Chapter II (2)

That is why a perambulation of the stalls is as perilous as to pick one's way through hot ploughshares. You can hardly hope always to pass through unscathed. You are as sure some night to find yourself seated beside him, as you will some day be called to serve on the jury. And then--

'O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged!'

However, 'sudden the worst turns best to the brave,' and 'there is much music' in this old fellow if only you have the humanity to listen.

To begin with, he has probably a distinguished face, with a bunch of vigorous curly hair, white as hawthorn. He has a manner, too. Suppose you try and enter into his soul for a moment. It does us good to get outside ourselves for a while, and this old man's soul is a palace of memory. Those lines that, may be, have been familiar to you for sixteen years, have been familiar to him for sixty. That is why he knows them off so well, why he repeats them under his breath--Look at his face!--like a Methodist praying, anticipating the actor in all the fine speeches. Do look at his face! How it shines, as the golden passages come treading along. How his head moves in an ecstasy of remembrance, in which there is a whole world of tears. How he half turns to you with a wistful appeal to feel what he is feeling: an appeal that might kindle a clod. It is the old wine laughing to itself within the old bottle.

And, one thing you will notice, it is the poetry that moves him: the great metaphor, the sonorous cadence, the honeysuckle fancy. He belongs to an age that had an instinct for beauty, and loved style--an age that, in the words of a modern wit, had not grown all nose with intellect, an age that went to the theatre to dream, not to dissect.

For you there may be here and there a flower of remembrance stuck within the leaves of the play, but for him it is stained through with the sweets of sixty springs. His youth lies buried within it like a thousand violets.

Practically he is Death at the play. To you there is but one ghost in _Hamlet_, to him there are fifty, and they all dance like shadows behind 'the new Hamlet,' and even sit about the stalls.

If your love be with you, forbear to press her hand in the love-scenes, or, at least, don't let the old man see you: because he used to punctuate those very passages he is muttering in just the same way--sixty years ago, when she whose angel face he will kiss no more, unless it be in the heavenly fields, sat like a flower at his side. Poor old fellow, can you be selfish to him? Can you say, 'These tedious old fools!' Fool thyself, this night shall thy youth be required of thee.

You might think of this next time you drop across the old playgoer. It was natural in Hamlet to swear at Polonius--who, you will remember, was an old playgoer himself--but, being a gentleman, it was natural in him, too, to recall the first player with, 'Follow that lord; but look you mock him not!'

THE MEASURE OF A MAN

I sometimes grow melancholy with the thought that, though I wear trousers and shave once a day, I am not, properly speaking, a Man. Surely it is from no failure of goodwill, no lack of prayerful striving towards that noble estate: for if there is one spectacle in this moving phantasmagoria of life that I love to carry within my eye, it is the figure of a true man. The mere idea of a true man stirs one's heart like a trumpet. Therefore, this doubt I am confiding is all the more dreary. Naturally, I feel it most keenly in the company of my fellows, each one of whom seems to carry the victorious badge of manhood, as though to cry shame upon me. They make me shrink into myself, make me feel that I am but an impostor in their midst. Indeed, in that sensitiveness of mine you have the starting-point of my unmanliness. Look at that noble fellow there. He is six-foot odd in his stockings, straight, stalwart, and confident. His face is broad and strong, his close-cropped head is firm and proud on his shoulders--firm and proud as a young bull's. It is a head made, indeed, rather to butt than to think with; it is visited with no effeminacy of thought or dream. It has another striking quality: it is hardly distinguishable from any other head in the room--for I am in an assemblage of true men all, a glorious herd of young John Bulls. All have the same strong jaws, the same powerful low foreheads. Noble fellows! Any one of them could send me to eternity with the wind of his fist.

And, most of all, is their manhood brought home to me, with a sickening sense of inferiority, in their voices. What a leonine authority in the roar of their opinions! Their words strike the air firm as the tread of lions. They are not teased with fine distinctions, possibilities of misconception, or the perils of afterthought. Their talk is of the absolute, their opinions wear the primary colours, and dream not of 'art shades.' Never have they been wrong in their lives, never shall they be wrong in the time to come. Never have they been known to conjecture that another may, after all, be wiser than they, handsomer, stronger, or more fortunate. They would kill a man rather than admit a mistake. Noble fellows! And I? Do you wonder that I blush in my corner as I gaze upon them, strive to smooth my hair into the appearance of a manly flatness, strive to set my face hard and feign it knowing, strive to elevate my voice to the dogmatic note, strive to cast out from my mind all those evil spirits of proportion?

Can it be possible that any one of my readers has ever been in a like case? Is there hope for us, my brother? You have, I perceive, a fine, expressive, sensitive countenance. That is, indeed, against you in this race for manhood. It is true that Apollo passed for a man--but that was long ago, and not in Britain. You have a pleasant, sympathetic voice. An excellent thing in _woman_. But you, my friend,--break it, I beseech you. Coarsen it with raw spirits and rawer opinions; and set that face of thine with hog's bristles, plant a shoe-brush on thy upper lip, and send thy head to the turner of billiard balls. Else come not nigh me, for, 'fore Heaven, I love a man!

