THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 EX LIBRIS SIBYL & 
 ARTHUR COLEFAX
 
 THE COLOUR OF LIFE 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 ON THINGS SEEN AND HEARD
 
 UNIFORM WITH THIS 
 
 By the same Author 
 
 'POEMS' 
 
 3s. M. net 
 Third Edition 
 
 ALSO 
 
 THE RHYTHM OF LIFE 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 3s. 6d. net 
 
 Third Edition
 
 THE 
 
 COLOUR OF LIFE 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 ON THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 
 
 r 
 
 BY 
 
 ALICE MEYNELL 
 
 * 
 
 LONDON 
 JOHN LANE : VIGO ST. 
 WAY AND WILLIAMS 
 
 CHICAGO 
 1896
 
 PR 
 
 502.1 
 
 Dedicated 
 
 TO 
 
 COVENTRY PATMORK 
 
 '-f (
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 1. THE COLOUR OF LIFE 
 
 2. A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY . 
 
 3. CLOUD .... 
 
 4. WINDS OF THE WORLD 
 
 5. THE HONOURS OF MORTALITY 
 
 6. AT MONASTERY GATES 
 
 7. RUSHES AND REEDS 
 
 8. ELEONORA DUSE 
 
 9. DONKEY RACES 
 
 10. GRASS .... 
 
 11. A WOMAN IN GREY 
 
 12. SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 
 
 13. THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME 
 
 14. EYES . 
 
 t'AGK 
 
 I 
 
 8 
 
 iS 
 
 23 
 30 
 32 
 40 
 
 45 
 
 53 
 60 
 
 65 
 
 73 
 88 
 
 96
 
 THE COLOUR OF LIFE 
 
 I ED has been praised for its nobility 
 as the colour of life. But the 
 true colour of life is not red. 
 Red is the colour of violence, 
 or of life broken open, edited, and pub- 
 lished. Or if red is indeed the colour of 
 life, it is so only on condition that it is 
 not seen. Once fully visible, red is the 
 colour of life violated, and in the act of 
 betrayal and of waste. Red is the secret 
 of life, and not the manifestation thereof. 
 It is one of the things the value of which 
 is secrecy, one of the talents that are to be 
 hidden in a napkin. The true colour of life 
 is the colour of the body, the colour of the 
 covered red, the implicit and not explicit red 
 of the living heart and the pulses. It is the 
 modest colour of the unpublished blood. 
 
 So bright, so light, so soft, so mingled, 
 the gentle colour of life is outdone by all
 
 2 THE COLOUR OF LIFE 
 
 the colours of the world. Its very beauty is 
 that it is white, but less white than milk ; 
 brown, but less brown than earth ; red, but 
 less red than sunset or dawn. It is lucid, 
 but less lucid than the colour of lilies. It 
 has the hint of gold that is in all fine 
 colour ; but in our latitudes the hint is 
 almost elusive. Under Sicilian skies, indeed, 
 it is deeper than old ivory ; but under the 
 misty blue of the English zenith, and the 
 warm grey of the London horizon, it is as 
 delicately flushed as the paler wild roses, out 
 to their utmost, flat as stars, in the hedges 
 of the end of June. 
 
 For months together London does not see 
 the colour of life in any mass. The human 
 face does not give much of it, what with 
 features, and beards, and the shadow of the 
 top -hat and chapeau melon of man, and of 
 the veils of woman. Besides, the colour of 
 the face is subject to a thousand injuries and 
 accidents. The popular face of the Londoner 
 has soon lost its gold, its white, and the 
 delicacy of its red and brown. We miss 
 little beauty by the fact that it is never seen 
 freely in great numbers out-of-doors. You 
 get it in some quantity when all the heads
 
 THE COLOUR OF LIFE 3 
 
 of a great indoor meeting are turned at once 
 upon" a speaker ; but it is only in the open 
 air, needless to say, that the colour of life 
 is in perfection, in the open air, " clothed 
 with the sun," whether the sunshine be 
 golden and direct, or dazzlingly diffused in 
 grey. 
 
 The little figure of the London boy it 
 is that has restored to the landscape the 
 human colour of life. He is allowed to 
 come out of all his ignominies, and to take 
 the late colour of the midsummer north-west 
 evening, on the borders of the Sei-pentine. 
 At the stroke of eight he sheds the slough 
 of nameless colours — all allied to the hues of 
 t 1 1.1st, soot, and fog, which are the colours the 
 world has chosen for its boys — and he makes, 
 in his hundreds, a bright and delicate flush 
 between the grey -blue water and the grey- 
 blue sky. Clothed now with the sun, he is 
 crowned by-and-by with twelve stars as he 
 goes to bathe, and the reflection of an early 
 moon is under his feet. 
 
 So little stands between a gamin and all 
 the dignities of Nature. They are so quickly 
 restored. There seems to be nothing to do, 
 but only a little thing to undo. It is like
 
 V 
 
 4 THE COLOUR OF LIFE 
 
 the art of Eleonora Duse. The last and 
 most finished action of her intellect, passion, 
 and knowledge is, as it were, the flicking 
 away of some insignificant thing mistaken for 
 art by other actors, some little obstacle to 
 the way and liberty of Nature. 
 
 All the squalor is gone in a moment, kicked 
 off with the second boot, and the child goes 
 shouting to complete the landscape with the 
 lacking colour of life. You are inclined to 
 wonder that, even undressed, he still shouts 
 with a Cockney accent. You half expect pure 
 vowels and elastic syllables from his restora- 
 tion, his spring, his slenderness, his brightness, 
 and his glow. Old ivory and wild rose in 
 the deepening midsummer sun, he gives his 
 colours to his world again. 
 
 It is easy to replace man, and it will take 
 no great time, where Nature has lapsed, to 
 replace Nature. It is always to do, by the 
 happily easy way of doing nothing. The grass 
 is always ready to grow in the streets — and 
 no streets could ask for a more charming 
 finish than your green grass. The gasometer 
 even must fall to pieces unless it is renewed ; 
 but the grass renews itself. There is nothing 
 so remediable as the work of modern man —
 
 THE COLOUR OF LIFE 5 
 
 "a thought which is also," as Mr Pecksniff 
 said, "very soothing." And by remediable 
 I mean, of course, destructible. As the 
 bathing child shuffles off his garments — they 
 are few, and one brace suffices him — so the 
 land might always, in reasonable time, shuffle 
 off its yellow brick and purple slate, and 
 all the things that collect about railway 
 stations: A single night almost clears the 
 air of London. 
 
 But if the colour of life looks so well in 
 the rather sham scenery of Hyde Park, it 
 looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real 
 sea-coast. To have once seen it there should 
 be enough to make a colourist. O memor- 
 able little picture ! The sun was gaining 
 colour as it neared setting, and it set not 
 over the sea, but over the land. The sea 
 had the dark and rather stem, but not cold, 
 blue of that aspect — the dark and not the 
 opal tints. The sky was also deep. Every- 
 thing was very definite, without mystery, and 
 exceedingly simple. The most luminous thing 
 was the shining white of an edge of foam, 
 which did not cease to be white because 
 it was a little golden and a little rosy in 
 the sunshine. It was still the whitest thing
 
 6 THE COLOUR OF LIFE 
 
 imaginable. And the next most luminous 
 thing was the little child, also invested with 
 the sun and the colour of life. 
 
 In the case of women, it is of the living 
 and unpublished blood that the violent world 
 has professed to be delicate and ashamed. 
 See the curious history of the political lights 
 of woman under the Revolution. On the 
 scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in 
 the fortunes of party. Political life might 
 be denied her, but that seems a trifle when 
 you consider how generously she was per- 
 mitted political death. She was to spin and 
 cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her 
 living houx-s ; but to the hour of her death 
 was granted a part in the largest interests, 
 social, national, international. The blood 
 wherewith she should, according to Robes- 
 pierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in 
 the tribune, was exposed in the public sight 
 unsheltered by her veins. 
 
 Against this there was no modesty. Of all 
 privacies, the last and the innermost — the 
 privacy of death — was never allowed to put 
 obstacles in the way of public action for a 
 public cause. Women might be, and were, 
 duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe
 
 THE COLOUR OF LIFE 7 
 
 de Gouges, they claimed a "right to concur 
 in the choice of representatives for the for- 
 mation of the laws " ; but in her person, too, 
 they were liberally allowed to bear political 
 responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de 
 Gouges was guillotined. Robespierre thus 
 made her public and complete amends.
 
 A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY 
 
 HERE is hardly a writer now — of 
 the third class probably not one 
 — who has not something sharp 
 and sad to say about the cruelty 
 of Nature ; not one who is able to attempt 
 May in the woods without a modern refer- 
 ence to the manifold death and destruction 
 with which the air, the branches, the mosses 
 are said to be full. 
 
 But no one has paused in the course of 
 these phrases to take notice of the curious 
 and conspicuous fact of the suppression of 
 death and of the dead throughout this land- 
 scape of manifest life. Where are they — 
 all the dying, all the dead, of the populous 
 woods ? Where do they hide their little 
 last hours, where are they buried ? Where 
 is the violence concealed ? Under what gay 
 custom and decent habit ? You may see, it 
 is true, an earth-worm in a robin's beak, 
 
 and may hear a thrush breaking a snail's 
 8
 
 A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY 9 
 
 shell ; but these little things are, as it were, 
 passed by with a kind of twinkle for apology, 
 as by a well - bred man who does openly 
 some little solecism which is too slight for 
 direct mention, and which a meaner man 
 might hide or avoid. Unless you are very 
 modern indeed, you twinkle back at the 
 bird. 
 
 But otherwise there is nothing visible of 
 the havoc and the prey and plunder. It is 
 certain that much of the visible life passes 
 violently into other forms, flashes without 
 pause into another flame ; but not all. Amid 
 all the killing there must be much dying. 
 There are, for instance, few birds of prey 
 l^ft in our more accessible counties now, and 
 many thousands of birds must die uncaught by 
 a hawk and unpierced. But if their killing 
 is done so modestly, so then is their dying 
 also. Short lives have all these wild things, 
 but there are innumerable flocks of them 
 always alive ; they must die, then, in innum- 
 erable flocks. And yet they keep the millions 
 of the dead out of sight. 
 
 Now and then, indeed, they may be be- 
 trayed. It happened in a cold winter. The 
 late frosts were so sudden, and the famine
 
 10 A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY 
 
 was so complete, that the birds were taken 
 unawares. The sky and the earth conspired 
 that February to make known all the secrets ; 
 everything was published. Death was mani- 
 fest. Editors, when a great man dies, are 
 not more resolute than was the frost of '95. 
 
 The birds were obliged to die in public. 
 They were surprised and forced to do thus. 
 They became like Shelley in the monument 
 which the art and imagination of England 
 combined to raise to his memory at Oxford. 
 
 Frost was surely at work in both cases, 
 and in both it wrought wrong. There is a 
 similarity of unreason in betraying the death 
 of a bird and in exhibiting the death of 
 Shelley. The death of a soldier — passe 
 encore. But the death of Shelley was not 
 his goal. And the death of the birds is so 
 little characteristic of them that, as has just 
 been said, no one in the world is aware of 
 their dying, except only in the case of birds 
 in cages, who, again, are compelled to die 
 with observation. The woodland is guarded 
 and kept by a rule. There is no display of 
 the battlefield in the fields. There is no 
 tale of the game-bag, no boast. The hunting 
 goes on, but with strange decorum. You
 
 A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY 11 
 
 may pass a fine season under the trees, and 
 see nothing dead except here and there 
 where a boy has been by, or a man with a 
 trap, or a man with a gun. There is nothing 
 like a butcher's shop in the woods. 
 
 But the biographers have always had other 
 ways than those of the wild world. They 
 will not have a man to die out of sight. I 
 have turned over scores of "Lives," not to 
 read them, but to see whether now and 
 again there might be a "Life" which was 
 not more emphatically a death. But there 
 never is a modern biography that has taken 
 the hint of Nature. One and all, these books 
 have the disproportionate illness, the death 
 dat of all scale. 
 
 Even more wanton than the disclosure of 
 a death is that of a mortal illness. If the 
 man had recovered, his illness would have 
 been rightly his own secret. But because 
 he did not recover, it is assumed to be news 
 for the first comer. Which of us would suffer 
 the details of any physical suffering, over and 
 done in our own lives, to be displayed and 
 described ? This is not a confidence we have 
 a mind to make ; and no one is authorised 
 to ask for attention or pity on our behalf.
 
 12 A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY 
 
 The story of pain ought not to be told of 
 us, seeing that by us it would assuredly not 
 be told. 
 
 There is only one other thing that concerns 
 a man still more exclusively, and that is his 
 own mental illness, or the dreams and illu- 
 sions of a long delirium. When he is in 
 common language not himself, amends should 
 be made for so bitter a paradox ; he should 
 be allowed such solitude as is possible to 
 the alienated spirit ; he should be left to 
 the " not himself," and spared the intrusion 
 against which he can so ill guard that he 
 could hardly have even resented it. 
 
 The double helplessness of delusion and 
 death should keep the door of Rossetti's 
 house, for example, and refuse him to the 
 reader. His mortal illness had nothing to 
 do with his poetry. Some rather affected 
 objection is taken every now and then to 
 the publication of some facts (others being 
 already well known) in the life of Shelley. 
 Nevertheless, these are all, properly speaking, 
 biography. What is not biography is the 
 detail of the accident of the manner of his 
 death, the detail of his cremation. Or if it 
 was to be told — told briefly — it was certainly
 
 A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY 13 
 
 not for marble. Shelley's death had no 
 significance, except inasmuch as he died 
 young. It was a detachable and disconnected 
 incident. Ah, that was a frost of fancy and 
 of the heart that used it so, dealing with 
 an insignificant fact, and conferring a futile 
 immortality. Those are ill-named biographers 
 who seem to think that a betrayal of the 
 ways of death is a part of their ordinary 
 duty, and that if material enough for a last 
 chapter does not lie to their hand they are 
 to search it out. They, of all survivors, are 
 called upon, in honour and reason, to look 
 upon a death with more composure. To 
 those who loved the dead closely, this is, for 
 I time, impossible. To them death becomes, 
 for a year, disproportionate. Their dreams 
 are fixed upon it night by night. They 
 have, in those dreams, to find the dead in 
 some labyrinth ; they have to mourn his 
 dying and to welcome his recovery in such 
 a mingling of distress and of always incredu- 
 lous happiness as is not known even to 
 dreams save in that first year of separation. 
 But they are not biographers. 
 
 If death is the privacy of the woods, it is 
 the more conspicuously secret because it is
 
 14 A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY 
 
 their only privacy. You may watch or may 
 surprise everything else. The nest is retired, 
 not hidden. The chase goes on everywhere. 
 It is wonderful how the perpetual chase 
 seems to cause no perpetual fear. The songs 
 are all audible. Life is undefended, careless, 
 nimble and noisy. 
 
 It is a happy thing that minor artists have 
 ceased, or almost ceased, to paint dead birds. 
 Time was when they did it continually in that 
 British School of water - colour art, stippled, 
 of which surrounding nations, it was agreed, 
 were envious. They must have killed their 
 bird to paint him, for he is not to be caught 
 dead. A bird is more easily caught alive 
 than dead. 
 
 A poet, on the contrary, is easily — too 
 easily — caught dead. Minor artists now 
 seldom stipple the bird on its back, but a 
 good sculptor and a University together 
 modelled their Shelley on his back, unessen- 
 tially drowned ; and everybody may read 
 about the sick mind of Dante Rossetti.
 
 CLOUD 
 
 JURING a part of the year London 
 does not see the clouds. Not 
 to see the clear sky might seem 
 her chief loss, but that is shared 
 by the rest of England, and is, besides, but 
 a slight privation. Not to see the clear sky 
 is, elsewhere, to see the cloud. But not so 
 in London. You may go for a week or two 
 at a time, even though you hold your head 
 up, as you walk, and even though you have 
 windows that really open, and yet you shall 
 see no cloud, or but a single edge, the frag- 
 ment of a form. 
 
 Guillotine windows never wholly open, but 
 are filled with a doubled glass towards the 
 sky when you open them towards the street. 
 They are, therefore, a sure sign that for all 
 the years when no other windows were used 
 in London, nobody there cared much for the 
 sky, or even knew so much as whether there 
 
 were a sky. 
 
 15
 
 16 CLOUD 
 
 But the privation of cloud is indeed a graver 
 loss than the world knows. Terrestrial scenery 
 is much, but it is not all. Men go in search 
 of it ; but the celestial scenery journeys to 
 them. It goes its way round the world. It 
 has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows 
 no bonds. The terrestrial scenery — the 
 tourist's — is a prisoner compared with this. 
 The tourist's scenery moves indeed, but only 
 like Wordsworth's maiden, with earth's diurnal 
 course ; it is made as fast as its own graves. 
 And for its changes it depends upon the 
 mobility of the skies. The mere green flush- 
 ing of its own sap makes only the least of 
 its varieties ; for the greater it must wait 
 upon the visits of the light. Spring and 
 autumn are inconsiderable events in a land- 
 scape compared with the shadows of a cloud. 
 
 The cloud controls the light, and the moun- 
 tains on earth appear or fade according to 
 its passage ; they wear so simply, from head 
 to foot, the luminous grey or the emphatic 
 purple, as the cloud permits, that their own 
 local colour and their own local season are 
 lost and cease, effaced before the all-important 
 mood of the cloud. 
 
 The sea has no mood except that of the
 
 CLOUD 17 
 
 sky and of its winds. It is the cloud that, 
 holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant 
 holds a handful of spears, strikes the horizon, 
 touches the extreme edge with a delicate 
 revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out 
 and makes the foreground shine. 
 
 Every one knows the manifest work of the 
 cloud when it descends and partakes in the 
 landscape obviously, lies half-way across the 
 mountain slope, stoops to rain heavily upon 
 the lake, and blots out part of the view by 
 the rough method of standing in front of it. 
 But its greatest things are done from its own 
 place, aloft. Thence does it distribute the 
 sun. 
 
 Thence does it lock away between the 
 hills and valleys more mysteries than a poet 
 conceals, but, like him, not by interception. 
 Thence it writes out and cancels all the tracery 
 of Monte Rosa, or lets the pencils of the sun 
 renew them. Thence, hiding nothing, and yet 
 making dark, it sheds deep colour upon the 
 forest land of Sussex, so that, seen from the 
 hills, all the country is divided between grave 
 blue and graver sunlight. 
 
