Idle Ideas in 1905................................................................................................................................................1

Jerome K. Jerome .....................................................................................................................................1

ARE WE AS INTERESTING AS WE THINK WE ARE?....................................................................1

SHOULD WOMEN BE BEAUTIFUL? ..................................................................................................6

WHEN IS THE BEST TIME TO BE MERRY?.....................................................................................8

DO WE LIE ABED TOO LATE? .......................................................................................................12

SHOULD MARRIED MEN PLAY GOLF?.........................................................................................16

ARE EARLY MARRIAGES A MISTAKE?........................................................................................19

DO WRITERS WRITE TOO MUCH? ..................................................................................................23

SHOULD SOLDIERS BE POLITE? .....................................................................................................27

OUGHT STORIES TO BE TRUE? .......................................................................................................31

CREATURES THAT ONE DAY SHALL BE MEN. ...........................................................................36

HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH LITTLE. ..........................................................................................40

SHOULD WE SAY WHAT WE THINK, OR THINK WHAT WE SAY?.........................................44

IS THE AMERICAN HUSBAND MADE ENTIRELY OF STAINED GLASS.................................47

DOES THE YOUNG MAN KNOW EVERYTHING WORTH KNOWING?....................................51

HOW MANY CHARMS HATH MUSIC, WOULD YOU SAY? ........................................................54

THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN! NEED IT BE SO HEAVY?...........................................................57

WHY DIDN'T HE MARRY THE GIRL? .............................................................................................60

WHAT MRS. WILKINS THOUGHT ABOUT IT...............................................................................64

SHALL WE BE RUINED BY CHINESE CHEAP LABOUR?...........................................................67

HOW TO SOLVE THE SERVANT PROBLEM. .................................................................................71

WHY WE HATE THE FOREIGNER. ..................................................................................................75

"Charmed. Very hot weather we've been having of lateI mean cold. Let me see, I did not quite catch your

name just now. Thank you so much. Yes, it is a bit close." And a silence falls, neither of us being able to

What has happened is this: My host has met me in the doorway, and shaken me heartily by the hand.

"So glad you were able to come," he has said. "Some friends of mine here, very anxious to meet you." He has

bustled me across the room. "Delightful people. You'll like themhave read all your books."

He has brought me up to a stately lady, and has presented me. We have exchanged the customary

commonplaces, and she, I feel, is waiting for me to say something clever, original and tactful. And I don't

know whether she is Presbyterian or Mormon; a Protectionist or a Free Trader; whether she is engaged to be

A friend of mine adopts the sensible plan of always providing you with a short history of the person to whom

"I want to introduce you to a Mrs. Jones," he whispers. "Clever woman. Wrote a book two years ago. Forget

the name of it. Something about twins. Keep away from sausages. Father ran a pork shop in the Borough.

Husband on the Stock Exchange. Keep off coke. Unpleasantness about a company. You'll get on best by

sticking to the book. Lot in it about platonic friendship. Don't seem to be looking too closely at her. Has a

By this time we have reached the lady, and he introduces me as a friend of his who is simply dying to know

"Wants to talk about your book," he explains. "Disagrees with you entirely on the subject of platonic

It saves us both a deal of trouble. I start at once on platonic friendship, and ask her questions about twins,

avoiding sausages and coke. She thinks me an unusually interesting man, and I am less bored than otherwise I

I have sometimes thought it would be a serviceable device if, in Society, we all of us wore a neat

cardpinned, say, upon our back setting forth such information as was necessary; our name legibly

written, and how to be pronounced; our age (not necessarily in good faith, but for purposes of conversation.

Once I seriously hurt a German lady by demanding of her information about the FrancoGerman war. She

looked to me as if she could not object to being taken for forty. It turned out she was thirtyseven. Had I not

been an Englishman I might have had to fight a duel); our religious and political beliefs; together with a list

of the subjects we were most at home upon; and a few facts concerning our careersufficient to save the

stranger from, what is vulgarly termed "putting his foot in it." Before making jokes about "Dumping," or

discussing the question of Chinese Cheap Labour, one would glance behind and note whether one's

companion was ticketed "Wholehogger," or "ProBoer." Guests desirous of agreeable partnersan

"agreeable person," according to the late Lord Beaconsfield's definition, being "a person who agrees with

"Excuse me. Would you mind turning round a minute? Ah, 'Wagnerian Crank!' I am afraid we should not get

Or, "How delightful. I see you don't believe in vaccination. May I take you into supper?"

Those, on the other hand, fond of argument would choose a suitable opponent. A master of ceremonies might

be provided who would stand in the centre of the room and call for partners: "Lady with strong views in

favour of female franchise wishes to meet gentleman holding the opinions of St. Paul. With view to

An American lady, a year or two ago, wrote me a letter that did me real good: she appreciated my work with

so much understanding, criticised it with such sympathetic interest. She added that, when in England the

summer before, she had been on the point of accepting an invitation to meet me; but at the last moment she

had changed her mind; she felt so sureshe put it pleasantly, but this is what it came tothat in my own

proper person I should fall short of her expectations. For my own sake I felt sorry she had cried off; it would

have been worth something to have met so sensible a woman. An author introduced to people who have

reador who say that they have readhis books, feels always like a man taken for the first time to be

shown to his future wife's relations. They are very pleasant. They try to put him at his ease. But he knows

instinctively they are disappointed with him. I remember, when a very young man, attending a party at which

a famous American humorist was the chief guest. I was standing close behind a lady who was talking to her

"Great Scott!" answered her husband. "How did you expect him to look? Did you think he would have a red

"Oh, well, he might look funnier than that, anyhow," retorted the lady, highly dissatisfied. "It isn't worth

We all know the story of the hostess who, leaning across the table during the dessert, requested of the funny

man that he would kindly say something amusing soon, because the dear children were waiting to go to bed.

Children, I suppose, have no use for funny people who don't choose to be funny. I once invited a friend down

to my house for a Saturday to Monday. He is an entertaining man, and before he came I dilated on his powers

of humoursomewhat foolishly perhaps in the presence of a certain youthful person who resides with me,

and who listens when she oughtn't to, and never when she ought. He happened not to be in a humorous mood

that evening. My young relation, after dinner, climbed upon my knee. For quite five minutes she sat silent.

She waited for another quarter of an hour. Then, evidently bored, and much to my relief, suggested herself

that she might as well go to bed. She ran to me the next morning in the garden with an air of triumph.

"Well, I can't exactly 'member it," she explained, "not just at the moment. But it was so funny. I dreamed it,

For folks not Lions, but closely related to Lions, introductions must be trying ordeals. You tell them that for

years you have been yearning to meet them. You assure them, in a voice trembling with emotion, that this is

At this point they have to interrupt you to explain that they are not the Mr. SoandSo, but only his cousin or

I had a nephew who was once the amateur longdistance bicycle champion. I have him still, but he is stouter

and has come down to a motor car. In sporting circles I was always introduced as "Shorland's Uncle."

Closecropped young men would gaze at me with rapture; and then inquire: "And do you do anything

But my case was not so bad as that of a friend of mine, a doctor. He married a leading actress, and was

At public dinners, where one takes one's seat for the evening next to someone that one possibly has never met

before, and is never likely to meet again, conversation is difficult and dangerous. I remember talking to a lady

at a Vagabond Club dinner. She asked me during the entreewith a light laugh, as I afterwards

recalledwhat I thought, candidly, of the last book of a certain celebrated authoress. I told her, and a

coldness sprang up between us. She happened to be the certain celebrated authoress; she had changed her

place at the last moment so as to avoid sitting next to another lady novelist, whom she hated.

One has to shift oneself, sometimes, on these occasions. A newspaper man came up to me last Ninth of

"Would you mind changing seats with me?" he asked. "It's a bit awkward. They've put me next to my first

I had a troubled evening myself once long ago. I accompanied a young widow lady to a musical At Home,

given by a lady who had more acquaintances than she knew. We met the butler at the top of the stairs. My

"My dear! how very quiet you have kept!" cried our hostess delighted. "Do let me congratulate you."

The crush was too great and our hostess too distracted at the moment for any explanations. We were swept

away, and both of us spent the remainder of the evening feebly protesting our singleness.

If it had happened on the stage it would have taken us the whole play to get out of it. Stage people are not

allowed to put things right when mistakes are made with their identity. If the light comedian is expecting a

plumber, the first man that comes into the drawingroom has got to be a plumber. He is not allowed to point

out that he never was a plumber; that he doesn't look like a plumber; that no one not an idiot would mistake

him for a plumber. He has got to be shut up in the bathroom and have water poured over him, just as if he

were a plumbera stage plumber, that is. Not till right away at the end of the last act is he permitted to

I sat out a play once at which most people laughed. It made me sad. A dear old lady entered towards the end

of the first act. We knew she was the aunt. Nobody can possibly mistake the stage auntexcept the people

on the stage. They, of course, mistook her for a circus rider, and shut her up in a cupboard. It is what

cupboards seem to be reserved for on the stage. Nothing is ever put in them excepting the hero's relations.

When she wasn't in the cupboard she was in a clothes basket, or tied up in a curtain. All she need have done

"If you'll stop shouting and jumping about for just ten seconds, and give me a chance to observe that I am

That would have ended it. As a matter of fact that did end it five minutes past eleven. It hadn't occurred to her

In real life I never knew but of one case where a man suffered in silence unpleasantness he could have ended

with a word; and that was the case of the late Corney Grain. He had been engaged to give his entertainment at

a country house. The lady was a nouvelle riche of snobbish instincts. She left instructions that Corney Grain

when he arrived was to dine with the servants. The butler, who knew better, apologised; but Corney was a

man not easily disconcerted. He dined well, and after dinner rose and addressed the assembled company.

"Well, now, my good friends," said Corney, "if we have all finished, and if you are all agreeable, I shall be

The servants cheered. The piano was dispensed with. Corney contrived to amuse his audience very well for

halfanhour without it. At ten o'clock came down a message: Would Mr. Corney Grain come up into the

"But I have given it already," explained Corney; "and my engagement was for one performance only."

"It seemed to me somewhat unusual," Corney replied; "but it has always been my privilege to dine with the

company I am asked to entertain. I took it you had arranged a little treat for the servants."

Another entertainer told me the following story, although a joke against himself. He and Corney Grain were

sharing a cottage on the river. A man called early one morning to discuss affairs, and was talking to Corney

in the parlour, which was on the ground floor. The window was open. The other entertainerthe man who

told me the storywas dressing in the room above. Thinking he recognised the voice of the visitor below, he

leant out of his bedroom window to hear better. He leant too far, and dived head foremost into a bed of

flowers, his bare legsand only his bare legsshowing through the open window of the parlour.

"Good gracious!" exclaimed the visitor, turning at the moment and seeing a pair of wriggling legs above the

"Oh, it's only What'shisname," he explained. "Wonderful spirits. Can be funny in the morning."

Pretty women are going to have a hard time of it later on. Hitherto, they have had things far too much their

own way. In the future there are going to be no pretty girls, for the simple reason there will be no plain girls

against which to contrast them. Of late I have done some systematic reading of ladies' papers. The plain girl

submits to a course of "treatment." In eighteen months she bursts upon Society an acknowledged beauty. And

"Only a little while ago I used to look at myself in the glass and cry. Now I look at myself and laugh."

The letter is accompanied by two photographs of the young lady. I should have cried myself had I seen her as

she was at first. She was a stumpy, flatheaded, squatnosed, crosseyed thing. She did not even look good.

One virtue she appears to have had, however. It was faith. She believed what the label said, she did what the

label told her. She is now a tall, ravishing young person, her only trouble being, I should say, to know what to

do with her hairit reaches to her knees and must be a nuisance to her. She would do better to give some of

it away. Taking this young lady as a text, it means that the girl who declines to be a dream of loveliness does

so out of obstinacy. What the raw material may be does not appear to matter. Provided no feature is

Arrived at years of discretion, the maiden proceeds to choose the style of beauty she prefers. Will she be a

Juno, a Venus, or a Helen? Will she have a Grecian nose, or one tiptilted like the petal of a rose? Let her try

the tiptilted style first. The professor has an idea it is going to be fashionable. If afterwards she does not like

it, there will be time to try the Grecian. It is difficult to decide these points without experiment.

Would the lady like a high or a low forehead? Some ladies like to look intelligent. It is purely a matter of

taste. With the Grecian nose, the low broad forehead perhaps goes better. It is more according to precedent.

On the other hand, the high brainy forehead would be more original. It is for the lady herself to select.

We come to the question of eyes. The lady fancies a delicate blue, not too pronounced a colourone of those

useful shades that go with almost everything. At the same time there should be depth and passion. The

professor understands exactly the sort of eye the lady means. But it will be expensive. There is a cheap

quality; the professor does not recommend it. True that it passes muster by gaslight, but the sunlight shows it

up. It lacks tenderness, and at the price you can hardly expect it to contain much hidden meaning. The

professor advises the melting, OhGeorgetakemeinyourarms andstillmyfoolishfears brand. It

Perhaps it will be best, now the eye has been fixed upon, to discuss the question of the hair. The professor

opens his book of patterns. Maybe the lady is of a wilful disposition. She loves to run laughing through the

woods during exceptionally rainy weather; or to gallop across the downs without a hat, her fair ringlets

streaming in the wind, the old family coachman panting and expostulating in the rear. If one may trust the

popular novel, extremely satisfactory husbands have often been secured in this way. You naturally look at a

girl who is walking through a wood, laughing heartily apparently for no other reason than because it is

rainingwho rides at stretch gallop without a hat. If you have nothing else to do, you follow her. It is always

on the cards that such a girl may do something really amusing before she gets home. Thus things begin.

To a girl of this kind, naturally curly hair is essential. It must be the sort of hair that looks better when it is

soaking wet. The bottle of stuff that makes this particular hair to grow may be considered dear, if you think

merely of the price. But that is not the way to look at it. "What is it going to do for me?" That is what the girl

has got to ask herself. It does not do to spoil the ship for a ha'porth of tar, as the saying is. If you are going to

be a dashing, wilful beauty, you must have the hair for it, or the whole scheme falls to the ground.

Eyebrows and eyelashes, the professor assumes, the lady would like to match the hair. Too much eccentricity

the professor does not agree with. Nature, after all, is the best guide; neatness combined with taste, that is the

ideal to be aimed at. The eyebrows should be almost straight, the professor thinks; the eyelashes long and

silky, with just the suspicion of a curl. The professor would also suggest a little less cheekbone. Cheekbones

Will the lady have a dimpled chin, or does she fancy the squarecut jaw? Maybe the squarecut jaw and the

firm, sweet mouth are more suitable for the married woman. They go well enough with the baby and the

teaurn, and the strong, proud man in the background. For the unmarried girl the dimpled chin and the

rosebud mouth are, perhaps, on the whole safer. Some gentlemen are so nervous of that firm, square jaw. For

Complexion! Well, there is only one complexion worth consideringa creamy white, relieved by delicate

peach pink. It goes with everything, and is always effective. Rich olives, striking pallors yes, you hear of

these things doing well. The professor's experience, however, is that for allround work you will never

improve upon the plain white and pink. It is less liable to get out of order, and is the easiest at all times to

For the figure, the professor recommends something lithe and supple. Five foot four is a good height, but that

is a point that should be discussed first with the dressmaker. For trains, five foot six is, perhaps, preferable.

But for the sporting girl, who has to wear short frocks, that height would, of course, be impossible.

The bust and the waist are also points on which the dressmaker should be consulted. Nothing should be done

in a hurry. What is the fashion going to be for the next two or three seasons? There are styles demanding that

beginning at the neck you should curve out, like a pouter pigeon. There is apparently no difficulty whatever

in obtaining this result. But if crinolines, for instance, are likely to come in again! The lady has only to

imagine it for herself: the effect might be grotesque, suggestive of a walking hourglass. So, too, with the

waist. For some fashions it is better to have it just a foot from the neck. At other times it is more useful lower

down. The lady will kindly think over these details and let the professor know. While one is about it, one may

It is all so simple, and, when you come to think of it, really not expensive. Age, apparently, makes no

difference. A woman is as old as she looks. In future, I take it, there will be no ladies over fiveandtwenty.

Wrinkles! Why any lady should still persist in wearing them is a mystery to me. With a moderate amount of

care any middleclass woman could save enough out of the housekeeping money in a month to get rid of

every one of them. Grey hair! Well, of course, if you cling to grey hair, there is no more to be said. But to

ladies who would just as soon have rich wavybrown or a delicate shade of gold, I would point out that there

are one hundred and fortyseven inexpensive lotions on the market, any one of which, rubbed gently into the

head with a toothbrush (not too hard) just before going to bed will, to use a colloquialism, do the trick.

Are you too stout, or are you too thin? All you have to do is to say which, and enclose stamps. But do not

make a mistake and send for the wrong recipe. If you are already too thin, you might in consequence

suddenly disappear before you found out your mistake. One very stout lady I knew worked at herself for

eighteen months and got stouter every day. This discouraged her so much that she gave up trying. No doubt

she had made a muddle and had sent for the wrong bottle, but she would not listen to further advice. She said

In future years there will be no need for a young man to look about him for a wife; he will take the nearest

girl, tell her his ideal, and, if she really care for him, she will go to the shop and have herself fixed up to his

pattern. In certain Eastern countries, I believe, something of this kind is done. A gentleman desirous of

adding to his family sends round the neighbourhood the weight and size of his favourite wife, hinting that if

another can be found of the same proportions, there is room for her. Fathers walk round among their

daughters, choose the most likely specimen, and have her fattened up. That is their brutal Eastern way. Out

West we shall be more delicate. Matchmaking mothers will probably revive the old confession book.

Eligible bachelors will be invited to fill in a page: "Your favourite height in women," "Your favourite

"I do think Henry William just too sweet for words," the maiden of the future will murmur to herself. Gently,

coyly, she will draw from him his ideal of what a woman should be. In from six months to a year she will

burst upon him, the perfect She; height, size, weight, right to a T. He will clasp her in his arms.

And if he does not change his mind, and the bottles do not begin to lose their effect, there will be every

Might not Science go even further? Why rest satisfied with making a world of merely beautiful women?

Cannot Science, while she is about it, make them all good at the same time. I do not apologise for the

suggestion. I used to think all women beautiful and good. It is their own papers that have disillusioned me. I

used to look at this lady or at thatshyly, when nobody seemed to be noticing meand think how fair she

They used to tell me, when I was a little boy, that girls were made of sugar and spice. I know better now. I

When I was quite a young man I used to sit in dark corners and listen, with swelling heart, while people at the

piano told me where little girl babies got their wonderful eyes from, of the things they did to them in heaven

that gave them dimples. Ah me! I wish now I had never come across those ladies' papers. I know the stuff

that causes those bewitching eyes. I know the shop where they make those dimples; I have passed it and

looked in. I thought they were produced by angels' kisses, but there was not an angel about the place, that I

could see. Perhaps I have also been deceived as regards their goodness. Maybe all women are not so perfect

as in the popular short story they appear to be. That is why I suggest that Science should proceed still further,

and make them all as beautiful in mind as she is now able to make them in body. May we not live to see in

the advertisement columns of the ladies' paper of the future the portrait of a young girl sulking in a

corner"Before taking the lotion!" The same girl dancing among her little brothers and sisters, shedding

sunlight through the home"After the three first bottles!" May we not have the Caudle Mixture: One

tablespoonful at bedtime guaranteed to make the lady murmur, "Goodnight, dear; hope you'll sleep well,"

and at once to fall asleep, her lips parted in a smile? Maybe some specialist of the future will advertise Mind

Massage: "Warranted to remove from the most obstinate subject all traces of hatred, envy, and malice."

And, when Science has done everything possible for women, there might be no harm in her turning her

attention to us men. Her idea at present seems to be that we men are too beautiful, physically and morally, to

need improvement. Personally, there are one or two points about which I should like to consult her.

There is so much I could do to improve things generally in and about Europe, if only I had a free hand. I

should not propose any great fundamental changes. These poor people have got used to their own ways; it

would be unwise to reform them all at once. But there are many little odds and ends that I could do for them,

so many of their mistakes I could correct for them. They do not know this. If they only knew there was a man

living in their midst willing to take them in hand and arrange things for them, how glad they would be. But

the story is always the same. One reads it in the advertisements of the matrimonial column:

"A lady, young, said to be goodlooking"she herself is not sure on the point; she feels that possibly she

may be prejudiced; she puts before you merely the current gossip of the neighbourhood; people say she is

beautiful; they may be right, they may be wrong: it is not for her to decide"welleducated, of affectionate

disposition, possessed of means, desires to meet gentleman with a view to matrimony."

Immediately underneath one reads of a gentleman of twentyeight, "tall, fair, considered agreeable." Really

the modesty of the matrimonial advertiser teaches to us ordinary mortals quite a beautiful lesson. I know

"An agreeable man! Of course I'm an agreeable man. What silly questions you do ask!" If he persisted in

"But there are people who do not consider you an agreeable man." I should get angry with him.

"Oh, they think that, do they?" I should say. "Well, you tell them from me, with my compliments, that they

are a set of blithering idiots. Not agreeable! You show me the man who says I'm not agreeable. I'll soon let

These young men seeking a wife are silent on the subject of their own virtues. Such are for others to discover.

The matrimonial advertiser confines himself to a simple statement of fact: he is considered agreeable."

He is domestically inclined, and in receipt of a good income. He is desirous of meeting a lady of serious

disposition, with view to matrimony. If possessed of meanswell, it is a trifle hardly worth considering one

way or the other. He does not insist upon it; on the other hand he does not exclude ladies of means; the main

It is sad to reflect upon a young lady, said to be goodlooking (let us say goodlooking and be done with it: a

neighbourhood does not rise up and declare a girl goodlooking if she is not goodlooking, that is only her

modest way of putting it), let us say a young lady, goodlooking, welleducated, of affectionate

dispositionit is undeniably sad to reflect that such an one, matrimonially inclined, should be compelled to

have recourse to the columns of a matrimonial journal. What are the young men in the neighbourhood

thinking of? What more do they want? Is it Venus come to life again with ten thousand a year that they are

waiting for! It makes me angry with my own sex reading these advertisements. And when one thinks of the

But life is a mystery. The fact remains: here is the ideal wife seeking in vain for a husband. And here,

immediately underneathI will not say the ideal husband, he may have faults; none of us are perfect, but as

men go a decided acquisition to any domestic hearth, an agreeable gentleman, fond of home life, none of your

gadabouts calls aloud to the four winds for a wifeany sort of a wife, provided she be of a serious

disposition. In his despair, he has grown indifferent to all other considerations. "Is there in this world," he has

said to himself, "one unmarried woman, willing to marry me, an agreeable man, in receipt of a good income."

Possibly enough this twain have passed one another in the street, have sat side by side in the same tramcar,

never guessing, each one, that the other was the very article of which they were in want to make life

Mistresses in search of a servant, not so much with the idea of getting work out of her, rather with the object

of making her happy, advertise on one page. On the opposite page, domestic treasures disciples of Carlyle,

apparently, with a passionate love of work for its own sakeare seeking situations, not so much with the

desire of gain as with the hope of finding openings where they may enjoy the luxury of feeling they are

leading useful lives. These philanthropic mistresses, these toilloving handmaidens, have lived side by side

So it is with these poor European peoples. They pass me in the street. They do not guess that I am ready and

willing to take them under my care, to teach them common sense with a smattering of intelligenceto be, as

one might say, a father to them. They look at me. There is nothing about me to tell them that I know what is

good for them better than they do themselves. In the fairy tales the wise man wore a conical hat and a long

robe with twiddly things all round the edge. You knew he was a clever man. It avoided the necessity of

explanation. Unfortunately, the fashion has gone out. We wise men have to wear just ordinary clothes.

Nobody knows we are wise men. Even when we tell them so, they don't believe it. This it is that makes our

One of the first things I should take in hand, were European affairs handed over to my control, would be the

rearrangement of the Carnival. As matters are, the Carnival takes place all over Europe in February. At Nice,

in Spain, or in Italy, it may be occasionally possible to feel you want to dance about the streets in thin

costume during February. But in more northern countries during Carnival time I have seen only one sensible

masker; he was a man who had got himself up as a diver. It was in Antwerp. The rain was pouring down in

torrents; a cheery, boisterous John Bull sort of an east wind was blustering through the streets at the rate of

fifteen miles an hour. Pierrots, with frozen hands, were blowing blue noses. An elderly Cupid had borrowed

an umbrella from a cafe and was waiting for a tram. A very little devil was crying with the cold, and wiping

his eyes with the end of his own tail. Every doorway was crowded with shivering maskers. The diver alone

February is not the month for open air masquerading. The "confetti," which has come to be nothing but

coloured paper cut into small discs, is a sodden mass. When a lump of it strikes you in the eye, your instinct

is not to laugh gaily, but to find out the man who threw it and to hit him back. This is not the true spirit of

Carnival. The marvel is that, in spite of the almost invariably adverse weather, these Carnivals still continue.

In Belgium, where Romanism still remains the dominant religion, Carnival maintains itself stronger than

At one small town, Binche, near the French border, it holds uninterrupted sway for three days and two nights,

during which time the whole of the population, swelled by visitors from twenty miles round, shouts, romps,

eats and drinks and dances. After which the visitors are packed like sardines into railway trains. They pin

their tickets to their coats and promptly go to sleep. At every station the railway officials stumble up and

down the trains with lanterns. The last feeble effort of the more wakeful reveller, before he adds himself to

the heap of snoring humanity on the floor of the railway carriage, is to change the tickets of a couple of his

unconscious companions. In this way gentlemen for the east are dragged out by the legs at junctions, and

packed into trains going west; while southern fathers are shot out in the chill dawn at lonely northern stations,

At Binche, they sayI have not counted them myselfthat thirty thousand maskers can be seen dancing at

the same time. When they are not dancing they are throwing oranges at one another. The houses board up

their windows. The restaurants take down their mirrors and hide away the glasses. If I went masquerading at

"Doesn't it hurt," I asked a lady who had been there, "having oranges thrown at you? Which sort do they use,

speaking generally, those fine juicy onesJavas I think you call themor the little hard brand with skins

like a nutmeggrater? And if both sorts are used indiscriminately, which do you personally prefer?"

"The smart people," she answered, "they are the same everywherethey must be extravagantthey use the

Java orange. If it hits you in the back I prefer the Java orange. It is more messy than the other, but it does not

leave you with that curious sensation of having been temporarily stunned. Most people, of course, make use

of the small hard orange. If you duck in time, and so catch it on the top of your head, it does not hurt so much

as you would think. If, however, it hits you on a tender placewell, myself, I always find that a little sal

volatile, with old cognachalf and half, you understandis about the best thing. But it only happens once a

Nearly every town gives prizes for the best group of maskers. In some cases the first prize amounts to as

much as two hundred pounds. The butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers, join together and compete.

