Chapter III: Part 3

The stream glides sweetly with a pleasant trotting tinkle of bells by the green parkside of Piccadilly, and sweet is it to hear the sirens singing, and to see them combing their gilded locks, on the yellow sands of Piccadilly Circus--so called, no doubt, from the number of horses and the skill of their drivers. Here are the whirling pools of pleasure, merry wheels of laughing waters, where your hansom glides along with a golden ease--it is only when you enter the First Cataract of the Strand that you become aware of the far-distant terrible roar of the Falls! They are yet nearly two miles away, but already, like Niagara, thou hearest the sound thereof--the fateful sound of that human Niagara, where all the great rivers of London converge: the dark, strong floods surging out from the gloomy fastnesses of the East End, the quick-running streams from the palaces of the West, the East with its wagons, the West with its hansoms, the four winds with their omnibuses, the horses and carriages under the earth jetting up their companies of grimy passengers, the very air busy with a million errands.

You are in the rapids--metaphorically speaking--as you crawl down Cheapside; and here where the Bank of England and the Mansion House rise sheer and awful from, shall we say, this boiling caldron, this 'hell' of angry meeting waters--Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, Queen Victoria Street and Cheapside, each 'running,' again metaphorically, 'like a mill-race'--here in this wild maelstrom of human life and human conveyances, here is the true 'Niagara in London,' here are the most wonderful falls in the world--the London Falls.

'Yes!' I said softly to myself, and I could see the sly sad smile on the face of the dead poet, at the thought of whose serene wisdom a silence like snow seemed momentarily to cover up the turmoil--'Yes!' I said softly, 'there is still the same old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street!'

By this time I had disbursed one of my two annual cab-fares, and was standing a little forlorn at that very corner. It was a March afternoon, bitter and gloomy; lamps were already popping alight in a desolate way, and the east wind whistled mournfully through the ribs of the passers-by. A very unflowerlike man was dejectedly calling out 'daffadowndillies' close by. The sound of the pretty old word, thus quaintly spoken, brightened the air better than the electric lights which suddenly shot rows of wintry moonlight along the streets. I bought a bunch of the poor pinched flowers, and asked the man how he came to call them 'daffadowndillies.'

'D'vunshur,' he said, in anything but a Devonshire accent, and then the east wind took him and he was gone--doubtless to a neighbouring tavern; and no wonder, poor soul! Flowers certainly fall into strange hands here in London.

Well, it was nearing four, and if I wanted a grateful country's twelve-pound-ten, I must make haste; so presently I found myself in a great hall, of which I have no clearer impression than that there were soft little lights all about me, and a soft chime of falling gold, like the rippling of Pactolus. I have a sort of idea, too, of a great number of young men with most beautiful moustaches, playing with golden shovels; and as I thus stood among the soft lights and listened to the most beautiful sound in the world, I thought that thus must Danæ have felt as she stood amid the falling shower. But I took care to see that my twelve sovereigns and a half were right number and weight for all that.

Once more in the street, I lingered a while to take a last look at the Falls. What a masterful alien life it all seemed to me! No single personality could hope to stand alone amid all that stress of ponderous, bullying forces. Only public companies, and such great impersonalities, could hope to hold their own, to swim in such a whirlpool--and even they, I had heard it whispered, far away in my quiet starlit garret, sometimes went down. 'How,' I cried, 'would--

'... my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights ...
Rush of suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites,'

again quoting poetry. I always quote poetry in the City, as a protest--moreover, it clears the air.

The more people buffeted against me the more I felt the crushing sense of almost cosmic forces. Everybody was so plainly an atom in a public company, a drop of water in a tyrannous stream of human energy--companies that cared nothing for their individual atoms, streams that cared nothing for their component drops; such atoms and drops, for the most part, to be had for thirty shillings a week. These people about me seemed no more like individual men and women than individual puffs in a mighty rushing wind, or the notes in a great scheme of music, are men and women--to the banker so many pens with ears whereon to perch them, to the capitalist so many 'hands,' and to the City man generally so many 'helpless pieces of the game he plays' up there in spidery nooks and corners of the City.

As I listened to the throbbing of the great human engines in the buildings about me, a rising and a falling there seemed as of those great steel-limbed monsters, weird contortionists of metal, that jet up and down, and writhe and wrestle this way and that, behind the long glass windows of great water-towers, or toil like Vulcan in the bowels of mighty ships. An expression of frenzy seems to come up even from the dumb tossing steel; sometimes it seems to be shaking great knuckled fists at one and brandishing threatening arms, as it strains and sweats beneath the lash of the compulsive steam. As one watches it, there seems something of human agony about its panic-stricken labours, and something like a sense of pity surprises one--a sense of pity that anything in the world should have to work like that, even steel, even, as we say, senseless steel. What, then, of these great human engine-houses! Will the engines always consent to rise and fall, night and day, like that? or will there some day be a mighty convulsion, and this blind Samson of labour pull down the whole engine-house upon his oppressors? Who knows? These are questions for great politicians and thinkers to decide, not for a poet, who is too much terrified by such forces to be able calmly to estimate and prophesy concerning them.

