The Project Gutenberg eBook, This and That and the Other, by Hilaire Belloc

THIS AND THAT AND THE OTHER

THIS AND THAT AND
THE OTHER

BY

H. BELLOC

Author of "On Anything," "On Everything," "On
Something," etc.

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1912

Copyright, 1912, by
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

Published, November, 1912

To
EVAN CHARTERIS

PREFACE TO THE READER

Since I am assured that this book requires a Preface I must attempt to write one, but I cannot conceive upon what lines it should run unless they be an apology for writing of so many things, and in very many different moods, and in so many different ways.

A Preface is intended to introduce to the Reader the air in which the book that follows must be taken, but what air attaches in common to historical reconstructions, to abstract vagaries, to stories, to jests, to the impression of a storm, and to annoyance with a dead scientist?

The sort of introduction which a book like this needs is like that which a man might find to say who should have to deliver at a house a ton of coals, some second-hand books, a warrant, several weather forecasts and a great quantity of dust. I do not know how such a man would make himself pleasant to the homestead, or prepare for the reception of so mixed a load.

But now I come to think of it the parallel is not quite just. For the man with that heap of rubbish in his cart would be bound to deliver the same, and proportionately to annoy the recipient. But you are not bound to buy, to borrow, or even to pick up this book. And even if you do you are not bound to read it. If you do read it I advise you to read the Essay beginning on page forty-five; the history beginning on page one hundred and forty-three; the denunciation of the very wickedest sort of men, which I have begun on page one hundred and three; the sort of thing which Shakespeare suffered, which you will find on page one hundred and eighty-six. When you have waded through all that you can console yourself by reading the last essay, which is intended to console you. I hope it will. Farewell.

H. Belloc.

P.S. I have never read a Preface in my life, and I suppose you will not read this.

CONTENTS

THIS AND THAT AND THE OTHER

I AN OPEN LETTER TO A YOUNG DIPLOMATIST

My Very Dear Young Diplomatist,

My life-long friendship with your father the Old Diplomatist, must excuse me for the liberty I am now taking.

I am infinitely concerned that your career should be a successful one and that before you perish of senile decay you should have held the position of Ambassador in at least three great capitals of Europe. You certainly will not attain to such eminence unless you are early instructed by some competent authority in the mysteries of your trade, and as I am singularly well placed for giving you private information upon these, I shall immediately proceed to do so.

I beg you to remember at the very outset of your responsible profession what destinies will lie in your hands. The lives of countless innocent men will depend upon your judgment and upon your provocation or restraint of some great war. The principal fortunes of our time will be largely dependent upon your decisions and will always fluctuate according to the advice you may give your Government. More important still, the honour of your country and its splendour before the world will hang upon your good sense and foresight. Weigh, therefore, I beg of you, before you undertake so high a function, its duties and its perils, and all that you may have to answer for at the Last Day, if indeed (as so many still pretend) human beings are answerable in the long run for the good or evil they have done upon earth. Do not, however, be deterred by any shirking of consequences, or by what Tennyson has well called "Craven fears of being great" from the tremendous task which your noble calling involves. Some one must undertake it, and why not you? Having well balanced in your mind these major things, next note carefully, I beg of you, the rules I am about to lay down.

The first of these is that you shall possess yourself of an income of not less than $2,000 a year. You will immediately protest, and with justice, that it is impossible upon such a revenue to impress the nobility of Austria, of Russia, or even of Montenegro, with those qualities which invariably accompany great wealth; but your objection is a youthful and improvident one. You will not be required at this outset of your activities to dazzle by any lavish expenditure the luxurious Courts of the countries I have just named. You are too young to be entrusted with any such duty and at the most it will be incumbent upon you to expend no more upon appearances than what is necessary for making a decent show at the dinner table of others. It is true that from time to time you will have to entertain at a meal, and at your own charges, a journalist perhaps or even a traveller, but from a narrow and cautious observation of some several hundred instances I have discovered that of an average of two hundred meals consumed by Young Diplomatists in the space of a year at places of public resort, no more than 83 at the most, nor less than 51 at the least, were a burden upon their purses. And by management of the simplest sort you can enjoy the hospitality of others at least three times as often as you are compelled to extend it yourself. Moreover, you will have this great advantage, that you will know the habits of the capital in which you reside and can give your guest the impression of having dined well amid luxurious surroundings, although as a matter of fact he shall have dined exceedingly ill amid surroundings which I tremble to remember: for I also have been in Arcadia.

If I have set down such a figure as $2,000 it is merely because that sum has been decided upon by those experts in the profound art of International Politics who determine the minimum for the Court of St. James.

Let us leave this sordid matter and consider next the higher part of your mission, in which connection I will first speak of what your clothing and demeanour should be.

It is not true that the presence of a crease clearly emphasised down the front of each trouser leg is a necessity or even an advantage to the conduct of World-wide affairs. Upon the contrary, I have come to the settled conclusion after no little review of the matter that a mere hint at such a line is not only sufficient, but preferable to any emphasis of it.

You may object to me that the eminent man who advised and all but carried out the occupation of the South Pole by the troops of Monomotapa six years ago, stretched his trousers in a machine every night, or, to speak more accurately, ordered his valet under pain of death to provide that detail. It is true. But it was not because of, it was in spite of, this habit that the Baron brought his pigs to market, and annexed to the dominion of his Sovereign those regions which were abandoned the next year with the utmost precipitation.

I yield to no one in my admiration of his amazing subtlety and comprehensive coup d'œil; but I have it upon unimpeachable testimony that the too great rigidity of his garments formed, until the very last moment, an obstacle to the success of his plans. I give it to you, therefore, as a general rule, that you should do no more than put the trousers upon a table, and pass your hand lightly over them before putting them on; in this way you will produce such a crease as will suggest, and no more than suggest, the feature upon which I have detained you in this paragraph.

More important even than your garments will be your method of address and in particular your conversation with women. Here I can only give you the advice which I fear may seem somewhat general and vague, that you should never neglect upon the one hand to engage in a dialogue of some sort, nor venture, upon the other, to be drawn into a violent altercation.

Thus, if it be your good fortune (as it was once mine) to sit upon a marble terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, and there drink a Chianti of that sort which the French call "Iron Filings" accompanied by the flesh of goats, it would be noted disastrously against you if you refused during the whole course of the meal to utter a word to the lady upon your left or to the lady upon your right. But it will advance you in no way if at the second course you allow your ungovernable temper to become your master, and to tell either of these flanking parties what you thought of them in the heat of the moment. Any attempt to retrieve your position after such an excess by loud appeals to the justice of your cause would but degrade you further in the eyes of your chief, and you might look in vain during all succeeding years for an appointment to the conduct of important and delicate negotiations between any two great powers. No: under such circumstances (to take a concrete instance) don't mention trivial things of literature or of the weather, but discover something novel in the aspect of the sea, or recite for the advantage of the company (but at intervals of not less than five minutes) some terse falsehood that may have occurred to you, and preferably one damaging to the moral character of an innocent man.

Never contradict any statement whatsoever that may be made in your presence, at least in public. Nor, upon your part, make any affirmation which might lead to a contradiction but, after waiting until you have heard an expression of opinion from that person whom you would address, agree with it, differing only in just so much as will lend salt to the remainder of the delightful interchange. Let it appear in all you say that you are at once more learned than those about you, and yet believe them to be more learned than yourself. When you allude to the Great never do so in terms of familiarity, even if the Great be your own Uncle, but rather in terms of distant admiration or of still more distant contempt. Above all—this I most urgently charge you—confess in the most open manner a complete ignorance of how money is made, whether honourably or dishonourably. This last precept is the more difficult to fulfil when you consider that in the high-bred world of European gentlemen in which you will find yourself, money is very nearly the sole subject of discourse.

There remains to be dealt with the last exercise whereby some important mission confided to you may be brought to an issue.

I will suppose that a cautious Government is making an experiment of your abilities and has despatched you for the negotiation of a Commercial Treaty with the Viceroy of Seringapatam: a very usual test for the judging of a man's capacities.

You will, during the weeks in which sundry varlets draft letters, exchange views, consider schedules, and argue tariffs, make it your particular care to visit His Excellency and His Excellency's Wife, to play tennis with His Excellency's daughters once or twice, but more certainly to pursue in company with His Excellency's sons some animal which may be killed without any serious risk.