They arrive in wagons, each group with its band. Free trade is encouraged. Each neighbouring town and

It is in these smaller towns that the spirit of King Carnival finds happiest expression. Almost every third

inhabitant takes part in the fun. In Brussels and the larger towns the thing appears ridiculous. A few hundred

maskers force their way with difficulty through thousands of dullclad spectators, looking like a Spanish

river in the summer time, a feeble stream, dribbling through acres of muddy bank. At Charleroi, the centre of

the Belgian Black Country, the chief feature of the Carnival is the dancing of the children. A space is

If by chance the sun is kind enough to shine, the sight is a pretty one. How they love the dressing up and the

acting, these small mites! One young hussyshe could hardly have been more than ten was gotten up as a

haughty young lady. Maybe some elder sister had served as a model. She wore a tremendous wig of flaxen

hair, a hat that I guarantee would have made its mark even at Ascot on the Cup Day, a skirt that trailed two

yards behind her, a pair of what had once been white kid gloves, and a blue silk parasol. Dignity! I have seen

the offended barmaid, I have met the chorus girlnot by appointment, please don't misunderstand me,

merely as a spectatorup the river on Sunday. But never have I witnessed in any human being so much

hauteur to the pound avoirdupois as was carried through the streets of Charleroi by that small brat.

Companions of other days, mere vulgar boys and girls, claimed acquaintance with her. She passed them with

a stare of such utter disdain that it sent them tumbling over one another backwards. By the time they had

recovered themselves sufficiently to think of an old tin kettle lying handy in the gutter she had turned the

Two miserably clad urchins, unable to scrape together the few sous necessary for the hire of a rag or two, had

nevertheless determined not to be altogether out of it. They had managed to borrow a couple of white

blousesnot what you would understand by a white blouse, dear Madame, a dainty thing of frills and laces,

but the coarse white sack the street sweeper wears over his clothes. They had also borrowed a couple of

brooms. Ridiculous little objects they looked, the tiny head of each showing above the great white shroud as

gravely they walked, the one behind the other, sweeping the mud into the gutter. They also were of the

Another quaint sight I witnessed. The "serpentin" is a feature of the Belgian Carnival. It is a strip of coloured

paper, some dozen yards long, perhaps. You fling it as you would a lassoo, entangling the head of some

passerby. Naturally, the object most aimed at by the Belgian youth is the Belgian maiden. And, naturally

also, the maiden who finds herself most entangled is the maiden whoto use again the language of the

matrimonial advertiser"is considered goodlooking." The serpentin about her head is the "feather in her

cap" of the Belgian maiden on Carnival Day. Coming suddenly round the corner I almost ran into a girl. Her

back was towards me. It was a quiet street. She had half a dozen of these serpentins. Hurriedly, with

trembling hands, she was twisting them round and round her own head. I looked at her as I passed. She

flushed scarlet. Poor little snubnosed pastyfaced woman! I wish she had not seen me. I could have bought

sixpennyworth, followed her, and tormented her with them; while she would have pretended indignation

Down South, where the blood flows quicker, King Carnival is, indeed, a jolly old soul. In Munich he reigns

for six weeks, the end coming with a mad two days revel in the streets. During the whole of the period, folks

in ordinary, everyday costume are regarded as curiosities; people wonder what they are up to. From the

Grafin to the Dienstmadchen, from the Herr Professor to the "Piccolo," as they term the small artist that

answers to our page boy, the business of Munich is dancing, somewhere, somehow, in a fancy costume.

Every theatre clears away the stage, every cafe crowds its chairs and tables into corners, the very streets are

Munich is always a little mad. The maddest ball I ever danced at was in Munich. I went there with a Harvard

University professor. He had been told what these balls were like. Ever seeking knowledge of all things, he

determined to take the matter up for himself and examine it. The writer also must ever be learning. I agreed to

accompany him. We had not intended to dance. Our idea was that we could be indulgent spectators, regarding

from some coign of vantage the antics of the foolish crowd. The professor was clad as became a professor.

Myself, I wore a simplycut frockcoat, with trousering in French grey. The doorkeeper explained to us that

this was a costume ball; he was sorry, but gentlemen could only be admitted in evening dress or in

It was half past one in the morning. We had sat up late on purpose; we had gone without our dinner; we had

walked two miles. The professor suggested pinning up the tails of his clericallycut coat and turning in his

waistcoat. The doorkeeper feared it would not be quite the same thing. Besides, my French grey trousers

refused to adapt themselves. The doorkeeper proposed our hiring a costumea little speculation of his own;

gentlemen found it simpler sometimes, especially married gentlemen, to hire a costume in this manner,

changing back into sober garments before returning home. It reduced the volume of necessary explanation.

"Have you anything, my good man," said the professor, "anything that would effect a complete disguise?"

The doorkeeper had the very thinga Chinese arrangement, with combined mask and wig. It fitted neatly

over the head, and was provided with a simple but ingenious piece of mechanism by means of which much

could be done with the pigtail. Myself the doorkeeper hid from view under the cowl of a Carmelite monk.

"I do hope nobody recognises us," whispered my friend the professor as we entered.

I can only hope sincerely that they did not. I do not wish to talk about myself. That would be egotism. But the

mystery of the professor troubles me to this day. A grave, earnest gentleman, the father of a family, I saw him

with my own eyes put that ridiculous pasteboard mask over his head. Later ona good deal later onI

found myself walking again with him through silent starlit streets. Where he had been in the interval, and

who then was the strange creature under the Chinaman's mask, will always remain to me an unsolved

It was in Paris, many years ago, that I fell by chance into this habit of early rising. My nightby reasons that

I need not enter intohad been a troubled one. Tired of the hot bed that gave no sleep, I rose and dressed

myself, crept down the creaking stairs, experiencing the sensations of a burglar new to his profession,

unbolted the great door of the hotel, and passed out into an unknown, silent city, bathed in a mysterious soft

light. Since then, this strange sweet city of the dawn has never ceased to call to me. It may be in London, in

Paris again, in Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, that I have gone to sleep, but if perchance I wake before the

returning tide of human life has dimmed its glories with the mists and vapours of the noisy day, I know that

beyond my window blind the fairy city, as I saw it first so many years agothis city that knows no tears, no

sorrow, through which there creeps no evil thing; this city of quiet vistas, fading into hope; this city of faroff

voices whispering peace; this city of the dawn that still is younginvites me to talk with it awhile before the

It is the great city's one hour of purity, of dignity. The very rag picker, groping with her filthy hands among

the ashes, instead of an object of contempt, moves from door to door an accusing Figure, her thin soiled

garments, her bent body, her scarred face, hideous with the wounds of poverty, an eloquent indictment of

smug Injustice, sleeping behind its deaf shutters. Yet even into her dim brain has sunk the peace that fills for

this brief hour the city. This, too, shall have its end, my sister! Men and women were not born to live on the

husks that fill the pails outside the rich man's door. Courage a little while longer, you and yours. Your

rheumy eyes once were bright, your thin locks once soft and wavy, your poor bent back once straight; and

maybe, as they tell you in their gilded churches, this bulging sack shall be lifted from your weary shoulders,

your misshapen limbs be straight again. You pass not altogether unheeded through these empty streets. Not

The little seamstress, hurrying to her early work! A little later she will be one of the foolish crowd, joining in

the foolish laughter, in the coarse jests of the workroom: but as yet the hot day has not claimed her. The

workroom is far beyond, the home of mean cares and sordid struggles far behind. To her, also, in this

moment are the sweet thoughts of womanhood. She puts down her bag, rests herself upon a seat. If all the day

were dawn, this city of the morning always with us! A neighbouring clock chimes forth the hour. She starts

A pair of lovers cross the park, holding each other's hands. They will return later in the day, but there will be

another expression in their eyes, another meaning in the pressure of their hands. Now the purity of the

Some fat, middleaged clerk comes puffing into view: his ridiculous little figure very podgy. He stops to take

off his hat and mop his bald head with his handkerchief: even to him the morning lends romance. His fleshy

face changes almost as one looks at him. One sees again the lad with his vague hopes, his absurd ambitions.

There is a statue of Aphrodite in one of the smaller Paris parks. Twice in the same week, without particularly

meaning it, I found myself early in the morning standing in front of this statue gazing listlessly at it, as one

does when in dreamy mood; and on both occasions, turning to go, I encountered the same man, also gazing at

it with, apparently, listless eyes. He was an uninteresting looking manpossibly he thought the same of me.

From his dress he might have been a welltodo tradesman, a minor Government official, doctor, or lawyer.

Quite ten years later I paid my third visit to the same statue at about the same hour. This time he was there

before me. I was hidden from him by some bushes. He glanced round but did not see me; and then he did a

curious thing. Placing his hands on the top of the pedestal, which may have been some seven feet in height,

he drew himself up, and kissed very gently, almost reverentially, the foot of the statue, begrimed though it

was with the city's dirt. Had he been some longhaired student of the Latin Quarter one would not have been

so astonished. But he was such a very commonplace, quite respectable looking man. Afterwards he drew a

pipe from his pocket, carefully filled and lighted it, took his umbrella from the seat where it had been lying,

Had it been their meetingplace long ago? Had he been wont to tell her, gazing at her with lover's eyes, how

like she was to the statue? The French sculptor has not to consider Mrs. Grundy. Maybe, the lady, raising her

eyes, had been confused; perhaps for a moment angrysome little milliner or governess, one supposes. In

France the jeune fille of good family does not meet her lover unattended. What had happened? Or was it but

the vagrant fancy of a middleaged bourgeois seeking in imagination the romance that reality so rarely gives

In one of Ibsen's bitter comedies the lovers agree to part while they are still young, never to see each other in

the flesh again. Into the future each will bear away the image of the other, godlike, radiant with the glory of

youth and love; each will cherish the memory of a loved one who shall be beautiful always. That their parting

may not appear such wild nonsense as at first it strikes us, Ibsen shows us other lovers who have married in

the orthodox fashion. She was all that a mistress should be. They speak of her as they first knew her fifteen

years ago, when every man was at her feet. He then was a young student, burning with fine ideals, with

What did you expect? Fifteen years have passedfifteen years of struggle with the grim realities. He is fat

and bald. Eleven children have to be provided for. High ideals will not even pay the bootmaker. To exist you

have to fight for mean ends with mean weapons. And the sweet girl heroine! Now the worried mother of

That is why, for one reason among so many, I love this mystic morning light. It has a strange power of

revealing the beauty that is hidden from us by the coarser beams of the full day. These worn men and women,

grown so foolish looking, so unromantic; these artisans and petty clerks plodding to their monotonous day's

work; these dulleyed women of the people on their way to market to haggle over sous, to argue and contend

over paltry handfuls of food. In this magic morning light the disguising body becomes transparent. They have

grown beautiful, not ugly, with the years of toil and hardship; these lives, lived so patiently, are consecrated

to the service of the world. Joy, hope, pleasurethey have done with all such, life for them is over. Yet they

One morning, near Brussels, I encountered a cart of faggots, drawn by a hound so lean that stroking him

might have hurt a dainty hand. I was shockedangry, till I noticed his fellow beast of burden pushing the

cart from behind. Such a scarecrow of an old woman! There was little to choose between them. I walked with

them a little way. She lived near Waterloo. All day she gathered wood in the great forest, and starting at three

o'clock each morning, the two lean creatures between them dragged the cart nine miles to Brussels, returning

when they had sold their load. With luck she might reckon on a couple of francs. I asked her if she could not

Yes, it was possible, but for the little one, her grandchild. Folks will not employ old women burdened with

You fair, dainty ladies, who would never know it was morning if somebody did not enter to pull up the blind

and tell you so! You do well not to venture out in this magic morning light. You would look so

It is curious the attraction the Church has always possessed for the marketing classes. Christ drove them from

the Temple, but still, in every continental city, they cluster round its outer walls. It makes a charming picture

on a sunny morning, the great cathedral with its massive shadow forming the background; splashed about its

feet, like a parterre of gay flowers around the trunk of some old tree, the women, young girls in their many

coloured costumes, sitting before their piledup baskets of green vegetables, of shining fruits.

In Brussels the chief market is held on the Grande Place. The great gilded houses have looked down upon

much the same scene every morning these four hundred years. In summer time it commences about half past

four; by five o'clock it is a roaring hive, the great city round about still sleeping.

Here comes the thrifty housewife of the poor, to whom the difference of a tenth of a penny in the price of a

cabbage is allimportant, and the much harassed keeper of the petty pension. There are houses in Brussels

where they will feed you, light you, sleep you, wait on you, for two francs a day. Withered old ladies, ancient

governesses, who will teach you for forty centimes an hour, gather round these ricketty tables, wolf up the

thin soup, grumble at the watery coffee, help themselves with unladylike greediness to the potato pie. It must

need careful housewifery to keep these poor creatures on two francs a day and make a profit for yourself. So

"Madame," the much grumbledat, who has gone to bed about twelve, rises a little before five, makes her

way down with her basket. Thus a few sous may be saved upon the day's economies.

Sometimes it is a mere child who is the little housekeeper. One thinks that perhaps this early training in the

art of haggling may not be good for her. Already there is a hard expression in the childish eyes, mean lines

about the little mouth. The finer qualities of humanity are expensive luxuries, not to be afforded by the poor.

They overwork their patient dogs, and underfeed them. During the two hours' market the poor beasts, still

fastened to their little "chariots," rest in the open space about the neighbouring Bourse. They snatch at what

you throw them; they do not even thank you with a wag of the tail. Gratitude! Politeness! What mean you?

We have not heard of such. We only work. Some of them amid all the din lie sleeping between their shafts.

Some are licking one another's sores. One would they were better treated; alas! their owners, likewise, are

overworked and underfed, housed in kennels no better. But if the majority in every society were not

overworked and underfed and meanly housed, why, then the minority could not be underworked and overfed

and housed luxuriously. But this is talk to which no respectable reader can be expected to listen.

They are one babel of bargaining, these markets. The purchaser selects a cauliflower. Fortunately,

cauliflowers have no feelings, or probably it would burst into tears at the expression with which it is

regarded. It is impossible that any lady should desire such a cauliflower. Still, out of mere curiosity, she

would know the price that is, if the owner of the cauliflower is not too much ashamed of it to name a price.

The owner of the cauliflower suggests six sous. The thing is too ridiculous for argument. The purchaser

The owner of the cauliflower is stung. She points out the beauties of that cauliflower. Apparently it is the

cauliflower out of all her stock she loves the best; a better cauliflower never lived; if there were more

cauliflowers in the world like this particular cauliflower things might be different. She gives a sketch of the

cauliflower's career, from its youth upwards. Hard enough it will be for her when the hour for parting from it

comes. If the other lady has not sufficient knowledge of cauliflowers to appreciate it, will she kindly not paw

it about, but put it down and go away, and never let the owner of the cauliflower see her again.

The other lady, more as a friend than as a purchaser, points out the cauliflower's defects. She wishes well to

the owner of the cauliflower, and would like to teach her something about her business. A lady who thinks

such a cauliflower worth six sous can never hope to succeed as a cauliflower vendor. Has she really taken the

trouble to examine the cauliflower for herself, or has love made her blind to its shortcomings?

The owner of the cauliflower is too indignant to reply. She snatches it away, appears to be comforting it,

replaces it in the basket. The other lady is grieved at human obstinacy and stupidity in general. If the owner

of the cauliflower had had any sense she would have asked four sous. Eventually business is done at five.

It is the custom everywhere abroadasking the price of a thing is simply opening conversation. A lady told

me that, the first day she began housekeeping in Florence, she handed over to a poulterer for a chicken the

price he had demandedwith protestations that he was losing on the transaction, but wanted, for family

reasons, apparently, to get rid of the chicken. He stood for half a minute staring at her, and then, being an

Foreign housekeepers starting business in London appear hurt when our tradesmen decline to accept

"Then why mark it only threeandsixpence?" is the foreign housekeeper's argument.

That we Englishmen attach too much importance to sport goes without sayingor, rather, it has been said so

often as to have become a commonplace. One of these days some reforming English novelist will write a

book, showing the evil effects of overindulgence in sport: the neglected business, the ruined home, the slow

but sure sapping of the brainwhat there may have been of it in the beginningleading to semiimbecility

A young couple, I once heard of, went for their honeymoon to Scotland. The poor girl did not know he was a

golfer (he had wooed and won her during a period of idleness enforced by a sprained shoulder), or maybe she

would have avoided Scotland. The idea they started with was that of a tour. The second day the man went out

for a stroll by himself. At dinnertime he observed, with a faraway look in his eyes, that it seemed a pretty

spot they had struck, and suggested their staying there another day. The next morning after breakfast he

borrowed a club from the hotel porter, and remarked that he would take a walk while she finished doing her

hair. He said it amused him, swinging a club while he walked. He returned in time for lunch and seemed

moody all the afternoon. He said the air suited him, and urged that they should linger yet another day.

She was young and inexperienced, and thought, maybe, it was liver. She had heard much about liver from her

father. The next morning he borrowed more clubs, and went out, this time before breakfast, returning to a late

and not over sociable dinner. That was the end of their honeymoon so far as she was concerned. He meant

well, but the thing had gone too far. The vice had entered into his blood, and the smell of the links drove out

We are most of us familiar, I take it, with the story of the golfing parson, who could not keep from swearing

"Golf and the ministry don't seem to go together," his friend told him. "Take my advice before it's too late,

"You were right, Jamie," cried the parson cheerily, "they didna run well in harness; golf and the meenistry, I

"What am I doing with them?" repeated the puzzled Tammas. "Why I am going to play golf with them." A

light broke upon him. "Great Heavens, man!" he continued, "ye didna' think 'twas the golf I'd gi'en oop?"

The Englishman does not understand play. He makes a lifelong labour of his sport, and to it sacrifices mind

and body. The health resorts of Europeto paraphrase a famous saying that nobody appears to have

saiddraw half their profits from the playing fields of Eton and elsewhere. In Swiss and German kurhausen

enormously fat men bear down upon you and explain to you that once they were the champion sprinters or

the highjump representatives of their universitymen who now hold on to the bannisters and groan as they

haul themselves upstairs. Consumptive men, between paroxysms of coughing, tell you of the goals they

scored when they were halfbacks or forwards of extraordinary ability. Exlightweight amateur pugilists,

with the figure now of an American rolltop desk, butt you into a corner of the billiardroom, and, surprised

they cannot get as near you as they would desire, whisper to you the secret of avoiding the undercut by the

swiftness of the backward leap. Brokendown tennis players, one legged skaters, dropsical

gentlemenriders, are to be met with hobbling on crutches along every highway of the Engadine.

They are pitiable objects. Never having learnt to read anything but the sporting papers, books are of no use to

them. They never wasted much of their youth on thought, and, apparently, have lost the knack of it. They

don't care for art, and Nature only suggests to them the things they can no longer do. The snowclad

mountain reminds them that once they were daring tobogannists; the undulating common makes them sad

because they can no longer handle a golfclub; by the riverside they sit down and tell you of the salmon they

caught before they caught rheumatic fever; birds only make them long for guns; music raises visions of the

local cricketmatch of long ago, enlivened by the local band; a picturesque estaminet, with little tables spread

out under the vines, recalls bitter memories of ping pong. One is sorry for them, but their conversation is not

exhilarating. The man who has other interests in life beyond sport is apt to find their reminiscences

monotonous; while to one another they do not care to talk. One gathers that they do not altogether believe one

The foreigner is taking kindly to our sports; one hopes he will be forewarned by our example and not overdo

the thing. At present, one is bound to admit, he shows no sign of taking sport too seriously. Football is

gaining favour more and more throughout Europe. But yet the Frenchman has not got it out of his head that

the coup to practise is kicking the ball high into the air and catching it upon his head. He would rather catch

the ball upon his head than score a goal. If he can manoeuvre the ball away into a corner, kick it up into the

air twice running, and each time catch it on his head, he does not seem to care what happens after that.

They talk of introducing cricket into Belgium; I shall certainly try to be present at the opening game. I am

afraid that, until he learns from experience, the Belgian fielder will stop cricket balls with his head. That the

head is the proper thing with which to play ball appears to be in his blood. My head is round, he argues, and

hard, just like the ball itself; what part of the human frame more fit and proper with which to meet and stop a

Golf has not yet caught on, but tennis is firmly established from St. Petersburg to Bordeaux. The German,

with the thoroughness characteristic of him, is working hard. University professors, stout majors, rising early

in the morning, hire boys and practise back handers and halfvolleys. But to the Frenchman, as yet, it is a

Your partner's service rather astonishes you. An occasional yard or so beyond the line happens to anyone, but

this man's object appears to be to break windows. You feel you really must remonstrate, when the joyous

laughter and tumultuous applause of the spectators explain the puzzle to you. He has not been trying to serve;

he has been trying to hit a man in the next court who is stooping down to tie up his shoelace. With his last

ball he has succeeded. He has hit the man in the small of the back, and has bowled him over. The unanimous

opinion of the surrounding critics is that the ball could not possibly have been better placed. A Doherty has

never won greater applause from the crowd. Even the man who has been hit appears pleased; it shows what a

But French honour demands revenge. He forgets his shoe, he forgets his game. He gathers together all the

balls that he can find; his balls, your balls, anybody's balls that happen to be handy. And then commences the

return match. At this point it is best to crouch down under shelter of the net. Most of the players round about

adopt this plan; the more timid make for the clubhouse, and, finding themselves there, order coffee and light

up cigarettes. After a while both players appear to be satisfied. The other players then gather round to claim

their balls. This makes a good game by itself. The object is to get as many balls as you can, your own and

other people'sfor preference other people'sand run off with them round the courts, followed by

In the course of halfanhour or so, when everybody is dead beat, the gamethe original gameis

resumed. You demand the score; your partner promptly says it is "fortyfifteen." Both your opponents rush

up to the net, and apparently there is going to be a duel. It is only a friendly altercation; they very much doubt

its being "fortyfifteen." "Fifteenforty" they could believe; they suggest it as a compromise. The discussion

is concluded by calling it deuce. As it is rare for a game to proceed without some such incident occurring in

the middle of it, the score generally is deuce. This avoids heartburning; nobody wins a set and nobody loses.

To the earnest player, it is also confusing to miss your partner occasionallyto turn round and find that he is

talking to a man. Nobody but yourself takes the slightest objection to his absence. The other side appear to

regard it as a good opportunity to score. Five minutes later he resumes the game. His friend comes with him,

also the dog of his friend. The dog is welcomed with enthusiasm; all balls are returned to the dog. Until the

dog is tired you do not get a look in. But all this will no doubt soon be changed. There are some excellent

French and Belgian players; from them their compatriots will gradually learn higher ideals. The Frenchman is

young in the game. As the right conception of the game grows upon him, he will also learn to keep the balls

I suppose it is the continental sky. It is so blue, so beautiful; it naturally attracts one. Anyhow, the fact

remains that most tennis players on the Continent, whether English or foreign, have a tendency to aim the ball

direct at Heaven. At an English club in Switzerland there existed in my days a young Englishman who was

really a wonderful player. To get the ball past him was almost an impossibility. It was his return that was

weak. He only had one stroke; the ball went a hundred feet or so into the air and descended in his opponent's

court. The other man would stand watching it, a little speck in the Heavens, growing gradually bigger and

bigger as it neared the earth. Newcomers would chatter to him, thinking he had detected a balloon or an

eagle. He would wave them aside, explain to them that he would talk to them later, after the arrival of the

ball. It would fall with a thud at his feet, rise another twenty yards or so and again descend. When it was at

the proper height he would hit it back over the net, and the next moment it would be mounting the sky again.

At tournaments I have seen that young man, with tears in his eyes, pleading to be given an umpire. Every

umpire had fled. They hid behind trees, borrowed silk hats and umbrellas and pretended they were

visitorsany device, however mean, to avoid the task of umpiring for that young man. Provided his

opponent did not go to sleep or get cramp, one game might last all day. Anyone could return his balls; but, as

I have said, to get a ball past him was almost an impossibility. He invariably won; the other man, after an

It is a pretty sight, generally speaking, a tennis ground abroad. The women pay more attention to their

costumes than do our lady players. The men are usually in spotless white. The ground is often charmingly

situated, the clubhouse picturesque; there is always laughter and merriment. The play may not be so good to

watch, but the picture is delightful. I accompanied a man a little while ago to his club on the outskirts of

Brussels. The ground was bordered by a wood on one side, and surrounded on the other three by petites

fermesallotments, as we should call them in England, worked by the peasants themselves.

It was a glorious spring afternoon. The courts were crowded. The red earth and the green grass formed a

background against which the women, in their new Parisian toilets, under their bright parasols, stood out like

wondrous bouquets of moving flowers. The whole atmosphere was a delightful mingling of idle gaiety,

flirtation, and graceful sensuousness. A modern Watteau would have seized upon the scene with avidity.

Just beyondseparated by the almost invisible wire fencinga group of peasants were working in the field.

An old woman and a young girl, with ropes about their shoulders, were drawing a harrow, guided by a

withered old scarecrow of a man. They paused for a moment at the wire fencing, and looked through. It was

an odd contrast; the two worlds divided by that wire fencingso slight, almost invisible. The girl swept the

sweat from her face with her hand; the woman pushed back her grey locks underneath the handkerchief

knotted about her head; the old man straightened himself with some difficulty. So they stood, for perhaps a

minute, gazing with quiet, passionless faces through that slight fencing, that a push from their work

Was there any thought, I wonder, passing through their brains? The young girlshe was a handsome

creature in spite of her disfiguring garments. The womanit was a wonderfully fine face: clear, calm eyes,

deepset under a square broad brow. The withered old scarecrowever sowing the seed in the spring of the

The old man bent again over the guiding ropes: gave the word. The team moved forward up the hill. It is

Anatole France, I think, who says: Society is based upon the patience of the poor.

I am chary nowadays of offering counsel in connection with subjects concerning which I am not and cannot

be an authority. Long ago I once took upon myself to write a paper about babies. It did not aim to be a

textbook on the subject. It did not even claim to exhaust the topic. I was willing that others, coming after me,

should continue the argumentthat is if, upon reflection, they were still of opinion there was anything more

to be said. I was pleased with the article. I went out of my way to obtain an early copy of the magazine in

which it appeared, on purpose to show it to a lady friend of mine. She was the possessor of one or two babies

of her own, specimens in no way remarkable, though she herself, as was natural enough, did her best to boom

them. I thought it might be helpful to her: the views and observations, not of a rival fancier, who would be

prejudiced, but of an intelligent amateur. I put the magazine into her hands, opened at the proper place.

