G* S 
 Street
 
 UNIVERSITY Of 
 
 MIA 
 DIEGO

 
 Books and Thin
 
 Books and Things 
 
 A Collection of Stray Remarks 
 
 By G. S. Street 
 
 Author of The Autobiography of a Boy," " The Trials 
 of the Bantocks," "A Book of Essays," etc., etc. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 DUCKWORTH & CO. 
 1905
 
 Note 
 
 WHEN last I printed a collection of 
 papers which had been already ex- 
 posed to the notice or indifference 
 of my contemporaries, I was care- 
 ful to apologise for so doing. But the critics 
 took, for the most part, so kind and encourag- 
 ing a view of the proceeding that now, si 
 celeres quatiunt pennas, so to speak, if they 
 think I go too far, I must say they have them- 
 selves to blame for my persistence. 
 
 "The Provincial Mind" appeared in the 
 Quarterly Review ; The Times has allowed me 
 to use material contributed to its literary sup- 
 plement in the articles on Don Juan, Sterne, 
 and Fielding ; I reprint a few short articles 
 from the Academy -, and some lengthier efforts 
 from the Fortnightly Review and the Pall Mall 
 Magazine. G. S. S.
 
 Contents 
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 PACK 
 
 I. THE POOR PUBLIC . ... 3 
 
 II. THE PROVINCIAL MIND . 10 
 
 III. "DON JUAN" . . . . 48 
 
 IV. A NOTE ON FIELDING . . .61 
 V. THE MURDER OF MOUNTFORD, THE PLAYER . 70 
 
 VI. STERNE AND HIS CRITICS . 85 
 
 VII. PHILOSOPHY AND HUMANITOMTITY . . 95 
 
 VIII. MR. THOMAS CREEVEY . . . 102 
 
 IX. ABOUT OUR FICTION . ... 122 
 
 X. THE VOGUE OF WRITERS . . .146 
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 I. BACKSTAIRS . . . . 155 
 
 II. ENGLISH CLASSES . ... 161 
 
 III. OF POLITICAL MEETINGS . . . 168 
 
 IV. THE DOCKS . . ... 175 
 V. THE HOUSE OF COMMONS . . . 189 
 
 VI. MY SPECTACLES . ... 202 
 
 VII. A QUESTION OF WOMEN . . .213 
 
 VIII. PETTICOAT LANE . ... 234
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS
 
 Books and Things 
 
 THE POOR PUBLIC 
 
 IT is commonly called the great public, but 
 I am rather sorry for it and would show 
 my sympathy. It is so often attacked, 
 poor thing, and I feel that it cannot defend 
 itself. I see it in imagination a poor, dumb, 
 scolded animal, looking at me, a possible cham- 
 pion, with beautiful, expressive eyes. "Poor 
 public," I say gently, "what a shame ! " But 
 "brute!" shout the other writers, "many- 
 headed beast ! stupid, pig-headed, coarse, 
 vulgar, imperceptive dolt ! Get out ! " Dear, 
 dear . . . my acquaintance is happily miscella- 
 neous, if I may affirm it without boasting for 
 the sake of the argument, and I converse in
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 my time with lawyers, doctors, sailors, soldiers, 
 shopkeepers, porters, men of fashion, states- 
 men, and shampooers at the Turkish bath. 
 I might lengthen the list and add several sorts 
 of ladies. Now all these people for I have 
 excluded artists in the ordinary sense of writers 
 and painters and actors make up, I suppose, 
 the public. But my general impression of 
 their conversation is anything but one of pig- 
 headedness, vulgarity, and the rest of it. How 
 comes it, then, that the public has exposed 
 itself to these unfortunate imputations ? 
 
 But a difficulty in the way of clear thinking 
 on the matter must be dealt with first. Are 
 these people the public? Not a single man 
 Jack of them regards himself as belonging 
 to the public. Every one of them, of course, 
 directly opposes to himself the public which 
 is outside of his own calling, and in that sense 
 is pretty sure, he also, to speak of the public 
 with contempt. But, beyond that, speak to 
 any one of them about the public in connection 
 with a book or a play, his withers are unwrung. 
 It never occurs to him that you may include him- 
 self. I remember, contrariwise, hearing a popu- 
 
 4
 
 THE POOR PUBLIC 
 
 lar actress in some one-act play pronounce a long 
 eulogy on the public, how dear and generous 
 and sympathetic it was. The author, cunning 
 rogue, no doubt had said to himself that the 
 poor public was always being attacked, that 
 he, on the other hand, would eulogise it : that 
 it would be touched and charmed. But not 
 a bit of it. The speech fell flat. No one in 
 the theatre thought that he or she was in- 
 tended, or took the least pleasure in hearing 
 the public praised, and if any superior people 
 were there they, no doubt, were disgusted. 
 And we dislike to think, indeed, that any agree- 
 able, responsive person with whom we talk 
 belongs to the guilty body. 
 
 Still, there it is ; we cannot suppose it to 
 be a subjective hallucination, vanishing when- 
 ever we test it in the flesh. There is an 
 amorphous, shifting, changing body, the public, 
 which influences so sadly our books and paint- 
 ing and plays, our art. But what does the 
 influence really mean ? Given the public at 
 the worst of the accusation, how much does 
 it signify? If a man has it in him greatly 
 to express himself in a book or a picture, it 
 
 5
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 needs little of a public to get the one printed, 
 the other furnished with canvas and paint. If 
 his first aim is a fortune, he will turn aside but 
 then he is not your artist. We are reduced 
 to the theatre, about which there has been such 
 a coil of late. A play cannot get itself pro- 
 duced without an anticipated public of many 
 thousands, true ! I fancy managers are apt 
 to put the public's standard on too low a level ; 
 plays with ideas in them have succeeded even 
 in our day, and some which merely repeated 
 an empty formula have failed. I would even 
 say a word for the public which makes suc- 
 cesses of "musical comedies." My experience 
 of contemporary examples is not large. I con- 
 fess that one or two I have seen appeared to 
 me to fall below any conceivable level of 
 civilised entertainment. But in three consecu- 
 tive years I have been at Brighton when a 
 company touring the provinces with the Gilbert 
 and Sullivan operas has been there. Now, 
 surely no one will dispute that when the 
 English art of the nineteenth century in its 
 latter half is soundly estimated, these Gilbert 
 and Sullivan operas will show very high in 
 
 6
 
 THE POOR PUBLIC 
 
 its achievements. Pass the greatest artists of 
 the period Tennyson, Meredith, Swinburne, 
 Whistler and you will not have a long roll 
 to read before you come to them. They are 
 almost perfect in their way, and their way is 
 not a common one ; the wit, musical and 
 verbal, is a true wit, delightful to the intelli- 
 gence. For myself, I admit that my interest 
 is as sentimental as critical. I was brought up 
 on them, I know them by heart, they are full 
 of associations for me. Well, they came to 
 Brighton, not an intellectual place, so to speak, 
 with no such centre of culture in it as you find 
 in Manchester or Birmingham. They were 
 extremely well done, I must add in gratitude, 
 by players who had learned to sing and relished 
 the jokes ; I forgave one or two of them 
 even I, with my memories for not being Mr. 
 Grossmith or Miss Jessie Bond. Very well, 
 they came to Brighton. Empty seats? A 
 bored audience ? A longing for this or that 
 contemporary nullity ? No ! Packed houses, 
 continuous laughter, hushed attention to the 
 songs, vociferous applause the last night of 
 the visit a regular ovation. I maintain that 
 
 7
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 even in comic musical pieces there is a public 
 for better things. 
 
 But to resume. I think managers of theatres 
 rate public intelligence too low. But I grant 
 that as a whole the theatre public is not 
 an intelligent, an artistic public. Whatever 
 our race has been, or will be, it now has 
 little sense of art. I am inclined to think 
 that its sense of beauty is keener a little 
 keener than it was, but not its intelli- 
 gence. The idea, the genuine working of 
 thought, is not what will attract it in a play. 
 A Review published a monthly list of imposing 
 signatures of people eminent solicitors and so 
 on who deplored and protested against the 
 state of the theatre in England, and wanted 
 this and that done to remedy it. I should have 
 thought that they could have afforded a theatre 
 between them if they wished for one ; if I were 
 a millionaire I should engage my favourite 
 players, regardless of expense, to play me 
 Congreve's comedies. The hope of getting 
 anything done in a public way merely to make 
 the theatre more intelligent and thoughtful 
 I believe to be vain. Intelligence laudatur et 
 
 8
 
 THE POOR PUBLIC 
 
 alget in England to-day. Then what did I mean 
 by suggesting that even in the playhouse the 
 public might not be quite such a criminal as the 
 poor thing is accused of being? Why, this. 
 I believe that a great play, a play great in 
 terms of its own art, will find a public here 
 or anywhere. Not merely a clever play, an 
 ideaed play, or a play with beautiful thoughts 
 and moments in it. That may miss its chance, 
 or sometimes lack a chance altogether. But 
 a play which is a great play, with passionate 
 drama and dramatic passion in it that will not 
 lack a chance. 
 
 So it appears that this poor public you are 
 reviling does not prevent the greatest art, but 
 merely discourages the second order. It is 
 a pity. But if art does not exist for the public, 
 neither does the public exist for art. There 
 are other virtues than a sense of beauty and 
 a joy in intelligence. You have scolded it 
 enough. Here poor public here is a biscuit.
 
 II 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 IT is certain that all educated and thought- 
 ful people are confronted at times with 
 modes of thought, with points of view, 
 with systems of argument, or with habits 
 of expression, which, for one reason or another, 
 they call provincial ; it is equally certain that, 
 if asked for some definition of the term which 
 should include all admitted instances of its 
 application and yet possess some historical 
 and logical propriety, they would be severely 
 posed for an answer. I, no more than they, 
 am prepared with any brief and precise for- 
 mula which shall meet the occasion ; but, since 
 it would be futile ,to pursue the subject at all 
 without some sort of agreement as to its scope, 
 I must endeavour at least to supply the reader 
 with some approximate equivalent of that de- 
 siderated and unattainable certainty. But I 
 
 10
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 must premise that this attempt will make for con- 
 venience of argument rather than for precision 
 of thought ; that my examples may not always 
 correspond with fine-drawn exactness to my 
 general remarks ; that suggestion more than 
 information will be the upshot ; in fine, that 
 while it is hoped there may be something of 
 philosophic merit in the following pages, scien- 
 tific accuracy is not to be expected. 
 
 Living in an age and country of compro- 
 mises, we find here also a practical utility in 
 the mean. The original sense of " provincial " 
 is no longer useful in discussing questions of 
 intellect or taste, except as applied to the 
 material on which intellect and taste are exer- 
 cised. The telegraph, the newspaper, and the 
 railway have brought the metropolis and the 
 provinces so near together that very little can 
 be argued as to a man's taste and mode of 
 thought from his place of abode. To live away 
 from the metropolis is no longer necessarily to 
 be remote from its culture, from the centre of 
 things. In that sense the provincial need not 
 be, and in the case of active and educated 
 minds very seldom is, paganus. We shall find 
 
 ii
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 in this section of our meditations that there 
 is more to be said for his advantages than his 
 disadvantages. This section, however, is not 
 an extensive one. When we come to the 
 secondary and enlarged meanings of the word, 
 we discover that it has been taken to include 
 almost every limitation and fault of taste and 
 intelligence. Matthew Arnold, for example, 
 finds a note of provinciality in Addison on 
 account of the commonplaceness of his ideas. 
 At this point, surely, comprehensiveness merges 
 into nothingness. If commonplaceness of ideas 
 be in itself provincial, then is Horace, for 
 example, provincial, which is absurd. Even 
 to take Matthew Arnold's own definition of 
 provinciality, that it is ignorance of the best, 
 no acquaintance with the best will preserve 
 a certain order of intellect from dealing in 
 commonplaces ; and, since certain intellects, 
 dealing with commonplace ideas, have pro- 
 duced certain of the world's most cherished 
 masterpieces of expression, perhaps we need 
 not deplore the fact. But of Matthew Arnold 
 there will be something to say in our connection 
 later. Again, provincial is often taken to mean 
 
 12
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 the antithesis to catholic or universal. That 
 also is not convenient. The true antithesis 
 at least in matters of art to the universal is 
 the personal ; and although the personal, that 
 is to say, the introspective or self-regarding, 
 writer may be encouraged in his tendency by 
 a provincial state in the literal sense, he is 
 sometimes, as in Byron's case, a man eminently 
 versed in general life and society and well 
 acquainted with the best. 
 
 So that we find that, while we must extend 
 the denotation of the word from its original 
 sense, we must extend with caution, and it 
 seems well to extend it along its natural lines ; 
 that is to say, not to lose sight of an implica- 
 tion of position, not to confuse it altogether 
 with a vague antithesis to cultivated or well- 
 informed. The flexibility, the lack of definite- 
 ness in our language supplies most of us, who 
 are loose thinkers, with synonyms enough and 
 to spare ; it will be no ill thing to invest this 
 word, so far as we are able, with a particular 
 and distinctive meaning. We shall look, then, 
 for provinciality in writers or in persons other- 
 wise articulate as an outcome of associations 
 
 13
 
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 with places, sets of people, or circumstances ; 
 and we shall not have to do with limitations of 
 intellect or taste except in so far as they come 
 from such associations. When we praise the 
 results, we shall mean that the associations are 
 properly and happily operative. But since it 
 is best to keep, so far as possible, to the 
 ordinary uses of language, and since pro- 
 vinciality is almost always used in an ill sense, 
 we shall attend chiefly to the results which mar 
 an otherwise good thing, to the results which 
 come from associations irrelevantly and mis- 
 chievously operative. We shall observe such 
 results of too intense or too limited associations 
 in very diverse spheres ; we shall observe a 
 provinciality of class, of coterie, of education, 
 as well as the lack of it ; a provinciality of 
 patriotism and anti-patriotism, of platitude and 
 paradox. The scope will be wide enough ; 
 but, since the whole subject might fill many 
 volumes, it is well to confine ourselves in the 
 main to the most practical field, that is, to 
 English life and letters as they are now or have 
 been in the last few generations. 
 
 In the days before the common use of printed 
 
 14
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 books, when living remote from local centres 
 meant living remote from possibilities of culture, 
 from learned teachers and famous lecturers, 
 the disadvantages were no doubt unmitigated. 
 But those days were in the Middle Ages ; and 
 then, happily, local centres were not infrequent 
 and philosophers and other lecturers were peri- 
 patetic. When we come to the period when 
 books were to be had with tolerable ease, but 
 communications were difficult and men had to 
 abide with the friends and acquaintances their 
 local business gave them, to live a provincial 
 life was to the man of exceptional talent and 
 mental energy at once a torture and a stimulus. 
 A torture, because he found little oral and per- 
 sonal sympathy ; a stimulus, because, being 
 thrown in upon himself, and being sharply and 
 constantly reminded of the folly and the pre- 
 judices of those in the far rear of his advance- 
 ment, he was set the more sternly to assert 
 good reason and enlightenment against them. 
 Often such a stray unhappy genius may have 
 wasted in futile repinings and bitterness the 
 powers which, in sympathetic surroundings, 
 might have worked to a brilliant end. But 
 
 15
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 often, also, one who in happier circumstances 
 had melted away in urbane discourses and 
 pleasant jeux d 1 esprit, has been wrought upon 
 by intellectual and emotional discomfort, the 
 direct result of a provincial life, to strike hard 
 and successfully against these things, and has 
 so got fame for himself and left us some fine 
 possession. Which, in the latter case, had 
 been his happier lot is a question we need not 
 go about to decide ; we at least are gainers. A 
 man in such a case finds himself and finds his 
 age as he sees it. Imagine Burns a wealthy 
 cosmopolitan peer : what should we have had 
 of him ? A few careless love-songs and drink- 
 ing songs, it is likely ; it is possible some 
 ordered philosophical work from that wide and 
 inquiring mind ; but not the immortal pathos 
 he has left us, and not that masterpiece of 
 satirical invective, " Holy Willie's Prayer." 
 
 As for living in the provinces nowadays, I 
 think a cultivated and thoughtful man is to be 
 congratulated on the fact. Only very excep- 
 tional circumstances can prevent his visiting 
 and being visited by his intellectual peers ; and 
 the thought of his age is easily accessible in 
 
 16
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 print. He is no more apart from the move- 
 ment or the crisis of his day than the man in 
 the city, and he has readier to his sympathies 
 the homely humanising" interests and anxieties 
 of common life outside his own house. To the 
 general intellectual interests, political interests, 
 and so forth, of the town man, who has no 
 neighbours and meets his acquaintances in a 
 hurry, the provincial man may add all sorts of 
 kindly gossip from village and country-side. 
 He may be exposed to the temptations of con- 
 ceit which come from a narrow and too admir- 
 ing circle, but he need not be so exposed, and 
 if he be a humane man he will not be ; for it is 
 likely his country neighbours will think poorly 
 enough of his intellectual achievements. The 
 London man for I am speaking of England 
 is just as much exposed to mischievous 
 admirers if he has a taste for them, and if he 
 be a man of exceptional prominence ; while he 
 may still have something of the conceit of place 
 which lingers yet as to some extent the pro- 
 vinciality of the Londoner the delusion that 
 comparative proximity to greater or more im- 
 portant men still confers an advantage. But 
 c 17
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 how little provinciality in the original sense 
 tells either way may be guessed from the 
 vagueness of these speculations. 
 
 A word should be added in this place of the 
 confusion which is sometimes made between 
 the provincial nature of a writer's subject- 
 matter and provincial qualities of mind. When 
 such subject-matter is the result of prolonged 
 residence in the place where it is found, the 
 writer may have been exposed to the advan- 
 tages and disadvantages already adumbrated. 
 So that while, in instances too numerous to 
 need example, the writer poet or novelist 
 who writes of provincial things has shown ex- 
 ceptional concentration and devoted insight, in 
 others he has shown a narrowness of view and 
 pettiness of feeling. In contemporary writers 
 we should attribute such faults to other associa- 
 tions than those of place ; but plenty of 
 examples may be found in the " Kailyard 
 school," and in certain lovers of the slums. 
 There is, however, no inevitable reason why 
 the writer on provincial themes should be in any 
 way provincial. What subjects more provincial 
 than Miss Austen's? What writer more free 
 
 18
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 from the faults commonly called provincial? 
 Or, to take a better instance, Cranford is 
 occupied for the most part with the utmost 
 pettinesses of provincial life ; but there is an 
 all-embracing humanity in Mrs. Gaskell, which 
 being properly restrained in expression is the 
 very reverse of provinciality. Such writers 
 may suffer in popularity : the excellent idiom 
 of Dorsetshire may have lost the poet Barnes 
 some lazy readers ; but that is not to the pur- 
 pose. 
 
 I pass to the next division, which in modern 
 England is the most important of all the pro- 
 vinciality of class. It embraces more than 
 snobbery. In England, where there is no 
 caste in the proper sense of the word caste 
 renders snobbery impossible where changes 
 of class are constant, and where small distinc- 
 tions of class are still fervently, though no 
 longer rigidly, preserved, snobbery is both 
 rampant and subtly pervasive. The highest 
 technically and the lowest classes are com- 
 paratively free from it, but elsewhere it dims 
 our social life with all kinds of irrational dis- 
 tinctions and reservations. Consequently he 
 
 19
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 who looks suspiciously for it will seldom fail to 
 find it. But provinciality of class is wider than 
 snobbery, which it includes, because it is pro- 
 duced by any limitation, coming from class 
 associations, of understanding and knowledge, 
 and does not imply necessarily any personal 
 animus or mean admirations and dislikes. 
 
 This provinciality of class has indeed an im- 
 portance in our national life which transcends 
 any question of taste or literary achievement. 
 It is a price we pay in our government for the 
 advantage of being governed by men who are 
 above the temptations of material corruption, 
 and whose word can generally be trusted as a 
 matter of course. As a rule the price is not 
 heavy ; but there are occasions, easily to be 
 imagined, when a want of first-hand know- 
 ledge of popular emotions and points of view 
 may handicap national policy. The authentic 
 statesman, of whatever class, is not subject to 
 this provinciality ; but authentic statesmen are 
 rare. 
 
 This sort of provinciality shows itself occa- 
 sionally in the political deliveries of public 
 writers, and, where it has the least excuse, in 
 
 20
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 criticisms of literary work. In the latter case 
 it is often connected with an academic pro- 
 vinciality, of which I shall speak later, but may 
 be considered, for the credit of academic pro- 
 vinciality, as essentially distinct. The ideal 
 of the "English gentleman," derived perhaps 
 from the ideal of the perfect knight professed 
 by post-mediaeval chivalry, is worthy and 
 wholesome. It is true that we are finding 
 cause to regret that the ideal, as understood 
 by our schoolmasters, should exclude know- 
 ledge and intellectual ability ; and it is certainly 
 a pity that it too often leads our critics, even 
 some of the most eminent of them, to dis- 
 parage unduly any literary work which, in 
 their opinion, conflicts with it. If the work 
 does truly so conflict, the fact may be rightly 
 mentioned, but it should not overshadow merit 
 in all other directions. For instance, some 
 of the criticism lavished on Mr. Rudyard 
 Kipling's book, Stalky and Co., illustrated the 
 provinciality of class working narrowly but 
 naturally enough. An instance of this pro- 
 vinciality in a more degraded form may be 
 taken from a weekly paper, which remarked 
 
 21
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 some time ago that the Americans were grow- 
 ing tired of being " governed by a gentle- 
 man." Such an appalling piece of imperti- 
 nence is not of course typical, but it is worth 
 mentioning as an instance of the dangers 
 which this class preoccupation has for ill- 
 regulated minds and manners. 
 
 But it is more profitable to observe a weak- 
 ness in a great than in a little intelligence. 
 There is no such interesting and remarkable 
 instance of the provinciality of class among 
 English writers as Thackeray, because no 
 other writer approaching his genius of observa- 
 tion and presentment has had it in anything 
 like the same degree. When Thackeray writes 
 of contemporary life in three parts of his 
 work, that is he writes as an Englishman of 
 the upper middle class. Whatever else is 
 there, the shrewd and comprehensive observa- 
 tion, the gay or melancholy or subtle humour, 
 the perfect ear for dialogue, the perfect artistry 
 in narrative English, always the upper middle 
 class is there also. If he had occasion to 
 write of the titular aristocracy, its titles seem 
 to have haunted him, and he must needs 
 
 22
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 approach it, either with an air of ironical 
 servility or with an air of apologetic patronage. 
 So obsessed was he by this distinction of class 
 that, artist and observer as he was, he could 
 never fully use the advantage of our aristocracy 
 for a novelist, which consists in its comparative 
 freedom from preoccupation with matters ir- 
 relevant to the simple passions. Again, if he 
 wrote of the classes technically beneath his 
 own, he could never approach them fairly 
 and squarely as composed of human beings. 
 Servants, tradespeople, and the like, he seems 
 to have thought of as themselves rather ridicu- 
 lous, if not despicable. Their love-affairs and 
 ambitions were with him themes for good- 
 natured banter, and that only. The artist in 
 him triumphed over all this of course. If his 
 provinciality of class was great, his natural 
 powers were greater. But undeniably the 
 fault is there, and is a reason why his 
 Esmond even his Virginians with far less 
 of life and knowledge in them than there is 
 in Pendennis and The Newcomes are read 
 by some of us wi*h the more continuous 
 pleasure, because he has gone back to a time 
 
 23
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 when this provinciality had no occasion to 
 appear. 
 
 It is difficult to mention Thackeray and not 
 to say something about Dickens ; and it hap- 
 pens that he comes into the argument, in so 
 far as he shows a bias against the ' ( upper 
 classes." He is a little inclined reversing the 
 dictum of Tennyson's farmer to say that the 
 rich " in a loomp is bad, " and that irrationally, 
 with no consistent economic creed to back him 
 up ; in short, he reflected the Radicalism of his 
 day. But happily the largest part, and all the 
 best, of his work concerned the poor, or at 
 least those who were not rich, so that his pro- 
 vinciality is in the result only sporadic. His 
 case serves, however, to remind us that pro- 
 vinciality of class is by no means confined, 
 among English writers, to one class. Mr. 
 Barrie, in that charming idyll of his, The Little 
 Minister, is free enough from provincial pro- 
 vinciality, so to speak, as he is in his Thrums 
 book, and as some of his imitators are not ; 
 but in the rather absurd passages where he 
 brings in members of the " upper " class, he 
 treats himself to a mode of class provinciality. 
 
 24
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 So in his play, The Admirable Crichton, 
 otherwise so refreshing because it contains an 
 idea, he has a rather malignant fourth act 
 which lacks the fairness of the true comic 
 spirit. In criticism this aspect of class pro- 
 vinciality shows itself among certain writers 
 who seem to hold a brief for the lower classes, 
 rather artificially, because they do not them- 
 selves belong to them or profess any particular 
 knowledge of them. But so it is ; provided a 
 book concerns itself with a remote village or 
 a London slum, and abounds in dialect which, 
 whether like its professed models or not, is at 
 least unfamiliar to the critics, some of them 
 will always acclaim the profound observation 
 and humanity of the author. But in coming 
 to this odd fashion we touch the bottom of the 
 subject. 
 
 The division which seems to me nearest to 
 class provinciality, and which, though far from 
 rivalling it in extent, is for questions of taste 
 almost as important, is academic provinciality. 
 By this I mean a perversion or limitation of 
 view which results from the associations of 
 university culture and scholarship, associations 
 
 25
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 either direct and professional, or immediately 
 derived from those in direct and professional 
 touch with universities. The word academic 
 is therefore literally correct, but it has a side 
 advantage in suggesting Matthew Arnold's 
 well-known opinion of academies. It sug- 
 gests, in fact, his essay on "The Literary 
 Influence of Academies." Now, that essay is 
 an important locus classicus on the subject of 
 my essay ; and the reader may have wondered 
 that, having mentioned Matthew Arnold at an 
 earlier stage, I did not proceed to discuss it. 
 But since I did not adopt his definition of 
 provinciality there was no necessity ; and con- 
 venience suggested that I should leave the 
 essay to this place, because I saw in it the 
 note of academic provinciality. It is with no 
 audacious wish to turn the tables on that great 
 writer that I make this assertion, but because, 
 as in Thackeray's case, the fault is made the 
 clearer by being set in a heap of merits. 
 And it certainly is not with Matthew Arnold 
 as with fair Amoret, that " he is the thing 
 that he despises.' He was free from the 
 national fault which he rebuked, but in the 
 
 26
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 very fulness of his culture, the very fervency 
 of his zeal, he was betrayed into a fault of 
 another kind. 
 
 He himself would hardly have allowed the 
 propriety of the term " academic provinciality, " 
 because with him provinciality meant the 
 absence of academies. He believed that for 
 this reason it afflicted the whole of our litera- 
 ture, and that even our greatest men of genius 
 would have been somewhat greater for the 
 restraining influence of an academy. If it 
 could be shown that an academy would have 
 corrected our prevailing demerits of formless- 
 ness and eccentricity, or that an academy 
 ensured knowledge, the theory would be very 
 largely true. Even so, I should have preferred, 
 as a question of words, not to adopt Matthew 
 Arnold's use of the word provinciality, taking 
 ignorance to be barbarous rather than pro- 
 vincial. An unkind critic might say that much 
 of our literature, that a little even of its best, 
 is barbarous for want of knowledge. So much 
 is true ; whether a literary academy would 
 have removed the reproach is doubtful. 
 
 Academic provinciality is of two kinds. One 
 
 27
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 kind is an excessive regard for mere informa- 
 tion, mere reading, and in consequence a con- 
 tempt for ignorance which extends to the 
 belittling of fine qualities sometimes joined to 
 ignorance. Your academic is apt to forget 
 that information without understanding is at 
 least as poor a thing as understanding 
 without information. The other kind is 
 an excessive devotion to system, to complete- 
 ness of presentment, to apparent logic. 
 The academic provincial is always /care'xwv 
 Oeo-tv. It is to be said of both these faults 
 that, in the balance of English taste and 
 intelligence, they are faults on the right side. 
 Beyond all question ignorance is the chief vice 
 of our popular contemporary writings and the 
 parent of their innumerable vulgarities. So 
 little is knowledge in evidence or in demand that 
 even among our professed critics in our pro- 
 fessed "literary" papers, a tendency to regard 
 literature as bounded by the last catch-shilling 
 novel is emphatic. It is this prevailing ignor- 
 ance, unconscious and shameless, among us 
 which, in matters intellectual and artistic, is 
 ever widening the gulf between the few and the 
 
 28
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 many to the loss of both sides. Moreover, 
 we are beginning to find out that contempt of 
 knowledge is not an advantage even in our 
 practical life. The glory of the showy and 
 incompetent amateur is somewhat dimmed 
 among us ; the outer darkness of the expert is 
 receiving rays of popular recognition. In this 
 regard, then, the spirit of the academic pro- 
 vincial may be by accident a blessing. Nor 
 need his excessive regard for logic and system 
 disturb us. There also the general run of us 
 are very much to seek. We have come to 
 regard the practical common-sense on which 
 we pride ourselves as something so superior 
 to logic and systems, even so much opposed to 
 them, that we are in danger, it seems, of for- 
 getting the relations of cause and effect in very 
 important concerns. And in such matters as 
 criticism of literature, of painting, and the 
 drama, and so forth, we are, to use an intelli- 
 gent colloquialism, "all over the place." 
 
 By accident, then, the academic provincial is 
 in general to be welcomed. But what there 
 was of provinciality in Matthew Arnold was 
 not to be welcomed, because he stood before 
 
 29
 
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 England as the type of ideal culture and 
 pointed the way of intellectual salvation ; 
 because he was one of the very few great 
 critics we have ever had who could gain an 
 extensive hearing ; so that whatever tended to 
 mar the perfect reasonableness, the sweetness 
 and light, of his utterance, tended to spoil the 
 effect of his mission. Did it fail ? This is not 
 the place to answer the question ; but we 
 remember that it was "the depression of pure 
 intelligence " among his countrymen (the 
 phrase is in his essay on Heine) which was 
 most present to his militant consciousness, and 
 we see that pure intelligence has even less to 
 say in our national life to-day than it had in the 
 sixties and seventies. However this may be, 
 it can hardly be denied that Matthew Arnold 
 betrayed a note or so of academic provinciality 
 as we have diagnosed it. Take, for example, 
 the opinion of Byron, whose genius, as genius, 
 he appreciated to the full. He found him "so 
 empty of matter, " and traced that emptiness to 
 want of knowledge and implicitly to want of 
 reading. Mr. Rowland Prothero has shown us 
 that Byron's reading would hardly have shamed 
 
 3
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 a professional student ; but surely to say of 
 Byron, introspective and personal though his 
 genius was, that the author of the Vision of 
 Judgment or of Don Juan was empty of matter, 
 is to carry regard for mere knowledge some- 
 what far. Again, Matthew Arnold is concerned 
 to show that intelligence is more likely than 
 genius to be followed worthily by disciples and 
 imitators. We do not dispute it ; great genius 
 is a thing apart. But Matthew Arnold, Karex^v 
 Oca-iv, asks what was the sequel to the * ' literature 
 of genius, as we may call it, stretching from 
 Marlowe to Milton," and answers that it was 
 " our provincial and second-rate literature of the 
 eighteenth century." " Now, really," as he 
 himself says of a passage in Ruskin, " what a 
 piece of extravagance all that is ! " Fielding, 
 Pope, Gibbon, and Sterne second-rate and 
 provincial ! That they were inferior to Shake- 
 speare may be allowed. The phrase means 
 nothing if it does not mean that they were 
 second-rate in the contemptuous sense. Mat- 
 thew Arnold could not have meant that soberly 
 and deliberately ; but he was concerned to 
 make his theory complete, and sacrificed ex- 
 
 31
 
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 / 
 
 actness to a touch of academic provinci- 
 ality. 
 
