THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 

 
 / 
 
 Ccc^t 
 
 

 
 LOVE TRIUMPHANT
 
 LOVE TRIUMPHANT. 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM PL ATT. 
 
 LONDON. 
 
 CHARLES HIRSCH. 
 
 4, Prince's Buildings, Coventry Street, W. 
 
 MDCCCXCVI.
 
 Printed by 
 
 The Castle Printing Company, 
 
 10 & 12, Elephant Roaiv, 
 
 London.
 
 LOVE TRIUMPHANT 
 
 CONSISTING OF 
 
 "Troth and its Teller," 
 
 and 
 
 "That Rare Thing a Marriage." 
 
 Two variant tales of one Artist's 
 
 pure passion. 
 
 BY 
 
 ■W ILLIAM PLATT. 
 
 True art is love, true love is chastity ; 
 Thou Trinity I serve, upheld by Thee, 
 I dare frank words, from baser usage free. 
 
 WILLIAM PLATT.
 
 LOVE TRIUMPHANT. 
 
 THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED TO 
 
 RICHARD IxK GAIxIxlKKKK, 
 
 TO 
 
 CHARIxES HIRSCH, 
 
 AND TO MY BROTHER 
 
 fiAMKS PIxATT, 
 
 In token of the aid they lent me in 
 
 bringing out my book 
 
 WOMEN, LOVE, AND LIFE. 
 
 THE READER will observe that the two 
 stories in this book v)ere at last completed 
 in October and November, 189 If. 
 
 BE IT ESPECIALLY NOTED, to save 
 possible misunderstanding, that my first book 
 " Women, Love, and Life, 1 ' was not actually 
 published till July, 1895. 
 
 William Platt.
 
 LOVE TRIUMPHANT. 
 
 TO THE READER. 
 
 I, a pure man, have dreamed of humanity 
 pure, transparently pure, nakedly pure ! 
 
 If so be that you have denied noble 
 organs ; and if from your impurity you 
 breed from my book thoughts impure (as 
 from the purest of women an impure 
 husband may breed libertine sons ) — then 
 at least for very shame cry nothing aloud, 
 leave me unwaked in my dreamings, howl 
 not your beasthood unto me. 
 
 For ideality is a very tender thing, and 
 faith a very rare one; sad if a stone 
 bruises a child's tender ankle ; terrible when 
 beasthood pains an artist's ideality. 
 
 My ideas are very different to yours you 
 say, very different to those of most men 
 
 1524231
 
 To The Readek. 
 
 — truly there were not much need to write 
 if this were not so. 
 
 First and foremost, ere any and every 
 noble doctrine of life be framed, first and 
 foremost must it be felt that birth and 
 the reason of birth is an unspeakably pure 
 
 and holy thing. Have I risked all in 
 bringing this home to you ? Then I have 
 done well, Oh World ; Oh need of frankness 
 in a lying World ! Do I iterate it till 
 you cry you are tired of it? If you are 
 tired of it it is because it finds you out. 
 
 From the innocent eyes of young girls 
 I have learnt the need of iterating ideals 
 of frankness to a dull world — grave 
 simplicities deserve openness, must never be 
 made ashamed by the suggestive lowered 
 voice. 
 
 From the manly eyes of youths I have 
 learnt the need of my outcry — in these 
 youths and their brave schoolboy honour 
 lies a mine of possible manhood ; but the 
 time comes, and never a true man speaks 
 to them of their manhood, but every 
 libertine speaks to them ; they are ruined 
 ere they are twenty years old ; and they 
 crv out "Nobody taught us."
 
 To The Reader. 
 
 Must not men know vital facts'? And 
 shall not women know 1 If women knew, 
 were not the world half saved ! So I cry 
 in my dreams ; and the world laughs with 
 a laughter more hideous than bleeding 
 wounds. 
 
 From harlot-haunted, wretched London 
 the shriek has come to my soul. With 
 tears of blood I have dreamed my utmost 
 dreams of purity and set them on paper 
 — miserable indeed that wretch who dares 
 call me impure. 
 
 Ye great ones, grave-eyed, calm and 
 deliberate in frankness, believers in openness 
 and knowledge — already I know I have 
 your hearts 1 
 
 William Platt.
 
 Never Count the Cost! 
 
 Words and Music by William Platt 
 With great force — not too slow. 
 
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 TRUTH AND ITS TELLER. 
 
 "" "•qfeg/Sagp^f 
 
 &*&" '
 
 TRUTH AND ITS TELLER. 
 
 A short but rather thick-set man, turning 
 a corner into a poor London street, saw a tall 
 youth striking savagely with a stick a girl 
 about two years younger than himself. The 
 man stopped and cried out " Hold there — 
 what are you doing you cad 1 " The youth 
 turned round and leered "She's only an 
 interloper" he said, "she can't complain." 
 " You cursed bully " said the man " you 
 had better not strike again ! " The youth, 
 in mere sulkiness, just touched the girl's 
 back with the stick, a touch not to kill a 
 fly — but the man, whose blood was up, and 
 who was the more ready to strike seeing 
 that the youth was a little taller than 
 himself, hit out with his right hand, and 
 catching the other man on the point of the 
 jaw hurled him howling into the road. The 
 girl surveyed him — she had that expression 
 of dogged fortitude acquired under some
 
 14 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 circumstances by certain natures, and not 
 
 without a rich force, nay, and a native grace 
 
 of its own. She said quite simply " Thanks 
 
 — but I like to take my own part, for 
 
 good or bad. If I could have done that — ! " 
 
 her eye glistened. He read in her at once 
 
 her proud independence, her nature stong 
 
 without brutality ; he replied to her almost 
 
 apologetically " I did the thing I must do." 
 
 A new comer came suddenly on the scene 
 
 — tall, well built, with a sallow face and 
 
 high cheek-bones — a Scotchman. He eyed 
 
 all three with cold impartiality — then said 
 
 " Young man, excuse me but you are a 
 
 fool!" (He silenced interruption with his 
 
 hand and continued) "Let me instruct you 
 
 — I am a man of science, the late public 
 
 analyst for Castle-Douglas. I was brought 
 
 up as a Calvinist, believing that God made 
 
 men pre-ordained to Salvation or Damnation, 
 
 giving them no option — they must even go 
 
 as they must. But turning my attention to 
 
 science, to the noble science of Chemistry, to 
 
 strict methods of analysis, I soon began to 
 
 see that by no scientific process could a 
 
 God be discovered in nature at all. So 
 
 I went to my professor and put it to him
 
 Truth and its Teller. • 15 
 
 clearly — could my Calvinism be but a myth? 
 And he replied to me that it was a myth 
 and yet no myth — that as science was right 
 and all else wrong, as science could discover 
 no God then there was none ; but Calvinism 
 was right in this, the rule of the pre- 
 ordination; in nature chance was the real God 
 — all matter was but composed of varying 
 forms of one central thing — whether it was 
 turned to iron or water, air or gold, depended 
 upon chance ; life came in by accident and 
 was ruled by the same chances ; the one 
 rule was that the strong survived and the 
 weak went to the wall ; and it was as silly 
 in science with the reign of chance as in 
 Calvinism with the reign of God to try and 
 alter the essence of things — we are born 
 strong to survive, or born weak to be crushed 
 — you can't move away from that ; this 
 boy is strong, that girl weak ; it is her 
 fate to be thrashed." And he puffed his 
 pipe contentedly. The short man replied 
 " I, like you, have been forced to give up 
 all belief in God — but none the less despise 
 your miserable doctrine. You are to me a 
 living proof of what I know well — that 
 neither Christianity nor Atheism makes any
 
 16 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 difference to a nature radically mean. In 
 Calvinism or Agnosticism you remain as 
 miserably selfish, as wretchedly ready to 
 speciously argue out the indifference to 
 others which is born of your miserable 
 selfishness. I agree with you that nature, 
 dull senseless and material, has evolved life 
 as an accident — had there been any design 
 in Creation surely it would have left unmade 
 such things as you are — but I differ when 
 you argue that we, living sentient things, 
 are to walk blindly according to the models 
 of a nature that you yourself admit to be 
 dead and feelingless — the behoof to be 
 generous, kindly, full-hearted, that is the 
 everlasting behoof, in Christianity, in Atheism, 
 in whatever doctrine you will — real men 
 can live no other way." 
 
 The Scotchman shook his head, "You are 
 of the side of the weak — you will be crushed 
 — I shall survive — I am on the side of the 
 strong." The old Calvinism was repeating 
 its miserable doctrines under the new formula. 
 But the short man lost his temper and 
 missed the humour of the situation. "You 
 are strong, I weak " he said, measuring his 
 man — "take your coat oft!"
 
 Truth and its Teller. 17 
 
 The Scotchman looked at him — he did not 
 understand. 
 
 " Take your coat off ! " shouted the short 
 man — then as the other still affected not to 
 know his meaning, he slapped him across 
 the cheek. 
 
 It was enough — the Scotchman made a 
 savage blow at his opponent, who, however, 
 ducked and slipped back. Then both stepped 
 silently into the middle of the road, and the 
 fight began. 
 
 The Scotchman had strength, reach and 
 weight in his favour, but the other had 
 pluck and skill. When the Scotchman lunged 
 the other would duck and counter, and 
 knock the tall man badly about the ribs 
 and wind, getting in return, however, several 
 nasty knocks on the face — for even at short- 
 arm his opponent's fists were heavy. Then 
 after a while, the Scotchman, beginning to 
 feel the breath going out of him from his 
 adversary's heavy body-hitting, followed up 
 desperately with the last of his wind, 
 and succeeded in getting in a strong knock- 
 down blow on his opponent's brow. " Had 
 enough 1 " he asked ; but his tone was 
 over-eager ; the other man jumped up shouting
 
 18 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 *' Not half enough ! " and it then became 
 evident that he held the greater reserve. 
 In vain his tall rival tried to repeat the 
 knock-downer — his wind was gone, and the 
 short man now began to dance around him 
 with terrible effect, putting in first one on 
 the body, then one on the face, always 
 getting back again quickly. Then he, too, 
 seemed to get out of breath from his 
 exertions; and drew the Scotchman some- 
 what rashly on to an attack. It was well 
 planned ; the tired Scot, trying another 
 knock-down blow, hit with too round an 
 arm ; and the other, slipping to the off-side 
 of the blow, put in a one and two on his 
 ribs that, aided by the man's own impetus 
 forwards, threw him to the ground. 
 
 The Englishman snorted the blood from 
 his nose and spat it from his mouth ; then 
 seeing that the other had had quite enough 
 of it he withdrew gravely from the ground 
 without a word. 
 
 Before he had gone far he heard steps 
 behind him — it was the young girl running 
 after him. After many thanks came explana- 
 tions, and he learnt to his horror that the 
 man he had thrashed was her uncle and
 
 Truth and its Teller. 19 
 
 .guardian, the boy being his son — her cousin. 
 But when he expressed his sorrow she at 
 once stopped him — she knew well the 
 heartless fatalism engrained in her uncle — it 
 was incapable of variation for better or 
 worse ; and as to her cousin — well she had 
 a, plan — but first she told him more of her 
 history. 
 
 Her father was a soldier, and loved her 
 mother passionately ; and when, without 
 warning, he heard the awful news of his 
 wife's sudden death from an accident, without 
 staying to think of the little life still left 
 to his care, he took up his musket and blew 
 his brains out — "But I had rather," said the 
 girl, passionately, " be the friendless wretched 
 orphan of parents like those, who loved one 
 another, than be a comfortable offspring of 
 a pair of miserable loveless wretches like 
 my uncle and aunt — and so I tell my 
 cousin, often and often — and he taunts me 
 as an interloper, and living on charity — but 
 the work I do (Aunt is fat and lazy) is 
 worth more than my keep, and they give 
 me never a farthing ; and Jack (my cousin) 
 beats me whenever he thinks he will ; oh, 
 and 1 don't want you to interfere — strangers
 
 20 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 have no right in family quarrels — but I 
 thought, seeing you fight uncle, seeing 
 you were good and kind, and meant well, 
 if you would teach me to fight like that 
 (I saw there were dodges in it) then I 
 should be able to take my own part — there 
 is nothing so good as taking your own part 
 — even if others do it for you it only makes 
 you feel wretched and weak — and the weak 
 always go to the wall — or so uncle says." 
 
 And so this strange man of thirty odd 
 years with a sad and meditative face began 
 in these evenings, in a secluded wild heath- 
 land near to hand, to give boxing lessons 
 to this wild wiry strong-hearted girl half- 
 way through her teens, tall, spare, strong 
 for her age, dauntless in the quality of her 
 pluck ! A strange fatality ! 
 
 The boxing lessons proved a success in 
 more ways than one. Firstly the pupil 
 made rapid progress ; secondly the odd pair 
 formed a genuine friendship — as ever happens 
 when generous soul meets generous soul, be 
 they otherwise as different as they may. 
 His chief difficulty at the start was to get 
 her to hit hard and straight at his face — 
 but she soon got to feel the entrancing
 
 Truth and its Teller. 21 
 
 flavour of the sport, and to see that good- 
 natured glove hitting is not to be called 
 hurting, least of all when one hits straight. 
 And she too had to call on him to hit 
 harder — "How else am I to get seasoned to 
 it?" she said. "Poor Girl," he thought, "Your 
 seasoning to pain was early begun!" and the 
 only quarrel between the two was that 
 neither hit hard enough. But the science 
 of the thing she soon caught — the straight 
 left toe and half-turned chest, the high guard 
 with the right, the smart lead of the left, 
 the head guards, the heavy right counters — 
 all of these she learnt up greedily. 
 
 Each soon knew more of the other's 
 surroundings and character. Her hard life 
 at her imcle's was revealed to his quick 
 nature in all its blackness without her ever 
 making a real complaint. That strange 
 Scotchman with his affectation of strength 
 and knowledge, who as a young man had 
 held the post of public analyst at Castle 
 Douglas, who lost it through whiskey 
 drinking, and gradually descended in the 
 scale till at last he grubbed together a 
 miserable living by reports (?) on patent 
 foods and patent medicines — all certified to
 
 22 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 contain only the very best constituents — 
 " Vide the late public analyst for Castle 
 Douglas " — this figure, however hard and 
 terrible it bore its part on her life, never 
 lost to her brave heart its humorous side ; of 
 her fat lazy bullying aunt she always said, 
 with naive generosity — " She loves her own 
 child and so not me — I should very likely 
 be as harsh if anyone else's child came near 
 to mine." And she held in her deep heart 
 a passionate affection for another uncle of 
 hers — an awful drinker this one — who 
 seemed to have a real tenderness for the 
 "wee lassie," and used at intervals to bring 
 her shillings, counselling her to hide them 
 carefully, and answering her protests by 
 saying frankly " My dearie its either you 
 or the whiskey shop — and I have enough 
 of that." She kept these shillings hid in 
 her bosom, mementos of him — and vowed 
 never to spend them except in deepest need. 
 A great brave proud passionate little soul — 
 that is how he found her — and he of all 
 men was fittest to know such a one, and 
 educate her — for it was her real education 
 that he had now unconsciously engaged 
 on.
 
 Truth and its Teller. 23 
 
 She had asked him what he was — and 
 he had some difficulty in making his strange 
 life clear to her. A man who had spent 
 his days working for his living, and his 
 nights writing noble and passionate poetry 
 from a soul that was vast, far vaster than 
 the dull world looking on had any ken of 
 — who had with his own poor savings 
 published his book of high doctrine, his law 
 of noble living, his eloquent eulogium of 
 love, highest elevator of a humanity too 
 low (oh far too low) in its selfishness — too 
 awful in its tragic unutterable baseness — 
 and because his book was outspoken, frank 
 and free in its truth, a world too miserable 
 for anything but lying had turned with 
 contempt from what was beyond its praise. 
 It was out of his scope to make this clear 
 to her, this life of devotion horribly repaid; 
 but it was free to him to show in simple 
 phrases how the hearts of all the world's 
 great poets and preachers beat for all 
 humanity and the elevation of all humanity; 
 to tell her that in these ranks he had 
 striven ; and to end by saying " Like you, 
 little sweetheart, I have found hard work 
 but ill repaid, though, being proud like you,
 
 24 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 I, too, quiet my grumblings ; for I, too, 
 have lost my relations, and find in this 
 world scarce one who is kith and kin to 
 me." 
 
 And these two friendless ones become rich 
 friends ; and into her heart, already large 
 and generous, he poured those high ideals 
 of life and honour, courage and restraint, 
 tolerance and generosity — and above all, in 
 solemn moments, he impressed on her (as- 
 far as he could on one her age) the 
 importance and nobility of the grand passion 
 of love ; love that teaches us the highest 
 of all that we know ; love that between a. 
 man and a woman, reaching high-water mark, 
 girds itself up to that holiest of duties the 
 building of the generation to come — a 
 generation that must be built only of love 
 — of highly considered, deeply felt, strong- 
 couraged, great-hearted love. 
 
 And as thus soul to soul they talked, 
 their souls like veritable lovers seemed — 
 and into her very soul did his soul getj 
 and it placed there, drawn from the noblest 
 part of his vitality, his generous ideals. 
 
 She was as pure as the day, and he also. 
 Nothing in their intercourse but what
 
 Truth and its Teller. 25 
 
 savoured of purity and truth. All subjects 
 they could talk on and not a blush of 
 shame. 
 
 One day she caine to him looking very 
 tired, but mad with a wild glee. " Victory, 
 victory," she said "in fair fight I gave 
 Jack such a thrashing ! Now he will leave 
 me fairly alone ! But I had to pay for it 
 
 — aunt gave me such a strapping ! But 
 never mind — I have won my spurs ! I am 
 independent ! I can fight ! But oh my back 
 
 — aunt stripped me and she did flog ! But 
 things are best loved when paid for, you 
 tell me, and I know you are right — mother 
 paid for me in pain, as you said, and loved 
 me all the more. And I am independent 
 now — that is the thing ! I can fight ! Oh 
 look at my back though, and see how I 
 paid for my victory ! " And the mad thing 
 
 — she slipped the back of her dress down, 
 and loosed her under-clothes, and showed 
 him, in the sweet summer twilight, the 
 wales down that fair strong back of hers — 
 that lovely flesh of hers that she was 
 neither shamed to show nor he to see, for 
 what is nakedness save a sacred beautiful 
 thing to those who are pure 1 Let the shame
 
 26 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 be with the shameful-thoughted ! And she 
 kissed him her thanks in her sweet and 
 girlish way, and felt so thankful to him in 
 her heart — how exquisite a joy had come 
 to her since she had known him ! And the 
 two sat side by side, and quietly watched 
 the sun go down, and both were too full 
 of heart for words. But when she got home 
 and happy to bed, somehow there seemed 
 to come to her an after-dream of that kiss 
 she had given him that made it different 
 to the thing she had meant it for — a 
 haunting mysterious death-in-life lassitude, 
 yet withal the impress of a new and terrible 
 energy — like the first of a string of exquisite 
 wild discords, each of which the more demands 
 some strong concordant climax, unknown but 
 that must be attained. 
 
 Their friendship, their meetings, her educa- 
 tion, all continued. But when he spoke 
 to her, as was his wont at times, of love 
 and lover's constancy, and lover's duties 
 and privileges, she listened with a beating 
 thrilled heart. With all his observation he 
 did not perceive this ; he credited her only 
 with the years she had passed, forgetting 
 how much her strenuous life had aged her;
 
 Truth and its Teller. 27 
 
 and was but seeking to prepare her gradually 
 for the new feelings soon to spring up in 
 her, which, iia alas too many maids, aue 
 allowed to come without a word of warning 
 being given of their infinite importance both 
 to the girl herself and a possible nest 
 generation. The poet loathed the conven- 
 tional education that taught a girl the capital 
 of China and left unmentioned the purpose 
 of the sweet pink flowers of her breast ; 
 and in a simple tender delicate manner he 
 spoke to this girl a few natural truths ; 
 the spotless purity of the life she after- 
 wards led may be as much due to this as 
 to her innate virtue. 
 
 For to such as her, passion comes all of 
 a rush. So it came indeed one sultry day, 
 at their meeting-place on the mead. She 
 had come with a face black and blue and 
 a heart as bitter. Her cousin had played 
 a mean trick on her. Beaten by her, afraid 
 now to bully her, his friends had taunted 
 him upon this issue ; he came home and 
 called her an unwomanly something — she 
 treated him with a silent contempt — instead 
 of fighting her fair he waited a chance to 
 get her head under his arm — holding her
 
 28 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 thus "in chancery" he had given her face 
 a bruising, but stung her still more by his 
 unfairness, by the advantage he had taken 
 of her — " When he had done all he dared " 
 she said grimly " he ran away — battered 
 as I was he dared not face me — and he 
 couldn't have had much wind left, for I 
 did all I could on his body — but what can 
 one do when one is held like that?" The 
 poet bit his lip till the blood came, and 
 cursed between his teeth — "the blackguard 
 — who would have thought it?" he muttered. 
 Then he smiled at the girl and said tenderly 
 " Poor little sweetheart ! " and he kissed her 
 lightly and sweetly over the bruises; then 
 he said, quite simply, knowing that that 
 was best with her, "Now I must show you 
 the guards against that. The blackguard ! 
 Who would have thought it! First and 
 simplest — hold me and I will show you — 
 look here, right hand over his left shoulder, 
 grip brow, mouth, chin, where you can, 
 but pull his head back sharply — see ? — ■ 
 Try that on me." She soon learnt that — 
 and gained much composure ; a sweet peace 
 began to come over her as this supple 
 man touched her arm or held her brow or
 
 Truth and its Teller. 29 
 
 neck. Of this he knew nothing, as, with the 
 eagerness of a true artist, he proceeded to 
 show her a wrestling trick more terrible than 
 the first. " See — the arm tight — slip the 
 right leg quite across — put all your back 
 and hind-quarters in and you pitch him 
 clean over your head — see ? I will not pitch 
 you, but you see I could. Now take me. 
 Fling me mind, no nonsense. That's right — 
 hurl, hurl, hurl — come along hurl in God 
 or the Devil's name — ah ! " He had excited 
 her to the proper length, and with a 
 vigorous throw she sent him flying a header 
 — it was with some awkwardness that he came 
 down, and for the moment she was frightened. 
 But he sprang up at once, delight on face 
 — "Splendid!" he gasped. His knee seemed 
 shaken, but with invincible energy he kicked 
 and stamped on the ground to put it right, 
 muttering strong language. She watched, 
 fascinated at his grand virility, all the more 
 marked from his smallness of size. Then 
 he turned to her and cried out excitedly 
 "Now then — another wrestling throw!" He 
 advanced towards her, hands extended. She 
 started from a dream — there coming towards 
 her in all his strength, pluck and splendour, 
 
 D
 
 30 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 excited and eager-faced, with grip extended, 
 was this man, this thorough man ; and this 
 girl older than her age, who had not known 
 love heretofore, shrieked out suddenly and 
 turned and ran with all her might away from 
 him — love in his grandeur came on her and 
 her soul went mad for fear. 
 
 She ran on, on, on, without staying or 
 turning — ran till breathless she stopped and 
 leant against a tree to recover — leant 
 breathless and terribly torn by a grand 
 tremendous rapture — she loved this man, yes 
 loved him. Oh the joy of it ! She could 
 think of nothing else than that, that she 
 loved him ; and there she stood and watched 
 the glorious sunset-tints spreading all over 
 the sky their many-coloured flame-flags — till 
 all the universe seemed glowing with the 
 rapture that racked the body of this girl 
 into a convulsion of joy. And she stood 
 and trembled and watched and dreamt, and 
 slowly the flame in the sky toned down, 
 and a dim grey twilight set in, and an air 
 almost chill seemed to be creeping up her 
 limbs into her heart — she shivered, and 
 with this change in nature there came too 
 a grey change into her thoughts — the rays
 
 Truth and its Teller. 31 
 
 of bright gladness in her heart seemed too 
 
 like sunset-rays, the last gleams of a fading 
 
 day ; and in place of them came a mist 
 
 and a chill air — what could there be 
 
 between her and this man so raised above 
 
 her — above her beyond compare in his 
 
 grand knowledge of all things, his high 
 
 noble sense of the real values of all thinsrs, 
 
 in his rich doctrines solidly based on the 
 
 inmost depths of the soul, doctrines that 
 
 rang so new, and yet every stroke and dot 
 
 of which were so clearly drawn from innate 
 
 nobilites always findable somewhere in the 
 
 truest realest idealities of the heart. She 
 
 loved him — and remembered with a thrill, 
 
 such a thrill, his noble doctrine of love 
 
 (again but the grandest expansion of purely 
 
 natural idealities) that passing all things 
 
 trivial and base, all the baser elements 
 
 possible in its composition, this intensest of 
 
 the passions showed itself at its heights as 
 
 the noblest reachable peak of unselfishness, 
 
 the beacon-light of achievement — love to him 
 
 was in a man the highest virile, in a 
 
 woman the most exquisite feminine, and of 
 
 the two together, this — the building of a 
 
 new generation. This simplest of truths
 
 32 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 strongly insisted on, shaped itself in his 
 mouth the highest of size and weight — so 
 that those who might hear him rightly 
 should remember the eternity that lay in 
 their hands to make, should remember how 
 their every and any act was of an eternal 
 import (all acts bearing on character, all 
 bearing upon parentage) ; and in the name of 
 love, builder of the race to come, there should 
 be made a grander and more passionate 
 morality than any system the world might 
 previously have conceived of — all beauty, 
 all honour, all courage, all tolerance — 
 the whole world of force and virtue we 
 could rightly conceive to be born from love 
 alone — and it were better, nay the only 
 morality, to live virgin, sterile, gloomily 
 alone, than by a lesser passion than the 
 highest to distort this subtlest power to a 
 lesser than its potence called due to it. 
 And she, in this supreme moment of her 
 life, gathering all recollection of his teaching 
 into one tremendous moment of cerebration, 
 shouted out in her heart in heroic ecstacy 
 that she would remain barren and sterile and 
 gloomily alone rather than accept a less than 
 this ideal — a less than this man from whom
 
 Truth and its Teller. 33 
 
 feeling him too grand for her she fled — 
 thus by an awful contradiction shutting from 
 her life the thing that in the same moment 
 she admitted to be the greatest of life's 
 worthinesses — who loves most touches least, 
 and the ans;el grand above all those of the 
 heavenly host is he who rapt in his terrible 
 adoration never dai-es once lift his eyes to 
 the presence of God. 
 
 But in her renunciation there was a 
 grander joy and a higher strength than 
 could have been found in the hearts of the 
 brides who had gone that day to the altar. 
 And her heart was flooded with poetry, and 
 her every elastic muscle, her every bounding 
 drop of blood sang aloud a song of ecstacy. 
 And leaving all mundane thoughts and 
 arrangements apart, she prepared to lay 
 herself down in the sweet meadowlands she 
 had strayed to, to sleep in the wondrous 
 arms, on the sweet breast of her mother 
 nature ; and she said to herself " This day 
 has Love come to my heart; and this night, 
 be tomorrow what it may, I must dream 
 bridal dreams on a couch of flowers, and 
 sweetheart-thoughts must possess me." So 
 she plucked wild flowers, with plenty of
 
 34 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 sweet smelling May, and lay down and 
 strewed them over her — thus in the first 
 day of her Love this pure virgin, high- 
 idealled, poet-taught, sank into the first 
 of those slumbers that are less calm but 
 far, far sweeter than those of undeveloped 
 age. 
 
 She woke at the early dawn and sprang 
 up — feeling gloriously the mistress of her 
 fate ! Oh that supreme feeling that the world 
 contains nothing that can break the assured 
 spirit within you ! A feeling only attainable 
 by the greatest natures. And in her there 
 welled up a rich thankfulness to that friend 
 and poet, teacher and loved man, who had 
 taught her the essential heroism without 
 which life is a nought. The flowers hanging 
 all night over her had brought to her a 
 slight languor — and that too strengthened 
 her superb feeling of fate-mastery ; for to 
 grand spirits it is better to feel some present 
 ill that they are fighting against than a 
 mere absence of perverse sensation. Thus she 
 set about deciding her future. 
 
 She would not return home. She would 
 not pass again into the path of the man 
 she felt unworthy of. She would go to a
 
 Truth and its Teller. 35 
 
 distant part of town and thrive as best 
 she might. Thanks to her kind uncle's 
 dowerings, she had three or four pound on 
 her — then she felt keenly her sex-disability, 
 ( she had some inkling of how the world 
 treats woman) — but Oh, an inspiration ! Why 
 not lose sex, pass as a man ! And with the 
 practical side of the idea came the large 
 poetry of it, that the man she loved shall 
 have been the last man to have seen her 
 in her sweetness as a woman, all other men 
 shall now have not even bare fact-know- 
 ledge of the sex of her. 
 
 Execution easy to so practical a girl. She 
 knew town well, as her uncle had been a 
 frequent shifter of home. She took an early 
 train in one direction, there bought at second- 
 hand shops some clothing, cheap and old — 
 ( the better disguise ) ; cord trousers, sleeved 
 moleskin vest, rough wool shirt, saucy cap 
 — then a return to her meadow, a change, 
 a practise for easy swagger ; all of which 
 amused her vastly, so that she broke out 
 into bursts of excited laughter. Her girl's 
 clothes sink into a muddy river ; then 
 comes the what-to-do? Devouring dry crusts 
 she thought it out — she looked at the
 
 36 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 flowers of last night — but she could not 
 sell what had lain on her breast ; those 
 went into the river to float to the sea, on 
 whose rich heart even they would only be 
 less rapturously tossed — all went save one- 
 sprig of May that she twisted between her 
 breasts, that seemed there to give out an 
 exquisite and most thrilling scent ; delirious 
 reminder of that her first night of maid- 
 dainty, love-bewitched slumbering. 
 
 And then this saucy boy rose and picked 
 other nosegays, and at a distant station took 
 a train that led far away to another corner 
 of the vastness of London. 
 