"Read it through carefully and quietly," I said; "don't let anything distract you. Have a pencil and a bit of

paper ready at your side, and note down any points upon which you would like further information. If there is

anything you think I have missed out let me know. It may be that here and there you will be disagreeing with

me. If so, do not hesitate to mention it, I shall not be angry. If a demand arises I shall very likely issue an

enlarged and improved edition of this paper in the form of a pamphlet, in which case hints and suggestions

That is another thing I have learnt. Never lend a pencil to a woman if you ever want to see it again. She has

three answers to your request for its return. The first, that she gave it back to you and that you put it in your

pocket, and that it's there now, and that if it isn't it ought to be. The second, that you never lent it to her. The

third, that she wishes people would not lend her pencils and then clamour for them back, just when she has

"If you will read the paper," I replied, "you will see for yourself. It's all there."

I thought my presence might disturb her, so went out into the garden. I wanted her to get the full benefit of it.

I crept back now and again to peep through the open window. She did not seem to be making many notes.

But I heard her making little noises to herself. When I saw she had reached the last page, I reentered the

"Is it meant to be funny," she demanded, "or is it intended to be taken seriously?"

"Because if it's meant to be funny," she said, "I don't think it is at all funny. And if it is intended to be serious,

With the unerring instinct of the born critic she had divined my one weak point. Other objections raised

against me I could have met. But that one stinging reproach was unanswerable. It has made me, as I have

explained, chary of tendering advice on matters outside my own department of life. Otherwise, every year,

about Valentine's day, there is much that I should like to say to my good friends the birds. I want to put it to

them seriously. Is not the month of February just a little too early? Of course, their answer would be the same

I know I am not a bird, but that is the very reason why they should listen to me. I bring a fresh mind to bear

upon the subject. I am not tied down by bird convention. February, my dear friendsin these northern climes

of ours at all eventsis much too early. You have to build in a high wind, and nothing, believe me, tries a

lady's temper more than being blown about. Nature is nature, and womenfolk, my dear sirs, are the same all

the world over, whether they be birds or whether they be human. I am an older person than most of you, and I

If I were going to build a house with my wife, I should not choose a season of the year when the bricks and

planks and things were liable to be torn out of her hand, her skirts blown over her head, and she left clinging

for dear life to a scaffolding pole. I know the feminine biped and, you take it from me, that is not her notion

of a honeymoon. In April or May, the sun shining, the air balmywhen, after carrying up to her a load or

two of bricks, and a hod or two of mortar, we could knock off work for a few minutes without fear of the

whole house being swept away into the next streetcould sit side by side on the top of a wall, our legs

dangling down, and peck and morsel together; after which I could whistle a bit to herthen housebuilding

The swallows are wisest; June is their idea, and a very good idea, too. In a mountain village in the Tyrol,

early one summer, I had the opportunity of watching very closely the building of a swallow's nest. After

coffee, the first morning, I stepped out from the great, cool, dark passage of the wirtschaft into the blazing

sunlight, and, for no particular reason, pulledto the massive door behind me. While filling my pipe, a

swallow almost brushed by me, then wheeled round again, and took up a position on the fence only a few

yards from me. He was carrying what to him was an exceptionally large and heavy brick. He put it down

beside him on the fence, and called out something which I could not understand. I did not move. He got quite

excited and said some more. It was undoubtable he was addressing menobody else was by. I judged from

his tone that he was getting cross with me. At this point my travelling companion, his toilet unfinished, put

"Such an odd thing," he called down to me. "I never noticed it last night. A pair of swallows are building a

nest here in the hall. You've got to be careful you don't mistake it for a hatpeg. The old lady says they have

Then it came to me what it was the gentleman had been saying to me: "I say, sir, you with the bit of wood in

Now, with the key in my possession, it was so clear and understandable, I really forgot for the moment he

"I beg your pardon," I replied, "I had no idea. Such an extraordinary place to build a nest."

I opened the door for him, and, taking up his brick again, he entered, and I followed him in. There was a deal

"He shut the door," I heard him say, "Chap there, sucking the bit of wood. Thought I was never going to get

"I know," was the answer; "it has been so dark in here, if you'll believe me, I've hardly been able to see what

Observing me sitting there, they lowered their voices. Evidently she wanted him to put the brick down and

leave her to think. She was not quite sure where she would have it. He, on the other hand, was sure he had

found the right place for it. He pointed it out to her and explained his views. Other birds quarrel a good deal

during nest building, but swallows are the gentlest of little people. She let him put it where he wanted to, and

he kissed her and ran out. She cocked her eye after him, watched till he was out of sight, then deftly and

"Poor dears" (I could see it in the toss of her head); "they will think they know best; it is just as well not to

Every summer I suffer much from indignation. I love to watch the swallows building. They build beneath the

eaves outside my study window. Such cheerful little chatterboxes they are. Long after sunset, when all the

other birds are sleeping, the swallows still are chattering softly. It sounds as if they were telling one another

some pretty story, and often I am sure there must be humour in it, for every now and then one hears a little

twittering laugh. I delight in having them there, so close to me. The fancy comes to me that one day, when

my brain has grown more cunning, I, too, listening in the twilight, shall hear the stories that they tell.

One or two phrases already I have come to understand: "Once upon a time""Long, long ago""In a

strange, faroff land." I hear these words so constantly, I am sure I have them right. I call it "Swallow Street,"

this row of six or seven nests. Two or three, like villas in their own grounds, stand alone, and others are

semidetached. It makes me angry that the sparrows will come and steal them. The sparrows will hang about

deliberately waiting for a pair of swallows to finish their nest, and then, with a brutal laugh that makes my

blood boil, drive the swallows away and take possession of it. And the swallows are so wonderfully patient.

"Never mind, old girl," says Tommy Swallow, after the first big cry is over, to Jenny Swallow, "let's try

And half an hour later, full of fresh plans, they are choosing another likely site, chattering cheerfully once

more. I watched the building of a particular nest for nearly a fortnight one year; and when, after two or three

days' absence, I returned and found a pair of sparrows comfortably encsonced therein, I just felt mad. I saw

Mrs. Sparrow looking out. Maybe my anger was working upon my imagination, but it seemed to me that she

Mr. Sparrow then flew up with a gaudy feather, dyed blue, which belonged to me. I recognised it. It had come

out of the brush with which the girl breaks the china ornaments in our drawingroom. At any other time I

should have been glad to see him flying off with the whole thing, handle included. But now I felt the theft of

that one feather as an added injury. Mrs. Sparrow chirped with delight at sight of the gaudy monstrosity.

Having got the house cheap, they were going to spend their small amount of energy upon internal decoration.

That was their idea clearly, a "Liberty interior." She looked more like a Cockney sparrow than a country

"There is not much justice in this world," said I to myself; "but there's going to be some introduced into this

I did find a ladder, and fortunately it was long enough. Mr. and Mrs. Sparrow were out when I arrived,

possibly on the hunt for cheap photo frames and Japanese fans. I did not want to make a mess. I removed the

house neatly into a dustpan, and wiped the street clear of every trace of it. I had just put back the ladder

when Mrs. Sparrow returned with a piece of pink cottonwool in her mouth. That was her idea of a colour

scheme: appleblossom pink and Reckitt's blue side by side. She dropped her wool and sat on the waterspout,

"Number one, number two, number four; where the blazes"sparrows are essentially common, and the

Mr. Sparrow came up from behind, over the roof. He was carrying a piece of yellowfluff, part of a

"I went out just for a moment," replied Mrs. Sparrow; "I could not have been gone, no, not a couple of

"It's what I'm telling you," continued Mrs. Sparrow, "if you would only listen. There isn't any door, there isn't

"Isn't any" Mr. Sparrow, holding on to the rim of the spout, turned himself topsyturvy and surveyed the

street. From where I was standing behind the laurel bushes I could see nothing but his back.

"Oh, bother where you had gone. Where's the darned house gone? that's what I want to know."

They looked at one another. If ever astonishment was expressed in the attitude of a bird it was told by the

tails of those two sparrows. They whispered wickedly together. The idea occurred to them that by force or

cunning they might perhaps obtain possession of one of the other nests. But all the other nests were occupied,

and even gentle Jenny Swallow, once in her own home with the children round about her, is not to be trifled

with. Mr. Sparrow called at number two, put his head in at the door, and then returned to the waterspout.

"Lady says we don't live there," he explained to Mrs. Sparrow. There was silence for a while.

"If it were not for that terrible tired feeling of mine," said Mr. Sparrow, "blame if I wouldn't build a house of

"Perhaps," said Mrs. Sparrow, "I have heard it said that a little bit of work, now and then, does you good."

"All sorts of wild ideas about in the air nowadays," said Mr. Sparrow, "it don't do to listen to everybody."

"And it don't do to sit still and do nothing neither," snapped Mrs. Sparrow. "I don't want to have to forget I'm

On a newspaper placard, the other day, I saw announced a new novel by a celebrated author. I bought a copy

of the paper, and turned eagerly to the last page. I was disappointed to find that I had missed the first six

chapters. The story had commenced the previous Saturday; this was Friday. I say I was disappointed and so I

was, at first. But my disappointment did not last long. The bright and intelligent subeditor, according to the

custom now in vogue, had provided me with a short synopsis of those first six chapters, so that without the

"The first instalment," I learned, "introduces the reader to a brilliant and distinguished company, assembled in

the drawingroom of Lady Mary's maisonette in Park Street. Much smart talk is indulged in."

I know that "smart talk" so well. Had I not been lucky enough to miss that first chapter I should have had to

listen to it once again. Possibly, here and there, it might have been new to me, but it would have read, I know,

so very like the old. A dear, sweet whitehaired lady of my acquaintance is never surprised at anything that

"Something very much of the same kind occurred," she will remember, "one winter when we were staying in

We do not live new storiesnor write them either. The man's name in the old story was Robinson, we alter it

to Jones. It happened, in the old forgotten tale, at Brighton, in the winter time; we change it to Eastbourne, in

the spring. It is new and originalto those who have not heard "something very like it" once before.

"Much smart talk is indulged in," so the subeditor has explained. There is absolutely no need to ask for more

than that. There is a Duchess who says improper things. Once she used to shock me. But I know her now. She

is really a nice woman; she doesn't mean them. And when the heroine is in trouble, towards the middle of the

book, she is just as amusing on the side of virtue. Then there is a younger lady whose speciality is proverbs.

Apparently whenever she hears a proverb she writes it down and studies it with the idea of seeing into how

many different forms it can be twisted. It looks clever; as a matter of fact, it is extremely easy.

"Too simple that one," she tells herself. Be virtuous and your friends will be happy if you are not.

"Better, but not wicked enough. Let us think again. Be happy and people will jump to the conclusion that you

She is a painstaking lady. One feels that, better advised, she might have been of use in the world.

There is likewise a disgraceful old Peer who tells naughty stories, but who is good at heart; and one person so

Occasionally a slangy girl is included, and a clergyman, who takes the heroine aside and talks sense to her,

flavoured with epigram. All these people chatter a mixture of Lord Chesterfield and Oliver Wendell Holmes,

of Heine, Voltaire, Madame de Stael, and the late lamented H. J. Byron. "How they do it beats me," as I once

overheard at a music hall a stout lady confess to her friend while witnessing the performance of a clever

The synopsis added that: "Ursula Bart, a charming and unsophisticated young American girl possessed of an

Here you have a week's unnecessary work on the part of the author boiled down to its essentials. She was

young. One hardly expects an elderly heroine. The "young" might have been dispensed with, especially

seeing it is told us that she was a girl. But maybe this is carping. There are young girls and old girls. Perhaps

it is as well to have it in black and white; she was young. She was an American young girl. There is but one

American young girl in English fiction. We know by heart the unconventional things that she will do, the

startlingly original things that she will say, the fresh illuminating thoughts that will come to her as, clad in a

loose robe of some soft clinging stuff, she sits before the fire, in the solitude of her own room.

To complete her she had an "elusive expression." The days when we used to catalogue the heroine's "points"

are past. Formerly it was possible. A man wrote perhaps some halfadozen novels during the whole course

of his career. He could have a dark girl for the first, a light girl for the second, sketch a merry little wench for

the third, and draw you something stately for the fourth. For the remaining two he could go abroad.

Nowadays, when a man turns out a novel and six short stories once a year, description has to be dispensed

with. It is not the writer's fault. There is not sufficient variety in the sex. We used to introduce her thus:

"Imagine to yourself, dear reader, an exquisite and gracious creature of five feet three. Her golden hair of that

peculiar shade"here would follow directions enabling the reader to work it out for himself. He was to pour

some particular wine into some particular sort of glass, and wave it about before some particular sort of a

light. Or he was to get up at five o'clock on a March morning and go into a wood. In this way he could satisfy

himself as to the particular shade of gold the heroine's hair might happen to be. If he were a careless or lazy

reader he could save himself time and trouble by taking the author's word for it. Many of them did.

"Her eyes!" They were invariably deep and liquid. They had to be pretty deep to hold all the odds and ends

that were hidden in them; sunlight and shadow, mischief, unsuspected possibilities, assorted emotions,

strange wild yearnings. Anything we didn't know where else to put we said was hidden in her eyes.

"Her nose!" You could have made it for yourself out of a pen'orth of putty after reading our description of it.

"Her forehead!" It was always "low and broad." I don't know why it was always low. Maybe because the

intellectual heroine was not then popular. For the matter of that I doubt if she be really popular now. The

brainless doll, one fears, will continue for many years to come to be man's ideal womanand woman's ideal

"Her chin!" A less degree of variety was permissible in her chin. It had to be at an angle suggestive of

To properly understand her complexion you were expected to provide yourself with a collection of assorted

fruits and flowers. There are seasons in the year when it must have been difficult for the conscientious reader

to have made sure of her complexion. Possibly it was for this purpose that wax flowers and fruit, carefully

kept from the dust under glass cases, were common objects in former times upon the tables of the cultured.

Nowadays we content ourselvesand our readers also, I am inclined to thinkwith dashing her off in a few

bold strokes. We say that whenever she entered a room there came to one dreams of an old world garden, the

sound of faroff bells. Or that her presence brought with it the scent of hollyhocks and thyme. As a matter of

fact I don't think hollyhocks do smell. It is a small point; about such we do not trouble ourselves. In the case

of the homely type of girl I don't see why we should not borrow Mr. Pickwick's expression, and define her by

saying that in some subtle way she always contrived to suggest an odour of chops and tomato sauce.

If we desire to be exact we mention, as this particular author seems to have done, that she had an "elusive

expression," or a penetrating fragrance. Or we say that she moved, the centre of an indefinable nuance.

But it is not policy to bind oneself too closely to detail. A wise friend of mine, who knows his business,

describes his hero invariably in the vaguest terms. He will not even tell you whether the man is tall or short,

"Make the fellow nice," is his advice. "Let every woman reader picture him to herself as her particular man.

Then everything he says and does becomes of importance to her. She is careful not to miss a word."

For the same reason he sees to it that his heroine has a bit of every girl in her. Generally speaking, she is a

cross between Romola and Dora Copperfield. His novels command enormous sales. The women say he draws

a man to the life, but does not seem to know much about women. The men like his women, but think his men

Of another famous author no woman of my acquaintance is able to speak too highly. They tell me his

knowledge of their sex is simply marvellous, his insight, his understanding of them almost uncanny. Thinking

it might prove useful, I made an exhaustive study of his books. I noticed that his women were without

exception brilliant charming creatures possessed of the wit of a Lady Wortlay Montagu, combined with the

wisdom of a George Eliot. They were not all of them good women, but all of them were clever and all of

them were fascinating. I came to the conclusion that his lady critics were correct: he did understand women.

The second chapter, it appeared, transported us to Yorkshire where: "Basil Longleat, a typical young

Englishman, lately home from college, resides with his widowed mother and two sisters. They are a

What a world of trouble to both writer and to reader is here saved. "A typical young Englishman!" The author

probably wrote five pages, elaborating. The five words of the subeditor present him to me more vividly. I

see him positively glistening from the effects of soap and water. I see his clear blue eye; his fair crisp locks,

the natural curliness of which annoys him personally, though alluring to everybody else; his frank winning

smile. He is "lately home from college." That tells me that he is a firstclass cricketer; a first class oar; that

as a halfback he is incomparable; that he swims like Captain Webb; is in the first rank of tennis players; that

his half volley at pingpong has never been stopped. It doesn't tell me much about his brain power. The

description of him as a "typical young Englishman" suggests more information on this particular point. One

assumes that the American girl with the elusive expression is going to have sufficient for both.

"They are a delightful family." The subeditor does not say so, but I imagine the two sisters are likewise

typical young Englishwomen. They ride and shoot and cook and make their own dresses, have common sense

In the fourth, Ursula Bart (I was beginning to get anxious about her) turns up again. She is staying at the

useful Lady Mary's place in Yorkshire. She meets Basil by accident one morning while riding alone. That is

the advantage of having an American girl for your heroine. Like the British army: it goes anywhere and does

In chapter five Basil and Ursula meet again; this time at a picnic. The subeditor does not wish to repeat

himself, otherwise he possibly would have summed up chapter five by saying it was "taken up with the

"Basil, returning home in the twilight, comes across Ursula Bart, in a lonely point of the moor, talking

earnestly to a roughlooking stranger. His approach over the soft turf being unnoticed, he cannot help

overhearing Ursula's parting words to the forbiddinglooking stranger: 'I must see you again! Tomorrow

night at halfpast nine! In the gateway of the ruined abbey!' Who is he? And why must Ursula see him again

So here, at cost of reading twenty lines, I am landed, so to speak, at the beginning of the seventh chapter.

"You read it," I want to say to him. "Tell me tomorrow morning what it is all about. Who was this bounder?

Why should Ursula want to see him again? Why choose a draughty place? Why halfpast nine o'clock at

night, which must have been an awkward time for both of themlikely to lead to talk? Why should I wade

though this seventh chapter of three columns and a half? It's your work. What are you paid for?"

My fear is lest this sort of thing shall lead to a demand on the part of the public for condensed novels. What

busy man is going to spend a week of evenings reading a book when a nice kind subeditor is prepared in

Then there will come a dayI feel itwhen the businesslike Editor will say to himself: "What in thunder

is the sense of my paying one man to write a story of sixty thousand words and another man to read it and tell

We shall be expected to write our novels in chapters not exceeding twenty words. Our short stories will be

reduced to the formula: "Little boy. Pair of skates. Broken ice, Heaven's gates." Formerly an author,

commissioned to supply a child's tragedy of this genre for a Christmas number, would have spun it out into

five thousand words. Personally, I should have commenced the previous springgiven the reader the

summer and autumn to get accustomed to the boy. He would have been a good boy; the sort of boy that

makes a beeline for the thinnest ice. He would have lived in a cottage. I could have spread that cottage over

two pages; the things that grew in the garden, the view from the front door. You would have known that boy

before I had done with himfelt you had known him all your life. His quaint sayings, his childish thoughts,

his great longings would have been impressed upon you. The father might have had a dash of humour in him,

the mother's early girlhood would have lent itself to pretty writing. For the ice we would have had a

mysterious lake in the wood, said to be haunted. The boy would have loved o' twilights to stand upon its

margin. He would have heard strange voices calling to him. You would have felt the thing was coming.

So much might have been done. When I think of that plot wasted in nine words it makes me positively angry.

And what is to become of us writers if this is to be the new fashion in literature? We are paid by the length of

our manuscript at rates from halfacrown a thousand words, and upwards. In the case of fellows like Doyle

and Kipling I am told it runs into pounds. How are we to live on novels the serial rights of which to most of

It can't be done. It is no good telling me you can see no reason why we should live. That is no answer. I'm

And what about bookrights? Who is going to buy novels of three pages? They will have to be printed as

leaflets and sold at a penny a dozen. Marie Corelli and Hall Caineif all I hear about them is truewill

possibly make their ten or twelve shillings a week. But what about the rest of us? This thing is worrying me.

My desire was once to pass a peaceful and pleasant winter in Brussels, attending to my work, improving my

mind. Brussels is a bright and cheerful town, and I think I could have succeeded had it not been for the

Belgian Army. The Belgian Army would follow me about and worry me. Judging of it from my own

experience, I should say it was a good army. Napoleon laid it down as an axiom that your enemy never ought

to be permitted to get away from younever ought to be allowed to feel, even for a moment, that he had

shaken you off. What tactics the Belgian Army might adopt under other conditions I am unable to say, but

against me personally that was the plan of campaign it determined upon and carried out with a success that

I found it utterly impossible to escape from the Belgian Army. I made a point of choosing the quietest and

most unlikely streets, I chose all hoursearly in the morning, in the afternoon, late in the evening. There

were moments of wild exaltation when I imagined I had given it the slip. I could not see it anywhere, I could

I had been doing it injustice: it had been working round me. Approaching the next corner, I would hear the

tattoo of its drum. Before I had gone another quarter of a mile it would be in full pursuit of me. I would jump

upon a tram, and travel for miles. Then, thinking I had shaken it off, I would alight and proceed upon my

walk. Five minutes later another detachment would be upon my heels. I would slink home, the Belgian Army

pursuing me with its exultant tattoo. Vanquished, shamed, my insular pride for ever vanished, I would creep

up into my room and close the door. The victorious Belgian Army would then march back to barracks.

If only it had followed me with a band: I like a band. I can loaf against a post, listening to a band with

anyone. I should not have minded so much had it come after me with a band. But the Belgian Army,

apparently, doesn't run to a band. It has nothing but this drum. It has not even a real drumnot what I call a

drum. It is a little boy's drum, the sort of thing I used to play myself at one time, until people took it away

from me, and threatened that if they heard it once again that day they would break it over my own head. It is

cowardly going up and down, playing a drum of this sort, when there is nobody to stop you. The man would

not dare to do it if his mother was about. He does not even play it. He walks along tapping it with a little

stick. There's no tune, there's no sense in it. He does not even keep time. I used to think at first, hearing it in

the distance, that it was the work of some young gamin who ought to be at school, or making himself useful

taking the baby out in the perambulator: and I would draw back into dark doorways, determined, as he came

by, to dart out and pull his ear for him. To my astonishmentfor the first weekI learnt it was the Belgian

Army, getting itself accustomed, one supposes, to the horrors of war. It had the effect of making me a

They tell me these armies are necessary to preserve the tranquility of Europe. For myself, I should be willing

to run the risk of an occasional row. Cannot someone tell them they are out of date, with their bits of feathers

and their odds and ends of ironmongerygrown men that cannot be sent out for a walk unless accompanied

by a couple of nursemen, blowing a tin whistle and tapping a drum out of a toy shop to keep them in order

and prevent their running about: one might think they were chickens. A herd of soldiers with their pots and

pans and parcels, and all their deadly things tied on to them, prancing about in time to a tune, makes me think

always of the White Knight that Alice met in Wonderland. I take it that for practical purposesto fight for

your country, or to fight for somebody else's country, which is, generally speaking, more popularthe thing

essential is that a certain proportion of the populace should be able to shoot straight with a gun. How standing

in a line and turning out your toes is going to assist you, under modern conditions of warfare, is one of the

In mediaeval days, when men fought hand to hand, there must have been advantage in combined and precise

movement. When armies were mere iron machines, the simple endeavour of each being to push the other off

the earth, then the striking simultaneously with a thousand arms was part of the game. Now, when we shoot

from behind cover with smokeless powder, brain not brute forceindividual sense not combined solidity is

surely the result to be aimed at. Cannot somebody, as I have suggested, explain to the military man that the

proper place for the drill sergeant nowadays is under a glass case in some museum of antiquities?

I lived once near the Hyde Park barracks, and saw much of the drill sergeant's method. Generally speaking,

he is a stout man with the walk of an egotistical pigeon. His voice is one of the most extraordinary things in

nature: if you can distinguish it from the bark of a dog, you are clever. They tell me that the privates, after a

little practice, canwhich gives one a higher opinion of their intelligence than otherwise one might form.

But myself I doubt even this statement. I was the owner of a fine retriever dog about the time of which I am

speaking, and sometimes he and I would amuse ourselves by watching Mr. Sergeant exercising his squad.

One morning he had been shouting out the usual "Whough, whough, whough!" for about ten minutes, and all

had hitherto gone well. Suddenly, and evidently to his intense astonishment, the squad turned their backs

"Halt!" yelled the sergeant, the instant his amazed indignation permitted him to speak, which fortunately

The squad looked bewildered, but said nothing, and were brought back to the place where they were before.

A minute later precisely the same thing occurred again. I really thought the sergeant would burst. I was

preparing to hasten to the barracks for medical aid. But the paroxysm passed. Calling upon the combined

forces of heaven and hell to sustain him in his trouble, he requested his squad, as man to man, to inform him

of the reason why to all appearance they were dispensing with his services and drilling themselves.

"Please go away, sir," he requested me. "How can I exercise my men with that dog of yours interfering every

It was not only on that occasion. It happened at other times. The dog seemed to understand and take a

pleasure in it. Sometimes meeting a soldier, walking with his sweetheart, Columbus, from behind my legs,

would bark suddenly. Immediately the man would let go the girl and proceed, involuntarily, to perform

The War Office authorities accused me of having trained the dog. I had not trained him: that was his natural

voice. I suggested to the War Office authorities that instead of quarrelling with my dog for talking his own

They would not see it. Unpleasantness was in the air, and, living where I did at the time, I thought it best to

part with Columbus. I could see what the War Office was driving at, and I did not desire that responsibility

Some twenty years ago we, in London, were passing through a riotous period, and a call was made to

lawabiding citizens to enrol themselves as special constables. I was young, and the hope of trouble appealed

to me more than it does now. In company with some five or six hundred other more or less respectable

citizens, I found myself one Sunday morning in the drill yard of the Albany Barracks. It was the opinion of

the authorities that we could guard our homes and protect our wives and children better if first of all we

learned to roll our "eyes right" or left at the given word of command, and to walk with our thumbs stuck out.

Accordingly a drill sergeant was appointed to instruct us on these points. He came out of the canteen, wiping

his mouth and flicking his leg, according to rule, with the regulation cane. But, as he approached us, his

expression changed. We were stout, pompouslooking gentlemen, the majority of us, in frock coats and silk

hats. The sergeant was a man with a sense of the fitness of things. The idea of shouting and swearing at us

fell from him: and that gone there seemed to be no happy medium left to him. The stiffness departed from his

back. He met us with a defferential attitude, and spoke to us in the language of social intercourse.

"Well, now, gentlemen," said the sergeant, with a pleasant smile, "what do you say to falling in?"

We agreed to fall in. He showed us how to do it. He cast a critical eye along the back of our rear line.

"A little further back, if you don't mind, sir," he suggested, addressing the third gentleman from the end.

