> i.2^ uiv/VERs/ry or cai '?lVERSH)f ^ A SCRAP BOOK MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAV • CALCUTTA • MADRAS MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS ■ SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO A SCRAP BOOK BY ; V)3L^e^^^^ GEORGE SAINTSBURY [SatiTcr/St'ptos] rab' iypaipa, waXaid re /jLuipd re eZStiy. LuciAN mui. nom. MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1922 S3 c 2- COPYRIGHT PRINTED IN GKEAT BRITAIN PREFACE We all know what qui s' excuse really does, so I shall not say much as to further reappearances after a certain leave-taking. It is true that then I was honestly referring only to appearance '* in panoply " — " Histories of Literature " of the kind I had been writing for more than thirty years in nearly or quite half that number of volumes. These I have never attempted since, and am not likely ever to attempt — indeed I have refused proposals for things of the kind, not merely on the score of age, but because Fate has not been kind in some other ways. As, when I began again with smaller and lighter things, people seemed to like these, " request of friends " became more than a polite apology — there is no need to say anything about the rest of the line as to another kind of obligation. After all, one goes back as usual to Shakespeare and Benedick, vl A SCRAP BOOK with a touch of Touchstone. My present Beatrice may be a poor thing ; but when I said that I should write no more I did not know that I was going to write her. And whether she will be Mr. Baxter's absolutely Last Word or not I do not know now. Like other people in these days of Reminis- cences^ I have of course — long ago and often since — been asked to write them. But without in the least reflecting on anybody who has done so, I am bound to say that, in any complete or continuous form, the proceeding has always discommended itself to me. I have had no great and big public experiences ; and when you come to private ones my possibly old-fashioned tastes would oblige me to leave out all the more interesting things to and about myself, and most of those most interesting to others about others yet. The greatest compliment that can be paid to anybody is, " You are a gentleman," and I do not seem to see a gentleman either kissing and telling or remembering to backbite. Nevertheless a few personal anecdotes, especially of Oxford PREFACE vii at a time when men, I fancy, were lectured and shepherded less and allowed to prepare for the risks of their future life more,i may perhaps be introduced to vary other matter. As for that other matter, it consists of things to some extent perhaps validated by the experi- ences of a life, undistinguished, as has been confessed, by any striking events, but sufficiently free from unvaried ruts of any kind. Twenty years of passive education and eight of active schoolmastering — not undiversified in frequenta- tion as guest of barrack and ball-room, as habitue of the open road as well as the closed study ; twenty more of London journalism of a rather varied type ; twenty more yet of that profes- sorial life in a Scotch University which, especi- ally for persons not to the country born, gave an almost ideal combination of vocational em- ployment, with varied residence and oppor- tunities for .^vocational work and play ; yet ^ The apparent growth of " Battels " amazes me most. After the next Commission they will probably include college-furnished clothing on the good old " Moses " principle — " three suits a year, two to be returned." viii A SCRAP BOOK another seven of" shelf," with the opportunities that shelf gives of looking without falling " down and out," and certain circumstances not favour- able to mere going to sleep on it — all this at least does not disqualify a man for forming and holding opinions — even for giving them. Also without boasting I believe I may say that these opinions are home-grown, in respect not only of minor " books and things and persons," but of the greater matters in politics and religion, in aesthetics and philosophy. I do not take to myself the slightest credit for this independence. I suppose I was born so, just as another man might be born handsome, a third physically strong, a fourth amiable, and a fifth able to write so that other people can read his writing. At any rate no person that I can think of, in racking a pretty good memory, ever did influence my opinions in the slightest degree, and no author except Carlyle, with whom in details I disagree as often as I agree, if not oftener. My father was, I believe, a Conservative, but he died when I was fourteen, and never talked politics, with or PREFACE ix before me, at all. Nor did my schoolmasters, or my tutors when I went to Oxford. ^ Although my family was sincerely and, as the French say, ** practisingly " religious, there was no contro- versial element about in it, and nothing to make me, either by attraction or repulsion. High Church or Evangelical. In these two most important divisions of thought and practice, as in literature and in art, in work and play, in personal relations, and in everything else, I have loved things and persons because / loved them, and loathed them because / loathed — not because the love or the loathing was fashionable or un- fashionable, profitable or unprofitable, orthodox or heretical, customary or eccentric. And when it comes not to loving or loathing, but to know- ing or believing, accepting or rejecting, I have always held with the poet on the voyage of man's life, that Save his own soul, he hath no star, 1 I think I may say that I imitated them when I came into functions similar to theirs. All my students may have known that I was a Tory : I am sure none can say that I talked Tory politics on the platform. X A SCRAP BOOK though that poet and I might differ considerably as to Who put the soul there and to several other conditions and circumstances, rules for star- observation, and charts to consult in steering. I only trouble the reader with all this to explain, if not excuse, my troubling him further with a few notes of this voyage as taken by myself — notes lighter and graver — a farrago, in short. Southey's Omniana, Locker's Patchwork^ and my regretted friend Austin Dobson's Bookman s Budget may have had something to do with suggesting it to me, in form ; though they are all, especially the first and last, as much less purely personal as they are, no doubt, better. I could, of course, have followed their example in the " Commonplace-book " direction to any extent — there are one or two such followings as it is. But I did not want to make a big book, and I did want to say what I have said here. In my twenty years of journalism I calculate, on principles again employed here later, that I must have written the equivalent of at least a hundred volumes of the ** Every Gentleman's Library " PREFACE xi type — and probably more. I have not, to my knowledge, repeated any sentence in that extensive and fortunately uncollectable collection ; ^ but some of the following articles contain expressions, in short, of the principles on which the others were written. I might have called the booklet A Little Testament^ but that would have been presumptuous and plagiarising. The title actually to be adopted is unpretentious, common property, and yet exact to individual contents. So let it take its chance — offering, as it does, free opportunity of play on the various meanings of the word " scrap," and, by the help of the motto below it,^ additional handles to any one who chooses to take hold of them. If there is ^ Nothing here given has appeared before, except two of the " Little Necrologies," that on Mr. Lang, which appeared in the Oxford Alagaaine, just after his death, and that on Mr. Dobson, from the Bookman's Journal, both reprinted by kind permission of the respective liditors. 2 " Lucian wrote this, knowing old things and vain." If the epigram is really his, some lines must surely be lost, dealing with TraXaid and its opposite I'^a, as the actual sequel does with fjuiypd. and ao'i stepping-stones across a goodish-sized *' beck." We hit these off all right, but when we got there the beck was in spate, and running a good foot or more over the stones. Now whosoever of my possible readers has experienced these con- ditions will admit that they are not ideal. You can't see the stones for the Guinness-coloured foam ; the stream, up to, if not above your knees, does not make the shots at them and the balance upon them any surer ; and if you do slip between them, the consequences are likely to be, in more ways than one, unpleasant. I suppose some of the other places " had work for me " (as the ballad says of Dragut), for I " got safe to shore " ; but my companion just failed, and though with some help he managed to land, the beck had his boots and socks, which we had stripped off in order to wade. We had slippers in our knapsacks ; but slippers are anything but suitable cothurns for the heather- mixture (with stones and gravel) of the kind of place where Westmorland and Durham and York- D VIII 34 A SCRAP BOOK shire meet, so that his progress to the mining Hut of Salvation was not beatific. But it was good if piquant sauce for that Evening Meal, call it, as you like, tea-dinner, or high-tea, or the mysterious term which I only know from Borrow, " boxing Harry." Another late meal, with some curious resem- blances and dijfferences, happened about ten or a dozen years after, when I was living in the north of Scotland, and, again with a companion, was again trying a very out-of-the-way walk of con- siderable length, from the upper Findhorn to Loch Ness. We could count on no guidance (it was in May) except that of possible shepherds (only one of whom ever turned up, and that too early to be of much use) and a reputed burn, most appropriately termed Alt-na-Gallagach or Gealgach (I " have " no Gaelic), which name I understand to signify " Burn of the Deceivers," and to be, curiously enough, rather common in the Highlands. It was as dry a spring as in the other case it had been a wet autumn ; and the VIII COENAE DEUM—ET ALIORUM 2S peat-hags were like monstrous and irregular imitations of a cake one sometimes sees in the shops — hollows studded with tumps or teeth of more or less solid turf sticking up all over them. To go round each as it came would have made an already long walk Heaven knows how much longer, so the only thing was to hop or jump from tump to tump. Once more my guardian angel, or somebody else, brought me through, but my companion slipped and sprained his ankle rather badly. However, with much ado we got down after dark to the hotel at Foyers, and ordered a meal as prompt and as copious as possible. Against the copiousness (when it came) or the goodness, in a simple fashion, there was nothing to say ; but the promptitude ! It is only fair to admit that it was utterly out of the season ; there was not a visible guest in the house but ourselves, and probably next to no staff. But the next-to-no staff conducted itself on principles pretty exactly described in The Uncommercial Traveller^ when Dickens and his friend went to 36 A SCRAP BOOK vm dine at the Temeraire in Brighton. We had, of course, requested beer instanter, and with no regard to other things. The door opened — we were (both dog-tired and my friend with the additional excuse of his ankle) reclining on sofas in a desert of coffee-room. We started up, each right hand expecting a tankard. But it was only table -gear, and a mere instalment of that — a mustard-pot or a bread-platter or — most insulting of all — a water-carafe. We said, as sweetly as possible, " Let us have that beer, please^'' and lay back. Again and again this happened, till at last (at least so my friend said) I bellowed, " Will you bring that BEER .'' " in a voice that made him shriek with laughter. And it came — the food after it ; and once more we slaked the desire of food and drink in what Hesperus brought us after pains and — in a mild way — perils. The third was a lonely but not very dissimilar experience. I had been walking round that queerest of queer places, the neighbourhood of viii COENAE DEUM—ET ALIORUM 37 the Roman Steps, in the Hinterland of Barmouth, with the intention of continuing across the moor to Trawsfynydd. But finding it impossible to ascertain the way thither from an exceedingly amiable but entirely monoglot Welshwoman, who seemed to be the only living being in that universe, and the day shortening, I made down the valley for Harlech, not by the way I had come, got off the path somehow, and found myself, after dark, in one of those agreeable chess-boards of boulders and heather in which the betting is rather in favour of breaking your leg. (I know a still worse one — for the stone is more slippery — on one side of Yestor or Cawsand, I am not sure which.) Therefore it seemed to me that, as Aristotle saith, " the phronimos would decide " to stand still and shout " Hullo ! " ^ Luckily, a boy who had been on an errand up to some moor-farm heard this S.O.S., extricated me, and 1 When did the utterly un-English " Hf//o ! " come in? " Hi/11," generally with " o," and " Hall," most commonly with " oo," are classic ; there is warrant even for " h/U," with " y-ho," while the verb " hollow " or " holla " is all right. But what on earth do we want with " H*ll- " ? 38 A SCRAP BOOK vm showed me the way down. And when, after- wards, I was eating this evening meal, a man of Harlech flavoured it with many anecdotes of the appalling experiences of waifs and strays on the mountain. Now motorists, and even cyclists, never get such sauce to their suppers, or delicacies to their dinners, as fell to my lot in these three cases. Not that the other kind, the kind without pre- cedent storm and stress, is to be pooh-poohed — very much the contrary. Kindj rather — for of the regulation or domestic dinner after the work or the worry of the day the varieties are, of course, infinite. The tete-a-tete at its own best is equally, of course, the best of all, as it always is, whether bi- or mono-sexual. But three are company, and very good company too, with food and drink to occupy their hands. In fact, next to the perfect tete-^-tete of a man and a (not necessarily) maid comes the feast of a man and two ladies.^ ^ The rather uncommon litre or imperial quart of champagne fits this ideally. A magnum sometimes succeeds admirably, but is subject to problems. vin COENJE DEUM—ET JUORUM 39 One of a lady and two men, not both nearly related to her, might possibly be Lapithaean ; but three men at one table can have a glorious time, and the number may be increased to some half-dozen (a large men's dinner, unless it is broken up into coteries, is apt to be a rather dismal thing), with fair prospect of the glory not departing soon or — in memory — ever. Of mixed dinners of the ordinary festal kind, the best of all is a special gift of God ; and the fact that it is hardly possible under the modern limitation to half a dozen or so — good as this may sometimes be — is rather against such limi- tation, though certainly the chances are heavy against the " best of all." It comes when you happen to sit next Theodora or Dorothea — whether yourself or another takes her down does not matter, for this marriage is recklessly in- different between assignment and capture — and she recognises (it nearly always happens im- mediately) that you are Dorotheus or Theodorus. 40 A SCRAP BOOK vm You eat and drink other things, no doubt ; but, as in the case of Mr. David Copperfield, you consume chiefly her. When she is gone, you drink her and think of her still ; and at last, when you get into the drawing-room, you make straight for her. Your hostess very likely comes up and says, " You two are behaving disgracefully," but you both remember Heine — Wir Beide bekiimmem uns um Nichts, though you can't fully imitate the absorption of his pair in each other. And then you both go away, having had the triple blessing of Ceres and Bacchus and Venus. Perhaps you meet again ** for good," perhaps only for a more or less agreeable friendship, but never again thus ; perhaps never at all. And which of these things is the better business is unknown, except to God, as goes one of the greatest of all sayings and one of the most constant and repeated in some folks' minds and memories. IX NAMES OF RACEHORSES 41 IX. Names of Racehorses. — It will be remem- bered by the lovers (I hope many) of Henry Kingsley's Ravenshoe that he protested against the absurdity of racing nomenclature. " Allow Me," " Ask Mamma," and ** Pam's Mixture " were his examples — foolish, doubtless, but not extravagant. (I did once myself name a filly for my school-fellow the late Mr. Leopold de Roth- schild ; but the name, Hippolyta, was, as the twentieth century will at once say, too " obvious," and she never, I think, came to anything.) Just about Derby time this year there were bitter complaints about an animal called " Suryakumari." I do not know whether she was too much for the " ring," but if so they must be degenerate. In the early 'sixties I happened to be, on a solitary walking tour, at a Salisbury hotel. Somebody, who had, I suppose, done duty in the Crimea,^ had baptized a beast by the name of Baktchiserai. ^ We had some wars in those days, my dear young friends, and there were places called Inkerman and Lucknow, though it was astonishingly difficult to make people who had been there talk of them. 42 A SCRAP BOOK x The coffee-room was full of racing people, but they had no difficulty. " Back -kitchen Sarah," reverberated cheerfully. In the later case ** Mary " is there beforehand, and I will not insult intelligence by suggesting transliterations for the rest. X. Wordsworth and the Pussyfoots. — If the Pussyfoots were not such noxious and obnoxious creatures themselves, they would provide — indeed they do, as it is — a certain amount of innocent amusement for the people of God. Take their production of Wordsworth as an instantia con- tradictoria to Sir Arthur Quiller - Couch's ab- solutely impregnable assertion of the historical connection of liquor and literature. For every- body who is up in Wordsworthian lore and liquids knows the tradition, supported by his own evi- dence, that Wordsworth at Cambridge was once actually drunk. And it has always been the habit of the profane to mourn the impossibility of having been present on that occasion and of XI TORYISM 43 observing the demeanour of the bard. Therefore, in the first place, the claim is subject to demur in itself. But it is even more fertile of fun in another respect. For it illustrates the fact — already well known to the observers of their ways — that it is not drunkenness, but what is in the true sense temperance — not the sot, but the sensible drinker — that Pussyfoots hate. They rather like the drunkard — he is useful as a Helot. They resist proposals to make him, as such, more uncomfortable than at present. They are proof against the fact — a -priori almost demon- strable, and hideously demonstrated a -posteriori — that Prohibition will multiply his numbers and aggravate his condition. " Never mind the drunkard," is their line, " except as a lantern- slide. Let us go for the ruffians who drink and are not drunk, who have the impudence to take the gifts of God and thank the Giver." XI. Politics : I. Toryism. — There lies open before me, with inside end-paper and flyleaf 44 A SCRAP BOOK « exposed, a small volume inscribed as follows in a very comely hand, names only blanked : To One of two Tories left in England, from the other, January 1892. " The other " is, alas ! dead, and " the one " (whose hand is not comely) probably has not long to live, so that unless some recruits have sprung up in the last thirty years, Toryism would seem, on the authority of this document, to be in a rather bad way. If I remember rightly, Victor Hugo, in his Victorian manner, announced once, je serai celui-la I in the case of its coming to a definitely last man of another (quite other) sort of political creed, and seemed rather to enjoy the prospect. I am afraid I should not possess fi€ya\o-ylrvxta of that kind to that extent if I were in the case above suggested. XI TORYISM 45 For it would not only be a great pity, from various minor points of view, but would show, rather uncomfortably, that the human brain is returning rapidly to that ape-stage in which some of us still don't believe. (Everything that I have ever seen of or read about monkeys inclines me to believe that there is pretty com- plete democracy among them.) Toryism — how- ever contrary this may go to Radical chatter about it — is at least a political creed which can stand the tests of rational examination of the physical and historical facts of life. It rests, in the first place, on the recognition of the facts that all men and women are born «;/equal ; that no men or women are born free (if one could play the hackneyed " time-reversal " game it would be cruelly amusing to catch a future democrat at his birth, leave him entirely free from all interference, and see what happened to him) ; and that if you leave two healthy brothers or sisters alone together they will frequently, if not continually, fight. In the 46 A SCRAP BOOK xi second, being well acquainted with history, it knows that all attempts to establish Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity have failed more or less disastrously and disgustingly, whatever camouflage of success they may have kept up ; while acceptance and judicious regulation of the contraries have always (barring the faults of in- dividuals, or more rarely of systems) done well. For the sentimental pleas of Socialist Democracy, it has the answer of Religious Charity. For the arithmetical plausibility of " share and share alike," it has the irresistible replies in kind that the " alikeness " will not last a year, a month, a week, a day, nay, not an hour, and that in a very short time there will be nothing to share afresh. ** Why should there be kings ? " Because there always are kings — whether by Divine Right, as in some cases, or by Diabolic Selection, as in others. " Why should there be peers } " Be- cause you want in all, or nearly all, cases some court of political appeal ; and when your first line of government is elective, there should XI TORYISM 47 clearly be a second with which direct popular election has as little to do as possible. Now the hereditary principle supplies this, as it also does in the case of kingship, better, by all experience, than anything else. Behind all this, and any amount more which anybody can have who wants it, there is the vague-seeming but rationally impregnable back- ground-argument, provided once more by age- long experience, that change is rarely for the better, and that continual change, for the sake of changing, will certainly sometimes, and prob- ably often, be for the worse. The goods you have are real, and the ills, in all probability and experience, to a large extent imaginary — certainly bearable in that they have been borne. The goods that are to come may, and by experi- ence to a large extent will, be imaginary, and the ills very real indeed. Nothing has been said here — purposely nothing — of the non-practical side of Toryism ; which is, of course, giving away masses of weight. Some of the more generous 48 A SCRAP BOOK xi iconoclasts themselves admit the beauty of the icons they would destroy. For my part, their own ideals seem to me more hideously ugly and uninteresting the more they elaborate them. Put away all thought of the crime and agony which would have to be gone through in order to bring about the Socialist Utopia ; get it some- how brought about by fairy agency ; could there, even then, be anything more loathsome than one wide waste of proletariat- Cocqcigrue comfort; everybody as good as the President ; everybody as " well educated " as everybody else ; every- body stationed, rationed, regulated by some kind of abstract " State " — as equal, and really about as free, as pigs in a sty, and not m.uch better deserving the name of man, or the manly chances of position, possession, genius, ancestry, and all that differentiates us from brutes ? If any one says, " But you have no business to assume that there is no via media between this and Toryism," history and not I shall answer him. Whiggery, Liberalism, Moderate Radi- XII A SEASHORE STORY 49 calism — all have failed more or less : the only- reason why, in this or that case, they have not failed utterly, or have held out for a long time, being that they have not been " extreme," that the remnant of the principles of Toryism itself — Inequality, Individualism, Heredity, Property, etc. — which they have retained, has kept them alive. XII. A Seashore Story. — Once upon a time, there was an extremely wicked man who did not believe in Science with a large S, though he quite acknowledged the importance and usefulness of divers sciences with a small ; and perhaps knew a little about some of them. He happened to be taking a walk about a part of the coast of the island in which he lived. In one of the bays certain small pebbles or shingle were said to occur which did not correspond to any rock in the immediate vicinity. But Science was quite sure that they came from another part of the coast at some distance — travelling to the place where they were found by this or that set of E so A SCRAP BOOK winds and tides. As the wicked man looked at and handled these nice little pebbles, it occurred to him — the instigator being clearlv something like that Devil in whom Science generally doesn't believe — that he would have a game with Science. So he filled his pockets and part of his knapsack with the pebblets and went off to another bay- several miles distant, quite out of the way of any probable set of those winds and tides, and scattered them carefully just above ordinary high-water mark on the beach. Of course the next storm might, and probably would, sweep them away. But in any case, the fact of their being there, if only for five minutes, " gave something to think " about the methods and arguments, and especially the assumptions, of Science. Of course, again, the wicked man knew all about a certain story as to shells and the Alps and pilgrims ; and though that was in more senses than one " another story," it may have put his wickedness in his head. But that is beside the matter. Only, to round the thing off, let it XIII GREEN TEA IN PUNCH 51 be mentioned that sometime afterwards he told his wickedness to a friend who did believe in Science. " You dontmefSin to say you did that ? " quoth the friend in pious horror. Yet perhaps the action is worth relating, if onlv to make a few think twice about accepting the dicta of Herr von Goethe's Jarno and the Reverend Charles Kingsley's Dean Winnstay as to the rocks " telling no lies." Not that the rocks tell any lies at all themselves, but that they may possibly be m.ade to tell them by folks who insert all sorts of un- proved premisses among their e\ndence. Also one may think of it when one hears of a new " further back " human ancestor being dis- covered on the strength of a tooth, which may, it seems after ail, be that not of anything anthro- poid, but of a " primitive bear." Yet it cannot be said that there is nothing of the primitive bear in man : and so we come round aeain. XIII. Gree-'i Tea in Punch. — One of the numerous amiable reviewers of mv ^sotes on a 52 A SCRAP BOOK xin Cellar-Book was a little grieved because I did not include '* made " green tea in a receipt which I gave for punch. I need not say that I was perfectly well acquainted with that prescription, in more forms than one or two. But I do not ** hold with " it, as the old lady said she did not with curates. In the first place — and indeed this might be the last also, for everything else is superfluous — I think it spoils the punch. But there is more against it, for it is obviously founded on a faulty theory. Green tea (according to the strictest sect, in combination with a wet towel round the forehead) is supposed to sober you after you have drunk too much. Therefore, taken in combination with drink, it will, even without a wet towel, prevent your drinking too much, or at least enable you to drink more before the " too much " is reached. But part, if not all, of this argument seems to me, after much thought, some observation, and a little experiment, to be unsound in logic, ethics, and fact. Green tea (though I confess GREEN TEA IN PUNCH 52 that by itself with sugar — it is the only tea that should be sugared — I rather like it) is notoriously bad for the nerves. The wet towel (it is true the green-tea-/;/-punch advocates do not insist on this adjunct) is much more conducive to neuralgia than to sobriety. And I doubt whether the plan of pitting