The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Silver Domino, by Marie Corelli

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.

"The 'Silver Domino' can handle words and phrases in a manner which either proves an extraordinary original gift or a good deal of practice.... The parody of Miss Olive Schreiner is one of the best and severest parodies we have seen for years.... The book is one to read and laugh over."—Daily Chronicle, Oct. 14th.

"All unexpectedly one finds one's self in the midst of a most up-to-date literary satire.... I am bound to say the 'thwackings' [in the 'Silver Domino'] are entertaining."—Star, Oct. 10th.

"The unknown author of the 'Silver Domino' has been good enough to send me his book, which is very bright and amusing and outspoken. He has his knife into a great many people."—The World, Oct. 10th.

"An audacious little book called the 'Silver Domino' is causing a great deal of amusement in literary circles.... There are some delightful parodies; also a capital literary creed, which takes liberties with the Saturday Review, which, by the way, is again for sale."—Western Daily Mercury, Oct. 15th.

"The 'Silver Domino' consists of truculently candid sallies at the expense of men eminent in politics, literature, and journalism."—The Times, Oct. 15th.

"I must confess to have chuckled hugely over some of his [the 'Silver Domino's'] diatribes."—News of the World, Oct. 23rd.

"Pungent, mordant satire went out with Grenville Murray, but his mantle has fallen upon the anonymous author of the 'Silver Domino,' who has issued some intensely amusing social and literary side-whispers.... All that he has to tell us is told with wonderful verve and in an easy flowing style which has a great charm for all who can appreciate such satire.... I could dwell upon the 'Silver Domino' with great benefit to my readers and satisfaction to myself, but space forbids; so I will only say that the book is the most valuable contribution to our satirical literature that has appeared for many, many years. Our advice is: 'Get it; read it; and re-read it.'"—Society, Oct, 19th.

"The 'Silver Domino' is a volume of essays.... There are pungency and freshness about many of the writer's observations."—Sunday Sun, Oct. 23rd.

"The 'Silver Domino' is suggestive of the gentle Malayan exercise of running a-muck or the emancipated young person having a fling to its own obvious enjoyment."—Saturday Review, Oct. 29th.

"If it is to Mr. Lang's generosity that we owe the hatching of this book, that gentleman must assuredly stand aghast."—Vanity Fair, Oct. 29th.

"The literary puzzle of the hour is—Who wrote the 'Silver Domino'?... The question of authorship apart, nothing at once so bitter and so clever has appeared since the days of Lord Byron."—The Literary World, Nov. 4th.

"'Who is the author of the "Silver Domino"?' That is the question I am asked wherever I go. Whoever it is, he is the author of an extremely clever book.... Were I to make one single quotation from the 'Silver Domino' you would be angry with me, yet there is not one of you but will read it speedily."—The Queen, Oct. 29th.

THE
SILVER DOMINO;

OR

Side Whispers, Social and Literary.

EIGHTH EDITION.

WITH AUTHOR'S NOTE TO THIS ISSUE.

LONDON:
LAMLEY AND CO., Exhibition Road.
1893.

[All rights reserved.]

To
ANDREW LANG,
WHOSE LITERARY GENEROSITY TOWARDS ME
IS PAST ALL PRAISE,
I,
WITH THE UTMOST RECOGNITION,
DEDICATE THIS BOOK.

AUTHOR'S NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

Since the first edition of this book was published, some three weeks ago, a grave event has occurred, which may be said to have closed an epoch in the history of Literature. Tennyson, Poet and Laureate, the last, perhaps, of the exponents of a pure, refined, and musical school of English poesy, has left us. I will not say he has "crossed the bar," because I consider that phrase has been overdone. He has passed away in the fulness of years and honours, amid the sorrowing regret of all those thousands to whom his melodious muse was as a part of home and country. No poet ever lived a more easy and amply rewarded life,—no poet ever died a more easy and enviable death. And I have nothing to recant in what I have said of him in my chapter entitled "Of Certain Great Poets." I am only sorry that he did not live to read my lines, as I know he would have readily understood the sincere spirit of admiration for his great qualities that moved me to my candid speech. My "reviewers" have not elected to quote any word of mine on the subject of the late Laureate, they generally preferring to save time and trouble by an all-round but rash declaration that there is no good said of any one in my book. I therefore challenge my readers to the perusal of "Certain Great Poets," for I will yield to no one in my admiration of Tennyson, no, not even to Lewis Morris, who calls him "Master," whereas I was privileged to call him "Friend." I have praised his genius with as much fervour and possibly more sincerity than any of the versifiers who have written rhymes to his memory while squabbling for his vacant post; and, as regards his Diogenes-like unsociability and distaste for the "outside vulgar," I have only said what every one admits to be true. I transcribe here the copy of a letter received from the great Poet not long before his death:—

"Aldworth, Haslemere, Surrey.

"My dear ——,—I thank you heartily for your kind letter and welcome gift. You do well not to care for fame. Modern fame is too often a mere crown of thorns, and brings all the vulgarity of the world upon you. I sometimes wish I had never written a line.

"Your friend,
"Tennyson."

The "vulgarity of the world" and the "outside vulgar" are phrases by which the literary folk designate the vast Public, without whose substantial appreciation, they, the inside elect, would starve. The "outside vulgar," however, with unerring good taste, have purchased Tennyson's work for the past fifty years, and in the rich harvest of thoughts they have thus gathered, they can smile with a tender indulgence at their Kingly Minstrel's shrinking aversion to the "crowd" who loved him. He was the greatest poet of the Victorian era; and, draped in the flag of England, as befits his sturdy and splendid patriotism, he sleeps the sleep of the just and pure-minded who have served their Art, as worthy subjects serve their Queen, loyally and unflinchingly to the end. It was "fitting," I suppose, that he should be laid to rest in dismal "Poet's Corner"—(beside Browning, too! the Real singer beside the Sham!)—but many would rather have seen him placed in a shrine of his own,—a warm grassy grave under the "talking" English oaks whose forest language he so well translated, than thus pent up among the crumbling ashes of inferior and almost forgotten men.

Another change has come "o'er the spirit of my dream" since, in the language of the Daily Chronicle, I flung back the curtain and made my bow to the public "in a breezy, not to say slap-bang, manner." The Pall Mall Gazette has changed hands and politics. Once, as will be seen in the ensuing pages, I adored the Pall Mall Gazette. Its fads, its whimsies, its prize "booms," and above all its religious notions, were my delight. It was, as I said, a "bright particular star" in the sphere of journalism, but I doubt whether it will continue to shine on. I much fear that its days of Whimsicality and Boom are over, though it now has a serious and gentlemanly Scot for an editor, who does not find his chief amusement in levelling cheap sneers at Crown and Constitution, and advocating a dangerous and (at heart) unpopular Democracy. However, we shall see. In the interim, though I may not now "adore" the Pall Mall, I mournfully respect it.

I fancy I have made a slight error in that harmless, but Grundy-scaring jest of mine entitled "The Journalist's Creed." I have alluded to the excellent and brilliant Henry Labouchere, as "very Rad of very Rad." It should have been "very Tory of very Tory." This is absurd? Incongruous? Impossible? Well! Events will prove whether I am right or wrong. And I beg to assure all whom it may concern, that I consider there is no more "irreverence" in the "Journalist's Creed" than is displayed by the respectable church-goer who murmurs an address or prayer to God in the hollow of his stove-pipe hat, rather than spoil the set of his trousers by kneeling down.

I very earnestly desire to thank my critics one and all for the attention they have bestowed upon me. They have taken me very seriously; much more seriously than I have taken myself. I am so little "peculiar," that I confess to have copied the phraseology of my diatribes on certain poets and novelists from the language of the "reviews" in divers journals, and I am truly surprised to hear such phraseology termed "vulgar." When I was a "known" author (I was, once!) reviewers "reviewed" me with a profuseness of vituperative force that struck me as singular; but I did not presume to call their well-rounded terms of abuse "vulgar" or "scurrilous." Now I see I might very well have done so, as they all agree in a condemnation of their own literary vernacular. One lives and learns (this is a platitude), and when an author anonymously "slates" those who anonymously "slate" him, it is curious and instructive to observe what a different view is taken of his case! It is a strange world (platitude number two).

In conclusion I would fain express my gratitude for the diverting entertainment which I have had out of the various "guesses" as to my identity. They are guesses as wild and strange and erroneous as any that ever followed the track of a "domino noir" through the mazes of Carnival. I can, however, only repeat that I am not what I seem, and that up to the present, so far as my personality has been hinted at, or even boldly asserted, such supposititious "clues" are all random shots and fall wide of the mark. With the utmost civility, I beg to inform you, dear friends and enemies alike, that in this trivial matter of "guessing," you are all, every one of you,—wrong!

The Silver Domino.

Nov. 9th, 1892.

CONTENTS

I.

OPENETH DISCOURSE.

I. OPENETH DISCOURSE.

Well, old musty, dusty, time-trodden arena of Literature and Society, what now? Are your doors wide open, and may a stranger enter? A perpetual dance is going on, so your outside advertisements proclaim; and truly a dance is good so long as it is suggestive of wholesome mirth. But is yours a dance of Death or of Life? A fandango of mockery, a rigadoon of sham, or a waltzing-game at "beggar my neighbour"? Moreover, is the fun worth paying for? Let me look in and judge.

Nay, by the gods of Homer, what a dire confusion of sight and sense and sound is all this "mortal coil" and whirligig of humanity! What noise and laughter, interspersed with sundry groanings, as of fiends in Hell! Listening, I catch the echoes of many voices I know; now and again I have glimpses of faces that in their beauty or ugliness, their smiling or sneering, are perfectly familiar to me. Friends? No, not precisely. No man who has lived long enough to be wise in social wisdom can be certain that he has a friend anywhere; besides, I do not pretend to have found what Socrates himself could not discover. Enemies then? Truly that is probable! Enemies are more than luxuries: they are necessities; one cannot live strongly or self-reliantly without them. One does not forgive them (such pure Christianity has never yet been in vogue); one fights them, and fighting is excellent exercise. So, have at you all, good braggarts of work done and undone! I am as ready to give and take the "passado" as any Mercutio on a hot Italian day. Note or disregard me, I care naught; it is solely for my own diversion, not for yours, that I come amongst you. I want my amusement as others want theirs, and nothing amuses me quite so much as the strange customs and behaviour of the men and women of my time. I love them—in a way; but I cannot, help laughing at them—occasionally. Sentiment would be wasted on them; one does not "grieve" over folly and vice any more, unless one is an ill-paid (and therefore ill-used) cleric, because folly and vice assume such pettifogging and ludicrous aspects that one's risible faculties are at once excited, and pity dries up at its fountain-head. For we live in a little age, and nothing great can breathe in the stifling atmosphere of our languid, listless indifference to God and man.

Nevertheless, there is a curious touch of fantastic buffoonery in everything that temporarily stirs our inertia nowadays. Consider our Browning-mania! Our Stanley-measles! With what dubious and half-bewildered enthusiasm we laid the mortal remains of our incomprehensible "Sordello" to rest in Westminster Abbey! With what vulgar staring and ridiculous parade we gathered together to see the "cute" Welsh trader in ivory wedded to his "Tennant for life" in the same wrongfully-used sacred edifice! Has not our "world of fashion" metaphorically kissed the cow-boots of Buffalo Bill? and "once upon a time," as the fairy-tales say, did not the great true heart of England pour itself out on—Jumbo? A mere elephant, vast of trunk and small of tail—a living representative of our Indian and African possessions; sure 'twas an innocent beast-worship that became us well! What matter if giddy France held her sides with hilarious laughter at us, and Spain and Italy giggled decorously at us behind their fans and mantillas, and Germany broke into a huge guffaw at our "goings-on" over the brim of her beer-mug,—let those laugh who win! And have we not always won? yea, though (in an absent-minded moment) we allowed Barnum, of ever-blessed memory, to buy for vulgar dollars that which we once so loved!

Ah, we are a marvellous and motley crowd at this huge gathering called Life, dear gossips all!—gossips in society and out of society—a motley, lying, hypocritical, crack-brained crowd! I glide in among you, masked for the nonce; I hold my silver draperies well up to my eyes that the smile of derision I now and then indulge in may not show itself too openly. I am not wishful to offend, albeit I am oft offended. Yet it is well-nigh impossible to avoid giving offence in these days. We are like hedgehogs: we bristle at a touch, out of the excess of our hog-like self-consciousness, and the finger of Truth laid on a hair of our skins makes us start with feeble irritability and tetchy nervousness. Christ's command to "bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you," is to us the merest feeble paradox; for our detestation of all persons who presume to interfere with our business, and who say unpleasant things about us, is too burningly sincere to admit of discussion. I, for my part, frankly confess to entertaining the liveliest animosity towards certain individuals of my acquaintance, people who shake my hand with the utmost cordiality, smile ingenuously in my eyes, and then go off and write a lying paragraph about me in order to pocket a nefarious half-crown. I never feel disposed to "bless" such folk, and certes, I should be made of flabbier matter than a jelly-fish if I prayed for them.

But then I am not a Christian; please understand that at once. I am a Jew, a Gentile, a Pharisee, and—a devil! I may be all four if I like and yet be Pope of Rome. Why not? since these are the days of free thought, and one's private religious opinions are not made the subject of inquisitorial examination. Moreover, all classes aid and abet the truly pious hypocrite, provided his hypocrisy be strictly consistent. With equal delightsomeness, all creeds, no matter how absurd, just now obtain some kind of a hearing. We are at perfect liberty to worship any sort of fetish we like, without interference. We can grovel before our Divine Self, and sink to the lowest possible level of degradation in ministering to its greedy wants, and yet we shall not for this cause be ostracised from society or excommunicated from any sacred pale. With clerics and with laymen alike, our Divine Self needs more care than our soul's salvation; for our Divine Self, in its splendid egoism, is a breathing, eating, drinking, digesting Necessity; our soul's salvation is a hazy, far-off, dubious concern wherein we are but vaguely interested, a sort of dream at night which we now and then remember languidly in the course of the day.

Talking of dreams, one cannot but consider them with a certain respect. They are such very powerful "factors," as the useful penny-a-liner would say, in the world's history. We affect to despise them; and yet how large a portion of the community are at this moment getting their daily bread-and-butter out of nothing more substantial than the "airy fabric" of a vision, which in this particular instance has proved solid enough to establish itself as one of the foundations of European civilisation.

"The angel of the Lord appeared unto Joseph in a dream."

It is all there. That dream of the good Joseph was the strange nutshell in which lay the germ of all the multitudinous Churches, Popes, Cardinals, Archbishops, bishops, confessors, priests, parsons, and last (not least), curates. One wonders (when one is a doomed and damned "masquer" like myself) what would have happened if Joseph had dreamed a different dream? or, as might have chanced, if he had slept so profoundly as not to have dreamed at all? We should have perhaps been under the sway of Mahomet (another dream), or Buddha (another dream); for certain it is we cannot do without dreams at any period of our lives, from the celebrated "deep sleep" of Adam, when he dreamt he lost a rib to gain a wife, down to the "hypnotic-trance" schools of to-day, where we are gravely informed we can be taught how to murder each other "by suggestion." The most abandoned of us has an Idea—or an Ideal—of something better (or worse) than ourselves, according to whether our daily potations be crushed out of burgundy grape, or made of mere vulgar gin-and-water. Even Hodge, growing stertorous and sleepy over his poisoned beer and Daily Telegraph at his favourite "public," takes his turn at castle-building, and drowsily muses on a coming time of Universal Uproar, which till it comes is proudly called Socialism, when the "sanguinary" aristocrat will be laid low in the levelling mire, and he, plain Hodge, will be proved a more valuable human unit than any educated ruler of any realm. Alas for thee, good Hodge, that thou should'st boozily indulge in such romantic flights of fancy! Thou, who in uninstructed thirsty haste dost rush to vote for him who most generously plies thee with beer, what would'st thou do without the aristocrat or rich man thou would'st fain trample upon? Who would employ thee, simple Hodge? Another Hodge like thyself? Grant this, and lo! Hodge Number Two, by possessing the means, the will and the power to make thee work for him, tacitly becomes thy master and superior. Wherefore the Equality thou clamourest after, is wholly at an end if thou, Hodge Number One, dost hire thyself out as labourer or servant to Hodge Number Two! This is a plain statement, made plainly, without Gladstonian periods of eloquence; think it over, friend Hodge, when thou art alone, sans beer and cheap news-sheet to obfuscate thy simple intelligence.

Nevertheless, it would be cruel to deprive even Hodge of an idea, provided the idea be good for him. For ideas are the only unalterable suggestions of the eternal; their forms change, but themselves are ever the same. One Idea, running through history, built Baal-bec, the Pyramids, the temples of India, the Duomo of Milan, and in our own poor day of brag, the hideous Eiffel tower. The idea has always been the same; to compass great height and vastness of some kind, and Eiffel has only dragged down to the level of his merely mechanical intelligence Nimrod's fantastic notion of the Tower of Babel. Nimrod had a belief that he could reach Heaven. M. Eiffel was convinced he could advertise himself. Voilà la difference! That "difference" is the great gulf between ancient art and modern. In the past they went star-gazing and tried to climb—in the present, we stay where we are, look after ourselves, and put up an advertisement. Thus has the form of the idea changed from the likeness of a god into a painted clown—yet, fundamentally, it is still the same idea. And, reduced to its primeval element, its first dim, nebulous hint, an idea is nothing but a dream.