Sometimes, however, I am inclined to a more comfortable consideration of this great question--for it is one of my weaknesses to be positive on few matters. But to-day I taunted my soul with its unmanliness till it rose in rebellion against me. 'Poor-spirited creature,' I said, 'where is thy valour? When a fool has struck thee I have seen thee pass on without a word, not so much as a momentary knitting of thy fist When ignorance has waxed proud, and put thee to the mock, thou hast sat meek, and uttered never a word. It must needs be thou art pigeon-livered and lack gall! There is not in thee the swagger, the rustle, the braggadocio of a true swashbuckler manhood. Out on thee!'

And my soul took the blows in patience.

'Hast thou any courage hid in any crevice of thee?' I continued my taunt. And suddenly my soul answered with a firm quiet voice: 'Try me!'

Then said I, 'Coward as thou art, fearful of thy precious skin, darest thou strike a blow for the weak against his oppressor, darest thou meet the strong tyrant in the way?'

And thereon I was startled, for my soul suddenly sprang up within me, and, lo! it neighed like a war-horse for the battle.

'Ah!' I continued, 'but couldst thou fight against the enemy of thy land? Surely thy valour would melt at the clash of swords and the voice of the drum?'

And the answer of my soul was like the march of armed men.

Then said I softly, for I was touched by this unwonted valour of my soul, 'Soul! wouldst thou die for thy friend?'

And the voice of my soul came sweet as the sound of bells at evening. It seemed, indeed, as though it could dream of naught sweeter than to die for one's friend.

This colloquy of inner and outer set me further reflecting. Can it be that this manhood is, after all, rather a quality of the spirit than of the body; that it is to be sought rather in the stout heart than in the strong arm; that big words and ready blows may, like a display of bunting, betoken no true loyalty, and be but the gaudy sign to a sorry inn? Dr. Watts, it may be remembered, declared the mind to be the standard of the man. As he was the author of a book on 'The Human Mind,' envious persons may meanly conceive that his statement was but a subtly-disguised advertisement of his literary wares.

'Were I so tall to reach the Pole,
Or grasp the ocean in my span,
I must be measured by my soul:
The mind's the standard of the man.'

The fact of Dr. Watts being also a man of low stature does not affect the truth or untruth of this fine verse, which may serve to comfort many. One may assume that it was Jack, and not the giant, whom we would need to describe as the true man of the two; and one seems to have heard of some 'fine,' 'manly' fellows, darlings of the football field and the American bar, whose actions somehow have not altogether justified those epithets, or, at any rate, certain readings of them. Theirs is a manhood, one fancies, that is given to shine more at race-meetings and in hotel parlours than at home--revealed to the barmaid, and strangely hidden from the wife, who, indeed, has less opportunities for perceiving it.

This kind of manhood is, perhaps, rather a fashion than a personal quality: a way of carrying the stick, of wearing, or not wearing, the hair; it resides in the twirl of the moustache, or the cut of the trouser; you must seek it in the quality of the boot and the shape of the hat rather than in the actions of the wearer.

Take that matter of the hair. When next the street-boy sorrowfully exclaims on your passing that 'it's no wonder the barbers all 'list for soldiers,' or some puny idiot at your club--a lilliputian model of popular 'manhood'--sniggers to his friend behind his coffee as you come in: call to mind pictures of certain brave 'tailed men' of old, at the winking of whose eyelid your tiny club 'man' would have expired on the instant. Threaten him with a Viking. Show him in a vision a band of blue-eyed pirates, with their wild hair flying in the breeze, as they sternly hasten across the Northern Sea. Summon Godiva's lord, 'his beard a yard before him, and his hair a yard behind.' Call up the brave picture of Rupert's love-locked Cavaliers, as their glittering column hurls like a bolt of heaven to the charge, or Nelson's pig-tailed sailors in Trafalgar's Bay. But, before you have gone half-way through your panorama, that club-mannikin will have hastily departed, leaving his coffee half-drunk, and you shall find him airing his manhood in the security of the billiard-room.

Yes, for us who are denied the admiration of the billiard-marker; denied the devotion of the barmaid (with charming paradox so-called); for us who make poor braggarts, and often prefer to surrender rather than to elbow for our rights; for us who deliver our opinions with mean-spirited diffidence, and are men of quiet voices and ways: for us there is hope. It may be that to love one's neighbour is also a part of manhood, to suffer quietly for another as true a piece of bravery as to fell him for a careless word; it may be that purity, constancy, and reverence are as sure criteria of manhood as their opposites. It may be, I say; but be certain that a strong beard, a harsh voice, and a bull-dog physiognomy are surer still.

THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMAN

Have you ever remarked as a curious thing that, whereas every day we hear women sighing because they have not been born men, you never hear a sigh blowing in the other direction? I only know one man who had the courage to say that he would not mind exchanging into the female infantry, and it may have been affectation on his part. At any rate, he blushed deeply at the avowal, and his friends look askance at him ever since. Of course, the obvious answer of the self-satisfied male is that he is the lord of creation, that his is the better part which shall not be taken from him. Yet this does not prevent his telling his wife sometimes, when oppressed with the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches, that 'it is nice to be her. Nothing to worry her all day long. No responsibility.' For in his primitive vision of female existence, his wife languidly presides for ever at an eternal five-o'clock tea. And it is not in the province of this article to turn to him the seamy side of that charming picture. Rather is it our mission to convince him of the substantial truth of his intuition. He is quite right. It _is_ 'nice to be her.' And if men had a little more common-sense in their consequential skulls, instead of striving to resist the woman's invasion of their immemorial responsibilities and worries, they would joyfully abdicate them--and skip home to Nirvana and afternoon tea.

