ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 BY 
 
 HOLBROOK JACKSON 
 
 ' 3 > 3 ' 
 
 LONDON 
 
 GRANT RICHARDS LTD 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
Printed by the Riverside Press Limited, Edinburgh 
 1911 
 
TO 
 
 FREDERICK & MARGARET 
 RICHARDSON 
 
 M90076 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Utopian — 
 
 Here and Now 
 
 Going to Nowhere 
 
 Southward Ho ! 
 Peterpantheism — 
 
 Peterpantheism 
 
 Make-believe 
 
 Playthings 
 
 Festival of Gifts . 
 
 Apostle to the Pagans 
 
 Bet^veen Waking and Awake 
 Readings in Earth — 
 
 Winter Glamour . 
 
 Hedgerows 
 
 Spring 
 Before Dawn — 
 
 Deserts of Noise . 
 
 Torpor 
 
 Hunger-tameness . 
 
 Immortal Russia . 
 Introductions — 
 
 Maurice Maeterlinck 
 
 G. K. Chesterton . 
 
 H. G. Wells 
 
 Robert Blatchford 
 
 Pavlova and the Dancing Spirit 
 
 The Lithographic Portraits of 
 Rothenstein 
 
 A Note on Dandies 
 
 7 
 
 Will 
 
 PAGE 
 11 
 
 17 
 26 
 
 41 
 47 
 55 
 60 
 66 
 72 
 
 81 
 89 
 94 
 
 101 
 106 
 111 
 117 
 
 127 
 139 
 152 
 168 
 
 182 
 
 188 
 198 
 
UTOPIAN 
 
" I could never content my contemplation with those 
 general pieces of wonder ^ the Flux and Reflux of the 
 Sea, the increase of Nile, the conversion of the Needle 
 to the North ; and have studied to match and parallel 
 those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of 
 nature, which without travel I can do in the Cosmo- 
 graphy of myself We carry with us the wonders we 
 seek without us : there is all Africa and her prodigies 
 in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of 
 nature, which he that studies ivisely learns in a com- 
 pendium what others labour at in a divided piece and 
 endless volume.'^ — Sir Thomas Browne, " Religio 
 Medici." 
 
, , J > J > ' 
 
 • > 
 
 HERE AND NOW 
 
 I LIKE to do nothing. To sit by a fire in 
 winter, or in a garden in summer ; to loaf 
 on a sea-beach with the smi on me ; to hang 
 over the wall of a pier-head and watch the waves 
 in their green and white tantrums ; to sit in a 
 brasserie on a Parisian boulevard with a common 
 bock, and the people moving to and fro ; to idle in 
 parks or public squares, or in the quadrangles and 
 closes of colleges, or the Inns of Court, or the great 
 cathedrals ; to forget haste and effort in old empty 
 churches, or drowsy taverns ; to rest by a roadside 
 hedge, or in a churchyard where sheep browse ; to 
 lie in a punt in the green shade of the willows ; to 
 sit on a fence — these things please me well. 
 
 My love of doing nothing is deep-rooted : so deep- 
 rooted that I have never thought it necessary to 
 argue about it ; besides, there are so many people 
 arguing about so many things. And I am not vain ; 
 I desire not to convert. Who, indeed, shall say to 
 what faith one ought to be converted ? Faith and 
 faithfulness, to be sm^e, are often separated in our 
 time, and my private opinion is that the convertible 
 are already converted. 
 
 Of course I work — but I make no virtue of that. 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 1 Yk^oik because I must. I do not make this admis- 
 sion to invite your sympathy. Even were I rich I 
 might do semething, just to give a relish to my real 
 aim in life. ... As it is, I work to provide a margin 
 to my days, a margin in which I may " taste the 
 vaguely sweet content of perfect sloth in limb and 
 brain." 
 
 I know there are people who like work, and I am 
 bound to respect their taste ; but I do not in the 
 least imderstand them. They do tease me out of 
 thought, as doth Eternity ; and I am silent before 
 them as Keats was before a greater thing. There 
 are many things we are forced to accept with our 
 limited perceptions ; we understand very little in 
 spite of our hm'rying here and there, and of our vast 
 knowledge. Doubtless work has rewards unknown 
 to me : my powers of observation may be faulty, 
 for most people seem to be working all their waking 
 hours ; they do nothing only when they sleep, after- 
 wards they begin to work again. I must conclude 
 that they get some pleasure out of it, or they would 
 not work, for we all agree that ours is an age of 
 freedom. It behoves me, therefore, to take the 
 militant worker for granted. 
 
 Still I am often tempted to look more deeply into 
 the phenomenon of work, because if the love of work 
 in some moves me to silence, surely the inclusion of 
 work among the rights of man ought to move me 
 to tears — or laughter. But I shall neither weep nor 
 smile nor pursue the matter further, for I am un- 
 
 iz 
 
HERE AND NOW 
 
 worthy. One cannot properly understand a subject 
 unless one comes to it with sympathy ; and I have 
 no sympathy for work. I do not hold it among the 
 virtues. 
 
 I would be better employed in considering, nay, 
 in emulating the lilies of the field, who have con- 
 founded the wisdom of those who toil from the 
 beginning of time. Why, I often ask myself, why 
 has this not been generally accepted ? And in my 
 effort to answer the question, I am forced to admit 
 that it has been generally accepted, though not 
 generally admitted. And, after all, I may not be 
 alone in my faith : perhaps the majority are with me, 
 only some perverse tradition prevents them from 
 avowing it. I am, indeed, quite satisfied that 
 
 " Hearts just as pure and fair 
 Do beat in Belgrave Square 
 As in the lowly air 
 
 Of Seven Dials 1 '^ 
 
 The whole matter, however, is a mystery, for I find 
 that Seven Dials, using the term as the symbol of a 
 place where work is the sole occupation, is always 
 working, without any very obvious enthusiasm for 
 the performance ; whilst Belgrave Square, using the 
 term as the symbol of a place where work is not the 
 sole occupation, manages to combine an elegant idle- 
 ness with a remarkable moral enthusiasm for work. 
 The solution of the riddle would require more subtlety 
 than I can command ; it would merely be a vain 
 
 13 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 begging of the question were I to charge either with 
 insincerity or folly, especially in the light of the 
 known honour and sincerity of our leisured classes 
 and that shrewdness and almost touching self- 
 interest which are the traditional characteristics of 
 the workers. 
 
 The matter is further complicated by the curious 
 fact, common to the most superficial observer, that 
 Seven Dials is no more consistent in its calling than 
 Belgrave Square ; for just as the latter can find time 
 in its idleness to sing the praises of work, so Seven 
 Dials reserves its highest praise and its highest 
 rewards for those who do no work. Human beings 
 are strange creatures ; they pride themselves upon 
 being distinguishable from what they call " the lower 
 animals " by possessing the faculty of reason, yet 
 they remain superbly unreasonable. Yet, in the 
 last resort, there is one consistency between the two 
 forces : the practice of Belgrave Square and the 
 taste of Seven Dials coincide, thus proving that 
 idleness, either voluntary or enforced, is a link, and 
 perhaps the only link, between rich and poor. 
 
 Perhaps on this basis a truce might be called in 
 which each might be allowed to follow his own 
 inclinations. We might call it — a Pragmatic Sanction 
 for Idleness. Unless some such agreement is ar- 
 ranged, I greatly fear that rich and poor may do 
 something to each other which they would eternally 
 regret. Their inconsistencies may make slaves of 
 them all. This would not matter so much if we 
 
 14 
 
HERE AND NOW 
 
 who prefer to do nothing were left out of it, but that 
 would be impossible, for slavery is both infectious 
 and contagious, and sooner or later it afflicts every 
 citizen in those States where it has gained a footing. 
 We are threatened with the disease even now, and I 
 think it would be far from unwise if our legislators 
 considered means of arranging for the quarantine of 
 all who were suspected of the taint. 
 
 But I do not ^vish to follow a question which for 
 the moment does not affect me. I am fortunately 
 placed. The gods have been kind to me. They 
 have permitted me to do just sufficient work, and 
 then to loaf, to dream, to do nothing ! For this boon 
 I should give praise every moment of my life ; and 
 I do — ^for is not appreciation praise ? Hours of 
 voluntary idleness are indeed hours of praise. For 
 in such hours we are in communion with the real 
 world ; in them we have done with the time that 
 passeth away, and become one with the time which 
 is eternal. The priests of old knew this when they 
 instructed their acolytes in the art of meditation. 
 Walt Whitman knew it when he loafed on " fish- 
 shaped Paumanok " observing a spear of summer 
 grass ; Thoreau knew it in his hut by Walden Pond ; 
 William Blake knew it when he saw the angels on 
 Peckham Rye. 
 
 It is only when hfe is overwrought with the tyramiy 
 of doing that we miss the joy of being ; and it is only 
 the consciousness of being that makes us capable of 
 any worthy action. That is why the great ones of 
 
 15 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 the earth have always been men of a wide leisure, 
 men who have had a margin to their days, like the 
 margin about the page of a well-built book. The 
 men who do anything worth doing are just the men 
 it is easiest to catch doing nothing. But I did not 
 even set out to make a virtue of doing nothing. 
 Virtues are to the virtuous; and it may be that 
 some of us are unworthy of work as others are 
 certainly unworthy of idleness. 
 
 One cannot settle such questions ; they must be 
 left to settle themselves. So I end as I began. I 
 like doing nothing, and the one who likes doing 
 nothing has time to appreciate everything — even 
 time. He is at one with the long silences ; Idn with 
 the world. . . . 
 
 16 
 
GOING TO NOWHERE 
 
 I WAS walking along a familiar English highroad, 
 when the sound of wheels caused me to move 
 unconsciously to the greensward on the right. 
 Presently a friend in a dogcart appeared. " Hello ! " 
 he said, ^vith good-humour, " where are you going ? " 
 " To Nowhere," I replied cheerfully. " Oh, thought 
 you'd like a lift," said he, whipping up his mare and 
 getting away rapidly. He no doubt concluded I was 
 in a chiu'lish mood. But I was never less chiu-lish 
 nor more truthful. I was actually going to No- 
 where, and that my admission of the fact could 
 excite ill-feeling is a curious reflection upon our 
 times. 
 
 But a moment's thought and the matter becomes 
 quite clear. This is an age in which everybody is 
 going Somewhere, and Nowhere, as a destination, 
 has become a term of evasion. You say you are 
 going Nowhere to the over-curious, the inquisitive, 
 and the word, used in this sense, means just the 
 opposite. It is a piece of protective irony, and thus 
 a part of the modern convention of pi^poseful 
 gadding about. 
 
 The man who is not going Somewhere nowadays is 
 very rare indeed. The habit is rapidly becoming an 
 B 17 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 instinct. I hardly ever meet people who are not 
 going Somewhere ; or if they are not actually doing 
 so it is merely because circumstances are against 
 them ; they have work to do, money to earn, masters 
 to serve, homes to support. As it is they devote 
 their spare moments to planning journeys to remote 
 places for the holidays. Journeying has become a 
 part of the ritual of life. The wedding trip is as much 
 a circumstance of getting married as the honeymoon 
 used to be ; and you no longer hear of merchants 
 retiring from business and taking things easily ; 
 they retire from business, nowadays, to devote them- 
 selves to travel. This journeying is always, as I say, 
 purposeful ; people are always going Somewhere ; 
 and, just as the act of going Somewhere has become 
 a kind of social ritual, so certain places have become 
 the symbols and impedimenta of the ritual. Their 
 names are adorably familiar to all purposeful 
 travellers — Florence and Rome ; the Bernese Ober- 
 land and the Trossachs ; parts of Holland, Belgium, 
 France ; Cairo, Morocco, the Land of the Midnight 
 Sun (vide Guide-Books), and even, for the extra 
 wealthy, Japan. It is a far-flung list, but yet a 
 narrow one, for the ritual of going Somewhere, or, to 
 give it its real name, the art of the tourist, imposes 
 upon you the necessity of keeping on the beaten 
 track. Somewhere is a place to which everybody 
 has been or " ought " to go ; it has been written 
 about, praised, defined. 
 
 Now when I say that I prefer going to Nowhere, I 
 
 i8 
 
GOING TO NOWHERE 
 
 would not have you jump to the conclusion that I 
 am a contrar}^ person. Were you to do so you would 
 do me an injustice. Nowhere is simply my favourite 
 destination, and I get so much pleasure in going there, 
 that it is not easy for me to imagine why people put 
 themselves to so much trouble in going elsewhere. 
 Perhaps it is all due to the rapidity and cheapness of 
 modern travel conditions. You merely push a little 
 money through a pigeon-hole in a railway station, 
 and utter the name of the desired Somewhere, when 
 lo ! like the result of an occult incantation, a slip of 
 pasteboard will drop into your hand, which in turn, 
 by the simple process of sho^ving it to a mmiber of 
 uniformed men, will be the means of translating you 
 to the place where you would be. Who would not 
 be overcome by such a magic ? Yet I have a magic, 
 beside which the magic of touring slips into the 
 limbo of futile things. Let me tell you of it ; not 
 for the sake of conversion, but out of gratitude. 
 
 My magic is involved in going to Nowhere, which 
 is quite a different thing to not going Anywhere. 
 Others know of it, but they keep quiet. They are 
 in no hurry, in the patois of commerce, to let the 
 public in. But I dislike such privacy and break it 
 down wherever I can. The difficulty, however, in 
 this case is greater than usual, for money will not 
 buy the requirements for the jomiiey to Nowhere. 
 You either have them or lack them, and there is an 
 end of the matter. Neither are they the things you 
 throw into a ruck-sack at the last moment, though 
 
 19 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 to be sure such things are not to be despised even by 
 the Nowherer. They are the strange things a man 
 carries in the cells of his brain or beneath the wings 
 of his imagination. They are no more tangible than 
 these, and yet they have all the authority of money, as 
 well as the grip of that which religious people under- 
 stand by a call, which is something greater than money. 
 
 Once you possess these things you may safely set 
 out to Nowhere. And then the miracle will happen, 
 in this wise : Somewhere will come to you ! For I 
 have invariably found that in persistently going to 
 Nowhere you not only ignore the object of travel, 
 which is to get Somewhere, but j^^ou actually accom- 
 plish the fact by reversing the process. In going to 
 Nowhere, Somewhere let me repeat, indeed Every- 
 where, comes to you. This is no vain paradox ; 
 it is a mild statement of common fact, and because 
 of this, and for no other reason, it sounds astounding. 
 
 Everybody knows that even the adorable destina- 
 tions of tourists rarely come up to expectations. 
 Somehow or other it is the places by the wayside 
 upon which the lingering eye is cast. And at this 
 let us cease to wonder, for we are near the heart of 
 the mystery. The most beautiful places are not 
 those which you go to see deliberately, but those 
 which visit you. They are the places which rise 
 out of the shadowy plain to greet you unawares ; 
 the places that steal upon you like dreams, that flood 
 your vision like sunlight. They are, like all memor- 
 able things, the places that happen. If you go to 
 
 20 
 
GOING TO NOWHERE 
 
 meet them you are almost certain to miss them ; 
 for they are coy and shy, like beauty or joy, or a 
 maiden new to love. You pursue them and they 
 retreat before you. But just wait awhile and they 
 will peep at you over the hill-tops or between the 
 pines : you will feel their presence stealing upon you 
 like a new joy, and in a flash you will see a vision, 
 and that vision is the vision of Nowhere. 
 
 This experience comes rarely or not at all to those 
 who are for ever going Somewhere. The material 
 of such experiences, to be sure, exists everywhere, 
 but constant harping on approved destinations 
 blunts the faculty of vision ; and this is a great loss 
 to those who go a-journeying. And it is not only the 
 person who goes Somewhere who is damaged by the 
 act. Somewhere also is injured. Deterioration is 
 contagious, and places are destroyed or renovated by 
 the spirit of the people who go to them. I know as 
 fair an island as ever graced the sea. Once that 
 island was Nowhere, and in those days it was peopled 
 by fisher-folk and farmers who spoke their own 
 language, sang their own songs, told each other their 
 own tales, and provided each other with their own 
 natural food : the fish of the sea, the sheep of the 
 pastures, and the fruit of the plains. Since then the 
 delectable island has become Somewhere, and its 
 people are no longer fishermen and farmers ; most 
 of them are touts and flunkeys, attending and ex- 
 ploiting a strange, noisy people for one-third of the 
 year, and awaiting the return of the strangers for 
 
 ai 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 the rest. They are forgetting their own tongue, 
 songs and tales, as they talk more and more the 
 language, sing more and more the ditties and read 
 more and more the newspapers of the invaders. 
 There are also other signs of evil, but anyone can 
 see these in any Somewhere, so I will save my ink 
 for less obvious things. My island is but one 
 example of a modern ill which is spreading over the 
 whole earth ; no fair place is immune ; those who 
 gad about settle upon them like a blight, and peace 
 and beauty shrink before their advance. 
 
 For that and for other reasons I go to Nowhere. 
 
 Anyone can go a journey, but every journey is a 
 pilgrimage for those who go to Nowhere. To set 
 out for Nowhere requires courage, therefore those 
 who go there may be said to be alive. They are 
 ready to take their chance and do not barter with a 
 guide-book for promises of scenery, antiquities, or 
 other conventional reward, at the end of the day's 
 march. Enough for them the open road and the 
 things life offers by the wayside. The violet shadows 
 of the woodland path flecked with silver light ; the 
 tonic breath of the heath and the smell of peat ; the 
 shrill green of the new fronds among the crumpled 
 tan of last year's bracken ; the staccato flutter of 
 hurried wings in the hedgerows ; the fragrance of 
 hay and cattle from the shippens ; the buildings 
 mellowed by time ; the roll of down and the sway 
 and rhythm of the sea ; the murmuring music of 
 dingles full of leaves, faint breezes, birds, and bees 
 
 22 
 
GOING TO NOWHERE 
 
 and lapping waters ; the arrogance of mountains, 
 and the hovering loneliness of sky-swept plains ; 
 these are the treasures Life offers to him who goes 
 forth to Nowhere. 
 
 But Nowhere is not only to be sought in coimtry 
 places or by the sea ; to believe that would be to join 
 issue with those absurd people who insist upon 
 separating man and his works from Natiire and her 
 works, which is like separating the tree from its 
 leaves, or the bird from its nest. All the things 
 made by man are as much a part of nature as the 
 things you read about in the natural history books. 
 And deep in the heart of his masterpiece, the city, 
 hides also the genius of Nowhere. No one knew this 
 better than Charles Dickens, who devoted, literally, 
 years to tramping to Nowhere in London, and the 
 results are to be found in that immortal series of 
 novels which constitute the Iliad of the Metropolis. 
 And when wise old Dr Johnson set a walk down 
 Fleet Street against a walk to any Somewhere in 
 England, he knew quite well, although Boswell has 
 not recorded the fact, that the Nowhere of Fleet 
 Street was the whole world. 
 
 I know not how many times I have walked to 
 Nowhere in London, but this I do know, that every 
 time I have done so some new revelation of the great 
 city-coimty has come to me. London is strangely 
 elusive to the tom-ist. Indeed, I know of no place, 
 save Paris, which eludes those who come to see her 
 so effectually as London. She deliberately lures 
 
 23 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 them from her track by throwing what are popularly 
 known as " sights " in their way. And they go 
 back to the provinces thinking they have seen her, 
 when they have only seen the Tower, Crystal and 
 Buckingham Palaces, the Poets' Corner, Madame 
 Tussaud's, and such things as your proper Londoner 
 has only heard of but never seen. Paris also tricks 
 the tourist after her manner by showing him sordid 
 and wearisome things called " pleasures," which 
 have very little to do with the real life of the sober 
 and industrious capital of France. 
 
 Yes, a thousand pitfalls and boredoms await the 
 tourist, but he who goes to Nowhere is immime from 
 such evils. He is under a spell which is irresistible. 
 It is as though he were set apart, like a knight-errant 
 in an age devoid of such orders. Indeed, as yet, these 
 essential saunterers, wayfarers, ramblers or whatever 
 you may call them, are not conscious of their aim or 
 condition, neither do they know one another by 
 name. But, scattered and nameless as they are 
 among men, a subtle bond links them together in an 
 informal fellowship, and by chance signs they come 
 to know each other when they meet on the open road. 
 The Holy Grail lies in Nowhere, and those who go 
 thither must needs belong to the same fellowship. 
 
 I never yet felt lonely on my journeys to Nowhere. 
 Still it is pleasant to think that there are others going 
 my way and that perchance we shall meet if not there 
 at least on the road. Occasionally we have met and 
 spoken, as they say of ships on the High Seas. One of 
 
 24 
 
GOING TO NOWHERE 
 
 these days, in sooth, I am quite prepared to find that 
 the fellowship is much larger than I thought. Why 
 not? 
 
 Everyone who is engaged in the great pilgri mage 
 of Life — and what better thing can happen to any 
 of us ? — is marching to the same goal. It is the goa 
 which is the repudiation of all goals, the great path- 
 less way, imnamed on maps, unpraised in guide- 
 books ; it is the goal to which every man is destined. 
 But most men prefer to go Somewhere, they have so 
 little faith. How fruitless are their efforts they them- 
 selves will tell you. Nowhere is akin to wisdom, it is 
 the ^visdom of place, and Hke ^^^sdom the merchandise 
 of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and 
 the gain thereof than fine gold. Its beauties are real 
 and enduring, yet they are not to be set do^n in 
 words. Some say they have been revealed in music, 
 but I doubt it. Nowhere has been defined in 
 the happy bearing of those who have been there. 
 Perhaps some day a great change "svill come over 
 humanity, and all rushing hither and thither ^\dll 
 cease. All the guide - books will be burnt, and 
 scenery and antiquities ^vill no longer be sought by 
 weary tourists. In that hour shall Nowhere be dis- 
 covered. 
 
 as 
 
SOUTHWARD HO! 
 
 THOSE who remember Liverpool before the 
 multi-domed Dock Offices and the sky- 
 scraper of the Royal Liver Insm'ance Com- 
 pany flaunted themselves on the pier-head, over- 
 topping the tallest spars of the fleetest barques of 
 the South Sea trade, and making even the colossal 
 red funnels of the Mauretania look like toys, will 
 remember also the St George's Dock. And if they 
 are further touched with a sentimental regard for old 
 familiar things, as which of us is not, they will no 
 doubt resent somewhat the intrusion of those 
 arrogant monsters of iron and stone, modem hybrids 
 of building construction, half engineering and half 
 architecture, usurping the place of that same old 
 rectangular basin of muddy green water. For do 
 they not stand precisely where it once stood ? Are 
 they not the monstrous gravestones of the cosiest 
 dock in the whole world ? 
 
 Well, it was in this dock, in the corner beside the 
 swing bridge which used to connect James Street 
 with Mann Island, in the shadow of the Goree 
 Piazzas, that I first beheld the craft which after- 
 
 26 
 
SOUTHWARD HO! 
 
 wards took me to the South Seas. I was just out 
 of my teens and had come over the water from the 
 Cheshire side and was crossing from Mann Island 
 into the City of Ships. I had passed the hut where 
 the ancient gentleman sells cheap Bibles and Testa- 
 ments and other accounts of the True Faith, and stood 
 turning over the battered volumes on the stall of 
 the second-hand bookseller which at that time stood 
 in a row of stalls, most of which displayed glowing 
 pyramids of oranges and apples presided over by 
 plump old dames with immobile, wind-tanned faces, 
 who seemed to do nothing but sit staring all day at 
 the pleasant row of sailors' dram-shops opposite. 
 Even in those days I had a keen scent for a good 
 book, and almost the first I touched on the stall 
 was a musty copy of " Typee," by Herman Melville. 
 I had never heard of it before, but was attracted by 
 the name. " Typee," I murmured, " Typee suggests 
 something childlike and exotic," and turning over 
 the pages I came across this passage : 
 
 " There were none of those thousand sources of 
 irritation that the ingenuity of civilised man has 
 created to mar his o^vn felicity. There were no 
 foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, 
 no bills payable, no debts of honour, in Typee ; 
 no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers, perversely 
 bent on being paid ; no dims of any description ; no 
 assault and battery attorneys, to foment discord, 
 backing their clients up to a quarrel, and then knock- 
 
 27 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 ing their heads together; no poor relations ever- 
 lastingly occupying the spare bedchamber, and 
 diminishing the elbow-room at the family table ; 
 no destitute widows with their children starving 
 on the cold charities of the world ; no beggars ; no 
 debtors' prison ; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs 
 in Typee ; or, to sum up all in one word — ^no 
 money ! That ' root of all evil ' was not to be found 
 in the valley." 
 
 " A sort of Socialist Utopia," I thought, and dipped 
 again. I caught this the second time : 
 
 " To begin with the morning. We were not very 
 early risers — ^the sun would be shooting his golden 
 spikes above the Kappar mountains ere I drew aside 
 my tappa robe, and, girding my long tunic about 
 my waist, saUied out with Fayaway and Kory-Kory 
 and the rest of the household, and bent my steps 
 towards the stream. Here we found congregated 
 all those who dwelt in our section of the valley ; and 
 here we bathed with them. The fresh morning air 
 and cool flowing waters put both soul and body in a 
 glow, and after a half -hour employed in this recreation, 
 we sauntered back to the house — Tinor and Marheyo 
 gathering dry sticks by the way for firewood ; some 
 of the young men laying the cocoa-nut trees under 
 contribution, as they passed beneath them ; while 
 Kory-Kory played his outlandish pranks for my 
 particular diversion, and Fayaway and I, not arm- 
 
 28 
 
SOUTHWARD HO! 
 
 in-arm, to be sure, but sometimes hand-in-hand, 
 strolled along, vnth feelings of perfect charity for all the 
 world, and especially good-will towards each other." 
 
 " How much ? " I inquired of the patient merchant. 
 
 " Threepence," said he. 
 
 As I crossed the swing bridge I saw, lying in her 
 accustomed berth, the schooner Eostre^ as I had seen 
 her many times on her periodical visits, for this 
 corner berth seemed hers by historic right, hke the 
 berths of the Dutch Eel-Schuyts in the Pool of 
 London by Billingsgate \Miarf. She looked just 
 the same as ever, neither older nor younger, indeed 
 she had reached that age when time seems to pass by 
 unheeding and unheeded, as is often the case 'svith 
 hearty old women. Her grey mainsail flapped loosely 
 and untidily, with its square brown patch in the 
 right-hand comer, as it always did when she was in 
 dock ; and her blue-jersey ed crew were disembarking 
 her familiar cargo of bmidles of boardlike salted fish. 
 Her sides, as usual, were almost guiltless of paint, 
 and inclined to portliness ; they bulged, mmatiually 
 for a schooner, from a square stem, on which was 
 painted in yellow letters on a blue gi'omid, " Eostre — 
 Christiania," but they made amends by tapering 
 rather gracefully to the bows, from wliich a new jib 
 shot out with obvious coquetry. I recrossed the 
 bridge late that evening with " Typee " in my pocket, 
 which I had been devouring all the aftemoon at 
 the risk of commercial disaster in a fragrant smoking 
 
 29 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 cafe, and on my way to the pier-head I had bought 
 at a bookshop " Omoo," which, I learned from the 
 title-page of " Typee," was by the same author. 
 The Eostre still lay at her berth, but a light now shone 
 into the twilight from her binnacle, and only one of 
 her crew was in sight ; he leaned over the starboard 
 side meditatively watching the traffic on Mann 
 Island, puffing a pipe and spitting into the dock. 
 That night I went to bed early, propped myself up 
 with pillows, placed the light in a convenient position, 
 read " Typee " to the end and " Omoo " half through 
 before the guttering of the candle forced me to close 
 my smarting eyes on the glories of the South Seas. 
 
 II 
 
 Doubtless there are people who, having read 
 " Typee," are not moved with an urgent desire to 
 take ship for the Marquesas, but I have yet to hear 
 of them. But there can be none in the early twenties 
 who are so tame. Anyhow I was not of their number. 
 I had barely got half through the book when the 
 South Seas filled my imagination with an over- 
 powering longing. I seemed to have known them 
 all my life ; Herman Melville, most delightful and 
 discursive of chroniclers, simply relit my memory. 
 He made it all quite clear and revealed my destiny. 
 My longing was no vague desire for novelty, it was 
 simply homesickness. 
 
 It all came back to me in the cafe between the 
 
 30 
 
SOUTHWARD HO! 
 
 dream-pauses of my reading; I felt like a foreigner 
 whose mind constantly harked back homewards. 
 Vision after vision of the luscious archipelagoes of 
 Polynesia flashed across my mind. My thoughts 
 were a perpetual cinematograph of lagooned islands 
 in "wine-deep seas ; of palm-trees rising above the 
 eternal surf of the endless Pacific ; of forests gar- 
 landed ^vith flowers ; of palm-leaf houses, cocoa-nuts, 
 yams, bananas, and bread-fruit ; of lithe men beauti- 
 fully tattooed in strange arabesques of blue and green 
 and red ; and of olive women with red, laughing 
 mouths and bright, soft eyes — a cleanly, idle, gentle 
 folk, who did nothing in the world but live, rounding 
 off their perfect Uves by occasionally eating one 
 another. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There are several ways of going to the South 
 Seas. You may travel over the great antipodean 
 ferries in floating hotels, from London or Liverpool, 
 through the IMediterranean and the Suez Canal, the 
 Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, or round the Cape of 
 Good Hope. Or you may cross over the Atlantic 
 Ferry to New York, from thence going overland to 
 San Francisco, where you may again ship comfort- 
 ably. Or, better, you may take the old route of the 
 navigators round the Horn, meeting the icy gales, 
 smelling the Antarctic almost, as a vantage and a 
 standard for future contrasts, when the good ship 
 turns her nose up to the Line. That way went I ; 
 
 31 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 but in no ocean-going Savoy or Carlton. I roughed 
 it deliciously in the Eostre, who, as long as I could 
 remember, had been beating the channels of the 
 British archipelago, exchanging at Christiania and 
 Liverpool cargoes of dried fish and the factored goods 
 of Lancashire and Yorkshire. 
 
