As soon, therefore, as the London season was over we began our preparations, which would necessarily be somewhat lengthy. From the beginning of August up to the end of October we met again and again at Beckett's house in Yorkshire, our proceedings being shrouded in serio-comic secrecy. In order that we might perfect ourselves in the use of our mathematical weapons, each day after breakfast the dining-room table was cleared and covered with a large green cloth divided into numbered spaces, like the green roulette board at Monte Carlo. In the middle of this was placed a large roulette. Rakes were provided of the true Monte Carlo pattern. One of us played the part of croupier, while to each of the others was allotted a certain number of counters indistinguishable in aspect from twenty-franc gold pieces. Each of us made his own calculations on cards provided for the purpose; each day we played solemnly for four hours on end, and then examined the results. We sometimes varied this routine by taking one of the Monte Carlo records, our croupier not turning the wheel, but calling out the numbers or colors seriatim which had actually turned up at the tables on this day or that. The general results were, I must say, most extraordinary. On only two occasions did the operations of an entire day leave any of the players bankrupt or without a substantial gain, though they all started their work at different moments, and the actual details of the staking were in no two cases the same. Throughout a long series of these experimental meetings, the winnings were as a whole about 20 per cent. daily on the total capital risked.

Encouraged by these results, we had no sooner mastered the system as a mathematical scheme than we promptly made arrangements for beginning the work in earnest. We all thought it desirable that, until it was crowned with success, our enterprise should remain unknown to anybody except ourselves. It was therefore settled that our journey should take place at once—that is to say, about the end of October, at which time Monte Carlo would be nearly empty, and we should run least risk of encountering loquacious acquaintances or of having our secret stolen from us by inquisitive and sinister rivals. We accordingly secured in advance—since all the great hotels at the time in question were closed—a suite of four bedrooms and a sitting room at a small establishment called the Hotel de Russie. Its appointments, when we arrived, proved to be so simple that the floor of the restaurant was sanded; but the rooms upstairs were comfortable; and not even at the Hotel de Paris could anything better have been found in the way of wine or cooking.

Accordingly on a certain night we, the four precursors, were duly assembled on the platform of Victoria Station; and Beckett, with the air of a conspirator, appeared at the last moment, thrust into our keeping certain notes of credit, and gave us his blessing as we seated ourselves in the continental train. Had we been agents of a plot organized to convulse Europe we could not have been in a condition of greater and more carefully subdued excitement, though there was not absent from any of us an underlying sense of comedy. In the dead of night we were having supper at Calais, and, scanning the few other travelers who were engaged in the same task, we were rejoicing in a sense of having escaped all curious observation, when Jerningham gripped my arm and said: "Did you see the man who has just gone through the door? Wasn't he your friend W——?" He had named one of the most intimate of the Catholic connections of my family, who was, moreover, the greatest gossip in Europe. Never would a dear friend have to us been less welcome than he. Happily, however, I was able to assure Jerningham that his fears were groundless, and we settled ourselves in peace among the cushions of the Paris train without having seen a soul who was otherwise than a stranger to all of us. Having reached the Gare du Nord at six o'clock in the morning, we scrutinized the faces at the exit with the same gratifying result.

Thus freed from anxiety, we enjoyed at the Hotel Continental a prolonged sleep, which was haunted by pleasing dreams. By eight o'clock that evening we found ourselves at the Gare de Lyon, disposing our belongings in a compartment of the wagon-lit which ended its course at Ventimiglia. My own arrangements having been made, I was smoking a cigarette in the corridor when a well-known voice over my shoulder was ejaculating my Christian name. I turned round, and there was the very friend whom Jerningham had identified but too correctly at Calais. I took the bull by the horns. I greeted him with the utmost enthusiasm; and when he asked me what I was doing I told him that I and three companions were going to amuse ourselves in the south of France till Christmas, and should—such, I think, was my phrase—have "a look in" at Monte Carlo as one incident of our program. I begged him to come and be introduced to my friends, as soon as our compartment was in order, and I managed meanwhile to inform them as to what had happened. In due time he visited us. He was full of good spirits and conversation, and one of the first facts that he communicated to us was that he was on his way to Monte Carlo himself, to play an infallible system. With sublime presence of mind we expressed a hope that we might meet there, adding that, if we did, he might find that the place had seduced us into trying a little system likewise. He was, however, so much taken up with his own that he had no time or inclination to propound any questions as to ours; and when he got out at Nice he never suspected that, so far as play was concerned, we were more than casual triflers.

When we reached Monte Carlo it was dark. The only vehicle in waiting was the omnibus of the Hotel de Russie; and into its well of blackness one other passenger followed us. Four hearts were at once set beating by the thought that this man might be a spy, who had already heard of our enterprise, and whose mission was to appropriate or else to thwart our secret. The following day two of us drove into Nice and deposited our notes of credit at one of the most important banks, the manager looking at us with an oddly repressed smile, as though he detected in us a new contingent of dupes. We went back to Monte Carlo armed with two small steel safes, one for such capital as was needed for our immediate purposes, the other for our prospective winnings. Jerningham, who had a curious talent for initiating intimacies everywhere, had meanwhile managed to ascertain from somebody that, if we desired to secure preferential civility from the croupiers, the right thing to do was to make each of them a present of fairly good cigars, gifts of money being naturally not allowed. This was done, and ultimately we began our play feeling as children do when they first put their feet into sea water.

We played in couples, one player calculating the stakes, the other placing them on the table. The couples were to play alternately, one giving place to another as soon as the winnings amounted to fifty pounds. When the total winnings of both reached a hundred pounds we stopped. We played it for that day no longer.

For three weeks the whole thing went like clockwork. We ground out our daily gains—a hundred pounds on an average—as though they were coffee from a coffee mill. But at the beginning of the fourth week the fates were for the first time against us. We lost in the course of a morning about half the sum which it had cost us the labor of three weeks to win. We were not, however, daunted. We resolved that for the future no couple of players should bring into the rooms more than five hundred pounds, and should this sum be lost we would suspend our proceedings for the day and start afresh next morning. This arrangement being made, our successes began again. A risked capital of five hundred pounds regularly yielded a return of 10 per cent. in not much more than an hour, and we had nearly recovered the whole of our previous loss when a catastrophe occurred owing to causes which had not come into our calculations. One of our couples, not finding that they were winning as fast as they had hoped to do, completely lost their heads, and began throwing money on the tables without any system at all. The result was that in less than a quarter of an hour every penny which they had brought with them had disappeared. Beckett, as the only person who could possibly lose through the enterprise, was promptly consulted by telegram. His answer was that he was coming out himself in a month or so, and begged us to stay where we were, but to suspend our play till the situation could be discussed more fully. By this prudent decision on his part I was not myself displeased; for system-playing, even when successful, I discovered to be a very tedious matter.

Meanwhile, in respect of amusements, we four were by no means derelicts. Empty as Monte Carlo was, some villas were already occupied, one of these being Le Nid, of which Laura, Lady Wilton was the mistress—a woman whose hospitalities were no less agreeable than herself. Having found out enough about us to show her that we were at least presentable, she inaugurated an acquaintance with us by sending a little box to myself, which proved to contain, on being opened, something in the nature of a valentine. It contained a spray of mimosa packed in cotton wool, and lying like an elf among the petals was a little sleeping bat. Lady Wilton a week before had appeared as the Evening Star at a fancy ball at Nice. In return for her valentine I bought a microscopic puppy, which, packed in cotton wool and inclosed in a box as the bat was, was transmitted to her by a florist with a card attached to its person, and bearing the words, "From the bat to the Evening Star." Among other friends whom I discovered at Monte Carlo, I may mention a certain family whom I had once known well at Homburg, but had never seen again till now—a father, a mother, and an eminently beautiful daughter. Their home at Monte Carlo was a villa, small, but so curtained with velvet that it looked like a French jewel box. It was smothered in Banksia roses, and it overlooked the sea. By one of its windows the daughter would play the harp.

At length Beckett arrived, bringing his wife with him. Apart from the matter of the system, their coming effected a change which to me was extremely grateful. The Becketts and I before long migrated from Monte Carlo, and took a villa between us for a couple of months at Beaulieu. As for the system, Beckett, who was by no means disheartened, played it himself for many nights in succession, and ultimately admitted that there were defects in it which its late breakdown had revealed rather than caused. Not long afterward he was persuaded into adopting another, commended to him by Butler Johnson, once a prominent Member of Parliament. This system, mechanical rather than mathematical, was based on the assumption that the roulettes used at Monte Carlo were in all probability not accurate implements—that the bearings, unless constantly rectified, would soon be so worn with use that the wheel during a long enough period would bring out certain numbers in more than their due proportion. Hence, anyone backing these—so the argument ran—was necessarily bound in the long run to win. This conclusion, reached by a feat of a priori reasoning, was due to the ingenuity of an English engineer called Jaggers, and it was verified by the fact that a system having this mechanical basis was ultimately, with astounding success, played by a syndicate of persons who, before the officials of the Casino managed to detect its nature, had won no less than eighty thousand pounds between them. The secret, however, was found out at last. Before the players were aware of it, the construction of the roulettes was amended. Each was built up of a number of interchangeable parts, the construction of no wheel being for any two days the same. The spell was broken; the players began to lose. One or two of them, suspecting what had actually happened, withdrew from the enterprise and carried off their gains along with them. Less prudent and more sanguine, the rest persisted till all that they had gained was gone. An Italian professor of mathematics, however, declared that, despite the officials, he had discovered how this system might be revived in a new and more delicate form; and Beckett, with renewed hopes, was induced to finance for a time the second experiment out of some of the capital which he had got together for his first. The money, however, melted away as though by a slow hemorrhage; before very long he refused to produce more, and the history of both systems thus came to an end.

