And while I do not believe that art is best nourished in this "atmosphere of praise," preferring to read instead "an atmosphere of appraisal," I believe that of this appraisal the more important element is "praise." Criticism with the praise left out savours of the counsel for the prosecution rather than of the judge,—and indeed some critics assume that every author is guilty till he is proved good: if he is popular the presumption of his guilt is almost irresistible. A Henley young man once explained to me that the function of the critic was to guard the gates of literature, keeping at bay the bulk of print, for it would surely not be literature. This last is true enough; yet the watch-dog attitude generates a delight to bark and bite, and turns critic literally into cynic. Should not the true critic be an interpreter? For bad work let him award the damnation of silence. "It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill."

It is a great privilege to praise. It is a great joy to give an artist the joy of being understood. Not every artist arrives at the divine standpoint: "And God saw all that He made, and behold it was very good." The human creator is not always content with the rapture of creation. He sits lonely amid his worlds. Neglect may be the nurse of strength, but as often it is the handmaid of idleness. The artist without an audience will smoke the enchanted cigarettes of Balzac. The rough labour of execution is largely the labour of conveying to others what the artist already feels and sees. Why should he toil thanklessly? It is sweeter to dream. Even the money that art produces may be a valuable incentive. Not, of course, if the artist aims at the money; but art wrought for love may bring in money, like a woman married for love. In so far as the lover has his eye on the dowry, in so far his love is vitiated; and in so far as the artist has his eye on the profits, in so far is he untrue to a mistress who demands undivided allegiance. Natheless, the auri sacra fames may be his salvation. What subtle sympathy connects fama with fames? The butcher's bill may drive him from the dreamland of luxurious meditation to the practical embodiment of his dreams. Only, while he is at work, the laws of art alone must be his masters; he must not alter or abate a jot by way of concession to the great cash question. When he has completed his work, then indeed he may sell it in the best market. But the least preliminary paltering with the spirit of commerce is a degradation. Does this seem an ideal demand? Let us remember, then, ideals are goads and goals, counsels of perfection. No one expects people to come quite up to them, but it is better for human nature that they should be there. For there is something in hero-worship, despite Carlyle's grandiosities, provided you choose your hero wisely. We do, in this valley of doubt and confusion, touched with false sparkles, follow men who speak from their souls sincerely, who work from their hearts. Instinctively we feel it degrading and disillusionising that inspiration shall be paid in hard cash, and genius entered on the credit side of a ledger. Does a man plead that he has to support his wife and children? Well, in the first place, he need not have got them. In the second, one may be admirable as a man, but as an artist abominable. Still it is better that a man should write Adelphi dramas than that his starving family should qualify for scenes in them. All honour to the artist who lives on bread and water in a garret rather than prostitute his art! but less honour to the man who lives on my bread, and adds somebody else's whisky to his water, rather than earn an honest living by dishonest books and plays. This was the question that split up the Bohemians of Murger. While the majority did odd jobs for the Philistines, to have the time for real art, the very poet consenting to write Alexandrines for a dentist at fifteen sous a dozen—vastly cheaper than oysters—there was an inner band of the faithful who preferred starvation to the desecration of their genius for the unsaleable. Even so among the vegetarians there is a holier circle that eats only nuts and fruits. The sensible artist will compromise. There is in political economy a region called "the margin of subsistence." It is a sort of purgatory. Above it, we enter the heaven of superfluities; below it, lies the dread Hades of hunger. It is here that the impecunious artist—with a family (and, alas! the artist is nearly always impecunious—with a family) should pitch his tent. He may be allowed to prostitute himself, if need be, sufficiently to pay the ground-rent. He must not be driven lower down by his devotion to the Muses: an artist who dies of starvation is simply a dead donkey. Rather than play a false note, he stops his music for ever. It is sublime—but silly. He had better black boots. There is no reason on earth why a shoeblack should not read Schiller, or moralise as he does in Bret Harte's parody of Bulwer Lytton. A bachelor artist might do worse than get locked up for some simple offence, and thus throw himself upon the nation. Remember what Sir Walter Raleigh did in prison. The poet can rise superior to the sordidness of skilly. Only he must be careful to preserve his seclusion. Leigh Hunt made his cell the artistic centre of London, but I doubt if he got through much work; and more recently, when Jokai was in gaol, he was compelled to insist on two hours' privacy and confinement per day. To be a "first-class misdemeanant" seems to me the height of happiness for a literary man.

Unfortunately there are few honest opportunities for going to gaol. The most honest way of all would be to write the truth about men and things; but this editors will not print. So one has to live at one's own expense. Nevertheless, the Hotel of the Black Maria remains an ideal.



IV

BOHEMIA AND VERLAINE

It is one of the pleasures of my life that I never saw Tennyson. Hence I am still able to think of him as a poet, for even his photograph is not disillusionising, and he dressed for the part almost as well as Beerbohm Tree would have done. Why one's idea of a poet is a fine frenzied being, I do not quite know. One seems to pick it up in the very nursery, and even the London gamin knows a poet when he doesn't see one. Probably it rests upon the ancient tradition of oracles and sibyls, foaming at the mouth like champagne bottles. Inspiration meant originally demoniac possession, and to "modern thought" prophecy and poetry are both epileptic. "Genius is a degenerative psychosis of the epileptoid order." A large experience of poets has convinced me as little of this as of the old view summed up in genus irritabile vatum. Poets seem to me the homeliest and most hardworking of mankind—'t is a man in possession, not a daimon nor a disease. Of course they have their mad moods, but they don't write in them. Writing demands serenity, steadiness, patience; and of all kinds of writing, poetry demands the steadiest pen. Complex metres and curious rhyme-schemes are not to be achieved without pain and patience. Prose is a path, but poetry is a tight-rope, and to walk on it demands the nicest dexterity. You may scribble off prose in the fieriest frenzy—who so fiery and frenzied as your journalist with the printer's devil at his elbow?—but if you would aspire to Parnassus, you must go slow and steady. Fancy inditing a sonnet with the compositors waiting for "copy"! Pegasus were more truly figured as a drayhorse than a steed with wings; he jogs along trot-trot, and occasionally he stands at an obstinate pause. The splendid and passionate lyrics of Swinburne, with their structural involutions and complicacies, must have been "a dem'd grind." The English language does not easily lend itself to so much "linked sweetness long drawn out." Even the manuscript of Pope's easy meandering verse is disfigured by ceaseless corrections. As he himself says:

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.

Probably these very lines run in the original manuscript somewhat as follows:



Shelley is the ideal of a poet, a soul of white fire, fed by bread and raisins; yet Shelley's last manuscripts are full of lacunae and erasures, some of which have had to be reproduced perforce in the printed editions.

Clothed with the ... as with light, And the shadows of the night, Like ... next, Hypocrisy, On a crocodile rode by.

It reads like a puzzle set by a Competition Editor. Here is another one, which begins as beautifully as Hedda Gabler could desire, and ends in blankness.

Within the surface of the fleeting river The wrinkled image of the city lay, Immovably unquiet, and for ever It trembles, but it never fades away; Go to the [ ] You, being changed, will find it then as now.

The fact is, of course, that inspiration is no guarantee of perfection. The limitations of inspiration vary with the limitations of the writer—a proposition that may be commended to the theologians. Genius can no more safeguard a man against his own ignorance than it can find a rhyme to "silver." Inspiration could not save Keats from his Cockney rhymes nor Mrs. Browning from her rhymeless rhymes. I met a poet in a London suburb—it seemed odd to see one out of Fleet Street—but after a few bewildered instants I recognised him. There was on his brow the burden of a brooding sorrow. I sought delicately to probe the cause of his grief, and he confessed at last that in a much-praised poem just published he had made a monosyllable dissyllabic. He had never got over a youthful mispronunciation, and in an unguarded moment of inspiration it had slipped in.

This prosaic view of poetry is distasteful to many, who like to think that "Paradise Lost" came out in a jet. But all these grandiose conceptions belong to the obscurantist view of human life, which is popular with all who hate, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, "to think clear and see straight." People fancy that the dignity of human life demands that artists at least should be Ouidaesque, but the true dignity of the artist is to be sublimely simple rather than simply sublime. The finest art—be it literature, music, or painting—is, after all that inspiration can do has been done, a matter of painful pegging away; and the finest artists will be found quietly occupying themselves with their art without pose or fuss. That side of the business is largely monopolised by the little men. But even the big men sometimes fall victims to the popular conception, as when a Byron stagily takes the centre of the universe, and looms lurid like the spirit of the Brocken. We do not need biographical scandal-mongers to tell us what "the real Lord Byron" was like. He was like "Don Juan," his own poem; shrewd, cynical, worldly, with flashes of exquisite feeling. The poem which is cut out of young ladies' editions of Byron is the one that represents him most truly in his blend of sensualism and idealism, whereas the Brocken figure is but Byron as he appeared to himself in his stormiest and gloomiest moments, and even that phantasm artistically draped and limelit by a poet's imagination. If people realised how much Byron wrote in his pitiable span of thirty-six years, how much hard labour went to make those cleverly-rhymed stanzas of "Childe Harold" or "Don Juan," despite Swinburne's accusation of botchery, they would see that he really had very little time to be wicked. They would understand that art—even the most decadent—is based on strenuous labour.

Young, gay, Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden ground Of thought and of austerity within.

