum is pitifully insignificant. 
 It measures the democracy's contempt 
 for the class, whose talents it employs, and 
 which cannot organise itself at the polls. 
 But it is not the insignificance of the re- 
 wards upon which I desire to comment ; 
 it is upon the lack of grace, with which 
 they are made. To the pittance that is 
 awarded to the widows and daughters of 
 those, who have spent themselves in the 
 public service, there is attached a meaning- 
 less and superfluous insult. It is made 
 quite clear that honour and distinction 
 are not of themselves deserving of reward. 
 It is poverty, which moves the State to an 
 act of justice. The terms of affront are 
 not always the same. There was a time 
 when the Treasury justified its munificence 
 by the ' destitute condition ' of its pen- 
 sioners. To-day it excuses itself to the 
 democracy for rewarding merit by citing
 
 ' STRAITENED CIRCUMSTANCES ' 59 
 
 the ' straitened circumstances ' or the ' in- 
 adequate means of support ' of those, who 
 receive its bounty. 
 
 The affront is wholly superfluous, what- 
 ever form it assumes. We may take it 
 that those who apply for pensions are not 
 affluent. The mere acceptance of an an- 
 nuity implies the absence of wealth. In 
 most cases the ' straitened circumstances ' 
 are the necessary outcome of sacrifices 
 made by those, on whom the victims of 
 necessity were dependent. The servant 
 of the State devotes himself to his duty 
 without any thought of the morrow. The 
 man of letters, who makes pleasure for 
 thousands, too often finds it impossible to 
 provide for those who come after him. 
 The single-minded enthusiast, who gives 
 his years to the solution of a scientific pro- 
 blem, and thus enormously increases the 
 sum of national wealth, the fearless dis- 
 coverer, who unravels the mystery of un- 
 trodden lands and pathless seas, cannot 
 but prefer their ultimate success to the 
 proximate reward of money. Nor are they
 
 60 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 blameworthy if, in the devout pursuit of 
 their chosen end, they are unable to leave 
 behind them a comfortable fortune. Rather 
 they deserve whatever bounty the State 
 can bestow upon them and their families. 
 To such apostles of science and art the 
 Government should give freely, not in 
 disdain, but in all humility of spirit. It 
 should proclaim aloud its willingness to 
 reward distinction wherever it be found. 
 It should severely refrain from a wanton 
 parade of the poverty, which is the obvious 
 misfortune of all who ask for or accept a 
 pension. After all, is it not for dis- 
 tinguished service that the pensions on 
 the Civil List are distributed ? ' Straitened 
 circumstances,' 'destitute condition,' 'in- 
 adequate means of support,' while they are 
 not of themselves sufficient to be re- 
 warded, are a common factor in the lives 
 of those, who seek the aid of the State. 
 But that is no reason why the aid should 
 not be given in the proper terms of grati- 
 tude and respect. 
 An explanation is less easy, because
 
 ' STRAITENED CIRCUMSTANCES ' 61 
 
 the insult is not invariable. Some persons 
 there are in receipt of pensions, to whom 
 no public slur of ' destitution ' attaches. 
 Though in every case, no doubt, the 
 pension is welcome, the Treasury makes 
 no attempt to justify the difference of 
 its terms. It sprinkles the uncomfortable 
 words ' straitened circumstances ' with a 
 careless lack of thought. In one list of 
 annuities, for instance, we find the name 
 of the widow of a diplomatist, who for 
 nearly half a century was the faithful 
 servant of his country. He held the 
 highest offices, which the Foreign Secretary 
 can bestow, and which bring honour rather 
 than wealth to those who hold them. Is 
 not his widow worthy of our gratitude 
 in consideration of her husband's distin- 
 guished public services ? Is it necessary 
 for the purpose of policy, or in the cause of 
 generosity, that the whole world should be 
 reminded superfluously of her 'straitened 
 circumstances' ? 
 
 From one example you may learn many, 
 and if you will consult the ' Return of All
 
 62 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 Persons now in Receipt of Civil List Pen- 
 sions ' you may estimate the grudging 
 spirit of insult, which animates the Treasury. 
 And it is not for nothing that the Treasury 
 reserves its amiable allusions to straitened 
 circumstances for what the tub-thumper 
 calls the ' classes.' It is too good a chance 
 of patronage for the democracy to lose. 
 What right have soldiers or ambassadors, 
 scholars or writers, to the consideration 
 of the governing proletariat ? They do 
 not turn elections, or shout their political 
 opinions from the house-tops. Still worse, 
 they would do the work, which it has been 
 given them to do, even if there were no 
 hope that the ' destitute condition ' of 
 their wives and daughters would be miti- 
 gated by an indulgent Government. It 
 is plain, therefore, that they are entitled 
 to the respect of no true democrat, and 
 if they eat the bread of ' charity,' let it 
 be made as bitter to them as possible. 
 
 How different is the treatment meted 
 out to the people ! When the Old- Age 
 Pensions Bill was introduced Ministers
 
 < STRAITENED CIRCUMSTANCES ' 63 
 
 insisted (rightly enough) that the feelings 
 of the people should be tenderly respected. 
 It was pointed out that the pension given 
 to all, who had attained the age of seventy 
 was not a gift, but a right. It was a reward 
 for faithful service faithfully accomplished ; 
 it was deferred pay ; it was anything you 
 please but an act of charity. The inquiries 
 into suitability were ordered to be as little 
 irksome as possible. Above all, no word 
 of affront might be spoken to the recipient. 
 There was much talk in the jargon of the 
 hustings, of refreshing fruit held to parched 
 lips, and that was all. For the rest, the 
 pensioners walked boldly to their post- 
 office, conscious that they were performing 
 an act of favour to the State. 
 
 Is it too much to ask that those, who 
 receive pensions, not for their years, but 
 for distinguished service, should have equal 
 consideration shown to their feelings ? 
 Though another interpretation has been 
 put upon democracy, equal treatment for 
 all should still be the essence of that 
 form of government, lest injustice be done
 
 64 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 to the highest in the land. Grotesque 
 though it may seem to the hardy politician, 
 the poet, whose immortal verse is echoed 
 from age to age, the sculptor, whose chisel 
 commemorates the glories of our State, the 
 painter, who imprisons the hues of the rain- 
 bow upon his canvas, the soldier, who dies 
 for his country, the ambassador, who 
 defends abroad the cause of England, are 
 entitled to the nation's respect, and may 
 boldly demand the nation's generosity for 
 their widows and daughters, without the 
 insulting excuse of ' straitened circum- 
 stances,' or ' destitute condition.'
 
 WHAT IS HAPPINESS ? 65 
 
 IX 
 
 WHAT IS HAPPINESS ? 
 
 IN an eloquent speech delivered by Mr. 
 F. E. Smith against Women's Suffrage, a 
 speech with whose main thesis I am in 
 cordial agreement, and which in due time 
 passed out of practical life into the region 
 of Hansard, the orator was guilty of an 
 obiter dictum, which must not go unchal- 
 lenged. He declared, in fact, that 'the 
 sum total of human happiness, knowledge, 
 and achievement would have been almost 
 unaffected if Sappho had never sung, if 
 Joan of Arc had never fought, if Siddons 
 had never played.' 
 
 Why he enveloped these great names in 
 the musty atmosphere of women's rights or 
 wrongs I do not know. They who bore 
 them engaged in far worthier fights than 
 the paltry battle of sex. They won their 
 
 E
 
 66 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 triumphs in the open field of human en- 
 deavour. It is not as women that we 
 applaud them, but as the fearless cham- 
 pions of life and art, who lived and worked 
 superbly indifferent to foolish rivalries, 
 and took their place in the starry heaven 
 of immortality by virtue of the genius, 
 which sustained them on this earth. 
 
 Joan of Arc needs no defence. Even 
 if her acts had not changed the fate of 
 Europe, her splendid courage and noble 
 mysticism would have been an inspiration 
 to thousands of men and women. Not 
 merely is she secure of fame : the vision 
 of her sacrifice will show others the path 
 of loyalty and devotion unto the end of 
 time. Sappho and Mrs. Siddons need a 
 sturdier defence in these days of unen- 
 lightened commonplace, and yet it should 
 be easy to prove the profound debt of 
 happiness, which the world owes to these 
 supreme artists. 
 
 If happiness be anything better than the 
 certainty of to-morrow's dinner, then are 
 poets and players the real makers of joy.
 
 WHAT IS HAPPINESS ? 67 
 
 To the poets, above all, mankind owes the 
 purest delight that God has given it. There 
 is an intense pleasure breathed into the 
 mind and spirit by beautiful words, which, 
 if it be not comparable with, still transcends 
 the ephemeral triumphs of politicians. 
 What Sappho meant for her own country- 
 men, who might read her as they list, we 
 can surmise only by their generous praise. 
 For Plato she was the tenth Muse. The 
 ancient critics did not hesitate to place her 
 in the same rank with Homer ; she was 
 the poetess, as he was the poet of Greece. 
 One critic marvels at the euphony and 
 grace of her language. Another discovers 
 in her works his best example of sublimity. 
 And we of to-day, who have but fragments 
 to guide our judgment, find no dark mys- 
 tery in the enthusiasm of the ancients. She 
 writes no line that does not burn with life 
 and movement. Her words, as the Hali- 
 carnassian said, ' nestle close to one another 
 and are woven together.' Is it wonderful, 
 then, that she should be a poet of poets, 
 that Catullus himself delighted to turn her
 
 68 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 masterpiece into Latin, that our own Ben 
 Jonson, who took his jewels of speech 
 where he found them, borrowed from her 
 verse one beautiful line : ' The dear good 
 angel of the spring, the nightingale ' ? 
 
 Thus it is that for more than two thou- 
 sand years Sappho has increased the sum 
 of human happiness. The happiness that 
 came to the world when the noble, austere 
 Siddons played was perhaps more intense 
 at the moment of applause, and without 
 doubt more quickly transient. The voice 
 of the poet echoes down the corridors of 
 time. The voice of the actor is stilled for 
 ever in death. The poet's is the greater, 
 the better part, though he is not witness of 
 the rapture which his works inspire. The 
 actor, of course, finds some compensation 
 in the thunder of applause which greets 
 his well-graced entrance on the stage. 
 What matters it, he may say to himself, 
 if my name be writ in water, so long as 
 in my life the incense of flattery burns 
 upon a thousand altars ? And even dead 
 actors may live again in the eloquent
 
 WHAT IS HAPPINESS ? 69 
 
 applause of their critics. The glory of 
 Mrs. Siddons, for instance, is for ever en- 
 shrined in Hazlitt's rhapsody, which none 
 can read and doubt that the incomparable 
 Sarah made a generous addition to the 
 sum of human happiness. 
 
 Hazlitt is discoursing, it will be recalled, 
 of the three great tragic actors of his time 
 Mrs. Siddons, Mr. Kean, and Madame 
 Pasta ; and it is in these terms that he 
 describes the great artist whom Mr. F. E. 
 Smith summarily dismisses : ' Mrs. Siddons 
 seemed to command every source of terror 
 and pity, and to rule over their wildest 
 elements with inborn ease and dignity. Her 
 person was made to contain her spirit ; 
 her soul to fill and animate her person ; 
 her eye answered to her voice. She wore 
 a crown. She looked as if descended from 
 a higher sphere, and walked the earth in 
 majesty and pride. She sounded the full 
 diapason, touched all chords of passion ; 
 they thrilled through her, and yet she 
 preserved an elevation of thought and 
 character above them, like the tall cliff
 
 round which the tempest roars, but its 
 head reposes in the blue serene ! ' With 
 such words as these in our ear, how can 
 we assert that Sarah Siddons did not 
 enhance our mortal happiness ? 
 
 The danger of such a hasty generalisation 
 as Mr. F. E. Smith's is that it goes beyond 
 the intention of its author. It travels 
 further than the boundaries of sex. If 
 Sappho and Mrs. Siddons are condemned, 
 Shakespeare and Kean legitimately share 
 the condemnation. All those, in fact, must 
 be pronounced guilty at the bar of opinion, 
 who have not actively striven to ' do good.' 
 For, as I have said, this is no contest of 
 man and woman. If it be true that the 
 greatest poet, the greatest actor, among 
 women failed to increase the sum of human 
 happiness, then poetry and the drama 
 have failed throughout the ages. But they 
 have not failed. It is for the proper enjoy- 
 ment of the arts that all human efforts are 
 made ; it is by the solace of the arts that 
 we are fitted to make those efforts. 
 
 There is no Government so debased that
 
 WHAT IS HAPPINESS ? 71 
 
 has not recognised the paramount duty of 
 patronage. The glory of Athens resides 
 rather in the noble monuments wrought 
 by Phidias, in the marmoreal tragedies 
 of Sophocles, than in the eloquence and 
 statesmanship of Pericles. The history of 
 the Italian States is but the history of 
 painting, poetry, and philosophy. If we 
 are not ignorant of Florentine politics, it 
 is because Machiavelli's ' Prince ' intro- 
 duced general ideas into the arid region 
 of statecraft. And, as we descend through 
 the years, it is the same tale that is told. 
 The age of Elizabeth is less the age of 
 Burleigh than of Shakespeare. The author 
 of Hamlet created out of the dry bones of 
 reality an imperishable kingdom of happi- 
 ness and romance. Fielding was at once 
 the maker and historian of a later age. 
 Who shall say that Gibbon, in comparing 
 the fortunes of the English and German 
 branches of the Habsburgs, was guilty of 
 exaggeration ? ' The successors of Charles 
 V.,' wrote the author of the Decline and 
 Fall t in a magniloquent passage, ' may
 
 72 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 disdain their brethren of England, but the 
 romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite 
 picture of human manners, will outlive the 
 palace of the Escurial and the imperial 
 eagle of the House of Austria.' 
 
 In brief, all passes save the imaginings 
 of Art. The politics, which to-day seem 
 the last thought of wisdom and beneficence, 
 go out forgotten into the night. The 
 Constitutions, designed to bring perpetual 
 prosperity upon suffering States, survive 
 only as curiosities in a text-book. The 
 eloquence, which hushed the Senate, is lost 
 like the rustling of leaves in the tree-top. 
 A word, a colour, a melody, as they bring 
 a purer delight, so they live longer than 
 the tangled policies of tyranny or revolu- 
 tion. And I verily believe that the dis- 
 covery of Sappho's nine books of poems 
 would more surely increase the sum of 
 human happiness than the wisest Act of 
 Parliament, which ever could be added to 
 the Statute-book.
 
 GENIUS AND WEALTH 73 
 
 X 
 
 GENIUS AND WEALTH 
 
 LORD ROSEBERY, in speaking one day 
 of Robert Burns, touched with less than 
 his usual happiness on the vexed ques- 
 tion of genius and wealth. ' Poverty pro- 
 duces masterpieces,' said he, 'and wealth 
 smothers.' He is sure that the genius of 
 Burns could not have survived a comfort- 
 able balance at his bank. He goes yet 
 further, and boldly declares that, had 
 Wordsworth been as rich as Rogers, he 
 would have written no better than Rogers. 
 I wonder if he would admit the converse 
 that Rogers, in a cottage, might have 
 composed The Excursion ? 
 
 Superstitions die hard, and this parti- 
 cular superstition has survived the hostile 
 test of reason and experience. It was not 
 poverty, which spurred Burns to the sublime
 
 74 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 composition of The Jolly Beggars. It was 
 genius. No thought of economy quenched 
 the divine fire. He wrote it in the prodi- 
 gality of his mind, and did not trouble 
 to give it to the world. Had poverty 
 produced the masterpiece, poverty would 
 have made the best bargain it could, and 
 found solace in the barley-bree. No, Burns 
 knew many foes within and without. In 
 life he was, as he said himself, ' the sport, 
 the miserable victim of pride, hypochon- 
 driac imaginations, agonising sensibility, 
 and bedlam passions.' After death, he 
 became something far worse a national 
 bard, the pack horse of a national sen- 
 timent. But poverty was neither his 
 friend nor his foe. He sang the songs not 
 of an empty pocket, but of a full heart 
 and an eager brain. 
 
 The argument from Wordsworth is still 
 more unsound. All the wealth of Gol- 
 conda could not have affected the supreme 
 gift of that devout man devout in sub- 
 jection to his own genius and in the worship 
 of the Muse. Had he been thrice a banker,
 
 GENIUS AND WEALTH 75 
 
 he would still have been Wordsworth. He 
 knew nothing, he cared for nothing, save 
 the practice of his art. To the outside 
 world he was an old gentleman who talked 
 only of his own poetry. As Hazlitt said 
 with truth as well as with malice : ' He 
 tolerates nothing but what he himself 
 creates ; he sympathises with what can 
 enter into no competition with him, with 
 the bare earth and mountains bare, 
 and grass in the green field. He sees 
 nothing but himself and the universe.' 
 What influence could the accident of gold 
 have exerted upon an egoism such as this, 
 cold, deep, sheltered, and immovable like 
 a Highland tarn ? 
 
 It is little indeed that we know of genius. 
 When we see it, we do not always recog- 
 nise it. It needs the sifting hand of time 
 for its full discovery. It comes and goes, 
 where and as it chooses. It transcends the 
 laws of life and fate. It is a very Proteus 
 in shape and mien. ' Valiant in velvet, 
 light in ragged luck.' One thing only 
 we know: genius cannot be * smothered.'
 
 76 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 If there be an encounter, it is wealth that 
 will be ' smothered ' by genius. But the en- 
 counter seldom comes, for it is only chance 
 which confronts two unrelated accidents. 
 
 The other qualities change as they will. 
 Genius is invariable. It may coexist with 
 poverty or wealth, with meanness or 
 generosity. A thing apart, it is enclosed 
 within an impregnable fortress of the mind. 
 A man of genius may be adroit as an 
 ambassador, or he may be a dolt in the 
 conduct of human affairs. He may ' write 
 like an angel, and speak like poor Poll.' 
 If without the impregnable fortress he be 
 acquisitive, he will grow rich. If he be 
 a miser, he will collect halfpence, and blow 
 out his candle when he sits alone. Inspired 
 by the habits of business, he will follow 
 the laudable ambition of a decent life ; 
 he will satisfy the longing which may be 
 his for dignity and splendour, and he will 
 be none the less therefore a man of genius. 
 
 Shakespeare did not return to Stratford 
 with an empty pocket. ' Sir Simon Two- 
 and- a- Half -Shares,' as the highwayman
 
 GENIUS AND WEALTH 77 
 
 called the actor, found the reward which 
 he asked for a life of labour in the comfort 
 and solace of New Place. And he was no 
 less a man of genius than was Marlowe, 
 who died at Deptford in a drunken brawl. 
 The grandiose ambition of Sir Walter Scott 
 was satisfied with nothing but the Gothic 
 magnificence of Abbotsford, and if he 
 turned his genius to what in the city is 
 called the best account that he might 
 obtain his ambition, who shall find a 
 word of reproof for his thrift ? And did 
 he not presently, in his heroic struggle with 
 the ruin caused by another, prove the 
 courage and sacrifice of which the sanity 
 of genius is capable ? 
 
 In our own generation there was none 
 so surely marked by the hand of genius 
 as Alfred Tennyson. Truly it might 
 be said of him that, like Horace, he 
 belonged to the Muses, and if he found 
 their wings feathered with gold, he made 
 the best of his good fortune: he pur- 
 chased estates, founded a family, and 
 upheld the dignity of his life and of his
 
 78 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 craft, while he surrendered not a jot of their 
 freedom and independence. The wealth 
 which he acquired was an economic acci- 
 dent, which neither ' smothered ' nor en- 
 hanced its native genius. And even when 
 wealth exists not, genius may be happy 
 in hope and credit. Thus Goldsmith was 
 rich, without a shilling in his pocket. He 
 died, owing 2000, and well might Johnson 
 exclaim, ' was ever poet so trusted before ? ' 
 If men of genius be sometimes poorer 
 than those who follow the humbler crafts, 
 their poverty is not a cause of their genius, 
 but its effect. The baker and candlestick- 
 maker are concerned chiefly with the 
 acquisition of money. They bake bread 
 and fashion candlesticks, not that they 
 may express their thoughts or uphold an 
 ideal, but that they may prove worthy 
 of their hire. The man of genius looks to 
 another end than riches, which, when they 
 come to him, come as a welcome accident. 
 Concerned only with the perfection of his 
 work, he forgets perchance the weight and 
 value of money. But it is not in this
 
 GENIUS AND WEALTH 79 
 
 forgetfulness that his genius lies. That, 
 as I have said, is a thing apart, which asks 
 for judgment on its own merits, and does 
 not admit the plea of extenuating circum- 
 stances. 
 
 It is the danger of such generalisations 
 as Lord Rosebery's that they persuade 
 us to mistake the accidents of genius for 
 its proper expression. Riot, drunkenness, 
 and poverty are the infrequent companions 
 of poetry. Burns might have loved women 
 and the bottle, even if he had not written 
 a line of The Jolly Beggars. Balzac's 
 necessity of debt was born not of his 
 genius but of his temperament. In their 
 daily life men of genius differ not percep- 
 tibly from their fellows, and thousands 
 have died of poverty or excess who never 
 tasted the waters of Helicon. Between 
 them come those starveling souls, who, 
 mistaking the foible of genius for its forte, 
 believe that in mimicking the sins of poets 
 they will catch their inspiration. To these 
 let it be said again that genius lies in 
 nothing else than in its own expression.
 
 80 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 And if now and again we base our delight 
 upon the misery of others, if there was 
 nothing the world could do for Burns, 
 which should compensate for a sublime 
 inheritance of verse, let us accept the gift 
 in thankful humility. Above all, genius 
 should suffer no reproach. If it have vices, 
 let us forget and forgive them. Let us 
 show a still greater magnanimity, and 
 condone even its homelier virtues.
 
 THE DECAY OF COMEDY 81 
 
 XI 
 
 THE DECAY OF COMEDY 
 
 THE one benefit which the short-lived Re- 
 pertory Theatre conferred upon the world 
 was the production of a little masterpiece, 
 called The Sentimentalists, and written by 
 George Meredith. The critics reproved it 
 for its lack of action. It threw its audiences 
 into a bored slumber. And had it not 
 been for the happy wisdom of a magazine, 
 which presently printed it, its fate might 
 have been swift as a butterfly's to sparkle 
 an hour, and then perish in oblivion. 
 