When the preliminaries of the Treaty have been agreed to and the moment has come for fixing your signature thereto, it is in the essence of good breeding that you should perform the act quite simply with some ordinary pen, such for instance as the fountain pen which you carry in your pocket, and I need hardly say that jokes framed for the occasion, or any flippancy of demeanour during the solemnity would be in equally bad taste. You shall (if my memory of many such occasions serves me right) spread your left hand (which you will previously have washed very carefully) outwards over the paper, arch your eyebrows somewhat, say to your salaried friend, "Where do I sign?" and then quickly put down your name in the place indicated, and that in a very ordinary manner. These are the little things that betray not only the Gentleman but the Arbiter of the World's Destinies.

Space forbids me to deal with the minor matters of religion, affection and morals. I only beg you to keep all three under a severe restraint, and in particular the first, too great a zeal in which has early ruined many a rising young fellow.

Good-bye, my dear Young Diplomatist. If they send you to Paris ask for Berlin; and if they send you to Berlin kill yourself.

I am, in fond remembrance of your father,
Your devoted friend,
H. Belloc.

II ON PEDANTS

The just and genial man will attempt to take pleasure in what surrounds him when it is capable of giving him amusement, always supposing that it does not move him to wrath. I mean, that a man who is both just and companionable will rather laugh than turn sour at the discomforts of this world. For example, consider the Pedant.

Never was such an exasperating fellow; never was there a time when he ran riot as he does now! On which account many are bewildered and many sad, they know not why, and many who know their time are soured, but a few (and I hope they may be an increasing few) are neither bewildered nor saddened nor soured by this spectacle, but claim to be made merry—and are.

What is a Pedant?

There are many fixed human types, and every one of them has a name. There is the Priest, there is the Merchant, there is the Noble—and there is the Pedant. Each of these types are known by a distinctive name, and to most men they call up a clear image, but because they are types of mankind they are a little too complicated for definition. Nevertheless I will have a try at the Pedant.

The essence of the Pedant is twofold, first that he takes his particular science for something universal, second, that he holds with the Grip of Faith certain set phrases in that science which he has been taught. I say "with the Grip of Faith"; it is the only metaphor applicable; he has for these phrases a violent affection. Not only does he not question them, but he does not know that they can be questioned. When he repeats them it is in a fixed and hierarchic voice. When they are denied he does not answer, but flies into a passion which, were he destined to an accession of power, might in the near future turn to persecution.

Alas! that the noblest thing in man should be perverted to such a use; for Faith when it is exercised upon those unprovable things which are in tune with things provable, illuminates and throws into a right perspective everything we know. But the Faith of the Pedant!...

The Pedant crept in upon the eclipse of our religion; his reign is therefore brief. Perhaps he is also but a reflection of that vast addition to material knowledge which glorified the last century. Perhaps it is the hurry, and the rapidity of our declining time, which makes it necessary for us to accept ready-made phrases and to act on rules of thumb good or bad. Perhaps it is the whirlpool and turmoil of classes which has pitchforked into the power of the Pedant whole groups of men who used to escape him. Perhaps it is the Devil. Whatever it is it is there.

You see it more in England than in any other European country. It runs all through the fibre of our modern literature and our modern comment, like the strings of a cancer. Come, let us have a few examples.

There is "the Anglo-Saxon race." It does not exist. It is not there. It is no more there than Baal or Moloch or the Philosopher's Stone, or the Universal Mercury. There never was any such race. There were once hundreds and hundreds of years ago a certain number of people (how many we do not know) talking a local German dialect in what is now Hampshire and Berkshire. To this dialect historians have been pleased to give the name of Anglo-Saxon, and that is all it means. If you pin your Pedant down to clear expression, saying to him, "Come, now, fellow, out with it! What is this Anglo-Saxon race of yours?" you find that he means a part (and a part only) of such people in the world as habitually speak the English language, or one of its dialects: that part only which in a muddy way he sympathises with; that part which is more or less of his religion, and more or less conformable to his own despicable self. It does not include the Irish, it does not include the negroes of the United States, but it does include a horde of German Jews, and a mixed rabble of every origin under the sun sweating in the slums of the New World.

Why then you may ask, and you may well ask, does the man use the phrase "Anglo-Saxon" at all?

The answer is simple. It smacks—or did originally smack—of learning. Among the innumerable factors of modern Europe one, and only one, was the invasion of the Eastern part of this island (and only the Eastern part) by pirates from beyond the North Sea. The most of these pirates (but by no means all) belonged either to a loose conglomeration of tribes whom the Romans called Saxones, or to a little maritime tribe called Angles. True, the full knowledge of that event is a worthy subject of study; there is a good week's reading upon it in original authorities, and I can imagine a conscientious man who would read slowly and make notes, spending a fortnight upon the half dozen contemporary sources of knowledge we possess upon these little barbarian peoples. But, Lord! what a superstructure the Pedant has raised upon that narrow base!

Then there is "alcohol"; what "alcohol" does to the human body, and the rest of it; to read the absurd fellows one would imagine that this stuff "alcohol" was something you could see and handle; something with which humanity was familiar, like Beef, Oak, Sand, Chalk, and the rest. Not a bit of it. It does not exist any more than the "Anglo-Saxon race" exists. It is a chemical extraction. And in connection with it you have something very common to all such folly, to wit, gross insufficiency even in the line to which its pedantry is devoted. For this chemical abstraction of theirs may be expressed in many forms and it is only in one of these forms that they mouth out their interminable and pretentious dogmas. Humanity, healthy European humanity that is, the jolly place called Christendom, has drunk from immemorial time wine and beer and cider. It has been noticed (also from immemorial time) that if a man drank too much of any of these things he got drunk, and that if he got drunk often his health and capacity declined. There is the important fact which humanity has never missed, and without which the rhodomontades of the Pedant would have no foothold. It is because his pretended knowledge relates to a real evil with which humanity is acquainted that people listen to him at all on the subject. He ill requites their confidence! He exploits and bamboozles them to the top of their bent. He terrifies the weak victims (and the weaker witnesses) of drunkenness and often, I am sorry to say, picks their pockets as well. I can call to mind as I write more than one Pedant who by harping on this word "alcohol" has got very considerable sums out of the public. Well, it is the public's fault! Vult decipi et decipiatur. And a murrain on it—also a quinsy!

Then there is "the Fourth Gospel": your Pedant never calls it the Gospel of S. John, as his fathers have done before him for two thousand years. He must give it a pretentious name and then, because it happens to be cram-full of Christian doctrine, he must deny its authenticity. There is not a vestige of proof against that authenticity, nor for that matter a vestige of sound historical proof in favour of it. Like everything else in the fundamental structure of the Faith from the Mass to the Apocalypse, it has for witness the tradition of the Church, and is no more acceptable as an historic document of the type of the "Agricola" or the "Catiline Orations" than any one of the other Gospels. There is not an event mentioned in the whole of the New Testament which has true historic value. The whole thing depends upon Belief, and Belief in a corporate teaching body. Yet how your Pedant has flourished upon this same Fourth Gospel! Now he is "reverently accepting it," now "reluctantly rejecting it"; he fondles it as a cat does a mouse, and when you try to come to handgrips with him he will first (taking you for a simple and unlearned man) put you off with silly technicalities. You have but to read up the meaning of these technicalities in the dictionary to find that he is talking through his hat. He has no evidence, and there can be no evidence, as to whether the Gospel was or was not written by the traditional figure which the Catholic Church calls S. John, and all he has to say on the matter would not tempt the most gullible gambler to invest a penny on a ten-to-one chance.

Then there is "the conflict between religion and science." What the Pedant really means when he uses that phrase (and he has not only used it threadbare but has fed it by the ton to the recently enfranchised and to the vulgar in general) is the conflict between a mystical doctrine and every-day common sense. That conflict has always existed and always will exist. If you say to any man who has not heard of such a thing before "I will kill you and yet you will survive" or "This water is not ordinary water, it does more than wash you or assuage your thirst, it will also cure blindness, and make whole a diseased limb," the man who has not heard such things before, will call you a liar; of course he will, and small blame to him. We can only generalise from repeated experience, and oddities and transcendental things are not within the field of repeated experience. But "science" has nothing to do with that. The very fact that they use the word religion is enough to show the deplorable insufficiency of their minds. What religion? Your Pedant is far too warped and hypocritical to say exactly what he means even in so simple a case; so he uses the word "religion," a term which may apply to Thugs with their doctrine of the sanctity of murder, or to the Mahommedans who are not bound to any transcendental doctrine but only to a Rule of Life, or to Buddhists who have but a philosophy, or to Plymouth Brethren, or to Head Hunters.