Even in poetically declaring himself a decadent, the artist must take as many pains as fall to the prosiest bourgeois. This is the paradox of the position. Just as the pyrrhonist in maintaining that there is no truth asserts one, so the literary pessimist partly contradicts his contention of the futility of existence by his anxiety to express himself elegantly. Leopardi's Italian and Schopenhauer's German are far superior to those of the optimistic philosophers; and one of the most polished poems of our day is poor Thomson's "City of Dreadful Night." So, too, the poet who declares himself an idler and a vagabond gives the lie to his pretensions by the labour he takes to clothe them in unimpeachable verse. The other morning I looked out of my study window after breakfast and discovered that the weather was heavenly. I had lingered over the meal, reading the beautiful political speeches, from which I gathered there was a Crisis at hand. I knew that Crisis. I had heard about it ever since I learnt to hear. Nevertheless, the newspapers were still devoting as much space to it as if it were brand-new, and beguiling me to take interest in it. I felt quite annoyed when I looked at the blue sky after breakfast and took deep breaths of ambrosial air, and thought how I had wasted my time. Thrilled by the sunshine, a cosmic rapture seized me, and I wondered that men should fritter away their time in politics and other serious occupations. The inspiration grew and grew, and I felt that my lips had been touched by the sacred fire, and that I had been called to preach a great moral lesson to mankind. So I took up my pen and wrote:

Bright the sun this lovely May-day; Youth and love should have their heyday; Every day should be a play-day.

Yet mankind will work and worry, Over trifles fuss and flurry, Getting hot as Indian curry.

Orators, in such a season, How unreasonable is reason! 'Gainst the sunshine't is a treason.

What care I for Gladstone's glories? Hang the Radicals and Tories! Give me hammocks, pipes and stories!

What's the use of all this wrangling, Grammar and emotions mangling? Up the river let's go angling.

Sweet are walks and swimming nice is, Bring me lemon-squash and ices, Bother that eternal Crisis!

I was called away to lunch in the middle of the attack of inspiration. Inspiration is of course very useful, but it has a way of suggesting words that won't rhyme, and luring you off into all sorts of false tracks. Moreover, it affords no help whatever in polishing. After lunch I set to work with renewed zeal, licking the lines into their present perfection. At last they were finished, and as I lit the gas to enable me to see to make a fair copy, I realised that the beautiful blue day was gone.

Yes, the busy bee is a fraud by the side of the irresponsible artistic butterfly.

Sims Reeves tells an amusing anecdote of Mario the singer. Being brought one Thursday night by an eminent composer to sing at a big fashionable party, he found so great a line of carriages in front of his own that it was past midnight ere he arrived at the door. The thought that it was already Friday, and that he was about to sing in a new house, whose hostess he did not even know, had already dismayed the superstitious singer. But when he saw the number on the door was 13, no power on earth and no amount of argument could induce him to enter. "Ah, yes," said the hostess, smiling pleasantly, when the composer explained, "a very ingenious excuse, for which Mario ought to be grateful to you. Of course he was intoxicated, and after a long argumentation you at last persuaded him to go home."

Poe was doubtless occasionally drunk; but think of the years of sober labour, of stooping over desks, that must have gone to make those wonderful tales! Which is the true Poe, the hard drinker or the hard worker? That the artist must get drunk is, indeed, the belief of certain schools of young men even to-day; but is it not based on the old eternal false-logic, that because some artists have got drunk, therefore to get drunk is to be artistic? It was Murger who invented the Bohemian artist, poor and gay and of an easy morality. "Musette and Mimi!" says Sarcey. "The image of those ideal beings shone on every man who was twenty-one about 1848. 'La Vie de Boheme' was youth's breviary—fifty years ago." The great dramatic critic goes on to complain of the onslaught made upon him because he wrote against this "idleness of disposition, this heedlessness for the morrow, this inclination to look for the day's tobacco and the quarter's rent from loans and debts rather than from honest work, this witty contempt for current morality." But this is scarcely the teaching of the ever delightful book, which catches the spirit of youth and gaiety and irresponsibility wedded to artistic ardour as no other book has done before or since, and for which one might put in the plea that Charles Lamb made for the dramatists of the Restoration. Its world is only a pleasing fiction, and the ordinary rules of morality do not carry over into it. It is the East of Suez of literature, "where there ain't no Ten Commandments, and a man may raise a thirst." The real Bohemia, as Jules Valdes showed in "Refractaires," is a world of misery and discontent. Still more sordid is the English Bohemia expounded by Mr. Gissing in "New Grub Street." Mr. Robert Buchanan indeed writes as if there had been a Murgerian Bohemia in England in his young days. "Et ego fui in Bohemia. There were inky fellows and bouncing girls, then; now there are only fine ladies, and respectable God-fearing men of letters." Really! Surely there are plenty of bouncing girls and inky fellows still, just as there were respectable God-fearing men of letters and fine ladies even in the roaring forties. I doubt if Bohemia was ever so amusing as Mr. Buchanan imagines now, and I suspect the bouncing girls were "gey ill to live with." What is true in the immortal Bohemian myth, what appeals to the universal human instinct, is the eternal contrast between the dreams and aspirations of youth and the sobrieties of success and middle age. As Jeffery Prowse sang:

I dwelt in a city enchanted, And lonely, indeed, was my lot; Two guineas a week, all I wanted, Was certainly all that I got. Well, somehow I found it was plenty, Perhaps you may find it the same, If—if you are just five-and-twenty, With industry, hope, and an aim; Though the latitude's rather uncertain, And the longitude also is vague, The persons I pity who know not the City, The beautiful City of Prague!

This Bohemia will never disappear, because every generation of youth reconstructs it afresh, to migrate from it into the world of respectability above or the world of shame below. "Qu'on est bien a vingt ans!" will always be a cry to fill the breast of portly respectability with tender regret. As Thackeray put it in that delightful poem, which is almost an improvement on Beranger:

With pensive eyes the little room I view, Where, in my youth, I weathered it so long; With a wild mistress, a staunch friend or two, And a light heart still breaking into song; Making a mock of life and all its cares, Rich in the glory of my rising sun, Lightly I vaulted up four pair of stairs In the brave days when I was twenty-one.

What a pity that life is so stern and severe, that for the light morality of Bohemia somebody must pay, some life be wrecked! Nature fills us with youth and romance, but for her own purposes only. She is the great matrimonial agent, and heavy is the penalty she exacts from those who would escape her books, and extract from life more poetry than it holds. And so the beautiful roselight of Bohemia veils many a tragedy, many a treachery. Yet will the grisette be ever a gracious memory, and literature will always embalm the "Mimi Pinson" of De Musset.

She is dead now, la grisette, even in Paris, and "hic jacet" may be written over the bonnet she threw pardessus les moulins.

Ah, Clemence! When I saw thee last Trip down the rue de Seine, And turning, when thy form had pass'd, I said, "We meet again," I dreamed not in that idle glance Thy latest image came, And only left to Memory's trance A shadow and a name.

That is how she affected even the Puritan Oliver Wendell Holmes. Yes, there is something in the Bohemian tradition that touches the sternest of us—not the roystering, dissolute, dishonourable, shady Bohemia that is always with us, bounded by the greenroom, the racecourse, the gambling club, and the Bankruptcy Court, but the Bohemia that is as unreal as Shakespeare's "desert country near the sea," the land of light purses and light loves, set against the spiritual blight that sometimes follows on pecuniary and connubial blessedness. For, after all, morality is larger than a single virtue, and Charles Surface is always more agreeable than Joseph or Tom Jones than Blifil, even when Joseph or Blifil is as proper as he pretends. And if Tom or Charles is a poet to boot, what can we not forgive him? The poet must have his experiences—be sure that nine tenths of them are purely of the imagination. For the other tenth—well, if Burns had been strictly temperate, "the world had wanted many an idle song," and we should not have celebrated his centenary so enthusiastically. The poet expresses the joy and sorrow of the race whose silent emotions become vocal in him, and it is necessary that he should have a full and varied life, from which "nihil humanum" is alien. Mr. Barry Pain once wrote a subtle story, which only three persons understood, to show that a great poet might be an elegant egotist, of unruffled life and linen. If so, I should say that such a poet's genius would largely consist of hereditary experience; he would, in language that is not so unscientific as it sounds, be a reincarnation of a soul that had "sinned and suffered." But as a rule the poet does his own sinning and suffering, and catches for himself that haunting sense of the glory and futility of life which is the undertone of the modern poet's song, and which finds such magical expression in Heine's verses:

I have loved, oh, many a maiden kind, And many a right good fellow,— Where are they all? So pipes the wind, So foams and wanders the billow.

But the poet's morals are maligned. The fierce light which beats upon the throne of song reveals the nooks and crannies of the singers' lives, which for the rest they themselves expose rather than conceal. I should say that the average morality of the poet is much superior to the average morality of the man of the world who sins in well-bred silence. The poet gloats over his sins—is musically remorseful or swingingly defiant; he hints or exaggerates or invents. That is where the poet's imagination comes in—to give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. The poet's imagination is often far more licentious than his life; the "poet's licence" is rightly understood to be limited to his language. To have written erotic verses is almost a certificate of respectability: the energy that might have been expended in action has run to rhyme. Qui ose tout dire arrive a tout faire, say the French. Arrives at, perhaps, though even this is doubtful, but certainly does not start from that platform. Much less questionable were it to say: Qui ose tout faire arrive a ne rien dire.

The late M. Verlaine will be cited as a substantiation of the popular idea of the vagabond poet. The Verlaine legend has now been consecrated by his death; and for all time, I suppose, Verlaine will rank with Villon as an impossible person. He may have been all that is said, all that is hinted, even in Mr. George Moore's famous description of him. "I once saw Verlaine. I shall not forget the bald prominent forehead (une tete glabre), the cavernous eyes, the macabre expression of burnt-out lust smouldering upon his face."

But there is another side to him, and it is perhaps because I do not go about the world with Mr. Moore's "macabresque" eye, which to-day happily sees things in a soberer colouring, that I saw this other side of Verlaine when, like Mr. George Moore, I hunted him up on his native heath. For one thing, I was not prepared to see anything very lurid and diabolique: life is really not so picturesque as all that. I knew besides that he had been a schoolmaster in England; and can you imagine anything more tedious and toilsome than to be the "French master," the poor, despised, "frog-eating Mounseer Jacques" of boys' stories, the butt of all their facetious brutality? If ever anything was calculated to make a man diabolique! I trust biographers will not forget to place all this depressing drudgery to our "vagabond's" credit. Think of it! The first poet of France correcting French exercises! The poet of the passions conjugating the verb aimer in its hideous grammatical reality!