 IV 
 
 Southward Ho ! What greater joy than in those 
 words ! Down the Mersey we tacked on a high tide ; 
 and I watched with riotous glee the towers and domes 
 of the great city fade behind us. The river tossed 
 and tumbled, scattering spindrift like confetti of 
 silver. Over towards the North Fort we sped, 
 peeped into the mouths of the big guns, and with a 
 fluttering of patched sails, tacked and scm^ried across 
 towards the Perch Rock Battery, bidding adieu as 
 it were to the watch-dogs of Liverpool, and so out 
 into the Channel ; and I turned and saw old England 
 dissolve itself into the nothing it had become for me. 
 Rio first ; then, in an heroic curve, we tacked down 
 to the Plate, glimpsed into Buenos Ayres for water 
 and fresh meat, and off round the Horn on swift 
 mysterious wings. No storm checked the little 
 weather-ripened Eostre. It was like a dream, I kept 
 saying, and our tiny schooner, bearing the name 
 of a goddess, fore and aft, was a ship o' dreams. I 
 sprang on to her prow as we rounded the historic 
 cape, and looked ecstatically at the Queen of Oceans. 
 
 32 
 
SOUTHWARD HO! 
 
 There before me she lay, league after shimmering 
 league, incalculable, illimitable, invincible, wearing, 
 as I knew, over her heart, the clustered jewels of the 
 Marquesas. 
 
 It was Northward Ho ! now, but northward in the 
 rich South Seas. Flying-fish leaped out of the blue- 
 green swell before us, as if the Eostre were a faery 
 boat and they her steeds ; and behind floated a milk- 
 white albatross, like an attendant beautiful aero- 
 plane. The ghostly bird took a fancy to us outside 
 the Rio Plato and never left us till we sighted our 
 Hesperides. Ever and anon Leviathan rose out of 
 the deep in the vast arena of ocean through which 
 we sailed, coming into existence like a phantom 
 island, spouting aloft a cascade of spray which would 
 have put the fountains of Versailles to shame, and 
 then, beating the Pacific with monstrous horizontal 
 tail, was gone to reveal, anon, his slate-grey form a 
 dozen miles away. 
 
 These were the incidents of our voyage, the 
 " sights " of the ocean. These and the eternal 
 memories of the great navigators. Cook, Vancouver, 
 Cabot, and the rest, and best of all, Mendafia, who 
 discovered the Marquesas. They were no longer 
 memories, however, but realities. The South Seas 
 are theirs, their ships surrounded us, a motley 
 flotilla of all ages, beckoning, speeding, hailing our 
 ship o' dreams. Presently we sped along those 
 highways of the southern ocean, the Trade Winds ; 
 with all sails spread we were hurled by the great 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 forces, day after day, into the tropical heat, as if we 
 were sailing into the sun ; night after starry night, with 
 the Southern Cross above and strange constellations 
 dancing and singing around us. And then, lo ! a 
 mystery ! The air was transfigured ! Not alone 
 the salt breath of the mighty ocean Queen, but a 
 warm fragrance to which the salt was but savour. 
 All the gardens of the Riviera and Surrey, the Tyrol 
 in spring, England in Maytime, distilled into one 
 voluptuous scent, and steeped in odom's new and 
 strange. No land in sight ; nothing but the encir- 
 cling sea, the flying-fish, the albatross, the big whales, 
 and the swift glancing of the shark. But we knew 
 what it was. It was the Marquesas calling to us ; 
 it was the spirit of Typee, the home of Fayaway, 
 it was the voice of the Syrens distilled into a magical 
 fragrance, greeting the Eostre. 
 
 Presently they rose out of the ocean. A huddle 
 of purple hills in the sea ; and as we drew near they 
 changed colour with every league, as though they 
 signalled us. Purple, mauve, blue, green, opal, 
 mother-of-pearl. Then they assumed form and 
 detail. Forests running up the sides of mountains ; 
 deep valleys, luscious and dark. Nearer still we 
 came, with eyes, ears, nostrils strained to meet them. 
 I saw, heard, smelt the wonderland. Curves of 
 roaring sm^f ; air like that of a Yorkshire moor ; 
 and a palisade of palms, leaning towards the lagoon 
 or holding aloft their feathered heads like noble 
 dames. We did not put into the larger islands of 
 
 34 
 
SOUTHWARD HO! 
 
 Hivaoa or Nukahiva, but sallied farther north to the 
 cluster of islets of the Washington Group where the 
 natives are less affected by the customs of their 
 French masters. 
 
 And at length the voyage ended. A little island 
 was our destination ; it stood on the very frontier 
 of the ^larquesas, rising out of the sea as easily as 
 Leviathan, but permanently and beautifully. Per- 
 haps they knew I was coming, I could have believed 
 anything of the Marquesans. They guessed it was 
 no mere trader, no potential beach-comber, but me, 
 the Marquesan, lost in the great imi verse, exiled 
 through countless incarnations, homing at last ! 
 It was a mystery and they understood. Anyhow 
 they came out to meet us ; outside the reef the sea 
 was populous \^dth canoes, some few with lateen 
 sails, but most of them propelled by paddles. We 
 sailed slowly through them like a monarch through 
 her courtiers. I noted how the carved bows of the 
 canoes were newly painted in bright dyes, and how 
 nearly all were decked with leaves and flowers. 
 Slowly we glided through the doorway of the reef 
 into the still chiysoprase of the lagoon, the canoes 
 following, and the water about us full of swimming 
 youths and maidens. Diving, floating, splashing, 
 laughing, they encircled the Eostre, hke irresponsible 
 angels who had somehow got into a misplaced heaven, 
 
 35 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 or a rightly placed one for all I knew. I watched their 
 mad capers. Marvellously active they were, darting 
 under the surface like fish, their lithe bodies flashing 
 like polished shagreen, the long dark hair of the girls 
 streaming behind them as they rushed along, or 
 curling about them as they turned and rose, laughing, 
 with flashing teeth. 
 
 Then with a rattle of chains the anchor dropped 
 to the coral bed of the lagoon ; I descended into 
 a waiting canoe and was paddled swiftly ashore. 
 Surrounded by joyous and inquisitive crowds, men 
 graceful and symmetrical, some bearded and their 
 beards plaited, or cut short and square and pointed, 
 smooth limbed, easy of carriage, briefly clad. Women 
 in loose white tappa robes revealing here and there 
 glimpses of olive bodies which they declared with the 
 frankness such beauty deserved ; hair long, straight, 
 and dark, and into the tresses were woven the scarlet 
 flowers of the hybiscus, which contrasted delightfully 
 with full, dark eyes, smiling ^vith the vital smiles of 
 superb health and natural joy. 
 
 VI 
 
 So I was there at last. I looked around me at the 
 forests which came down to the beach, at the cocoa- 
 palms, at the little tent-like houses of bamboo 
 thatched with palmetto leaves ; and as I walked 
 along to the chief's house, I noted the colour of the 
 woods. They were not green, like the woods of 
 
 36 
 
SOUTHWARD HO! 
 
 England, but rainbow-hued ; the very shadows 
 were painted like the wings of a butterfly. All the 
 trees seemed linked together with garlands of 
 flowers. Strange birds sang and hopped and 
 fluttered before me. Insects of metallic lustre 
 sported in the sun. The bamboos rattled on either 
 hand, and the Marquesans laughed and shouted ; 
 some ran and jumped ; others gathered bread-fruit 
 and cocoa-nuts ; some spanked each other T\ith long 
 palmetto leaves. I saw no signs of work, nothing 
 but idleness and play. I sighed out of very joy ; 
 here I was at last, free for ever of the fever and fret 
 of England, where one puts on clothes because of 
 the cold, where one works because one must, and 
 hypocritically says one likes it ; I laughed joyfully 
 with the Marquesans. I could have embraced them 
 all, I was so happy. As we neared the big house of 
 the chief on the hillside, raised on its pi-pi of stones, 
 another crowd ran to meet us ; they scattered 
 flowers as they came, and ahead of them sped the 
 most beautiful damsel of them all. Quickly they 
 came on, and straight she made for me. At first I 
 felt nervous. Then, as she drew nearer, I seemed 
 to recognise her. It was Fayaway, the beautiful 
 Fayaway of Typee, Herman Melville's lovely savage. 
 She approached, laughing, panting, in a shower of 
 flowers, laid tw^o soft hands in mine, held up her red 
 lips — and then, then, as they say, I woke up. 
 
 37 
 
PETERPANTHEISM 
 
** Be young, dear my soul : soon will others be men, and 
 I being dead shall be dark earth.'* — From the Greek Anthology, 
 J. W. Mackail's translation. 
 
PETERPANTHEISM 
 
 WHAT ill turn in the trend of evolution gave 
 man the aspiration to grow up ? It must 
 have been an evil chance, for the secret 
 desire of all is for eternal youth. No one surely who 
 had his will of life would dream of growing up, and 
 yet we all not only do it, but succeed in persuading 
 ourselves that we like doing it. 
 
 We have even gone so far as to w^ean the imagina- 
 tions of children from their rightful heritage and make 
 them wish to become big, like father, or good, like 
 mother. These ambitions are now commonplaces 
 of childish imagination. But in spite of it all, the 
 evidence is still against growing up. The purpose 
 of the child is to live, to feel the mysterious presence 
 of life in every limb, and in so far as he does this he 
 is happy. But the purpose of the adult has become 
 a febrile pursuit of the symbols of life. Real life 
 fills him with dread, and success in his endeavour is 
 his undoing. 
 
 Age is a tragedy ; and the elderly person strives 
 heroically to make the best of it by covering his 
 retreat with pathetic attempts at superiority and 
 wisdom, little arrogances and vanities which at 
 bottom deceive nobody, not even himself. For well 
 
 41 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 he knows, as he casts wistful glances at the pranks 
 of childhood, that in spite of his imposing cry of 
 " Eureka ! " he has found nothing. What profit 
 has a man if he gain the whole world but lose his 
 own youth ? Perhaps, indeed, it would be more 
 becoming in those who have grown up to admit the 
 fact with fitting lamentation and humility, and, 
 instead of flaunting their age with pomp and circum- 
 stance, cover their bodies with sackcloth and put 
 ashes in their hair. 
 
 The great difficulty, however, is that men persist, 
 in spite of bitter experience, in looking upon growing 
 up as a worthy thing. Women are their superiors 
 in this respect. Intuitively they know that age is a 
 cul-de-sac, that it leads not even to heaven, for to get 
 there one has to become as a little child. This, 
 probably, is why most women disown the passing 
 years. 
 
 Still even they grow up ; indeed, are not women 
 always a little older than men ? Both nature and 
 society seem to have conspired to make them so. 
 But that is no excuse. Human beings ought not 
 to be content to remain the slaves of either. Surely 
 it is by the constant flouting of such authorities that 
 new variations of life are attained. Neither gods nor 
 millenniums are the outcome of passivity. There- 
 fore, gentle women, put by your subterfuges about 
 age, for you have been found out ; we know you to 
 be older than we men are, and our immemorial desire 
 is that you should be younger. 
 
 42 
 
PETERPANTHEISM 
 
 Few serious attempts to restore the golden age 
 have been made in modern times, but one of the 
 greatest of these is that of ^Mr Barrie. Peter Pan 
 is more than a Christmas pantomime ; it is a con- 
 tribution to religious drama. It is a mystery play, 
 giving significance to the childlike spirit of the uni- 
 verse. Peter Pan is a symbol of eternity, of that 
 complete, unchangeable spirit of the world which is 
 superior to the illusion of growing up : that dim 
 vision which has set bounds to the imagination of 
 humanity ever since the elderly person usurped the 
 throne of the child. Peter Pan reminds us again 
 that the world has no final use for grown-up things, 
 that cities and civihsations pass away, that monu- 
 ments and institutions crumble into dust, that weeds 
 are conquering the Coliseum, and that the life of the 
 immemorial Sphinx is but a matter of time. Peter 
 Pan is the emblem of the mystery of vitality, the 
 thing that is always growing, but never grown. 
 
 He came among us some years ago, when our 
 faith in the child had nearly gone. But even to-day 
 we shall see that there is no place for little children 
 in the average home, and that when a place is pro- 
 vided for them it is provided because they are a 
 nuisance and a burden to the grown-ups. It might 
 as well be admitted that children irritate us ; and 
 this means that we are no longer capable of entering 
 into their kingdom. We revenge ourselves by 
 teaching them all sorts of worthless knowledge. 
 But we teach them nothing so worthless as this facile 
 
 43 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 art of growing up. That is the final and unforgivable 
 act of our hopelessly bewildered lives. We make 
 our peace with the children by moulding them to 
 our own image ; perhaps, one of these days, for all 
 things are possible, we shall become wise enough to 
 permit the children to return the compliment. 
 
 The desire to make them as we are is the fatal 
 desire of a lost cause. It means that communications 
 with the child-world have been cut off, which is 
 only another way of saying that we have abandoned 
 our alliance ^vith the main tendency of life. We 
 have ceased to grow. We have, in fact, grown up, 
 and are fit only for life's scrap-heap. 
 
 We talk of evolution ; but half of the idea of 
 evolution is illusion, and the other half the assertion 
 of the child-spirit. It is the child-spirit building 
 castles in the air. And our talk of that little sister 
 of evolution, progress, is not any more helpful ; for 
 progress is generally nothing more than a vain 
 endeavour to put the clock forward. The only 
 really vital thing in life is the unconscious abandon- 
 ment of yoimg things — the spirit of play. And if 
 we think for a moment we shall see that it is play, 
 or the contemplation of play, that gives us most joy. 
 We never tire of watching the play of children or of 
 young animals. That is sane and healthy : there 
 are no better things to watch. Our approval links 
 us with the living world again, just as om' love of 
 children does. That is why our delight in young 
 life is always tinged with melancholy. Whilst we 
 
 44 
 
PETERPANTHEISM 
 
 approve and love the ways of the young we uncon- 
 sciously condemn our elderliness. We realise that 
 the most superb adult is a dismal failure beside a 
 child making mud pies, or a kitten chasing its tail. 
 But we rarely admit it ; when there is a chance of our 
 going so far we become frightened, and, shaking oiu'- 
 selves, we murmur something about sentimentality, 
 and speedily commence grooving old again, thereby 
 displaying our impotence and our ignorance. 
 
 The sign that we have accomplished our ignoble 
 aim, and grown up, is that we no longer have the 
 impulse to play. We go about our business in colour- 
 less garments and surroimdings, buying and selling 
 and ruling with revolting solemnity. The last 
 glimmering of the spark of play is seen in our shame- 
 lessly hiring people to play for us. We hire foot- 
 ballers and cricketers to play games for us, jockeys 
 to ride for us, singers to sing for us, dancers to dance 
 for us, and even pugiHsts and soldiers to fight for us. 
 
 Those who have become as little children will want 
 to do all these things for themselves. They will no 
 more desire to play by proxy than they will desire 
 to live by proxy. Art has been described as the 
 expression of man's joy in his work, and joyful work 
 is the kind of work practised by those who have the 
 courage to be yoimg. It is fundamentally play, and 
 no other kind of work really matters. We have 
 some remote idea of this when we utter the common- 
 place that success depends largely upon one's doing 
 the work one likes to do. It is also pretty generally 
 
 45 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 recognised that there is no joy in what is merely 
 laborious. Beyond all men the artist knows this ; 
 not because his work is easy, but because he is happy 
 in his work. It is a wonderful game. " I pray God 
 every day," said Corot, " that He will keep me a 
 child ; that is to say, that He will enable me to see 
 and draw with the eye of a child." And France 
 heard him sing as he painted. The childhood of the 
 world was in that song, and in its results. 
 
 Children are unconscious artists in living. How 
 to reach this happy state is another matter ; precise 
 rules cannot be given, because there are none. Per- 
 haps there is no direct way to the Golden Age, and 
 even if there were, so few of us are worthy. However, 
 there is at least one useful rule — that is, never to look 
 upon the Golden Age as past. For the rest, we 
 might follow Peter Pan, and refuse to grow up. 
 
 46 
 
MAKE-BELIEVE 
 
 IT is the prevailing habit nowadays to look upon 
 make-believe with contempt. But then we scorn 
 so many charming things that the value of this 
 attitude should be very carefully discounted by those 
 who are simple enough to be wise. Much better 
 would it be to attempt to discover how far one 
 may wisely believe and at what point make-believe. 
 Such an inquiry might bring us to the conclu- 
 sion that there is more than a little virtue in the 
 latter. 
 
 For myself I have no doubts. I believe make- 
 beheve to be the prelude to belief. It is the quicken- 
 ing of faith, an earnest of the gTowing world. It 
 shines like a prophecy through the eyes of every 
 child, it lights up the path of everyone who has not 
 ceased to wonder. But it is not mere credulity, 
 blind acceptance of things. That is ignorance. 
 Make-believe is wise and coy, it looks whimsically 
 upon its sm-roundings, and laughs, because it knows 
 them for what they are worth — nothing. That is to 
 say, it knows that things, as they are, are worth 
 nothing imtil they have been transfigured by human 
 desires; and, furthermore, that our desires are 
 deepened by the colour we throw upon things. 
 
 47 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 This throwing of colour, this splashing of the world 
 with design, is the function of make-believe. 
 
 You may have observed that one of the earliest 
 amusements of the child is to make-believe it is an 
 adult. Children have a game, and it is a game 
 common to children of all times and places, in which 
 they pretend, with much solemnity, to be fathers 
 and mothers and other elderly persons. And, sure 
 enough, showing what a powerful thing make- 
 believe is, these youngsters do grow up. This is not 
 one of the happiest uses of the faculty, but its familiar 
 and appalling results ought to appeal to all. And is 
 not the sequel to this tragedy revealed in the bitter 
 cry of the elderly person that things were better in his 
 youth ? An admission surely that the elderly person 
 is beaten in the race. 
 
 It ought to make us realise the possibility of there 
 being a realm, intermingled with the mundane world, 
 about which we are so confident, where substances 
 and appearances yield more readily to the influence 
 of will ; a world in which make-believing takes the 
 place of all our ponderous social machinery ; where 
 forms are changeable at the instance of a wish, and 
 life finds eternity in itself, and not, as it hopes to do 
 to-day, by piling stone upon stone for a thankless 
 and impossible posterity. 
 
 Such a realm does actually exist in our very midst, 
 did we but know. Our cities are not the permanent 
 things we think they are, they are at best little more 
 than clusters of houses made of cards, such as we 
 
 48 
 
MAKE-BELIEVE 
 
 used to build as children, only we do not give our- 
 selves the pleasure of knocking them down as often 
 as we might do. We leave them to fall down, or to 
 be crumbled away in the hands of Time. And we 
 don't even know that the sad joy we feel as we con- 
 template a ruined castle or abbey is more than half 
 due to the unconscious recognition of the stupendous 
 fact that destiny, also, is playing at card-castles. 
 We have small interest in a building, no matter how 
 noble, until it lies in ruins. Then we are so much in 
 love with it that we are happy if permitted to spend 
 a holiday beside it. The actual process of change 
 gives us, as it should, even more happiness. We 
 rush with almost savage joy to see a house on fu-e ; 
 the sight of the scampering fire-engine fills us with 
 envy because we cannot follow it. And what would 
 we not have given to have seen the easy and tragic 
 contempt with which the fates toppled the beautiful 
 cities of the Straits of jMessina to destruction, or to 
 have had reserved seats at the same Olympic game 
 when San Francisco and all her towers and sky- 
 scrapers were thrown over as a child wrecks the 
 buildings it has made out of wooden bricks. 
 
 There are, however, other and less melodramatic 
 expressions of this mutable world of which I write. 
 They come to us in the stillness of night, when reason 
 has been dethroned by slumber, and material con- 
 sistency dissolved in a mystery, a mystery out of 
 which is reared up a life infinitely more vivid than 
 the thing we call reality when we are awake. In our 
 D 49 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 dreams objects yield to the touch of fancy, as easily 
 and as quickly as the keys of the piano respond to 
 the light touch of a lady's finger-tips. In dreamland 
 we live among familiar things, whose reality has 
 become so intense that it is almost painful to our dull 
 senses. Yet we know, if not dicing sleep, at least 
 afterwards, that, intensely real as the dream-things 
 are, they are mere airy nothings compared with the 
 same things when met out of dreamland. 
 
 Whatever the dream-specialist may say about 
 dreams, and Just now he is saying many things, the 
 indisputable fact remains that dreamland is as yet 
 unexplained and unexplored. We do not know why 
 we look upon dreams as airy nothings in our wakeful 
 moments, any more than we know why we live more 
 intensely in our dreams than we do whilst we are 
 awake. These things are mysteries. But I cannot 
 understand why we should pass off so lightly a con- 
 dition of life which is so much greater in every sense 
 than the round of duties, drudgeries, and hypocrisies 
 which make up our waking hours. Such circum- 
 stances seem tiny and ineffectual, seem indeed what 
 they are, compared with the vivid and masterly 
 accomplishments of our dreams. 
 
 Everything which means anything to us whilst 
 awake, means ten times as much in dreamland. 
 There is not only a concentration of time, for dreams 
 seem to happen rapidly in the few seconds between 
 waking and wakefulness, but, quite naturally there 
 is also a concentration of life. The life we would spread 
 
 50 
 
MAKE-BELIEVE 
 
 over hours, even years, is forced, in our dreams, into 
 the point of a second. Our remembrance of these 
 experiences is the recollection of immemorial things, 
 yet they have happened like a flash of light or the 
 opening and shutting of a fan. We feel we have 
 lived deeply and experienced greatly. Generally 
 our experiences have been quite familiar, but as 
 different from those of our waking hoiu-s as the 
 figures of Michael Angelo are different from ordinary 
 men and women. Yet in spite of it all, in spite of 
 its intense reality, our poor minds cannot contain 
 the memory of it. We remember almost as briefly 
 as we dream, and oiu* minds ache with the effort to 
 retain the slightest souvenir of dreamland, even 
 though the memory be some gigantic terror or pain, 
 for all things are greater there. It is as though we 
 had been living in a land of looking-glass ; a realm 
 where all things are one with the play of light on 
 water, the flickering of flames ; with shadows, with 
 sounds, with thoughts. . . . 
 
 I wonder is life all make-believe ? Or are we, as 
 we lie asleep, provoked into an imaginative effort, 
 by mysterious presences, elves, gnomes, fays, pixies, 
 or what not, who delight in our hungry bewilderment ? 
 It may be. Yet I think it more probable that 
 dreamland is a foretaste of the sort of life we would 
 live if we could. Dreamland is not make-believe, 
 but reality. Make-believe is an endeavour to enter 
 the enchanted realm by an effort of the will. It is 
 self-conscious dreaming; dreaming by will instead 
 
 SI 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 of by sleep. The word dreaming bears the same 
 relationship to the deeper realities of dreamland, as 
 living does to the mundane world. When we make- 
 believe we build with the material of dreams. The 
 desire to do this exists somewhere in the hearts of 
 us all, in spite of the fact that we devote so much time 
 to denying it. This denial, however, is a false shame, 
 the sort of shame we feel about our relationship with 
 all really vital experiences. In the polite world we 
 only admit the admitted, and therefore polite con- 
 versation is trivial. Politics, religion, and love, the 
 three things that matter and into which make-believe 
 enters so largely, though it must be granted not 
 always to the best advantage, are forbidden. 
 
 What the world wants at the present moment is 
 not more morals or more leaders, or more reforms, 
 it wants, more than anything else, more of that 
 capacity of wonder, more of that faculty of faith, 
 which expresses itself in the large and abandoned 
 principles of make-believe. Dreamland lies at our 
 frontiers but we have deliberately kept its products 
 out of our markets by the establishment of a tariff 
 of reason and rationalism which is making of our land 
 a humdrum and a barren waste. We are overcome by 
 the pompous mock-permanency of the hfe we see about 
 us, and we have handed over the reins of government 
 to the dull persons who are the reflection of these 
 ponderous things. These folk have no imagina- 
 tion, and so they fear a change. Their minds are 
 bankrupt, they cannot dream of another and a 
 
 52 
 
MAKE-BELIEVE 
 
 better world. Therefore they have ceased to believe 
 and to build anew. Make-believe is repudiated as 
 child's play; but the defenders of make-believe 
 would be the last to deny this charge. They accept 
 it and say that it is good. The make-believe of the 
 child is creativeness. It is the same power which 
 moves the poet to give to airy nothing a local habita- 
 tion and a name; that is why, in spite of all our 
 power as adults, we look back wistfully to the days 
 of our childhood. That is why we love children — 
 we see in them what we might have been. 
 
 But the greatest evil is not that our governors are 
 dull and doubtful. The evil lies in the fact that our 
 poets and artists, the high priests of make-believe, 
 are content to sing, play, and paint, to the time 
 called by the dullards. Artists have become pm'- 
 veyors of bric-a-brac to the people who have kept 
 imagination out of our daily lives. But one of these 
 days they will awaken to their true destiny. Poets 
 will become w^hat Shelley imagined they were, " the 
 imacknowledged legislators of the world." In that 
 day we shall have conquered a new realm. The 
 centuries of make-believe will be succeeded by 
 centuries of behef ; we shall still live amidst familiar 
 things, but those familiar things will have gathered 
 about them the intensity and the mutability of 
 dreams. Then we shall enter dreamland by other 
 doors than the door of sleep. 
 
 It is not impossible, this dream of a world grown 
 so young as to have faith in its dreams. Everyone 
 
 53 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 who has done any worthy thing has believed in 
 dreams, and the creations of fancy have outlived the 
 so-called creations of reason. Even in our present 
 age of science, our great scientists have rarely made 
 discoveries by means of reason. They have seen the 
 wonders first through the imagination and not the 
 microscope. Reason has been imagination's tool. 
 In an age, therefore, that has imagined and created 
 eyes that can see through the opaque, that can flash 
 messages across the world without wires, that has 
 captured the human voice on a sensitive cylinder, 
 and that has tamed and utilised the most powerful 
 and mysterious of natural forces, in an age that can 
 almost demonstrate the hereafter and create organic 
 life out of dead matter — there is still hope. 
 
 Make-believe has gone so far and realised so much, 
 that all things may be expected of it. Already it is 
 becoming absurd to talk of the impossible in the old 
 reasonable sense. Logic tells us that the impossible 
 is impossible. But make-believe is always giving 
 the lie direct to this pessimist by showing that the 
 impossible is the only thing worth attempting. 
 Things are of course impossible to the reason, but 
 that is no argimient against the things : it is an 
 argument against reason. Dreams may not stand 
 the test of reason, but why should we not inaugurate 
 the renaissance of make-believe by insisting upon 
 reason standing the test of dreams ? 
 
 54 
 
PLAYTHINGS 
 
 PLAY is one of the great mysteries, and the 
 toy is its symbol. It is a symbol before 
 which all have bowed ; it is older than the 
 gods and younger than the latest human invention ; 
 packed with the spirit of life it has survived the ages, 
 and full of the same spirit it awaits with invincible 
 patience the ages to come ; it has survived all creeds 
 and \\ill survive everything but life. The individual 
 toy may pass away, for fashions change ; the day 
 before yesterday it was a wooden doll of Dutch 
 extraction, yesterday it was a calico cat, to-day it is 
 a gollyw^og or a Teddy bear, to-morrow it will be 
 something else ; but these changes are merely the 
 changing of clothes : the essential toy is eternal. 
 
 We worship the toy every time we gratify the 
 delight of a child ; but our worship is deeper in those 
 fleeting moments when we stand in a place of toys 
 and look wistfully at them with a look full of bashful 
 wonder which reveals a desire bom of the remote 
 past, nay, of the eternal present, a desire to buy one 
 for ourselves ! 
 
 It is as though the soul, after being driven 
 by necessity or by ambition into all manner of 
 solemn, tedious byways of life, suddenly realised, by 
 
 55 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 a magic flash, that all purposes are useless, and that 
 only one thing finally matters. That one thing is 
 play. Some men laugh at this feeling, and put it 
 hastily by with a sense of shame. They would not 
 like to be caught playing. Such men are infidels, 
 for play is of the gods. 
 
 It is the expression of the creative spirit, the child 
 of joy, and joy is finally the basis of all religions. 
 When we are full of life, when each sense overflows 
 with vitality, then we become prodigal, we scatter 
 ourselves broadcast, we take chances, risk great 
 odds, love, laugh, dance, write poems, paint pictures, 
 romp with children ; in short, we play. It is only 
 the impotent who do not play. The people who play 
 are the creators. 
 
 The proper name of toys is playthings. They are 
 quite irrational, and their only justification is that 
 they give happiness — and I have yet to learn of any- 
 thing better worth giving. But in giving happiness 
 they give life, that is why happiness is worth having. 
 When you play you are happy, while you are happy 
 you are in eternity — for happiness annihilates time 
 and space. Children are the greatest players, they 
 follow their instincts, which tell them that play is 
 recreation. Even adults call games recreations, but 
 they have almost forgotten what the word means. 
 They have so far forgotten the meaning of it that 
 they have set apart a certain time for play and a 
 certain time for work. All work should be recreation ; 
 all work should be play. 
 
 56^ 
 
PLAYTHINGS 
 
 Children are always playing when they are healthy 
 — and we who are older might learn wisdom from 
 them. But as a matter of fact we do just the 
 opposite ; we even go to considerable trouble and 
 spend endless money in teaching children how not to 
 play. At the same time we do not deny that unless 
 we become as little children we can in no wise enter 
 the kingdom of heaven. But we are not lost to all 
 hope : we have not sunk to the lowest depths, be- 
 cause we still look upon at least one feast in the year 
 as a festival of play. When we fill our youngsters' 
 stockings with toys on the eve of Yule we pour 
 libations on the altar of the true faith. 
 
 No one ever performs an act without becoming 
 part of the act. We are all but the reflections of the 
 things we do. So when w^e join in the great ritual 
 of the festival of toys we recreate in ourselves some- 
 thing of the spirit of the joyous children who are the 
 recipients of our bounty. We feel not only benefit 
 from the giving, but from the gift. When we walk 
 through the stored bazaars at Yuletide and hear the 
 babel of sounds, children's happy voices clamouring 
 with the voices of toy dolls and animals, raucous 
 gramophones out-shouting musical boxes, and all 
 the merry noises of Toyland, we are conmiunicants 
 in a great sacrament. 
 
 The happy be\vilderment w^e feel at such times is 
 one of the most genuine of all human feelings. It is 
 really a harking back to the child-spirit. We are 
 turning om: dull, grown-up wits into the main cmTent 
 
 57 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 of life. A revolution is going on in our spirits — ^we 
 must not arrest it, for we are becoming as little 
 children. 
 