Foolish women! To want of your own free will to put yourselves in painful harness; to take the bit of servitude between your rose-leaf lips; to fight day-long in the reeking arena of bacon merchants; to settle accounts instead of merely incurring them; to be confined in Stygian city-blocks instead of silken bedchambers; to rise with the sparrow and leave by the early morning train. What fatuity! Some day, when woman has had her way and man has ceased to have his will, she will see of the travail of her soul and be bitterly dissatisfied; for, unless man is a greater fool than he looks, she shall demand back her petticoats in vain.

For what is the lot of woman? The first superficial fact about a woman is, of course, her beauty. Secondly, as the leaves about a rose, comes her dress. To be beautiful and to wear pretty things--these are two of the obvious privileges of woman. To be a living rose, with bosom of gold and petals of lace, a rose each passer-by longs to pluck from its husband-stem, but dare not for fear of the husband-thorns. To be privileged to play Narcissus all day long with your mirror, to love yourself so much that you kiss the cold reflection, yet fear not to drown. To reveal yourself to yourself in a thousand lovely poses, and bird-like poises of the head. To kneel to yourself in adoration, to laugh and nod and beckon to yourself with your own smiles and dimples, to yearn in hopeless passion for your own loveliness. To finger silken garments, linings to the casket of your beauty, never seen of men, to draw on stiff embroidered gowns, to deck your hands with glittering jewels, and your wrists with bands of gold--and then to sail forth from your boudoir like the moon from a cloud, regally confident of public worship; to be at once poet and poem, painter and painted: does not this belong to the lot of woman?

But it was of nobler privileges than these that the candidate for womanhood of whom I have spoken was thinking. It is fit that we skim the surface before we dive into the deeps--especially so attractive a surface as woman's. He was, doubtless, thinking less of woman as a home comfort or a beauty, and much more of her as she once used to be among our far-off sires, Sibyl and Priestess. Is it but an insular fancy to suppose that Englishmen, beyond any other race, still retain the most living faith in the sanctity of womanhood? and, if so, can it be doubted that it is an inheritance from those wild child-hearted Vikings, who were first among the peoples of Europe to conceive woman as the chosen vessel of the divine? And how wittily true, by the way, how slily significant, was both the Norse and the Greek conception of the ruling destinies of man, the Norns and the Fates, as women!

To speak with authority, one should, doubtless, first sprout petticoats; and, meanwhile, one must rest content with asking the intelligent women of our acquaintance--whether man inspires them with anything like the feelings of reverential adoration, the sense of a being holy and supernal, with which woman undoubtedly inspires man. He is, of course, their god, but a god of the Greek pattern, with no little of the familiarising alloy of earth in his composition. He is strong, and swift, and splendid--but seems he holy? Is he angel as well as god? Does the dream of him rise silvery in the imagination of woman? Is he a star to lift her up to heaven with pure importunate beam? I seem to hear the nightingale-laughter of women for answer. Man neither is, nor would they have him, any of these things.

But though some men, by a fortunate admixture of woman silver in their masculine clay, may be even these, there is one sacred thing no man can ever be, a privilege by which nature would seem to have put beyond doubt the divinity of woman: a mother. It is true that it is within his reach to be a father; but what is 'paternity' compared with motherhood? The very word wears a droll face, as though accustomed to banter. Let us venture on the bull: that, though it be possible for most men to be fathers, no man can ever be a mother. Maybe a recondite intention of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was the accentuation of the fact that man's share in the sacred mystery of birth is so small and woman's so great, that the birth of a child is truly a mysterious traffic between divine powers of nature and her miraculous womb--mystic visitations of radiant forces hidden eternally from the knowledge of man.

We stand in wonder before the magical germinating properties of a clod of earth. A grass-seed and a thimbleful of soil set all the sciences at nought. But if such is the wonder of the mere spectator, how strange to be the very vessel of the mystery, to know it moving through its mystic stations within our very bodies, to feel the tender shoots of the young life striking out blade after blade, already living and wonderful, though as yet unsuspected of other eyes; to know the underground inarticulate spring, sweeter far than spring of bird and blossom, while as yet all seems barren winter in the upper air; to hear already the pathetic pleadings of the young life, and to send back soothing answer along the hidden channels of tender tremulous affinities; to lie still in the night and see through the darkness the little white soul shining softly in its birth-sleep, slowly filling with life as a moon with silver--it was a woman and not a man that God chose for this blessedness.