certain qualities of the tea against certain others of the spirit, and expecting thereby to get the benefit of both and the mischief of neither, is at all sound hygienically or logically. I remember too well the French fabliau of the ugly but wise knight, who married a pretty but foolish girl on this same principle, and was rewarded by an offspring as plain as its papa and as silly as its mother. Besides, as I ventured to point out in my little book itself, you don't want either to stimu- late drinking beforehand or to facilitate excess in it afterwards. You want every good person to have as much good liquor as is good for him, and as he really desires and can enjoy. You don't want Nature to be expelled with the fork 54 A SCRAP BOOK xiv of Prohibition, but you also don't want her to be tricked and outwitted with counter-irritants. More particularly so, because it is even more certain than that she will " recur " in the former case, that you, and not she, will be the tricked and outwitted one in the latter. All which implies not the slightest ill-temper with my reviewer. He was merely repeating a traditional formula which has been respected by many of our fathers before us, partly as a tradi- tion (and tradition is more often right than wrong, just as innovation is more often wrong than right), partly from what seemed to them good reasons. And it is better even to drink green -tea punch than none. And there is much too little punch of any kind drunk now. So let us end as friends with all — except Pussyfoots. XIV. Little Necrologies : I. Andrew Lang. — There is no such Greek word as vcKpoXoyia, I fear ; but neither is there any such Latin one — ANDREW LANG 55 classical or early post-classical at least — as oM- tuarium, and " necrology " is much prettier than " obituary." Of these little tributes to friends in life and comrades in letters, two, as acknow- ledged in Preface, have appeared before ; the others are, as yet, unpublished. If any one, knowing Lang's strong adherence to the dislike shown by many of the best men for biographies, asks me why I, even in miniature, neglect it, let me point out that there is nothing or very little "biographical," except as regards literary " life," in any of these notices. They are, as it were, criticisms a little vivified by personal touches. And I have the warrant of a spontaneous utter- ance by some one who knew Lang himself, even better than I did, in reference to this very paper : " Ah ! he wouldn't have disliked what you have written." Nor do I think Dobson would. In Henley's case I have almost confined myself to one episode of his career, the details of which nobody now living, to the best of my belief, knows as well as I do. And as for Traill, he is one 56 A SCRAP BOOK xiv of the rare persons — he was rare in more ways than one — about whom far too little has been written at all. Marry ! there is no lack of those about whom there has been written too much ! I never knew Lang when we were both undergraduates, nor, though we certainly had common acquaintances, do I remember hearing him spoken of. In fact, as one of the greatest of undergraduates observes, it may be ** reckoned a remarkable thing " that in nearly fifty years I never met him in Oxford till the Merton gaudy of 191 1. He was my elder by eighteen months, but my junior at Oxford by nearly as much, for I went up rather early and he very late. And he was not elected Fellow at Merton till the last year of my Postmastership had expired, and I had gone down for good. Nor for the next five years was I at all in Oxford or much in England. As soon, however, as he began to write in the Dark Blue^ in the Academy^ and as author of Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, I could not fail XIV ANDREW LANG 57 to hear of him, especially as our lines of reading (I had myself written nothing as yet) were curiously similar. In 1873, goi^g up to take my Master's Degree, and staying with the Creightons, I found my host and hostess one morning at breakfast reading a letter from Lang (who was then in Switzerland or on the Riviera, I forget which) and speculating whether he would or would not manage a reprieve from the sentence that had been passed on his lungs. As every one knows now, the reprieve was granted to an extent un- usually " indefinite," as the grim French saying has it, for it covered forty years, and the lungs were not to blame at last. Still, there was no actual acquaintance between us for some time longer ; and then I owed it, as I suspect a vast number of other people did, to an act of kindness on his part. The pack of lame dogs whom Lang helped over stiles will make a considerable and perhaps not inconvenient com- pany for him on the Day of Judgment. I was XIV 58 A SCRAP BOOK a very lame dog indeed at that moment ; for I had found schoolmastering (to adapt an old " Shooting Star " pun) not only not at all dear to me, but exceedingly expensive ; and was, as usual, fleeing to the Press (where Lang was already pretty well established) for refuge. Creighton was once more the Galeotto. Lang had (with that frankness which, I think, made one like him quite as much as any other quality) previously declined to introduce me to Spencer Baynes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica^ because, as he observed, " he'll want to do all the things that I want to do." But it was he who put me on that quaintest, but while it lasted by no means least profitable, of periodicals, London,^ to which, though he never wrote much except fascicles of delightful verses, some of them never reprinted, he, Stevenson, Henley, and myself were at one time, I think, almost the only contributors. He introduced me to Frank Hill of the Daily News, where I first obtained a regular if not extensive ^ y. inf. on Henley. ANDREW LANG 59 income by writing non-political articles under a conscience clause which I think rather annoyed Robinson the manager ; and it was he who, by transferring to me Lenient's book on French Satire, made my first connection with the Saturday Review. Which things, though they may be very unimportant to the public, are not forgettable by the recipient of the benefits, and perhaps not impertinent here. They gave me at any rate some right to write this article, for during the next twenty or nearly twenty years few people, I think, saw more of Lang than I did. During full seven of these we used to walk home together, some three times a week, from Fleet Street to Kensington ; and when, after a short interval, I became sub-editor of the Saturday^ much the same sort of thing used to take place, though less frequently. Besides, independently of our own houses, we met con- stantly at the Savile, at the Rabelais Club dinners from 1880 to 1888, and elsewhere. Among other results of this frequentation I became 6o A SCRAP BOOK xiv better instructed than perhaps anybody else as to that remarkable chain or cycle of " crazes " for which he was famous. It began with Homer ; and in a sense this never ceased, for, as is well known, he took it up again not long before his death ; but there were many others. Folk-lore was nearly as permanent a mistress as Homeric study ; he had begun it, I think, by much read- ing of magical books in his student days at St. Andrews. But I own that I heard him on this particular subject (except the magical part) not very gladly. Moli^re for a time, and a long time, was another ; but this he exhausted or wearied of, and there were many more. He never, like Sainte - Beuve, loved mediocrities ; but he had quite a Gautieresque fondness for Les Oubliis et les Dedaignes, and Prowse, alias *' Nicholas," John Hamilton Reynolds, and a few others, survive in his reprinted work as specimens of an almost innumerable company. It was later, and when, having myself moved to Scotland, I only saw him on my rare visits to XIV ANDREW LANG 6i London, or by means of his pretty usual calls on me in Edinburgh on his way to or from St. Andrews, that this " craze "-habit directed itself to historic problems, though the Moliere fancy had set him earlier on the Man with the Iron Mask. As for Pickle the Spy and all the other ramifications of his general research into Scottish history, I have always thought it rather disastrous that his great popularity, both with the public and the publishers, led him to treat these matters in book-form rather than in essays. As the latter they would have been invariably delightful — readable and re-readable, as one reads Macaulay or Carlyle, if not Lamb or Hazlitt. As books, to speak frankly (and I think I may do so), they sometimes approached boredom and almost always struck one as out of proportion. It required, however, a singular conspiracy of bad fairies (indignant, doubtless, at the way in which he had shown them up and glorified their good sisters) to infuse this quality into anything that Lang wrote. His more extensive 62 A SCRAP BOOK xiv prose fiction, though perhaps not up to his mark in other ways, was often such as no one else could have written, especially in The Mark of Cain earlier and The Disentanglers later. But I have always thought his verse inconceivably underrated, even more so than the verse of very abundant and miscellaneous writers in prose is wont to be. It ought to be collected ; for the volumes which contain it are numerous, and he had the bad though natural habit of reprinting with additions and omissions which ** confuse the issue " in a non-legal sense, while he some- times never reprinted or even never printed at all. Was The Castle of the Seven Deadly Sins a real thing ? or was it as the Life of Joseph Selly or even as that wondrous legend of" The Butler " which was bandied about between Southey and Grosvenor Bedford ? ^ He used to talk of it as having been written in or before his Oxford days in the crimsonest and yellowest of Pre-Raphaelite ' A relation and confidante of his told mc, after this notice was first published, that it did exist, but was not of any great length. XIV ANDREW LANG 6^, colours. But when I asked for a sample, it was unattainable, being sometimes spoken of as destroyed. The Ballads and Lyrics of Old France he gave me very early, with a loose manu- script leaf containing a version (with variants) of " Light has Flown " and another " Last Translation," which I do not think was ever printed. Helen of Troy I never loved to dis- traction ; for who can write at length of Helen } Even Homer only gave us priceless fragments ; and Tennyson never showed his unmatched com- bination of poetry and criticism better than by confining his presentation of her to twelve lines, themselves divinely fair.^ But there is splendid verse in it ; and as for the best of the smaller things, they are poetry sans phrase. " A Dream " and the great Burnaby sonnet, and above all that exquisite Ballade of His Choice of a Sepulchre — these poems show what a poet he was when he wrote them ; what he might have been always ^ Marlowe's passage on her has indeed five of the greatest lines in poetry, but is short as a whole, and not, in the rest, very wonderful. 64 A SCRAP BOOK xiv had he chosen and been able to make the neces- sary sacrifice, and be a poet only. If he had done this he might have given higher pleasure to the few, now and in the future ; but he would have given nothing like the enormous volume of it that he actually gave to his con- temporaries for not much less than half a century. Long ago, in the time of his Daily News leaders, a lady, herself of no small distinction in letters, and daughter of one of the greatest of Victorians, is said to have declared that when her husband had gone to his office in the morning, these leaders were her only pleasure in life. This, perhaps, was rather lyrical, but it was true, in a more prosaic and diffused sense, of a vast number of persons for a very long series of years. To turn the pages of a newspaper or a review or a magazine and come upon something of Lang's (signed or not, it was all the same to the initiated) had a most curious effect of stimulation and refreshment. The ease, the wit and humour (for he had that rare combination), the versatility. XIV ANDREW LANG 6$ the reading, the taste, and half a dozen other good qualities, made an entirely unmatched blend. A good deal of its singular power to delight was no doubt due to the fact that the author himself almost invariably took pleasure in his own work. He very soon proved himself so valuable to editors that nobody thought of imposing mere grind upon him ; and he very seldom worked against the grain. Indeed his own grain was of such a variegated and manifold texture that it would puzzle the veriest " beast of a subject " to get across or against it. Most of those who have dealt with him have touched, and perhaps it is necessary so to touch, on the parrot cries of" amateurishness," " dilettantism," and so forth, which were raised about him. The fact is that these were only uttered either by those who did not know half what he knew on any subject, or by those who thought they knew more on one, and were vexed because he followed not them. He was, and deliberately chose to be, oddly ignorant of some things, though this F 66 A SCRAP BOOK xiv ignorance was sometimes (not always) simulated ; and writing as he did in the odder fashion to be presently noted, he might now and then make slips of pen or memory. But on anything that he took up seriously, his knowledge was minutely and almost meticulously accurate. And it was not a little amusing to observe how, in the rather acrimonious comments which his History of Scotland and its offshoots occasioned, objectors were nearly always in the long run reduced to mutter, or shout, that his conclusions were not in accordance with Scottish prejudices, and therefore must be wrong. His extraordinary fertility has been almost as much of a byword as the matters just men- tioned. It was no doubt partly due to sheer facility of composition. I have often sat opposite to him at the same table, writing leaders, and I was not myself a slow hand ; but he had nearly always finished some quarter of an hour before me. And the amazing amount of his work (speaking not at random I should say it would, XIV ANDREW LANG 67 if collected, fill nearer two than one hundred ordinary volumes of the " Every Gentleman's Library " kind) had other causes. One, and the most individual, was his absolute indifference to conditions and continuity of writing. Many people can turn out work freely enough if you give them a quiet room, uninterrupted concentra- tion of thought, and the like. Most journalists learn to dispense even with the quiet room. But all times, places, and circumstances were alike to Lang ; and he would turn into the pavilion, during the intervals or uninteresting parts of a cricket match, and begin, finish, or write some middle part of an article, on the corner of a table or the top of a locker, quite as comfortably as he would in his own study. But, after all, the main reasons of the quantity of his work were the same as those of its quality — the extraordinary range and versatility of his mind ; the fund of solid scholarship, with an immense superstructure of miscellaneous read- ing, which he possessed ; and one peculiar gift 68 A SCRAP BOOK xiv which I have never known to be enjoyed by any one else in equal measure. Whether Lang was what Dr. Johnson would have called " funda- mentally original " may admit of some debate ; but for spontaneous and unfailing originality in treatment of whatever subject might present itself, he certainly had no equal. Of the four most remarkable men of letters of my own generation whom I knew most intimately, and who now 1 navigate " the equal waters of the dead," one could find parallels for three. Steven- son was a sort of Maturin-Borrow, with a better temperament and a higher sense of art than either ; Henley was a minor Johnson, a little damaged in some parts ; Traill, the strongest of all, was a Swift who too often bound if not blinded himself at the mill with slaves. But Lang was only and always Lang ; even the Thackerayan touches in him kept their own and his own nature. On two subjects only he never talked and ' Written in loiz. XV THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY 69 rarely wrote — strict party politics and, in the proper sense, religion. But on some of the results of the former he felt deeply, and wrote sometimes ; while, if anybody thinks that he was only interested in religion in the " rascally comparative " sense as a Gifford Lecturer and a folklorist, let that person read, as I did on the day when Lang was being buried in the Cathedral Kirkyard of St. Andrews, the letter " From Piscator to Christian " in Old Friends, There will be no more to say then : neither is there now. XV. The Greek Anthology. — The charms of the great collection of miscellaneous verse which goes under the general name of the Greek Anthology, but which is really an anthology of anthologies — selected, and combined, and re- selected through more than a thousand years — have been often — though never to be enough — celebrated by worthier pens than mine. It is doubtful whether any single book is, for mere pleasure of reading, better worth salving from 70 A SCRAP BOOK xv a classical library in danger of fire or the auctioneer. But there is one thing that has sometimes struck me, when taking it up for pastime, that the mania of the later Greek- writing folk for classification and ticketing has done not a little harm here. Even the Erotica would be more delightful in some cases, less un- delightful in others, if they turned up sporadic- ally, each after a piece on Myron's cow or a not too successful epitaph, or the like, instead of being massed together like a menu entirely com- posed of " sweets." And some of the other sections (though they could not, as now, be skipped bodily) would be better as single spies than in battalions or even platoons. An Anthology thus reshuffled would have been one of the first books for me to get printed if I had been a million- aire, or could have got hold of one ; and it would have been in several little volumes of large print, so as to avoid at once the cumbrous- ness of Jacobs and the blinding typography of the Tauchnitz. XVI EDUCABLENESS 71 XVI. Education : II. Educableness. — The sub- ject of this note or articlet, though almost neces- sarily following the first on its subject, is not so much cinis dolosus as red-hot coals to walk upon ; and I remember that, when I ventured on it in a little book of mine on Matthew Arnold some twenty years ago, the wrath of " educational experts " showed itself in a small volcano of flame and ash, hot water and lava. But it has become more burning in another sense since and cannot be neglected. No honesty intelligent^ and impartial person who has practical experience of education in sufficiently varied kinds can deny that the educahle capacity of different boys and girls varies enormously. (The variety is, I think, rather less in girls than in boys, but this may have been due, up to very recent times, to the fact that girls, not getting so much education as a matter of course, have taken more interest in it and worked harder. The effects of the new combination of equality and privilege in their favour have yet to be seen.) 72 A SCRAP BOOK xw Few such persons, I think, unless they allow their honesty and impartiality, if not their in- telligence, to be dominated by political or other influences, would assert that the educable capacity of the majority of children is high. There ?nay be cases where some special subject will develop educableness where the general curriculum has failed ; but they are fewer, I think, than is popu- larly supposed. The present ideal, therefore, of giving all the fifty millions intensive and identical education, from Kindergarten or even creche to University Honours Schools, not only spells bankruptcy and other unpleasant things, of which a little more later, but involves the most enormous absurdity. You might as well attempt to train every four-legged donkey to Derby form, and subject every drop of currant or gooseberry juice to the elaborate processes which turn out cham- pagne. Undoubtedly it would be a pity if something that might yield a result comparable to '6^ Krug or '93 Clicquot were allowed to fall on the XVI EDUCABLENESS 73 ground and be smashed into it. But of this, in the parallel case, there is not, and never has been, much fear. The *' mute inglorious Miltons " are creatures of the poetic imagination not by any means free from furor poeticus. The Whewells and the Porsons are facts of yesterday, as were the proletarian bishops and doctors long ago. And neither then was it wanted, nor is it wanted now, to " force " Whewells and Porsons by the million or myriad. There is no use for them, and there is use of another sort for the less educable or almost non-educable myriads and millions who remain. But of course something else " remains " here, and that is to consider the shocked and certain exclamation, " But you say nothing of the right to education. Did not an exalted ecclesiastic affirm the other day that every child had that right.?" Well, one did; but, unfortunately, exalted ecclesiastics at present are too apt not to be quite as inspired as the Apostles from whom they officially derive. 74 A SCRAP BOOK xvn The next of these educational notelets shall take this up. XVII. Misunderstandings (II.). — An example of misunderstanding occurs to me as I write, which can hardly be set down to the presence of politics and religion — the two subjects, as the satirist so justly observed, which require no study or teaching — and which everybody, therefore, is qualified to pronounce upon.^ This new case is one of pure and plain English, and concerns so well-known a poem as Landor's" Rose Aylmer." Now there are some things to be said against Landor, but nobody worth attending to can accuse him of obscurity. And the words of this exquisite epicede are as clear as rock-water : Ah ! what avails the sceptred race ? Ah ! what the form divine ? What every virtue, every grace ? Rose Aylmer — all were thine ! ^ As when a distinguished Cambridge scientist the other day declared both to be " expressions of hysteria." xvii MISUNDERSTANDINGS: II 75 That is to say, Miss Aylmer possessed birth, beauty, goodness, and charm — but none of these — nor all together — prevailed or availed against Death. The three " whats " and the "all" combine and equalise the combination unmistak- ably. Yet one commentator, very careful, quite scholarly, well read, and possessed of intelli- gence which here at least should not be affected by any crotchet or prejudice, annotates the first two lines, " i.e. Neither kings nor gods have a monopoly of goodness or beauty." To un- ravel the intricacy of error which this interpreta- tion involves would make a capital examination question. You must overvalue " sceptred " and undervalue " race." You must misunderstand and misapply " form," at the same time not perceiving that " divine " means, " god-like^'" not ^'^ go(\-constituting.'" You must conceal from your- self that the third " what " requires, demands, insists upon another " avail " or " avails " to be supplied ; and you must thrust in a notion of " monopoly," of which there is no suggestion 76 A SCRAP BOOK xvn whatever as regards goodness or beauty, though there is one that birth and beauty, like goodness and grace, have neither monopoly of, nor any command over, immortality. I used myself, at a very early age, to think that Tennyson's " Falser than all fancy fathoms " referred to lengths not standardised, " cheating ell-wands," as the same poet has it elsewhere. But, after all, this involved no misappreciation of the general sense, though it did mistake the methods by which the intensity of the falseness was to be measured. The annotation referred to confuses and upsets Landor's meaning altogether, and substitutes a merely irrelevant platitude for a pathetic statement of what is, indeed, a common- place — but one of the great commonplaces — one of those which, by fresh and poignant form, as here, can be made equal, if not superior, to the most far-fetched preciousnesses. And the most curious thing is that in more than 200 pages of similar annotations on all sorts of sub- jects I have noticed no similar blunders. It XVIII NOTRE DAME D' AMOURS 77 looks after all as if anxiety to say something unpleasant of kings and gods — neither of which classes, one may admit, were pets of Landor himself — had led his sympathising scholiast to misread him. XVIII. Miracle de Notre Dame d' Amours} — In a chamber of one of the homes of Venus (but whether it were at Cyprus or at Cythera, the Greek book sayeth not), the goddess and a Suppliant might, one afternoon, have been found. She was half-sitting, half-lying, on a couch, and playing with a peacock fan which her step- mother had given her — because they were on good terms at the time, and because the Samians did not know what to do with the feathers that year, there were so many, and perhaps because peacock feathers are held by some to be unlucky. He, though he had begun quite properly on his ^ Written many years ago, and with no obligation to any one except, I suppose. Lord Bcaconsfield. As a specimen of a great deal of matter burnt as not worth publishing, it may not please one reader in a hundred for itself ; but their escape from the rest may reconcile the ninety and nine. 78 A SCRAP BOOK xvm knees, was now striding about, gesticulating to the patient goddess in a very tiresome manner, and raising his voice most unpleasantly. But there is not a more good-natured divinity in the whole Pantheon than Aphrodite — the representa- tion of her as spiteful and malignant is a late and shameful blasphemy, though it happens to be associated with at least one otherwise charming legend. Still, her kindness was severely tried by the man's ravings at a certain faithless love of his ; and her politeness, in view of the length of them, had to be assisted by the peacock fan. At last he paused for mere want of breath, and Venus could get a word in : " What do you want me to do, sir ? I will not have the girl hurt in any way, for after all she has only strained our prerogatives a little. And remember also " — here the sweet face grew grave, *' not merely that, as you know, the gods cannot recall their gifts, but, as you perhaps do not know, these gifts sometimes turn out strangely contrary to the askers' expectation," xviii NOTRE DAME D'AMOURS 79 But he paid no attention to the warning, and hardly looked at the beautiful, serious counte- nance that he was privileged to behold. " O Goddess," he said, "this is all I request. My rival is with her now, and is jealous. He will ask her if she has ever loved any one before. We all do." "Yes," said Venus, glad to find any point of agreement with her Sup- pliant, for whom she had taken a considerable dislike, " you all do it. I have observed that frequently in my own experience. But go on." " When he asks this, I pray you. Goddess, let my initials (he knows them well 1) appear in scarlet letters, so large as to be distinctly visible, and for so long as one may count ten, on her false flesh where I have kissed it. His eyes are sharp enough, and jealousy will sharpen them." The goddess (who disliked him more and more) curled her lips and shrugged her shoulders. " / should have called it more in- genious than gentlemanly," she said, " but doubtless you know best. What you ask comes 8o A SCRAP BOOK XVIII within the limits I gave you, and I do not refuse to grant it. But, once more, sir, I warn you to think of what I said before as to the way in which things may turn out." The man, however, was too mad with spite and gloating expectation to pay any heed. He only cried, " Let it be done at once, O Alma, and let me see it done ! " " So be it," she said, more gravely than ever ; " the doom is on her — and on you." Then she touched him lightly with the peacock fan, and they found themselves (invisible, of course) in the damsel's chamber, where she was sitting very much as Venus had sat, and her lover was kneeling, but in a very different state of mind from that in which the Suppliant had knelt and risen. There was nothing noticeable about him ; but the un- conscious victim was very noticeable indeed, and Venus (who never need be, and is never, jealous) fell much in love with her. And her indignation was increased by seeing that the contrast of dark hair and pale complexion, and XVIII NOTRE DAME D' AMOURS 8i the costume showing open throat and bare arms, made the suggested experiment specially danger- ous. The goddess looked at her own companion in faint hopes of seeing some ruth as he looked on this fair flesh ; but there was nothing save a hideous mixture of baffled desire, and rage, and