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THE ENGLISH REVIEW
CONTENTS
1.
OF ELEVENTH
NUMBER
377 378 380 382 385 39 2
MODERN POETRY
Arnold Bennett Rachel Annand Taylor Alfred E. Randall Ezra Pound The Church in Lucina's House The Nest T w o Essays
2.
EDWARD H U T T O N
3. ANNE DOUGLAS
SEDGWICK
4- ELIZABETH
MARTINDALE MAX BEERBOHM 56. S. PEREZ TRIANA
7- C. F. KEARY
426
Four Studies Don Marcelino T h e Antiquary (i)
[Contents
437 442
continued on page ix
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CONTENTS—(continued) 8. F O R D MADOX HUEFFER A Call (iii)* 460
9. T H E M O N T H : EDITORIAL T h e Critical A t t i t u d e English Literature of To-Day 10. SIR CHARLES W. DILKE, Foreign Affairs By M.P. 11. T h e Economic Aspects of SIDNEY WEBB Poor Law Reform 1 2 . M. P. The Policy of the Government The Present Moment in 13- W . T . GOODE Spain
14. J. A. H O B S O N 15. G.
481 495 501 517 525 543 555
T h e Task of Realism Review : The Place of History in Education
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October 1909
A List of the Month's Arrangements compiled especially for our readers
1
Pheasant Shooting begins. Baptist Union of Wales—Mr. LloydGeorge delivers his Presidential address, Treorchy, Pontypridd. Alexandra Park Race Meeting. Acton Golf Cup. Cinque Ports G. C. (Autumn Meeting). Hall, Messrs. Boosey's Ballad Concerts. Club—Bonnin Royal Albert
2
3
Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity. Gordon-Bennett Balloon Race at Zurich. Aviation Meeting at Juvisy (till 17th). Aviation Week at Frankfort starts. Nottingham Race Meeting (two days). Mr. F. E. Smith, M.P., addresses a Mass Meeting at Limehouse. Folkestone Race Meeting (two days). British Dairy Farmers' Association Show at Royal Agricultural Hall, Islington (four days). Church Congress opens at Swansea (four days). Leicester Autumn Race Meeting (two days). Meeting (Motor). Prestwick Golf Club (Autumn Meeting). Kempton Park Autumn Meeting (two days). Production of The Merry Peasant at the Strand Theatre. Eigthteenth Sunday after Trinity. Congregational Union, Annual Meeting opens at Sheffield. Michaelmas Law Sittings begin. Newmarket, Second October Meeting (four days). London County Council reassembles. Classical Concert Society will begin a series of ten Programmes of Chamber Music at Bechstein Hall. Gloucester Diocesan Conference (two days). Aviation Meeting at Marseilles begins. Last Day of Newmarket Second October Meeting. Brooklands Race
4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15
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xi
O C T O B E R 1909
16 17 Orchestral Concert Queen's Hall, M. Ysaye will play Brahm's Violin Concerto, first time in London. Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity.
18
Aviation Week at Blackpool begins. Opening of a Season of Opera in English by the Carl Rosa Company, at Covent Garden. Gatwick October Meeting. Gatwick October Meeting (last day). Sandown Park Autumn Meeting. Colchester Oyster Feast.
19 20
21 22
Sandown Park Autumn Meeting (last day).
23
Stockton Races. Twentieth Sunday after Trinity. His Majesty the King visits Norwich and presents Colours to the Territorial Forces of Norfolk. The First of a Series of Performances of The Silver Box at Letchworth (Garden City), Newmarket Houghton Meeting (four days).
24
25
26
27 28
Worcester Autumn Meeting (two days). Meeting at Marseilles.
Last Day of Aviation
29
30
Folkestone Race Meeting. Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity.
31
xii
THE ENGLISH
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THE
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OCTOBER 1909
MODERN
POETRY
Town and Country
By Arnold Bennett GOD made the country and man made the town. And so—man made the doctor, God the clown; God made the mountain, and the ants their hill, Where grinding servitudes each day fulfil. God doubtless made the flowers, while in the hive Unnatural bees against their passions strive. Goa made the jackass and the bounding flea; I render thanks to God that man made me. Let those who recognise God's shaping power Here but not there, in tree but not in tower, In lane and field, but not in street and square, And in man's work see nothing that is fair— Bestir their feeble fancy to the odd Conception of a " country ' made by God ; Where birds perceive the wickedness of strife Against the winds, and lead the simple life Nestless on God's own twigs ; and squirrels, free From carking care, exist through February On nuts that God has stored. Let them agree To leave the fields to God for just a year And then of God's own harvest make good cheer.
III
377
2B
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Three Poems
By Rachel Annand Taylor THE EPILOGUE OF THE DREAMING WOMEN
back this armour. Give us broideries. Against the Five sad Wounds inveterate In our dim sense, can that defend, or these ? In veils mysterious and delicate Clothe us again, in beautiful broideries.
TAKE
Take back this justice. Give us thuribles. While ye do loudly in the battle-dust We feed the gods with spice and canticles. T o our strange hearts, as theirs, just and unjust Are idle words. Give graven thuribles. Keep orb and sceptre. Give us up your souls, That our long fingers wake them verily Like dulcimers and citherns and violes ; Or at the burning disk of ecstasy Impose fair sigils on your gemlike souls. Give mercies, cruelties, and exultations, Give the long trances of the breaking heart; And we shall bring you great imaginations T o urge you through the agony of Art. Give cloud and flame, give trances, exultations.
T H E FIRST T I M E O H 1 Was it down in Samothrace Beside the great Greek sea, That first I saw thy dreaming face And swore thy slave to be ? 378
M O D E R N POETRY
With crosses blazoned on our ships We sailed for Palestine ; But sweet, oh, sweet upon thy lips That heathen song of thine ! The Knights went sailing o'er the wave To Christ His Sepulchre !— But I was traitor to the Grave, O breast of rose and myrrh !
T H E MASQUE O F P R O T E U S H A R K through the azure veils ! For Orpheus plays Upon the star-strung Lyre, Luring the Masque of Matter through dim ways Of rhythmical desire. Gaze through the veils. The Pomp of Proteus dances,— God, hero, satyr, ape, By flaming raptures, long amazed trances, Moving from shape to shape. Swift goblins of corruption, dubious powers Of sea and earth and air, Passionate wings and cast-up hands, faint flowers And flying hooves are there. In gracious and grotesque and mournful measures They triumph and they tire ; Their yearning pains, their wild repentant pleasures Obey that secret lyre. * * * * * Behind the Veils the strange Musician dwells. Alone the Unchanging, H e ; Whether he fold the sheep in twilight dells Of tender Arcady ; Or hunt on Thracian hills his sacrifice With furious timbrelling; Or steal through Easter morn like burial-spice, The dreaming garden's King.
379
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Four Poems
By Alfred E . Randall T H E MEMORY OF A M O M E N T O U T of the deep I called, and she did hear. She thrilled, and woke, and thro' the darkness came : A radiant spirit with a lambent flame Of revelation that made all things clear. Like an outworn garment, our sins dropped sheer To the abyss. Our naked souls arose, Merged for a moment, blent, and ere the foes Of life could gather, without any fear We gazed at God. In the eternal eyes We saw no condemnation, no reproach To blast us with a terrible surprise Of judgment smiting ere we could approach. Only an overwhelming pity fell Around us gently, like a magic spell. A PRAYER O GOD of earth and sky and shining star, Who madest man not vainly, nor to be Vassal to peace, and slave to misery, Descend again, a glorious avatar ! Come in thy might and panoply of war, A scourging pestilence to men not free From fear, who cannot love, and will not be Gods to themselves, nor worship one afar. Call out thy children from the barren horde Of dead, decayed, and dying souls that fill The earth with lamentation and discord. Thy sons are eager : let not mercy still Confound us with our enemies. The sword Of vengeance draw, Lord, if it be thy will. 380
MODERN POETRY
T O ELSIE happy stars conjunctive met to mark The hour of her nativity ! The queen Of love toward her errant lord did lean And languish in his volant arms. The lark Trilled blithely as the iridescent spark Did glow along the heavens, and demean Its glory never ; for the lovely sheen Awoke the sky to rapture, and the dark Declined, and vanished. Then the pearly day Apparent grew, and light began to lurk 'Neath every cloud that threatened its array At sunrise. 'Mid the shifting mist and murk The glory gathered, grew, and thro' the grey It burst; and Elsie heralded the day !
WHAT
DISAPPOINTMENT O GOD ! that this should be the end of all! This unimagined anguish of the heart; This feeble pulse; this pain that, like a dart Of vital fury, stabs ! The bitter gall That rises as remembrance doth appal The mind is but a savour, and a tang To sorrow; and the tears that lately sprang Were balm to this ! O, would they now could fall And wash away remembrance in a flood Of grief, and ease the soul! 'Twere better far T o be unloved than be misunderstood ; To be denied the conquest and the car, Than to be reft of purple and the crown By envy, and a treacherous renown.
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Three Poems
By Ezra Pound BALLAD OF THE GOODLY FERE*
SIMON Z E L O T E S SPEAKS I T S O M E W H I L E A F T E R T H E CRUCIFICTION
H A ' we lost the goodliest fere o' all F o r the priests and the gallows tree ? A y e lover he was of brawny men O ' ships and the open sea. W h e n they came wi' a host to take " O u r M a n , " H i s smile was good to see. " First let these go ! " q u o ' the Goodly Fere, " O r I'll see ye d a m n e d , " says he. Aye he sent us out through the crossed high spears A n d the scorn o' his laugh rang free, " W h y took ye not me when I walked about Alone in the town ? " says he. O h , we drank his " H a l e " in the good red wine W h e n we last made company. N o capon priest was the Goodly Fere But a man o' men was he. I ha' seen him drive a hunderd men W i ' a bundle of cords swung free, T h a t they took the high and holy house F o r their pawn and treasury. T h e y ' l l no' get him aa in a book I think T h o u g h they write it cunningly, N o mouse of the scrolls was o u r Goodly F e r e B u t aye loved the open sea.
* Fere, Anglo-Saxon and Old English, meaning mate, companion 382
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If they think they ha' snared our Goodly Fere They are fools to the last degree. " I ' l l go to the feast," quo' our Goodly Fere, " Though I go to the gallows tree." " Ye ha' seen me heal the lame and blind And awake the dead," says he, " Ye shall see one thing to master all, 'T's how a brave man dies on the tree." A son of God was the Goodly Fere That bade us his brothers be. I ha' seen him cow a thousand men. I have seen him upon the tree. H e cried no cry when they drave the nails And the blood gushed hot and free. The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue But never a cry cried he. I ha' seen him cow a thousand men On the hills o' Gallilee. They whined as he walked out calm between, Wi' his eyes like the grey o' the sea : Like the sea that brooks no voyaging, With the winds unleashed and free, Like the sea that he cowed at Genseret Wi' twey words spoke' suddently. A master of men was the Goodly Fere, A mate of the wind and sea. If they think they ha' slain our Goodly Fere They are fools eternaly. I ha' seen him eat of the honey comb Sin' they nailed him to the tree.
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NILS LYKKE BEAUTIFUL, infinite memories, That are a-plucking at my heart, Why will you be ever calling and a-calling And a-murmuring in the dark there, And a-stretching out your long hands Between me and my beloved ? And why will you be ever a-casting The black shadow of your beauty On the white face of my beloved, And a-glinting in the pools of her eyes ?
UN RETRATO Now would I weave her portrait out of all dim splendour. Of Provence and far halls of memory, Lo, there come echoes, faint diversity Of blended bells at even's end, or As the distant seas should send her The tribute of their trembling, ceaselessly Resonant. Out of all dreams that be, Say, shall I bid the deepest dreams attend her ? Nay ! for I have seen the purplest shadows stand Alway with reverent chere, that looked on her, Silence himself is grown her worshipper, And ever doth attend her in that land Wherein she reigneth, wherefore let there stir Naught but the softest voices, praising her.
384
T h e Church in Lucina's House
By E d w a r d H u t t o n T H E Catacomb—the place by the tombs, in which to the curious philologist every symbol of Christianity seems to lie hid, the cup of the Holy Grail, the ship of the Church, was, indeed, the very cradle of Christianity, of Catholicism, where Love lay helpless, a little child—Pity, love's own self—till He was strong enough to take the whole world into His arms. Born as it were in the desert, in the stony silence of Judaea, Christianity, by an act of Love, had at once solved the great mystery ; it was in itself a denial of Death, of the power of Death, and as though to prove its sincerity, its belief in the hope it alone had dared to offer mankind, it made its first home in the Catacombs, those cemeteries of the dead. They too, are of our company it seemed to say, for Death is not death but a sleep ; and so it refused to be separated from them waiting patiently beside their resting-place, really in communion with them who had slept and wakened. The Christian alone in Rome found hope in his heart. Yes, while the City amused herself at the Bath or grew weary with horror at the Circus, that little society, secret so reluctantly, driven underground, waited not without songs—the songs of children, mainly, we are told—beside the tombs, where alone it was safe, far from the Pagans, in those burial-places which gradually grew, outside the City, about certain villas along the Appian Way or between it and the Via Ardeatina ; the villa of Lucina for instance, or the house of Cecilia, places excavated by the householder and inviolable, as were all places of sepulture declared by their owners to be religious, to belong to their cultus or sect. There in the darkness lighted only by occasional luminaria they celebrated their mysteries, even in the time of the Apostles, the Mass, the Commendatio Animae, the Funeralia, refusing always to speak of the departing brother or sister as dying but rather as of one summoned or called away, accersitus ab angelis, as the beautiful Roman inscription has it—summoned by angels. These cemeteries, later to bear the names of Saints, S. Calisto, S. Sebastiano, S. Balbina among the rest, excavated almost 385
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entirely in the volcanic soil, stretched really for miles outside the wall on the left bank of the Tiber. And beside them were the gardens—horti—those cemeteries in the open air : the Hortus Hilariae where S. Hilaria was buried, the Hortus Justi where lay S. Nicomedes, the Hortus Themis beside the Via Ostia where they buried S. Timothy. These gardens were, however, comparatively few and were too public to be used for worship. It was in the Catacombs, so many of which still remain unexplored, that the Christian Church spent its childhood, in those five especially which date from Apostolic times, and which were added to little by little, till in the third century we find some forty-five, only twenty of which were still in the hands of private owners, the rest being under the government of the Ecclesia Fratrum. For with the growth of the Catacombs, their enlargement, till one led into another, the Church herself took command ; these places of sepulture which she attached each one to a parish church being, indeed, her first possession and remaining for ages the most holy shrines in the city. " The people of Rome," writes S. Jerome, " have left the ancient Temples covered with cobwebs and rust ; the golden Capitol squalid with filth, while they pour out from the city and run to the Tombs of the Martyrs." Serenity, a bold and confident gladness, grave and yet by no means without its more joyful moments, would seem to have been the most striking characteristic of the life of the Catacombs, expressing itself in many a beautiful or graceful custom accommodated to the human heart, a little wistful perhaps after the years of persecution, in a strange power of sweetness and patience and especially in a wonderful new music and poetry. With the inexplicable blindness of all the best minds of that old pagan world Tacitus, like Marcus Aurelius later, has failed to understand the joy in the heart of that new song, recording with a curious bitterness in A.D. 58 the conversion of Pomponia Grecina, the first Lucina, whom he thinks of ever after as leading a life lugubris et moesta, dejected and mournful, in a retirement little less complete than that of the grave. Yet as we know even in those days of austere ascesis, that element of profound serenity in the soul of her Founder was part of the very being of the Church, soon in the Minor Peace under the Antonines to come to its own—to involve her altogether in its beauty and sweetness. It was as it were the very soul of her song. Singing certainly, " though often it dared only be of the heart," there had been from the first, the singing of children, as on the morrow of a great deliverance. Was it only that song which Pliny heard, caught it might seem, almost in spite of himself, by its freshness and blithe386
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ness, long a stranger in that complicated Roman world, was it only that morning or evening song—like the evening itself full of hope and fear and yet with the stars there in the darkness after all,—or was it, yes, something more eager, more mysterious even, than that which he heard as he passed in the early morning on his way to the City ?
' bursum corda. Habemus ad Dominum.
The Mass, indeed, would seem to have been said always, even in the Apostolic age, almost as we have it to-day, for " its details," as has been well said, " as one by one they became visible in later history have already the character of what is ancient and venerable." A ritual altogether expressive and full of meaning —a meaning often obscure to us in its detail at any rate—grew little by little about it in those early times really for the sake of expressing some profound mystery that could only thus be made plain, which it was not lawful to speak. And for the Christians of the Minor Peace certainly, the ritual of the Mass, its action namely, was altogether indicative, not hiding but expressing the very " heart of the mystery " which for them as for us was often rather obscured than made plain by the words. In those times the words were in the Greek language, the people answering in their own vulgar tongue, that colloquial or base Latin into which, though without any more popular success, the whole of the Liturgy has gradually passed : but not without leaving certain indications of its Greek original, the dreadful vocatives in the Mass of Good Friday, for instance, the old plea for mercy of the Kyrie eleison. There, certainly, in Lucina's house on the Via Appia amid what we now call the Catacombs, the cemetery of S. Calisto, the Mass was sung, already before the final triumph of the Church, substantially complete. In the old Pagan worship, in its essence at any rate, an act of worship, of appreciation of the beauty of the world, the warmth and splendour of the sunshine, the refreshment of the rain, the serenity of the blue sky, there might seem to have been little for the understanding to be busy about. But in that earliest act of Christian worship eloquent and yet reticent of so much, there was more than enough for intellectual reception, a whole new world of thought revolving round a fact or series of facts known to every one, and, rightly understood, the very secret of the whole. " If one knew what the Mass was," one has said who loved it exceedingly, " he would die, yes of joy and gratitude : for there that which was the desire of the Patriarchs and was foreseen by the Prophets, of which the 387
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shepherds at Bethlehem, the Apostles at the last supper, Mary and the holy women on Calvary and at the holy Sepulchre, the Disciples after the Resurrection, were witnesses, we see ourselves to-day." While Pope Innocent I I I . tells us that : " The order of the Mass is arranged on a plan so wonderful that everything done by Jesus Christ from His Incarnation to His Ascension is there contained in words and in actions and wonderfully presented." And, indeed, amid those sacred readings, in silence at certain intervals, or again with bursts of chanted invocations, amid the many prayers and protests of love, the complicated but expressive ritual of an act of sacrifice, little by little the drama, the dramatic narrative disengages itself till it appears with all the vividness of a picture and we see that mournful Figure towards whom the whole act of worship is continually turned, who has as it were summed up in Himself all the impassioned hopes of man, as the hero, the central figure of a divine tragedy—the tragedy of the Life and Death of Jesus Christ. It is then as a dramatic action, a tragic drama as we might say, that the Mass from the earliest times presented itself to those who in the subterranean oratories of the Catacombs were gathered together not merely in a common act of worship to hear the words of life, to be made partakers with Christ of the Kingdom of Heaven, but chiefly to remind themselves of the great deliverance won for them by that mournful and heroic figure who passed before them in the words of the drama, the actions of the priest, from birth to death, to resurrection, into His Heaven. Among a people to whom gesture meant so much, often surpassing words in an emphasis of sorrow, disaster, or joy, the mere acting, as we should say, the natural expression of the thought and emotion of their hearts was easy to follow, to expand to the full measure of its intention ; and in those serene moments, joyful so gravely,there would certainly be no need or desire for any unseemly or disorderly emphasis either of gesture or expression. The proper action of the rite had already become as secure as the rite itself, difficult enough for the uninitiated, but easily understood by all who had " ears to hear "—or for that matter eyes to see, for the action not only interpreted the words but in some wonderful manner was in itself dramatic, making together with the words a single piece of music in which you might not divide the form from the matter, the subject from that perfect expression of it. Thus the story of the life and death of Christ fading already from the memory of men, of men who had heard of it as the wonder of a far land, was caught up and made immortal by an art unconscious for the most part and highly
T H E C H U R C H IN LUCINA'S H O U S E
dramatic, universal too in its appeal, as no Greek play or even the more human work of Shakespeare has ever really been. That heroic Figure round whom the Tragedy gathers is you might think inexplicably absent, is never represented there, the whole mystery, if such it be, centring indeed, in the actions and words of one person, but not He, arrayed in beautiful vestments and aided now and then by assistants, at an altar strangely like a tomb before which the whole drama passes like a great procession, to which it leads and from which it issues ending so inexplicably in farewell. That marvellous work of art, perfect from the beginning, like a melody which cannot but proceed to an assured end, might seem for the Christians of the Minor Peace, as for us to-day, to have fallen naturally into three parts, corresponding to the three periods of Our Lord's life. Preceded by a Prologue concerned with the old world before the advent of the Prince of Life, the first part from the Introit to the Credo traces His life to the Last Supper ; the second from the Credo to the Paternoster showing His suffering and Death ; while the third, from the Paternoster to the Ite Missa Est embraces all His glorious Life on earth. For the acceptable soul certainly, acceptable always in proportion to what it can admire, such a vision of the most wonderful act of worship the world has ever seen is even to-day not too difficult, but for the Christian of the Minor Peace, it might seem to have been just a reality. We can picture such an one a little weary after a long night journey along the Appian Way, still at dawn some little distance from the City, arrested suddenly on his way by that singing Pliny heard and knowing its import turning out of the road through that narrow door in the vineyard wall of the old villa, and, following the path, coming to that " gap of blackness " in the grassy hill at the back of the house and so descending by devious, narrow ways lined with the names of those already sleeping—his own friends perhaps—till he would come at last to the " Church in Lucina's House " to remind himself once more in the early spring morning of that great deliverance. And so one's first impression on entering one of those catacombs to-day is altogether of serenity and peace ; a kind of ecstatic happiness, temperate and still fresh with a hope that has never quite passed away. On the walls one reads words of quiet expectation, full of light, confidence and repose : Pax, you read Pax tibi, In Pace Christi or Vivas in Deo : and then sometimes as though to sum up all contentment Vivas in Christo, in Bono. And the scenes painted there are serene and glad. In those days 389
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at any rate they do not seem to have been preoccupied with the Crucifixion, the Death of Christ, they thought only of the Resurrection. A certain Latin sanity and quietness are expressed in the work we find there ; and, indeed, there is no hatred or contempt at all of Pagan thought or religion, nor even a complete repudiation of it, for it remains, yes, a real thing, seen with new eyes as we might say, seen really for the first time, and drawn gently into the service of Christ, so that Orpheus becomes as it were but a prophecy of Him there in S. Calisto, and the Good Shepherd bears the lamb on his shoulders precisely as Hermes had been wont to do, but with a new tenderness. The continuity of life, of art the most sensitive expression of life was not to be interrupted even by that New Song, which, as Clement of Alexandria tells us with reference not only to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice but to Paganism generally, " has made men out of stones and out of beasts so that those even who were as dead, not being partakers of the true life, have, indeed, come to life again, simply by being hearers of this song." The portrait of Christ is but seldom found, for already we seem to feel the shadow of the coming controversy between Tertullian, for instance, who continually reminded himself of the words of Isaiah, " He hath no form nor comeliness," and his opponents who found in the Prince of Life the fount of all Beauty. But when we do find a presentment of Him as in S. Nereo and S. Achilleo for instance, He is represented as young and bearded, with a smile on His lips, splendid as Apollo, who has forgotten everything but that he is a God and our friend. Yet it is a shadow, that hardly dims the serenity of this world, that we are aware of, when we consider how rare those representations of Christ really are. For in that world of the Catacombs, surrounded by symbols of Hope, one thought little of Theology, that madness which was to overwhelm everything in the fourth century; one was content with the new Love born into the world, which changed the whole aspect of Life, of Death, of conduct, so marvellously, and made things hitherto difficult and mysterious just a kind of joy. It was, indeed, a new " state of soul," really a new morality that one came upon suddenly in these dark obscure ways, out of the boisterous cruel delight of the Colosseum or the ennui of the Baths, a profound spiritual enthusiasm, an eager heed of love, of the redemption, of just that. There as it were, after the agony of the arena, the new fraternity was born, the new brotherhood of man. Side by side they lay down to sleep, the rich beside the poor, the bond by the free, all whom Christ has made equal, to await in 390
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perfect confidence the promised resurrection. They buried one another still by night, as they had been used to do, but the rite was no longer a gloomy or even a sad one : Exercitia sunt . . . non funera. And, indeed, the Funeralia of the earliest times were quite unlike those of the Middle Age even, less self-conscious, less self-reproachful. Then, as in our day too, for the Church is not forgetful, the commendatio animae was said over the dying, with its pitiful cry for mercy, Kyrie eleison, its invocations and the marvellous prayer, Libera Domine animam servi tui sicut liberasti Petram et Paulum de carceribus ; ending too, still with a song— Requiem aeternam dona ei Domine . Et lux perpetua luceat ei. Nor have we added much, or even at all, to the rite itself. For the Christians even in the earliest days observed the customs of their ancestors, though in more seemly wise and with a new intention. The ancient rite of Extreme Unction was administered, the dying being literally anointed with aromatic oils and balsams, till in the fourth century the body was merely touched in various places with myrrh. Then singing still they swathed it in stuffs often precious, the arms close to the body, the Funeralia beginning where death had taken place and coming to an end in the cemetery itself. The ceremony was almost exactly that of a Mass for the dead, the same psalms were sung, but " cum omni gaudio " ; the sacrifice following, the sacrifice of the Eucharist, at the tomb itself. Sometimes as though for comfort the Divine Species would be buried with the dead, but this was forbidden in the sixth century. There they laid them down, one after another, thousand upon thousand in those subterranean galleries, closing the place carefully with cement and writing above " Dulcissima . . . in Pace. Vivas in Christo.'' Often they would return to those silent resting-places through the long galleries always full of a far-away sound of children's voices singing. And one such, heart-broken in spite of himself for all that new joy, without a single look, kiss, or even a clasping of hands these many days, has written there over and over again the name he loved, Sofronia, vivas . . . in Christo Sofronia in Domino, Sofronia dulcis, semper vivas in Deo. Sofronia . . . Ah, after all, in spite of that new joy come into the world so meekly, the bitterness is not gone:
Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus Tam cari capitis.
What promises will avail anything at all with the regret for " so dear a head " still fresh at one's heart ? 391
The Nest
By Anne Douglas Sedgwick
H E seemed to have had no time for thinking before he sank into a corner of the ' railway carriage and noted, with a satisfaction under the circumstances perhaps trivial, that he would have it to himself for the swift hour down to the country. Satisfactions of any sort seemed inappropriate, an appendage that he should have left behind him for ever on stepping from the great specialist's door in Wimpole Street two hours ago. When a man has but a month—at most two months—to live, small hope; and fears should drop from him : he should be stripped, as it were, for the last solitary wrestle in the arena of death. But the drive, from the doctor's to the city and from there to the station, had seemed unusually full of life's solicitations. The soft, strained eyes of an over-laden horse, appealing in patience from the shade of dusty blinkers ; the dismal degradation of a music-hall poster—a iunny man with reddened nose and drunken hat, as appealing in his slavery as the horse ; the vaporous blue-green silhouettes of the Park on a silvery sky ;— he had found himself responding to these with pity, repugnance and pleasure as normally as if they meant for him now what they always would have meant. That such impressions were so soon to cease must change all their meaning,—at least, so one would have supposed ; he began to think of that and to wonder a little over the apparent apathy of those intervening hours ; but while it had lasted the fact of finality, of the pit dug across his path, had done hardly more than skim on the outskirts of his alert yet calm receptivity. He seemed never to have noticed more, to have been more conscious of the outer world and so little conscious of himself. Now, in the train, the outer world, wraith-like in a sudden summer shower, became the background as it sped on either side, and thoughts were in the foreground, thoughts of himself as doomed, and of the life that he had loved and worked in, as measured into one shallow cupful at his lips. Even yet it was 39 2
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almost absurd, the difficulty he found in realising it. The doomed figure detached itself, became that of a piteous, a curious alien, whom one watched respectfully and from a distance. From a safe shore he observed the tossing of the rapidly sinking skiff with its helpless occupant. It required a great pull, push, and effort of his whole being, like that of awakening from a halfdream, in order to see, in order to say to himself, really believing it, that he was the man. Wonder, rather than dread or sorrow, was still the paramount feeling, though, oppressively, as if he picked his steps about the verge of an echoing cavern, turning away his eyes, there lurked behind all that he felt the sense of sudden emptiness and dark. It was wonderful, immensely absorbing and interesting, this idea of being himself doomed. Self-conscious, observant, sensitive as he was, he still thought more than felt. It was at last credible and indubitable that he was the man, and he was asking himself how he would take it ; he was asking himself how he would bear it. He was amused to observe that the pathetic old human vanity, by no means stunned, was pushing its head above the tossing surface in order to assure him again and again that he would bear it very well. It should be a graceful and gallant exit. If there were to be dark moments, moments when the cavern sucked him in and had him, if he was to know horror and despair, no one else, at all events, should know that he knew them ; no one else should share his suffering. U p to the edge of extinction he would keep silence and a Stoic cheerfulness. The doctor had promised him that there would be little pain ; there would be knowledge only to conceal. This vanity, and there was satisfaction in it for all his ironic insight, was not so selfish as it seemed ; the next turn of thought led him to this. For no one had a right to share his suffering; or perhaps it would be more magnanimous to say that the some one of whom he was thinking had a right to be spared the sharing of it. He shared so few of the things that mattered with Kitty that she might well claim immunity. His wife's figure, since the very beginning, had been hovering near his thoughts, not once looked at directly. It might be horribly painful to look at it, but he suspected that it would not be so painful as to look at the other near thing that he must leave behind ; his work ; the work that with all its grind and routine—so hard to harness to at first— had now become so much a part of himself. The fact that he might come nearer to despair, nearer to the crumbling edge of the cavern, when he thought of leaving his work than when he thought of leaving his wife, was in itself a pain ; but it was an old III 393 2c
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pain in a new guise. Kitty had for so long been one of the things that counted for less than his work. Vanity even raised its voice high enough to say ruefully that they might get on badly without him at the Home Office ; the country itself might suffer. He smiled ; but the dart told ; it was perhaps feathered with truth. Yes, everything most essential in him, everything that most counted, was answered, called forth in his work. It was in that that he would most truly die. For, of course, in the many other, the young, the ardent, the foolish hopes, he was dead already. And it was round the figure of his wife, that light and radiant figure, sweet, soft, appealing, that those dead hopes seemed to gather, like mist about a flower. Poor, lovely little Kitty : the sight of the rain-dimmed meadow-sweet, by the brookside in a passing field, brought her before him in this aspect of innocent disillusioner. For nothing essential, nothing that counted in him, was answered or called forth by Kitty except a slightly ironic tenderness, He didn't judge life from his own failure to find splendid mutual enterprise and sacred mutual comprehension where his lover's blindness had thought to find it. Nor did he judge Kitty. His own blindness was the fault, if fault there were, and even that blindness he could now see tolerantly. The dart and pang had gone from his memory of young love ; his smile for it was indulgent ; he was even glad that the memory was there, glad that he had known the illusion, even if it were at the price of failure in that happy realm of life. Little of the sadness could have been Kitty's ; she had not known the bitterness of his slow awakening ; she was easily contented with the tame terms of unillumined life. A charming home ; a fond husband ; a pretty, diligent part to play in the political and social life of the country-side ; the nicest taste to show in dress and friends ; —Kitty, he imagined, thought of her life as completely successful. And why not ? He himself saw love as an episode and contentedly accepted the fact that for the flower-like woman and the man who works there can be, eventually, no deeper bond. He knew two or three other women who interested him more than Kitty ever could ; to them he went when he wanted to talk about anything he cared for. Kitty was sweet to see ; she made him very comfortable ; she rarely irritated him. With friends and Kitty what did he want of women more ? Outside these domestic and drawing-room circles was the world of men and ideas in which he lived, in which his real life had its roots. Yet, as the train neared the little country station, as familiar lanes and meadows glided slowly past the windows, he became 394
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aware that his thoughts had more and more slid from this outside life, this world of work and reality, and that from thinking of the little part that Kitty played in it he had come to thinking of Kitty and to the thought that he was to see her for the last time.—Yes. That crashed in at last. At last something seemed to come to him which, in the pain of it, was completely adequate to the situation. It was the Kitty of six years ago that he saw most clearly, the girl he had fallen in love with, his bride ; but there were all the other memories too, the little silent memories, the nothings, the everythings of daily life together ; small joys, small sorrows. The breakfast-table, Kitty behind the coffee, reading aloud to him some scrap of her morning budget ; the garden, Kitty showing him how a new flower was thriving ; Kitty riding beside him in the dew to an early meet ; and, suddenly, among all the trivial memories, the solemn one that hardly seemed to go with Kitty at all,—Kitty's face looking up at him, disfigured with grief and pain, as he told her that their child—it had died at birth— was dead. The other women, the interesting ones, the women who, more or less, knew their way about his mind and soul, were forgotten, blotted out completely by the trivial and the solemn memories. He felt no desire to see them, no desire at all to say good-bye to them ; that would be to bring them near. But he did want to see Kitty, at once. She was not near mind or soul; but she was near as life is near ; near like the pulse of his heart ; and, with all the other things, he felt, suddenly, that Kitty was his child, too, and that paternal yearning was mingled with the crying out of his whole nature towards her. For it was crying out ; and, if she was his child, in what deep strange sense was he not her child, too. The wide world, the real world, the outside world of work and achievement, collapsed like a crumpled panorama ; he was covering his eyes ; he was shuddering ; he was stumbling back to the nest, wounded to death, there to fold himself in darkness, in oblivion, in love.—How near we are to the animal, he thought, smiling, with trembling lips, as he saw the station slide outside the windows at last, saw the face of the station-master—he had never before known that the station-master was such a lovable person—he seemed so near the nest that he must be lovable— saw, beyond the flower-wreathed palings, the dog-cart waiting for him. But his deeper self rebuked the cynical side-glance. The trembling smile, he knew, had more of truth :—how near we are to the divine. The pain and ecstasy of this moment of arrival made it one of the most vivid and significant of his life. 395
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Almost worth while to know that one is to die in a month if the knowledge brings with it such flashes of beauty, of vision. The whole earth seemed transfigured and heavenly. Dean, the coachman, gave acquiescent answers to his questions on the homeward drive. He heard the sound of his own voice and knew that he was speaking as he wanted to be sure of speaking for these next weeks, with ease and lightness. He would be able to keep up before Kitty. Until the very end she should be spared everything ; there was joy in the thought, and no longer any vanity. He would see her, be with her, and she should not know. He would see her happy for their last month together. He clasped the thought of her happiness—with her— to his heart. Like all ecstasies, it faded, this rapture of his return. By the time the house was reached, the lovely little Jacobean house that they had found together, the buoyancy was gone and what was left was a sweetness and a great fatigue. He was to see her ; that was well; and here was the nest ; that was well, too. But he wanted to fold his wings and sleep. Mrs. Pallant was not in the house, the butler told him, she and Sir Walter had gone down to the river together. Pallant felt that he would rather not go after them. He would wait so that he should see Kitty alone when he first saw her. He liked Sir Walter, their friend and neighbour ; it would not be difficult to act before him, and he knew that he could begin acting at once ; but, for this first meeting of the new, short epoch he must see Kitty alone. So he had his tea in the library—queer to go on having tea, queer to find one still liked tea—and looked over some papers, and saw, outside, the afternoon grow stiller and more golden, and knew that all dreads were in abeyance and that the somnolence, as of a drugged sweetness and fatigue, still kept him safe. He was conscious at last of a purely physical chill; the library was cool and he stepped into the sunlight on the lawn, walking up and down among the flowers and, presently, across the grassy terraces, to the lower groups of trees, vaguely directing his steps to the little summer-house that faced the west and was as full of sunlight at this hour as a fretted shell of warm, lapping sea-water. They could not see him, on their way up from the river, nor he them, from here, and after a half-hour or so of dreamy basking it would be time to dress for dinner, Sir Walter would have gone and Kitty would be at the house again. He followed the narrow path, set thickly with young ashes and sycamores, and saw beyond the trees the roof of the summer396
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house, heaped with illumined festoons of traveller's-joy, and then, when he was near, he heard voices within it, Kitty's voice and Sir Walter's. Hesitating, half turning to go back, it was as if a childish panic of shyness seized him, so that he smiled at himself as he stood there, in the arrested attitude of an involuntary eavesdropper. But the smile faded. A look of bewilderment came to his face. Kitty was weeping and Sir Walter was pleading with her, and so strange was Sir Walter's voice, so strange what he was saying to Kitty, that all the strangeness of the day found now its culminating moment. He walked on, slowly, unwillingly, helplessly, walked on, as he now knew, into some far other form of suffering than any that had been foreseen by him that afternoon. A rustic seat ran round the summer-house. On the side most hidden he sank down. He did not choose the hidden side. He had no feeling of will or choice ; had they come out upon him he would have looked at them with the same bewildered eyes. But, dully, he felt that he must know,—know,—why Kitty was unhappy. Sunken on the seat, among the traveller's-joy, exhausted, yet alert, his head dizzy and his heart stilled, as it were, to listen, it was this amazement and curiosity that Pallant felt rather than anger, jealousy, or grief. Kitty was unhappy ; Sir Walter loved her, and she loved Sir Walter. Sir Walter was imploring her to come away with him. " But you do love me," was the phrase that he repeated again and again, the strong protest of fact against her refusal. The dizziness lifting, the heart beating more normally, Pallant knew more. Kitty was unhappy and loved Sir Walter, but, deeper than that, was the truth that she was happy in her knowledge of his love, deeper than that—though this depth was of thankfulness in her husband's heart—was the truth that the love was as yet a beautiful pastime ; there was joy for her in her own sadness, drama in her pain ; she was a child with a strange toy in her hand ; it charmed her and she had not learned to dread it. Her husband's comprehension of her, of her childishness, her fluidity, her weakness, actually touched with respect his comprehension of Sir Walter ; for Sir Walter's strength was reverent, even in his recklessness there was dignity. Pallant knew that he spoke the truth when he said to Kitty that she might trust him for life. It was the real thing with Sir Walter. With Kitty the real 397
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thing could be little more than the response to reality in others, There was the danger that her husband steadied himself to look at, as he sat in the sunlight outside the summer-house and listened. The dizziness was quite gone. He had never felt a greater mental clarity. He knew that he must be suffering ; but suffering seemed relegated to some region of mere physical sensation. He saw as he had never seen and understood as he had never understood. He felt no jealousy, not a pang of the defrauded, injured male, not a throb of the broken-hearted lover ; yet it was not indifference to Kitty that gave him his immunity ; he had never cared more for Kitty ; it was, perhaps, in a tenderer key, as he cared for the station-master, as he cared, now, for Sir Walter. He was himself soon to die and, as personalities, as related to his own life, people had ceased to count ; but as lives that were to go on after he was dead, they counted as they had never done before ; and Kitty most of all. It was this intense consciousness of her youth, of all the years of life she had to live, that pressed with such clearness and such fear upon him. She had all her life before her and she held in her hands a terrible, a beautiful toy that, suddenly transformed to an engine of destruction, might shatter her. Sir Walter was going. He said that he would come again to-morrow. " Nicholas will be here," said Kitty. She no longer wept. Her voice, now that the stress of the situation was over, had regained its pensive sweetness. " Yes," said Sir Walter, " that's what's so odious, darling ; he will always be here and everything will be twisted and horrible. I like your husband." " He is a strange man ; I sometimes think that he cares for nothing but his work ; he is all thought and no heart. I don't believe that he would really mind if I were to go away with you. He would smile, sadly and ironically, and say : ' Poor, silly child.' And then he would turn to his papers. I'm nothing to him but a doll, a convenient, domestic doll. And he doesn't care for playing with dolls except for a little while now and then." Kitty spoke with a sober pathos that did not veil resentment. " Ah, you can say all that to me—and expect me to go on bearing seeing you wasted and thrown away ! " Sir Walter broke out. " What stands between us ? Why must we go on suffering like this ? " " Isn't it a great joy—to know that the other is there, understanding—and caring ? " 398
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" A killing sort of joy." " How cruel, how wrong you are," Kitty murmured ; but her husband knew that for her, indeed, the joy was deep, and that it was in such moments of power over an emotion she could rouse yet dominate that she had her keenest sense of it. " I can't help it," said Sir Walter. " I shall always want you to come away with me." " Good-bye :—for to-day." " It's you who are cruel." At that, silence following, Pallant knew that Kitty's quiet tears fell again. Sir Walter was subjugated. He pleaded for pardon ; promised not to torment her—to try not to torment her. A trysting-place was fixed on for next day and Pallant felt another chill of fear at Kitty's swift resource and craft in planning it. The child knew how to plot and lie. It thought itself nobly justified, no doubt, and that its fidelity to duty gave it right to every liberty of conscience. And before Sir Walter went there was a moment of relenting that showed how near was the joy of yielding to the joy of ruthlessness. " For this once,—for this once only—" Kitty murmured. And Pallant knew that Sir Walter held her in his arms and kissed her. After his departure Kitty sat on for some moments in the summer-house. She sighed deeply once or twice and Pallant fancied, from her light movements, that she had leaned her arms on the table and rested her head on them. He heard presently, that she was softly saying a prayer and, at the sound, tears filled his eyes. Then, rising, she collected her basket of flowers, her parasol, her books, and walked away with slow steps along the path leading to the house. II Two facts stood clear before Pallant's eyes. He had been culpably blind and Kitty was in danger. He asked himself if he had not been culpably selfish, too, for Kitty's summing up of his attitude towards her would have hurt had he not been beyond such hurts ; but, looking back, he could not see that he had ever pushed Kitty aside nor relegated her to the place of plaything. No ; the ship of his romance, all its sails set to fairest, sweetest hopes, had been well-ballasted by the most serious, most generous of modern theories as to the right relations of man and wife. And the shock and disillusion had been to find, day by day, that it was, so to speak, only the sails that Kitty cared for. The cargo, 399