 His instance is the most perfect, because so 
 finely relieved. We might pursue the charac- 
 teristic into many deliveries of many lesser 
 men. We might detect it in an appearance 
 here and there of self-conscious superiority or 
 impertinent knowingness, amusing but not 
 urbane, and might go on to speculate as to the 
 effect of comparative isolation and immunity of 
 life in preserving the attributes of clever adole- 
 scence to old age. But we should not do 
 wisely, partly because we have other themes to 
 our hand, and partly because all this is the 
 defect of a quality which at present is very rare 
 and valuable. Academic provinciality is a far 
 better thing than its opposite, the pretentious 
 ignorance which is proof against rebuke. 
 
 On the provinciality of the coterie, the 
 militant essayist might say provoking things. 
 Even the essayist who would fain be agreeable 
 to his fellow-men is likely, on this subject, to 
 annoy some few of them. The most prominent 
 of all coteries have been those formed by men 
 of letters, or by those interested, or appearing 
 
 32
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 to be interested, in things literary. The 
 quarrels of authors have commonly been 
 quarrels of coteries, formed of people person- 
 ally acquainted, or at least in some personal 
 sympathy. We must not go too far back, but 
 we will permit ourselves to go back to Doctor 
 Johnson. Doctor Johnson found room in his 
 extensive brain for prejudices of all kinds, and 
 his overwhelming personality impressed these 
 prejudices on his coterie. They were not 
 seldom prejudices of a merely personal origin, 
 irrelevant to the literary judgments in which 
 they found expression, and therefore the coterie 
 which promulgated the judgments was in so far 
 provincial. It was the more conspicuously 
 provincial in some few of these matters, because 
 Doctor Johnson's great influence made almost 
 invariably for the correction of provinciality 
 for masculine judgment and good sense and 
 sound morality. It was the coterie more 
 particularly devoted to his friend Samuel 
 Richardson which showed how provincial a 
 coterie may become, wholly absorbed in the 
 master's one theme, hymning his praises till the 
 high notes ended in a shriek, hysterical with 
 D 33
 
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 alarm and rage when his greater rival and 
 crushing satirist came into view. It may be 
 said that the contemporary disparagement of 
 Fielding and of Sterne was the provinciality of 
 coteries, among them Horace Walpole's not, 
 of course, his large and cosmopolitan social 
 set, but the section of it which exchanged 
 opinions about literature. He is by no means 
 to be included in an earlier division of our 
 subject ; writers in our times who have found a 
 snobbery of exclusiveness in him have forgotten 
 the altogether different constitution of society 
 in his day, or have been impervious to the 
 whimsical irony which lightens all that he says 
 on matters of social interest. Horace Walpole 
 had no provinciality of class in our meaning of 
 the phrase, but he was a man of fastidious 
 taste in manners and in the minor ethics, and 
 associated by choice with those who satisfied 
 the taste and did not provoke the fastidious- 
 ness. What he heard of Johnson's social 
 customs, and still more what he heard of 
 Fielding's, repelled him ; and not having our 
 advantage of perspective, he underrated their 
 work. So did those of his friends who cared 
 
 34
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 for letters. It was the provinciality of a coterie 
 which was as little provincial as any recorded 
 or existing. 
 
 The war of poets in the first quarter of the 
 nineteenth century was essentially a war of 
 coteries. Byron, Shelley, and Thomas Moore 
 on one side, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey 
 on the other, in spite of all the cross-divisions 
 which individual genius and real intellectual 
 interest would have made, were led by personal 
 motives to form hotly contesting factions. 
 Moore, of course, was no friend of Shelley, but 
 we may assume that it was Byron's personal 
 influence which prevented his being an enemy. 
 On both sides continued, systematic, deliberate 
 depreciation of work because of personal dislike 
 the provinciality of coterie at its deadliest. 
 We might say that Shelley was merely a sufferer 
 if we did not remember that most brilliant of 
 wicked parodies, Peter Bell the Third. But 
 Shelley was the victim of a provinciality of 
 coterie from which Byron was free. Like some 
 other great lyric poets, he was neither a pro- 
 found nor an original philosopher ; but the 
 Godwin coterie impelled him to excursions in 
 
 35
 
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 social philosophy which may be called pro- 
 vincial without erring on the side of harshness. 
 A curious cross - division of conviction and 
 achievement is that Byron should have stood 
 forth as the champion of the classic tradition. 
 But whatever works or opinions were to be 
 criticised, ever since Southey wrote his personal 
 libels on Shelley and Byron in 1816, we find 
 this bitter personal hostility directing judgments 
 and inflaming language. That is the provinci- 
 ality of coterie. 
 
 The same period, or one immediately ante- 
 cedent, saw the opening roars of critical 
 Edinburgh answered anon from Albemarle 
 Street. It is the fashion to decry those hardy 
 scrimmagers whose battle-pieces occupy so 
 much of the old Reviews ; and of course their 
 proper inclusion in a discussion about the pro- 
 vinciality of coteries can hardly be disputed. 
 Political publications in intention though the 
 Reviews were, we think it unfair to attribute 
 the fierceness of writers indubitably interested 
 in literature for its own sake to political predis- 
 position, and not rather to the more human 
 influence of personal association and sympathy. 
 
 36
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 But if they were guilty of ferocity in their 
 language and of narrowness in their judgments, 
 and were very far from fulfilling Matthew 
 Arnold's requirements of the true critic, they 
 certainly had a double dose of that "vivacity" 
 on which he once congratulated himself. When 
 you can permit yourself to write of an author 
 that he has " exhausted every species of sensual 
 gratification," and " drained the cup of sin 
 even to its bitterest dregs," you are not a very 
 calm or collected critic, but you are in your way 
 an amusing writer. Disproportionate savagery 
 in these matters may be regretted, but let us 
 not be too deeply shocked ; these good folks 
 doubtless said more than they meant, and 
 these little excitements must have cheered 
 many a dull moment. They have passed out 
 of our manners ; and sometimes, in the level 
 dullness of our prints, one almost wishes them 
 back. 
 
 As the mind, pondering on coteries, follows 
 the years after Byron's death, it lingers in- 
 evitably in Holland House. It may be said 
 that the sterling qualities of host and hostess, 
 and the personal affection they inspired, were 
 
 37
 
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 strong ties in that brilliant circle. Neverthe- 
 less, that coterie was far more political than 
 personal, and stood so largely for the whole 
 Whig party that mention of it in this place 
 may be thought irrelevant. Hardly so ; for 
 politics, especially among the Whigs, were 
 then an affair of coteries rather than of 
 parties ; and it is to be observed that that 
 part of political provinciality which is the 
 irrelevant depreciation or exaltation of non- 
 political work on political grounds disappeared 
 along with the coterie. We all remember 
 Macaulay's attack on Croker's edition of Bos- 
 well and on Johnson himself. Mr. Meredith 
 has recently attacked the present government : 
 would any of its supporters on that account 
 depreciate Mr. Meredith's works? But the 
 coterie of Holland House was too notable and 
 valuable a centre of wit and intellect for its 
 occasional provinciality to count for much 
 against it. 
 
 The decay of the fierce fighting spirit which 
 animated criticism in Byron's day has left even 
 literary coteries of more recent years tolerably 
 free from the provinciality of excessive de- 
 
 38
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 preciation. The Mills and Carlyles may have 
 been inclined to exalt themselves and their 
 friends, but not to attack their opponents over- 
 fiercely or unfairly on any literary issue. 
 From time to time, however, intellectual and 
 artistic fashions appear which their advocates 
 will push with a provincial zeal. Such a pro- 
 vinciality, for example, did much to prevent 
 the appreciation of Ibsen's plays in this 
 country. A coterie of his admirers, exulting 
 in a rather cheaply acquired philosophy, found 
 a new heaven and earth in these plays, and 
 proclaimed aloud their rather absurd discovery. 
 So the British public, which, left alone, might 
 have perceived in some measure Ibsen's mas- 
 tery of dramatic effects, hearing this cry of 
 "new ideas," was frightened away. Since it 
 is my habit, however, to look for good in all 
 things, it may be added that, although the less 
 discreet of these admirers and of their oppo- 
 nents divided a rather plentiful stock of ignor- 
 ance between them, it is something in our 
 country nowadays that ideas of any kind, even 
 "new ideas," should attract any public atten- 
 tion. A like merit may be claimed for another 
 
 39
 
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 coterie, or set of coteries, which it occurs to 
 me to mention. Starting from the late Mr. 
 Oscar Wilde, a habit of paradox and attempted 
 epigram spread over a large portion of the 
 more or less educated inhabitants of London 
 in the nineties. It resulted, of course, in a 
 great deal of silliness and of irritation to the 
 judicious. Mr. Wilde himself, a man of fine 
 intellect and of marvellously ready and light- 
 playing wit, carried this fashion with distinc- 
 tion. With his imitators it was apt to become 
 a nuisance. Ineffectual wit is destructive of 
 agreeable intercourse. An affected horror of 
 the commonplace is an insult to humanity : 
 love and life and death are commonplace. 
 Wit, even true wit, is inappropriate on certain 
 themes: "nam risu inepto res ineptior nulla 
 est." Some taste as well as intelligence is 
 needed by your social wit ; and these witlings 
 sometimes lacked it. But, for all that, to 
 pride oneself as a wit, to have the ambition of 
 being thought one, is better in itself than the 
 common contentment with stupidity. These 
 little coteries were provincial in their incessant 
 striving for effect and in their choice of inappro- 
 
 40
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 priate subjects for their jests, no doubt. But 
 they had their good ingredient. 
 
 Of strictly literary coteries we have very little 
 sign among us. A generation in which ideas 
 at least for the moment are languid and 
 barren, and which therefore can produce but 
 very few creative artists of the first or even the 
 second rank, but which abounds in fairly com- 
 petent mediocrities, and is, moreover, blessed 
 with a myriad occasions for their appreciation 
 "literary columns" and what not such a 
 generation is likely to produce its little rings 
 of criticism, its little business-like societies of 
 mutual aid ; but they are very innocuous. 
 The more considerable men are apart from 
 them ; the bubbles of reputation they send up 
 are often quite pretty to see, and they are 
 generally free from malevolence. Provincial 
 they are, of necessity, but in a sphere where 
 little if any harm can be done and much inno- 
 cent satisfaction afforded. 
 
 I thought it a mistake to confuse the pro- 
 vincial with the personal or individual, and I 
 think it equally a mistake to confuse it with 
 the national. If we can predicate a quality 
 
 41
 
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 of a whole nation, it seems to me a misuse 
 of terms to call that quality provincial. It 
 has been said of the English that they are 
 as a nation, or as a race, intellectually coarse, 
 impatient of ideas, prone boorishly to resent or 
 to gibe at the unfamiliar, as certain English 
 visitors are reported to have gibed at the dress 
 of the Indian princes at the Delhi Durbar. 
 Such a reproach, fixed upon a man or a group 
 of men, might be the result of narrow associa- 
 tions and would then be provincial ; but, if it 
 be true of a whole race, the word is inapplicable 
 in that connection. A mere question of words, 
 perhaps ; but it is best to keep to the line of 
 thought on which one started. It seems to 
 me, however, not inconsistent and if it be, I 
 must be content to risk it to say of a national 
 literature, if it be too narrowly national, that 
 it is so far provincial ; because a literature is 
 the work of a certain limited number of 
 writers, and these writers may fairly be called 
 provincial if the result of their national associa- 
 tions be pushed to narrow or irrelevant ex- 
 tremes. 
 
 It may be said that the culture of Europe 
 42
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 generally is at this time less homogeneous, less 
 inclined to mutual inspiration, than it was a 
 century and a half ago, or even later. That 
 may be so. Unfortunately, it is to be said 
 with greater confidence that our own literature 
 at this present day neither gives nor takes as 
 once it gave and took. Through the greater 
 part of the eighteenth century London and 
 Paris exchanged ideas intimately and with 
 freedom. The fact is a commonplace of literary 
 history. Sterne and Richardson on the one 
 shore, Rousseau and Diderot on the other, are 
 the simplest cases of this cosmopolitan interest, 
 and it is to be observed that in these the 
 Englishmen were the inspirers. Cultivated 
 men of fashion to be cultivated was then 
 a distinction, not an opprobrium, in English 
 general society, and how distant it seems ! 
 Chesterfield, Horace Walpole, George Selwyn, 
 frequented Parisian philosophers and littera- 
 teurs; Montesquieu spent two years in England; 
 Voltaire visited Congreve. Which of our con- 
 temporary dramatists would be so honoured ? 
 We bowdlerise a few French plays, and these 
 not the best ; we translate some of the more 
 
 43
 
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 popular French novels ; we translate Tolstoy, 
 Annunzio, a stray German or so. But what 
 are we giving back? Where are we leading, 
 influencing European thought ? To what extent 
 it is asked merely for information are we 
 even listened to ? So far as our contemporary 
 literature is concerned, we seem to be moving 
 outside the thought of Europe, outside its 
 social interests, theories, problems, emotions, 
 ideas. 
 
 This is not to condemn ourselves off-hand 
 a vice which alternates with our self-com- 
 placency. Much of our literature concerns 
 social conditions, humours, or eccentricities 
 which are distinctively and essentially English 
 and incommunicable to the foreigner. We may 
 say cheerfully that it is his loss. But it is hardly 
 a matter for congratulation that our contem- 
 porary literature should reflect so little of the 
 general human movement in addition to what 
 it may produce justly for ourselves alone so 
 little of the ideas and fancies which the 
 thoughtful and cultivated among us share 
 more or less with those of other lands. It is 
 a matter for reflection that, so far, our literature 
 
 44
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 should now be provincial, which in the eigh- 
 teenth century, pace Matthew Arnold, it most 
 assuredly was not. 
 
 One reason, among others, for the fact may 
 be found in a quality which is become national, 
 but was in its origin essentially provincial. 
 The first Puritans were zealous rather for 
 doctrine than for ethics ; but what is rightly 
 called the Puritan spirit, in affairs where 
 questions of morality can be discussed, dates 
 from them, from a set of people alien to the 
 general English of their time, and has gradu- 
 ally imposed itself as strength of conviction 
 and keenness of interest, met by indifference 
 only, will ultimately do on us all as a nation. 
 We may call this spirit historically provincial, 
 at least. In practical morality it may be good 
 or otherwise. But in matters intellectual and 
 artistic its effect is an obsession of formal and 
 specialised morality, and of hair-splitting issues 
 concerning this specialised morality. It is not, 
 as it is commonly stated, that we refuse to dis- 
 cuss certain things ; it is that we refuse to discuss 
 anything else. It is something far more formid- 
 able than mere prudery, far more insidious, far 
 
 45
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 less easily thrown off. We must bring every- 
 thing down to its level. All of the human heart 
 and the human mind which does not concern 
 these questions of narrowly moral right and 
 wrong in one field only of morality is for us sec- 
 ondary, slightingly entertained, apt to be ignored 
 altogether. The prudes and their irritated oppo- 
 nents are at one in this. They approach the 
 matter with different opinions, but they are all 
 intent on it, all obsessed by it. " Art for Art's 
 sake," that old phrase, represented literally 
 an impossible idea ; morality cannot be ban- 
 ished from art. But morality is more even 
 than questions of sex, much more than the 
 transitory customs of this or that society which 
 regulate questions of sex. If our contempo- 
 rary literature is to cease to be exposed to the 
 charge of provinciality, this note of provinci- 
 ality at least it must lose. 
 
 I leave my subject incomplete, having prom- 
 ised nothing better. Even on the broad lines 
 I proposed I have left many modes of pro- 
 vinciality untouched, it is very probable ; and 
 anyone who should inquire a little more curi- 
 ously than I will find a thousand more notes of 
 
 46
 
 THE PROVINCIAL MIND 
 
 provinciality leap to his mind. If I have in 
 any way been suggestive to him I am content. 
 It is pleasant to have done with fault-finding. 
 Looking back through these pages I am almost 
 shocked to find a demerit alleged against 
 Thackeray, who has made me a whole world 
 of friends, or against Matthew Arnold, but for 
 whose teaching it is likely this article would 
 never have been written. I observe the phrase 
 4 ' academic provinciality, " and remember shame- 
 fully a university where so many dreams of 
 youth lie graciously buried. ... It is pleasant 
 to be done with fault-finding. 
 
 47
 
 Ill 
 "DON JUAN" 1 
 
 A,L who are lovers and students of Byron 
 waited in some anxiety for the volume 
 in Mr. Murray's final edition of his 
 poetry which should contain Don Juan. 
 It has not been with the poetry as with the 
 letters. In their case it was known that many 
 letters in the possession of Mr. Murray and 
 others had not been printed, and that many 
 others had been discreetly mutilated. We 
 looked, therefore, to receive a mass of new 
 material, and in the event we have been en- 
 riched by over four hundred new letters and 
 
 1 This was written when Mr. Murray published the sixth volume 
 of his new and probably final edition of Byron's poetry. In a previous 
 book of essays I have reprinted two on the new edition of Byron's 
 letters, and in this case also I think the particular occasion of im- 
 portance enough to justify me in retaining my criticism of the edition, 
 as distinct from the poems. I make this remark because I hold thar 
 to reprint one's ordinary reviews would be rather intolerable. In the 
 case of Sterne and that of Fielding I have reprinted (from matter 
 written for specific occasions) merely what concerned my apprecia- 
 tion, such as it may be, of the authors themselves. 
 
 48
 
 "DON JUAN" 
 
 many additions to the old. But in the case of 
 the poetry previous editions had included so 
 much that was slight and merely topical, 
 pieces bubbling out in his letters from sheer 
 good spirits " My dear Mr. Murray, you're 
 in a damn'd hurry," and the like that little 
 could be expected to remain behind. Don 
 Juan, however, was so intimately and minutely 
 personal that we might well hope (fortified, too, 
 by certain indignant passages in the letters) 
 that original stanzas, fearfully censored by 
 Murray and Hobhouse and Thomas Moore, 
 might now appear for our delight. Moreover, 
 Don Juan was unfinished, and Trelawny had 
 talked of stanzas for a seventeenth canto found 
 in Byron's room at Missolonghi. Well, the 
 final Don Juan has appeared, and we, the 
 lovers and students aforesaid, have to confess 
 that as regards fresh material we are on the 
 whole disappointed. 
 
 First, we have the stanzas referred to by 
 Trelawny fourteen, not fifteen, as he said. 
 (Hobhouse took possession of the MS., and it 
 now belongs to Lady Dorchester.) They are 
 not, on their merits, worth much ; they are 
 E 49
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 Byron at his laziest, when he was least " in his 
 stride," and belong to one of the occasions, 
 inevitable in a poem of the nature and length 
 of Don Juan, when he was content, as it were, 
 to mark time. I do not for a moment believe 
 that he would have published them as they 
 stand. All one can say of them is that Mr. 
 Coleridge would have had no right to keep 
 them from us, and that Byron can afford their 
 exposure. Secondly, there are some stanzas 
 on Brougham, which should have followed 
 stanza 189 in the first canto, apropos of the 
 suit between Donna Inez and her spouse 
 
 " 'Twas a fine cause for those in law delighting 
 
 Tis pity that they had no Brougham in Spain," etc., 
 
 but which were omitted for the same reason as 
 those (originally) on Castlereagh, namely, that 
 Byron was not in England to meet him ; they 
 are now printed in a note. These are good 
 Byron vehement, scornful, bitterly allusive. 
 
 "Thersites of the House, Parolles of Law, 
 The double Bobadill takes Scorn for Awe " 
 
 that, for example, is in the true Byron vein. 
 But even these stanzas have not the sense and 
 
 50
 
 "DON JUAN-" 
 
 humour of the more cherished passages and 
 they are only seven. Lastly, there is a stanza 
 in a note which was rejected from the third 
 canto ; it is unimportant. So far, then, as 
 the fresh verses go we are disappointed. Per- 
 haps it was unreasonable to hope. 
 
 There is a new and very curious interest in 
 the notes made by Hobhouse and others, and 
 by Byron in answer to them, on the MS. of the 
 first two cantos. These two cantos, it will be 
 remembered, caused great dismay in Murray's 
 parlour when first they came from Venice, and 
 a junta of the poet's friends sate solemnly upon 
 them to consider if they really could be pub- 
 lished. Byron was curiously patient, and his 
 letters of the time are full of answers to their 
 fears and objections. These fears and objec- 
 tions are reflected on the MS., and one cannot 
 wonder that the poet complained, after Tony 
 Lumpkin, that he should be " snubbed so 
 when I am in spirits." " You certainly will be 
 damned for all this scene," wrote Hobhouse 
 of the " ne'er consent, consented" passage. 
 "Carissimo, " he says of the bedroom scene, 
 "carissimo, do review the whole scene, and 
 
 51
 
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 think what you would say of it if written by 
 another." "Don't swear again the third 
 'damn." Collation with the MSS. reveals, 
 by the way, that Byron pretty constantly re- 
 membered this admonition he denied himself 
 innumerable " damns." This, however, we 
 knew before, since the varia have been given 
 in previous editions. 
 
 So much for fresh matter ; I pass to the 
 editing. In the way of explanatory notes Mr. 
 Coleridge had little to do. Byron annotated 
 himself freely, and his previous editors have 
 been assiduous. Mr. Coleridge has identified 
 the guests at Lord Henry's country place in 
 Canto XIII., some with certainty, some a little 
 dubiously. That is an interesting piece of work ; 
 but it may be noted in the connection that at 
 this time of day Mr. Coleridge need not have 
 refrained from telling the world that "Lady 
 Pinchbeck " in Canto XII. was Lady Blessing- 
 ton, or, if he doubted it, from guessing at 
 someone else. He has a long and extremely 
 interesting note on Newstead, based on a very 
 careful study of the place ; from which study 
 he concludes that Byron's description in Canto 
 
 52
 
 "DON JUAN" 
 
 XIII. " unites the charm of a picture with the 
 accuracy of a ground plan." Notes other than 
 explanatory or verifying* he has not attempted, 
 and wisely, for lovers of Byron prefer to make 
 their own opinions of the text ; an illuminative 
 flash on it from a poet of Mr. Swinburne's or 
 Mr. Henley's parts were very well, but the 
 time is gone for minute editorial appraisement. 
 In his introduction, Mr. Coleridge puts forward 
 a view of the conception oi Don Juan, which is 
 attractive. He declines to believe that Byron 
 stated the whole truth when he wrote to Murray, 
 "You ask me for the plan of Donny Johnny ; 
 I have no plan I had no plan. . . . You are 
 too earnest and eager about a work never 
 intended to be serious. Do you suppose that 
 I could have any intention but to giggle and 
 make giggle? a playful satire, with as little 
 poetry as could be helped, was what I meant." 
 "Great works," says Mr. Coleridge, "in which 
 the poet speaks ex ammo, and the man lays 
 bare the very pulse of the machine, are not 
 conceived or composed unconsciously and at 
 haphazard." He thinks that Byron, stung 
 thereto by some remarks in Coleridge's Critique 
 
 53
 
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 on Bertram, deliberately determined "to con- 
 ceive and to depict an ideal character, gifted, 
 gracious, and delightful, who should carry into 
 all its practical consequences the doctrine of 
 a mundane if not godless nature " the phrase 
 refers to the Critique "and, at the same time, 
 retain the chanties and virtues of uncelestial 
 but not devilish manhood . . . the argument 
 is a vindication of the natural man. It is By- 
 ron's 'criticism of life.'' The last sentence 
 is no doubt true, with the proviso (too often 
 forgotten by critics) that a writer does not 
 express his whole criticism of life all at once. 
 But with Mr. Coleridge's theory of the concep- 
 tion of the poem I cannot agree. Great works 
 are sometimes conceived at haphazard, though 
 perhaps none has been so composed through- 
 out. Byron was steeped in Pulci and Berni ; 
 he had found the ottava rima perfectly fitted to 
 his genius and (as it is) to the genius of Eng- 
 lish humour ; he had made a brilliant success 
 of Beppo ; he determined on something in the 
 same vein, and very likely Coleridge's critique 
 did suggest the name of his hero. Then, as 
 the work grew under his hand, and as the 
 
 54
 
 "DON JUAN" 
 
 personal and introspective nature of his genius 
 impelled him irresistibly to put more and more 
 of himself, his own mind and heart, into it, 
 he may have conceived some such "vindication 
 of the natural man " as Mr. Coleridge sup- 
 poses. But that he did so in the first instance 
 one can hardly believe, remembering his letters 
 at the time, and remembering also that more 
 than once he half decided to stop. Had his 
 purpose been so complete and single as Mr. 
 Coleridge thinks, he would hardly have spent 
 hundreds of stanzas over shipwrecks and slave- 
 markets and harems he, the most militant 
 and direct of English writers. But the theory 
 is attractive. 
 
 We miss from this edition those extracts 
 from the contemporary reviews of Don Juan 
 which were a joy in the edition of 1837. Mr. 
 Coleridge gives the references, but life is too 
 short for burrowing in the files of u Maga " and 
 the Edinburgh, to say nothing of extinct publi- 
 cations less easy of access. It is true the 
 volume runs already to six hundred pages, but 
 just a few more, devoted to those extracts, 
 would have enabled the reader to contrast the 
 
 55
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 estimation of the poem then and now. It may 
 be permitted briefly to recur to them for the 
 purpose. There are two notes in nearly all 
 these reviews, one of bellowing indignation at 
 what was (in truth) its coarseness, and at what 
 was asserted to be its immorality, and one 
 of hearty and entire recognition of the genius 
 and skill of the author that he was Byron was 
 a secret de Polichinelle even of the first two 
 cantos. "My Grandmother's Review, the 
 British " was of opinion that no passages "can 
 be produced without insult to the ear of 
 decency, and vexation to the heart that feels 
 for domestic or national happiness " ; Black- 
 wood thought it contained "a more thorough 
 and intense infusion of genius and vice power 
 and profligacy than any poem which had ever 
 before been written in the English or, indeed, 
 in any other modern language ... a cool, 
 unconcerned fiend, laughing with detestable 
 glee," etc., though Wilson was to make hand- 
 some amends to Byron after his death. Jeffrey 
 was exceedingly eloquent : " This is the 
 charge which we bring against Lord Byron. 
 We say that ... all the powers of his power- 
 
 56
 
 "DON JUAN" 
 
 ful mind ... all ennobling pursuits, and dis- 
 interested virtues, are mere deceits and illusions 
 . . . love, patriotism, valour, devotion, con- 
 stancy, ambition all are to be laughed at, 
 disbelieved in, and despised ! " and much more 
 to the same random effect ; and the Rev. John 
 Styles, D.D., exhorted his congregation : " Be 
 assured, my brethren, it is with sorrowful reluct- 
 ance I feel myself called upon to denounce 
 the greatest genius of the age as the greatest 
 enemy of his species." (The Rev. John Styles, 
 by the way, drew freely from the article in 
 Blackivood.) I cannot linger over these ex- 
 tracts, but it is refreshing to turn to the article 
 in John Bull, by far the best, as Byron ad- 
 mitted, of all the deliveries on the subject, in 
 spite of its flippancy : 
 
 " I consider Don Juan as out of all sight the best 
 of your works ; it is by far the most spirited, the 
 most straightforward, the most interesting, and the 
 most poetical ; and everybody thinks as I do of it, 
 although they have not the heart to say so. Old 
 Gifford's brow relaxed as he gloated over it ; Mr. 
 Croker chuckled ; Dr. Whitaker smirked ; Mr. Mil- 
 man sighed ; Mr. Coleridge took it to his bed with 
 him." 
 
 57
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 Well, times are changed, and the very mu- 
 table fashion of critics. The immorality and 
 indecency of Don Juan no longer trouble us. It 
 is recognised not to be a book for the school- 
 room, possibly (the point is too delicate for 
 argument here) not to be a book for the draw- 
 ing-room. But in male society, especially of 
 public school and University breeding, save 
 when the very senior or the reverend are 
 present, conversation among Englishmen was 
 and is plain-spoken ; and Don Juan, written in 
 the spirit of male conversation by a man who, 
 for all his exploits, cared little or nothing for 
 the opinion of women, is no longer a theme 
 of horror. But Byron, who laughed at the 
 charges of immorality "it will be nuts to 
 them all," said he would have liked far less 
 the latter-day depreciation which questions his 
 powers. A reaction there has been, no doubt, 
 in his favour ; but still in places where they 
 discuss literature you may hear him languidly 
 belittled. One thing is certain by Don Juan 
 Byron stands or falls. The sentimental verse 
 of his earlier time his boyhood we should 
 think it now owed its stupendous vogue 
 
 58
 
 "DON JUAN" 
 
 largely to accident, to the romantic movement 
 of the times, the reaction against the common- 
 sense and wit of the eighteenth century. It 
 was not until his later work, The Vision of 
 Judgment, Beppo, and, finally, Don Juan, that 
 the real Byron stands out. He knew it ; his 
 earlier poems (he wrote to Shelley) were " ex- 
 aggerated nonsense which has corrupted the 
 public taste," and he himself was the stanchest 
 champion of Pope. But, putting aside the 
 mock Byron of legend, the melancholy posing 
 creature, and coming to the real Byron of Don 
 Juan, we find there are a number of excellent 
 people to whom he is wholly antipathetic. 
 Critics of letters, it may be said without offence, 
 are in the main a sedentary folk, and therefore 
 a little timid of life and perhaps a little anaemic 
 of heart ; and to them Byron's jolly humour 
 and abounding vitality and zest for emotions 
 and broad masculine intelligence are an offence. 
 Naturally they criticise this work of his, open 
 as it is to criticism, with acidity. They take 
 passages of broad fun and complain that they 
 are not ecstatic poetry ; they take him in his 
 pedestrian moments, and say he is common- 
 
 59
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 place, and so on. It is an offence to many that 
 with him as with all the ancient and most of 
 the modern writers outside England love is 
 based on physical passion and not on com- 
 munity of ideas or social convenience or the 
 like. I might explain the objections for 
 ever. Meanwhile the impartial man of judg- 
 ment perceives that in this great and extra- 
 ordinarily sustained work there is more percep- 
 tion, more understanding, more imagination, 
 more humour, and, finally, more excellent play 
 of language than would furnish out a whole 
 corpus of merely accomplished artists, the 
 critic's favourites. A comic epic a picaresque 
 novel in verse call it what you will, it is a 
 whole vigorous world in itself. 
 