VIRAGOES OF THE BRAIN

The strength of the old-fashioned virago was in her muscles. That of the newfangled modern development is in her 'reason'--a very different thing indeed from 'woman's reasons.' As the former knocked you down with her fist, the latter fells you with her brain. In her has definitely commenced that evolutionary process which, according to the enchanting dream of a recent scientist, is to make the 'homo' a creature whose legs are of no account, poor shrivelled vestiges of once noble calves and thighs; and whose entire significance will be a noseless, hairless head, in shape and size like an idiot's, which the scientist, gloating over the ugly duckling of his distorted imagination, describes as a 'beautiful, glittering, hairless dome!' A sad period one fears for Gaiety burlesque. In that day a beautifully shaped leg and a fine head of hair will be rather a disgrace than a distinction. They will be survivals of a barbarous age. Indeed that they are already so regarded, there can be no doubt, by the more 'advanced' representatives of the female sex.

There is one radical difference between the old and the new virago: the old gloried in the fact that she was a woman, because thus her sex triumphed over that male whom she despised, like her modern sister, in proportion as she resembled him. The new virago, however, hates above all things to be reminded of her womanhood, which she is constantly engaged in repressing with Chinese ferocity. Not, as we have hinted, that she thinks any better of man. Though she dresses as like him as possible, she is very angry if you suggest that she at all envies him his birthright. And the humour of the situation, the hopeless dilemma in which she thus places herself--if it be right to apply the feminine gender!--never occurs to one whose sense of humour has long been atrophied, perhaps at Girton, or by a course of sterilising Extension lectures.

Obviously, there is but one course open for the advanced 'woman' in this dilemma--to evolve a third sex, and this she is doing her best to achieve, with, I am bound to admit, remarkably speedy success. The result up to date is the Virago of the Brain, or the Female Frankenstein. The patentees of this fearsome _tertium quid_ hope to present it to their patrons, within a very few years, in a form entirely devoid of certain physiological defects, with which the cussedness of human structure still uselessly burdens the Virago. As it is, of course, it is by no means uncommon for the virago to be born without that sentimental organ, the heart; and it can, therefore, only be a matter of time before she is rid of what the present writer has been criticised for calling 'her miraculous womb.' Doubtless, the patentees will then turn their attention to Sir Thomas Browne's suggested method for the propagation of the race after the reasonable, civilised, and advanced manner of trees.

But I am warned that I commit impropriety even in naming such matters. They are 'sacred,'--which means that we ought to be ashamed to mention them, however reverent our intention. Motherhood, it would appear, is not, as one had regarded it, a sanctifying privilege, but a shameful disability, of which not the Immaculate Conception, but the ignoble service for the 'purification' of women, is the significant symbol. It behoves not only the unmarried, but the married mothers, so to speak, to wear farthingales upon the subject, and pretend, with as grave a face as possible, that babies are really found under cabbages, or sent parcel post, on application, by her Majesty the Queen.

How long are we to retain the pernicious fallacy that sacredness is a quality inhering not in the sacred object itself, but in the superstitious 'decencies' that swaddle it, or that we best reverence such sacred object by a prurient prudish conspiracy of silence concerning it?

Then there is, it would also appear, a particular indignity, from the new virago's point of view, in the assumption that a woman's beauty is one of her great missions, or the supposition that she takes any such pride in it herself as man has from time immemorial supposed. No sensible woman, we have been indignantly assured, ever plays at Narcissus with her mirror. That all women find such pleasure in their reflections no one would think of saying. How could they, poor things? One is quite ready to admit that probably our virago looks in her glass as seldom as possible. But all sensible women that are beautiful as well should take joy in their own charms, if they have any feelings of gratitude towards the supernal powers which might have made them--well, more advanced than beautiful, and given them a head full of cheap philosophy instead of a transfiguring head of hair.

No one wants a woman to be silly and vain about her beauty. But vanity and conceit are qualities that exist in people quite independently of their gifts and graces. The ugly and stupid are perhaps more often conceited than the beautiful or the clever,--vain, it would appear, of their very ugliness and stupidity. Besides, is it any worse for a woman to be vain of her looks than of her brains?--and the advanced woman is without doubt most inordinately vain of those. Of the two, so far as they are at present developed, is there any doubt that the woman with beauty is better off than the woman with brains? In some few hundred years, maybe, the brain of woman will be a joy to herself and the world: when she has got more used to its possession, and familiar with the fruitful control of it. At present, however, it is merely a discomfort, not to say a danger, to herself and every one else--a tiresome engine for the pedantic assimilation of German and the higher mathematics. And it may well happen--horrid prophecy--that when that brain of woman has come to its perfection, the flower of its meditation will be to realise the significance, the sacredness, of the Simple Woman. It is in its apprehension of the mystery of simplicity that the brain of man, at present, is superior to that of woman.

Young brain delights in the complex, old in the simple. Woman's love of the complex has been illustrated abundantly during the last few years, in her enthusiasm for certain great imperfect writers, who have been able to stir up the mud in the fountain of life (doubtless, to medicinal ends) but unable to bring it clear again. An eternal enigma herself, woman is eternally in love with enigmas. Like a child, she loves any one who will show her the 'works' of existence, and she is still in that inquisitive stage when one imagines that the inside of a doll will afford explanation of its fascinating exterior. It is no use telling her that analysis can never explain the mystery of synthesis. Like an American humourist, she still goes on wanting 't'know.'