ignoble triumph. " The man is a brute," she said to herself, " and he shall have brute's measure ! " Meanwhile things came quickly to the point that the Suppliant's cunning had foreseen. The question was put in his very words, and there certainly was nothing in it to disturb so old (though so young) a hand as this Dark and yet White Ladye. But in the few looths of a second in which she was choosing between one or other of the usual answers, she felt, to her horror, something like a blush of extraordinary ardour and extent rising. And then there broke over face and neck and arms a deep wave of crimson- scarlet, under the intolerable sense of which she had almost broken down. But she was a brave girl, and a clever one ; and Venus was on her G 82 A SCRAP BOOK xvm side, and she was able to say, with only the proper tremble in her voice, " How can you ask me ? " And her lover (a good creature and foolish) could do nothing but mumble the hand he held in her lap, and beg her pardon, and congratulate himself over and over on the sensi- tiveness and maiden modesty of his love. But it was perhaps as well that in kissing the hand his eyes were turned away from the face and neck. For as the long blush died away and gradually faded ojfiF, there were to be seen here and there, by a prying eye, and especially on the outskirts, odd traces and shapes which looked uncommonly like letters, and were pretty uniform. By the time, however, that he had finished his hand- kissing and felt it possible to meet the gaze of the innocence he had injured, the treacherous witnesses had quite disappeared, and everything went well with the lovers. But the Suppliant ? His rage and his sense that his dirty trick had not only failed, but turned to his own disadvantage, may be felt but cannot XVIII NOTRE DAME D'AMOURS 83 be told. Venus, who naturally understands these things, had kept a watchful eye on him — all the more so that she knew how intense human emotion can break through spells and plans divine, and even death itself. So another touch of the peacock fan wafted them back to the temple before he could break out. Then his fury found vent. Once more he raged about the room, and if " Fate and meta- physical aid" had not forbidden, he might have dared the crime of Diomed. As it was, he only used the worst language that an ill mind, anger, and a reminiscence of Lempri^re could suggest ; and certainly some of the things he said were very rude. But the goddess, as before when he had been merely tedious, reclined quietly on her sofa and played with the peacock fan, though the play of it was a little more spasmodic, the set of the divine lips rather harder, and the shrug of the heavenly shoulders was replaced by a tell-tale beat of the heavenly foot. At last, as before, he stopped for want of breath, and she spoke : 84 A SCRAP BOOK xvm ** Sir," she said, " if your bad manners and your classical education suggest nothing more to you, perhaps you will listen to me. If I were what your extremely ill-informed scandal-mongers have told you, I suppose I should send you to Tartarus, or turn you into something or other disagreeable. I think that unnecessary. You appear to me to have all the qualifications of a self-tormentor. But before I leave you to your- self, I shall take the again unnecessary trouble to justify wjyself a little. Was it my fault that you would not even attend to my warning } Was it my fault that you were so greedy a lover as not to leave a pin's-point space on the girl's face and neck and shoulders and arms unprofaned by your Judas ^-kisses ? Was it my fault that, in your headlong spite and thankless revenge, you never remembered that prints of letters, heaped on one another, will make an indis- 1 I hope somebody will point out that this and the Lcmpriere reference above are, as the Yankee said of Poe's conversation to Baudelaire, trh incon- siquiouti'vei in the mouth of Venus. X XIX MATTER AND FORM 85 tinguishable blur ? Go, sir ! buy yourself a stencil-plate and instruct yourself in some of the rudiments of physical and mechanical science. This may qualify you for the service of my sister Pallas. I hereby dismiss you, now and for ever, from mine ! " And one imperial flutter of the peacock feathers wafted the wretch away from Venus, away from Love, into the perpetual company of himself — and perhaps the occasional consolations of Science. XIX. Criticism : II. Matter and Form. — Few things have surprised me more — I don't know that many things have surprised me at all, barring the never-to-be-exhausted freshness of beauty in things and persons beautiful and of folly in things and persons foolish — than the objection of some who are certainly not fools, to the separation of Form and Matter in literature. This objection seems to be mainly due to a generous but surely unfounded dislike of the notion of good Form 86 A SCRAP BOOK XIX sanctifying — or even being compatible with — matter not good, or to the still more unreal notion — apparently entertained to some extent by Wordsworth — that good matter will insist on being clothed with good form. I only wish it did ! The reluctance to admit what seems, to me at least, to be one of the necessary axioms of the study of Art, and especially of Literature, seems (to me likewise) to be conducive to one or other — perhaps both — of the worst and most fatal faults of criticism itself. The first is that boldly formulated and acknowledged by Peacock's man in Gry// Grange, " I must take pleasure in the thing represented l?efore I can take pleasure in the representation " ; the second something worse still, though not perhaps so common, the accept- ance of the matter because of the form or vice versa. Let us take an example. It would be difficult to find a piece of poetry the matter of which, in almost every possible sense of that word, seems to me sillier and more mischievous than that of Mr. Swinburne's Song in Time of MATTER AND FORM 87 Revolution. Political logic and ethics tell me that revolution in the abstract is nearly always unjustifiable, and political history tells me, more emphatically and unanswerably, that revolutions in the concrete have nearly always done much mischief, and seldom, if ever, much good. I like The house of the priests made stately, the might in the mouth of the kings. I should rejoice in abundant and successful houffees de mitraille on the persons whom the poet exhorts, if not quite so picturesquely as a certain French ahbe or a certain English elocutionist, to make priests and kings uncomfortable. But this does not make me in the least insensible to the vis superba formae in the piece — to the rise and rush and roar of the volleying anapaests, the deft and fresh handling of the Biblical lan- guage, the rocketing soar of the whole to the final explosion : For the breath of the face of the Lord that is feU in the bones of the dead. 88 A SCRAP BOOK xx The matter would be mere rubbish if it were not dangerous as well ; the- form is superb, and it is the form that is the poetry. I can see how, by no very extensive changes, the matter could be changed to suit the unchanged form and to leave the poetry unchanged likewise. Change the form and this poetry goes, whatever matter you " set " to the new form. XX. " Catching a Line.'' — Is this a recog- nised expression } Several meanings are obvious enough, and the one which will give the point of the following note not least of them ; but the writer does not remember to have seen it so used on any occasion, or heard it on any but this. It so happened that he had just experienced one of those " nasty jars " which happen to all more or less, but especially to those who do not hear their horse clatter (or their boots squeak) " Proputty, proputty, proputty," as the Northern Farmer did. In plain words, the changing of " CATCHING A LINE " 89 hands of a certain business threatened me with what they called in the seventeenth century " the canvas " and we call " the sack." I was alone in chambers, did not feel inclined to dine there, and felt still less inclined for society in my club or elsewhere. But I had always had a great affec- tion for Greenwich.^ I had gone there twice as a small boy, on one of the occasions seeing and hearing the launch of the Great Eastern (we rowed down then, in the good old style) and on the other falling in love with a young lady, whose age was (naturally enough) about twenty to my twelve. After settling again in London a good ^ Of the other " B'lowbridger " dining - places, the most famous — Lovegrove's at Blackwall — came to an end, I think, in my nonage, though I have a dim idea that my father, who used to take me as a schoolboy from his office to all sorts of proper places in and about the City of London, once took me there to lunch. If you cared to go as far as Gravesend, the " Old " Falcon (there were two Falcons, but as usual the old was the better) was capital. They had particularly good port there, and both my wife and I liked the place. Less generally known and on the other side of the river, but not quite unfamed in story, and deserving fame, was a hotel (the name of which slips me) at Purfleet, close by the powder-magazine. They had a way of currying the " bait " — i.e. not making a ragout of them, but dusting curry, not gunpowder, over them as they were fried, which was excellent. 90 A SCRAP BOOK xx many years later, my wife and I had made a practice of going down. Sometimes we were alone — indeed I remember one visit quite out of the season, in winter, when, though we were the only occupants of the biggest room at the Trafalgar, and it was evident that nobody else had been there or was coming, they knocked us up an improvised but excellent fish-dinner. Once we took a relation of mine, who diverted the waiters and protracted the entertainment by heading, tailing, and boning each individual whitebait. Another time, when we were a partie carree with friends, I was introduced to Mr. George Meredith, who happened to be there. There were the famous Saturday feasts to look back on, and divers other memories. What had been had been, and still was, good. But at the exact moment the past was, or seemed, undeniably better than the present. As, however, I paced, as usual before dinner, the narrow terrace in front of the Hospital (what a fantastic picture might be made of ghostly XXI THE MODERN GRENDEL 91 pacers there !), I necessarily passed the old lady (even now there must be a fair number of people remembering her) who kept an apple stall at the Trafalgar end. She looked at me and said in a curious grumbling tone, more to herself than to me, " Touvt a lucky fellow ; youVe caught a line^ and you'll do it again." And sure enough, after an interval of " pavement," the line was flung and I did catch it. But whether I held on to it long enough, and whether " you'll do it again " referred to something still further in the future, is again uncertain to all except — but the quotation has been made already. XXI. Politics: 11. The Modern Grendel. — It was not in The year of the great crime When the false English nobles and their Jew, By God demented, slew The trust they stood thrice pledged to keep from wrong, as the late Mr. Patmore somewhat grandilo- quently (and as to ** their Jew," I think unhistoric- 92 A SCRAP BOOK xxi ally) called the year 1867. It was in the year before that — when there were still some pocket boroughs, though the Whigs had taken care to keep most of those that were left in 1832 for their own pockets ; when the variety of constituencies and constituents still, to some extent, made the House of Commons really representative of the country at large and not of a mere brute majority (and not even that) of its inhabitants ; and when " sagging " this way and that of the said brute majority took place (if it took place at all) at much longer intervals and on more substantial impulses. The rickety old railings of Hyde Park, constructed as if on purpose to be pulled down — with a low stone base to get one foot well on (the other safe on ground) and high uprights to give you good purchase and long leverage — were still standing. The democratic idea is, I believe, that a glorious people levelled them as a sign of determination to be free ; but an omnibus driver, by whose side I sat as they lay on the ground, chuckled to me, XXI THE MODERN GRENDEL 93 " Good lark for the fellows to have with Dicky,^ wasn't it ? " and I am inclined to think that his view was the correct one. Nothing but an unbreakable cordon of police from Craven Hill to Tyburn could have saved the railings. They were so rotten that, when one gave way, whole breadths of them followed. " But this is a digression." It was early in 1866, and before the " lark with Dicky," when a few Oxford undergraduates, getting into their latter days as such, were — as hundreds of such groups must have done before and scores since — discussing what they were going, or would like to be going, to do. One of them said, " If somebody would give me a safe seat in Parliament and five hundred a year [he was not greedy, you see], I would give my life to smashing Trades Unions as Charles Villiers smashed the Corn ^ I fear it may be necessary to tell some readers that the Commissioner of Police at this time was Sir Richard Mayne, whose long and excellently efficient tenure of office has left its mark by allusions to him as simply " Sir Richard," without surname, in such books as TroUope's. The irrepressible Cockney naturally reduced it further. 94 A SCRAP BOOK xxi Laws." I should be afraid that if he is alive now, this monster is more convinced than ever that if England does not smash Trades Unions, Trades Unions will smash England. There are few more curial instances of what foreigners unkindly call our " hypocrisy " than the way in which newspapers and public speakers usually handle these organisations of " Labour." ^ The enormous and ever-increasing practical mischief which they have done for the last half- century can escape no intelligent and well- informed person unless he wilfully shuts his eyes to it. Apart from this, I can think of no more flagrant and unquestionable instance of injustice than that one man, or any number of men, should be allowed to prevent others from working. And besides these two gigantic, in- 1 I hope it is, but it may not be, needless to say that it is only when Labour " capitalises " itself that I have any objection to it. 1 certainly have none to " labour," having practised that same nearly all the days of my life, and heartily respected other labourers, from colonels and canons to corporals and carpenters. This capitalism seems to have a bad effect often — compare " Science," " Education," " Liberty," and sometimes even, I am afraid, " Literature." XXI THE MODERN GRENDEL 95 separable, and all-pervading evils — with their innumerable subdivisions, consequences, and appurtenances — there is a third — vaguer, but perhaps worse than either — the frightful deteri- oration of morale ^ which Trades Unionism has brought about. There is hardly an aspect of goodness in conduct which has not been affected by this. At one end there is the peaceful per- suader, who peacefully persuades by bashing blacklegs and kicking them on the ground, with the saunterer who cuts his hours of work to the minimum and then does one hour's fair work in two. At the other there are the leaders who, after exacting for their clients enormous wages, paid out of money borrowed by the nation, suggest " capital levies," — which mean that part of the money lent is never to be paid back in capital — or (perhaps and) more direct frauds by reduction of interest. I have sometimes wondered how any Labour ^ It may be as well to observe once more that if I were writing French I should write moral without the e. 96 A SCRAP BOOK xxi M.P. ever manages to make a balance-sheet of his conscience. His duty, when elected, is of course first, if not wholly, to the country at large, and, secondly (as best can be combined with this), to his constituency. These duties, though they may not always be reconcilable, clearly may be so not seldom. But his duty to " Labour " — at least as Labour appears to under- stand it — can hardly be done at all without breach of duty to both the others — must, at any rate, be in constant and perilous conflict with it. People talk of " class selfishness." Well, I know something of history, and I never heard or read of any class — tyrant, aristocrat, capitalist, slave-holder, buccaneer, middle-class shopkeeper — so absolutely and exclusively governed by selfishness as Trades Union " Labour." One question may be important to add and answer : " You want to smash Trades Unions and leave Employers' Federations intact ? " Not for five seconds. A forced lock-out is to my mind as bad in itself as a forced strike, though XXI THE MODERN GRENDEL 97 it may in most cases seem a more excusable, and in some a necessary evil. The only principle that should govern all these things is the good old one — till lately, unless I mistake most sur- prisingly, that of English law, and obviously that of common justice — that if any two or more persons combine to do, to the detriment of another, something even not in itself criminal or tortious, their action is conspiracy, and punishable. Hold to that, and everything will go as right as, in a world where everything doesn't go right, you can make it. Let that go, and everything will go as wrong as it has been going at increased speed since we began to foster the Trades Union imperium in imperio. Well ! perhaps Grendel will be killed some day, and even Grendel's mother — the hag Equality. For though we do " know the hue of the cap " on Liberty's brows ; though " Be my brother or I will kill you " is not more witty than historical, as a description or motto of Fraternity ; perhaps the most hopeless word of H 98 A SCRAP BOOK xxi the three is Equality, the ugliest, the meanest, the most mischievous. Liberty, not in the cant sense, is good and noble. Fraternity, in theory if not practice, is a pretty dream. But as soon as you begin really to think about it you perceive that /;/equality — Variety — is Heaven's first law for Earth in Beauty, Polity, and everything else. Even the beauty of the sea or the fen country which one knows, that of prairie or desert which one hears of, is simply created by the eternal contrast of the over-arching sky. Imagine the prettiest girl you can think of; make every other girl like her, and where would her beauty be } Even then, the variety — that is to say, inequality — of the features between themselves would remain ; and you must reduce further to wig-blocks, nay, to rigid and unfeatured globes, before you get equality. And so in every feature and function of individual and social life. Put aside all hardship, injustice, bloodshed, etc., in achieving equality with the most Poplarian or Bolshevist indifference ; and, if you have xxn MY ONLY GHOST 99 the slightest glimmer of aesthetic or intellectual appreciation left, you will shudder then at the world you have brought about. XXII. My Only Ghost. — It was Coleridge, was it not ? who said that he had seen too many ghosts to believe in them. I have always believed in them, but I have only seen one. It could hardly have been anything else ; but the circumstances were extremely curious. I had been playing whist for a long evening at Fort George in Guernsey ; it is perhaps not irrelevant to say that I had not dined there, and that people with some reputation at the game of games ^ do not usually over-stimulate themselves either at or between rubbers. It must have been in the small hours, though not far into them, that I left the Fort by the main gate to walk by ^ It nuas this before it was, like other things, ruined by being made " scientific." A club which imposed on " American leads " the penalty of a revoke would benefit the world. I never was quite sure about "calling for trumps " : while it must have been very pleasant to ask, " Can you one ? " — things how like in terms and how different in sense ? loo A SCRAP BOOK xxn myself to Cambridge Park on the other side of St. Peter Port. The road, as I hope some readers of this Httle book will know, after beginning with a deep hollow way (the Fort was inaccessible except by a postern during the tremendous snow- fall of the " Terrible Year "), sweeps at a sharpish curve round a shoulder of high ground, which runs up again sharply, on the right, and sinks on the left — less steeply, but at a good angle — to the valley below. Just at the outside bend of the shoulder there is, or was at that time, a small quarry, the floor of which (for it was in active use by day) was dotted, but not very thickly, with heaps of more or less broken stone, wheel- barrows, planks, etc. (I should mention that there was a perfectly blazing full moon.) Just as I turned the shoulder at an easy walk- ing pace, I saw on one of these heaps, in front and close to the road, what looked like the figure of an old woman sitting or crouching in something verv like the traditional witch's attitude when she is going to do or say something unpleasant. It XXII MY ONLY GHOST loi startled me so completely that, I regret to say, I scuttled down the hill at the double, or some- thing more, for the fifty or a hundred yards or so which took me out of sight of the quarry and the figure. But when I got so far it occurred to me that this was not exactly the course of conduct that England would expect from a person who had not only been called George by his god- fathers and godmothers in his baptism, but had just left an English fortress of the same name. So I pulled up and turned back, determined to investigate the phenomena more dispassionately. But when I had again rounded the shoulder and got the quarry before me, there was nobody at all on the heap 1 And as it was several decades too early for air-travelling of the modern kind, there was no possibility of anybody having got away. The back and sides of the quarry were perpendicular ; the impedimenta on its floor were not individually large enough to hide a child ; the slope on the other side of the road was in any case pretty steep to negotiate, with I02 A SCRAP BOOK xxn very little cover of any kind and no shrubs or thick tree-trunks, while quarry, slope and road up to the Fort were all clear as in daylight with the blaze of the moon already mentioned. " Oh 1 a man's coat left on the heap " is the obvious rationalist solution ; but in that case the coat must have been endowed with a power of making away with itself, which appears to me as super- natural as that of my old hag, if not a little more so. I never hit upon any explanation of the matter ; but it did appear afterwards that the place had rather a reputation (quite unknown to me at the time) for accidents ; and a friend of my own told me that once as he was driving past it his horse, generally quiet enough, shied and almost bolted in a manner for which he could not account. " Some one's dinner-paper left and flickered by the wind," says Rationalism again for this. Very possibly ; but I am quite sure that nobody's dinner — my own or another's — had anything to do with My Only Ghost. She did me no harm, and I was the real intruder on what may have xxiii « A GOOD TIME " 103 been merely a rest in a journey from El Dorado to Samarcand. There were, now I come to think of it, things about which I took for pick-handles, and one of which may have been a broomstick ! Witch or ghost, what does it matter ? XXIII. ''A Good Time:'— Some people, of the order of Pessimists, say that the prevalence of the phrase " a good time," and the expressed determination of youth — especially feminine youth — to have the thing, is one of the saddest features of the twentieth century. They might derive a gloomy satisfaction from one of the earliest instances, I think, to be found in great litera- ture of " time " used just in the same way. Of course " good time " and " times " are much older in slightly different senses. But with " have " and in definite reference to personal satisfaction of a not too exalted kind, Dryden's The sons of Belial had a glorious time comes, in combination of nearness of sense and I04 A SCRAP BOOK xxiv distance of age, most pat to my memory. For you will observe that the persons who " had " it were Sons of Belial. And it may be further observed that about the same period the Daughters of Belial also appear to have enjoyed a " time " equally good in their sense, and exceptionally " glorious " in more senses than one. XXIV. Education : III. The Right to It. — One prepares oneself to hear nonsense whenever the word ** Right " is uttered.