 Captured in print, it lost perforce some- 
 thing of its charm. The artist, who com- 
 posed it, made his appeal to the ear, not to 
 the eye. His magic words were designed 
 to be spoken. There is not a line in the 
 fragment for a fragment it is either of 
 prose or verse, whose mere falling upon the 
 sense is not a delight. When we hold 
 
 F
 
 82 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 the text in our hand, we must use an effort 
 to recall the charm. So nicely is the drama 
 suited to its purpose, that it seems but a 
 half of itself without the voices of the 
 actors, without the delicate decoration 
 of the stage. But the half that remains 
 is still a treasure. Even the eye that 
 reads can see in a moment that it is per- 
 vaded by the true spirit of comedy. 
 
 For once style and purpose are intimately 
 united. George Meredith's purpose was 
 to shoot folly, as it flies ; but if his aim 
 is unerring, his archer's hand is light upon 
 the string. While he corrects, he amuses 
 and enchants. His Professor Spiral, whose 
 ' oratory is a whole orchestral symphony,' 
 who launches forth, ' like an eagle from 
 a cliff,' is a sketch of an English Tar tuff e. 
 His Astraea, ' a dedicated widow,' is a 
 sentimentalist, whose heart is destined 
 to revolt. About her circle the other 
 persons of the drama, in pious worship or 
 kindly ridicule. And from beginning to 
 end the dialogue glints and flashes, always 
 brilliant, always humorous.
 
 THE DECAY OF COMEDY 83 
 
 Yet the public would have none of The 
 Sentimentalists. Its ear does not thrill to 
 the music of beautiful words. It knows 
 nothing of George Meredith, who did not 
 take the precaution, seldom neglected by 
 other dramatists, of ' writing to the papers.' 
 The public, moreover, has its own views 
 of comedy, which were not Meredith's. It 
 goes to the theatre to laugh to laugh 
 idly. For those who most patiently 
 haunt the stalls, the drama is a time- 
 killer, a pleasant instrument for doing 
 away with the necessity of conversation. 
 As they will tell you, they go to the theatre 
 to be taken out of themselves, a difficult 
 enterprise, one would think, when there 
 is so little to emerge from. They cannot 
 bear to hear tragedy, because, as their 
 stock phrase has it, * there 's too much of 
 that in real life,' an absurd boast in the 
 mouths of men, whose notion of tragedy is 
 a punctured motor-tyre. Were they asked 
 to hear comedy, which seldom happens to 
 them, they would not understand it. Its 
 fine point would miss their ear, the serious
 
 84 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 delicacy, which is its essence, would evapo- 
 rate in the chill atmosphere of antipathy, 
 which lies over the footlights. 
 
 For the theatre, like the hustings, is gov- 
 erned by the majority. There minorities 
 have no rights and little consideration. 
 Pleasures taken in common must perforce 
 be judged not by the most but by the least 
 intelligent among those who share them. 
 And the taste of the English public is crude 
 in its simplicity. Sentimentality governs it, 
 and if it is to respond with a whole heart to 
 the appeal of the stage, it must be given 
 farce, which is comedy run to seed, or 
 melodrama, which is tragedy hard-ridden, 
 and pulled up short at the last ditch of 
 disaster. The theatre-goer, in truth, must 
 not be asked to exercise a critical judg- 
 ment. He would rather guffaw than 
 laugh. For him the symbol of comedy is 
 a bladder on the end of a string, and he 
 can split his sides at the foolish discom- 
 fiture of him, on whose head the bladder 
 resounds. His melodrama must be equally 
 primitive. Not one personage must differ
 
 THE DECAY OF COMEDY 85 
 
 from the accepted type. His wicked 
 baronet must be very wicked indeed. 
 No spark of intelligence must check his 
 bluff hero, until he is saved in the fifth act 
 by the god or goddess descending blithely 
 from the machine. 
 
 So it comes about that the average play- 
 goer delights above all in a strange con- 
 vention called musical comedy, which is 
 never comedy and seldom musical. In 
 the contemplation of this varied entertain- 
 ment he never grows weary. He knows 
 which act should be enlivened by the great 
 duet, in which act the Muse of the twink- 
 ling feet should sing her song. He can 
 even distinguish between one example of 
 the kind and another. Viewed by his 
 practised eyes, the Girl from Here bears no 
 resemblance to the Girl from There. He 
 delights in those merchants of the comic, 
 whose business is to make themselves 
 ridiculous. And it is easy to appreciate the 
 bewilderment which he would feel if he 
 strayed perchance upon so pure a comedy 
 as George Meredith's Sentimentalists.
 
 86 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 And should the average play-goer be 
 persuaded to endure the performance of 
 what is known as an ' intellectual drama,' 
 he is satisfied only with a savage presenta- 
 tion of the truth. He owns that he makes 
 a vast concession in passing an evening 
 among persons, whom he would not know 
 ' at home,' for he is still unable to separate 
 life and art. But if he must suffer, let 
 him suffer openly and crudely. If a 
 lesson must be thrust upon him, let it 
 be brutally expressed. The act of Mr. 
 Galsworthy's Justice which most tightly 
 ' gripped ' its spectators was the act in 
 which no word was spoken, the act which 
 was a pantomime of suffering, a panorama 
 of degradation, a blatant appeal to the 
 self-pity of the mob. That the sermon 
 of his preaching should elude nobody, 
 Mr. Galsworthy put upon the stage a 
 convict in the throes of solitary confine- 
 ment. Not a word was said. What was 
 seen plainly exceeded the limits of dramatic 
 art. But the spectators went home with 
 terror in their souls and prejudice in their
 
 THE DECAY OF COMEDY 87 
 
 minds, as though they had heard a tub- 
 thumper fulminate in Exeter Hall. And the 
 dramatist's purpose no doubt was effected. 
 What, then, should those who take delight 
 in the eccentricities of drama say of comedy? 
 They understand it not ; they know not 
 whence it came. It has never been popu- 
 lar. To-day in England at any rate it is 
 almost unknown. Yet, if we chose, we 
 might understand its qualities, we might 
 mark its character. If we leave out of 
 our count the comedy of Aristophanes, 
 that magic tree filled with ' singing night- 
 ingales, and climbing, chattering apes,' 
 and the comedy of Shakespeare, which 
 wore the robe of poetry and romance, 
 comedy has never changed its face. It 
 meant for Meredith what it meant for 
 Menander. It is, and has always been, 
 a painting of manners, an attempt to 
 show society what it is, and what are its 
 failings with a light hand and without cen- 
 soriousness. An absence of exaggeration, 
 a restraint in action, a propriety of style 
 these are essential to it. The greatest
 
 88 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 comedy in the strict sense of the word 
 that we have in English, Congreve's Way 
 of the World, has the mere semblance 
 of a plot. For Congreve comedy resided 
 strictly in phrase and portraiture. And 
 this very limitation renders pure comedy 
 distasteful to the general. It demands a 
 power of comparing life with art, a power 
 unexercised by the popular drama. Dryden 
 has made this distinction clear in a few 
 lines. ' Comedy,' he says, ' presents us 
 with the imperfections of human nature ; 
 farce entertains us with what is monstrous 
 and chimerical ; the one causes laughter 
 in those who can judge of men and manners, 
 by the lively representation of their folly 
 and corruption ; the other produces the 
 same effect in those who can judge of 
 neither, and that only by its extravagance.' 
 To-day the monstrous and chimerical win 
 all the suffrages ; and if it be true that 
 ' there will never be civilisation where 
 comedy is not possible,' the frigid reception 
 of Meredith's enchanting fragment places us 
 sadly, if not irrevocably, without the pale.
 
 OLD AND NEW TRAVELLERS 89 
 
 XII 
 
 OLD AND NEW TRAVELLERS 
 
 AT the fall of the year all those who have 
 a shilling in their pocket, and some who 
 have not, pack up their bags and hie them 
 away across the Channel. If they cannot 
 change their minds, they are determined at 
 least to change their sky, an enterprise of 
 itself worth many a sacrifice. The mere 
 breath of a fresh breeze, the mere sound of 
 an unwonted speech are sufficient to remove 
 from our backs the burden of daily grind- 
 ing care. And this truth the ideal traveller 
 recognises. He travels for travel's sake. 
 His ambition is not to ' improve his mind,' 
 but to recapture the holiday spirit of his 
 youth, to silence once more the insistent 
 voice of responsibility. So, with as light 
 a wallet as possible, he sets forth, caring 
 not whither he goes, and cherishing in his
 
 90 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 mind the pleasures of uncertainty. Hap- 
 piest is he, if in the morning he know not 
 what roof will shelter him at night, if 
 throughout the day he chooses for the 
 companions of his voyage contentment 
 and hope. ' They run not,' said Montaigne, 
 ' that run after a benefice or after a hare, 
 but they run that run at barriers and to 
 exercise their running.' 
 
 So they travel not who travel for some 
 definite profit or advantage. Yet how 
 much may the intelligent traveller learn, 
 if he keep his mind free from pedantry ! 
 After the delight of the road, to enjoy which 
 is the chief purpose of those, who leave their 
 homes, there is the diversity of other men's 
 ' lives, customs, humours, and phantasies.' 
 To drink new wines, to eat unaccustomed 
 food these are the legitimate joys of the 
 traveller, who, while he marks all that 
 differs from his own experience, must 
 harden his heart against the sin of hasty 
 generalisation. He who would condemn 
 a whole nation because he encounters an 
 extortionate innkeeper should be forbidden
 
 OLD AND NEW TRAVELLERS 91 
 
 by law ever to leave his native country 
 again. 
 
 The journeys of to-day differ in purpose 
 and design from the journeys of yesterday. 
 If we would find an unknown land we 
 must go further afield. Time was when 
 Russia seemed undiscoverable, like the 
 North Pole. And railways, as they have 
 annihilated distance, are fast annihilating 
 curiosity. The truth is that what all men 
 may enjoy loses something of its freshness, 
 and it was this reflection that persuaded 
 the French philosopher to discern in 
 travelling ' something democratic, a secret 
 love of majorities,' which should be avoided. 
 Fortunately , the majorities maybe avoided. 
 There are still some corners of the world 
 in which the tourist is unknown, and which 
 are not yet defaced by the paper bag and 
 ginger-beer bottle of advanced civilisation. 
 
 A worse defect in modern travel is its 
 absence of adventure. It is no longer 
 the unexpected that happens. Ease and 
 Mr. Bradshaw have proved themselves the 
 determined and triumphant enemies of
 
 92 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 uncertainty. And yet, as we look back 
 upon the past, we may discover one source 
 of satisfaction we are no longer con- 
 demned, not even the most prosperous of 
 us, to the tyranny of the Grand Tour. 
 In the seventeenth century the Grand 
 Tour was as stern and arduous as a uni- 
 versity course. James Howell, in his In- 
 structions for Forreine Travett, has set out 
 the aims and duties of a young Englishman, 
 who went forth to see the world. The 
 book, published in 1642, was written, by 
 a strange irony of fate, in the Fleet Prison, 
 where the author might survey the countries 
 of Europe only with his mind's eye. It is 
 none the less vivid for that, nor has time 
 robbed it of its value. Though no traveller 
 will ever again put it in his pocket as a 
 present guide, it preserves for us a picture 
 or ' character ' of Europe, which is a clear 
 proof that mind and temper outlast the 
 most rigid of political systems. 
 
 Most liberally did James Howell treat 
 the youth of England both in time and 
 money. He sent them touring for three
 
 OLD AND NEW TRAVELLERS 93 
 
 years and four months, and he allowed 
 them 300 a year each, and 50 apiece for 
 their servants. Nor was it in any spirit 
 of idleness that James Howell bade them 
 go forth. The Grand Tour in his eyes was 
 a moving academy, or the true Peripatetic 
 School. It was not for pleasure nor at 
 hazard that the young zealots of the seven- 
 teenth century crossed the Channel. They 
 sat in their carriages, which rumbled 
 heavily across France, they sojourned in 
 the vast and comfortable inns, which have 
 survived to welcome the motor-car, intent 
 upon self-improvement. They devoted 
 themselves gravely to acquire the lan- 
 guages, to understand the customs, to 
 master the politics and literature of the 
 lands through which they passed. Books, 
 says Howell, must be the traveller's con- 
 stant companions, and ' he must choose 
 them, as he should do his friends, few, 
 but choice ones, yet he may have many 
 acquaintances.' But, lest he grow too 
 bookish, he must apply himself also ' to 
 know the fashion and garb of the Court,
 
 94 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 observe the person and genius of the 
 Prince, and inquire of the greatest noble- 
 men and their pedigree (which I recommend 
 to his special consideration).' Above all, 
 he was to seek conversation with any 
 famous men there might be, a habit, which 
 was continued far into the eighteenth 
 century, when no Englishman ever thought 
 of traversing the Channel without paying 
 his respects to Voltaire at Ferney, and 
 which Howell easily justifies by the saying 
 of a great emperor that he had rather go 
 fifty miles to hear a wise man than five 
 to see a fair city. 
 
 Thus the young Englishman was bidden 
 to read foreign countries like a book, and 
 to neglect the foolish toys which engross 
 his descendants. It was his to spend the 
 hours in reading, in meditation, or in 
 discourse. ' By the first,' says Howell, 
 ' he converseth with the dead, by the 
 second with himself, by the last with the 
 living.' And, if he returned to his island 
 home in any other guise than that of the 
 prig, it was not the fault of his wise and
 
 OLD AND NEW TRAVELLERS 95 
 
 excellent mentor. Moreover, he is re- 
 minded, and justly too, that the best 
 means of understanding foreign lands is 
 to understand his own. He must not be 
 an eagle abroad, and a stark buzzard at 
 home. A knowledge of England, in brief, 
 must teach him the true modesty. 
 
 In the seventeenth century, then, travel- 
 ling was an affair of scholarship and dis- 
 cernment. It was not enough to run 
 through France and Spain. The young 
 voyager was instructed by Howell in words, 
 which have not lost one jot of their truth, 
 to compare the characters of the nations 
 which he visited. He was asked to observe, 
 with an amazing sense of prophecy, how 
 it was that Germany, ' its power being 
 divided 'twixt so many, serves only to 
 balance itself, who if it had one absolute 
 monarch would prove terrible to all the 
 rest.' Thus the golden youth of three 
 centuries since went abroad but once in 
 his life. He undertook the duty in no 
 light spirit. He learned such lessons as 
 should last him through many years of
 
 96 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 home-keeping. The golden youth of to- 
 day spends his week-ends in Paris, and 
 never goes beyond the dominion of our 
 English tongue. Neither Ho well's con- 
 temporary nor our own is the ideal traveller. 
 Perhaps neither of them is a traveller at 
 all. The one strove to learn too much ; 
 the other is content to learn nothing. But 
 the true traveller, as I have said, journeys 
 for pleasure, and never in haste. Nothing 
 irks him, nothing disconcerts him, and if 
 night surprise him far from the shelter of 
 an inn, shall he not lie happily at the Sign 
 of the Great Bear ?
 
 JOHN BULL AND HIS RIVALS 97 
 
 XIII 
 
 JOHN BULL AND HIS RIVALS 
 
 THE publication of Mr. Meredith's Celt and 
 Saxon, with its extravagant tirade con- 
 cerning ' Bull,' recalls the almost universal 
 practice of inventing some gross personage 
 to represent the character and tempera- 
 ment of this nation or that. The practice 
 is natural enough. Images appeal more 
 vividly than ideas to the mind of man. To 
 see is always easier than to argue, and a 
 plain, simple vision has more power to 
 convince than many volumes of theory. 
 Anthropomorphism the faculty of endu- 
 ing abstractions with mortal shape is the 
 common tendency of primitive man and 
 the germ of the poet's symbolism. Savages 
 carve their gods into the rude semblance 
 of themselves. They bow down to idols, 
 which if their skill had been greater would
 
 98 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 have been nothing else than portraits. 
 Nor is there in this ingenious method of 
 worship any impiety. The savage cannot 
 but interpret the unseen in terms of the 
 seen, and he approaches as nearly to realism 
 as his ignorance will permit him. 
 
 The personification of nationality, on 
 the other hand, is made always without 
 piety, and generally in scorn. The nations 
 set up idols of themselves not to worship, 
 but to kick and insult. Jacques Bon- 
 homme and John Bull, France and Eng- 
 land anthropomorphised, are figures of fun. 
 They are, so to say, Aunt Sallies, at which 
 their enemies, foreign and home-bred, may 
 have as many shies as they like for nothing. 
 
 Devised in contempt, these personi- 
 fications are composed chiefly of vices. 
 Each one bears the burden of all the sins 
 of his fellows. The virtue, which every- 
 where flourishes by the side of vice, is 
 purposely suppressed, while the vice is 
 transformed by that touch of exaggeration, 
 which is the essence of caricature. John 
 Bull, Jacques Bonhomme, Fritz the Ger-
 
 JOHN BULL AND HIS RIVALS 99 
 
 man, Sandy the Scot, Paddy the Irishman, 
 exist in comic papers and in the popular 
 imagination. The world of reality knows 
 them not, and their invention, trivial as 
 it might appear, has led before now to 
 political crises and even to international 
 complication. 
 
 This habit of caricature, in truth, is the 
 more foolish because there is no such thing 
 as a national character. It is impossible 
 to express England or France by a pictorial 
 formula. Nations are not merelv multi- 
 
 V 
 
 plex ; they are ever changing. The Ger- 
 many of to-day is not the Germany of 
 yesterday. Even if we attempt to strike 
 an average, the attempt can be made only 
 for a single generation. And what is most 
 strangely baffling in the persistent attempt 
 to fit the countries of Europe with their 
 symbols is that the symbols, for the most 
 part, have no point of contact with their 
 countries. That France, the home of the 
 arts, the cradle of heroes, should have found 
 so obscure a representative as Jacques 
 Bonhomme is one of the puzzles of history.
 
 100 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 That there are Jacques Bonhommes in 
 France none would deny. He is a type 
 that may be found under any sky. But he 
 is in no sense characteristic, and a more 
 absurd representative could not be found 
 for the France of Rabelais and Moliere, 
 of Descartes and Pascal, of Louis xiv. and 
 Napoleon. Genius, courage, and splendour 
 are the inheritance of the French. Shall 
 they be personified in a foolish man clad 
 in a blouse, or in the pompous citizen who 
 speaks in the well-worn phrases of Monsieur 
 Prudhomme ? 
 
 But the most monstrous perversion of 
 all is John Bull. You cannot arrive at 
 him by counting heads. He will elude 
 the most diligent study of the past. We 
 have many worse in our midst. Him 
 we know not, and it will defy the efforts 
 of the fiercest Anglophobe to discover 
 his lair. We are all familiar with his 
 image, as presented in the comic papers. 
 I wonder if he has ever been revealed even 
 to England's bitterest enemy ? What is 
 he, then ? What are his qualities and
 
 JOHN BULL AND HIS RIVALS 101 
 
 pretensions ? He is obese, above all. A 
 Falstaffian paunch suggests an inability to 
 move or think, though it does not suggest 
 for a moment the immortal humour of 
 Shakespeare's fat knight. His obesity 
 binds him to the earth, and invests with a 
 kind of earthiness his hopes, his purposes, 
 and his ambitions. He never lifts his 
 eyes to heaven, save in greedy anxiety for 
 his crops. He cares not for poetry or 
 philosophy ; he despises the decorative 
 side of life. The one god of his whole- 
 hearted idolatry is the bundle of bank- 
 notes strapped up in his breeches pocket. 
 This he adores with a constant devotion, 
 and a sincere prayer that it may never 
 prove less. To it he is ready to sacrifice his 
 rest, his leisure, and his honour. To in- 
 crease it, he will live laborious days, and 
 sleep through the long nights with half- 
 opened eyes. He goes through the world, 
 selfish, useless, and esurient. 
 
 Thus it follows that he cares neither for 
 his country nor his country's fame. So 
 long as he is permitted to add another roll
 
 102 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 to his stock of bank-notes he is content. 
 As for the defence of hearth and home, he 
 is sure that the Channel will be all-sufficient 
 for them, and he cares not how many 
 enemies clamour at his door. England is 
 an island, and his pocket is full, and over- 
 head the sun is still shining. The single 
 virtue which he boasts is a sort of obstinacy, 
 which forbids him to change his view and to 
 take on a new habit, or to acknowledge 
 himself in the wrong. But this virtue is 
 not enough to redeem his many vices, 
 and he remains stolid and clumsy, the 
 least amiable portrait in the gallery of 
 nations. 
 
 And as we contemplate his placid pro- 
 tuberance we wonder whence in the world 
 he came. He corresponds to nothing in 
 fact. He represents exclusively the agri- 
 cultural interest, which died an unnatural 
 death many years ago. He is too heavy 
 to ride to hounds, the one sport which is 
 religiously English. Nor are his terrene 
 qualities in any sense characteristic of his 
 country. I would not dogmatise concern-
 
 JOHN BULL AND HIS RIVALS 103 
 
 ing England, in which good and bad are 
 mixed as elsewhere. I would not substi- 
 tute for John Bull another formula, equally 
 irrelevant. But if we may judge of a 
 nation by its policy, we cannot but admit 
 that Great Britain has bred men of 
 constructive imagination, men who have 
 gazed across the wide horizons of the sea, 
 and pictured to themselves the new lands 
 that lay beyond. Before all things, the 
 policy of England has been a policy of 
 ideals. In that which she has achieved 
 she has sought profit less eagerly than the 
 solution of a problem. Her dominions 
 oversea have never been a field of extortion. 
 She has watched their growth with the 
 proud eye of sympathy, an eye which looks 
 not out from the fat face of our friend 
 John Bull. You cannot imagine that old 
 gentleman, clad in breeches three sizes 
 too small for him, holding the gorgeous 
 East in fee, and then, as if that were not 
 enough, founding a new empire in the 
 Pacific Ocean. 
 
 However, the image has been set up, and
 
 104 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 we must still bear with our changeling. 
 For a changeling John Bull is, and none 
 of our breed. Drake and Nelson were 
 not his kinsmen. Chaucer, Shakespeare, 
 Tennyson knew him not. He is not sib 
 to Chatham and Pitt. Even the voter, 
 foolish as he is, resembles him neither for 
 good nor evil. In brief, he has no more 
 of truth in him than Paddy the Irishman, 
 that imagined victim of Saxon asperity 
 and insensitiveness, or Sandy the Scot, 
 who is said to ' jock wi' deeficulty,' and 
 to deplore perpetually ' the saxpence that 
 went bang.' But there he stands in all his 
 obstinate rotundity, and there he will stand 
 to give a false impression unto the end of 
 time.
 