 And all this is but its influence, its second- 
 ary work upon the world. Its own beauty is 
 
 B
 
 18 CLOUD 
 
 unaltered when it has no earthly beauty to 
 improve. It is always great : above the 
 street, above the suburbs, above the gas- 
 works and the stucco, above the faces of 
 painted white houses — the painted surfaces 
 that have been devised as the only things 
 able to vulgarise light, as they catch it and 
 reflect it grotesquely from their importunate 
 gloss. This is to be well seen on a sunny 
 evening in Regent Street. 
 
 Even here the cloud is not so victorious as 
 when it towers above some little landscape of 
 rather paltry interest — a conventional river 
 heavy with water, gardens with their little 
 evergreens, walks, and shrubberies ; and thick 
 trees, impervious to the light, touched, as the 
 novelists always have it, with "autumn tints." 
 High over these rises, in the enormous scale 
 of the scenery of clouds, what no man 
 ! expected — an heroic sky. Few of the things 
 that were ever done upon earth are great 
 enough to be done under such a heaven. It 
 was surely designed for other days. It is for 
 an epic world. Your eyes sweep a thousand 
 miles of cloud. What are the distances of 
 earth to these, and what are the distances of 
 the clear and cloudless sky ? The very
 
 CLOUD 19 
 
 horizons of the landscape are near, for the 
 round" world dips so soon ; and the distances 
 of the mere clear sky are unmeasured — you 
 rest upon nothing until you come to a star, 
 and the star itself is immeasurable. 
 
 But in the sky of "sunny Alps" of clouds 
 the 'sight goes farther, with conscious flight, 
 than it could ever have journeyed otherwise. 
 Man w6uld not have known distance veritably 
 without the clouds. There are mountains 
 indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those 
 of the earth are pigmy. Yet the sky-heights, 
 being so far off, are not overpowering by 
 disproportion, like some futile building fatu- 
 ously made too big for the human measure. 
 T'.p cloud in its majestic place composes 
 with a little Perugino tree. For you stand 
 or stray in the futile building, while the 
 cloud is no mansion for man, and out of 
 reach of his limitations. 
 
 The cloud, moreover, controls the sun, not 
 merely by keeping the custody of his rays, 
 but by becoming the counsellor of his temper. 
 The cloud veils an angry sun, or, more terribly, 
 lets fly an angry ray, suddenly bright upon 
 tree and tower, with non-grey storm for a 
 background. Or when anger had but threat-
 
 20 CLOUD 
 
 ened, the cloud reveals him, gentle beyond 
 hope. It makes peace, constantly, just before 
 sunset. 
 
 It is in the confidence of the winds, and 
 wears their colours. There is a heavenly 
 game, on south-west wind days, when the 
 clouds are bowled by a breeze from behind 
 the evening. They are round and brilliant, 
 and come leaping up from the horizon for 
 hours. This is a frolic and haphazard sky. 
 
 All unlike this is the sky that has a centre, 
 and stands composed about it. As the clouds 
 marshalled the earthly mountains, so the 
 clouds in turn are now ranged. The tops of 
 all the celestial Andes aloft are swept at 
 once by a single ray, warmed with a single 
 colour. Promontory after league -long pro- 
 montory of a stiller Mediterranean in the sky 
 is called out of mist and grey by the same 
 finger. The cloudland is very great, but a 
 sunbeam makes all its nations and continents 
 sudden with light. 
 
 All this is for the untravelled. All the 
 winds bring him this scenery. It is only in 
 London, for part of the autumn and part of the 
 winter, that the unnatural smoke-fog comes 
 between. And for many and many a day no
 
 CLOUD 21 
 
 London eye can see the horizon, or the first 
 threat of the cloud like a man's hand. There 
 never was a great painter who had not 
 exquisite horizons, and if Corot and Crome 
 were right, the Londoner loses a great 
 thing. 
 
 He loses the coming of the cloud, and 
 when it is high in air he loses its shape. A 
 cloud-lover is not content to see a snowy and 
 rosy head piling into the top of the heavens ; 
 he wants to see the base and the altitude. 
 The perspective of a cloud is a great part of 
 its design — whether it lies so that you can 
 look along the immense horizontal distances 
 of its floor, or whether it rears so upright a 
 pillar that you look up its mountain steeps 
 in the sky as you look at the rising heights 
 of a mountain that stands, with you, on the 
 earth. 
 
 The cloud has a name suggesting darkness ; 
 nevertheless, it is not merely the guardian of 
 the sun's rays and their director. It is the 
 sun's treasurer; it holds the light that the 
 world has lost. We talk of sunshine and 
 moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is 
 yet one of the illuminations of our skies. A 
 shining cloud is one of the most majestic of
 
 22 CLOUD 
 
 all secondary lights. If the reflecting moon 
 is the bride, this is the friend of the bride- 
 groom. 
 
 Needless to say, the cloud of a thunderous 
 summer is the most beautiful of all. It has 
 spaces of a grey for which there is no name, 
 and no other cloud looks over at a vanishing 
 sun from such heights of blue air. The 
 shower-cloud, too, with its thin edges, comes 
 across the sky with so influential a flight that 
 no ship going out to sea can be better worth 
 watching. The dullest thing perhaps in the 
 London streets is that people take their rain 
 there without knowing anything of the cloud 
 that drops it. It is merely rain, and means 
 wetness. The shower-cloud there has limits 
 of time, but no limits of form, and no history 
 whatever. It has not come from the clear 
 edge of the plain to the south, and will not 
 shoulder anon the hill to the north. The rain, 
 for this city, hardly comes or goes ; it does 
 but begin and stop. No one looks after it 
 on the path of its retreat.
 
 WINDS OF THE WORLD 
 
 [VERY wind is, or ought to be, 
 a poet ; but one is classic and 
 converts everything in his day co 
 unity ; another is a modern man, 
 whose words clothe his thoughts, as the modern 
 critics used to say prettily in the early sixties, 
 and therefore are separable. This wind, again, 
 has a style, and that wind a mere manner. 
 Nay, there are breezes from the east-south- 
 east, for example, that have hardly even a 
 manner. You can hardly name them unless 
 you look at the weather vane. So they do 
 not convince you by voice or colour of breath ; 
 you place their origin and assign them a his- 
 tory according as the hesitating arrow points 
 on the top of yonder ill -designed London 
 spire. 
 
 The most certain and most conquering of 
 all is the south-west wind. You do not look 
 to the weather-vane to decide what shall be 
 
 23
 
 24 WINDS OF THE WORLD 
 
 the style of your greeting to his morning. 
 There is no arbitrary rule of courtesy between 
 you and him, and you need no arrow to point 
 to his distinctions, and to indicate to you the 
 right manner of treating such a visitant. 
 
 He prepares the dawn. While it is still 
 dark the air is warned of his presence, and 
 before the window was opened he was already 
 in the room. His sun — for the sun is his — 
 rises in a south-west mood, with a bloom on 
 the blue, the grey, or the gold. When the 
 south-west is cold, the cold is his own cold — 
 round, blunt, full, and gradual in its very 
 strength. It is a fresh cold, that comes with 
 an approach, and does not challenge you in 
 the manner of an unauthorised stranger, but 
 instantly gets your leave, and even a welcome 
 to your house of life. He follows your breath 
 in at your throat, and your eyes are open to 
 let him in, even when he is cold. Your blood 
 cools, but does not hide from him. 
 
 He has a splendid way with his sky. In 
 his flight, which is that, not of a bird, but of 
 a flock of birds, he flies high and low at once : 
 high with his higher clouds, that keep long 
 in the sight of man, seeming to move slowly ; 
 and low with the coloured clouds that breast
 
 WINDS OF THE WORLD 25 
 
 the hills and are near to the tree-tops. These 
 the south-west wind tosses up from his soft 
 horizon, round and successive. They are tinted 
 somewhat like ripe clover-fields, or like hay- 
 fields just before the cutting, when all the grass 
 is in flower, and they are, oftener than all other 
 clouds, in shadow. These low-lying flocks are 
 swift and brief; the wind casts them before 
 him, from the western verge to the eastern. 
 Corot has painted so many south-west winds 
 that one might question whether he ever 
 painted, in his later manner at least, any 
 others. His skies are thus in the act of 
 flight, with lower clouds outrunning the highei*, 
 the farther vapours moving like a fleet out at 
 sea., and the nearer like dolphins. In his 
 " Classical Landscape : Italy," the master has 
 indeed for once a sky that seems at anchor, 
 or at least that moves with "no pace per- 
 ceived." The vibrating wings are folded, and 
 Corot's wind, that flew through so many 
 springs, summers, and Septembers for him 
 (he was seldom a painter of very late autumn), 
 that was mingled with so many aspen-leaves, 
 that strewed his forests with wood for the 
 gatherer, and blew the broken lights into the 
 glades, is charmed into stillness, and the sky
 
 26 WINDS OF THE WORLD 
 
 into another kind of immortality. Nor are 
 the frees in this antique landscape the trees 
 so long intimate with Corot's south-west wind, 
 so often entangled with his uncertain twilights. 
 They are as quiet as the cloud, and such as 
 the long and wild breezes of Romance have 
 never shaken or enlaced. 
 
 Upon all our islands this south-west wind 
 is the sea wind. But elsewhere there are 
 sea winds that are not from the south-west. 
 They, too, none the less, are conquerors. 
 They, too, are always strong, compelling 
 winds that take possession of the light, the 
 shadow, the sun, moon, and stars, and con- 
 strain them all alike to feel the sea. Not a 
 field, not a hillside, on a sea-wind day, but 
 shines with some soft sea-lights. The moon's 
 little boat tosses on a sea-wind night. 
 
 The south-west wind takes the high Italian 
 coasts. He gathers the ilex woods together 
 and throngs them close, as a sheep-dog gathers 
 the sheep. They crowd for shelter, and a 
 great wall, leaning inland also, with its strong 
 base to the sea, receives them. It is blank 
 and sunny, and the trees within are sunny 
 and dark, serried, and their tops swept and 
 flattened by months of sea -storms. On the
 
 WINDS OF THE WORLD 27 
 
 farther, side there are gardens — gardens that 
 have in their midst those quietest things in 
 all the world and most windless, box-hedges 
 and ponds. The gardens take shelter behind 
 the scared and hurried ilex woods, and the 
 sea-wind spares them and breaks upon the 
 mountain. But the garden also is his, and 
 his wild warm days have filled it with orange- 
 trees and roses, and have given all the abund- 
 ant charm to its gay neglect, to its grass-grown 
 terraces, and to all its lapsed, forsaken, and 
 forgotten dainties. 
 
 Nothing of the nature in this seaward Italy 
 would be so beautiful without the touch of 
 man and of the sea gales. 
 
 ^When the south-west wind brings his rain 
 he brings it with the majestic onset announced 
 by his breath. And when the light follows, 
 it comes from his own doorway in the verge. 
 His are the opened evenings after a day shut 
 down with cloud. He fills the air with in- 
 numerable particles of moisture that scatter 
 and bestow the sun. There are no other 
 days like his, of so universal a harmony, so 
 generous. 
 
 The north wind has his own landscape, 
 too ; but the east wind never. The aspect
 
 28 WINDS OF THE WORLD 
 
 which lie gives to the day is not all his 
 own. The sunshine is sweet in spite of him. 
 The clouds go under his whip, but they have 
 kinder greys than should be the colours of 
 his cold. Not on an east-wind day are these 
 races in heaven, for the clouds are all far off. 
 His rain is angry, and it flies against the sun- 
 set. The world is not one in his reign, but 
 rather there is a perpetual revolt or difference. 
 The lights and shadows are not all his. The 
 waxing and waning hours are disaffected. He 
 has not a great style, and does not convince 
 the day. 
 
 All the four winds are brave, and not the 
 less brave because, on their way through 
 town, they are betrayed for a moment into 
 taking part in any paltriness that may be 
 there. On their way from the Steppes to 
 the Atlantic they play havoc with the nerves 
 of very insignificant people. A part, as it 
 were, of every gale that starts in the far 
 north-east finds its goal in the breath of a 
 reluctant citizen. 
 
 You will meet a wind of the world nimble 
 and eager in a sorry street. But these are 
 only accidents of the way — the winds go free 
 again. Those that do not go free, but close
 
 WINDS OF THE WORLD 29 
 
 their course, are those that are breathed by 
 the nostrils of living creatures. A great 
 flock of those wild birds come to a final pause 
 in London, and fan the fires of life with 
 those wings in the act of folding. In the 
 blood and breath of a child close the influences 
 of continent and sea.
 
 THE HONOURS OF MORTALITY 
 
 jHE brilliant talent which has quite 
 lately and quite suddenly arisen, 
 to devote itself to the use of the 
 day or of the week, in illustrated 
 papers — the enormous production of art in 
 black and white — is assuredly a confession 
 that the Honours of Mortality are worth 
 working for. Fifty years ago, men worked 
 for the honours of immortality ; these were 
 the commonplace of their ambition ; they de- 
 clined to attend to the beauty of things of 
 use that were destined to be broken and 
 worn out, and they looked forward to surviv- 
 ing themselves by painting bad pictures ; so 
 that what to do with their bad pictures in 
 addition to our own has become the problem 
 of the nation and of the householder alike. 
 To-day men have begun to learn that their 
 sons will be grateful to them for few be- 
 quests. Art consents at last to work upon 
 30
 
 THE HONOURS OF MORTALITY 31 
 
 the tissue and the china that are doomed 
 to the natural and necessaiy end — destruc- 
 tion ; and art shows a most dignified alacrity 
 to do her best, daily, for the "process," and 
 for oblivion. 
 
 Doubtless this abandonment of hopes so 
 large* at once and so cheap costs the artist 
 something ; nay, it implies an acceptance of 
 the inevitable that is not less than heroic. 
 And the reward has been in the singular 
 and manifest increase of vitality in this work 
 which is done for so short a life. Fittingly 
 indeed does life reward the acceptance of 
 death, inasmuch as to die is to have been 
 alive. There is a real circulation of blood — 
 qwfk use, brief beauty, abolition, recreation. 
 The honour of the day is for ever the honour 
 of that day. It goes into the treasury of 
 things that are honestly and completely ended 
 and done with. And when can so happy a 
 thing be said of a lifeless oil-painting ? Who 
 of the wise would hesitate ? To be honour- 
 able for one day — one named and dated day, 
 separate from all other days of the ages — or 
 to be for an unlimited time tedious ?
 
 AT MONASTERY GATES 
 
 [O woman has ever crossed the inner 
 threshold, or shall ever cross it, 
 unless a queen, English or foreign, 
 should claim her privilege. There- 
 fore, if a woman records here the slighter 
 things visible of the monastic life, it is only 
 because she was not admitted to see more than 
 beautiful courtesy and friendliness were able 
 to show her in guest-house and garden. 
 
 The Monastery is of fresh-looking Gothic, 
 by Pugin — the first of the dynasty : it is 
 reached by the white roads of a limestone 
 country, and backed by a young plantation, 
 and it gathers its group of buildings in a cleft 
 high up among the hills of Wales. The brown 
 habit is this, and these are the sandals, that 
 come and go by hills of finer, sharper, and 
 loftier line, edging the dusk and dawn of an 
 Umbrian sky. Just such a Via Crucis climbs 
 the height above Orta, and from the foot of 
 32
 
 AT MONASTERY GATES 33 
 
 its final crucifix you can see the sunrise touch 
 the top of Monte Rosa, while the encircled 
 lake below is cool with the last of the night. 
 The same order of friars keep that sub-Alpine 
 Monte Sacro, and the same have set the 
 Kreuzberg beyond Bonn with the same steep 
 path' by the same fourteen chapels, facing 
 the Seven Mountains and the Rhine. 
 
 Here,' in North Wales, remote as the 
 country is, with the wheat green over the 
 blunt hill-tops, and the sky vibrating with 
 larks, a long wing of smoke lies round the 
 horizon. The country, rather thinly and 
 languidly cultivated above, has a valuable 
 sub-soil, and is burrowed with mines ; the 
 breath of pit and factory, out of sight, 
 thickens the lower sky, and lies heavily 
 over the sands of Dee. It leaves the upper 
 blue clear and the head of Orion, but dims 
 the flicker of Sirius and shortens the steady 
 ray of the evening star. The people scat- 
 tered about are not mining people, but half- 
 hearted agriculturists, and very poor. Their 
 cottages are rather cabins ; not a tiled roof 
 is in the country, but the slates have taken 
 some beauty with time, having dips and 
 dimples, and grass upon their edges. The
 
 34 AT MONASTERY GATES 
 
 walls are all thickly whitewashed, which is 
 a pleasure to see. How willingly would one 
 swish the harmless whitewash over more than 
 half the colour — over all the chocolate and 
 all the blue — with which the buildings of 
 the world are stained ! You could not wish 
 for a better, simpler, or fresher harmony 
 than whitewash makes with the slight sun- 
 shine and the bright grey of an English sky. 
 
 The grey-stone, grey-roofed monastery looks 
 young in one sense — it is modern ; and the 
 friars look young in another — they are like 
 their brothers of an earlier time. No one, 
 except the journalists of yesterday, would 
 spend upon them those tedious words, 
 "quaint," or "old world." No such weary 
 adjectives are spoken here, unless it be by 
 the excursionists. 
 
 With large aprons tied over their brown 
 habits, the Lay Brothers work upon their 
 land, planting parsnips in rows, or tending a 
 prosperous bee-farm. A young friar, who 
 sang the High Mass yesterday, is gaily hang- 
 ing the washed linen in the sun. A print- 
 ing press, and a machine which slices turnips, 
 are at work in an outhouse, and the yard 
 thereby is guarded by a St Bernard, whose
 
 AT MONASTERY GATES 35 
 
 single evil deed was that under one of the 
 obscure impulses of a dog's heart — atoned 
 for by long and self-conscious remorse — he 
 bit the poet ; and tried, says one of the 
 friars, to make doggerel of him. The poet, 
 too, lives at the monastery gates, and on 
 moriastery ground, in a seclusion which the 
 tidings of the sequence of his editions hardly 
 reaches! There is no disturbing renown to 
 be got among the cabins of the Flintshire 
 hills. Homeward, over the verge, from other 
 valleys, his light figure flits at nightfall, like 
 a moth. 
 