 Whosoever would learn of the poetry latent 
 in men (too seldom alas ! anything but 
 latent) let him take flowers to the poor 
 quarters of London. Half she sold, half she 
 gave away (could she bear a wistful eye to 
 look on her unsalved?) ; and her manner 
 was so sweet and bright, with her short 
 tangled half-curled hair, and her happy 
 lustre-haunted face, with its pathetic brown 
 bruises adding glory to its smile as black 
 rocks throw up the sun, that all who passed 
 her turned their heads to look at this 
 winsome boy. So that as soon as she had
 
 Truth and its Teller. 37 
 
 got rid of her flowers an artist in street- 
 chalks (cute man ! ) solicited her partnership. 
 He did eight or ten lots about the neigh- 
 bourhood, left the others to deputies, looked 
 after this one himself ; would she make 
 arrangements to take a lot on ? (Of course 
 he addressed her as a he — I write she as- 
 the reader, and I are in the secret). The 
 innocent girl replied simply that she would 
 be mistaken for the artist of the pictures 
 — the artist explained that that was the 
 idea — he might have added that such 
 deceptions were not confined to the lower 
 ranks of the profession. She turned red and 
 bit her lip — then in her fresh young mind 
 the new-born love-spirit whispered a sweet 
 idea, and she said — " Let us both stop here 
 — I will work something." And she stooped 
 down, and with the chalk wrote in big 
 letters on the paving stone this inviting 
 message " The likeness of your sweetheart 
 — one half-penny ! " Then to the young 
 men as they came up she repeated the 
 inviting message — " The likeness of your 
 sweetheart, Sir — one half-penny only." And 
 at the invitation of this pert ruddy-cheeked 
 Cujjid they quickly put down their coins,
 
 38 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 and the Artist drew on a clear paving- 
 stone some quick likeness, more or less 
 attractive ; which, after a moment's stay 
 there, was rubbed out to make way for 
 the next. 
 
 And the two soon grew more and more 
 expert at the trade ; his quickness and 
 variety in profile became notorious, but still 
 more attractive in the neighbourhood was 
 the fresh and innocent chaff of the "boy." 
 Neither the rector of the parish nor the 
 policeman on beat escaped the seductive 
 attentions of this merry charmer; and though 
 the dignity of either was too much to allow 
 of a condescending affirmative reply, still 
 they were both of them, I believe, found 
 chuckling pleasantly over the episode some 
 days after its occurrence. 
 
 So for a few weeks at this Bohemian 
 trade our heroine flourished in pocket and 
 fame ; none the less her proverbial brightness 
 was often a little forced on — London, 
 looked at closely, is an ugly place ; we oan 
 learn there terrible truths about humanity 
 that it were better for one's peace of mind 
 never to have learnt ; three weeks of knock- 
 ing about in these streets brought her quickly
 
 Truth and its Teller. 39 
 
 to a terrible maturity ; though (do not 
 misunderstand me) it left her as sweet and 
 as pure as it had found her ; but more 
 grave, not nearly so young. 
 
 She began to dread discovery of her sex 
 ■with an awful horror. One crowded Saturday 
 afternoon .she and her partner were well 
 surrounded, and one man, a little drunk, 
 began chaffing her girlish appearance — a 
 thing which unnecessarily frightened her. 
 He w T as merely jesting, after his manner ; 
 but with it grew coarse, made an anatomical 
 observation that was the truth without his 
 intending it. Shamed, nervous and angry, 
 her wit did not leave her ; she suddenly 
 put in her best left bander, full on the 
 point of his jaw, with the repartee " Was 
 that a woman's fist?" He fell on to the 
 pavement ; many applauded the " lad's " 
 pluck, some few urged the other up to a 
 fight ; but while the matter was still 
 unsettled, all chances of its coming to a 
 head were dispersed by the appearance on 
 the scene of a middle-height tough-built 
 man evidently well known. He looked at 
 her and said "That was well struck my 
 boy — half-a-crown for you if you can hit mo
 
 40 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 in the same place." He stood up quite 
 carelessly, his hands behind his back. She 
 looked at him, his eye seemed to mock her, 
 she hit quickly, but not hard, at his mouth 
 — then a second and third time, but at 
 every attempt he moved his head with such 
 easy precision as to quite avoid the blow. 
 She got excited, tried feints and dodges, 
 all to no avail. Getting more excited and 
 orer-reaching herself, she suddenly felt his 
 right hand on her ribs ; a mere touch and 
 she went to the ground. She got up and 
 laughed, and all the crowd were laughing 
 too ; and several shouted to her " That's 
 so-and-so," mentioning a name familiar to 
 her as a champion boxer, and the teacher 
 of her master. He merely threw her a 
 half-crown, saying " There, you deserve it ! " 
 But she was proud, and gave it back again, 
 saying decisively " I have not earnt it ; I 
 take no money I have not earnt." He 
 looked her square in the face — Then struck 
 her across the cheek, saying " Don't be 
 saucy." She came at him, both fists hitting 
 heavily — she scarcely, however, managed to 
 touch him, but soon found both her wrists 
 held in his strong grip. "Look here lad,"
 
 Truth and its Teller. 41 
 
 he said, " I only did that to try your 
 pluck ; forgive me, you're a brave lad ; and 
 whenever you want to learn more boxing 
 than you know come round to the Morley 
 Tavern and ask for me." He turned to go 
 — then wheeled back and said to the 
 Artist " Is this your son ? '' " No, my pal " 
 said the Artist. Then to the boy "You 
 should do better than this knock-about 
 life ; you please me ; I will give you a 
 chance in life if I can — come with me and 
 answer my questions." 
 
 The girl and this strange man walked off 
 together — she told him she had lost both 
 parents and run away from a guardian and 
 was sick of irregular life; having got her 
 thus far, being a frank and talkative man, 
 and one who knew well that he had a 
 personality, he gave her the following account 
 of himself. 
 
 "It always was my habit to go on in 
 my own way, follow my fancies. I have 
 taken a fancy to you, and, if you choose 
 to follow it out, can put you into a regular 
 living not very high up, but still far better 
 for you than your present one. Miss this 
 chance you may not get another. You see
 
 42 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 you have no character but your frank face ; 
 the silly world thinks nothing of that for 
 a recommendation ; but I who know full well 
 what good characters are held by rogues, 
 and that taken in the long run we none 
 of us have any characters at all worth 
 speaking of — I in common fairness feel bound 
 to give you a chance, and will do so. You 
 see I myself am a man of no character 
 whatever — don't stare, and don't laugh. I 
 had a university education, rowed in the 
 eight, and taught blackguardism to a noble 
 lord who died last year ( poor chap ! ) of 
 delirium tremens — leaving several widows to 
 mourn his loss. My parents wanted me to 
 go into the church, because it was so 
 respectable. I declined ; I was a bad'un, 
 but not such a bad'un as that ; one of my 
 friends became a popular preacher, and 
 remains so despite an awkward contre-temps 
 with a pretty servant. He is a bigger 
 Atheist than I am. My parents then wanted 
 me to be a lawyer ; I declined — I was a 
 blackguard, but not a hypocrite nor a rogue. 
 They suggested medicine ; I pointed out that 
 I should be out of half my practice — for 
 I never could bear old or ugly women and
 
 Truth and its Teller. 43 
 
 could never trust myself with young or 
 pretty ones. So they left me to myself; 
 and I became what I am now — a sporting 
 critic, a professional blackguard, but not a 
 liar nor a humbug. I took the middle- 
 weight boxing championship, and with the 
 help of my friend who owned the horse I 
 got up my well-known boxing coterie at the 
 Morley Tavern — appropriately named ; which 
 brings him much custom and me much 
 sport ; ah, here we are, come in — you must 
 have a steak and bitter with me — no 
 better living in the world ! Life, my lad, 
 is mixed of sweets and bitters — take my 
 advice, and you will get your bitters out 
 of a glass and your sweets from the lips 
 of a girl ! In you go lad, make no fuss — 
 I like your face, I say ; that's good 
 enough for me ; there, don't trouble to 
 thank me so much, for my kindness is but 
 a slip-shod skin-deep silly affair ; and would 
 as readily help you to-morrow (if you 
 wanted it) to blackguardism, death and Hell 
 as it would to-day to respectability ! Are 
 you still chaste 1 Ah good God I see by 
 the red flag you mount that you ai*e ! A 
 modest youth — how long will that last?"
 
 44 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 She rose from her seat, and without a 
 word marched grimly towards the door — he 
 jumped up, caught her arm angrily, and 
 shook her. "Little fool," he said, "When 
 I've got you a berth you shall quarrel 
 with me — not before — sit down ! " She 
 obeyed his dominant energy, and he went 
 on. "Look here, it is one of the blessings 
 of the School Board (to my republican mind 
 anyhow) that it enables one to talk to just 
 about whoever he meets in London and be 
 understood — that alone is worth the cost, 
 if men only looked at things heartily; so 
 let you and me talk this matter out. You 
 are angry with me because I am frank ; if 
 I thought the same, and spoke otherwise, 
 you would like me well enough ; and I 
 should be a worse man ! But that is the 
 world all over! It can never appreciate the 
 manhood of a chap who refuses to raise 
 his words higher than his acts. Be a 
 Shelley, write love-poetry, and desert the 
 woman you loved and who still loves 
 you; be a Goethe, write philosophic plays 
 and ruin women; be a Burns or Byron, 
 utter passionate sentiments to cover a base 
 libertinage; be an Eliot to write virtue and
 
 Truth and its Teller. 45 
 
 live unvirtuously ; be a Wagner to write a 
 Parsifal and sin most miserably worse than 
 his own Amfortas — both trusted guardians 
 of a sacred vessel, both hideously unfaithful 
 to the trust — be any of these, or far, far 
 worse, and the world has nothing to say 
 against you — it is only too content that 
 you should be as bad as it is, miserable 
 world, slow to learn the rudiments of 
 honesty, let alone virtue, which comes later! 
 But if an artist holds as his first duty his 
 own morality of living, holds it so strongly 
 as to say, as one said to me and meant 
 it " If I make a moral lapse I must 
 perforce stop writing," and if that same 
 artist wrote a book (as he did) unspeakably 
 moral and pure, but with the free out- 
 spokenness of honest morality and high 
 purpose — then the world of which he attacks 
 the vices by his example and writing will 
 turn as it turned on my friend, and ban 
 his art-work as immoral ! The only man 
 whose morality I was ever perfectly sure of 
 — with most the certainty ran the other 
 way ! He cut my acquaintance over a — 
 woman — (I had treated her shamefully of 
 course) — I was the only friend who hadn't 
 
 E
 
 46 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 cut him ! Well, and you are pure — if you 
 •wish to keep so, here you will find the 
 rules of pure living — take it — I have a 
 dozen copies." He handed down a copy of 
 his friend's book — the girl gave a cry of 
 joy — it was a book by her master. Then 
 she answered the astonished query of her 
 new-found friend by saying " I knew him 
 once — and loved him — he was my master." 
 This seemed to puzzle the new friend, 
 "What did he teach you?" he asked. 
 
 " All 1 know " she replied. There the 
 matter ended — he did not perceive the 
 deeper shade in her words. 
 
 Her new friend got her a place as porter 
 in a parcels delivery office where he had 
 influence. The work was half out-doors, and 
 muscular, and she thrived on it ; she soon 
 became tall and strong, though always slim 
 in figure ; she was tough also and most 
 large-hearted ; lying and unfairness shrank 
 before her keen eyes and ready fist, and 
 she soon earnt the respect of all she had 
 to do with. But the important thing to 
 her at this time was the reading of the 
 book. For on that the fate of her whole 
 life was to hang. She read the book — ■
 
 Truth and its Teller. 47 
 
 re-read and ever re-read it. There she found 
 again, in all its incomparable grandeur and 
 purity, his doctrine of love — of love the book 
 was written, love was its whole philosophy, 
 love looked at as the supreme power, the 
 highest unselfishness, the making of men. 
 But it was no longer modulated to fit the 
 mind of immaturity — it loomed out in all 
 its weight and splendour a doctrine for all 
 full-grown men and women, fit and necessary 
 for them — Love of all types shone in it, 
 from the merest physical to the highest soul- 
 attraction ; but its commanding message 
 was eternally the same — in the building of 
 men to succeed us lay our highest function 
 
 — shame to the man who defiled himself 
 and the next generation, and the Mother 
 of the next generation — One way to live, 
 and one way to love — the highest ! And 
 Love rightly conceived was at once life's 
 highest duty and its highest reward. And 
 she saw that it was the work of no mere 
 dreamer, but of a dweller even in the very 
 market-place where men stood closest — aye 
 
 — and one who saw into their most secret 
 thoughts. Idealism based upon the clearest 
 knowledge of humanity and the side most
 
 48 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 ready for noble expansion ; a huge system 
 of ethics built upon one elemental fact — 
 that a man and a woman together make 
 children to survive them ; passion rarefied by 
 duty, love made evident in all its power, 
 builder of the whole world of men ; who 
 was there that facing thus this noble truth 
 of love as builder of eternity could listen 
 again to the hideous insistencies of sin t 
 
 la its glorification of love, its crushing 
 spite against sin, its rich and tolerant appeals 
 to poor straying passion to ennoble itself and 
 become the grandest ; in its recognition of 
 love as a power containing all forces, from 
 lowest to very highest, and ideal love 
 refusing all but the very highest — as this 
 it stood out to her as both highest aim and 
 highest truth. For she had learnt in her 
 brief London sojourn how truly love grand 
 or base (and alas too often base) is still the 
 swaying factor of all minds ; and the awful 
 history of man's brutality and woman's 
 weakness in ten million variations rang all 
 around her, and she felt it stretching through 
 this dark London over all the countries of 
 the earth in one grim encircling ring that 
 held all human-kind — and feeling that she
 
 Truth and its Teller. 49 
 
 stood on the border-line of her maturity she 
 read and re-read the one book that seemed 
 a vital power for good against the coming 
 ferment of her blood encouraged by every 
 awful influence around her ; and with set 
 teeth and clenched hands this full-veined 
 passionate girl still nightly swore on her 
 book of books that every event should find 
 her pure. 
 
 The night that she got to the grand end 
 of this book seemed to her a very counter- 
 part to that wondrous night when love first 
 lay on her heart — and she took out from its 
 sweet resting place that quite dead sprig of 
 May, and kissing and re-kissing it she seemed 
 smothered up in its renewed perfume. Then 
 she re-read that wondrous climax — read the 
 last and grandest iteration of love as the 
 builder of children, deriving all its law from 
 what is necessary to the children, marriage 
 the only morality as securing an oath of 
 fatherhood to the children, and only pure 
 so long as stands before all other duties the 
 bringing up in very love of a race that shall 
 excel past generations in its fitness and purity, 
 manhood, womanhood, strength, and power 
 of loving — above all other duties this duty
 
 50 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 of love shall still shine if the world is to 
 live with a true life ; without it the mere 
 ceremony of marriage were too poor a thing 
 to make morality ! Grand ideality, founded 
 on. the grandest thing that reality has to 
 show, will it ever reach possibility ? 
 
 She threw up her window and looked out. 
 In the black streets beneath her were being 
 enacted tragedies, terrible negations of love. 
 Prostitution, pollution, lust, desire, all base- 
 ness and blackness and selfishness was at 
 work — breeding men ! She threw down her 
 window — she was choking. She took out 
 her May flower again, and took up her 
 book ; and sweetness reigned anew. Then 
 she renewed her vows of devotion to the 
 memory of the idealist — sure that it were 
 better to die unchilded rather than bear 
 from her body children other than of the 
 highest ideal ; for even as the first angel of 
 God is He who dare not for very awe scan 
 the Almighty's face, so this girl, sworn to 
 the holy worship of pure love as her highest 
 religion, shook in awe from her highest 
 conception of it — while at the same moment 
 she shrank in disdain from some voice in
 
 Truth and its Teller. 51 
 
 her nature that whispered a low conception 
 of it. 
 
 For she had low conceptions of it — 
 tossed in terrible self-interrogation she recog- 
 nised the fact — grappled, as we all must 
 do before the higher life comes easy to 
 us, grappled with the lower. There was 
 a man, a porter at her office, who made 
 her shake with a mere physical desire. 
 Dark, strong, manly, rough of speech, coarse 
 of jest, with a smell of sweat from chest 
 and brow, he fascinated her — she felt it 
 and shuddered. Then a horror of sterility, 
 of dying in impotent virginity, came upon 
 her — the need of maternity came choking 
 into her gorge, strangled her. And she 
 reeled under the strain. Then temptation 
 came to her — was not the book after all 
 one call to marriage? And the answer 
 came steady — Yes, to marriage that may be 
 called marriage — and soul to soul we may 
 marry and no other way. She was instantly 
 sure of herself. If she ever got babies 
 they should be such that no point in the 
 character of their father should make her 
 sli udder as to that of her boys and girls. 
 And the supreme voice of idealism rang in
 
 52 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 her ears — Better renounce than half-do. 
 Then utterly lonely, worn out with the 
 pain of self-surrender to this ideal, she 
 turned with a ray of joy-in-triumph to one 
 huge poem in this huge book that sang 
 the glories of all who truly achieve. And 
 psean-like it rang, and made tremendous 
 music echo in her ears, a blaze of triumph 
 glint before her eyes, for it struck the deep 
 thunder note of all achieved-heroism, known 
 or unknown, since the world began — and 
 the room giddily danced in the music of 
 this grand poem, that as her chant of 
 triumph she murmured aloud to the room. 
 
 Scalding tears, hot pains, make brighter laughter, 
 
 Never count the cost ! 
 Cowards count before, and fools count after, 
 
 But the brave (oh! tempest-tossed!) 
 Glory in their holocaust, 
 Driving ever direr, dafter, 
 
 Daring Death (uncanny craf ter ! ) 
 
 Counting ne'er a sorrow lost 
 
 That they've grappled, over-crossed, 
 Till their swing of fate (wild waf ter ! ) 
 Break their heads on the highest rafter ! 
 In the merry grave enfossed 
 They will never count the cost !
 
 Truth and its Teller. 53 
 
 What need to dwell on the years thus 
 passed by her, youthful heats and heroic 
 idealism striving each with each ? This only 
 will I say, that she was happy in having 
 found at the commencement of her trial- 
 time (a time that comes to all of us — or 
 all that are of any good) — I say she was 
 happy to have then found a voice that 
 explained to her sweetly and nobly all the 
 meaning of her womanhood — happy were all 
 maids if such a pure voice could speak to 
 them just at the time ! 
 
 So with her trials and victories, work, 
 experience, integrity, fearless upholding of 
 right she filled up the next few years, and 
 no incident came of so large a moment as 
 to be noted ; and the girl grew in spirit, 
 in muscle, in head. 
 
 All this time she attended regularly at 
 the boxing rooms — for this manly English 
 sport was to her (as to the master she 
 first learnt of) a fine symbol of the battle 
 of life, an inspiriting rehearsal of how to 
 take blows and meet difficulties ; and besides 
 this it was a necessity to her in her fearless 
 war against the bullies who are alwavs with 
 us ; many of whom were now disposed to
 
 54 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 regard her left-hander-on-the-jaw-point as an 
 unanswerable moral argument. 
 
 Now for the benefit of the sporting and 
 aristocratic patrons of the " Morley " tavern 
 the landlord frequently got up a glove- 
 match for money — these, of course, having 
 a good deal more life — and hard-hitting — in 
 them than the ordinary sparring. 
 
 And to the disgust of this worthy man 
 his hairless youth " Whiskers " (such was 
 his witty name for her) though apparently 
 plucky enough at most things, refused to 
 take part in these. His friend the sporting 
 writer, who had maintained his interest ever 
 in "the lad," was at last persuaded to put 
 his influence in the scale, he being very 
 anxious that the uppish potman of the 
 " Morley," who had carried all before him 
 thus far, should be taught his place ; so this 
 gentleman came round to our heroine and 
 endeavoured to talk her into it. With all 
 her willingness to oblige him, she found it 
 still abhorrent to her to turn to mere 
 money-making what was to her fine sport, 
 and like all fine sport, a duty of moral 
 and physical training. So she again firmly,
 
 Truth and its Teller. 55 
 
 but blushingly, refused, and he left her 
 somewhat out of temper. 
 
 Her dark friend and fellow porter, in his 
 •coarse manly way, noted her blushes with 
 some amusement, as a man will smile at 
 the flushes of a youth ; in a hearty good- 
 humored manner he put his arm around 
 her and called her his pretty sweetheart, 
 little guessing the exquisite feminine quality 
 of the flesh he so carelessly caressed ; she 
 shook with the unexpected pressure of his 
 virile frame against her ; then she angrily 
 disengaged herself ; unheeding his half-jesting 
 sorrow at provoking her she brooded moodily 
 in her corner ; all the depths of sex-instinct 
 had been stirred up in her — and he was a 
 fine fellow in his way — surely — and tempta- 
 tion urged the old familiar tale. She 
 hurried away to her room when work was 
 over, and moodily undressed ; all through 
 her head ran the terrible refrain — "You 
 must give up impossible ideals — you must 
 take this man — tell him your secret and he 
 is yours." And it rang through her head, 
 and rang again, and she felt powerless to 
 answer. She moodily undressed ; and half 
 unrobed stood playing captiously with her
 
 56 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 •woman's breast, divided between its native 
 longing to give suck, and the whispering 
 voice of all her spirituality that cried out 
 to her "Soul to soul we love, not body to 
 body ; bound to a body how shall the soul 
 aspire ? Shall the sweetness of your entrails 
 be to him only that of your fair flesh 1 
 Shall the charm of his virility be to you 
 only that of strong muscle ? Soul to soul we 
 love, not body to body; soul to soul must 
 babes be made, for the soul not the body 
 must love them ! " She choked down the 
 voice with a gasp, and shook with her 
 longing for the man, and put her hands 
 passionately to her breast — Ah ! What was 
 that she missed — where was her faded May 
 bloom? The string had snapped, it was 
 lost — she hunted the room, dressed and 
 hunted the stairs — then disconsolately entered 
 the room again to find it under the counter- 
 pane that she must have turned back on it 
 — oh, she kissed it madly many times ! 
 Then with a laugh the thought came back 
 to her of how some minutes back ( it 
 seemed ages) another man had occupied her 
 thoughts — it seemed impossible ! Then she 
 grew grave, and a threatening voice hissed
 
 Truth and its Teller. 57 
 
 in her ear " Adulteress ! " But a something 
 in her heart of hearts said to her '"You 
 could not have succumbed." 
 
 The next day two of the habitues of the 
 "Morley" stopped her outside — " Greyshirt, 
 they say you've shown the white feather " 
 said one of them. They called her Grey- 
 shirt because she always boxed in her loose 
 woollen shirt — a boxing sweater would have 
 betrayed too much of her contour, she was 
 slim enough for the loose garment to cover 
 all risk ; for after all it is ( whether for 
 good or ill ) so rare for a woman in this 
 country to learn the use of her fists that 
 suspicion was not likely to lurk in any 
 mind. The other man responded, laughing 
 coarsely " Greyshirt is right ; the gallant 
 potman is too much of a man to be lightly 
 faced ; I hear he has proved his manhood 
 once again ! " " The scullery maid this 
 time isn't it 1 Well a good-looking wench * 
 Particularly now she's stouter" remarked the 
 first. 
 
 Our girl's eye flashed — she was in no 
 mood this morning for such awful iteration 
 of how man's brutality treats woman's weak- 
 ness and laughs at the result. IShu cried 
 
 ■e-
 
 58 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 "Do you mean he has debauched that girl?" 
 The two men laughed " We didn't say so " 
 they said — implying of course that they 
 meant it. Then our girl bit her lip and 
 said — "If it is true I will fight him — and 
 she shall pocket the stakes if I win, for 
 the benefit of — " She broke off; and her 
 woman's cheeks flushed all crimson at the 
 thought of how some poor babies come into 
 the world. 
 
 The match was arranged between her and 
 the potman. And he had strength and 
 height and reach : but she the eyes of a 
 lioness fighting for her cubs. 
 
 The potman stood up in the ring, confident 
 of victory; and as time was called he cried 
 out to his opponent an easy "come on." 
 
 She came on, with teeth set, striking 
 full at his leering face ; several times she 
 came on, but he, perfectly cool, avoided her 
 blows and with some well timed counters 
 showed in this round an easy superiority. 
 
 The second round was called. She, teeth 
 set, mad, still did most of the leading 
 But she varied it this time with feints and 
 tricks and tried her bitter best to give him a 
 blow that would take that easy smile off
 
 Truth and its Teller. 5$ 
 
 his face, but do what she would, this round 
 again showed to her obvious disadvantage. 
 And she had been leading and tiring herself, 
 while he had been keeping his breath ! It 
 was clear to her that she must do some- 
 thing to overturn his easy self-confidence — 
 she hated to think that she could stand up 
 to champion right, and be beaten ! 
 
 Round three called. She looked at him, 
 then pulled off the gloves, threw them into 
 a corner, and advanced with bare fists, 
 motioning him to do the same. The whole 
 room shook with terrible emotion. Her 
 adversary paled ; stopped, would have liked 
 to have protested, but dared not. Then, 
 seeing he had no other course, he suddenly 
 threw off the gloves and sprang at her, 
 seeking to take her unprepared. It was a 
 coward's trick, and the coward paid for it 
 — the right hand counter on the ribs is 
 never the source of much enjoyment to the 
 receiver of it — and she followed it up by a 
 quick left on the mark, which sent him a 
 moment gasping. And through the rest of 
 that round, and the whole of the next, he 
 followed her up, seeking to knock her out 
 by a ferocious blow ; three times he knocked
 
 60 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 her down, but each time she sprang up 
 again ; and though her face was badly 
 marked by his hitting, and she felt blood 
 in her nose and mouth, she gave him in 
 return, with all her power, chiefly in skilful 
 counters, a constant series of body blows, 
 all body blows, having it in her mind to 
 so damage his wind as to stop him from 
 so readily following her up, fearing a blow 
 that should stun her and make her lose the 
 fight, resolved, at all risks, to spoil the 
 quickness of his moving. So the fifth round, 
 though it showed her terribly marked, and 
 he had scarce a scar, left those who knew 
 still thinking well of the chances of the 
 younger fighter. She began it by a plucky 
 l'ight-hander at the mark that seemed to 
 take away the rest of his wind ; and then 
 for a change she began to do the most of 
 the leading. Literally dancing round him, 
 now on, now off, keeping wonderfully out 
 of harm's way, she kept up a series of 
 blows not too heavy, but pretty continuous, 
 upon his face, chiefly upon his eyes. And 
 he let her do it for a little, bent on 
 recovering his wind, standing pretty still, 
 and guarding all he could. But when the
 
 Truth and its Teller. 61 
 
 round was nearly at an end he made a 
 sudden dart forward, and with a vicious cut 
 with his knuckles he ploughed up a seam 
 of flesh on her cheek bone, and the ugly 
 gash ran blood. He tried to follow it up, 
 but she, keeping wonderful pluck, retreated 
 in good order in no way disconcerted ; 
 and when he thought he had her in a 
 corner she landed both her hands fairly in 
 his eyes, and dodged away from further 
 punishment. 
 
 The blood still ran down her face as she 
 stood up bravely for the sixth round ; and 
 he laughed. And one of his friends said to 
 him " Knock his wind out old man so that 
 he can't dodge so much — then down on 
 him." But for all the girl was hurt there 
 was a look in her brave eyes that showed 
 she would take some beating yet, though 
 the blood did trickle down her grey shirt. 
 
 Both sides being tired and somewhat 
 desperate, the round started with some 
 heavy exchanges. He hit recklessly at her 
 wind and ribs ; she, with equal grimness, 
 pounded steadily at his eyes. It soon 
 became evident that if she could no longer 
 skip about, neither could he distinctly see* 
 
 F
 
 62 
 
 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 They alternately sparred and pounded with 
 terrible obstinacy. She gasped under his 
 fearful body blows, he moaned under her 
 punishment, but neither heeded anything 
 but the one thought of finishing the other 
 as speedily as possible. And when she 
 knew they were nearly through the round 
 she felt a mad desire to finish it anyhow 
 but now ; so she paused for two seconds' 
 breath, then, with undiminished courage, 
 stepped in to him, resolved to take all his 
 terrible hitting for the chance of breaking 
 him now and for all. There they stood, 
 and again his blows fell cruelly on her poor 
 ribs and body ; but hit on quick hit she 
 struck at his eyes till the blood fell from 
 both brows, and she never flinched under 
 her pain, but he, with a moan, tossed back 
 his head to free his eyes from their torturer- 
 then she put all her weight into a last 
 right-handed blow on his exposed throat, and 
 knocked him heavily on to the ground, 
 almost falling herself on top of him. 
 
 His backers anxiously called on him to 
 rise before the time allowed him had expired. 
 But he had no anxiety to meet again this 
 terrible adversary, whom no amount of
 
 Truth and its Teller. 63 
 
 punishment could deter, who, though worse 
 hurt of the two, still stood up for more, 
 ghastlily set on the thrashing of him; and 
 when he did not rise she knelt down and 
 cried out in a terrible voice "No matter 
 what the rules are — I will not cease this 
 fight with you, I will kick you into getting 
 up and fighting again, unless you admit 
 aloud that you were a cowardly cad for 
 what you did to that poor girl wbom you 
 left to bear all the brunt of it." 
 
 And as he lay on the floor he said " I 
 was a cowardly cad." 
 
 And her eve flashed, and she laughed — 
 then from all over the room came men 
 shaken by the wild excitement of the fight 
 to compliment her on her pluck and her 
 victory; and as they drew near her, and 
 saw how she tottered and how she ran 
 blood and could scarcely stand, they 
 marvelled the more; but when they men- 
 tioned in their praises her efforts on the 
 side of virtue there came a look into their 
 faces that made the blood rush to the 
 bleeding wounds of her face, and she 
 haughtily strode from the room — for sex- 
 virtue is still a mockery to a world of
 
 64 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 men too vulgar to see it as anything but 
 coldness. 
 
 As she got out of the room she found 
 suddenly that she could scai'cely crawl — 
 but her friend, the sporting-writer, came up 
 and caught her in his arms, and carried 
 her up to a bedroom, the best in the 
 house ; and he laid her on a couch there, 
 and stood gazing at her, and said " Oh 
 you damned handsome boy ! More than hand- 
 some, for the dauntless look of you is 
 handsomer than all handsomeness — for your 
 face is not a mere face as beauties 
 oft have it — but a face that is lit from 
 every rich reckless twist of nerve, every 
 inch of the mad heroic guts of you ! 
 Manly and pure ! And I, a blackguard, 
 will you give me a handshake'?" 
 
 And the tears came into her eyes ; she 
 knew he was the soul of truth always ; 
 she caught his hand in both hers, then 
 reeled giddily, and was terribly sick. And 
 he was very kind ; he waited on her with 
 every thoughtfulness, he would let no one 
 else enter ; he wished to strip her and rub 
 her down (taking her still to be a young 
 man) ; but in this, her worst of difficulties,
 
 Truth and its Teller. 65 
 
 her nerve did not leave her — when she 
 found she could not persuade him to leave 
 her — (she had no reason to give him' — >he 
 sent him down for some brandy and water, 
 and slipped into bed while he was absent ; 
 he was not quick, and she heard some 
 noise downstairs ; then he came up all of a 
 hurry and somewhat angry. 
 