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the purpose of their voyage, left her prettily, vaguely indifferent. Again and again, he remembered, it had been as if he had led her down into the busy heart of the ship, explained the chart to her, pointed out all the interesting wares. Kitty had shown a graceful interest, but with the manner of a lovely voyager, brought down from sunny or starlit contemplations on deck to humour the dry tastes of the captain. She didn't care a bit for the cargo, or the purposes; she didn't care a bit for any of his interests nor wish to share them ; his interests, in so far as specialised and unrelated to their romance were, she intimated, by every retreating grace, as of gathered-up skirts and a backward smile for the captain in his prosy room, the captain's own particular manly business ; her business was to be womanly, that is, to be charming, to feel the breeze in the sails, and to gaze at the stars. And though, now for the first time he saw it, Kitty was not the happy, facilely contented woman he had thought her, it was really as if the ship, with weightier cargoes to carry, more distant ports to reach, had undergone a transformation ; throbbing and complicated machinery moved it instead of sails, and on its workaday decks Kitty strolled wistfully, missing the sails, missing the romance, but missing only that. He had accepted, helplessly, her interpretation of their specialised existences, hoping only that hers might assume the significance that would, perhaps, justify the old-fashioned separation of interests ; but no children came after the first, the child that died at birth, the child that his heart ached over still ; and he could not believe that Kitty felt the lack, could hardly believe that she shared his hope for other children. She had suffered terribly in the birth of the one, more, perhaps, than in its death-—though that had temporarily crushed her—and she had been horribly frightened by the cruelties and perils of maternity. So, though he had come to think of her as essentially womanly, it was in a rather narrow sense ; the term had by degrees lost many, even, of its warm, instinctive associations, and as he now sat thinking, near the summer-house, it took on its narrowest, if most piteous meaning. Kitty was essentially womanly. She needed some one to be in love with her. Her husband had ceased to be in love—though he had not ceased to be a loving husband—and she responded helplessly to a lover's appeal. Sir Walter's appeal was very persuasive. A ship of snowy, wing-like sails, a fairy ship, rocked on the waves at the very edge of Kitty's sheltered life. Only a shutting of the eyes, a holding of the breath, and she would be carried across the narrow intervening depth to the deck, to freedom, to safety—
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she would believe—to sails trimmed for an immortal romance. Would Kitty's cowardice, and Kitty's prayers—they were interwoven he felt sure—keep her for one month from running away with Sir Walter ? In only a month's time she could respond and not be shattered : in only a month's time the ship of romance would be really safe, she might walk on board with no shutting of the eyes or holding of the breath. Pallant gazed, and the facts became clearer and more ominous. For the lack of a knowledge that was his, Kitty and Sir Walter might wreck their lives. All the motives for the concealment of his secret, the vanity, the bravery, the cherishing tenderness that had inspired him, were scattered to the winds. The nest was a tattered, wind-pierced ruin. And he, already, was a ghost. Kitty should not lack the knowledge. The dew was falling, and he had grown chilly. He walked back quickly to the house that he had left a little while ago so vividly aware of the sweetness that the shallow cup might hold. The cup was empty. Not a drop of self was left to hope or live for. He waited till the next day to tell her. He did not feel a tremor, he felt too deep a fatigue. Their meeting at dinner was a placid gliding over the depths ; two hooded gondolas floating side by side, each with its shrouded secret. But skill and vigilance were his. Kitty's gondola drifted with the current, knowing no need of skill, secure of secrecy. The eyes she quietly lifted to her husband were unclouded. He guessed the inner drama that held her thoughts, the tragically beautiful role that she herself played in it. It was as a heroine that she saw herself. Why not, indeed. No heroine could have played her part more gracefully and worthily, and a heroine's innocent eyes could not be expected to see as far as his " ironic " ones. It was the sense of distance, from her, from everything, that grew upon him during the long intervals of the night when he lay awake and watched the stars slowly cross his open window. He was no longer divided from himself, no longer groping, as in the train, to find a clue between the doomed man and the watcher. The self that he had found was adrift upon a sea, solitary indeed, and saw pigmy figures moving in the shifting lights and shadows of the shore. His mild pre-occupation was with one figure, light, fluttering, foolish : she was walking near the verge of the cliff and her foothold might give way. He intended to signal to her and to point out a safe road through
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the corn-fields, before he turned himself again to loneliness, the sky, and the sea that was soon to engulf him. This self-obliterating immensity of mood was contracted and ruffled next morning by the trivial difficulties that stood in the way of his determination. He went to Kitty's boudoir— and, in spite of immensities, he knew that his heart beat heavily under the burden of its project, how careful he must be, how delicate—to find her interviewing the cook. In the garden, she was talking to the gardener, and afterwards, in her room, she was trying on a tea-gown before the mirror. Actually he felt some irritation. " When can I see you, Kitty ? " he asked. Her eyes in the glass met his with surprise at his tone ; but surprise was all. " See me f Here I am. What is it ?—No, Cecile, the sash must knot, so ; tie it more to the side." " I want to talk over something with you." " I'm rather busy this morning. Will after lunch do ? Don't you see, Cecile, like this." " No, it won't. I must sec you now," said Pallant, almost querulously. She turned her head to look at him and a shadow crossed her face. Suddenly, he saw it, she was a little frightened. " Of course, directly. I'll come to the library." Seeing that fear, and smitten with compunction, a rather silly impulse made him smile at her and say :—" Don't bother to hurry. I can wait." But he did want her to hurry. He felt that he could wait no longer. He walked up and down the library. The weariness of the day before was gone ; the sweetness, of course, was gone, and the inhuman immensity was gone too. He felt oddly normal and reasonable, detached yet implicated; almost like a friendly family doctor come to break the fatal news to the ignorant wife. It was just the anxiety that the doctor might feel, the grave trouble and the twinge of awkwardness. He had only waited for ten minutes when Kitty appeared in the doorway. Kitty Pallant was still a young woman and looked younger than her years. The roundness and blueness and steady gaze of her eyes, the bloom of her cheeks and innocent lustre of her golden hair gave an infantile quality to her loveliness. She was not a vain woman, but she was conscious of these advantages and the consciousness had touched the child-like candour and confidingness with a little artificiality, for long apparent to her
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husband's kindly but dispassionate eye. T o other people Mrs. Pallant's manner, the whispering vagueness of her voice, the wistful dwelling of her glance, was felt to be artificial only as the gold embroideries and serrated edges on the robes of a Fra Angelico angel are felt as something added and decorative. Kitty was far too intelligent to try to look like a Fra Angelico angel; she was picturesque as only the extremely fashionable can be picturesque ; but Pallant knew she was conscious that she reminded people of an angel, and of a child, and that she reminded herself continually of all sorts of exquisite things, partly because she was dreamily self-conscious and keenly aware of exquisiteness, and partly because he had—in their first year— the year of sails and breezes—so impressed these things upon her attention. He himself had grown accustomed to—perhaps a little tired of—the lily poise of the head, the long, gentle hands, the floating step, quite the step of an angel aware of flower-dappled grass beneath its feet and the flutter of embroidered draperies. But Kitty, though accustomed to these graces in herself, had not grown tired of them, they had, indeed, more and more filled the foreground of her delicate and decorative life, so that he could guess at how much his own indifference had helped to alienate her. And now, as he turned to look at her, these half ironic, half affectionate impressions hovered as a background, and, sharply drawn upon it, with the biting acid of his new perceptions, he saw something else in Kitty's face that he had never seen before. Already he had seen her as a womanly woman, as that in its narrowest sense. He saw her now as a type of the women who live in and through and for their affections, and this with their sensations rather than with their intelligences. Vividly his memory struck them out ;—the faces of the satisfied women, taking on, as years pass over them, as experience detaches from the craving, sentimental self, and frees the instincts to push, climb, cling in roots and tendrils for other selves, a vegetable serenity and simplicity ; —and, more vividly, with discomfort in the memory, the faces of the unsatisfied ; the womanly married woman whose romance is over, the spinster who has missed romance ; faces chiselled to subtlety by dreams and frustration. On Kitty's face he saw it now, that look of a subtlety childlike, innocent, of flesh rather than of spirit, yet, in its very unconsciousness, almost sinister. For a moment, as the lines of the sharp new perception etched themselves, lines gossamer-like in fineness, floating, transforming shadows rather than lines, he was 403
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afraid of his wife, afraid of the alien, mysterious force he guessed in her. For the delicately sinister subtlety was remote from his understanding, was a subtlety that no man's face can show, capable as it is of a grossness and corruption merely animal by contrast ; open and obvious. Kitty's subtlety did not make her animal : it made her more than ever like an angel; but an ambiguous angel; and to feel that he did not understand her made her strange. It was no clue to feel that she did not understand herself ; it was only a further depth of mystery. He was ashamed of his own folly in another moment, ashamed of an insight distorted and distorting, so he told himself. Over and above all such morbidities was the fact that Kitty was looking at him with the eyes of a frightened child—a real child. The reaction from his fear, the recognition of her fear, stirred in him a love more personal than any of the vast benevolences that he had felt. He went to her and led her to the window-seat where, sitting down himself, holding both her hands in his and looking up at her standing before him, he said with the quiet of long-prepared words : " Kitty dear, I have something that I want to tell you and that will make you, I think, a little sad. But we have had happy times together, haven't we ? It won't be all regret. You and I are going to part, Kitty." She gazed at him and terror widened her eyes. She could not speak. She did not move. Her hands in his hands seemed dead. He saw in a moment what the fear was that showed itself in this torpor of apprehension and he hastened on so that she should not, in her dread, reveal the secret that need never be spoken. " I'm going to die, Kitty," he said, " I had my sentence yesterday, from Dr. Farebrother. I never dreamed that it was anything serious, that complaint of mine, you know,-—never dreamed it even when it began to trouble me a good deal, as it has of late. But it's not what I thought. It's fatal; and it will gallop now. He gives me one month—at the very most, two months." He spoke deliberately, though swiftly, and, as he finished, he smiled up at her, a reassuring smile. His wife's dilated eyes, fixed on him, made him flush a little in the ensuing pause. He felt that the smile had been inept. He had spoken too much from the height of his detachment, and the placidity of his words might well seem horrible to her. She was finding it horrible. She seemed to be breathing the icy air of a vault that he had opened before her ; heavy, slow, painful breaths, those of a sleeper oppressed by nightmare ; 404
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the sound of them, the sight of her labouring breast hurt him. He put his arms around her and smiled, now, as one smiles at a child to console it. " I've frightened you," he said ; " forgive me. You see, one gets used to it, so soon, for oneself. Dear little Kitty, I'm so sorry." Still she did not speak. Still it was that torpid terror that gazed at him. And the terror was not for what he had thought it was ; it was for what he had said. It was a contagious terror. She cared. In some unexplained, unforesseen way she cared terribly ; and his projects crumbled beneath her gaze ; bewilderment drifted in his mind ; her fear gained him. " What is the matter ? What is it ? " he asked. The change and sharpness in his voice brought them near at last. Kitty seized his hands and lifted them from her ; yet grasping, clinging as she held him off. He would not have thought her face capable of such fierceness and demand. She was hardly recognisable as she said : " Do you want to die ? Don't you mind dying ? " " Mind ?—I should rather not, of course. I care for my life. But one must face it ; what else is there to do ?—And, —what is it Kitty ? What have I done to you ? " And now, her head fallen back, her eyes closed, tears ran down her face, as piteously, agonised and stricken, she asked : " Don't you love me at all ? Don't you mind leaving me at all ? " His astonishment was so great that for a moment it bereft him of words. He had risen and was holding her ; her eyes were closed and she sobbed and sobbed, her head fallen back. And her passion of sorrow and despair, her loveliness, too, and youth, seized and shook him ; so that all the things he had not felt yet, all the hovering, dreadful things, the dark forms of the cavern, encompassed, pressed upon him. Despair and longing, the horror of annihilation, the agonising sweetness of life. It was as if a hidden wound had been opened and that his blood was gushing forth, not to peace, but to pain and torment. He felt his own sobs rising ; she cared ; how much she cared. It was as if her caring gave him back the self that yesterday had blotted out ; in her pain he knew his own ; in her self he saw and mourned his own doomed and piteous self. His head leaned to hers and his lips sought hers, when, suddenly, a furious memory came, and indignation suffocated him. He thrust her violently away, holding her by the shoulders. " How dare you ! how dare you ! " he cried. " You don't love 405
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m e . You d o n ' t m i n d my dying. H o w dare you t o r t u r e me like t h i s — w h e n it's not real,—when I was at p e a c e . " It was like a wild, impossible dream. T h e i r faces stared at each other ; their hands seized each other ; t h e y spoke, t h e i r voices clashing, and shaken by strangling sobs. " H o w dare you say t h a t to me ! You have broken m y h e a r t ! You haven't cared for years—for years ! " K i t t y cried. " I've longed—longed. I t is too horrible. H o w dare you come and tell me t h a t you are going to die and t h a t it will make me a little sad. O h ! I love you—and you are horrible to m e . " " You are lying, Kitty—you are lying ! " " T h a t too ! You can say t h a t ! T o me ! T o me ! " " It's true. You know you lie. I h a v e n ' t loved you as I did. B u t I've cared,—good G o d ! I see now how m u c h . — I t is you who have ceased t o care." At these words K i t t y was transfigured. Joy, joy u n m i s takable, flamed u p in her. I t m o u n t e d t o h e r eyes a n d lips, revivifying her ravaged face, beaming forth, i n u n d a t i n g h i m , unfaltering, assured, absolute. " Darling—darling—you love me ? you do love me ?—Oh you shan't die—I w o n ' t let you die. M y love will keep you with me. W e will forget all these years when we haven't understood—when we've forgotten. W e will forget everything—except t h a t we love each other and t h a t t h a t is all there is to live for in t h e world." " And—Sir Walter ?—" he said, simply and helplessly. Kitty's arms were about his neck, her transfigured face was u p t u r n e d t o him. Worshipped by those eyes, held in t h a t embrace, his words, in his own ears, were absurd. Yet h e h a d n ' t been dreaming yesterday. K i t t y might make t h e words seem absurd ; b u t even Kitty's eyes and K i t t y ' s arms could n o t conjure away the facts of the sunlit summer-house, t h e tears, the parting kiss. W h a t of Sir Walter ? W h a t else was t h e r e left to say ? But after he had said t h e m , and stood looking at her, it was as if his words released the last depths of her r a p t u r e . She did n o t flush or falter or show, even, any shock or surprise. H e r arms about him, her eyes on his, it was a stiller, a more solemn joy t h a t dwelt on him and enfolded him. " You know ? " she said. " I heard you last evening," Pallant answered. " I was sitting outside the summer-house. You said you loved h i m . You let him kiss y o u . " " You will forgive m e , " said K i t t y . T h e y were looking at each other like two children. " I t h o u g h t I l o v e d h i m , because 406
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I was so unhappy, and he is so dear and kind and loves me so much. I must love some one. I must be loved. I was so lonely. And you seemed not to care at all any more. You were only my husband, you weren't my lover.—And you don't know all. He doesn't know it. But I know it now. And I must tell you everything—all the dreadful weakness—you must understand it all. Perhaps, if this hadn't come, perhaps, if you hadn't been given back to me like this, I might have gone away with him, Nicholas. It wasn't that I had ceased to love you ; it was that I had to be loved and was weak before love. It is dreadful ;—I believe all women are like that. And I did struggle, oh, I did. Nicholas, you will forgive me ? " " I knew it, dear, and I forgave you." " You knew it ? You loved me so much that you forgave ? " " That was why I told you, Kitty. I hadn't meant to tell you ; I had meant to keep it from you, this sadness, and to make our last month together a happy one for you. I was coming back to you with such longing, dear. And then I heard ; and then I was afraid that you might go away before you would be free." " You loved me so much ? You did it because you loved me so much ?—Oh Nicholas—Nicholas ! " " That was why I said those horrible things. I wanted you to be happy. I didn't think you could be more than a little sad when you knew that you were going to be free. Foolish, darling Kitty—you are sure it's me you do love ? " Again she could not speak, but it was her joy that made her silent. She was no more to be disbelieved than an angel appearing in the vault, irradiating the darkness. Flowers sprang beneath her footsteps ; her smile was life. And the memory of his own cynical vision of her smote him with a self-reproach that deepened tenderness. She was only subtle, only sinister, when shut away, unloved. She was womanly, meant for love only, and her folly made her the more lovable. Love was all that was left him. One month of love. His hands yielded to her hands ; his eyes answered her eyes. The fragrance of the flowers was in the air, the flutter of heavenly garments. One month of life ; but how flat, how mean, how dusty seemed the arduous outer world of the last years ; how deep the goblet of enchantment that the unambiguous angel held out to him. III There were two cups to drink, for he had to put the cup of death to her lips. He told her all as they walked in the garden 407
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that afternoon ; of the growing gravity of symptoms, the interview with the great specialist to whom his own doctor, unwilling to pronounce a final verdict, had sent him. He begged her to spare him further interviews. He was to die, that was evident; and doctors could do nothing for him. If pain came he promised that he would take what relief they had to give. She leaned her head against his shoulder, weeping and weeping as they walked. They were two lovers again, lovers shut into the straitest, most compassed paradise. On every side the iron walls enclosed them ; there were no distances ; there was no horizon. But within the circle of doom blossomed the mazy sweetness ; the very sky seemed to have narrowed to the roofing of a bower. To be in love again ; to feel the whole world beating like a doubled pulse of you-and-I to and fro between them. She must weep, and he, with this newly born self, must know to the full the pang and bitterness; but the moments blossomed and smiled over the dread ; because the dread was there. Sir Walter passed away like a shadow. Kitty saw him and came to her husband from the interview with a composure that almost made him laugh. It would have hurt her feelings for him to laugh at her, and he listened gravely while she told him that Sir Walter, now, was going to accept the big post in India that, for her sake, he had been on the point of refusing. He was going away that very night. She had been perfectly frank with him ; she had explained to him—" quite simply and gently " said Kitty—that she had been very foolish and had let her friendship for him, her fondness, and her loneliness, mislead her ; yes, she had told him quite simply that he would always e a dear, dear friend, but that she was in love with her husband. The poor toy. The child, with placid hands and unpitying eyes, had snapped it across the middle and walked away from it. He didn't need her to say it again ; he saw that she had ceased completely to love Sir Walter. " And weren't you sorry for him at all ? " he asked. " Sorry ? Of course, dear, how can you ask ? " said Kitty. " I was as tender as possible. But, you know, I can't but feel that he deserved punishment. Oh I know that I did, too !— don't think me hard and self-righteous. But see—see, darling, what you have saved me from ! Remember what he wanted me to do. Oh—it was wrong and cruel of him. I shall never be able to forgive him, just because I was so weak—just because I did listen." " Ah, do forgive him—just because you were so strong that 408
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you never let him guess that you were weak," said Pallant. He was very sorry for Sir Walter. And he was conscious, since he might not smile outwardly, of smiling inwardly over the ruthlessness of women towards the man, loved no longer, who has tarnished their image in their own eyes. The angel held him fast in Paradise, but something in him, a mere sense of humour, the humour of the outer world, perhaps, escaped her at moments, looked down at her, at himself, at Paradise, and accepted comedy as well as tragedy. It was only to these places of silence, loneliness and contemplation that Kitty did not come. She shared sorrow and joy. She guessed too well at the terrors ; she would be beside him, her very heart beating on his, through all the valley of the shadow ; he would be able to spare her nothing, and even in death he would not be alone. And she was joy. The years of pining and lassitude, the toying with danger, the furnace of affliction that, in the library, had burned the dross from her soul, all had made another woman of Kitty from his girl-bride of six years before. She was joy ; she knew how to make it, to give it. She surprised him continually with her inventiveness in rapture. When fear came upon them, she folded it from him with encircling arms. When fear passed, she seemed to lead him out into the dew and sunlight of early morning and to show him new paths, new flowers, new bowers of bliss. All artifice, all self-centred dreaminess, all the littler charms, dropped from her. She was as candid, as single-minded, as passionate as a newly created Eve, and she seemed dowered with a magic power of diversity in simplicity. There was no forethought or plan in her triumph over satiety. Like a flower, or an Eve, she seemed alive with the instinctive impulse that grows from change to change, from beauty to further beauty. Pallant for summer-day after summer-day was conscious only of joy and sorrow ; of these, and of the still places where, sometimes, he seemed to hover above them. The serpent of weariness still slept. * * * * * * * " Tell me, dearest," said Kitty one day-—how they talked and talked about themselves, recapturing every mutual memory, analysing long-forgotten scenes and motives, explaining themselves, accusing themselves, for the joy of being forgiven,— " Tell me ; you loved me so much that you were willing to give me up to him, to make me happy, and to save me ;—but, if you hadn't been going to die—oh darling !—then you would have loved me too much to give me up, wouldn't you ? " His arm was about her, a book between them—unread, it
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usually was unread—and they were sitting in the re-consecrated summer-house ; Kitty had insisted on that punishment for herself, had knelt down before her husband there and, despite his protests, had kissed his hands, with tears; the summer-house had become their sweetest retreat. He answered her now swiftly, and with a little relief for the obvious answer : " But then I couldn't have set you free, dear." " No ; " Kitty mused. " I see. But—would the fear of losing me have made you re-fall in love with me ? You know you only re-fell, darling, only knew how much you cared when you thought I was deceiving you, lying to you, in saying that I loved you ; but you would have loved me—not in that dreadful, big, human way—but loved me, just me —loved me enough to fight for me, wouldn't you ? " He looked into her adoring, insistent eyes and a little shadow of memory crossed his mind. Was she an altogether unambiguous angel ? Was it there, the subtlety, in her eyes, her smile ; something sweet, insinuating, insatiable ? And as she fondled him, leaning close and questioning, it was as though a little eddy of dust from the outer world blew into Paradise through an unguarded gate. Well, why should not the dear angel have a little dust on its shining hair ? It was a foolish angel, as he knew ; and it lived for love, as he knew ; and women who did that and who didn't get loved enough grew to look subtle—he remembered the swift train of thought. But Kitty was loved enough, so that there must be no subtlety to make her beauty stranger and less sweet, and in Paradise one forgot the outer world and need not consider it again ; it was done with him and he with it, so that he answered, smiling, " I would have loved you for yourself; I would have fought for you." " And won me," she murmured, hiding her face on his breast. " Oh, Nick, if only it had been sooner, sooner." Her suffering sanctified even the shadow ; but he remembered i t ; remembered that the dust had blown in. It lay, though so lightly, on the angel's hair, on the blossoms, on the bowers, and it made him think, at times, of the outer world, of his old judgments and values. He would have had to fight for her, of course ; he would have had to save her ; but it wouldn't have been because he had " re-fallen ". That was a secret that he kept from Kitty ; it belonged to the contemplative region of thought, where he was alone. And in Paradise, it seemed, one was forced to tell only half-truths. Their ties with the outer world were all slackened during these days. No one knew the secret of the doomed honeymoon.
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T h e one or t w o friends w h o d r o p p e d in u p o n t h e m for a night seemed like q u a i n t marionettes crossing a stage t h a t n o w a n d t h e n t h e y agreed to have set u p before the bower. T h e s e figures, t h e i r own relation t o t h e m , quickened the sense of secrecy and love. T h e i r eyes sought each other past unconscious eyes ; t h e y h a d lover's dexterities in meeting unobserved by their guests, gay little escapades when they would r u n away for an hour of drifting on t h e river or wandering in t h e woods. A n d the formalities and c h a t t e r of social life—all these queer people interested in queer things, people who used t h e present only for t h e future, w h o were always planning and looking forward,— made the h i d d e n t r u t h s t h e sharper and sweeter. N o t h i n g , for the t w o lovers, was t o go on. T h a t was the t r u t h t h a t made the marionettes so insignificant and t h a t made their love so deep. T h e r e was, for t h e m , no looking forward, no adapting of means to ends. T h e r e were no ends, or, rather, they were always at t h e end. A n d there was n o t h i n g for t h e m to do except to love each other. " I feel sometimes as if we had become a Pierrot and a P i e r r e t t e , " Pallant said to her. " It's for t h a t , I suppose, t h a t a Pierrot is such an uncanny and charming creature ;—the future doesn't exist for h i m at all." K i t t y , who had always been a literal person, and whose literalness h a d now become so beautifully appropriate,—for what is literalness b u t a seeing of the fact as standing still ?— K i t t y tried to smile b u t begged h i m not to jest about such things. " I ' m not jesting, darling I ' m only musing on our strange state. It's like a fairy-tale, the life we lead." She t u r n e d her head, with t h e pathetic gesture grown habitual w i t h her of late, and hid her eyes on his shoulder. " Oh, darl i n g , " she said, " do you h a t e t o leave me ! " She h a d felt t h e m o m e n t of detached fancy as separative, and he h a d now to soothe her passionate weeping. H e found t h a t t h e r e was a certain pendulum-swing of m o o d in Paradise. E m o t i o n was the being of this mood, and to keep e m o t i o n one must swing. E i t h e r he must soothe K i t t y or K i t t y must soothe h i m or they must transcend t h e dark necessities of their case by finding in each o t h e r a joy, including in its ecstasy t h e sorrow it o b literated. T h i s p e n d u l u m swung spontaneously during those first weeks, it swung as their hearts beat, from need to response. A n d , at t h e beginning of t h e t h i r d week, it was not so m u c h a faltering in t h e need or t h e response t h a t Pallant knew, as a mere lessening of t h e swing ;—it d i d n ' t go quite so fast or carry him 411
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quite so far. He became conscious of an unequal rhythm ; Kitty seemed to swing even faster and further. She saw him as dead ; that was the urgent vision that lay behind her demonstrations and ministrations ; she saw him as more dead with every day that passed, and every moment of every day was, to her, of passionate significance. No one had ever been idealised as he was idealised, or clung to as he was clung to. The sense of desperate tendrils enlacing him was almost suffocating, and each tendril craved for recognition ; a lapse, a look, an inattention was the cutting of something that bled, and clung the closer. Every moment was precious and any not given to love was a robbery from her dwindling store. As the time grew less her need for significance grew more. Her sense of her own tragedy grew with her sense of his, and he must share both. Resignation to his fate was a resignation of her, and a crime against their love. Pallant by degrees grew conscious of keeping himself up to a mark. It was then that the blossoms began to look a little overblown, the paths to become monotonous, the bowers to grow oppressive with their heavy sweetness as though a noonday sun beat down changelessly upon them. The dew was gone, and though Kitty remained a primitive Eve, he himself knew that in his conscious ardour there hovered the vague presence of something no longer pure, something unwholesome and enervating. She saw him as dead, and the thought of death, always with her, renewed her pity and her adoration ; he knew that his own background lent a charm enthralling and poignant to his every word, look and gesture. But for him this charm and this renewal lacked. He could not feel such pity, either for her or for himself. She was to live, poor little Kitty, and, by degrees, the tragedy would fade and the beauty of their last weeks t o gether would remain with her. There was no cavern yawning behind Kitty's figure ; life, inexorably, showed him her smiling future. And, for himself; well, if it was tragic to have to die, it was a tragedy one got used to. He might have felt it more if only Kitty hadn't been there to feel it so superabundantly for him. No : he could keep up ; he could see to it that the pendulum didn't falter ; but he couldn't hide from himself that its swing was growing mechanical. By the end of the third week the serpent was awake and walking in Paradise. Pallant was tired ; profoundly tired. He found his wife's eyes on him one day as they sat with
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books under the trees on the lawn. He tried to read the books now, though in a casual manner that would offer no offence to Kitty's unoccupied hands and eyes. He wanted very much to read and to forget himself—to forget Kitty—for a little while. It was difficult to do this when such a desultory air must be assumed, when he must be ready to answer anything she said at a moment's notice and must remember to look up and smile at her or to read some passage aloud to her at every few pages. But he had been trying thus to combine oblivion and alertness when a longer interval than usual of the first held him beguiled, and alertness, when it returned, returned too late. Kitty's eyes made him think of the eyes she had gazed with on the day of revelation in the library. They were candid, they were frightened ; the eyes of the real child. Now, as then, they were drinking in some new knowledge ; a new fear and an old fear, come close at last, were pressing on her. He felt so tired that he would have liked to look away and to have pretended not to see ; but he was not so tired as to be cruel, and he tried to smile at her, as, tilting his hat over his eyes so that they were shadowed, he asked her what she was thinking of. She rose and came to him, kneeling down beside his chair and putting her hands on his shoulders. " What is the matter, Kitty ? " he asked her, as he had asked on that morning three weeks before. " Nicholas—Nicholas—are you feeling worse ? " she returned. Pallant was surprised and almost relieved. It was no new demand, it was merely a sharper fear. And perhaps she was right, perhaps he was feeling worse and the end was approaching. If so, any languor would be taken as symptomatic of dissolution and not of indifference, and he might relax his hold. Actually a deep wave of satisfaction seemed to go lapping through him. " I don't feel badly, dear," he said, smoothing back her hair ; " You know, I shall suffer hardly any pain ; but I do feel very tired." " In what way tired ? " Another alarm was in her voice. " Bodily fatigue, dear. Of course one doesn't die without fading." He felt, when he had said it, that the words, in spite of his care, were cruel; that she would feel them as cruel; he had gone too fast ; had tried to grasp at his immunity too hastily. " Nicholas ! " she gasped. " You speak as if I were accusing you ! " " Accusing me, darling ! How could you be ! Of what ? " 413
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" Oh Nick," she sobbed, hiding her face on his breast,— " Am I tiring you ? Do you sometimes want me to go away and to leave you more alone ? " His heart stood still. Over her bowed head he looked at the sunlit trees and flowers, the hazy glory of the summer day, a phantasmagoric setting to this knot of human pain and fear, and he said to himself that unless he were very careful he might hurt her irremediably ; he might rob her of the memory that was to beautify everything when he was gone. He had found in a moment, he felt sure, just the right quiet tone, expressing a comprehension too deep for the fear of any misunderstanding between them. " There would be no me left, Kitty, if you went away. I am you—all that there is of me. You are life itself ; don't talk of robbing me of any of it ; I have so little left." She was silent for a moment, not lifting her face, no longer weeping. Then in a voice curiously hushed and controlled she said : " How quiet you are ; how peaceful you are—how terribly peaceful." " You want me to be at peace, don't you, dear ? " " Y o u don't mind leaving life. You don't mind leaving me," she said. " Kitty—Kitty—" She interrupted his protest :—" I've nothing to give you but love ; I've never had anything to give you but love. And you are tired of that. You are going, you are going for ever. I shall never see you again. And you don't mind ! You don't mind ! " She broke into dreadful sobs. Helpless and tormented he held her, trying to soothe, to reassure, to convince, recovering, even, in the vehemence of his pity, the very tones of passionate love, the personal note that her quick ear had felt fading. She sobbed, and sobbed, but answered him at last, in the pathetic little child language of their first honeymoon that they had revived and enriched with new, sweet follies. But he felt that she was not really comforted, that she tried to delude herself. " You do feel tired—in your body,—only in your body ?— not in your soul ? " she repeated. " It isn't I, it's only you." " It's only I who am dying," he almost felt that, with grim irony, he would have liked to answer for her complete reassurance. The funny, ugly, pathetic truth peeped out at him ; she would rather have him die than have him cease to love her. Soulless sylvan creatures, dryads, nymphs, seemed to gaze from green shadows among branches; the mocking faces of pucks 414
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and elves to tilt and smile in the breeze-shaken flowers ;—that subtle gaze, that sinister smile, of what did it remind him ? All nature was laughing at him, cruelly laughing ; yet all nature was consoling him. His love and Kitty's was a flower rooted in death and contradiction. Not affinity, not the growing needs of normal life had brought them together ; only the magic of doom and the craving to be loved. Poor Kitty ; she did not know. It was his love she loved, his love she clung to and watched for and caressed. She didn't know, but she would rather have him dead than have him loveless. That was the truth that smiled the sinister smile. One might summon one's courage to smile back at it, but one was rather glad to be leaving it—and Kitty. And, in the days that followed, when from the pretence of passion he could find refuge only in the pretence of dying, disgust crept into the weariness, he began to wonder when the pretence would become reality. He began to want to die. This weariness, this irritation, this disgust, belonged to life rather than to death ; it was a sharp longing to escape from consciousness of Kitty—Kitty, alert and agonised in her suspicion. It was a nostalgic longing for the old, tame, dusty life, his work, his selfless interests. The month was almost up, and yet he was no worse ; was he really going to last for another month ? He said to Kitty one morning that he must go up to town. Her face grew ashen. " The doctor ! You are going to the doctor, Nicholas ? " " No, no ; it's only that Colley is passing through. I heard from him this morning. He wants to see me." " Why should you bother and think about work now, darling ? " " Why, dearest, I must be of any use I can until the end." He tried to keep lightness in his voice and patience out of it. " Let him come down here. I'll write myself and ask him." She, too, was assuming something. She, too, was afraid of him, as he of her. " He hasn't time. He is on his way to the Continent." " It will be bad for you to travel now. And London in August! " Her voice was grave, reproachfully tender. " No dear, I promise you I will run no risk." " Promise as much as you will—" how, gaily, sweetly, falsely, but how pathetically, she clasped her hands about his arm ;— " but I couldn't think of letting you go alone : you didn't really believe I'd let you go alone, darling : I'll come too, of course. 415
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Won't that be fun !—Oh, Nick, you want me to come ! You don't want to get away ! "—The falsity broke down and the full anguish of her suspicion was in her voice and eyes. It was this sincerity that pierced him and made him helpless—sick and helpless. He was able now to blindfold its dreadful clear-sightedness by swift resource : he acted his delight, his gratitude : he hadn't liked to ask his dearest—all the bother for only a day and night ; he had thought it would bore her, for he must be most of the time with Colley ; but, yes, they would go together, since she petted him so ; they would do a play ; he would help her choose a new h a t ; it would be great fun. Yet, while he knotted the handkerchief around her eyes, turned her about and confused her sense of direction, as if in a merry game, he knew that fear and suspicion lurked for them both in their playing. He had, indeed, meant to go to the doctor, but now that must be postponed. The meeting with Colley, his chief at the Home Office, was his only gulp of freedom. At the hotel Kitty waited and his heart smote him when he found her sitting just as he had left her, mute, white, smiling and enduring. She hadn't even been to her dressmaker's or done any shopping as she had promised him to do. " I know I am absurd ;—I know you think me, silly ;—but I can't—I can't do anything—think anything—but you ! " she said, her lips trembling. " Absurd, darling, indeed ! " he answered, " as if you couldn't think of me and order a new dress at the same time ! You know I told you I wanted to see you in a pale blue lawn—isn't lawn the pretty stuff ?—And what of the hat ? You do want one ?—Come, let us go out and I'll help you to choose it." But she did not want to go o u t ; she only wanted to sit near him, lean her head against him, have him make up to her for the hours of loneliness. He knew that night at the play that she hardly heard a word, and that when once or twice, he was lured from his absorption and made to laugh, really forgetting, really amused, his laughter hurt her. She gazed at the stage with wide, vacant eyes. He felt the strain of being in town with this desperate devotion beside him worse than the strain of being shut up with it in the country, for there Kitty need hide and repress nothing and his danger of hurting her by forgetfulness was not so great. He was like a prisoner led about by his gaoler, manacles on his wrists and ankles and a yoke on his neck ; there was a certain relief in going back to prison where, at all events, one wasn't so tormented by the sights and sounds of freedom, nor so conscious of chains and the watchful eye upon one. 416
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" This is the end," he thought, as, in the train, they sat side by side, holding hands and very silent, but that from time to time, when their eyes met, she would smile her doting, hungry smile and murmur : " Darling." After this, the prison again ; the high walls and stifling sweetness of Paradise, and then, thank goodness, release. How strange a contrast to the journey a month ago, when, stunned, shot through, he had only felt the bliss of home-coming, the longing for the nest. It was all nest now ; there was no space for the fear of death. He was shut in, smothered by this panting breast of love. IV He knew that evening that Kitty was horribly frightened from the fact that she was horribly careful. She did not once press for assurances or demonstrations of love. She foresaw all his needs, even his need of silence. Delicately assiduous, she pulled his chair near the lamp for him, lit his cigar, cut the pages of his review, even brought a footstool for his feet, saying, when he protested, " You are tired, darling; you must let me wait on you." " And won't you read, or sew,—or do something, dear ? " he asked, as she drew her low chair near his. " I only want to sit here quietly, and look at your dear face," she said. And she sat there, quietly, not moving, not speaking, only mutely, gently, fiercely watching him. Pallant felt his hand tremble as he turned the pages. A full hour passed so. Accurately, punctually, he turned the pages ; he had not understood one page ; and he had not once looked up. It was almost a sense of nightmare that grew upon him, as if he were going to sit there for ever, hearing the clock tick, hearing Kitty breathe, knowing that he was watched. Fear, pity, and repulsion filled his soul. He longed at last to hear her voice. He did not dare to hear his own ; something in it would have broken and revealed him to her ; but if she would but speak the nightmare might pass. And, with the longing, furtively, involuntarily, he glanced round at her. Her eyes were on him, fixed, shining. How horrible ;—how ridiculous. Their gaze smote upon his heart and shattered something,—the nightmare, or the repulsion. An hysterical sob and laugh rose in his throat. He dropped the review, leaning 417
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forward, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and the tears ran down his face. She was there, of course, poor creature, there, close, holding him, moaning, weeping with him. He could do nothing but yield to her arms, feel his head pillowed on her breast, and mingle his tears with hers ; but, horribly, ridiculously, he knew that laughter as well as weeping shook him. And he heard her saying " Oh my darling—my darling—is it because you must leave me ? "—and heard himself answering " Yes, because I must leave you." " You love me-—so much—so much—" " So much," he echoed. And, her voice rising to a cry, he knew how dead, as if sounding from the cavern, his echo had been : " You are not dying ! Not now ! " And it was again only the echo he could give her : " Not now," it came. Why not now ? Why could it not be, mercifully, now ? When in heaven's name was he going to die ? A strong suspicion rose in him and seemed to pulse into life with the strong beat of his heart. How strong a beat it was ; how faint and far any whispers of the old ill. What if he were not going to die ? What if he were to go on loving Kitty for a lifetime ? And at that the mere hysterics conquered the tears ; he burst out laughing. There, on Kitty's breast, he laughed and laughed, helpless, cruel and ridiculous. Terrified, she tried to still him. When he lifted his face he saw that hers was ashen, set to meet the tragedy of imminent parting. Did she think it the death rattle ? He flung his head back from her kisses, flung himself back from her arms. Still laughing the convulsive laugh he got up and pushed away the chair. " I'm tired—I'm so tired, Kitty," he said. She sat, her hands fallen in her lap, staring at him. " You are tired, too," he went on ; " it's been a tiring day, hasn't it ?—we have been through a lot, haven't we, poor Kitty ? Poor Kitty :—do go to bed now. Will you go to bed, and leave me here to rest a little ? " " Nicholas, are you mad—what has happened to you ? " she murmured, spell-bound, not daring to move. " Why I'm ill, you know ; I'm very ill. I'm not mad— I'm only so abominably tired. You mustn't ask questions ; I can't stand it,—I can't stand it—" And, leaning his arms on the back of the chair, resting his face on them, with tears of 418
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sheer fatigue, tears untouched by laughter—" I'm so tired. I want to be alone," he sobbed. The abominable moments that followed were more full of shame for him than any he had ever known. Of shame, and of relief. He had torn his way, with his words, out of the nest ; he had fallen to the ground. He was ashamed and horrified, yet—oh the joy, the deep joy of being on the ground, out in the cold, fresh world, out of the nest. At last he heard her speak, slowly, softly, with difficulty, as though she were afraid of angering him. " Shall I go away Nicholas ? " His face was still hidden. " Yes, do go to bed," he answered. " I can do nothing for you ? " " Nothing, dear." " You are not dying ? " " No ; I'm not feeling in the least ill." " You would—send for me—if you were dying ? " " Dear Kitty,—of course." " And,—" she had risen, not daring to draw near, he knew that the trembling voice came through tears :—" And, you love me ? you love me a little ? " " Dear Kitty—of course I love you." It was over. She was gone. She had not asked for his goodnight kiss. It was like a sword between them. He drew a long breath, lifting his head. Alone. There was ecstasy in the thought. He walked out into the garden and looked up at the stars as he walked. There had been no stars in the nest. He didn't think of death. There had been too much thinking of death, that was one of the things he was tired of. He did not want to think of Kitty, even, nor of himself. He looked at the stars and thought of them, but not in any manner emotional or poetical; he thought of astronomical facts, dry, sound, delightful facts : he looked at the darkened trees and dim flowers and thought of botany : the earth he trod on was full of scientific interest; the Pierrots, the fairies and the angels —yes, the angels too—were vanished. He hungered for impersonal interests and information. Kitty would, indeed, have thought him mad ; after the calming walk he came in, lit a cigar and sat for hours studying. Before Kitty was up next morning he was on his way back to London to see the great specialist. It was a long visit he paid, an astonishing visit, though the astonishment, really, was not his; life had seemed deeply to have 419
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promised something when he had ceased to think of death—when he had ceased to want death, even. That strong beating of his heart had been a mute forestalling. The astonishment was the good, great doctor's, and it was reiterated with an emphasis that showed something of wounded professional pride beneath it. It was, indeed, humiliating to have made such a complete mistake, to have seen only one significance in symptoms that, to farsightedness clairvoyant enough, should have hinted, at all events, at another, and, as a result, to have doomed to speedy death a man now obviously as far from dying as oneself : " I can't forgive myself," the doctor said, " for robbing you of a month of life. A month with death at the end of it can't be called a month of life." " Very much of life," said Pallant. " So much so that I hardly know yet whether I am glad or sorry that you were mistaken." He indeed hardly did know. All the way down in the train he was thinking intently of the new complicated life that had been given back to him, and of what he should do with it. At moments the thought seemed to overwhelm him, to draw him into gulfs deeper than death's had been. For all that month life had meant the moment only. The vistas and horizons seemed now to open and flash and make him dizzy. How could he take up again the burden of far ends and tangled purposes ? The dust of coming conflicts seemed to rise to his nostrils. Life was perilous and appalling in its fluctuating immensity. But, with all the disillusion and irony of his new experience, with all the unwholesome languor that had unstrung his will, some deeper wisdom, also, had been given him. He could turn from the nightmare vision that saw time as eternity. The walk in the night had brought a message. He couldn't say it nor see it clearly, but the sense of its presence was like the coolness and freshness of wings fanning away fevers and nightmare. Somewhere there it hovered, the significance of the message, somewhere in those allied yet contrasted thoughts of eternity and time. There had been his mistake, his and Kitty's, the mistake that had meant irony and lassitude and corruption. To heap all time into the moment, to make a false eternity of it, was to arrest something, to stop blood from flowing, thought from growing, was to create a nightmare distortion, a monstrous, ballooned travesty of the eternity that, in moving life, could never be more, could never be less, than the ideal life sought unceasingly.
