Date: 1913-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Essays; Social Criticism; Social Commentary
Description: Reflections on a wide assortment of topics, presenting the author’s opinions with wit and clever humor.
Publisher: MobileRead
Rights: Public domain in countries where the copyright term is “Life+80” or less.

On
Money
and Other Essays

G. S. STREET

•   CONTENTS

ON MONEY AND OTHER ESSAYS

… About This eBook
Money
Nerves
On a Race-Course
“Thence by Omnibus”
Fallen Among Thieves
Dear People
Dreadful People
While I Wait
An Evil Tongue
A Drop of Comfort
What Might Have Been
Strength and Weakness
Slush and Gush
An Acquittal and a Charge
Ballets and Philistines
An Old Grievance
Men’s Clothes
Pavement Reflections
The Lime-Light Man
The Jew in Our Social Life
The Social English
Another Conversation
George Wyndham
… Editing Notes

•   ABOUT
THIS EBOOK

On Money and Other Essays

BY  G. S. Street (1867–1936)

Reflections on a wide assortment of topics, presenting the author’s opinions with wit and clever humor.

~~~

An excerpt from “An Old Grievance”:

I do not complain that I have known hardly a spring or a summer free from the uproar of builders in the ordinary working hours. It has prevented my achieving any really solid result, but what of that?
[…]
The grievance I urge affects thousands and thousands of people;
[…]
I refer, of course, to the [early] hour at which building begins.
[…]

If we were really a civilised community, knowing how to give and take, the remedy would long ago have been taken voluntarily. Since we are not, a short Act should be passed empowering a two-thirds majority of householders, flat-occupiers and lodgers in any given district to prevent the uproar before eight. But there’s the old obstacle of our individualism run mad, run into anarchy. Annoy your neighbour as you please, so long as you do not assault his person. Some time ago a young man, driven mad by this torture, went out with his revolver and winged a workman. I hope I shall not be driven to that….

George Slythe Street (18 July 1867 – 31 October 1936) was a British critic, journalist and novelist. He was associated with William Ernest Henley and the “counter-Decadents” on the staff of the National Observer. In 1914 he was appointed to the office of the Lord Chamberlain as Examiner of Plays.

Street is perhaps best known for his 1894 novel, The Autobiography of a Boy, which satirized contemporary aesthetes Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, and the Decadent movement of the late nineteenth century. [—Wikipedia]

This ebook was created by E.C.M. for MobileRead.com, February 2019, and may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.

This book was first published in 1914. The text is in the public domain in countries where the copyright term is “Life+80” or less.

Click here for editing notes.

•   MONEY

This essay is not about the theory of banking or the ratio of exchanges or the power of wealth in modern politics, or anything of that sort. It is about money, simple money, cash, coin, the stuff.

I am aware that, according to the philosophers, money is not money at all. It is a means to an end. It is comfort, power, and so forth. But it is possible, and not at all unusual, to think of it merely as itself, as a heap of gold or packets of banknotes, or a balance at the bank, and it is thus that I propose to consider it, at least in the first place, and as closely as I can with my frailty of thought, which will run hither and thither. Other writers who have taken money for their subject have never done this; they have shot away in no time into commerce or sociology, and the glittering heaps and crackling packets have become mere symbols. Yet I am sure most people’s thoughts stop short at mere money now and then and for a time. If you have a chance of making a thousand pounds, you think, no doubt, of paying a debt or buying a motor car or doing good with it; but you also, surely, stop short sometimes at thinking of what a splendid and noble thing is a thousand pounds and of how jolly it will be to have it. (Forgive my mentioning so small a sum, reader, if you are a plutocrat. I am not.) And when you do so stop it is a pity that no one should have provided you with a true philosophy of the matter, and I think no one has. I have but a few fancies in my head, but such as they are it is a pleasure to offer them.

It has always seemed to me to be as superficial as it is obvious to point out that money is merely a means to an end. All sorts of things are means to ends and are ends in themselves as well. A sword is a means of killing a man, but when a smith is making a sword it is an end in itself to him. (That sounds the sort of thing Aristotle told me in my youth: it is hard to be original.) The excellence of the sword is in the fine temper of its blade and so on, and that is an end to the maker. Even so money to the money-maker is an end in itself, and the excellence of money is in its amount: a vulgar excellence, but I come to explain money, not to praise it. Therefore, it is not so completely logical as it seems to exhort the money-maker always to remember that money is a means to an end and to rebuke him for going on after a reasonable end has been attained. In any human pursuit, be it business or profession or sport or game, most of those eminently successful have always thought of the matter in hand and not of a remoter end. The advocate who is thinking of his reputation and prospect of being Lord Chancellor is less likely to win causes than he who is giving all his wits to the points of the suit and is finding his keenest joy in its chances and quibbles for their own sake. The general who wins battles may be inspired by his country’s safety or glory, but while he fights his soul is given to outmanoeuvring the other general. The golfer who golfs merely for air and exercise—poor abused souls who are made over to golf, you see I find an excuse for you, as for the inveterate money-makers. But by money-makers we mean money-makers, those whose sole object in their business is money, and that is less often the case than is commonly supposed. It is true that in any calling where a man has no money at all, or next to none, his first object is probably to make some. But when the point of decent comfort and freedom from anxiety has been gained, money becomes much of an accident and a by-product. I have never joined, for example, with other unpopular writers in denouncing our popular brothers as mean souls who sacrifice art to pelf, for I believe that they simply do what is most congenial to them and fitted to their aptitudes and that it happens to be profitable. I make no imputation on their souls, and will drink their health if the wine be good, so to say. But when money is the sole object, necessarily, in share-dealing and so forth, then, on the other hand, I believe that the remoter ends of increased luxury and “position” and all that are not thought of by the money-maker, though very present to the minds of his family, after the same point of comfort has been gained. He simply goes on making money because it is the game which engrosses him, as it were billiards. And herein is the explanation of his often-observed meanness. It has often been noticed that rich men who are generous are nearly always men who have inherited their money, not men who have made and are making it. In their case money is not part of their game; they can take a detached view of it and value services it may do other people higher than the possession of it to superfluity. With the others their quantity of money means the points they have scored in their soul-engrossing game, and to ask the pure money-maker to give away a tithe of what he has is to ask the billiard-player who has made a hundred to be content with ninety recorded as his best score. When he buys pictures they are still part of his capital, though I often wonder how he can bring his soul to forego the interest their worth would have fetched in his market…. Think less hardly of the passion of avarice when the avaricious man owes his hoard to his own cunning and skill. He is merely a sort of golfer.

This suggestion towards the psychology of the pure money-maker is not irrelevant, but I must keep closer now to the contemplation of the stuff itself. Beautiful, terrifying sight and thought! I wish I could drop into poetry over it. Mind you, I mean the actual thing. If you like to be reasonable and commonplace, you may say that the significance lies in what the thing can do, the peace of mind it may bring, the comfort, the sight of beautiful cities, ballets, pictures, the succouring of those we want to succour, or in what it saves us from: all very true, but there is such a crowd of these considerations that they all merge together, the mind does not separate them, and what you look at or think of, being a symbol of so much, ceases to be a symbol at all and is itself a strong, living entity, mystic, wonderful. Cash a cheque for ten pounds, if you can, reader, and hold the golden things in your hand and gaze at them. Are you not strangely moved? No? Then you have not been for days without a much-needed half-crown. But for me, at least, there is fear as well in the sight, a vague sense of danger as well as of strength and beauty, and that can hardly be rationally explained—unless one has stolen the money—and clearly shows the mystic nature of the thing. Why not? The use of this precious metal by humanity for so many thousands of years as power has begotten an intimate correspondence between our minds and it, and banknotes or a balance at the bank (which are almost, though not quite, as frightening to me) stand immediately for it even to the least active imagination. We inherit certain feelings about it through innumerable generations (or if we don’t the learned have given us much more unlikely things to believe), and we cannot analyse them all.

But why fear? I protest I do not know, unless extreme unfamiliarity with money gives me such a sense of fear when I have any that some folk have when they visit a foreign country. I do not know if it is common, but I am sure poor X. died of it. X. was a painter who painted pictures quite satisfactory to himself, but extremely unmarketable. He was always “in difficulties,” but what with a little money of his own and a rare sale, managed to be, though never up to time, never fatally behind it. Still, he was always worried about the means of finding the next necessary five-pound note and generally preoccupied with that uncomfortable subject. Well, X. was left a legacy, not an enormous sum, but enough to put him straight and make him a few thousands to the good. I met him a week later and he told me he had hardly slept for a week. He said the reaction from his previous worries and the excitement of possessing, for the first time, money he was at liberty to spend as he liked, excited him too much. A week later he was still sleepless and very ill. He was haunted by the idea that his bank would break; he did not really mind if he did lose his money, but the thought of the possibility got on his nerves. He kept on putting it into this or that investment and taking it out again and hoarding it in notes and putting it back into his bank—all was no good. It was too much to spend casually, and he did not want to throw it away like a lunatic. He slept worse and worse, had a bad break-down and is now dead. X.’s thousands worried him into his grave, and I am sure it was the vague fear and terror of them that killed him.

I suggest with diffidence an explanation of this fear. There is a mystic attraction between money and some natures, and a mystic repulsion between it and others, as we all know. We all know money flies to some people, not by their money-making skill, but apparently by accident, and flies away from others. Rich people are generally lucky in gambling, poor people always unlucky. This is so universally recognised that if a poor person wins a lottery there are paragraphs in the papers about it—never when a rich person wins, for that is too ordinary. Well, sometimes, very seldom but sometimes, this mysterious correspondence is disturbed by some cause beyond our knowledge and money goes to an alien nature. Immediately it is unhappy and rebellious—one or the other or both are, I do not know—there is a disturbance in the natural order of the universe. It is as though poison were introduced into a body. If the body is fortunate it throws out the poison; if it does not, it dies. I think, though, it is the money rather than the nature which is distressed; it loathes being with the wrong nature. It inspired, probably, Charles Lamb’s friend to say that money kept for three days stank: his body rejected the poison. It filled poor X.’s soul with fear, so that he died. Shall we ever understand how it really works? I wonder if my own vague terror means that a legacy would kill me as it killed X. I wonder … but I am a brave man.

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   NERVES

Whether it was due to a touch of influenza or too much work or not enough smoke I know not, but I lately had an attack of nerves. That is one of the many evils which we arrogantly call the disease of the age, but of course civilised humanity has always suffered from its nerves, and even savage humanity, overstrained with prolonged hunting or fighting, must have been irritable the next day. With me such an attack is rare, or at least such an attack as that of late, when it was really a severe effort to endure the futilities and ineptitudes of my fellow-creatures, so that, unlike the habitual neuropath, I can note and record how it affected me, can moralise about it, can walk round it, as it were, and philosophise. The pleasure I offer my readers is that of recognition. It is not a sublime pleasure, but it is a considerable one and explains why anybody reads novels of everyday life or eighteenth-century diaries of travels on the Continent or why anybody goes to the average drawing-room comedy. So “How true!” will one reader say, and “I’m just like that,” another will say, and we ought to be quite happy and comfortable together. And the pleasure I propose to myself is pure egotism.

I am not in the least ashamed of the attack, convinced that it came from no fault of mine. Considering, indeed, the trials to which circumstances and man subject me, I believe my cheerfulness and equanimity to be merely amazing. Other people, with less fortitude and self-control, succumb more easily, and I am too much of a philosopher to blame them; but I do ask them, when I have my next attack, not to be so snappy and intolerant with me. The very people to whose bad nerves I am as a rule a sort of unpaid doctor with my solicitude and tolerance, are the first to cry out against me, when for once in a way I give them back a bit of their own. And that is my first observation; that people in a state of nerves expect everyone else to have nerves of iron. I was like that myself. The idea that anyone else should be bored or irritated by my fretfulness and irritability under the common little trials of daily life seemed to me the last inhuman outrage possible.

It would be superfluous to remark the examples of things always irritating which are made worse by nerves; that is too obvious an effect even for an essayist; we must consider sensations and moods which nerves really bring into being. One exception, however, I would make by your leave, because it gives me an opportunity of saying something by way of an irrelevant digression which otherwise would have to be turned into a whole article by itself—a thrifty proceeding but opposed to my sense of fairness. I have written at one time or another so many articles, letters to the editor, and so forth, upon the insane worship of individualism, which makes us allow ourselves to be driven into madhouses and early graves by the untimely noises of builders—I have written so many articles and letters about it in vain, and in vain appealed so often to the sympathy of healthily sleeping and unimaginative friends, that I am ashamed to inflict another whole article on yet another editor: besides, he might have the impertinence not to print it. But tortured by builders beyond the usual extent during my attack of nerves, I made a study of their methods, which resulted in an interesting discovery. You may have noticed, when a house is being built or repaired or demolished in your neighbourhood, that work which is not in tolerably noisy for the rest of the day makes a fiendish and inconceivable uproar in the early morning. You have wondered at the unmathematical coincidence that the earliest work is always the noisiest, and so used I to wonder until I found out the truth. It is not a coincidence at all, and it is not even work, that early uproar. It is a ritual which comes right down from the Middle Ages, when it was instituted to awaken to their tasks the unhappy serfs whom the curfew had sent to bed. Its name is Hell Let Loose, and it is performed by banging on iron girders, beating any metal things handy against one another, kicking those otherwise purposeless wooden erections you must have seen, shouting all together, making any other noise ingenuity and malice may suggest. It is useless to try to abolish this custom; the workmen enjoy it, disliking that anyone else should sleep while they have to be up, and cling to the tradition; their Trade Union is too strong, and more likely to reimpose the curfew on the rest of us than let us sleep our morning sleep…. A frank digression, which I hope you will pardon: I thought you might like to know.

As I said, I will not dwell on the commonly annoying things which nerves make worse—the malice of inanimate objects, the dullness of talkative humanity, the rain at precisely the most inconvenient moment, the fatuity of articles in newspapers, all the common afflictions which nerves merely make to appear more insistent and harder to bear. The new effects of course vary with all of us: I can but mention mine on the probability that some of my readers have the same. The most marked is an absolute hatred of humanity in the mass. As a rule, I rather like it, in my confounded superior, observant way. I console myself for the discomfort of tubes and buses by the thought that there is something inhumanly aloof and haughty in the expensive taxicab. If some wise measure of Tariff Reform—or some folly of Free Trade—were to export two-thirds of our population to Canada and we were again a mainly agricultural community, England would be a pleasanter place, no doubt, but there would still be crowds in popular resorts. They are inevitable, and I don’t mind them; provided that they are not too stuffy or throaty or expectoratory, they do not spoil my enjoyment of theatres or processions through the streets. My attack of nerves made them merely loathsome. I shrank through back streets, and would not have gone to a successful play or a race meeting if anyone had offered to pay for me. A crowded omnibus seemed to be so horrible, so morbidly suggestive of the terror and horror of too prolific nature, that I got out and walked in the rain. That was one new effect; a second marked one was hatred of individual strangers. Normally, no doubt, we pass from time to time in the street men and women whom a beneficent autocrat would have slain at once, merely on account of their arrogant, insolent, esurient, predatory, vile, repulsive faces, but we do not see very many of them, and I for one would kill very few fellow-creatures—outside my acquaintance—in any ordinary week. In my nervous state I saw those better-dead brutes by the shoal and would have ticked off lives as you play the piano. In truth an unusually kindly nature was warped. (Unusually kindly, I am sure. I notice it in the case of the rich. Most people hate the rich, apart from those they happen to like individually, merely because they are rich, and it is human nature to have an extra glass of port after dinner when a millionaire has been run over by an omnibus, whereas I would only fine him.) Dreadful to think one’s soul may be so ill affected by some trumpery physical cause, is it not?

Things which would have been amusing at any other time drove me wild. For example, I read an interview with Mr. Hichens, in which that novelist—-whose books no one enjoys more than I—was made to say: “It always gives me pleasure to depict the female character.” I don’t suppose he can have said it, but anyhow some human brain did conceive the phrase, and there is something so sublimely bland and fatuous about it, as though Mr. Hichens calmly and easily and with pleasure achieved that which has called out at its strongest the genius of Tolstoy or of Meredith, something so monstrously inclusive, as though he thought all women were alike and could be “depicted” at a sitting, that any power of humour and irony in me foundered in amazement as I read. But what would have delighted me at any other time infuriated me at this. So did some things which are wont to be only tire some, like the humbug of politicians, about which I got as angry as Mr. Belloc. Moreover—but you see the sort of change made in me by this attack of nerves. I shall be slow to judge such symptoms in others in future as marks of a permanently embittered nature. As for all the little exaggerated irritations and fussinesses with which I have always borne in them, I shall continue to bear with them in increased understanding. But I repeat that I look for reciprocity.

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   ON A RACE-COURSE

In civilised societies, as they call themselves—it is a pathetically conceited expression—what is most disastrously absent from the lives of average men and women, with the daily round and common task, is excitement. If I am never to be dogmatic again, I will be dogmatic about that. Sameness and the lack of expectancy dull the brain and make sluggish the blood. Variety, in itself a mild excitement at least, uncertainty, if there is any chance of a good result, surprise—these quicken our senses and stir our thoughts. Oh, has not one nearly shrieked aloud with dullness when for some days running one’s work has been the same and one’s leisure spent in the same way with the same people—if they happened not to be our chosen—and nothing novel has happened nor anything decided which we cared should be thus or otherwise? Yet your and my work, reader, has some variety and interest in it and we have many entertaining acquaintances. Think of the clerk and the artisan, in this day of minutely specialised employment, and the chances of variety and interest in their work, and think of the narrow orbit into which circumstances most often thrust their leisure. Can you deny that the crying need of their lives is excitement, and yet more excitement?

So cannot I, and herein I find the explanation, if not the excuse, of our working-man’s habit of betting. Of course it would be much better if the excitement he sought and found were of an intellectual sort. If he could get it out of refuting Nietzsche, or discovering a new element, or writing a perfect sonnet, it would be better. But since he is what he is, and his circumstances are what they are, and the need of which he is most conscious is money, he seeks excitement in gambling. I won’t repeat the truism that all life is more or less of a gamble: the degree makes all the difference, I admit. Still, there is a vast amount of gambling in the world other than betting on races, and if you say that much of it is less sordid than this, because it goes with large ambitions, I ask you why you should deny them to the working-man who bets. If I understand his psychology at all there is generally at the back of his mind the hope of miraculous and accumulative good luck: that his five shillings will make a pound, and the pound ten, and the ten a hundred, and the hundred a thousand, and so on, until he is fabulously rich. Oh, yes, indeed, there is a sort of romance about him, I assure you. And think how sorely he wants money; how many even to his vision are the enviable things he could buy with it. It is not difficult to explain the wide-spread evil of betting.

Gamble for gamble, there is to be said for betting, even for betting done away from the course, that there is, or can be, more imagination about it than about almost any other form. To draw a given card at poker, or to see the ball at roulette settle on a given number, is the excitement of the chance and nothing more: apart from that it is jejune and childish. A man who gambles in rubber shares may think of the Congo with its beautiful associations, but most stocks and shares necessarily mean nothing to the gambler but his profit or loss. To hear that a given horse has won a race is to see in the mind’s eye a beautiful animal with a skilful rider in a gay jacket tearing along the grass. The betting man reads the account of the race, and, unless he has never seen racing at all and has no interest in horses except as gambling machines—in which case I agree there is nothing to be said for him in this connection—he can picture the whole affair; how there was a perfect start, or how this or that horse was left at the post; how the horse of his choosing made all the running, or came with a rush at the end; how it won easily, or was only- beaten by a head. Some part he may have in the wonderful exhilaration there is in watching a close finish. There is, or may be more, much more, even in betting at home than the mere material result. It is as though we could gamble on the last act of a play, if it were not known and if there were ever any doubt.

It is natural, then, that gambling should be wide-spread in the grey and inadequate lives of the unfortunately average English, and in my opinion it is not necessarily or wholly an evil thing, since I believe in the uses of excitement. Further, there is something to be said for betting on races -as a form of gambling. The real mischief of it is that there is far too much of it; I do not mean that it is too widely spread, but that the same people bet too often. Some people will bet on anything, and I am told that in the North it is common for people to bet all day long, on anything about which there can be a doubt, like the bloods of the eighteenth century at Brooks’s or White’s. Most people, however, will only bet when there are professional facilities, and it is a pity—so far as this is concerned—that there should be horse-races—if you include steeple-chasing—nearly every weekday of the year. There is far more betting than can be wholesome. Young clerks, and others, are for ever considering chances and following tips and waiting for results, and that is altogether vicious. It would be well if they could bet only on the principal races—the “ante-post” betting races, the Lincoln Handicap, Derby, Hunt Cup, and so on. They could study the form of horses—an interesting and delusive occupation—at their leisure, and the losses would not come with too fatal a frequency. But I am inclined to suggest, as an alternative, that the stay-at-home betting people should be deprived of the imaginative pleasures I have described, and that the State, recognising that gambling is inevitable and accepting (I suggest this modestly) my opinion that in the dreadful dullness of our average lives some amount of it is even helpful, should re-establish public lotteries. It is painful to me to shock people, and I think that fewer will be shocked now than a few years ago, for the mixture of Pharisaism and individual ism run mad, which forbids the State to control any human interests disapproved of by anybody, is losing its attractiveness. The lotteries might happen often enough to keep the poor gambler “going,” as it were, and not often enough to take too much of his attention; say once a week. For a few shillings a month he might indulge his golden dreams, and the odds against him would be fairer, on the whole. All would be better for him. But I doubt I shall be pooh-poohed.

Now, this wide-spread betting of the working-man and others on races they never see is a parasite of racing, has nothing vital to do with it, and is not at all necessary for the continuance of a fine sport. I have chatted about it at so much length, partly, of course, because I had something to say and it was a convenient opportunity to say it, and partly that the matter—with its undoubted evils—should not depress your mind when you come racing with me. We have cleared it out of the way and can take our pleasure with an untroubled mind and a free conscience. Let us go.

I do not propose to eulogise racing for its services to the breed of horses or for the employment it gives to thousands of people. I am just slightly afraid that some obscure fallacy may lurk in that, and, in any case, it is done sufficiently by the enthusiasts of the sporting papers. I wish to eulogise it only as a fine sport and a jolly and wholesome holiday. If it is your business, reader, by any chance—if you are a professional backer—you will read me with a supercilious air, I am afraid. I don’t give you back the raised eyebrow, for I think there are many as useless businesses as yours, which has the advantages of fresh air, intelligence in judgment, swiftness of decision, and other valuable qualities. I much prefer you to a publisher. But I talk of racing as a holiday amusement, representing in a humble way many thousands who take that view of it. And I think the best way of praising is to record my own happy emotions and impressions when I go racing.

Truth to tell, I can make no claim to count for anything as a racing man. I am too poor to join racing clubs or to go on long journeys. A Cockney race-goer, in fact, who has been, when by chance I had the means for so mild a spree, to a good many meetings near London. One, however, who takes some trouble about the matter, who has looked up the record of the horses running and knows something of what to expect. I like my companions to be holiday-makers, but holiday-makers with a purpose and an intelligent regard to the matter in hand. I don’t like them to be too holidayish. The Derby crowd is a great sight to see once in a way, but it distracts one and makes things too difficult. A fashionable crowd, too, is a nuisance. But I love my fellow race-goers to Kempton or even to Alexandra Park. It is all nonsense to talk of their rowdyism. They are much too intent on the real pleasure of the occasion for that, and I have never been pushed about so much, even at the railway station going to and fro, as I have on a crowded night at the opera. There is some amount of chaff, but, on the whole, if there is a fault, it is a too great solemnity. So … give me a meeting near London, where a sovereign takes me into the ring and paddock and everywhere except the members’ enclosure, and the company of other humble seekers of interest and excitement in the open air. Give me, above all, Newbury, which is not very near, but it is brought near by a practical railway company; and, while I am about it, a day at Newbury last year will serve my purpose as well as anything else. So it’s ho! for my experiences and emotions at Newbury. I won’t apologise for egotism. It would be easy to write that you feel this or that one does that; but I am honouring you with a rather intimate revelation, and I will stick to the honest first person.