 He scarcely seemed to notice her being 
 already abed ; he bit his lips as he stood 
 there, and said to her abruptly "You 
 know, do you not, that I honour your 
 virtue? I at least know virtue from vice." 
 She flushed, and guessed what had passed 
 downstairs — she half moved out of bed and 
 cried out " So they still think it part of a 
 man's life to ruin girls ! Let them come 
 up, I will thrash them all ! '' She ground 
 her teeth and cursed. "All right, you 
 concentrated sinew," he said cheerfully, "I 
 broke six of their heads — I could give them 
 no more heavenly sign, as Christ said to 
 the Pharisees ! " 
 
 " Thank you," she said, '' But I know 
 them ! A tussle between two bulldogs gives a 
 pleasant thrill to their nerves, so they are 
 obliged to the combatants; but the part
 
 66 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 of a fight that makes it a fight of honour 
 is beyond their meagre intelligences." " Oh 
 damn them, damn them ! " said her friend. 
 " Look here, I will tell you since you 
 know — they sneered at you in their slang 
 as lacking what they were pleased to call 
 ' One part of a man ' — the fools ! And then 
 I showed them what to sneer at ! But 
 think of it ! A Burns, a Byron, a Balzac, 
 three poor trivial vulgarities who might have 
 been men, were found to hymn the blatant 
 bellowings of the wretched crew. Qu'y a-t-il 
 de plus honteux en France que l'impuissance, 
 que la froideur, que l'absence de toute 
 passion, que la niaiserie ? * Such is Balzac 
 upon the youth of virtue ! So this impotent 
 ignorant, because he could not restrain hi3 
 animalism thought he must be a man, and 
 raised a scoff that would exclude a Beethoven 
 from the title ! Look here, I am a cad 
 myself, but I know it — and I know men 
 and can thrash blackguards — and I know, 
 good youth, that there is more potency 
 and passion in your purity than in their 
 indulgence ; far more real blood in your 
 
 * From ' ' Physiologie du Mariage."
 
 Truth and its Teller. 67 
 
 restraint than they will put into their 
 eldest born ! You should have brave boys 
 when you make yours, you who will not 
 creep flippantly to fatherhood — remember 
 that I, who speak, have been one of the 
 trivial ones, I make no pretence. And I 
 know that the struggle you must have had to 
 keep pure (full-blooded rich-gutted youth that 
 you are !) made a harder battle, a grander 
 victory for you than this night's was ! 
 You have won all yours — and I lost all 
 mine ! But be a little tender with me ; 
 Mahomet and Swedenborg founded religions 
 and were both as sensual as I am; 
 remember I have founded no religion, knew 
 at least my place ! " 
 
 In the tone of this singular man lay a 
 trembling tenderness, an evident sensitive 
 love of true moral character so touching in 
 him that she could have wept at it ; she 
 wrung his hand and said " Thank you, 
 thank you ; one thing only I shall remember 
 of you, all the rest I shall forget; and 
 that is that you are most good and kind 
 to me." And he left her, greatly moved, 
 and went downstairs again.
 
 68 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 She lay there passing towards sleep ; and 
 through the flooring she still heard all high 
 in talk about her ; but she, thinking of 
 none of them, still mused sweetly of one 
 under whose command she acted; every ache 
 was a new rapture ; till sleep blest her 
 body with the sweetest peace. 
 
 And her face, with its dauntless beauty 
 thrown up strong by its black and brown 
 terrible bruises and crimson wales, seemed 
 to haunt her strange friend the sporting 
 writer ; and at midnight he crept into her 
 room with a lamp to look at her again. 
 And as he gazed on her an absurd un- 
 accountable idea came to him ; and something 
 in her breathing as she slept there seemed 
 to give an impossible support to his 
 ridiculous notion — but when he carefully 
 pulled back the bedclothes, undid the night- 
 dress, lo the absurd, the impossible, the 
 ridiculous, was true / It was a woman that 
 lay there ! 
 
 He looked no longer, but reverently 
 covered the sweet bruised body up ; then 
 stole to his room. A woman, a woman, a 
 woman, this youth that he loved ! All his 
 senses burnt and ached with that dainty
 
 Truth and its Teller. 69 
 
 knowledge — a woman, a woman ! With 
 instant sex-instinct he blushed to think of 
 the things he had told her about men, 
 about himself — he blushed, who had not 
 blushed these 20 years ! 
 
 A woman, a woman ! — he could not think, 
 overwhelmed by the sweetness of it. 
 
 A woman! Fancy that woman for a wife! 
 The close cuddling of a grand girl like 
 that ! He was a hell-deserving fool if he 
 missed her ! 
 
 Miss her ! How could he miss her 1 A 
 man like him, well up in all the strange 
 secret springs of humanity, easily a head 
 and shoulders above the men she had met ; 
 and she in man's clothing must have learnt 
 to see through all the others ! All the 
 others — and him too? Then he cursed his 
 frankness with all the curses he knew, and 
 cursed himself and the parents who made 
 him ; and he swore over it all that she 
 should have him ! Why be hopeless ? She 
 must know that in very truth he was one 
 of the world's strong men — a man in his 
 own character ! And Mahomet and Swedcn- 
 borg had been as sensual as he, and he 
 had this claim over them — that he had not
 
 70 Truth aiul its Teller. 
 
 sought to found religions, he knew his 
 unworthiness. 
 
 Knew his unworthiness? Sought to found 
 no religion ? Was not the seeking of the 
 love of a pure girl as much as the founding 
 of a religion, yea even the veritable making, 
 flesh blood and all, of a new sect ; a baby 
 sect to make the new generation — was he 
 fitted to be their patriarch? He groaned in 
 terrible mad anguish; he writhed his limbs; 
 he gnawed his lips as he was gnawing his 
 soul. 
 
 "Too impure, too impure, too impure!" The 
 record rang out in his brain ! In that 
 moment he remembered the belfry he used 
 to stand in as a boy, attracted by the 
 terrible gonging that made his every sense 
 dull and dizzy with its smashing noise — 
 just in that way the outcry "Too impure!' 
 seemed jangling his every sense into im- 
 potency. He wrestled terribly to gain his 
 nerve-control. But the gonging grew louder, 
 and there arose also a second brazen voice 
 in his ear — the brazen one of vice striving 
 to out-din the brazen one of virtue — a voice 
 that cried out " Force her, force her ! " and 
 carried in its echoing overtones a suggestion
 
 Truth and its Teller. 71 
 
 of how wondrous sweet would be the 
 struggling with such a girl as that — the 
 fighting and mastering of her before, against 
 her will, he got what he wanted to get. 
 
 The next morning, as soon as she was 
 up, he was there waiting on her; mutely 
 reverently tenderly satisfying every wish, 
 bringing every comfort before even it had 
 time to be wished. 
 
 But, unlike himself, he said nothing ; 
 with a hungry gaze followed her ever with 
 his eyes, drinking in the splendours of her 
 manifold beauties. She, absorbed, for some 
 little time did not notice his taciturnity — 
 then she laughingly remarked on it, ignorant 
 utterly of its cause. " Silent ! " he said, 
 bitterly " Yes I am silent ! I have little 
 cause to open my mouth ! I discovered a 
 new thing last night — that I, who made 
 myself out different, am in reality only one 
 of the crowd of the vulgar cads of men ! 
 My acts are the same as theirs — and if I 
 try to make (as I used to make) a 
 difference in my clearer recognition, then all 
 the more damned cad me that seeing it the 
 more clearly I do nothing, nothing, nothing 
 to alter or improve it ! The life led is the
 
 72 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 test, and mine condemns me. Marriage ! 
 Which of us vulgar crowd is fit for 
 marriage, marriage rich pure union of souls 
 fit to repeat themselves, marriage as you 
 might know it, as any clean man or woman 
 might know it? Do not talk of marriage 
 to such as us — let us, as we do, consort 
 with harlots, they are our fit partners, 
 shame our fit passion, a grin and a drink 
 our fit wooing, a scandal our achieved 
 paternity — how other than a scandal can be 
 the repetition of such as we are ? Impure, 
 impure, impure ! " And he buried his head 
 in his hands, scalded them with tears that 
 broke as blood might from his strong heart. 
 Then he looked up and stared at her, even 
 as she was staring at him, and said with 
 terrible emphasis " I wish to amend the 
 remnant of this life of mine ; one thing 
 would help me — mind I ask no more than 
 just what I say — If a pure woman would 
 but kiss me once ! " And he stared at her,, 
 and said again and then again, with rising 
 terrible emphasis " If a pure woman would 
 but kiss me once ! " 
 
 And lost in wonderment she stepped up 
 to him, put up her mouth to him, kissed 

 
 Truth and its Teller. 73 
 
 him on the mouth ; and she knew by the 
 way he took her kiss that he knew she 
 was a woman ; and with downcast eyes he 
 left the room, never to see her more. 
 
 In the afternoon she had to receive a 
 gathering of the " smartest " members of 
 the Morley set, congratulating her on her 
 victory — and very heartily they did it, with 
 a good English admiration for so tenacious 
 a specimen of the obstinate old breed. 
 
 And what if they had known she was a 
 girl ! But they merely remarked the hand- 
 some curves of the youth's face, made 
 grand with many scars, and marvelled at 
 his pluck. 
 
 And a surprise awaited her. One of 
 them, (a noble lord if you please), brought 
 her a purse of forty pounds they had put 
 together, begged her acceptation of it. They 
 all admired, he said, the grand spirit that 
 prompted the youth to refuse persistently 
 to fight for money ; they all admired the 
 noble purpose for which it was fought 
 ( this lord of many harlots here suppressed 
 his smile ) ; and without suggesting for a 
 moment any pay they offered a testimony 
 of their esteem; and suggested, with all
 
 74 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 due deference and respect, that so young 
 a lad would do well, after the exhaustion 
 of so doggedly plucky a fight, to take some 
 rest and holiday. The acceptance of the 
 C'ift would confer a real favour upon all 
 who had witnessed the manly performance. 
 
 She hesitated ; then she thought with an 
 inward smile of that uncle of hers, with 
 his protest that it would go a worse way 
 if she refused it ; so she put on her 
 kindest manner, and in a few really-felt 
 words (she was touched at their evident 
 good feeling) told them how grateful she 
 was, and what a pleasant variation it would 
 make to her from the sameness of her 
 life. 
 
 His lordship in reply intimated that any 
 post suitable on his estate would be open 
 to the youth's acceptance on his return ; 
 and when she had thanked him graciously 
 the interview closed. 
 
 As she walked her way she could not. 
 restrain a merry laugh at the thought that 
 his lordship's answer, taken literally, left 
 a coronet open to her ! This put her into 
 a train of reflection. Her woman's instinc- 
 tive recognition of the romance innate in
 
 Truth and its Teller. 75 
 
 man told her, and told her truly, that she 
 had but to declare herself a woman and 
 this common-place libertine would marry her 
 in the face of all the world, penniless low- 
 born orphan though she was. Here had 
 her master shown his knowledge of Man — 
 he had seized the one generosity, that 
 of sex to sex, that must in some faint 
 way exist even in the meanest of natures ; 
 expanding it with a huge idealism he had 
 built of it a whole religion ; a dream of 
 the purest grandeur that still never left 
 the tangible out of grip. Then her thoughts 
 went to the strange man who had quitted 
 her so strangely that morning — ( he, had 
 she known it, had put the half of the 
 money down) — from the way he had kissed 
 her she knew that he knew her a woman 
 — knew her, loved her, kissed her, left 
 her ; that was his pure record, the only 
 one fit between them ; he was a man 
 indeed, reverently she recognised it. 
 
 By the side of him, in what light stood 
 these others, who pitied a youth bruised, 
 and jested coarsely at a maiden violated? 
 She wished she had not taken their money ; 
 overpowered momentarily by a sense of their
 
 76 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 kindness she had taken it ; but there it 
 was, and with it a chance of closing her 
 eyes for a little while to the sickening 
 sight of the town life around her ; but 
 before it all one purpose dominated her — 
 she must look once more on the face of 
 him who was her master, her best of 
 friends, her guide to the victory of victories, 
 that over her worser self ; she must look 
 once more on his face whether known to 
 him or not — perhaps better not known to 
 him. 
 
 She came to the house she knew, and 
 knocked. A man opened ; she asked with 
 inward trembling for him she wanted ; 
 "Yes, he is in" came the reply, "But he 
 is in bed very ill." " 111 " she almost 
 shrieked "dangerously?" "Well," replied 
 the man, " I hope it won't be fatal ; it 
 would be very awkward for me to have a 
 death in the house." She could have 
 knocked him down — without a word she 
 passed up into the room. 
 
 He lay like a corpse as she gazed at 
 him — turning feebly to her he said "Who 
 is that — I can but half see," it was the 
 old grave simple voice. She replied all in
 
 Truth and its Teller. 77 
 
 a tumult " One who has read your book, 
 and made of it meat and drink, and a 
 staff to stand up by, shoes to walk in, and 
 a rule to walk by — one who has lived by 
 it, loved it, lived honourably by it, loved 
 honour through it, one who comes to look 
 at you, thank you." 
 
 Her face glowed with a wondrous smile. 
 He held out his hand — she clasped it 
 eagerly — and for the rest of the evening 
 each held the other, glad of the sweet 
 symbolism of soul-union. 
 
 In a moment he spoke, dreamily, ecsta- 
 tically. " Life is like to the restless yawn 
 of a man half-awoke from his slumber. It 
 comes after a dead sleep, and merges into 
 a dead sleep, and is itself but vague and 
 half-awake. Tiny atoms in a limitless 
 universe, awake but for the smallest particle 
 of eternal time, what is our living save a 
 thing of the meagrest importance 1 But 
 this we know assuredly, that of all the 
 wondrous miracles of nature none is so 
 beautiful in grandeur and sweetness as the 
 true speech of soul to soul. You to me, 
 I to you, have passed a word of under- 
 standing. It is enough — I am content."
 
 78 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 She knew aforetime of the Atheism of 
 this man — she had accepted it without a 
 question. But at this moment a belief in 
 God suddenly came to her as absolute 
 truth (there as she gazed at her lover) 
 and she whispered " Is there no God, no 
 Eternity?" 
 
 "I cannot believe in them," he said 
 " Man's conceit invented them — he would 
 not admit that Nature made him, nor that 
 he could die. But in his very religion he 
 proves his material origin. Listen to the 
 outcry of the pulpits ; it is this — ' Strive to 
 gain Heaven, to avoid Hell ' — those who 
 should be the chief ministers of spirituality 
 are but the ones who loudly cry out a 
 mere sensual material selfish bargain — do 
 this for desire of Heaven, for fear of Hell, 
 they cry — dogs are trained on the same 
 formula. But I cry out ' Be moral, keep 
 the ways of Honour, be passionately chaste, 
 serve Love as the highest — and disdain 
 reward.' Honour and Chastity, Morality and 
 Love — these promise nothing, ask everything 
 — these a man serves because he loves to 
 serve them, passionately loves them for their 
 own sake — no religion can offer so high a
 
 Truth and its Teller. 79 
 
 doctrine as unselfish Atheist morality. And 
 as I lie here poor, miserable, unknown, 
 dying, I rejoice in the thought that my 
 service of these idealities has brought me 
 no reward save the joy and pride of that 
 service. 
 
 No reward did I say 1 I was well off, 
 honour made me poor — I had friends — 
 honour tore them from me — and terriblest 
 of all, no girl has loved me — I who served 
 love have lost in that service love's own 
 privileges — and in my loneliness, as I pass 
 into the black night of Death, I cry out 
 — it is good ! I am content ! How shall 
 I count the cost of Honour and her 
 service 1 
 
 Listen to this — Nature, mere material, 
 evolved mind by some accident, grew it 
 little by little. In material nature it served 
 but the purpose of directing certain inde- 
 pendent material formations which thus 
 became what we call alive. And in proof of 
 it you may see how to-day ninety-nine men 
 out of the hundred have no use for their 
 minds save the more systematically to gain 
 satisfaction of mere material instincts — 
 and religion itself prostitutes its voice to
 
 80 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 a mere — "Heaven is desh'able, Hell is 
 undesirable " — oh the horror of it ! 
 
 But by the sweetest of accidents it came 
 about that souls were parted in twain, two 
 different halves, each necessary for the other. 
 And thus unselfishness began to appear 
 gradually, and with it all spirituality. And 
 so the basis, nay the very sum of all that 
 we call the higher life is Love ! 
 
 What could be holier to us, were our 
 natures grave and holy, than the sublime 
 union of souls that brings new sweet lives 
 into the world, lives in which the blood of 
 a man and of his sweetheart go on blending 
 and blending? The world fouls this sacra- 
 ment into mere lust because it has no soul, 
 feels nothing but material sensation ! With 
 all its pretence of God and religion it is 
 so base and material that the very making 
 of men, the very issue by which itself is 
 produced and reproduced, is either hid in a 
 shameful silence or grinned over with coarse 
 suggestiveness. But this world of libertines 
 that lies to its young girls from the 
 coarseness of its own instincts I have arisen 
 and stung with the bitterness of my voice, 
 stung still more by the grand pictures I
 
 Truth and its Teller. 81 
 
 have drawn of high honour and chaste 
 passion — and I lie here, my life wrecked 
 through my service of love, and am 
 content ! 
 
 Rich, and it made me poor (the world's 
 hate ruined me), having friends, and it took 
 them away ( they dared not be known as 
 the friends of him who preached honour), 
 healthy and it racked me with pains ( for 
 I worked into dead of night, being at 
 work at business all day ), loving women 
 passionately (it was love that taught me 
 all I know, love the foundation of all 
 spirituality!) — I say loving women passionately 
 I could find none to love me, and I die 
 virgin, for none could take a pure man 
 who cried out that love was chaste, and 
 that its every sweetness could be spoken of 
 — I say none would take me, they dared 
 not for fear of what their neighbours would 
 say — I, who have served love with all my 
 blood, all my nerves, all my brain, all my 
 terrible personality, I have *felt never a 
 woman's kiss on my lips ! And all will 
 say that that book wrecked my life ; but 
 I, who knew that this would be before 
 ever I wrote it, I cry out that this book
 
 82 Truth and its Teller, 
 
 made my life, is my life, will be my life 
 after the mere flesh of me has died» 
 broken down by the strain of it, by the 
 blood I put into it — I tell you that book 
 is my life, my soul, my honour, and my 
 love — I am content." 
 
 He stopped ; she answered him as in a 
 rapture " I am come into the fresh air 
 here. Outside there, in the world, things 
 rose into my throat and choked me ; here 
 all is different, different — I can breathe — I 
 am in fresh pure air." 
 
 And he clasped her hand hard ; and it 
 seemed to her that a soft sweet tear fell 
 upon it. And he said " We two are 
 brothers ; two of that rare and noble family 
 who, beyond the power of any stroke of 
 fortune to hurt our dauntless souls, find 
 none the less a more terrible grief than 
 any our own fate could give us in the 
 life around us — the mean miserable meagre- 
 hearted life ^pound us. In the world that 
 we hate and love, and must hate and must 
 love, and both to the uttermost (poor 
 wretched world) — there lies the grief that 
 afflicts us, the grief without cure.
 
 Truth and its Teller. 83 
 
 And men have said to me "Feel things 
 less, feel things less " — if I could let myself 
 feel the dishonour of my fellow-men less, 
 then were I myself well started on the 
 path of dishonour ! So I cried to myself 
 " Feel them more, feel things more ! " And 
 the more terrible the melancholy that lay 
 heavy on me, the more loudly did I cry 
 to myself to weep under its bitter affliction ; 
 knowing that in that lay the deeper 
 spirituality, the thing that would save the 
 world could the world but feel it, that 
 passionate moaning, never contentable, over 
 the degradation of humanity. 
 
 Oh this century of ours, I know it — for 
 I have observed with deep and passionate 
 observations since ever I was eight— these are 
 its components : First, what need to discuss 
 those so-called " Noble," who revel in a 
 slough of Sycophancy ? What need to 
 mention the claims of such or their backers? 
 Begin then at the much -mixed middle 
 classes, and find at the top of admiration 
 are the lying commercials and thieving 
 lawyers, swindling and impudent company 
 promoters — a century of cads and cut- 
 purses, all worshipped by the lesser cads
 
 84 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 and cut-purses who wish more than they 
 can. 
 
 I have seen men struck in the face, and 
 they dared not strike back, neither had 
 they proper shame enough to hide the fact ; 
 but they slink round to a lawyer, and first 
 try what money they can get out of it ; 
 or next the paltry revenge of a court of 
 law — a century of sharks and sneaks. 
 Some few buffetted left-behinds, desperate 
 anarchists holding their own lives cheap, 
 make millions tremble with cowardly terror; 
 and while a few sleek senators wounded is 
 an overwhelming outrage, the scum even of 
 this civilisation is allowed, scarce a murmur 
 uttered, to mow down with Hellish machinery 
 into ghastly bloody heaps poor savages, less 
 savage than the best of their adversaries — 
 and how you will be laughed at if you 
 suggest to a man that he should not take 
 money shares in a company of such robbers 
 and murderers — a century of cowards and 
 cut-throats. 
 
 But money is the measure of all. For 
 money there slave in pig-dens of warehouses, 
 live in pig-dens of dwellings, rot in con- 
 secrated corpse-dens, a nation that might
 
 Truth and its Teller. 85 
 
 have sap, ought to have blood, should have 
 entrails — money above them keeps them 
 down ; each sells his life for money, none 
 would risk his money to gain his life; and 
 mixed with a blind envy and a blind 
 hatred is still a blind fear of the money 
 that is above them — so with neither wit 
 to live nor courage to die they go on — a 
 century all dolts and dittoes. 
 
 And there are socalists in this century 
 who would reform it all — each is to sell 
 his last rag of a chance of freedom, man- 
 hood or individuality, each puts a stone 
 willingly to that building half workhouse, 
 half jail, half reformatory that they call 
 their state — and in return gets a promise 
 of his meals regular ! Promise of a century 
 all paupers and .... 
 
 The girls of this century, as one would 
 suppose, are sold by their parents to the 
 highest bidder. If a woman is jilted by a 
 man who asked her love she brings him to 
 the law courts, and takes money of him, 
 and is satisfied. And if a woman is 
 deflowered by a man she brings him to the 
 law courts as satisfaction for her forced 
 virginity — time was when girls carried
 
 86 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 knives — but that is over, the law court 
 washes out honour-stains in this century 
 of documents and dastards ! And if you 
 seduce the wives of this exhibition century 
 the husband similarly brings you to the 
 law court to satisfy his honour, and will, 
 if he has an excuse for it, take money of 
 you to satisfy his feelings — for this century 
 knows not that a man is a foul beast 
 that will bring his wife (no matter what, 
 still his wife) into a divorce court ; and 
 that if he takes money over the loss of 
 his wife's honour he is selling his wife's 
 honour; and that if a girl takes money 
 over the slighting of her love she is 
 putting a money price on her love ; and 
 if she marry for money she is putting a 
 money price on her body. 
 
 Oh century of bastards born of bawds 
 and bona-robas, where can you show me 
 men ! Oh self-styled images of God ! Like 
 God to know good from evil, choosing the 
 evil, finding that sweetest! Like a God 
 with the power of creation — and the 
 miserable high water-mark of your most 
 snivelling ruin being your treatment of that 
 same power of creation ! By what stupidity is
 
 Truth and its Te.llet. 87 
 
 it allowed to such things to make men 1 For 
 this richest and noblest faculty — they blush 
 at ! Blush at the filth they themselves 
 have put over it ! They drag the dignity 
 of Gods into a lustful mire, and there with 
 foul things their fellows have made foul 
 they reek, and reek, and reek — death's 
 rottenness is sweet to it ! The holiest of 
 trusts is made into a stinking dishonour — 
 and men never talk of it save to grin 
 over their supreme abasement. 
 
 And I have dreamt of two blending in 
 holy ecstasy, pure with the very madness 
 of purity ; rent with the thought of joy 
 that their unmixed blood shall die, and be 
 no more, but that that of the two, the 
 blood of these twin sweethearts mixed, shall 
 flow ever in its place, while more sweet- 
 hearts, more sweethearts, more sweethearts, 
 shall be ever added to the factors, till the 
 rich stream shall seem the very tide of 
 love itself. 
 
 I have dreamt that a man should rejoice 
 in death, and that he has no future life — 
 feeling how much sweeter it was that his 
 only survival should be in those children 
 that mixed with his the blood of his
 
 88 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 sweetheart — and the humanity I see when 
 awake flings its genitals to whores ! Yet 
 look you good youth, make this the ideal 
 of your life — Love every man — despite the 
 awful ideal-born necessity of despising him, 
 each man you meet you must love. But 
 outside that, live separate — a weeping 
 terrible dissatisfied man. Pessimism is the 
 difference between idealism and reality — the 
 proof of a man who will not satisfy himself 
 with less than the deepest longing of his 
 soul ; be even such a pessimist. Put these 
 ideals before yourself — cry out for them or 
 ever you will be satisfied : — 
 
 Before you will be satisfied the race of 
 men must tell, and more than tell, must 
 live the perfect truth — in all its nakedness, 
 shirking nothing, live the perfect truth — If 
 they are shame-faced, or if they grin at 
 the natural decent operations of the body, 
 if any part of the body is shameful to 
 them ; and if beyond and before all things 
 those sweet doings with their sweatheart- 
 wives that make the birth of all of us are 
 shameful in their eyes — if they thus tacitly 
 consent themselves to make their very 
 entrance to the world a mockery and a
 
 Truth and its Teller. S9 
 
 shame — then with such a world you dare 
 not ever be satisfied. 
 
 Before you will be satisfied the race of 
 men must be such that they live in social 
 virtue justly and decently with one another 
 without the need of the fear of any law, 
 the hope of any reward, to keep them 
 straight. The virtue that obeys a law of 
 rewards and punishment is no virtue, but 
 a calculation. And I tell you if men were 
 men there could be a state where virtue 
 was punished, and vice rewarded, and yet 
 men live virtuous. And here some scoffing 
 fool will laugh at me, and cry out that I 
 dream impossibilities — Impossibilities / Have 
 I not served virtue when I knew it would 
 lead (as it did lead) to my punishment — 
 refused vice when society offered me for vice 
 a high reward — how possibly could I be 
 so wretchedly self- conceited to accept as 
 passable a humanity of lesser beings than 
 myself ? 
 
 These then the ideals that must guide 
 you to misery and failure, and the 
 mockery of men — follow them to the very 
 end ! "
 
 90 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 And he spoke as he needed to speak, 
 friend to friend heart-free ; disdaining an 
 unreal posturing at humility that might 
 have degraded a lesser mind; he knew well 
 he was a man. 
 
 And it is well for a man to know 
 himself, lest he be turned from his path ; 
 let those who read, note ! 
 
 And she said to him " Tell me your 
 life; that I may know how to fail as you 
 have failed ; and to be miserable as yon 
 have been miserable; and to be mocked as 
 you have been mocked." And she felt 
 again on her hand the pressure of his 
 hand, and the fall of a sweet soft tear 
 from him, a heart-healing tear for him, 
 wrought by her loving compassion ; and 
 more to her were these than the pressure 
 and moisture other girls took on their 
 wedding nights. 
 
 And he said "I will tell you the whole 
 frank story of myself, of my strength and 
 of my weakness ; a story of an artist, a 
 story of all my burning heart, and the 
 miseries and greatness of it, and my 
 v passionate loving-hatred of the world, and 
 how I loved women, and how I lost them,
 
 Truth and its Teller. 91 
 
 and my art and what it cost me, and 
 how, in moments of weakness, I have 
 furiously regretted it, and with what huge 
 strength and joy in sacrifice and mad 
 gladness I have rejoiced in it ; and of 
 that most tragic and awful thing that 
 brought so near to my very blood that 
 eternal degradation of humanity which before 
 I had so intensely and bitterly wept at; 
 and the morbid horror of life that arose 
 out of it, and the longing for death. 
 
 And the dream of a woman, a woman 
 as my very ideal, a woman whom I once 
 half seemed to meet and turned away 
 from, a woman whom somehow sweetly 
 your voice brings to my mind — who, in 
 my fantastic dreaming, I thought would 
 come too late, but oh so sweetly though 
 too late, and on my very death-bed kiss 
 me the kiss that life denied to me, the 
 kiss of love I hungered for so long ! 
 
 You shall hear it — this story of a heart 
 that really loves, this heart that really 
 feels, this heart built for sorrow — for 
 sorrow that is greater than joy ! Give me 
 a moment's pause, and I will tell it you ! 
 Tell it you as I dreamt in that dream of
 
 92 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 mine I should tell it, on my death-bed, to 
 a woman who came thus at last, and so 
 sweetly that I forgot it was too late — you 
 shall be that woman for me ! " And these 
 two smiled at one another, with the grave 
 great happiness of two grand sad souls 
 meeting ; and she, being the woman, kissed 
 his hand, and he stroked her head, 
 thinking over the words he had to say to 
 her ; and she felt no harm in her disguise, 
 for she knew that this pure and noble 
 man had no word to say that he would 
 not have said to a woman-friend as much 
 as to a man ; for such as he had but one 
 way of speaking, the honourable ; they 
 made no distinctions; need make none. 
 
 Thus he told his story : — 
 
 "Know me as a soul innocent and 
 passionate; there is no innocence like the 
 innocence of pure passion. As a boy I 
 dreamt huge dreams, even as I dream now, 
 dreamt but could not then understand 
 them. As a youth the time came for me 
 to go into the world ; and I, poor youth, 
 with my passion and my innocence, rejoicing 
 in my idealising heart at my on-coming 
 manhood, rejoiced thus to go into the
 
 Truth and its Teller. 93 
 
 work of life by the side of men ; and 
 they laughed at my innocence, stared at 
 my ideals, sought to make muddy my 
 passion — so ! These were men after all ! 
 And I laid low, brooding, saying nothing, 
 watching them till I knew them from top 
 to toe, did not give over my hopes of 
 them till I knew for certain what worthless 
 vulgarities they were. Then in my third 
 period, a full-grown man, I went back to 
 the rich melancholy dreams of my boyhood 
 — only now I understood them, terrible 
 prophecies of the mute agonies awaiting me 
 from the badness of men ! — And thus the 
 stories I wrote at twenty-six were but clear 
 muscular drawings from the dreams I had 
 at seventeen — separated by that black abyss 
 of my life, the time I spent in learning 
 men ! 
 