^ If the utterance concerns an individual the expectation may be limited to boredom ; when it extends to classes, peoples, or humanity at large, serious mischief may be apprehended. That " nobody has any right to anything except what he has already," may look like a paradox of the " rotting " type, which sprang up when the nineteenth century ^ Within half an hour of correcting this proof I have just read that " no one has a right to punish a child." In the sense that to punish a child is a duty, not a right, one may agree ; otherwise the statement is purely idiotic. Of course it was attributed to a Professor : we are, alas 1 born to folly as Baronets to badness I XXIV THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION 105 was becoming ** high," and has not yet been quite cleaned away. But it has a great deal of truth in it. At any rate, to say, as the Right Reverend person referred to before ^ said, that " Every child has a right to a good education " is nonsense of the most mischievous and mischief of the most nonsensical. To say that " all parents who bring children into the world ought to give them as good and suitable an education as they can " is to say something defensible enough : but it will be observed by any one possessing intelligence that the whole point of view and standard of judgment are changed in it. Duty imposes something on one side, but it by no means confers anything on the other. Had his Lordship, as bishops would once have done, dwelt on the duty of parents in this respect ; had he even gone further and expatiated on the charity incumbent on others than parents in this respect, no one could have found serious fault with him, though one might have desiderated 1 V. sup. p. 73. io6 A SCRAP BOOK xxiv an addition or limitation having reference to the educableness of the particular child, and the extent to which children educated up to this or that standard are wanted. But a child has — as such, and without reference to his or her parents — as much and as little right to a good education as he has to a good horse, a good yacht, or a good dukedom. You may think it expedient that he should have a chance of it, which is, if not certain, arguable, again with reasonable limitations ; but Expediency confers no Right. In fact a little treatise " Of Right " in the combined manners of Hobbes and Swift would be a choice thing. The Right to Vote, with its companion Right to be Outvoted ; ^ the Right to the Land on which you were born, with its large but vague corollary of right to the vessel or even the sea on which you may possibly have come ^ The only logical system of voting involves the old Polish Liberum Veto, and, alas .' we do not need history to tell us what that came to. Nay, even with it there is the further difficulty that each member of the majority is defrauded of his will ! The Vote and the Veto, the Veto and the Vote, arc as fatally entwined in struggle as they are mysteriously coupled in spelling. XXV A NIGHT-PIECE 107 into existence, — many — nay, most other — Rights would afford excellent texts. But the Right to a Good Education would come not very far below the best of them. XXV. A Night-Piece, — What may be the laws of the University of Oxford, as to raising dust in curricles, since the advent of motor-cars and -cycles is not clear to the present writer. But most people, even if they have not been themselves sealed of the City of the Unknown God, must be aware from literature that its authorities used to be particularly unpropitious to any form of driving — for what exact reason I never could make out. You could, indeed, in my time, procure a " permit " for this (in two senses) extravagance from your tutor ; but for some cause or other it was — at any rate in my own college, and, I believe, in most others — seldom or never applied for. Again, the reason was not quite obvious, though several might be conjectured — the natural youthful desire to do io8 A SCRAP BOOK xxv what you ought not to do, and not to do what you ought, even in obtaining leave to do what you want to do ; the fun of escaping being ** caught " — even that of being caught itself; perhaps the uncertainty of leave being granted. Anyhow I believe very few permits were ever asked for, and still fewer expected by the Proctors. It so happened, however, that on one day very late in my Time of Roses, feeling down in the mouth and aspiring to a bath of solitude on those White Horse Hills whence has come help to more than a hundred generations of " men," I thought I would combine the drive not only with the walk, but with immunity from fine, and the amusement of surprising a Proctor. So, for the first time in such a case, I asked my tutor, the late Mr. William Sidgwick (cleverest perhaps, if not exactly wisest, of his singularly brilliant family), for the requisite firman. Sidgwick de- lighted in anything unusual. On another occa- sion, when they altered the services in Chapel in a manner which seemed to some of us to XXV A NIGHT-PIECE 109 affect undergraduates, he held an informal evening symposium-court in his own rooms, with himself arguing the point on one side, myself and another Postmaster on the other, the late Sir Kenelm Digby as principal umpire, and some more dons (the late Mr. Reynolds of Brasenose was one, and, I think. Sir James Thursfield — he may remember it — was another) for, I fear rather bored, assessors. In this simpler business he looked at me and gave me the document, managing somehow to give me the impression that he had never been asked for one before. So I got my vehicle and set off. In those days there was a further " difference according to vehicles " besides that recorded in the Art of Fluck^^ and the tandem — very delightfully conditioned in that work of genius as ** and ^ I trust that this very pleasant book is not and will ne'er be forgot. The " therefore " quoted above (it need hardly be said that no reason is given) is admirable ; ihovv^brr^cav is one of the noblest efforts in Hellenist- Macaronic, and one still shudders at the sorites, " All young ladies are agree- able ; all agreeable things are pleasant 5 all pleasure is uncertain ; all uncertain things are vain [it might have been ended here] ; all vanity is good for nothing ; therefore all young ladies are good for nothing." no A SCRAP BOOK xxv therefore more serviceable to Pluck," and familiar to all readers of university-novels of the first half of the nineteenth century — had rather gone out of fashion. Low pony-carts were the order of the day, and though these may seem effeminate, men mighty in the hunting-field, noted in the then new University Sports, and famous in the crews who for all but that entire decade kept the boat-race for Oxford, did not disdain them. So there was certainly no call for one who neither hunted, nor hurdled, nor even boasted a scratch - four pewter, to do so. The drive to Wantage took the rest of the morning ; the wander on the Ridgeway the afternoon ; and dinner at the Bear^ the early evening, till it was time to journey back under the ** huge and thoughtful night " ^ to Oxford and the designed ^ It ivas the Bear, was it not ? I have never been in Wantage from that day to this. ^ I apologise for this second repeated quotation. Hut it would by itself estate Whitman as a poet : just as another did Leigh Hunt. And it has always seemed to me as perfect for one aspect of Night as onrxaffLTj, rpiXXtcrroJ is for another. A NIGHT-PIECE in amusement. Sure enough, somewhere in the outskirts came the expected flash of lanterns and grab of bulldogs at the pony's head, and flutter of velvet sleeves, and " Your name and college, sir ? " So I adjusted my whip properly in my left hand, produced my talisman, and handed it most politely to the avenger. Whether he was really surprised or not I cannot say. But when he had looked at it and waved a " Pass ! " that proctor certainly grinned. And I grinned, and the bulldogs grinned, and, I believe, the pony (who had, of course, relieved his captivity by looking round after the manner of these animals) grinned too. And the peace of the Lord fell on all that night, as Robert Buchanan (who was not such a bad fellow as he chose to show himself in the most notorious episode of his life) says somewhere. Merely a trifling experience, of course, but somehow fixed, not less than the flash of the diamond in front of the lady's breast mentioned 112 A SCRAP BOOK xxvi in Notes on a Cellar Book^ and a hundred other things, in the vista of memory. XXVI. Some Suggestions for a Newest English Dictionary : Idealism. Dollars. Imagination. The power of being convinced that meum and suum and alienum generally ought to be tuum. Temperance. Being in a temper with those who temperately enjoy themselves. Serfdom. The state of being worshipped with somebody's body and endowed with his worldly goods ; of being cherished, etc., for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. Broad-mindedness. The result of flattening high-mindedness out. Mentality. A state of somebody else's mind that you dislike or don't understand. Gesture. Word stripped of all proper meaning, and therefore usable at indiscretion. xxvn « ART FOR ART'S SAKE " 113 Victimisation. *' Making the doer suffer " — which the Greeks thought right and " Labour " thinks wrong. Psychology. Something like ** gesture ** and " mentality," i.e. used without meaning. For instance, a husband writing to his wife, once expressed desire for a divorce because " your psychology is impossible." He did not mean that she had written a bad book or held erroneous opinions on the subject. He only meant he wanted to get rid of her. PsYCHO-ANALYsis. Term used by persons who do not know Greek for processes always questionable and generally mischievous. Psychanalysis (which is what they mean) I have once seen correctly spelt. Imagine psycho-agogia or psycho-emporos ! XXVII. Criticism: III. '' Art for Art's Sake.'' — As a sort of postscript to what was said of 114 A SCRAP BOOK xxvn Matter and Form,^ a word or two on the subject of this section may not be too tedious. Fifty years ago and more there was a good deal of unintelHgent pother and bother about " Art for Art's sake." The present humble writer was credibly informed that he lost at least one Fellow- ship partly, if not mainly, by adopting the notion in an Essay of the 'sixties. And he " got it over the face and eyes " from proper moral men for more mature delinquencies in the same key when writing on Baudelaire in 1875 ^^^ Gautier three years later. Then, as usual, it made its way, as far as it deserved to make it, and was little heard of in theory, though a good deal seen, especially (as usual, likewise) in degeneracies and exaggerations of practice. Recently I have seen a sort of revival of notice of it, showing — as such revivals generally do show — a slight misunderstanding of the views of the original apostles. Even my friend Mr. Middleton Murry, a Captain (and D.S.O.) in 1 F. iup. p. 85. xxvii "ART FOR ART'S SAKE" 115 the Young Guard of criticism, seemed to me to be not quite at the right angle in some Times " Pencillings " of his. We did not, I think (at least I can answer for one of us), at all disregard the ** matter " of Baudelaire and Flaubert, or make small or no account of the " life " in their work. To this day, while chuckling a little, as I did of old, at Baude- laire's " Satanic " poses, I feel just as keenly as ever I felt at first, ten years before I wrote on him, that the Hymne and Les Enfants de la Lune^ to take one piece only from each of his two great books, and the magnificent conclusion- poem which he added after the first edition of the Fleurs du Mal^ express, as all the greatest things in poetry do express, thoughts and feelings which one has thought and felt oneself in dumb and inorganic fashion. I know, and always have known, that Madame Bovary and the Tentation (alas ! for the people who could not see it in both) reproduce with perfect mimesis actual life and dream-life. But when we praised these men and ii6 A SCRAP BOOK xxvn others, when we rejoiced in them because they had followed art for art's sake, it was also, or rather at the same time, because they had followed life for life's sake as well. In fact you cannot do the first without doing the second, though you certainly may do the second without doing the first. Form without matter, art without life, are in- conceivable — or conceivable only like the jejune conceptions of mathematics. What we fought against when we carried that banner was the meddling and muddling of the two, the inability to distinguish them, the stipulation that the canvas must have been bought at the proper shop, the paper manufactured at the particular mill, before people should allow themselves to enjoy the picture or the poem. And let no one suppose that this danger has passed. What was once the proper shop may have been shut up ; the river may have been turned away from the old mill. But unless you train yourself to value the art and the form and the literature XXVIII THE TWO HEXAMETERS 117 apart from, though by no means to the neglect of, the matter and the life, you are likely to fall, as a delightful phrase of the Articles has it, into " wretchlessness of most unclean [critical] 1" • >> iving. XXVIII. The Two Hexameters, — Many people may have noticed how glibly that rather un- comfortably true line — aXX ov TTws a/;ta tto-vto. deol Socrav dvOpwiroicrtj goes into an English " accentual " hexameter — But never yet did the gods give all things together to mortals. If SO, have the noticers also noticed how the com- parison illustrates (quite independently of the spondaic ending in the Greek) the substantial difference, beneath the formal resemblance, of the two metres ? and the way in which it supports Mr. Swinburne's magisterial pronouncement that all combinations of dactyls and spondees are alien to English ? ii8 A SCRAP BOOK xxix XXIX. Politics: III. The Two Command- ments of " Labour " ; ^ (i) Nobody else shall have anything that I have not. (2) Somebody else shall pay for everything that I have. XXX. Wreaths, — I am told that among the Victorian vices which are elsewhere con- sidered more generally, the wearing of wreaths by young women is one of the most odious to the living posterity of those who in two senses " bore " the ornament and the generation. It is sad that the dislike should — if it does — survive familiarity with the work of Leech and " Dicky ** ^ Once more let me say, without the least " hedging " or flinching, that whenever and wherever in this book uncomplimentary references occur to Labour, there is no thought of obloquy on any man who does with his might a fair day's work and takes with content a fair day's wage. There is more sorrow than anger for those who are deluded into ways opposite to this. But hateful to me as the gates of Hell are the agitators who agitate for pay ; the " bookish theorists " who prostitute their wits and do treason to their training in support of strikes ; the schoolmasters who take public money to sow tares in the public field, and the rest of the " leaders " of Labour to those very gates. XXX WREATHS 119 Doyle, who may be taken as the Serjeant-Limners of the wreath. But there is just this to be said for its enemies (though it is doubtful whether they have the excuse of recognising the fact), that hardly any headgear was so treacherous to those who put it on. There was no need of caricatures like the *' Miss Bunion " of Mrs. Perkins's Ball. Some faces — not necessarily ugly or even plain — simply could not stand wreaths, and others, positively good-looking per se, got on little better with them. And the general riskiness was agreeably complicated by dangers in detail. Too big or too niggling constituents ; hardness of outline always (that is, not for gold or gems, but flowers), and " floppiness " to nearly the same extent ; many such things you had to beware of, even in the stereotyped and almost sacra- mental " wreath of roses." But when they did " suit," there was no doubt about the suitableness of probably the very oldest method of at once part-covering and wholly super-glorifying the glory of a girl's hair. It is curious that I20 A SCRAP BOOK xxxi nothing makes, for almost any kind of good hair, from gold to black, a better wreath than mistletoe. But it has been held that there is too much invitation in the decoration, and that the necessarily strong garde-du-corps in attendance would be a bore in the ballroom. XXXI. Local Coercion > — Almost all honest writers on politics and many honest historians (the dishonest ones take good care not to do so, having too much use for it themselves) have noticed the strange and almost uncanny influence of phrase — often phrase which has no meaning, or a meaning quite different from that commonly assigned to it. There are few better, or rather worse, examples of such phrases than that from which the title of this note is corrected. " Local option " sounds — and is always represented by its advocates as being — quite beautifully fair and just. These blissful loca are the home of Option, Choice, Freedom. No tyranny of Parlia- XXXI LOCAL COERCION 121 ment — which, my friends, we know, alas ! to be quite as capable of tyranny as any Phalaris or Dionysius, Ezzelin or President Francia. Places left to their own choice ! Unfortunately, when anybody begins to apply the rare but refreshing process of thought to the matter, he discovers that what is meant is the very opposite of what is phrased ; that it is Local Coercion — Local Abolition of Choice — the oppor- tunity, not for the place (a place, unfortunately for itself, cannot drink), but for certain individual inhabitants of the place, to prevent other in- dividuals from having any choice — any option — at all. Observe further that the proposition is wholly one-sided. Nobody suggests, or ever has suggested, that 5 1 members of an accidentally or arbitrarily constituted 100 shall be able to force 49 to drink ; but it is gravely proposed that the 51 shall be empowered, if they be so minded, to force the 49 not to drink. Again, '* local " legislation of all other kinds, without exception, is invariably and properly universal. 122 A SCRAP BOOK xxxi Every one has, directly or indirectly, to pay local rates ; everybody has to obey local by-laws ; while in wider ranges local rain descends equally on the just and the unjust ; local beauty exists for the delight or the neglect of those who can feel it and those who cannot ; you can't, because you are in a majority, force a " Manchester black " ^ into the eyes of the minority and keep your own free. But, because certain weak- minded people have an objection to strong- bodied drink, they are to be allowed to deprive those who have the misfortune to be their neigh- bours of a supply of it, and to call this local OPTION ! It is true that — as Scotland, the Promised Land of this unjust and impudent absurdity, recently showed — it has not at present much chance of prevailing largely ; and it is true also that unless it prevailed largely it would be more ^ I have never seen this object mentioned in print. But once when I suffered sudden eye-torture in the streets of Cottonopolis (which I mention otherwise with all honour), a chemist who relieved me told mc its name. He seemed rather proud of it. xxxii THE TWO SUPERNATURALS 123 of a nuisance than of a major hardship — inasmuch as, in almost all cases, some more rational locus would be attainable without much difficulty. But neither its injustice, nor its absurdity, nor its impudence is affected by these considerations ; and the " thin end " argument is as much valued by the wise as it is laughed at by fools. Good seldom comes of lies — never of malignant lies ; and though some people may try to palliate the malignity, nobody can disprove the charge that Local Option is a lie in terms. XXXII. The Two Supernaturals. — Religio Laid is not only a title preoccupied, after a fashion very dangerous to disturb, in actual fact, but one to be touched very cautiously in anything like imitation of its purport — even in prose. Yet in a scrap-book (or, if any one pleases, -heap) like this, it may not be wholly improper to express a slight doubt or surprise which has beset one layman certainly, and probably others, for a 124 A SCRAP BOOK xxxn good many years as to the tactics of his clerical friends.^ Of course They may be angels, and we may be fools, to foul-copy a favourite rhythm of the author of Religio Laid itself in words suggesting another famous tag. But there have been in- cidents in the history of all wars — holy as well as unholy — where the rushers-in have been justified of their rushing and the fearers to tread have wished to goodness, too late, that they had not feared. I am referring to the curious reluctance which Orthodoxy now so often shows to posit and defend any idea, definite, if only definite by negation, of God, or indeed of the Supernatural at all. Reluctance is, indeed, hardly the word for those transfugae who take advantage of electrons and ethers and Fundamental Stuffs as shelters behind ^ Oddly enough, while correcting the proof of this little book in August, I find that a discussion on this very subject is included among the Agenda of the Church Congress to be held in October. XXXII THE TWO SUPERNATURALS 125 which to drop successive portions of their creed. But even those who are not content to be left Fundamentally Stuffy as regards the beginning of all things, and in what mind one knows not as to their end, seem very rarely to be clear about what they themselves mean by the Supernatural ; while, on the other hand, the average Free- thinker never writes a book, and seldom a page, without assuming, or seeming to assume, that the Supernatural must submit to the tests of the Natural. Now this is precisely what any logical believer must deny. A Supernatural which will so submit is not an article of the nature and quality that he requires. " Credo quia im- possibile " may be an exaggeration ; but " Non ^z'j-credo (if there were such a word, as there might be) quia impossibile " is not unreasonable at all — it is merely the acknowledgment of the differences (v, inf.) between Belief and Know- ledge. In fact, it is what should be the motto not merely of every Christian, but of everybody who feels the vanity of that " natural knowledge 126 A SCRAP BOOK xxxn which merely pushes ignorance farther back." It is impossible to be too contemptuous of the process of throwing Virgin Births and literal Resurrections, Transfigurations and Pentecostal mysteries as infants to the wolves. If anybody won't or can't believe, it may or may not be the worse for him. But if anybody thinks that he can >^^^-believe, pick and choose something as not quite too impossible,^ he is, begging his pardon — well ! something described by Dante. There may be some who can comfort themselves with the elephants perched on tortoises, and the tortoises sprawling on Fundamental Stuff, of scientific or semi-scientific explanations. There may be others who don't want any explanation at all. But, for my part, I hold with the man who said, perhaps with something too much of Claverhouse's audacity, ** I am afraid I may sometimes have given occasion to God to do without me^ but I find I can't do without Him." ^ Cf. my friend on Omnipotence, infra {Misunderstandings, III.). XXXIII HENRY DUFF TRAILL 127 XXXI IL Little Necrologies : II. Henry Duff Traill. — Somehow or other, from the time that I first knew Traill, I recognised him as the living representative of Thackeray's War- rington, with the proper and inevitable, as well as *' excellent," differences. But that time itself was not early. He did not, indeed, go down from Oxford till two years after I went up, but it so happened that I hardly knew any one at St. John's. The first thing I saw of his — indeed I think the first thing that made me know of his existence — was an article (already satiric more suo) on the difference of legal ways between France and England, in that mysterious periodical The Dark Blue., which had one of the best staffs of " new hands " ever known, but was said to have made the mistake of forgetting to pay them, and so died young. It was still a little time after I had myself joined the Press (he had done so, I believe, almost immediately after leaving Oxford) that I came across him, though his fame was already great in Fleet Street. I did not even 128 A SCRAP BOOK xxxm personally meet him when we both contributed to a certain ambitious daily which started on full first-class scale and collapsed in a month or two. (//(?, knowing the ropes, left it very shortly : it was kind enough to owe me a hundred and twenty-seven pounds when it went into liquida- tion, and to pay me a guinea and a half in satis- faction thereof.) But before very long we drifted together, and for years were closely associated. I do not know which I admired most — Traill's prose or his verse. In the greater harmony he tried little outside the satiric modes ; but his skill in these was greater than any one's since Canning, and there were touches of majesty and passion, which Canning hardly knew, as in the poem on Demo- cracy, sphinx-like or Eastern-god-like : With the hands at ease on the monstrous knees. But he preferred lighter if almost sharper keys, and if anybody can pick up Recaptured Rhymes and Saturday Songs at the prices I have sometimes xxxm HENRY DUFF TRAILL 129 seen in catalogues, he is a lucky man. The Ballad of Baloonatics Craniocracs ^ (how the writer would have chuckled, with me, over it in these days of impossibly parcelled-out states, with jargonic names to suit 1), Laputa Outdone (O for appendices to it on Female Suffrage, and the League of Nations, and "Treaties" with rebels and assassins !), and the grave report of the Swinburne- Buchanan business — all these could not be better and have certainly never been bettered. But I believe — he told me so himself — the books had hardly any sale. The New Lucian, in prose, was more fortunate — it went, I think, into at least a second edition, and he wrote some capital smaller books in " series," especially the Sterne and the Coleridge in " English Men of Letters." But all this was as nothing, in point of bulk, compared to his production in mainly anonymous journalism. I have ventured to estimate, in the Preface of this book, the bulk of my own stuff in 1 This, with Laputa and another, he most kindly allowed me to reprint in a little anthology of Political Verse (London : Percival and Co., 1891). K I30 A SCRAP BOOK xxxm that line at about one hundred volumes octavo, and elsewhere Lang's at more. Traill, I should think, must have doubled the hundred at least ; for he began some years before I did, and con- tinued some years after I, practically, left off And the quality was as amazing as the quantity. It was Thackeray's phrase about Warrington's anonymities, " the sense, the satire, and the scholarship," that brought the two together in my mind when I began to be familiar with Traill's — and fixed them there in company. He had no peculiarities of style — the veriest school- marm could find no fault with his prose — though in verse, of course, he shifted dialect and structure from high to low as occasion required. ^ But the blow always " came straight from the shoulder " when the shoulder was required ; the fingers could ply the dissecting knife as deftly when it was their business ; and behind * I never remember laughing more over the first words of a proof coming fresh (the " copy " previously unread) from the press, than over a piece of Traill's, in which the famous AfOre TratSes tcDc 'EWtjvwj' was made to spell " Duty " and followed up with Grcek-spclt English. xxxiii HENRY DUFF TRAILL 131 and above both the brain worked and directed them in masterly fashion. How much was lost to literary and political history by the merging of such talents in the newspaper Sea of Oblivion, it is idle to discuss. Fortunately his republished verse, if not much of his book-prose, shows how great Traill was as a Tory writer ; and the New Lucian exhibits the peculiar scepticism which in one form or another, to one degree or another, must always season really great Toryism. The Preacher is the chaplain of our political creed, and I have always thought it one of the most comic achieve- ments of the ludicrum humani saeculi that Thack- eray thought himself a Liberal. If, however, anybody is so unfortunate as to think that Scepticism and Satire make the people in whom they abide disagreeable, a very slight knowledge of Traill would have corrected that error if it were corrigible. He was certainly ^(?/-tempered — a Traill of Rattar, with Heaven knows how many Berserks and Vikings among 132 A SCRAP BOOK xxxm his ancestors, might plead having hot-temper by kind. Within the nineteenth century his father, afterwards an excellent police-magistrate, had been second to Christie in the too famous duel which brought such unjust discredit on Lockhart. But he was eminently ^oo(^-tempered — there was not a drop of bad blood in him — and in years of the pretty close association above referred to, I never knew him do or say a single thing that I could object to. He had a most agreeable laugh for other people's jokes as well as his own. And I always like to think of him as I once saw him, then perhaps the most formidable of all- round fighters on the Press in English journalism, sitting cross-legged, in flannels, at his wife's feet on their lawn at Putney — just off a set at tennis, and discarding, with his laugh, a finished jorum of lemon-squash. XXXIV. Three Ways of taking a " Terror^ — I know three very curious stories — each of them coming straight from one of the persons con- XXXIV WAYS OF TAKING A "TERROR" 133 cerned in it — of the different way in which the Irish Terror that prevailed more or less from the 'seventies to the 'nineties of the last century- affected three different Cabinet Ministers, not all of the same party or holding the same office. Let us call the Ministers A, B, and C ; the other parties X, Y, and Z. X, who was a newspaper editor, was walking home with A from the House late at night. After a time, noticing that his companion was very silent, X either offered the usual amount of coin of the realm for his thoughts or, in some other way, asked the reason of the taciturnity. Whereupon A stopped on the edge of a curb, turned half-round, and said, " I'm wondering whether I shall find my wife and children murdered when I get home." The second instance of " terror " producing terror was less unselfish. It so happened that Y, a man young enough to be mischievous — but, as Mrs. Grundy would most justly remark, old enough to know better — had chambers or rooms 134 A SCRAP BOOK xxxiv or a flat or the house itself (it mattereth not) next door to a Cabinet Minister, who was a very robustious and aggressive speaker, but who was, justly or not, whispered to be not quite so valiant as his tongue would give him out to be. It happened further that Y one night, again pretty late, spied his neighbour, who did not know him by sight, walking unaccompanied in a very empty street, and resolved to play him tricks. So first he followed him in a stealthy kind of way, till he saw an over-shoulder look suggesting alarm ; then he walked rapidly past, turned a corner, hid in a porch or entry, and resumed his shadow- ing when the victim had passed. By this time the latter was in an obvious state of panic, and, as they approached their abodes, seemed to be inclined to make for a distant policeman instead of going home. Whereupon the villain shook off his allures of villainy, passed the victim by in a straightforward, manly, say-nothing-to- nobody fashion, struck across the street, skipped up his own steps, and put in his latch-key, XXXIV WAYS OF TAKING A "TERROR" 135 leaving his Right Honourable victim to get his nerves into order again as best he could. " Con- duct," of course, " 'ighly to be reprobated," as the poet says, but not quite unamusing. The third story speaks much more for the credit of our governmental stuff. C and Z had been dining at the same house rather far away from the centre, and C had, very good-naturedly, offered his carriageless fellow-guest a lift home- ward. Z perceived in the coachman's companion something not quite like the usual " male domestic of Mrs. Boffin," but paid little attention, and naturally said nothing at all about it. Con- versation went on as usual till, when they got fairly near their respective destinations, C said suddenly, " O, Z ! do let us get out and walk ! They make me have that fellow on the box, but his back does bore me so ! " Now to B " that fellow's " detective, protective " back " would doubtless have been an immense comfort ; and his presence might even have suggested to the amiable mind of A that some one of the same 136 A SCRAP BOOK xxxv class could look after his family. But C was avTapKT)^ ; and to all such be glory I XXXV. Education : IV. Its Objects and Uses. — Something having been already said on certain general aspects of Education — on the so-called ** right " to it ; on the possibility of people at large undergoing it with profit to themselves, etc.; let us now consider — with equal brevity, but, as before, with the help of some real knowledge of the matter — what the objects and uses of it, as regards the Public Good, may and should be. It is an invidious, perhaps even an odious, but an indubitable truth that a very large diffusion of elaborate education — even if it were more possible as regards the capacity of the receiver, and less onerous to the givers than it has been said to be — would be of less or more^ than doubtful benefit to the country at large and to the receivers themselves. There is, indeed, no ' I have never been clear wJiich of these phrases best represents " no probable." XXXV EDUCATION: IV 137 doubt — unpopular as the statement may be — that on the one hand vulgarisation impairs value, and that on the other it is cruel to sow desires which are very unlikely to receive satisfaction as they grow up. But one may employ less " meta- physical " arguments than these. Once more it may seem, to the curious, perverted senti- mentality of these days, brutal to point out that a community wants, from the majority of its members, work rather with their hands than with their heads ; but there is no more absolute truth. Neither is a second unlike to it — namely, that a much larger number are fit to work with their hands than with their heads. As for a third, there is no more wretched and no more mischievous class of human beings than a dissatisfied intelligentsia — no more pitiable or worthless one than a congregation of fruits sees ; and these should be fair matters for consideration by any reasonable person. Somebody, more or less foaming at the mouth, may cry " Caste ! " On the contrary, there is 138 A SCRAP BOOK xxxv not the slightest intention on the part of the writer, or necessity in the nature of the scheme, for any caste-Kke separation of classes whatever. With a rational and, in the good sense, liberal system of education such as (what- ever ignorant or reckless references to it may say) always did prevail in England before the later nineteenth century, and then only required a little readjustment, any gutter child of the towns might become an archbishop or any hedge- bantling of the country a Lord Chancellor. Parish schools, grammar schools, universities, always have given the right ladder to the real salmon, and always might have continued to do it on reasonable scales and without over- crowding or disappointment.