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As for Paradise, what more grotesque illusion than to see it with walls around it, what more piteous dream than to feel it narrowed to a nest ? V He found Kitty alone in the drawing-room, alone, with empty hands and empty, waiting eyes. He saw that she had wept, and that his departure, only a brief note to break it to her, had added deep indignation to her sorrow. She was no longer timid, nor cowed by the change she felt in him. She had cast aside subtlety and appeal. It was a challenge that met him in her eyes. He had intended to tell her his news at once and the preparatory smile was on his lips as he entered, a smile, though he did not know this, strangely like that smile of reassurance and consolation that had met her in the library a month ago. But she gave him no time for a word. Leaping from her chair she faced him, and with a vision still clearer than that which had showed him subtlety a month ago, he saw now her pettiness, her piteousness, her girlish violence and weakness. " Cruel ! Cruel ! Cruel ! "—she cried. He remained standing at a little distance from her, looking at her sadly and appealingly. Her words of reproach rushed forth and overwhelmed him like a frenzied torrent. " To leave me without a word, after last night ! You treat me like a dog that one kicks aside because it wearies one with its love. You have no heart—I've felt it for days and days !—No heart ! You hate me ! You despise me ! And what have I done to deserve it but love—love—love you—like the poor dog ! But I know—I know— It is Sir Walter. You can't forgive me that— It has poisoned everything—that ignorant folly of mine. At first you thought you could forgive, and then you grew to hate me. And I—I—" her voice choked, gasped into sobs ;— " I have only loved you—loved you—more and more " " Kitty, you are mistaken," said Pallant. " I've never given Sir Walter a thought." It was a reed she grasped at in the torrent, he saw that well;—a desperate hope. " It's false ! " she cried. " You have ! You thought at first that you would be magnanimous and save me,—you could be magnanimous because you were going to die—it's easy enough to be magnanimous if you are going to die ! easy enough to be peaceful and sad—and to stand there and smile and smile as if you were only sorry for me. But you found out that you were alive enough to be jealous after all, and that you could not really forgive me, and then you hated me."
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" Kitty—you know that you do not believe what you are saying." " Can you deny that if you had been going to live you would not have forgiven me f " " I can. I could have forgiven. But then, as I said to you —that day, Kitty, on the lawn,—it would have been more difficult to save you." " Your love, then, was a pretence to save me ! " " Nothing was pretence, at first," he answered her patiently. " At first I was only glad for your sake that I was going to be out of the way so soon ; and when I found that you could care for me again I was glad that I had still a month to live with you." His words smote on her heart like stones. He saw it and yearned over her pain ; but such yearning, such dispassionate tenderness was, he knew, the poison in her veins that maddened her. She looked, now, at last, at the truth. He had not put it into words, but with the abandonment of her specious hope she saw and spoke it. " It was, then, because it was only for a month." He hesitated, seeing, too. " That I was glad ? " " That you loved me." Across the room, in a long silence, they looked at each other. And in the silence another truth came to him, cruel, clear, salutary. " Wasn't it, perhaps, for both of us, because it was only for a month." The shock went as visibly through her as though it had, indeed, been a stone hurled at her breast. " You mean—you mean—" she stammered—" Oh—you don't believe that I love you— You believe that it could pass, with me, as it has with you." She threw herself into the chair, casting her arms on the back, burying her face in them. Pallant, timidly, approached her. He was afraid of the revelation he must make. " I believe that you do love me, Kitty, and that I love you ; but not in the way we thought. We neither of us could go on loving like that ; it was because it was only for a month that we thought we could. It wasn't real." " Oh," she sobbed, " that is the difference—the cruel difference. You love me in that terrible way—the way that could give me up and not mind ; but I am in love with you ;— that's the dreadful difference. Men get over it ; but women are always in love." Perhaps Kitty saw further than he did. Pallant was abashed
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before the helpless revelation of a mysterious and alien sorrow. For women the brooding dream ; for men the active dusty world. Yet even here, on the threshold of a secret, absurd, yet perhaps, in its absurdity, lovelier than man's sterner visions, he felt that, for her sake, he must draw her away from the contemplation of it. That was one thing he had learned, for Kitty. She, too, must manage to fly—or fall—out of the nest ; she must get, in some way, more dust into her life. He had forgotten the news he was to tell her ; he had forgotten all but her need. " Perhaps that is true, dear Kitty," he said ; " but isn't it, in a way, that women are merely in love. It's not with anybody ; or, rather, it is with anybody—with me or with Sir Walter; I mean, anybody who seems to promise more love. Horrible I sound, I know. Forgive me. But I wish I could shake you out of being in love. I want you to be more my comrade than you have been. Don't let us think so much of love." But Kitty moaned : " I don't want a comrade. I want a lover." And, in the silence that followed, lifting her head suddenly, she fixed her eyes on him. " You talk as if we could be comrades," she said. " You talk as if we were to go on living together. What did the doctor say ? I don't believe that you are going to die." He felt ridiculous now. The real tragedy was there, between them ; but the tragedy upon which all their fictitious romance had been built was to tumble about their ears. It was as if he had all along been deceiving, misleading her, acting on false pretences, winning her love by his borrowed funereal splendour. Almost shamefacedly, looking down and stammering over the silly confession, he said : " It was all a mistake. I'm not going to die." He did not look at her for some moments. He was sure that she was deaf and breathless with the crash and crumbling. Presently, when he did raise his eyes, he found that she was staring at him, curiously, intently. She had found herself : she had found him ; and—oh yes—he saw it—he was far from her. The stare, essentially, was one of a hard hostility. She had been betrayed and robbed ; she could not forgive him. " Kitty," he said timidly, " are you sorry ? " Her sombre gaze dwelt on him. " T e l l me you're not sorry," he pleaded. She answered him at last : " How dare you ask me that ? How dare you ask me whether I am sorry that you are not going to die ? You must know, that it is an insult." 423
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" I mean—if I disappointed—failed you so " " I must wish you dead ? You have a charming idea of me." How her voice clashed and clanged with the hardness, the warfare, the uproar of the outer world. After the hush, the gentleness of Paradise, it was like being thrown, dizzy and bewildered, among the traffic and turmoil of a great city. " Don't be cruel," he murmured. " I ? Cruel! " she laughed. She got up and walked up and down the room. A fever of desperate, baffled anger burned in her. He saw that she did not trust herself to speak. She was afraid of betraying, to herself and to him, the ugly distortion of her soul. He was not to die ; he was not her lover ; and Kitty was the primitive woman. She could be in love, but she could not love unless pity were appealed to. His loss of all passion had killed her romance. His loss of all pathos had, perhaps, killed even human tenderness. For it was he who had drawn away. She was humiliated to the dust. And that she made a great effort upon herself, so that to his eyes the ugliness might not be betrayed, he guessed presently when, looking persistently away from him and out at the garden —their garden ! alas !—where a fine rain fell silently, she said : " I am glad that your sorrow is over. I hope that you will find happier things—and realler things—than you have found in this month. I will remember all that you have said to-day. I think that you have cured me for ever. I shall not be in love again." " Kitty ! Kitty ! " he breathed out. She hurt him too much, the poor child, arming its empty heart against him. " Don't speak like that. Remember—the month has been beautiful." The tears rose in her eyes, but the hostility did not leave them. " Beautiful ? When it has not been real ? " " Can't we remember the beauty—make something more real ? " he now almost wept. But there it was, the shallow, the hard child's heart. He was not in love with her. And, like a nest of snakes, the memory of all her humiliations—her appeals, her proffered love, his evasions and withdrawals—was awake within her. She smiled, a smile that seeking magnanimity, found only bitterness. " You must speak for yourself, dear Nicholas. For me it was real, and you have spoiled the beauty." The servants came in while she spoke and she moved aside to make way for the placing of the tea-table. Traces of the fever were upon her y e t ; her delicate face was flushed, her eyes sparkled. But she had regained the place she meant to keep. 424
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She would own to no discomfitures deeper than those that were creditable to her. Moving here and there, touching the flowers in a vase, straightening reviews scattered on a table, she was even able to smile again at him a smile almost kind, and keeping, before him, as well as for the servants, all the advantage of composure. That smile would often meet him throughout life, and so he would see her, moving delicately and gracefully, making order and comeliness about her, for many years. She set the key. It was the key of their future life together, Pallant knew, as he heard her say : " Do sit down and rest. You must want your tea after that tiresome journey."
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Two Essays
By Elizabeth Martindale I. THE ART OF MANNERS
night there was not much sleep for me. I went to bed early because it was blowing hard and once asleep I thought I might not notice the noise my sails make when it is stormy. I pegged them down well to windward—having done this so many times now in all sorts of weathers I can do it almost as well in the dark as in daylight. The loops of line come through the brass eyelet holes in the canvas and I fix them there with wooden pegs from my coat pocket. I have a bag full of them hanging up inside the shanty. It was beginning to rain and there was need for haste—for it is far more difficult to get the sails stretched tight when they are wet. The line becomes so stiff and hard that it makes my fingers sore and blistered before I can get the pegs through the loops. But I managed to stretch the canvas as tight as a drum. When I had to reach up to the pegs the wind blew up my sleeves and my coat flapped now and then. T o the north I left an opening because the wind was coming from the Channel. Air, entirely closed up, wherever it may be, loses its vital quality ; it becomes so cold, dank and dead, and it chills my very bones. I was warmly tucked up in my swinging bed when the rain really started—great heavy drops against the south sail. I was very sleepy and the wind was not sufficient then to keep me awake. But towards the middle of the night it became uproarious and I lay wide awake listening to it, particularly alive to every impression and every thought. Sometimes the wind sounded only in the distance, moaning fiercely in the woods below and then would come a terrific gust —alarming enough to make me hold my breath till it was over. " Like a man in a rage," I thought. The bed swings on four cords high above the ground. The cords are fixed to the roof 426
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and at each movement the bed sways to and fro and I feel again that sensation as of floating on a calm sea. At each gust of wind I felt my bed tremble a little, begin to swing anew and after each attack on my poor little shanty there came a lull in which I had time to take up again the thread of my thoughts. In England, a man who flies into rages and gives vent to them is not considered well-mannered. I know a man like that —I know a woman too and I like to dwell on the fascinating quality of their manners. There came another blast against the sails. It is like having a safety-valve, I thought. There are so many people here who lack the faculty of being able to let out their pent-up feelings. If they could only plunge in occasionally as noisily as did the weather last night, how much more charming would they be able to make themselves in the intervals. My friend in Italy certainly had a safety-valve. He is not Italian and he had lived some time in England. But here he is called passionate, highly strung—overbearing. It is curious that his manners are rarely mentioned. It may be that we do not much " care " about manners—perhaps there is something in our climate that befogs our perception of them. He sat next to me at the pension while I was in Rome. It was a queer little establishment kept by a handsome Dutch countess, a widow with no means. There were ten of us and all the others were Italians. He and I talked about many things, he was very anxious to keep up his English. I was only a beginner at Italian, which every one else poured forth in volumes—sufficient sometimes to make my head ache. One day he burst into a rage with one of the men opposite. They had been discussing minute scientific details in wireless telegraphy—I could not understand what they said, but any way it ended in his jumping up from the table. The lunch was not half finished and he had only taken one glass of wine from his little decanter. We each had our own set before us, some choosing white, some red. He dashed out of the room, pulling the door to with a furious slam. I remember one of the Italians murmured, " Ja—le forestieri ! " and I had come to know the meaning of the words. An hour afterwards we met in the street—he was still excited—but it was the excitement of a dropping storm, and each lull that came to his passion lasted longer than the one before. As he calmed down he became charming again—he had from the first been full of apologies to me for having behaved so like a madman in my presence. We went for a walk in the Pincio—we sat on the grey stone parapet and watched the carriages file by in the slow winding 427
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procession up the hill—a daily ceremony in the spring that no good Roman likes to miss. I remember the blond Queen Margherita was there all in black. The sun was setting with a real Roman glow. The great grey Vatican and the dome of San Pietro were growing slowly more and more purple. It was March, the ilex-trees were very dark and more shadowy than trees are in England. The leaves on the orange bushes near me were dark too and very glossy ; the large open space of the Piazza del Popolo, spreading out beyond the fountain underneath where we sat, was almost deserted. The worrying little drivers of the vetturini who are usually scattered there were all employed that golden afternoon. Only a few decrepit beggars dozed on the steps of the Santa Maria del Popolo by the gate. We talked mostly about London, which seemed to us to be a city plunged in rain, fog and gloom. He became quite peaceful at last and when we got up to stroll along the crowded Corso to take an ice at Aragno's like the rest of the world, he said : " Afterwards I must go and make my apologies to la Contessa." That evening at dinner all went well again—he and the Countess were very great friends and his opponent was not present. The Countess, it seemed, had quarrelled with this man in the afternoon. She called his manners insulting and he had left the house for good. He would not come back, he had not the grace. " Your friend is molto piu buono," she said. " Every one loves him." I have heard of his making similar scenes in England. Another lashing outburst of wind seemed in a way to help on my thoughts. If his manners were not so charming, these scenes he makes would not be so excused, especially in this damp, critical island. So that even here good manners are worth something. The other day some visitors came to tea. I do not have many visitors and it always happens that they come all together instead of spreading themselves out to different days in the week. It is just as if I give out unconsciously some telepathic command to my friends within a twenty-miles radius and they feel themselves impelled to obey. But this time the telepathy had only reached two houses, one in a village by the silver streak of sea and the other, a lonely farm-house at the foot of the bare russet downs that I see on clear days against the cold grey sky some miles to the north. It was a Sunday and I was dozing in my shanty when there 428
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came the drone of a car along the ridge. That drone always means for me—is it going to stop at my gate or is it not ? Sometimes it stops only to ask the way, but this time it stopped to deposit a lady and a gentleman—the lady was large and ruddy, the gentleman thin and pale. After a good deal of nervous prevarication as to what would happen to the car in my lonely lane—I do not possess a garage or even a properly equipped stable and the young man had driven himself,—I suggested that the simplest way would be to draw it into the roadside at the gate. " A brilliant inspiration," said the young man with a tired voice. They both at once on their arrival seemed to consider it necessary to become exceedingly flattering. Everything they noticed was remarked upon and admired, my carpets, my cups, my coffin stools, my dresses, my pictures and my roof. As we went indoors they asked if my " quaint " clogs, which remain at the front door, so as to be near at hand when I want them, were really there for use. They certainly are picturesque, for they came from Bruges and are made of yellow wood with splashes of green painted on them—but as they had also a considerable amount of mud sticking to them, the question seemed unnecessary. The lady is the wife of a distinguished art critic and her kind of manners are considered the most fitting and appropriate for her particular circle. Perhaps they are. I listened to her with extreme interest—she was quite entertaining and she made me wonder. The young man sat by occasionally echoing a remark in a nervous, hollow way. She made me wonder a great deal—how these things spring up, these conventions, these curious little foibles and ideals of manners and ways of thought. Living a quiet life these things strike me more markedly than they would other people who cannot be so contemplative. The wind was coming near again. I heard a crash in the distance—somewhere in the woods a tree must have fallen ! My dog heard it too, and he dashed out under the sail to growl and bark spasmodically. The gale came up the hill and made a new onslaught round about. There is a mosque lamp of green engraved glass hanging from the roof. The glass chains jangled to the accompaniment of the wind—but it made me a little nervous to listen to them. One day I am afraid it will fall with a smash on to the sanded floor. It is curiously engraved on the inside only, with faces of the Prophet and inscriptions that have not yet been translated to me. 429
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My lady visitor and her friend fell into raptures over this lamp. " You can't anyway use that, can you," she said almost triumphantly. She went on to say it was really beautiful enough to be in the South Kensington Museum. The young man murmured that perhaps here it had a hidden significance for me, as though he imagined I might be some lonely theosophist, and I did not contradict him. . My other visitors were a mother and her little girl. They were staying at the seaside because the child had had some slight operation. She is like a ball of quicksilver with fair, soft curls, turn-up nose and a chin that turns up too and is never still. Her mother is almost as attractive—it is she whom I always class in my mind with my passionate friend of the Pincio. By the side of the artistic lady she seemed small, slender, pale, quiet and very sedate. Her voice was deep and her phrasing always rhythmical. She is quite young—people say she cannot live long—she knows they say so and when she speaks of it she smiles a little. It is a smile of contentment, calm, wise and resigned. Her husband is a young engineer in a western town and their lives are not easy ones. My visitors had met her before, they had common friends— but there was a chilliness somewhere between them. The conversation was kept on general subjects, the mother and I doing our best to interest the others. The young man became epigrammatic, and the ruddy lady spoke in monosyllables. The child played with my collie on the hearthrug. We were talking of a play when the mother exclaimed suddenly in horror and alarm, " Child—what are you doing ? " She was trying to make the dog eat his fluffy tail with her little hands clenched tightly round his nose. Her eyes grew large. " Funny dog ! " she said and did not let go. The mother became very angry, her eyes flashed at the child's disobedience. " You are a cruel little thing," she said. The child's eyes turned suddenly watery and she ran to hide her face in her mother's lap. She had been innocently enjoying herself and at first her proud little spirit would not allow her to acknowledge herself in the wrong. T h e next moment the white cheeks were kissed again and again. " Dear old pussums—what should I do if you were bitten," the mother said tenderly, neither with affectation nor self-consciousness. " The poor little thing was frightened," commented the ruddy lady. And the mother answered : " It is just as well she should be." I always remember the calm, proud way in which she said that. 430
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After the car had borne away the lady and her attendant there was a question of hers ringing in my head. " What do you find to do with yourself here all day long ? " It was said in a pitying tone with a lowering droop of the eyelids. I can see those eyes now making calls every afternoon about South Kensington, looking every afternoon the same way, expressing the same gush or boredom and always wherever they are, trying not to look what they really feel; trying in fact to appear superior and to hold themselves stiffly aloof from everything with which they may come into contact. The wind was beginning to be too much for me, and I very much wanted to get to sleep. It would end by my having to go indoors. People so often, it came to my mind, must either feign ecstasy or else be awkward, ill at ease, stiff, afraid of expressing themselves. This becomes more and more strange as one thinks of it, for there is certainly sufficient in every one's mind, in every one's nature to make them extremely interesting to others. But it is, with this as with everything else, a matter of convention, and here in this island of ours it is not considered " good form " to express oneself at all, and the convention of " good form " is of more importance to us than the convention of good manners. I groped on the table for the matches and had to light several before my candle would burn. It was quite a long time before I had sufficient courage to leave my warm bed. I let my dog loose and piled the blankets on my arm—they must be taken indoors for I should have to make myself a bed with the cushions on the sofa. There was no other way. There would be no light in the cottage, so I made sure of a box of matches in my fur coat pocket, blew out my candle and plunged forth into the dark hurricane. I could hardly stand, my dog had utterly disappeared, the wind blew a blanket around my back and I was glad of the extra warmth. It is not far to the back door, but I was a long time groping about in the wrong place for the latch. I did not get to sleep even indoors until the wind dropped. The calm came very suddenly within a space of five minutes and I went to sleep confident that the next day would be a day of sun, blue sky and brightness, just as the mother's kisses came after her spell of anger.
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I AM sitting alone in my shanty. The tea-cups not long since emptied are scattered about the table. I try to get another cupful out of the teapot, but I have to make up with milk and this is just as well, for the tea will certainly be cold and bitter. The rest of the household has gone off to the tenniscourt to see if it is yet fit for a game—I know it is not and that is why I am staying here. Besides it is a beautiful evening, the sun is preparing to set and it is just at moments like these that one should be alone— the suggestion of spring on the way, the twilight hour, the half hazy light picking out the heavy hanging snowdrops on the grass, and the low pulsating bleat of a sheep—they are all around me and I feel that life is superbly beautiful. Even my life and my world. Sometimes, it seems so miserable, such prolonged agony and the world so full of pain. I like to rest my head on my hands, elbows on the table if there is something soft underneath them, feeling all the while a remote consciousness that there is still one more cup of tea to drink. Only the north sail is down as there is a little cold wind. I am facing the sun and all before me is the view that I am not yet tired of looking at. The sun will be over the knoll in a few minutes, the woods in the hollow are darkening rapidly, a pigeon flies across and I can see the outline of his light grey wings flapping distinctly. The sea is too blurred to see, but Dungeness light has just made its first flash and the country-side seems not quite so tranquil as it is in work hours. The labourers are going home, some with slow, heavy steps, some on jangling bicycles, some very silent except for an occasional tinkle of a bell. On the marsh, plodding noisily along a winding road, there is a traction-engine ; it gives out a curl of smoke that hangs suspended in the air for some distance behind it. Down there it is more sheltered than here on the summit of the ridge. They say, there, they would not like to live up here on these stony hills and certainly I should not be so contented if I were shut in down there, confined by trees, hills and hedges. And yet if the change had to come about I am sure that by some means or other I should manage to make the best of it. I have been away in Belgium and at the sea-side. I had to go because some one told me I ought to have a cellar and Wedman said he could make one. My cottage has only four rooms and 432
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the cellar is under one of them. Doorways had to be made and the poor little place was very soon in a chaotic state—so I went to try to find peace elsewhere. I did not find very much of that externally in Belgium— but a sense of peace is a thing one takes with one, just as one takes one's hat or one's heart. There was extreme contentment for myself even in tramping along the noisy Rue Neuve, with its cruel pave, or watching the throng of gaping little school children in their black hoods in Bruges, or listening to the clamouring, blue-frocked porters on the wind-blown quay of Ostend. There was peace for me even on the little paddle-ship that bore me home over the most stormy, swelling, cold, sunlit, foamy sea I have ever been on. Perhaps I found contentment in these events which were sometimes laughable, sometimes exceedingly annoying, because I knew that they were at most transitory, but the real reason is that I value this beautiful sense of peace and I cling tight hold of it—cherish it, guard it jealously, love it more than anything in the world. It is my most precious possession. It has become the key to my existence, it helps me to live, tries to make me kind, considerate, shows me how to feel for people, how to understand. It makes me happy, drives away despair and shows me many things that I could not see before. Near the borders of France, by the side of a large sixteenthcentury church, half hidden by monastic outbuildings, and shrouded by tall poplar trees that overhung a calm lake, I stayed in a country house. It was so perfectly the dwelling-place of long past, gay generations and it had so much the air both inside and out of wishing to be left alone to a calm, quiet, nodding sort of second childhood that I marvelled all the time at its inmates. There was a carriage-drive of pave that circled round under trees by the church. The house was white with long, high windows and a pointed grey slate roof. The long hall was flagged with large black stones, the rooms were pannelled with light and dark oak in the Flemish style—the fireplaces were large and open, with brass handles hanging from the mantels so that one could rest on one's hands and warm one's feet at the same time. There were large black portraits with haunting eyes, white frills, pointed fingers and hands in unnatural attitudes, and mirrors everywhere as though they wished to accentuate the difference of the ages by reflecting a modern figure side by side with these solemn relics of the past. My hostess was middle-aged, with a fair soft face and kind 433
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blue eyes, but she did not seem happy or even content. The first evening, in fact the first five minutes, she almost apologised for the antiquity of her house and she told me that she was going to build. She sighed sadly : " There is so much always to be done." It is a large estate, she is a widow with one son only and each time she thinks of him she sighs. He loves the country, his gun, his dogs, his ferrets and the peasants and he lives with them all day long. He paints at rare intervals—but she sighs again when she thinks that she might have had a great artist as a son if only . . . She manages the estate ; it is hers for her lifetime, but of course if only Pierre's ideas were more like her own it would be possible for them to work together. They are both very rich, their tastes are of the simplest, and indeed it is curious to see Pierre sitting in a gilt chair in his broad corduroy peasant trousers of an evening, reading the paper while his mother dozes near him, worn out with the day's struggles. She has servants that make her sigh too—they are lazy, stupid, rude, and all the morning she works hard about the house herself. He calls it foolish, tells her to turn them out of doors, arrange for her meals with the cure while he would gladly eat at the nearest estaminet. She listens to his wildness with a tender little glance, half amused, half injured, and then sighs again. She looks up at the smoking lamp that hangs dimly high over the dining-table and tries to forget her misery in the fact that next year they are going to have the electric light put in. How can all these expensive lamps be converted, is her next thought. Will it be possible ? There must be more than fifty in the house. In daylight I discovered that the house had a new wing— a facade of speckly red and white brick and large rooms. Standing by the lake I had to admire it and afterwards I was shown plans of things that had still to be done. It was wonderful to watch her, she aroused extreme pity. It seemed so sad that at her age she should be having so little peace, so little contentment. Perhaps though she has more than I think and she finds it in a different way from me. One evening the bells in the church were ringing for benediction; I had been awakened by them very early in the morning and she told me that that was when she said her prayers. " My prayers in the house," she said, " are curious things." There were always thoughts of tasks to be done that came to distract her mind when she prayed at home. In the church her chair was the only one with a red plush cushion. 434
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It stands against the grey distempered wall and where her arm comes there is a bare white patch. But she comes back to her house, her servants, her son, her estate, her large gardens and greenhouses, her relations and her lamps and she sighs till it makes one long to be able to take her away from them all. Her son is good in his way. He has a kind eye and he is intelligent. He has a word for every peasant on the road and they have a bright smile for him. They call him " tu " and he is glad of it. He is not a Socialist ; in many ways he is loyal to his family that has always been staunchly Liberal, and when he mentions his father there is a plaintive note of fondness on the e sound in saying " mon pere." But in the house under his mother's eye, his face changes—he is silent, grumbling sometimes and usually wears a sulky pout. Their unhappiness troubled me a great deal and I wondered why things need be so for certain people, especially when they seem so good. The sun has grown twice as large and it is just touching the top of the dark hill. The knoll in daylight is very green but now it is almost black. I look round at my little house. It has no high windows, no peaked slate roof, no carriage drive, no portraits, hardly any mirrors, no servants and it contains no worries for me. It is very simple, the walls are limewashed, on the floor there are rugs, there are logs of wood in the fire, candles to be lit at night, and water in pails at the back door carried up by Wedman from the spring in the wood. There are no pipes, no gas, no telephone, no electric light, no bells, none of those things that are commonly considered necessities. " It's a matter simply of adjusting one's point of view "—I think to myself as I watch the last sparrows on the low red roof fighting for possession of a certain hole in the tiles. A matter of giving up what one least desires, sifting out the purely unnecessary, limiting one's wishes, being content with the little that is within easy reach and making the very most of that. The snowdrops are still very white on the grass, but it is getting more hazy now that the sun has gone and the fog is coming over the marsh from the sea. Snowdrops are beautiful little things, too beautiful I think, and I have a strange fear of them. A year after I had left school the head mistress grew ill suddenly. We were living near her in an old farmhouse with a garden where there were masses of snowdrops as large as molehills. I sent a large bunch to her. She died the next day and I have been afraid of snowdrops ever 435
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since. She was a remarkable woman with white hair and black eyes. As a pupil I lived in hourly fear of her and even now her strenuous personality seems always strangely vivid to me. I should have liked to see her before she died, to see if she had found contentment on her deathbed. She was not content when I knew her, she strove too much to make her poor little pupils a credit to her school. Her husband died a fortnight later, people said he could not get on without her. I hope this fact has brought her contentment now—if she had known in her lifetime how much she was to him perhaps she would not have striven so hard. But who knows ? Perhaps she could not help it. Perhaps she was not made for a peaceful life. There seem to be some souls in the world who are predestined for a life of torture. I must pick some of those queer little snowdrops. Some have long stalks, some short—they are all very cold. T h e double ones are not so beautiful as the single, but they dangle more and look sad, they have no scent, at least not a flowery scent, but there is a faint odour of earth about them—like an open grave. Voices come up the garden path. They seem to jar on my ears in the half light and the stillness. There comes a boisterous laugh, too boisterous to be quite a real mirthful laugh and I feel that I must run away from it. The little path that leads to the spring through the wood is quite near. I can escape that way. There are white violets down there, small ones with deep orange glowing centres and as sweet as anything on earth. The snowdrops are still cold in my fingers and I know that as soon as I find some violets I shall throw the poor little ill-omened things away—for if I take them into the house I am afraid they will drive out my precious little spirit of contentment.
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Four Studies
By Max Beerbohm
Miss Mona Limerick
Earl Beauchamp
Captain Hugh Warrender
Mr. Augustus John
Don Marcelino
By S. P e r e z T r i a n a RED roofed, white walled, the town groups its houses in regular squares, on either bank of the rushing stream flowing deep below the street level, crossed by a few bridges, where people congregate to gossip in the clear moon-lit nights, listening to the ceaseless turmoil of the waters. The valley is long, irregular and narrow, hemmed in in all directions by hills culminating in cloud-wreathed mountains. The hand of winter is never laid upon the land. Forests ever leafy, meadows ever green, year in, year out, bask in the rays of the equatorial sun. Brooks and rivulets gladden the hill-sides, sparkling in the sunlight as a flow of liquid diamonds on the green background. Fields of rustling sugar cane and maize row on'row, the stalks festooned with bean vines, heave like billows in the wind. Such is the site of Medellin, deep in the Andean fastnesses of Antioquia, where the crowded mountains have left no level ground and the waters writhe through gorges, or leap over precipices. A land stern, yet kindly in its ruggedness, bountiful of harvest, covering rich veins of precious metals, heralded by surface outcroppings and golden particles sprinkled like glittering dust in the alluvial sands. No railway as yet desecrates the soil. The traveller follows narrow mule paths, meandering over the mountain flanks, skirting precipices, piercing the sombre forests, to the muddy Magdalena, flowing to the distant Caribbean, five hundred miles to the north. Sword and cross in hand, principally the former, the first settlers came, late in the sixteenth century. It is said they were Jews converted to Christianity. The inducements to adopt the Catholic faith under Spain's proselytising hand, so ready to roast the unbeliever and the recalcitrant alive, were strong for the chance survivors of the suspected race. But baptism accomplished no change, for Judaism is in the blood. The newcomers so mercifully—since that meant salvation—driven into the fold 437
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of the true and only church, remained what they were, what their ancestors had been, thousands of years back when " the true and only " and, of course, also eternal, church, was not even dreamt of. Following the command they grew and multiplied ; they prospered, building cities and towns and villages. With the new faith they kept their unchanging altar : the counter, which as an embodiment of barter, marks the point where the milk of human kindliness begins to sour, and many noble virtues and high qualities disappear. Between buyer and seller fairness and justice as guides to conduct have no place. One wants to get the most, the other to give the least ; flattery, cunning and all manner of trickery, bordering on deceit, where the statute defines, are permitted and plausible ; the lower instincts of greed prevail paramount : friends and comrades, and dear relations, all are lawful prey. Success is measured by the excess obtained over value given ; special conditions of hard necessity or great misfortune are irrelevant ; generosity, charity itself avowedly proscribed. Such are the foundations, and the moral principles of almighty trade, the ruler of the world, under whose broad and catholic auspices, murder to be holy only needs to attain, by unlimited increase, the dignity of war, and pillage, likewise, that of conquest. Time, soil and climate, the irresistible moulders, have kneaded the befitting local conditions into the grain of the colonisers, who are as genuine local products now, thus adapted and modified, as the ceibas, clustering in groves with aisles like temples, or the lazy mud-loving iguanas in marsh and river-front. The old backbone subsists, on which the new characteristics have been grafted. The race is hardy and industrious; loving wine or rather fire-water—aguardiente—dice, and song ; quick to resent, quick also to forgive, prolific, twelve being an average family, generous of its blood and money, with a sort of fanatical affection for the native mountains, expert in bargaining, bartering, banking, qualities that assert themselves, like the steel sharp claws in the softness of the cat's paw. My friend Marcelino was a doctor with a large practice, a manufacturer of chemicals, a cattle breeder and dealer, and a professor of anatomy at the local school. In those new lands a single groove spells ruin and failure. Routine is fatal where nature, unconquered, still rejoices in forest and glade, and jungle, inviolate, and men are few. 438
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Marcelino was no dilettante ; the average of deaths amongst his patients was as respectable as that of any practitioner exclusively devoted to his art in more advanced countries; his chemicals and drugs caused scantier havoc to life and health than the better-presented German concoctions of starch masquerading as quinine, wooden nutmeg and pasteboard cloves, flavoured with essences, touched with benzoic and nitric acids; his herds flourished in the luscious meadows; his prosperity vouched for his ability, and as for his pupils, the great majority of them managed to secure their diploma, entitling them to experiment on their fellow mortals. In his boyhood he had worked in the parental cane fields, along the stream, three leagues from the town. With self-earned hoardings he betook himself afoot—averse from all avoidable expense—to the national capital beyond many a mountain range and intervening valley. In time he returned, having strayed to foreign lands, a learned and far-travelled man. With a national poet he could say : " Nations have I visited mighty and great; their monuments and triumphs have I seen ; I have danced their dances, drunk their wines and rested on the bosoms of their beauteous women. Don Marcelino, the senior, then eighty, lived at the old homestead hard-by the road-side, dazzling white, with bright green columns, broad open veranda, shaded by canopies of creeper-vines, the bellisima or " most beautiful," in flower and leaf well-deserving of its name, and the siete cueros or " seven hides," whose flowers have as many colours. Fields in all hues of green and yellow stretched to the mountain tops ; from the Santa Elena peak, two thousand feet above, a large stream dropped in many leaps and cascades, to the valley, in full view, as a performing acrobat from the trapeze on the net, before the public. Don Marcelino was tall and thin and wrinkled ; clad in collarless shirt and trousers of native homespun, feet bare, in sandals, with thongs passing between the toes to fasten round the ankle, the ruana, a square cloth with a slit in the centre for the head to pass, and broad brimmed, high topped straw hat of weave fine as a cotton fabric, completed his attire. Strong of limb, alert of mind, his eyes alone were dimmed by years. A child of the people, his life reflected the history of the dying century ; he was a human link between the old colonial days and the looming years of bustling progress. 439
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One day, on the broad veranda as we waited for the midday meal, Don Marcelino poured forth ; his memories flowed as water from a tap. The road in front teemed with life ; long trains of heavy laden pack mules, ear-wagging and rhythmically grunting at each step, resenting the muleteer's interference with a vicious kick, snapping omnivorously at any tuft of grass, intervening bush or branch, or even stray bit of paper or dry creaking banana or palm leaf ; lines of pack oxen, also heavy laden for roads more difficult than the average, slow, patient, impervious to blow or curse, feeling the ground, as a kind hand a sore spot, before firmly settling the cloven foot, steady, conscientious, with a vacant stare, that looks but sees not, of a poet hunting for a rhyme, or a hopeful candidate haranguing inwardly the spellbound house and public, conjured by his creative imagination ; muleteers, brimming with lusty song and ready imprecation, whistling to their animals, pleading, cajoling, beating them on along the dusty road, helping up a fallen mule here, straightening a shifting load further ; carriers, men and women, with packages on their backs larger than themselves with huge stones tied to steady the weight; riders on smart pacers, jingling their silver spurs against the shining shoe-shaped copper stirrups, that take in the whole foot ; herds of bullocks driven to market, running astray, getting mixed with the carrier mules and oxen, causing profanity and great labour of disentanglement. And thus the wave of life rolled on whilst Don Marcelino spoke, the wave he could hear, but not see, -which he knew so well, which had swept past him for years as many as he could remember, and beyond, far beyond, like the river behind the house, through the canefields, under the bridge, by the large boulder that marked the boundary of his lands. His youth had coincided with the close of the revolutionary struggle that severed the country from Spain. Men grown famous in war walked amongst the people ; there seemed to be the scent of gunpowder and the flash of sabres in the air ; even the humble, to whose number he belonged, had been thrilled by the promise of liberty and independence. What these were, how their lot was to be made a happy one, they knew not, nor did they ever learn ; the thrill passed, but gunpowder and sabre had come to stay, more oppressive as the years went by. But, as torrents over broken ground, life sped on, amidst disturbances and political disorder. Pleasure beckoned and he followed, as men will at twenty. Unrelenting poverty tracked his heels. It was at that period that help came whence least expected. 440
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An ardent lover of cock-fights, he always kept a few select birds, tied by the leg to stakes in the yard behind the house, chanticleering challenges to any and all who might hear. Of a Sunday, the hallowed day, set apart for morning mass and afternoon bull- and cock-fighting and general merriment and carousing, for joy is the best form of rest, and every man knows his own counsel, he would sally forth with a bird held in a canvas sash comfortably slung over the shoulder, to the cockpits, near and far, with varying success. Luck became his worst foe. When misery stared him in the face, his one remaining bird retrieved his fortune. As if taught by man, it would spar, and fence and, when ready, deal an ever-fatal blow. After he had once become famous amongst the initiated, no one would bet. The bird then changed colour, chameleon-like, before each victory. Don Marcelino, aware that its identity, if known, would preclude all betting, took no advantage of the disguise, and simply hired out the services of his animal to others less scrupulous. After supporting its master in idleness and a tranquil conscience for two years or so, like Caesar and Napoleon, the bird met its doom. The hereditary instincts of the race came to Don Marcelino's rescue. With borrowed money he acquired the first acre of that land to which, in fifty odd years, so many others had been added. There he reared his tent and formed his home. Wife and children came to share his lot. Behind the plough, or axe in hand, the passing years saw him unwearied at his toil; and now, his labour done, he waited peacefully for Nature's law. Guiding me as I departed, though almost blind, he did not falter, walking with the assured step of one who sees. To my remark, he summed his life, and the secret of his success, saying " There is not a clod upon this land, that I have not drenched with the sweat of my brow."
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The Antiquary
By C . F . Keary I PAUL MORDANT was perched high up above the common world in his fifth storey in a narrow street of Rome. There for the while he had found his pensive citadel. Dark heat-rays ascended from earth into the night air, and along with them innumerable odours, which that day and many previous days had brought forth. The petroleum lamp in his room smelt likewise ; and it gave out so much heat that there could be no thought of shutting the window. Wherefore there entered in a myriadwinged host of gnats and fiercer mosquitos whose call to battle resounded on many sides. And yet—the murmur of wheels from below ; the shrill womanish tones, that ever and anon called and answered from balconies or from the pavement ; the never-ceasing sound of rushing water ; yea, the very trumpetings of the gnats ; were they not one and all the voices of the Eternal City ? The outer blackness was fanned by the wings of Memory. And who was more fitted to feel these beatings than the student Paul. His short working day, spent with Professor Bernabei and in watching some excavations near the forum, had left his mind full of that sense, which is so rare to modern minds, the sense of greatness : I do not mean of size. His concentrated nature took nothing lightly. For the nonce antiquarian work was over with him : but he was absorbed by a poet of modern Italy with whose work he had only lately made acquaintance ; picking the book up by chance. Paul Mordant's ignorance of all modern literature was in fact wide. What were these Italian authors beside their forefathers the Latins ? But, by exception, this one seemed to him to breathe a larger air and to move with no little of the majesty of the ancients, with which he united a melancholy greater than theirs, yea, a sadness far beyond the saddest sadness of Tibullus—
Lygdamus hie situs est; dolor huic et cura Neaerae Conjugis erepts causa perire fuit.
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This mood too, though he scarcely recked of it, suited the mind of the present reader. What Paul read (as we are concerned to render his thoughts) we must dare to translate into English—
Bulwark nor target hath Beauty or youth 'gainst the long arm of Death, I know, and knowing not the less I weep. Little though grief or passionate wish avail, Desperate I hoped that brazen Fate might keep For other houses other times its bale, And elsewhere sad examples choose, Not here. Now even this prayer our sorrow bids Affrighted Hope disuse.