Even more than man, she exaggerates the value of the articulate, the organised. She has always been in love with 'accomplishments,' and she loves natures that are minted into current coin of ready gifts and graces. She cares more for the names of things than for the things themselves. Of things without names she is impatient. Talkative as she is said to be, and in so many modern languages, she knows not yet how to talk with Silence--unless she be the inspired Simple Woman--for to talk with Silence is to apprehend the mystic meanings of simplicity. For this reason, mystics are more often found among men than women--a fact on which the Pioneer Club is at liberty to congratulate itself. What advanced woman understands that saying of Paracelsus: 'who tastes a crust of bread tastes the heavens and all the stars.' Else would she understand also that the 'humblest' ministrations of life, those nearest to nature, are the profoundest in their significance: that it means as much to bake a loaf as to write a book, and that to watch over the sleep of a child is a liberal education--nay, an initiation granted only to mothers and those meek to whom mysteries are revealed. It has always been to the simple woman that the angel has appeared--to Mary of Bethany, to Joan of Arc. Is it impious to infer that the Angel Gabriel himself dreads a blue-stocking? What chance indeed would he have with our modern viragoes of the brain, the mighty daughters of the pen?

THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Other people's poetry--I don't mean their published verse, but their absurdly romantic view of unromantic objects--is terribly hard to translate. It seldom escapes being turned into prose. It must have happened to you now and again to have had the photograph of your friend's beloved produced for your inspection and opinion. It is a terrible moment. If she does happen to be a really pretty girl--heavens! what a relief. You praise her with almost hysterical gratitude. But if, as is far more likely, her beauty proves to be of that kind which exists only in the eyes of a single beholder, what a plight is yours! How you strive to look as if she were a new Helen, and how hopelessly unconvincing is your weary expression--as unconvincing as one's expression when, having weakly pretended acquaintance with a strange author, we feign ecstatic recognition of some passage or episode quoted by his ruthless admirer. There is this hope in the case of the photograph: that its amorous possessor will probably be incapable of imagining any one insensitive to such a Golconda of charms, and you have always in your power the revenge of showing him your own sacred graven image.

Is it not curious that the very follies we delight in for ourselves should seem so stupid, so absolutely vulgar, when practised by others? The last illusion to forsake a man is the absolute belief in his own refinement.

A test experience in other people's poetry is to sit in the pit of a theatre and watch 'Arry and 'Arriet making love and eating oranges simultaneously. 'Arry has a low forehead, close, black, oily hair, his eyes and nose are small, and his face is freckled. His clothes are painfully his best, he wears an irrelevant flower, and his tie has escaped from the stud and got high into his neck, eclipsing his collar. 'Arriet has thick unexpressive features, relying rather on the expressiveness of her flaunting hat, she wears a straight fringe low down on her forehead, and endeavours to disguise her heavy _ennui_ by an immovable simper. This pair loll one upon each other. Whether lights be high or low they hold each other's hands, hands hard and coarse with labour, with nails bitten down close to the quick. But, for all that, they, in their strange uncouth fashion, would seem to be loving each other. 'Not we alone have passions hymeneal,' sings an aristocratic poet. They smile at each other, an obvious animal smile, and you perhaps shudder. Or you study them for a realistic novel, or you call up that touch of nature our great poet talks of. But somehow you cannot forget how their lips will stick and smell of oranges when they kiss each other on the way home. What is the truth about this pair? Is it in the unlovely details on which, maybe, we have too much insisted--or behind these are we to imagine their souls radiant in celestial nuptials?

Mr. Chevalier may be said to answer the question in his pictures of coster love-making. But are those pictures to be taken as documents, or are they not the product of Mr. Chevalier's idealistic temperament? Does the coster actually worship his 'dona' with so fine a chivalry? Is he so sentimentally devoted to his 'old Dutch'? If you answer the question in the negative, you are in this predicament: all the love and 'the fine feelings' remain with the infinitesimal residuum of the cultured and professionally 'refined.' Does that residuum actually incarnate all the love, devotion, honour, and other noble qualities in man? One need hardly trouble to answer the absurd question. Evidently behind the oranges, and the uncouth animal manners, we should find souls much like our own refined essences, had we the seeing sympathetic eye. All depends on the eye of the beholder.

Among the majority of literary and artistic people of late that eye of the beholder has been a very cynical supercilious eye. Never was such a bitter cruel war waged against the poor _bourgeois_. The lack of humanity in recent art and literature is infinitely depressing. Doubtless, it is the outcome of a so-called 'realism,' which dares to pretend that the truth about life is to be found on its grimy pock-marked surface. Over against the many robust developments of democracy, and doubtless inspired by them, is a marked spread of the aristocratic spirit--selfish, heartless, subtle, of mere physical 'refinement'; a spirit, too, all the more inhuman because it is for the most part not tempered by any intercourse with homely dependants, as in the feudal aristocracy. It would seem to be the product of 'the higher education,' a university priggishness, poor as proud. It is the deadliest spirit abroad; but, of course, though it may poison life and especially art for a while, the great laughing democracy will in good time dispose of it as Hercules might crush a wasp.