 THE NATION'S TREASURES 105 
 
 XIV 
 
 THE NATION'S TREASURES 
 
 A SUDDEN fire at Brussels, which proved 
 the risks incidental to all exhibitions, and 
 the losses sustained by the museum at 
 South Kensington would not have been 
 wholly in vain if they had dissuaded 
 governments and private collectors from 
 too generously sending their treasures 
 across the sea. Those who are privileged 
 to possess works of art have no right to 
 endanger their existence. Whether their 
 motive be benevolence or pride, it is in 
 either case insufficient. There is no excuse 
 for dragging precious pictures or rare 
 furniture up and down Europe, like 
 travellers' samples. Even if they escape 
 destruction by fire or flood, they are 
 battered by the way; and there is only 
 one place in which to see the masterpieces
 
 106 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 of art and handicraft, and that is the 
 treasure-house to which they properly 
 belong. 
 
 The nations hold their treasures in trust. 
 As they received them from their fore- 
 fathers, a noble inheritance, so it is their 
 duty to transmit them untarnished to 
 posterity. They must give an honest and 
 honourable account of their stewardship. 
 Those who are responsible for an irreparable 
 loss must answer for their carelessness at 
 the bar of history. It is no matter for 
 monetary compensation. Works of art 
 must be measured not by the cipher of an 
 auction-room, but by the pleasure which 
 their contemplation may afford. A picture 
 by Rembrandt may exchange hands for 
 the sum of 100,000. If it be destroyed, 
 all the hoards of all the millionaires cannot 
 bring it back into the world of vision. 
 
 It is clear, then, that no mistaken 
 amiability should persuade our museums 
 to relinquish even for a month the charge, 
 that is laid upon them, to guard their 
 treasures with jealous eye and anxious
 
 THE NATION'S TREASURES 107 
 
 hand. The splendour of a nation's collec- 
 tions, the care and taste wherewith they 
 are preserved are some measures of a 
 nation's grandeur. We express our magni- 
 ficence, whether we be English, or French, 
 or German, by our eagerness to possess the 
 best that the world of art can give us. In 
 days of old art followed the flag. A suc- 
 cessful war justified itself partly by the 
 great libraries and fine pictures, which 
 the victorious generals carried to their 
 homes as a symbol of conquest. What 
 had been won by the sword served for the 
 contemplation of peaceful citizens. And 
 though the ancient motto, ' Spoils to the 
 victor,' is no longer written upon our 
 banners, there is many a capital which 
 still takes a legitimate pride in the priceless 
 gems of painting and typography, which 
 rewarded the conduct of a successful 
 campaign. 
 
 So when we visit picture galleries and 
 museums we may read upon their walls 
 the history of the past. London and 
 Windsor are eloquent of the debt we owe
 
 108 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 to monarchs, who were patrons of art as 
 well as upholders of their country's honour 
 and their country's faith. It is to the 
 generosity of Henry vin. that is due the 
 proud possession of Holbein's masterpieces. 
 The king, who by his munificence brought 
 the great painter to the English Court, 
 should still attach to his memory the grati- 
 tude of England. And in the taste of 
 Charles I., who bade Vandyke commemo- 
 rate a great age, that sad monarch's un- 
 happy fate is for the moment happily 
 forgotten. 
 
 The Socialists, no doubt, would tell us 
 that picture galleries and libraries are 
 purchased with ill-spent money. They 
 are not contrived for the immediate profit 
 of the proletariat. The capitalist, also, 
 may if he will take pleasure in them. In 
 the thrice-fortunate days when the hope 
 of the Socialist is realised, when we all live 
 in hygienic prisons, fed, clothed, taught, 
 and doctored at the public expense, there 
 shall be no need of those things which 
 embellish life. The Government, intent
 
 THE NATION'S TREASURES 109 
 
 upon the feeding and educating of its 
 victims, will not be permitted to waste its 
 money upon the purchase of paintings 
 and sculptures. It will have done its 
 duty, if it distribute with impartial hand 
 an equal dose of comfortable misery to 
 each of its dependants. But even from 
 the Socialist's point of view the Govern- 
 ment will be wrong. The possession of 
 works of art is not merely honourable, it 
 is also profitable to a nation. 
 
 For picture galleries are like the shrines 
 of the ancient world. Pilgrims take long 
 journeys to gaze upon their treasures. 
 And, where there are pilgrims, there comes 
 profit in their train. The railways along 
 which the pilgrims travel, the taverns 
 where they are fed and sheltered, all the 
 complex energies of life feel the quickening 
 effect. Not that I would lay stress upon 
 this accident of the arts. But its advan- 
 tage as an argument is evident even to the 
 most rigid utilitarian. That which helps 
 to fill the pocket of the cabdriver and hotel 
 proprietor may not seem wholly despicable
 
 110 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 even to those, who on every other ground 
 would condemn as pernicious folly the 
 purchase of a painted canvas or piece of 
 sculptured marble. 
 
 Far greater than the profit is the honour. 
 The Spain of to-day no longer plays a fore- 
 most part in the policies of Europe. The 
 conquests of Charles v. are but as a tale that 
 is told. The glory of the Museum of the 
 Prado has outlived all the victories of war, 
 all the triumphs of diplomacy. If, under 
 the auspices of Philip iv., Spain lost her 
 universal power, she gained in the cherished 
 genius of Velazquez something which in- 
 vincible armies could not give her. So, 
 forgetful of a long line of kings, unmindful 
 of a shattered Empire, we visit Madrid, 
 conscious that there we may see a vision 
 of beauty and splendour which no other 
 capital can afford. 
 
 Thus it comes about that many a city 
 is associated indissolubly in our minds 
 with this or that miracle of art. Lille is 
 the seat of a distinguished university. It 
 is the centre of ever-increasing activity.
 
 THE NATION'S TREASURES 111 
 
 Its busy streets are packed with prosperous 
 citizens. Yet many travellers pause at 
 Lille neither to hear its professors nor to 
 engage in its commerce. For there in the 
 museum is kept, as in a temple, the famous 
 bust of wax which has baffled spectators 
 and connoisseurs alike. Who modelled 
 the strange and wistful head none knows. 
 Who shall say what is the meaning of its 
 solemn and elusive smile ? Its sightless 
 eyes still look out upon us, wondering and 
 mysterious. Within the waxen brow is 
 imprisoned something of palpitating life. 
 And many a pilgrim who cares little for 
 learning or profit will still visit Lille, know- 
 ing that on the lips of the waxen bust there 
 still lurks for him the smile of an unrevealed 
 secret. 
 
 And as a sacred charge is laid upon 
 museums, so also those who are privileged 
 to guard in their houses the masterpieces 
 of art may not lightly endanger them. The 
 hands, which fashioned them, fashioned 
 them for all time, and purchase does not con- 
 fer upon the purchaser the right over them
 
 112 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 of life and death. He who owns them enjoys 
 them for his lifetime alone. He is faithless 
 to his trust, if he bequeaths them in worse 
 shape than that in which they came to 
 his hands. Truly he shall not be held 
 guiltless, if he expose them to the risk of 
 fire and water. Let him allow those to 
 see them, who are willing to undertake the 
 proper pilgrimage. Above all, let him 
 remember that steamboats and railway 
 trucks are not the proper homes of works 
 of art, and that he who risks the existence 
 of books or pictures, even though his own 
 money has bought them, is an accomplice 
 in destruction.
 
 THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE 113 
 
 XV 
 
 THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 THE meetings of the British Association, 
 once notorious, have ceased to be fruitful 
 of surprise or sensation. Its speakers are 
 no longer facetious, as in days of old. They 
 make no attempt to lighten the gravity 
 of their speech with quips and jests. They 
 do not improve the occasion with moral 
 discourses. Accordingly they have been 
 condemned as dull by the critics, and, if 
 they deserve all that is said in their dis- 
 praise, they may easily retort that it is not 
 their business to amuse or to improve, that 
 science is not even distantly related either 
 to the pulpit or the music hall. 
 
 Indeed, the failure of the learned to 
 excite the interest of the people is in a 
 sense the best proof of their competence. 
 Science has suffered not a little, especially 
 
 H
 
 114 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 in England, from an unmerited popularity. 
 In the dim eighties of the last century the 
 natural sciences became so many branches 
 of rhetoric. The vague quality, called 
 eloquence, was more highly esteemed 
 than the true spirit of scientific inquiry. 
 Chemists and geologists, who should have 
 known better, thumped their tubs with 
 an unrestrained energy. The pupils of 
 Darwin, who still wears with Newton 
 the wreath of scientific supremacy, dis- 
 covered in The Origin of Species a new 
 method of theology, and thus ignored the 
 teaching of their master. A general super- 
 stition grew up that there was nothing 
 which science could not achieve. Not 
 only was it ready to save our bodies in this 
 world ; it was ready also to save our souls 
 in the next. Briefly, it seemed to a 
 thousand ardent proselytes most necessary 
 for salvation, and straightway its popu- 
 larity was assured. The intellectually 
 restless took refuge from a ' creed outworn ' 
 in a scientific dogma, rhetorically expressed, 
 which they were wholly incapable of under-
 
 THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE 115 
 
 standing. With the hopefulness bred of 
 novelty, they were sure that all would be 
 well, here and hereafter, if only they 
 listened to the rotund utterances of chemi- 
 cal evangelists. And they met together 
 thirty years ago in a very different spirit 
 from that which animates them to-day. 
 
 With a light heart they surrendered 
 their old beliefs, and were sure that they 
 proved an intellectual superiority in accept- 
 ing the freshest doctrine contrived by the 
 biologist. When Professor Tyndall stood 
 up and quoted Lucretius in a famous 
 address all seemed well with both worlds. 
 Science was not only triumphant ; it was 
 fashionable. Art and literature bowed 
 humbly before it. The mere discussion 
 of such vague problems as spontaneous 
 generation gave it an impetus far greater 
 than any imparted thereto by Newton 
 or Darwin, and to the populace at any 
 rate it appeared the golden age of science, 
 when science had travelled furthest from 
 its proper province. 
 
 And thus it came about that the im-
 
 116 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 portance of science and its mission was 
 vastly exaggerated. Reaction followed 
 inevitably. Much was heard in France 
 and in England concerning the bankruptcy 
 of science. The phrase, invented by M. 
 Brunetiere, had far more meaning than 
 such phrases are wont to carry with them. 
 In the sense that science had not fulfilled 
 its obligations, it was indeed bankrupt. 
 It had promised to invent a new world, 
 to correct the old theology, to bring the 
 solace of assurance to wavering minds, 
 and it had done none of these things. 
 The rhetoric of its professors had found 
 no other echo than disappointment. The 
 philosophic doubt, which once had seemed 
 a necessity, no longer fulfilled the aspira- 
 tions of inquiring spirits. The foundations 
 of belief seemed more firmly established 
 than ever. And the victims, whose peace 
 of mind had been wantonly disturbed, 
 turned upon the new dogma and rent it. 
 In tyranny it was fiercer than the old ; in 
 authority and tradition it was the upstart 
 of yesterday.
 
 THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE 117 
 
 To-day a better feeling prevails. It is 
 recognised that science, like literature, is 
 concerned with itself alone. It cannot, 
 and should not be asked to save the souls 
 of men, or to 'render their lives happier,' 
 as the common phrase has it. To uncover 
 the secrets of nature ; to decipher the 
 history which is written in mountain, 
 valley, and stream ; to wrest from the 
 past the reason of custom and tradition ; 
 to isolate substances, hitherto vaguely 
 surmised ; to find fresh elements these 
 are a few of the legitimate tasks of science. 
 Sometimes the performance of these tasks 
 is met with a legitimate reward. If it be, 
 the true man of science cares not. His 
 hope begins and ends with research. The 
 fortune which Lord Kelvin amassed was a 
 comfortable accident. It was an accident 
 only in the career of a great man of science, 
 and should not affect the estimate which 
 is made of his splendid discoveries. In 
 truth, the science that is worthiest of re- 
 spect is pursued with no desire of gain, 
 and to reproach it with having no bearing
 
 118 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 upon the pains and pleasures of life is to 
 confuse its scope and to misunderstand 
 its purpose. 
 
 So. when we hear that the British Asso- 
 ciation is losing touch with the people, 
 we need think none the worse of it for that. 
 Rather let us wonder that it ever stooped 
 to make a popular appeal. Neither science 
 nor the people would lose much, if no 
 attempt ever was made to bring them 
 together. In the many congresses, which 
 disturb the autumn of the year, there is 
 a kind of vulgarity which we cannot too 
 bitterly deplore. They are but so many 
 attempts to democratise learning, to turn 
 what should be a serious pursuit into a 
 picnic. If men of science, bound together 
 by the ties of a common interest, choose 
 to meet together for the discussion of their 
 researches, there is no reason why they 
 should not. But why should they take 
 the unknowing public into their confidence ? 
 Why should they descend from the serene 
 height of investigation to attempt the 
 impossible task of amusing or instructing
 
 THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE 119 
 
 the crowd ? And what has science, which 
 should be a jealous mistress, to do with 
 cheap trips and noisy excursions ? No 
 man can serve God and Mammon, and it 
 is a wholesome sign that after thirty years 
 of rhetoric the world of science is beginning 
 to find it out. 
 
 The truth is that there is a kind of 
 stuffiness in congresses of all kinds. It 
 matters not a jot for what purpose they 
 are met together. Books, science, and 
 politics are one and all an insufficient 
 excuse. And the enterprise is all the 
 worse when it is publicly undertaken. 
 The lion is a noble animal. He loses his 
 nobility when he is asked to dance to the 
 popular tune. Nor is it by mobs that 
 good work is ever achieved. The work- 
 shop, not the platform, is the proper arena 
 of research. Nothing has ever added to 
 our knowledge, which has not been done 
 in secrecy and solitude. It was not at a 
 congress that Newton discovered the force 
 of gravitation. It was not by haunting 
 assemblies that Darwin arrived at his
 
 120 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 theory of the origin of species. And the 
 worst of it is that evil communications 
 corrupt good manners. Science, with the 
 limelight turned upon her brow, is apt to 
 forget her limitations, to pretend that she 
 can solve the insoluble, and can bring 
 solace by her mere presence into many a 
 stricken home. So it is that many, hear- 
 ing with satisfaction of the loosened hold, 
 which the British Association is said to 
 have upon the general curiosity, will 
 reflect that the unpopularity of science is 
 the most hopeful sign of its usefulness, and 
 that one hour of quiet research spent in 
 the study is better worth than many a 
 weary week of tea-meetings.
 
 THE TYRANNY OF GOLF 121 
 
 XVI 
 THE TYRANNY OF GOLF 
 
 To the returning traveller, who has spent 
 some weeks under foreign skies, England 
 appears at the first sight as the country 
 where they play golf. Everywhere the 
 tyranny of the game is visible. The rail- 
 way stations are packed with golfers men 
 who would not journey ten miles from their 
 homes, unencumbered with the necessary 
 clubs. As you look out from the window 
 of the train, which carries you to London, 
 you see without pause or intermission the 
 same sight. The pursuit of the white ball 
 is universal. It is undertaken in a spirit 
 of solemn sacrifice. The laughter of gaiety 
 must not approach the green. There is 
 no sign of light-hearted joy in this serious 
 profession. The first rule of golf etiquette 
 is that ' no player, caddie, or onlooker 
 should move or talk during a stroke.' And,
 
 122 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 though I believe that after the stroke the 
 worst blasphemies are excused, a studied 
 alternation of silence and self-reproach is 
 not the best encouragement of hilarity. 
 
 However, it is not the grimness of golf 
 that I would condemn, but its tyranny. 
 None can escape it. It leaves no corner 
 of the land inviolate. The whole of Great 
 Britain is now mapped out into golf links, 
 from north to south, from east to west. 
 If time-honoured rifle-ranges injure the 
 nerves of the sacred player, they must 
 be (and have been) suppressed. I can well 
 believe that a man might play from the tee 
 at Land's End and hole his ball in the top- 
 most promontory of Caithness, without 
 ever stirring a yard from an eighteen-hole 
 course. That the homely crafts of hus- 
 bandry are still permitted to flourish here 
 and there is the one concession which 
 golf makes to our daily life. In all else 
 she is a jealous sovereign, demanding and 
 obtaining the wholehearted devotion of 
 her patient lieges. 
 
 The benefits, which Englishmen have
 
 THE TYRANNY OF GOLF 123 
 
 obtained from their games and manly 
 sports, are a commonplace. Priceless 
 lessons of good temper and self-reliance 
 have been learned at cricket and football. 
 The skill of hand and eye necessary to the 
 gentler game are no less admirable than 
 the spirit and courage enforced by the 
 other. If, as is easily credible, the well- 
 educated Englishman is of a better temper 
 and of a higher resolution than men of his 
 own age and class abroad, it is no doubt to 
 games that he owes his superiority. But 
 it should be remembered that cricket and 
 football are but the means to this desirable 
 end, and that they are not carried into 
 middle life, with any better reason than the 
 Latin grammar, which once taught the un- 
 willing boy the art of prose. 
 
 To all field sports, to all other games than 
 golf, there are appointed times and seasons. 
 A man may not hunt at midsummer. He 
 cannot play cricket on Christmas Day. 
 However violent his passion for this pastime 
 or that, there are many months, in which 
 perforce he must curb that passion, in
 
 124 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 which, to be sure, the pastime itself is 
 nothing more than a pleasant memory. 
 Cricket and football, again, demand for 
 their proper exercise the suppleness of 
 youth. When once the muscles harden 
 into their places, the hero of a thousand 
 games must himself become a spectator, 
 or discover at the last that life holds some- 
 thing else fit for accomplishment than sport. 
 
 The tyranny of golf, on the other hand, 
 ceases only with life. It knows not the 
 restrictions of time and season. It may 
 be played in July and December with 
 equal comfort and facility. Not a single 
 day is unsuitable for the pursuit of the 
 white ball. Nor need any age be inefficient. 
 As a child of nine is not too young, so a 
 veteran of ninety is not too old. Not for 
 nothing has it been called the old man's 
 game. And thus it is that golf absorbs 
 the energies of the nation as no other game 
 has ever absorbed them, until it has passed 
 from a condition of mere boredom and has 
 become a national danger. 
 
 Long ago it ceased to be a sport and
 
 THE TYRANNY OF GOLF 125 
 
 became a profession. The true golfer is 
 a professional, no more and no less. The 
 fact that he earns no money at the game 
 does not in reality affect his state. He is 
 a professional in the sense that he lives for 
 golf and golf alone. It is the only career, 
 the only ambition that he knows. Even 
 if at the outset he has other interests and 
 other aspirations, he speedily forgets them, 
 and henceforth regards golf with a gravity, 
 which he cannot bring to the discharge of 
 any duty. Henceforth golf is for him the 
 test and touchstone of all things. In his 
 eyes a ' plus ' player is a hero to whom the 
 wisest statesman and the bravest general 
 should alike bow the knee. To ' foozle 
 a drive ' he regards as an irreparable 
 disaster. He thinks no pains lost which 
 shall improve his game by a single stroke. 
 Thus there is growing up in our midst 
 a generation, which knows nothing else than 
 golf, which is ignorant of European history 
 and politics, which has a vague belief that 
 Paris is a city in the neighbourhood of 
 Le Touquet, and that Berlin, which cannot
 
 126 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 boast an eighteen-hole course, has not yet 
 been called into existence. These sports- 
 men travel not. Travel takes them too 
 far away from their favourite links. They 
 think not. Thought may put them off 
 their stroke. So they dream of ' stymies ' 
 and go early on the links. If you ask them 
 why they play golf they will tell you it 
 makes them ' fit.' Fit for what ? For 
 more golf. 
 
 So, in obedience to the universal domina- 
 tion, England is changing her manners 
 and her customs. That as little time as 
 possible should be withheld from the golf 
 course the week-end encroaches on the 
 week. Once upon a time ' Saturday to 
 Monday ' was deemed long enough for the 
 recuperation of jaded nerves. Then a 
 wiseacre discovered that ' Friday to Tues- 
 day ' gave the ardent golfer two other days. 
 And, if that left only Wednesday and Thurs- 
 day for the proper settlement of his own 
 and the nation's affairs, there was no help 
 for it. Affairs must give way to golf, and 
 there 's an end.
 
 THE TYRANNY OF GOLF 127 
 
 The result is a curious confusion in the 
 values of things. Golf, which is a game 
 and no more, which was played in Scotland 
 for many years, and is still played there 
 by some in the pure spirit of sport, has 
 appeared to Englishmen as the whole duty 
 of man. Here we have another proof 
 of the danger of transferring from one soil 
 to another games or plants or animals. 
 The rabbit, harmless in England, has 
 proved the ruin of Australia. Legislation 
 alone could check the ardour of the Fijians, 
 who, when cricket was first introduced to 
 their enchanted island, thought that the 
 proper limit of a match was six weeks. 
 The English have interpreted the game of 
 golf with a more than Fijian liberality. 
 A game which lasts six weeks is all too 
 brief for them. So they have appointed 
 that golf shall be played everywhere, every 
 day, and all the year round. 
 
 Now, even though golf be the noblest 
 game that ever the ingenuity of man con- 
 trived, we may yet pay too high a price 
 for it. In the international competition
 
 128 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 of to-day we cannot afford to yield the 
 smallest advantage. If, while we are en- 
 wrapped in the mysteries of golf, our rivals 
 make a profound study of politics and train 
 themselves in all the difficult arts of war, 
 it will avail us little to possess the first links 
 in Europe. In the temper of modern 
 England there is nothing more gravely 
 deplorable than the apathetic levity, with 
 which her citizens approach serious ques- 
 tions of State. To arouse them to the 
 necessity of self-defence seems an almost 
 hopeless task. National service is shirked 
 by one class, because it would interfere with 
 a pleasant habit of loafing about the public- 
 house ; it is shirked by another class, be- 
 cause it would interfere with the amiable 
 contest, which it is never tired of waging 
 against ' Colonel Bogey.' But there are 
 worse enemies, in store for us than ' Bogey,' 
 enemies, who cannot be defeated by cleek 
 or niblick. And when the hour of danger 
 strikes will it not shame us that golf has 
 dulled the edge of patriotism, that our hands 
 are better fitted to carry clubs than rifles ?
 