But the pleasantness of our life at Beaulieu was sufficient to counterbalance the disappointments inflicted on us by Fortune at the gaming tables. Our fantastic villa was embowered in flowers and foliage. Buginvillaeas made a purple flame on the walls. An avenue of palms led down from the house to the flashings of a minute harbor, on which fishing boats rocked their gayly painted prows, while woods of olive made a mystery of the impending hills behind. Friends and acquaintances from Cannes often came to lunch with us, Alfred Montgomery and the Duchess of Montrose among them. Beckett's spirits rose. Singularly sensitive as he always was to poetry, I could hear him (for the walls which divided our rooms were thin) reciting passages from "Paradise Lost" in his tub. Though he had done with systems, he, his wife, and I frequently went to Monte Carlo for dinner, our inducements being mainly the chance of meeting friends whose scrutiny we no longer feared, and the beauty of the homeward drive by the Lower Corniche road. The Prince's palace, pale on its rocky promontory, seemed like some work of enchantment as we swept by in the moonlight, and our horses carried us into strange, fantastic solitudes, with mountainous woods on one side and the waves just below us on the other. In stillnesses broken only by the noise of our own transit, the murmur of the waves was merely a stillness audible, as they whispered along crescents of sand with a sound like a sleeping kiss.

The Becketts, however, had to go back to England some weeks sooner than they expected, and I was left till the expiration of our lease, to occupy the villa alone. It was during the weeks for which I was thus left to myself that a letter reached me from St. Andrews, announcing that if I wished to retire I was honorably free to do so, as a suitable substitute had been found. The news was extremely welcome to me. I had many books with me at Beaulieu, for the most part dealing with economic and social science; and once more, when I was left to myself, the study of these absorbed me, and led me to begin the planning of a kind of political novel, of which I shall speak presently. But my solitude was not enlivened by political speculation only. Two or three times a week I went to Monte Carlo to enjoy the society of the R——s in their villa, which I have already described, and which, still remains in my memory as associated with flowers and harp strings. Out of my intimacy with the R——s an incident arose which may be regarded as a fitting conclusion to the drama of Monte Carlo, so far as I myself was concerned with it. The R——s had a friend, Mrs. P——, a not very prosperous widow, who was spending the winter and spring with them. She was far from beautiful, and her manners perhaps were deficient in polish, but her temper was singularly sweet. She was willing to oblige everybody. She accompanied Miss R—— and myself on many interesting expeditions, and was pleased by our seeking her companionship. Otherwise she was much alone, and was left to amuse herself; her only amusement—so I gathered from her chance conversation—being the winning or losing of a five-franc piece at the tables. One day, when I called at the villa, I saw by the butler's face that something unusual must have happened. I learned a few minutes later that Mrs. P—— was dead. The cause of her death turned out to have been this. Having begun her exploits at the gambling rooms with winning or losing a five-franc piece occasionally, she had, unsuspected by anybody, succumbed by slow degrees to the true gambler's passion. In order to gratify this, everything she could sell—and it was not much—she had sold. Not many hours ago she had placed her last louis on the table, and had seen it disappear under the traction of the croupier's rake. She had nothing left in her bedroom but the clothes which she had worn yesterday, a hairbrush, and a bottle of laudanum. The bottle that morning had been found in her hand, empty. The last incident of my visit to Monte Carlo was her burial. In the mists of a rainy morning a surpliced English clergyman saw her put out of sight and mind in a little obscure cemetery. There were only two mourners. I myself was one; Miss R——, with her fair hair and her black dress, was the other.

A few days later I left Beaulieu for England by way of the Italian lakes. I had managed to hire at Nice a great old-fashioned traveling carriage—a relic of pre-railway days. By way of a parting dissipation I picked up the R——s at their villa, and took them with me as far as San Remo. There I joined the train, the R——s going back in the carriage. Next morning I was at Cadennabia, and Monte Carlo and the system, and Beaulieu and its Buginvillaeas, were behind me.



CHAPTER XI

"THE OLD ORDER CHANGES"

Intellectual Apathy of Conservatives—A Novel Which Attempts to Harmonize Socialist Principles with Conservative

In spite of the severance of my connection with the St. Andrews Boroughs, I found, when I returned to England from Monte Carlo, that my active connection with politics was not by any means at an end. Politics, as a mere fight over details, or as a battle between rival politicians, appealed to me no more than it had done during my experience of electioneering in Fifeshire; but presently by family events I was drawn once more into the fray. My cousin, Richard Mallock of Cockington, had been asked, and had consented, to stand as Conservative candidate for the Torquay division of Devonshire. His local popularity, which was great, depended mainly on the engaging and somewhat shy simplicity of his manner, on his honesty, which was recognized by all, and on his generosity and sound sense as a landlord. These latter qualities had lately been made conspicuous by his administration of those parts of his property which were now, one after another, being quickly covered with buildings. He was no student, however, of statistics or political theory; as a speaker his practice had been small, and he and his advisers asked me to give what assistance I could.

One night early in July I had, at a large ball in London, spent a most agreeable hour with a companion who was, like myself, no dancer, in watching and discussing with her the brilliantly lighted company. At last, catching sight of a clock, I found myself obliged to go. "I have," I said, "to be at Paddington at five o'clock in the morning. To-morrow I must speak in Devonshire to a meeting of agricultural laborers." She expressed approval and sympathy, and I presently found myself in the dimness of the still streets, happy in the thought that soon I should be among the smell of meadows and listening to the noise of rooks. The following evening at a village on Richard Mallock's property, his political campaign was to be inaugurated, and I was to be one of the orators.

When the time for the meeting came I found myself erect in a wagon, with a world of apple trees in front of me and a thatched barn behind, and heard myself discussing the program of "three acres and a cow," of which my listeners understood nothing, and I not more than a little. Compared with such an audience the Liberals of St. Andrews were sages. The most intelligent of the Conservative audiences in the constituency were those got together under the auspices of the Primrose League. But Conservatism even with them was no more than a vague sentiment, healthy so far as it went, but incapable of aiding them in controversy with any glib Radical opponent. I tried again and again during the following few weeks to call their attention to the sources from which our national wealth generally, and most of their own food, was derived, and particularly to the economic significance of a town such as Torquay, much of the wealth of which had its origin in foreign countries. In dealing, however, with these matters, I met with no response more encouraging than puzzled smiles; but whenever, for want of something better to say, I alluded to "this great Empire on which the sun never sets," I was greeted with volume of cheers sufficient, one might almost have thought, to have secured the election of a Conservative candidate on the spot. Besides myself, two other workers were active, who began their political life as Richard Mallock's supporters at Torquay, and who subsequently rose to eminence of a wider kind—George Lane Fox, as Chancellor of the Primrose League, and J. Sandars as secretary and adviser to Mr. Arthur Balfour. But they, so it seemed to me, found it no easier than I did to vitalize the non-Radical or temperamentally Conservative classes with any definite knowledge of the main conditions and forces on which their own livelihood depended, and which Radicals and revolutionaries would destroy. Of this state of mind I remember an amusing illustration.

Many Primrose League meetings, at the time of which I now speak and later, were held at Cockington Court, which was now a political center for the first time since the days of William and Mary. The proceedings on one occasion were to begin with a few preliminary speeches, delivered from some steps in a garden which adjoined the house. The chair was to be taken by the Duchess (Annie) of Sutherland, who for many years spent part of the summer at Torquay. Her opening speech consisted of five words: "I declare this meeting open." Subsequently George Lane Fox moved a vote of thanks to the duchess "for the very able way in which she had taken the chair." Never did appropriate brevity receive a more deserved tribute. These preliminaries having been accomplished, the business of the day began. The slopes surrounding the house were dotted with various platforms, from each of which addresses were delivered to all who cared to listen. The audience which clustered round one of them was soon of such exceptional size that I joined it in the hope of discovering to what this fact was due. The platform was occupied by two county members, both men of worth and weight, but not even the highest talents which their warmest friends could attribute to them would account, so it seemed to me, for the outbursts of uproarious applause which greeted from time to time the one who was now speaking. In the applauded passages I failed to detect anything more cogent or pungent than the general substance of those which were passed by in silence. I could find no explanation of this perplexing fact till I realized that behind the platform was a tall, greased pole, up which successive competitors were doing their best to climb, the victor's reward being a large leg of mutton at the top of it, and the applause being excited by the feats, not of the orator, but of the acrobats.