"Ah," said the sergeant, "a little fullchested, some of us. We will make the distance another foot, if you

"Now then, gentlemen, shall we try a little walk? Quick march! Thank you, gentlemen. Sorry to trouble you,

but it may be necessary to runforward I mean, of course.. So if you really do not mind, we will now do the

double quick. Halt! And if next time you can keep a little more in lineit has a more imposing appearance,

If the thing must be done at all, why should it not be done in this way? Why should not the sergeant address

"Now then, you young chaps, are you all ready? Don't hurry yourselves: no need to make hard work of what

should be a pleasure to all of us. That's right, that's very good indeedconsidering you are only novices. But

there is still something to be desired in your attitude, Private Bullyboy. You will excuse my being personal,

but are you knockkneed naturally? Or could you, with an effort, do you think, contrive to give yourself less

the appearance of a marionette whose strings have become loose? Thank you, that is better. These little things

"Don't you like your boots, Private Montmorency? Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought from the way you were

bending down and looking at them that perhaps their appearance was dissatisfying to you. My mistake.

"Are you suffering from indigestion, my poor fellow? Shall I get you a little brandy? It isn't indigestion. Then

what's the matter with it? Why are you trying to hide it? It's nothing to be ashamed of. We've all got one. Let

Having succeeded, with a few such kindly words, in getting his line into order, he would proceed to

"Shoulder arms! Good, gentlemen, very good for a beginning. Yet still, if I may be critical, not perfect. There

is more in this thing than you might imagine, gentlemen. May I point out to Private Henry Thompson that a

musket carried across the shoulder at right angles is apt to inconvenience the gentleman behind. Even from

the point of view of his own comfort, I feel sure that Private Thompson would do better to follow the usual

"I would also suggest to Private St. Leonard that we are not here to practice the art of balancing a heavy

musket on the outstretched palm of the hand. Private St. Leonard's performance with the musket is decidedly

"Believe me, gentlemen, this thing has been carefully worked out, and no improvement is likely to result

from individual effort. Let our idea be uniformity. It is monotonous, but it is safe. Now, then, gentlemen,

The drill yard would be converted into a source of innocent delight to thousands. "Officer and gentleman"

would become a phrase of meaning. I present the idea, for what it may be worth, with my compliments, to

The fault of the military man is that he studies too much, reads too much history, is over reflective. If,

instead, he would look about him more he would notice that things are changing. Someone has told the

British military man that Waterloo was won upon the playing fields of Eton. So he goes to Eton and plays.

One of these days he will be called upon to fight another Waterloo: and afterwardswhen it is too

latethey will explain to him that it was won not upon the play field but in the class room.

From the mound on the old Waterloo plain one can form a notion of what battles, under former conditions,

must have been. The other battlefields of Europe are rapidly disappearing: useful Dutch cabbages, as Carlyle

would have pointed out with justifiable satisfaction, hiding the theatre of man's childish folly. You find,

generally speaking, cobblers happily employed in cobbling shoes, women gossipping cheerfully over the

washtub on the spot where a hundred years ago, according to the guidebook, a thousand men dressed in blue

and a thousand men dressed in red rushed together like quarrelsome foxterriers, and worried each other to

But the field of Waterloo is little changed. The guide, whose grandfather was present at the battlequite an

extraordinary number of grandfathers must have fought at Waterloo: there must have been whole regiments

composed of grandfatherscan point out to you the ground across which every charge was delivered, can

show you every ridge, still existing, behind which the infantry crouched. The whole business was began and

finished within a space little larger than a square mile. One can understand the advantage then to be derived

from the perfect moving of the military machine; the uses of the echelon, the purposes of the linked battalion,

the manipulation of centre, left wing and right wing. Then it may have been worth while if war be ever

worth the whilewhich grown men of sense are beginning to doubtto waste two years of a soldier's

training, teaching him the goosestep. In the twentieth century, teaching soldiers the evolutions of the Thirty

Years' War is about as sensible as it would be loading our ironclads with canvas.

I followed once a company of Volunteers across Blackfriars Bridge on their way from Southwark to the

Temple. At the bottom of Ludgate Hill the commanding officer, a young but conscientious gentleman,

ordered "Left wheel!" At once the vanguard turned down a narrow alleyI forget its namewhich would

have led the troop into the purlieus of Whitefriars, where, in all probability, they would have been lost for

ever. The whole company had to be halted, rightabout faced, and retired a hundred yards. Then the order

"Quick march!" was given. The vanguard shot across Ludgate Circus, and were making for the Meat Market.

At this point that young commanding officer gave up being a military man and talked sense.

There was once upon a time a charming young lady, possessed of much taste, who was asked by her anxious

parent, the years passing and family expenditure not decreasing, which of the numerous and eligible young

men then paying court to her she liked the best. She replied, that was her difficulty; she could not make up

her mind which she liked the best. They were all so nice. She could not possibly select one to the exclusion of

all the others. What she would have liked would have been to marry the lot; but that, she presumed, was

I feel I resemble that young lady, not so much in charm and beauty as in indecision of mind, when the

question is that of my favourite author or my favourite book. It is as if one were asked one's favourite food.

There are times when one fancies an egg with one's tea. On other occasions one dreams of a kipper. Today

one clamours for lobsters. Tomorrow one feels one never wishes to see a lobster again. One determines to

settle down, for a time, to a diet of bread and milk and rice pudding. Asked suddenly to say whether I

preferred ices to soup, or beefsteak to caviare, I should be completely nonplussed.

There may be readers who care for only one literary diet. I am a person of gross appetites, requiring many

authors to satisfy me. There are moods when the savage strength of the Bronte sisters is companionable to

me. One rejoices in the unrelieved gloom of "Wuthering Heights," as in the lowering skies of a stormy

autumn. Perhaps part of the marvel of the book comes from the knowledge that the authoress was a slight,

delicate young girl. One wonders what her future work would have been, had she lived to gain a wider

experience of life; or was it well for her fame that nature took the pen so soon from her hand? Her suppressed

vehemence may have been better suited to those tangled Yorkshire byways than to the more open, cultivated

There is not much similarity between the two books, yet when recalling Emily Bronte my thoughts always

run on to Olive Schreiner. Here, again, was a young girl with the voice of a strong man. Olive Schreiner,

more fortunate, has lived; but I doubt if she will ever write a book that will remind us of her first. "The Story

of an African Farm" is not a work to be repeated. We have advanced in literature of late. I can well remember

the storm of indignation with which the "African Farm" was received by Mrs. Grundy and her then

numerous, but now happily diminishing, school. It was a book that was to be kept from the hands of every

young man and woman. But the hands of the young men and women stretched out and grasped it, to their

help. It is a curious idea, this of Mrs. Grundy's, that the young man and woman must never thinkthat all

literature that does anything more than echo the conventions must be hidden away.

Then there are times when I love to gallop through history on Sir Walter's broomstick. At other hours it is

pleasant to sit in converse with wise George Eliot. From her garden terrace I look down on Loamshire and its

commonplace people; while in her quiet, deep voice she tells me of the hidden hearts that beat and throb

Who can help loving Thackeray, wittiest, gentlest of men, in spite of the faint suspicion of snobbishness that

clings to him? There is something pathetic in the good man's horror of this snobbishness, to which he himself

was a victim. May it not have been an affectation, born unconsciously of selfconsciousness? His heroes and

heroines must needs be all fine folk, fit company for lady and gentlemen readers. To him the livery was too

often the man. Under his stuffed calves even Jeames de la Pluche himself stood upon the legs of a man, but

Thackeray could never see deeper than the silk stockings. Thackeray lived and died in Clubland. One feels

that the world was bounded for him by Temple Bar on the east and Park Lane on the west; but what there was

good in Clubland he showed us, and for the sake of the great gentlemen and sweet ladies that his kindly eyes

found in that narrow region, not too overpeopled with great gentlemen and sweet women, let us honour him.

"Tom Jones," "Peregrine Pickle," and "Tristram Shandy" are books a man is the better for reading, if he read

them wisely. They teach him that literature, to be a living force, must deal with all sides of life, and that little

help comes to us from that silly pretence of ours that we are perfect in all things, leading perfect lives, that

This is a point that needs to be considered by both the makers and the buyers of stories. If literature is to be

regarded solely as the amusement of an idle hour, then the less relationship it has to life the better. Looking

into a truthful mirror of nature we are compelled to think; and when thought comes in at the window self

satisfaction goes out by the door. Should a novel or play call us to ponder upon the problems of existence, or

lure us from the dusty high road of the world, for a while, into the pleasant meadows of dreamland? If only

the latter, then let our heroes and our heroines be not what men and women are, but what they should be. Let

Angelina be always spotless and Edwin always true. Let virtue ever triumph over villainy in the last chapter;

and let us assume that the marriage service answers all the questions of the Sphinx.

Very pleasant are these fairy tales where the prince is always brave and handsome; where the princess is

always the best and most beautiful princess that ever lived; where one knows the wicked people at a glance

by their ugliness and illtemper, mistakes being thus rendered impossible; where the good fairies are, by

nature, more powerful than the bad; where gloomy paths lead ever to fair palaces; where the dragon is ever

vanquished; and where wellbehaved husbands and wives can rely upon living happily ever afterwards. "The

world is too much with us, late and soon." It is wise to slip away from it at times to fairyland. But, alas, we

cannot live in fairyland, and knowledge of its geography is of little help to us on our return to the rugged

Are not both branches of literature needful? By all means let us dream, on midsummer nights, of fond lovers

led through devious paths to happiness by Puck; of virtuous dukesone finds such in fairyland; of fate

subdued by faith and gentleness. But may we not also, in our more serious humours, find satisfaction in

thinking with Hamlet or Coriolanus? May not both Dickens and Zola have their booths in Vanity Fair? If

literature is to be a help to us, as well as a pastime, it must deal with the ugly as well as with the beautiful; it

must show us ourselves, not as we wish to appear, but as we know ourselves to be. Man has been described

as a animal with aspirations reaching up to Heaven and instincts rootedelsewhere. Is literature to flatter

Of living writers it is not safe, I suppose, to speak except, perhaps, of those who have been with us so long

that we have come to forget they are not of the past. Has justice ever been done to Ouida's undoubted genius

by our shallow school of criticism, always very clever in discovering faults as obvious as pimples on a fine

face? Her guardsmen "toy" with their food. Her horses win the Derby three years running. Her wicked

women throw guinea peaches from the windows of the Star and Garter into the Thames at Richmond. The

distance being about three hundred and fifty yards, it is a good throw. Well, well, books are not made worth

reading by the absence of absurdities. Ouida possesses strength, tenderness, truth, passion; and these be

qualities in a writer capable of carrying many more faults than Ouida is burdened with. But that is the method

of our little criticism. It views an artist as Gulliver saw the Brobdingnag ladies. It is too small to see them in

Why was not George Gissing more widely read? If faithfulness to life were the key to literary success,

Gissing's sales would have been counted by the million instead of by the hundred.

Have Mark Twain's literary qualities, apart altogether from his humour, been recognised in literary circles as

they ought to have been? "Huck Finn" would be a great work were there not a laugh in it from cover to cover.

Among the Indians and some other savage tribes the fact that a member of the community has lost one of his

senses makes greatly to his advantage; he is then regarded as a superior person. So among a school of

AngloSaxon readers, it is necessary to a man, if he would gain literary credit, that he should lack the sense

of humour. One or two curious modern examples occur to me of literary success secured chiefly by this

All these authors are my favourites; but such catholic taste is held nowadays to be no taste. One is told that if

one loves Shakespeare, one must of necessity hate Ibsen; that one cannot appreciate Wagner and tolerate

Beethoven; that if we admit any merit in Dore, we are incapable of understanding Whistler. How can I say

which is my favourite novel? I can only ask myself which lives clearest in my memory, which is the book I

run to more often than to another in that pleasant half hour before the dinnerbell, when, with all apologies to

I find, on examination, that my "David Copperfield" is more dilapidated than any other novel upon my

shelves. As I turn its dog eared pages, reading the familiar headlines "Mr. Micawber in difficulties," "Mr.

Micawber in prison," "I fall in love with Dora," "Mr. Barkis goes out with the tide," "My child wife,"

"Traddles in a nest of roses"pages of my own life recur to me; so many of my sorrows, so many of my joys

are woven in my mind with this chapter or the other. That dayhow well I remember it when I read of

"David's" wooing, but Dora's death I was careful to skip. Poor, pretty little Mrs. Copperfield at the gate,

holding up her baby in her arms, is always associated in my memory with a child's cry, long listened for. I

found the book, face downwards on a chair, weeks afterwards, not moved from where I had hastily laid it.

Old friends, all of you, how many times have I not slipped away from my worries into your pleasant

company! Peggotty, you dear soul, the sight of your kind eyes is so good to me. Our mutual friend, Mr.

Charles Dickens, is prone, we know, just ever so slightly to gush. Good fellow that he is, he can see no flaw

in those he loves, but you, dear lady, if you will permit me to call you by a name much abused, he has drawn

in true colours. I know you well, with your big heart, your quick temper, your homely, human ways of

thought. You yourself will never guess your worthhow much the world is better for such as you! You think

of yourself as of a commonplace person, useful only for the making of pastry, the darning of stockings, and if

a mannot a young man, with only dim halfopened eyes, but a man whom life had made keen to see the

beauty that lies hidden beneath plain faceswere to kneel and kiss your red, coarse hand, you would be

much astonished. But he would be a wise man, Peggotty, knowing what things a man should take carelessly,

and for what things he should thank God, who has fashioned fairness in many forms.

Mr. Wilkins Micawber, and you, most excellent of faithful wives, Mrs. Emma Micawber, to you I also raise

my hat. How often has the example of your philosophy saved me, when I, likewise, have suffered under the

temporary pressure of pecuniary liabilities; when the sun of my prosperity, too, has sunk beneath the dark

horizon of the worldin short, when I, also, have found myself in a tight corner. I have asked myself what

would the Micawbers have done in my place. And I have answered myself. They would have sat down to a

dish of lamb's fry, cooked and breaded by the deft hands of Emma, followed by a brew of punch, concocted

by the beaming Wilkins, and have forgotten all their troubles, for the time being. Whereupon, seeing first that

sufficient small change was in my pocket, I have entered the nearest restaurant, and have treated myself to a

repast of such sumptuousness as the aforesaid small change would command, emerging from that restaurant

stronger and more fit for battle. And lo! the sun of my prosperity has peeped at me from over the clouds with

Cheery, elastic Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, how would half the world face their fate but by the help of a kindly,

shallow nature such as yours? I love to think that your sorrows can be drowned in nothing more harmful than

May you and such childlike folk trip lightly over the stones upon your path! May something ever turn up for

you, my dears! May the rain of life ever fall as April showers upon your simple bald head, Micawber!

And you, sweet Dora, let me confess I love you, though sensible friends deem you foolish. Ah, silly Dora,

fashioned by wise Mother Nature who knows that weakness and helplessness are as a talisman calling forth

strength and tenderness in man, trouble yourself not unduly about the oysters and the underdone mutton, little

woman. Good plain cooks at twenty pounds a year will see to these things for us. Your work is to teach us

gentleness and kindness. Lay your foolish curls just here, child. It is from such as you we learn wisdom.

Foolish wise folk sneer at you. Foolish wise folk would pull up the laughing lilies, the needless roses from

the garden, would plant in their places only useful, wholesome cabbage. But the gardener, knowing better,

plants the silly, shortlived flowers, foolish wise folk asking for what purpose.

Gallant Traddles, of the strong heart and the unruly hair; Sophy, dearest of girls; Betsy Trotwood, with your

gentlemanly manners and your woman's heart, you have come to me in shabby rooms, making the dismal

place seem bright. In dark hours your kindly faces have looked out at me from the shadows, your kindly

Little Em'ly and Agnes, it may be my bad taste, but I cannot share my friend Dickens' enthusiasm for them.

Dickens' good women are all too good for human nature's daily food. Esther Summerson, Florence Dombey,

Scott's women were likewise mere illuminated texts. Scott only drew one live heroineCatherine Seton. His

other women were merely the prizes the hero had to win in the end, like the sucking pig or the leg of mutton

for which the yokel climbs the greasy pole. That Dickens could draw a woman to some likeness he proved by

Bella Wilfer, and Estella in "Great Expectations." But real women have never been popular in fiction. Men

From an artistic point of view, "David Copperfield" is undoubtedly Dickens' best work. Its humour is less

"Oh, poor dear, he's ill," says a tenderhearted lady in the crowd. "Ill!" retorts a male bystander indignantly,

Dickens suffered from too little of what some of us have too much of criticism. His work met with too

little resistance to call forth his powers. Too often his pathos sinks to bathos, and this not from want of skill,

but from want of care. It is difficult to believe that the popular writer who allowed his sentimentalityor

rather the public's sentimentalityto run away with him in such scenes as the death of Paul Dombey and

Little Nell was the artist who painted the death of Sidney Carton and of Barkis, the willing. The death of

Barkis, next to the passing of Colonel Newcome, is, to my thinking, one of the most perfect pieces of pathos

in English literature. No very deep emotion is concerned. He is a commonplace old man, clinging foolishly to

a commonplace box. His simple wife and the old boatmen stand by, waiting calmly for the end. There is no

straining after effect. One feels death enter, dignifying all things; and touched by that hand, foolish old Barkis

In Uriah Heap and Mrs. Gummidge, Dickens draws types rather than characters. Pecksniff, Podsnap, Dolly

Varden, Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Gamp, Mark Tapley, Turveydrop, Mrs. Jellybythese are not characters; they are

We have to go back to Shakespeare to find a writer who, through fiction, has so enriched the thought of the

people. Admit all Dickens' faults twice over, we still have one of the greatest writers of modern times. Such

people as these creations of Dickens never lived, says your little critic. Nor was Prometheus, type of the spirit

of man, nor was Niobe, mother of all mothers, a truthful picture of the citizen one was likely to meet often

during a morning's stroll through Athens. Nor grew there ever a wood like to the Forest of Arden, though

every Rosalind and Orlando knows the path to glades having much resemblance thereto.

Steerforth, upon whom Dickens evidently prided himself, I must confess, never laid hold of me. He is a

melodramatic young man. The worst I could have wished him would have been that he should marry Rose

Dartle and live with his mother. It would have served him right for being so attractive. Old Peggotty and Ham

are, of course, impossible. One must accept them also as types. These Brothers Cheeryble, these Kits, Joe

Gargeries, Boffins, Garlands, John Peerybingles, we will accept as types of the goodness that is in men

though in real life the amount of virtue that Dickens often wastes upon a single individual would by more

To sum up, "David Copperfield" is a plain tale, simply told; and such are all books that live. Eccentricities of

style, artistic trickery, may please the critic of a day, but literature is a story that interests us, boys and girls,

men and women. It is a sad book; and that, again, gives it an added charm in these sad later days. Humanity is

nearing its old age, and we have come to love sadness, as the friend who has been longest with us. In the

young days of our vigour we were merry. With Ulysses' boatmen, we took alike the sunshine and the thunder

with frolic welcome. The red blood flowed in our veins, and we laughed, and our tales were of strength and

hope. Now we sit like old men, watching faces in the fire; and the stories that we love are sad storieslike

I ought to like Russia better than I do, if only for the sake of the many good friends I am proud to possess

amongst the Russians. A large square photograph I keep always on my mantelpiece; it helps me to maintain

my head at that degree of distention necessary for the performance of all literary work. It presents in the

centre a neatlywritten address in excellent English that I frankly confess I am never tired of reading, around

which are ranged some hundreds of names I am quite unable to read, but which, in spite of their strange

lettering, I know to be the names of good Russian men and women to whom, a year or two ago, occurred the

kindly idea of sending me as a Christmas card this message of encouragement. The individual Russian is one

of the most charming creatures living. If he like you he does not hesitate to let you know it; not only by every

action possible, but, by what perhaps is just as useful in this grey old world, by generous, impulsive speech.

We AngloSaxons are apt to pride ourselves upon being undemonstrative. Max Adeler tells the tale of a boy

who was sent out by his father to fetch wood. The boy took the opportunity of disappearing and did not show

his face again beneath the paternal roof for over twenty years. Then one evening, a smiling, well dressed

stranger entered to the old couple, and announced himself as their longlost child, returned at last.

"Well, you haven't hurried yourself," grumbled the old man, "and blarm me if now you haven't forgotten the

I was lunching with an Englishman in a London restaurant one day. A man entered and took his seat at a table

"Excuse me a minute," said my friend, "I must just speak to my brotherhaven't seen him for over five

He finished his soup and leisurely wiped his moustache before strolling across and shaking hands. They

"Never thought to see him again," observed my friend, "he was one of the garrison of that place in

Africawhat's the name of it?that the Mahdi attacked. Only three of them escaped. Always was a lucky

"But wouldn't you like to talk to him some more?" I suggested; "I can see you any time about this little

"Oh, that's all right," he answered, "we have just fixed it upshall be seeing him again tomorrow."

I thought of this scene one evening while dining with some Russian friends in a St. Petersburg Hotel. One of

the party had not seen his second cousin, a mining engineer, for nearly eighteen months. They sat opposite to

one another, and a dozen times at least during the course of the dinner one of them would jump up from his

chair, and run round to embrace the other. They would throw their arms about one another, kissing one

another on both cheeks, and then sit down again, with moist eyes. Their behaviour among their fellow

But the Russians's anger is as quick and vehement as his love. On another occasion I was supping with

friends in one of the chief restaurants on the Nevsky. Two gentlemen at an adjoining table, who up till the

previous moment had been engaged in amicable conversation, suddenly sprang to their feet, and "went for"

one another. One man secured the waterbottle, which he promptly broke over the other's head. His opponent

chose for his weapon a heavy mahogany chair, and leaping back for the purpose of securing a good swing,

"A thousand pardons, madame," returned the stranger, from whom blood and water were streaming in equal

copiousness; and taking the utmost care to avoid interfering with our comfort, he succeeded adroitly in

A policeman appeared upon the scene. He did not attempt to interfere, but running out into the street

"This is going to cost them a pretty penny," observed my host, who was calmly continuing his supper; "why

It did cost them a pretty penny. Some half a dozen policemen were round about before as many minutes had

elapsed, and each one claimed his bribe. Then they wished both combatants goodnight, and trooped out

evidently in great good humour and the two gentlemen, with wet napkins round their heads, sat down again,

They strike the stranger as a childlike people, but you are possessed with a haunting sense of ugly traits

beneath. The workersslaves it would be almost more correct to call themallow themselves to be

exploited with the uncomplaining patience of intelligent animals. Yet every educated Russian you talk to on

But he talks to you about it with the door shut, for no man in Russia can be sure that his own servants are not

police spies. I was discussing politics with a Russian official one evening in his study when his old

housekeeper entered the rooma softeyed greyhaired woman who had been in his service over eight

years, and whose position in the household was almost that of a friend. He stopped abruptly and changed the

conversation. So soon as the door was closed behind her again, he explained himself.

"It is safer to trust no one," he answered. And then he continued from the point where we had been

"It is gathering," he said; "there are times when I almost smell blood in the air. I am an old man and may

escape it, but my children will have to suffersuffer as children must for the sins of their fathers. We have

made brute beasts of the people, and as brute beasts they will come upon us, cruel, and undiscriminating;

right and wrong indifferently going down before them. But it has to be. It is needed."

It is a mistake to speak of the Russian classes opposing to all progress a dead wall of selfishness. The history

of Russia will be the history of the French Revolution over again, but with this difference: that the educated

classes, the thinkers, who are pushing forward the dumb masses are doing so with their eyes open. There will

be no Maribeau, no Danton to be appalled at a people's ingratitude. The men who are today working for

revolution in Russia number among their ranks statesmen, soldiers, delicatelynurtured women, rich

landowners, prosperous tradesmen, students familiar with the lessons of history. They have no

misconceptions concerning the blind Monster into which they are breathing life. He will crush them, they

know it; but with them he will crush the injustice and stupidity they have grown to hate more than they love

The Russian peasant, when he rises, will prove more terrible, more pitiless than were the men of 1790. He is

less intelligent, more brutal. They sing a wild, sad song, these Russian cattle, the while they work. They sing

it in chorus on the quays while hauling the cargo, they sing it in the factory, they chant on the weary, endless

steppes, reaping the corn they may not eat. It is of the good time their masters are having, of the feastings and

But the last line of every verse is the same. When you ask a Russian to translate it for you he shrugs his

It is a pathetic, haunting refrain. They sing it in the drawing rooms of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and

somehow the light talk and laughter die away, and a hush, like a chill breath, enters by the closed door and

passes through. It is a curious song, like the wailing of a tired wind, and one day it will sweep over the land

A Scotsman I met in Russia told me that when he first came out to act as manager of a large factory in St.

Petersburg, belonging to his Scottish employers, he unwittingly made a mistake the first week when paying

his workpeople. By a miscalculation of the Russian money he paid the men, each one, nearly a rouble short.

He discovered his error before the following Saturday, and then put the matter right. The men accepted his

explanation with perfect composure and without any comment whatever. The thing astonished him.

"But you must have known I was paying you short," he said to one of them. "Why didn't you tell me of it?"

"Oh," answered the man, "we thought you were putting it in your own pocket and then if we had complained

it would have meant dismissal for us. No one would have taken our word against yours."

Corruption appears to be so general throughout the whole of Russia that all classes have come to accept it as

part of the established order of things. A friend gave me a little dog to bring away with me. It was a valuable

animal, and I wished to keep it with me. It is strictly forbidden to take dogs into railway carriages. The list of

"Oh, that will be all right," my friend assured me; "have a few roubles loose in your pocket."

I tipped the station master and I tipped the guard, and started pleased with myself. But I had not anticipated

what was in store for me. The news that an Englishman with a dog in a basket and roubles in his pocket was

coming must have been telegraphed all down the line. At almost every stoppingplace some enormous

official, wearing generally a sword and a helmet, boarded the train. At first these fellows terrified me. I took

Visions of Siberia crossed my mind. Anxious and trembling, I gave the first one a gold piece. He shook me

warmly by the handI thought he was going to kiss me. If I had offered him my cheek I am sure he would

have done so. With the next one I felt less apprehensive. For a couple of roubles he blessed me, so I gathered;

and, commending me to the care of the Almighty, departed. Before I had reached the German frontier, I was

giving away the equivalent of English sixpences to men with the dress and carriage of major generals; and

to see their faces brighten up and to receive their heartfelt benediction was well worth the money.