 THE ANNIHILATION OF SPACE 129 
 
 XVII 
 
 THE ANNIHILATION OF SPACE 
 
 WHEN, after many years of absence, Dr. 
 Johnson visited Lichfield, still the object 
 of pious pilgrimages, he was astonished at 
 the modesty of his native town. The 
 imagination of youth had magnified its 
 houses and ennobled its streets. The ex- 
 perience of Dr. Johnson is familiar to us 
 all. None of us can revisit his ancient 
 haunts without surprise. The truth is that 
 our own growth dwarfs the memory of past 
 things. Our standard of grandeur changes 
 with the passage of time. Seen through 
 the mist of fancy, a poor hill shows like 
 a cloud-capped mountain, a mere rivulet 
 assumes the dignity of the silver Thames. 
 
 The familiar experience of each one of 
 us is also the experience of mankind. The 
 whole race looks upon size and distance
 
 130 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 with a more lenient eye than three cen- 
 turies ago. Cities which once appeared 
 far distant one from another now rub 
 shoulders with a kind of intimacy. Time 
 was when London, which year by year 
 extends its borders and may still be tra- 
 versed in half an hour, was a congeries of 
 separate, almost inaccessible towns, a sign 
 of whose independence remains in the 
 High Streets now tethered at either end 
 to the main thoroughfare. In the seven- 
 teenth century, no one embarked upon 
 a journey from Westminster to London 
 without forethought. When Swift took 
 refuge in Chelsea from the society of his 
 friends, he recognised that he was dwelling 
 in another city. In foul weather he made 
 * the journey,' as he called it, by stage- 
 coach. When he returned on foot, he re- 
 joiced that he went with an empty pocket, 
 and so could laugh at the footpads. Even 
 in the heyday of Holland House, Lady 
 Holland's guests set out for Kensington 
 as for a sojourn in the country. Yet Ken- 
 sington was no further from Charing Cross
 
 THE ANNIHILATION OF SPACE 131 
 
 than it is to-day, and ten minutes in a 
 taxicab will take us thither. 
 
 In fact, the annihilation of space is the 
 great achievement, for good or evil, of the 
 modern world. It has come upon us with 
 a strange suddenness, and an explanation 
 is not so simple as it might seem. Of 
 course, the facilities of what the Americans 
 call ' transportation ' have played a large 
 part in the change. When Queen Eliza- 
 beth came to the throne London was a 
 grave and silent town. Its streets were 
 emptied of all save foot passengers. Stow 
 tells us that ' shod carts ' were forbidden 
 to enter the city except upon such reason- 
 able cause as ' the service of the Prince.' 
 And, if an infrequent carriage made its 
 appearance, its fore-horse was decently 
 led by hand. Then a hungry Dutchman 
 brought coaches to England, but for many 
 years none but the highest nobility pre- 
 sumed to ride in them. At last, when 
 James i. sat upon the throne, the old 
 restraint vanished. What seemed a vast 
 number of carts and coaches encumbered
 
 132 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 the narrow streets. ' The coachman,' said 
 the chronicler, ' rides behind the horse 
 tails, lasheth them, and looketh not behind 
 him. The drayman sitteth and sleepeth 
 on his dray, and letteth his horse lead him 
 home.' Yet the miles must have been long 
 indeed, when the horse of every carriage 
 was led by hand, and the drayman slept 
 upon his dray, even in Cheapside ! 
 
 The river was still the fair highway of 
 London, and the highway it remained for 
 many a year. The citizens took their 
 barges as we take our taxicabs, and read 
 their books or talked with their friends in 
 great content as they passed from West- 
 minster to London Bridge. A pleasanter, 
 more leisurely method of progress could 
 not be imagined. And how noble a spec- 
 tacle must the Thames have been, packed 
 with brightly painted barges ! But pres- 
 ently, as fashion passed northward from 
 the river, the sedan chair was brought from 
 abroad, and gradually the poor bargeman 
 found himself ousted from prosperity, just 
 as in our day the hansom cab is succumbing
 
 THE ANNIHILATION OF SPACE 133 
 
 to the swifter motor-car. So evil, indeed, 
 was the plight of the bargeman that an 
 ingenious dramatist, anticipating a later 
 beneficence, proposed that performances 
 should be given in a playhouse in aid of the 
 poor wretches whose occupation was gone. 
 
 And still the mile kept its immeasurable 
 length. Travel was dangerous as well as 
 difficult, and a journey from London to 
 Edinburgh entailed more risk and asked 
 more patience than a voyage from Liver- 
 pool to New York asks to-day. Then at 
 last what De Quincey called ' the steam 
 kettle ' invented a new speed, and set all 
 the world running up and down. Miles 
 were reduced to yards, to feet, and the vast 
 spaces, which once served to separate 
 country from country, were contracted, 
 until Paris was brought to the very door 
 of London, and Moscow, the remote, the 
 inaccessible, seemed far nearer to us than 
 Dublin to our less adventurous fore- 
 fathers. 
 
 But it is not mechanism alone which has 
 annihilated space. In the last century we
 
 134 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 have changed all our units of measurement. 
 We have undergone a moral as well as a 
 physical alteration. We are, every one of 
 us, like Dr. Johnson gazing at the shrunken 
 streets of Lichfield. What seemed to our 
 ancestors a noble mansion is in our am- 
 bitious eyes a mere cottage. The wealth 
 of our fathers seems poverty to our greed. 
 We pile Pelion upon Ossa, and are not 
 content. We worship excess in whatever 
 shape we find it. To break a record which 
 need not be broken seems of itself a vir- 
 tuous action. Above all, we worship speed. 
 How proud we are to set out from London, 
 which we have no desire to leave, that we 
 may dine in Paris, which we do not wish 
 to visit ! The reward we get for our excite- 
 ment is a perpetual confusion of mind. 
 The uncertainty of the traveller is easily 
 intelligible who, sitting in the stalls at 
 the Alhambra, asked his neighbour with 
 perfect politeness whether he was in Paris 
 or London. 
 
 So we have decreed in our minds that 
 there shall be no more space, and our
 
 THE ANNIHILATION OF SPACE 135 
 
 motor-cars and aeroplanes are helping us 
 to put our decree into force. That we 
 shall benefit by the change of manners, 
 which the decree involves, is not likely. 
 For the sake of haste we destroy the variety 
 of life. When Kensington and Chelsea 
 had each its separate existence, when 
 Westminster was a little provincial town 
 gathered round an abbey church, the life 
 of London had a change and colour which 
 it knows no longer. Far distant as Chelsea 
 was, it was not inaccessible, and, if the 
 Londoner of old needed a change of air, 
 he might take the stage, and go with ease 
 and comfort to the Gravel Pits at Kensing- 
 ton. And while he kept for himself the 
 hours, which we now give to trains and 
 motor-cars, he found leisure for thought 
 and study. Unappalled by the penny 
 post, dreaming not of telephones, he might 
 still cultivate the art of letter- writing, and 
 not merely delight his friends with his wit 
 and humour, but send down the ages a 
 lively picture of his times. It is true that 
 he knew by books alone what we, if we
 
 136 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 choose, may know by actual observation. 
 But knowledge is like butter on a piece 
 of bread the more widely it is spread the 
 thinner it becomes. 
 
 In brief, may we not pay too high a 
 price for our fierce abolition of space and 
 time ? May not the time come, when we 
 shall regret that the mile no longer con- 
 tains 1760 yards ? Shall we not sigh for 
 the simplicity, now vanished in speed, 
 which enabled Peregrine Langton, not 
 much more than a brief century ago, to live 
 in dignity on 200 a year, and keep always 
 a post-chaise and three horses ?
 
 A WORLD OF UNREST 137 
 
 XVIII 
 A WORLD OF UNREST 
 
 THE years 1910 and 1911 will be remembered 
 always as years of riot and unrest. Wher- 
 ever your casual eye was cast the same 
 vision confronted you of revolution and 
 discontent. In Berlin the police was firing 
 upon the mob and sabring British jour- 
 nalists. England was hampered by strikes 
 and locks-out, of which it was not easy to 
 see the end. Her trade unions were pre- 
 pared to defy the law, merely because a 
 majority of their members found it incon- 
 venient. Discipline and orderliness were 
 at an end. The feeblest Government of 
 modern times attempted to win the support 
 of all the disloyal and disaffected persons, 
 by destroying the Constitution and dis- 
 membering the Empire. America took 
 refuge from her troubles in a veiled des-
 
 138 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 potism, a form of government which 
 hitherto has not seemed agreeable to ' the 
 greatest Republic on earth.' The weak- 
 minded zealots of India and Egypt, excited 
 by the dangerous eloquence of agitators, 
 persuaded themselves that freedom and 
 murder are synonymous, and revived a 
 wicked and futile policy of bombs. 
 
 If we reflect at all upon the state of 
 the world we cannot but be struck by 
 the unanimity of folly and outrage. Men 
 who live under different skies seem to 
 be governed by the same impulses. The 
 passions, which for good or evil sway the 
 human heart, are epidemic. They attack 
 whole peoples, they infect the nerves of vast 
 continents. There is, in truth, nothing 
 so fatally catching as anarchy and riot. 
 They march across the world more swiftly 
 than cholera, and for them unfortunately 
 there is no quarantine. 
 
 How is it, then, that in a season of general 
 disaster scarce a country escapes ? Let 
 him explain, who understands the subtle 
 transference of thought from crowd to
 
 A WORLD OF UNREST 139 
 
 crowd. Somewhat, no doubt, is achieved 
 by those itinerant preachers, those bagmen 
 of sedition, who wander up and down 
 Europe attending congresses and inflam- 
 ing the popular mind. But they are not 
 enough of themselves to invent a riot. 
 The most that they can do is to pour oil 
 upon a smouldering fire, and I am not sure 
 that they should not be regarded rather as 
 a symptom than as a cause of disorder. 
 What more is Mr. Keir Hardie, for instance, 
 than a fretful echo of the ignorance and 
 anarchy preached by others ? 
 
 And so we are driven to assume that 
 certain periods of the world's history are 
 periods of unrest and lawlessness, that 
 political ideas are, as I have said, catching, 
 like cholera or smallpox. The infection is 
 rapidly and secretly conveyed. No con- 
 tact of voice and ear is necessary. It is as 
 though insolence and licence were in the 
 air which we breathe, penetrating the very 
 fibre of the people. In brief, the chief 
 lesson of history is the history of recur- 
 rent epidemics, which travel by unknown
 
 140 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 routes, and which cannot be excluded by 
 the vigilance of Custom Houses. 
 
 At the end of the eighteenth century, for 
 instance, there were few corners of the 
 earth that escaped the blight of revolution. 
 From America the subtle poison spread to 
 France, and devastated the country with 
 a wild fury. Nor was the Channel any 
 bar to its progress. England, whose very 
 existence depended on an immunity from 
 the fever, caught it at least in a modified 
 form. Her business it was to act as the 
 doctor of Europe, to fight the disease 
 wherever it made its appearance, and, 
 though she succeeded at last, the cure was 
 delayed because many within her own 
 borders fell to the infection. Thousands 
 of Britons, touched by the malady, called 
 themselves 'citizens,' banded themselves 
 together as ' the Friends of the People,' and 
 promised the abolition of 'all taxes, no- 
 bility, and every privilege.' But their 
 frenzy was in vain. Pitt's courage stayed 
 the march of the disease, and Waterloo 
 destroyed the last germs of infection.
 
 A WORLD OF UNREST 141 
 
 A still better example of the rapid spread 
 of political plague was that annus mirabilis 
 1848. As Greville said : ' Revolution, ruin, 
 sickness, and death ravaged the world 
 publicly and privately.' Moral maxims 
 and lofty phrases took the place of virtue 
 and obedience. There was hardly a city 
 in Europe, where the mob did not attempt 
 to overthrow the throne and destroy the 
 basis of civil law. Everywhere the rioters 
 clamoured for a Constitution, and they 
 were best answered by the wise monarch, 
 who proclaimed, amid the wildest enthu- 
 siasm : ' You want a Constitution, my 
 children; you shall have two.' Fervently 
 they believed that only the ignorant and 
 unbridled had a right to reform the State, 
 and they saw in every act of subversion 
 the sublime wisdom of the people. In 
 brief, democracy and philanthropy ' had 
 their own way without let or hindrance,' 
 and they left behind them from one end 
 of Europe to another ' ruin, terror, and 
 despair.' 
 
 North and south, east and west, there
 
 was the same tale to tell. While the 
 Fenians threatened the safety of Ireland, 
 while the Chartists did their best to in- 
 timidate England, the Continent of Europe 
 seethed with rebellion. Berlin and Paris, 
 Rome and Vienna, were all the scenes 
 of riot and bloodshed. One mind, one 
 ambition (or shall we say one disease ?) 
 was common to the whole of Europe. 
 The fever broke out first here, then 
 there, without warning or apparent cause. 
 It crossed frontiers, and over-passed the 
 loftiest mountains. And, when at last it 
 died out, the wisest physicians could do 
 no more than mark its ravages, and build 
 up anew the shattered Constitutions of 
 Europe with such remedies as care and 
 patience might suggest. 
 
 This same mysterious spirit of disease 
 still broods over us all. It travels like 
 news across the desert without any known 
 means of communication. Its mystery 
 and secrecy make it all the harder to fight. 
 There is no cause for it, which statesman- 
 ship may remove. We can but wait until
 
 A WORLD OF UNREST 143 
 
 its malevolence is spent, until with equal 
 mystery the peoples of the world are 
 restored to a better health of mind and 
 body. The better health, which politicians 
 call reaction, is sure to come, and we might 
 contemplate the passing fever with equa- 
 nimity, if we had not learnt by experience 
 that it always leaves the politic body 
 weaker than it found it. 
 
 There is, however, no reason for despair. 
 Good counsel as well as evil may be dis- 
 seminated through the air. It is not 
 disease alone that is passed from nation 
 to nation. There are times when liberty, 
 good order, and repose seem to be the 
 universal inheritance. All that is best 
 and noblest on the earth has travelled from 
 land to land with the same secret, indistin- 
 guishable persistence as the poison of 
 politics. The strange stirring of the in- 
 telligence, which we call the Renaissance, 
 traversed Europe by no surer route than 
 the atmosphere. There was no reason 
 why every country should join in recover- 
 ing the ancient spirit of wisdom and beauty.
 
 144 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 Yet this same intangible universality of 
 thought, which to-day drives all men to 
 insolence and to folly, once led them in the 
 paths not of anarchy but of culture. Even 
 at the very time when revolution was 
 deluging France with blood a peaceful 
 movement of romance, born in England of 
 the ancient ballads and the odes of Gray, 
 cherished by Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
 was finding its way into France and Ger- 
 many, and crushing everywhere the for- 
 mality of an outworn classicism. In brief, 
 the mind has no ramparts and knows no 
 frontiers. And, though for a while intelli- 
 gence may everywhere suffer eclipse, it 
 will emerge again into the light of heaven, 
 and shine with equal splendour upon all 
 the peoples of the earth.
 
 STYLE 145 
 
 XIX 
 
 STYLE 
 
 THE writer who dares to plead the losing 
 cause of Style displays a rare and reckless 
 courage. To demand that the written 
 and spoken word should be marked by 
 ' precision, aptitude, harmony ' ; in other 
 words, that the orator and man of letters 
 should never forget the imperious claim of 
 artistry sounds like a platitude. It is a 
 platitude, which of late has been obscured 
 by a paradox. We have been told gravely 
 that literary style is not merely an ex- 
 crescence upon the fair face of thought, 
 but a clear proof of wickedness. Form 
 and matter have been pictured as violent 
 enemies, between whom no reconcilement 
 is possible, and the same sort of suspicion 
 has fallen upon those, who have striven after 
 beauty of style, as they incur who in the 
 
 K
 
 very presence of the Puritan dare to em- 
 bellish their fading charms with the artifice 
 of rouge-pot and powder-puff. 
 
 That perfection of form should be 
 thought blameworthy is due to an absurd 
 confusion of ideas, and is sternly con- 
 fined to the art of literature. Nobody 
 would blame a sculptor, a painter, or a 
 musician because he strove to make his 
 work beautiful and harmonious. The man 
 of letters has not the same freedom. He 
 is charged by the fool with insincerity 
 if he profess a faith in the paramount 
 necessity of writing well. In England at 
 least the objection to style is a moral not 
 an aesthetic objection. Our critics are not 
 like Stendhal, who declared that he mas- 
 tered French prose, merely that he might 
 know how not to write it, and thus attain 
 an effect of simplicity. They have heard 
 murmurs of Art for Art's sake, and not 
 understanding those mystical words have 
 thought that an ambition of style should 
 be punished, like other felonies, after trial 
 at the Old Bailey.
 
 STYLE 147 
 
 It is not strange, therefore, that the very 
 meaning of prose style should have escaped 
 many of our contemporaries. One grave 
 critic has told us that the highest ideal of 
 prose is the ideal of easy conversation ; 
 that the man of letters should be content 
 to talk upon paper as he would talk across 
 the dinner-table. Common sense and ex- 
 perience prove this dangerous critic in the 
 wrong. Talk and literature are separated 
 by a whole world of sentiment and purpose. 
 It is a mere accident which forces the two 
 arts to employ the same medium. And 
 he, who would substitute the processes of 
 the one for the processes of the other, 
 would convict himself of as pitiful a con- 
 fusion as would a sculptor who attempted 
 to fashion a monument in bronze by the 
 rules of painting. 
 
 The examples of the masters come to 
 the aid of logic. There is no great writer 
 of prose, who is not a conscious artist in 
 the use of written words, who knows not 
 how to give shape, colour, and substance 
 to his periods. Words may shine like
 
 148 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 pigments, or assume a beautifully modelled 
 form as of marble. The splendid pomp 
 of Sir Thomas Browne, the intense, living 
 reality of Defoe, the classical familiarity 
 of Fielding are English prose at its highest. 
 Yet how far remote they are from one 
 another ! And still further remote from 
 the amiable conversation of the tea- 
 table ! 
 
 There have been many attempts to define 
 style, and none of them satisfactory. We 
 know well what it is not. It is not mere 
 decoration. There are times in which a 
 studied plainness is its essence. It is not 
 something which may be put on and off like 
 a hat. It is a part of a man's being ; it 
 enters into the very fibre of his brain. 
 Above all, it is organic ; it is discernible 
 in the cadence and structure of the lan- 
 guage ; it proves the faculties and prefer- 
 ences of the writer. The choice and order- 
 ing of words correspond to the character 
 and temperament of him, who selects and 
 sets them forth. And, like all gifts, style is 
 incommunicable. The politician who sug-
 
 STYLE 149 
 
 gested that a university should enforce its 
 merits asked too much of our seats of learn- 
 ing. A language can be conquered only 
 by the artist himself and in solitude. The 
 examples of the masters may teach some- 
 thing. The lofty tradition of our literature 
 is still a beacon light. But in the end the 
 writer, who has the talent of sincerity, must 
 express himself alone and in his own 
 terms. 
 
 The struggle after a perfect style has 
 claimed its victims, like the battlefield. 
 Flaubert, for instance, did himself well- 
 nigh to death in the search for ' the right 
 word.' His hatred of what was obvious 
 and common compelled him to endure a 
 sort of martyrdom. ' I grow so hard to 
 please as a literary artist,' he wrote to a 
 friend, ' that I am driven to despair. I 
 shall end by not writing another line.' 
 And again : ' I am growing peevish about 
 my writing. I am like a man whose ear is 
 true, but who plays falsely on the violin : 
 his fingers refuse to reproduce precisely 
 those sounds, of which he has the inward
 
 150 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 sense. Then the tears come rolling down 
 from the poor scraper's eyes, and the bow 
 falls from his hand.' Here are all the 
 elements of a tragedy, and it is a high 
 tribute to the courage of Flaubert that he 
 rose superior to it. He did not cease to 
 write. He found ' the right word,' which 
 should enable him to tell the truth, as the 
 truth was in him, without any faltering 
 or uncertainty of expression. And the 
 victory was worth winning, for it has given 
 him a place among the conquerors. His 
 name will die only with the death of France. 
 And he owes his immortality to style, that 
 mysterious quality which alone gives life 
 to inanimate words. But the martyrdom, 
 which Flaubert endured, is not the universal 
 fate of artists. Some happy ones there 
 are, buoyant of spirit and little critical of 
 self, who leave the impress of their style 
 upon all that they say or write, with light 
 labour, and without the torturing of an 
 eager mind. Benjamin Disraeli, for in- 
 stance, was an instinctive artist. He
 
 STYLE 151 
 
 was born in a library, with a pen in his 
 infant hand. His novels have many faults. 
 They are hurried, inconsequent, over- 
 decorated. Yet ' the right phrase ' may be 
 surprised on every page, and ' the right 
 phrase ' lives for ever in the memories 
 of men. 
 
 How different the fate of Mr. Gladstone, 
 who, with his immense volubility, was pro- 
 fuse of words as he was sparing of ideas ! 
 The gift of style was never his. The energy 
 of his mind was unrestrained by any sense 
 of harmony. And his speeches, his books, 
 and his pamphlets are alike unreadable. 
 The truth is that a mere statement has no 
 lasting value. And let them who think 
 that writing is no more than the art of 
 saying something recall an ingenious com- 
 parison once made by an eminent scholar. 
 This scholar was criticising the arid manner 
 in which works of art are described in 
 the scientific catalogues which seem to be 
 written by the imbecile for the blind. 
 ' Suppose,' he said, ' the Grecian urn had
 
 152 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 been bought by the Museum of Berlin.' 
 The poet's eye saw such visions as these : 
 
 Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness ! 
 
 Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time, 
 Sylvan historian, who canst thus express 
 
 A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme : 
 What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape 
 
 Of deities or mortals, or of both, 
 In Tempe or the dales of Arcady ? 
 
 What men or gods are these ? what maidens 
 
 loath ? 
 What mad pursuit ? What struggle to escape ? 
 
 What pipes and timbrels ? What wild ecstasy ? 
 
 How would the scientific archaeologist de- 
 scribe it ? ' Marble vase (Krater). Much 
 chipped ; obverse, man pursuing woman ; 
 reverse, sacrificial scene.' Here are two 
 ways of depicting the same object, and 
 their diversity suggests that style is ever 
 supreme, and that the first and last lesson 
 of literature is the value of words.
 