Hence I return to my previous proposition, i.e., the respect we owe to dreams, particularly when they result in fixed realities such as, well!—such as curates, for example. I mention this class of individuals particularly, because there are so many of them, and also because they are generally so desperately poor, and (to young ladies in country parishes) so desperately interesting. What English fiction would do without a curate or a clerical personage of some kind or other to figure in its pages I dare not imagine. The novels of other countries do not produce such hosts of invaluable churchmen, but in England the most successful books are frequently those which treat of the clergy, from "Robert Elsmere," who found himself startled out of orthodoxy by a few familiar and well-ventilated French and German theories of creed, down to the gentle milksops of the church as found in the novels of Anthony Trollope and the dreary stories of Miss Edna Lyall. This well-intentioned lady's productions would assuredly find few readers were it not for the "old-woman-and-faded-spinster" fanaticism for clergymen. And yet—I once knew a wicked army man (worshippers of Edna Lyall prepare to be disgusted! truth is always disgusting) who for some years amused himself by collecting out of the daily newspapers, cuttings of all the police reports and criminal cases in which clergymen were implicated, and this volume, an exceedingly bulky one, he brought to me, with a Mephistophelian twinkle in his bad old eyes.

"Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest!" said he. "These fellows in 'holy orders' have committed every crime in the calendar, and the only mischief I have not found them out in yet is Arson!"

This was the fact. The calm, unromantic statements of the police, as chronicled in that carefully-collected book of damnatory evidence, bore black witness against clerical virtue and morality—a "reverend" was mixed up in every sort of "abomination" which in old times called down the judgments of the Lord—save and except the one thing—that none of them had been convicted of wilfully setting fire to their own or other peoples' dwellings. But I believe—I may be wrong—that Arson is not a very common crime with any class. It is not of such frequent occurrence as murder or bigamy—or if it is, it does not attract so much attention. So I fancy it may be taken for granted that clergymen are, on the whole, not a whit better, while they are very often worse, than the laity they preach at—hence their "calling and election" is vain, and nobody wonders that they are by their proven inefficiency causing the very pillars of the Church to totter and fall. And has not Parliament been seriously busying itself with a "Clerical Immorality" Bill? This speaks volumes for the integrity of the preachers of the Gospel!

As for me, who am no Churchman, but merely a stray masquerader strolling through the social bazaar, I consider that all churches as they at present exist, are mockeries, and as such, are inevitably doomed. Nothing can save them; no prop will keep them up; neither fancy spiritualism, nor theosophism, nor any other "ism" offered by notoriety-hunting individuals as a stop-gap to the impending crash. Not even the Booth-boom will avail—that balloon of cleverly-inflated philanthropy which has been sent up just high enough to attract attention from the gaping Britishers, who, like big children, must always have something to stare at. Of course, my opinion, being the opinion of an "anonymous," is worthless, and I do not offer it as being valuable. In saying things, I say them for my own amusement, and if I bore any one by my remarks, so much the more am I delighted. As a matter of fact, I take peculiar pleasure in boring people. Why? Because people always bore me, and I adore the sentiment of revenge! And that I stand here, masked, a stranger to all the brilliant company whirling wildly around me, is also for my own particular entertainment. If I have said anything to offend any of the excellent clericals I see running towards me with the inevitable "collection-plate," I am sorry. But I will not bribe them for their good opinion, nor will I flatly disobey the command received (which they all seem to forget), "Do not your alms before men." Besides, I have nothing with me just now—not a farthing. I am only in this great assembly for a few moments, and my "silver domino," lavishly studded with stars, has cost me dear. For the completion of churches, and the mending of chancels, and the french-polishing of pews, I have no spare cash. Walls will not hold me when I am fain to worship—I take the whole arching width of the uncostly sky. There are rich old ladies in this vast throng of people, doubtless?—dear Christian souls who hate their younger relatives, and who are therefore willing to spend spare cash in order to prove their love of God. From these gather your harvest while you may, all ye ordained "disciples of the Lord," but excuse a poor wandering Nobody from No-land from the uncongenial task of helping to provide a new organ for parish yokels, and from sending out cheap Bibles to the "heathen Chinee," who frequently disdains to read them. Let me pass on—I am not worth buttonholing—and I want to take a passing glance at things in general. I shall whisper, mutter, or talk loudly about anything I see, just as the humour takes me. Only I will not promise any polite lying. Not because I object to it, but simply because it has become commonplace. Everybody does it, and thus it has ceased to be original, or even diplomatic. To openly declare the Truth—the truth of what we are now, and what, in the course of our present down-hill "progress," we are likely to become; the truth that is incessantly and relentlessly gnawing away at the foundations of all our social sophistries—to do this, I say, and stand by it when done, would be the only possible novelty that could really startle the indolent and exhausted age. But nobody will undertake it. It would be too troublesome. One would run so many risks. One would offend so many "nice" people! True—very true. All the same, neither for convenience nor amiability do I personally consider myself bound to tell lies for the mere sake of lying. So, while elbowing a passage through the crowd, I shall give expression to whatever thoughts occur to me, inconsequentially or rationally, as my varying moods suggest; moreover, I shall be very content to glide out of the "hurly-burly," and enter it no more, when once I have said my say.

II.

SOLILOQUISETH ON LITTLE MANNERS.

II. SOLILOQUISETH ON LITTLE MANNERS.

One can hardly be among a great number of people more or less distinguished, without observing the way they move, talk, walk, and generally behave themselves. And the first impression received on entering the throng over which the electric light flashes its descriptive sky-sign "Present Day" is distinctly one of—bad manners; yes, bad, ungainly, jostling, "higgledy-piggledy" manners. The general effect (bird's-eye view) is as of motley-clothed lunatics hurrying violently along to a land of Nowhere. Men stoop and shuffle and amble from the knees, instead of walking with an erect and dignified demeanour; women skip or waddle, making thereby an undue exhibition of purely English feet. In art-collections one sees plenty of old engravings wherein are depicted gallant, well-shaped gentlemen, pressing three-cornered hats to the left sides of their lace-ruffled, manly bosoms, and bending with exquisite deference and stately deportment to demurely sweet dames, who, holding out gossamer skirts in taper fingers, perform the prettiest curtsies in response. It must have been charming to see them thus habitually realising the value of mutual politeness in everyday life; one would like to witness a revival of the same. Men lost nothing by outwardly expressing a certain reverence for women; women gained a great deal by outwardly expressing their gentle acknowledgment of that reverence. "Manner makyth the man," says the old adage, and if that be true, then there are no men, for certainly there are no manners—at least, not among the "upper ten." I am in a position to judge, for I am somewhat of a favourite at Court, where manners are not at a very high premium. I can only judge, of course, by what I see, and in my observations of the fair sex I submit that, not being a "fair" myself, I may be wrong. Yet I believe it is true that ladies of high rank and good education are obliged to be taught (three lessons for one guinea) how to make a proper obeisance to the Queen. And the lesson is, I presume, too cheap to include any training in the art of decently polite behaviour during the "wait" before entering the Throne-room. The impudent push and self-assertion of these "noble dames" is something amazing to witness: the looks at one another—looks as bold as those of Jezebel—the scramble, the reckless tearing of lace, and scratching of arms and shoulders in the heated mêlée is—well—simply degrading to the very name of womanhood. Better, dear ladies, not to go to a Drawing-room at all if you cannot get to your Queen without tearing your fellow-woman's dress off her back and inflicting scars on her unprotected shoulders. Men are better behaved at the levées, but among them all scarce one knows how to bow. Nevertheless, they are more polite to each other than women are; they are obliged to be—no man will take insolence from another man without instantly resenting it.

A strange thing it is to consider how poets have raved from time immemorial about the "grace" of woman! It is pathetic to see how these ingenuous verse-writers will persist in keeping up their illusions. As a matter of fact, in England at least, there is scarce one woman in a hundred who knows how to walk well. And that one is always such a "peculiar" object that her movements are generally commented upon as "affected." To a masculine observer this is very strange. A lady who bundles up her clothes well behind, exposes thick legs, flat feet, and ugly boots all at once in order to effect her entrance into carriage, cab, or omnibus, is, by certain of her own sex, voted "a good soul," "unaffected," "no nonsense about her," "as frank and simple a creature as ever lived." But a lady who lifts her dress just high enough to show the edge of a dainty lace on her petticoat, clean, trim boots, the suspicion of an ankle, and only the pleasing suggestion of a leg—she—ah! nasty designing creature! "No good, my dear!" "all affectation, every bit of her!" "Look at the lace on her petticoat!" This last clause, I have noticed, is always damnatory in the opinion of super-excellent females with no lace on their petticoats. There is enough in this suggestion to make even a strolling masquerader pause and meditate, because, arguing from the point of view taken by many eminently virtuous dames, it would seem that manners, i.e., walking well, keeping clean, and holding one's self with a certain affable grace and air of distinction, are indicative of latent cunning. This curious but popular fallacy applies in England to men as well as women. The awkward gawk, whose clothes never fit, and who appears to be always encumbered and distressed by his own hands and feet, is frequently declared to be a "good fellow," "heart in the right place," "regular trump," and so forth, as probably he is. I do not for a moment imply that he is not. But I will maintain that because a man holds himself well, dresses well, and is perfectly at ease with the appurtenances of his own body, he need not therefore be "a confirmed roué" "a turf man," or "a club gamester." But this is what he frequently passes for if he dares to indulge in a suspicion of "manner." In fact, the only presumable effort of "style" now attempted by the men of to-day appears to be concentrated in the art of twirling or stroking the moustache whenever the owner of the moustache perceives a pretty woman. This little trick is done in different ways, of course; the "twist" can be rendered insolently, familiarly, aggressively, or with a caressing feline movement, indicative of dawning amorousness. It is frequently effective, particularly with schoolgirls and provincial misses, who have been known to render up their susceptible hearts instantaneously to one victorious twirl of a really well-grown moustache, but I have also seen many creditable performances of moustache-twirling completely thrown away on unappreciative women. It is, however, the only piece of elegance—if elegance it can be called—indulged in by the true "masher." And beyond it he never soars. He does not know how to lift his hat gracefully; he does not know how to enter a room (without looking vaguely surprised or beamingly idiotic), or leave it again with any touch of affable dignity. His movements are generally stiff and ungainly to the very last degree, and, worst of all, he seldom has any brains to make up for his lack of breeding.

A good position from whence to observe the manners of the time is close to the right hand of the Premier on the evening of a great crush at the Foreign Office. If courtly Lord Salisbury be there, you get in his bow, smile, and cordial handshake the finest essence of diplomatic urbanity and ease. But when you have exchanged greetings with him and his gracious lady you have seen nearly all you shall see of "manner." The throng come tumbling in helter-skelter, treading on each other's heels, for all the world like an untrained crowd of the "bas-peuple," all heated, all flustered, all vaguely staring ahead. Ambassadors, foreign princes, military dignitaries, jerk their heads spasmodically on entering the rooms, but evidently have no proper notion of a bow, while some of them let their arms hang stiffly down at their sides, and proffer a salutation that seems as though it were the result of a galvanic wire working their spines by some curious patent process not yet quite perfected. And the women!—the poets' goddesses! They arrive in very ungoddess-like bundles of rich clothing, some waddling, some ambling, some sidling, but only a rare few, a dozen at most, walking, or carrying themselves as being at all superior to their gowns. Most of these "fair" forget to curtsey properly to their distinguished entertainers, and the general impression made on the mind of an observer in looking at the "manner" of their entrance is distinctly unpleasing. Most of them wear far too many diamonds, a notable sign of egregious bad taste. A woman I saw there on one occasion wore a sort of dish-cover of diamonds on her head. (A friend told me it was a "garland"; it may have been, but it looked like a dish-cover.) Her hair was straight and flat, and stuck close to her scalp, and beneath the gorgeous headpiece of jewels was a fat red face profusely adorned with wrinkles and pimples, on which the diamonds cast a cruel glare. "Alas, good soul," I thought, as she went glittering past, "thou hast fallen on the most evil hour of all thy span—the fateful time when thy jewels are preferable to thyself!"—though, truly, as an unnoteworthy personage, I may here remark that I do not like diamonds. I own that a few choice stones, finely set and sparkling among old lace, are effective, but the woman who can wear a soft white gown without any ornaments save natural flowers would always carry away the palm of true distinction for me. I confess my notions are old-fashioned, especially those concerning women.

Talking of the Foreign Office, there was a terrible man there once who trod on everybody's toes. He seemed born to do it. He was tall and powerful, and wore the full Highland costume. I shall never forget the bow he made to Lady Salisbury—it bent him double in true Scottish fashion; for a bonâ-fide Scot, you know, always yearns to cast himself on his knees before a title. It is in his blood and heritage so to do: the remains of the old humility practised by the clans to their chiefs what time they were all robbers and rievers together. This man literally divided himself to do fitting homage to the Premier's lady—his head sank to the level of the hem of her dress, while the back part of his kilt (not to be irreverent) rose visibly in air in a way that was positively startling. The achievement appeared to alarm some people, to judge by their anxious looks. Would the noble Highlander ever come straight again? That was the question that was evidently agitating the observers of his attitude. He did come straight, with galvanic suddenness too, and marched off on the war-path through the rooms, planting his foot, not "on his native heath," but on every other foot he could find with a manly disregard of consequences. He was a great man, he is a great man; I feel sure he must be, otherwise he would not have hurt so many people without apologising.

As a matter of fact, there is nothing so rare in these days as distinguished and affable manners. An Arab thief has often more external personal dignity than many an English peer. In some of the best houses in the land I have seen the owners of the stately surroundings comport themselves with such awkward sheepishness as to suggest the idea that they were there by mistake. I have seen great ladies sitting in their own drawing-rooms with a fidgety and anxious air, as though they momentarily expected to be ordered out by their paid domestics. When I was "green" and new to society I used to think somewhat of dukes and earls. I had a foolish notion that the wearers of great historic names must somehow look as if they inwardly felt the distinction of race and ancestry. Now that I know a great many of these titled folk, I have discovered my mistake. I find several of them vote their "ancestors" a "bore." They carry no outward marks to show that they ever had ancestors. They might indeed have been ground into existence by means of a turning-lathe, for aught of inherited beauty, stateliness or courtesy they exhibit. I have seen great dukes bulge into a room with less grace than sacks of flour, and I have watched "belted earls" sneaking timorously after the footman who announced their lofty names, with a guilty air as though they had picked that footman's plush pockets on the way. I once heard a very, very "blue-blooded" duchess run through the items of her chronic indigestion with as much weight and emphasis of detail as a brandy-seeking cook. A famous lord, brother to a famous duke, has shuffled into my study and sunk into a chair with the "manner" of an escaped convict, and I have had much ado to drag him out of his self-evident humiliation. He has picked his fingers and surveyed his boots disconsolately. He has felt the leg of his trouser in doubtful plight. That his "ancestry" performed acts of valour on Bosworth field awakens in his flabby soul no pulse of pride. His heroic progenitors might as well have been tallow-chandlers for all he cares. Yet he is the living representative of their greatness, more's the pity! I often wonder what those old Bosworth fellows would say if they could come to life and see him—their descendant—as he is—with but two ideas in his distinguished noddle—ballet-girls and brandy-and-soda!

I am here reminded of an incident which in this place may not come amiss. I happened to be present on one occasion at a luncheon-party made up chiefly of men, most of them well known in Parliament and society. Our hostess was (and is) a lady who always has more men than women at her parties, but on this particular day there was one stranger present, a lady noted for a great literary success. After luncheon, when this lady took leave of her hostess and went downstairs into the hall, it was found that her carriage had not arrived. She waited patiently, with the footman on guard staring at her. Meanwhile man after man came downstairs, passed her in the hall as though she were a stray servant (they had all eagerly conversed with her at luncheon, and had tried to get as much entertainment out of her as possible), and never uttered a word. Not one of them paused to say, "Allow me to escort you upstairs till your carriage comes," or, "Can I do anything for you?" or, "May I have the pleasure of waiting to see you into your carriage?" or any other of the old-world chivalrous formalities once de rigueur with every gentleman. Not one man; except the last who came down, and who (under the immediate circumstances) shall be nameless, as he was evidently a fool. Because among the gentlemen who thus passed the lady by, were Lord Randolph Churchill, Mr. Lockwood, Q.C., and other "notabilities," so I am forced to argue from this that it is the very essence of modern "good form" to ignore a lady (with whom you have previously conversed) at the precise moment when she might seem to require a little attention. So that the stupid and ill-bred person was the nameless "he" who came down last, who spoke to the solitary "damozel," escorted her upstairs again to her hostess, waited with her, chatting pleasantly in the drawing-room till her carriage arrived, then took her down to it, put her in, and lifted his hat respectfully as she drove away. He was not "nineteenth-century form"—and his "manner" was obsolete. Most people would rather be considered downright vulgar than what they are pleased to term "old-fashioned."

Hurry kills "manner," and there can be no doubt that in this day we are all in a frantic hurry. I don't know what about, I'm sure. We are after no good that I can see. I have tried to fathom the reason of this extraordinary and vilely unbecoming haste, and the only apparent cause I can discover is that we are trying to get as much out of life as possible before we die. The means, however, entirely defeat the object. We have no time to be generous, no time to be sympathetic, no time to converse well, no time to do anything but feed and look after our own interests, and we get so fatigued in the business of living that life itself becomes worthless. At least, so it seems to me. I say we are "all" in a terrible hurry, but this is not quite correct. There are exceptions to the rule. I myself am one. I never hurry. I "laze" through life and enjoy it. I never "scramble" for anything, and never "fluster" myself for anybody. Even now I am sauntering, not rushing, amidst you all with the utmost ease; I move softly and talk softly, and, though frequently disposed to laughter, I never snigger aloud. The loud snigger (sign of "well-bred" hilarity) is the muffled but exact echo of the donkey's bray. It resembles it in tone and sense and quality. I avoid it; because, though a donkey is an exceedingly clever beast and much maligned, his voice might be easily surpassed. As it is, au naturel, it does not appear to me worth imitating.