Paul started, as might a criminal, when of a sudden he heard the creak of the top stair and a moment after a boot ring harshly on the tiles of the landing. Then came a knock at his door. " Entrate." A tall figure stood in the gloom, then advanced hesitatingly into the circle of light. Paul had got up : the two men stood confronting each other. " I—I must apologise for calling at this hour, my name " Consciousness of the everyday world came back to Paul with a bound. " Won't you sit down \ " he said, and moved his chair a little aside. " Thanks. My name's Cartwright. You don't know me, I know. But I've been anxious to see you personally, rather than write, to thank you for what you did on the Pincio the other day. It was my little girl whose life you saved." " Whose life I saved ? " Paul had taken another chair by this time. " Yes : I understood so. My wife and the bonne both " " Oh, yes, of course. Well she might have been run over, certainly. " Exactly : so that you saved her life. And I could not do otherwise than come and thank you for doing so." The visitor had lost his hesitation now, and even spoke with a hint of patronage, the smell of the petroleum lamp having entered the outskirts of his mind. " Of course," he went on, " my wife was too frightened to thank you at the time. But Angela—that's the maid—has seen you several times before on the Pincio ; and so we found out your address." " Will you take a cigarette ? " It was not rudeness on Paul's part ; only awkwardness. But the visitor pulled himself up short. He did not, however, lay aside his suavity touched with con443
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descension. He was very tall, fair, with excellent features and fine eyes. Time had passed a light hand over features and colouring both, making them only a little dull, or as an artist might say a little enveloppes by an atmosphere of years. " Thanks. But may I offer you an English cigar ? A friend of mine, who was on his way to Brindisi, smuggled me over a couple of hundred a few days ago." Mordant took the cigar, yet with an apology. " It seems hardly fair, as I shall be back in England in a month or so, and perhaps you live in Italy ? " " Yes : my home's here, certainly. But we shall be going to the lakes presently ; and I shall very likely be in England in the autumn. I have a daughter in England." " Oh ! " The visitor had spoken all this while with the same benevolent voice, the smell of the lamp being still in his nostrils and the memory of the four pairs of stairs in his legs. He had at first taken in little else of his surroundings, beyond the face and figure of the occupant of the room and his old working jacket. A figure strongly built, not tall, with thick black hair and rough-hewn features that had a certain leonine air and majesty. " It's rather late in the year to find a visitor," he said now. " Have you been in Rome long ? " " More than a month. I didn't come altogether as a tourist." " No ? " On business then ? Cartwright's thought guessed. But now an illustrated pamphlet caught his eye, and all at once its significance flashed across him. " Why, dear me ! Mr. Mordant. Of course I know your name. O, yes, I read an article of yours in the Classical Review on—on Roman antiquities." He searched his memory. " Yes : I've written one or two." " Of course. And Bernabei asked me to meet you—last month. I remember perfectly. Only unfortunately I could not go. Well, I came here to ask if you would be good enough to dine with us. My wife wants to thank you herself, naturally. Could you ? . . . Should we say Thursday ? or any day " Paul hesitated. " Perhaps you would rather write. But I hope you will come. I collect a little myself. You're in the British Museum are you not, Mr. Mordant ? " " No, I'm not, I'm sorry to say. I'm at South Kensington." " Ah, well, it's much the same thing. You prefer the British Museum ? Isn't Ralph Auburn at the South Kensington Museum ? He's a charming man : don't you think so ? He's 444
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an old friend of mine. Of course you're a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries ? " " Yes, I am," Paul answered, shrugging his shoulders. " You don't care for it ? You don't go ? O, I like the meetings so much. I always go if I'm in England—if it's the season of course : only that's not often the case. Now tell me, why don't you like the Antiquaries ? " Paul gave a little laugh. " I didn't say anything against them, did I ? They are rather amateurish, it seems to me." " Really ? Well, I'm an amateur myself, and I'm afraid I'm taking up your time." . . . " Not in the least." " But I know that Bernabei thinks a good deal of the work they do, especially in relation to the Roman antiquities found in Britain. . . . But, but," he began to stammer again, " I trust you'll give us the pleasure of dining with us some day, or coming to lunch, if you would prefer it—on the earliest day you can. Did you say you were engaged for Thursday ? " And immediately after Paul found himself engaged to dejeuner with the Cartwrights two days hence. For his thoughts had been turned elsewhere than to the finding of excuses. " Yes," he said when left to himself, " I believe it's true what he says, that Bernabei thinks a lot of such papers as Dickinson and Pulling write, just because they give raw material, without a grain of reflection or sense." And the thoughts of the speaker were surcharged with bitterness. He turned again to his Leopardi. But an unbidden host of memories laid siege to his mind. " That comes of people coming in and interrupting you," he muttered. " What a fool I was to accept." When he was only fifteen Paul Mordant had left Haileybury just before the Christmas holidays to meet his father and mother in Italy. He was a bright boy then, well up in the school, strong enough to hold his own, though with no special proficiency in games. He had come away full of pride, in that he had just been sent up " for good " (Optime, the lines were marked, and the " Head " made special mention of them in his speech at the end of term), for a translation into hexameters of a passage from Virginia.
"Though the Great Houses love us not, we own, to do them right That the Great Houses, all save one, have borne them well in fight,"
and so on. Macaulay's Lays were the joy of Paul's life, his highest standard of poetry at that time. 445
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It was a mild winter in the south : and Mrs. Mordant, even then maybe lightly touched by the hand of that disease she was to die of, could not make up her mind to continue the journey to England ; but, when the Colonel went back she still stayed under the Italian skies, keeping her boy and] girl with her. Thus it was that Paul's school education came to a sudden stop. The rest of his learning he got from a scholarly and sceptical Jesuit in Rome, who had taught Latin to the wife of our ambassador. I t was a classical teaching, unorthodox by English standards but really sound enough. From the old man Paul caught that strong taste for Latin literature and Latin antiquities that in course of time grew into a passion of his mind. He was a poor Grecian : and he spoke Latin with the Italian accent, which made him laughed at by the half-educated, and reckoned a pedant by others in after years. Alas, that there are other passions beside those of the mind ! and that under the warm southern sun the boy matured too rapidly. The generous wines of Italy inflamed his blood. I t was at the age of barely eighteen, when staying with his mother at Orta that Paul made the acquaintance of Nita Calenka, the charming Galician actress, at that moment under the protection of a Jew banker of Pesth, who became the master-mistress of Paul's thoughts. He followed her to Vienna, and the sorrow of it and the scandal to the Mordant household was boundless. After six months the prodigal son came back, having in that brief space tasted every form of misery, at the last the supreme shame of ,being rescued from starvation by his faithless mistress and by her restored to his family. This escapade darkened all young Mordant's prospects in life. Paul's father believed, or persuaded himself, that his wife's fatal illness, which now declared itself, though she did not die till some years later, had been brought on by this trouble. It was not to be expected, General Mordant argued (he was " General " now), that he should be at the cost of a university education for the boy, who would be almost safe to run into more dissipation there. And as old " M a c " Sanderson of the Engineers had a post of command at the South Kensington Museum, nothing appeared more suitable than to get Paul in there. To an eye unsharpened by criticism, Paul might seem to have exactly the berth for which he was cut out. T o the young man himself his earliest years of work in the institution were years of wretchedness unspeakable. One sort of antiquities might seem to a soldier much the same as another : but when Paul himself, his wild love miseries over, began to stretch 446
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forth a groping hand towards his earlier intellectual love— straightway he found what a strange step-mother to learning was (in those days) the institution to which he was affiliated. An impossible acrobatism of the mind, that seemed the be-all and the end-all of " duty " there : never to dwell long enough with any single branch of knowledge to make it knowledge; that was the golden rule. For the first month 'twas a collection of book-plates Paul was set to classify with some help of hand-books and of his colleagues. A recent purchase of French eighteenth-century fans next claimed him : then Italian musical instruments of a century earlier : a collection of coins of the Swiss cantons : Derby ware, Oriental carpets : all followed in due course. To a man of business there would have seemed nothing unnatural in all this : it was but a parallel to the invoices of a broker. And all Paul's colleagues were in reality, by nature and by training men of business. Nor could the new assistant take pride in the fact that his instincts and his training were those of a scholar ; there was no one by to cheer him with that assurance ; and his misery was multiplied a hundredfold by seeing how lightly the others did the work which crushed him to the ground. Life stretched before him an endless blank, without love or society or intellectual pursuit : he was too tired for real work when his useless tasks were done. By day he struggled in dry-eyed wretchedness : but at night now and then the tears would flow, as he read maybe the verse of Catullus, its pains, its passions and hopeless cries for mercy. Catullus or Tibullus, Delia and Neaera, and Lesbia, and Lesbia's more favoured lovers, were they not all alike dead ? Then Paul would clothe himself with the philosophy of the Stoics and glory in the thought that, if life offered him nothing, he had at least nothing to fear from death—
" Hippocrates, after curing many diseases, himself fell sick and died. The Chaldaeans foretold the death of many, and then Fate caught them too. Alexander and Pompeius and Caius Caesar, after so often destroying whole cities and, in battle, annihilating thousands, likewise departed at last from life. Heracleitus was filled with water and so died. And lice destroyed Democritus, and another kind of vermin killed Socrates. What means all this ? Thou hast embarked, thou art come to the shore, get out."
" What means all this ? " Paul asked himself this evening once again. Why had his thoughts gone back to such longpassed troubles ? That very quotation had not been on his tongue for years and it returned as clear as ever now. What an evening—to begin with Leopardi and end with all these melancholy thoughts ! And as he sat at his desk he hearkened once more to the 447
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trumpeting of the gnats and the perpetual sound of rushing water : but the other voices of the night had fallen dumb. The high and silent houses in the Via Vecchia Colonna produced a peculiar impression on the Cartwrights' guest, as something mid-way between his own narrow, noisy thoroughfare and the mute ruins among which his days were spent. T o these great palaces, cold as petrified giants, there was yet a something falsely modern superadded—huge plate glass eyes and ever and anon vulgarly moulded balconies or facades. The palazzo he sought lay at the end, where the street had become a cul-de-sac. So soon, however, as the porter had let Paul Mordant within the folding doors, a pleasant vision burst upon him of a flowery court at the back, in which a fountain played. Over the basin nodded a Judas-tree half shorn of its purple blossoms. High shadowy elms and ilexes were to be discerned behind. The Cartwrights' apartment was on the first floor, making an elbow, and looking altogether into the garden court. The shorter limb touched the wall of the Palazzo Sforza : and it was in the gardens of that more important palace that the great elms grew. By chance Mordant encountered his host at the very door, whereupon James Cartwright took him at once along the balcony and through a French window to the salon. Paul just saw an indistinct form in white, reclining upon a sofa and reading. But the moment the window was darkened, the reader sprang up letting her book fall heavily on the ground. " My wife, Mr. Mordant," Cartwright said in an off-hand manner, and at once went to pick up the volume. " Ah ! " She had bounded up as if wakened from a trance. The visitor had no time to take in aught but a flash of eyes and neck before the hostess was holding one of his hands in a long earnest clasp and pressing nervous fingers upon the back of it. " I thank you," were all the words she said to him : but a moment later—" Sotta—where is Sotta ? " and in higher tones " Isotta ! come, come quickly ! " Straightway a child seemed to Mordant to have sprung from the earth upon his other side. The mother spoke a rapid sentence in Italian and the girl—Mordant remembered her quite well—had seized his other hand and kissed it. Paul was a solitary, easily confused in society, and the scene paralysed him. But it was over so quickly that it seemed a moment after as if it had never been : and he was conscious through it all of his host, as of one in another world, smoothing out the leaves of the dropped volume and laying it carefully upon a table. 448
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The effect of this first reception, however, did not quite pass away. All through the lunch, which was excellent, and afterwards in his host's cabinet, as Cartwright took him through the fatiguing changes of an amateur's collection, a certain dis-ease possessed Mordant which he could not understand. At table the host took charge of the conversation—a man, as it seemed, elaborate in the smaller courtesies, but with a reserve of querulousness behind, and with a shadow of pretence and vulgarity that missed Paul's observation but touched his sensitiveness. He was continually coming across that type of person (more or less) in the race of connoisseurs. After lunch the two men lingered over coins and vase-handles stamped with various seals, and lamps of earthenware and bronze. Cartwright seemed to have forgotten his wife. But when the valet-de-chambre came and spoke to him in Italian, he resigned Paul without an effort, and the visitor was conducted back to the salon once more. " Sit—sit there. I thought my husband he would have kept you altogether to himself. He is enraptured to show his collection to any one new. And you—" she changed her tone at once to one of deference — " you are an archeologo too. And my father was : you will have heard of my father, the Count Giuseppe de' Lanzi ?," " Oh, yes, certainly." " I cannot understand it. I am too stupid, I suppose," she shrugged her shoulders. " It makes me unhappy sometimes : the great. . . . But why should I speak English to you ? I am sure you speak Italian—don't you ? " Every word was punctuated by a gesture. " Very badly." " Oh, but I am sure that not. You read Italian ? Dante for instance ? " " Yes : I've read some Dante." " And Petrarca ? But you should read too the moderns— the poets." " I don't read Italian much," Paul said, " except you know for history and archaeology and so on. . . . But," he went on, " I got hold of a modern poet the other day, Leo . . ." " Leopardi! Of course, he is the greatest. And yet so few Englishmen know Leopardi. I am glad, so glad you read Leopardi. He is great, he is grandiose. Don't you think so ? " (" My God ! " Paul said to himself at this point, " why did I come here ? ") Now the Contessa Margarita de' Lanzi was started, she paid little heed to her guest's answers or to his expression. 449
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" He is great and so sad. For us he is so inexpressibly sad." And without more ado she began to quote :
" Dove sono i tuoi figli ? Odo suan d'armi E di carri e di voci e di timballi: In estranie comrade Pugnano . . . pugnano "
" Isotta, Isotta," she called out in her shrill tones; and once again, from some obscure corner of the room, the elfin child came to her side. " That part of the Ode all' Italia, say it—say it from Dove sono i tuoi figli." With not more than half a minute's hesitation the child began. She had spoken a dozen lines or so when her mother pulled her up. " Yes, yes, that is enough. That is so dreadful, so fearful for us to think of these things," she continued to Paul, whose mind was becoming more and more in a whirl. He spoke only the thought which had remained in his mind. " How clever of your little girl! " For indeed, Isotta had recited the lines with good accent and discretion. She had been dismissed, but she had not again retired to the corner, but stood there at the end of the sofa fixing large black eyes upon the visitor. " He is a melancholy poet for a child to learn," Paul thought. The contessa spoke. " Yes, he is sad, Leopardi. But if the world is sad, what is the use of having illusions ? Why do you move like that ? " Paul had, indeed, almost jumped; she spoke as if she had read his thought. " Do you know," Margarita went on, " it makes me so angry with myself that I cannot, I cannot care more about our monumenti, when that is all that remains to us of our greatness, and when my father was a great archeologo. But my husband buys his bits of pottery, or to-day a coin, and I cannot, I cannot care for such things." Her voice ended upon a deep contralto note, and like her child she looked Paul in the face with large, black, immovable, sad eyes. " What a blessing ! " Mordant said when he got at last into the street. " I need never go there again," he added; but immediately put in the proviso—" except for one call," and with emphasis assured himself that that one call should end his relations with the Cartwright family. For all that, instead of reading a paper which had been sent him from Germany and which the day before he thought would be so interesting, his thoughts would go back to the Via Vecchia Colonna. " I shouldn't mind seeing the child again," he confessed. Yes, he did seem still to feel the 450
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touch of the little girl's lips on his hand. And there was something strange and pathetic in her silent ways, standing or moving in the room like a ghost. How she had stared at him ! And the kiss she had given without uttering a word ! " If one could see her on the Pincio without getting mixed up with the family ! " And wilfully Paul concentrated all his thoughts on the child. Yet he knew in reality that little Isotta had been only part of the complexity of influences which had affected him : and he might have resolved that complexity into a simple once more and called it the Ewig Weibliche. For on a man who has been long a solitary the Ewig Weibliche has a way of thrusting itself with irresistible claims—to notice at the least. The kiss even of a child is enough to do the business. Isotta was, too, only a small copy of her mother : and though the child was eternally silent and the mother perpetually talking, the eyes of both contradicted silence and speech equally, and seemed to plead for a better understanding than could come from words. II " I have so tried, so tried to understand these things," said the Contessa Margarita—she always went by that name. It was of archaeology again that she was speaking, hardly a subject for such a pathetic ring as her tones had taken. And yet Paul could understand her. Had not he himself suffered infinitely in years gone by just from the type of " antiquarian " which was Cartwright the husband, rule-of-thumb-men, mere collectors. He had suffered more than he himself knew or could have explained. The Greatness of the Past seemed to receive an insult from such folk, as though dirt had been cast upon some shrine. Paul's feelings were mostly silent ones. But for ever at the backward of his thoughts marched the great cadences of the Virgilian line like the march of an army of veterans steadfast to the very portals of eternity. The Conte de' Lanzi—he at least might have given his daughter some of the understanding she craved : but probably he would not consider a woman worthy of the knowledge. Beside, Margarita was almost a child when he died. Though Count de' Lanzi had taught his daughter nothing, he had bequeathed her of his blood and of his character maybe. She may have been capable of feeling as much as he felt about these things. Paul thought of his old master the Jesuit. Yes, there was no reason in the nature of things why there should be any sort of humbug in Margarita's tones, nor in the eyes which in her fashion, in Isotta's fashion, were fixed so solemnly on Paul's. But what 451
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to do ? How to help her ? Paul knew that he himself had no fluency of speech. " Come with me—here," said Margarita and she took Paul to her husband's library, for Cartwright was not there that afternoon. " Why is the good of all these lamps ? If one—only one could speak, it might tell us things. But twenty, forty, are as dumb as one alone, nay more dumb. What is the good of it ? Tell me." Paul, happily inspired for this once, turned the conversation aside. He spoke of Epictetus' lamp. And then the conversation touched upon stoicism, which really did not interest Mordant much now—as a system. Only the transition was easy to the idea of virtue, virtus ; and that was the idea which beat for ever at the back of Mordant's thoughts : it was virtus that echoed through the veteran footfalls and in the Virgilian line. " Ah, if I knew Latin," sighed the Contessa. " My father began to teach me a little : but then he died." " It can't be difficult for an Italian. But then I suppose you've no time." " Time ! Oh, I have time. But who is to teach me f " Once more the immovable black eyes found Paul's. " Your husband must " " Know it ? I do not think so. No, not much I am sure." " No : I don't suppose he does," Paul reflected. He had noticed that Cartwright gave to all Roman names the Italian pronunciation, a habit which he, Mordant had striven so hard to correct in himself. Cartwright might, of course, have fallen into this way from long residence in Italy. And the young man's eyes straying round the library—it was there that he and the contessa were-—lighted upon a large edition of Livy (Weissenborn's) in paper covers. He went and took down a volume with a little thrill of pleasure at the fine print and excellent notes. (For in his travels the student had to use pocket editions of his beloved Latins.) Ah, yes, only a few pages were cut. For a moment he forgot where he was, looking between the leaves. " But cut it if you want to read," said his companion without any show of resentment, and she handed him a paper-knife. Paul gave a little start of guilt. And to excuse himself he placed the book before the other where he had opened it at hazard. It was that passage (in the twenty-second book) which tells of the rescue of Minucius by Quintus Fabius Maximus and the generous confession which the former makes of his unfitness to command. 452
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" But now," Paul said, " an Italian ought to be able to understand that at once." She sat down before the open page, and spelt out the contents . . . " Turn, what is that allora ? " " Yes; and ' paventium ' that's dei spaventi or spaventati I think in Italian." . . . . " Yes, that's about right. Well, if you did some of that every day, you'd soon know Latin better than I do." The other did not reply to this. She only got up with a slight sigh and said : " He has other Latin books, no doubt. You see." And when Paul went to look round the shelves, " And any you would like to have, take it." " Oh, I should not like " " Yes, yes, he will lend them you, I am sure . . . Take this," she handed him the open volume. " No : I won't take that. I'll take another. That is for you to read." " Must I ? " She shot him a strange and sudden glance, then smiled. It made her look ten years younger when she smiled. And Paul afterwards, in the recesses of his pensive citadel, reflected that after all the Contessa Margarita could not be a flirt, or she would not smile so seldom. He felt quite like a man of the world when he made himself that observation. But he also reflected or told himself that he had been a fool to borrow the Livy ; for of course he would have to take it back in a day or two : and then the Contessa or her husband would very likely ask him to something else and so on. And he told himself that was just the sort of bother he did not want. It was worse, as Paul called it, than that ; for only two days had passed and he was in his room one afternoon, when the top stair creaked doubly, the same knock came at the door, and behold ! there was Cartwright with the little Isotta. " She wanted so much to come," the father apologised. And with an odd mixture of diffidence with a shade of temper he went on, " Of course she doesn't think anything of me as I'm always there. But she wanted to see the home of a learned man." Isotta only looked with large eyes, speechless. " I suppose," the father continued as if his child were a league off, " her mother has talked to her about the learned men there used to be in Italy in the old days." Of all which the upshot was another invitation to lunch, and a general one to tea of an afternoon. English were getting rare in Rome now, and Cartwright was genuinely proud to get a scholar 453
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of some reputation to look over his belongings. Whenever his wife was present the collector sought to bring to notice her complete ignorance of such matters. She made no reply, but her eyes were fixed on Paul inquiringly, sadly. He had not made any further advances towards teaching the Contessa Latin : and he felt self-reproach and some gratitude that she never brought the subject up. Why had he done nothing in that direction ? . . . His life was wonderfully lonely . . . Dilettantism and pretence ! . . . How Cartwright brought all that world back to him ! T h e papers that people read at the Antiquaries! The Ralph Auburn whom his late host had spoken of, was Sir Ralph Auburn, a man with a great reputation as the best judge of china and Damascus ware and of many other things in England. Good God ! what humbugs and what ignoramuses they all were ! Paul in his eight and thirtieth year saw clearly now what had seemed a mystery in old days when he first settled at the South Kensington Museum. It was that horror of amateurishness which made him shrink away at the thought of giving Margarita a helping hand with her Latin. Instead he chose to ignore all that. " I don't think," he said once, " women can be expected to care for anything their husbands go in for." " Do you know," she answered—They were alone again, for Cartwright always professed to be busy in the afternoon. He would come in, and take his cup of tea, then go back to his library —to sleep maybe, Paul thought—" Do you know it seems to me as if my husband did not care so very much for that himself. ' Goes in for '—what do you mean by that ?—pretends ? " " Oh, no." " He goes in for antiquities because . . . For you know he was an artist." " No : I didn't know that." " Yes, and he married a rich lady—older perhaps than he was, I do not know." " He's been married before ! Oh yes, he said he had a daughter in England." " You didn't know ? Oh he is much older than I. He was a friend of my father." " Really ? " " Of course he was very, very handsome when he was young. . . . And the rich lady fell in love with him. . . . Yes, he has a daughter in England. You will get to know her when you go back perhaps." 454
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" England is rather a big place." " Ah, but she is very pretty and rich. I advise you to get to know her." And the Contessa de' Lanzi Cartwright looked at Paul with a sad glance. That night as he read through the notes he had taken in his morning's work, Paul thought he had made a little discovery. If this Sulpicius Gnatho whose trace he had come upon to-day should really be the same as the Sulp. Gn. of the leaden bar in the British Museum, would not that show that the Romans had got as far as Bath in A.D. 42 ? He'd show it to Cartwright What was the use ? Cartwright would not understand a word of its importance ! But how odd (only Paul did not make this reflection) that he should feel such a strong desire to talk of what he had found out—when for years and years he had worked in his own way without thinking of a confidante. " Oh, if you would ! " " But I thought you and your husband must be as familiar with the Colosseum as with your morning rolls." " Ah, not in the morning. I did not think you meant to go in the morning." " By night ? But could you go then ? " " Why not ? It is better then, because my husband is always comfortable in his library : and I like to see Isotta put to bed." " He wouldn't come ? " Paul asked in some surprise. " No, no. I am beginning to understand something since I have talked to you. He does not understand—he never will " " What ? " Paul asked, not because he did not know what she meant, but from an obscure motive of clearing his conscience. Her dark eyes did not change their calm gaze. But on her mouth there passed a look of disappointment mingled with contempt. " You know. What you are always thinking of." " Always thinking of ? " She was still quite calm, but the line of contempt deepened. " Ah ! how stupid of me to forget I was talking to an Englishman. Of course you pretend not to know what I mean. . . . Why of Rome and all our greatness once. How can you be so, so . . . I watched when you were reading that book, that Livius . . . only for a few minutes. What is there to be ashamed of ? And I would give anything to feel all that for a moment, I have said it often. . . . Because it is in my blood, I have the right to feel much more . . . My father had the right: but 455
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you have no right, you take it from us. . . . And so you are still half-ashamed—Of what are the English not half-ashamed ?— And you will be ashamed to take me to the Colosseo . . . afraid, because " " O no, I should like to do that very much," Paul said in as matter-of-fact a tone as possible. For of course, he was not going to own that she had hit the nail on the head. As for the Contessa she gave an enigmatical little laugh and said no more. " Oh it is grand ! It is immense ! . . . Yes, I have been by night before. But I never saw it as I do now. . . . Think of our being the only two people in this great vast place." It is the thing to do the Colosseum by moonlight. For that very reason Paul had never done it. But, though such a sight may in a fashion be vulgarised it cannot to the seeing mind ever be vulgar. And the moonlight is not of our English moon. There lay the huge semicircle of blackness ; it seemed illumined by an inward fire, a pale yellowish fire which shone or seemed to shine through the tiers on tiers of stone seats, making them unearthly, supernatural. Paul's eyes dwelt long upon this dark portion, till a veritable superstition seized him and a sort of vision. T h e place grew peopled not quite to his visible sense, yet with such a persuasion of reality—that he awoke with a start to take in a contrasted picture, the moonlight silence of the other semicircle, and all the floor of the amphitheatre with its deep channels and pits, subterranean cages and passages. Yes, it was so immense and so tragic that it swept away selfconsciousness as the tramp of a legion might sweep away the common vulgar sights of Ancient Rome. He heard the tramp, not in his mortal ears but in his spirit. The whole history of the greatest people that the world has known—greatest in character— this, too, swept through his mind like the breath of a mighty wind. And a line of Virgil came unbidden upon his lips :
Littora quum patris lacrimans portusque relinquo Et campos ubi Troja fuit.
" Ubi Troja fuit." A double sadness was in his mind. " My father had the right," the Contessa had said once, " but you have no right, you take it from us." That thought was not new to Paul : nay it had been with him to his sorrow more or less at least, ever since his childhood days were passed. For in childhood when he read Macaulay and Roman History he persuaded 456
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himself that with the name he bore he was an offspring of the AEmillian gens maybe of the victor of Pydna himself. " Ubi Troja fuit." He had forgotten his companion and did not know how long he stood, really—though he would never have guessed it— almost a majestic figure outlined black against the moonlight. Paul came to himself with a start, and turned to find Margarita, her hands straight down clasped before her and looking at him in Isotta's fashion with her deep eyes. It was Isotta's attitude too, so she had recited her Leopardi. " Oh," Margarita sighed as if thinking aloud, " you are great, great; " and lower still she added softly, " Paolo." Paul heard her, but made as if he had not : nay, persuaded himself that she might have said, " They were great, great." And then the Contessa made him start as she had done once before when he spoke of Leopardi as a melancholy poet for a child—" Yes," she said still as if thinking aloud, " all these people—" and she made a gesture as if she saw them, as if they were before her and below her on the stone benches, all round— " all these people gone to the infernal gods." (" She has a touch of the real thing," Paul said to himself as he looked at her. And he was ashamed that in his thoughts even he had used so commonplace a phrase . . .) The Contessa went on but hardly above a murmur :
Due belle cose ha it mondo Amore e morte.
(" There is something Sibylline about her." A vague fear took possession of Paul's mind.) " Tell me," his companion spoke as if she had roused herself from a half-trance. " Tell me those words, I half heard them " " Words ? " " Those words you said to yourself just now. Ah ! " she went on in almost a pleading tone, as Paul hesitated a moment, " what is there to be ashamed of ? You are an Inglese again. You were like one of them—" she made the same gesture to the benches around, " like one of them a minute ago." And Paul did repeat—in the Italian accent which came naturally to him :
Littora quum patriae lacrimans portusque relinquo Et campos ubi Troja fuit.
" Lacrimans—yes lagrimante—yes, yes, I understand." III 457 2G
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" It isAEneasleaving Troy. I don't know why those particular lines came into my mind." " It is majestic. You promised to teach me Latin and you have never done." She did not, however, wait for his answer, but with a gentle sigh turned to look over the parapet. How young she seemed in this light ! How slim her figure was ! The fur cloak caressed and partly hid her oval cheek. Paul had an extraordinary sensation of having acted all the scene over before. " It is because she is a witch," his thoughts halfuttered. He was standing almost behind her. His hand rested upon the parapet. They looked down together over the empty space, and an unwonted eloquence of thoughtcame over the English antiquary. The empty space peopled itself once more, now in another fashion, not so physically but not now with ghosts. I t was with ideas and symbols rather than with people. With one half of his mind Paul seemed to be dwelling among all that was most gentle and pastoral in Roman literature, with a Menalcas and a Mopsus lamenting over Daphnis ; with the other half of his mind he was in the crowd of the amphitheatre and drank in with a wild pleasure the smell of blood spilt upon the sand. He heard the roaring of lions in their hidden cages below his feet. . . His arm touched his companion's fur-lined cloak. But the cloak now was more than a cloak. It gave an almost imperceptible pressure against his arm. Was it a nymph ? Was it Phyllis or Neaera ? Was it a Roman woman under the empire ? His arm went a little further round the cloak which, it seemed, had grown more solid and leant a shade more perceptibly against him. And then . . . " Oh, hush ! " He had made no sound. But it was as if his lips just brushed the fairy-like cheek. Then a throb of terror stopped his heart for a moment. It had been all along like re-acting some past scene. He saw why. So had he once stood with Nita Calenka—oh ! twenty years ago. She turned round suddenly. " Yes," she said, " I see it all now. I feel it all. You have made me feel it all for the first time. Thank you ! Thank you ! " It was a strange interpretation of the situation. But in any case the motion of turning and speaking thus had brought her quite within the circle of his protecting arm. And she remained passive, her eyes looking into his. " My God ! " Paul said to himself, " I must." And he 458
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stooped down and kissed her on the lips. He could not be quite sure if her lips gave back the kiss or only took it unresisting. In any case they both instinctively turned to descend the sloping gallery to where their vettura stood in the moonlight. On the drive back she nestled close to her companion, and once she spoke. " Eneo—who said that about lagrimante—he was a codardo too. He did not weep when he left the queen who loved him." Paul dared not look in her face. For, indeed, she had read his thought once again. All desire had died down in him—so utterly that he could not now imagine why he had acted so. Instead of desire was a deep-seated terror. It had been that scene of twenty years ago almost exactly. Just in the same fashion too had Nita received his first kiss—even then he could not be quite sure if her lips returned the kiss or only took it unresisting. The next night Paul was on his way back to England. (To be continued)
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A Call
A T a l e of a P a s s i o n
By Ford Madox Hueffer PART IV I
" O H no," the specialist said. " I don't see what purpose it would serve, your telling his wife exactly what happened. I prefer, indeed, that you should not. No doubt it was the shock of hearing the voice on the telephone that actually induced the state of mind. But to know the fact doesn't help us. It doesn't help us towards the cure. All we can do is to wait. His chance is that he's not such a very young man. If it had happened ten years ago, there wouldn't have been any chance for him at all, but the brain-fibre—what the Germans call the ' Hirn-Stoff ' is tougher now. Anyhow, we can't say." Sir William Wells, an unreasonably lugubrious man of fifty, having in his eyes the look of a man doomed beyond hope, with ruffled grey hair, an untidy grey beard, very dark eye-brows, a whitish complexion, in which tints of blue predominated, except that on his cheek-bones were patches of red so bright that he had the appearance of having rouged—with an air in fact, of having had all his hair ruffled up the wrong way and of remaining still a personage of importance—Sir William Wells repeated : " All we can do is to wait." " Don't you think ? " Robert Grimshaw said,—they were in the great man's first-class consulting room—a tall place, very gay, with white walls, bright plaster-worked ceiling, chairs with seats and backs of scarlet leather, and numerous cabinets inlaid with green and yellow wood, very shiny and new and yet conveying a sinister suspicion that they contained not rose leaves, silks or bibelots but instruments, diagrams and disinfectants— " Don't you think," Robert Grimshaw said, " that since his mania, if it is a mania, is so much along the lines of his ordinary
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character it is an indication that his particular state is not so very serious ? " " My dear sir," the specialist answered, " what we've got to do is to establish whether there is or isn't a lesion in the brain. His character's nothing to do with it." " Of course, we're in your hands," Grimshaw answered, " but I should have thought that a man who's been abnormal all his life " " My dear sir," Sir William repeated, shaking his glasses as if mandatorily at Grimshaw's nose, " have you any profession ? I suppose not. But if you had a profession you would know how utterly impossible the suggestions of laymen are to the professional. People come to me for this sort of thing because I have had thousands—literally thousands of similar cases. It's no good my considering individual eccentricities. My business is to put my finger on the spot." " Then what do you propose to do ? " Grimshaw said. " Nothing ! " the specialist answered. " For the present absolutely nothing ! " " But don't you think a change ? " Grimshaw suggested. Having entirely redecorated his house from top to bottom in order to indicate that he was more prosperous than Doctor Gegg of No. 161 Sir William, who was heavily indebted to Jews, was upon the turning-point between bankruptcy and possible salvation. " No," he said determinedly, so that he seemed to bay like a dog from his chest. " Certainly not. If I am to cure him I must have him under my own close personal attention. There's nothing to be done but to wait." He rose upon the points of his toes and then brought his heels sharply down upon the floor. " You understand, we know nothing yet. Your friend doesn't speak a word. He's no doubt aware that he's watched. He has a companion whom I have personally instructed myself, and who will report to me. Get him to take as much exercise as he can. Keep him fairly quiet, but have him in the room when cheerful people are about. I will drop in at every moment of the day that I can spare." He paused to glare at Robert Grimshaw. " I'm a very busy man but I'll pay special attention to your friend's case. I will try to be always in and out of the Leicesters' house. More I can't do." Backed up as he was by Katya Lascarides' suggestion that Sir William was a good man Grimshaw felt an intense satisfaction, 461
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even a gratitude to Sir William, and whilst he slipped his five pound note carefully wrapped round five shillings under the specialist's paper-weight which was made of one huge aquamarine-—whilst he uttered a formal speech of thanks: " Mind," Sir William shouted at him as he reached the door, " I don't promise you a cure. I'm not one of these quacks. But you know my position and you know my reputation. I work from ascertained facts, not from theories. If it were possible to communicate with your friend, if he'd speak or if it were possible to manipulate him we might get at something. If for instance, we could get him to stand with his heels together, his hands at his sides and his eyes shut. But we can't get him to speak, and he doesn't listen when he's spoken to. There's nothing to do but wait until he does." A period of strain, enhanced by the continual droppings-in of Sir William Wells ensued for the house in Curzon Street and nothing happened save that they all became personally acquainted with Sir William's idiosyncrasies. They discovered that he had a singular prejudice against the eating of fish. That he was exceedingly insolent to the servants. That he read the Daily Telegraph. That he liked the singing of Scotch comedians and considered all ballet-dancers to be physically abnormal. They also had the perpetual company of a gentle and black-haired youth called Held. This young man with a singular slimness and taciturnity had been put by Sir William as if he were a bailiff in possession of Dudley Leicester. Dudley Leicester never spoke, the young man hardly ever, but he was exceedingly nice in his table manners, and eventually Pauline made the discovery at dinner that he very much disliked cats and was a Christian Scientist. And with these additions the household continued its way. To Robert Grimshaw the bright spot in this tenebrous affair was the inflexible tranquillity of Pauline Leicester. Looking back upon it afterwards, he seemed to see her upon the background of his own terrible pain—to see her as a golden and vibrating spot of light. She spoke about the weather, about some improvements that were being made in the village of Icking, about the forthcoming General Election, about her clothes. She went everywhere that she could go without her husband. She went to " At Homes," to private views, she was " at home." She had Dudley himself in her drawing-room, where in the further corners young Mr. Held and Ellida Langham held animated conversations so close to his passive form that it might
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appear that, monosyllabic as he always was he was, at least attentive to the conversation. She drove regularly in the Park with Dudley beside her and most often with Robert Grimshaw sitting opposite them, but she never mentioned her husband's condition to Grimshaw, and her face wore always its little, tender smile. He was aware that in her there was a certain determination, almost a fierceness. It wasn't that in her deep black her face was more pallid, or that her features hardened. It wasn't that she chattered less. Her little tongue was going perpetually, with its infantile gaiety, if her eyes were for ever on the watch. There was, moreover, a feeling of a General Election in the air, of that General Election in which Dudley, as a foregone conclusion was to replace the member sitting for his division of the county, and one afternoon Robert Grimshaw came in to one of Pauline's " At Homes." The little encampment round Dudley Leicester had its place usually in the small, back drawing-room which Dudley's great chair and Ellida's enormous hat and Mr. Held's slim figure almost contrived to fill. Dudley sprawled back, his complexion perfectly clear, his eyes gazing abstractedly before him, perfectly normal, perfectly healthy, on show for any one who chose to look at him, and Ellida and Mr. Held joined in an unceasing and animated discussion on Christian Science. Robert Grimshaw having addressed a word or two to Madame de Bogota, and having nodded to Mr. Balestier who sat for a Midland county, and having shaken hands with Mrs. Jimtort, the wife of a Recorder of a south-western city, was moving slowly up to close in the little group in the background. And suddenly, with an extraordinary running step Dudley Leicester shot past him straight at the member for the Midland county. He had brought out the words : " Are you the man . . ." when already shooting, as it were sideways, between the people Mr. Held had very likely touched his wrist. " You know," he said, " that you're not to talk politics this afternoon. We're all tired out." Leicester passed his hand lightly down his face and turning slowly went back to his arm-chair. Mr. Balestier opened his eyes rather wide : he was a stoutish clean-shaven man of forty-five with a rather disagreeable expression who, probably because he was interested in South American railways, went about everywhere with the Senhora de Bogota. " Oh, I say," he ejaculated to Pauline, " you have got them 463
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under your thumb, if it's you who insist they're not to talk politics. It seems to act like a military command." And Pauline stifled a yawn with her tiny hand. " Well, it's perfectly true what Dudley's secretary says. " We are all nearly worn out, so you'll have to excuse my yawning," Grimshaw heard her say from behind his back. " And Dudley hasn't been really well since he had the ' flu.'" " Oh, you're altogether too nervous," Mr. Balestier's fat voice came. " Dudley's absolutely certain of his seat, and as for not well, why he's a picture of ox-like health. Just look at him ! " " But he's so terribly thorough," Pauline answered. " He's much too wrapped up in this work. Why he thinks about nothing else all day and all night. If you watch him you'll see he hardly ever speaks. He's thinking, I wouldn't mind betting, about how to win the heart of a man called ' Down ' with red whiskers, who's an antipedal Baptist and not our tenant, and supposed to be able to influence thirty Nonconformists' votes. You just keep your eye on Dudley." " Oh, I'll take your word for his industry," Mr. Balestier said. " But I've got something much better worth keeping my eyes on." " Is that meant for you or me, Madame de Bogota ? " Pauline said. " Or possibly it's you, Mrs. Jimtort ! " " As a matter of fact," Mr. Balestier said, " I was thinking of Grimshaw's dog. I feel convinced he'll have a piece out of my leg one of these days." Robert Grimshaw meanwhile was supporting himself with one hand on the blue curtains that decorated the archway between the two rooms. He was positively supporting himself, the sudden shock of Leicester's shooting past him had left him weak and trembling. And suddenly he said : " What's the good ? " Ellida—for even Ellida had not yet recovered from the panic of Dudley's swift evasion—took with avidity this opening for a recommencement of one of her eternal and animated conversations with Mr. Held. " What's the good of exposing those impostures ? " she said. " Why all the good in the world. Think of all the unfortunate people that are taken in. . . ." And so she talked on until Mr. Held, the name of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy upon his lips, plunged again into the fray. But Robert Grimshaw was not asking what was the good of Christian Science. He had turned his back upon the front 464
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room. Nevertheless, every word that Pauline uttered had at once its hearing, its meaning and its painful undermeaning in his ears. And when he had said : " What's the good ? " it had been merely the question of what was the good of Pauline's going on with these terrible vigilances, this heart-breaking pretence. And through his dreadfully tired mind there went, and the vision carried with it a suggestion of sleep, of deep restfulness—the vision of the logical sequence of events. If they let Dudley Leicester down, if they let the pretence down, the pretence that Dudley Leicester was no more an engrossed politician, then Dudley Leicester would go out of things and he and Pauline . . . he and Pauline would fall together. For how long could Pauline keep it up ? The cruelty of the situation, of each word that was uttered, as of each word that she uttered in return, the mere impish malignancy of accidental circumstances, all these things changed for the moment his very view of society. And the people sitting behind him, Madame de Bogota, with the voluptuous eyes and the sneering lips, Mrs. Jimtort, whose lips curved and whose eyes were cold, Mr. Balestier whose eyes rolled round and round, so that they appeared to be about to burst out of his head, and the deuce only knows what they didn't see or what conclusions they wouldn't draw from what they did see—these three seemed to be a small commission sent by society to inquire into the state of a household where it was suspected something was " wrong." He realised that it was probably only the state of his nerves, but every new word added to his conviction that these were, not merely " people," bland, smiling, idle and innocuous— good people of social contacts. They were, he was convinced, Inquisitors representing each a separate interest, Mrs. Jimtort standing for provincial society, Mme. de Bogota for all the Cosmopolitanism of the world's centre that western London is, and Balestier for the Party. And outside there seemed to be—he seemed to hear them-—the innumerable whispers of the tongues of all Society, canvassing the results of the report that would be brought back by this committee of inquiry. It worked up indeed, to an utterly abominable climax when Balestier with his rather strident voice exclaimed : " Why don't you let me mote you down to Well-lands one day, Mrs. Lucas ? You ought to know the Hudsons. Lady Etta's a peach as I learned to say when I went over with the Newfoundland Commission." And at that even Ellida threw up her hands and gazed, her lips parted, into Grimshaw's eves. From behind his back a 465