 60
 
 IV 
 
 A NOTE ON FIELDING 
 
 FOR one who has read Fielding, even 
 Tom Jones alone, probably half a 
 dozen have a general idea of his 
 life, and deriving it from Thackeray 
 have a false idea. Thackeray's picture of 
 Fielding gives furiously to puzzle. It is not 
 explained by saying that Thackeray was 
 a sentimentalist. Sentimentalist Thackeray 
 was, no doubt, but here we should expect 
 his sentimentalism to carry him too far in 
 defence of Fielding's character, not in the 
 other direction. His judgment (we should 
 have thought) must have at once suggested 
 the a priori improbability of the stories to 
 Fielding's discredit, and his knowledge and 
 Thackeray's reading in the period was wide 
 enough should have told him that there was 
 next to no evidence for them. It was natural 
 
 61
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 enough for him to be unfair to George IV., 
 the cock-shy of the Whigs ever since he threw 
 them over, or even to Swift, the implicit enemy 
 by anticipation to the ineffectual sentiment of 
 the Liberalism Thackeray professed. But 
 Fielding (the writer) was one of his idols, one 
 to whom his own novels in theme and method 
 owed an enormous debt. And as for effect, 
 an indignant refutation would have had a more 
 striking effect than that which he actually 
 achieved. One has to say that he was lazy in 
 valuing evidence. But a fancy which occurs 
 to one who loves Thackeray well may be 
 worth mentioning. It is that, thorough man 
 of the world as he was, he knew, better than 
 the average Englishman knows, that a certain 
 amount of free drinking and loose living is 
 quite compatible with profound thought and 
 even with hard toil, and that while his audience 
 were sighing over "poor Fielding," he in his 
 heart was thinking of their narrow view and 
 superficial inferences. The stories need trouble 
 us no more. Some of them like his supping 
 off "a ham bone" merely reflect on his 
 poverty, a natural discredit to the coarse and 
 
 62
 
 A NOTE ON FIELDING 
 
 unimaginative of a materially successful race, 
 but not one to the thoughtful. Others, or the 
 same, refer to his keeping low company, as, of 
 course, he must have done at times, even as 
 Dickens must, or he could not have written 
 about it so well. It is odd, by the way, that 
 these stories were so eagerly taken up by the 
 aristocratic patrons of literature, and that they 
 so hated Fielding, a gentleman by birth and 
 an aristocrat in temperament, and so belauded 
 Richardson, who was neither ; perhaps not 
 odd, since the contrast has often happened 
 your patron likes to patronise but notable at 
 least. The real gravamen of the charges 
 against Fielding is that he was a persistent 
 drunkard ; and that is rendered absurd by his 
 work as a public servant and a writer. An 
 occasional bout need not signify, but Fielding's 
 novels written by a persistent drunkard ! the 
 idea is simply stupid. There is a parallel here 
 with Byron, whose work is a triumphant re- 
 futation of the amiable theory of his con- 
 temporaries that he was a worn-out debauchee. 
 But it is the frequent fate of a great English- 
 man. When once his name is established as 
 
 63
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 familiar to the public ear few care to know 
 what he did to make it, very few (if he was a 
 writer) to read what he wrote ; the question is, 
 Was he faithful to his wife and did he pay the 
 tailor? The genius of the race for conduct, 
 as Matthew Arnold politely put it. And, of 
 course, it is dull to hear that the great man's 
 morality was much like that of other men. 
 
 The mention of Byron suggests a comparison 
 in work as well as in libels. Most com- 
 parisons are futile, but perhaps it is less un- 
 profitable to compare two men who had much 
 in common, as Fielding and Byron, than two 
 who had nothing in common, like Fielding 
 and Richardson. To Byron, as to Fielding, 
 there belonged a pre-eminently masculine in- 
 telligence it is an expression that might take 
 many pages adequately to analyse, but which 
 is clear to experience an intelligence which 
 is true to itself, which goes, not only far, but 
 thoroughly, which may use a prejudice to 
 suggest, but not to dictate. This of the later 
 Byron, of course. But it is of the later 
 Fielding, too, that one thinks not the Field- 
 ing of the plays, or the Byron of the senti- 
 
 64
 
 A NOTE ON FIELDING 
 
 mental lyrics. Here, again, is a parallel ; 
 fashion and ambition of fame set Byron writing 
 his " exaggerated nonsense," fashion and the 
 need of bread set Fielding writing plays ; life 
 and genius sent Fielding to his novels, Byron 
 to "Don Juan." There was more attraction 
 in romance for Byron than for Fielding, but 
 to both it was the romance of earthly circum- 
 stance, not the romance of vague imaginings, 
 which appealed. Byron had a greater love of 
 beauty for its own sake ; but in both it was 
 the stress and pull of life, not the contempla- 
 tion of beauty, which was a mastering force. 
 Both could dwell without an effort though it 
 lay, of course, far more in Fielding's way to 
 do so on the sordid and the mean, because 
 they are part of life, and both took life as a 
 whole. And but the comparison will break 
 if I continue it, as the way is with comparisons, 
 and my concern is with Fielding. 
 
 Save to the very curious or the very thorough, 
 Fielding's plays are now unreadable, as un- 
 readable as the modern " Society novel," 
 which in their catalogue of uninteresting in- 
 trigues they rather resemble. That the plays 
 
 F 6 5
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 are so dull to read is not accounted for by 
 their lacking, as certainly they lacked, the gift 
 of the theatre. Other plays have lacked it 
 and so been poor things to act, but are read- 
 able still for their wit or style. But Fielding 
 was not only attempting an art for which his 
 genius was unfitted in general, but a small and 
 conventionally narrowed section of that art 
 the formal comedy of fashion. The observer 
 and philosopher of free, robust, and vigorous 
 life, and low life for choice, is inimitable ; the 
 manipulator of rigidly artificial life, where wit 
 is the one thing needful, has been beaten out 
 of the field by many inferior men. In truth 
 this observer and philosopher was not a great 
 wit ; and the result is that if you except 
 the burlesques, where a high-spirited young 
 man's fun had play, his theatre is nothing. 
 He himself thought that he should have started 
 play-writing at the age when he gave it up 
 (impelled by Walpole's creation of that re- 
 markable institution, the dramatic censorship) ; 
 and if he meant that he might then have 
 broken through a convention which as a 
 younger man he inevitably followed, no doubt 
 
 66
 
 A NOTE ON FIELDING 
 
 he was right. Mr. Henley, in the intensely 
 human, brilliant, and minutely informed essay 
 on Fielding, which he wrote for a recent 
 edition, compares him with Vanbrugh, but 
 breaks off, in mercy as it were to his subject, 
 and, transferring the comparison to the novels, 
 puts Squire Western against Sir John Brute in 
 The Provok'd Wife. It is a most interest- 
 ing suggestion. In the thought and genius 
 of the two creations there is no comparison at 
 all ; yet because Vanbrugh had a measure of 
 the comic spirit (coarsely dressed, if you will) 
 given to few dramatists, he gets such an effect 
 out of an ordinary "situation" of intrigue 
 (when Sir John discovers his wife's lover and 
 muses drunkenly on the grievance that he 
 should have to fight a duel in addition to the 
 wrong done him) that in terms of his own art 
 his protagonist can be put against one of the 
 greatest inventions of the greater man. The 
 lesson is that the greatest artist must pursue 
 the art for which he is fitted and not another. 
 
 It was a lucky accident, indeed, that the 
 surprising Pamela so struck the humour 
 and ire of Fielding that he started on a 
 
 67
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 burlesque of it and drifted into his proper 
 calling. There is nothing new to be said 
 of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews and 
 Amelia. They may be left as they stand 
 in the universal judgment of those who can 
 savour life and letters. Englishmen can hardly 
 regret that Fielding's works are so character- 
 istically and intensely English that, except as 
 a curiosity, they have been little studied in 
 other lands ; for it means that they have in 
 detail a vivid panorama of English life in the 
 eighteenth century as it was seen, closely and 
 minutely, by an unfaltering eye and an under- 
 standing mind. Nor do we now regret their 
 " coarseness, " as was once the fashion, since 
 that is, again, a necessity of the faithful treat- 
 ment of the subject ; the coarseness was in 
 the material, never in the mind of the artist, 
 as it was (for example) in Smollett's. True it 
 is that there are sensitive souls who can con- 
 template the beautiful only, and Fielding's 
 work (save in intellectual play and handling 
 of our language) is not beautiful ; happier they 
 who can enjoy both kinds of art. The quality 
 in Fielding's mind which inspired his method 
 
 68
 
 A NOTE ON FIELDING 
 
 of using his splendid gift of sight was irony, 
 and this quality may have kept others from a 
 right enjoyment of him. For we pride our- 
 selves on disliking a "pose," and irony is 
 an obvious pose, and, more, a wilful pose. 
 Irony runs through all Fielding's novels, and 
 reaches a great climax in Jonathan Wild^ 
 which is probably the least popular (the plays 
 apart) of his works. In point of pure art, of 
 perfect achievement of an artistic purpose, it 
 is perhaps the greatest of them. Much has 
 been written of it, but perhaps full justice has 
 never yet been done it. It is a more perfect 
 sustainment of irony than is to be found even 
 in Swift, who will half abandon it for sarcasm 
 and wholly abandon it for direct invective. 
 But irony is never popular Gulliver s 
 Travels are read as a fairy tale ! as any 
 modern who has tried to write in its terms 
 knows very well ; few will care to read it, and 
 half of them will take it for simple statement. 
 
 6 9
 
 THE MURDER OF MOUNTFORD, 
 THE PLAYER 
 
 AtONG the State trials most shrewdly 
 selected and admirably edited by Mr. 
 H. L. (now Judge) Stephen, there 
 does not appear the trial by his peers 
 of Lord Mohun for the murder of Mr. Mount- 
 ford. It does not, indeed, deserve to be called 
 a famous trial : it raised no important point 
 of law, affected no leading interest, and, 
 inasmuch as the accused was acquitted, it 
 had no particular result. Naturally, therefore, 
 with so many other cases leaping to his eye, 
 Mr. Stephen omitted it. It is possible, too, 
 that if the social significance of its details and 
 the literary interest (through Thackeray) of 
 Mohun himself made Mr. Stephen pause before 
 rejection, he concluded that on the whole it 
 had been sufficiently exploited. That, it is 
 obvious, is not my view. Lord Mohun, it is 
 
 70
 
 THE MURDER OF MOUNTFORD 
 
 true, has come down to us as the typical 
 profligate and debauchee of his age a reputa- 
 tion which is severe rather on the age than 
 on Lord Mohun and Thackeray was familiar 
 with this incident in his career. He does not, 
 however, describe it anywhere at length, but 
 merely alludes to it in Esmond, and mentions 
 it elsewhere as one of Mohun's villainous 
 escapades. I think it deserves a lengthier 
 treatment. In its essence it was but a 
 commonplace and brutal murder : poor Mr. 
 Mountford was stabbed by Captain Hill before 
 he could put himself on guard, and the motive 
 was only the stupid jealousy of a stupid and 
 brutal man. But as the story is unfolded we 
 cannot help seeing, if we have any imagination 
 at all, part of the life of those days start for 
 a moment into being again the dissipated 
 aristocrat, his blackguardly boon companion, 
 the easy-going, harmless player-folk, the night- 
 watchmen and constables. We see them as 
 they lived, with here a detail and there a detail 
 marking the difference and distance of their 
 times and ours. Their Bohemia lives again 
 authentic, as it was two hundred years ago. 
 
 71
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 Some of us think such revelations worth 
 attention. 
 
 I propose to relate the events simply, in the 
 order of their happening. But first we may as 
 well consider briefly the three chief actors in 
 them. These are Lord Mohun, his friend Mr. 
 Richard Hill (the murderer), and the bewitch- 
 ing Mrs. Bracegirdle ; for poor Mr. Mount- 
 ford, who was murdered, was rather a lay-figure 
 in the affair. 
 
 Lord Mohun was seventeen years old at the 
 time, that is to say, in the fourth year of 
 William and Mary, and already a proficient 
 in the vices of the town. His age need not 
 surprise us. For good and evil, the age of 
 active manhood began in those days almost 
 as soon as a man was a man. When it was 
 possible a hundred years later to be an eminent 
 statesman in the early twenties, there is nothing 
 wonderful about a debauchee in his teens. 
 But if we had to pass a moral judgment upon 
 him, his youth might plead that mere boyish 
 delight in an tl affair, "and boyish hero-worship 
 of the ruffianly principal in it, led him wrong 
 more than did a depraved love of wickedness 
 
 72
 
 THE MURDER OF MOUNTFORD 
 
 for its own sake. His father had been killed 
 in a duel while he was a child, and he had 
 been ill brought up. " Poor fellow!" let us 
 say, by all means. Probably the picture 
 Thackeray drew of him (as he was a few years 
 after this date) in Esmond is a pretty fair one. 
 Probably "he was a devil," as someone says 
 of a character meant for Rochester in one of 
 Etherege's plays, "with something of the 
 angel yet undefaced in him," at seventeen. 
 He seems to have had some charm of manner, 
 and the story we are concerned with shows a 
 sort of generosity in his mind. 
 
 Nothing such can be said of Captain Dick 
 Hill. A vulgar ruffian and bully, if ever there 
 was one, and we need not waste qualifying 
 words over him. But let us not suppose the 
 type extinct. It is seldom indeed found con- 
 sorting with gentlemen nowadays though we 
 can hardly say it never is and a difference 
 more important for the rest of the community 
 is that it has lost its sword. But in the shadier 
 parts of a racecourse crowd, in some public 
 bars and elsewhere, Dick Hills flourish yet, 
 more or less, swaggering, shouting, picking 
 quarrels, muttering revenges. 
 
 73
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 Let us turn quickly to Mrs. Bracegirdle. 
 Her powers as an actress and her witchery as 
 a woman are one of the traditions vaguely 
 glorious, pathetically intangible of the stage. 
 For me, as a lover of it, and especially as 
 a lover of the comedies in which she played, 
 her name has a wonderful fascination, and I 
 would rather have seen her play Millamant 
 than Mrs. Siddons play Lady Macbeth. She 
 is said to have been as virtuous as she was 
 beautiful, in spite of a whisper about the great 
 Mr. Congreve, and we may as well believe it 
 as not. And now to the story. 
 
 Captain Dick Hill fell in love with Mrs. 
 Bracegirdle, and wished to marry her, but 
 Mrs. Bracegirdle would have nothing to do 
 with Captain Dick Hill. Unable to under- 
 stand any objection to himself, and disregard- 
 ing the actress's character for virtue, he decided 
 that she " loved another," and fixed on Mr. 
 Mountford, though Mr. Mountford was a 
 married man, as his rival. His suspicions 
 were based solely on the fact that Mountford 
 was a player in the same company, but he 
 vowed publicly that he would have Mountford 's 
 
 74
 
 THE MURDER OF MOUNTFORD 
 
 blood. Rejected by Mrs. Bracegirdle, he 
 approached Mrs. Knight, a sister comedian, 
 and implored her good offices. But Mrs. 
 Knight refused, alleging that she did not wish 
 to make enemies in the house. Hill at once 
 thought of Mountford, of course, and an- 
 nounced with an oath that he would "find a 
 way to deal with him speedily." 
 
 Then Hill made up his mind to sterner 
 measures, and determined to abduct Mrs. 
 Bracegirdle and marry her by force. A con- 
 federate was necessary, and he pitched on 
 Lord Mohun, over whom he evidently possessed 
 a great influence, and to whom, it is probable, 
 he had been an admired tutor in dissipation. 
 Lord Mohun was delighted to assist his friend 
 and mentor. The affair was exciting, and 
 seemed likely to involve a fight, since Hill was 
 assured that Mountford would interfere. Not 
 that Lord Mohun was hostile to Mountford : 
 on the contrary, he had made advances of 
 friendship to him, being an admirer of his 
 acting, but Hill's claims came first. So on 
 Friday, December gth, my Lord Mohun being 
 just returned to town from a duel at Kensington, 
 the two commenced operations. 
 
 75
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 They set to work methodically. First they 
 agreed with William Dixon, who let out 
 coaches, to take them up at the theatre that 
 evening and drive them to Totteridge, near 
 Barnet at the reasonable rate of thirty 
 shillings. Then they hired a gang of soldiers 
 (actually soldiers !) to assist them, and, these 
 preliminaries accomplished, went to dine at the 
 " Three Tuns" in Shandois Street. There they 
 somewhat imprudently talked over their plans, 
 Hill as usual denouncing Mr. Mountford ; but, 
 mindful of business, Hill took an opportunity 
 of borrowing a case of pistols. And so to the 
 theatre. 
 
 A disappointment awaited them. Mrs. 
 Bracegirdle was not playing that day, but was 
 to sup, they learned, with Mr. Page in Princes 
 Street, out of Drury Lane. So they left the 
 theatre, after the worthy Captain had threatened 
 characteristically to split the nose of anyone 
 who should ask payment of him. At nine 
 o'clock they moved Dixon and his coach from 
 the Horseshoe Tavern lower down the Lane to 
 Lord Clare's house, and there also the de- 
 fenders of their country whom Hill had hired 
 
 76
 
 THE MURDER OF MOUNTFORD 
 
 were smoking and drinking. But there was 
 no sign of Mrs. Bracegirdle, and fearing a 
 mistake the party moved to Norfolk Street, 
 where now is the office of Mr. Stead, but 
 where then lived, or hard by, both the Brace- 
 girdle and Mr. Mountford. The Captain, 
 believing his adversary to be at home (he 
 listened outside the door and thought he heard 
 voices), was for going in and thrashing Mount- 
 ford, but in the end they went back to the 
 Lane and waited. At this point the party was 
 diminished by Dixon, who took exception, 
 not to the nature of the enterprise but to the 
 lateness of the hour, and went home to bed, 
 leaving a postilion in his place. 
 
 But now at something past ten the drama 
 began. Mrs. Bracegirdle, accompanied by 
 Mr. Page and (you will be pleased to hear) 
 chaperoned by her mother, came into the Lane 
 from Princes Street, the three walking hand in 
 hand, as the custom was. 
 
 Mohun was sitting inside the coach, and 
 Hill standing outside, and as the others came 
 up he gave the signal to his men. Followed 
 a sharp scuffle. The soldiers separated Page 
 
 77
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 from Mrs. Bracegirdle and pushed her towards 
 the coach, while Hill, that warrior, attacked 
 the unlucky Page, who had no weapon but a 
 walking-cane, with his sword. Cries, curses, 
 and shouts for aid ! Mrs. Bracegirdle's mother 
 clung desperately to her daughter, and, so 
 doing, really defeated the plot, for the neigh- 
 bours hurried up before the soldiers could 
 hustle Mrs. Bracegirdle into the coach. Hill, 
 recognising facts with the quickness of a tacti- 
 cian, called his men off and dismissed them, 
 and offered his agreeable assistance to Mr. 
 Page in seeing the ladies home. Lord Mohun, 
 who seems to have thought that there were 
 men enough to deal with one unarmed man 
 and two women without him, got out of the 
 coach and joined the party. 
 
 So the first act ended in farce. Mrs. Brace- 
 girdle and her mother were allowed to go into 
 their lodging ; and there also poor Mr. Page, 
 after being brutally threatened by Hill, took 
 refuge. Hill and his noble friend stood out- 
 side in the street, Hill with a naked sword, 
 having lost the scabbard in the scrimmage ; 
 and to them presently Mrs. Bracegirdle's land- 
 
 78
 
 THE MURDER OF MOUNTFORD 
 
 lady, Mrs. Browne, who had heard of the 
 outrage from her lodger, and who came to ex- 
 ercise her right of criticism as a free English- 
 woman, peer or no peer. She received a polite 
 but rather confused apology from Mohun, who 
 in fact claimed to have saved Mrs. Brace- 
 girdle's life. "Had it not been for me the 
 rabble would have torn her a-pieces." He 
 added that his friend the Captain's intentions 
 were honourable. 
 
 The Captain meanwhile had begun to harp 
 again on Mountford, though, as we have seen, 
 he had no share in defeating the plot ; and 
 Mrs. Browne, hearing Mr. Mountford's name, 
 cried out: "Why, what hurt hath Mr. Mount- 
 ford done you ? " 
 
 "I have been abused," growled he, "and 
 I will be revenged." 
 
 Mrs. Browne was justly alarmed, and hurried 
 in to Mrs. Bracegirdle, who sent her mother 
 and her maid round to Mrs. Mountford to beg 
 her send her husband warning. 
 
 Mrs. Bracegirdle's lodging was in Howard 
 Street, out of Norfolk Street, and Mountford 
 must pass the corner of it to reach his house 
 
 79
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 in Norfolk Street itself. Hill and Mohun, 
 therefore, had merely to stay where they were 
 to make sure of getting him. And so they 
 stayed, drinking a bottle of wine they had 
 fetched from the "White Horse"; and there 
 Mrs. Page, seeking her husband at Mrs. 
 Bracegirdle's, found them drinking toasts to 
 the Bracegirdle and to Mrs. Barry, another 
 name well known to stage history. The neigh- 
 bourhood was alive by now, and expectant 
 heads peered out of the windows. 
 
 A scene horrid enough they were soon to 
 see. But first farce demanded a further toll, 
 and the watch came round the corner from 
 Surrey Street, headed by a man with a lantern. 
 
 "Who comes here?" cried the lantern- 
 bearer, as he saw the drawn swords. 
 
 "A friend," quoth Mohun. 
 
 " Return your swords and stand off." 
 
 "I am a peer of the land. Here, will you 
 have my sword ? " 
 
 Dogberry was overawed at once. "God 
 bless your honour, my lord, but I hope you 
 are doing no harm ? " 
 
 "We are only drinking a bottle of wine," 
 80
 
 THE MURDER OF MOUNTFORD 
 
 said Mohun ; but Hill was not for politeness 
 with a watchman, and asked him to knock him 
 down if he pleased. Then up came the con- 
 stable, a portly man and out of breath, and on 
 him too the presence of a peer worked like 
 magic. Mohun asked him to drink a glass of 
 wine, and in the end the constable, assured 
 further by some women that the gentlemen 
 had only been serenading them, went off with 
 his men. 
 
 Scarcely had they gone when the doomed 
 Mountford appeared. As he passed the corner 
 of Howard Street on his way home the dis- 
 turbance attracted his notice, and he turned 
 into Howard Street to see what it was. Good 
 Mrs. Browne ran up to warn him of his 
 danger, but he pushed past her, and went on 
 to where Lord Mohun was standing. 
 
 "Mr. Mountford," said Mohun, "your 
 humble servant: I am very glad to see you." 
 
 Mountford did not at first recognise him : 
 you remember the darkness at night of Lon- 
 don in those days. When he did, "What 
 makes your lordship here at this time o' 
 night? " he asked. 
 
 G 81
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 "I suppose, Mr. Mountford, you were sent 
 for?" 
 
 "Sent for? For what?" 
 
 " I have a great respect for you, Mr. Mount- 
 ford," said Lord Mohun, "and would fain 
 have no difference between us, but there is a 
 thing fallen out between Mrs. Bracegirdle and 
 Mr. Hill." 
 
 Mountford disclaimed any concern with 
 Mrs. Bracegirdle. "I know nothing of the 
 matter. I came here by accident. But I hope 
 your lordship will not vindicate such an ill 
 man as Mr. Hill in such a matter as this. 
 Pray let me desire your lordship to forbear." 
 
 Then Hill interrupted. " Pray, my lord, 
 hold your tongue," he said; "this is not a 
 convenient place to discuss this business," and 
 struck Mountford a box on the ear, and bade 
 him draw. 
 
 "Damme," cried he, "what's that for?" 
 He seized his sword, but before he could draw 
 Hill ran him through. He reeled back, and 
 his sword fell clattering on the stones and broke. 
 
 Hill had done his work, and fled towards 
 Surrey Street into the darkness. Mountford, 
 
 82
 
 THE MURDER OF MOUNTFORD 
 
 muttering that he was a dead man, staggered 
 to his house, and met Mrs. Page, who was 
 with his wife, on the doorstep ; he threw his 
 arms round her neck to support himself, saying 
 that Hill had murdered him. She left him to 
 his wife, and rushed into Howard Street, now 
 ringing with cries of murder. Lord Mohun 
 had not run away, like his friend ; he waited 
 the watch, and gave the constable his sword, 
 remarking that he was innocent. He appealed 
 to Mrs. Page : " I bid you take notice, madam, 
 I had no hand in this murder, for my sword 
 was not drawn." But Mrs. Page answered 
 sensibly that she had seen him in Hill's com- 
 pany with his naked sword just before, and 
 told the watch to take him to the Round House. 
 
 So to the Round House Lord Mohun was 
 taken. On the way they went to Hill's lodg- 
 ings, and found his sword with the blood on it, 
 but Hill himself had escaped. Then Lord 
 Mohun showed a touch of generosity, which 
 is at least a feeble ray of light in this black 
 business. He said that he only wished Hill 
 had taken his money, and " I do not care a 
 farthing if I am hanged for hirn." 
 
 Hanged he was not to be, though Mount- 
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 ford died on the following morning. At his 
 trial by his peers in Westminster Hall, six 
 weeks later, fourteen of them voted him guilty, 
 but sixty-nine for his acquittal. There is this 
 to be said for their view, that possibly he might 
 not have foreseen that Hill would give Mount- 
 ford no chance of self-defence. Only possibly, 
 however, for the scoundrel's character was 
 known to him ; and we may assume that his 
 youth and his peerage (it was two centuries 
 ago) saved him. They found that he was in 
 the position of one who is by accident present 
 at a crime, not an accessory. Neither as a 
 moralist does the result please me, nor as a 
 Tory ; for when Mohun at length was killed 
 he caused the death of the hopes of the Tories 
 at the end of Anne's reign the Duke of 
 Hamilton. But that duel and murder are too 
 famous for a fresh relation. Nor is it agree- 
 able to know that Hill got clear away, and 
 lived to die in a duel, and not to be hanged as 
 he merited. Poor Mountford, the player, was 
 not avenged. 
 
 So they fade away into darkness again, with 
 just one faint glimmering light left, where is 
 the memory of the Bracegirdle. 
 
 8 4
 
 VI 
 
 STERNE AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 IT is a hard treatment of Sterne that he, 
 who sought above all things to amuse, 
 to "open the heart and lungs," as he 
 said, has almost always been criticised 
 with a heavy scowl. He was indecent, no 
 doubt. But he had a genius of humour, 
 and it is hard that the critics should have 
 occupied themselves so much less with his 
 genius than with his indecency. Some of 
 them, indeed, seem really to think his inde- 
 cency the more important fact. That is surely 
 perverse. Anyone can be indecent ; before the 
 advent of Mr. Mudie innumerable writers have 
 been so. That Sterne should have been one 
 of them may be regretted. But comparatively 
 few writers, before or since Mr. Mudie, have 
 had genius, and that Sterne was one of them is 
 his inalienable glory. It will not be supposed
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 that I wish to make light of the charge against 
 him. Remembering how rare, and how pre- 
 cious to humanity, is the gift of exciting in- 
 telligent and refreshing mirth, no one but 
 must lament that another quality of Sterne's 
 mind, given our present ideas as to what is 
 and is not permissible for allusion, should take 
 Tristram Shandy from the hands of very many 
 who would otherwise relish him, and mingle 
 with the enjoyment of many others an occa- 
 sional disgust. But, after all, grown and edu- 
 cated men can surely read him without harm 
 and with little inconvenience to their delicacy, 
 and the unique gift of mirth and humane 
 appreciation he brings to these surely out- 
 weighs his offences a thousandfold. 
 
 In connection with this matter there is a 
 recent development of criticism which is in- 
 teresting in itself and bears on the right under- 
 standing of Sterne. The old treatment of him 
 was something as follows: " Here, Sterne! 
 you've been saying improper things. Hold 
 out your hand. . . . That will do, and here's 
 a sugar-plum because you're a genius." The 
 later method is to say " Sterne, come here! 
 
 86
 
 You've been hinting at improper things. How 
 dare you ? Why can't you say them right 
 out, like Rabelais ? Then we should applaud 
 you. As it is, take that ! " The two critics of 
 him I have read last, Mr. Charles Whibley in 
 a brilliant introduction to an edition of Tris- 
 tram Shandy, and Mr. J. H. Millar in his Mid- 
 eighteenth Century, both adopt this later atti- 
 tude. It belongs to the manly and robust 
 school of criticism, which has done much 
 good in correcting a certain foolish sort of 
 prudery, but which, like other good things, 
 may be occasionally pushed too far. Sterne, 
 according to Mr. Whibley, "is not overtly 
 immoral, alas ! he is only too pure. He is 
 always hankering after a licence he dare not 
 enjoy. . . . Between Yorick and Rabelais lies 
 the chasm impassable." Mr. Millar is down 
 on the unlucky Yorick even more trenchantly, 
 not to say ferociously. "When Sterne ap- 
 proaches the region where free speech is diffi- 
 cult, and genteel periphrasis impossible, it is 
 with the wink and leer of the adolescent 
 schoolboy," whom Mr. Millar would have 
 flogged heartily, we are sure. "When he was 
 
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 stealing so much from Rabelais, he might well 
 have taken a lesson from the master's frank 
 and honest attitude to life." So he might, 
 though surely Mr. Millar does not deny that 
 Sterne was ever frank and honest. But the 
 broadness of Rabelais was not in Sterne's 
 nature ; and it was not, so to speak, his game. 
 Mr. Whibley thinks that he set out to defy the 
 conventions, and would have been as frank as 
 Rabelais only he did not dare. That seems to 
 me to be almost absurd. Sterne did not want 
 to defy conventions ; he used them for a certain 
 effect. He would not have been frank if he 
 could in this particular. He makes an art of 
 suggestiveness an art of suggesting the im- 
 proper ingeniously, unexpectedly. That is the 
 truth of Sterne's pruriency, a deliberate inten- 
 tion to suggest and adumbrate. No doubt he 
 deserves all the hard things Mr. Whibley and 
 Mr. Millar say of him. But it is well to under- 
 stand him ; and to believe that he was fearfully 
 and inadequately imitating Rabelais is to mis- 
 understand. A perverted ingenuity, no doubt, 
 but a deliberate. . . . 
 
 Then the critics ah ! those critics say he 
 
 88
 
 STERNE AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 was a plagiarist. So he was. I think that 
 Mr. Whibley, with the natural zeal of the 
 scholar, is over-ingenious in detecting corre- 
 spondences. Still, there they are. Sterne's show 
 of curious erudition owed much to Burton, for 
 example. But no man ever yet acquired a 
 great reputation by means of such borrowing. 
 Sterne sometimes cribbed an unimportant 
 passage directly one of those erudite displays 
 which, to us at least, are the least readable 
 part of him and at other times reflected his 
 reading very obviously. But he did not steal 
 my Uncle Toby, nor Mr. Shandy, nor Mrs. 
 Shandy, nor Trim ; and if Dr. Slop was drawn 
 from some obscure doctor of his acquaintance, 
 as it was alleged, that obscure doctor has done 
 indirectly more posthumous good than ever he 
 could have done alive. When a writer, who is 
 proved to have stolen but the word is harsh 
 from another, has done work of himself incom- 
 parably greater than that he stole, then the 
 theft may be a blemish on his character, but 
 is a very unimportant fault in his art. And if 
 Sterne borrowed, he also lent. 
 
 His sentiment has been harshly assailed. 
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 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 Well, it is most often unequal to the humour. 
 Le Fevre's death scene is no great thing. But 
 it is neither false nor inappropriate ; it shows 
 my Uncle Toby's benevolence in action. So, 
 in its way, does the much-derided anecdote of 
 Uncle Toby's letting the fly escape. Sterne's 
 genius was more at home with talk. The in- 
 imitable touch of Uncle Toby after the reading 
 of Ernulphus's curses comes to mind: "I 
 declare, quote my Uncle Toby, my heart would 
 not let me curse the Devil himself with so much 
 bitterness. . . . He is the father of curses, re- 
 plied Dr. Slop. ... So am not I, replied my 
 uncle. But he is cursed and damned already, to 
 all eternity, replied Dr. Slop. I am sorry for it, 
 quoth my Uncle Toby." That is worth many 
 Le Fevres and escaped flies, but these are not 
 altogether out of place either. It is otherwise, 
 perhaps, with some other examples of Sterne's 
 sentiment, more often in the Journey than in 
 Tristram. But we have this to remember. 
 We are sternly taught to repress our feelings ; 
 writers of Sterne's time were taught to encour- 
 age them. Reticence is the mode of our day, 
 effusiveness was that of his ; it is possible that 
 
 90
 
 STERNE AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 our fashion, as well as his, tends to the ex- 
 treme, and our criticism, therefore, as well. 
 The incident of Maria, for an instance, is set 
 out with considerable coxcombry ; yet it is 
 possible in itself and not unaffecting. The 
 coxcombry was of the day ; the bit of feeling 
 there is in it need not be rejected by ours. 
 We may smile at the tears of our ancestors 
 which gushed so freely, but we need not be 
 angry with them. Judged by their actions 
 they were not less manly than we. And if 
 Sterne's tears had little salt in them sometimes, 
 that does not prove he was unfeeling, as the 
 critics say, any more than we are proved so by 
 our dry eyes. 
 