 Take this from me, it sums up the 
 misery and glory of my life — that I am 
 an innocent, the simplest single-mindedest of 
 innocents. And all life and its functions 
 are to. me simple, innocent and worthy ; 
 and the functions of sex, the producing of 
 life, are the most worthy, the most simple, 
 the most innocent. Think of the tragedy 
 
 H
 
 94 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 of such a man brought up in a city ; 
 shudder over the horror of it; but in the 
 throes of that great shudder remember, 
 with a joy whose tremour shall out-shake 
 that shudder, the glory of innocence 
 retained, nay heightened, a thousand-fold 
 sublimed. 
 
 Take one instance to tell the whole — 
 I stood waiting in a shop once, and next 
 me was a sweet young girl of about fourteen 
 (sweet in all the sweetness of approaching 
 womanhood) ; and the shopman said to her, 
 about some order she was leaving " You 
 shall have it up soon Missie " ; and seeing 
 her there in all the sweetness of approach- 
 ing womanhood I could not but think of 
 the double meaning his words might bear 
 in the slang of towns — and my thought 
 was one of intensest and tenderest poetry — 
 yet had I spoken it aloud where was the 
 man but would have translated it into 
 some miserable filthiness created by his own 
 foul mind ? Oh worse a million times than 
 in the wretchedest solitary dungeon it is 
 to live in a world where one dare not 
 speak sweet innocent truth ! Every day a 
 shackle was on my tongue, and some poetry
 
 Truth and its Teller. 95 
 
 of thought was silenced — silenced and for 
 ever lost ! — And I, how could I stand the 
 horror of it, the horror of a world so foul 
 that one dared not speak words of innocence 
 to it, so foully would the world translate 
 them to its own meanings ! 
 
 It was my life's work to breathe out 
 such poetry of thought — lacking that I 
 lacked my life, dumb in a hopeless misery ! 
 And the eternal daily inforced silence but 
 impelled me the stronger to speak in Art. 
 Oh nature which is beauty ! Oh beauty 
 which is nature ! Let who will turn from 
 you, I dare not turn from you ! 
 
 There are two extremes of pessimism — 
 one that out-fouls the foulness of the world 
 in the vileness of its reckoning up of life 
 and function — such a foulness as Tolstoi's, 
 that goat whom the irony of baptism mis- 
 called a lion, he who made no less than a 
 supreme purity of supreme Beethoven to be 
 the writing paper for his muddy thoughts 
 to soil. In the middle comes the average 
 man, with some possibilities on rare occasions, 
 who fouls most things on most occasions. 
 At the other end come I and such as I — 
 to whom all life, all natural function is
 
 96 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 holy — so holy that they can never cease to 
 grieve over a world that cannot see their 
 plain holinesses ; and the optimist who can 
 cease to grieve is but by so much less a 
 man. 
 
 The optimist in his folly has elevated 
 happiness into a necessity, a duty, a 
 sacrament — happiness is no necessity, no 
 duty, no sacrament. In our humanity of 
 incapacity, sorrow is the seal of a mind 
 deep and capable — sorrow at a humanity 
 that cannot do its simplest things decently 
 or well. 
 
 Worship then the gaudy pageant of grief 
 to make your eyes shine and your cheeks 
 go swollen red, with a beauty greater than 
 smiling ! And underneath to make the 
 mind know and feel and pity, to be wise 
 and strong and merciful, and to enrich 
 itself with a full store of courage and of 
 charity. — Oh courage and charity, courage 
 and charity, these are the highest ! From 
 the joys of my life I could spare many — 
 almost all ! Sorry to part, still let them 
 go ! But of the sorrows — no not one, not 
 the least, not the slighest of my sorrows — 
 let me keep all and feel more, for in
 
 Truth and its Teller. 97 
 
 sorrow lies all that is good and of worth, 
 aye all the joys themselves, tender flowers 
 can but spring fairly up where the 
 sorrows with tears have melted the ground, 
 melted the hard ground of the heart and 
 mind — all other joy is but a spawning 
 weed, all that grows not out of softening 
 sorrow ! Show me a great man — I will 
 show you one with a huge capacity of grief 
 — so shall it ever be. 
 
 The highest doctrine, I have said it, I 
 repeat it, is this — that the highest sens 1 - 
 tiveness produces pain ; that the highest 
 sensitiveness is the noblest thing there is ; 
 that a man who is a man must face the 
 pain with a laugh, strive ever for the 
 highest sensitiveness. 
 
 And when he feels that happiness would 
 come sweeter and easier to him if he could 
 but get away from the surrounding of 
 selfish and degraded humanity — then he 
 must the closer cling to humanity, servo 
 them and love them in despite of all. 
 
 Melancholy pessimist, ever in my inmost 
 heart divided from men by that melancholy 
 ideality that is the badgo of those who 
 are greater than their fellows, yet know
 
 98 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 this of me — in its way as high a victory 
 as I have achieved, a victory that was a 
 necessary part of my other victory, of my 
 victory of victories, my book — know this— 
 that the men who met me in daily life, 
 in the daily life of business, close known 
 and observed under one roof — they loved 
 me. 
 
 For with them I was comrade to comrade 
 always ; comrade in joy and in sorrow, in 
 rest and in work. And my gloomy ideals 
 and sad pessimism did but the stronger 
 make my charity and humanity to all the 
 men that I met — sadness for the many 
 never made a hardness for the one. 
 
 But in this daily life of business one 
 horror stood — since I was one of those men 
 who seek to put their own whole doctrines 
 into their own whole lives — that it was an 
 absolute conviction to me that all ruling of 
 men by men was a thing utterly wrong 
 and degrading. No ideal to me were the 
 spoon-fed men of socialism, that miserable 
 doctrine that would cure lust by emascula- 
 tion — that mere selling of a birthright for 
 a mess of pottage ! That no man should 
 rule other men, such was my ideal — and
 
 Truth and its Teller. 99 
 
 "here was I in authority — terrible contradic- 
 tion ! So these things I did for ease of 
 conscience — I made my every-day life with 
 them one of even fellowship, all were alike 
 to me, all comrades to me, with the porters 
 I was the same as with any other of them 
 — the men behind the counter were dis- 
 dainful of those said porters ! I joined in 
 all sports with them, I swam with them 
 and ran with them and jumped and turned 
 circles on the bar with them, cycled with 
 them, row T ed with them, wrestled and boxed 
 with them ; and even as great Moliere 
 loved all his fellow-workers, so I loved them 
 and they loved me. 
 
 Work was to be done and well done 
 before all thiwgs — that rule applied to me 
 and to all alike ; I was there to see it 
 done, I saw it done, and was a kind 
 master and a gentle tyrant to them. 
 
 Still the galling fact remained — that I 
 was a man in authority over men — a 
 thing degrading to both. If eleven men 
 at cricket elect a captian, know that they 
 can select another if they do not like him, 
 and if for the vitality of the sport they 
 follow his lightest word while he is in
 
 100 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 office, that is grand self-discipline and a 
 high and noble thing ; though such a 
 principle can never be said to be fairly 
 applied to the rule of majority -voting in 
 large countries with an enormous variety 
 of interests. If by some power other 
 than by voluntary election a man has 
 control over other men, and they know 
 and he knows that they have little or no 
 power to change him or to remove them- 
 selves, they having, in most cases, someone 
 depending on them — then that state of the 
 case is in good train to degrade both. 
 How many times in bitter self-abasement in 
 the quiet nights when the soul seems naked 
 and undressed as we are, have I wept over 
 some biting word of anger that I have 
 said in the day to some man who dared 
 not be angry back again — degradation to 
 both, deterioration of the manhood of both ! 
 Good master though I was, many things 
 must I reproach myself for — if they made 
 careless blunders so did I — it is horrible 
 that men should have their tongues tied 
 under the anger of other men. 
 
 This much I must say in excuse of 
 myself, though all excuse is a poor thing —
 
 Truth and it* Teller. 101 
 
 that whosoever replied with anger to my 
 anger, his wrath I always respected ; that 
 on occasions I have been of my own 
 accord to tell men that I was sorry 
 for things said ; that I knew well that 
 my successor might well be ten times worse 
 than I — and if my temper was quick it 
 was without cowardice and entirely free 
 from malice. Note this well ; that where I 
 found men whom I could leave with a 
 certainty of their doing their best, honestly 
 and thoroughly, to these no matter what 
 depth of occasional blunder they might 
 make, to these I had no word of authority 
 
 — it seems little to say, but can many 
 London managers say it? Gratitude was 
 what I felt to those who did away with 
 the necessity of my un-wished-for authority. 
 
 But the worst was to find in my 
 daily life how many men were in absolute 
 need of supervision ere they did their 
 little share with any semblance of decency 
 
 — how much shirking and slobbering and 
 messing about at work a man will do if 
 he can ! Read in this too the old sad 
 message of pessimism — that the errors of the 
 management of a state ai-e but a reflex of
 
 102 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 the incapacity of the men — the vileness of 
 our commercial system but a result of the 
 vileness of the men ! So all politics are 
 but a trifle compared to the supreme 
 necessity of the elevation of the man — and 
 Art, if it be real Art, must be the elevation 
 of the man ! 
 
 I sought solace where all can find it — 
 in nature. What perverted poet is that 
 who sings that nature heeds not our griefs, 
 that the sun shines gaily while men are 
 weeping — oh never believe it ! Nature, sad 
 melancholy mother of our melancholy race, 
 waits ever ready to sob with us when we 
 come to her with our cares, and sobbing with 
 us saves us from the worst of our despair. 
 To those who can see it, that same sun- 
 shine, like tears from the lustrous eyes of 
 a young girl struck with love-sorrow, will 
 drop and drop upon our hearts till we for- 
 get our own weeping, and largened by 
 sympathy step back into the world we 
 withdrew from, holier and more helpful to 
 our fellows than before. This is the miracle 
 worked in us by the pathos of all Nature, 
 and all Art (and real Art and Nature are
 
 Truth and its Teller. 103 
 
 always pathetic ) ; this is the high-mark of 
 their grandeur and force. 
 
 So to nature I went — gentle sunlight 
 and gloomy mist, blonde day and black- 
 haired night, suave meadowland, gigantic 
 hill, rich forest, tireless river, meditative 
 lake, and huge and melancholy sea all 
 cried out to me one message, in many 
 tones the same imperial message — " Brooding 
 brother of ours seek in Art that which you 
 seek." In all the voices of nature came 
 that command and with it a strength to 
 do. But freshest and maddest and best it 
 came when the edge of the North Wind 
 bore it puissant from the land of the hero 
 Norse, with the sharpness that turns soft 
 ■water to flint, with the strength of one 
 who looks in the eyes of eternal night — 
 when the North Wind brought that message 
 it sang in my ears as it came "I bring a 
 tenfold force for him who does my will — me 
 for your mistress take and suck my breath 
 in a long kiss ; then arise and more than 
 the world is yours in the joys you get of 
 me ! " Oh North Wind you are my strong 
 love, more exquisite than softer beauties !
 
 104 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 " Why do we so love nature ? " Will 
 you ask that? I have my own thought 
 upon that subject — is not the love of 
 nature, like all that is highest in us, 
 derived too from the primal grand sex- 
 passion? Sun, frost, moorland, mountain, 
 sea — is it not some wild personification we 
 make when we think of them? And if a 
 personification, then surely one with sex in 
 it? And those who love great capable 
 women, rejoice in an Emily Bronte, a 
 Brunhild, a Belle Berners — such men love 
 to see large passionate beings mirrored in 
 grand skies or huge tumultuous seas \ 
 Women, women, everywhere women — life is 
 nothing to a man but what he learns from 
 a woman ! 
 
 And my wild mistress is the North Wind 
 — as bitter and stern and strong of speech 
 as I am — that curses a weak heap of 
 shuddering trees as I have cursed a miser- 
 able world that trembled 'neath the truth 
 of my invective, and hated me ! And may 
 I die while the north wind howls (just as 
 it howls to-night ) and some good friend 
 put my wild mistress's name on my tomb- 
 stone, and thus truly sum me up —
 
 Truth and its Teller. 105 
 
 Here lies one 
 
 Who loved the North Wind more than the Sun ! 
 
 Oh the North Wind's kisses are sweet ! 
 
 Picture me then, a serious innocent 
 youth, dreamy but with a terrible faculty 
 for the intensest observation when the 
 coarse world disturbed my dreams with its 
 shouting — picture me striving for a some- 
 thing that I might slave at to work this 
 wretched crowd into something of a higher 
 living — Rejecting politics, because its trickery 
 was too vulgar, and its highest aim 
 too low and impotent for my ideal 
 seekings ; rejecting religion as still too 
 material with its rewards and punishments 
 for my high ideals ; leaving science aside, 
 science that calmly claims no more than it 
 is, that works ceaselessly and earns respect 
 of all who love the great, and which yet 
 was not high enough for my ideal ; all 
 these louder voices passed me ere I heard 
 the small still one that I sought. 
 
 I was seeking the highest ideal — and that 
 is the highest truth of his own power 
 that a man can conceive and grasp — and 
 that must be ever possible, his highest 
 possibility.
 
 106 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 The truth, what is the truth? That the 
 lights in the sky at night are not nearly 
 so efficient for illuminating us as the gas 
 lamps of the city? That is a truth as the 
 world knows truth — a something dull and 
 stale and silly! But a truth real is a 
 thing that goes right to the bottom of 
 matters, tells us their real nature and 
 essentials. 
 
 There was a lover who, as he looked on 
 his sweetheart's exquisite nakedness in the 
 marriage embrace, saw in that mist her 
 sweet body embellished with a thousan 
 breast-flowers. 
 
 Yet the anatomist saw but two — and 
 which was right? Why the lover! Babe 
 behind babe, breast after breast, generation 
 and generation — who says that the lover 
 embracing his sweetheart looks on but two 
 breast-flowers ? 
 
 Where shall we turn to get to the 
 truths of the earth, the truths that are 
 deep below and high above ; and in front 
 of our eyes when we are digging deep for 
 them ; and behind our backs when we are 
 staring straight seeking them ? The highest 
 truth of truths, the soul that underlies all
 
 Truth and its Teller. 107 
 
 truths 1 That soul of a woman, that real 
 puissance and woman -hood of a woman, 
 with the thousand breast-flowers as the lover 
 saw her, not as the anatomist saw her — 
 where shall we find her, that highest 
 reality 1 
 
 Read the books of the world, the writers 
 of them are still too sane ( ! ) too material 
 for truths of that vitality — look at the 
 paintings of the world, would you find 
 them, those deeper realities ? But in the 
 music of the world you will find them, 
 where truths unspeakable are spoken, where 
 the soul listens, not the sense. And from 
 music that stole over my soul in my 
 strivings I learnt the truths that I know. 
 — It was music that showed her to me, 
 that woman supremely maternal with the 
 thousand breast-flowers ! 
 
 And above all musicians, all artists, 
 all men, was that sublime musician of 
 musicians, artist of artists, man of men, 
 that Beethoven whom I loved who taught 
 me music, art, humanity, all that I know 
 (other than that rich store myself taught 
 ever to myself ! ) — Beethoven sublime in life 
 as in art, his few recorded words whole
 
 108 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 poems, highest philosophies, who summed 
 up love-of-women in Fidelio, Christ and 
 Religion in his Mass in D, Nature in his 
 Pastoral, Heroism in his third and fifth 
 symphonies, all Brotherly aspiration in his 
 Choral symphony, all Ideality in his last 
 quartets — and who wrote as the noblest 
 autobiography any artist has left us that 
 string of wondrous huge personal piano 
 sonatas. 
 
 And this Beethoven it was who summed 
 up all art for all time in that noble 
 description of his own grand purposes — 
 " To raise humanity by large and generous 
 emotions." 
 
 This grand Beethoven, even as I, his poor 
 devoted pupil, was supreme in his sex- 
 quality — a past-ideal lover of lovers ! There 
 is the ring of a lover of round -breasts 
 in all his heroic work — a glint of long 
 hair in it, a dream of tender thighs. 
 
 But where was a woman to share the 
 possibilities he held of generation 1 ? Too 
 weak, too weak — as the love of such a 
 man would demand an equal love they 
 shrank away, poor impotents! To breed for 
 lesser uiea.
 
 Truth and its Teller. 109 
 
 And he built for himself, even as I have 
 done, a sweetheart straight from nature — 
 built her in his own mind (for all that we 
 love in nature is built from our own 
 minds, nature stolid material stupid, being 
 and knowing nothing ! ) — built from his own 
 mind a sweetheart fit for him, built her 
 from the lightning flash, as befitted him, 
 he a grand genius of light and warmth as 
 well as of grand severity, huge simplicity, 
 and passion's own brilliant and fiery morality 
 — while I, less warm with beauty, more 
 terribly stark-naked in the furious conviction 
 of my severity and simplicity and passionate 
 morality — I who hated the thought of love 
 for mere attractiveness, hated those who 
 loved Beethoven for his attractiveness, 
 knowing that his teaching, his " Raising of 
 humanity by large and generous emotions " 
 was all in all to him — I, as befitted me, 
 chose the North Wind as my wild bony 
 naked sweetheart — loved the mad kiss of 
 her on my face, oh wild, wild sweetheart 
 putting teeth into her kiss ! Let the North 
 Wind howl love songs while I die ! Death 
 must wait for me till the North Wind
 
 110 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 comes ! I must have my sweetheart by me, 
 and life has given me no other ! 
 
 And the death of this Beethoven — the 
 strange story of the death of this Beethoven! 
 Almost miraculous ! 
 
 He wrote among his last great quartets — 
 those hugest grandest things in music — 
 nay in all Art ! — those he wrote on his 
 very death-bed ( at the utmost of physical 
 break-down he wrote them, disproving for 
 ever all theories materialistic ) — I say 
 among these was one wondrous heroic and 
 sti'ong, the B flat major, its first movement 
 of most colossal manhood, its second of 
 grimmest irony, the slow movement of such 
 transfigured tears, the fourth so simple, 
 innocent, youthful, the Cavatina sorrow's 
 highest most heart-broken song. 
 
 And for its finale — a grand and terrible 
 and noble fugue that summed up all life — 
 the last and highest prophetic note of a 
 huge artist about to die. But owing to 
 the poor wretchedness of the world he had 
 to write for, it came about that this finale 
 was found too vast, a second was demanded 
 of him. And strange to say this powerful 
 dominant artist did really write a second
 
 Truth and its Teller. Ill 
 
 in answer to this demand ; a finale equally 
 apt for this sum up of all his grand 
 heroic doctrine ; a finale weird and strange 
 and sadly resignedly smiling at the world, 
 and so eerie in its quality that one were 
 tempted to make this criticism of it — That 
 this Beethoven who wrote this strange sad 
 smile at all the world, at one with all his 
 work yet in its resigned peace so different 
 to it all — that this Beethoven were surely 
 already dead — only that Death that had 
 claimed him still waited, as Death will 
 wait for great men, till the dominant will 
 of this stoutest of men should say " Now 
 I am ready." And strange to say on a 
 day in March there came a thunderstorm — 
 Beethoven's own sweetheart, the lightning- 
 flash came down to kiss him on the lips — 
 and rising in his bed, staring at the wild 
 eyes he loved, the only ones nearly as 
 wild as his own, staring at the maddest 
 sweetest flash of them, he died— as such a 
 man should, with his sweetheart breast to 
 breast ! Ah, how the North Wind howls 
 to-night ! May the North Wind howl as I 
 die — the world has given me no other 
 sweetheart !
 
 112 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 Beethoven was to me supreme spiritual 
 leader. And I studied music and wrote 
 music, grand music since Beethoven's self 
 had taught me — to what good 1 The world 
 wants a lower revelation. And to so many, 
 music is a close sacrament ; to be partaken 
 of only by the intermission of a chilly 
 professional, ignorant of art — from whom 
 the noblest message proceeds as unintelli- 
 gently as our noble church service proceeds 
 from the majority of our pulpits — making a 
 reverent Atheist, such as I am, shudder at 
 its arrant irreverence. And Professionalism 
 would say of me and my music " Only 
 an amateur ; learnt late ; cannot play at 
 all." 
 
 It was like a circle of staid old men 
 and one youth discussing some girl together. 
 These men who talk have known the girl 
 from a child, her parents before her, the 
 whole history of her — yes, but I have lain 
 with her, long rapt passionate terrible 
 nights, body to body, now which of us 
 knows the girl ? And what are the any- 
 things they can know to the everything I 
 know ?
 
 Truth and its Teller. 113 
 
 Besides, in my terrible zest for music, 
 my science, though largely studied alone by 
 myself, was in its own strange way most 
 enormous. The handling of new free chords, 
 the massing of terrible counter-points, the 
 thrashing out of long pieces from terrible 
 two note themes — but it was the science 
 that art and love taught me, the only 
 science of value in music. To work up a 
 huge spiritual bugle-call of a melody, to 
 rich it in chords of the utmost grandeur } 
 to hurl it out from all pitches one on top 
 of the other with huge shouting counter- 
 points, mad many-voiced music — that is 
 science and art in music, music master- 
 made ! Many shook their heads at my 
 extreme love of canon — they did not know 
 music — the shout of one tune, pitch after 
 pitch combining with itself is a glorious 
 thing, and as subtle-deep in its many- 
 sided oneness (Art is but many-sided love 
 displayed ! ) as subtle-deep a thing in its 
 
 meaning and beauty but the 
 
 world knows not music — so I represented 
 my personality in print, left my mark on 
 the Art's records, and then left it — ( after 
 all what can a man do more ? What
 
 114 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 value in vain repetition?) — left it, my 
 Art of Arts, purest and least trammelled of 
 the Arts, Art where one dare say all one's 
 sweetnesses without rebuke — left it because 
 I wished to reach the world, the world 
 that I must ever love — left music to 
 write books ; but to write ever as a 
 musician, as one used to soul-sweetness and 
 highest naked spiritual truth — no earth 
 grovellings ! 
 
 Yes in every word that I wrote in prose 
 and verse stood the lesson that music had 
 taught me — the lesson that the world 
 wanted generous emotion, that love had 
 more logic than logic had, and charity 
 more justice than justice; for music was 
 nobler than writings, even as emotion was 
 grander than thought. 
 
 And I learnt from music how to be 
 truly didactic in Art. All great Art must 
 teach, and yet how often has Art that sets 
 forth to teach, become so much lower than 
 Art that apparently has not set forth to 
 teach ? Eliot so much lower than Bronte. 
 But the key lay in music. What was 
 Beethoven but an inspired prophet and 
 revolutionist ? Can musio teach ? Yes it
 
 Truth and its Teller. 115 
 
 teaches the teaching of Art that is greater 
 than the teaching of science or the teaching 
 o'.' philosophy — and Art alone is of the 
 grandest and most truly didactic that teaches 
 the teaching of Art, disdaining all others. 
 
 But to make my book strong and true 
 and worthy I had more to do than trans- 
 late musical impulses, Art impulses, into 
 words — I must perfect myself by the study, 
 hard study, of all other artists. What 
 though from concerts and picture galleries 
 I drew so much, yet work, work, work I 
 ever must to study those who in the line 
 chosen, in literature that is, had worked 
 and won before me. — Yes, every style of 
 them, learning something from each. Steel- 
 clanging sagas of the North I read and 
 loved — learnt to put weighty matter into 
 few words — learnt from them the drawing 
 of supreme and sinewy women. Elizabethans 
 I loved — Melancholy Webster, Shakespeare 
 who knew everything, and John Ford, 
 largest poet of the world, who knew more 
 than everything, who knew how to draw 
 the sublimest of all the women that the 
 world's virile artists have dreamt on, 
 throbbed in passion for — for what great
 
 116 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 artist draws women that he does not throb 
 in passion for 1 Did not Emily Bronte for 
 sure long for a giddy gripping embrace 
 from her Heathcliff, most virile of men ? 
 Oh great-hearted sweet bitch Emily Bronte, 
 you too have I loved ! And your great 
 sisters ; and George Borrow, man of men, 
 the lover of Isopel Berners, that grandest 
 woman of the century, rivalling even Ford's 
 if that were not impossible — and Walt 
 Whitman, supreme monument of eloquent 
 personality ; and let not Browning be 
 forgotten, nor his true wife either. And I 
 studied the artists of abroad — Moliere 
 whose women stand great in passionate 
 sweetness of sex ; who of all the world's 
 ai'tists most had the exquisite gift of 
 bringing his ideals so near to natiire that 
 we blink looking for the difference ; who 
 drew himself in his superbest picture that 
 the world to come might know there were 
 giants in that day; Dante who showed us 
 outside Hell the men whom Hell disdained; 
 since deep suffering is a badge of honour 
 too large for the spiritless; Michael Angelo, 
 great among the world's great poets, 
 supreme among its artists, save for Beethoven
 
 Truth and its Teller. 117 
 
 only, his only equal ; Zola terrible intense 
 brooder, blending the " is " too strongly 
 with the "might-be," but shaking weak 
 earth with a thunder as loud as even 
 Jonson himself made crack around us in 
 England three centuries before ! — These and 
 many others, in all schools, I studied and 
 loved — for nothing less than every style 
 that had been did I put into my boiling- 
 pot for the making of my Art — though the 
 shout of my own strength, my own life, 
 my own self, rang loud above the hissing 
 of that cauldron ! For they only can learn 
 who already nine-tenths know ! 
 
 To produce Art — yes Art — not literary 
 cleverness, not tricks and charms of style, 
 but Art, real, terribly felt, blood-and-nerve 
 Art — to do this. 
 
 To feel as one writes that one's life lies 
 in what one is writing ; to feel after one 
 has written so true and terrible exhaustion 
 that one knows that one's life has gone 
 into the work ; and at the same time so 
 grand an uplifting from what one has 
 written, so vast and new a strength from 
 it, that one knows that to others it will 
 be (if properly read) as supremely vitalising
 
 118 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 without the exhaustion of it — these things 
 mark truly the production of Art. 
 
 Here in my right side is a gnawing pain 
 that for years (since my beginning of Art- 
 wori v has never left me — that has been 
 one of the prices paid — gladly paid ! — one 
 of the hall-marks of true work — for pain is 
 a grand hall-mark of true achievement — 
 and great as is the joy of Art, of all 
 achievement, the joy would be less were 
 there not some pain with it to swell up 
 its rapture as pain felt and despised only 
 can ; making joy's sensations overflow in a 
 giddy wild whirlpool of unconqiierable 
 ecstasy. In this, as in many other things, 
 women are still the betters of men ; to 
 some men only is it given to feel the 
 fullest ecstasy of joy made perfect in 
 despised pain; but it lays in the mother- 
 hood of women, this lessons of lessons, this 
 highest truth of rapture's heroism, taught 
 in all grand natural nakedness to all who 
 have been fit to be mothers of men ; this 
 essential heroism of life which is the real 
 excuse for living (how many men have any 
 excuse for living ? ) lies revealed to woman-
 
 Truth and its Teller. 119 
 
 hood, deep in the tenderest sweetest 
 sacredest corner of their hearts. 
 
 Women and I then had this additional 
 link of common sympathy — this community 
 of birth-pangs. 
 
 Many a night after the highest wildest 
 raptures of my terrible ■ labours, when the 
 climax was reached, and I stopped to gasp 
 a breath, have I been suddenly fit to fall 
 in an awful sweaty exhaustion. A moment 
 before supreme in power, I now lay pal- 
 pitating in a chair with scarce force to 
 move a limb. And somewhere from the 
 midst of my still quivering entrails there 
 began to come a fell and clammy chill 
 that spread and spread till my whole body 
 (all of me but my seething brain) was one 
 abnormal shiver. In the heat of the 
 summer, feet and limbs were cold as stone. 
 But I laughed and knew that the work 
 had been great indeed — what need I care 
 now for verdict of public or critics or 
 anyone — with my own life -heat I had 
 written my book — who could do more % 
 And I laughed in my pride and strength 
 and pluck, and my whole cold body seemed 
 loud in uttering one huge long scream of
 
 120 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 joy and power — for 'twas I who could cry 
 to the whole world " Listen — since a man 
 is revealed ! " And could shrug my shoulders 
 if it listened not — for I knew my place 
 now — had no need to ask my whereabouts ! 
 Then I used to half eat my lips and go 
 on — I wrote best with the taste of blood 
 upon my tongue ! 
 
 Do not mistake me — do not imagine my 
 Art-work but a mere froth of excitement, 
 however powerfully generated ; years and 
 years of devoted study it had been to me 
 — I only say that the proof of the quality 
 lay in the remorseless grip and grandeur 
 with which its ultimatum was ground 
 out. 
 
 I was no self-control-less madman, thiat 
 much this fact will tell you — that at the 
 end of this work I threw my things off 
 and jumped into bed, and cried to the 
 fiery ferment of my brain " Now rest ! " 
 And despite all the fever-heat of it I had 
 power to command myself to sleep — no 
 greater test of self-control can the world 
 show to me, 
 
 And in those days of creation all life 
 and all the acts of life had a meaning and
 
 Truth and its Teller. 121 
 
 fullness and worth to me — to eat was to 
 build up strength for Art, to sleep was to 
 build up strength for Art, to live virtuously 
 was to build up strength for Art ; and all 
 those enjoyable healthy athletics that I had 
 practised in intervals lest my Art by too 
 much strain should deteriorate in quality, 
 these too derived a double enjoyment from 
 the glad thought — it is Art, Art, Art, that 
 will benefit by this relax ! And every pain 
 that I suffered I could rejoice in — for Art 
 would take a graver wider sweep for that 
 new pain ; and every joy went into Art 
 too, and would brighten the trip of its 
 pace. 
 
 And that way was written the book that 
 is my life — the book that the world was 
 afraid of, that my friends were afraid of, 
 that the women I knew were afraid of — 
 all ran away from me because my book 
 had not got on the trousers and top-hat 
 that they loved ! 
 
 Though my book was admired of some — 
 I will tell you of the sort of men they 
 were — the sort who admired Art in this 
 world. They were those who loved the 
 new and the strange, for the sake of the
 
 122 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 fresh mental excitement it gave them ! 
 Those who loved the " odd " the bric-a- 
 brac hunters in Art, those who posed as 
 "modern,'' the whole army of the affected 
 
 — miserable insincerities ! — These took me 
 up, discovered me, admired me, if you please 
 
 — till my manners to them led them to 
 discover that I was an ill-bred person — for 
 I refused the exchange that was expected 
 of me, refused to admire them ! There was 
 a man I used to box with before I had 
 lessons with my master — this good fellow 
 took a real pride in any progress that I 
 made ; once ( quite by accident I assure 
 you ! ) I raised a big bruise behind his ear 
 by a "right counter " — he was so delighted, 
 brave man ! And a grip of the hand from 
 him (who alas would scarce have under- 
 stood a .word of my poor book ! ) was 
 worth more far to me than the admiration 
 of all these posturers. It was real. 
 