But to the man without roubles in his pocket, Russian officialdom is not so gracious. By the expenditure of a

few more coins I got my dog through the Customs without trouble, and had leisure to look about me. A

miserable object was being badgered by half a dozen men in uniform, and hehis lean face puckered up into

a snarlwas returning them snappish answers; the whole scene suggested some half starved mongrel being

worried by schoolboys. A slight informality had been discovered in his passport, so a fellow traveller with

whom I had made friends informed me. He had no roubles in his pocket, and in consequence they were

sending him back to St. Petersburgsome eighteen hours' journeyin a wagon that in England would not

It seemed a good joke to Russian officialdom; they would drop in every now and then, look at him as he sat

crouched in a corner of the waitingroom, and pass out again, laughing. The snarl had died from his face; a

dull, listless indifference had taken its placethe look one sees on the face of a beaten dog, after the beating

is over, when it is lying very still, its great eyes staring into nothingness, and one wonders whether it is

The Russian worker reads no newspaper, has no club, yet all things seem to be known to him. There is a

prison on the banks of the Neva, in St. Petersburg. They say such things are done with now, but up till very

recently there existed a small cell therein, below the level of the ice, and prisoners placed there would be

found missing a day or two afterwards, nothing ever again known of them, except, perhaps, to the fishes of

the Baltic. They talk of such like things among themselves: the sleighdrivers round their charcoal fire, the

fieldworkers going and coming in the grey dawn, the factory workers, their whispers deadened by the rattle

I was searching for a house in Brussels some winters ago, and there was one I was sent to in a small street

leading out of the Avenue Louise. It was poorly furnished, but rich in pictures, large and small. They covered

"These pictures," explained to me the landlady, an old, haggard looking woman, "will not be left, I am

taking them with me to London. They are all the work of my husband. He is arranging an exhibition."

The friend who had sent me had told me the woman was a widow, who had been living in Brussels eking out

"Not again. I was married eighteen years ago in Russia. My husband was transported to Siberia a few days

"I should have followed him," she added, "only every year we thought he was going to be set free."

"Yes," she answered. "They set him free last week. He will join me in London. We shall be able to finish our

I read in the English papers of the exhibition in London. It was said the artist showed much promise. So

Nature has made life hard to Russian rich and poor alike. To the banks of the Neva, with its ague and

influenzabestowing fogs and mists, one imagines that the Devil himself must have guided Peter the Great.

"Show me in all my dominions the most hopelessly unattractive site on which to build a city," Peter must

have prayed; and the Devil having discovered the site on which St. Petersburg now stands, must have

"I think, my dear Peter, I have found you something really unique. It is a pestilent swamp to which a mighty

river brings bitter blasts and marrowchilling fogs, while during the brief summer time the wind will bring

you sand. In this way you will combine the disadvantages of the North Pole with those of the desert of

In the winter time the Russians light their great stoves, and doubly barricade their doors and windows; and in

this atmosphere, like to that of a greenhouse, many of their women will pass six months, never venturing out

of doors. Even the men only go out at intervals. Every office, every shop is an oven. Men of forty have white

hair and parchment faces; and the women are old at thirty. The farm labourers, during the few summer

months, work almost entirely without sleep. They leave that for the winter, when they shut themselves up like

dormice in their hovels, their store of food and vodka buried underneath the floor. For days together they

The Russian party lasts all night. In an adjoining room are beds and couches; half a dozen guests are always

sleeping. An hour contents them, then they rejoin the company, and other guests take their places. The

Russian eats when he feels so disposed; the table is always spread, the guests come and go. Once a year there

is a great feast in Moscow. The Russian merchant and his friends sit down early in the day, and a sort of

thick, sweet pancake is served up hot. The feast continues for many hours, and the ambition of the Russian

merchant is to eat more than his neighbour. Fifty or sixty of these hot cakes a man will consume at a sitting,

An uncivilised people, we call them in our lordly way, but they are young. Russian history is not yet three

hundred years old. They will see us out, I am inclined to think. Their energy, their intelligencewhen these

show above the groundworkare monstrous. I have known a Russian learn Chinese within six months.

English! they learn it while you are talking to them. The children play at chess and study the violin for their

Folks suffering from Jingoism, Spreadeagleism, Chauvinismall such like isms, to whatever country they

belongwould be well advised to take a tour in Holland. It is the idea of the moment that size spells

happiness. The bigger the country the better one is for living there. The happiest Frenchman cannot possibly

be as happy as the most wretched Britisher, for the reason that Britain owns many more thousands of square

miles than France possesses. The Swiss peasant, compared with the Russian serf, must, when he looks at the

map of Europe and Asia, feel himself to be a miserable creature. The reason that everybody in America is

happy and good is to be explained by the fact that America has an area equal to that of the entire moon. The

American citizen who has backed the wrong horse, missed his train and lost his bag, remembers this and feels

According to this argument, fishes should be the happiest of mortals, the sea consistingat least, so says my

atlas: I have not measured it myselfof a hundred and fortyfour millions of square miles. But, maybe, the

sea is also divided in ways we wot not of. Possibly the sardine who lives near the Brittainy coast is sad and

discontented because the Norwegian sardine is the proud inhabitant of a larger sea. Perhaps that is why he has

left the Brittainy coast. Ashamed of being a Brittainy sardine, he has emigrated to Norway, has become a

The happy Londoner on foggy days can warm himself with the reflection that the sun never sets on the

British Empire. He does not often see the sun, but that is a mere detail. He regards himself as the owner of the

sun; the sun begins his little day in the British Empire, ends his little day in the British Empire: for all

practical purposes the sun is part of the British Empire. Foolish people in other countries sit underneath it and

feel warm, but that is only their ignorance. They do not know it is a British possession; if they did they would

My views on this subject are, I know, heretical. I cannot get it into my unpatriotic head that size is the only

thing worth worrying about. In England, when I venture to express my outofdate opinions, I am called a

Little Englander. It fretted me at first; I was becoming a mere shadow. But by now I have got used to it. It

would be the same, I feel, wherever I went. In New York I should be a Little American; in Constantinople a

Little Turk. But I wanted to talk about Holland. A holiday in Holland serves as a corrective to exaggerated

There are no poor in Holland. They may be an unhappy people, knowing what a little country it is they live

in; but, if so, they hide the fact. To all seeming, the Dutch peasant, smoking his great pipe, is as much a man

as the Whitechapel hawker or the moocher of the Paris boulevard. I saw a beggar once in Hollandin the

townlet of Enkhuisen. Crowds were hurrying up from the side streets to have a look at him; the idea at first

seemed to be that he was doing it for a bet. He turned out to be a Portuguese. They offered him work in the

docksuntil he could get something better to doat wages equal in English money to about ten shillings a

day. I inquired about him on my way back, and was told he had borrowed a couple of forms from the foreman

In Holland work is easily found; this takes away the charm of looking for it. A farm labourer in Holland lives

in a brickbuilt house of six rooms, which generally belongs to him, with an acre or so of ground, and only

eats meat once a day. The rest of his time he fills up on eggs and chicken and cheese and beer. But you rarely

hear him grumble. His wife and daughter may be seen on Sundays wearing gold and silver jewellery worth

from fifty to one hundred pounds, and there is generally enough old delft and pewter in the house to start a

local museum anywhere outside Holland. On high days and holidays, of which in Holland there are plenty,

the average Dutch vrouw would be well worth running away with. The Dutch peasant girl has no need of an

illustrated journal once a week to tell her what the fashion is; she has it in the portrait of her mother, or of her

When the Dutchwoman builds a dress she builds it to last; it descends from mother to daughter, but it is made

of sound material in the beginning. A lady friend of mine thought the Dutch costume would serve well for a

fancydress ball, so set about buying one, but abandoned the notion on learning what it would cost her. A

Dutch girl in her Sunday clothes must be worth fifty pounds before you come to ornaments. In certain

provinces she wears a closefitting helmet, made either of solid silver or of solid gold. The Dutch gallant,

before making himself known, walks on tiptoe a little while behind the Loved One, and looks at himself in

her headdress just to make sure that his hat is on straight and his front curl just where it ought to be.

In most other European countries national costume is dying out. The slopshop is year by year extending its

hideous trade. But the country of Rubens and Rembrandt, of Teniers and Gerard Dow, remains still true to

art. The picture postcard does not exaggerate. The men in those wondrous baggy knickerbockers, from the

pockets of which you sometimes see a couple of chicken's heads protruding; in gaudy coloured shirts, in

worsted hose and mighty sabots, smoking their great pipesthe women in their petticoats of many hues, in

gorgeously embroidered vest, in chemisette of dazzling white, crowned with a halo of many frills, glittering

in gold and silverare not the creatures of an artist's fancy. You meet them in their thousands on holiday

On colder days the women wear brightcoloured capes made of fine spun silk, from underneath the ample

folds of which you sometimes hear a little cry; and sometimes a little hooded head peeps out, regards with

preternatural thoughtfulness the toylike world without, then dives back into shelter. As for the

childrenwomen in miniature, the single difference in dress being the gay pinaforeyou can only say of

them that they look like Dutch dolls. But such plump, contented, cheerful little dolls! You remember the

holloweyed, palefaced dolls you see swarming in the great, big and therefore should be happy countries,

and wish that mere land surface were of less importance to our statesmen and our able editors, and the

happiness and wellbeing of the mere human items worth a little more of their thought.

The Dutch peasant lives surrounded by canals, and reaches his cottage across a drawbridge. I suppose it is in

the blood of the Dutch child not to tumble into a canal, and the Dutch mother never appears to anticipate such

possibility. One can imagine the average English mother trying to bring up a family in a house surrounded by

canals. She would never have a minute's peace until the children were in bed. But then the mere sight of a

canal to the English child suggests the delights of a sudden and unexpected bath. I put it to a Dutchman once.

"But what I mean is," I explained, "don't you do anything to prevent their falling into save them from

There is always a wind in Holland; it comes from over the sea. There is nothing to stay its progress. It leaps

the low dykes and sweeps with a shriek across the sad, soft dunes, and thinks it is going to have a good time

and play havoc in the land. But the Dutchman laughs behind his great pipe as it comes to him shouting and

roaring. "Welcome, my hearty, welcome," he chuckles, "come blustering and bragging; the bigger you are the

better I like you." And when it is once in the land, behind the long, straight dykes, behind the waving line of

sandy dunes, he seizes hold of it, and will not let it go till it has done its tale of work.

The wind is the Dutchman's; servant before he lets it loose again it has turned ten thousand mills, has pumped

the water and sawn the wood, has lighted the town and worked the loom, and forged the iron, and driven the

great, slow, silent wherry, and played with the children in the garden. It is a sober wind when it gets back to

sea, worn and weary, leaving the Dutchman laughing behind his everlasting pipe. There are canals in Holland

down which you pass as though a field of windblown corn; a soft, low, rustling murmur ever in your ears. It

is the ceaseless whirl of the great mill sails. Far out at sea the winds are as foolish savages, fighting,

shrieking, tearing purposeless. Here, in the street of mills, it is a civilized wind, crooning softly while it

What charms one in Holland is the neatness and cleanliness of all about one. Maybe to the Dutchman there

are drawbacks. In a Dutch household life must be one long springcleaning. No milkpail is considered fit

that cannot just as well be used for a lookingglass. The great brass pans, hanging under the pent house roof

outside the cottage door, flash like burnished gold. You could eat your dinner off the redtiled floor, but that

the deal table, scrubbed to the colour of cream cheese, is more convenient. By each threshold stands a row of

empty sabots, and woebetide the Dutchman who would dream of crossing it in anything but his stockinged

There is a fashion in sabots. Every spring they are freshly painted. One district fancies an orange yellow,

another a red, a third white, suggesting purity and innocence. Members of the Smart Set indulge in

ornamentation; a frieze in pink, a star upon the toe. Walking in sabots is not as easy as it looks. Attempting to

"How do you run in sabots?" I asked a Dutchman once. I had been experimenting, and had hurt myself.

And observation has proved to me he was right. The Dutch boy, when he runs, puts them for preference on

The roads in Holland, straight and level, and shaded all the way with trees, look, from the railwaycarriage

window, as if they would be good for cycling; but this is a delusion. I crossed in the boat from Harwich once,

with a wellknown black and white artist, and an equally wellknown and highly respected humorist. They

had their bicycles with them, intending to tour Holland. I met them a fortnight later in Delft, or, rather, I met

their remains. I was horrified at first. I thought it was drink. They could not stand still, they could not sit still,

they trembled and shook in every limb, their teeth chattered when they tried to talk. The humorist hadn't a

joke left in him. The artist could not have drawn his own salary; he would have dropped it on the way to his

pocket. The Dutch roads are paved their entire length with cobblesbig, round cobbles, over which your

If you would see Holland outside the big towns a smattering of Dutch is necessary. If you know German

there is not much difficulty. DutchI speak as an amateurappears to be very bad German mis

pronounced. Myself, I find my German goes well in Holland, even better than in Germany. The

AngloSaxon should not attempt the Dutch G. It is hopeless to think of succeeding, and the attempt has been

known to produce internal rupture. The Dutchman appears to keep his G in his stomach, and to haul it up

when wanted. Myself, I find the ordinary G, preceded by a hiccough and followed by a sob, the nearest I can

One needs to save up beforehand if one desires to spend any length of time in Holland. One talks of dear old

England, but the dearest land in all the world is little Holland. The florin there is equal to the franc in France

and to the shilling in England. They tell you that cigars are cheap in Holland. A cheap Dutch cigar will last

you a day. It is not until you have forgotten the taste of it that you feel you ever want to smoke again. I knew

a man who reckoned that he had saved hundreds of pounds by smoking Dutch cigars for a month steadily. It

Watching building operations in Holland brings home to you forcibly, what previously you have regarded as

a meaningless formulanamely, that the country is built upon piles. A dozen feet below the level of the

street one sees the labourers working in fishermen's boots up to their knees in water, driving the great wooden

blocks into the mud. Many of the older houses slope forward at such an angle that you almost fear to pass

beneath them. I should be as nervous as a kitten, living in one of the upper storeys. But the Dutchman leans

out of a window that is hanging above the street six feet beyond the perpendicular, and smokes contentedly.

They have a merry custom in Holland of keeping the railway time twenty minutes ahead of the town

timeor is it twenty minutes behind? I never can remember when I'm there, and I am not sure now. The

"But the train goes at ten," you say; "the station is a mile away, and it is now halfpast nine."

Another argues with him that his first idea was right. They work it out by scientific methods. Meanwhile you

have dived into a cab. The result is always the same: you are either forty minutes too soon, or you have

missed the train by twenty minutes. A Dutch platform is always crowded with women explaining volubly to

their husbands either that there was not any need to have hurried, or else that the thing would have been to

have started half an hour before they did, the man in both cases being, of course, to blame. The men walk up

The idea has been suggested that the railway time and the town time should be made to conform. The

argument against the idea is that if it were carried out there would be nothing left to put the Dutchman out

A mad friend of mine will have it that the characteristic of the age is MakeBelieve. He argues that all social

intercourse is founded on makebelieve. A servant enters to say that Mr. and Mrs. Bore are in the

"Hush!" says the woman. "Shut the door, Susan. How often am I to tell you never to leave the door open?"

The man creeps upstairs on tiptoe and shuts himself in his study. The woman does things before a

lookingglass, waits till she feels she is sufficiently mistress of herself not to show her feelings, and then

enters the drawingroom with outstretched hands and the look of one welcoming an angel's visit. She says

how delighted she is to see the Boreshow good it was of them to come. Why did they not bring more Bores

with them? Where is naughty Bore junior? Why does he never come to see her now? She will have to be

really angry with him. And sweet little Flossie Bore? Too young to pay calls! Nonsense. An "At Home" day

The Bores, who had hoped that she was outwho have only called because the etiquette book told them that

they must call at least four times in the season, explain how they have been trying and trying to come.

"This afternoon," recounts Mrs. Bore, "we were determined to come. 'John, dear,' I said this morning, 'I shall

The idea conveyed is that the Prince of Wales, on calling at the Bores, was told that he could not come in. He

That afternoon the Bores were going to enjoy themselves in their own way; they were going to see Mrs.

Mrs. Bounder remains mute for a moment, straining her ears. She can hear him creeping past the door on his

way downstairs. She hears the front door softly opened and closedto. She wakes, as from a dream. She has

been thinking of the sorrow that will fall on Bounder when he returns home later and learns what he has

And thus it is, not only with the Bores and Bounders, but even with us who are not Bores or Bounders.

Society in all ranks is founded on the makebelieve that everybody is charming; that we are delighted to see

everybody; that everybody is delighted to see us; that it is so good of everybody to come; that we are desolate

Which would we rather dostop and finish our cigar or hasten into the drawingroom to hear Miss

Screecher sing? Can you ask us? We tumble over each other in our hurry. Miss Screecher would really rather

not sing; but if we insistWe do insist. Miss Screecher, with pretty reluctance, consents. We are careful not

to look at one another. We sit with our eyes fixed on the ceiling. Miss Screecher finishes, and rises.

"But it was so short," we say, so soon as we can be heard above the applause. Is Miss Screecher quite sure

that was the whole of it? Or has she been playing tricks upon us, the naughty lady, defrauding us of a verse?

Miss Screecher assures us that the fault is the composer's. But she knows another. At this hint, our faces

Our host's wine is always the most extraordinary we have ever tasted. No, not another glass; we dare

notdoctor's orders, very strict. Our host's cigar! We did not know they made such cigars in this workaday

world. No, we really could not smoke another. Well, if he will be so pressing, may we put it in our pocket?

The truth is, we are not used to high smoking. Our hostess's coffee! Would she confide to us her secret? The

baby! We hardly trust ourselves to speak. The usual babywe have seen it. As a rule, to be candid, we never

could detect much beauty in babieshave always held the usual gush about them to be insincere. But this

baby! We are almost on the point of asking them where they got it. It is just the kind we wanted for ourselves.

Little Janet's recitation: "A Visit to the Dentist!" Hitherto the amateur reciter has not appealed to us. But this

is genius, surely. She ought to be trained for the stage. Her mother does not altogether approve of the stage.

Every bride is beautiful. Every bride looks charming in a simple costume offor further particulars see local

papers. Every marriage is a cause for universal rejoicing. With our wineglass in our hand we picture the

ideal life we know to be in store for them. How can it be otherwise? She, the daughter of her mother.

(Cheers.) He well, we all know him. (More cheers.) Also involuntary guffaw from illregulated young

We carry our makebelieve even into our religion. We sit in church, and in voices swelling with pride,

mention to the Almighty, at stated intervals, that we are miserable wormsthat there is no good in us. This

sort of thing, we gather, is expected of us; it does us no harm, and is supposed to please.

We makebelieve that every woman is good, that every man is honest until they insist on forcing us,

against our will, to observe that they are not. Then we become very angry with them, and explain to them that

they, being sinners, are not folk fit to mix with us perfect people. Our grief, when our rich aunt dies, is hardly

to be borne. Drapers make fortunes, helping us to express feebly our desolation. Our only consolation is that

Everybody goes to a better world when they have got all they can out of this one.

We stand around the open grave and tell each other so. The clergyman is so assured of it that, to save time,

they have written out the formula for him and had it printed in a little book. As a child it used to surprise

methis fact that everybody went to heaven. Thinking of all the people that had died, I pictured the place

overcrowded. Almost I felt sorry for the Devil, nobody ever coming his way, so to speak. I saw him in

imagination, a lonely old gentleman, sitting at his gate day after day, hoping against hope, muttering to

himself maybe that it hardly seemed worth while, from his point of view, keeping the show open. An old

nurse whom I once took into my confidence was sure, if I continued talking in this sort of way, that he would

get me anyhow. I must have been an evil hearted youngster. The thought of how he would welcome me, the

only human being that he had seen for years, had a certain fascination for me; for once in my existence I

At every public meeting the chief speaker is always "a jolly good fellow." The man from Mars, reading our

newspapers, would be convinced that every Member of Parliament was a jovial, kindly, high hearted,

generoussouled saint, with just sufficient humanity in him to prevent the angels from carrying him off

bodily. Do not the entire audience, moved by one common impulse, declare him three times running, and in

stentorian voice, to be this "jolly good fellow"? So say all of them. We have always listened with the most

intense pleasure to the brilliant speech of our friend who has just sat down. When you thought we were

The higher one ascends in the social scale, the wider becomes this necessary base of makebelieve. When

anything sad happens to a very big person, the lesser people round about him hardly care to go on living.

Seeing that the world is somewhat overstocked with persons of importance, and that something or another

generally is happening to them, one wonders sometimes how it is the world continues to exist.

Once upon a time there occurred an illness to a certain good and great man. I read in my daily paper that the

whole nation was plunged in grief. People dining in public restaurants, on being told the news by the waiter,

dropped their heads upon the table and sobbed. Strangers, meeting in the street, flung their arms about one

another and cried like little children. I was abroad at the time, but on the point of returning home. I almost felt

ashamed to go. I looked at myself in the glass, and was shocked at my own appearance: it was that of a man

who had not been in trouble for weeks. I felt that to burst upon this griefstricken nation with a countenance

such as mine would be to add to their sorrow. It was borne in upon me that I must have a shallow, egotistical

nature. I had had luck with a play in America, and for the life of me I could not look grief stricken. There

were moments when, if I was not keeping a watch over myself, I found myself whistling.

Had it been possible I would have remained abroad till some stroke of illfortune had rendered me more in

tune with my fellowcountrymen. But business was pressing. The first man I talked to on Dover pier was a

Customs House official. You might have thought sorrow would have made him indifferent to a mere matter

of fortyeight cigars. Instead of which, he appeared quite pleased when he found them. He demanded

threeandfourpence, and chuckled when he got it. On Dover platform a little girl laughed because a lady

dropped a handbox on a dog; but then children are always callousor, perhaps, she had not heard the news.

What astonished me most, however, was to find in the railway carriage a respectable looking man reading a

comic journal. True, he did not laugh much: he had got decency enough for that; but what was a

griefstricken citizen doing with a comic journal, anyhow? Before I had been in London an hour I had come

to the conclusion that we English must be a people of wonderful selfcontrol. The day before, according to

the newspapers, the whole country was in serious danger of pining away and dying of a broken heart. In one

day the nation had pulled itself together. "We have cried all day," they had said to themselves, "we have cried

all night. It does not seem to have done much good. Now let us once again take up the burden of life." Some

of themI noticed it in the hotel diningroom that evening were taking quite kindly to their food again.

We make believe about quite serious things. In war, each country's soldiers are always the most courageous

in the world. The other country's soldiers are always treacherous and tricky; that is why they sometimes win.

"Now all of you sit round and throw your pennies in the cap," says the author, "and I will pretend that there

lives in Bayswater a young lady named Angelina, who is the most beautiful young lady that ever existed. And

in Notting Hill, we will pretend, there resides a young man named Edwin, who is in love with Angelina."

And then, there being sufficient pennies in the cap, the author starts away, and pretends that Angelina thought

this and said that, and that Edwin did all sorts of wonderful things. We know he is making it all up as he goes

along. We know he is making up just what he thinks will please us. He, on the other hand, has to

makebelieve that he is doing it because he cannot help it, he being an artist. But we know well enough that,

were we to stop throwing the pennies into the cap, he would find out precious soon that he could.

"Walk up! walk up!" he cries, "we are going to pretend that Mrs. Johnson is a princess, and old man Johnson

So Mrs. Johnson, pretending to be a princess, comes out of a wobbly thing that we agree to pretend is a

castle; and old man Johnson, pretending to be a pirate, is pushed up and down on another wobbly thing that

we agree to pretend is the ocean. Mrs. Johnson pretends to be in love with him, which we know she is not.

And Johnson pretends to be a very terrible person; and Mrs. Johnson pretends, till eleven o'clock, to believe

it. And we pay prices, varying from a shilling to halfasovereign, to sit for two hours and listen to them.

I am glad I am not an American husband. At first sight this may appear a remark uncomplimentary to the

American wife. It is nothing of the sort. It is the other way about. We, in Europe, have plenty of opportunity

of judging the American wife. In America you hear of the American wife, you are told stories about the

American wife, you see her portrait in the illustrated journals. By searching under the heading "Foreign

Intelligence," you can find out what she is doing. But here in Europe we know her, meet her face to face, talk

to her, flirt with her. She is charming, delightful. That is why I say I am glad I am not an American husband.

If the American husband only knew how nice was the American wife, he would sell his business and come

Years ago, when I first began to travel about Europe, I argued to myself that America must be a deadly place

to live in. How sad it is, I thought to myself, to meet thus, wherever one goes, American widows by the

thousand. In one narrow bystreet of Dresden I calculated fourteen American mothers, possessing

nineandtwenty American children, and not a father among themnot a single husband among the whole

fourteen. I pictured fourteen lonely graves, scattered over the United States. I saw as in a vision those

fourteen headstones of best material, handcarved, recording the virtues of those fourteen dead and buried

Odd, thought I to myself, decidedly odd. These American husbands, they must be a delicate type of

humanity. The wonder is their mothers ever reared them. They marry fine girls, the majority of them; two or

three sweet children are born to them, and after that there appears to be no further use for them, as far as this

world is concerned. Can nothing be done to strengthen their constitutions? Would a tonic be of any help to

them? Not the customary tonic, I don't mean, the sort of tonic merely intended to make gouty old gentlemen

feel they want to buy a hoop, but the sort of tonic for which it was claimed that three drops poured upon a

It struck me as pathetic, the picture of these American widows leaving their native land, coming over in

shiploads to spend the rest of their blighted lives in exile. The mere thought of America, I took it, had for ever

become to them distasteful. The ground that once his feet had pressed! The old familiar places once lighted

by his smile! Everything in America would remind them of him. Snatching their babes to their heaving

bosoms they would leave the country where lay buried all the joy of their lives, seek in the retirement of

Also, it struck me as beautiful, the noble resignation with which they bore their grief, hiding their sorrow

from the indifferent stranger. Some widows make a fuss, go about for weeks looking gloomy and depressed,

making not the slightest effort to be merry. These fourteen widowsI knew them personally, all of them, I

lived in the same streetwhat a brave show of cheerfulness they put on! What a lesson to the common or

European widow, the humpy type of widow! One could spend whole days in their companyI had done

itcommencing quite early in the morning with a sleighing excursion, finishing up quite late in the evening

with a little supper party, followed by an impromptu dance; and never detect from their outward manner that

From the mothers I turned my admiring eyes towards the children. This is the secret of American success,

said I to myself; this high spirited courage, this Spartan contempt for suffering. Look at them! the gallant

little men and women. Who would think that they had lost a father? Why, I have seen a British child more

Talking to a little girl one day, I enquired of her concerning the health of her father. The next moment I could

have bitten my tongue out, remembering that there wasn't such a thing as a fathernot an American

fatherin the whole street. She did not burst into tears as they do in the storybooks. She said:

"I am sure of it," I replied with fervour, "well and happy as he deserves to be, and one day you will find him

"Ah, yes," she answered, a shining light, it seemed to me, upon her fair young face. "Momma says she is

getting just a bit tired of this onehorse sort of place. She is quite looking forward to seeing him again."