 Sterne's idea of writing was that it should be 
 as conversation ; and, however inapplicable to 
 most kinds of writing that idea may be, it is 
 certain that most of Tristram Shandy has on 
 one the effect of delightful talk, of table talk, 
 or smoking-room talk, as the case may be. By 
 his ingenious communings with himself, by his 
 invention of imaginary objectors, and so on, he 
 accomplishes, even in his longest digressions 
 from the narrative, the effect of spirited dia- 
 
 91
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 logue. When in another writer you would 
 have a string of propositions, in Sterne there is 
 repartee, quaint evasions, lively clinches. His 
 merry trick of suddenly supposing that he 
 speaks to a woman, imitated often since, of 
 course, has sometimes an inimitable effect. He 
 turns from one to another of an imaginary 
 audience with appropriate phrase and comic 
 tact. Of course, he has been solemnly re- 
 proved for doing so but I will let the critics 
 rest. All his disquisitions are delightful ready 
 conversation, and if ever a writer justified a 
 theory of writing Sterne has done so. When 
 you come to the actual conversations, the dra- 
 matic dialogues, Tristram Shandy would fur- 
 nish you comic scenes for a dozen plays. My 
 Uncle Toby's harping on his hobby of fortifica- 
 tions, and his mistaking every remark of the 
 philosophical Mr. Shandy which can be so 
 mistaken for an illusion to it, are in the truest 
 vein of light comedy, just as Mr. Shandy's 
 choleric outbursts and affectionate atonements 
 are comedy of a subtler cast. What scene in 
 all our comic dramatists, even in Congreve, is 
 more fulfilled of the comic spirit than the re- 
 
 92
 
 STERNE AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 ception of the news of Brother Bobby's death 
 in the parlour and in the kitchen ? Mrs. 
 Shandy, with her good-tempered, acquiescent 
 stupidity, is a splendid foil for a scene of char- 
 acter. Why did Sterne never write a play? 
 Perhaps he could not think of some silly in- 
 trigue for a plot, and so his play, if he had 
 written one, would have been a failure. And 
 we do not need the dramatic form to visualise 
 the scenes in Tristram. 
 
 Probably it is not his quips and cranks, nor 
 his comic scenes, that his lovers remember 
 best. What they think of when they remember 
 Tristram Shandy is first one and then another 
 whole living man or woman coming freshly 
 into the mind. The comic scenes go to make 
 up these characters, of course, but one remem- 
 bers the characters as wholes because they are 
 alive and, so far as we need look, imperishable. 
 They are essentially of general human life ; 
 there is no difficulty in being intimate with 
 them. They are whimsical, eccentric ; but so 
 are your friends and neighbours if you could 
 see them with the eyes of Sterne. For all time 
 Mr. Shandy struggles with his coat-tail pockets 
 
 93
 
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 to get at his handkerchief, and Mrs. Shandy 
 listens at the keyhole, and Uncle Toby potters 
 about his mimic fortifications, and Mrs. Wad- 
 man waits for him with her Bible open, and 
 Trim harangues the servants on life and death, 
 and Susannah lays her hand on his shoulder 
 when he tells of the finest face that ever man 
 looked at, and takes it off when he says it is 
 but corruption, and we might go on for ever. 
 There is no analysing or cataloguing these 
 people ; they are too complete for the one pro- 
 cess, too individual for the other. Even eulogy 
 is impertinent. One forgets the critics and 
 turns to the book. 
 
 94
 
 VII 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 AND HUMANITOMTITY 
 
 A1ONG the books which are left to me 
 from my youthful studies is Ueberweg's 
 History of Philosophy, in two large 
 volumes. I smile at them sometimes 
 when I observe them. They are very dusty. 
 Ueberweg's two large volumes, mostly in small 
 print, recording the opinions of innumerable 
 philosophers, if I never read them, sometimes 
 start in me a train of thought. What have the 
 philosophers done for mankind ? It is not 
 necessarily an empty question, and is not to 
 be answered by the quarrels about Dreyfus or 
 the fact that in our own time, in the unhappy 
 province of Macedonia, one sect of Christians 
 urged the Turks to massacre another sect. The 
 average of mankind is very much as it was, no 
 doubt, and philosophy has done no more than 
 
 95
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 religion to remove its bigotries and cruelties. 
 Even in the tiny minority which in any age has 
 assimilated philosophy in its reason, conduct 
 has seldom been affected. Given two men 
 otherwise alike, Stoicism in the one, Epicurean- 
 ism in the other, will come to much the same 
 thing in action. Sometimes indeed the con- 
 sciousness of philosophy may affect conduct 
 unfavourably : a philosopher, said Horace Wai- 
 pole, was "a supercilious brute." And Shake- 
 speare, anticipating my platitudes as so many 
 of better men, has made his remark about the 
 philosopher and the toothache. 
 
 For all that, philosophers have influenced 
 large affairs at times, even by their philosophy 
 and not by some accidental (and generally dis- 
 astrous) realisation of Plato's wish to have them 
 kings. Rousseau and his like without doubt 
 gave point to the crisis in economics which 
 made the French Revolution. In England I 
 think the complacent exponents of philosophical 
 individualism were responsible to some extent 
 for the slowness with which we realised the 
 horrors of industrial individualism (when you 
 come to philosophy you come to hideous words) 
 
 96
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND HUMANITOMTITY 
 
 two generations since, and for the resistance to 
 the remedies. I mean, of course, the horrible 
 usage of women and children in factories. And 
 here I come upon a thought which occurred to 
 me the other day as having a possible signifi- 
 cance. Philosophers may be irritable, but 
 they have been in the main a comfortable folk ; 
 they have taken a calm view of human sorrows 
 and distresses, and in their theories the most 
 have leaned to optimism. Why? I will tell 
 you. The .vorld not wanting philosophy, the 
 philosopher has generally written at his own 
 expense. Therefore he has generally been a 
 man either living with no necessity to work, or 
 with work little enough to leave him time for 
 philosophy. The same thing may be said, if 
 it may be said without irreverence, of many 
 theologians and writing divines, ascetic men, 
 perhaps, but with their ascetic needs provided. 
 A deal of calmness, a deal of optimism we find 
 in comfortably provided men ! A base thought, 
 you think? But look you. If you or I, men 
 toiling for scanty subsistence, were to write, for 
 instance, a treatise on the evils of individualism, 
 should we not be inclined to bitterness when 
 
 H 97
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 we think of the many people, some of them for 
 certain drunken men and brainless women, 
 whom that system gives enormous incomes to 
 play with in return for nothing? But your 
 philosopher is calm, sometimes tolerant, occa- 
 sionally (when an eminent Socialist) flippant. 
 I am not thinking of Pangloss and Candide ; I 
 do not say our toil upsets an optimistic theory ; 
 I only say that philosophers are generally in 
 comfortable circumstances. 
 
 Let us double on the track. What have 
 philosophers done for mankind ? For the 
 average very little at all. For the minority 
 which has read them very little in conduct. 
 But to this minority they have given a great 
 deal of innocent pleasure. Your emotions in 
 reading an exciting novel are mostly pleasur- 
 able, but partly painful. Suspense is painful, 
 indignation is painful, you are eager that justice 
 should be done or for the right discovery, and 
 eagerness is of the painful (though slightly so), 
 not the pleasant emotions. Poetry, fine poetry, 
 brings tears to your eyes, it stirs the depths of 
 melancholy memories. But if you can read 
 philosophy, there is your pleasure unalloyed. 
 
 98
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND HUMANITOMTITY 
 
 The philosopher shares with the clown the 
 glory of bestowing an unqualified pleasure on 
 mankind. And even the laughter the clown 
 excites is apt to have its reaction. There is no 
 such unqualified enjoyment as that of the pure 
 intelligence. No matter the aim or the result. 
 So that the process be consistent with itself and 
 worthy of your intellect, your pleasure is com- 
 plete. We read it too little in these days, save 
 when a philosopher startles us, as did Mr. 
 Myers, and that is not often. Probably if I 
 myself had read more philosophy I should not 
 have needed you to tell me that all these things 
 have been said before. 
 
 I would say a word or two on humanitomtity, 
 of which a passage above has reminded me. It 
 was the word with which his friends mocked 
 Nevill Beauchamp's " humanity." Mr. Mere- 
 dith puts the scene at the time of the Crimean 
 War, and is it not curious that it was then, 
 when " humanity " as a political profession was 
 mostly preached, that one of the greatest crimes 
 against humanity ever done on the earth was 
 being done? By whom? By the political friends 
 and allies of the eminent men who preached 
 
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 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 humanity. One of the greatest crimes : I 
 say it advisedly. For this murderous usage 
 of children in factories was not the work 
 of religious fanaticism, or of war-begotten 
 passions, but of greed, greed and a selfishness 
 worse than bestial. It was done by men who 
 subscribed to a great political party and whose 
 aims were large homes and luxuries for their 
 womenkind. An interesting study, the minds 
 of their women, who probably patronised 
 charities. If ever an enlightened age sums up 
 our civilisation, that crime will weigh heavily, 
 I think, and I can no more imitate the calmness 
 of a philosopher when I write about it than I 
 could talk calmly to a man who murdered a 
 child of my own. No wonder Mr. Everard 
 Romfrey talked about humanitomtity. This 
 curious partiality of the political professors of 
 humanity survives. The atrocities in Mace- 
 donia are shouted in our ears, the atrocities in 
 Finland are almost unnoticed. But while we 
 compress our lips at humanitomtity, it is well 
 not to forget that the genuine humanitarianism 
 which existed among our fathers was a noble 
 emotion, and that the policy which tried 
 
 too
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND HUMAN ITOMTITY 
 
 genuinely to act on it was a noble policy. As 
 a policy circumstances have for long been 
 against it. It is not the fault of England that 
 other empires, consolidating and reaching out, 
 have forced her to play for her own hand. 
 " Humanity" may qualify her actions still : it 
 can no longer be their direct aim. We must 
 guard our own first, or we can guard nothing. 
 Still. ... It was a noble ideal when it was 
 true, and one feels kindly to those who let it 
 still unwisely obsess them when the obsession 
 is true also. 
 
 101
 
 WE are growing richer in letters and 
 journals with decent rapidity. But 
 a little while since Mr. Rowland 
 Prothero gave us the last of his 
 five hundred new Byron letters ; later still we 
 have had the correspondence of Lady Sarah 
 Lennox ; and now from the Shades comes Mr. 
 Thomas Creevey, M.P., gossip and past-master 
 in the use of other people's houses. The two 
 sets of letters I have chosen from my own 
 reading to put by Mr. Creevey 's make an odd 
 contrast with them, by-the-by ; Byron, with 
 his world-wide interest and stormy passions, 
 and Lady Sarah, with her romantic history and 
 indestructible fascination, make up a strange 
 trio with Mr. Creevey, shrewdly calculating 
 
 1 The Creevey Papers: a selection from the correspondence and 
 diaries of the late Thomas Creevey, M.P., 1768-1838. Edited by 
 Sir Herbert Maxwell. Published by John Murray. 
 
 I O2
 
 MR. THOMAS CREEVEY 
 
 the minor probabilities of politics, and proud 
 of the imitations with which he could enliven 
 a dinner table. But neither of them would 
 have disdained his company, nor would he 
 have been in the least put about by theirs. 
 For if he had not a great soul, he had an 
 amusing observation, and if circumstances led 
 him to live habitually in the society of the 
 great, he was never a snob, but took people 
 on their merits, as he saw them for the moment. 
 It strikes me, I am afraid, as a remarkable fact 
 that Creevey, a man "of no origin," as the 
 pleasant phrase was, whose talents were not 
 really important in politics, and who was a 
 poor man to boot, was able to live where 
 "dukes were two a penny," so to speak, and 
 to have for friends so many of the social and 
 political lights, without condescension on their 
 part or subservience on his. I fear it seems to 
 me remarkable, considering that he was with- 
 out any extraordinary force of character, or 
 the genius that will always upset the pre- 
 possessions of ordinary men, and I doubt if a 
 contemporary Creevey, neither rich nor well- 
 advertised, could easily hold such a position. 
 
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 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 The difference, if it exists, I take to lie in the 
 fact that in the time of Wellington and Grey 
 there still prevailed an idea of caste which 
 made such men a Creevey's technical superiors, 
 but left them free to meet him on terms of 
 absolute equality on the ordinary occasions 
 of life ; whereas nowadays, such men, clinging 
 consciously or not to a distinction which is 
 professedly abolished, would be more inclined 
 to intimate the distinction in their attitude 
 or, rather, not men of character and capacity, 
 like Grey and Wellington, but inferior men of 
 their position in life, whom Creevey frequented 
 as easily. Were the contemporary Creevey 
 rich, he might, perhaps, marry into their 
 families with less difficulty than his forerunner, 
 how rich soever : that is another question. 
 But I will not pursue this excursion into the 
 lesser philosophy of social life ; it is easy to 
 be prejudiced against one's times. It is clear, 
 however, that Thomas Creevey had a simple 
 self - respect, and was never anything of a 
 parasite. I find him a great deal more in- 
 dependent (for example) than Thomas Moore. 
 Unfortunately, however, good qualities of 
 104
 
 MR THOMAS CREEVEY 
 
 character are not the best recommendations 
 for a letter- writer to posterity. It is pleasant 
 to respect Mr. Creevey for his independence, 
 but for us it is far more important that he was 
 very indiscreet, a considerable scandalmonger, 
 and apt to be both violent and malicious in 
 his dislikes. When the Princess Charlotte 
 died, and all the Royal Dukes had to start 
 a-marrying, the Duke of Kent sent for his 
 friend Creevey in Brussels, expatiated on the 
 situation, and appealing 1 to Creevey 's own feel- 
 ings in regard to Mrs. Creevey, pointed out 
 the painfulness of his position in regard to 
 Mme. St. Laurent, a lady with whom he had 
 lived for twenty-seven years. Pathetic, in his 
 way, this elderly gentleman, who had done no 
 harm, and merely because of his birth might 
 have to break up his establishment and revolu- 
 tionise his habits, and at least one would have 
 thought the conversation confidential. But 
 Mr. Creevey greatly increased his reputation 
 for amusing talk by repeating it to his friends. 
 Again, when he was staying with Mr. Lambton 
 (afterwards Lord Durham), no delicacy pre- 
 vented his describing his host in a letter as 
 
 105
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 a " stingy, swindling, tyrannical kip." I admit 
 the provocation to have been severe : Lord 
 Durham had not given Mr. Creevey enough 
 to eat at dinner. His violence is usually re- 
 served for his political opponents, for he was 
 a partisan after the manner of the day, and 
 among those on his side for Brougham I 
 shall come to a pretty example later on but 
 old friendship did not prevent his glancing 
 pretty sharply at faults when he saw them. 
 (He looked with a tolerant eye, however, on 
 the faults of his own youth: "About twelve 
 years ago he wrote to me to inquire the character 
 of a mistress who had lived with me some time 
 before, which mistress he took upon my re- 
 commendation " and, by the way, Charles 
 Greville tells us that he left his papers to his 
 mistress ; but in this matter it is enough to 
 say that, not being a Puritan, the fashion of 
 the period did not force him to pretend to be 
 one.) That of the moral faults which help to 
 make him entertaining. He was also intensely 
 inquisitive. When he heard that the corre- 
 spondence of George and Mrs. Fitzherbert had 
 been burned, "Oh dear! oh dear!" says he, 
 
 106
 
 MR. THOMAS CREEVEY 
 
 "that I could not have seen them," and the 
 destruction of George's letters to Lady Jersey 
 was " damned provoking" to him. He would 
 not have burnt Byron's diary, you may be sure. 
 He was sometimes rather an old woman in the 
 sort of tattle he would gravely repeat by letter, 
 such as Lady Grey's complaining that her 
 daughter-in-law took down her remarks in a 
 journal : that again is to our advantage. He 
 had a strong, though not a delicate, sense of 
 humour. After persons and politics and in 
 regard to both his judgment was shrewd within 
 the limits of his prejudices, and his observation 
 always quick for details he dwells most on 
 houses, furniture, and the like, in which he 
 was curious, like Horace Walpole ; he was 
 very severe on the new Buckingham Palace ; 
 but he knew nothing of pictures, and could go 
 to Petworth without noticing the Romneys, 
 though that, as his editor says, was a general 
 deficiency of his time. His style is entirely 
 colloquial. There, I think, he has an advan- 
 tage over Croker, with whom Sir Herbert 
 Maxwell compares him. A fine literary sense 
 brought to the service of letter- writing, and 
 
 107
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 thoroughly bent to it, the gift of Horace 
 Walpole, is one thing ; to write letters in the 
 manner of essays, which is largely Croker's 
 way, is another. Neither Croker nor Creevey 
 is to be mentioned as a letter - writer with 
 Walpole, but Byron, who at least approached 
 him, and who could write good enough 
 " literary" prose when he chose, was content 
 to be colloquial in his letters, and Creevey was 
 well inspired to be so also. I attended pretty 
 closely to his slang, and in general to his use 
 of phrases, having a fad for the niceties of 
 my native tongue in its progression. Slang 
 which occurs in Lady Sarah's earlier letters 
 i.e. in the 'sixties and 'seventies of the 
 eighteenth century is not in Mr. Creevey 's 
 no " grubbing up" a conversation, or " lend- 
 ing a tascusa." In fact, his slang is quite 
 modern. His acquaintances are often " chaps," 
 and " Croker had made a damned rum figure " 
 in the House. His swearing, for which I 
 noticed that a reviewer censured poor Creevey, 
 is all damns, a word I have heard in my time 
 from people by no means pariahs, the reviewer 
 will be surprised to hear. A lady who had 
 
 1 08
 
 MR. THOMAS CREEVEY 
 
 gone astray was " known to be a 'neat 'un.' ' 
 " Carnarvon never uttered," is an aposiopesis 
 I had thought was of only the other day, and 
 so " really beyond" and " really too" smack 
 of the eighteen - eighties. The second Mrs. 
 Tanquerays of the period (as Lady Darlington, 
 and the wife of a son of his friend, Lord 
 Sefton) are poplollies, or pops. "Wouldn't 
 touch it," is used in the sense of not respond- 
 ing to praise, etc., etc., a slightly different use 
 from our own, but these two expressions, and 
 the afore - mentioned "kip," are almost the 
 only obsolete slang. And so much for the 
 qualities of the letters and diaries. 
 
 Their interest is chiefly in their content, and 
 I think the best plan by which I can give an 
 idea of that is to name some few of the more 
 notable persons who figure in the volumes, and 
 to repeat something of what he says of them. 
 Of Creevey's own life it is enough for my pur- 
 pose to say that he was born in 1768, went into 
 Parliament for a pocket borough in 1802, and 
 from that time until his death in 1838 was 
 intimate with the Whig chiefs, especially with 
 Lord Grey, and with the Whig society, and 
 knew in a way nearly everybody else. 
 
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 The whole of Charles Fox's career is 
 familiar, but in most of the entertaining, 
 intimate records which we have of him he is 
 an uncontrolled young man, offending every 
 one by his gambling, his debts, his innumer- 
 able excesses, and- conciliating every one by 
 his wit, his manners, and his friendly humanity. 
 So in Selwyn and Walpole ; in Lady Sarah he 
 is also a charming boy. It is a little odd to 
 find him in Creevey's earliest letters become 
 "Old Charley." (He had always been 
 "Charles" to his friends; "Charley" be- 
 longed to the wider circle of admirers. We 
 all know Charles's and Charlies, and it would 
 be a congenial exercise to discriminate be- 
 tween the names, but I forbear.) Of course 
 he fascinated Creevey also, who calls him 
 this "noble animal," and "amiable crea- 
 ture," and so shows him in his last years still 
 the unaffected, kindly genius he had always 
 been, distinguished by sheer force of intellect, 
 in all else the natural friend to all pleasures 
 and frailties. It is good to know that in 1803 
 "you would be perfectly astonished at the 
 vigour of body, the energy of mind, the inno- 
 
 no
 
 MR. THOMAS CREEVEY 
 
 cent playfulness and happiness of Fox. The 
 contrast between him and his old associates is 
 the most marvellous thing I ever saw they 
 having all the air of shattered debauchees, of 
 passing gaming, drinking, sleepless nights, 
 whereas the old leader of the gang might 
 really pass for the pattern and effect of do- 
 mestic good order." Constitution, partly or 
 mostly, but also the essentially innocent soul, 
 the native childlikeness of that lovable pro- 
 digy, I like to fancy ; it is pleasant to have the 
 record. Pitt, of course, is "the fellow"; the 
 useful working of our glorious party system, 
 which ensures that half the politicians shall 
 belittle any great man on the other side, was 
 in strong force. 
 
 The Royal Family was honoured by afford- 
 ing Mr. Creevey a great part of his anecdotes, 
 jokes, and reflections. I cannot but think 
 there was something heartless and unamiable 
 in the manner in which the letter-writers and 
 diarists of the period speak of it. Of course, 
 the extreme reverence of our attitude to the 
 Crown, which is a creation of Queen Victoria's 
 later years, must not be looked for. It would 
 
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 have seemed un-English to Creevey's con- 
 temporaries. I can understand, also, the con- 
 temptuous references to the first two Georges, 
 who were despised as foreigners of an inferior 
 social civilisation, and were unkindly men. 
 George III., too, who in many ways claimed 
 respect, was naturally hated for his successful 
 fighting in politics ; it is natural that Brougham 
 should refer to him as the " old ruffian " 
 in writing to Creevey, and that "the gentle- 
 man at the end of the Mall " should be his 
 most impartial description. But George the 
 Fourth, though he might not claim respect, 
 might reasonably complain (as he complained 
 to Croker) of ingratitude and unkindness to- 
 wards him personally. The Whigs thought 
 he threw them over. Good ; a reason for 
 opposition to him. But, as well as courting 
 them politically, before he was Regent, he had 
 shown a great deal of genuine personal kind- 
 ness to individuals. Creevey, for instance, 
 was entertained over and over again at the 
 Pavilion ; Mrs. Creevey was complimented 
 with Mrs. Fitzherbert's confidences, and so 
 on. (It is hardly necessary to mention that 
 
 112
 
 MR. THOMAS CREEVEY 
 
 Mrs. Fitzherbert's marriage was regarded as 
 regularising her position, or that even when 
 she had ceased to live with the Regent, she 
 was "received" in English society.) But as 
 soon as it was clear that the Regent intended 
 not to dismiss his father's Ministers his " folly 
 and villainy " became clear to Mr. Creevey, 
 and from that time onwards poor "Prinny," 
 as they called him even after he was King, is 
 handled mercilessly and at times brutally, both 
 by Creevey and his correspondents. It was 
 the mode of the time, and it was unfair, be- 
 cause if the Royalties were fair game for 
 criticism, as of course they were, they were 
 also entitled to ordinary pity and sympathy, 
 and in the main they were all, George and his 
 brothers perhaps one should except the Duke 
 of Cumberland very human and good-natured 
 people. But " Prinny has let loose his belly, 
 which now reaches his knees ; otherwise he is 
 said to be well " (Lord Folkestone to Creevey 
 in 1818 : George had given up stays) is a fair 
 specimen of their treatment, and it is rather 
 coarse-fibred. There is, however, a deal that 
 is amusing in all this abuse of Prinny. As, 
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 for example, the Duke's attacking him for 
 swearing of all things in the world. " By 
 God ! you never saw such a figure in your life 
 as he is," the Duke is made to say in Creevey's 
 journal. "Then he speaks and swears so 
 like old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not 
 ashamed to walk into a room with him." A 
 touch of Creevey's humour here. It was Lord 
 Thanet who called George the "bourgeois 
 gentilhomme," a phrase which, as Creevey 
 said, would have annoyed him more than "our 
 fat friend." His brothers were treated with 
 the same unkind raillery, and yet they seem to 
 have been homely and unaffected. It was a 
 tradition, no doubt, this hostile attitude, per- 
 haps better than servility. A few stories, 
 however, of William's genuine, though un- 
 dignified, kindliness are related pleasantly, 
 and Creevey, like the rest of the world, was 
 conciliated by Victoria's virgin modesty and 
 grace ; there is a picture one can see of her 
 struggling to get off a tight glove when he 
 was presented to her at Brighton. George's 
 singing has often been mentioned (and criti- 
 cised), but I had never heard before of his 
 
 114
 
 MR. THOMAS CREEVEY 
 
 lending his vocal assistance to the band in the 
 Pavilion, "and very loud, too," Mr. Creevey 
 says. All this early part about him shows 
 at least a pleasant host, and the pumped-up 
 indignation about Queen Caroline might have 
 been less bitter. Still, he was certainly bring- 
 ing the monarchy down with a run, and when 
 one reads that Dr. O'Reilly, who attended 
 him on his death-bed, said that "with com- 
 mon prudence he might have lived to a hun- 
 dred," one reflects that perhaps his excesses 
 were for the best. 
 
 Creevey 's conversations with Wellington are 
 most life-like. Croker's tell one infinitely 
 more of military and political points ; but he 
 never gives us the "real thing," the Duke, as 
 he really spoke, in all his bluff sincerity and 
 unconsciousness. Creevey started by under- 
 valuing him as a political opponent, but he was 
 brought round by the Duke's good sense, or, 
 perhaps, a little by the great man's friendli- 
 ness. One enjoys his saying, just after 
 Waterloo, "By God ! I don't think it would 
 have done if I had not been there." Creevey, 
 discreet for once, omitted this sentence in 
 
 "5
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 sending home a report of the conversation, 
 thinking it might sound vainglorious, and 
 rightly perceiving that the Duke had no 
 thought of himself at all. He showed "no 
 triumph or joy," but spoke of the affair as a 
 piece of business done, a grave business which 
 had cost so many lives, just, in fact, as 
 Englishmen like their generals to speak, even 
 to the Duke's plainness. "It has been a 
 damned serious business ; Bliicher and I have 
 lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice 
 thing the nearest run thing you ever saw in 
 your life." Surely if ever a good Englishman 
 spoke it was then. 
 
 There is not much to say of Creevey's 
 friends, unless one were to dive into the 
 smaller politics and pick up very minute 
 pearls indeed of added information. He was 
 at home with Grey, and Lord Sefton, and the 
 twelfth Duke of Norfolk, whom he calls 
 "Barney" or "Scroop." It was Sefton who 
 offered him a dinner in London whenever he 
 dined nowhere else ; Grey, with whom he 
 stayed several weeks at a time. With Holland 
 House he was sometimes familiar, sometimes 
 
 116
 
 MR. THOMAS CREEVEY 
 
 at feud, resenting Lady Holland's bullying 
 ways one remembers Melbourne's " damned 
 if I'll dine with you at all !" and I think 
 enjoying the overtures she would make for his 
 recall. The people he cuts at in passing are 
 legion. He was friends with Brougham at 
 first, nominally so till the end, but, like many 
 other men, soon began to suspect that brilliant 
 eccentric of double-dealing and rapidly arrived 
 at his " low lying dirty shuffling villany." To 
 Macaulay I was pleased it would be tedious 
 to explain why to read that he took a great 
 dislike. " Yesterday I dined at Stanley's. 
 Mr. Macaulay and Mr. Gordon were the only 
 performers after dinner, and two more noisy, 
 vulgar fellows I never saw. Fitzroy Somerset, 
 Kempt, McDonald, and I settled them between 
 ourselves afterwards." He disliked Lord John 
 Russell, and was of opinion that D'Orsay was 
 " as ultra a villain as either city," London or 
 Paris, "can produce." That I was sorry to 
 read, but, after all, it is more amusing to read 
 censorious than eulogistic judgments, is it not? 
 Creevey gives you a great many. 
 
 Useless to extract many more of the interest- 
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 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 ing points : how he travelled in the earliest 
 railway, and was terrified by its twenty miles 
 an hour ; how a balloon drew out the members 
 from the House of Commons, so that there 
 was a count-out, and Brougham, who had 
 been preparing a speech all day, could not 
 deliver it ; how Lady Holland described Lady 
 C. Lamb's notorious Glenarvon to Mrs. Cree- 
 vey, and gave her the key, and the like. I 
 am reminded by this that one sometimes needs 
 a key to Mr. Creevey, where Sir Herbert 
 Maxwell has suppressed names. For his edit- 
 ing in general I offer my humble praises. The 
 book did not require the extraordinarily 
 thorough annotation which Mr. Prothero has 
 given Byron's letters. I think that Sir Herbert 
 might have given occasionally the least bit 
 more of information, for the sake of readers 
 who are not well "up" in the period ; Hob- 
 house, for example, is mentioned several 
 times, and it would have added to their interest 
 to be told that he was Byron's most intimate 
 friend ; or when Queen Adelaide's refusal to 
 receive the Duchess of St. Albans (relict of 
 Mr. Coutts) is related, they might have been 
 
 118
 
 MR. THOMAS CREEVEY 
 
 told that she had been Mrs. Mellon, the 
 famous actress. Mr. Creevey will make his 
 way to other than the well-informed. In the 
 main, however, Sir Herbert's identifications 
 and dates are all that is required, and his 
 interspersed narrative is excellently to the 
 point. But I am not sure that his suppres- 
 sions are always wise, quite sure they are 
 not always logical. He speaks of a " severe 
 system of selection," and sometimes gives 
 initials only once, when all that is said is 
 that certain people were talking scandal. 
 Creevey died in 1838 ; was any one likely to 
 be aggrieved ? It is assumed that the King 
 does not object to scandalous stories about 
 his great-uncles^ or even about his grand- 
 father ; and if that is so, need his subjects 
 be supposed more touchy? In one place 
 Creevey gives the parentage of Captain Garth, 
 which Sir Herbert Maxwell makes " the Duke 
 
 of . . . ," and the "Princess ," and then 
 
 remarks that he would "hesitate to withdraw 
 the veil," if Madame de Lieven had not done 
 so. Withdraw the veil indeed ! I know I am 
 on more slippery ground if I add that the 
 
 119
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 suppression of coarse phrases, the "terms 
 too little equivocal for modern taste," does not 
 meet my approval. My reasons are that these 
 books are produced for grown-up people, who 
 would not be supposed to be in danger of 
 adopting offensive terms into their own con- 
 versation, that the very omission gives a dis- 
 proportionate importance to mere fashions of 
 speech, that the terms in question may be 
 interesting for the history of language, and 
 that since we do not expect contemporary 
 notions of taste in other respects, when we 
 read long dead authors, it is foolish to force 
 our contemporary taste upon them in this 
 respect. But I have argued the matter before, 
 and know that I am alone in my opinion. No 
 one ever says or writes anything coarse now, 
 or can endure that his grandfather ever did 
 so either. Be it said that Sir Herbert Maxwell 
 is less squeamish than most other English 
 editors. I take leave of my pleasant gossip a 
 little saddened at the end. For though we 
 may dig up more of his like, I doubt if any 
 one living is preparing a rivalry with him. 
 We push more, and have less leisure generally, 
 
 120
 
 MR. THOMAS CREEVEY 
 
 it may be, but I fancy that the Creevey type 
 of man, the man who was in, and of, the most 
 important political or other life of the time, 
 but had leisure from his own advancement to 
 observe and write down, is too scarce. Also, 
 I fancy, that the society he describes, where 
 social gifts were still valued for their own sake, 
 and money was less of an open sesame any- 
 where, must have been more agreeable, on the 
 whole, than any general society we are likely 
 soon to see again. ... I began by noting 
 our increasing richness in old letters and 
 diaries ; I will end by hoping that the increase 
 may continue. When we see, I forget how 
 many thousand, new novels come out every 
 year, novels which are, for the most part, the 
 superfluous creation of imaginary dullards in a 
 world that is full of real ones, we may surely 
 find room for more of these genuine records of 
 interesting life. 
 