Fumons philosophiquement, Promenons-nous Paisiblement: Rien faire est doux.

So might Verlaine write, though contradicting himself by doing something in so doing; but in the absurd actual he had to earn his bread and butter, and man cannot live by poetry alone, unless one sings the joys and sorrows of the middle classes. It was rather late at night before, having vainly hunted for him in his favourite restaurants, I found the narrow, poverty-stricken rue in which Verlaine was living a year or so ago. Passing through a dark courtyard, I had to mount interminable stone stairs, lighting foul French matches as I went, to relieve the blackness. At last I arrived outside his door, very near the sky. I knocked. A voice called out, "I've gone to bed." I explained my lateness and said I would call to-morrow.

"No, no! Attendez!" I heard him jump out of bed, stumble and grope about, and then strike a match; and in another instant the door opened, and in the interstice appeared a homely nightcapped bourgeois pulling on his trousers. There flashed on me incongruously the thought of our English laureate's stately home by the sea, in which, jealously guarded by hedges and flunkeys, the poet chiselled his calm stanzas; and all the vagabond in me leapt out to meet the unpretentious child of Paris. He greeted me with simple cordiality; and, ugly and coarse though his face was, it was lit up throughout by a pleasant smile. His notorious leg was bandaged, but not repulsively. No, "homely" is the only impression I shall ever have of Verlaine, the man. Even in that much maligned "macabresque" head of his, there was more of the bonhomme than of the poet or the satyr. The little garret was his all in all; a bed took up half the space. On the table stood the remains of supper. A few shelves of books, a sketch or two, and a bird-cage with a canary were the only attempts at ornament.

Such was Verlaine at the climax of his fame, when he had won a sure immortality; simple and childlike, and with a child's unshamed acceptance of any money one might leave behind on the mantelpiece. He seems to have made very little by his verses. He spoke English quite well, having probably acquired it when teaching French; and he was perhaps more proud of it than of his poems. Mr. Moore says he wished to translate Tennyson. He read aloud a poem he had just written in celebration of his own fiftieth birthday. There was an allusion to a "crystal goblet." "Ce verre-la!" he interpolated, with a humorous smile, pointing to a cheap glass with the dregs of absinthe that stood on the table. There was also an allusion to a "blue-bird," a sort of symbol of the magic of spring, I fancy, that flutters through many of his poems. (The "plumage bleute de l'orgueil" figures in one of his very last verses.) When he arrived at this "blue-bird" he pointed to the cage with the same droll twinkle: "Cet oiseau-ci." When I left him he stood at the head of the gloomy stone stairs to light me down, and the image of him in his red cotton nightcap is still vivid. And now he is only an immortal name. Ah, well! after the English school-rooms, the French prisons, the Parisian garrets and hospitals, the tomb is not so bad. Rien faire est doux.

In giving him place with the immortals I feel no hesitation. An English clergyman found immortality by writing one poem,—"The Burial of Sir John Moore,"—and, however posterity may appraise Verlaine's work as a whole, he has left three or four lyrics which can die only if the French language dies, or if mankind in its latter end undergoes a paralysis of the poetic sense such as Darwin suffered from in his old age. Much of his verse—especially his later verse—is to me, at least, as obscure as Mallarme. But

Il pleut dans mon coeur Comme il pleut dans la rue

can never be surpassed for the fidelity with which it renders the endless drip, drip of melancholia, unless it is by that other magical lyric:

Les sanglots longs Des violons De l'automne Blessent mon coeur D'une langueur Monotone.

He is the poet of rhythm, of the nuance, of personal emotion. French poetry has always leant to the frigid, the academic, the rhetorical—in a word, to the prosaic. The spirit of Boileau has ruled it from his cold marble urn. It has always lacked "soul," the haunting, elusive magic of wistful words set to the music of their own rhythm, the "finer light in light," that are of the essence of poetry. This subtle and delicate echo of far-off celestial music, together with some of the most spiritual poems that Catholicism has ever inspired, have been added to French literature by the gross-souled, gross-bodied vagrant of the prisons and the hospitals! Which is a mystery to the Philistine. But did not our own artistic prisoner once sing:

Surely there was a time I might have trod The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God?

Was ever more devout Catholic than Benvenuto Cellini, who murdered his enemies and counted his beads equal gusto?



V

THE INDESTRUCTIBLES

I wonder if you have ever been struck by the catholicity—not to say the self-contradictoriness—of the constant correspondent. The creature will enter with zest into any discussion; there is no topic too small for it, and certainly none too great. The following letters, carefully culled from the annual contributions of a lady whose epistolary career I have followed with interest, will indicate the delicious inconsequence that has made them for me such grateful reading:

1888.

SIR,—There is nothing in life worth purchasing by pulsations and respirations. The world is a dank, malarious marsh, with fitful Will-o'-the-Wisp flashes of false radiance—a vast cemetery waiting for our corpses. There is no such thing as happiness.

Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravin, shrieks against

the idea. Youth is an illusion, maturity a regret, and old age an apprehension. Fortunately Providence has sent us a panacea—Universal Suicide.

I am, Sir, Yours obediently, AGATHA P. ROBINS.

1889.

SIR,—Surely "A Mad Englishman" and "Dorothy X.," who maintain so glibly that country life is more enjoyable than town life, fail to realise how much of our pleasure depends on human intercourse. It is given only to poets to talk with trees. Nor can ordinary mortals find

Sermons in stones, Books in the running brooks.

We need the cathedrals and the libraries that are to be found only in the great centres of national life—yes, and also the art galleries and the theatres. Of course, if people will martyr themselves to keep up appearances, and want to live in a fashionable neighbourhood, they will not find town life either cheap or pleasant. But if they are content to live outside the aristocratic radius, they can find many a comfortable villa, with baths (hot and cold), and back gardens which may easily be converted into rustic retreats (I would especially recommend rhododendrons). If you are also not above omnibuses (taking a cab only when it rains, and selecting a driver who does not look as if he would swear), and are satisfied to go to the pit, then I feel sure London is not only as cheap as the obscurest village, but gives you a far greater return for your money. Newly-married couples in especial often make a great mistake in settling in the country for the sake of economy. It is only in the town that they can really lead a tranquil, happy life, enriched with all the resources of culture and civilisation.

I am, Sir, Yours obediently, AGATHA P. ROBINS.

1890.

SIR,—The failure of marriage is too apparent to be glossed over any longer. "A.Y.Z." and "A Woman of No Importance" deserve the thanks of every honest heart for their brave outspokenness. Too long has this mediaeval monstrosity cramped our lives. The beautiful word "Home" conceals a doll's house or whitewashes a sepulchre. Marriage is misery in two syllables. How can people be happy chained together like galley-slaves? It contradicts all we know of human nature.

Love, free as air, at sight of human ties Spreads his light wings and in a moment flies.

Away with this effete Pharisaism! Let us realise the infinite possibilities of happiness latent in the blessing of existence. The world is longing for freedom to love truly, nobly, wisely, many.

I am, Sir, Yours obediently, AGATHA P. ROBINS.

1891.

SIR,—I can testify by personal experience to the fact that the manners of our children are deteriorating. Coming up to the Metropolis for a day's excursion last Bank Holiday, I could not walk anywhere without overhearing ribald remarks—and, what was worse, at my own expense—even from respectably dressed children. Let those look to it who

Teach the young idea how to shoot.

I thank Heaven my lot has always been cast in a sweet Devonshire village, where the contagion of ill-conduct has not yet spread among the juvenile population.

I am, Sir, Yours obediently, AGATHA P. ROBINS.

1892.

SIR,—Have your flippant correspondents, "Polygamist" and "Illegal Brother-in-Law," any conception of the thousands (ay, tens of thousands) of hearts that are, languishing in misery because they cannot marry their deceased sisters' husbands? And all because of a text which is not to be found in the Bible! Fie upon you, ye so-called Bishops,

Dressed in a little brief authority.

Abolish this unrighteous law, I say, and let floods of sunshine and happiness into a million darkened homes.

I am, Sir, Yours obediently, AGATHA P. ROBINS.

But, after all, is it fair to juxtaposit Agatha's letters? What if one were to collect the leaders of any newspaper on any given subject, before or after any event? I have met Agatha P. Robins in many other places at many other times. Sometimes she is interested in the best substitute for shirt-buttons or for Christianity, sometimes in the problem of living on a thousand a year, sometimes in the abolition of stag-hunting.

SIGNS OF THE SILLY SEASON.

A gooseberry that groweth green and great, A serpent round the sea serenely curled, A lonely soul that fails to find a mate, A boy redundant in a teeming world,

A sister yearning for dead sisters' shoes, A life that longs for death, or after-life, A ghost, a mistress whom her maids abuse, An erring judge, a French or German wife,

A child's long ear or holiday, a slum, A man gone bald, or drunk, a coin's design— Should things like these across your paper come, Conclude the Silly Season will be fine.