It touched me very deeply: this weary woman, tired of her long bereavement, actually looking forward to the

fearsome passage leading to where her loved one waited for her in a better land.

For one bright breezy creature I grew to feel a real regard. All the months that I had known her, seen her

almost daily, never once had I heard a single cry of pain escape her lips, never once had I heard her cursing

fate. Of the many who called upon her in her charming flat, not one had ever, to my knowledge, offered her

consolation or condolence. It seemed to me cruel, callous. The overburdened heart, finding no outlet for its

imprisoned grief, finding no sympathetic ear into which to pour its tale of woe, breaks, we are told; anyhow,

it isn't good for it. I decidedno one else seeming keenthat I would supply that sympathetic ear. The very

"Well, hardly alone," she corrected me, while a look of patient resignation added dignity to her piquant

features. "You see, there are the dear children always round about me, during the holidays."

"Besides," she added, "the people here are real kind to me; they hardly ever let me feel myself alone. We

make up little parties, you know, picnics and excursions. And then, of course, there is the Opera and the

Symphony Concerts, and the subscription dances. The dear old king has been doing a good deal this winter,

too; and I must say the Embassy folks have been most thoughtful, so far as I am concerned. No, it would not

be right for me to complain of loneliness, not now that I have got to know a few people, as it were."

A cloud passed over her usually sunny face. "Oh, please don't talk of him," she said, "it makes me feel real

But having commenced, I was determined that my sympathy should not be left to waste.

"Say, young man," she cried, "are you trying to break it to me gently? Because if so, I'd rather you told me

"Never heard a word about his being dead till you started the idea," she retorted. "So far as I know he's alive

I said that I was sorry. I went on to explain that I did not mean I was sorry to hear that in all probability he

was alive and well. What I meant was I was sorry I had introduced a painful subject.

I had an idea she was getting angry with me. She did not say so. I gathered it. But I had to explain myself

"Well," I answered, "I take it, you didn't get on well together, and I am sure it must have been his fault."

"Now look here," she said, "don't you breathe a word against my husband or we shall quarrel. A nicer, dearer

"Then what did you divorce him for?" I asked. It was impertinent, it was unjustifiable. My excuse is that the

mystery surrounding the American husband had been worrying me for months. Here had I stumbled upon the

"There hasn't been any divorce," she said. "There isn't going to be any divorce. You'll make me cross in

But I was becoming reckless. "He is not dead. You are not divorced from him. Where is he?" I demanded

"Where is he?" she replied, astonished. Where should he be? At home, of course." I looked around the

luxuriouslyfurnished room with its air of cosy comfort, of substantial restfulness.

"What is he doing there?" I had become so much in earnest that my voice had assumed unconsciously an

authoritative tone. Presumably, it hypnotised her, for she answered my questions as though she had been in

"How do I know? How can I possibly tell you what he is doing? What do people usually do at home?"

"Answer the questions, madam, don't ask them. What are you doing here? Quite truthfully, if you please." My

"Enjoying myself. He likes me to enjoy myself. Besides, I am educating the children."

"You mean they are here at boardingschool while you are gadding about. What is wrong with American

"Last? Let me see. No, last Christmas I was in Berlin. It must have been the Christmas before, I think."

"If he is the dear kind fellow you say he is, how is it you haven't seen him for two years?"

"Because, as I tell you, he is at home, in Detroit. How can I see him when I am here in Dresden and he is in

Detroit? You do ask foolish questions. He means to try and come over in the summer, if he can spare the

"Answer my questions, please. I've spoken to you once about it. Do you think you are performing your duty

as a wife, enjoying yourself in Dresden and Berlin while your husband is working hard in Detroit?"

"He was quite willing for me to come. The American husband is a good fellow who likes his wife to enjoy

"I am not asking for your views on the American husband. I am asking your views on the American

wifeon yourself. The American husband appears to be a sort of stainedglass saint, and you American

wives are imposing upon him. It is doing you no good, and it won't go on for ever. There will come a day

when the American husband will wake up to the fact he is making a fool of himself, and by over indulgence,

overdevotion, turning the American woman into a heartless, selfish creature. What sort of a home do you

think it is in Detroit, with you and the children over here? Tell me, is the American husband made entirely of

driven snow, with blood distilled from moonbeams, or is he composed of the ordinary ingredients? Because,

if the latter, you take my advice and get back home. I take it that in America, proper, there are millions of real

homes where the woman does her duty and plays the game. But also it is quite clear there are thousands of

homes in America, mere echoing rooms, where the man walks by himself, his wife and children scattered

"You take the advice of a sincere friend. Pack upyou and the childrenand get home."

I left. It was growing late. I felt it was time to leave. Whether she took my counsel I cannot say. I only know

that there still remain in Europe a goodly number of American wives to whom it is applicable.

I am told that American professors are "mourning the lack of ideals" at Columbia Universitypossibly also

at other universities scattered through the United States. If it be any consolation to these mourning American

professors, I can assure them that they do not mourn alone. I live not far from Oxford, and enjoy the

advantage of occasionally listening to the jeremiads of English University professors. More than once a

German professor has done me the honour to employ me as an object on which to sharpen his English. He

also has mourned similar lack of ideals at Heidelberg, at Bonn. Youth is youth all the world over; it has its

own ideals; they are not those of the University professor. The explanation is tolerably simple. Youth is

I can sympathise with the mourning professor. I, in my time, have suffered like despair. I remember the day

so well; it was my twelfth birthday. I recall the unholy joy with which I reflected that for the future my

unfortunate parents would be called upon to pay for me full railway fare; it marked a decided step towards

manhood. I was now in my teens. That very afternoon there came to visit us a relative of ours. She brought

with her three small children: a girl, aged six; a precious, goldenhaired thing in a lace collar that called itself

a boy, aged five; and a third still smaller creature, it might have been male, it might have been female; I could

not have told you at the time, I cannot tell you now. This collection of atoms was handed over to me.

"Now, show yourself a man," said my dear mother, "remember you are in your teens. Take them out for a

To the children themselves their own mother gave instructions that they were to do everything that I told

them, and not to tear their clothes or make themselves untidy. These directions, even to myself, at the time,

appeared contradictory. But I said nothing. And out into the wilds the four of us departed.

I was an only child. My own infancy had passed from my memory. To me, at twelve, the ideas of six were as

incomprehensible as are those of twenty to the University professor of forty. I wanted to be a pirate. Round

the corner and across the road building operations were in progress. Planks and poles lay ready to one's hand.

Nature, in the neighbourhood, had placed conveniently a shallow pond. It was Saturday afternoon. The

nearest publichouse was a mile away. Immunity from interference by the British workman was thus assured.

It occurred to me that by placing my three depressed looking relatives on one raft, attacking them myself

from another, taking the eldest girl's sixpence away from her, disabling their raft, and leaving them to drift

without a rudder, innocent amusement would be provided for half an hour at least.

They did not want to play at pirates. At first sight of the pond the thing that called itself a boy began to cry.

The sixyearold lady said she did not like the smell of it. Not even after I had explained the game to them

I proposed Red Indians. They could go to sleep in the unfinished building upon a sack of lime, I would creep

up through the grass, set fire to the house, and dance round it, whooping and waving my tomahawk, watching

with fiendish delight the frantic but futile efforts of the palefaces to escape their doom.

It did not "catch on"not even that. The precious thing in the lace collar began to cry again. The creature

concerning whom I could not have told you whether it was male or female made no attempt at argument, but

started to run; it seemed to have taken a dislike to this particular field. It stumbled over a scaffolding pole,

and then it also began to cry. What could one do to amuse such people? I left it to them to propose something.

They thought they would like to play at "Mothers"not in this field, but in some other field.

The eldest girl would be mother. The other two would represent her children. They had been taken suddenly

ill. "Waterworks," as I had christened him, was to hold his hands to his middle and groan. His face brightened

up at the suggestion. The nondescript had the toothache. It took up its part without a moment's hesitation, and

That was their "ideal" game. As I have said, remembering that afternoon, I can sympathise with the

University professor mourning the absence of University ideals in youth. Possibly at six my own ideal game

may have been "Mothers." Looking back from the pile of birthdays upon which I now stand, it occurs to me

that very probably it was. But from the perspective of twelve, the reflection that there were beings in the

Eight years later, his father not being able to afford the time, I conducted Master "Waterworks," now a

healthy, uninteresting, gawky lad, to a school in Switzerland. It was my first Continental trip. I should have

enjoyed it better had he not been with me. He thought Paris a "beastly hole." He did not share my admiration

"Why she's so tied up, she can't walk straight," was the only impression she left upon him.

We changed the subject; it irritated me to hear him talk. The beautiful Junolike creatures we came across

further on in Germany, he said were too fat. He wanted to see them run. I found him utterly soulless.

To expect a boy to love learning and culture is like expecting him to prefer old vintage claret to gooseberry

wine. Culture for the majority is an acquired taste. Speaking personally, I am entirely in agreement with the

University professor. I find knowledge, prompting to observation and leading to reflection, the most

satisfactory luggage with which a traveller through life can provide himself. I would that I had more of it. To

All that the University professor can urge in favour of idealism I am prepared to endorse. But then I amlet

us say, thirtynine. At fourteen my candid opinion was that he was talking "rot." I looked at the old

gentleman himselfa narrowchested, spectacled old gentleman, who lived up a by street. He did not seem

to have much fun of any sort. It was not my ideal. He told me things had been written in a language called

Greek that I should enjoy reading, but I had not even read all Captain Marryat. There were tales by Sir Walter

Scott and "Jack Harkaway's Schooldays!" I felt I could wait a while. There was a chap called Aristophanes

who had written comedies, satirising the political institutions of a country that had disappeared two thousand

years ago. I say, without shame, Drury Lane pantomime and Barnum's Circus called to me more strongly.

Wishing to give the old gentleman a chance, I dipped into translations. Some of these old fellows were not as

bad as I had imagined them. A party named Homer had written some really interesting stuff. Here and there,

maybe, he was a bit longwinded, but, taking him as a whole, there was "go" in him. There was another of

themOvid was his name. He could tell a story, Ovid could. He had imagination. He was almost as good as

"Robinson Crusoe." I thought it would please my professor, telling him that I was reading these, his favourite

"But I know English," I answered; "they have all been translated into English. You never told me that!"

It appeared it was not the same thing. There were subtle delicacies of diction bound to escape even the best

translator. These subtle delicacies of diction I could enjoy only by devoting the next seven or eight years of

my life to the study of Greek and Latin. It will grieve the University professor to hear it, but the enjoyment of

those subtle delicacies of diction did not appear to meI was only fourteen at the time, please

The boy is materially inclinedthe mourning American professor has discovered it. I did not want to be an

idealist living up a back street. I wanted to live in the biggest house in the best street of the town. I wanted to

ride a horse, wear a fur coat, and have as much to eat and drink as ever I liked. I wanted to marry the most

beautiful woman in the world, to have my name in the newspaper, and to know that everybody was envying

Mourn over it, my dear professor, as you willthat is the ideal of youth; and, so long as human nature

remains what it is, will continue to be so. It is a materialistic ideala sordid ideal. Maybe it is necessary.

Maybe the world would not move much if the young men started thinking too early. They want to be rich, so

they fling themselves frenziedly into the struggle. They build the towns, and make the railway tracks, hew

down the forests, dig the ore out of the ground. There comes a day when it is borne in upon them that trying

to get rich is a poor sort of gamethat there is only one thing more tiresome than being a millionaire, and

that is trying to be a millionaire. But, meanwhile, the world has got its work done.

The American professor fears that the artistic development of America leaves much to be desired. I fear the

artistic development of most countries leaves much to be desired. Why the Athenians themselves sandwiched

their drama between wrestling competitions and boxing bouts. The plays of Sophocles, or Euripides, were

given as "side shows." The chief items of the fair were the games and races. Besides, America is still a young

man. It has been busy "getting on in the world." It has not yet quite finished. Yet there are signs that young

America is approaching the thirtynines. He is finding a little time, a little money to spare for art. One can

almost hear young Americanot quite so young as he wassaying to Mrs. Europe as he enters and closes

"Well, ma'am, here I am, and maybe you'll be glad to hear I've a little money to spend. Yes, ma'am, I've fixed

things all right across the water; we shan't starve. So now, ma'am, you and I can have a chat concerning this

art I've been hearing so much about. Let's have a look at it, ma'am, trot it out, and don't you be afraid of

I am inclined to think that Mrs. Europe has not hesitated to put a good price upon the art she has sold to

Uncle Sam. I am afraid Mrs. Europe has occasionally "unloaded" on Uncle Sam. I talked to a certain dealer

"What is the next picture likely to be missing?" I asked him in the course of general conversation.

"Yeth; you'll hear it a bit oftener during the next eighteen month or tho. You take care you don't get tired of

hearing it, thath all," he laughed. "Yeth," he continued, thoughtfully, "Reynoldth ith played out. Nothing

much to be made of Gainthborough, either. Dealing in that lot now, why, it'th like keeping a potht offith.

"Between uth," he answered, "yeth, I think we've got them all. Maybe a few more. I don't think we've mithed

"You're thmart," he answered, regarding me admiringly, "you thee through everything you do."

"How do you work it?" I asked him. There is a time in the day when he is confidential. "Here is this man,

Hoppner. I take it that you have bought him up at an average of a hundred pounds a picture, and that at that

price most owners were fairly glad to sell. Few folks outside the art schools have ever heard of him. I bet that

at the present moment there isn't one art critic who could spell his name without reference to a dictionary. In

eighteen months you will be selling him for anything from one thousand to ten thousand pounds. How is it

"How ith everything done that'th done well?" he answered. "By earnetht effort." He hitched his chair nearer

to me, "I get a chap one of your thort of chapthhe writ'th an article about Hoppner. I get another to

anthwer him. Before I've done there'll be a hundred articleth about Hoppnerhith life, hith early thruggie,

anecdo'th about hith wife. Then a Hoppner will be thold at public auchtion for a thouthand guineath."

"A fortnight later there will be a thale of halfadothen, and the prithe will be gone up by that time."

"After that," he replied, rising, "the American millionaire! He'll jutht be waiting on the doorthtep for the

"If by any chance I come across a Hoppner?" I said, laughing, as I turned to go.

The argument of the late Herr Wagner was that grand operathe music drama, as he called itincluded,

and therefore did away with the necessity forall other arts. Music in all its branches, of course, it provides:

so much I will concede to the late Herr Wagner. There are times, I confess, when my musical yearnings

might shock the late Herr Wagnertimes when I feel unequal to following three distinct themes at one and

"Listen," whispers the Wagnerian enthusiast to me, "the cornet has now the Brunnhilda motive." It seems to

me, in my then state of depravity, as if the cornet had even more than this the matter with him.

"The second violins," continues the Wagnerian enthusiast, "are carrying on the Wotan theme." That they are

carrying on goes without saying: the players' faces are streaming with perspiration.

"The brass," explains my friendhis object is to cultivate my ear "is accompanying the singers." I should

have said drowning them. There are occasions when I can rave about Wagner with the best of them. High

class moods come to all of us. The difference between the really highclass man and us commonplace,

workaday men is the difference between, say, the eagle and the barnyard chicken. I am the barnyard chicken.

I have my wings. There are ecstatic moments when I feel I want to spurn the sordid earth and soar into the

realms of art. I do fly a little, but my body is heavy, and I only get as far as the fence. After a while I find it

Listening to Wagner, during such temporary Philistinic mood, my sense of fair play is outraged. A lone, lorn

woman stands upon the stage trying to make herself heard. She has to do this sort of thing for her living;

maybe an invalid mother, younger brothers and sisters are dependent upon her. One hundred and forty men,

all armed with powerful instruments, wellorganised, and most of them looking well fed, combine to make

it impossible for a single note of that poor woman's voice to be heard above their din. I see her standing there,

opening and shutting her mouth, getting redder and redder in the face. She is singing, one feels sure of it; one

could hear her if only those one hundred and forty men would ease up for a minute. She makes one mighty,

supreme effort; above the banging of the drums, the blare of the trumpets, the shrieking of the strings, that

She has won, but the victory has cost her dear. She sinks down fainting on the stage and is carried off by

supers. Chivalrous indignation has made it difficult for me to keep my seat watching the unequal contest. My

instinct was to leap the barrier, hurl the bald headed chief of her enemies from his high chair, and lay about

me with the trombone or the clarionetwhichever might have come the easier to my snatch.

"You cowardly lot of bullies," I have wanted to cry, "are you not ashamed of yourselves? A hundred and

forty of you against one, and that one a still beautiful and, comparatively speaking, young lady. Be quiet for a

A lady of my acquaintance says that sitting out a Wagnerian opera seems to her like listening to a singer

accompanied by four orchestras playing different tunes at the same time. As I have said, there are times when

Wagner carries me along with him, when I exult in the crash and whirl of his contending harmonies. But,

alas! there are those other moodsthose after dinner moodswhen my desire is for something distinctly

resembling a tune. Still, there are other composers of grand opera besides Wagner. I grant to the late Herr

Wagner, that, in so far as music is concerned, opera can supply us with all we can need.

But it was also Wagner's argument that grand opera could supply us with acting, and there I am compelled to

disagree with him. Wagner thought that the arts of acting and singing could be combined. I have seen artists

the great man has trained himself. As singers they left nothing to be desired, but the acting in grand opera has

never yet impressed me. Wagner never succeeded in avoiding the operatic convention and nobody else ever

will. When the operatic lover meets his sweetheart he puts her in a corner and, turning his back upon her,

comes down to the footlights and tells the audience how he adores her. When he has finished, he, in his turn,

retires into the corner, and she comes down and tells the audience that she is simply mad about him.

Overcome with joy at finding she really cares for him, he comes down right and says that this is the happiest

moment of his life; and she stands left, twelve feet away from him, and has the presentiment that all this sort

of thing is much too good to last. They go off together, backwards, side by side. If there is any lovemaking,

such as I understand by the term, it is done "off." This is not my idea of acting. But I do not see how you are

going to substitute for it anything more natural. When you are singing at the top of your voice, you don't want

a heavy woman hanging round your neck. When you are killing a man and warbling about it at the same time,

you don't want him fooling around you defending himself. You want him to have a little reasonable patience,

and to wait in his proper place till you have finished, telling him, or rather telling the crowd, how much you

When the proper time comes, and if he is where you expect to find him while thinking of your upper C, you

will hit him lightly on the shoulder with your sword, and then he can die to his own particular tune. If you

have been severely wounded in battle, or in any other sort of row, and have got to sing a long ballad before

you finally expire, you don't want to have to think how a man would really behave who knew he had only got

a few minutes to live and was feeling bad about it. The chances are that he would not want to sing at all. The

woman who really loved him would not encourage him to sing. She would want him to keep quiet while she

moved herself about a bit, in case there was anything that could be done for him.

If a mob is climbing the stairs thirsting for your blood, you do not want to stand upright with your arms

stretched out, a good eighteen inches from the door, while you go over at some length the varied incidents

leading up to the annoyance. If your desire were to act naturally you would push against that door for all you

were worth, and yell for somebody to bring you a chest of drawers and a bedstead, and things like that, to pile

up against it. If you were a king, and were giving a party, you would not want your guests to fix you up at the

other end of the room and leave you there, with nobody to talk to but your own wife, while they turned their

backs upon you, and had a long and complicated dance all to themselves. You would want to be in it; you

In acting, all these little points have to be considered. In opera, everything is rightly sacrificed to musical

necessity. I have seen the young, enthusiastic operasinger who thought that he or she could act and sing at

the same time. The experienced artist takes the centre of the stage and husbands his resources. Whether he is

supposed to be indignant because somebody has killed his mother, or cheerful because he is going out to fight

his country's foes, who are only waiting until he has finished singing to attack the town, he leaves it to the

Also it was Herr Wagner's idea that the back cloth would leave the operagoer indifferent to the picture

gallery. The castle on the rock, accessible only by balloon, in which every window lights up simultaneously

and instantaneously, one minute after sunset, while the full moon is rushing up the sky at the pace of a

champion comet that wonderful sea that suddenly opens and swallows up the ship those snowclad

mountains, over which the shadow of the hero passes like a threatening cloudthe grand old chateau,

trembling in the windwhat need, will ask the operagoer of the future, of your Turners and your Corots,

when, for prices ranging from a shilling upwards, we can have a dozen pictures such as these rolled up and

But perhaps the most daring hope of all was the dream that came to Herr Wagner that his opera singers, his

grouped choruses, would eventually satisfy the craving of the public for high class statuary. I am not quite

sure the general public does care for statuary. I do not know whether the idea has ever occurred to the

Anarchist, but, were I myself organising secret committee meetings for unholy purposes, I should invite my

comrades to meet in that section of the local museum devoted to statuary. I can conceive of no place where

we should be freer from prying eyes and listening ears. A select few, however, do appreciate statuary; and

such, I am inclined to think, will not be weaned from their passion by the contemplation of the opera singer in

And even if the tenor always satisfied our ideal of Apollo, and the soprano were always as sylphlike as she

is described in the libretto, even then I should doubt the average operatic chorus being regarded by the

connoisseur as a cheap and pleasant substitute for a bas relief from the Elgin marbles. The great thing

required of that operatic chorus is experience. The young and giddypated the chorus master has no use for.

The sober, honest, industrious lady or gentleman, with a knowledge of music is very properly his ideal.

What I admire about the chorus chiefly is its unity. The whole village dresses exactly alike. In wicked,

worldly villages there is rivalry, leading to heartburn and jealously. One lady comes out suddenly, on, say, a

Bank Holiday, in a fetching blue that conquers every male heart. Next holiday her rival cuts her out with a

green hat. In the operatic village it must be that the girls gather together beforehand to arrange this thing.

"The dear Count's wedding," announces the chairwoman, "you will all be pleased to hear, has been fixed for

the fourteenth, at eleven o'clock in the morning. The entire village will be assembled at ten thirty to await

the return of the bridal cortege from the church, and offer its felicitations. Married ladies, will, of course,

come accompanied by their husbands. Unmarried ladies must each bring a male partner as near their own

height as possible. Fortunately, in this village the number of males is exactly equal to that of females, so that

the picture need not be spoiled. The children will organise themselves into an independent body and will

group themselves picturesquely. It has been thought advisable," continues the chairwoman, "that the village

should meet the dear Count and his bride at some spot not too far removed from the local alehouse. The

costume to be worn by the ladies will consist of a short pink skirt terminating at the knees and ornamented

with festoons of flowers; above will be worn a bolero in mauve silk without sleeves and cut decollete. The

shoes should be of yellow satin over fleshcoloured stockings. Ladies who are 'out' will wear pearl necklaces,

and a simple device in emeralds to decorate the hair. Thank God, we can all of us afford it, and provided the

weather holds up and nothing unexpected happenshe is not what I call a lucky man, our Count, and it is

always as well to be prepared for possibilitieswell, I think we may look forward to a really pleasant day."

It cannot be done, Herr Wagner, believe me. You cannot substitute the music drama for all the arts combined.

The object to be aimed at by the wise composer should be to make us, while listening to his music, forgetful

It is a delightful stroll on a sunny summer morning from the Hague to the Huis ten Bosch, the little "house in

the wood," built for Princess Amalia, widow of Stadtholter Frederick Henry, under whom Holland escaped

finally from the bondage of her foes and entered into the promised land of Liberty. Leaving the quiet streets,

the tree bordered canals, with their creeping barges, you pass through a pleasant park, where the softeyed

deer press round you, hurt and indignant if you have brought nothing in your pocketnot even a piece of

sugarto offer them. It is not that they are graspingit is the want of attention that wounds them.

"I thought he was a gentleman," they seem to be saying to one another, if you glance back, "he looked like a

Their mild eyes haunt you; on the next occasion you do not forget. The Park merges into the forest; you go by

winding ways till you reach the trim Dutch garden, moatencircled, in the centre of which stands the prim

oldfashioned villa, which, to the simple Dutchman, appears a palace. The concierge, an old soldier, bows

low to you and introduces you to his wifea stately, whitehaired dame, who talks most languages a little,

so far as relates to all things within and appertaining to this tiny palace of the wood. To things without,

beyond the wood, her powers of conversation do not extend: apparently such matters do not interest her.

She conducts you to the Chinese Room; the sun streams through the windows, illuminating the wondrous

golden dragons standing out in bold relief from the burnished lacquer work, decorating still further with light

and shade the delicate silk embroideries thin taper hands have woven with infinite pains. The walls are hung

with rice paper, depicting the conventional scenes of the conventional Chinese life.

You find your thoughts wandering. These grotesque figures, these caricatures of humanity! A comical

creature, surely, this Chinaman, the pantaloon of civilization. How useful he has been to us for our farces, our

comic operas! This yellow baby, in his ample pinafore, who lived thousands of years ago, who has now

But is he dyingor does the life of a nation wake again, as after sleep? Is he this droll, harmless thing he

here depicts himself? And if not? Suppose fresh sap be stirring through his three hundred millions? We

thought he was so very dead; we thought the time had come to cut him up and divide him, the only danger

Suppose it turns out as the fable of the woodcutter and the bear? The woodcutter found the bear lying in the

forest. At first he was much frightened, but the bear lay remarkably still. So the woodman crept nearer,

ventured to kick the bearvery gently, ready to run if need be. Surely the bear was dead! And parts of a bear

are good to eat, and bearskin to poor woodfolk on cold winter nights is grateful. So the woodman drew his

If the Chinaman be not dead? If the cuttingup process has only served to waken him? In a little time from

From the Chinese Room the whitehaired dame leads us to the Japanese Room. Had gentlelooking Princess

Amalia some vague foreshadowing of the future in her mind when she planned these two rooms leading into

one another? The Japanese decorations are more grotesque, the designs less cheerfully comical than those of

cousin Chinaman. These monstrous, misshapen wrestlers, these patientlooking gods, with their inscrutable

eyes! Was it always there, or is it only by the light of present events that one reads into the fantastic fancies of

the artist working long ago in the doorway of his paper house, a meaning that has hitherto escaped us?