 " Could you melt ten thousand pimples 
 Into half a dozen dimples " 
 
 Could we exchange the novels of Messrs. 
 A., B., and C. for another Walpole, or even 
 another Creevey ! 
 
 121
 
 IX 
 
 ABOUT OUR FICTION 
 
 THE thought has occurred to me that the 
 English novel, as we know it from 
 Fielding to Mr. Meredith and Mr. 
 Hardy, is in point of artistic significance 
 dying, and nearly dead ; that, on the other 
 hand, the art of narrative fiction generally is 
 extremely vital in itself and even important in 
 our lives. I am far from stating this as an 
 original discovery of my own, but I do not 
 remember to have seen it set forth in print, 
 and I am tempted therefore to contrive some 
 analysis of the matter, to separate if I can what 
 is only an amiable survival from what is ener- 
 getic and progressive, and to indicate some 
 tendencies and probabilities. No sort of class 
 list or hierarchy is in my mind. I once at- 
 tempted such a thing, and still rejoice that 
 I did it anonymously ; it was not a discreet 
 
 122
 
 ABOUT OUR FICTION 
 
 thing to attempt. The subject is tolerably 
 voluminous, and had best be treated for the 
 most part in outline ; if I mention a name here 
 and there it is not that I think no other names 
 worth mentioning, but that those in question 
 illustrate the argument. 
 
 But first, since this is an examination of an 
 art, and not one of the book-market or the 
 effects of popular education, we must put aside 
 a great majority of the novels which are sold, 
 and an overwhelming majority of those which 
 are published. The multitude of these is a 
 constant subject of rather tedious complaint. 
 Indignant essayists are for ever counting the 
 hundreds or thousands of novels published 
 every week or every month, and throwing them 
 at our heads. There is no need to make a coil 
 of the matter. It is a reading age and country, 
 and our people are at present trivial in their 
 interests ; inevitably, what they read will be 
 trivial also ; most of their favourite novels are 
 trivial in effect, and do not signify to our 
 purpose. And of the enormous number pub- 
 lished, but not read, it is to be said that novels 
 have been for some time in the air, and a 
 
 123
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 crowd of amateurs has been naturally attracted 
 to the writing of them. It is a fashion, as 
 strumming on the piano was, or " sketching," 
 with the difference that a little money will force 
 the novels outside the range of personal ac- 
 quaintances, force them, to wit, on the atten- 
 tion of certain wretches called reviewers, whom 
 a foolish custom of the newspapers compels to 
 write about them. Not to appear contemp- 
 tuous or inhuman, I will confess that such a 
 general impulse once drove me also to write 
 a novel, just as on occasion I have played 
 cricket incompetent, but anxious to oblige. 
 It is all very unimportant, and perhaps the 
 general uselessness of the fashion is balanced 
 by its discovery, here and there, of a genuine 
 gift a thought which I regret was not sug- 
 gested by my personal confession. But the 
 mass of catch-shilling novels and novels written 
 to soothe an innocent vanity does not now 
 concern us. 
 
 Evidence for the assertion that the type of 
 novel most familiar to us and our forefathers, 
 since Fielding fairly started it, is almost ex- 
 hausted, may not leap to the eye of the reader. 
 
 124
 
 ABOUT OUR FICTION 
 
 Let him consider of what elements the English 
 novel, on the average of its greatest examples, 
 was composed. First, there was the story, the 
 yarn, with its incidents ; secondly, there was 
 the examination or development or psychology 
 generally of the leading characters, who, it is 
 important to remark, were usually not extreme 
 or out-of-the-way characters, but fair examples 
 of average humanity, like Tom Jones, Arthur 
 Pendennis, Clive Newcome, Harry Richmond, 
 Evan Harrington, or any of Miss Austen's 
 characters ; thirdly, there was the drawing of 
 remarkable or out-of-the-way characters, strik- 
 ing or humorous, subordinate in the scheme 
 of the book, or the subordinate treatment of 
 special phases of life. This is a rough state- 
 ment, and to be made nicely accurate would 
 need a multitude of qualifications, but I think 
 it will be allowed to hold in the main. The 
 fact that the leading character was most often 
 an ordinary person may be explained by the 
 picaresque origin of the novel by the con- 
 venience that a person whose office was to be 
 a peg for a series of incidents and adventures, 
 should himself be familiar and taken for granted, 
 
 125
 
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 so that the surprising events and people he en- 
 countered should stand out the more distinctly. 
 The effect of this origin lasted long after the 
 picaresque conception had given place to that 
 of a coherent complication of story or of a com- 
 posite picture of life. The three elements, of 
 course, have been combined in various degrees. 
 In Walter Scott the story is predominant, 
 though it was, perhaps, on his minor characters 
 that his finest genius, that wide, observant, 
 humour-loving eye of his, was exercised; Miss 
 Austen always, and Thackeray at times, were 
 chiefly concerned with the thorough exposition 
 of common character; of Fielding and Dickens 
 we remember the minor, striking, eccentric 
 characters more than the protagonists or the 
 stories. But the point is that in all our great 
 novelists, down to Mr. Meredith and Mr. 
 Hardy, as in those of France down to recent 
 years, as in those of Russia so far, these three 
 elements are plain. I take for an example that 
 novel of Mr. Meredith's, which after much 
 pondering and delightful re-reading, I have 
 come to think his greatest The Adventures 
 of Harry Richmond. There we have two 
 
 126
 
 ABOUT OUR FICTION 
 
 extreme characters, it is true, not subordinate, 
 but the essential protagonists of the book, the 
 Squire and Richmond Roy. They are surely 
 of the very greatest, the most splendid and 
 complete creations in English literature, and 
 both are, as I have admitted, extreme and 
 unusual characters. But still the other ele- 
 ments are strongly present. The more or less 
 ordinary man is there for hero, and on his 
 psychology Mr. Meredith has spent a wealth 
 of minute pains ; and there is the yarn, in this 
 case true romance, charged with the right 
 atmosphere, lively and compelling. Certainly 
 I think that no work so fine has been done in 
 English fiction in the thirty years since Harry 
 Richmond was written, and it may stand in this 
 place for a supreme example of the old, large 
 method. 
 
 An art is eternal, but the modes of it are 
 recurring fashions. It seems almost as though 
 the mere persistence of a mode in art, the mere 
 number of its examples, clogged at length the 
 spirit of the artist, and impelled him to another 
 mode on pain of losing vitality and zest. In so 
 far, at least, as this mode of fiction implies the 
 
 127
 
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 elaborate picturing of common life and common 
 characters, he may well feel that anything he 
 can hope to do has been done so often so 
 often and so much better. Here in England at 
 present our common life and our ordinary 
 types of people have been presented to us in 
 fiction over and over again. We are chang- 
 ing, of course, improving or growing worse, 
 but there has not been, as yet, any general 
 break in our common interests and aptitudes 
 since the time of Thackeray, at least. It may 
 be that such a change will be disclosed before 
 the reader and I are dead. But now the most 
 fanciful of us can only see a beginning. In 
 one attitude, for example, I myself seem to 
 detect the beginning of a change the general 
 attitude to capital and property. The motive 
 of so many old novels the question, namely, 
 whether or not the hero or heroine was to be 
 given the means to live in luxury without work- 
 ing is hardly so thrilling or interesting a 
 motive to us as to our grandparents. Other 
 changes, slight as yet, might be mentioned : 
 the increasing subtlety of our snobbishness, 
 for another instance not its lessening strength. 
 
 128
 
 ABOUT OUR FICTION 
 
 But in the main the artist who would concern 
 himself in the old, large manner with our 
 common life has only repetitions to achieve, 
 and for this reason among others, it may be 
 (the hint is not at all exhaustive), he cannot be 
 vital in it. 
 
 However this may be, my point is that with 
 Mr. Meredith and Mr. Hardy the novel as we 
 have so far known it has reached its last vital 
 exemplars. It continues to be written, but 
 there is little energy or worth of art left in it. 
 It will not be required of me that I should take 
 the writers of it one by one and exhibit my 
 reasons for thinking this of them. The opinion 
 would remain a mere opinion, and I should 
 have performed a task almost as useless as 
 unpleasant. I am not denying all merit to 
 these writers, either; observant, accomplished, 
 humorous, they may often be. I think merely 
 that as artists they are otiose, not vital. And 
 I would suggest to the reader that he and I 
 may differ in our classification of modes, so 
 that he may think I am silently condemning 
 some writer for whom my admiration is really 
 unbounded : I would suggest it especially to 
 K 129
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 a reader who himself writes fiction. It may be 
 well to add what will be clear later on, but I 
 would not appear inconsistent for a moment 
 that by " common life" I have meant the average 
 life depicted in our social novels, the life of ordi- 
 nary, well-to-do people. There are phases of life 
 which may be called common, as being lived 
 by multitudes of people, but are, from the 
 novelist's point of view, fresh ground, or nearly 
 so. The point in this connection is that these 
 phases are his main subject, not a subordinate 
 addition to his theme. Also, if I am right 
 in thinking that a stateness of the novelist's 
 common life and characters may partly prevent 
 an artist who would be vital from writing a 
 novel of the old order, that, of course, does not 
 apply to short stories. Such life and such 
 people may furnish subjects for short stones by 
 no means otiose, because there even a slight 
 change, a subtle originality, may cover the 
 whole small canvas. 
 
 I come to the positive and more interesting 
 part of my subject some account of the con- 
 temporary fiction, which, to my mind, has 
 energy and vitality. 
 
 130
 
 ABOUT OUR FICTION 
 
 It seems to me that the three elements which 
 I have mentioned are no longer fused in this 
 fiction, but are taken separately for exclusive 
 treatment. The artist no longer contemplates 
 a large and complicated picture, compact of 
 these elements, but takes one, and is wholly 
 occupied by it, concerns himself with one 
 motive, is driven by one impulse. The in- 
 fluence of the short story, brought to so artistic 
 a finish of recent years in France, may have 
 something to do with this. It disposes writers 
 to think on single lines, as it were. Indeed, 
 many recent novels I have seen struck me as 
 short stories spoiled, inartistically expanded to 
 make a book ; but of course the single motive 
 may be such as rightly to fill the bulkiest volume. 
 We find, then, each of the three elements in 
 constant and varied play, single play, with one 
 exception. The psychology of the common 
 life of old novels, or the description merely 
 of its outward aspects, which I have fancied 
 the chief obstacle to the traditional practice 
 by vital writers, naturally is not much exercised 
 by itself. The work of Mr. Henry James, of 
 course, occurs at once to us. There, un- 
 
 131
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 doubtedly, is a fine artist who concerns himself 
 elaborately and minutely (at times) with the 
 most trivial actions and thoughts of the ordin- 
 ary well-to-do classes. Indeed, he has pushed 
 this so far as almost to have created a new art. 
 It might be called the art of leaving nothing 
 out. Pepys is supposed to be the most 
 minutely comprehensive of diarists, but if 
 Pepys had written his diary as Mr. James writes 
 some of his novels, in place of saying "up 
 and dressed " he would have said, " pushed the 
 bed-clothes in a direction opposite from myself 
 with one hand, assisting the later development 
 of the process by a spasmodic action of my 
 legs. The encumbrance of the bed-clothing 
 fairly removed from my person, drew my feet 
 in a position to facilitate," etc., and so on 
 for many pages. It is an art rather curious 
 to me than attractive, and I reserve my warmer 
 admiration for that other and quite distinct 
 phase of Mr. James, when he presents the 
 weird, the uncanny, or the morbid to our 
 minds with an amazing force of penetration. 
 You will hardly find, however, another contem- 
 porary English writer, approaching Mr. Henry 
 
 132
 
 ABOUT OUR FICTION 
 
 James's power, who is concerned with this 
 division, the exposition of normal, educated 
 English life. 
 
 The story, the yarn, is eternal. While men 
 have any imagination left about them a story 
 will tickle them. I wonder how many superior 
 people when they see a halfpenny morning 
 newspaper are above reading its surprising 
 feuilleton ? I am not sure, however, that the 
 romance, as we generally understand the term, 
 can be said to flourish very remarkably among 
 us. In this respect, at least, it is a pity the 
 old style of novel, with its leisurely combina- 
 tion of features, is no longer the model, be- 
 cause by attending exclusively to the mechan- 
 ism of their stories and neglecting character 
 almost altogether, our contemporary romancers 
 run a risk of failing to interest us. Their 
 stories are ingenious mechanism, very compli- 
 cated and clever, but we are watching machines, 
 not men and women. Their protagonists have 
 to be monsters of physical strength to perform 
 their grandiose feats, and monsters of stupidity 
 duly to fall into their difficulties. It is gener- 
 ally a hollow business, I think ; I, for one, am 
 
 133
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 indifferent to their fate. Above all, these 
 romances lack it is usual to apologise for 
 the inevitable phrase lack atmosphere. Mr. 
 Chesterton it is reassuring to me to find 
 myself at one with a younger critic has 
 pointed out very aptly how the romantic atmo- 
 sphere never fails Walter Scott, however ordi- 
 nary the scene he is describing. But our 
 present romancers derive from Dumas, not 
 from Scott, and have little or nothing of 
 Dumas's high spirits and humorous gaiety, 
 which compel the reader to take his characters' 
 humanity for granted. The last English writer 
 to give us romantic atmosphere was Stevenson, 
 in The Master of Ballantrae and Weir of 
 Hermiston. Where the yarn really flourishes 
 with energy and proper daring is in the quasi- 
 scientific, fantastic stories of Mr. Wells. They 
 are the legitimate descendants of the Arabian 
 Nights, or of such old-world imaginings as 
 Wandering" Willie's Tale the old superstition 
 of the supernatural replaced, naturally and 
 legitimately, by the exaggeration of the ascer- 
 tained wonders of science. They are in the 
 way to do for us what the supernatural yarn
 
 ABOUT OUR FICTION 
 
 did for our forefathers for us who disbelieve 
 in the supernatural, but have fancies agog 
 for the natural marvels to be discovered. They 
 are, in their fashion, vitally of their time. 
 Popular as they are, no one yet has imitated 
 them with success I have read some obvious 
 imitations which were mere fiascos and therein 
 is the proof that the imagination in them is 
 true in its quality, that their inventor is a true 
 story-teller, not only a possessor of lucky 
 material. We are not richly provided with 
 good yarns, however, because when we have 
 thought of Mr. Wells, we have next to dip 
 down to those "detective" stories, which are 
 again mere mechanism, though more entertain- 
 ing than our romances, and are generally too 
 improbable for yarns which deal with ordinary 
 life. Wilkie Collins has not yet had a worthy 
 successor. 
 
 Striking character, or eccentric, humorous 
 character, and out-of-the-way phases of life it 
 is here, I think, that our fiction is most generally 
 characteristic and vital. In spite of the marvels 
 of science, and in spite of the great problems 
 of politics, which will certainly confront us 
 
 135
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 shrewdly at home and abroad, it is a fact (I 
 speak of the average) that we are a somewhat 
 weary and indifferent people, not keenly in- 
 terested in our usual life, and therefore we 
 welcome the strange and the forcible and 
 (when we understand it) the whimsical. Mr. 
 Wells seems to be the only worker in fiction 
 who can interest us in the marvellous, but we 
 have many writers who in these other ways 
 express a real need of their times, and in doing 
 so often give us sincere and thorough and 
 intelligent work. The success of so thorough 
 and essentially intellectual a performance, in 
 the way of striking character, as Lucas Malet's 
 Richard Calmady, was encouraging, though 
 for my part I thought its judgments in 
 psychology open to dispute. Another novel 
 of strong and exceptional characters, done 
 with a thoroughly workmanlike hand, was 
 A Magdalen's Husband^ by Mr. Vincent Brown. 
 Mr. Conrad is a man whose genius of intuition 
 and whose extraordinary eye for the colour and 
 fire of life might well be seen in a clearer perspec- 
 tive by our critics, might well be distinguished 
 from the facile, respectable qualities of the 
 
 136
 
 ABOUT OUR FICTION 
 
 writers with whom he is commonly placed on a 
 level. Any oddity to an English mind which 
 his exotic birth and training have given him is 
 a disadvantage, because, working in an acquired 
 medium, his appeal is to the reader's recogni- 
 tion of humanity, and not to a common literary 
 culture. Had he written in his native language 
 and been duly translated, I think his recog- 
 nition would have been more ample ; had he 
 been an artist in English words, as Stevenson 
 was, it would have been immediate and un- 
 hesitating at the hands of all competent judges, 
 for his intellect, at once sensitive and powerful, 
 goes farther into the truth of men and the 
 meaning of things than ever did Stevenson's. 
 Well, Mr. Conrad has chosen to write either 
 of striking characters, or, if of ordinary, then 
 with the clear purpose of throwing into relief 
 an out-of-the-way phase of life. 
 
 By this last expression I mean, of course, a 
 phase of life unfamiliar to the ordinary readers 
 of English novels. It seems to me that there 
 is something invigorating and vitalising to a 
 writer in the fact that he is showing his reader 
 a new thing. It is, for example, a common 
 
 '37
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 but perfectly true criticism of Mr. Kipling that 
 an exotic theme has always called out his finest 
 gifts. Miss Robins's Magnetic North, again, 
 has an intensity of imaginative grip which she 
 would never have shown us in a study of literary 
 or artistic English people, in Bloomsbury or 
 Mayfair. The book is unique, in that, being 
 by a woman, it contains only a few essentially 
 feminine pages, and that it exhibits men, recog- 
 nisable men, in manly activities away from 
 women men whose minds are not, as in most 
 women's books, entirely occupied with love 
 affairs. But apart from this singular merit, 
 the book is full of an informative zest, a zest to 
 display the truth of a life with great difficulty 
 only accessible to a woman, which it owes 
 (given the qualities of its author) to the strange- 
 ness of its subject. There is, be it said, an 
 unimportant danger in the success of books 
 which take remote places for their scene that 
 editors are apt to prefer any such story to a 
 better one with a more homely setting, for- 
 getting that the Australian Bush can be made 
 as dull as Piccadilly. But unintelligent editors 
 are a constant danger of small importance. 
 
 138
 
 ABOUT OUR FICTION 
 
 Mr. Zangwill occurs to me as another writer 
 who is obviously stimulated by the feeling that 
 he is telling his readers something they do not 
 know, or correcting their false impressions. 
 His books about "his own people" are incom- 
 parably his best. I wonder if we should reckon 
 the stories of aristocratic and plutocratic society 
 as studies of out-of-the-way phases ? The 
 authors of them, at least, generally assume the 
 airs of discoverers, and have a knowing manner 
 of telling us details we should not otherwise be 
 acquainted with. And I think their books are 
 false for this reason, that the subjects of them 
 are in their ordinary lives much as other well- 
 to-do English ; but these writers, anxious to be 
 continuously informing, leave all that out, and 
 give us nothing but gambling, the divorce 
 court, crowded receptions, and meals at ex- 
 pensive restaurants an unnecessarily repulsive 
 picture. In this case the air of discovery is 
 innocent enough. I like it less when it appears 
 in those studies of so-called "low life" which 
 are very popular at present. We are all mixed 
 up in this country ; we might all be not very dis- 
 tant relations ; you may see an aristocratic face 
 
 139
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 on an unskilled labourer, and a very plebeian 
 one on a peer. We are all very much alike, 
 and I confess I feel ashamed when the speech 
 and manners of my ' 'lower- class " fellow- 
 citizens are presented to my superior eye as 
 though they were some strange animals. Some 
 such air is perhaps inevitable in studies which, 
 from the average reader's point of view, are of 
 out-of-the-way phases, and I know for certain 
 that one, and perhaps the most truthful, of the 
 authors I refer to has no idea of patronage or 
 of superiority to his subjects ; but I do not 
 think the " Aren't they funny?" attitude is 
 entirely of my own imagining. 
 
 Sometimes, of course, these lower-class 
 characters are directly humorous, conscious 
 wags, or people whose characteristics would be 
 amusing in any society ; and then the winking 
 manner is not unkindly, though it may not be 
 artistically effective. Humorous or eccentric 
 character, however, is not the most fruitful 
 theme of our fiction-writers, as indeed we can 
 hardly expect it should be in an age of spread- 
 ing uniformity, an age when " Brown grows 
 liker every day to Jones." The whimsical 
 
 140
 
 ABOUT OUR FICTION 
 
 philosophy which Sterne made so popular 
 with our ancestors is somewhat to seek now, 
 and satire raises but a timid front. The mag- 
 nificent figure of Mr. Dooley is rather solitary. 
 One of the most amusing of light satires I 
 have read for a long time is A Great Man, by 
 Mr. Arnold Bennett, artfully exposing the 
 genesis of a popular novelist, which I, not 
 being a popular novelist, welcomed with de- 
 light. 
 
 Such is my account of our fiction as it stands 
 for the present. The old-fashioned novel, as a 
 living form of art, seems to me doomed, and I 
 think that special studies of special phases of 
 life and of abnormal and minutely observed 
 character will continue to fill its place. The 
 conditions of the time and the mental atmo- 
 sphere both of our most vital writers and of 
 their most intelligent readers make for strong, 
 concentrated, exclusive, and rather abnormal 
 studies. I think Professor Courthope but I 
 am not certain : he or another scholar and 
 critic has laid it down that great art, or at 
 least the art of great periods, is always con- 
 cerned with the normal. I remember thinking 
 
 141
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 that he laid himself open to too many clear 
 exceptions for the formation of a rule, in Latin 
 if not in Greek literature, and assuredly in 
 English. But I fear I see no insuperable 
 obstacle to admitting that this is not a great 
 period in art, and that the present art of our 
 fiction-writers is not a great one. If that be 
 so, however, it is also true that no great art 
 was ever the mere imitation of a mode which 
 had lived its day. As for the simple yarn, 
 which is eternal, I wonder if in my time anyone 
 will recapture the spirit of romance, which is 
 eternal also, and may be forced from the least 
 likely matter. I am sure of one thing, that it 
 is not to be recaptured by dressing up con- 
 temporary lay-figures in old clothes and setting 
 them to fight duels. You cannot so revive it 
 any more than you can revive civic patriotism 
 by setting Netting Hill to fight South Ken- 
 sington, as in Mr. Chesterton's fantasy a 
 book whose serious and quite true idea seemed 
 to escape its critics. 
 
 That the greater number of our energetic 
 writers will continue for a long time to write 
 narrative fiction I believe to be certain. There 
 
 142
 
 ABOUT OUR FICTION 
 
 have been signs that many of them would as 
 lief write plays, but the market for these is very 
 much smaller, and subject to a capricious and 
 incalculable control. And the journalistic field 
 for thoughtful and self-stimulating work has 
 been curtailed so much of it occupied by 
 enterprises for which ignorance and a vulgar 
 level of thought are rigidly required. Given, 
 then, this continuing vogue of narrative fiction, 
 the question is asked if there is any harm in 
 it. As I have said, I do not think the answer 
 of great importance, but I would indicate 
 in conclusion one way in which I think the 
 vogue of fiction really does harm, adding that 
 any appreciable good work in it will more than 
 balance the account. 
 
 Fiction is written by people who have a case 
 to set forth, and some capacity for doing it, 
 but with no gift for story-telling, and no ear 
 for dialogue. They write fiction where straight- 
 forward description, theory, and comment would 
 be better. In that there is a distinct waste of 
 the good, and a distinct production of the bad. 
 The objection to fiction " with a purpose " was 
 often pedantically urged. If you have the 
 
 143
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 necessary ability there is no reason why you 
 should not state a case of course, you cannot 
 prove it in a novel. The objection is one of 
 those limitations which are sought to be im- 
 posed on people who can do things by people 
 who cannot. It was, I think, for an instance, 
 unreasonably urged against Mrs. Humphry 
 Ward, since her ability to write fiction could 
 hardly have been denied. (I have noticed, by 
 the way, that she supports my general view in 
 her last book, which is the study of a curious 
 and unusual phase of life the case of Madame 
 du Deffand and her prote"ge"e.) But if you can 
 state a case plainly, but are not skilled in 
 drawing character or telling a story, it is a pity 
 if the omnipresence of the novel should lead 
 you to write one. I read the other day a book 
 about a draper's shop which gave one an in- 
 forming and interesting account of such a 
 place, and of the hardships which may be 
 suffered by the workers therein. That was its 
 raison d'etre, but it was cumbered by an otiose 
 story which wasted one's time. Another novel 
 which should have been a treatise was one 
 about Jews (not by Mr. Zangwill), where the 
 
 144
 
 ABOUT OUR FICTION 
 
 author wished to explain that intermarriage of 
 them and Gentiles was a bad thing, and en- 
 cumbering himself with a story for which he 
 had an indifferent aptitude, was driven to make 
 a love-sick girl talk of " the genius of atavism." 
 Such mistakes are a pity in the interest of 
 the proper use of talents. But perhaps a really 
 fine gift is seldom so misled. I am tempted, 
 unconscionable time writing though I am, to 
 discuss the evil alleged against the prevalence 
 of fiction, which is the extent to which the 
 inexperienced adopt their beliefs from it. But 
 I have tried to keep to my subject, the present 
 state of the art, and will not be lured into 
 sociology. I may add, however, germanely to 
 my subject, that in so far as our writers leave 
 the old themes, the old elaborate love affairs, 
 for example, of average people, the less likely 
 are they actually to influence the unwary by 
 misrepresentation. And if it is, on the whole, 
 the less able writers, and the most apt to err, 
 who still offer models for possible imitation, I 
 imagine that their influence, for good or evil, 
 is less great than they suppose it.
 
 X 
 
 THE VOGUE OF WRITERS 
 
 TEN years ago, and a little more and a 
 little less, there was quite a boom in 
 writers, at least in London. Essayists 
 flourished and patted one another to a 
 moderate popular applause. The air was dark 
 with critics. Novelists of course but of them 
 hereafter. Even poets were granted a momen- 
 tary hush. It was a little something, I assure 
 you, to have made a hit with one's little book. 
 People with large houses liked to fill them 
 from the publishers' lists. There were many 
 literary enterprises in the world of journalism, 
 the periodical world, which claimed and re- 
 ceived attention, some of them sound and 
 virile, some merely obtrusive and excessive. 
 
 Well, in so far as this little hubbub meant 
 a genuine interest in letters we may grieve for 
 its passing. In so far as it was merely an 
 
 146
 
 THE VOGUE OF WRITERS 
 
 artificial fashion we should be glad. For in 
 that regard its patronage was bad for the 
 weaker of its proteges, who might have been 
 led to strut and peacock instead of working in 
 unruffled obscurity. Social patronage, in par- 
 ticular, is always bad for an artist, even a 
 minor artist, and though it affects not the 
 self-respecting man, whose social life is based 
 on social reasons, it is apt to find among the 
 others a sadly extended bag. 
 
 All that is past, like many another fashion 
 doubtless to recur in due time. But I wonder 
 if there has been a change in the subject- 
 matter, so to speak, of the fashion which may 
 account for the passing as well as the natural 
 instability of fashions. Booms, in such matters, 
 are mainly for the young. Now, ten years or 
 so since, there were a number of young 
 writers really young, in the twenties who 
 brought off excellent effects and gave very 
 respectable promises. Some of those promises 
 have been kept, others have not. A. has 
 blossomed out handsomely, B. does honest 
 hack-work. But my concern is not with these 
 comparative oldsters. I look for their succes- 
 
 147
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 sors, and I ask myself if they are there. I ask 
 myself: perhaps I shall get a "damned silly 
 answer," as some one suggested to an orator : 
 it may be that I am a soured veteran. They 
 are not very obvious to my spectacles. Only 
 one name rises immediately to my conscious- 
 ness ; I will not mention it for fear of being 
 invidious ; it is that of a young writer who 
 grows you paradoxes, while you sleep, all over 
 the place ; he surprises of himself, but he is 
 only one. Who are the others the essayists, 
 critics, poets in the twenties ? Quick ! You 
 are silent. Is it that they lack a boom, or 
 does the boom lack them ? I should like 
 to know. 
 
 Assuming for the moment that the latter 
 alternative is true, I suggest an economical 
 reason. Even here, you see, questions of 
 money and material competition pursue us. 
 Young essayists and critics have to live, and 
 they are commonly found living on journalism. 
 Most of them must work in journalism before 
 they make their names and print their books ; 
 the happy minority which wisely houses itself 
 in the Civil Service is a minority still. Now, 
 
 148
 
 THE VOGUE OF WRITERS 
 
 the demand in journalism for educated men is 
 not what it was, nor their pay either, and at 
 the same time the demands in England on 
 men's purses in the sumptuary way have risen. 
 That is a pity, because the implication is not 
 of more comfort but of more display. But the 
 fact is so, and you cannot expect young men 
 to resist all the influences of their time. They 
 see that the respectably paid places in journal- 
 ism are few, and in a general way the abler of 
 them betake themselves elsewhere, and are 
 immersed in pursuits which leave no time or 
 taste for essays and criticism. This change in 
 the demand had begun some years before the 
 time of that little boom ten years ago ; the 
 "old days" of the Saturday Review and 
 the St. James's Gazette, for example, when 
 the sort of educated journalism I mean was 
 well paid were over. But the change had not 
 been appreciated ; it was still a common thing 
 for clever young men at the Universities to 
 contemplate writing for bread. The more 
 popular Press, I am told and if I may say it 
 without offence, I believe is suspicious of 
 scholars and Universities. It may be wrong in 
 
 149
 
 MAINLY OF BOOKS 
 
 this : I think it is, remembering that the one 
 man who has made a name worth having on 
 the popular Press in its modern form, or indeed 
 a name at all, has been the late George 
 Steevens, a finished scholar, and by far the 
 most widely read man of his age I have known. 
 Also I reflect that ignorance is not an absolute 
 guarantee of cleverness. But with the old 
 opportunities very greatly diminished and the 
 new enterprises caring not for them, clever 
 young scholars turn away from journalism, and 
 it is from them that the material for any little 
 boom in writers must chiefly come, if it is not 
 to be wholly ridiculous. All this to explain 
 the dearth, if there be a dearth, of promising 
 young writers. Of course it does not matter. 
 