It is difficult to trace exactly when "The Season" ends and "The Silly Season" begins. It needs the finest discrimination to know when the adjective comes in—without a worldly training, indeed, you cannot tell the one from the other. But the past masters of the social art proclaim that "The Season" is dead, and we bow our heads in reverence. Yes, it is vanished, that focus of futilities, that wonderful Season, that phantasmagoria of absurdities, of abortive ambitions, over which a hundred humourists have made merry: it is dead, with its splendours and jubilations and processions—dead as the ropes of roses in St. James's street. Often have I debated the potency of satire, again and again have I suggested to learned friends a scientific and historical investigation of the popular belief that satire moves mountains or even molehills. But they agree only in shrinking from the task. To take only the last half-century: we have had one supreme satirist who harped eternally on the failings of fashion and the vanity of things. In his novels society saw itself reflected in all its attitudes and postures and posings. Not one meanness or folly escaped. What Professor Huxley has done for the crayfish, that Thackeray did for the Snob. He studied him lovingly, he dissected him, he classified every variety of him. A thousand disciples, less gifted but equally remorseless, followed in the Master's footsteps. "Punch" took up the tale, and week by week repeated the joke. It was heard in drawing-room recitations to the accompaniment of pianos; it even went on the stage. Ladies rushed into print to expose foibles men never guessed, and to say of the sex at large what less gifted women say only of their personal friends. For years we have never ceased for a moment to hear the lash of the whip, the swish of the birch, the whizz of the arrow, the ping of the bullet, the thwack of the flail, the thud of the hammer, the buzzing of the hornet. And what does it all amount to? How much execution has been done? Is society purer or nobler? Have less daughters been sold at Vanity Fair, or more invitations been sent to poor relatives? Has Jones got better manners or champagne? Is Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkins more distant to duchesses? Did my Lady Clara Vere de Vere consider whether Hood's seamstress was at work on her court gown? Is any one wiser or kinder or honester for all the literary pother? Are the diplomatic corps less maculate than in the days of Grenville Murray? Have we not, on the contrary, cast on our own imperfections the complaisance of an eye educated in the superior imperfections of our neighbours?

Lo, here is a new satirist arisen, Sarah Jeannette Duncan, who, in "The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib," sketches Anglo-Indian society in a manner that would not discredit Thackeray—and with something, too, of Thackeray's haunting sense of the pathos of the dead Past and the flying Present. But will the memsahib of to-morrow take warning by the fate of Helen Peachey, who went out to India in all her bridal bravery, in all her youth and freshness? Will she escape exchanging the placidity of Fra Angelico's piping cherubim for the petulance and ring-shadowed eyes of the seasoned matron? Will she be on her guard against shrinking to the prejudices and flirtations of a coterie, dying to all finer and higher issues? Will she worship virtue more and viceroys less? Alas, I fear me not—no more than Pagett, M. P., will leave off talking solar myths, or foolish things cease to be done under the deodars. Will Hogarth keep wine-bibbers from the bottle, or can you make men sober by acts of "L'Assommoir"? Will "Madame Bovary" stay a sister's fall, or "Sapho" repel an eligible young man? Will "The Dunciad" keep one dunce from scribbling, or "Le Tartufe" elevate a single ecclesiastic? As well expect "long firms" to run short, and the moths to avoid the footlights, and the fool to cease from the land. "How gay they were, and how luxurious, and how important in their little day! How gorgeous were the attendants of their circumstances, on the box with a crest upon their turbans!—there is a firm in Calcutta that supplies beautiful crests. And now, let me think! some of them in the Circular Road Cemetery—cholera, fever, heat-apoplexy; some of them under the Christian daisies of England—probably abscess of the liver." Yes, madam, we know it all, we recognize the Thackeray touch. "And soon, very soon, our brief day, too, will have died in a red sunset behind clustering palms, and all its little doings and graspings and pushings, all its petty scandals and surmises and sensations, will echo further and further back into the night." True, most true, and pity 't is 't is true. But meantime we will go on with our little doings and graspings and pushings—yes, madam, even you and I who have realised the vanity of all things; for the knowledge thereof—this, too, is vanity. "And it was all a striving and a striving, and an ending in nothing, and no one knew what they had lived and worked for." Yea, so it is, Frau Schreiner. And still we are living on—and oh! how hard we work (on African farms or otherwhere) to express artistically our sense of the futility of life!

VANITAS VANITATUM.

A rich voluptuous languor of dim pain, A dreamy sense of passionate regret, Delicious tears and some sweet, sad refrain, Some throbbing, vague, and tender canzonet, That mourns for life so real and so vain, Wherein we glory while our eyes are wet.

I am afraid, if I pursue this investigation, I shall end by believing that satire is simply an aesthetic satisfaction—the last luxury of the sinful. Ridicule, we are always told, is a tremendous destructive—an atmosphere in which nothing can live. But is it? Christianity, Kings, and War are little the worse for the jets of mockery that have been playing on them for two centuries. In Swift's day the wits at the coffee-houses regarded religion as a farce that even the Augurs could not keep up any longer without public winking; yet Diderot and the Encyclopaedia are dead, and the bishops we have always with us! It was thought War could not survive Voltaire's remark that a monarch picks up a parcel of men who have nothing to do, dresses them in blue cloth at two shillings a yard, and marches away with them to glory—but here is our Henley singing a song of the sword, while all our novelists are looking to their weapons. Despite Heine's sarcasm, the collection of English kings is as incomplete as ever. A passing fad can, perhaps, be made to pass along a little faster, but it only makes room for another. True, "Punch" killed the craze for sunflowers and long necks; but then "Punch" invented it. It was merely made to be destroyed brilliantly, like a Chinese cracker or a Roman candle. Folly is older than "Punch's" jokes, and will survive them. Snobbery and self-seeking, pettiness and stupidity, envy, hate, and all uncharitableness, were no secret to the mummies in the British Museum. "Unto the place whither the rivers go, thither they go again." Are there not a hundred sayings in Ecclesiastes and Menander, in Horace and Moliere, as apt to-day as though fresh from the typewriter? One of the learned friends to whom I proposed the thesis contended that Perseus and Juvenal at least are out of date. But this was merely my learned friend's ignorance. Is it not the truest piety to conclude that those things which the ridicule of the ages cannot kill deserve their immortality—that Kings, War, and Christianity play a part in the scheme of creation, and that even snobbery and jobbery, folly and fraud, rouge and respectability, and horse-racing, bounders and politicians, the prize-ring and the marriage market, are all necessary to the fun of Vanity Fair! They are thrown up by the flux of things for Honesty to set his heel on. So houp-la! On with the dance! louder, ye fiddlers! faster, O merry-go-round! Nay, not so glum, ye moralists and satirists, philanthropists and preachers; link hands all—ducdame, ducdame!—and thank the gods for keeping you in occupation. What should we do without our fools? The question seems pat for a Silly Season correspondence. Come, gather, fools all. Ye could not be better employed than in answering it. For, mark, brother-satirists mine, you cannot kill the Silly Season correspondence.

And you cannot kill Ghosts. Perhaps because they do not exist. No other dead thing is so tenacious of life as your ghost. If ridicule were really fatal, we should have given up the ghost long since. Consider the fires of burlesque through which he has passed unscathed. What indignity has been spared him? Now at last he is to encounter the supreme test—he is to be taken seriously. The Psychical Society has the matter in hand—or should one say, the spirit? And Mr. Stead, who believes in himself in a way that is refreshing in these atheistic times, proposes either to rehabilitate the ghost or to lay him for ever. But this latter is beyond the might of man or society.

And you cannot kill Grouse. At least I can't. I sometimes suspect there are others of the population equally incompetent, and perhaps still less interested in battues; though the Twelfth figures in everybody's calendar like a Church festival, and the newspapers devote leaders to it, and the comic papers have pictures, and sometimes even jokes about it, and you would think the whole population of these islands struck work and went a-shooting with gillies and dogs and appropriate costume. But that is the craftiness of the editors, from Mr. Buckle and Mr. Yates down to the editor of the Halfpenny Democrat—they make the humblest of us feel we are in the best sets, so we all come up to town for the season, and are seen at three parties a night, and we ride in the Park, and we go to Henley and Goodwood to a man; and we yacht at Cowes, and pot grouse in Scotland—still with the same wonderful unanimity; and we hunt with the hounds, and run with the salmon, and keep our Christmas in country houses, and come up smiling for the New Year, ready to recommence the same old Sisyphean round. I suppose the people who really do these things could be exhibited in the National Gallery, but the space their doings fill is incalculable.

And you cannot kill Adelphi Melodrama. But I have a piece of advice to offer to the Italian gentlemen who have done so much for our stage. It is, that they run their theatre on a principal of duality befitting their joint management. Let it be the home of Melodrama and Burlesque, the same play serving for both genres. Let, say, Mr. Sims—who is so clever in either species—write the pieces—each melodrama being its own burlesque. An extra dash of colour here, an ambiguous line there, with a serious meaning in the melodrama and a droll in the burlesque, will secure the brothers two audiences, and after eight o'clock I guarantee standing room only. The simple will come to weep and thrill, the cynics to laugh and chuckle. And everybody will be happy.

In sooth, is not the world divided into those who take the great cosmic drama seriously, and those who treat it as farce? On the one hand the workers and the fighters, on the other the journalists, politicians, and men about town. Yet have the workers and the fighters the nobler part. A genuine emotion, an earnest conviction, vitalises life. The day-dreams of hungry youth are better than the dinners of prosaic maturity, and a simple maiden in her flower is worth a hundred epigrams. I had rather be an Adelphi god than a smoking-room satyr.

Who shall blame the melodramatist? He writes for those to whom literature makes no appeal. Literature is a freemasonry of the highest minds, and that poetry is Greek to the masses I should scarcely have thought a "Question at Issue" demanding substantiation from Mr. George Gissing. Mr. Gosse must know that the eclipse which darkened England at the passing of Alfred Tennyson was invented by the newspapers and the poets who outraced one another to weep upon his tomb. Look upon Mr. Booth's map of East London, with its coloured lines showing the swarms of human beings who live ignobly and die obscurely, and realise for yourself of what import the cult of beautiful form is to these human ant-heaps. Walk down the populous Whitechapel Road of a Saturday night, or traverse the long slimy alleys of Rotherhithe among the timber wharves, and discover how many of your countrymen and contemporaries are living neither in your country nor in your century. To Mr. Henry James, the dull undertone of pain and sorrow is part of the music of London—such harmony is in aesthetic souls. But the dull and the gross, who only suffer and endure, the muddy vesture of decay closes them in and they cannot hear it.