The hour’s journey down was made in silence. I was without a friend—my few racing friends go by members’ trains and only patronise me in the paddock—and that was the case with all but two of us in my carriage, and, friends or strangers, we were all intent on the programme and the sporting papers. Not a jolly company, perhaps, but at least a decorous one. Newbury station and refreshing air, and the brief and crowded, but not hustled, walk to the course, payment, and entrance to the enclosure, and then, ah, then! I felt my spirits rise indeed. Whatever the sombre or stupid chances of life behind and before me, here at least was a respite, an assurance of some happy hours. Win or lose, they would be happy, though I do not mean to deny that the chance of winning had something to do with the exhilaration…. The paddock at Newbury greets one immediately on one’s arrival—everything is comfortably compact there—and I noticed a few dear horses being led about in it. I glanced affectionately at them, but hurried past them to refresh my forces with washing and beef and beer, and then to the ring, for the first race was near being run. I notice that we all enter the ring importantly, as though we were going to ruin it, even though our bet, like mine, is to be but half a sovereign. Up the steps and into the ring. Ah! that babel of bawling bookmakers! I remember my friend, George Steevens, wrote wonderingly of it, but he was not a lover of racing, and, I doubt, missed the sweetness of the noise. Surely a great triumph of the soul over the senses, for I hate noises more than most people: the motor omnibuses make the main thoroughfares of London a torture to me, I could slay all cab-whistlers, and my nerves are shattered by piano organs. But the “Six to four the field,”  “Three to one this,”  “Five to one that,” as one bookmaker goes steadily down the list at the top of his brazen lungs, the frenzied “Two to one the field,” of a more daring colleague—ah! that is music to me. I had chosen my horse and approached a bookie, who stopped his shouting to answer curtly, “Six to one.”  “Oh, I want eight.”  “Dessay you do, so do I. Two to one the field, four to one bar one,” he resumed his shouting. “Seven?”  “Very well, seven to you”—this compliment always sounds ironical to me. I produced the first of my few poor half-sovereigns and went down the ring close to the course to see the race.

It was an unimportant affair of two-year-olds, and I fully expected my outsider to lose: still a race is a race. Down they cantered, and I observed my animal with a moderate satisfaction: still, a race is a race, and there is always hope when moderate two-year-olds are concerned, and as we waited for the start my excitement grew. Ah, that waiting for the start! In a race one has really studied and stands to win something comfortable on, a race—let us be just to ourselves—which has a strong sporting interest for the excellence of its horses, how intense, almost intolerable, are those waiting moments! More especially in a short race, when it will be all over in less than a minute from the clang of the starting bell; in a longer the start is less important, and one has not the same “Now! Now!” feeling when it happens. In a short sprint race, when the fateful bell clangs, one’s eyes seek intently one’s horse’s colours to see if it is well away: then one is conscious of nothing else in the world but those horses, in the few moments before they are thundering on one in a rush, and then what ecstasy if one’s own is leading or making a race of it. “Go on! Go on! Go on!” some of us can’t help shouting, and it is always wonderful to me how any of us refrain, but all are willing that “go on” with bursting hearts. I have written as though I owned race-horses myself, a lot that is never likely to be mine; but in truth when one has looked over an animal carefully in the paddock and backed it, one’s own it is for the time being. “Go on! Go on!” The horse you have backed is not leading—no, but see, it is close up, it “challenges” with a brilliant rush—yes, it got its head in front, surely, didn’t it? No one about you is quite sure; a really feverish moment till the number goes up on the board—then, “Thank Goodness!” or “Alas!” let us say. It is mere human nature, not racing nature only, believe me, that the chagrin of neighbouring losers pleases one if one has backed the winner, more especially if it was an outsider which just beat the favourite. I remember a little two-year-old race at Epsom one day last year. The favourite was at too short a price for me to back, and I chose an outsider, a filly who was running her first race, on her comely appearance, her breeding, which was first rate, and the fact that the draw had given her the place next the rails, an important thing at Epsom. As they tore up to the ring I was sure my filly was winning, but two rough fellows beside me thought otherwise, and it was a near-run thing.

“Favourite wins!” shouted one of them. “It’s all right. We win!”

“No, she don’t,” said I. I couldn’t help myself.

“No, she don’t!” wailed the other one, “that ——— on the rails wins, by ———, it does!”

And so it did.

“What is it?” he growled, and I informed him blandly, pleased, as I frankly admit, with his displeasure.

I declare there is no such excitement, of a common and easily bought kind, as a close finish in a horse-race. I don’t compare it with the great excitements of life, with first love accepted, with a chief place in the honours list, with the attainment of a life’s ambition, though with some keen sportsmen or heavy gamblers it may have gone near one of them. But for an excitement that may be cheaply bought most days of the year, and which at least need leave no bad taste afterwards, commend me to a horse-race over and over again. How many times over again, I would not say. With me, as I have explained, the pleasure is infrequent, and I know not if repetition might ever stale it; not, I am sure, for many a long day’s racing. And I maintain that such an excitement, such an intense sensation, in a life that must needs contain a good deal of tedious sameness, is wholesome and vitalising and altogether jolly. I trust the kill-joys will not stop it in my time…. This first race at Newbury was not such an exciting affair, however, but neither was it much of a disappointment, and when it was over I made my way cheerfully to the paddock.

At a businesslike meeting, such as this, everybody looks knowing in the paddock. Nobody lounges about as though at a garden-party, listlessly killing time. People walk rather quickly to the place where the horses for the next race are being led round, consult their cards eagerly to identify a horse by the number on his boy’s jacket, and then look critically at him—oh, so critically!—their heads on one side, their brows puckered. I wonder with how many of them it is all humbug. I confess it is all humbug, or nearly all humbug, with me, who was not brought up among horses, and do not readily seize on their points for myself. Vanity, dear reader, mere vanity: this knowingness is in the atmosphere. Round and round go the horses, knowing and yet more knowing become the spectators. They speak to each other in low tones, they nod significantly, they change their positions to get a better view. Then one by one the horses are led away to be saddled for the race, and we follow the animals which interest us most, and as we watch the saddling and patting and soothing our knowingness becomes wonderful to behold. Of course, some of us do really understand the points of a horse, and even I can tell the difference, if I can do no more, between one which is highly trained and one which is in a very untrained state. Moreover, it has once or twice happened to me that having thought of backing a horse for some reason or other—probably a bad reason—I have found it in the paddock and been struck with a keen or businesslike appearance, and made up my mind, and the horse won. Surely after that I have a right to a knowing air?

But the saddling is done, the numbers are up, and we knowing ones make our way back to the ring, I fingering my second half-sovereign in my pocket, and the roar of voices meets us on the top of the stairs. And so it went on, ring, race, paddock, some half-dozen times over. One race only, that day, went in my favour, but that happily was enough to prevent the weak-minded repining at fortune men call regret for folly, for I won more than I lost altogether. And so back to London, in a carriage full of tired, but wholesomely tired race-goers. We had been in the open air all the afternoon; our spirits had risen before every race, and if they fell, ’twas but to rise again before the next; we had had sensations, excitements, and in our simple way we had lived. For my part as I left Paddington I felt I could face imminent worries and failures with a serener spirit. The moment of release and forgetting was over, but at least that moment I had had, and I blessed the jolly sport and detested those who would end it.

Are you a race-goer, reader? You are not, and all this makes no appeal to you, this praise of mine, this brief record of impressions? Then, alas! I have done my work ill. But if you are one, reader, at least you will sympathise with my effort and forgive its falling short: for you that was inevitable.

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   “THENCE BY OMNIBUS”

High up in the air, a long way off, appears a black dot, and those of us who are not too excited for utterance rapturously cheer it. Nearer it comes, and might be some strange bird; nearer it comes, and, lo! it is a man; down with a swoop it comes, and we applaud the individual and expected man; he is standing on Mother Earth, and the shouting assemblage surges towards him. Once more, but such a brief time from the first accomplishment, the dream of mankind from the beginning of thought has come true. A thrilling sight, of necessity, even to those who had seen it often; to those of us who saw it for the first time an uplifting memory for ever. All true, is it not, reader? And I think I have put it rather well—as an effort of imagination. For I didn’t see it. I meant to see it, I wanted to see it consumedly; I tried to see it, but I did not see it.

It is my fate never to do things in the right way, unless somebody else takes me in hand and does them for me. This was clearly an occasion for leaning on others. I ought to have asked some wealthy friend with a motor to take me to Hendon. Failing such a friend, I ought to have asked someone else to share a taxicab; there are times when one is justified in living beyond one’s means for an hour or so, and I might have saved up for it. Conceivably, too, by dealing with the matter long in advance I might have persuaded some kindly editor that I had a picturesque pen and been sent officially with all the mysterious facilities of the Press. It has always been a wonder to me how war correspondents contrive to be in the right place when battles are fought, but I suppose—from long experience of my fellow-creatures—that it is really quite simple, and since so many journalists seem to have been in the right place at Hendon probably I, too, had I been one of them, should have got there some how. It fell out altogether otherwise, for occupied with the difficulty of keeping alive at all in the heat, I exercised no prevision in the matter, and last Saturday found me with a fixed resolve to see flying men that day, and a con science which bade me do it on the cheap. After all, who was I that I should go more comfortably than millions of my fellow-countrymen? I had always professed my sympathetic enjoyment of a London crowd—so good-natured, so humorous, so patient. (No one pointed out to me that to admire patience in others and to enjoy the necessity of patience in oneself are different emotions.) There was an advertisement in the paper which told one how to go. The Tube to Golder’s Green, which I had always wished to see since I read poetical articles about the beauty of its Garden City—or garden something, anyhow: the idea of a shady garden attracted me subconsciously in the broiling sun—and “thence by omnibus”: the omnibus would be delightful if there were only a breeze. All very simple and easy, and I picked up an equally hopeful friend and we started.

Partly I was going for a fresh emotion, partly to free myself of a disgrace, for I had never seen men fly before, and not to have seen them I count shameful. Since all those millions went with me last Saturday it is probable that no one is left in that condition; but on the chance that someone may so linger still, and since that someone is likely to be a cultivated and fastidious person even as you, reader, I would reason on the matter for a paragraph before recounting how in a large measure I failed. First, it is well to be a witness of the chief events of one’s time. I have met several people who were proud of having left London to avoid the Coronation Procession, and I did not admire them: it was such a cheap distinction. And when they are very old it will be a distinction to have seen it—which they will probably arrogate in converse with their grandchildren. At least events which are more or less unique it is well to witness: some things to which people flock in their thousands I am content not to see, because I have seen the like before, and they bore me, such as University cricket matches and the average popular play. It is well to be of one’s time and interested in what will appear in the histories. But secondly and chiefly, not to care about flying and the progress in it is not to care for man and his pathetic and tragic and comic hopes and efforts, and failures and achievements, is deplorably to lack imagination. Poor man has set his mind on flying, off and on, for so many centuries, and so far as we know has only of late accomplished it to any purpose. And you, fastidious and cultivated reader, and I, with no such claims, until the other day were content to sit in our studies and be languidly bored by newspaper accounts of it all. You may be so still, but on Saturday I was at last awake to my treason against my species. So it was hey for the Tube to Golder’s Green! One felt certain to die soon of the heat in any case, and it was rather fine to die in this cause.

At first it was pleasant. The Tube was much cooler than the street, and obviously the crying need of London is not, as the superficial say, open-air restaurants, but restaurants and reading- rooms and bedrooms several miles beneath the earth. Then it became less pleasant. My companions and I filled the train at Leicester Square, so far as sitting space and most of the standing space were concerned, and at the next station what remained of the standing space was packed. It grew considerably hotter. Dear fellow-creatures, holding on by the straps, lurched and bulged over one’s seat. We were all complaining of bad management, and indeed it seemed at first unreasonable that we should stop at every station for crowds to surge against the doors with no chance of a single man jack getting in. On reflection, however, I think the Tube authorities wished to give us something extra for our three-pences, the pleasant emotion of being where others want to be and can’t be. Lucretius was quite right, and no doubt the Tube authorities had been reading him: suave mari magno. It is useless to deny the facts of human nature and to pretend to be better than we are. Most of us beheld with great pleasure the hopeless efforts of the waiting crowds to join us and smiled on their discomfiture. Otherwise we were our good-humoured, well-behaved selves, being a London crowd. I did not observe, by the way, that we were different from other London crowds, racing crowds for example, and I mention this humbly because I have read elsewhere that we were quite different, going with set faces, deeply conscious of the significance of the occasion, with the light of enthusiasm in our eyes and all that. Descriptive reporters see such a lot, don’t they? I thought we were merely pleasant and patient—too patient, says a friend of mine, who thinks we are simply dull-witted not to wreck trains and that sort of thing when matters are mismanaged: but how could we in Saturday’s heat? … It did grow hotter and hotter, and we welcomed the emergence into fresh air, which was silly of us, as it was ten times hotter above ground.

“Thence by omnibus.” Yes, but two or three buses for some millions of people … it was a case of waiting and fighting for hours … no vehicle of any sort to be had … my friend turned viciously on me and I on him … we had to walk. I have taken pretty long walks in my time, but those two miles or so to Hendon, with millions to right and left and in front and behind, with the sun doing its worst, seemed the longest walk of my life. I looked for the Garden City of the poetical articles in vain; it was round a corner somewhere, I suppose, for all I saw was the ordinary row upon row of little villas. A nightmare walk. Ever as a denser block in the traffic happened we thought we were there, and it was always “further on.” At last we did arrive at Hendon, but what was that? The flying place was still “further on.” On and on and on, round corners, and down lanes, and through a churchyard, where I was positively too weary to moralise as a literary person should, we followed the crowd. At last we saw people sitting down in a field, and getting over the hedge joined them and sank on to the earth. (This was impatience but looked like cunning, for we discovered afterwards our hedge-climbing had saved us threepence each.) And then … is this the place? No! We must retrace part of our way and go on another, heaven knows how far.

Well, we stayed where we were, and I missed the thrill I described at the beginning. Some other time, perhaps, someone will take me properly. Yet in my own humble and ineffective way a thrill I did compass. To a naked and short-sighted eye—of course field-glasses had been forgotten—the speck remained little more than a speck, but one did see—for we were on a hill overlooking the aerodrome—the first determined swoop and descent. And, after all, one knew it was a man—a man flying victorious. Yes, it was a thrill, and after several thrills we left early, bent on that “thence by omnibus,” and on to one we climbed in the sweltering sun…. My last recollection is of a motor passing our bus equipped with a horn which imitated a man being sick. Its occupants beamed with satisfaction at their agreeable and ingenious contrivance. Great are the marvels of our scientific civilisation, but just at that moment it was hardly kind.

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   FALLEN AMONG THIEVES

It happened years and years ago, but I admit I was twice old enough to know better. That is why I have not written about it before. The few friends in whom I confided agreed in saying I was the greatest fool they had ever heard of, and agreed in counselling silence on my part. One of them drew for me the diverting figure I should make in a law court if I prosecuted. “I suppose,” the cross-examining counsel would say, “you consider yourself a man of the world?” (Roars of laughter, in which the judge joins.) I decided not to prosecute, and for the same reason have abstained from writing. But two reasons impel me now. One is commercial: I don’t see why I should not get a little of my own back, to the extent of a few guineas if I can, with my thieves for material; and they can hardly complain: every man to his trade. The other reason is artistic or scientific: people who suffer what I suffered are, as a rule, callow boys or intoxicated idiots, whereas I am a practised writer with some interest in psychology and can give the world such a reasoned study of the thieves and their mentality as it may find quite interesting to have. It is almost unique for this sort of villain to catch an articulate victim.

And, after all, was I such an unmitigated fool as my best friends said? If it had happened on a steamer crossing the Atlantic, or among strangers in a railway carriage, my temporary insanity had been proved. But I had met the arch thief in respectable society. You either suspect everything or nothing; so far as I knew I had never been in the company of professional thieves before, and it simply did not occur to me…. Oh, yes; as you read the narrative you will say that this, that, and the other were most suspicious circumstances, but that is only because your mind will have been prepared…. Really and truly, though they brought off their coup, it was the thieves who were the essential fools in the matter for thinking I was a likely subject for their enterprise or had anything for them to steal. But I will make a beginning with the plain facts.

He was a jovial little Irishman, who bore a well-known surname and had been in a good regiment. Of course, there’s Thackeray’s Captain Rook at once, but how was I to know? He was a little on the noisy side, perhaps I might say a little on the vulgar side, but I have never been exclusive, and, to be sure, my life had been much less amusing than it has been had I always shied at everybody imperfectly bred. Besides, he was rather subdued when I first met him, being, as I said, in a respectable house. His sojourn of a few hours there was no fault of my host’s, who was quite ignorant of his profession. It’s strange—is it not?—how some blacklegs with a good start contrive to keep a footing here and there. Their exclusion is comparatively slow, I suppose, partly from old friends refusing to believe the worst as long as they possibly can, partly from those who know it shirking the disagreeable trouble of speaking. But fancy the nerves of the blackleg still clinging to a reputable rope or two! His eager look when he goes into a room to see if there is anyone there who knows too much, his anxiety when someone mentions another who does know, his innumerable perturbations! With what joy must he find himself among “the boys” again, frankly predatory! All I saw on this occasion, however, was a friendly little man who amused me with stories of the camp and the course. He on his side must have made up his mind that I was a fool—about which I say nothing—and also a man with money, which was silly of him. The least inquiry would have told him I hadn’t a shilling…. I met him in London a few days later, when he told me he was at a loose end, being kept there by business a day longer than he had intended, and that I should be doing him a kindness by dining with him. I accepted, and he named an expensive restaurant. Here again the wise folk told me too late that a fellow of that kind would never waste a dinner without an object, but I had never lived with people who order their social lives on such strict business principles, and was rather flattered by being liked so much at first sight by a man of a type so different from my own. I went, and there were two other men, whom he had met by chance that afternoon, he said—all in his character of expansive friendliness. One was a slim young man with quite a jolly laugh and something of a frank appeal about him, the other an elderly person with something of a racy humour: I think he said he had been a doctor. Apart from one’s intimate men-friends, or men one has wished to meet to talk over a subject of mutual interest, men alone make dull dinner-parties, in my opinion. But there was so much bonhomie and joviality, a little too noisy as between themselves, but always delicately respectful to me, about my three scoundrel convives that this dinner passed off very pleasantly indeed. Really they “played” me with great skill, and I think a less innocent person than I would have been lulled and flattered. I had always imagined card-sharpers as unattractive, weather-beaten fellows, bouncing timid youths, asking ferociously if their honour was doubted and all that; these three, throughout the evening, never once missed their role of careless companions bent on mutual enjoyment only. And I think this attitude was not entirely a pretence. You see, the occasion was an ordinary one in their professional lives and cannot have been a strain on them; probably I was agreeable enough to them; I believe they enjoyed their dinner without preoccupation. In so far as they were artists, however, carefully humouring and pleasing, I make them my compliment; they did it exceedingly well. If their real vocation had suddenly been apparent to me I am sure I should have finished that dinner in peace—and with even greater pleasure, for I should have got them to talk of their adventures and the tricks and customs of their trade. That, too, would have been cheaper.

When the dinner was over it was too late to go to any theatre or music-hall, and the youngest of them suggested that his flat was near and commodious and we might smoke another cigar there, and thither we went. What about a mild game of bridge? I really believe it was I, I myself, who, disliking the prospect of bridge with players probably better than I, and possibly critical, suggested poker. That must have been a delightful moment to them, but I am sure they exchanged never a smile. I had played poker years before that with other quiet people at low points for a little fun, and not having played for a long time, and being in a cheerful, perhaps reasonably exhilarated mood, the idea made a sudden appeal to me. Play poker with men you know nothing about! protested somebody afterwards with horror. Well, but I had never before dined with people with whom poker was unsafe, and why should it have crossed my mind that for the first time in my life I was consorting with sharpers? I played a fairly sound, cautious game, and it so happened that at this particular time—of all times—I had for once some money in the bank, and it would not be absolutely fatal if I did lose a few pounds. So … we played poker. I dare say the course of the game was hackneyed enough, but I am sure it was arranged with skill.

The method, of course, was to arrange the pack so that I was given a good hand, a hand to bet on, a hand which would have won nine times out of ten, and one of my opponents a hand which would just beat it. This was not done every time, by any means. Frequently I won—small amounts. They grew a little less careful as the evening went on, perhaps, but they never verbally egged me on and repressed any sign of triumph; indeed, it is probable the affair was so much one of routine with them that little triumph was felt. They expressed sympathy with me, and more than once suggested that as the luck was so dead against me we should play bridge instead. Then I would win a trifle and take heart to go on. I protest it was all very skilful. Finally, I had four knaves against four queens, and that brought me to the end of my resources and I stopped. As we went away together, my original friend and I, he expressed a frank regret that I should have lost so much, and delicately hoped it was not a very inconvenient amount. In truth it was for me a tragical sum—that unlucky coincidence of money in the bank! else had I stopped earlier—but I thought the luck must turn…. Well, there the money was, and on the next day I wrote out cheques.

Was I really cheated? asks the pitying if censorious reader. Was it not possible it was only an extraordinary run of ill coincidences? Alas! there was no doubt. In a few days a more than suspicious friend had made inquiries and discovered that my amusing Irishman had a very bad reputation indeed; I was persuaded to go to a solicitor and the solicitor consulted a detective, and the detective found out that the other two were persons well known to the police. Of course, I did not make a fuss. The money was gone, and both to lose one’s money and declare one’s folly in public as well would have been a climax of mismanagement. That is how thieves prosper and the police are impotent. I should admire vastly the public spirit of one who came forward in such a case, but it seemed to me any public advantage would have been incommensurate with the annoyance to myself. My acquaintance will not be met again where I met him, and there’s an end of it so far as I am concerned.

I proceed to a few reflections. Candidly, I find in myself no animus or grudge whatever against the other two. It was all in the way of their calling. To them I was as a person they had met in a railway train or on a steamer; they had no especial obligation to me; I was just a unit of the society on which they preyed. Their geniality was partly acting, but partly, I am sure, a genuine expression of temperament. They were rather like company promoters who had got my money by a lying prospectus, or patentees of a sham medicine who had got it by a lying advertisement. And their skill was rather greater, their nerve far greater, than that of such malefactors. Let me say all I can for them. They are an instrument to punish a kind of folly that is generally vicious. Even in my exceptional case, though there would have been little harm in the mild and honest game I had thought to enjoy, still, I had no business to be gambling, and their fools are nearly always useless creatures, and the money they steal would have been spent as they spend it. There is no prolonged hypocrisy or sneaking dissimulation in their lives; they meet with honest folk for brief periods only, and their real social moments are passed in the company of their fellows, mutually cognisant of their profession, though I dare say there is an etiquette of nescience. It is otherwise with the sharper who still keeps some sort of footing in decent society and uses it to decoy an unsuspecting fool among his professional friends, and with every wish to be magnanimous I confess I think of my original betrayer with pronounced dislike. Really, not a nice existence—to go about among people who would not speak to one if they knew what one really was, to study a new acquaintance’s humour and ingratiate oneself and make a show of frank jollity and all that—all to pick his pocket in the end! No, my dear man, you really are a worm, a very nasty sort of excrescence on our muddle of barbarism and civilisation, and it’s a pity people’s care for their boots prevents their squashing you. And you couldn’t even play your own game through: you had to call in your more skilful experts. Go away! Even as regards the other two, I confess I should hear of their being laid by the heels with some complacency, though since the elder of them has been watched by the police for twenty years without that happening, I doubt I may never have that satisfaction. For, after all, it is not a happy use of skill and nerve, and the burglar—the really accomplished burglar—must have more of both. Farewell to all three forever—for I don’t think any of them will fit the cap and bring an action against me. The experience was not worth the money; still, an experience it was and has made me something of an article.

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   DEAR PEOPLE

It is a test, no doubt, of one’s bodily well-being and vigour when one returns to a town from the country, whether one loves or hates the people in the streets. If you are well you are good-humoured and vaguely sympathetic; if you are ill you are aloof and censorious. Capturing the former happy mood while I may and offering brief thanksgiving for its probably crumbling foundation, I find it pleasant to play round it awhile and allow my little mind to assist and ornament the benevolent impulse of nature.

I suppose if one is accustomed to seeing many people about for the most of one’s life, though one may be glad at first to miss them when one goes away, one goes back to them with pleasure (given those happy spirits) just because the sight is familiar. It is a sort of paradox that the familiarity should consist in their being unknown. My own absences from London are always spent in my friends’ houses in the country, and so it happens that except for a few people in railway carriages and such glimpses as a motor gives one of other passengers along roads I see practically nobody with whom I am not acquainted. That is sometimes agreeably modified, however—this article shall be all digressions. A house I stay in much and love much more is built (itself nearly four centuries old) on the site of an ancient feudal castle. I commend such a position to all who can secure it. It is kindly and human. You have the village about your gates, and the village post office a few yards from your front door. That was the true aristocratic way. When nobles began to build their houses with great parks all round them aristocracy was beginning to merge in mere greatness of possessions and the hateful individualism of the modern world was black in the sky. As you know—at least I have often said it—feudalism was socialism in the rough. Reciprocal duties and mutual kindness were the spirit of it, or at least they might have been, and something of all that seems in a way to linger when the cottages and the big house are close together; the park wall and miles-long avenue seem to shut it out. But the familiarity of the unknown soon ceases in a village after all.