This is the spirit that draws up its skirts and sneers to itself at poor 'old bodies' in omnibuses, because, forsooth, they are stout, and out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh. One thinks of Falstaff's plaintive 'If to be fat is to be hated!' At displays of natural feelings of any sort this comfortless evil spirit ever curls the lip. Inhabiting modern young ladies, it is especially superior to the maternal instinct, and cringes from a baby in a railway carriage as from an adder. At the dropping of an 'h' it shrinks as though the weighty letter had fallen upon its great toe, and it will forgive anything rather than a provincial accent. It lives entirely in the surfaces of things, and, as the surface of life is frequently rough and prickly, it is frequently uncomfortable. At such times it peevishly darts out its little sting, like a young snake angry with a farmer's boot. It is amusing to watch it venting its spleen in papers the _bourgeois_ never read, in pictures they don't trouble to understand. John Bull's indifference to the 'new' criticism is one of the most pleasing features of the time. Probably he has not yet heard a syllable of it, and, if he should hear, he would probably waive it aside with, 'I have something more to think of than these megrims.' And so he has. While these superior folk are wrangling about Degas and Mallarme, about 'style' and 'distinction,' he is doing the work of the world. There is nothing in life so much exaggerated as the importance of art. If it were all wiped off the surface of the earth to-morrow, the world would scarcely miss it. For what is art but a faint reflection of the beauty already sown broadcast over the face of the world? And that would remain. We should lose Leonardo and Titian, Velasquez and Rembrandt, and a great host of modern precious persons, but the stars and the great trees, the noble sculptured hills, the golden-dotted meadows, the airy sailing clouds, and all the regal pageantry of the seasons, would still be ours; and an almond-tree in flower would replace the National Gallery.

Yes, surely the true way of contemplating these undistinguished masses of humanity, this 'h'-dropping, garlic-eating, child-begetting _bourgeois_, is Shakespeare's, Dickens', Whitman's way--through the eye of a gentle sympathetic beholder--one who understands Nature's trick of hiding her most precious things beneath rough husks and in rank and bearded envelopes--and not through the eye-glass of the new critic.

For these undistinguished people are, after all, alive as their critics are not. They are, indeed, the only people who may properly be said to be alive, dreaming and building while the superior person stands by cogitating sarcasms on their swink'd and dusty appearances. More of the true spirit of romantic existence goes to the opening of a little grocer's shop in a back street in Whitechapel than to all the fine marriages at St. George's, Hanover Square, in a year. But, of course, all depends on the eye of the beholder.

TRANSFERABLE LIVES

I sometimes have a fancy to speculate how, supposing the matter still undecided, I would like to spend my life. Often I feel how good it would be to give it in service to one of my six dear friends: just to offer it to them as so much capital, for whatever it may be worth. In pondering the fancy, I need hardly say that I do not assess myself at any extravagant value. I but venture to think that the devotion of one human creature, however humble, throughout a lifetime, is not a despicable offering. To use me as they would, to fetch and carry with me, to draw on me for whatever force resides in me, as they would on a bank account, to the last penny, to use my brains for their plans, my heart for their love, my blood for added length of days: and thus be so much the more true in their love, the more prosperous in their business, the more buoyant in their health--by the addition of _me_.

But then embarrassment comes upon me. Which of my friends do I love the most? To whose account of the six would I fain be credited? Then again I think of the ten thousand virgins who go mateless about the world, sweet women, with hearts like hidden treasure, awaiting the 'Prince's kiss' that never comes; virgin mothers, whose bosoms shall never know the light warm touch of baby-hands:

'Pale primroses
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength.'

How often one sees such a one in train or omnibus, her eyes, may be, spilling the precious spikenard of their maternal love on some happier woman's child. I noticed one of them withering on the stalk on my way to town this morning. She was, I surmised, nearly twenty-eight, she carried a roll of music, and I had a strong impression that she was the sole support of an invalid mother. I could hardly resist suggesting to one of my men companions what a good wife she was longing to make, what a Sleeping Beauty she was, waiting for the marital kiss that would set all the sweet bells of her nature a-chime. I had the greatest difficulty in preventing myself from leaning over to her, and putting it to her in this way--

'Excuse me, madam, but I love you. Will you be my wife? I am just turning thirty. I have so much a year, a comfortable little home, and probably another thirty years of life to spend. Will you not go shares with me?'

And my imagination went on making pictures: how her eyes would suddenly brighten up like the northern aurora, how a strange bloom would settle on her somewhat weary face, and a dimple steal into her chin; how, when she reached home and sat down to read Jane Austen to her mother, her mother would suddenly imagine roses in the room, and she would blushingly answer, 'Nay, mother--it is my cheeks!'; and presently the mother would ask, 'Where is that smell of violets coming from?' and again she would answer, 'Nay, mother--it is my thoughts!'; and yet again the mother would say, 'Hush! listen to that wonderful bird singing yonder!' and she would answer, 'Nay, mother dear--it is only my heart!'

But, alas! she alighted at Charing Cross, and not one of us in the compartment had asked her to be his wife.