I said at the beginning of this that the Pedant was food for laughter, rather than for anger.

Humph!

III ON ATHEISM

The Atheist is he that has forgotten God. He that denies God may do so in many innocent ways, and is an Atheist in form, but is not condemnable as such. Thus one man will reason by contradiction that there can be no God. If there were a God (says he), how could such things be? This man has not read or does not know sufficient to his purpose, or is not wide enough. His purpose is Truth, so he is not to be condemned. Another will say, "There is no God," meaning, "There is none that I have heard called God": as, the figure of an old man; some vengeful spirit; an absurdity taught him by fools; and so forth. Another also will say, "There is no God," as he would say, "Thus do I solve this riddle!" He has played a game, coming to a conclusion of logic, and supposes himself right by the rules of the game. Nor is he more to be condemned than one who shall prove, not that God is not, but that God is, by similar ways. For though this last man proves truth, and that first man falsehood, yet each is only concerned with proving, and not with making good or standing up for the Truth, so that it shall be established. Neither would found in the mind something unshakeable, but each would rather bring a process to its conclusion for neatness.

We call that man Atheist who, thinking or unthinking, waking or sleeping, knows not God; and when it is brought to him that either God is not or is, would act as though the question mattered nothing. Such an Atheist makes nothing of God's judgments nor of his commands. He does not despise them but will have them absent, as he will have God absent also. Nor is he a rebel but rather an absconder.

Of Atheism you may see that it is proper to a society and not to a man, so that Atheists are proper to an Atheist Commonwealth, and this because we find God in mankind or lose him there.

Rousseau would have no Atheist in the Republic. All other opinion he thought tolerable, but this intolerable because through it was loosened every civil bond. But if a Commonwealth be not Atheist no Atheist will be within it, since it is through men and their society that one man admits God. No one quite lonely could understand or judge whether of God's existence or of much lesser things. A man quite lonely could not but die long before he was a man grown. He would have no speech or reason. Also a man Atheist in a Commonwealth truly worshipping would be abhorrent as a traitor with us and would stand silent. How, then, would Rousseau not tolerate the Atheist in his Republic, seeing that if his Republic were not Atheist no Atheist could be therein? Of this contradiction the solution is that false doctrine of any kind is partially hidden and striving in the minds of men before one man shall become its spokesman. Now of false doctrine when it is thus blind and under water nothing can be either tolerated or proscribed. The ill-ease of it is felt but no magistrate can seize it anywhere. But when one man brings it up to reason and arms it with words, then has it been born (as it were) into the world, and can be tried and judged, accepted or expelled.

No Commonwealth has long stood that was Atheist, yet many have been Atheist a little before they died: as some men lose the savour of meats, and the colours and sounds of things also a little before they die.

A Commonwealth fallen into this palsy sees no merit in God's effect of Justice, but makes a game of law. In peril, as in battle or shipwreck, each man will save himself. In commerce man will cozen man. The Commonwealth grown Atheist lets the larger prey upon the less, until all are eaten up.

They say that a man not having seen salt or knowing that such a thing as salt might be and even denying that salt could be (since he had not seen it), might yet very livelily taste the saltness of the sea. So it is with men who still love Justice, though they have lost Religion. For these men are angered by evil-doing, and will risk their bodies in pity and in indignation. They therefore truly serve God in whose essence Justice resides, and of whom the Effect in Society is Justice. But what shall we say of a man who speaks of salt as a thing well known, and yet finds no division between his well and the water of the sea? And that is the Atheist case. When men of a mean sinfulness purchase a seat of judgment, and therein, while using the word "God," care nothing for right but consider the advantage of their aged limbs and bellies, or of the fellow rich they drink with, then they are Atheist indeed.

That Commonwealth also is Atheist in which the rulers will use the fear of God for a cheat, hoping thereby to make foolish men work for them, or give up their goods, or accept insult and tyranny. It is so ordered that this trick most powerfully slings back upon its authors, and that the populace are now moved at last not by empty sentences which have God's name in them, but by lively devils. In the end of such cheats the rich men who so lied are murdered and by a side wind God comes to his own.

One came to a Courtier who had risen high in the State by flattery and cowardice, but who had a keen wit. To this Courtier he propounded a certain scheme which would betray the Commonwealth, and this the Courtier agreed to. But when he had done so he said: "Either God is or is not. If he is not, why then we have chosen well."

This instance is a mark and Atheism is judged by it. For if God is not, then all falsehoods, though each prove the rest false, are each true, and every evil is its own good, and there is confusion everywhere. But if God is, then the world can stand. Now that the world does stand all men know and live by, even those who, not in a form of words but in the heart, deny its Grand Principle.

IV ON FAME

Fame is that repute among men which gives us pleasure. It needs much repetition, but also that repetition honourable. Of all things desired Fame least fulfils the desire for it; for if Fame is to be very great a man must be dead before it is more than a shoot; he therefore has not the enjoyment of it (as it would seem). Again, Fame while a man lives is always tarnished by falsehood; for since few can observe him, and less know him, he must have Fame for work which he does not do and forego Fame for work which he knows deserves it.

Fame has no proper ending to it, when it is first begun, as have things belonging to other appetites, nor is any man satiated with it at any time. Upon the contrary, the hunger after it will lead a man forward madly always to some sort of disaster, whether of disappointment in the soul, or of open dishonour.

Fame is not to be despised or trodden under as a thing not to be sought, for no man is free of the desire of it, nor can any man believe that desire to be an imperfection in him unless he desire at the same time something greater than Fame, and even then there is a flavour of Fame certain to attach to his achievement in the greater thing. No one can say of Fame, "I contemn it"; as a man can say of titles, "I contemn them." Nor can any man say of the love of Fame, "This is a thing I should cast from me as evil," as a man may say of lust when it is inordinate, that is, out of place. Nor can any man say of Fame, "It is a little thing," for if he says that he is less or more than a man.

The love of Fame is the mobile of all great work in which also man is in the image of God, who not only created but took pleasure in what he did and, as we know, is satisfied by praise thereof.

In what way, then, shall men treat Fame? How shall they seek it, or hope to use it if obtained? To these questions it is best answered that a man should have for Fame a natural appetite, not forced nor curiously entertained; it must be present in him if he would do noble things. Yet if he makes the Fame of those things, and not those things themselves his chief business, then not only will he pursue Fame to his hurt, but also Fame will miss him. Though he should not disregard it yet he must not pursue it to himself too much, but he will rightly make of it in difficult times a great consolation.

When Fame comes upon a man well before death then must he most particularly beware of it, for is it then most dangerous. Neither must he, having achieved it, relax effort nor (a much greater peril) think he has done his work because some Fame now attaches thereto.

Some say that after a man has died the spreading of his earthly Fame is still a pleasure to him among greater scenes: but this is doubtful. One thing is certain, Fame is enjoyable in good things accomplished; bitter, noisome and poisonous in all other things—whether it be the Fame of things thought to be accomplished but not accomplished, or Fame got by accident, or Fame for evil things concealed because they are evil.

The judgment of Fame is this: That many men having done great things of a good sort have not Fame. And that many men have Fame who have done but little things and most of them evil. The virtue of Fame is that it nourishes endeavour. The peril of Fame is that it leads men towards itself, and therefore into inanities and sheer loss. But Fame has a fruit, which is a sort of satisfaction coming from our communion with mankind.

They that believe they deserve Fame though they lack it may be consoled in this: that soon they shall be concerned with much more lasting things, and things more immediate and more true: just as a man who misses some entertainment at a show will console himself if he knows that shortly he shall meet his love. They that have Fame may correct its extravagances by the same token: remembering that shortly they will be so occupied that this earthly Fame of theirs will seem a toy. Old men know this well.

V ON REST

Rest is not the conclusion of labour but the recreation of power. It seems a reward because it fulfils a need: but that need being filled, Rest is but an extinction and a nothingness. So we do not pray for Rest; but (in a just religion) we pray after this life for refreshment, light and peace—not for Rest.

Rest is only for a little while, as also is labour only for a little while: each demanding the other as a supplement; yet is Rest in some intervals a necessary ground for seed, and without Rest to protect the sprouting of the seed no good thing ever grew.

Of many follies in a Commonwealth concerning Rest the chief is that Rest is not needed for all effort therein. Thus one man at leisure will obtain work of another for many days without a sufficiency of Rest for that other and think to profit by this. So he may: but he profits singly, and when many rich do so by the poor it is like one eating his own flesh, since the withdrawal of Rest from those that labour will soon eat up the Commonwealth itself.