There is one element of pleasure, the recognition of a familiar sight, the stream of unknown faces. Another demands expression at once: the unknown faces, or most of them, are of Londoners. I doubt my spirits would have to be better than I remember them that I should enjoy the unknown faces of Manchester or Newcastle. I belong to the South Country, and more and more so as I grow older. For the other parts my respect, my appreciation, but they are alien to me. (If I were a poet like Mr. Belloc, I would express all this in verse as he has done.) It happened some weeks ago that I had come from Wales, which is a foreign country to me in a sense, however happy I may be in it, and was motoring through Wiltshire villages and towns. This truly, I felt, was my own country, my own civilisation. The beautiful villages, the towns with their old brick houses and market-crosses and worthy inns, and the beloved pattern of them, were all a deep joy to me. It happened to be a Sunday and as we went slowly, like decent motorists, through town and village white-dressed children laughed and waved to us. An agricultural country, mark you, struggling against unfair difficulties, but struggling happily and healthily. You may say what you like about insanitary dwellings and low wages: here were men and women and children who looked happy and healthy. A curse on the industrialism which has blighted this fair civilisation over most of England! I know, I know: without industrialism we should not have had this and that: I did not ask for this and that, and do not want them.

But what has all this to do with Londoners? say you. They come from all over Great Britain and Ireland and Palestine. I suppose that is true, but the mass of them seem always to me like South Country folk, as I mingle with them and listen to them in tube or bus. I know those who hate the Cockney accent, but so do not I. As an accent it is ugly in its management of vowels and in its Australian variety, when it is used harshly, I confess it smites my nerves disagreeably. But in London it is used softly and amicably, and I think the quality of it, for all the difference in pace and pronunciation, is the quality of Sussex speech. I went on a bus yesterday all the way to East Sheen and back to Piccadilly. I was melancholy enough, for I went to see what had become of my old “preparatory” school, of which I have affectionate memories, and found it more utterly demolished and vanished than any disappearance I have seen: red villas where the comely old house had stood and a horrible new road ran through the space of the jolly old garden. But going back on the bus my dear Londoners positively comforted me. Of course one meets unpleasing Londoners at times, even on the tops of buses, shouting men, and men who spit to excess, but that is not often, and those yesterday were typical—dear, quiet, gentle-spoken, civilised folk, enjoying a simple pleasure simply. Weak and inefficient? Alas, yes, I see that also in them and for my country’s sake would wish it otherwise, but I won’t pretend those demerits antagonise me. Alas and alas! I am much at home with them.

Then there is another attraction about these Londoners in public places. They are my brothers and sisters in so far as most of them are swimmers like me in perilous waters where the tide is ever against us. After forty one envies the secure and reflects bitterly one did not choose a calling with a secure end to it. One’s contemporaries who went into organised professions, unless they were hopelessly incompetent, are by now well-to-do men with a prospect of retirement, by pensions or investments, into comfort. And then this fortunate country supports so many who (for that purpose) have no need of professions at all. It had happened that the men I had been with in the country were in the one case or the other, none of them idle and some of them great workers, but all well-to-do and secure against the material accidents of life. But most of these folk in the streets, on the buses, I suppose, must earn their bread while they can, and … then? There is the timely grave or … No: I won’t depress you too much, gentle-hearted reader, and indeed there is a sort of exhilaration in our hand-to-mouth and insecure existence, rather less than there was twenty years younger, but still some, and it was this cheerful aspect rather than the gloomy that appealed to me as I smiled my sympathy on my precarious fellows. There is a sort of elementary bond in the elementary difficulty of life, is there not? So that between these strangers and me there was some community which is not between me and the most of my constant associates and intimate friends. These strangers would need no imagination to realise what weight there is in this kind of sitting care or what joy in the temporary relief. And just now, when the prosperous people are all still away, the community is not interrupted by any obvious or arrogant intrusion of success. We are all poor strugglers together, bless us.

Such have been the elements of my pleasure in mixing with crowds once more. Looking at them with a comparatively fresh eye I make many observations, and I might enlarge, for example, on the development in the women of the average classes in London, which is out of all proportion to that of the men. They seem to me not only to grow in stature, year by year, but to walk with a freer gait and to look on the world with a bolder and more self-reliant eye. (And a “bold-face” was once the word for shamelessness: how ideals change!) Whereas the men seem, if anything, smaller and more sheepish than before, and they do say that when the women of a race take on the masculine qualities the men grow effeminate. A period of rule by women? The very masculine men would be amused: I notice it is not the strongest who are bitter in the matter of this development…. Or I might remark on that old question (which I see has bobbed up again) of the emergence of the cavemen, or at least pre-Aryan people, over their conquerors: blue eyes and yellow hair are vanishing. In fact, I might digress and stray for ever all round my starting-point. But I wished merely to record a rare and, I fear, a fleeting pleasure, and that I have done.

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•   DREADFUL PEOPLE

I expressed, some few weeks ago, my pleasure in seeing once again the dear people in the streets of London, and since then I have noticed a great many unpleasant and antipathetic people about, who evidently thought I had meant them and gave themselves airs in consequence. I think it well therefore to adjust the balance. Moreover, the good spirits, which I confessed were the inspiration of the thought and the article, have long departed and I am much more easily displeased. I would not allow an incomplete impression of myself, either, to remain in the public mind.

General sympathy is very well, but we must keep our critical faculties awake. It is very well, like St. Francis, to think of the wolf as your brother, but the dog, after all, is nearer than the wolf. We all know the man, or more probably the woman, who will waste precious hours and hours—they might have been given to ourselves—listening to silly and futile troubles and emotions quite beneath her own plane of mental life. It is a wrong to the worthier associate. And so it is a wrong to the thousands of kindly-looking, harm less, unknown folk in the streets to whom our sympathy properly goes, if an equal kindness is excited by every objectionable brute. I must be on my guard, for in actual intercourse my own critical faculties are apt to be excessively dormant and out of mere common humanity I sympathise with all sorts of people, their actions and reflections, whom my better judgment would condemn. (This is especially the case—I have often wanted to say this for the sake of my best friends—in the matter of wit and humour. If a man tells me in good faith a professed jest or amusing anecdote, I not only laugh, as civility demands, but my mind grows confused between humanity and the merit of the joke, and I am likely to go about repeating some really coarse or tiresome thing to my friends’ affliction. May they forgive me, and you this irrelevance.) I must be on my guard and balance and make worthier my friendliness by a right hostility. Of late I have had no difficulty in doing so.

How can some people look such brutes as they do? One would have thought that their friends would have slain them, or if that could not be managed in a society foolishly fearful of taking human life, would have cut and ostracised and boycotted them until they mended their appearance. Some of them, to be sure, cannot possibly have any friends at all and can have acquaintances only by purchase, so horrible are they. But let us go down the dreadful scale in order. First, in mere horror, are they to whose faces vice has given a touch of diabolism, so that one is conscious of a sort of distinction in repulsion which takes one beyond mere irritation. You must know those sheet-white, staring-eyed, cruel-mouthed faces. They are not frequent in London streets, happily, and I have seen more of them in a night on Montmartre—faces straight from hell—than in months at home; but then, truly, I don’t frequent any London equivalent of Montmartre, and there perhaps the faces are made up to shock the casual foreigner. Assuming them to be real, I have no doubt what should be done with them, here or there; they should be annihilated at sight, swiftly and silently, and the libel on humanity quelled. How poor humanity, with all its touching average futilities and kindnesses, comes to breed such monsters I know not. Maniac emperors and kings one understands, though one believes them exaggerated. But that in our humdrum modern London, and not the Rome of Nero or Pope Alexander VI., there should be seen, walking calmly in Piccadilly, monsters with faces illustrating the worst stories of Suetonius … if it were not so horrible it would be picturesque.

Having begun on this top-note, I feel almost softened towards the next stage of offensiveness, but it is necessary to be firm. Lacking the diabolism of the others, with its sort of horrible distinction, there are faces merely vicious in a brutal way which allow one to observe other qualities in them, such as cunning, meanness, arrogance, and quarrelsomeness. These are obviously evil and harmful people, with a conceivable explanation (unlike the others) but without excuse, and it really does seem to me extraordinary that neither the disgust of their acquaintances nor any remnant of human feeling in themselves should have ameliorated them. They look to be prosperous, and so one may suppose they have bought wives and have children—why don’t the Eugenists tackle them?—over whom they tyrannise, and one can imagine very hungry business acquaintances being paid to eat with them. But of social life in any sense tolerable to decent people they can know nothing. What an existence! To know that if you were suddenly poor not a soul on earth would be sorry for you and hardly a soul would speak to you; that your illness would cause happy smiles and your death a shout of joy—what a consciousness! And it must be so; this type is not stupid and it must know the odium of it, must count on no kindness that is not bought, that is on no kindness at all. A dehumanised existence, in which the apparatus and material of life are all and there is no soul. I am not writing fancifully. I never believed in the “criminal type” and the rest of that now-exploded nonsense. But on some human beings brutality and unkindness and meanness are sealed so plainly that if the impression were a lie the victims would die of shame.

That disposes of the people who all their amiable fellow-creatures must wish would perish, and I come to more personal dislikes, to the unpleasant people who I do not wonder should be alive, whom I should not feel justified in destroying, but who I wish would stay indoors when I am abroad. Arrogance and self-satisfaction inspire all these, but there are varieties. The first, and most disliked, is of an arrogant, truculent, aggressive, swaggering mien, but probably of an otherwise normal constitution. As a reasonable man I grant them their share of humanity; they may be not unkindly fathers and husbands, in a dictatorial way, and I dare say have a sincere respect and liking for their more prosperous acquaintances. But they are extremely hostile to strangers. Frequently they are oldish men, with a high colour, white beards, and angry eyes. These bustle somewhat. Frequently they are youngish men, and then their walk is statelier and the offensiveness of their regard is calm, not angry, a disdainful stare. Frequently they are women, but them I do not mind. I wonder if this curious effect of sex is present in other men also, that truculent and aggressive-looking men annoy us and truculent and aggressive-looking women only amuse us? It is not in all, for I have heard bitter denunciations. For my part, while it has been my happy lot never, so far as I can remember, to have met this sort of man in any social relation—I wonder, a little arrogantly myself, perhaps, in what world they live—women of the kind I have met more than once. Even then I did not mind them, was only amused. It is unfair, but this is a personal sort of scribbling and not a treatise in ethics. One habit all these truculent creatures have in common, that they look with pronounced hatred on the slightest departure from the ordinary. If, for example, you like the fresh air on your head and walk with your hat in your hand, you might be a naked savage for their amazement and disgust, and you may hear them ex change bitter comments on your absurdity…. I said I should not feel justified in slaying them, but if I had the secret power of inflicting a sharp spasm of internal pain at will, I doubt I should use it sometimes. It would be a comfortable thing, when one is met with an unprovoked stare of surprise and contempt, to see the starer and contemner double up suddenly and cry aloud. I said this was not a treatise in ethics.

With the next stage dislike is mingled with amusement, even in the case of men. I refer to the arrogant and self-satisfied, who are also, unlike the former, fatuous and stupid. Such a one I saw yesterday. He was in early middle age, tall, broad, fat, newly and elaborately dressed. He walked very slowly, at about a mile an hour, and as he walked he looked from side to side, haughtily, with a slight surprise that anyone should presume to share God’s earth with him, but without malevolence. His pride was probably based on much money, and he had never had the luck to go where money is not everything. A sudden stomach-ache, not too severe, would have been helpful, I think, but he was such an ass one could not be angry with him…. And then come those whom one cannot help disliking, since dislike provokes dislike and they seem so evidently to dislike oneself, but for whom one is sorry too. I once wrote a plea for public smiles, but I would not insist too rigorously if I were an autocrat. We know what relief it is in unhappiness to get away from those for whom one must force cheerfulness and be alone with strangers to let our melancholy show itself. But it should not be bitter melancholy, as the wit said about the coldness of his egg. You never dined with me, and I did not cause your dyspepsia; I have not taken away your mistress—far from it; if I had more congenial work for you it should be yours; I have no riches to insult your poverty; do not, sorrow-stricken man, make me responsible for your trouble and look so unkindly upon me. I do not ask you to be cheerful, but merely to keep your resentment for those who may deserve it. Or if you must be angry with strangers, join with me and attack some one of the really horrid people who are spoiling my pleasure in the unknown faces abroad in London this bright October day.

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•   WHILE I WAIT

I am waiting, and have been waiting for the last two hours, for my telephone bell to ring. A friend has promised to ring me up between five o’clock in the afternoon and dinnertime to give me news in a matter which concerns me nearly and acutely. I cannot fix my mind on a book and am weary with walking up and down my little room. And I feel that if my brain stays entirely idle (but for the anxiety which is to be resolved by the telephone) something weird will happen to me. I may as well busy myself with words and try to philosophise somewhat on paper…. It is of no use for me to ring up my friend. I am to be told as soon as the matter is decided. I have only to wait.

Only to wait! I have written already about the tortures of waiting and would not cheat any rare reader of my books by repeating myself. It was many years ago, however, and I do not observe that my world has taken to heart what I said. Causeless waiting still goes on, waiting, that is to say, which a little care or thought or kindness or imagination in the person who inflicts it might have spared the sufferer. I speak, you understand, of anxious waiting, waiting for a thing one desires greatly to do or to know, for a person one desires greatly to see, waiting which tries the nerves and troubles the heart. I speak also (but this is altogether secondary) of uncomfortable waiting, in public places or the like. It is stupid that we should have to bear even that, when it is avoidable, for it irritates and makes us less agreeable company—I am still unable easily to forgive a person who makes me wait alone in a restaurant—but a short, bracing quarrel will restore one’s equanimity on those occasions, and as for waiting in a comfortable room with somebody to talk to for some slightly late arrival at dinner—the sort of waiting fussy people make such a coil of—my iron nerves and benevolent nature carry me through it triumphantly. But oh! that anxious waiting for vital news, for somebody who may not come at all—he is a stock or a stone or dangerously blest in life who has not felt, at some time or other, the searing and souring of it, and Heaven help the wretch on whom it is light-heartedly inflicted. Let him pray that imagination, not humanity, may be at fault—but it is an ill alternative.

My present case, however, is free from bitterness against persons, and I profess honestly that I could bear this really unavoidable waiting with an even mind and resolutely fix my thoughts on something else but for one element in it. That element is this ugly instrument on my table, this thrice-accursed invention, the telephone.

Far be it from me to depreciate the marvels of science. I feel for them all the reverence—the terror, rather—of the incurably ignorant. When one thinks of it, really it is curious that I and many other thousands, my contemporaries, fairly intelligent, supposedly well educated (and of a surety expensively so), should be so completely lacking in knowledge of all that distinguishes our civilisation. I have often thought in what a hole I should find myself were I wrecked on an island of inquisitive savages. “Explain to us,” they would say, “how your wonderful telegraph works,” and I, after much thought, “Well, you put up long poles at intervals with wires stretched from one to the other….”  “The telephone?”  “Oh, a man comes and makes holes in the wall….” Then they would kill me. The late Samuel Butler thought that machinery would in the end enslave mankind and was for destroying it utterly. I suppose the real men of science would not mind if it were destroyed, for they are always angry with me when I praise inventions, scouting the idea that science is concerned with the useful, explaining that these things are but toys and by-products, insisting that all they care for is the contemplation of the beauty of relations, or of curves or something—I am never quite clear. For my part I would keep the safety razor, which I do believe has contributed to human happiness. As to the eventual benefit of the other inventions I have an open mind, but I think they ought not to be thrust on us until they are quite ready, as it were. We should have waited for the motor-omnibus until it was (as I am told it is to be) noiseless, and for the telephone until Mr. Samuel had trained clerks of sufficient intelligence and carefulness to work it properly. Then perhaps …

For that is how the telephone has increased the tortures of waiting: you do not know but that the waiting might not be over if some fiend or fool in the exchange had done the right thing. A telegram or a letter properly addressed arrives in certain course; if it comes not, a thousand to one it has not been sent. But someone may be doing his best to send a vital message by the telephone and be failing. I am extremely anxious, but if I were waiting for a note to be brought by a messenger I think I could read a book with patience till it came. It is the additional uncertainty introduced by the mechanical medium that defeats me. Moreover my telephone is merely an “extension” of one in common use in the house where I lodge, so that the line may be really engaged when my friend tries it. It is, of course, the fault of my poverty and not of the telephone that I have not one all to myself, but if the wretched thing had never been invented… O for the pre-telephone days! It may have been more trouble to write a note, though, as it is, one often has to write after unavailing shouts and mistakes and confusions, but O for the certainty gone for ever!

Another feature of the telephone which makes it harder to wait anxiously with calm nerves is that my anxiety is to be resolved, not by a quiet person entering with a note, but by a sharp, horrid, noisy bell a yard from my chair. My heart is to be made to jump violently…. It has jumped; the bell has rung; and the cause was an unexpected voice giving an undesired invitation; I have made an enemy by the abruptness of my refusal. Probably that was the very moment chosen by my friend to send the message. Thrice-accursed, did I say? I wish I could print what I said to the telephone just now.

Yet another grievance is the menacing ugliness of the brute. The orifice into which one actually speaks always looks to me as if it would suddenly shout something irrelevant or unintelligible at me. There the thing stands on my writing-table—there was no other place for it—reminding me insistently of the mechanical age which may have, very likely, its romance and poetry, but with which I seem to have been born unfitted to cope. Yet I was forced to have it, since my friends are forgetting how to write because of it.

Yes, it has rung at last and I know what I wished to know. My friend had tried twice before, the first time more than an hour ago, so that…. In happier days I should have sent a note asking for the news and told the messenger to wait for an answer, and half my distress of nerves and all this article would have been spared me and you, kind reader.

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•   AN EVIL TONGUE

To any reader of this article who may think it unreasonably full of faults, and to either or both of my habitual readers—I have really heard of two—who may find it lacking in any previously detected qualities, I offer this explanation. First, I am writing in a passion, and, secondly, I am writing a sort of thing I have never tried to write before. The passion, indeed, has restrained me for years. Writers who foam at the pen make a mess of their paper, and I am tidy by nature. They are ineffective, moreover—and I desire very strongly to make an effect. So I have started time and again, in a temporary calm, remembering emotion in tranquillity, but ever the passion has come over me and I have desisted. But the years go by and the thing I hate grows worse: passion or no passion I will have my kick at it now. As for the other disadvantage, I have never preached at anybody or any collection of bodies before. If I have not lived very much, at least I have let live with unvarying thoroughness. I hate attacking people; I hate being offensive; I like to look at what is amusing and jolly and harmlessly absurd, if I cannot always look at what is fine and beautiful, in my fellow-creatures; I have avoided the arrogance of censure. And now I’m going to preach, I’m going to be offensive, I’m going to attack, I’m going to look, and make you look, if I can, upon what is ugly and base and not at all amusing, I’m going to be arrogant—it is more than likely I’m going to be a bore. So—we must take our chance, the reader and I.

Calumny is older than the hills we know, like dying or making love, no doubt, but I see no necessary superfluity in examining an old thing again as it is freshly displayed in the world one knows. Sheridan exhausted the theme in The School for Scandal? Not he, nor any other. Of Sheridan, indeed, it is to be said that although his original motive may well have been wrath with the Bath gossips who traduced his Miss Linley—this appears from an earlier draft, if you will excuse the literary irrelevance—he had a dramatist’s crafty eye on the amusement of the public and was not concerned merely with the truth, like your single-hearted essayist. He made his scandalmongers grotesques and so robbed them of their power, for the truly dangerous calumniator is to appearance reserved, unwilling, irreproachable. They were a single vice made concrete, and met as for a game and shouted their scandal: my rascals go about with caution and pledge you to secrecy. There are indeed specialists in calumny who bear their stigma upon them. Such are they whose delight is in traducing women, sometimes inventing, most often putting a sinister meaning into alleged facts and rumours, or into the common, innocent events of daily life. They often bear upon them this mark, that they speak of women in general as of strange animals or as exclusively things of sex: never believe what they say of any woman whatsoever. You may be sorry for them, for it is hard to think they ever loved truly or were real friends of a woman in their lives, and because they are morbid: it is wholesome to love this woman or to have a romantic friendship for that, and to meet and think of the rest in a civilised inclusiveness. Be sorry for them, but believe them not. The most of evil speakers, however, bear no stigma upon them, and until you know them well you believe in their regret and reluctance and desire for justice and truth and all that; many of them, I regret to say, are honey-spoken women. And often, their evil-speaking apart, they are blameless creatures. I remember an acquaintance giving me a lurid account, afterwards found partly false and wholly exaggerated and uncharitable, of the iniquities of one whom, it turned out, he had known from childhood, whose parents were his intimate friends. Yet he was an estimable man and could show a dozen virtues where I could show one: an excellent husband and father, who worked hard and lived within his income.

Is it not strange and horrible that so base a vice as this should be the unclean delight of otherwise estimable folk? The reason of it? Largely self-importance: the destroyer of character feels his own superior, and thinks he is throwing darts downward from a height, when he may be throwing mud, upwards, from a ditch. Partly he guesses from the chagrin of disappointed curiosity or to show an intimate knowledge; partly he enjoys an easy method of holding attention; sometimes he revenges a slight. In any case he enjoys himself; you may see the twinkling eye reflecting the pleasure of the (temporarily) dirty little soul.

Some calumnies are so preposterous that it is hard to suppose they are mere distortions and exaggerations and guesses, and not deliberate lies. But I am disposed for my part to think that the deliberate and whole lie is rare, because I have known but one in my personal experience. A., desiring to make mischief between B. and C, informed another person (in strict secrecy) that B. had said something mean and treacherous in regard to C. It was too coarsely planned, being such a lie as though you, reader, were accused of robbing a blind beggar, and it therefore miscarried, for when C, as of course was designed, came to hear of it, C. disbelieved entirely, and B. and C. laughed over it together. (This little history has a lesson to it with which we shall be concerned in a moment.) That, however, is the only case I know of personally. As a rule the thing begins in confusion. Jones tells Brown that Robinson’s odd behaviour looks like drink, or that Mrs. Robinson looks unhappy and he wonders if Robinson bullies her; Brown tells Smith he has heard on good authority that Robinson is a drunkard or a wife-beater; very likely it was a muddle in Brown’s mind. The facility of this sort of evil-speaking is shown by its changing fashions. If, for example, it got about that a prominent politician drank too much you may be sure a dozen others would soon be alleged to be in the same, case, and I remember, how, many years ago, several unlikely people were accused of a far worse vice because one notable person had come to grief through it. Calumny is hateful, anyhow, often malignantly repeated and malignantly exaggerated, but not as a rule malignantly invented. None the less is it to be chastised and stopped by you and me, so far as in us lies. I will show you how, for this article has a practical purpose without which it had been uselessly ugly.

If the evil speaker be not more cowardly than other people, then most people are cowards. “Man is a rascal and always will be,” said Byron, too generally, but it is true there is a rascally strain in most of us. Well, the evil speaker may not be altogether a rascal, he may be brave enough on other issues; on this rascally side of him he is pretty certain to be a coward. He shows it in two ways. First, he chooses for his victims most commonly those to whom a fuss would be specially abhorrent—sensitive people, people in positions which even a successful defence would damage, people in whose lives there has been some episode, perhaps many years gone by, they would not have flung anew to the gossips. Secondly, he likes to speak in confidence. “For heaven’s sake don’t bring me into it,”  “I tell you because you ought to know, but you mustn’t quote me,” and so forth. He ran risks in the days of the duel, and I fancy he has flourished increasingly since it was abolished in England. Especially in that delicate case when he attacks a woman who is your friend and whose name you would not throw to the vulgar: you could quarrel on another issue and fight on that. True that you and not he might be slain, but there is no space here to argue about the logic of it: enough that to you at the moment the world seemed too small for both: you took your chance…. Fisticuffs are an inadequate substitute: you may set out to “horsewhip” and only succeed in knocking off a hat, as happened to a friend of mine…. I am always glad to read of a lawsuit for slander, for even though the wrong person may prosecute and the wrong person have to defend, it is a warning that serious inconvenience may follow the light-hearted lie. But as I have explained, the evil speaker likes to attack those to whom an action at law is an unfair and prejudiced opening. For these reasons he flourishes and enjoys himself with impunity, and how are you and I to check him? Disappoint his confidence. If you have given your word, break it. Suppose a man made you promise not to resent a criticism and proceeded to accuse you of some monstrous blackguardism, you would go for him, promise or no promise, would you not? Do as much for others; bestir yourself; the evil waxes in the supine selfishness of the world. You are most unlikely to be a person entitled yourself to resent the story or to say more than that you don’t believe it: that is the story-teller’s craft. But go straight to the victim or to the victim’s most intimate friend or natural avenger; state the story and the name of the story-teller. If for the reasons I have given no prosecution or open row result, at least it is probable the evil speaker will suffer some unpleasant moments, and if the proper exposure happens often to him he will come to be stigmatised and known for what he is; his stories will never be believed, he will grow weary-hearted and perish of a vanished occupation. The A., B., and C. history had this lesson: B. was told and A. in consequence was disappointed. But I can tell you of a better case than that, one in which I took the course I recommend to you with the happiest results. It happened a year or two ago and cheered me vastly, so that I have been encouraged to pursue this beneficial activity ever since. I heard of a story about a lady of my acquaintance which I knew to be false and of which I identified the originator. I told her husband with the least possible loss of time. Things went uniquely well. Justice uncovered her eyes for a moment and Fate took a lease of a conscience. The husband, whom the story-teller supposed to be at variance with his wife and indifferent, was in reality devoted and a passionate man to boot, moreover a physically powerful one. The two met outside a house, at the top of a steep flight of steps—at the bottom of which, after a brief conversation, lay my story-teller in a heap. I am sorry to say I did not witness the event, but I am glad to say he suffered some internal injury of which he shortly afterwards died. But, of course, such a triumph cannot be looked for often. It has cheered me to remember, however, and I who began in a passion finish complacently. Do take my advice.