 It is indeed remarkable, and even hopeful, that we 
 grown-ups ever do choose aright. It is no easy matter 
 to enter into the ideals of a child at any time, and 
 when we stand in Toyland smToimded by all the 
 bizarre fetishes of childhood, which the stern laws 
 of our workaday lives condemn as absurd, it is a 
 wonder that we do not wish to sweep the whole 
 bauble shop into eternit}^ But we do not do this. 
 We, for a brief space, become absurd. Happy is the 
 man who can thus make a fool of himself. The world 
 is saved by such acts. 
 
 How easy it is to vote " straight," or to do a deal 
 in cotton or corn, or even to buy Consols for the rise, 
 which does not always occur at the appointed 
 moment ! But when it comes to a deal in toys, you 
 are up against a new game. It is no easy matter to 
 decide whether little Miss Five-year-old will prefer 
 a gollywog or a Teddy bear, or to speculate on the 
 measure of appreciation some lady of ten years 
 would accord to the pink curves of a dainty rogue 
 in celluloid, in comparison with the more graceful 
 charms of some aristocratic doll from Paris, with 
 immaculate cork stuffing, kid limbs, real hair, and 
 elegant mutable joints. Before such deep questions 
 the trials of commerce pass into nothingness. 
 
 Our difficulties are due to inexperience, and these 
 are largely modified when we have to deal with boys. 
 
 58 
 
PLAYTHINGS 
 
 A ball, the greatest of all symbols of play, even a 
 grown-up can appreciate, and we can even see 
 more fun in a toy railway system, steamship, or 
 waggon and horses. 
 
 The ti-uest test, however, lies in our capacity for 
 appreciating the irrational playthings. We must be 
 uplifted at the rotund absurdity of Humpty-Dumpty. 
 Gollywog must fill us with w^onder and delight. 
 Teddy bear must be our big game. A horse whose 
 body is a stick upon two wheels must be our charger. 
 Noah's Ark must be our Zoo, and Caran d'Ache, 
 rather than the Kennel Club, must decide the points 
 of our dog ! We must, in conclusion, not only 
 administer to the child, we must look thi'ough the 
 eyes of a child. For children see very clearly, and 
 their play is more serious than our work, and more 
 important. An awakening of a true delight in toys 
 will be the signal to play — and play in the last resort 
 is prayer. Therefore, let us play. 
 
 59 
 
FESTIVAL OF GIFTS 
 
 I OFTEN wonder how long society would hold 
 together if the ideal of thrift were pushed to its 
 logical conclusion ; it would not hold together 
 very long, I feel certain, for saving is farther removed 
 from vitality than spending. He who spends well 
 saves, and even he who spends ill saves more than he 
 who saves all. Most people believe this, and old 
 sayings like " 'Tis better to give than to receive " 
 are accepted as truisms. In the mysterious natural 
 economy of social life, generosity must be taken as 
 the basis of our traffic with one another, otherwise 
 the social fabric, or what is worth having of it, would 
 quickly fall to pieces. But at the same time we are 
 all too eager to take the ancient saying that 'tis better 
 to give than to receive, " as read." Our acceptance 
 is so complete that the act of giving has been de- 
 graded into a charitable convention, or else entirely 
 suspended. We seem to recognise this failing once 
 in a twelvemonth, when, at Yuletide, the year dies 
 in a burst of splendid generosity. Yuletide has be- 
 ccniie the symbol of giving, the Feast of Gifts. 
 
 It is the season of penance for past niggardliness. 
 It is the appointed hour for the payment of the only 
 genuine debts, the unconscious and inevitable in- 
 
 60 
 
FESTIVAL OF GIFTS 
 
 debtedness of one human being to another. At 
 Yuletide men realise with more unanimity than at 
 any other time their interdependence, their common 
 humanity. Their generosity droppeth as the gentle 
 dew from heaven upon the just and the unjust alike. 
 Distinctions are cast aside, worthiness is out of count, 
 recompense is not expected. They reward each other 
 for being human, for having like desires and similar 
 needs. Humanity becomes a nation. 
 
 This spirit is traditional. It has its origin far 
 back in the pagan days, when Yuletide foreran 
 Christmastide, when the pastoral folk gave thanks 
 to the Sun for his bounty, linking the arm of fellow- 
 ship one with another as a sign of the desired union 
 of hearts. And these early feasts were but the ex- 
 pression of a still more remote recollection of the 
 kinship of man in the lonely spaces of the world. 
 
 It is all very well for specially constituted pjiilo- 
 sophers to deny loneliness, as Thoreau did, because, 
 forsooth, our planet was in the ]Milky Way! 
 Such pious imaginings will never suffice for the great 
 mass of humanity. We may cast our love up to the 
 stars to our own infinite advantage, but I doubt 
 very much whether we or the stars are affected by 
 the performance. There is only one star, so far as 
 w^e have any information, that is affected by our love, 
 and that is the star which no man has ever seen 
 shining in the night : the planet Earth. Wheehng 
 through space, she reciprocates the love of men 
 because it is the point at which her love of self be- 
 
 6i 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 comes conscious. It is this primal thing, this|earth- 
 love, which informs all great festival. No matter 
 how degraded a festival become, the spirit at its 
 heart can never be finally eradicated ; and not till 
 the joy of life itself be dead can the inner mystery of 
 Yuletide, though snowed under no matter how many 
 vulgarities and insincerities, be a thing of indifference. 
 All this seems very reasonable. But the Christmas 
 spirit is not reasonable at all. Standing apart from 
 it you can explain and diagnose ; you can trace its 
 descent from " the dim red dawn of man," but after 
 all, that is a mere act of erudition or mental ingenuity, 
 valuable enough as a tag upon which to hang your 
 conception of a thing. But to Santa Claus and 
 his laughing host of gift-gathering parents, sons, 
 daughters, and lovers, romping through Shopland 
 during the joyful crescendo of Christmas week, such 
 ideas are inconsiderable. The bewildered looks 
 on the shining philanthropic faces of the Christmas 
 shoppers are not caused by futile endeavours to track 
 down the remote origins of the impulses which brought 
 them into this wild jungle of gifts. Paterfamihas is 
 pleasantly worried by no primal theory, but by a 
 primal need, as he tries to decide between the pleasure- 
 giving propensities of a toy railway system and a 
 rocking-horse ; and the young mother who resists 
 the solicitations of a two-foot-three golliwog, because 
 it will not go into baby's stocking, is filled with a 
 much more subtle emotion than he who endeavours 
 to trace the evolution of the Yuletide spirit. 
 
 62 
 
FESTIVAL OF GIFTS 
 
 Christmas is quite irrational, for that reason it 
 cannot die. For just one week a new currency is 
 in operation. Of course, people do pay for things, 
 but it w^ere unkind to think the keepers of toys and 
 the masters of the great bazaars expected payment. 
 They would all far rather give just in the same spirit 
 as you are going to give. That a small charge is 
 made is a symbol of our low estate. They at least 
 try to sell you things in the spirit of presentation. 
 This is brought out in some instances, when the fine 
 feeling of certain toy merchants has taken the form 
 of providing means for what really amounts to 
 surreptitious payment. At the bottom of their 
 hearts they know that to receive money for com- 
 modities during Christmas week is a vulgar necessity 
 — almost an irregular commission. So some of them 
 have built wonderful grottos, or other semblances of 
 Fairyland, wherein you enter, if you are yoimg 
 enough, with some kindly adult who secretly pays 
 an entrance fee, and you meet Santa Claus himself 
 scattering largesse of wondrous coloured parcels 
 containing untold treasures. And to my own know- 
 ledge there are halls of dazzling brightness, full of 
 the desired things of all the earth, where no one is 
 asked to buy ; where you may walk down avenues 
 full of strange beasts and weird persons, elephants 
 and tigers, Teddy bears, jabberwocks, Humpty- 
 Dumpties, and golliwogs ; dolls of all nations, and all 
 the wonders of science from locomotives to aero- 
 planes ; and where the air is full of merry sounds : 
 
 ^3 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 the persevering harmony of the gramophone, and 
 that music of the spheres, the happy laughter of 
 children. 
 
 I know quite well that again, if you are young 
 enough — ^for you remember that it is necessary to 
 become as a Uttle child before you can enter the 
 kingdom of heaven — if you are quite yoimg enough 
 then, and like any particular thing well enough, that 
 thing is quite certain to be either in your stocking 
 or on yoiu* bed on Christmas morning. There are 
 many authentic instances ; one quite fresh in my 
 own experience is that in which an elephant was 
 miraculously translated from the town to the suburbs 
 in this way without any obvious payment ! 
 
 And are not the bankers also in the happy con- 
 spiracy ? Do they not, during this irrational week, 
 give you bright new money, obviously made to be 
 given away ? Fresh threepenny pieces to add to 
 the flavour of the Christmas pudding ; star-like 
 sixpences and shillings for errand boys who come 
 mysteriously into your life at this season ; moon- 
 like florins and crowns for postmen and policemen 
 who, like new planets, swim into your ken on Christ- 
 mas morning ; fresh, bright sovereigns, so gorgeous 
 that they look worth at least twenty-five shillings, 
 for rich uncles with deserving nephews ; and last 
 of all, those new pennies, bright and beautiful as 
 four-pound pieces, made expressly for distribution 
 among street urchins and beggars, vendors of " wax- 
 lights " and newspapers. It were profanation to 
 
 64 
 
FESTIVAL OF GIFTS 
 
 use such splendid coinage for any purpose save 
 these. 
 
 And later comes the good cheer, the best gift of 
 all, the sanctification of all presents. Without this 
 all the rest were as naught, and the Festival of Gifts 
 nothing but a weariness of the flesh. Li the festival 
 of Yule we raise the gift to a higher level. We give 
 ourselves. This is the consummation of the gift of 
 life itself, and " the moral of it is," as the Duchess 
 used to say to Alice, that sooner or later we shall 
 learn that there is no reason why this special form of 
 present should be confined to one season, to almost 
 one day. The currency of good fellowship and good 
 cheer now peculiar to Christmas Day may yet be 
 consecrated upon many other days, upon the other 
 three hundred and sixty-four, for instance. Why 
 not? 
 
 E 65 
 
APOSTLE TO THE PAGANS 
 
 " A BIT of fire's very nice," said Frank, hugging 
 Zjk himself before the flaming hearth like a 
 
 JL JL luxurious cat. 
 
 Outside it was leaden and raw, and a slab of damp 
 mist hung over the fields like wet wool. The same 
 insistent but elusive element clung to the bare 
 hedgerows and the tree-tops, and in the half lights 
 of the December afternoon the country-side had the 
 dreary effect of the scene of a fire the morning after, 
 when the water-sodden ruins are still steaming. 
 
 " My one objection to summer is that fires are 
 then impossible," said Merrion, by way of assent. 
 Merrion was an alleged paradoxist, and everyone 
 smiled. 
 
 " Do you know," said Hargreaves to nobody in 
 particular, as he sat in the comer pressing his half- 
 baked trousers against his legs, " do you know, if I 
 wanted an object of worship, I should worship fire." 
 
 " Here, I say ! " said Frank admonishingly, for 
 Frank, like most luxiu^ious persons, was rather ortho- 
 dox. 
 
 " Why not ? " asked Merrion. " Fire is every- 
 tliing and everything is fire. Without the eternal 
 conflagrations in the centre of the earth, and that 
 
 66 
 
APOSTLE TO THE PAGANS 
 
 eternal circle of flame caused by the fire-ball we call 
 the sun, outside the earth — there would be no life 
 at all. Fire is the only creator we know, and the 
 only destroyer. Without light and warmth there 
 is no growth — and light and warmth are the outward 
 signs of the Almighty Fire. I worship power, and 
 the greatest power is fire — it drives the motor of the 
 world. It can as easily burn the orchid and the 
 alligator into existence as it can reduce man and all 
 
 his pmiy works to ashes. If it were not for fbe " 
 
 " Steady on, old chap ! " This interjection seemed 
 to come from all. 
 
 " I was only going to say that if it were not for 
 
 fire we should have had no Christmas " 
 
 " Let's leave religion out of it," said Frank. 
 Merrion's invincible logic made his ideals wince. 
 
 " Will you let me tell you a story ? " asked the 
 fire-worshipper. 
 
 " Fire away ! " said a voice. 
 
 " Once upon a time and a very long time ago, 
 but not so very long after orthodox Rome had been 
 moved to righteous indignation by the blasphemies 
 of a sect of revivalists called Christians, who preached 
 what was then (as it is now) a kind of new theology, 
 a devotee named Glycon, moved by the fervour of 
 his new-fomid faith, set forth to convert the pagans 
 of the North. 
 
 " Bearded was Glycon, and dour, as befitted the 
 apostle of a gospel of joy ; bare of foot also was he, 
 and clad soberly in a loose robe of grey cloth. He 
 
 67 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 carried naught with him save a long staff of birch, 
 and with this he would mark the sign of the cross on 
 the earth from time to time and always before address- 
 ing another person. So Glycon journeyed from the 
 land of the olive and the pomegranate to carry the 
 glad tidings to the heathen North. 
 
 " ' Alleluia,' he cried as he passed through Alpine 
 vales ; ' Alleluia,' as he wended his way through great 
 forests and verdant coppices ; ' Alleluia, Alleluia,' 
 in the wilderness, where the wolves shrank from him, 
 and in the settlements, where the men laughed at 
 him and the women sighed for lack of argument. 
 ' Alleluia,' he cried in a loud voice as he entered the 
 domain of men. ' Repent ye and rejoice, for the 
 kingdom of heaven is at hand, wherein no man nor 
 woman nor child is heavy of heart or sad. Alleluia ! ' 
 
 " The simple pastoral folk were so ignorant that 
 they did not know they were happy, and, despite 
 their burdened lives, knew not that the kingdom of 
 heaven was not here and now, and they clustered 
 curiously about the strange teacher. ' Alleluia,' he 
 cried to the ignorant peasants. ' Have ye not heard 
 that the old gods are no more, and that a new life is 
 opened unto ye all, a life of gladness and great joy, 
 because sinless ? Alleluia, the kingdom of heaven 
 is at hand ! ' t I 
 
 " Glycon was a gentle creature, or the people 
 would have driven him forth. So they laughed 
 instead, and went about their ways husbanding the 
 earth and hunting and propitiating their gods as of 
 
 68 
 
APOSTLE TO THE PAGANS 
 
 old time. But here and there the good Glycon won 
 followers, and under his guidance they peered into 
 the mystery of life and saw more mystery ; and they 
 were filled with an unfamiliar kind of unrest which 
 Glycon called ' peace ' ; and they acquired the power 
 of contemplating their lives and of labelling this 
 action as good and that as bad ; and they talked 
 much of their happiness. . . . But only those who 
 were sad of heart joined the good apostle. 
 
 " Glycon nevertheless pushed on, carrying the 
 glad tidings into still wilder regions, where thinking 
 and acting had not been separated from one another 
 at all. Here the pagan folk tilled the field, hunted 
 the boar and the bear and the savage wolves, tended 
 the cattle, as simply and as satisfactorily as they 
 engaged in the deeper recreations of love and worship. 
 They would have none of Glycon's teaching, but they 
 did not molest him. On the contrary, they even 
 allowed him to abide in their midst, particularly as 
 his wants were hmited to a cave for sleeping purposes 
 and a very little food. 
 
 " But one morning after the fall of the year he saw 
 that a great change had come over the people. He had 
 gone out into a clear space that he knew of in a wood, 
 where he had erected a rude cross, and there he had 
 intended remaining all day in prayer, in celebration 
 of the birthday of his Saviour — for the day was 
 Christmas Day. 
 
 " But as he went forth to his lonely temple he met 
 bands of merry folk chanting joyful songs and carry- 
 
 69 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 ing garlands of holly and great branches of mistletoe. 
 The maidens wore laurel in their hair and the yomig 
 men carried branches of pine. Everyone seemed astir, 
 and radiant happiness shone on the faces of all. The 
 hills echoed back their songs, and their merry shout- 
 ings were thrown about the woods by invisible hands. 
 All seemed to be wending their way to the centre of 
 the village, and Glycon, filled with human curiosity, 
 followed, and as he went along he sang aloud of the 
 Nativity. ' Alleluia, I bring ye good tidings of great 
 joy, for unto you is born this day in the city of David 
 a Saviom* which is Christ the Lord.' 
 
 " The people were in a good humour, and nodded 
 their encouragement to the good prophet. Soon they 
 came to the meeting-place where an altar had been 
 raised and a great fire blazed. The priests of the 
 people were there, and standing high above the throng 
 they gave thanks to their gods for the bounty of the 
 earth, and in that hour of the darkest winter day they 
 rejoiced the more for out of its full darkness was the 
 Sun born and the earth again replenished. 
 
 " When the priests had done, a great shout went 
 up, and fires were kindled all over the village, and 
 around each romped a mad rout of pagans, laughing 
 and singing in joyful fellowship. Gifts were ex- 
 changed, and there was drinking and junketing. 
 And foremost among the revellers was Glycon. 
 The pagans rejoiced because the good prophet had 
 thrown off his sombre habit, and hailed him one of 
 themselves, a brand from the burning, a convert to 
 
 70 
 
APOSTLE TO THE PAGANS 
 
 the only true faith. Shortly after the great festival 
 of good-will, Glycon returned to the land of the olive 
 and the pomegranate, filling his co-religionists with 
 joy by his accounts of the miraculous conversion of 
 the pagans of the North to the true faith on Christ- 
 mas Day." 
 
 Merrion stopped. " Go on," said a voice. 
 
 " That's all," said he. 
 
 " I call it highly blasphemous," said Frank. 
 
 " What I want to know," said Hargreaves, " is, 
 where does the fke- worshipping come in ? " 
 
 " It doesn't come in," said Merrion ; " it's there 
 all the time." 
 
 71 
 
BETWEEN WAKING & AWAKE 
 
 IT came about in this way. The red face of a 
 winter dawn peered through the window as I 
 responded (vocally) to the signal of the domestic 
 tyrant whose duty it is to break into one's dreams 
 with a reveille rapped out briskly on the bedroom 
 door. My response evidently carried small con- 
 viction with it, for she knocked again. 
 
 " Right-o ! " I cried, snuggling into the bed- 
 clothes and cosily yielding to the seductive influence 
 of the last (positively the last) forty winks — all the 
 ioys of rest, as everyone knows, are distilled into 
 those last forty winks — ^those luxurious forbidden 
 fruits of sleep before the matutinal dip, breakfast 
 and work. 
 
 There was another rap at the door — a little lighter 
 this time — a muffled staccato sound — but deter- 
 mined. 
 
 " All right ! " I shouted, with some show of 
 feeling, throwing the blame on the diligent 
 awakener. 
 
 The rap was again repeated. Now I have the 
 courage of my desires, and my desire then was to 
 complete those forty winks — ^had I not snuggled in 
 for them ? Were they not, therefore, mine by right ? 
 
 ^2 
 
BETWEEN WAKING k AWAKE 
 
 Well, I was just on the point of proving this by a 
 masculine demonstration of forceful language — when 
 the door gently, almost shyly, opened, revealing the 
 slight form of my lady INIarjorie. 
 
 There she stood, as I looked at her none too 
 pleasantly from over the curve of the do^\^l quilt. 
 She was just discernible in the gathering dawn, her 
 little red sHppers peeping under the hem of her night 
 robe, her eyes sparkhng elfishly, and all her locks 
 a-tangle. She came towards me with whimsical 
 seriousness, and as she did so my irritation died 
 down, for I thought I could see a faint nimbus 
 round her head — but this may have been illusion. 
 I waited patiently though curiously. Then that 
 small full voice, the voice I could easily distinguish 
 from all the voices of earth, spoke. 
 
 "Come from the Land of Nod," it said; then 
 paused. " I am a fairy," it said again, and there 
 was a caressing note like the coo of a dove. " I am a 
 fairy and I come to take you to fairyland." 
 
 Perhaps I had better explain that my lady 
 Marjorie is five years old. 
 
 Her words and manner took me by surprise, and 
 I remember Keats' lines from " La Belle Dame sans 
 Merci " passed through my mind ; you know how 
 
 they go : 
 
 '- I met a lady in the meads 
 Full beautifulj a faery's child.-' 
 
 I pulled myself together. 
 
 " But how," I began with some confusion, " how 
 
 73 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 can we get there ? " Adding rather meanly, I 
 thought afterwards, " and I hope it's not far." 
 
 " Oh no," said my lady sweetly. " It's not very 
 far — ^besides, we can fly." 
 
 " Airships ? " I murmured. 
 
 " You're a fairy prince," she explained. 
 
 " Oh ! thought I was daddy." 
 
 " No, a fairy prince." Then imperatively, " Come 
 along ! " 
 
 I meekly obeyed. The sex has ever had its will of 
 me, just as it has of other men, only I admit it and 
 don't struggle. A girl child is even more compelling. 
 A little soft hand, frog-cold, was thrust into mine, 
 and the voice again commanded me, this time, to 
 
 I bungled at first, but the process was quite simple. 
 We made little jumps about the room, much as 
 they do in Peter Fan, waving our arms as though 
 swimming in air. Presently we glided upwards, and 
 soon reached the Jacobean oak chest with the crude 
 fleur-de-lis on its sides, which stands in the window 
 bay overlooldng the garden. 
 
 " This is the place," said my lady, in a business- 
 like way, and she croodled close to me. 
 
 I took the little form in my arms and sat cross- 
 legged on top of the old oak chest like an Oriental 
 god, my lady in my lap like a symbol of some new 
 beautiful faith. 
 
 " What now ? " I asked, trying to warm her cold 
 hands in mine. 
 
 74 
 
BETWEEN WAKING & AWAKE 
 
 She looked very demure and very happy. There 
 were some love passages. Each of us vowed eternal 
 fidelity and confessed the complete sufficiency of the 
 other's company. I am ashamed to admit it, but 
 we went such lengths as to make mothers unneces- 
 sary. 
 
 " We seem to be getting along famously," I said. 
 
 " Don't we ? " echoed my lady. 
 
 There we sat above the tree-tops. I remember a 
 bullfinch came on to the window-sill and looked at 
 us in a friendly way before he descended upon the 
 yew crest just below. We talked and talked. It 
 was not merely stories but the record of our ex- 
 periences, which were most strange and wonderful. 
 I grew more and more absorbed in the adventure, 
 and my lady was in an ecstasy of happiness. 
 
 The red dawn tmnied to gold. Sunrays shot 
 through the window, making light blue squares on 
 the deeper peacock of the carpet. I had seen sim- 
 beams many a time, but never such sunbeams as 
 these. Or perlaaps I had never looked at them from 
 the same angle. Anyhow the wonder of sunbeams 
 was enhanced a hundredfold, and sunbeams are 
 always wonderful. 
 
 These teemed with life, and with such life, it was 
 life in essence, the rare and ultimate reahty. They 
 were populous with dehghtful beings. Brownies, 
 elves, fays, hobgoblins, tiny satyrs, fauns, and 
 centaurs, and all manner of charming people, 
 dancing and gambolling and sliding down the bright 
 
 75 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 shafts of light like hoydens down a banister rail. 
 They were dashed on to the light patches on the 
 floor in sprawling and hilarious heaps, only to jump 
 up again and glide up another sunbeam with as much 
 ease as they had slid down ! 
 
 Some danced in a ring, as they coursed down, 
 binding each other together loosely with garlands of 
 red and yellow roses ; others pelted each other with 
 confetti of tiny flowers and glittering stars, whilst 
 still more scattered fragrant red clover into the riot 
 of the slide. A queer little hairy fellow, with goat- 
 legs and mischievous green eyes peeping through 
 a ravel of brown hair, romped about on a blue hobby- 
 horse, bumping into everj^one and being received 
 with laughs and banter. Six dainty creatures, with 
 the quaint heads and big absolute eyes of the opossum 
 and the black and gold fur and translucent wings of 
 the humble-bee, flashed down the bright gradient of 
 the sunbeam on a toboggan. 
 
 There were aeroplanes crowded with reckless elves 
 filling the light with coloured fire and mad laughter ; 
 and swift, strangely coloured motor cars, sea-green, 
 opal, chrysoprase, blue, with goggled brownies at 
 the wheel, rushing up and down continually, with no 
 other object save the love of speed, and instead of 
 passing each other side by side, they passed over 
 one another like fishes at play, and instead of sound- 
 ing toots through a pneumatic horn, there was a 
 perpetual tootling from a silver clarion, which was 
 blown by a smaller brownie, who rode astraddle the 
 
 76 
 
BETWEEN WAKING & AWAKE 
 
 radiator in front of the car. Anon there was a great 
 buzzing, and a flight of blue dragon-flies passed, each 
 one ridden bareback by a vividly-spangled harlequin 
 holding on perilously to a golden rein. And satyrs 
 rode on the backs of prancing centaurs. 
 
 Then came an endless concourse of fairies tripping 
 down in military order. Their officers rode upon 
 green lizards with flame-coloured wings, but the rank 
 and file were afoot, divided into battalions of about 
 a hmidi-ed, each of which carried a great coil of daisy 
 chain. They came ST\iftly towards where we sat, 
 and, before we knew what had happened, they had 
 advanced upon us, entangled us in the daisy chains, 
 and hauled us on to a sunbeam. 
 
 Immediately, without any fear, we entered into 
 the fun. I placed my lady upon my shoulders, and 
 led all fairyland in a grand shde do^vn the shaft of 
 light. Away we went, an avalanche of shrieking 
 merriment ! Oh, the invigorating rush of air I The 
 wild delight — ^when, bump ! We crashed on the 
 floor ! 
 
 I conmienced to rub myself and to look for my 
 lady at one and the same time, but the sim got into 
 my eyes, and something was poking me in the ribs — 
 I turned round, and there beside my bed stood my 
 lady Marjorie, fully dressed, and childish consterna- 
 tion on her face. 
 
 " Come, Daddy Lazybones," she said, with reckless 
 famiUarity, "breakfast is ready, and mother says, 
 you'll never catch the nine-fifteen." 
 
 77 
 
READINGS IN EARTH 
 
" The exceeditig beauty of the Earthy in her splendour of life^ 
 yields a new thought with every petal. ^'' — Richard Jefferies, 
 The Life of the Fields." 
 
WINTER GLAMOUR 
 
 '' There is winter in the air : 
 Frost and sunshine everywhere. 
 Rime with branches intertwined. 
 And the frolic of the wind 
 Forcing into merrie trot. 
 All the warm blood man hath got ; 
 And the sunshine everywhere, 
 Rarely warm and debonair — 
 Therefore youths and maids be gay 
 On a winter holiday.'-'- 
 
 Old Song. 
 
 OUR love of summer in England is rarely tried 
 by overmuch familiarity ; were it so I doubt 
 not that our poets would tune their lan- 
 guorous notes to cooler themes. For summer is a 
 flamboyant goddess loved best at a distance ; I love 
 her best when she is no nearer than IMorocco ; at that 
 distance she has charms which almost move me to 
 song ; but when she draws nearer, as she is wont to 
 do, sometimes, \\ith her pageantry of fiery flower- 
 decked days, my love becomes indifferent. 
 
 I long then to see her foliage heaped in great 
 brown piles and sending forth the sacrificial incense 
 of autunrn ; I long to see the hot dust her golden 
 chariots have raised on the highways laid low again 
 with the rain of less amorous days, and to hear the 
 r 8i 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 same highways ring once more with the tread of 
 hoofs on frost-bound surface, and, better still, 
 to see once more the trees stand bare and graceful, 
 with never a leaf to hide their sinuous loveliness, as 
 the soft lights spread over wood and glade, and over 
 brown arable lands and grey streets, the sun no 
 longer a proud god too bright for human eyes, but 
 a friend to walk with in equal fellowship. 
 
 Surely the excessive worship of summer to the 
 detriment of winter is a sign of frailty. It is fleshly 
 fear of the frank strength of the cold : a physical 
 recognition of unfitness for the necessary effort 
 demanded by winter in her traffic with man. Or 
 from another point of view, it is akin to a confession 
 of moral weakness in the face of that which is naked 
 and unashamed. Most objections to winter are but 
 the querulousness of the invalid, for winter is no 
 less beautiful than other seasons, no less bountiful 
 to those who are not subdued by the abuse of 
 Nature, and no less uncomfortable. 
 
 What a folly it is to suppose that winter is the 
 dead season — ^indeed, the poets are much to blame 
 in this matter, for they have stimulated the false 
 doctrine in no small degree. For winter is no more 
 dead than summer is. It is certainly not so much 
 alive in the blossoming sense, but it is quick enough 
 in other ways. Changed, to be sure, is the face of 
 Nature — her greenness is confined to the fields and 
 the lichen-covered tree-trunks. In place of the 
 assertive verdure of June there is the prevailing 
 
 82 
 
WINTER GLAMOUR 
 
 brown, Nature's predominant note in northern 
 latitudes, the colour of earth, with its familiar 
 earthy fragrance full of I know not what suggestions 
 of man's immemorial kinship with the mysterious 
 mother. 
 
 This colour of earth, so elusive in summer, when its 
 homely scents are lost in the fragrance of the flowers, 
 and its strangely friendly mould labours beneath the 
 foliage of a myriad growths, comes upon us in winter- 
 time with the surprise of revelation. It is the old, 
 old earth again, more akin to man than perhaps any 
 organic thing save man, more close to man than 
 any other thing. For the spirit of the earth is in 
 him, he is bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh, her 
 child to whom she is revealed again after the leaves 
 are fallen, after his eyes have feasted upon the in- 
 numerable phases of her progeny in the periods of 
 foliage and blossom. 
 
 This perhaps is why certain natures feel a new 
 joy at the sight of the fresh-turned com lands. 
 To see the sturdy horses plod dreamily over the 
 stubble into which the ploughman drives his blade, 
 leaving behind him long fragrant furrows of fertile 
 mould, is to them a joy, a devout exercise. It is 
 not merely the stalwart labour they see, but the 
 whole rhythm of the earth ; the association of man 
 with organic life, the very genesis of the processes 
 of gro^vth. For to them the old earth is never dead, 
 least of all in winter, the period of preparation for 
 her continuance in the flowers and songs of summer. 
 
 83 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 It is but a sleep, a sleep of health and hope, like that 
 of a growing child whose growth continues the while, 
 or that of a healthy man weary with sane labour — 
 it is, in fact, the beauty sleep of life. 
 