 And another class admired me — the class 
 with a " taste " for literature, who perceive 
 it intellectually— they might be said to see 
 the meaning of my book, but they never 
 by any chance got it into their souls ! 
 And by a most melancholy and awful mis- 

 
 Truth and its Teller. 123 
 
 chance it thus happened that a man would 
 make my book of love a text on which to 
 lecture his wife because she " had no 
 culture " could not understand it— why she 
 understood it ten thousand times more not 
 reading a line of it than he ever could by 
 learning it by heart — oh the tragedy of 
 Art that it thus misses the very persons 
 that it loves, is like a captured cannon 
 made to pour deadly shot into the very 
 ranks that it belongs to — how few 
 centuries passed before Christianity had 
 raised a set of Pharisees ten times more 
 horrible than those who crucified Christ — a 
 set of Pharisees enduring to this day ! 
 And my book too must, by the terrible 
 satire of things, be a weapon in the hands 
 of Pharisees that tears may the more 
 flow in the world where I tried to dry 
 them ! 
 
 And then there was that laru'e class who 
 " admired " my book in my company, or 
 when they knew that admirers of it 
 were alone present ; but in the presence 
 of Mrs. Grundy what dared they say ? 
 Miserable mental moral cowards, reeds
 
 124 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 shaken by the wind — rather hatred than 
 such admiration ! 
 
 And the class that dared not show to 
 wives and daughters, sisters and sweethearts 
 that book written for women to read, full 
 of women's duties and women's glory, and 
 so passionately moral in tone — how horrible 
 a farce it was that these should talk about 
 admiring my work, and yet deny its very 
 purpose, mock themselves and me with 
 so still-born a delivery, lifeless form of 
 belief — yet where was there room in such 
 small souls for so large and vital a thing 
 as a belief ? The world has no beliefs, 
 rotten-gutted world ! And I, poor believer, 
 terribly lonely, I cursed my so-called 
 admirers, that could make my inmost heart 
 a spectacle for their curiosity, the sight of 
 it giving them the tickling pleasure of a 
 strange novelty. — 
 
 Love me or hate me, Oh world, I am a 
 man and made for love or hatred — but a 
 world of non-men and non-women cannot 
 love or hate — Oh the pity of it, that such 
 things can breed ! 
 
 And in the moral cowardice of one class 
 of these men there lay a thing far more
 
 Truth and its Teller. 125 
 
 terrible than even their dishonouring of Art 
 
 — Love is the very teacher and builder 
 and God of Art, all Art is but the praise 
 of love (high or low as the artist is high 
 or low ! ) and these men dishonoured Love, 
 the greater than Art — for since they 
 mentally held the conviction (as far as such 
 men can have convictions ! ) that I was 
 right and my book a great one, then those 
 men who lied or kept up a lying silence 
 over it to their sweethearts, they put lies 
 into their love, from the fatherhood of a 
 very liar they would breed men — Oh the 
 horror of it, thus is a world of liars daily 
 built — liars in their lives, far, far worse than 
 a slip-shod lying with the tongue ! 
 
 And the deepest pain that my book 
 brought me lay in two things — the admira- 
 tion of these men — the shrinking Grundyism 
 of the women. Oh women, women, whom I 
 loved and wrote for before all ! Because I 
 wept tears of blood at the sight of but 
 one harlot in the streets ! And for that 
 the women said of me " He is not proper 
 
 — he is not respectable," while vice that 
 said nothing was still both proper and 
 respectable!
 
 12G Truth and its Teller. 
 
 Have you any conception of the misery 
 that this meant to me ? 
 
 Do you not understand how to me the 
 weak-kneed Grundyism of one woman was 
 more awful than that of ten men ? 
 
 Yet note that a few real men gripped 
 hands with me as they passed along — to 
 them such thanks ! And to-morrow and 
 to-morrow and to-morrow such men will 
 grip the dead bones of my hand — they 
 will not go without me, those men — 
 simplicity and sincerity I served — no mere 
 fashion and no luxury ; I wrote a doctrine 
 all could reach, and the few must reach 
 — these few will never go without me — 
 men of manhood and sex — men and 
 women too, of greatness, gravity, and 
 sex ! 
 
 There is one test of a man that every 
 man must be tested by, that most are 
 weighed and found wanting by, the grand 
 test of Sex. 
 
 Sex — that grandest and Godliest of things 
 — Sex, that in the truly great men and 
 women rings out, cries itself aloud, becomes 
 the very man, the very whole man to 
 those who can see — the one or two
 
 Truth and its Teller. 127 
 
 who can see among the millions of the 
 blind ! 
 
 For it takes a great imisician to know 
 the value of a great musician ; and it 
 takes a man great in qualities of sex to 
 know the value of a man great in qualities 
 of sex. 
 
 Would you know the thing that raised 
 me head and shoulders and more among the 
 sexless lustful fellows I stood with in this 
 miserable generation? Quality of sex is the 
 thing that raised me. 
 
 First I will tell you the verdict of the 
 world on me — the verdict of a stupid 
 vulgar world that knew not manhood upon 
 one who was a man. 
 
 The verdict of the men (that is the 
 name they give themselves) of this world 
 was — "He is passionless." And the verdict 
 of the women (so they are called) of this 
 world was — " He is passionless." The men, 
 because I had too much of the gravity of 
 true sex in me, because I had not relish 
 for flimsy flippancies, such said "Passionless." 
 And the women too, because I could not 
 treat them without that nobler franker 
 gravity, could not offer them the disrespect
 
 128 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 of insincere flippancy, these said "Passionless." 
 And the men, who practised immoralities, 
 and could get me neither to practise them 
 nor relish their narrations of their practice, 
 they said " Passionless." And the harlots 
 in the streets, poor fallen women whom I 
 have shaken off tenderly (I could not treat 
 women other than tenderly ) these also, 
 seeing the unmoved gravity of my face, 
 would say behind my back — " The gentle- 
 man is kind — but passionless." Iron restraint 
 and noble manhood, what are you valued 
 at in a world too feeble and too gross to 
 even class you when found? How can such 
 a world value such ? 
 
 This is my record of passion — a man 
 who, if in a book or newspaper the 
 name of a woman appeared, must stop and 
 read and re-read, and again re-read it, broken 
 into tenderness at the mere sweetness 
 reflected in but a simple Mary or Hettie 
 as it lay on the paper in print ! What 
 girl was there in the countless millions I 
 have passed, seen, half- seen, quarter- seen, 
 that I could not find in myself some 
 quality to love her for ? To dream some 
 impossible love -wrapt dream years long,
 
 Truth and its Teller. 129 
 
 over some face — to write music to it, to 
 dream of learning painting to paint it, this 
 face of a girl unknown — and if known 
 perchance worse than unknown ( life has 
 made me bitter even to the saying of that 
 — then surely I am near dead — and better 
 bo ! ) How I have risked my neck cycling 
 through town for the gaze at those faces 
 on the pavements I could not leave with 
 my eyes — how, when some face extra 
 expressive, extra womanly, has caught my 
 eye, I have kept it, and the memory of 
 it, all the circumstances of the sight of it, 
 in my memory for years long — how, at a 
 theatre, oft some face has caught my eye, 
 and I have stared and stared, and loved and 
 loved, and when a man passed along that 
 row and touched the knees of her with his 
 knees I could have sprung and caught him 
 by the throat, seized with a horrible 
 jealousy — and the world, because my 
 eyes were great and grave with love 
 ( not squinting puckered up with flippant 
 obscene lust ! ) this world has called me 
 passionless. 
 
 And the women of this world have
 
 130 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 made me their friend — passionless, sexless 
 me ! 
 
 And with my old gravity I have helped 
 them where I could — ay, often helped them 
 to their lovers ! — and they gave me their 
 friendship — such as it was ! 
 
 And terrible nights I laid awake with a 
 hoarse outcry in my throat that of all 
 these women not one had so much as 
 kissed me — and in hours of weakness I 
 have lain awake and sobbed — sobbed in 
 terrible hunger for just the slightest of 
 caresses between a woman and me. Not 
 one kiss could they spare from their lover's 
 lips to put on my forehead, for all the 
 love I might help them to — help them, 
 poor wretch as I am, who could not help 
 myself ! Oh I will give you a pretty 
 account of my wooings! Those many failures 
 my many wooings ! I will tell you of one, 
 the deepest felt of them all — one will stand 
 for them all ; one the deepest in itself 
 and in its consequence. A girl handsome 
 with a beauty of expression that was more 
 than beauty; quick-tempered, passionate, 
 generous ; clear-headed, true-hearted, great- 
 soul ed ; and a girl of sex, full of sex. I 

 
 Truth and its Teller. 131 
 
 met her, loved her, my God did I not 
 love her ! And wooed her 1 you will ask 
 — yes, in my fashion. I loved her too 
 well to put my heart into my mouth and 
 give her compliments — the gullet of a man 
 is too small for a big heart to come up 
 through it ! — Love with me was a thing 
 grave and noble, proud — Oh I can tell 
 you the fool's cross purposes I played when 
 I loved indeed ! The girl artlessly summed 
 it up once, talking with me friend to 
 friend (pity the man whom women make a 
 friend of ! ) — she said to me with a smile 
 "Whenever I begin to like you, you say 
 something to stop me." She was not cruel, 
 she knew no other than that we were 
 friend and friend — and she spoke the truth. 
 For love with me was sober and devout — 
 no leering late-at-night tippler — love was a 
 teller of truths, not lies. This sort of scene 
 went on. — 
 
 The girl, in a vague way taken by me, 
 would say, in a pleasant way she had, and 
 meaning what she said " I certainly think 
 you are good-tempered." And I, knowing love 
 to be grave and a teller of truths, would 
 reply " I have at times the temper of Hell "
 
 132 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 for I had truly that badge of a disposition 
 large and generous. And she who herself 
 possessed that noble quickness of the blood, 
 she poor ignorant knowing nothing of men 
 and women (not even her own self as a 
 woman) she misled by the stupid ignorances 
 of conventional standards saw not the man 
 who in his sex and his truth and his 
 love stood before her, merely wondered, 
 misunderstood, half-disliked him. Tims on 
 and on, in many times and w T ays, un- 
 wavering truth heightened in its intensity 
 by very love of her, kept us apart, a 
 thing known of me — but the knowledge of 
 it, and the temptation of the knowledge of 
 it brought no cowardice — though I shrieked 
 in the nights for women, women ; shrieked 
 hopelessly and inconsolably, while my iron 
 manhood yielded no jot of its grand ideal 
 of a love grave and truthful — for love 
 builds all life, all the world, men and 
 women linked by love (oh in cases what 
 petty adulteration of love!) these bring into 
 the world through love all life, and life is 
 all — and love to a man who knows love, 
 to a man great in his quality of sex, love 
 must be grave and truthful.
 
 Truth and its Teller. 133 
 
 I had a rival with that girl — a rival. 
 He asked her faith when out of a situation 
 and with scarce a penny — faith liberally 
 granted by her, noble girl — and literally 
 held. Of him I knew but little other than 
 these bare facts — I will not blame him, 
 knowing how mightily love (there are many 
 sorts of love) urges us to such selfishness 
 — this I can proudly say, that his way of 
 love was not mine. 
 
 Her parents hated the match — poor girl, 
 her constancy was tried — good girl, it was 
 triumphant ! 
 
 Her mother spoke to me of her aversion 
 to the match — and I used to finesse and 
 flatter the old lady into a good opinion of 
 herself in order to then neatly insinuate 
 into her ear something in favour or defence 
 of the young people — oh I had tact on 
 occasion ! 
 
 Though I had none to help my own love, 
 which disdained it, it was ready at hand, 
 and well used to give my sweetheart to 
 the arms of another! And I cursed in the 
 nights the folly of my idealism, and of 
 my elevated views of love that kept love's 
 tangible possibilities from me — for know this,
 
 134 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 that nothing is gained that has not been 
 fought for ; there is no virtue that has 
 not been battled for ere it was won. And 
 the day times saw me grave and strong as 
 ever ; holding to the eternal truth that 
 Love, builder of life and the whole world 
 must build no other than children of very 
 love. For there are three kinds of love ; 
 and the first is no-love, and the second is 
 half-love, and the third is love ; the first 
 tells a man to seek the sweetness of his 
 own desire ; it is lustful and degraded. 
 The second tells him to give sweet rapture 
 to the woman he loves ; that is half-love. 
 The third, love all-in-all, tells him to build 
 out of love a new generation — that is love 
 grave, truthful, and ennobling, love that 
 would save the whole world would the 
 world let it ! 
 
 And the Whole-Love state must include 
 the half-love ; and the half-love state often 
 leads to the whole-love. And I, having 
 grasped the truth of whole-love, had more 
 thought of her love-happiness than I had 
 for my own ; and besides I was an artist, 
 writing music of love, a book of love, 
 love's servant and the servant of lovers;
 
 Truth and its Teller. 135 
 
 and I used to talk with this girl, and 
 encourage her in love and constancy ; what 
 else could I do but that 1 And another 
 thing I did ; I was saving my money then 
 hard that I might get independence to 
 serve Art the better; she knew me as a 
 little rich, knew no details of how or why ; 
 she knew me as eccentric ( one of the 
 work s names for a man ! ) This girl, who 
 my frankness had but puzzled, this girl, to 
 whom my deep love remained unknown ; 
 under cover of that and plausible excuses 
 I offered her a sum as a gift (not so 
 great a sum, but great to me then — a 
 sum that might go through the furnishing 
 of a small house — oh the luxury to think 
 of her limbs reposing on my bought chairs 
 and beds ! ) so that this sum might hasten 
 their savings and wedding night (a prurient 
 world that dares not look upon realities 
 would say wedding day ) ; she refused it ; 
 I said " It shall be a wedding gift — will 
 you take it ? " She replied " I bind you 
 to nothing; but what you give then I 
 will take." Proud, passionate, great-hearted 
 tender, constant, full of sex, why was it 
 that a girl so gifted would not trust her
 
 136 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 rich insight to direct her, must lean to 
 the world and look to its conventions, 
 knew not a man when she saw one revealed 
 in his truth and gravity, pride and heat 
 when aroused, in his scorn of the things 
 he hated, and grave simple attachment to 
 what he loved — in his sex-supreme saw him 
 not, missed him ! Well, a great-hearted 
 girl, and a rich thing to have known dier ; 
 and look you here, young friend, listen to 
 this and know that it is holy ; let no 
 blushing blood sting your cheeks, save only 
 that which passion's freemasonry brings up 
 to grip there — no flush of shame ; this I 
 say in all holiness, love -sweetness, and 
 humanity — that I looked forward in those 
 days with happy thoughts for the bliss of 
 that sweetheart of mine on that night so 
 faithfully, devotedly waited for, when the 
 man she loved should bring all his manhood 
 to its highest task in dowering her body, 
 mid love's wild joy, with the male possi- 
 bilities that should complete her female 
 possibilities, and with love and rapture 
 build a child of true love for the world — 
 thus I looked forward for her with a hope 
 natural and noble in me for the soundness
 
 Truth and its Teller. 137 
 
 and sufficiency of his sex — and who, with 
 my record, dare to call me a materialist ? 
 Poor vulgar world that has called me 
 passionless because I was not gross ; that 
 brings up its young girls with lying, in 
 tragic ignorance of their faculties and 
 duties ; against this world I have beyond 
 others a deep and terrible accusation — that 
 it had brought this sweetheart of mine up 
 in such manner that I could not in those 
 days tell her, in the free and innocent way 
 in which I have worded it to you, you 
 sweet youth who understand me, who has 
 grown out of convention, who, with your 
 hairless face, might be a sweet girl come 
 to grieve my last griefs with me, and who, 
 if you were, I could still talk to with the 
 same innocent frankness and truth, not a 
 word missed — still to this sweetheart of 
 mine who never understood me, misled by 
 the world, I could not say the sweet thing 
 that I longed to say in the words I 
 worded it to you — oh worse than in the 
 miserablest dungeon it is to live in a 
 world that dares not hear the truth !
 
 138 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 And the world of lies, lies, lies, calls 
 me a dreamer because I am a man of 
 truth ! 
 
 And still a dreamer the world would 
 call me if it heard my story to-day ( what 
 good to it are the things it hears ? ) ; and 
 the libertine would still think me lesser 
 than he in passion, because my passion was 
 grand and pure, I, who have more pulse 
 in my little finger on my death-bed than 
 he had in his whole body on his very 
 wedding-night ! So listen ! For I am proud, 
 and will defend myself even to the utter- 
 most ; and will show what victory is, and 
 of what I am victor — hear this ! Corning 
 home from a function at night she and I 
 were alone. Walking there in the dark 
 with that girl I loved, and who loved 
 another, there seethed one thought of 
 thoughts in my brain — that I stood there 
 all powerful to violate her. She and I 
 small units in an infinite space — both to 
 be annihilated on a near to-morrow for all 
 eternity — yet from the beginning of time 
 that never was unto the end that never 
 will be there would be but one her and 
 but one me; and if I violated her there,
 
 Truth and its Teller. 139 
 
 throughout the whole eternity of time 
 nothing could alter the imperishable past 
 fact that her maidenhood had been taken 
 then by me. If I killed both after, what 
 was that to me, to whom life was a 
 despised thing ? And everything within me 
 cried out louder to heighten the din of 
 that loud temptation; the very spotless 
 purity of my past life raised still madder 
 the storm, crying out that this was no 
 mere vulgar lust, for I was no mere vulgar 
 lustful man ; this had passion's pre-eminence ; 
 and I — I deliberately wilfully brought every 
 power of soul and mind and body to 
 further enflame that terrible temptation to 
 the uttermost heat it could get to — because 
 I knew that I loved that girl, and that 
 nothing existed or could exist, that could 
 make me harm the slightest hair upon that 
 holy body of hers. We talked indifferent 
 subjects — I scarce remember what, my 
 thoughts were elsewhere — perhaps she found 
 me dull. 
 
 Such is the record of a love — to a girl 
 who is another man's wife, whom I have 
 not seen this long time ; a girl who made
 
 140 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 me a friend of hers, and thanked me for 
 the kindness I did her. 
 
 Do you think I regret having loved her? 
 No, not so, it was sweet to love her — true 
 love is always sweet, whatsoever hap. To 
 look into the sweet eyes of that sweet girl 
 and learn from loving her the larger 
 chastity, the broader honour, the nobler 
 truth about things — Oh take it from me as 
 very fact that out of a world of bitter 
 things this love-in-hopelessness was sweet — 
 here as I lie on my death-bed solemnly I 
 offer to that girl's memory nought but 
 thanks, thanks, thanks — think not I hold 
 her as harming me, good, good only, 
 highest good save one, she gave me — 
 here to her my heart swells with its 
 thanks ! 
 
 Oh my friend, my dear friend, it is very 
 good to talk to you — talk to you of all 
 my sorrows as I dreamt I should dying to 
 a young maid — one who should know and 
 pity and kiss me — for I am to-day that 
 weakest of things, a man who desires pity. 
 Blame me not this weakness — when I 
 wanted strength I could always find it ; 
 but I spent my store of it on high things,
 
 Truth and its Teller. 141 
 
 and to-day finds me but a poor wretch, 
 over-eager of talking. 
 
 Believe me, awfullest among the awful 
 things to those who raise themselves to 
 higher thoughts than their fellows, awfullest 
 among the awful things is the getting 
 beyond that daily atmosphere of sympathy 
 which is as the very air to the lungs. 
 
 To cultivate thoughts of the purest, most 
 delicate, and most searchingly daring, to do 
 this is to put yourself beyond daily equal 
 talk with men ; and terribly often cornea 
 the deep desire to be anything, say any- 
 thing, think and feel anything, no matter 
 how vulgar, so that one stands for a 
 moment in the hand-grip of one's fellows. 
 
 And if one does that all Art goes — goes 
 assuredly and certainly — to think, to feel 
 to be of the vulgar and trivial, to renounce 
 the soul — so like a pathetic Grettir stands 
 the artist, the strongest man of his time, 
 out-lawed by his time, unbroken in mighty 
 courage save by this — his terrible dread of 
 loneliness, utter loneliness — ah, you press 
 my hand and I am blest ! 
 
 This is a weakness — yes, but I am a 
 man of weakness ! I am no strong man, 
 
 i.
 
 142 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 save by comparison with a world of 
 weaklings ! Strong enough to keep from 
 smirching women, to keep from using holy 
 flesh and holy faculties for shame ; strong 
 enough not with deliberate selfishness to 
 injure fellow-men ; but how simple, indeed, 
 these things were if the world were but 
 reasonably strong ! Oh, but then I served 
 Art to my own scathe — yes, put that alone 
 to my credit. It was after having loved 
 her that I finished my book, my great 
 book, my dearly loved book. For a book 
 to be great must always have a man 
 behind it. During the many years that I 
 was working out my book I did many 
 things that proved me a man — I worked 
 late hours and scorned delights, and laughed 
 at ill-health and constant pains, and made 
 strict rules for myself, and held by my 
 ideals, and told truths that it hurt me in 
 many ways to tell — and great and most 
 manly things I did, and rich in sex, in 
 those days that I had encouraged that 
 sweetheart to hold to another, and in that 
 day when I offered her my help and 
 money, and on that day that I had talked 
 indifferent subjects — every day was a day
 
 Truth and its Teller. 143 
 
 rich in manhood ; but greater still were the 
 days of my grave wooing of her when I 
 would not lie, the day I told her that I 
 was an Atheist in case she had not heard 
 that against me ; the day I told her that 
 I was an Anarchist in case she had not 
 heard that against me ; the days I used to 
 go in my working clothes, disdained so 
 stupid a thing as a clothes-wooing ; the 
 days when I stood up for rough language 
 and plain speaking, and the generous heat 
 of a rich quick temper — every day that in 
 service of truth (no matter how I, sensitive 
 artist, shivered under the pain it was to 
 me) every day that in the service of deep- 
 souled truth I, true-hearted lover, did 
 myself one more harm with that girl — 
 every one of those days of sorrow was a 
 rich and noble day for my Art. And 
 believe me it is easier in a generous 
 impulse to put down a sum of money to 
 help one's rival than to stand the daily 
 grind of paying so terrible a price for one's 
 truth of living — it is the dull daily 
 grinding heroism that costs, not the flashing 
 moments — and the proof of true achieved 
 love is in my eyes more in the daily
 
 144 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 tender tiring loving care of the children 
 of love than in any special devotion to the 
 partner in the making of the children — 
 love is ever at its heights as the builder 
 of children ! 
 
 Yet greater than all were the nights 
 when I tossed cursing and miserable and 
 weak, and hated all my ideals and all my 
 Art that was in turn brought by and the 
 bringer of my ideals. 
 
 Greater than all were these, for the 
 greater the weakness the greater the strength 
 that comes to overthrow it ! And as love 
 and Art go ever hand in hand, from this 
 training in courage did I gain the victory 
 of that grandest day of all when I hurled 
 my book triumphantly into the world, 
 knowing beforehand that the world would 
 wreck me for it, the world that hates truth 
 and manhood and sex — knowing and glad 
 to be wrecked by such a world ! And the 
 heroism and victory all the greater because 
 on many nights and days of weakness I 
 had trembled in very fear at the thought 
 of what I was working up for myself, 
 sensitive artist, at the hands of the dull 
 and cruel world — fears heroically hurled back
 
 Truth and its Teller. 145 
 
 to the Hell they came from as I set my 
 teeth and chanted my chant of " Never 
 count the cost." 
 
 Let me not wander. — Let me come back 
 to the time when, pulling myself together 
 after that terrible love-experience, I set my- 
 self once more to the work of my life, the 
 finishing of my book — My book that for 
 years I had meditated upon, that I had so 
 many times entirely re-cast, I turned to it 
 again now with a still grimmer earnest ; 
 and turning to it I found as the result of 
 that time of trial that everything I had 
 written was too poor for what I could now 
 write. I stood at that moment at my 
 supremest height of power — the highest I 
 should reach, and height enough for the 
 ambition of any man, one of the artists of 
 the world that has shown so few artists, 
 that spoils millions for every one she 
 achieves. So I set to work to re-cast and 
 to re-write. I shut myself up alone in my 
 evenings, and everything I wrote was of 
 the intensest value and vitality — my ideals 
 worked up to the grandest maddest heights, 
 yet so clear in their drawing that the 
 possible never seemed left — all the dreams
 
 14G Truth and its Teller. 
 
 of my boyhood, all the observation and 
 experience of early manhood, all that I had 
 ever learnt, ever known, ever felt, ever 
 enjoyed, ever suffered, all this swelled my 
 book up to its height of power and ideality. 
 All was renewed and broadened in its 
 renewal — so terribly had I worked it up 
 stage after stage that one of my earliest 
 sketches had been seven years in the writing, 
 and when written was but six pages of 
 supreme prose — what a work ! 
 
 And the men that I drew were most 
 huge and yet most vital — and the women 
 were most huge and yet most vital — they 
 were indeed men and women ; and the 
 men were my true and strong companions 
 — and the women, they were my dearly- 
 loved sweethearts. And Love was the warp 
 and weft, and all the words and meaning 
 of the book ; so that there came a time 
 when those who had called me passionless 
 now called me Love-mad ! Yes, indeed ! If 
 it be mad to burn with a strong steady 
 light like the sun, if it be sane to burst 
 and splutter like a cheap firework, then I 
 am Love-mad, and the world Love-sane !
 
 Truth and its Teller. 147 
 
 And when I had finished my book, 
 showed the world an ideal that still touched 
 possibility, one that it could live by, and 
 living by must be great by, one that it 
 will never live by, most miserable world ! — 
 having done this I had a time of pause, 
 waiting for its publication — and in that 
 time of pause stopped to observe the world 
 again. 
 
 Ever higher and higher my ideals had 
 been tending till that highest height that 
 my book saw them in — and now as I 
 looked on the world with those clearest 
 eyes I paid the terrible penalty of all high 
 ideals. 
 
 For still I was human — still came the 
 aching cry at nights of the longing for the 
 love of women ; still came the cry loudened 
 by my Atheism for the one sweet eternity 
 open to me — that eternity so sweet that 
 had it been ready for me I should, for the 
 sake of its sweet completeness, have gladly 
 thrown over an offered possibility of the 
 ordinary vulgar eternity longed for by man 
 — preferring the eternity that mixes in 
 its course the blood of sweethearts and 
 •sweethearts.
 
 148 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 Now I looked on the world with those 
 clearest eyes of my hugest idealism. 
 
 I saw once at the edge of a pond a 
 cat staring wide-eyed at a swan — longing in 
 her cat-like heart for the possession of such 
 a bird of birds. I had just such a heart 
 as the heart of that cat — nothing less than 
 the most exquisite, the purest, the holiest, 
 the grandest of women, nothing less did I 
 gaze at and dream of — should I, with such 
 as that in my mind's eye, be content 
 with such as the world offered me for 
 women 1 
 
 Hope against hope to find what I wanted 
 — I will give you at random a dozen 
 experiences, all true, all terrible — the world's 
 daily life is a tragedy to the man who 
 loves, and I loved all women ; love all still, 
 niust love all, must grieve that they are 
 not more of what I dreamt they were, 
 poor sparrows that cannot be swans ! 
 
 This is what happened so oft, never 
 losing its edge ! — In a drawing room a 
 girl who played with real feeling ; I had 
 been introduced to her but that evening, 
 but with characteristic warmth and frankness 
 and eagerness to love her I walked up to
 
 Truth and its Teller. 149 
 
 her to talk raptly about music. And she 
 could look at me with an air half chilly, 
 half critical, not shyness, but the air of 
 one who has no knowledge to judge men 
 who differed in their methods from the 
 stale mean of convention. And the passionate 
 surge in my heart raised the inward outcry 
 " Shall I go with a feeble reed of a woman 
 like that to bear into the world children 
 without entrails 1 " She and all her class 
 were no women to me. Can a life that 
 lives be bound by so dirty and paltry a 
 thing as Grundyism ? offended by open 
 frankness ! 
 
 And the girl I knew two years and called 
 her by her Christian name and she objected; 
 and the girl I knew four years and offered 
 to teach music to, and she carefully kept 
 her sister in the room with her — these too 
 were such as the first was, such as dared 
 not think and dared not feel and dared 
 not live by their own souls ; mothers fit 
 to make children without entrails ! If they 
 thought or felt how could they do other 
 than see the grovelling dirtiness of their 
 suspicion 1 The cowardice of it all !
 
 150 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 And the girl I offended because I said 
 it was sweet to see a mother suckling her 
 child ; and the girl I offended because I 
 said there was no harm that a girl should 
 cycle in knickers, but on the contrary it 
 was good that girls should follow a way 
 of health, seeing that they will be mothers 
 of a new generation ; what shall these be 
 mothers of, save children with no entrails ? 
 
 And the one who said a woman was 
 justified in marrying for her keep ; and the 
 one who said of the girl engaged to a poor 
 man " She is foolish in her engagement ; 
 what advantage will she get out of it?" 
 
 Oh my God, my God, how 
 
 shall I go on, for of this class are the 
 mothers of us all, these who have not the 
 wit nor courage to think or feel or live by 
 their own souls — these to whom I wrote a 
 message in my book of love — a message of 
 love and the duties of love, and how a 
 world born of love would be a world saved 
 beyond question — what did they do with 
 my book and me ? save turn away and 
 leave us, for that they were too afraid 
 and too ignorant and too ashamed ( only 
 the vile are ashamed ) to know when they
 
 Truth and its Teller. 151 
 
 saw it the salvation of their souls ! Afraid, 
 ignorant, ashamed — such is the definition of 
 Grundyism ! 
 
 In this wretched world I have known a 
 woman hold up a libertine as a good 
 example to her pure-lived son "Because he 
 has such manners ! " The manners of a 
 vulgar conventional rake — Oh terrible world 
 indeed ! Lost beyond any man's power of 
 saving ! 
 
 If they had had any real belief whatso- 
 ever, however vicious, however degraded — 
 that would make them something better 
 than they were — for they were nothings, 
 mere copiers of their neighbours, their own 
 shadows, anything to imitate, anything to 
 save them the drudgery of thinking or 
 feeling or living by their own souls — poor 
 pitiable mockeries of women, mere Grundy- 
 fied clockworks ! To bear into the world 
 more inane Grundyfied clockworks through 
 an eternity of tragedy ! Oh for one woman 
 amongst such a crowd ! "Was not a blooded 
 terrier bitch a thousand times more whole- 
 some a female than they ! 
 
 And so at last even women lost their 
 charm to me, became parts of the same
 
 152 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 dull farce and piteous tragedy ; yet still 1 
 dreamt on of one woman, one I never 
 hoped and yet still hoped ever to meet — 
 till a crash great above all the crashes of 
 my life came to break me. 
 