The weary clerk, the sweated shopman, the jaded engineer--how good it would be to say to any of them, 'Here, let us change places awhile. Here is my latch-key, my cheque-book, my joy and my leisure. Use them as long as you will. Quick, let us change clothes, and let me take my share of the world's dreariness and pain'!

Or to stop the old man of sixty, as he hobbles down the hill, with never a thought of youth or spring in his heart, not a hope in his pocket, and his faith long since run dry--to stop him and say: 'See, here are thirty years; I have no use for them. Will you not take them? If you are quick, you may yet catch up Phyllis by the stile. She has a wonderful rose in her hand. She will sell it you for these thirty years; and she knows a field where a lark is singing as though it were in heaven!'

To take the old lady from the bath-chair, and let her run with her daughter to gather buttercups, or make eyes at the church gallants. Oh, this were better far than living to one's-self, if we were only selfish enough to see it!

But, best of all were it to go to the churchyard, where the dead have long since given up all hopes of resurrection, and find some new grave, whose inhabitant was not yet so fast asleep but that he might be awakened by a kind word. To go to Alice's grave and call, 'Alice! Alice!' and then whisper: 'The spring is here! Didn't you hear the birds calling you? I have come to tell you it is time to get ready. In two hours the church-bells will be ringing, and Edward will be waiting for you at the altar. The organist is already trying over the 'Wedding March,' and the bridesmaids have had their dresses on and off twice. They can talk of nothing but orange-blossom and rice. Alice, dear, awaken. Ah, did you have strange dreams, poor girl--dream that you were dead! Indeed, it was a dream--an evil dream.'

And, then, as Alice stepped bewildered homewards, to steal down into her place, and listen, and listen, till the sound of carriages rolled towards the gate, listen till the low hush of the marriage service broke into the wild happy laughter of the organ, and the babbling sound of sweet girls stole through the church porch; then to lie back and to think that Alice and Edward had been married after all--that your little useless life had been so much use, at least: just to dream of that awhile, and then softly fall asleep.

Ah, who would not give all his remaining days to ransom his beloved dead?--to give them the joys they missed, the hopes they clutched at, the dreams they dreamed? O river that runs so sweetly by their feet, when you shall have stopped running will they rise? O sun that shines above their heads, when you have ceased from shining will they come to us again? When the lark shall have done with singing, and the hawthorn bud no more, shall we then, indeed, hear the voices of our beloved, sweeter than song of river or bird?

THE APPARITION OF YOUTH

Sententious people are fond of telling us that we change entirely every seven years, that in that time every single atomy of body (and soul?) finds a substitute. Personally, I am of opinion that we change oftener, that rather we are triennial in our constitution. In fact, it is a change we owe to our spiritual cleanliness. But there is a truth pertaining to the change of which the sententious people are not, I think, aware. When they speak of our sloughing our dead selves, they imagine the husk left behind as a dead length of hollow scale or skin. Would it were so. These sententious people, with all their information, have probably never gone through the process of which they speak. They have never changed from the beginning, but have been consistently their dull selves all through. To those, however, who can look back on many a metamorphosis, the quick-change artists of life, a fearful thing is known. The length of discarded snake lies glistering in the greenwood, motionless, and slowly perishes with the fallen leaves in autumn. But for the dead self is no autumn. By some mysterious law of spiritual propagation, it breaks away from us, a living thing, as the offspring of primitive organisms are, it is said, broken off the tail of their sole and undivided parent. It goes on living as we go on living; often, indeed, if we be poets or artists, it survives us many years; it may be a friend, but it is oftener a foe; and it is always a sad companion.

I sat one evening in my sumptuous library near Rutland Gate. I was deep in my favourite author, my bank-book, when presently an entry--as a matter of fact, a quarterly allowance to a friend (well, a woman friend) of my youth--set me thinking. Just then my man entered. A youth wished to see me. He would not give his name, but sent word that I knew him very well for all that. Being in a good humour, I consented to see him. He was a young man of about twenty, and his shabby clothes could not conceal that he was comely. He entered the room with light step and chin in air, and to my surprise he strode over to where I sat and seated himself without a word. Then he looked at me with his blue eyes, and I recognised him with a start 'What's the new book?' he asked eagerly, pointing to my open bank-book.

Bending over he looked at it: 'Pshaw! Figures. You used not to care much about them. When we were together it used to be Swinburne's _Poems and Ballads_, or Shakespeare's _Sonnets_!'

As he spoke he tugged a faded copy of the _Sonnets_ from his pocket. It slipped from his hand. As it fell it opened, and faded violets rained from its leaves. The youth gathered them up carefully, as though they had been valuable, and replaced them.

'How do you sell your violets?' I asked, ironically. 'I'll give you a pound apiece for them!'

'A pound! Twenty pounds apiece wouldn't buy them,' he laughed, and I remembered that they were the violets Alice Sunshine and I had gathered one spring day when I was twenty. We had found them in a corner of the dingle, where I had been reading the _Sonnets_ to her, till in our book that day we read no more. As we parted she pressed them between the leaves and kissed them. I remember, too, that I had been particular to write the day and hour against them, and I remember further how it puzzled me a couple of years after what the date could possibly mean.