 And the woodland beauty of June is redundant 
 compared with the fine reticence of December. 
 The artificers of the winter forests have a rare 
 taste in illumination, they allow nothing to come 
 between the inmost grace of branch and trunk, 
 and the tempered light of the winter smi. They 
 seem to have exercised a process of reduction, in 
 much the same manner as the sculptor who chisels 
 away the superfluities of the block of marble until 
 the goddess mthin stands free in splendid ultimate 
 beauty. So have the winter woods been treated. 
 The masses of foliage have been stripped from the 
 branches, and strewn like the fragments of marble 
 around a statue; then rises out of its soft brown 
 carpet in all the uncloaked majesty of a perfect 
 thing, the leafless tree, intricate yet symmetrical, 
 graceful yet strong, a symbol of infinite beauty. 
 
 This is but one joy of the winter woods ; it is 
 the joy in beauty of form. No less beautiful is 
 the colour of the woods when the trees are bare. 
 For then the soft browns of the fallen leaves blend 
 with all the more delicate shades of green peculiar 
 to shy mosses and furtive lichens, and the grey 
 distances reveal purple boles and mysterious blue 
 branches, illuminated with startling clusters of 
 yellow fimgi. Then do the pines wave dark-plumed 
 
 84 
 
WINTER GLAMOUR 
 
 heads above limbs of flame, and the white arms 
 of the dancing birch-trees glisten in the sun. The 
 laurels cluster in hillocks of polished green, and the 
 scarlet berry of the holly shines like a beacon over 
 all the woodland peace. 
 
 Then again there is the beauty of frost when 
 the rime traces its delicate white lines over every- 
 thing ; when all the world becomes a study in 
 black and white, and one goes forth to walk or 
 skate with a new sense of life ; with a strange 
 impulsive vigour, an epicurean sense of resistance 
 towards some kindly yet indomitable antagonist. 
 It is like going into a contest with a conscious deter- 
 mination to taste its every phase ; \\ath the sure know- 
 ledge also that Jack Frost, though fully intending to 
 play the game and lay you low if he can, is never- 
 theless all the better pleased when you conquer him 
 with quick, hot blood coursing through your delighted 
 veins and resisting him laughingly at every point. 
 
 But these are outside joys, and they are but half 
 of the fascinations of winter. There is another side, 
 a side more intimate and fully as beautiful, a side 
 that welcomes the shortening of the days and the 
 cooling of the sunbeams, because it is happily 
 haimted with a piquant vision full of tender memories 
 and comfortable delights. For as the brown earth 
 of winter days is a revelation to man of his kinship 
 with all things, so is the blazing hearth a revelation 
 of his kinship with all men. And it is around this 
 altar of flame that those inner joys of winter cluster, 
 
 85 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 bringing into prominence the essential fellowship of 
 man, the camaraderie of the true social life. 
 
 It is most fitting that this symbolism should 
 have its great feast. And when we have taken 
 our delight in the beauty of winter sunshine aslant 
 upon echoing woods and furrowed earth, we take 
 our memories of it, in great nests of mistletoe 
 and branches of holly, into our homes, which, by 
 this act, cease to be castles and become temples 
 whose altar is the blazing hearth. 
 
 Far back in the dawn of that conscious state 
 which made man possible was born a new power, 
 a new knowledge, almost a new sense — ^the sense 
 of fire. The animals and even the vegetables 
 knew the use of water and air, and used these 
 elements fearlessly. But it was reserved for man 
 to use and love fire. And now when the hearth 
 burns with a rich glow and the chairs circle round 
 the warmth, in the t-\vilight when it seems a fault 
 to hght up, man harks back to his dim beginnings. 
 His contented silence as he watches the embers 
 form strange fantasies to fit his dreams, his sense 
 of peace and comfort, are charged with a thousand 
 memories born out of the imfathomable past. His 
 peace at such times is built out of the unrecognised 
 memories of ancestral bivouacs beside darkling 
 caves, of his jousts and junketings, of all the ages 
 that have contributed their energies to the building 
 of the present. 
 
 Summer can give us roses and long fair days of 
 
 86 
 
WINTER GLAMOUR 
 
 the sun ; autumn gives us of the earth's bounty, 
 golden cornfields, stored granaries, and sun-kissed 
 fruits ; spring comes ^vith wind-swept robes of 
 dainty emerald, recalling us to the rebirth of material 
 things ; but no season save winter can bring us 
 the long, warm fireside evenings, when all social life 
 seems concentrated in a triumphant cosiness. And 
 as though man had recognised this, we have not 
 his words or his songs, but we have his most memor- 
 able festival established in the heart of this abused 
 season. What is May Day, or IMidsummer Day, 
 or Michaelmas Day compared with Christmas Day ? 
 They are almost as immaterial as the equator, so 
 much so that we are hardly aware of them until 
 the day after. But what proper man, or better, 
 what proper child, ever forgot it was Christmas 
 Day ? The idea is absurd. Christmas is an entity 
 among days with a distinct and deliberate flavoiu' 
 that brooks no denying. It is a real thing, like 
 Santa Claus, and not a myth Hke the May Queen, 
 who, as often as not, is merely some pretty village 
 damsel playing at masquerade. I have not had the 
 good fortune to see Santa Claus myself, but I 
 know a little girl who has, and that is sufiicient 
 evidence for me. Besides, she showed me the 
 presents he brought her, all cunningly stuffed into a 
 stocking, and just the things she wanted : an orange, 
 and chocolates, a pictm-e book and a wonderful 
 Japanese doll. Of course they " couldn't all get 
 into the stocking," I was informed, and I tried to 
 
 87 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 think what other season possessed so kindly an 
 attendant spirit ; but it made my head ache trying 
 to discover the impossible, and I was glad to be con- 
 soled with some of the self-same chocolates brought 
 by Santa Claus. 
 
 88 
 
HEDGEROWS 
 
 ISOMETBIES wonder what England would be 
 without her hedgerows ; and particularly does the 
 thought arise when those illimitable walls of life 
 are bursting into leaf and song. The thought of such 
 an England, an England fenced vnth iron instead of 
 whitethorn, fills me with dismay. England without 
 hedgerows woiild be like England without Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 And yet, how many of us are properly conscious 
 of this great boon ? How many of us realise what 
 it means when we are moved again and again by 
 the first glimmer of green on the hedgerows, that 
 green which blends magically with the deepening 
 notes of blackbird and thrush, as if all were one 
 musical strain ? At such moments om' joy is some- 
 thing more than a response to the call of beauty at 
 the birth of new life : it is, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, a response also to one of the most remark- 
 able manifestations of our national genius. 
 
 For the hedgerow in the modern world is English 
 — as English as Shakespeare, and as great. I am 
 proud of many English things, but of none more 
 than this. In our hedgerows I see all that is great 
 in our race and all that is beautiful. I see in them 
 
 89 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 nature turned to the will of man with such inevit- 
 ability that both man and nature are benefited ; I 
 see the creation of a beautiful thing by a whole 
 people, and not by any special individual ; I see, 
 in short, beauty springing naturally, as it always 
 does, out of skill running hand-in-hand with utility 
 and common-sense. 
 
 The idea of the hedgerow itself is not English. It 
 is one of those many ideas which, though born else- 
 where, have come to our land for full fruition. For 
 just as Shakespeare was a part of the Renaissance 
 which began in Italy, so are the hedgerows the con- 
 summation of an idea which also began in that sunny 
 land. 
 
 They guarded the vineyards of ancient Rome, as 
 they guard to this day those of modern Italy. \Mien 
 the Romans colonised Britain and conferred upon 
 this land the inestimable boon of a roadway the 
 hedgerow was part of the gift. Dangerous and in- 
 definite parts of the Roman roads were guarded and 
 marked by walls of living trees, and the institution 
 of the hedgerow was born in our midst. But the 
 idea took centuries to develop, and it did not become 
 general until the end of the sixteenth century or the 
 beginning of the seventeenth. 
 
 Once thoroughly appreciated, the hedgerow 
 rapidly grew in use, until it marked the boundaries 
 of nearly all our tracts of land. England has so 
 surpassed other countries in its adoption of this 
 beautiful method of fencing in fields that she may 
 
 90 
 
HEDGEROWS 
 
 be said to have made the hedgerow her own. All 
 those who set eyes on our shores for the first time 
 know this. Hedgerows dominate our lowlands and 
 climb up om' hills to sometliing like a thousand feet, 
 gladdening the eye more permanently than any other 
 of our products. 
 
 I can imagine nothino- more beautiful than these 
 walls of living green. Similar as they are to the 
 casual glance, they are, in reahty, as infinite in variety 
 as they are illimitable in extent ; and where there is 
 a well-grown hedgerow there is life, for in them- 
 selves they contain a whole world of natural things 
 — all the more interesting for being interwoven with 
 the hf e and habits of man. 
 
 The hedges are associated not only A\^th orderly 
 agriculture, noble parks, or trim gardens. They 
 are intimately linked up with other phases of hmnan 
 life, particularly ^^dth that element which borders the 
 social hem as they border the fields. Vagabonds 
 and others who stand beyond the prim fences of 
 society are lmo^^^l as hedge-folk, just as the wander- 
 ing priests of the common people in the Middle Ages 
 w^ere known as hedge-priests. And many of those 
 things in human hfe which are a little ^^^ld are 
 associated ^^ith the hedgerows, not least of wliich is 
 new love, for we laiow that 
 
 "' Every lover tells his tale 
 Under the hawthorn in the dale -' 
 
 in the bright, untamed days before domesticity sets 
 
 in. 
 
 91 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 As for Nature, she herself has returned man's 
 compliment of the hedgerow, by making the hedge- 
 rows her home. They teem with vitality. Mysteri- 
 ous walls of life in a double sense, housing, as they 
 do, a far greater number of wild things than any 
 other place or object in our land. It is in the hedges 
 that most of our familiar birds nest, from the cheer- 
 ful and friendly hedge sparrow up to those incorrigible 
 melodists, the thrush and the blackbird. Most of the 
 finches make their homes in those walls of green ; 
 the nightingale sings his passionate prelude to- 
 summer in their branches; the wi'cns and the tom- 
 tits fuss up and do^vn their quickset lanes, and the 
 robin nests cosily in the ivy-clad banks from which 
 they spring. 
 
 It is in the hedgerows also that our smaller animals 
 love to find a home; rats, dormice, weasles, stoats, 
 hedgehogs, are all to be found there. And amidst 
 the infinite song and chatter and squeak which accom- 
 panies the affairs of all these little creatures, we have 
 a constant humming of innumerable hedge-loving 
 insects, the whispering of bordering sedges, and the 
 eternal music of the breeze sighing gently through 
 their dense foliage. 
 
 But the wonder of the hedgerows is not in the life 
 they draw to them, it is in themselves. The life they 
 attract is but an evidence of their own inherent 
 vitality and variety. The hedges are growing walls, 
 that is their chief call for wonder; and then 
 comes their variety. Almost every tree that grows 
 
 92 
 
HEDGEROWS 
 
 in England has been induced to lend its strength and 
 beauty to their cause. 
 
 The queen of the hedgerows, as we all know, is 
 the whitethorn. Greater is she than hazel, or holly, 
 or sloe-plum ; greater still because she allows all 
 these and every other tree that has been honoured by 
 service in her ranks to grow and flourish by her side. 
 The hedgerow is never a single growth, it is as com- 
 posite as the English race. The flowers and creepers 
 of the hedge banks are as much a part of it as the 
 whitethorn ; and no hedgerow is complete unless 
 it is decked with bramble and eglantine, honeysuckle 
 and travellers' joy. 
 
 At all seasons of the year are the hedgerows beau- 
 tiful, but at none are they so beautiful as in early 
 spring when the young leaves flash from the brown 
 tangle of branches like green fire. More beautiful are 
 they then even than when covered with the fragrant 
 snow of the may, the delicate pink stars of the June 
 dew-rose, or the scarlet hips and haws of autumn. 
 Then do they seem most alive, you almost feel them 
 growing; and their green fire seems to be a part of 
 the riot of song which swells from their hearts. 
 
 93 
 
SPRING 
 
 I HAVE watched her coming shyly over the tree- 
 tops these many days, and now she is here. You 
 could almost feel the sap tingling in the branches 
 as she drew nigh, and when she was within hailing 
 distance the happy trees greeted her by hanging 
 upon their branches a myriad tiny lanterns of 
 sparkling green. 
 
 Sometimes I caught a glimpse of her in a gown of 
 shimmering white ; but she generally wore sober 
 russet, touched cunningly here and there with green. 
 Sobriety, however, ended with her gown, for her 
 whole being was intoxicated with young life. She 
 came romping like a hoyden among the shivering 
 shrubs, her tempestuous petticoats shaldng the 
 remnant of last autumn's leaves and catkins out of 
 their stark hands. 
 
 A merry child, this Spring, full of pranks and 
 whims, and, like all children, an eternal problem. 
 She will and she won't, like a maiden, like a woman ; 
 but generally she won't. That is why she sets the 
 bards a-singing. When she \vill she is beautiful with 
 the beauty of young things, and when she won't she 
 is also beautiful, with the beauty, the more seductive 
 beauty, of promise unfulfilled. 
 
 94 
 
SPRING 
 
 But over and above every one of her moods she 
 never allows you to forget that she is the girlhood of 
 the year, and she reminds you as well that all girls 
 worth their salt are coquettes at heart. 
 
 How she flirts and teases ! See her smile and 
 pout ; see her coax — and scratch ! Now she leans 
 forward with beckoning lips, you advance, and she 
 is gone, and the breeze is full of her laughter. Again 
 she meets you ^vith gay crocuses in her hands, and as 
 you go to take her gifts she hits you with a snowball, 
 or leaves you blinking in a shower of rain ; and in 
 the midst of your surprise you catch sight of her 
 shaking her curls at you from a sunny patch over the 
 hazel hedge. 
 
 ' Yet you cannot resist her ; she still lures you on 
 with renewed hope, scattering fair promises behind 
 her. Your faith in her is immortal ; you feel she 
 will not always be so capricious, and that anon she 
 will pelt you with kingcups and cowslips, with daisies 
 and buttercups, instead of with hailstones and snow- 
 balls. And you know surely that the tender green, 
 which now only glints among the russet folds of her 
 gown, ^^^ll soon robe her completely, and that it 
 Avill be decorated \vith dew-roses and flounced with 
 cloths of blue and gold ; and on her head will shine 
 a coronet of hawthorn blossom and laburnum. 
 
 Meantime she is maiden Spring. Her gown is the 
 colour of life, the colour of the awakening earth ; 
 its peeping green the symbol of creation. Her growth 
 is marked by this spreading greenness of things. 
 
 95 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 Green is for us the universal colour. It follows the 
 ploughman like a beneficent fairy, and creeps 
 wonderfully over the tree-trunks, giving them a 
 richer beauty ; it tingles in the branches until they 
 burst into leaf as birds burst into song. It broods 
 mysteriously over waste places in strange devices, 
 and liu-ks elfishly in the hearts of the flowers ; it 
 lights up the eyes of animals, and shimmers over the 
 wings of the raven and the rook, and on the soft 
 breast of the dove. 
 
 But this maiden Spring, who makes the world 
 green again, is not only coy and whimsical ; she is 
 brave and warlike, a Joan of Arc, if you will, battling 
 against tyrannical winter, in the name of the only true 
 faith, which is life. For does she not come with a 
 flourish of swords and the glancing of many spears ? 
 Indeed she is the veriest of Amazons leading a host of 
 warriors against the brown battlements of winter. 
 
 Mark how her legions advance. First come the 
 fair ranks of the snowdrop, an advance guard of 
 light infantry pushing strong delicate lances through 
 the frost-boimd earth. Then follow company after 
 company of hardy troops, crocus, jonquil and daffodil, 
 marching in gallant array ; then the solid ranks of 
 the veteran grass blades, flanked by the gleaming 
 swords of the iris ; whilst overhead glance the green 
 arrows of the beech and the assagais of the chestnut. 
 
 Sun and rain wait upon her aimies, tempering their 
 spears and swords, and quenching their thirst ; and 
 all the birds lift up their voices in a mighty war-song, 
 
 96 
 
SPRING 
 
 half rebellious " fa ira," half chant of praise and 
 jubilation. 
 
 True, the birds are never wholly silent in our 
 favoured land, but they never sing so bravely as 
 they do during this great annual contest. Even the 
 good sparrows and the robins, who never desert us 
 in our darkest hours, chirp more bravely, and sing 
 a fuller melody ; and throstle and blackbird tune 
 their merry notes to richer themes ; whilst the sky- 
 lark, " singing of summer with full-throated ease," 
 urges from above the hosts of Spring with spurs of 
 silver song. All the little warblers and finches pipe 
 their jolly marching ditties, or blow their bugles in 
 the hedgerows ; the rooks shout their advice from 
 their watch-towers in the elm-trees ; and the starling 
 with infinite virtuosity repeats everything he hears 
 in exaggerated terms Uke an enterprising war 
 correspondent. 
 
 And as the legions of the Amazon add victory unto 
 victory, the music swells in mightiness, augmented 
 after each triumph by the string orchestras of the 
 insect world, until the last citadel is taken, when the 
 movement changes and the great war-song dreams 
 itself away in a hymn of praise. The renewal of life 
 is accomplished, Spring has conquered. 
 
 The birds that went on fiu-lough in the autumn 
 begin to come back to the army. A butterfly flaps 
 lazily in the sun ; a swallow skims over the tarn ; 
 the cuckoo rings her monotonous wedding bell ; you 
 hnger out of doors as the sun sets in a golden haze 
 G 97 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 and watch the angular capers of the flittermouse. 
 A new note of passion has come into Hfe. The trees 
 are fully clothed with foliage, you can no longer see 
 their graceful limbs. The air is rich, the grass is 
 deep and ripe ; the year is no longer cool and slim 
 and energetic ; the spears of Spring are gone, and 
 Spring herself, though still beautiful, is plump and 
 voluptuous. You admire her still, but your admira- 
 tion, though just as deep, perhaps deeper, is not so 
 bright, it is clouded with melancholy. 
 
 You know not why this should be so ; but it is 
 quite natural. Your melancholy is mortal dread of 
 change. You will get over it. But standing as you 
 do at that mysterious moment of life when you can 
 feel the transfiguration of the girlhood of the year 
 into something new and strange, you cannot but feel 
 sad. At one moment she was with you, elfish, 
 capricious, coy, and, even as you stood in adoration, 
 her wildness fell from her, the coronet of may- 
 blossom dropped from her head, the violets faded 
 out of her hands, and in a flash she was gone, and 
 where she stood stands a ripe beauty with a crown 
 of roses on her brow. 
 
 98 
 
BEFORE DAWN 
 
" Creatures shall be seen upon the earth who will always be 
 fighting one with afiother with very great losses and frequent 
 deaths on either side- These shall set no bounds to their nialice ; 
 by their fierce limbs a great number of the tj'ees in the immense 
 forests of the world shall be laid level with the ground; and 
 when they have crammed themselves with food it shall gratify 
 their desire to deal out death, affliction, labours, terrors^ and 
 banishment to every livi7ig thing. And by reason of their 
 boundless pride they shall wish to rise towards heave Jt, but the 
 excessive weight of their limbs shall hold them down?'' — 
 From the Note-Books of Leonardo da Vinci — Edward 
 M'CuRDY's translation. 
 
DESERTS OF NOISE , i . i 
 
 THE maddest place in all England is Cheap- 
 side. If you were to describe it accurately 
 and put it in a book no one would believe 
 you. Yet there it is — a monstrous huddle of noisome 
 traffic — a roaring canyon of commerce. Sometimes 
 I go there, but I always come away with the feeling 
 that I have been riding the nightmare. 
 
 The last time I was there I met a friend at the 
 corner of Gutter Lane. " Listen to it," I said to 
 him, waving my right arm, to the peril of the passer- 
 by, " is it not monstrous ? " He looked at me, 
 stupidly, I thought. " Come down here," I con- 
 tinued, putting my arm through his and conducting 
 him towards a subterranean cafe ; "let us, like hunted 
 things, escape to earth ! " And down there, over 
 the coffee and cigarettes, amid tobacco clouds and 
 the rasp and clatter of dominoes, 1 told him about 
 Cheapside. He listened meditatively, with a pained 
 expression coming and going on his face, and as we 
 left he said with tragic conviction, " It will be a sad 
 day for England when there is no noise in Cheapside 1" 
 With a sigh, I went my ways. 
 
 What is happening in Cheapside is happening 
 everywhere. Cheapside is but the symbol of the 
 
 lOI 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 high noises of modernity And we have become 
 inured to them ; they have mastered us hke a 
 fatality :• our indifference is resignation. 
 
 So triumphant is the clangour that it is now ahnost 
 impGS:s>ble to realise its pressure on the senses except 
 by suddeil contrast. So certain is the grip of noise 
 that a gradual unloosening after flight to some 
 hushed rural place, although giving relief, does not 
 awaken us to the tyranny of the thing itself. No- 
 thing will do this save a sudden change from noise to 
 quiet. 
 
 In London, where the clamour of the age meets in 
 a triumphant crash, such an experience is still 
 possible. It can be tried by anyone who is not 
 quite tone-deaf, by the simple process of passing 
 from the hubbub of Holborn into the rich stillness 
 of Staple Inn. The change is as though the dance 
 of life had suddenly abandoned rag-time for the 
 stately movement of a minuet. 
 
 When you leave the fussy pavement of the great 
 thoroughfare, and turn under the age-worn archway 
 beneath the familiar timbered houses, you feel a 
 sharp and definite relief ; and, by the time you have 
 fully entered the grey, cobble-stoned quadrangle 
 with its flagged pathways laced and flecked with the 
 green shadows of the plane-trees, you find relief 
 giving place to wonder. It is almost a physical 
 wonder — " born of the very sigh that silence heaves," 
 and you taste it deliberately as you taste the fu'st 
 moments of peace following bodily or mental pain. 
 
 102 
 
DESERTS OF NOISE 
 
 The sudden releasing of the grip of noise brings you 
 face to face with the essential fulness of quiet. You 
 are surprised to find that quietness is full of low 
 sounds, like the murmuring of bees or mountain 
 streams — sounds which are a real part of life and 
 which have been obliterated by the outside clamour. 
 And you realise that your own soul, which up to 
 now you had somehow overlooked, is not one with 
 the noise, but kin to this living silence. You, in 
 short, possess yourself. 
 
 At other times you own not yourself ; you are 
 possessed by the legioned devils of noise who clamour 
 indecently in the public places for your soul. Every 
 time you give way to them, every time you live them 
 down, they conquer you. There is no escape save 
 flight. 
 
 1 do not advise flight because noise in itself is evil. 
 That would be folly, for evil, like other abstract 
 terms, is purely relative. Besides, are there not 
 noises which we all know to be good ? Noises which 
 spring from the harmony of life, or from the contest 
 of healthy forces — the cheers of a multitude with a 
 imited purpose, the cries and counter-cries of political 
 meetings. These are music. But the clatter of a 
 modern city is not music any more than its smoke 
 and grime are decorative art. 
 
 The noise of a modern city is nothing but the 
 creaking of the wheels of commerce ; it is a shuffling, 
 a colliding, a groaning, a dissonance of expletives. 
 ... It is the scurry of an age which rushes hither 
 
 103 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY / 
 
 and thither after it knows not what ; the tumult of 
 a people who have forgotten the meaning of utility 
 in their haste to buy and sell. Life has become a 
 market-place, a stock exchange, and repose, reticence, 
 and quietness have been lost in a maze of tradesmen's 
 war-whoops, each wildly striving to outshout the 
 other. 
 
 Gladly would I ignore it, if that were possible. 
 But the hucksters' age insists upon breaking into 
 one's dreams. The clamour is everywhere — even in 
 the silences. It is reflected in our cleverness, our 
 smartness, our pushfulness. I walk down the street 
 and it yells at me from the advertising hoardings. 
 It shrieks at me from the columns of the Press, 
 the pages of books, and the frames of pictures ; 
 it roars from platform and pulpit, and clatters 
 across the stage. Each individual sound seems to 
 say it is the biggest, or, that, for it is not easy to 
 distinguish clearly, something it has to sell is the 
 biggest. In vain I say that I am not out for the 
 biggest, that I am quite content with the best, and 
 can find that out for myself. Heedless, the noise 
 goes on, until I realise that society has ceased to be 
 a social thing, it has become a strident confusion of 
 rattles of all sizes, each shaking against the other 
 for prizes which demand more noise — the chatter of 
 privilege, the loudness of riches. 
 
 But do not imagine that I would substitute a 
 Trappist silence. I have no such desire. My love 
 of sane and healthy sounds is too deep-rooted for 
 
 104 
 
DESERTS OF NOISE 
 
 that. The noises of our strident age are not healthy : 
 they are a disease, a form of waste. Shouting is not 
 progress, much less discordant shouting. At times 
 I am inclined to the belief that all this noise is a sign 
 of failure, an elegy of despair. The discord of 
 modern life, whether it be the roar of the street, the 
 bickering of the Stock Exchange, the shouting of the 
 advertiser — that specialist of noise — or the crowing 
 of fashion, is probably nothing more than the wailing 
 of a lost multitude, of a people who have mislaid life's 
 highway, and, like the blind folk in Maeterlinck's 
 play, are calling pitiful and chimerical directions to 
 each other. 
 
 In the meantime I shall resist the temptation of 
 adding my cry to the tumult — no one w^ould hear me. 
 I shall keep quiet, and occasionally retreat under the 
 old archway by Holborn Bars and taste the stilhiess 
 of Staple Inn. I shall rest awhile on the seat sur- 
 rounding the centre plane-tree, and reflect securely 
 upon the blind, mad age outside, with which I shall 
 have no traffic. 
 
 105 
 
TORPOR 
 
 IN a little cluster of mean streets packed in 
 between the lower end of Shaftesbury Avenue 
 and New Oxford Street, amid a welter of 
 coster stalls loaded with vegetables and fish, reek- 
 ing eating-houses with bubbling pans of sausage in 
 their windows, and tenth-rate dram-shops, stands 
 the Church of St Giles, Bloomsbury. Its colimmed 
 Renaissance spire, weathered to that rich, shadowy 
 greyness which makes the stones of London a 
 joy for ever, rises aloft majestically like a piece of 
 wrought silver. The beauty of its eaves mingles 
 pleasantly with the green of the foliage in the little 
 churchyard, which reposes like an oasis in a desert 
 of brick and asphalt. 
 
 Across this desert wayfarers are continually 
 passing and repassing — hungry folk and weary, 
 who seem doomed to wander up and down the town 
 like bewildered ghosts. To-day there are more 
 than usual, and as I walk through the oasis of the 
 chiu'chyard of St Giles I notice the seats are all 
 occupied. But still more weary ones come with 
 starved looks, seeking rest, only to pass on hopelessly 
 with shuffling gait to the bigger oases of the Thames 
 Embankment or the great parks, where they can 
 
 io6 
 
TORPOR 
 
 rest within the shadow of royal palaces and the 
 gathering places of the Olympians. 
 
 There is a quietness in St Giles' churchyard, 
 a religious peace, lulled gently by the eternal song 
 of London, that grinding orchestration of its immense 
 traffic, reduced here to a piping melody that can 
 scarcely hold its own with the cheerful and incessant 
 bickering of the sparrows. The poor have yielded 
 to the calming influences, and they sleep. Busy 
 people pass through the churchyard and look upon 
 the sleepers generally with superior scorn, but 
 sometimes they try to avert their faces with a 
 pained look, as though they were accidentally made 
 privy to a shameful thing. A telegraph boy enters 
 the gateway whistling merrily, but stops suddenly 
 and hurries through the sorry dormitory with a 
 blush on his cheeks. A policeman stands motionless 
 beside the church door, like a new kind of ecclesias- 
 tical symbolism ; and a grey cat glides suspiciously 
 among the sleepers. 
 
 I pass along unostentatiously, noting the seats and 
 their occupants. On the first are three men — one an 
 old man with a long beard yellow with neglect, and 
 pale, gaunt cheeks ; he sleeps like a child, his battered 
 and greasy felt hat resting idly in his lap; next to 
 him, his head resting upon his arm, which lies along 
 the back of the seat, is a decently-clad young man 
 with a face like a death-mask ; and in the far corner 
 a ruddy and hairy-faced tramp in ragged corduroys 
 snoring luxuriously. 
 
 107 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 Farther along on the opposite side is another 
 group of human wreckage. There are four here : 
 three men, two of whom hang limply over the arms 
 at either end, and an old and wrinkled woman, 
 sitting upright, and muttering in her sleep. Three 
 women occupy the next seat ; all are in rags and 
 filth that shame the day. They are awake ; two 
 are talking listlessly, one adjusting her grotesquely 
 dilapidated bonnet the while, with a pitifully 
 automatic reminiscence of past coquetry. The 
 third is a half-crazed creature of about thirty ; her 
 tangled black hair is streaked with grey ; upon her 
 feet are a pair of men's heavy boots, ridiculously 
 broken and worn, and tied round the insteps with 
 pieces of faded red rag ; she wears a rent black 
 skirt and a mangy blue woollen coat pinned together 
 and open at the throat, showing a leaden, stringy 
 neck, but no sign of any under-garment. She is 
 eating a faded apple, and as I pass she leers inanely, 
 and says with vindictive affability, " 'Ere we are, 
 sir, all a-blowin' and a-growin'." 
 
 So I pass on. Seat after seat, each with its 
 scrap-heap of useless humanity, line the pathway ; 
 it is like walking through an avenue of the dead. 
 Happily they sleep, a comfortless sleep, to be sure, 
 but such as it is it brings oblivion. I can see only 
 one other person awake. He is a hopeless man in 
 shiny black, a decayed clerk, probably, and he turns 
 over a bundle of soiled letters, characters, letters 
 of recommendation, maybe, full of ironical praise 
 
 io8 
 
TORPOR 
 
 of his virtues and capabilities. He, hopeless though 
 
 he is, has obviously not yet given up hope — he is 
 
 the one tragic figure of the place, because the sense 
 
 of contest in him is still alive; he alone amid all 
 
 those derelict beings is conscious of the will to live. 
 
 The rest are alive, but dead : the will to live 
 
 has flickered out of their consciousness ; they are 
 
 indifferent to all sense of contest, and the desire 
 
 of conquest is no more ; they have surrendered to 
 
 circumstances in the unequal battle for bread, and 
 
 lie here broken, useless, scrapped. 
 
 • • • • • I • 
 
 Why do they go on living, I wonder, as I turn 
 from this human scrap-yard. Death is such a simple 
 thing compared with this. Besides, they are in- 
 different to pain — ah, that is it. They are indif- 
 ferent to pain, they no longer feel the pain of life, 
 therefore they do not think of death. People who are 
 happy or in pain think of death — the rest are dead. 
 