 To the coming and going of the friars, too, 
 the village people have become well used, 
 and the infrequent excursionists, for lack of 
 intelligence and of any knowledge that would 
 refer to history, look at them without ob- 
 trusive curiosity It was only from a Salva- 
 tion Army girl that you heard the brutal 
 word of contempt. She had come to the 
 place with some companions, and with them 
 was trespassing, as she was welcome to do, 
 within the monastery grounds. She stood, 
 a figure for Bournemouth pier, in her 
 grotesque bonnet, and watched the son of 
 the Umbrian saint — the friar who walks
 
 36 AT MONASTERY GATES 
 
 among the Giotto frescoes at Assisi and 
 between the cypresses of Bello Sguardo, and 
 has paced the centuries continually since the 
 coming of the friars. One might have asked 
 of her the kindness of a fellow-feeling. She 
 and he alike were so habited as to show the 
 world that their life was aloof from its "idle 
 business." By some such phrase, at least, 
 the friar would assuredly have attempted to 
 include her in any spiritual honours ascribed 
 to him. Or one might have asked of her 
 the condescension of forbearance. " Only 
 fancy/' said the Salvation Army girl, watch- 
 ing the friar out of sight, " only fancy making 
 such a fool of one's self!" 
 
 The great hood of the friars, which is 
 drawn over the head in Zurbaran's ecstatic 
 picture, is turned to use when the friars are 
 busy. As a pocket it relieves the over- 
 burdened hands. A bottle of the local white 
 wine, made by the brotherhood at Genoa, 
 and sent to this house by the West, is 
 carried in the cowl as a present to the 
 stranger at the gates. The friars tell how 
 a brother resolved, at Shrovetide, to make 
 pancakes, and not only to make, but also 
 to toss them. Those who chanced to be in
 
 AT MONASTERY GATES 37 
 
 the room stood prudently aside, and the 
 brother tossed boldly. But that was the last 
 that was seen of his handiwork. Victor 
 Hugo sings in La Legende des Siecles of 
 disappearance as the thing which no creature 
 is able to achieve : here the impossibility 
 seerhed to be accomplished by quite an 
 ordinary and a simple pancake. It was clean 
 gone, and there was an end of it. Nor 
 could any explanation of this ceasing of a 
 pancake from the midst of the visible world 
 be so much as divined by the spectators. It 
 was only when the brother, in church, knelt 
 down to meditate and di-ew his cowl about 
 his head that the accident was explained. 
 
 Every midnight the sweet contralto bells 
 call the community, who get up gaily to this 
 difficult service. Of all duties this one never 
 grows easy or familiar, and therefore never 
 habitual. It is something to have found but 
 one act aloof from habit. It is not merely 
 that the friars overcome the habit of sleep. 
 The subtler point is that they can never 
 acquire the habit of sacrificing sleep. What 
 art, what literature, or what life but would 
 gain a secret security by such a point of 
 perpetual freshness and perpetual initiative ?
 
 38 AT MONASTERY GATES 
 
 It is not possible to get up at midnight 
 without a will that is new night by night. 
 So should the writer's work be done, and, 
 with an intention perpetually unique, the 
 poet's. 
 
 The contralto bells have taught these 
 Western hills the " Angelus " of the French 
 fields, and the hour of night — I'ora di notte 
 — which rings with so melancholy a note 
 from the village belfries on the Adriatic 
 littoral, when the latest light is passing. It 
 is the prayer for the dead : " Out of the 
 depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord." 
 
 The little flocks of novices, on paschal 
 evenings, are folded to the sound of that 
 evening prayer. The care of them is the 
 central work of the monastery, which is 
 placed in so remote a country because it is 
 principally a place of studies. So much 
 elect intellect and strength of heart with- 
 drawn from the traffic of the world ! True, 
 the friars are not doing the task which 
 Carlyle set mankind as a refuge from de- 
 spair. These " bearded counsellors of God " 
 keep their cells, read, study, suffer, sing, hold 
 silence ; whereas they might be " operating " 
 — beautiful word ! — upon the Stock Exchange,
 
 AT MONASTERY GATES 39 
 
 or painting Academy pictures, or making 
 speeches, or reluctantly jostling other men 
 for places. They might be among the in- 
 voluntary busybodies who are living by futile 
 tasks the need whereof is a discouraged 
 fiction. There is absolutely no limit to the 
 superfluous activities, to the art, to the litera- 
 ture, implicitly renounced by the dwellers 
 within- such walls as these. The output — 
 again a beautiful word — of the age is lessened 
 by this abstention. None the less hopes the 
 stranger and pilgrim to pause and knock once 
 again upon those monastery gates.
 
 RUSHES AND HEEDS 
 
 jALLER than the gi'ass and lower 
 than the trees, there is another 
 growth that feels the implicit 
 spring. It had been more aban- 
 doned to winter than even the short grass 
 shuddering under a wave of east wind, more 
 than the dumb trees. For the multitudes of 
 sedges, rushes, canes, and reeds were the 
 appropriate lyre of the cold. On them the 
 nimble winds played their dry music. They 
 were part of the winter. It looked through 
 them and spoke through them. They were 
 spears and javelins in array to the sound of 
 the drams of the north. 
 
 The winter takes fuller possession of these 
 things than of those that stand solid. The 
 sedges whistle his tune. They let the colour 
 of his light look through — low-flying arrows 
 and bright bayonets of winter day. 
 
 The multitudes of all reeds and rushes 
 
 40
 
 RUSHES AND REEDS 41 
 
 grow out of bounds. They belong to the 
 margins of lands, the space between the 
 farms and the river, beyond the pastures, 
 and where the marsh in flower becomes 
 perilous footing for the cattle. They are 
 the fringe of the low lands, the sign of 
 streams. They grow tall between you and the 
 near horizon of flat lands. They etch their 
 sharp lines upon the sky ; and near them 
 grow flowers of stature, including the lofty 
 yellow lily. 
 
 Our green countiy is the better for the 
 grey, soft, cloudy darkness of the sedge, and 
 our full landscape is the better for the dis- 
 tinction of its points, its needles, and its 
 resolute right lines. 
 
 Ours is a summer full of voices, and there- 
 fore it does not so need the sound of rushes ; 
 but they are most sensitive to the stealthy 
 breezes, and betray the passing of a wind 
 that even the tree-tops knew not of. Some- 
 times it is a breeze unfelt, but the stiff 
 sedges whisper it along a mile of marsh. 
 To the strong wind they bend, showing the 
 silver of their sombre little tassels as fish 
 show the silver of their sides turning in the 
 pathless sea. They are unanimous. A field
 
 42 RUSHES AND REEDS 
 
 of tall flowers tosses many ways in one warm 
 gale, like the many lovers of a poet who 
 have a thousand reasons for their love ; but 
 the rushes, more strongly tethered, are swept 
 into a single attitude, again and again, at 
 every renewal of the storm. 
 
 Between the pasture and the wave, the 
 many miles of rushes and reeds in England 
 seem to escape that insistent ownership 
 which has so changed (except for a few 
 forests and downs) the aspect of England, 
 and has in fact made the landscape. Culti- 
 vation makes the landscape elsewhere, rather 
 than ownership, for the boundaries in the 
 south are not conspicuous ; but here it is 
 ownership. But the rushes are a gipsy 
 people, amongst us, yet out of reach. The 
 landowner, if he is rather a gross man, 
 believes these races of reeds are his. But 
 if he is a man of sensibility, depend upon 
 it he has his interior doubts. His property, 
 he says, goes right down to the centre of 
 the earth, in the shape of a wedge ; how 
 high up it goes into the air it would be 
 difficult to say, and obviously the shape of 
 the wedge must be continued in the direc- 
 tion of increase. We may therefore pro-
 
 RUSHES AND REEDS 43 
 
 claim his right to the clouds and their cargo. 
 It is true that as his ground game is apt to 
 go upon his neighbour's land to be shot, so 
 the clouds may now and then spend his 
 showers elsewhere. But the great thing is 
 the view. A well-appointed country-house 
 sees' nothing out of the windows that is not 
 its own. But he who tells you so, and 
 proves it to you by his own view, is certainly 
 disturbed by an unspoken doubt, if his other- 
 wise contented eyes should happen to be 
 caught by a region of rushes. The water is 
 his — he had the pond made; or the river, 
 for a space, and the fish, for a time. But 
 the bulrushes, the reeds! One wonders 
 ■whether a very thorough landowner, but a 
 sensitive one, ever resolved that he would 
 endure this sort of thing no longer, and 
 went out armed and had a long acre of 
 sedges scythed to death. 
 
 They are probably outlaws. They are 
 dwellers upon thresholds and upon margins, 
 as the gipsies make a home upon the green 
 edges of a road. No wild flowers, however 
 wild, are rebels. The copses and their prim- 
 roses are good subjects, the oaks are loyal. 
 Now and then, though, one has a kind of
 
 44 RUSHES AND REEDS 
 
 suspicion of some of the other kinds of trees 
 — the Corot trees. Standing at a distance 
 from the more ornamental trees, from those 
 of fuller foliage, and from all the indeciduous 
 shrubs and the conifers (manifest property, 
 every one), two or three translucent aspens, 
 with which the very sun and the breath of 
 earth are entangled, have sometimes seemed 
 to wear a certain look — an extra-territorial 
 look, let us call it. They are suspect. One 
 is inclined to shake a doubtful head at them. 
 And the landowner feels it. He knows 
 quite well, though he may not say so, that 
 the Corot trees, though they do not dwell 
 upon margins, are in spirit almost as extra- 
 territorial as the rushes. In proof of this 
 he very often cuts them down, out of the 
 view, once for all. The view is better, as a 
 view, without them. Though their roots are 
 in his ground right enough, there is a some- 
 thing about their heads . But the reason 
 
 he gives for wishing them away is merely 
 that they are " thin." A man does not 
 always say everything.
 
 ELEONOKA DUSE 
 
 jHE Italian woman is very near to 
 Nature ; so is time drama. 
 
 Acting is not to be judged like 
 some other of the arts, and praised 
 for a "noble convention." Painting, indeed, 
 is not praised amiss with that word; painting 
 is obviously an art that exists by its conven- 
 tion — the convention is the art. But far other- 
 wise is it with the art of acting, where there 
 i no representative material ; where, that 
 is, the man is his own material, and there is 
 nothing between. With the actor the style 
 is the man, in another, a more immediate, 
 and a more obvious sense than was ever in- 
 tended by that saying. Therefore we may 
 allow the critic — and not accuse him of re- 
 action — to speak of the division between art 
 and Nature in the painting of a landscape, 
 but we cannot let him say the same things 
 of acting. Acting has a technique, but no 
 convention. 
 
 45
 
 46 ELEONORA DUSE 
 
 Once for all; then, to say that acting reaches 
 the point of Nature, and touches it quick, is 
 to say all. In other arts imitation is more 
 or less fatuous, illusion more or less vulgar. 
 But acting is, at its less good, imitation ; at 
 its best, illusion ; at its worst, and when it 
 ceases to be an art, convention. 
 
 But the idea that acting is conventional has 
 inevitably come about in England. For it is, 
 in fact, obliged, with us, to defeat and destroy 
 itself by taking a very full, entire, tedious, 
 and impotent convention ; a complete body 
 of convention ; a convention of demonstrative- 
 ness — of voice and manners intended to be 
 expressive, and, in particular, a whole weak 
 and unimpulsive convention of gesture. The 
 English manners of real life are so negative 
 and still as to present no visible or audible 
 drama ; and drama is for hearing and for 
 vision. Therefore our acting (granting that 
 we have any acting, which is granting much) 
 has to create its little different and comple- 
 mentary world, and to make the division of 
 "art" from Nature — the division which, in 
 this one art, is fatal. 
 
 This is one simple and sufficient reason 
 why we have no considerable acting ; though
 
 ELEONORA DUSE 47 
 
 we may have more or less interesting and 
 energetic or graceful conventions that pass 
 for art. But any student of international 
 character knows well enough that there are 
 also supplementary reasons of weight. For 
 example, it is bad to make a conventional 
 world of the stage, but it is doubly bad to 
 make it badly — which, it must be granted, 
 we do. ' When we are anything of the kind, 
 we are intellectual rather than intelligent ; 
 whereas outward-streaming intelligence makes 
 the actor. We are pre-occupied, and there- 
 fore never single, never wholly possessed by 
 the one thing at a time ; and so forth. 
 
 On the other hand, Italians are expressive. 
 They are so possessed by the one thing at a 
 time as never to be habitual in any lifeless 
 sense. They have no habits to overcome by 
 something arbitrary and intentional. Accord- 
 ingly, you will find in the open-air theatre 
 of many an Italian province, away from the 
 high roads, an art of drama that our capital 
 cannot show, so high is it, so fine, so simple, 
 so complete, so direct, so momentary and im- 
 passioned, so full of singleness and of multi- 
 tudinous impulses of passion. 
 
 Signora Duse is not different in kind from
 
 48 ELEONORA DUSE 
 
 these unrenowned. What they are, she is in 
 a greater degree. She goes yet further, and 
 yet closer. She has an exceptionally large 
 and liberal intelligence. If lesser actors give 
 themselves entirely to the part, and to the 
 large moment of the part, she, giving herself, 
 has more to give. 
 
 Add to this nature of hers that she stages 
 herself and her acting with singular know- 
 ledge and ease, and has her technique so 
 thoroughly as to be able to forget it — for 
 this is the one only thing that is the better 
 for habit, and ought to be habitual. There 
 is but one passage of her mere technique in 
 Avhich she fails so to slight it. It is in the 
 long exchange of stove-side talk between Nora 
 and the other woman of "The Doll's House." 
 Signora Duse may have felt some misgivings 
 as to the effect of a dialogue having so little 
 symmetry, such half-hearted feeling, and, in 
 a word, so little visible or audible drama as 
 chis. Needless to say, the misgiving is not 
 apparent ; what is too apparent is simply the 
 technique. For instance, she shifts her posi- 
 tion with evident system and notable skill. 
 The whole conversation becomes a dance of 
 change and counterchange of place.
 
 ELEONORA DUSE 49 
 
 Nowhere else does the perfect technical 
 habit lapse, and nowhere at all does the 
 habit of acting exist with her. 
 
 I have spoken of this actress's nationality 
 and of her womanhood together. They are 
 inseparable. Nature is the only authentic 
 art of the stage, and the Italian woman is 
 natural : none other so natural and so justi- 
 fied by her nature as Eleonora Duse ; but all, 
 as far as their nature goes, natural. More- 
 over, they are women freer than other Euro- 
 peans from the minor vanities. Has any one 
 yet fully understood how her liberty in this 
 respect gives to the art of Signora Duse 
 room and action ? Her countrywomen have 
 no anxious vanities, because, for one reason, 
 they are generally "sculpturesque," and are 
 very little altered by mere accidents of dress 
 or arrangement. Such as they are, they are so 
 once for all ; whereas, the turn of a curl 
 makes all the difference with women of less 
 grave physique. Italians are not uneasy. 
 
 Signora Duse has this immunity, but she 
 has a far nobler deliverance from vanities, in 
 her own peculiar distance and dignity. She 
 lets her beautiful voice speak, unwatched and 
 unchecked, from the very life of the moment. 
 
 D
 
 50 ELEONORA DUSE 
 
 It runs up into the high notes of indifference, 
 or, higher still, into those of ennui, as in 
 the earlier scenes of D'worcons ; or it grows 
 sweet as summer with joy, or cracks and 
 breaks outright, out of all music, and out of 
 all control. Passion breaks it so for her. 
 
 As for her inarticulate sounds, which are 
 the more intimate and the truer words of her 
 meaning, they, too, are Italian and natural. 
 English women, for instance, do not make 
 them. They are sounds a Louche fermee, at 
 once private and irrepressible. They are 
 not demonstrations intended for the ears of 
 others ; they are her own. Other actresses, 
 even English, and even American, know how 
 to make inarticulate cries, with open mouth ; 
 Signora Duse's noise is not a cry ; it is her 
 very thought audible — the thought of the 
 woman she is playing, who does not at every 
 moment give exact words to her thought, but 
 does give it significant sound. 
 
 When la femme de Claude is trapped by the 
 man who has come in search of the husband's 
 secret, and when she is obliged to sit and 
 listen to her own evil history as he tells it 
 her, she does not interrupt the telling with 
 the outcries that might be imagined by a
 
 ELEONORA DUSE 51 
 
 lesser actress, she accompanies it. Her lips 
 are close, but her throat is vocal. None who 
 heard it can forget the speech-within-speech ' 
 of one of these comprehensive noises. It was 
 when the man spoke, for her further confusion, 
 of the slavery to which she had reduced her 
 lovers ; she followed him, aloof, with a twang 
 of triumph. 
 
 If Parisians say, as they do, that she makes 
 a bad Parisienne, it is because she can be 
 too nearly a woman untamed. They have 
 accused her of lack of elegance — in that 
 supper scene of La Dame aux Cornelias, 
 for instance; taking for ill -breeding, in her 
 Marguerite, that Avhich is Italian merely 
 *and simple. Whether, again, Cyprienne, in 
 Divorcons, can at all be considered a lady 
 may be a question ; but this is quite un- 
 questionable — that she is rather more a lady, 
 and not less, when Signora Duse makes her 
 a savage. But really the result is not at 
 all Parisian. 
 
 It seems possible that the French sense 
 does not well distinguish, and has no fine 
 perception of that affinity with the peasant 
 which remains with the great ladies of the 
 old civilisation of Italy, and has so long dis-
 
 52 ELEONORA DUSE 
 
 appeared from those of the younger civilisa- 
 tions of France and England — a paradox. The 
 peasant's gravity, directness, and cai'elessness 
 — a kind of uncouthness which is neither 
 graceless nor, in any intolerable English sense, 
 vulgar — are to be found in the unceremonious 
 moments of every transalpine woman, how- 
 ever elect her birth and select her conditions. 
 In Italy the lady is not a creature described 
 by negatives, as an author who is always 
 right has denned the lady to be in England. 
 Even in France she is not that, and between 
 the Frenchwoman and the Italian there are 
 the Alps. In a word, the educated Italian 
 mondaine is, in the sense (also untranslatable) 
 of singular, insular, and absolutely British 
 usage, a Native. None the less would she 
 be surprised to find herself accused of a lack 
 of dignity. 
 