 I promised a word of the novelists. The 
 present condition and probable evolution of 
 their art are the subject of another paper. But 
 from the point of view I have been taking, the 
 poor novelists suffer very hardly from their mere 
 numbers. I should say, off-hand, that I read 
 as many clever efforts by new hands to-day as 
 I read ten years ago. But who can separate 
 their names ? They must grow fairly old at 
 
 150
 
 THE VOGUE OF WRITERS 
 
 their task before they stand out individually. 
 No dearth of material here, only too much : 
 the reason being that every kind of man and 
 woman, and boy and girl, can take a hand at 
 this game, whereas the others mentioned must 
 imply some little specialised talent. There 
 must be something very discouraging to a 
 conceited or even a merely sensitive novelist to 
 feel that he is joining the ranks of an un- 
 numbered host, even as an unknown painter 
 must surely feel it ridiculous that his picture is 
 one of thousands at Burlington House. He 
 has my sympathy.
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS
 
 BACKSTAIRS 
 
 I HAD occasion recently to talk with an 
 actor, and went for the purpose to the stage 
 door of his theatre. An actor's room at 
 the theatre, especially if he is a manager, 
 is a natural place of business for him, of course. 
 I have heard a man of letters, however, object 
 to such an appointment, complaining of the 
 backstairs approach, and more especially of a 
 dressing-room for the scene of a business inter- 
 view, as being unsuited to his dignity. Not 
 so I ! On me the stage door, up some narrow 
 alley for choice, the dim porter's lair, and the 
 cramped staircase never pall. I trust sincerely 
 that even if I am ever rich and famous no 
 actor will ever suggest coming to see me, or 
 appoint his club or private house for a rendez- 
 vous. I can go to clubs and private houses 
 any day ; for me the stage door ! You go up 
 the narrow alley, curiously eyed and that's a
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 pleasure ! by sympathetic loafers ; you push 
 open the stage door it opens to the palm like 
 doors on a stage ! the porter, or whatever the 
 attendant there is called, sends up your card, 
 grudgingly, as one who guards the privacy of a 
 great man ; another man beckons mysteriously 
 from above ; you go up the narrow staircase 
 and follow him along a passage, where who 
 knows? some charming lady in her " make- 
 up" may frou-frou past you; a gentle tap you 
 are admitted to the sacred room. And let 
 that room, I beg, always be a dressing-room. 
 I love the grease-pots and the paint-pots. I 
 love the looking-glasses and the litter. I love 
 to see the actor change before my eyes as we 
 talk, and I shall never forget the pleasure I 
 had when one, gentlest and most amiable of 
 mortals, turned suddenly and confronted me 
 in a fierce Syrian beard and eyebrows to match. 
 Ah, the stage door and behind the scenes ! 
 The mystery, the intimacy, the infinite sugges- 
 tion ! Gently, gently, my muse, we are men 
 of letters. 
 
 Thackeray complains somewhere of the dingi- 
 ness and meanness behind the scenes in con- 
 
 156
 
 BACKSTAIRS 
 
 trast to the lights and brilliance of the stage. 
 So do not I. The managers, I am sure, insist 
 on the dinginess and meanness from a native 
 love of dramatic contrast, an artistic sense 
 which for the moment Thackeray wanted. I 
 think it helps to conciliate our affection for 
 Thackeray that in the midst of his many great 
 excellences he so often lets us feel superior to 
 him. He wanted more light and more brilli- 
 ance, as who should want a chop instead of 
 coffee after dinner. The complaint is charac- 
 teristic, a part of his theory of disillusion ; just 
 as he would insist that actresses and singers 
 and dancers, so gay and beautiful before the 
 curtain, were all old and haggard and wrinkled 
 behind it. The artistic soul would count it 
 disillusion only if before the curtain the effect 
 cheated his memory ; what he sees behind is a 
 fresh experience altogether. But as a matter 
 of happy fact actresses are more often than not 
 as beautiful off the stage as on it, and often far 
 more agreeable, in Thackeray's teeth. Many 
 have talents apter for private than for public 
 success. For myself, I have never been disil- 
 lusioned in this way, and if I had been the 
 pride of it would have well supported me. 
 
 157
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 Backstairs ! In the theatre or out of it their 
 charm is everlasting. Think of the backstairs 
 of kings and courts, of Whitehall and Charles 
 
 II. and N no ; we have heard too much of 
 
 the hussy, who was by no means the most 
 interesting of those ladies, jolly but rather 
 simple set as they were. There have been 
 wickeder and more dramatic intriguers than 
 those who used the backstairs of Whitehall, 
 but Charles the Second's Court stands as a 
 type of backstairs influence, since there it was 
 so all-powerful. Backstairs influence ! The 
 thing itself is generally mean and common- 
 place enough, but even in these days what an 
 enchantment in the name ! Even in these 
 days it suggests all kinds of romance. Back- 
 stairs influence ! The Minister, stern and 
 business-like, speaks to the deputation, in- 
 artistically huddled about. Yes, gentlemen, 
 the demand is reasonable ; I will see that it 
 receives due attention. The deputation thanks 
 him in matter-of-fact phrases ; its slovenly 
 frock-coats, its baggy trousers, its common 
 commercial faces are shown out. The Minister 
 is alone, and hist ! a mysterious rap. He 
 flushes, wavers, pulls aside a piece of tapestry. 
 
 158
 
 BACKSTAIRS 
 
 A secret panel is pushed slowly open. A 
 beautiful radiant figure enters. She threatens, 
 flatters, cajoles. Then do as you will. I am 
 your slave. She puts forth a white hand, 
 flashing with jewels, seizes the memorial of 
 the Protectionists, Free Traders, War Office 
 reformers, what you will, and tears it in pieces 
 with a triumphant laugh. She had come up 
 by the backstairs. 
 
 That is the gay suggestion. Alas for the 
 reality ! If we searched very cleverly for 
 backstairs influence in English political life we 
 might find that a Minister's wife, not beautiful 
 but merely persistent, had persuaded a Minister 
 to give her sister's husband's first cousin a very 
 minor appointment. A little while ago the 
 phrase was used (very foolishly) about the 
 decision of a statesman on a question of 
 politics, and it turned out that the backstairs 
 influence meant was that of another eminent 
 statesman, an old gentleman of over seventy, 
 all that there is of the most respectable. Alas 
 for romance ! Even a modern king, at least 
 an English king, can give your imagination no 
 assistance based on fact. If he wished he 
 could not confer public honours without public
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 reasons. He can give his private friends the 
 honour of his society and even that un- 
 doubted right will be criticised by the dis- 
 appointed and that is all. 
 
 A few years ago we heard a great deal of 
 feminine influence at the War Office. But 
 what was alleged was merely that weak officials 
 had yielded to the open pressure and per- 
 suasion of ladies in their own intimate society. 
 In any society if men grow weaker, women 
 are apt to grow stronger, and if it is true, as it 
 is sometimes pretended, that our statesmen are 
 of weaker fibre than of old, no doubt the 
 influence of women would gain ; not, as with 
 the strongest men in all times, the influence of 
 immemorial arts, but the influence of domineer- 
 ing wills. But that is not backstairs influence. 
 There is no fascination for our fancy there. 
 
 We must go back to past ages for backstairs 
 influence with really lively and dramatic effects. 
 But the backstairs remain, and I say that they 
 are always delightful. They suggest that you 
 are more intimate, further "ben, " as the 
 Scotch say, than before. Even in private 
 houses I will reach my room that way when- 
 ever it is possible. 
 
 1 60
 
 II 
 ENGLISH CLASSES 
 
 I HAVE been reading an account of a play 
 in which the situations arose (the writer 
 said) out of the marriage of an " upper- 
 middle-class " man to a * * lower-middle- 
 class " woman. Not pretty phrases, are they? 
 How far they imply, as in the case of the play 
 they were meant to imply, genuine and useful 
 distinctions of culture and taste, how far their 
 rather rough and unsympathetic tone of the 
 social drill-sergeant is really practical, are ques- 
 tions to which in my casual way I shall return. 
 But the unlovely phrases set me thinking first 
 of all of the extraordinary complexity and in- 
 volution of this class business in England. I 
 wish that some philosopher with a strictly 
 scientific habit of mind but a trivial taste would 
 set himself to a thorough classification, with 
 tables and diagrams, of our classes. He would 
 
 M 161
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 have to determine first the several grades in so 
 far as they can be distinguished, and next (of 
 course keeping to the average) how each grade 
 respects or despises the grades above or below 
 it. Thus, if the classes were A, B, and C, 
 and so on, they would be arranged in several 
 tables in accordance with the ideas of pre- 
 cedence held by each of these classes, A, B, 
 and C, etc., with regard to itself and the others. 
 So if you are a wholesale bootmaker you could 
 find out at a glance how a peer, a barrister, or 
 a boot-black ranked you in the social scale. 
 There might also be a table expressing what 
 distinctions, if any, are made by intelligent 
 people who try to see men as they are. All 
 this would be the merest ground plan of the 
 work, of course. A multitude of excursuses 
 and appendices would be needed, and some- 
 thing colossal in the way of prolegomena. 
 Such a work, when completed, would be of 
 immense value to the foreigner, to whom the 
 present confusion must be bewildering. And 
 incidentally it would enable me when my friend 
 Jones, an ordinary barrister, speaks contemptu- 
 ously of "the middle classes," to know (a) 
 
 162
 
 ENGLISH CLASSES 
 
 what he means by the middle classes ; (b) if 
 he thinks he belongs to them ; and (c) if he 
 thinks I belong to them. 
 
 Thackeray, in a minutely observant way, but 
 not in a very scientific spirit, did a great deal 
 to inform his generation on the subject. But 
 it is become far more involved and subtle since 
 his day ; the progressive mixing up of classes 
 leads the single-minded snob into a quagmire 
 of inconsistencies if you cross-examine him. 
 Take, for instance, the question of trade. The 
 idea that its pursuit is incompatible with the 
 status of a gentleman is quite a modern in- 
 vention. To apprentice his younger son to a 
 tradesman in the neighbouring town was a 
 natural proceeding to the country gentleman 
 of old. Also, while this particular form of 
 snobbery has grown up in the last two hundred 
 years or so, we now have members of recog- 
 nised "great families" with fat titles going 
 into trade. What is the snob to say? Can 
 he object to Bob Smith without objecting to 
 Lord Robert Brown ? Yet the distinction 
 between trade and professions is still pushed 
 to an incredibly puerile minuteness. A and B 
 
 163
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 are next-door shopkeepers ; A makes a parson 
 of his son, B takes his into the business ; A's 
 grandson despises B's grandson on the score 
 of his inferior birth. And that sort of im- 
 becility in varying degrees runs through English 
 life, and plays havoc (among fools, of course) 
 with freedom and courtesy. 
 
 A man is ranked altogether differently by 
 different people. Mr. Levantheim, whose father 
 was a Frankfort money-lender, who owns three 
 large houses and consorts with dukes, regards 
 himself or certainly Mrs. Levantheim regards 
 herself as definitely of the aristocracy, the 
 natural superior of Jones and me, but Jones re- 
 gards Levantheim as unfit to black his (Jones's) 
 boots. Some people, again, still regard players 
 as persons of no account, others as somewhere 
 in precedence between earls and marquises, 
 * 4 actor-managers " between royal and ordinary 
 dukes, and so forth. An exhaustive tabulation 
 would make these obscure things plain. 
 
 As for the intelligent Englishman who 
 respects himself for what he may be and tries 
 to see other men as they are, his position is 
 probably something as follows. One class he 
 
 164
 
 ENGLISH CLASSES 
 
 admits to be apart. So long as the institution 
 of monarchy remains with us he admits it is 
 a logical and convenient corollary that royalty 
 is socially a definitely superior class, entitled 
 to a deference not given to others. Americans, 
 if I may say so, proud of their own equality, 
 are inclined to attribute to him a sort of 
 servility towards royalty from which he is free ; 
 in some past reigns his criticism has been of 
 the freest, and he is happy in this and the last 
 that it has not been stimulated. For the aris- 
 tocracy, if he belongs to it, it is quite possible 
 that he has still a feeling of caste he would not 
 confess that is merely human ; if he does not, 
 he grants it no social privileges outside the 
 House of Lords, or in such trifles as precedence 
 at formal dinners. Save for the legislative 
 privilege a political question not for these 
 pages he regards it as a pleasantly picturesque 
 survival. There, again, Americans sometimes 
 misjudge him, sometimes take (I have been 
 told) when they join our aristocracy a view of 
 their position he does not share. If I may put 
 in a word for myself, I confess to rather a 
 liking for your genuine old families, people 
 
 165
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 who represent the direct line of a knightly 
 house for eight or nine hundred years ; but 
 they are very few, and are hardly to be found 
 among our titles. The intelligent Englishman 
 (to go back to him) takes little account indeed 
 of all the minor distinctions which have their 
 absurd value only in the small radius about 
 them. For it is a curious fact, which they who 
 talk of classes and masses quite forget, that 
 the lower you go in the social scale the keener 
 are the differences. 
 
 The philosophy of the matter I take to be 
 roughly that our system of classes is in essence 
 an inconvenient survival from a caste system 
 that had its meaning and uses. Inconvenient, 
 if not worse, I say, for this reason ; unintelli- 
 gent Englishmen and most people everywhere 
 are unintelligent who admit that A, B, and 
 C classes are superior to themselves, thereby 
 weaken that sense of possession in the country 
 which a citizen should feel with no qualifica- 
 tion. So much, I think, is true, but I believe 
 the inconvenience to be passing away. The 
 usefulness of those terms we started withal, 
 your upper-middle and your lower-middle? In- 
 
 166
 
 ENGLISH CLASSES 
 
 finitesimal, I do believe. They may still 
 roughly express real differences in culture and 
 taste, but in my own experience the exceptions 
 are so many, we are being so rapidly mixed 
 up, we are growing so rapidly in a rough way 
 alike save always the really cultivated, who 
 must always be few and for whose qualities 
 class is no sort of guarantee that I think it 
 hardly worth while to keep them up. Hardly 
 worth their ugliness. 
 
 167
 
 Ill 
 OF POLITICAL MEETINGS 
 
 STRANGE how slow is the adaptation of 
 useful inventions to common life. Four 
 hundred and fifty years at least since 
 the invention of printing, and under- 
 graduates still sit on plaguey hard seats in 
 lecture-rooms to hear what they could read 
 (more thoroughly in half the time) sitting in 
 comfortable armchairs at home, and smoking 
 the brain-assisting pipe ; and other people will 
 sit, also uncomfortably, it is probable, crowded 
 in an atmosphere where the microbes of disease 
 swarm so thickly that (as the late Mr. Bright 
 might have said) you can almost hear the 
 flapping of their wings sit in this atmosphere 
 and listen for hours to what will be all in the 
 papers to-morrow, straightened out and made 
 comparatively lucid, to what in most cases they 
 have all read in the paper already many times. 
 It is not strange, perhaps, that horses should 
 
 168
 
 OF POLITICAL MEETINGS 
 
 still drag the traffic in towns beside the motor- 
 cars, but strange it is that political meetings 
 should exist beside newspapers. 
 
 This not of all political meetings, I need 
 not say. Not even of all lectures to under- 
 graduates. I remember, for example, of my 
 own time at Oxford that there was an artist 
 who could make fun of John Stuart Mill with 
 a comic intonation no book could have added, 
 and one or two others whose oral methods did 
 seem to make obscure things clear. So there 
 is at least one public speaker in this country 
 who by aid of a powerful personality can 
 generate or renew public enthusiasm for his 
 cause : his meetings are useful, even necessary. 
 Two or three public speakers are agreeable to 
 hear, apart from what they have to say, having 
 some natural or acquired art of oratory : their 
 meetings are worth attending, even if not 
 necessary. We others who are not much 
 influenced by speeches, but who form our 
 opinions by study of the facts, still enjoy these 
 two or three there may be more : I confine 
 myself to my own taste and experience in the 
 way of art. Again, electors may like to see 
 
 169
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 their candidates, and citizens in general to see 
 their important men, and the meeting is an 
 opportunity ; but for this purpose it lasts ten 
 times too long. In most cases, however, the 
 whole affair is mere fatuity and futility. You 
 listen to a halting mediocrity laboriously and 
 imperfectly expounding what you know al- 
 ready, or can learn more easily and more fully 
 otherwise, and the nett result is weariness in 
 you, increased vanity in the performer, and 
 impaired health in every one concerned. 
 
 Surely all this might be left to newspapers. 
 Heaven knows they do many useless and 
 offensive things but here at least is an oppor- 
 tunity for them to do some positive good. The 
 object of most speeches, or at least all that 
 they effect, is the statement that the speaker 
 holds such or such opinions. Very good. The 
 newspapers might refuse to report any speech 
 whatever, except those made by four or five 
 politicians who should be agreed upon by a 
 general vote : I should prefer the vote to be 
 taken from a very limited constituency, but let 
 that be. On the other hand, they could 
 provide space, the London papers for the 
 
 170
 
 OF POLITICAL MEETINGS 
 
 prominent politicians, the local for the dimmer 
 lights, in which the worthy creatures could 
 state their opinions, and their reasons if any 
 for holding them. So could a great deal of 
 discomfort be avoided and the State be none 
 the worse. Let it be done. 
 
 I will take an instance of a useless meeting 
 which might not be obviously so, arguing 
 a fortiori. It was my fortune some time ago 
 to listen to an eminent statesman for an hour 
 and a half. (The precise occasion does not 
 signify, and I wish to avoid an essay in politics.) 
 He was really an eminent man, one who has 
 many claims on the respect of his fellow- 
 countrymen. But it so happened that he had 
 nothing fresh whatever to advance on behalf 
 of the cause for which he spoke, no new 
 argument, no new fact, no new consideration 
 whatever. And his many excellent qualities 
 do not include even the beginning of effective 
 oratory. His opinions were known already, 
 but perhaps it was necessary they should be 
 emphasised : a letter of half a dozen lines to 
 the newspapers would have secured that. His 
 facts and arguments, such as they were, had 
 
 171
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 all been stated, and, to be frank, stated far 
 more strongly and lucidly, many times in 
 several newspapers of his side. Then what on 
 earth was the use of his speaking an hour and 
 a half? It must have bored him no one 
 watching and listening to him could doubt that 
 and it must have bored nearly everybody 
 else. There was little enthusiasm, and that 
 only for well-worn platitudes. The cheering 
 was perfunctory and polite. Part of the 
 audience was female, and that part of course 
 was the more appreciative. Just as in private 
 life a woman will always pretend to be de- 
 lighted by your old anecdote, while a man 
 will tell you brutally that he saw it in Punch 
 years ago, so here, while the men "hear- 
 hear'd " rather tamely, the women greeted 
 every hackneyed argument with glances of 
 joyful interest, revelling in the intellectual 
 feast, and I dare say that little exercise in 
 social hypocrisy was healthy. But otherwise 
 I believe no man or woman took any good 
 from that political meeting, and for my part I 
 took the influenza. 
 
 If the papers were to report public speeches 
 172
 
 OF POLITICAL MEETINGS 
 
 as they really are delivered, I fancy a great 
 deal of this oratory would be quenched. There 
 is much make-believe about this matter among 
 us. We insist that our eminent men shall be 
 eminent all round, and among other things 
 good speakers. So when a speech is reported 
 at all, it reads more or less coherent and 
 straightforward. But it is not so delivered. 
 In America, where public speaking is a general 
 habit, some say a disease, speakers are at least 
 fluent as a rule. With us it is otherwise. A 
 true report of a really eminent statesman would 
 have read in one place as follows : " I er 
 ladies and gentlemen I er am I am not 
 going " the orator paused and drank some 
 water, paused again, consulted his notes, and 
 resumed, but left the first beginning to its fate 
 
 "I was about to say that I am er desirous 
 of er impressing upon you the er expedi- 
 ency of adopting a certain course, and the er 
 
 expediency of resisting, resisting, a er " 
 
 he thought hard for the right word, and finally 
 gave us again "a certain course." In this 
 case one was able to admire the calmness with 
 which the speaker suffered his own hesitation 
 
 173
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 and lack of words, and to respect the indomit- 
 able British doggedness, but still . . . was it 
 worth an uneasy seat and all the microbes in 
 the air ? " Cheaper for you," said the cabman, 
 "and cheaper for me if you'd taken a 'bus." 
 
 Diffidence, or perhaps a certain standard 
 of manners, deprives many of us of what is 
 perhaps the only enjoyment possible at a 
 political meeting of the usual kind, the pleasure 
 of interruption. To shout "Good old Joe!" 
 or some opposite war-cry to the discomfiture 
 of a speaker, is no doubt an agreeable amuse- 
 ment. A riot may be exciting fun, and heaven 
 forbid I should help to destroy any occasion of 
 liveliness in these dull days. I think, however, 
 it may be more easily and less wastefully 
 procured by a turn with the gloves or a football 
 match. And I can think of no other service 
 the mediocre meeting gives us. Let us perfect 
 the megaphone and turn on the really moving 
 speakers at meetings all over the place. But 
 for the opinions of their wearisome lieutenants 
 let us take advantage of the invention of print- 
 ing. It is four hundred and fifty years old, 
 and its uses should be understood. 
 
 174
 
 IV 
 
 THE DOCKS 
 
 NO : not " Docks I have been sentenced 
 in." Most of my friends who heard 
 that I had been to the Docks made 
 some such remark, and I myself made 
 it to those who did not. We are not, perhaps, 
 a witty nation, but we like our little joke. 
 
 "I am sick," said I to the Editor, " of 
 literary subjects. The world can do without 
 my opinion of deceased great writers, or my 
 opinion of some one else's opinion of them. 
 Why, again, should I offend a contemporary 
 by finding fault with him or by praising his 
 rival ? Movements ? What movements ? I see 
 only people marking time." We discussed 
 rather wearily one or two other matters of 
 which I may pretend to some knowledge, and 
 they were either tedious to me or unsuited to 
 his magazine. "Then why," said he at last, 
 "why not take a subject of which you know 
 
 '75
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 nothing whatever ? " An illimitable horizon, I 
 admitted ; but I could not see the usefulness of 
 the effort. He was delighted with his idea, 
 however ; the impression made on a previously 
 ignorant person by a scene or an incident 
 familiar to many other people he thought it 
 would be interesting. "Go to the Docks," 
 said he, "and write what you think of them." 
 I demurred for some time. The written im- 
 pression business is, I think, very much over- 
 done. Who wants to know whether it was 
 a clear or a foggy day when I went to the 
 Docks ? Who cares whether the dock-hand 
 I chiefly conversed with was a big strong man 
 or a weak and feeble one ? Unless you know 
 a place, another man's impression of it means 
 nothing to you : that is why books of travel 
 are such hopeless reading when they are not 
 telling you of manners and customs. If you 
 know a place, on the other hand, the chances 
 are that you do not like it well enough to care 
 to read of it, and if you do, that pleasure of 
 recognition is rather a stupid one for a man 
 of sense to provide. Also, the scheme sug- 
 gested the copy-hunting of a journalist, which 
 
 176
 
 THE DOCKS 
 
 I have always hated ever since I tried it, and 
 failed dismally, when I first began to write. 
 But the Editor was so cheerful about it that 
 with a fatal sympathy I consented. That is 
 to say, I consented to go to the Docks, and 
 thereafter to write something. I did not under- 
 take to bore my readers with any detailed de- 
 scription of what I saw. 
 
 With that understanding let us commence : 
 the Docks and my qualities and defects are to 
 take their chance as Heaven wills. You catch 
 the Editor's idea, I suppose? No statistics or 
 useless information. Others will sing how 
 many matches could be made out of all the 
 wood I saw imported there from Jamaica and 
 Canada, or how many times higher than St. 
 Paul's would all the cases of rum and dates 
 reach if any idiot put them end to end. The 
 most definite fact I can give you is that if a 
 man in average health walks for several hours 
 about the Docks, he becomes extremely tired. 
 
 But before you can appreciate my impression 
 you must learn my anticipation. I went to 
 a friend who knows all about ships and naval 
 manoeuvres and gunnery and torpedoes, and 
 
 N 177
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 told him I was going to the Docks. "You 
 will be Shanghaied," said he. To be Shang- 
 haied, it appeared, was to be drugged in some 
 horrible den, to be taken on board ship in that 
 condition, to wake up in mid-ocean, and to be 
 compelled to work for the rest of the voyage. 
 It would be a consolation that my kidnappers 
 would probably lament the waste of good 
 drugging material, but the prospect was agi- 
 tating. I asked him what I should see, and 
 he replied many things, but that all I should 
 really notice would be the mud. He seemed 
 annoyed that a non-expert person should pre- 
 sume to go near ships at all ; comforted that I 
 should probably be at least hocussed and robbed. 
 A more credible cause of uneasiness for 
 I determined not to go into horrible dens, and 
 was unlikely to be drugged in the open was 
 the anticipation that I should see crowds of 
 men doing longer and harder work than ever I 
 do. As a philosopher I do not believe in the 
 benefits of hard work, in the platitudes which 
 tell of its dignity and of the misfortune of 
 idleness, and I further know that in a com- 
 plicated social system the directly and obviously 
 
 178
 
 THE DOCKS 
 
 useful labour is not necessarily worthier than 
 such labour as my own. But my natural in- 
 stinct is to feel rather ashamed in the presence 
 of those who work more strenuously and for 
 longer hours than I, and also to feel that in a 
 broad view of the social system an ordinary 
 writer one who may offer now and then a 
 shred of instruction, but whose main office is 
 to amuse is merely a sort of Punch, inferior 
 by his office to citizens who serve the State 
 directly. But "Pooh, Davey, Punch has no 
 feelings ! " and I will not dwell upon mine. 
 
 But I am relapsing into generalities, and 
 must get to the Docks. It may have been the 
 cheerless day, or the slack season, or some 
 other inconstant cause : certainly the upshot of 
 my impressions was intense gloom, profound 
 discontent. The gloom of a cheerless, dull, 
 unhappy scene ; discontent with a civilisation 
 which is so slowly striving to a possible good 
 through so much hardship and waste and 
 injustice. Mankind, I thought, may have 
 gained this or that, may be on its way to we 
 know not what of perfection, but what have 
 these men gained, and to what will their way 
 
 179
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 tend ? I speak of the men standing about outside 
 the West India Docks, unemployed. For my 
 anticipation of seeing strenuous work was not 
 realised ; it was a slack season, and few jobs 
 were going. Now this is not the place, I know, 
 for an essay in economics or sociology, and a 
 brief remark on such subjects as poverty and 
 property, or this of the unemployed, is apt to 
 sound cheap. But I will venture, for my peace 
 of mind, trusting not to alarm any harmless 
 reader, to say as much as this : that except in 
 time of pestilence, or other general disaster (if 
 necessarily unforeseen), it is a disgrace to any 
 community that in it an able-bodied and sober 
 man, willing to work, should be without work, 
 and therefore without food. "It has always 
 been so and always will be so." It has not 
 always been so ; if it will always be so, we 
 know not : it is so now for lack of public 
 intelligence and public conscience. If there is 
 no work for these men in England, then either 
 work could be provided by a wiser economy or 
 they could be taken elsewhere, where their 
 work is needed. The negation of both alter- 
 natives means partly that well-meaning people 
 
 1 80
 
 THE DOCKS 
 
 are not intelligent enough, and mostly that the 
 mass of the prosperous care nothing. Homo 
 homini lupus in more ways than deliberate 
 oppression. The man with whom I walked 
 about the Docks was intelligent and well 
 informed ; his face showed he was no drunkard, 
 his build that he was fairly strong ; a police 
 sergeant had picked him out, as he would not 
 have done had his character been bad. This 
 man was dependent on the arrival of a chance 
 stranger for his food that day there had been 
 no job for him. I know a man with less 
 valuable qualities who has twenty thousand a 
 year. No, dear reader, I am not going to force 
 socialism down your unwilling throat. But I 
 assure you that if this civilisation of ours is 
 really a stage to better things, the destitution 
 of the one and the excessive provision for the 
 other of these two men will surprise posterity. 
 For my part I am inclined to think that 
 posterity will be a knave ; but that is neither 
 here nor there. The sight of these unemployed 
 Dock hands, and the thought of the stupidity 
 which wasted their chances of happiness in life, 
 gave me a sombre view of our present civilisa- 
 
 181
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 tion at least. We know that, historically, the 
 "social contract" theory was a fantastic 
 figment ; but it roughly expresses our sense of 
 fairness, and those men, who had been deprived 
 of savage freedom, I felt had been swindled 
 out of their compensation. They had been 
 happier in caves. So I felt in looking at the 
 rows and rows of squalid houses, as I came 
 down the railway as indeed one feels in any 
 approach to London or departure houses 
 where cleanliness was impossible, which 
 hideous sights and sounds encompassed per- 
 petually. ... I bore you, good easy reader, 
 but you will understand that if my impression 
 of the Docks was unhappy, it may not have 
 been altogether the fault of the ships and 
 packing-cases. 
 
 The West India Dock, which I entered first, 
 was guarded by numerous policemen, and 
 policemen I met frequently afterwards. They 
 removed any fear of being kidnapped and my 
 faith in another expert. A sergeant was kind 
 enough to provide me with a guide, and we 
 went inside. Ships . . . sheds . . . packing- 
 cases. More ships . . . more sheds . . . 
 
 182
 
 THE DOCKS 
 
 more packing-cases. Many ships . . . many 
 sheds . . . innumerable packing-cases. Voila 
 the Docks. I am not one whose heart is up- 
 lifted by size and numbers. Show me a log of 
 wood and say it came from Jamaica; good 
 my imagination will roughly present a picture 
 of Jamaica, and my reason will note the 
 wonderfulness of man's works, how near are 
 come to be the parts of this planet ; yes, there 
 is romance in the fact that this log of wood 
 came from Jamaica. Show me an immense 
 shed full of logs of wood, and tell me they 
 came from Jamaica : my imagination and 
 reason will do no more for me. There is some- 
 thing fine in this shed of huge trunks, a whole 
 clan of noble, gracious creatures exterminated 
 by puny man. But I am no poet to dwell 
 upon it ; still less can I dwell upon cases of 
 figs, cases of dates, barrels of rum. . . . The 
 work that goes on in the Docks concerning 
 these imports would excite the keen attention 
 of other minds, but mine was content to remain 
 vague, if you will have a faithful report. An 
 education entirely classical? Perhaps so, but 
 it has left me interested enough in the farrago 
 
 183
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 of general life, the ambitions and amours and 
 politics of men ; only the details of machinery 
 and handicrafts appeal not to me. I thought 
 of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and could imagine 
 his keen glances and vital sympathy : how 
 instinctively he would ask the question that 
 should bring on him a shower of facts. I felt 
 myself a log. But after all, I suppose nothing 
 happens at the Docks except the loading and 
 unloading of ships with hands and cranes. 
 Some human facts I learned from my guide, 
 but they were typical of poverty and hardships, 
 and I am not disposed to repeat them. 
 
 Of the ships, though I cannot speak as an 
 expert, neither can I as altogether an ig- 
 noramus. What struck me and perhaps 
 vainly pleased me was the number of sailing 
 merchant vessels I saw, in proportion to the 
 number of steamships. A very beautiful thing 
 no, I do not intend an absolute platitude, for 
 I speak of the contemporary merchant sailing- 
 ship a very beautiful thing is she, who flies 
 round the world, often two years away, with 
 her strength and towering beauty. The full 
 masts and the tracery of ropes the beautiful 
 
 184
 
 THE DOCKS 
 
 creatures ! The liners, with their sullen slate- 
 coloured hides and sulky swollen aspect the 
 ugly monsters! "The liner, she's a lady," 
 says Mr. Kipling. Well, yes, perhaps, but a 
 lady fit to mate with an over-fed, purse-proud, 
 ungainly alderman of tradition. You think of 
 her tonnage and the number of persons she 
 can house, even as the populace admires the 
 aldermanic lady for the price of her diamonds 
 and furs : but as I said, that exaltation of spirit 
 is not mine. One ship I saw was dry-docked. 
 She looked very awkwardly savage and out of 
 place, and reminded me of some strong athlete 
 on a bed of sickness. 
 