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minute before there had come little rustlings of people standing up. He had heard Pauline say : " What, you can't all be going at once ? " And he had heaved a great sigh of relief. But in the dead silence that followed Mr. Balestier's words, whilst Robert Grimshaw was wondering whether Balestier had merely and colossally put his almost ox-like foot into it, or whether this actually was a " try on," Pauline's voice came : " Oh, not just yet. I'm in mourning, you know. I think I go out a little too much as it is." " Oh, she's saved the situation again," and then irresistibly it came over him to ask what was the good of this eternally saving the situation that neither of them really wanted to maintain. " She should," he said to himself fiercely, " give it u p . " He wasn't going to stand by and see her tortured. Dudley Leicester had given in and serve him right, the cad ! For all they could tell he was having the time of his life. Why shouldn't they do the same ? " Oh isn't she wonderful," Ellida exclaimed suddenly. " I don't wonder. . . ." And then she gazed at him with her plaintive eyes. The slim, dark Mr. Held brought out suddenly : " It's the most wonderful . . . " but his voice died away in his jaws. " After all," he continued, as suddenly, " Perhaps she's holding the thought. You see, we Christian Scientists. . ." But again his voice died away : his dark eyes gazed, mournful and dog-like at Pauline's dimly lit figure. The tall, small room with its large white panels to which the frames of pale-tinted pictures gave an occasional golden gleam had about it an air of blue dimness, for the curtains straight at the sides and half concealing the very tall windows were of a transparent and ultramarine network. The little encampment around Dudley Leicester occupied a small back drawing-room where the window, being of stained glass that showed on its small, square panels the story of St. George, was on account of its tall, dark, front almost in the gloom. Little, and as it were golden, Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the room : she looked upon the floor and appeared lost in reflection. Then she touched one side of her fair hair and without looking up she came silently towards them. Ellida was upon the point of running towards her, her arms outstretched, and of saying : " You are wonderful : " but Pauline, with her brown eyes a little averted brought out without any visible emotion, but as if she were very abstracted, the words: " And how is your little Kitty ? She is still at Brighton with Miss Lascarides ? 466
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Robert dear, just ring the bell for the tea-things to be taken away." It was as if the strain upon her rendered her gently autocratic to Robert Grimshaw who watched her from another point, having settled himself down in the arm-chair before the window looking into the little back room. Against the rose of the stained glass window Ellida Langham appeared all black, impulsive and ready, as it were, to stretch out her arms to enfold this little creature in her cloak, to hide her face under the great black hat with the drooping veil and the drooping feathers. But, as he understood it, Pauline fended off these approaches by the attentive convention of her manner. They were in face of Dudley Leicester's condition : they had him under their eyes but Pauline was not going—even to the extent of accepting Ellida's tenderness—to acknowledge that there was any condition about Dudley Leicester at all. It wasn't, of course, that Ellida didn't know, for Robert Grimshaw himself had told her, and Ellida with her great and impulsive tenderness had herself offered to come round and to play at animated conversation with Dudley and Mr. Held. But except by little pressures of the hand at meeting or at parting, and by little fluttering attentions to Ellida's hats and toilets when she rose to go, Pauline was not going to show either gratitude or emotion for the moment. It was her way of keeping her flag flying. And he admired her for it as he admired her for everything, and looking down at Peter between his feet, Robert shook his head very sadly. " Perhaps," he thought to himself, " until she knows it's hopeless she's not going to acknowledge even to herself, that there's anything the matter at all." II Between his feet Peter's nostrils jerked twice, and a little bubble of sound escaped. He was trying to tell his master that a Bad Man was coming up the stairs. It was however, only Sir William Wells who, with his brisk straightforwardness and his frowning authority seemed to push himself into the room as its master, and to scatter the tables and chairs before him. In his harsh and minatory tones he informed them that the Marchioness of Sandgate had gone to Exeter with Mrs. Jjohns and then he appeared to scatter the little group. It was, indeed, as if he had thrown Ellida out of the room so quickly—whilst she exclaimed over her shoulder to Grimshaw : " Well, you'll be round to dinner ? "—did she disappear. 467
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With his rasping voice, shaking his glasses at her, Sir William continued for some minutes to inform Pauline of the movements of those of his patients who were of political prominence. They were, his patients of that class, uneasily dispersing over the face of the country, opening bazaars, bowling the first balls of cricketseasons, devising acts of graciousness all night, putting them into practice all day and perpetually shaking hands that soiled their delicate gloves. For that particular world was full of the whispered words " General Election." When it was coming no one seemed to know, for the Prime Minister with his amiable inscrutability very reasonably distrusted the great majority of his followers. This disconcerted innumerable hostesses, for no one knew when they wouldn't have to pack up bag and baggage, and bolt like so many rabbits back to their burrows. This febrile condition gave occupation of a secretarial kind to great numbers of sleek and smooth-haired young gentlemen, but it was very hard upon the London tradesman. It was—Robert Grimshaw was thinking—very hard upon Pauline too. He couldn't be absolutely certain what she meant to do in case the General Election came before Dudley could make some sort of appearance in the neighbourhood of Cove Park. In the conversations that he had had with her they had taken it for tacitly understood that he was to be well—or at least, that he was to be well enough for Pauline to run him herself. But supposing it was to be a matter of some years or even of some months ? What was Pauline thinking of when she thought of the General Election that hung over them ? Mustn't it add to her suspense ? And he wondered what she meant to do. Would she simply stick Leicester in bed and give it out that he had a temporary illness and run the Election off her own bat ? She had already run Leicester down in their car all over the country roads, going dead slow and smiling at the cottagers. And there wasn't much chance of the other side putting up a candidate. . . . Between his feet, Peter was uttering little bubbles of dissatisfaction whenever Sir William spoke, as if his harsh voice caused the small dog the most acute nervous tension. Grimshaw whistled between his teeth to keep the animal quiet. " All these details," Grimshaw thought. Pauline had all these details to attend to, an incessant vigilance, a fierce determination to keep her end up and to do it in silence and loneliness. He imagined her to be quivering with anxiety, to be filled with fear. He knew her to be all this. But Sir William having ceased to im468
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part his social information turned his brows upon his patient, and Pauline came from the back room to sit down opposite him by the fire-place and all she had to say was : " These coals really are very poor ! " Silence and loneliness. In the long grass engrossed, mere small spots of black, the starlings in a little company went about their task. From beneath the high trees came the call of the blackbirds echoing in true wood-notes, and overhead a woodpigeon was crooning incessantly. The path ran broad down the avenue. The sounds of the wood-cutters at work upon the trees felled that winter were sharp points in the low rumble from a distance, and over all the grass that could be seen beneath the tree-trunks there hung a light blue haze. Having an unlit cigarette between his fingers Grimshaw felt in his pocket for his matchbox, but for the first time in many years the excellent Jervis had forgotten to fill it. And this in his silence and his loneliness was an additional slight irritant. There was undoubtedly a nostalgia, a restlessness in his blood and it was to satisfy this restless desire for change of scene that he had come from his own end of the Park into Kensington Gardens. Peter was roaming unostentatiously upon his private affairs and upon his seat Grimshaw leaned forward and looked at the ground. He had been sitting like that for a long time quite motionless when he heard the words : " You will not I think object to my sharing your seat ? I have a slight fit of dizziness." He turned his head to one side and looked up. With a very long, square, and carefully tended grey beard, with very long and oily locks, with a very chiselled nose, high, dark brows, a complexion as of marble, and upon his head a black cylindrical hat, wearing a long black cassock that showed in its folds the great beads of a wooden rosary, an orthodox priest was towering over him. Robert Grimshaw murmured : " Assuredly not, Father," in Greek, and silently the priest sat down at the other end of the bench. His face expressed aloofness, severity and a distant pride that separated him from all the rest of the world. He, too, sat silent for a very long time, his eyes gazing down through the trees over the Serpentine and into immense distances. Robert Grimshaw looked distastefully at the unlit cigarette which he held between his fingers, and then he observed before him a man who might have been fifty, with watery blue eyes and a red nose, his clothes and hat all a mossy green with age, and between his lips a misformed cigarette. " You haven't got a light ? " Grimshaw said ; and the man 469
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fumbled in his pocket, producing a greasy, blue box which he pushed open to exhibit its emptiness. " Oh well, give me a light from your cigarette," Grimshaw said. A hesitancy came over the man's whole being, but reluctantly he surrendered the feeble vapour tube. Grimshaw took his light. " Oh here," he said, and he drew out his bulky case. " That your last ? Take one of mine," and he shook his case over the extended palm. The cigarettes fell into it in a little shower. " That'll keep you going for a bit. Thanks, it's nothing. I'm only obliged to you for the light. I wanted it." " Ah, you do want it when you do, guvnor," the man said; then he walked off, lifting his feet a little higher, with a little colour in his cheeks and his back more erect. " Poor devil," Grimshaw said, half to himself. " Surely," the priest said beside him in fluting and lofty tones, " are we not all poor devils in the sight of the Ruler of Ages ? " Robert Grimshaw minutely bowed his head. " Your dizziness has left you, Father ? " he asked. " It is the long fasting. I was on the watch for you to fall." " You speak Greek," the priest said, " and are acquainted with the practices of the Church ? " It was then just the end of Lent, for Easter fell very late that year. " My mother was a Lascarides and I have many interests in Greece," Grimshaw answered. " Ah ! the Lascarides were very faithful," the priest said. " It was they in the main who helped us to build the Church here." " The Church can't be much more than a stone's throw from here. I was wondering what brought you." " I am glad you are Greek," the Father said, " for I think it was a very good charity you did just now, and you spoke to that man like a brother, which is not what the best of these English can do." " Oh come ! " Grimshaw said, " the English have their virtues." The priest bowed his head in courtesy. " It is one of their traditions," Robert Grimshaw said, " to give tobacco instead of pence to beggars. It is less demoralising." Again the priest bowed. " Precisely so," he said. " It is less demoralising. It gives less pleasure. I imagine that when the English blest spirit de470
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scends from heaven once a year to the place of torment he will bear a drop of water to place upon the sufferer's tongue. It will be less demoralising than the drop of healing oil that you and I will bear. Also it will teach the poor soul to know its place. . . Tell me, my son," he added suddenly, " do we not, you and I, feel lonely in this place ? " " Well : it is a very good place," Robert Grimshaw said. " I think it is the best place in the world." " Eemeision ! " the priest said. " I do not say that it is not, and in that is shown the truth of the saying : ' How evil are the good places of this world ! ' " " Assuredly you have fasted long, father," Grimshaw said. " To a demoralising degree ! " the priest answered ironically. " And let us consider where that leads us. If we have fasted long we have given ourselves to the angelic hosts. We have given our very substance to these sweet beggars. So we have demoralised the poor of Heaven by the alms of our bodies." " Surely," Robert Grimshaw said, " if we overburden our bodies with fasting we demoralise the image of our Creator and Saviour ? " " Not so ! " the priest thundered suddenly, and his eyes blazed far back in his skull: " we have mortified this our body, which is from the devil and, in the lowness of the tides of this life, we see the truth. For I tell you that when we see this place to be lonely, then indeed, we see the truth, and when we say that it is pleasant we lie foully." " Then, indeed," Robert Grimshaw said, " we—I mean you and I—are to be creatures of two natures. We shall follow our passions—if they be passions of well-doing—till they lead us, as always they must, into evil." " And," the priest assented, " we must purge then from us that satisfaction of well-doing and well-being by abstentions and by fastings and by thinking of the things that are not of this world." " It is strange," Robert Grimshaw said, " to hear your conversation. I have heard so little of these things since I was a very young man. But you teach me now as my aunt and foster-mother taught me at her knee. She was Mrs. Peter Lascarides." " I knew her," the priest said. " She was a very good woman. You could not have had a better teacher." " And yet," Robert Grimshaw said, " it was from her teaching that I have evolved what has been the guiding phrase of my life : ' Do what you want and take what you get for it.' " . 471
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" And God in his mercy pardon the ill we do," the priest crossed himself. " I had forgotten that," Grimshaw said and he added gravely : " God in his mercy pardon the ill I have done." " May it be pardoned to you," the priest said. He stopped for a moment to let the prayer ascend to Heaven. Then he added didactically : " With that addition your motto is a very good one. For, with a good training a man should have few evil instincts. And to do what you want, unless obviously it is evil, is to follow the dictates of the instincts that God has placed in you. Thus if you will feast, feast : if you will fast, fast : if you will be charitable to your neighbour pour out your goods into the outstretched hands of the poor. Then, if you chance to give three scudi into the hands of a robber, and with these three scudi he purchase a knife wherewith he slay his brother, God may well pardon it to you, who hung, omnipotent, upon the Cross, though thereby to Caesar was left power to oppress many of the Churches." " So that we should not think too much of the effects of our deeds ? " Robert Grimshaw asked. " Not too much," the priest said. " For then we shall lose much Christian Charity. I know a lady who resides near our Church and is noted for a frosty sort of charity, going with tracts into the poorer regions. I have heard that she said once to her niece : ' My dear, never keep a diary : it may be used against you ! ' " The priest pronounced these words with a singular mixture of laughter and contempt. " Do you not hear all England speaking in these words ? " he asked suddenly. A nurse, tall, pink and white, with a dove-coloured veil and cloak, passed them, with averted face, pushing in a low cart, a child whose blue eyes gazed with contentment upon the treetops. " Well: hasn't it given us that ? " Grimshaw said. " Yes : it has given that to the world," the priest said. " A menial who averts her eyes : a child who is inanimate by force of being kept ' good.' A ' good' child! My son, a ' good' child is a thing to make the angels cry. For is it not recorded of our Comforter that once He struck His mother ? " " But should not the nursemaid avert her eyes ? " Grimshaw said. " Consider," the priest answered, " with what a laughing glance she would have passed you had she been] a Cypriote, or how she would have gazed till her eyes started from her head at 472
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an English Bishop. But, as for this girl—she averts her gaze. Her aunt has told her that it might be used against her." " I t might be used against her, you know," Grimshaw said. " O my son," the priest said. " For what has God given a maiden eyes save to use them in innocent glances ? And what use is the teaching of our Church if passer-by may not smile upon passer-by and pass the time of day by well-heads and in the shady groves. It may be used against them. But tell me this my son : Are there not four times more fallen women and brothers in one half of this city than in all Greece and Cyprus and the Isles ? " " Nor is there one such nursemaid," Grimshaw said. " And it is that that our civilisation has bent all its energies to produce. That, without doubt, is why you and I are lonely here." He added : " But is it not wiser to strive to produce nursemaids ? " " Son," the priest asked, " will you not come with me and confess your troubles ? For I am very certain that you have troubles. You have, is it not, done what you wanted : you are now, therefore, taking what you get for it ? I have heard you say : May God pardon the ill you have done. It is not that you regret having rained your cigarettes upon that poor man ? " " Ah : I regret that less than other things," Grimshaw said. " Because you asked him first for the service of a light ? " " Why," Grimshaw answered, " in this case I had really need of a light. But I confess that, quite often I have asked poor men for lights when I had my own, that I might give them a taste of good tobacco." " And why did you first ask them for a light ? " the priest asked. " Was it that they might not be demoralised ? " " I hardly know," Grimshaw said. " I think it was to get into touch with them—to precede the pleasure of the tobacco with the pleasure of having done me a service. One doesn't inquire so closely into one's motives." " Ah," the black pope answered. " From that alone one may perceive that you are not English, for the English do not, like you, seek to come into contact with their fellow beings or with persons whom they may meet by chance. They are always afraid of entanglements—that it may be used against them." Robert Grimshaw leaned forward over his stick. It was pleasant to him to come into contact with this representative of an unseen world; to come for a moment out of the ring very visible and circumscribed. It gave him as it were a chance to III 473 2H
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stand upon a little hill and look down into the misty " affair " in which he was so deeply engaged. " Then you don't advise me," he said suddenly in English, " to pull up my sticks—to wash my hands of things and people and affections ? " " Assuredly," the priest said, " I do not advise you to give away your little dog for fear that one day it will die and rend your heart." Grimshaw looked meditatively at Peter who was flapping through the grass, his nose tracking some delicious odour beyond the path just opposite them. " I certainly will not give away my little dog," Grimshaw said. He meditated for a little longer, then he stood up, straightening himself, with his stick behind his back. " I know I may not offer you my arm," he said, " to take you back to your Church." The priest smiled gently. " That is forbidden to you," he said, " for it would militate against the dignity of my appearance, but all other human contacts lie open to you. Cherish them ! " The haughty curve of his brows became militant. His voice took on the tone of a challenger. " Go out into the world. Help all that you may. Induce all that you may to go into the right paths. Bring one unto the other that mutual comprehension may result. That is the way of Christian fellowship. That is the way to bring about the peace of God on earth." " And pray God to forgive any ill that I may do," Grimshaw answered. " That, too," the priest answered. And tall, haughty, his brows very arched, his hair curled and his beard tended he moved slowly away towards the gates casting looks, apparently of indignation, at the chestnut-blossoms of the avenue.
III
That night Robert Grimshaw dined at the Langhams'. Little Kitty was still at Brighton with Katya and the room, in the pleasant shade of a hanging lamp above the table, was tranquil and soothing. Paul Langham, who was the director of a bank doing most of its business with the Orient, was a blond gentleman with a high nose who was able to pass from the soup to the coffee without speaking a word, and having that afternoon purchased at a railway book-stall an engineer's puzzle by means of which sixteen crescents of orange-coloured cardboard could 474
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be made to fit the form of a perfect circle into a little square box, Ellida was more engaged with these little coloured objects than with either of her companions. And suddenly Mr. Held was in the room. He had the air of springing from the dark floor into the little circle of light that the lamp cast. His black hair hung down over his ears, his great black eyes were luminous and very open, and his whole gentle being appeared to be pervaded by some deep excitement. " I thought if you'd just come round," he said in a voice deep with extreme embarrassment. Robert Grimshaw was already half way out of his chair, but to his : " What is it f " Mr. Held replied only : " I don't know that it's anything, but I should like you just to come round." Robert Grimshaw was in the hall and then in the street beside the figure of Mr. Held, who with his dancing and hurrying step and his swarthy but extreme leanness had the grotesque appearance of an untried tragic actor. It wasn't that Dudley was any worse, he said, and it wasn't, no certainly it wasn't that he'd made any attack upon Pauline. It was simply that he would like Mr. Grimshaw just to come round. In the drawing-room in Curzon Street Pauline was sitting chafing Dudley Leicester's hands between her own, and Robert Grimshaw never quite understood what it was that had led the young man to call him in. By cross-questioning him a great deal later he discovered that young Mr. Held had conceived a mournful but enormous tenderness for Pauline. It was indeed enough to see how from a distance his eyes pored like a spaniel's over her tiny figure, or to see how, like a sprinter starting to make a record, he would spring from one end of the drawing-room to fetch her a footstool before she could even select a chair upon which to sit down. It couldn't be said that he did not brood over Dudley Leicester with efficiency and attention, for that, obviously, was one of the services he rendered her. But the whole of his enthusiasm went into his attempts to foresee what in little things Pauline would be wanting. Arid —as he explained later to Robert Grimshaw—that day he had felt, he had felt it in his bones, in his soul, that Pauline was approaching a crisis—a breakdown of her personality. It wasn't anything she had done ; perhaps it was rather what she hadn't. For she had sat that whole afternoon holding Leicester's hand, rubbing it between her own, without speaking, looking straight in front of her. And suddenly he had a feeling : he couldn't explain it. Perhaps, he said, Christian Science had had something to do with it : helped him to be telepathic. 475
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But, sitting as she always did, perched on the arm of the chair where Leicester sprawled, Pauline simply turned her head to the door at Grimshaw's entry. " This doctor's no good," she said, " and the man he's called in in consultation's no good. What's to be done ? " And then, like Mr. Held himself, Robert Grimshaw had a " feeling." Perhaps it was the coldness of her voice. That day Sir William Wells had called in a confrere, a gentleman with red hair and an air of extreme deafness ; and, wagging his glasses at his friend Sir William had shouted : " What'd you say to light baths ? Heh ? What'd you say to Zyrotic massage ? Hey ? " whilst his friend had looked at Dudley with a helpless gaze, dropping down once or twice to feel Leicester's pulse and once to press his eyeball. But he did not utter a word and to Grimshaw, too, the spectacle of these two men standing over the third—Sir William well back on his heels, his friend slouched forward—had given him a sudden feeling of revulsion. They appeared like vultures. He understood now that Pauline, too, had had the same feeling. " No ; they don't seem much good," he said. She uttered with a sudden fierceness the words : " Then it's up to you to do what's to be done." Robert Grimshaw recoiled a minute step. " Oh, I don't mean," she said, " because it's your fault. But simply : I can't think any more. It's too lonely : yet I can't talk about it. I can't." Mr. Held, his mouth wide open with agony, glided out of the room, squeezing his ascetic hands together. " But " Robert Grimshaw said. " Oh, I know," she answered. " I did talk to you about it. But it does not somehow seem to be right any more. Don't you understand ? Not only because it isn't delicate or it doesn't seem the right thing to talk about one's relations with one's husband, but simply—I can't. I can keep things going ; I can run the house and keep it all dark. . . . But is he going to get well, or isn't he ? We know nothing. And I can't face the question alone. I can do things. It drives me mad to have to think about them. And I've no one to talk to, not a relation, not a soul in the world." " You aren't angry with me ? " Grimshaw asked. " Angry ! " she answered with almost a touch of contempt in her voice. " Good heavens ! I'd dust your shoes for all you've done for us and for all you're doing. But you've got to do more. You've got to do much more. And you have to do it alone." (To be continued) 476
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EDITORIAL : THE CRITICAL ATTITUDE—English Literature of to-day; Foreign Affairs, by SIR CHARLES W. DILKE; The Economic Aspects of Poor Law Reform, by SIDNEY WEBB; The Policy of the Government, by M.P. ; The Present Moment in Spain, by W. T. GOODE; The Task of Realism, by J. A. HOBSON; Review: The Place of History in Education, by G.
THE CRITICAL ATTITUDE
English Literature of To-day
W E have set ourselves the task of determining for the uninstructed reader the difference between the writer of the commercial book and the writer of a book which shall be a work of art. When it comes to results this is a matter of great difficulty, demanding of the analyst a cool faculty of criticism, a broad catholicity and great powers of self-abnegation in the realms of taste. Suppose, for instance, we consider the case of a debateable writer—let us say George Eliot. Here was a writer almost omnipotent in her power to charm at once the great multitude and the austere critic of her time. She was taken more seriously than any writer of to-day ever has been, or ever will be taken. Yet, to the great bulk of educated criticism of to-day, George Eliot has become a writer unreadable in herself and negligible as a critical illustration. Her character-drawing appears to be singularly wooden : her books without any form, her style entirely pedestrian and her solemnity intolerable. And it is probable that it was this very solemnity that gave to her works all the qualities that make them to men in touch with the life of to-day so entirely unreadable, so exactly like so many heavy cakes. George Eliot was, in fact, a great figure. She was great enough to impose herself upon her day ; she probably never sought, though she certainly found, the popularity of sensationalism. Taking herself with an enormous seriousness, she dilated upon sin and its results, and so found the easy success of the popular preacher who deals in horrors. She desired, that is to say, to be an influence : she cared in her heart very little whether or no she would be considered an artist.
LET us place her alongside another writer of her day whose ambition did not soar above producing a good " household article." As an artist—as a mere writer—Anthony Trollope had most of the vices of George Eliot. He is never remarkably 481
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engrossing, his writing has no particular justness of phrase, his novels are hardly constructed at all, but meander one into another without any particular bounds, without there being any particular reason why any given book should begin or end here or there. Yet, although Trollope's books do not very much cry aloud to be read, we can take up with interest " Barchester Towers " in a hand from which nervelessly " Adam Bede " drops. The reason is that never taking himself with any attempt at solemnity, Trollope was content to observe and to record, whereas George Eliot, as if she had converted herself into another Frankenstein, went on evolving obedient monsters who had no particular relation to the life of her time—monsters who seduced or admitted themselves to be seduced, who murdered their infants or quoted the Scriptures just as it suited the creator of their ordered world. Trollope, on the other hand, observed the world he lived in : his characters walk upon the ground ; perhaps they are even a little flat-footed, but his observations have the light of facts, filtered through the screen of a personality. That the personality was not a very rare, was not a very subtle one, is perhaps the reason why we do not read him with very great avidity. But because the personality was so honest, so humble and above all, so conscientious, he helps us to live in a real world, he affords us real experiences. And precisely because George Eliot had no conscience, precisely because she gives us a world that never was, peopled by supermen who, we may thank God, never could have been, she is now a moral force practically extinct, is hourly losing impetus. And she has as an artist no existence whatever. Having studied " Das Leben Jesu," she became inflated by the idea of the writer as prophet, she evolved monstrous works which contained her endless comments upon Victorian philosophy, forgetting that our Lord, Who was the supreme influence, because He was the supreme artist, limited Himself in His recorded fiction to the barest statement of fact, to the merest citation of instance.
HAVING stated so much we may pause to concede that probably the great majority of humanity would say that the converse of what we have stated is the actual fact. They would say, precisely, that George Eliot was the great artist because she presented them with an unreal, with an idealised world, which is what they demand of art. George Eliot, that is to say, takes them out of themselves. Mr. Trollope makes them think. With this, of course, we cannot quarrel, since it is merely a
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matter of terms. We prefer, that is to say, to consider that the artist is the renderer of human vicissitude—the creator of a world of his own in which conscientiously, as he sees it, effect follows cause. We should not, supposing each of them to render life as he saw it, quarrel with Fielding, whose idea of cause and effect is that drinking makes a man a fine genial fellow any more than with the late M. Zola, who wrote a book called " L'Assommoir." Actually " Tom Jones," since it is a more filtered work—since it is the product of the author's experience of life, whereas Zola's book is a product not of experience, but of tabulations—" Tom Jones " will probably have a more persistent vitality. It is a rendering of life ; it is, such as it is, a picture of manners. It interests because it excites our curiosity. After all, we most of us read because we want to know—because we want to know so many things. We want to know how people used to live in past days, we want to know what happened to a given character ; we want to know what was the outcome of a given affair. We want to be, as a Stevensonian writer would put it " at grips with life."
T H A T there are innumerable methods of attaining to this end is nothing to the point, and it is nothing to the point to say that the greatest works deviate occasionally from the strict sequence of cause and effect. Thus the plots of Shakespeare are the evolutions of an infantile mind—the merest followings out of the more foolish parts of folklore. But we do not read Shakespeare for his plots, we read him for his texture, for his personality, for his charm. And whilst making these concessions to his genius we are apt to forget that he would have been an even greater writer if he had more frequently lapsed into the sense of the realities. As You Like It is a great comedy, but it would be infinitely greater did it not end in a farrago of childish impossibilities. And Shakespeare, if he had taken time to think upon these matters, would have been as great an artist as Tourgenieff. He would have remained none the less great a poet.
W E may, indeed, see in the condition of the Stage to-day a rather ominous, a rather terrible warning as to what in the present circumstances Literature in England is coming to. At the present moment the Literary Art is almost entirely confined to the novel. In a literary sense the " serious book " hardly exists at all. It is, for instance, almost impossible to 483
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name any historical work of late years that has any educational as opposed to an instructional weight : it is difficult to name any work of a social or political nature that has any literary value. Historical works are nowadays assemblages of facts presented in an utter baldness of manner. Works social or political limit themselves to bald statements of doctrine supported by such tabulations and statistics as suit the purpose of the writer. The " memoir" of to-day is a loosely strung necklace of anecdotes without, as a rule, any attempt to give a view of the subject's personality or to render the atmosphere of the world in which he lived. It panders, in fact, almost wholly to that love of " ana "—of tit-bits—which has always been the distinguishing feature of the English reader.
RUSKIN, Carlyle, the late Mr. Gladstone, Fred Archer, Colonel Burnaby, Sir Frederic Leighton, the late Duke of Edinburgh, Sir Charles Russell, Sir Frank Lockwood and the late Colonel North—the fact that all these people once spoke or did not speak to the subject of the memoir : a remarkable shot at a markhor, a dinner at the Savage Club with a catalogue of the guests present, some maudlin regrets for the passing of an extinct music-hall, some lamentations that Sir Henry Irving is equalled by no actor of to-day—all these things shaken together and written down without any particular regard for sequence or for any of the unities—there you have your book of memoirs of to-day. That the public appreciates this fare every publisher knows quite well—the average book of memoirs sells, indeed, better than the average novel. It is, in consequence, a better speculation, and simply because it does not appear under the guise of fiction it is regarded as a more respectable venture. But that any page of any book of memoirs published now will remain in the minds of any of their innumerable readers we are very much inclined to doubt. That the reading can, and will, profit nobody we are very certain.
T H E downfall of the seriously historic book has come about because the writing of such works has fallen into the hands of the schoolmaster—into the hands of the specialist. And the aim of the schoolmaster—of the professor—becomes inevitably not education—which teaches the marshalling and the analysis of facts—but instruction which teaches merely their collection. The historic book of to-day exactly shadows the 484
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attitude of the modern University towards history. There is no particular attempt to awaken an historic sense, but enormous efforts to secure a meticulous knowledge of a small period are encouraged. An average historic curriculum for one of our Universities would prescribe to-day the acquiring of a very loose acquaintance with five hundred years of English history, a study more serious of some particular century, a study au fond of some fifty years and then a study, minute beyond belief, of five to ten years of that fifty. And the candidate will be given to understand that he cannot, by any means, expect to attain honours in his subject unless his examiners be afforded proof that he has done what is called " original work"— that is to say, the candidate must bring forward some new documents, some new statistics or some new measurements of battlefields. Given the purpose of the educational bodies of to-day we need have no particular quarrel with this system. But it is obvious that it is a system calculated to turn out, not educated men who will write great books, but specialists who will go on discovering documents. And, inasmuch as what emoluments and honours there are will go to those who have distinguished themselves in such academic courses, the commissioning of historic books will fall almost altogether into the hands of these specialists.
T H E compiling of histories is to-day put into the hands of committees of such academic historians, each writer being allotted a period as to which, with the sanction of his University, he is considered to be an authority. And thus we have such a phenomenon as a late volume in a very respectable historic series. Here the writer was allotted a given century as to which he was considered to be the best authority. Some seventy years of the hundred he treated perfunctorily as being of no significance. He permitted himself occasional inaccuracies, which would have been trifling in a historian merely literary, but which are much less pardonable in a work of reference. He omitted to attach any particular weight to the financial policy of the chief Minister of that period—a financial policy which changed the whole course of English affairs. In revenge he devoted by far the greater portion of the book to a minute analysis of the events of some twenty years out of the century. He produced, in fact, an elaborated version of such a paper as would entitle a University candidate to honours in history.
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We are not, of course, inclined to quarrel with this tendency. The production of works of reference is a laudable occupation. But the fact remains that at the present day these works of reference have stifled any literary activity within the domain of history. And the tendency has bred an almost worse evil—it has led to the production of innumerable works concerning themselves with the secret lovers of queens, with king's mistresses and with the debaucheries of the favourites of the various decadent sovereigns that the world has seen. This is a class of book which again, though the profits far exceed those of any conscientious novelist, is detrimental, not so much because it panders to the baser sexualities of the idle—indeed, hardly any of these volumes are produced with sufficient skill in portraying an atmosphere, to pander to any passions at all—but because they combine with the daily press and with the popular memoirs to which we have alluded in affording the mental anodynes with which the English reader of to-day so persistently drugs himself. T H E characteristic of modern life that is most appalling is its inability to sustain any protracted train of thought. Thought consists in the classification of matter, in the perception of analogies and, as a subsidiary branch, in the arriving at an exact means of expression. And in this sense thought is as much discouraged by, is as distasteful to, the scientific historian as it is to the hack-writer who assembles salacious details. The province of Art, however, is the bringing of humanity into contact with humanity, and Art is the supreme bringer into contact of person and person. The artist is, as it were, the eternal mental prostitute who stands in the market-place crying : " Come into contact with my thought, with my visions, with the sweet sounds that I cause to arise—with my personality." He deals, that is to say, not in facts, and his value is in his temperament. The assembler of facts needs not temperament at all but industry. He does not suggest, he states, and save in the mind of professed thinkers he arouses no thought at all. But the business of the artist is to awaken thought in the unthinking. Tolstoi has said that the writer should aim at interesting the agricultural labourer alone, and the dictum, if it be exaggerated after the manner of this considerable rhapsodist, is nevertheless an exaggeration of great value. What it means technically is that the artist should strive to be explicit. What it amounts to in practice is that the artist should consider himself as writing for the uninstructed man bonce voluntatis— 486
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for the absolutely uninstructcd man who is of his own type. And the more men there are who are of his own type, the greater will his appeal be, the greater his sympathies, the greater the effect of his art upon the world. j
T o this wideness of appeal, to this largeness of sympathy, the specialist can never hope to attain. He addresses himself to an aristocracy, since he addresses himself to the instructed. The province of Art is to appeal to, to solace, the humble. The excuse for the existence of the artist is that he voices the unvocal of his own type. He has no other claim to dominance : he has no other right to the six foot of his country's ground that he will finally claim. The specialist exists and has the right, drudge-like, to exist to the measure of the industry that God has vouchsafed to him : the compilers of salacious memoirs and of contemporary reminiscences, the writer even of commercial fiction and of the negligible drama, have a right to exist which they share with the licensed victualler. They supply drams to the brains of men too weary to think and too much caught up in the machine to feel.
WE have been celebrating recently the bi-centenary of Dr. Johnson, the greatest, because the most representative, of all English figures. That he was the greatest of all English writers outside the realm of imaginative literature, we should hesitate categorically to set down, whatever our private tastes might lead us to feel. But the point is that for a writer such as Johnson there would be to-day no chance of existence. He is unthinkable. If we look upon the serious book as it is produced to-day, we see that there is no room for clear, for logical, for merciless thought, and such an essay as Johnson's upon Shakespeare if it so much as found the light of day, would be received with a chorus of sentimental outpourings of indignation. Johnson, of course, was no particular hand at the compilation of facts ; he was before all others the thinker who rendered the verdict of common sense upon any given set of facts. No such writer is to-day required. We have no critics but we have panegyrists, we have no desire to face remorseless thoughts, though we are pleased occasionally with those quaint paradoxes that are half truths. Froude and Carlyle were bad enough in their day, but they had at least the courage to seek to find a pattern in the carpet. And if Carlyle's " French Republic " 487
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or Froude's " Henry the Eighth " is, historically considered, of little value compared with the work of the scientific historian of to-day, they have at least the merit of bringing us into contact with their authors—with men who were human beings, who were fallible but vital, who were childish, but upon occasion Titanic. And this is the especial value of the art of writing to the reader of to-day. The world is so full of a number of things, facts so innumerably beset us, that the gatherer of facts is relatively of very little value. And when, each man by himself, we are seeking to make out the pattern of the bewildering carpet that modern life is, it matters very little whether the facts are those collected by the scientific historian, by the socio-political economist or by the collector of railroad statistics. But to be brought really into contact with our fellow men, to become intimately acquainted with the lives of those around us, this is a thing which grows daily more difficult in the complexities of modern life. This, vicariously, the artist is more and more needed to supply. For, as we have formerly remarked, the tendency of humanity is to crowd into the large cities, and within their bounds to live semi-migratory lives. Of the history and of the thought of the great number of men with whom we come into contact we have no knowledge at all. We see them for the allotted minutes, for the allotted hours. Of their lives and passions we know nothing. So that unless the imaginative writer help us in this matter we are in great danger of losing alike human knowledge and human sympathy.
W E have, for the moment, no space in which to deal with the modern novel, but there remains a much older Art, that of the Drama, which may claim our immediate attention. T h e condition of the Drama in England is a matter of interest for the student of Literature. By those of the critics who are most impatiently modern we are told that the Drama is at its very lowest ebb. By those old enough to remember the Robertsonian days, the view is held that the Drama is upon the up-grade. And probably the latter is the case. Struggling very fiercely against the necessities of commercialism—and the Theatre more than any of the other Arts is under the grip of finance—there has been arising on the English Stage a small tendency to bring the Drama into some contact with the life that we live, and to instil into the actor some sense that his is a profession with its dignities, its call for self-sacrifice, its decencies. 488
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COMMERCIALISM must always have its grip upon the throat of the London Theatre. Rents are very high, rates are very high, lighting is very costly, and advertising is only obtained at the cost of a system at least as expensive as that of ordinary blackmail. The price of seats, therefore, is also unreasonable and the manager has evolved the theory—in which at first sight the public would appear to back him—that the public must have something for its money. And the something takes the form of elaborate scenery, of unreasonably costly pageants and of childish stage-realism. These things must necessarily be the death of Literature upon the Stage. For, for Romeo to describe in impassioned terms the moonlight, when an excellent representation of the moon is shining in the face of the audience is the merest tautology. And it is absurd for a lover to chant the beauties of his mistress when the audience can see her. They can judge for themselves of an actress's personal charms. Similarly all verse, fine writing and even impassioned speeches must strike false notes upon a stage realistically set.
T H E truth of this may be very readily seen at the Haymarket where Mr. Herbert Trench's Repertory Company acts King Lear in a setting beautifully inspired by the late aesthetic movement and extraordinarily realistic in all its atmospheric effects. The end of it is that from any point of view of a harmonious representation the production is an entire disappointment. So long as any action is in progress the play holds the attention, but the moment it comes to speculative or descriptive passages in the text, the moment it comes to any monologue at all the effect is one of disappointment and of ennui. To hear Lear describing the storm in the appalling din produced by sham elements, to have to strain one's ears to catch his voice is to lose all the pleasure in the matchless verbiage, whereas, to have heard Mr. Norman McKinnel, who played Lear, reciting these passages upon an ordinary platform in every-day dress would be to feel with the feelings of Lear and to see and hear inwardly all the pitilessness of the storm. Shakespeare, in fact, has given us scenery, atmosphere and human emotions. All that the stage-manager has to provide for him is declamation. Anything more that he provides spoils Shakespeare's effect. For it should be remembered that in a modern sense Shakespeare was not a playwright; he was a poet who wrote novels for recitation. And any attempt to revive the Shakespearean literary play upon the modern stage is doomed simply to failure, since it is
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inspired by a want of knowledge of the materials in which the playwright works. No scenery, however skilfully painted, can appear absolutely real to an audience, and the actor, if he succeeds in holding attention, does so not with the aid, but in spite of his surroundings. At the Haymarket, for instance, it was very difficult to enter into the spirit of Kent's monologue in the stocks since people do not soliloquise in such situations in real life, and since Mr. France need only have reached out his hand to undo the thirlpin and set himself free. W E confess, therefore, that this production of the RepertoryTheatre fills us with disappointment. We had hoped that either Mr. Trench would give us plays adapted to the modern stage or that he would have given us renderings of Shakespeare more in consonance with the poet's art. The one great advantage of a really Shakespearean production of one of Shakespeare's or of any literary play would be its relatively small cost. This would mean that many more trials could be made. For the great cost of modern theatrical productions does harm to the art of the Drama, not only by the false realism of its settings but also because it kills speculation. When a manager must put all his eggs in one basket he becomes—as we had occasion to say of the modern publisher—exceedingly timorous as to what that basket shall be. He cannot afford to put plays on for trials. In consequence the infusion of new blood into the ranks of dramatic authors is a matter of an extreme slowness. And the production of any play with any newness of situation, of handling, or of point of view, becomes increasingly difficult. Nevertheless, the Drama—even the purely commercial drama —seems to move more and more into contact with the life of the people. If the reader will take the trouble to consider the annexed plot of a play which aims at being no more than an agreeable evening's entertainment, he will see that, in spite of certain absurdities which are apparently inevitable to modern conventions, there is some attempt at the handling of an idea and the solution of a problem : " Two married couples have joined in taking a cottage in the Island of Mull for the fishing. The husband of the one and the wife of the other amuse themselves by having a flirtation which sets up intense jealousy on the part of the remaining husband. The bereft wife thinks of the value of a sense of humour in these circumstances and persuades husband No. 2 to pretend to be violently in love with her. This works extremely well in the case of Sir W. Hutton, but Viola sees through their 490
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game and instead of herself becoming jealous she simply plays up to them. Here we have the ground for many farcical incidents, one of the choicest being the butler's espionage and delight in the prospect of appearing in the witness-box of the Divorce Court in a red tie and a fancy waistcoat." * Or here again is the analysis of a plot by a dramatist of a more considerable skill, standing and aspiration : t " This is a play well-handled and carefully executed, but the characters are all the obviously stock ones. The question it raises is whether the making of a gentleman of the present day is a thing to be desired for the race of the future. The beginnings of all gentlemen must have been very similar, and even after having been gentlemen for several generations it is doubtful whether one in like circumstances would or could have acted differently from Mr. Sutro's. But we think that Mr. Sutro has no serious social object in view ; he means simply to amuse and to show us his skill in handling puppets. His gentleman, Mr. Archibald Carey, was made by pickles, Harrow and Oxford, and when twenty-six, practically a beggar, he finds that he is as incompetent and as unwilling to earn his livelihood as a gentleman not made by pickles. He is an easily influenced young man. After whole-heartedly offering to go and make more pickles with his father, he takes his sister's advice and finds it more to his liking to mend his fortunes by marrying a rich widow, one close to hand, one possible to be fallen in love with quite sincerely within four hours' time. The father is a welldrawn character of a self-made man founded upon the Pere Goriot of Balzac." So that with Mr. Pinero producing at the St. James's his usual play, we have the usual drama of commerce at its usual height. In the meantime Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty's presents us with a Spectacle, which in a dim way is an advance upon most of the spectacles that he has hitherto given us.
SIR ARTHUR PINERO calls his play Mid-Channel. It deals with the middle years of a married career. Of the three dramatists that we have mentioned, Sir Arthur is the best equipped technically. But although he selects excellent subjects and treats them in the most spirited manner imaginable, squeezing the last drop of effect out of each situation and building the whole up to the most effective imaginable crisis, so steely * A Sense of Humour. By Beryl and Cosmo Hamilton. The Playhouse, t The Making of a Gentleman. By Alfred Sutro. The Garrick.