Having secured his book, my visitor once more looked me straight in the face, and as he did so he seemed to grow perplexed and disappointed. As I gazed at him my contentment, too, seemed to be slowly melting away. Five minutes before I had felt the most comfortable _bourgeois_ in the world. There seemed nothing I was in need of, but there was something about this youth that was dangerously disillusionising. Here was I already envying him his paltry violets. I was even weak enough to offer him five pounds apiece for them, but he still smilingly shook his head.

'Well!' he said presently, 'what have you been doing with yourself all these years?'

I told him of my marriage and my partnership in a big city house.

'Phew!' he said. 'Monstrous dull, isn't it? As for me, I never intend to marry. And if you don't marry, what do you want with money? You used to despise it enough once. And do you remember our favourite line: "_Our loves into corpses or wives_?"'

'Hush!' I said, for wives have ears.

'Is it Alice Sunshine?' he asked.

'No,' I said, 'not Alice Sunshine.'

'Maud Willow?'

'No, not Maud Willow.'

'Jenny Hopkins?'

'No, not Jenny Hopkins.'

'Lucy Rainbow?'

'No, not Lucy Rainbow.'

'Now who else was there? I cannot remember them all. Ah, I remember now. It wasn't Lilian, after all?'

'No, poor Lilian died ten years ago. I am afraid you don't know my wife. I don't think you ever met.'

'It isn't Edith Appleblossom, surely? Is it?'

'No, I ...' and then I stopped just in time! 'No, you don't know my wife, I'm sure, and if you don't mind my saying so, I think I had better not introduce you. Forgive me, but she wouldn't quite understand you, I fear....'

'Wouldn't quite approve, eh?' said he, with a merry laugh. 'Poor old chap!'

'Well, I'm better off than that,' he continued. 'Why, Doll and I love for a week, and then forget each other's names in a twelvemonth, when Poll comes along, and so on. And neither of us is any the worse, believe me. We're one as fickle as the other, so where's the harm?'

'Ah, my dear fellow, you did make a mistake,' he ran on. 'I suppose you forget Robert Louis' advice--_"Times are changed with him who marries,"_ etc.'

'He's married himself,' I replied.

'And I suppose you never drop in for a pipe at "The Three Tuns" now of an evening?'

'No! I haven't been near the place these many years.'

'Poor old fellow! The Bass is superb at present.

I recollected. 'Won't you have some wine with me?' I said. 'I have some fine old Chianti. And take a cigar?'

'No, thanks, old man. I'm too sad. Come with me to "The Three Tuns," and let's have an honest pint and an honest pipe together. I don't care about cigars. Come to-night. Let's make a night of it. We'll begin at "The Three Tuns," then call at "The Blue Posts," look in at "The Dog and Fire-irons," and finish up at "The Shakespeare's Head." What was it we used to troll?--

'From tavern to tavern
Youth passes along,
With an armful of girl
And a heart-full of song.'

'Hush!' I cried in terror; 'it is impossible. I cannot. Come to my club instead.' But he shook his head.

I persuaded him to have some Chianti at last, but he drank it without spirit, and thus we sat far into the night talking of old days.

Before he went I made him a definite offer--he must have bewitched me, I am sure--I offered him no less than L5000 and a share in the business for the sprig of almond-blossom the ridiculous young pagan carried in his hat.

And will you believe me? He declined the offer.

THE PATHETIC FLOURISH

The dash under the signature, the unnecessary rat-tat of the visitor, the extravagant angle of the hat in bowing, the extreme unction in the voice, the business man's importance, the strut of the cock, the swagger of the bad actor, the long hair of the poet, the Salvation bonnet, the blue shirt of the Socialist: against all these, and a hundred examples of the swagger of unreflecting life, did a little brass knocker in Gray's Inn warn me the other evening. I had knocked as no one should who is not a postman, with somewhat of a flourish. I had plainly said, in its metallic reverberations, that I was somebody. As I left my friends, I felt the knocker looking at me, and when I came out into the great square, framing the heavens like an astronomical chart, the big stars repeated the lesson with thousand-fold iteration. How they seemed to nudge each other and twinkle among themselves at the poor ass down there, who actually took himself and his doings so seriously as to flourish, even on a little brass knocker.

Yes, I had once again forgotten Jupiter. How many hundred times was he bigger than the earth? Never mind, there he was, bright as crystal, for me to measure my importance against! The street-lamps did their best, I observed, to brave it out, and the electric lights in Holborn seemed certainly to have the best of it--as cheap jewellery is gaudiest in its glitter. One could much more easily believe that all these hansoms with their jewelled eyes, these pretty, saucily frocked women with theirs, this busy glittering milky way of human life was the enduring, and those dimmed uncertain points up yonder but the reflections of human gas-lights.

A city clerk, with shining evening hat, went by, his sweetheart on his arm. They were wending gaily to the theatre, without a thought of all the happy people who had done the same long ago--hasting down the self-same street, to the self-same theatre, with the very same sweet talk--all long since mouldering in their graves. I felt I ought to rush up and shake them, take them into a bystreet, turn their eyes upon Jupiter, and tell them they must die; but I thought it might spoil the play for them.