THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 t 
 
 Ex Libris 
 ISAAC FOOT
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 Ex Libris 
 ISAAC FOOT
 
 REMNANTS
 
 REMNANTS 
 
 By DESMOND MacCARTHY 
 
 Ml 
 
 LONDON 
 
 CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD. 
 
 1918
 
 
 g 
 
 ^
 
 Acknowled gme7it 
 
 My thanks are due to the editors and proprietors 
 of those papers in which these articles appeared ; 
 namely, The New Statesman^ The New fVitness^ 
 The Eye IVitness^ and The SpeaJ^er.
 
 Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Thk Poet and the Looking-Glass . . i 
 
 The Snob-Doctor . ... 8 
 
 A Hermit's Day . . . . 22 
 
 Two Historic Houses . . . . 40 
 
 Hero Worship . . , . 48 
 
 Meredith's Method . , . . 5^ 
 
 Samuel Butler : an Impression , . , 62 
 
 Dan Lend : the Life of a Droll . . 69 
 
 Pelissier and "The Follies" . . . 76 
 
 Miss Ethel Levey . . . . 83 
 
 Lord George Sanger . . . . 87 
 
 Lion Taming . . . -9^ 
 
 The Wonder Zoo . . . . 107 
 
 Castles in the Air . . . , 120 
 
 Tears . . . . . 126 
 
 "Bohemia" . . . • • '35 
 
 Society and Solitude, or his First Disciple . 143 
 
 vii
 
 VIU 
 
 Contents 
 
 KaloprosQpy . 
 
 Too Much Tact 
 
 The Brothers Brindle . 
 
 "The Padded Man " 
 
 Mr. Shaw on Shakespeare 
 
 The G.O.M. . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 167 
 
 175 
 194 
 
 202 
 
 210
 
 The Poet and the hooking' Glass 
 
 IT was a vulgar little sitting-room, crowded 
 with genteel gimcracks of dead old maids 
 and chairs and tables from timid homes, long 
 ago broken up, such as find inevitably their last 
 resting-place in furnished lodgings. Beside the 
 window- fern lay a magazine a year old and a ten- 
 penny Pickwick^ and above the poet's head the 
 gas, flaming within a pink glass shade, made a 
 tiny steady noise, like the singing in a tired man's 
 ears. He was thinking " how exquisitely the 
 world was fitted to the mind." All that day 
 thought and imagery had come to him, it 
 seemed, perfectly fused, and the excitement 
 of his own words had drawn out from their 
 lurking-places thoughts he had never had be- 
 fore and would not have again. Now he felt 
 empty and at rest, as though he would never
 
 2 The Poet and the Lookhig-GIass 
 
 want to write again. He had walked the 
 streets quickly that afternoon, as a man who 
 uses the stirring crash and hurry of an un- 
 intelligible orchestra to feed his inner dream, 
 and he had written, — written surely well ? 
 Surely he had seldom had so good a day ; 
 and he had waited so long, too, for that 
 critical sensation which would tell him he 
 could write. It had come and he had written. 
 " My peace now is like a pool beneath a water- 
 fall, which the waterfall has made," he thought, 
 and he began to muse about himself. 
 
 The fire suddenly settled upon its cinders 
 and flamed. Looking at it, he remembered 
 how, in his home, the reflection of the fire 
 on the black, uncurtained windows used to 
 fascinate him as a child ; how while others 
 sat talking round the real fire, he used to 
 creep under the table, and, lifting the hanging 
 cloth, watch the reflection flickering and burn- 
 ing harmlessly among the laurel bushes out- 
 side. It had been his fire, which no one else 
 seemed to notice. Perhaps from the beginning 
 he had loved more the reflections of things
 
 The Poet and the Loo kifig-G lass 3 
 
 than things themselves. So he had known 
 what it was to live in an absolute, intimate 
 solitude. O, he had had his panics ; his 
 frantic dashes into the circle of warmth and 
 human intercourse ; and he remembered he 
 had once written an ironic poem about a 
 youth, a kind of ecstatic prodigal of contempla- 
 tion, who, terrified that life was slipping past 
 him, had run towards others with outstretched 
 arms, crying. " I am coming back. I come, I 
 come," much to their perplexity, and ulti- 
 mately to his own. But looking back, he did 
 not now know whether to be more grate- 
 ful for the hunger, once sharp as his 
 hopes had been great, which had driven 
 him outward, or to the aloofness which had 
 always softly and inevitably drawn him back 
 again. It was to both he owed it that now 
 when he shut himself in with his imagination 
 " the shapes came eddying forth." 
 
 He smiled and sighed ; got out of his stiif 
 rep chair, the springs of which resounded like 
 a drum, and turned down the gas. Surely he 
 would feel that hunger again ; he was still
 
 4 The Poet and the Looking-Glass 
 
 gloriously at the mercy of experience — would 
 be, perhaps, until he died. Only that terror 
 of his youth, of missing everything, he would 
 feel no more. For now he knew he was a poet. 
 Solitude was no longer suffocating, dumb ; he 
 could speak — had spoken ; to whom he did 
 not know. When he tamed an exuberant 
 sentence, or manipulated a metre, he often 
 thought of so and so or so and so ; but 
 his meaning — who was that for ? A listen- 
 ing silence over-arching like the sky the little 
 creatures of his mind. 
 
 How many of them there were ! He had 
 never realised, he thought, before, how much 
 he had actually done. One by one they came 
 before him ; sometimes as he had seen them 
 across the footlights, sometimes as he had first 
 conceived them, fresh, undamaged, radiantly 
 promising, sometimes a little changed as though 
 he had indeed made them alive, and they, like 
 others, had gone their own way with time. 
 There were the lovers in whose mouths he had 
 put his own conception of the playful and 
 tender genius of man's love for woman ;
 
 The Poet and the Looking-Glass 5 
 
 there were those who had spat out his rage with 
 life that would not let him love it more ; 
 there the queer gnome characters he had 
 found within himself squatting like toads in 
 the heart of marble virtues his hammer had 
 broken. Then came the furry, four-pawed 
 creatures into whom he had entered, the 
 insects to which he had lent a tiny " spark-like 
 consciousness," all the scenes in uhich on in- 
 animate things he had bestowed " a life com- 
 patible with infinite motionless repose." He 
 remembered, too, how often he had let him- 
 self down like a spider h}- its thread into his 
 own obscurities ; how, when he had " drawn a 
 sword against what he hated, the lightning of 
 heaven had seemed to flash along it and strike 
 before he struck." He remembered how the 
 idea of those he met had pre) cd upon him and 
 devoured his ner\es, how he had appropriated 
 their jo}s and sufferings for his own, and 
 springing from his chair in excitement he 
 shouted, " I am the most generous and the 
 most selfish of men. Who dares to say I have 
 not Hved ? "
 
 6 The Poet and the Lookwg-Glass 
 
 The silence which followed the sound of his 
 own voice reminded him there were others in 
 the house. " Good heavens, I shall wake them 
 all up," he muttered. Then, turning round, 
 he felt a violent shock ; he was not alone. At 
 the other end of the room stood a shadowy 
 little figure facing him with an ominous 
 startled attention. He could see the gleam of 
 the firelight in its spectacles, and a hank of 
 greyish hair. The next moment he remem- 
 bered the looking-glass. But the sense of an 
 alien presence had been so acute for a second 
 that, lighting his bedroom candle, he advanced 
 almost cautiously towards his own reflection, 
 as though investigating an independent object. 
 Slowly they came towards each other, and he 
 raised the candle. The little man opposite 
 him peered, stooping forward till he seemed 
 about to touch him with the end of his long 
 inquisitive nose ; both stopped. His fore- 
 head was scratched with tiny confused lines, 
 and the eyes in so restless a face had an odd 
 look as though not belonging to it, as if, how- 
 ever much it changed, they would remain the
 
 The Poet and the hooking-Glass y 
 
 same, lustrous and blank. The poet stared at 
 himself : " Well, you are an odd little fellow ! " 
 He burst out laughing, and walked quickly up 
 to bed.
 
 The Snob-Doctor 
 
 PERHAPS some of my readers also received 
 a copy of the prospectus, which I found 
 enclosed in a large envelope of superfine 
 quality on my breakfast table the other morn- 
 ing. The drift of it was unusual. In this 
 document, Mr. Ponde, m.a., of Harley Street, 
 announced that his consulting hours were 
 10 to I and 3 to 5, and that between those 
 hours he was at the service of any one who 
 wished to consult him about any uneasiness 
 they might have felt with regard to their 
 social position. " It is not uncommon," the 
 prospectus ran, " for those whose accomplish- 
 ments, education, incomes and good sense 
 might be expected to render them immune 
 from such uneasiness, to suffer intermittently, 
 or even chronically, from distressing doubts as 
 to their own claims to gentility, especially in
 
 TJie Snob-Doctor 
 
 the company of those who set store by such 
 distinctions. Their trouble has been, in most 
 cases, much aggravated by reserve, such matters 
 being regarded as too delicate and invidious 
 to be touched upon in conversation. For 
 although the claims of the absent to be lady 
 or gentleman, as the case may be, are often 
 brightly discussed among their friends, the 
 person concerned derives little benefit from 
 these discussions ; on his or her appearance 
 the conversation is too often turned into other 
 channels. On the other hand, free communica- 
 tion on the part of the patient about his own 
 sufferings and symptoms — the open-mind cure 
 — ^wide experience has convinced Mr. Ponde 
 is the first step towards healthy recovery. He 
 therefore holds himself prepared to examine 
 into and advise all upon such cases between 
 the hours mentioned above. The strictest 
 confidence is, of course, guaranteed." 
 
 Enclosed were a number of testimonials 
 announcing complete recovery from fear of 
 flunkeys, imintentional condescension, unwill- 
 ing humility, chronic oblivion of unsuccessful
 
 lo The Snob-Doctor 
 
 relations and cases of the most virulent com- 
 pound snobbishness. One well-known novelist 
 writes : " Since undergoing three weeks' treat- 
 ment at the hands of Mr. Ponde, dining out 
 in fashionable houses has been an unmixed, 
 pleasure to me. ... I no longer experience a 
 painful acuity of delight on such occasions, nor 
 on returning h®me to my wife and flat do I 
 suffer from any wistful sense of depression. 
 . . . The scenes of social life in my books 
 have gained, too, in verisimilitude. Such 
 phrases as ' undefinable charm,' * easy breadth 
 of manner,' ' gracious frankness ' no longer 
 come with undue frequency from my pen ; 
 nor have I lately let slip such sentences as, 
 ' Certainly,' he replied, ' wiping the duchess's 
 cream from his moustache.' " 
 
 A business man of great resources and wide 
 influence also writes : " Thanks to IMr. Ponde, 
 I am a richer man than I should otherwise 
 have been. I have not only refused a peerage, 
 but I am much harder to get round. It is 
 almost impossible now to- persuade me to 
 employ idle young men of good connections
 
 The Snob-Doctor 1 1 
 
 to the detriment of my own business. The 
 bracing effect o£ the Ponde treatment upon 
 my own deportment may be illustrated by an 
 extract from a letter written by my youngest 
 daughter to her brother at Oxford. ' Papa,' 
 she writes, ' is changed. He no longer fusse? 
 about like a little dog that has been scratched 
 behind the ears when Lady X. drives over here 
 in the afternoon.' " 
 
 Although Mr. Ponde's fee was high, two 
 guineas for a first consultation, my curiosity 
 was so strong that I felt that I must visit this 
 interesting specialist. I flattered myself that 
 I stood in no need of his professional advice ; 
 but half an hour later, on ringing his bell in 
 Harley Street, I confess I felt the qualms of a 
 patient. As the man-servant opened the door 
 my nervousness was increased by having to 
 step aside for an elegant lady hurrying out in 
 a state of unmistakable agitation. She was 
 adjusting her veil, on the meshes of which a 
 tear trembled, and I noticed in the palm of her 
 little gloved hand, squeezed into a tight ball, a 
 tiny, damp, cobwebby handkerchief. I began
 
 1 2 The Snob-Doctor 
 
 to conceive a distinctly alarming side of Mr. 
 Ponde. 
 
 In the waiting-room, decorated with the 
 usual massive bronze ornaments and large, in- 
 expensive oil paintings, sat two other patients, 
 one of whom lowered his paper for a moment 
 to throw a penetrating glance at me as I 
 entered. After a few minutes, this one — an 
 elderly, grizzled man, with pince-nez and per- 
 fectly dressed — ^was silently summoned from 
 the door. He got up with prompt determina- 
 tion, crossed the room with a quick military 
 step, and left me alone with a pair of legs and 
 the broad sheet of the opened T^imes facing 
 me in the chair opposite. The boots con- 
 veyed nothing ; the trousers were black. 
 Could he be a clergyman ? I gave a barking 
 cough, but the large, clean hands only shifted 
 their grasp upon the crackling paper, and 
 raised it a little higher, displaying a well-filled 
 waistcoat and a watch-chain. However, I 
 thought, he must reveal himself presently, 
 and I relapsed into wondering vaguely what 
 could be the matter with him. At last the
 
 The Snoh-Doctor 1 3 
 
 front door shut again and the man-servant 
 appeared ; but to my great disappointment 
 my companion did not move. " I have a 
 definite appointment at a definite hour," said 
 a sonorous voice behind the paper. " I prefer 
 to wait." 
 
 The consulting room was large with dark 
 corners. Mr. Ponde, a pale, beardless man of 
 forty, was standing before the fire with his 
 coat-tails up. Without shaking hands, but 
 with a reassuring, almost humorous smile, he 
 motioned me to a great chair, on which the 
 full light from the long garden window fell, 
 while he sat down himself at a large writing- 
 table. Taking from a drawer a heavy indexed 
 volume, he asked me my name and address, 
 the amount of my income, my father's pro- 
 fession, my own, if I was married, who my 
 grandfather was, my maternal grandfather, 
 whether I was richer or poorer than my 
 parents ; and while I was answering these 
 questions he looked at me narrowly yet not 
 unpleasantly. I was just explaining that my 
 wife's father imported bananas when he said
 
 14 The Snob-Doctor 
 
 quickly : " You should be more careful about 
 your clothes ; but I will give a few practical 
 hints presently." After having jotted down 
 my replies in the ledger, he got up and stood 
 again before the fire, this time warming his 
 hands and with his back to me. " Well," he 
 said heartily, " I have seen very little of you, 
 but I can tell you one thing positively : you 
 need not change your address. You can stand 
 Pimlico. Now tell me your symptoms." 
 
 Oddly enough, I was not prepared for this. 
 Quite a long pause followed. 
 
 " I know," he began in a steady, kind voice, 
 " these things are difficult to tell, but you must 
 treat me with the same confidence as you would 
 your medical man or I can do nothing for 
 you." 
 
 As I could not collect my wits and remained 
 silent, he went on : " However strange and 
 delicately humiliating your own case may seem 
 to you, let me assure you it is not an excep- 
 tional one. My experience enables me to tell 
 you confidently that others whom you would 
 not suspect have felt the same. Come, I will
 
 The Snob-Doctor i 5 
 
 ask you some questions. Do you, for instance, 
 feel more embarrassed — excited, shall we say — 
 when actually in the company of your social 
 superiors or afterwards on the way home ? 
 An important temperamental difference is in- 
 volved, and I must be quite clear as to the 
 category to which you belong, if I am to 
 diagnose your case and prescribe for you." 
 
 At this point, I could not help telling him 
 that it was no uneasiness whether I was, or 
 was not, a gentleman that had brought me to 
 him, but merely curiosity to hear what he 
 would say. He smiled. " Do you know thirty 
 per cent of my patients tell me that ? " This, 
 I confess, staggered me, and a dreadful mis- 
 giving crept into my mind. " Could I all the 
 time have felt unconsciously that . . . ? " 
 But his scepticism nettled me, and I told him 
 rather tartly that a man of my descent, with a 
 pedigree going back to a Giant Mog who lived 
 202 A.D., could not possibly doubt his gentility 
 or suspect himself of being a snob. 
 
 " There you make a great mistake," he said 
 quickly. " Some of the most difficult cases of
 
 1 6 The ^nob-Doctor 
 
 diffident snobbishness that come under my 
 notice are precisely those in which a lively 
 sense of lineage is combined either with poverty 
 or with a position to which no dignity is 
 attached. Oh, when alone, such people think 
 themselves equals of anybody and do not 
 worry their heads about such matters, but in 
 the company of important personages they 
 are apt to be as uneasy about themselves as 
 the most conventional parvenu, and, on the 
 opposite sort of occasion, to be as insufferably 
 condescending. My usual method of treating 
 such patients is to make them fetch their 
 pedigree and to point out that as a matter of 
 creeping fact they are as much descended 
 from women as from men. In forty-nine 
 cases out of fifty pride of birth collapses under 
 this test. I have had hundreds of letters from 
 patients, thanking me in glowing terms, for 
 having removed secretly nourished pretensions 
 which prevented them from behaving to every- 
 body in a natural straightforward sort of way. 
 But, of course, w^hen the descent is unimpeach- 
 able on both sides, the case requires more
 
 The Snob-Doctor 1 7 
 
 delicate handling. The most difficult case of 
 diffident snobbishness I think I ever treated, 
 was that of a great-nephew of a Duke who 
 happened also to be a dentist : he died. In- 
 deed, the poor relations of great houses are, 
 alas, almost incurable. And when they have 
 intermarried, I usually say quite frankly, ' Dear 
 Madam or Sir, as the case may be, you are 
 wasting your money, I can do nothing for you.' 
 You know these people, how rude and dis- 
 agreeable they often are to the people they 
 meet staying at the great house on their annual 
 visit there, and how they work the head of the 
 family for all he is worth the rest of the year, till 
 his name becomes a perfect bugbear to their 
 neighbours at home. 
 
 " Your case, however, is happily different, 
 but your mention just now of A log (do not 
 wince at my flippancy) suggests that you might 
 find it salutary to follow up some of the female 
 branches of your pedigree. Anyhow, try it, 
 try it by all means. But look here, I must give 
 you a warning. It is, indeed, part of the pre- 
 scription. Don't, in consequence of your in-
 
 1 8 The Snob-Doctor 
 
 vestigations, pull yourself together like a man 
 who looks facts in the face and proclaim your- 
 self heartily ' middle-class.' If you catch your- 
 self doing that, believe me, you are not cured. 
 Plus 9a change, plus c'est la memc chose. And 
 a word of counsel with regard to criticising 
 other people. Don't think that snobbishness 
 in all its forms is a disease peculiar to any one 
 class ; it is sporadic. Let me disabuse you of 
 the dangerous idea that it is a middle-class 
 ailment. Only the other day a man of the 
 people, as the phrase goes, a Labour leader, 
 mark you, came to me literally pale with dis- 
 tress, having experienced a peculiar and de- 
 licious glow while driving with a Marchioness. 
 He concluded he was tainted with snobbish- 
 ness, a thing he abhorred and despised ; and 
 having marked it down in himself he now saw 
 it sticking out not only of determined Radicals, 
 but even out of some of his colleagues. He 
 has put himself entirely in my hands, and at 
 the present stage of his ailment the principal 
 mischief against which I am contending is the 
 subtlety and persistence of his penetration.
 
 The Snoh-Doctor 1 9 
 
 He goes about snuffing for the tainted breeze, 
 damning and swearing with tears in his eyes, 
 and whiffing it everywhere. When he comes 
 here, T say to him, ' Old chap ' (he Hkes being 
 called old chap), ' old chap, you have missed 
 your vocation, you're another Thackeray.' I 
 am trying, you see, a little chaff-treatment. 
 
 " Again, at the other end of the scale, one 
 of the saddest cases of snobbishness taking the 
 form of Chronic Condescension, is a young 
 Countess, a sweet, charming creature with a 
 heart of gold. She comes to mc week after 
 week, always with the same lamentable story : 
 ' Oh, Mr. Ponde, it's too dreadful. I canH help 
 feeling, whenever I do anything kind, even 
 when it's a little ordinary thing, that it is 
 quite specially kind as coming from me. It's 
 too, too awful. I can't even hand a cup of 
 tea to an author or an artist whom I admire 
 intensely without feeling somehow that he 
 ought to respond as though it were a great 
 favour. Dear, dear Mr. Ponde, tell me what 
 I ought to do.' Well, I always try to spare mr 
 patients all the pain I can, but this morning,
 
 20 The Snob-Doctor 
 
 in her case, I was driven to touch a nerve. 
 I simply told her, ' My dear lady, they all 
 notice it and grin about it behind your back.' 
 It quite broke her down, but I think it may 
 do her good." 
 
 Mr. Ponde paused, and smiled at me : "I 
 have talked to you about my other patients, 
 but that is part of my method. In one sense, 
 you are an unsatisfactory patient. I mean," 
 he added kindly, seeing, no doubt, a look of 
 consternation on my face, " from my point of 
 view. For I am conscientiously compelled to 
 prescribe for you that for the present you do 
 not visit me again. On these topics you must 
 give your mind a good rest. You have told 
 me you are a journalist, and it will do you no 
 harm, nor me either, to give a certain publicity 
 to our interview, but after that let the subject 
 drop." We parted, and I never found it so 
 little embarrassing to give a professional man 
 his fee. On leaving the house, owing no doubt 
 to some miscalculation on his part, I found 
 myself confronted with the person who had 
 sat behind The limes in the waiting-room. I
 
 The Snob-Doctor 2 1 
 
 recognised his smooth, dramatic face in a 
 moment, having myself heard him lash the sins 
 of Society from the pulpit. I sat under him 
 last Sunday ; the congregation was thinner. 
 His denunciations lacked something of their 
 old romantic gusto. " The Ponde treatment is 
 working," I thought ; " I really believe he is 
 better, but it will lose him his congregation."
 
 A Hermifs Day 
 
 BLUE damask curtains were drawn across 
 the windows, but one long slit of day- 
 light made every shadowy object in the room 
 discernible : a cold white pyramidal stove op- 
 posite the marble fireplace, the portraits and 
 the magnificent mirror on the walls, five writ- 
 ing-tables piled with neat papers, and under 
 its canopy of blue silk the low, plain bed, with 
 a deep cleft in the swelling pillow. Absolute 
 stillness reigned. 
 
 Outside a dazzling sun had long ago drunk 
 up the freshness of morning. The balustrade 
 of the Chateau steps was warm to the touch, 
 and a surprising number of men were moving 
 about watering newly planted trees. In the 
 near distance a busy little village hummed and 
 clanked and smoked, while far off, across fields 
 
 of corn and vines, higher in the sky than the 
 
 2a
 
 A Hermit' s Day 23 
 
 eye expected, above a scarf of cloud, shone 
 mildly the snow mountains of Geneva. 
 
 Presently a quietly dressed man entered, fol- 
 lowed by a lackey in a gorgeous livery carrying 
 before him a satin suit with long lace cuffs, 
 white stockings, and a pair of red-heeled shoes. 
 At the rattle of drawn curtains a hollow groan 
 came from the bed, and the being in it rolled 
 round to the light. Part of a turban with wisps 
 of grey hair hanging from it, part of a high 
 yellow forehead, and one large, uncommonly 
 bright eye became visible between the peaks of 
 the pillow. The eye watched the movements 
 of the two men with the suspicious intensity 
 of a jackdaw fixing some shining object. Sud- 
 denly a voice of startling resonance — could it 
 proceed from the old creature in the bed ? — 
 broke the silence. 
 
 " I am dying," it said. 
 
 The valet continued methodically to lay out 
 the clothes. 
 
 More groans followed. 
 
 The voice spoke again, this time with a more 
 plangent, peremptory ring :
 
 24 A Hermit' s 'Day 
 
 * I am dying, my poor Wagniere, I am 
 dying ! Fetch Madame Denis." 
 
 " Certainly, monsieur." 
 
 The turbaned figure in the bed sat up sud- 
 denly. 
 
 " What ! ! Ten thousand panniers full 
 of devils ! I tell the man I'm dying, 
 and he says, * Certainly, monsieur ' ! Fly, 
 idiot ! " 
 
 The valet and the footman vanished, and 
 the emaciated old head sank back upon the 
 pillows with a gasp. 
 
 In a large room, beyond the antechamber, a 
 man and two women were standing in the recess 
 of a' sunny window, waiting. The first was a 
 priest of singularly simple, self-indulgent aspect, 
 with a brown smear of snuff under his nose and 
 the stains of many meals upon his cassock ; 
 and of the two women, one was middle- 
 aged, plump, and self-important, and dressed 
 in a manner which exhibited at once an 
 absence of youthful charms and a desire to 
 possess them, while the younger, who held an 
 ape in her arms, though not very pretty, had a
 
 A Hermit's Day 25 
 
 fresh, sweet, round, good-tempered face. The 
 sound of voices, exaggerated by the well of the 
 hal], penetrated through the open door. A 
 tall man, whose fine physique and flawless 
 health were accentuated by the severe neatness 
 of his dress, was seen mounting the stairs, 
 laughing as he listened to the vivacious chatter 
 of a Swiss servant-girl. 
 
 " I assure Monsieur," she was saying, " it 
 was because he couldn't wait for his coffee to 
 cool. He burnt his mouth, and so he poured 
 the rose-water into his cup. I told him he 
 was more stupid than any one of his own 
 turkeys, in spite of all his cleverness. Oh, he 
 was sick ! He kept on making himself sick all 
 day, and he swallowed all the medicines in the 
 house — though he said he didn't believe in 
 them." 
 
 *' Hold your tongue, Barbara ! " exclaimed 
 the round-about lady, moving majestically to- 
 wards them. " How dare you speak like that 
 of my Lord ! Doctor Tronchin." She made 
 a low curtsey. 
 
 " Madame, your servant," he replied, with
 
 2 6 A Hermit's Day 
 
 his hand on his chest. " The servant also of 
 Mademoiselle Belle et Bonne," he added, with 
 another bow and a smile to the younger. " And 
 how is the illustrious old baby this morning, 
 Mademoiselle ? " 
 
 At that moment the other door opened and 
 the secretary appeared. 
 
 " Mesdames, M. de Voltaire bids me tell 
 you he is dying. Will you come at once ? " 
 
 " Order breakfast and the clyster to be 
 brought up immediately," said Madame Denis, 
 leading the way. 
 
 The sage lay still with his withered arms out- 
 side the coverlet ; at the sound of steps he 
 began to moan softly. " Belle et Bonne " 
 went up to the bed and kissed him. His eyes 
 opened, and he looked at her intently for a 
 moment. " It is life kissing death," he said 
 presently, raising his hand and letting it drop 
 gently on the counterpane. The next moment 
 he was twisting in a spasm of colic and utter- 
 ing imprecations. 
 
 " Oh, my poor Galas, what must you have 
 suffered ! Scoundrels, fiends, devils ! Ou-
 
 A Hermit' s Day I'j 
 
 000 ! Ou-ooo ! Ecrasez Tinfame ! Quick, 
 Tronchin ! My friend ! how I suffer ! " 
 
 After the physician's deft injection he was 
 propped up with pillows, and, exhausted but 
 smiling, he began to enjoy the sunshine and 
 to feel hungry. A table with coffee was pushed 
 near the bed. The day had begun. The 
 phoenix had risen once more from its ashes. 
 
 " Ah ! my Tronchin, a grain of opium and a 
 little water can do more for men than all the 
 systems of philosophy." 
 
 Madame Denis began to pour out coffee, the 
 hermit of Ferney to mumble his crust, Luc, 
 the ape, to play with the curtains of the bed, 
 and " Belle et Bonne " and Doctor Tronchin 
 to take their breakfast. 
 
 " Adam, where art thou ! " called the sage 
 in his sombre and majestic tones, and the fat 
 priest sidled awkwardly into view. 
 
 " Sit down, Adam. You have eaten of the 
 Tree of Knowledge ; so perhaps ^vhile I break- 
 fast you will explain to me some of the contra- 
 dictions which are so necessary to the salvation 
 of the soul. 

 
 28 A Hermit' s Day 
 
 " Monsieur, if Monsieur will forgive . . ." 
 