 It was this way — let me gather my 
 courage up and tell you the weary horror. 
 
 My father was a Lancashire Mill owner, 
 a hard-working man who had made money ; 
 a brute to his men, and a greater brute 
 to my mother ; a man who boasted much 
 of his virtue, and who one would have 
 believed to be at any rate sex-virtuous, 
 he being so chill -hearted ; an important 
 man at his chapel ; a man who wrote 
 and published Moral and Religious Leaflets ; 
 for his own edification — and that of persons 
 who did not know him. Such he was; 
 that was grief enough to me, though I 
 knew gladly that my qualities of worth I 
 had got from my dear mother ; yet the 
 horror of him remained ; and also the 
 shame that bites a proud man's heart 
 when he knows he was got between cold 
 sheets ; such feelings I will not dwell on ; 
 think for yourself what they must havp 
 been.
 
 Truth and its Teller. 153 
 
 Suddenly I got the news of his death 
 from a paralytic stroke ; and that death 
 took place at a house of shame ! And 
 this, and other attendant evidences, proved 
 to me, beyond doubt, that the producer 
 both of me and of the Moral and 
 Religious Leaflets was a keeper of harlots, 
 foul, foul, foul — he who would black- 
 guard a poor clerk over an error of 
 
 sixpence — he who to my mother 
 
 need I go on? You shake and turn pale, 
 good youth — you may shake and turn pale 
 — if you love me you must do no other — 
 for my life broke upon that awful human 
 document, that to me mos* terrible of 
 terrible evidences of humanity's bestial 
 worthlessness — for what was now to come 
 of me, I who had lived for love, and for 
 the hope of the throb of a heart to mine? 
 I to whom love meant children, refused all 
 more selfish or lesser facts, meant but a 
 blood to blood building of a race vigorous 
 and sweet ! 
 
 Dared I, with the blood in my veins of 
 
 that man, that As I said to 
 
 myself in my passionate metaphor: — What 
 if though a head and shoulders above the
 
 154 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 crowd of men, I was still from the waist 
 downwards on a level with them? The one 
 thing that could make life more horrible 
 than before, the fear, the absolute fear of 
 what might be the offspring of my love to 
 a woman, love to me meaning children — I 
 with the blood in my veins of that 
 
 not adulterer only, but hypocrite 
 
 and lying coward also . . . There my life 
 Wrecked — sooner or later this vile world 
 will wreck the life of a man who cherishes 
 ideals ! And the more the ideality the 
 more the wreckage. — 
 
 Little remains to tell. How the book 
 came out, the book that is for all time 
 my triumph, the one battle I have won 
 against the world contemptible that has 
 broken me up — and the victory of the noble 
 is an eternal glory, and the victory of the 
 base world over the noble is but a derision! 
 So my book counts ; while the world that 
 wrecked my life into a melancholy misery 
 is but the ten times baser that its vilenesa 
 overthrew me — overthrew me because of my 
 nobility, because baseness must become 
 ever more and more utterly intolerable to 
 me !
 
 Truth and its Teller, 155 
 
 But to tell ray tale quickly — how the 
 book came out, how the conventional hated 
 it, how those who pretended to love it 
 dared not show it to their sisters, dared 
 not defend it before their sweethearts, 
 funked Mrs. Grundy, thought me well to 
 be satisfied if they whispered into my ear 
 their faint approval of it, while they 
 squinted round the corner to make sure 
 there was no one hearing them ! How, in 
 my pride and my loneliness, I quarrelled 
 with them and with all — (or they with me !) 
 — with my employer too — left home, friends, 
 fortune, womanhood, health, everything the 
 world calls anything ; nothings when looked 
 at the everything I had achieved , and how 
 in a letter to a friend some months before 
 the book came out I had predicted all this, 
 knew it beforehand, walked calm and straight 
 at it when I brought out my book — all 
 this you will estimate and think it no more 
 than my duty owed, the tally of what I 
 ought — should I count the cost of my book? 
 Am I a coward who would count before 1 
 Am I a fool who would count after? And 
 no woman has kissed me — shall I count the 
 ; cost 1 "
 
 156 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 He fell back and lay staring in front of 
 him, meditating his solitary and terrible 
 life ; she waited in silence — she knew he 
 had not finished, she knew he could not 
 have forgotten her. In a moment he 
 resumed : — 
 
 " In my loneliness came cheer — a cheer 
 unexpected and awfully sweet — for I saw 
 even in the very flesh and blood a glimpse 
 of a sublime woman. 
 
 A girl who learnt boxing of me that she 
 might take her own part — a girl whose face 
 was more than beautiful because it was 
 fearless truth — oh so great of heart ! My 
 God there was more living potency of men 
 in the menstrue of that girl that went a 
 wasting unachieved than in the whole flesh 
 and blood of things who crawl about under 
 their top-hats deeming themselves complete ! 
 And I taught that noble creature the way 
 of love and the way of life — taught her 
 to know the grand possibilities of herself, 
 taught her what heights those possibilities 
 demanded — there is no other teaching!" He 
 stopped ; and the girl, all aflame, said 
 " She loved you, did she love you 1 " And 
 he replied slowly "Had I been base I
 
 Truth and its Teller. 157 
 
 could have made her love me — but her love 
 was not for me. For I was broken — the 
 vile world had broken me. 
 
 Late hours, neglected health, struggles for 
 Art, these were nothing — but to see in the 
 streets at night women selling sex, men 
 buying it — the next generation bought and 
 sold, fouled before its birth — none the less 
 fouled because born of wives who take 
 what the harlo s leave — and then the awful 
 
 knowledge that in my own race 
 
 The world had broken me I say — no shame 
 to me ; for in cases of such stress the 
 greater the man the greater the wreckage 
 — the wreckage the proof of the greatness ; 
 the world had broken me — should such a 
 man marry such a girl 1 For in marriage 
 the man must still be stronger than the 
 woman — marriage puts a man to a woman 
 as a smith puts a tyre to a wheel. Red 
 hot iron binds together fibrous wood that 
 cracks and shrieks as the iron comes, but 
 rejoices at its coming — and the iron will 
 wear into nothingness ere ever it lets the 
 wood be hurt ! — Should so rusted a hoop 
 as I clip such a heart-of-oak ? No, rather 
 nothing than less than the full ideal ! " 
 
 M
 
 158 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 Then she looked at this grand man who, 
 while all his nature shrieked for sex, yet 
 could with all in his grasp reject all from 
 very worship of sex — looked at him and 
 knew it was better to have lost him thus 
 than to have had any other man, or to 
 have had him and have had him lessened 
 by that much of his greatness ; and he 
 rose with a terrible light in his eyes and 
 spoke on — 
 
 " Listen to me — let me on my death-bed 
 make my final confession of faith — the noble 
 religion of sorrow — then, if you can, make 
 ~our solemn promise that as I have lived 
 you will live — for the world has need of 
 such men as I, to waste their lives 
 miserably and fail ! 
 
 Failure — that is the word — for how will 
 my life lived virtuously, commanding virtue 
 to men, how shall that in any way affect 
 them 1 Base they were and are and will 
 be— evermore base. But join with me and 
 be one of those singing a pa;an to failure 
 — take the way that leads to nowhere in 
 this world, neither to your own prosperity 
 nor to that of others, for others will not 
 follow you in your virtue nor gain anything
 
 Truth and its Teller. 159 
 
 from it ! Follow ideality to its maddest 
 heights counting no cost — let it tear your 
 heart with melancholy, let it deprive you 
 of all lesser and vulgar pleasures other than 
 its bitter self, serve it disdaining reward, 
 hold no Heaven, fear no Hell, have no 
 future life save the one eternity you look 
 ever wistfully at — that of sex — and that 
 your ideality will never let you get to — 
 for you, hater of the world's basenesses, it 
 is not for you to be a breeder with some 
 poor stuff of children without entrails — and 
 two, fit to make men, are so scarce that 
 they will not meet in this world ! — And 
 when you have racked yourself into misery 
 with your grand ideals, and the miserable 
 world set against them, then take this as 
 your only and fit consolation — that you 
 must not, whatever haps, and however 
 miserable, turn your back upon this wretched 
 world — you must not take your life, you 
 must not live alone — yours to be even 
 like the fabled rose that flung wilfully its 
 single sweetness on to the rails before the 
 stench of the cattle-train ; utterly wasted 
 though its exquisite perfume might be, 
 having still no choice but to hurl its best
 
 160 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 against the foulness ; and wasted utterly, 
 you, too, must not budge till the last 
 agony of the last wrench of the last awful 
 wheel has gone over your heart — then you 
 die shrieking with joy, as I shriek with 
 joy, that the flesh at last will peel from 
 your bones, and you will feel nothing more, 
 nothing more — 
 
 "In the merry grave enfossed 
 You will never count the cost!" 
 
 He fell in a terrible exhaustion back — 
 then she spoke — she who all this while 
 had been learning the meaning of that deep 
 instinct that had led her in never-forgotten 
 day to run from the sight of his out- 
 stretched arms — she who now saw at the 
 clearest how a vague luminous voice had 
 cried to her on that day how unfit the 
 thing she was would be to hold the distilled 
 manhood, the ripened possibilities, of such 
 a man as he ; now, at his very death gasp, 
 she spoke. 
 
 " I knew a girl " she said " who knew 
 you, learnt what love was through you, 
 learnt what life was through love of you,
 
 Truth and its Teller. 161 
 
 lived a life fair to be called worthy only 
 through you. Her life saw two grand days. 
 The first was thus — you had taught her to 
 hold her own against her cousin ; on the 
 day she first thrashed him her Aunt stripped 
 her to flog her ; the cousin stood about 
 grinning at what nakedness of hers was 
 thus displayed. Knocking about in courts 
 had made her know more than her age; 
 shame and wrath held her ; she vowed to 
 herself that within a week she would catch 
 him in that court, their playground, and 
 either by strength or fraud and at any risk 
 would show to the laughter of the other 
 girls of the court the male parts of this 
 youth as a tit-for-tat; but in the evening 
 she came to you, her friend ; with you she 
 was always innocent ; and in the frankness 
 of her innocence showed you her bruises ; 
 yes in very nakedness showed you her 
 bruises; and you spoke to her of the 
 holiness of nakedness ; and as a moral you 
 kissed her there where the back-bone ends 
 and a lovely dimple sets off the dignity of 
 two grand curves — these were your words, 
 cherished ever since — and she gave up her 
 purpose, would set no one grinning at naked-
 
 1G2 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 ness, remembered ever your lesson, lived 
 pure conquering her worser-self, and fought 
 for the cause of purity and honour a set 
 fight with a strong man, made him admit 
 the swine he was, and in the joy of the 
 cause hugged and kissed and loved like 
 your very baby there the aching hard, 
 brown bruises that across her breast " — in 
 her madness she tore her garments apart, 
 showing the scars of her victory, the 
 nakedness of her purity — hearing the words 
 he, in a mad frenzy, had risen in his bed 
 — tottering, he shrieked " You, you, you ! 
 I choke, I choke, joy, I choke ! " And he 
 tore from his stifling throat the night-dress, 
 tore till his throbbing chest was bare, 
 "You," he shrieked, "Oh, sweetheart, kiss 
 me — You!" And he fell forward into her 
 arms, dead. 
 
 And she held him there hugged tight 
 against her breast ; jealously tore away 
 what strips of clothing might hang between 
 their nakedness and nakedness, pressed the 
 very skin of him against her very skin in 
 her ecstatic love for this proved man of 
 men.
 
 Truth and its Teller. 163 
 
 And she kissed him with all her lips, 
 and all the throbbing throat behind her 
 lips, and with all the heart under her 
 throat, and with all the woman's sweetness 
 under her heart ; with all her whole 
 passionate being she kissed him. And while 
 she held him there the hours passed, but 
 time had ceased to be for her ; day went 
 into night, but light and darkness had 
 ceased to be for her; no outcry of her 
 muscles told her of the strain of his weight, 
 of her standing ; for her own physical being 
 had ceased to be for her ; Time and Space 
 and Matter had ceased to be for her, there 
 as she stood hugging against her breast the 
 body of her love, there as she pressed her 
 kisses into his face. 
 
 And all the while she never wept — why 
 should she weep 1 This man dead had out 
 of his grand black creed of Atheism and 
 Pessimism evolved so madly high an idealism 
 that Priest and Politician spoke of but 
 grovelling dirt beside of it ; this man had 
 lived by that grand creed of his, suffered 
 for it ; and out of it and his pain had 
 wrought art more huge and strong than 
 any, save the few of the gravest and
 
 164 Truth and its Teller. 
 
 greatest (his brothers) had put before the 
 world's incompetence ; he stood so grand 
 that tears were disdained for him — not 
 tears for such as he, the dead who had 
 lived. — 
 
 But as she stood there she was awakened 
 to the world around her by the laughter 
 of a man toying with a drunken harlot in 
 the streets — then for the world fell the 
 tears, tears, tears, bitter and inconsolable ! 
 
 "William Platt. 
 Finished, October, 1894. 

 
 
 THAT RARE THING — A MARR IAGE. 
 
 '"N^j-^ 
 
 p^ ^^
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 MUSING ON THE FATE OF A BROTHER OF MINE. 
 
 A triumph of surgery was performed the 
 other day — a man without a nose was 
 supplied with one in the following interest- 
 ing manner : — The surgeon wrung the neck 
 of a lark, and while it was still warm with 
 life he cut off the breast bone with the 
 flesh covering it, and applied it to the 
 man's face — with time it grew to him as 
 his own flesh. 
 
 To the surgeon it was but a triumph of 
 technique ; a proof of his power and 
 knowledge ; bird and man were to him but 
 as things to practise on. To the man it 
 was the best method obtainable to cover 
 the ugliness and discomfort of a lost 
 feature ; the life of the bird being to him
 
 168 Introduction. 
 
 an absolute nothing, he, the Lord of 
 Creation, free to take all lives ! To the 
 philosophic poet, what might it be to 
 him? 
 
 The lark had been a singer of sweet 
 music, a joy to all those men who had a 
 spark of innocence left in their souls, a 
 purifier with sweet music of such men, a 
 raiser of their spark of innocence for the 
 moment into a fitful flame, a bringer of 
 rest and peace to all souls sad — a very- 
 artist, a brother of mine that lark was — 
 like a very artist, a giver of sweeter peace 
 and wider innocence to men. 
 
 And in his life ( like all real artists ) 
 what grave simplicity and quiet worth I 
 What love and faithfulness and ecstasy in 
 tender duties this lark displayed — a true 
 and simple life like all real artists ! 
 
 And like all true and simple minds he- 
 made his saying true and simple — be sure 
 he was never ashamed to sing of love, love, 
 love, all that he knew of it, nakedly pure, 
 sweet, never ashamed !
 
 Introduction. 169 
 
 That blood that had throbbed in the 
 breast of that lark was limpid and holy, 
 and had never need to go turgid and 
 ashamed at the innocent nakedness of his 
 singing. 
 
 Now that man — who bullied where he 
 could, and was coward where he could not, 
 who brought to the ears of other men no 
 songs save coarse ones, no innocence, but a 
 vulgar jest ! Whose life ( like all bullies) 
 was selfish and sensual and lying, whose 
 pleasures were whoring and drinking — that 
 man cruel in domestic duties, harsh to his 
 wife and child, slovenly in the simple 
 matters of life — that man whose sole notion 
 of outspokenness was distorted prurience — 
 oh the impudence of men ! He had spilt 
 a sweet singer's heart blood but to brighten 
 the look of his face ! 
 
 And the breast that had vibrated over 
 the pure heart of that singer is set to 
 receive the purple blood of sensual sottish- 
 ness ! But should one blame you, poor 
 lark, for the grossness that pollutes those 
 tender veins of yours ?
 
 170 Introduction. 
 
 And I weave out of this a deeper moral 
 — This book that I have written has been 
 torn from my heart, my blood is warm in 
 it, it leaves me throbbing, ecstatic and 
 pure ; but when it comes to the reader, 
 and he makes it a part of himself, then, 
 if in my songs of passionate holy ecstasy 
 there should run a libertine foulness] of 
 blood, who then is to blame?
 
 r72 
 
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 ^^^^^^^ 
 
 wj*M 
 
 THAT RARE THING — A MARRIAGE. 
 
 Coming home from some little musical 
 evening were a small party of friends ; 
 they naturally divided into groups ; among 
 others was a group of three, two girls with 
 a man betwixt; the left hand girl sensible 
 and practical, about three and twenty ; the 
 man about twenty-eight, earnest, dreamy, 
 powerful ; the right hand girl vivacious, 
 lovable-faced, though certainly not beautiful 
 — looking very artless, merry and girlish 
 for her seventeen or eighteen years. 
 
 And they talked all brightness and 
 lightness, skipping from subject to subject 
 and making innocent sport of all, he, the 
 earnest-faced man, as light and witty as 
 the others — till a passing word of the elder 
 broke through his lighter mannerism, showed 
 his deeper self. 
 
 "Look at that girl" she had said of one 
 ahead of them " How she keeps the balance 
 between those two men who ;ire with her, 
 sets one against the other, keeps both round
 
 172 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 her, the gay thing ! She will end for 
 certain, however, in taking the richer ! " 
 
 The man did not laugh — he bit his lip 
 and grunted out sardonically "To you that 
 is a scene from a farce — well truly so, for 
 farce is the world's tragedy, tragedy the 
 poet's farce ! The poor contemptible things 
 of farce are more awful than the heroes of 
 tragedy ; and what except laughable are 
 the grand passions of a Bianca, of an 
 Othello, viewed in the lights of you 
 practical commercial girls ? " 
 
 " It's all very well for you people who 
 read poetry and write music " she replied, 
 " But we girls have got our livings to 
 think of, and reading your books won't give 
 them to us." 
 
 As so often happens in these lightly 
 raised disputes she began by force of 
 opposition to take up a point of view more 
 extreme than she would otherwise have 
 maintained — and kept false to her better 
 lights through the rest of the discussion. 
 He began by giving her a chance of 
 withdrawal —
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 173 
 
 " Come," he said, " You must really 
 honestly see how disgusting such traffic of 
 love is." 
 
 She stupidly refused this offer of asserting 
 her truer self. — 
 
 "Look here," she said, "If a girl is 
 equally disposed to both may she not 
 let material advantage have the casting 
 vote?" 
 
 " If she is but equally disposed to both " 
 he replied, with scornful emphasis, " What 
 right has she to marry, marry a man she 
 does not love, this girl equally disposed to 
 both — ah!" The last grunt was a cry of 
 pain — the outcry of poor wounded idealism 
 from a man who must strive to think well 
 of all women. 
 
 She continued blind to the vulgarity of 
 her arguments. "A woman has a right to 
 marry for a home " she said defiantly. He 
 gritted his teeth, paused a moment, then 
 cried out his attack " A right to sell 
 herself for her keep ! Do you know, you 
 ignorant, what marriage is? Are you so 
 poor in self respect that you will sell the 
 using of your body to the highest bidder 
 — ah, you blush, you have cause to, not 
 
 N
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 at my words, but at the weakness in you 
 that they show — marriage is the making of 
 children — will you sell your share in the 
 making of children to the highest bidder — 
 sell so sacred a quality, your motherhood, 
 for a paltry keep and comfort — Yes, and 
 have babies born of ledgers and calculations 
 — not love, not love — do you see the poor 
 thing you are?" 
 
 His voice was rent with grand and noble 
 passion, racking his utterance into a hoarse 
 undertone — he was terribly moved. She put 
 her hand to her eyes struggling with tears; 
 she suffered terribly, yet less terribly than 
 he did, that idealist rent and racked with 
 the horror of the world's non-idealism ; she 
 had strength and courage enough to keep 
 from a break-down till she got home ; and 
 there, sobbing on her bed, she felt and 
 found a larger nobler purity, and with it 
 a grander sweeter happiness, than had ever 
 yet befallen her. 
 
 Whenever sex and sex are seen by one 
 another soul to soul there is, and must be, 
 a momentary flash of love between the two 
 — for love is the only understanding ; and 
 complete underbian.ling impossible without
 
 That Bare Thing — A Marriage. 175 
 
 the aid of love. Yet it was not love that 
 I referred to when I said she had found 
 the grander sweeter happiness ; I meant the 
 grander sweeter happiness of a new found 
 purity to be striven for and held to ; for 
 she knew and felt truly that he and she 
 moved in planes quite different — he, large 
 passioned, rugged, terrible, strong -as -death 
 artist, she, sweet, sane, ordinary-strengthed 
 girl ; though, till the end of their time, 
 they would be two, who, for a passing 
 moment, had been blown naked to one 
 another in the awful gusts of a storm — 
 naked to one another, that is the condition 
 spiritual of all love — soul-naked — of which 
 skin-nakedness must be but a sweet sign 
 and symbol nothing in itself — or if it seek 
 to be something in itself, then less than 
 nothing. 
 
 That girl of eighteen had something to 
 think of that night — that girl of eighteen 
 who had just begun wondering terribly what 
 shiverings of the body meant — now she had 
 learnt and knew, and now this knowledge 
 made her for ever sure of her true-achieved 
 purity — for ignorance breeds impurity, stupid 
 mischievous ignorance, that ignorance that
 
 176 That Rare TJdng — A Marriage. 
 
 is the tragic educator of our girls, that 
 ignorance that vulgar men esteem, because 
 they have made their own knowledge so 
 impure, that ignorance that all elevated 
 men must despise, because they have made 
 their own knowledge so pure — that ignorance 
 breeds impurity, because it is the doctrine 
 of the impure, because it must at every 
 moment subtly suggest to* the young sweet 
 innocent the impurity of things pure. Oh 
 the horror of it, that impurity should breed 
 so fast ! 
 
 But to this girl had come a rush as 
 grand and wild and purifying as a rich 
 October north wind that sweeps away a 
 summer's sickliness — and there rang through 
 her mind the words "Your sacredest quality 
 your motherhood," and they rang again 
 and again in her ears, and she knew that 
 her shiverings were but the ecstasy of one 
 who was approaching holiest mysteries — and 
 she was pure, had swept away all the 
 impurity that had been threatening her — 
 was pure, because she had been shown 
 purity face to face — and who so bad in 
 this world as to reject purity if at the
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 177 
 
 moment supreme of youth it be shown us 
 face to face ? 
 
 Within a week it chanced that he and 
 she met in the streets together — they 
 paused in their walk to look at an 
 illustrated advertisement. It advanced the 
 merits of some educational work, and 
 showed two lines of faces ; the top row, 
 who had read the work, eminently respect- 
 able ; the other row, who had not read the 
 work, eminently the reverse. She laughed 
 in her quick witty way and said — " How 
 dull the top lot are ! — Do you know I find 
 the lower row by far the more attractive? 
 There seems somehow an interest, a reckless 
 poetry in them that the other set com- 
 pletely lack ! " 
 
 He replied " The top are the Pharisees 
 of the century ; Christ hated and the 
 Christians love them ! The lower lot Christ 
 came to save — to very little purpose. 
 Generous minds have often believed in 
 them, misled by the higher moments that 
 such reckless dogs possess — those higher 
 moments, alas ! are varied by lower half- 
 hours ! Still if self-indulgence kills the 
 lower lot, self-righteousness kills the upper
 
 178 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 — all are corpses, all rotten ! — And of the 
 two rottennesses, the rottenness of hypo- 
 critical Grundyism is by far the most 
 offensive to the nose ! Look at that man 
 in the top row, with the smile of a dentist 
 when he tries to persuade you that it 
 won't hurt you to have three back teeth 
 out — he is as big a rogue as the man 
 underneath him, and his lying and self- 
 conceit are more awful than his roguery ! 
 All are bad ! Let us stick up for those 
 who are trodden on ! " 
 
 She turned to him with her eyes lit up 
 — she recalled the man of the other night 
 in the impetuosity of his speech ; and to 
 show him how truly she admired and held 
 his doctrine she said " And the top row, 
 the lying, the lifeless, the Grundyfied, are 
 those who marry on calculation, and are 
 born of ledgers — the lower, anyway, look 
 as if they might marry for love ! " 
 
 He stared at her face to face — she had 
 the triumph face of one saturated with 
 living and glorious doctrine ; he took her 
 hand and said "Never forget that sacrament; 
 your body is too precious for any price — 
 gi?e it when it goes." — Then he walked off
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 179 
 
 — her fingers tingled gladly with the last 
 grip of him. 
 
 He lay awake in rich and happy thought 
 that night — happy to have awakened in her 
 all her sweet youthful pure ideality ; and 
 as he was a man not to half-do things he 
 sought in the next few weeks a chance for 
 another talk with her. 
 
 They knew one another well, so a chance 
 soon came — a seeing-home from somewhere. 
 
 She began by asking him a question, 
 what it was he had been so occupied with 
 lately, some new music or what — and he 
 saw that he could lead from this to what 
 he wanted to say ; and thus he talked to 
 her, talked in his grave deep voice that she 
 eagerly drank in, drank in with her ears, 
 drank in with her eyes since it seemed to 
 take shape and colour for her, drank in 
 with her whole being. 
 
 " No music this time " he said " but a 
 book that I have been long busy on ! A 
 book to be new as Whitman was new, pure 
 as Whitman was pure, simple as Whitman 
 was simple, daring as Whitman was daring ! 
 and with its out-bringing 1 risk, I gladly 
 risk a fate such as Whitman met. Do you
 
 180 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 know the story of him ? How in the war 
 he had devotedly nursed thousands of 
 sufferers into health — all free work, that 
 he could not be, was not, paid for — how 
 after the war he was thrown out of 
 his clerkship because he was Whitman 
 who had written that book ; how the one 
 return of a country he had so served 
 in works of humanity, so blest with a 
 poetry complete and virile, was but an 
 utter forgetfulness of his work of humanity, 
 a shameful attempt at suppression of that 
 poetry so complete, so virile ; he sunk to 
 an end of poverty, he who had so enriched 
 all men ; and the holy decency of his 
 work was but condemned as u indecent n 
 by the vulgar indecencies of a world too 
 low for its acceptance. Make sure of this : 
 — That a world to whom Love, love entire 
 and in its fullest and every act, is a thing 
 to blush at, that world is foul — utterly 
 foul. What is Love, save the holiest of 
 sacraments? The making of men, the next 
 generation ; what but the holiest of things 
 can it be that a man from his own blood 
 and that of his sweetheart builds new sweet 
 bodies to live in the world 1 What but
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 181 
 
 the tenderest of things is it that in the 
 building of them he shall pass into her 
 being those essences of his that are most 
 puissantly male ? There all is said — where 
 is the horror that oppresses humanity, save 
 in its own too horrible filthiness ? I have 
 said all ; and there is no horror, save what 
 men themselves put in ; but because I am 
 moral and they are immoral I risk in that 
 book my whole future (material future, such 
 is nothing — but with it may go the chance 
 of producing more work.) What matter, it 
 is worth it ! — Because I have said that 
 girls should be taught of motherhood, ay, 
 all there is to teach — for that a foul 
 world will call me foul — for so long they 
 have not been shocked at vice it is time 
 they were shocked at virtue ! 
 
 Look you here, the treatment of the 
 physical is the touchstone of a man's 
 morality. If it is to him but a sign and 
 symbol ; and if in consequence nakedness is 
 a sweet and clean thing to his thoughts 
 and in his eyes, then he is moral — nohow 
 else ! For if the physical revolts him that 
 is because it touches him too nearly. A 
 sweet sign and symbol, that is all that it
 
 182 That Bare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 is ; and properly looked at it is a guardian 
 of morality. You remember, yes I know 
 you remember, good pure girl, that talk I 
 had with your cousin 1 Well, with deliberate 
 purpose, I said to her the words " The 
 using of your body," because I knew that 
 this broad suggestion of the physical would 
 quickest bring her purity to its true high 
 level — a girl would be far gone indeed if 
 she matched for money after it were 
 brought home to her that marriage gave 
 the right of use of her body — truly then 
 she must blush for shame at the physical, 
 blush because not yet pure — but between a 
 girl and her sweetheart there would be 
 nothing in the suggestion but symbolism 
 and purity. The physical is the touchstone 
 of purity — a touchstone that condemns the 
 world — the world that blushes or that 
 smirks equally condemned by the gravity 
 of nakedness, the beautiful symbolism of 
 nakedness, the holy sincerity of nakedness." 
 She used to paint landscapes that girl, 
 had an artist's soul with it. One day he 
 came round to look at her pictures — then 
 artist to artist spoke, soul to soul. In 
 scraps and patches the conversation was ;
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 183 
 
 but as at night she lay awake glad with 
 the knowledge of that most beautiful of 
 miracles that soul to soul had met with 
 perfect understanding, there in her ecstasy 
 all his scattered words recalled themselves, 
 one long grand chord progression of deep- 
 felt resonant harmonies. 
 
 " Why so shy with showing me your 
 work 1 " (he had begun with chiding her 
 awkward bashfulness ) " It is your soul 
 that speaks in your Art, and no more 
 can be done than the displaying of your 
 soul in the highest purity that Art 
 adoration can raise it to for that display. 
 What though the technique be awkward, 
 what of that since I am an artist real 
 (that rare thing an artist real) and not a 
 mere seeker of Art enjoyment (Art is no 
 enjoyment to me.) Look you here, Beethoven, 
 chief of all the world's artists, has said 
 once for all " Let a man in playing strike 
 wrong notes, it is nothing to matter ; let 
 him put wrong feeling, he is no player at 
 all ! " and if I play a Beethoven sonata I 
 seek above all to play with my whole soul ; 
 convinced that even if many chords were 
 wrong the swell of earnest feeling over all,
 
 184 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 through all, would make a grander reading 
 of that work than the " perfection " of our 
 gymnastic professionals ! And oh, in his 
 art-creation how grandly rough and wild 
 this Beethoven was — mad, untrammelled artist 
 of artists, king of the kings of artists, 
 personification of passion's hugest generosi- 
 ties ! Many of the world's musicians 
 excelled him in finish, beauty, technique — 
 how Wagner excelled him in all three 1 
 And Wagner, poor feebleness that appetite 
 ran away with, Wagner not fit to fill 
 Beethoven's ink-pot ! The artist is an artist 
 in proportion to what he has to say — 
 nohow else — and Wagner has but a little 
 nothing, Beethoven, oh such a wild resistless 
 everything of manhood ! 
 