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   A DROP OF COMFORT

I wonder if The Eye-Witness will allow me to suggest a thought of comfort to those who, like myself, have been rendered unhappy by its terrible and all too probable picture of the state to which we unfortunate English are tending. It will not think, I trust, that this comfort will do anything to weaken those feelings of disgust or those determinations to resist which it has aroused or strengthened with such vigour and success. Rightly analysed, indeed, the ground of my comfort should make the disgust more intense, the determination fiercer. But, look you, I am not a fighter. I see Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton dealing their hard and skilful knocks, and I stand on one side and applaud with all my might. It is not mine even to follow in their train. Probably they would chase me out of it as a heretic on a matter of prime importance, and indeed it would be inconvenient to have a follower who would not attack all your enemies, but only certain of his own choice. “You’re going for Brown today? Then leave me at home. Tell me when you attack Jones and I’ll land him one on the jaw.” That would not do; and besides, I doubt Jones’s jaw would not be broken either by blows of mine. So I applaud heartily (on most occasions) and when there is a moment for taking breath, as one may fancy just now when Mr. Belloc retires from the captaincy of the host, and the wounded are lying about all over the grass, I come forward with my little bottle of comfort. It will do no harm. You won’t fight the worse for a suggestion of weakness in the forces opposing you.

Well, the great and horrible evil which The Eye-Witness foresees is that through the plans of wealthy employers, assisted by the absurd oligarchy which governs us and makes our laws, and by the ignorance and supineness of their victims, England is drifting rapidly into a Servile State. My comfort is found in the fact that in the last two decades the English have been growing liker and liker to each other until at this moment, when the prophecy is made with such force and reason, and when the half-articulate protests are compelling the notice of everyone, they are rapidly becoming indistinguishable. I do not say that this fact must prevent the consummation of the slavery, but I do say it must make it so madly preposterous and intolerable that the difficulty will be enormous. That surely is obvious. I must suppose that by slavery The Eye-Witness means slavery. We may differ a little in our understanding of the word. I gather that to The Eye-Witness the essential point of slavery is that a man must continue to work at a task for hours and at wages determined by others, not bargained for by himself: to me the essential point is that a man should be at the mercy of another’s convenience or caprice, should have to do whatever he is ordered, without reason given. Such a position as that, except in rare cases not determined by general causes, is in the bare form unthinkable in modern England; therefore The Eye-Witness’s slavery and mine are not quite the same thing; but it must mean the use of one man by another practically, whatever laws and unions and societies and all that may be intermediary, and the recognition by the slave that such, practically and eventually, is his case. Very good; I may—conceivably—endure a slavery imposed on me by an alien and conquering despot, or even by a caste of my own race obviously and patently superior to myself in knowledge and abilities, but a slavery imposed by Tom Smith, who talks the same slang and reads the same books (if either of us reads at all) and admires the same humbugs? I should tell Tom to go to hell. There might be a little more difference with Ikey Moses, but I do not think The Eye-Witness suggests that our masters are all to be Jews. Roughly, then, this increasing oneness must work against the Servile State. I do not say it is bound to defeat the Servile State, but surely it means a weakness in those who would impose that monstrosity, and there is at least a chance that we shall reach a point of likeness and servility when they will be too clamantly incompatible for co-existence.

I see the likeness increasing in every direction. The fluidity of English classes has been a commonplace for very long, but this approximation goes beyond that interchange which indeed sometimes checks a good-natured assimilation by promoting snobbery. For of the two great factors which have hindered the coming together of people natural in a small country where blood is indefinitely mixed, the more powerful has been the social aspirations of the middle classes. (I apologise every time I use that expression; it is invidious and unpleasant; the really amiable and intelligent have no “class” that the other amiable and intelligent bother about; but there the expression is, an inevitable convenience.) In the main what was left of old aristocracy, together with what successfully adopted its habits and manners, and the bulk of the labouring classes were always very much alike in their virtues and weaknesses—tolerant, easy-going, good-humoured, thinking little, innately sluggish, pleasure-loving, fond of a fight or a gamble. The acute reader will say that nevertheless the one had the other in subjection, and where is my argument? Where it was, for there was a great chasm of culture and opportunities, now much be-bridged. But between these two elements of English, alike in nature and coming together (remember our so-called educated classes are now the most ignorant of any professedly educated classes in the world) in culture and opportunities, came this powerful wedge of classes whom social aspirations and the resulting temper, roughly called snobbery, made unlike and worse than either. In everyday life snobbery has been a mildly amusing futility, to be castigated lightly by our satirists, but in the region of English character it has been a fierce, devastating, de-humanising force, a relentless passion, murdering kindness and pity and good-humour and sanity. From this have come the entirely unaristocratic hatred of the “common people” and many another antagonising quality. If you have no time to be yourself you are likely to become something less than yourself. Whence came the especial fury of social aspiration I do not profess to say. But it has ruined millions of kindly English. Mere greed could not explain the devilish horrors of the early factories: it was desire of the money which was to gratify this fierce passion to move among one’s “betters.” And it spread up and down and everywhere and divided us from one another by a myriad of walls.

On my faith I believe this force, this passion, though in some mild form you find it everywhere still, has lost its inmost fire and no longer burns up all fellowship and kindness. Partly it is so much easier of gratification, partly it has been so long a cock-shy, partly a wider range of pleasures has occupied minds and energies. In the result the large class of successful money makers and its immediate descendants have time and temper to be more like the rest of the English world. Of course there are rich and idle people about who are rather an offence to the eye and the ear, and are economically indefensible, to be imitated neither for their culture, their taste, nor their manners. But they are merely rather more vulgar than the average, otherwise much like the rest of us. It is a mistake to suppose that the average workman, from the height of his reading and ideals, looks on them and their luxuries with contempt. He thinks in the main that their luck is unfair, but he has no frigid lack of sympathy with their use of it.

And here comes in the other factor which has promoted unlikeness and antipathy. Strongest in the middle classes, but by no means absent altogether in the others, that strange un-English attitude to life and one’s fellows which is called Puritanism (but is a flabbier and less reasoned affair than the Puritanism of the seventeenth century) has bred discomfort and discontent. I need not labour the extent to which the poor, as distinct from the rich, have suffered in their comforts and pleasures, for I should be going over ground which The Eye-Witness has often covered with a firmer tread and a more elegant carriage. My point is that these pestilent Puritans have driven the open exercise of tastes the poor man shares with his brothers, the rich, a carouse with friends, a gamble on a race, into a furtive and therefore vicious indulgence. That obviously makes for unlikeness and disunion. The poor man hears of a rich man, with his own tastes, giving a big dinner, and such equivalent as he could manage in the public-house is denied him. So his geniality, as great as the other’s and more certainly genuine, since it costs him more in proportion, is warped. The fussiness about gambling is particularly unfair, because the “instinct of gambling” means in most people merely the refusal to accept material limitations and what dullness of life they imply as final, and the poor man’s are so much worse. I would like to bring the lovers of a hazard in all classes comfortably together over a cheap and frequent public lottery. There will be no difficulty about that, my Puritans, when we are really democratic and representative. For your power outside the moribund Parliament is waning and waning. We may be happy together yet, in spite of you.

There is my drop of comfort. I cannot prove my alleged fact, if it is disputed. But I am certain that coincidence cannot account for my experience. The accidents of life have made many sets and segments of English society, up and down, familiar to me, and all of these have drawn closer and closer together in the last twenty years, of late with increasing swiftness. Everywhere the same language, the same scope of thought. The ignorance and mispronunciation of servants, for example, once such a standby for Punch, have gone. Your host, your lawyer, your hair-dresser, your chauffeur, even your favourite author, all talk alike. As one a little curious in life I may regret it, for differences make humours and excitements, and (for my private pleasure) I thank heaven there are differences of atmosphere and attitude still. But they are fewer and fewer…. And when we are all Tom Smiths will one Tom really be able to enslave another Tom? The hope that he won’t need not lessen the fury of your onset, dear Eye-Witness. At ’em again!

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

There is a melancholy pleasure in reflecting on the losses of dead and gone generations, in reflecting, that is to say, on what they would have gained had they been as wise and scientific as our own. Sad, most sad, it is to think that in the hundreds of thousands of years that he has existed on the earth, Man has so far been a wild animal from the eugenist point of view, as Mr. Balfour remarked the other day; pleasant, most pleasant it is to know that in a very short time surely he will be safely and finally domesticated. Think of him remaining wild, mating where he would, fathering insanity, epilepsy, feeble-mindedness, genius, and heaven knows what unhappy divagations from the normal, and then think of him properly stalled and looked after, all eccentricity weeded out of him by careful and permanent segregation, his mating arranged by learned committees after the most searching and interesting examinations—oh, it is too wonderful, and one’s heart leaps with gratitude that one was born into this glorious and truly golden age! And yet, again, how distressing it is to remember what was lost. What devastating conquerors, born with a taint, would never have been born at all, or would have been promptly destroyed at birth or at least permanently sequestered! No Caesar, no Napoleon, no Alexander—ah me! And if I may use a homely phrase, it positively makes my mouth water to think of the many poets whose eccentricities proved an obvious taint, and who, there fore, would never have been allowed by their useless and unscientific productions to divert mankind from its proper study, namely its muscular development and the state of its digestive system.

One such instance, that of the poet Byron, has occurred to me with great force and persistence, and I have been tempted to amuse a little leisure I have enjoyed from my work in the cause by imagining in some detail what would have happened in the more fortunate conditions soon to be. Perhaps the eugenist reader will honour me by allowing me to state it all as an actual event…. I quote from the minutes of the sub-committee for Scotland of the General Autocratic Eugenist Council for the Sanction or Prevention of Marriages in Great Britain and Ireland, as it might and ought to have existed in the year 1785, on March 18, with Professor McCloskie in the chair:

“The first application before the sub-committee was that of Catherine Gordon of Gight, spinster, to be allowed to intermarry with Captain John Byron, widower, having no fixed residence. Miss Toovy at once rose to oppose the application. She stated that she was personally acquainted with the applicant and had no hesitation in affirming that she was a totally unfit person to be granted the possibility of motherhood. She (Miss Toovy) based this statement on three unfortunate defects in the applicant’s character. In the first place Miss Gordon was a woman of violent temper and had been rude to her (Miss Toovy) personally on more than one occasion. She considered her a victim of cholosthenia. In the second place she was clearly a megalomaniac, giving herself ridiculous airs on the score of her property, which after all was insignificant, and on account of her personal attractions, which simply did not exist. Dr. James Baxter here interposed to remark that it was a shameful thing that a Scotswoman of property should be exposed to the machinations of an adventurer, who on Miss Toovy’s showing could be actuated only by motives of greed. Captain Byron was an Englishman. Professor McCloskie, however, ruled this point outside the reference of the sub-committee, and Miss Toovy, continuing, said that in the third and last place she had seen Miss Gordon in the society of Captain Byron and had observed with distress, mingled with disgust, an exhibition of fondness for that gentleman which amounted to erotomania. What chance had such a woman of becoming the mother of a sane, wholesome, normal child? Professor Binny also opposed the application. He had inquired into the family history and personal antecedents of Captain Byron, and as a result had no hesitation in characterising the application as simply impudent. He observed that Captain Byron had not had the courage to bring his case before the sub-committee for England, and he had heard that when advised to do so Captain Byron had refused with a violence of language which in itself proved him quite unfit to continue the species, being a proof of a wicked insubordinate attitude to his scientific superiors. The family was homicidal, Captain Byron’s uncle, the present Lord Byron, having slain a man in an alleged duel under suspicious circumstances. Lord Byron was now a recluse at his estate of Newstead Abbey, and agoraphobia was clearly indicated. As for Captain Byron himself, he was notoriously lacking in the virtues of citizenship, being idle, reckless and improvident, and the fact that he had eloped with the late Lady Carmarthen, and now, only a year after that lady’s death, was proposing to marry again looked suspiciously like nymphomania. No scientific mind could doubt for a moment that the child of such a union as that now suggested would be imbecile and probably deaf and dumb. Professor McCloskie, without calling on further evidence, put the question to the vote and the application was refused, nemine contradicente.”

So far, so good, but we must not suppose that unruly natures would always have bowed in grateful submission to the guidance of science, and we have to imagine that some legal pressure would have been necessary to enforce its decisions or to avenge the disregard of them. I quote from The Times of a date towards the end of 1787:

“The notorious Captain Byron and his (so-called) wife arrived in England yesterday in custody. As our readers will remember, it was the crime of these malefactors in defying an order of the Eugenist Council and marrying abroad which was the immediate cause of the Universal Retrospective Extradition Act for Anti-Eugenism Offenders passed last year. On the order of the Secretary of State, Captain Byron was committed to Newgate and his wife to Bridewell.”

And to carry the pleasant imagination to the end I quote a further paragraph from an issue of the end of January, 1788:

“An event occurred yesterday which has completely and triumphantly vindicated the judgment of the Eugenist sub-committee for Scotland in the notorious Byron case. Mrs. Byron gave birth to a male child and it was born with a club foot. Further comment is needless. The unfortunate child was of course at once taken to the lethal chamber.”

So much for Byron. But since I have a little more space at my disposal, I should like to suggest how the other great movement of our time, that for the proper regulation and confinement of the feeble-minded, had it happily been brought to fulfilment a century or so ago, might have worked for good. Again I imagine and quote a paragraph from a newspaper of the period.

“A smart piece of work was performed yesterday by one of the Special Constables of the Feeble- Minded Suppression Bureau. Special Constable Hoskins, observing two men on Hampstead Heath whose gestures and conduct generally appeared to him abnormal, stationed himself where he could listen to their conversation unseen. As a result of what he heard he took them into custody and brought them before the magistrate sitting at Hampstead. Their names were Coleridge and Lamb. Coleridge, it appeared, had talked nonsense, the unintelligible words ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ continually recurring. Asked to explain these terms Coleridge embarked on a rigmarole which neither the magistrate nor anyone in the Court could understand, and he was committed to detention during his Majesty’s pleasure as a feeble-minded person. Lamb stammered in Court and was about to be committed for that when he expressed a wish ‘to feel the magistrate’s bumps.’ The charge against him was therefore altered to that of being a dangerous lunatic at large, and he also was sentenced. The magistrate warmly thanked Special Constable Hoskins for his zeal and activity.”

There! It might have been. If only it had been! If only they had had our advantages!

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS

I

When war broke out between the Allies and the Turks I asked a friend on which side his sympathies lay. He said they were with the Turks, emphatically. I expressed some surprise, pointing out to him that he, like myself, had been born a happy Christian child, whatever we might have become since; that we could not help sharing the tradition of Christian civilisation; and that the Allies, also sharing it in their way, must be nearer to us in spirit than were the Moslems. I urged that Europe should be for Europeans, and that this race of Asiatic nomads had dominated part of it long enough. All to no purpose; my friend was adamant. The Turks, said he, were a strong race, fine fellows, and he hoped and believed they would roll up those wretched Bulgars and Serbs and Greeks in a fortnight. Well, when the other thing had happened, I saw my friend again, and condoled with him on the shock his sympathies had received. But my friend, a person of unusual candour, said that his interest in the Turks was over; it seemed that it had been their metier to be strong and powerful, and that, since they were defeated, there was no particular merit left to them. “The Southern Slavs,” said my friend, “are a fine race. They are going to be a great Power.”

This change of attitude may seem indecent, but it is certainly logical, and I fancy a great many professed pro-Turks who lack my friend’s frankness are feeling as he feels. If your only reason for admiring a person or a people is strength, your admiration must founder in revealed weakness. You may cherish the memory of departed strength as you may cherish the memory of beauty vanished from a woman’s face; but, while in the last case some tenderness for what is may survive, in the other nothing survives but the memory of an illusion, which is a poor basis for sympathy. And truly I believe that most of the sympathy felt for the Turks in England came from admiration of assumed strength. This is not the moment I should choose for saying anything against them if I had anything to say. You must remember that most English people were densely ignorant of the Turks and their opponents alike, and if there was anything else in them besides strength to admire did not know what it was. Of those I met who wished success to the Turks some few had lived among them and experienced hospitality and kindness. A few others had a vague idea that their success would be a happy thing for us in India. More, expanding the idea of strength, thought that the Turks were aristocrats and gentlemen, and their opponents born inferiors, and sympathised from a natural feeling of caste or from a sort of snobbishness. But the majority, I am convinced, simply backed and sympathised with the supposedly stronger side. I speak of England only, of course. In Germany there was a sense of the Turks being especial protégés, and in Austria all who are not Czechs have an ever-present fear of the Slav and his anti-German bias. In England sympathies were more confused and divided in the same people than I remember in any other war, but of those who were single-heartedly for the Turks, the majority, as I said, were simply for the upper dog. They admired the kicker, and despised the kicked. “Give ’em hell!” was the cry of their heart, and with delighted anticipation they waited to see hell given.

This attraction of the stronger I believe to be much more general than our floating optimism would allow. It is generous to be on the weaker side, and we like to think ourselves generous. We are agreed that the truly strong (but here we are getting close to a confusion of meanings) are disposed to favour the weak. But I will not admit the argument of Mr. G. K. Chesterton (in Heretics) that in fiercer and bolder times it was the weak as against the strong who were always glorified. I don’t believe that for a moment (and here is my own optimism), being assured on the contrary that on the whole we are kinder and more compassionate than we were. He cited “Jack the Giant Killer” and “Robin Hood” and the “Tinker” and other old ballads. But observe—observe carefully, please—that the stories and ballads were made after the event, when the supposed weaker had proved himself the stronger. They don’t glorify weakness at all, they glorify strength—or, at least, superior skill, which was the same thing: strength means aptitude for the fighting business. If they had really been generous and magnanimous they would have praised the fallen giant. Insisting on the odds against the actual conqueror was simply a method of decorating his victory. This is not to deny the charm for many minds of lost causes—Heaven forbid. It is mainly a literary, a poetical affair. In practice the charm can never have been extensive: otherwise the causes had not been lost. But the lost causes which attract us are of the long-ago past. In the present, even when we are and can be spectators only, those who sympathise with the patently weaker side because it is weaker are few indeed.

But let us look at the matter more largely, and isolate the moral issue more clearly. I mentioned this Turkish business only because it seemed to me that it was a case where the general ignorance made it certain that the attraction of strength was the cause of sympathy. The relative strength or weakness of two parties to a dispute is a childish reason for favouring the one or the other. Generally there is the good reason of honest opinion, or the mean reason of personal advantage. Put all that on one side. Strength is an excellence like beauty, weakness is a defect like ugliness. Considered simply, there is no reason why we should not admire the one and dislike the other. But, if you are to see strength in action you must see the stronger defeating the weaker, and then the pleasure of seeing an excellence working must tend to blunt the feeling of compassion. As I said, by strength I mean aptitude for the fighting business in hand. I am not writing about dog-fights, where strength in its first meaning only is concerned; and, though in simple and individual human contests we distinguish between strength and skill, when we talk ethics, as I am trying to do now, we must include skill in strength: a man would not claim to be supporting magnanimously the weaker side if he backed an expert pugilist to beat a slightly more muscular ploughboy. By the Turks’ strength was meant that they had, as it was supposed, larger forces composed of better soldiers, braver and more enduring men, and of better-trained officers. Well, there is something to be said for the anticipated pleasure in seeing such an engine working inevitably and rightly. Let us set that against whatever of ignoble we may have imagined in those pro-Turks who, not even pretending to any knowledge of the affair except the relative strength, simply wanted the supposed stronger side to win.

II

I want, if I may, to add something about strength and weakness in character. While we keep to physical strength or the strength of an army, which is closely analogous to physical strength, it is plain sailing, or only on a slightly choppy sea. But when we go on to strength of character, we are in the shoals and shallows of opinion. The point is worth making, because strength of character, when it exists, is a fine thing, and it is always being imputed on insufficient grounds. Let me illustrate: Somebody told me the other day the revolting story of a man who, in his youth, had saved money out of his total income of ten shillings a week, in order to amass a little capital, and was now enormously rich, and I was invited to admire his strength of character. But singleness of purpose is not the same thing as strength of character: it may imply merely a narrow nature, a mere lack of desire for life, an unlovely bluntness to any other stimulus. I, on my side, invited vainly admiration for the strength of character in a different sort of man, well known to me, who has saved nothing out of an income sometimes touching a whole sovereign, and who, now in middle life, contemplates with serene courage a certain old age of penury. He has had the strength of character to spend the whole sovereign, undeterred by craven fears of the future. There is a difference of opinion and taste, whereas we all admit and admire physical strength, or strength truly analogous to it, as strength of intellect, whether its possessor or its use is agree able to us or not. I argue from this that strength of character is an unprofitable metaphor, dubiously applied. Most people sympathise with success, and so the successful man is generally applauded for strength of character, whereas most probably his success was due to a lucky chance in the beginning exploited by average ability and an ignoble concentration on the art of wages. And most people assume that everybody else has their own common aims, and assume weakness in whoever does not attain to their own common goal. Yes, it is an unprofitable expression, this strength of character, and I hope I shall hear it less often. But, at least, I have suggested a defence for many agreeable people whom the moralist condemns.

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   SLUSH AND GUSH

I hope no one will think me arrogantly censorious. I don’t say I could do any better myself—far from it. It worries and fatigues me dreadfully to do it at all, and I wonder how the others keep it up. But I am bored by it, and since I am more easily pleased than most people, heaps of others must be bored also; in fact all the people I know are bored to death. They all seem to despair of the infliction ever being lighter, but I think I see a way to make it so, just a little, and so it becomes my duty to the community to arise and speak. I have been referring to the persistent, desolating, overwhelming, unreasonable, intolerable dullness of the average periodical Press.

In a time so significant as ours, with thoughts so vital moving our minds, with questions so great plainly nearing their decision, one must sometimes find matters of interest and excitement in the papers. Things happen, and though the perspective of their reporting may be unintelligent or perverse, still they do get themselves reported. But the comments on those things, the leading articles, the “middle” articles, the weeklies, the monthly reviews—think, please, of all these spread out before you, and do you not see over the greater part of that vast expanse a ravening blight of stupidity? I am sure you do. I follow you heartily with your exceptions, of course. I have not a word to say against your favourite Mr. X. and no one admires more than I the versatile and a+musing Mr. Y. The What’s-its-name quite frequently has well-informed and sanely reasoned articles, and you and I know of one paper which is always helpfully provocative, at least. I will be as modest as you please; but the rest, the average? The mind’s eye sees millions of unfortunate English heads all bowed over periodicals, because the periodicals are ready to hand, all weary, all bored. It is very, very sad.

Now, I am no foe to dullness or stupidity in a general way. Without quite understanding the clever writers who eulogise it as a great national asset, I can dimly perceive its usefulness as a background or a safeguard. In social life I count dullness a far slighter fault, if fault it be, than a dozen which clever people may possess. The older I grow the less I value intelligence and the more I value kindness in life generally. Many dull people are dear to me, many sparkling people are loathsome. All very well, but everything in its place. You don’t go to periodical productions for kindness. It does not console you for the boredom or irritation of a sloppy piece of parroting that you may get a vague idea from it that the writer is possibly a pleasant, good-humoured creature to meet. You really need brains in a writer if you are to enjoy his stuff. Even when the actual writing before you has not called for immediate brains, when it is mere easy fooling or mere necessary statement, you must be at least subconsciously aware of brains in the background. (Is not therein the difference between the humorist and the buffoon?) And putting X. and Y. and the What’s-its-name aside, are you very often so conscious? You know you are not.

If all this dullness, stupidity, mediocrity of intelligence were deliberate policy on the part of the proprietors and editors of the periodicals, it would be waste of time to comment on it; they certainly would not listen to me. Mr. Chesterton says somewhere that they—or some of them—are afraid of insulting the clerk in the train by asking him to read what he could not have written for himself. I confess I am sure of one paper—no, I will not be punished for libel—that if a writer in it had amused or interested man, woman or child, he is printed no more. But I am sure that is unusual. Those potentates, the proprietors and editors, must be aware, for even I know it, that nearly all people—all but the nervously self-conceited—admire and wish to have given them what is above, not on, their own level of thought, if it be not altogether unintelligible to them. If the potentates supply dull stuff, it is because, so far as they are aware, they cannot supply better. And I appear with my partial remedy.