 ' THE IDLE RICH '. 153 
 
 XX 
 
 ' THE IDLE RICH ' 
 
 ONCE upon a time a turbulent demagogue 
 delivered from the Rev. R. J. Campbell's 
 pulpit an harangue, which by a bold irony 
 was described as ' non-political,' but which 
 was nothing more than the old familiar 
 appeal to class hatred. In his pleasant 
 way the demagogue denounced ' the idle 
 rich,' who, said he, lead a life of ease at 
 the expense of the community, and to 
 an accompaniment of * applause ' and 
 ' laughter,' oddly suited to a place of 
 religious worship, he promised to ' over- 
 haul ' the nation and the Empire. ' What- 
 ever is done must be bold,' he declared in 
 a tone which sent a shudder, no doubt, 
 through every idle home in Britain. 
 
 Fortunately for the demagogue, it is his 
 business to speak, not to think. Otherwise 
 he might have reflected who and what are
 
 154 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 ' the idle rich,' whom he so bitterly con- 
 demned. As a class, they exist only in the 
 pages of the penny novelette or in the care- 
 less brain of the mere politician. A rich 
 man may be idle, just as a poor man may 
 be idle. The virtue of industry is not 
 confined to one class, to one creed, or to 
 one age. But the demagogue's prejudice 
 is obvious. We all know what he means 
 by ' the idle rich.' They are the miscreants, 
 who dare to lunch in London clubs, to 
 walk in ' country lanes, gun at shoulder, 
 dog at heel.' They are, in brief, the very 
 men, to whom the demagogue and every 
 other Briton owe the profoundest debt of 
 gratitude. 
 
 For good or evil England is the creation 
 of ' the idle rich.' The class, which the 
 demagogue, in his ' non-political ' urbanity, 
 would sweep from the earth, has governed, 
 defended, and enlightened the country for 
 many centuries. The history of English 
 politics is (with interludes) the history of 
 ' the idle rich.' The policy and firmness, 
 which have given us a place in the world
 
 ' THE IDLE RICH ' 155 
 
 unrivalled and apart, are the policy and 
 firmness of the hated class. Turn to your 
 annals, regard the great names with respect, 
 and confess that they who bore them would, 
 if they lived to-day, lunch in London clubs, 
 and find their recreation in the shooting 
 of pheasants or in riding to hounds. Cecil 
 and Cromwell, Harley and Bolingbroke 
 and Walpole, Chatham and Pitt and Fox, 
 Melbourne and Gladstone and Disraeli, 
 were descended, one and all, from ' the 
 idle rich.' Yet, however great might have 
 been their temptation to pass their time 
 idly as they did in the golden age, they 
 freely gave themselves to the service of 
 their King and State, and wrote imperish- 
 able names upon the tablets of history. 
 
 And thousands of their kind, unknown 
 to fame, have spent laborious days in the 
 quiet sacrifice of self. They have sat in 
 Parliament, they have administered justice, 
 they have done the business of the country, 
 ungrudgingly and without reward. They 
 have understood the duties, which privilege 
 entails, and, born to authority, they have
 
 156 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 exercised it with wisdom and modera- 
 tion. Even, when a democratic Government 
 attempted to enrol a citizen army, it was 
 to those, whom our demagogue covers with 
 ridicule, ' the idle rich,' that the Govern- 
 ment went for aid. To-day another spirit 
 begins to prevail. Service that is unpaid 
 seems unworthy of acceptance, and when 
 at last the House of Commons, the county 
 councils, the country magistracies, are 
 handed over to greedy office-seekers, who 
 think more of the wage they earn than the 
 nation's profit, the people will perhaps 
 regret its temerity, and sigh for the ancient 
 days, when 'the idle rich' gave themselves 
 and their leisure freely and honourably to 
 the public cause. 
 
 As in peace, so in war. The despised 
 class has always been ready to leave its 
 club and its coverts to fight its country's 
 enemies, wherever the sword was drawn. 
 It has spared its blood as little as its energy. 
 The British Empire has been made by the 
 valour of the heroes, whom the Radicals 
 despise, because their skill or fortune has
 
 ' THE IDLE RICH ' 157 
 
 set them above the necessity of a labourer's 
 wage. Is no debt of gratitude due to John 
 Churchill or Arthur Wellesley ? Shall the 
 narrow prejudice of a class blind us to the 
 gallantry of those, who in Europe as in 
 India, in Egypt as in South Africa, led our 
 armies to victory, and purchased, many 
 of them with their lives, the blessings of a 
 lasting peace ? 
 
 ' The idle rich ' have done more than this. 
 They have made possible the amenity 
 of our English life. They have built 
 them houses which are still the glory of 
 the land. They have gathered together 
 such treasures of art as all who will may 
 take delight in. They have founded seats 
 of learning, and spent their wealth in the 
 endowment of poor scholars. Neither a 
 country nor a man may live by bread alone, 
 and England, rich in monuments fashioned 
 by the zeal and taste of ' the idle rich,' still 
 holds her own among the civilised nations 
 of Europe. Nor should we forget the 
 wisdom and beneficence of the great land- 
 lords, who have gladly shared the misfor-
 
 158 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 tunes of their tenantry, and have regarded 
 their acres not as a means of extorting 
 money but as a place of livelihood for the 
 thrifty and industrious. 
 
 Our demagogue, in his haste to attain a 
 dismal uniformity, forgets that a country 
 which has no leisured class must ever lack 
 distinction. Where wealth and comfort 
 are crimes, the arts of life must perish of 
 inanition. There is a passage in Gibbon's 
 Memoirs, which we commend to the notice 
 of all jealous Radicals. The historian 
 of the Roman Empire was an excellent 
 example of ' the idle rich.' He never 
 raised a hand to earn his bread. As he 
 said himself, ' the gratification of his desires 
 was seldom disappointed by the want of 
 money or credit,' and his affluence enabled 
 him to compose a work which will endure 
 with the English language as a monument 
 of noble style and profound erudition. 
 Our demagogue, no doubt, would have 
 done ' something bold ' with this idler, who 
 lived upon the work of others. In com- 
 plete ignorance of the use to which the idler 
 put his laborious leisure, he would have
 
 1 THE IDLE RICH ' 159 
 
 turned him out to perform some menial 
 office for which his genius made him totally 
 unfit. But he, who prates in a pulpit of 
 ' a scandalous and stupid waste of first- 
 class material,' arrogates to himself a skill 
 and knowledge beyond the reach of human 
 attainment. No man is or has ever been 
 wise enough to decide how this one or 
 that shall spend his days. The whole of 
 human happiness and human distinction 
 depend upon inequality and surprise. ' The 
 idle rich,' by the employment of their 
 capital or their brains, contribute more 
 than their share to the national prosperity. 
 Truly, in the length and breadth of Eng- 
 land there is room both for rich and for 
 poor. All men set not their hearts upon 
 the same treasure, and the world will be 
 well, until we attain the drab ideal of the 
 new Radicals, which means a barrack and 
 poverty for everybody. 
 
 Meanwhile let us remember that as we 
 have no right to despise a man because he 
 is poor, so we have no right to thrust the 
 rich beyond the pale of a tolerant civili- 
 sation.
 
 160 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 XXI 
 
 THE ROMANCE OF LIFE 
 
 WHEN Mr. George Wyndham chose to dis- 
 course, at Edinburgh, of the springs of 
 romance in the literature of Europe, he 
 selected a theme that is blown about by 
 every wind of controversy. Whence and 
 when poetical romance came to mitigate 
 our dulness will be discussed so long 
 as human curiosity is alive. But the 
 Romance of Life is intelligible to all of 
 us. Here is no ground of argument. 
 Life is romantic at all times and in all 
 seasons. Whether we know it or not, 
 romance follows us from our cradle to 
 the grave. This is no question of literary 
 criticism or of historical doubt. Romance 
 is the common birthright of mankind, and 
 it is our own fault if we do not make the 
 best of it.
 
 THE ROMANCE OF LIFE 161 
 
 There is food for wonder and surprise 
 in every movement of nature. The sun 
 cannot rise nor the moon shine in the sky 
 without imparting a thrill. The torrent 
 ' haunts us like a passion ' ; the snow-clad 
 mountains lift their tops to heaven with 
 all the enchantment of mystery. Nature 
 does not repeat herself. There is the fresh- 
 ness of an untold fairy story in every 
 thundercloud which obscures her face. 
 And as each year spring grows to summer, 
 and summer fades to autumn, we listen 
 with a new interest to the tale, that has 
 been told a thousand times. 
 
 But wonderful and ever changing as is 
 the face of nature, it is man who is the true 
 creature of romance. His first impact with 
 the world is the material of all the great 
 novels that have ever been written. Think 
 what it is to be young and hopeful, and to 
 look out for the first time upon the land 
 which expects its conqueror. * Adventures 
 are to the adventurous/ and victory is 
 always ready to perch upon the shoulder 
 of the brave man. It matters not which
 
 162 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 citadel is to be assaulted ; it matters not 
 which is the weapon of attack the sword, 
 the pen, the voice. There is still the ex- 
 citement of uncertainty ; there is still the 
 surprise which waits the generous hero. 
 
 In the kingdom of romance are many 
 mansions, not builded all after the same 
 fashion. To some men are allotted the 
 loftier enterprises to discover unknown 
 seas, to stand upon rocks hitherto un- 
 trodden of mortal men, to feel ' like some 
 watcher of the skies when a new planet 
 swims into his ken.' These, whether they 
 know it or not, are the happiest of mortals. 
 They share the thrill of stout Cortez, ' when 
 with eagle eyes 
 
 He stared at the Pacific and all his men 
 
 Look'd at each other with a wild surmise 
 Silent, upon a peak in Darien.' 
 
 If we had our choice, whose romance 
 would we claim for our own ? Columbus 
 knew a great moment when he saw for the 
 first time the coastline of the new world. 
 The moment would have been greater had 
 he been able to foretell all that the new
 
 THE ROMANCE OF LIFE 163 
 
 world was to suffer and inflict. Napoleon 
 rose to the height of human endeavour 
 when, escaped from Elba, he set his foot 
 once more upon French soil. Wellington, 
 when he fell asleep after the battle of 
 Waterloo, had such an experience as comes 
 to him only who conquers the conqueror 
 of Europe. To win the Derby, ' the blue 
 riband of the turf,' when the jaws of ruin 
 are open to swallow you, is a victory of 
 romance which cannot easily be surpassed 
 in the annals of welcome surprise. And 
 who would not have been Byron, who on 
 the appearance of Childe Harold woke up 
 and found himself famous ? Or Kean, 
 who after his first triumph at Drury Lane 
 came back to tell his wife that she should 
 ride in her carriage, and that ' Charlie ' 
 should go to Eton ? 
 
 In a competition such as this let who 
 will decide. Every one according to his 
 temperament will know which victory to 
 prefer. But the variety of conquests shows 
 that romance is not necessarily the child 
 of action. There are other things to
 
 discover besides continents. There are 
 other battles to be won besides those which 
 are decided with gun and sword. Two 
 men who marvelled most sincerely at the 
 romance of existence never travelled far 
 from the four walls of their studies. 
 Erasmus, whose battles were all the battles 
 of the spirit, who fought his enemies, sloth 
 and stupidity, at the pen's point, marvelled 
 on his deathbed at ' this miracle of human 
 life.' And Sir Thomas Browne, who did 
 not stray beyond the boundaries of medi- 
 aeval Norwich, whose discoveries were never 
 more than the discoveries of dead bones 
 and noble words, echoed the marvel of 
 Erasmus. He, too, after many years spent 
 in the quiet curing of the sick and the 
 patient facture of beautiful sentences, 
 acknowledged that there was a romance 
 which he had never fully understood 
 the marvel of his own retired and peaceful 
 life. 
 
 This brings us to the real paradox of 
 romance. They who lead the lives of high 
 endeavour and ' wild surmise ' are too often
 
 THE ROMANCE OF LIFE 165 
 
 all unconscious of their good fortune. They 
 have the courage to achieve, but not the 
 mind to understand nor the artistic sense 
 to describe. They spend their years in 
 sublime unconsciousness of what they have 
 accomplished. The salt spray may be in 
 their beards. They may carry in their 
 minds the memory of a wonderful past, 
 and at the first touch of curiosity it all 
 vanishes into thin air. You ask them 
 of islands which only their eyes have 
 looked upon, and they will tell you what 
 they had for breakfast one morning ten 
 years ago. It is not illuminating to you, 
 and yet what would you ? The point of 
 view is completely different. The savage 
 ocean is to the sailor a fierce obstacle which 
 it is his business to overcome. He can, 
 if he will, explain with a wealth of techni- 
 cality what the true meaning of a storm 
 is to him. Shakespeare, no doubt, before 
 he wrote The Tempest, had gossiped with 
 many a sailor in the blind ale-houses of 
 Southwark. They told him the stern, 
 hard facts. He turned them with his
 
 166 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 magician's wand into the very substance 
 of romance. 
 
 So it is that, as we look back on the past, 
 we notice ever this strange divorce. On 
 the one hand are those who have lived 
 romance, on the other are those who have 
 thought it and understood it. In the 
 great age of Elizabeth you may most clearly 
 perceive the two methods at work. The 
 travellers, who went across the sea in search 
 of gold, who lived for its own sake the life 
 of free adventure, took all the marvels 
 which they saw as matters of course, and 
 came home well pleased if only they had 
 added something to their store of wealth. 
 Meanwhile the poets stayed at home, 
 travelling only ' in the realm of thought,' 
 and weaving in the wonderful web of their 
 words the true tapestries of romance. That 
 which the adventurers, celebrated by 
 Hakluyt and Purchas, saw and achieved, 
 Shakespeare and his fellows set to immortal 
 music. Here is no literal interpretation. 
 It is but the mere spirit of enterprise, 
 which passes from the page of solid fact
 
 THE ROMANCE OF LIFE 167 
 
 into the drama of many-coloured imagina- 
 tion. The romance, which one has lived, 
 another translates with a splendid freedom 
 into the language of poetry. Thus it has 
 ever been. Thus will it ever be. Man- 
 kind will still marvel at the romance which 
 confronts it ; and even the scholar, who 
 has never passed beyond the four walls of 
 his sequestered study, will still applaud, 
 as the breath leaves his body, the miracle 
 of our human life.
 
 168 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 XXII 
 
 ACTION AND REACTION 
 
 MR. ASQUITH, at the instance, I hope, of a 
 quickened conscience, once propounded 
 a doctrine which, coming from him, had 
 deep significance. ' The course of our 
 constitutional progress,' said he, ' has been 
 in the main not an alternation of revolution 
 and reaction, but a course of more or less 
 even development.' This is a theory which 
 consoles the apostle of change at any price. 
 The weak Minister, who cannot control the 
 discordant elements of his party ; the 
 noisy breaker of images, who believes that 
 all which is new is sanctified, find comfort, 
 no doubt, in this pretence of development. 
 History gives them no support. Its one 
 indisputable lesson is that every revolution 
 is a disaster ; that reaction alone avails to 
 save us from the pit of anarchy.
 
 ACTION AND REACTION 169 
 
 Abroad as at home the two forces are 
 perpetually at work. The insensate orgy 
 of blood and madness, known as the French 
 Revolution, would have ruined the fair land 
 of France for ever, had not the greatest 
 reactionary of all time, the man of iron 
 hand and tyrant's brain, appeared in the 
 nick to assert his sovereignty. The English 
 Revolution of 1832, which was to make 
 the Whigs the masters of Britain for life, 
 opened the way to the domination of Peel. 
 The last half century has been a period 
 of reaction against the ambition of plunder 
 and rapine cherished in the 'fifties. Even 
 in this very heyday of Radical government, 
 we have not travelled so far on the road 
 of theft as the stalwarts of '52. Said the 
 satirist of that inauspicious year : 
 
 Theft, my friend, the gods have pity on thy 
 weak and watery brain ! 
 
 How can they who own the total steal a por- 
 tion ? pray explain. 
 
 Men in Nature's state are equal : property con- 
 ferred by laws, 
 
 From the sanction of the people all its rights 
 and safeguards draws.
 
 170 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 You but hold it at their pleasure, you must 
 
 yield it at their summons. 
 And the pleasure of the people, seek it hi the 
 
 House of Commons. 
 
 Thus was the gospel of the flaunting de- 
 magogue preached in identical terms fifty 
 years ago, and it will presently be driven 
 into oblivion again by the wisdom of re- 
 action and the logic of facts. We can but 
 hope that the old and necessary lesson 
 will be taught us by less violent means. 
 Then nothing less than the Crimean War 
 and the Mutiny in India would have 
 steadied the nerves in England. In face 
 of a peril, for which they were unprepared, 
 even the prophets of theft changed their 
 policy, even ' the broad-brimmed hawker 
 of holy things, whose ear was crammed 
 with his cotton,' ceased to preach down 
 ' our poor little Army.' In brief, reaction 
 came in an instant, and brought with it 
 the only method of safety. 
 
 As in politics, so in the arts, reaction and 
 revolution alternate. Those who are de- 
 bauched with the spirit of novelty and
 
 ACTION AND REACTION 171 
 
 irreverence do not ' crib, cabin, and con- 
 fine ' their energies in one profession. The 
 temperament, which sees nothing sacred 
 in an honourable constitution, cheerfully 
 flouts the example of the masters. The 
 artistic iconoclast has no spark of respect 
 in his heart for any save himself and his 
 cenacle. He would cut, if he could, all the 
 trammels which bind him to the past. He 
 believes that originality consists in breaking 
 the established rules of his craft, in doing 
 something different from the others. Ori- 
 ginality is not so easily come by. The most 
 of literary experiments are made in vain. 
 For eccentricity is no part of genius, and 
 he is the true original, who learns how to 
 express something of himself with the old 
 means and in the old materials. 
 
 Schools rise and fall, and each genera- 
 tion hopes against hope that it has .solved 
 for the first and last time the problem of 
 literature. Thirty years ago what Zola 
 called ' Naturalism ' appeared to the revolu- 
 tionary the one and only method of expres- 
 sion. The notebook was pronounced the
 
 172 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 sole repository of fiction. Industrious 
 novelists gathered ' facts ' and ransacked 
 the files of forgotten newspapers, confident 
 that truth lay not in the bottom of a well, 
 but in the annals of the police court. And 
 so facts, true in themselves, were turned to 
 falsehood by being packed together between 
 two covers ; imagination was banished 
 from the field of letters ; and the statis- 
 tician appeared to a sedulous generation 
 the only real poet in prose. Then ' Natural- 
 ism ' was carried a step farther. Finding 
 crimes more easy to be discovered than 
 virtues, its professors neglected all such 
 facts as were not scandalous, and attempted 
 to persuade us that nothing happened in 
 town or country that did not deserve 
 punishment either in gaol or at the gallows. 
 The reaction was swift, and dire the 
 vengeance wreaked upon the Naturalists. 
 The Symbolists, in scorn of a false reality, 
 returned to the ancient paths of poetry. 
 They believed it was the poet's duty, in 
 prose or verse, to evoke beautiful images, 
 and to clothe simple themes in noble and
 
 ACTION AND REACTION 173 
 
 expressive words. Once more reaction 
 saved the world of letters from anarchy. 
 
 Paris has always been the home of artistic 
 movements. The arts are followed and 
 esteemed in her nimble atmosphere with 
 a keener zest and a graver sincerity than 
 beneath our clouded sky. Sometimes the 
 humour which would kill with laughter 
 a vain experiment is lacking ; but this 
 seriousness is but a defect of a splendid 
 quality, and it permits us to contemplate 
 at our leisure the constant triumph of re- 
 action. London still remembers a famous 
 exhibition which should have taught a 
 salutary lesson to revolutionaries of all 
 kinds. Certain Winston Churchills of 
 painting or their patrons set themselves 
 recklessly to show what might be done 
 by an open contempt of tradition. Post- 
 Impressionists they were called by the 
 interested persons who gathered their 
 experiments together. They could not 
 have justified any name that was chosen 
 for them, since they had no adherence, 
 no common aim. They were complete
 
 174 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 strangers one to the other. The best of 
 them were dead before the others had 
 taken brush in hand. They agreed in one 
 thing only, in the expression of scorn for 
 the conservative temper, which is essential 
 to the artist. Other men have learnt how 
 to draw. It was for them, therefore, to 
 neglect the difficult lesson. The splendour 
 of colour has been revealed to many 
 masters. Let them, then, prove them- 
 selves colour-blind. What hope is there 
 for them in following the path trodden 
 by Holbein and Rembrandt, by Titian 
 and Velazquez ? None whatever. So 
 with a face of brass they pretended to 
 forget the lessons of all the ages, that 
 they might win the crown of originality. 
 
 MM. Van Gogh, Matisse, and the other 
 post-impressionists, these anarchs of the 
 brush, having achieved a success of scandal 
 or curiosity, passed away speedily into 
 the lumber of forgotten things. They 
 will not keep a line in the history of the 
 craft whose laws they outraged. And they 
 do no harm even to that craft. A breath
 
 ACTION AND REACTION 175 
 
 of reaction sends them out of sight, and 
 in the ridicule which overtakes them the 
 glory of the masters is re-established. 
 The anarchs of politics are not thus in- 
 nocuous. The false doctrines which they 
 preach, the false hopes of plunder which 
 they hold out to their dupes, still exert a 
 baleful influence. It is true that the re- 
 action is sure to come, the more violent 
 on account of the violence of the revolution ; 
 but it will not come before the nation has 
 been weakened, before a wanton injustice 
 has been done to innocent men. Mean- 
 while I refuse to believe in the comfortable 
 doctrine of ' an even development.' That 
 would rob us of all hope for the future. 
 The path of safety is the path of retreat, 
 and the sooner we turn our back upon the 
 present the surer will be England's fate in 
 an ultimate victory.
 
 176 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 XXIII 
 THE END OF EDUCATION 
 
 THE determined assault which every day 
 is made upon education is part of the 
 general conspiracy to sever the last link 
 which binds the present to the past. The 
 headmasters who from time to time sit in 
 conclave make no attempt to defend the 
 studies which they direct. They resolutely 
 refuse the guidance which we have a right 
 to expect from them. Their position is 
 that of the humble democrat. They are 
 willing to grant whatever is asked, to abolish 
 whatever seems distasteful to the idlest 
 of their pupils ; and if they follow their 
 present policy of complaisance, in five years 
 England will be illiterate as well as lawless. 
 Hitherto the attack has been cunningly 
 directed upon Greek, which Mr. Carnegie 
 and other specialists have pronounced as
 
 THE END OF EDUCATION 177 
 
 of no more value than Choctaw. The un- 
 familiar characters, employed by the ancient 
 Greeks, seem an open affront to the cham- 
 pions of popular mediocrity. Why should 
 those arrogant persons, it is asked, have 
 presumed to reject an alphabet, which 
 serves all the purposes of the free and en- 
 lightened voter ? Why should Homer and 
 Sophocles have wantonly separated them- 
 selves from the British proletariat ? In- 
 deed, there seems no valid reason for their 
 impudence, and Greek, in the eyes of the 
 friends of progress, is as roughly con- 
 demned as the House of Lords itself. 
 