^ 1 This last point has been urged before, but its importance and the way in which it is constantly overlooked by chance or design make it well to duplicate. I own that a short time ago I was very sorry to see that Lord Haldane had attributed to him the following statement : " One of the greatest sources of the unrest and class-consciousness to-day lay in the fact that the working classes found themselves to an enormous extent cut off from the chances of higher education." There is no justification for this whatever. The only class who are to-day so " cut off " consists of those middle class people who will not pauperise themselves at the expense of others XXXVI PASTICHE ROCOCO 139 XXXVI. Pastiche Rococo (^Season 1870) : The sad spring sun looked wearily forth On the March winds fretting the sea ; And the snowdrop shivered and turned from the north, When my last love dawned for me. It dawned with no promise of happier days, With no forecast of bliss to be — But with blushes that reddened a stormy haze My last love dawned for me. And the sun of July blazed laughter and scorn And a dead calm smothered the sea ; — And the rose in her pride veiled canker and thorn, When my last love died for me. It died unsoothed by the passing-bell, Without hope of a heaven to be : But sullenly sure of a waking in hell. My last love died for me. — as the " workers " — so-called and limited — are tempted and almost forced to do. On the other hand, a high official of tlie Hoard of Education actually regretted quite recently (as I feel sure Lord Haldane would never have done) that the ladder above referred to, when successfully climbed, was wont to estrange the climbers from their own class. In other words, he wished (if his wish is intelligible) to perpetuate a caste system of the most objectionable kind possible, by giving a continuous primary, secondary, and, I suppose, academic culture to the working class by itself, and so to keep it lo itself. 140 A SCRAP BOOK xxxvn Not such bad rhythm that, perhaps, but quite conclusive, to any one born a critic, that he wasn't born a poet. Somebody wanted to set it, and not only (as every good Christian should be) was afraid of " hell," but also wanted the word altered. Which was unthinkable in 1870, even if the versifier had had the least wish to see his name on a " drawing-room song " — which he had not. But after 52 x 52 weeks it may perhaps have its day out — in company with the story given elsewhere — pour faire rire un peu mesdemoiselles les lee trices of 1922. XXXVII. Pastiche Ampoule {late 'Eighties). Here is another : Whoso shall look In what men call a book " Chapters " shall find, divided with much care, " Chapter the First " and " Chapters " everywhere, Ushered perhaps with mottoes, choice and fair. XXXVII PASTICHE AMPOULE 141 But in that other Book of Life and Love The chapters that begin For weal, for woe, for sin — Destined to end with wailing or with laugh — Announce themselves in no such patent wise, Start with no mottoes, warning to the eyes. Only when they do end Dost thou know foe from friend. Good from ill fortune, cockatrice from dove — So to select, in Epimethean guise. Some colophon — perhaps some epitaph. Again, not such a bad or stale idea perhaps, and not so vilely versified — but " not inevitable enough " by a long way. And when poetry is not inevitable, it is agreed by all good judges that it becomes eminently evitable, except by the patient student and the honest reviewer. In these two capacities I have met (not being able to avoid) myriads, if not millions, of lines like the above — lines which are just good enough to be told that they ought to be better. But if you must sacrifice children to any god, of criticism or anything else, it is at any rate more decent to 142 A SCRAP BOOK xxxvm sacrifice your own, when you are doing it wilfully, than another's as examples. And you can abstain from increasing the family further. XXXVIII. Some States and Conditions of Games {^furnishing also subjects for -pictures suitable for the infuriation of modern art-critics^ : (i) Whist — in the open air, with daylight, at midnight, on Midsummer Eve, by the sea. (2) Cat' s-cradle — on the stairs, at a dance, with other people raging below because they cannot get hold of your partner in this frivolous wickedness. (3) Piquet. There are many arguments why this should be played tete-a-tete. Some are dis- creditable — as those which influenced Lord Castle- wood's objections to lookers-on when he played with his cousin Harry. Some defensive, as when you may wish to protect yourself from confederacy. These affect the male sex only, or mainly ; for though the card-sharper France, the most literary of all Latin nations in the vernacular, is perhaps the weakest here in the ancestral tongue. There is some clever stuff, partly of a ferocious political kind, in sixteenth-century French- Latin, but Santeul, its biggest man of this kind in the seventeenth, is, I fear, having a bad time in Purgatory for modernising the Breviary hymns. I. ©ANATH ZHMIOTSen 187 the felicity, the " compact enchantment " (to borrow and abstract from the least as a scholar of all great English writers about, as it happens, a French woman) of old and middle Latin itself. For a certain kind of style in verse — not the highest, not the kind that I like best myself, but at least one of the most perfect in its own scale and scheme — there is nothing like Latin. And this I say, as never having been able to write it well myself, though able, I think, pretty well to appreciate the charm of it, and acquainted (again, I think, I may say pretty well) with that wonderful range of it which far outruns that of verse in any other Western tongue. It is this acquaintance and this appreciation which I should like to see extended and fortified in others. L. %avar((> ^7)fitov(Tdo). — Aged Oxonians will remember that when the controversy (not ^uite a pretty one on either side^) about the salary 1 The statement which I find in a famous book of reference that Jowett was " deprived for ten years of the emoluments of his office " is unhistorical 1 88 A SCRAP BOOK i. of the Chair of Greek was going on, Professor Jowett, very strategically, gave, not merely public lectures^ but private essay-hearings to pairs of men in the Greats stage from colleges other than Balliol. It chanced once that such a pair attended with essays that he had set on the Laws^ and Plato's attitude therein to State religion. One of the two was a very wise and admirable man, destined to attain, and deserve, the best and highest positions in the Church, and a high one in the State, of his country. The other, if he did not quite deserve Mr. Lang's description — or was it Mr. Traill's } — of a more celebrated person — and, in fact, neutralised by another, which, I think, the Times of the period made, that those emoluments were " not as much as Dr. Pusey gives his butler." How did " the Jupiter," as it was then, know this i But of course the Jupiter knew everything then. I had at least one opportunity (see the last section but one of this little book) of asking Dr. Pusey and the butler. Some journalists of the present day would, I suppose, have done so. At any rate both the butler and the professor knew what their " emoluments " were when they took office, and could not complain if these were not increased. But that it was not quite the game to refuse a bonus on a certainly inadequate " screw," for reasons unconnected with the work done, I see perhaps rather more clearly now than I did then. I. ©ANATi^ ZHMIOTS0n 189 Charles Stewart was a wicked boy. To break commandments was his joy, was afflicted with the too frequent undergraduate fondness for breaking eggs, without any hope of making omelettes of them or fear of their turning out cockatrice-kind. So he arranged his essay (these precious compositions were read /o, not by^ the examiner) with great care, so as elaborately to lead up to, and emphatically at more than one paragraph end to enounce, in the original Greek, the Platonic sentence of death on dissenters. His companion shook at his side with suppressed laughter, but Jowett, though he did not interrupt, got up and walked up and down the room rather briskly. At the end the essayist and the Pro- fessor held the following dialogue : Professor (in his peculiar snapping tone). " And do you agree with Plato ? " Undergraduate, " I shouldn't dare to disagree with Plato." Professor {with a sharper snap than before^. " Then I dont agree with him." I90 A SCRAP BOOK n The late Dr. Appleton (founder of The Academy of chequered but not unblessed memory), on hearing this story told — in conversation — said that " Everybody had done that to Jowett." Possibly ; but it is well known that " everybody " is sometimes an alias for " nobody." He could not specify any additional claimant, and I have never heard of any, so, as if not wholly credit- able to the youngster it seems to me not unamus- ing, it may perhaps be published as a thing that happened " sixty years since." LI. Criticism : /^. " The Devil take all Theories I " — When somebody adopted some years ago the above sentence (in the original German) of the Austrian dramatist, poet, and critic, Grillparzer, as a motto for a part of a book about criticism, he was gravely rebuked by other somebodies. It was not because he used a forbidden language, or praised the speakers of it generally ; for it was some ten years before the war, and his expressed opinion of German criticism was, at that impartial LI CRITICISM : v.— THEORIES 191 time, pretty low. But the exclamation of Grill- parzer (whose centenary the other day evoked far too little notice in England) was shocking, and the adoption of it fatally revelatory of defects in the adopter. Was it so ? ®eoipia itself is indeed a word of might as well as of beauty. I wonder it has not been adopted as a girl's name. My friend Mr. Lang and I once agreed that if either of us had a daughter, we should like to call her " Voluptas " (after Miss Cupid - and - Psyche), were it not that the final s would hiss terribly before the initial of my surname and the whole of the last syllable clash hideously with the vowel-sound of his. There could be no such objection to Theoria, which would be a pretty addition (though with a different ancestry) to the already pretty company of "Theo"s, and the only other objection that I can think of — that the lady would, one hopes, be the object of honorific embassies, instead of, according to the Greek, being one herself — is trifling. 192 A SCRAP BOOK u But our modern *' theories " are too often as remote from the abstract sense (" seeing " or " vision ") of the original Greek as from its derived ones of " travelling " (" going to see ") in general and of special delegations to festivals and the like. We do indeed keep the antithesis of " theoretic " and ** practical," but I don't re- member many Greek instances of the former word and its connections being used as definitely equal to " ««practical." Now this faulty opposition is so common to-day that it almost justifies a thing in itself faulty (and quite different from what is being advocated here) the vulgar contempt of " theoretical " things. Theory founded on practice is as good a thing as can be, but it is also an uncommonly rare one, at least in aesthetics ; physics, to do them justice, do not discourage it, at least " in theory " — though perhaps they do so more than formerly. But criticism of all kinds — biblical and artistic, I should say, most of all ; musical (as far as an almost complete outsider as regards technique u CRITICISM : v.— THEORIES 193 may judge) pretty badly ; dramatic rather too much ; and literary with increasing eagerness — simply wallows in theories adopted almost in- dependently of study of fact — theories made by fancy synthesis and put in control of corresponding analysis — card-castles, or rather cobwebs of rule and scheme and system. To such theories the Devil is most heartily welcome — though one hopes, of course, that he will not deal too severely with the amiable theorisers.i Two points closely connected with the present subject were suggested to me by a writer for whom I have a great respect, in his pleas that present-day critics might feel less, but that they thought more, than some predecessors of theirs, and that they attach more importance to reality. Now, as to increased " thinking," let us — admitting the fact for the argument's sake only — consider first whether thinking is not to be 1 It was some time after writing this that I read a review of one of our youngest critics by one of our slightly older. It was highly laudatory, but started with a significant " hedge " : " The defect, if any, is that it is too abstract." One for Grillparzer and me, I think. O 194 A SCRAP BOOK oi judged rather by its quality than its quantity ; and then whether, as compared with feeling, it has not a certain fallaciousness. If you feel (I admit that there is vice as well as virtue in that "if"), you do feel, and no mistake. There is no such certainty about " thinking." And as to " reality," the fallaciousness is even greater. What is reality ? That which appears to be real at one time is declared (we should not have to go far for instances) to be utterly unreal at another ; and, for my part, I should say that nothing but a relentless comparison of what has seemed real at different times can ever give one even an inkling of what reality is. The more real any- thing seems to be at any particular moment and to any particular individual — still more to any body of individuals — the more I should suspect it. LI I. Sausages. — It is one of the common tricks or blunders (according as the person committing it is, well, let us say trickster or blunderer) of the decriers of Toryism to assume that its pro- i-n SAUSAGES 195 fessors always run down the present and cry up the past. Of course this is not true. In respect of things of nature, I do not suppose that there has been much or any difference. There were probably never prettier girls, or kittens, or roses than there are at present ; I do not believe that there ever were braver men than those who fought at Ypres and Zeebrugge ; and (rash as this may seem) I doubt whether there ever were greater fools than those we have with us. But when you pass from the works of God to those of men, the case is altered. The student of history knows that the good- ness of poetry, wine, sculpture, flannel, and many other things has, or must have, varied considerably. But personally I do not know anything which has, during my own lifetime, experienced so severe and so prolonged a deca- dence as the article which was sold by that admir- able person who out-Cleoned Cleon (O for him to be in England now !) ; which, becoming alive, supplied the loyal subjects of Queen Niphleseth ; 196 A SCRAP BOOK lh which formed, in another sense, the subject of part of one of the pleasantest essays of Charles Lamb ; and which was judiciously selected by King Valoroso as the solid of his breakfast to the Prince of Crim Tartary. What has come to — I had almost said what has become of — sausages? Indeed the last phrase would seem to be most applicable to that admirable variety, the Oxford Sausage (much herbed, skinless, and moulded into sausage-shape only just before cooking), which was not to be found the last time I ordered it there. The common or skin-provided kind is, of course, still common in the other sense ; but, alas ! it is even more " common " in a third. The last sausage that I remember as worthy of its ancient popu- larity was produced at Sidmouth in one of the early 'eighties. Any one who possesses astro- nomical records may identify the exact year from the fact that in the autumn there was an unusually fine eclipse of the moon. My lodgings had a balcony looking straight over the Channel, and Lii SAUSAGES 197 high up. It was a magnificent night, and the watching of the occultation and resurrection of Our Lady wan and marvellous was something for any of her children to remem- ber. But I do not think enjoyment of the sausages next morning was incongruous. They were made by an old lady (could she have been a descendant of Mrs. Partington ?) who lived in a by-lane, and did nothing else but make them. But their representatives else- and everywhere to-day ! The worst I don't believe Lamb's chimney-sweeps would have condescended to eat : the best are hopelessly degenerate — even when they are not messed up with tomatoes, and when their integuments do not remind one of india- rubber, or, worse still, of shipping news about vessels loaded with so many thousand barrels of salted sausage-skins from Australia or the Argen- tine. Sometimes they appear to be made of nothing but bread-crumbs and fat ; very seldom do they possess any satisfactory flavouring, and 198 A SCRAP BOOK m almost never do they afford the least suggestion of another and even greater Agnism — to wit, Roast Pig ! 1 A good deal of this decadence may be due to the ever-present curse of factory and machinery : for the further you get from individual plain- handwork the worse everything becomes — and especially everything eatable or drinkable. Some- thing more may be owing to ill-breeding, ill- feeding, and ill-keeping of the pigs themselves — beef sausages, let it be mentioned in passing, are, and always were, an abomination. ^ But what- ever be the cause or causes, the grievous fact remains, that not even in Lancashire, where they specially delight in sausages, and where you still, perhaps, get the least bad — not even in Cambridge, the highly respectable name whereof ^ May I warn enthusiasts who take this solemnly — and, like Mr. Pepys and his wife, " sit down hand to fist to a good pig " — that Lamb mistook the sauce ? It should be bread-sauce with currants in it : a combined tribute to the innocence of the child-pig and guard against its slight tendency to over- richness. ^ 1 have never been able to understand how so good a thing as beef can become so vile. TENNYSON THE BRIGAND 199 is stolen and prostituted shamelessly all over the country in connection with them — do you get such things as, I should imagine, Tom Brown toasted, or, as I know, my old woman of Sid- mouth manufactured what time the moon glim- mered or gloomed over the Channel waves. LI II. Tennyson the Brigand. — One had thought that, by the present time, even the twentieth century had exhausted its indictments against the abandoned poetaster and poet-laureate who for more than sixty years persisted in writing verse that scanned and rhymed and parsed ; in producing poetry that was sense, and sense that was poetry ; in being an Englishman of English- men ; in " spurning the vulgar," and so forth. But not long ago one was mildly surprised to learn that he " dressed like a brigand," and so invited the popular attention which he pretended to dislike. Now Tennyson certainly did not wear a steeple-crowned hat adorned with ribbons, or variegated puttees like those which decorated 200 A SCRAP BOOK LIII and discomforted Mr. Tupman. I have never heard, in his case, of the jacket with the three-inch tail which so nearly brought on a fratricidal or parricidal contest, or of a stiletto. So it must have been the cloak — which he did wear. Now the worst of the just-mentioned twentieth century, in spite of its many better qualities, is that it so often doesn't know. This is really not its fault, for its predecessor, long before its own decease, introduced that process of cramming with heterogeneous and undigested *' education " which is more fatal to knowledge than no educa- tion at all. The reason why Tennyson wore a cloak is not in the least recondite — to mention one easy source of information, Carlyle's Life of Sterling will give it to any intelligent person. In the future Poet-Laureate's early days we were, as we so often have been, " taking up " certain interesting foreigners who were making them- selves a nuisance in their own countries. In this instance they were Spaniards, and perhaps had a little more to say for themselves than has been the on TENNYSON THE BRIGAND 201 case with some others. With the history of the particular affair we need not trouble ourselves, for, once more, is it not written in, if not the best, the least provocative and most attractive of the books of Thomas the Master ? It was tragic in such cases as poor Boyd's ; tragi-comic and a little worse in Sterling's own ; followed by an admirable future in Archbishop Trench's, etc. But it particularly interested Tennyson's Cam- bridge friends : and, what is more, the sad and stately refugees, clad in their cloaks, took the fancy of London. Any one who knows the portraits of the 'twenties or early 'thirties should know how frequently these cloaks appear in them. (My own father, who was neither a poet nor a poseur^ is represented on canvas in one.) Now I suppose Tennyson, having taken to the garb, knowing, as he must have done, that he looked well in it, and finding it comfortable, did not, like the sensible man he was, think it neces- sary to discard it when it went out of fashion. In which course of conduct, whether it immediately 202 A SCRAP BOOK ov concerns cloaks or anything else, all sensible men should follow him. Women ought, I think, to follow fashion, unless it happens distinctly to non-suit them. To any mans tailor, bootmaker, hatter, or haberdasher, when he says, " It's not worn now, sir," the only answer should be, " Oh yes, it is. I wear it." LIV. Politics : V. Cabbage-Sticks. — People who have lived in the Channel Islands, and people who have only visited them — from voyagers on stately yachts to what the islanders used to call ** five-pounders " — know the cabbage-stick — the stalk, dried, varnished, and variously prepared, of the tall, indigenous cabbage. To look at, it is quite comely and almost imposing — its knots suggesting vigour and its gloss almost giving beauty. It is light, of course, and so long as you use it merely as a walking-stick to flourish, and even tap the ground with, it will, as the advertisements say, " give complete satisfaction." But if you try it too high, even though the Lv MR. MIDSHIPMAN EAST 203 height be moderate — if, say, you fix it in the side of a bank and endeavour to pull yourself up by it — a snap, a collapse, and perhaps the spectacle and sound of a gentleman on his back uttering comminatory language, will illustrate the im- mutable but constantly ignored fact that you can't play tricks with Nature. In the abstract, of course, everybody knows this ; indeed My Cabbage-Sticks would be a fair metaphorical title for at least some chapters in any rational being's autobiography. Yet, as a humble but lifelong student of politics, may I ask whether there was ever such a Cabbage-Stick as the League of Nations ? So tall ! so polished ! so finely knotted ! so suggestive of a real oak- plant ! and so certain to crack at the first serious strain ! LV. Mr. Midshipman Easy. — I had for some time made a note to include something on this golden book in this other, my copper one, when, not at all to my displeasure, I read two different 204 A SCRAP BOOK lv tributes to Marryat in newspapers — one by Mr. Squire, the other by some good man whose identity escapes me. More power to their elbows ! The goodness and the grace, again acknow- ledged elsewhere, acquainted me with the book very early, and it has throughout my life (though at the moment I haven't got a copy of it, and hardly need one) been to me what Moll Flanders was to Borrow's old woman, and perhaps something more. Nor can I imagine any book more likely to eradicate from the rising generation, and re- place with healthier growth, certain weeds which flourish at present. A more English book, as far as it goes, I do not know, and the rest of such Englishness as God gave us — to produce, or at any rate enjoy, say Spenser or Donne, Shelley or Keats — will, experto crede, find no difficulty in keeping company with it. It is not only Marryat's most flawless book (for, though the best of Peter Simple is its equal, nearly all the pother about the Privilege succession MR. MIDSHIPMAN EAST 205 is by turns extravagant and dull), but it is one of the flawless books of its own order in literature, and its complete contempt of all " rules " saves it from the too frequent drawback of flawlessness — to wit, insipidity. From Sarah's memorable plea, " It was a very little one," through Mr. Bonnycastle's admirable casuistry (or ca;zuistry) as to flogging, past the really masterly construction of the apples-and-bulldog-and-bull-and-bees- scene to the opening of the proper business of the book on board ship, all is well — and there- after all is better. There are few books which leave more distinct and numerous pictures on the half-shut eye — from those of the scenes mentioned above, before the main action, to the irruption and taming of Mrs. Oxbelly after it. Technical nautical criticism, I believe, prefers the club- hauling in Peter to the two great fights of the Aurora with the Russian frigate and the storm. I will have all three, please. And Jack's various " cruises " 1 — for subtle perfection oigenre^ nothing perhaps excels the little scene when the cattle 2o6 A SCRAP BOOK lv transport goes out of harbour with Jack and Gascoigne reclining on the quarter-deck, porter bottles at hand, and Mr. Falcon feeling " in his bones " that he had much better hail her and make her heave-to. But it is all good, not merely these more material " scenes," but Jack's gradual weaning from the delusion of Equality, and the admirable argument with which he quenches his parent just before that agreeable but idiotic person is quenched otherwise. To the last- named incident, I believe, some persons of merit — perhaps even less of " sentimentalists " than I am myself — object. I cannot admit the objec- tion. Poor Nicodemus Easy was a very nice man, and a gentleman. But politically he was a hopeless and mischievous fool ; he had had his time ; he would probably have been finished off much more unpleasantly by one of ** his murderers " before long ; and his actual end was not likely to hurt him very much. Besides, if he had not died, Jack could not have bought that delightful privateer, or put the eighteen- Lv MR. MIDSHIPMAN EAST 207 pounders and long nines in her, or picked up Gascoigne again, or married Agnes. No : I cannot find a single incident or char- acter or speech in the book that I would have altered or omitted. The most vulnerable part is perhaps concerned with the machinations of the priest against Jack's courtship, and Captain Tartar's brutality ; but Mesty's account of the journey, in which he bites the ecclesiastical biter, saves it. And, by the way, the excellent Captain Wilson's previous letting loose of the galley- slaves has a sarcastic force, both historical and prophetic, of which Marryat may, or may not, have been conscious. We are always letting galley- slaves loose, we English, and we have been doing it all over the world lately on an enormous scale, in places near and far, and in conditions quite unnecessary to particularise. Only, how intelligent Rajahs — ever since we began with the Ilbert Bill — must have half-laughed, half-shaken their heads over Captain Wilson, if they had the 2o8 A SCRAP BOOK lvi good luck and taste to read Mr. Midshipman Easy ! LVI. On the Taxation of Eau de Cologne. — It has been, I believe, agreed by the best authorities on the disgusting subject of taxation that it should be so distributed as (i) To bring in the most net money. (2) To create the least public or private inconvenience. (3) To encourage good habits. In all these respects the present taxation of Eau de Cologne appears to me to be hopelessly faulty. As for the first point, the lesson of champagne and cigars as to reducing receipts by checking consumption might have been learnt. I used to buy Eau de Cologne (let it be observed that it need not necessarily be Colognial, for excellent substitutes are brewed in England and the Channel Islands, though they may not be quite up to " the gegenilber " or " 471 1 ") by the quarter-gallon frequently. I now buy it by the Lvi EAU DE COLOGNE 209 quarter-pint ^ at the longest intervals possible. And I have no doubt that many others do the same, or have given it up altogether.