Much that men do with most anxiety is for the establishment of Rest. Wise men have often ordered gardens carefully for years, in order to enjoy Rest at last. Beds also are devised best when they give the deepest interval of repose and are surrounded by artifice with prolonged silence, made of quiet strong wood and well curtained from the morning light. It is so with rooms removed from the other rooms of a house, and with days set apart from labour, and with certain kinds of companionship.

Undoubtedly the regimen of Rest for men is that of sleep, and sleep is a sort of medicine to Rest, and again a true expression of it. For though these two, Rest and Sleep, are not the same yet without sleep no man can think of Rest nor has Rest any one better body or way of being than this thing Sleep. For in sleep a man utterly sinks down in proportion as it is deep and good into the centre of things and becomes one with that from which he came, drawing strength not only by negation from repose, but in some way positive from the being of his mother which is the earth. Some say that sleep is better near against the ground on this account and all men know that sleep in wild places and without cover is the surest and the best. Sleep promises waking as Rest does a renewal of power; and the good dreams that come to us in sleep are a proof that in sleep we are still living.

A man may deny himself any other voluptuousness but not Rest. He may forego wine or flesh or anything of the body, and music or disputation, or anything of the mind, or love itself, or even companionship; but not Rest, for if he denies himself this he wastes himself and is himself no longer. Rest, therefore, is a necessary intermittent which we must have both for soul and body and is the only necessity inherent to both those two so long as those two are bound together in the matter and net of this world. For food is a necessity to the body and virtue to the soul, but Rest to one and to the other.

There is no picture of delight in which we envy other men so much as when, lacking Rest, we see them possessing it; on which occasions we call out unwisely for a Perpetual Rest and for the cessation of all endeavour. In the same way men devise a lack of Rest for a special torment, and none can long survive it.

Rest and innocence are good fellows, and Rest is easier to the innocent man. The wicked suffer unrest always in some sort on account of God's presence warning them, though this unrest is stronger and much more to their good if men also warn them and if they live among such fellows in their commonwealth as will not permit their wickedness to be hidden or to go unpunished.

Rest has no time, and in its perfection must lose all mark of time. So a man sleeping deeply knows not how many hours have passed since he fell asleep until he awake again.

There are many good accompaniments for Rest, slow and distant music which at last is stiller and then silent; the scent of certain herbs and flowers and particularly of roses; clean linen; a pure clear air and the coming of night. To all these things prayer, an honourable profession and a preparation of the mind are in general a great aid, and, in the heat of the season, cool water refreshed with essences. A man also should make his toilet for Rest if he would have it full and thorough and prepare his body as his soul for a relaxation. He does well also in the last passage of his mind into sleep to commend himself to the care of God; remembering both how petty are all human vexations and also how weathercock they are, turning now a face of terror and then in a moment another face of laughter or of insignificance. Many troubles that seem giants at evening are but dwarfs at sunrise, and some most terrific prove ghosts which speed off with the broadening of the day.

VI ON DISCOVERY

There is a great consolation lying all bottled and matured for those who choose to take it, in the modern world—and yet how few turn to it and drink the bracing draft! It is a consolation for dust and frequency and fatigue and despair—this consolation is the Discovery of the World.

The world has no end to it. You can discover one town which you had thought well known, or one quarter of the town, or one house in the quarter of the town, or one room in that house, or one picture in that room. The avenues of discovery open out infinite in number and quite a little distance from their centre (which is yourself and your local, tired, repeated experience) these avenues diverge outwards and lead to the most amazingly different things.

You can take some place of which you have heard so often and in so vulgar a connotation that you could wish never to hear of it again, and coming there you will find it holding you, and you will enjoy many happy surprises, unveiling things you could not dream were there.

How much more true is it not, then, that discovery awaits you if you will take the least little step off the high road, or the least little exploration into the past of a place you visit.

Most men inhabiting a countryside know nothing of its aspect even quite close to their homes, save as it is seen from the main roads. If they will but cross a couple of fields or so, they may come, for the first time in many years of habitation, upon a landscape that seems quite new and a sight of their own hills which makes them look like the hills of a strange country.

In youth we all know this. In youth and early manhood we wonder what is behind some rise of land, or on the other side of some wood which bounded our horizon in childhood. Then comes a day when we manfully explore the unknown places and go to find what we shall find.

As life advances we imagine that all this chance of discovery has been taken from us by our increased experience. It is an illusion. If we are so dull it is we that have changed and not the world; and what is more we can recover from that dulness, and there is a simple medicine for it, which is to repeat the old experiment: to go out and see what we may see.

Some will grant this true of the sudden little new discoveries quite close to home, but not of travel. Travel, they think, must always be to-day by some known road to some known place, with dust upon the mind at the setting out and at the coming in. It is a great error. You can choose some place too famous in Europe and even too peopled and too large, and yet make the most ample discoveries there.

"Oh, but," a man will say, "most places have been so written of that one knows them already long before seeing them."

No: one does nothing of the kind. Even the pictured and the storied places are full enough of newness if one will but shake off routine and if one will but peer.

Speak to five men of some place which they have all visited, perhaps together, and find out what each noticed most: you will be amazed at the five different impressions.

Enter by some new entry a town which hitherto you had always entered by one fixed way, and again vary your entry, and again, and you will see a new town every time.

There are many, many thousand Englishmen who know the wonderful sight of Rouen from the railway bridge below the town, for that lies on the high road to Paris, and there are many thousand, though not so many, who know Rouen from Bon-Secours. There are a few hundred who know it from the approach by the great woods to the North. There are a dozen or so perhaps who have come in from the East, walking from Picardy. The great town lying in its cup of hills is quite different every way.

There is a view of Naples which has been photographed and printed and painted until we are all tired of it. It is a view taken from the hill which makes the northern horn of the Bay; there is a big pine tree in the foreground and Vesuvius smoking in the background, and I will bargain that most people who read this have seen that view upon a postcard, or in a shop window, and that a good many of them would rightly say that it was the most hackneyed thing in Europe.

Now some years ago I had occasion to go to Naples, a town I had always avoided for that very reason—that one heard of it until one was tired and that this view had become like last year's music-hall tunes.

I went, not of my own choice but because I had to go, and when I got there I made as complete a discovery as ever Columbus made or those sailors who first rounded Africa and found the Indian Seas.

Naples was utterly unlike anything I had imagined. Vesuvius was not a cone smoking upon the horizon—it was a great angry pyramid toppling right above me. The town was not a lazy, dirty town with all the marks of antiquity and none of energy. It was alive with commerce and all the evils and all the good of commerce. It was angrily alive; it was like a wasp nest.

I will state the plain truth at the risk of being thought paradoxical. Naples recalled to me an American seaboard town so vividly that I could have thought myself upon the Pacific. I could have gone on for days digging into all this new experience, turning it over and fructifying it. My business allowed me not twenty-four hours, but the vision was one I shall never forget, and it was as completely new and as wholly creative, or re-creative, of the mind, as is that land-fall which an adventurous sailor makes when he finds a new island at dawn upon a sea not yet travelled.

Every one, therefore, should go out to discover, five miles from home, or five hundred. Every one should assure himself against the cheating tedium which books and maps create in us, that the world is perpetually new: and oddly enough it is not a matter of money.

VII ON INNS

Here am I sitting in an Inn, having gloomily believed not half an hour ago that Inns were doomed with all other good things, but now more hopeful and catching avenues of escape through the encircling decay.

For though certainly that very subtle and final expression of a good nation's life, the Inn, is in peril, yet possibly it may survive.

This Inn which surrounds me as I write (the law forbids me to tell its name) is of the noblest in South England, and it is in South England that the chief Inns of the world still stand. In the hall of it, as you come in, are barrels of cider standing upon chairs. The woman that keeps this Inn is real and kind. She receives you so that you are glad to enter the house. She takes pleasure in her life. What was her beauty her daughter now inherits, and she serves at the bar. Her son is strong and carries up the luggage. The whole place is a paradise, and as one enters that hall one stands hesitating whether to enjoy its full, yet remaining delight, or to consider the peril of death that hangs to-day over all good things.

Consider, you wanderers (that is all men, whatsoever, for not one of you can rest), what an Inn is, and see if it should not rightly raise both great fears and great affection.

An Inn is of the nation that made it. If you desire a proof that the unity of Christendom is not to be achieved save through a dozen varying nations, each of a hundred varying counties and provinces and these each of several countrysides—the Inns will furnish you with that proof.