Yes! if you want to realise Tennyson's picture of 'one poor poet's scroll' ruling the world, take your poet's scroll down to Fenchurch Street and try it there. Ah, what a powerless little 'private interest' seems poetry there, poetry 'whose action is no stronger than a flower.' In days of peace it ventures even into the morning papers; but, let only a rumour of war be heard, and it vanishes like a dream on doomsday morning. A County Council election passeth over it and it is gone.

Yet it was near this very spot that Keats dug up the buried beauty of Greece, lying hidden beneath Finsbury Pavement! and in the deserted City churches great dramatists lie about us. Maybe I have wronged the City--and at this thought I remembered a little bookshop but a few yards away, blossoming like a rose right in the heart of the wilderness.

Here, after all, in spite of all my whirlpools and engine-houses, was for me the greatest danger in the City. Need I say, therefore, that I promptly sought it, hovered about it a moment--and entered? How much of that grateful governmental twelve-pound-ten came out alive, I dare not tell my dearest friend.

At all events I came out somehow reassured, more rich in faith. There was a might of poesy after all. There were words in the little yellow-leaved garland, nestling like a bird in my hand, that would outlast the bank yonder, and outlive us all. I held it up. How tiny it seemed, how frail amid all this stone and iron! A mere flower--a flower from the seventeenth century--long-lived for a flower! Yes, an _immortelle_.

BROWN ROSES

'Well, I never thought to see this day, sir,' said Gibbs, with something like tears in his voice, as he reluctantly plied his scissors upon Hyacinth Rondel's distinguished curls.

'Nor I, Gibbs--nor I!' said Rondel sadly, relapsing into silence again, with his head meekly bent over the white sheet spread to catch his shorn beauty.

'To think of the times, sir, that I have dressed your head,' continued Gibbs, whose grief bore so marked an emphasis, 'and to think that after to-day ...'

'But you forget, my dear Gibbs, that I shall now be a more constant customer than ever!'

'Ah, sir, but that will be different. It will be mere machine-cutting, lawn-mowing, steam-reaping, if you understand me; there'll be no pleasure in it, no artistic pleasure, I mean.'

'Yes, Gibbs, and you are an artist--I have often told you that.'

'Ah, sir, but I am coming to the conclusion that it is better not to be an artist, better to be born just like every one else. In these days one suffers too much. Why, sir, I haven't in the whole of my business six heads like yours, and I go on cutting all the rest week in and week out, just for the pleasure of dressing those six--and now there'll only be five.'

* * * * *

'It looks like a winding-sheet,' mused Rondel presently, after a long silence, broken only by the soft crunch and click of the fatal scissors, as they feasted on the beautiful brown silk.

'It do indeed, sir,' said Gibbs, with a shudder, as another little globe of golden brown rolled down into Rondel's lap.

'Poor brown roses!' sighed the poet, after another silence; 'they are just like brown roses, aren't they, Gibbs?'

'They are indeed, sir!'

'Brown roses scattered over the winding-sheet of one's youth--eh, Gibbs?'

'They are indeed, sir.'

'That's rather a pretty image, don't you think, Gibbs?'

'Indeed I do, sir!'

'Well, well, they have bloomed their last; and when Juliet's white hands come seeking with their silver fingers, white maidens lost in the brown enchanted forest, there will not be a rose left for her to gather.'

'Believe me, sir, I would more gladly have cut off your head than your hair--that is, figuratively speaking,' sobbed the artist-in-hair-oils.

'Yes, my head would hardly be missed--you are quite right, Gibbs; but my hair! What will they do without it at first nights and private views? It was worth five shillings a week to many a poor paragraph-writer. Well, I must try and make up for it by my beard!'

'Your beard, sir?' exclaimed Gibbs in horror.

'Yes, Gibbs; for some years I have been a Nazarene--that is, a Nazarite, with the top half of my head; now I am going to change about and be a Nazarite with the lower. The razor has kissed my cheeks and my chin and the fluted column of my throat for the last time.'

'You cannot mean it, sir!' said Gibbs, suspending his murderous task a moment.

'It's quite true, Gibbs.'

'Does she wish that too, sir?'

'Yes, that too.'

'Well, sir, I have heard of men making sacrifices for their wives, but of all the cruel....'

'Please don't, Gibbs. It does no good. And Mrs. Rondel's motive is a good one.'

'Of course, sir, I cannot presume--and yet, if it wouldn't be presuming, I should like to know why you are making this great, I may say this noble, sacrifice?'

'Well, Gibbs, we're old friends, and I'll tell you some day, but I hardly feel up to it to-day.'

'Of course not, sir, of course not--it's only natural,' said Gibbs tenderly, while the scissors once more took up the conversation.

THE DONKEY THAT LOVED A STAR

'That is how the donkey tells his love!' I said one day, with intent to be funny, as the prolonged love-whoop of a distant donkey was heard in the land.

'Don't be too ready to laugh at donkeys,' said my friend. 'For,' he continued, 'even donkeys have their dreams. Perhaps, indeed, the most beautiful dreams are dreamed by donkeys.'

'Indeed,' I said, 'and now that I think of it, I remember to have said that most dreamers are donkeys, though I never expected so scientific a corroboration of a fleeting jest.'