^ Now (to come to the other two heads) this is a hardship and a pity ; for the uses as well as the delights of the thing are manifold and great. Merely as a perfume, it may, of course, be called a luxury ; but it is one of the least merely luxurious of its kind. Maupassant's two ladies, if not to be approved in some ways, were absolutely right in pronouncing it the only per- fume that a man should use for himself. He should, however (perhaps they knew not this, but I should have been pleased to show them), not spare to use it in spraying from a perfume- diffuser on the eye-closed countenances of the other sex. And these lighter employments, with others like them, are very far from being its only ones. All forms of the gracious creature, alcohol, are antiseptic — it would surely extirpate the rot ^ Less, indeed ; for the normal bottle is 4 oz., not 5. - Opinion confirmed by those who sell. P 2IO A SCRAP BOOK lvi in Pussyfoots if they would take it. But I believe even " scientists " of the heresy just named, who have not yet utterly forsworn Truth and bound themselves to Fad and Falsehood, admit that some of the essences used in the manu- facture of this elixir increase the antiseptic quality remarkably. The wise man never scratches or cuts a finger or any other part of his body without dabbing Eau de Cologne on it till it leaves off smarting (which is sometimes not so very soon). When that chief of common curses — a cold — threatens, there is nothing like inhalation of it for the catarrhous and embrocation with it for the bronchial form. Inflamed surfaces cool and cease to fret when laved with it and water ; and the same dilution, wetting your brushes, will at once cleanse and control the unruliness of the hair, and ward off the neuralgia which untempered wetness sometimes incites. As to the idiotic bugbear of " intoxicant," it is both too strong and too nasty to drink neat, and not particularly attractive to drink diluted. On lumps of sugar Lvii AT ONCE AND FOR EVER 211 it is not so bad ; but anybody who could consume enough to make him drunk in that way had better be got rid of anyhow. No ! great is the ware of John Maria Farina, no matter who makes it ; and the wisest thing for a Chancellor of the Exchequer to do would be to let a voucher for half the taxation, if any, on it, count as a drawback for income-tax. ^ LVII. At Once and For Ever. — I have some- where heard or read of a French saynete^ which must have been about the concisest on record. The stage was divided down the middle, and the characters were represented simultaneously in exact make-up by an actor and actress on each side of the division. On the left the man, passionately embracing the lady, was exclaiming, Sidonie ! entre nous c est pour toujours ! On the ^ An extension of this system would remove the present enormous injustice of excusing teetotallers from contributing to about one-sixth of the whole taxation of the country. If you cat barley-cakes and drink water to the extent necessary to produce a barrel of beer, you pay not one farthing of tax ; if you combine the barley and the water in the beer, you pay five pounds. 212 A SCRAP BOOK LVII right the lady, pointing to the door in correct fashion and looking tout ce quilfaut for showing hatred and contempt of the man, was ejaculating, Va-fen^ traitre ! et que je ne te revoie jamais ! It is, I believe, the general opinion that this grim comedy — if not in exact coincidence, in more or less rapid sequence of scene — is not in- frequent in life : which, if it be true, would make against the more vulgar parodist of a vulgar song — For I likes a bit of good girl — I'm particklarly partial to girl — In men and in boys There is mostly annoys. But that's never the case with girl ! Fortunately, however, the saynete never does justify itself in literature. There may, indeed, be cases (Hazlitt says Lamb was one, and I think I knew another, more recent, but of not much inferior distinction) where the Sultanas cease to be Valideh (is that right, or ought it to be plural ?). But really great literature, once in favour, never goes out of it, and (with curious differences, no I.VII AT ONCE AND FOR EVER 213 doubt, in individual cases) the " dead shepherd's saw " usually, if by no means always, applies to it. On such a matter nothing but first-hand evidence is of any value whatever. " The Best Hundred Books " notion is, of course, an absurdity — if it ever had been accepted (as it never was) by " Victorians " who " counted " in the slightest degree, Victorianism would deserve the worst that has been, or could be, said of it. Sir John Lubbock was an amiable person, but I know the Stones of Avebury, and I think I know what the Spirit of those Stones said when Sir John helped himself to their title. In one sense there may be ten best books, in another ten thousand ; but attempting to number them deserves worse curses than those from which King David had to choose. Indeed His Hebraic Majesty (I wish he had not behaved so badly to Princess Michal !) has furnished us with the only test in this matter by his admirable words about Goliath's sword, " There is none like that : give it me." The best book — at least the best author — must be to 214 A SCRAP BOOK lvh each person, at each momentj the Einzige^ the Sanspareil. But it is not always at once that this unique- ness is recognised. The recognition depends, of course to some extent, but by no means wholly, on the stage of development of the individual reader when the book or author is presented to him. I have confessed elsewhere that I did not appreciate Thackeray till I went to Oxford, if not even a little later, or Dante till about the same age as his when he met the Three Beasts ; while it took some time before I fully appreciated Tennyson. But I did not " sin my mercies " so long with others. Purely, or mainly, comic writers hardly count : if a boy does not rejoice, however imperfectly, in The Knights^ The True History^ The Canterbury Tales^ Gargantua and Pantagruel^ V Avare^ Gulliver^ or Pickwick, the first time he reads them in the original, there is no help or hope for him. The milk of fun should attract him : the meat of life-criticism, and the wine of art can wait. Lvii AT ONCE AND FOR EVER 215 But with " serious " writers (as the old but not replaced phrase went) the case is a good deal altered. There must be something con- genial — something not requiring much experi- ence of life, though helped by that which comes — if youth " cottons to " these before years of nominal discretion. For my part, I had the luck to be presented (" introduced " would be a presumptuous word) to the following magnates while yet in my novitiate, and to echo the words of David on the sword as to each, though I certainly had myself slain no Goliath with them yet — Homer, Aeschylus, Lucretius, Malory, Spenser, Shakespeare, Shelley, Heine, and Victor Hugo — the last was the last, by accident mainly, if not wholly. Add the three above mentioned — Dante, Tennyson, and Thackeray — and I think you have my panel of " greatests " — though, of course, I could add twelves on twelves almost ad infinitum from all but "firsts" like Plato and Catullus, like Keats and Baudelaire, down to writers of whom I hardly care to remember more 21 6 A SCRAP BOOK Lvm than one thing, as with Leconte de Lisle's Requies and Marie Stona's Meine Lip-pen brennen so. LVIII. Education : VI. Modernising and Specialising. — I do not propose, in the present section, to deal much with the " Classical and Modern " question. Other things in this little book will show what my opinion, if it be of any value, is on that point. I only wish here to touch on the " dissidence of dissent " — the ultra- modernisation of modernity, which has some- times recently manifested itself. There is no need to give instances — they are familiar enough. But it may not be useless to point out that they sin against a real principle of Education, that it should always proceed by familiarising the un- familiar — by teaching the mind not to " shy " at what is strange to it. What is already familiar has no teaching or developing power, and exer- cises a positively deadening influence on the as yet not fully developed faculties of comprehen- sion and interpretation. Baudelaire's Lviii EDUCATION: MODERNISING 217 Au fond de I'inconnu pour trouver du nouveau, if in a rather different sense from the author's, should be the motto of every teacher and every scholar. As regards using contemporary literature as a teaching instrument, there are, moreover, two arguments of very different kind against it. In the first place, you " spoil the verdure " ; you take away the freshness of the enjoyment that should be in finding out for oneself what one's fellows are doing and thinking. In the second, you abstain from providing the necessary condition of that enjoyment if it is to be intelligent — know- ledge of what has gone before. I wonder what illegitimate offspring of Mr. M'Choakumchild and Miss Self-Deceit it was who wrote these words : " When you have schooled your child in facts after the readiest and ■pleasantest fashion possible ..." I read them not long ago, and I can hardly imagine more pestiferous doctrine than they impart, or at least imply. 21 8 A SCRAP BOOK lix But somewhat later there was a little balm in some others of Bishop Welldon's — who, indeed, ought to know something of education, though perhaps we might not agree in all points. It was, starting from a regret at the disappearance of the old " Double First " — a protest against the increasing specialisation of University and even of School work. It is, indeed, a great evil, and the most curious thing about it is, that it implies a sort of result of, or reaction from, the ever- increasing complication of the general curriculum. You teach so many things that, unless you, sooner or later, confine a man to one, he doesn't learn any ! LIX. " Whitey — How many people know this charming verse from The Loyal Garland (seventeenth century) ? — Her lips arc two bumpers of clary, Who drinks of them sure he'll miscarry ^ — ^ Slight clumsiness of rhythm in original smoothed out. // runs, I think, " which made me first to miscarry," and anybody who likes rough verse may have it so. LIX "WHITE" 219 Her breasts of delight Are two bottles of white, And her eyes are two cups of canary ! Here, independently of the pure delight in con- joining things delightful, there are two points to note. One is the selection of ^o/tZ-brown for the lady's eyes — an admirable but by no means common one. The other concerns a problem which has often puzzled oenophilists : what, exactly, was the '* white " or " white wine " which is often mentioned by seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writers ? As everybody knows, the term was later, and is still, greatly enlarged. fVe call yellow wines — even when the yellow darkens to the deepest brown, as in sherry — " white " : in fact, in modern times, ** white " wine simply means wine that isn't red. Obviously our very agreeable bard did not understand the term in that way, or he would hardly have written " of delight." Of course there is the usual licence of comparing transparent or water- to opaque or mi\k-w/iiie ; but that is 220 A SCRAP BOOK lx nothing. A " bottle of white " may have been something like the very lightest produce of French, Italian, or Spanish vineyards. It cannot have been sherry, hardly even hock. LX. Misunderstandings (JIL)- — The notes previously given under this heading applied to the meaning of whole clauses or sentences. But misunderstandings of actual words are even com- moner. It would not, of course, be worth while here to dwell on common instances like " trans- pire," but one or two more complicated and individual (though by no means wholly that) which have come under the writer's notice may be mentioned as not unamusing. The first, indeed, is not confined even to a few writers or speakers : it may be said to be all but universal, except with experts, being the direct result of widespread ignorance. It concerns no less famous a word than Transubstantiation.^ 1 It should not be, but perhaps is, necessary, or at least desirable, to point out that no oflfence is meant, and, in fact, no reference made, to members of MISUNDERSTANDINGS : III 221 It is even doubtful whether all should-be expert divines who have used it, fully appreciated its meaning ; and it is pretty certain that a promi- nent legal and political luminary (not so very long ago gathered to his fathers, the Plantagenets) did not. Indeed, how many people, out of any twenty you would be likely to meet in any street out of perhaps Oxford or Cambridge, could tell you what it does mean, and explain to you that it practically has no meaning at all, unless you accept and apply the axioms and methods of a particular and, in most cases, long obsolete system of philosophy ? For the " substance " which is translated or transposed in it is no more what is ordinarily meant by that word than a " box " in a coach is a " box " on the ear. Probably not so many in proportion, but, I fancy, a much larger number positively, use the word Omnipotence without the slightest realisa- the Roman Church, instructed in the philosophy which is ancillary to its theology. I am only speaking of ordinary Englishmen, English by Church as well as by nationality, like Sir William Harcourt himself. 222 A SCRAP BOOK lx tion of what it really means. I had a delightful instance of this once when I was on the Press. The old question of the Holy Coat of Treves and its multiplication had come up again — apropos of what I do not remember or think worth remembering. I had ventured to point out that, given Omnipotence, it covered this multiplication as well as anything else. Where- upon a correspondent grew extremely irate. He fully believed, he said, in Omnipotence — in fact I think he was good enough to specify some of the things that he would allow Omnipotence to do — but it must draw the line at cutting more cloth for Holy Coats than would do for one. In fact, to alter Sir William Gilbert slightly — That " All " he couldn't understand, 'Twould pain him very much. Or had he, anticipating the twentieth century itself as far as it has gone (for this was some thirty years ago), decided that Latin was rot, and it didn't really matter what " Omnis " meant } Lxi MARGARITA IN STERQUILINO 223 Lastly, a most excellent scholar and divine, worthy of the high academical and ecclesiastical stations and honours he held, once confessed that he had never, till it was pointed out to him, noticed the difference between the statements of the Athanasian Creed as to the Future, namely, that a person who goes into Everlasting Life must live everlastingly, whereas a person who goes into Everlasting Fire may be burnt up at once, or pass through it, without the sentence being in any way altered, remitted, or affected in the full accuracy of its terms, " life " being a state, and " fire " not. I.XI. Margarita in Sterquilino. — (The reader who plays the game is requested, if he does not know the author of the following verses, to make, at any rate, one guess before he turns the page, or glances down it, to find him out.) Which of us has most cause to grieve ? Which situation would you choose ? 224 A SCRAP BOOK lxi I a capricious tyrant leave, And you a faithful lover lose. / can find maids in every rout With smiles as false and forms as fine. But you must search the world throughout To find a heart as true as mine. Nothing particular in the matter, of course, but something very particular in the form, and especi- ally in the cadence. For that form, and especi- ally that cadence, belong to the seventeenth century, and this is mid-eighteenth (a minute light for the guesser). Hardly anybody had got them since Aphra Behn and Sir Charles Sedley ; hardly anybody was to get them again even at the best times of poetry. Yet the lines were written by John Hall Stevenson, friend of Sterne, Castellan of " Crazy Castle," and author of other ** crazy " things, in which, to one reader at any rate, ** craziness " is not so obvious as certain Swiftian associations with it. He has, it is fair to say, left some other prettyish verses, but nothing that I re- BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE 225 member with this Caroline soar and sink of pinion. LXIL Criticism: VI. Belief and Knowledge. — Not very long ago one of our younger critics, in whom, at his first coming and for some time after, I had ventured to anticipate something like a pillar, saddened me. He observed — whether seriously or as a kind of undergraduate joke does not much matter — that as long as some people took the Book of Jonah for revelation, others regarded it as simply a joke ; while now, that " nobody " did the former, anybody could see that it was a delightful work of art. We may let that " nobody " alone. But the really sad- dening thing is that anybody who can see that the Book of Jonah is a delightful work of art should have been prevented from doing so through its being regarded by himself or others as a work of revelation. What is the obstacle, as Lord Boanerges said to Miss Dunstable, to *' owning the power and tracing the flower " '^. Q 22 6 A SCRAP BOOK lxh Or, to go still further and pierce to the very root of the matter, " Why not recognise that accept- ance of the revelation and recognition of the aesthetic value are things entirely independent of each other, compatible or separable as man's mind chooses ? " There is a phrase of Aristotle's (I forget where it occurs, and have no books to refer to) which for many years has been more constantly in my mind, as a caution when I write criticism and a test when I read it, than any other — fxtj fiera^aiveiv et? aXko 761/09, ** not to shift to another kind of thought or subject." Now Belief, Know- ledge, Aesthetic Appreciation, Moral Judgment, Love, are all genera of the most different kinds, and each has its own method, its own premisses, its own " establishment," so to speak. Further, each and all of these should be, and must be, carefully kept clear of each other, or the human being who tries to put them in motion will get into an awful tangle. Yet this is what people are perpetually doing, — not to mention that they BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE 227 nearly always muddle the two kinds or senses of Belief — that which is familiarly used for an imperfect kind of human knowledge and that which concerns God and the things of God only. Further, they constantly muddle " not knowing " with *' knowing not," as did Mr. Matthew Arnold when he assured us, in respect of that matter of the Garden of Eden, that " It never happened — none of it," which he could only have been entitled to do if he had been there all the time and saw that it didn't. Of the messes between Aesthetics and Morality it is needless to speak ; and when you come to Love, in the widest as in the narrowest sense, it notoriously can exist without belief in the object, or know- ledge of it, or aesthetic admiration for it, or moral approval of it. Therefore let us not merely clear our minds of cant, but disentangle them from mixtures of kinds. And then we shall find that we are freed from many woful errors, and especially shall not have to put off perceiving the magnificence of Job or Isaiah till Canon This or 22 8 A SCRAP BOOK Lxm Dean That has determined that we need not worry about the Creeds or the exact amount of Revelation in the Bible.^ LXIII. Criticism : VII . Evidence. — Of Evi- dence 2 in the special or legal sense it would hardly become a man, who has (as elsewhere observed) only eaten half the proper number of dinners at the Temple, to speak otherwise than anonymously, even if he used to make pecuniary apologies for doing so in his journalist days and later by paying " dues " for nearly half a 1 At the British Association meeting the other day a dignitary, whose prosodic views I am impertinent enough to like better than his theological, is reported as having said that, " The Educated Christian has already succeeded in getting his creed within the framework of the universe as we know it to be." The expression is not very dignified, and reminds one rather of the advertise- ment where a neat parlourmaid hands a bottle of medicine to a gentleman packing his kit-bag. But that is not fatal. Mr. Browning, we know, decided that it was " very hard to be a Christian," but to be an educated Christian, according to this formula, must be much harder. He need not perhaps believe in miracles, but he must work them. For " Creed " begins exactly where " Knowledge " stops, and the evidence of things not seen supplements — but never falls within — the evidence of things seen. 2 This and the last article are so closely connected that it seems better to break the rule of not putting two on the same subject together. Lxiii EVIDENCE 229 century — the coin of his pocket for the laches of his teeth. But the fact is that, except purely arbitrary ones in each case, the rules of legal, historical, literary-critical, and other evidence are pretty much the same. And I am bound to say that they appear to me to be among the least commonly understood things in this much-misunderstood world. To confine myself, without further innuendo (but we rather want some word like extranuendo)^ to my proper vocation — in the two extensive depart- ments of Biblical and Shakespearian criticism, nothing is commoner than to find practitioners who seem to have no notion of evidence at all. In the one you find people who, as Scherer (not exactly a bigot) said of Renan, accept and reject parts of the same document, possessing exactly the same claims to acceptance or grounds for rejection, according to their own convenience or choice. In the other, you find people who, because there was a Grammar School at Stratford, say Shakespeare must have been there, and 230 A SCRAP BOOK Lxm " would have learnt " this, that, and the other. Even short of the mere dunceries of Bakespearism and its imitations, it is extremely rare to find books on " the Stratforder " which do not swarm with every kind of fallacious assumption, question- begging, guesswork, and the like. Lesser books and men are naturally less obnoxious to the bestowal of this particular variety of tediousness on them and their readers. But they too often get it. And as the biographical and bibliographical parts of criticism give much more occasion for it than the strictly aesthetic, so they abound in it to a much greater extent. After all, unless enjoyment and admiration are actual shams, there is no difficulty of the evidential kind with them. You do enjoy, you do admire, or you do not. There may be a little more, but still very little, about the discussion of their sources in the work and the symptoms they excite in the reader. It is, if not only, chiefly when you come to authorship, date, details of life and writing, etc., etc., that opportunities of displaying Lxni EVIDENCE 231 inability to estimate evidence arise. When Colomba made her famous double remark, " Que cela est beau ! Qui a fait cela ? " the exclamation was all in the right way. It would be too much to say that the interrogation was all in the wrong. But it opened a path leading to as many dangers and difficulties as that of any Pilgrim of Allegory, and needing, for guidance, protection, and sup- port, all good ministers from Interpreter to Greatheart rolled into one ; a clear vision and a steady grasp of what is Evidence ; and an equally clear discernment, with an equally steady rejec- tion, of what is not. One thing more on Evidence — though it touches the reserved ground. I have seen it quoted from Jeremy Bentham (though it is a long time since I read him, and I am not in a position to verify) that witnesses may lie, and circumstantial evidence cannot ; therefore we ought to prefer the latter. I confess that this makes me think of what a wicked man once said, " Jeremy is a crucial instance of a strange but 232 A SCRAP BOOK lxiv not very uncommon case — the combination of an exceptionally clever man with an exceptionally d d fool." For the point is really this — whether the interpretation of circumstantial evidence may not lie. And God and the law- reports know that it may ! LXIV. Some Single Meetings. — Most people, I suppose, have had meetings with others, once occurring and never repeated, which have been of some moment in their lives. But of these, the most noteworthy to the individual are often those which have interest for the individual only, and of which he or she is not likely (if he or she is good for anything) to speak. There are others the interest whereof, if not so personal, is rather more general, while there is no seal on them, and two or three of these may be worth chronicling. The only occasion on which I came into personal relations with Mr. Gladstone was in the summer of 1862, when he was giving the prizes at King's College School, and had to give me Lxiv SOME SINGLE MEETINGS 233 one for a poem on " Sicily." I take it that the real object of School Prize Poems is to afford the perpetrators a chance, some years afterwards, of playing Drydens to their own Swifts, and saying, " Cousin , you will never be a poet." Perhaps I did thus deserve the distinction in this paullo-post-^xxtMVt, and I have kept the poem (beautifully bound, for use in recitation, in black silk with gold ribbon corners, by an affectionate sister). Sometimes when I am very melancholy I read it, to make me laugh a little. It begins in a style which Thackeray (he was alive then) would, I think, have allowed to be not inferior to Mr. Pendennis's own : As gleams the pavement of a Gothic hall When through the tracery-lights the splendours fall. It talks about The setting sun whose crimson blaze Spears the now envious East with dying rays. It refers to Filicaja on the neighbouring con- tinent, and then does the handsome and regular 234 A SCRAP BOOK lxiv thing by Persephone, the Athenian expedition, Timoleon, etc., " till," as it observes itself — Till the Cross sank before the Crescent's sweep — a line which, I think, I must have stolen, though I don't know from whom. There is a passage on Wine, which speaks more favourably of Marsala than I have since done, but is, even at that early age, perfectly sound on the general and anti-Pussyfoot goose. " What wonder," I exclaim — What wonder Paracelsus vainly thought To have found in wine the elixir which he sought ? Next, going back, we have Theocritus and a lot of flowers, and a miniature gazetteer of Agrigentum and Syracuse, Messina and Palermo. And, finally, Camarina and its warning /x^ Kcpei, bring us up to modern (then quite recent) times, and a magnificent