And now, pardon me, sirs and dames, but as I perceive a small crowd of you engaged in the truly English occupation of staring, not at me, but at my glittering domino, and as I do not wish to create an obstruction, I will, with your very good leave, pass on. Observe how quietly I glide; with only the very faintest rustle of my "star-spangled" wrappings; striving not to tread on anybody's corns, carefully winding my way in and out the busy throng, and only holding myself a little more erect than some of you, because—well! because I have no favours to ask of anybody, and therefore need not trouble myself to acquire the nineteenth-century skulk and propitiatory grin. And so—on through the motley!

III.

PRONOUNCETH ON LESSER MORALS.

III. PRONOUNCETH ON LESSER MORALS.

I think if everybody would only be as frank as I am, they would confess we haven't such a thing as a Little Moral left, except in the copy-books. Big Morals are everywhere, writ large for all the world to see; we don't trouble about them because they do not individually concern us—they are merely the names and forms that help to keep things going. But little morals are gone out of fashion entirely. It is rather perplexing when we come to think of it. Because we ought to be moral, strictly moral; and feeling that we ought to be, we have to pretend that we are. Sometimes we find it difficult to keep up the game, but as a rule we succeed fairly well. Only we know, you know, that a "little moral" is a bore. That is why, in our heart of hearts, we will have nothing to do with it. For example, it is not on the lines of "little morality" that we should run up bills. But we do run them up. Sometimes, too, without the smallest intention of paying them. It is not in the path of unselfish virtue that we should give our dear friends wine from the "stores" at "store" prices, while we carefully reserve our old Chambertin and Chateau d'Yquem for our own special drinking; but we do this sort of thing every day. And yet we love our dear friends—oh! how we love them! we would do anything for them, anything—except produce our Chambertin. And it is not, I believe, a "little moral," i.e., a copy-book maxim, that we should fall in love with our neighbour's wife. But that is just precisely the most delightful among our modern fashionable amusements. Our neighbour's wife is the most interesting woman in our social set. Our neighbour's daughter is not half so interesting. Because our neighbour's daughter is generally marriageable; our neighbour's wife is only divorceable—hence her superior charm. The scandalous and rude statement, "Whoso looketh on his neighbour's wife to lust after her, hath already committed——" No, no! I will not defile delicate ears polite with pure New Testament language. It is too strong; it is painfully strong—quite unpleasant—a thunderous speech uttered by the holiest lips that ever breathed man's breath, but it is shocking, and gives our nerves an unpleasant thrill. Because we do look after our neighbour's wife a good deal nowadays; "neigh" after her is the old Scriptural term for our latter-day custom, which has been set in vogue by the most distinguished examples of aristocracy among us. And our neighbour's wife's husband is a capital butt for our "chaff"; we like him, oh yes, we always like him: we go and stay with him for weeks, and shoot game in his preserves, and ride his best horses; he is a capital fellow, by Jove, but an awful fool. Yes, so he is. Our neighbour's wife's husband is generally a fool. His dense noddle never discerns any way out of his dishonour but the crooked path of the law. I haven't got a wife—praise be to heaven!—but if I had, and I found any "noble" personage disposed to "neigh" after her, I know what I should do with him. I should trounce him with a tough cowhide thong till his "blue blood" declared itself, till his "nobility" roared for mercy. Whether he were prince, duke, lord, or plain "Mister," he would be black as well as "blue" before I had done with him. Of course the law would have to come in afterwards by way of a summons for assault, but who would not pay liberally for the satisfaction of thrashing a low scoundrel? Besides, viewed in the most practical light, it would cost less than the business of divorce, besides having the immense advantage of giving no satisfaction to the guilty parties concerned.

By Heaven, there are some men I know whom I would kick in the way of pure friendship, if a kick would rouse them to a sense of their position—men whose wives are openly shamed, the whole public knowing of their flagrant, unblushing infidelity—men who stand by and look on at their own disgrace, and yet presume to offer the "example" of a public career to the "lower" classes. And how these "lower" despise them; how they who still do call a spade a spade are filled with honest scorn for such "distinguished" cowards! Well, well, I shall do no good, I warrant, by heating my blood in the cause of the worthless and degraded; fidelity in wives, manly principle in husbands, are "little morals," and seem to have gone out with the jewelled snuff-boxes and rapiers of old time.

Among other of these "little morals" it used to be tacitly understood that "gentlemen" should preserve a certain delicacy of speech when conversing before "ladies." This idea appears to be almost obsolete. Men have no scruple nowadays in talking about their special ailments to women (and not old women either), and they will allude to the various parts of their bodies affected by those ailments in the most frankly disgusting manner. At a supper-party given by one of the most exalted of noble dames not long ago, I heard a brute detailing the ins and outs of his "liver" trouble to an embarrassed looking young woman of about eighteen. As for the ugly word "stomach," it is commonly used in various circles of the beau-monde, and the most revolting details of medicine and surgery are frequently dealt with in what used to be termed "polite conversation." That ugly old women, and fat, greasy matrons love to chatter about their own and their friends' illnesses, is of course an accepted fact, but that men should do so before a casual company of the married and unmarried "fair" is a new and highly repulsive phase of "social intercourse." I remember hearing the editor of a well-known magazine talk with a pretty young unmarried woman concerning the possibilities of her sex in Art, and after the utterance of many foolish platitudes, he brought his remarks to a brusque conclusion with the following words: "Oh yes, I admire gifted women, but, after all, their genius is bound to be interfered with and marred by the bearing of children." Coarse ruffian as he was, I suppose the surprised, hot blush that stained the poor girl's face was agreeable to his low little soul, while I, for my part, yearned to knock him down. His words, and above all, his manner, implied that he in his fatuous mind considered every woman bound, willy-nilly, to submit herself to the passions of man, be she saint or sinner. "The bearing of children," as he put it, is, according to natural animal law, the prime business of the average woman's life, average women being seldom fit for anything else. But it has to be conceded that there are women above the average, who, gifted with singular powers of ambition and attainment, sweep on from one intellectual triumph to another, and do so succeed in quelling the natural animalism that they do not consider themselves bound to "bring forth and multiply" their kind. With brilliant, fiery-souled Bashkirtseff, they exclaim: "Me marier et avoir des enfants! Mais chaque blanchisseuse peut en faire autant!"

And in her next sentence the captive genius cries: "Mais qu'est ce que je veux? Oh, vous le savez bien. Je veux la gloire!" And "la gloire," despite the opinions of the vulgar little editor aforementioned, does not precisely consist in having babies, in hushing their frantic yells hour after hour, and wiping their perpetually dribbling noses, what time the fathers of these "blessings" sleep and snore in peace. "La gloire" assumes an inviting aspect to many feminine souls to-day, and the "joys of marriage" pale in comparison. It is rather a dangerous seed to sow, this "la gloire," in the hitherto tame fields of woman's life and labour, and the harvest promises to astonish the whole world. That is, provided women will be original and not imitate men. At present they imitate us too closely, and even in the question of coarse freedom of speech they ape the masculine example. If a man insists on talking about his "liver" a woman will bring her "leg" into the conversation in order to be even with him. The vulgar word "ripping" slips off the tongue of a well-bred young woman as easily as though she were a rough schoolboy. And so on through the whole gamut of slang. As a casually interested spectator of these things, I would respectfully inform the "fair" that as long as they elect to "follow" instead of "lead," so long will their efforts to attain eminence be laughed at and contemptuously condemned. A painful flabby-mindedness distinguishes many of the sex feminine, an inviting readiness to be "sat upon" which is perhaps touching, but also ridiculous. If you take up an art, dear ladies, you require to be strong if you ever wish to consummate anything worth doing. Art accepts no half measures. You will need to live solitary and eat the bread of bitterness, with tears for wine. Consolations you will have doubtless, but they will come slowly, and not from without, only from within. An ethereal ice-air will surround and sever you from the common lot, you will be lifted higher and higher into a cold, pure atmosphere that will require all your force of lung to breathe without losing life in the effort. If you can stand it—well! if not, better be Bashkirtseff's "blanchisseuse qui pent faire autant."

Is it worth while, among "little morals," to mention gambling? I trow not? Everybody gambles, from the men on the Stock Exchange to the princes of the blood. We gamble on the turf, in the clubs, and in our own homes, with the most admirable persistency. Any trifling excuse serves, as, for example, a man asked me the other day to risk a sovereign on the question as to whether a certain music-hall artiste's Christian name began with a P. or a W. I declined the offer, not being interested in music-hall artistes. And this brings me to a final point in our "little morals," namely, the point of considering how utterly and finally some of us have kicked over the traces with regard to preserving the respectability and virtue of our women. We frequently allow women to do things nowadays that may, or will, in the end degrade them, while we put obstacles in all directions to retard their elevation to distinction in the arts or sciences. We hate the idea of their having a voice in the government of the country, but we do not at all mind their appearing half naked to dance before us on the stage. We are hardly civil to the young daughters of our aristocratic host, but we will make a countess of the public dancer of "break-downs." We will only arrive at an intimate friend's ball in time to eat his supper, but we will hang about for hours to stare at an advertised "beauty barmaid." Yet I should not say "we," since I am not guilty of these things. I am not fond of music-halls, though I confess to finding them more entertaining than Mr. Irving's hydraulic efforts at tragedy. Still I daresay my good friend Gladstone patronises them more than I do. Again, I am not devoted to barmaids. I may here remark a trifling particular connected with "little morals" which has often struck me. It is this. A "man about town" will kiss a pretty housemaid or any other "low-class" woman he fancies without considering himself demeaned by the act. Now, how is it that a lady of equal position never wishes to kiss a footman or a waiter at a restaurant? One would think the situation as tempting to one sex as another. But no. The "lady" would consider herself insulted if kissed by a footman; the "gentleman" chuckles with ecstasy if kissed by the housemaid. Why is this thus? I am inclined to think that here the "fair sex" score the winning number in the trifling matter of self-respect.

And now we have come soundly upon the cause of our open disregard of "little morals." It is this: loss of self-respect. We do not respect ourselves any longer, probably because we do not find ourselves worthy of respect. We cannot respect a creature who is ready to sell soul, body, sentiment, and opinion for hard cash, but that creature is Ourself, in this blessed time of progress. Morals are nowhere weighed against a fat balance at the banker's. Self-respect is ridiculous if it opposes the gospel of Grab. What will self-respect do for us? Simply isolate us from our fellow-men! Our fellow-men tell convenient lies, cheat prettily, steal their neighbour's wives, and yet walk openly in social daylight; why should not we all do the same? Where is the harm? We only hurt ourselves if we try to do otherwise, and, what is far worse, we are looked upon as fools. We cannot possibly be "in the swim" unless we are good hypocrites. Herein is my sore point. I am unable to hypocrise. Candour is part of my composition. It is unfortunate, because it keeps me out of many delightful entertainments where Humbug rules the roast. Socrates was not a "social" favourite, neither am I. I am perfectly aware how unpleasantly tedious I have been all the time I have talked about morals. They are not interesting subjects of conversation at any time, and people would much rather not hear about them at all. True! Only in church o' Sundays are we bound (by fashion's decree) to listen to discourses on morality by a possibly immoral cleric, but during the week we are, thank Heaven, free to forget that morals, little or big, exist. This is as it should be in all civilised communities. Of course we must keep up the pretence of morality—this is a necessity enforced by law and police. But we may piously assure ourselves that our "feigning" is the most perfectly finished art in the world. No nation can out-rival the English in Sunday-show morality. It is the severest, grandest, dullest Sham ever evolved from social history. From its magnitude it commands wondering admiration; from its ludicrous inconsistency it provokes laughter. And I, strolling idler as I am, stop an instant to stare and smile, and involuntarily I think of the Ten Commandments. I believe that on one occasion Moses was so angry that he broke the tablets on which they were graven. This was mere temper on the part of Moses; he should have known better. He should have spared the tablets, and broken the Commandments, every one of them; as we do!

IV.

OF SAVAGES AND SKELETONS.

IV. OF SAVAGES AND SKELETONS.

Pausing awhile to consider the question, I find that on the whole, most of you, my dear friends, appear to get on excellently well without either manners or morals. There you all are, taking your several parts in the pageant before me, pushing, scrambling, and making generally the most infernal din, the while you move heaven and earth to serve your own personal interest and pleasure, regardless of anybody else's convenience, and you manage to make a tolerably good show of respectability. Your finished education in the great art of counterfeiting does everything for you. The sum and substance of modern culture is in the one line, "Assume a virtue though you have it not." You all "assume" superbly. And yet the best actors tell us they find their profession entails fatigue and exhaustion at times, and they are glad when they can throw aside the mask and take to "rough-and-tumble" in the secrecy of their own homes. For there is one great fact about us which we all strive to hide, and yet which is for ever declaring itself, and that is, that despite all our civilisation and progress, we are savages still. Absolute barbarians are we, born so, made so, and neither God nor Time shall alter us. Our education teaches us how to cover Nature with a mask, even as our innocent Scriptural progenitors covered themselves with fig-leaves; but Nature is not thereby destroyed. The savage leaps out at all sorts of times and seasons, in the tempers and habits of the most highly cultured men and women. "My Lord," unbracing himself at night and unbuttoning his waistcoat to give freedom to his ample paunch, hiccoughs himself into bed with as much rude noise as the naked Zulu who has drunk himself nearly dead on rum. "My Lady," unclasping her fashionable "corset" and allowing her beauties to expand, sighs, yawns, shakes herself jelly-wise in freedom, and plumps between the sheets as casually as any squaw in a wigwam. And it is probable that both my lord and my lady asleep, snore as loudly and look as open-mouthed and ugly in their slumbers as any uncivilised brutes ever born. Old Carlyle's notion of the virtue of clothes was the correct one. What should we do with a naked Parliament? The clothes maintain order and respectability, but without artificial covering the whole community would be as they truly are in their heart of hearts—savages, and no more.

I think we are all pretty well conscious of this, some of us perhaps painfully so. And what we are painfully aware of we always try to conceal. Byron, despite his genius, was always thinking of his club-foot. So are we always voluntarily or involuntarily, thinking of our savagery. It will out, still, as I say, we do try to keep it in. We do most faithfully pretend we are civilised, though we know we never shall be; not in this planet. The thing is manifestly impossible. The attraction of sex, the love of fighting, the thirst of conquest, the greed of power: these things are savage elements, like wind and fire and lightning; they make up life, and so long as life is ours, so long shall we be savages at heart—savages in our grandest passions as well as in our meanest. That is why I am disposed to think the doctrines of Christianity unsuited to the world, because they are so directly opposed to natural instinct. However, this is a point I am quite unfitted to argue upon, being of no creed myself, and very much of a savage to boot. Personally, I would not give a fig for a man who had nothing of the savage about him. I have met the kind of fellow often, especially among the literary set. "Not that I intend to imply," as the G. O. M. sayeth, "that under certain circumstances, and given certain conditions," the literary set cannot be savage—they can be, and are, but it is a savagery that is mere palaver, and never comes to honest fisticuffs. The "literary set" are physically timorous, and not fond of firearms or manly sports; effeminacy and dyspepsia mark these gifted creatures for their own. They have "nerves," have the bookish folk, like fine ladies, and with the "nerves" spite and petulance go as a matter of course. Real, bonâ-fide, fierce savagery is infinitely preferable to the puling whine or the cynical snarl of little poets and "society" philosophers; and the company of a bluff soldier who has "faced fire" is preferable to that of a dozen magazine editors.

Gathering my domino closer about me, I gaze steadily over the circling noisy throng that whirls before me, and I think of wild tribes and famished hordes scurrying fiercely along through clouds of sand over miles of desert, and I see very little difference between the "cultured" crowd and the hungry "barbarians." Desert, or the road called Custom; sand or dust in the eyes of moral perception—they come to very much the same thing in the end. Can it be possible that the present century is "helping on" civilisation? I don't believe it any more than I believe that the wretches who flung themselves under the car of Juggernaut went straight to heaven. The most curious and awful part of the whole spectacle to me is to realise that all this movement, clamour, and confusion, should be doomed to end in sudden silence by and by; such silence, that not a sound from any one of these now living noisy tongues will stir it by so much as a curse or a groan.

Yes, my friends; deny it if you will that we are all savages (I expect you to deny it because I assert it, and you would not be human if you did not contradict me), you will hardly refuse to admit that we are all skeletons. Our flesh makes our savagery. Our clothes make our morality. But reduced to our primal selves, we are plain Bones. And in honest, unadorned Bones, to be positive to the utmost degree of positivism, we invariably discover ourselves grinning. At what? Ah, who shall say! Unless it be at our own exquisite fooling with fate, which, truth to tell, is very exquisite indeed. And, however serious we may look in the flesh, we must remember our own death's-head is always laughing at us.

Death's-heads are jolly companions. Some of my friends are fond of wearing imitation ones to remind them of the wide perpetual smile they carry behind their own fleshly covering. One or two charming ladies I know carry jewelled death's-heads on their watch-chains, and play with them in a sufficiently gruesome manner. Lady Dorothy Nevill, she of shrewd Walpole wit and keen intelligence, wears a conspicuous ornament given her by our own amiable Prince of Wales—a red coral or cornelian death's-head, with a couple of diamonds in the eye-sockets. I wonder what Albert Edward was thinking about when he made the lady this valuable present, and whether the line, "To this complexion must we come at last," occurred at all to his memory. Lady Dorothy herself is particularly fond of the suggestive bauble; she perceives and appreciates as much as I do the delicate irony of a skull's smile.