Now, my friend is an eminent scientist and poet in one, a serious combination; and he took my remarks with seriousness at once scientific and poetic.

'Yes,' he went on, 'that is where you clever people make a mistake. You think that because a donkey has only two vowel-sounds wherewith to express his emotions, he has no emotions to express. But let me tell you, sir ...'

But here we both burst out laughing--

'You Golden Ass!' I said,'take a munch of these roses; perhaps they will restore you.'

'No,' he resumed, 'I am quite serious. I have for many years past made a study of donkeys--high-stepping critics call it the study of Human Nature--however, it's the same thing--and I must say that the more I study them the more I love them. There is nothing so well worth studying as the misunderstood, for the very reason that everybody thinks he understands it. Now, to take another instance, most people think they have said the last word on a goose when they have called it "a goose"!--but let me tell you, sir ...'

But here again we burst out laughing--

'Dear goose of the golden eggs,' I said, 'pray leave to discourse on geese to-night--though lovely and pleasant would the discourse be;--to-night I am all agog for donkeys.'

'So be it,' said my friend,' and if that be so, I cannot do better than tell you the story of the donkey that loved a star--keeping for another day the no less fascinating story of the goose that loved an angel.'

By this time I was, appropriately, all ears.

'Well,' he once more began, 'there was once a donkey, quite an intimate friend of mine--and I have no friend of whom I am prouder--who was unpractically fond of looking up at the stars. He could go a whole day without thistles, if night would only bring him stars. Of course he suffered no little from his fellow-donkeys for this curious passion of his. They said well that it did not become him, for indeed it was no little laughable to see him gazing so sentimentally at the remote and pitiless heavens. Donkeys who belonged to Shakespeare Societies recalled the fate of Bottom, the donkey who had loved a fairy; but our donkey paid little heed. There is perhaps only one advantage in being a donkey--namely, a hide impervious to criticism. In our donkey's case it was rather a dream that made him forget his hide--a dream that drew up all the sensitiveness from every part, from hoof, and hide, and ears, so that all the feeling in his whole body was centred in his eyes and brain, and those, as we have said, were centred on a star. He took it for granted that his fellows should sneer and kick-out at him--it was ever so with genius among the donkeys, and he had very soon grown used to these attentions of his brethren, which were powerless to withdraw his gaze from the star he loved. For though he loved all the stars, as every individual man loves all women, there was one star he loved more than any other; and standing one midnight among his thistles, he prayed a prayer, a prayer that some day it might be granted him to carry that star upon his back--which, he recalled, had been sanctified by the holy sign--were it but for ever so short a journey. Just to carry it a little way, and then to die. This to him was a dream beyond the dreams of donkeys.

'Now, one night,' continued my friend, taking breath for himself and me, 'our poor donkey looked up to the sky, and lo! the star was nowhere to be seen. He had heard it said that stars sometimes fall. Evidently his star had fallen. Fallen! but what if it had fallen upon the earth? Being a donkey, the wildest dreams seemed possible to him. And, strange as it may seem, there came a day when a poet came to his master and bought our donkey to carry his little child. Now, the very first day he had her upon his back, the donkey knew that his prayer had been answered, and that the little swaddled babe he carried was the star he had prayed for. And, indeed, so it was; for so long as donkeys ask no more than to fetch and carry for their beloved, they may be sure of beauty upon their backs. Now, so long as this little girl that was a star remained a little girl, our donkey was happy. For many pretty years she would kiss his ugly muzzle and feed his mouth with sugar--and thus our donkey's thoughts sweetened day by day, till from a natural pessimist he blossomed into a perfectly absurd optimist, and dreamed the donkiest of dreams. But, one day, as he carried the girl who was really a star through the spring lanes, a young man walked beside her, and though our donkey thought very little of his talk--in fact, felt his plain "hee-haw" to be worth all its smart chirping and twittering--yet it evidently pleased the maiden. It included quite a number of vowel-sounds--though, if the maiden had only known, it didn't mean half so much as the donkey's plain monotonous declaration.

'Well, our donkey soon began to realise that his dream was nearing its end; and, indeed, one day his little mistress came bringing him the sweetest of kisses, the very best sugar in the very best shops, but for all that our donkey knew that it meant good-bye. It is the charming manner of English girls to be at their sweetest when they say good-bye.

'Our dreamer-donkey went into exile as servant to a woodcutter, and his life was lenient if dull, for the woodcutter had no sticks to waste upon his back; and next day his young mistress who was once a star took a pony for her love, whom some time after she discarded for a talented hunter, and, one fine day, like many of her sex, she pitched her affections upon a man--he too being a talented hunter. To their wedding came all the countryside. And with the countryside came the donkey. He carried a great bundle of firewood for the servants' hall, and as he waited outside, gazing up at his old loves the stars, while his master drank deeper and deeper within, he revolved many thoughts. But he is only known to have made one remark--in the nature, one may think, of a grim jest--

'"After all!" he was heard to say, "she has married a donkey--after all!"

'No doubt it was feeble; but then our donkey was growing old and bitter, and hope deferred had made him a cynic.'