 But the assailants of Greek forget that 
 their attack involves all studies known to 
 our schools, either humane or scientific. 
 If Greek be abolished every other subject, 
 which exacts discipline or presents difficulty, 
 must be abolished with it. The single 
 argument which the enemies of education 
 have advanced against the humanities is 
 that the humble student, who devotes his 
 hours and days to their study, has not time 
 to learn a great deal about them. He gets 
 
 M
 
 178 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 but a smattering, which profits him nothing 
 in the stern fight of existence. And they 
 do not see, these enemies of education, 
 that they are arguing not against Latin 
 and Greek but against knowledge in every 
 shape and form. The smatterer is not 
 confined to the classics. A brief course of 
 chemistry, a casual acquaintance with 
 Shakespeare, the knack of speaking a few 
 barren sentences of French and German 
 these pass with the passing of school, and 
 leave behind them no trace of thought or 
 discipline. 
 
 As the headmasters refuse to impose 
 their views upon their pupils, it is left for 
 the parents of the pupils to take the lead. 
 And the parents are resolutely opposed to 
 every form of culture upon the simple 
 ground, that ' it will be of no use to my son 
 in his future career.' One headmaster has 
 assured us that every subject in his curri- 
 culum has been condemned upon this 
 irrelevant ground. A stern demand has 
 been made upon him to abolish Greek, 
 Latin, Algebra, Mathematics generally,
 
 THE END OF EDUCATION 179 
 
 French, German, Natural Science, English, 
 and Scripture. The demand varies accord- 
 ing to the taste and fancy of the parent. 
 The reason given is always the same : ' It 
 will be of no use to my son in his future 
 career.' 
 
 What will be ' of use to my son in his 
 future career ' is clear enough. The 
 future career of the unfortunate boy is 
 rigidly circumscribed. In accordance with 
 the mean ideals of to-day the beginning 
 and end of every career should be either 
 a balance at a bank or complete immunity 
 from any trying or serious work. The boy, 
 whom his parents would zealously defend 
 from the irksomeness of the classics, mathe- 
 matics, and science will probably devote 
 his arid life to exchanging with colleagues, 
 narrow as himself, telegrams about stocks 
 and shares. He will know when to buy 
 and when to sell. And for the satisfaction 
 of this high purpose Greek and Latin, 
 mathematics and chemistry, are alike use- 
 less. We can imagine nothing which will 
 serve this young hero save the rudiments
 
 180 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 of reading and writing, and an early 
 initiation into the mysteries of the Stock 
 Exchange. 
 
 He, who keeps an eye fixed resolutely 
 upon ' his future career,' should remain 
 no longer at school than will satisfy the 
 law of the land. The monster who, even 
 in childhood, prefers profit to education 
 would, if our headmasters were wise, find 
 no place in a public school. He and his 
 parents misunderstand the sole purpose 
 of education, which is discipline. It is not 
 for the amount of Latin and Greek, which 
 boys carry away with them from school, 
 that the humanities are worth all the 
 respect we can pay to them. It is for the 
 admirable training which they impart to 
 the intelligence. 
 
 And what would these champions of the 
 ' future career ' at all costs substitute for 
 the humanities ? A smattering of arith- 
 metic, just enough to understand to-day's 
 ' quotations,' and a distant knowledge of 
 French and German, not the French and 
 German, which might unlock two noble
 
 THE END OF EDUCATION 181 
 
 literatures, but the French and German, 
 which every waiter speaks in a cosmo- 
 politan hotel. The fine flower of modern 
 training was once heard disporting himself 
 in a Swiss tavern, and this is what he said : 
 4 Zwei Eier, bien cuits, and mind they are.' 
 It is not the language of Heine or Racine, 
 but it is what passes current as German 
 and French among those, who, despising 
 Greek and Latin, look only at what may 
 serve their * future career.' 
 
 I do not care to think what will be the 
 product of our schools, when they have 
 renounced all semblance of learning, and 
 have settled down comfortably and in- 
 famously to consider nothing but the 
 * future career ' of their victims. We shall 
 see grow up in our midst a race of men 
 which dreams money, talks money, writes 
 money, all day long. They will have larger 
 motor-cars, these gentlemen, than their 
 fathers, and they will drink more champagne. 
 But what kind of citizens will they make ? 
 Without the slightest knowledge of the 
 past, with no gift of foreseeing the future,
 
 182 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 they will live wholly in the present ; they 
 will consider nothing else than their own 
 profit. Poor in all those things of the 
 mind, which their grandfathers deemed 
 worthy of reverence, they will be rich in 
 pocket, and their riches will bring them 
 neither happiness nor respect. Nor, until 
 death overtakes them, will they ever reflect 
 that anything save gold is worth a sacrifice. 
 Nowthe perfect education aims at making 
 something better than a money-getter. It 
 regards the happiness and intelligence of 
 the individual. It does not aspire to make 
 a lawyer or a mechanic, or a thrifty em- 
 ployer of labour. Much daring, it hopes 
 (or hoped, for it is dead or dying) to make 
 a man. It insisted that all who came 
 under its sway should, for once in their 
 lives, know the pleasures of the imagination, 
 and realise what it was to bask in the sun 
 of unprofitable knowledge. If Latin and 
 Greek availed nothing in the dull science 
 of making an empty pocket full, at least 
 they promised their loyal disciples a brief 
 sojourn in an enchanted land, they un-
 
 THE END OF EDUCATION 183 
 
 locked a secret door into a world of gaiety 
 and wisdom, they revealed the true source 
 of our noblest poetry and our profoundest 
 philosophy. Then might we not, if we 
 followed this real education, wrestle a fall 
 with Time himself, and call back to life 
 the heroes of a dead age ? 
 
 But, interposes the one-sided master of 
 us all, education of this kind will be useless 
 if tried by the standard of the city ; its 
 very uselessness is its best justification. 
 The perfectly disciplined mind can be 
 turned upon every human enterprise with 
 success. The mind, which is fashioned 
 from the beginning for one, and only one, 
 purpose is crushed by a single failure ; and 
 the old system, now passing away, was, I 
 believe, of better profit as well as more 
 honourable than that, which our timid 
 headmasters are willing to accept. But 
 the ancient discipline is the very element 
 in our education, which to-day appears 
 detestable. The aim of modern life is that 
 nobody should do anything that he does 
 not want to do. The boy finds Greek
 
 184 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 irksome. Why should it be inflicted upon 
 him ? The murderer resents the gallows. 
 What an infamy it is that his fear of death 
 should be outraged ! The unemployed 
 hate nothing so much as the chance of 
 a day's work. Therefore it is indelicate 
 to offer them a job. And when, at last, we 
 have reached the Radical millennium, in 
 which nobody is punished for the worst 
 crime with anything heavier than a penny 
 reading (and magic-lantern slides), in which 
 the schoolboy chooses what he will con- 
 descend to learn, and in which the loafer 
 is driven to labour merely by boredom, 
 we may regret those honester days which 
 thought that idleness was not the highest 
 good, and that there was still a greater 
 happiness than indiscipline.
 
 GOSSIP 185 
 
 XXIV 
 
 GOSSIP 
 
 GOSSIP is a penalty of greatness, a penalty 
 which only the greatest of all may escape. 
 The love of irrelevancy has not laid a 
 foolish hand upon Chaucer. Though we 
 know more of Shakespeare than of any 
 of his contemporaries save Ben Jonson, 
 his Olympian brow is scarce touched by 
 scandal. These poets, perhaps, transcend 
 the habit of human thought, and an in- 
 voluntary reverence holds them sacred. 
 And of those that might fall an easy prey 
 to the gossip-monger many escape by an 
 accident of fortune. The immaterial story 
 of Keats is happily writ in water. He 
 comes before the judgment bar of posterity 
 with nothing in his hand save a book of 
 immortal verse. 
 
 Others, his contemporaries, have fared
 
 186 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 more evilly. Byron and Shelley are en- 
 throned upon the topmost pinnacle of 
 curiosity. Everything that they said or 
 did seems of the vastest importance to 
 thousands, who never read a line of their 
 poetry. For many years the best method 
 of studying English literature has seemed 
 to be to collect ' chatter about Harriet 
 Shelley.' Idle readers by the score have 
 sat, like a crowner's quest, upon her hapless 
 remains. They have taken sides in the 
 tragedy ; they have arrogantly apportioned 
 the praise and blame. Every shred of 
 Shelley's writing has been treasured, tran- 
 scribed, and printed, not because it was of 
 interest, but because it flatters the prevail- 
 ing love of gossip. The poet's letters, 
 which reveal an unexpected aptitude for 
 business, and for the rest are not of much 
 import, have been piously gathered and 
 presented to the world, and the busybodies, 
 who have done all this, are possibly un- 
 conscious of casting any slur upon the fame 
 of a great poet. 
 
 Yet slur it is, for Shelley, of all men,
 
 GOSSIP 187 
 
 should have been exempt from prying eyes. 
 We like to think of him as a disembodied 
 spirit, an immortal child, ' gold-dusty from 
 tumbling amidst the stars ' ; and then 
 the gossip intervenes, with his scraps 
 rescued from the broken heap of the past, 
 laying bare the secret places of the poet's 
 life, and opening to the common eye what 
 the poet would most resolutely have con- 
 cealed. Byron, on the other hand, may 
 bring a charge of indiscretion against 
 nobody. He was never so happy as when 
 his name was in the mouths of men. He 
 was, so to say, the architect of his own 
 reputation. He rejoiced unfeignedly on 
 the day that he awoke and found himself 
 famous. He would be known not merely 
 as a poet but as a man of fashion, and, not 
 content with creating his works, he created 
 himself also, a strange monster of reckless- 
 ness and daring, who first touched the 
 imagination of the people, and then aroused 
 the fury of all good prudes. There is no 
 meaner episode in our social history than 
 the fierce ostracism of Byron. The poet was
 
 188 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 driven forth, insulted, stoned by the very 
 persons, who had most loudly acclaimed 
 his genius, and who most noisily affected 
 to admire his daring in life and art. Yet 
 the pity you give to Shelley you withhold 
 from Byron. Did not Byron stimulate 
 and encourage the noisy applause which 
 speedily turned to his own dishonour ? 
 
 It is commonly said that the fame bred 
 of gossip does not persist long after the 
 death of the victim. Nothing can be 
 further from the truth. Shelley died in 
 1822, Byron two years later, and the curious 
 are as eager as ever they were to pry into 
 the hidden places of their lives. After the 
 lapse of nearly a century it is still thought 
 worth while to print a collection of Tre- 
 lawny's letters, edited by Mr. Buxton 
 Forman, with all the care usually reserved 
 for an ancient text ; and nothing save the 
 survival of the legends, which have grown 
 about the names of Byron and Shelley, 
 could justify or explain their publication. 
 Trelawny was a bluff old gentleman who 
 wrote one excellent book The Adventures
 
 GOSSIP 189 
 
 of a Younger Son but that is not enough 
 to keep green his memory. However, he 
 knew both the poets ; he made love with 
 varying ardour to Mary Shelley and Claire 
 Clairmont. The names, sacred to those 
 who profess the cult, bristle in his pages. 
 Here is the twice told tale of the burning 
 of Shelley's body, of the poet's heart which 
 no flame could consume ; there is the poor 
 man's ' degrading reflection ' that so weak 
 and ignoble a soul as he thought Byron's 
 ever influenced him ! And when we lay 
 the book aside, we have acquired nothing 
 from it but an uncomfortable feeling of 
 indiscretion. What right have we to read 
 the love-letters of a man, whom we never 
 knew, and who has lain in the grave no 
 more than thirty years ? When Trelawny 
 poured forth what there was in him of a 
 heart to Mary Shelley or to Claire, he meant 
 the effusion for their eyes alone. Shall 
 we, then, look with so small an excuse into 
 the secrets of a stranger ? 
 
 It is not easy to understand this passion 
 for the discovery of other men's affairs.
 
 190 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 It comes, in the unlearned, from a common 
 curiosity. The restless mind, which cannot 
 leave a letter unopened upon a table, finds 
 a pleasure in reading the faded corre- 
 spondence of men and women dead and 
 gone. And then gossip about poets is an 
 easy substitute for learning. The number 
 of those, who take a genuine delight in 
 the art of poetry, is few indeed. ' Prome- 
 theus Unbound ' still remains a riddle un- 
 tried to the vast majority. But any one 
 can pretend a fashionable acquaintance 
 with Shelley, who has turned over the pages 
 of some ardent biography, and who can 
 declare with amazing wisdom that he does 
 not like the way in which Shelley treated 
 his first wife. It does not occur to this 
 reader that his experiment in posthumous 
 eavesdropping carries him leagues away 
 from the poet's works, makes it impossible 
 that he should ever appreciate the splen- 
 dour of the poet's thought, the music of the 
 poet's verse. As for Shelley, ' he dances 
 in and out of the gates of Heaven ; its 
 floor is littered with his broken fancies.'
 
 GOSSIP 191 
 
 And the industrious reader asks, ' Was he 
 happy with Mary ? ' 
 
 Yet the notoriety that fate has contrived 
 for Shelley is regarded by many a poeticule 
 of to-day, by many a patient spinner of 
 prose, as the summit of ambition. If only 
 he can win the notice of his fellows, the 
 poeticule is willing to make the last sacrifice 
 of dignity. To be known is to be famous, 
 and what matters it, says he, how or by 
 what you are known ? If the world will 
 not applaud, he will go into the market- 
 place and blow aloud his own trumpet ; he 
 will cut such antics in the sight of all that 
 men must ask in indolent curiosity who 
 he is. Nor, for the acquisition of fame, 
 which to-day may swiftly be translated 
 into success, need a man write, or make, 
 or discover anything for himself. It is 
 enough to boast an acquaintance with 
 him who writes, makes, or discovers some- 
 thing. And so there grow up among 
 us friends of the great, resolute men, 
 who follow their victims stealthily, pack 
 their notebooks with the victims' innocent
 
 192 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 sayings, and are ready when the time comes 
 with a biography. Thus it is that gossip 
 obscures achievement, and we sigh in vain 
 for that golden age, in which poets were 
 revered only for the songs, which they 
 sang, and in which their faces, honourably 
 muffled, were hidden from the anxious gaze 
 of the people.
 
 SENTMENTALISM AND CRIME 193 
 
 XXV 
 
 SENTIMENTALISM AND CRIME 
 
 OP late years our legislators have considered 
 far too amiably the susceptibilities of the 
 criminal. The law-abiding citizen appears 
 a dull thing in their eyes. With a sort of 
 Pharisaism they have applauded their own 
 generosity and broadmindedness. Other 
 nations have very properly refused the right 
 of asylum to murderers and housebreakers. 
 Here was an admirable opportunity to 
 prove that the English Radical was not as 
 the politicians, who control the destinies 
 of the European Continent. The Aliens 
 Act, faulty enough in theory, was made in 
 practice of small effect, in order that our 
 Ministers, warming their hands before the 
 fire of vainglory, might boast that every 
 man was free who had once set foot upon 
 the sacred soil of England. 
 
 N
 
 194 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 And thus London has become the refuge, 
 the rubbish heap of the world. The 
 criminal, driven by a wise justice from 
 Berlin or Paris, knows that he will meet 
 with the profound sympathy of the English 
 Radical, who will sob over the hardships 
 which he has undergone in the past, and 
 denounce as a cruel inquisition the legiti- 
 mate interference of the police. In this 
 sympathy there is neither justice nor 
 reason. It is born not of sentiment but of 
 sentimentalism. It is the mad expression 
 of the democratic idea that men are equal, 
 that there is no difference between genius 
 and mania, between intelligence and im- 
 becility, between virtue and vice. All 
 men are free to do as they will, shouts the 
 sentimentalist. The right of punishment 
 belongs to none. The sole enemy of the 
 State is the law-abiding, thrifty citizen, 
 who goes about his work and harms nobody. 
 If it were not for him the criminal would 
 not be driven to sin. He it is, who denies 
 the opportunity of an honest career to 
 the weaker brethren. Therefore let him
 
 SENTIMENTALISM AND CRIME 195 
 
 take the consequences, and, if he be plun- 
 dered and killed, he gets no more than the 
 proper wages of his prosperity. 
 
 It is not merely the alien, who is looked 
 upon with this kindly eye by our legis- 
 lators. The modern attitude towards 
 crime of every kind is an attitude of genial 
 complaisance. Our sentimentalists profess 
 a profound hatred for the suffering of others, 
 though it be righteously inflicted. Their 
 weak nerves twitch at the thought of a 
 harsh punishment, which conflicts with 
 their general theory that all men and 
 women should be permitted to do precisely 
 what they please without fear of conse- 
 quences. Recognising that it is not fair 
 to accept the verdict of ' the opposite 
 party,' they agree with Jonathan Wild 
 that a robber should be tried by a jury of 
 his fellow-craftsmen. They demand that 
 the principle of the franchise should be 
 applied to the administration of justice. 
 Let every man choose his own method 
 of punishment. If the gallows affright 
 him there is poison at his elbow. If he
 
 196 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 dislike solitary confinement, let him mingle 
 freely with his fellows. When he is weary 
 of reading, comfort him with lectures, and 
 permit him to carry away from his prison 
 a mixed memory of picked oakum, if so 
 harsh a task be still imposed, and popular 
 astronomy. 
 
 The prevailing sentimentality is pure 
 egoism. It springs from self-pity, not 
 from pity of others. The poor philan- 
 thropist, who expresses it, fears only the 
 effect that prison and hard labour might 
 have had upon himself. His imagination 
 cannot carry him so far as the thoughts 
 and feelings of the criminal. That gentle- 
 man, we make no doubt, looks upon the 
 sentimentalist with a kind of amused 
 contempt. He knows perfectly well how 
 to play his game. He will take every 
 advantage that is offered him, he will smile 
 at the irresolution of the foolish persons, 
 who wish to spare and pamper him, and 
 then, if he be captured in fair fight, he 
 will pay the penalty without wincing. 
 ' Poor fellow,' murmurs the philanthropic
 
 SENTIMENTALISM AND CRIME 197 
 
 legislator, * if only he had had my advan- 
 tages, he would not be lying in a dank cell ; 
 he would be passing laws for the benefit 
 of his kind.' Perhaps he would, and in the 
 scrimmage that would follow there would 
 be an end of justice and society. 
 
 The sentimentalist is still unconvinced. 
 For justice he cares as little as for society. 
 The commonplaces of mercy still engross 
 his errant mind, and it matters not to him 
 who suffers for his tears. He is no new 
 thing in the experience of England. He 
 recurs at fixed periods, and then is put 
 away again until a fresh access of weeping 
 shakes the country. Carlyle knew him 
 and described him in terms which are ever 
 fresh : ' A foolish stump-orator, perorating 
 on his platform mere benevolences, seems 
 a pleasant object to many persons ; a 
 harmless or insignificant one to nearly 
 all. Look at him, however ; scan him till 
 you discern the nature of him ; he is not 
 pleasant, but ugly and perilous. That 
 beautiful speech of his takes captive every 
 long ear, and kindles into quasi-sacred
 
 198 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 enthusiasm the minds of not a few : but 
 it is in the teeth of the everlasting facts of 
 this universe, and will come to mischief 
 for every party concerned. . . . Long- 
 eared fellow-creatures, more or less resemb- 
 ling himself, answer, " Hear, hear ! Live, 
 Fiddle-string, for ever ! " Whereupon 
 follow Abolition Congresses, Odes to the 
 Gallows, perhaps some dirty little Bill.' 
 So to-day, when crime flourishes upon the 
 sympathy of our rulers, the sentimentalist 
 again clamours for the free entry of aliens 
 into London, and demands in the name of 
 liberty that what is called ' politics ' should 
 still be the impenetrable cloak of violence. 
 Another form assumed by the present 
 sentimentalism is a morbid fear of death. 
 Whatever happens no drop of blood must 
 be shed. If men or women be murdered, 
 that cannot be helped, and the less said 
 about it the better. The criminal stands 
 upon another foot, and is entitled to every 
 consideration. Nor in arresting him must 
 the lightest risk be run. The valiant 
 policeman, who is as willing now as he
 
 SENTIMENTALISM AND CRIME 199 
 
 always was to face danger, must be pro- 
 tected by the sentimentalist against his 
 own valour. And in this nervousness the 
 police has not the smallest share. We can 
 easily imagine the shame and anger of the 
 men who are not permitted to avenge their 
 comrades. Pistols may be matched with 
 pistols, and if policemen are not restrained 
 there is no miscreant, who may not be 
 brought to justice and forced to expiate 
 his sins upon the scaffold. 
 
 Meanwhile the sentimentalism of our 
 legislators can be interpreted by the des- 
 perate aliens, welcomed to our shores, in 
 one sense only in the sense of weakness. 
 In the eyes of the hardened assassin, pity 
 is weakness, the fear of death is weakness, 
 a light sentence is weakness. Irrelevant 
 philanthropy meets with no heartier con- 
 tempt than with those upon whom it is 
 lavished. Sympathy with the criminal 
 evokes not gratitude but the laughter of 
 cynicism. And we shall not suppress the 
 anarchy, which reigns in our midst, until 
 we close our ports against the murderer,
 
 200 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 who affects an interest in politics, until 
 we understand that the suppression of 
 crime, not the indulgence of a lachrymose 
 sentimentalism, is the purpose of the law- 
 maker. 
 
 ' There is but one thing needed in the 
 world,' said Carlyle, ' but that one is indis- 
 pensable. Justice, justice in the name of 
 Heaven ; give us justice, and we live ; 
 give us only counterfeits of it, or succedanea 
 for it, and we die ! '
 
 LIBRARIES 201 
 
 XXVI 
 
 LIBRARIES 
 
 THE dispersing of a famous library is as 
 grievous a spectacle as the destruction of 
 an ancient building. For a collection of 
 books, if they be gathered with taste and 
 knowledge, is a living, organic whole. When 
 once they are disparted one from another, 
 they have no more power to excite our 
 wonder than the scattered stones of a 
 demolished cathedral. But while they are 
 arranged in all the glory of sumptuous 
 bindings upon a shelf, who so churlish as 
 to grudge the proximity which enhances 
 their value ? Who would not feel pleasure 
 to see a band of old contemporaries, long 
 severed by the chances of time and place, 
 brought together in decent companion- 
 ship ? 
 