What shall literature do for these? In a great smoky Midland town, on dreary pavements, under sloppy skies, I saw a girl who was a greater argument for melodrama than all the cheques of all the managers. She was going to her work in the raw dawn, her lunch in a package under her arm; the back was bent and the face was pale and pinched, but there was a slumbering fire of romance in the deep-fringed eyes, and suggestions of poetry lurked in the shadows of her hair; and at once my breast was full of stirrings to write for her—only for her—a book full of beauty and happiness and sunshine, and, oh! such false views of life, such inaccurate pictures of the pleasures of a society she would never know. The hero should be handsome and brave and good, with a curling moustache; and the heroine should be beautiful and true, with an extensive wardrobe; and the clouds would come only to roll by, and the story should die away in an odour of orange-blossom, and in a music of marriage-bells. And there should be lots of money for everybody, and any amount of laughter and gaiety, and I would give dances twice a volume, and see that all the girls had partners, delightful waltzers with good conversation. And there would be garden-parties (weather permitting invariably), and picnics without green spiders, and sails without sea-sickness. And as for truth and realism—fie on them! We can create a much nicer world than nature's. Why be plagiarists, when we can make universes of our own?



VI

CONCERNING GENERAL ELECTIONS

Twice in succession has it befallen me to be privately busy in a backwater when the main stream was spuming and ramping with the great bore of a general election. I have been able to hear the swallows twitter at sunrise in serene unconsciousness of the crisis, to watch the rooks homing at twilight, as though the course of Nature were still the same, and to see the moonlight rippling over the sombre water at midnight in unaffected tranquillity. Myself was scarcely better informed of the tidal flood: stray echoes of speech, odd fragments of newspaper floated down to me, and at intervals some visitant from the greater deep held, like a sea-shell, the rumour of its sounding waters.

And, indeed, where shall we find a better metaphor for party-government than this of the tide, of the ebb and flow of political power—remorseless, inevitable, regardless of those who, tossed high on the stream, imagine they direct it? And in this metaphor the People must play Moon, like the clown in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." But, as Juliet says:

O swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon.

The cause of this inconstancy has not escaped even the philosophers. The Whig and the Tory, rival lovers of Luna,—moonstruck ravers,—woo her with honeyed words and dulcet promises, and she inclines her coquettish ear—most of the month she is all ear—to the highest bidder. But when she comes to her full—and is all eye—then she perceives her swain faithless and empty-handed, and straightway she plights her troth to his clamorous and expostulant fellow, who dangles his untried promises before her disappointed vision. And the days pass, and she rises and sets; but lo! the bridal gifts linger still, and the horn of plenty is an empty trumpet, and, forgetful of her first lover's failure, she turns to him again. And so for ever, in a fickle quest of fidelity, pathetic enough. Perhaps she—with the two strings to her bow—shares the just fate of coquettes, happy with neither; perhaps she were wiser to give herself to a single lover, and be rid for ever of these hesitancies. And yet, would she profit by the change? Endymion, the one youth whose beauty drew her from heaven, remained perpetually asleep. Is there not some profound significance in the ancient myth, some truth that would have pleased Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam (as the pedants will have us call the man who did not write Shakespeare).

But the philosophers, who have understood the levity of mind that underlies changes of Cabinets, have not always understood the numerical pettiness of the voting power by which the change is effected. Just as every philosopher is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian, so, as Mr. Gilbert sings, is every Englishman born a little Liberal or a little Conservative: even if his politics be not original sin, it is early acquired. Thus, then, the nation consists of two great camps—the Liberals and the Conservatives—which are practically fixed; standing armies that may be relied upon. A born Liberal may wax fat and kick at his ancient principles: a born Conservative may change his coat and turn Whig. But these exceptions are rare. For the most part men stick to their party and die as foolish as they were born—which is called consistency. Convinced sometimes against their will, they are of the same opinion still. Loyalty and obstinacy will look facts in the face and never blench, and every one remains truer to his social circle than to his private judgments. People's politics are their prejudices at a masked ball, and the Conservatives will vote Conservative and the Liberals Liberal, through a cannonade of unanswerable cartoons. Apart from these two great standing armies, there is a shifting body of free-lances, guerrillas, Jacks-o'-both-sides, call them what you will—waverers who have too much conscience or too little, who are swayed by their reason or their pocket, or who are gullible enough to believe that the opposition will do better, or sportsmen enough to desire fair play and a chance for the other side, and who are found fighting now in this camp, now in that. The camps themselves are fairly matched: Rads and Tories—the sexes of politics—are as evenly created as men and women. They are like ten-pound weights standing on either scale of a balance. What, then, determines the oscillation this way or that? Evidently the miserable little half-ounce weight placed sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other. In fine,'tisthe tiny squadron of free-lances that wins general elections, the voters who think or who don't think, or who veer to be with the majority. The Jacks-o'-both-sides rule England, even as the Parnell brigade ruled Parliament. To this floating population is it given to make or unmake Cabinets; theirs is the righteous indignation that sweeps the country like a new broom, and sweeps Ministries into limbo; to them is made the magniloquent "appeal to the country!" L'etat, c'est nous! might be the motto of this third party, were it but conscious of itself as a party.

"The majority is never right," cries Dr. Stockmann in "The Enemy of the People." "Never, I say. That is one of those conventional lies against which a free, thoughtful man must rebel. Who are they that make up the majority of a country? Is it the wise men or the foolish? I think we must agree that the foolish folk are, at present, in a terribly overwhelming majority all around and about us the wide world over. But, devil take it, it can surely never be right that the foolish should rule over the wise.... The majority has might—unhappily—but right it has not. I and a few others are right." But how if "I and a few others" organised themselves after the fashion of the Parnellites? how if the wise men made up their minds that the world should no longer be governed with the proverbial minimum of wisdom, and, taking advantage of the natural balance of parties, resolved that they should be the ones to supply the principle of movement to the equilibrated social machine? Surely the Millennium could not long resist the Philosophers' party. But, alas! would the wise men agree? Would not they also split up into two factions? And even if philosophers were kings and kings philosophers, would the kingdom of Plato be at hand?

Popular suffrage is much maligned. "Think," says Bouvard, one of the tragi-comic twain who serve for title to that saddest of all humorous books, Flaubert's "Bouvard et Pecuchet," "think of all those who buy pomades and patent medicines. These blockheads form the electorate and we submit to their will. Why can't one make three thousand a year by breeding rabbits? Because too much crowding together is fatal to them. In like manner, by the mere coming together of a crowd the germs of stupidity which it contains get developed and the consequences are incalculable." But popular suffrage does not operate like this at all. One might almost say that half the stupidity contradicts and annihilates the other half: in practice the franchise carries its own antidote,—the "germs of stupidity" do not get developed, but destroyed. The metaphor of germs would be more appropriate if applied to the ideas of the party-programmes, for these ideas are introduced by a few wise or foolish men and disseminated epidemically throughout their respective parties. Democracy never escapes aristocracy, for the people never invents ideas; its whole power is that of choice between the ideas offered by its would-be leaders, and even these ideas it accepts less as a philosopher than as a patient, rather as "germs" than as thoughts. And when once it has accepted its leaders or its representatives, the beautiful parliamentary system deprives it of all further rights of interference for a term of years, and the policy of the country is far more dependent on the intestine rivalries and manoeuvrings of the representatives than on the desires and demands of the represented. In a really democratic system there would be a central bureau of statesmen not necessarily elected by the voice of the people, and this bureau should have for object not the wrangling over measures, but the mere proposition of them. These trained thinkers and diplomatists—accepting advice freely from the great newspapers and the chiefs of factions—would propose whatever measures seemed necessary from time to time for the preservation, the elevation, and the dignity of the commonweal, and these propositions would be submitted officially to every franchise-holder, just as the inquisitive census-paper or the parochial voting-paper is to-day. The "Ayes" or "Noes" of the people would have it, not of those who represent them, save the mark! The details could be drafted by specialists, as to-day. That this would be a better or even a feasible system I do not say; but I do maintain that any other democracy than this is a fraud. To have the ten-thousandth part of a voice in selecting among the varying policies of sundry ambitious gentlemen, all of whom have been foisted on me by committees, and of whom the successful one—whose professed views may be quite antithetical to mine and can at best only roughly represent them—will have, when he is not absent or manoeuvred into silence, the six-hundred-and-seventieth part of a voice in accepting or rejecting the ideas of half a dozen very ambitious gentlemen, whose measures are themselves liable to be quashed at the eleventh hour by an Upper House that sits without my will or consent, and which is in its turn legally liable to be superseded by the Sovereign, whose government is all the while being really carried on in silence by permanent officials whose very names I do not know and who have no connection with me beyond accepting, in ignorance of my existence, my dole towards their salaries,—this is not a form of democracy that appeals very attractively to me as an individual member of Demos.

And, moreover, the position of my Member of Parliament is scarcely less paradoxical than my own role of free and independent elector. He is the mouthpiece of his constituents, and yet he is expected to have a will and conscience of his own. Why? Why should he be any more honest than a lawyer or a journalist? Each of these classes is paid to maintain certain propositions, and the most successful in these lines are those with the highest powers of persuasion. The constituency wishes certain opinions and desires put forward in Parliament,—why should the man who offers to execute the job be presumed to share those opinions and desires? The point is, can he represent them more forcibly than the rival candidates? I do not for a moment imagine that the M. P. invariably agrees with the politics of his electors; I only inquire why he should have to profess to,—why should he pay this homage of hypocrisy to an illogical ideal? Theoretically we do not elect our M. P. because he wants to get on, but because we want to get on or the country to get on; because we want certain measures carried, not because he wants certain measures carried. Therefore it is to our interest to get the most skilled advocate at our command; his personal opinions are no concern of ours. A fig for his ambitions and aspirations! This may not be a dignified position for the M. P., but it is the one logically implicated in the democratic notion of universal suffrage; and when the gentleman honestly asserts himself and his private ambitions and his private conscience, he is deucedly dishonest to his constituents.