The word "acrobats," indeed, represents not inaptly the character which I had from the first imputed to the extreme reformers (whether Radicals or Socialists) as a whole. These extremists were, in my opinion, at once wrong and popular, not because they actually invented either the facts or principles proclaimed by them, but because they practiced the art of contorting facts into any shape they pleased, no matter what, so long as this amounted to a grimace which was calculated to attract attention, and which, in the absence of any opponents who could counter them by detailed exposure, could, by constant repetition, be invested with the prestige of truth. And why was exposure of the requisite kind wanting? Simply because the Conservatives as a whole were so ignorant that they did not know, or so timorous or apathetic that they did not dare to use, the true facts, figures, or principles by the promulgation of which alone the false might be systematically discredited. The need of a scientific Conservatism equipped with these weapons of precision was not so urgent at that time as it has since then become. But I felt it even then. I foresaw how rapidly this need was bound to be aggravated. It had haunted me even at Beaulieu, when I wandered among the sleeping flowers by the light of Mediterranean moons.

The difficulties in the way of formulating a true scientific Conservatism, which the masses shall be able to comprehend, I am the last person to ignore. There is the difficulty of formulating true general principles. There is the difficulty of collecting and verifying the statistical and historical facts, to which general principles must be accommodated. There is the difficulty of bringing moral and social sentiments into harmony with objective conditions which no sentiment can permanently alter. There is the difficulty of transforming many analyses of facts of different kinds into a synthesis moral and rational, by the light of which human beings can live; and, feeling my way slowly, I now attempted to indicate what the nature of such a synthesis would be. In so doing I felt that political problems of life reunited themselves with those which are commonly called religious, and with which, during my earlier years, my mind had been alone engaged.

This attempt at a synthesis was embodied ultimately in the form of another novel, which I have mentioned already, and to which I gave the name of The Old Order Changes. The scene of this story, like that of A Romance of the Nineteenth Century, was, for the most part, the Riviera, and the story itself was to a very great extent the product of many solitary hours at Beaulieu, during which Monte Carlo and the system became no more than a dream. The Old Order Changes, moreover, resembles its predecessor in this—that the love interest centers in a woman considered in relation to her higher beliefs and principles; but whereas in A Romance of the Nineteenth Century such higher beliefs and principles are those connected with the mysticism of personal virtue, they are connected in The Old Order Changes with a sense of social duty, as experienced by a well-born Catholic, to the mass of the common people in respect of their material circumstances.

The heroine, who had come across the writings of modern agitators, in which the masses are depicted as brutalized by an almost universal poverty, most of the fruits of their industry being stolen from them by the rapacious rich, becomes gradually possessed by the conviction that this picture, even if exaggerated, is in the main true. Such being the case, another conviction dawns on her, which troubles her nature to its depth—namely, that the Catholic Church—her own religion by inheritance—will for her have lost all meaning unless it absorbs into the body of virtues enjoined by its doctrines on the rich a corporate sense of their overwhelming obligations to the poor.

She lays bare the state of her mind to a highly connected and highly intellectual priest, Father Stanley (who figures in A Romance of the Nineteenth Century also), and asks him if he thinks her wicked. The priest's answer is No. "The Church," he says, "is always extending the sphere of duty as from age to age needs and conditions change. Political economy, as related to the conditions of labor, has indeed in our day become a part of theology—its youngest branch; and as such, I, a priest, have studied it. Every age has its riddle, and this riddle is ours."

He then goes on to explain to her that the relation of the rich to the masses is not so simple as she thinks it. The poverty which agitators ascribe to all mankind, except a small body of plutocrats, is, he says, neither so deep nor so universal as these persons represent it; and, though in part it may arise from a robbery of the many by a rapacious few, this is not the whole of the story. He points out that if a hundred years ago the whole wealth of this country had been divided equally among all, the masses would, as a whole, be poorer than they are now; and that most of the wealth which is monopolized now by the few consists not of abstractions which they perpetrate from a common stock, but of additions to it which they have made themselves by their own talents and enterprise. It is true, he proceeds, that if, having made these additions, the few gave them away instead of retaining them for themselves, as the principles of Socialism would demand, the wealth of the many would be so far increased for the moment; but here comes the practical question. If, of these additions, the few were to retain nothing—if exceptional talent secured no proportionate reward—would these additions, a part of which goes to the mass already, continue to be made by anybody? This might be so if the great leaders of industry had all of them the temperament of monks, whose one passion was not to get, but to give; but to suppose this possible would be merely to dream a dream. "It would be easier," he says, in conclusion, "far easier, to make men Trappists than it would be to make them Socialists."

Animated by this last argument, the heroine is led to dream a dream of her own. Let it be granted, she says to herself, that the leaders of modern industry capable of accepting the Socialist gospel are few, and will always remain few. Still there may be some exceptions; and it may not be unreasonable to expect that, under the influence of the Catholic Church, certain great factories might be assimilated to Trappist or Franciscan monasteries, the profits of which the monks would consecrate to social purposes, voluntarily living the lives of the poorest of the poor themselves. Here, she argues, we should have examples, at all events, by which all might be moved, though all were not fit to follow them.

This outburst of a girl's idealism is considered by the priest with a sympathetic, yet at the same time a cautious, interest. When, turning from the priest, she opens her mind to the hero, he regards some of her ideas as exaggerated; but the affection which he feels for her as a lover makes their appeal deeper. In A Romance of the Nineteenth Century, the hero's love for the heroine resembles the affection of St. Augustine for Monica—a love whose consummation is contingent on a mystical union of both with "the Selfsame, the everlasting One." In The Old Order Changes the passion is contingent on a partnership with her in some scheme of idealized political action for the social benefit of the masses. But circumstances soon arise by which the two are estranged. A mischief-maker, quite untruly, informs the heroine's aunts, who are her guardians—Catholics of the strictest type—that the hero is still carrying on an old intrigue with a beautiful Frenchwoman, now living at Nice. This gossip is passed on to the girl. The aunts forbid the hero to have any more communication with her; and the girl herself writes him a cold letter which is tantamount to an abrupt dismissal.

The aunts and the niece leave him to find out the reason for himself, which, since it is quite fictitious, he is unable to do. Having received their letters, and smarting under a sense of wrong, he starts for a walk among the mountains on the slopes of which his house, an old chateau, is situated. He sprains his ankle, and some strangers bring him home in a carriage. These strangers consist of an American general, who is a Southerner, his attractive wife, and a singularly beautiful daughter. Solitude being for him intolerable, he begs them to become his guests. A few days later they arrive, and round him, like a naive Circe, the beautiful daughter undesignedly weaves her spell. "Under her influence," as the words of the novel describe it, "the voices of men asking for spiritual guidance, the growth of a democracy uneasily chafing for change, dwindled in his ears till at last they were hardly audible." This act of the drama is, however, abruptly interrupted by family business, which recalls the hero to England. Meanwhile the Catholic heroine and her aunts learn that he was wholly guiltless of the intrigue at Nice imputed to him, and a kindly mediator discreetly gives him to understand that if in a week or two he would meet them at the Italian lakes, all would be forgotten and forgiven, if indeed there were anything to forgive. It happens that an Italian cousin of his has put at his disposal a villa in the middle of Lago Maggiore; and there his reunion with the heroine and her Catholic kindred is accomplished. Other friends, who are staying at Baveno, join the group, Father Stanley among them. In the chapel of the villa he, by way of a sermon, gives them a sort of address on the social problems of the time; and this throughout has reference to the sort of ideas or projects of which the heroine had already spoken to him.

He takes for his text the following words from St. James: "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Behold, the hire of the laborers, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth. If a brother or sister be destitute, and if any of you say to them, 'Depart in peace'; notwithstanding ye give not them those things needful for the body, what doth it profit? To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin." The priest then proceeds to the question of what virtue and duty are. "To this," he says, "there are two answers. The first is, that virtue and duty have for their object God. The second answer is, that their object is our fellow men and the health of the social organism, while our inducement to practice them is in part the constant teasing of the tribal instinct or conscience, and in part our imaginative sympathies, as stimulated by a glow of emotion which is consequent on our contemplation of idealized Humanity as a whole. Within certain limits," he says, "this second answer I take to be entirely right; but if there were nothing further to add, I maintain that it would be right in vain." Summing up the ideas of the heroine, Miss Consuelo Burton, he says that the main duty which the Church to-day enjoins on us is "our spiritual duty to the material conditions of the poor"—our duty to adorn the cottage, though not to destroy the castle. "Duty to the race as a substitute for duty to God is," he says, "worth nothing. It means nothing. But duty to the race regarded as a new and more definite interpretation of our duty to God is a conception which to us Catholics of the present day means everything. Though it relates to material things, it does not supersede spiritual. On the contrary, it represents the spiritual world taking the material world into itself as its minister, and the Catholic who realizes this will find that the echoes of the mass and of the confessional follow him into the street and mix themselves with the clatter of omnibuses. If any of you think that he or she individually can do little, after all, to alter the general condition of things, let them not be thereby disheartened. Let them carry in their minds this divine paradox, that it is far more important to every man that he should do his utmost for Humanity than it ever can be for Humanity that any one man should do his utmost for it."