denunciation of the Gari- baldian revolution and the part played therein by England — all this recited before, and to be rewarded by, of all people, Mr. Gladstone. Lxiv SOME SINGLE MEETINGS i^S There was no mere ** schoolboy cheek " in this : I had not known when I wrote the stuff — stuff as to form ; I don't quarrel now with the ** fundamental stuff" or matter — that he was to give the prizes. But I need not say that I chuckled to myself as I read it out, and nobody who ever knew Mr. Gladstone needs to be told of the mixture of kindness and indignation — hand-clasp and eye-flash — with which he, praising the form with the usual amiable excess, intimated, with much more than the usual sincerity, that he was " afraid he couldn't at all agree with the sentiments." The circumstances of a second single meeting — with Lord Randolph Churchill — were rather curiously different. When he came up to Merton I was a very senior man, and though there were only some five years between the dates of the prize poem and of this incident, there is perhaps no lustrum in a man's life more influential thereon than that which sees him through Oxford. I had gone in for Greats most unwisely early ; 1^6 A SCRAP BOOK lxiv had been rejected as Fellow five times at four colleges (a fact not so disastrous in circumstance as Colonel Jack's experiences of matrimonial acceptance on Defoe's title-page, but identical numerically) ; had decided, after reading history, law, and political economy for a whole year, not to go in for Second Schools, but to transfer the burden of myself from my family and the College 1 to Education. But while waiting for a post I went up to Oxford for a week or two, and one evening dropped in for whist at a man's rooms in college. As I finished a hand I heard a voice — a youthful voice — speaking over my shoulder, ** You played that very well." So I looked round and remarked with, I trust, polite surprise, " I'm very much obliged to you." My patron left the room soon afterwards, and I said to our host, " , who is that exceedingly gory [I apologise, but we used to employ that pictur- esque adjective to describe a not too modest * Which would in those days have borne part of it for a couple of terms longer. SOME SINGLE MEETINGS 237 youth] freshman ? " " Oh," he said, " that's Randolph Churchill ; he's just come up." A day or two later I went off to Manchester (to be a freshman of another kind myself under the late Mr. Walker), and I never met Lord Randolph again. But I own that in the years during which he was a politician and I was a journalist I found occasion, not very seldom, to recall the incident — again with a chuckle. These two meetings were, of course, of no public importance whatever ; the third might have been, if Fate had willed, of very great im- portance indeed. I have mentioned elsewhere ^ that it happened to me, in looking after Irish matters for newspaper work, to come to the con- clusion that the ingenious Mr. Pigott was, as is said of a certain family in Old Mortality^ " no muckle to lippen to," and that I had thereby been enabled to prevent an Editor from having dealings with him. Some little time after this, but well before " Parnellism and Crime " (I ^ In Notes on a Cellar-Book. 238 A SCRAP BOOK lxiv cannot give exact dates, having been too busy at that time to keep full diaries, and having later destroyed those that I had), I went down, out of any season and in very bad weather, to Bognor. I had not seen the place since I was a child, and wanted to know whether it and its accommoda- tions would suit my wife, who was not very well. The hotel — at least its coffee-room — appeared to be quite empty, save for one man, and we frater- nised that evening to some extent, finding out soon that we were both citizens of that " Satan's Invisible World Displayed," the main thorough- fare of whose capital is Fleet Street. Both being Englishmen, or at least Britons, we did not communicate our names or the newspapers to which we were attached — indeed they were perhaps the very two which held longest to anonymity and non-publication of connection. But we talked a good deal about public affairs, both at home and abroad — only, as it happened, we never touched Irish matters at all. Next morning when I came down to breakfast Lxv AUSTIN DOBSON 239 I found myself alone, and on asking the waiter whether my over-night companion was likely to appear, was told that he had gone back to town by an early train. " It was Mr. of The Times J sir." Now, when the famous and un- fortunate business came off, it was always said by those who should have known, that it was to Mr. 's personal belief in the trustworthiness of Pigott's communications that their acceptance was due. So a colloquy between us on the subject might have had results. But, as has been not ill-said, the might-have-beens are the might-not-have-beens, and " aiblins," as the Ettrick Shepherd remarked of his grandmother, the waiter " was an awfu' leear " ! LXV. Little Necrologies : IV. Austin Dobson. — It was in the year 1877 — but exactly on what day in it I cannot say, having, as before observed, burnt my diaries — that I first met Mr. Austin Dobson. I had been living out of London for nearly ten years before, and had made few new 240 A SCRAP BOOK lxv acquaintances in that city, having just returned to establish myself there, as it turned out, for nearly another twenty. But already for some time, owing chiefly to the then not long estab- lished Academy and to the Savile Club, a more or less loosely connected literary society — far inferior in quality, of course, to the greater ones of former times and of the present day, but some- what akin in genus and not utterly contemptible in species — had come into being, I was asked to meet Mr. Dobson at dinner, and we either liked each other well enough or dissembled our dislike completely enough to walk home together from Pall Mall to Kensington. And the friend- ship, or the simulation thereof, lasted forty-four years ; the last card I had from him in his well- known copper-plate " back-hand " (or whatever is the proper name for it) was written in May of his last year. In London, during the time of my journalistic activity so often mentioned, we met pretty constantly ; after I moved to Edin- burgh, less often, though he came to stay with us Lxv AUSTIN DOBSON 241 there when the University gave him an Honorary LL.D. in 1902. But for another fairly long stretch of years, till ill-health interfered with his movements, we used to " tryst " in a certain small smoking-room at the Athenaeum whenever I came to town. He had a way, after ordering some " soft " liquor (skilful metrist as he was in words, his only convivial foot was, alas ! the Antibacchius\ of pulling his chair forward, settling himself therein, and saying, " Now, let's talk about books," which was very engaging. In this long acquaintanceship I can remember not merely no quarrel — but no single instance of that uncomfortable reflection, " I wish he hadn't said that or done this ! " which one's friends sometimes suggest to one, and which, no doubt, one sometimes suggests to one's friends. That he was rather sensitive to unfavourable criticism I think very likely ; to tell the honest truth, I have yet to meet the man of letters who is wholly indiff^erent to it. But it never caused the slightest waspishness in him, and he was equally free from 242 A SCRAP BOOK lxv an even more curious and far more inexcusable malady or malpractice of our kind, which has been pleasantly called the " That's my Bone ! " habit. It is by no means uncommon — almost every one of the craft, even if himself immune, must have known it in others — for men to think that, because they have touched a subject or an author, they have established a " claim " in the strictest mining sense, and nobody else may make or meddle. You might follow, or accompany, or (which is, perhaps, most unforgivable of all) anticipate Dobson in any matter without his being in the least aggrieved ; and whatever he knew about Fielding or Walpole, Hogarth or Bewick, was, whether published or unpublished, heartily at the service of fellow-students. Nor was it a case of " light come, light go." For there never was a more indefatigable " student " than he himself was. And here again he had a meritorious peculiarity, perhaps rarer than it is thought to be. There have been persons of great distinction — I have, I think, Lxv AUSTIN DOBSON 243 glanced at this before — as well as others of none at all, who take to subjects with zest, work at them for a time lustily, turn out good or bad results of their work, and then lose all, or most, of their interest in it. Leur siege est fait. The dish is " off." The late Mr. Lowell once con- fided to me that he had once been very fond of Old French, but that the authors who were exhumed since that time did not appeal to him. They might be as good as, or better than, his old friends, but he didn't want them. This rather hedonistic satiety never showed itself in Dobson. It may, however, be said, and with justice, ** One is very glad to hear that Mr. Dobson was a good companion and a generous student ; but there is no lack of such. What was he really as a writer, and especially as a poet ? " The question is perfectly legitimate, and the last part of it is by far the most important. Dobson's essays, his biographies, his editorial work, his Bookman s Budget^ etc., were most agreeable 244 A SCRAP BOOK lxv reading, not easily to be beaten for charm of manner, and not to be beaten at all — very rarely even approached — in fullness and accuracy of matter. But it was possible to imagine some one else doing them. Was this the case with his poetry ? For that is the question, and having myself some little acquaintance with the history of literature and of criticism — which may, from one point of view, be translated " the reception of literature as contrasted with its production " — I should say that it is a question the importance of which is, as a rule, not quite sufficiently considered. I have seen, since his death, Dobson dis- missed — not at all contemptuously, but as a matter of course — as a " minor " poet. Now this facile phrase, which has had at times quite a palpi- tating history, is, like many others, one fears, frequently, if not generally, used with a very vague meaning. A man may be called, and actually be, a minor poet in comparison with undoubted majors of his own or some other time. Lxv AUSTIN DOBSON 245 Or he may be held to be such in consequence of the setting up of some very high standard of poetry itself, which is to apply equally to all times. Or, lastly, he may seem to be minor because he does not deal with the most important and grandiose kinds of poetry — narrative, dramatic, or lyrical. The first calculus is, it will be seen at once, shifting and untrustworthy, though occasionally applicable. According to it, a man may be a minor poet at one part of his career, and a major, though on the score of no fresh work, at another. Everybody is a minor poet, perhaps, if your standard is Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley in the three divisions. So with the second. The impossibility of getting any agreed estimate of what the essence of poetry is makes it unpractical, to say nothing more. For those, indeed, who accept the doctrine of the poetic " moment," the whole thing is idle. There are poets and there are those who are not poets ; but there is no majority or minority except in point of mere bulk or number. With Shake- 246 A SCRAP BOOK lxv speare and Shelley the moments come thick as Perseids in August or Leonids in November. In Beddoes and Darley they only flash now and then, sometimes in this class reducing their light to that of will-o'-the-wisps or glow-worms. In people like Rogers or Kirke White they never come at all. Out of this welter of uncertainty one may perhaps pick two useful test-questions : " Was Dobson minor in one way as regards poets of his own time ? " and " Was his kind of poetry minor in the other ? " Neither of these ques- tions is invidious, and the consideration of both, especially of the latter, may be profitable. As regards poets who had already published when he began to write, there can, of course, be no hesitation in admitting that he was " minor " to Tennyson and Browning certainly, to Matthew Arnold somewhat less so. As regards those nearer his own age, he certainly could not contest majority with either Dante or Christina Rossetti, with Swinburne or with William Morris. But AUSTIN DOBSON 247 he was in much more than the same ratio " major " to Lewis Morris or Alfred Austin. Looking at a later time, one fancies a discussion as to who should succeed the last-named writer as Poet Laureate. There seemed to be no doubt that for the purpose there were only four possible candi- dates, unless the great mistake at Tennyson's death was to be repeated. These were the present holder, Mr. Kipling, Mr. W. B. Yeats, and Mr. Dobson himself. They would all " pass " in poetry as far as poetry was concerned ; but then, according to all wise precedent, a Satan would be called in to object. He could find nothing to say against Mr. Bridges except that he was not popularly known enough. But he would point out that there were in this country such a number of people who hated it that no minister would face their hubbub if Mr. Kipling were chosen, and this would have to be sorrow- fully admitted. Refreshed by this, the Accuser would go on to suggest delicately that a sort of counterbalancing consideration might make 248 A SCRAP BOOK lxv Mr. Yeats's appointment unpopular. Nor would this be denied. But with Mr. Dobson he would take his stand on the " kind of poetry " argument. Was this, albeit certainly poetry, and very perfect poetry of its kind, major or minor when you regarded the kind itself .'' It was very like Satan to say this ; but there is no need to grapple with the whole of his objection. Fate, we know, so far conceded it that Mr. Dobson was not made Poet Laureate. But in the remainder of this short tribute it may be best to point out that the assignment of per- fection in the kind can make a good fight for itself. There have been grumbles, we know, and in very high quarters, against " faultlessness " in poetry. But where they have been made justly it will generally, if not invariably, be found that the work objected to has been work aiming at that " Sublime " which the chief objector, Longinus, was himself discussing. Dobson did not aim at the Sublime. He aimed at something for which we have, unfortunately, no current AUSTIN DOBSON 249 word or favourable description, because we have wantonly degraded and made ignoble its proper designation, " elegant." Of the Muse of Elegance as she was before " her Godhead passed away," Dobson was really Pontifex Maxi- mus. It was natural enough that his priesthood should appeal less and less to a public which, after the very earliest part of his time, was tending ever more to jazz in colour and sound, to cubism in outline, and to any kind of nonsense and rubbish so long as it is glaring and blaring, in public and private affairs. The combined intricacy and sureness of his address to a differently constituted audience may be shown by studying in smallest space one of the smallest of all his poems — one of those triolets which the British public, perhaps justly from its own point of view, considered frivolous, and which a certain publisher (with still more obvious justice from his point of view) insisted on paying for at the rate of five verses, not eight verses, 'because one of them appeared 250 A SCRAP BOOK lxv three times and another twice. (I quote from memory) : Rose kissed me to-day ; Will she kiss me to-morrow ? Let that be as it may, Rose kissed me to-day. But the pleasure gives way To a savour of sorrow. Rose kissed me to-day ; IViil she kiss me to-morrow ? Trivial .'' Sentimental } Childish .'' etc., etc. Well, is it } One would like to know whether those who think it so have, or have not, perceived the follow- ing things about it. In the first place, short as it is, its shortness gives the scenario of a by no means uncomplicated sequence of thought and feeling. The lover thinks with satisfaction of the agreeable occurrence, and as he does so the inevitable Care jumps behind on the thought that is carrying him so softly. He tries to shake her off. " Let that be as it may," is almost the gesture itself, and reaffirms the actual ecstasy. ALTON LOCKE 251 But this particular occupant of pillions has far too firm a seat and tight a hold ; and the only couplet of the four which contains no repetition dismally admits her constricting purchase. In the last, as it echoes the first, the discouragement has altogether the best of it. The horrid " But " — once actually used — dominates the whole. Rose did kiss him to-day ; but will she do so to-morrow.^ Not bad Sidvota — "thought-sub- stance " — for eight apparent and five substantive two-foot lines. Let me, in the second place, point out that this could not have been done in prose, because it would be impossible there to give the different inflexions and reversions of thought, rhythmed and " set " appropriately as they are now — and then I shall have given the heads of a much longer pleading " Against the Minority of Austin Dobson." LXVI. Politics: VL Alton Locke. — More than one good person has fixed on Don Quixote as " the saddest book in the world." I think Kingsley 252 A SCRAP BOOK lxvi himself did so, and I do not myself know any of the great world-books which is sadder, with- out being wholly and deliberately tragical. But, in a minor way — as being more of one par- ticular age, and less, one hopes, for all time — I think his own Alton Locke bids high in the com- petition for the prize of " sadness." This is not merely, or mainly, because of the suffering and the folly of its hero and the gloom of the general story. To bring out the full pathos — pathos of that mixed-with-satire sort which is the most poignant of all — it should be read in the revised edition ^ with the later Preface, in which its author not too cock-a-hoopishly, but with a touching trustfulness, dwells on the social im- provements that had then taken place, and the others that were coming, some sixty years ago. Well ! even more have come since. Practic- ^ I have never been quite sure that he ought not to have reprinted, in an Appendix, the very much less favourable account of Cambridge originally given. The excision and replacement, though no doubt quite deserved by the actual state of that University, were rather too much on the lines of his hero's own complaisance and Bowdlerising in respect of his own Poems. Lxvi ALTON LOCKE 253 ally all the Six Points have been conceded politic- ally, and sixty or six hundred others socially. Even if the purely personal hardships of" labour " in the 'forties were not exaggerated, they have simply disappeared now. Instead of workers cowering half-clad in their employers' dungeons, they ask those employers what the devil they are mouching about the shops for ; and in- stead of starvation - wages for the individual " hand," elaborate calculations are made — not on comic opera stages, but in solemn Committees and even Commissions — how much it will take to keep him,i his wife, and their two or three children, housed, fed, clothed, and amused — education and medical attendance being already provided for at the expense of the upper and middle classes. Now, according to the expecta- tions of the Christian Socialists of eighty years ago, all this ought to have resulted in something like a golden age. Is there much gold of any ^ He sometimes makes me think of that other mysterious multicrcaturc, the mediaeval " lance," which included a knight, a squire, a page, and half a dozen yeomen-archers. 2 54 A SCRAP BOOK kind about now ? And especially, have all these enormous changes in their favour benefited the morale of the working classes ? Are they cheer- fully industrious ? " content with their wages," as the Saint in " the \yery\ old-fashioned camel's- hair coat " suggested ? ready to live and let live ? Are they not ^ lazier, greedier, more full of hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness towards other classes, readier to put on those classes any burden of which they may relieve themselves ? Of course we all know, or ought to know, that " fools' para- dises are wise men's purgatories," but was there ever a more tragi-comic — a more pathetic-satiric — example of it than this ? LXVII. " Ohrianr—ln my Notes on a Cellar- Book there was noticed and quoted Pepys's refer- ence, under the name of " Ho Bryen," to a certain claret, still famous and delectable under its proper style of Haut Brion. But the writer had then * I may refer to previous notes to show that it is only of those who deserve it that I am speaking here. Lxvii "OBRIAN" 255 forgotten another more or less contemporary mention which he had noted years before from the Roxburghe Ballads (v. 4) : With a flood of Obrian we'll fill up each vem. Now what made this wine so popular in the latter half of the seventeenth century ? As a matter of fact, individual vineyards are very seldom mentioned in English literature before the nineteenth,! though there are a few excep- tions, which do not, so far as I remember, include one other claret now in consumption. It has occurred to me that Saint-Evremond may have had something to do with it. He was, of course, himself a Norman ; but he had been much in Gascony with that Due de Candale of whom he has left such a double-edged account; and he was not merely an Epicurean, but an epicure of the first water. During his forty years in our wilderness he would have had plenty of time to provide for the special tastes he had formed earlier ^ Even then Scott somewhere calls " Margaux " " Margout," and to this day people will double t " Lafite." 2^6 A SCRAP BOOK Lxvm in the society of Les Coteaux, and as he was familiar with men of letters as well as with the Court, to communicate them widely.^ LXVIII. Prize Fellowships, — The various University Commissions which, in the last three- quarters of a century, have successively neglected Lord Melbourne's greatest of all political com- mandments, *' Can't you let it alone ? " have perhaps agreed in nothing so much as in their persistent attacks on " Prize " or, as they are sometimes called, " Idle " Fellowships. This is not surprising, for, on the one hand, there was no more obvious opportunity for what the wise call conveyance ; and on the other there was hardly any state or condition of life so irritatingly ^ It is true that in one of his best known passages, while he blasphemes Burgundy (he repented later) and glorifies champagne — not, it must be re- membered, sparkling champagne, which was only invented ten years before his almost centenarian life ceased — he does not mention any Bordeaux. But I have not seen the fullest — there is, I believe, no actually complete — edition of him for many years. ^By the way, I have been rebuked in friendliest fashion for speaking of " Gascony " and not of " Guienne " in reference to claret. But " the Gascon wine " is too classical a phrase to be neglected. Lxvin PRIZE FELLOWSHIPS 257 tempting to one of the principal motives of modernity — the desire to make somebody else uncomfortable, even if you cannot directly transfer his comfort to yourself. Now there certainly were few more ideal positions than that of a College Fellow of the older type. True, like everything else, it had to be paid for — by enforced celibacy. And it may be contended that, as has happened to the occupants of most Paradises, those of this one gave it away by breaking the conditions, in the latest 'sixties or thereabouts, and insisting on being married.^ They held, in regard to Coleridge's beautiful phrase, " the too dear and inevitable Eve," that she was unavoidable, but was so dear in the one sense that she couldn't be /oo dear in the other. And, once more, she did as all Eves and all Pandoras of story have done : she blocked pro- motion ; she made it necessary for men to run * I do not intend to start a new heresy by suggesting that Adam insisted on being married ; let it be freely granted that his Paradise was not complete till he was (putting scandal about Lilith also quite out of the question). But like all Paradises, it Aad conditions, and, as with all, these were broken. 258 A SCRAP BOOK Lxvm about to pick up extra jobs to support families ; and, perhaps worst of all, she took them out of the colleges in which it was desirable that they should reside. But this was only indirectly the fault of the Commissioners : what was directly their fault was the unceasing endeavour (now almost if not completely successful) to do away with the " Prize," " Idle," or " Idle Prize " Fellowship itself. For this, to impartial and tolerably far- ranging judgments, was one of the very best features of the specially English University, hardly inferior to that which accompanied and led up to it — of which, indeed, it was the fruit as this was the flower — the undergraduate college- life of combined solitude and society, work and play, discipline and freedom, search after good, opportunity of resisting ill, and enjoyment of beauty. Of course it could be abused ; what good thing cannot ? But the idle Fellows of legend (and, let it be frankly admitted, of history too), who locked up the doors of their rooms and Lxviii PRIZE FELLOWSHIPS 259 never went near them, were at no time numerous ; sometimes made up to their colleges by legacies handsomely redeeming the rent ; and at any rate kept worse people out ! On the other hand, from a viewpoint as sternly practical as any, how many careers ^ of the greatest brilliancy — in law above all, in literature not seldom, in other ways not a few — have been made possible, and could, without some miracle of luck, hardly have been made possible otherwise ? It is diffi- cult to imagine anything more likely to develop any possibility of good in Art or Science, Philo- sophy or Theology, Poetic or Prose Letters, than a seven- or ten -year period — longer tenures might, without mischief, be subjected to some conditions — following the pupillary state. " Oh, but," some one is sure to say, " this is still kept by the allowance of Research Fellow- ^ I purposely put aside in this section the connection between the Universi- ties and the Church, which almost involved temporarily and partially idle Fellowships. But having had no interest whatever in the matter myself, I can say deliberately that hardly any worse blow to the weal of England has been dealt in the last half-century than the breaches of that connection. 26o A SCRAP BOOK lxvih ships for those who deserve them, while those who don't are kept out." Well, " Research " has been another of your " blessed words " for a long time now ; but it has been observed of the thoughtful — indeed I think it has already been observed here — that blessed words sometimes come to exercise a rather unblessed influence. I think I may claim to have done a little research in my own time, and to have had rather ample opportunities of observing how other people have done it in theirs. An invaluable thing it is, when it is valuable at all ; but there is perhaps nothing in all the wide range of human occupation which has been the occasion of more lost time and more lost labour. In literature the main danger is the losing of these on things not worth doing at all ; in both literature and science, the re- doing of things that have been done already.^ In a certain sense, of course, the idle Fellow will, ^ Besides, the specialised Research condition shackles : there is not the sense of freedom to choose and change — even to lie fallow if necessary — which belonged to those lesser gods, almost like the greater as peia fuiovrej, who used to walk in the gardens by Isis and by Cam. Lxix EIN GEIST DER VERNEINT 261 if he be worth anything, often, if not always, before long devote himself to some research, or production, or career, that will be of value to the world. He may write an Anatomy of Melancholy ; the odds are much shorter against his becoming Lord Chancellor or Archbishop of Canterbury. But he has another chance — where, but for his own fault, the odds are on, not against — of adding to the State of Things one of the most perfectly con- ditioned of lives : and that is a very great gain. LXIX. Ein Geist der stets verneint. — The exchange values of literature do not vary with those of the moneys, morals, wits, fortunes, etc., of the people who speak the language in which it was written. Moreover, as a matter of fact, Goethe did not attach to the remarkable phrase above borrowed exactly the same meaning as that in which I propose to use it. I do not accuse our twentieth century of being at all Mephistophelean in the usual sense of that word : it might be better if — to a not damnable extent — 262 A SCRAP BOOK lxix it were more so in some respects.