To be strictly logical, indeed, M. P.'s should confine themselves to stating the wishes of the people they represent: they might as well be mechanical dolls, moved through the lobbies by the respective wire-pullers and fitted with inarticulate noises. Or, for the matter of that, they might be superseded altogether by written summaries of the opinions of the winning majority in each constituency on all the points at issue in the current session. The chiefs of the party could play the game with markers. But indeed what is the use of dealing the cards at all, when the Prime Minister holds all the trumps in advance, not up his sleeve, but openly on the table? As for the speeches in the House, they have as much effect upon the issue as the conversations at the card-table. They are an obsolete survival from the times when members were liable to come to the House with open minds, instead of having them closed by their constituencies. Indeed, I can suggest a simple device by which, without any departure from the ancient forms of the House, most of the evils of Party Government could be swept away. By the system of "pairing" a Tory may neutralize a Radical, and both go on together without interfering with the good of the country. Let therefore the entire minority pair off with members of the opposite party, leaving the bare majority in possession of the floor. Being agreed on their policy, these would not want to make speeches, but would simply spend their time walking through the "Ayes" lobby. A few afternoons of pleasant promenading would provide the country with enough legislation for a lifetime. Solvitur ambulando. The party leaders would be enabled to husband their energies for the hustings, since like all the agreeable members they would easily find "partners." It is only the bores who would be left to walk the House. It will be observed that this incalculable gain of time, temper, money, and Acts of Parliament would be secured without revolution, on constitutional lines, and by a mere extension of an existing practice. I am convinced the salvation of the country depends on the universal adoption of the system of Parliamentary "pairing," or legislation by walking "wall-flowers."

A further advantage of this system deserves to be noted. As it takes forty members to make a House, should the Governmental majority fall below this number no business could be transacted. Thus it would become impossible, when the country was almost equally divided, for one party to impose its will on the nation by force of a bare majority. Again, therefore, a very necessary reform would be achieved on strictly constitutional lines.

In so confused a constitution, or so constitutional a confusion, it ill becomes one to inquire why pre-eminence in Parliament is attained by dexterity in the word-duel, and why a John Stuart Mill, who gave his life to the study of sociological questions, is a failure in the House, while a Randolph Churchill, who confessedly found politics more exciting than any other form of sport, including even horse-racing, should be a success. As in Athens of old, the rhetorician is master of the field. Does it not seem ridiculous that a man shall be allowed to legislate who has not passed an examination in political philosophy, political economy, and universal history? As absurd as that men should be able to set up as critics merely by purchasing reviews, that they should be permitted to ply without a license. Still, monstrous as is the mischief wrought by the quack critic, his sphere of influence is limited. But this question of government touches us all. No one ought to be allowed in the House who has not satisfactorily grappled with papers like the following.

1. Explain the use of the following phrases: "Home Rule," "Liberty," "Well-being of the Masses," "G. O. M.," "Good of the State," "The Constitution." What meaning do you attach to them, if any?

2. "The Function of an Opposition Is To Oppose." Criticise this statement from the point of view of the Party in Power, and trace carefully the modification in its view produced by a change of government.

3. What is a good electoral address? Is there any relation between it and its owner's votes in the House?

4. (a) Prove that Female Franchise is demanded not only by the women of England, but by every consideration of reason and justice.

(b) Disprove the same.

5. The leader of your party suddenly reverses his policy.

(a) What would you think?

(b) What would you say?

(c) How would you vote?

Give no reasons for your answer.

6. If C represents Conscience, and C1 the Constituency, show that C1 will always be represented by C2[*].

[Transcriber's note: So in original.]

7. What is a working-man? Explain why professional men who work sixteen hours a day are excluded from this category.

8. Define a political victory, and distinguish between a political victory and a moral victory.

But perhaps the discrepancy is less than meets the eye. The House of Commons is a Representative Assembly; the rhetoricians and fencers represent the unreason and the pugnacity of the partisans. A country has the politicians it deserves. I have heard the most ignorant girls rage against Mr. Gladstone; damsels in their teens who knew nothing of life or its problems, nor could have studied any question for themselves; pretty girls withal, but who at the mention of the veteran statesman took on the avenging aspect of the Eumenides.

It was a girl of quite another temper who replied to me when, talking over old times and old discussions, I said I had not yet become a Socialist: "I don't think you ever knew what you were." I winced as at a just reproach, yet when I had left her the retort occurred to me (as retorts will, when too late) that there was no particular merit in being a "what," that men were not necessarily "'ists" or "'ites," that thoughts did not fit into pigeonholes, and that if there was any merit in the matter it consisted rather in preserving free play and elasticity of mind. Because certain men had put certain ideas into the world it did not follow that every other man had definitely to accept or reject each and all of them, and to become an "'ite" or an "anti-'ite" in so doing. Plague take great men! What right had they to force one into the jury-box? Still less was it compulsory to return a verdict if, as the vulgar were apt to think, the acceptance of any one "'ism" precluded the acceptance of another, so that to be an Ibsenite was synonymous with detesting the dramas of Sardou, and to be a Wagnerite involved a horror of Mendelssohn. It was only the uncultured who held their artistic and political creeds with the narrowness of Little Bethel, importing into thought and aesthetics the zealotry they had lost in religion. The book of Experience, thought I, is not an Encyclopaedia, with every possible topic neatly ranged in alphabetical order; 'tis no A B C Time Table, with the trains docketed for the enlightenment of the simple,'t is rather an Encyclopaedia torn into a million million fragments by kittens and pasted together again by infants, so that all possible things are inextricably interfused, every one with every other; 't is a Bradshaw edited by a maniac, where the trains that start but don't arrive are not even distinguished from the trains that arrive but don't start. Wherever persons are conscious of the infinite complexities of things, they will be found cautious of creed and timid of assertion. You have probably noted that at Waterloo Station, in London, no porter will ever bind himself to a definite statement concerning any train. It is only the inartistic who hold that black is black and white is white, unconditionally, irretrievably; and who have invented the proverb "He'd say black's white" to express the Sophist in excelsis. It must be true, as Ruskin contends, that not one man in fifteen thousand has ever observed anything, else how account for this wide-spread fallacy? The "wit of one," instead of crystallising this "wisdom of the many," should have flatly contradicted it. For, take two blackboards and place them at right angles to each other: let a ray of bright sunlight fall upon them, so that one cast a shadow on the other. The portion of blackboard overshadowed will indeed be blackish, but the portion illuminated by full sunlight will be comparatively white, although it is still thought of as a "black-board." So, too, ask the man in the street for the colour of trees, and he will reply "green." If I may permit myself a vulgar locution, the green is in his eye. Trees are, of course, all colours of the rainbow, according to kind and season; and grass, too, is by no means always so green as people think it. We start in our childhood with prejudices on these subjects—what is education but the systematic imparting of prejudice?—and we rarely recover. Even the primitive rhymes of childhood fix ideas unalterably in our minds:

The rose is red, the violet's blue, Sugar is sweet and so are you.

Tea-roses are not red nor Neapolitan violets blue; sugar is only sweet to those unversed in metaphysics, and sugar of lead not even to them. As for the compliment to the juvenile petticoat, let it remain. But the blackness of black is a superstition that deserves no such courteous concessions. There is, in fact, no black and no white at all, as any black-and-white artist will tell you. Black is not a colour: it is merely the negation of light. By day nothing is ever black—it always contains reflected light from some surrounding object or objects: if you look at a "black" thing by day, you see its details, which convincingly proves that light is not absent. If there were such a thing as a black object, it could only prove its existence by being seen; but if it is seen it is no longer black, and if it is black it is no longer seen. The mourners at a funeral no more wear black than the bridesmaids at a wedding wear white. To be white, a thing would have to escape all reflected light; and even if this were possible, the sunlight itself, the source of all light and colour, would tinge it with yellow, or red, or pink, according to the time of day. "What!" the injudicious reader will cry, "is not snow white? Does not the Dictionary boast even a double-barreled epithet 'snow-white'! How about the 'great white sea' that stretches round the Pole?" I cannot help it: these adjectives, these expressions were invented before artists had taught men to see: hastily, as by men falling in love at first sight, who are destined to make many discoveries concerning their idol later on. Snow is never white, any more than the beloved is absolutely blameless. For snow to be "snow-white," the sky would have to be white, whereas in those arctic circles it should be either blue or grey. Moreover, the snow being only semi-opaque must be tinctured by the shadow of the darkness of its own depths; as for icebergs, well, you may see green, brown, and even deep-grey ice, whilst the whitest have pinnacles and crags that must break the light like prisms into all the colours of the spectrum, and all these hues, again, do not fail to tint the snow. Nor will the white bear improve the situation, for, to judge by the specimen in our London Zoological Gardens, white bears are dirty yellow, just as black bears are dirty brown.

But, so far from realising that black may be white, your average voter seems to imagine that neither is ever even tempered: that his party is purest white, and the opposition party impurest black. That the other side reverses this colouring does not trouble him: it is merely due to the aforesaid sophistical faculty of proving black white. I once knew a man—no average voter he—who owned two comic papers, the one Radical, the other Conservative. How he must have chuckled as he planned the cartoons and settled the chiaroscuro! What blacks for the Tories to be answered by counter-blacks for the Radicals! Beaconsfield as a sweep, Gladstone as an Angel of Light; Beaconsfield as Ormuzd, Gladstone as Ahriman; each in turn Lucifer, Son of the Morning, and Satan, the discomfited demon. I tremble to think what would have happened if, by one of those contretemps which sometimes occur even in real life, the cartoons had got interchanged. And caricatures such as these influence the elections! The most childish nonsense, written in the picture-language so dear to children! And on such ineptitudes the destinies of the nation are supposed to turn! 'T is a comforting reflection, then, that the whole thing is so largely a farce, that the real axis of events is elsewhere—by no means a thing to grieve over. If the British Constitution is a paradox not to be fathomed by human intellect, why, that is a quality which it shares with Space and Time and all deep and elemental things. Your deep thinker is invariably a paradox-monger, because everything when probed to its bottom proves illusive, and is found to contain its own contradiction. Truth is not a dead butterfly, to be transfixed with a pin and labelled, but a living, airy, evasive butterfly. Perhaps that is the inner meaning of the Whistlerian motto. The Hegelian self-contradictoriness of the British Constitution will not, therefore, affright us. To Tennyson the fact that it is a "crowned republic" seemed a source of security. The English have abolished the Crown, though they are too loyal to inform the Sovereign of his deposition; in like manner they have evaded Democracy by conceding universal suffrage. The strength of the British Constitution lies in its inherent absurdity, its audacious paradoxicalness. It exists by force of not being carried out. And the reason of this illogicality is clear: our Constitution, like Topsy, was not made but "growed," and that which grows is never logically perfect; it is like an old tree, strangely gnarled, with countless abrasions and mutilations, and sometimes even curious grafts. Here the lightning struck it, and yonder branch was snapped in the great gale. Machine-made schemes may be theoretically perfect, but they will never suit human nature, which is a soil for living growths, not a concrete foundation for elegant architecture. This is the truth which trips up Comte, and Fourier, and St. Simon, and all the system-makers and utopia-builders. Perfect things are dead things: the law of life is imperfection and movement. Life is never logical, it is only alive. If man had been made by machinery his body would not have been erratically hairy; his toes would long since have been improved away or welded together by an American patentee; nor would there have remained, for our humiliation, those traces of a caudal appendage which some osteologists have thought to perceive in our distinguished anatomy; our brotherhood to the beasts would have been betrayed only by our behaviour.