Illuminated by thoughts like these, the hero and the heroine are once more drawn together; and when at night the guests go back to Baveno, and the hero is left in his island villa alone, he betakes himself to a boat, and awaits the approach of the morning. "At last," says the story, "he put the boat about, with thoughts of returning home, and there, far off, beyond the spikes of the mountains, he saw that the sky was pale with the first colors of dawn. There, too, was the star of morning, shining bright with a trembling steadfastness, and he knew that for him a star had risen also. On his spirit descended the hush of the solemn hour, which makes all the earth seem like some holy sanctuary, and there came back to him two lines of Goethe's:

"The woman-soul leadeth us Upward and on.

"Meanwhile on the sliding and glassy waters, that moved to left and right at the touch of his dipping oars, there began to flicker a gleam of faint saffron and rose color, and the breeze of the daybreak laid its first touch on his cheek and gently stirred a straying lock of his hair. The lights of Baveno, though still bright, looked belated, and the mounting saffron was clear in the dome over him. Thoughts thronged on his mind of many careers to which his life, with hers, might be dedicated. Visions also, though he knew them too bright to last, floated before him and made his being tingle—visions of great works done among the toiling masses, of comfort and health invading the fastness of degradation, and the fire of faith shining on eyeballs that had long been blind to it."

I am not alluding here to The Old Order Changes with a view to discussing its merits or demerits as a novel. I am citing it merely as a record of how my own social philosophy step by step developed itself, the problems of economics and politics being step by step united with those of psychology, of religion, of ambition, and the higher romance of the affections. I am dealing with what took place in my own mind as an example of analogous things which have probably taken place in the minds of most men who, however they may differ otherwise from myself, have been preoccupied in the same way. Thus the emotional optimism with which this novel of mine ends—the vision of the Old Order as capable of being born anew by a sudden reillumination of faith and new acquisitions of knowledge—represents, it has subsequently seemed to me, a mood analogous to that which possessed Lord Beaconsfield when he wrote his romance Sybil, or when he seemed to insinuate that all social strife might be ended by doles to the poor, distributed week by week through the almoners of manorial lords.

Of Lord Beaconsfield's visions this is not the place to speak, I am concerned here only with the growth and the defects of my own; and as to the general theory of things which is dramatized in The Old Order Changes, its merits and its defects seem to me to be these. As for its merits, if compared with my earlier works, Is Life Worth Living? and A Romance of the Nineteenth Century—in which no cognizance is taken of social politics whatever—The Old Order Changes represents a great extension of thought, social problems being brought to the fore as an essential part of the religious. If compared with Social Equality, it represents an extension of thought likewise, in that it shows (as Social Equality does not) how these two parts are connected.

It is, however, in two ways deficient. At the time when the book was written, the extremist party in England, though comprising many militant Socialists, was for practical purposes composed mainly of men who were known as extreme Radicals. A prominent representative of this class war was Bright. Another at that time was Mr. Joseph Chamberlain. Instead of attacking all wealth, like Socialists, most of them were business men who spent their lives in pursuit of it. They denounced it in one form only—namely, land, and land only as the inheritance of aristocratic owners. The extraordinary inconsistency of attitude by which these men were characterized created an animus against them in the minds of many—I myself being one—which, though far from being undeserved, was not sufficiently discriminating. As I pointed out in Social Equality—and the same argument was repeated in The Old Order Changes—the great modern manufacturer, whatever he may think about old landed families, represents the forces on which the increasing wealth of the modern world depends. And yet in that novel I was more than once betrayed into so far joining the Socialists as to partially accept or repeat their denunciations of the modern manufacturers as persons owing all their wealth to the plunder of those employed by them.

This extreme view is, indeed, corrected more than once by the priest; but it is nevertheless insinuated in certain passages in which the writer, by attributing them to the hero, seems to make it his own. It was not till I had carried my statistical studies farther that I was able to reduce the charge hurled by Socialists against the modern employers to what are their true and their relatively small dimensions.

Meanwhile I felt that in The Old Order Changes, as a synthesis of my previous writings, I had made my profession of faith as clearly as I then could; and not long after its publication I betook myself for a mental holiday to a country where I hoped to discover that modern problems were unknown.



CHAPTER XII

CYPRUS, FLORENCE, HUNGARY

A Winter in Cyprus—Florence—Siena—Italian Castles—Cannes—Some Foreign Royalties—Visit During the Following Spring to Princess Batthyany in Hungary

By the time of which I am now speaking Richard Mallock was Member for the Torquay division of Devonshire, and I often still helped him at political and other meetings in his constituency. Lauriston Hall, Torquay, which had been for a time my home, was let. I stayed on such occasions at Cockington, or somewhere else in the neighborhood. One house at which I often stayed was Sandford Orleigh, near Newton, belonging to Sir Samuel Baker, the traveler and Egyptian administrator, with whom I had for years been intimate. In his cabinets, or on his walls, Sir Samuel had treasures and trophies from half the savage or out-of-the-way countries of the world. One day in his study he took from a shelf a few pieces of marble—green, streaked with white, and said to me: "Those are bits of the precious verd antique. I picked them up among the mountains of Cyprus, where similar blocks were lying about me everywhere. Anyone who would bring this marble down to the sea might make a fortune in no time."

As Sir Samuel talked, the whimsical idea occurred to me of going myself to inspect the particular spot he mentioned, and seeing whether any enterprise of such a kind would be practicable. This idea, like Beckett's idea of his system, was for me at first no more than a plaything, but the very name of Cyprus had always excited my imagination, and the thought of the island having thus by chance been revived in me, I began to feel that a visit to it would be a very charming adventure, and that Sir Samuel's story of the marble, even if it should prove to be a myth, would at least be a plausible excuse for embarking on so long a journey. Moreover, it provided Sir Samuel with an excuse for writing to Sir Henry Bulwer, then governor of the island, and asking him to do what he could in the way of securing accommodation for me during my projected stay. Sir Henry's reply was to the effect that if I would so time my movements as to reach Cyprus in January, the Chief Secretary, Colonel Warren, would receive me as a guest for a month or so, and that during the rest of my stay he would himself entertain me at Government House. Posts to and from Cyprus were at that time extremely slow, and it was not till nearly Christmas that these arrangements were complete. Meanwhile, by Sir Samuel's advice, the specimens of the marble were submitted to a London expert. As I was now bent on going, his verdict, though not very favorable, did nothing whatever to discourage me. What mainly occupied my mind were thoughts of an island which was unknown to ordinary tourists, the history of which united the sway of Byzantine emperors with that of crusading kings, of Venetian doges and subsequently of Moslem dynasties, where the mountains were crowned with castles almost lost in clouds; where the walls of the marine fortress in which Othello lodged cast the white reflection of the Lion of St. Mark's on the waters, and where half the inhabitants prayed with their faces turned to Mecca and half with their eyes cast down before jeweled and gilded icons—an island, moreover, where I could watch and explore these hybrid scenes and pageants without any appreciable sacrifice of the comforts and the ease of London.

In this agreeable frame of mind, I left one evening the lamps of Charing Cross Station behind me bound via Brindisi for Alexandria, from which port an Austrian Lloyd steamer would ultimately bring me to Cyprus, after a voyage, incredibly slow, of very nearly a week. On my way out I encountered several acquaintances—Sir Augustus and Lady Paget, who were going back to Vienna, and were just visible in the gloom of the Dover boat; Arthur Paget, bound for Africa; and also several others, among whom were Edward Milner and John St. Aubyn, subsequently Lord St. Levan. The goal of these last was Damascus. We three slept at Alexandria on the boat which had brought us from Brindisi, and were next day rowed across the enormous harbor to a black craft, the Diana, which had just arrived from Trieste, and which by way of Port Said and Jaffa brought us in four days to Beyrout. There, after a day of sightseeing, we had tea with the English consul, whose house was very like a mosque. Milner and St. Aubyn were to sleep that night at a hotel and start for Damascus next morning by diligence. I returned to the ship alone, and I found myself twelve hours later looking at Cyprus from the open roadstead of Larnaca.

I remained in the island for something like three months, as the guest of Sir Henry, Colonel Warren, and other British officials. A year or so afterward I recorded my experiences in a short book called In an Enchanted Island. It will here be enough to summarize the various impressions and experiences which are there described in detail.

My impression on landing was one of half-forlorn disappointment. The winter that year in Europe was the coldest within living memory. Even the air of Cyprus had something in it not far from frost, and the treeless hills seemed blighted by the clouded and inhospitable sky. But a day like this proved to be a rare exception. Cyprus, as I knew it in the winter, was for the most part a land of what Englishmen mean by a late spring or an early summer when they dream of it. The evenings were chilly, but the days were warm and shining. They were sometimes, though not often, too warm for refreshment. The greens of the trees glittered, the mountains were scarred with purple, and the midday shadows of arcades were sharp as chiseled jet. My first host, Colonel Warren, had his home in Nicosia, a town in the middle of the island, and twenty miles from the sea. Nicosia lies in a great inland plain, and, as seen from the hilly road which slopes slowly down to it from the south, it resembles the pictures of Damascus with which all the world is familiar. Nicosia, however, has one feature which is in Damascus wanting. Among a forest of minarets is a great cathedral, used as a mosque since the days of the Turkish conquest, but built in the Middle Ages by Christian kings of the house of Guy de Lusignan. The town is a maze of lanes, to which ancient houses turn unwindowed walls, broken only by doors whose high, pointed arches often bear above them the relics of crusading heraldry, and give access to cloistered courts, the splash of secret fountains, and rockwork gay with violets. In a house thus secluded, and entered by such a door, lived Colonel Warren, my host, and under his roof, the morning after my arrival, I first definitely felt that I had left the West behind me, when I found that a noise by which I had been just awakened, and which sounded like the cawing of a rook, was that of the muezzin borne from a neighboring minaret and requesting me to adore Allah.