If any foolish man pretend in your presence that the brotherhood of men should make a decent man cosmopolitan, reprove his error by the example of an Inn.

If any one is so vile as to maintain in your presence that one's country should not be loved and loyally defended, confound so horrid a fool by the very vigorous picture of an Inn. And if he impudently says that some damned Babylon or other is better than an Inn, look up his ancestry.

For the truth is that Inns (may God preserve them, and of the few remaining breed, in spite of peril, a host of new Inns for our sons), Inns, Inns are the mirror and at the same time the flower of a people. The savour of men met in kindliness and in a homely way for years and years comes to inhabit all their panels (Inns are panelled) and lends incense to their fires. (Inns have not radiators, but fires.) But this good quintessence and distillation of comradeship varies from countryside to countryside and more from province to province, and more still from race to race and from realm to realm; just as speech differs and music and all the other excellent fruits of Europe.

Thus there is an Inn at Tout-de-suite-Tardets which the Basques made for themselves and offer to those who visit their delightful streams. A river flows under its balcony, tinkling along a sheer stone wall, and before it, high against the sunset, is a wood called Tiger Wood, clothing a rocky peak called the Peak of Eagles.

Now no one could have built that Inn nor endowed it with its admirable spirit, save the cleanly but incomprehensible Basques. There is no such Inn in the Béarnese country, nor any among the Gascons.

In Falaise the Normans very slowly and by a mellow process of some thousand years have engendered an Inn. This Inn, I think, is so good that you will with difficulty compare it with any better thing. It is as quiet as a tree on a summer night, and cooks crayfish in an admirable way. Yet could not these Normans have built that Basque Inn; and a man that would merge one in the other and so drown both is an outlaw and to be treated as such.

But these Inns of South England (such as still stand!)—what can be said in proper praise of them which shall give their smell and colour and their souls? There is nothing like them in Europe, nor anything to set above them in all the world. It is within their walls and at their boards that one knows what South England once did in the world and why. If it is gone it is gone. All things die at last. But if it is gone—why, no lover of it need remain to drag his time out in mourning it. If South England is dead it is better to die upon its grave.

Whether it dies in our time or no you may test by the test of its Inns. If they may not weather the chaos, if they fail to round the point that menaces our religion and our very food, our humour and our prime affections—why, then, South England has gone too. If, if (I hardly dare to write such a challenge), if the Inns hold out a little time longer—why, then, South England will have turned the corner and Europe can breathe again. Never mind her extravagances, her follies or her sins. Next time you see her from a hill, pray for South England. For if she dies, you die. And as a symptom of her malady (some would say of her death-throes) carefully watch her Inns.

Of the enemies of Inns, as of rich men, dull men, blind men, weak-stomached men and men false to themselves, I do not speak: but of their effect. Why such blighting men are nowadays so powerful and why God has given them a brief moment of pride it is not for us to know. It is hidden among the secret things of this life. But that they are powerful all men, lovers of Inns, that is, lovers of right living, know well enough and bitterly deplore. The effect of their power concerns us. It is like a wasting of our own flesh, a whitening of our own blood.

Thus there is the destruction of an Inn by gluttony of an evil sort—though to say so sounds absurd, for one would imagine that gluttony should be proper to Inns. And so it is, when it is your true gluttony of old, the gluttony of our fathers made famous in English letters by the song which begins:

I am not a glutton

But I do like pie.

But evil gluttony, which may also be called the gluttony of devils, is another matter. It flies to liquor as to a drug; it is ashamed of itself; it swallows a glass behind a screen and hides. There is no companionship with it. It is an abomination, and this abomination has the power to destroy a Christian Inn and to substitute for it, first a gin-palace, and then, in reaction against that, the very horrible house where they sell only tea and coffee and bubbly waters that bite and sting both in the mouth and in the stomach. These places are hotbeds of despair, and suicides have passed their last hours on earth consuming slops therein alone.

Thus, again, a sad enemy of Inns is luxury. The rich will have their special habitations in a town so cut off from ordinary human beings that no Inn may be built in their neighbourhood. In which connection I greatly praise that little colony of the rich which is settled on the western side of Berkeley Square, in Lansdowne House, and all around the eastern parts of Charles Street, for they have permitted to be established in their midst the "Running Footman," and this will count in the scale when their detestable vices are weighed upon the Day of Judgment, upon which day, you must know, vices are not put into the scale gently and carefully so as to give you fair measure, but are banged down with enormous force by strong and maleficent demons.

Then, again, a very subtle enemy of Inns is poverty, when it is pushed to inhuman limits, and you will note especially in the dreadful great towns of the North, more than one ancient house which was once honourable and where Mr. Pickwick might very well have stayed, now turned ramshackle and dilapidated and abandoned, slattern, draggle-tail, a blotch, until the yet beastlier reformers come and pull it down to make an open space wherein the stunted children may play.

Thus, again, you will have the pulling down of an Inn and the setting up of an Hotel built of iron and mud, or ferro-concrete. This is murder.

Let me not be misunderstood. Many an honest Inn calls itself an hotel. I have no quarrel with that, nor has any traveller I think. It is a title. Some few blighted and accursed hotels call themselves "Inns"—a foul snobbism, a nasty trick of words pretending to create realities.

No, it is when the thing is really done, not when the name is changed that murder calls out to God for vengeance.

I knew an Inn in South England, when I was a boy, that stood on the fringe of a larch wood, upon a great high road. Here when the springtime came and I went off to see the world I used to meet with carters and with travelling men, also keepers and men who bred horses and sold them, and sometimes with sailors padding the hoof between port and port. These men would tell me a thousand things. The larch trees were pleasant in their new colour; the woods alive with birds and the great high road was, in those days, deserted: for high bicycles were very rare, low bicycles were not invented, the rich went by train in those days; only carts and caravans and men with horses used the leisurely surface of the way.

Now that good Inn has gone. I was in it some five years ago, marvelling that it had changed so little, though motor things and money-changers went howling by in a stream and though there were now no poachers or gipsies or forestmen to speak to, when a too smart young man came in with two assistants and they began measuring, calculating, two-foot-ruling and jotting. This was the plot. Next came the deed. For in another year, when the Spring burst and I passed by, what should I see in the place of my Inn, my Inn of youth, my Inn of memories, my Inn of trees, but a damnable stack of iron with men fitting a thin shell of bricks to it like a skin. Next year the monster was alive and made. The old name (call it the Jolly) was flaunting on a vulgar signboard swing in cast-iron tracing to imitate forged work. The shell of bricks was cast with sham white as for half-timber work. The sham-white was patterned with sham timbers of baltic deal, stained dark, with pins of wood stuck in: like Cheshire, not like home. Wrong lattice insulted the windows—and inside there were three bars. At the door stood an Evil Spirit, and within every room upstairs and down other devils, his servants, resided.

It is no light thing that such things should be done and that we cannot prevent them.

From the towns all Inns have been driven: from the villages most. No conscious efforts, no Bond Street nastiness of false conservation, will save the beloved roofs. Change your hearts or you will lose your Inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your Inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.

VIII ON ROWS

The Hon. Member: Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker! Is the Hon. Member in order in calling me an insolent swine?

(See Hansard passim)

A distinguished literary man has composed and perhaps will shortly publish a valuable poem the refrain of which is "I like the sound of broken glass."

This concrete instance admirably illustrates one of the most profound of human appetites: indeed, an appetite which, to the male half of humanity, is more than an appetite and is, rather, a necessity: the appetite for rows.

It has been remarked by authorities so distant and distinct, yet each so commanding, as Aristotle and Confucius, that words lose their meanings in the decline of a State.

Absolutely purposeless phrases go the rounds, are mechanically repeated; sometimes there is an attempt by the less lively citizens to act upon such phrases when Society is diseased! And so to-day you have the suburban fool who denounces the row. Sometimes he calls it ungentlemanly—that is, unsuitable to the wealthy male. If he says that he simply cannot know what he is talking about.

If there is one class in the community which has made more rows than another it is the young male of the wealthier classes, from Alcibiades to my Lord Tit-up. When men are well fed, good-natured, fairly innocent (as are our youth) then rows are their meat and drink. Nay, the younger males of the gentry have such a craving and necessity for a row that they may be observed at the universities of this country making rows continually without any sort of object or goal attached to such rows.