So that, though Politics be as absurd as the Constitution, God bless her, it may yet fulfil as useful a function. Who would deprive the hosts of working-men of their generous enthusiasms, even though these be to the profit of the professional politician? Who would narrow their horizon back to the public-house and the workshop or the clerical desk and the music-hall, by assuring them that all these great national and international questions will be no penny the worse or the better for their interest in them? For it is they, not the State, that will be benefited. Politics is a great educative force: it teaches history, geography, and the art of debate, and is not without relation to Shakespeare and the musical glasses. The flies on the wheel are not moving the wheel, but they are travelling and seeing the world, whereas they might otherwise be buzzing around the dust-bin. Politics sets the humblest at the centre of great cross-roads of history: it promotes clubs and all manner of fellowship, and enables the poorest—on polling-day at least—to know himself the equal of the greatest. Even the most illiterate is spared the mortification of being reminded that he cannot sign his name. And finally, and most of all, it preserves among us the lost art of fighting. The long and oft-vaunted immunity of England from the foot of a foreign foe has its drawbacks: we have forgotten what war really means, we have delegated our courage and patriotism to an army of mercenaries, who represent us in the field as a nobleman's carriage represents him at a funeral; we are valiant vicariously and sublime by deputy; we take the war-fever in its pleasant heats, and contract out the chills and the blood-letting. And so the blood-letting fails to purge us as before: the evil humours are still in the system. All those seething, restless spirits which generate in the blood of a once warlike race clog us up and turn to bile and dyspeptic distempers. Our militant instincts, suppressed by a too-secure civilization, break out in sordid maladies of the social organism. As a vent-hole for the envy, hatred and uncharitableness of mankind, politics cannot be overestimated. In the absence of real battles on our soil these sham fights of the polling-booth—sham because they determine nothing, because the great silent forces are working behind all the noises—are the national purge for "our present discontents"; no more truly efficacious than that ancient therapeutics of the lancet, a General Election yet comforts the patient, he takes a lease of fresh hope, the sun leaps out, the clouds pack, the sky is blue, the grass is dew-pearled, God's in his heaven, and all's right with the world. Even the beaten party feels that it has won a moral victory, and confidently looks forward to victory without morality at the next turn of the wheel. And so all these diseased humours of the body politic pass harmlessly off.

No one but a confirmed cynic would wish to do away with all this harmless dissipation, all the innocent fun of electioneering, the speeches, riotings, mud-throwings, everybody happy as sandboys or mudlarks. What a great day that was—Plancus being M. P. and I a boy in a provincial town—when the Blues and the Reds meant broken heads, and the flowing tide of beer, and spruce carriages with beribboned horses, and jocund waggonettes, and bands and banners, and "hoorays," and shuttered shops, and an outpour of citizens; a day festive, yet solemn, pregnant with mysterious dooms and destinies, fatal, ineluctable, if victory fell to the wrong-coloured ribbons. I remember when my father went to poll his vote—a strange, weird article that had to be carried carefully concealed on the person, lest the roughs of the opposition should catch a glimpse of the tip of it and bash in the holder's head—with what awed imagination we followed his course, as of a hero gone to storm a redoubt or lead a forlorn hope! with what anxiety we waited at home with the bandages! For the civil war, which our constitution foments, was less of a sham then than now, and the polling-booths vied with the playing-fields of Eton as the nursery of England's heroes. Ah, the brave old times! An anaemic age languishes for want of you, and finds its solace in "bluggy" tales. For just as politics supplies the shadow, the simulacrum of fighting, so art supplies the shadows of life to those who lack the substance. We herd in towns, and take the country in dashes of water-colour framed in gilt. We marry for money, and satiate our baulked sense of romance with concoctions from Mudie's. We lie and haggle and cheat only the better to apprehend the subtleties of spiritual discourse in fashionable churches, and our generous appreciation of the consummate chivalry of the hero of melodrama is the reward we owe ourselves for the pain it gave us to kick our wives. Practical joking is banished from reputable circles—even Bob Sawyer is ranging himself; and so this primitive appetite seeks its satisfaction in farcical comedies. Poetic tragedies owe their attraction to the dominance in real life of the drab and the unlovely, and the overstrain of the intellect in modern life gives a peculiar flavour to the ineptitudes of Gaiety burlesque. All the primal instincts and passions are still in us, though distorted, exaggerated, diminished, modified, applied to different objects and purposes. The man with vagabond instincts becomes an explorer, Ishmael writes social dramas, the happier son of a defalcating cashier rises to be a minister of finance, the born liar turns novelist, the man with murder in his soul hunts big game in foreign lands or settles down at home as a critic. And so, too, the born warrior becomes a political leader; and politics, if it does not do any of the things it professes to do, plays yet an invaluable part in modern life, bridging over, perchance, the transition from the bellicose ages to those belauded days when the war-drum shall throb no longer, "and the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law."

That this is confusedly and sub-consciously understood, even by politicians, is shown by their very vocabulary. The Salvation Army itself boasts no more militant a phraseology than the profession whose business it is to administer peacefully the affairs of the realm. That which should be, and sometimes is, expressed by nautical metaphors—the ship of state, guiding the helm, and the rest of it—is much more frequently expressed by military metaphors. Even the posts of duty are the "spoils" of office. The State which to Plato was a deliberately harmonised music is to us a deliberate discord, and the acme of politics, whose crowning glory should be a peaceful measure, is by the vulgar not so inaccurately regarded as attained at a General Election, the nomenclature of which positively bristles with bayonets. Seats are won as towns were of old, and, as in the days of Joshua, victory is achieved by walking round the town and blowing your own trumpets. Great organs shamelessly lament that their side has no good grievance to go to the country with,—as if the absence of grievances were not the very object of government! A stirring war-cry—that is the indispensable. If good government were really the object of a General Election, it would all be over and done with in a day. Election day would everywhere be as simultaneous as Christmas, and votes would be polled with the punctuality with which puddings are eaten. But this would be to contract a campaign into a battle—to make a short story out of a great military serial, peppered with exciting incidents, to be continued in our next. We want our vicissitudes, our sharpshooting, our skirmishing, our days of triumph for the Whigs, and our days of triumph for the Tories. What we like best of all is when the fighting is so level that the Election progresses as breathlessly as a good University boat race. Failing that, we like to see one side swamping the other, like a great flood, the stream rising daily higher and higher, with a crescendo roar, till the vanquished are swept away in a thunderous mountain of waters. So for a full moon the waters rage, the noise of battle roars, till our suppressed fighting instincts have been deluded into repose and satisfaction, till the champing war-horses have been quieted by being allowed to snort and cry "Ha! ha!" to see the glitter of stage spears, and to hear the noise of the supers and the shouting. This is the real end masked beneath all those interminable phrases. And it is achieved at any and every cost. For does not everybody complain that a General Election upsets everything? The publishers groan, the theatrical managers tear their wigs. Englishmen cannot think of two things at once; they are like heavy, solid craft, sound of timber but slow of turning. "One thing at a time" is a national proverb. They cannot even read two books at once, and if two classics should be published on the same day one would be a failure. There is the book of the week, and the book of the season, and the book of the year. This applies even to our appreciation of past periods, and because Shakespeare is the first of the Elizabethan dramatists, the rest are nowhere. Wherefore one would suppose that everybody would make haste to get the Election out of the way; but, on the contrary, it is allowed to linger on, till sometimes our overstrained suspense snaps, and the Election dribbles out in unregarded issues. No, the fight's the thing! War, if not dead, is banished from our shores; the duello has been laughed to death; cock-fighting and bull-baiting have ceased to charm: politics alone remains to gratify the pugnacity and cruelty that civilisation has robbed of their due objects. How we brighten up again at a bye-election, when duels which passed unregarded in the big battle, when towns scarcely noted at the fag-end of the great campaign, become the cynosure of every eye. Through Slocum or Eatonswill the hub of the universe temporarily passes: to its population of four thousand, mostly fools, are entrusted the destinies of the Empire; it is theirs to make or mar. The duel is watched by a breathless nation. The party leaders on each side cheer on their men; their careers and claims and countenances fill up the papers, and they cross swords in a shower of telegrams. Advice to those about to enter Parliament: Elect for a bye-election. Why be a nonentity, a mere M.P., when by a little patience you may hold the centre of the stage, if only for a week? Better almost to be beaten at a bye-election than to be successful at a General.

In case I should ever seek the suffrages of electors myself, I would venture to remind opposition agents and private secretaries that these random criticisms of the glorious constitution (hear, hear!) of that great Empire on which the sun never sets (cheers), over which the Union Jack waves (loud cheers)—a thousand years the battle and the breeze—hem!—I—I—ahem!—Lord Salisbury (loud and prolonged cheers)—I mean that I trust they will not forget that all this is set down without prejudice.