And it really needs a good deal of intelligence to understand death's-heads. A duke I know, of the best possible ducal brand, annoys me exceedingly by his lack of perception in this regard. The handle of his walking-stick is an ivory skull, and he is always sucking it. The effect of this act is indescribable. He seems to be mouthing the dried and polished cranium of an ancestor. I meet him frequently in the "row," or Snobs' Parade, where gilded youth goes to stare at gilded age, by which phrase I mean that the foot-passengers are mostly young and lissom of limb, while the fine carriages frequently contain naught but the dried and desolate fragments of old age, or the painted and bedizened wrecks of youth. It is really quite curious to note how few pretty or even genial-looking persons are seen in the vehicles that crowd the Row during a "season." Max O'Rell declares that the entire show is like Tussaud's wax-work taken out for an airing, but I have never seen any one so good-looking or so clear-complexioned as wax-work in a carriage. On foot, yes; there are any number of pretty women and tolerably well set-up men to be met with strolling about under the trees, and it is precisely for this reason that whenever I go to the Park I walk instead of driving, as I prefer pretty women to ugly ones.

And thus by preamble and general tedium I have come leisurely round to the point I wished to arrive at, which is the narration of a singular dream I once had; a vision which fell upon me, not in the "silence of the night," but in the glaring heat of a midsummer afternoon while I was seated on a penny chair in the middle of the Row. I had just exchanged the usual greetings with my kindly young idiot friend the duke (sucking the ivory skull on his cane as usual) and he had gone on his way blandly grinning. I had shaken hands with a couple of vagrant journalists. I had saluted a few charming women, chatted for ten minutes with Lord Salisbury, and had imparted to a dear paunchy diplomat the secret of stewing prawns in wine—a dish which I assure you, on the faith of a true gourmet, is excellent. I had studied the back of a massively fat woman's dress for several seconds, trying to puzzle out the ways and means by which it got fastened over so much rebellious flesh. Fatigued with these exertions, and lulled by the monotonous noise of the rolling wheels of the carriages going to and fro, I fell into a sort of semi-conscious doze, in which I was perfectly aware of my surroundings, though more than half asleep. And "a change came o'er the spirit" of the scene—a change which might have alarmed unphilosophic people, but which to one like myself, who am surprised at nothing, merely transformed a dull and ordinary spectacle into a deeply interesting one. A curious white light pervaded the atmosphere and tinged the overhanging foliage with a sickly shade of green, the yellow sunshine took upon itself a jaundiced hue, and lo! all suddenly and straightway the "row" was stripped of its "too, too solid flesh" and appeared as too, too truthful Bones. Bones were the fashion of the hour—skulls the order of the day. Clothes were worn, of course, for decency's sake, clothes, too, of the very newest fashion and cut; but flesh was discarded as superfluous. And so the most elegant Paris "creations" in the way of lace parasols shaded the sun from the delicate female death's-heads; skeleton steeds in gorgeous trappings worked their ribs bravely, guided along by skeleton coachmen superb in plush and wigs well powdered; and dear antiquated Lady Doldrums, as she turned her eye-sockets to right and left with a pleasant leer, seemed to be more cheerful than she had been for many a long day. She still wore her favourite style of youthful hat, pinched artistically about the brim and turned up with artificial roses, but these handsomely-made French flowers now nodded quite waggishly against her bare jaws, knowing there was no longer any painted flesh there to eclipse their colour. Yes, Lady Doldrums was herself at last—the terrible strain of pretending to be young was over, and the only coquetterie she practised in her honest condition of Bones, was the wielding of a fan in her grisly sticks of fingers, not for heat's sake—no, merely to keep away the flies. And the wonderful crowd thickened every moment—bones, bones, nothing but bones;—they multiplied by scores, and I began to find out a few of my dear society friends by the armorial bearings on their carriages. I could guess nothing by their faces, as these were nearly all alike, and there was no variety of expression. True, there were short jaws and long, high foreheads and low, wide skulls and narrow, but I was unable to guide myself entirely by these hints. I found out Randolph Churchill, though, in a minute, but then his head is of a curious shape one does not easily forget. I should know his skull anywhere as thoroughly as the gravedigger in Hamlet knew Yorick's. He looked very cool and comfortable in his bones, I thought. So did the delightful danseuse who followed close behind him in a high-wheeled trap, with the smartest little skeleton "tiger" possible to conceive, pranked out in livery, an impudent little top-hat perched jauntily on his impudent little half-grown skull, while as for the exquisite "dancing-girl" herself, good heavens! her bones were positively fascinating! The wind whistled in and out them with a breezy amorousness—and then her smile was more than usually perfect owing to the admirable set of false teeth which were so dexterously screwed into her jaw. It would take years of mouldering away to loosen those teeth, and the mouldering had evidently not yet begun. She wore a wig too—a bronze-red wig in beauteous curl—and upon my soul, she looked almost as well arrayed in bones as in her usual heavily enamelled flesh. Very different was the aspect of the toothless old bundle that came after, seated in a springy victoria, and wrapped in rich rugs to the chin. His skeleton steeds pranced nobly, his skeleton coachman sat stiffly upright, his skeleton footman preserved the accustomed dignified cross-armed attitude, but he himself, poor wretch, rolled uneasily from side to side, till it seemed that his yellow skull would sever itself from the spinal attachment and fall incontinently into his own shaking claws. I recognised him by the showy monogram on his carriage-rug; he was the rich proprietor of several newspapers, the "impresario" of several music-halls, and the dotard lover of several ballet-girls. After him came a "four-in-hand," a marvellous sight to see with its skeleton team, its "lordly" skeleton driver, and its "select" party of skeleton "professional beauties" on top. It made quite a white glare as it passed in the sickly sun, and scattered a good deal of bone-dust from its wheels. Quite close to me there were a couple of skeletons engaged in love dallyings of the most ethereal description. The one, a female, was seated in a victoria, sheltering the top of her skull (on which a fashionable bonnet was perched) with a black lace parasol lined in crimson—a tint which flung a rouge-like reflection on her fleshless but still sensually-shaped jaws. The other, a man, clothed in "afternoon visiting" costume, leaned tenderly towards her over the park-railing, proferring for her acceptance a spray of white lilies which he had taken from his button-hole, and which he held affectionately between his dry bone fingers. Anything more sublimely chaste, yet "realistic," can never be imagined. The way their two skulls nodded and grinned at each other was intensely edifying—it was a case of purely "spiritual" love and platonic desire, in which the wicked flesh had no existing part. And one of the most remarkable features of the whole pageant was the intense stillness which pervaded the movements of the elegant bony throng of "rank, beauty, and fashion." Not a leaf on the trees rustled, not a joint in any distinguished skeleton cracked. Two skeleton policemen kept order, and the crowd itself kept silence. The skeleton horses rubbed against each other in the press, but not a bone clattered, and not a wheel grated. As noiselessly as mist or rolling cloud, the white-ribbed, motley-clothed multitude moved on; the foot-passengers were skeletons also, and 'Arry, turning empty eye-sockets about, looked quite as "noble" as my lord the duke in his barouche, somewhat more so in fact, though wearing shabbier clothes. A delightful equality ruled the scene—a true "fraternity," fulfilling some of the socialistic ideas to the letter. For once the "row" had cast off hypocrisy, and appeared in its absolutely real aspect—everybody had found out everybody else—there was no polite lie possible; frank Bones declared themselves as Bones, and nothing more. Moreover, each skeleton was so like its neighbour skeleton that there were really no differences left to argue about. The famous beauty, Lady N., could no longer scowl at her rival, the Duchess of L., because they looked precisely similar, save for a trifling difference in length of jaw, and also for the more impressive fact that one wore blue and the other grey. The bones were the same in each "fair" composition, and as bones, the two ladies were, or seemed to be, amiable enough—it was only the wretched flesh that had made them quarrelsome. And of all things, the chief thing that was truly beautiful to witness was the universal smile that beamed through the vast assemblage. Never had the "row" presented itself to broad daylight with such a sincerely unaffected, all-pervading Grin! From end to end the grin prevailed—horses, dogs, and men—there was not one serious exception. Into the air, into the very sky, the wide, perpetual, toothy smile appeared to stretch itself out illimitably, everlastingly: like a grim satire carved in letters of white bone, it seemed to inscribe itself upon the blue of heaven; a mockery, a savagery, a protest, a curse, and a sneer in one, it spread itself in ghastly dumb mirth to the very edge of the far horizon, till I, watching it, could stand the death's-head jollity no longer. Starting in my chair, I uttered a smothered cry, and awoke. A friendly hand fell on my shoulder—a pair of friendly eyes twinkled good-humouredly into mine. "Hullo! Were you asleep?" And there beside me stood Labby—the genial Labby—with "Truth" glittering all over him. Should I tell him of my queer vision, I thought, as I took his arm and strolled away in his ever-delightful company? No. Why should I bother him with the question of honest Bones versus dishonest Flesh? He was (and is) already too busy exposing Shams.

V.

HOW NAMES ARE SUPERIOR TO PERSONS.

V. HOW NAMES ARE SUPERIOR TO PERSONS.

"What's in a name?" sighed the fair Juliet of Shakespeare's fancy. She was very much in love when she propounded the question, so she must be excused for coming to the conclusion that a name meant nothing. But no one who is not in love, no one who is not absolutely mad, can be pardoned for indulging in such an opinion. Romeo was more than his name to Juliet, but out of romantic poesy, nobody is more than his name as a rule. The Name is everything; the Person behind the Name is generally nothing when you come to know him. A fine title frequently covers the most unpretentious individual. Beginning with the very highest example in the land, can there be anything more lofty-sounding than this—"Her Majesty Victoria Regina, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India!" The full-mouthed, luscious, trumpet-roll of this description calls up before the imagination something beyond all speech to express; visions of great nations, glittering armies, stately war-ships, kingdoms of the Orient, stores of wealth and wonder untold—well, and after it all, when you come to stand face to face with this so tremendous Victoria Regina, you find only a dear, simple old lady attired in dowdy black, who might just as well be Mrs. Anybody as the Queen, for all she looks to the contrary. She is a dreadful disappointment to the young and enthusiastic, who almost expect to see something of the enthroned goddess about her, with Athene's shield and buckler bracing her woman's breast, and all the jewels of her Eastern Empire blazing on her brow. Alas for the young and enthusiastic! They are doomed to a great many such disillusions. They dream of Names, and find only Persons, and the fall from their empyrean is an almost paralysing shock as a rule. There are exceptions of course. There is a majestic Cardinal in Rome who looks every inch a Cardinal—the others might be anybodies or nobodies. The Pope is not entirely disappointing; he has the air of a refined Spanish Inquisitor, a sort of etherialised Torquemada. He is much more impressive in demeanour than our own excellent Archbishop of Canterbury, who does not overawe us at any time. In fact, we are seldom awed by persons at all, only by names. A small boy of my acquaintance, taken to see the Shah, expressed his disgust in a loud voice—"Why, he's only a man!" There is the whole mischief of the thing. Only a man—only a woman. Nothing more. But the Names seem so much more. Names spread themselves in a large, vast way over the habitable globe—they are everywhere, while the Persons remain limited to one place, or else are nowhere. The name of Shakespeare is so all-pervading that we will not hear of Bacon being substituted for it, even though Donelly should chance to be right. How well it is for us that we never knew the Person (whoever he was) that wrote the plays. Even Homer himself—should we have cared to know him? I doubt it. His name has proved infinitely better than himself because more lasting. And so, what slight amount of reverence I have in my nature I bestow entirely on Names—for Persons I have little or no respect. A great name possesses a great charm—a great person is generally a great bore. Any one who takes the trouble to observe society closely will support my theory of the superiority of names to individuals. Try the mere sound of several names and see. "The Prince of Wales." That is a fine historical designation, but, curiously enough, it does not convey so much in the way of grand suggestions as it ought to do. Yet he who bears it now is the first gentleman in the land; kindly, courteous, chivalrous, and a veritable Prince of good fellows. "Baron Rothschild"—a name suggestive of wealth galore—but the great financier himself is not such wondrous company. "His Grace the Duke of Marlborough" hath a pleasing roll in the utterance, but when you get close to the distinguished biped so designated, you are conscious of a dismal sense of failure somewhere. "Her Grace the Duchess of Torrie MacTavish" suggests a "gathering of the clans" and bonfires on the Highland hills, but her Grace herself is but a little mean old Scotchwoman, with an avaricious eye upon every "bawbee" expended in her household. "Prime Minister" is a fine title—"Prime Minister of England"—the finest title in the world; but Salisbury is the only man who looks the stately part. The G.O.M. is pure Plebeian—a big-brained plebeian, if you like, but plebeian to the marrow. The demagogue declares itself in the shape of his feet and hands, which are as long and flat as it is the privilege of demagogue hands and feet to be. Coming to the "dream-weavers," or men of letters, some of us (young and enthusiastic) breathe the name "Tennyson" with reverential tenderness, thinking the old man must be well-nigh a demi-god. Not a bit of it. Crusty and perverse, he will have little of our company, and against many of those who have bought his books he thunders denunciation and bars his garden-gate. A little of the exquisite vanity of old Victor Hugo, who used to show himself to passers-by at his window, would better become our veteran Laureate than his hermit-like sourness. "Ruskin" is another great name—but who can count the intense disappointments entailed on ardent admirers of the Name when they discover the Person! "Swinburne" suggests poetry, romance, wild and wondrous things—a bitter awakening awaits those who will insist on peering behind the Name to see the bearer thereof. And it is nearly always so. Names open to us the gates of the Ideal—Persons shut us up in the dungeon of Commonplace. Few famous people come up to their names—still fewer go beyond them. If ever I chance to meet a celebrated man or woman whose personal charm fascinates me more than his or her celebrated name, I shall make a great fuss about it. I shall—let me see, what shall I do?—why, I shall write to the Times. The Times is the only correct threepenny outlet for ebullitions of sincere national feeling. But till I am otherwise convinced, I adhere to my expressed opinion that Names are the chief motors of social influence, and that individuals are of infinitely less account. Thus, I think it a thousand pities that Stanley did not meet with the good old style of melo-dramatic hero's death in the Dark Continent. His Name might have become a glory and a watchword—as matters now stand his Person has extinguished his Name.

Yes, my dear friends all, I assure you, on my honour as an honest masquer, that both my opinion and advice in this matter are well worth following. When you have selected a Name to hold in some particular reverence, you will be unwise if you try to peep behind it in search of the person belonging to it. The Name is like the door forbidden to Bluebeard's wife: once opened, it shows no end of horrors, headless corpses of good intentions weltering in their blood, and hacked limbs of fine sentiment mouldering on the floor. Keep the door shut therefore. Never unlock it. Let no light fall through the crannies. Stand outside and worship what you imagine may be within. Do as I do—know as many Names as you like and as few Persons as possible. Life is more agreeable that way. For example, if you wanted to find me out, and you were to peep behind my name and tear off my domino, you would only be disappointed. You would find nothing but—a person; a Person who might possibly be your friend and might equally be your foe. 'Twere well to be wary in such a doubtful business. Best accept me as I appear, and entertain yourselves with the notion that there may be a "Somebody" hidden behind the mask. Make an "ideal" of me if you choose—ideal saint, or devil, whichever pleases your fancy, for I have no taste either way. Only, for Heaven's sake, remember that if you do persuade yourselves into thinking I am a Somebody, and I turn out after all to be a Nobody, it is not my fault. Don't blame me; blame your own self-deception. Inasmuch as it is especially necessary in my case to bear in mind that the Name is not the Person.

VI.

CONVERSETH WITH LORD SALISBURY.

VI. CONVERSETH WITH LORD SALISBURY.

Excellent and courteous friend, one moment, I beseech you! I know how busy you are, but I also know, much to my satisfaction, that, like a true diplomat and wise man, you give ear to all, even to fools occasionally, inasmuch as from fools sometimes emanate certain snatches of wisdom. Therefore pause beside me for an instant with the patient grace and friendliness I am accustomed to from you; for though I call myself a fool with the heartiest good will, you have often thought and spoken of me otherwise, for which condescension I thank you. It is something to have won your good opinion, inasmuch as you are guiltless of "booming" second-rate literature, in the style of the venerable Woodcutter of Hawarden, for the sake of bringing yourself into notice. Indeed, I think the admirable qualities of your head and heart have hardly been sufficiently insisted upon by the party you serve. And the genius of patriotism and love of Queen and country which inspire your spirit—are these rightly, fairly, acknowledged? No. But what can you or any one else expect from the weak, vacillating souls you are called upon to lead, such as Randolph Churchill, for example, whose political career is but a disappointment and mockery to public onlookers. I consider that you fight single-handed. Your endeavours are noble and fearless, but those who should support you are for the most part cowards—and not only cowards, but selfish cowards; for to some of your party whom I know, a matter of digestion is more paramount than the good of the country. When a leading Conservative finds himself slightly bilious through over-eating, he hastens away abroad, there to nurse his miserable physical ills and pamper his worthless carcase, regardless of, or indifferent to, the fact that, by virtue of his position, if not his brains, his presence in England might be useful and valuable. There are numerous such lazy hounds in your party, my dear Lord, who deserve to be lashed with the whip of a Fox's or a Pitt's eloquence. And I have wondered oft why you have not spoken the lurking reproach against them, the indignant "Shame on you all!" that must have frequently burned for utterance in your mind.