Sometimes he does not call it ungentlemanly, but points out that a row is of no effect, by which he means that there is no money in it. That is true, neither is there money in drinking, or breathing, or sleeping, but they are all very necessary things. Sometimes the row is denounced by the suburban gentleman as unchristian; but that is because he knows nothing about human history or the Faith, and plasters the phrase down as a label without consideration. The whole history of Christendom is one great row. From time to time the Christians would leap up and swarm like bees, making the most hideous noise and pouring out by millions to whang in their Christianity for as long as it could be borne upon the vile persons of the infidel. More commonly the Christians would vent their happy rage one against the other.

The row is better fun when it is played according to rule: it sounds paradoxical, and your superficial man might conceive that the essence of a row was anarchy. If he did he would be quite wrong; a row being a male thing at once demands all sorts of rules and complications. Otherwise it would be no fun. Take, for instance, the oldest and most solid of our national rows—the House of Commons row. Everybody knows how it is done and everybody surely knows that very special rules are observed. For instance, there is the word "traitor." That is in order. It was decided long ago, when Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, of Birmingham, called Mr. Dillon a traitor. But I have heard with my own ears the word "party-hack" ruled out. It is not allowed.

By a very interesting decision of the Chair, pointing is ruled out also. If a member of the House suddenly thrusts out his arm with a long forefinger at the end of it and directs this instrument towards some other member, the Chair has decided the gesture to be out of order. It is, as another member of the Chamberlain family has said, "No class." Throwing things is absolutely barred. Nor may you now imitate the noise of animals in the chamber itself. This last is a recent decision, or rather it is an example of an old practice falling into desuetude. The last time a characteristic animal cry was heard in the House of Commons was when a very distinguished lawyer, later Lord Chief Justice of England, gave an excellent rendering of a cock-crow behind the Speaker's chair during a difference of opinion upon the matter of Home Rule—but this was more than twenty years ago.

It is a curious thing that Englishmen no longer sing during their rows. The fine song about the House of Lords which had a curse in it and was sung some months ago by two drunken men in Pall Mall to the lasting pleasure of the clubs, would come in very well at this juncture; or that other old political song now forgotten, the chorus of which is (if my memory serves me), "Bow wow wow!"

No one has seized the appetite for a row more fully than the ladies who demand the suffrage. The "disgraceful scenes" and "unwomanly conduct" which we have all heard officially denounced, were certainly odd, proceeding as they did from great groups of middle-class women as unsuited to exercises of this sort as a cow would be to following hounds, but there is no doubt that the men enjoyed it hugely. It had all the fun of a good football scrimmage about it, except when they scratched. And to their honour be it said they did not stab with those murderous long pins about which the Americans make so many jokes.

Before leaving this fascinating subject of rows, we will draw up for the warning of the reader a list of those to whom rows are abhorrent. Luckily they are few. Money-lenders dislike rows; political wire-pullers dislike rows; very tired men recovering from fevers must be put in the same category, and, finally, oddly enough, newspaper proprietors.

Why on earth this last little band—there are not a couple of dozen of them that count in the country—should have such a feature in common, Heaven only knows, but they most undoubtedly have; and they compel their unfortunate employees to write on the subject of rows most amazing and incomprehensible nonsense. There is no accounting for tastes!

IX THE PLEASANT PLACE

A gentleman of my acquaintance came to me the other day for sympathy.... But first I must describe him:—

He is a man of careful, not neat, dress: I would call it sober rather than neat. He is always clean-shaven and his scanty hair is kept short-cut. He is occupied in letters; he is, to put it bluntly, a litteratoor; none the less he is possessed of scholarship and is a minor authority upon English pottery.

He is a very good writer of verse; he is not exactly a poet, but still, his verse is remarkable. Two of his pieces have been publicly praised by political peers and at least half a dozen of them have been praised in private by the ladies of that world. He is a man fifty-four years of age, and, if I may say so without betraying him, a little disappointed.

He came to me, I say, for sympathy. I was sitting in my study watching the pouring rain falling upon the already soaked and drenched and drowned clay lands of my county. The leafless trees (which are in our part of a low but thick sort) were standing against a dead grey sky with a sort of ghost of movement in it, when he came in, opened his umbrella carefully so that it might not drip, and left it in the stone-floored passage—which is, to be accurate, six hundred years old—kicked off his galoshes and begged my hospitality; also (let me say it for the third time) my sympathy.

He said he had suffered greatly and that he desired to tell me the whole tale. I was very willing, and his tale was this:

It seems that my friend (according to his account) found himself recently in a country of a very delightful character.

This country lay up and heavenly upon a sort of table-land. One went up a road which led continually higher and higher through the ravines of the mountains, until, passing through a natural gate of rock, one saw before one a wide plain bounded upon the further side by the highest crests of the range. Through this upland plain ran a broad and noble river whose reaches he could see in glimpses for miles, and upon the further bank of it in a direction opposite that which the gate of rock regarded, was a very delightful city.

The walls of this city were old in their texture, venerable and majestic in their lines. Within their circumference could be discerned sacred buildings of a similar antiquity, but also modern and convenient houses of a kind which my friend had not come across before, but which were evidently suited to the genial, sunlit climate, as also to the habits of leisured men. Their roofs were flat, covered in places by awnings, in other places by tiled verandas, and these roofs were often disposed in the form of little gardens.

Trees were numerous in the city and showed their tops above the lower buildings, while the lines of their foliage indicated the direction of the streets.

My friend was passing down the road which led to this plain—and as it descended it took on an ampler and more majestic character—when he came upon a traveller who appeared to be walking in the direction of the town.

This traveller asked him courteously in the English tongue whether he were bound for the city. My friend was constrained to reply that he could not pretend to any definite plan, but certainly the prospect all round him was so pleasant and the aspect of the town so inviting, that he would rather visit the capital of this delightful land at once than linger in its outskirts.

"Come with me, then," said the Traveller, "and if I may make so bold upon so short an acquaintance, accept my hospitality. I have a good house upon the wall of the town and my rank among the citizens of it is that of a merchant;—I am glad to say a prosperous one."

He spoke without affectation and with so much kindness, that my friend was ravished to discover such a companion, and they proceeded in leisurely company over the few miles that separated them from their goal.

The road was now paved in every part with small square slabs, quite smooth and apparently constructed of some sort of marble. Upon either side there ran canalised in the shining stone a little stream of perfectly clear water. From time to time they would pass a lovely shrine or statue which the country people had adorned with garlands. As they approached the city they discovered a noble bridge in the manner, my friend believed, of the Italian Renaissance, with strong elliptical arches and built, like all the rest of the way, of marble, while the balustrade upon either side of it was so disposed in short symmetrical columns as to be particularly grateful to the eye. Over this bridge there went to and fro a great concourse of people, all smiling, eager, happy and busy, largely acquainted, apparently, each with the others, nodding, exchanging news, and in a word forming a most blessed company.

As they entered the city my friend's companion, who had talked of many things upon their way and had seemed to unite the most perfect courtesy and modesty with the widest knowledge, asked him whether there was any food or drink to which he was particularly attached.

"For," said he, "I make a point whenever I entertain a guest—and that," he put in with a laugh, "is, I am glad to say, a thing that happens frequently—I make a point, I say, of asking him what he really prefers. It makes such a difference!"

My friend began his reply with those conventional phrases to which we are all accustomed, "That he would be only too happy to take whatever was set before him," "That the prospect of his hospitality was a sufficient guarantee of his satisfaction," and so forth: but his host would take no denial.

"No, no!" said he. "Do please say just what you prefer! It is so easy to arrange—if you only knew!... Come, I know the place better than you," he added, smiling again; "you have no conception of its resources. Pray tell me quite simply before we leave this street"—for they were now in a street of sumptuous and well-appointed shops—"exactly what shall be commissioned."

Moved by I know not what freedom of expression, and expansive in a degree which he had never yet known, my friend smiled back and said: "Well, to tell you the truth, some such meal as this would appeal to me: First two dozen green-bearded oysters of the Arcachon kind, opened upon the deep shell with all their juices preserved, and each exquisitely cleaned. These set upon pounded ice and served in that sort of dish which is contrived for each oyster to repose in its own little recess with a sort of side arrangement for the reception of the empty shells."

His host nodded gravely, as one who takes in all that is said to him.

"Next," said my friend, in an enthusiastic manner, "real and good Russian caviar, cold but not frozen, and so touched with lemon—only just so touched—as to be perfect. With this I think a little of the wine called Barsac should be drunk, and that cooled to about thirty-eight degrees—(Fahrenheit). After this a True Bouillon, and by a True Bouillon," said my friend with earnestness, "I mean a Bouillon that has long simmered in the pot and has been properly skimmed, and has been seasoned not only with the customary herbs but also with a suspicion of carrot and of onion, and a mere breath of tarragon."