 As to intelligence — a little intelligence is 
 sufficiently dramatic, if it is single. A child 
 doing one thing at a time and doing it com- 
 pletely, produces to the eye a better impres- 
 sion of mental life than one receives from — 
 well, from a lecturer.
 
 DONKEY RACES 
 
 [NGLISH acting had for some time 
 past still been making a feint of 
 running the race that wins. The 
 retort , the interruption, the call, 
 the reply, the surprise, had yet kept a spoilt 
 tradition of suddenness and life. You had, 
 indeed, to wait for an interruption in dialogue 
 — it is true you had to wait for it ; so had 
 the interrupted speaker on the stage. But 
 when the interruption came, it had still a 
 false air of vivacity ; and the waiting of the 
 interrupted one was so ill done, with so roving 
 an eye and such an arrest and failure of con- 
 vention, such a confession of a blank, as to 
 prove that there remained a kind of reluctant 
 and inexpert sense of movement. It still 
 seemed as though the actor and the actress 
 acknowledged some forward tendency. 
 
 Not so now. The serious stage is openly 
 the scene of the race that loses. The donkey 
 
 53
 
 54 DONKEY RACES 
 
 race is candidly the model of the talk in 
 every tragedy that has a chance of popular 
 success. Who shall be last ? The hands of 
 the public are for him, or for her. A certain 
 actress who has " come to the front of her 
 profession " holds, for a time, the record of 
 delay. " Come to the front," do they say ? 
 Surely the front of her profession must have 
 moved in retreat, to gain upon her tardiness. 
 It must have become the back of her pro- 
 fession before ever it came up with her. 
 
 It should rejoice those who enter for this 
 kind of racing that the record need never 
 finally be beaten. The possibilities of suc- 
 cess are incalculable. The play has perforce 
 to be finished in a night, it is true, but the 
 minor characters, the subordinate actors, can 
 be made to bear the burden of that necessity. 
 The principals, or those who have come "to 
 the front of their profession," have an almost 
 unlimited opportunity and liberty of lagging. 
 
 Besides, the competitor in a donkey race 
 is not, let it be borne in mind, limited to 
 the practice of his own tediousness. Part of 
 his victory is to be ascribed to his influence 
 upon others. It may be that a determined 
 actor — a man of more than common strength
 
 DONKEY RACES 55 
 
 of will — may so cause his colleague to get 
 on (let us say "get on/' for everything in 
 this world is relative) ; may so, then, compel 
 the other actor, with whom he is in conver- 
 sation, to get on, as to secure his own final 
 triumph by indirect means as well as by direct. 
 To be plain, for the sake of those unfamiliar 
 with , the sports of the village, the rider in a 
 donkey race may, and does, cudgel the mounts 
 of his rivals. 
 
 Consider, therefore, how encouraging the 
 prospect really is. The individual actor may 
 fail — in fact, he must. Where two people 
 ride together on horseback, the married have 
 ever been warned, one must ride behind. 
 And when two people are speaking slowly 
 one must needs be the slowest. Comparative 
 success implies the comparative failure. But 
 where this actor or that actress fails, the 
 great cause of slowness profits, obviously. 
 The record is advanced. Pshaw ! the word 
 " advanced " comes unadvised to the pen. It 
 is difficult to remember in what a fatuous 
 theatrical Royal Presence one is doing this 
 criticism, and how one's words should go 
 backwards, without exception, in homage to 
 this symbol of a throne.
 
 56 DONKEY RACES 
 
 It is not long since there took place upon 
 the principal stage in London the most im- 
 portant event in donkey-racing ever known 
 until that first night. A tragedian and a 
 secondary actor of renown had a duet to- 
 gether. It was in "The Dead Heart." No 
 one who heard it can possibly have yet for- 
 gotten it. The two men used echoes of one 
 another's voice, then outpaused each other. 
 It was a contest so determined, so unrelaxed, 
 so deadly, so inveterate that you might have 
 slept between its encounters. You did sleep. 
 These men were strong men, and knew what 
 they wanted. It is tremendous to watch the 
 struggle of such resolves. They had then- 
 purpose in their grasp, their teeth were set, 
 their will was iron. They were foot to fo*t. 
 And next morning you saw by the papers 
 that the secondary, but still renowned, actor, 
 had succeeded in sharing the principal honours 
 of the piece. So uncommonly well had he 
 done, even for him. Then you understood 
 that, though you had not known it, the 
 tragedian must have been beaten in that 
 dialogue. He had suffered himself in an 
 instant of weakness, to be stimulated; he 
 had for a moment — only a moment — got on.
 
 DONKEY RACES 57 
 
 That night was influential. We may see its 
 results everywhere, and especially in Shake- 
 speare. Our tragic stage was always — well, 
 different, let us say — different from the tragic 
 stage of Italy and France. It is now quite 
 unlike, and frankly so. The spoilt tradition of 
 vitality has been explicitly abandoned. The 
 interrupted one waits, no longer with a rov- 
 ing eye, but with something almost of dig- 
 nity, as though he were fulfilling ritual. 
 
 Benvolio and Mercutio outlag one another 
 in hunting after the leaping Romeo. They 
 call without the slightest impetus. One can 
 imagine how the true Mercutio called — cer- 
 tainly not by rote. There must have been 
 
 I 
 
 pauses indeed, brief and short-breath'd pauses 
 of listening for an answer, between every 
 nickname. But the nicknames were quick 
 work. At the Lyceum they were quite an 
 effort of memory : " Romeo ! Humours ! Mad- 
 man ! Passion ! Lover ! " 
 
 The actress of Juliet, speaking the words 
 of haste, makes her audience wait to hear 
 them. Nothing more incongruous than Juliet's 
 hurry of phrase and the actress's leisure of 
 phrasing. None act, none speak, as though 
 there were such a thing as impulse in a play.
 
 58 DONKEY RACES 
 
 To drop behind is the only idea of arriving. 
 The nurse ceases to be absurd, for there is 
 no one readier with a reply than she. Or, 
 rather, her delays are so altered by exagger- 
 ation as to lose touch with Nature. If it is 
 ill enough to hear haste drawled out, it is ill, 
 too, to hear slowness out-tarried. The true 
 nurse of Shakespeare lags with her news be- 
 cause her ignorant wits are easily astray, as 
 lightly caught as though they were light, 
 which they are not ; but the nurse of the 
 stage is never simply astray : she knows before- 
 hand how long she means to be, and never, 
 never foi'gets what kind of race is the race she 
 is riding. The Juliet of the stage seems to 
 consider that there is plenty of time for her to 
 discover which is slain — Tybalt or her husband ; 
 she is sure to know some time ; it can wait. 
 
 A London success, when you know where 
 it lies, is not difficult to achieve. Of all things 
 that can be gained by men or women about 
 their business, there is one thing that can be 
 gained without fear of failure. This is time. 
 To gain time requires so little wit that, except 
 for competition, every one could be first at 
 the game. In fact, time gains itself. The 
 actor is really not called upon to do anything.
 
 DONKEY RACES 59 
 
 There is nothing, accordingly, for which our 
 actors and actresses do not rely upon time. 
 For humour even, when the humour occurs 
 in tragedy, they appeal to time. They give 
 blanks to their audiences to be filled up. 
 
 ft might be possible to have tragedies 
 written from beginning to end for the ser- 
 vice of the present kind of "art." But the 
 tragedies we have are not so written. And 
 being what they are, it is not vivacity that 
 they lose by this length of pause, this length 
 of phrasing, this illimitable tiresomeness ; it is 
 life itself. For the life of a scene conceived 
 directly is its directness ; the life of a scene 
 created simply is its simplicity. And sim- 
 plicity, directness, impetus, emotion, nature 
 fall out of the trailing, loose, long dialogue, 
 like fish from the loose meshes of a net — 
 they fall out, they drift off, they are lost. 
 
 The universal slowness, moreover, is not 
 good for metre. Even when an actress speaks 
 her lines as lines, and does not drop into 
 prose by slipping here and there a syllable, 
 she spoils the tempo by inordinate length of 
 pronunciation. Verse cannot keep upon the 
 wing without a certain measure in the move- 
 ment of the pinion. Verse is a flight.
 
 GRASS 
 
 OW and then, at regular intervals of 
 the summer, the Suburb springs for 
 a time from its mediocrity ; but an 
 inattentive eye might not see why, 
 or might not seize the cause of the bloom and 
 of the new look of humility and dignity that 
 makes the Road, the Rise, and the Villas seem 
 suddenly gentle, gay and rather shy. 
 
 It is no change in the gardens. These are, 
 as usual, full, abundant, fragrant, and quite un- 
 interesting, keeping the traditional secret by 
 which the suburban rose, magnolia, clematis, 
 and all other flowers grow dull — not in colour, 
 but in spirit — between the yellow brick house- 
 front and the iron railings. Nor is there any- 
 thing altered for the better in the houses 
 themselves. 
 
 Nevertheless, the little, common, prosperous 
 road, has bloomed, you cannot tell how. It is 
 
 unexpectedly liberal, fresh, and innocent. The 
 60
 
 GRASS 61 
 
 soft garden-winds that rustle its shrubs are, 
 for the moment, genuine. 
 
 Another day and all is undone. The Rise 
 is its daily self again — a road of flowers and 
 foliage that is less pleasant than a fairly well- 
 built street. And if you happen to find the 
 men at work on the re-transformation, you 
 become, aware of the accident that made all 
 this difference. It lay in the little border of 
 wayside grass which a row of public servants — 
 men with spades and a cart — are in the act 
 of tidying up. Their way of tidying it up is 
 to lay its little corpse all along the suburban 
 roadside, and then to cany it away to some 
 parochial dust-heap. 
 
 But for the vigilance of Vestries, grass would 
 reconcile everything. When the first heat of 
 the summer was over, a few nights of rain 
 altered all the colour of the world. It had 
 been the brown and russet of drought — very 
 beautiful in landscape, but lifeless ; it became 
 a translucent, profound, and eager green. The 
 citizen does not spend attention on it. 
 
 Why, then, is his vestry so alert, so appre- 
 hensive, so swift ; in perception so instant, in 
 execution so prompt, so silent in action, so 
 punctual in destruction? The vestry keeps,
 
 62 GRASS 
 
 as it were, a tryst with the grass. The " sunny 
 spots of greenery " are given just time enough 
 to grow and be conspicuous, and the barrow is 
 there, true to time, and the spade. (To call 
 that spade a spade hardly seems enough.) 
 
 For the gracious grass of the summer has 
 not been content within enclosures. It has — 
 or would have — cheered up and sweetened 
 everything. Over asphalte it could not pre- 
 vail, and it has prettily yielded to asphalte, 
 taking leave to live and let live. It has taken 
 the little strip of ground next to the asphalte, 
 between this and the kerb, and again the 
 refuse of ground between the kerb and the 
 roadway. The man of business walking to the 
 station with a bag could have his asphalte 
 all unbroken, and the butcher's boy in his 
 cart was not annoyed. The grass seemed to 
 respect everybody's views, and to take only 
 what nobody wanted. But these gay and 
 lowly ways will not escape a vestry. 
 
 There is no wall so impregnable or so vulgar, 
 but a summer's grass will attempt it. It will 
 try to persuade the yellow brick, to win the 
 purple slate, to reconcile stucco. Outside the 
 authority of the suburbs it has put a luminous 
 touch everywhere. The thatch of cottages
 
 GRASS 63 
 
 has /given it an opportunity. It has perched 
 and alighted in showers and flocks. It has 
 crept and crawled, and stolen its hour. It has 
 made haste between the ruts of cart wheels, 
 so they were not too frequent. It has been 
 stealthy in a good cause, and bold out of reach. 
 It has been the most defiant runaway, and the 
 meekest lingerer. It has been universal, ready 
 and potential in every place, so that the happy 
 country — village and field alike — has been all 
 grass, with mere exceptions. 
 
 And all this the grass does in spite of the ill- 
 treatment it suffers at the hands, and mowing- 
 machines, and vestries of man. His ideal of 
 grass is growth that shall never be allowed 
 u» come to its flower and completion. He 
 proves this in his lawns. Not only does he cut 
 the coming grass-flower off by the stalk, but 
 he does not allow the mere leaf — the blade — to 
 perfect itself. He will not have it a "blade" 
 at all ; he cuts its top away as never sword or 
 sabre was shaped. All the beauty of a blade 
 of grass is that the organic shape has the inten- 
 tion of ending in a point. Surely no one at 
 all aware of the beauty of lines ought to be 
 ignorant of the significance and grace of mani- 
 fest intention, which rules a living line from
 
 64 GRASS 
 
 its beginning, even though the intention be 
 towards a point while the first spring of the 
 line is towards an opening curve. But man 
 does not care for intention ; he mows it. Nor 
 does he care for attitude ; he rolls it. In a 
 word, he proves to the grass, as plainly as 
 deeds can do so, that it is not to his mind. 
 The rolling, especially, seems to be a violent 
 way of showing that the universal grass 
 interrupted by the life of the Englishman 
 is not as he would have it. Besides, when 
 he wishes to deride a city, he calls it grass- 
 grown. 
 
 But his suburbs shall not, if he can help 
 it, be grass-grown. They shall not be like 
 a mere Pisa. Highgate shall not so, nor 
 Peckham.
 
 , A WOMAN IN GREY 
 
 HE mothers of Professors were in- 
 dulged in the practice of jumping 
 at conclusions, and were praised 
 for their impatience of the slow 
 process of reason. 
 
 Professors have written of the mental habits 
 of women as though they accumulated gener- 
 ation by generation upon women, and passed 
 over their sons. Professors take it for granted, 
 obviously by some process other than the 
 slow process of reason, that women derive 
 from their mothers and grandmothers, and 
 men from their fathers and grandfathers. 
 This, for instance, was written lately : " This 
 power [it matters not what] would be about 
 equal in the two sexes but for the influence 
 of heredity, which turns the scale in favour 
 of the woman, as for long generations the 
 surroundings and conditions of life of the 
 
 female sex have developed in her a greater 
 
 e 65
 
 66 A WOMAN IN GREY 
 
 degree of the power in question than circum- 
 stances have required from men." " Long 
 generations " of subjection are, strangely 
 enough, held to excuse the timorousness and 
 the shifts of women to-day. But the world, 
 unknowing, tampers with the courage of 
 its sons by such a slovenly indulgence. It 
 tampers with their intelligence by fostering 
 the ignorance of women. 
 
 And yet Shakespeare confessed the partici- 
 pation of man and woman in their common 
 heritage. It is Cassius who speaks : 
 
 " Have you not love enough to bear with me 
 
 When that rash humour which my mother gave me 
 Makes me forgetful ? " 
 
 And Brutus who replies : 
 
 " Yes, Cassius, and from henceforth 
 When you are over-earnest with your Brutus 
 He '11 think your mother chides, and leave you so." 
 
 Dryden confessed it also in his praises of 
 Anne Killigrew : 
 
 " If by traduction came thy mind, 
 Our wonder is the less to find 
 A soul so charming from a stock so good. 
 Thy father was transfused into thy blood." 
 
 The winning of Waterloo upon the Eton
 
 A WOMAN IN GREY 67 
 
 playgrounds is very well ; but there have 
 been some other, and happily minor, fields 
 that were not won — that were more or less 
 lost. Where did this loss take place, if the 
 gains were secured at football ? This inquiry 
 is. not quite so cheerful as the other. But 
 while the victories were once going forward 
 in the playground, the defeats or disasters 
 were once going forward in some other place, 
 presumably. And this was surely the place 
 that was not a playground, the place where 
 the future wives of the football players were 
 sitting still while their future husbands were 
 playing football. 
 
 This is the train of thought that followed 
 the grey figure of a woman on a bicycle in 
 Oxford Street. She had an enormous and 
 top-heavy omnibus at her back. All the 
 things on the near side of the street — the 
 things going her way — were going at different 
 paces, in two streams, overtaking and being 
 overtaken. The tributary streets shot omni- 
 buses and carriages, cabs and carts — some to 
 go her own way, some with an impetus that 
 carried them curving into the other current, 
 and other some making a straight line right 
 across Oxford Street into the street opposite.
 
 68 A WOMAN IN GREY 
 
 Besides all the unequal movement, there 
 were the stoppings. It was a delicate tangle 
 to keep from knotting. The nerves of the 
 mouths of horses bore the whole charge and 
 answered it, as they do every day. 
 
 The woman in grey, quite alone, was 
 immediately dependent on no nerves but 
 her own, which almost made her machine 
 sensitive. But this alertness was joined to 
 such perfect composure as no flutter of a 
 moment disturbed. There was the steadiness 
 of sleep, and a vigilance more than that of 
 an ordinary waking. 
 
 At the same time, the woman was doing 
 what nothing in her youth could well have 
 prepared her for. She must have passed a 
 childhood unlike the ordinary girl's childhood, 
 if her steadiness or her alertness had ever 
 been educated, if she had been rebuked for 
 cowardice, for the egoistic distrust of general 
 rules, or for claims of exceptional chances. 
 Yet here she was, trusting not only herself 
 but a multitude of other people ; taking her 
 equal risk ; giving a watchful confidence to 
 averages — that last, perhaps, her strangest 
 and greatest success. 
 
 No exceptions were hers, no appeals, and
 
 A WOMAN IN GREY 69 
 
 no' forewarnings. She evidently had not in 
 her mind a single phrase, familiar to women, 
 made to express no confidence except in 
 accidents, and to proclaim a prudent fore- 
 sight of the less probable event. No woman 
 could ride a bicycle along Oxford Street 
 with any such baggage as that about her. 
 
 The woman in grey had a watchful con- 
 fidence not only in a multitude of men but 
 in a multitude of things. And it is very 
 hard for any untrained human being to 
 practise confidence in things in motion — 
 things full of force, and, what is worse, 
 of forces. Moreover, there is a supreme 
 difficulty for a mind accustomed to search 
 timorously for some little place of insignificant 
 rest on any accessible point of stable equili- 
 brium ; and that is the difficulty of holding 
 itself nimbly secure in an equilibrium that 
 is unstable. Who can deny that women are 
 generally used to look about for the little 
 stationary repose just described ? Whether 
 in intellectual or in spiritual things, they do 
 not often live without it. 
 
 She, none the less, fled upon unstable 
 equilibrium, escaped upon it, depended upon 
 it, trusted it, was 'ware of it, was on guard
 
 70 A WOMAN IN GREY 
 
 against it, as she sped amid her crowd : 
 her own unstable equilibrium, her machine's, 
 that of the judgment, the temper, the skill, 
 the perception, the strength of men and 
 horses. 
 