 Thus all, save the rich and intrepid book-
 
 202 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 hunter, will regret the doom now too fre- 
 quently pronounced upon great libraries. 
 The treasures garnered with a wise and 
 lavish zeal fall presently to the cruel music 
 of the hammer. All the hopes that were 
 flattered in their chase, all the pride that 
 throbbed at their acquisition, are dashed 
 for ever. The noble edifices raised by 
 patient and discerning hands crumble to 
 the earth. Old friends which met last, 
 maybe, in the shops of Caxton, Wynkyn 
 de Worde, or Berthelet are once more 
 scattered to the ends of the earth, and 
 nought remains to mark their passage save 
 costly catalogues, those grave monuments 
 and sepulchres of dead libraries. 
 
 Two noble libraries, patiently gathered 
 and sadly dispersed in our own day, will 
 point the moral. I know not to which 
 of the two collectors the palm shall be 
 awarded. Happily, they were not fired by 
 precisely the same ambition, and those, 
 who knew that the masterpieces of the 
 one collection were far beyond their reach, 
 might still have cherished a faint hope
 
 LIBRARIES 203 
 
 of making a modest capture at the other. 
 Henry Huth recognised that no treasure was 
 outside the scope of his purse and courage. 
 He gave chase to whatever was rare with 
 the intrepidity of a hunter. The works 
 of Caxton, the folios of Shakespeare, the 
 finest spoils of the early Venetian presses, 
 were the legitimate conquests of his bow 
 and spear. And wisely counselled, he 
 sought far and wide for broadsides, tracts, 
 and pamphlets, for those strange wild- 
 fowl of literature which graver scholars 
 are wont to despise. Here, indeed, he 
 achieved a triumph, a triumph which he 
 gladly shared with the world, and it is 
 not too much to say that by recovering 
 and reprinting the prose works of Dekker, 
 Greene, Nashe, and the rest, he manifestly 
 increased our knowledge of the Elizabethan 
 age. 
 
 Mr. Hoe's aim was less high and no less 
 worthy. Though he did not quail before 
 Italian manuscripts, or miracles of early 
 printing, he found his chief joy in possessing 
 the first editions of English masterpieces,
 
 204 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 and so well did he succeed in his pursuit 
 that his catalogue, as those who have con- 
 sulted it well know, is a handbook of 
 bibliography. If he captured less rarities 
 than Henry Huth he covered a wider field ; 
 his collection was the collection of one, who 
 not only bought but read, and it would have 
 been difficult to imagine a pleasanter prison 
 wherein to be shut up than the library of 
 Mr. Hoe. For there is a delight in early 
 editions of which no lover of books need 
 be ashamed. We all know the bluff, 
 hearty fellow who is perfectly content with 
 modern echoes of ancient books. ' Give 
 me a plain reprint,' says he, ' that 's good 
 enough for me.' That is precisely what 
 it is : it is good enough for him. It is not 
 good enough for those, who would recover 
 from their books the very tone and accent 
 of dead writers. 
 
 The truth is that the best of reprints is 
 but the pale reflection of its original. From 
 this travesty of an ancient book the spirit 
 and substance of the past are gone. The 
 old print, the gold-toned paper, the ancient
 
 LIBRARIES 205 
 
 sheep-skin cover, show you the book as it 
 appeared to the hero that wrote it. It is 
 in such type as this, you say, that he read 
 his proofs. The simple frontispiece was 
 of his choice. The printer, whose name 
 stands at the foot of the title-page, was his 
 friend and colleague. Are not all these 
 indications of his mind and temper ? Can 
 you not catch an added vision of the man 
 himself, when you look at the outward 
 show of the book as he saw and approved 
 it? 
 
 If books are worth reading, they are 
 worth reading at their best and in their 
 handsomest shape. True, it is a delight 
 to read The Anatomy of Melancholy, even 
 in a new garb. It is a far keener delight 
 to turn over the pages of the quarto of 
 1621, which Burton himself handled and 
 conned for the press. The commentators 
 no doubt, have illuminated the text of 
 Hobbes with their later wisdom, but you 
 will better understand the author, if you 
 turn the pages of the edition, across whose 
 title-page strides the Leviathan with sword
 
 206 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 in one hand and crozier in the other. And 
 as for Chaucer, how shall he be read and 
 understood save in black letter ? Cold 
 does our English Homer look in the neat- 
 ness of modern print, and noble was the 
 compliment which Burton paid him, when 
 he set all citations from his works in 
 Gothic type. 
 
 Nor do the pleasures of book-hunting 
 lie only in the splendour of the quarry. 
 There is also the pleasure, vivid and inex- 
 haustible, of the chase. Mighty men in- 
 deed were the old hunters. They gave 
 their days and nights to the sport. Gladly 
 would they travel from end to end of Great 
 Britain, gladly would they cross the in- 
 hospitable sea, if only they might track 
 to its lair a single treasure. How great 
 must have been the satisfaction of the 
 
 Duke of Roxburghe, when hetaas able to 
 
 i 
 
 produce the first edition of Boccaccio, 
 printed at Venice in 1474, which his friends 
 had assured him had no existence ! And 
 if from the land of shades he could watch 
 the dispersing of his books, his ghost must
 
 LIBRARIES 207 
 
 have worn a boastful smile, when the 
 Boccaccio for which he paid 100 passed 
 to a rival for 2260. Truly, in those brave 
 days, the hunting of books was sport for 
 kings. The collector knew well every 
 treasure that his library contained. The 
 fatigue of the search, the glory of the cap- 
 ture, were all his own, and he did not hide 
 his acquisitions from his friends. ' Why, 
 you see, sir,' said Richard Heber, who had 
 a hoard of books in every city of Europe, 
 ' no man can comfortably do without three 
 copies of a book. One he must have for 
 a show copy ; . . . another he will require 
 for his own use and reference ; . . . and 
 he must needs have a third at the service 
 of his friends.' 
 
 To-day, alas ! another fashion prevails. 
 With high prices a spirit of piracy has crept 
 into the saleroom. The collector sends 
 forth his agents to lay harsh hands upon 
 whatever money can buy, and, when he 
 has gathered together books and manu- 
 scripts, good or bad, which should never 
 find an incompatible shelter under one roof,
 
 208 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 he carries them off to his secret fastness, 
 where wise eyes may not look upon them. 
 But he is no true conqueror, who owes his 
 victory to gold alone, and the honours of 
 war still remain with the scholar of old, 
 whose taste told him what he should 
 acquire, and who fought himself for its 
 possession even at the auction's mouth.
 
 EXAMINATIONS 209 
 
 XXVII 
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 ONE of the worst of the legacies which 
 have come down to us from the nineteenth 
 century is the legacy of competitive ex- 
 amination. This, the strangest method of 
 choosing officials ever devised by the in- 
 genuity of man, possesses all those qualities, 
 which were cherished by our simple fore- 
 fathers. It appears logical at first sight. 
 It has an air of scrupulous fairness. The 
 logic falls to pieces when the premises are 
 found to be false. And no one can praise 
 the fairness of a system, which sets out to 
 discover wise men, and chooses those only 
 who have learned the trick of deceiving 
 their examiners. 
 
 However, for many years England has 
 rivalled China in the waste and multiplicity 
 of examination. We have examined our
 
 210 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 soldiers, we have examined our civil ser- 
 vants at home and abroad. If a new 
 office be created, now a daily occurrence, 
 the poor, silly candidates are driven into 
 a pen and asked irrelevant, bewildering 
 questions. Thus there is one avenue, and 
 one avenue alone, to preferment. A long 
 room, lightly furnished with tables and 
 benches, with red blotting-paper, foolscap, 
 and quill pens, represents to many a loyal 
 servant the hard-travelled road to Empire. 
 Those, who look back upon the experience 
 of their youth, smile at the foolish game 
 they were asked to play. But what can 
 be said in extenuation of a Government, 
 which needs the best service that it can 
 obtain, and resolutely applies a false test ? 
 To seek the governing spirit in an examina- 
 tion room is like looking for a Derby winner 
 in a circus. 
 
 No sooner were examinations invented 
 than human ingenuity discovered how to 
 evade them. In other words, the new 
 disease instantly found a suitable remedy. 
 The crammer came to the candidate's aid,
 
 EXAMINATIONS 211 
 
 and made it certain that the examiners 
 should test not his knowledge, not his 
 intelligence, but his cunning. Thus the 
 candidate was stuffed, fat as a Strasburg 
 goose, with multifarious information ; he 
 studied ' tips ' in history and algebra with 
 the interested zeal of a racecourse tout. 
 He knew that, if once he could amass a 
 certain number of marks, he would be 
 beyond the reach of poverty all his life 
 long. And at every step he took on the 
 way to success be separated himself further 
 from the possibility of a clear under- 
 standing. There is nothing better than 
 a wise education for the making of public 
 servants. Again and again it has been 
 proved that they are most capable of 
 Empire who in their youth have followed 
 scholarship for its own sake. But those 
 are not the men, who shine most brilliantly 
 in the examiner's room. They have not 
 been trained to cram their brains with 
 hastily gathered lumber, and then to un- 
 pack it all and for ever within the compass 
 of a busy fortnight.
 
 212 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 In the old days a more prudent method 
 of selection prevailed. Those who had 
 influence, whether Ministers or directors, 
 did not scruple to make an intelligent 
 choice among their friends. There is much 
 to be said in favour of a system which gave 
 Clive and Warren Hastings to India. It 
 is easy to believe that, under our present 
 rules, Arthur Wellesley, ' idle and inatten- 
 tive in his studies,' would not have been 
 given a chance of military distinction. So 
 honest a man might perchance have shrunk 
 from the trickery of examination, and 
 wasted his talents in some civil employ. 
 Are we sure even that Nelson would have 
 found admission to the Navy, had not an 
 uncle been willing and able to set him 
 on his way from a Norfolk vicarage to 
 the quarter-deck of the Victory ? 
 
 That England, in spite of an evil system, 
 has accomplished her many noble designs 
 is the highest possible tribute to the ex- 
 cellence of her material. Her servants, 
 whether chosen by influence or by examina- 
 tion, have known how to do their duty and
 
 EXAMINATIONS 213 
 
 to uphold the dignity of the Empire. They 
 have also been able, many of them with the 
 passage of the years, to outgrow the evil 
 effects of cram. Beneath other skies they 
 have rid themselves of a foolish incubus 
 and have forgotten in the responsibilities 
 of high office that they ever stooped, with 
 the aid of a crammer, to assume a know- 
 ledge which they did not possess. 
 
 But, because examination has not wholly 
 checked the growth of our English intelli- 
 gence, there is no reason why we should 
 continue to hold it in respect. Indeed, 
 there are hopeful signs of a return to better 
 counsels. Mr. Hartog, a sound authority, 
 has publicly deplored, before the Society 
 of Arts, the hideous waste of national 
 energy imposed by the Civil Service. He 
 has drawn a pitiable picture of the over- 
 worked, under-educated candidate, who 
 spends a large part of his life in attempting 
 to attain the end of a paltry ambition. 
 If he be successful, he must still deplore 
 the loss of squandered years. If he fail, 
 he has packed his brain for nothing, and
 
 214 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 must begin life again, stripped of know- 
 ledge and with a warped intelligence. And 
 he fails as often as not. In one single year 
 there were some two hundred thousand 
 candidates at public examinations in the 
 United Kingdom, and only one hundred 
 thousand won the posts which they coveted. 
 With these facts in our mind, shall we dare 
 to reproach China, the reckless mother of 
 examinations, with sacrificing her national 
 energy ? 
 
 Meanwhile Lord Cromer has made a de- 
 finite experiment, which has been crowned 
 with success. He has appointed a board 
 of * highly qualified officials,' who are left 
 free to choose from the universities such 
 candidates for the Sudanese Service as they 
 think fit. The plan has worked admirably, 
 and there is no reason, save one, why this 
 same plan should not be applied to every 
 service at the disposal of the Government. 
 The one reason in its disfavour is the 
 jealousy and inverted snobbishness which 
 prevail to-day. The class hatred recently 
 stirred up has thrown a slur of suspicion
 
 EXAMINATIONS 215 
 
 upon all well-educated men. The Labour 
 Party has discovered that political virtue 
 resides only in manual toil. It has even 
 made a demand that it should be repre- 
 sented upon the Indian Council, though 
 its ignorance of our great dependency 
 is as profound as its ignorance of the art 
 of government. It is not likely, therefore, 
 to approve of any scheme, which should 
 find the properly qualified servants of the 
 Empire in our universities. There is for 
 the moment a taint on education. He is 
 instantly suspected of incompetency, who 
 by industry and intelligence has raised 
 himself above his fellows. The horny 
 hand of toil is represented as alone fit for 
 government, because a compact body of 
 some forty members believe itself able to 
 intimidate weak Cabinets. And as the 
 horny hand may not yet grasp all the reins 
 it will do its best to impede the coach of 
 Empire. The competitive system appears 
 to those, who have not realised its dangers, 
 a symptom of democracy. Here, says the 
 horny-handed one, there is no favour, and
 
 he is likely to give the system a qualified 
 support, until all the offices in the State 
 are handed over to his free disposal. And 
 thus we see the great danger of all demo- 
 cracies. Fear and distrust are eternal 
 stumbling-blocks in the way of just selec- 
 tion. That an able man should be placed 
 where his ability might be useful seems to 
 the people an open affront. In Athens, 
 where at last the democracy involved the 
 State in ruin, they chose their magistrates 
 by lot. We choose the most of our public 
 servants by examination. Which method 
 is the wiser ? I am not sure that the toss 
 of a coin is not preferable.
 
 FAME 217 
 
 XXVIII 
 
 FAME 
 
 ' FAME,' said a philosopher some years ago, 
 ' is a very subtle thing. If you neglect it, 
 it will not come to you. Now, I propose 
 to win it by asking the distinguished 
 Americans who visit London to dine with 
 me.' Whether the Americans ate their 
 dinner, and the philosopher attained his 
 end it boots not to inquire. The lapse of 
 time has proved fame, the object of many 
 men's desire, to be far less subtle than 
 once it was. The curiosity and indiscretion 
 of the age in which we live have rendered 
 it indistinguishable from notoriety and 
 advertisement. To be in the mouths of 
 men for a week or a month is within the 
 compass of all those, who for profit or 
 vanity pursue publicity. The daily record 
 of the modern world passes few aspirants
 
 218 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 by, and he, who takes delight in the vision 
 of his name standing boldly in print, need 
 seldom suffer disappointment. There are 
 a thousand ways, in which the eager citizen 
 may call attention to himself, and even if 
 he fail in all else he may yet indite a letter 
 to the papers. 
 
 And the camera has come to the aid of 
 printer's ink. In this time of facile glory 
 the photographer is beyond the reach of 
 very few. How brave a show does Mr. X., 
 the well-known author, make in his new 
 motor-car ! Thus literary eminence and 
 manufacturing enterprise are illuminated 
 in a single flash. The maker of cars re- 
 joices that the world is thus reminded of 
 his skill. The literary gentleman, remem- 
 bering what Horace said, that the eye is 
 more vividly imposed upon than the ear, 
 recognises that his counterfeit image is 
 worth two columns of lofty appreciation. 
 Here, indeed, is the secret of modern fame. 
 That hero is secure of glory whose face is 
 familiar to the crowd. It is for this reason 
 that the actor or politician become most
 
 FAME 219 
 
 readily notorious. They achieve their 
 effects not merely with their brains, but 
 with their bodily presence. Their features 
 are familiar to thousands who will never be 
 privileged to address them. As they pass 
 in the street they are pointed at with 
 ecstatic fingers. Even their voices, the 
 most persuasive and most rapidly transi- 
 tory implements of fame, strike without 
 strangeness upon the ear of the general. 
 It is poetically just that they vanish most 
 swiftly from the minds of men. 
 
 Yet the artist in fame well knows when 
 and how to draw back. He will under- 
 stand the point at which familiarity turns 
 to contempt. He must be seen far sel- 
 domer than his photograph. However 
 keen may be his zest for visible glory, he 
 must now and again enwrap himself in a 
 mysterious gloom. For, by a curious para- 
 dox, the people, which apportions fame, 
 does not like to be taken completely into 
 its hero's confidence. It is prepared to 
 suspect whoever comes to it in simple 
 guise. Grandeur in its eyes should tran-
 
 220 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 scend the ordinary measure of things and 
 persons. The actor, who drives to the 
 theatre from his suburb home, is a very 
 different being from the buskined monster 
 who glares over the footlights upon the 
 pit. The orator, who shakes the Senate, is 
 not the same man as the candidate who 
 humbly solicits votes. Once upon a time 
 the captain of a boat which carried pas- 
 sengers to Samoa discussed the merits of 
 Stevenson with a devout pilgrim. ' Him 
 a great man,' exclaimed the burly mariner. 
 ' Don't you believe it. Why, many 's the 
 time he 's sat in this boat with me.' A 
 simple story, which reveals one danger 
 lying in the footsteps of fame. 
 
 By a fortunate irony, he who pursues 
 fame too zealously grasps a shadow. For 
 a moment, no doubt, he basks in the sun- 
 shine of glory. He sees his face smile from 
 the hoarding, and is proud. The sound 
 of his name upon the lips of strangers fills 
 him with exultation. But the fame, which 
 he has contrived himself, or snatched in 
 a happy moment from the fickle mob,
 
 FAME 221 
 
 is forgotten in a night and leaves behind 
 it no enduring lustre. The only fame 
 worth cherishing is that, which comes un- 
 sought, which is born of good work faith- 
 fully accomplished, and of the appreciation 
 of friends and equals. Mozart's twice- 
 cited boast, that he wrote for himself and 
 a few friends, proves that he looked not 
 at time but at eternity. Shakespeare, 
 whose fame is equal with the earth, took 
 no thought of notoriety. When Byron de- 
 scribed Lamb as the most ignoble follower 
 of Southey and Company, who would have 
 believed that Lamb's name and fame were 
 destined to outlive the many pompous 
 reputations of his age ? In brief, many 
 a man, who seems to his own time of the 
 loftiest stature, is dwarfed to nothingness 
 by the passage of a few years. And none 
 may control the wayward accidents of 
 fame. Brummel's manner of putting on 
 a cravat, Jack Sheppard's trick of putting 
 off his irons sufficed for immortality. 
 
 As if to show the changes and chances 
 of reputation, there came an exhibition
 
 222 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 of the works of Wenceslaus Hollar which 
 set that master upon the pedestal he 
 should have adorned two centuries ago. 
 Never did etcher more nobly neglect the 
 common approaches of fame. Born at 
 Prague in 1607, he came to England with 
 the Earl of Arundel in 1637, and, excepting 
 the interval of the Civil War, he devoted 
 himself with loyalty and single-mindedness 
 ( to the practice of his art. That he fought 
 for the king of his adopted country and 
 was taken prisoner at Basing House 
 proves the aristocracy of his mind. A 
 vast number of incomparable plates prove 
 the aristocracy of his craftsmanship. He 
 was an equal master of landscape and 
 portraiture. He could imprison upon a 
 few inches of copper a spacious city. With 
 a delicacy, which suggests that his hand 
 was poised on wings, he drew the towers, 
 the river, and the skies of London. To 
 him we owe a shining record of our capital 
 as it seemed to his artist's eye before the 
 great fire. His skill has given us the por- 
 traits of the kings, soldiers, and courtiers,
 
 FAME 223 
 
 who dominated the seventeenth century. 
 Of him truly it might be said that he 
 touched nothing that he did not adorn. 
 And fame has overtaken him with slow 
 and halting foot. Even prosperity, the 
 least privilege of so fine a craftsman, was 
 denied him. So long as the Earl of Arundel 
 lived, he was sheltered from disaster. In 
 his experience, at any rate, the patron 
 might not be ranked with envy and 
 the gaol. Forced back upon the print- 
 sellers, he fought a long and losing battle 
 with poverty. Nor did the restoration 
 of Charles n. establish his fortunes. His 
 plan for rebuilding London after the fire 
 was not accepted, and though he worked 
 while life was in him he could not make 
 enough for his necessities. It is said that 
 he was forced to beg of his creditors the 
 pallet-bed upon which he died. Thus un- 
 equally are the gifts of fame and fortune 
 distributed. Had Hollar made his work 
 subservient to a love of passing glory, he 
 would have been flattered amiably, and we 
 should be deprived of a hundred master-
 
 224 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 pieces. His reward is posthumous and 
 belated. His memory outlives the memory 
 of the most of his contemporaries. For 
 it is part of the irony of life that other 
 hands reap what the man of genius sows, 
 and that it is the height of good fortune 
 to escape an instant and a vulgar fame.
 
 THE GAIETY OF NATIONS 225 
 
 XXIX 
 
 THE GAIETY OF NATIONS 
 
 THERE is no quality of the human soul 
 more shyly elusive than gaiety. It will 
 visit none an unwilling guest, and he, who 
 forces it upon others, commits as gross an 
 outrage as the monster, who unlocks his 
 sorrows to the public eye. If it would 
 bring us delight, it must come and go as 
 it pleases, flashing upon us like some 
 bright-plumaged bird, and leaving us wiser 
 and more joyous for its sudden apparition. 
 This waywardness of gaiety, for instance, 
 does not suit the practical Teuton, who is 
 so eagerly intent to demonstrate the superi- 
 ority of Berlin that he would reduce the 
 emotion for the most of men a hope rather 
 than areality to line and measure. All that 
 is wanted to produce 'gaiety,' he says, is 
 to instal the electric light, to lay on a tap
 
 226 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 of Munich beer, to hire a troupe of Tziganes, 
 and to keep your doors open all night. 
 Above all, late hours and an easy Licensing 
 Act are essential. If these be granted, then 
 you shall laugh as long and as loud as you 
 like ; in a fine spirit of pot-valiance, you 
 shall turn night into day, and the merri- 
 ment of beer shall lift from your shoulders 
 all the heavy burdens of life. 
 