 " Adam, the Tree of Knowledge is a little 
 worm-eaten now ; its roots are the works of 
 rabbis, of Pope Gregory the Great, of Saint 
 Thomas and Saint Bonaventura, of Saint 
 Bernard, Luther, Calvin, the reverend Father 
 Garasse, of Bellarmine, Suarez, and of the 
 doctors Tournelli and Tamponet. Its bark is 
 wrinkled ; its leaves sting like nettles ; its 
 fruit is bitter as gall, and the juice of it flies to 
 the head like opium ; it produces sleep ; in- 
 deed, it makes everyone go to sleep ; but as 
 soon as they wake up they carry their heads 
 very high and look down on humanity ; they 
 proceed to speak unintelligible words which 
 often bring them considerable wealth. How 
 was it, Adam, to begin at the beginning, since 
 it was said that the day you eat of this fruit 
 you would ' surely die,' that you managed 
 nevertheless to live another nine hundred and 
 thirty years ? " 
 
 " Monsieur . . . ." 
 
 " Don't tease the poor Father, uncle," said 
 " Belle et Bonne."
 
 A Hermit's Day 29 
 
 " The poor Father, indeed ! The poor 
 Calas ! Ah, my child, as long as people con- 
 tinue to believe absurdities they will continue 
 to commit atrocities ! No, Adam, you must 
 travel. We will play chess when you come 
 back. You must penetrate into the land of 
 Nod, where Cain built the city of Enoch, and 
 there investigate carefully the number of 
 masons, carpenters, ironworkers, locksmiths, 
 weavers, shepherds, farmers, labourers, and 
 overseers he employed, when there were still 
 only four or five people on the face of the 
 earth. Remember to tell me about the giants 
 the angels begot upon the daughters of men. 
 Only be careful, above all things, to address 
 them civilly, for they are deficient in humour. 
 I rely upon you to climb Mount Ararat, to 
 examine the remains of the ark which was 
 built of gopher wood, and to verify the cal- 
 culations which the illustrious M. Le Pelletier 
 made on the spot. Measure the height of the 
 mountain itself, and afterwards the altitude 
 of Chimborazo in Peru, and of our Mont Saint- 
 Gothard ; then calculate how many inches of
 
 30 A Hermit's Day 
 
 rainfall were required to cover them. Greet 
 Father Noah, too, who first planted the vine, 
 for us all. We all deplore his having got drunk. 
 Do not imitate him in this respect. And don't 
 fail to visit the tower of Babel, or to find out 
 if Saint Gregory of Tours has estimated its 
 dimensions correctly. From Babel you must 
 go to Ur, in Chaldea. Try to discover from 
 Abraham's descendants why he left that 
 beautiful country to buy a tomb in Hebron 
 and corn in Memphis ; why he told everybody 
 his wife was his sister ; and, above all, what 
 face-wash she used which made her still beauti- 
 ful at ninetv." 
 
 At this moment Wagniere entered with 
 letters, and announced that the courier had 
 arrived from Geneva and also several gentle- 
 men. 
 
 " Save me," exclaimed the sage, holding up 
 his hands devoutly, " save me from my friends, 
 O God, and I will deal with my enemies myself. 
 Who have come to see the rhinoceros this 
 morning ? What, that fellow ! I wrote to 
 him last week saying that, since I was dead, I
 
 A Hermit' s Day 3 i 
 
 should no more have the honour of correspond- 
 ing with him. He prints every word I sa}'. 
 Show him up. I'll finish him, and then Til 
 see the Englishman." 
 
 A solemn man in a cherry-coloured coat was 
 ushered in. 
 
 " Monsieur, I know absolutely nothing about 
 any single question you are going to ask 
 me." 
 
 The visitor, as though fascinated by the 
 eyes of this extraordinary old mummy, ad- 
 vanced bowing : 
 
 " M. de Voltaire, you are the candle which 
 lights the world ..." 
 
 A piercing voice cut him short : " Quick, 
 Babette, the extinguisher ! " 
 
 " Has he gone ? " inquired the old gentle- 
 man from under the blankets. " Then I am 
 ready to receive my Englishman. They are a 
 wonderful people," he said, rearranging his 
 turban. " When I was in London they buried 
 a mathematician with the pomp of a king." 
 
 A young man was graciously received. 
 
 " Sir," said the sage, in answer to some com-
 
 32 A Hermit' s Day 
 
 plimcnts on French literature, " an English- 
 man who knows France well and a Frenchman 
 who knows England well are both the better 
 for it. The English know how to think ; the 
 French know how to please. We are the 
 whipped cream of Europe. There are not 
 twenty Frenchmen who understand Newton." 
 Going on to talk of science, he indulged in 
 rather a pompous eulogy of the Swiss savant, 
 Haller. 
 
 " I am surprised, monsieur, that you should 
 praise him so much," said the young man, 
 " for he does nothing but abuse you." 
 
 " Perhaps," replied the sage sweetly, " we 
 are both mistaken. You have been amiable 
 enough to say I have done a great work for 
 posterity. It is true — I have planted four 
 thousand feet of timber. I will rejoin you 
 in the garden. Now for my letters." 
 
 The first one to be opened was the weekly 
 budget of gossip from Paris. To the enormous 
 delight of Voltaire, it reported that M. de 
 Pompignan could not now appear in his 
 carriage without the boys in the street singing
 
 A Hermit's Day 33 
 
 one of the songs the hermit of Ferney had 
 written in his honour ; and sitting up in bed, 
 he began to sing in a nasal and spectral voice : 
 
 " Oui, ce Le Franc de Pompignan 
 Est un terrible personnage, 
 Oui, ses psaumes sont un ouvrage 
 Qui nous fait bailler longuement. 
 
 Oui, de province un president 
 Plein d'orgueil et de verbiage, 
 Nous parait un pauvre pedant 
 Malgre son riche mariage." 
 
 « 
 
 Ah, Tronchin, you never gave me a better 
 prescription than when you ordered me to 
 hunt Pompignan for two hours every morn- 
 ing ! " And, turning to Father Adam, his 
 eyes glowing like carbuncles, he went on, 
 with great show of solemnity, stretching out 
 a bony finger, and ending in a whisper of 
 horror : 
 
 " Savez-vous pourquoi Jeremie 
 A tant pleure pendant sa vie ? 
 C'est qu'en prophete il prevoyait 
 Qu'un jour Le Franc le traduirait." 
 P
 
 34 ^ Hermit' s Day 
 
 " Go on, go on, read me more. So they 
 sing it in the streets ! " 
 
 But when the letter went on to report that 
 someone had written to say that Voltaire, 
 gentleman-in-waiting to the King, was the 
 nephew of a pastry-cook, he became extremely 
 excited. " I'll have him Bastilled ! Slander 
 must be suppressed. I shall write to the 
 Pompadour. He is not fit to live with human 
 beings " ; and the concluding passage produced 
 a still more violent effect. It reported that a 
 young man, M. Arnaud, being in Berlin, had 
 addressed a letter in verse to Frederick II, who 
 had himself replied in verse, saying that the 
 sun of the young Arnaud was rising, v/hile the 
 sun of Voltaire was going to bed. 
 
 " The dawn of Arnaud ! " he screamed, 
 throwing off the clothes. " Voltaire setting ! 
 It's Frederick's business to govern, not to 
 judge. I'll teach this king with his ceuvres de 
 poesie that Voltaire is not in bed " ; and, 
 tearing on his stockings, he dismissed the com- 
 pany. 
 
 All the morning more and more visitors kept
 
 A Hermit's Day 35 
 
 arriving. Indeed, they sat down more than 
 thirty to a dinner, at which the host made 
 only a brief appearance — still in his dressing- 
 gown. He laughed till the tears came into his 
 eyes at a young man's answer to the effect 
 that he had been born a Catholic : " You see 
 he does not say he is one now. What a splendid 
 answer ! My friend," he added, when he 
 had recovered, " he only half lives who half 
 thinks. The consolation of life is to say what 
 one thinks." He received compliments on his 
 adopted daughter. Mademoiselle Corneille, 
 now happily married, saying that nothing had 
 given more satisfaction at the time ; but that 
 now, alas ! he could not be happy till he had 
 married Mademoiselle Calas to two counsellors 
 of the Parliament of Toulouse. A dramatic 
 performance of Tjdire was decided on as the 
 evening's entertainment. The bustle of pre- 
 parations, the cries, the laughter, the embraces, 
 seemed to put the old man in a fever. He sang, 
 he talked, he shouted down the others ; he 
 seemed to be everywhere at once, hauling out 
 costumes, reciting verses, acting, gesticulating :
 
 36 A Hermit's Day 
 
 and then he vanished like a ghost for two 
 hours. At the performance he sat in the wings, 
 but in view of the audience, leading the ap- 
 plause ; when the actors went wrong lifting 
 eyes and hands to heaven, when they spoke or 
 acted well breaking out into exclamations : 
 " Clarion could not have done it better ! " 
 " It's Lekain, pure Lekain ! Incomparable 1 " 
 When Madame Denis appeared herself on the 
 scene, acting, indeed, with great spirit, despite 
 her solid proportions, he was moved to 
 tears. His forty-two diseases were forgotten. 
 Then his face suddenly contracted with rage : 
 the President de Brosses had fallen into a 
 gentle sleep ; it was unmistakable — ^he was 
 actually snoring. " Do you imagine you're 
 on the bench ? " he screamed, flinging his hat 
 in the face of the sleeping man. There was a 
 shout of laughter, and the tragedy went on 
 again. In the dining-room a gorgeous supper 
 had been prepared. Outside in the darkness 
 the noise of chatter and laughter could be 
 heard, and the lighted windows shone far 
 down the long new avenue. M. Voltaire sat
 
 A Hermit's Day 37 
 
 at the head of his table, telling stories and 
 mimicking actors, till a breath of cool air from 
 the garden suddenly reminded him of his 
 seventy years. He got up and addressed the 
 company : " Love like fools when you are 
 young ; work like devils when you are old. It 
 is the only way to live. Good night, my 
 children." The question where they were all 
 to sleep — for it was too late for them to get 
 back to Geneva — was left for Madame Denis 
 to decide ; and with a parting and perhaps 
 too lively joke the hermit of Ferney disap- 
 peared. 
 
 Hours after the candles of the supper table 
 began to gutter down, the old man, once more 
 in his turban and Persian robe, his wig and 
 satin suit upon a chair, was writing, now at 
 this table and now at that, now dictating to 
 Wagniere from his bed, now drawing up a 
 pamphlet purporting to be written by some- 
 one else, now making notes for that cold 
 moving document The History of the Galas, 
 now bombarding Villars and Richelieu with 
 amusing letters, now tickling the vanity of
 
 38 A Hermit's Day 
 
 Madame de Pompadour (" always one of us ") 
 and Madame la duchesse de Choiseul — letters 
 in which every line, however airy and dis- 
 cursive, had an end in view. Last, having 
 twice dismissed Wagniere and twice recalled 
 him by thumping on the wall, he took a four- 
 sided sheet of quarto paper and, inscribing 
 neatly in one corner ^^ ecras : Pin/:^^ he 
 began a letter to Comte d'Argental and his 
 wife. 
 
 " My angels," it ran, " it is now fifty years 
 since you were good enough to love me a little. 
 I regard myself already as a dead man, although 
 I enliven my last agonies as best I can. I know 
 that wherever you are you are making others 
 happy, and that is the best way of being happy 
 oneself. As for me, poor shivery old mortal, I 
 am waging war till the last moment with priests, 
 persecutors, Jesuits, Jansenists, Molinists, 
 Frerons, Pompignans, right and left, preachers 
 of all sorts and J. J. Rousseau. I receive a 
 hundred thrusts. I return two hundred. I 
 can still laugh ; and thank God ! I still see 
 this life as a farce which sometimes turns to
 
 A Hermit' s Day 39 
 
 tragedy. . . ." And so on, and so on, till the 
 paper was covered, and the sky had begun to 
 turn hard and clear above the mountains 
 behind Geneva, when the turbancd head 
 rested again in the cleft of the pillow.
 
 Two Historic Houses 
 
 ONE is an unlovely little bungalow near 
 Pretoria, with a tin roof and a dark 
 veranda, standing beside a rough road down 
 which a puff of wind sends clouds of tawny- 
 dust. The stony ground is cracked and weedy. 
 The landscape has a littered, slovenly look 
 as though it were not virgin soil, but an 
 enormous tract of uncomfortable building land. 
 Near the house lie many years' accumulations 
 of tins ; meat tins, sardine tins, fruit tins, 
 biscuit tins, oil cans and broken pots. They 
 have mostly rusted down to kinship with the 
 soil, but here and there the sun, blazing like a 
 white combustion in the sky, still strikes out a 
 flash among the shards and weeds. Four 
 strides take one to the veranda, the steps of 
 which are guarded by two small couchant lions 
 of heraldic type with rueful countenances. 
 
 40
 
 Two Historic Houses 41 
 
 Where did they come from ? Witnessing to 
 man's power of conventionalising natural 
 forms, to that freedom of conception and sub- 
 missiveness to tradition upon which imagina- 
 tive art depends, they seem on this spot singu- 
 larly impressive. Amid so much aridity, 
 material and spiritual, they seem unique, beyond 
 criticism, relics of a former world. 
 
 Under this veranda old Paul Kruger used 
 to sit, with his pipe, his Bible and his spittoon, 
 gazing across the road at the large proportion- 
 less reach-me-down building, half church and 
 half conventicle, where he used to preach on 
 Sundays. It was the site, this tin " stoop," 
 of historic and cautious colloquies, and of many 
 slow, sly meditations and religious resolves. 
 Looking back it seems to me as though he must 
 have been there himself when I visited it, so 
 strong at the time was the sense of his presence. 
 I seem to remember a black ungainly figure — a 
 drayman dressed as an undertaker — ^with brown, 
 black-nailed hands slackly joined across the 
 creases of an ancient frock-coat, sitting there, 
 hunched and motionless ; a heavy yellow mask
 
 42 Two Historic Houses 
 
 of a face seen in the shadow, with low forehead, 
 thick eyebrows, neck-beard and saurian eyes, 
 preoccupied and drowsily watchful. Every 
 now and again the wind would lift a cloud of 
 grit from the road and blow it tinkling against 
 the corrugated roof and dry shivering bushes. 
 The loneliness and publicity of the place, its 
 solitude and lack of privacy are appalling to 
 one sensitive to ordered permanence and to 
 that " tranquillising stamp of man's affections 
 upon the things around him which gives a 
 sense of home." Like many a great man, 
 Kruger was an epitome of the characteristics 
 of his race, the flower of its most conservative 
 instincts. The Boer, though physically an 
 immovable sort of man and reluctant to up- 
 root himself, has a trekker's indifference to his 
 immediate surroundings, and he is as content 
 to live for years in his own litter as though he 
 were moving on next month. He loves not 
 possessions, but money and independence, and 
 not money as one who knows its value, its im- 
 mediate possibilities, but as one who has known 
 the importance of hoarding necessitous re-
 
 Two Historic Houses 43 
 
 sources. Here lived one who, it is said, was 
 very rich. What an effort of imagination to 
 supply here a background of ghostly money- 
 bags ! What a contrast between this house and 
 Groote-Schuur where his enemy lived, who also 
 bothered little about luxury, ceremony or 
 show, but liked to have things about him fine, 
 solid and elegant ! 
 
 To one who arrives at his own sense of rival 
 political ideals in a country more through 
 impressions than through statistics and state- 
 ments, the contrast between the homes of 
 Cecil Rhodes and Paul Krugcr has much to 
 say. Groote-Schuur is built in a fold of the 
 spurs of Table Mountain, one of the most 
 beautiful sites in the world, among bright, 
 green pines and chestnut trees. Its garden is 
 laid out in careless masses of flowers, which 
 mix with the woods and slopes beyond. The 
 house is not Avhat we should consider a large 
 one. It is built in a kind of Italianate Dutch 
 style, with thick white walls, and wide verandas 
 supported by slender columns. Its decorations 
 arc akin to the sober, solid exuberance of old
 
 44 Two Historic Houses 
 
 Dutch wardrobes and heavy, brass-bound 
 chests. It is cool, spacious yet compact, and 
 superbly comfortable ; and it is haunted by 
 a very different presence. A heavy-shouldered, 
 restless man with reddish hair, who talks 
 and talks in a reedy head-voice, and whose 
 prominent formidable eyes are lit with the 
 glare of dreams, visions of vast empty terri- 
 tories, gigantic material possibilities. The 
 Hero as Financier ! It was a long time before 
 I could envisage such a character ; and I am 
 not sure that I like his fervid followers now. 
 But I realise that he gave them imaginative 
 " openings " as no one else could, and threw 
 upon their projects and activities the light of 
 larger issues and impersonal aims, just as for his 
 people '^Oom Paul" expressed a biblical ideal. 
 The smoke of our inglorious war has cleared 
 away, but the struggle between those two ideals 
 is still going on, the one Vvdth all the faults and 
 virtues of old Scottish Calvinism, the other 
 with all those of a pioneering, commercial 
 civilisation. 
 
 In the dining-room of the tin bungalow
 
 Two Historic Houses 45 
 
 outside Pretoria stands the black coffin case 
 of Krugcr. It was strewn when I saw it with 
 withering wreaths ; every foot, too, of the 
 walls was covered with laurel trophies, and at 
 the end of the small dark wall hung one of the 
 few genuine specimens I have seen of modern 
 primitive art. The head of the last President 
 of the RepubHc (Hfc size) was represented as 
 bursting through a hard blue sky, the colour 
 of a sparrow's eg^. The collar-stud and tie 
 were carefully painted, and then abruptly cut 
 off by more blue sky. On either side of his 
 head a miniature angel hovered ; one, propping 
 a large book against a cloud, was presumably 
 writing in it the deeds of the hero, the other 
 was about to crown him with a little wreath the 
 size of a bracelet ; and underneath, far below, 
 was a sea of human hats, diminishing to the 
 horizon; straw hats, felt hats, bowlers, sun 
 hats, caps and waving sticks. The artist had 
 evidently felt uncertain of his power of invent- 
 ing human faces, and he had relied upon hats 
 to produce the effect of a gigantic acclamation. 
 It was the best his own people could do for
 
 46 Ti.vo Historic Houses 
 
 Kruger in the way of art, which is not in their 
 line. To the memory of Rhodes his country- 
 men set up the great bronze horse of Watts, 
 which champs and paws beneath a rider 
 who looks eagerly out under his hand across 
 seas and miles of fertile land ; a monument 
 reminiscent in every line of the long inherit- 
 ance of civilisation. 
 
 What a subject for an imaginative historian, 
 the struggle between these two and that con- 
 flict betvv^een ideals ! Not for an historian 
 most interested in weighing immediate rights 
 and wTongs in the quarrel between the two 
 nations, but for an historian with a sense of 
 drama, and of the everlasting inevitable clash 
 of new things with old. Kruger is one of the 
 most tragic figures ; all the more tragic for 
 his narrownesses and crookednesses. For me 
 the dusty, dark room and tin " stoop " was full 
 of echoes of those Cromwellian speeches of 
 his, with their dry references to Peter v., 
 verses 7 and 8, or Revelation xiv. 9, 10, 12 
 and 13, as the case might be, and their closings, 
 " I have spoken," " I have done." I remem-
 
 Two Historic Houses 47 
 
 bered his flight that night in September, 1900, 
 when his country was swarming with the 
 enemy, and the fighting Boers were making 
 their way north through an uninhabitable 
 country to reorganize there and begin the 
 struggle again. I remembered the opening words 
 of his final Proclamation : " Whereas the great 
 age of His Honour the State President renders 
 it impossible for His Honour to continue to 
 accompany the Commandoes," and imagined 
 his parting from his grey-haired wife that 
 evening, to see whom as a boy of sixteen he 
 once swam a river in spate, which the ferry- 
 man refused to cross.
 
 Hero JVorship 
 
 TURNING over the Meredith letters, and 
 reading here and there in them, brings 
 back in pictures a December afternoon, still 
 vivid to me across a considerable gap of 
 years. I had long been promised a visit to 
 the man whom of all living English writers I 
 then revered the most, and at last the day 
 had come. 
 
 Hero-worship they say is the duffer's virtue, 
 though by no means all heroes are of that opinion. 
 Is not Victor Hugo reported to have said of 
 some young poet, " He will never write well ; 
 he did not turn pale on meeting me." And 
 certainly the worshippers themselves would 
 violently resist the imputation that their ardour 
 had its root in their own incompetence. No ; 
 the saying evidently originates from those for- 
 midable people of whom the first thing to be 
 
 said, and sometimes the last, is that they are not 
 
 48
 
 Hero Worship 49 
 
 duffers. If they are right, it certainly needed 
 some one with a touch of the duffer about 
 him to envy me the sight of the smoke rising 
 from the roof of Flint Cottage, that late 
 December afternoon, as my friend and I ran 
 up the rise of ground which brings the little 
 five- windowed house in view. Well worth 
 envying that moment was. 
 
 One who is young and a hero-worshipper 
 approaches the home of a writer who has 
 fired his imagination with feelings very like 
 a lover's. Bushes, trees and paths take on a 
 strange significance, and to pull the bell is a 
 momentous action. On the doorstep the 
 lover's incredulity comes over him. Can the 
 person he will see the next minute really be 
 inside ? Savages have a word we might adopt 
 for this significance which clings about certain 
 places. They say that a place or person has 
 mana. For me the high box hedges, the damp 
 gravel drive, the quiet house with its black 
 speckless windows, all had mana. The next 
 moment we were in a narrow passage-hall, 
 hanging up our caps and coats, and through 
 
 E
 
 5© Hero Worship 
 
 the thin door on the right I heard the resonant 
 rumble of a voice. The great man was talk- 
 ing to his dog. 
 
 He was sitting on one side of the fire, dressed 
 in a soft, quilted jacket, with a rug upon his 
 knees. On a little rickety table by his side 
 stood two candles and one of those old- 
 fashioned eye-screens which flirt out green 
 wings at a touch ; a pile of lemon-coloured 
 volumes lay beside it. His face beneath a 
 tousled thatch of grey hair, soft as the finest 
 wood-ash, and combed down into a fringe 
 upon a high round forehead, had a noble, 
 ravaged handsomeness. The vanity and deli- 
 cacy, as of the too aesthetic petit maitre, which 
 marks Watt's portrait of him was not dis- 
 cernible, rather a noteworthy, leonine bold- 
 ness. I guessed him to be one of those men 
 who seem bigger seated than when on their legs. 
 At this time he could not rise from his chair. 
 That keen look in profile, as of an upward- 
 pointing arrow, had gone. Old age had blurred 
 his eyelids, and his eyes, once blue, were faded 
 and full of " the empty untragic sadness of old
 
 Hero Worship 5 i 
 
 age." But that vitality which had inspired many 
 a packed page still vibrated in his powerful voice, 
 and told in the impetuosity of his greeting. 
 His talk was full of flourishes and his enun- 
 ciation grandiose, as though he loved the sound 
 of words. This characteristic at first, I remem- 
 ber, somewhat disconcerted me. It struck me 
 that he talked with a kind of swagger, and I 
 was not prepared for that. Copy-book bio- 
 graphics always insist upon modesty as the 
 test of true greatness. I had certainly found 
 out that humility was not the invariable 
 accompaniment of power and insight, but I 
 still clung to the idea that great men were 
 always " simple," as biographers say. Now 
 " simple " Meredith was not, nor was he 
 " natural," " unaffected " ; in fact none of 
 the commonplace adjectives of obituary respect 
 would apply to him. He was almost stone 
 deaf, which accounted for the exaggerated 
 loudness of his voice, and the continuity of 
 his discourse, which rolled elaborately along ; 
 but the eagerness with which he would now 
 and again curve a hand round his ear and stoop
 
 52 Hero Worship 
 
 forward to catch an interjection, showed that 
 he was not a born monologist, and missed the 
 give and take ; though, I expect, he was one 
 in any company likely to follow the sequence 
 of his own thoughts. 
 
 My Irish name set him off upon the theme 
 of Celt and Saxon. The English were not in 
 high favour with him just then ; the Boer 
 War (he detested it) was dragging lamely on, 
 and he belaboured the English with the vigour 
 and bitterness of a disillusioned patriot : few 
 men thought more often of their country, or 
 felt more need of pride in her than he. He 
 accused them of lack of imagination in state- 
 craft, and fell upon their manners and their 
 unsociability ; their oafish contempt of friendly 
 liveliness and wit, the sluggish, casual rudeness 
 that passed among the wealthy for good form ; 
 mouthing out sentences he had used (I felt) 
 before, and throwing himself back, before a 
 burst of laughter, rather with the air of one 
 saying, " There, what do you think of that ? " 
 to watch upon our faces the effect of some 
 fantastic, hammered phrase.
 
 Hero Worship 53 
 
 Then came the question of refreshments for 
 us. What would we drink ? Tea ? Beer ? — a 
 list of wines ending with Champagne. (This 
 pronounced in French fashion, with a gusto 
 that brought foam and sparkle before the 
 eyes.) I forget the beverage we drank, for, 
 shouting like a boatswain in a gale, I had 
 directed the chasing waters of his discourse to 
 irrigate fresh fields of inquiry. I wanted to 
 hear him talk of his famous contemporaries. 
 Had he met Disraeli ? No, he wished he had, 
 " he would have amused me very much." 
 Then followed an account of the most remark- 
 able Jew he had ever met, a scholar of pro- 
 digious erudition and dirtiness, who had begun 
 as a boy by tending goats upon the mountains 
 of Roumania. 
 
 By this time I had come to feel rather the 
 zest behind his elaborate phraseology than its 
 artificiality, and to marvel at and enjoy the 
 determination to strike a spark from every 
 topic laid upon the anvil, astounding in a 
 paralysed old man, and in one to whom 
 physical decay must have been the most de-
 
 54 Hero Worship 
 
 pressing o£ all humiliations. Scraps of his talk 
 I remember : of Gladstone, as " a man of 
 most marvellous aptitudes but no greatness of 
 mind " ; of Swinburne's emotional mobility, 
 " he was a sea blown to a storm by a sigh " ; 
 of Dickens's face in laughter and the surprise 
 of it, sudden as the change in a white-beam 
 " when a gust of wind shivers it to silver " — 
 this spoken with quick gesticulation, which 
 gave me the measure of his youthful vehemency 
 in talk. 
 
 Indeed, there was still such a fund of in- 
 vincible vitality in him, it was incongruous to 
 hear him bemoaning himself as one already 
 dead and better buried : " Nature cares not 
 a pin for the individual ; I am content to be 
 shovelled into the ditch." I remember in the 
 midst of such discourse, solemn as the wind in 
 pines, with a humorous growl in it, too, for an 
 under-note, he looked towards the black un- 
 curtained window, past which a few large snow- 
 flakes came wavering down, and the animation 
 of his exclamation was quick with the interest 
 of a child. It was a momentary interruption
 
 Hero Worship 55 
 
 and on he went: yes, the angel Azrael was stand- 
 ing behind him, and he wished he would 
 touch him on the shoulder. It was, however, 
 his nurse who appeared and stood over him, 
 with a graduated glass, containing some dismal 
 fluid, in her hand ; and we, who had forgotten 
 we had been listening for two hours to an old 
 invalid, took our leave. I looked from the door ; 
 he had sunk back in his chair and with a wave of 
 his hand he sketched an oriental salaam. Had 
 we tired him unconscionably, we asked our- 
 selves anxiously outside the door ? As I was 
 hoisting on my coat, I heard again that resonant 
 rumble. He was talking to his dog.
 
 Meredith'' s Method 
 
 MEREDITH has more fault-finders 
 among his critics than he had a few 
 years ago. His drawing of character and his 
 style can best be defended, it seems to me, on 
 some such lines as these. 
 
 Every line he wrote, whether you like the 
 result or not, shows a love of his craft you 
 must respect. How can one describe the general 
 characteristics of this very personal style, in 
 which many touches are there, not so much 
 to help you to realise the object as to put power 
 into the form, style in which " reflection on a 
 statement is its lightening in advance " ? Firstly, 
 it is the style of a poet. It is metaphorical, 
 fearless and allusive. Nothing in Meredith is 
 more remarkable than his gift of swift allu- 
 sion. To that he owes his power of suggesting 
 beauty and intensity of feeling in his characters. 
 
 56
 
 Mer edit lis Method 57 
 
 When we come to examine how we have been 
 brought to realise so unforgettably his men 
 and women, it seems to have been due, not, 
 as in the case of the creations of other novelists, 
 to our having known them intimately, so much 
 as to this poetic gift of allusion. 
 