Colonel Warren was an ardent antiquarian, nor was he altogether insensible to the fascination of business ventures. He was not only eager to tell me whatever he knew of the architectural curiosities of the island, ancient and medieval, but he also offered me every assistance in my quest of the precise spot where, according to Sir Samuel, the green marble was to be found. He at once put me into communication with the owners of mules and carriages, with guides and with other persons whose aid would be necessary for me in reaching and exploring the mountains in whose fastnesses the treasure was concealed. He also introduced me to a charming professor from Edinburgh, who, in some official capacity, was excavating Phoenician tombs, and who, by way of taking a holiday, was willing to be my companion. Accordingly one morning we set out in a carriage which brought us to the foot of the mountains where the rough road, made by the English, ended, and where mules awaited us, on whose very disagreeable backs the rest of our expedition was to be accomplished. Sir Samuel Baker's maps and descriptions provided us with outstanding landmarks, which were more or less unmistakable. The spot which we were seeking lay high up in the clefts of a curious mountain known as "The Five Fingers," and was marked by a ruined church, a cave, and a lonely cypress tree. Our first attempt to find this spot was a failure. Our second attempt was successful. There could be no mistake about it—the lonely cypress was there, the cave and the church also. There, too, after a long search, we discovered fragments of stone—duplicates of Sir Samuel's specimens. But these were fragments only. Nothing could be found that was larger than a large pebble. The potential quarries of which Sir Samuel had spoken were children of his own imagination, and the only good they did us was to illustrate how easily practical men may deceive themselves—even when, like Sir Samuel, they are usually keen observers. We did indeed bring a few specimens back with us, but to the marble quarry as a practical project I had already said "Good-by." Let all disappointed prospectors learn philosophy from me. I said it without regret. I was on the whole relieved—for now I was free to devote myself to those pleasures of imagination which the life and the scenes around me had already begun to stimulate.

Before long each page of my life in Cyprus was like a page from an illuminated missal. I climbed to the mountain castle of St. Hilarion, once occupied by Richard the First. Through the traceries of its windows and from its towers I looked at the snowy summits of Cilicia across sixty miles of sea. I explored its stables, hewn out of the solid rock—stables not for horses, but camels. I examined its cisterns, hanging on the brinks of precipices. While on this expedition, I stayed with one of the judges in a lodge on the mountain side, and spent a night with him looking out on a garden of spices, and comparing the Septuagint version of the Song of Solomon with the English. On another occasion I came in a seaward valley to a beautiful monastery, whose refectory still was perfect, though there was no life in its silence but the life of oleanders peering in at the windows and half hiding from view the foam from which Venus sprang. Often in the early morning, on one expedition or another, I saw groups of peasants moving across dewy plains, their coats as bright as Joseph's, who, with their ass or camel, suggested the Flight into Egypt. When I journeyed for any distance by road my equipage was some old landau, drawn by five horses, and accompanied by three servants, one of these being my own, who spoke very fair English, and who had been born on the slopes of Lebanon. It was in this manner that, when I was staying with Sir Henry, I went from Nicosia to Famaugusta, a distance of fifty miles, which it took ten hours to accomplish. This was how Englishmen traveled in the days of William and Mary. Among the remains of Famaugusta I wandered for several days, its huge walls being still very nearly perfect, though they now inclose little but the huts of some Turkish shepherds, about fifty deserted churches, bright inside with frescoes, and a cathedral so profusely carved that it looks like a hill of flowers.

Within the limits of a day's expedition from Famaugusta were the remains—I was taken to visit them—not entirely ruinous, of the country residence of one of the crusading nobles. I found my way into monasteries still peopled by devotees, and saw in the eyes of many of them monastic faith still shining. In strange churches I studied, behind gilded screens and icons, magnificent copies of the Gospels, and read aloud to a sacristan this passage and that, asking him to read them also, so that I might adjust my pronunciation to his. On one occasion, from a height near Government House, I watched, if I may so express myself, a celebrated icon in action—a jeweled portrait of the Madonna, said to have been painted by St. Luke. On the plain below was the broad bed of a river, dry from continued drought. Unanswered prayers for rain had for some time been frequent and at last this miraculous relic had been brought forth from its hiding place, as a charm which was bound to effect what ordinary prayers could not, and was being carried along the banks of the river by a black procession of monks, who were followed—so it seemed to me—by half the population of the neighborhood. As these companies drew nearer, I gradually distinguished outbursts of distant shouting. I had arrived at the psychological moment. Far off, along watercourses lately dry, a streak of light was advancing like the coils of a silver snake. This was the river, which was actually coming down in flood. Presently, with a rattle of pebbles, it was pouring by below me. In less than an hour the portent died away, but left the memory of a new miracle behind it.

The only thoroughly modern thing in Cyprus at the time of my own visit was Government House, which is not in Nicosia, but outside it. It is built wholly of wood, and was sent out from England—a mere series of rooms surrounding a court, which was then marked out for a tennis ground. There was only one steam engine in the island, and (needless to say) no railway. These appliances not being there, nobody missed them. I myself thought the absence of railways pleasant rather than otherwise, and steam as an aid to industry was the last thing—so it seemed—that the native population wished for. The Duke of Sutherland, it appeared, had not very long ago thought of buying an estate in the southern part of the island and applying all the methods of science to the cultivation of early potatoes. He would, however, in order to insure success, have had to buy from the neighboring peasants certain way leaves and water rights, and for these they banded together to ask such preposterous prices that the duke, as they half hoped he would do, abandoned an enterprise by which they, then the poorest of the poor, would have been the first persons to benefit.

Sir Henry often discussed with me the economic conditions of Cyprus. The population, he said, comprised no class that in England would be called rich, and very few of the peasants, though mostly their own landlords, lived a life which an English plowman would tolerate. The inhabitants as a whole were certainly exceptionally liable to a class of diseases the cause of which is malnutrition, and I came, as I talked to Sir Henry, to see in Cyprus a very useful refutation of the doctrine that the masses are only poor when a few rich people plunder them.

Meanwhile it was a satisfaction to reflect that nobody in Cyprus could make trouble by holding up the rich to execration, the reason being that there were no rich to execrate, and the charm which the imaginative spectator found in the life around him was not likely to be broken by any very rude awakening. Sir Henry himself was not perhaps sensitive to romance, but he did all he could to aid me in my own quest of it, and until my time for quitting his roof came, one day followed another leaving behind it soothing or exciting memories, the colors of which even now have not lost their freshness.

On my way homeward I went from Cyprus to Florence, to stay with some friends who had a villa there. The time was Easter, but the weather was like a damp winter. I found there many acquaintances. Among them was a Madame de Tchiacheff, whom I had known in my boyhood at Littlehampton. Scotch by birth, she had married a well-known Russian, and her house, with its cosmopolitan company, was among the most distinguished in Florence. I and my hostess went to pay a call on "Ouida," whom I knew more or less by correspondence, but the coachman took us by mistake to the Villa Careggi instead. By the kindness of Madame de Tchiacheff I was made known to the Strozzi family, and we visited their monumental palace, which was not then shown to the public. With two other palatial houses I came to be acquainted also—one the home of the Russo-American Bourtolines, the other then occupied by Mr. Macquay the banker. The latter of these houses was specially interesting to myself as having been once the home of the then Austrian Minister, Baron von Hugel, whose younger son my cousin, Miss Froude, married.

The constant question which to me all these great houses suggested was, how were the fortunes made by which they were maintained and built? The Pitti Palace, which would hold the palace of the Strozzi in its court, was built by a private citizen, Luca Pitti, for himself. According to modern requirements it is too large for a king. I often thought that, were I an American millionaire, I would secure the services of a hundred of the most accomplished students of Europe and set them to examine simultaneously the business archives of Florence, and thus provide (as in a short time they might do) a mass of digested materials on which a complete economic history of Florentine wealth might be founded.