And "shame on you all!" is the cry that leaps to the lips of every true Briton who thinks of the former historical glories of his country, and at the same time observes the lamentable unsteadiness, the lack of courage, the dearth of principle in politicians of every grade to-day. Parliament gabbles; it does not speak. Often it resembles a cackling chorus of old women striving to describe their own and their friends' various ailments. Why is Radicalism rampant? Why is there any Radicalism? Because so many Radicals are honest, hard-working men—honest in their opinions, honest in the utterance of those opinions, honest in thinking that their cause is good. And you, my dear Lord, have a certain sympathy with this active, energetic, vital, if wrong-headed honesty—you know you have. You love your Sovereign, you love your country, you love the constitution, but for all that you cannot but sympathise with integrity. You know that the Monarch has left England pretty much to itself for the last thirty years, and that she has allowed the people to realise that they can get on without her, seeing she will take no part with them in their daily round. A pity! but the evil is done, and it is too late to remedy it. There is practically no social ruler of the realm, and you must confess, good Salisbury, that this fact makes your work difficult. The mass of the people can only be got to understand a monarch who behaves like one, and the more intellectual food you put into them, the more obstinate they become on the point. With similar pigheadedness they can only understand the personality of a prince whose conduct is a princely example; they are quite sure about themselves here, and have the most appallingly distinct notions concerning right and wrong. They do not go to church for these notions—no. Many cobblers and coalheavers would be mentally refreshed if they were allowed to kick a few seeming-holy clerics whose hypocrisies are apparent despite sermons on Sunday. It must not be forgotten that education is making huge strides among the populace; it has got its seven-leagued boots on, and is clearing all manner of difficulties at a bound. When your greengrocer studies Plato o' nights, when your shoemaker carries the maxims of Marcus Aurelius about in his pocket to refresh himself withal in the intervals of stitching leather, when the wife of your butcher sheds womanly tears over Keats' "Pot of Basil," a poem which the "cultured" dame has "no time" to read—these be the small signs and tokens of a wondrous change by and by. Cheap literature, especially when it is a selection of the finest in the world, is a dangerous "factor" in the making of revolutions, and among other purveyors of literary food for the million, one who calleth himself Walter Scott, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, is unconsciously doing a curious piece of work. He is putting into the hands of the "lower classes," for the moderate price of one shilling (discount price ninepence) small volumes well bound and well printed, which contain the grandest thoughts of humanity, such as "Epictetus," "Seneca," Mazzini's "Essays," "Sartor Resartus," "Past and Present," the "Religio Medici," the Emerson "Essays," and what not—and it is necessary to take into consideration the fact that the people who buy these books read them. Yes, they read them, every line, no matter how slowly or laboriously; for whether they have expended a shilling or the discount ninepence, they always want to know what they have got for their money. This is the peculiar disposition of the "masses"; the "upper ten" are not so particular, and will lay out a few guineas on Mudie by way of annual subscription, getting scarce anything back of value in exchange. After this fashion, too, the "upper ten" entertain the ungrateful, keep horses and carriages for display, and trot the dreary round of season after season, striving to extract amusement from the dried-up gourd of modern social life, and finding nothing in it all but a bitter jest or a sneering laugh at the slips in morality of their so-called "friends" and neighbours. And thus it is, my dear Lord, that the balance of things is becoming alarmingly unequal; the "aristocratic" set are a scandal to the world with their divorce cases, their bankruptcies, their laxity of principle, their listless indifference to consequences; they never read, they never learn, they never appear to see anything beyond themselves. Whereas the "bas-peuple" are reading, and reading the books that have helped to make national destinies—they are learning, and they are not afraid to express opinions. They do not think a duke who seduces his friend's wife merely "unfortunate"—they call him in plain language a low blackguard. They cannot be brought to believe that the heir to a great name who has gambled away all his estates on the turf a "gentleman"—they call him a "loose fish" without parley. Now you, excellent and true-hearted Salisbury, have to look on two sides of the question. On the one are your own people, the aristocrats, the Tories, lazy, indifferent, inert, many of them—fond of what they term "pleasure," and as careless of the interests of the country (with a few rare exceptions) as they can well be. On the other hand you have the sturdy, loyal, splendid English "masses," who in their heart of hearts are neither Radicals, Whigs, or Tories, but are simply as they always have been—"For God and the Right!" It matters not which party expresses what they consider the Right; it is the Right they want, and the Right they will have, and they will try all means and appliances in their power till they get it. And it is with this clamour for the Right that you, my Lord, sympathise, because you know how much there is just now that is wrong; how politicians shuffle and lie and play at cross-purposes simply to attain their own personal ends; how over-competition is cutting the throat of Free Trade; how foolishly the tricksters have played with poor distracted Ireland; how openly we have lowered the standard of society by admitting into it men and women of well-known degraded reputation, as well as the painted mimes and puppets of the stage; how wives are bargained for and bought for a price, almost as shamelessly as in an open market; how good faith, chivalry, honour, and modesty are every day becoming rarer and rarer among men; and how, worst of all, we try to cover our vices by a cloak of hypocrisy—the most canting hypocrisy current in the world. English hypocrisy, the ultra-pious form—oh! "it is rank; it smells to heaven!" There is nothing like it anywhere—nothing—no devil so well sainted by psalm-singing, church-going, Sunday observance, and charitable subscription lists. The married woman of title and high degree who sells the jewel of her wifely chastity for the trifling price of a fool's praise, is ever careful to look after the poor, and give her "distinguished" patronage to church-bazaars. Pah! such things are as a sickness to the mind; one's gorge rises at them; and yet they are, as the Queen said to Hamlet, "common." So common, i' faith, that we are beginning to accept them as an inevitable part of our "social observances." And, alas, my Lord of Salisbury, you can do nothing to remedy these things, and yet it is precisely "these things" that swell the rising wave of Radicalism. And despite all the power of your keen, capacious brain, and all the love of country working in your soul, believe me, the storm will break. Nothing will keep it back; because, though there are men of genius in the realm, these men are not permitted to speak. The tyrant Journalism forbids. Why "tyrant"? Is not Journalism free? Not so, my Lord; it is not the "voice of the people" at all; it is simply the voice of a few editors. Were the most gifted man that ever held a pen to write a letter to any of the papers on a crying subject of national shame, he would be refused a hearing unless he were a friend of the proprietors of whatever journal he elected to write to. And men of genius seldom are friends of editors—a curious fact, but true. And so we never really hear the "voice of the people" save in some great crisis, and when we do, it invariably astonishes us. It upsets our nerves, too, for a long time afterwards. It is always so horribly loud, authoritative and convincing! The "voices of editors" die away on these occasions like the alarmed squealings of cats chased by infuriated hounds, and into the place of such a smug and well-satisfied person as the Editor of the Times, for example, leaps a shabby, dirty, hungry, eager-eyed creature like Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, instead of a clean and carefully prepared pen, uses for the nonce a red, sputtering torch of revolution, which, setting fire to old abuses, spreads wide conflagration through the land. And how the heart leaps, how the blood thrills, when old abuses are destroyed! When the rats' nests of cliques are thrust out to perish in the gutter, when the dirty cobwebs of self-interest and love of gain are swept down, and the fat spiders within them trampled under foot, when the great white palace of national Honour is cleansed and made sweet and fresh for habitation, even at the cost of groaning labour, confusion, and stress, how one breathes again, how one lives the life of a true man in the purified strong air!

As you know well, my Lord, I am of no political party. I am proud to be as one with this great nation in its vital desire for the Right and the Just. Wherever the Right appears I am its follower to the death. I hate false things; I hate bubble reputations, empty wind-bags of policy, dried skeletons of faith. Why not leave this dubious handling of bones and dusty material? It is too late to set wry matters straight. They are an obstruction, and must be cleared from the path of England. Had you the temerity, as I know you have the will, you would speak your thoughts more openly than you have yet done. You would say: "I refuse to lead cowards. I will call to my side men of proved brain and honesty and skill, with whom honour is more than pelf; I will get at the heart of England, and move with its pulsations; and of those who are not with this heart I will have none. I will at once make some attempt to remedy the frightful abuses of the law; I will move heaven and earth till England, not party, is satisfied!"

And oh, my most excellent friend, what a wise thing you would do, if you would only keep a watchful eye on the scribblers—the poor and hungry and ambitious scribblers especially! Your party at all times of history has been foolishly prone to neglect this sort of inky folk, and what an error of policy is such neglect! These same inky folk, my Lord, do cause thrones to fall and empires to tremble, wherefore you and all whom it concerns should look after them warily. Make friends with them; soothe their irritated nerves; take time and trouble to explain a situation to them, and remember, never was there dusty, crusty writing-biped yet but could not be moved to a pale, pleased smile of response to a royal hand-shake, a royal greeting, given in good season. It is not singers and twiddlers on musical strings that a wise Court should patronise, but the wielders of pens—they, who, if despised and neglected, take relentless vengeance, and, fearing neither God nor devil, proceed to make strange bargains with both. The Press is a plebeian creature—yes, I know; but for all that, it has stumbled with its big, hob-nailed shoes and Argus eyes into the Royal precincts, and stands there smacking its greasy lips and staring rudely, after the fashion of all plebeians unaccustomed to polite society. It is vulgar, this Press—there is no doubt of that; it dresses badly, and wears, not a sword by its side, but a stumpy pen stuck unbecomingly behind its ear, and it gives itself a vast amount of coarse swagger because it is for the most part deficient in education, and picks up its knowledge by hearsay—nevertheless it has power. And it is a power which neither you nor any one else can afford to despise; wherefore, good friend, when you have any grand object in view and want to attain it, let all else go if necessary, but gather a grand muster-roll of Pens. These shall win you your cause if you only know how to lead them, and without their assistance you shall be lost in a sea of contradictions. Some of these Pens are already yours to command; but others are not, and you trouble not your head concerning these "others" which are the very ones you should secure. As for me, I could go on advising you with the most infinite tedium on sundry matters, but I will not now, inasmuch as we shall have frequent opportunities for discourse in the library at Hatfield. And so, till we meet again, accept the assurance of my admiration and devoted service. You are one of the noblest of living Englishmen; you have the kindest heart in the world; your foreign policy means peace and satisfaction to Europe; and yet, with it all, and with my ardent friendship for you, I cannot help asking myself the question whether, if the storm breaks and the waves rise mountains high, will you have the strength to be a pilot for the ship of England in her dark hour? And if it should be proved that you cannot steer us, Who shall be found that can?

VII.

CHATTETH WITH THE GRAND OLD MAN.

VII. CHATTETH WITH THE GRAND OLD MAN.

Dost thou remember, my dear Mr. Gladstone, a certain warm and pleasant July afternoon when thou didst honour and oppress me with thy Grand Old Presence for a couple or more of weary hours, regardless of the fact that the "House" expected thee to appear and reply on some moot point or other to Mr. Goschen? There in my modest studio thou didst sit, rubbing that extensive ear of thine with one long forefinger, and smiling suavely at such regular intervals as almost to suggest the idea of there being a patent smiling-machine secreted behind thy never-resting jaw!

Ah, that was a day! We talked—but no! 'twas thou didst talk, thou noble old man! and I—as all poor mortals must needs do in thy company—listened. Listened intently; helpless to remove thee from the chair in which thou sattest; hopeless of putting any stop to thine eloquence; while on, on, on, still on, rolled the stream of thy fluent and wordy contradictions, till my mind like a ship broken loose from its moorings, rocked up and down in a wild, dark sea of uncertainty as to what thou didst mean; or whether thy meaning, if it could by chance be discovered, should in truth be meant? Hadst thou been a Book instead of a Man, I should have flung thee aside, walked the room, and clutched my hair after the manner of the intense tragedian; but with thee, thou astonishing Biped, I could do no more than stare stonily at thy careless collar-ends and concentrate all my soul on my powers of hearing. "Listen, fool!" I said to my inner self—"Listen! It is Gladstone who is speaking—Gladstone the old man eloquent; Gladstone the thinker; Gladstone the Bible scholar; Gladstone the Greek translator; Gladstone the Scotchman, Gladstone the Irishman, Gladstone the—the—the—Wood-cutter! Listen!"

And, as I live, I listened to thee, Gladstone; I swallowed, as it were, thine every word, in spite of increasingly lethargic mental indigestion. Specially did I strive to follow thee in thy wild flights up the stairs of many religious theories, when with gray hair ruffled and eyes aglare, thou didst solemnly rend piecemeal "Robert Elsmere," forgetting, O thou grand old Paradox, that if thou hadst never lifted up that clamant voice of thine in Nineteenth-Century-Magazine utterance, Robert and his oppressive religious troubles might scarcely have attracted notice? Didst thou not "boom" Robert, and then feign surprise at the result? Ay, venerable Splitter of Straws and Hewer of Logs, wilt deny the truth? And shall I not advise thee in thine own terms to retire from public life, not "now," but "at present." Or if not "at present" then "now"? Either will serve, before thou dost make more blows with thy hatchet-brain (somewhat dulled at the edge) at the future honour and welfare of thy country.

Ah, what things I could have said to thee, thou Quibble, when thou didst venture to assail me with thy converse, if thou hadst but taken decent pause for breathing! Why, amongst other marvels, didst thou deem it worth thy while to flatter me, or to praise the casual sputterings of my pen? Thy unctuous insinuations carried no persuasion; thy "nods and becks and wreathed smiles" were wasted on me; thy soft assurances of the "certainty of my future brilliant fame" went past my ears like the murmur of an idle wind. For a fame "assured" by thee is nothing worth; and thy Polonius-like approbation of any piece of work, literary or otherwise, is as a mark set on it to make it seem ridiculous. For thou art destitute of humour save in wood-cutting; and thou needest many a lesson from my dear friend Andrew Lang before thou canst successfully comprehend the subtly critical art of proving a goose to be a swan. And so, by monosyllables slipt in like frailest wedges between thy florid bursts of ambiguity, I strove to entice thy wandering wits back to the discussion of personal faith in matters religious, wherein I found thee most divertingly inchoate, but my feeble efforts were of small avail. For lo, while yet I strove to understand whether thou wert in truth a Roman Papist, a Calvinist, a Hindoo, a Theosophist, or a Special Advocate of the War Cry, the subject of Creed, like a magic-lantern slide, disappeared from thy mental view, and Divorce came up instead. Frightful and wonderful, according to thee, goodman Gladstone, are the wicked ways of the married! No sooner are they united than they move heaven and earth to get parted—so it is at any rate very frequently in the free and happy American Republic, where the disagreeing parties need not move heaven and earth, but simply make a mutual assertion. Oh, of a truth here was no smiling matter! No Deity in question, but a very positive Devil, needing thy exhortation and exorcism; and thy jaws clacked on sternly, strenuously, and with a resolute gravity and persistency that seemed admirable. Not every man could be expected to find a Mrs. Gladstone, but surely all were bound to try and discover such a paragon. If all married society were composed of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstones, why, married society would realise the fabled Elysium. And supposing there continued to be only one Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, and all the rest were quite a different set of hopelessly different temperaments, then, naturally, it was impossible to state what disasters might ensue. It would be a case of Noah and his wife over again—after them the Deluge. In the interim, Divorce was shocking, abominable, sinful, diabolical, ungodly—an upsetting of the most sacred foundations of morality—and it was chiefly because Gladstonian domestic tastes were not universal. This, at least, is what I seemed to gather from thee in thine onslaughts against the large and melancholy mass of the Miserably Married; I say I "seemed" to gather it, because it "seemed" thy meaning, but as thy whole mode of speech and action is only "seems," I cannot be absolutely sure either of myself or thyself. For thou didst set out an attractive row of various learned propositions, gently, and with the bland solicitude of a hen-wife setting out her choicest eggs for sale, then suddenly and incontinently, and as one in a fit of strangest madness, thou didst sweep them up and fling them aside into airy nothingness without concern for the havoc wrought. Thou didst calmly state what appeared to be a Fact, reasonable and graspable; and with all the powers of my being I seized upon it as a grateful thing and good for consideration; when suddenly thy senile smile obscured the intellectual horizon, and thy equably modulated voice murmured such words as these: "Not that I desire to imply by any means that this is so, or should be so, but that it might (under certain circumstances, and provided certain minds were at harmony upon the point) probably become so." Ah, thou embodied Confusion worse Confounded! Had it not been for this constant playing of thine at thy favourite shuffling game of cross-purposes, I should have roused my soul from its stupor of forced attention to demand of thee more of thy profound Bible scholarship. Whether, for example, if Divorce, thy bugbear, were ungodly, and the Bible true, a man should not have two, three, nay, half-a-dozen wives at his pleasure for as long or as short a time as he chose, and find situations for them afterwards as servants, telegraph-clerks, and bookkeepers, when their beauty was gone and snappishness of temper had taken the place of endearing docility. Whether English harem-life, lately set in vogue by certain great and distinguished "Upper" people, could not be easily proved pleasing unto the Most High Jehovah? For did not God love His servant Abraham? and did not Abraham bestow his affections on Sarai and Hagar? and when the hoary old reprobate was "well stricken in years" and "the Lord had blessed him in all things" did he not again take a wife named Keturah, who presented him in his centenarian decrepitude with six sons?—all "fine babies," no doubt. What sayest thou to these morals of Holy Writ, thou "many-sounding" mouthpiece of opinion? Answer me on a postcard, for with thee, more than with any other man, should brevity be the soul of wit!

Some of us younger and irreverent folk oft take to speculating why, in the name of bodies politic, thy days, O Venerable, are so long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee? The Lord thy God, friend William Ewart, must have some excellent reason for allowing thee to ruthlessly cut down so many growing oaks of English honour and walk unscathed across the bare, disfigured country, with the wild dogs of Democracy sneaking at thy heels. And I forgot, in speaking of the holy Abraham, that late events have proved the high superiority of thy tastes in morality to those of God's anciently-favoured servant. For didst thou not disown thy sweetest nursling, thine own favourite adopted son, Parnell, simply and solely to publicly clasp and kiss the wrinkled, withering hand of Mrs. Grundy? And knowest thou not, thou gray-haired Conundrum, that nothing has ever seemed more preternaturally absurd to the impartial observer and student of social life in all countries, than this making a public question out of personal matter?—this desertion of a former friend, a man, too, of immense intellectual capability, all because, as the old German ballad goes, "he loved a, to him, temptingly-forbidden lady"? Just Heavens! I could name dozens of men (but I will not), party men too, respectably married likewise, who have their "temptingly-forbidden ladies" tucked snugly away in the innermost recesses of their confidence, and who avoid betraying themselves into such impulsiveness as might lead to a fire-escape and political dissolution. As for Mrs. Grundy, the dear old soul never sees anything now unless she is led up to it with her spectacles on; she is more than half blind, and totally deaf—a poor, frail creature very much on her last legs—and she must have been vaguely flattered and surprised at thy voluntary Grand Old Hand-Shake, given to her in the very face of all the staring world of intelligence and fashion. It must have soothed her aching heart and comforted her tottering limbs to find she still had left to her a pale vestige of past power. Ah, it was a grand and edifying party-split!—almost as exciting as if it had occurred on a question of Beer, which fateful subject angrily discussed, did, I believe, on one occasion actually effect a change of Ministry. And it is rather a notable proof of the curious littleness of the age we live in, that of late, political parties have seldom broken up on great questions—questions of momentous and general interest affecting the welfare of the state and people—but nearly always on petty, personal, nay almost vulgar and childish disputes, such as might make Fox and Pitt turn and groan in their graves. Is there no such thing as unadulterated patriotism left, I wonder?—no real ardent love of the "Mother" England? or hast thou, old Would-Be Despot, choked it all by thy pernicious gabble?