 She had learnt the difficult peace of sus- 
 pense. She had learnt also the lowly and 
 self-denying faith in common chances. She 
 had learnt to be content with her share — 
 no more — in common security, and to be 
 pleased with her part in common hope. For 
 all this, it may be repeated, she could have 
 had but small preparation. Yet no anxiety 
 was hers, no uneasy distrust and disbelief of 
 that human thing — an average of life and 
 death. 
 
 To this courage the woman in grey had 
 attained with a spring, and she had seated 
 herself suddenly upon a place of detachment 
 between earth and air, freed from the prin- 
 cipal detentions, weights, and embarrassments 
 of the usual life of fear. She had made 
 herself, as it were, light, so as not to dwell 
 either in security or danger, but to pass 
 between them. She confessed difficulty and 
 peril by her delicate evasions, and consented 
 to rest in neither. She would not owe safety
 
 A WOMAN IN GREY 71 
 
 to the mere motionlessness of a seat on the 
 solid earth, but she used gravitation to balance 
 the slight burdens of her wariness and her 
 confidence. She put aside all the pride and 
 vanity of terror, and leapt into an unsure 
 condition of liberty and content. 
 
 She leapt, too, into a life of moments. 
 No pause was possible to her as she went, 
 except the vibrating pause of a perpetual 
 change and of an unflagging flight. A woman, 
 long educated to sit still, does not suddenly 
 learn to live a momentary life without strong 
 momentary resolution. She has no light 
 achievement in limiting not only her fore- 
 sight, which must become brief, but her 
 memory, which must do more ; for it must 
 rather cease than become brief. Idle memory 
 wastes time and other things. The moments 
 of the woman in grey as they dropped by 
 must needs disappear, and be simply forgotten, 
 as a child forgets. Idle memory, by the 
 way, shortens life, or shortens the sense of 
 time, by linking the immediate past cling- 
 ingly to the present. Here may possibly be 
 found one of the reasons for the length of 
 a child's time, and for the brevity of the 
 time that succeeds. The child lets his
 
 72 A WOMAN IN GREY 
 
 moments pass by and quickly become remote 
 through a thousand little successive oblivions. 
 He has not yet the languid habit of recall. 
 
 "Thou art my warrior/' said Volumnia. "I 
 holp to frame thee." 
 
 Shall a man inherit his mother's trick of 
 speaking, or her habit and attitude, and not 
 suffer something, against his will, from her 
 bequest of weakness, and something, against 
 his heart, from her bequest of folly ? From 
 the legacies of an unlessoned mind, a woman's 
 heirs-male are not cut off in the Common 
 Law of the generations of mankind. Brutus 
 knew that the valour of Portia was settled 
 upon his sons.
 
 ' S YMMETRY AND INCIDENT 
 
 I HE art of Japan has none but an 
 exterior part in the history of the 
 art of nations. Being in its own 
 methods and attitude the art of 
 accident, it has, appropriately, an accidental 
 value. It is of accidental value, and not of 
 integral necessity. The virtual discovery of 
 Japanese art, during the later years of the 
 second French Empire, caused Europe to re- 
 learn how expedient, how delicate, and how 
 lovely Incident may look when Symmetry has 
 grown vulgar. The lesson was most welcome. 
 Japan has had her full influence. European 
 art has learnt the value of position and the 
 tact of the unique. But Japan is unlessoned, 
 and (in all her characteristic art) content with 
 her own conventions ; she is local, provincial, 
 alien, remote, incapable of equal companion- 
 ship with a world that has Greek art in its 
 own history — Pericles "to its father." 
 
 73
 
 74 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 
 
 Nor is it pictorial art, or decorative art only, 
 that has been touched by Japanese example of 
 Incident and the Unique. Music had attained 
 the noblest form of symmetry in the eighteenth 
 century, but in music, too, symmetry had since 
 grown dull ; and momentary music, the music of 
 phase and of fragment, succeeded. The sense 
 of symmetry is strong in a complete melody — 
 of symmetry in its most delicate and lively and 
 least stationary form — balance ; whereas the 
 leit-motif is isolated. In domestic architecture 
 Symmetry and Incident make a familiar anti- 
 thesis — the very commonplace of rival methods 
 of art. But the same antithesis exists in less 
 obvious forms. The poets have sought " irre- 
 gular" metres. Incident hovers, in the very 
 act of choosing its right place, in the most 
 modern of modern portraits. In these we 
 have, if not the Japanese suppression of minor 
 emphasis, certainly the Japanese exaggeration 
 of major emphasis ; and with this a quickness 
 and buoyancy. The smile, the figure, the 
 drapery — not yet settled from the arranging 
 touch of a hand, and showing its mark — the 
 restless and unstationary foot, and the unity 
 of impulse that has passed everywhere like a 
 single breeze, all these have a life that greatly
 
 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 75 
 
 transcends the life of Japanese art, yet has 
 the nimble touch of Japanese incident. In 
 passing, a charming comparison may be made 
 between such portraiture and the aspect of an 
 aspen or other tree of light and liberal leaf; 
 whether still or in motion the aspen and the 
 free-leafed poplar have the alertness and ex- 
 pectancy of flight in all their flocks of leaves, 
 while the oaks and elms are gathered in their 
 station. All this is not Japanese, but from 
 such accident is Japanese art inspired, with its 
 good luck of perceptiveness. 
 
 What symmetry is to form, that is repetition 
 in the art of ornament. Greek art and Gothic 
 alike have series, with repetition or counter- 
 change for their ruling motive. It is hardly 
 necessary to draw the distinction between 
 this motive and that of the Japanese. The 
 Japanese motives may be defined as unique- 
 ness and position. And these were not known 
 as motives of decoration before the study of 
 Japanese decoration. Repetition and counter- 
 change, of course, have their place in Japanese 
 ornament, as in the diaper patterns for which 
 these people have so singular an invention, 
 but here, too, uniqueness and position are the 
 principal inspiration. And it is quite worth
 
 76 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 
 
 while, and much to the present purpose, to 
 call attention to the chief peculiarity of the 
 Japanese diaper patterns, which is interruption. 
 Repetition there must necessarily be in these, 
 but symmetry is avoided by an interruption 
 which is, to the Western eye, at least, per- 
 petually and freshly unexpected. The place 
 of the interruptions of lines, the variation of 
 the place, and the avoidance of correspond- 
 ence, are precisely what makes Japanese 
 design of this class inimitable. Thus, even 
 in a repeating pattern, you have a curiously 
 successful effect of impulse. It is as though 
 a separate intention had been formed by the 
 designer at every angle. Such renewed con- 
 sciousness does not make for greatness. Great- 
 ness in design has more peace than is found in 
 the gentle abruptness of Japanese lines, in 
 their curious brevity. It is scarcely necessary 
 to say that a line, in all other schools of art, is 
 long or short according to its place and pur- 
 pose ; but only the Japanese designer so con- 
 trives his patterns that the line is always 
 short ; and many repeating designs are entirely 
 composed of this various and variously-occur- 
 ring brevity, this prankish avoidance of the 
 goal. Moi*eover, the Japanese evade sym-
 
 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 77 
 
 metry, in the unit of their repeating patterns, 
 by another simple device — that of numbers. 
 They make a small difference in the number 
 of curves and of lines. A great difference 
 would not make the same effect of variety ; 
 it would look too much like a contrast. For 
 example, three rods on one side and six on 
 another would be something else than a mere 
 variation, and variety would be lost by the 
 use" of them. The Japanese decorator will 
 vary three in this place by two in that, and 
 a sense of the defeat of symmetry is imme- 
 diately produced. With more violent means 
 the idea of symmetry would have been neither 
 suggested nor refuted. 
 
 " Leaving mere repeating patterns and diaper 
 designs, you find, in Japanese compositions, 
 complete designs in which there is no point of 
 symmetry. It is a balance of suspension and 
 of antithesis. There is no sense of lack of 
 equilibrium, because place is, most subtly, 
 made to have the effect of giving or of sub- 
 tracting value. A small thing is arranged to 
 reply to a large one, for the small thing is 
 placed at the precise distance that makes it a 
 (Japanese) equivalent. In Italy (and perhaps 
 in other countries) the scales commonly in
 
 78 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 
 
 use are furnished with only a single weight 
 that increases or diminishes in value accord- 
 ing as you slide it nearer or farther upon a 
 horizontal arm. It is equivalent to so many 
 ounces when it is close to the upright, and 
 to so many pounds when it hangs from the 
 farther end of the horizontal rod. Distance 
 plays some such part with the twig or the 
 bird in the upper corner of a Japanese com- 
 position. Its place is its significance and its 
 value. Such an art of position implies a great 
 art of intervals. The Japanese chooses a few 
 things and leaves the space between them 
 free, as free as the pauses or silences in 
 music. But as time, not silence, is the sub- 
 ject, or material, of contrast in musical pauses, 
 so it is the measurement of space — that is, 
 collocation — that makes the value of empty 
 intervals. The space between this form and 
 that, in a Japanese composition, is valuable 
 because it is just so wide and no more. And 
 this, again, is only another way of saying that 
 position is the principle of this apparently 
 wilful art. 
 
 Moreover, the alien art of Japan, in its 
 pictorial form, has helped to justify the more 
 stenographic school of etching. Greatly
 
 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 79 
 
 transcending Japanese expression, the modern 
 etcher has undoubtedly accepted moral sup- 
 port from the islands of the Japanese. He 
 too etches a kind of shorthand, even though 
 his notes appeal much to the spectator's 
 knowledge, while the Oriental shorthand 
 appeals to nothing but the spectator's simple 
 vision., Thus the two ai'tists work in ways 
 dissimilar. Nevertheless, the French etcher 
 would never have written his signs so freely 
 had not the Japanese so freely drawn his 
 own. Furthermore still, the transitory and 
 destructible material of Japanese art has done 
 as much as the multiplication of newspapers, 
 and the discovery of processes, to reconcile 
 the European designer — the black and white 
 artist — to working for the day, the day of 
 publication. Japan lives much of its daily 
 life by means of paper, painted ; so does 
 Europe by means of paper, printed. But as 
 we, unlike those Orientals, are a destruc- 
 tive people, paper with us means short life, 
 quick abolition, transformation, re-appearance, 
 a very circulation of life. This is our present 
 way of surviving ourselves — the new version 
 of that feat of life. Time was when to sur- 
 vive yourself meant to secure, for a time in-
 
 80 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 
 
 definitely longer than the life of man, such 
 dull form as you had given to your work ; 
 to intrude upon posterity. To survive your- 
 self, to-day, is to let your work go into daily 
 oblivion. 
 
 Now, though the Japanese are not a de- 
 structive people, their paper does not last for 
 ever, and that material has clearly suggested 
 to them a different condition of ornament from 
 that with which they adorned old lacquer, fine 
 ivory, or other perdurable things. For the 
 transitory material they keep the more purely 
 pictorial art of landscape. What of Japanese 
 landscape ? Assuredly it is too far reduced to 
 a monotonous convention to merit the serious 
 study of races that have produced Cotman and 
 Corot. Japanese landscape -drawing reduces 
 things seen to such fewness as must have made 
 the art insufferably tedious to any people less 
 fresh-spirited and more inclined to take them- 
 selves seriously than these Orientals. A pre- 
 occupied people would never endure it. But 
 a little closer attention from the Occidental 
 student might find for their evasive attitude 
 towards landscape — it is an attitude almost 
 traitorously evasive — a more significant reason. 
 It is that the distances, the greatness, the
 
 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 81 
 
 winds and the waves of the world, coloured 
 plains, and the flight of a sky, are all cer- 
 tainly alien to the perceptions of a people 
 intent upon little deformities. Does it seem 
 harsh to define by that phrase the curious 
 Japanese search for accidents ? Upon such 
 search these people are avowedly intent, even 
 though they show themselves capable of ex- 
 quisite appreciation of the form of a normal 
 bird and of the habit of growth of a normal 
 flower. They are not in search of the per- 
 petual slight novelty which was Aristotle's 
 ideal of the language poetic ("a little wildly, 
 or with the flower of the mind," says Emerson 
 of the way of a poet's speech) — and such 
 novelty it is, like the frequent pulse of the 
 pinion, that keeps verse upon the wing ; no, 
 what the Japanese are intent upon is per- 
 petual slight disordei*. In Japan the man in 
 the fields has eyes less for the sky and the 
 crescent moon than for some stone in the 
 path, of which the asymmetry strikes his 
 curious sense of pleasure in fortunate acci- 
 dent of form. For love of a little grotesque 
 strangeness he will load himself with the 
 stone and carry it home to his garden. The 
 art of such a people is not liberal art, not
 
 82 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 
 
 the art of peace, and not the art of humanity. 
 Look at the cui'ls and curves whereby this 
 people conventionally signify wave or cloud. 
 All these curls have an attitude which is like 
 that of a figure slightly malformed, and not 
 like that of a human body that is perfect, 
 dominant, and if bent, bent at no lowly or 
 niggling labour. Why these curves should be 
 so charming it would be hard to say ; they 
 have an exquisite prankishness of variety, the 
 place where the upward or downward scrolls 
 curl off from the main wave is delicately un- 
 expected every time, and — especially in gold 
 embroideries — is sensitively fit for the ma- 
 terial, catching and losing the light, while 
 the lengths of waving line are such as the 
 long gold threads take by nature. 
 
 A moment ago this art was declared not 
 human. And, in fact, in no other art has 
 the figure suffered such crooked handling. 
 The Japanese have generally evaded even 
 the local beauty of their own race for the 
 sake of perpetual slight deformity. Their 
 beauty is remote from our sympathy and 
 admiration ; and it is quite possible that we 
 might miss it in pictorial presentation, and 
 that the Japanese artist may have intended
 
 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 83 
 
 human beauty where we do not recognise 
 it. But if it is not easy to recognise, it is 
 certainly not difficult to guess at. And, 
 accordingly, you are generally aware that 
 the separate beauty of the race, and its 
 separate dignity, even — to be very generous 
 — has been admired by the Japanese artist, 
 and is represented here and there occasionally, 
 in the figure of warrior or mousme. But even 
 with this exception the habit of Japanese 
 figure-drawing is evidently grotesque, derisive, 
 and crooked. It is curious to observe that 
 the search for slight deformity is so constant 
 as to make use, for its purposes, not of action 
 only, but of perspective foreshortening. With 
 us it is to the youngest child only that there 
 would appear to be mirth in the drawing of 
 a man who, stooping violently forward, would 
 seem to have his head "beneath his shoulders." 
 The European child would not see fun in 
 the living man so presented, but — unused to 
 the same effect "in the flat" — he thinks it 
 prodigiously humorous in a drawing. But so 
 only when he is quite young. The Japanese 
 keeps, apparently, his sense of this kind of 
 humour. It amuses him, but not perhaps 
 altogether as it amuses the child, that the
 
 84 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 
 
 foreshortened figure should, in drawing and 
 to the unpractised eye, seem distorted and 
 dislocated ; the simple Oriental appears to 
 find more derision in it than the simple 
 child. The distortion is not without a 
 suggestion of ignominy. And, moreover, the 
 Japanese shows derision, but not precisely 
 scorn. He does not hold himself superior to 
 his hideous models. He makes free with 
 them on equal terms. He is familiar with 
 them. 
 
 And if this is the conviction gathered from 
 ordinary drawings, no need to insist upon 
 the ignoble character of those that are inten- 
 tional caricatures. 
 
 Perhaps the time has hardly come for 
 writing anew the praises of symmetry. The 
 world knows too much of the abuse of Greek 
 decoration, and would be glad to forget it, 
 with the intention of learning that art afresh 
 in a future age and of seeing it then anew. 
 But whatever may be the phases of the arts, 
 there is the abiding principle of symmetry 
 in the body of man, that goes erect, like an 
 upright soul. Its balance is equal. Exterior 
 human symmetry is surely a curious physiologi- 
 cal fact where there is no symmetry interiorly.
 
 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 85 
 
 For 'the centres of life and movement within 
 the body are placed with Oriental inequality. 
 Man is Greek without and Japanese within. 
 But the absolute symmetry of the skeleton 
 and of the beauty and life that cover it is 
 accurately a principle. It controls, but not 
 tyrannously, all the life of human action. 
 Attitude and motion disturb perpetually, with 
 infinite incidents — inequalities of work, war, 
 and pastime, inequalities of sleep — the sym- 
 metry of man. Only in death and " at 
 attention " is that symmetry complete in 
 attitude. Nevertheless, it rules the dance 
 and the battle, and its rhythm is not to be 
 destroyed. All the more because this hand 
 holds the goad and that the harrow, this 
 the shield and that the sword, because this 
 hand rocks the cradle and that caresses the 
 unequal heads of children, is this rhythm 
 the law ; and grace and strength are inflec- 
 tions thereof. All human movement is a 
 variation upon symmetry, and without sym- 
 metry it would not be variation ; it would 
 be lawless, fortuitous, and as dull and broad- 
 cast as lawless art. The order of inflection 
 that is not infraction has been explained in 
 a most authoritative sentence of ci-iticism of
 
 86 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 
 
 literature, a sentence that should save the 
 world the trouble of some of its futile, violent, 
 and weak experiments : " Law, the rectitude 
 of humanity," says Mr Coventry Patmore, 
 "should be the poet's only subject, as, from 
 time immemorial, it has been the subject of 
 true art, though many a true artist has done 
 the Muse's will and knew it not. As all 
 the music of verse arises, not from infraction 
 but from inflection of the law of the set 
 metre ; so the greatest poets have been 
 those the modulus of whose verse has been 
 most variously and delicately inflected, in 
 correspondence with feelings and passions 
 which are the inflections of moral law in 
 their theme. Law puts a strain upon feeling, 
 and feeling responds with a strain upon law. 
 Furthermore, Aristotle says that the quality of 
 poetic language is a continual slight novelty. 
 In the highest poetry, like that of Milton, 
 these three modes of inflection, metrical, 
 linguistical, and moral, all chime together 
 in praise of the truer order of life." 
 
 And like that order is the order of the 
 figure of man, an order most beautiful and 
 most secure when it is put to the proof. 
 That perpetual proof by perpetual inflection
 
 SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT 87 
 
 is the very condition of life. Symmetry is 
 a profound, if disregarded because perpetually 
 inflected, condition of human life. 
 