From Florence I went for a few days to Siena, where, with a completeness to which Florence offers no parallel, the Middle Ages spectacularly still survive. I visited, while I was there, the great castle of Broglio, which, standing among mountains on the brink of a wooded precipice, lifts into the air its clusters of red-brick towers like tulips. I visited also Cetinale—a strange classical villa, built by a Cardinal Chigi, and surrounded by miles of ilex woods, which are peopled with pagan statues. Returning to Florence, I discovered, with the aid of a large-scale ordnance map, a building equally strange, and so little known even to Florentines that our coachman had never heard of it, and often had to ask the way. This is Torre a Cona—half medieval castle and half classical palace. It occupies the summit of a flat-headed hill or mountain. It is surrounded by a circular park full of deer and statues. It is approached by an avenue of cypresses sixty feet in height, and between these trees, on either side of the way, are colossal horses rampant, beneath whose extended forelegs the carriage of the invader passes. I opened a large door in one wing of the house, and found myself in a miniature theater, with its semicircle of boxes decorated in green and silver.

My own days at Florence, however, were on this occasion prematurely ended by the breaking of a drainpipe in the villa of my valued hostess, and my consequent migration at very short notice to Cannes. I started at night, and in the small hours of the morning I had to change trains at Genoa. As I paced the dark platform, the air was bleak and wintry, and, looking back with regret to the shining suns of Cyprus, I took my place at last in another train, shivering. For a few hours I slept. When I woke I was less uncomfortable. The air, unless this was mere fancy, had lost something of its sting. I looked out of the window, and from what I could see in the grayness I guessed that we were somewhere or other between Rappallo and Spezzia. As the light grew slowly clearer the prospects were still bleak, but yet with the following of one chill five minutes on another some change was, it seemed, in progress. The gray air acquired a tinge of purple, the chill turned to warmth, the thin purple turned to a soft, enveloping bloom; and when the train reached San Remo a sunrise worthy of midsummer was shining on a world of roses.

Cannes, though the season was not far from its close, was as yet by no means empty. As I drove to my hotel the streets were alive with carriages, white skirts, and the shining of red sunshades. I was soon asked to participate in a number of forthcoming dissipations, the first of these being a tea party given by Philip Green at his villa, "La Foret," which was close to my own doors. The company comprised a charming and interesting group of French ex-royalties, and a live German king, who looked like a commercial traveler. This party remains in my mind as though it were a vignette on the last page of a diary, the principal entries in which related to a land of which Catherine Cornaro was the last royal ruler, and whose last democracy was democracy as understood by the doges.

On the whole, my expedition to Cyprus, which, together with its two sequels, had occupied about four months, did for me more than I had ever seriously expected. It was at once a stimulus and a rest. I returned to England in May, pleased with the prospect of enjoying a couple of months of London, after which, in Scotland and elsewhere, I hoped to resume my study of political and social problems, and restate them in forms which politicians might find useful. This labor was, however, often interrupted by the pressure of family business, which would call me back for a week or ten days to Devonshire. When the more urgent details were for the time settled, as they were toward the end of the year, I went once more to Cannes, and subsequently to the Cap d'Antibes, being one of a small party who were to stay at the same hotels and lunch and dine in private. No such arrangement could possibly have prospered better. I had, as I knew I should have, much time to myself, and among my luggage was a boxload of statistical Blue Books, which formed my companions in hours of industrious solitude. We made a number of expeditions to old towns in the hills, one of our frequent companions being Father Bernard Osborne, the Catholic nephew by marriage of Mr. Froude the historian, and son of Rev. Lord Sidney Godolphus Osborne, then the most stalwart choregus of ultraevangelical Protestantism. Another frequent companion was Miss Charlotte Dempster, famous as a writer of novels—especially of one, Blue Roses, the scene of which was, oddly enough, Cockington. Miss Dempster, whose mere presence was a monument to her own celebrity, was much given to the cultivation of royalties, and which was to bring to her villa the presence of a reigning sovereign. So important did she deem the occasion that, before the potentate was due, she got together the ladies whom she had honored with an invitation to meet him, and instructed them as to how, in his august presence, they should demean themselves. The instructions had been given, and had been followed by an expectant hush, when sounds in the hall were heard like those of the Second Advent. "Now, ladies," said Miss Dempster, solemnly, "rise." The ladies rose like one man, the portals were thrown open, and a loud voice announced a shy little pink Welshman, Mr. Hugh Price Jones, who had innocently looked in for the purpose of a familiar call.

My original intention, when I joined my friends at Cannes, had been to remain on the Riviera till April, and then go back to England, but I received one morning a letter which suggested a project of a more adventurous kind, the thought of which stirred me as much as my last year's voyage to Cyprus, though it would not geographically take me to any such remote distance.

This came about as follows. Among the country houses of England with which I became familiar soon after leaving Oxford was Eaglehurst, situated on the Solent and immediately facing Cowes. It was then occupied by Count and Countess Edmund Batthyany, subsequently Prince and Princess. The countess, who had seen much of the diplomatic life of Europe, was a shrewd, kindly, and a most agreeable woman, who spoke English like a native. Her husband, who had been educated at Eton, was English in all his tastes and at Cowes he was an illustrious character, on account of the many victories of his racing yacht Kriemhilda. From the Cowes Week till the middle of September he kept open house at Eaglehurst, where for ten days or a fortnight I had many times been his guest. All kinds and degrees of ornamental and agreeable people, from archdukes downward, flocked to Eaglehurst from The Island, and made day after day a garden party on its lawns. When the count, on the death of his father, succeeded to the family honors, he gave up his lease of Eaglehurst, and the now Prince and Princess took up their abode at the castle of Koermend in Hungary. The Prince subsequently discovered that Vienna was more to his taste. The Princess, however, preferred Koermend, which nothing would induce her to abandon, and there she invited a number of her English friends to visit her. I was one of the number. Her invitation was often renewed, but for this reason or that I had never been able to accept it. I had, indeed, put the matter quite out of my mind when, during my visit at Cannes, I heard from her once again. "I saw, in some paper," she said, "that you were going to be at Cannes for the winter. Come on to me afterward and I will show you a Hungarian spring."

If any country had ever roused in my imagination more interest than Cyprus, that country was Hungary. Of all European countries I gathered that it was the least progressive; that all sorts of impossible things might happen in its enchanted forests; that the rulers were still noble; that the peasants were still contented (a fact which they signalized by kissing their lords' hands), and that nothing was very different from what it had been before the first French Revolution. Here was temptation too strong to resist. I was asked to be a guest at Koermend from April till the end of May. I wrote to say I would come, and when the time arrived I went.

I was happy in having with me an admirable Austrian servant who had been in the country before, and knew more or less of its ways. I found his resources inexhaustible, except on one occasion. I stayed on the way at Vicenza, for the purpose of seeing some of its Palladian palaces, and I asked him, when I reached the hotel, to find some guide or waiter who spoke either French or English. He could find no one who knew a syllable of one tongue or the other. Next morning, however, he had secured an Italian native who spoke and understood German. Here was all I wanted. I spoke English to my servant, he spoke German to the Italian, the Italian spoke to the people of whom I wanted to make inquiries. This arrangement, I found, was productive of great advantages. Having made notes of the palaces I wished to see, I told my Italian in each case to inquire whether an English gentleman, much interested in architecture, might be privileged to visit the interior, of the beauty of which he had heard much. The fact that I was making my rounds with a retinue of two attendants was accepted as such a guaranty of my own good character and importance that I was admitted with the utmost courtesy to stately and interesting interiors, from the portals of which I should otherwise have been driven with suspicion and ignominy.

Having seen what I could at Vicenza, I spent a night at Treviso, whence, having got up before sunrise, I drove in a weeping morning to the wonderful Villa Maser, about twenty miles away—the villa whose halls and chambers are gorgeous from end to end with the frescoes of Paul Veronese, and whose tutelary gods look out over the vastness of the Lombard plains, though their view is slightly impeded by the bulk of a Renaissance church. That evening I ensconced myself in an ill-lit train, which, passing close to Venice and crossing the Austrian frontier, brought me and my servant to a strange little medieval town, where we slept in an arcaded hostelry which would not have seemed strange to Erasmus. I halted here because in the neighboring wonderland is, as I knew from descriptions, a castle more fantastic than any fancy of Albert Duerer's—the high-perched castle of Hoch-Osterwitz. I spent next day in exploring it. It outdid all my dreams. Reached by a corkscrew road which, passing through strange gatehouses, winds upward round an isolated hill resembling a pine-clad sugar loaf, the castle covers the summit. It suggested Tennyson's line to me: "Pricked with incredible pinnacles into heaven." Not so large or terrific as St. Hilarion, it inflicts perhaps on the imagination a yet acuter twinge, for St. Hilarion belongs to an age so wholly dissociated from our own that the distance between them is beyond the reach of measurement. Hoch-Osterwitz, on the other hand, though in consequence of its inconvenient position its owners no longer lived in it, was still not wholly derelict. Its roofs were watertight; a portion of it was occupied by a caretaker; two of its halls were full of neglected armor; and some fragments of ancient furniture survived in a cell-like bedroom which were sufficient for the baron when he came—as from time to time he did—to see the caretaker, a sort of steward, on business. The life of a distant age still smoldered within the ancient walls like a fire not quite extinguished, and the nerves of the present and of the past formed one living and unbroken tissue. A strange example of this fact revealed itself to me when, wandering in a rough courtyard, I noticed a little building which jutted out over a precipice. I opened the door, and discovered a Lilliputian chapel with seats in it for some twenty people. Facing me was an altar trimmed with decaying lace and supporting a mildewed breviary, and before it, in full armor, with gauntleted hands outstretched, was the effigy of a kneeling knight. He had knelt there as an image of prayer for more than three centuries. When sightseeing was over, and we descended to the world below, my excellent servant said to me, "Ah, sir, if these trees could talk, what strange things they could tell us!" Resuming our journey that evening, we reached Gratz by midnight, where I slept in a lofty bedroom of the days of Maria Theresa. By the following afternoon I was at Koermend, drinking tea with the Princess, and answering her many questions—for she was an unappeasable gossip—about old English friends.