 Outside in HUgh Street, Bloomsbury, an organ 
 is playing Mr Harry Lauder's song, " I know a 
 Lassie," and a niimber of ragged but merry children 
 are dancing. Up and down the pavement they go, 
 shaking their skirts and kicking their heels like a 
 mad rout of elves. They take up snatches of the 
 chorus : 
 
 '* As sweet as the heather, 
 The bonnie purple heather, 
 
 Mary, my Highland belle y* 
 
 109 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 and the bright-faced Italian woman who plays the 
 organ smiles appreciatively as their shrill voices 
 rise over the din of the street. 
 
 Suddenly the organ stops and the dancing ceases. 
 Men remove their hats and look thoughtful. A 
 funeral is passing. When it is out of sight the music 
 begins again. 
 
 I cross the road towards Oxford Street, and 
 before turning the corner I look back at St Giles'. 
 The silver-grey spire looks peaceful and beautiful 
 in the sunny autumn noon. The policeman has 
 walked out of the churchyard and he is " moving 
 on " some derelicts who have been resting against the 
 railings. I catch a last glimpse of the sleepers — the 
 seats look like open graves, and I feel the whole of 
 society is being affected by their decay. . . . 
 
 " Move along, there, move along," I can just hear 
 the officer. But over the gateway of St Giles' I 
 see an imwritten legend : " Rubbish may be shot 
 here." 
 
 no 
 
HUNGER-TAMENESS 
 
 IT was one of those familiar spring days which 
 belie the calendar. There was a wind, a keen 
 and penetrating wind ; a ^vind that discovered 
 your weaker spots with wonderful precision. It 
 caught up little patches of dust in the roadways, 
 whirled them round until they looked like ghostly 
 Dervishes, and then scattered them into oblivion. 
 It was a merry wind, but its humour was vindictive. 
 It stung my face as I stood indecisively in a diminu- 
 tive maze of crossing streets between the Law 
 Courts and Kingsway ; and it seemed to be enjoying 
 itself so heartily as it scampered along a little lane, 
 after an invigorating romp over the vacant spaces 
 of the Strand "improvement," that I marvelled 
 at its spite. 
 
 As I stood for a moment taking my bearings, 
 which the most habitual Londoner is forced to do 
 every now and then in this wilderness of streets, I 
 became conscious of a certain raggedness about me. 
 It was not in the actual locality, that bore marked 
 evidences of rebuilding and was still neat and 
 clean ; neither was it in the atmosphere, for such a 
 wind had no mercy on stray ^visps and remnants 
 of fog, even had they shown any desire to hang 
 
 III 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 themselves about at the time, which they certainly 
 had not. I eventually realised that it was in the 
 people; not the rapid passer-by, but the loiterers 
 who are to be found in every street, and who may 
 be said to be the street's inhabitants as distinct 
 from the inhabitants of the houses. They were not 
 ordinary loiterers, however, men lapped in a sort of 
 Nirvana of idleness, but loiterers with a purpose. 
 At every corner they stood ; eager little groups 
 of dejected men of all ages, but mostly middle- 
 aged to old, or that indefinite age which is a 
 characteristic of so many poor adults, and they 
 seemed to be watching, hungrily, I imagined, a stout 
 constable who paced serenely up and down the 
 middle of the broadest of the adjoining streets, 
 sometimes stopping and looking about him with 
 blank severity. 
 
 I had hardly time to reflect on this curious and 
 scattered dejectedness, which struck me suddenly in 
 the manner of a dream, when something happened ; 
 it was something very simple — the policeman 
 raised a hand aloft ; but the effect was like the 
 releasing of a spring which sets an intricate machine 
 in motion. The ragged men seemed to be awaiting 
 this signal, for they were suddenly thrown into 
 activity. In a moment every avenue in the vicinity 
 shot forth a stream of abject humanity — greasy, 
 ragged, careworn, dilapidated human beings, who 
 shuffled — I could not call it running — towards a 
 spot near the constable. Their very eagerness was 
 
 112 
 
HUNGER-TAMENESS 
 
 unclean, their presence unseemly. Yet in some 
 strange way I felt linked with them and their 
 destiny ; not in brotherhood, but in kind ; I was 
 of their species and I felt ashamed, ashamed of 
 them, ashamed for them, and ashamed of myself. 
 
 The constable stood in the roadway, a plump, 
 haughty figm'e. The tatterdemalions darted past 
 him from all directions, colliding against one another 
 in the gutter before the door of a religious mission. 
 A silent, half-hearted little struggle followed ; the 
 cluster of shuffling beings looked like a writhing 
 heap of rags, like offal disturbed by decomposition. 
 The policeman eyed it critically ; and a few passers- 
 by stopped before going on their way. Soon the 
 human tangle unravelled itself into a queue of fifty 
 or sixty men, in the gutter. 
 
 " Why do they wait ? " I said, approaching the 
 portly officer. 
 
 " For soup," he replied simply, sardonically. 
 
 " When do they get it ? " I asked. 
 
 " At half-past four." 
 
 It was just three o'clock. 
 
 " Have they been waiting long ? " I inquired. 
 
 " All day." 
 
 This is heroic, I thought, and I walked over to 
 look at the thin grey line. What a crew ! There 
 was not a decent garment among them, not a clean 
 body. The line was but an anxious empty stomach 
 covered with rags and filth. It emitted a foetid 
 odour like a midden. Unclean, unkempt, unfed, 
 H 113 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 it stood and shivered — almost unrecognisable as 
 human. 
 
 ! The individuality of the separate members of the 
 ragged queue, such as it was, was, as usual in crowds, 
 merged in the individuality of mass. There were 
 different features and certain ludicrous distinctions 
 among the rags which covered their limp bodies. 
 There were shades of pallor and greyness in the 
 faces ; degrees in the sunkenness of cheeks ; grades 
 in beards, from grisly stubble to flowing yellowy 
 white ; some high cheek - bones shone blue with 
 cold; there were red noses, sore eyes, and fester- 
 ing necks. 
 
 Among the garments were frock coats, and tweed 
 lounge coats ; some had great rents, others were 
 patched carelessly ; one buttonless frock coat was 
 threaded up the front with string ; through a 
 broken seam in the back I could see the man's 
 pallid flesh : he wore no under-garments. Trousers 
 himg baggy, limp, and frayed ; and boots were 
 manifold in abject characteristics — all were burst, 
 none had heels ; one creature wore tennis shoes tied 
 about the instep with strips of dirty calico, another 
 wore the sorriest patent leathers I had ever seen. 
 Their hats were grotesque in their battered and 
 greasy variety. 
 
 These details had to be sought out ; to the casual 
 glance they did not exist. The queue was a thing in 
 itself, a silent, patient thing ; a tabid line of men ; 
 a wrecked, wasted line of superfluous humanity ; an 
 
 114 
 
HUNGERTAMENESS 
 
 evil-smelling scrap-heap gradually decomposing. It 
 sidled and snivelled ; sometimes it laughed hoarsely 
 and sometimes it swore ; it spat and grunted and 
 swayed slightly, shuffling from one foot to the other ; 
 here and there it smoked, in foul little pipes, dis- 
 carded bits of tobacco and cigar ends, picked up in 
 the gutter. It was long-suffering, but tame ; it was 
 dirty and hungry, but patient. 
 
 My shame deepened as I reviewed the sorry line. 
 I felt as though in the presence of deformed naked- 
 ness. I had an impulse to take the thing into an 
 eating-house and gorge it with food. I smiled as I 
 thought of the consternation of the manager of 
 the Holbom Restaurant if we marched into his 
 sumptuous haUs. I walked away some paces and 
 then stood looking back at it. I was . spell-bound. 
 It overpowered me. I wanted to talk to someone 
 about it, but everybody was in a hurry, none seemed 
 to care, and few to notice. I was not so much 
 impressed by its squalor as by its tameness — the 
 slow decay, the evil-smelling tameness of the thing, 
 obsessed me. 
 
 I thought of certain animals and how hunger 
 makes them fierce and brave. I saw a hungry 
 tigress with her cubs. I saw her spring upon 
 another animal, rending and devouring it, and the 
 little ones dabbled appreciatively in the blood, 
 before snuggling into their dam's replenished breasts. 
 Himgry savages peopled my brain, but none stood 
 in queues awaiting soup. They were fierce, they 
 
 115 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 did not wait for food to be given them, they took 
 it. Sometimes there was no food and nothing to 
 kill ; then they lay down and died ; but whilst 
 there was the least chance of food they took it, even 
 if in the taking of it they were killed. That struck 
 me as splendid. But these men starved patiently. 
 There was food all about them — in the warehouses, 
 in the shop windows, in the eating-houses ; they 
 knew it was there, they could see it, smell it, but 
 not eat it — and they became tame, not fierce like 
 the animals. 
 
 1 felt that Nature had produced in them some- 
 thing new ; she had produced patience with hunger, 
 she had made it possible for beings to fester and 
 decompose without resistance, to be acquiescent in 
 a living death. She had created something lower 
 than the brutes. 
 
 I took another look at the ragged thing, and left 
 it standing there, watched by the portly constable, 
 awaiting the coming of charity. 
 
 ii6 
 
IMMORTAL RUSSIA 
 
 (1908) 
 I 
 
 I WAS sitting in a little cafe in a little street just 
 off the Rue Sainte Honore ; one of those streets 
 which are familiar in the centre of Paris, more like 
 a chasm than a street ; one of those cafes common 
 to every town in France, a little narrow place ^ith 
 little tables and white cloths, awaiting diners, and a 
 row of smaller round tables and iron chairs between 
 two wooden partitions abutting on to the pavement 
 of the street. I sat at one of these. 
 
 My eyes had wandered up the tall stucco front 
 of the opposite house. It had a double door with 
 upper panels of fretted ironwork, behind which was 
 glass, and the rows of tall windows had shutters 
 painted a dull red. One of the shutters was unhinged, 
 and swung to and fro — I wondered idly why no one 
 fastened it. The house was painted grey — Parisian 
 grey, the grey that looks as if it had once been white, 
 which it probably had been ; the grey that turns to 
 purple and blue with the changing light. I again 
 wondered why. I wondered why it did not turn 
 green and pink and saffron — and saw no reason 
 
 117 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 why it should not do so, or even chequer and line 
 and foliate — why not ? 
 
 No, it was not absinthe. It was bock, le bon bock 
 — a pointed flagon and a golden liquid — and, as yet, 
 I had not touched it. It was simply idleness. I 
 had nothing else to do, and I was the only customer. 
 Presently, however, two young men sauntered in 
 and occupied chairs in the corner on my right. 
 They were dressed in the sober black of the gay city, 
 with black soft hats, dilapidated of brim, and 
 flowing black ties hanging over their coats. One 
 was clean-shaven, the other the same, save for a line 
 of black hair on the upper lip, like a strayed eyebrow. 
 In a httle while they were joined by a third, a tall, 
 heavy-featured young man, also all black, except 
 for his hair and beard, which were flaming red ; 
 the first cropped short, the last wild and bushy. 
 He was clearly a Russian ; if his beard had been 
 black, he would have been the Russian of fiction. 
 The others were Russian also, but, after the manner 
 of Russians in Paris, they looked like Frenchmen, 
 and spoke the language of France. They talked 
 very quietly but earnestly. I could only catch 
 a word or so. The youth with the moustache seemed 
 dejected. " What's the use ? " he kept on asking. 
 The red Russian was reasonable, rational, argumenta- 
 tive ; whilst the clean-shaven man showed some- 
 thing like passion ; he seemed to burn with a fierce 
 enthusiasm which now looked like hate and now like 
 the sort of love you give to a child. I only caught 
 
 ii8 
 
IMMORTAL RUSSIA 
 
 one burning phrase from his lips : " Russia is 
 immortal ! " It was uttered with the irrational 
 finality of conviction. And just as I had thought 
 idly about the swinging shutter and the iridescent 
 greyness of the house opposite, I thought, or rather 
 felt, about Russia. 
 
 II 
 
 I saw that great coimtry in a fresh light. Her 
 wracked and tortured body no longer represented a 
 shuddering people awaiting the coming of a leader. 
 It was the expression of the long agony of the 
 pathway to Freedom. Russia has no supreme 
 pathway to Freedom. Russia, I thought, has no 
 supreme man because she is a supreme nation — 
 what has individual supremacy to do with her great 
 courage, her eternal revolt, her savage determination 
 and patience ? One of these days we shall know that 
 these qualities have made the Russians the master- 
 people of civilisation. If the Revolution fail, Russia 
 will still be supreme. She will be supreme in spite 
 even of victory, as she is supreme in spite of defeat, 
 because she can abandon herself with eternal hope 
 and without regret. Russia has the spirit to take 
 great risks and to make great sacrifices. She has 
 courage : courage in power and weakness, in virtue 
 and vice, in ignorance, in knowledge, in imagination ; 
 she thrives on destruction, like an admiralj^who 
 survives by burning his ships. 
 
 119 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY / 
 
 The very weakness of Russia is a kind of strength. 
 The Governors are strong in their mortality before the 
 bullet and the bomb ; the people are strong in their 
 tortured bodies and in the long silences of Siberia. 
 The personality of Russia is a flaming sword — its 
 metal has been fired by revolt and tempered by snow 
 — it shines like a beacon over the world. It shines 
 in a noble and passionate art, which Russians do not 
 only make for themselves, if they make it at all for 
 themselves, which I sometimes doubt. Perhaps they 
 do not want art because they are too busy living 
 and dying. Art is civilised and tame ; art is for 
 Paris, for London, for Vienna, not for Warsaw and 
 Moscow and Odessa. Russia thrives on sacrifice, 
 not art. She conquers the invader by burning 
 down Moscow and the Revolution by precipitating 
 it. 
 
 There is, however, an art she keeps for herself. 
 It is the great ironic art — the art of tragedy. Tragedy 
 is her normal state. No other nation as a nation 
 can love and hate like Russia. No other nation 
 could bear such sufferings with dry eyes and with 
 laughter. Her life to the outer world looks like an 
 infinite succession of deaths — yet of no people does 
 the world expect so much. Russia is the prophet 
 out of the Galilee of civilisation — her cross lies 
 heavy on her, but she does not cry out that she is 
 forsaken of God — she laughs. 
 
 The throne of Russia is fenced about by lies, 
 glorified by the priests, and defended by rifles, 
 
 I20 
 
IMMORTAL RUSSIA 
 
 whips, and swords. The Czar withholds from his 
 people a freedom he has given to the Cossacks in 
 exchange for their services as the instmments of his 
 tyranny. The peasants, after having been freed 
 from one form of slavery and thrown into another, 
 are shot down because they cry out in their bondage 
 of want, and their little starving communes are 
 destroyed. And so it is always ; what one hand 
 of the Little Father gives the other takes away. 
 Yet he cannot kill his people any more than they 
 can kill him or his system. But, after all, he is not 
 killing them, he is creating them. The Russian 
 people is not yet born ; the pains of Russia are the 
 pains of labour. Russia is a woman in agony. 
 
 Again, paradox that she is, she is more than this. 
 She is not wholly woman, although the central 
 figures of her drama are women, Sophie Perovskaya 
 and Marie Spiridinova : she is almost a god. She 
 kills and laughs. Assassination with her is virtue. 
 She rushes into the fiery furnace, certain that one day 
 she will come out unscathed, as Shadrach, Meshach, 
 and Abed-nego did. Individually her people are 
 like satyrs ; in the mass, Dionysos — that is why they 
 sacrifice themselves with joy. 
 
 Death stalks through her cities. It dogs the 
 footsteps of student and peasant and workman, 
 and of the Cossacks marching bomb-file through 
 the streets of Warsaw — yet the cafes are crowded, 
 and hilarious shouting and the clatter of glasses 
 almost drowns the orchestra screaming madly 
 
 121 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 La Maichiche or dreaming voluptuously Quand 
 r Amour Meurt ; and over the smouldering chaos 
 of Baku, over the pain and death of the desolate 
 city, floats like a challenge the ribald song of a 
 chanteuse. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Thus I saw Russia, in a swift series of ideas and 
 pictures, as one sees life from the window of a 
 railway train whilst discussing the changing view 
 with a friend, and then my eyes drifted again 
 towards the swinging shutter of the house opposite ; 
 no one came to fasten it ; but I no longer wondered 
 why, I took it for granted as one takes life for 
 granted, as the world takes Russia for granted. The 
 little tables began to attract people ; they sat in 
 twos and threes chatting, smoking, drinking. A 
 plrnnp woman sat next to a plump man ; she ate 
 olives dreamily out of a white paper in her hand, 
 between appreciative draughts of bock. The man 
 read UAurore, every now and then reading a passage 
 aloud for her ears. An elderly gentleman drank 
 black coffee out of a tumbler, and looked into space 
 through clouds of cigarette smoke. A dejected 
 person with lank hair dropped water out of a bowl 
 on to an oblong piece of sugar held in a spoon over 
 a glass of absinthe, his eyes following the delicate 
 green clouding of his liquor with enthusiasm. " Le 
 Matin ? " queried a newsvendor at my elbow. " No, 
 
 122 
 
IMMORTAL RUSSIA 
 
 thanks," I said forgetfully in English. His face 
 lit up intelligently, and he offered me first the 
 Daily Mail, then some mildly indecent picture 
 postcards. He recognised my nationality. 
 
 The three men were still drinking and talking, 
 talking, talking — every word a dream of Russia — 
 every thought a pain. Russia is immortal, I reflected, 
 as I turned down an empty glass. " Vive la Russie " 
 were the parting words I heard as the three were 
 joined by another, and I walked away into the 
 laughter of Paris. 
 
 123 
 
INTRODUCTIONS 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 IT is customary in our time to classify certain 
 writers as modern, and by the use of the word 
 we probably mean to indicate those ^v^ite^s 
 whose work, whilst being in the tradition of great 
 art, is primarily moved by the ideas, feelings, and 
 aspirations of our own age. No art, any more than 
 life itself, can be quite independent of its forbears ; 
 art, like life, builds on old foimdations, and traditions 
 may be modified but they are rarely scrapped. Those 
 who are called modern simply vary the texture of the 
 edifice, give a new turn to the foliation, a fresh 
 balance to the design, or a different accent to the 
 comer-stone. Maurice Maeterlinck belongs to such 
 moderns. His ideas and his art are obviously 
 hnked with the past both immediate and remote, yet 
 together they form an art-work which is peculiar 
 to our day and to its author. That is why it is 
 misleading to give him an ancestral label, as some 
 critics have desired to do. There are better grounds 
 for calling him, at least in so far as his ideas are 
 concerned, a Belgian Emerson, as Mr James Huneker 
 has done, than a Belgian Shakespeare, after the 
 
 127 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 manner of his earliest and most enthusiastic French 
 critic, M. Octave Mirbeau. All such attempts to 
 pigeon-hole genius are, however, unsound. Maeter- 
 linck is a Flemish Maeterlinck, with all the leanings 
 of his race towards the practical side of mysticism. 
 He was born in Belgium, and it was the Admirable 
 Ruysbroeck, the passionate and austere Flemish 
 mystic, who first fired his inward vision. 
 
 The city of his birth was Ghent, one of those 
 cities which stand between two eras, that of modern 
 commerce, with its workshops and machines, and 
 that of the slow industry of the peasant past, much 
 as it lies between the mediaeval dream of Bruges 
 and the brisk wakefulness of Parisian Brussels. 
 These accidents of locality have woven themselves 
 into the art of Maurice Maeterlinck, for a man 
 becomes a part of the city and country in which 
 he has lived and dreamed. He was born on 29th 
 August 1862, of old Flemish stock, and trained for 
 the law. But he soon abandoned the legal gown 
 and went to Paris, where he became an associate 
 of the Symbolist group of writers, collaborated in the 
 production of Ple'iade, one of those short-lived 
 reviews whose importance is only recognised years 
 after their death, and in 1889, when he was twenty 
 seven years old, he ventured into separate print 
 with a small volume of poems bearing the suggestive 
 title " Serres Chaudes." Moth-hke little poems 
 they were, beating soft wings against the dim-lit 
 windows of a new realm of consciousness, and 
 
 128 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 obviously related to the indefinite symbolism of 
 Stephane Mallarme and the ill-fated Arthur Rim- 
 baud ; yet in them is to be found the first glimmering 
 of that strange light which he afterwards threw upon 
 the helplessness of man before the blows of destiny. 
 
 But these poems were also the outcome of earlier 
 and deeper influences. Maeterlinck had brooded 
 alone in the silence of the cloud-swept plains of his 
 native Flanders. Sauntering along the still canals 
 where the barges drifted lazily, or among quiet 
 farmlands where the slow peasants seemed one Avith 
 the brooding landscape, and in his father's garden, 
 he cultivated unconsciously that inward-looking 
 habit which, though latent in all men, becomes 
 conscious only in the few, and which would seem to 
 be an intimate part of the lives of those who hve in 
 countries where the sky sweeps magnificently over 
 long rolling plains. The homely things of the 
 comitryside moved liim to wonder and delight, the 
 cottage flowers, the bees, the faithfulness of dogs, 
 and the busy and ancient craftsmanship of the 
 lacemakers. And every now and then noble relics 
 of the past would come in his way, feudal castle 
 and Gothic minster, forming the scenario of a mind 
 which was already peopled ^vith a romantic dramatis 
 personoe. 
 
 He was naturally drawn towards minds of his 
 
 own kin ; and besides Ruysbroeck the Admirable, 
 
 he consorted with Novalis, Swedenborg, Jacob 
 
 Boelime, Plato, Plotinus, and om* own Emerson, 
 
 I 129 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 Coleridge and Carlyle. He brooded over the spiritual 
 deeps of these sages until he saw in them the reflec- 
 tion of his own ideas. But he was not only drawn 
 towards the mystics : his reading was as catholic 
 as it was profound. He sat long at table with the 
 modern French writers, and longer still with the great 
 dramatists of the Renaissance, more particularly 
 Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, with whom 
 he drank deep, and thus laid the foundations of that 
 intimacy with the works of our national poet which 
 astounds English readers of his essays. 
 
 His early interest in the mystics found separate 
 expression in his translations of works by Ruj^s- 
 broeck and Novalis in 1891 and 1895, to both of which 
 he added sympathetic and illmninating introductions. 
 But whilst he was studying the mystics and trans- 
 lating their works, other matters engaged his atten- 
 tion ; for as in after life his concern for art is never 
 far removed from an equal concern for practical 
 ideas, so in those young days absorption of mystical 
 wisdom impelled him towards artistic expression ; 
 and side by side with his translations from Ruys- 
 broeck and Novalis came poems and stories and plays 
 which brought him fame in his own country and 
 France, the country of his adoption, long before 
 Pelleas and Melisanda gave him English and 
 American repute. His first published play. The 
 Princess Maleine, appeared in 1890, and the same 
 year saw the issue of The Sightless and The 
 Intruder. Between the fh'st play and the two 
 
 130 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 latter there is a marked difference. The fonner, 
 like his early story, " The Massacre of the Innocents," 
 is obsessed by death and violence, and it is only in 
 certain vivid flashes of dialogue that we get a hint 
 of the essential Maeterlinck who begins to come 
 into his kingdom in the two little plays of the same 
 year. 
 
 With The Sightless we get a fuller glimpse of the 
 genius which was destined to create that perfect 
 tragedy. The Death of Tintagiles : the ^Maeterlinck 
 who created something like a clairvoyante drama, a 
 drama of the spirit, revealing material things in 
 essence, ghostly little bodies consumed by ardent 
 souls which he visualises for his readers or audiences, 
 men as marionettes s^\aing and jerked by Destiny. 
 Such were the themes and aspects of the cycle of 
 plays which now came in steady succession : The 
 Seven Princesses, in 1891 ; Pelleas and Melisanda, in 
 1892 ; Alladine and Palomides, Interior, and The 
 Death of Tintagiles, in 1894 ; and Aglavaine and 
 Selysette, in 1896. 
 
 Then came a change ; it had been perceptible even 
 in the last-named play, where a tendency to dis- 
 cursiveness seems to replace the intuitive directness 
 of the earlier plays. Maeterlinck reaches the summit 
 of the art which is peculiarly his own in The Death 
 of Tintagiles ; its wizardry still, however, dominates 
 Aglavaine and Selysette, and it even casts a glamour 
 at times over Sister Beatrice and Ariane and Barbe 
 Bleue, which appeared in 1901. But somewhere 
 
 131 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 between 1896 and 1901 Maeterlinck the dramatist 
 of mysticism died, and with the issue of Monna 
 Vanna, in 1902, a new cycle begins; he is still 
 engaged with the mystery of life, but from the point 
 of view of the psychologist rather than that of the 
 mystic. And in the successors to Monna Vanna, 
 Joyzelle (1903), and The Blue Bird (1908), he has not 
 returned to his original attitude. 
 
 During the time of this dramatic production he 
 has been expounding his ideas and his drama by 
 means of essays, and the change which I have noted, 
 though less definite, is to be seen here also. The first 
 essay volume, "The Treasure of the Humble" 
 (1897), is an exposition of the attitude which pro- 
 duced the marionette plays, it is a book full of mystic 
 suggestion and hope, it reads at times like a scripture 
 foretelling immediate revelation. With his next 
 book, " Wisdom and Destiny " (1898), he attempts 
 to formulate his ideas into a working philosophy, 
 and he is gradually drawn away from mysticism with 
 its introspection, to a more objective moral psycho- 
 logy, which in succeeding volumes — " The Life of 
 the Bee" (1901), "The Buried Temple" (1902), 
 "The Double Garden" (1904), and "The IntelH- 
 gence of Flowers " (1906) — becomes almost entirely 
 absorbed in an outward view of life, a kind of tran- 
 scendental rationalism. 
 
 132 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 n 
 
 With the deepening of the personal note, which is 
 one of the marked features of modern art, the ideas 
 of the artist become more intimately associated ^vith 
 his art, and it becomes less and less advisable to 
 attempt their segregation. This is quite obvious 
 in the work of IMaeterlinck. His plays have, of 
 course, a marked glamour of their own apart from 
 any ideas which may be held by their author ; just 
 as much as his essays, which possess independent 
 hterary charms of form, delicacy of expression and 
 vocabulary. But, even were it possible, it would 
 be as wholly undesirable to accept the mere charm 
 of the essays and neglect their ideas, as it would be 
 to attempt to enjoy the beauty and mystery of the 
 early plays wthout realisation of their deeper 
 meaning. 
 
 Maeterlinck, like Ibsen and Bernard Shaw, is a 
 type of the artist-philosopher. He is a man with a 
 message. He does not trust, however, to the action 
 and symbolism of his drama revealing the whole of 
 his ideas, as Ibsen did, but like Bernard Shaw, he 
 expounds his aims in his essays. 
 
 But as a philosopher he is not strikingly original, 
 except in the sense that originality and sincerity are 
 accounted one. He has added little of note to our 
 stock of ideas, but drawing as he has done largely on 
 the wells of the older mystics and some modem sages, 
 
 133 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 he has distilled their thoughts in the alembic of his 
 own temperament and applied the result to life in 
 his own way. His accomplishment amounts to a 
 more intimate revelation of the spirit of man and, 
 in his essays, of animals and flowers. Li no other 
 plays do you feel so close to the spiritual essence of 
 life as in the early plays of Maeterlinck; so acutely 
 does he manifest the reality of the soul that you feel 
 at times that he alone among artists has come 
 closest to the unseen and the unknown. The human 
 soul moves through these plays like an actual 
 presence ; tragic and tormented it is, to be sure, but 
 it is a vivid reality, more real indeed than the ghostly 
 bodies of his characters, which fade before the fervour 
 of their awakened inner consciousnesses. You feel 
 yourself instinctively pitying their pains ; not the 
 pains of the flesh, but, for the first time in a theatre, 
 the pains of the spirit, and this again, as distinct from 
 emotional pain. The creation of such an attitude 
 is Maeterlinck's original contribution to art. 
 
 All mystics have been conscious of the soul, but 
 none in quite the same way as Maeterlinck. They 
 have generally looked upon it as a religious counter 
 with a purely formal destiny ; he looks upon it with 
 the eye of the naturalist. Where the older mystics 
 are theological Maeterlinck is secular. Consciously 
 or not he has attempted the secularisation of mysti- 
 cism, but under his touch it is none the less religious 
 in the deeper sense. Everything for him has 
 spiritual significance, yet never for a moment does 
 
 134 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 he pretend to revealed or superhuman knowledge : 
 he is untiring in his watchfulness, but brings no news 
 of final certainty ; and although he is sensibly 
 credulous, " Iknow not " is ever on his lips, punctuat- 
 ing his aspiration with something like pathos. Still, 
 he is never without hope, something may happen 
 at any moment. Humanity after passing through 
 many vicissitudes stands on the threshold of wisdom. 
 
 At the same time Maeterlinck anticipates no sudden 
 change ; catastrophic revivalism has no place in his 
 outlook ; his awakening is progressive, a gradual un- 
 rolling, as it were, of the inner vision. He sees this 
 awakening in many directions : in the discoveries of 
 science ; the growth of psychological knowledge ; the 
 spread of humanism ; the desire for fellowship among 
 men and nations ; and the higher regard we pay to 
 women who have, he is convinced, guarded through 
 the ages a fuller sense of the mystic value of life. 
 
 Into this spiritual sensitiveness he weaves his idea 
 of Destiny — the unknown determining force of life. 
 But he gives no detailed scheme of predestination 
 except in the simple symbolism of The Blue Bird. 
 Destiny, for Maeterlinck, is immanent and closely 
 related to the will and personal power. Our Des- 
 tinies are to be guided and controlled by wisdom, 
 which is love, and truth, and justice. He is pro- 
 gressive both as a fatalist and as a mystic ; Destiny 
 is, he beheves, constantly being conquered by 
 individuality, by science, by invention, and by every 
 addition to human power. 
 
 135 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 Such is the philosophy behind his drama. It domi- 
 nates those early plays which flutter in a wizard 
 twilight on the very frontiers of consciousness, just 
 as much as the later plays. But it is the early plays 
 which, as I have said, stand alone. They have the 
 quality of uniqueness and, in " The Treasure of the 
 Humble," Maeterlinck has shown that they have a 
 philosophy and an aesthetic which is peculiar to them. 
 Like Ibsen's plays, they have a simple and realistic 
 movement and the inevitability of all great drama, 
 but the contest, despite the violence in which it 
 usually culminates, is largely static. Material action 
 is reduced to a minimum, but it is not substituted by 
 discussion as in the later plays of Shaw and Granville 
 Barker, it is replaced by abrupt self-revealing 
 dialogue and long silences. Silence is the chorus of 
 the Maeterlinckian drama. 
 
 The tragedy in these plays is the outcome of con- 
 test with the unknown and the foreordained. But it 
 is almost tragedy and life in the abstract. His 
 people are like children in peril, symbols of man 
 battling against nature. You do not see the photo- 
 graphic realism of Ibsen, but a clairvoyante realism ; 
 you become an initiate whilst reading Maeterlinck's 
 early plays, and see what is ordinarily unperceived ; 
 indeed ordinary sight is almost unnecessary for these 
 plays. Walter Pater has said that "All art con- 
 stantly aspires to the condition of music," and in 
 Maeterlinck's plays for marionettes you see this 
 aspiration at the very parting of the ways. The 
 
 136 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 dramatist himself, however, as M. Gerard Harry has 
 pointed out in his admirable essay just issued by 
 Messrs George Allen, is practically deaf to music, 
 especially opera, so it cannot be assumed that he 
 has left the static drama for the drama of action 
 deliberately because he felt he had pushed his art as 
 far in the direction of music as it would go. But he 
 may have felt unconsciously that any further de- 
 velopment along those lines must be continued by 
 musicians like Claude Debussy, whose operatic treat- 
 ment of Pelleas and Melisanda does actually carry 
 the theme into deeper realms of consciousness. But 
 w^hatever may have been his motive, he no longer 
 reveals upon his stage man as an anxious marionette 
 w^hipped and scourged by Destiny. 
 
 His later plays are purely romantic ; clairvoyance 
 has entirely disappeared, and in its stead we have 
 passion and vnM stalking across the stage after the 
 old dramatic method, dependent upon plot and 
 costume and scenery, as bravely as in any of the 
 masterpieces of stage-craft which we associate with 
 the art of Victorien Sardou. There is one exception, 
 however, to this rule, and that is in his latest play, 
 The Blue Bird, which sjnithesises the Maeterlinckian 
 idea of Destiny in a kindergarten fairy play of 
 intense charm. 
 
 But the poet in Maeterlinck, it would seem, is 
 destined to give place to the humanist and psycho- 
 logist. There were always two sides to his genius, 
 even in the early days : the introspective and the 
 
 137 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 objective. The latter has prevailed, and Maeter- 
 linck, apart from his drama, has become a new type of 
 scientist ; his essays reveal something like a marriage 
 between science and poetry. " The Life of the Bee " 
 is perhaps the best example of the work of the new 
 Maeterlinck, for in it he has given us, not only excel- 
 lent natm-al history, but social philosophy and 
 mysticism as well, wrapped in a prose which alone 
 would have made his reputation as a writer. And if 
 his di-amatic genius no longer dives for pearls in the 
 perilous deep, but is content to investigate the 
 surface of the waters of life, we may be sure that 
 whatever he does will have the quality of great art, 
 and that he has not ceased beating at the doors of 
 mystery. 
 
 1910 
 
 138 
 
G. K. CHESTERTON 
 
 IT is generally agreed that there is an intimate 
 relationship between happiness and the circum- 
 ference of a man's waist. But if there were any 
 doubt about it this could easily be settled by refer- 
 ence to the massive proportions of Gilbert Chester- 
 ton. He strikes one as being the happiest and 
 heaviest of men. There is something altogether 
 prodigious in his hilarity, his genius, and his person. 
 One feels impelled to speak of him in superlatives. 
 He looms upon the vision, just as he bestrides modem 
 journalism, Hke a Colossus. You cannot get away 
 from him, even if you desired to do so, which is 
 inconceivable. You may not be able to see eye-to- 
 eye with him, but there is a fascination in his point 
 of view. His genius is interesting, suggestive, pro- 
 vocative, and never dull. 
 
 He plays with ideas just as Cinquevalli plays with 
 billiard balls. And his skill is just as irresistible. 
 At the same time, his skill in making sentences and 
 ideas fly through the intellectual air like the inspired 
 billiard balls of the famous juggler is not a complete 
 thing in itself, delightful as it is. When G. K. C. 
 
 139 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 balances two or more ideas on the end of his intellect, 
 if I may be permitted the image, he does not perform 
 this interesting feat for the sake of the mere skill of 
 the thing, delighted as he undoubtedly is with that 
 part of the performance. He juggles with ideas to 
 show his readers not how clever he is, but how wise 
 he is. He, in fact, has something to teach ; he is a 
 missioner, and his method of conveying his gospel of 
 glad tidings to men is by a process of mental equili- 
 brium in cap and bells. 
 
 p' At one time I doubted in the existence of G. K. C. 
 I listened to the stories of him as one listens to the 
 yarns of men who have been in the ends of the earth. 
 And even now, after I have looked upon him with 
 my own eyes, I have to nudge myself to realise his 
 probability. He has the reality of one of those 
 dragons or fairies in which he has such invincible 
 faith. I first beheld him on a Yorkshire moor far 
 from his natural element, which is London. He 
 was in the locality on a holiday, and I had gone over 
 to verify his existence just as one might go to the 
 Arctic regions to verify the existence of the North 
 Pole or the North-West Passage. 
 
 He was staying at the house of a Bradford merchant 
 adjoining the moor, and I was to meet him there. It 
 was April, and raining. I trudged through the damp 
 furze and heather up to the house only to find that 
 the object of my pilgrimage had disappeared without 
 leaving a trace behind him. No alarm was felt, as 
 this was one of his habits. Sometimes he would go 
 
 140 
 
G. K. CHESTERTON 
 
 down to the railway station, and, taking a ticket to 
 any place that had a name which appealed to him, 
 vanish into the unknown, making his way home on 
 foot or wheel as fancy or circumstance directed. 
 On this occasion, however, nothing so serious had 
 happened. Therefore I adjourned with the lady of 
 the house and Mrs Chesterton to an upper hall, where 
 a noble latticed window commanded a wide vista 
 of the moor. I peered into the wild, half hoping 
 that I should first behold the great form of Gilbert 
 Chesterton looming over the bare brow of the wold, 
 silhouetted against the grey sky like the symbol of a 
 new large faith. 
 
 You see my imagination was somewhat over- 
 wrought, and I was not to be thus gratified. G. K. C. 
 did not fill the high horizon of the far wold, he 
 did not burst upon our ken like a titan gradually 
 growing bigger as he came nearer into our vision. 
 His coming was not melodramatic; it was, on the 
 contrary, quite simple, quite idyllic, and quite 
 characteristic. In fact, he did not come at all, 
 rather was it that our eyes, and later our herald, 
 went to him. For quite near to the house we espied 
 him, hatless and negligently clad in a Norfolk 
 suit of homespun, leaning in the rain against a 
 budding tree, absorbed in the pages of a httle 
 red book. 
 
 This was a more fitting vision. It suited admir- 
 ably his unaffected, careless, and altogether childlike 
 genius. He came into the house shortly afterwards 
 
 141 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 and consumed tea and cake like any mortal and talked 
 the talk of Olympus with the abandonment and irre- 
 sistibility of a child. I found his largeness wonder- 
 fully proportionate, even, as is so rarely the case with 
 massive men, to his head. This is amply in keeping 
 with the rest of his person. He wears a tangled 
 mass of light brown hair prematurely streaked 
 with grey, and a slight moustache. His grey-blue 
 eyes laugh happily as his full lips unload themselves 
 of a constant flow of self -amused and piquant words. 
 Like Dr Johnson, whom he resembles so much in 
 form, he is a great talker. But while I looked at him 
 I was not reminded of the lexicographer, but of 
 Balzac. And as his monologue rolled on and we 
 laughed and wondered, I found myself carried away 
 to a studio in France, where the head of Chesterton 
 became one with the head of Rodin's conception of 
 France's greatest literary genius. 
 
 Since then I have seen G. K. C. many times. I 
 have seen him standing upon platforms defending 
 the peoples' pleasures against the inroads of Puritan- 
 ism. I have seen liim addressing men from a 
 pulpit, and on one memorable occasion at Clifford's 
 Inn Hall I saw him defending the probability of the 
 liquefication of the blood of St Januarius in the 
 teeth of a pyrotechnic heckling from Bernard Shaw. 
 Again I have seen his vast person dominating the 
 staring throng in Fleet Street like a superman ; 
 and I have seen the traffic of Ludgate Circus held 
 up for him, as he strolled by in cloak and sombrero 
 
 142 
 
G. K. CHESTERTON 
 
 like a brigand of Adelphi drama or a Spanish hidalgo 
 by Velasquez, oblivious alike of critical 'bus-driver 
 and wonder-struck multitude. 
 
 But best is it to see him in his favourite habitat 
 of Bohemian Soho. There in certain obscure yet 
 excellent French restaurants, with Hilaire Belloc 
 and other writers and talkers, he may be seen, 
 sitting behind a tall tankard of lager or a flagon of 
 Chianti, eternally unravelling the mj^sterious tangle 
 of living ideas ; now rising mountainously on his 
 feet to overshadow the company with weighty 
 argument, anon brandishing a wine-bottle as he 
 insists upon defending some controversial point 
 until " we break the furnitm^e " ; and always 
 chuckling at his own wit and the sallies of others, 
 as he fights the battle of ideas with indefatigable 
 and unconquerable good-humour. 
 
 II 
 
 Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born at Camden 
 Hill, Kensington, on 29th May 1874. His parents 
 are English, and his father has been long and honour- 
 ably associated with Kensington as an estate agent. 
 On his mother's side he inherits foreign blood, 
 his maternal grandmother, Marie Louise Grosjean, 
 being Swiss. There is no indication that his literary 
 talent is inherited, and the only instance of a writer 
 among his immediate relatives is that of his great- 
 uncle, Captain Chesterton, who was a governor of 
 
 143 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 Coldbath Fields Prison, aiid who occasionally 
 plied his pen in the cause of prison reform. But 
 he is not the sole exponent of the literary art in the 
 present generation of the Chestertons, for his younger 
 brother, Cecil, is an author and journalist and socialist 
 propagandist of pronounced individuality and ability. 
 Gilbert Chesterton was educated at St Paul's 
 School, and it was at this famous scholastic estab- 
 lishment that his precocious and versatile literary 
 genius first made itself known. Besides taking the 
 Milton Prize for poetry, he was the founder and 
 chief combatant of a particularly lively debating 
 circle called the Junior Debating Club, and his 
 earliest published work appears in the pages of the 
 society's journal. The Debater. There were twelve 
 members of the " J.D.C.," as the club was familiarly 
 termed, and each one of them seems to have been 
 more or less inspired by the optimism of their leader 
 Some of these early friends of the '' J.D.C." have 
 already, like Messrs E. C. Bentley, Lucien Older- 
 shaw, Laurence Soloman, and Robert Verneve, 
 made positions for themselves in journalism and 
 education ; and even to-day the club is not dead. 
 For the original twelve, and the wives of those who 
 have made the matrimonial venture, meet at an 
 annual dinner, for which occasions G. K. C. draws 
 weird invitation cards with an appropriate and 
 humorous picture for each member. 
 
 But long before he went to St Paul's School 
 Gilbert Chesterton commenced writing. He is a 
 
 144 
 
G. K. CHESTERTON 
 
 young man now, with a name familiar to the reading 
 public of two continents, but he was a literary 
 prodigy and the marvel of his parents at the tender 
 age of five. He wrote romances when he was a baby, 
 and he has been follo^ving the vocation of a lord of 
 lancniase ever since. 
 
 After leaving St Paul's he went for a term or 
 so to the Slade School, where he received some 
 instruction in drawing, but fortmiately not enough 
 to destroy the delicious irresponsibility and indi- 
 viduality of his amazing pencil. The dra"v\ings 
 of G. K. C. are as distinct and remarkable as his 
 literary work, and he turns them out as prodigally 
 and as easily as he writes. They are a kind of 
 laughing and grotesque efflorescence of his wonder- 
 fully active personality. In some ways they recall 
 the nonsense drawings of Edward Lear, and 
 again the humorous sketches of Sir Frank Lock- 
 wood. But they are not quite the same in spirit. 
 They are more barbarous and more childish. 
 They are the hilarious and spontaneous by-products 
 of a genius that can laugh at the whole world and 
 love it at the same time. They are an eminently 
 Gothic product, the inevitable grotesques of a 
 cosmic and human personality. They spring natur- 
 ally out of his pencil in his spare time; they cover 
 the envelopes and scraps of paper in his pockets ; 
 and while he is talking to one they gradually and 
 unconsciously appear upon whatever smooth surface 
 lies near to his hand. 
 
 K 145 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 After leaving the Slade School he went into the 
 office of ]\Ir T. Fisher Unwin with the intention of 
 learning the publishing business, and it was during 
 the spare hours of his apprenticeship to that amiable 
 profession that he discovered his literary work had 
 a market value ; or rather that this was discovered 
 for him, for it was his friend Mr Lucien Oldershaw 
 who first urged him to send articles to the Press. 
 His earliest contributions, apart from his work for 
 The Debater, appeared in The Bookman and The 
 Speaker, He was " discovered " by The Baity 
 News in 1900, and he has contributed a weekly 
 article to that paper ever since, and on the death 
 of L. F. Austin he succeeded to the weekly control 
 of "The Pocket Book" in the Illustrated London News. 
 
 In 1900 he published his first book. This was the 
 unique volume of poems called " The Wild Knight." 
 He struck a new note in poetry. The mock humility 
 of the minor poet, the yearning, " the light loves, and 
 little errors " of so much modern verse, were quite 
 absent from his song. He had humility, but it was 
 a strange, proud humility ; he was romantic, but he 
 did not yearn ; he was serious, but he laughed ; 
 he was humble before the world, yet insolent as a 
 god. After this came " The Defendant," a reprint of 
 his contributions to The Speaker. Here for the 
 first time the public were introduced to Gilbert 
 Chesterton's brilliant gift of dialectic and of paradox. 
 The volume is a series of triumphant defences of 
 indefensible subjects. 
 
 146 
 
G. K. CHESTERTON 
 
 It was after the publication of " The Wild Knight " 
 that G. K. C. received the greatest compliment 
 ever paid to a young and nearly unkno^vn author. 
 Viscount Morley, then plain John Morley, invited 
 him to write the study of " Browning " for the 
 English ;Men of Letters Series, a series of books 
 famous wherever the English language is spoken, 
 not one of which had hitherto been written by an 
 author who was not at the time weighed down with 
 literary and academic honours. The editor of the 
 Men of Letters Series was rewarded for his courage 
 and insight by a volume of analytical and inter- 
 pretive criticism equal to the best volumes in the 
 series, and perhaps the finest contribution to the 
 literature that has grown about the genius of Robert 
 Browning. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There is much of the child in Gilbert Chesterton. 
 He is the Peter Pan of modern philosophy : he won't 
 grow up. This is so rare a thing in this weary and 
 elderly age that one ought to be very thankful. 
 Indeed, on the fu'st appearance of any signs of 
 G. K, C. getting out of, say, his teens, I would gladly 
 advocate some scheme of State subsidy that would 
 encourage him to remain a child. But there is not 
 much need for fear on that score. His youthfulness 
 will last for ever. He will be cutting capers on the 
 Patmos of his own imagination when we are weary 
 
 147 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 even of our small sins and yearning for some chance 
 of good works that will bring, as a reward, eternal 
 peace. 
 
 His essays teem with the unexpectedness of the 
 child. You are never certain how his sentences 
 will end. His similes are the familiar similes of 
 babes and sucklings. Into some high discourse 
 upon will and destiny he will drag in pigs and 
 cabbages and lamp -posts with fearful and wonderful 
 appropriateness ; as though the deep, mysterious 
 wisdom that shines through the frank eyes of a child 
 had become articulate and found expression in the 
 first homely objects of self -consciousness : the 
 simple things of everyday life. That, indeed, is his 
 attitude towards life. He sees the wonder, mystery 
 and utiHty of common, everyday things, just as a 
 child does, and he is not afraid of proclaiming his 
 delight to the whole world. " There is only one 
 thing," he says, " it requires real courage to say, and 
 that is a truism." Gilbert Chesterton's mission in 
 life is to revalue the truisms — the beliefs that are 
 so commonly accepted as to be almost lifeless — and 
 to proclaim them still and for ever true. 
 
 So great is his power of reasoning that you feel 
 he could prove anything, and so he could. But he 
 is too busy proving his own theories and enjoying 
 them to waste time in that way. He is not deceived 
 about logic, he knows logic is but a means and not 
 an end. He could prove that black is white, and 
 probably has done so already. And he may or may 
 
 148 
 
G. K. CHESTEKTON 
 
 not be convinced that twice two are not four. 
 Such excursions, however, would be the merest in- 
 cidentals of his game. His main concern is to save 
 the world from the designs of modern tendencies, 
 in the first place because they are tendencies, and 
 in the second place because they are pessimistic. 
 '' Seriousness is the special and secret seal of Satan," 
 he says. 
 
 He is the first apostle of the New Romanticism. 
 And he has come bounding and laughing into the 
 camp of the heretics with the direct intention of 
 hauling do^^^l their flag. He advocates mysticism 
 against materialism, Christianity against Agnosti- 
 cism. In politics he is a Liberal. He loves the 
 common people and common things. The world 
 for him is a great paradox, a monstrous, irrational 
 thing cloaking mysteriously the sanity of God, who 
 reveals Himself to those who can face great odds and 
 laugh. In his o\mi words, he has heard " the 
 call of that buried and subconscious happiness which 
 is in all of us, and which may emerge suddenly at 
 the sight of the grass of a meadow or the spears 
 of the enemy." 
 
 IV 
 
 His personal life is hke his teaching. He fights 
 for his cause joyfully with the weapon he knows 
 best how to use, his pen. He mixes freely with the 
 people and lectures here, there, and everywhere. 
 
 149 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 He carries on the propaganda of faith and happiness, 
 by being happy and having faith. Careless in his 
 dress and of all the superfluous details of life, he 
 is yet an earnest and consciously careful writer, 
 taking endless pains in the final quality of his work, 
 much of his writing for book form being diligently 
 written and rewritten until his severest self-criticism 
 is satisfied. 
 
 Yet he hardly lives the life of the methodical 
 literary man. He rarely works in his study, most of 
 his essays being written at odd times and in odd 
 places, in restaurants, clubs, electric cars, and tube 
 railway trains. He writes rapidly, and is surpris- 
 ingly careless of his manuscript. Waiters in cafes 
 and clubs are continually finding sheets of valuable 
 " copy " which he has shed during his sojourn 
 in such places. Method is apparently not a feature 
 of the dreamful game of life which he plays. Yet he 
 gets his work done. He seems to have read every- 
 thing, and has a memory like the British Museum 
 Library. But nowadays his chief reading is Dickens, 
 Thackeray and Scott, of whom he never tires, and 
 few men know their way about the works of these 
 masters so well. 
 
 His days are like incidents in a great game. The 
 seriousness of life he leaves to take care of itself; 
 he plays. And he would have all men play so 
 happily that a new colour should come into their 
 days, finding a symbolism in their brightly coloured 
 garments, in the waving of flags, and the singing 
 
 150 
 
G. K. CHESTERTON 
 
 of songs. The essence of life is the sane hilarity 
 of man laughing at the " vast stupidity of things." 
 In his hilarious way he is serious about everything, 
 but about one thing he is specially serious : that 
 thing is the right of men to enjoy hfe. He has a 
 toy theatre, of which he is not only sole lessee and 
 proprietor, but scene-painter, playwright, general 
 manager and manipulator all rolled into one. His 
 favourite toy play is St George and the Dragon, 
 This may be taken as a symbol of his life and his 
 point of view. The play's the thing, but the play is 
 the eternal play of the triumph of light over dark- 
 ness. Gilbert Chesterton plays in real life his puppet 
 play of St George and the Dragon. He goes forth to 
 slay the dragon of despair every day. That is his 
 romance, that is his joy. Even if the end of the 
 fight is but the beginning of the fight again, his faith 
 for ever tells him that the New Jerusalem is just 
 round the next corner, and that all comrades in 
 arms shall meet ultimately and drink " from the 
 great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world." 
 
 1908 
 
 151 
 
H. G. WELLS 
 
 (before "TONO BUNGAY ") 
 
 " All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, 
 and a day will come — one day in the unending succession of 
 days — when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts 
 and hidden in our loins, will stand upon this earth as one stands 
 upon a footstool, and laugh and reach out their hands amidst 
 the stars."— H. G. Wells, "The Discovery of the Future." 
 
 THE attitude of H. G. Wells towards social life 
 is, fundamentally, the same now as it was in 
 1895 when a new planet swam into our ken in 
 the form of his masterly short story, " The Time 
 Machine." That book was the result of a formula 
 which has been used in the production of each of his 
 succeeding scientific romances. Wells developed early 
 a scientific habit of mind ; he first came up to London 
 as a student at the Normal School of Science, where his 
 natural scientific tendency was drilled and systema- 
 tised with the intention of bringing him up to the 
 accepted standard of a first-class scientist. 
 
 This, as we know to our advantage, did not happen. 
 Wells' imagination was too much for the Normal 
 School of Science ; and although he took a degree, 
 
 15^ 
 
H. G. WELLS 
 
 he never in reality became a scientist ; he became 
 a writer — an artist. But he never lost his scientific 
 habit of mind. It is there to this day, as those who 
 follow his tales of aerial battle and magic food-stuffs 
 know so well. But added to this scientific sense 
 there is that other sense — the artist's sense of vision. 
 Wells, instead of allo\\dng science to dominate him, 
 has made science the handmaiden of imagination. 
 And the formula at the back of his scientific romances 
 is a combination of these two qualities. He gives 
 his theme a normal scientific basis, then extends 
 it into the realms of fancy. 
 
 " The Time Machine " is a good example of this 
 
 method. In this tale he carefully observes the facts 
 
 of our social conditions, and he notices, as Karl 
 
 Marx before him noticed, what would seem to be the 
 
 tendency of the means of ease and luxury to fall into 
 
 the hands of one section of the people, whilst the 
 
 remaining section has to toil and struggle for 
 
 the necessaries of life. Karl Marx, in his role 
 
 of political economist, generalised years before from 
 
 these facts, that society must, imder the existing 
 
 capitalist system, more and more augment this 
 
 differentiation of classes, with the result that, with 
 
 the gro^^i:h of the class consciousness of the toiling 
 
 section, a state of war would come about — the Class 
 
 War which would end in the workers seizing the 
 
 means of wealth and administering them for the 
 
 welfare of all. 
 
 Karl Marx was as imaginative in his deductions 
 
 153 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 as H. G. Wells ; the only difference is that he was 
 neither such an artist nor did he permit his imagina- 
 tion to go so far. It is perhaps impossible to say at 
 what point science reaches the frontiers of the 
 imaginative realm. One thing is certain, however, 
 and that is, the scientist cannot wholly do without 
 the imaginative faculty. It is highly probable, if 
 we could only analyse the beginnings of scientific 
 ideas, that the great discoveries of science — such as 
 the law of gravitation and the theory of evolution — 
 were in the earliest stages concepts of the imagination. 
 
 Wells being an artist then, was able to make the 
 necessary scaffolding for his dreams. So, starting 
 where Karl Marx did, he gradually increases the 
 gap between the two hypothetical classes, ignoring 
 the revolutionary possibilities of a class war, which 
 the mere scientist could not afford to do, until in 
 the illimitable future he gives us an amazing picture 
 of a class segregation so complete as to have produced 
 two distinct races : the one dainty and delicate, 
 living playfully for ease and love, without labour and 
 without care save fear of the other class ; the other 
 brutalised by long centuries of degrading toil, and 
 living in an underground world of dim passages 
 and the clangour of machines. They have large 
 luminous eyes which, cat-like, probe the dark, and 
 at night time they come to the surface of the earth 
 and prey horribly upon the dainty upper classes. 
 
 This era in the earth's history is reached by an 
 ingenious person who has pondered much upon ideas 
 
 154 
 
H. G. WELLS 
 
 of dimension, and, ultimately concluding that the 
 fourth dimension is in time, constructs a time machine 
 and rides into futurity. The journey into the 
 future is described with an imaginative power 
 unsurpassed in any of Wells' later works, and it is 
 an excellent example of his method of building an 
 imaginative structure upon a scientific basis. He 
 speaks of the peculiar sensation of time-travelling, 
 of how, by pulling a lever, the traveller sees night 
 following day " like the flapping of a black wing " 
 and the " sun hopping across the sky " every minute, 
 and every minute marking a day. 
 
 " Then in the intermittent darkness, I saw the 
 moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from 
 new to full, and had a faint ghmpse of the circling 
 stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, 
 the palpitation of night and day merged into con- 
 tinuous greyness ; the sky took on a wonderful deep- 
 ness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that 
 of twilight ; the jerking sim became a streak of fire, 
 a brilliant arch in space ; the moon, a fainter fluctuat- 
 ing band ; and I could see nothing of the stars, save 
 now and then a bright circle flickering in the blue. 
 
 " The landscape was misty and vague. I saw 
 trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour : 
 now brown, now green ; they grew, spread, shivered, 
 and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up 
 faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole 
 surface of the earth seemed changed — melting 
 
 155 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 and flowing under my eyes. . . . Presently I noted 
 that the sunbelt swayed up and down, from solstice 
 to solstice, in a minute or less, and that, consequently, 
 my pace was over a year a minute ; and minute by 
 minute the white snow flashed across the world, 
 and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief 
 green of spring." 
 
 And so on, the story culminating in that dim 
 future, eight hundred thousand years hence, past 
 the age of the cannibals, when the heat of the sun has 
 failed, and the weary earth is a desert of ice in a 
 twihght world, whose sole inhabitant is a huge 
 crab-like creature with monstrous tentacles — the 
 Caliban of a sun-forgotten waste. 
 
 This process of constructing new worlds upon 
 a basis of fact, of taking a plain fact and making it 
 grow into whatever wonder the fancy may conceive, 
 is behind all of the scientific romances of Wells. 
 In "The Food of the Gods" he is perhaps less scien- 
 tific and less plausible ; this is worth noting, because 
 it is not so much the imaginative side of his stories 
 that is convincing, but the fact that the imaginative 
 structure is built upon a foundation of science. 
 But the other stories are more convincing than fact ; 
 stranger, yet more plausible than truth. It is 
 always possible for the events in these tales to happen 
 because the writer is so scrupulous about his first 
 hypotheses. But he does not give them to you as 
 hypotheses, but as facts. The consummate art, 
 
 156 
 
H. G. WELLS 
 
 the artfulness with which he plays the confidence 
 trick upon his readers at the point where he takes 
 them over the quicksands that lie between fact and 
 fancy, amounts to genius. 
 
 One remembers in this instance the clever way 
 in which he disposes of his Martians in " The War 
 of the Worlds," after they have wreaked as much 
 ruin as the story can stand. He plays upon 
 the scientific idea of survival by resistance. The 
 Martians come from a planet which has no disease 
 germs, consequently the uncanny planetary visitors, 
 never having had to resist disease, are an easy prey 
 to the energetic bacilli of jMother Earth. And after 
 all our means of defence against them have done their 
 best and failed, our ancient enemy, Disease, becomes 
 our ally for once and brings about the destruction our 
 science of war failed to accomplish. Similarly, in the 
 same book, ^Ir Wells disposes of that other visitant 
 from ^lars, the Red Weed. This plant, coming 
 from the dry atmosphere of that planet, indulges 
 in an orgy of growth in our humid climate. It 
 dams the Thames and causes devastating floods in 
 the adjoining valleys, it creeps over buildings, com- 
 pletely shrouding them in its red leaves until its ab- 
 normal powers of growth finally act as a check and it 
 ultimately dies of its own excess — of over-population. 
 
 Once having done this successfully a novelist can 
 do what he likes with his imagination, so long as he 
 keeps his details in structural accord with his original 
 facts. Wells seems to have been born with this 
 
 157 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 gift. He did not grow into it. It is an accomplish- 
 ment in " The Time Machine." It is quite convincing 
 in " The Island of Dr Moreau " and " The War of the 
 Worlds," in " The First Men in the Moon," " The In- 
 visible Man," and "When the Sleeper Wakes," not 
 to mention the thrilling matter-of-factness of many 
 of the short stories, several of which are equal to 
 anything he has done, and one or two ranking with 
 the best short stories in the language. 
 
 It is the convincing quality of these stories which 
 is mainly responsible for their place on the plane 
 of adult fiction. Jules Verne dealt with similar 
 themes, but he never, in England at least, succeeded 
 in winning the attention of any but schoolboys. It is 
 doubtful if Wells is read at all by youths ; he is the 
 Jules Verne of grown-ups. One reason for this is that 
 he is more convincing, the other that he is more of a 
 philosopher. Jules Verne was interested in the prob- 
 lem of things, H. G. Wells is interested in the problem 
 of man. To Jules Verne men were pawns ; they were 
 almost unnecessary : to Wells they are the most im- 
 portant pieces in the game, and in spite of his air- 
 ships and his handling-machines, his main concern 
 is for the effect of his super-scientific changes upon 
 the ways of men. 
 
 II 
 
 The senses of fact and fancy are constantly active 
 in the art of Wells, and very often in open conflict. 
 
 158 
 
H. G. WELLS 
 
 But in spite of his overweening sense of fact, which 
 ever impels him towards something hke an apotheosis 
 of science, he is fundamentally a story-teller. The 
 love of tales for their own sake is deeply embedded 
 in his nature. The world for him is a story book, 
 and all the men and women merely fairy tales. 
 He resembles Robert Louis Stevenson in this 
 respect. And like the author of " Treasure Island " 
 he is a careful, almost a punctilious stylist. 
 He is a mighty hunter of phrases, and would 
 lay the dictionary waste in his hunt for unique 
 words. 
 
 His sentences are like finely-clad persons who 
 peacock themselves upon their appearance. They 
 strut. They also possess little mannerisms, curious 
 little turns, of which they are apt to boast. They 
 belong to the realm of conscious art and practically 
 remind one of the skill and care which has made them 
 what they are. They are dandified sentences wear- 
 ing their conceits like epaulettes or feathers. One 
 could imagine Mr Wells stepping back from one of 
 his highly finished periods, as Whistler was wont to 
 do before his canvases, and saying, " Amazing ! " 
 
 His method of telling a story is ingratiating. He 
 does not spring it upon you suddenly, but leads you 
 up to it by easy stages, gradually raising the slides, 
 like an operator of a magic lantern, until the full 
 theme is revealed. At other times he is like a genial 
 lecturer who, although not quite certain of his 
 audience's intelligence, gives it the credit of possess- 
 
 159 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 ing imagination. " You must figure to yourselves," 
 he has a habit of saying, and then comes one of his 
 immaculate descriptions in all the pride of its polished 
 phraseology, until a point is reached when it would 
 seem words were inadequate, and a row of dots 
 appears along which the reader's imagination can 
 disport itself. . . . 
 