And yet, whatever may be said of thee now or in after history as a Man-Enigma, thy bitterest enemy, unless he be an idiot born, can hardly be blind to thy numerous and extraordinary endowments. Jumbled as they are together with so much confusion that it is difficult to tell which savour most of vice or most of virtue, they are nevertheless Endowments, rare enough to find in any other living composition of mortal mould. And the mystic gift that keeps thee powerful to grasp and retain thy dominance over the minds of the Majority, is simple Genius—a gift of which there are many spurious imitations, but which in itself is given to so few as to make it seem curious and remarkable, aye, even a thing suggestive of downright madness to the men of mere business talent and capacity who form the largest portion of the governing body. Misguided, captious, flighty as caprice itself, it is nevertheless a flash of the veritable Promethean fire which works that busy, massive brain of thine—a kindling, restless heat which is entirely deficient in the brains of nearly all thy fellow-statesmen of the hour. This it is that fascinates the Public—the giant Public that above all the whisperings and squealings of the Press, reserves its own opinion, and only utters it when called upon to do so, with sundry roarings and vociferations as of a hungry lion roused—a convincing manner of eloquence which doth wake to speculative timorousness the wandering penny-a-liner. For Genius is the only quality the Public does in absolute truth admire, without being taught or forced into admiration—and that Genius has ever in reality been despised or neglected by the world, is, roughly speaking, a Lie. Everything noble that deserves to live, lives; and Homer wrote as much for the England of to-day as for the Greece of past time. The things that die, deserve to die; the "genius" who deems himself ill-used, does by his childish querulousness prove himself unworthy of appreciation. For no great soul complains, inasmuch as all complaint is cowardice.

Thus, when I bring the Public well into sympathetic view, and consider thee in relation to it, O Grand Old Gladstone, I understand readily enough what is meant by the feeling of the "majority" concerning thy civic and personal qualifications for power. It is this—that the people feel, that notwithstanding thy chameleon-like variableness, and thy darkly cabalistic utterances on the political How, When, and Why, thou art still the "only" man in the professed service of the country possessing this talisman of Genius which from time immemorial has carried its own peculiar triumph over the heads of all opposers. For when thou shalt be gone the way of all flesh, who is left? Little brilliancy of wit or good counsel is there now in the Commons, and the Lords are but weary creatures, bent on maintaining their own interests in the face of all change. Is there a man who can be truly said to have the gift of eloquence save Thou? Wherefore the attention and interest of the people still continue to revolve round thy charmed pivot, thou Hawarden Thinker, with, as the Scotch say, "a bee" in thy bonnet. And, whether Premier or Ex-Premier, all because thou art a Thinker in spite of the bee. Thy thoughts may be "long, long thoughts" like the "thoughts of youth" in Longfellow's pretty poem—they may be indeed without any definite end at all, but they are thoughts, they are not mere business calculations of the State's expenses. Only being ill-assorted and still worse defined, they are unfit to blossom into words, which they generally do, to the perplexity and anxiety of everybody concerned. And there is the mischief—a mischief irremediable, for nothing will stop thy tongue, thou Grand Old Gabbler, save a certain Grand Old Silence wearing only bones and carrying a scythe, who is not so much interested in politics as in mould and earthworms à la Darwin.

Nevertheless I, for one, shall be exceedingly sorry when this fleshless "reaper whose name is Death" mows thee down, poor Gladdy, and turns thee remorselessly into one more pinch of dust for his overflowing granary. Remember me or not as thou mayest, do me good service or bad, I care nothing either way. Thy visits to me were of thine own seeking, and of conversation thou didst keep the absolute monopoly; but what matter?—I at least was privileged to gaze upon thee freely and mentally comment upon thy collar unreproved. 'Twas but thy unctuous flattery that vexed my soul; for Gladstonian praise is but Art's rebuke. Otherwise I bear thee no malice, though for sundry reasons I might well do so.... Oh, venerable Twaddler! Didst thou but know me as I am, would not the hairs upon thy scalp, aye "each particular hair" rise one by one in anger and astonishment, and thou for once be rendered speechless?... Nay, good Gladstone-Grundy, have no fear! I will not blab upon thee; I am well covered, closely masked; and thou shalt hear no more of me as I slip by, save ... a smothered laugh behind my domino!

VIII.

OF THE TRUE JOURNALIST AND HIS CREED.

VIII. OF THE TRUE JOURNALIST AND HIS CREED.

I am very fond of journalists. I look upon them, young and old, fat and lean, masculine and feminine, as the salt of the earth wherewith to savour the marrow of the country. And I like to put them through their paces. I am always devoured by an insatiable curiosity to fathom the depths of their learning—depths which I feel are almost infinite; yet despite this infinity I am always fain to plunge. Whenever I see a son of the ink-pot I collar him, and demand of him information—information on all things little and big, because he knows all things. I believe he even knows why Shakespeare left his second-best bed to his wife, only he won't tell. As for languages, he is everybody's own Ollendorf. He knows French, he knows Russian, he knows Italian, he knows Spanish, he knows Hindustani, he knows Chinese, he knows—oh divine Apollo! what does he not know! Let anybody write a book and try to introduce into its pages one word of Cherokee, one wild unpronounceable word, and the omniscient journalist is down upon him instantly with the bland assertion that it is a wrong word, wrongly spelt, wrongly used. For the journalist knows Cherokee; he spoke it when a gurgling infant in his mother's arms, together with all the living and dead dialects of all nations. So that when I get a journalist to dine with me, is it to be wondered at that I am consumed by a desire to know? The thirst of wisdom enters into me, and having plied my man with eatables and wine, I hang on his lips entranced. For can he not tell me everything that ever was, or ever shall be?—and shall I not also aspire to oracles?

Once upon a time, to my unspeakable joy, I caught a fledgling journalist; a fluttering creature, all eagle-wings and chuckles, and I carried him home in a cab to dinner. He was a wild fowl, with plumage unkempt, and beak, i.e., a Wellingtonian nose, that spoke volumes of knowledge already. I discovered him hopping about a club, and seeing he was hungry, I managed to coax him along to my "den." When I had him there safe, I could have shouted with pure ecstasy! He became gentle; he smoothed his ruffled feathers; he dipped his beak into my burgundy wine and pronounced in a god-like way that "behold, it was very good." Then, when his inner man was satisfied, he spoke; and information, information, came rolling out with every brief and slangy sentence. Of kings and queens, of princes and commoners, of he and she and we and they, of fire, police, law, council, parliament, and my lady's chamber, of all that whirls in the giddy circle of our time, my fledgling had taken notes—yea, even on the very wheels of government, he had placed his ink-stained finger.

"O wondrous young man!" I muttered as I heard; "O marvel of the age! Why do not the kings of the earth gather together to hear thy wisdom? Why do not the councils of Europe wait to learn the arts of government from thee? Wert thou at the right hand of Deity, I wonder, when worlds were created and comets begotten?" ... Here, filled with ideas, I poured more wine out for the moistening of the Wellingtonian beak, and demanded feverishly—"Tell me, friend, of things that are unknown to most men—tell me of the dark mysteries of time, which must be clear as daylight to a brain like yours!—instruct me in faith and morals—show me the paths of virtue—explain to me your theories of the future, of creed—"

I stopped, choked by my own emotion; I felt I was on the point of comprehending the incomprehensible—of grasping great facts made clear through the astute perception of this literary Gamaliel. And he arose in response to my adjuration; he expanded his manly chest, and stood in an attitude of "attention"; his nose was redder than when he first sat down to dine, and the vacuous chuckle of his laugh was music to my soul.

"Creed!" said he. "Drop that! I'm not a church-goer. I've got one form of faith though." And he chuckled once again.

"And that is?" I questioned eagerly.

"This!"

And with proud unction he recited the following simple formula:—

I believe in the Times.

And in the Morning Post, Maker of news fashionable and unfashionable.

And in one Truth, the property of one Labby, the only-begotten son of honesty in Journalism,

Who for us men and our salvation, socially, legally, and politically,

Came down from Diplomacy into Bolt Court, Fleet Street,

And was there self-incarnated Destroyer of Shams. Labby of Labby, Truth of Truth, Very Rad of Very Rad, Born not made, Being one with himself and answerable to nobody for his opinions.

Member for Northampton, he suffered there, secured votes and was left unburied,

And he sitteth in the House, save when he ariseth and speaketh,

And he will continue with triumph to judge all those that judge, both the living and the dead,

Whose "legal pillory" shall have no end.

And I believe in one Pall Mall Gazette, Pure Giver of frequently mistaken information, which proceedeth from pens feminine,

And which with the soporific St. James's, together, exerteth the lungs of the newsboys.

I acknowledge one holy and absolute Court Circular.

I confess one "Saturday" for the flaying of new authors,

And I look for the death of the Nineteenth Century

And the life of a less dull magazine to come Amen.

With this, my journalistic fledgling gave way to Homeric laughter, and helped himself anew to wine. And since that day, since that witching hour, I have watched his wild career. I track him in the magazines; I recognise the ebullitions of his wit in "society" paragraphs; I discover his withering, blistering sarcasm in his reviews of the books he never reads; in fact, I find him everywhere. As the air permeates space, he permeates literature. He is the all-sure, the all-wise, the all-conquering one. With such a faith as his, so firmly held, so nobly uttered, he is born to authority. I only wish some one would make him Prime Minister. Everything that is wrong would be righted, and with a Journalist (and such a journalist!) at the head of affairs, all questions of government would be as easy to settle as child's play. He himself—the Journalist—implies as much, and with all the fibres of my soul I believe him!

IX.

OF WRITERS IN GROOVES.

IX. OF WRITERS IN GROOVES.

There are a certain class of authors who remind me of a certain class of gamblers—men who believe in a special "lucky number," and are always staking their largest amounts upon it. To speak more plainly, I should say that I mean the "groovy" men, who, as soon as they find one particular sort of "style" that chances to hit the taste of the public, keep on grinding away at it with the remorselessness of an Italian street-organ player. I see lots of such fellows in the crowd around me, and I know most of them personally. For instance, there is William Black, a distinctly "groovy" man if ever there was one. All his books are like brothers and sisters, bearing a strong family resemblance one to another. If you have read "A Princess of Thule" and "A Daughter of Heth" you have got the crême de la crême of all that was or is in him. The rest of his work is evolved from precisely the same substance as is found in these two books, only it is drawn out into various criss-cross threads of deft weaving; and, deft as it is, it makes uncommonly thin material. In his latter novels, indeed, there is so much of what may be justly termed "feminine twaddle," that one has to look back to the title-page in order to convince one's self that it is really one of the "virile" sex who is telling a story. Excellent Willie! With his small head and inoffensive physiognomy, he suggests an intellectual sort of pint-pot, out of which it would be absurd to expect a quart of brain. Inasmuch as a pint-pot can only hold a pint; so let us be grateful for small mercies. And let us admire, not for the first time either, the persistent kindly confidence of the British Public, who steadily take up Willie's novels, one after the other, in the sanguine faith of finding something new therein. "Some day," says the patient B.P. in its trot to and from Mudie's Library—"some day Willie will give us a book without a sunset in it. Some day, by happy chance, he will forget there exists such a thing as a yacht. And some day—who knows?—he may even awaken to the fact that there are other places on earth besides Scotland, and other men who are as interesting as Scotchmen."

Good B.P.! Excellent B.P.! What a heart you have! You deserve the very best that can be given you for the sake of your tolerance and cheerfulness of temper, which qualities in you seem truly inexhaustible. Here followeth an anecdote: A certain flimsy scribbler I wot of, who had just got himself into a loosely-fitting suit of literary armour, and was handling his sword a bit awkwardly, as beginners at warfare are apt to do, said to me one day, with a sort of schoolboy vaunt, "The Public want trash!—and trash is what I'll give them!" O wise judge! O learned judge! Out he went with his "trash," his sword poking into everybody's eye, and his armour waggling uncomfortably round him, and lo! the Public "took" his trash and threw it into the gutter, broke his sword for him, gave him back the pieces, and civilly recommended him to look after the loose places in his armour. He went home, did that proud warrior, and sat thinking about what had chanced—it may be he is thinking still.

No, the B.P. don't want "trash"—they want the best of everything—but they have an infinite kindness and patience in waiting for that "best," and carefully looking out for it; and when it truly comes they welcome it with honest enthusiasm. Thus did they welcome and applaud the "Princess of Thule," because they found it good and charming and unique, and ever since that time they have reposed quite a pathetic trust in little Black, hoping against hope that he will give them something else equally good again. Alas for the vanity of all such human wishes! for William is a "groovy" man now, and in his groove he evidently purposes to remain. I remember dining with, him on one occasion, when, in the ordinary way of conversation, I asked him what books he had been reading lately? Oh, what sublime amazement in his rolling eye!

"Read?" he drawled. "I never read. Reading spoils an author's own style."

Haw-haw! Weally! Good B.P., you see how matters stand? Willie's "kail-yairdie," or little plot of garden-ground, is barren; its first crop has been gathered, and no more seed sown by study, so don't expect any other rich harvests, or look for wonders in such work as "Stand fast, Craig Royston!" For even brain-soil wants cultivation, if it is to produce something better than weeds.

Another "groovy" man is William Clark Russell. The waves rule Britannia in his opinion: The sea occupies his inventive faculty to the exclusion of everything else. A pigmy Neptune sits on his bald pate, touching it up with a trident. Sailors' "yarns," sailors' marriages, sailors' shipwrecks—tales of mariners in every sort of painful and pleasant situation—influence his mind and bring it into that "One-idea" condition which is considered by gravely spectacled specialists as a form of cerebral disease. Moreover, his books bristle with sailors' jargon, sailors' slang, sailors' "lingo," which people, who are not sailors and who never intend to be sailors, do not understand and do not want to understand. However, this monomania of his produced one good result—"The Wreck of the Grosvenor." He exhausted his best energies in that book, and having found it a success (as it deserved to be), settled into the Jack Tar line of writing, and became once for all and evermore "groovy." The "Wreck of the Grosvenor" is his "Princess of Thule." He is all there, and there is no more of him anywhere.

At one time I feared, but it was only a passing shudder, that one of the most brilliant novelists we have, Marion Crawford, was drifting in the fatal direction of "groove." When the rather lengthy "Sant' Ilario" came trailing along, after the equally lengthy "Saracinesca," I thought, "Alas! and woe is me! Are we never to hear the last of the beautiful and lovable Astrardente? A noble character, but somewhat too much of her is here." And I was on the verge of uncomfortable doubt for some time, for I had always judged Crawford to be of the true Protean type of genius, capable of touching every string on the literary harp he holds. And I was not mistaken, for "A Cigarette-maker's Romance," that most delicate and delightful work, proves that he is anything but "groovy"; and his "Witch of Prague" is a breaking of entirely new soil. So that the more I read of him, the more I am confirmed in the opinion I have previously ventured to express—namely, that he is our best man-novelist. I use the term "man-novelist" because I know there are women-novelists—ladies whom I should be very sorry to offend by applying the adjective "best" to any member of the viler sex. For I know also that those ladies, if affronted, have curious and unexpected ways of revenging themselves, and though I am masked, my silver domino is hardly proof against the green and glittering eye of a remorseless literary female. So pray you be not wrathful, sweet ladies!—rather join with me in gentle chorus, and say, as you know you must, that the author of "Dr. Isaacs," "A Roman Singer," and "Marzio's Crucifix" is indeed the least "groovy," and therefore the best "man-novelist" living; be kind and condescending thus far, for of women-novelists you shall have a word presently.