But the chief attraction of the Huis ten Bosch is the gorgeous Orange Saloon, lighted by a cupola, fifty feet

above the floor, the walls one blaze of pictures, chiefly of the gorgeous Jordaen school"The Defeat of the

Vices," "Time Vanquishing Slander"mostly allegorical, in praise of all the virtues, in praise of

enlightenment and progress. Aptly enough in a room so decorated, here was held the famous Peace Congress

that closed the last century. One can hardly avoid smiling as one thinks of the solemn conclave of grandees

It was in the autumn of the same year that Europe decided upon the dividingup of China, that soldiers were

instructed by Christian monarchs to massacre men, women and children, the idea being to impress upon the

Heathen Chinee the superior civilization of the white man. The Boer war followed almost immediately. Since

when the white man has been pretty busy all over the world with his "expeditions" and his "missions." The

world is undoubtedly growing more refined. We do not care for ugly words. Even the burglar refers airily to

the "little job" he has on hand. You would think he had found work in the country. I should not be surprised

to learn that he says a prayer before starting, telegraphs home to his anxious wife the next morning that his

Until the faroff date of Universal Brotherhood war will continue. Matters considered unimportant by both

parties willwith a mighty flourish of trumpetsbe referred to arbitration. I was talking of a famous

financier a while ago with a man who had been his secretary. Amongst other anecdotes, he told me of a

certain agreement about which dispute had arisen. The famous financier took the paper into his own hands

"Let it go," he concluded, "it is only a thousand pounds at the outside. May as well be honest."

Concerning a dead fisherman or two, concerning boundaries through unproductive mountain ranges we shall

arbitrate and feel virtuous. For gold mines and good pasture lands, mixed up with a little honour to give

respectability to the business, we shall fight it out, as previously. War being thus inevitable, the humane man

will rejoice that by one of those brilliant discoveries, so simple when they are explained, war in the future is

In byelections, as a witty writer has pointed out, there are no defeatsonly victories and moral victories.

The idea seems to have caught on. War in the future is evidently going to be conducted on the same

understanding. Once upon a time, from a faroff land, a certain general telegraphed home congratulating his

Government that the enemy had shown no inclination whatever to prevent his running away. The whole

"Why, they never even tried to stop him," citizens, meeting other citizens in the street, told each other. "Ah,

they've had enough of him. I bet they are only too glad to get rid of him. Why, they say he ran for miles

The enemy's general, on the other hand, also wrote home congratulating his Government. In this way the

same battle can be mafficked over by both parties. Contentment is the great secret of happiness. Everything

happens for the best, if only you look at it the right way. That is going to be the argument. The general of the

future will telegraph to headquarters that he is pleased to be able to inform His Majesty that the enemy,

having broken down all opposition, has succeeded in crossing the frontier and is now well on his way to His

"I am luring him on," he will add, "as fast as I can. At our present rate of progress, I am in hopes of bringing

Lest foolish civilian sort of people should wonder whereabouts lies the cause for rejoicing, the military man

will condescend to explain. The enemy is being enticed farther and farther from his base. The defeated

generalwho is not really defeated, who is only artful, and who appears to be running away, is not really

running away at all. On the contrary, he is running homebringing, as he explains, the enemy with him.

If I remember rightlyit is long since I played itthere is a parlour game entitled "Puss in the Corner." You

beckon another player to you with your finger. "Puss, puss!" you cry. Thereupon he has to leave his

chairhis "base," as the military man would term itand try to get to you without anything happening to

War in the future is going to be Puss in the Corner on a bigger scale. You lure your enemy away from his

base. If all goes wellif he does not see the trap that is being laid for himwhy, then, almost before he

knows it, he finds himself in your capital. That finishes the game. You find out what it is he really wants.

Provided it is something within reason, and you happen to have it handy, you give it to him. He goes home

crowing, and you, on your side, laugh when you think how cleverly you succeeded in luring him away from

There is a bright side to all things. The gentleman charged with the defence of a fortress will meet the other

"So here you are at last!" he will explain. "Why didn't you come before? We have been waiting for you."

And he will send off dispatches felicitating his chief on having got that fortress off their hands, together with

all the worry and expense it has been to them. When prisoners are taken you will console yourself with the

reflection that the cost of feeding them for the future will have to be borne by the enemy. Captured cannon

"Confounded heavy things!" you will say to yourself. "Thank goodness I've got rid of them. Let him have the

War is a ridiculous method of settling disputes. Anything that can tend to make its ridiculous aspect more

apparent is to be welcomed. The new school of military dispatchwriters may succeed in turning even the

The present trouble in the East would never have occurred but for the white man's enthusiasm for bearing

other people's burdens. What we call the yellow danger is the fear that the yellow man may before long

request us, so far as he is concerned, to put his particular burden down. It may occur to him that, seeing it is

his property, he would just as soon carry it himself. A London policeman told me a story the other day that

struck him as an example of Cockney humour under trying circumstances. But it may also serve as a fable.

From a lonely street in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden, early one morning, the constable heard cries of

"Stop thief!" shouted in a childish treble. He arrived on the scene just in time to collar a young hooligan, who,

having snatched a basket of fruit from a small lada greengrocer's errand boy, as it turned outwas, with it,

making tracks. The greengrocer's boy, between panting and tears, delivered his accusation. The hooligan

"What d'yer mean, stealing it?" exclaimed Mr. Hooligan. "Why, I was carrying it for yer!"

The white man has got into the way of "carrying" other people's burdens, and now it looks as if the yellow

man were going to object to our carrying his any further. Maybe he is going to get nasty, and insist on

A friend of minehe is a man who in the street walks into lamp posts, and apologisessees rising from

the East the dawn of a new day in the world's history. The yellow danger is to him a golden hope. He sees a

race long stagnant, stretching its giant limbs with the first vague movements of returning life. He is a poor

sort of patriot; he calls himself, I suppose, a white man, yet he shamelessly confesses he would rather see

Asia's millions rise from the ruins of their ancient civilization to take their part in the future of humanity, than

that half the population of the globe should remain bound in savagery for the pleasure and the profit of his

He even goes so far as to think that the white man may have something to learn. The world has belonged to

him now for some thousands of years. Has he done all with it that could have been done? Are his ideals the

Not what the yellow man has absorbed from Europe, but what he is going to give Europe it is that interests

my friend. He is watching the birth of a new forcean influence as yet unknown. He clings to the fond belief

that new ideas, new formulae, to replace the old worn shibboleths, may, during these thousands of years, have

been developing in those keen brains that behind the impressive yellow mask have been working so long in

What is wrong with marriage, anyhow? I find myself pondering this question so often, when reading

highclass literature. I put it to myself again the other evening, during a performance of Faust. Why could not

Faust have married the girl? I would not have married her myself for any consideration whatsoever; but that

is not the argument. Faust, apparently, could not see anything amiss with her. Both of them were mad about

each other. Yet the idea of a quiet, unostentatious marriage with a week's honeymoon, say, in Vienna,

followed by a neat little cottage orne, not too far from Nurnberg, so that their friends could have come out to

There could have been a garden. Marguerite might have kept chickens and a cow. That sort of girl, brought

up to hard work and by no means too well educated, is all the better for having something to do. Later, with

the gradual arrival of the family, a good, allround woman might have been hired in to assist. Faust, of

course, would have had his study and got to work again; that would have kept him out of further mischief.

The idea that a brainy man, his age, was going to be happy with nothing to do all day but fool round a

petticoat was ridiculous from the beginning. Valentinea good fellow, Valentine, with nice ideaswould

have spent his Saturdays to Monday with them. Over a pipe and a glass of wine, he and Faust would have

He would have danced the children on his knee, have told them tales about the wartaught the eldest boy to

shoot. Faust, with a practical man like Valentine to help him, would probably have invented a new gun.

Things might have come of it. Sybil, in course of time, would have married and settled downperhaps have

taken a little house near to them. He and Marguerite would have jokedwhen Mrs. Sybil was not

aroundabout his early infatuation. The old mother would have toddled over from Nurnbergnot too often,

The picture grows upon one the more one thinks of it. Why did it never occur to them? There would have

been a bit of a bother with the Old Man. I can imagine Mephistopheles being upset about it, thinking himself

"I should like to marry the girl, but I won't do it; it would not be fair to the Old Man; he has been to a lot of

trouble working this thing up; in common gratitude I cannot turn round now and behave like a decent,

sensible man; it would not be playing the game"if this was the way Faust looked at the matter there is

nothing more to be said. Indeed, it shows him in rather a fine lightnoble, if quixotic.

If, on the other hand, he looked at the question from the point of view of himself and the girl, I think the thing

might have been managed. All one had to do in those days when one wanted to get rid of the Devil was to

show him a sword hilt. Faust and Marguerite could have slipped into a church one morning, and have kept

him out of the way with a sword hilt till the ceremony was through. They might have hired a small boy:

"You see the gentleman in red? Well, he wants us and we don't want him. That is the only difference between

us. Now, you take this sword, and when you see him coming show him the hilt. Don't hurt him; just show

The old gentleman's expression, when subsequently Faust presented him to Marguerite, would have been

"Allow me, my wife. My dear, aa friend of mine. You may remember meeting him that night at your

As I have said, there would have been ructions; but I do not myself see what could have been done. There

was nothing in the bond to the effect that Faust should not marry, so far as we are told. The Old Man had a

sense of humour. My own opinion is that, after getting over the first annoyance, he himself would have seen

the joke. I can even picture him looking in now and again on Mr. and Mrs. Faust. The children would be

But the Old Man had a way with him. He would have told one or two stories at which Marguerite would have

blushed, at which Faust would have grinned. I can see the old fellow occasionally joining the homely social

board. The children, awed at first, would have sat silent, with staring eyes. But, as I have said, the Old Man

had a way with him. Why should he not have reformed? The good woman's unconsciously exerted

influencethe sweet childish prattle! One hears of such things. Might he not have come to be known as

MyselfI believe I have already mentioned itI would not have married Marguerite. She is not my ideal of

a good girl. I never liked the way she deceived her mother. And that aunt of hers! Well, a nice girl would not

have been friends with such a woman. She did not behave at all too well to Sybil, either. It is clear to me that

she led the boy on. And what was she doing with that box of jewels, anyhow? She was not a fool. She could

not have gone every day to that fountain, chatted with those girl friends of hers, and learnt nothing. She must

have known that people don't go leaving twenty thousand pounds' worth of jewels about on doorsteps as part

of a round game. Her own instinct, if she had been a good girl, would have told her to leave the thing alone.

I don't believe in these innocent people who do not know what they are doing half their time. Ask any

London magistrate what he thinks of the lady who explains that she picked up the diamond brooch:

"Not meaning, of course, your Worship, to take it. I would not do such a thing. It just happened this way,

your Worship. I was standing as you might say here, and not seeing anyone about in the shop I opened the

case and took it out, thinking as perhaps it might belong to someone; and then this gentleman here, as I had

not noticed before, comes up quite suddenly and says; 'You come along with me,' he says. 'What for,' I says,

'when I don't even know you?' I says. 'For stealing,' he says. 'Well, that's a hard word to use to a lady,' I says;

And if she had put them all on, not thinking, what would a really nice girl have done when the gentleman

came up and assured her they were hers? She would have been thirty seconds taking them off and flinging

"Thank you," she would have said, "I'll trouble you to leave this garden as quickly as you entered it and take

Marguerite clings to the jewels, and accepts the young man's arm for a moonlight promenade. And when it

does enter into her innocent head that he and she have walked that shady garden long enough, what does she

do when she has said goodbye and shut the door? She opens the groundfloor window and begins to sing!

Maybe I am not poetical, but I do like justice. When other girls do these sort of things they get called names. I

cannot see why this particular girl should be held up as an ideal. She kills her mother. According to her own

account this was an accident. It is not an original line of defence, and we are not allowed to hear the evidence

for the prosecution. She also kills her baby. You are not to blame her for that, because at the time she was

feeling poorly. I don't see why this girl should have a special line of angels to take her up to heaven. There

must have been decent, hardworking women in Nurnburg more entitled to the ticket.

Why is it that all these years we have been content to accept Marguerite as a type of innocence and virtue?

The explanation is, I suppose, that Goethe wrote at a time when it was the convention to regard all women as

good. Anything in petticoats was virtuous. If she did wrong it was always somebody else's fault. Cherchez la

femme was a later notion. In the days of Goethe it was always Cherchez l'homme. It was the man's fault. It

The convention has not yet died out. I was reading the other day a most interesting book by a brilliant

American authoress. Seeing I live far away from the lady's haunts, I venture to mention names. I am speaking

of "Patience Sparhawk," by Gertrude Atherton. I take this book because it is typical of a large body of fiction.

Miss Sparhawk lives a troubled life: it puzzles her. She asks herself what is wrong. Her own idea is that it is

If it is not civilisation, then it is the American man or Natureor Democracy. Miss Sparhawk marries the

wrong man. Later on she gets engaged to another wrong man. In the end we are left to believe she is about to

be married to the right man. I should be better satisfied if I could hear Miss Sparhawk talking six months after

that last marriage. But if a mistake has again been made I am confident that, in Miss Sparhawk's opinion, the

fault will not be Miss Sparhawk's. The argument is always the same: Miss Sparhawk, being a lady, can do no

If Miss Sparhawk cared to listen to me for five minutes, I feel I could put her right on this point.

"It is quite true, my dear girl," I should say to her, "something is wrongvery wrong. But it is not the

American man. Never you mind the American man: you leave him to worry out his own salvation. You are

not the girl to put him right, even where he is wrong. And it is not civilisation. Civilisation has a deal to

answer for, I admit: don't you load it up with this additional trouble. The thing that is wrong in this case of

yoursif you will forgive my saying sois you. You make a fool of yourself; you marry a man who is a

mere animal because he appeals to your animal instincts. Then, like the lady who cried out 'Alack, I've

married a black,' you appeal to heaven against the injustice of being mated with a clown. You are not a nice

girl, either in your ideas or in your behaviour. I don't blame you for it; you did not make yourself. But when

you set to work to attract all that is lowest in man, why be so astonished at your own success? There are

plenty of shocking American men, I agree. One meets the class even outside America. But nice American

girls will tell you that there are also nice American men. There is an old proverb about birds of a feather.

Next time you find yourself in the company of a shocking American man, you just ask yourself how he got

there, and how it is he seems to be feeling at home. You learn selfcontrol. Get it out of your head that you

are the centre of the universe, and grasp the idea that a petticoat is not a halo, and you will find civilisation

"You say all this to meto me, a lady? Great Heavens! What has become of chivalry?"

A Frenchman was once put on trial for murdering his father and mother. He confessed his guilt, but begged

for mercy on the plea that he was an orphan. Chivalry was founded on the assumption that woman was

worthy to be worshipped. The modern woman's notion is that when she does wrong she ought to be excused

I like the naughty heroine; we all of us do. The early Victorian heroinethe angel in a white frock, was a

bore. We knew exactly what she was going to dothe right thing. We did not even have to ask ourselves,

"What will she think is the right thing to do under the circumstances?" It was always the conventional right

thing. You could have put it to a Sunday school and have got the answer every time. The heroine with

passions, instincts, emotions, is to be welcomed. But I want her to grasp the fact that after all she is only one

"What is wrong in civilisation? What is the world coming to?" and so forth, she would occasionally say to

Last year, travelling on the Underground Railway, I met a man; he was one of the saddestlooking men I had

seen for years. I used to know him well in the old days when we were journalists together. I asked him, in a

sympathetic tone, how things were going with him. I expected his response would be a flood of tears, and that

in the end I should have to fork out a fiver. To my astonishment, his answer was that things were going

"Then what has happened to you to make you look like a mute at a temperance funeral?" I said:

I thought that if the trouble lay there he would take the opportunity. It brightened him somewhat, the

necessity of replying to the question. It appeared that his wife was in the best of health.

"You remember her," he continued with a smile; "wonderful spirits, always cheerful, nothing seems to put

His motherinlaw, I learned from further talk with him, had died since I had last met him, and had left them

a comfortable addition to their income. His eldest daughter was engaged to be married.

"It is entirely a love match," he explained, "and he is such a dear, good fellow, that I should not have made

any objection even had he been poor. But, of course, as it is, I am naturally all the more content."

His eldest boy, having won the Mottle Scholarship, was going up to Cambridge in the Autumn. His own

health, he told me, had greatly improved; and a novel he had written in his leisure time promised to be one of

"If I am opening a wound too painful to be touched," I said, "tell me. If, on the contrary, it is an ordinary sort

of trouble upon which the sympathy of a fellow worker may fall as balm, let me hear it."

"So far as I am concerned," he replied, "I should be glad to tell you. Speaking about it does me good, and

may leadso I am always in hopesto an idea. But, for your own sake, if you take my advice, you will not

"It need have nothing to do with you," he answered, "if you are sensible enough to keep out of it. If I tell you:

from this time onward it will be your trouble also. Anyhow, that is what has happened in four other separate

cases. If you like to be the fifth and complete the half dozen of us, you are welcome. But remember I have

"It has changed them from cheerful, companionable persons into gloomy oneidead bores," he told me.

"They think of but one thing, they talk of but one thing, they dream of but one thing. Instead of getting over

it, as time goes on, it takes possession of them more and more. There are men, of course, who would be

unaffected by it who could shake it off. I warn you in particular against it, because, in spite of all that is

said, I am convinced you have a sense of humour; and that being so, it will lay hold of you. It will plague you

night and day. You see what it has made of me! Three months ago a lady interviewer described me as of a

sunny temperament. If you know your own business you will get out at the next station."

I wish now I had followed his advice. As it was, I allowed my curiosity to take possession of me, and begged

"It was just about Christmas time," he said. "We were discussing the Drury Lane Pantomimesome three or

four of usin the smoking room of the Devonshire Club, and young Gold said he thought it would prove a

mistake, the introduction of a subject like the Fiscal question into the story of Humpty Dumpty. The two

things, so far as he could see, had nothing to do with one another. He added that he entertained a real regard

for Mr. Dan Leno, whom he had once met on a steamboat, but that there were other topics upon which he

would prefer to seek that gentleman's guidance. Nettleship, on the other hand, declared that he had no

sympathy with the argument that artists should never intrude upon public affairs. The actor was a fellow

citizen with the rest of us. He said that, whether one agreed with their conclusions or not, one must admit that

the nation owed a debt of gratitude to Mrs. Brown Potter and to Miss Olga Nethersole for giving to it the

benefit of their convictions. He had talked to both ladies in private on the subject and was convinced they

"Burnside, who was one of the party, contended that if sides were to be taken, a pantomime should surely

advocate the FreeFood Cause, seeing it was a form of entertainment supposed to appeal primarily to the

"'The Fiscal question,' I said, 'is on everybody's tongue. Such being the case, it is fit and proper it should be

referred to in our annual pantomime, which has come to be regarded as a review of the year's doings. But it

should not have been dealt with from the political standpoint. The proper attitude to have assumed towards it

"'The very thing I have been trying to get hold of for weeks,' he said'a bright, amusing resume of the whole

problem that should give offence to neither side. You know our paper,' he continued; 'we steer clear of

politics, but, at the same time, try to be uptodate; it is not always easy. The treatment of the subject, on the

lines you suggest, is just what we require. I do wish you would write me something.'

"He is a good old sort, Johnson; it seemed an easy thing. I said I would. Since that time I have been thinking

how to do it. As a matter of fact, I have not thought of much else. Maybe you can suggest something."

"Pilson," said I to myself, "shall have the benefit of this. He does not need anything boisterously funny. A

I lit a pipe and sat down to think. At halfpast twelve, having to write some letters before going out to lunch,

But not for long. It worried me all the afternoon. I thought, maybe, something would come to me in the

evening. I wasted all that evening, and I wasted all the following morning. Everything has its amusing side, I

told myself. One turns out comic stories about funerals, about weddings. Hardly a misfortune that can happen

to mankind but has produced its comic literature. An American friend of mine once took a contract from the

Editor of an Insurance Journal to write four humorous stories; one was to deal with an earthquake, the second

with a cyclone, the third with a flood, and the fourth with a thunderstorm. And more amusing stories I have

I myself have written lightly on Bimemetallism. Home Rule we used to be merry over in the eighties. I

remember one delightful evening at the Codgers' Hall. It would have been more delightful still, but for a

rawboned Irishman, who rose towards eleven o'clock and requested to be informed if any other speaker was

wishful to make any more jokes on the subject of Ould Ireland; because, if so, the raw boned gentleman was

prepared to save time by waiting and dealing with them altogether. But if not, thenso the rawboned

gentleman announcedhis intention was to go for the last speaker and the last speaker but two at once and

No other humourist rising, the rawboned gentleman proceeded to make good his threat, with the result that

the fun degenerated somewhat. Even on the Boer War we used to whisper jokes to one another in quiet

For days I thought of little else. My laundressas we call them in the Templenoticed my trouble.

"Mrs. Wilkins," I confessed, "I am trying to think of something innocently amusing to say on the Fiscal

"I've 'eard about it," she said, "but I don't 'ave much time to read the papers. They want to make us pay more

"For some of it," I explained. "But, then, we shall pay less for other things, so that really we shan't be paying

"Just so," I agreed, "that is the advantage of the system. It will cost nobody anything, and will result in

"Ah," said Mrs. Wilkins, "I never 'eard much good of 'em, though they do say the Almighty 'as a use for

"These foreigners," I continued, "these Germans and Americans, they dump things on us, you know."

"What's dump? Well, it's dumping, you know. You take things, and you dump them down."

"Why, all sorts of things: pig iron, bacon, doormatseverything. They bring them over herein ships, you

"You don't mean surely to tell me that they just throw them out and leave them there?" queried Mrs. Wilkins.

"Of course not," I replied; "when I say they dump these things upon our shores, that is a figure of speech.

"But why do we buy them if we don't want them?" asked Mrs. Wilkins; "we're not bound to buy them, are

"It is their artfulness," I explained, "these Germans and Americans, and the others; they are all just as bad as

one anotherthey insist on selling us these things at less price than they cost to make."

"It seems a bit silly of them, don't it?" thought Mrs. Wilkins. "I suppose being foreigners, poor things, they

"It does seem silly of them, if you look at it that way," I admitted, "but what we have got to consider is, the

"Don't see 'ow it can do us much 'arm," argued Mrs. Wilkins; "seems a bit of luck so far as we are concerned.

"I don't seem to be putting this thing quite in the right light to you, Mrs. Wilkins," I confessed. "It is a long

argument, and you might not be able to follow it; but you must take it as a fact now generally admitted that

the cheaper you buy things the sooner your money goes. By allowing the foreigner to sell us all these things

at about half the cost price, he is getting richer every day, and we are getting poorer. Unless we, as a country,

insist on paying at least twenty per cent. more for everything we want, it is calculated that in a very few years

"It may sound so," I answered, "but I fear there can be no doubt of it. The Board of Trade Returns would

"Well, God be praised, we've found it out in time," ejaculated Mrs. Wilkins piously.

"It is a matter of congratulation," I agreed; "the difficulty is that a good many other people say that far from

being ruined, we are doing very well indeed, and are growing richer every year."

"But 'ow can they say that," argued Mrs. Wilkins, "when, as you tell me, those Trade Returns prove just the

"Well, they say the same, Mrs. Wilkins, that the Board of Trade Returns prove just the opposite."

"You would be surprised, Mrs. Wilkins," I said, "how many things can be proved from Board of Trade

"What is all this talk I 'ear about the Chinese?" said Mrs. Wilkins to me the other morning. We generally

indulge in a little chat while Mrs. Wilkins is laying the breakfasttable. Letters and newspapers do not arrive

in my part of the Temple much before nine. From half past eight to nine I am rather glad of Mrs. Wilkins.

"The foreigner, Mrs. Wilkins," I replied, "whether he be Chinee or any other he, is always up to tricks. Was

not England specially prepared by an allwise Providence to frustrate these knavish tricks? Which of such

"Well, 'e's comin' over 'ereisn't he, sir? to take the work out of our mouths, as it were."

"Well, not exactly over here, to England, Mrs. Wilkins," I explained. "He has been introduced into Africa to

"It's a funny thing," said Mrs. Wilkins, "but to 'ear the way some of them talk in our block, you might run

away with the notionthat is, if you didn't know 'emthat work was their only joy. I said to one of 'em, the

other eveninga man as calls 'isself a brass finisher, though, Lord knows, the only brass 'e ever finishes is

what 'is poor wife earns and isn't quick enough to 'ide away from 'imwell, whatever 'appens, I says, it will

be clever of 'em if they take away much work from you. It made them all laugh, that did," added Mrs.

"Ah," continued the good lady, "it's surprising 'ow contented they can be with a little, some of 'em. Give 'em a

'ardworking woman to look after them, and a day out once a week with a procession of the unemployed,

they don't ask for nothing more. There's that beauty my poor sister Jane was fool enough to marry. Serves 'er

right, as I used to tell 'er at first, till there didn't seem any more need to rub it into 'er. She'd 'ad one good

'usband. It wouldn't 'ave been fair for 'er to 'ave 'ad another, even if there'd been a chance of it, seeing the few

of 'em there is to go round among so many. But it's always the same with us widows: if we 'appen to 'ave

been lucky the first time, we put it down to our own judgmentthink we can't ever make a mistake; and if

we draw a wrong 'un, as the saying is, we argue as if it was the duty of Providence to make it up to us the

second time. Why, I'd a been making a fool of myself three years ago if 'e 'adn't been goodnatured enough to

call one afternoon when I was out, and 'ook it off with two pounds eight in the best teapot that I 'ad been soft

enough to talk to 'im about: and never let me set eyes on 'im again. God bless 'im! 'E's one of the borntireds,

'e is, as poor Jane might 'ave seen for 'erself, if she 'ad only looked at 'im, instead of listening to 'im.

"But that's courtship all the world overold and young alike, so far as I've been able to see it," was the

opinion of Mrs. Wilkins. "The man's all eyes and the woman all ears. They don't seem to 'ave any other

senses left 'em. I ran against 'im the other night, on my way 'ome, at the corner of Gray's Inn Road. There was

the usual crowd watching a pack of them Italians laying down the asphalt in 'Olborn, and 'e was among 'em.

"'Ullo,' I says, 'glad to see you 'aven't lost your job. Nothin' like stickin' to it, when you've dropped into

"'What do you mean, Martha?' 'e says. 'E's not one of what I call your smart sort. It takes a bit of sarcasm to

"'Well,' I says, 'you're still on the old track, I see, looking for work. Take care you don't 'ave an accident one

"'There's enough of you doing that,' I says. 'I've got my room to put straight and three hours needlework to do

before I can get to bed. But don't let me 'inder you. You might forget what work was like, if you didn't take

"'Lazy devils! 'e says. 'Look at 'em, smoking cigarettes. I could do that sort of work. There's nothing in it. It

"'No,' I says, 'and you never will in the sort of places you go looking for it. They don't 'ang it out on

lampposts, and they don't leave it about at the street corners. Go 'ome,' I says, 'and turn the mangle for your

"Looking for work!" snorted Mrs. Wilkins with contempt; "we women never 'ave much difficulty in finding

it, I've noticed. There are times when I feel I could do with losing it for a day."