VII

THE REALISTIC NOVEL

The realistic novel, we know from Zola, that apostle of insufficient insight, is based on "human documents," and "human documents" are made up of "facts." But in human life there are no facts.

This is not a paradox, but a "fact." Life is in the eye of the observer. The humour or the pity of it belongs entirely to the spectator, and depends upon the gift of vision he brings. There are no facts, like bricks, to build stories with. What, pray, in the realm of human life is a fact? By no means a stubborn thing, as the proverb pretends. On the contrary, a most pliant, shifting, chameleon-coloured thing, as flexible as figures in the hands of the statistician. What is commonly called a fact is merely a one-sided piece of information, a dead thing, not the series of complex, mutually inter-working relations that constitutes a fact as it exhibits itself to the literary vivisectionist. I walked with a friend in a shabby district of central London, a region that had once been genteel, but was now broken up into apartments. Squalid babies, with wan, pathetic faces, pullulated on the doorsteps; they showed from behind dingy windows at the breasts of haggard women. The fronts of the houses were black, the plaster had crumbled away, the paint had peeled off. It was the ruins of a minor Carthage, and, like Marius, I was lost in mournful reverie; my companion remarked, "These houses are going up; they now pay 7 per cent." He was perfectly justified. There are a hundred ways of looking at any fact. The historian, the scientist, the economist, the poet, the philanthropist, the novelist, the anarchist, the intelligent foreigner,—each would take away a different impression from the street, and all these impressions would be facts, all equally valid, all equally true, and all equally false. Life, I repeat, is in the eye of the observer. What is farce to you is often tragedy to the actual performer. The man who slips over a piece of orange peel, or chases his hat along the muddy pavement, is rarely conscious of the humour of the situation. On the other hand, you shall see persons involved in heartrending tragedies to whom the thing shows as farce, like little children playing in churchyards or riding tombstones astride. To the little imps of comedy, who, according to Mr. Meredith, sit up aloft, holding their sides at the spectacle of mankind, to the

Spirit of the world, Beholding the absurdities of men, Their vaunts, their feats, ...

human life must be a very different matter from what we poor players on the scene imagine it; we are cutting a very different figure, not only from that which faces us from the mirror of vanity, but from that which is "as ithers see us." Not only, then, may our tragedy be comedy; our comedy may be tragedy. The play of humour at least suggests these alternatives. Life is Janus-faced, and the humourist invests his characters with a double mask; they stand for comedy as well as for tragedy; Don Quixote wears the buskin as well as the sock. Humour, whose definition has always eluded analysis, may, perhaps (to attempt a definition currente calamo), be that subtle flashing from one aspect to another, that turning the coin so rapidly that one seems to see simultaneously the face and the reverse, the pity and the humour of life, and knows not whether to laugh or weep. Humour is, then, the simultaneous revelation of the dual aspects of life; the synthetical fusion of opposites; the gift of writing with a double pen, of saying two things in one, of showing shine and shadow together. This is why the humourist has always the gift of pathos; though the gift of pathos does not equally imply the gift of humour. The tragic writer must always produce one-sided work, so must the "funnyman" who were only a "funny man" and not a humourist (though this is rarer). Each can only show one side of life at a time; the humourist alone can show both. Great novels of romance and adventure, great works of imagination, great poems, may be written by persons without humour; but only the humourist can reproduce life. Milton is great; but the poet of life is Shakespeare. Thus the whole case of "realism" falls to the ground. There being no "facts," Zola's laborious series is futile; it may be true to art, but it is not true to life. His vision is incomplete, is inexhaustive; it lacks humour, and to the scientific novelist the lack of humour is fatal. He is the one novelist who cannot succeed without it. Leave out humour, and you may get art and many other fine things, but you do not get the lights and shadows or the "values" of life.

All novels are written from the novelist's point of view. They are his vision of the world. They are not life, but individual refractions of it. The ironical pessimism of Thomas Hardy is as false as the sentimental optimism of Walter Besant or the miso-androus meliorism of Sarah Grand. What Hall Caine happily calls "the scenic view of life" of Dickens is no more true than the philosophic view of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Each is existence viewing itself through a single medium. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" is as false as "Lorna Doone" or "Plain Tales from the Hills." Life, large, chaotic, inexpressible, not to be bound down by a formula, peeps at itself through the brain of each artist, but eludes photography. This is the true inwardness of the Proteus myth. The humourist alone, by presenting life in its own eternal contradictoriness, by not being tied down to one point of view, like his less gifted brother, comes nearest to expressing its elusive essence. The great novelists are Fielding, Cervantes, Flaubert, Thackeray. But all the novelists supplement one another, and relatively-true single impressions of life go to make up a true picture of

Life, like a dome of many coloured glass.

It is because there are all novels and every aspect of existence in Shakespeare that he sits supreme, the throned sovereign of the literature of life.

All this is writ to console those who suffer too poignantly from book-tragedies and "pictures of life." The artist selects, he studies tone and composition, whereas in real life tragedies are often accompanied by "extenuating circumstances." The unloved girl temporarily forgets her sorrow in the last new novel, or a picnic up the river; the broken-hearted hero betakes himself to billiards and brandy-and-soda, or toys with a beefsteak. Again, many pathetic tales are the outcome of imperfect insight. The novelist imagines how he would feel in the shoes of his characters, and cries out with the pain of hypothetic bunions. This mistake better deserves the name of "the pathetic fallacy" than the poetic misreading of Nature to which Buskin has annexed it. A good novel may be made of bad psychology; indeed, this is what most novels are made of. Yet the gentle reader, misled by the simulation of life, makes himself miserable over dabs of black ink on white paper. The failure of two imaginary beings to unite their lives in wedlock brings unhappiness into myriad homes. How delicious is that story of the German novelist who, having failed to unite his leading couple at the conclusion of a newspaper serial, saw no way of appeasing the grief and indignation of his vast audience save by inserting in the advertisement columns of a later issue of the journal an announcement of their union under the usual head of "Marriages"!



VIII

IN DEFENCE OF GAMBLING

Without gambling life would lose its salt in many a humble household. The humdrum, deadening routine of monotonous daily toil finds relief by this creation of an outside interest; to have a shilling on the favourite enlarges and colours existence, gives it a wider and vaguer horizon. Imagine the delicious anguish of suspense, the excitement of hearing the result, the exultation of winning. And the beauty of gambling is that you cannot lose. Gambling is really a disguised system of purchase. One buys excitement, a most valuable emotion, for which even the members of the Anti-Gambling League are prepared to pay heavily in other forms! And the advantage of gambling over all these other forms is the possibility that you may not be called upon to pay for your purchase after all—nay, that you may even be paid instead! You get not only excitement, but a possible bonus. Is there any earthly transaction that offers such advantages? Why, 't is always "heads I win, tails you lose." Who speaks of losing at cards? As well speak of losing at play-going or novel-reading; what is called loss is simply payment for excitement. You cannot lose at cards, though you may win; unless it be in games where skill preponderates, and then loss means penalty for lack of skill. The mere transfer of money from hand to hand leaves the wealth of the world what it was before. 'T is redistribution, not destruction. It is scarcely relevant to look for the evils of gambling in its effects—to point to ruined reputations and ruined homes. Everything is capable of abuse, from love to religion. The evil of gambling lies in the fact that it is an unworthy form of excitement—that it is possible to colour life more intellectually. The Anti-Gambling League, for all its recent prospectus, will not put down gambling among the poorer classes, except by widening their outlook otherwise, by creating other interests outside the dull daily groove. For the well-to-do classes there is less excuse. With all the arts and amenities of life at their command, it is degrading to use up time and nervous energy in so brainless a pursuit. The gambling that is inherent in the constitution of modern civilization is another affair: that is pursued for the sake of gain; or for a livelihood. The Stock Exchange is an unhappy consequence of the joint-stock company; credit in business is an equally inevitable outcome of the ramified mechanism of exchange. We are all gamblers to-day, insomuch as there is no stable relation between work and reward, and the failure of a bank in Calcutta may impoverish a shopkeeper in Camden Town. Our investments may rise or fall in value through the obscure machinations of unknown millionaires. And even the Anti-Gambling League has no word to say against those great gambling concerns, Life and Fire Assurance Societies, which bet you that you will not die or be burnt out within a certain number of years, or those journals which offer you large odds that you won't be smashed up while reading them. The prudential considerations behind these forms of gambling seem quite to moralise them: indeed, to refuse to accept the bet of the Life Assurance Companies is now considered immoral; a man is expected to amend on his marriage at the very latest.

There is a form of gambling to which I must myself plead guilty. A forlorn, shabby creature, pathetically spruced up, arrives from a ten-mile tramp. He has been a journalist or a poet, but owing to this or that he is on his beam-ends. He has eaten nothing for two days. His wife is dying, his children are weeping for food. His voice breaks beautifully as he tells me I am his last hope. What is to be done? According to Charles Lamb, the solution is to give, to give always. For either the man is in need and speaks truth, or he is a liar and therefore a consummate actor. We pay for stage representations: why deny our obolus to the histrionics of the beggar? So artistic a make up, an elocution with such moving notes of pathos, surely deserve our tribute. Nay (and this Elia forgot to note), the beggar-actor is frequently the author of his own piece; that consistent argument, those tragical episodes, those touches of nature, that minute detail, all are his. For my part, this view does not touch me; I scarcely ever pay for the play, so I expect even the beggar to perform to me as to one of "the press." If I give to beggars, it is purely from the gambling spirit. What are the odds against the man being a scamp? If they are short, or if the betting is level, I incline to the side of mercy. The money is of so much more consequence to him than to me, if the beggar is genuine, that the speculation is well warranted. I know how wrong it is from the point of view of the Charity Organization Society, but I am a man, not a bureau of beneficence. Few of us, I fancy, escape this godly gambling.