Somewhere, once upon a time, I called George Meredith an Eccentricity. I meant him no harm by this phrase or term—I mean none now, when I repeat it. He is an Eccentricity—of Genius! Ha! where are you now, all you commentators and would-be clearers-up of the Mighty Obscure? An Eccentricity—a bit of genius gone mad—an Intellectual Faculty broken loose from the moorings of Common Sense, and therefore a hopelessly obstinate fixture in the "groove" of literary delirium. A Meredithian description of Meredith is found in his story of "One of our Conquerors"—a description there applied to the character of Dudley Sowerby, but fitting Meredith himself exactly. Here it is; "His disordered deeper sentiments were a diver's wreck where an armoured subtermarine, a monstrous puff-ball of man, wandered seriously light in heaviness, trebling his hundred-weights to keep him from dancing like a bladder-block of elastic lumber; thinking occasionally amid the mournful spectacle, of the atmospheric pipe of communication with the world above, whereby he was deafened yet sustained." Of course it is difficult to grasp all this at once—but I seize upon the words, "a bladder-block of elastic lumber"—I know, I feel that "bladder-block" is Meredith, though I cannot precisely inform myself or others what a "bladder-block" in its original sense may mean. But meanings are not expected to be vulgarly apparent on the surface of this "diver's wreck" or new school of prose—you have to search for them; and you must hold fast to whatever "atmospheric pipe of communication" you can find, in order to keep up with this "Monstrous puff-ball of man wandering seriously light in heaviness." It has been left to George Meredith to tell us about "the internal state of a gentleman who detested intangible metaphor as heartily as the vulgarest of our gobble-gobbets hate it"—and if we would not be considered "gobble-gobbets" ourselves, we must strive to be grateful for the light he throws on our intellectual darkness. He is supposed to understand women in and out and all round, so we must take it for granted that a woman can "breathe thunder." It sounds alarming—it is alarming—but if Meredith says it, it must be true. And he does say it. With the calm conviction of one who knows, he assures us that "the lady breathed low thunder." She is a very remarkable person altogether, this "lady," called Mrs. Marsett, and her modes of action are carried on in positive defiance of all natural and physical law. For at one time we are told "her eye-lids (not her eyes) mildly sermonised," and on another occasion she actually "caught at her slippery tongue and carolled," quite a feat of leger de langue. Again, "her woman's red mouth was shut fast on a fighting underlip." Till I read this, I was fool enough to think that the underlip was part of the mouth, but now I know that the underlip is quite a separate and distinct thing, as it is able to go on "fighting" while the mouth is "shut fast" on it. She does all sorts of curious things with this mouth of hers, does Mrs. Marsett; in one scene of her career it is said that "she blushed, blinked, frowned, sweetened her lip-lines, bit at the under one, and passed in a discomposure." Moreover, this strange mouth was given to the utterance of bad language, for with it and her "slippery tongue" Mrs. Marsett said her own name was "Damnable!" and what was still worse, "had the passion to repeat the epithet in shrieks and scratch up male speech for a hatefuller," whatever that may mean. Of course, it is all very grand and mixed and magnificent, if any one chooses to think so; people can work themselves up into an epilepsy of enthusiasm over prose run mad à la Meredith, as over poetry gone a-woolgathering à la Browning. It is a harmless mania which is confined to the few, and is of a distinctly non-spreading tendency; while those who are not partakers in the craze can look on thereat and be amused thereby—for Meredith is at all times and all seasons both personally and in literature a real entertainment. Whether he be haranguing to the verge of deafness some stray acquaintance in the Garrick Club; whether he be met, a greybeard solitary, stalking up the slopes of Box Hill, at the foot of which he resides; whether he be inveighing against the "porkers," i.e., the Public, within the precincts of a certain small and extortionate but rigidly pious bookseller's shop in the town of Dorking; or whether he be visited in his own small literary "châlet," which he built for himself in his own garden, away from his house, what time he had a wife, (a very charming, kindly lady, whose appreciative sense of humour enabled her to understand her husband's gifts better than any of his wildest worshippers), in order to escape from "domesticity" and the ways of the "women" he is supposed to understand—in each and all of these positions he is distinctly amusing—and never more so than when he thinks he is impressive. Yet there can be no doubt whatever as to his natural cleverness, and the original turn of mind which might have made him a distinctly great writer, if he had not forced himself into the strained style of the artificial "groove" he has adopted. Even now, if he would only leave the first spontaneous output of his thought alone, instead of altering it when it is on paper, and weighing it down with all the big words he can find in the dictionary, he would probably write something above the average of interest. However, it's no use being hard upon him, as he has quite recently been Lynched.[1] I cannot endure his novels, it is true—but still, I never wished him to meet such a frightful fate. When we reflect on the barbarity of the institution known as Lynch-law, we cannot but wonder how his admirers have tamely stood by and seen him delivered over to so awful a punishment. Yet it is a positive fact that they have made no defence. And he has been torn limb from limb, and broken into explained pieces by a pitiless executioner self-elected to the performance of the abhorrent deed. A woman too—yclept Hannah as well as Lynch; and eke a spinster—mind cannot picture a more formidable foe—a more fearful fate! Heaven save you, poor Meredith! for man cannot. Lynched you are, and Lynched you must be by every word, sentence and chapter, until you be dead, and may God have mercy on your soul!

Among other "groovy" men may be included Hall Caine (whose big "bow-wow" style is utterly unchanged and unchangeable), W. E. Norris, the pale, far-off, feeble imitator of Thackeray, and F. C. Philips. This latter gentleman is evidently fast "set" in the "groove" of naughty but interesting adventuresses. His tale of "As in a Looking-glass" met with so much success, besides receiving the extremely questionable honour of dramatisation, that he now indulges in the error of imagining that all the world must for the future be persistently eager to know the histories of a continuous succession of conscienceless ladies like Lena Despard. One of his creations of the kind, Margaret Byng, might be Lena's twin sister. (According to the title-page, one P. Fendall would seem to have something to do with Margaret Byng, but how and where it is impossible to discover.) Adventuresses for breakfast, adventuresses for dinner, tea and supper; adventuresses in all sorts of gowns, brand-new or shabby, and adventuresses in all sorts of difficult situations at all sorts of seasons—this is the "four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" kind of dish, which is what we must expect from Mr. Philips in the future. This and no more, since he considers it enough. And among "groovy" men, alas! must be reckoned one of the most delightful of writers, Bret Harte. The "groove" he chose was at first so new and fresh that we all felt as if we could never have enough of it; but even in excess of love there is satiety, and such satiety is our sad experience with the gifted author of "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and the pathetic "Outcasts of Poker Flat." We know exactly the sort of thing he will write for us now—and the charm is broken.

I lay no claim to being possessed of any literary taste, so it will matter to no one when I say I can see no beauty and no art in Mr. Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." It is an entirely hateful book in my opinion. Neither can I endure Mrs. Ward's "David Grieve," and as this lady has undoubted literary gifts, I hope she will for the future avoid the religious "groove." It is extremely uninteresting, and is enough to cramp any author's style. Mr. Gladstone, who "boomed" "Robert Elsmere," apparently has nothing to say for "David Grieve," though it seems he can admire such crude performances as "Mdlle. Ixe" and "Some Emotions and a Moral." But it would never do for us to go by the taste of the Grand Old Man in these things. He is as variable as a chameleon. He might call our attention to the splendours of Dante on one occasion, and directly afterwards assure us that nothing could be finer in literature than the nursery rhyme of "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man." Dear old Gladdy! He is the greatest "leader" ever born in his quality of misleading.

It is difficult indeed to find a writer who is not more or less "groovy"—that is, one who will not only give us different stories, but different "styles." And as a rule the men writers are more "groovy" than the women, though the women are bad enough in their own particular way. Miss Braddon, for example, is, as every one knows, the "grooviest" of novelists going—her canvas is always prepared in the same manner, and the same familiar figures stand out upon it in only slightly altered attitudes. Her books always remind me of a child's marionette theatre, having the same set of puppets, who can be placed in position to enact over and over again the same sort of play. And it is a play that always amuses one for an hour, when one has nothing better to do. "Ouida," though she tells all sorts of different stories (of which her short ones are by far the best), has no difference of style—she is always the same old "Ouida"—and so will be to the end of her life's chapter. There are always the same wicked, but exquisitely lovely, ladies, to whom the marriage tie is frailer and less to be considered than a hair, and always the same good, pure, and therefore (according to "Ouida") stupid girls who are just sixteen. There are always the bold, bad men with "mighty chests" and "Herculean limbs," who covet their neighbour's wives, or play havoc with the hearts of trusting maidens—and all these things are told with a gorgeousness of colour and picturesqueness of description that is not only brilliant, but very marvellously poetical. "Ouida" holds a pen such as many a man has good secret reason to envy. There are rich suggestions for both poets and painters in many of her books—but there is no convincing portrait of life, except in "Friendship," which was a satirical exposé of the actual lives of some very questionable and unpleasant people. Yet "Ouida's" gift was one which might have been turned to rare account had she studied more arduously in her earlier years; but now, across her little garden of genius, in which all the flowers have run wild, are written the fatal words "Too Late."

Another very "groovy" lady novelist is Rhoda Broughton. The not-particularly-good-looking and "loose-jointed" young man (all Miss Broughton's heroes are "loose-jointed"—I don't know why) puts in his appearance in all her books without fail—and there is always the same sort of distressing hitch in the love-business. The liberties she takes with the English language are frequently vulgar and unpardonable. Familiarity with "slang" is no doubt delightful, but some people would prefer a familiarity with grammar.

A very promising creature was the fair American, Amelie Rives. I say "was" because she is married now, and I'm afraid she will not write so well with a "worser half" looking over her "copy." Her story, "Virginia of Virginia," was a delicious study—quite a little work of genius in its way—though I must own her novel, "The Quick or the Dead," was a mere boggle of wild sentiment and scarcely-repressed sensualism. Some critics were very hard down upon her, because she threatened to be "original" all the time, and critics hate that sort of thing. That is why they invariably "go" for one of our newest inflictions, Marie Corelli, of whom it may be truly said that she has written no two books alike, either in plot or style; and the grave Spectator on one occasion forgot itself so far as to say that her romance entitled "Ardath" had actually beaten Beckford's renowned "Vathek" out of the field. But all the same, with every respect for the Spectator's opinion, I, personally speaking, find her a distinctly exasperating writer, who is neither here, there, nor anywhere—a "will-o'-the-wisp" sort of being, of whom it is devoutly to be wished that she would settle into a "groove," as she would be less of a trial to the (in her case) always savage reviewer.

Nothing is more irritating to a critic than to have to chronicle the reckless flights of this young woman's unbridled and fantastic imagination. She tells us about heaven and hell as if she had been to them both, and had rather enjoyed her experiences. Valiant attempts to "quash" her have been made, but apparently in vain, and most of my brethren in the critical faculty consider her a positive infliction. Why does she not take the advice tendered her by the World, and other sensible journals, and retire altogether from literature? I am sure she would be much happier "picking geranium leaves" à la Becky Sharp, with a husband and two thousand a-year. As it is, her very name is, to the men of the press, what a red rag is to a bull. They are down upon it instantly with a fury that is almost laughable in its violence. But I suppose she is like the rest of her sex—obstinate, and that she will hold on her wild career, regardless of censure. Only, as I say, I wish she would elect a "groove" to run in, for I, among many others, shall be relieved as well as delighted when we are all quite certain beyond a doubt as to what sort of book we are to expect from her. At present she is a mere vexation to any well-ordered mind.

Poor Mrs. Henry Wood! What a wonderfully "groovy" woman she was! always writing, as one of my brother-critics has aptly remarked, "in the style of an educated upper housemaid." And yet her books sell largely—partly because Bentley and Son advertise them perpetually, and partly because they "will not bring a blush to the cheek of the Young Person." This latter reason accounts for the popularity (in the pious provinces) of that astoundingly dull writer, Edna Lyall. Patience almost fails me when I think of that lady's closely-printed, bulky volumes, all about nothing. "Groove"? ye gods! I should think it was a "groove"—a religious, goody-goody "groove," out of which there is never the smallest possibility of an escape. But perhaps one of the circumstances that surprises me most in the fate of all the mass of fiction produced weekly, is the curious placidity with which the public take it up, scan it, lay it aside, and forget it instantly. Scarce one out of all the writers writing, male and female, has a book remembered by Mudie's supporters after a year. If any novel is still thought of and talked of after that period, you may be sure it is not "groovy," but that it runs in a directly contrary current to all "grooves" of preconceived opinion—that it has something vaguely irritating about it as well as pleasing—hence its success. But on the whole I am not sure that I do not prefer "groovy" writers after all. There is a comfortable certainty in their literary manœuvres. They are not going to frighten you by exploding a big fiery bomb of Imagination or Truth (both these things are abhorrent to me) on the reader unawares. It is really quite a weird sensation to take up the latest book by a writer who has the reputation of being able to tell you something different each time, because, of course, you never know what he or she may be at. You may have your very soul racked by painful or pathetic surprises—and why should we have our souls racked? The persistently "original" man may take us to the brink of a hell and force us to look down when we would rather not; he may suddenly exert all his forces to drag our leaden minds after him up to a heaven where we are not quite ready to go. Then, again, he may give us descriptions of human passion such as will make us grow quite hot and anon quite cold with the most curious feelings; what have we done that we should be afflicted with literary ague? No; it is better, it is safer, to have our novelists all arranged in "grooves" or "sets" ready to hand, so that we shall know exactly where to find the chroniclers of rural stories, sporting stories, detective stories, ghost stories, every "male and female after their kind," each in his or her own appointed place. To get a book by an author who is recognised as a manufacturer of "racing novels," and find him breaking out into a strain of sublimated philosophy, would be indeed an alarming circumstance to most readers. Oh, yes, it is better to be "groovy"; sometimes the public get tired and throw you over, but that sort of thing happens more frequently in restless France and Italy than in England. Had I been "groovy" I should have been famous—at least, so I have been told by a lady skilled in the fashionable science of palmistry. But being unable to play the mill-horse, and go round and round in a recognised rut, here I am—the merest un-notorious Nobody. What a pity! I cannot but heave an involuntary sigh over my lost opportunities. If I had only had the necessary ambition, I could have been made a "Celebrity at Home" for one of the leading journals. "Fancy that!" to quote from the immortal Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler." And then—proud thought!—I should have been a Somebody. Not because I had achieved something—oh, no, that isn't required of a "Celebrity at Home." Not at all. In fact, the less you do nowadays the more likely you are to become a "celebrity" of the newspapers. So that as I have done nothing, and moreover, as I have really nothing to do, I ought, by all modern rule and plan, to be "interviewed" as—well, let me modestly suggest, as a "Coming" person, perhaps? Lots of fellows are "Coming," according to the press, who never arrive. I could be advertised as one of those, without doing much harm to anybody? Won't some one back me up? I am fully aware of the extent of my loss in literature in having failed to find a "groove"—but it's never too late to mend, and perhaps I shall discover it still and settle down in it. At present I am not anxious, because, as far as my observations on the great literary raree-show have gone, I find the chief object of the modern Pen is to earn Money, not Fame. Now, of money I have enough, and of fame—well! I am a friend of Gladstone's, and that assures fame to anybody!

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Miss Hannah Lynch has published a "Commentary" on the works of George Meredith.

X.

OF THE SOCIAL ELEPHANT.

X. OF THE SOCIAL ELEPHANT.

Upon my word, the crowd is very dense just here! I find it more than difficult to elbow a passage through. And I know how dangerous it is to jostle literary men, even by accident—they are so touchy, that no matter how politely you apologise for the inadvertency, they never excuse it. And there is a little obstruction yonder in the person of the tame Elephant, who is a sort of grotesque pet of ours; he moves slowly on account of his bulk, and he has a big palanquin on his back in which sits the Fairy who manages him. It's quite a charming spectacle—especially the Fairy part of it—and although there is such a crush in this particular corner, it is pleasant to see how good-natured some of the people are, and how kindly they allow the Elephant to get along in spite of increasing scarcity of room, and how they all make light of his awkward size because he is such a nice, mild, innocent, sagacious creature.

What am I talking about?—who am I talking about? Nothing!—nobody! I am only making an allegory. It is not called "The Sunlight Lay Across my Bed," but "The Elephant Walked Across my Path." So he did on one occasion. I wasn't a bit inconvenienced by his proceedings; he thought I was, but I wasn't.

When they are at home the Elephant and the Fairy live together. The Elephant has a Trunk (or Intellectual Faculty) of the utmost delicacy and sensitiveness at the tip, and with this exquisitely formed member he is fond of picking up Pins. The Fairy watches him with a touch of melancholy interest in her lovely eyes; pins are certainly useful, and he does pick them up "beautifully." No one can be more bewitching than the Fairy; no one can be blander or more aware of his own value than the Elephant. Conscious of weight and ponderous movement, he nevertheless manages to preserve a suggestion of something indefinable that is "utter." He is not without malice—note the slyness of his eye when he is at his graceful trick of Pin-lifting. He will, it is true, wave his trunk to and fro with a majestic gentleness that seems harmless, but a closer inspection of him will arouse in the timorous observer a vague sense of danger. The chances are ten to one that he will accept the sugared biscuit (or compliment) offered to him by the unsuspecting beholder, and then that he will incontinently seize the unsuspecting one suddenly round the body and dash him to bits on the flat ground of some hard journalistic matter suitable for smashing a man. But he never forgets himself so far as to trumpet forth this secret capability of his; the only warning the visitor ever receives as to his possible malicious intent is the solemn twinkle of his sly green eye. Beware that eye! it means mischief.

As for the Fairy, it is not too much to say that she is one of the prettiest things alive. She does not seem to stand at all in awe of her Elephant lord. She has her own little webs to weave—silvery webs of gossamer-discussion on politics, in which, bless her heart for a charming little Radical, she works neither good nor harm. Her eyes would burn a hole through many a stern old Tory's waistcoat and make him dizzily doubtful as to what party he really belonged to for the moment. She has the prettiest hair, all loosely curling about her face, and she has a very low voice, so modulated as to seem to some folks affected in its intonation. But it isn't affected; it is a natural music, and only repulsive old spinsters with cracked vocal cords presume to cast aspersions on its dulcet sweetness. She dresses "æsthetically"—in all sorts of strange tints, and rich stuffs, made in a fashion which the masculine mind must describe as "gathered-up-anyhow"—with large and wondrous sleeves and queer mediæval adornments—it pleases her whim so to do, and it also pleases the Elephant, who is apt to get excited on the subject of Colour. We all know what a red rag is to a bull—so we should not be surprised to find an Elephant who is calmed by some colours and enraged by others. Colour, in fact, is the only rule of life accepted by the Elephant—better to have no morality, according to him, than no sense of Colour. And so the Fairy robes herself in curious and cunningly-devised hues to soothe the Elephant's nerves (Elephants have thick hides but excessively fragile nerves, as every naturalist will tell you); and pranks herself out like a flower of grace set in a queen's garden. She does not talk much, this quaint Fairy, but she looks whole histories. Her gaze is softly wistful, and often abstracted; at certain moments her spirit seems to have gone out of her on invisible wings, miles away from the Elephant and literary Castle, and it is in such moments that she looks her very prettiest. To me she is infinitely more interesting than the Elephant himself, but as it is the Elephant whom everybody goes to see, I must try to do him justice—if I can!