 The effect of this manner is to create in one's 
 mind an idea of exactitude, a particular care as to 
 detail, a refining " process," to use one of his pet 
 words, which in the end becomes almost a primness. 
 Wells is never vulgar, he has a disconcerting horror 
 of vulgarity. This expresses itself in his prose, in 
 that conscious pride of which I have spoken ; but it 
 also leads to the elimination of everything in his 
 writings in the nature of superfluous ornament or 
 flourish. His style, though dandified, is not loud, 
 it never raises its voice, its purple patches are sub- 
 dued, they are mauve and dove-grey, it is the Beau 
 Brummell of prose. 
 
 Wells' self-consciousness always turns his novels 
 into criticisms of conduct. His shorter stories are 
 more in the nature of stories for the story's sake. As 
 a novelist his outlook upon life reminds one of Charles 
 Dickens, but his range is narrower. He has at least 
 one advantage over Dickens : he never attempts 
 what he cannot do. He is too conscious an artist 
 for that. He is an example of the dictum that true 
 genius reveals itself by working within limits. Wells, 
 like Dickens, knows those social drudges, the lower - 
 
 i6o 
 
H. G. WELLS 
 
 middle class, the small traders and their dependants, 
 but, unlike Dickens, he gives one the impression of 
 being ashamed of them. 
 
 He has a nice faculty for laying bare their little 
 foibles, their pitiful vanities, and small ambitions. 
 " Love and IMr Lewisham," " The Wheels of Chance," 
 and " Kjpps," his three novels proper, are full of a 
 keen insight into such things. But under all his 
 satire, there is genuine concern for the finer qualities 
 of his people. One laughs at the amiable vanities 
 of Hoopdriver and Kipps, but all the time one is 
 forced to feel that they are very nearly related to 
 one's own precious weaknesses. But Wells reserves 
 his deepest pity for the domestic " slavey," and her 
 big sister, the most tragical figure in our civilisa- 
 tion, the mother-drudge : the careworn woman who 
 spends her hfe grubbing about an impoverished 
 home in a mean street, with uncertain health, im- 
 certain pay, and no future. 
 
 In such books he is following his true vocation 
 as artist. As the student, critic, and interpreter of 
 certain phases of lower-middle class life, he is 
 supreme among modern writers, so supreme that 
 one begiiidges every deviation on his part from 
 this work. Yet here we come in contact with 
 the complex nature of his genius. Wells is not 
 finally an artist, he is a man with a mission. He 
 is a lover of order. His hatred of vulgarity 
 reaches out to a hatred of the vulgarity of un- 
 seemly social conditions, of the vulgar display of 
 L i6i 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 idle riches no less than vulgar acceptance of 
 laborious poverty. 
 
 Each succeeding scientific romance and novel 
 betrays his growing irritation with such things. 
 He was always conscious of them, but in his earlier 
 books he was conscious of them largely from the 
 spectacular point of view. Later he came to think 
 out ways of giving our social chaos the magic yet 
 practical touch that would create order. At first he 
 experimented with the almost immediately practical 
 issues which might reasonably be expected to follow 
 modern inventions in locomotion and similar things, 
 and he published his conclusions in that suggestive 
 volume, "Anticipations." Since then the growth of 
 his ideas from separate and individual schemes to 
 complete social organisms has made of him the first 
 of living Utopists. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Somewhere between the issues of " Anticipa- 
 tions " and " Mankind in the Making," Wells be- 
 came a Socialist. In 1903 he avowed his new faith 
 by joining the Fabian Society. All the distributed 
 satire, invective and social criticism of his novels 
 were concentrated in the practical endeavour to 
 reorganise society on a newer and less wasteful 
 foundation. And quite naturally he arrives at this 
 conclusion by the pressure upon his imagination of 
 the numerous depressing incidents of our poverty- 
 
 162 
 
H. G. WELLS 
 
 ridden age. Nowhere does he state his case, and 
 incidentally the working of the scientific imagination, 
 better than in the essay called " This Misery of 
 Boots," contributed first to The hidependent Review 
 in 1905, and afterwards reprinted by the Fabian 
 Society as a tract. 
 
 Sociahsm was inevitable to a man of Wells' tem- 
 perament. You can feel it tugging at his coat-tails 
 in most of his books. His earlier studies in experi- 
 mental sociology were not avowedly socialistic, but 
 throughout " Anticipations " and " Mankind in the 
 Making " the demands made upon the State and the 
 social consciousness of the people were so great as 
 inevitably to impel him into collectivism, if not into 
 the larger fi'eedom of Socialism. The New Repub- 
 licanism of " Mankind in the Making," although in 
 the first instance based upon the will of a finer social 
 tjrpe, whose life shall be saturated with conscience 
 and disciphne, and who shall be ruled by duties and 
 " a certain ritual," looks to the increase of this type 
 until ultimately it shall embrace the whole State. 
 The volume is an essay on the cultivation of social 
 psychology. 
 
 The final position of this phase of Wells' gro^vth 
 tow^ards Socialism is recorded in *' A Modern Utopia," 
 which is a pictm^e of the ideas in the two previous 
 volumes as a going concern. He has adopted the 
 imaginative method of his scientific romances, and 
 extended the theories and tendencies of his studies 
 to Utopia. " Anticipations " and " Manldnd in the 
 
 163 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 Making " are the bricks and mortar out of which he 
 has built his ideal kingdom — or rather republic. 
 
 " A Modern Utopia " depicts a State based upon 
 a code of privileges which aim at the administration 
 of affairs for the welfare of all. The government is 
 in the hands of the New Republicans of " Mankind 
 in the Making," who have become an order of 
 Samurai, living a life of exalted discipline and service. 
 The social system A this Utopia is what might be 
 called class-socialism. It is the organisation of 
 humanity into a series of four grades, in keeping with 
 certain observable psychological tendencies. 
 
 At the bottom of the social scale there are those 
 people who are by nature morally deficient ; these 
 are graded as the Base. Next to them are that vast 
 host of honest folk who are incapable of initiative 
 but willing to be instructed and directed ; these are 
 called the Dull, and with the Base Class they form 
 the Lower Classes. There are two higher classes : 
 the Kinetic Class, composed of the practical admini- 
 strative people, and the Poietic or people of ideas. 
 The last is the highest of all. The Samurai are a 
 patrician class drawn from the two upper classes by 
 personal worthiness and examination. And just as 
 it is possible for the Kinetics or Poietics to become 
 Samurai, society is so arranged as to make a constant 
 movement possible of the lower classes to the higher, 
 and of all classes to finer states of social life. 
 
 The greatest privileges in " A Modern Utopia " are 
 awai'ded to the higher classes, whose members are 
 
 164 
 
H. G. WELLS 
 
 expected to bear the greater social responsibilities. 
 There is no poverty, and labour and industry are 
 carried on under a system of perfect organisation. 
 All the material dreams of " Anticipations " are 
 actual facts, just as the psychological dreams of 
 " Mankind in the Making " are facts. '' A Modem 
 Utopia " is a vision of a completed human growth ; 
 it is mankind not in the making, but made. It is 
 the dream of a country in which the most powerful 
 men act from generous and unselfish motives, accord- 
 ing to a given recipe ; it is life by formula, as against 
 life by instinct. 
 
 From this systematic vision Wells turns to a 
 dream of a fuller freedom ; and in " In the Days of 
 the Comet " he abandons system and principle and 
 gives us a picture of a world grown young again. 
 He takes the world as we know it, the struggling, 
 anxious world of commercial effort, and by the 
 magic sweep of a comet's tail he inspires it with an 
 immaculate goodwill towards all men, expressing 
 itself in a serene and beautiful communism. All 
 men are equal, and all are happy. Poverty and the 
 diseases, spiritual and physical, which poverty and 
 the fear of poverty bring in their train are no more. 
 Commercial strife and the waste of competition are 
 at an end. A wonderful picture is given of the dawn 
 of this new era, and of how men set about destroying 
 every vestige of the ugly past, and then remoulding 
 the world nearer to the desires of hearts and minds that 
 are free for ever from the tyranny of private ambition. 
 
 165 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 One is inclined to believe that at one time Wells 
 had faith in the possibility of a change of heart that 
 might make such dreams suddenly practicable. But 
 in his latest phase his Utopianism is a pious belief, 
 a dream for Sundays. Utopia is something we may 
 hope for as a reward of long years of training in 
 worthy citizenship : a target for our faith, an ideal, 
 but not a practical scheme. Nothing short of a 
 visit of Martians or the sweep of a comet's tail could 
 make us suddenly realise our common humanity so 
 clearly as to impel us to inaugurate for ourselves the 
 kingdom of heaven upon earth. 
 
 The formula which turned Wells' science into 
 romance, and his sociology into a modern Utopia, 
 has at length been directed to actual social affairs, 
 and it would turn these into Socialism. Its method 
 of manipulating tendencies and processes is prac- 
 tically the same. Wells has become a practical 
 Utopist. But he is not going to shatter the world 
 to bits and then remould it nearer to his heart's 
 desire. He is going to build his new world gradually, 
 brick by brick, street by street, town by town, until 
 the old world is crowded out. 
 
 As a Socialist, he believes in educational and 
 constitutional methods of propaganda, and in spite 
 of the fact that he uses the word " revolution," he is 
 a revolutionist only in the sense of that word meaning 
 change. He repudiates anything in the nature of 
 sudden social changes by means of insurrection. In 
 " New Worlds for Old," his most recent book, and 
 
 i66 
 
H. G. WELLS 
 
 the one in which he sets forth his full Socialistic 
 faith, he adopts the propagandist methods of the 
 Fabian Society, that is to say, he would teach the 
 ideas of Socialism and at the same time use what- 
 ever parliamentary, municipal, or other authorised 
 administrative means for the practical application of 
 those ideas. He looks to the growth of the sense of 
 service, what he calls " goodwill," as the motive power 
 behind the movement towards Socialism. 
 
 Its basis should be sensitive and conscious recog- 
 nition of the claims of the futm-e. We must build 
 for the futm'e, we must look upon life as a garden 
 that can be trained and cultivated. That really is 
 the spirit in wliich H. G. Wells approaches the 
 question of applied Socialism. He is a social puritan 
 demanding a clean and orderly citizenship ; his 
 practical politics are a constant concern for, and the 
 fullest possible application of the most vital means of 
 promoting cleanliness, health and decency in mind 
 and body, and seemliness and good taste in the 
 building of the city and the nation. 
 
 1908 
 
 167 
 
ROBERT BLATCHFORD 
 
 I SIT in a great hall, shaped somewhat like an 
 amphitheatre ; in fact, the place is an obsolete 
 circus in a northern city, now given over to 
 political " demonstrations " and other monster 
 forgatherings of the people. Reminiscences of 
 past pomp still exist in its canvas ceiling, scrawled 
 over with crude rococo designs in faded reds and 
 blues and golds, and from the highest point in the 
 centre still hangs a garish cluster of gas jets. All 
 around is a dense mass of people — far denser than it 
 had ever been in those past days when Whimsical 
 Walker made the house rock with laughter at his 
 clownish antics, or when some fair equestrienne 
 dazzled the youth as she leaped lightly from the 
 arena on to the plump haunches of her docile horse ; 
 tier upon tier they rise, six thousand strong, like a 
 mountain terraced with human faces, until they 
 fade into the dim heights and mingle with the rococo 
 cherubs in the canvas sky. 
 
 The vast audience is familiar, genial, cheerful, 
 yet full of an enthusiastic tiptoe expectancy. It is 
 no ordinary political meeting. I had seen many 
 
 i68 
 
ROBERT BLATCHFORD 
 
 such in this hall, and the difference is quite marked. 
 I remember Lord Randolph Churchill coming to the 
 same place to meet a throng as great as this. The 
 enthusiasm ran high, but it was of a different order. 
 It was self-confident to cocksureness ; but it left 
 one with the feeling that it had been stage-managed. 
 You felt the people admired " Randy," and that was 
 all. It was here also that I heard Gladstone, as an 
 old man, mighty in his \\Tath, hold a vast crowd 
 spell-bound for over an hour, as he denounced the 
 Armenian massacres. But that, I remember think- 
 ing, was a personal triumph. Gladstone was ad- 
 mired, respected, reverenced, and the magnetism of 
 his personality w^as inspiring ; but it ended in that 
 monumental eloquence which was its means of 
 expression. Once that stopped, all was over and 
 nothing done. 
 
 Here, however, the case is different. Conviction 
 shines from the earnest faces of all. They have not 
 come to learn anything ; they have come to reassert 
 what they already know\ They have not come to 
 be aroused ; they have come to show that they 
 are aroused. One personality, however, is marked 
 out as the point to which the whole interest of the 
 audience is directed, and, amidst the beating of 
 those waves of chatter which always act as a prelude 
 to such gatherings, one name — or, rather, three 
 names for one person — can be heard above the 
 genial babble : " Nimquam," " Blatchford," and 
 " Robert." The expectancy clusters around these 
 
 169 
 
TtOMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 names, for the objective of the assembly is to meet 
 Robert Blatehford. All the difference between 
 this and other political meetings lies in that simple 
 fact. Its enthusiasm has a certain note peculiar 
 to the fact ; it is a note born not only of admiration 
 and respect but of love. Robert Blatehford is not 
 an aristocrat or a statesman come to talk through 
 them for the benefit of Press or Cabinet ; he is one 
 of themselves, a big brother who has given a voice 
 and direction to their dreams and aspirations. 
 
 The enthusiasm grows keener as the time for the 
 arrival of the guest of the evening draws near. There 
 is a constant hustle of excitement marked by such 
 incidents as hand-clapping at the arrival of familiar 
 personages on the platform, the rustling of hand- 
 bills and I newspapers, predominant among which 
 is " Nunquam's ' Clarion. Greetings are thrown 
 merrily across the hall, and snatches of song every 
 now and then float out of the mass. The songs have 
 a revolutionary accent ; they breathe the hopes and 
 aspirations of the Socialists, and when one has 
 ended with more than usual gusto, someone calls out 
 " Boots ! " to which there is a hilarious reply of 
 " Spurs ! " after the manner of the testing of wake- 
 fulness in the barrack-room of Robert Blatchford's 
 soldier tales. 
 
 At length the appointed hour arrives, and amidst 
 tremendous cheering, clapping of hands, and waving 
 of handkerchiefs and hats, the whole audience 
 standing, " Nmiquam " appears. He is a short, 
 
 170 
 
ROBERT BLATCHFORD 
 
 thick-set man of swarthy complexion ; he wears a 
 heavy moustache and close-cropped hair, both of 
 which are intensely black, and his expression would 
 be stolid, almost sardonic, were it not for the peculiar 
 and sympathetic light of his eyes. He walks 
 behind the chairman towards the little green- 
 cloth-covered table, in the middle of the platform, 
 on which rests a water-bottle and glass, and a vase 
 containing three spikes of flaming red gladioli. 
 The thunderous reception probably dazes him for a 
 moment ; he stands for a while contemplating the 
 scene in apparent bewilderment. Then he smiles 
 pleasantly, shakes his head, and moves his hands in 
 a deprecating way, and sits do^vn. In a moment 
 the chairman is on his feet, and in the temporary 
 stillness annoimces the Socialist hymn, " England, 
 Arise ! " This is greeted with stormy approval, 
 and the plaintive air of Edw^ard Carpenter's song 
 becomes robust and virile ^vith the enthusiasm 
 of the moment. There is a compelling note in the 
 prophetic demands of the song : 
 
 " England, arise ! The long, long night is over. 
 Faint in the East behold the dawTi appear. 
 Out of your evil dream of toil and sorrow. 
 Arise, O England, for the day is here. 
 From your fields and hills 
 Hark ! the answer swells : 
 Arise, O England, for the day is here.-' 
 
 And, as the last words die aw^ay, renewed cheering 
 breaks over the assembly. Robert Blatchford is 
 
 171 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 now on his feet again, a little dark speck in the vast 
 crowd, yet the centre of all this wild enthusiasm. 
 " Good old Robert ! " someone calls out affection- 
 ately. " Hear, hear ! " responds everyone else. 
 " Three cheers for ' Merrie England ' " are demanded 
 and given ; then three more for " Socialism and the 
 Revolution." " Nunquam " stands immobile, like 
 a small statue in ebony with face and hands of ivory. 
 Now he raises aloft a hand — and silence falls over the 
 audience ; he utters his opening words : " Comrades 
 
 and friends " " Boots ! " calls out someone up 
 
 among the cherubs. " Spurs ! " thunders back the 
 audience. " Hip, hip, hurrah ! " — then quietness, 
 and with this final assurance of wakefulness, Robert 
 Blatchford begins his speech — which everyone takes 
 for granted, but only half can hear. " Nunquam " 
 is no speaker, but that is a detail. He is Nun- 
 quam the Well-Beloved, and his audience is quite 
 content merely to be in the same room with 
 him. 
 
 II 
 
 Robert Blatchford, whose name is a household 
 word among the ever-growing ranks of Socialism, 
 and one of horror among the orthodox, is a thorough- 
 going son of the people. He wields a pen which is 
 mighty because of its trenchant, earnest simplicity. It 
 is really the pen of the people, proud of being of them 
 and happy only when busy in their cause. No one 
 
 172 
 
ROBERT BLATCHFORD 
 
 who has read any one of his books can doubt that for a 
 moment, and no one who knows the simplicity of his 
 hfe and its whole-hearted devotion to this cause can 
 fail to be moved by its earnestness, its thoroughness, 
 and its prophetic self-confidence. For Blatchford is 
 not meek. He is absolutely and irrevocably certain 
 that he is right. This gives his unvarnished Socialist 
 writings a certain arrogance which, did they lack 
 the sweet reasonableness of their lucid dialectic, 
 might reduce considerably their propaganda value. 
 As it is, it does not repel, but rather does it affect 
 the susceptible reader 'svith a like brusque self- 
 confidence. The burden of his message, reiterated 
 in his own direct phrase a thousand times, is : 
 "Socialism is the only remedy." There is no hedg- 
 ing, or prevarication. Blatchford, like Ibsen's Brand, 
 demands " All or nothing." In his vision of society 
 he sees only the rich and the poor — the rich on the 
 backs of the poor — and he looks upon philanthropy 
 and charitable legislation as so much dross in the 
 way of the realisation of the new Golden Age when 
 there shall be no more poor. He sees in such things 
 but the exemplification of Tolstoy's dictum that 
 " The rich will do anything for the poor — but get 
 off their backs." Robert Blatchford's mission is to 
 make the rich get off the backs of the poor. In his 
 fight for this ideal he is indefatigable and incor- 
 ruptible. It is said that every man has his price : 
 this is probably true, but all men are not to be 
 bought with money. Blatchford does not want 
 
 173 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 money ; he became a poor man for Socialism. The 
 lures which sometimes destroy other men do not 
 affect him. Flattery leaves him unmoved. There 
 is only one means by which you could buy " Nun- 
 quam " — that is by giving him Socialism. 
 
 Those who have been cradled in poverty and after- 
 wards attained material success are generally most 
 indifferent to the sufferings of the poor. Whatever 
 be the cause, whether it be that they become " tight- 
 fisted " out of fear of reversals which might bring 
 them to poverty again, or whether they are convinced 
 •ihat success depends upon righteousness, I do not 
 know ; the irony of the thing is none the less. But 
 when a man who has been poor and who has had 
 imagination enough to hate his condition attains 
 success without loss of imagination (a very rare thing, 
 by the way), then the causes of poverty are in danger. 
 Robert Blatchford is of this order. 
 
 He was born at Maidstone on 17th March 1851, 
 the son of poor travelling actors. His mother was 
 Italian, and his father an Englishman who died 
 when the boy was two years old. His early years 
 were spent going up and down the land with his 
 mother in search of a precarious livelihood. Some 
 attempt was made to teach him stage dancing, but 
 this came to nothing. What little schoohng he had 
 was of small use to him, and by sheer doggedness he 
 taught himself how to read when he was nine years 
 old, but, it is interesting to note, he did not learn how 
 to write until he was nearly sixteen. 
 
 174 
 
ROBERT BLATCHFORD 
 
 The life of the child up to this time must 
 have been a trial, but with the birth of his new 
 accomplishment a new heaven and a new earth 
 were opened unto him. He revelled in books, and 
 he devoured all reading matter that came in his way. 
 As he grew older he appeared on the stage, and at the 
 age of eleven he sang at a London music hall ; but 
 just after this his mother retired from the stage and 
 settled at Halifax, where young Robert was sent to 
 learn a trade. He worked for two years at a litho- 
 gTaphic printer's, and afterwards was apprenticed to 
 the brushmaking trade, at which he remained until 
 he was twenty years old, when he could endure 
 it no longer, so, without ceremony, he shook the 
 dust of Halifax off his feet and the bristles of 
 the brushmaker out of his clothes, and, with a 
 light heart and a still lighter pocket, tramped to 
 London. 
 
 Here luck was against him, and he sank lower 
 and lower into the mire of poverty, and on one 
 occasion almost sought shelter in a casual ward at 
 Clerkenwell. He had actually gone to the police 
 office for the necessary ticket when an old woman 
 dissuaded him from this resolve. " There was a 
 crowd of casuals round the police office," he says, 
 " a miserable crew ; and amongst them a pale, thin, 
 ragged woman, who sat upon the pavement. This 
 woman noticed me, and at last said, ' You are not 
 going into the ward, are you ? ' I said I was. She 
 looked at me earnestly, and said, ' ^ly poor boy, you 
 
 175 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 don't know what you are going to do. Don't go 
 there — don't ye go there ; it's no place for you. 
 See, I know these places, and I have had boys of my 
 own, and you must not go into this ward ; it is the 
 worst in London. Be advised by me.' So I thanked 
 the woman and went away. I slept that night stand- 
 ing up imder the portico of the Opera House." 
 
 Shortly after this experience he joined the army 
 and served in the 103rd Fusiliers and the 96th 
 Regiment for nearly seven years, attaining the rank 
 of sergeant, and being placed on the reserve in 1877. 
 His hfe in the army was the turning-point in his 
 career ; it rescued him from poverty, and gave him 
 experiences which he afterwards used so well in his 
 delightfully humorous " Soldier Tales," and in his 
 masterly novel of barrack life, " Tommy Atkins 
 of the Ramchunders," which Sir Evelyn Wood 
 found the truest picture of soldier life he had seen. 
 It was also while in the army that his mind was 
 awakened to the deeper problems of life by reading 
 Carlyle's " Heroes and Hero-worship," lent to him 
 by a fellow-sergeant. On leaving the army he 
 received an appointment as timekeeper on the 
 Weaver Navigation at Northwich at thirty shillings 
 a week, and married in the year 1880. 
 
 in 
 
 He did not start writing until he was some thirty- 
 three years of age, when for a few months he contri- 
 
 176 
 
ROBERT BLATCHFORD 
 
 buted sketches to The Yorkshireman and Toby, and 
 in 1885 he joined the staff of Bell's Life, on which 
 he rapidly made a name. On the staff of this paper 
 also he made the acquaintance of Edward Francis 
 Fay, the big-hearted Rabelaisian, who eventually 
 became endeared to readers of The Clarion under 
 the name of "The Bounder," and whose life now 
 forms the subject of one of Blatchford's most de- 
 lightful books, " The Bounder : the Story of a Man, 
 by his Friend." In the August of the same year 
 The Manchester Sunday Chronicle was started, and 
 he became its chief contributor, writing under the 
 pen-name of " Nunquam." The Chronicle was an 
 immediate success, and " Nimquam " became the 
 best-kno^vn writer in the north of England. Gradu- 
 ally his view of life changed, and towards 1890 
 he was openly advocating Socialism in the Sunday 
 Chronicle. This was an unheard-of thing in those 
 days, and his action invoked the wrath of his pro- 
 prietors. Robert Blatchford had, however, received 
 the call ; and rather than sell his pen he renounced 
 his position, which was worth a thousand pounds 
 a year, and with three friends, one of whom 
 was " The Bounder," and the other Alexander 
 M. Thompson (" Dangle "), who had followed him 
 into Socialism, he started The Clarion in 1891. 
 
 That was an heroic and, in many ways, a memor- 
 able performance. In the first place, the paper was 
 started relatively without funds, the capital being 
 something like three hundred pounds, a sum which 
 M 177 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 would have proved very inadequate to any but those 
 who were prepared to rough it. Secondly, The 
 Clarion was something new in journalism : it was, 
 and is, unique. It was unique then as being a 
 Socialist paper, which could be read with pleasure 
 by people of all shades of political thought ; but it 
 was more remarkable in that it had a personality 
 quite different to anything previously known to 
 journalism. Usually the personality of a paper is 
 the personality of its editor, but the personality 
 of The Clarion is a family affair, in which all the 
 members of the staff take a share. It is, in itself, 
 the expression of a kind of Socialism in which each 
 member of the community is provided with the 
 conditions under which he may best develop his 
 own individuality. The result in The Clarion has 
 entirely justified the original experiment, for all 
 The Clarion personalities have thriven under it in 
 an exceptional way. 
 
 Robert Blatchford's subsequent life was to be 
 wrapped up in The Clarion ! That has been his 
 platform, although he is by no means unknown to 
 the platforms of Socialist meetings, and in the year 
 of The Clarion^s birth he was adopted as Parlia- 
 mentary candidate for East Bradford, but withdrew 
 before the contest. TJie Clarion started with a circu- 
 lation of about thirty thousand, and this has gradually 
 increased until to-day it stands at about eighty thou- 
 sand. No other English paper has quite the same hold 
 upon its readers, and no other paper has succeeded in 
 
 178 
 
ROBERT BLATCHFORD 
 
 making its readers feel themselves to be collaborators 
 in The Clarion idea, for The Clarion is not merely a 
 paper — it is a movement, with a language and 
 humour of its own. Its ramifications spread all 
 over the coimtry, and embrace such varied activities 
 as cycle clubs, field clubs, guilds of handicraft, 
 scouts for the propagation of Socialism, cinderellas, 
 thi'ough which numberless poor children are fed 
 every year, reading and correspondence circles, 
 and The Clarion Fellowship, which was intended 
 to weld the various groups into something like a 
 homogeneous organisation. 
 
 IV 
 
 The editor of The Clarion, and uncrowned king 
 of all these activities, is one of the few living 
 writers who can write in simple language with dis- 
 tinction and charm. His " Merrie England," and 
 his other popular expositions of Socialism and 
 Determinism, " Britain for the British," " God and 
 my Neighbour," and " Not Guilty," are master- 
 pieces of simple and lucid English — and few books 
 of modern times have created so much controversy 
 as they have. These four volumes have created a 
 revolution in the mental outlook of hundreds of 
 thousands of working men ; in fact, they have gone 
 far towards making thinking beings of the members 
 of the vast working populations of the north of 
 
 England. 
 
 179 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 " Merrie England " is a book that has already 
 made history. Over a million copies have been sold 
 in England alone, and probably twice as many in 
 America. Besides this, it has been translated into 
 Welsh, Dutch, German, Swedish, French, Spanish, 
 Hebrew, Danish, and Norwegian. The effect of the 
 volume, with its amazingly lucid exposition of the 
 idea of Socialism, was electric. It has been said that 
 one year before its publication there were not more 
 than a thousand Socialists in Lancashire ; twelve 
 months after there were known to be fifty thousand. 
 
 Whether in his novels or his essays, the predomin- 
 ant features of Robert Blatchford's writings are 
 goodwill and tolerance. At the same time he is no 
 slave to dogma, even to the dogma of free thought. 
 His goodwill is not inconsistent with a good fight, 
 and he has scandalised many of his comrades in 
 Socialism by his consistent militarism. He sees 
 mankind as the creatures of circumstance, and the 
 basis of his attack upon modern society is a plea for 
 better human conditions. He does not blame any- 
 one for these conditions. They are all a part of a 
 system which is wrong. Robert Blatchford's mission 
 is to show people why this is wrong, and how the 
 wrong may be righted. Addressing John Smith, of 
 Oldham, the typical working man, he says : 
 
 " Your duty, it seems to me, is clear enough. 
 First of all, having seen that misery and wrong 
 exist, it is your duty to find out why they exist. 
 Having found out why they exist, it is your duty to 
 
 i8o 
 
ROBERT BLATCHFORD 
 
 seek for means to abolish them. Having found out 
 means to abolish them, it is your duty to apply these 
 means, or, if you have not yourself the power, it is 
 your duty to persuade others to help you." 
 
 The appeal of Robert Blatchford is to the humanity 
 and common-sense of men. He is convinced that the 
 human heart is finally good, but that it has lost its 
 way in a jungle of selfishness and ignorance. If one 
 could only make it realise this, all would be well. 
 That is his desire and his faith. That is the motive 
 behind the work of his life. 
 
 1908 
 
 i8i 
 
PAVLOVA AND THE DANCING 
 SPIRIT 
 
 IT is impossible to describe a great dancer or a 
 great dance — I mean in words. It can be done 
 in music, and Degas and one or two others have 
 done it in paint. More particularly is it beyond the 
 art of letters to describe Pavlova. There is nothing 
 upon which words can hang themselves ; she is 
 intangible as air, as light and as wonderful. Genee, 
 Polaire, and Isidora Duncan are also great dancers, 
 but it is easier to capture some of their character- 
 istics in a noose of words, because they have that 
 something which we call individuality. They are 
 dancers of a kind, individualists of dancing ; per- 
 sonality dominates their art. 
 
 Pavlova is dancing incarnate ; she is all the others 
 in one ; she is the very spirit of the dance, neither 
 classical, traditional, nor modern, but all three — 
 an ever-changing trinity of enraptui'cd motion. 
 She does not make you think of herself ; she sets 
 you dreaming of all the dancing that has ever been, 
 of all the dancing that is. Whilst watching her I 
 could not help thinking she was not merely following 
 the rules of an art, but that she was following the 
 rules of life. The leaves dance in the breeze, the 
 
 182 
 
PAVLOVA AND DANCING 
 
 flowers dance in the sun, the worlds dance in space, 
 and Pavlova dancing is a part of this cosmic measure. 
 