 How I wander ! But then how sweet it 
 is to talk of Art to an artist ! Look at 
 that wild heath-land of yours, how sublime 
 for all its awkwardness ! Nature is but the 
 most wonderful of blank canvasses, poor, 
 purblind, stupid, of no beauty innately, 
 but of the fullest capacity for containing 
 all the beauty we put into her from our 
 own personifications! Those wind-swept trees, 
 and the clash of their green with that so
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 185 
 
 boldly blue a sky, and the yellow of the 
 wild gorse next it — ah, in that clash of 
 colour magnificent one sees all — all the 
 meanings of your soul in a way too clear 
 for words to say them — too clear, I say, 
 not too dark, for word's translation — what a 
 piece ! — That is a dream of virile men, 
 more grand than flesh shows them — 
 
 " When the moist drops of spring-time 
 are borne on the breeze 
 
 To fill the soft dale with brave 
 masculine trees." — 
 
 Thus your hymn of power and life — I like 
 your primitive colour and its eternal discords 
 — you raise the nerves by those heroic 
 clashes — passion-struck colour ; love me, or 
 hate me, says a man ! " And she had 
 treasured those words of his, and joyed 
 over them with such thrills ! For into that 
 piece of nature she had, in the strange 
 mood of the true artist, sought to put even 
 the grand pulsations of his passionate voice, 
 that seemed to her to bode forth with a 
 shape, a wild colour, of its own — a clash of 
 wild primitive colours, a blaze as of yellow,
 
 186 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 blue and green under the staring ruddy 
 sun of the moorland sky — not the colours 
 of respectability, washed out and dirty and 
 drab ! And he had said — 
 
 " I love rich amateur art, art for its own 
 grand sake, art that is a religion, an object 
 for living, not the Art of professionalism. I 
 love its grand clumsy tendernesses, would give 
 all the finish of the professional world for 
 just one of those grand clumsy tendernesses 
 of the love-struck amateur ! I speak not 
 of course of the few great — it were as 
 absurd to speak of Beethoven as an artist 
 by profession as to speak of Buddha or 
 Christ as prophets by profession ! 
 
 Do not mistake me — Work and Learn are 
 both great commands — but what way to 
 Work and Learn 1 
 
 With your whole soul serve — that is the 
 message to artists. And the critics spend 
 their time in a query as to whether or no 
 Turner painted true to nature ! Fools, what 
 matters it ? Since Turner's soul stares at 
 one through those landscapes ! Call them 
 what you will, for those who have souls 
 stands a soul revealed. And grander still 
 the soul that shines from the grand figures
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 187 
 
 of Angelo — about whose anatomies I believe 
 there is cavil ! Why will it not suffice to 
 the miserable world that with a memory 
 remaining of these so terribly grand figures 
 one feels, and is incapable of baseness — 
 but the miserable world feels and knows 
 nothing of this ! And the artists and critics 
 who stand at the top, have they felt it 1 
 A few sad ones unknown may have felt it 
 — felt it, and with it a higher joy than 
 all prosperity — and in their loneliness a 
 greater misery than all fate's miseries ! 
 
 The old myth tells us that there were 
 many irreligious who worked miracles in 
 the name of God to fill their own pockets ; 
 and many religious, who with no miracles 
 but their own purity of heart to help them 
 struggled out a living in the true faith ; 
 and so it is in art. Come out of a high 
 class classic concert — you leave behind the 
 thoughts of a chilly sane correct utterly 
 mad and incorrect performance by some poor- 
 blooded sucker-up of the blood of Beethoven 
 ( dead blood not living ) ; but out in the 
 streets you may chance to pass some eager 
 ragged girls dancing to a barrel organ; 
 there in the delight and glory of them, in
 
 188 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 their love and beauty and the delirious 
 joy of their doing it you have met Art 
 at last — Art at last ! 
 
 Oh those concerts ! When Beethoven 
 passionately puts a harsh chord in ( like 
 your wild yellow there !) they smooth it 
 over in their playing so that it is harsh 
 no longer — that they call finished playing 
 — yes finished indeed ! dead and buried as 
 well. — He was wild that grand Beethoven 
 — they will cut his rough hair and comb 
 it and make him presentable to the sleek 
 society he hated ! 
 
 Oh no more concerts for me ! I have a 
 Beethoven at home who lives with me, 
 sitting ever in front of me as I play my 
 
 piano 
 
 at a concert I but stare at his 
 
 hearse ! In the Church is the grave of 
 Christ, at the theatre the burial place of 
 Shakespere ; in the homes of artists these 
 live for ever ! " 
 
 Then he had turned back to her work 
 with an excuse for his ramblings — praised 
 with such feeling, such knowledge ( artists 
 know art — all art ) — shrugged at technical 
 awkwardnesses even when strongly marked 
 and pointed out to him; now-and-again put
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 189 
 
 his finger on such an awkwardness, just to 
 show it was not for lack of seeing them 
 that he called them nothings ; and at the 
 end when she said " How you over-praise 
 me ! " He replied gravely " I praise ; your 
 critics would not ; but when you get 
 "finished," cold, dead, correct, stupid — 
 utterly worthless — they will praise, but I 
 shall have no good word to say to you ! " 
 Then after a short pause he added " For- 
 give my cruel and utterly unwarranted 
 assumption — but just as they used to beat 
 the boys at all the boundary stones, I am 
 often cruel when I have something in mind 
 that I do not want people to forget — but 
 it was uncalled for ! Will you forgive 
 me?" 
 
 " There is nothing to forgive " she had 
 said, "Nothing — nothing — and oh so much 
 to be thankful f or ! " They gripped one 
 another's hands ; she madly hoped that he 
 would kiss her ; but of that he was 
 altogether unconscious, this grave and dreamy 
 man ; he left her to go to his midnight 
 work, for he toiled at business by day and 
 at Art by night, this artist so grave and 
 severe and full of Art that Art could give 
 
 o
 
 190 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 him no living in a world of lightnesses ; 
 and she, with tears that she had had no 
 kiss, with thrillings at the thought of a 
 kiss from him, with ecstasy beating out a 
 thunder-pulse, full of mad joy lay down to 
 dream out his words in an endless repeating 
 sequence, changing with ever rapter changes 
 key upon key ! 
 
 She loved him, she loved him ! 
 
 That became the whole meaning of her 
 being, the whole music of her soul. 
 
 And her Art grew apace under the 
 ecstasy of her love — she painted madly at 
 glorious spring-time landscapes, landscapes 
 rustled in a beauteous and thrilling wind, 
 of which the grass trembled with a new- 
 born, all-inspiring passion, matted with itself, 
 throbbed with the all-devouring vibration of 
 new young life full-felt — a landscape glowing 
 and alive with the eager-eyed expectancy of 
 youth — ablaze with the gay streaming colour 
 of youth, ashout with the loud-hailing voice 
 of youth — mad youth hailing the new day ; 
 which, when it comes, shall, if the promise 
 prove true, but leave the youth younger 
 for every year it takes on it !
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 191 
 
 But the quick introspection of love, true 
 love ever jealous for purity, found a hectic 
 stain upon that soul of hers, a stain that 
 must be washed away. It was that stain 
 that he had spoken of, brought by our 
 impure education of youth, that he had in 
 her case in part swept away — in part but 
 not wholly. Pure though she was with a 
 passionate purity, yet there was one weak 
 spot about her, a weak spot of ignorance 
 — and ignorance whets desire, knowledge 
 alone has passion's tumultuous calm of 
 purity — she knew that she must utterly 
 triumph over the physical, must wholly 
 forget it, save only as transformed into its 
 symbolical aspect, must know the visible 
 only as the sign of the invisible — and she 
 could not forget what she had yet to learn 
 the secret of, could not transform the 
 thing she knew not ; she must look it in 
 the face, know it, pass it by. 
 
 There was but one way to take — that 
 way she took. To that man to whom she 
 talked soul to soul she said — said in broken 
 accents of nerve-strained gravity — 
 
 " There is one thing — I wanted to ask 
 you — because — because I feel I am not
 
 192 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 pure in that complete sense that you are 
 pure — because I still — that is — you know 
 it, I know it, that ignorance of physical fact 
 whets physical desire, being an evasion, and 
 as an evasion a recognition of impurity where 
 impurity must not be. I wish to be quit 
 of such ignorance — to look all in the face 
 and be pure even as you look all in the 
 face and are pure — would you — instruct me 
 for such purity ? " Then flushing with a 
 terrible sense of the abyss she had put 
 between herself and all her bringings up 
 she cried in a sudden sweat of fear — "You 
 understand me?" 
 
 His utterance was grave and measured as 
 befitted the task before him — for her soul 
 lay in his hands — thus in his even weighty 
 tones he spoke — "I understand you — you 
 wish to be pure in the only way that one 
 can attain to perfect purity, in the grand 
 ease of perfect knowledge sweeping away all 
 impure disease generated by ignorance — on 
 to which purity when passion comes it 
 must be grave with the thrilling gravity of 
 a perfect religion — a passion ennobling, 
 spiritual, a passion full of duties and 
 honour, ordering a life, not wrecking it.
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 193 
 
 And to lead you to attain to that perfect 
 purity, to lead you away from that morbid 
 attention to physicalism that commanded 
 ignorance must bring with it, it is your 
 wish and my duty that I clearly tell you, 
 as far as can or need be known by virgins 
 as you and I, what is to be told of the 
 mere physical side of the many-sided passion 
 of Love. 
 
 There is no victory without a struggle, 
 no birth without blood — and the bigger 
 natures have the greater struggle and win 
 it the easier. 
 
 Then this you must know ere we begin 
 — that on the presentment of what I tell 
 you, you will have at first a revulsion, the 
 result of your education — this will be 
 morbidly bad, it is doing too much honour 
 to the merely physical to fear it ; you 
 must conquer it, must say truly within 
 yourself — spirit to spirit we love, and 
 the physical is but a pure and lovely 
 symbol. 
 
 You will have for a short space, mixing 
 with the revulsion, a wild thrill, a fevered 
 temptation, the outcome of your material 
 constitution ; that also will be bad, not
 
 194 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 morbidly but animally bad, the other 
 extreme ; it is doing too much honour to 
 the merely physical to enjoy it — you must 
 conquer that, must say truly within your- 
 self — spirit to spirit we love — the rapture 
 of touch to touch is but the rapture of 
 sense that spirit has engulfed and made 
 her own — the spirituality of love must 
 engulf all — all — body and mind all trans- 
 formed into shivering soul ! 
 
 And then you will know truly that the 
 physical has glorious capacity as a touch- 
 stone of purity, of love's own passionate 
 purity (there is no other truly ! ) ; for with 
 regard to all other men, save your own 
 true lover, the touch of the body will be 
 absolutely unthinkable ; only with true love 
 is the physical absolutely thinkable because 
 absolutely disregarded ; for of him you will 
 have said gloriously in your soul "It is 
 fit — nay a very duty, that he and I shall 
 make children together — make children with 
 love," and with him the act of love will 
 be the highest spirituality, the holy of 
 holies. And the bodies of all humanity 
 will become to you calm and decent, and 
 without repulsion — none will bring a flush
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 195 
 
 to you, the nakedness of them all could 
 not — they will be calm and decent in your 
 eyes, and you will know that each is holy 
 to some lover, and they will have a brotherly 
 sweetness to you, and you will have for all 
 a charity^a charity and tenderness springing 
 from the ideal love for one. 
 
 Learn from me then all the physical 
 details of the act of love — yes all, lest 
 behind some ignorance still left there lurks 
 a cover for curiosity to breed desire in — 
 and as you listen keep strong within your 
 soul all those dawnings of ideal love that 
 have yet come to you — rich and dreamy 
 and strong as they must be in all generous 
 natures — wrapped in this proof listen to 
 my unfolding — it must make or mar you 
 spiritually, know that, as it makes or mars 
 all spirituality in man or woman — and know 
 that I hold for certain that it will make 
 and not mar you, this grand proof of Love 
 — though even if I feared the issue I 
 would none the less put it to the test -— 
 if you break you are worthless, and may 
 
 as well be broken. 
 
 There .she listened to this gloomy grand- 
 idealed man — listened, and the love of him
 
 196 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 it was that kept her spirit unwavering 
 through his recital. But since all are 
 human, he was still right when at the end 
 he said to her most tenderly, though quite 
 calmly — 
 
 "Now I have finished — you are, no doubt, 
 a little sick and giddy and disturbed. You 
 are too large a nature and too full-blooded 
 and great-hearted not to be deeply made on 
 all sides— but of your sort that are tempted 
 more, the strongest are made — sit here and 
 let the north wind cool your brows — the 
 north wind that came from that heroic 
 place where the Sagas were made, and 
 where men revered women more than any- 
 where on earth — let a wind from the 
 birth-place of Signy cool your brows — sit, 
 then go home and think — win your battle, 
 be pure, be great — I leave you to it. ,f 
 He gripped her hand and went away. 
 
 His book came out, and he sent her a 
 copy, and she read it — no need here to 
 speak of it, that book of love and purity 
 and passion, that book of an artist's very 
 soul. 
 
 Know this, that the world condemned it 
 as indecent, this naked-souled, this naked-
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 197 
 
 bodied book ; now you can judge, if you 
 have judgment, to what highest heights of 
 decency it soared ! 
 
 "Would you set ninety-nine out of every 
 hundred men against you 1 Then write a 
 free-spoken, high-moraled, naked-souled, naked- 
 bodied book. The vicious will be against 
 you — the outspokenness with which you 
 attack their vices will shock them, because 
 it will be an outspokenness that lashes 
 them, and that contains no details to attract 
 them — the so-called moral men, Pharisees of 
 the nineteenth century, will be against your 
 book, because it will call natural things 
 innocent, and they like to think all things 
 guilty — because purity to you will be a 
 high passion, and they hate everything that 
 is not as cold as themselves ; there will be 
 none to give you a good word — but you 
 will be beyoud the reach of all. Yet your 
 publishing-day will be a weeping-day ; terrible 
 it is to have to set one's brother-men 
 against one ! 
 
 And our artist's book got such a reputa- 
 tion that it turned him from the business 
 he got his living at — what matter, he said, 
 should he count the cost of his book, set
 
 198 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 a value against his conscience, a limit to 
 the truth of his soul ? 
 
 So he went to the ruin that he had 
 even been ready for ; but ere he passed 
 away into utter loneliness, he paused to say 
 a farewell to the girl he had spoken soul 
 to soul to — for whom he cherished the 
 deepest love, a love now to be for ever 
 hid! 
 
 He met and told her, in a few brief, 
 clear words, that he must even say a 
 farewell to her, as he knew not now what 
 he was to do, where to go — a few well 
 saved pounds he had, no more — the rest, 
 what cared he ? If he could not live he 
 could die. He had achieved his book, his 
 life. — Yet ere he passed into the struggle he 
 wished to say a farewell to the one who 
 had understood as she read of his book of 
 love and love's spirituality, love's utmost 
 importance, love's omnipotence, love, the 
 defter of death, the everlasting builder of 
 life from sweethearts wrapped body to body, 
 love, the eternal decency of life — to her 
 in soul-felt friendship his thanks and his 
 farwell.
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 199 
 
 And she said to him — " How will you 
 live ? " And he replied truly — "I know 
 not, nor care ! " 
 
 Then she said — " How miserable are all 
 the precarious arrangements of this selfish 
 century ! I have been reading lately a 
 Socialist book — are you a Socialist? It 
 seemed to me great and fine." Then he 
 said — " Refuse it — it is an unworthy 
 doctrine ; what is its ultimate ideal — to give 
 humanity its meals regular, never mind the 
 rest. They tell me that morality would 
 follow — Why? I cry out — I tell you that 
 suffering teaches us more heroism and more 
 real morality of life than ever prosperity 
 taught us. So how are the ethics of their 
 theory proven, and what good a theory that 
 makes not for ethics? They would make a 
 spoon-fed humanity — I tell you that is no 
 humanity for me! They would make geldings, 
 and boast that they had cured lust — miserable 
 Socialists, I tell you there is but one 
 thing worth the doing, to produce MEN 
 — all other things are but time-wastes. 
 
 Even admitting that they would produce 
 the morality they talk about, what would 
 be the worth of it? The morality of cowards
 
 200 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 who fear the law, what would be the 
 worth of it? A state-regulated humanity 
 that does what it is told, teeth in the 
 great cog-wheel, lifeless, miserable gooseberry 
 bushes to grow as they are planted ! I 
 want men of souls — and though I starve 
 to death in this wretched civilization of 
 ours, I had rather that than open my 
 mouth to be fed by the hand of the 
 Socialist workhouse-master ! 
 
 Listen to this, a fable I have written on 
 the matter, a deep passioned story, this is 
 the plot of it — 
 
 That there was a great King who said 
 I will have Men or nothing in my city — 
 what shall we call the things who are 
 moral because they fear the law ? In their 
 minds they are immoral, and they are 
 cowards to boot — doubly damned ! So I 
 sweep away all law — let men live moral 
 for morality's sake, or not at all — better 
 not moral at all than have immorality 
 covered only by cowardice ! And the state 
 henceforth was ravaged by all the vices — 
 and there came citizens to the King, who 
 said " Restore us our laws." And he 
 answered "Have you lived morally?" And
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 201 
 
 they faltered and said " No." Then he said 
 " Be you such slaves that you want a law 
 to frighten you ere you live morally ? Go 
 hang yourselves, you are not fit to live. 
 And you talk in vain of morality — for it 
 is better that men live vicious than that 
 they should have no reason for morality 
 but fear!" 
 
 And he lived stainlessly moral — and the 
 morality of his life offended them, and they 
 murdered him. And they chose a successor 
 who made laws and broke every law himself, 
 and went unpunished. And he had ministers 
 who were to inflict the laws — they studied 
 to avoid the letter of the law, and to 
 break them all in the spirit, and they 
 went unpunished ! but to make up for it 
 they let it go hard with all poor offenders 
 who broke the letter of the law. And 
 when a man had stolen enough of the 
 common land to make himself rich they 
 made him a justice ; and he dropped a 
 heavy hand upon those who took as much 
 as a rabbit from the lands he had stolen. 
 Thus the land had laws and was moral — 
 in the way that our century is moral. But 
 a crowd arose who said — " No man is fit
 
 202 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 to trust with his life — let the state hold 
 the lives of all" — and lo the vileness of 
 the century was morality itself compared to 
 the vileness of that crowd ! 
 
 Let me starve in the gutter, I care not ! 
 I will not sell my birthright for a mess of 
 pottage ! There is no happiness save self- 
 reliant heroism, there is no state-aided 
 happiness for MEN. 
 
 Let us have pride of ourselves. 
 
 I have another story writing, as great as 
 this. It tells how a man passed down the 
 streets at night ; he saw a poor harlot at 
 a street corner, saw a blackguard stop to 
 speak to her of lust; though he knew she 
 was a harlot by the manner of her, yet 
 he walked up to that blackguard, and for 
 a set purpose cried out "Why do you talk 
 thus to this lady 1 How dare you 1 One 
 can see she is not what you take her for." 
 Then the blackguard called him a fool, but 
 the man persisted in his pretended belief in 
 that poor woman's purity. And he struck 
 the blackguard over the face, knocked him 
 into the road. And the blackguard jumped 
 up and spoke to the woman, but she, made 
 strong by the sense that someone believed
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 203 
 
 in her, denied her impurity ; was offered 
 ^"10, ^"15, £20, but still denied impurity. 
 And for the rest of her life she lived pure 
 this woman — it was enough that someone 
 had believed in her — she could not go back 
 upon that." 
 
 The artist stopped in his feverish eloquence. 
 Then he said to the girl "It is sweet to 
 talk to you — I can talk my whole heart. 
 Now I must say good-bye ; but ere I go 
 take this from me, a parting counsel — take 
 the large heroic view of life — no other is 
 worth taking ; live for the grand heroisms 
 of life, no other is worth living for. — Be so 
 strong that if need be you might press 
 your whole existence into the heats of a 
 burning moment, as I have done in my 
 book; let ruin come, you can exult in it. 
 Now farewell." 
 
 She cried out to him " Shall I follow 
 your advice ? Or shall I like a coward let 
 you, whom I love, go lonely on your way 
 un-loved, un-kissed, un-married — utterly 
 deserted. Which shall I do, take your 
 advice, or leave it 1 " 
 
 He looked at her amazed ; though he 
 loved her with all his soul he had thought
 
 204 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 himself too severe, not soft enough ever to 
 have won the love of women. Tenderly he 
 replied to her. — 
 
 " Little heroine, I shall take upon my 
 weary way with me the sweet knowledge 
 of your sympathy and courage and love ; 
 but the sacrifice you offer is too great for 
 me to take." 
 
 She replied " You love me, I see it in 
 your eyes — you are mine, I yours, for ever 
 and ever ! " 
 
 Then he said " I am worn out with 
 melancholy, and broken down with my 
 struggles for Art and my working late 
 hours, and my terrible griefs at the badness 
 of humanity. Weary and ill and racked 
 with the sights I could not help seeing of 
 the wickedness of the world, horrors that 
 I am too open-hearted to conceal from you, 
 what could I do but eternally pain you — 
 kiss me, sweetheart, and let me go — I am 
 strong enough to stand alone." 
 
 Then she said " Every word of the horror 
 doubles my eagerness ! " 
 
 Then he said again " And what, poor 
 sweetheart, shall we live on, I, who am 
 ruined, you, who have nothing? And love
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 205 
 
 only gets her gracious privileges as a maker 
 of children — what shall our babies thrive 
 on?" 
 
 Then she said " If we cannot live we 
 can die ; You, I, yes, and our baby too — 
 die together ! Happier thus than live apart 
 — for this way we may have something, the 
 other way is nothing for any of us ! And 
 do you not see that it is just because of 
 the sweet possibilities of babies that I 
 cannot forego you? My ambition is high — 
 and I have no life but to venture for 
 it." 
 
 He smiled tenderly at her, but said 
 "The outlook is dark — I see nothing but 
 vagueness and fears — not fears for myself 
 but for you." 
 
 Then she said what she knew was a lie, 
 said it because she was desperate and would 
 have him, would have him as she knew in 
 her loving heart that it would be oh so 
 sweet for him to have her — thus she 
 uttered the lie "Oh I see you have no 
 faith in me, and no love — no doubt because 
 I am small and plain it is " 
 
 Then he seized her in his arms in a 
 rage of love, crushed her against his breast,
 
 206 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 and kissed her face ravenously, splitting his 
 dried lips on it, so the red blood from 
 the cracks of them fell on her temples 
 and eyelids and chin and mouth — then he 
 said — 
 
 "Do I love you?" 
 
 The two stood in happy silence hugged 
 close together. Then he said : — 
 
 "It is fit when two marry, set about to 
 build in love the new race that is to 
 people England, that the state have some 
 note of so grave and national a business ; 
 some record of the pride with which the 
 man claims the fatherhood of her babies to 
 come ; thus the formalities of marriage are 
 high and grave in my eyes, not to be 
 lightly looked on. So to-morrow we will go 
 to the Registrar's ; till then, sweetheart, 
 farewell." 
 
 So with the gravity of a grandly restrained 
 passion he kissed her good-bye ; but into 
 the ears of this iron man she whispered as 
 he went that noble line of Whitman, the 
 sweetest and the purest that a maid could 
 say to the lover about to wed her, the 
 thing that made the truest nobility of her 
 proffered love to him, that only decent
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 207 
 
 reason for real marriage, thus from the 
 poet of poets she quoted it to him " Have 
 I not learnt the truth of that line that 
 All "were lacking if sex were lacking, or if 
 the moisture of the right man were 
 lacking?" 
 
 Thus came the two to their wedding 
 night in holiness and purity and full 
 knowledge of the meaning of what they 
 were about to do. 
 
 Two undefiled, two unashamed, two proud 
 of the privilege of man -building, two 
 Atheists glad to have no eternity save that 
 which, if it happily came to them, would 
 make the blood of both run evenly in a 
 new sweet body born of love ; two who 
 knew that the promise and potency of this 
 sacred night were nowise reached, save if 
 the children born of their loves were reared 
 in love, every effort made holily and tenderly 
 to leave on the earth a new generation 
 that, educated by love's own self, should be 
 nobler and more fit to live than the parents 
 who preceded them — this, the only ideal 
 of love, this, the only real salvation of the 
 world, the salvation by self-suppressing love, 
 this was the hymen-torch that lit these two
 
 208 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 to the sacred raptures of their bridal — 
 through which ran gravity's whole-souled 
 passion, passion's supreme gravity ; like my 
 prose, but the more madly passionate because 
 of its enforced terrible calm, so their grave 
 deliberate interlacing of this night held in 
 its throb a madness that the skins of ten 
 millions of libertines would be but too small 
 to hold — Virtue alone has passion worth the 
 name — hear it, nation of corruptors ! Call 
 not passion an excuse for your depravities, 
 virtue alone has passions. And you, self- 
 styled moralists, who are cold and "Arrange" 
 your matches, know this — Passion alone is 
 virtuous in love. 
 
 Oh the sweet madness of a passion-led 
 life ! They lived in attics, down courts, 
 anyhow, nohow, fed when they could, starved 
 the rest of the time — for what could he do, 
 this man who had put his pure soul into 
 a book for the impure world to trample on ? 
 To be decent among indecencies — that ruined 
 him. And the few who thought with him 
 dared not raise a finger to help him ! Not 
 strong enough for a navvy (he otherwise 
 would not have cared what he did) for he 
 had spent his best strength in art — with
 
 209 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 " no character " for higher employments — ■ 
 this man who had ruined himself for his 
 principles had " no character " in the eyes 
 of a world of no principles ! — There remained 
 to him but the few shillings he could pick 
 up from violin teaching, the few shillings 
 she could pick up from teaching painting 
 or selling pictures — that was their poor 
 all. 
 
 But oh she was so happy in these days 
 — for she felt a babe of his stirring within 
 her. She was heroine-built this girl, knew 
 what true courage was, knew that it con- 
 sisted in the full-hearted attempt, come what 
 might. " All goes well " she would say to 
 him — "I have done my best, will do my 
 best, to keep your rich hot blood alive in 
 the world — that is my whole life, life 
 enough for me ! — and if it so haps that 
 you and I and baby cannot live, then we 
 must all die together — death is nothing ! — 
 and better he should die with us than be 
 left to the world's care without our aid ! 
 He will be happy while he lives, he must 
 be happy now I am sure — love-children 
 must be happy — yours and mine ! And if 
 we die together, well, death is nothing ! "
 
 210 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 And her art took colour, exquisite beautiful 
 colour, from her tender condition. 
 
 It was the art of a pregnant woman ; 
 under a warm sun of rich red fertility 
 there glowed, veiled by a tender romantic 
 mist, a summer landscape that one seemed 
 to see growing apace in strength and beauty, 
 mystery and meaning — even as through a 
 dreamy mist she saw her child (his child) 
 grow in mystery and beauty, meaning and 
 strength. And few understood those land- 
 scapes—for why? Because they were deeply 
 spiritual, not paltrily decorative ; but her 
 husband understood them. 
 
 And he said to her — "It is great this 
 wild art of yours — great — though the schools 
 would not like it since you are too great 
 to stipple over the finish and spoil it with 
 finnicking — oh those schools ! They who wash 
 the sweat marks off Beethoven's face ere 
 they show him at concerts ! I love to see 
 the sweat marks on the brow of the artist 
 — those sweat marks are the proof of the 
 artist — the sweat of art as rapturous as 
 those sweats of love that we have felt 
 together .' "
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 211 
 
 He thought of a plan — almost his last. 
 He got the loan of a hall, gave there a 
 reading from his great book, read in his 
 deep and grave full-hearted voice those tales 
 wrung out in terrible emotion that had 
 racked all his nerves, wrecked all his health, 
 ruined his fortunes, made, his life — yes, 
 made his life and his love, that brave, 
 great, happy, heroic life, that sweet, great, 
 desperate, happy, heroic love — oh love and 
 life of him so infinitely grander and happier 
 than other loves and lives ! 
 
 And he read of his book to a selected 
 few, and greatly they applauded him. Then 
 he said in a calm and simple tone to all 
 there "My friends, this outspoken book has 
 ruined me. My wife, who bears a child 
 within her, cries out for bread — I want 
 employment, can get none. If any here 
 really feels the full morality of my purpose, 
 wishes to help an artist to that quiet, 
 unextravagant life that is all he asks, then 
 let him try a poet for his clerk — I am 
 well up to the work, no fool at it — so if 
 any really believes in me, as you all kindly 
 say you do, will he give me a chance to 
 live 1 "
 
 212 That Rare Thing — A Marriage 
 
 A man of * .very advanced views sat in 
 front ; he said to himself " These revolu- 
 tionaiy people are most interesting — but 
 give me a Churchman and a Tory to trust 
 with money — one who has got Hell and the 
 Police well before his eyes." 
 
 Another argued in his mind thus " I 
 quite agree"*) with everything he says — still 
 there must be something wrong in a man 
 to make him think in so out-of-the-ordinary 
 a manner." 
 
 A third thought this way " He may be 
 all right — but what shall I gain if I do 
 take him?" 
 
 And with many it was just this that 
 stopped them, that like poor humanity they 
 were quite incapable of really grasping any 
 situation that was new to them — they 
 prided themselves on breadth of mind, they 
 liked to listen to new views when it 
 committed them to nothing — but beyond 
 that they could not go — in their lives they 
 were imitative automata, doing what they 
 saw done around them. 
 
 To ease the painful task of a complete 
 refusal, one proposed a subscription, to 
 which all quickly consented — but not the
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 213 
 
 artist. " I cannot take your money " he 
 said " You want it yourselves. You are 
 things without convictions, without decencies, 
 humanity, or knowledge — though you applauded 
 me and pretend to understand me, yet you 
 would let starve among you one who has spent 
 himself trying to raise you into being men, 
 and you are so ignorant of what a man is 
 that when he asks brother-to-brother help 
 you insult him with an offered charity — 
 keep your money then, you want it, it is 
 all you have to recommend you — you have 
 no souls ! " 
 
 So he strode from the room and went 
 home to starve. And his wife lay there 
 and smiled on him, and said " Do you 
 know how happy I feel in suffering with 
 you, for you 1 Tell me now that you are 
 happy in seeing me thus suffer for you ! 
 You do not love me if you are not ! " 
 
 And he said " I am happy seeing you 
 suffer since you tell me to be ! " 
 
 They had got just a little behind with 
 rent. The landlord of their garret was a 
 most moral man ; he had made a large 
 fortune out of brothels and public houses, 
 and was a most regular attendant at chapel.
 