 We remember Clara Middleton, because, 
 besides being an extremely sensible, quick- 
 witted young woman, she has reminded us of 
 so many beautiful things in the course of the 
 story, of summer beech-woods with brown 
 leaves underfoot, of mountain echoes and 
 torrents with their ravishing gleams of emerald 
 at the fall. 
 
 And here is an instance of this power of 
 describing human emotion in terms of nature, 
 which will recall many others : " Rapidly she 
 underwent her transformation from doubtfully 
 minded woman to woman awakening clear-eyed, 
 with new sweet shivers in her temperate blood, 
 like the tremulous light seen running to the 
 morn upon a quiet sea." 
 
 And if our sense of the beauty of character, 
 if our impression of his men and women arc
 
 58 Meredith's Method 
 
 the result of his drawing upon what is beautiful 
 in nature to express all he feels about them ; 
 how much, too, is our retention of the most 
 moving scenes in his stories due to his having 
 created a romantic harmony between the 
 passions described and their surroundings ; a 
 harmony so complete that in memory both rise 
 up together. 
 
 How closely involved are our impressions of 
 such scenes as Diana's early morning walk on 
 the slopes above Lugano with our sense of 
 her character. Through the description of 
 the scene we understand her feelings, so that, 
 like her lover Dacier, we also know her 
 best when we remember the rolling grass 
 meadows and pale purple crocuses, and " the 
 rocky pool beneath the icy cascade." How in- 
 distinguishable, too, from the scene is our im- 
 pression of Sandra herself, waiting with the 
 patience of passion under the cedars in the 
 yellowish, hazy moonlight, or our compre- 
 hension of Beauchamp's eagerness, travelling 
 to obey the sudden summons of Renee, from 
 the sight of the coast of Normandy, " dashed
 
 Meredith's Method 59 
 
 in rain-lines across a weed-strewn sea " ! How 
 Richard's mood of desolate convalescence is 
 stamped upon the country the train passes as 
 it carries him away from his love — the pine 
 hills, and the last rosy streak in the sky ! 
 
 Most wonderful of all for coalescence of 
 nature without and emotion within, is the 
 chapter in Richard Feverel called " Nature 
 speaks." This is the chapter in which, after 
 hearing that Lucy has borne him a son, he 
 walks rapidly away into the woods, and a 
 storm breaks over them. Every detail of the 
 storm — the oppressive slumber of the air, the 
 crash and quiver of the heavens, the cool 
 steady drench of rain — seems in turn to express 
 better than any direct description the feelings 
 which take him back to her at last. 
 
 It is this poetic power, not Meredith's power 
 of analysis, which makes us feel afterwards we 
 have lived in his characters. In tracing a train of 
 complicated reflection, in following the thoughts 
 which were those of that particular person 
 and no other, he is not the equal, say, of 
 Henry James. He may surprise in a flash senti-
 
 6o Mereditfis Method 
 
 ment at its source ; but it is much truer to say 
 of him than of them when he is no longer 
 writing as a poet, that he dissects his characters. 
 He does not, like Henry James, return with 
 intricate delay, till by almost abstaining 
 to touch the subtle thing he conveys 
 it to you living and complete. To give 
 one example : in Sandra Belloni he says 
 of the Pole family that they all had a 
 kind of dim faculty of imagination. One sees 
 immediately how true that might be of them ; 
 but when he handles the three sisters (" the 
 three fine shades and the nicer feelings," as he 
 calls them) it vanishes. He knows the quality 
 is there ; he tells us it is there ; but in their 
 talk — their thoughts he does not follow — it 
 does not appear. 
 
 Again, what lapses of credibility occur in his 
 plots ! No novelist who was a thorough crafts- 
 man would have ever left unexplained, or so 
 little explained, so many important occurrences. 
 How did Diana come to marry Mr. Warwick ? 
 Meredith makes some casual attempts long 
 afterwards to make it credible ; but he has
 
 Mer edit lis Method 6 1 
 
 avoided the scene. Why did Nesta engage 
 herself to Sowerby ? We are told that Richard 
 Feverel, after he had yielded to the Enchantress 
 and rushed abroad, destroyed letter after letter 
 which came to him from his home and from his 
 wife. Accept the fact that he did. Would 
 not the first time that he handled an envelope 
 with Lucy's writing on it and destroyed it 
 have been a moment in his ordeal worthy 
 of the novelist's art ? But we are only told 
 that he had gone on destroying, unread, 
 letter after letter. You can find instances of 
 this kind in almost every one of Meredith's 
 novels. He often fails to respect his theme, 
 and to go thoroughly into it. He was no 
 artist ; but he was a poet, and he did the best 
 things best.
 
 / Samuel Butler 
 
 i An Impression 
 
 ONE of the most interesting biographies 
 in the supplement to The Dictionary of 
 National Biography, recently published, is the 
 account of Samuel Butler. It contains, as far 
 as I know, only one mistake. You will read 
 there that Butler had his portrait painted by 
 Gauguin, and if you believe it (as of course 
 you will) you will get a wrong impression of 
 Butler's artistic sympathies. Butler had very 
 interesting ideas upon Art, but he would not 
 have approved of Gauguin's pictures. The 
 portrait in question was painted by Gogin in 
 1895. It is not a good likeness. It suggests 
 an altogether too glossy and too sagacious a 
 person. The short beard is too snowy, the 
 shaggy black eyebrows too well-groomed, the 
 
 complexion too pink, the brow too victorious. 
 
 62
 
 Samuel Butler ti^ 
 
 There is nothing, in fact, of the literary 
 Ishmaclite about the portrait. Looking at it 
 you might exclaim, surely this man might have 
 easily got a literary pension out of the pockets 
 of the Public. Butler himself made a different 
 impression. 
 
 In stature he was a smallish man, but you 
 did not notice that. His lightly built frame was 
 disguised in clothes of enviable bagginess and 
 of a clumsy conventional cut, and he wore 
 prodigiously roomy boots. But it was the 
 hirsute, masculine vigour of his head which 
 chiefly prevented you from thinking of him 
 as a small man. Indeed, it was a surprise to 
 me to hear afterwards that he had coxed at 
 Cambridge St, John's College boat ; I had 
 remembered him, it seemed, as even rather a 
 heavy man. His company manner was that of 
 a kind old gentleman, prepared to be a little 
 shocked by any disregard of the proprieties ; 
 the sort of old gentleman who is very mild in 
 reproof, but whose quiet insistence that every- 
 body should behave quite properly and con- 
 siderately is most soothing to elderly ladies
 
 64 Sa??iuei Butler 
 
 of limited means. He spoke softly and slowly, 
 often with his head a little down, gravely 
 looking over his spectacles and pouting his lips, 
 and with a deliberate demureness so disarming 
 that he was able to utter the most subversive 
 sentiments without exciting more than a 
 moment's astonishment. The next, his com- 
 panion was completely reassured — " No, Mr. 
 Butler could not have meant that. I wasn't 
 quite quick enough. Dear Mr. Butler, he is 
 such an original man." Such was the impres- 
 sion he made upon circumspect, humdrum 
 people. 
 
 He handled their prejudices with the tender 
 precaution of a man replacing upon the shelf 
 a precious cracked Venetian vase. This was 
 comic to any one who knew what a bull in a 
 china shop he really was. And though he was a 
 great adept at poking gentle fun at people, 
 fun so gentle that they did not feel how deep 
 it went, he never snubbed them or scored 
 off them. In fact, he had a strong abhorrence 
 to anything of that kind. I think he enjoyed 
 a little the irony which resides in perfect
 
 Samuel Butler 65 
 
 politeness, but politeness was not in the least a 
 pose on his part. It sprang from his dislike of 
 overbearingness. To take advantage of superi- 
 ority of intellect, or any other kind of superi- 
 ority, moral force, knowledge of the world, 
 reputation, wealth, social position, a fine 
 manner, and to use it to browbeat a helpless 
 person was in his eyes a revolting, unpardon- 
 able offence. I heard him use the word 
 " caddish " on several occasions (in his mouth 
 it carried violent reprobation) and it always 
 stigmatised that kind of behaviour. If I were 
 to mention the names of those he called '' cads," 
 the list would cause great surprise. Besides, 
 he liked mediocre, humdrum people ; they 
 were at any rate freer from this odious sin 
 than the intellectual and the successful. I 
 am sure that much of the asperity in Butler's 
 attacks upon some of the scientific men who 
 disagreed with him, sprang from the suspicion 
 that they found it easier to ride over him, an 
 amateur, " on the high horse of professional 
 attainments " than to answer his objections to 
 their theories. He suspected that he was
 
 66 Samuel Butler 
 
 being bullied, and when that idea took hold of 
 his mind he became very fierce, hitting out at 
 weak spots which in " people who are above 
 suspicion " are seldom attacked. 
 
 In private life he considered a man to be a 
 very wrong-headed prig who could not hold 
 his opinions lightly enough to modify them on 
 occasion in the cause of charity. Surtont point 
 de zele was a motto he trusted profoundly. It 
 seemed to him written across the history of 
 all creation. Compromise was the guide to 
 life ; the development of species showed it ; 
 progress meant successful adaptation. To be 
 a little too far ahead of circumstances to adapt 
 yourself to them was, then, as " sinful " as 
 lagging behind ; in both cases it meant in the 
 end that you were thrown on the scrap-heap. 
 
 But if a man set up to be a writer another 
 principle came into play. When he took up 
 his pen he could no longer consider the feelings 
 of other people. 
 
 He " should know neither self nor friend nor 
 foe — he should be able to hob-nob with those 
 whom he most vehemently attacks, and to fly at
 
 Samuel Butler 6j 
 
 the scientific throat of those to whom he is per- 
 sonally most attached ; he should be neither 
 grateful for a favourable review nor displeased 
 by a hostile one ; his literary and scientific 
 life should be something as far apart as possible 
 from his social ; it is thus, at least, alone that 
 any one will be able to keep his eye single for 
 facts and their legitimate inferences." 
 
 " The fear-of-giving-yourself-away disease " 
 was one of his favourite themes. He thought 
 it more fatal to the intelligence than any other, 
 inevitably producing atrophy of the opinions 
 after a few years. In the last edition of Ere- 
 whon he declared, " no cure for this disgusting 
 fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease has yet 
 been discovered." The best course is the one 
 he adopted himself of keeping the literary and 
 scientific life as far apart as possible from the 
 social. 
 
 I have spoken of the extreme demureness of 
 his manner in company. It was apt to be 
 interrupted in a rather startling manner. 
 When he laughed the change in his expression 
 was extraordinary. His laughter was mostly
 
 68 Samuel Butler 
 
 silent. The corners of his mouth went up in 
 a wide semicircle beneath his beard, his eyes 
 sparkled with mockery, and suddenly before 
 you, instead of the face of a quaintly staid, 
 elderly gentleman mindful of the P's and Q's, 
 was the wild laughing face of an old faun, to 
 whom the fear of giving himself away was 
 obviously a sensation unknown. I have pur- 
 posely written here only about characteristics 
 observable by any one who had been in his 
 company once or twice. How rare a com- 
 panion he was in intimacy the world will 
 learn when Mr. Testing Jones publishes Samuel 
 Butler's memoirs.
 
 Dan Leno : the Life of a DrolP 
 
 IN one of Meredith's novels there is a short 
 parenthetical discussion upon the ideal 
 buffoon. The gist is that such a one must, in 
 all his antics, mingle sense and madness in 
 peculiar proportion. His spontaneous flights 
 of nonsense must be frantic and wild enough 
 to inspire the feeling that you are a goose for 
 your pains if you try to discover a poi?it. Our 
 fancies are like tethered balloons, in strict 
 captivity to some spot on solid earth, until an 
 imaginative buffoon cuts the cord and up 
 we go with a leap of laughter. Comedy, 
 Humour, and Wit require discrimination to be 
 understood ; they criticise life piecemeal ; but 
 Nonsense is a challenge to the whole of life ; a 
 direct appeal to feeling, to which children and 
 
 » Dan Leno. By J. Hickory Wood. London : Mcthuen 
 and Co. 
 
 69
 
 70 Dan Leno 
 
 even the slow-witted respond ; the one mode of 
 lyrical emotion open to those who are not 
 poets. It is beyond analysis, because it is a 
 criticism of the whole world in the form of a 
 reductio ad absurdum. 
 
 Dan Leno was often inspired, in his own line, 
 by a spirit akin to the gift of Edward Lear in 
 literature ; but there was another side to his 
 talent more easy to discuss. He could, in his 
 ephemeral way, sketch characters, taken from 
 the sordid, grimy regions of life, and suggest 
 scenes of drunkenness, petty poverty, indignity, 
 and spite, with an art comparable to Dickens's 
 for vividness and good nature. It was this 
 sympathy and good nature which in his hands 
 transformed the usual stock-in-trade of the 
 music-hall performer into the material of 
 comedy. He could make you forget half the 
 realities these grotesque figures represented 
 and thus make them fit objects for laughter. 
 He could hit the right mixture of extravagance 
 and realism. 
 
 Dan began as an " Infant Wonder." He 
 was first billed at the age of four, as " Little
 
 Dan Leno 71 
 
 George, Contortionist and Posturer." His 
 father and mother went the round of the 
 variety halls as " Singing and Acting Ducttists." 
 His father died, and his mother married 
 again, a man who performed under the name 
 of Leno. The children were expected not 
 only to contribute their own keep but to 
 be a source of profit to their parents. 
 Looking back on his life, and remembering 
 these days of struggle, squalor, and semi- 
 starvation, he said, " I've earned a good deal 
 of butter to my bread in my time ; but I 
 should have enjoyed it more if it had been 
 better spread. I don't want to eat dry bread 
 on Monday and lumps of butter on Sunday." 
 On the whole, it is difficult to say which part 
 of his life it is, the dry crust period or the 
 prosperous, that makes the reader saddest ; the 
 first, lighted by happy-go-lucky pluck and a sense 
 of fun, that nothing could suppress ; or the 
 second, in which the hero drives in a brougham, 
 lives in an expensive suburban home, spend- 
 ing and earning something like ten thousand a 
 year ; a period of treating and being treated,
 
 72 Dan Leno 
 
 of much good fellowship, slovenly and warm- 
 hearted, of reckless, wasteful generosity, at 
 last ending in over-strain and insanity. 
 
 Most people, among their school recollec- 
 tions, can recall the figure of some small boy 
 who by a knack of drollery secured unenviable 
 popularity and precarious patronage, which he 
 enjoyed only on the terms of perpetually play- 
 ing the buffoon. The life of Dan Leno offers 
 a painful spectacle, something similar to that. 
 
 You feel behind the affectionate, patronising 
 admiration and flattering hubbub with which 
 the world surrounded him an unthinking, im- 
 movable demand on its part that he should only 
 be what amused and distracted. Wherever he 
 was, whatever he did, he was expected to do 
 something or say something to raise a guffaw ; 
 no wonder some of his pranks fall flat when re- 
 counted in print ! His friends, his admirers, 
 his acquaintances, and, above all, the strain 
 of his work, seemed to have forced him into a 
 permanent state of flighty, fantastic humour, 
 such as no man of feeling can in the long run 
 surely sustain. And if he had not been a man
 
 Dati he no 73 
 
 of more than usual sensitiveness, and therefore 
 capable of being driven mad, his humour would 
 have lacked the quality which distinguished 
 him from his contemporaries. As you read 
 his life you cannot help feeling that the 
 world, under the guise of spoiling him and 
 making him a favourite, really ran him to 
 death for its own amusement. You find him 
 very early in his career practising on all occa- 
 sions the patter of music-hall repartee with his 
 friend Johnny Danvers in order to cultivate 
 the habit of keeping the ball of nonsense rolling. 
 Here is a specimen of " practice " during 
 dressing : 
 
 " Dan : I once had an I O U. 
 
 " Johnny : So had I ; but now I've only 
 got U left. 
 
 " Dan : Yes ! Poor I died. 
 
 " Johnny : What did I O die of ? 
 
 " Dan : Don't you know ? Iodide of potas- 
 sium. 
 
 " Johnny (looking for socks and finding a 
 pair with holes in them) : Don't talk to me ! 
 I'm collecting my rents.
 
 74 -C)^/? Lena 
 
 " Dan : Ah ! That's the worst of taking 
 socks on a long lease." 
 
 Poor, wretched fun this. Its significance 
 lies in showing the habit of mind he had 
 perpetually to encourage and sustain in 
 order to fulfil what the world expected of 
 him. You hear of him at the christening 
 of his son, driving a coach and four to 
 the church, dancing a cellar-flap on a 
 flower pedestal in the inn garden, and finally 
 scrambling up the ivy and making a speech 
 from the roof with a champagne bottle in 
 one hand, answering all remonstrances with, 
 " You mustn't talk to me like that, because 
 I'm the father of a very large child." There 
 are a good many like instances of humour, 
 which Carlyle would have called " diluted 
 madness." Perhaps the last story of him is the 
 best ; it is certainly very characteristic. On 
 the second day of his confinement in a private 
 asylum he got up an argument with one of the 
 attendants about the correctness 'of the hall 
 clock. " That clock's wrong," he said. *' No, 
 sir, the clock is quite right." " I tell you it's
 
 Dan Leno 75 
 
 wrong." " No, sir, it's quite right." " Then, 
 if it's right, what's it doing here ? " The most 
 generous man who ever dipped hand in pocket, 
 he found it cheaper to drive to and fro in 
 London than walk the streets, since he could 
 not resist the appeals which were made to 
 him. He would dash from the cab into the 
 stage door through a crowd of out-of-elbows, 
 who waylaid him wherever he went ; but on 
 his return he usually succumbed to their en- 
 treaties. Generous, too, of his spirit and 
 unable to resist any claim made upon him 
 in good fellowship, he spent his life 
 lavishly in the cause of laughter. He will 
 be remembered (surely, as long as such men 
 can be) as a master of grotesque nonsense, 
 sympathetic caricature, and fantastic drollery. 
 In the one book he published he says : " The 
 world from the standpoint of the Leno Philo- 
 sophy is a football kicked about by the Higher 
 Powers, with mc hanging on somewhere by 
 my teeth and toe-nails to the laces " — that, 
 too, is very much what his life looks like to 
 readers of his biography.
 
 Pelissier and " The Follies'''' 
 
 GRAVITY is the safest mode of human 
 behaviour ; the careers of jesters prove 
 this ever-so-sorry fact. Pelissier has died young ; 
 Dan Leno died in a madhouse. We love 
 our genius-buffoons — and we work them to 
 death. We flatter and spoil them and pelt 
 them with gold, fistfuls, bagfuls of it, on 
 condition they never stop, that they keep it 
 up. The strain of turning oneself into a sort 
 of walking Sunday (have you tried it ?) is severe, 
 but it can be nothing to that of becoming a 
 perpetual Bank-holiday. We tempt them to 
 stimulate artificially that arbitrary fantastic 
 detachment of mood it is exhilarating for an 
 hour or so to enjoy. They yield, and find it 
 good for their art to live along that "hare- 
 brained-edge excitement " which divides sanity 
 from madness. " It is a strange trade, this, 
 
 76
 
 Pe Ussier and " The Follies " 77 
 
 of making good fellows laugh." I do not covet 
 Heaven for those who have walked " circum- 
 spectly, like a cat on a wall," but on behalf of 
 those who have thrown themselves into the 
 confusion of life, lived in it and by it, and lit 
 it up with laughter and brought us the free- 
 dom of wit, one would fain believe the 
 nature of the world to be, indeed, what so 
 jolly and careless a courage seems to take for 
 granted. 
 
 Pelissier, like all inventive minds, used 
 material which was ready to hand. His enter- 
 tainments, so original in their merit, were 
 developments of the performances of the wan- 
 dering Pierrots who haunt the beaches and 
 esplanades during the holiday months. His 
 relation to London audiences was precisely 
 the informal personal one of the out-of-door 
 entertainer who has by hook or crook to keep 
 a ring intact until the hat goes round. Songs, 
 sentimental or funny, will not do it by them- 
 selves, for people, sometimes justifiably and 
 sometimes inexcusably, are chary of their six- 
 pences, and will often slink away and miss the
 
 yS Pe Ussier mid " The Follies " 
 
 last verse of a song for the sake of having heard 
 the rest for nothing. Only one thing will 
 hold them ; the expectation of the unexpected, 
 the conviction that any moment may give 
 birth to a whimsical impromptu not to be 
 missed. The audience must be made to feel, 
 too, that their own presence is a necessary part 
 of the entertainment. This,too, was one of the 
 charms of " The Follies." They stood in the 
 same relation to us as an orator — an orator 
 who has prepared a set speech, but who gets 
 inspiration from the mood of those he addresses. 
 There was always a wide margin left for im- 
 promptu invention, and you could see " The 
 Follies " often took each other by surprise. 
 They seemed to enjoy themselves as much as 
 we did, and it was Pelissier himself who sup- 
 plied that infectious spirit. Their humour, 
 however broad, had a delicacy about its extra- 
 vagance which distinguished it from the 
 elaborate professional jocularity of the Halls. 
 It bore being looked at close ; it did not seem 
 to require footlights and the paraphernalia of 
 the stage. Indeed, part of the fun was the
 
 Pe Ussier and ^^ The Follies " 79 
 
 extent to which such preparations were dis- 
 pensed with. Properties had the air of having 
 been commandeered for the occasion, and 
 every makeshift had a witty point. " The 
 Follies " made as much fun of scenery as they 
 did of actors and dramatists. At last we got 
 the chance of seeing perfect private theatri- 
 cals ; and behold, the charade too was a form 
 of art ! 
 
 To Pelissier's musical gift obituary notices 
 did not do justice. He had a very pretty 
 vein of melody in him, as those who heard 
 " The Potato Man " will not forget. Of the 
 Gastronomic Quartettes, " Cannibals " (" Mis- 
 sion-ary-good. Wow, wow ") and " Haggis " 
 were my favourites, but '' The Potato Man " 
 was the prettiest of them. Do you remember 
 the girl in the gaudy shawl ? the ungrateful 
 whining lout ? and the good-natured potato 
 man beside his queer tin machine (not unlike 
 Stephenson's first attempt at a railway engine) 
 with the group of shivering creatures round 
 him, and the doleful, comforting sound of the 
 singing ?
 
 8o Pelissier and " The Follies " 
 
 What made " The Follies," apart from their 
 genially ludicrous fun, was the amount of 
 authentic observation they put into their 
 mimicries. Mimicry in its elementary phase is 
 the lowest of the talents, but combined with 
 intelligence its achievements may be prodigious. 
 One need only read a page or two of Dickens to 
 feel how much his observation was akin to that 
 of the actor-mimic's. "The Follies" music- 
 hall programme, with gallery comments upon 
 each item, was worthy of Dickens ; so were 
 the voice-trial scenes, in which a series of 
 would-be " Follies " came forward, one after 
 the other, to display their qualifications before 
 the weary Pelissier. One understood after that 
 how difficult it must liave been to recruit 
 " The Follies," when gaps had to be filled up 
 in that sprightly circle on which the curtain 
 used to rise, promising by their aspect a 
 flowing readiness of ingenuity and wit. 
 
 I always hoped that Pelissier with his dex- 
 terous, extravagant turn for satirical fun would 
 not stop at ridiculing actors and entertain- 
 ments ; that we might some day have had
 
 Pe Ussier and '■'' The Follies " 8 i 
 
 " Potted Parliaments," as well as " Potted 
 Plays." What admirable exhibitions of de- 
 portment, inconsequence, and pomposity we 
 might have witnessed : ministers receiving 
 deputations, suffragettes and others ; candidates 
 propitiating alternately publicans and teeto- 
 tallers ; M.P.'s upon the platform, with their 
 attitudes and gesticulations and their flapping, 
 grandiloquent sentences, shot dead by inter- 
 ruptions ! 
 
 Wc shall not look upon Pelissier's broad, 
 moony face again, or its like, I think. Talking 
 of speeches, his face comes back to me most 
 vividly at this moment, as he appears before 
 the curtain to make a little speech to us. 
 He is apparently confused by the pleasure 
 our enthusiasm gives him, but he begins 
 all right, though his modesty makes his 
 meaning a little abstruse. He has something 
 to say which is most appropriate, but he 
 is tripped up by a sort of amiable coyness, 
 and proceeds to plunge desperately forward 
 into chaotic utterance, like a man stumbling 
 on over loose sliding scree, getting hotter
 
 82 Pe Ussier and '* The Follies 
 
 and hotter, and more and more incoherent 
 till, after a second's horrified stare at the blank- 
 ness of his own mind, he abruptly with- 
 draws in confusion.
 
 Miss Ethel L 
 
 evey 
 
 POSTERS are going about the streets now 
 with " Hullo Tafigo I Nearing the 400 " 
 printed on them, and if it were runs and not a 
 " run " which was in question, Miss Levey 
 would be credited with the largest score in this 
 long innings. I have seen her twice, and both 
 times it struck me that what gave the peculiar 
 spice to her performance, her dancing, her 
 singing and her carriage was the irony which 
 pervaded them. 
 
 Years ago Miss Cissy Loftus took the halls by 
 storm with her naivete. There was a sort of 
 freshness about her which gave a charm to her 
 clever imitations. She seemed to belong to a 
 world which was not the music-hall world. 
 There is a good deal of clever fun besides 
 amazing skill in all sorts of directions to be 
 enjoyed in those places, but also an appal- 
 
 83
 
 84 M/j-j E,thel Levey 
 
 ling amount of fun which only gives the 
 measure of man's misery by the mere fact that 
 such entertainments could be supposed for a 
 single moment to be enlivening. What a hell 
 — no, that is too strong a word — but what a 
 dismal purgatory most people's lives must be 
 to make it possible that such turns as one often 
 sees could be offered to them at all ! Think of 
 the exhibitions of miserably inefficient feminine 
 archness to which we are so constantly treated ! 
 Think of the heart-damping gambols of per- 
 forming animals, the songs which are by way 
 of being mischievous and are like flat soda- 
 water when not a bubble wriggles to the sur- 
 face, and then of the miserable ditties meant to 
 express the fantastic and tender genius of love ! 
 Then amidst all this rubbish comes something 
 really clever or funny or pointful, something 
 with a perfection about it rare enough upon 
 the dramatic stage. A music-hall audience is 
 chiefly composed of jaded tolerant people 
 thankful for the smallest mercies. Miss Cissie 
 Loftus conquered the jaded by being quite 
 out of the run of music-hall performers. She
 
 Miss Ethel Levey 85 
 
 succeeded by being unusually simple and 
 untouched by the music-hall atmosphere. Miss 
 Ethel Levey has triumphed through possessing 
 the opposite quality, through being unusually 
 sophisticated. Her arts are the arts of the 
 music-hall performer, but they are interpreted 
 by one who understands them so thoroughlythat 
 she is outside them herself. She gives an exciting 
 impression of being superior to her job. There 
 are two ways of being superior to one's job : 
 one a very bad way and one which is an artistic 
 grace when the job is not important. To attain 
 this, however, you must have a perfect mastery 
 of the work in hand ; contempt without com- 
 plete efficiency condemns you to the inane ; but 
 granted perfect accomplishment, it may be 
 the subtlest embellishment. Miss Ethel Levey 
 dances and sings her songs with the deftest 
 precision and the most satisfying " go," but 
 there is a suggestion of contempt in every kick 
 of her foot and twinkle of her ankle ; and in 
 the sentimental swoops of her powerful con- 
 tralto voice there is disdain for " all that 
 sort of thing " audible to anyone who can
 
 86 Miss Ethel Levey 
 
 hear. It is precisely this combination of in- 
 tellectual detachment with perfect efficiency, 
 of mockery and passion, balanced in a scornful, 
 superior composure, that makes me think she 
 has in her the capacity to become an actress 
 of unusual range and force. Her performance 
 is a finished one, but she throws it at us with 
 the air of saying, " This is just the sort of 
 thing you like." And consequently those who 
 do not as a rule care much for that sort of thing 
 in this case thoroughly enjoy it.
 