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hard is his temperament, so entirely wanting is he in any quality of heart that his characters fail, not only in exciting sympathy but even in interesting us. Mr. Sutro, on the other hand, whilst distinctly below Sir Arthur Pinero in technical achievement has about him a considerable touch of humanity. His figures are largely stock figures, but he does attempt to sympathise with them in their worries, or to use the larger word, their problems. T H E province and the powers of the Stage are so enormous because it speaks to the Public in the crowd. It has an appeal which no book can ever have, simply because the book must always speak to units. A crowd is quickly swayed, emotion running from individual to individual cumulatively until an enthusiasm is raised such as only elsewhere is caused by orators and preachers. For this reason it is a much coarser art than that of the writer of books. And if its effects upon the crowd are swifter, so they go less deep. The Drama, moreover, is a very interesting thermometer of the state of public desires and necessities, for the Public, if it is affected by the piper, to a very great extent has the privilege of calling the tune. Thus in the great mass of printed literature that is purchased to-day there is no very particular tendency since there is at the present moment no very overpowering national desire, no very overpowering national necessity, no visible public danger, nor any all-embracing enthusiasm. For this reason books on social and political subjects have no marked type, have no particular appeal and fall under no particular classifications. And in the case of novels no classification whatever is possible. Comparatively speaking a writer writes a book to please himself, and comparatively speaking a playwright writes a play that will appeal to his audience. His work being purely temporary he attempts to make as much as possible of the dominant interest of the moment. T H E Drama of the day is frequently condemned because it deals almost exclusively with matters of individual contact— it deals with divorce, with sexual attractions—with the problems, that is to say, of how people may live together at home, and not with the great subjects of History, Political Economics, Public Morals and the like. But if we regard with an unprejudiced eye the state of civilisation to which we have attained, we shall see that this is its almost logical outcome. The province of civilisation is so to instruct or so to coerce bodies of men that they shall live together if not at peace at least without much 492
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friction. And in the present stage in England, as far as the outside of our houses is concerned, we have arrived at a fairly considerable pitch of civilisation. Household lives at peace with household, the Roman Catholic and the Baptist dwell side by side without any burning desire to employ the faggot or the rope. Tory no longer attempts to shoot Whig in public places. Whig no longer attempts to attainder Tory. And if at all Class is arrayed against Class, its weapons are the taxes to be imposed and the ballot-box which infers the power to impose taxes. And these conditions hardly afford much material for handling by the dramatist. (We shall consider later the cases of Messrs. Granville Barker, Galsworthy and Bernard Shaw.) For the Drama, painting everything with a broad brush and being the essentially popular art that it is in modern conditions, must have incident to keep it going, and in the more public and broader aspects of life, incident is to-day a thing so rare that it would outpass the probabilities to include in any one Drama a sufficiency of incident to keep the ball rolling. T H E problem then of the English Drama of to-day is not as to how people of differing creeds, nationalities and customs shall steal fragments of the world one from another, but as to how people may best live together in the same household. A great many years ago a dramatist called Ibsen wrote a play called A Lady from the Sea. Here the problem stated was how one of a married couple should retain the other in her domestic fidelities and duties in face of the illicit, the adventurous and the alluring. The end was obtained by giving the departing partner her " head." No sooner was she told she might go with the mysterious and blue-eyed stranger than the wife suddenly discovered that Romance had gone out of the situation. She returned to become an excellent spouse, a fond mother. This possible solution of domestic duties was received at the time with jeers by the English public. Two years ago, however, Mr. Barrie produced What Every Woman Knows. Here the problem was the same and the same the solution. Having perhaps reflected upon Ibsen's Drama, or seduced by the more winning qualities and the quaintnesses of Mr. Barrie's views, the public at any rate in the crowd in the theatre accepted Mr. Barrie's panacea for domestic ills. Soon afterwards Mr. Somerset Maugham produced his play called Penelope. Here again the problem stated was exactly the same. An erring husband desired to pass his time with an attractive lady not his wife. He is permitted to do so, he is encouraged to do so 493
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to his heart's desire. As a result he tires of the extraneous attractions and returns to his domestic hearth. And if the reader will consider the plot of Messrs. Beryl and Cosmo Hamilton's play, he will see that these authors, attacking the same problem, deduce from it the same result in a play of negligible value intended to appeal to the least thinking class of audience'. Thus this idea filtering down from the harsh utterances of an austere playwright who at his most popular was appreciated only by a small intellectual oligarchy in England—this idea has descended through the tender quaintnesses of Mr. Barrie, through the comparative frivolities of Mr. Maugham, writing in his more popular vein. It has become a stage property, it has become one of the texts from which the Dramatist can preach. It means that at any rate in the homes that are reached by the Drama, a nodding acquaintance has been made with the idea that it is best to ride the domestic horse with a light rein, with an easy hand. Sir Arthur Pinero, it may also be observed, handles the problem of domestic relations whilst Mr. Sutro considers the problem of social contacts. So that if in the Drama of to-day there is little subtlety the dramatist has come to realise that in order to interest his public he has to select matter to preach from texts concerned with the Public's interests. It would have been inconceivable that any of the plays we have alluded to could have been produced in Robertsonian days. Sir Arthur Pinero has travelled immensely far in the direction of rendering modern life as it is since he wrote Sweet Lavender. The Mr. Barrie who wrote What Every Woman Knows is a Mr. Barrie much more earnest than the author of The Professor's Love Story. Even Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree has seen fit to give us as his autumn attraction a piece of spectacular atheism, a glorified version of Mr. Shaw's Showing up of Blanco Posnet. And these are only the plays of commerce. IN them, it is arguable, we may see that the commercial drama, poor and unsubtle as it is, is on a higher basis as far as problems of modern life are concerned, than are the commercial novel, the commercial history, the commercial memoir and the commercial socio-political work. For any particular poetry, for any particular originality of outlook, for any particular human sympathy we look to this class of Drama in vain. But it has in some cases a certain seriousness, in other cases a certain pretence of seriousness, that it is encouraging to find in any of the more popular forms of the art of writing. 494
Foreign Affairs
By the Right Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Bt., M . P .
T H E Editor has asked me for an article on the bearing of the Anglo-Russian entente upon the European situation. We may assume that we are supporters of the understanding with Russia. Its conclusion was an essential requirement of M. Delcasse in his first proposal of an Anglo-French agreement, although in the case of Russia details caused delay until long after M. Delcasse's fall, and after a reconstituted Cabinet had been replaced by that of M. Clemenceau. The suggestion of the Editor followed our debate on the Foreign Office Vote, in which he had remarked the repetition in more definite form of misgivings as to the development of the arrangement with Russia already expressed by me in the Foreign Office Debate last year. It was plain in 1908 that, however peaceable our policy, dangerous explanations had been made of it, with an air of much authority, and without contradiction. Yet no warrant can be found in the language of Sir Edward Grey for reckless talk about a new alliance of three Powers. In France, the friends of M. Delcasse went far beyond the mild account given in our Parliament of the combination between the Franco-Russian alliance and Great Britain. It was impossible to deny that the Germans had some ground for supposing an intention to isolate Germany by coalition of the three Powers, joined, for Mediterranean purposes, by Italy, Spain and the new Turkey, while Austria was also a party to a declaration as to the status quo in the Mediterranean, " and the Adriatic." Just before this year's debate in Parliament, the development of Anglo-French policy had come to a sharp issue in a French debate which led to the fall of M. Clemenceau at the hands of M. Delcasse, although it was clear that a majority in the French Chamber approved the opinion expressed by M. Clemenceau at the moment of his defeat—that the policy of " alliance " had been pushed too far and had led to humiliation. In this country we fail to recognise the identity of meaning 495
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attributed to " the new Triplice " in France and Germany. A book by M. Mevil, in which the Delcasse policy is explained, with use of despatches not otherwise made public, and the writings of distinguished Frenchmen who are no followers of M. Delcasse, such as M. Rene Millet, M. Tardieu and the writers of the Debats, the Temps and the Revue des Deux Monies, all lead do the same conclusion as do the official speeches in the German Chamber. The virtual alliance defended by the Delcasse party is thought by most Frenchmen, as by most Germans, to constitute a military alliance of Powers not prepared for a land war, and certain to meet with rebuff. If it is of the nature suggested by the secrets revealed in the discussion, it differs vitally from that to which Parliament has assented. But a popular Minister in a Liberal Government can, if he think it wise, commit the country to a policy more adventurous, in matters not essential, than many of us intend. The Labour Party in 1908 had attacked the visit of the King to the Emperor of Russia on grounds similar to those put forward by them against the reception of the Emperor Nicholas at Cowes in the week that followed the Foreign Office Debate this year. That an arrangement with Russia, welcome for Asian reasons, had become less defensible when applied to Balkan politics, only helped the Labour argument. The risks were already obvious in the Debate of 1908, while this year the situation was more clear but essentially the same. The dangers run had been ended by the collapse of the first common action of the three Powers. Mr. Dillon asked, in a most powerful House of Commons speech, in which Russian internal administration was attacked, as it had been by the Labour Party, this question about our close friendship with that Empire—" And what have you got for it all ? " It is perhaps an exaggeration to declare that the check towards which we were heading straight a year ago when we agreed with Russia to back Servia against Austria, constituted, as Mr. Dillon said, our " greatest humiliation since Austerlitz." But the slap in the face given by Germany to Russia had been expected by competent observers, including even the majority of French statesmen, as well as Dr. Dillon in his capacity as a writer on foreign affairs—none of them, to say the least, hostile to Russia and to an understanding with that Power. Our press is inclined to attribute to the indefensible attitude of an unfriendly Germany the check which it thinks undeserved by British policy. The caution of Sir Edward Grey is so conspicuous in other matters and his admirable expression of 496
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our best national characteristics so perfect in form, that we cannot wonder—given the patriotic wish to support the national position before the world—if the House of Commons has stifled criticism. It is indeed useless to worry about the past, except for the purpose of guarding against a tendency to try and lead a divided Europe in matters not to us of chief importance. That the Turkish Revolution presented features less hopeless than the previous state of things and worthy of some measure of support, may be conceded without committing us to unreserved approval of a military pronunciamento attended by a good deal of hanging. That Servia represents in some degree democratic principles upon the Danube may be equally clear; but it is difficult to defend our expressing for a cynical Europe official horror at the conduct of the Servians in the murder of their king and queen, and equally difficult to justify our joining Russia in a support of Servia, against Austria, too absolute for French concurrence. Moreover, we were unable to give practical effect to our opinion in a matter thought vital by the rulers of the dual Empire—assured as they were of the support of the German ally. We it was who alone seriously backed the Russian inclusion among the bases for the proposed Conference, of territorial compensation to Servia for the annexation by Austria of the occupied provinces. We were told by France, who declined to follow us in this matter, that such territorial compensation would certainly be opposed at Berlin as at Vienna. Exactly one month before the publication by the Agence Havas of the nine " Heads " for the Conference agreed on by the Russian Foreign Minister and Sir Edward Grey during the visit of the former to London, M. Isvolski had been reminded by the Austrian Minister of his own adhesion (in June 1908) to the proposed action of Austria. Our policy was based upon the sound doctrine of public faith as against unilateral breach of treaty. Circumstances, however, were such that few were prepared for a warmth of language thought outside this country to look hypocritical. The union of Eastern Roumelia with Bulgaria had formed the great breach of the Treaty of Berlin in an essential clause. Most Liberals in this country had supported Bulgaria in 1885, and the Conservative Party had accepted, in 1886, the reversal of the Disraeli-Salisbury policy in its main feature. On the recent occasion Sir Edward Grey took for his text the declaration of the Conference of 1871 as to the denunciation by Russia, in 1870, of a clause in the Treaty of 1856. But Russia got her way, and had, indeed, been privately promised that she 497
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would get it before the Conference of London met. In 1886 Russia broke another article of the Treaty, but Lord Rosebery wrote a despatch based on the same doctrine as that adopted in 1908 by Sir Edward Grey. Lord Rosebery concluded his final despatch by the words, " It must be for other Powers to judge how far they can acquiesce in this breach of an international engagement." Russia again succeeded. When Bulgaria swallowed Eastern Roumelia, all the Powers theoretically protested, but nothing came of their joint remonstrance. Sir Edward Grey insisted on the Conference—which he failed to obtain—with the support of colleagues and of the press, couched in even stronger language than is usual in such cases. The words of the Secretary of State himself were less fierce than those of his backers, but they were these, " How can public faith continue, if any Power can suddenly violate international treaties at its good pleasure ? " The Russian Foreign Minister made one speech of the same kind but immediately afterwards announced a discovery that his "predecessors" had tied his hands—as indeed our own hands were tied, and those of Europe. We had not the excuse of Russia who, when Alexander II. was about to go to war with Turkey in 1876, had been forced to purchase the neutrality of Austria by unconditional surrender of Servian hopes in the two provinces. During the war, when her military situation was most dangerous, Russia renewed the bargain. There has been a great deal of controversy about these "Treaties," every detail of which is now known. They are unimportant in face of other revelations, making public the back-stairs history of the Treaty of Berlin. Lord Salisbury himself became acquainted in 1877 with the written agreement between Russia and Austria of January of that year ; it contemplated " annexation" of the provinces. We now know that on June 6, 1878, Lord Salisbury concluded with Austria a similar agreement, although there is reason to think that the real date was May 1, and that the word " annexation" did not appear. A more general form of words was adopted, containing no reservation and promising support to the Austrian policy as regarded the provinces—whatever it might be. Technically, this engagement may have " lapsed " with the signature of the Treaty, but the fact, with its moral consequences, is there. Meantime, Beaconsfield had taken Cyprus from Turkey for ourselves, behind the backs of the Powers, and had given a greater shock to Europe by the form and the secrecy of the proceeding than could possibly attach to recent unilateral action. During the sittings at Berlin, Salisbury had promised Tunis to France ; others, 498
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in order to make mischief, had promised it to Italy. Turkish sovereignty was technically maintained in Cyprus, as it was for thirty years in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and as it is in the Sudan, but at no time did the Turks expect to see these territories again. While France rules Tunis without objection from the Powers, and Egypt has long been occupied by us with their assent, it is not difficult to discern the grounds upon which the Continental charge of having different measure for Austria and for ourselves is based. Criticism of our recent action has come even from supporters of our general policy. We may not agree with his opinions, but we all read Mr. Garvin. He is a friend of the Triple Entente as a prominent part of the European system, and regrets that it is less binding than an alliance, which, however, " would involve risks that Russia is not yet fit to support." Nevertheless this brilliant writer adjures us not to " talk as though the annexation in form of Bosnia and Herzegovina, already completely annexed in substance . . . were flagrant acts of international criminality." Air. Garvin pleads for restoring the old relations of friendship between the dual Empire and this country. Replying to myself in the debate Sir Edward Grey expressed his confidence that the return to better relations would be accomplished, but the official announcement made at Vienna as to a proposed meeting between the Emperor of Austria and our King shows that our advances are, naturally enough, received with a somewhat " injured " politeness. Not only did our warm denunciation of Austrian action, and support of principles which we were unable to enforce, set back the cause of our client, Servia, but our revival of a much damaged sanctity of the public part of the " settlement " of Berlin, weakened us in the expression of national aims. Such for example are execution of Belgian promises in the Congo, and promotion of the eventual union of Crete with Greece. A policy in closer accord with the Liberal attitude during the long years of Liberal opposition before Lord Salisbury's death, and with the Liberal approbation of the improved policy inaugurated by Lord Lansdowne in the present reign, would have prevented the set-back to the cause of Greece, and the weakening of our maintenance of moral obligations imposed on us by the violation of the principles underlying the first creation of the Congo State by our philanthropists. It might have saved us from unnecessary conflict with Austria and rebuff at the hands of Germany. The policy into which M. Isvolski drew us has not only detracted from our influence, as in the Congo 499
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case, but has been damaging to our interest by assisting the popularity in Germany of a naval rivalry such as burdens us with increased expenditure on armaments. The best informed defender of our policy in the Press is of the opinion that a " solemn treaty has been violated and Europe coerced into condoning " the violation, by " the brutal dictation of the central European Powers," but admits that we have been "rudely awakened from Hague illusions" by our failure. Sir Edward Grey, he thinks, in dropping the Conference made a " concession . . . not really a concession, especially as he was preceded in it by M. Isvolski himself. The policy was entirely M. Isvolski's and since he had abandoned it, Sir Edward Grey had no ground for persisting. In softening the formula of the Servian surrender he has done admirably but . . . the only security for public law lies in armaments. . . . The day-dreams of the pacivists are at an end." The result and the moral have strengthened a proposal long popular among non-official Liberals for some measure of control in foreign affairs by a Committee, as recommended by the example of the French Parliament and the Senate of the United States. Neither country has a king, and we know from the life of the German adviser of the Prince Consort, from the letters of Queen Victoria, and from the lecture of Lord Esher, that the wearer of the crown of England plays in Foreign Affairs a part more personal than in other matters is that of the constitutional king. No one can deny that there are advantages and no one can pretend that there are never drawbacks attendant on this system. It is not my purpose to discuss it, but it makes the adoption in this country of control by a Parliamentary Committee difficult, if not impossible. Moreover, there is nothing in our non-federal Empire—eternally condemned by the possession of India to be non-federal—that can in the least compare with the United States, or suggest analogy with the American Senate. In France, the writings of M. Deschanel on behalf of the Foreign Affairs Committee have been most brilliant, but the real power of that body over the Quai d'Orsay is but slight, and, were it otherwise, would only be in accordance with the traditions of Parliamentary France, in which Cabinets have not a tithe of the strength accorded to them in this country. Doubt as to Committee control does not affect my regret that Parliament itself should accept in the name of " continuity " the foreign policy described.
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The Economic Aspects of Poor Law Reform
By Sidney W e b b , L L . B . , L.C.C. T H E question of Poor Law reform no doubt appeals to the general public mainly in its humanitarian and financial aspects. The ordinary citizen wishes to see his destitute fellow creatures provided for with as much kindness and consideration as is compatible with a reasonably low poor-rate. But to the economist, concerned as he is, or should be, with the condition of the nation as a whole, both these aspects have but a secondary importance. The first question which it is his duty to ask about any proposals is, not how far they commend themselves to the hearts or the pockets of individuals, but how far they are likely to increase or decrease the economic efficiency and therefore the material prosperity of the community. It is my purpose in this article to apply this, the ultimate test of the economist, to the proposals contained in the Minority Report of the recent Poor Law Commission. But before we can discuss schemes for the future there are two questions to be considered. First, why do we have a Poor Law at all ? And, second, is the existing Poor Law an efficient instrument for the fulfilment of our purpose, whatever that may be ? The first question cannot be answered by any simple and comprehensive formula. The motives which originally underlay the origin of any long-lived public institution are rarely identical and often have little in common, with those which account for its continued existence; and the Poor Law is no exception to this rule. Different motives have predominated at different periods, and each has left its mark upon the law or practice of public relief ; until to-day it may be said that our reasons for choosing to make public provision for the destitute are as mixed and complicated as the provision itself. The various purposes which seem to have been recognised from time to time may be divided roughly into four classes :
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Purpose (a).—Humanitarianism or religion. Purpose (b).—The prevention of various forms of aggression upon property, such as mendicity and vagrancy, theft and violence, and spasmodic " rebellions of the belly." Purpose (c).—The prevention of the social evils which arise out of the existence, in the midst of a community, of a festering mass of destitution. Purpose (d).—The prevention of the waste of potential productive citizens, (i) by maintaining orphans, (2) by preventing unnecessary sickness and death, and (3) by giving help against starvation in 'cases'of emergency. Up to the sixteenth century, such provision as was made for the poor was organised by the municipalities and the Church ; and contributions for the purpose, although frequently almost universal and virtually compulsory, were supposed to represent a voluntary performance of the Christian duty of charity. But when, in the reign of Elizabeth, statutes were drawn up confirming and extending the current practice and arranging for a regular assessment to be made on all householders, it became clear that —as is not uncommon amongst English institutions—the religious motive had long since been reinforced by the more political consideration of preventing aggression on the part of the poor. During the seventeenth century the religious motive, in the more modern form of humanitarianism, spasmodically reasserted itself alongside of the main purpose. This phase continued throughout the eighteenth century until it culminated in the disastrous laxity which gave rise to the famous Report of the Royal Commission of 1834. During the nineteenth century the growth of national industry and the rise of the great towns changed the whole aspect of the problem, and purposes (c) and (d) assumed a steadily increasing significance. To-day we acknowledge the importance of taking all the objects named into consideration, although perhaps those under (b) have lost much of their practical consequence. We realise that whilst a high state of civilisation involves a steady development of those forms of poor-relief, such as care for the aged, which are ultimately dependent upon purely humanitarian motives, the economic efficiency of the nation demands an ever-increasing attention to the more diffcult questions of preventing the social evils of destitution and the waste of potential citizens. I now pass to the second question as to how far the existing Poor Law fulfils efficiently the mixed purposes which I have described. As regards its humanitarian objects, the Poor Law to-day is undoubtedly more successful on the whole than it has.
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E C O N O M I C ASPECTS OF POOR L A W R E F O R M ever been before. The " deterrent " policy associated with the Report of 1834 is in some Unions still applied to a certain extent to the sick, the aged and the permanently incapacitated —classes for whom, by the way, it was by its authors never avowedly intended. But, generally speaking, there has been a considerable improvement in these directions. The accommodation for the sick, though still hopelessly inadequate, apart from the hospitals provided in a few scores of towns by voluntary and in seven hundred centres by municipal agencies, is more extensive and better in quality than it used to be, especially in large towns ; and the condition of the aged under the Destitution Authority has been somewhat ameliorated through the direct precepts of successive Presidents of the Local Government Board and, more recently, through the indirect effects of the example set by Parliament in the Old Age Pensions Act. But our humanitarian standards are steadily rising, and the practice of the Poor Law, improved though it be, still lags far behind. As regards purpose (b) we find that the existing system is fairly successful—except in the matter of suppressing vagrancy. Here there is nothing to record but total and unqualified failure. From time to time severely deterrent regulations have emptied the casual wards of the particular Unions in which they have been put in force ; and the Boards of Guardians concerned have congratulated themselves on their success in reducing vagrancy. But the only real result has been to drive the vagrants from one Union to another, or else to increase the number of cases of " sleeping out." All the available evidence, indeed, goes to show that in spite of the efforts of the Poor Law Authorities vagrancy is again steadily increasing. The Poor Law Authorities take no account of the " unwarded vagrant," though he may even be the greater danger to the community. Much the same may be said in regard to purpose (c). In the big cities the Poor Law Authority skims off, as it were, and relieves, a certain amount of destitution, but it fails to reach the bottom, or to raise the general level of the lowest classes. It does something to lessen the aggregate amount of la misere, but it allows the depths to remain as deep as ever. In spite of all the expensive organisation that has been created, there still remains, in every large urban area, a mass of unrelieved and largely unmeasured distress, with which the Poor Law Authorities do not even attempt to deal. They do not regard it as any part of their duty to search out the people who need their assistance ; and so a great deal of the worst sort of destitution, the destitution of the more helpless classes, of the children sent hungry to 503
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school, of the sick, of the feeble-minded and of the infirm aged, is allowed to continue unremedied. T o all this social suffering must be added the evils which arise from the existence in all such areas of a large class of able-bodied wastrels who are allowed under the present system to roam at large, living by charity and " pickings," a danger to the public and a perpetual trouble to the police. In the fulfilment of purpose (d) the Poor Law again achieves only a very partial success. Foundlings and children who are wholly orphaned, together with a few others selected to all intents and purposes at random, are well cared for and fairly well trained in Poor Law schools or cottage homes or in the still better " scattered homes " or under the " boarding out " system. But the majority of children for whom the Poor Law Authorities have made themselves responsible—and it must be remembered that even these are only a fraction of the total number of children who are more or less destitute of the necessaries of life—the Boards of Guardians choose to maintain on outdoor relief, which means that they are not looked after at all, but are left to the uncontrolled mercies of parents who are practically never put in a position to do for the children what all children require, and are, unfortunately, too often themselves incapable, neglectful, vicious and positively degenerate. On the medical side the failure to prevent the waste of productive citizens is equally notable. Poor Law medical relief can never legally be given until destitution has set in, that is to say until the breadwinner himself is suffering from disease to such an extent as to be unable to get to his work. With the commoner sorts of disease, such as phthisis, this is equivalent to saying that disease is never treated until it has gone too far to be prevented or even cured. As for the help given against starvation in cases of " sudden or urgent necessity," that also is a failure ; since it always takes the form of a dole of food and does nothing to set a man once more on his feet. It is not generally known that some tens of thousands of cases are dealt with annually in this wasteful and senseless fashion. Thus it is plain that the existing Poor Law system is very far from being an efficient instrument for the fulfilment even of its old purposes. Indeed, its failure to maintain any sort of minimum standard of living and efficiency amongst the poorest classes has been so obvious to every one, that the statesmen of the last few decades have been driven to set up a number of rival authorities to do various parts of the work which the Poor Law Authorities, just because they were Poor Law Authorities, 504
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necessarily failed to accomplish ; and, in particular, to effect purposes (c) and (d), i.e., the purposes which are specially characteristic of the present day. Thus, for the sick there is now everywhere the Public Health Medical Service with its own separate staff of rate-paid doctors and its seven hundred rate-supported hospitals, with their steadily widening circle of diseases and patients, treated and maintained at the public expense without the stigma of pauperism. For the children there is now everywhere the Education Authority with functions successively so enlarged that it now provides, not merely schooling but, for many thousands of children, complete maintenance and medical attendance as well. For the mentally defective there are now separate Lunacy Authorities, for the aged separate Pension Authorities and for the unemployed, in the Distress Committees and now in the Board of Trade, separate Unemployment Authorities. The work of these new authorities, be it understood, is distinct from that of the Poor Law which, pro tanto, it supersedes. All of them deal largely with destitute persons and often with the very same individuals who are being simultaneously relieved by the Guardians. It is scarcely necessary to add that in the absence of any co-ordinating machinery the confusion and financial waste which results from this overlapping of functions is enormous. Every large town now has many children who are simultaneously being provided for both by the Board of Guardians and by the Education Committee. It does not require any very profound study of the failure of the Poor Law and of the comparative success of the newer authorities to discover the cause of the difference. Where the Poor Law has failed is in not preventing the evils which it exists to relieve. The recognised legal duty of the Poor Law Authorities begins and ends with the relief of destitution. There has necessarily been no attempt to prevent the creation of destitution. In the case of the sick, as I have already pointed out, Poor Law medical relief can only be given when destitution has set in ; when the disease is already far advanced ; when it is too late to be effective ; with the result that millions of public money are annually wasted in the prolonged and hopeless treatment of diseases which are known to be preventable, or at least easily curable, if taken in their early stages. Moreover, when the Poor Law Authority has relieved the destitution of any individual its duty is at an end. It does nothing to prevent the spread of the disease amongst other members of the family, or even its recurrence in the individual himself. The same may be said in regard to the moral defects of the III 505 2K
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able-bodied. The Poor Law system fails with them simply because mere relief given only when destitution has set in, whether given willingly or grudgingly, can never do anything to save the recipient from that gradual decay of the mental and moral fibres which seems to be the gravest accompanying feature of unemployment and destitution. In the system of maintaining children upon outdoor relief without any supervision of their environment, we have another example of this same defect of principle. Having once granted a sum of money to " relieve the destitution " of the children, the Guardians consider their duty to be at an end : they do not trouble to think of what is happening to the child, and they make little or no effort to see that the public funds are not being spent in the mere manufacture of future paupers. What is wanted then, in the view of the Minority Commissioners, is a reconsideration of the whole problem and a restatement of the purposes of our public provision—through whatever authorities it may be made—in terms of national economic efficiency. Humanitarian considerations as such may safely be subordinated, since if we seek the economic well-being of the nation we shall necessarily, as I hope to show, be promoting the physical and moral well-being of each individual in every sense which comes within the scope of this article. Omitting, therefore, the question of the general distribution of wealth, we may for the moment consider the nation simply as a number of associated industrial units whose highest good lies in the achievement of their maximum productive capacity. Regarding the problem in this light, we can scarcely avoid the conclusion that, even if the existing system of public provision for the necessitous were so reformed as to do away with the overlapping functions of different authorities, the £20,000,000 which is spent annually by the Poor Law Authorities would still be almost wholly wasted—except just in so far as it satisfies the undiscriminating humanitarian sentiments of the well-to-do— for nothing is really achieved by money devoted to the mere relief of destitution but the prolongation of life in a number of human carcases, which are demonstrably not being put to any economic use. From the point of view of national economic efficiency, such expenditure only serves to perpetuate a waste of human material. Now the question arises, Upon what does the productive capacity of a nation depend ? Different economists might use different forms of words, but all who are acquainted with the ascertained facts of modern industry would agree that productive 506
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capacity depends to a very large extent upon the individual efficiency of the co-operating human units. The well-known paradox that high wages and moderate hours of labour are the surest factors of industrial success is explained by the fact that men who are well paid and who are not overworked, not only produce more than those who are less happily situated, but actually produce more in proportion to the cost of their labour. Sweated industries may be temporarily and locally successful from the point of view of profit-making, but in the long run they cannot hold their own against more highly organised and highly paid industries, unless they are directly or indirectly subsidised by the community through the poor-rates, through private charity, through the help of relations of the workers or in some other way. Consider, for example, the most successful of all our industries the Lancashire cotton manufacture. Here we find the workers so closely and completely organised that the employers have been steadily forced to pay higher and higher wages and to grant shorter and shorter hours. Every avenue which might have led to larger profits has been closed, except those which involved in one way or another increased efficiency on the fart of the operatives or of the managers. Consequently, there has been the keenest competition amongst employers to secure the services of the best workers, the most efficient managers and the newest machinery, with the result that the Lancashire cotton factories dominate the industry throughout the world, beating in their own markets even those nations which produce the raw cotton. Nothing indeed is more remarkable in the development of British industry during the last fifty years than the enormous increase in our industrial statistics in the proportion occupied by those industries in which the highest conditions of employment and consequently the greatest individual skill and efficiency prevail. The lesson of the practical man, as it is that of economic theory, is that in order to secure the greatest expansion of our national industry as a whole we must increase the efficiency of our productive units. The main obstacle to more rapid industrial expansion to-day is not, as some people imagine, the lack of demand for the finished product (because the finished product is itself the measure of the effective demand and therefore grows with it), but the lack of competence in the workers in all grades. As a matter of fact, even in the times of the greatest distress from unemployment, there is, as the experience of the London labour exchanges has once more shown, always an unsatisfied demand for skilled labour of one sort or another. " The capacity 507
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of the industrial system to absorb fresh labour," says Mr. Beveridge, " is no doubt far from exhausted, but this capacity depends entirely upon the labour being of a sort to be absorbed, that is to say, being suited or able to become suited to the particular developments of the time." Hence from an economic point of view the main object of our public provision should be to maintain and increase the supply of competent and adaptable workers by hand and by brain, and to stop, as far as possible, whatever is now reducing human beings to demoralisation and inefficiency. As destitution itself is one of the potent and dangerous causes of demoralisation and inefficiency, we must give up all idea of "relieving" it, and definitely aim at preventing it. This will involve the abandonment of the old Poor Law ideal of " deterring " every one from applying for help, and the substitution for it of a policy of " searching out " every one who is suffering from anything detrimental to his efficiency, in order to take him in hand and effect the changes in him and in his environment which will promote his mental and physical health. In a word preventive treatment must take the place of meagre palliatives. Our first aim must be to minimise individual inefficiency with regard to the infants and the children. We must ensure, as far as the community can do so, that no individual citizen grows up, or is allowed to sink, below current physical and mental standards. This involves the public provision of education in its widest sense. It is not enough to insist merely on schooling. We must definitely accept responsibility as a community for seeing that no child reaches maturity untrained in body and mind to perform a useful function in the world. In this matter there is, as we now see, no alternative to collective responsibility if the end is to be attained. Simultaneously we must maintain and improve the public health, and adopt all possible methods of reducing sickness or any other physical or mental inefficiency to a minimum, in order to lessen the drain upon the national productivity which every day's ill-health involves. Our second aim must be to maximise individual opportunity, that is to say to do away, as far as possible, with everything that obstructs the continuous development of industrial productivity. In the labour market to-day there is not merely a qualitative maladjustment between demand and supply but also a local and temporal maladjustment. In many cases the supply may be there, but it does not happen to coincide in time or in place with the demand, and the consequence is a great deal of unnecessary 508
E C O N O M I C ASPECTS OF POOR L A W R E F O R M friction and delay, which involves the maintenance of unnecessarily large reserves of unemployed workers. If the labour market were properly organised this friction might be largely if not entirely done away with, so that no work would remain undone whilst there was a man out of employment capable of doing it. Our third aim must be to develope to its utmost limit the faculty and desire of each individual to fulfil his proper function in the State. The desire to be an efficient citizen, or in other words, the possession of high social character, is something which can never, in a strict sense, be given from without. But the community may open up to each the way to achieving it for himself. Example is potent, and giving public honour and esteem to the right people. Environment has a very great deal to do with the formation of the social virtues and environment is eminently controllable. If we cannot make the horse drink we can at least take him to the water. Every year we are learning more and more how the State as a whole may exercise a real control over local bodies and over individuals, without a mere penal compulsion and without interfering with their final independence of choice. It is simply a question of making that course which you wish to see adopted appear to the individual or to the local authority as the line of least resistance. The community must see to it in the first place that the desirable opportunity is really afforded, and then that the course to be pursued is made the most eligible by " weighting the alternatives." Now, bearing in mind this restatement of the purpose of public provision, let us examine the proposals for reform put forward by the Minority Commissioners. Briefly, the Minority scheme consists in the abolition of the Poor Law and of the Boards of Guardians, and the distribution of their duties amongst the various new authorities mentioned above which have been created during the past few decades and which have already encroached extensively upon the sphere of the Destitution Authority. These new authorities (with the exception of the new National Authority for the able-bodied unemployed) are actually all committees of the County and County Borough Councils, a fortunate circumstance which will greatly facilitate the effective co-ordination of their different functions. In the case of the able-bodied paupers, the unemployed and the vagrants, it is proposed to set up an altogether new authority of national scope under a special department of the Central Government, of which the beginning is seen in the National Labour Exchange which Mr. Winston Churchill has started. 509
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The most important general result which may be expected to flow from these administrative changes is the adoption of the principle of preventing destitution by arresting the operation of its several causes. The newer authorities—the Local Education Authority, the Local Health Authority, the Local Lunacy Authority, the Local Pension Authority and the Unemployment Authority—have all been created for special purposes and have never had anything to do with the relief of destitution as such. Their duty has been to look after the education of the children, or the well-being of the aged or the feeble-minded, or the general health of the community, as the case may be, and to press their services upon all who need them, with a single eye to the efficiency of their particular branch of public provision. They have not been troubled with any of those difficult problems which are involved in the application of the principles of " deterrence " and " less eligibility " ; and consequently they have developed a tradition and a technique of their own which are far better adapted for the purpose of searching out the various forms of individual inefficiency and of arresting the operation of their several causes than those of the more old-fashioned Poor Law, which aimed merely at relief. But, to come to greater detail, let us deal first with the proposals of the Minority Commissioners relating to the necessary provision for the " non-combatants " ; for birth and infancy, for the children, the sick, the aged, and the feeble-minded. Of these the first is perhaps the most important, for it is clear that a community which neglects to provide a good environment for its future members during their earliest years cannot hope to secure a maximum of efficiency later on. The question to be decided is whether necessitous expectant mothers should be dealt with by an authority whose main object is to reduce the volume of pauperism or by an authority whose only concern is to diminish infantile mortality by securing favourable conditions for the mother and her child. At present the two public authorities work side by side upon diametrically opposite principles, without any demarcation of their respective spheres and without any precautions against overlapping. One of them will clearly have to go. The Minority policy is to retain the one whose work reacts most favourably upon the public health. In the case of the children the principle is the same. The Minority Commissioners hold the view that it is more economical in the long run to secure as far as possible the efficiency of the child than to endeavour to penalise the defaulting parent at the child's expense. Consequently they propose that the offspring
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of the pauper should be placed under the supervision of the authority which is specially skilled in the treatment and upbringing of children, not as paupers but as children and as future citizens. After all, sound and healthy children are the greatest economic asset a nation can possess, and those children who happen to be directly dependent upon public provision should be regarded, not as a burden at all, but as a valuable opportunity for rearing really efficient citizens. In regard to the sick there is again a need for a new classification. The fundamental thing about a sick man who is also destitute, is not his destitution but his sickness—the former being indeed often merely an incidental consequence of the latter —and common sense and economy alike demand that he should be dealt with, in the first instance at all events, not by an authority specialising on the subject of relieving destitution but by an authority specialising on the subject of preventing and curing disease. The Minority Report therefore proposes that the whole of the public provision for the sick should be undertaken by the Public Health Authority. If we really wish to increase the efficiency of our industrial units we must find means of promoting the universal maintenance of a national minimum of health, and this will involve not only such general preventive measures as good sanitation and the provision of municipal hospitals for certain specific diseases, but a definite policy of searching out diseases of all sorts, quite irrespective of the destitution or otherwise of the individual sufferers, in order to ensure that no case goes without treatment at the earliest possible stage. In such a matter, indeed, the category of destitution is inappropriate and misleading, and its abolition must be regarded as a sine qua non of any further advance in the improvement of public health. From the point of view which I am specially concerned with in this article, all sickness represents so much economic inefficiency. Every day's ill-health of any productive worker is a national loss. I t " pays " us as a nation to use every means in our power to prevent the occurrence of disease of any kind, and where that is impracticable, to spare no reasonable expense in providing such treatment as will bring the worker back as rapidly as possible into a condition of indusrial fitness. If I owned all England as a slave farm, such a course would plainly be the economical one for me. Whether the cost of the treatment is eventually to be borne by the worker in his individual capacity as consumer, or in his corporate capacity as tax-payer, is an altogether secondary question which can be decided at a later stage. 511
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As for those who inevitably fall below the minimum of physical and mental efficiency, the insane, the feeble-minded and the permanently incapacitated, the only reasonable policy —since we are debarred by humanitarian considerations from disposing of them once and for all in the lethal chamber—is to segregate them from the rest of the community, to give them a reasonably comfortable life, and to set them to work to produce what they can for their own consumption. They have to be provided for in some way by the community, and of all possible ways the most ruinous economically is to allow them to remain at large and to compete as wage-earners for situations in the industrial organisation. The next worst is to allow them to drag down other individuals upon whom they happen to be legally dependent, and who might otherwise maintain a satisfactory level of existence. The same reasoning applies to the aged as well as to the permanent weaklings. The economist will accept all such in a broad spirit as a necessary burden upon the community, and will seek only so to distribute the burden as to minimise its pressure on the individual citizens. A satisfactory settlement of this problem is from the point of view of industrial efficiency more urgent than many people realise ; for a whole series of much-needed reforms, such as the establishment of a national minimum wage and the decasualisation of casual labour, involve the permanent elimination of a number of the unfit, and will therefore inevitably be " hung u p " by humanitarian considerations until we have some better means of provision than the existing Poor Law for those unfortunates who will be displaced. I now come to the question of the active workers themselves who already occupy places in the nation's industry. How will the proposals of the Minority Commissioners affect the efficiency of these ? Workers belonging to the higher and better organised grades of industry do not of course come much within the scope of the sort of public provision which we are now considering, except in so far as they suffer from occasional periods of shortage of employment, for which they have from one cause or another failed to make provision. In general the purpose of these proposals is to raise the level of all the lower grades up to a certain minimum of efficiency. The labour market to-day is glutted in most branches with an excess of inefficient and more or less unemployable workers. The causes of this are no doubt various, but there are one or two special causes which stand out as by far the most important and the most far-reaching in their results. The first is boy and girl
512
E C O N O M I C ASPECTS OF POOR L A W R E F O R M labour. Formerly the State saw to it that every boy was properly put to a trade. Nowadays hundreds of thousands of youths are allowed to grow up without any definite industrial training. As soon as they leave school they take any employment that offers, at wages appropriate to their age, and such employment is usually quite uneducative. They may become messenger boys or newspaper sellers or van boys, or they may obtain situations in productive industry which do not require any special skill or strength, such as the minding of various kinds of machines. Whatever the employment may be there is an overwhelming probability that when they reach man's estate, and demand a man's wages, they will be turned adrift with no qualifications for anything except unskilled manual labour. Frequent spells of idleness decrease still more their fitness for any sort of employment and in periods of industrial depression they quickly become unemployable. The Minority Commissioners regarded this perpetual recruitment of the unemployable from the youth of the nation as " perhaps the gravest of all the grave facts which the Commission has laid bare." They therefore propose " an amendment of the Factory Acts providing that no child shall be employed at all below the age of fifteen ; that no young person under eighteen shall be employed for more than thirty hours a week ; and that all young persons so employed shall be required to attend for thirty hours per week at suitable trade schools to be maintained by the Local Education Authorities." There is no need to enlarge upon the effect which this enforcement of a national minimum of training would have upon the efficiency of our future industrial units. The improvement is as inevitable as it would be immense. But an even more important factor in the creation and perpetuation of industrial inefficiency is to be found in the " under-employment " which prevails over a large section of our national industry. This " under-employment," or chronic deficiency of employment, arises in various ways. It may be due to the periodic variations in seasonal trades ; or to the shifting nature of the work in such trades as building and the carrying out of public works, where a man may have to tramp from town to town in search of work that is waiting for him ; * or it may be due to the way in which the labour is actually engaged, as in the loading and unloading of ships in the large
* In these trades a certain proportion of the men are always on tramp, and consequently a reserve of labour has to be maintained which is unnecessarily large in proportion to the total number who can ever be employed at one time
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docks of Liverpool or London. But the effect upon the individual is the same. Periodic spells of idleness, whether they occur about every other day as in the case of the docker, or whether they are only for a few weeks or a few months in the year, inevitably involve the industrial demoralisation of the individuals affected. If proof of this were needed there is ample to be seen in the reports of Distress Committees all over the country. Everywhere the same thing is found, that an overwhelming proportion of the applicants for help are normally employed as casual labourers. The Poor Law Commissioners of 1834 wrote that " whole branches of manufacture may follow the course not of coal-mines or streams, but of pauperism." To-day we may say that pauperism follows the course of casual labour* But in addition to the evil effects which the system of casual labour has upon the industrial character of the individual worker we must reckon the waste involved in the maintenance of unnecessarily large reserves of labour. For if we have—as is roughly the case with dock labour in Liverpool—15,000 men competing for 10,000 jobs and all of them getting only four days work per week, then clearly it would be possible with proper organisation to set 5000 men free for other productive work. And if we arrange, as we can arrange, for the absorption of these 5000 men in productive industries, the change would represent a clear economic gain to the community, in addition to its effects in preventing individual demoralisation. I have not space here to describe the Minority proposals for the " decasualisation of casual labour," and I can only say that, once we have an adequate system of Labour Exchanges, the problem will present no administrative difficulties beyond that of absorbing or providing for the surplus labour which will then stand revealed. As for the under-employment that is due to seasonal fluctuations in some trades and to the leakage between successive jobs in others, this also will be remediable through the National Labour Exchange. The Commissioners found reason to suppose that the total volume of employment in all the trades put together is fairly constant throughout the year ; and that it would be quite possible by a deliberate and systematic dove-tailing of one with another—again by the agency of the Labour Exchange—to secure for the labourers who were employed at all regular employment the whole year round.
* In this connection it is significant that, as has often been observed, there is a distinct tendency for the low-grade sweated women's industries to get established in districts where casual labour for men is rife. The surest way of dealing with these parasitic industries is to put a stop to the under-employment of husbands and fathers.