 214 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 And he heard that a tenant of his, behind 
 in his rent, had so scandalised public 
 decency as to give readings from a book 
 in which he maintained that young girls to 
 be kept pure and holy should be tenderly 
 taught the duties and importance of their 
 probable future motherhood ; a doctrine that 
 revolted that landlord, who, as a thorough 
 animal, held that the slightest breath of 
 the sort would be certain to lead girls 
 astray (oh that such filthy men should be! 
 And there are so many ! ) — I cannot dwell 
 on base characters ; suffice it that he, in 
 virtuous indignation, without notice turned 
 the expectant mother into the street ; and 
 when he was told of it, intimated that the 
 child of an Atheist were best born dead — 
 for such is Christian charity in this 
 nineteenth century after Christ ! 
 
 Let me but hastily record for history's 
 sake how, in a neighbour's room, she lay 
 in her pangs ; how distracted he was ; how 
 she cried out ever to him — " All is well, 
 all is well ! " — How a child was born dead 
 — how he swore to her fervently to keep 
 well, not to die, the child was alive — not
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 215 
 
 to die, not to die ! — how she swooned and 
 was weak as death. 
 
 He left her there, made his way to the 
 man who had done the publishing of his 
 book for him, sold all rights he had left 
 in this for a few haggled pounds. That 
 was all he had to live on for the rest of 
 his time ! Then he came back to learn 
 that his wife was doomed in a few days to 
 die — nothing could save her. He knew 
 what to do now. The most of his money 
 he spent in those things that would best 
 keep her strength together to last through 
 their tender farewells — then when all pre- 
 parations were made he came to her, thus 
 he spoke : — 
 
 " Sweetheart be strong " he said " Bear 
 all, it must be borne — our brave little baby 
 is dead.'' She knew that it must be — but 
 there was a mute anguish, terrible chokings, 
 a desperate gripping of hands each to each. 
 After that terrible pause he went on — 
 
 " Sweetheart, many times we have talked 
 of death, it is a nothing, we are on the 
 edge of it now, both of us ; we will not 
 die like caged rats in the stuffy haunts of 
 men ; let us go out into the fresh air and
 
 21 G That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 there talk all the things that we have 
 talked before together, only larger, grander, 
 more heroic ; let ns talk art and love and 
 life and courage there, there on the margin 
 of that stream where we used to walk and 
 talk in the sweet wooing days when I 
 made love to you and knew it not — let us be 
 there again and live in nature, in nature 
 that is to me as you have painted it, pure 
 and noble and heroic — let us be there and 
 talk soul to soul, all that is grandest and 
 truest and most native within us — and you 
 shall paint pictures greater and madder 
 and sweeter than you have ever painted ; 
 and I will tell stories greater and madder 
 and sweeter than I have ever told ; and 
 the world shall have no part in these 
 stories and pictures, they shall be for you 
 and me alone ; and one day when we stand 
 at the greatest and raptest of our heights, 
 you and I great rapt artists lost in the 
 small dead world — on that day, greater and 
 madder and more loving one to another than 
 even past days have found us, on that day 
 I will tell you a great secret, and while 
 we are mad of the joy of it, you and I, 
 with a bundle of stones for company, will
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 217 
 
 jump to where those reeds are that you 
 love to paint at the bottom of the water ; 
 there we will lie beneath the water and 
 grieve no more over the wickedness of the 
 world ! " 
 
 Thus he spoke to her, did not tell her 
 that she was death-doomed in any case, 
 gave her the bliss of thinking that she 
 willingly gave up her life ; and she grew 
 so tenderly cheerful, ate what he gave her, 
 and with her undaunted spirit to help her 
 got up quite a little false show of strength. 
 
 So before a few days had passed he took 
 her by the rail to the nearest point to 
 their happy haunt of old; then carried her, 
 strong in his love for all that frail body of 
 hers, carried her down to that breezy high 
 spot on the bank where he had bid her 
 rest on that day when his lesson had left 
 her dizzy. 
 
 There those death-doomed lovers sat and 
 talked, and sketched. " Oh how happy we 
 have been " she said " Happy, happy, 
 happy ! " And she wept tears of tenderness 
 and joy with her face hidden in his coat — 
 then crawled to the water's edge and looked 
 at her swollen eyes reflected in the water,
 
 21$ That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 and laughed and laughed again to see them 
 They took hands together and swung them 
 like children, repeating ever " Happy, happy, 
 happy," they felt so innocent and so merry 
 and so sweet. He said to her " My life 
 was broken, melancholy ; Art strivings too 
 terribly intense, gloom at the world too 
 yawningly little, these had wrecked me ; 
 you came and all the joy of my life came 
 with you ; oh for my devotion to great 
 things I have been so sweetly paid ! " 
 
 And she said " I was in a vague, stupid, 
 wistful mood — I knew nothing and wanted 
 something, and everyday seemed waste — then 
 you came and I knew what I wanted — 
 love ! And oh I got it, love that no maid 
 that lived in the world yet has had the 
 like of — what had I done to deserve it ? 
 Then I felt your boy within me, and that 
 was the greatest happiness of all — yes, and 
 is happy to think on, though he died — I 
 held your boy and had the pangs from 
 him — that is happiness enough to fill my 
 life — what can I ask more 1 " 
 
 Then he said to her " I dreamt wild 
 dreams of such a sweet mad woman as you 
 — dreamt them but dared not write them
 
 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 219 
 
 in such a world as the world is ! The 
 artist is the greatest of men, and the sanest, 
 and the maddest ! No one ever played 
 Beethoven mad enough to please me — that 
 grand, wild, ruffian of the fierce eyes, 
 tangly-haired lion, whom the Bottom-Con- 
 ductors made roar like a sucking-dove ! I 
 liked to smash his wildness out on the 
 piano in all its native rawness ! Brave 
 Beethoven ! And how much madder would 
 the stuff be that he to a sweetheart might 
 have confided, as I to you? Artists are 
 wild, there is no tame art — and artists are 
 moral, there is no immoral art — the world 
 it is that is both tame and immoral. 
 
 To you then sweetheart two tales of my 
 inner dreamings, prophetic dreams of you, 
 dreamt ere I met you — 
 
 There was a girl once seized by a false 
 king, to whose lust she would not yield. 
 Her eyes were put out, then this trap 
 laid for her. One of the jailors feigned 
 semblance of her lover's voice, led her, poor ' 
 girl, as if to escape, then, in a whispered 
 rapture, asked love's payment. And the vile 
 trick was that the girl, when expecting her 
 tender lover, should meet instead a hot iron
 
 220 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 to do her to death — but she, passion-struck 
 virgin, mad with the gravity of caress, died 
 in a shriek of rapture, her imagination's 
 joy swallowing all sense of pain, dreaming 
 fertility, shivering purity of love ! 
 
 And I wrote it to show a dull world 
 that heroic love is joy, and joy alone — joy 
 inextinguishable— lo, you are that girl, you 
 have proved it for me ! 
 
 And another tale I wrote, that a passionate 
 wild girl living near Aetna, disdaining the 
 cold lovers of the world, sought a lover of 
 the highest — she dreamt that the volcano 
 was the Devil's outlet, her pity and her 
 passion and her purity made her sorrow for 
 one given over to despair ; so she cried 
 that she would give her whole self for 
 eternity that the tortured one might have 
 love to ease him — there on the volcano's 
 top sought lava as her hot bride-bed potion, 
 died madly happy in self-denying love ! 
 
 You, like that girl, have made love the 
 1 comforter of despair — choosing rashly and 
 generously you have chosen the highest ! 
 And so my art's wildest madness was 
 true and prophetic, justified, grand ! And 
 your ear alone shall know, as it alone could
 
 That Rare Thing- — A Marriage. 221 
 
 weigh, those deepest, maddest utterances of 
 my soul ! " 
 
 Then the girl said " Sweetheart, give me 
 my colours and my paper," and he gave 
 them to her. Quickly she streaked on to 
 the paper masses of mad rich harmonies of 
 tones, formless, vivid, terribly grand — 
 painting at its highest heights, where one 
 troubled not over what it represented, lured 
 by the meaning and the madness of it, 
 passion put straight into paint. " Look " 
 she said " Thus looked the room on my 
 wedding night ! I can see the same now 
 everywhere in the air ! " The excitement 
 brought on exhaustion — she seemed almost 
 about to die ; so now was the time to 
 make the end. " Sweetheart " he said to 
 her " Sweetheart, this is the secret I hold 
 in reserve for you — stand on the bank with 
 me, stones in all our pockets, and in the 
 rapture of this grand truth let us jump, 
 and so die together, madly happy, as we 
 have lived together. 
 
 Listen then — our sweet wedding has done 
 more than dower us both with over-flowing 
 happiness — it has served art, art that we 
 both worship, eternal art. I have written
 
 222 That Rare Thing — A Marriage. 
 
 the whole story of it into a passionate 
 book, yes, even down to our suicide in 
 happiness — I have sent it to a publisher 
 who is sure to publish it since we die to 
 advertise it for him — into the spirits of true 
 lovers will our book and story go to 
 strengthen them in love ! And the last, 
 maddest, truest word of the book is " This 
 is no tale of gloom, but one of triumphant 
 happiness ! " 
 
 William Platt. 
 
 Finished November, 1S94-
 
 Will be Eeady March 1st, 1896. 
 
 BEING THE 
 
 <50I}YEW™I2 & fllJEGDOTES 
 
 OF 
 
 FIVE YOUNG MEN 
 
 UPON THE 
 
 ABSORBING SUBJECT OF MVE. 
 
 BY 
 
 WIIOJAM PIxATT. 
 
 CERTAIN CRITICS have said that — 
 " Mr. Piatt has no sense of humour '' ; the 
 purchaser of " Love's Comedy " is invited to 
 settle that point for himself. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 CHARLES HIRSCH, 
 Coventry Street, London, W.
 
 , LOYE, & LIFE, 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM PLATT, 
 
 A NEW & MOST OHXGXNAL BOOK, 
 CONSISTING OF ROMANTIC ESSAYS, 
 
 PROSE STORIES & VERSE, 
 
 Each item complete in itself, yet all 
 
 arranged in sequential order of thought, 
 
 upon a ground plan entirely novel. 
 
 Crown 8vo, Cloth Bound, Price: 3/6.
 
 Criticisms on William Piatt's 
 " Women, Love and Life." 
 
 GRANT ALLEN'S OPINION. 
 
 AN INSPIRE]) MADMAN. 
 
 Enterprising editors, eminent journalists, sane 
 historians and novelists, this world turns out so fast 
 and furious that they jostle one another for a bare 
 subsistence. But inspired madmen are rare : only 
 thrice in a century does our planet produce a Blake, a 
 Walt Whitman, a Maurice Maeterlinck. To this 
 weird little company of elemental geniuses Mr. 
 William Piatt, I take it, belongs of right — so much 
 so that it seems incongruous courtesy to Mister him. 
 Nothing madder, wilder, more lawless, more eccentric 
 than Ids uncouth little book has been published in 
 our time : few things so besprent with sudden jets 
 of truth, so illuminated by lierce flash-lights into 
 the very core of reality. It reminds me more of 
 William Blake, in its peculiar quality of being 
 " naked and not ashamed," than anything else I 
 have seen for many centuries. (1 speak the appro- 
 priate critical tongue of Blakedom. ) Here and there 
 it is ineffective ; here and there it is strained : but 
 here and there again it rises on wild pinions of ecs- 
 tasy to visionary heights unreached by minor wax- 
 winged [caruses. From these -pecular mounts 
 many mysteries are beheld by the fervid imagination 
 of the formless poet. Let me hasten however to
 
 ii. Criticisms. 
 
 assure any readers inclined to search for that form of 
 literature euphemistically described as " very 
 curious" in bookseller's catalogues, that they will 
 meet with nothing to their tastes in Mr. Piatt's far- 
 rago. He is ferociously innocent. His nudities are 
 as frank as Whitman's, yet as pure as Blake's : he 
 reminds me constantly of that exquisite picture of 
 the great painter-poet's in which " All the Sons 
 of God shouted for joy." 
 
 The book is a short one, yet it is composed of 
 many very different elements. It comes straight from 
 the soul and the heart of a dreamer. Most of its 
 pieces are prose poems or apologues, one might some- 
 times say parables ; but here and there the wild 
 creature bursts suddenly into snatches of blank 
 verse ; more rarely into rhyme, or irregular and un- 
 certain rhyme-like assonances. Many of the stories 
 are terrible ; some the foul-minded would even call 
 nasty, but all of them are vivid with deep and ear- 
 nest purpose. Hence it does not astonish one to per- 
 ceive that Mr. Piatt has had to take them to a pub- 
 lisher whose name I will confess is entirely new to 
 me. Probably nobody will read his spasms in the 
 present generation. But after he is dead and his 
 grave forgotten, some good resurrectionist in 
 socialised England may discover one day that a man 
 called Piatt wrote inspired insanities during the 
 dying decade of the 19th century. No doubt the 
 author is prepared for such a fate. 
 
 GRANT ALLE\.
 
 Criticisms. iii 
 
 M. 31AE7i::: r .IXCICS LETTER. 
 
 Permission has been I to reproduce the following' 
 
 i< it'll! if tier from Maurice Maeterlinck to 
 Wil i im PI I . 
 
 Oher Ami, 
 
 J'avaia ouvert votre livre negligemment — on 
 recoit tant de livres inutiles — et je me mefiais. Mais 
 je n'avais pas lu trois pages que je me suis senti pro- 
 fondement maitrise par une puissance extraordinaire- 
 ment forte et pure. Votre livre est vraiment un 
 livre hero'ique. II pouri neler " Le tr^sor des 
 
 •" ou " Le fcresor des purs'' ou " Le manuel de 
 Tame saine. " J'en connais peu qui soient plus nette- 
 ment " d'un homme," et qui moiitrent plus admirable- 
 ment la possibility d'une vie superieure dans larealite 
 quotidienne — N'est-ce pas Ik ce qu'on peuttrouver de 
 plus beau en ce monde ? II n'y a dans ce livre 
 qu'une chose qui, me semble-t-il, sonne faux et 
 que je ne puis n I er de trouvcr presque abomi- 
 
 nable : e'est " Goneril's Defence. " Mais pom- tout 
 le reste il faut bien qu'on vous aime. . . 
 
 MAURICE MAETERLINi
 
 iv. Criticisms. 
 
 THE STAR. 
 
 Mr. William Piatt's curious little book, " Women, 
 Love, and Life," (Hirsch), has, ! understand on good 
 authority, been rejected by no fewer than four 
 printers ! Printers marl;, no! merely publishers. 
 We are often told of gna1 books that have gone the 
 round of the publishers in vain till some publisher 
 has sufficient brains and courage — to make his for- 
 tune out of them. If rejection be any criterion of 
 greatness — and to be des] is< d rid rejected lias long 
 been a sacred mark, not merely of greatness but of 
 divinity — how grest must be vhebook which is not 
 only rejected by all the publishers — for .Mr. Charles 
 Hirsch, whose charming little French book-shop 
 in Coventry Street is a sort of Zoar in our Puritanic 
 Egypt, is rather a connoisseur of belles lettres than 
 a publisher — but also by four printers. All honour 
 to the noble fifth. He has the blessing of his author, 
 for, says the latter, " Courage is happiness! there 
 is no happiness but courage !'' 
 
 A book which the printers rejected must evidently 
 have striking characteristics for good or ill. It can- 
 not be merely a stupid book — because it is obvious 
 that no publisher or printer rejects a book on the 
 ground of its stupidity. You may be too clever, but 
 you cannot be too stupid, to get published. Now 
 Mr. Piatt, as one guessed, is by no means stupid. He 
 is, to my thinking, occasionally absurd, and perhaps 
 a little mad. He runs amuck rather blindly, even of
 
 ( 'riticisms. v. 
 
 those who would be prepared to welcome him. Em- 
 ploying the literary medium, and evidently a student 
 of great masters, he is yet paradoxical enough to 
 treat his medium with disrespect, apparently not 
 having mastered the truth that the more inspired 
 the message the more perfect should be the instru- 
 ment of its expression. But this is a common mis- 
 take of prophet.-, who have only to get into a temper 
 with the world to break all the literary command- 
 ments — commandments by no means dictated by 
 small self-constituted critics of the day, but by the 
 eternal fitness of a«t. Yet all this said, Mr. Piatt's 
 " Women, Love, and Life." remains a remarkable 
 book. It ha: that central electrical vitality which 
 makes surface blemishes, however tiresome, of no 
 permanent importance. It is alive and we can for- 
 give a gn. Leal bo a book that is alive — for as our 
 author finely says in a dedication " to all artists" — 
 "That which has lived shall surely live for ever, 
 Onl\ lies that was for ever dead !" 
 
 Of all book- that are books we feel that they are still 
 more men. " Camerado, this is no book, who 
 touche- this touches a man," said Whitman of his 
 " Leaves oi Glass"— and there is considerabli r< 
 semblance between "The Leaves of Grass," and 
 " Women, Love, and Life." Mr. Platl has evi'd 
 been an i disciple of Whitman, Whitman to 
 
 it will be n Lembered, was rejected of the printers, 
 ■ i- book with his own hands and f v the
 
 vi. Criticisms* 
 
 - me reason ; because, as ! e said, Jie would celebrate 
 that which he was determined to make illustrious 
 even if he stood sole among men — namely, the phy. 
 sical holiness of man and die mystical beauty of 
 sex. 
 
 Sex, I am aware, is for the moment a word un- 
 pleasing in a critic's ear, particularly in the ears of 
 those critics and publishers who have made most 
 capital out of it in the fiction of the last few years. 
 However, it is difficult to see how any of the arts are 
 to dispense with it, and as a human instinct it is 
 likely, one fears, to survive even the onslaughts of 
 the Westminster Gazette. Among the several dedi- 
 cations which are an odd feature of Mr. Piatt's book, 
 is one to " The Knights of the Garter,'' in which Mr. 
 Piatt moralises the familiar story of King Edward 
 and declares that the meaning of the foundation of 
 the K.G. is to" cry out their eternal truth that to men 
 noble of nature garters and the thighs they bind, 
 llesh, sex, nakedness, all is grand arid holy — let the 
 shame be to the lewd man who smirks, let the shame 
 be to the lewd man who blushes, to loose libertinism, 
 lust and lechery, to grovelling Grundyism, bastard 
 Bowdlerism, prurient purity-society-ism . . " I 
 suppose Mr. Piatt would extend the application of 
 this passage to — ladies who garter below the knee ; 
 if so, one cannot but admit the tiuth of his conten- 
 tion, though there may be just a little jar in it, a 
 sense of that nakedness which in literature alone
 
 Criticisms. vii. 
 
 jails forth a blush, namely, a nakedness of style. 
 Mr. Coventry Pat more once made the very suggestive 
 comment upon the erotic verses of a certain young 
 poet; that he lived " too much on the capital rather 
 than on the interest of passion." In his desire to be 
 sincere, Mr. Platfc is sometimes too crudely literal, 
 but no one whose opinion counts can ever say that 
 he is impure. Perhaps he has too little sense of 
 humor to be impure. I never remember reading a 
 purer book. What his gospel of sex is it is a little 
 difficult to determine. Certainly it does not seem to 
 be the new Hedonism, though one cannot be quite 
 sure. Mr. Piatt evidently believes in the wife, but 
 he is very tender and compassionate to the prosti- 
 tute. Yet, of course, there is no incongruity in that, 
 for surely it is not the man who is tender and com- 
 passionate towards the demi-monde who habitually 
 supports it. " In all practical charity," as Mr. Piatt 
 finely puts it, " it is the innocent and not the guilty 
 who are the first to pity ; out of the mob that fol- 
 lowed the woman taken in adultery was there no one 
 to speak for her ? Christ spoke for her. And the 
 loudest who yelled out against her will have been he 
 
 had sinned the most." There is no doubt that 
 this is for the most part true, though recent events 
 at the Empire are exceptions to the rule. Mr. 
 Piatt's general, view of the matter seems to be that 
 
 itial and not merely conventional purity of re- 
 lation is the one law for the intercourse of the sexes,
 
 viii. Criticisms. 
 
 and thai there is no competent critic save charity — a 
 gospel which surely can hurt nobody. 
 
 Mr. Piatt lias evidently little care for a hope of 
 appreciation — not to speak of fame. He .-ays this 
 plainly, not to say insultingly, in a wonderful intro- 
 duction. Surely the reader never found himself ad- 
 dressed so disrespectfully before. The author 
 usually approaches hat in hand, with bowed head. 
 Mr. Piatt, on the contrary, slaps you on both cheeks, 
 knocks you down, kicks you about the gutter, and 
 tells you " to take that ! " Of course, you won't un- 
 derstand him he says, you the Bourgeois and the 
 Pharisee, nor will you the libertine and the deserter 
 of women. " Some of it," he says, " you will find 
 unintelligible — for unintelligible verse and prose has 
 been written as long as fools did the reading of it — 
 the rest of it vou will sum up ignorantly and ineffici- 
 ently, not knowing that a stronger pulse beats in 
 these pages than ever did in your heart — nay. not on 
 your wedding-night did such a pulse beat in you, 
 eneral reader." How savage the man is, you say 
 — he is 111- e a wild beast at bay ! But towards the 
 end he has a gentle word to say to those " few souls 
 who love art desperately and serve her with purity 
 and love," by whom he need have no fear but that his 
 book will be appreciated and indeed beloved. 
 
 Never was such a bitter blasphemous pes>imist as 
 this William Piatt, yet never a more tender faithful 
 believer in Love and Beauty — yet a believer without
 
 Criticisms. ix. 
 
 hope, for he sees his ideals beset on every hand by 
 coarse and cruel materialism, and he despairs of 
 their ever building here the Kingdom of Heaven 
 they dream of — as, indeed, how should he not 
 despaii ? 
 
 RICHARD LE CALLIENNE. 
 
 PUBLIC OPINION. 
 
 This is a collection of stories and verse, 
 most original and stimulating, each item com- 
 plete in itself, yet all arranged in sequential 
 order of thought upon a ground plan entirely novel. 
 It is also emphatically a book with a purpose, 
 passionate and austerely outspoken. "Love," "Love 
 and Honour," "Love and Courage," "Love and 
 Tolerance," " Love and the Whole World," these are 
 the titles of some of the sections, and also of the first 
 sketch in each section, and in a general way of those 
 which give the best idea of the doctrine set forth. 
 It is sweet and wholesome, and without pledging 
 ourselves to an unconditioned agreement with every 
 jot and tittle of it, we are sure that no right-minded 
 man can read work so honest and with so beautiful a 
 soul beneath it, and not experience benefit. It is 
 practically a. nineteenth century gospel, and one 
 adapted to nineteenth century needs. Without
 
 Criticisms. 
 
 attacking the old religions, in all that touches the 
 merely secular life it preaches an evangel of its own, 
 and one that we must confess has had a far-reaching 
 effect upon us. Mr. William Piatt may even have 
 found what Comte could not find— the motive power 
 strong enough for a Religion of Humanity. It is 
 obviously impossible to deal at great length in a 
 column like this with the ethical questions involved. 
 We can only recommend our readers. to get the book 
 for themselves, in full confidence that no one who 
 takes it up will ever regret having done so. 
 
 THE MORNING LEADER. 
 
 The spirit in which Mr. William Piatt wages war 
 against ugliness, dishonour, cowardice, and intoler- 
 ance is that of a Red Cross Knight of mediaeval 
 times : the Red Cross Knight of Spenser minus 
 something of his gentleness. " Women, Love, and 
 Life ; ' (Charles Hirsch) forms a series of " half 
 battles for the free," a noble protest that may avail 
 much against the widespread prurience that goeth 
 about seeking where it may plant the fig-leaf. There 
 are, it seems to me, two methods by which that holy 
 of holies — the body of woman — can be defended 
 against meanness, degradation, and dishonour : the 
 first and the best that of the great and the careless 
 poet, who transported by love and admiration loses
 
 Criticism*. xi. 
 
 sight of Bowdler and Mrs. Grundy, if indeed he was 
 ever conscious of their existence? The second and 
 lowlier method that of the poet who writes scorn- 
 fully in the bitterness of his soul. 
 
 Mr. Piatt employs both methods, and, like all true 
 poets, he is happier when most unconscious of the 
 Prurient Presences. I could have wished indeed that 
 he had poured out less of the scorn of scorn and 
 more of the love of love, for there is ever a note of 
 degradation struck when a poet buckles on his armour 
 to fight the crawling reptiles that spring from the 
 brain of lust. Every stroke of his sword seems to 
 multiply the number of these squirming homogeneous 
 monsters. The force against which they cannot fight 
 is that spiritual, naked lightning that kills 
 while it illumines. Of this august force the 
 author of "Women, Love, and Life" has a won- 
 derful command. His book may truly be said to de- 
 liver itself in flashes of lightning ; here a poem, there 
 a vivid bit of prose. One such prose poem — on the ter- 
 ribly fascinating subject of death — may well enrich 
 my column . — 
 
 Great Death, thou art the foundation of all honour. 
 When we shudder at honourable things that are 
 hard shall we not cry out : "Only a few years and 
 Death comes " and will not the things become easy ■>. 
 Thou hangest over us making us severe and strong. . . . 
 Thou teachest us that honour is of more worth 
 than life, and that kisses are of more worth than
 
 XU. 
 
 Criticisms. 
 
 life, and the love of women more worth than life. 
 Who said that a God made us? It is easier to be 
 good if we know that our own honour alone is there 
 to help us to uprightness ! Who said that we live for 
 ever ? It is easier to be good if we know that death 
 lies waiting to sweep away the tears and pangs that 
 the good must suffer at the hands of men. Oh, mis- 
 erably conceited men ! Think you yourselves such 
 grand things that it needed a god to make you? 
 That it needs an eternity to show you off? Thou 
 shalt be my God, Oh Death, and annihilation my 
 eternity ! And together ye twain shall cry out to me 
 " The time for rotting shall surely come, rot not be- 
 fore ! The time to be nothing shall surely come, be 
 something while you may !" 
 
 Yet not altogether is this poet in love with death ; 
 the love of life, beautiful, and free, is quite as strong 
 within him. Only through love can such life come. 
 The mechanical doctrine of the survival of the fittest 
 will not produce such a race. It can but bring forth 
 selfishness. To women, whose hearts are the shrine 
 of love, our poet looks for the regeneration of man- 
 kind. " To cry out to you, Oh women, a message of 
 your power, and pride, and responsibility ; advising, 
 nay commanding, if you will, how a generation shall 
 be built that shall be rugged and male, turbulent, 
 tough and large, and capable of grandeurs — that 
 will have honour and courage in it, and a heart (by a 
 grand old turn of language the word heart signifies
 
 Criticisms. xiii 
 
 both courage and tenderness and pity — for the three 
 are one — the trinity of grand natures, the trinity 
 that women must eternalise, lest trickery and selfish- 
 ness contrive to outrsurvive it) . . . — a race at 
 last of real men and women inhabiting the earth ! To 
 cry out all my soul to you Oh women, in one cry to- 
 wards this large ideal, has been the aim and glory of 
 my book — was the time but thrown away ?" 
 
 Surely not ; Mr. Piatt's book is like the love of 
 which he sings, " grave, and terribly in earnest," 
 and no book into which a grave, earnest, and noble 
 soul has poured the elixir of its life can have been 
 written in vain. 
 
 D. PITKETHLY. 
 
 COUNTY GENTLEMAN. 
 
 There is here little or nothing of common-place. 
 High thought, bold speculation, force, fire, and pas- 
 sion, an honesty that terrifies the reader capable of 
 understanding it, and a stark purity, the only purity 
 that is unashamed in the sight of the sun, are quali- 
 ties that find expression on almost every page. For 
 the style, while in some ways it strikes the last note 
 of modernity, in others it is old fashioned, almost 
 archaic. Certainly this little book of life and love 
 will be " caviare to the general," but it is worth 
 a true man's reading, especially if he have that 
 highest form of mind and soul culture which comes
 
 xiv. Criticisms. 
 
 from Nature herself, and is nob taught— or learnt 
 in books. Mr. Piatt's ideals of humanity are high ; 
 we are s-ure that his view of the great sex-problem 
 is the true one, but we are afraid that we must write 
 down his " message " as transcendental in the pre- 
 sent stage of the world's progress— or retrogression, 
 as some might not unreasonably prefer to say. The 
 practical value of " Women, Love, and Life," will 
 lie rather, we fancy, in the direction of strengthen- 
 ing the saints than in converting the sinners from 
 the error of their ways. 
 
 PALL MALL GAZETTE- 
 
 Egomania. 
 
 LIFE. 
 
 Sturdy independence of character, commendable 
 detestation of hypocritical conventionality. 
 
 ACADEMY. 
 Mr. Piatt is not an artist. 
 
 WHITEHALL REVIEW- 
 There is real genius in this work not often found 
 in these days of slip-shod fiction. 
 
 SATURDAY REVIEW. 
 
 Mr. Piatt has no sense of proportion or grace, 
 no tact, no sense of humour.
 
 Criticism*. xv. 
 
 REALM- 
 One of the most striking and original books pub- 
 lished in England for a long time .... The 
 writer is evidently an individuality, eccentric indeed, 
 but sane enough on all the great matters, and master 
 of an English which at its best has that spontaneous 
 strength and beauty which comes of an inspired 
 artistic gift, and no mere self-conscious stylist can 
 ever attain. 
 
 BLACK AND WHITE. 
 A book to command attention, and most will be 
 the better for reading it. 
 
 DAILY GRAPHIC- 
 An extraordinary book, which had been far better 
 left unpublished. 
 
 YORKSHIRE POST. 
 
 It, is bracing to find a man idealising chastity in 
 
 _re when so many women writers agree to flout 
 
 it. 
 
 GLASGOW HERALD. 
 
 In parable, lyric story, and character sketch he 
 seeks to glorify what he understands by love and bo 
 stand up for the flesh and its just and pure claims 
 against asceticism on the one hand, and swinishness 
 on the other, and he certainly has the courage of his 
 ipinio
 
 wi. Criticisms. 
 
 SCOTSMAN. 
 
 Short sketches of a page or so with nothing in 
 them but an intolerable violence and spasmodicality 
 of language. 
 
 LEEDS MERCURY. 
 
 He is honest, sincere, and his high aspirations de- 
 serve acknowledgment. 
 
 BRADFORD OBSERVER. 
 A remarkable book of apologues, brief narratives, 
 meditations &c, somewhat resembling the Turgenieff 
 manner, and dealing rather freely with some themes 
 not commonly handled, but with purity and tire. 
 That love is the greatest thing in life, that the body 
 is holy, that vice and lust can only be prevented by 
 giving love its place and the body true honour — but 
 our cold synopsis cannot do justice to Mr. Piatt's 
 passionate parables, and fables and verse. 
 
 WOMEN, LOYE & LIFE, 
 
 By William Platt, 
 
 Published by 
 
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