 The nimble art of Japan is unessential ; 
 it may come and go, may settle or be fanned 
 away. It has life and it is not without law ; 
 it has an obvious life, and a less obvious 
 law. , But with Greece abides the obvious 
 law and the less obvious life: symmetry as 
 apparent as the symmetry of the form of man, 
 and life occult like his unequal heart. And 
 this seems to be the nobler and the more 
 perdurable relation.
 
 THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME 
 
 E who has survived his childhood 
 intelligently must become con- 
 scious of something more than 
 a change in his sense of the pre- 
 sent and in his appi-ehension of the future. 
 He must be aware of no less a thing than 
 the destruction of the past. Its events and 
 empires stand where they did, and the mere 
 relation of time is as it was. But that which 
 has fallen together, has fallen in, has fallen 
 close, and lies in a little heap, is the past 
 itself — time — the fact of antiquity. 
 
 He has grown into a smaller world as he 
 has grown older. There are no more extremi- 
 ties. Recorded time has no more terrors. 
 The unit of measure which he holds in his 
 hand has become in his eyes a thing of 
 paltry length. The discovery draws in the 
 annals of mankind. He had thought them 
 to be wide.
 
 THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME 89 
 
 Fen* a man has nothing whereby to order 
 and place the floods, the states, the conquests, 
 and the temples of the past, except only the 
 measure which he holds. Call that measure 
 a space of ten years. His first ten years had 
 given him the illusion of a most august scale 
 and measure. It was then that he conceived 
 Antiquity. But now ! Is it to a decade of 
 ten such little years as these now in his hand 
 — ten of his mature years — that men give the 
 dignity of a century ? They call it an age ; 
 but what if life shows now so small that the 
 word age has lost its gravity? 
 
 In fact, when a child begins to know that 
 there is a past, he has a most noble rod to 
 measure it by — he has his own ten years. 
 He attributes an ovei - whelming majesty to 
 all recorded time. He confers distance. He, 
 and he alone, bestows mystery. Remoteness 
 is his. He creates more than mortal centuries. 
 He sends armies fighting into the extremities 
 of the past. He assigns the Parthenon to a 
 hill of ages, and the temples of Upper Egypt 
 to sidereal time. 
 
 If there were no child, there would be 
 nothing old. He, having conceived old time, 
 communicates a remembrance at least of the
 
 90 THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME 
 
 mystery to the mind of the man. The man 
 perceives at last all the illusion, but he cannot 
 forget what was his conviction when he was 
 a child. He had once a persuasion of An- 
 tiquity. And this is not for nothing. The 
 enormous undeception that comes upon him 
 still leaves spaces in his mind. 
 
 But the undeception is rude work. The man 
 receives successive shocks. It is as though 
 one strained level eyes towards the horizon, 
 and then were bidden to shorten his sight and 
 to close his search within a poor half acre 
 before his face. Now, it is that he suddenly 
 perceives the hitherto remote, remote youth 
 of his own parents to have been something 
 familiarly near, so measured by his new 
 standard ; again, it is the coming of Attila 
 that is displaced. Those ten last years of 
 his have corrected the world. There needs 
 no other rod than that ten years' rod to 
 chastise all the imaginations of the spirit of 
 man. It makes history skip. 
 
 To have lived through any appreciable part 
 of any century is to hold thenceforth a mere 
 century cheap enough. But, it may be said, 
 the mystery of change remains. Nay, it does 
 not. Change that trudges through our own
 
 THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME 91 
 
 world — our contemporary world — is not very 
 mysterious. We perceive its pace ; it is a 
 jog-trot. Even so, we now consider, jolted 
 the changes of the past, with the same hurry. 
 
 The man, therefore, who has intelligently 
 ceased to be a child scans through a shortened 
 avenue the reaches of the past. He marvels 
 that he was so deceived. For it was a very 
 deception. If the Argonauts, for instance, 
 had been children, it would have been well 
 enough for the child to measure their remote- 
 ness and their acts with his own magnificent 
 measure. But they were only men and 
 demi-gods. Thus they belong to him as he 
 is now — a man ; and not to him as he was 
 once — a child. It was quite wrong to lay 
 the child's enormous ten years' rule along 
 the path from our time to theirs ; that path 
 must be skipped by the nimble yard in the 
 man's present possession. Decidedly the Ar- 
 gonauts are no subject for the boy. 
 
 What, then? Is the record of the race 
 nothing but a bundle of such little times? 
 Nay, it seems that childhood, which created 
 the illusion of ages, does actually prove it 
 true. Childhood is itself Antiquity — to every 
 man his only Antiquity. The recollection of
 
 92 THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME 
 
 childhood cannot make Abraham old again in 
 the mind of a man of thirty-five ; but the 
 beginning of every life is older than Abraham. 
 There is the abyss of time. Let a man turn to 
 his own childhood — no further — if he would 
 renew his sense of remoteness, and of the 
 mystery of change. 
 
 For in childhood change does not go at that 
 mere hasty amble ; it rushes ; but it has 
 enormous space for its flight. The child 
 has an apprehension not only of things far 
 off, but of things far apart ; an illusive 
 apprehension when he is learning " ancient " 
 history — a real apprehension when he is 
 conning his own immeasurable infancy. If 
 there is no historical Antiquity worth speak- 
 ing of, this is the renewed and unnumbered 
 Antiquity for all mankind. 
 
 And it is of this — merely of this — that 
 " ancient " history seems to partake. Rome 
 was founded when we began Roman history, 
 and that is why it seems long ago. Suppose 
 the man of thirty-five heard, at that present 
 age, for the first time of Romulus. Why, 
 Romulus would be nowhere. But he built 
 his wall, as a matter of fact, when every one 
 was seven years old. It is by good fortune
 
 THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME 93 
 
 that te ancient" history is taught in the only 
 ancient days. So, for a time, the world is 
 magical. 
 
 Modern history does well enough for learn- 
 ing later. But by learning something of 
 antiquity in the first ten years, the child 
 enlarges the sense of time for all mankind. 
 For even after the great illusion is over and 
 histoiy is re-measured, and all fancy and 
 flight caught back and chastised, the enlarged 
 sense remains enlarged. The man remains 
 capable of great spaces of time. He will 
 not find them in Egypt, it is true, but he 
 finds them within, he contains them, he is 
 aware of them. History has fallen together, 
 but childhood surrounds and encompasses 
 history, stretches beyond and passes on the 
 road to eternity. 
 
 He has not passed in vain through the 
 long ten years, the ten years that are the 
 treasury of preceptions — the first. The great 
 disillusion shall never shorten those years, 
 nor set nearer together the days that made 
 them. " Far apart," I have said, and that 
 "far apart" is wonderful. The past of 
 childhood is not single, is not motionless, 
 nor fixed in one point ; it has summits a
 
 94 THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME 
 
 world away one from the other. Year from 
 year differs as the antiquity of Mexico from 
 the antiquity of Chaldea. And the man of 
 thirty-five knows for ever afterwards what is 
 flight, even though he finds no great historic 
 distances to prove his wings by. 
 
 There is a long and mysterious moment in 
 long and mysterious childhood, which is the 
 extremest distance known to any human 
 fancy. Many other moments, many other 
 hours, are long in the first ten years. Hours 
 of weariness are long — not with a mysterious 
 length, but with a mere length of protraction, 
 so that the things called minutes and half- 
 hours by the elderly may be something else 
 to their apparent contemporaries, the children. 
 The ancient moment is not merely one of 
 these — it is a space not of long, but of 
 immeasurable, time. It is the moment of 
 going to sleep. The man knows that border- 
 land, and has a contempt for it : he has 
 long ceased to find antiquity there. It has 
 become a common enough margin of dreams 
 to him ; and he does not attend to its 
 phantasies. He knows that he has a frolic 
 spirit in his head which has its way at those 
 hours, but he is not interested in it. It is
 
 THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME 95 
 
 the inexperienced child who passes with 
 simplicity through the marginal country ; 
 and the thing he meets there is principally 
 the yet further conception of illimitable 
 time. 
 
 His nurse's lullaby is translated into the 
 mysteries of time. She sings absolutely 
 immemorial words. It matters little what 
 they may mean to waking ears ; to the ears 
 of a child going to sleep they tell of the 
 beginning of the world. He has fallen 
 asleep to the sound of them all his life ; 
 and "all his life" means more than older 
 speech can well express. 
 
 ^Ancient custom is formed in a single 
 spacious year. A child is beset with long 
 traditions. And his infancy is so old, so 
 old, that the mere adding of years in the 
 life to follow will not seem to throw it 
 further back — it is already so far. That is, 
 it looks as remote to the memory of a man 
 of thirty as to that of a man of seventy. 
 What are a mere forty years of added later 
 life in the contemplation of such a distance ? 
 Pshaw !
 
 EYES 
 
 jHERE is nothing described with so 
 little attention, with such slovenli- 
 ness, or so without verification — 
 albeit with so much confidence and 
 word-painting — as the eyes of the men and 
 women whose faces have been made memor- 
 able by their works. The describer generally 
 takes the first colour that seems to him prob- 
 able. The grey eyes of Coleridge are recorded 
 in a proverbial line, and Procter repeats the 
 word, in describing from the life. Then 
 Carlyle, who shows more signs of actual 
 attention, and who caught a trick of Coler- 
 idge's pronunciation instantly, proving that 
 with his hearing at least he was not slovenly, 
 says that Coleridge's eyes were brown — 
 " strange, brown, timid, yet earnest -looking 
 eyes." A Coleridge with brown eyes is one 
 man, and a Coleridge with grey eyes another 
 — and, as it were, more responsible. As to 
 96
 
 EYES 97 
 
 Rossetti's eyes, the various inattention of his 
 friends has assigned to them, in all the ready- 
 made phrases, nearly all the colours. 
 
 So with Charlotte Bronte. Matthew Arnold 
 seems to have thought the most probable 
 thing to be said of her eyes was that they 
 were grey and expressive. Thus, after seeing 
 them^ does he desci-ibe them in one of his 
 letters. Whereas Mrs Gaskell, who shows 
 signs of attention, says that Charlotte's eyes 
 were a reddish hazel, made up of "a great 
 variety of tints," to be discovered by close 
 looking. Almost all eyes that are not brown 
 are, in fact, of some such mixed colour, gen- 
 erally spotted in, and the effect is vivacious. 
 All the more if the speckled iris has a dark 
 ring to enclose it. 
 
 Nevertheless, the eye of mixed colour has 
 always a definite character, and the mingling 
 that looks green is quite unlike the mingling 
 that looks grey; and among the greys there 
 is endless difference. Brown eyes alone are 
 apart, unlike all others, but having no variety 
 except in the degrees of their darkness. 
 
 The colour of eyes seems to be significant 
 of temperament, but as regards beauty there 
 is little or nothing to choose among colours.
 
 98 EYES 
 
 It is not the eye, but the eyelid, that is 
 important, beautiful, eloquent, full of secrets. 
 The eye has nothing but its colour, and all 
 colours are fine within fine eyelids. The 
 eyelid has all the form, all the drawing, all 
 the breadth and length ; the square of great 
 eyes irregularly wide ; the long corners of 
 narrow eyes ; the pathetic outward droop ; 
 the delicate contrary suggestion of an upward 
 turn at the outer corner, which Sir Joshua 
 loved. 
 
 It is the blood that is eloquent, and there 
 is no sign of blood in the eye ; but in the 
 eyelid the blood hides itself and shows its 
 signs. All along its edges are the little 
 muscles, living, that speak not only the ob- 
 vious and emphatic things, but what reluc- 
 tances, what perceptions, what ambiguities, 
 what half- apprehensions, what doubts, what 
 interceptions ! The eyelids confess, and reject, 
 and refuse to reject. They have expressed 
 all things ever since man was man. 
 
 And they express so much by seeming to 
 hide or to reveal that which indeed expresses 
 nothing. For there is no message from the 
 eye. It has direction, it moves, in the service 
 of the sense of sight ; it receives the messages
 
 EYES 99 
 
 of the world. But expression is outward, and 
 the eye has it not. There are no windows 
 of the soul, there are only curtains ; and these 
 show all things by seeming to hide a little 
 more, a little less. They hide nothing but 
 their own secrets. 
 
 But, some may say, the eyes have emotion 
 inasmuch as they betray it by the waxing 
 and contracting of the pupils. It is, how- 
 ever, the rarest thing, this opening and nar- 
 rowing under any influences except those of 
 darkness and light. It does take place ex- 
 ceptionally; but I am doubtful whether those 
 who talk of it have ever really been attentive 
 enough to perceive it. A nervous woman, 
 brown - eyed and young, who stood to tell 
 the news of her own betrothal, and kept her 
 manners exceedingly composed as she spoke, 
 had this waxing and closing of the pupils ; 
 it went on all the time like a slow, slow 
 pulse. But such a thing is not to be seen 
 once a year. 
 
 Moreover, it is — though so significant — 
 hardly to be called expression. It is not 
 articulate. It implies emotion, but does not 
 define, or describe, or divide it. It is touch- 
 ing, insomuch as we have knowledge of the
 
 100 EYES 
 
 perturbed tide of the spirit that must cause 
 it, but it is not otherwise eloquent. It does 
 not tell us the quality of the thought, it 
 does not inform and surprise us with intri- 
 cacies. It speaks no more explicit or delicate 
 things than does the pulse in its quickening. 
 It speaks with less division of meanings than 
 does the taking of the breath, which has 
 impulses and degrees. 
 
 No, the eyes do their work, but do it 
 blankly, without communication. Openings 
 into the being they may be, but the closed 
 cheek is more communicative. From them 
 the blood of Perdita never did look out. It 
 ebbed and flowed in her face, her dance, 
 her talk. It was hiding in her paleness, and 
 cloistered in her reserve, but visible in prison. 
 It leapt and looked, at a word. It was con- 
 scious in the fingers that reached out flowers. 
 It ran with her. It was silenced when she 
 hushed her answers to the king. Everywhere 
 it was close behind the doors — everywhere 
 but in her eyes. 
 
 How near at hand was it, then, in the 
 living eyelids that expressed her in their 
 minute and instant and candid manner ! All 
 her withdrawals, every hesitation, fluttered
 
 EYES 101 
 
 there. A flock of meanings and intelligences 
 alighted on those mobile edges. 
 
 Think, then, of all the famous eyes in the 
 world, that said so much, and said it in no 
 other way but only by the little exquisite 
 muscles of their lids. How were these ever 
 strong enough to bear the burden of those 
 eyes of HeathclifF's in " Wuthering Heights " ? 
 " The clouded windows of Hell flashed a mo- 
 ment towards me ; the fiend which usually 
 looked out, however, was so dimmed and 
 
 drowned " That mourning fiend, who 
 
 had wept all night, had no expression, no 
 proof or sign of himself, except in the edges 
 of the eyelids of the man. 
 
 And the eyes of Garrick ? Eyelids, again. 
 And the eyes of Charles Dickens, that were 
 said to contain the life of fifty men ? On 
 the mechanism of the eyelids hung that fifty- 
 fold vitality. " Bacon had a delicate, lively, 
 hazel eye," says Aubrey in his "Lives of 
 Eminent Persons." But nothing of this be- 
 longs to the eye except the colour. Mere 
 brightness the eyeball has or has not, but 
 so have many glass beads : the liveliness is 
 the eyelid's. " Dr Harvey told me it was 
 like the eie of a viper." So intent and nar-
 
 102 EYES 
 
 rowed must have been the attitude of Bacon's 
 eyelids. 
 
 " I never saw such another eye in a human 
 head," says Lockhart in describing Burns, 
 "though I have seen the most distinguished 
 men in my time. It was large, and of a 
 dark cast, and glowed (I say literally glowed) 
 when he spoke with feeling or interest. The 
 eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical 
 character and temperament." No eye literally 
 glows ; but some eyes are polished a little 
 more, and reflect. And this is the utmost 
 that can possibly have been true as to the 
 eyes of Burns. But set within the meanings 
 of impetuous eyelids the lucidity of the dark 
 eyes seemed broken, moved, directed into 
 fiery shafts. 
 
 See, too, the reproach of little, sharp, grey 
 eyes addressed to Hazlitt. There are neither 
 large nor small eyes, say physiologists, or the 
 difference is so small as to be negligeable. 
 But in the eyelids the difference is great 
 between large and small, and also between 
 the varieties of largeness. Some have large 
 openings, and some are in themselves broad 
 and long, serenely covering eyes called small. 
 Some have far more drawing than others,
 
 EYES 103 
 
 and interesting foreshortenings and sweeping 
 curves. 
 
 Where else is spirit so evident ? And 
 where else is it so spoilt ? There is no vul- 
 garity like the vulgarity of vulgar eyelids. 
 They have a slang all their own, of an in- 
 tolerable kind. And eyelids have looked all 
 the cruel looks that have ever made wounds 
 in innocent souls meeting them surprised. 
 
 But all love and all genius have winged 
 their flight from those slight and unmeasur- 
 able movements, have flickered on the mar- 
 gins of lovely eyelids quick with thought. 
 Life, spirit, sweetness are there in a small 
 place ; using the finest and the slenderest 
 machinery ; expressing meanings a whole 
 world apart, by a difference of material 
 action so fine that the sight which ap- 
 preciates it cannot detect it ; expressing 
 intricacies of intellect ; so incarnate in slen- 
 der and sensitive flesh that nowhere else in 
 the body of man is flesh so spiritual.
 
 PRINTED BY 
 W. H. WHITE AND CO. LTD. 
 EDINBURGH RIVERSIDE PRESS
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 THE RHYTHM OF LIFE 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 t 
 
 Third Edition. Foolscap 8vo. Price js. 6d. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 " Full of profound, searching, sensitive appreciation of all kinds 
 of subjects. As exercises in close thinking and exact expression, 
 almost unique in the literature of the day." — The Athenceum. 
 
 " It is no exaggeration to say that both in the delicacy of their 
 unhackneyed thought and the charm of their style, these essays 
 are the most stimulating that have appeared since Mr Stevenson 
 delighted us with his Virginibus Puerisgue . To appreciate them 
 S a step forward in education. We are conscious as we read that 
 henceforth we shall look on life with a finer perception and more 
 discriminating eyes." — The Guardian. 
 