The castle of Koermend lies in a great plain. On one side of it is a park planted in radiating alleys, according to the taste of Le Notre. On the opposite side its precincts abut on the market place of a small town, and from the south and north it is approached by two poplar avenues which together traverse the Batthyany territory for something like thirty miles in an absolutely straight line. The dwelling house is a large, square block, with a courtyard in the middle and a tower at each angle. One of its frontages forms the side of a forecourt flanked by grandiose outbuildings—estate offices, stables, and a great frescoed ballroom. Elsewhere round the house was a very untidy flower garden, which half the old women of the little town spent, so it seemed to me, most of their days in weeding—herein reviving my recollections of Dartington Hall and Denbury. Indeed, throughout my whole stay at Koermend country life in Hungary was constantly reminding me of what country life was during my own early days in Devonshire. These likenesses gave piquancy to the points of difference. Koermend, though containing a good deal of English furniture, and a certain amount of valuable, if not very valuable, tapestry, was not well furnished according to English standards. The stonework of the great staircase leading to the principal floor was unpolished and rude, and the walls were rudely whitewashed. My own bedroom, which in many ways was delightful, was reached by a vaulted passage so cold and draughty that the Princess advised me always to wear my hat when I traversed it. There was not a bell in the house, and, if I had not had my own servant with me, who was placed in a room near mine, I should have been helpless. And yet the doors of this dwelling were guarded by a porter in crimson robes, who wielded a staff of office topped by a prince's coronet. Most of the dishes at dinner might have come from some rough farmhouse, but the pastry could hardly have been equaled by the finest chef in Paris, while the walls of the circular dining room were daubed with theatrical pillars, so that it looked like a ruined temple on the stage of some company of strolling players in a barn.

Other contrasts and other notable things I discovered as the days went by. The whole of the lower portion of one side of the house was a museum of family archives, many of them going back to the beginning of the fourteenth century, and most of the attic floor—a kind of museum likewise—was crowded with precious spoils taken by the Batthyanys from the Turks—jeweled swords and muskets, horsecloths sewn with emeralds, and pavilions, still splendid, which once had sheltered Pashas in the field. Another curiosity was a theater still displaying the scenery which had been painted for some private performance before the end of the eighteenth century.

During the first week of my visit the Princess and I were alone, and considerately for most of the day she left me to my own devices. I had brought out with me to Cannes a diary of my life in Cyprus, and, inspired by my present surroundings, I set myself to begin a task which more than once I had contemplated—the task of working my notes into a small coherent book. I very soon found this pursuit absorbing, and my hostess realized that my entertainment would be far from burdensome to herself. Meanwhile when we were together I was never weary of questioning her with regard to Hungarian life. She told me all sorts of quaint and curious things. She told me of robbers who still haunted the forests—of forest gypsies whose lives were a mixture of theft and music, and who often twanged their instruments in a tavern near the castle gates. She told me of former Batthyanys and of other castles once possessed by them. She told me how the latest alterations of Koermend had been made to satisfy the whims of a beautiful French mistress whom a Batthyany had brought there from the court of Louis Quatorze. Sometimes she asked to dinner a priest and also one of the agents called Molna, in whom she reposed great confidence. When I was talking with the agent the Princess played the part of interpreter. The priest and I took refuge in bad Latin. I copied his pronunciation, and we both of us threw Ciceronian language to the winds. On the whole we were mutually intelligible, and we differed so favorably from the talkers of the fashionable world that we both of us meant a great deal more than we said. One of the questions as to which I was most anxious for information was whether there were in the neighborhood any other old castles, a visit to which I might find interesting. Neither the Princess, the priest, nor the agent on the spur of the moment had very much to tell me. At all events I found out presently for myself much more than they could tell me.

Adjoining the dining room was a small oval library, the contents of which the Princess had, oddly enough, never been at the trouble of examining. I found that they consisted largely of magnificent French folios, consecrated entirely to descriptions and elaborate engravings of court life in Paris as it was under Louis Quinze—of royal balls, of banquets and garden fetes, and of the chief hotels in the Faubourg—not only of their architecture, but of their furniture also, and even of the manner in which the furniture was arranged. Of these pictures some of the most curious were those which represented balls or other great entertainments as they would have appeared to the spectator had the facades of the buildings in which they took place been removed, and the halls, rooms, and even the servants' staircases been revealed in section, like the rooms in a doll's house when the hinged front swings open. In one compartment kitchen boys would be carrying up dishes from below to magnificent footmen on a landing. In another some powdered lady, close to the dividing wall, would be offering her eyes and patches to the homage of some powdered beau. With pictures such as these last the Princess was specially pleased. I brought a number of the great volumes into the drawing-room, and we spent in examining them many pleasant evenings.

But I presently found in the library one which, much humbler in appearance, was to myself of much more immediate interest. It was smaller in size, and its binding was stained and broken. This, too, was full of pictures. As pictures they had no great merit, but together they made up the prize for which previously I had looked in vain. This book, published about the year 1680, consisted entirely of bald but careful engravings of the principal castles of Hungary, some of them in ruins, but most of them still inhabited. This book I showed to the Princess likewise, having marked the castles which apparently were not very far from Koermend, and asked her if they still existed, and whether a visit to any of them would be practicable. Though she had heard of some of them, her own knowledge was vague, but she passed the book on to Molna. Many of these castles Molna knew by name. Some of them he had seen, some of them were still inhabited, their aspect, so he reported, being practically indistinguishable from that represented in the old engravings. He picked out five or six as being well within the compass of a day's or a two days' expedition. If, said the Princess, I wished to see these places I might as well begin doing so at once, as she was before long going to receive some visitors whom she trusted that I would help her to entertain. Matters were arranged accordingly. She placed a carriage and four brisk horses at my disposal, and under Molna's advice my explorations began.

Most of the great castles of Hungary remained veritable castles long after castles in England had been transformed into halls and manor houses. The reason was that constant wars with the Turks made it still necessary that every great house should be a fortress. Thus it came about that the ornaments and luxuries of life—many of them under French influence—developed themselves within walls approachable only by drawbridges; that boudoirs were neighbored by towers loopholed for musketry; and that under smooth lawns and orangeries rocks were hollowed into caverns in which on occasion regiments of troops could hide. One of the greatest of these great castles, Riegersbourg, was refortified in the days of Pope and Addison. It covers an elevated plateau of which every side is precipitous, and above the entrance arch is a white marble tablet on which, in very bad Latin, the builder, Baron Hammer Purgstall, bewails the fact that the rocks by their irregular shape have caused him to violate the rules of classical architecture. Of such castles I visited as many as I could. In all of them, as though by some enchantment, the present had become the past. The unrest of western Europe in the modern sense was dead. In dining rooms trays of the finest Japanese lacquer formed a background for oaken tables into which the beard of Barbarossa might have grown. Knights in armor kept watch over billiard tables whose green baize had survived the fadings of two hundred years. For me this half-visionary world held the same intoxicating spell that many ears discover in Wagner's music.

The Princess, when I described these scenes to her, showed a genuine though rather faint interest. At all events, before very long my explorations were interrupted by the arrival of some of her promised guests. These—a brother and sister—were in some ways modern enough, but in one way they suggested the period of Wilhelm Meister. They brought with them not only their servants. They brought with them also a retinue of two musicians, who emerged from their quarters in the evening, and played to us after dinner. But we had other music besides. The weather by this time had grown rapidly warmer, and, when these performers had retired, we went out on a balcony overlooking the great forecourt, and from some unseen quarter beyond the castle walls came night after night the vibrations of a gypsy band. Nor was this the only sound. From the frondage of the park close by there would come in answer to it the early notes of the nightingales.

The first installment of visitors, with their attendant musicians, having departed, their places were presently taken by a distinguished Hungarian diplomat, Count —— and his wife. When I say of the count, who spoke English perfectly, that one could not distinguish him from a highly placed English gentleman, I am paying him, no doubt, an insular, but I mean it to be a sincere, compliment.

But the Princess had still another guest in reserve, on whose qualities, so I judged from her tones, she set even a higher store. This was a Hungarian lady, young, well born, and married, but unfortunately neglected by her husband, although she was extremely beautiful. As my mind was much engaged with the thoughts of old castles, and also with the composition of my own little work on Cyprus, I paid no great attention to what the Princess said in praise of this guest whose advent was now approaching. But when the lady arrived I felt that the praise was justified. As she and her husband are by this time beyond the reach both of praise and blame, I may say of her without fear of impertinence that she was a model of innocent beauty, that her conversation was as charming as her expression, and her dresses as charming as her conversation. I am myself not much addicted to cards, but when she proposed in the evenings to teach me the Hungarian game of Tarok I should not have been human had I failed to become her pupil. But I was never long in her company without being conscious of a feeling that she was a woman who, through no fault of her own, had already had a history, or was certain to have one some day. This feeling did not mislead me. A year later it was justified. I learned, by accident, that her history had been short, forlorn, and fatal. Its hidden actualities, reconstructed by my own imagination, I afterward combined in my novel A Human Document.