 Everybody in the theatre must have felt some- 
 thing similar — especially when she and Michael 
 Mordkin, her superb consort in the art, danced 
 together the Bacchanale of Glazounov. I imagine 
 also those dim segments of faces in the darkened 
 auditorium, many of them reflecting the frigid 
 morality of English respectability, would be touched 
 to strange emotions. Their staid owners would feel 
 a new wakefulness, recalling as in a dream all that 
 had ever happened to them of passion or beauty, all 
 that might have happened to them had they followed 
 their real desires, their sacred whims. You could 
 indeed feel the heart of the audience in its very 
 happiness linking itself with memory and regret, 
 for in the very temple of delight, as Keats knew, 
 veiled Melancholy hath her sovran shrine. 
 
 But for myself, regret was ever tinged with a fuller 
 joy. I felt all the laughter of the world coursing 
 through me ; I was pulled back into a younger period, 
 when men and gods were on speaking terms with 
 one another : 
 
 " And as I sat, over the light blue hills 
 There came a noise of revellers : the rills 
 Into the wide stream came of purple hue — 
 
 'Twas Bacchus and his crew ! 
 The nearest trumpet spake, and silver thrills 
 From kissing cymbals made a merry din — 
 
 'Twas Bacchus and his kin ! 
 
 183 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 Like to a moving vintage down they came. 
 Crowned with green leaves, and faces all on flame ; 
 All madly dancing through the pleasant valley, 
 To scare thee, Melancholy ! -* 
 
 The swaying form of Pavlova rhymed and romped 
 with life and joy, with love and beauty. O the wild 
 flight across the stage, the hot pursuit, the sweet 
 dalliance, and then the rich luxury of capture and 
 supreme surrender ! The very essence of life was 
 there : life so full of joy that it overflowed with 
 blissful abandonment until it sank from the only 
 pardonable excess — excess of happiness. 
 
 She dances with soul as well as body ; her beautiful 
 slight form is but the instrument upon which she 
 plays the psalm of life. And her face dances too, 
 dances in joy and fear, in surrender, and in the 
 rapture of accomplished passion. She is the first 
 dancer I have seen whose face also dances. Rarely 
 does one see such a vivid facial expression of absolute 
 joy, never before in a dancer. Most other dancers' 
 faces are too preoccupied with their steps. Pavlova 
 looks as if she has no preoccupations — she just lives. 
 For her there is neither future nor past, only the 
 mad rhythmic present. 
 
 That really is what dancing should be. Dancing 
 is rhythmic life. When life is most intense, when it 
 is master of its own destiny, then it sways and rhymes 
 and dances, it becomes lyrical. Dancing is the song 
 of the body, the lyric of form. It bears the same 
 relation to motion as the flower does to the plant : 
 
 184 
 
PAVLOVA AND DANCING 
 
 it is a phase of efflorescence, a sign of ripeness. 
 William Blake got very near the heart of this mys- 
 terious thing when he said, " Exuberance is Beauty." 
 People only dance when they feel the exuberance 
 of hfe coursing through their veins. And there is a 
 very real link between the Danse Bacchanale of 
 Pavlova and Michael Mordkin and the circling 
 scamper of the children on the village green to the 
 delicious eternal nonsense of : 
 
 " Here we dance — Looby Loo ! 
 And here we dance — Looby Light ! 
 Here we dance — Looby Lum ! 
 All on a Saturday night ! -- 
 
 But the conventional measures of the modern 
 ballroom are not dancing : they are as far removed 
 from the spirit of dance as an orgy in a modem gin- 
 palace is from a festival of Dionysos. The ballroom 
 is a fashion, like rinking, and it will go the way of all 
 fashions. It is a kill-time for those who are too 
 weary to live, an amusement for those who have no 
 life to spare, for people whose vitality is exhausted 
 or atrophied. Now and then you do see a bit of 
 genuine dancing in a ballroom : two lovers are 
 mysteriously moved by some strain in a common 
 waltz tune, and they begin to dance. But a whisper 
 immediately goes round the room, starting from the 
 dowagers' chairs, where elderliness is stamping on 
 happiness, and the burst of exuberance is called im- 
 proper ! 
 
 185 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 Far otherwise is it, however, in the " sixpenny 
 hops " of those who have no respectability to main- 
 tain. In the reeking atmosphere of the dancing- 
 rooms of the East End you will see dancing that has 
 little art, but much life. It is gross and graceless, 
 but it possesses what the ballroom lacks — passion, 
 joy. I often think that our comfortable middle- 
 class people should not attempt to dance. They 
 no longer live : their ideals are money, appearance, 
 prestige, and these things have nothing to do with 
 life. It is only those who have never had or who 
 have long since abandoned these ideals that can 
 dance : children, simple peasant folk, common East 
 End Cockneys, and the elect — those who create, 
 those who have the exuberance which is life and 
 beauty. But the rest are still fortunate, for just as 
 they live by proxy, so can they dance by proxy. 
 Pavlova and the great dancers are very kind — they 
 will dance before them, if not exactly for them. 
 
 " I will only believe in a God who can dance," said 
 Nietzsche ; and those who are alive to the real issues 
 of life will be with him. One should dance because 
 the soul dances. Indeed, when one thinks of it, what 
 are any real things but dances ? I mean the only 
 realities — moments of joy, acts of pleasure, deeds of 
 kindness. Even the long silences, the deep quiet- 
 ness of serene souls, are dances ; that is why they 
 seem so motionless. When the top dances most 
 perfectly it seems most still ; just as the apparently 
 still earth is dancing round itself and roimd the sun ; 
 
 i86 
 
PAVLOVA AND DANCING 
 
 just as the stars dance in the night. All art is a 
 dance ; the painter is but a ballet-master marshalling 
 the dance of light and colour ; a poem is a dance of 
 words ; music a dance of tones. And why, there- 
 fore, should we not have gods that dance ? Perhaps 
 Pavlova and her sisters in the great art will teach 
 them. 
 
 But maybe they dance already, only we cannot see 
 them. Who knows ? Let us not forget that religion 
 and dance have often gone hand in hand. There 
 have been many guesses at the riddle of life, and 
 there will be many more ; for mystery still lies around 
 us and about — it lies within us and above, it throws 
 dust in our eyes, and lays in our path barricades that 
 seem invincible. But we shall not cease striving to 
 peer through that veil of dust, to mount those barri- 
 cades : to light the lamp of vision, after our own 
 manner. I also shall guess. Indeed I have done so 
 a thousand times, as which of us has not ? Some- 
 times I fancy life is nothing after all but a glorious 
 dance, a carnival of motion beginning in dance, 
 continuing in dance ; and when the end comes it is 
 but a signal from the Master of the Ballet that the 
 dance shall begin again, for there is no end. Yes, 
 there can be no further doubt, the gods are always 
 dancing, and the great dancers are among the true 
 prophets. 
 
 1910 
 
 187 
 
THE LITHOGRAPHIC PORTRAITS 
 OF WILL ROTHENSTEIN 
 
 A S the hurrying years strip the inessentials 
 /\ from the records of man and his doings 
 ^^ jLwe find that high up in the scale of the 
 things that endure are the records of personality in 
 art. Men have always been curious about each 
 other, and three parts of art is an infinite capacity 
 for taking and comparing notes. And, in spite of 
 Attica, in spite of the Parthenon and Praxiteles, 
 the personal element in art endures. An artist 
 must of course be master of his materials first, 
 he must know of a certainty how to use the media 
 of his art with never-failing deftness and fastidious 
 care ; but once that is attained, it is the quality 
 of his personality which comes into sway. Great 
 vision must be woven in the texture of his skill, or 
 his effort were vain — a thing of a day. 
 
 Matthew Arnold's dictum, that poetry at bottom 
 is a criticism of life, is applicable to all art. And 
 this is just where the personal element comes in. 
 The artist does not only create, he discriminates. 
 Art is always a series of choices between definite 
 ways of interpreting life. This act of choice is an 
 act of criticism. It is an assertion of preference, 
 the most intensely personal assertion of the way of 
 
 i88 
 
WILL ROTHENSTEIN 
 
 doing a thing known to a man. And just as far as 
 the artist, once he is an artist, has an attractive 
 personality, to that extent does liis art interest his 
 fellows. That art which endures longest is a com- 
 bination of the most perfect balance between 
 technique and personality. 
 
 This is borne out in the arts of painting and 
 dra^^dng, in the interest taken in the actual pictures 
 of men and women, although personality need not 
 necessarily express itself in that way. But in the 
 portrait of a man we have a dual personahty, that 
 of the sitter and that of the painter, a fact which 
 explains the immense and constantly grooving in- 
 terest in the art of portraiture. Every year the 
 Royal Academy seems to grow nearer to the ideal 
 of the National Portrait Gallery, and it is an open 
 secret that painters, with few exceptions, could 
 hardly subsist at all but for this all-pervading desire 
 of the counterfeit presentment. 
 
 The art of Mr Will Rothenstein is largely confined 
 to the art of portraiture, but not necessarily of 
 known men and women. He is intensely curious 
 of personahty; he wants to record the innermost 
 secret of everyone he sees. He is possessed of an 
 inquisitiveness that will not let him rest. It is as 
 though he were a Joseph constantly meeting people 
 who are dreams to be interpreted for the under- 
 standing of Pharaoh — but in this case the Pharaoh 
 is himself. I doubt if Mr Rothenstein gives a 
 thought to any other Pharaoh. He dreams his own 
 dreams, and interprets them for himself. 
 
 189 , 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 The idea of interpretation always suggests itself 
 when considering his work. In all his pictures 
 there is a strong intellectual element ; he is a painter 
 who thinks as well as sees. But he is too much of 
 an artist ever to allow the mind to dominate the 
 imagination. At the same time, his more purely 
 aesthetic work is to be seen in those subjects which 
 demand less of the intellect, such as landscape. Here 
 his art abandons itself to the sensuous charm and 
 delight of his theme. The mind does not interfere 
 with the mysterious and beautiful arrangement of 
 eolom^ from a palette which seems to have come 
 from the Orient by way of Paris, catching, on its 
 way, some of the subtle and daring tones of the 
 French impressionists. 
 
 But in his portraits and studies of men, particu- 
 larly in that fine series of pictorial interpretations 
 of Jewish life in the East End of London, there is 
 no such complete freedom of the imagination. In 
 almost all of these paintings the artist is half a 
 philosopher. One is constantly reminded of Watts, 
 yet Mr Rothenstein is never so frank a symbolist, 
 and rarely such an idealist. Indeed, he is a realist 
 who sees beneath the surface of things. He is a 
 realist who gives significance to that often forgotten 
 reality, the spirit of man, rather than making a 
 fetish of his physical qualities. 
 
 There is, however, a still further resemblance 
 between the work of Mr Will Rothenstein and that 
 of George Frederick Watts; and again it is in 
 reference to portraitm'e. Both painters have made 
 
 190 
 
WILL ROTHENSTEIN 
 
 pictorial records of the notable men of their day, 
 and, as the years pass away, it will, without doubt, 
 be seen that the younger artist's work is no less 
 sincere and earnest in its motive, nor less capable 
 in its art, than that of the older artist, w^hose por- 
 traits are the chief glory^ of the National Portrait 
 Gallery. So important are these lithographs of 
 Mr Rothenstein's that some means ought to be 
 found for securing a complete series for permanent 
 hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. These 
 lithographic portraits are as representative of the 
 personal genius and abihty^f the age as it is pos- 
 sible for such a series to be. IMr Rothenstein has 
 practically drawn everybody whose name stands 
 for anything in modem imagination and thought. 
 The wisdom of his choice, and the excellence of his 
 portraiture, have been recognised in many directions. 
 This may be seen in the growing number of volumes 
 which are appearing graced with reproductions of 
 his drawings. One remembers the fine dra^ving of 
 Coquelin in :Mr Arthur Symons' " Plays, Acting and 
 Music," and that of Ernest Dowson in the collected 
 edition of the poet's work, also the study of Mr George 
 Moore which appeared as the frontispiece to " Sister 
 Teresa." 
 
 Most of the portraits were drawTi in the eighteen- 
 nineties, and it is of that lively decade in British 
 art that they are most representative. And very 
 fittingly many of them first appeared between 
 the famous covers of the Yellow Book. A folio, 
 with a selection, was issued later on by IMr Grant 
 
 191 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 Richards ; and those who are alive to any genuinely 
 worthy note in journalism will not easily forget the 
 first (and only) illustrated supplementof The Saturday 
 Review, issued for Christmas 1896, which contained, 
 among other treasures, Mr Rothenstein's portraits 
 of " John Oliver Hobbes " and Mr Beerbohm Tree, 
 not to mention a delightful lithographic drawing of a 
 lady, reproduced in a delicate shade of green, and 
 the bold and original cover design, produced in two 
 tones, and representing in strong, beautiful lines the 
 lady of the lithograph brooding over the page. 
 These drawings alone should make this unique 
 nimiber of a famous jom^nal an artistic treasure. 
 But apart from what, after all, is a remarkably 
 meagre pubhcity for such a series of portraits, the 
 main body of this side of Mi- Will Rothenstein's work 
 is practically unknown to even the cultured pubUc. 
 It must be noted, however, that this printing-press 
 publicity has been, from time to time, augmented by 
 exhibitions, where a more representative collection 
 of the drawings has appeared. Among the chief of 
 these displays was that at the Cartwright Memorial 
 Hall, Bradford (the artist's native town), where a 
 room was practically devoted to his lithographs. 
 
 The representative nature of the series could only 
 be conveyed on paper by a list of eminent names 
 which would fill a page or more. Among the leading 
 British writers there are drawings of George Gissing, 
 Thomas Hardy, Ernest Dowson, W. B. Yeats, 
 A. E. Housman, W. H. Hudson, R. B. Cunninghame 
 Graham, Joseph Conrad, John Morley , Robert Bridges, 
 
 192 
 
WILL ROTHENSTEIN 
 
 Prof. Gilbert Murray, W. H. Lecky, Bernard Shaw, 
 W. E. Henley, John Davidson, and H. G. Wells. 
 Painters and artists are represented by Walter Crane, 
 John S. Sargent, Charles H. Shannon, Max Beerbohm, 
 Aubrey Beardsley, and others. Then there are 
 drawings of Lord Kelvin, Alfred Russel Wallace, 
 and other leaders of science ; and musicians like 
 Sir Hubert Parry and Sir ViUiers Stanford. Besides 
 this, Mr Will Rothenstein has gone abroad, and 
 included many of the distinctive personalities in 
 literature, painting, and the drama on the Continent. 
 In this section there are Rodin, Coquelin, Fantin 
 Latour, Paul Verlaine, Adolf von Menzel, Haupt- 
 mann, and Ernest de Goncourt. 
 
 In looking through this series of drawings, one is 
 first struck by its amazingly representative nature. 
 Mr Will Rothenstein has really done more than Watts, 
 who practically confined himself to the highest 
 points of genius — those lofty peaks which do not 
 represent so much the active intelligence of an age 
 as its most eminent aspirations. A Browning, a 
 John Stuart Mill, a Newman, or a Tennyson, are 
 the consummation of a human period : they are 
 the symbols of accumulated genius and culture, and 
 more properly the final effect of an era, rather 
 than an era in being. Mr Rothenstein's pencil has 
 given us a fuller utility than even the brush of 
 Watts, because it has recorded for us an era in being. 
 He has not merely glorified what is already accepted, 
 but he has sought out and given personal significance 
 to energies that were, and in many cases still are, 
 
 N 193 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 to become more fully known. All the vital ten- 
 dencies of the decade covered by his series are 
 represented in these drawings. 
 
 Next, one is impressed by Mr Rothenstein's 
 draughtsmanship : the delicate and subtle strength 
 of his line, his amazing skill in the use of his materials, 
 and the consummate art with which he has brought 
 out the nicest possibilities of the lithographic process. 
 In this last alone he has produced a work which 
 must rank with the great series of lithographs of 
 Whistler, and on lines quite as individual as those 
 of that master. 
 
 Then one begins to realise the immense inter- 
 pretative nature of the series ; the whole activity 
 of the best elements in a nation's genius passes before 
 the eye in a procession of strikingly impressive faces 
 and nervous, communicative hands. There is one 
 feature that is common to all these portraits, it is 
 in the nature of a dominant refinement of the intelli- 
 gence of the subjects to a point of almost conscious 
 fastidiousness. Mr Rothenstein sees the personal 
 intellect and imagination of his age as a kind of super- 
 sensitiveness. Each of his subjects fulfils the idea of 
 the artist as the critic of life. Marius the Epicurean 
 lurks behind the features of all of his people, refining, 
 rejecting, and paring away, in their own several 
 ways, the grossness, the inessential, the otiose 
 matter, until the ultimate reality, the final beauty 
 of things is revealed. 
 
 This quality is obvious in almost every one of 
 the portraits — ^in the large workman-like figure of 
 
 194 
 
WILL ROTHENSTEIN 
 
 Rodin, no less than in the shrinking figure of Ernest 
 Dowson ; in the almost athletic pugnacity of Co- 
 quelin, and in the scholarly wistfulness of Robert 
 Bridges ; in the aristocratic aggressiveness of 
 Cunninghame Graham, in the almost supercilious 
 friandise of W. H. Lecky, and in the direct 
 and bluff attitude of William Ernest Henley, as 
 well as in the nonchalant and audacious pose of 
 Bernard Shaw. In all it is the same, revealing in 
 unmistakable terms the underlpng and natural 
 aristocratic nature of genius. Mr Rothenstein sees 
 and reveals the master. 
 
 Individually one is naturally drawn by personal 
 preference to one portrait more than another. But 
 for sheer ability and clever drawing it would be 
 difficult to find any that excel the Coquelin, with 
 its delicate suggestion of rude strength, and what 
 might be termed cosmic humour ; and the portrait 
 of Mr Charles H. Shannon, with its uncommon 
 pose and its rare and dainty arrangement of sin- 
 uously rhythmic lines. The portrait of Henley 
 brings out the virile personality of the poet, and 
 more especially the masterful qualities which went 
 to the making of the most discriminating of editors. 
 There are several drawings of Rodin, and one, at 
 least, is a masterpiece. It represents the sculptor 
 seated sideways, with his massive, intelligent hand 
 resting lovingly upon a torso, whilst his eye looks 
 critically towards a stooping model just suggested 
 in the distance. There is more of the real Rodin in 
 this drawing than in any portrait I have seen. It 
 
 195 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 indicates his immense power — ^the power of a man 
 who makes statues in the spirit of an inspired 
 workman, not for the sake of art and the valuations 
 of critics, be they never so superior, but for the sake 
 of some joyful and irresistible impulse towards 
 creative work. 
 
 The drawing of Mr Bernard Shaw is not so satis- 
 fying. Mr Rothenstein seems to be too conscious 
 of the challenging side of the playwright-philosopher. 
 He has allowed his intellect to dominate his pencil 
 overmuch. At the same time, he has caught the 
 piquant and combative attitude of our leading con- 
 troversialist. That of Mr H. G. Wells is a later 
 product, having been done so recently as 1904. It 
 is an excellent likeness, in heavier hne than the 
 earlier work, and gives a good idea of the thought- 
 burdened imagination of the novehst, peering 
 beneath deep brows into some distant Utopia, 
 with a note of prophetic earnestness. The clear-cut 
 drawing of Mr R. B. Cunninghame Graham is a 
 delightful interpretation of this writer and thinker, 
 cleverly suggesting his superior and impatient 
 attitude towards our social follies. And in the easy 
 attitude of the portrait of Mr W. H. Hudson, with 
 its fine imaginative seriousness, we can see with Mr 
 Rothenstein one of the deepest intelligences of our 
 time. 
 
 The note of realism in these drawings is always 
 coloured by the personal view of the artist. There 
 is a reverence in his attitude, a kind of critical hero- 
 worship, which not only sees but reveals. But the 
 
 196 
 
WILL ROTHENSTEIN 
 
 personality of the draughtsman never forces itself 
 upon one; rather does it take one by the hand 
 and place one in the same point of vantage as that 
 occupied by the artist. It is in the nature of an 
 invitation to look in such a way ; an unobtrusive 
 hint as to position and light. 
 
 1908 
 
 197 
 
A NOTE ON DANDIES 
 
 A DANDY is an artist whose media are him- 
 self and his own personal appearance. The 
 use of such materials has laid him open 
 to the contempt of sedate and uniform ages, but 
 his claims to existence are as justifiable as those of 
 any other artist. There seems to be some irritability 
 in those who dislike him because he shamelessly 
 exploits himself in his art, but surely he shares the 
 distinction with all artists. Every artist expresses 
 himself in his art, so does the Dandy, but he admits 
 it. Perhaps the opponents of dandyism feel, un- 
 consciously, that man is too insignificant and 
 ephemeral a material for the purposes of art, and 
 they may be right, but I very much doubt it. We 
 are here only for a very brief while, to be sure, but 
 is that any reason why we should not act our little 
 parts during the small period we are upon the stage 
 as splendidly as possible ? It is the tragedy and 
 not the fault of dandyism that it is brief, but the 
 dandy shares the brevity of his art with the actor, 
 the singer, the musical performer, the dancer, and 
 the orator. 
 
 The art of the Dandy is the art of putting forward 
 the best personal appearance, of expressing oneself 
 in one's clothes, in one's mamiers, in one's talk ; 
 
 198 
 
A NOTE ON DANDIES 
 
 it is, in short, the faculty of being able to become, 
 in the phrase used by Mr Arthur Symons to describe 
 Oscar Wilde, an artist in attitudes. Clothes are only 
 the outer envelope of dandyism; the real Dandy 
 begins within, his dandyism is the result of an 
 attitude of mind, a conviction that man is, as the 
 poets have often hinted, a creatm'e of splendour and 
 flame, and a desire to act accordingly. It is, hke 
 to^vn planning, an eminently social art, and should 
 be honoured and revered as such. Your true 
 Dandy looks upon his personality as a movement in 
 the pageant of life, to be planned and arranged as 
 carefully as a city in Utopia. He is, indeed, Utopia 
 become man ; his is a man in excelsis, man glorified 
 and peacocked into something as beautiful as a 
 sea-shell, as light, as dehcate, and as sufficient as a 
 feather. Which all amounts to one thing, and that 
 one thing is that the Dandy above all men is the 
 one most proud of being man. 
 
 He must not, however, be confused with the 
 mere creature of fashion ; such poor fellows are not 
 Dandies at all. The Dandy proper is beyond 
 fashion: but in a fashionable throng he never 
 looks out of place; that is because he is the in- 
 dividuahst and not the anarchist of dress. Slaves 
 of fashion are but parrots, they dress by rote. 
 Women have been the greatest offenders, but who 
 ever heard of a woman dandy ? The very thought 
 is ridiculous. Women are far too earnest, far too 
 rational, to break the laws imposed by custom. I 
 say "are," but should, remembering the militant 
 
 199 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY / 
 
 feminism of to-day, say have been, for women are 
 changing ; and, now I come to think of it, I have 
 noticed a certain new and individual quahty about 
 the gowns of those women who form the vanguard 
 of the revolt. Is this the beginning of female 
 dandyism ? 
 
 It has often happened that the fop has been 
 mistaken for the Dandy. One should be careful 
 of such pitfalls. Fops and Dandies are only super- 
 ficially allied. The Dandy, as I have hinted, 
 begins from within, his external splendour is the 
 consummation of some inward glow, of that intense 
 need of personal expression for the sake of expression, 
 which impels other artists to recreate themselves 
 in music, in painting, in poetry. He dreams only in 
 terms of himself and those things which are most 
 intimately associated with himself. The glory of the 
 fop, if such it be, is extraneous, superimposed. It 
 has been provoked from without, bought at a shop 
 at the dictation of a salesman, it is bespoke dandjdsm, 
 spiu-ious and insufferable ; and I imagine most 
 people who denounce Dandies are really denouncing 
 fops. Anyhow, I will be generous and think so. 
 
 At the same time I have a very promising sus- 
 picion that there is an honest objection to dandyism 
 among the great majority of people. The Dandy, 
 you observe, is an individual, and the crowd has 
 resented individuality ever since Dionysos last 
 appeared — ^and before. Perhaps the crowd is right. 
 I leave the question open. The individual may 
 absorb too much of life and his persecution is a 
 
 200 
 
A NOTE ON DANDIES 
 
 kind of supertax on the unearned increment of 
 personality. Be it so or not, I shall not strive to 
 reduce so elegant a theme to economics, only the 
 fact noted above must be remembered in all con- 
 siderations of the Dandy. 
 
 But such persecution as the individual has suffered 
 in the past has, perhaps, not been entirely the 
 expression of resentment against individuality as 
 such. A great deal of it has, I feel sure, been due 
 to the average man's traditional incapacity to 
 weather variations in his surroundings and his habits. 
 He gets into a groove, as we say, that is the preroga- 
 tive of the average man, and so long as his grooves 
 are inoffensive no one should gainsay him. The 
 Dandy would never do so ; he is not out to teach 
 or even to correct — ^the simple and effective act 
 of being is all in all to him. He requires his stage 
 and audience, of course, but he asks not the flattery 
 of imitation, but of admiration, and not always 
 that; the quality of what is said affects him very 
 little, enough for him that he is noticed. 
 
 Now the man in the groove does not like such an 
 attitude towards life. Life is real, life is earnest, 
 says he, therefore let us get about our business. 
 And so we should, if we feel that way. But what 
 if we don't ? Ay, there's the rub ! For if our 
 souls promote us to attitudinise in rare and distinct 
 apparel, to discourse elegantly of things that hardly 
 matter, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of whim 
 and fancy, who shall say we are not as much in 
 earnest as those who are content to be serious about 
 
 201 
 
ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 
 serious things ? So might the Dandy argue, and he 
 would be right. 
 
 Such a life, it might be reasoned, is open to grave 
 moral temptations, and the argument might be 
 substantiated by many apt examples. The Dandies 
 of the Restoration, for instance, had not the nicest 
 of moral habits. Sedley, Dorset, Buckingham, John 
 Wilmot, Earl of Rochester are shocking even as 
 historical associates. Bath, in the great days of 
 Beau Nash, was not above reproach, as we know. 
 And both Brummell and D'Orsay would be seriously 
 discounted by an ethical society. 
 
 But such lapses from the straight paths of moral 
 rectitude are not, after all, the outcome of dandyism. 
 The Dandy has too often been mixed up with the 
 rake and the cad, and I must admit there have been 
 very good reasons for doing so. But there are rakes 
 and cads who are not Dandies, just as there are 
 Dandies who are not rakes and cads. 
 
 Barbey D'Aurevilly, a Dandy himself, as well as 
 a philosopher and historian of Dandies, has thrown 
 the light of his own genius upon the question of 
 dandyism and morals, and, speaking as he does from 
 the inside, as one having authority, we must hear him. 
 "Dandyism," he says, "while still respecting the 
 conventionalities, plays with them. While admitting 
 their power, it suffers from and revenges itself 
 upon them, and pleads them as an excuse against 
 themselves ; dominates and is dominated by them 
 in turn. To play this twofold and changing game 
 requires complete control of all the suppleness which 
 
 202 ' 
 
A NOTE ON DANDIES 
 
 goes to the making of elegance, in the same way as 
 by their imion all shades of the prism go to the making 
 of the opal. This Brummell possessed. Heaven- 
 born elegance was his, such as social trammels often 
 spoil, and he was thus able to supply the capricious 
 wants of a society bored and too severely bent under 
 the strict laws of decorum. He proved that truth 
 which matter-of-fact people always forgot, namely, 
 if fancy's wings are clipped, they will grow half as 
 long again. His was that charming familiarity which 
 touches everything and profanes nothing." 
 
 Let us not then rush into the error which supposes 
 dandyism to be a vicious and an unnecessary thing. 
 Dandyism is an expression of social life ; it is social 
 life, in fact, at white heat, the union of all the shades 
 which go to the making of the opal. But although 
 the Dandy of history is generally a person of means 
 and elegance, even though his means have occasional 
 and tiresome aberrations and estrangements, there 
 is no real reason why the Dandy should have either 
 means or be elegant in the luxurious sense. Elegant 
 he will always be in the eternal sense, even though he 
 be threadbare, for his dandyism is from within. 
 
 We have all known those tattered beaux on the 
 fringe of comfortable life ; real Dandies they, who 
 contrive to be elegant on clothes a decade old, and 
 who dine off a chop and porter ^vith all the distinction 
 of a Brummell at the table of Alvanley's fat friend, 
 the royal Dandy, George IV. Such Dandies, although 
 unwritten and unsung, are in the great tradition, 
 eternal devotees of the art of attitude and personality. 
 
 203 
 
Note. — The essays in this volume have already appeared 
 either in Black and White, The Bookman, The Booklover's 
 Magazine, The Beau, The Idler, The New Age, The Morning 
 Leader, The Daily Dispatch, The Yorkshire Weekly Post 
 The Sheffield Telegraph, The Woman Worker, The Odd 
 Volume, or The Ti-amp, but they have been revised and 
 rewritten, some becoming entirely new essays in the process. 
 I am indebted to the editors of the aforementioned journals 
 for permission to reprint them. 
 
 The studies in the section called " Introductions," dealing in 
 
 the main with living artists, have been written during the last 
 
 five years, and although the writers have added to their works 
 
 since these essays were written I have not thought it necessary 
 
 to alter their original form ; but I have placed the date of 
 
 composition at the end of each study for the guidance of the 
 
 reader. 
 
 H.J. 
 
Books by Holbrook Jackson 
 
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 He also brings out well the great preponderance of the novels with a 
 purpose in English literature." — Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
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 for the most part, just and illuminating." — Westminster Gazette. 
 
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 " Mr Holbrook Jackson has written a really interesting and capable 
 book on ' G. B. S.,' which is all the better for being also quite enthusiastic 
 and quite one-sided. Mr Bernard Shaw is not only a brave, a detached, 
 and yet a responsible man, but he has this great quality about him, that 
 men are for him or against him. You cannot write an impartial life of 
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 for arguing for ' G. B. S.' He must have argued either for him or against 
 him. He would have written better philosophy if he had argued against 
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 very fact that Mr Holbrook Jackson's work moves the mind to destructive 
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 been saved much idle grumbling at Mr Shaw for that pervading didacticism 
 which, far from being a flaw in his art, is its soul and inspiration." — 
 William Archer in The Tribune. 
 
 " There is, I am glad to say, no evidence in this book that Mr Shaw has 
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