 " I am about to direct attention to one of the very rarest products 
 of nature and grace — a woman of genius, one who I am bound to 
 confess has falsified the assertion I made some time ago that no 
 female writer of our time had attained to true 'distinction.' In a 
 very small volume of very short essays, Mrs Meynell has shown an 
 amount of perceptive reason and ability to discern self-evident 
 things as yet undiscerned, a reticence, fulness, and effectiveness of 
 expression which place her in the very front rank of living writers 
 in prose. At least half of the volume is classical work, embodying 
 as it does new thought in perfect language, and bearing in every 
 sentence the hall-mark of genius, namely, the marriage of masculine 
 force of insight with feminine grace and tact of expression." — Mr 
 Coventry Patmore in the Fortnightly Review. 
 
 " Mrs Meynell's prose has the qualities of her poetry— the con- 
 densation, the refinement, the fastidious choice of epithet and 
 phrase. Mrs Meynell packs into two or three little pages enough 
 
 H
 
 thought to equip most modern writers for a lifetime."— The St 
 James's Gazette. 
 
 " The dominant quality of Mrs Meynell's prose is reticence. The 
 prophet of silence and rejection, the herald of abstention and pause, 
 she has so sternly refined and selected her few pages that The 
 Rhythm of Life may be accepted as the ultimate expression of a 
 curiously restrained and quiet nature. The matter of her essays is 
 sometimes marked by a rare insight, a rarer wit. ' The Rhythm 
 of Life,' ' Decivilised,' ' Composure,' are masterpieces in little, and 
 they stand not alone in excellence."— The Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 "It is impossible to read without wondering how it is that Mrs 
 Meynell's genius has been familiar only to the few. Her essays are 
 stamped with the hall-mark of genius. Each sentence is a clear- 
 cut gem of thought and expression, epigrammatic and sparkling 
 as any in modern literature." — The Review of Reviews. 
 
 " Mrs Meynell is inspired with that passion for restraint which 
 characterises the genius of Greece. But those who can meet her 
 upon her own level will find large stores of wisdom and suggestion 
 within the covers of this little volume of essays."— The Literary 
 IVorld. 
 
 "After the immortal letter to Mr Hyde, of Honolulu, there was 
 nothing more signal in Mr Henley's editorship of the National 
 Observer than certain gracious essays, packed with thought and 
 vibrile with wit. And when those essays re-appeared in book form 
 as The Rhythm of Life, who was there who failed to recognise 
 the presence of a new and potent pen, of a fresh critical force to be 
 reckoned with, of an imperative need to reconsider and readjust 
 certain old critical tendencies? Subtle herself, Mrs Meynell 
 demands some response of subtlety from her readers. She is 
 difficult because she is not facile. She requires, compels thought ; 
 compels even an effort of thought, grinds the edge of thought." — 
 E. K. Chambers in The Bookman. 
 
 JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO STREET, W. 
 COPELAND AND DAY, BOSTON
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 POEMS. 
 
 Third Edition. Foolscap Svo. y. 6d. nett. 
 
 t 
 "She sings with a very human sincerity, a singular religious 
 intensity — rare, illusive, curiously perfumed verse, so simple always, 
 yet so subtle in its simplicity." — The Athetueum. 
 
 " In its class I know no nobler or more beautiful sonnet than 
 ' Renouncement ' ; and I have so considered ever since the day I 
 first heard it, when Rossetti (who knew it by heart), repeating it to 
 me, added that it was one of the three finest sonnets ever written by 
 women." — Mr William Sharp in The Sonnets of the Century. 
 
 " . . . What a lesson it is, this thin little volume, to some of 
 our prolific young poets ! We have in it the purest expression, the 
 finest sifting of the writer's art ; her best she has given, and the 
 result is a volume of the true and most delicate poetry." — The St 
 James s Gazette. 
 
 " The last verse of that perfectly heavenly ' Letter from a Girl to 
 her Own Old Age,' the whole of ' San Lorenzo's Mother,' and the end 
 of the sonnet 'To a Daisy,' are the finest things I have yet seen or 
 felt in modern verse." — Mr Ruskin. 
 
 "The charm is of the intellect, of the spiritual emotions. Intensely 
 feminine, and yet touched with an abstraction that is not feminine 
 at all ; intensely personal, and still holding an indefinable element of 
 impartiality — these strange and beautiful melodies appeal to the 
 imagination with a voice as of unfamiliar things brought near : 
 melancholy, with never the echo of a whine, sweet with an almost 
 exultant nobility of sorrow." — The Academy. 
 
 " Many of her verses rise almost to the utmost heights of poetry.' 
 — The Guardian. 
 
 " How many of those who to-day are buying the books of Mrs 
 Alice Meynell, the greatest of living English women poets, re- 
 member how long ago Rossetti spoke with glowing enthusiasm of 
 her sonnets? Of other poems in the volume, it is no exaggeration 
 to say that they hold a high and a permanent place among the 
 noblest poetry which this generation has produced." — The Literary 
 World.
 
 " A poetess I had often admired."— R. L. Stevenson. 
 
 "The footfalls of her muse waken not sounds, but silences. We 
 lift a feather from the marsh and say : ' This way went a heron.' 
 It would be false, nevertheless, to suppose her only an emotional 
 poet. On the contrary, she is penetratingly thoughtful. And pro- 
 foundly imaginative her poetry always is, even when its emotion is 
 too instant for thought. It is all (in the Roman sense of the word) 
 mere poetry — poetry with no allaying verse, vinum merum of song. 
 Mrs Meynell's is poetry, the spiritual voice of which will become 
 audible when the ' high noises ' of to-day have followed the feet that 
 made them." — The Tablet. 
 
 "Verses full of delicate and original thought." — The Fortnightly 
 Review. 
 
 " ' Renouncement ' is a deep, moving expression, simple, poignant, 
 and final, of a tragedy constant to the human heart. That sonnet 
 equals, if not surpasses, the finest of the Sonnets from the Portu- 
 guese. Mrs Meynell has written a few sonnets which true lovers of 
 poetry will carry in their hearts side-by-side with their most 'heart- 
 remembered ' song." — Mr Le Gallienne in Retrospective Reviews. 
 
 "The book is one whu-h ought to be possessed by every student 
 of poetry." — The Globe. 
 
 " Her verse is the antithesis of her prose. It is distinguished by 
 what she somewhere calls 'the fast-disappearing grace of un- 
 consciousness.' Harmonious, sweet, at its best exquisitely handled, 
 it is the work of a bard rather than of an artist. The thought is 
 often rare and personal ; and yet one feels that her lasting triumph 
 will be achieved, not in verse, but in the less trammelled and more 
 difficult medium. However, none who respects literature would 
 endure to miss her two little books ; and the best we can wish for 
 them is that they find an audience fit and few."— The Pall Mall 
 Gazette. 
 
 "Mrs Meynell, with her one exquisite volume, stands well in 
 front. She has subtlety of thought, exceeding fineness of ex- 
 pression, and a pathos which lies on all her poetry, tender as 
 twilight."— The Speaker. 
 
 JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO STREET, W. 
 COPELAND AND DAY, BOSTON
 
 m% JOHN LANE mm 
 
 CATALOGUES-PUB LICATIONS 
 £2 BE LLE S LETTRE S ggggGs^
 
 1896. 
 
 List of Books 
 
 IN 
 
 BELLES LETT RES 
 
 (Including some Transfers} 
 
 Published by John Lane 
 
 VIGO STREET, LONDON, W. 
 
 ADAMS (FRANCIS). 
 
 Essays in Modernity. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. [Shortly. 
 
 Chicago : Stone & Kimball. 
 A Child of the Age. (See Keynotes Series.) 
 ALDRICH (T. B.). 
 
 Later Lyrics. Sm. fcap. 8vo, 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
 ALLEN (GRANT). 
 
 The Lower Slopes : A Volume of Verse. With Title- 
 page and Cover Design by J. Illingworth Kay. 
 Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 
 Chicago : Stone & Kimball. 
 The Woman who Did. {See Keynotes Series.) 
 The British Barbarians. (See Keynotes Series.) 
 ARCADY LIBRARY (THE). 
 
 A Series of Open-Air Books. Edited by J. S. 
 Fletcher. With cover designs by Patten Wilson. 
 Cr 8vo. 5s. net. 
 Vol. 1. Round About a Brighton Coach Office. 
 By Maude Egerton King. With over 30 illustra- 
 tions by Lucy Kemp-Welch. 
 
 The following are in preparation. 
 Vol. 11. Scholar Gipsies. By John Buchan. With 
 
 seven full-page etchings by D. Y. Cameron. 
 Vol. in. Life in Arcadia. By J. S. Fletcher. Illus- 
 trated by Patten Wilson. 
 Vol. iv. A Garden of Peace. By Helen Crofton. 
 With illustrations by Edmund H. New. 
 New York : Macmillan & Co.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF JOHN LANE 3 
 
 BEECHING (Rev. H. G). 
 
 In a Garden : Poems. With Title-page designed by 
 Roger Fry. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 New York : Macmillan & Co. 
 
 BEERBOHM (MAX). 
 
 The Works of Max Beerbohm. With a Bibliography 
 by John Lane. Sq. i6mo. 4s. 6d. net. 
 New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 
 BENSON (ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER). 
 LYRICS. Fcap. 8vo, buckram. 5s. net. 
 New York : Macmillan & Co. 
 
 BODLEY HEAD ANTHOLOGIES (THE). 
 
 Edited by Robert H. Case. With title-page and cover 
 
 designs by Walter West. Each Volume cr. 8vo. 
 
 5s. net. 
 Vol. 1. English Epithalamies. by Robert H. Case. 
 Vol. 11. Musa Piscatrix. By John Buchan. With 
 
 six etchings by E. Philip Pimlott. 
 Vol. in. English Elegies. By John C. Bailey. 
 Vol. iv. English Satires. By Charles Hill Dick. 
 
 BRIDGES (ROBERT). 
 
 Suppressed Chapters and other Bookishness. 
 Crown 8vo. 3s.6d.net. [Second Edition. 
 
 New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 
 BROTHERTON (MARY). 
 
 ROSEMARYFOR Remembrance. With Title-page and Cover 
 resign by Walter West. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 CRANE (WALTER). 
 
 Toy Books. Re-issue. Each with new Cover Design and 
 end papers. o,d. net. 
 I. This Little Pig. 
 II. The Fairy Ship. 
 III. King Luckieboy's Party. 
 The group of three bound in one volume, with a decora- 
 tive cloth cover, end papers, and a newly written and 
 designed title-page and preface. 3s. 6d. net. 
 Chicago : Stone & Kimball. 
 
 DALMON (C. W.). 
 
 Song Favours. With a Title-page designed by J. P. 
 Donne. Sq. i6mo. 3s. 6d. net. 
 Chicago : Way & Williams.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 DAVIDSON (JOHN). 
 
 Plays : An Unhistorical Pastoral ; A Romantic Farce ; 
 Bruce, a Chronicle Play ; Smith, a Tragic Farce ; 
 Scaramouch in Naxos, a Pantomime, with a Frontis- 
 piece and Cover Design by Aubrey Beardsley. 
 Small 4to. 7s. 6d. net. 
 Chicago : Stone & Kimball. 
 Fleet Street Eclogues. Fcap. 8vo, buckram. 4s. 6d. 
 net. [Third Edition. 
 
 Fleet Street Eclogues. 2nd Series. Fcap. 8vo, 
 buckram. 4s. 6d. net. [Second Edition. 
 
 New York : Dodd, Mead & Co. 
 A Random Itinerary and a Ballad. With a Fron- 
 tispiece and Title-page by Laurence Housman. 
 600 copies. Fcap. 8vo, Irish Linen. 5s. net. 
 Boston : Copeland & Day. 
 Ballads and Songs. With a Title-page and Cover 
 Design by Walter West. Fcap. 8vo, buckram. 
 5s. net. [Fourth Edition. 
 
 Boston : Copeland & Day. 
 DE TABLEY (LORD). 
 
 Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical. By John Leicester 
 Warren (Lord De Tabley). Illustrations and Cover 
 Design by C. S. Ricketts. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. 
 net. [ Third Edition. 
 
 Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical. Second Series, uni- 
 form in binding with the former volume. Crown 8vo. 
 5s. net. 
 
 New York : Macmillan & Co. 
 
 EGERTON (GEORGE). 
 
 Keynotes. (See Keynotes Series.) 
 Discords. (See Keynotes Series.) 
 Young Ofeg's Ditties. A translation from the Swedish 
 of Ola Hansson. With Title-page and Cover Design 
 by Aubrey Beardsley. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. 
 Boston : Roberts Bros. 
 EVE'S LIBRARY. 
 
 Each volume crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. 
 Vol. 1. Six Modern Women : an English Rendering 
 of Laura Marholm Hansson's ' Das Buch der 
 Frauen.' By HermioneRamsden. Subjects dealt 
 with : — Sonia Kovalevsky; George Egerton; Eleonora 
 Duse ; Amalie Skram ; Marie Bashkersteft ; A. Ch. 
 Edgren-Leffler.
 
 JOHN LANE 
 
 EVE'S LIBRARY— continued. 
 
 Vol. ii. The Ascent of Woman. By Mrs Roy 
 
 Devereux. 
 Vol. in. Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction. 
 By E. R. Chapman. 
 
 FIELD (EUGENE). 
 
 The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac. Post 8vo. 
 t 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 
 FLETCHER (J. S.). 
 
 The Wonderful Wapentake. By 'A Son of the 
 Soil.' With 18 full-page Illustrations by J. A. 
 Symington. Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net. 
 Chicago : A. C. M c Clurg & Co. 
 Life in Arcadia. (See Arcady Library.) 
 
 FOUR AND SIX-PENNY NOVELS. 
 
 Each Volume with title-page and cover design by Patten 
 
 Wilson. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net. 
 Galloping Dick. By H. B. Marriott Watson. 
 
 New York : The Frederick A. Stokes Co. 
 The Wood of the Brambles. By Frank Mathew. 
 
 Chicago : Way & Williams. 
 The Sacrifice of Fools. By R. Manifold Craig. 
 Chicago : Stone & Kimball. 
 
 The following are in preparation, 
 A Lawyer's Wife. By Sir Nevill Geary, Bart. 
 Weighed in the Balance. By Harry Lander. 
 Glamour. By Meta Orred. 
 
 Patience Sparhawk and Her Times. By Gertrude 
 Atherton. 
 
 The Career of Delia Hastings. By H. B. Marriott 
 Watson. 
 
 GALE (NORMAN). 
 
 Orchard Songs. With Title-page and Cover Design 
 by J. Illingworth Kay. Fcap. 8vo, Irish Linen. 
 5s. net. 
 
 Also a Special Edition limited in number on hand-made paper 
 bound in English vellum. £i, is. net. 
 New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 GARNETT (RICHARD). 
 
 Poems. With Title-page by J. Illingworth Kay. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 Dante, Petrarch, Camoens, cxxiv Sonnets rendered 
 in English. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 Boston : Copeland & Day. 
 
 GIBSON (CHARLES DANA). 
 
 Pictures : Nearly One Hundred Large Cartoons. Ob- 
 long Folio. 15s. net. 
 
 New York : R. H. Russell & Son. 
 
 GOSSE (EDMUND). 
 
 The Letters of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Now 
 first edited. Pott 8vo. 5s. net. 
 Also 25 copies large paper. 12s. 6d. net. 
 
 New York : Macmillan & Co. 
 
 GRAHAME (KENNETH). 
 
 Pagan Papers : A Volume of Essays. With Title- 
 page by Aubrey Beardsley. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net. 
 
 [Out of print at present. 
 The Golden Age. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 [ Third Edition. 
 Chicago : Stone & Kimball. 
 
 GREENE (G. A.). 
 
 Italian Lyrists of To-day. Translations in the 
 original metres from about thirty-five living Italian 
 poets, with bibliographical and biographical notes. 
 Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 New York : Macmillan & Co. 
 
 GREENWOOD (FREDERICK). 
 
 Imagination in Dreams. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 New York : Macmillan & Co. 
 
 HAKE (T. GORDON). 
 
 A Selection from his Poems. Edited by Mrs 
 Meynell. With a Portrait after D. G. Rossetti, 
 and a Cover Design by Gleeson White. Crown 
 8vo. 5s. net. 
 
 Chicago : Stone and Kimball. 
 
 HAYES (ALFRED). 
 
 The Vale of Arden and Other Poems. With a 
 Title-page and a Cover designed by E. H. New. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. 
 Also 25 copies large paper. 15s. net.
 
 JOHN LANE 
 
 HAZLITT (WILLIAM). 
 
 Liber Amoris, or the New Pygmalion. A New 
 Edition from the Original MS. With Letters and a 
 Diary never before printed. Portrait after Bewick, 
 and Facsimiles, and a lengthy Introduction by 
 Richard le Gallienne. 4to, buckram. 21s. net. 
 
 HEINEMANN (WILLIAM). 
 
 The First Step. A Dramatic Moment. Small 4to. 
 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 HOPPER (NORA). 
 
 Ballads in Prose. With a Title-page and Cover by 
 Walter West. Sq. i6mo. 5s. net. 
 Boston : Roberts Bros. 
 Under Quicken Boughs. With Title-page designed by 
 Patten Wilson. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net. 
 
 HOUSMAN (CLEMENCE). 
 
 The Were Wolf. With six Full-page Illustrations, 
 Title-page and Cover Design, by LAURENCE Hous- 
 MAN. Sq. i6mo. 3s. 6d. net. 
 Chicago : Way & Williams. 
 
 HOUSMAN (LAURENCE). 
 
 Green Arras : Poems. With Illustrations by the 
 Author. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. [In preparation. 
 
 IRVING (LAURENCE). 
 
 Godefroi and Yolande : A Play. Sm. 4to. 3s. 6d. 
 net. [In preparation. 
 
 JAMES (W. P.). 
 
 Romantic Professions : A Volume of Essays. With 
 Title - page designed by J. Illingworth Kay. 
 Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 
 New York : Macmillan & Co. 
 
 JOHNSON (LIONEL). 
 
 The Art of Thomas Hardy •. Six Essays. With Etched 
 
 Portrait by Wm. Strang, and Bibliography by John 
 
 Lane. Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net. [Second Edition. 
 
 Also 150 copies, large paper, with proofs of the portrait. £1, is. 
 
 net. 
 
 New York : Dodd, Mead & Co. 
 
 JOHNSON (PAULINE). 
 
 White Wampum : Poems. With a Title-page and Cover 
 Design by E. H. New. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 Boston : Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 JOHNSTONE (C. E.). 
 