 The method is too simple to inspire con- 
 fidence, and before we pack our bags, in 
 obedience to the Teuton, and take refuge 
 in the beer-palaces of Berlin, we might ask 
 ourselves what we mean by gaiety. Look 
 out the word ' gay' in Johnson's Dictionary, 
 and you will find these apt equivalents : 
 4 Airy, cheerful, merry, frolic.' The virtues 
 which these epithets denote are the virtues 
 of the heart and mind. You cannot pur- 
 chase them as you buy boots, in the 
 common mart. Their acquisition is in 
 your power, and in the power of none other. 
 They may be sought in solitude as easily 
 as in the crowded haunt of pleasure-seekers. 
 I can imagine gaiety in a desert, or the
 
 THE GAIETY OF NATIONS 227 
 
 inspissated gloom of misery in the splendid 
 Panopticums of Berlin. 
 
 Nevertheless, it may be admitted that 
 every nation has its own way of expressing 
 gaiety. The French, before all, are masters 
 of this delicate quality, and they are most 
 apt to share it generously with others. 
 Thackeray once said, with perfect truth, 
 that he never landed at Calais without 
 feeling that a weight of care had fallen 
 from his shoulders like a discarded coat. 
 There is something in the brisk and vivid 
 air of France that forbids despondency. 
 Even the unaccustomed traveller must re- 
 joice with those about him. He must take 
 his part in the keen curiosity and zest of 
 life, which no Frenchman escapes. And in 
 Paris he cannot but be conscious that there 
 prevails a sound standard and measure of 
 things. There is an atmosphere of art 
 and letters, which envelops no corner of 
 London. The poets of the quarter sing 
 not that they may turn their songs to profit, 
 but for love of their craft and pure joyous- 
 ness of heart. You may find gaiety, if
 
 228 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 you will, at the next corner. You are not 
 asked to pay for it. All that is required 
 of you before you enter into its full inherit- 
 ance is to put away sordid ambitions, 
 and to forget that the earth is a Tom 
 Tiddler's ground, where the serious ones 
 scramble for gold. 
 
 Such are the sentiments, which give to 
 Paris a gaiety of heart we miss some- 
 times in the bustle of London. And, if 
 you will surprise the visible embodiment 
 of this gaiety, go in the afternoon upon the 
 boulevards, at the hour of absinthe, and 
 watch what Johnson's Dictionary would 
 call the ' frolic ' interchange of wit and 
 thought. There in its perfection is the 
 talk, ardent and sincere, which makes for 
 gaiety in a far higher sense than shows, 
 theatres, or gin-palaces. And, when night 
 has fallen upon the city, cross the river 
 and visit some far-distant cafe, where meet 
 those cenacles of poetry, whose loyal mem- 
 bers cheerfully carry aloft the banners of 
 their school in the very jaws of poverty. 
 There you may learn a lesson in high
 
 THE GAIETY OF NATIONS 229 
 
 spirits, which all the vulgar racket of Mont- 
 martre cannot teach. 
 
 It has been the misfortune of Paris that 
 her loudly advertised ' gaiety ' was long 
 since discovered by London and New York. 
 Her northern heights have become the goal 
 of raffish pilgrimages. The sad trippers, 
 who know not how to enjoy themselves, 
 find bought pleasures ready to their hand 
 in the restaurants of the Place Pigalle. 
 There they can enjoy the privilege, so 
 highly esteemed in Berlin, of sitting up 
 all night in a heavily laden atmosphere of 
 tobacco smoke and champagne. There 
 they can listen to an empty chatter, in 
 which they take no part, and smile back 
 at a laughter incomprehensible to their 
 timid souls. It is but a shadow, which 
 they grasp. The gaiety, after which they 
 pine, escapes them. How, indeed, should 
 it thrive where its worshippers are ' per- 
 sonally conducted ' ? Yet time was, when 
 Montmartre, the capital of Paris, as it was 
 proudly called, echoed with genuine merri- 
 ment, when Rodolph Salis and Aristide
 
 230 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 Bruant, its sovereign lords, proved how 
 much wit might be packed into a little 
 room. Alas ! the puppet-plays of the 
 Chat Noir are no more than a happy 
 memory, and nothing is left upon the 
 sacred hill save dull taverns, where joy- 
 ousness is dealt out, amid a racket of 
 glass and crockery, at so much a head. 
 
 And shall London emerge in triumph 
 from this competition of gaiety ? By no 
 means, if we may believe the foreigners 
 who visit our shores. They are con- 
 vinced at a first glance that the English 
 still take their pleasures as they took 
 them in the time of Froissart. There are 
 no cafes in London to tempt the hardy 
 Teuton from his bed. An inexorable law 
 closes the doors of all hostelries half an 
 hour after midnight. It seems as though 
 the curfew of William the Norman was 
 still in force. The poor tourist, whose toes 
 itch to join in the twinkling dance, finds 
 this simple pleasure cruelly denied him. 
 No wonder he sighs for the ampler licence 
 of his own land ! No wonder he condemns
 
 THE GAIETY OF NATIONS 231 
 
 his hosts in a fury of rage as killjoys close- 
 bound in the iron bonds of Puritanism ! 
 
 Yet his condemnation is undeserved, as 
 he would speedily discover, if he were 
 permitted to look through the windows of 
 our clubs and houses. The life of modern 
 London is like a Moorish palace : it shows 
 only its darkest side to the world. During 
 the last centuries a complete change of 
 manners has taken place in our metropolis. 
 The rufflers, the roaring-boys, the blades, 
 and the Mohocks have followed each other 
 into the limbo of forgetfulness. Bob Logic 
 and Corinthian Tom no longer box the 
 watch in the purlieus of Covent Garden. 
 The age of night-houses is past. Our gaiety 
 breathes a quieter and more private air. 
 We refuse obstinately to exhibit to the 
 eyes of strangers our emotions of joy as of 
 grief. But the true gaiety of mind and 
 spirit, cloistered though it be, still flourishes 
 in our midst. It may be difficult to de- 
 fend our inveterate practice of keeping to 
 ourselves the best of our pleasures. Not 
 even the envious man, who has more than
 
 232 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 a tourist's knowledge of London, can deny 
 that joy and lightheartedness sparkle there 
 for those who seek them. 
 
 Concerning the gaiety of Berlin there 
 can be no doubt. It is of that poor kind 
 that insists upon publicity. In the beer- 
 halls, which sleep neither by day nor by 
 night, there is an eager resolution to snatch 
 every one of the four-and-twenty fleeting 
 hours. On all sides are theatres, music 
 halls, cabarets, restaurants, to capture the 
 wayward fancy of the citizen. It is as 
 though every man you met slapped his 
 chest and shouted in your ear, ' See how 
 cheerful I can be !' As once upon a 
 time I walked down the Friedrichstrasse, 
 bright with all the glare and glitter of 
 Panopticums, I remembered a picture, 
 by John Leech, which appeared many 
 years ago in Punch. It represented two 
 women, damp and draggled, standing at a 
 street corner, under the rain ; and says one 
 to the other : ' How long have you been 
 gay ? ' A sardonic question which you 
 would put to no other capital in Europe.
 
 PRACTICAL JOKING 233 
 
 XXX 
 
 PRACTICAL JOKING 
 
 A QUESTION asked and an answer given in 
 the House of Commons remind us that the 
 habit of practical joking is not yet extinct. 
 On the contrary, it survives in its simplest 
 and most primitive form. To bring a 
 sudden charge of stealing a watch against 
 a friend is what the jokesmiths themselves 
 would call ' the classical example.' It 
 has shaken the sides of many a dullard 
 with laughter. Theodore Hook, I am sure, 
 a master in the kind, often inflicted this 
 species of cruelty upon his friends, and 
 the wonder is that it was not familiar to 
 the very youngest policeman on the beat. 
 
 There is no word to be said in extenuation 
 of the practical joker. He is commonly a 
 boisterous fellow who pretends to wit, 
 having none. When tongue and brain
 
 234 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 fail him he must devise some noisy dis- 
 comfort for his friend. He thinks that he 
 has achieved a triumph if, like Sir Hum- 
 phrey Noddy in the play, he has ' twisted 
 a fellow's hat over a little river that is not 
 navigable, and he is forced to go a mile 
 about to fetch it.' At his least subtle, he 
 has as much grace as a clown in a 
 circus. He is content to trip and punch 
 his companions. When he pursues the 
 more subtle sort of joke, he does no more 
 than impose upon somebody's good faith. 
 
 His method is always the same. He 
 makes a statement, as elaborate as you 
 please, and, when his statement is accepted 
 for truth by an honourably credulous 
 person, he shouts with merriment. This 
 man, says he to a policeman, has stolen 
 my watch ; the policeman, knowing no 
 evil, believes what he hears, a crowd 
 gathers, and when the farce is done a grave 
 injury is inflicted upon a perfectly innocent 
 man. 
 
 Many years since, a French philosopher 
 noted the pleasure which men take in the
 
 PRACTICAL JOKING 235 
 
 misfortunes of others. It is this pleasure, 
 and this pleasure alone, which can explain 
 the self-complacency of the practical joker. 
 The end and aim of all his experiments are 
 to involve others in visible and public 
 discomfort. When once his victims are 
 placed in a ridiculous or humiliating posi- 
 tion, his triumph is complete. That the 
 laughter of fools goes with him is doubtless 
 an added joy. Not merely do they chuckle 
 at the misery of those, whom they never 
 saw before, but they observe with a kind 
 of envy what they think the work of a 
 master, and they hope against hope that 
 some day they will devise a trick not 
 unworthy of comparison. 
 
 Were the practical joker a man of sense, 
 he could feel no reasonable pride in his own 
 achievement. He rarely displays a quick 
 ingenuity. He follows with a slavish de- 
 votion the well-tried examples of ancient 
 days. He goes about his work with a 
 solemn pedantry which would bore if it did 
 not distress his victims. His jokes cannot 
 by their nature be unpremeditated. They
 
 236 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 are prepared with elaborate care and solemn 
 circumstance ; they are rehearsed with all 
 the gravity of a theatrical performance, 
 and at every step they are separated farther 
 from the wit, which is fondly pretended 
 to be their inspiration. For very young 
 undergraduates and newly joined soldiers 
 some extenuation may be found. The 
 man, who carries a love of practical joking 
 into middle life, should be exiled from 
 society as an untamed, irredeemable 
 savage. 
 
 It is wholly without vanity that we 
 confess that practical joking is a peculiarly 
 English vice. With us the comic spirit has 
 breathed more faintly than in the land of 
 France. The fool in the pillory has seemed 
 to many the very type of humour. The 
 red-hot poker of immemorial pantomimes 
 has accustomed us to the crudest form of 
 mirth. Yet, though the practical joke 
 drew intermittent laughter from the begin- 
 ning of our history, though Cromwell's 
 jam- tarts are a legend, it was, by an odd 
 paradox, the restored Court of Charles n.,
 
 PRACTICAL JOKING 237 
 
 which first set this infamous form of wit 
 upon a solid foot. The memoirs of Count 
 Grammont display in not a very pleasant 
 light the determination of courtiers and 
 maids of honour to involve their friends 
 and enemies in ridicule, and the measure 
 of their wit may be taken by the fact that 
 nothing served them for a jest so well as 
 physical deformity. 
 
 There was, for instance, the trick put 
 upon Lady Muskerry, a rich heiress to 
 whom nature had been sparing of her gifts. 
 ' Of two legs uncommonly short, one was 
 much shorter than the other,' and ' a face 
 suitable to this description gave the finish- 
 ing stroke to this disagreeable figure.' 
 When, therefore, the Queen devised a 
 masquerade of Babylonian ladies, what 
 better chance did mischievous maid of 
 honour ever grasp ? The Queen sent notes 
 to all those she appointed to take part in 
 the dance, and Miss Hamilton lost no time 
 in counterfeiting a note to Lady Muskerry. 
 The poor creature, her head turned with 
 vanity, instantly got into her coach to
 
 238 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 seek information of the merchants, who 
 traded to the Levant, as to how the ladies 
 of quality dressed in Babylon. And she 
 appeared at the threshold of the Court on 
 the proper day, ' the devil of a phantom 
 in masquerade,' having about her at least 
 sixty ells of gauze and silver tissue, ' not 
 to mention a sort of a pyramid upon her 
 head adorned with a hundred thousand 
 baubles.' Thus the poor creature's ill- 
 omened vanity was exposed, and it was 
 only the tact of Lord Muskerry, which 
 saved the jest from going beyond the 
 bounds of cruelty, and prevented the mis- 
 shapen princess of Babylon from standing 
 up to dance in all the glory of ridicule. 
 
 The duller times of our Hanoverian 
 sovereigns encouraged with what energy 
 they might the practical joke, which per- 
 haps reached its zenith under the Regency. 
 That the dandies should have indulged 
 in horseplay is something of a slur upon 
 their cold, impassible reputation. It is 
 less strange that horseplay should have 
 flourished in the nineteenth century, for
 
 PRACTICAL JOKING 239 
 
 horseplay is but the reverse of the respect- 
 able medal, a sort of reaction against the 
 autocratic rule of sentimentality. But, as 
 the years pass, the method of the horseplay 
 grows more and more childish. How poor 
 the invention of the practical joker has 
 been our annals and our literature alike 
 confess. The common artifice of persona- 
 tion was long since stale. What shall we 
 say concerning the ingenuity of those 
 humorists who half a century ago invited 
 thousands to the Tower of London ' to 
 view the annual ceremony of washing the 
 white lions ' ? They had their poor reward 
 in seeing all the approaches to Tower Hill 
 packed with purposeless cabs, and doubt- 
 less they went home, proud in the con- 
 sciousness that at last they had really 
 accomplished something. 
 
 And now that the Victorian, early or late, 
 has had his day, there might surely be an end 
 to this boisterous nonsense. The practical 
 joke should have gone out of fashion long 
 since with chignons and side-spring boots. 
 It is but a survival of a dull custom, which
 
 240 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 Shakespeare alone has lifted above the 
 level of folly. The one jest of the kind 
 which I recall with pleasure is that wrought 
 upon Christopher Sly. ' Sirs, I will prac- 
 tise on this drunken man,' says the lord in 
 the ' Induction.' 
 
 ' What think you, if he were conveyed to bed, 
 Wrapp'd in sweet clothes, rings put upon his 
 
 fingers, 
 
 A most delicious banquet by his bed, 
 And brave attendants near him when he wakes, 
 Would not the beggar then forget himself ? ' 
 
 And forget himself he did in such sort that 
 with his ' madam wife ' by his side he let 
 ' the world slip,' and in all the joy of an 
 enforced splendour witnessed the Taming 
 of the Shrew.
 
 ROOKS AND PIGEONS 241 
 
 XXXI 
 
 ROOKS AND PIGEONS 
 
 THE case of Mrs. Home, who generously 
 invited her friends to share with her all the 
 wealth of Madagascar, and was ignomini- 
 ously brought before the courts, differed in 
 no essential details from the accepted type. 
 It is true that there were elements of 
 farce in the grim comedy. One gentleman, 
 cast for a part, who combined in his single 
 person the millionaire and the undis- 
 charged bankrupt, and who (honest soul) 
 preferred to take his rum out of the bottle, 
 overstepped the limits of comic propriety. 
 The intellectual atmosphere, too, in which 
 the drama was played afforded an amiable 
 diversity. The strange hints of religious 
 enthusiasm given us by witnesses, the 
 fervent discussion concerning the shape 
 of the earth, which softened the stern 
 
 Q
 
 242 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 financiers to our hearts, were a new and 
 pleasant invention. For the rest, the old 
 comedy was played with the old zest and 
 to the old purpose. The rooks on the one 
 hand, the pigeons on the other, did what 
 was expected of them with the precision 
 and energy of well-trained actors. 
 
 In truth, the uniformity of fraud will 
 never cease to surprise us. The human 
 race profits nothing by experience. The 
 centuries do not wither the honoured 
 artifices, and vanity and greed will always 
 prevent the hungry dupe from taking 
 warning by his fellows. Though men and 
 women have been deceived a thousand 
 times by a familiar trick they are as ready 
 as ever to fall victims again to their sim- 
 plicity and hope. The spider needs little 
 cunning. However openly he spins his web, 
 the fly will walk into his parlour as into 
 a place of hospitality and joyous resort. 
 
 For instance, the gold brick of America 
 is as widely known and has been as piti- 
 lessly exposed as the enterprise of the 
 Spanish prisoner. Yet, if we may judge 
 by the persistence of those frauds, they
 
 ROOKS AND PIGEONS 243 
 
 are still profitable to their contrivers. A 
 man dies ; in a few weeks a letter, obviously 
 the work of a familiar friend, arrives at his 
 address, and is opened by his executor. The 
 poor man is told that only a small sum is 
 necessary for the complete purchase of the 
 mine, which has been so long the object of 
 his solicitude. The executor hastens to 
 America, opens his purse with avaricious 
 anxiety, and is left with no better con- 
 solation than a gold brick. And, though 
 many have ventured their money to aid 
 the hapless and well-advertised victim of 
 Spanish justice, no human eye has ever 
 seen the treasure, of which it is his good 
 fortune to dispose. 
 
 Mrs. Home's imagination soared high 
 above gold bricks and hidden treasure. 
 She saw with the eye of her sanguine mind 
 a vast kingdom in Madagascar, where 
 timber, gold, and precious stones were 
 waiting to enrich all those, who would take 
 a share in her grandiose project. That she 
 found friends ready to entrust her with their 
 money need not surprise us. From the 
 beginning of time there has been a glamour
 
 244 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 about gold, and silver, and jewels which 
 few can resist, whether they lurk in the 
 mines of Peru or are hidden in the moun- 
 tains of Mexico. 
 
 Some years ago, for instance, the famous 
 Madame Humbert deceived the world of 
 Paris with no better artifice than a tin box, 
 within whose slender limits was contained 
 the untold wealth of two mythical heroes. 
 The box, the symbol and treasure-house 
 of millions, seen but never opened, re- 
 mained for years an inexhaustible source 
 of gold. That it contained nothing but 
 an old newspaper and a few sous was 
 part of Madame Humbert's irony, and 
 at least it was more solid than the Mada- 
 gascar of Mrs. Home's imagining. But 
 Madame Humbert's artifice had no claim 
 to originality. A similar trick had been 
 played by an English boy a century before, 
 and patriotism bids us recall his achieve- 
 ment with an interested satisfaction. 
 
 Abraham Causton was the boy's name, 
 and he was born in 1800 not far from 
 Newmarket. Gifted with an intelligence 
 far above his fellows, he was sent, though
 
 ROOKS AND PIGEONS 245 
 
 a peasant, to Shrewsbury School. There 
 be became an accomplished scholar, and, 
 what is more to our point, the cleverest 
 impostor of his time. He, too, invented 
 a box, but it was of iron, and buried deep 
 in the garden of a nameless benefactor, 
 who met him in a stage-coach, and en- 
 dowed him with all his worldly goods for 
 no better reason than that the boy con- 
 tradicted him in the course of a political 
 discussion. The young Abraham told his 
 story with the truthful simplicity of phrase, 
 of which the swindler is always master, 
 and he had no difficulty in winning the 
 confidence of his fellows. Being by tem- 
 perament a true artist, he was never guilty 
 of boastful display. His policy was to 
 drop hints rather than to make aggressive 
 statements. Mr. Weatherby, the New- 
 market lawyer, was from the very first the 
 boy's friend and adviser. The knowledge, 
 which he had gained among the sharps 
 of the racecourse, did not suggest for a 
 moment that Causton was capable of dis- 
 honesty, and thus wisely supported the 
 Fortunate Youth, as he was speedily
 
 named, found no hindrance in the path of 
 glory. His fortune, fed by rumour, in- 
 creased daily. A modest half-million at 
 first, it presently surpassed the computation 
 of the boldest accountant. He was the 
 creditor, said the gossips, of every crowned 
 head in Europe, and his political influence 
 equalled his wealth. With an admirable 
 cunning he proposed no plan of life, which 
 did not become a gentleman. Mere boy 
 though he was, he was determined to raise 
 his family to gentility, and to educate his 
 eldest brother at the University of Cam- 
 bridge. Indeed, he went so far as to enter 
 him as a fellow-commoner at Emmanuel 
 College, declaring at the same time, by a 
 happy inspiration, that he himself had 
 scholarship enough, and could sink no 
 lower than to a political career. The 
 whole world trusted and applauded him. 
 Bankers vied with one another in giving 
 him credit. An eminent goldsmith de- 
 clared that ' he might have cleared all the 
 goods in his shop.' But though now and 
 then he astonished the simpler-minded
 
 ROOKS AND PIGEONS 247 
 
 by giving them the sight of a cheque for 
 half a million, he adopted an air of assured 
 tranquillity, and refused to adorn his 
 person with diamonds. 
 
 How long he might have lived upon the 
 easy faith of the world I know not. He 
 made one mistake and was ruined. He 
 had boasted proudly that he expected a 
 consignment of wines from his vineyards 
 near Mount Etna, and asked a party to 
 test them at dinner. One of his guests, 
 thinking no evil, idly picked up a cork and 
 read upon it the name of a London wine 
 merchant. He visited the merchant, and 
 discovered that Thames Street, not Mount 
 Etna, was the provenance of the Fortunate 
 Youth's famous vintage. The discovery 
 of fraud was then a matter of weeks. 
 Causton, in sublime unconsciousness, had 
 left England, with a discreet retinue, for a 
 tour through his European estates. He 
 was speedily overtaken. Yet his youth 
 and ingenuity pleaded for him. He 
 suffered no punishment, and when at last 
 the fame of his exploits had fallen into
 
 248 LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 oblivion he took orders and became a 
 successful if obscure tutor. 
 
 The Fortunate Youth soared on the wings 
 of fancy high above his fellows. The 
 motive of the common swindler is plain 
 for all to see. It is greed pure and simple. 
 The man, who hopes to acquire wealth 
 without labour or delay, is readily led into 
 the path of deception. The dupe's motive 
 is not less ignoble. Only in him the greed 
 of the idler is complicated by vanity. 
 He is so sure he cannot be tricked that 
 he eagerly gives credence to the most 
 outrageous falsehood. He will show his 
 friends, says he, how profitable are his 
 foresight and his courage. And when, in 
 his foolish attempt to get rich quickly, he 
 is robbed even of the poor pittance that 
 is his, how shall we condole with him ? 
 After all, he is but the necessary accom- 
 plice of the swindler. If there were no 
 pigeons there would be no rooks. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty 
 at tha Edinburgh University Press
 
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