"Right!" said his host. "Right!" nodding with real appreciation.

"And next," said my friend, halting in the street to continue his list, "I think there should be eggs."

"Right," said his host once more approvingly; "and shall we say——"

"No," interrupted my friend eagerly, "let me speak. Eggs sur-le-plat, frizzled to the exact degree."

"Just what I was about to suggest," answered his delighted entertainer, "and black pepper, I hope, ground large upon them in fresh granules from a proper wooden mill."

"Yes! Yes!" said my friend, now lyric, "and with sea salt in large crystals."

On saying which both of them fell into a sort of ecstasy which my friend broke by adding:

"Something quite light to follow ... preferably a sugar-cured Ham braised in white wine. Then, I think, spinach, not with the ham but after it; and that spinach cooked perfectly dry. We will conclude with some of the cheese called Brie. And for wine during all these latter courses we will drink the wine of Chinon: Chinon Grillé. What they call," he added slyly, "the Fausse maigre; for it is a wine thin at sight but full in the drinking of it."

"Good! Excellent!" said his host, clapping his hands together once with a gesture of finality. "And then after the lot you shall have coffee."

"Yes, coffee roasted during the meal and ground immediately before its concoction. And for liqueur...."

My friend was suddenly taken with a little doubt. "I dare not ask," said he, "for the liqueur called Aquebus? Once only did I taste it. A monk gave it me on Christmas Eve four years ago and I think it is not known!"

"Oh, ask for it by all means!" said his host. "Why, we know it and love it in this place as though it were a member of the family!"

My friend could hardly believe his ears on hearing such things, and said nothing of cigars. But to his astonishment his host, putting his left hand on my friend's shoulder, looked him full in the face and said:

"And now shall I tell you about cigars?"

"I confess they were in my mind," said my friend.

"Why then," said his host with an expression of profound happiness, "there is a cigar in this town which is full of flavour, black in colour, which does not bite the tongue, and which none the less satisfies whatever tobacco does satisfy in man. When you smoke it you really dream."

"Why," said my friend humbly, "very well then, let us mention these cigars as the completion of our little feast."

"Little feast, indeed!" said his host, "why it is but a most humble meal. Anyhow, I am glad to have had from you a proper schedule of your pleasures of the table. In time to come when we know each other better, we will arrange other large and really satisfactory meals; but this will do very well for our initiatory lunch as it were." And he laughed merrily.

"But have I not given you great trouble?" said my friend.

"How little you will easily perceive," said his companion, "for in this town we have but to order and all is at once promptly and intelligently done." With that he turned into a small office where a commissary at once took down his order. "And now," said he emerging, "let us be home."

They went together down the turnings of a couple of broad streets lined with great private palaces and public temples until they came to a garden which had no boundaries to it but which was open, and apparently the property of the city. But the people who wandered here were at once so few, so discreet and so courteous, my friend could not discover whether they were (as their salutes seemed to indicate) the dependents of his host, or merely acquaintances who recognized him upon their way.

This garden, as they proceeded, became more private and more domestic; it led by narrowing paths through high, diversified trees, until, beyond the screen of a great beech hedge, he saw the house ... and it was all that a house should be!

Its clear, well set stone walls were in such perfect harmony with the climate and with the sky, its roof garden from which a child was greeting them upon their approach, so unexpected and so suitable, its arched open gallery was of so august a sort, and yet the domestic ornaments of its colonnade so familiar, that nothing could be conceived more appropriate for the residence of man.

The mere passage into this Home out of the warm morning daylight into the inner domestic cool, was a benediction, and in the courtyard which they thus entered a lazy fountain leaped and babbled to itself in a manner that filled the heart with ease.

"I do not know," said his host in a gentle whisper as they crossed the courtyard, "whether it is your custom to bathe before the morning meal or in the middle of the afternoon?"

"Why, sir," said my friend, "if I may tell the whole truth, I have no custom in the matter; but perhaps the middle of the afternoon would suit me best."

"By all means," said his host in a satisfied tone. "And I think you have chosen wisely, for the meal you have ordered will very shortly be prepared. But, for your refreshment at least, one of my friends shall put you in order, cool your hands and forehead, see to your face and hair, put comfortable sandals upon your feet and give you a change of raiment."

All of this was done. My friend's host did well to call the servant who attended upon his guest a "friend," for there was in this man's manner no trace of servility or of dependence, and yet an eager willingness for service coupled with a perfect reticence which was admirable to behold and feel.

When my friend had been thus refreshed he was conducted to a most exceptional little room. Four pictures were set in the walls of it, mosaics, they seemed—but he did not examine their medium closely. The room itself in its perfect lightness and harmony, with its view out through a large round arch upon the countryside beyond the walls (the old turrets of which made a framework for the view), exactly prepared him for the meal that was prepared.

While the oysters (delightful things!) were entering upon their tray and were being put upon the table, the host, taking my friend aside with an exquisite gesture of courteous privacy, led him through the window-arch on to a balcony without, and said, as they gazed upon the wall and the plain and the mountains beyond (and what a sight they were!):

"There is one thing, my dear sir, that I should like to say to you before you eat ... it is rather a delicate matter.... You will not mind my being perfectly frank?"

"Speak on, speak on," said my friend, who by this time would have confided any interests whatsoever into the hands of such a host.

"Well," said that host, continuing a little carefully, "it is this: as you can see we are very careful in this city to make men as happy as may be. We are happy ourselves, and we love to confer happiness upon others, strangers and travellers who honour us with their presence. But we find—I am very sorry to say we find ... that is, we find from time to time that their complete happiness, no matter with what we may provide them, is dashed by certain forms of anxiety, the chief of which is anxiety with regard to their future receipts of money."

My friend started.

"Nay," said his host hastily, "do not misunderstand me. I do not mean that preoccupations of business are alone so alarming. What I mean is that sometimes, yes, and I may say often (horrible as it seems to us!), our guests are in an active preoccupation about the petty business of finance. Some few have debts, it seems, in the wretched society from which they come, and of which, frankly, I know nothing. Others, though not indebted, feel insecure about the future. Others though wealthy are oppressed by their responsibilities. Now," he continued firmly, "I must tell you once and for all that we have a custom here upon which we take no denial: no denial whatsoever. Every man who enters this city, who honours us by entering this city, is made free of that sort of nonsense, thank God!" And as he said this, my friend's host breathed a great sigh of relief. "It would be intolerable to us to think," he continued, "that our welcome and dear companions were suffering from such a tawdry thing as money-worry in our presence. So the matter is plainly this: whether you like it or whether you do not, the sum of £10,000 is already set down to your credit in the public bank of the city; whether you use it or not is your business; if you do not it is our custom to melt down an equivalent sum of gold and to cast it into the depths of the river, for we have of this metal an unfailing supply, and I confess we do not find it easy to understand the exaggerated value which other men place upon it."

"I do not know that I shall have occasion to use so magnificent a custom," said my friend with an extraordinary relief in his heart, "but I certainly thank you very kindly for its intention, and I shall not hesitate to use any sum that may be necessary for my continuing the great happiness which this city appears to afford."

"You have spoken well," said his host, seizing both his hands, "and your frankness compels me to another confession: We have at our disposal a means of discovering exactly how any one of our guests may stand: the responsibilities of the rich, the indebtedness of the embarrassed, the anxiety of those whose future may be precarious. May I tell you without discourtesy, that your own case is known to me and to two trustees, who are public officials—absolutely reliable—and whom, for that matter, you will not meet."

My friend must have looked incredulous, but his host continued firmly: "It is so, we have settled your whole matter, I am glad to say, on terms that settle all your liabilities and leave a further £50,000 to your credit in the public bank. But the size of the sum is in this city really of no importance. You may demand whatever you will, and enjoy, I hope, a complete security during your habitation here. And that habitation, both the Town Council and the National Government, beg you, through me, to extend to the whole of your life."

* * * * *

"Imagine," said my friend, "how I felt.... The oysters were now upon the table, and before them, ready for consumption, the caviar. The Barsac in its original bottle, cooled (need I say!) to exactly thirty-eight degrees, stood ready...."

At this point he stopped and gazed into the fire.

"But, my dear fellow," said I, "if you are coming to me for sympathy and simply succeed in making me hungry and cross...."

"No," said my friend with a sob, "you don't understand!" And he continued to gaze at the fire.

"Well, go on," said I angrily.

"There isn't any on," he said; "I woke!"