 Lord George Sanger 
 
 WHEN we hear of an odd adventurous 
 career, we often think, " What a book 
 that man could have written if he had just 
 put down what he remembered." The people 
 who do write the story of their own lives are, 
 as a rule, either people who have been con- 
 cerned with public events or those who are 
 already half-authors or authors ; and to most 
 very little happens that is startling ; the ad- 
 ventures which come in their way are nearly 
 all of a spiritual kind. Experience gives them 
 an inch and they stretch it to an ell ; that is 
 the way they write their books of adventure. 
 But when they turn into autobiographers, the 
 inches by themselves make but a poor story. 
 
 The case is different with the men of un- 
 likely and erratic enterprise ; unfortunately, 
 though their life provides them with masses 
 
 S7
 
 88 Lord George Sanger 
 
 of material, it usually deprives them at the 
 same time of the power of using it for literary- 
 purposes. There are exceptions, however, 
 and one of the most striking of these books is 
 the autobiography of a man who, at the age 
 of eighty-five, was foully murdered not many 
 weeks ago. His name in the heyday of his 
 career was as widely known up and down Eng- 
 land as the name of Gladstone. Seventy 
 Tears a Showman (Arthur Pearson, Ltd.), by 
 Lord George Sanger (I remove the conven- 
 tional quotation marks from the title with 
 feelings of profound respect : he earned it), is 
 one of the most romantic, entertaining, down- 
 right books that have been written for many a 
 year. And the style of it ! It is as direct as 
 Defoe, and yet there is an engaging finery 
 about it, too, which pleases, much as the 
 decorations on a wandering showman's van 
 may please us. Stevenson would have revelled 
 in the book. Every page is vivid, and yet the 
 light of memory is on it, and there is no better 
 compositor than memory. In that light things 
 fall into their places and adjust themselves into
 
 hord George Sanger 89 
 
 a kind of picture for the mind as every day- 
 dreamer knows, though when he tries to copy 
 the picture with ink on paper, atmosphere and 
 proportion are apt to vanish. In this book, 
 however, they are preserved. Lord George 
 did not, we may conjecture, know anything 
 about style — except in a jaguar or circus-horse 
 — but he has achieved it. And when he is 
 determined to rise to an occasion, his effort 
 does not amuse us because it falls flat. When 
 he turns a sentimental glance over the past, 
 he docs not write in the vein of the Babu who 
 wrote announcing the death of his mother, 
 " the foot that rocked the cradle has kicked 
 the bucket." He succeeds in high sentiment 
 as naturally as in plain narrative. 
 
 His father was a sailor. The elder Sanger 
 was seized by the press-gang one day as he was 
 walking over London Bridge. He served and 
 fought on board the Victory^ and he saw Nelson 
 fall ; memories which served him well, when 
 later on he came to " patter " in front of a 
 peepshow. He lost several fingers, broke ribs, 
 and got a severe scalp wound in boarding a
 
 90 Lord George Sanger 
 
 French vessel at Trafalgar, and consequently- 
 retired from the Navy with the magnificent 
 pension of £\o a year. His future career 
 was decided by the following event. Before 
 serving on the Victory he had been to sea upon 
 the Pompey, and one day two Jew conjurers 
 came on board the vessel to earn an honest 
 penny by amusing the sailors. Seeing that 
 they had the makings of able-bodied seamen, 
 the captain promptly pressed them for the 
 service of the King. Lord George's father was 
 kind to the unfortunate wretches, and in return 
 they taught him many conjuring and hanky- 
 panky tricks. So when pensioned off he looked 
 in that direction to gain an honest living. A 
 little peepshow box, carried on the shoulder, 
 was the mustard seed from which the great 
 tree of his son's famous prosperity grew. The 
 elder Sanger was evidently a man of great 
 resource and sterling merit, courage and piety. 
 In a few years a collapsible merry-go-round, 
 worked by two boys, a giantess (really six foot 
 high), " two cannibal pigmies of the dark 
 continent " (intelligent mulatto children aged
 
 Lord George Sanger 9 1 
 
 ten and nine), and a caravan were at the show. 
 One of Lord George's earliest recollections 
 (he was the sixth child ; his father had married 
 a lady's maid at Bristol) was a terrific battle 
 between the great rival shows of Hilton and 
 Wombwcll on the Oxford road, about two 
 miles from Reading, at three o'clock in the 
 morning. The Reading fair was over, and the 
 showmen were making for Henley and the 
 fair there. WombwcU's got away from Reading 
 first, and Hilton's tried to overtake them to get 
 the best pitch at Henley. 
 
 " There was Nelson Lee with his original 
 Richardson's Booth ; Fred Randall, ' the 
 Giant ' ; Sam Taylor, from Ilkeston ; another 
 very tall man showing as a giant ; ' Fat Tom,' 
 an enormous personage, exhibited as * the 
 heaviest man on earth ' ; ' Skinny Jack,' the 
 North American ' Living Skeleton,' with the 
 big Holden booth ; ' Bob,' the armless man, 
 who painted pictures with his feet ; and many 
 others, including our humble selves — each show 
 having a little army of assistants and hangers- 
 
 on.
 
 92 Lord George Sanger 
 
 Wombwell's men drew across the road to 
 prevent their faster rivals passing. The fight 
 began by one of Hilton's men knocking one of 
 Wombwell's drivers off his seat with a tent- 
 pole. 
 
 " Then the rest of the showmen took sides, 
 for in the profession Hilton's and Wombwell's 
 each had their supporters, and in less than 
 quarter of an hour a battle was being waged 
 on the Oxford road, at three in the morning, 
 such as had not been seen since the time of 
 the Civil Wars. Even the Freaks took part. 
 The fat man made for the living skeleton with 
 a door-hook ; the living skeleton battered at 
 the fat man with a peg mallet. Windows and 
 doors of caravans were smashed, and men 
 were lying about bleeding and senseless from 
 wounds. 
 
 " While the melee was at its height there 
 came a terrible diversion. The horses drawing 
 Wombwell's elephants, left unattended, had 
 taken fright at the noise made by the fighting, 
 swearing men, and the wild beasts who, aroused 
 by the combat, added their howling to the din.
 
 Lord George Sanger 93 
 
 Rushing madly away, the powerful team had 
 got too close to one of the deep ditches — 
 dykes, we called them then — that bordered 
 the road, the wheels of the great van left the 
 level, and with a crash the vehicle turned over. 
 
 " In two minutes the elephants, mad with 
 fright, had smashed the sides of the waggon 
 to splinters, and made their way out, rushing 
 hither and thither, and turning over every- 
 thing in their path." 
 
 The adventures of the Sanger family upon 
 the road, dangers from the chartists, the small- 
 pox, drunken rioters, unjust magistrates, and 
 jealous rivals, make a most exciting Odyssey. 
 One incident made a profound impression upon 
 the little George. His father had good- 
 naturedly given a lift to two men with a heavy 
 sack one night. George, walking behind the 
 cart in the moonlight, began to feel an uneasy 
 curiosity about the bulky, long, shapeless sort 
 of bundle contained in the big sack : " It 
 wobbled about in a fashion that made it seem, 
 to my boyish eyes, as though it had sometliing 
 alive in it.
 
 94 Lord George Sanger 
 
 " I swung myself up to the waggon rail and 
 took a close look at the bundle. I could see 
 the neck of the sack was unloosed, as though 
 somebody had recently untied it, and pulling 
 aside the sack I peeped in. 
 
 " Oh ! my God ! the horror of that moment ! 
 I hung to the rail paralysed with fear. The 
 moonlight shone clearly through the loosened 
 sack, and I saw a naked human arm and the 
 pallid, wax-like face of a dead woman ! Why 
 I did not scream out I cannot tell from that 
 day to this, but I did not. I simply dropped 
 off the back of the waggon, shaking with 
 fear, my knees giving way under me so that I 
 could not walk. Indeed, when I recovered 
 myself, the waggon was some distance ahead 
 and I had to run to catch it. 
 
 " When I got to my father's side he evidently 
 saw by my white face and shaking form that 
 I had discovered what we were carrying, for 
 he caught hold of my shoulder, and stooping 
 down, said in a stern whisper, ' Don't speak, 
 Georgie, not a word ! Keep on by the side 
 of the horses ! ' "
 
 honi George Sanger 95 
 
 The two men proved to be, not murderers, 
 but something even more abhorrent to the 
 poor at that time — body snatchers. 
 
 George, as he grew up, developed into a 
 strong young man, with a kind of a dashing 
 quahty air about him. He was magnificent 
 in his dress, scornful and fascinating. On his 
 first independent venture as " Wizard of the 
 West," he adopted the costume of Hamlet, to 
 which several admirers among the beauties who 
 thronged his booth were proud to contribute 
 a bit of ribbon, a feather, or a collar. But he 
 was proof against even the charms of " Water- 
 cress Betty " ; indeed, until at Stepney fair 
 he met Madame Pauline de Vere, the Lady of 
 the Lions, who became his wife, his indiffer- 
 ence to the sex was only equalled by the fine 
 figure he cut, shouting his patter among the 
 " flares " in front of the stage. The rest of 
 his story is a series of triumphs until he reaches 
 the acme of a showman's career, and performs 
 before Her Majesty Queen Victoria. He over- 
 shadows the great Wombwell ; he owns a 
 circus ; he beats the Yankees and becomes
 
 g6 Lord George Sanger 
 
 proprietor of Astley's ; he performs in every 
 capital in Europe. 
 
 Popular rumour has accounted for his 
 courtesy title by supposing that he was christ- 
 ened " Lord." This is untrue ; he acquired 
 his title in the following manner : " Buffalo 
 Bill " had made a great hit with his Wild West 
 exhibition of prairie life. The name of the 
 Honourable William Cody figured everywhere. 
 Sanger was determined to have one or two 
 real buffaloes of his own and a number of un- 
 real Red Indians. With these properties, a 
 rickety stage coach and some good mules, he 
 was able to produce " Scenes from Buffalo 
 Bill " as one of the features of his circus. The 
 Honourable William was annoyed and appealed 
 to the law. " He went into the box and I 
 went into the box, and a very pretty display 
 of contradictory statements resulted." Sanger 
 won his case ; but the continual reiteration of 
 the phrase "the Honourable William Cody" 
 during the trial had got on his nerves, and he 
 said to himself, " Hang it ! I can go one better 
 than that, anyhow. If he's the Honourable
 
 Lord George Sanger 97 
 
 William Cody, then I'm Lord George Sanger 
 from this out ! " He got new bills printed, 
 " Lord George Sanger's Circus " ; everyone 
 began to speak of him as Lord George, and so 
 he became not only a self-made man, but a 
 self-made peer — in the strictest sense of the 
 term — an honourable title. 
 
 " Walk up ! Walk up ! Walk up ! This 
 way for a tale of strange things, scenes, and 
 adventures ! Lord George is on the road 
 again ! " — and he will travel round among us 
 still with this new pcepshow for many a year. 
 
 H
 
 JLion Taming 
 
 MR. FRANK BOSTOCK is known to 
 his less intimate friends as " The 
 Animal King." His beasts (there are some 
 splendid specimens), in spite of being confined 
 in small cages, seem in excellent condition. 
 They are sleek and clean. Of course it is most 
 important that performing animals should 
 never be hungry, and consequently feeding- 
 time at Bostock's is a very different thing from 
 feeding-time at the lion-house at the Zoo. In 
 the lion-house at the Zoo the animals begin 
 pacing swiftly to and fro quite a quarter of 
 an hour before the meat truck appears, and when 
 it does they start ramping and roaring furiously. 
 These professional animals showed compara- 
 tively little impatience. 
 
 Over each cage is placed the name of the 
 
 98
 
 Liofi TiUJiing 99 
 
 tamer : Signorita Louise has a troop of six 
 Rocky Mountain pumas ; Madame d'Arcy six 
 young lionesses ; Mr. Brooks six bears ; the 
 great Falkendorf two tigers and several lions ; 
 Signor Morelli six leopards ; and a mysterious 
 French aristocrat, who wishes to be known as 
 the Baron X, four mancless lions from northern 
 India. It is a romantic profession. The method 
 of taming and cowing wild beasts is always the 
 same. First the animal is chained in its cage, 
 and for about three weeks the tamer visits it 
 tlirec or four times a day. It springs at him, 
 of course, again and again, while he stands just 
 out of reach, till having been baffled a hundred 
 times it becomes more resigned to his presence. 
 This is the first stage. Continual disappoint- 
 ment acts very powerfully on animals, and 
 has been known to affect even the spirits of a 
 fish. In an aquarium some years ago there was 
 a tank in which a pike and a number of small 
 appetising perch were to be seen swimming 
 about together, the pike keeping to one half 
 of the water and the perch to the other. This 
 happy state of things had been brought about
 
 loo Lion Taming 
 
 by inserting a plate-glass partition between 
 them, and removing it after the pike had 
 knocked himself senseless against the invisible 
 barrier many times. But the tamer must get 
 control over his animal. It is not sufficient 
 to persuade it merely to tolerate him. When 
 the lion or leopard has been baffled in its spring 
 a sufficient number of times, then comes the 
 day when the tamer risks his life. The animal is 
 drugged and loosed in the steel arena ; when it 
 comes to its senses the tamer is already there, but 
 this time padded with leather and tightly woven 
 straw (the best protection against scratches), 
 in thick thigh-boots and with a steel case over 
 his head. Under one arm he has a strong wooden 
 chair, and in the other hand a kind of blunt 
 pitchfork, which has been heated in the fire. 
 The four legs of a wooden chair have been 
 found the best defence against the spring of 
 one of the greater cats. There are, of course, 
 attendants outside the bars, armed with hot 
 forks to drive off the lion when he has got his 
 tamer down ; but the tamer must stay and be 
 charged until the beast gives it up in despair.
 
 Lion Taming loi 
 
 This is- the most important moment in its 
 education. It has to be convinced that it 
 cannot get the better of the man if it does 
 spring, and it must learn to dread the sight of 
 one of those blunt forks. Lions and pumas 
 learn these lessons most thoroughly; leopards 
 and some bears are more dangerous after they 
 have been broken in ; tigers always remain un- 
 certain — a tiger-tamer cannot get an insurance 
 policy on his life. The puma, however, has 
 the reputation of being friendly to man. 
 There are travellers' tales of pumas following 
 men in the forest to protect them against other 
 animals, which may be dismissed as untrue ; 
 but the puma has some of that curiosity in its 
 nature which has ended in making the dog 
 man's friend, and I was told by a tamer that 
 one of the Signorita's pumas would probably 
 come to her rescue if one of the leopards 
 attacked her. It is disappointing that the 
 bear's nature should belie its appearance. The 
 small Malayan bear — the beautiful dark, glossy, 
 brown bear with an orange V on its chest — 
 is the easiest to tame, and the grey Pyrcnean
 
 102 Lion Taming 
 
 bear is a fairly patient, approachable beast ; 
 but on the whole, the apparently endearing 
 bonhomie of the race is most deceptive. They 
 look good-humoured, but they are not. Not 
 that they are bad-tempered, few of the larger 
 animals are ; ill-temper is a human failing and 
 a failing of the little beasts. Perhaps among 
 the larger animals only the two-horned black 
 rhinoceros, the wild-ass and the mandrill deserve 
 that epithet ; such, at least, was the opinion 
 of the late C. T. Cornish, who understood the 
 characters of animals very well. The bear is 
 implacable once he is roused, and the blows 
 of his fore-paws, as the Rev. J. G. Wood re- 
 marks, " if they take effect upon their object, 
 cause the most dreadful injuries " ; but he is a 
 good performer and he goes through his tricks 
 with the air of enjoying them, while the great 
 cats exhibit, even when they are docile, a 
 sullen or bored reluctance. One little cinna- 
 mon-coloured bear at Bostocks', whose trick is 
 to bounce about on its fore and hind paws 
 alternately, was so delighted with its own 
 clumsy agility that it lost its temper when it
 
 Lion Taming 103 
 
 was told to stop. But the tricks which the 
 showman is most proud of and the crowd seems 
 to appreciate most cannot give pleasure to any 
 one who is really fond of animals. To him 
 there is no pleasure in seeing a lion riding on a 
 horse or an elephant lighting a fire or rocking 
 a cradle. In common with the crowd he can 
 enjoy the spectacle of wild animals dominated 
 by human courage and perseverance, but he 
 cannot enjoy seeing a beautiful animal made 
 a fool of. 
 
 The arena gives him an opportunity of seeing 
 animals such as lions, tigers, leopards, pumas, and 
 bears in moods in which he could not other- 
 wise observe them. The sudden change from 
 smooth composure to a blaze of fury, as quickly 
 quenched, the perfidious, slinking movements 
 of the cowed beasts, the blunt, round paws, 
 batting at the whip-lash, and the soft, easy 
 leap with which one of them will land on its 
 appointed ledge, and sit there as though com- 
 posedly awaiting a caress, are well worth seeing ; 
 but to watch a sagacious and collected elephant 
 waving a baby's bottle in its trunk and deposit-
 
 I ©4 Lion Taming 
 
 ing it beside a doll in a cradle is simply de- 
 pressing. 
 
 One occasional feat in the tamer's exhibition 
 of his courage and power ought not to be al- 
 lowed. He ought not to be encouraged by 
 public cheers to put his head between the jaws 
 of a lion. It is horribly risky, as is proved 
 by the fact that he dares not attempt it every 
 night. He has to watch very carefully to see 
 what kind of temper the lion is in ; and of 
 course the men who stand behind the door 
 with revolvers in case an animal should get 
 out of hand could not save him, if he had 
 miscalculated the beast's mood. You will not 
 get a first-rate lion-tamer to give up this feat, 
 because he is fearless and naturally takes a 
 pride in his own daring ; but the public has 
 no business to encourage him by applause. 
 
 In one corner of " Bostock's Jungle " is an 
 animal which it is restful to contemplate after 
 going the round of the splendid fierce crea- 
 tures — a quiet and modest tapir. The voice of 
 the tapir is seldom heard. It is reported to be 
 a whistle. This is surprising ; but no one
 
 Lion Tayning 105 
 
 who has looked thoughtfully at the tapir will be 
 astonished to hear tliat its response to affection 
 is so effusive as to be embarrassing. How the 
 tapir has managed to survive in this desperate 
 world is a wonder. It is utterly defenceless. 
 Its tough, smooth hide enables it to crash 
 through the thickest underwood, head down, 
 and it must be faster than it looks ; but with 
 only these advantages, how did such a plump, 
 homely creature manage to get along ? It is a 
 most ancient animal, nearer to the ancestor of 
 the horse than any other. In old-fashioned 
 natural history books it is often represented 
 dragging downwards with its short prehensile 
 nose a succulent branch for the benefit of its 
 young. I am inclined to think that such pic- 
 tures divined the secret of the tapir's survival, 
 that it got a pull over animals much superior 
 in defence and attack, in the domestic virtues. 
 Anyhow, there it still is, and though it would 
 be impossible to write a poem to such a cobby, 
 compact, absurdly mild animal, it is equally 
 impossible not to feel fond of it. It is the 
 most bourgeois of animals ; that is why we
 
 io6 Lion Taming 
 
 despise it a little, laugh at it and like it. It 
 could not learn a trick to save its life, but if 
 you clapped a hat on its head and turned it 
 into the arena, it would behave with unim- 
 pressive dignity.
 
 The TV^onder Zoo 
 
 IT was Saturday afternoon. Each train dis- 
 gorged two or three hundred people, and a 
 number of children of different ages and sizes. 
 I, too, passed into the entrance lobby of 
 Olynipia. The turnstiles were worked by 
 large men in tall, white coaching-hats and drab 
 ulsters. The next moment I was in '^he 
 Wonder Zoo. The first impression is a complex 
 one. You walk up a slight incline and find 
 yourself in a place which reminds you of a vast 
 railway station, a huge terminus which has 
 been touched by the wand of a somewhat 
 theatrical Bacchus. Extravagant pale green 
 vines have covered the glass roof, shutting out 
 the light of day, and the familiar, glaring, 
 electric balls, which depend from it, are half 
 shrouded in clustering creepers. Fix }0ur 
 eyes on the tobacco or sweet kiosk at your 
 
 107
 
 io8 The Wonder Zoo 
 
 elbow and you might still believe yourself at 
 Paddington or Charing Cross, but raise them, 
 and you are astonished to find yourself at the 
 foot of a towering cliff, on the stony ledges of 
 which are huddled in squalid sociability dozens 
 of brown pink-behinded apes. A little to the 
 left on a less precipitous slope lies an Abys- 
 sinian lion, frowning majestically and trying 
 to doze. A flight of steps leads you to a kind 
 of platform grooved in the rock, and then you 
 perceive that a deep trench, some twenty-five 
 or thirty feet wide, separates you from these 
 animals. This is the best spot for getting a 
 general view of your surroundings. Below 
 lies a rocky landscape with flat-bottomed 
 hollows in it, and here and there a pool of 
 water. One of them is full of birds. In it all 
 sorts of cranes are pruning themselves and 
 stretching their necks, and beside it ostriches 
 are launching themselves about with that 
 jaunty, springy gait, at once so elegant and so 
 ridiculous. There are geese and pelicans, too, 
 round the water-hole, and a lovely zebra, 
 looking as smart as a new carriage in a coach-
 
 The Wonder Zoo 109 
 
 builder's window, and a number of meek- 
 eyed, brittle-legged antelopes. To the left 
 again there is a dark pool with two pairs of 
 eyes and nostrils just apparent above its sur- 
 face : the young hippopotami are enjoying 
 that euthanasia which is the aim of their exist- 
 ence. True, they have never known the joys 
 of mud-wallowing or of reaping sheaves of 
 succulent reeds by the mouthful, still they 
 are free from one of the principal worries of 
 hippopotamic existence, being washed down 
 river while asleep. On the whole, next to the 
 crocodile, of all captive animals I am inclined 
 to commiserate them least. Yet they are par- 
 ticularly difficult to keep in captivity, which 
 suggests, as is the case with some poets, 
 that a somewhat stolid appearance bewrays an 
 inward deep capacity for sentiment. Not far 
 off is a two-horned rhinoceros or rhinaster, a 
 native of East Africa. He lives in a depression 
 in the rocks with a sandy floor. He has a 
 choleric and saurian eye. The skin of this animal 
 does not fall in heavy folds like that of the 
 Asiatic species ; of it no poet could write,
 
 1 1 o The Wotider Zoo 
 
 " Rhinoceros, your hide is all undone." Natur- 
 alists described it as a " truly fearful opponent," 
 though all are agreed that it is not so formid- 
 able as the keitloa, which is bigger, and, size 
 apart, can easily be distinguished from it by 
 the shape of the second horn. This is equal in 
 length to the first, while the rhinaster's second 
 horn is short and conical. It is an animal 
 difficult to please. The Asiatic rhinoceros can 
 be placated (so they say) by anyone who has 
 the nerve to lift up one of the heavy flaps of 
 hide and remove the parasites collected there ; 
 but I do not see how one is to please the smooth 
 African rhinoceros. 
 
 In another of these depressions in the rock 
 live what is called a " happy family " ; that 
 is to say, a number of animals which would 
 naturally fly at each other's throats, if they 
 did not share bed and board. In this case " the 
 happy family " consists of young bears, Eskimo 
 dogs, young hyenas, young lions and a young 
 Himalayan bear. I do not care for " happy 
 families " myself. In them, as in human homes 
 where deep incongruities of temperament exist,
 
 The Wonder Zoo i 1 1 
 
 the individuals by living together seem to lose 
 in spirit what they gain in wariness. Think 
 what your own feelings would be if you were 
 born with the traditions of a young lion, and 
 had to put up with a beastly hyena snuffling 
 round you all day ! Of course they get used 
 to it, but I do not believe in total eradication 
 of racial prejudices, however difficult they may 
 be to justify in the court of reason, and Pliny 
 says that the lion hates the hyena so intensely 
 that " if both their skins be hanged to- 
 gether, the hair of the lion's skin shall fall 
 away." Lastly, immediately in front of you, 
 as you stand on the platform, rises an immense 
 round object, like the socket of a gigantic 
 night-light. This is one end of the arena. 
 The spectators are hidden, but out of it issue 
 shouts of laughter and sudden crepitations of 
 applause. There was not a seat to be got last 
 Saturday, not even for ten shillings. Looking 
 through the various passages leading into the 
 arena, I could see for a second a racy individual 
 twinkle by in a light buggy, or a deft and 
 spangled lady poised on a bare-backed steed.
 
 I 12 
 
 The Wonder Zoo 
 
 I felt like one of those little louts who lie on 
 their bellies at travelling shows and peep under 
 the tents — " Hi ! Bill, here ; I can see the 
 'oofs of the 'orses." No, not quite like one 
 of them, for I do not care for performing 
 animals. To see an elephant make a fool of 
 itself does not amuse me in the least, and I 
 had much rather watch seals catching fish than 
 catching balls. I saw the seals in their tank 
 between their performances. There was a 
 constant flow of water in and out of it, and 
 the liveliness of the slippery creatures was more 
 delightful to me than any of their acquired 
 antics could possibly have been. The seal is 
 one of the most intelligent and affectionate 
 of animals, and it is very painful to think 
 of what goes on at the seal fisheries every year. 
 It has, as my first natural history book taught 
 me, " a disposition to become familiar " ; and 
 my next instructor, the Rev. Wood, added 
 that seals taken young " have been strongly 
 domesticated with their captors, considering 
 themselves to belong of right to the household, 
 and taking their share of the fireside with the
 
 The Wonder Zoo 1 1 3 
 
 other members of the family." Dear old 
 Wood ! if modern naturalists write with more 
 knowledge and terseness than you, none tell us 
 so many things we should like to believe about 
 animals ! I cannot now quite beheve in a 
 seal on anybody's hearth-rug, gazing with 
 melting eyes upon the glowing coals, though at 
 one time, had I been fortunate enough to 
 possess one, I should no doubt have tried to 
 domesticate it " strongly." 
 
 Near the tank was a row of young Indian 
 elephants, each tethered by one hind and one 
 fore leg and standing shoulder to shoulder. 
 They were presumably performers, waiting for 
 their " turn." They were shuffling and sway- 
 ing up and down uneasily, and in spite of the 
 notice PLEASE DON'T FEED US above 
 their heads, they kept lifting their trunks 
 and showing the inside of their moist, pink 
 mouths. Many of them were so young that 
 the sparse black hair on their weighty foreheads 
 was not yet rubbed off. It is extraordinary 
 how this thin-set growth adds to the majestic 
 thoughtfulness of their appearance. No man
 
 1 1 4 The Wonder Zoo 
 
 was ever as wise as a young elephant looks. 
 The story of elephantine sagacity which pleases 
 me most is that of the painter, who wished to 
 paint an elephant with its trunk erect and its 
 mouth open, and therefore engaged a man to 
 throw fruit to it during the sitting. The supply 
 of fruit running rather low, the man began to 
 feign, instead of throwing an apple every time. 
 After a series of disappointments, the elephant 
 turned to the artist, and directing his trunk at 
 the canvas, obliterated it completely with one 
 wet blast. 
 
 At the other end of the arena are two cages : 
 one large semicircular one with a tank, con- 
 taining " Tilli Bebes " polar bears ; the other, 
 a long narrow travelling cage, containing Mr. 
 Richard Sawade's ten Bengal tigers. The 
 bears were trained for Captain Amundsen as 
 draught animals for Arctic exploration, but it 
 was decided that they would want too much 
 watching when off work. Besides, however 
 docile at their job they may appear in the 
 arena, once they got upon their native snows 
 and felt the fierce delicious cold, I am sure
 
 The Wonder Zoo 1 1 5 
 
 they would prove a difficult team to drive. 
 Although the cage is small for twenty bears, 
 they appear to be in prime condition. I do 
 not think I have seen such fine specimens any- 
 where before. I watched them for a long 
 time ; some, after the manner of their race, 
 swinging doggedly back and forth, as though 
 doing some exercise prescribed by an ursine 
 Sandow ; others rolling each other over like 
 great snowballs, or standing on their hind legs 
 and cuffing playfully each other with their 
 paws. 
 
 The tigers are young, but they are very 
 large for their age and remarkably sleek. In 
 the preceding article I described the pro- 
 cess by which savage animals are broken in 
 by trainers, and I will not repeat it. It 
 must be remembered that in the case of 
 lions, bears or tigers which, like these tigers, 
 have been practically reared in a Zoo (the 
 oldest of them is only sixteen months old, 
 and the}' have all been exhibited and trained 
 for eight months) their natural ferocity is 
 much less, and consequently the process of
 
 1 1 6 The Wonder Zoo 
 
 cowing them much less drastic. They may- 
 even require a flick of the whip to kindle that 
 sudden flare of temper which the public ex- 
 pect, if they are to believe in the danger to 
 the tamer his exhibition nevertheless always 
 entails. I watched Mr. Sawade get his tigers 
 out of their cage. Most of them went like 
 lambs ; only one glared and snarled when he 
 touched the bars of the cage with his whip, 
 and then drew off with sullen slink of lovely 
 treachery, licking its stiff whiskers as though it 
 longed to fasten its jaws on him. They are 
 superb beasts. The beauty of the tiger is so 
 impressive that I wonder anybody wants to 
 see it play tricks, but then its beauty is so 
 terrifying that I am not surprised people like 
 to see man dominating it. The tiger is at one 
 moment the very incarnation of the beauty of 
 anger, and yet " how politic his grace in moods 
 morose " ! How thrilling to see him sharply 
 shorten his body for a spring ! He took his 
 name from his swiftness, for the Parsees call 
 an arrow "Tigris." And then "the royal 
 cruelty of that face " !
 
 The Wonder Zoo 1 1 7 
 
 It is not the tamer but the big-game sports- 
 man the lover of animals loathes. Though 
 tricks may bore him and even depress him, 
 though the sight of caged animals make him 
 sorry ; yet without the one he would miss op- 
 portunities of seeing many of their movements, 
 and if there were no Zoos he would probably 
 not see the animals at all. When we alarm 
 ourselves with the idea that training implies 
 punishment, it is reassuring to remember that 
 most of the men who train animals have a 
 passion for them, and to recall that teaching 
 one's own cat or dog has implied keeping 
 their confidence and Avinning their affection. 
 Personally, I wish all tricks were given up, but 
 it is not the showman but the sportsman who 
 rouses my wrath. I hate him as some hate 
 those who destroy old buildings, with his 
 " bags," explosive bullets, and tree platforms, 
 well stocked with powder and refreshments. 
 Look at him as he is photographed in his sun 
 helmet, his sandwich box slung around him, 
 posing for us in the public prints as an 
 Horatius Codes, arms crossed, his foot upon
 
 1 1 8 The Wonder Zoo 
 
 the neck of one of a row of glorious beasts, each 
 possessing a hundred times more beauty every 
 hour of the day than he could create in a life- 
 time. Who can walk up the stairs of one of 
 our big clubs, past the hundreds of horns of 
 lovely and harmless creatures, now being exter- 
 minated in every quarter of the earth merely 
 to give young men healthy exercise and dis- 
 traction, without whispering a wish to the 
 propitious heavens that every married man 
 among them may be horned himself before he 
 dies ? 
 
 The Hagenbecks have a good tradition. 
 Their father, Carl Hagenbeck, introduced the 
 system of substituting for cages plots of varie- 
 gated ground in Zoos. At Olympia many of 
 the animals are necessarily kept in their 
 travelling quarters, which are, of course, 
 narrow ; but they have every appearance of 
 being admirably tended, and the only smell 
 which reaches the nostril (even the vultures' 
 cage is odourless) is a human one. It is of 
 course a trying experience for a wild animal, 
 a show like this ; the glaring electric light,
 
 The Wonder Zoo 1 1 9 
 
 the shindy and ceaseless shuffling of feet. 
 Many of them struck me as looking like pas- 
 sengers in a night train, who are being woken 
 up to show their tickets. But let the tender 
 reader comfort himself or herself — the nerves 
 of the Bactrian camel or dwarf hippo are 
 probably more firm than either his or even 
 hers.
 
 Castles in the Air 
 
 SINCE I am about to write upon Day- 
 dreams, let me begin by indulging in 
 one : I am ordained, and about to preach my 
 first sermon. Of course it is most important 
 that I should prove myself to my new flock a 
 physician of souls and no ordinary one. As I 
 shake out the folds of my surplice, all eyes are 
 fixed upon the interesting young preacher. 
 What is my text ? I will not choose one which 
 will offer an excuse for lashing poor humanity 
 where the strokes of moralists have fallen so 
 frequently that the place has become hard and 
 cicatrised ; that will not serve the purpose. 
 No, to establish my power I must discover a 
 disquieting intimacy with weaknesses so shame- 
 fully silly that they are rarely spoken of, even 
 among friends. I catch beneath the brims of 
 
 glamorous hats earnest glances, in which 
 
 1 20
 
 Castles in the Air 121 
 
 curiosity and reverence are delightfully min- 
 gled. Ah ! young women, you will wince first, 
 but before I have done yonder gravid church- 
 warden, whose mind, to judge from his de- 
 portment, never strays from the matter in 
 hand, whether practical or holy, he, too, and 
 others like him, shall feel my probe. My text 
 is already given out : " Behold, this dreamer 
 cometh." 
 
 Alas, the sermon itself is too long to report 
 in these pages. Besides, I am not in Holy 
 Orders, only a critic who must choose his text 
 from secular books. 
 
 As a reader of novels, I have often been 
 struck by the fact that modern novelists, even 
 those who set out to display the secrets of the 
 recesses in human nature, never seem to be 
 aware of the extent to which men and women, 
 sensible matter-of-fact men and women, in- 
 dulge themselves in building castles-in-the-air 
 — castles of such absurd, fantastically improb- 
 able architecture that the Prince Regent's 
 Pavilion at Brighton is a sensible edifice com- 
 pared with these. It is the commonest form
 
 1 2 2 Castles in the Air 
 
 of dram-drinking. And yet, if we were to 
 believe these novelists, who pretend to hold 
 up a glass to human nature, we should be per- 
 suaded that men's and women's thoughts and 
 emotions habitually sprang from rational ex- 
 pectations and actual events. Nothing of the 
 kind. The average human being's imagination 
 is employed almost perpetually in feeding a 
 preposterous vanity upon food which, though 
 airy and insubstantial, has apparently a certain 
 nourishing quality. His or her interests and 
 rational ambitions are only attended to in the 
 interstices of a long wool-gathering process. 
 When anything disagreeable occurs, if the 
 remedy does not lie to hand, they proceed to 
 nestle down in a little warm nest of dreams. 
 The hygienic property of work and of society 
 lies almost entirely in their being preventatives 
 to day-dreaming, for this habit, if it gets strong 
 possession, reduces the mind to a condition 
 in which anything that really happens hardly 
 affects it ; to rouse such a person is like stirring 
 a dish of skimmed milk, you may stir and stir 
 and stir without any result. If introspection
 
 Castles in the Air 123 
 
 fails to convince any reader of the truth of this 
 charge (a wide shot which hits half the world), 
 let him reflect upon these additional facts, 
 which are symptoms of the fantastic prevalence 
 of the castle-in-the-air habit. Think how 
 many contented failures you have known, who 
 yet, you are sure, have neither stoicism nor 
 romance enough to be one of whom it could 
 be prophesied cantahit vacuus. What is the 
 secret of their placid resignation ? Dreaming. 
 Look at the type of literature that is really 
 widely and profoundly popular. Are not the 
 novels which run like a prairie fire through 
 continents, against which the cold douche of 
 criticism is an ineffectual hose — are they not 
 made of the same stuff as castles in the air ? 
 Are they not merely reflections of those 
 idiotic, egotistic dreams of satisfied vanity, to 
 which their voracious readers are ashamed to 
 confess ? One reason why our fiction on the 
 average is so bad is that writers mistake for the 
 genuine impulse to write, the desire (coupled, 
 of course, with the honest hope of royalties) 
 to fondle their own dreams of how splendid it
 
 1 24 Castles in the Air 
 
 would be to appear like their hero or heroine 
 in such intensely gratifying circumstances. If 
 by any chance you are snowed up or rained up 
 at an inn, with a set of trashy novels as the only 
 possible means of distraction, and you are not 
 in a mood to let your mind flow with the 
 author's current, some amusement may be 
 derived from divining in his book the nature 
 of his day-dreams. 
 
 When you meet the crowd stepping westward 
 along the pavements, watch the faces of the 
 solitary people hurrying by. Do not be de- 
 ceived by portentous, magisterial appearances ; 
 that wheezy old gentleman in a top-hat is really 
 crowned with an all-England cricket-cap, and 
 has hit to the boundary three times running 
 in the most critical test match of the year ; 
 that most improbable person has saved the life 
 of a famous beauty under the most heroic 
 circumstances. Watch his lips, he is talking to 
 her now. That young clerk (England is in- 
 vaded, her fleet is sunk) has invented a marvel- 
 lous submarine, and at the last moment, when 
 all seemed lost, he has saved his country and
 
 Castles in the Air 125 
 
 blown the Germans into smithereens. He is 
 replying now to his own toast at a great ban- 
 quet in the Mansion House. That little 
 woman with a prayer-book in her hand, hurry- 
 ing demurely as the church-bell rings more 
 quickly on the hour of the afternoon service, 
 has reared a still higher-towering aerial edifice. 
 It is the day of the Last Judgment : proceed- 
 ings are interrupted by a gratifying duologue 
 between her and the Maker of the Universe. 
 Friends who have neglected her and her land- 
 lady had better take care, her magnanimity will 
 on that day be overwhelming. Dreams, dreams 
 — " we are such stuff as dreams are made of."
 
 ^jrf^ahfcKij -wv. k fca»~.-aff»~*a-. . 
 
 Tears 
 
 IT has been observed that fainting has gone 
 out of fashion, and that heroines no longer 
 faint from emotion. Indeed, the only modern 
 heroine I can recall who faints at an emo- 
 tional crisis is Ann Whitefield in the last act 
 of Man and Superman, whose collapse is cer- 
 tainly not made an occasion for sympathy. 
 It seems that tears too are falling out of 
 favour. Sentimental novelists, and they are 
 indices to common feeling, are now all for 
 iron self-control ; they count on producing 
 the pathetic effects of their old-fashioned 
 prototypes by insisting on the contrary that 
 she or he did not break down. If they describe 
 tears, they are tears of joy or " hard, dry sobs," 
 and a quiver of the lip is held to be more 
 moving. Sentiment, indeed, to be widely 
 popular now must be cloaked in a sham in- 
 
 126
 
 Tears 1 27 
 
 difference ; in the talk of Mr. Kipling's subal- 
 terns the reserve which intentionally betrays 
 emotion could not be carried further. 
 
 But open weeping was not always held in 
 such disfavour. Sterne, who certainly studied 
 to be admired by the world and to cut a figure 
 there as a man of finest sensibility, parades his 
 proneness to tears as the irreproachable proof 
 of it. He had no misgiving that his readers 
 might think him an ass for crying over a dead 
 donkey. Tears Vv^ere the noble language of the 
 eye, and the only trouble was that they could 
 not be always turned on at the right moment. 
 To Byron later they were still, at any rate, an 
 ornament of womanhood : 
 
 Oh ! too convincing, dangerously dear 
 In woman's eye the unanswerable tear. 
 
 Or again he sings : 
 
 What lost a world and bade a hero fly ? 
 The timid tear in Cleopatra's eye. 
 
 It is not thus that we are now made to feel 
 the fascinations of a heroine. Goethe was in 
 advance of his time in sentiment, though not
 
 1 2 8 Teat^s 
 
 perhaps in humour, when after mentioning 
 the lovely tear that glittered in Theresa's right 
 eye, he makes her say to Wilhelm Meister, 
 " Think not that I am so weak, so easy to be 
 moved. It is but the eye that weeps. There 
 was a little wart upon the under-eyelid ; they 
 have removed it successfully ; but the eye has 
 been weak ever since ; the smallest cause brings 
 a tear into it. Here sat the little wart : you 
 cannot see a vestige of it now." The next 
 generation, the generation of Dickens and 
 Thackeray, give us the impression of having 
 cried more easily than we do ; they mention 
 often a particular kind of tear called " a manly 
 tear," which is seldom shed to-day. 
 
 They were not such manly tears as Virgil 
 praised in Euryalus when he had lost the race. 
 
 Lacrimaeque decorae 
 Gratior et pulchro veniens in corpora virtus. 
 
 As for such a man as the hero of Gray's Elegy, 
 of whom we are told 
 
 He gave to misery (all he had) a tear, 
 
 our social reformers will have none of him.
 
 Tears 129 
 
 Affairs of State are now conducted without 
 tears. To us it is strange to hear that Cromwell 
 and his council spent eight hours sobbing and 
 crying before they signed the King's death- 
 warrant. In our House of Commons there is 
 sometimes excitement ; but though a Lobby 
 correspondent recorded that on one occasion 
 Mr. Asquith's voice " broke like the string of a 
 Stradivarius under the bow of a maestro," who 
 would believe that an event similar to Lord 
 John Russell's withdrawal, during the Crimean 
 War, of his second Reform Bill^ (say Mr. 
 Lloyd George's withdrawal of the Insurance 
 Bill, to which he is so personally pledged) 
 could evoke such a scene as this ? " I know," 
 wrote an M.P. in 1854, describing it, "that 
 the unbidden tears gushed to my cheeks, 
 and looking round I could see scores of 
 other careless, worldly men struck by the 
 same emotion — and even the Speaker (as he 
 subsequently admitted to me) was affected 
 in precisely the same manner. The face of the 
 Caucasian (Disraeli) was, of course, as immov- 
 able as usual, but Mr. Walpole wept outright."
 
 130 Tears 
 
 And when poor Mr. Walpole cried some years 
 later because the mob had torn up the railings 
 of Hyde Park, he was dubbed " weeping " 
 Walpole, and there were jokes in Punch about 
 " tears, idle tears ! " Yes, time is against tears. 
 
 " If you have tears, prepare to shed them 
 now," for though it is not a good moment, it 
 is the best you will get. 
 
 The occasions on which a man weeps are 
 not always indicative of the spot where his 
 steadiest, strongest feelings lie. There is a 
 working handle to the mechanical pump of 
 tears in us all, which the most trivial circum- 
 stance may get hold of. Our self-conscious and 
 honestly analytical age has become aware of it, 
 and this is one of the reasons why tears have 
 fallen into disrepute. But sometimes the 
 occasions on which a man is recorded to have 
 wept are extraordinarily illuminating. Take 
 the instance of Rossini. He is recorded to 
 have wept three times : once when he heard 
 Paganini play for the first time, once when the 
 debut of one of his operas was hissed, and once 
 when, returning late, he let fall into a piece of
 
 Tears i 3 i 
 
 ornamental water the truffled duck he was 
 carrying home to supper. After that we feel 
 we know Rossini. 
 
 Yet there are puzzles connected with tears : 
 why should sympathy with others' distress 
 excite tears more easily than our own troubles f 
 Why should people who hardly ever cry over 
 anything that happens to them, cry profusely 
 over books ? Why should those who meet each 
 other with great joy, weep when they meet ? 
 These questions, Why is this ? Why is that ? 
 Why is a cow's tail long ? Why is a fox's 
 bushy ? are quite uninteresting to many ; but 
 they are not so to all, and it is to such my con- 
 cluding remarks are addressed. 
 
 To explain these puzzles we must suppose 
 that sympathy is a separate human emotion, 
 distinct from affection, though affection in- 
 tensifies it, and is not merely, as has been so 
 often asserted, the pale reflection in ourselves 
 of another's emotions ; and that crying has 
 become the natural expression of this distinct 
 emotion, when it reaches intensity. For people 
 are moved to tears when great good fortune
 
 132 
 
 Tears 
 
 befalls those they love, just as naturally as 
 when they realise their distress. They cry also 
 at the news of a national victory, or at the 
 description of a heroic act. This hypothesis 
 that sympathy is a distinct emotion, which also 
 finds its natural relief in tears, would also ex- 
 plain our readiness to cry over characters in 
 books and plays ; since art appeals directly to 
 our faculty for sympathy, and neither self- 
 consciousness nor irrelevant impressions and 
 associations intervene, in reading, to check its 
 exercise. 
 
 Tears are, of course, also the natural physical 
 expression of our own pain and distress ; but 
 men at any rate are drilled from a very early 
 age to keep back tears which rise from such 
 causes. In the nursery boys are taught that 
 they " mustn't cry " when they hurt them- 
 selves, and " blubbing " at school is terrible 
 disgrace. How strong the effect of this train- 
 ing is in making us keep back our tears, may be 
 seen by comparing ourselves with races who 
 do not go through it. Many Southern and 
 Eastern peoples cry easily from vexation or
 
 Tears I 3 3 
 
 disappointment ; though they may be courage- 
 ous enough, they are quite abandoned in their 
 expression of grief. I remember well my 
 astonishment on seeing a ferocious and terrify- 
 ing Albanian burst into tears because he was 
 not allowed to carry my bag. 
 
 Most Englishmen tend to think that only 
 feeble folk weep ; a great mistake. And in 
 consequence of having learnt that they must 
 repress tears when they spring from their own 
 pain and distress, they come to regard all tears, 
 including those which spring from sympathy, 
 as signs of weakness. Again, our feelings of 
 sympathy are curiously independent of our 
 judgments of people and the relative import- 
 ance of things. We dislike being moved against 
 our judgment — it is a most uncomfortable 
 feeling — yet all we can do is to repress the 
 visible signs that we are moved. We tend to 
 become suspicious of tears. 
 
 But I should be sorry if as a race we ever 
 reached the perfect physical self-control of the 
 Redskins, the Japanese, and the Laplanders. 
 Though it would, of course, be a boon to those
 
 134 
 
 Tears 
 
 who now have often " to turn away to hide 
 their want of emotion." 
 
 Tears are peculiar to man, the Indian 
 elephant, and one species of monkey.
 
 " Bohemia " 
 
 THERE is a great difference of opinion as 
 to where the confines of this country- 
 begin. I sec the smaller Oxford Dictionary 
 defines a Bohemian as " a socially unconven- 
 tional person of free and easy habits, manners, 
 and sometimes morals (esp. of artists, etc.)." 
 This definition leaves much to be desired. 
 " Especially of artists, etc." ; it is precisely 
 the " et ccetera " one is curious about. Un- 
 conventionality alone docs not make a Bo- 
 hemian. It was an unconventional thing to 
 invent " ear-stoppers," and to put them on the 
 moment the conversation became trying, yet 
 Herbert Spencer was not a Bohemian ; the 
 most rigid conventionalist would hesitate to 
 call him that. These " ear-stoppers " were 
 formed by a band, almost semicircular in 
 
 135
 
 136 ^'' Bohemia^'' 
 
 shape, with a little velvet knob at each end, 
 which a spring kept pressed over each ear. The 
 device was unconventional ; the effect was 
 comic ; but it was too rational and deliberate 
 a proceeding to be the mark of a Bohemian. 
 In fact, I shall endeavour to persuade you that 
 it was the reverse. For Bohemianism must be 
 distinguished from mere eccentricity of be- 
 haviour. I remember knowing in my early 
 youth a successful Yorkshire manufacturer 
 who exhibited two odd traits, but the one 
 strikes me now as belonging, like Herbert 
 Spencer's ear-stoppers, to the category of in- 
 genious, rational contrivances, and the other 
 to that of pure eccentricity ; neither marks 
 him as a Bohemian. His case is instructive. 
 At the bottom of his park ran an inky canal, 
 down which coal barges were towed all day. 
 A high wall separated his grounds from the 
 tow-path, and along the top of this wall, which 
 was several hundred yards in length, he placed 
 a row of bottles. The bargees could not resist 
 shying coal at them. In fact, it became their 
 regular practice, a sport to which they all
 
 ^^ Bohemia'' 137 
 
 looked forward, and on which bets were laid. 
 Periodically the gardener went round to collect 
 the missiles which had fallen on the park side 
 of the wall, and the ingenious proprietor 
 boasted that he kept one small greenhouse 
 going during the year without its costing him 
 a penny. 
 
 His eccentricity was to keep open house at 
 midday on cold beef, which he cut into slices 
 himself with extraordinary rapidity, and flung 
 on to the plates of the expectant guests with a 
 dexterous flick of the carving knife. The slices 
 always landed flat on the plates, and, with the 
 exception of the left-hand corner plate at the 
 other end of the table, his aim was unerring ; 
 for this shot he had visibly to pull himself 
 together, and sometimes he failed. Out of 
 consideration for the feelings of a possibly 
 touchy guest, this place was always occupied 
 by a member of the family, which was a large 
 one. He had, I think, the makings of a 
 Bohemian in him, and yet clearly he was not 
 one. He was merely eccentric and ingenious 
 and unconventional.
 
 138 ''Bohemia'' 
 
 The respect in which a Bohemian differs 
 essentially from other people seems to me to 
 lie not in laxity of morals, nor in irregularity 
 of habits (for some Bohemians have clock- 
 work habits), nor in casual manners (for some 
 are punctilious), but in not possessing a sense 
 that everything ought to serve a particular 
 purpose and no other. The Bohemian has no 
 delight in allocation for its own sake. Now 
 the run of mankind take an almost childish 
 delight in contrivances intended to meet the 
 need of particular occasions, and their object, 
 as the contents of shop windows show, is not 
 to make the same thing serve many ends, but 
 to have at hand as many things as possible 
 made in such a way that they can only be used 
 on certain definite occasions. The man who 
 is the antithesis to the Bohemian is the man who 
 cannot resist a new patent egg-decapitator. 
 He likes his travelling bag to be constructed 
 in such a way that only a shoe-horn and nothing 
 else will go in a particular place in it. He 
 would, if such a suit could be designed, like 
 to possess one in which the wearer could only
 
 ''''Bohemia'" 139 
 
 go through the motions necessary in golf, and 
 in which it would be quite impossible to shoot 
 or ride. Conventions in dress, dictating a 
 particular costume on particular occasions, 
 delight instead of bothering him. He rejoices 
 to think that he must dress differently for 
 Newmarket and for Ascot. And he treats 
 time and space, as far as he can, in the same 
 way. He likes to arrange his day so that it is 
 difficult to do anything except certain kinds 
 of things at certain hours ; his house so that 
 each room is used only for certain purposes, 
 and each part of each room so that it becomes 
 more fitted for one purpose than any other. 
 His dining-room will be a room in which it is 
 almost impossible to sit comfortably, except 
 round the table ; his drawing-room one in 
 which it would be hard to concentrate upon 
 work, with a corner of it especially suitable for 
 afternoon tea. On the other hand, the note 
 of the Bohemiafi's house is that any room and 
 ahything in it may be used for any purpose as 
 occasion arises, from the dining-room table as 
 a writing-table, to paper clips as studs, or
 
 140 ''''Bohemia'^ 
 
 tooth-brushes as window wedges. He prefers 
 to use his ulster as a dressing-gown, whereas 
 his opposite would like to have an excuse for 
 having three dressing-gowns, each for a different 
 stage in his toilet. The Bohemian does not 
 scorn to use an old hat-box as a waste-paper 
 basket, and although his way of life does not 
 conduce to order like his opposite's, it is a 
 mistake to conclude that the one loves order 
 and the other does not. The real difference 
 between them is that the one gets an exquisite 
 satisfaction from thinking that everything 
 round him serves a definite purpose, and is 
 amused by forestalling the minute contin- 
 gencies of life, while the other is bored by 
 preparing for them, and the purpose things 
 serve is by no means the most interesting 
 quality they possess for him. To the former 
 the charm of thinking about the hours ahead 
 oF him is that each one is ear-marked ; to 
 the latter that they are empty, and can be 
 filled with anything. ^Esthetic people are 
 not most interested in the purpose for 
 which things are made, but in their appear-
 
 '■^Bohemia'' 141 
 
 ancc, or the suggestions they may carry for 
 their imagination ; they therefore tend to be 
 " bohemian." 
 
 The question what are the signs by which a 
 traveller may know that he has crossed the 
 borders of Bohemia are difficult to define. The 
 frontier begins at different places for different 
 people. To me it is marked by a house at 
 which one might find any afternoon the master 
 shaving at three o'clock by the drawing-room 
 looking-glass ; but to some people such a sight 
 would suggest that they must be nearing the 
 capital. It depends upon previous experience. 
 But if you wish to find out whether or not you 
 are likely to be at home and comfortable any- 
 where throughout its dominions (this is a 
 practical question often requiring decision), 
 call up to yourself the vision of someone butter- 
 ing bread with a perfectly clean razor ; if the 
 idea sends a shudder through you, you may 
 conclude you will be happier in other social 
 latitudes ; but if you can envisage it with 
 equanimity, you may, if you choose, make 
 " Bohemia " your home. As everybody knows,
 
 142 " Bohemia " 
 
 it has as an abode many advantages, and 
 having passed this test you may be con- 
 fident that its drawbacks will not prove serious 
 ones for you.
 
 Society and Solitude^ or his 
 First Disciple 
 
 DEAREST LADY —I shall have the plea- 
 sure of kissing your hand on Thursday 
 week at the very latest, if — oh ! how I hate 
 that exceptious particle ! — if the delectable 
 little tyrant of Dunstable docs not insist. You 
 know how very peremptory she can be in her 
 favours, and how impossible it is to cope, dear 
 creature, with her innocent oblivion of other 
 people's feelings and arrangements. Between 
 you and me, the Noble Lord in the Blue 
 Ribbon is beginning to find that out — and 
 other things besides ! Sticky moons about the 
 gallery and terraces at Hodleston with a de- 
 cidedly chastened and watchful air, so Tishy 
 Cardoyle tells me. Well, in case, vnberufen, 
 unberufen, I miss my crack with you, I will 
 
 143
 
 1 44 Society and Solitude 
 
 write my news now, though writing is a poor 
 substitute for pouring out to you who under- 
 stand everything, and never did I stand more 
 in need of the sympathy of a delicate, humor- 
 ous penetration. How we might have laughed 
 over my story together ! But seriously, dear 
 Lady of undoing smiles, there was something 
 rather pathetic about him too. You were 
 right : there is certainly a ray of moonshine 
 mixed with his brains. It was waste of time 
 and money, both scarce things with me, going 
 all the way to Badheim to see him — at least 
 I am tempted to think so, whenever I forget 
 that my ludicrous adventure will amuse you. 
 
 Never did I rise from a posture of worship, 
 dusting my knees and feeling more foolish. 
 What comforted me afterwards was remem- 
 bering that you once said that what you ad- 
 mired most of all in me was my worship of 
 genius. Certainly, if my own Grapes of Proser- 
 pine does not live, I shall be at least able to 
 reflect on my death-bed that I have paid un- 
 grudging homage where it was due, and be- 
 stowed sympathy where it was needed. Yes,
 
 Society and Solitude 145 
 
 and who knows ? Perhaps one or two of the 
 lusty young heirs to fame, to whom I gave 
 their first sweet sip at the cup of success, 
 may some day remember and immortalise even 
 poor little me ! You see, dear friend, it is 
 little I ask at the hands of Destiny, who has 
 seen fit to dower others with her greatest gifts, 
 and pass over the one who would have appre- 
 ciated them perhaps most of all. I hear you 
 protest. It is sweet of you. But on this point 
 I will not listen to the arguments even of my 
 dearest friends. 
 
 Talking of les jeunes, that reminds me of the 
 first surprise of my visit to Badheim. You 
 remember how positive we were from his 
 writing, from his saugrenu audacities, and the 
 sonorous aberrations of his style that he was 
 young — ^you added, broad-shouldered, with a 
 beautiful plangent voice and " an excited eye 
 just a millimetre too wide open." Well, he is 
 a short, grizzled, yes, almost old man, with a 
 walrus moustache, spectacles, and one shoulder 
 higher than the other. And he wears a made- 
 up tie. My second surprise was that Lucid
 
 146 Society and Solitude 
 
 Intervals^ so far from being his first book, is 
 his sixth ! He has written two others since ! 
 So you see it was not interesting, after all. 
 We were had, dear Lady, we were had. He 
 has been before the world nearly thirty years, 
 and all his books — ^he admitted as much him- 
 self — have been wretched draggle-tailed fail- 
 ures. Once or twice he has only sold about 
 twenty copies, and he never, or hardly ever, 
 gets reviewed. My third surprise — but I 
 must begin at the beginning of my story, or 
 you will never climb to the comic climax of my 
 humiliation. 
 
 I believe the good little cherub who sits up 
 aloft and looks after the life of poor Jack was 
 wanting to warn me that night I parted from 
 you, after we settled that we had discovered a 
 new philosophic genius, who must be written 
 to. Never before had I found a letter of that 
 kind so hard to write. I supposed then it was 
 his personality which was embarrassing me ; 
 for Vv^e had divined it — hadn't we ? — as de- 
 cidedly farouche. I believe now my good angel 
 was trying to save me ! I must have torn up
 
 Society and Solitude 1 47 
 
 at least three sheets of paper, and when I did 
 get started, of course, I wrote much more 
 excitedly and enthusiastically than I felt — in 
 fact, I was, I know now, quite ridiculous. No 
 answer came for nearly a week ; but at last a 
 letter with a foreign stamp arrived. It was 
 very long, written in a queer hieroglyphic 
 hand, and, with our preconceived notions of 
 the writer in my mind, it pleased me very 
 much. I thought it rather grand. It read, 
 too, as though behind its guarded gravity (Oh, 
 it must have taken him hours to write — it was 
 most elaborate !) lay pent up a longing for 
 sympathy which suggested thrilling conversa- 
 tions. And when I learnt from the postscript 
 that he was at Badheim for his heart (probably 
 incurable), I wrote back at once still more 
 enthusiastically, I am afraid, about his philo- 
 sophisings, adding that I was longing to see 
 him. Should I come out ? I got back a letter, 
 quite different from the first — I had written 
 purposely myself with more intimate effusive- 
 ness the second time. My letter had drawn 
 him with a vengeance. It was exactly like
 
 1 48 Society a?id Solitude 
 
 lifting up a weir-hatch ; he simply poured. 
 (I must show you the letter ; there really are 
 some striking things in it.) It was the sort of 
 letter one might wTite if one had not seen a 
 soul to speak to for weeks. It began : " My 
 friend." I wired back: " Cor ad cor loquitur I 
 am coming." Three weeks later I was in the 
 train. By the by, just before my departure I 
 received a third letter from him — most touch- 
 ing — suggesting I should postpone my visit 
 since, partly from physical causes, partly from 
 excitement at the prospect of meeting me, he 
 had lately got only snatches of sleep and was 
 far from his best. Of course I started at 
 once. You know how delightful it is to feel 
 that one can hel'p. 
 
 On arriving, I found at my hotel an excited 
 dithyrambic little note : " O long-awaited 
 friend ! " it ran, " the feast of feasts is set " ; 
 and after continuing as though we were going 
 to breakfast at dawn on the top of the Matter- 
 horn, he ended — I need not say, without a 
 glimmer of humour — by asking me to Mittag^s 
 essen at his pension. However, before the time
 
 Society and Solitude 1 49 
 
 came round I heard from him again : no, it 
 was not thus, apparently, two half-blind, 
 battered Titans, labouring in different hemi- 
 spheres, should meet at last ; he would expect 
 me at four. You know how strongly I hold 
 that men and women destroy the interest of 
 life by not expressing all they feel, and by 
 being ashamed of their great emotions, and 
 how convinced I am that reserve is the death 
 of friendship and all we mean by society, in the 
 best sense of the term ; yet I confess something 
 in this last missive blew a little cold draught 
 across my enthusiasm for him. It is not good 
 manners to take for granted that anyone, before 
 you have seen him, is like yourself, however 
 sympathetic he may have sho\\n himself by 
 letter. The note pointed to a stupidity and 
 an ignorance of the world which slightly 
 alarmed me. I thought I would find out a 
 little more about our Berserk philosopher 
 before I approached his den ; so immediately 
 after lunch I went round to his pension^ and 
 introduced myself to the occupants of the 
 salon. The Frau HaushalterinwiLS most com-
 
 / 
 
 1 50 Society and Solitude 
 
 municative. I made her laugh by describing 
 my trepidation, after having travelled from 
 England to see our flaming prophet in the 
 flesh. I do not know whether she was more 
 astonished at my pilgrimage (you see, dearest 
 Lady, she did not know yoii) or at my precon- 
 ception of him. For it appeared that he had 
 no belongings and hardly ever received letters, 
 that he was a polished, quiet little man, always 
 elaborately polite, even when suffering and in 
 pain, and that he made himself agreeable 
 sometimes by taking ladies of the 'pension out 
 for botanising expeditions. I was relieved, but 
 even more disappointed. Everybody has heard 
 of the labouring mountain producing the 
 mouse, but you and I, who know the world of 
 letters, have oftener met with the more amaz- 
 ing, illusion-shattering phenomenon of a moun- 
 tain issuing from a ridiculus mus / "Is this 
 going to prove yet another instance of it ? " 
 I thought, as I ascended the stairs. I heard 
 him walking in his room, tapped, and opened. 
 He stared at me in astonishment ; an emotion, 
 by the by, which his features are peculiarly
 
 Society and Solitude 1 5 i 
 
 adapted to express. Then he asked me stiffly 
 to what he was indebted. ... I was nearly 
 an hour before my time, and I saw he had not 
 put two and two together. I smiled. " I am 
 * the long-awaited ' and, I am afraid, now, over- 
 punctual — ' friend,' " I said as soon as I had 
 myself recovered from the shock of his appear- 
 ance. I thought the moment before that his 
 face had reflected the last limit of blankness of 
 which the human countenance is capable, but 
 at this reply it dropped to an even profounder 
 gape of stupefaction. I moved forward, saying 
 gently : " IN lay I sit down ? " when suddenly 
 he pounced at me — it is the only word — and, 
 gripping ni)- shoulders with his hands, almost 
 dragged me into the room. " You ! I must 
 look at you first." You know how silly one 
 feels when a doctor takes one's head in his 
 hands and turns one's face to the window to 
 look at one's throat ? Think of your feelings 
 if a stranger did it without a moment's warn- 
 ing ! It is true he didn't hold my tongue down 
 with a spoon and make me quack " Ah ! ah ! 
 ah ! " but under the stare of his sunken eyes,
 
 1 5 2 Society and Solitude 
 
 which were near enough to mine to look 
 enormous behind their spectacles, I felt as 
 helpless as a patient, and when his hands slid 
 from my shoulders, I assure you, I felt posi- 
 tively weak. Then, without a word, he turned 
 his back and looked out of the window, while I 
 stood there literally unable to frame a single 
 sentence. Presently an odd sound came from 
 him, something like a gulp and a chuckle, and 
 he turned to me, grinning queerly : " Take a 
 chair. I'll ring for coffee. " When we were 
 settled he asked me why I had called him 
 " Master " in my letters. (Had I ? Heaven 
 knows what I had written !) I said I hoped 
 my letters explained Vv hat I felt. " Nobody has 
 called me that before," he said ; and then — the 
 vanity of these cranks ! — he proceeded, if you 
 please, to put me through a sort of catechism : 
 which of his books had I read ? what had I 
 written myself ? etc. etc. I have conveyed 
 nothing if you cannot beheve that I had en- 
 tirely lost grip of the situation. It came out 
 that I had only dipped into Lucid Intervals — 
 appropriate title that ! — and that I had often
 
 Society and Solitude i 5 3 
 
 written before to authors I did not know. In- 
 deed, he made me go through the list of them, 
 and he laughed every now and then when I 
 mentioned a name. Really, the childish 
 jealousy of authors ! Do you remember 
 Meredith's story of the erudite professor who 
 objected to his visitor going out for a walk 
 with another distinguished professor, and who, 
 " after a short prelude of gloom and obscure 
 explosions, behaved to his faithless admirer 
 (if we exclude the dagger) with the vindictive 
 jealousy of an injured Spanish beauty " ? Our 
 friend's laughter gave him away, and to salve 
 his wounded vanity at discovering he was not 
 the sole object of my admiration, though I 
 doubt if he valued it, I told him that he had 
 another admirer in a charming and distin- 
 guished lady, who was most anxious he should 
 visit her. (Don't chide me ; we could have 
 wriggled out of it somehow.) This provoked 
 a bitter, but really quite amusing harangue on 
 " modern simony," which no longer, he said, 
 consisted " ' in buying promotion in the Church, 
 but in rich society people fancying they can
 
 1 54 Society and Solitude 
 
 purchase the Holy Ghost by dabbling in 
 Literature and the Arts,' " and getting artists 
 and philosophers to dance attendance on them. 
 It really hit some of our friends rather hard. 
 He then had the impertinence to ask if I was 
 your lover, and when I snubbed him he laughed 
 very much. Naturally I got up to go, when he 
 suddenly became grave. We were both stand- 
 ing. " I shall keep your letters by me always," 
 he said, for a moment, I thought, rather kindly — 
 certainly most solemnly, " and read them some- 
 times. . . . When I feel lonely it may console 
 me to recall " (he bowed to me with insulting 
 formality) " my first disciple ! " He watched 
 me go down the stairs, and then I heard him 
 blow off a great sigh and slam the door. Love 
 to the chicks, etc. . . . etc. . . . Your devoted 
 Popples.
 
 Kaloprosopy 
 
 {A review of V Art Ideal'tste tt Mystique^ and a criticism 
 by implication of M. Peladan^s ideas, here transferred 
 into the mouth of a Park-Prophet.) 
 
 IT is easy to scrape odd acquaintances in 
 London, about the parks or in the streets. 
 But, of course, you must be properly dressed 
 for that pursuit, as indeed for any other. 
 There must be nothing about your get-up 
 which entitles you to particular respect, cer- 
 tainly nothing that extorts deference, for that 
 puts your relations to others all wrong from 
 the very start. You must indeed be dressed 
 badly enough to be embarrassed if you en- 
 counter your tailor, or an old prosperous friend 
 whom you have not met for years ; for the 
 personal appearance most favourable to easy 
 talk with strangers is a cheerful shabbiness.
 
 I 5 6 Kaloprosopy 
 
 Cheerfulness must peep through the shabbiness, 
 since people do not fall into ready talk with 
 glum, embittered, down-in-the-world strangers, 
 especially if they have good reason to know 
 those moods themselves. They do not expect 
 any extraordinary sympathy from a casual 
 acquaintance, nor any help from him if he 
 does not look prosperous ; but those who lead 
 lonely, haphazard lives (unlike people who live 
 in society) are quite ready to believe a little 
 pleasant intercourse is possible with a casual 
 stranger, and the stranger who encourages 
 that belief is one who wears an air of not 
 having made a very good thing of life himself, 
 but yet remains content. 
 
 One summer evening, during a long sunset, 
 I was sitting on a bench in the Marble Arch 
 quarter of Hyde Park, just out of earshot of 
 the orators. I had gone the round of the plat- 
 forms, and was now feeling glad to be out of 
 the babel — glad to be away from the secularist 
 whose speech had broken down into a dialogue 
 (the conduct of the Creator was under dis- 
 cussion), and who kept on repeating with calm
 
 Kaloprosopy 1 57 
 
 annoyance, " That's not my question. I ask 
 you, is it behaving like a gentleman P " — away 
 from the frantic, hunted-looking young man, 
 who, his moist pale face working in the twilight, 
 kept declaring, with the emphasis of despair, 
 that he was the happiest man in the world since 
 his salvation ; away from the woman who was 
 grappling with the decline of the birth-rate in 
 Australia ; away even from a large, shiny, 
 radiant negro, who, having just read a text- 
 book on astronomy, had rushed out to explain 
 the heavens to the world, shouting to us, 
 " and de earth goes round and round de sun, 
 and de moon goes round and round de earth," 
 whirling an arm in an ecstasy of explanatory 
 enthusiasm. He certainly had (as the phrase 
 goes) something to say, but I was glad I had 
 got away from him too. The Park is the 
 University of the People ; but it is a Univer- 
 sity in such a hubble-bubble ferment of con- 
 viction and curiosity, that those brought up 
 at one of the quieter seats of learning 
 cannot attend it long without feeling worried 
 and alarmed.
 
 158 Kaloprosopy 
 
 In front of the platforms, and some distance 
 from them, I had noticed several times an 
 elderly man in a cloak and soft hat with a high 
 crown ; standing almost stock still. He had 
 a soft bushy beard and a noble, hooked nose. 
 Every now and then some one on his way to 
 sample another speaker would linger as he 
 passed him, as though expecting to be ad- 
 dressed. Indeed, in the old man's passivity 
 there was something arresting, something that 
 at first invited approach, and then repelled it. 
 I had not sat long on the bench, when I ob- 
 served him coming down the path. He looked 
 so aloof, I did not like to speak to him, but as 
 he was about to pass, I moved significantly to 
 one end of the bench : it was a suggestion he 
 could accept or ignore with perfect politeness. 
 He stopped without looking at me, and sat 
 down. We remained silent. 
 
 It is a mistake to start immediately talking 
 hard to anybody you do not know. People 
 with *' social gifts " invariably do it, but it is a 
 mistake all the same. You have a better chance 
 of getting to know each other if you get used
 
 Kaloprosopy 159 
 
 to silence together first, and after an odd, long 
 pause you are not nearly so likely to fall into 
 futile, mechanical converse. " It is a fine 
 evening," I said at last, " but I think we shall 
 have rain." This was not a penetrative con- 
 versational opening; you will think., but remem- 
 ber we had been sitting quite five minutes 
 together, thinking not about each other, but 
 of anything under the sun. We had learnt in 
 that short time that our companionship was 
 compatible with the internal freedom of each, 
 and after that the fear of embarrassing and 
 being embarrassed is much smoothed. The 
 weather did very well as a topic, and while we 
 were still speaking about it, I was wondering 
 of whom he reminded me. His large white 
 hand caressed a beard as soft and grey as wood- 
 land smoke ; his dark eyes, which seemed both 
 opaque and bright, were fixed beyond the round 
 tops of the elms. Those eager features, grand, 
 yet delicate as porcelain — where had I seen 
 them, or when had I imagined them before ? 
 Suddenly I remembered. There is no evidence 
 for the transmigration of the soul, but of the
 
 1 6o Kaloprosopy 
 
 reappearance of the body Samuel Butler 
 furnished startling instances. I myself have 
 dined at the same restaurant table with 
 Henri IV, and my family doctor is no less a 
 person than John Bright. And does not Lon- 
 don already contain statues and busts of Mr. 
 Joseph Chamberlain from which the name of 
 William Pitt need only be deleted ? Now 
 upon the bench with me sat — Leonardo da 
 Vinci. Yes, somewhat shrunken, dusty, har- 
 assed, it was surely no other than the great 
 Archimage of Florence. I knew his restless, 
 distinguished face, brooding, eager, worn by 
 the attrition of thought. 
 
 " If this world were as it ought to be, it's a de- 
 lightful palace you'd be living in," I exclaimed. 
 
 " Ah, well," said he, and his eyes turned to- 
 wards heaven's emblazonries in the west, 
 " p'r'aps you'd like to know what I am." I 
 nodded, expecting anything. 
 
 " I'm a professor," he said. 
 
 I must confess I was disappointed. I had 
 expected a stranger claim, a preposterously 
 romantic revelation.
 
 Kaloprosopy i 6 1 
 
 " My science, or rather the art which I pro- 
 fess," he continued, in a sweet discouraged 
 tone, " is one men stand in need of, but do not 
 know they need. Possibly you have not heard 
 of it. It is called Kaloprosopy. It is a lost 
 art. KaXo9 is a Greek word meaning beautiful, 
 ■jrpoa-coTTov was their word for the person, a man's 
 person. By kaloprosopy, I mean the art not 
 merely of embellishing the body, of graceful 
 movements, but of expressing and bringing 
 into relief the individual nature through ges- 
 ture and demeanour." 
 
 " I should like to read your book — or books," 
 said I. 
 
 " I talk, I do not write," he replied. " I 
 am well known about here." He added, " They 
 call me Old Soapy." 
 
 Feeling I should do him wrong, " being so 
 majestical," if I condoled with him, or even 
 expressed disapproval of his mockers, I made 
 no comment. 
 
 " You seem interested," he continued after 
 a pause. " Politeness is, I need not say, a 
 branch of this science, and it is the easiest one
 
 1 62 Kaloprosopy 
 
 to master. For politeness is simply the charity 
 applicable to persons whom we cannot help at 
 the moment, either in body or soul. We must 
 do what we can, and circumstances seldom 
 allow us to be more than polite. The rest is 
 more difficult to learn." 
 
 He stopped, and I asked him when in history 
 men had most cultivated the art o£ kalo- 
 prosopy. 
 
 " Never less than now. Yet never was there 
 greater opportunity. The man of leisure 
 should consider himself as an actor imper- 
 sonating his own character. We cannot all be 
 creative artists, we cannot make ; but what 
 material, what marvellous material, has not 
 each one in himself ! The living person has an 
 advantage over the most beautiful statue in the 
 world : he is capable of an indefinite series 
 of movements, and a series of poses, gestures, 
 charming, expressive. . . ." 
 
 Here I could not help interrupting. " But 
 many of us are not the right shape." 
 
 " Then," he continued, ignoring my inter- 
 ruption, " the beauty of the eye ! Art can
 
 Kaloprosbpy 163 
 
 never translate it, for it is made of changing 
 dreams, of vision, of desire. Think, too, of 
 the human voice. In modulation it is capable 
 of indefinite melodies more tantalising and 
 satisfying than Wagner himself has written. 
 The voice is the spirit, the soul of movement, 
 movement which the subtlest curves of an 
 artist's pencil or sculptor's chisel can but catch 
 to petrify ; Music itself is only the movement 
 of a perfect voice. And yet with such resources 
 in themselves, men and women of leisure will 
 turn to paint or clay or the piano, thinking 
 indifferently acquired accomplishments in these 
 directions can — O lamentable, scandalous neg- 
 lect ! Think, think, too, when the actor has so 
 trained his instrument, his body, that every 
 gesture, every intonation is expressive, what a 
 part he has to play ! Whoever he is, it is one 
 more intricate and unique than genius ever 
 wrote for an actor on the stage. Now the 
 student of kaloprosopy begins his inner task : 
 he must decide what he is, and believe accord- 
 ingly. Society, institutions, traditions, all 
 come to his aid. What figure is less aesthetically
 
 164 Kaloprosopy 
 
 expressive than a country rector or a Member 
 of Parliament ? Yet I never see a specimen 
 of these familiar types without being over- 
 whelmed with a sense of their opportunities. 
 What is a Rector ? — an Ambassador from 
 Heaven. He should be absent and remote. 
 His silence should be full of unction, and his 
 speech enthusiasm. He should never laugh, 
 and never joke. He should not read the papers 
 in public, nor by word or deed convey that he 
 is part of the civil order. And the Member of 
 Parliament, what is he ? — the Physician of the 
 Body politic. He may smile ; but he, too, is 
 better grave and silent. The power he wields 
 over liberty and life should weigh upon 
 him like a sorrow. Nor can he show a 
 personal sentiment without avowing himself 
 unworthy of his abstract role of justice and 
 utility." 
 
 At this point a question rose to my lips : 
 " But would not kaloprosopy, if widely and 
 conscientiously practised, lead to a good deal 
 of posing and humbug, not to speak of loss of 
 happiness and amusement ? "
 
 Kaloprosbpy 165 
 
 " On the contrary it would destroy hypo- 
 crisy. Life would cease to be tolerable if what 
 was within a man did not correspond to his 
 outward expression. Besides, remember what 
 St. Ignatius said : ' Perform the acts of faith, 
 and faith will come.' " 
 
 I was not prepared to argue with a saint, 
 and thinking that a tentative course of kalo- 
 prosopy might do me no harm, I proposed 
 myself as a pupil. 
 
 " I shall be happy ; you will be my 
 first." 
 
 During the last ten minutes of his discourse, 
 had I not been listening intently, I should have 
 been distracted by an intermittent shower of 
 small missiles, twigs and pebbles, which kept 
 coming from behind. Finally, quite a large 
 clump of earth caught me on the back of the 
 neck, and another knocked the philosopher's 
 hat over his eyes. There was a juvenile squawk 
 of " Old Soapy," and looking angril)- round, I 
 saw two urchins making off among the trees. 
 I turned to my master : " Would it be a very 
 bad beginning if I ran after those brats ? "
 
 1 66 Kaloprosopy 
 
 I am not sure I was right, but I interpreted a 
 movement of his head which may have merely 
 expressed contempt as assent, and started in 
 pursuit. After an exhausting chase I caught 
 one of them, and administered punishment 
 with what will probably prove to have been 
 the last ungainly gesture of my life.
 
 Too 3\4uch Tact 
 
 THE small pretty grounds of the Prime 
 Minister's official residence were alive 
 with people dressed in their smartest clothes, 
 slowly circulating over the parched grass 
 or standing about in forlornly natural atti- 
 tudes. 
 
 Everybody of any importance in the Colony 
 had been asked to meet the Great Personages, 
 everybody — thanks to an indefatigable equerry 
 from Government House, who had prevented 
 the Prime IMinister's wife from making the 
 invitation list an instrument for pacing off old 
 grudges. His engaging display of polished 
 agitation (itself a liberal education had she 
 known it) on the occasion of their interview 
 had overcome her resolve to teach So-and-so 
 and So-and-so to know their places. 
 
 167
 
 1 68 Too Much Tact 
 
 A hot white sun blazed like a combustion in 
 a cloudless sky, while the alternate blaring and 
 swooning of the band seemed to express in 
 music sensations cf intolerable heat. Across 
 the wide veranda, druggeted with crimson 
 felt and decorated with swinging plants, a 
 stream of guests kept passing. Mounting the 
 steps at one end and descending at the other, 
 they received on the way a handshake from the 
 Great Personage in scarlet uniform, who stood 
 beside his consort. She held a heavy bouquet, 
 and smiled kindly and tirelessly upon every 
 one who passed. The touch of that white 
 glove seemed to possess a vivifying power, for 
 the demeanour of those descending was marked 
 by a repressed excitement, not unlike that of a 
 young spaniel which has been patted by its 
 master. Their vivacity contrasted with the 
 glum reserved expressions of those who had 
 not yet mounted the steps behind them. 
 But the stimulus was evanescent. On re- 
 joining their friends on the lawn they appeared 
 at once to think rather sadly of something 
 else.
 
 Too Much Tact 169 
 
 As the morning wore on, glances were 
 directed more and more frequently towards the 
 big tent at the bottom of the grounds, and the 
 men began to push back their top-hats, and to 
 wipe their damp foreheads with less furtive 
 gestures. Against the sky the ragged palm- 
 trees leaned and drooped. Now and again a 
 guest would half withdraw a white or pink 
 card from his breast-pocket, as though to 
 reassure himself that it was really there. The 
 women under the clear shadows of their tight 
 parasols bore up much better. 
 
 In the tent all preparations for lunch had 
 been more than complete an hour ago, but the 
 caterer (who was also invited as a guest) could 
 not tear himself away from the scene of his 
 triumphant organisation. He kept walking up 
 and down between the long flowered tables, 
 his white waistcoat unbuttoned and his hands 
 behind him, eyeing as he passed the rows of 
 ice-buckets on the side trestles, which con- 
 tained clusters of bottles with golden necks. 
 Behind them, rank on rank stood other bottles, 
 native wine, intended for the intermittent
 
 I/O Too Much Tact 
 
 refreshment o£ the guests to the afternoon 
 party. Twice in the course of his peram- 
 bulations he stopped opposite a large bucket 
 at the very end of the table, reflected for a 
 moment, and passed on : that lot was destined 
 for the high table ; his ticket was not a white 
 one. The next time he passed he signalled to 
 a waiter. " Bring a glass and just open that 
 bottle," he said, pointing to one. " Of course 
 it's all right, but I'd better try myself." He 
 watched the white effervescence subside to a 
 golden sparkle with detachment, drained it ; 
 refilled, drank, and put down the glass with a 
 gasp of satisfaction. Then buttoning up his 
 waistcoat, and nodding " Cork it up tight," 
 he stepped briskly out into the glare. He pro- 
 ceeded carelessly, threading his way through 
 the groups and throwing cheerful recognitions 
 to friends. Passing one whose air of constricted 
 misery in a black frock-coat seemed to amuse 
 him, he nipped him by the arm and winked 
 towards the tent. " It's worth it, old man. 
 Best I ever tasted. Bear up." On he went 
 a happy man. Those to whom he had spoken
 
 Too Much Tact i J 
 
 sceiTlcd to betray an increased restiveness ; 
 watches and cards were fingered and glanced at. 
 
 The sun blazed. The band played inde- 
 fatigably on and on. The stream of people 
 across the veranda never ceased. At last 
 something happened. There was a slight 
 movement among the uniforms ; the crowd 
 divided, and a procession, preceded by cocks'- 
 fcathers and bouquets, headed for the tent, 
 while the band, suddenly changing its tune, 
 blared out " Mother of the Free." 
 
 Inside the tent the top table filled quickly 
 and quietly ; all the white tickets had ascer- 
 tained the whereabouts of their places before- 
 hand. But at the other tables, there was some 
 embarrassment before the young archbishop 
 had finished booming out a grace only too 
 short for his powers of elocution. Those nearest 
 to the August Personages slipped into their 
 seats cautiously as though getting into hot 
 hip-baths. The airy chatter of the accom- 
 plished equerry to his neighbour only accentu- 
 ated the absence of general conversation, which 
 the appearance of iced soup and shcrr}- did
 
 172 Too Much Tact 
 
 nothing to mitigate. Small talk had been 
 exhausted during the morning ; politics were 
 felt to be dangerous in so representative a 
 company, while the merits and defects of the 
 steamship service, an unfailing conversational 
 resource in the colonies, had been monopolised 
 by the group on whom all eyes and ears were 
 fixed. Things were hanging fire to such an 
 extent that the Prime Minister found himself 
 using a sentence he had prepared for the 
 peroration of his speech, and compared the 
 ship which had brought the illustrious per- 
 sonage to their shores to a great shuttle weav- 
 ing, as it passed across the sea, the seamless 
 fabric of a united empire. He was regretting 
 this extravagance, when following the glances 
 of those opposite he became aware that the 
 waiters behind the chairs were each holding a 
 bottle wrapped in a napkin. He bent side- 
 ways to make the murmurous inquiry which 
 was to be the signal for releasing the springs 
 of exhilaration. The Great Personage had an 
 inspiration. He had been silently blaming 
 himself for his inability to set the ball rolling,
 
 Too Much Tact 173 
 
 and now smiling on the company he uttered 
 momentous words : " We should, I think, 
 celebrate such an occasion as this in the wine 
 of the country." 
 
 Smiling at the amazement these words 
 created as a tribute to the tact for which his 
 family had been famous, he proceeded to put 
 some question to the Prime Minister about 
 native vintages. At a peremptory gesture of a 
 magnificent man in a chain, the golden-necked 
 bottles disappeared, and in another moment 
 the waiters were leaning over the shoulders of 
 the guests with the insinuating whisper " Cha- 
 teau Chatterhoochee, sir ? " The Illustrious 
 Guest sipped his glass. The solemnity of the 
 table had intensified rather than diminished, 
 and for a moment he thought he might have 
 failed to do the right thing. He was not a 
 man to pick his adjectives, but something in 
 the sensations of his mouth suggested a 
 word he had never used before. " A ferru- 
 ginous wine ? " he said gently. " Yes, sir, 
 it is, I believe, sometimes described as feroo- 
 ginous,"
 
 174 Too Much Tact 
 
 The lunch dragged on to the speeches, 
 which seemed long and lame. A gloom which 
 nothing could enliven had settled upon the 
 company. Then the garden-party began 
 again.
 
 The Brothers Brindle 
 
 MR. LEONARDO and Mr. Ernest Brindle 
 sat opposite each other with their 
 knees under a large rosewood and leather 
 writing-table. In front of each of the brothers 
 lay a pad of spotless blotting-paper, a large 
 inkstand of eccentric design, and a gold and 
 glass bottle containing eau-de-Cologne, with 
 which, at moments of heat or perplexity, it 
 was their custom to dab their foreheads. 
 
 The room in which they w-ere sitting was 
 lit by skylights and warmed by a radiator. On 
 one wall, behind Mr. Ernest, hung a Siennese 
 Madonna in a startling state of preservation ; 
 behind Mr. Leonardo, a lush and brilliant 
 Hoppner ; while the side walls of the room 
 were decorated with French landscapes alter- 
 nating with Dutch interiors. 
 
 175
 
 176 The Brothers Br in die 
 
 It will be guessed that the brothers were not 
 people of taste ; then- business was rather to 
 understand the taste of others. They were 
 dealers in pictures. 
 
 Mr. Leonardo and Mr. Ernest Brindle looked 
 at each other. 
 
 Both brothers had brown eyes, dark hair 
 and moustaches ; both were going bald, only 
 on the crown of Mr. Ernest the application of 
 some powerful remedy had produced a thin 
 down of fluff. They wore braided tail-coats, 
 white slips within their waistcoats, and black 
 ties ; Mr. Leonardo's tie was pinned with a 
 silk emerald carved into the head of a Medusa, 
 while in the cravat of Mr. Ernest gleamed a 
 large round sallow pearl. Mr. Ernest was the 
 younger of the two, and looked younger than 
 he was. There was a certain rouge-like fresh- 
 ness about his cheeks, and his features and 
 movements expressed a vivacity which con- 
 trasted with the almost somnolent lethargy of 
 his brother. 
 
 " Well, what do you propose to do ? " said 
 Mr. Ernest, folding his arms upon the table
 
 The Brothers Br In die 177 
 
 and gazing provocatively at his brother. " I am 
 absolutely certain that we've been let in badly 
 about it, and since you bought the thing in the 
 first instance, I really think it is your business 
 to see we get out again." 
 
 Mr. Leonardo, without raising his eyes from 
 the table, said, " Did Wendover spot it ? " 
 
 " I was convinced by his manner he was as 
 certain as he could be that the picture was a 
 fake. I could tell that from his smile and from 
 the damned way in which his spirits went up 
 afterwards. I'm quite sure it's no use trying 
 to place the picture here ; so now, you old 
 cow, what do you propose to do ? " 
 
 Mr. Leonardo gazed at the end of his cigar 
 with the expression of one who realizes that 
 in life there is often little or nothing to be 
 done. His sultry silence exasperated his 
 brother, who burst out at last, " Think, man, 
 think. Don't go to sleep." 
 
 " Well," said Mr. Leonardo, gently screwing 
 his cigar between his lips again, " we must 
 get some kind of guarantee for it." 
 
 " Guarantee, indeed ! How ? You know 
 
 N
 
 iy?> The Brothers Brmdle 
 
 there's no pedigree with the damned thing, 
 and I've just told you that even Wendover 
 turns up his nose at it. We shan't get a con- 
 noisseur who counts to back us." 
 
 " Send it away," said Mr. Leonardo. 
 
 " Where ? " said Mr. Ernest rudely. 
 
 Mr. Leonardo sighed heavily and turned 
 himself about in his chair. " It's the guarantee 
 we Vv'ant," he said. 
 
 " Of course it is. What's the use of repeating 
 that ? " 
 
 Mr. Leonardo sighed again. " I'm thinking 
 of the DouaneP 
 
 " What ! you propose to send this picture 
 to France ? Surely, you boiled owl, by your 
 time of life you know that if a doubtful Watteau 
 hasn't a chance in London, it hasn't the ghost 
 of one in France. Go out and get your lunch. 
 You want a pick-me-up, that's what you want. 
 You're half dead." 
 
 " No, no," said Mr. Leonardo ; " I'm won- 
 dering. I'm wondering if we couldn't work 
 the Customs in America for a guarantee.' 
 
 " How do you mean ? 
 
 >i a guaiiiutcc
 
 The Brothers Br in die 179 
 
 " Ring the bell for the picture and have it 
 brought in." 
 
 " As you like," said his brother contemptu- 
 ously, " though I don't see that looking at it 
 is going to help us." 
 
 He gave the order, however, and presently 
 both the brothers were gazing disconsolately 
 at a little dark picture of courtiers dancing 
 under twilight trees. In the lower corner, 
 modestly hidden yet quite distinct to the in- 
 quisitive eye, was the signature of the famous 
 artist. 
 
 " It seems to me a charming little piece," 
 said Mr. Leonardo, " and I think we ought to 
 get our guarantee. The first thing I propose 
 is that we cover that signature with a light 
 wash. Then we'll send the picture to the 
 United States, and put a value on it of, say, 
 [7.^. I think," he added thoughtfully, " they 
 might hold it up and come down on us for 
 smuggling — especially if they were warned 
 first." 
 
 " By Jove, you're a genius ! " cried Mr. 
 Ernest after a moment of rapturous astonish-
 
 i8o The Brothers Br in die 
 
 ment. " Look here, when we send over our 
 batch of pictures, before they arrive we'll 
 get someone to write a letter to the Customs 
 warning them that Messrs. Brindle are about 
 to pass into the country as a picture of no par- 
 ticular value an undoubted Watteau. They'll 
 stop it, they'll wash it ; they'll find the name ! 
 And their experts will be in glory ! We'll have 
 to pay the duty on a picture worth j^io,ooo, 
 but we'll sell it, old boy, we'll sell it — for that 
 or more." 
 
 Mr. Leonardo was quite used to his brother 
 expatiating upon his ideas as though he had 
 originated them himself ; and Ernest, his 
 brown eyes beaming with vivacious delight, 
 continued to pat him emphatically on both 
 shoulders and to explain, " You see, old man, 
 the strong thing about it will be that we shall 
 be absolutely safe. Our attitude all through 
 will be, ' We think you are mistaken, quite 
 mistaken. We did not and do not believe this 
 picture to be genuine. But, of course, if your 
 experts can prove it . . . ! — Well, we shall be 
 only too delighted.' The onus of proving
 
 The Brothers Br indie i8i 
 
 authenticity will lie with them. It's beauti- 
 ful ! " 
 
 " Yes," said Mr. Leonardo, " I thought it 
 seemed good the moment I thought of it. 
 The Press ought to be useful about it. And 
 now I think I will get some lunch." 
 
 II 
 
 It is difficult for anyone who has followed 
 the development of that prosperous firm 
 the Brindle Brothers, dealers in pictures and 
 objects of virtu, to know whether he may 
 admire more the pert pushful opportunism of 
 Mr. Ernest Brindle, or the subterraneous, slow, 
 but strictly legal methods of Mr. Leonardo. 
 
 One late summer afternoon, Mr. Ernest, 
 walking down Piccadilly, overtook his brother. 
 Ernest appeared in excellent spirits. He was 
 swinging his umbrella and humming^ not to 
 say singing, to himself the Wedding March of 
 Mendelssohn. A melody the sentiment of 
 which fitted admirably the train of his rcflcc-
 
 1 8 2 The Brothers Br indie 
 
 tions. " Oh, I've scored again. I've scored 
 all along the line, O." 
 
 " Well, old chap," he cried, clapping his 
 brother on the back, " I see you're stepping 
 westward," and he broke again into music. 
 
 " You seem to be in fine spirits," said Mr. 
 Leonardo dolefully. 
 
 " Yes, and I've every right to be. You will 
 be, too. Listen. I've sold a Vanbosch, and 
 what's more, to no less a person than Sir 
 Charles Lavender ; price j^95. I told you 
 they would go off sooner or later." 
 
 " One swallow doesn't make a summer," 
 said Mr. Leonardo, with his eyes fixed upon 
 the ground. 
 
 Like most long-established picture dealers, 
 the Brothers Brindle had their cellars full of 
 Dutch pictures ; and it had been a constant 
 source of small worry to them to observe 
 that the trend of much influential criticism 
 and high connoisseurship was running against 
 such pictures. They had not fallen in 
 market value below the price at which Messrs. 
 Brindle, at any rate, had been fortunate
 
 The Brothers Br indie 1 8 3 
 
 enough to purchase ; still, the market, which 
 at one time they had every reason to think 
 promising, had shown signs of depreciating. 
 The brothers had at least nine or ten Van- 
 bosches, mostly kitchen interiors (minutely 
 painted), and for quite that number of years 
 they had hardly had a nibble at one of them. 
 To Mr. Ernest the success of his afternoon 
 augured, for he was of sanguine temperament, 
 that sooner or later, sooner more probably than 
 later, they would succeed in disposing of them 
 all. 
 
 Mr. Leonardo walked on in silence. 
 
 " Well, you don't seem particularly pleased, 
 old chap," said Mr. Ernest. " It's a small deal, 
 but it means, anyhow, that we shall get 
 some dead stock off our hands before very 
 long." 
 
 " Did you say Lavender ? " queried Mr. 
 Leonardo, ungluing his lips. 
 
 " I did ; and you know the way he always 
 cracks up his purchases. He thinks he's got a 
 bargain^ and so for the matter of that would 
 anyone."
 
 1 84 The Brothers Br indie 
 
 " We must buy it back," said Mr. Leonardo, 
 after a long pause. 
 
 " What ! Arc you up the pole ? Don't you 
 know we have got about a dozen of them down- 
 stairs — besides, the thing's not worth the 
 money." 
 
 " We must buy it back," said Mr. Leonardo. 
 " We'll offer four hundred and fifty pounds." 
 
 At these words Mr. Ernest stopped abruptly 
 in the street. For a moment he looked at his 
 brother as though he was seriously ill ; then, 
 " You've got something in your mind, old 
 boy," he said kindly. " Let's sit down quietly 
 on a couple of chairs in the park and talk 
 about it." 
 
 As soon as they had comfortably settled 
 themselves and paid their pennies, Mr. Leon- 
 ardo appeared to become totally absorbed in 
 the moving spectacle of Rotten Row. " That's 
 a pretty woman," he said at last with a sigh. 
 " You must buy it back and offer him 
 four hundred pounds. He's a great talker ; 
 he's a great believer in his own judgment. He 
 will talk. I look at it this way. We will write
 
 The Brothers Br indie 185 
 
 to him and say that since selling the picture 
 we have discovered that it is one of the last 
 first-class Vanbosches in the market, and that 
 if he would consider our offer we should be 
 happy to send him a cheque for four hundred 
 pounds. You see, he has been let in very 
 badly lately, and the memory of it has hurt 
 his vanity even more than his pocket. This 
 will be quite a change for him, quite a change. 
 He'll think himself cute. He'll be proud. He'll 
 never stop telling his friends (he lives with 
 connoisseurs and collectors) how he made 
 three hundred pounds out of the Brindlcs. 
 Then . . ." said Mr. Leonardo. 
 
 "By Jove," broke in Mr. Ernest Brindlc, 
 " you old Machiavel, it's worth risking ! In a 
 month we'll put another Vanbosch in the 
 window, and when that's gone we'll hang 
 another in our little sanctum, and so on. If 
 they don't sell for three hundred and fifty 
 apiece . . . well, I shall be disappointed 
 in myself. Oh, he'll talk. He'll chortle. 
 He'll swagger. Everyone will know that a 
 Vanbosch cannot be got now at the old price
 
 1 86 The Brothers Br in die 
 
 and that Brindles bought one back at a loss of 
 three hundred pounds within a fortnight of 
 selling." Mr. Ernest rubbed his hands to- 
 gether. " We shall get rid of the whole lot 
 at a fine profit." 
 
 During the next eighteen months fortunate 
 collectors kept on picking up at rather obscure 
 little dealers Vanbosches at stifiish prices. There 
 are only two now left in Messrs. Brindles' 
 storeroom ; and if you go to their shop and 
 ask Mr. Ernest if he could get one for you, he 
 will probably wrinkle his forehead, look absent 
 and depressed for a moment ; then, suddenly 
 brightening, offer you an excellent cigarette, 
 saying : " Vanbosches are rather scarce now — 
 good ones — and . . . well, they are not as 
 cheap as they were. I can show you one, 
 however. Mr. Lux, just fetch ' The Peeled 
 Potatoes.' Like these cigarettes ? " Then, 
 when the picture is before you, " Now I can 
 let you have that one for two-fifty."
 
 The Brothers Br in die 187 
 
 III 
 
 It was a July afternoon. The temperature 
 had reached an intensity which makes the 
 idea of tea positively abhorrent to the male 
 sex. To a boy it may never seem too cold for 
 an ice or too hot for a muffin, but a man must 
 marvel how women can persist during the 
 dog-days in regarding " tea " as refreshing. 
 It goes a long way to account for the highly 
 irritated state of Mr. Ernest Brindle at 5.30 
 p.m. this particular afternoon, that he had 
 partaken of three teas. Talking to rich ladies 
 was part of his work. Now, though his throat 
 was parched, his thirst was hopelessly quenched; 
 his handkerchief, on which he had repeatedly 
 wiped his fingers, was almost transparent with 
 melted butter, and he prickled with heat from 
 the nape of his neck to the root of his spine. 
 The postman had just delivered a letter which 
 Ernest had torn open like a man to whom every 
 effort is the last straw ; and now flicking it 
 across the table to his somnolent brother, he 
 threw himself back in his chair with the disgust
 
 1 88 The Brothers Br indie 
 
 of the born optimist, who had never believed 
 for a moment in the existence of such a thing 
 as the last straw. 
 
 The contents of the letter were certainly- 
 calculated to upset even a cooler man. It was 
 from Lord X, a famous buyer of pictures, 
 who, inheriting a large miscellaneous art collec- 
 tion, had added to it with a recklessness which 
 had brought him astonishing luck and conse- 
 quently the name, on both sides of the Atlantic, 
 and, indeed, in every capital of Europe, of 
 a shrewd collector. For once he had been too 
 rash. The letter briefly but ominously in- 
 formed the Brothers Brindle that he had good 
 reason to think that the portrait which he had 
 recently purchased from them for ^^i 0,000 
 was not by Rembrandt. Would one of the 
 partners be good enough to call and discuss 
 the matter early next week ? 
 
 Never had the mute-like face of his brother 
 exasperated Ernest more intimately than while 
 he watched him reading this terse communica- 
 tion. At the close of a third perusal, Mr. 
 Leonardo took from the drawer a quire of
 
 The Brothers Br in die 1 8 9 
 
 fine, square writing-paper, and wrote slowly a 
 few lines in his careful childish hand across the 
 top sheet. He then dived for his cheque-book 
 and began methodically to fill in first the fly- 
 leaf and then the cheque itself. 
 
 This was too much for Mr. Ernest : " Do 
 you mean to say you are going to give in with- 
 out a kick ? Chuck away j^i 0,000 without a 
 protest, when we might at any rate get him 
 to buy something else instead ? He is always 
 changing his mind about his pictures ; he 
 doesn't know from month to month what he 
 thinks about them. Anyone can talk him 
 round. He's been listening to some ass of a 
 critic, that's all. He can't bring the matter 
 into court. He won't. He knows what the 
 evidence of experts is worth before a British 
 jury well enough himself." 
 
 Mr. Leonardo did not reply, but handed 
 over the letter he had just written. It ran as 
 follows : — 
 
 My Lord, — We know we were not mistaken 
 with regard to the authenticity of the picture
 
 190 The Brothers Brindle 
 
 in question. But if you have a doubt yourself, 
 or regret having bought the picture, that is 
 enough for us. We enclose a cheque for 
 j(^i 0,000. Kindly let us have the picture back 
 as soon as possible. 
 
 " Take long views, Ernest, take long views. 
 Think of the firm," said Mr. Leonardo., shut- 
 ting the drawer again ; to which Ernest replied 
 by clapping on his hat and leaving the room, 
 while his elder brother licked the envelope 
 and rang for a messenger. 
 
 The next morning the picture arrived at 
 Messrs. Brindles' premises ; also a letter from 
 Lord X, quite extraordinarily friendly in tone, 
 almost apologising for returning the picture 
 and enclosing a receipt. 
 
 Mr. Ernest could not bear the sight of the 
 picture. The amazing chiaroscuro on which 
 he had once so enthusiastically expatiated now 
 gave him no pleasure. Mr. Lux had asked him 
 in which of the best lights he should hang the 
 picture. " Oh, leave the damned thing where 
 it is," Mr. Ernest had snapped back. So there 
 it stood on the floor, propped against another
 
 The Brothers Br indie 191 
 
 picture. Whenever he passed it he could not 
 help looking at it ; and the more he looked at 
 it the snuffier the shadow under the nose 
 seemed to become, and the more like treacle 
 the high lights on the golden helmet. . . . To 
 think that it had actually been sold ! Sold ! 
 Sold for _^io,ooo ! It was too exasperating ! 
 
 Mr. Ernest was lunching that day with a 
 rich American who was coming round after- 
 wards to the gallery (Mr. Ernest was an 
 incorrigible hoper) to see what the Brindles had 
 got. Perhaps that visit would turn up trumps. 
 But though lunch, it turned out, was a success, 
 the inspection of the pictures looked like a 
 failure from the first. Little silvery Corots, 
 Boors Carousing by Teniers, eighteenth cen- 
 tury portraits of ladies and gentlemen — 
 nothing seemed to make an impression on him. 
 Mr. Ernest's buoyant bright enthusiasm ^vas 
 actually beginning to flag, when the American's 
 eye was caught by Lord X's picture. " That's 
 strong," he said, " what is it ? " 
 
 " Oh, it's a Rembrandt," replied Mr. Ernest 
 casually.
 
 192 The Brothers Br indie 
 
 " Can you prove it ? " asked the American. 
 
 Now one o£ the drawbacks to this unfortu- 
 nate canvas was precisely the pedigree attached 
 to it. It was lamentable. 
 
 " Oh," said Mr. Ernest, " its authenticity 
 sticks out of it. You can see the touch of the 
 master in every stroke of the brush." 
 
 " >You may, but 1 can't," said the millionaire. 
 
 " Would you like to hear one of the very 
 best critics about it," said Mr. Ernest eagerly. 
 " Mr. Cradle would be delighted, I know, to 
 meet you." 
 
 " Where did you get it ? " 
 
 As was his custom when he wanted a moment 
 to think, Mr. Ernest replied, " Have a cigar- 
 ette ? " and he began to feel in his pockets, but 
 his cigarette case was not there. He pulled 
 out his papers to feel more thoroughly, and 
 one of them caught his eye. It was Lord X's 
 receipt. He had an inspiration. 
 
 " We bought it," he said carelessly, " from 
 Lord X — from his collection. Here is his 
 receipt for ^10,000." 
 
 The American gazed at it. " Well," he said,
 
 The Brothers Br indie 193 
 
 after a pause, " I guess Lord X's collection is 
 good enough for me. What's your price ? " 
 
 " Eleven thousand for yow," said Mr. 
 Ernest, and the bargainj;was concluded next 
 morning.
 
 " The Padded Man " 
 
 SOMETIMES the critic sees himself, or 
 rather reads himself, as others read him. 
 He does this when he reads other critics. For 
 instance, the other day I read a review of the 
 Lije of Bulwer Lytton, which struck me as un- 
 fair to him both as a man and as an author. 
 The critic wrote as though the most significant 
 thing about him was that he was an " idol of 
 Belgravian drawing-rooms," a " pet of Lady 
 Blessington," who had no right to call any 
 man " effeminate." Now if there is one fact 
 which this grandson's biography brings out, 
 it is that Bulwer Lytton was a prodigious 
 worker, a novelist who toiled at fiction with 
 something of the furious, hurried concentra- 
 tion of Balzac, a reviewer as indefatigable as 
 Jeffreys, a forcible and prompt pamphleteer, a 
 
 speaker of set orations among the best of his 
 
 194
 
 " The Padded Man'' 195 
 
 day, at once elaborate and voluble, a satirist 
 in verse, a producer of epic poems, a Cabinet 
 Minister, a man of fashion who took his 
 recreation in shining as a wit and conver- 
 sationalist. And what remains now of this 
 prodigious activity, his critic will ask ? Little 
 of much value, I admit. Lytton cashed his 
 cheque on fame for ready money. But the 
 significant fact about him was that he was not 
 the pampered author of society, but a writer 
 who appealed, and aimed at appealing, to " the 
 great heart of the people." He had the vogue 
 of a Ouida and a Hall Caine rolled into one. 
 The people were his audience, and the extra- 
 ordinary thing is that, in spite of competitors, 
 he has held that audience for eighty years. 
 His popularity may be at last on the wane, 
 but still in little back parlours, in lodgings, in 
 wayside inns, on the shelf which serves for a 
 library, underneath the plant on its crochet 
 mat, you will probably find among the very 
 latest Charles Garvices and Silas Hockings, one 
 of Bulwer Lytton's ancient novels. The critic 
 will exclaim that I am giving him all — more
 
 196 " The Padded Man'' 
 
 than he asked for ; but wait. I urge him to 
 reflect that it needed an extraordinary dose of 
 that power, whatever it is, which captivates 
 and satisfies the imaginations of a million, thus 
 to have kept his place so long. 
 
 What is this power, and A\hat is its value ? 
 Like myself, the writer of that review has 
 probably paid, at the age of fourteen, his 
 tribute of tears to The Bondman and The 
 Deemster ; at the age of fifteen, soared perhaps 
 into the empyrean on the wings of Marie 
 Corelli ; and at a still tenderer age been in- 
 ducted beneath humble roofs by the gentle 
 hand of Mrs. Henry Wood. We have thrilled 
 at the horror of Gagool and rejoiced in the 
 valour of Umslopogaas ; we have — it is surely 
 not taking too much for granted ? — bathed 
 with immortal tenors at Trouville, and envied 
 the splendours of Strathmore. If, now, to 
 read The Last Days of Pompeii were to us a 
 penance exactable only for the gravest excesses 
 of literary fastidiousness, yet once we were 
 under its spell, or the spell of books like it, and 
 so cannot plead inexperience as an excuse for
 
 " The Padded Man'' 197 
 
 dismissing such authors as men with no power 
 in them. The power which underlies a great 
 and prolonged popular reputation in fiction, 
 and sways the imaginations of those who, 
 either from youthtulncss or heedlessness, in- 
 stinctively take books on trust, is a kind of 
 " go," usually inseparable from an unfaltering 
 good faith on the part of the author in the 
 scenes he creates. It is a gift so precious that 
 when it is absent it can only be compensated 
 by a most exquisite economy and artistic pre- 
 cision ; and even then generations will always 
 recur who place a Dostoievsky far above a 
 Turgenev, a Zola above an Anatole France. 
 The vitality which made Lytton's or Ouida's 
 fame is akin to that which roars down the 
 crowded thoroughfares of the Comedie Humaine 
 and packs the pages of Meredith, contriving 
 somehow to hold together for the delight of 
 more exacting readers a world as glittering and 
 incoherent as a smashed chandelier. It is 
 because Mr. Arnold Bennett can also write 
 T^he Grand Babylon Hotel that he can rivet our 
 attention when he describes Mr. Povey's shop.
 
 198 " The Padded Man'' 
 
 By itself this power makes no man an artist, 
 but it surely gives him a right to call any man 
 " effeminate," if he thinks him so. Bulwer 
 Lytton had it to an eminent degree. What 
 justification he had for abusing Tennyson I 
 will not go into here. Personally, I would 
 rather have written one phrase like " the music 
 of the moon that sleeps in the plain eggs of the 
 nightingale " than (remuneration apart) any 
 two of Lytton's novels. I am on that side. 
 But I understand the impatience of the writer 
 who sends his leaves flying daily to the press, 
 with the craftsman in words, who spends a 
 delicious hour wondering if " the mellow ousel 
 fluted from the elms " was a line which could 
 possibly be improved. There was a note of 
 somewhat peevish and passive lamentation in 
 some of Tennyson's poems concerned with 
 lovers' woes which may well have irritated a 
 man whose love was not only as a mill-stone, 
 but as a bag of ferrets round his neck ; and 
 one whose reputation was an open raw, buzzed 
 about by flies, might be pardoned for thinking 
 he detected in the poet's too-nervous dread of
 
 " The Padded Man'' 199 
 
 gossip an over-pampered sensitiveness. " The 
 padded man who wears the stays " — Tenny- 
 son's rejoinder in Punch — was formidable, but 
 the phrase does not, as was asserted, sum Bulwer 
 Lytton up. There is a story of his saying to a 
 friend after it had appeared : " I don't know 
 what to do about these fellows in Punch. Do 
 you know what they are saying now ? They 
 say I wear stays ! " " Well, my dear fellow," 
 replied his friend, " what does it matter if 
 you don't ? " " Oh, but I do ! " Docs not 
 that story make you like Bulwer better ? It 
 starts me wondering which of the two was 
 really " the padded man," the poet or the 
 man of the world. I do not grudge Tennyson 
 an inch of the thick, soft warm cocoon de- 
 votion and admiration spun round him through 
 life. He wrote too beautifully; how beauti- 
 fully our grandchildren will undci inland better 
 than we who are in reaction against him. But 
 if ever a man enjoyed the advantages (such as 
 they are) of quilt and screen and padding, it 
 was he. Why, Lytton lived on the decks of 
 the world compared with him ! " Pet of Lady
 
 200 " The Padded Man 
 
 >> 
 
 Blessington," indeed ! He took his pleasures 
 in society, which is a strenuous form of recrea- 
 tion; requiring a light stoicism not to be 
 despised. 
 
 I declare my heart warms to the flashy, vivid, 
 laborious dandy burning midnight oil (and 
 morning sunshine for the matter of that), 
 keeping as many bowls spinning as Cinquevalli 
 himself, including philandering and politics. 
 A great man ? No, no, no ; but do not let 
 those stays deceive you. The first step in an 
 English schoolboy's subsequent education is to 
 dissociate the idea of virtue from the morning 
 plunge bath, the second (I forget the second), 
 the third is perhaps to perceive that a valorous 
 temperament is not incompatible with stays. 
 
 He who wrote of Bulwer Lytton in these 
 pages complained that in relation to his trouble- 
 some wife he did not behave as a gentleman. 
 The standard applied must have been severe. 
 I know what happened. The critic was com- 
 paring Lytton's behaviour with that of men 
 who would never have got in such a predica- 
 ment at all. Biographers, critics and moralists.
 
 " The F Lidded Man " 201 
 
 they are always doing that. Has a man got 
 into debt ? His behaviour in that trying cir- 
 cumstance is compared with the hypothetical 
 behaviour of, say, a man like Franklin, who 
 would never have got into debt at all. Does 
 a passion make hay of a man's life ? His 
 struggles are dubbed feeble by his biographer 
 because Cromwell would have got his impulses 
 under. Does another write a play on a theme 
 which Ibsen would never have chosen, he is 
 hauled over the coals for not conducting his 
 plot with Ibsen's consistency. Surely if we 
 take Bulwer Lytton on his own lines, so to 
 speak, the story of his private life, which his 
 grandson tells with admirable impartiality, is 
 by no means to his discredit. Pelham, My 
 Novel, The Caxtons may not often be read 
 now ; but try them, enterprising reader, try 
 them ; you will find Pelham quite as witty as 
 Fiviafi Grey or The Toung Dicke, and the others 
 much better than you expected.
 
 ^r, Shaw on Shakespeare 
 
 HISTORY has unfortunately hung the 
 portrait of Shakespeare in a bad light. 
 Like some dark, rich, glazed masterpiece in an 
 ill-planned gallery, it seems to reflect not in- 
 frequently something of the features of those 
 who peer curiously into it. Shakespeare has 
 often been compared (an ill comparison) with 
 Nature herself. If the comparison holds at 
 all, he was most like Nature in this : that it 
 seems only too easy to read into him whatever 
 you have a mind to read. Sir Sidney Lee's 
 Shakespeare is essentially a steady man, one 
 who, farming judiciously an inexplicable talent, 
 gathered much comforting gear about him 
 during life and died honoured, safe, satiated, 
 and prosperous ; Sir Leslie Stephen's a stoic 
 who was no pipe for Fortune's fingers to play 
 upon. Mr. Frank Harris's Shakespeare, on 
 the other hand, is a man as intellectual, book- 
 
 202
 
 Mr. Shaw on Shakespeare 203 
 
 minded, and will-less as Coleridge himself, as 
 tremulously sensitive too, who, to the per- 
 petual advantage of mankind, was pitched, 
 shivering and longing, into the roaring rapids 
 of the world, there to struggle vainly in the 
 whirlpool of his own passions and appetites, 
 there to be pounded and twisted and tossed 
 and washed at last, a poor broken empty shell 
 of himself, into a little bay rocked gently by 
 the drumming thunder of the falls. Mr. 
 Harris's Shakespeare has a treble dose of 
 sensuality in him ; he is a sweet-natured sort 
 of man with a hunger for all pleasant, bright 
 things, for happiness and the amenities, and no 
 heart at all to condemn any man for anything 
 except downright cruelty. Never did gentler 
 spirit " affront the long humiliation of life." 
 He showed Hashes of ferocity and anger when 
 excruciated, but his anger had no sort of root 
 in pride to nourish it, and was most placable. 
 He could forgive Life as easily as men when 
 they smiled on him, and as easily fall to cursing 
 her again. He had " two loves of comfort and 
 despair," but no philosophy ; fate played its
 
 204 Mr. Shaw on Shakespeare 
 
 pain fugues and paeans on him as on an instru- 
 ment. He was the friend of picturesque 
 scalliwags and adored gaudy noblemen. He 
 talked, laughed, drank swaggered, worked, 
 loved — above all, loved — wept, suffered, and 
 wore himself out. Such, in its essentials, is the 
 picture of Shakespeare in Mr. Harris's wonder- 
 ful psychological study ; " no hero I confess," 
 but such a one to whom-mankind nevertheless 
 holds out its arms and greets with Cleopatra's 
 greeting : 
 
 O infinite virtue ! Com'st thou smiling from 
 The world's great snare uncaught ? 
 
 Uncaught ? That is the point to discuss. Un- 
 caught in a sense, but mauled and broken, 
 having been torn by the teeth of many snares. 
 Then Mr. Shaw comes along and says : 
 " Frank, you're a wonderful fellow. There's 
 no one to touch you at all as a Shakespearean 
 interpreter. But you've no sense of humour ; 
 at least, it's in abeyance, swamped by your 
 great capacity for scorn and pity. You don't 
 understand the main fact about genius. Genius 
 is gay ; it's gay. Pity in you demands that
 
 Mr. Shaw on Shakespeare 205 
 
 Shakespeare should be a broken man, whose 
 sweetness exhales from having been brayed in 
 a mortar. Nonsense : genius is the faculty of 
 rising superior to life. The characteristic of a 
 dramatist of genius is that he can ' discover 
 comedy in his own misfortunes almost in pro- 
 portion to the pathos with which the ordinary 
 man announces their tragedy. ... I cannot 
 for the life of me see a broken heart in Shake- 
 speare's latest works.' Why, Frank, you're 
 not going to tell me a big pot like that was set 
 boiling by a flame for any dark lady. Have not 
 I proved to the world that a man of genius is 
 a man essentially immune from the weakness 
 and trivialities of the passions ? " And as we 
 read we see the shadowy portrait of Shakespeare 
 taking on an air of familiar and indomitable 
 detachment. Mr. Frank Harris's sympathy, 
 according to Mr. Shaw, is misplaced. It is 
 the dark lady, or ladies, he ought to pity. 
 
 " The man who ' dotes yet doubts, suspects 
 yet strongly loves,' is tolerable even by a 
 spoilt and tyrannical mistress ; but what
 
 2o6 Mr. Shaw on Shakespeare 
 
 woman could possibly endure a man who 
 dotes without doubting ; who knows^ and who 
 is hugely amused at the absurdity of his in- 
 fatuation for a woman of whose mortal im- 
 perfections not one escapes him : a man always 
 exchanging grins with Yorick's skull and in- 
 viting ' my lady ' to laugh at the sepulchral 
 humour of the fact that, though she paint an 
 inch thick (which the Dark Lady may have 
 done), to Yorick's favour she must come at 
 last ? " 
 
 It is a case of Jupiter and Semele over again ; 
 " it was not cruelty that made Jupiter reduce 
 Semele to ashes ; it was the fact that he could 
 not help being a god nor she help being a 
 mortal." You see, Mr. Shaw, in a subtler 
 sense, remains after all among the bardolators : 
 Shakespeare was superhuman. Years ago he 
 wrote one of the finest pieces of modern 
 criticism proving that, compared with Bunyan, 
 Shakespeare had no sense of the heroic life or 
 turn for drawing a hero ; yet when it comes to 
 summing up his character, he will have it that 
 he was, after all, made of that stern stuff.
 
 Mr. Shaw on Shakespeare 207 
 
 He could not have been at the mercy of life. 
 Mr. Shaw points out that if any man could 
 look the ugly facts of life in the face with a 
 chuckle, it was Shakespeare ; certainly a 
 Shakespeare without irony and gaiety would 
 not be Shakespeare. In such lines as Richard 
 Ill's— 
 
 And this word " love " which greybeards call divine, 
 
 Be resident in men like one another 
 
 And not in me ; I am myself alone — 
 
 he sees his fundamental attitude 'towards that 
 passion. Of course, Shakespeare could often 
 " be hugely amused at the absurdity of his 
 infatuation," whether for a woman, fame, 
 riches or for life itself ; but he must have 
 been also quite as often contemptuous or 
 oblivious of that amusement ; otherwise he 
 could never have written the poetry which 
 makes men feel that he has said their best for 
 them. I have not read Mr. Harris's play. I 
 dare say Mr. Shaw's criticism that the poet 
 appears as a depressing victim, a pitiable broken 
 man with a grievance, is true. But I have read 
 Mr. Shaw's play, T^he Dark Lady of the Sonnets,
 
 20 8 Mr. Shaw on Shakespeare 
 
 and anything less like a poet than the principal 
 figure in it I can hardly imagine. Of course, 
 the qualities Shakespeare shows there are con- 
 sistent with being a great poet — fun, prompt- 
 ness, airy courage and a relish for fine phrases, 
 but these do not make a great poet. Mr. Shaw 
 leaves out the belief the poet must have that 
 his own feelings are wonderful and that the 
 objects of his desires and admiration are 
 supremely worthy of his art. The fact is Mr. 
 Shaw will have it that a great man must be in 
 a deep sense invulnerable. He thinks of genius 
 as a kind of immunity from average human 
 weakness, bringing with it an irrepressible gaiety 
 of heart. This is the chief difference between 
 him and Mr. Harris. To me it is easier to 
 imagine Shakespeare as Mr. Harris describes 
 him, as a man even more at the mercy of all 
 that tortures and beglamours than average 
 mortals, with an enormous overplus of sensi- 
 bility which even his intellect and vital 
 resilience could not control. His towerings of 
 gaiety and lyrical happiness seem easier to 
 reconcile with such a temperament than is his
 
 Mr. Shaw on Shakespeare 209 
 
 power of expressing extremest pain, pleasure 
 and longing with the idea of a man planted 
 beyond the range of their direst power. In 
 some poets — Dante, Milton, Wordsworth — 
 one feels a fundamental mastery and detach- 
 ment, but not in Shakespeare. Who would 
 invoke him at a crisis : " Shakespeare, thou 
 shouldst be living at this hour " ? We feel 
 instinctively he would be no rock.
 
 The G,O.M, 
 
 THE G.O.M. ! What emotion will these 
 initials, I wonder, convey to one of the 
 youngest generation, should such a person find 
 himself reading this page ? What once they 
 conveyed to me has been revived by reading 
 some of Gladstone's speeches, selected by Lord 
 Morley and now reprinted,^ together with a 
 most valuable bibliography by Mr. Bassett. 
 Reading them, I recovered my reverence, my 
 astonishment, which the last twenty years, 
 with their new types and subversive standards, 
 had somewhat overlaid. Not a few of my 
 contemporaries, I fancy, have also half for- 
 gotten or misremembered that dauntless old 
 man, at once so aloof and so passionate. It is 
 chiefly for them I write. As for the youngest 
 
 1 Gladstone' i Speeches : with Descriptive Index and Biblio- 
 graphy By A. Tilney Bassett. Methuen. 12/. 6d. net. 
 
 2IO
 
 The G.O.M. 211 
 
 generation of all, if they ever do think of Glad- 
 stone, I am sure they think of him only as a 
 typical Victorian, pompous, prolix, and pi. ; 
 as a public character, with nothing in him but 
 platform emotions and a remarkably infectious 
 power of self-deception ; as a man with 
 marvellous aptitudes and energy no doubt, 
 but who, considered as a personality or a 
 political thinker, was little better than a yawn- 
 ing emptiness. Is that an exaggeration ? 
 Hardly, I think. When once he had vanished 
 from hearing and sight, then the portraits of 
 him which Disraeli and other opponents had 
 laboured in vain — ^while he Hved — to paint 
 upon the general imagination began to gather 
 plausibility : the portraits of him as one 
 " intoxicated with the exuberance of his own 
 verbosity," as " an unconscious hypocrite," or 
 simply as " an old man in a hurry." And 
 they succeeded not because these were his true 
 Hneaments, but because when he himself was 
 no longer there, that something which was 
 hke a fire in his breast, which kept so many 
 copy-plate virtues from being in him insipid,
 
 212 The G.O.M. 
 
 so many of his lofty denunciations from sound- 
 ing like stage thunder, and excused, moreover, 
 so many of his dodgy expedients, was no 
 longer imaginable to the hmp comprehensions 
 of men. After his death the ironic, common- 
 sense, negative spirits began to have it all their 
 own way. Once the flame was out they could 
 hold up the empty lantern, and lo ! it seemed, 
 sure enough, to have been only exceptionally 
 pretentious in design. And they have un- 
 fortunately been since abetted in their work 
 by some scribes and biographers, unconscious 
 of what they were doing, who thought that 
 the way to render his incandescence was to 
 bleach him white. What follows are mere 
 hints towards remembering him correctly, 
 first-aids to the imagination. 
 
 It is important to picture him as a formid- 
 able, not to say daemonic, old man, vdth a 
 glance that was a weight and a terror, possessed 
 by a perpetual enthusiasm that abashed luke- 
 warm human nature. Parnell was a dominating 
 character, precipitous to approach when once 
 his mind was made up, yet it has been put on
 
 The G.O.M. 213 
 
 record, through his own confession, that the 
 only man with whom in personal interview he 
 did not feel sure of himself was " the old 
 spider," as he called him. This characteristic 
 might be illustrated by many anecdotes ; one 
 more will serve. Professor Blackie, another 
 grand old man, was fond of narrating how, 
 in the course of an argument with Mr. Glad- 
 stone he was about to deliver a final and crush- 
 ing rejoinder when he found, to his astonish- 
 ment, that the words were frozen on his lips ; 
 Gladstone had opened his eyes a shade wider 
 and looked at him. The Professor, on whom 
 this experience had apparently made a great 
 impression, repeated the story so often that it 
 acquired a title among his acquaintances, and 
 was referred to as " Blackie's peep into hell." 
 
 When one is reading these speeches it is easy 
 to supply, in imagination, the sonorous voice, 
 the threatening rumble of it, as over a sounding- 
 board within the chest, and the beautiful stir- 
 ring cry of appeal and indignation in certain 
 passages. It is not recollection of the voice 
 itself — it was husky and like the dashing of a
 
 214 ^'^^^ G.O.M. 
 
 cascade at the end of a cavern, when I heard 
 it — that makes it clearly audible to me in these 
 speeches. Tlie sentences, unlike most published 
 oratory, are spoken sentences, not written ones 
 composed with a pen by a man imagining 
 himself in the act of speaking. They contain 
 in themselves all the delays and circumlocutions 
 of elaborate improvisation. The charm of 
 these speeches is that they are so spontaneous 
 and yet have so much dignity of form. The 
 attitude of mind of the speaker towards his 
 theme is felt in the gravity of their rhythm ; 
 and no reader, however sceptical, can fail to 
 credit, as he reads, the tradition that when 
 Gladstone intervened the tone of debate was 
 raised to a different level. But if it is easy to 
 supply the voice, it is hard to supply an image 
 of that formidable personality. Yet, to gauge 
 the effect of these orations, we must make that 
 effort. When, for instance, he is reported as 
 turning upon interrupters with the question 
 " Am I permitted to proceed ? " unless we 
 supply also something of the awfulness which 
 we read into the story of Chatham quelling
 
 The G.O.M. 215 
 
 laughter by repeating the word sugar, " Sugar, 
 sugar, sugar ; who laughs at sugar now ? " we 
 shall not enjoy the privilege of being, even in 
 imagination, on the spot. Nothing is more 
 astonishing to a modern than the courtesy of 
 Gladstone's invective. Such excessive caution 
 to keep within the bounds of courtesy will seem 
 to lessen the effectiveness of the rebuke, if we 
 forget the formidable pressure of the person- 
 ality behind it. As Cromwell, when Lord 
 Protector of England, could throw snowballs 
 with scullions in the Palace yard of St. James's 
 without fear of jeopardising his dignity, so 
 Gladstone could hedge about his invective with 
 the circumlocutions of politeness without de- 
 tracting in the least from its weight. So 
 remarkable was he for courtesy of speech, even 
 among his contemporaries, who in such matters 
 lived under a tradition stricter than ours, that 
 when by chance at some moment of irritation 
 he let fall an expression of contempt a general 
 outcry was sure to follow. The smallest sug- 
 gestion of rudeness (and this in the days of 
 Dizzy !) on the part of Gladstone, and all his
 
 2i6 The G.O.M. 
 
 opponents were howling as though he had 
 committed an atrocity. Some may remember 
 the shindy created by his reference to Jesse 
 CoUings as " a certain Mr. ColHngs," an ex- 
 pression which would surely escape notice 
 falling now from the lips of Mr. Lloyd George. 
 As an example of his method of invective I 
 will quote a passage from his speech in the 
 Reform Bill of 1866, a passage where he is also 
 defending himself for having said, with regard 
 to some opponents of that Bill — " we know 
 with whom we have to deal " — an expression 
 which, by the innuendo conveyed, had given, 
 what seems to us, incomprehensible offence. 
 " I had in my mind very different persons " 
 {i.e. not the Opposition as a whole or Mr. 
 Spencer Walpole, who had complained, in 
 particular). " Does my right hon. friend the 
 Member for Calne (Mr. Robert Lowe) recollect 
 how, in one of his plays, that prince of come- 
 dians, Aristophanes, conveys, through the 
 medium of some character or other, a rebuke 
 to some prevailing tendency or sentiment of 
 the time — I cannot recollect now what it was
 
 The G.O.M. 217 
 
 — too many arc the years that have slipped 
 away since I read it — but that character, ad- 
 dressing the audience, says, ' But now, my 
 good Athenians, pray recollect I am not speak- 
 ing of the city, I am not speaking of the pubHc, 
 I am only speaking of certain depraved and 
 crooked little men ' ? And if I may be per- 
 mitted to make a metaphorical application of 
 these epithets — confining myself most strictly 
 to the metaphorical use, speaking only in a 
 political sense, and with exclusive reference to 
 the question of Reform, I would say it was not 
 of the House of Commons, but of ' certain 
 depraved and crooked little men ' that I used 
 these words, and I frankly own now in candour 
 my right hon. friend is, according to my 
 judgment and intention, first and foremost 
 among them." 
 
 How distinctly audible beneath the delays 
 and qualifications, which only seem to load 
 the denunciation more heavily, is that personal 
 formidableness. Lowe, it may be remem- 
 bered, though he had made a speech opposing 
 any extension of the franchise in any form.
 
 21 8 TheG.O.M. 
 
 was not prepared to vote against the Bill, pre- 
 ferring to support an amendment which said, 
 in effect, we think that a bad Bill which is on 
 the table, but you must lay another bad Bill 
 on the table, and then we will consider it. " I 
 think, therefore, that I am justified in using 
 the words," Gladstone goes on, " significant 
 as I admit them to be " (imagine here the 
 stare of the smoky, bright eyes and the 
 menacing inclination of his body in assent to 
 those opposite), " that we know with whom 
 we have to deal." 
 
 Since I am merely supplying first aid to the 
 comprehension of Gladstone (not needlessly 
 as far as many are concerned, I believe), it is 
 worth saying that, next to his passionate nature, 
 the most important thing to realise about him 
 is that he is best to be understood by the 
 present generation under the figure of a great 
 Conservative ; Liberalism, and the priceless 
 things that attitude towards public life denotes, 
 having unfortunately become incomprehensible 
 to many. 
 
 In the few autobiographical notes he has
 
 The G.O.M. 219 
 
 left behind, admirably clear, unpretentious to 
 the point of being commonplace, he says that 
 while at Oxford he read Rousseau's Social 
 Contract, which made no impression on him, 
 and Burke, who made a great one. At the age 
 of eighty-two he said in conversation with 
 Lord Morley : "I think I can truly put up all 
 the change that has come into my politics into 
 a sentence : I was brought up to distrust and 
 dislike liberty, I learned to believe in it. That 
 is the key to all my changes." Rousseau 
 gradually getting the better of Burke in his 
 mind ; that is the history of his political 
 development. What amazes the reader of the 
 speeches, apart from the sweep and power of 
 the exposition, is the prodigious reverence 
 betrayed at every turn for the framework of 
 society, the hierarchy of office, the prestige of 
 tradition, and the august institutions of 
 Throne and Parliament. Why, it extends to 
 the very buildings inhabited by those prodigies, 
 sans peur et sans refroche (however incompre- 
 hensibly blind in their policy and behaviour 
 he may judge them at the moment to be).
 
 220 The G.O.M. 
 
 whom men now call politicians and officials ! 
 I confess I laughed when in his speech at 
 Blackheath, considered at the time a triumph 
 of demagogy, I came across references in it 
 to " the noble hospital at Greenwich and the 
 views with which Her Majesty's Government 
 would approach the consideration of questions 
 connected with that truly national building." 
 I pictured the scene : the damp autumn after- 
 noon, the crowd, some five or six thousand, 
 round the platform on the heath, mostly 
 working men, furious at an economising 
 Government which had discharged some thou- 
 sands of them from Woolwich Dockyards. 
 And such elaborate talk to them ! Yet after 
 the first half-hour the small frock-coated 
 figure, with the eager and melodious voice, 
 discoursing as though he were addressing 
 Privy Councillors, completely dominates them. 
 The interruptions stop ; the phrases and peri- 
 phrases flow on. There is something dauntless 
 and electrical about him to be felt at a radius 
 unexpectedly wide ; and in the ceremonious 
 consideration of his address a genuine demo-
 
 The G.O.M. 221 
 
 cratic sentiment, which makes him abate not a 
 jot of the formahty and elaboration due to an 
 audience of princes and plenipotentiaries. 
 Plenipotentiaries they are indeed to him, 
 though they stand about in heavy boots, 
 smoking their dottles and turning their pipes 
 askew when the wind blows, plenipotentiaries 
 of a great, vague power called The People, to 
 whose dumb heavings that ancient order, with 
 its accretions of sentiment he loves so well, 
 must slowly but inevitably give room. And it 
 is to this process his imagination more and 
 more fervently assents, with rebates and quahfi- 
 cations, it is true, but more and more faith- 
 fully as time goes on, though with revulsions 
 from the idea of change for its own sake and 
 a devotion to formulae such as that every 
 member of the House of Commons is, of course, 
 fundamentally disinterested, and a poetic 
 devotion to the decencies of public life and the 
 romance of ancient institutions. That there 
 was an English people who Jelt right, a Parha- 
 ment that meant right, and a Throne that was 
 worthy of a life's devotion — that was his
 
 222 The G,OM. 
 
 political creed. Bless me, who, without con- 
 siderable glosses, would assent to that creed 
 now ? We are too cynical and have learnt too 
 much, and our statesmen have been too 
 cynical. Sartor Resartus and its clothes philo- 
 sophy has ceased to be even pointful enough 
 to amuse. The crowns and wigs and robes are 
 already off. 
 
 Yet reading these speeches I found myself 
 continually exclaiming : " Gladstone, would 
 thou wert living at this hour ! " It was not 
 the obvious fact that if he, and not the dizzy 
 Imperialists, with their hankerings after Cyprus 
 and heaven knows how much Asia Minor in 
 ■prospectu, had had his way, there would have 
 been no Constantinople to fight for now, that 
 the Turks " with their Zaptiehs and their 
 Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, 
 their kaimakans and their Pashas, one and all, 
 bag and baggage " would have been cleared 
 out long ago ; but that we should then have 
 someone in whose mouth high, disinterested 
 sentiments and expressions of respect for small 
 nationalities would sound impressive. Nothing
 
 The G.O.M. 223 
 
 is more striking in these speeches than the 
 passages in which he calls the foreign policy of 
 his own country to account ; turns on those 
 who give as a reason for thwarting Russia her 
 oppression of Poland with a list of our own 
 tyrannical acts towards other nationahties, or 
 proves that if British interests (since they cover 
 the world like a web) are to be the only criteria 
 of foreign policy, we shall never be without 
 an excuse for annexation or war. 
 
 " This England of ours " (he is speaking upon 
 the Treaty of Berlin) " is not so poor and so 
 weak a thing as to depend upon the reputation 
 of this or that Administration ; and the world 
 knows pretty well of what stuff she is made. I 
 am not quite sure, however, that the world 
 has the same clear and strong conviction with 
 respect to the standard of our moral action 
 as it has with respect to the standard of our 
 material strength. Now, I am desirous that 
 the standard of our material strength shall be 
 highly and justly estimated by the other nations 
 of Christendom : but I believe it to be of still 
 more vital consequence that we should stand
 
 224 The G.O.M. 
 
 high in their estimation as the lovers of truth, 
 of honour and of openness in all our proceed- 
 ings, as those who know how to cast aside the 
 motives of a narrow selfishness, and give scope 
 to considerations of broad and lofty principle." 
 
 Only a statesman who has dared to rebuke 
 his own country can express with real energy 
 indignation at another. 
 
 Listen to him addressing imaginary Otto- 
 mans, holding them with his glittering eye 
 on Blackheath : " You shall receive your 
 regular tribute, you shall retain your titular 
 sovereignty, your empire shall not be invaded, 
 but never again as the years roll in their course, 
 so far as it is in our power to determine, never 
 again shall the hand of violence be raised by 
 you, never again shall the flood-gates of lust 
 be open to you, never again shall the dire 
 refinements of cruelty be devised by you for 
 the sake of making mankind miserable." We 
 may wish such a voice could speak for us now, 
 but it must not be forgotten that what lent 
 it an ominous grandeur was a moral indigna- 
 tion so genuine as not to spare his own country
 
 The G.O.M. 225 
 
 on occasion : " That is the case of India in 
 particular. We go to the other end of the 
 world as a company of merchants ; we 
 develop the arts and arms of conquerors ; we 
 rule over a vast territory containing 200,000,000 
 people, and what do we say next ? We lay a 
 virtual claim to a veto upon all the political 
 arrangements of all the countries and seas 
 which can possibly constitute any one of the 
 routes between England and the East, between 
 two extremes, or nearly such, of the World. 
 We say to one State — ^You must do nothing in 
 the Black Sea at Batoum, because Batoum and 
 Erzeroum may one day become a route to the 
 East. We say : You must do nothing in 
 Syria or Bagdad, because we may finally dis- 
 cover the Valley of the Euphrates to be the 
 best route to the East. The Suez Canal was 
 made for the benefit of the World ; but it is 
 thought by some of these pretenders that we, 
 who almost furiously opposed the digging of 
 it, have rights there which are quite distinct 
 in kind from those of the rest of the World, 
 and that we are entitled to assert our mastery 
 Q
 
 226 The G.O.M. 
 
 without regard to the interests of other por- 
 tions of mankind. Then there is the route by 
 the Cape of Good Hope. It happens, however, 
 that at the Cape no one annexes but ourselves. 
 Nay, it appears from news no older than 
 to-day (May 7th, 1877), that we are so stinted 
 in our possessions that it is expedient to make 
 large additions to our territory there ; and to 
 make them exactly by those menaces of force 
 which Ministers think so intolerable in the 
 case of Turkey. And then you know, Mr. 
 Speaker, that any additions to our territory 
 are always perfectly innocent. Sometimes 
 they are made not without bloodshed ; some- 
 times they are made not without a threat of 
 bloodshed. But that is not our fault ; it is 
 only due to the stupidity of those people who 
 cannot perceive the wisdom of coming under 
 our sceptre. We are endowed with a superi- 
 ority of character, a noble unselfishness, an 
 inflexible integrity which the other nations 
 of the World are slow to recognise ; and 
 they are stupid enough to think that we — 
 superior beings that we are — are to be
 
 The G.O.M. 227 
 
 bound by the same vulgar rules that might 
 be justly applicable to the ordinary sons of 
 Adam." 
 
 The irony of this passage was not, and can 
 never be agreeable to patriots of an Imperial- 
 istic tinge, but only a statesman v^ho could 
 thus measure the degree of delusion that 
 enters into every form of national complacency, 
 could have adequately exposed nov^^ the gross 
 pretensions of German " Kultur." " A nation 
 is rarely just to other nations," he wrote. 
 " Perhaps it is never truly just, though some- 
 times (like individuals) what may be called 
 more than just. There can be no difficulty in 
 any country in finding foreign ministers able 
 and wilHng to assert the fair and reasonable 
 claims of their countrymen with courage and 
 with firmness. The difficulty is quite of another 
 kind. It is to find the foreign minister : first, 
 who will himself view those claims in the day- 
 Hght both of reason and prudence ; secondly, 
 and a far harder task, who will have the 
 courage to hazard, and if need be to sacrifice 
 himself, in keeping the mind of his country-
 
 228 The G.O.M. 
 
 men down to such claims as are strictly fair 
 and reasonable." 
 
 Gladstone's genius was a moral passion. 
 His power over men, apart from his immense 
 abilities, lay in the faculty of rousing in them 
 a sense of responsibility. Men will readily 
 take a lead from anyone who can make them 
 feel that the work they are engaged upon is of 
 urgent importance. They suffer from their 
 own indifference. There is a narcotic in all 
 experience, grateful and comforting on occa- 
 sion, but entailing dullness in the end. Things 
 go wrong, but the world rolls on ; it does not 
 seem to matter much after all. Work is 
 scamped, decisions are postponed ; the sky 
 does not fall. Yes, it is a relief, but how boring 
 it becomes for that very reason to shoulder 
 day after day recurring botherations. Then a 
 man comes along who attributes an enormous 
 importance to the next step to be taken, 
 however trivial. Again what a relief ! " This 
 is a vital matter ; I am important because the 
 issue, in part at any rate, rests with me ; I 
 count ; I am alive." So cries the heart. " This
 
 The G.O.M. 229 
 
 is the man I will believe in and follow ; when 
 I feel things through him they become interest- 
 ing." Such was " the Gladstone touch," in 
 Parliament, in the Civil Service, and in private 
 life. He was praised for raising the level of 
 discussion in debates, and at the same time 
 laughed at for urging or refusing some petty 
 amendment to some subordinate clause of 
 some minor Bill, as though the destiny of 
 mankind hung on the issue. The temper of 
 mind involved, however, was the same. He 
 had no humour, and to this generation, wiiich 
 overrates ridiculously that quality, this has 
 appeared a grave blemish. But humour was 
 inconsistent with his master faculty of making 
 men feel the urgency of the matter in hand. 
 It is at bottom an easy way of coming to terms 
 with pain and pettiness ; if we cannot get the 
 better of life, at any rate we can be so free as 
 to laugh at it ; if we cannot help being insignifi- 
 cant, we can at any rate acknowledge the fact 
 gracefully with a joke, thereby keeping in 
 touch with a larger sense of things than our 
 preoccupations and passions viewed alone
 
 230 
 
 The G.O.M. 
 
 might appear to justify. Humour is certainly 
 the salvation of those whose souls are not on 
 fire, but of such it is uninteUigent to demand 
 it. Disraeh without humour would have been 
 hideous ; Gladstone with it, what his enemies 
 delighted to think him — a hypocrite, conscious 
 or unconscious, it matters little. 
 
 When he lay dying, the Vice-Chancellor of 
 Oxford sent him a message from the Council, 
 expressing the sorrow and sympathy of the 
 University. " He listened," says his biographer, 
 " most attentively and over it he brooded long, 
 then he dictated to his youngest daughter 
 sentence by sentence his reply : ' There is no 
 expression of Christian sympathy that I value 
 more than that of the ancient university of 
 Oxford, the God-fearing, God-sustaining uni- 
 versity of Oxford. I served her, perhaps mis- 
 takenly, but to the best of my abihty. My 
 most earnest prayers are hers to the uttermost 
 and the last.' " There is a grandeur, a pathos 
 and a perfect tightness in that valediction 
 which enables us, to whom, if I may suggest 
 it, humour comes perhaps more fittingly, to
 
 The G.O.M. 231 
 
 excuse in this old man of eighty- nine a lack of 
 irony towards human struggles, the counter 
 purposes of human zeal and the incongruities 
 of experience. 
 
 PRINIEll IN GREAT BRITAIN BV ■( 
 
 WM. BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PLYMOUTH )
 
 
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