"But what did he reply, Mrs. Wilkins," I asked; "your brassfinishing friend, who was holding forth on the

subject of Chinese cheap labour." Mrs. Wilkins as a conversationalist is not easily kept to the point. I was

"Oh, that," replied Mrs. Wilkins, "'e did not say nothing. 'E ain't the sort that's got much to say in an

argument. 'E belongs to the crowd that 'angs about at the back, and does the shouting. But there was another

of 'em, a young fellow as I feels sorry for, with a wife and three small children, who 'asn't 'ad much luck for

the last six months; and that through no fault of 'is own, I should say, from the look of 'im. 'I was a fool,' says

'e, 'when I chucked a good situation and went out to the war. They told me I was going to fight for equal

rights for all white men. I thought they meant that all of us were going to 'ave a better chance, and it seemed

worth making a bit of sacrifice for, that did. I should be glad if they would give me a job in their mines that

"It is a difficult problem, Mrs. Wilkins," I said. "According to the mine owners"

"Ah," said Mrs. Wilkins. "They don't seem to be exactly what you'd call popular, them mine owners, do they?

"Some people, Mrs. Wilkins," I said, "paint them very black. There are those who hold that the South African

mineowner is not a man at all, but a kind of pantomime demon. You take Goliath, the whale that swallowed

Jonah, a selection from the least respectable citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah at their worst, Bluebeard,

Bloody Queen Mary, Guy Fawkes, and the seaserpentor, rather, you take the most objectionable

attributes of all these various personages, and mix them up together. The result is the South African

mineowner, a monster who would willingly promote a company for the putting on the market of a new meat

extract, prepared exclusively from newborn infants, provided the scheme promised a fair and reasonable

"I've 'eard they're a bad lot," said Mrs. Wilkins. "But we're most of us that, if we listen to what other people

"Quite so, Mrs. Wilkins," I agreed. "One never arrives at the truth by listening to one side only. On the other

hand, for example, there are those who stoutly maintain that the South African mineowner is a kind of

spiritual creature, all heart and sentiment, who, against his own will, has been, so to speak, dumped down

upon this earth as the result of overproduction up above of the higher class of archangel. The stock of

archangels of superior finish exceeds the heavenly demand; the surplus has been dropped down into South

Africa and has taken to mine owning. It is not that these celestial visitors of German sounding nomenclature

care themselves about the gold. Their only desire is, during this earthly pilgrimage of theirs, to benefit the

"For gold, everything can be obtained. The aim of the mineowning archangel is to provide the world with

gold. Why should the world trouble to grow things and make things? 'Let us,' say these archangels,

temporarily dwelling in South Africa, 'dig up and distribute to the world plenty of gold, then the world can

"There may be a flaw in the argument, Mrs. Wilkins," I allowed. "I am not presenting it to you as the last

word upon the subject. I am merely quoting the view of the South African mineowner, feeling himself a

"I expect," said Mrs. Wilkins, "they are just the ordinary sort of Christian, like the rest of us, anxious to do

the best they can for themselves, and not too particular as to doing other people in the process."

"I am inclined to think, Mrs. Wilkins," I said, "that you are not very far from the truth. A friend of mine, a

year ago, was very bitter on this subject of Chinese cheap labour. A little later there died a distant relative of

his who left him twenty thousand South African mining shares. He thinks now that to object to the Chinese is

narrowminded, illiberal, and against all religious teaching. He has bought an abridged edition of Confucius,

and tells me that there is much that is ennobling in Chinese morality. Indeed, I gather from him that the

introduction of the Chinese into South Africa will be the saving of that country. The noble Chinese will

afford an object lesson to the poor white man, displaying to him the virtues of sobriety, thrift, and humility. I

also gather that it will be of inestimable benefit to the noble Chinee himself. The Christian missionary will

get hold of him in bulk, so to speak, and imbue him with the higher theology. It appears to be one of those

rare cases where everybody is benefited at the expense of nobody. It is always a pity to let these rare

"Well," said Mrs. Wilkins, "I've nothin' to say agen the Chinaman, as a Chinaman. As to 'is being a 'eathen,

well, throwin' stones at a church, as the sayin' is, don't make a Christian of you. There's Christians I've met as

couldn't do themselves much 'arm by changing their religion; and as to cleanliness, well, I've never met but

one, and 'e was a washerwoman, and I'd rather 'ave sat next to 'im in a thirdclass carriage on a Bank 'Oliday

"Seems to me," continued Mrs. Wilkins, "we've got into the 'abit of talkin' a bit too much about other people's

dirt. The London atmosphere ain't nat'rally a drycleanin' process in itself, but there's a goodish few as seem

to think it is. One comes across Freeborn Britons 'ere and there as I'd be sorry to scrub clean for a shillin' and

"It is a universal failing, Mrs. Wilkins," I explained. "If you talk to a travelled Frenchman, he contrasts to his

own satisfaction the Paris ouvrier in his blue blouse with the appearance of the London labourer."

"I daresay they're all right according to their lights," said Mrs. Wilkins, "but it does seem a bit wrong that if

our own chaps are willin' and anxious to work, after all they've done, too, in the way of getting the mines for

"Again, Mrs. Wilkins, it is difficult to arrive at a just conclusion," I said. "The mineowner, according to his

enemies, hates the British workman with the natural instinct that evil creatures feel towards the noble and

virtuous. He will go to trouble and expense merely to spite the British workman, to keep him out of South

Africa. According to his friends, the mineowner sets his face against the idea of white labour for two

reasons. First and foremost, it is not nice work; the mineowner hates the thought of his beloved white

brother toiling in the mines. It is not right that the noble white man should demean himself by such work.

Secondly, white labour is too expensive. If for digging gold men had to be paid anything like the same prices

they are paid for digging coal, the mines could not be worked. The world would lose the gold that the

"The mineowner, following his own inclinations, would take a little farm, grow potatoes, and live a

beautiful lifeperhaps write a little poetry. A slave to sense of duty, he is chained to the philanthropic work

of goldmining. If we hamper him and worry him the danger is that he will get angry with uspossibly he

"Well, 'e can't take the gold with him, wherever 'e goes to?" argued Mrs. Wilkins.

"You talk, Mrs. Wilkins," I said, "as if the gold were of more value to the world than is the mineowner."

"I am glad to see, Mrs. Wilkins," I said, "that the Women's Domestic Guild of America has succeeded in

"Ah," said Mrs. Wilkins, as she took the cover off the bacon and gave an extra polish to the mustardpot with

her apron, "they are clever people over there; leastways, so I've always 'eard."

"This, their latest, Mrs. Wilkins," I said, "I am inclined to regard as their greatest triumph. My hope is that the

Women's Domestic Guild of America, when it has finished with the United States and Canada, will, perhaps,

see its way to establishing a branch in England. There are ladies of my acquaintance who would welcome, I

"Well, good luck to it, is all I say," responded Mrs. Wilkins, "and if it makes all the gals contented with their

places, and all the mistresses satisfied with what they've got and 'appy in their minds, why, God bless it, say

"The mistake hitherto," I said, "from what I read, appears to have been that the right servant was not sent to

the right place. What the Women's Domestic Guild of America proposes to do is to find the right servant for

"That's the secret," agreed Mrs. Wilkins. They don't anticipate any difficulty in getting the right sort of gal, I

"I am not so sure about it," she said; "the Almighty don't seem to 'ave made too many of that sort. Unless

these American ladies that you speak of are going to start a factory of their own. I am afraid there is

"Don't throw cold water on the idea before it is fairly started, Mrs. Wilkins," I pleaded.

"Well, sir," said Mrs. Wilkins, "I 'ave been a gal myself in service; and in my time I've 'ad a few mistresses of

my own, and I've 'eard a good deal about others. There are ladies and ladies, as you may know, sir, and some

of them, if they aren't exactly angels, are about as near to it as can be looked for in this climate, and they are

not the ones that do most of the complaining. But, as for the average mistresswell it ain't a gal she wants,

it's a plaster image, without any natural innardsa sort of thing as ain't 'uman, and ain't to be found in 'uman

nature. And then she'd grumble at it, if it didn't 'appen to be able to be in two places at once."

"You fear that the standard for that 'right girl' is likely to be set a trifle too high Mrs. Wilkins," I suggested.

"That 'right gal,' according to the notions of some of 'em," retorted Mrs. Wilkins, "'er place ain't down 'ere

among us mere mortals; 'er place is up in 'eaven with a 'arp and a golden crown. There's my niece, Emma, I

don't say she is a saint, but a better 'earted, 'arder working gal, at twenty pounds a year, you don't expect to

find, unless maybe you're a natural born fool that can't 'elp yourself. She wanted a place. She 'ad been 'ome

for nearly six months, nursing 'er old father, as 'ad been down all the winter with rheumatic fever; and

'ardput to it she was for a few clothes. You 'ear 'em talk about gals as insists on an hour a day for practising

the piano, and the right to invite their young man to spend the evening with them in the drawingroom.

Perhaps it is meant to be funny; I ain't come across that type of gal myself, outside the pictures in the comic

papers; and I'll never believe, till I see 'er myself, that anybody else 'as. They sent 'er from the registry office

"'I 'ope you are good at getting up early in the morning?' says the lady, 'I like a gal as rises cheerfully to 'er

"'Well, ma'am,' says Emma, 'I can't say as I've got a passion for it. But it's one of those things that 'as to be

"'I'm a great believer in early rising,' says my lady; 'in the morning, one is always fresher for one's work; my

'usband and the younger children breakfast at 'arf past seven; myself and my eldest daughter 'ave our

"'And I 'ope,' says the lady, 'you are of an amiable disposition. Some gals when you ring the bell come up

"'Well, it ain't a thing,' explains Emma, 'as makes you want to burst out laughing, 'earing the bell go off for

the twentieth time, and 'aving suddenly to put down your work at, perhaps, a critical moment. Some ladies

"'I 'ope you are not impertinent,' says the lady; 'if there's one thing that I object to in a servant it is

"'We none of us like being answered back,' says Emma, 'more particularly when we are in the wrong. But I

know my place ma'am, and I shan't give you no lip. It always leads to less trouble, I find, keeping your mouth

"'It depends upon the children,' says Emma; 'there are some I 'ave 'ad to do with as made the day seem

pleasanter, and I've come across others as I could 'ave parted from at any moment without tears.'

"'I like a gal,' says the lady, 'who is naturally fond of children, it shows a good character.'

"'Four of them,' answers my lady, 'but you won't 'ave much to do except with the two youngest. The great

thing with young children is to surround them with good examples. Are you a Christian?' asks my lady.

"'Every other Sunday evening out is my rule,' says the lady, 'but of course I shall expect you to go to church.'

"'There are better things,' says my lady, 'than seeing what you call your people, and I should not care to take a

girl into my 'ouse as put 'er pleasure before 'er religion. You are not engaged, I 'ope?'

"'Walking out, ma'am, do you mean?' says Emma. 'No, ma'am, there is nobody I've got in my mindnot just

"'I never will take a gal,' explains my lady, 'who is engaged. I find it distracts 'er attention from 'er work. And

I must insist if you come to me,' continues my lady, 'that you get yourself another 'at and jacket. If there is

"'Er own daughter was sitting there beside 'er with 'alf a dozen silver bangles on 'er wrist, and a sort of thing

'anging around 'er neck, as, 'ad it been real, would 'ave been worth perhaps a thousand pounds. But Emma

"'I can put these things by and get myself something else,' she says, 'if you don't mind, ma'am, advancing me

something out of my first three months' wages. I'm afraid my account at the bank is a bit overdrawn.'

"The lady whispered something to 'er daughter. 'I am afraid, on thinking it over,' she says, 'that you won't suit,

after all. You don't look serious enough. I feel sure, from the way you do your 'air,' says my lady, 'there's a

"But do they get servants to come to them, this type of mistress, do you think, Mrs. Wilkins?" I asked.

"They get them all right," said Mrs. Wilkins, "and if it's a decent gal, it makes a bad gal of 'er, that ever

afterwards looks upon every mistress as 'er enemy, and acts accordingly. And if she ain't a naturally good gal,

it makes 'er worse, and then you 'ear what awful things gals are. I don't say it's an easy problem," continued

Mrs. Wilkins, "it's just like marriages. The good mistress gets 'old of the bad servant, and the bad mistress, as

"But how is it," I argued, "that in hotels, for instance, the service is excellent, and the girls, generally

speaking, seem contented? The work is hard, and the wages not much better, if as good."

"Ah," said Mrs. Wilkins, "you 'ave 'it the right nail on the 'ead, there, sir. They go into the 'otels and work like

niggers, knowing that if a single thing goes wrong they will be bullyragged and sworn at till they don't know

whether they are standing on their 'ead or their 'eels. But they 'ave their hours; the gal knows when 'er work is

done, and when the clock strikes she is a 'uman being once again. She 'as got that moment to look forward to

all day, and it keeps 'er going. In private service there's no moment in the day to 'ope for. If the lady is

reasonable she ain't overworked; but no 'ow can she ever feel she is her own mistress, free to come and go, to

wear 'er bit of finery, to 'ave 'er bit of fun. She works from six in the morning till eleven or twelve at night,

and then she only goes to bed provided she ain't wanted. She don't belong to 'erself at all; it's that that irritates

"I see your point, Mrs. Wilkins," I said, "and, of course, in a house where two or three servants were kept

some such plan might easily be arranged. The girl who commenced work at six o'clock in the morning might

consider herself free at six o'clock in the evening. What she did with herself, how she dressed herself in her

own time, would be her affair. What church the clerk or the workman belongs to, what company he keeps, is

no concern of the firm. In such matters, mistresses, I am inclined to think, saddle themselves with a

responsibility for which there is no need. If the girl behaves herself while in the house, and does her work,

there the contract ends. The mistress who thinks it her duty to combine the roles of employer and of maiden

aunt is naturally resented. The next month the girl might change her hours from twelve to twelve, and her

fellowservant could enjoy the six a.m. to six p.m. shift. But how do you propose to deal, Mrs. Wilkins, with

"Well, sir," said Mrs. Wilkins, "it seems to me simple enough. Ladies talk pretty about the dignity of labour,

and are never tired of pointing out why gals should prefer domestic service to all other kinds of work.

Suppose they practise what they preach. In the 'ouse, where there's only the master and the mistress, and, say

a couple of small children, let the lady take her turn. After all, it's only her duty, same as the office or the

shop is the man's. Where, on the other 'and, there are biggish boys and gals about the place, well it wouldn't

do them any 'arm to be taught to play a little less, and to look after themselves a little more. It's just arranging

"You remind me of a family I once knew, Mrs. Wilkins," I said; "it consisted of the usual father and mother,

and of five sad, healthy girls. They kept two servantsor, rather, they never kept any servants; they lived

always looking for servants, breaking their hearts over servants, packing servants off at a moment's notice,

standing disconsolately looking after servants who had packed themselves off at a moment's notice,

wondering generally what the world was coming too. It occurred to me at the time, that without much trouble,

they could have lived a peaceful life without servants. The eldest girl was learning paintingand seemed

unable to learn anything else. It was poor sort of painting; she noticed it herself. But she seemed to think that,

if she talked a lot about it, and thought of nothing else, that somehow it would all come right. The second girl

played the violin. She played it from early morning till late evening, and friends fell away from them. There

wasn't a spark of talent in the family, but they all had a notion that a vague longing to be admired was just the

"Another daughter fancied she would like to be an actress, and screamed all day in the attic. The fourth wrote

poetry on a typewriter, and wondered why nobody seemed to want it; while the fifth one suffered from a

weird belief that smearing wood with a red hot sort of poker was a thing worth doing for its own sake. All

of them seemed willing enough to work, provided only that it was work of no use to any living soul. With a

little sense, and the occasional assistance of a charwoman, they could have led a merrier life."

"If I was giving away secrets," said Mrs. Wilkins, "I'd say to the mistresses: 'Show yourselves able to be

independent.' It's because the gals know that the mistresses can't do without them that they sometimes gives

The advantage that the foreigner possesses over the Englishman is that he is born good. He does not have to

try to be good, as we do. He does not have to start the New Year with the resolution to be good, and succeed,

bar accidents, in being so till the middle of January. He is just good all the year round. When a foreigner is

told to mount or descend from a tram on the near side, it does not occur to him that it would be humanly

In Brussels once I witnessed a daring attempt by a lawless foreigner to enter a tram from the wrong side. The

gate was open: he was standing close beside it. A line of traffic was in his way: to have got round to the right

side of that tram would have meant missing it. He entered when the conductor was not looking, and took his

seat. The astonishment of the conductor on finding him there was immense. How did he get there? The

conductor had been watching the proper entrance, and the man had not passed him. Later, the true

explanation suggested itself to the conductor, but for a while he hesitated to accuse a fellow human being of

He appealed to the passenger himself. Was his presence to be accounted for by miracle or by sin? The

passenger confessed. It was more in sorrow than in anger that the conductor requested him at once to leave.

This tram was going to be kept respectable. The passenger proved refractory, a halt was called, and the

gendarmerie appealed to. After the manner of policemen, they sprang, as it were, from the ground, and

formed up behind an imposing officer, whom I took to be the sergeant. At first the sergeant could hardly

believe the conductor's statement. Even then, had the passenger asserted that he had entered by the proper

entrance, his word would have been taken. Much easier to the foreign official mind would it have been to

believe that the conductor had been stricken with temporary blindness, than that man born of woman would

Myself, in his case, I should have lied and got the trouble over. But he was a proud man, or had not much

senseone of the two, and so held fast to the truth. It was pointed out to him that he must descend

immediately and wait for the next tram. Other gendarmes were arriving from every quarter: resistance in the

circumstances seemed hopeless. He said he would get down. He made to descend this time by the proper

gate, but that was not justice. He had mounted the wrong side, he must alight on the wrong side. Accordingly,

he was put out amongst the traffic, after which the conductor preached a sermon from the centre of the tram

There is a law throughout Germanyan excellent law it is: I would we had it in Englandthat nobody may

scatter paper about the street. An English military friend told me that, one day in Dresden, unacquainted with

this rule, he tore a long letter he had been reading into some fifty fragments and threw them behind him. A

policeman stopped him and explained to him quite politely the law upon the subject. My military friend

agreed that it was a very good law, thanked the man for his information, and said that for the future he would

bear it in mind. That, as the policeman pointed out, would make things right enough for the future, but

meanwhile it was necessary to deal with the pastwith the fifty or so pieces of paper lying scattered about

My military friend, with a pleasant laugh, confessed he did not see what was to be done. The policeman,

more imaginative, saw a way out. It was that my military friend should set to work and pick up those fifty

scraps of paper. He is an English General on the Retired List, and of imposing appearance: his manner on

occasion is haughty. He did not see himself on his hands and knees in the chief street of Dresden, in the

The German policeman himself admitted that the situation was awkward. If the English General could not

accept it there happened to be an alternative. It was that the English General should accompany the

policeman through the streets, followed by the usual crowd, to the nearest prison, some three miles off. It

being now four o'clock in the afternoon, they would probably find the judge departed. But the most

comfortable thing possible in prison cells should be allotted to him, and the policeman had little doubt that

the General, having paid his fine of forty marks, would find himself a free man again in time for lunch the

following day. The general suggested hiring a boy to pick up the paper. The policeman referred to the

"I thought the matter out," my friend told me, "imagining all the possible alternatives, including that of

knocking the fellow down and making a bolt, and came to the conclusion that his first suggestion would, on

the whole, result in the least discomfort. But I had no idea that picking up small scraps of thin paper off

greasy stones was the business that I found it! It took me nearly ten minutes, and afforded amusement, I

calculate, to over a thousand people. But it is a good law, mind you: all I wish is that I had known it

On one occasion I accompanied an American lady to a German Opera House. The takingoff of hats in the

German Schausspielhaus is obligatory, and again I would it were so in England. But the American lady is

accustomed to disregard rules made by mere man. She explained to the doorkeeper that she was going to

wear her hat. He, on his side, explained to her that she was not: they were both a bit short with one another. I

took the opportunity to turn aside and buy a programme: the fewer people there are mixed up in an argument,

My companion explained quite frankly to the doorkeeper that it did not matter what he said, she was not

going to take any notice of him. He did not look a talkative man at any time, and, maybe, this announcement

further discouraged him. In any case, he made no attempt to answer. All he did was to stand in the centre of

the doorway with a faraway look in his eyes. The doorway was some four feet wide: he was about three feet

six across, and weighed about twenty stone. As I explained, I was busy buying a programme, and when I

returned my friend had her hat in her hand, and was digging pins into it: I think she was trying to make

believe it was the heart of the doorkeeper. She did not want to listen to the opera, she wanted to talk all the

time about that doorkeeper, but the people round us would not even let her do that.

She has spent three winters in Germany since then. Now when she feels like passing through a door that is

standing wide open just in front of her, and which leads to just the place she wants to get to, and an official

shakes his head at her, and explains that she must not, but must go up two flights of stairs and along a

corridor and down another flight of stairs, and so get to her place that way, she apologises for her error and

Continental Governments have trained their citizens to perfection. Obedience is the Continent's first law. The

story that is told of a Spanish king who was nearly drowned because the particular official whose duty it was

to dive in after Spanish kings when they tumbled out of boats happened to be dead, and his successor had not

yet been appointed, I can quite believe. On the Continental railways if you ride second class with a firstclass

ticket you render yourself liable to imprisonment. What the penalty is for riding first with a secondclass

ticket I cannot sayprobably death, though a friend of mine came very near on one occasion to finding out.

All would have gone well with him if he had not been so darned honest. He is one of those men who pride

themselves on being honest. I believe he takes a positive pleasure in being honest. He had purchased a

secondclass ticket for a station up a mountain, but meeting, by chance on the platform, a lady acquaintance,

had gone with her into a firstclass apartment. On arriving at the journey's end he explained to the collector

what he had done, and, with his purse in his hand, demanded to know the difference. They took him into a

room and locked the door. They wrote out his confession and read it over to him, and made him sign it, and

The policeman crossexamined him for about a quarter of an hour. They did not believe the story about the

lady. Where was the lady? He did not know. They searched the neighbourhood for her, but could not find her.

He suggestedwhat turned out to be the truththat, tired of loitering about the station, she had gone up the

mountain. An Anarchist outrage had occurred in the neighbouring town some months before. The policeman

suggested searching for bombs. Fortunately, a Cook's agent, returning with a party of tourists, arrived upon

the scene, and took it upon himself to explain in delicate language that my friend was a bit of an ass and

could not tell first class from second. It was the red cushions that had deceived my friend: he thought it was

Everybody breathed again. The confession was torn up amid universal joy: and then the fool of a ticket

collector wanted to know about the ladywho must have travelled in a secondclass compartment with a

firstclass ticket. It looked as if a bad time were in store for her on her return to the station.

But the admirable representative of Cook was again equal to the occasion. He explained that my friend was

also a bit of a liar. When he said he had travelled with this lady he was merely boasting. He would like to

have travelled with her, that was all he meant, only his German was shaky. Joy once more entered upon the

scene. My friend's character appeared to be reestablished. He was not the abandoned wretch for whom they

had taken himonly, apparently, a wandering idiot. Such an one the German official could respect. At the

Not only the foreign man, woman and child, but the foreign dog is born good. In England, if you happen to

be the possessor of a dog, much of your time is taken up dragging him out of fights, quarrelling with the

possessor of the other dog as to which began it, explaining to irate elderly ladies that he did not kill the cat,

that the cat must have died of heart disease while running across the road, assuring disbelieving

gamekeepers that he is not your dog, that you have not the faintest notion whose dog he is. With the foreign

dog, life is a peaceful proceeding. When the foreign dog sees a row, tears spring to his eyes: he hastens on

and tries to find a policeman. When the foreign dog sees a cat in a hurry, he stands aside to allow her to pass.

They dress the foreign dogsome of themin a little coat, with a pocket for his handkerchief, and put

shoes on his feet. They have not given him a hatnot yet. When they do, he will contrive by some means or

One morning, in a Continental city, I came across a disturbanceit might be more correct to say the

disturbance came across me: it swept down upon me, enveloped me before I knew that I was in it. A

foxterrier it was, belonging to a very young ladyit was when the disturbance was to a certain extent over

that we discovered he belonged to this young lady. She arrived towards the end of the disturbance, very much

out of breath: she had been running for a mile, poor girl, and shouting most of the way. When she looked

round and saw all the things that had happened, and had had other things that she had missed explained to

her, she burst into tears. An English owner of that foxterrier would have given one look round and then have

jumped upon the nearest tram going anywhere. But, as I have said, the foreigner is born good. I left her

But it was about the dog I wished to speak more particularly. He had commenced innocently enough, trying

to catch a sparrow. Nothing delights a sparrow more than being chased by a dog. A dozen times he thought

he had the sparrow. Then another dog had got in his way. I don't know what they call this breed of dog, but

abroad it is popular: it has no tail and looks like a pigwhen things are going well with it. This particular

specimen, when I saw him, looked more like part of a doormat. The foxterrier had seized it by the scruff of

the neck and had rolled it over into the gutter just in front of a motor cycle. Its owner, a large lady, had darted

out to save it, and had collided with the motor cyclist. The large lady had been thrown some half a dozen

I have seen a good deal of trouble in my life, but never one yet that did not have an Italian imagevendor

somehow or other mixed up in it. Where these boys hide in times of peace is a mystery. The chance of being

upset brings them out as sunshine brings out flies. The motor cycle had dashed into a little milkcart and had

spread it out neatly in the middle of the tram lines. The tram traffic looked like being stopped for a quarter of

an hour; but the idea of every approaching tram driver appeared to be that if he rang his bell with sufficient

In an English town all this would not have attracted much attention. Somebody would have explained that a

dog was the original cause, and the whole series of events would have appeared ordinary and natural. Upon

these foreigners the fear descended that the Almighty, for some reason, was angry with them. A policeman

The delighted dog rushed backwards, barking furiously, and tried to throw up paving stones with its hind

legs. That frightened a nursemaid who was wheeling a perambulator, and then it was that I entered into the

proceedings. Seated on the edge of the pavement, with a perambulator on one side of me and a howling baby

Forgetful that I was in a foreign landthat he might not understand meI told it him in English, I told it

him at length, I told it very loud and clear. He stood a yard in front of me, listening to me with an expression

of ecstatic joy I have never before or since seen equalled on any face, human or canine. He drank it in as

"Where have I heard that song before?" he seemed to be saying to himself, "the old familiar language they

He approached nearer to me; there were almost tears in his eyes when I had finished.

"Say it again!" he seemed to be asking of me. "Oh! say it all over again, the dear old English oaths and curses

I learnt from the young lady that he was an Englishborn foxterrier. That explained everything. The foreign

dog does not do this sort of thing. The foreigner is born good: that is why we hate him.