Mark you, I never said I could abolish the infliction of dullness. I claimed only to make it a little lighter. There are different kinds of dullness, and I want the periodical Press to go back to the dullness of twenty years ago. My private opinion is that it was less dull in the average then than now; that more men with brains were writing periodically, but that may be only because I am old and rusty and praise my own day. Put my private opinion on one side and assume that the Press, reflecting the average intelligence of the country, is no duller than it was. The difference is this: that the dullness of twenty years ago was in the main an educated dullness, that of today in the main an ignorant dullness. Do not, I beseech you, put me down a pedant or a prig. As I was no foe to dullness generally, so am I no particular friend to knowledge. By all means let us have your ignorant, brilliant man; I care nothing if he quotes wrongly or writes bad grammar. Better a flash of real ability than any amount of book-learning. But when it comes to dullness, I maintain that the dullness of the don is ever so much to be preferred to the dullness of the clerk in the train. And in the main the one is the dullness we had twenty years ago, the other is the dullness we have now. Twenty years ago promising young men of the Universities regarded writing as a promising trade; the promises were reciprocal. None do so now, and it is clear that they must have been discouraged. It is clear that proprietors and editors came to the conclusion that know ledge was a hindrance to brightness; that what they wanted was minds with fresh, virgin surfaces. Quite possibly they had reason in the case of some exceptional minds, and quite possibly other minds, which might have been bright, have been dulled by other men’s work. But in the long run they had to fall back on the average, which is necessarily dull and mediocre; I think they have exchanged one sort of dullness for a worse, and I beg them to go back to it. (Perhaps I had better say I am extremely disinterested in this respect. My own knowledge has such frightful gaps in it that no editor could rely on it with safety. It is with the ignorant dullards I must take my chance.) The don has two advantages at least over the clerk in the train. He may not stimulate your soul, but he may quite likely enrich your mind. He is likely to know, or to be able to find out, a heap of things you don’t know. I am sure the reading clerk in the train is aware of this and likes it, and would rather gain knowledge from the writing don than be given the impressions about this or that enjoyed or imagined by another like himself. And then for the reading don, as it were, the educated reader, the writing don revives pleasant associations. He suggests better things than himself; the clerk suggests himself only, and one grows tired of looking at him. Won’t the editors and proprietors reconsider their prejudice against knowledge and lure a few scholars from schoolmastering or the Civil Service? They may not be brilliant, but they may find out something to say, and I assure your worships that they are quite as likely to be brilliant as the others. To know a little of what had happened in the world before one was twenty, to have heard of a few famous people even though they are dead, not to be amazed at the novelty of every old phase or movement that comes round in its turn—dear potentates, I assure you this is not the disadvantage you seem to think it.

There would also be a sensible relief as regards the second offensive word in the title of this article. There would not be nearly so much pretentious, shouted, self-conscious inanity as there is at present. Does anybody really enjoy it? I mean when the clerk in the train lashes himself into an insincere ecstasy about something quite beyond his understanding, or when he simulates the mantle of a prophet and bow-wows platitudes as though they were fresh truths drawn from the deep well of his thought—that shallow pool. Very little education would correct all that—make it impossible. Would anybody miss it? It is sometimes more harmful than the momentary irritation it causes, because on certain subjects it sets a fashion. The gushing river irrigates all the neighbouring shallows. The artistic terrorism set up in the eighties—in itself a good thing, a needed corrective—has had the result that the average English person goes in deadly fear of being thought a Philistine. So that when the gushing writer told him that the Sicilian players—an interesting, capable little troupe—were all Garricks and Bracegirdles, or that Miss Allen’s pretty posing was the last word in the art of dancing, or that he (the gusher), closing his eyes at the performance of Oedipus, saw the sunlit slopes of the Acropolis, the average English person went about repeating the nonsense and the air was thick with insincerity. In the last instance, at least, the older sort of average writer would have been much more likely to tell the truth, which was—I really must be dogmatic, having been exasperated by unfulfilled expectations—that one had a thrill from a crowd rushing in through the stalls because one had not seen that before, and the rest was weariness. It was not Greek at all, and while, as Professor Murray argued, the spirit of it may have been pre-Greek, of the barbarous days to which the story went back, the actors were very post-Greek indeed, being English. Yet the gusher said … never mind; happily one does not remember him. Unhappily, when another Oedipus comes along he will be gushing again. I am all, if you please, for emphasis and enthusiasm and letting oneself go—when one is really impelled. My complaint of the gusher is that, prostrating himself before everything, he admires nothing truly. And how he lets the really fine things go by! … Never mind. It is all a trifle, I know. But so often one is bored and so often one is irritated, and my remedy would make such a difference. Can’t it be tried?

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•   AN ACQUITTAL AND A CHARGE

I shall soften and sweeten this article for my fellow-countrymen by acquitting them handsomely, in the first place, of a charge which has been generally and for a long time brought against them. And I shall then suggest a fault of a different nature into which they are at present increasingly apt to fall. The task is a sad one for a patriot, but must not be shirked, being useful, for the two faults may be easily confused, and besides, who knows that my words will necessarily fall upon deaf ears? I see in imagination numberless heads bowed, and hearts turned inside out, and hands uplifted in solemn vows of amendment.

Our dear old friends persist in crediting us with the characters and tastes we had when they first knew us, whereas we know that we have altered immeasurably for the better. And so with nations—qualities go on being attributed to them long after the justification has ceased, if it ever existed. England was once really remarkable for mirth and genial customs beyond the other nations of Europe, and she was pathetically called merry long after she had cause to laugh on the wrong side of her mouth. We were not a nation of shopkeepers when Napoleon called us one; we were more like it later, when Manchester and Cobden swayed us, though even then we were fairly leavened by the spirits of devotion and adventure; we are not all like it now, for to take us on our worst side it is not the mark of a shrewd shopkeeper to be controlled by a moneylender. But that idea of us still lingers in the minds of foreigners who do not love us, and even so another and worse accusation still affects the air about us. Let me blow it away.

A nation of hypocrites! That is a natural stone to be flung at any community by members of it who have quarrelled with it, and it is probable that certain hardy and very articulate rebels against English society, like Byron or Shelley, who have flung it with strong arms and skilful aims, have done much to make the missile popular with foreigners. Some hypocrisy is, of course, necessary for any civilised life until humanity is perfect, and if it is the homage vice pays to virtue—as it sometimes is, though the epigram is not Rochefoucauld’s most profound—it is also the homage selfishness pays to kindness. A married man with a mistress, for example, unless his wife be quite indifferent, must be a hypocrite or a brute, and in lighter matters we must all be actors at times or be a very awkward element in society. In that sense the English were never more hypocritical than other nations have been—disadvantageously less so than some. But in the bad use of the word, in which a hypocrite means a man who being in practice no better than others—probably worse—professes an ultra-rigid standard of conduct and applies it unmitigated to his fellow-creatures, the Englishman seems at one time really to have deserved his bad eminence. During a large part of the last century this smug meanness was triumphant among us, and was aggravated by another form of hypocrisy—by a futile and silly pretence of nescience, which ignored both the evils common to all monogamous civilisations and those especially produced by our own unfettered industrialism, by a sham refinement which pretended that the ordinary facts of physical life did not exist. There is no room here for historical and psychological explanations of how this evil came upon the once humorous and joyous and free-spoken English. The charge was true and has been admitted by all our domestic observers.

But it is true no more. Partly (let us hope) increased charitableness and breadth of mind, partly the decay of clerical dogmatism, partly the spreading influence of certain lay teachers, have undermined the old rigid and unqualified standards and for many years the tone of English ethical conversation and the attitude towards our neighbour’s conduct has been (with no more exceptions than elsewhere) as tolerant as anywhere in Europe. In our average private life the average sinner can be the average critic without hypocrisy. We talk scandal like our predecessors and see evil where none is, and all that, but we do not hurl our moral judgments and cross the road and whisk our skirts out of the way as they did. If our practice be much as it was—and conduct changes slowly—and it used to be laxer than our theory, they are now brought together. The Englishman is acquitted of his old hypocrisy and may leave the dock.

But I have to put him back there on another charge which comes of this very breadth and tolerance. It used to be charged against him that his practice accorded ill with his professed standards, but it was not charged against him that he was ready to adapt or change those standards at the bidding of people who had no claim to bid. He was supposed to be remarkably stubborn in opinion, remarkably indifferent to dictation. He took his line and was not afraid of policemen and magistrates and newspapers. That is his danger now, a soft and weak fear of what is said in public. You can see how it happens. You and I, who have replaced the old rigid and narrow standards by a reasoned and enlightened ethic, will be as stubborn, character for character, over our own opinion as our grandfather over his.

But suppose a man has lost the old standards and principles, with their dogmatic sanction, and gotten no others for himself? For my part I do not regret this state, though I understand those who regret it deeply, believing it to be a necessary stage towards one better than the old. But being in this empty condition, an average man is apt to be always a little afraid in secret, and very much afraid if there is a public fuss over a matter about which he is consciously void of principle. Having no particular standards of his own he is in a fit state to have them stuck into him by people with no authority whatever for the office—politicians, magistrates, newspapers. He is afraid, as he used not to be, of what is said in public as distinct from what is said in private.

Anyone can think of instances. A man and a woman decide to “live their own life,” let us say. Some of their acquaintances, having the old standards, act accordingly; more are quite indifferent; some few applaud. But there comes a rumpus and row in public and there is a change of views: perhaps they have gone too far, perhaps we ought not to countenance, etc. etc. Or to take a lighter instance. About a year ago a rage for chemin-de-fer set in and several hells were started in London. Everybody knew and nobody cared, save those of us who had gambling friends with brains and temperaments worthy of a better occupation. (I hate chemin-de-fer.) But then a hell was raided and the gamblers were brought before a magistrate, and oh! it was too dreadful and shocking for words. It was said—if one may repeat that rumour without being broken on the wheel—that certain eminent public men went to one of those hells. People smiled and nobody cared, but if the police had raided them, in what homilies should we not have wallowed! (Of course, I don’t believe that any public man would ever do anything in private anybody could possibly censure.) And then those other rumours—I dare not mention them precisely—which everyone repeated for ages unrebuked: as soon as they were in print, what horror that they should be mentioned without proof!

Dear me, you know, I should doubt all this was rather cowardly if I were not sure my kinder and more profound explanation was right. But I have warned my country.

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•   BALLETS AND PHILISTINES

Not since I fell in love with Calve in Carmen have I written about anything which happened at Covent Garden. I have been afraid of annoying the people who went constantly, happy plutocrats or friends of plutocrats or experts in music. So have I been annoyed in reading some astonished person’s first impressions of the Turkish bath, having myself had a thousand. And now I have no intention of writing another appreciation of the place, and still less of taking sides in any musical quarrel. Not even do I intend to add my tribute at any length to the graces of the ballet, though that I might do with more forgiveness out of the greatness of my love for it. I wish only to utter a prayer on a point of practical arrangement. I have loved ballets and the sight of good dancing from my youth upwards, and in the last few years, since we have had those delightful artists from Russia among us, love has been suffused with wonder. And because of many associations, literary and others, I have a great kindness for Covent Garden and am always struck afresh (it is true my visits are rare) with the prettiness and gaiety of the scene. I am told that the Russian ballet is going elsewhere than to Covent Garden when it comes to us next time. My prayer is that it will never go there again, never, never, never.

What exasperates and sickens the soul more than a fine pleasure spoiled? To meet the philosopher of your age (if you care for that sort of thing) in the tube railway, unable to hear a word he says; to be alone with the woman of your dreams and a severe stomach-ache…. I won’t multiply the horrid experiences, but one of them is to love a ballet dearly and to see the best in the world at Covent Garden, in an average seat. I wish to speak justly and carefully, and should hate to be prosecuted for libel; in my opinion, and so far as I can judge, about a tenth of the audience there has an uninterrupted sight of the stage. Really, one would like to be the royal artist and maniac of Bavaria and have the theatre to oneself; but curbing one’s spirit to normal ambitions one does reasonably expect to see the feet of dancers if one sees dancers at all. At Covent Garden one is fairly fortunate if one sees to their waists. I do not know if any critic has pointed this out. Probably critics are put into the best places, and then they are such clever fellows that I dare say they can imagine the feet, or deduce them by inference from the music. I go to feed my senses rather than my mind and imagination, and want my eyes to be of service to me. I speak bitterly.

Look you, Covent Garden is not cheap. Is it not cruel that I should dine off biscuits for a week, as it were, to save money for a stall, that I should congratulate myself on getting one as near as the fifth row, and that I should be conscious of four dodging heads between me and the stage the whole time? That was my experience on the only occasion I was able to go this last season. In the former two seasons none of my visits brought me much more than a sight of the heads. I was discouraged, but made this last attempt, and such was the comparatively fortunate result. Oh, yes, at odd moments when I dodged right I saw a foot or two. I love Covent Garden, but if the seats cannot be “raked” properly it should be kept for sound.

It is a dreadful thing to doubt the sincerity of one’s fellow-countrymen, but in this case I cannot help it. We patriots have been congratulating ourselves that in the Russian ballet the English had at length found an achievement of art both new and fine which they appreciated. (New for most of us, at least, for our home-grown ballets, which I should be an ingrate to disparage, were hardly a preparation.) Covent Garden was full night after night. Yes, but full of people of whom one-tenth only could see the ballet as it should be seen. If they had really loved it, would they have borne such a spoiling of the pleasure? Would they not simply have stayed away, in exasperation and despair, as I did; or more manfully have formed a union of ballet-lovers and insisted on this glorious show being taken to a fit place? But there they were, night after night, seeing (for most of them) the less important halves of the dancers and then applauding madly. Mental suggestion? Afraid of being Philistines? Mere fashion? Oh, my country!

Some of them at least were Philistines. I had two of them close to me on this solitary visit. They were two middle-aged boys of a kind we all love and admire and boast of, clean, well set-up, well groomed, fit, athletic, brutally insensible. One of the two greatest woman dancers in the world appeared, and “This,” quoth one to the other, “is rather a pretty girl.” But they made amends to me. “Cleopatra” was given, and when the young lover was writhing out his life before the thrilled Cleopatra, “You know,” said one of my neighbours again, “I don’t think this fellow’s Antony after all.” That paid me for their other ineptitudes, as I hope it may pay you for this article. But the Russian ballet must not go to Covent Garden again. Never, never.

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•   AN OLD GRIEVANCE

Let not the reader shy at the adjective. If the grievance is old it is also, so far as the public expression of it goes, exclusively mine. It is true that I have been agitating it, in letters to The Times and in articles in various publications successively in the habit of printing me, as my patience (almost my reason) temporarily gave way, for twenty long years. Never, though, in The New Witness, save once when I alluded to it lightly and, not being at the moment exasperated, fantastically. It follows, then, that the present reader either meets a full statement of it for the first time or else has been in the habit of reading me, in which case I may suppose that he finds, bless him, something attractive in me and will not mind meeting an old friend in the subject. I shall treat it in a brighter and more convincing way than ever before, but I am sure he will forgive me if I use some facts and arguments I have used already; the victim on the rack is not expected to groan in a different key at every twist of his limbs. It is something if I remain coherent with a fury of words boiling inside me. The early morning building season is in full swing.

Mark you, that I am not unreasonable. I do not complain that for the twenty years or so that I have lived more or less continuously in London I have known hardly a spring or a summer free from the uproar of builders in the ordinary working hours. It has prevented my achieving any really solid result, but what of that? I compliment an important industry on its flourishing condition. If you live in a city at all, or anywhere in the midst of your fellows, as you must live if you are not rich enough to have a country house in the middle of your private park, you must expect that old houses will be pulled down or altered and new houses built. Even writers prosperous enough to take country cottages must endure the nuisance sometimes, or at least I hope so. Nor is it a personal grievance only that I urge. I know I must take my share of noises; nor do I complain, except in private, that a great man’s stable, which my humble windows over look, shelters a horse which beguiles the night by trying to kick down his stall and welcomes the dawn with neighs. I am fond of horses and there is something picturesque and feudal in the sacrifice of my sleep and health to the great man’s horse’s nerves or spirits. Also it helps me to understand the French Revolution—but this is by the way—I apologise for the digression, I am admittedly in a nervous state.

The grievance I urge affects thousands and thousands of people; it is utterly unfair and unreasonable; it could be remedied, in my belief, without hurt to anybody, and most certainly with none but a slight inconvenience to comparatively few. I refer, of course, to the hour at which building begins.

Doctors differ about the amount of sleep necessary to the average man, and since few of us are exactly the average we differ from one another in our practice. But building contractors and their workmen have decided that whatever may be necessary or wise, six hours at the most is all the sleep that thousands and thousands of Londoners shall get, from about the end of April to about the end of August. The fact cannot be denied, given the present habits, conveniences and necessities of those thousands. A large number, such as Members of Parliament, actors, or journalists on morning papers, are kept up late by their work. The rest of professional men, and the large majority of business men and even of their clerks, are allowed by their work to stay in bed until eight o’clock. Naturally they order their evenings accordingly, and the result is that all of them who take any share in the public amusements or ordinary social pleasures of London are accustomed to go to bed about twelve—some earlier, some later, but that is the average—and expect, good souls, at whatever hour they are fortunate enough to go to sleep, to sleep on till eight. And over large districts of London entirely inhabited by such people and their womenfolk, at six or half-past there begins a hideous and horrible disturbance fit to wake the dead. The disproportion between the annoyance, suffering and downright illness on the one side and the supposed but (as I shall show) illusory interest of one trade and its employees on the other beggars me of words, even on paper. It is the most monstrous sacrifice of the many to the few recorded in modern times.

Let us take the remedy first. The workmen begin at half-past six, let us say: it is sometimes earlier, but I think that is the usual hour. At eight (when they are comparatively harmless) they leave off for breakfast, resuming at half-past and going on, with an hour off for dinner, until five or six—let us say six. If they had breakfast first and began at eight they would still have a nine-hours day (not counting the dinner interval) instead of ten hours, as now. Heaven knows that ought to be enough! I am quite certain the additional efficiency would more than compensate for the hour lost. If not, could not an hour be added at the other end? I should have thought that the additional comfort to the workman, his more pleasant evenings and less unpleasant mornings, would long ago have caused his Union to insist. But even if he is not in favour of the change, because, as I suppose, there would be no chance of extra pay for overtime, surely the sacrifice would be slight in comparison with what is demanded of us. (It is of no use, by the way, to speak of Daylight-Saving Bills: they would merely mean a five-thirty awakening.) But in truth these long hours are a fetish of the contractor: the workman should make him pay as much as at present—I should be delighted.

Then take the alternatives before us, if this obvious remedy be not adopted. We might change our habits to suit the contractor’s convenience, dining at five or six, leaving the theatre at nine, looking askance at the guest who stayed till ten. Why should we? Or else we can submit to the docking of two hours’ sleep with equanimity, grin and bear it. Easy for the brute who can sleep through anything to say this. I should like—I should like very much—to have him roused, by a wet sponge or otherwise, two hours before his usual time and kept awake every day for a fortnight…. Being awakened and kept awake when you would naturally be asleep is infinitely worse than insomnia. Rushes of sleep come over you, you are half asleep and beginning to dream—then bang! Crash! You are writhing awake again. Jangled nerves, depressed vitality, constant headaches, muddled brains are the result. Why should we suffer it?

If we were really a civilised community, knowing how to give and take, the remedy would long ago have been taken voluntarily. Since we are not, a short Act should be passed empowering a two-thirds majority of householders, flat-occupiers and lodgers in any given district to prevent the uproar before eight. But there’s the old obstacle of our individualism run mad, run into anarchy. Annoy your neighbour as you please, so long as you do not assault his person. Some time ago a young man, driven mad by this torture, went out with his revolver and winged a workman. I hope I shall not be driven to that….

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   MEN’S CLOTHES

I wonder how many people read the articles one sees from time to time about the changing fashions in the contemporary dress of men. I wonder if all their readers read them as I do, not with the faintest intention of profiting by their instruction, not even for any interest in their subject-matter, but from a sort of odd attraction they have for one in their authoritative manner, their meticulous comprehensiveness and their pleasant remoteness from real life.

For surely there never was a time when men cared less about their raiment. One man is more neatly dressed than another; one man goes oftener to his tailor. But what man ever gives more than a vague, probably un-seeing glance to his neighbour’s coat or any serious thought to the cut of his own? Yet here are writers gravely telling you that the lapels of your coat must be of this shape this year and not of that shape which was all right last year—as though we had a new outfit every year!—and just so many, no more and no fewer, must be its buttons; nay, even informing you of what colour are the fashionable socks. Does anyone heed them? No doubt the things supplied us by tailors and linen-drapers change from time to time. The time is so long between my own new coats—but even a man of letters must have one sometimes—that I am able to observe differences, and am pleased to escape complete monotony. But surely these are arranged by the tailors? Does anyone go to his tailor, printed authority in hand, and insist on the “correct” length of his coat-collar? You would fancy from the writers that men not only did this but discussed the question among themselves. I seem to remember reading-—or was it a dream?—that a “sensation” was caused in a London drawing-room by the appearance of a man with one button to his waistcoat, or it may have been ten. As though anybody would have noticed! The whole thing seems to be an elaborate make-believe. There is, indeed, one touch of actuality to be found as a rule in these articles, in that the writer mentions, with a touching persistency, the name and address of his favourite tailor, who usually responds, in a pleasing spirit of camaraderie, by advertising in the paper. Apart from that, the whole thing is in the air, a game played for its own sake, signifying nothing, and that somehow is attractive to me, that and the solemn finality of the pronouncements. “We shall all,” remarked the writer in this sort I have read last, who, indeed, set me writing myself, “we shall all be wearing black waistcoats with white slips.” The devil we shall.

I do not mean that no contemporary man ever thinks about his clothes at all. You may be driven to do so by necessity, as when your one evening coat becomes hopeless and you have neither money nor credit with a tailor. Certain prejudices may linger from your boyhood, obeyed without thought as a rule, but causing absurd perturbations if accident should outrage them, as if you arrived evening-tieless on a visit and were lent a “made-up” affair, or as happened when somebody in a book had to walk down Piccadilly frock-coated and pot-hatted. Badly made clothes, too, are generally uncomfortable and make the wearer conscious of them while they last. But all that is nothing to the attitude and concern which the articles assume, beautifully insisting on a world which does not exist.

I would not say that Dandyism is dead. In the first place its spirit and its attitude to life went far beyond the small question of man’s raiment. To care nothing, or at least to say nothing, about the wide issues of life, to be absorbed in sports and amusements, to have no rules of morality at all except those whose violation expels from clubs, to keep the same face to the world whatever happens—that, roughly, was the life of Dandyism, and that, of course, survives. But even as to dress, if we allow the admitted King of Dandies to represent his subjects, we have preserved his chief principles—only they have become so habitual to us that only unusual accidents make us conscious of them. Brummell obliged us by insisting more on cleanliness than smartness: “fresh linen and plenty of it,” was his first command. Then the conspicuous and the flamboyant were never to his taste, which, until his madness was coming on him, was ever sensitive and good. According to his sincere admirer, Byron, an “exquisite propriety” was his aim and his achievement, and he insisted on men being dressed appropriately to the occasion. These principles, in our rougher way and without the thought necessary to this great teacher, we conserve. In some respects we have even extended their practice, no longer playing cricket or shooting in top hats. It is a commonplace with us that an obtrusively or too obviously well-dressed man is ill-dressed, and Brummell would have smiled approval. We have made a precise rule about the wearing of our different kinds of clothes, which, apart from sport and games, are only three, and keeping it modestly and quietly are really, even the shabbiest of us, in the true spirit of Dandyism.

What is really dead, or what at any rate is asleep, is the D’Orsay or young Disraeli spirit, which prompted a man to dress for a striking effect. No doubt there was mingled with that spirit the impulse to express beauty, as he understood it, on his person, but the leading idea was to make a sensation. That is gone even from artistic circles: I know of but one velvet coat habitually worn abroad, and its wearer, I am sure, seeks merely his own comfort and not the gratification of the public eye. I shall be told of the Nuts. But are there really Nuts, and if there are, who are they? Generally it is a word of derision for young men a little more carefully or newly dressed than their fellows; none of them would call himself a Nut, and all would deny they deserved it. Of course, if it means simply young men who are given expensively to young men’s pleasures, then Nuts exist in reality, but I think these are still, if one wishes to speak correctly, called Bloods. The Nut of the picturesque article, with his amazing ties and wonderful socks—is he to be found anywhere? Certainly not in the regions which knew D’Orsay and the young Disraeli. Elaborate and striking costume is not found on the backs of young M.P.’s, fortunately born, or of young Guardsmen. The latter are especially quiet in their dress, and I believe would be severely discouraged were they otherwise. And Pendennis of Boniface is most decidedly gone from us: the very opposite of his idea of dress is the mode of Oxford and Cambridge. No, if the Nuts so richly imagined by the writers of men’s fashion articles exist, they are but “Wallikers and such-like.” I am so obscurely allusive for fear of being called a snob by a fool. Among the men who would set men’s fashions, if they were set by anybody but tailors, you may find those who are given to a more careful and “exquisite propriety” than others and so keep alive the essential spirit of the Dandy’s dress. But even they do not seriously think about the matter or grow critical (as Brummell did) of those who lack their precision. And the daring artistry of D’Orsay is imitated, if at all, by Wallikers only.