ON LOVING ONE'S ENEMIES

Like all people who live apart from it, the Founder of the Christian religion was possessed of a profound knowledge of the world. As, according to the proverb, the woodlander sees nothing of the wood for its trees, so those who live in the world know nothing of it. They know its gaudy, glittering surface, its Crystal Palace fireworks, and the paste-diamonds with which it bedecks itself; they know its music-halls and its night clubs, its Piccadillys and its politics, its restaurants and its salons; but of the bad--or good?--heart of it all they know nothing. In more meanings than one, it takes a saint to catch a sinner; and Christ certainly knew as well as saved the sinner.

But none of His precepts show a truer knowledge of life and its conditions than His commandment that we should love our enemies. He realised--can we doubt?--that, without enemies, the Church He bade His followers build could not hope to be established. He knew that the spiritual fire He strove to kindle would spread but little, unless the four winds of the world blew against it. Well, indeed, may the Christian Church love its enemies, for it is they who have made it.

Indeed, for a man, or a cause, that wants to get on, there is nothing like a few hearty, zealous enemies. Most of us would never be heard of if it were not for our enemies. The unsuccessful man counts up his friends, but the successful man numbers his enemies. A friend of mine was lamenting, the other day, that he could not find twelve people to disbelieve in him. He had been seeking them for years, he sighed, and could not get beyond eleven. But, even so, with only eleven he was a very successful man. In these kind-hearted days enemies are becoming so rare that one has to go out of one's way to make them. The true interpretation, therefore, of the easiest of the commandments is--make your enemies, and your enemies will make you.

So soon as the armed men begin to spring up in our fields, we may be sure that we have not sown in vain.

Properly understood, an enemy is but a negative embodiment of our personalities or ideas. He is an involuntary witness to our vitality. Much as he despises us, greatly as he may injure us, he is none the less a creature of our making. It was we who put into him the breath of his malignity, and inspired the activity of his malice. Therefore, with his very existence so tremendous a tribute, we can afford to smile at his self-conscious disclaimers of our significance. Though he slay us, we _made_ him--to 'make an enemy,' is not that the phrase?

Indeed, the fact that he is our enemy is his one _raison d'être_. That alone should make us charitable to him. Live and let live. Without us our enemy has no occupation, for to hate us is his profession. Think of his wives and families!

The friendship of the little for the great is an old-established profession; there is but one older--namely, the hatred of the little for the great; and, though it is perhaps less officially recognised, it is without doubt the more lucrative. It is one of the shortest roads to fame. Why is the name of Pontius Pilate an uneasy ghost of history? Think what fame it would have meant to be an enemy of Socrates or Shakespeare! _Blackwood's Magazine_ and _The Quarterly Review_ only survive to-day because they once did their best to strangle the genius of Keats and Tennyson. Two or three journals of our own time, by the same unfailing method, seek that circulation from posterity which is denied them in the present.

This is particularly true in literature, where the literary enemy is as organised a tradesman as the literary agent. Like the literary agent, he naturally does his best to secure the biggest men. No doubt the time will come when the literary cut-throat--shall we call him?--will publish dainty little books of testimonials from authors, full of effusive gratitude for the manner in which they have been slashed and bludgeoned into fame. 'Butcher to Mr. Grant Allen' may then become a familiar legend over literary shop-fronts:--

'Ah! did you stab at Shelley's heart
With silly sneer and cruel lie?
And Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats,
To murder did you nobly try?

You failed, 'tis true; but what of that?
The world remembers still your name--
'Tis fame, _for you_, to be the cur
That barks behind the heels of Fame.'

Any one who is fortunate enough to have enemies will know that all this is far from being fanciful. If one's enemies have any other _raison d'être_ beyond the fact of their being our enemies--what is it? They are neither beautiful nor clever, wise nor good, famous nor, indeed, passably distinguished. Were they any of these, they would not have taken to so humble a means of getting their living. Instead of being our enemies, they could then have afforded to employ enemies on their own account.

Who, indeed, are our enemies? Broadly speaking, they are all those people who lack what we possess.

If you are rich, every poor man is necessarily your enemy. If you are beautiful, the great democracy of the plain and ugly will mock you in the streets. It will be the same with everything you possess. The brainless will never forgive you for possessing brains, the weak will hate you for your strength, and the evil for your good heart. If you can write, all the bad writers are at once your foes. If you can paint, the bad painters will talk you down. But more than any talent or charm you may possess, the pearl of price for which you will be most bitterly hated will be your success. You can be the most wonderful person that ever existed, so long as you don't succeed, and nobody will mind. 'It is the sunshine,' says some one, 'that brings out the adder.' So powerful, indeed, is success that it has been known to turn a friend into a foe. Those, then, who wish to engage a few trusty enemies out of place need only advertise among the unsuccessful.

_P.S._--For one service we should be particularly thankful to our enemies--they save us so much in stimulants. Their unbelief so helps our belief, their negatives make us so positive.

THE DRAMATIC ART OF LIFE

It is a curious truth that, whereas in every other art deliberate choice of method and careful calculation of effect are expected from the artist, in the greatest and most difficult art of all, the art of life, this is not so. In literature, painting, or sculpture you first evolve your conception, and then, after long study of it, as it glows and shimmers in your imagination, you set about the reverent selection of that form which shall be its most truthful incarnation, in words, in paint, in marble. Now life, as has been said many times, is an art too. Sententious morality from time past has told us that we are each given a part to play, evidently implying, with involuntary cynicism, that the art of life is--the art of acting.

As with the actor, we are each given a certain dramatic conception for the expression of which we have precisely the same artistic materials--namely, our own bodies, sometimes including heart and brains. One has often heard the complaint of a certain actor that he acts himself. On the metaphorical stage of life the complaint and the implied demand are just the reverse. How much more interesting life would be if only more people had the courage and skill to act themselves, instead of abjectly understudying some one else! Of course, there are supers on the stage of life as on the real stage. It is proper that these should dress and speak and think alike. These one courteously excepts from the generalisation that the composer of the play, as Marcus Aurelius calls him, has given each of us a certain part to play--that part simply oneself: a part, need one say, by no means as easy as it seems; a part most difficult to study, and requiring daily rehearsal. So difficult is it, indeed, that most people throw up the part, and join the ranks of the supers--who, curiously enough, are paid much more handsomely than the principals. They enter one of the learned or idle professions, join the army or take to trade, and so speedily rid themselves of the irksome necessity of being anything more individual than 'the learned counsel,' 'the learned judge,' 'my lord bishop,' or 'the colonel,' names impersonal in application as the dignity of 'Pharaoh,' whereof the name and not the man was alone important. Henceforth they are the Church, the Law, the Army, the City, or that vaguer profession Society. Entering one of these, they become as lost to the really living world as the monk who voluntarily surrenders all will and character of his own at the threshold of his monastery: bricks in a prison wall, privates in the line, peas in a row. But, as I say, these are the parts that pay. For playing the others, indeed, you are not paid, but expected to pay--dearly.

It is full time we turned to those on whom falls the burden of those real parts. Such, when quite young, if they be conscientious artists, will carefully consider themselves, their gifts and possibilities, study to discover their artistic _raison d'être_ and how best to fulfil it. He or she will say: Here am I, a creature of great gifts and exquisite sensibilities, drawn by great dreams, and vibrating to great emotions; yet this potent and exquisite self is as yet, I know, but unwrought material of the perfect work of art it is intended that I should make of it--but the marble wherefrom, with patient chisel, I must liberate the perfect and triumphant ME! As a poet listening with trembling ear to the voice of his inspiration, so I tremulously ask myself--what is the divine conception that is to become embodied in me, what is the divine meaning of ME? How best shall I express it in look, in word, in deed, till my outer self becomes the truthful symbol of my inner self--till, in fact, I have successfully placed the best of myself on the outside --for others besides myself to see, and know and love?

What is my part, and how am I to play it?

Returning to the latter image, there are two difficulties that beset one in playing a part on the stage of life, right at the outset. You are not allowed to 'look' it, or 'dress' it! What would an actor think, who, asked to play Hamlet, found that he would be expected to play it without make-up and in nineteenth-century costume? Yet many of us are in a like dilemma with similar parts. Actors and audience must all wear the same drab clothes and the same immobile expression. It is in vain you protest that you do not really belong to this absurd and vulgar nineteenth century, that you have been spirited into it by a cruel mistake, that you really belong to mediæval Florence, to Elizabethan, Caroline, or at latest Queen Anne England, and that you would like to be allowed to look and dress as like it as possible. It is no use; if you dare to look or dress like anything but your own tradesmen--and other critics--it is at your peril. If you are beautiful, you are expected to disguise a fact that is an open insult to every other person you look at; and you must, as a general rule, never look, wear, feel, or say what everybody else is not also looking, wearing, feeling, or saying.

Thus you get some hint of the difficulty of playing the part of yourself on this stage of life.

In these matters of dressing and looking your part musicians seem granted an immunity denied to all their fellow-artists. Perhaps it is taken for granted that the musician is a fool--the British public is so intuitive. Yet it takes the same view of the poet, without allowing him a like immunity. And, by the way, what a fine conception of his part had Tennyson--of the dignity, the mystery, the picturesqueness of it! Tennyson would have felt it an artistic crime to look like his publisher; yet what poet is there left us to-day half so distinguished-looking as his publisher?

Indeed, curiously enough, among no set of men does the desire to look as commonplace as the rest of the world seem so strong as among men of letters. Perhaps it is out of consideration for the rest of the world; but, whatever the reason, immobility of expression and general mediocrity of style are more characteristic of them at present than even the military.

It is surely a strange paradox that we should pride ourselves on schooling to foolish insensibility, on eliminating from them every mark of individual character, the faces that were intended subtly and eloquently to image our moods--to look glad when we are glad, sorry when we are sorry, angry in anger, and lovely in love.

The impassivity of the modern young man is indeed a weird and wonderful thing. Is it a mark to hide from us the appalling sins he none the less openly affects? Is it meant to conceal that once in his life he paid a wild visit to 'The Empire'--by kind indulgence of the County Council? that he once chucked a barmaid under the chin, that he once nearly got drunk, that he once spoke to a young lady he did not know--and then ran away?

One sighs for the young men of the days of Gautier and Hugo, the young men with red waistcoats who made asses of themselves at first nights and on the barricades, young men with romance in their hearts and passion in their blood, fearlessly sentimental and picturesquely everything.

The lover then was not ashamed that you should catch radiant glimpses of his love in his eyes--nay! if you smiled kindly on him, he would take you by the arm and insist on your breaking a bottle with him in honour of his mistress. Joy and sorrow then wore their appropriate colours, according, so to say, to the natural sumptuary laws of the emotions--one of which is that the right place for the heart is the sleeve.

It is the duty of those who are great, or to whom great destinies of joy or sorrow have been dealt, to wear their distinctions for the world to see. It is good for the world, which in its crude way indicates the rudiments of this dramatic art of life, when it decrees that the bride shall walk radiant in orange blossom, and the mourner sadden our streets with black--symbols ever passing before us of the moving vicissitudes of life.

The mourner cannot always be sad, or the bride merry; the bride indeed sometimes weeps at the altar, and the mourner laughs a savage cynical laugh at the grave; but for those moments in which they awhile forget parts more important than themselves, the tailor and the dressmaker have provided symbolical garments, just as military decorations have been provided for heroes without the gift of looking heroic, and sacerdotal vestments for the priest, who, like a policeman, is not always on duty.

In playing his part the conscientious artist in life, like any other actor, must often seem to feel more than he really feels at a given moment, say more than he means. In this he is far from being insincere--though he must make up his mind to be accused daily of insincerity and affectation. On the contrary, it will be his very sincerity that necessitates his make-believe. With his great part ever before him in its inspiring completeness, he must be careful to allow no merely personal accident of momentary feeling or action to jeopardise the general effect. There are moments, for example, when a really true lover, owing to such masterful natural facts as indigestion, a cold, or extreme sleepiness, is unable to feel all that he knows he really feels. To 'tell the truth,' as it is called, under such circumstances, would simply be a most dangerous form of lying. There is no duty we owe to truth more imperative than that of lying stoutly on occasion--for, indeed, there is often no other way of conveying the whole truth than by telling the part-lie.

A watchful sincerity to our great conception of ourselves is the first and last condition, of our creating that finest work of art--a personality; for a personality, like a poet, is not only born but made.

THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX

In an essay on Vauvenargues Mr. John Morley speaks with characteristic causticity of those epigrammatists 'who persist in thinking of man and woman as two different species,' and who make verbal capital out of the fancied distinction in the form of smart epigrams beginning '_Les femmes_.' It is one of Shakespeare's cardinal characteristics that _he understood woman_. Mr. Meredith's fame as a novelist is largely due to the fact that he too _understands women_. The one spot on the sun of Robert Louis Stevenson's fame, so we are told, is that he could _never draw a woman_. His capacity for drawing men counted for nothing, apparently, beside this failure. Evidently the Sphinx has not the face of a woman for nothing. That is why no one has read her riddle, translated her mystic smile. Yet many people smile mysteriously, without any profound meanings behind their smile, with no other reason than a desire to mystify. Perhaps the Sphinx smiles to herself just for the fun of seeing us take her smile so seriously. And surely women must so smile as they hear their psychology so gravely discussed. Of course, the superstition is invaluable to them, and it is only natural that they should make the most of it. Man is supposed to be a complete ignoramus in regard to all the specialised female 'departments'--from the supreme mystery of the female heart to the humble domestic mysteries of a household. Similarly, men are supposed to have no taste in women's dress, yet for whom do women clothe themselves in the rainbow and the sea-foam, if not to please men? And was not the high-priest of that delicious and fascinating mystery a man--if it be proper to call the late M. Worth a man,--as the best cooks are men, and the best waiters?

It would seem to be assumed from all this mystification that men are beings clear as daylight, both to themselves and to women. Poor, simple, manageable souls, their wants are easily satisfied, their psychology--which, it is implied, differs little from their physiology--long since mapped out.

It may be so, but it is the opinion of some that men's simplicity is no less a fiction than women's mysterious complexity, and that human character is made up of much the same qualities in men and women, irrespective of a merely rudimentary sexual distinction, which has, of course, its proper importance, and which the present writer would be the last to wish away. From that quaint distinction of sex springs, of course, all that makes life in the smallest degree worth living, from great religions to tiny flowers. Love and beauty and poetry; Shakespeare's plays, Burne-Jones's pictures, and Wagner's operas--all such moving expressions of human life, as science has shown us, spring from the all-important fact that 'male and female created He them.'

This everybody knows, and few are fools enough to deny. Many people, however, confuse this organic distinction of sex with its time-worn conventional symbols; just as religion is commonly confused with its external rites and ceremonies. The comparison naturally continues itself further; for, as in religion, so soon as some traditional garment of the faith has become outworn or otherwise unsuitable, and the proposal is made to dispense with or substitute it, an outcry immediately is raised that religion itself is in danger--so with sex, no sooner does one or the other sex propose to discard its arbitrary conventional characteristics, or to supplement them by others borrowed from its fellow-sex, than an outcry immediately is raised that sex itself is in danger.