 Ballads of Boy and Beak. With a Title-page designed 
 by F. H. Townsend. Sq. 32010. 2s. net. 
 
 KEYNOTES SERIES. 
 
 F^ach volume with specially designed Title-page by Aubrey 
 Beardsley. Crown 8vo, cloth. 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 Vol. i. Keynotes. By George Egerton. 
 
 [Seventh edition. 
 Vol. 11. The Dancing Faun. By Florence Farr. 
 Vol. III. Poor Folk. Translated from the Russian cf 
 F. Dostoievsky by Lena Milman. With a Preface 
 by George Moore. 
 Vol. iv. A Child of the Age. By Francis Adams. 
 Vol. v. The Great God Pan and The Inmost 
 Light. By Arthur Machen. [Second edition. 
 
 Vol. vi. Discords. By George Egerton. 
 
 [Fourth edition. 
 Vol. vii. Prince Zaleski. By M. P. Shiel. 
 Vol. vill. The Woman who Did. By Grant Allen. 
 
 [ Twenty-second edition. 
 
 Vol. ix. Women's Tragedies. By H. D. Lowry. 
 
 Vol. x. Grey Roses. By Henry Harland. 
 
 Vol. xi. At the First Corner and Other Stories. 
 
 By H. B. Marriott Watson. 
 Vol. xii. Monochromes. By Ella D'Arcy. 
 Vol. xiii. At the Relton Arms. By Evelyn Sharp, 
 Vol. xiv. The Girl from the Farm. By Gertrude 
 
 DlX. [Second edition. 
 
 Vol. xv. The Mirror of Music. By Stanley V. 
 
 Makower. 
 Vol. xvi. Yellow and White. By W. Carlton 
 
 Dawe. 
 Vol. xvii. The Mountain Lovers. By Fiona 
 
 MACLEOD. 
 
 Vol. xviii. The Woman Who Didn't. By Victoria 
 Crosse. [ Third edition. 
 
 Vol. xix. The Three Impostors. By Arthur 
 Machen. 
 
 Vol. xx. Nobody's Fault. By Netta Syrett.
 
 JOHN LANE 9 
 
 KEYNOTES SERIES— continued. 
 
 Vol. xxi. The British Barbarians. By Grant Allen. 
 
 {Second edition. 
 Vol. xxii. In Homespun. By E. Nesbit. 
 Vol. xxiii. Platonic Affections. By John Smith. 
 Vol. xxiv. Nets for the Wind. By Una Taylor. 
 Vol. xxv. Where the Atlantic meets the Land. 
 By Caldwell Lipsett. 
 
 The following are in rapid preparation. 
 
 Vol. xxvi. In Scarlet and Grey. By the Hon. Mrs 
 Arthur Henniker. (With a story, 'The Spectre 
 of the Real,' written in collaboration with Thomas 
 Hardy. 
 
 Vol. xxviii. Maris Stella. By Marie Clothilde 
 Balfour. 
 
 Vol. xxviii. Morrison's Heir. By Mabel E. Wotton. 
 Vol. xxix. Shapes in the Fire. By M. P. Shiel. 
 Vol. xxx. Ugly Idol. By Claude Nicholson. 
 Boston : Roberts Bros. 
 
 LANE'S LIBRARY. 
 
 Each volume Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. 
 « Vol. 1. March Hares. By George Forth. 
 Vol. 11. The Sentimental Sex. By Gertrude War- 
 den. 
 Vol. in. Gold. By Annie Luden. 
 Vol. iv. The Sentimental Vikings. By R. V. Risley. 
 
 LEATHER (R. K.). 
 
 Verses. 250 copies. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. net. 
 
 Trans/erred by the Author to the present Publisher. 
 
 LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD). 
 
 Prose Fancies. With Portrait of the Author by 
 Wilson Steer. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. 
 Purple cloth. 5s. net. 
 Also a limited large paper edition. 12s. 6d. net. 
 New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. 
 The Book Bills of Narcissus, An Account rendered 
 by Richard lb Gallienne. Third Edition. With 
 a Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. Purple cloth. 3s. 6d. net. 
 Also 50 copies on large paper. 8vo. 10s. 6d. net. 
 New York : G. P. Putman's Sons.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD)— continued. 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy, and Other 
 Poems, mainly Personal. With Etched Title-page 
 by D. Y. Cameron. Cr. 8vo. Purple cloth. 4s. 6d. net. 
 Also 75 copies on large paper. 8vo. 12s. 6d. net. 
 Boston : Copeland & Day. 
 
 English Poems. Fourth Edition, revised. Crown 8vo. 
 Purple cloth. 4s. 6d. net. 
 Boston : Copeland & Day. 
 Retrospective Reviews, A Literary Log, 1891-1895. 
 2 vols, crown 8vo. Purple cloth. 9s. net. 
 New York : Dodd, Mead & Co. 
 GEORGE Meredith : Some Characteristics. With a Biblio- 
 graphy (much enlarged) by John Lane, Portrait, etc. 
 Fourth Edition. Cr. 8vo. Purple cloth. 5s. 6d. net. 
 The Religion of a Literary Man. 5th thousand. 
 Crown 8vo. Purple cloth. 3s. 6d. net. 
 Also a special rubricated edition on hand-made paper. 8vo. 
 10s. 6d. net. 
 
 New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. 
 
 Prose Fancies. Second Series. Cr. 8vo, purple cloth. 
 5s. net. [In preparation. 
 
 See also Hazlitt. 
 
 LUCAS (WINIFRED). 
 
 A Volume of Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net. 
 
 [In preparation. 
 
 LYNCH (HANNAH). 
 
 The Great Galeoto and Folly or Saintliness. Two 
 Plays, from the Spanish of Jose Echegaray, with an 
 Introduction. Small 4to. 5s. 6d. net. 
 Boston : Lamson, Wolffe & Co. 
 
 MARZIALS (THEO.). 
 
 The Gallery of Pigeons and Other Poems. Post 
 8vo. 4s.6d.net. [Very few remain. 
 
 Transferred by the Author to the present Publisher. 
 
 THE MAYFAIR SET. 
 
 Each volume fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 Vol. 1. The Autobiography of a Boy : Passages 
 selected by his Friend, G. S. Street. With Title- 
 page by C. W. Furse. [Fifth Edition.
 
 JOHN LANE 
 
 THE MAYFAIR SET— continued. 
 
 Vol. II. The Joneses and the Asterisks : a Story in 
 Monologue. By Gerald Campbell. With Title- 
 page and six Illustrations by F. H. Townsend. _ 
 
 [Second Edition. 
 
 Vol. in. Select Conversations with an Uncle now 
 
 extinct. By H. G. Wells. With Title-page by 
 
 F. H. Townsend. 
 Vol. iv. For Plain Women Only. By George 
 
 Fleming. With Title-page by Patten Wilson. 
 Vol. v. The Feasts of Autolycus : The Diary of a 
 
 Greedy Woman. Edited by Elizabeth Robins 
 
 Pennell. With Title-page by Patten Wilson. 
 Vol. vi. Mrs Albert Grundy : Observations in Philistia. 
 
 By Harold Frederic. With Title-page by Patten 
 
 Wilson. 
 
 New York : The Merriam Company. 
 
 MEREDITH (GEORGE). 
 
 The First Published Portrait of this Author, 
 engraved on the wood by W. Biscombe Gardner, 
 after the painting by G. F. Watts. Proof copies on 
 Japanese vellum, signed by painter and engraver. 
 £i, is. net. 
 
 MEYNELL (MRS), (ALICE C. THOMPSON). 
 
 Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. [ Third Edition. 
 
 A few of the 50 large paper copies (First Edition) remain, 12s. 6d. net. 
 
 The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays. Fcap 
 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. {Third Edition. 
 
 A few of the 50 large paper copies (First Edition) remain, 12s. 6d. net. 
 
 The Colour of Life and Other Essays. Fcap. 8vo. 
 3s. 6d. net. \In preparation. 
 
 See also Hake. 
 
 MILLER (JOAQUIN). 
 
 The Building of the City Beautiful. Fcap. 8vo. 
 With a Decorated Cover. 5s. net. 
 Chicago : Stone & Kimball. 
 
 MONKHOUSE (ALLAN). 
 
 Books and Plays : A Volume of Essays on Meredith, 
 Borrow, Ibsen, and others. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 Philadelphia : J. B. Lippincott Co.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 NESBIT(E.). 
 
 A Pomander of Verse. With a Title-page and Cover 
 designed by Laurence Housman. Crown 8vo. 
 5s. net. 
 Chicago : A. C. M c Clurg & Co. 
 In Homespun. (See Keynotes Series.) 
 
 NETTLES HIP (J. T.). 
 
 Robert Browning : Essays and Thoughts. With a 
 Portrait. Crown 8vo. 5s.6d.net. [Third Edition. 
 New York : Chas. Scribner's Sons. 
 
 NOBLE (J AS. ASHCROFT). 
 
 The Sonnet in England and Other Essays. Title- 
 page and Cover Design by Austin Young. Crown 
 8vo. 5s. net. 
 Also 50 copies large paper. 12s. 6d. net. 
 
 O'SHAUGHNESSY (ARTHUR). 
 
 His Life and His Work. With Selections from his 
 Poems. By Louise Chandler Moulton. Por- 
 trait and Cover Design. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net. 
 Chicago : Stone & Kimball. 
 
 OXFORD CHARACTERS. 
 
 A series of 24 portraits by Will Rothenstein, with text 
 by F. York Powell and others. 200 copies only, 
 folio, buckram, ,£3, 3s. net. 
 25 special large paper copies containing proof impressions 
 of the portraits signed by the artist, £6, 6s. net. 
 
 PETERS (WM. THEODORE). 
 
 Posies out of Rings. With Title-page by Patten 
 Wilson. Sq. i6mo. 2s. net. 
 
 [//* preparation. 
 
 PIERROT'S LIBRARY. 
 
 Each volume with Title-page, Cover Design, and End- 
 papers designed by Aubrey Beardsley. Sq. i6mo. 
 2s. net. 
 
 Vol. 1. Pierrot. By H. de Vere Stacpoole. 
 
 Vol. 11. My Little Lady Anne. By Mrs Egerton 
 Castle. 
 
 The following are in preparation. 
 Vol. in. Death, the Knight and the Lady. By 
 
 H. de Vere Stacpoole. 
 Vol. iv. Simplicity. By A. T. G. Trice.
 
 JOHN LANE I3 
 
 PIERROT'S LIBRARY— continued. 
 
 Vol. v. My Brother. By Vincent Brown. 
 Philadelphia : Henry Altemus. 
 PLARR (VICTOR). 
 
 In the Dorian Mood : Poems. With a Title-page by 
 Patten Wilson. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 
 [In preparation. 
 
 RADFORD (DOLLIE). 
 
 'Songs and other Verses. With Title-page designed 
 by Patten Wilson. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net. 
 Philadelphia : J. B. Lippincott Co. 
 RHYS (ERNEST). 
 
 A London Rose and other Rhymes. With Title-page 
 designed by Selwyn Image. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 New York : Dodd, Mead & Co. 
 
 RICKETTS (C. S.) and C. H. SHANNON. 
 
 Hero and Leander. By Christopher Marlowe 
 and George Chapman. With Borders, Initials, and 
 Illustrations designed and engraved on the wood by 
 C. S. Ricketts and C. H. Shannon. Bound in 
 English vellum and gold. 200 copies only. 35s. net. 
 Boston : Copeland & Day. 
 RQRERTSON (JOHN M.). 
 
 Essays towards a Critical Method. (New Series.) 
 Crown 8vo. 5s. net. [In preparation. 
 
 ST CYRES (LORD). 
 
 The Little Flowers of St Francis : A new ren- 
 dering into English of the Fioretti di San Francesco. 
 Crown 8vo. 5s.net. [In preparation. 
 
 SHORE (LOUISA). " 
 
 Poems. With a Memoir by Frederick Harrison. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net. [In preparation. 
 
 STEVENSON (ROBERT LOUIS). 
 
 Prince Otto. A rendering in French by Egerton 
 Castle. With frontispiece, title-page, and cover 
 designs by D. Y. Cameron. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d net. 
 
 [In preparation. 
 
 Also 100 copies on large paper, uniform in size with the Edinburgh 
 Edition of the Works. 
 
 A Child's Garden of Verses. With over 150 Illustra- 
 tions by Charles Robinson. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 
 [Second Edition.
 
 *« THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 STODDART (THOS. TOD). 
 
 The Death Wake. With an Introduction by Andrew 
 Lang. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net. 
 Chicago : Way & Williams. 
 
 STREET (G. S.). 
 
 Miniatures and Moods. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. net. 
 Episodes. Post 8vo. 3s. net. 
 
 Transferred by the A uthor to the present Publisher. 
 
 The Autobiography of a Boy. (See Mayfair Set.) 
 Quales Ego ; a few remarks, in particular and at large. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 New York : The Merriam Co. 
 
 SWETTENHAM (F. A.). 
 
 Malay Sketches. With Title-page and Cover Design 
 by Patten Wilson. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 
 [Second Edition. 
 New York : Macmillan & Co. 
 TABB (JOHN B.). 
 
 Poems. Sq. 321110. 4s. 6d. net. 
 Boston : Copeland & Day. 
 
 TENNYSON (FREDERICK). 
 
 Poems of the Day and Year. With a Title-page by 
 Patten Wilson. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 Chicago : Stone & Kimball. 
 
 THIMM (CARL A.). 
 
 A Complete Bibliography of the Art of Fencing 
 and Duelling, as practised by all European Nations 
 from the Middle Ages to the Present Day. With a 
 Classified Index, arranged chronologically according 
 to Languages. Illustrated with numerous portraits of 
 Ancient and Modern Masters of the Art. Title-pages 
 and frontispieces of some of the earliest works. 
 
 Portrait of the Author by Wilson Steer, and title- 
 page designed by Patten Wilson. 4to. 21s. net. 
 
 [In preparation. 
 THOMPSON (FRANCIS). 
 
 Poems. With Frontispiece, Title-page, and Cover Design 
 by Laurence Housman. Pott 4to. 5s. net. 
 
 [Fourth Edition. 
 Boston : Copeland & Day.
 
 JOHN LANE *5 
 
 THOMPSON (FRANCIS)— continued. 
 
 Sister Songs : An Offering to Two Sisters. With Frontis- 
 piece, Title-page, and Cover Design by LAURENCE 
 Housman. Pott 4to. 5s. net. 
 Boston : Copeland & Day. 
 THOREAU (HENRY DAVID). 
 
 Poems of Nature. Selected and edited by Henry S. 
 Salt and Frank B. Sanborn, with a Title-page 
 designed by Patten Wilson. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. 
 net. 
 
 Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
 
 TRAILL (H. D.). 
 
 From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier. With title- 
 page and cover designed by Patten Wilson. Crown 
 8vo. 5s. net. [In preparation. 
 
 Chicago : Way & Williams. 
 The Barbarous Britishers : A Tip-top Novel. With 
 Title and Cover Design by Aubrey Beardsley. 
 Crown 8vo. Wrapper, is. net. 
 
 TYNAN HINKSON (KATHARINE). 
 
 Cuckoo Songs. With Title-page and Cover Design by 
 Laurence Housman. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net. 
 Boston : Copeland & Day. 
 Miracle Plays : Our Lord's Coming and Childhood. 
 With Six Illustrations, Title-page, and Cover Design 
 by Patten Wilson. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net. 
 Chicago : Stone & Kimball. 
 
 WATSON (ROSAMUND MARRIOTT). 
 
 Vespertilia and other Poems. With a Title-page 
 designed by R. Anning Bell. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. 
 net. 
 A Summer Night and Other Poems. New edition, 
 with a decorative Title-page. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. net. 
 Chicago : Way & Williams. 
 WATSON (WILLIAM). 
 
 The Father of the Forest, and other Poems. 
 With New Photogravure Portrait of the Author. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. [Fifth Thousand. 
 
 75 copies, large paper, ios. 6d. net. 
 Chicago : Stone & Kimball. 
 Odes and Other Poems. Fcap. 8vo, buckram. 4s. 6d. 
 net. [Fourth Edition. 
 
 New York : Macmillan & Co.
 
 16 THE PUBLICATIONS OF JOHN LANE 
 
 WATSON (WILLIAM)— «>«tf««*rf. 
 
 The Eloping Angels : A Caprice. Square i6mo, 
 buckram. 3s. 6d. net. [Second Edition. 
 
 New York : Macmillan & Co. 
 Excursions in Criticism : being some Prose Recrea- 
 tions of a Rhymer. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net. [Second Edition. 
 New York : Macmillan & Co. 
 The Prince's Quest and Other Poems. With a 
 Bibliographical Note added. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net. 
 
 [ Third Edition. 
 The Purple East : a Series of Sonnets on England's 
 Desertion of Armenia. With a Frontispiece by G. F. 
 Watts, R.A. Fcap. 8vo. Wrappers, is. net. 
 
 [ Third Edition. 
 WATT (FRANCIS). 
 
 The Law's Lumber Room. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 [Second Edition. 
 Chicago : A. C. M c Clurg &. Co. 
 
 WATTS (THEODORE). 
 
 Poems. Crown 8vo. 5s.net. [In preparation. 
 
 There will also be an Edition de Luxe of this volume printed at 
 the Kelmscott Press. 
 
 WHARTON (H. T.). 
 
 Sappho. Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a 
 Literal Translation by Henry Thornton Wharton. 
 With three Illustrations in Photogravure, and a Cover 
 designed by Aubrey Beardsley. Fcap. 8vo. 
 7s. 6d. net. [Third Edition. 
 
 Chicago : A. C. M c Clurg & Co. 
 
 THE YELLOW BOOK 
 
 An Illustrated Quarterly 
 Pott ifto. $s. net. 
 Volume i. April 1894. 272 pages. 15 Illustrations. 
 
 [Out of print. 
 Volume 11. July 1894. 364 pages. 23 Illustrations. 
 Volume hi. October 1894. 280 pages. 15 Illustrations. 
 Volume iv. January 1895. 285 pages. 16 Illustrations. 
 Volume v. April 1895. 317 pages. 14 Illustrations. 
 Volume vi. July 1895. 335 pages. 16 Illustrations. 
 Volume vn. October 1895. 320 pages. 20 Illustrations. 
 Volume viii. January 1896. 406 pages. 26 Illustrations.
 
 T-- '"» 4 T» 
 
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