Well, well, I am sorry. It looks like a final abandonment of that brave fight civilised man fought for so long against the nature which had made him, on the whole, not a beautiful animal, of his gay insistence on being beautiful, let nature wrong him as it would. The rout first set in, I think, in England, when Charles Fox gave up being a Macaroni and set a mode of such shabbiness that his appearing in a new coat was a portent among his friends. That was the beginning, which divided the men who counted in England into two camps: the aggressively slovenly and the exuberantly gay. Brummell made a great centre party of moderates, who were content to be clean but quiet, and that has enlisted us all now, save for a few eccentrics in dirt or elaboration. It is a dull business, and, like all rational compromises, dissatisfies the soul of man—which would lend him to sackcloth at times, at times to blue satin. I should like to be dressed in silk and bright colours now and then, though a philosopher should weep beholding me. Women, I hope and believe, will not give up the fight: so many more of them (but then, I am a man) have no need to fight at all. I should like to thank every uncomely woman I see who is beautifully dressed. And even so I am obliged to the writers who inspired this article, in their degree.

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   PAVEMENT REFLECTIONS

A few weeks ago it was reported in the papers that a man who had stepped off the pavement to make way for two women had been knocked over by a motor and killed. One’s first thought on reading of the accident was that it was a very pitiful and futile way to die. It was an accident like another, a death like another, but something in the ghastly disproportion between the trivial act of politeness and the fatal result of it struck one’s imagination. Yet there was, I think, something fine, too, in such a death. It was the poor fellow’s fault that he did not look round before obeying his instinct of not incommoding a woman, just as it would have been his fault if he had not looked round before starting to cross the road on his own account. But the latter death would have meant nothing at all; as it was, he died in performing what is a finely significant gesture, however slight and trivial, a gesture which lingers on to remind us of a great European ideal and tradition. That such slight actions are still instinctive and automatic with us is sure evidence that the ideas of chivalry had some practical reality and truth in them. When we read of the barbarities practised against women in the age of chivalry itself, or how in later Victorian times, when so much sentiment was popular about the sacredness and holiness of Woman, women were used in factories, we are apt to call the whole theory of chivalry humbug, but for all that it was real and active in the lives and spirits of men. And just as that poor man’s gesture of politeness reminds one of the reality still lingering, so his death might well be a symbol of the probable doom of chivalry, as things go in modern England. Perhaps it should not be regretted. Chivalry means reverence and helpfulness for the weak, and perhaps we should rejoice if women are really to be as strong as men. In any case, if they are to compete with men in everything, it will go ill with the man who makes way for them. It is hardly worth while to speak of the “militant” women, since they must be merely a passing phase in a civilised community, but they have done their appreciable something to hasten the death of the chivalrous frame of mind. Not, I suppose, that they would care.

This line of reflection, however, would take me into deeper depths than I care to swim or sink in on the present occasion. Let us keep to the surface of life and consider the manners and customs of people in the streets. In my opinion they have become more slovenly than they used to be and require admonishment. A stationary London crowd is the most easily managed, the best-humoured and pleasantest in the world. Occasionally there is trouble at a political meeting, and of late some resentment has been shown about befouled letters, and houses and railway stations burnt down, but a London crowd at a procession or a show is charming. It is when people move that they are troublesome, and I mention it believing they err from ignorance and carelessness rather than an evil heart. Not always, though. Harking back to the matter of making way for women I have to say with great regret that most of them accept that courtesy most ungraciously. Very seldom with the slight smile or “Thank you” the occasion demands; as a rule they march by you without a glance. It may be due to the increasing self-importance of women or it may not, but somehow they make you feel, not that you have done a slight act of voluntary politeness, but that you have obeyed a law imposed on you of making way for your betters, your born superiors. It is annoying, when you pass two women who take up all the pavement and you step into a muddy gutter, that they should sail by as though you were a “native” and they were the governing race. To be frank, you regret the politeness and in time may even discontinue it. More annoying still to give up your seat in the tube and it is taken as a matter of course without a word. That, I hope, is not frequent, but it has happened to me and I have thought a little wistfully of the East, where women wait on men and wash their feet and carry the burdens on the march. I have heard or read of a typical Eastern scene, in which a woman carried over a narrow stream first her husband and then her four grown sons. A shocking scene, but, after all, the European treatment of women is a thing of yesterday in the history of mankind. They must be careful. They must not Orientalise us. But I am approaching deep waters again, and must really attempt a lighter touch.

Nobody seems to know the rule of the pavement. Every driver knows the rule of the road, that in England he keeps to the left, but hardly any pedestrian seems to know that he ought to keep to the right. Why, I cannot tell him; I did not make the rule, but there it is. You must have a rule. In old days men fought duels about “taking the wall,” and in these days they would look ferocious, at least, without the rule. As a fact, they do look ferocious, not knowing it. Over and over again, when I am walking, as I should, close to the wall on my right I am met by a man also walking, as he should not, close to the wall, who looks as though he thought me a brute for expecting him to make way for me. Once such a man, very raggedly dressed, positively upbraided me, calling me “the rich” and asking why on that account I should have the wall to myself; money had to pass before his serenity was restored. At other times wrongly polite men, being properly next the wall, make way for you while you make way for them and you dodge to and fro for minutes. In a crowded street the rule must be kept, woman or no woman, unless it is a question of one of you getting off the pavement. I notice that the City of Westminster is fond of advertising its existence rather uselessly at street corners; could it not print this rule also, even in its horrid white on blue? Then might I point to it in triumph, as I should have done the other day, when a furious dog nearly bit me under the impression I had insulted its mistress by taking the wall of her…. These are trifling matters, reader? Who shall say? Perhaps all this is a symptom of a chaotic, undisciplined, uncertain state of mind into which this unhappy nation is falling.

I would not infer all that, nor would I make too much of the way people hurry round corners without a thought of whom they may knock over, or the way they rush down steps and crash into passers-by at right angles. Indeed, those are rather hopeful signs, giving some indication of business and purpose, and I am prepared to allow some roughness of manner and to suffer some inconvenience for the health and prosperity of my country. For now I come to the gravest matter: to the opposite fault and its most sinister significance. I refer to the exasperatingly slow pace at which most people walk. At almost any hour of the day about a quarter of the London population is abroad in the main thoroughfares, and of that quarter only a tiny fraction show the least evidence that time is of any value to them, or indeed that they have any wish to arrive anywhere. Obviously, this means a frightful amount of idleness. It means an indolent and flaccid habit of mind and body. It means, moreover, extreme stupidity and insensibility, for, with the most numerous and beautiful parks and gardens of any city in the world to walk in why should people crawl and saunter for pleasure in crowded and noisy streets? If you wish to advance at more than a mile an hour in the Strand or Oxford Street you have to edge your way and slither between people and dodge into the road and back all the time. Even in wet weather, or in cold, raw weather, it is much the same; you have to evade a thousand umbrellas in a quarter of a mile…. Perhaps I was wrong in my inferences. Let us hope that all this languid crawling is really due to the fine athletic spirit of modern England. These are all splendid fellows tired out with tennis and football and golf, and nursing their energies for fresh bouts. Let us hope so. But they do get horribly in one’s way.

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   THE LIME-LIGHT MAN

It is a natural and harmless vanity enough to be pleased by the pointing finger. To hear your name whispered among the new boys when you were a big boy at school, to be conscious of nudges as you enter a theatre, to meet the glance of obvious interest in the street—all that must flatter the humanity in everyone. Even the contemptuous soul which cares nothing for the favour or disfavour of the commonalty is yet pleased by its recognition. Other ages than ours knew that joy at its keenest, in the Greek State, in the cities of the Middle Ages, where considerable men in any walk of life were known by sight to all their fellow-citizens. In our own larger community, in spite of photographs in the papers, hardly anyone is known by sight outside the sphere of his special activity or beyond the range of his acquaintance, or would be recognised by a crowd which was not prepared for his appearance. All but a very few must savour the joy at one remove by seeing their names in the papers, with the sub-conscious knowledge that hundreds or tens of thousands of other people have seen it also. One’s first review was a joy, not for what it said, for even if it was favourable one’s young superiority was not greatly exhilarated, but because one’s name appeared at intervals in it, and after many books and many weary years there is still some faint pleasure in seeing that sequence of letters. It is not so vivid as the pointing finger, but still, people are being reminded of one’s existence. Those who are for ever writing letters to the papers do not as a rule, I am sure, intend deliberately to advertise themselves; they merely have a passion for seeing their names in print at the foot of their letters, and, if they are lucky, in answers to them.

So much I have written in kindly homage to our common humanity, to disclaim any particular austerity or fastidiousness or priggishness, because now I wish to make a few unpleasant remarks about the nature of newspaper publicity in its present developments.

Its extension to matters with which it should have no concern is a commonplace and is not important, but I think it deserves a passing kick.

A century back papers pandered to impertinent curiosity far more shrewdly and viciously than they do now, but then they were concerned with a few prominent people only, and those people did not do the pandering themselves. Now hosts of people with the slightest claim to public attention, and with nothing material to gain from advertising themselves—that is a motive for which in my human way I make allowance—voluntarily display their private likes to the world; it is absurd to suppose that pictures of their intimate domesticity get published against their will. Personally I like the pictures—they are often of folk delightful to behold—but assuredly they mirror an age of rare vulgarity. It is not enough for the contemporary snob that he should climb to a dinner with the Duke of Snodgrass, that fashionable but exclusive peer; he must dine in public, like the kings of old. Poor fellow, he has many a disappointment, for many such hosts still live their private lives in private. Yet there are others, of no less dignity otherwise, whose arrivals and departures and visits and dinner-parties are all solemnly recorded in print. All that is unimportant, however. Not quite so is the significance now accorded to newspaper prominence. With a certain sort of person it is all-important. A little while ago one of the most gifted and beloved men of our generation died, and a writer commented, with the air of patronage dear to many small men when they speak of their betters: “Poor ———! brilliancy under partial eclipse is always sad….” He meant that the name I have omitted had not been so prominent in the newspapers lately as those of some other men in his calling. But wiser men than that fall easily into almost as coarse and foolish a mistake, tacitly assuming—what they would never verbally admit—that there is no importance but newspaper importance. “One never sees So-and-so’s name now,” is said regretfully as of certainly extinguished powers. A man may have done fine work and given no proof that he is not as good as ever he was, but unless he is for ever “before the public,” he is done for in the regard of many who should know better. It goes further even than the vulgar habit of being influenced by the praise or blame accorded by critics whose opinion is worthless; not praise even, but mere frequency of mention is the criterion. I believe if some really serious matter were in hand and for its decision a committee of this or that calling—science, art, literature, anything—were appointed, newspaper frequency and not merit would mainly determine the choice. And, to lighten the picture with a comic touch, there are people—you won’t believe me if you don’t know it—who seeking, as certain folk have always sought, to make friends only of importance, are guided by newspaper prominence alone. If you fall out of the papers, you fall out of their houses.

You may say, though inaccurately, that this is merely an immemorial grumble about the mistakes of popular esteem. But what will you say when I tell you that this newspaper prominence is most often no genuine reflection of popular esteem or popular importance at all, but a fake? Yet that is the case, and, if you think of it, must be the case. Newspaper prominence goes by favour. Even as regards that foolish social advertising, I am told that the most effective of it is all controlled by one man. One would have guessed so, indeed, from the incessant repetition in certain places of names not otherwise distinguished. I am also told that he is a very agreeable and popular man, and I dare say he is extremely conscientious in his peculiar business, but I presume he must give lifts to those he likes personally in their ambitions. I suppose he invented “the smart set,” and I hope to see a statue of him before I die. But if newspaper prominence goes by favour, still more does newspaper insignificance go by disfavour. To ignore is the journalist’s deadliest weapon—for after all it can do material harm in many callings—and his dearest scheme of revenge. This I know for a fact. I know of papers in which certain men, who have somehow offended those papers, are never mentioned. It is a fine thought—that of the editor or proprietor hugging his great soul, and chuckling to think how surely he is getting back on someone who has annoyed him. It sounds so much nobler than attack or abuse, that “We never mention his name in this paper,” and it does so much more injury. Even when the offender is too considerable to be ignored, he may be slighted with effect, his speeches, if he is a politician, ill reported, his books obscurely noticed, and so forth. Given a certain quality of mind, there is nothing to surprise in the use of this weapon. No, but does not its use take away from the importance of newspaper mention any basis of fact it ever had? Criticism is generally honest; deliberately to write, especially at any length, praise or dispraise against conviction needs more strength in dis honesty than most writers possess, though some exaggeration of both for personal reasons is natural and often unconscious. To say nothing or to mention often is an easier course, and the dear public, which is apt to suspect criticism, is not alive to it.

Go stand in the lime-light in your innocent way if you can get it turned on you, reader. I am sure you would not bribe the lime-light man. But when you sit in the theatre of journalism, don’t take it as a guide to the importance of the players. In that theatre the lime-light man is got at—very often indeed.

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   THE JEW IN OUR SOCIAL LIFE

I have no hope that this article will escape offence. There will be nothing in it which, in my opinion, can give reasonable cause, but I have no hope, none whatever. Some ten years ago—decades seem to whisk by me like fortnights now—I ventured to write a little essay on what I called “The Paradox of the Jew.” The bulk of it consisted of a sincere tribute to the good qualities of the race, its moral courage and persistence in tribulation, and so on, and to the antiquity of its civilisation. I reminded myself that the Jews’ ancestors had a great literature in days when mine were savages, and I was eloquent about the Jew—taking him with complete trustfulness on Mr. Zangwill’s authority—who sold matches by day, and by night lived in the spirit with Moses his teacher and Abraham his father. And then I came to the paradox and permitted myself to wonder how it was that all this fortitude and idealism in adversity should be blown away in the case of so many Jews by the least breath of prosperity, that having made some miserable money and finding it possible to be accepted by us others, or so they thought, as ordinary middle-class English folk, they should abandon all they had fought for and clung to, adopt Scotch surnames, and carry shame in their origin so far as positively to take it as an insult, or at least a tactless and vulgar indiscretion, if anyone recognised it in conversation. I had hoped that all this would be taken in good part, that the sincerity of my admiration would be seen and my wish that it could be more whole-hearted: there was no spirit of attack in me at all. I was disappointed, receiving angry letters and irrelevant, if deserved, depreciation of myself. It was pointed out to me, as a conclusive answer, that a certain Jew who had taken an old English name was enormously rich and extremely philanthropic, and so forth. I have even wondered, in darker moments, if an extraordinary unsuccess in life has been due to my having unwittingly offended such powerful people. But I was not altogether disappointed, for some sound Jews—the late Chief Rabbi, Dr. Adler, was one—approved warmly of my little essay, though they did not give me the explanation I sought. So now, though I have no hope of escaping offence, I have some hope that I shall interest, without offending, fair-minded Jews who will see that I wish merely to express, on an interesting subject, the results of impartial observation.

My theme is a slighter one than before. I do not propose to ask difficult questions about Jews, to go far into their distinctive psychology, to estimate their influence on our foreign politics, our domestic situation, our public life. But since one meets them in almost every sort of English society in varying frequency, it is of interest to inquire a little precisely what is the nature of their relation to it and what is their effect upon it.

It is the nature of the relation which, in my opinion, is the important matter in this connection and not the personal qualities of the Jews. These, of course, have their effect. But the subject is obscure, it leads one into the swamp of profitless generalities, it is an invitation to be swayed by prejudice or accidental experiences: I won’t dogmatise about Jewish characteristics. When the society in which one sees them is met upon the most superficial basis and when superficial manners only are in question—at dinner-parties and the like, where the tie is not necessarily more than that of mere acquaintance and the slight similarities that involves—in so far as one can say this or that of them—one generally speaks in their favour. In the most pleasant society there must be a background of intellect and sound taste, and in such a society those Jews one meets there are, on an average, at least as thoughtful and rightly appreciative as the Gentiles. Some light of bonhomie and gaiety is wanted everywhere and no one accuses Jews of lacking these qualities: if anyone, contrariwise, thinks they sometimes exceed in them (for the occasion) I remark that in England there is a balance to be made up pretty often and so the fault is distinctly on the right side. Coming down (though not by the snobs’ pathway) to societies where manners are less certain, where the cloven hoof of competition is betrayed, where finally vulgarity is enthroned, I have “heard a gentleman say,” so to speak, that Jews are more boastful—and other bad adjectives—than the rest: I have not noticed it for myself, and in any case it does not matter much. Every society has its unconscious standard of manners, and Jews and Gentiles alike who do not attain to that tend not to be in it, don’t they? The question is superficial. When we go a little deeper and consider the association which frequency of meeting has made rather more intimate, where something more than superficial manners comes into question, where tone of mind and attitude of life begin to tell, where kindness can be seen, where sympathy can be felt, where the colour of reality below warms the surface of conventional civilisation, then personal qualities begin to be more important. But I said I would not dogmatise, and it is quite unnecessary to my purpose. I permit myself only one observation—of a fact, if it be a fact, which is really important. I do believe that the attitude of Jews to women is, culture for culture, more possessive, less individual, less amiable and civilised than our own. We, the best of us, are nearer “rounding Cape Turk.” I think a Jew is more inclined than an Englishman of a like culture and general human standard otherwise to think of women as “women”—you must know what I mean—to regard a woman as necessarily the possession of some man and only counting in relation to him, to bring in sex irrelevantly, to depend on superficial man-of-the-world maxims—“all women think” this, “no woman likes” that, “never tell a woman” so and so, all that sort of stupid substitute for thought and observation. I hesitate to say they are less chivalrous than we, because chivalry is a cloudy and misleading word, but I think they are somewhat rougher and cruder in their ideas about women. I am told, and do not doubt, that they make excellent husbands, but I am sure it is in a possessive way. That is surely natural, and natural is their implicit denial of individuality to women: do they not thank God publicly, so long as they remain orthodox, that He did not create them women?

Well, that personal quality, if I am right about it, must have an influence on those of us who come into any intimacy with them. It is the only bad one I care to mention, being confident about it. But although their personal qualities are not directly necessary to my purpose, it is important to note, as it is absurd to deny, that they must differ a good deal from our own. I am the last person to make too much of blood and race, the first person to recognise the unifying effects of mental culture and environment; moreover I am aware that all human beings have much in common. But such broad differences of race, carefully fostered for centuries, as we have here, cannot possibly disappear in a generation or two. The Jews must be tired of hearing themselves called Asiatics, and indeed it seems superficially unfair so to call families who came from the East so many centuries ago, as the case is with most of those we know. But though they came into Europe so long ago, they have kept themselves, or have been kept by others, a community apart until the other day. We cannot possibly think of English Jews, for example, as of the Huguenot families which mixed and married with their English neighbours from the first. Original differences must have remained, if they were not intensified. And is it not the case that when Jews have come in our own time from the East, in the next generation, if not in the first, they are just like most other Jews, as like to ourselves as these are? Then if there was ever anything in the Oriental difference, it remains. But I do not make too much of blood, and I do know the unifying effects of association: Jews who in a real sense have separated them selves from their community, who have lived all their lives in intimacy with Gentiles, with whom perhaps they have married, must lose the difference and become practically as like ourselves as any one of us is like his fellow. You must know, I certainly know, people about whose Jewish origin it would be minutely silly to bother—one never thinks about it. But they are few, even among those Jews whom one meets “all over the place.”

And now, with all this in mind, for the important matter, the nature of their social relation to us. It is outwardly different here from elsewhere. In America there is very little feeling against Jews as financiers, in spite of their immense and growing importance, but they remain, and are content to remain, socially apart. On the Continent of Europe the religious difference tells more, and converted Jews are incorporated in a genuine way. In England nobody cares whether a Jew is orthodox or not, and if he is not it is from indifference or intellectual inability to be so, not for social advancement. And in England Jews mingle freely with us, and when they mingle it is on a basis of thorough equality. There must be very few English who decline to receive Jews because they are Jews, and very few among the well-to-do Jews who decline to meet Gentiles. Circumstances for circumstances, class for class, they are superficially counted as ourselves. Superficially, then, they are in our society.

But really and truly they are not of it. That is the real point, and that explains everything. On our side this more intimate exclusion may not be strong, but the mere fact that we are always aware that Jews are Jews must go for a good deal. This is the case to a greater extent than they imagine, I fancy, and when they—foolishly, and to me inexplicably—seek to dissimulate their race under old English surnames and the like, it is naturally intensified. I think I have never heard the character or social quality of a Jew discussed and not heard some allusion to his being a Jew, even in those very few cases where real assimilation has happened. Since unhappily there is a good deal of floating prejudice against the race, it is usually pointed out, if he is a good fellow, that he is free from certain alleged Jewish characteristics, and if he is not liked, it is remarked that he possesses them. Always the race is mentioned, and that alone is evidence that we make a difference, at least, in the direction of exclusion from intimacy. I would not press that further.

On their side, the fact, as I take it, of being in but not of our society, whether present in their minds or not, is an absolute one. I arrive at it by inference, I fully admit. Certain understanding Jews to whom I have been able to put the question have agreed with me, but that is not enough for an induction. I put aside those very few exceptions I have mentioned—of the rest I am certain. It must be so. The mixing has not been so long or thorough that it can be otherwise. Charles Lamb thought that “centuries of injury, contempt and hate on the one side—of cloaked revenge, dissimulation and hate on the other, between our and their fathers must and ought to affect the blood of the children.” I would not go so far; hereditary hate soon dies when it is not nourished by fresh offences, and most of the English Jews, though they or their fathers may have been persecuted elsewhere in Europe, have no grievance against ourselves. But the differences of codes and attitudes are more stubborn things, and the strangeness they beget must pass slowly. We may blandly assume, being on our own ground, that our modes are universal and that they must understand: they, not being on their own ground, and being in a little minority, cannot assume that. Whether consciously so or not, they are strangers among us, and so they are spectators, critics, sometimes exploiters in our society, not really at home, not truly intimate in it. Native geniality of manner may conceal the fact, but true it is. And as a result of it their real affections and the sympathies and knowledge which come of affection are not for us, or only for some rare individual among us. Take the case of Disraeli. There you have a Jew of great intellectual power, of genius and imagination, who lived all his life in our society and who had ties of intimate friendship and also of romantic affection among us. Don’t you feel when you read his novels that he never understood the real attitudes, the real modes of feeling of the English in their social life? Politics and the machinery of them he knew like the back of his hand, of course. The outsides of our society he could satirise with an exact touch, but he is always the alien spectator and critic, and when he comes to our feelings he goes astray. And if Disraeli did not understand us below the surface, how should the average intelligent Jew? Disraeli chose a few men and a few women among us for his affections, but otherwise in our society he was never at home—always, one is told, a little stiff. Stiff the average intelligent Jew is not, but though he may seem to be at his ease, he is not at home, and looks only on the surface. I found another literary example of this the other day in an extremely clever attempt to write a story in imitation of Byron’s Don Juan. The author, who is a Jew, will not mind being told that he lacks something of Byron’s genius, and his subject, being mainly of chorus-girls and restaurants and that sort of life, lacked the scope of Don Juan, but the difference in kind, apart from design, of the two works lay in the complete absence of feeling. It was all very clever, some of it brilliantly so, but all hard, glittering, superficial observation, “cynical,” unfeeling. Or have you ever noticed the great gap between Mr. Zangwill’s novels about his own people and those about us others? The feeling in the first rings full and true. Jews, we all know, have plenty of feeling, are indeed quickly emotional, and if they have not much for us it is because of strangeness and want of knowledge. They are in and not of our society.

Two lines of thought are suggested by all this. One makes for excuses if certain charges against Jews are true. It is said of them that, more crudely and obviously than other people, they seek to use social acquaintance and opportunities for professional or material advancement or for snobbish social climbing—that they are constantly asking to be made known to those who can be of use to them, that they drop with a thud as it were those whose usefulness has faded. Well, if I am right about their essential attitude, we ought not to blame them for this as we blame one another. (I do not say the charge is true: I have known shocking instances among Jews, but so I have among Gentiles.) To use the society in which you are native, with all its occasions of friendliness and affection, as a background for getting on, to estimate people socially by their irrelevant importance or usefulness, to mix social life with business, whether material or the empty business (but still business) of the snob’s progress, that is a hideous proceeding, and none the less so because it is common enough to be the bane of English life. But if you look on the whole affair from the beginning as a sort of campaign, and keep all your real affections outside it, then surely the offence against your soul is much lighter. It is still an offence which no one with any true dignity of mind commits, but if there be any excess of it among Jews, it may be brought down to our bad level by this consideration.