Sex--the most potent force in the universe--in danger because women wear knickerbockers instead of petticoats, or military men take to corsets and cosmetics!

That parallel with religion may be pursued profitably one step further. In religion, the conventional test of your faith is not how you live, not in your kindness of heart or purity of mind, but how you believe--in the Trinity, in the Atonement; and do you turn to the East during the recital of the Apostles' Creed? These and such, as every one knows, are the vital matters of religion. And it is even so with sex. You are not asked for the realities of manliness or womanliness, but for the shadows, the arbitrary externalities, the fashions of which change from generation to generation.

To be truly womanly you must never wear your hair short; to be truly manly you must never wear it long. To be truly womanly you must dress as daintily as possible, however uncomfortably; to be truly manly you must wear the most hideous gear ever invented by the servility of tailors--a strange succession of cylinders from head to heel; cylinder on head, cylinder round your body, cylinders on arms and cylinders on legs. To be truly womanly you must be shrinking and clinging in manner and trivial in conversation; you must have no ideas, and rejoice that you wish for none; you must thank Heaven that you have never ridden a bicycle or smoked a cigarette; and you must be prepared to do a thousand other absurd and ridiculous things. To be truly manly you must be and do the opposite of all these things, with this exception--that with you the possession of ideas is optional. The finest specimens of British manhood are without ideas; but that, I say, is, generally speaking, a matter for yourself. It is indeed the only matter in which you have any choice. More important matters, such as the cut of your clothes and hair, the shape of your face, the length of your moustache and the pattern of your cane--all these are very properly regulated for you by laws of fashion, which you could never dream of breaking. You may break every moral law there is--or rather, was--and still remain a man. You may be a bully, a cad, a coward and a fool, in the poor heart and brains of you; but so long as you wear the mock regimentals of contemporary manhood, and are above all things plain and undistinguished enough, your reputation for manhood will be secure. There is nothing so dangerous to a reputation for manhood as brains or beauty.

In short, to be a true woman you have only to be pretty and an idiot, and to be a true man you have only to be brutal and a fool.

From these misconceptions of manliness and womanliness, these superstitions of sex, many curious confusions have come about. They so to say, professional differentiation between the sexes had at one time gone so far that men were credited with the entire monopoly of a certain set of human qualities, and women with the monopoly of a certain other set of human qualities; yet every one of these are qualities which one would have thought were proper to, and necessary for, all human beings alike, male and female.

In a dictionary of a date (1856) when everything on earth and in heaven was settled and written in penny cyclopædias and books of deportment, I find these delicious definitions--

_Manly_: becoming a man; firm; brave; undaunted; dignified; noble; stately; not boyish or womanish.

_Womanly_: becoming a woman; feminine; as _womanly_ behaviour.

Under _Woman_ we find the adjectives--soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous, modest.

Who can doubt that the dictionary maker defined and distributed his adjectives aright for the year 1856? Since then, however, many alarming heresies have taken root in our land, and some are heard to declare that both these sets of adjectives apply to men and women alike, and are, in fact, necessities of any decent human outfit. Otherwise the conclusion is obvious, that no one desirous of the adjective 'manly' must ever be--soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous, or modest; and no one desirous of the adjective 'womanly' be--firm, brave, undaunted, dignified, noble, or stately.

But surely the essentials of 'manliness' and 'womanliness' belong to man and woman alike--the externals are purely artistic considerations, and subject to the vagaries of fashion. In art no one would think of allowing fashion any serious artistic opinion. It is usually the art which is out of fashion that is most truly art. Similarly, fashions in manliness or womanliness have nothing to do with real manliness or womanliness. Moreover, the adjectives 'manly' or 'womanly,' applied to works of art, or the artistic surfaces of men and women, are irrelevant--that is to say, impertinent. You have no right to ask a poem or a picture to look manly or womanly, any more than you have any right to ask a man or a woman to look manly or womanly. There is no such thing as looking manly or womanly. There is looking beautiful or ugly, distinguished or commonplace, individual or insignificant. The one law of externals is beauty in all its various manifestations. To ask the sex of a beautiful person is as absurd as it would be to ask the publisher the sex of a beautiful book. Such questions are for midwives and doctors.

It was once the fashion for heroes to shed tears on the smallest occasion, and it does not appear that they fought the worse for it; some of the firmest, bravest, most undaunted, most dignified, most noble, most stately human beings have been women; as some of the softest, mildest, most pitiful and flexible, most kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous and modest human beings have been men. Indeed, some of the bravest men that ever trod this planet have worn corsets, and it needs more courage nowadays for a man to wear his hair long than to machine-gun a whole African nation. Moreover, quite the nicest women one knows ride bicycles--in the rational costume.

THE FALLACY OF A NATION

It is, I am given to understand, a familiar axiom of mathematics that no number of ciphers placed in front of significant units, or tens or hundreds of units, adds in the smallest degree to the numerical value of those units. The figure one becomes of no more importance however many noughts are marshalled in front of it--though, indeed, in the mathematics of human nature this is not so. Is not a man or woman considered great in proportion to the number of ciphers that walk in front of him, from a humble brace of domestics to guards of honour and imperial armies?

A parallel profound truth of mathematics is that a nought, however many times it be multiplied, remains nought; but again we find the reverse obtain in the mathematics of human nature. One might have supposed that the result of one nobody multiplied even fifty million times would still be nobody. However, such is far from being the case. Fifty million nobodies make--a nation. Of course, there is no need for so many. I am reckoning as a British subject, and speak of fifty million merely as an illustration of the general fact that it is the multiplication of nobodies that makes a nation. 'Increase and multiply' was, it will be remembered, the recipe for the Jewish nation.

Nobodies of the same colour, tongue, and prejudices have but to congregate together in a crowd sufficiently big for other similar crowds to recognise them, and then they are given a name of their own, and become recognised as a nation--one of the 'Great Powers.'

Beyond those differences in colour, tongue, and prejudices there is really no difference between the component units--or rather ciphers--of all these several national crowds. You have seen a procession of various trades-unions filing toward Hyde Park, each section with its particular banner with a strange device: 'The United Guild of Paperhangers,' 'The Ancient Order of Plumbers,' and so on. And you may have marvelled to notice how alike the members of the various carefully differentiated companies were. So to say, they each and all might have been plumbers; and you couldn't help feeling that it wouldn't have mattered much if some of the paper-hangers had by mistake got walking amongst the plumbers, or _vice versa_.

So the great trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word 'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany'--this with a particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called 'England.' Other smaller bodies of nobodies, that is, smaller nations, file past with humbler tread--though there is really no need for their doing so. For, as we have said, they are in every particular like to those haughtier nations who take precedence of them. In fact, one or two of them, such as Norway and Denmark--were a truer system of human mathematics to obtain--are really of more importance than the so-called greater nations, in that among their nobodies they include a larger percentage of intellectual somebodies.

Remembering that percentage of wise men, the formula of a nation were perhaps more truly stated in our first mathematical image. The wise men in a nation are as the units with the noughts in front of them. And when I say wise men I do not, indeed, mean merely the literary men or the artists, but all those somebodies with some real force of character, people with brains and hearts, fighters and lovers, saints and thinkers, and the patient, industrious workers. Such, if you consider, are really no integral part of the nation among which they are cast. They have no part in what are grandiloquently called national interests--war, politics, and horse-racing to wit. A change of Government leaves them as unmoved as an election for the board of guardians. They would as soon think of entering Parliament or the County Council, as of yearning to manage the gasworks, or to go about with one of those carts bearing the legend 'Aldermen and Burgesses of the City of London' conspicuously upon its front. Their main concern in political changes is the rise and fall of the income-tax, and, be the Cabinet Tory or Liberal, their rate papers come in for the same amount. It is likely that national changes would affect them but little more. What more would a foreign invasion mean than that we should pay our taxes to French, Russian, or German officials, instead of to English ones? French and Italians do our cooking, Germans manage our music, Jews control our money markets; surely it would make little difference to us for France, Russia, or Germany to undertake our government. The worst of being conquered by Russia would be the necessity of learning Russian; whereas a little rubbing up of our French would make us comfortable with France. Besides, to be conquered by France would save us crossing the Channel to Paris, and then we might hope for cafés in Regent Street, and an emancipated literature. As a matter of fact, so-called national interests are merely certain private interests on a large scale, the private interests of financiers, ambitious politicians, soldiers, and great merchants. Broadly speaking, there are no rival nations--there are rival markets; and it is its Board of Trade and its Stock Exchange rather than its Houses of Parliament that virtually govern a country. Thus one seaport goes down and another comes up, industries forsake one country to bless another, the military and naval strengths of nations fluctuate this way and that; and to those whom these changes affect they are undoubtedly important matters--the great capitalist, the soldier, and the politician; but to the quiet man at home with his wife, his children, his books, and his flowers, to the artist busied with brave translunary matters, to the saint with his eyes filled with 'the white radiance of eternity,' to the shepherd on the hillside, the milkmaid in love, or the angler at his sport--what are these pompous commotions, these busy, bustling mimicries of reality? England will be just as good to live in though men some day call her France. Let the big busybodies divide her amongst them as they like, so that they leave one alone with one's fair share of the sky and the grass, and an occasional, not too vociferous, nightingale.

The reader will perhaps forgive the hackneyed references to Sir Thomas Browne peacefully writing his _Religio Medici_ amid all the commotions of the Civil War, and to Gautier calmly correcting the proofs of his new poems during the siege of Paris. The milkman goes his rounds amid the crash of empires. It is not his business to fight. His business is to distribute his milk--as much after half-past seven as may be inconvenient. Similarly, the business of the thinker is with his thought, the poet with his poetry. It is the business of politicians to make national quarrels, and the business of the soldier to fight them. But as for the poet--let him correct his proofs, or beware the printer.

The idea, then, of a nation is a grandiloquent fallacy in the interests of commerce and ambition, political and military. All the great and good, clever and charming people belong to one secret nation, for which there is no name unless it be the Chosen People. These are the lost tribes of love, art, and religion, lost and swamped amid alien peoples, but ever dreaming of a time when they shall meet once more in Jerusalem.