CHAPTER XIII

TWO WORKS ON SOCIAL POLITICS

The Second Lord Lytton at Knebworth—"Ouida"—Conservative Torpor as to Social Politics—Two Books: Labor and the Popular Welfare and Aristocracy and Evolution—Letters from Herbert Spencer

My visit to Cyprus one year, and my visit to Hungary the next, were both of them retreats from the life of political and even philosophical thought. They were frank acts of truancy in the regions of pure romance; where life, individual and social, is a spectacle to be enjoyed, not a problem of which thinkers compete in devising an explanation. But on returning from Hungary to England the practical affairs of the moment met me again halfway, at Vienna, where for a day or two I broke my journey. My acquaintances at Vienna were few, but they included Sir Augustus and Lady Paget at the Embassy, whom I had last seen at midnight on the deck of the Dover packet when I was bound for the shores of Cyprus more than a year before. Ambassadors, if they know their business, are necessarily preoccupied with the present, and when lunching or dining with Sir Augustus it was not possible to forget it. It was all the more impossible because on these occasions there was another diplomat present, also an old acquaintance—Sir Henry Drummond Wolf, who happened to be then on his way home from Persia, and who was voluble on questions of international, and especially of English, politics. So far, however, as my own mood was concerned, this dissipation of romance by realities was a more or less gradual process. Even when I was again in England my inclinations to the life romantic—to what Virgil (I think) calls the "amor ulterioris ripae"—survived for many months the new recall of my mind to the philosophies of prosaic action.

As an illustration of this fact I remember a weekend visit which I paid that summer to Robert, the second Lord Lytton, at Knebworth. The occasion was marked by the coappearance of things romantic and practical in more ways than one. On the day of my arrival one of the first topics discussed was "Ouida," who at that time was in England, and had been staying at Knebworth only the week before. "Ouida's" view of life was nothing if not romantic. Lytton, during the previous spring, had been spending some weeks in Florence. He was quite alone; and "Ouida," who, apart from her affectations, was a very remarkable woman, had had no difficulty in securing his frequent company at her villa, where she fed him at an incredible price with precociously ripe strawberries. On her memory of these tender proceedings she had built up a belief that his nature had been emptied of everything except one great passion for herself, and she had actually come to Knebworth convinced that a single word from her would tear him from the bosom of his family and make him hers alone. The magic word was said. The expected results had, however, failed to follow—perhaps because the word, or words, had not been very happily chosen. They had been these: "Why don't you leave this bourgeois man-and-wife milieu behind you and prove in some Sicilian palace what life may really mean for people like you and I?"

On the occasion of the same visit another meeting between romance and reality was this: Knebworth was originally a dignified but plain structure, built (I should say at a guess) in the time of Charles II; but, as is well known, the first Lord Lytton (the novelist), inspired by the taste of his time, and aided by inexhaustible stucco, metamorphosed it into the semblance of a pinnacled castle or abbey, the old dining room reappearing in the form of a baronial hall. One evening after dinner I, my host, and a certain Admiral B—— happened to be in the hall alone. While the admiral was reading a letter, my host drew me aside and gave me an amusing description of the rise of the admiral's family. His grandfather, having accumulated a substantial fortune as a solicitor, discovered a ruin—a small tower in France—the name of which was identical with his own. This ruin he bought, and declared that it was the cradle from which his own family sprang. He then, having bought an estate in an English county, proceeded to build a Norman castle in ruins, and adjoining this he built a turreted Tudor mansion. Here was a family pedigree translated into terms of stone. The builder crowned his work by the adoption of feudal manners, to which his domestics had so to adapt their own that when a neighbor, who called on him, asked if Mr. B—— was at home, the reply of the footman was, "The right honorable gentleman is taking a walk on the barbican." My host, having finished his story, was for a moment called away. He had no sooner gone than the admiral, coming up to me, jerked his thumb in the direction of the surrounding panels, and said, confidentially, "The whole of this was put up by that man's father."

But in a much more memorable way romance conquered reality one night in the drawing-room. The ladies of the party had disappeared; and by way of doing something Lytton, two other men, and myself became somehow grouped round a card table with our minds made up for whist. At first we put down our cards with promptitude and a semblance of attention, but someone before long made some observation which, though interesting, was wholly irrelevant to the game. The three others put down their cards to listen, and had, when they took them up again, some difficulty in remembering who was to play next. Presently one of them quoted a line of poetry. It was from Coleridge's "Kublai Khan." Somebody else suggested a mild doubt as to whether that poem had, as the author contended, really been composed in a dream. The game once more proceeded, but our host's eyes had already begun to wander, and at last he frankly threw his own cards on the table. Everybody else followed him. Cards were things forgotten. Their place was taken by poetry. Single lines were cited which the authors had dreamed undoubtedly. The most remarkable was dreamed by a brother of Tennyson, after a day spent in examining a bundle of ancient manuscripts. The line—it was Latin—was as follows:

"Immemorabilium per fulva crepuscula palpans"—that is to say, "fumbling among the tawny twilights of immemorables." Lord Lytton looked as if he were in a dream himself. Presently he spoke as though his mind were coming back from a distance. "I," he said, "dreamed a poem in India. It has never been written down, but I still can remember every line of it. Listen." The poem, which was full of vague Oriental imagery, was perfectly intelligible, and throbbed with a certain sonority like that of distant gongs; but no sane man would have written it in his waking moments. In that fact lay its charm. The author's voice, naturally low and musical, acquired new tones as he recited it, giving to it the qualities of an incantation; and round us, as though fashioned out of shadows, was the large, dimly lighted drawing-room, which the old novelist had incrusted with impossible heraldries, culminating in escutcheons of pre-Christian Welsh kings.

The pseudo-Gothic revival, of which Knebworth is a late monument, but which was inaugurated by Horace Walpole in the stucco of Strawberry Hill, is, if judged by the strict canons of architectural taste, absurd, but as time goes on and the taste which produced it vanishes the houses in which it embodied itself cease to be mere absurdities. They acquire the rank and dignity of historical documents. They are more than mere architecture. They represent attempts at a reconstruction of life—a new fusion of politics with poetry, romance, and mysticism. Their fault is that this fusion has failed to become actual. And yet these attempts, though largely recorded in stucco, still evoke visions and atmospheres from which many of us are loath to be driven into the wintry actualities of to-day.

For myself, on my return from Hungary, the influence of romance was further protracted by the fact that I for some time was occupied in completing my work on Cyprus; but when this at last had received its finishing touches there was nothing left that could keep other interests at bay. Radical and Socialist oratory was resounding on every side. Doctrines with regard to Labor were again being promulgated in forms so extreme that they reached the verge of delirium, and were yet received with acclamations. Old statistical errors, for the complete refutation of which unimpeachable evidence abounded, were shouted afresh, as though they were not open to question. But in respect of all facts and principles which lie really at the basis of things, the Conservative party was, as a whole, dumb.

I began to say to myself daily, "Semper ego auditor tantum? Nunquam ne reponam?" "Will no one wake up this unhappily lethargic mass, and by forcing the weapons of knowledge and reason into their hands provoke them and enable them to meet the enemy at the gate?" Every other interest, philosophic, romantic, religious, fell away from me for the time. Wherever I was, whether in London or country houses—for in these respects my habits remained much what they had been—I had with me the works of economists, statistical reports, multitudes of current speeches, all bearing on industrial and social questions. At intervals I dealt with one or another of these in tentative articles contributed to reviews like the Nineteenth Century, till at length I redigested, rewrote and combined them, thus, after some three years of effort, producing a succinct book called Labor and the Popular Welfare.

This book, in carefully simplified language, dealt comprehensively with the fundamental causes to which the increased wealth of the modern world is due, and on which the maintenance, to say nothing of the enlargement, of this modern increment depends. The argument of the book, in its general outline, is as follows. Without manual labor there can be no wealth at all. Unless most of its members are laborers, no community can exist. But so long as wealth is produced by manual labor only the amount produced is small. In whatever way it may be distributed, the majority will be primitively poor. The only means by which the total product of a given population can be increased is not any new toil on the part of the laboring many, but an intellectual direction of the many by a super-capable few. Here is the true cause of all modern increments of wealth. Let these increments be produced, and it is possible for the many to share in them. It is on securing a share of them that their only hope of an ampler life depends, but it is from the efforts of the few that any increase of their shares must come. The fundamental facts of the case are, indeed, of a character the precise reverse of that which the theories of the Socialists impute to them. In proportion as the wages of labor rise above a given minimum the many are the pensioners of the few, the few are not the plunderers of the many, and those who maintain the opposite are mere intellectual gamins standing on their heads in a gutter.