I am afraid the other line of thought is rather more gloomy. As I have said, where the society is met on a mere superficial basis, so that manners and (if luckily that can be) some intellectual content of talk are all that matter, the relation of the Jews present to the others is sufficient. But when by frequency or length of meeting intimacy begins, then something much more important is in question. The supreme end of human intercourse is humanity. Friendship, mutual appreciation of feelings, sympathy, kindness—these are the effects which make social life worth while—I might say, for many of us, which make life worth while. The English, less formal and less clumsy than they were, are still a little slow in the production of these. They are too easily hampered by differences of antecedents and little habits. These are small matters, however, and we are much of a muchness and very much of a blood. But when there is present an element which means great differences and strangeness and a relation, therefore, stubbornly superficial, then a far heavier obstacle is in the way. And it is not only in regard to that element directly that real humanity stays under cover and only surface geniality and politeness and conversational qualities prevail. It extends its influence over the whole party…. It is to be observed that the thinner, so to speak, the superficial bonds are, the more destructive is such an element of persistent aloofness of spirit. Intellectual acuteness and appeal and a communicable sense of art are very good things indeed, though they are not everything, and a wise man will be satisfied with them alone for a pretty long time. But sometimes the mental content of a milieu is nothing, so to say, and the communion of taste consists of banalities and trivialities only. We all know such a milieu, though nothing would induce us to name whereabouts in our acquaintance it exists. In such a milieu friendliness and kindness and intimacy are everything: there is nothing else. And if they are held under by an element which keeps the intercourse on the surface, the result is a mere banal hardness and emptiness. You see the alternative. You may be friendly and jolly or merely intellectual and mutually amusing: the second is no bad thing. You may be friendly and jolly or merely dull and banal: the second alternative is dreadful.

I could not but be a little vague and general in the preceding paragraph; to cross t’s and dot i’s might have had an unfriendly air. To be clear at all I had to put as absolute results what perhaps I should have put as tendencies. The upshot of the whole argument can be stated very briefly. When the society is superficial the Jews, by reason of taste and intelligence, make an agreeable contribution to it. When it is or should be more intimate they tend to be a check on humanity, and their effect is one of hardness. I have explained why that is so: it is so naturally and inevitably. As for the future, I have little doubt that this effect will pass. The exceptions I have spoken of will grow in number until they are the whole. The process may be slow, because the heart has to be reached from the head. The approach is seen now more often where the bond of intellect and art is strong, among savants and artists of all kinds, and then among professional men. The path from the head to the heart, from the philosopher or the artist or the doctor or the advocate to the man, means slow walking, but it is traversed imperceptibly while we talk. And the loosening of ancient restraints will spread from above to below, even to quarters where the head is no great matter. I see that a Jewish writer laments the (as he also thinks) inevitable “passing” of English Jews. So do not I, for the only logical alternative to wishing that would be to wish they should not mix in our society at all, if my argument has been sound. And I am far from wishing that.

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   THE SOCIAL ENGLISH

The general drift of these remarks will be extremely comfortable and pleasant and friendly, but a few reproving criticisms must occur in the course of them. I am told, and believe, that a critic of painting or music should be able to paint a little or play the piano, but he need not necessarily do it well. Everyone who lives in the world at all must have manners good or bad, but the critic of manners need not be assumed to approve of his own. Indeed, it is likely that the person more than usually keen to observe manners, being more than usually sensitive, should commit many faults of his own, from the acuteness of his feelings or from the over-subtlety of his efforts to study other people’s. He will be more easily rebuffed, and, in consequence, silent or awkward; he will appear heartless to the less sensitive from fear of touching on what is painful, and so forth. For my part, I awake miserable in the night from some reminiscent dream of clumsy or offensive acts or words of mine, and I do not know that I can make that excuse. There is always something of a boomerang about criticism of manners, but now no reader is justified in assuming any odious self-complacency in me, no acquaintance in turning an ironical eye on me when next we meet. I am only a critic.

I do not propose to contradict Matthew Arnold. Much of what he observed in our life generally as hideous and base is unfortunately much the same. We revel in stupid murders, and (some time ago) the “Life Story” of a wretched girl accused of complicity in one of them was advertised, written by her wretched father or mother, as the great attraction of a popular paper. My theme is a much narrower one, being only the English as they appear in the manners and talk of their social life. Even so it might well fill a big book, or a row of big books for that matter. But since those books will never be written by me I may as well set down the notes which reading and a rather widely varied experience have suggested to me, even though they be rather out lines or headings for a more elaborate study than the study itself.

It is my belief that our manners are more agreeable and easy than they have ever been, are indeed distinctly civilised, and a credit to us generally. It would be, of course, a hopeless attempt to prove this conclusively and directly. One cannot quote a number of agreeable remarks and contrast them with less agreeable conversations preserved for us, and if one could the method would be fallacious. What I propose to do is to examine the causes which I think have produced the changes for the better in which I believe, to show how probable it is they should have produced such changes, and invite you to recollect your reading in memoirs and novels and plays of manners, and look about you and compare. I think you will then agree with me. We shall ramble about a good deal, excusably, I hope, since this article is a collection of notes and not a scientific treatise, and we shall dive now and then beneath the surface of appearances, and possibly—for this is my ambition—bring back with us a little pearl worth finding, a suggestion, to wit, for the quality in our social civilisation which distinguishes it from others, and for which, if we are to be overwhelmed and perish, the world would do well to mourn our disappearance. I see in fancy an arching of foreign eyebrows, but let the foreign reader bear with me to the end.

Let me first remove one obstacle to belief. Old people very often tell us that manners were better when they were young, and we, observing what charming manners the old people themselves have, are apt to think they must be right. It is an illusion. Old people have good manners because they are old, not because their manners were better than ours when they were young. They are no longer obsessed as are young people with their own passions and ambitions, and they have learned tolerance and to be merely amused by extravagant opinions, or, if they have not, their prejudices sit prettily on them. In every generation it is a common saying that manners have grown worse, and it is absurd to ask us to believe that they have progressively deteriorated since the days when people called one another bad names, and fought on the spot over a difference in opinion. Old people, too, are often referring to a different standard or principle, as when they complain of a lack of reverence in children towards their elders, not observing that the spirit of comradeship may be just as good a thing as the spirit of discipline. As an ageing person myself, I think it is far more agreeable, and trust that my age at least will never be reverenced. But let us now get into the thick of the main subject.

Manners are of the head and the heart. Perfect manners can be only of both, because occasions there must be in social life when the heart is not a sufficient guide. A clever person with little or no heart may be better-mannered as a rule if he takes pains than a good-natured person with little or no head; but when he falls, as he is pretty sure to fall sometime, his selfishness or irritation betraying him, he falls with a thud. Indeed, it is curious to observe how often very clever people, with every reason to conciliate those about them, offend from sheer bad nature, indifference to others’ feelings, or brutal aggressiveness, whereas, when your clumsy, well-meaning fellow goes wrong, nobody who is not both fool and prig really minds, and one loves him the more after his apology, which usually makes the blunder worse. Now, I am sorry to say I cannot pretend for a moment that we English have been gaining in intelligence. The evidence is too sadly strong the other way. We are not what we were in matters for which we once had a special aptitude, and do please, look, though only for the briefest moment, at the mental quality of our popular papers and novels. Consequently it is improbable, to say the least, that examples of exquisite fine breeding should be more frequent than they were. That must be, say what you will, an affair partly of intelligence, of quick perception, imagination, the gift of the right word, with something of humour added, if our enjoyment is to be complete. I may say that the examples I know are nearly all of men, and somebody says that intellect is a male speciality: I would rather say that intellect in a woman is apt to be a little too conscious and proud of itself. I have read in the ingenious Mr. Chesterton that all men have bad manners except those under the immediate influence of women, who are the exemplars and guardians of manners, and I think he is altogether wrong. They may take it as an amende (or they may not—I am not at all sure) that the most perfect manners known to me are possessed by a woman, but she also has very rare gifts of perception and humour. Such fineness of breeding, however, in woman or man, must be rare, just as fine painting or poetry is rare, and moreover it needs some hard trial of circumstance before it can be surely known; it is rare now, and I think it always was rare. It is not the theme of this article, which deals with a more average matter—the pleasant manners which are all the better for some intelligence, but are mainly based on friendliness and kindness. And it is quite certain that we English are a kinder people than we were. That is proved by many things. The first blot on our history is the treatment of factory-workers, especially of women and children, in the beginning of our industrial prosperity; the treatment may be hard still, but it is no longer inhuman. Our care for the sick and old, and our attitude to prisoners and offenders against the law, prove the change. Our tenderness and solicitude for children run into an unwholesome worship of them here and there, but think of the unfortunate “Fairchild family”! Every middle-aged person must have noticed the disappearance of brutality in our dealings with the other animals. Without any doubt at all we are kinder all round. There are observers who say that we are softer all round, and that this kindness is but the agreeable side of it, the other being loss of courage and endurance and man hood. “When Britain set the world ablaze, in good King George’s glorious days,” we were harsher and hardier.

Well, we may be softer, and if so, it is a pity, but that has nothing to do with kindness, for in civilised peoples the bravest men are nearly always the gentlest. In any case we are kinder, and it is inevitable that the fact should appear in our ordinary social intercourse. And surely and obviously it does so. Do but remember not only the rows and scrimmages of olden days, but the rude encounters of the “wits” in more recent times, the incessant effort to “score” at any cost to somebody else’s feelings. The idea of social intercourse seems to have been a hostile encounter or competition; it is now, or is be coming, as it should be, an occasion merely of mutual pleasure. If the “art of conversation,” which is alleged to be dead, involved necessarily all the competitive rudeness and snubbing of which one reads, the monologues and breezes, I should rejoice at its decease, but, of course, it did not necessarily involve them. One who was considered, and rightly, as of the very best talkers of our time, was remarkable, even more than for his own wit, for the skilful sympathy with which he appealed to and drew out the previously silent: he is dead, alas! but he would be only middle-aged were he still with us. That is the true model, and I think it is followed unconsciously more often than it was. And even when there is no occasion for it, when there is no predominant wit, but everyone is talking, well or not, happily together, I would rather by far be of that company than of one when the most brilliant talker you like was exercising his wit at the expense of a butt who did not enjoy it. Would not you also? The mere monologist, however clever, is universally voted a bore among us: the wit who wanted to crush people, like Samuel Rogers, we simply would not tolerate. All this is because we are kinder, and whether it means that we are less brilliant or not, it certainly means that we are better-mannered.

This point is as good as another at which to dispose of the objection that our conversation is rough because it is so full of chaff and slang. It really is not an absolute rule that formality and punctilio imply good manners. There are occasions, no doubt, when these are necessary, and when chaff would be offensive, but they are rare, happily, and the occasions are more numerous when formality would be even more offensive, because it would be unfriendly. You must pass this truism, because it may serve to correct a vague but prevalent idea that various societies we read of which had more forms and ceremonies than ours therefore had better manners. The contemporary English might be the better, perhaps, for a little more ceremony in public: a little more hat-raising, for instance, when men enter a shop served by women, or enter a restaurant, would do them no harm. But the ceremonies of our ancestors often went with a good deal of rudeness. In the old plays, where everyone was everyone else’s humble servant, what rude things they said! And gentlemen who were always sweeping their hats with a profound bow not infrequently dashed them in one another’s faces. Formality, like familiarity, may be well or ill timed. But assuredly chaff is, at its best, the salt of conversation. It is a mistake to suppose that it is a modern invention, because it is a natural human instinct among friends, and one finds it scattered everywhere in history. You find it in Plato’s dialogues, in the letters to George Selwyn, in the jokes of the Regency—where it was very poor and coarse. It is the accusers of our manners, however, who allege that it distinguishes our time especially, and we will accept their allegation. The more chaff of the right sort the better, say I. It bridges gaps in acquaintance, it produces an atmosphere of intimacy more quickly than anything else, and even when it is barren it fills with a fair appearance the place of the wit which is lacking. Like everything else, it may be used excessively, and it is a bore when some of us would argue seriously; but that is a defect of intelligence, not of manners. So with slang. Slang is a bore when people will use the same word or phrase of it to express anything, but there again it is intelligence, not manners, that is at fault. Slang in itself, which most often is simply a new or revived metaphor, seems to me rather preferable as an ornament of speech to the oaths of our ancestors, though I am no pronounced enemy of oaths, either. Here, again, I am set off at a tangent, like Sterne—and would there were more resemblances!—in regard to oaths. Swearing is said to be an occasionally offensive feature of modern manners, being used, that is, when it should not be used. If that be true I fancy the explanation to be this. Among themselves our males—I hope I do not offend my associates—do not object to strong language when they know one another fairly well. They avoid it instinctively in the society of ladies. But some ladies, in these days, like their ancestresses, do not object to it either, and even use it themselves, and then, of course, there are no bad manners in the men who swear within limits, because nobody is annoyed. The male mind, however, may grow confused by this licence and lose its instinctive restraint in the matter, and so an occasional stray word may be dropped unawares and unfortunately. The same explanation may apply to a story or joke offensive to the propriety of the last generation, and told to an unhappily chosen audience in this. One hears such a complaint now and then. But I do not think such things often happen, and they are but a small affair…. Less formality on the one side, more chaff and slang on the other, what does it all mean but that as our social civilisation improves strict rules are found less needful, and natural fun and emphasis can have freer play? Chaff and slang make for ease and friendliness, and these, after all, are the basis of good manners.

In this connection there may as well be a separate paragraph about the manners of the young and adolescent. I have just read again an essay of Mr. Max Beerbohm, in which he attacks quite bitterly the manners of contemporary young women. Well, I am some years older than he, and have arrived at a time of middle life at which one is not apt to be a harsh critic of young women. I am sure, however, that he is far happier in the company of contemporary girls than he would have been with those of 1820, whose manners he eulogises so wistfully. In one respect I agree with him. It is a pity that the teaching of a graceful deportment should have gone out of fashion—I mean in the matter of moving and sitting, and so forth. I have in mind a lady who was taught those arts by Taglioni, and whose movements certainly shame the girls of the period. But when it comes to conversation, the girls of this period, being more individual and articulate, are a world more interesting than those of a hundred years ago, who would have bored Mr. Beerbohm to death; and I question if their manners are not better also. They are sometimes too brusque and downright: that is a fault of self-conceit, and theirs is more respectable than their ancestresses’, because it comes from a good opinion of their own wits and perceptions, and not from infallible maxims and views laid down for them. Down-rightness, too, shows interest. I would far rather that a girl who disagreed with me were to say, as nowadays she might say, “Oh, that’s frightful rot!” and proceed to argue vehemently, than that she should give me a frigid “Indeed! I fear I cannot agree with you,” and change the subject. The former, in my opinion, would be the better-mannered of the two. As for the very young men, Mr. Beerbohm rightly condemns their slouching and inattention to appearances, which compulsory military service, as I hope, will cure in them. I do not find anything to complain of in their attitude to myself; rather the contrary, indeed, since it seems to me less aloof and retiring than ours was twenty years ago, to men of my age. Mr. Beerbohm arraigns their casual carriage towards girls of their own age, but I will explain how that happens, and why he should be easy about it, a little later; there is a more creditable reason than the numerical preponderance of women in England to which he is driven. We must now go back to the causes.

The increasing kindness and humanity of the English, then, I take to be the chief cause, perhaps. of their greater ease and amiability in society. That is a good cause, and operates altogether in a good manner. There is another cause which may be good or bad, but which operates sometimes through the less fine qualities of poor humanity. I refer to the ever greater fluidity of our classes, which is a commonplace of social observation. We are mixed up socially every day with greater and greater freedom. It is true that certain gloomy observers see emerging from our economic circumstances a plutocracy which will form a real caste. I hope that will not happen, and as I am not dealing with the future, I may disregard the possibility. What the manners of such an avowed plutocracy would be like I do not know, and with all my optimism would rather not guess. M. Anatole France’s prophecies in his Ile des Pingouins were not encouraging. For the present, if we are governed by a plutocracy it is good enough to mask its authority in social intercourse, and does not prevent the fluidity of classes I spoke of. Now, in a rigid caste system the manners of each caste may be good within itself, and are less likely to be good as between caste and caste. The family party—I had written “happy family,” but what with its duels and divorces it was hardly that—the family party which formed the English aristocracy in Horace Walpole’s or Charles Fox’s time was certainly easy, and was very tolerably amiable, I should think, in its internal manners; the country gentry were rather rough; the middle classes were stiff and dull, as until lately they remained; the lower orders were distressingly brutal. The manners of superior caste to inferior caste I am sure were of an extreme arrogance and patronage on the whole. Well, these distinctions have been continuously losing their significance, though convenience still enforces the invidious use of them in writing. The aristocracy has still much power, but it is also partly an element of the plutocracy and partly an illusion; nobody could perform the tiresome task of defining the middle classes; the lower orders, bad as their economic condition is often, have often, also, scant cause to envy those who aforetime were their immediate superiors, and so far as social life goes, do gain something from the lip homage paid to equality. And the whole thing is being mixed up, though social distinctions remain more rigid in the lower than in the higher strata. Now, when these classes first began to mingle there must have been a great deal of patronising manner and conceit and giving of airs on one side, and a great deal of unsocial watchfulness and degrading servility on the other. Snobbishness in any ordinary sense is impossible in a rigid caste system: it gets its head when the barriers are broken down. As time has gone on, however, I see, comparing one thing with another, a great improvement. Partly kindness and humanity, as I said, but partly a reason less noble—decreasing power and stability on one side, increasing possibility of power on the other. Let me illustrate. When, fifty years ago or so, an average duke made the acquaintance of an unknown Mr. Smith, I am sure his manner, however affable, was patronising to an extent which would be extremely unpopular now, while Mr. Smith was generally diffident and obsequious in a degree which made pleasant intercourse impossible. But the average duke today is aware, I feel pretty sure, that dukes are not quite what they were, that he is in a way on his trial, and had best be conciliatory on the whole; while this unknown Mr. Smith may turn out to be a remarkably important fellow. The wide and constantly changing mixture involves much ignorance about chance acquaintances. Smith, on his side, is not awed as his predecessor was, to begin with; and then if, unlike you and me, he has not humanity enough to take his duke simply, without worrying about the dukedom, he is probably anxious above all things—thanks to the anti-snob satirists—to dissimulate his snobbishness, and if he makes a mistake it is probably in the direction of an inverted snobbishness, of a too easy familiarity. So here and in a thousand like cases qualities not the noblest in us work on the whole for a comfortable sociality. Of course I know that the worst manners on the face of the earth belong to those successfully aspiring snobs who are short-sighted enough to slight their old acquaintances, or to snobs who are afraid that too great intimacy, or even association, with people (infinitely their betters, very likely) not in favour with the common world may prejudice their own miserable ambitions. But these, I sincerely hope and believe, are rare exceptions whom a more enlightened community will merely push into a lethal chamber on the first offence. On the whole when snobbishness is at all illuminated by intelligent self-interest it works for conciliation and bonhomie in the sphere of manners…. In the mixture of classes, again, manners have filtered down, inevitably, and those of the upper classes used certainly to be better, because more natural and less embarrassed, than those of the classes technically beneath them. There are people who are annoyed by a lack of deference toward them in shops and so forth. I cannot sympathise with them, and I believe that real dignity seldom fails of respect. The manners of class to class, not only in equal social intercourse, but in all the occasions of service, are infinitely more agreeable than they were. Even the suddenly enriched learn by observation that a de haut en bas manner to waiters and shopkeepers is not the best. And what young man of fashion would dream in these days of calling his valet “scoundrel” and “rascal,” as was the common custom aforetime if we believe the books and plays? I am told that in this respect, at least, of our attitude towards technical inferiors, we much-criticised English may be favourably compared with some peoples abroad. That a real democracy exists anywhere may be doubted. But an apparent democracy by making for a common form in manners tends vastly to improve them—when there is a good model for imitation, which fortunately we English have possessed.

This slight comparison brings me to one of greater significance, to that dive below the surface of which I spoke at the beginning, to the pearl I fondly hope may be found there. The English, I truly believe, have “rounded Cape Turk” at last, or at least the best of them have done so, and if that is the fact indeed, then surely our English civilisation has achieved something of its own. There is the Mussulman attitude to women. I have no quarrel with it; travellers have told me that it promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number; I dare say it does. There is the attitude of chivalry, or of idealised chivalry. I have no quarrel with that either when it is genuine, for then it is a beautiful thing. As an attitude of a man to a woman there may be found in it the deepest happiness known to us, our strongest instincts and our least petty and selfish qualities of the spirit working together. I count him wise who worships what he finds kindest and sanest and finest in humanity; I count him most happy if he finds that in a woman; I count the cynic who calls him the mere dupe of sex a fool. But that attitude I praise as one of a man to a woman, the fruit of deep and intimate experience, and only so can it be approved by sense as well as sentiment. As an attitude of men to women generally it is rarely genuine, and then it is a beautiful folly; it is more often a sham, and one remembers that when the sentimental worship of women was most popular with us the usage of women in factories was most vile. There is a third attitude, that professed by modern Western civilisation, as to beings free to think and act for themselves, and worthy of attention on equal terms. It does not exclude the saner chivalry, and the man, happy in knowing one woman whose welfare is more to him than his own, to whom he is in a real sense devoted, is precisely the man who most easily can treat the other women of his world in a vein of rational friendship and acquaintance, with no perpetual obsession of their sex. The road of progress which Western life has followed in regard to women may be in one sense a return, if we believe the story of their position in the Germanic tribes of old, may be a reassertion of our racial spirit after its centuries-long thralldom to alien influences and authority. St. Paul—I trust I may mention the fact without offence—was an Asiatic. In any case we have followed that road for a long time now, and it is futile to hope for a return: there is the stationary Eastern ideal, and there is the moving Western: we must take one or the other.

In other countries as well as in England this road has been followed, and I do not know that ours is distinguished by any wise lead in respect to material equalities and opportunities for women. That subject is beset with the gravest difficulties, and fortunately it is quite beside my purpose to discuss it. If women should have votes, if they should hold importantly responsible positions, if wives should labour in factories—these questions let others dispute. They are doing so with much heat, and as it seems to me, with much disposition to ignore the essential: I agree with the “advanced” party in some respects, disagree in others, as my customary fate is in most discussions. My special point is that in social life, in the attitude of men to women as they talk and take their social pleasures together, we English have gone, and gone wisely, beyond the other peoples of the West in a sincere respect and friendliness which has nothing to do with sex. I mean that the most amiable of us accept and show that we accept our women friends on their merits as social creatures simply. Heaven forbid I should affirm that we have abolished the indirect consequences of sex. Most miserable then were we to have lost so much of the savour and fun of life. For my part I should think most of the charm of social life gone if I ceased to prefer a reasonably attractive woman as a companion to a man of equal conversational gifts. I mean that we are not obsessed by sex, are not always thinking of it in regard to the women we meet. It is very likely indeed that the reader knows more of foreign people than I, and I am very sorry if his knowledge will not support me. All I can say is that such experience and reading and indirect know ledge as I have convince me that the Latin civilisation has never really gone beyond regarding women from the sexual view only. Of course that does not appear too openly or offensively among well-bred people. But the man of the Latin civilisation—which of course is wider than the so-called Latin races—seems to me, in his social intercourse, to be dominated entirely by the fact whether or no the women he meets attract him as women. Within the range of their civilisation other people may be more civilised than we: in this attitude to women I believe we have extended civilisation beyond the old range, have achieved or are achieving something new: pity, I think, if we have no time given us to improve on the experiment. Meredith said that true comedy began only when women were admitted to a social equality; social civilisation, I think, is only perfect where that equality is real, and where, therefore, a fact which after all is irrelevant to social occasions no longer dominates them.