 In going from one dock to another we passed 
 through the Blackwall Tunnel. Fine thing, is 
 it not ? Superb achievement of engineering. 
 Since mechanical civilisation is the present 
 pride of mankind, let us rejoice by all means in 
 the Blackwall Tunnel. But I confess that my 
 experience of it increased my annoyance that 
 mere mechanical civilisation should pass for the 
 real thing. The Blackwall Tunnel expedites 
 traffic : that is its advantage to humanity. Its 
 disadvantage is that any one who goes through 
 
 185
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 it twice a day must certainly be rendered deaf in 
 a very short time, and will in all probability de- 
 velop some frightful nervous disease of which he 
 will die prematurely and in great agony. I never 
 heard anything like its reverberating din, but I 
 fancied I was in the thick of a battle between 
 all the artillery of the world. At one point I 
 perceived that the horrid crashing was growing 
 louder and coming nearer it seemed that a 
 dozen express trains were bearing down on me. 
 I looked wildly round for a ladder of escape 
 my guide gently pushed me on to the side 
 pavement a little cart with a very small pony 
 went by. I came out of the Blackwall Tunnel 
 with a splitting headache, trembling in every 
 limb. A superb achievement of civilisation, a 
 great contribution to the brightness and happi- 
 ness of human life ! 
 
 I can imagine few more cheerless fields of 
 labour than the Docks in winter, at least on 
 such a dull day as I saw them. A litter of 
 wood and iron and packing-cases : on one 
 side of you lines of dismal sheds and bare 
 offices ; on the other dirty water with a few 
 sulky ships sitting in it. Outside, Father 
 
 1 86
 
 THE DOCKS 
 
 Thames waits, a sleepy murderer. There is no 
 protection between the edge of the Docks and 
 the water except a painted white line. You 
 must look out for that in time of fog : if you 
 forget it, you will fall in and be drowned : men 
 often die so a fitting death, it seemed, to the 
 life. It was the dinner-hour when I arrived, 
 and the place was almost empty, bare, un- 
 tended, forlorn. Afterwards a few gangs 
 arrived, and got to shifting and hammering. 
 Had I been one of those men, I should have 
 resented a sight-seeing stranger in a comfort- 
 able greatcoat. Happily or otherwise, how- 
 ever, a rebellious view of the cosmos is not 
 common, and I suppose they did not mind. I 
 would have talked cheerily with them about 
 their work, if I could ; but I knew my questions 
 would be stupid, and that I should feel myself 
 an impertinence, and so forbore and confined 
 myself to the man whose attentions I had 
 bought. Some of these men seemed ill fed and 
 were ill clad ; I saw more in worse plight, as 
 was natural, in the filthy streets hard by. Dirt 
 in those streets everywhere filthy steps, grimy 
 windows. How could it be otherwise? And 
 what sort of men and women can they be who 
 
 187
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 are born and bred in these surroundings? 
 Kindly human virtues will flourish hardly, and 
 no doubt those poor people have their share of 
 them ; no doubt in the sparse good times the 
 native fun of the cockney will out. But when 
 we are told that London families will not 
 persist, we must reflect that in parts of London 
 it is well. But what a comment on our philan- 
 thropy and humanitarianism and civilisation ! 
 The man who in the Middle Ages died pre- 
 maturely as a retainer in some silly baronial 
 feud had a better lot than this of physical and 
 mental and moral decay. 
 
 Well, an examination of poverty is not in 
 the bond, and I hate sermonising as much as 
 you. Two practical remarks to finish. I know 
 many people who might get a wiser perspective 
 of themselves and their grievances and ambi- 
 tions if they walked about the streets near the 
 Docks and talked with a dock-hand out of 
 work. And I noticed a big "Scandinavian 
 Home " the Scandinavians I saw, by the way, 
 were not fair-haired giants, but rather swarthy 
 and slight men and I wondered if something 
 of the kind could not be done for some of the 
 Englishmen in the neighbourhood. 
 
 1 88
 
 V 
 
 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 
 
 IT was nearly twenty years since I had 
 visited it, so that I may fairly claim to 
 have gone there with a fresh eye and an 
 open intelligence. That is to say, of 
 course, so far as an actual impression is con- 
 cerned. No one who is interested in politics 
 can be an ignoramus generally about the 
 House of Commons. He must be acquainted 
 more or less with its machinery, and every now 
 and then must consider a debate, reading per- 
 haps one whole speech or so of the eminent, 
 and the abbreviation of the rest mercifully pro- 
 vided by the newspapers. But you may do 
 that for ever without really appreciating the 
 actual atmosphere, tone and mutual attitudes 
 of the House ; and certainly one coming 
 freshly to all that and taking nothing of it for 
 granted should be able to throw some sort of 
 
 189
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 a light on the affair, flickering or dim it may 
 be, for the ignorant or the familiar. But first 
 I must ask you to listen to my preliminary 
 discourse. We have lunched, let us say, some- 
 where about Piccadilly, and there is time as 
 we walk to Westminster for some useful re- 
 trospect. 
 
 Some twenty years ago the House of Com- 
 mons still held the eyes of England. It was 
 still very actually the governing force in the 
 country. How far the balance has really 
 swerved, to what precise element in our polity, 
 is a question in which I am too greatly in- 
 terested for any random remarks which I 
 should lack time, if not your attention, to 
 explain. What is quite certain, and sufficient 
 for our present occasion, is that men no longer 
 look on the House of Commons with the keen 
 attention and anxious expectation it once 
 attracted. Yet there are interesting figures 
 enough still playing with seriousness and gusto 
 on this stage. But we are not excited about 
 the House of Commons, and our minds follow 
 these men into a direct relation with the country 
 without pausing for long over that medium. 
 
 190
 
 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 
 
 It was otherwise in my comparatively hot 
 youth or boyhood twenty good years ago. 
 For I do not think it was any morbidity or 
 eccentricity in myself that aroused the enthusi- 
 astic interest I certainly felt. I am sure that 
 in general conversation there was an even 
 minute concern with proceedings in the House 
 of Commons quite beyond anything one hears 
 nowadays. Elderly men displayed a liveliness 
 and heat about it they keep now for golf or 
 bridge. They tore the papers open and pointed 
 triumphantly to a passage in So-and-so's speech 
 admitting this or denying that, and thumped 
 the table. For my part I spent hours when 
 I should have been doing Latin prose, or even 
 (you will never forgive me !) when I should 
 have been playing football, in reading whole 
 debates, warming with the "hear hears" or 
 derisively echoing the "oh! oh!s." And in 
 those days there was no greater occasion for 
 me than an occasional admission to the 
 Strangers' or Speaker's gallery. I gloated 
 over the bald heads below. Every nerve in 
 me was tense when Mr. Gladstone answered 
 an ordinary question and truly his way of 
 
 191
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 doing it was extraordinarily impressive. It 
 was a glorious happening when I heard Lord 
 Randolph Churchill make a fighting speech : 
 I was a fervid supporter of his, and I think 
 too that the natural snobbishness of a public 
 school boy made the "aristocratic insolence" 
 with which he treated his Irish interrupters 
 extremely delightful to me. And the next day 
 I would verify the whole affair in the news- 
 paper with a noble sense of importance in 
 having myself been present. And now . . . 
 But we are upon Palace Yard. 
 
 We walk through the Hall, and anticipation 
 is stimulated when we see Fox confronting Pitt 
 and the other Parliamentary heroes in effigy. 
 We arrive at the outer lobby, where public- 
 spirited but rather listless citizens are restrained 
 by policemen from the penetralia. ... I had 
 been furnished with an order of admittance to 
 the seats " under the gallery," the best in the 
 House for contiguity : you are less substanti- 
 ally divided from the floor of the House than 
 the pit of a theatre is from the stalls. And 
 here I must hope that the member who gave it 
 me will not feel as the host whose guest has 
 
 192
 
 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 
 
 gone away to write in the papers of his enter- 
 tainment. That destruction of social decency 
 is one of the more obvious abominations of the 
 age, and I should feel very sensitively the 
 accusation that I am doing that sort of thing. 
 I am doing it in a way, of course : I was there 
 by courtesy. But I shall name no names, and 
 . . . these fine feelings are an impertinence in 
 your contemporary writer. I flourished my 
 order at the policeman, and was allowed to 
 enter the inner lobby. Members were stand- 
 ing about, some of them listening to intelligent 
 constituents with a mechanical interest. An 
 official at the end of the lobby took my order, 
 and no consideration of delicacy shall prevent 
 my complimenting him in public on his manner 
 of doing it. He was himself the very perfect 
 type of an official, in evening dress, and having 
 an aquiline and slightly cynical face with 
 whiskers to it. He took the order the like 
 of which he takes by the score every day 
 and looked at it with a mild surprise, as at 
 some inoffensive but novel object. He raised 
 his eyebrows, held it nearer, finally took out 
 a pair of pince-nez and slowly adjusted them, 
 o 193
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 Then he read it deliberately, and looked up 
 at me with a reassuring smile. All was well : 
 I should not be fined or imprisoned. There, 
 in brief, was the essential character of the 
 genial official : he might make you an outcast 
 from your fellow-citizens ; instead of which he 
 is polite and considerate, and you feel im- 
 measurably grateful. He pointed to a little 
 staircase, which I ascended and was actually, 
 though not technically, in the House, on a 
 level with the members except for the con- 
 venient ascent of the benches. 
 
 I had carefully chosen an ordinary day, to 
 take the House of Commons at its normal, 
 and not to be disturbed in my impression by 
 my own interests and prejudices. It was an 
 Irish amendment to the Address in reply to 
 the King's Speech, the course and result of 
 which were alike known. So, indeed, are 
 the course and result of everything else in 
 this assembly ; but there are times when one's 
 interest in the speeches induces the illusion 
 that they really have some effect. This was 
 not such a time : it was bare and obvious 
 routine. 
 
 194
 
 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 
 
 I sat close to the Irish Nationalist benches. 
 They, of course, were crowded. There was 
 one man on the front Opposition bench : on 
 the other Liberal benches another man. On 
 the Treasury bench sat of course the Chief 
 Secretary for Ireland, patient and attentive, 
 not alarmed. Occasionally a colleague came 
 and spoke to him. On the rest of the Con- 
 servative benches two men. That was one's 
 first impression : a few benches closely packed, 
 the rest of them empty ; and it pointed the 
 contemporary character of the House of 
 Commons a registering machine, where the 
 hands work in their sections and go off duty 
 when they are not immediately wanted. The 
 proposer of the amendment commenced his 
 speech. He went as near to reading it as the 
 custom of the House allowed. He had no gift 
 of elocution, no instinctive or artful gesture, 
 no modulation of tones, almost no emphasis 
 at all. At intervals the words "in my judg- 
 ment " came out with comparative cheerfulness 
 and force : it sounded conceited, but was 
 merely the inartistic management of a point ; 
 the gentleman's demeanour was almost labori-
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 ously modest. After ten minutes of this I 
 looked about me again. The place looks 
 smaller, more social, less assuming than you 
 would suppose if you were never there. But 
 it has a dignity of construction and circum- 
 stance. The wood panelling, the decent green 
 of the benches, the wigs of the Speaker and 
 the clerks. . . . But no again and again I 
 looked at it, and each time the effect of the 
 whole was spoiled by it : there is an absurd, 
 irrelevant, truncated green canopy over the 
 Speaker's head, which catches one's eye per- 
 sistently until one's arm longs to hack it off. 
 It is an ugly excrescence on the Speaker's 
 spacious and comely chair, a common candle- 
 shade over a large chased silver candlestick, 
 a patch of green plaster on a fine large-featured 
 face. It is a paltry, mean object, and the most 
 prominent in all the House. Again and again, 
 as I tried to remember emotionally that, though 
 the man on his legs was halting and ineffective, 
 still here was the Mother of Parliaments, a 
 great and glorious survival, the centre of in- 
 numerable associations with our history again 
 and again this preposterous green canopy 
 
 196
 
 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 
 
 dominated everything. It was a symbol of 
 business, as business is too often understood, 
 something of its nature exclusive of beauty 
 and dignity and seemliness. It was as though 
 this place, conscious that it was no longer 
 useful, was determined, in the teeth of archi- 
 tect and designer, that ornamental it should 
 not be. 
 
 If my fancies rambled, the interminable 
 proposer of the amendment was the cause. 
 More than a stricken hour did he dodder on 
 his way. Every now and then came cheers, 
 sparse "hear hears" merging at times, as 
 they came more thickly, into " year-year- 
 years," but they were perfunctory. The Chief 
 Secretary took notes, no doubt for a practical 
 purpose, but with a suggestion to me of 
 compassionate courtesy. At length the pro- 
 poser finished, the "year-year-years" came in 
 a burst and then half the scanty audience 
 went out. Here was another odd evidence 
 of the mere machine. The seconder of the 
 amendment was a far better speaker than the 
 other ; he had some effectively picturesque 
 illustrations at his command ; but because it 
 
 197
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 was a duty to the party to support the mover, 
 but less incumbent on them to support the 
 seconder, the latter had but half the audience. 
 After him came a really practised debater, with 
 the Parliamentary arts ready to his hands and 
 voice, and though what he said interested me 
 little (the substance being well known to me) I 
 listened with the ease one attends to an artist 
 withal. The Nationalist members returned, 
 and even a few Unionists loafed in. I use the 
 word, because that is the effect of the hat 
 routine in the House of Commons. A member 
 comes in bareheaded, bows to the Speaker if 
 he passes opposite the chair, sits down, and 
 then as a rule puts on his hat. The effect 
 is one of negligence, as though he thought 
 anything was good enough for the confounded 
 place. That is of course an accident from the 
 differing hat customs of our ancestors, who 
 wore them everywhere and whose removing 
 them was a sign of great deference, and our- 
 selves who always take them off indoors. One 
 observes the same effect in those London clubs 
 where hat wearing is a tradition : to see a man 
 in a dignified dining-room, lined with old por- 
 
 198
 
 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 
 
 traits, eating with his hat on always strikes 
 one's eye if one does not see it habitually. 
 You may still carry your hat into a drawing- 
 room when you "call" in the afternoon, and a 
 little while since carried your opera hat shut up 
 into an evening party: it is an odd and (to me) 
 an agreeable fact that these customs change so 
 slowly. 
 
 But I digress. . . . With this new speaker, 
 who attracted and replied to objections, I was 
 aware of a new impression. The atmosphere 
 of the House is quite different from that aloof- 
 ness you would infer from the reports. Some- 
 times, even in the newspapers, when there has 
 been a quick interchange between prominent 
 men literally reported, you perceive something 
 of it. But even from those incidents you do 
 not gather how informal in manner (when men 
 are really interested) the debates are. The 
 " oh, oh's " one reads appear merely as colour- 
 less symbols of disagreement. More often they 
 are really "oh . . . oh's " with an interval be- 
 tween them, and with a genuine accent of 
 protest. For example, the speaker in question 
 said no matter what. The Irish leader, who 
 
 199
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 disagreed in a friendly way, said "oh!" 
 smiling. "No?" returned the man on his 
 legs. The Irish leader, without rising, inter- 
 jected his version in a short sentence. "Ah, 
 well," replied the other, u but I must say what 
 I believe, you know." It seems to me that 
 such a conversational atmosphere is one of 
 the best facts about the English Parliament, 
 where it is very unusual for men to lose their 
 tempers, and where the ready belief in good 
 intentions keeps up for the most part a tone 
 of personal friendliness. It does not go so far 
 as to render the proceedings (though I have 
 admitted that I think their importance may 
 be exaggerated) merely academical : if a 
 practical effect is not directly produced, at 
 least practical life is directly reflected : it is 
 merely the sanity and sense of order which 
 happily distinguish us in public life, and be- 
 yond that the sense of solidity, of the essential 
 likeness between us, in spite of all our incon- 
 venient nonsense of classes. 
 
 Well I need not go on. My impressions 
 were repeated. An impression, first of all, of 
 a proceeding absolutely mechanical and per- 
 
 200
 
 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 
 
 functory, not valued or valuable for itself, 
 recognised as a thing just worth while to be 
 kept going. And then, as spirit and life were 
 infused into it, the proceeding became a mildly 
 interested and essentially friendly colloquy, in 
 spite of the subject, which was beset by tradi- 
 tional denunciations. My honourable friend 
 must allow me to say . . . The right honour- 
 able gentleman, whose abilities no one re- 
 cognises more freely than I, is mistaken 
 in supposing . . . The honourable and 
 learned gentleman, whose attitude on this 
 question is very natural. . . . We are all very 
 good fellows. That, I think, is the usual 
 atmosphere, when nothing very exciting is 
 toward, and no pronouncement which could 
 thrill the country is possible. Nine-tenths of 
 the affair repetition and waste of time. But a 
 tone which does credit to us all. 
 
 201
 
 VI 
 
 MY SPECTACLES 
 
 THE man of taste is commonly unwilling 
 to write about his personal and private 
 experiences. Poets, to be sure, are an 
 exception, and we are glad to accept 
 the result, though sometimes a slight surprise 
 may mingle with our admiration as they reveal 
 their intimacies. But to set down in plain 
 prose one's sensations in love and bereavement 
 would be monstrous (it has been done), and 
 must bring overwhelming discomfort upon the 
 sensitive reader. Even the minor accidents of 
 private life are felt by the man of taste to be no 
 subject for his pen, to be at once a prodigality 
 of himself and an intrusion on the public. His 
 friends have not this feeling, and are constantly 
 urging him to "make an article" of some 
 pleasant event, an excursion or what not, but 
 (when the man of taste is concerned) without 
 
 202
 
 MY SPECTACLES 
 
 success. So, I feel that it is no business of the 
 public that I am short of sight, and that I have 
 lately been fitted with spectacles which enable 
 me to see like other men ; and I feel, moreover, 
 that the public might be apt to agree. 
 
 Nevertheless I shall break the rule. The 
 affair does not, after all, touch the secrets of 
 my heart : I am full of it, 1 and it will be inter- 
 esting, I am convinced, to other people. It is 
 not as though a blind man had been made to 
 see, but it is something in that way. 
 
 I had been conscious of short sight almost 
 as long as I can remember, but in the last ten 
 years or so my sight had become much shorter. 
 But I did not know how bad it was how far 
 inferior to the sight of ordinary men. I in- 
 creased the strength of a single eyeglass I wore, 
 and imagined that when I wore it I saw pretty 
 well. Constitutionally averse from doing any- 
 thing definite, I postponed and postponed an 
 interview with an oculist. Eventually, how- 
 ever, I saw one (I wish a man of taste might 
 advertise him), who prescribed spectacles 
 
 1 I suppose I was. But alas ! my spectacles are become a 
 commonplace to me now. Two years, Postumus. 
 
 203
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 which, he told me, would bring my sight very 
 near the normal. And ever since I have had 
 those spectacles I have been aware of throng- 
 ing new sensations and experiences. In- 
 tellectually, aesthetically, socially, the world 
 and not the visible world alone is changed to 
 me. I see definite objects where I saw nothing, 
 I see faces where before I merely inferred that 
 faces were, I see expressions where before I 
 saw only faces. The comparative effect of all 
 this should be interesting, I believe : if it 
 merely tells the lucky-sighted how much they 
 score, or send the unlucky and neglectful to 
 the oculists, it is worth the writing. One thing 
 I must premise. It is all literal and true, not 
 metaphorical. By spectacles I mean spectacles, 
 not philosophy nor religion of any sort, old or 
 new. It is as well to say it : the subtle are so 
 easily misled. 
 
 I will take the broader effects first. In my 
 walks abroad in the country I like to think as 
 my eye suggests : I dislike ruminating over 
 life, I avoid trying to solve my private troubles, 
 and I refuse altogether to make schemes for 
 work. Consequently, when my vision was so 
 
 204
 
 MY SPECTACLES 
 
 limited and blurred as it was, I was often bored 
 for want of mental incitement, I was driven 
 upon what a prig of my acquaintance used to 
 call "my own thoughts." There might be 
 nothing round me but a bare plain, or the 
 slope of a hill, which is all very well for a 
 mystic, but little good for a matter-of-fact in- 
 telligence : the aesthetic emotion excited or the 
 vague mood suggested cannot I challenge any 
 candid person to deny it pleasurably last. 
 But now I see many small objects I should 
 have missed, and see many larger ones houses, 
 flocks of sheep or the like long before I should 
 once have seen them. There, clearly, is an 
 intellectual gain. But of course there is also a 
 loss. Dimness of sight was a better minister 
 to one's mood when one was for romance ; it 
 was for certain scenes a more gracious introduc- 
 tion. The world now looks plainer and 
 brighter, but somehow not quite so natural, 
 something painted, a picture under glass. It 
 invites to a readier criticism, less easily to 
 dreams. But if all our gains were unqualified, 
 life would be all self-reproach. 
 
 A similar loss and gain holds of faces : I 
 205
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 mean the faces of people I pass in the street 
 or see in other public places. They used 
 to be simply faces ; at a distance merely 
 tokens for that part of the human body ; 
 nearer seen, they were objects with eyes and 
 noses. If the general presence suggested an 
 acquaintance, I put my single glass in my eye 
 and with increasing inaccuracy came to a deci- 
 sion: otherwise there was no chance of interest. 
 Now I am aware of a definite type at some 
 distance, and when the face passes me I see it 
 in all its peculiarities of fashioning and life. 
 Another intellectual gain and a large one. At 
 first speculation ran riot, and I was never dull. 
 I have not so far, it is true, seen a large num- 
 ber of fervid ambitions, intense enthusiasms, 
 rapt passions of love and despair, patent on 
 human faces. But I find it interesting yet to 
 note the obvious signs or so one thinks them 
 of ordinary characteristics : anxiety, greed, 
 benevolence, sulkiness, intolerance, servility. 
 Children they especially delight me. Of old 
 I appreciated those I knew, and caressed, and 
 saw close : the others I thought vaguely 
 charming little animals. But now I see and 
 
 206
 
 MY SPECTACLES 
 
 marvel at the range of expressiveness in nearly 
 all children their wonder, amusement, curi- 
 osity, furtive appeals to one's sympathy, con- 
 scious appeals how wonderful that is when 
 one passes in a moment and will never see 
 them again ! to one's interest and almost to 
 one's affection. I am bound to say that it is 
 amusement I personally most excite in them. 
 For some reason or other children find some- 
 thing diverting in my appearance or my 
 carriage ; they nearly always smile at me, and 
 when I smile back they laugh outright. That 
 reassures me. When children of my private 
 acquaintance used to laugh at me before I said 
 a word, I used to fear that their parents might 
 have told them I was a funny man. (I am not, 
 but ever since I fell off an omnibus in the early 
 'nineties, certain of my friends have thought 
 so.) Now I perceive that to a child's eye 
 there is something really comical about me, 
 and "Courage!" I say to myself, "we have 
 our uses. ..." 
 
 But this is one side only. Except for the 
 children, whose beauties are more evident, I 
 lose aesthetically by this clear envisaging of 
 
 207
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 faces. Well, I have said it : I meant to hint 
 it only. But, reader, in your ear : we ourselves 
 are handsome creatures, and there is no one by 
 to overhear and take it to himself. You have 
 always been clear-sighted : tell me, has it ever 
 struck you how very ugly most people are ? I 
 have been astonished. I used to take it for 
 granted, with an optimism I am proud to 
 remember, that the average man I passed was 
 more or less inoffensive, the average woman 
 more or less comely. And now ! I was quite 
 unprepared. My friends are all exceptionally 
 beautiful, and the pictures of people in the 
 illustrated papers are presumably doctored. 
 It is rather heartbreaking. I see some one 
 coming towards me in the distance, and lo ! 
 thinks I, a fine, pleasant-looking man, or a 
 quite attractive woman, as the case may be. 
 And then he or she comes up, and I see the 
 features distinctly, the colouring, and so forth. 
 . . . Are our women really the most beautiful 
 in Europe ? Since the advent of my spectacles 
 I have had no means for a fair comparison. 
 . . . But all this is little to set against the 
 gain of interest. 
 
 208
 
 MY SPECTACLES 
 
 I come to social changes. The first is the 
 probability that I shall be much more popular 
 than in the past. My single eyeglass and 
 very short sight gave between them innumer- 
 able offences. Why anybody should be worse 
 annoyed by one glass than by two I do not 
 know, but the fact is notorious. I have often 
 noticed an angry scowl as I stuck my one glass 
 in my eye, as though the intention to see 
 my interlocutor more plainly were an insult to 
 him. I gather from novels that forty years 
 ago, or so, the single eyeglass was used as a 
 kind of offensive weapon. It was the mark in 
 Ripton Thompson's mind of the aristocrat, 
 and so of course, if Mr. Meredith was right, 
 quickly became the assumption of the pseudo- 
 aristocrat. The heavy swell in Caste wears it 
 traditionally. But that use of it surely ceased 
 many years ago, and it was rather hard to be 
 thought an imbecile and anachronistical impos- 
 tor. The offence given by one's short sight 
 was even more foolish. If I did not see a new 
 acquaintance quite close, or saw him only for a 
 few minutes, I was apt to forget his face when 
 next we met. It is almost inconceivable that 
 p 209
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 any man should be fool enough to think this 
 forgetfulness due not to a very common physical 
 imperfection, but to a piece of silly and gratui- 
 tous rudeness. Yet so it was. I have more 
 than once been told that some idiot accused me 
 of having "cut " him, and I was rendered so 
 nervous by the mistake that over and over 
 again I accosted complete strangers on the 
 off-chance of their being sensitive and stupid 
 acquaintances. This offence will now pass. I 
 shall fix the faces of new acquaintances on my 
 mind, and insist on their recognising me, for a 
 change. 
 
 That is an advantage, but one not so great 
 as the increased fulness and animation of social 
 intercourse. I can now see the expressions of 
 my friends across a dinner-table, and so on : 
 I can see if the gaiety of their words is belied 
 by the weariness of their eyes : I can see if 
 their pessimism is real or the mere naughtiness 
 of repletion ; I can see the irrepressible faint 
 smile, the quickly banished moisture of the 
 eyes. I shall be a shrewd observer. 
 
 The thought occurs to me that Frenchmen 
 must have better sight than Englishmen. 
 
 2IO
 
 MY SPECTACLES 
 
 When a man describes a character in a book of 
 fiction, unless he be describing" an actual inti- 
 mate acquaintance which I hope is not often 
 done he sees the character with the vision he 
 has for the casual face. Have you never ob- 
 served that, whereas in English fiction you get 
 faces and sizes in a general way, a long nose, 
 sparkling eyes, a manly expression and the 
 like, in French you get so often very much 
 more? You get the quality of the skin, the 
 exact degree of puffiness under the eyes, the 
 warts on the chin, the pimples on the cheek. 
 I have a fancy that the average Frenchman 
 sees all this in real life more commonly than 
 the Englishman, and therefore writes of it ; 
 and I offer the fancy as the subject of a critical 
 article. 
 
 The brief digression does not mean that my 
 subject is exhausted. But it is well to set 
 a term to one's smaller egotisms, and I doubt 
 this one has run away with my pen, and I may 
 have been mistaken in its interest for others. 
 Neither short sight nor spectacles is an un- 
 common thing. But these rough heads of 
 discourse may suggest their own reminiscences 
 
 211
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 to my readers, or their own good fortune : the 
 perfect in sight may read them with an agree- 
 able superiority. 
 
 I record in conclusion that I find the world 
 worth seeing clearly. There was produced a 
 little while ago a play by M. Clemenceau 
 which of our famous politicians is likely to 
 write a play? a play half metaphorical, no 
 doubt, in which a blind Chinaman, restored to 
 sight, finds, in place of the kindly and affection- 
 ate relations and friends he thought were round 
 him, knaves and hypocrites who humoured him 
 for their purposes. He decides that it is 
 wicked magic, and that he will go blind again. 
 So would not I. 
 
 212
 
 VII 
 
 A QUESTION OF WOMEN 
 
 " Je me rappelai heureusement une maxime de feu mon grand-pere, 
 qui avait coutume de dire que tout est permis aux dames, et que tout 
 ce qui vient d'elles est grace et faveur." M. SILVESTRE BONNARD. 
 
 A LITTLE while ago there was a case 
 reported in the newspapers in which 
 the author of a book about women 
 prosecuted a critic thereof. The ex- 
 tracts from it given in the papers did not 
 encourage me (if I may say it without a legal 
 risk) to read the book in question, and I am, 
 therefore, ignorant if it contained any reasoned 
 considerations of women's position in contem- 
 porary society, or if (as the extracts suggested) 
 it was a merely violent denunciation. To attack 
 a whole sex, save perhaps in an epigram or so, 
 is an obviously foolish proceeding, impossible 
 to any one who has the slightest interest in 
 social history and problems. On the other 
 
 213
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 hand, the smug gallantries which are still em- 
 ployed by a certain sort of writers when they 
 speak of women generally, are also irrelevant 
 to the facts of modern life. I have quoted, 
 however, a general compliment, too naive and 
 kindly to offend the most determined woman, 
 at the head of this essay, to indicate that my 
 own mental attitude to women is all that there 
 is of the most deferential, chivalrous, and even 
 romantic. I indicate this fact because the task I 
 have set myself might suggest to a thoughtless 
 reader an idea that I have some vulgar and 
 stupid wish to say disagreeable things. We 
 have all heard a good deal about the unsatisfied 
 aspirations of women and the unfair limitations 
 imposed upon them. But I have come across, 
 also, a good deal of floating discontent on the 
 part of men, from their own point of view, with 
 the condition of women, and the case I have 
 referred to has suggested to me that I might 
 attempt to give some rational account of this 
 discontent, to investigate its causes, to estimate 
 its worth, and to set forth the probable solution 
 of the matter in the progress of contemporary 
 civilisation. It is clearly convenient, therefore, 
 
 214
 
 A QUESTION OF WOMEN 
 
 that I should be able to disclaim any personal 
 reason for showing this discontent ; that I 
 should be able to examine it as an impartial 
 philosopher. The discontent means, of course, 
 that, in the opinion of the discontented, women 
 are given unfair advantages in life. Person- 
 ally, I do not suffer by them ; as a philosopher, 
 then, I can examine and explain them im- 
 partially ; as a man I can make an old-fashioned 
 bow and assure society that it has my permis- 
 sion to give as many unfair advantages to 
 women (at the expense of other men) as it 
 chooses. 
 