We both looked into the fire together for perhaps three minutes before I spoke and said:

"Will you have some wine?"

"No thank you," he answered sadly, "not that wine." Then he got up uneasily and moved for his umbrella and his galoshes, and the passage and the door. I thought he muttered, "You might have helped me."

"How could I help you?" I said savagely.

"Well," he sighed, "I thought you could ... it was a bitter disappointment. Good night!" And he went out again into the rain and over the clay.

X ON OMENS

Only the other day there was printed in a newspaper (what a lot of things they print in newspapers!) five lines which read thus:

"Calcutta, Thursday.

"An hour before the Viceroy left Calcutta on Wednesday for the last time lightning struck the flag over Government House, tearing it to shreds. This is considered to be an omen by the natives."

The Devil they did! A superstitious chap, your native, and we have outgrown such things. But it is really astonishing when you come to think of it how absurdly credulous the human race has been for thousands of years about omens, and still is—everywhere except here. And by the way, what a curious thing it is that only in one country, and only in one little tiny circle of it should this terrible vice have been eradicated from the human mind! If one were capable of paradox one would say that the blessing conferred upon us few enlightened people in England was providential; but that would be worse superstition than the other. There seems to be a tangle somewhere. Anyhow, there it is: people have gone on by the million and for centuries and centuries believing in omens. It is an illusion. It is due to a frame of mind. That which the enlightened person easily discovers to be a coincidence, the Native, that is, the person living in a place, thinks to be in some way due to a Superior Power. It is a way Natives have. Nothing warps the mind like being a Native.

The Reform Bill passed in 1832 and destroyed not only the Pot-Wallopers, but also the ancient Constitution of the country. From that time onwards we have been free. When the thing was thoroughly settled (and the old Poor Law was being got rid of into the bargain), the old House of Lords, and the old House of Commons, they caught fire, "and they did get burnt down to the ground." Those are the very words of an old man who saw it happen and who told me about it. The misfortune was due to the old tallies of the Exchequer catching fire, and this silly old man, who saw it happen (he was a child of six at the time), has always thought it was an Omen. It has been explained to him, not only by good, kind ladies who go and visit him and see that he gets no money or beer, but also from the Pulpit of St. Margaret's Church, Westminster (where he regularly attends Divine Service by kind permission of the Middle Class, and in the vain hope of cadging alms), that there is no such thing as Providence, and that if he lets his mind dwell on Omens he will end by believing in God. But the old man is much too old to receive a new idea, so he goes on believing that the burning of old St. Stephen's was an Omen.

Not so the commercial traveller, who told me in an hotel the other day the story of the market-woman of Devizes, to exemplify the gross superstitions of our fathers.

It seems that the market-woman, sometime when George III was King, had taken change of a sovereign on market-day, from a purchaser, when there were no witnesses, and then, in the presence of witnesses, demanded the change again. The man most solemnly affirmed that he had paid her, to which she replied: "If I have taken your money may God strike me dead." The moment these words were out of the market-woman's lips, an enormous great jagged, forked, fiery dart of lightning, three miles long, leapt out of a distant cloud, and shrivelled her up. "Whereupon," ended the commercial traveller, "the people of Devizes in those days were so superstitious that they thought it was a judgment, they did! And they put up a plate in commemoration. Such foolishness!" It is sad to think of the people of Devizes and their darkness of understanding when George III was King. But, upon the other hand, it is a joy to think of the fresh, clear minds of the people of Devizes to-day. For though, every Sunday morning, about half an hour after Church time, every single man and woman who had shirked Church, Chapel, Mosque or Synagogue, each according to his or her creed should fall down dead of no apparent illness, and though upon the forehead of each one so taken, the survivors returning from their services, meetings or what-not, should find clearly written in a vivid blue the Letters of Doom. None the less the people of Devizes would, it is to be hoped, retain their mental balance, and distinguish between a coincidence (which is the only true explanation of such things) and fond imaginings of supernatural possibilities.

There is an old story and a good one to teach us how to fight against any weakness of the sort, which is this. Two old gentlemen who had never met before were in a first-class railway carriage of a train that does not stop until it gets to Bristol. They were talking about ghosts. One of them was a parson, the other was a layman. The layman said he did not believe in ghosts. The parson was very much annoyed, tried to convince him, and at last said, "After all, you'd have to believe in one if you saw one."

"No, I shouldn't," said the layman sturdily. "I should know it was an illusion."

Then the old parson got very angry indeed, and said in a voice shaking with self-restraint:

"Well, you've got to believe in ghosts now, for I am one!" Whereat he immediately vanished into the air.

The old layman, finding himself well rid of a bad business, shook himself together, wrapped his rug round his knees, and began to read his paper, for he knew very well that it was an illusion.

Of the same sturdy sense was Isaac Newton, when a lady came to him who had heard he was an astrologer, and asked him where she had dropped her purse, somewhere between Shooter's Hill and London Bridge. She would not believe that the Baronet (or knight, I forget which) could be ignorant of such things, and she came about fourteen times. So to be rid of her Newton, on the occasion of her last visit, put on an old flowered dressing-gown, and made himself a conical paper hat, and put on great blue goggles, and drew a circle on the floor, and said "Abracadabra!" "The front of Greenwich Hospital, the third great window from the southern end. On the grass just beneath it I see a short devil crouched upon a purse of gold." Off went the female, and sure enough under that window she found her purse. Whereat, instead of hearing the explanation (there was none) she thought it was an Omen.

Remember this parable. It is enormously illuminating.

XI THE BOOK

This is written to dissuade all rich men from queering the pitch of us poor litteratoors, who have to write or starve. It is about a Mr. Foley: a Mr. Charles Foley, a banker and the son of a banker, who in middle life, that is at forty, saw no more use in coming to his office every day, but began to lead the life of a man of leisure. Next, being exceedingly rich he was prompted, of course, to write a book. The thing that prompted him to write a book was a thought, an idea. It took him suddenly as ideas will, one Saturday evening as he was walking home from his Club. It was a fine night and the idea seemed to come upon him out of the sky. This was the idea: that men produce such and such art in architecture and society and so forth, on account of the kind of climate they live in. Such a thought had never come to him before and very probably to no other man. It was simple like a seed—and yet, as he turned it over, what enormous possibilities.

He lay awake half the night examining it. It spread out like a great tree and explained every human thing on earth; at least if to climate one added one or two other things, such as height above the sea and consequent rarity of the air and so forth—but perhaps all these could be included in climate.

Hitherto every one had imagined that nations and civilisations had each their temperament and tendency or genius, but those words were only ways of saying that one did not know what it was. He knew: Charles Foley did. He had caught the inspiration suddenly as it passed. He slept the few last hours of the night in a profound repose, and next day he was at it. He was writing that book.

He was a business-man—luckily for him. He did not speak of the great task until it was done. He was in no need of money—luckily for him. He could afford to wait until the last pages had satisfied him. Life had taught him that one could do nothing in business unless one had something in one's hands. He would come to the publisher with something in his hands, to wit, with this MSS. He had no doubt about the title. He would call it "Man and Nature." The title had come to him in a sort of flash after the idea. Anyhow, that was the title, and he felt it to be a very part of his being.

He had fixed upon his publisher. He rang him up to make an appointment. The publisher received him with charming courtesy. It was the publisher himself who received him; not the manager, not the secretary, nor any one like that, but the real person, the one who had the overdraft at the Bank.

He treated Mr. Charles Foley so well that Mr. Foley tasted a new joy which was the joy of sincere praise received. He was in the liberal arts now. He had come into a second world. His mere wealth had never given him this. When the publisher had heard what Mr. Charles Foley had to say, he scratched the tip of his nose with his forefinger, and suggested that Mr. Foley should pay for the printing and the binding of the book, and that then the publisher should advertise it and sell it, and give Mr. Foley so much.

But Mr. Foley would have none of this. He was a business man and he could see through a brick wall as well as any one. So the publisher made this suggestion and that suggestion and talked all round about it. He was evidently keen to have the book. Mr. Foley could see that. At last the publisher made what Mr. Foley thought for the first time a sound business proposition, which was that he should publish the book in the ordinary way and then that he and Mr. Foley should share and share alike. If there was a loss they would divide it, but if there was a profit they would divide that. Mr. Foley was glad that he came to a sensible business decision at last, and closed with him. The date of publication also was agreed upon: it was to be the 15th of April. "In order," said the publisher, "that we may catch the London season." Mr. Charles Foley suggested August, but the publisher assured him that August was a rotten time for books.