^ But it seems to me to have a curious and excessive tendency to Verneinung — denial — in the sense of simple negation or reversal in practice, instead of in- dependent action. I do not think it at all neces- sary to take up the cudgels for things and persons Victorian. As King George III. said of some- thing else, they do not seem to me to require any apology, and, as the great Lord Derby said of somebody else's attacks, it pleases our abusers and doesn't hurt us. Moreover, the best of the younger generation seem to be growing tired of this stale and cheap iconoclasm. But too few people still seem to see that the abuse of Victorianism is a compliment in the thinnest and most ragged of disguises. If you don't know what you yourself really like, wish, etc., there are two ways of behaving. You may imitate somebody else, or you may go contrary to somebody else. Ages which ' Mephistopheles was nearly as " clayver " a man as Shakespeare, and he was distinctly amusing. I.XIX EIN GEIST DER VERNEINT 263 it is not necessary to specify have done the first ; others, whereof the present appears to be one, have preferred the second. Between these Hnes of thought and conduct come periods Hke the EHzabethan and the Victorian, which, sometimes wisely, sometimes unwisely, some- times prettily and sometimes not, do speak and think as they please, and not as some one else has, or has not, pleased. Perhaps there was no more thorough Victorian, in time as in character, in faults as in merits, than Thackeray. And Thack- eray, writing of something said by Maginn (who, though just Victorian in time, was a Georgian otherwise), says this about the dictates of Society — the " maxims of fashionable life " in respect of certain combinations of food and drink. " The maxim of fashionable life," says Thackeray, " is to drink what you will." Now I happened to come to some knowledge of life — fashionable and unfashionable — just as Thackeray, alas ! left it ; and I should say that " what you will," subject to certain general rules of good behaviour and 264 A SCRAP BOOK lxix ** good form " (which, coming from the nature of things, have never varied much), was the " maxim of society," not merely as to drink, but generally. And now the maxim seems to be the very curious one, " Speak, Think, or Do what a certain generation didnt think, speak, or do " — this maxim sometimes extending to the higher range of behaviour and ** form " itself. It has been my fortune (I purposely qualify the word neither with " good " nor " bad "), after reading few contemporary novels for some years, to have to read a great many lately. And I have discovered a most curious negative code in them — a really interesting result of what must evidently have been a careful, if sometimes erroneous, study of the manners of the last generation. As thus : Thou shalt not have much furniture in thy room ; Thou shalt not put any of it against the wall ; ^ Thou shalt not ' Above all, Thou shalt not have an overmantel. How interesting it is to remember that some half a century ago an overmantel was It. With a little Lxix EIN GEIST DER VERNEINT 265 wear a beard, and still less whiskers ; ^ Thou shalt not dine at home if thou canst pay for, or sponge for, a dinner at a restaurant. ** flushing " is anathema, but by changing one letter thou mayest "/lush," and while " eyeglasses " were a Victorian vanity,^ " monocles " are strictly correct. There are some positive commands, but they are chiefly concerned with purely mechanical matters, as : Thou shalt get into and out of taxis often, and always mention it, lest folk should suspect thee of using horse-cabs ; Thou shalt in the same way utilise and mention the utilisation of telephones — never forgetting to " hang up the receiver " ; and Thou shalt brass tray and blue china, some peacock feathers, and a Japanese fan or two, It was the Word, and the Sign, and the Phylactery. Now, I am told, it is the Sign of — a boarding-house. ^ " Whiskers " seem particularly abominable — an interesting fact to those who remember (arte a la crime and other things — even " whiskers " themselves. * As such, Bishop Wilberforce took professional advantage of it once at St. Giles's in a Lenten sermon. An unhappy youth was wearing one just in front of the pulpit, and Samuel preached straight at him for several minutes, with the look " as if he wasn't there," which is the most terrible of all looks, and making the great A of " Vanity " thunder through the church. 266 A SCRAP BOOK lxx always " push a si/ver cigarette-box across the table." One might, of course, carry on the investiga- tion into this curious process of Denial, Reversal, Topsyturvification, Destruction of what others have built, Throwing away what others have gained, and the like ; but it would be tedious on the one hand, and painful on the other. Let it only be pointed out how ridiculously in some cases, how deplorably in others, easy it is. Only in mechanical matters can it boast any acquisi- tiortj and any cool observer of the history of mechanical gains will find that they always have had, and so always will have, to be paid for. Your telephone makes a quiet life impossible : and if you want to know what Dante's folk looked like in the 20th Canto, just go to the top or bottom of Shaftesbury Avenue, or to Charing Cross, when motors are going strong. LXX. Education : FII. Its Cost and Con- duct. — On these two very large subjects it is Lxx EDUCATION : VII 267 only possible here to indicate conclusions stated succinctly. (i) No education should be entirely gratuitous, except in the case of orphans, paupers, children of criminals, etc., though of course the propor- tion of its cost should be adjusted to the income of the parents. (2) " Scholarships " should be reserved for cases of proved and indubitable merit. (3) The waste of endowments which took place fifty or sixty years ago under the guise of reform, should be, as far as possible, replaced by private munificence — which it is not likely to be as long as rates and taxes can be tapped at pleasure. (4) This latter source should be stopped as soon and to such a degree as possible. (5) The separation of Education from Clerical control is most unfortunate. It has done harm both to the Schools and to the Church — to the former by lowering the standard of morality, manners, and political atmosphere, as well as religion ; to the latter in education itself, and 268 A SCRAP BOOK lxx perhaps in the other respects likewise. An alternation of curacy and ushership did good to parishioners and schoolboys alike, and whatever the faults of the " Greek-play bishops " they were rarely Pussyfoots or Bolshevists by antici- pation. On the usually unpleasant subject of* Costs " a little more may be said. It may, indeed, seem ungracious for a man who has profited, and is profiting, by expenditure on Education, to cavil at its cost, but the seeming will hardly affect any clear-sighted or fair-minded person. No one denies that there should be such expenditure, or that some people may fairly benefit by it if they do their duty. But even the elder Mr. Weller's unusual combination of close logic and charitable forethought as to the neces- sity of death, lest the undertakers should suffer, might have boggled as to the expenditure of a hundred million annually on undertaking, with no safeguard that there is something to bury. I am myself more concerned with the thought Lxx EDUCATION : VII 269 that the not small number of persons who, after passing through my hands as a teacher, are them- selves teaching, may think it ungenerous of me to plead for " the axe." But, in the first place, I am not arguing for any levy on actual incum- bents. My conception of the necessity of that idiotically misunderstood and shamelessly mis- used word " Justice " is that every one should keep what he has, unless it has been gained by fraud or violence. Wages obtained by strikes or threats of strikes, or by making use of national emergencies, may be justly lowered. But though unwise and unworthy members of the teaching profession may have tried to organise trade-union methods, they have never yet been brought into very extensive activity ; and what most teachers have they deserve to keep. So far from being injured, they would be benefited by such changes as I should like to see introduced. They would not be pushed from their stools by such floods of novices ; they would not be worried on them by such mobs of pupils ; and, above all, they 270 A SCRAP BOOK lxxi would, to a large extent, be freed from what is the greatest curse of the teacher — the unteach- able oaf who has to be taught. ^ LXXI. A Blue Funk. — If a new application of the world-old practice of making a company tell stories on some general theme were wanted, a worse one might be taken than " The Bluest Funk of Your Life." I at least should have no difficulty as far as this seventy-seventh year of my life goes. Half a century plus half a decade ago, I was staying in Scilly for some little time : and a more delightful place than it then was I have seldom known. The too intensive cult of the daffodil ^ On one special point a word or two may be added. There is perhaps none of the numerous or innumerable " throwings open " of employment to both sexes which is less objectionable than that of teaching work. To begin with, it is no novelty — in not the worst times almost everybody was, I suppose, taught rudiments by mother, sister, or nurse, in very many cases with a period of " dame-school " to follow. I think, too, that women, in things that they can teach — which, if not all, are many — are better teachers than men. But of course this is a rather large subject, and requires a good deal of limiting and conditioning. One very important consideration is that there are sq many other things for men to do. Lxxi A BLUE FUNK 271 had not invaded it then, and though there was already much early potato growing, it did not disfigure. There is a peculiar charm about almost all islands ; but these — enclosed by the Atlantic, and themselves enclosing the almost land-locked Crow Sound — -seem to transfer to that Atlantic Pacific fascinations. Tregarthen's Hotel at St. Mary's was the most comfort- able of the now almost defunct kind of country inn known to the rather large experience of the present writer, except, perhaps, the King's Arms at Kingsbridge. Captain Tregarthen's daughters — for the landlord was also captain of the Pen- zance steamer — were — they will I hope, if alive, excuse my frankness — some of the jolliest girls in the West, where it is rather the wont of girls to be jolly ; and Star Castle with its Cavalier memories, and the Bishop lighthouse far out to sea, and Tresco with its caves and its flowers, and the minor islands with their quaint names, and all manner of other contrasted amenities, com- bined together to charm. Now you had tramp- 272 A SCRAP BOOK lxxi steamers from all sorts of places waiting in the Sound for orders, and occasionally productive in their cabins of wines unknown to St. Swithin's Lane, and queer-shaped bundles of unheard-of cigars. Now your boatmen, asked how far it was across to Brittany, would wink and say, ** Take you over some night this fine weather, if you like, sir. We know the way," the emphasis on the pronoun, taken together with the wink, suggesting dim notions of tricks played on the Revenue. Well, one day we were fishing for whiting and pollack with good success (the final bag was seventy-five, I think), till the sudden entire absence of bites made our man say, *' Seal about somewhere," and, sure enough, a wicked old grey head emerged before long not far from us. To give things time to recover, we made for one of the smaller islets, which the celebrated proprietor, most arbitrary ^ of the great clan 1 It was admitted that his arbitrariness had been on the whole a godsend to the islanders, whom he converted from pauperism to prosperity. Uut it A BLUE FUNK 273 of Smith, had cleared of its, I think, single occupant household, in order to make it a pre- serve for a peculiar breed of white rabbit. I took a fancy to land : my companion preferred to circumnavigate and pick me up at a point on the other side. When I got there, after startling many bunnies and catching one who proved himself amphibious, I saw the boat some hundred yards off one of those curious " bites " or *' scoops," as one might call them, which are common in granite coasts — places where the shore does not slope down to the water and does not rise high above it, but stops abruptly a little short of ordinary high-water mark, with a sharp drop of a few feet, and then a flattish beach. The drop was not great, and my eyes, not much better than they are now, saw nothing more than a greyish floor of stones below. So I simply jumped. But my feet had no sooner was sometimes a little trying — as when, conceiving himself to be safest from seasickness on the top step of the companion, he used to establish himself there, blocking the way alike up and down. T 274 A SCRAP BOOK lxxi struck the ground than that ground became alive with rats. (The rabbits might have warned me of the brutes' probable presence, if they had been more talkative or I more notice-taking.) It of course flashed across me that if they turned on me in the way of some gruesome stories, I should have very little chance. I had no stick in my hand ; the wall round the little bay, though not high, was high enough and perpendicular enough to make getting up it a very different thing from getting down ; and the boat was far enough off to give the rats a most unpleasant start. It was, of course, only a matter of a moment ; but a moment is quite enough for Fear. Luckily the rats were quite as much afraid of me as I was of them, and scuttled off to their holes forthwith, relinquishing their opportunity of giving a revanche-stnst to the term " rat-pit." The boat came up and took me in, and we re- turned to our fishing, Mr. Seal having ceased interloping — though I suppose, in fact, we were the interlopers. But I own to a Funk of the Lxxn TV A P PING OLD STAIRS 275 Bluest. It is not pleasant to climb the some- times almost concave and nearly always crumbling mud-cliffs of the Holderness coast of Yorkshire, with an unexpected tide coming in actually under your feet ; but one was not quite help- less there, and although I have always doubted the alleged unobjectionableness of drowning, it must surely be preferable to the fate of Bishop Hatto. Nevertheless, both experiences are good to remember. The most precious gift of any Present is that it provides you for the Future with a Past — at the best, enjoyed ; at even the worst, got over 1 LXXII. Wapping Old Stairs. — Some people may still remember that Thackeray, in that opening scene of The Newcomes which has few superiors in the overtures of the English Novel, speaks of *' Wapping Old Stairs " as " a ballad so sweet and touching that surely any English poet might be proud to be the father of it," and calls it " as quaint as charming." Some little 276 A SCRAP BOOK lxxh time ago I saw it described by Pennialinus as ** maudlin pseudo-nautical doggerel." Now if P. had stopped at his second word of abuse, or had substituted another for " doggerel," one could only have shrugged one's shoulders and agreed to agree with Mr. Titmarsh rather than with his successor in Fleet Street. But the latter, by calling it *' doggerel," has given a handle — as Aristophanes would say. That word is, of course, sometimes very loosely used, but never, by any one entitled to criticise verse at all, without reference to irregular or clumsy rhythm and metre, as well as sometimes, though rather less correctly, of things like Lillibullero^ which, though all right rhythmically, are wholly or mainly gibberish in language. These are not questions of mere " taste " — they concern accuracy or inaccuracy of reading and hearing. And in these respects " Wapping Old Stairs " is faultless. So, though our P. may be entitled to his own view of " maudlin," and may be as well qualified to decide on real and pseudo- Lxxm CRITICISM : VIII 277 nauticality as the captains of the Cautious Clara or of H.M.S. Pinafore^ it will go near to be feared shortly that he has, in respect of " doggerel," written himself down earless — if not also some- thing else that is not usually remarkable for earlessness. LXXIII. Criticism : VII I. Of Wheel-Cir clings and Poetic Visibility. — Within the present year, I think, it was allowed in one of the chief literary papers of England that Poe and Whitman were " the only great poets of America." And it was interesting to remember how very different orthodox and accepted literary opinion was, forty or fifty years ago. The singular recalcitrance of American taste to Poe was, indeed, never fully imitated here. I hope no Englishman of any mark in letters would have endorsed the late Mr. Henry James's estimate of " To Helen " and •' For Annie " and " The Haunted Palace " ; of " Ulalume " and " Annabel Lee " as " very valueless verse." But, as I may have said else- 278 A SCRAP BOOK Lxxm where, late in the 'seventies Sir (then Mr.) Leslie Stephen not only refused an introduced and in a manner invited essay by the present humble writer, but accompanied the refusal with a some- what schoolmasterly denunciation (for which it is fair to say he apologised later) of my description of Poe as having something of " the first order of poets." As for Whitman, we could not for a long time boast even partial appreciation of the right kind (for I fear Mr. Swinburne's was chiefly due to that curious delusion of his that he himself was a Republican). And here the American intelligentsia was much worse than ours. Its principal organ at that time, the Nation^ again somewhere in the 'seventies, got into quite " a state of mind " over an article of mine in the Academy eulogistic of Leaves of Grass. But whether any particular critic or critics at any particular time, in any particular country, had the good sense, good taste, or good luck to appreciate a particular poet when others did not, is a question of very little moment. It is of much Lxxiii CRITICISM : VIII 279 greater to perceive that in almost — I think quite — all cases of real poetry the wheel does come full circle in a happier sense than Edmund's. Sometimes it may revolve backwards and forwards like the actual wheel of a ship : sometimes it may go steadily forward ; sometimes, alas ! as steadily the other way. But these and other variations are chiefly due to the extraordinarily fluctuating character of what (to promote a new-comer in the language of weather-reports) we may call the *' visibility " of contemporary atmosphere as to poetry. It is certain that not everybody knows what to look for in poetry, and it is still more certain that at times the poetic panther is not glimpsed by — the poetic moment does not sound for — any one. To take two instances almost as different as possible, who really heard or saw Herrick in later mid-seventeenth century, Blake in latest eighteenth ? On the other hand, how many " tartan cuddies " (as the population of a Scotch village used to call the results of crossing experiments with zebras) have been mistaken 2 8o A SCRAP BOOK Lxxm for the true beast with the gaietta pelle^ and how many tinklings of the brassiest cymbals for the sound of Apollo's lute ? But when the real thing does come, sooner or later it will be seen and heard by fit ears and eyes. Those by which it is mis-seen and mis-heard, or unseen and unheard altogether, do not matter. They pass : it does not pass. The " visibility " clears or thickens ; but the object abides. It may even seem different objects to the different eyes that see and ears that hear it : the same four words of Sappho or of Shakespeare may be " criticism of life " to one, and divine marriage of sound with sense to another. The wireless may wander about the world a long time before it finds its receiver ; but reception is certain, sooner or later, so long as the utterance is extant, and even periods of general blindness or deafness are only intervals. To conclude these purposely brief notes on Criticism by one who may, without fatuity, claim somewhat more than average acquaintance with Lxxin CRITICISM: VIII 281 its works and ways at all recorded times — there is no intention of any silly patronising or belittling of its phases at the present day. It seems to be rather unusually active, and I myself have certainly nothing to complain of the activities of its youngest stalwarts. It has the not small advantage of being much better read than at some periods of the past. If it is a kittle " jargonish," that is a sort of rash which besets letters and goes off again. If it sometimes amuses itself with making, say, Socrates and Stevenson into " myths," the mythopoeic faculty is notoriously strong in the young. Its principal fault and danger seems to me to lie in what I may call the Resurrection of the Rule — the fault and the danger being in some cases aggravated by the jargon just mentioned, which tends to substitute misti- ness of atmosphere for the clearness which has to some extent compensated for Rule-tyranny in the past. Mere eccentricities, such as that one of the Miss Miltons wrote {not from dictation) Paradise Regained or that Shakespeare meant the 282 A SCRAP BOOK lxxiv Prince of Denmark to be a model and pattern of decisive thought and resolute action, matter little. I know that Stevenson, and I think that Socrates, would have enjoyed being a " myth " immensely. But the Rule in Criticism brings Hell and Death ; the readiness — fed by appetite for masterpieces of all sorts and trained by study of them — to accept the illimitable idiosyncrasy of the work for what it is in itself worth (as the advertise- ments say) to YOU, brings Heaven and Life. LXXIV. The Oxford Movement. — There is no book which I should have more liked to write, or should more like to have written, than a History of the Oxford Movement. There is, of course, a great bulk of what is politely called, and some- times is, " literature " on the subject — some of it by persons, such as the late Dean Church, to whom I acknowledge myself inferior with a cheerful humility — some of it mere partisan chaff and draff, or at the best mere paste-and-scissors book-making. But, whether the handling were Lxxiv THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 283 good or bad, the matter has never yet been quite ripe for it till pretty recently, and I think a layman might perhaps have treated it with some advan- tages over a cleric, provided that he also possessed advantages of another kind not quite so open to persons of the present ^ or any future genera- tion. Some of these advantages did, I think, fall to my lot. When I went up to Oxford itself in 1863, the Movement was out of Egypt and the Wilderness — was, in fact, in possession of most of the brains and a fair proportion of the benefices of the Church of England. The Evangelicals of the day were amazingly devoid, not merely of brilliancy, but of actual intellect : ^ the intellect of the new Broad Church party, though it could 1 Which also shows a slight tendency to prefer that 'valet-de-chambrc style of biography from which never came any good yet. We can all, if we care to go low enough, guess what the v. de c. has to tell us : we cannot always divine what he has not. 2 The chief exception, among my contemporaries who were known to me, was the almost celebrated " Bazely of Brasenose " — the " Oxford Evangelist." But I rather doubt whether, if Bazely had been born some years earlier, he would have been Evangelical at all. He was rather of the stuff that likes to swim against the tide. 2 84 A SCRAP BOOK lxxiv not be denied, was, as a once famous joke of the time had it, rather a " d — d intellect," and was as yet small in numbers. Ritualism — an excellent thing in its way — was still for the most part kept within rational bounds in that way ; and High Churchmen could claim in Pusey, who was still their fj,eya<;, a theologian who had no superior in Europe for learning, orthodoxy, and brains, combined with personal saintliness and charm : ^ in Keble a true poet, who was also (though people who could not read Latin might not know it for a long time) a critic of very unusual insight and catholicity. As for the " Lost Leader," Newman, he was about to exhibit (and did so, while I was still " up," in the Apologia) that singular compound of dialectical ingenuity, want of historic sense and judgment, intense spiritual nervousness, and marvellous power of expression, both poetical and rhetorical, which — for once — explains his life as well as his works. * Something in Pusey's voice always reminded me of something in Shelley's poetry — the colour-key of both being found in moonlight. Lxxiv THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 285 No doubt, as often happens, if not always, ' when the battle is won, the army was losing some of its force. Liddon, whom some would have had to be a Successor, always seemed to me an exceedingly inadequate one — a pleasantly tinkling cymbal enough, but nothing more, and with most of its tinklings echoes ; while, though there were excellent old soldiers, such as Church him- self, King,i afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, and others, the younger generation were not always of the strongest. I early joined the Brotherhood of the Holy Trinity (of which, I believe, I am not even yet an excommunicated member, though Father Benson, its then Master, and I once had a difficulty as to the exact meaning of one of its rules about glasses of wine) and so saw something of things satisfactory enough for the most part. ^ Most people who take any interest in church matters must have heard of Bishop King's admirable qualities as a bishop, but a good many may not know of his wit. Some one was once extolling poor Luke Rivington's eloquence before he " went over." " Yes," said King, " when Luke has preached and you get up from your knees, you think you'll never do again anything you've done before. But if the church is full and you're some time getting to the door, you begin to think you will." 286 A SCRAP BOOK lxxiv But Ultra-Ritualism, as it was sure to do, played increasing mischief with the Littlebrains of the party, and before long far worse mischief was caused by the unfortunate facts that Mr. Glad- stone was turning his political, while nominally^ preserving his ecclesiastical coat, and that Mr. Disraeli, having no ecclesiastical coat of his own, borrowed, or hired, the wrong one. This is not the place to dilate on the matter. Only let me repeat that I should have liked to write two volumes — or, by 'r Lady, three — on the History of the Oxford Movement from the time when it began, almost equally, to startle High and Dry, Low and Greasy, to that when it may be said to have given up the ghost in face of National Assemblies and Revised Prayer-books and Pseudo- High-Church Bolshevists, and clerics who will 1 How even W. E. G. — to whom nothing that he himself did was wrong or inconsistent — could bring himself to rob the Irish Church and to strip the English of nearly all her hold on the Universities, has always been a slight puzzle to me. That when he had done these things he thought them all right goes without question. But as to wliat made him do them, I fear that the common explanation, " Vote-catching in general and his defeat at Oxford in particular," is only too correct. Lxxv SECRET DE POLICHINELLE 287 take up any mischievous or hypocritical fad — Pussyfootism, Female Preaching, Divorce-while- you-wait-or-don't-wait, Belief in a Fundamental Stuff and Disbelief in the Virgin Birth, Fellowship with Dissenters, Disestablishment, Disendow- ment, Dis-anything you like, provided they may — not " save," but — " catch " some.^ LXXV. Un Secret de Polichinelle. — Early in this year I happened to say to one of our most distinguished historical scholars, " Does anybody know any history now ? " and he replied, more suoy sedately, " I rather think not." A day or two later I read in a newspaper, which had recently advocated Irish Home Rule in the most energetic manner, that '* the passing of British [they meant English] responsibility had disclosed once for all the true cause of recent Irish troubles." So, ^ In what a Jesuit critic once called historia mixta, i.e. fiction qualifying and qualified by fact, Mr. Compton Mackenzie has lately been portraying, more vividly and truthfully than agreeably, the crapauds impre-vus and the froids limafons, who, with some more fiery evil beasts, have made their appear- ance at the " Coucher du Soleil Anglo-Catholi