 It has been alleged if publicly, I know not; 
 frequently to me in private that over large 
 sections of the community women have an 
 illogical combination of chances. That on the 
 one hand they claim and are acquiring equal 
 opportunities with men in the work-a-day 
 world, and on the other claim and are given 
 the right to be supported in idleness, in mere 
 pleasure-seeking or the exercise of intellectual 
 or artistic tastes, by the work of men. So that 
 large numbers of men are at this disadvantage, 
 that they have to work both for their own sub- 
 
 215
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 sistence and that of an idle person, or idle 
 persons, as well, and are at the same time ex- 
 posed to the competition of women who have 
 the spring-board of private security at the 
 expense of other men's work. Sometimes I 
 have heard a complaint of a simpler nature, 
 namely, that it is unfair to many a man that he 
 should have to work so hard that neither time 
 nor energy is left him for the intellectual or 
 aesthetic life while he supports in comfortable 
 idleness, or in the pursuit of agreeable studies, 
 a woman who contributes practically nothing to 
 the domestic economy. The former complaint 
 is sometimes reasonable for an individual case, 
 but logically pushed is inconsistent with itself. 
 The latter complaint is heard less frequently, 
 because it offends traditional sentiment and 
 appears unmanly, but the basis for it in life 
 occurs more often. It is the former, more 
 complicated position which has given point to 
 the whole matter, and the man who makes the 
 simpler complaint finds courage if he does 
 and if you call it courage to do so because of 
 this female competition, though it may not 
 affect himself. But there are two courses at 
 
 216
 
 A QUESTION OF WOMEN 
 
 work, the movement towards the economic in- 
 dependence of women, and the abolition, due 
 to modern improvements and facilities of 
 material life, of the domestic work which was 
 once performed by them and was economically 
 the counterpart of the outside work done by 
 the men. It is in this cause that the genuine 
 basis of complaint lies, and the remedy for the 
 grievance (if grievance there be) is precisely in 
 the economic independence of women which at 
 present stimulates the complaint. These are 
 elementary considerations, no doubt, and are 
 very far from being novel. I mention them to 
 show the point of view from which I propose 
 to discuss the men's disadvantages. A more 
 profitable discussion, it is probable, would 
 begin much deeper, in that still obscure division 
 of biology or physiology which is barbarously 
 called sexualogy, but had I the necessary 
 science, this is not the place for such an in- 
 cursion. I confine myself to some incidents 
 which attend the present stages of our social 
 progress, believing that even a superficial ob- 
 servation of them may not be without its sug- 
 gestions. And since the matter is first of all 
 
 217
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 economical, it may be useful to make our 
 divisions according to the uppermost fact in 
 modern life income. 
 
 There can be no fair grievance of the sort 
 which forms my subject among the " idle rich." 
 A rich and idle man may think he supports 
 his wife, but, economically, the community 
 supports them both. Moreover, the objects 
 for which a community supports rich and idle 
 people the benefit and delight derived by it 
 from their encouragement of art and science, 
 the excellence of their morals, and the charm of 
 their manners are served even better by the 
 women than the men. Nor can the very rich 
 man who makes his riches complain. If, un- 
 happily, his wife is a mere luxury or ornament 
 in his life, it is one he can well afford. It is 
 when you come to the moderately rich man of 
 commerce or a profession let us say with two 
 or three thousand pounds a year that a case 
 for a grievance here and there, very excep- 
 tional, may be set up. Let me observe that in 
 this, as in all other divisions, I have nothing to 
 do with the ordinary cases of life, the cases in 
 which every one concerned is content, when the 
 
 218
 
 A QUESTION OF WOMEN 
 
 man thinks it a privilege to do his utmost for 
 the comfort of his wife, and she makes him a 
 thousandfold return, and so forth. I am con- 
 cerned only with the discontented men, the 
 exceptions. Very well. In this condition of 
 life the sumptuary customs of England may 
 make it natural that a woman should insist on 
 her husband working to the utmost limit of his 
 powers to provide her with this, that, and the 
 other, and the husband may be unable to resist 
 the pressure of his wife, her family, their 
 friends, and traditions. In the result, you have 
 a man working beyond the possibility of enjoy- 
 ing the intellect, the art, or even the sports of 
 his day. And the woman ? The management 
 of her house and the care of her children take 
 up all her time ? But do they, in modern con- 
 ditions? They may, no doubt, and perhaps 
 they should. The care of children may fitly 
 occupy the whole of a woman's time. But as 
 a rule, in such a household as I indicate, the 
 succession of nurses and nursery-governesses, 
 and afterwards of schools or tutors, relieves the 
 mother of all educative work ; and the children 
 themselves being occupied with their games 
 
 219
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 and lessons, it is likely that the time devoted 
 to them by the mother, by reason of simple 
 affection, will not exceed an hour or so a day. 
 It is possible that there are no children ; when 
 there are, we all observe that the families of 
 the well-to-do are, on the average, smaller than 
 they were wont to be. As to the management 
 of the house, where all the manual work is 
 done by others, and everything, except for the 
 cooking of food, is bought ready-made, it is 
 neither necessary nor desirable that the super- 
 vision should be a lengthy task want of in- 
 telligence and method would be implied. At 
 least, we all know women whose houses are 
 perfectly ordered and comfortable, and who 
 can spare many hours a day for extra domestic 
 concerns. We have, then in these few cases 
 of grievances an overworked man and a 
 woman with most of her time free for pleasure 
 or " self-improvement." In either case the 
 man may complain with a show of fairness that 
 he is at a disadvantage ; he also may have a 
 taste for pleasure, or he also may wish to im- 
 prove his mind and artistic perceptions. It 
 may happen that he, at the start of equal gifts
 
 A QUESTION OF WOMEN 
 
 and attainments with his wife, may fall so far 
 behind her for want of opportunity that his 
 society becomes uninteresting to her. Another 
 man's society may be more agreeable. Perhaps 
 the other man is "my ancient friend, Don 
 Juan." And all the while the husband works 
 for an unreasonable number of hours a day and 
 pays for everything. I confess that when he 
 complains I am touched. You see, when the 
 average woman, even at this level of life, was 
 more or less a household drudge and his con- 
 fessed inferior, he had some return, in vanity, 
 if in nothing else. But now that out of his 
 own dull exertions in her behalf she makes her- 
 self his superior in many ways (possibly even 
 at golf!), and at least claims an equality all 
 round, his case may move a compassionate 
 heart. 
 
 The grievances or the basis for grievances 
 grow in number as we gradually reach a 
 lower income, since there is even less of the 
 domestic supervision and the social activities 
 which are partially for the man's advantage 
 also. I cannot be minutely accurate in figures, 
 but I am now contemplating a division of 
 
 221
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 society where, roughly to put it, marriage is 
 not indulged in without an income of from 
 five hundred to a thousand pounds a year. 
 (Happily, English society is not rigidly divided 
 by income, but my subject compels me to keep 
 to it ; the reader will imagine all the qualifica- 
 tions.) Here, by the way, as in the other 
 division, there mingles in the society a number 
 of men too poor to marry, and I am reminded 
 that I have heard complaints from them in re- 
 gard to the unfair advantages, not of wives, 
 but of female relations. Both sorts may be set 
 forth by an example, as clearly as by general 
 statement, and perhaps less dully. I take some 
 old friends of mine, the Brown family. Colonel 
 Brown had a small private income in addition 
 to his half-pay, and lived in Sussex. He had 
 two sons and two daughters, between the 
 eldest and youngest of whom the difference in 
 age was only five years. I will call them, for 
 convenience, the Browni and Brownae. The 
 complaint made to me came from Brownus 
 major, and was as follows. He was sent to a 
 public school and a university, so that up to the 
 age of twenty-three his education was more 
 
 222
 
 A QUESTION OF WOMEN 
 
 expensive than that of the Brownae ; but, on 
 the other hand, he got less good from it, since 
 they acquired some knowledge of foreign 
 languages and some artistic accomplishments, 
 while he was taught nothing at all. At twenty- 
 three he was sent into a bank, and his salary of 
 ;8o a year was supplemented by a very small 
 allowance from the Colonel, who considered 
 that it was time Brownus major made his own 
 living. He dwelt in small and uncomfortable 
 lodgings ; his food had to be of the simplest 
 sort, and sometimes, when he was out of pocket, 
 was hardly sufficient ; he had a good deal of 
 anxiety about paying his way ; his hours of 
 work were long ; he had few friends ; and 
 amusements which cost money he could enjoy 
 but seldom. Meanwhile, the Brownae lived 
 on in Sussex with their parents. They had 
 absolute security, a pleasant table, a comfort- 
 able allowance for dress and pocket-money, 
 and no necessity to work. As a matter of fact, 
 they passed their time in a round of simple en- 
 joyments hockey, golf, lawn tennis, dinners, 
 " small dances," theatricals, the agreeable 
 society of the district. This state of affairs 
 
 223
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 continued for some years, and I confess that at 
 the end of them it did seem as though the 
 sisters had had the best of it. They were 
 brimming with health and life and good spirits; 
 Brownus major looked tired and pale and dis- 
 contented. I think they rather despised him 
 for having ceased to be their equal in games. 
 Neither was a clever girl, but their wits, not 
 having been confined to rows of figures many 
 hours a day, were brighter and fresher than his. 
 It is, of course, a very tenable position that 
 this was all for the best, even as a type, if the 
 next generation depends mostly on the mothers. 
 As a matter of fact, only one, Browna minor, 
 married a rich man, so that comfort and, if 
 she likes, idleness are secured to her. The 
 Colonel is dead now, and his half-pay termi- 
 nated. Mrs. Brown and Browna major live on 
 the small private income, in a smaller house, 
 but much in the same way, with plenty of 
 amusement and no work for Browna major. 
 Brownus major toils on in his bank, and 
 has reached a salary of ^140 a year. For 
 three weeks in the year he can share in his 
 sister's pleasures. I glance for a moment at 
 
 224
 
 A QUESTION OF WOMEN 
 
 Brownus minor. He was a brighter boy, and 
 gained a place in a public office. To this 
 he gradually added the labour of writing 
 for magazines, and now, by working on an 
 average for ten hours a day, is enabled to 
 support a wife in considerable comfort. Her 
 luncheon parties, at which he, of course, can- 
 not be present, are popular. I have never 
 heard him complain, and have no doubt that 
 he thoroughly enjoys the situation. I mention 
 his case merely because Brownus major, who is 
 rather a crude misogynist, adduces it as another 
 injustice to men. For his own case, however, 
 I think there is something to be said. 
 
 We may now pass to a range of life in which 
 it is a question for a wife how much, if any, 
 of the actual housework she shall do. Let us 
 suppose a five-roomed cottage a kitchen, a 
 parlour, and three other rooms and a husband 
 making ^200 a year, the income of a lucky 
 clerk or of a highly-skilled workman. The 
 housework can be done easily by a wife in 
 average health, and leave her a reasonable 
 leisure. If her husband is a skilled workman 
 it is almost a certainty that she will do it, and 
 
 Q 225
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 if he has any grievance at all it is that in the 
 widespread ignorance of domestic arts in this 
 country the work will probably be ill done. 
 That is hardly the wife's fault, as an individual 
 woman ; and I have sometimes thought that it 
 would be well if some of the energy devoted 
 to the teaching of Christian theology to un- 
 willing Orientals could be directed to the sal- 
 vation of lower middle-class digestions at 
 home. In any case the wife will do less work 
 than of old, since so much that was made at 
 home is now bought ready-made. But shall 
 she keep a servant? As I said, if she is the 
 wife of a skilled artisan, she will not, following 
 the fashion of her class. And here, by the 
 way, is the great advantage in life of the 
 mechanical engineering folk, a comparatively 
 new class among us, who, if successful, make 
 more money than the sum I have mentioned, 
 but have few silly " appearances " to support, 
 and spend their earnings in real pleasures. 
 But if her husband is a clerk she will very 
 likely want a servant, for the sake of appear- 
 ances. When she makes up for the expense 
 by work of her own he can have no complaint. 
 
 226
 
 A QUESTION OF WOMEN 
 
 I know of one instance in which a woman 
 prefers to work all day at ill-paid needlework 
 to doing the simple work of such a menage ; it 
 seems idiotic to me, but there is no economical 
 grievance for the man. But if he has to work 
 longer hours and deny himself the cheapest 
 pleasures for the sake of a servant? Well, 
 then, sentiment and manliness will most 
 often keep him from complaint ; but if he 
 does complain, I am inclined to lend him 
 my ear. 
 
 In all these cases other than economical 
 causes operate, varying strength of wills, 
 selfishness, uxoriousness, many things. Also, 
 I am far from denying that very often there is 
 a quite opposite grievance : there are the 
 Robinsons as well as the Browns, for example, 
 the Robinson family in which the girls have 
 been systematically sacrificed to the boys, the 
 reasonable chances of life denied them for their 
 brothers' benefit. But, from the economical 
 point of view, it appears that scattered over 
 our society there are cases where women have 
 unfair advantages, and where, if the men are 
 not compensated for these, or rendered blind to 
 
 227
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 them by other considerations, they may have 
 ground for complaint. 
 
 When we reach the level in which the house- 
 work must be done by the wife, or female 
 relations, the ground for discontent comes to 
 an end (as it ends at the other extreme in the 
 idle rich) ; all the more, because here we find 
 most commonly the women earning outside 
 wages as well. At this point, therefore, we 
 may consider the other ground of complaint, 
 female competition. It is, as I have said, 
 inconsistent with the simple complaint, but it 
 gives point to it, because the increasing 
 activity of women outside their homes forces 
 on the discontented man the fact that, though 
 economically he is supporting a dependant, 
 otherwise he is supporting a person who claims 
 equal freedom of will and general independ- 
 ence with himself. 
 
 I have suggested that this very female com- 
 petition, this step towards economic inde- 
 pendence of women, is a possible remedy for 
 such grievances as I have mentioned. I do 
 not say it is the only one, or that it is an 
 obviously advisable course. It is beyond the 
 
 228
 
 A QUESTION OF WOMEN 
 
 range of my subject to go deeply into that, 
 and it is useless to go into it superficially. 
 I may, however, venture on a few remarks 
 round about it. There is a good deal of 
 feeling against women working at all. While 
 writing these pages I have read an article in 
 a daily paper by Mrs. Craigie, in which she, 
 an exceptionally gifted observer and student 
 of life, and, by the way, herself an indefati- 
 gable worker, protests against women doing 
 any work, and urges on fathers their duty to 
 provide dowries for their daughters. Of 
 course, if it is proved to be good for the race 
 that women should be without professional 
 work, not only for a comparatively short time 
 before and after childbirth, but all their lives, 
 there is no more to be said. But what Mrs. 
 Craigie and other objectors really mean (as it 
 seems to me) is not work, but overwork. She 
 speaks of a woman " who does far more than 
 a man for far less pay, goes home to a sloppy 
 meal she is too weary to eat, and a lonely 
 evening too sad to be described." These 
 evils are not due to the mere fact of her 
 working : they are due to an ill-regulated 
 
 229
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 labour-market, and the want of provision for 
 cheap and rational amusement. Partly they 
 are due to the failure of women, so far, to 
 combine as men combine in labour unions. 
 But overwork is bad for men also ; most of 
 the men who work in this country work too 
 much ; that is to say, too little time and energy 
 are left them for life and education. Suppose 
 a man who works ten hours a day, and a wife 
 whose home duties consume one hour ; would 
 it not be well if he could work less and she 
 more? Where is the economic necessity that 
 if she work at all, she must work as hard as 
 he, and for insufficient pay? Is human in- 
 telligence really unequal to the problem ? 
 
 I will not alarm my readers by preaching 
 any crude socialism. Dr. Karl Pearson, whose 
 works fed the socialistic aspirations of my 
 youth, sees in the desire of women for economic 
 independence an argument for socialism of a 
 very sweeping sort. My view is more practical 
 now, and I find a moderate and cautious exer- 
 cise of State-control in labour a very practicable 
 ingredient in my general politics. The inter- 
 ference of the State with a crude capitalist 
 
 230
 
 A QUESTION OF WOMEN 
 
 system has proceeded far since the days when 
 the successful pupils of the Manchester School 
 were allowed to work children to death, and 
 will proceed further yet. Because a woman 
 may not be able to work for so many hours as 
 a man, or because there are periods when she 
 cannot work at all, is no reason why she cannot 
 work. We have a large number of women 
 among us who either have no domestic duties, 
 or whose domestic duties, which modern 
 facilities have so greatly reduced, are very 
 light. Many of them clamour for chances to 
 work, and my exceptional complaining men, 
 at least, are absurd to resist that clamour. If 
 the Brownae had had some paying employ- 
 ment, the lot of Brownus major had not been 
 so hard. As for ill effects on men's chances 
 for work from female competition, that, again, 
 is an affair of a rightly regulated labour market, 
 an ideal, perhaps, not perfectly to be attained, 
 but not impossible to approach. I think the 
 only men who need absolutely suffer are the 
 writers of contemporary fiction, which is almost 
 exclusively read by women, since their public 
 would be at less frequent leisure. 
 
 231
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 I have confined myself in this paper to 
 England. I should have spoken of America if 
 I had more direct knowledge of its social life. 
 Americans with whom I have conversed, how- 
 ever, seem to accept it as an inevitable rule of 
 life that men must work and women must 
 enjoy themselves. That I observe of the well- 
 to-do ; the working women in American fac- 
 tories seem to need protection even more than 
 their sisters in England. In any case, I should 
 have confined myself to the " Anglo-Saxon " 
 world. A fanciful thinker might say that the 
 Teutonic race the Teuton as an element in 
 our origin as distinct from Latins and Celts, 
 is working out a new attitude to women, a new 
 position for them in civilisation. Another 
 might point to Germany and smile, to be 
 answered that German social civilisation is 
 backward, but on our own road. Who knows ? 
 The old attitude to woman as an angel or a 
 "plaything" is so implicit in the romance and 
 colour of our life, that middle-aged men, like 
 the writer, may sigh, contemplating a new 
 horizon, for romance and colour lost. But that 
 is a feeble thought. There is no true war be- 
 
 232
 
 A QUESTION OF WOMEN 
 
 tween independence and romance. It may 
 even be that the grandfather of M. Silvestre 
 Bonnard, could he live again some hundreds 
 of years hence, might make his remark with no 
 suggestion of irony. For my part, I repeat it 
 with a reverence. 
 
 233
 
 VIII 
 
 PETTICOAT LANE 
 
 THEY told me it was the most curiously 
 exotic scene in London. I should 
 hardly see an English face, or hear the 
 English tongue. An Oriental scene : 
 everywhere swarthy Eastern faces, with lustrous 
 black eyes, everywhere a babble of Yiddish. 
 I should see women with bright-hued shawls 
 for hats, and men in gabardines. The names 
 over the shops would be in Hebrew. Well . . . 
 they exaggerated, as they always do. Sunday 
 morning in Petticoat Lane is not all this. 
 I should not have believed them at all, indeed, 
 if their account had not been partially sup- 
 ported by Mr. Zangwill in his Children of the 
 Ghetto, to my mind one of the most interesting, 
 even fascinating, books written in our days. 
 Were I an autocrat, Mr. Zangwill should 
 publish nothing that did not concern his race, 
 
 234
 
 PETTICOAT LANE 
 
 for when he writes on other themes he is 
 equalled by Brown and Jones and surpassed 
 by Robinson, but when he writes of Jews he 
 has a genius of divination and presentment, 
 and is a rich mine of knowledge about a fact 
 of human history than which few stranger or 
 more vital are known to us. His description 
 of the Sunday Fair in Petticoat Lane was in 
 my mind as I listened to my friends, and 
 wondered why I had never been there before 
 with that stupid wonder of us Londoners when 
 we hear tell of the sights to be seen in our own 
 city. When I came back I looked up the 
 passage, and remembered that it referred to 
 a previous generation. Neither with him nor 
 with my friends, however, was I angry. If 
 Petticoat Lane is not what it was, it is still 
 extremely interesting. I enjoyed it thoroughly, 
 and some time when the mood for a vigorous 
 drama is on me I shall enjoy it again. 
 
 In one respect I knew that I should not 
 be disappointed : Oriental or not, the place 
 would be full of Jews, and Jews of a sort with 
 which I was not very familiar. The race is 
 a subject which interests me intensely, but 
 
 235
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 about which I speak or write with diffidence, 
 knowing how sensitive Jews are to observation, 
 even in England where they have nothing 
 to fear from it, and how apt to suspect an 
 observer of some ridiculous attitude, if not 
 of hostility, then of patronage. The baser 
 sort, of course, especially of those whom you 
 find mixed up with our well - to - do middle 
 classes, are anxious to conceal their race, and 
 are insulted if you refer to it. It is an absurd, 
 as well as an unworthy procedure, because 
 no amount of Scotch nomenclature imposes 
 on the Gentiles, and they are always despised 
 for their pains. It is a procedure deplored by 
 their self-respecting brethren, as I happen to 
 know. A little essay I wrote in all good faith 
 on this phenomenon still amazing and con- 
 founding to me in the light of the heroic faith- 
 fulness of the race through so many centuries 
 a little essay I published brought me some 
 bitter letters from Jews who thought themselves 
 aggrieved, but, I am glad to remember, the 
 approval of some who had the best right to 
 speak for their brethren. I refer to this be- 
 cause, coming now upon a subject which 
 
 236
 
 PETTICOAT LANE 
 
 compels me to write something of Jews as 
 Jews, I would say at the outset that if I claim 
 the right of a cat to look at a king, I exercise 
 it with the friendliest feelings. 
 
 To resume. Many Jewish artists had I seen 
 and admired, some known and liked. I had 
 met and appreciated Jews of intellectual pur- 
 suits. Mere successful money-makers of no 
 race appeal to me very much ; they are apt to 
 be rather limited in their sympathies ; I do not 
 know that the Jewish are more so than others 
 perhaps, indeed, they are less, having often 
 a savoir-vivre and good - humour which the 
 Saxon money-maker sometimes wants. Such 
 Jews also I had known. But I had never, 
 before the other Sunday, observed the chrysalis 
 Jew of the East End. Let me say at once 
 that in so far as he is represented by the 
 energetic gentlemen who shout their goods 
 in Petticoat Lane he is a treat. 
 
 The first thing that strikes an ignoramus 
 about Petticoat Lane is its propinquity to the 
 London he knows already. A penny 'bus from 
 Cornhill, and you are there. I asked the 'bus 
 conductor if he passed Petticoat Lane, and 
 
 23?
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 he looked at me with a rebuking stare, as 
 might the butler of some new-made knight 
 if you asked for Mr. Smith. It seems that 
 Petticoat Lane is called Middlesex Street. 
 Why any one should prefer such a stupid and 
 colourless name to one with such agreeable 
 associations (come, come, reader : you are not 
 such a prude as all that !) I do not know. 
 Happily there was no doubt when we arrived 
 at Middlesex Street that it was the Lane and 
 no other. A murmur of thousands, with the 
 roar of hundreds rising hoarsely above it, 
 4 'tuppence" the master- word. (I also call 
 it tuppence, as do other decent Englishmen, 
 but I have noticed that the ridiculously refined 
 reader expects the absurdly contemptuous 
 spelling.) The Lane was crowded, but not so 
 densely at that hour, eleven or so, as it became. 
 Lines of open shops at the sides, two lines 
 of stalls against the edge of the pavements, 
 in the middle way and along the pavements 
 a sauntering, dark-clad crowd. Here and 
 there, as you looked down the lines, a man 
 standing on his stall, shouting, gesticulating. 
 But let me disengage my impressions. 
 
 238
 
 PETTICOAT LANE 
 
 First we will fold our illusions up and lay 
 them aside. The scene was not Oriental. 
 True that almost all the sellers were Jews ; 
 but they were like other English Jews, and 
 were shouting English. One active and voluble 
 merchant recommended himself as "the only 
 Irish Jew in the Lane." Most of the names 
 I noticed over the shops were English-Jew 
 Marks, Davis, and so on. I have seen more 
 foreign-Jew names on the boxes at the Opera. 
 And if nearly all the sellers were Jews, I think 
 that quite a majority of the buyers and specta- 
 tors were English. A good many, I imagine, 
 came from about the Docks. There were tall, 
 broad-shouldered young men, carrying them- 
 selves easily, blond and lithe, an excellent type 
 of British labourer. Men were in a large 
 majority, but I saw a few women, too, who 
 were unmistakably English. I fancy that the 
 Fair, like Agamemnon's bones, is a show, and 
 that people come from the neighbourhood for 
 an entertaining stroll in it, as Mayfair (with 
 far less amusement) turns into Hyde Park 
 on a fine Sunday morning. Again (I speak 
 of the general impression) the literal colour 
 
 239
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 I had been led to expect was not there. Dark 
 and dingy was the garb everywhere. There 
 were exceptions, but I will come to them in 
 the particular. I heard some mumbled jargon 
 which might have been Yiddish among the 
 sauntering crowds never among the sellers, as 
 I said. In spite of that I had an idea that 
 in the main the sellers were Jews, the buyers 
 Gentiles, an order of things which somehow 
 seems very credible. The Jews had the trade, 
 and the Gentiles came to spend their wages 
 that was my idea. One has remarked the same 
 thing elsewhere. 
 
 If pleasant illusions went, however, so also 
 did bad anticipations. I had been told to be 
 careful of my watch ; it was even suggested 
 that I might be "gone over." That was 
 nonsense. My friends the police were there 
 in considerable force, to begin with, and I saw 
 no rough element at all : cause and effect, it is 
 likely, but let Petticoat Lane have its credit. 
 Again, there was no squalor at all. Remark- 
 ably well nourished, these Jew merchants, 
 buxom their ladies, happy and sleek their 
 children. The British labourers, too, had the 
 
 240
 
 PETTICOAT LANE 
 
 proper brawny air, as they shouldered their 
 way with good-humoured interest. One must 
 look for misery elsewhere. Nor was the crowd 
 
 well, we know how some crowds affect one 
 
 of our senses. Towards the end of my stay, 
 when it was very dense, the air was a little 
 thick or so, but reasonably clean was the 
 average. I take it that your destitute Jew 
 alien bears dirt when he cannot help it, but 
 that when he has worked his way to the pos- 
 sibility he changes his garb (which is the chief 
 thing) with decent frequency. Now let me go 
 to particulars. 
 
 I walked slowly down the Lane in the 
 middle. On both sides active and persistent 
 shouting of goods. Clothes and all sorts of 
 millinery, hats, boots, etc. by the way, there 
 was a stall of the most elegant and highly 
 polished boots I ever saw in my life were the 
 staple merchandise on the stalls, but there was 
 a curiously varied assortment of miscellanies 
 as well. Things you would have supposed 
 their owners would have thrown away the 
 refuse of deserted rooms, old bolts, even rusty 
 nails, were on sale, and presumably found a 
 R 241
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 market. Down the middle sauntered old men 
 in dim old great -coats, very hooked and 
 bearded, and offered you buttons and studs 
 and such-like small deer. Not raucous and 
 persistent, these old gentlemen, but leisurely 
 strollers ; they gave me the impression that 
 they carried their trays for companionship, as 
 other old gentlemen take a dog with them on 
 their walks. I thought of Moses Ansell. As 
 I went on the crowd was thicker. Dark-eyed 
 children pottered round its legs. Then some- 
 thing like an Oriental touch a pretty, black- 
 eyed, olive-hued young girl, a red garment 
 twisted round her and over her head, slithered 
 in and out, sparkling and talkative. From the 
 South, doubtless, with high cheek-bones and a 
 sinuous gracefulness, she was the first note of 
 colour I saw. But soon another, a strong note, 
 accompanied by a strong voice a man in a 
 brilliant jockey coat and cap, mounted on his 
 stall, shouting his thousand arguments why you 
 should buy his waistcoats. Near him a more 
 insinuating merchant selling watches. "Sir 
 John Bennett give yer my word just look 
 'ow it winds why, it winds like silk." But 
 
 242
 
 PETTICOAT LANE 
 
 the sellers of clothes were the more eminent 
 artists, to several of whom I listened atten- 
 tively. 
 
 And here I made an original observation. 
 These men were not merely trying to sell their 
 clothes : they were genuine artists in oratory, 
 who loved their art for itself. So many people 
 going to the Fair not to buy but to look 
 "all lookers, no buyers," said one disgusted 
 trader the orators are accustomed to an 
 audience that has to be kept merely as an 
 audience by ingenious art, and with the 
 artistic vanity and good-humour of their race 
 they rise to the occasion. It does them credit, 
 I think, this gratuitous display of talent. For 
 example, one fellow put on a coat and strutted 
 round the top of his stall in it, showing its 
 merits by comical movements of his vigorous 
 hips. Then he started the price at a guinea. 
 Now, he knew there would be no taker at that 
 figure. With hardly a pause between the 
 figures, but with much dramatic protest in his 
 voice, he brought the price down by shillings 
 to six, when I am glad to say he sold it. He 
 had his eye on mine, and I was wearing a 
 
 243
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 comparatively new great-coat : he must have 
 known I was not a buyer : I believe he recog- 
 nised in me an ex-dramatic critic. If he will 
 let me know when he goes on the West End 
 boards I will ask my friends on the Press to be 
 kind to him. The cheerful humour of all these 
 men is remarkable, and I am apt to think it is 
 typical of the race in business. Your true Jew 
 does not pucker his brow and lengthen his face 
 designing a deal : it is as easy and natural and 
 enjoyable to him to turn a shilling into eighteen- 
 pence as it is to drink a glass of beer a simple 
 activity, his heritage from generations. He 
 enjoys the art and the fun of his business : no 
 wonder he is successful. 
 
 I turned from the road on to a side pave- 
 ment. Here the chief vendibles were things 
 to eat whelks and cucumbers and fat olives : 
 there may be starvation in the East, but there 
 is also plenty. Arrived at the end of the Lane, 
 I asked my way into Houndsditch, and after a 
 couple of narrow streets there I was. Woe, 
 woe ! If my friends and my later reading had 
 given me an illusion about Petticoat Lane, so 
 far back as I can remember Houndsditch has 
 
 244
 
 PETTICOAT LANE 
 
 suggested to me all that there is of the most 
 villainous and weird and overtly criminal. How 
 I arrived at the idea I know not : it may have 
 been a scene in some forgotten romance, it 
 may have been the mere sound of the for- 
 bidding name. But though I did not expect 
 to see anything definitely horrible, back in my 
 mind there was a hankering after something 
 something well, not after a respectable 
 thoroughfare with omnibuses running through 
 it, very like Kensington High Street. People 
 who revile Jews taunt them with emerging 
 from Houndsditch as though it were some 
 grisly swamp let them go there and be 
 ashamed. But as for me, I left it hurriedly. 
 In a street leading back into the Lane I 
 came upon a beautiful young Jewess. She 
 was fresh and spotless as the dairymaid of 
 poets' dreams, well built, supple and straight ; 
 dressed in some clinging red stuff, selling large 
 and brightly-coloured handkerchiefs. So far 
 nothing remarkable : my aging eyes still be- 
 hold comely young women not infrequently. 
 But here is a point. Anywhere else, surely, 
 certainly at a charity bazaar, a pretty girl sell- 
 
 245
 
 MAINLY OF OTHER THINGS 
 
 ing things, and seeing a kindly-looking man, 
 even though middle-aged, would have tried the 
 effect of an agreeable smile or an inviting word 
 on his purse. But this one uttered a brusque 
 "twopence each," turned a cold commercial 
 eye on me for half a second, saw that I was 
 not like a person who wanted an enormous 
 handkerchief of many colours, and turned 
 away at once. She was out for business, strict 
 business as business. I liked her for it. It 
 may be far-fetched, but I think there was a 
 sort of native modesty in the action. I did 
 not insult her by purchasing an enormous 
 handkerchief I did not want. 
 
 Gradually, a little tired with the noise and 
 pushing, I regained the top of the Lane and 
 mounted the 'bus. It had been an experience 
 worth having, a multitude of fresh and com- 
 pelling sensations, many more than I can 
 remember to set down. Fresh sensations are 
 tiring, as we know, and habitual activities 
 persist easily. Still I felt a little ashamed that 
 I had left so many men shouting and driving 
 bargains with undiminished vigour, while I 
 was tired merely with looking on. Such vigour 
 
 246
 
 PETTICOAT LANE 
 
 such liveliness ! How should the able-bodied 
 Jew fail? Also I felt mildly sorry that I had 
 not thought of buying a memento a handker- 
 chief, say, from that beautiful Jewess. But no 
 matter : I shall see her again, in a few years, 
 belike, at the Opera or driving down Park 
 Lane, covered with pearls and diamonds.
 
 PLYMOUTH 
 
 WILLIAM BRKNDON AND SON 
 PRINTERS
 
 A 001366108 7