In all this I have written perhaps a little too absolutely, but if that is so it was to make my point with reasonable brevity. It is certainly far from me to accuse my countrymen of a priggish exclusion of natural feelings in society, of imperceptiveness or dullness before physical beauty in women. A face fair beyond others, a charm which is distinctly feminine—those qualities must first engage the attention of natural man everywhere, and most often continue to hold the first place in his regard. But we do not—the amiable of us—allow them to confuse a sensible equality of attitude in social life, which we feel would be unfair to their possessor as well as to others. I think, too—and will no attractive woman of cosmopolitan experience support me?—that their possessor, consulting an English lawyer or doctor, would have a greater certainty of his repressing the emotions they might excite and attending strictly to her case than if she were consulting his foreign colleagues. I have heard so. To put it roughly, we make love when we make love, but we do not make half-love on inappropriate occasions, counting it ill manners. That at least is our intention, and when we fall short of it we are criticised. A deeper philosopher than I may find some inner cause in our nature for the change. We are not less philoprogenitive than other men. Is it not possible, indeed, that a constant preoccupation with sex is more likely to fritter away real passion than to strengthen it? But I will leave the matter there: after all, I remind myself that, whatever our social merits, we are prudes in our reception of public utterances, and that I am not writing a scientific treatise…. Whatever unseen cause may produce this change or advance, its effect on our manners is obviously great. Dried up is the perpetual stream of personal compliments in which we were wont to paddle, and which other nations use more or less copiously still. I fear our excellent grandfathers were often clumsy at the business, and I am sure that contemporary Frenchmen are skilful and tactful at it, but I think our custom is the more comfortable even if we could be as witty as they. It must surely be a bore for a beautiful woman with brains that her face should never be taken for granted, even as those ladies among us who are public orators resent the reporting of their clothes to the exclusion of their speeches. Then, too, in the day of personal compliments what was done about the plain and unattractive women? If they were left out it was invidious; if they were brought in it was patently insincere, and therefore (I should imagine) offensive. Oh, no, ours is the more comfortable course. No doubt our equal and friendly attitude may err on the side of roughness. We should know when our attitude of absolute equality is unacceptable, as it may be to foreign ladies, and is, and should be, to old ladies of any country. Mr. Beerbohm rightly rebukes young men who are too off-hand, but I trust I have shown him that this fault comes from a better cause than he supposed, and may be called a fault on the right side. Chaff of a woman may be rude, but so may be chaff of a man. That is the fault of a naturally bluff people, but surely the risk of meeting with it is a small price for women to pay if they are relieved from an insincere and tiresome deference. They will not miss, in consequence, any of the real homage which is reserved for their private ears.

Such are the causes which in my opinion have produced in the last generation or so, and more particularly in the last twenty years, a very great improvement in our English manners, rendering them far more natural and easy and agreeable. That they are sometimes rough I have admitted, but I do not admit that they are rougher in a bad sense than they were, believing that formality can go hand-in-hand with great essential roughness to other people’s feelings. I wonder how far the reader has agreed with me in all this. If only a little or not at all, I should like to hear his objections and reason with him. He may be under an historical illusion. I think the pretty ceremonies with which we credit the past are greatly extended by tradition, especially by stage tradition. A certain sedateness and gravity of culture, for example, may well have distinguished the Court of Charles the First, but that must have been lost before the Restoration in the turmoil and camp-life of the Civil War, and yet the second Charles remarked to a remonstrating bishop that “Your martyr swore twice as much as I.” People of exceptionally fine breeding (like Charles the Second himself) shine in history, but we must not take their manners as typical. Or, again, the reader may be thinking of the whole interest of society, and confuse social attitudes and manners with the intellectual content of our talk. That very possibly, I fear probably, has declined, but he must not be misguided by brilliant exceptions here, too, or believe that society in general ever talked as it talks in Meredith’s works: Thackeray with his accurate ear for banalities is his better guide. Or he may be misled by modern discomfort, by the general hurrying from place to place which is the result of our much-vaunted inventions. I quite agree with him that this is an extremely stupid phase of civilisation, and I trust it will pass when people discover that it is pleasanter to stay for three weeks in one place than to pay seven different visits of three days each. That does affect manners evilly in so far as the older plan of hospitality made for serenity and familiarity: they have improved in spite of it. That is a trivial thing, however, and I am reminded that there may be triviality to spare in this article already. The subject compelled a good deal of it, I think, but I trust that some suggestion of what is not trivial has somehow been involved. I said at the beginning, however, that it was not a scientific treatise.

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   ANOTHER CONVERSATION

Some ten years ago Mr. Newbolt allowed me to relate in the Monthly Review, now unhappily no longer illuminating us, a rather unoriginal dream of mine. I had dreamed that I, then thirty-five years old, had talked with a young man in a country inn whom I found towards the end of the conversation to be myself at the age of twenty-five. I had the same dream, with some natural differences, the other night, and I should like to relate that also. No doubt this proceeding, like the other, may have a depressing air of self-absorption, and I will therefore say for myself that I really believe my own personality occupies less of my thoughts than that of almost any other of my more intimate acquaintances; on this occasion the consideration of it, in a way not as yet completely explained, was forced upon me. But why force it upon the public? Well, if one has reason to think that in most respects one is an average and ordinary person, it is probable that the changing qualities and values of one’s decades are something like those in the lives of one’s readers, if they have lived long enough, who will therefore have in reading of them the satisfied sense of recognition or an agreeable start of discovery. Then some part of the conversation came upon me myself as a surprise, and seems, therefore, worth recording. And, finally, there is no frightful amount of egotism in looking at oneself or one’s dead selves once in ten years. Even if it became a bad habit, it is improbable there can be many repetitions. So …

There was no delay in recognition this time, no talk in the dark. As I (45) approached the inn, I knew I should find them, 25 and 35, awaiting me in its little parlour. That was a pity in a way, certainly for the reader’s pleasure, since it prevented the irony of questioning and comment which happened when the living 35 encountered 25 without knowing it. But so it was: I knew well enough who they were when I saw them sitting at the table together, and they looked up at my entrance. They stopped what seemed to have been a rather sour and recriminating colloquy, and looked relieved to see me, but with something of sadness and apprehension in their aspect, like men greeting a relation fresh from prison. We did not begin pleasantly.

“There you are,” said 35, and, turning to 25, “and what do you think of him?”

“You have prepared me,” said 25.

“Such as I am, gentlemen,” said I, “I present myself as your handiwork.”

“I deny that,” said 25, “you might have made more of an effort.”

“Have you the right to say it?” asked 35 quickly; “you’re a convinced determinist, you know. I have an open mind.”

“Then we’re neither of us to blame,” returned the other; “but if there is any blame on us, he’s nearer to you than to me. And on the whole,” and for the first time he smiled at me, “I don’t find him so bad as you led me (ten years ago) to suppose he would be. I feared a complete vegetable, but he shows some faint signs of vitality. Yes, he’s less repulsive to me than you are.”

I bowed my thanks, and the light of a new and unexpected knowledge began to warm me. The reader (if such there be) who read the old conversation also may remember that 35 (who was then the living I: I am sorry if it is hard to avoid confusion) reproached 25 with his wastefulness and follies and idleness, and that 25 retorted on the death of his own ambitions, on the other’s failure to regenerate his country and incidentally to make himself the most powerful person in it, on his neglect to found a new philosophy and so forth, on his bovine contentment with simple pleasures and homely affections. Well, now I found myself taking sides in my mind with 25. True, I did not reproach 35 for not exercising powers none of us three ever possessed. But I did perceive in him a certain middle-aged indifference and apathy which at his age—35!—was ridiculous and unjustified. He was far too ready to acquiesce in, even to seek, a humdrum and colourless existence. Why, I myself was far more keenly interested in life and people, far readier to lose myself in it and them. I was really much younger than he. And so I was drawn, far more than he had been, to young 25. I liked his comparative warmth and recklessness. Ah, yes, I was nearer to him than 35 was. But 25’s view was different.

“You see, you poor old thing,” he continued, addressing me, “it’s no use reproaching you now. That fellow really ought to have had a kick in him. Of course at thirty-five a man is more or less rangé and on the shelf, but he ought to dislike being there. That brute simply tucked himself up and made himself as comfortable as he could, considering his lack of money.”

“Whose fault was that?” asked 35. “Why didn’t you adopt a decent trade?”

“Well, it ought to have been a stimulus,” replied 25, and went on speaking to me. “Simply tucked himself up and snored and snored. But you do seem to peep over the edge and watch the people on the floor. You’ve been really quite excited about the Marconi affair. I observe that you go to a race-meeting occasionally, though you haven’t my pluck in backing outsiders. I like your unaffected joy when you see a beautiful woman. It’s all very futile, of course. All my fine ambitions are quite dead now. I’m afraid philosophy bores you even more than it bored him, and you won’t bother yourself to go about expounding the real Toryism. But I regard you with a not unkindly melancholy. It’s rather nice of you to dodder along at all. He’s the real villain.”

35 smiled a sour smile. “You’re two fools,” said he, “the young and the old one. You, 25, spent the energies of your head on reading and theorising, which you were too hasty and careless to bring to an ordered result, and the energies of your heart running hither and thither. You were the prey of crude instincts, of tastes and desires unsuited to your condition. You wanted to do all sorts of things, and did nothing effectually. So much for you. And you, 45, instead of continuing and perfecting the serene and graceful egotism I had fairly set going, my amused detachment, my ironical toleration of common things and people, my content with my own society, and the pleasures of simple contemplation—instead, I say, of going on with all that as befitted your advancing years, you have relapsed into an almost emotional interest in things, and a quite emotional interest in persons. You have become again shamefully dependent on the society of others, on their liking or toleration for you. You can be hurt by life once more. The treason or mere changefulness of some people would embitter your existence, the fortunes of some people are of extreme moment to you. You cannot dine and spend the rest of an evening all alone—you admit you are terrified by the thought of it—whereas I could pass a month of such evenings quite happily. As 25 remarked, you have taken again to an amusement I had finally abandoned, and sometimes go racing, cheaply and cautiously I admit, but it is part of the relapse. I saw you the other night positively enjoying a common, commercial play, the sort of thing I gave up dramatic criticism to avoid: I shuddered. Yes; I thought I had saved the firm, if I may put it so, and you have ruined it once more. But don’t deceive yourself, poor misguided 45. You think you are younger than I. It is simply that your brain cannot stay on the lofty plane mine achieved, and therefore the common tastes and affections of humanity over whelm it, comparatively, again. A sort of senile decay, probably, a swan-song of your emotions, if you call it a song, pathetic, but ludicrous to hear. Ah, well, well, the serene and dignified old age I had thought to prepare will never be now. I see instead an indecorous senility, clutching with feeble hands at a sort of life more and more beyond their reach, propped up by pitiful but disgusted kindness, dying, it is probable, in a fit of mean despair. It is not a pleasant sight. I think I shall go.”

“Perhaps that would be as well,” said I, “since our company is so little agreeable to you. But since you have made such a long speech about me, it is fair, before you go, that you should listen to a truth or two about yourself. I would speak politely, but what the devil did you mean by your perpetual remarks in print about being middle-aged? That was a dirty trick to play on me. People with ordinary, arithmetical minds, who do not know me, probably think I’m in my dotage. There was no excuse, because in your heart of hearts you didn’t believe it; it was a pose and an affectation, and you had no right to deprive me of the indefinite postponement of middle-age which is customary today. There is no middle age for people like me. One is young, and one is inevitably, sometime or other, old—a charming old man, let us hope, remarkable for alertness and capacity in his mental and physical qualities, but until that day arrives of no age at all, or if of any age, young. Middle age is not a period of life; it is a disease. You had no right to talk as you did, but the pity of it was that you spoke unwittingly the truth. You were middle-aged, confound you. I do not know precisely how far you were typical of your decade; I ought to hope, for the sake of our world, that you were extremely exceptional. The qualities on which you dwelt just now with so much pride, on which I look back with shame, were partly, no doubt, a result of feelings and vitality temporarily tired. But I am inclined to think that men of sound, middle-class English stock like yours have an hereditary tendency to feel, at thirty-five or so, that they have done with the romance of life, and must put their physical and mental amusement in it a long way behind their main business, which is the pursuit of their profession, trade, or calling, and the making provision for their wives and families. Later on, the provision made, they look about again, and tastes and hobbies come once more into the foreground. Unfortunately you had no wife or children, and more unfortunately, perhaps, no decent trade or profession, for which 25 is mainly to blame, but you are also responsible, since you were not too old, as I am, to learn carpentering or joining. Editors and publishers did not encourage or enable you—I do not blame them so much as you did—to make a regular trade, such as it is, of your writing, and you had no other. But you still felt the comparative necessity and power to hold yourself aloof from distractions, and since there was no real business to concentrate on, you fell back on polishing your little efforts and making a great affair of your health and proper exercise, on the egotism and contemplation and indifference, and all that, and so you became that middle-aged portent you professed to be and were in truth, though you did not know it. Thank Heaven, that is all over. I have reached a time of life when the business should be well established, a junior partner taken in, and so forth. That has not happened; I am sorry, but I cannot help it. I have, all the same, and rejoice to have, the appropriate mental attitude. I am anxious about life again, concerned in its affections, keen in its amusements. Goodbye, 35!”

35 rose and sighed. “I wonder,” quoth he, “what 55 will be like, if he lives to see us. Dear me, dear me!”

And so he left 25 and myself. I looked at 25, expecting a face of approval and comradeship. To my surprise I saw gloom, and I raised my eyebrows.

“Don’t think,” said he, “that I am unsympathetic. I know you mean well and the effort is not ungallant. But it’s all so sad, so sad. Such a futile illusion.” He walked to the window and kept a dejected back to me. I confess I was nettled. If all my past disapproved….

“My good young man,” I said, “it is no thanks to you that I’m alive at all and still capable of odd jobs. I won’t repeat all that 35 said to you ten years ago, but he was certainly right in calling you spendthrift of your time and energies. I can sympathise better than he, but don’t provoke me.”

“Bosh!” he returned, and came back to the table. “I wrote books which had far greater success”—“of esteem,” I interjected; “neither of us otherwise.” He agreed, and I mention it to prevent a charge of immodesty against him—“than anything you write. You speak as though I never did anything. I invented. Damn it, I created. What do you create? You do nothing but criticise.”

I laughed at his youthful folly, and proceeded to take it in hand.

“Your little creations, as you call them,” said I, “were merely the result of your observations of types. You were interested in life, and types appealed to you because they were more or less new to you. So you studied them and copied from them, and now you call the result creation, though I grant you were never so indiscreet as to do so aloud in your own day. I, too, am interested in life, and types do not appeal to me because they are not new to me at all. In fact, I know them all too well, and they bore me. People begin to interest me when I get below the type to the intimate, individual differences. And I can’t put those into books, can I?”

“Then how do the other fellows manage?”

“Some of them, the inferior and even some of great ability, have the good fortune never to weary of types, and go on happily copying them all their lives. But the others, the greater ones, have something you and I lack, which makes them free of types and truly creative always.”

“And that?”

“Imagination,” said I, and we sighed in silent sympathy. And then, as it had happened ten years earlier, we fell to more intimate converse, and said things to one another of greater interest, which cannot be made public. What was alive in his day and is now a memory lived again. And I think I surprised him not a little. Incidentally we pursued the old argument about the period of life when the affections are strongest, taking our natural views, and I partly excused his mistake on the ground that certain of my friends were unknown to him. On that he began again about futile illusions, and I felt it time to wake up.

“But don’t you think,” he asked, as we prepared to go, “that you might do a little more to cheer me up before 55 comes along, if he ever does? Can’t you do something?”

I said I might try. Perhaps I might go back to his interest in types, or even find a new one, and start copying, or what flatterers call creating, once again.

“No, don’t,” said he as we shook hands, “something else—not that. You might disgrace me.” And then 25 and 45 parted for ever.

•    •    •    •    •    •

•   GEORGE WYNDHAM

It is hard to write about an intimate friend whose death must make a grievous blank in the rest of one’s life. To say only what anyone might say who was familiar with his public work seems a sort of treason to friendship, while to speak of closer knowledge is to take strangers where they have no claim to enter. So at least I have always felt, and I have liked better than our own the custom of an earlier day which drew a sharper line between public and private life, and which left a man’s impressions of his friends to be read, if at all, by a later generation. It is not for me, however, to quarrel with a course in which people as likely to be right as I am see no harm, and I follow it now because in all that I have read about George Wyndham I have not seen all that I think should be said in honour of him. A man so various in gifts and tastes must touch his friends in many different ways and be seen in many different lights, and it is not surprising that one of them should feel something absent from the tributes of others, generous and sincere as those have been, and should be impelled to add his own. So much preface it is not impertinent to have made, because anything of value which I can add must come from knowledge of him gained in intimate talk. Of his work as a statesman those have spoken who were associated with him in it, and better critics have written of his work in literature. I may add something—since every different conjunction of persons brings out different expressions—of the whole man. Almost always I saw him in holiday mood, giving freely of his thoughts, without pre occupation, with the fullness natural to the frankest and least self-conscious nature I have known. I had known and seen him at intervals, liked and admired him, for nearly twenty years, but it was in the last seven or so of his life that I saw him closely, alone or with his family or with a few of his more intimate friends, when real judgment and knowledge of a man become possible; nearly always in the country, in his own or in friends’ houses, where the blessed gift of time, save for the correspondence which follows a politician everywhere, was his own. In such circumstances the essential man is most easily understood, I think; for while the stress of business alone reveals certain of his powers, it forces his mentality, for the moment, into its own groove.

George Wyndham had a fuller life, understood and exercised more of the possibilities of life in his time than any other man I have known, and I feel assured that no other man of his day has been, in regard to all the life about us, more completely a man. It was much more than being versatile and brilliant. He has been called that with truth, and it has been pointed out that his versatility made some people mistrustful of his thoroughness—a natural enough mistake in our specialised age. But versatility and brilliance are poor words to express him. In the simpler age of Elizabeth it was comparatively easy for a man of parts and gifts to embrace life, physically and mentally, at every point. The lines of pursuit were fewer, and went, so to speak, a shorter distance. To recreate in our own complicated time this type of the man who should be knight and artist and scholar and statesman as well, was an unsurpassed achievement, and he was all of that. Even so I have not expressed it rightly, for I may have left on the reader’s mind an impression of an intentional attainment of all-round distinction which was altogether alien from his nature. His attitude was never that—to me an unlovely attitude—of the man who perceives a gap in his culture or experiences and seeks to fill it because it is a gap. He simply saw a thing which interested and attracted him, and went in pursuit of it. He was a master in French poetry because he loved it, just as he was a fine horseman because he loved horses and riding. That was true of all his activities in the first instance, and with one exception true of all throughout. That exception was politics; there were times when it was loyalty and duty, not pleasure and zest, which kept him to that severe and often tedious grind, and away from what was nearer his heart. For my part I am glad that it was so; I am glad that the ease which birth and opportunities and gifts gave him in most things was not always present in this, and that he had to work sometimes for long, and with all his energy, against the grain. It put a fine character to the proof. He had a deep sense of duty. In his own phrase he had been “born paid for,” and felt he must do what he could in return. He was unaffectedly modest in this, and in the recognition of the start he had had in life and of the handicap some others had suffered by comparison. The thought may be some consolation to those who felt that in politics as they are now in England his genius was wasted, though it had accomplished much and would have accomplished more. I will speak of that again; now I would return to my picture of him as some rare Elizabethan recreated, soldier, sportsman, poet, scholar, states man; all, not without effort, without which few good things are done, but—save where I have said—with no effort that was not a joy to his vitality, and all not to be this or that but because he loved life and had powers to pursue it so variously.

A full and most fortunate life, indeed. He talked freely of it, not from egotism, but because he knew his hearer to be greatly interested, for the speaker’s own sake and for the crowded attraction of it. I like to think of the young George Wyndham in the Guards, less boyish, probably, than most of his companions from native thoughtfulness and greater experience—he had spent an instructive and joyous time in Paris between Eton and the army—but full of high spirits and curiosity, taking “all the fun of the fair.” Then the Sudan campaign and then politics. I will not repeat what everyone knows. Everyone knows of the splendid achievement of his Land Act; no one can ignore the grave setback which happened afterwards. As to that, I have formed my own opinion of the courage and loyalty of those who should have supported him. He himself never spoke of the matter, and it was inevitable that one should argue from that silence in one so frank how much he felt the miscarriage of a great design. He was always frank and open, counting sometimes, I think, overmuch on the intelligence and kindliness of those who heard him. I say that because I have seen in an article about him certain seemingly over-confident phrases about himself quoted from his talk; if he used them at all I am sure it was in fun. But he never talked about his resignation of the Chief Secretaryship. That it was a grievous discouragement is certain, as it is certain that most men with his other chances in life and without his loyalty and high courage would have turned their backs on politics. But that he had entirely recovered from it and was near, at his death, to a greater success and achievement even than that he had compassed already surely few who really understood the matter could doubt. Some doubted it, I believe, because his name was not so frequent in the newspapers, the reports of his speeches were sometimes not so full as in the case of some others; those of us who knew on what small people newspaper patronage and notoriety depend were not discouraged by that. Our political life does not so abound in brains and character that George Wyndham’s could have been cheated of their effect, though a better time would have recognised his genius more readily and generously. Practical sense and imagination do not meet so often.

Imagination, working differently, enthusiasm for beauty, a fine sensitiveness, served him in literature, and here, where good work exists for itself and cannot be cheated of effect, there was no setback at all. When one remembers what fragments of energy were left him for it, it is wonderful he did so much. For my part, I do not so much wish he had done more as that he had had a longer, uninterrupted time for what he did. His intellect was too fecund, his ideas swarmed too readily, for rapid work. The result was, to my mind, an over-jewelled style, a manner over-pressed with matter. But I am a bigot for simplicity and lucidity, and will obstinately believe that they can be achieved with care and time, however subtle the argument, however rapid the flow of thought. In any case, and whether this criticism be just or not, he did fine work, creative and critical, and revelled in the doing of it. And the glorious library he had just finished at Clouds will remain a monument to his love of reading…. The soldier was never dead in him, and well I remember his keenness in the summer of 1912 when we tramped about Salisbury Plain in the wet, watching manoeuvres, made intelligible even to me by his comments…. There are different sorts of joy, and they cannot be compared, but I think some of the keenest thrills of his life were in the hunting-field. Certainly he said once that one of his most glorious moments was when, after a hard run, he found himself and two others in at the death alone—and the two were his son and his stepson. I can well believe it…. His senses served him well in other arts than literature, his senses and his natural impulse to know and judge for himself.

Surely as full and happy a life as was ever lived. And then there can be said—but can be said in few words only—that he was thrice happy in what transcends all the rest—thrice happy as a son, a husband, a father, a friend. On his friends he lavished helpfulness and sympathy, and was repaid to the full in affection. I think no one who knew him well did not count George Wyndham among the few human beings he loved best.

It is needless to write of the qualities which made possible this full and vivid life, the splendid vitality, the power of rapid understanding and placing in order, the singleness and sincerity of purpose, or of those which so quickly endeared him to all good men, the clear-cut, graceful, handsome presence, the genial approach, the gay humour and the understanding or compelling laughter. I would express, if I could, what seemed to me the two qualities which were most profound and strongly rooted in him, which next to his personal affections most ruled his feelings, which as it were made the rough mould of the man—to be finished afterwards by intellect and the chances of life. One quality the reader may think belongs to many people, and that it is a banal eulogy to make so much of it; I do not agree, thinking rather that in the sense I use it it is very rare. George Wyndham was fundamentally benevolent in the widest sense; not simply good-natured, glad to serve his friends—as, Heaven be thanked, are most men, more or less—but actively well-wishing to all the world, genuinely rejoicing to hear of anyone’s success or happiness, genuinely distressed to hear of anyone’s failure or sorrow. Joy in others unknown to him, happiness reported and imagined, found an instant response in his nature. He did not, of course, want people to prosper at the expense of better men or of his friends, or for the general harm, but even then his instinct would be to wish them success in some other way, and such circumstances made practically the only exception. He had to recognise that there were evil people in the world whose death or failure would be a good thing for it, but he was slow to recognise this in any instance, and it gave him pain. I am certain that in this strong and active sense this quality is very rare; I fancy its opposite is commoner. In any case it was at the root of his being. The other quality, perhaps, the reader will think better worth mention. I have thought hard how to express it, and have not satisfied myself; so near as I can say it, it was a profound sense of oneness with the old order of our English civilisation, with the soil, with the countryside, with the village. Birth had made him an aristocrat and a landlord, but he would have had essentially the same feeling had he been a labourer on a farm. It was his business as a statesman to understand the modern civilisation of commerce, and he understood it fully. To the ancient order of English life his soul responded. It is easy to say, and any critic who cares may say it, that he and his forbears had had the best of this life for hundreds of years. But that is altogether superficial beside the meaning I seek to express, save in so far as inheritance had helped to give him a natural intimacy with the whole country life—an intimacy many men of like descent entirely lack. The feeling was, as I said, a oneness with the very soil, with the fields and farms. Walking and motoring with him in his beloved Wiltshire, I have felt the serene and profound happiness which filled him as we stayed and looked about us in some beautiful village or ancient little town, or as he gazed peacefully from side to side on the rolling downs and fields. Had he lived, I think his old age would have passed at Clouds much like that of his great-grandfather, the last Lord Egremont, at Petworth—that of a kindly patriarch, his house full of a free and joyous hospitality, the natural head of his country side and the natural friend of every being on it. So, I think, would what was deepest in the full and manifold genius of George Wyndham have flowered sweetly in old age.

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