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The most essential and characteristic part of the Minority proposals in regard to unemployment, however, is that which deals with the question of provision for the surplus, for those workers for whom the Labour Exchanges can find no employment. Hitherto nothing has been tried or suggested better than Relief Works ; and this the Minority Commissioners emphatically condemn, not only as expensive and wasteful, but as being almost as damaging as the system of casual labour itself, in their effects upon the morale of the workers. It is therefore proposed that we should give up pretending to set the unemployed to work, and that, when the National Labour Exchange can find no situation for a man, we should utilise his enforced leisure in a course of physical and technical training. This training—useful if only in keeping the men from demoralising idleness—would be designed to increase their industrial efficiency generally and where necessary to fit them for new occupations. This proposal is of vast and far-reaching importance, for not only will it obviate the demoralisation caused by unemployment, but it will make it possible for the State to ensure a steadily rising level of individual efficiency throughout the whole of our national industry. Occasional periods of enforced idleness during depressions of trade will then be turned to the best possible account, and may even have a positive value by actually improving the men and therefore increasing the rate of future industrial expansion. Moreover—and this is in some respects the most important consideration—this systematic provision for all those who are unemployed will, for the first time, enable us to enforce parental responsibility. At present we do not enforce it at all. A man has only to say he is out of work, and no magistrate will convict him for failing to maintain his children. Under the minority scheme, every such man can be punished, for the magistrate will know that the neglect is wilful. Indeed a whole vista of possibilities is opened—but I have not space to enter it. There are other ways that might be mentioned in which the proposals of the Minority Commissioners may be expected to increase theeconomic efficiency of the nation. The economist cannot help believing, though the Commissioners think it not proved, that outdoor relief given to working widows with families acts as a " rate in aid of wages," and possibly even as a bounty in favour of uneconomical modes of production. In so far as this is so, the proposal that outdoor relief, when it is granted at all, shall always be adequate for subsistence and that the recipients shall not be allowed to engage in industry to the detriment of their children, will do much to prevent the misapplication of 515
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public funds. I might go on multiplying instances, but I think I have said enough to justify the Minority proposals, at least as regards their effects upon the economic efficiency of the nation. In conclusion I would refer very shortly to the question of the cost of the proposed changes. In a certain sense this question is not relevant to our purpose ; for, provided we are satisfied that every portion of our expenditure is justified in itself, that is to say, is balanced by an equivalent economic gain to the community, the total sum expended is, from the standpoint of the economist as from that of the business man, not material. But the political point of view has also to be considered and I will therefore say that there is no reason to suppose that the gross cost of all the Minority Report proposals will be formidable ; certainly not as considerable as that involved in the building of four " Dreadnoughts " or the granting of Old Age Pensions. Against this gross cost is to be set the saving that will be effected by the cessation of the absurd and extravagant duplication of services which the present system involves. Moreover, as with the Old Age Pensions Act, there will be a corresponding saving to individuals in all sorts of ways. All the persons for whom the Minority Report proposes to make systematic and efficient public provision are already being maintained by the community, for the most part out of public funds, but unsystematically and wastefully, and for the rest, out of the earnings of other individuals upon whom they prey. At present, whilst we incur the cost of maintaining our beggars, our vagrants, our unemployed, our lunatics, our inebriates, our feeble-minded, our patients ill with preventable diseases, our children growing up neglected and untrained, we let matters drift in such a way that we perpetuate and increase the whole army of these parasites, and take only very slight and unco-ordinated action to prevent the creation of new masses of destitution. Is it likely that the systematic adoption of a policy of searching out and preventing the oncoming of destitution, by dealing with every case in its most incipient stage—which is the proposal of the Minority Report and which no Poor Law, just because it is a Poor Law, can possibly do—could ever be so costly to the nation, and so destructive of its productive efficiency, as our present methods of so-called " relief " ?
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By M . P . T H E year 1909 will be memorable for much in achievement, it will be more memorable for much in beginnings. A series of social measures will be revealing the beginnings of various reforms, which may result in consequences to-day almost incalculable. There has been passed this summer, for example, a Bill for the regulation of the wages of labour by the State in certain trades. At present this is confined to two or three samples chosen from amongst the most conspicuously sweated industries. Yet the principle is established, and for the first time. Once established, no one with authority can set any bound to its extension. Again, the Labour Exchanges Bill appears but as a small measure inaugurating State-managed depots to encourage the fluidity of labour. But, confessedly, these labour exchanges, established in a closely connected network throughout the whole of the country, are destined to become not only centres of communication between the central Government Department on the one hand and the private demand for labour or for employment on the other, but also centres through which by schemes of insurance or the provision of State-organised work some large solution may be found for the whole problem of the workless labourer in the modern city. And the third, and perhaps most important of these three beginnings of schemes of great consequence, is the Bill for " the economic development of the United Kingdom " which has been presented by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in connection with the Budget of the year. This Development Bill has been much changed in Committee, and each change has been for the good. It now creates machinery for the encouragement of new ideas, and provides funds for their realisation. It sets up a body of Development Commissioners, five in number, who are to be altogether independent of the Executive or the Government of the day. Some will be paid, some unpaid, but all of them will be men of ability and renown ;—the best men the Government can persuade to embark 517
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upon such a tremendous and reponsible work. T h e function of this commission will be, in conjunction with any officers it may choose to employ, to examine every kind of scheme which may be submitted to it, and indeed, if it choose, to initiate schemes of its own, which may be carried out or subsidised by the Government. No suggestion, however fantastic, for the increasing of the productivity of this country, but will receive fair trial and consideration. The procedure is made as simple as possible. Any one who chooses can send any scheme, modest or grandiose, to the Treasury. Such schemes, minuted and criticised by the Government departments concerned in their particular kind of work, will be sent on to the Commissioners. T h e Commissioners may select from such schemes any which they think practicable and desirable, and the schemes will then be sanctioned by the Treasury and carried out in accordance with the Commissioners' demands. For these purposes Parliament has voted half a million of money for each of the next five years. In addition to this free grant, Parliament may from time to time vote further sums of money for these development schemes. A second and partially separate section of the Development Bill deals with the question of roads and locomotion. A separate Road Board, not to be confused with the Development Commission, will be charged with the duty of improving the roads which at present exist and of making new roads where new roads seem to be required. They will receive for funds the product of the motor taxes: to-day some £600,000 a year. Their duty will be, not merely to deal with improvements desired by the motor industry, but with the improvements generally required for the convenience of the whole public. The idea originally in the Bill of separate motor roads with a fine inflicted on other forms of traffic, has disappeared. The new roads will be public highways subject to the same conditions and restrictions as the old, the only difference being that, while in the case of the old roads subsidies will be given to the local authorities for improvements and the roads will still as public highways be maintained by the Highway Authorities; in the case of the new the maintenance will be in the hands of the new Road Board itself. A special provision in connection with this Road Board is of particular interest. In the case of land required for national development, whether it be for afforestation, the making of canals, the reclaiming of waste land or marsh land, or the provision of small holdings and experimental farms, a cheap and expeditious method is provided for compulsory acquisition of the land required. In the case of the Road Board, it is decreed that, 518
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if it so desires, the Board shall have the power of compulsorily purchasing strips of land, each an eighth of a mile wide, on either side of the new road. The land will be thus bought at agricultural price, and any increment which may be produced by the fact that a road runs through it, and frontages to that road increase its value, will go straight into the pockets of a public authority. Unearned increment—in the form of betterment—will at once begin to form a credit side to the account. Such in outline is the new scheme in its first tentative beginning. Two questions immediately arise. The first is, What kind of enterprise is to be undertaken by this new Development Commission in connection with a country of such old and settled civilisation, in which it might be thought that all possible avenues of profitable enterprise had been exhausted ? The second is, How far it is probable, and if probable, desirable, that this extension of State action should be encouraged from these ventures on a comparatively small scale into a large system of Statesubsidised or State-organised industry ? The answer to the first question is an easy one. Despite the enormous wealth of this country, and perhaps as a consequence of that wealth—acquired yesterday, largely squandered to-day— England has fallen far behind the other continental countries and most of its rivals in some of the oldest and most essential of national concerns. The whole agricultural system of England belongs to a time long gone by. Countries like France and Southern Germany, mainly dependent upon agriculture for the existence of their peasant populations, found themselves challenged, as this country has been challenged, by the great fall in prices and the competition from new lands beyond the sea. They met the challenge because, without meeting it, they would have perished. The old systems of laborious independent effort, of unscientific adherence to archaic methods, all the complete unconcern of the State to what was passing in the village, have here gone. By sedulous attention to scientific schemes of improvement, by elaboration of scientific research, and above all by that co-operation which combines the individual energy of the individual owner with all the advantages of trade upon a large scale, those countries are proving themselves successful competitors in the struggle for existence. In large areas, for example, of Wurtemberg or Bavaria, the whole region is one large garden; in which the peasant owning his own land, and intertwining work in the fields in the summer with work at cottage industries in the winter, has attained a standard of comfort for which the English agricultural labourer 519
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looks in vain. Rural England—and this is the crux of the matter —rural England, apart from certain specially favoured areas, has fallen into desolation and solitude. That desolation is hidden by the fact that the wealth of the cities and the wealth sucked in from abroad, is being largely spent throughout the countryside in an enormous apparatus of pleasure. Gardeners and gamekeepers, country houses from which money flows freely into the villages, the new sport of motoring, which brings funds to hotels and to village tradesmen, cloaks and conceals that hastening to decay. Ireland, having no towns and a peasant population, having also no landlords, or but few of them, spending money in Ireland—has been faced with a similar destruction. And Ireland has found fresh life just in that very kind of development which this Bill seeks to provide. The depopulation of rural England has been as deplorable and widespread as the depopulation of rural Ireland. But in England the labourer has gone to the towns ; in Ireland he has gone to America. The old system of tripartite farming, with the beneficent landlord at the top, the farmer of from 50 to 1000 acres at the middle, and the labourer with 12s. or 14s. a week at the base, is crumbling into fragments. Unless some new system replaces it, rural England will become a desert, save for those regions where wealthy men seek to regain their lost health in areas convenient for sport and pleasure. It is for the initiation of effort to prevent so mournful a calamity that this development fund is inaugurated. There are indications in the Bill of some of the methods which the Commission may consider and perhaps convert into reality. There is a free hand given in the Bill for the consideration or the devising of any other methods which may seem to the Commissioners good. Subsidies for agricultural education, the establishment of places for agricultural research, the provision of small holdings, and the gathering together of the small holders in co-operative societies or Land banks, with instructions as to the making and the marketing of produce, form one side of it. The afforestation of the waste lands of this country in the establishment of a national system of forestry which is common to all the nations of Europe except England, and which no individual owner can provide, is another. The improvement of the means of transport through light railways, canals and inland navigation, is a third. The creation of rural industries, which may provide work for those periods of the year when agriculture is impossible in village life, is a fourth. It may be that the process of degeneration has gone too far, that the labourers under no conditions will remain in the country, and that England is destined henceforth to be nothing but a city
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of smoky towns ; but it is impossible for any patriot to accept such a conclusion without at least a struggle for better things. This Government for the first time in history provides a machine for a rural regeneration. The question of the roads is a separate and peculiar problem. No one who is familiar with the great national highways of France, which resemble nothing so much as the Roman roads of tradition, but is conscious of the loss which this country sustains through the twisted, picturesque, inefficient means of communication in our own land. The establishment of a central Board means a new step in the history of locomotion. For the first time it will be possible to survey the problem of transit in this country as a whole ; for the first time to act with sufficient funds upon such a survey. A cry has been raised against this particular proposal on the ground that it is merely designed to aid the motorist to pursue his frantic efforts in the destruction of rural amenity. But whatever may be the fate of the motorist—best hated of all figures in rural England—no one who is cognisant of modern mechanical developments but is convinced that the motor has come to stay. Many of the difficulties which are now choking agricultural development in this country may find remedy in the application of mechanical traction to industrial purposes. The strangling process by which the railways have impeded the cheap and rapid passage of produce from the farm to the city market may be challenged by some forms of rural transit directly proceeding along new great highways and independent of all the heart-breaking expense and delay through the present complicated railway system. The Spectator, indeed, has already discovered a nefarious purpose in the Bill. It foresees the cutting of great avenues of competition with the railways in the new motor roads deliberately designed to reduce their capital value through such competition with a view to nationalisation. Mr. H. G. Wells, most secure of all prophets, whose fantasies can only be criticised because almost before they are published in cheap editions they have become part of the normal condition of mankind, pictures in the days to come the great " Eademite " roads along which at rates varying from fifty to one hundred miles an hour the daily supply of the enormous city is sucked up from the countryside. Mr. Lloyd George may have had some such vision in his mind when he designed that the new roads provided by the Road Board would be in the main confined to mechanical traction freed from the present speed limit. In doing so he was in advance of his time, which still looks upon the violation of such a legal limitation as representing merely the reckless enjoyIII 521 2L
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ment of rich men. But few people can have any doubt, who are watching the signs of the time, that these first feeble beginnings— in the horrors of the motor omnibus or the traction lorries which make hideous the streets of the suburbs—are destined to develope into methods of easy, smooth and rapid transit, which may revolutionise the whole social condition of England's deserted fields and overcrowded cities. Beyond these specific proposals there are indications of further advance and experiment, even in that scientific research into new processes of industry apart from agriculture, in which we are so woefully behind our great trade competitors. Tariff Reform, whatever mischief its propaganda may have accomplished, has at least awakened people to the conception of national trade competitions as distinct from the competitions of the individual. And it is the nation coming to the assistance of the individual by a free gift, to those who have the energy and enterprise to use it, of whatever results it may obtain in its laboratories and experimental stations, which is finding expression in this new great scheme of national development. The second question is a more difficult one to answer. It is a question which stands confronting all socialistic experiment, which offers perhaps the greatest obstacle to-day to the complete approval of the socialistic State by many who are largely sympathetic to its objects and claims. The more superficial question of direct corruption has been met by the changes which have taken place in the Bill. Undoubtedly in its original form, where the Executive was merely provided with an Advisory Committee whose recommendations it could set aside at its pleasure, there were opportunities and possibilities open for the forging of that great State system of bribes and doles which has vitiated the political life of other lands. T h e pressure upon the individual Member of Parliament is so great when any public money is going that it is doubtful whether the whole purpose of development might not have been swept aside before the demands of each separate section of the various parts of the country to receive some of this money—part of which it could claim to have contributed through the taxes—for special and futile Relief Works within its own district. And beyond the pressure of the individual, there was the possibility of any Government in power utilising this large and undoubtedly increasing source of revenue in promises made at critical times to those who required such a support in order to obtain election. The value which is attributed in such diverse civilisations as those of France or Australia by any Party to the fact of " being in power when
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the election comes " is some kind of an indication that promises made by those who are supporting the Government of direct financial aid in the constituencies are reckoned as being of substantial value. This particular difficulty, however, would seem to have been almost completely removed by the relegation of the choice of objects and purposes in loan or free grant to an independent body of Commissioners uncontrolled by the Executive. But a problem still remains which can only be solved in actual practice, and upon whose right solution much of the future depends. The Development Bill, if it means anything at all, will mean a large extension of State employment. It will mean many new officials ; it will mean many new employees. It designs, indeed, deliberately to consider in its organisations the state of the labour market at the time when any particular public works are undertaken, so that it may in indirect, but nevertheless substantial, fashion adjust the inequalities of private industry by public work just when work is especially needed. Can the State obtain that severe and arduous service which alone can render possible the continuance of the industrial supremacy of this country f And will it be able to attract, by what recompense it can offer, just those ambitious and alert men without whose guiding and driving force no particular industry can long survive ? There is a regrettable but pretty general recognition that in (for example) the work which was given under the Works Committee of the London County Council, a slow imperceptible but steady slipping down of labour energy was noticeable. The men on the one hand had come to the half-conscious conclusion that public work for a public authority did not demand from them all the energy which private work demanded. And—on the other—those who were supervising them found it difficult to exact, in face of the possibilities of complaint, what they would have exacted, with the ordinary right of dismissal, outside. It is again a disquieting and not altogether hopeful sign to see how, as at the present, so many thousands of applicants rush headlong into request for meanly paid Government appointments, in desire apparently for that security of tenure and certain ultimate pension which the State alone can give. The bulk of them seem to be in the position in which they prefer small guaranteed certainties to the larger adventures outside ; and the men who prefer the small certainties are not the men who can make really successful large communal effort. In America every man of twenty-one intends to be a Rockefeller or a Carnegie before forty, and the offer of a small State pension for life for regular, and not too laborious, effort would be rejected by most of them 523
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with scorn. It may be that in this furious competition for a purely monetary ideal a nation which has gained the whole world is in danger of losing its own soul; and, having no time for anything but fulfilment of the ambition for commercial expansion, has pushed aside the affections, artistic delights, little pleasures and religious devotions which make up a fully completed humanity. In a nation like France, on the other hand, we see the other extreme. The ambition of every mother in every tiny town is that her son may obtain some Government appointment. The result is a sense of settling down in life instead of a sense of furious struggle, with the difficulties of expanding family met by deliberate refusal of children, which results in a declining population. England seems walking at the moment between these two systems. The problem is more one of trade than of morality. The individual to-day retains wealth on inherited fortunes built up by his forefathers. The making of fortunes has been made largely by men of industrial genius and often reckless adventure : who have sought reward in the building up of a great industry and have obtained it in so many millions of pounds at the end. It is easy to demonstrate that this is not the method of artistic achievement nor of ethical advance. The great French chemist Berthelot, offered many millions of francs for the patent of one of his discoveries, proudly replied that all who desired might use i t ; " We work only for honour in the laboratories of France." Any work which has human and ethical significance—such as that of the State Educational inspectors, or the officials of the central departments—obtains to-day without difficulty an output of effort and devotion altogether incommensurate with the salary supplied. Can such effort and devotion be assured when the work is purely in the region of " business "—the reclaiming of waste lands, the planting of trees, the inauguration of State industrial experiment ? Time alone can reveal. The system inaugurated by the Development Bill will advance tentatively and experimentally, and may not for fifty or one hundred years come to find itself enrolling in its service any substantial proportion of the population of the Kingdom. But in these first experiments,—if such a system is to develope,— it will be exceedingly necessary for its advocates to demonstrate that work with the nation as employer shall be no less efficient and honest than work for the individual, and that the State will be able to attract to its services all that ardour, intellectual enterprise and mental energy which hitherto have found expression in the building up of the great private trade organisations by their " captains of industry." 524
T h e Present Moment in Spain
By William T. Goode
AFTER Madrid, Barcelona. We had heard that to go there was to put one's head into a hornets' nest, and in Madrid the report ran that at Zaragoza special relays of the Guardia Civile were swooping down on the trains, hustling and searching the passengers and inspecting their luggage. Here in Barcelona we can laugh at all that. The Ramblas, the great central promenades, are crowded with strollers ; the " Flores " as active and as sweet as ever with the scent of flowers ; the trams fly about in all directions as aforetime ; ox-wains, mule-carts, and automobile waggons crunch heavily over the lumpy granite setts in their usual fashion ; the customary herds of goats, deambulatory milkshops, clink and tinkle through the streets in the early morning ; and even the Catalonian mozo or porter, in short coloured blouse, flowing trousers, alpargatas and gory-hued Phrygian cap or barettina, waits as calmly as when we first knew him, for the job that never seems to come his way. In the port, business is decidedly brisk, and to the casual eye the eternal refrain of the authorities " Order reigns in Catalonia " seems justified. Everything seems normal, and yet we have an uneasy feeling that the abnormal is about. There are too many policemen, of various brands, in every street. Guardias Civiles, in twos and threes, patrol the Ramblas and the Plazas, afoot or on horseback. The Cuarteles or barracks are gorged with soldiers, who overflow during the hot hours on to the sidewalks where they bivouac with delightful freedom, and there is a constant movement of military who are being drafted to other places in the province. Above all, sullen and sombre, is Montjuich, where courts-martial are being held, and about that gloomy fort there is an air which makes one wonder what is going on inside. One may well wonder, for it has an unsavoury but authentic reputation since the horrors of some thirteen or
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fourteen years ago ; but little is vouchsafed to the ordinary public. There is quite enough in all this to create a sort of subconscious uneasiness, even if one does not add the decrees of the military governor still posted on the walls ; or the reply at the kiosques to a request for sundry papers, Spanish and Catalan, " Suppressed, sir ! " or the announcement just made, of the first (official) execution by shooting, after a court-martial. Barcelona may be tranquil, but it is the tranquillity of a storm just passed, of which one does not feel sure that it will not break out again. It is curious to see the ordinary stream of traffic and street business going on under the gaunt fragments of wall which are all that remain of huge buildings like the Escolapios ; or the blackened shells of convents and asilos; or the smoke begrimed facades of churches, whose doorways are replaced by hurriedly built brick partitions, and whose interiors are gutted to the bare stones of the fabric—and to think of what was going on in these busy streets so short a time ago. In some quarters the paving of the roadway is still irregular. Here were the barricades formed of the granite setts of the street, which, by a stroke of sardonic humour, the soldiers and police compelled the passers-by to replace. And on the walls of houses in the Rambla and elsewhere, bullet marks are plainly visible, made by the fusillade of the soldiery. Now, the ordinary business life of a great city mingles with the evidences of a desperate struggle, so fresh it might have been yesterday. It is useless to seek in the newspapers for information. They are passing through a woeful time. They contain no discussion, no expression of opinion ; only the anaesthetic reports which have passed the Censor or emanate from the Ministry of the Interior, consisting of denials of rumours or confessions of official ignorance : a complete blank. This dearth of information gives birth to all sorts of rumours which run like mercury : and so far from assuaging the public anxiety, this official reticence prepares the public mind for believing anything, and at last for thinking that " No news is bad news." Any attempt to publish news, however anodyne in nature, produces denunciation and threats, as happened just before I left Madrid : and when, in despair, the journals take to attacking one another, as happened the other day here in Barcelona, the outspoken attack is promptly met by the suppression of the paper. The paper attacked is a supporter of the Ministry, but the attack was purely personal. Instead of allowing the rival 526.
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editors to settle their differences in a court of law, the new Civil Governor made common cause with the official newspaper, the obvious inference being that free speech directed against a person might soon become free speech directed against the Governments All safety-valves of opinion are thus shut, no meetings are allowed ; no manifestations ; and all clubs of suspected (i.e., anti-governmental) opinions are dissolved. This in a Latin country is fatal. I am reminded of the remark of a witty Frenchwoman, to whom I was praising the brilliant eloquence of a speaker at a great meeting of the " Ligue de l'Enseignement " in Paris, where I was a guest : " Oui, Monsieur ! Dans ce pays on commence toujours par la parole : Paction suit . . . quelquefois ! " Well, here in Barcelona that blessed safety-valve " la parole " is closed, and the excitement which might evaporate through it is driven inwards. Talk, in this country, is incessant. Madrid is full of it, the Puerta del Sol and the cafes and clubs ring with it from one morning till far into the next. " Talking-clubs " have always been a feature of Spanish politics. They have sprouted like mushrooms in every internal convulsion for the last hundred years, and though many have undoubtedly been hot-beds of political faction and intrigue, they have provided an outlet for the intense excitement which accompanies any political movement in Spain. : That the Government would have its eye on them was certain, but the policy of damming all outlets of opinion by dissolving every club whose tenets, however tame, could not be wholly blessed by the Ministry, seems, to say the least of it, open to criticism. Anarchist clubs have met with a fate not entirely unexpected, but, with a fine semblance of impartiality, the hand of the Government has fallen on Republican clubs and workmen's associations, and especially upon their Presidents. And that not merely in Madrid and Barcelona, the two chief centres of interest, but in Leon, Ferrol, Oviedo, Gijon, Elche, Eibar, Almansa, Valladolid and Alcoy. It is not good just now in Spain to be known as a republican, or editor, or even contributor to a progressive journal, or an active member of any trade union. , ; On the spot, in Barcelona, the very centre of recent events, there is the material of an extremely interesting study for any one. For me especially so, since the opinions formed in Madrid would be here either confirmed or exploded. As to the occurrences, the hectic telegrams of special corre527
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spondents, where they are not concerned with actual proven fact, as in the burnings, can be dismissed. Rumour supplied the foundation, a special correspondent's imagination the rest, of most of them. How could it be otherwise when, as the editor of the chief paper of Madrid said : " For nearly a week in Madrid, hardly the Government, certainly none of us, editors, bankers, merchants, knew anything : Nada ! Nada ! Nada ! " The bare facts can be put very briefly. What was intended as a peaceful manifestation against the war in Africa, radically unpopular here, as elsewhere, became something quite different through the action of the authorities in denouncing and stopping everything, manifestations, meetings, papers, clubs, free speech. A manifestation was made malgre tout. The authorities, entirely unprepared, could do no more than safeguard the more important public buildings, and, the conflict once begun, the rioters found themselves, for a time, unopposed masters of Barcelona. If a convent burned the authorities dared not move, they had to look on. As Barcelona was cut off, the disaffected in the other towns of the province believed the rising had been successful, and rose in their turn, which accounts for the rapid spread of the movement and the proclamation of a Republic in some of the smaller industrial towns along the coast. Not until troops in numbers could be drafted in, and artillery used, did the authorities obtain the upper hand, with results that are now pretty well known. I t seems to have been due to an attempt by a weak and unprepared administration, by bluff and a policy of suppression to kill a very real and widely spread disaffection. There are in the Catalonian movement features that are special to the province, but there can be no doubt at all that popular anger against the operations in Africa was the immediate cause of the outbreak. The official reasons, given coup sur coup, deceive no one. First a mere affair of police castigation : then an expedition to prevent the " asphyxiation " of Melilla : then a punitive expedition for the murder of four Spaniards : then operations undertaken to prevent the French from stepping in : then a mission imposed by Europe to convey " the blessings of civilisation to the Rifefios " : all these have been given out in" turn, and in turn denied. Now, showy lectures are being given, and articles written, on the resources of the Riff, mineral and agricultural, and how to use it for Colonial expansion. In spite of all this it is significant that the mansions of Comillas and Guells, 528
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two of the men whose names are prominent in the business of the mining companies in the Riff, and in the deal with the Trasatlantica Shipping Company, escaped the fate of the convents only through the elaborate precautions taken by the authorities and their owners—the public were not to be hoodwinked. Never was a war so unpopular, and the cry to-day is : " Keep as secret as you please your plans of campaign, if you have any, but for Heaven's sake tell us clearly to what we are committed, why the affair began, and how it is to end." The only reply is the continued suspension of constitutional guarantees, the suppression of papers (even in Andalusia), the dissolution of clubs in other provinces as well as Catalonia, and now—the closing of schools : a curious sort of answer to the agonised anxiety of the entire nation. In one matter the Government has tried—too late—to make up for its folly—in stopping purchased exemption from service in the army, and in forming the married reservists into special regiments for service in Melilla, not in the field. Senor Maura has been at some pains in messages to the Standard, and the New York Herald to deny that there is any opposition among the population to the operations at Melilla. This is to ignore the openly expressed opinion of people of all sorts in all parts of the country. As for the public opinion which finds expression in the newspapers, it is easy to deny that any of it is hostile after suppressing all those journals which dared to have an opinion of their own, and holding the threat of extinction over all the others. In respect of public opinion Senor Maura " has made a solitude and calls it peace." He made capital also out of the fact that " Out of the 9000 municipalities in the Peninsula only a few have manifested their opinions in a more or less decided manner." (I quote from his published interview.) In the New York Herald that sounds crushing. In Spain it is ridiculous. For elections, parliamentary and municipal, with the exception of those few parts of the country where there is a real public opinion with which Ministers dare not tamper, are " managed " by the party in power, or about to assume it. The value of the argument from protesting Municipal Councils is thus reduced to a vanishing-point. Those who are little inclined to criticise the Government ask, like Orgon, " Que diable va-t-il faire dans cette galere ? " Others, less reserved, condemn the operations and their instigators, unsparingly. But perhaps the most significant of all 529
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is the allocution of General Marina to the troops. At the end he implored them to be true to the reputation of the Spaniards for valour, otherwise their own mothers would condemn them. It has been openly bruited that the Commander-in-Chief found that his men, in Shakespeare's words, " had no stomach to this fight," and his tearful adjuration would seem to justify the rumour. The net result is this, that in regard to the Government's plunge into war, what was in Madrid a quietly expressed hostile opinion is here a deadly dislike, violently shown. In explaining away the rising in Barcelona much has been said about international revolutionaries as agents and leaders. In his famous interview the Premier calls attention to the fact that Barcelona " is a cosmopolitan city where individuals from all parts of Europe, mostly belonging to the Anarchist party, congregate." It is significant that Senor Ugarte, sent by the Supreme Court to study the matter on the spot, in the notes of his report which have filtered through into the Press, says nothing at all of this, but refers only to radicals and Catalan nationalists as the actors, with the riff-raff of Barcelona as camp-followers and looters when once the movement had met with a measure of success. A journal has just published a detailed list of those who were killed and wounded on both sides during the " red " week, classifying them by town and province. Of those who were treated in private houses nothing is of course known, or likely to be. In the list are Catalans, Valencianos, Murcianos, Aragonese and even Castilians. Of foreigners, mention is made of two, one from Habana, the other from Switzerland. Repeated questioning of various informants has produced nothing to lengthen the list. T h e Swiss appears to have been noted by everybody, a fact which reeks with meaning. The " internationals " must have been singularly fortunate in escaping bullet-wounds, or equally lucky in bolting from a province where every exit has been closely watched. The conclusion is inevitable, that the international revolutionary theory is so much foudre aux yeux. There remains the Anarchist explanation so favoured by Senor Maura. It is true that Barcelona and Catalonia generally contain anarchical elements. Clubs are well known and the existence of the doctrine undoubted. An extremely intelligent Catalan of republican tendencies said that in these clubs are many theoretic Anarchists of a Tolstoyan type, incapable of any violent action, but that among them were also men prepared 530
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for anything. This great capital has its own lowest stratum of society in which these people move, finding their opportunity in the political discontent which is rampant here. That such men, seizing the occasion, took part in the disturbances, no sane person could doubt, nor can one doubt that the loafing, criminal class, as much in evidence in Barcelona as in Paris or London, availed themselves of the opportunity which the troubles afforded of satisfying their criminal instincts. But it is also equally indubitable that the movement was one of a large section of the working class, among whom, a prominent feature of the troubles, were numbers of young people : it is on this layer of the population that the war presses most heavily. The actual balance-sheet is sufficiently dreadful. Some fifty-four religious houses and churches were fired and more or less completely destroyed ; while two hundred and forty-seven barricades were erected in the disaffected quarters, where the narrow streets made such obstacles peculiarly effective. It was not only the street fighting which made the work of pacification difficult, there was in addition constant firing from the roofs of houses, the work of unknown sympathisers. An order was given to close all windows and persiennes, but fearing that sniping from behind the persiennes was going on, the windows were ordered to be closed but persiennes opened and curtains drawn back. The situation was for a time intolerable, for the soldiers and police, exasperated by shots from the roofs, at times lost their heads and poured a fusillade at the upper storeys of the houses. One informant took me to his balcony on the third floor overlooking one of the promenades, and there on the walls were the bullet-marks of a furious fire directed by the police at the roofs, while inside the room a number of peaceable people were sheltering, the shutters being thrown back and the window bare. Another, an Englishman, tired of being confined to the house, mounted to the roof, but beat a hasty retreat below, with the bullets of the police, who were stationed on a roof some distance off, whistling around his ears. They were acting on the principle of Donnybrook Fair, " When you see a head, hit i t ! " The marvel is that the roll of killed and wounded was not appalling, or at least equal to the feverish figures given by special correspondents. So far as is known, the list includes 4 soldiers and police, 79 among the emeutiers, killed, and 198 wounded, without reckoning any who were treated privately, or concealed. 531
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Bad as things were they never approached the sanguinarydescriptions of the special correspondents. Nor were the other lurid paragraphs detailing the massacre of monks and the violation of nuns, the ferocious behaviour of the women which was said to be like that of the petroleuses of the Commune or the furies who watched the falling heads at the guillotine in 1793, any nearer the truth. Even official accounts show that some care was taken to clear out inmates from the convents before they were destroyed : in some cases provision for shelter was made, and even food was provided. You cannot make a revolution without causing cruel pain any more than you can make an omelette without breaking eggs, but the ferocity of the mob seems to have been directed against institutions and not against persons, which is a very pertinent and significant indication. As I said above, there are in the affair features of peculiar interest, some of purely local, others of national, significance. When the first troops were brought in from other places in Catalonia, and came into contact with the rioters, they fired. in the air, sympathising : and others had to be brought from a neighbouring province, who said, " We go to kill." The antagonism between the Catalan and the other Spaniards, especially the Castilians, is most pronounced. Any one who will travel from Barcelona to Zaragoza, to Berga, to Gerona, in fact in any direction through the province, must be struck by the intense activity displayed. Agriculture is astonishingly prosperous, every inch of the country—even to terracing the mountain sides until the bare rock stops further operations— is under cultivation, and industrial enterprise is enormous in extent. " The Madrilenos talk, the Catalans work," say the Catalans. " The Catalans think of nothing but buying and selling, they are Judios (Jews)," say the Madrilenos. The contrast between this rich, enterprising province and much of the rest of Spain, is doleful. And the Catalans feel themselves the milch-cow of the country. They work and pay while their governors, the officials whose hands are ever held out for money, are the hated Castilians, who form the bulk of the horde of functionaries existing in Spain. The feeling is intense, and you have only to talk for a short time to a Catalan to get a spicy description of the vices of the Castilian, as a set-off to an equally tasty account of the virtues of the Catalan. Discounting the personal element, the t r u t h 532
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remains that the north-east portions of the country contain the vast majority of the business enterprise, initiative and wealth of the country, whose possessors fret and fume at being governed bureaucratically by men with whom they have nothing in common, and in whom they have no confidence. Hatred of the present form of government is the breath of political life to a Catalan. This antagonism has been strongly marked for many, many years past, and in the horrible internecine wars of the last hundred years it has always manifested itself. Catalonia was one of the strongholds of Carlism, which as an active cause may now be considered dead. There has been a strong separatist movement, for distinct autonomy. T h e separatist party still exists, but thinking Catalans see that a separate Government, on the lines of the present central one, would be no change for the better. It would be merely a change of masters, substituting for the despotism of the party in power and their plutocrat and clerical allies, governing from Madrid, the despotism of another plutocracy governing from Barcelona. The much-desired change—a change of system—is not at all implied in a change which should merely transfer the administration from Madrid to Barcelona. So although there is a nationalist or separatist party among the many political parties of Catalonia, it is losing ground before the other republican groups. At first sight it would seem that one must be republican or not ; and that being republican there was an end of distinctions. It is not so in Catalonia. And that is where its weakness lies. In this bitterness of feeling and antagonism of interests between it and Spain generally, Catalonia finds its own peculiar problems always to hand. But its internal dissensions not only prevent it from finding a solution of its own difficulties, they prevent it from taking a lead in the great body of opposition to the present system of government which seems to be growing up all over Spain. Catalonia is almost solidly republican—but republican with differences. There are republicans of the Union, desirous of a republican form of government generally for the country : others who are nationalist and want to set up a Republic in Catalonia : others again, who while republican in tenets, desire merely a wide measure of Home Rule for the province : and from all these have split off the Lerrouxistas, who seem to be a personal party into which are attracted the wilder and more unruly spirits, following their leader, Lerroux. With all these jarring sections mutually at war, there can be 533
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no solid political opposition, as republicans, to the other two parties in the State. And so Catalonia, without getting any nearer to a solution of its own problems, fails in the lead it might otherwise give to the republican elements in the country. That these elements are spreading the action of the Government itself shows, for republican clubs are being closed, and republican papers suppressed in many parts of the country, other than Catalonia. It is the desperate hope of putting an end to the rootedly corrupt form of administration existing that helps the spread of republicanism. And there is now a movement on foot to sink personal differences among these various shades of opinion, and, taking a stand on what is common to all, to form a solid, united, republican party. This will help to explain why in any troubles in which Catalonia is, or has been, involved, there is always present a personal element of intense bitterness and hostility to the Government peculiar to the province in many respects. A curious feature of the red week was the apathy of the ordinary inhabitants, who took no share in the manifestations. Senor Ugarte in his report speaks of " the passivity of the inhabitants being a support to the rioters : a passivity which permitted them to burn fifty-four convents and churches under the eyes of 600,000 spectators." T o speak of the inhabitants as so many hundred thousand spectators is a flowery turn of speech unlooked for in a lawyer : but of the passivity or apathy there can be no doubt. Again and again I have been told that the destruction of church or convent was brought about by a mere handful of men or youths, and the question sprang unbidden : " Why did not the inhabitants living near do something to put a stop to it ? " For though fire threatened their own dwellings, nothing was done. The reply was characteristic. " If you lived here you would soon learn to avoid anything which would bring you into conflict with the authorities." Mark that ! I t was not fear of the rioters, so much as fear of being mixed up with the authorities that caused people to remain quiet while a building was burning next door to them. Another informant, English this time, put the case more pointedly. " If you were walking down the Paseo here (it was the Paseo de Gracia) at night, and you saw some one fall, ill, dying maybe : you had better go on ; leave him alone. Once you get mixed up with the police, whether through helping him or trying to get help, you never know in this country where it will end.
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Worries, lost time, money spent, personal tracasseries, one or all you are sure to have. Let him die ! " In a brutal way this puts the universal distrust of the administration, founded too often on experience. The Director of an important Spanish Review said : " These people put everything on the shoulders of the Government : everything is an occasion for blaming it. And besides they have no respect for authority : they are not like you Anglo-Saxons." His remarks contain much truth. The attitude of the Latin towards his Government is one that it is difficult for an Anglo-Saxon to realise : his conception of the State is almost a personification of administrative functions that can be banged, bullied, or blamed, as a Neapolitan will treat his patron saint when his desires are not gratified. But my director contented himself with the caustic criticism of his countryman given above ; he did not seek for reasons which might account "for it. And there are plenty of them, nor are they far to seek. Ever since the drawing up of the really democratic constitution of Cadiz in 1812, Spain has been seeking with many convulsions to establish itself as a constitutionally governed country. Constitutions, more or less mangled copies of that of 1812, have been promulgated, and signed by the Sovereign, time after time, in 1820, 1834, 1836, 1855 and 1869, when the Government was settled as a democratic limited monarchy, with the usual guarantees of individual liberty, trial by jury, and inviolability of property. In appearance this seems quite correct and satisfactory. The reality is far otherwise. It is really a bureaucracy. Nominally under Party Government, the idea of party as understood in England is absent. There is little difference between the Conservatives and Liberals, a remark that both here and in Madrid is repeated again and again, in a hopeless way. The difference is really between the " ins " and " outs." The fall of a Cabinet is less due to a failure of its policy, than to a cynical arrangement with the opposite party, who are then allowed their share of the sweets and profits of power, for a period. A specious air of Constitutionalism is given to the proceeding by general elections, on a basis of what is practically manhood suffrage, at the age of twenty-five. But save in the great towns and industrial centres these elections are a farce. The party of " ins " manages, by all the unscrupulous devices at the command of corrupt politicians, that its candidates, at least in the country districts, which are by far the most numerous, shall be returned.