To begin with, I know him very well, and he knows me. I have fed him many a time and oft with the sugared compliments he likes best—and what is really a matter worth noting he has allowed me to feed him. This is very good of him. He is not so amiable to everybody. Few indeed are permitted the high honour of holding out a dainty morsel of flattery to that delicately-sniffing trunk which "smells a rat" too swiftly to be easily cajoled. But it has pleased the Elephant to take food from my hand, though while he ate, I noticed he never stopped winking. So that I know perfectly well who it was that lifted me up a while ago in a journal that shall be nameless, and did his utmost to smash me utterly by the force with which he threw me down again. Elephants have "nasty humours" now and then—it is their nature. But for once this particular animal found his match. He didn't hurt me though he tried; I got up from under his very feet, and—offered him another Compliment. He took it—gracefully; swallowed it "beautifully"—and does not wink quite so much now. Still, his eye is always on me—and mine on him—and we begin to understand each other.

His prettiest trick, and the one for which he is chiefly admired, is, as I said before, the delicate way in which he picks up Pins. Pins that any less sensitive creature would think worthless, he instantly perceives, selects and classes as "distinctly precious." Minute points of discussion having to do with vague subjects which (unless we could live on an Island of Dreams like the Laureate's Lotus-eaters) no one has any time to waste in considering, he (the Elephant) turns over and over and disposes of in his own peculiar fashion. He has a low estimate of man's moral responsibilities, he thinks that if the "masses" could only be brought to appreciate Colour as keenly as he himself appreciates it, the world would be both happy and wise, and would have no further need of law. He considers Nature au naturel a mistake. Nature must be refined by Art. Ergo, a grand waterfall would not appeal to him, unless properly illumined by electricity, or otherwise got up for effect. He himself is got up for effect—if he were not, according to his own showing, he would be hideous. An Elephant of the jungle is unlovely, but an Elephant in civilian attire, decently housed, with a Fairy to look after him and preside over his meals, is a very different animal. Art has refined him. Nature has nothing more to do with him.

Sometimes the Elephant ruminates. Pins cease to interest him, and with coiled-up trunk (i.e., Intellectual Faculty), and heavy limbs at rest, he shuts his blinking emerald eyes to outer things, and thinks. Then, rising with a mighty roar of trumpeting that blares across the old world and the new, he tears up the ground beneath his feet, and throws a Production—i.e., a novel, or a play—in the face of his foes. And his foes momentarily shrink back from him, appalled at the noise he makes; but anon they rise up boldly in their puny strength to confront his ponderosity. Staves, darts, arrows and stones they get together in haste and trembling, and, shielding themselves behind different editor's desks, begin the wild affray. Lo, how the huge Trunk sways and the green eyes glare! Trample the Production to pieces, ye pigmy ruffians of reviewers, ye shall never crush what is "immortal!" Howl, ye spitfires of the Press, ye shall never make the Elephant's shadow diminish by one iota! For the fulminating truth of the elephantine Production, from a literary point of view, is this: That "as a work of art it is perfection, and perfection is what we artists aim at."

Thus the Elephant, with much pounding of feet, swinging of trunk, lashing of tail, and scattering of dust in the eyes of bewildered beholders. And truly he succeeds in attracting an infinite amount of attention, as why should he not? He is a lordly animal; large enough to be seen at a distance, and society pets him as it pets all creatures of whom it is vaguely afraid. Shy, retiring souls have no chance whatever of what is called "social success" nowadays. You must either be an Elephant or a Gnat; you must rend or sting before society will take any notice of you. And though critics curse the Elephant and wish he were well out of their way, Society fondles him; and as long as he is thus fondled, so long will he score certain victories in art and literature. It is impossible to "quash" him, he is too big. Every one is bound to look at him, and when he begins to move, albeit slowly, every one is equally bound to get out of the way.

There was once a time, however (when the Elephant was younger), in which it seemed doubtful whether he would remain an Elephant. A strange spell was upon him, a wizard-glow of the light that blinds reviewers—Genius. He stood on the confines of a sort of magic territory, wagging his delicate Trunk wistfully, and taking inquiring sniffs at the world. He was then like one of those deeply interesting animals we read about in the dear old fairy-books; he was waiting for the proper person to come and cut off his head, or throw water over him, or something, and say—"Quit thy present form and take that of a ——" What? Well, let us say "Poet," for example. Yes, that would have probably been the correct formula—"Quit thy present form and take that of a Poet." And then, hey presto! he would have skipped out of his hide, all dressed in dazzling blue and silver, a very Prince of wit and wisdom. But the magician who could or might have worked this change in him didn't turn up at the right moment, and so no one would believe he was anything but an Elephant at last. And when he found that this was people's fixed opinion, and that nobody could be persuaded to think otherwise, he showed a few very ugly humours. He broke into the newspaper shops and went rampaging round among the pens and the ink-pots. He knocked down a few unwary authors whom he imagined stood in his way, and when they were down, he stamped upon them. This was not nice of him. But he ought to have known, if he had been as wise as elephants are supposed to be, that authors, unless they are very frail indeed, take a deal of killing before being killed. And he might have foreseen the possibility of those trampled people getting up and revenging themselves whenever they had the chance. His "perfect" work was the very thing they had waited for ever so long. And they did not spare the Elephant. Not they! They remembered the weight of his feet on themselves, and not being able to tread on him because he was so large and heavy and obstinate, they stuck things into him instead. The "barbëd arrow," you know, that kind of disagreeable small weapon that goes in deep and rankles. A whole shower of such irritating little darts went into the Elephant—just in the delicate fleshy places between the folds of his hide—and it was an amazing sight to see how badly he took them. Never was such a roaring and trumpeting heard before! In the unreasoning heat of rage he quite forgot how matters really stood, and that he was only getting the quid pro quo he actually deserved. He never gave a thought to the authors he had mangled and left for dead, and who had not been allowed to make any outcry on the subject of their wounds. He had no recollection of that Scriptural anecdote which tells how the "dry bones" came together "bone by bone," and became a "great standing army." His "dry bones" were the poor poets and novelists he had stamped upon; indeed, not only had he stamped upon them, but he had even filled his trunk with muddy water, and squirted it over their seemingly lifeless remains. But the "great army" was there, and not past fighting, and it marched straight at and around the Elephant. On one occasion it encamped a force against him in the St. James's Gazette, and alas, for the good Elephant's vanity, he imagined he had foes there simply because he holds Radical views. Ye gods! Who that is commonly sane, cares whether an elephant be Radical, Whig, or Tory? Politics are the very last subject in the world I should consult an Elephant about. The mere idea of such a thing is enough to make a certain St. James's Gazette reviewer I wot of, split his sides with laughter in the evil secrecy of his literary den.

As I hinted before, the Elephant while on the rampage in the newspaper-shops once chanced on my humble self, sitting back in an unobtrusive corner. One would have thought that to a lordly animal of such a size, I might have seemed too microscopic to be noticed, but not a bit of it. He "went" for me, with a good deal of unnecessary vigour—a total waste of power on his part, I considered; however, that was his look-out, not mine. He didn't know who I was then, and he doesn't quite know now, though I believe if I threw off my domino and showed him my features he would take to his old tricks again in a minute. But I don't want to irritate him, because he is really a good creature; I would much rather pet him than goad him. He can be cruel, but he can also be kind, and it is in the latter mood that everybody likes him and wants to give him sugar-candy. Moreover, as Elephant he is the living Emblem of Wisdom—a sacred being; and, if one is of an Eastern turn of mind, worthy of worship—and I never heard of any one yet who would venture to cast a doubt on his sagacity. He is wonderfully knowing; his opinion on some things is always worth having, and when he picks up Pins his movements are graceful and always worth watching. Moreover, one never gets tired of looking at the lovely Fairy who guards and guides him. We could not spare either of the twain from our midst—they form a picture "full of Colour." When we view that picture the "moral sense" of Colour enters into us—we feel twice born and twice alive. See how graceful is the cortége! how quaint and pretty and Oriental! Through the eye-holes of my domino I gaze admiringly upon the group—it makes a bright reflection on the "tablets of my memory." Move on, gentle Elephant! Move on! As slowly as you like, and at your own pleasure. Only don't try to "smash" me any more—it's useless. I am formed of that hard "virile" composition of literary ware "guaranteed unsmashable"—I am neither glass nor porcelain. Have another biscuit? Another bon-bon of sugared praise? Well, then, you are a poet in disguise—a genius, wrapped up and sealed down under a hopeless weight of circumstances. I know your buried qualities well, and had some brave person cut off your head—i.e. your Self-Esteem (as I previously suggested)—years ago, we might have had a Prince, nay, even a King, among us. Yet on the whole I think you are happy in your condition. The dolce far niente suits you very well, and the bovine repose of an almost Buddhistic meditation entirely agrees with your constitution, while as long as life lasts you may be sure you shall never lack Pins. Pass, good Elephant! I salute you profoundly, and with a still more profound reverence I kiss the hands of the Fairy!

XI.

THE STORY OF A SOUTH AFRICAN DREAM.

XI. THE STORY OF A SOUTH AFRICAN DREAM.

Elephants and Fairies suggest the "Arabian Nights." The "Arabian Nights" suggest, in their turn, the East, and the East suggests—ah! what does the East not suggest? A. P. Sinnett with his eyeglass? a vision of "Koot-Hoomi?" pretty Mrs. Besant, once atheist, now theosophist? or the marvellous fat (now dematerialised) of the marvellous Blavatsky? More, far more than these things! The very idea of the East causes me to stand still where I am, in a corner among all the literary folk, and "dream." The mood grows upon me; I am in the humour for "dreams." I feel metaphysical; don't listen to me; the fit will pass by and by. Nay, it is passing, and I feel pious instead—very pious; and I shall probably get blasphemous directly. From piety to blasphemy is but a step; from the prayer of Moses to his professing to see the Deity's "back parts" was but the hair's-breadth of a line in Holy Writ. And as I find everything in a very bad state, and as I think everybody wants reforming, I am going to tell a little story. It is a beautiful little story, and if you ask the Athenæum about it, it will tell you that it is "like a picture by Watts"; that "it has had no forerunners in literature and probably will have no successors." So you must pay great attention to it, and you must think it over for a long time. It requires thinking over for a long time, because it is a Parable. The best people, and especially those who want to "tickle the ears" of the Pall Mall groundlings, are all going to talk and live and write in Parables for the future. So listen!

"There was once a woman in South Africa.

She saw the sunlight lie across her bed.

When there is a window and no blind to it, the sunlight has a way of pouring in,

And of falling in the direction which is most natural to itself.

* * * * *

The sunlight did not move,

So the woman covered her eyes.

And sleep came upon the woman and she dreamed.

* * * * *

Now in her dream the woman saw a hole.

It was a round hole, and it was red inside and very deep

And the woman looked down at the hole and said—'What hole is this?'

And a loud voice answered her, saying—

'That hole is Hell!'

And the woman looked up, and, lo! there was God laughing at her.

* * * * *

And the woman looked down again at the hole, and saw how red it was and how very deep.

And she knelt down, with both arms leaning on the brink of the hole.

And she said to God: 'I like this place.'

And God answered: 'Ay, dost thou so?'

And God laughed again.

And the woman said again: 'I like this place. It seems warm.'

And God said: 'Ay, it is warm.'

And the woman said: 'I think I will go in thither.'

And God said: 'Ay, go by all means!'

And the woman went.

* * * * *

The hole was very wide and red and deep.

And the woman had plenty of space to slide down.

She slid; and the hole got wider and redder and deeper, but still she slid on.

And presently she caught a creature by the hair.

And she said to the creature: 'Who art thou?'

And the creature answered: 'I am X. Y. Z. of the Athenæum, Bream's Buildings, Chancery Lane.

And the woman said: 'Good, I like thee. Give me thy hand, and we will go together.'

And the creature went with the woman.

* * * * *

The hole grew deeper, and it began to be more hot than warm.

And further on the woman saw another creature saying mock prayers.

And the woman asked: 'To whom dost thou say mock prayers?'

And the creature said: 'To God up there. I want him not to laugh at me.'

Then the woman said: 'Who art thou that God should laugh?'

And the creature writhed, and answered: 'I am the religious Spirit of the Pall Mall, abiding in the street called Northumberland, off Strand.'

And the woman said again: 'And doth God laugh at thee?'

And the creature answered: 'Ay, he laugheth sore.'

And the woman said: 'Nay, he shall not laugh. I will tell him to protect thee. Come with me.'

And the creature ceased praying mock prayers, and followed the woman.

* * * * *

And presently the woman from South Africa grew weary.

She desired to get out of the hole.

And she called aloud to God: 'I wish to leave Hell.'

And God said: 'Leave it then.'

And she left it.

* * * * *

Outside the sun was shining.

There was no hole anywhere to be seen.

And the woman looked up, and lo! there was God laughing at her.

Then said the woman: 'There is no hole.'

And God gaily answered, 'No.'

Then the woman asked: 'Where is Hell?'

And God, very much amused, replied: 'I haven't the least idea!'

And the woman smiled right joyously, and said: 'I have had bad Dreams.'

And God said: 'You have!'

* * * * *

The sunlight lay across the bed of the woman from South Africa.

She woke, and thought of the deep red hole she had seen.

And she reflected on her strange meeting with X. Y. Z. of the Athenæum, and the 'Religious Spirit' of the Pall Mall.

And she also thought what a playful and hilarious personage God was.

Then she remembered she had had late supper the previous evening.

Which accounted for 'Dreams.'

* * * * *

The sunlight still lies now and then across the bed of the woman from South Africa.

It is a way the sunlight has.

And God laughs, as well He may."

Now I hope everybody sees what a "touching simplicity" there is, what a child-like familiarity with the Deity pervades the whole of this "prose poem." And yet there is a "subtlety," a candour, a strange melancholy, a curious cynicism, and a weirdness of conception and strong picturesqueness about its every line. It is unique in itself; it wants no explanation, because it says everything in the fewest words. It has a diction as innocent and unadorned as that of an infant's first spelling-book. And all the best critics I know want authors to let "brevity be the soul of wit," and to tell their stories as concisely as possible. If I were a novel-maker and wished to please the critics, I should write my "thrillers" in telegram form; twelve or twenty-four words to a chapter. Then I am sure I should get very well reviewed. Critics have no time to read any thoroughly finished and careful work—they seldom can do more than scan the first page and the last. I know this, being a Critic myself, and I think it is a thousand pities authors should take any trouble to write a middle part to their stories. An Ollendorf curtness of wording is always desirable, unless, indeed, one happens to be a George Meredith, and can manage to get cleverly involved in a long sentence which takes time to decipher, and when deciphered has literally no meaning at all. Then of course one is a genius at once; but such masterly art is rare. And so on the whole I like the "allegory" style best, because it is both brief and obscure at the same time. It has the surface appearance of simplicity, but its depth—ah! it is surprising to what a depth you can go in an allegory. You can fall down a regular well of thought and go fast asleep at the bottom, and when you wake up you wonder what it was all about, and you have to begin that allegory over again. That is what I call "reading"—hard reading—sensible reading. I like a thing you can never make head or tail of—the brain fattens on such provender. I am going to write out several dozen "Dreams" by and by—some of the queer ones I have had after a bout of champagne, for example—and I shall give them gratis to the Pall Mall with my fondest blessing. If there is "one bright particular star" in the sphere of journalism I worship more than another it is the Pall Mall, and I feel I can never do too much for it. And it likes "dreams" and little innocent religious allegories, because it is so good itself, and, like the boy Washington, has "never told a lie." I have always considered that the Pall Mall and the German Kaiser are the only two earthly institutions "God" can favour, seeing that, according to the lady from South Africa, He has taken to "laughing" at most things. It is a pleasant picture, that of God laughing—one, too, not to be found in all the Bible. There the Deity has been represented as angry, jealous, reproachful, or benignant, but it has been left to South African literary skill to show us how He "laughed." And as the Pall Mall thinks it all right that He should laugh, why then we ought to coincide unanimously in the Pall Mall's opinion. Because just imagine what London would be without the Pall Mall! Can mind conceive a more hideous desert?—a more wildly howling desolation? We should be left friendless and all unguided without our angel of reform; our clean, white-winged, heavenly, truthful Apostle of Northumberland Street, who is always able to tell us what is good and what is bad; who can inform us all, statesmen, clerics, authors, artists, and day-labourers, exactly what we ought and what we ought not to do. In the event of another Deluge (and some of the scientists assure us we shall have it soon) I know of a way in which some few of us might be saved; that is, some few with whom "God" is delighted, such as myself and the German Kaiser. We should simply require to make friends with the Pall Mall staff, (several of the members are ladies, and how charming to have their society!), and build an ark out of planks from the Pall Mall office floors. We should then paste it all over with Pall Mall placards of the latest accounts of the Flood up to date of sailing, for the fishes to read, and then we should get into it; we who were the elected ones (including the Kaiser of course), and off we would go in smiling safety, secure from winds and waves, being the only "just people" left on a corrupted earth. And if in the end we found another Mount Ararat, and it were left to the governing body, i.e., the Pall Mall staff and the German Kaiser, to begin a new world ... O ye gods and little fishes! What a world it would be!

XII.

QUESTIONETH CONCERNING THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND.

XII. QUESTIONETH CONCERNING THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND.