Chapter VII: Part 7

"But the percentage of failures among the officers shows a large decrease--from 22 per cent. in November 1904 to 13 per cent. in May last. The improvement is particularly noticeable among lieutenants. It is apparent, says the report, that a serious effort is being made by the commissioned ranks to master all the text-books and other aids to efficiency."

"This," says my correspondent, "is a shameful disclosure. Cannot you say something about it in print?" Inclining naturally to the more favourable view of my fellow-creatures, I prefer to reflect, not on the "poor penmanship" and "defective education" of my military friends, but on their manly efforts after self-improvement. There is something at once pathetic and edifying in the picture of these worthy men, each of whom has probably cost his father £200 a year for education ever since he was ten years old, making their "serious effort to master the text-books and other aids to efficiency," in the humble hope that their writing may some day rival that of the non-commissioned officers.

It was not ever thus. These laudable, though lowly, endeavours after Culture are of recent growth in the British Army. Fifty years ago, if we may trust contemporary evidence, the Uneducated Subaltern developed, by a natural process, into the Uneducated General.

"I have always," said Thackeray in 1846, "admired that dispensation of rank in our country which sets up a budding Cornet, who is shaving for a beard (and who was flogged only last week because he could not spell), to command great whiskered warriors who have faced all dangers of climate and battle." _Because he could not spell._ The same infirmity accompanied the Cornet into the higher grades of his profession--witness Captain Rawdon Crawley's memorandum of his available effects: "My double-barril by Manton, say 40 guineas; my duelling pistols in rosewood case (same which I shot Captain Marker) £20." And, even when the Cornet had blossomed into a General, his education was still far from complete: "A man can't help being a fool, be he ever so old, and Sir George Tufto is a greater ass at sixty-eight than he was when he entered the army at fifteen. He never read a book in his life, and, with his purple, old, gouty fingers, still writes a schoolboy hand."

But do Soldiers write a worse hand than other people? I rather doubt it, and certain I am that several of my friends, highly placed in Church and politics and law, would do very well to apply themselves for a season to those "text-books and other aids to efficiency" by which the zealous Subaltern seeks to complete his "defective education."

Mr. Gladstone was accustomed to say that in public life he had known only two perfect things--Sir Robert Peel's voice and Lord Palmerston's writing. The former we can know only by tradition; the latter survives, for the instruction of mankind, in folios of voluminous despatches, all written in a hand at once graceful in form and absolutely clear to read. "The wayfaring men" of Diplomacy, though sometimes "fools," could not "err" in the interpretation of Palmerston's despatches. The same excellence of caligraphy which Palmerston himself practised he rightly required from his subordinates. If a badly written despatch came into his hands, he would embellish it with scathing rebukes, and return it, through the Office, to the offending writer. The recipient of one of these admonitions thus recalls its terms, "Tell the gentleman who copied this despatch to write a larger, rounder hand, to join the letters in the words, and to use blacker ink."

If Lord Palmerston stood easily first among the penmen of his time, the credit of writing the worst hand in England was divided among at least three claimants. First there was Lord Houghton, whose strange, tall, upright strokes, all exactly like each other except in so far as they leaned in different directions, Lord Tennyson likened to "walking-sticks gone mad." Then there was my dear friend Mr. James Payn, who described his own hand only too faithfully when he wrote about "the wandering of a centipede which had just escaped from the inkpot and had scrawled and sprawled over the paper," and whose closest friends always implored him to correspond by telegraph. And, finally, there was the "bad eminence" of Dean Stanley, whose lifelong indulgence in hieroglyphics inflicted a permanent loss on literature. The Dean, as all readers of his biography will remember, had a marked turn for light and graceful versification. The albums and letter-caskets of his innumerable friends were full of these "occasional" verses, in which domestic, political, and ecclesiastical events were prettily perpetuated. After his death his sister, Mrs. Vaughan, tried to collect these fugitive pieces in a Memorial Volume, but an unforeseen difficulty occurred. In many cases the recipients of the poems were dead and gone, and no living creature could decipher the Dean's writing. So what might have been a pretty and instructive volume perished untimely.

Jane Maxwell, Duchess of Gordon, the brilliant dame who raised the Gordon Highlanders and who played on the Tory side the part which the Duchess of Devonshire played among the Whigs, had, like our English Subalterns, a very imperfect education; but with great adroitness she covered her deficiences with a cloak of seeming humour. "Whenever," she wrote to Sir Walter Scott, "I come to a word which I cannot spell, I write it as near as I can, and put a note of exclamation after it; so that, if it's wrong, my friend will think that I was making a joke." A respected member of the present Cabinet who shares Duchess Jane's orthographical weakness covers his retreat by drawing a long, involuted line after the initial letter of each word. Let the reader write, say, the word "aluminium" on this principle; and he will see how very easily imperfect spelling in high places may be concealed.

With soldiers this chapter began, and with a soldier it shall end--the most illustrious of them all, Arthur, Duke of Wellington. Let it be recorded for the encouragement of our modern Subalterns that the Duke, though he spelled much better than Captain Crawley, wrote quite as badly as Sir George Tufto; but that circumstance did not--as is sometimes the case--enable him to interpret by sympathy the hieroglyphics of other people. Is there any one left, "In a Lancashire Garden" or elsewhere, who recalls the honoured name of Jane Loudon, authoress of "The Lady's Companion to her Flower Garden"? Mrs. Loudon was an accomplished lady, who wrote not only on Floriculture, but on Arboriculture and Landscape Gardening, and illustrated what she wrote. In one of her works she desired to insert a sketch of the "Waterloo Beeches" at Strathfieldsaye--a picturesque clump planted to commemorate our deliverance from the Corsican Tyrant. Accordingly she wrote to the Duke of Wellington, requesting leave to sketch the beeches, and signed herself, in her usual form, "J. Loudon." The Duke, who, in spite of extreme age and perceptions not quite so clear as they had once been, insisted on conducting all his own correspondence, replied as follows:--

"F.M. the Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to the Bishop of London. The Bishop is quite at liberty to make a sketch of the breeches which the Duke wore at Waterloo, if they can be found. But the Duke is not aware that they differed in any way from the breeches which he generally wears."

XXXIV

AUTOGRAPHS

From handwriting in general to autographs in particular the transition is natural, almost inevitable. My recent reflections on the imperfect penmanship of the British officer sent me to my collection of letters, and the sight of these autographs--old friends long since hidden away--set me on an interesting enquiry. Was there any affinity between the writing and the character? Could one, in any case, have guessed who the writer was, or what he did, merely by scrutinizing his manuscript? I make no pretension to any skill in the art or science of Caligraphy; and, regarding my letters merely as an amateur or non-expert, I must confess that I arrive at a mixed and dubious result. Some of the autographs are characteristic enough; some seem to imply qualities for which the writer was not famed and to suppress others for which he was notorious.

Let us look carefully at the first letter which I produce from my hoard. The lines are level, and the words are clearly divided, although here and there an abbreviation tells that the hand which wrote this letter had many letters to write; the capitals, of which there are plenty, are long and twirling, though the intermediate letters are rather small, and the signature is followed by an emphatic dash which seems to say more explicitly than words that the writer is one who cannot be ignored. This is the autograph of Queen Victoria in those distant days when she said, "They seem to think that I am a schoolgirl, but I will teach them that I am Queen of England."

Surrounding and succeeding Queen Victoria I find a cluster of minor royalties, but a study of their autographs does not enable me to generalize about royal writing. Some are scrawling and some are cramped; some are infantine and some foreign. Here is a level, firm, and rapid hand, in which the exigencies of a copious correspondence seem to have softened the stiffness of a military gait. The letter is dated from "The Horse Guards," and the signature is

"Yours very truly,
GEORGE."

But here again we cannot generalize, for nothing can be more dissimilar than the Duke's hurried, high-shouldered characters and the exquisite piece of penmanship which lies alongside of them. This is written in a leisurely and cultivated hand, with due spaces between words and paragraphs, like the writing of a scholar and man of letters; it is dated May 29, 1888, and bears the signature of

"Your affectionate Cousin,
ALBEMARLE,"

the last survivor but one of Waterloo.

But soldiers are not much in my way, and my military signatures are few. My collection is rich in politicians. Here comes, first in date though in nothing else, that Duke of Bedford who negotiated the Treaty of Fontainebleau and got trounced by Junius for his pains. It is written in 1767, just as the writer is "setting out from Woburn Abbey to consult his Shropshire oculist" (why Shropshire?), and has the small, cramped character which is common to so many conditions of shortened sight. (I find exactly the same in a letter of Lord Chancellor Hatherley, 1881.) Thirty-nine years pass, and William Pitt writes his last letter from "Putney Hill, the 1st of January, 1806, 2 P.M.," the writing as clear, as steady, and as beautifully formed as if the "Sun of Austerlitz" had never dawned. And now the Statesmen pass me in rapid succession and in fine disregard of chronological order. Lord Russell writes a graceful, fluent, rather feminine hand; Charles Villiers's writing is of the same family; and the great Lord Derby's a perfect specimen of the "Italian hand," delicate as if drawn with a crow-quill, and slanted into alluring tails and loops. Lord Brougham's was a vile scrawl, with half the letters tumbling backwards. John Bright's is small, neat, and absolutely clear; nor is it fanciful to surmise that Mr. Chamberlain copied Mr. Bright, and were they not both short-sighted men? And Lord Goschen's writing, from the same cause, is smaller still. The Duke of Argyll wrote a startling and imperious hand, worthy of a Highland chief whose ancestors not so long ago exercised the power of life and death; Lord Iddesleigh a neat and orderly hand, becoming a Private Secretary or Permanent Official. Lord Granville's and Mr. Forster's writings had this in common, that they looked most surprisingly candid and straightforward. The present Duke of Devonshire's writing suggests nothing but vanity, self-consciousness, and ostentation. We all can judge, even without being caligraphists, how far these suggestions conform to the facts. By far the most pleasing autograph of all the Statesmen is Lord Beaconsfield's, artistically formed and highly finished--in his own phrase, "that form of scripture which attracts." With the utmost possible loyalty to a lost leader, I would submit that Mr. Gladstone wrote an uncommonly bad hand--not bad in point of appearance, for it was neat and comely even when it was hurried; but bad morally--a kind of caligraphic imposture, for it looks quite remarkably legible, and it is only when you come to close quarters with it and try to decipher an important passage that you find that all the letters are practically the same, and that the interpretation of a word must depend on the context.

From my pile of Statesmen's autographs I extract yet another, and I lay it side by side with the autographs of a great author and a great ecclesiastic. All three are very small, exquisitely neat, very little slanted, absolutely legible. Well as I knew the three writers, I doubt if I could tell which wrote which letter. They were Cardinal Manning, Mr. Froude, and Lord Rosebery. Will the experts in caligraphy tell me if, in this case, similarity of writing bodied forth similarity of gifts or qualities? Another very close similarity may be observed between the writing of Lord Halsbury and that of Lord Brampton (better known as Sir Henry Hawkins), which, but for the fact that Lord Brampton uses the long "s" and Lord Halsbury does not, are pretty nearly identical.

If there is one truth which can be deduced more confidently than another from my collection of autographs, it is that there is no such thing as "the literary hand." Every variety of writing which a "Reader's" fevered brain could conceive is illustrated in my bundle of literary autographs. _Seniores priores._ Samuel Rogers was born in 1763, and died in 1855. A note of his, written in 1849, and beginning, "Pray, pray, come on Tuesday," is by far the most surprising piece of caligraphy in my collection. It is so small that, except under the eyes of early youth, it requires a magnifying-glass; yet the symmetry of every letter is perfect, and, when sufficiently enlarged, it might stand as a model of beautiful and readable writing. I take a bound of sixty years, and find some of the same characteristics reproduced by my friend Mr. Quiller-Couch; but between the "Pleasures of Memory" and "Green Bays" there rolls a sea of literature, and it has been navigated by some strange crafts in the way of handwriting. I have spoken on another occasion of Dean Stanley, Lord Houghton, and James Payn; specimens of their enormities surround me as I write, and I can adduce, I think, an equally heinous instance. Here is Sydney Smith, writing in 1837 to "Dear John," the hero of the Reform Act, "No body wishes better for you and yours than the inhabitants of Combe Florey." Perhaps so; but they conveyed their benedictions through a very irritating medium, for Sydney Smith's writing is of the immoral type, pleasing to the eye and superficially legible, but, when once you have lost the clue, a labyrinth. Perhaps it is due to this circumstance that his books abound, beyond all others, in uncorrected misprints.

But there are other faults in writing besides ugliness and illegibility. A great man ought not to write a poor hand. Yet nothing can be poorer than Ruskin's--mean, ugly, insignificant--only redeemed by perfect legibility. Goldwin Smith's, though clear and shapely, is characterless and disappointing. Some great scholars, again, write disappointing hands. Jowett's is a spiteful-looking angular, little scratch, perfectly easy to read; Westcott's comely but not clear; Lightfoot's an open, scrambling scrawl, something like the late Lord Derby's. These great men cannot excuse their deficiencies in penmanship by pleading that they have had to write a great deal in their lives. Others before them have had to do that, and have emerged from the trial without a stain on their caligraphy. For example--"Albany, December 3, 1854," is the heading of an ideally beautiful sheet, every letter perfectly formed, all spaces duly observed, and the whole evidently maintaining its beauty in spite of breakneck speed. The signature is

"Ever yours truly,
T. B. MACAULAY."

Here is a letter addressed to me only last year by a man who was born in 1816. In my whole collection there is no clearer or prettier writing. As a devotee of fine penmanship, I make my salutations to Sir Theodore Martin.

XXXV

MORE AUTOGRAPHS

My suggestive friend has suddenly been multiplied a hundredfold. Handwriting is a subject which apparently makes a wide appeal. Each post brings me corrections or corroborations of what I wrote last Saturday. Fresh instances of enormity in the way of illegible writing are adduced from all quarters; nor are there wanting acrid critics who suggest that reform should begin at home, and that "the Author of Collections and Recollections" would do well to consult a writing-master, or to have his copy typed before it goes to the printers. Waiving these personalities, I turn again to my letter-case, and here let me say in passing that I committed a fearful indiscretion when I spoke of my "Collection" of autographs. That fatal word brought down an avalanche of "Collectors," who, hailing me as a man and a brother, propose all sorts of convenient exchanges. A gentleman who cherishes a postcard from Mr. Rudyard Kipling would exchange it for an unpublished letter of Shelley; and a maiden-lady at Weston-super-Mare, whose great-aunt corresponded with Eliza Cook, will refuse no reasonable offer.

But all these handsome propositions must be brushed aside, for I have no collection of autographs, if "collection" implies any art or system in the way in which they have been brought together, or any store of saleable duplicates. Mine are simply letters addressed to myself or to my kinsfolk, plus just a very few which have come into my hands in connexion with public business; but, such as they are, they are full of memories and morals.

Why did very old people write so well? I have already described the writing of Samuel Rogers, of the Waterloo Lord Albemarle, and of Sir Theodore Martin. Pretty well for octogenarian penmanship; but I can enlarge the gallery. A bundle of octogenarian letters lies before me as I write. Oliver Wendell Holmes sends a tribute to Matthew Arnold. Charles Villiers accepts an invitation to dinner. Lord Norton invites me to stay at Hams. Archdeacon Denison complains of "his first attack of gout at eighty-five." Mr. Leveson-Gower at eighty-six thanks me for a review of his first book. I protest that there is not an ungraceful line--scarcely a misshaped letter--in any of these five manuscripts. Here is a small, elegant, and "taily" hand, rather like an old-fashioned lady's. The signature is

"Yours sincerely,
EVERSLEY,"

better known as Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, the most authoritative Speaker the House of Commons ever had. Note that this was written in his eighty-eighth year, and he lived to buy a new pair of guns after he was ninety. Here is a strong, clear, well-defined writing, setting forth with precision and emphasis the reasons why the last Duke of Cleveland, then in his eighty-fifth year, will not give more than £5 for an object which he has been asked to help. The writing of the beloved and honoured Duke of Rutland, always graceful and regular, becomes markedly smaller, though not the least less legible, till he dies at eighty-seven. There is no more vigorous, even dashing, signature in my store than "G. J. Holyoake," written in July 1905. Close to the imperial purple of the Agitator's ink nestles, in piquant contrast, a small half-sheet of rose-pink paper bearing a Duchess's coronet and cypher. The writing is distinct and ornamental; the letter was written in 1880, and the writer was born in 1792. But the mere fact of attaining to eighty or ninety years will not absolutely guarantee, though it seems to promote, legibility of writing. My venerable friend Dean Randall, who was born in 1824, ends a letter, which certainly needs some such apology, with a disarming allusion to the "dreadful scrawl" of his "ancient MS."; and four sides of tantalizing hieroglyphics, drawn apparently with a blunt stick, are shown by external evidence to be a letter from Canon Carter of Clewer when he had touched his ninetieth birthday.

On similarity, approaching to identity, between the writings of very dissimilar persons I have already remarked, and a further illustration comes to light as I turn over my papers. Here are two letters in the graceful and legible script of the early nineteenth century, with long S's, and capitals for all the substantives. Both are evidently the handiwork of cultivated gentlemen; and both the writers, as a matter of fact, were clergymen. But there the resemblance stops. The one was "Jack" Russell, the well-known Sporting Parson of Exmoor; the other was Andrew Jukes, the deepest and most influential Mystic whom the latter-day Church has seen.

When I praise gracefulness in writing I mean natural and effortless grace, such as was displayed in the writing of the late Duke of Westminster. But, if we admire writing artificially fashioned and coerced into gracefulness like a clipped yew, it would be difficult to excel the penmanship of the late George Augustus Sala, who was an engraver before he was an author; or that of Sir A. Conan Doyle, who handles a pen as dexterously as in his surgical days he wielded the lancet. I praised just now the late Duke of Westminster's writing, and of him one might say what Scott said, in a different sense, of Byron--that he "managed his pen with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality"; but there is another kind of grace than that--the grace which is partly the result of mental clearness and partly of a cultured eye. Here are two specimens of such writing, the letters so alluringly fashioned that they look, as some one said, like something good to eat; and spaced with a care which at once makes reading easy, and testifies to clear thinking in the writer. Both are the writings of Scholars, and both of men who wrote a vast deal in their lives--Bishop Creighton and Dean Vaughan. It must have been a joy to read their Proofs. The late Dean Farrar was the only Public-School Master I ever knew who took pains with his pupils' writing and encouraged them to add grace to legibility. His own writing, small, upright, and characterful, was very pretty when he took time and pains; but the specimen which lies before me shows sad signs of the havoc wrought by incessant writing against time.

Grace and legibility are the two chief glories of penmanship, but other attributes are not without their effect. A dashing scrawl, if only it is easy to read, suggests a soaring superiority to conventional restraints, and rather bespeaks a hero. Here are two scrawls, and each is the work of a remarkable person. One is signed "Yours truly, Jos. Cowen," and I dare say that some of my readers would see in it the index to a nature at once impetuous and imperious. But Mr. Cowen's scrawl was crowquill-work and copperplate compared with its next-door neighbour. "Accept the enclosed, dear Mr. Russell," covers the whole of one side of a sheet of letter-paper; the ink is blue; the paper is ribbed; the signature, all wreathed in gigantic flourishes and curling tails, is "Laura Thistlethwaite," and the enclosed is one of the Evangelistic Addresses of that gifted preacher who once was Laura Bell. Odd incongruities keep turning up. As I pass from the Evangelical lady-orator, I come to Father Ignatius, an Evangelical orator with a difference, but with a like tendency to scrawl. Lord Leighton's writing is also a scrawl, and, it must be confessed, an egotistical scrawl, and a very bad scrawl to read. An illegible scrawl, too, is the writing of Richard Holt Hutton, but his is not a vainglorious or commanding scrawl, but rather humble and untidy. "Henry Irving" is a signature quite culpably illegible, but "Squire Bancroft" is just irregular enough to be interesting though not unreadable.

_Per contra_, I turn to one of the most legible signatures in my possession. The writing is ugly and the letters are ill-formed, looking rather like the work of a hand which has only lately learned to write and finds the act a difficulty. But it is as clear as print, and it shows no adventitious ornamentation or self-assertive twirls. The signature is

"Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL."

In this case, if in no other, the oracles of Caligraphy are set at naught. Here is a fine, twisty, twirling hand, all tails and loops, but not at all unsightly. The signature reads like "Lincoln," and only a careful study would detect that the "L" of "Lincoln" is preceded by a circular flourish which looks like part of the L but is really a capital C. It is the signature of that great scholar, Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln; and I remember that, in days of ecclesiastical strife, it was once imputed to that apostolic man for vanity that he signed his name "Lincoln" like a Temporal Peer. From that day he defined the "C" more carefully.

To the last letter which I bring to light to-day a different kind of interest attaches. It is dated

"DINGLE BANK, LIVERPOOL,
_April 13, 1888_."

The writing is small and clear, with the upstrokes and downstrokes rather long in comparison with the level letters; but some small blurs and blots show that the letter was written in unusual haste. It ends with these words: "Smalley has written a letter full of shriekings and cursings about my innocent article; the Americans will get their notion of it from that, and I shall never be able to enter America again.

"Ever yours,
M. A."

This was the last letter which Matthew Arnold ever wrote, and it closed a friendship which had been one of the joys and glories of my life.

XXXVI

CHRISTMAS

"Christmas, now," as Mr. Brooke in "Middlemarch" might have said--"I went a good deal into that kind of thing at one time; but I found it would carry me too far--over the hedge, in fact." That, I imagine, pretty well represents the attitude of the adult world towards the feast which closes the year. We all loved it when we were young. Now, it is all very well for once in a way; it might pall if frequently repeated; even recurring only annually, it must be observed temperately and enjoyed moderately. Anything resembling excess would carry one too far--"over the hedge, in fact." But, within these recognized and salutary limits, Christmas is an institution which I would not willingly let die. In the days of my youth a Jewish lady caused me not a little consternation by remarking that it seemed very odd for Christians to celebrate the Feast of Redemption with gluttony and drunkenness. She lived, I am bound to say, in a very unregenerate village in a remarkably savage part of the country, and as, of course, she did not go to church, I dare say that Gluttony and Drunkenness were the forms of Christmas observance which most obtruded themselves on her notice. Even Cardinal Newman seems to have remarked the same phenomenon in his youth, though he satirized it more delicately. "Beneficed clergymen used to go to rest as usual on Christmas-eve, and leave to ringers, or sometimes to carollers, the observance which was paid, _not without creature comforts_, to the sacred night." Now all that is changed. Churches of all confessions vie with one another in the frequency and heartiness and picturesque equipment of their religious services. Even the _Daily Telegraph_ preaches Christmas sermons; and I very much question whether the populace gets more drunk at Christmas than at Easter. But, though we may have learnt to celebrate the festival with rites more devout and less bibulous, we have not yet escaped my Jewish friend's reproach of gluttony. The Christmas Dinner of the British Home is still a thing imagination boggles at. The dreadful pleasantries of the aged--their sorry gibes about the doctor and the draught; hoary chestnuts about little boys who stood up to eat more--remain among the most terrible memories of the Christmas dinner. And they were quite in keeping with the dinner itself. I say nothing against the Turkey, which (as my medical friends well know) was found, by practical experiment in the case of Alexis St. Martin, to be the most easily digested of all animal foods, except venison; but surely, as a nation, we eat quite beef enough in the course of the year without making Christmas an annual orgy of carnivorous excess. I protest that the very sight of the butchers' shops at this season of the year is enough to upset a delicately balanced organization. Rightly said the Shah, in that immortal Diary which he kept during his visit to England in 1873--"Meat is good, but it should not be hung up in windows." Macaulay used to say that Thackeray, in his famous description of the Clapham sect in "The Newcomes," made one blunder--he represented them as Dissenters, whereas, in fact, they were rather dogged Church-people. The only exception to the rule was a Baptist lady, who, living on Clapham Common, testified against the superstitions of the Established Church by eating roast veal and apple-pie on Christmas-day instead of more orthodox dainties. Churchman though I am, I protest that I think the Baptist lady was right: and I believe that the Puritans were wiser than they knew when they denounced Plum-Pudding and Mince Pies as inventions of the Evil One. Yet the love of these vindictive viands is one of the root-instincts of our English nature. Forty-eight years ago the British Army was keeping its Christmas in the Crimea, amid all the horrors and hardships of a peculiarly grim campaign. An English Sister of Mercy, who was nursing under Miss Nightingale in the Hospital at Scutari, thus described the melancholy festivity: "The 'Roast Beef of Old England' was out of the question, but with the aid of a good deal of imagination, it seemed possible at least to secure the Plum Pudding. I think I might with safety affirm that as the doctor left the ward every man drew from under his pillow a small portion of flour and fat, with an egg and some plums, and began to concoct a Christmas pudding. I assisted many to make the pudding, whom nothing short of a miracle would enable to eat it; still they must have the thing. For some days previously I had been asked for pieces of linen, which, without dreaming of the use to which they were to be applied, I supplied. Thus were the pudding cloths provided."

It can scarcely be conceived that these unhappy soldiers, maddened by wounds and fever or perishing by frost-bite and gangrene, can have had much physical enjoyment in Christmas puddings made of materials which had been concealed under their sick pillows; in such circumstances the value of the pudding is spiritual and symbolic. A few Christmases ago I was assisting (in the literal sense) at a dinner for starving "Dockers." A more broken, jaded, and dejected crew it would be difficult to picture. They had scarcely enough energy to eat and drink, but lumbered slowly through their meal of meat-pies and coffee without a smile and almost without a word. All at once an unrehearsed feature was introduced into the rather cheerless programme, and a huge Plum Pudding, wreathed with holly and flaming blue with burnt brandy, was borne into the hall. A deep gasp of joy burst from the assembled guests, and the whole company rose as one man and greeted the joyous vision with "Auld Lang Syne." The eating was yet to come, so the exhilaration was purely moral. The Pudding spoke at once to Memory and to Hope.

There are other adjuncts of Christmas which must by no means be overlooked--Christmas presents, for instance, and Christmas amusements. As to Christmas presents, I regard them as definite means of grace. For weeks--sometimes months--before Christmas returns we concentrate our thought on our friends instead of ourselves. We reflect on people's likes and dislikes, habits, tastes, and occupations. We tax our ingenuity to find gifts suitable for the recipients, and buy objects which we think frankly hideous in the hope of gratifying our unsophisticated friends. Happily the age of ormolu and malachite has passed. We no longer buy blotting-books made unusable by little knobs of enamel on the cover; nor gilt-paper weights which cost a hundred times more than the overweighted letters of a lifetime could amount to. Christmas gifts of this type belong to an unreturning past, and, as Walter Pater said of the wedding-present which he was expected to admire, "Very rich, very handsome, very expensive, I'm sure--but they mustn't make any more of them." Nor will they. The standard of popular taste in the matter of nick-nacks has improved as conspicuously as in that of furniture; and the fancy shops, when spread for the Christmas market, display a really large choice of presents which one can buy without sacrificing self-respect, and give without the appearance of insult.

But Christmas presents, even at a moderate rate of charge, may, if one has a large circle of acquaintance, carry one over the hedge, as Mr. Brooke said; and here is the scope and function of the Christmas Card. Few people have bought more Christmas cards in a lifetime than the present writer; and, out of a vast experience, he would offer one word of friendly counsel to the card-sender. Do not accumulate the cards which you receive this Christmas and distribute them among your friends next Christmas, for, if you do, as sure as fate you will one day return a card to the sender; and old friendships and profitable connexions have been severed by such miscarriages.

Of Christmas amusements I can say little. My notion of them is chiefly derived from "Happy Thoughts," where Byng suggests some "Christmassy sort of thing" to amuse his guests, and fails to gratify even his Half-Aunt. My infancy was spent in the country, remote from Dances and Theatres, Pantomimes and Panoramas. "The Classic Walls of Old Drury" never welcomed me on Boxing Night. Certainly a Christmas Tree and a stocking full of presents appealed to that acquisitive instinct which is fully as strong in infancy as in old age; but, though exceedingly young in my time, I never was young enough to be amused by a Snow-Man or dangerously excited by Blind Man's Buff. Looking back, like Tennyson's "many-wintered crow," on these Christmases of infancy, I have sometimes asked myself whether I lost much by my aloofness from the normal merriment of youth. Mr. Anstey Guthrie knows the secret heart of English boyhood more accurately than most of us, and when I read his description of a Christmas party I am inclined to be thankful that my lot was cast a good many miles beyond the cab-radius.

"Why couldn't you come to our party on Twelfth-night? We had great larks. I wish you'd been there."

"I had to go to young Skidmore's instead," said a pale, spiteful-looking boy with fair hair, carefully parted in the middle. "It was like his cheek to ask me, but I thought I'd go, you know, just to see what it was like."

"What was it like?" asked one or two near him, languidly.

"Oh, awfully slow! They've a poky little house in Brompton somewhere, and there was no dancing, only boshy games and a conjuror, without any presents. And, oh! I say, at supper there was a big cake on the table, and no one was allowed to cut it, because it was hired. They're so poor, you know. Skidmore's pater is only a clerk, and you should see his sisters!"

All my sympathies are with Skidmore, and I think that the fair-haired boy was an unmitigated beast, and cad, and snob. But there is an awful verisimilitude about "Boshy Games and a Conjuror," and I bless the fate which allowed me to grow up in ignorance of Christmas Parties.

XXXVII

NEW YEAR'S DAY

On the 1st of January 1882, Matthew Arnold wrote to his sister: "I think the beginning of a New Year very animating--it is so visible an occasion for breaking off bad habits and carrying into effect good resolutions." This was splendid in a man who had just entered his sixtieth year, and we all should like to share the sentiment; but it is not always easy to feel "animated," even by the most significant anniversaries. Sometimes they only depress; and the effect which they produce depends so very largely on the physical condition in which they find us. Suppose, for instance, that one is a fox-hunter, in the prime of life and the pride of health, with a good string of horses which have been eating their heads off during a prolonged frost. As one wakes on New Year's morning, one hears a delicious dripping from the roof, and one's servant, coming in with tea and letters, announces a rapid thaw. Then "the beginning of a New Year" is "animating" enough; and, while we wash and shave, we pledge ourselves, like Matthew Arnold, to "break off bad habits and carry into effect good resolutions." We remember with shame that we missed three capital days' hunting last November because we let our friends seduce us to their shooting-parties; and we resolve this year to make up for lost time, to redeem wasted opportunities, and not willingly to lose a day between this and Christmas. Such resolutions are truly "animating"; but we cannot all be young or healthy or fox-hunters, and then the anniversary takes a different colour. Perhaps one is cowering over one's study-fire, with "an air of romance struggling through the commonplace effect of a swelled face" (like Miss Hucklebuckle in "The Owlet"), or mumbling the minced remains of our Christmas turkey as painfully as Father Diggory in "Ivanhoe," who was "so severely afflicted by toothache that he could only eat on one side of his face." Not for us, in such circumstances, are "animating" visions of wide pastures, and negotiable fences, and too-fresh hunters pulling one's arms off, and the chime of the "dappled darlings down the roaring blast." Rather does our New Year's fancy lightly turn to thoughts of dentistry and doctoring. We ask ourselves whether the time has not come when art must replace what nature has withdrawn; and, if we form a resolution, it is nothing more heroic than that we will henceforward wear goloshes in damp weather and a quilted overcoat in frost.

But, it may be urged, Matthew Arnold was not a fox-hunter (at least not after his Oxford days), and yet he contrived to feel "animated" by New Year's Day. In his case animation was connected with books.

"I am glad," he wrote, "to find that in the past year I have at least accomplished more than usual in the way of reading the books which at the beginning of the year I put down to be read. I always do this, and I do not expect to read all I put down, but sometimes I fall much too short of what I proposed, and this year things have been a good deal better. The importance of reading, not slight stuff to get through the time but the best that has been written, forces itself upon me more and more every year I live. It is living in good company, the best company, and people are generally quite keen enough, or too keen, about doing that; yet they will not do it in the simplest and most innocent manner by reading. If I live to be eighty, I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications."

We have not quite come to that yet, but we are not far off it, and I should fear that the number of even educated people who occupy New Year's Day in laying down a course of serious study for the next twelve months is lamentably small. But Hunting and Health and Books are not the only topics for New Year's meditation. There is also Money, which not seldom obtrudes itself with a disagreeable urgency. We cast our eye over that little parchment-bound volume which only "Fortune's favoured sons, not we" can regard with any complacency; and we observe, not for the first time, that we have been spending a good deal more than we ought to spend, and are not far from the perilous edge of an overdrawn account. This is "animating" indeed, but only as a sudden stab of neuralgia is animating; and we immediately begin to consider methods of relief. But where are our retrenchments to begin? That is always the difficulty. I remember that after the Cattle Plague of 1865, by which he had been a principal sufferer, the first Lord Tollemache was very full of fiscal reforms. "I ought to get rid of half my servants; but they are excellent people, and it would be very wrong to cause them inconvenience. Horses, too--I really have no right to keep a stud. But nothing would ever induce me to sell a horse, and it seems rather heartless to kill old friends. Then, again, about houses--I ought to leave St. James's Square, and take a house in Brompton. But the Brompton houses are so small that they really would not accommodate my family, and it would not be right to turn the boys into lodgings." And so on and so forth, with a magnificent list of contemplated reforms, which went unfulfilled till things had righted themselves and retrenchment was no longer necessary. In the same spirit, though on a very different scale, the inhabitants of Stuccovia contemplate the financial future which lies ahead of New Year's Day. We must economize--that is plain enough. But how are we to begin?

I must have a new frock-coat very soon, and shall want at least three tweed suits before the autumn. Economy bids me desert Savile Row and try Aaronson in New Oxford Street. "Budge," says the Fiend. "Budge not," replies Self-Respect. Aaronson is remarkable for a fit "that never was on sea or land," and, though his garments are undeniably cheap, they are also nasty, and are worn out before they are paid for. Or perhaps our conscience pricks us most severely in the matter of wine. We will buy no more Pommery and Greno at 98s. a dozen, but will slake our modest thirst with a dry Sillery at 31s. But, after all, health is the first consideration in life, and, unfortunately, these cheap wines never agree with us. The doctor holds them directly responsible for our last attack of eczema or neuritis, and says impressively, "Drink good wine, or none at all--bad wine is poison to you." _Drink none at all._ That is very "animating," but somehow our enfeebled will is unequal to the required resolve; we hold spirit-drinking in detestation; and so, after all, we are driven back to our Pommery. "Surely," as Lamb said, "there must be some other world in which our unconquerable purpose" of retrenchment shall be realized.

Travel, again. Many people spend too much in travel. Can we curtail in that direction? For my own part, I am a Londoner, and am content with life as it is afforded by this wonderful world miscalled a city. But the Family has claims. Some of them suffer from "Liver," and whoso knows what it is to dwell with liverish patients will not lightly run the risk of keeping them from Carlsbad. Others can only breathe on high Alps, and others, again, require the sunshine of the Riviera or the warmth of the Italian Lakes. So all the ways of retrenchment seem barred. Clothes and wine and travel must cost as much as they cost last year, and the only way of escape seems to lie in the steps of the Prince Consort, who, when Parliament reduced his income from the proposed fifty thousand a year to thirty, patiently observed that he should have to give less in subscriptions.

To the Spendthrift, or even to the more modest practitioner who merely lives up to his income, the New Year, as we have seen, offers few opportunities for resolutions of reform; but I fancy that the Skinflint, and his cousin the Screw, find it full of suggestive possibilities. I remember a gentleman of "griping and penurious tendencies" (the phrase is Mr. Gladstone's) telling me when I was a schoolboy that he had resolved to spend nothing with his tailor in the year then dawning. He announced it with the air befitting a great self-surrender, but I thought, as I looked at his clothes, that he was really only continuing the well-established practice of a lifetime. The Screw, of course, is of no one place or age; and here is an excellent citation from the Diary of a Screw--Mr. Thomas Turner--who flourished in Sussex in the eighteenth century: "This being New Year's Day, myself and wife at church in the morning. Collection. My wife gave 6d. But, they not asking me, I gave nothing. Oh! may we increase in faith and good works, and maintain the good intentions we have this day taken up." Those who have tried it say that hoarding is the purest of human pleasures; and I dare say that by the end of the year good Mr. Turner's banking-book was a phantom of delight.

All these reflections, and others like unto them, came whirling on my mind this New Year's Eve; and, just as I was beginning to reduce them to form and figure, the shrill ting-ting of the church-bell pierced the silence of the night. _Watch-Night._ Those who are not the friends of the English Church denounce her as hidebound, immovable, and unreceptive. Here is the--or an--answer to the charge. She has borrowed, originally, from the Swedenborgians and more immediately from the Wesleyans, a religious observance which, though unrecognized in Prayer-book or Kalendar, now divides with the Harvest Festival the honour of being the most popular service in the Church of England.

"Among the promptings of what may be called, in the truest sense of the term, Natural Religion, none surely is more instructive than that which leads men to observe with peculiar solemnity the entrance upon a new year of life. It is, if nothing else, the making a step in the dark. It is the entrance upon a new epoch in existence, of which the manifold "changes and chances" prevent our forecasting the issue. True, the line of demarcation is purely arbitrary; yet there are few, even of the most thoughtless, who can set foot across the line which separates one year from another without feeling in some degree the significance of the act. It would seem that this passing season of thoughtfulness was one of those opportunities which no form of religion could afford to miss. And yet, for a long time, that which may perhaps without offence be termed Ecclesiasticism sternly refused to recognize this occasion. The line was rigidly drawn between the Civil New Year and the Church's New Year. We were told that Advent was the beginning of our Sacred Year, and that the evening before the First Sunday in Advent was the time for those serious thoughts and good resolutions which rightly accompany a New Year."

Yes-so we were taught; and there was a great deal to be said, ecclesiastically, for the teaching. Only, unfortunately, no one believed it. We went to bed quite unmoved on Saturday evening, December 1, 1906. No era seemed to have closed for us, no era to have opened: there was nothing to remember, nothing to anticipate; nothing to repent and nothing to resolve. It is otherwise to-night.[11] The "church-going bell" does not tingle in vain. Old men and maidens, young men and children are crowding in. I involve myself in an ulster and a comforter, and join the pilgrim-throng.

[11] December 31, 1906.

XXXVIII

PETS

My suggestive friend has taken to postcards, and his style, never diffuse, has become as curt as that of Mr. Alfred Jingle. "Why not Pets?" he writes; and the suggestion gives pause.

When Mrs. Topham-Sawyer accepted the invitation to the Little Dinner at Timmins's, she concluded her letter to Rosa Timmins: "With a hundred kisses to your dear little _pet_." She said _pet_, we are told, "because she did not know whether Rosa's child was a girl or a boy; and Mrs. Timmins was very much pleased with the kind and gracious nature of the reply to her invitation." My mind misgave me that my friend might be using the word _pet_ in the same sense as Mrs. Topham-Sawyer, and inviting me to a discussion of the Crêche or the Nursery. As my views of childhood are formed on those of Herod and Solomon, I hastened to decline so unsuitable a task, whereupon my friend, for all reply, sent me the following excerpt from an evening paper:--

"The Westminster Cat Exhibition, which will be held in the Royal Horticultural Society's Hall, Vincent Square, Westminster, on January 10 and 11, will afford an opportunity to all who love the domestic cat to aid in improving its lot through the agency of Our Dumb Friends' League, which it is desired to benefit, not only by their presence on the occasion, but by contributing suitable specimens to the 'Gift Class' which will form part of the show, and be offered for sale in aid of the League during the time the exhibition is open. Children will be invited, for the first time, to enter into the competition with their pets for suitable prizes, and thus, it is hoped, increase their interest in and affection for domestic pets."

Here I felt myself on more familiar ground. For I, too, have been young. I have trafficked in squirrels and guinea-pigs, have invested my all in an Angora rabbit, and have undergone discipline for bringing a dormouse into school. These are, indeed, among the childish things which I put away when I became a Fifth Form boy; but their memory is sweet--sweeter, indeed, than was their actual presence. For the Cat, with which my friend seems chiefly to concern himself, I have never felt, or even professed, any warm regard. I leave her to Dick Whittington and Shakespeare, who did so much to popularize her; to Gray and Matthew Arnold and "C. S. C.," who have drawn her more sinister traits. Gray remarks, with reference to "the pensive Selima" and her hopeless struggles in the tub of goldfish, that "a favourite has no friend." Archbishop Benson rendered the line

"Delicias dominæ cetera turba fugit."

I join the unfriendly throng, and pass to other themes.

The pet-keeping instinct, strong in infancy but suppressed by the iron traditions of the Public School, not seldom reasserts itself in the freedom of later life. "The Pets of History" would be a worthy theme for a Romanes Lecture at Oxford; and, if the purview were expanded so as to include the Pets of Literature, it would be a fit subject for the brilliant pen of Mr. Frederic Harrison. We might conveniently adopt a Wordsworthian classification, such as "Pets belonging to the period of Childhood," "Juvenile Pets," "Pets and the Affections," "Pets of the Fancy," and "Pets of the Imagination." In the last-named class a prominent place would be assigned to Heavenly Una's milk-white lamb and to Mary's snowy-fleeced follower. "Pets of the Fancy" has, I must confess, something of a pugilistic sound, but it might fairly be held to include the tame eagle which Louis Napoleon, when resident in Carlton Gardens, used to practise in the basement for the part which it was to play in his descent on Boulogne. Under "Pets and the Affections" we should recall Chaucer's "Prioresse"--

"Of smale houndes hadde sche, that sche fedde
With rostud fleissh, and mylk, and wastel bredde."

The Pets of Tradition would begin with St. John's tame partridge, and would include an account of St. Francis preaching to the birds. The Pets of History would no doubt involve some reference to the Bruce's spider and Sir Isaac Newton's Diamond and the Duc D'Enghien's spaniel; and, if so belittling a title as "pet" may be applied to so majestic an animal as the horse, we should trace a long line of equine celebrities from Bucephalus and Sorrel to Marengo and Copenhagen. The Pets of Literature are, of course, a boundless host--chargers like White Surrey, and coursers like Roland; hounds like Keeldar and falcons like Cheviot--to say nothing of Mrs. Merdle's parrot, or Miss Tox's canary, or Mr. Kipling's appalling monkey, who murdered his owner's wife.

Wordsworth alone is responsible for a whole menagerie of pets--for a White Doe, for a greyhound called Dart, for "Prince," "Swallow," and "Little Music," let alone the anonymous dog who was lost with his master on Helvellyn. The gentle Cowper had his disgusting hares and his murderous spaniel Beau. Byron's only friend was a Newfoundland dog called Boatswain. The horses of fiction are a splendid stud. Ruksh leads the procession in poetry, and Rosinante in prose. A true lover of Scott can enumerate twenty different horses, of strongly marked individuality and appropriate names. Whoso knows not Widderin and his gallop from the bushrangers has yet to read one of the most thrilling scenes in fiction; and I think that to this imaginary stud may be fairly added the Arabian mare which Lord Beaconsfield thought he had ridden for thirty miles across country in the strongly-enclosed neighbourhood of Southend.