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A Castilian gentleman said : " We have no real suffrage. Those are elected whom the Government wish to be elected. No ! I am not a republican, but in the face of such things, I am, as who would not be, of advanced opinions, against their continuance." With a Parliament almost entirely servile, for the republican opposition, though active, is not by comparison large, and as yet not solid, Ministers are practically autocratic. The youth, inexperience, incapacity, and unpopularity of the Sovereign make them to-day almost absolute masters of the fate of the country and its population. And this autocratic power is strengthened by the practice of suspending all constitutional guarantees on the smallest provocation. Constitutionalism of such a kind is a mere mockery. The picture is dark enough, but there is more behind. " Places " are the spoils of the " ins." Every one knows what that means. Partisans to be fitted with posts, the desires of friends gratified, enemies to be appeased. Positions are multiplied, and filled, not from the point of view of efficiency, but of political expediency. Every change of Government thus produces a horde of cesantes or " outs " waiting their turn, and ready for any intrigue in order to become " ins." " Empleomania or, as they call it in France, fonctionnairisme is rampant, so that the Spaniard can never get away from the fact that he is being governed—and badly. Small blame if to him the Government becomes the one thing responsible for everything, the one thing to be looked upon with aversion. Such a political system instead of providing the minimum of temptation provides the maximum. For extravagant as the administration is in Spain such a horde of officials can only be, and is, badly paid. Official salaries are in most cases ridiculously small, with the inevitable result, corruption. The evil thing is rooted deeply in political customs and almost ceases to excite comment. An intimate friend, whose close business acquaintance with Spanish-speaking countries spreads over very many years, said one day in a fit of exasperation : " I believe a Spanish official would rather have one pound he has stolen than ten he has earned." This was repeated jokingly to a Catalan, who accepted it calmly, smiled, and said : " Remember that in this country it is so much easier for an official to steal ten pounds than earn one." And though there is a spice of malice in the remarks, they describe pretty accurately the general situation. The administration of the Customs is notoriously corrupt. 536
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On many voyages to Spanish ports, acting as interpreter between the English captain and the Customs officials I have had this fact thrust on my attention, and there are few captains engaged in the Spanish trade but could corroborate, and even add to, my knowledge. On one occasion, in one of the southern towns, I was in the company of acquaintances who were talking with some excitement of the arrival of a new Civil Governor. He had been, said they, for a long time cesante—" out " —and they added significantly tiene mucha hambre—he is very hungry. Talking over this matter the other day with a Catalan, I was assured that justice was bought and sold, a matter of common occurrence, and " so very easy." This from a Catalan seemed to require the proverbial pinch of salt. But sitting soon after on the balcony of an English friend, chatting over the recent occurrences, he suddenly pointed to the opposite house and said : " There lives a judge of my acquaintance whom I believe to be an honest man. He told me a while ago, if I could procure for him a post in England, literary or journalistic, £300 a year, he would gladly give up his judgeship and accept it." With such a political system, such a rapacious and corrupt administration, what respect for authority could possibly survive ? The passivity of the population of Catalonia, the tacit support given by their attitude to the rioters, takes on a different complexion in such a light as this. That there are those who hope for better things seems to be shown, as has been repeatedly urged, by the spread of republican opinions, even in backward Andalusia. The hope for a change of system is implicated in a change of form. The short-lived popularity of the English marriage was partly founded on a similar hope, expressed in the wild welcome given here to the royal couple. The address of welcome, pointed at the young queen much more than at the young king, said : " We look to you as an Englishwoman to introduce here English customs, English liberty." And now the inveterate Spanish hatred of foreigners has returned by a revulsion of feeling, and the popularity has vanished. The temporary flush of enthusiasm for the young couple, coloured by the anticipation of better things to come, has passed, and the unpopularity of the dynasty is no fiction. When not active dislike, the feeling is one of cool contempt. Too much was doubtless expected of one who has given no signs of intellectual power or political sagacity. No amaunt of genial bonhomie or personal courage can replace what III 537 2M
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in the long run is seen to be the indispensable quality of a strong ruler. And in such a state of public feeling the smallest things are apt to become exaggerated in value. Spain is bound hand and foot in rigid etiquette, from the ordering of court life down to the rules of ordinary politeness in the street. From Madrid the young King had gone to San Sebastian for a day. He returned for a Consejo de los Ministros —a meeting of the Cabinet. At the station, Ministers received him, in official costume, with all the paraphernalia of Court etiquette. To them appeared the King in deerstalker cap, lounge costume, free and easy in manner, full of details of his trip, his shooting, his pleasures : and . . . there was no consejo. Such an utter disregard for the almost sacro-sanct etiquette of the occasion, even more than the failure to appreciate the importance of the political situation, impressed every one, and was commented on in the severest fashion, even by ministerial supporters. The Sovereign is apparently utterly powerless to impress any course of action on his Ministers, in whose hands he is, to the public eye, a mere puppet. So that in the actual situation of antagonism to the Government in general and to the present administration in particular, there is nothing in the popular attitude towards the dynasty that can act as a counterpoise. But the most striking part of the manifestation yet remains— the form it assumed. For barring the intended attacks on the Guells and Comillas and other mansions, the brunt of the popular anger was borne by the religious houses ; convents, churches, educational institutions, homes, and refuges, were destroyed one after the other. If, as Catholic acquaintances say, the usual cry of hooligan youth in Barcelona is Vamos a quemar un convento—" Let's go and burn a convent "—there must be some reason for even such an apocryphal cry ; while the fact that the convents did burn is past a doubt. Again and again during the internal convulsions of Spain monkish orders have been attacked. In 1835 at Barcelona, Zaragoza and elsewhere, just as in Catalonia in July last, the cry was " Down with the friars." There are those who deny that there is any anti-clericalism in Spain : others affirm not only its existence, but its all-importance. Which of the positions is the true one ? The former forget that right from the fifteenth century there has been a ceaseless war between the Crown of Spain and Rome on the subject of religious orders. One of the 538
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bitterest political fights on record is that waged by the Kings of Spain, even the most Catholic, to maintain their ancient rights and privileges against the claims of Rome to set up in the persons of the regular clergy an imperium in imperio. The first compact dates from 1482, since when concordats follow in a series up to 1851. And it matters little what sort of Government has been in existence, the most bigoted of princes, the most reactionary as well as the most liberal of administrations have all had to fight in turn against la mano muerta, the dead hand of the religious orders. Indeed, there has always been a clerical question in Spain—that is a mere question of historical knowledge ; the sole variation is in the bitterness with which it has been conducted. As to the exact position to-day it is almost impossible to come at. Statistics of a partial kind are available for the various provinces, but of complete returns there are none. The Concordat of 1851 legalised three orders : to-day their number is legion, with a dictionary full of titles. When Luis Morote in 1904 estimated from the statistics available the number of monks and nuns at 60,000 and upwards, he had to confess that the real number is unknown. So many communities are unregistered, and the number has been increasing constantly since the laws against congregations in France. As he says : " La realidad. . . . quien la conoce ! " — " The truth . . . who knows it ? " Of the number who entered Spain, fleeing from the French laws some estimate may be formed from the return for one week made in 1904 by the Frontera de Irun at Irun : eighty-six nuns and 114 monks. And this at only one town of entry : an invasion which began in July 1901, after the passing of the French law. So that the number of indigenous orders, constantly increasing during the last seventy years, has been swelled by this transplantation of French orders. An investigation into the numbers of the religious houses in Catalonia has just been made by a Valencia newspaper. The writer estimates that between 1860 and 1899, in defiance of the law, the increase in convents was 222. These figures go only as far as ten years ago. Taking into account the French immigration he estimates the number of religious houses in the diocese of Barcelona at 500. Further, that in the same diocese, with a population of little more than a million, there are about 6000 institutions, centres of clerical propaganda, with a press more or less openly devoted to their interests. Even supposing Morote's estimate of 60,000 to be at all
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approximately correct, you have a body of people withdrawn from the life of the citizen, individually poor, collectively enormously rich, more than twice the size of the teaching body, the primary schoolmasters of Spain, who on the contrary are miserably paid and lacking in public consideration. Catalonia, Madrid, Valencia, on the map of Espana negro. show appalling conglomerations of religious orders, always increasing. But then these three places are rich, and Morote bitterly remarks, " for some people this valley of tears is a rich mine of fat legacies and donations." If Spain were many times richer than it is it could not afford to have quartered upon it, in perpetuity, a huge body of men and women, withdrawn from the active life of the nation, refusing to perform the duties which all citizens are called upon to perform. Their presence is not a passive but an active menace, for their influence on the country's life, social, political, and economical is enormous, and that influence, politically and educationally, is always thrown against progressive ideas. The present Ministers are strong supporters of the clericals, and the Jesuits are credited with immense influence in the Councils of the nation through the Queen Mother and the clerically minded Ministry. In conversation with a high official of the town, he, in a moment of frankness, said : " This country and this province are eaten up with monks and priests." Pushing the question with an editor in Madrid, he, though diplomatic and reserved, confessed that the hatred of the common people to the regular clergy has this much of true foundation,—that they, with capital provided by piety, are in numerous instances entering into competition with industrials, on terms that are quite unfair. They manufacture chocolate, liqueurs, do printing, make linen, undertake laundry-work, engage in agriculture, on terms with which, thanks to the means, facilities for obtaining labour, freedom from the burdens of ordinary commercial enterprises, which they enjoy, the ordinary manufacturer or entrepreneur cannot hope to compete. For the religious orders pay no taxes at all. One reason for the anger displayed against the asilos or homes in which children are received by the monks and nuns and brought up, is the fact that many of these children are made to work for the benefit of the Order, being paid nothing at all or at most but an insignificant sum. This is not a mere rumour ; it is well known, and was confirmed, for Madrid, by the editor of one of its most important newspapers. The industrial ventures of monks are also confirmed by Morote from returns which affect the registered congregations. 540
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There is no need to pay any attention to the stories of cruelties and enormities practised within convent walls, on which excited imaginations have recently fed : here is a more solid foundation for the feeling. As to the actual wealth of the orders there seems to be dead silence. A few comparative figures may help in forming an idea of what la mano muerta means to Spain. In the time of Carlos IV. it was estimated that two-thirds of the soil of Spain was in the hands of the Church. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Moreau de Jonnes, statistician, estimated the income of the Church from property, tithes and fees, at 263 millions of francs ! And to meet the invasion of the French in 1812 church property to the value of nearly fifty-two millions of francs was sold, without making any sensible impression on its colossal fortune. In 1835 Mendizabal suppressed the orders and next year ordered their property to be sold. In eight years property to the value of twenty-four millions sterling was sold. When Isabel II. was forced in 1855 to sign an Act for the sale of Church property, it was estimated that up to that date property to the value of fifty-seven millions sterling had been sold, and that an even larger amount still remained untouched. What the wealth of the orders may be to-day it is impossible to say. Probably as in the case of sheer numbers, " La realidad superatodos los calculos" (The reality surpasses all calculations). For the orders have never been of the opinion of St. Jerome or St. Ambrose who " could not understand that the way to gain Heaven was by amassing riches on earth." At the present rate of increase in numbers and wealth, the time is coming when some one will say, like Toreno in the eighteenth century : " If we have not sufficient energy to expel the Orders, let us all turn monks, and let Spain become a monkish nation ! " It seems as if those who say the question of clericalism is the question par excellence were nearer the truth. There is no reason to modify the opinions found to be held in Madrid ; on the contrary, they are strengthened by what can be learned in Catalonia. Unfortunately Spain lacks men. No man of commanding political force stands out as the one capable of transforming the system of government and making Spain free. Meanwhile the present administration goes airily on its appointed way of governing by decree, muzzling the press, destroying free speech, dissolving clubs, and, the newest inven541
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tion, closing schools. This last, in a country where illiteracy is shockingly prevalent, and the profession of public writer of letters, in the street, quite common, savours of topsy-turvydom. It shows the spirit which actuates authority, for this is sheer revenge. Many of the republican and other clubs had started schools of their own (primary education in Spain is in a wretched state), and as conventual schools were burned, the hand of the Government has fallen on their rivals. More, the men and women who were concerned in the direction of these schools are being forced to live under supervision in other provinces, in domiciliary exile. The troubles in Catalonia, Madrid, and Coruna were serious to the point of shaking the dynasty. Without investigating causes, the Government thinks to silence opposition by this high and mighty style of proceeding. Personally I think it will fail. What the final issue for Spain will be it is hard to foretell. But with one half its population on the verge of starvation it has little use for African adventures at half a million pesetas a day, in the interests of shady financiers. Political unrest is very widely spread ; disgust with the corruption and inefficiency of the administration is strong : and the hatred of the monkish orders is almost universal. Their numbers, wealth, and influence constitute a grave menace to the life and progress of the country. Instead of putting the national house in order, purifying the administrative system, making constitutionalism a deed as well as a name, and removing the garrotte fixed by the clericals on Spain, the Government acts like an autocrat and liberty is at an end. The time is highly critical, and judging from the omens here in Catalonia, the end of trouble is not yet.
542
The Task of Realism
By J. A. Hobson
I T is not without significance that the term rationalism should have acquired a destructive rather than a constructive meaning. Why this should be so is not at first sight obvious. Man's use of reason as a guide of life would seem to give an equal value to the selection of the true and the rejection of the false, and rather to lay the stress upon the former process as containing the stronger appeal to human interest. It is no doubt intelligible and inevitable that the defenders of things and ideas as they are, finding their strongest support in the emotional forces of usage and authority, should strive to represent reformers as mere destroyers and their intellectual engines as fitted only for this work. But as regards the later decades of the nineteenth century there was considerable justification for this attitude. The spirit of the age in the cultured circles of Europe was coldly sceptical and tending towards an ever-narrower specialisation. In both these respects it differed widely from the rationalism of the earlier portion of the century, which was still filled with the enthusiasm of revolution and with dreams of an age of reason which, out of the breakdown of the old order, should establish at once in politics and industry, in religion, education, art and literature, as well as in the practices of private conduct, a new moral and intellectual order. Such a dream of rational humanity did not only fire the imagination of the younger poets of two generations, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, even Tennyson : it possessed the minds of the most representative thinkers from Paine and Godwin to Owen, Bentham and J. S. Mill. Poetic prophets, co-operative socialists, utilitarian theorists and philosophic radicals, whether their primary impulse was drawn from romantic art, philosophic reflection, or from some passion of practical reform, all aimed consciously and avowedly at a general transformation of life. This vision of some new harmony of life and the glow of confidence in its achievement which inspired the Socialism of Owen and the weaker revival under Kingsley and Maurice, which even flickered in the earlier writings of Carlyle 543
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and Ruskin, had its counterpart in many other movements of the times. Wordsworth, with the romantic naturalism for which he stood, the new literary force of the novel in the hands of idealists like Dickens, Disraeli, the young Bulwer, the magnificent audacity of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the infinite vistas of human power opened up freshly by the new physical and organic sciences, there was no more narrow intellectualism, no economy of " Ca' canny," in any of these movements. These leaders of thought and action believed that the time was come for a new general plan of life, thought out afresh and freely carried out, in which a clear assessment of the past and the established order should be made so as to secure " a new moral universe " based on a free application of the mind of man to the control of his destiny upon this earth. There were wide divergences in the assessments of the new economy, according to the materialistic or spiritual standards of human welfare adopted : nor could it be claimed that all were equally or mainly rationalistic in the tests applied. But each of these movements had what may be regarded as its philosophic import and basis, it did endeavour to see life steadily and to see it whole : moreover, it designed to apply reason for constructive changes, and these changes were conceived, not departmentally, but in their bearing upon the general life. Now no sober student of our intellectual and moral life during the later nineteenth century can help recognising that this tide of intellectual and practical progress was checked and broken. Not that less intellectual and practical energy was generated and applied : improved education placed a great increase of raw force for progress at the disposal of the nation, and it was applied along innumerable channels of detailed work. But the larger purpose had passed out of it. Instead of flowing freely to the fertilisation of the whole kingdom of humanity, it was drawn off into numerous little channels to turn little private mill-wheels or to irrigate separate enclosures. T h e whole idea of the economy of progress had shifted. Large synthetic schemes of thought and action were renounced as wildly, wastefully speculative : evolution was the new watchword, and its substitution for revolution meant the assertion, as a primary doctrine of general application, that progress must be slow. This doctrine was derived from scientific records in fields of inquiry where the ordered consciousness of man played no part ; but once " discovered" it was applied with easy confidence to human history. Related to this doctrine of progress was another, viz., that progress can only be secured by 544
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rigorous division of labour. Thus retarded and divided, the powers of reason were no longer available for co-operation in the great work of human reconstruction. Rationalism almost inevitably became identified with destructive criticism. For such was the work that came easiest to hand under the new conditions. This is not at first sight the obvious result of the application of evolutionary formulae to the world process. It might rather have been expected that the linking of the natural sciences by the application of the law of the conservation of energy, the new conception of continuity secured by the acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis of the origin of species, and especially the bridging of the chasm which hitherto had separated man from Nature, with the finer application of causality to the innermost life of man, would have bent the systematic thought of all intellectual workers towards the making of a new all-embracing synthesis. As Comte, on the very threshold of the new scientific epoch, so Spencer, a generation later, felt himself impelled along this plain road of intellectual duty. The failure of each to win the acceptance or co-operation of more than a scanty handful of followers in his life-time was not due to any flaws there may have been in the synthetic system which he presented. It was due to certain forces which worked towards the postponement of any synthesis. What these forces were it is not now difficult to recognise. First one would place the important demands of material utility, the great bribes of fame and gain by which men of trained scientific intellect were harnessed to the trades and the professions. The heroic struggle of Herbert Spencer to enlarge evolution into a cosmic philosophy when what his practical countrymen required was aniline dyes, chemical manures and cheap electric lighting, dramatised the issue. Though the main stress of this utilitarian specialisation was commercial, drawn from the rapid discovery of innumerable profitable applications of the physical sciences, other more disinterested motives co-operated with this economic drive. Biology, the keystone of the new intellectual system, fell too early and too completely under the sway of particularist research directed to the solution of hygienic problems. The case of sociology was still more significant. It may be said to have been taken from its very cradle into the factory, forced before its frame was set to hard tasks of solving anthropological conundrums and devising remedies for social diseases. The same is true of psychology, put before it could well stand to grind grist in the educational mill, or to furnish sensational hypotheses for alienists and criminologists. No doubt a genuine though mistaken 545
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economy of scientific energy made in the same direction. It required a race of intellectual giants to handle the great conceptions of such men as Comte and Darwin, and to do the work of re-orientation they involved. No such crop of giants rose. Small worthy men, shrinking from so large an adventure, pleaded plausibly the economy of spade-work, how bands of humble patient students, set to work with test-tube, microscope and note-book in every patch of ground, would best advance the cause of learning. This doctrine of " thorough," under the guise of modest industry, was in large degree a cloak for intellectual cowardice. The trend was everywhere towards division of labour, breaking " the one " into " the many." Now division of labour is only a sound economy when a firm principle of co-operation underlies and dominates division, maintaining the supremacy of the unity and harmony of the whole process. Modern science has preserved no such economy. There is no strong centralising force to keep the special sciences in their proper orbits in the intellectual heavens : within each science numbers of little un-co-ordinated kingdoms and principalities arise : local self-government is carried everywhere into a licentious extreme. There exists no proper intellectual authority, correlating the work of the innumerable groups of scientific hodmen, sifting their results and forming them into the material for a higher grade of research, so step by step working by the inductive method towards great scientific laws which may finally be incorporated in a new intellectual system. There is no warrant for believing that the notion that " a simple system of natural liberty " and " enlightened self-interest " is any better economy in the intellectual than in the industrial world. Intellectual individualism is quite as injurious as industrial individualism. Neither indeed is anarchy. In each case there does survive and operate some principle of harmony. But in each case alike it operates feebly and wastefully. As in our industrial system failure of central control is responsible for the survival of the twin monsters of luxury and poverty in nations possessing natural resources and technical arts fully adequate to secure comfort and opportunity for all, so in our intellectual system a similar defect retards even more disastrously the production and distribution of the highest forms of wealth. It is not that intellectual labour is over-divided, but that there is no proper correlation of its specialisms, no proper harvesting and intellectual assimilation of its fruits. This can only be attributed to an abandonment of central intellectual control. I have discussed this tendency to sacrifice unity to multi546
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plicity in science at some length, because the nature of this false economy is there more visible than elsewhere to the naked eye. But the same tendency to prefer small specialised to large general activities of mind is seen in literature and the fine arts. And the forces at work are evidently the same. It is the tyranny of the market, the demand for immediate crude utility in conventional enjoyment, co-operating with a timidity which seeks shelter in some little bypath of expression whose peculiarity may figure as originality, without incurring the risks which attend audacity, that explain the failure of great creative work in the later years of the last century. But there still remains something lacking in the explanation of the failure of intellectual synthesis, and the prevalence of destructive rationalism. It is hardly possible to follow the early controversies to which the startling doctrines of Darwinism and Marxism gave rise in the middle century without recognising a curious phenomenon, which, though discernible in every civilised country, is studied to best advantage in England. As soon as the shattering impact of these new thoughts upon the established beliefs and institutions had been felt, the conservative instincts began to assert themselves, not in a formal repression or boycott, but in a steady silent refusal to face the intellectual consequences. The familiar advice tendered by the aged divine to the young student who inquired how he should deal with the arguments of sceptics, " Look them boldly in the face and pass on " is hardly needed in this country. Our literature is full of proverbs expressive of, or rather concealing, this proclivity. It is not our habit, we boast, to cross a stream until we come to it. We might add that, if the stream is deep and strong, we do not come to it. There are three adjectives commonly recognised by foreigners as peculiarly representative of English valuations, the terms " respectable," " comfortable " and " shocking." They denote the inward fortress of conservatism, primarily in conduct, but secondarily in thought. The English temperament stands for " comfort " and stubbornly resists anything that disturbs this aspect of " the good." Its method of defending " comfort " is by endowing it with " respectability " and by regarding all disturbing influences as " shocking." Our standard of " comfort " is solidly material, consisting au fond of " creature comforts." Though in its higher strata it appears as intellectual or even spiritual, so that we speak of the comforts of religion or philosophy, it will be recognised that anything which makes us feel really " uncomfortable," any sentiment or opinion that is " shocking," inflicts on us a physical disturbance. As a funda547
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mentally respectable, moral and religious people, we are very sensitive to all large disturbing thoughts which thus present themselves as shocking. Though our real feeling towards them, as I say, is mainly physical, compact of inertia and apprehension, we represent it to ourselves as moral. This bit of national psychology is necessary that we may understand how it could come to pass that our thinking men were successfully prevented for two generations from setting their minds to the large task of intellectual and spiritual reconstruction which the destructive criticism of nineteenth-century science involved. Feeling " in our bones," as nurses say, that the inflowing realism of modern science and of a literature and art which was drinking eagerly the realistic spirit, would wash us away from all our old conventional moorings, we set ourselves, doggedly, to stem the tide, and by diverting its force into the thousand little practically serviceable channels which I have described, to render it innocuous. We really succeeded for nearly half a century in keeping the " educated " public of England from facing the deep searching questions lying at the foundations of our institutions, our religion, morals, art and literature, which the new evolutionary conception of the cosmos involved. Intellectual men and women were sometimes half conscious of the process ; they felt that somehow they were not so " free " as they professed to be, that subtle influences, in which they came to acquiesce, prevented them from thinking out root questions. The few bolder ones who were not deterred from thinking out, found that impenetrable barriers stopped publication. It was not, as is sometimes thought, mere mischance that kept the revolutionary discoveries of Mendel buried for a generation. It was the tacit conspiracy against disturbing thoughts. Every broad-minded scientist can point to similar repression in his own province. It was not so much a rigid orthodoxy, still less an active hunting down of heresy, as a persistent avoidance of certain lines of thought, where what may be called the modern spirit was likely to be encountered. Just in proportion as a subject was likely to contain this spirit was it " doctored " for witchcraft. Not science alone, but every branch of learning has suffered this sterilising process. The true story of the modernising movement in our seats of higher education would be most instructive if it could be given in adequate detail. We should see how the newer branches of natural science were stoutly refused entrance, until their claim to culture was endorsed by proved utility and their fiery spirit tamed by slowly acquired orthodoxy. Religion and philosophy were secured against the new ferment, partly by 548
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authority, partly by a slow inoculation. But the most instructive cases are naturally to be found in what were termed the moral sciences. For here the erosive power of the new ideas could not be excluded. The efforts of the older ethics to apply evolution to its utilitarian or its idealistic standards proved singularly futile, while the accepted politics quickly crumbled into ruin with no serious attempt at ordered substitution. Political economy, as the study naturally most exposed to explosive thought, sought protection by dropping all organic unity and breaking into a variety of detailed historical and statistical researches. It has often been made a matter of amazing comment that our universities have ignored the great literature which their own language offers for the nourishment of English youth, or still worse have murdered it in order to dissect. For this systematic " doping " of all studies to which the new disturbing thought might obtain access, there is no other explanation than that this is the distinctive self-defence of vested interests and established causes. This formal resistance of the educational and intellectual world was supported by the equally instructive cunning of " society " in refusing to discuss or even to recognise the graver questions of the age. The effrontery of this attitude was only equalled by its consistency. Let me state the issue in its most general form. Our life and all it signifies for good and evil, happiness or misery, to ourselves and others, rests upon a number of feelings, thoughts and actions which, hardened into customs and institutions, constitute " the foundations of society." Such are the family, property, the State, the industrial system, the Church. Now the old fixed faiths on which these foundations were laid were undermined by the new thought. The engines of criticism were battering each of them. Not only the theories but the practice was assailed. T h e old clear-cut convictions of the permanency of a single type of monogamous family, of the sanctity of individual property, of the limits of government, of the private control of industry, of the conception of a God and of personal immortality, to name some crucial instances, have all been seriously and even fiercely assailed by free thought. Yet until quite recently the ostrich attitude has everywhere prevailed. The modern intellectual forces could be kept under but could not be kept out : everywhere they were seen at work, corroding the old cast-iron dogmas, eating away the old theology, the old politics, the old social conventions. In vain did we shun as " uncomfortable " and " shocking " the early inroads of realism into fiction, poetry and the drama. Tolstoy, Zola, Ibsen, Shaw, 549
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Brieux, we held back for a generation. But they are now visibly upon us. Meanwhile in the churches and the orthodox political parties, the work of erosion had been steadily advancing. The great blasting processes of interrogation have proceeded far. The seeds of scepticism, sown in the last generation, are bearing timely fruit and a new vigorous generation is beginning to demand that the constructive work shirked by their fathers shall be taken in hand. There are signs of a great intellectual and spiritual revival. At the very moment when blind critics are deploring the decline of genius and the barrenness of the age, an abundance of fresh inspiration is beginning to breathe through new forms of realism in poetry, the drama, prose fiction and art. The censorship, not Mr. Redford's but Mr. Podsnap's, is being brushed aside. The very problems which, springing directly from scientific history, biology and economics, had hitherto been most successfully evaded, have forced their way into a drama and a fiction which are actually becoming popular. Heredity, alike in its physical and moral bearings, the origins of poverty and luxury, the struggles of sex, of capital and labour, the corruptions of politics and religion, not merely furnish the material of art and the drama, but they are treated in modes of demonstration which, challenging the fundamental assumption of the older art, give it a novel intellectual and emotional authority. Not less significant is the demand, issuing from the more liberal sections of the Christian Churches and from their outcast sects, for a new spiritual synthesis in which the constructive as well as the destructive criticism still find expression. Twenty years ago it would have been impossible for such a publication as the Hibbert Journal to have obtained the influence it wields to-day. The whole modernist movement in Catholic and Protestant countries is a striking confession of the failure of the silent protest to keep the new wine out of the old bottles. In every church the new bottling industry is going on with more or less success. It is unnecessary here to illustrate from the field of practical politics a similar decay of faith and a similar demand for new principles and a new policy. It is the same penetrating force of realism, exposing the falsehood of the ancient party watchwords and cleavages, and craving intelligible and mentally satisfactory principles. Here Socialism has been the great educator, breaking down at last in this country the boycott of disreputability, and forcing politicians to fight it with some champion more substantial than the ghosts of Whiggism and Toryism. In a word, just as the theologians are beginning to seek a re550
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statement of religion that is " real," comprehensive, vital, so it is with the more enlightened politicians. The age of shirking, vapouring and opportunism is passing. A larger and larger number of modern men and women are possessed by the duty and the desire to put the very questions which their parents thought shocking, and to insist upon plain intelligible answers. What is more, they want all these questions answered at once. In other words, there is an instinct to reverse the dissociative current, which everywhere made for separation, and to lay the main intellectual and spiritual stress on harmony and unity. It is significant that this unifying process has been so counter to our national habits in the past that, when we seek to express it, we are obliged to have recourse to some foreign term such as Weltanschanung, the barbaric look of which seems to give artificiality to the process. Yet it is some such orderly assemblage of ideas that thousands of men and women are beginning consciously to seek after. For lack of intellectual guidance or effective co-operation, many of them became the dupes of some narrow doctrine which, appealing powerfully to some single craving of their nature, sets up as a religion and a philosophy. So Spiritualism, Christian science, Socialism, Quietism, even Anarchism and Agnosticism, in spite of their negative character, furnish to many a binding principle and a central enthusiasm which otherwise are lacking. They are the spiritual makeshifts of an age of disillusionment. Those who adopt them testify to their provisional character by their inconstancy. It is a time of short intellectual leases, not of permanent abodes. This restlessness is due not so much as is often held, to a nomad state of soul, as to an experimental discovery of defects in these improvised syntheses. We have had, it is true, even in the age of scepticism, little schools of intellectuals who have soared into some loftiness of thought where they have claimed to find the one and absolute. But the logical athletics of their ascent prelude most, and leave the climbers in an atmosphere so high and dim that unity seems only got by blotting out diversity, not by harmonising it. Whatever may be said about the logic of the pragmatists, their protest against the " unreality " of the idealistic synthesis remains valid. What is needed is not so much a system of thought, whether monism or pluralism, not so much a single faith, religious, ethical, intellectual, aesthetic, practical, as a single spirit in the conduct of life. Now it is the supreme claim of science that she has given form to the spirit of truth-seeking, embodying it in that realism which to-day is struggling for positive expression 551
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in every art of man. At first sight realism may appear an extremely inadequate word to express that striving of head and heart which is replacing the dissipation and distraction of the earlier rationalism. And indeed there is no term that is adequate : if there were, instead of the striving we should have the thing. But if we are to gather together the various efforts of enlightenment, reconcilement and reconstruction, presented in religion, politics, art, science, literature, we shall admit that there are two dominant features. The first is the persistent strenuous desire to reach, present and represent facts, not excluding fictions, illusions, superstitions, but disentangling this sort of facts from the others. The second is a firm conviction that every sort of salvation or success lies in a clear-eyed following of fact. We shall be told that the realism which consists in a mere following of fact will not give us any ordered scheme of life. Realism, like other isms, has suffered much from its friends. Neither naive realism nor sophisticated naturalism will do what is wanted, for their " Nature " and " reality " are doubly defective : they lean too heavily on the material side of things, and they give Nature too much independence. Modern thought, correcting this cruder realism, sees the whole of Nature as a psycho-physical process, interprets human history as a spiritualanimalism, and recognises clearly that so far as the selection, valuation and utilisation of " realities " go, Man is the maker of the Universe, and each man of his own Universe. Philosophers may busy themselves with the design of the pattern according to which man makes his universe, or with some ultimate hypothesis which shall regard the whole of human history as an episode in the self-realisation of the Absolute. It is unlikely that this sort of metaphysical unity will ever occupy the minds of men, will furnish them with any substitute for religion, will animate their art and literature, or will incite them to daring deeds for their own good and that of others. What men are seeking for is a wholeness without strained unity, a freedom of thought, of feeling, of conduct, which still enable each man to confront an object of nature, an idea, an event, a situation, not as appealing for acceptance or reprobation to some specifically moral, intellectual or aesthetic faculty of him, but as a reality to be seen clear-eyed and to be taken for what it is worth. This " worth " or " value " must be given on a human consideration which transcends the distinctively moral, intellectual, aesthetic. In fact the virtue of the realist outlook upon life will consist primarily in closing up this false division of the human standard, which, 552
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especially in England, has done more than anything to keep us uncivilised. The time of the Renaissance did not find us ripe for humanism, nor was a humanism so deeply impregnated with obsolete or obsolescent culture, truly realistic. So we have lived in separate strata of barbarism and philistinism with a growing but unassimilated tincture of cold intellectualism. But unless I read wrongly the signs of our time, there is a genuine awakening not in one but in many quarters. In the religious world the new term " comparative " religion is indicative of much, and the anxious rapprochement to science is in effect, though not in intention, a capitulation to the spirit of realism. In politics the same spirit is seen in the weakening hold of the " romantic " view of aristocracy and democracy, the critical restatement of the " revolutionary " formulae, the bolder expression of " real politics " in the organised craft and force of Bismarckism and political machines, but more particularly in the clear emergence of industrial and financial interests as the directing and dominating factors of national and international relations. In literature and art eager, even furious, endeavours are afoot to break down the barriers which have forbidden the keen presentation of the most disturbing thoughts and topics of our age. Wagner, Millet, Whistler, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Whitman, Ibsen have not laboured in vain. It is true that in our compromising English way we have at first received them, reluctantly, as freaks. We did not even recognise there was a new and common spirit in their work. Now, too late, our guardians of public order struggle to shut the conservatory windows. The invigorating air has already quickened a new perception of the purposes of literature and art ; we are no longer content to grow exotics under glass, we want the free growth of the natural flora of our country. Not less potent, though different in its working, is the new spirit in science. There it acts chiefly as a correction of the narrower realism of detailed research, by the healing process of even wider and more fruitful speculation. For the sort of facts which speculative science sees, its creative or interpretative hypotheses, fall under the fuller realism and indeed serve admirably to distinguish it from the cruder realism whose only facts were hard and dead. What is most needed now is a fuller consciousness among those who in different fields of thought and work are moved by this spirit, a recognition of their unity of purpose and a fruitful co-operation. This is more possible and more desirable, because it is not sought to secure adhesion to any common formulae or any creed, but only to a common temper and a common outlook. But we have so much faith in facts as to believe that this temper III 553 2N
THE ENGLISH REVIEW and this outlook will work towards a community of thought and feeling, not indeed fusing or subjugating personality but representing fairly and truthfully in a " practical philosophy " of life what is common to mankind, while leaving liberty for the uniqueness and waywardness of the individual. There will doubtless be some readers to whom this realism, to which the ENGLISH REVIEW devotes itself, will seem either a false generalisation, or a movement which being inevitable in its direction and its pace cannot profit by seeking self-consciousness in the pages of a Review. But those who accept the view that experiments in collective self-consciousness, as a means of accelerating and directing the " urge of the world " towards human enlightenment and well-being, are likely to yield great results, will recognise that a rendering of realism in many fields of thought and art is the most profitable use for such a Review.
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The Place of History in Education
The Place of History in Education. By J. W. Allen. 1909. 5s. net. Blackwood and Sons.
I T has been said of English education that its highest stage is characterised by knowledge, the intermediate by character, and the lowest by method. No one has yet been found to say that English education is distinguished by its system. And the omission is pertinent, the silence in this respect is pregnant. The reason is not far to seek. A system can only be raised on a distinctly formulated theory of the subject, and it is no exaggeration to say that in England of the twentieth century no real theory of education exists. Experiments of various kinds there are, initiated privately or by the administration, but they are concerned rather with isolated parts of an educational scheme than with the scheme as a whole : and we are acquainted with but one or two instances, and those private ones, in which an attempt has been made first of all to propound a distinct theory of what education should be, and then to work it out in all its details. In the seventeenth century and even in the thirteenth, people knew what they wanted in this respect, there was a pretty well-defined consensus of opinion as to what knowledge was most worth, and educational practice conformed to and embodied that opinion. But to-day, whether in the chaos of advisers and opinions, Englishmen do not know what they want, what knowledge is for them of most worth : or whether it arises from the characteristic inability of the average Anglo Saxon mind to seize upon general principles and apply them, the fact is fairly patent that we have no theory of education, but merely a welter of opinion on details. That is why, when a subject is fairly thrashed out, as Professor Allen has done here for history, the conclusion is thrust upon us which he arrives at in the few words of postscript added to his discussion : " But it is only on a theory of education, based on a theory of values, that we can determine the place in education of anything. It is really impossible to discuss the place 555
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of history in education except in reference to a theory of what education should do." Of recent years there has been issued a stream of books on the various branches of educational work, each treated from a methodological point of view, with a profusion of detail drawn from experience, and latterly, with attempts to apply the results of psychological investigation. An observer who would draw his inferences from this mass of instruction in method might arrive at the conclusion that English education was in a highly progressive and satisfactory condition : but he would be a rash man, who, with any knowledge of the facts from the inside, would agree with it. These exhaustive and exhausting treatises on how to teach everything, one and all tacitly assume the all-importance of their subject. The considerations whether anything is worth teaching, and if so what is to be the guiding principle of choice, and what will be the system built up on such a principle, are either burked, or treated as non-existent. Judged in this way, education is to be saved by subjects, not by system. If any proof were needed it can be found in the indigestible conglomerations of " subjects " which form the curricula of English schools and colleges of every degree, where many are the bequests of bygone centuries, respectable from their antiquity, and others find a place in obedience to local and personal pressure, or even to considerations of pecuniary expediency. Salvation, we repeat, is sought from subjects, not from system, from the pressure of immediate circumstances, not from regard to the future. It is for this reason we welcome Professor Allen's book. For after setting out to clear the ground carefully by a discussion of history generally, its subject-matter, and its treatment according to the methods of the two conflicting schools of historians, the scientific and artistic, he comes hurtling up against the larger question, the question of educational theory : and he has the courage to point out the lamentable lack of any theory of educational values in England. " Why do we want to teach history at all ? " is the first of such questions to confront us : and this runs up into a larger question, " Why do we want to teach anything ? " " The larger question must be answered first. In this, as in all practical matters, we must begin by thinking not of the beginning but of the end. For the beginning is determined by the end, if it is a beginning of anything." And we think that it is in the stimulus to thought in this 556
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direction that his investigation will prove of the greatest value. In saying that, we have no wish to minimise the effect that his discussion of historical matter, its style of treatment, and the suggestions he makes in this respect, will have. His discussion of the historian as a scientific man and as a " master of pageants " is particularly interesting, but he fully recognises that whatever injunctions may be laid upon the historian, the teacher of young people is in a different position. " It does not follow that a teacher of young people should be strictly scientific or strictly unscientific. The teacher may prefer to give glimpses of both ways of regarding and treating the past," but " the answers we give to these questions necessarily depend on our ideal of what education should effect." The omnipresent need of a theory recurs at every point.' In estimating the result of historical study as sound thinking, intellectual freedom and honesty, Professor Allen is obviously thinking of students of a somewhat mature age. But for this study the foundations must be laid at an earlier age, in the preliminary stages of education ; and so he is led to consider what can be done in these first steps, and incidentally to criticise some of the practices and assumptions of teachers of history to younger pupils. After all, in the question of the place of history in education, it is this laying of the foundations which is of the greatest importance, and it is on this point that Professor Allen's book deserves wide reading, and where his suggestions may bear the best fruit. As we have already said he concedes that the position of the teacher is somewhat different from that of the historian proper, though their ideals differ no whit. And it is interesting to observe that although a stickler for the purely scientific conception of history, he is led to allow that the preliminary work will lean a little towards the " pageantry " of the opposite school. Still " it is the very essence of the pageant that we wish to present. Even though we leave to others the moral commentary and present the thing from no aesthetic standpoint, it must surely appeal to the dullest imagination." The notion, still too prevalent, that a youth is sufficiently instructed in history who has studied more or less conventionally one or more periods of English history : or who at most has added to this some acquaintance with ancient Greece and Rome is justly scouted by Professor Allen. It is what he truly calls " a curious survival " and can only be justified by a conception 557
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of history which makes this an adjunct to the study of literature —which is a quaint inversion of the reality. If the teaching of history during the period of school education is to lay the foundations of sound thinking, to lead to the formation of any true conception of the causes which have led to the progress or decadence of a people, such a piecemeal way of proceeding is absurd. The history of England, or of any other country can only be really understood as a portion of the history of the civilisation to which it belongs. " We must teach our pupils to see the whole development of English life in relation to the life of Western Europe generally. All our laws, all our institutions are but specialised forms of the laws and institutions which arose in Europe on the union of the German barbarians with the wreck of the Roman Empire. The significance and the proportions of any English development can only be seen when it is compared with analogous developments elsewhere. The essential thing is that the young mind should be trained to think of European, or at least of West European, history as of a single great complex growth or process, and to think of English history as a special case, only ideally separable from the rest." And if patriotism be urged as an excuse, then Professor Allen's remark that " patriotic " history is always unscientific and nearly always distorted, is sufficiently true and crushing. Of the truth of that remark the teaching of history in the United States is a flagrant example, and Professor Allen gives en passant another brief illustration in the patriotic views of the positions of England and France during the Napoleonic wars. In the section of the book which deals with " Introductions," i.e., the preliminary teaching up to the age of fourteen years, which is the period fixed by him for the beginning of a regular course of history, there is valuable suggestion, with which we are in entire accord. " Beginnings are generally difficult. It seems clear that if we start teaching any sort of formal history to a child under fourteen, we shall be teaching what will be to the child unintelligible rubbish." There is much truth in that remark. But the beginning has to be made, and the " how " of this beginning has exercised teachers very much. Some have fallen back on historical stories, conscious all the time that these are more or less futile, for the background is lacking, the implications which any such narrative contains too incomprehensible. And on the other hand there 558
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is the despairing recourse to dates and their mysterious connections, the vague notions of royalties and their doings, and picturesque bits of detail : a worthless confusion. Professor Allen finds a possible remedy to this chaos in a sort of preparatory sociological course, a working back from the present to the notion of changes in past time. He states his case very clearly : " We ought to make a start by giving the child some notion of the subject-matter of history. In the largest sense this is simply the whole past life of humanity considered as an evolution. Therefore, in the logical order, we need first of all to develope the sense of past time, and then of great changes in that past. But we should be doing this along with something else. If nothing less than the past life of humanity forms the subjectmatter of history, yet what history has most specifically to deal with is the life of societies as such, the life of states, the life of institutions and of law, the life of classes, the life of trade and of knowledge. T o all this the child needs an introduction." His argument for this position and the illustration he gives of a possible way of beginning, though too long to quote, are very striking and well worth the close consideration of those whose share in the teaching of history is confined to laying the foundations of more systematic study. For ourselves we quite agree with him that even if the study of history went no further than this, something worth having in itself would have been gained, infinitely more educative than the usual rubbish. It is interesting to compare Professor Allen's line of argument and his practical suggestions, with the vague, anaemic remarks of Sir Oliver Lodge on the teaching of history, in the lectures on " School Teaching and School Reform " which he gave at Birmingham. In that comparison one has a measure of the value of this book. Professor Allen's short chapter on the moral value of history in education is an admirable answer to those people who talk of history as a store-house of moral precepts, putting nebulously what Henry St. John put succinctly : " History is philosophy, teaching by examples how to conduct ourselves in all the situations of private and public life." To which Professor Allen replies : " There are, truly, examples of every kind of conduct, attended by many very different kinds of results, to be found in history. What philosophy has to say to it all is not so clear." What the particular morality may be that is assumed to be inculcated by history, whether it is rules of conduct, or an ethical standard, actual morality or theoretical, is not clear : and we hardly think that those who rely on history as a means 559
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of training in intellectual honesty are likely to go to history for " morals." Perhaps in this matter Professor Allen is thrashing a dead horse, but he does his thrashing with excellent judgment, and there is always an uncertainty whether this particular horse is really dead. We have read his book with much interest and some profit. The acceptance or refusal of his view of the treatment of the subject-matter in educational practice will depend on the particular tendency of the individual mind towards the point of view of the historian as a scientific man or as an artist. But even an artist might allow his claim that the end of historical study should be sound thinking and intellectual honesty. And from that point the discussions of the latter part of the book flow logically. The freshness of Professor Allen's style, which is at times almost epigrammatic in its terseness and directness, adds to the pleasure of reading, and we could wish that the book be widely known. The pathos of it all comes up in the postscript: " It is really impossible to discuss the place of history in education except in reference to a theory of what education should do." " Have we, then, been trying to determine the ' place ' of history not in education, as we set out to do, but in cosmic space ? " A system of education can only be based on agreement as to values. It must allow for difference, but it must be founded on agreement. On our agreements a system might be built, and perhaps is being built. It is the place of history in such an hypothetical system that we have been discussing." Any worker in the educational field who treats his subject from any other point of view than that of an isolated portion of the universe of thought, runs at once into this impasse. We teach subjects because our ancestors learned them, or parents demand them, or competitive examinations insist on them : sometimes, after a cold scare, because another nation includes them in the curricula of its schools ; at other times, in obedience to the shrieking of a faddist who manages to get the ear of the public, or of those in authority—but never because we have thought out for ourselves the scheme of education as it appears to have significance for us, in which such and such subjects find a place. Perhaps the very vigour of such discussions as those in Professor Allen's book, may help to destroy the rather humiliating necessity, in writing on educational subjects, of assuming an hypothetical system. G.
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October Number now ready contains " T h e H o u s e - S u r g e o n " Part II., a new story by Also Stories by U n a S i l b e r r a d , H e n r y J a m e s , A l i c e B r o w n , e t c .
Illustrations by E . A . A b b e y , R . A . , H o w a r d Pyle, E. S h i p p e n
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xviii
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