Idle Ideas in 1905

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 mantel-piece; 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 neatly-written 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 Anglo-Saxons 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 long-lost child, returned at last.

“Well, you haven’t hurried yourself,” grumbled the old man, “and blarm me if now you haven’t forgotten the wood.”

I was lunching with an Englishman in a London restaurant one day.  A man entered and took his seat at a table near by.  Glancing round, and meeting my friend’s eyes, he smiled and nodded.

“Excuse me a minute,” said my friend, “I must just speak to my brother—haven’t seen him for over five years.”

He finished his soup and leisurely wiped his moustache before strolling across and shaking hands.  They talked for a while.  Then my friend returned to me.

“Never thought to see him again,” observed my friend, “he was one of the garrison of that place in Africa—what’s the name of it?—that the Mahdi attacked.  Only three of them escaped.  Always was a lucky beggar, Jim.”

“But wouldn’t you like to talk to him some more?” I suggested; “I can see you any time about this little business of ours.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he answered, “we have just fixed it up—shall be seeing him again to-morrow.”

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 countrymen excited no astonishment whatever.

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 water-bottle, 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, lurched against my hostess.

“Do please be careful,” said the lady.

“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 flooring his antagonist by a well-directed blow.

A policeman appeared upon the scene.  He did not attempt to interfere, but running out into the street communicated the glad tidings to another policeman.

“This is going to cost them a pretty penny,” observed my host, who was calmly continuing his supper; “why couldn’t they wait?”

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 good-night, and trooped out evidently in great good humour and the two gentlemen, with wet napkins round their heads, sat down again, and laughter and amicable conversation flowed freely as before.

They strike the stranger as a childlike people, but you are possessed with a haunting sense of ugly traits beneath.  The workers—slaves it would be almost more correct to call them—allow themselves to be exploited with the uncomplaining patience of intelligent animals.  Yet every educated Russian you talk to on the subject knows that revolution is coming.

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 room—a soft-eyed grey-haired 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 better to chat upon such matters when one is quite alone,” he laughed.

“But surely you can trust her,” I said, “She appears to be devoted to you all.”

“It is safer to trust no one,” he answered.  And then he continued from the point where we had been interrupted.

“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 suffer—suffer 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 to-day working for revolution in Russia number among their ranks statesmen, soldiers, delicately-nurtured 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 themselves.

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 the merrymakings, of the laughter of the children, of the kisses of the lovers.

But the last line of every verse is the same.  When you ask a Russian to translate it for you he shrugs his shoulders.

“Oh, it means,” he says, “that their time will also come—some day.”

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 heralding terror.

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 the pains and penalties for doing so frightened me considerably.

“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 stopping-place some enormous official, wearing generally a sword and a helmet, boarded the train.  At first these fellows terrified me.  I took them for field-marshals at least.

Visions of Siberia crossed my mind.  Anxious and trembling, I gave the first one a gold piece.  He shook me warmly by the hand—I 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 he—his lean face puckered up into a snarl—was returning them snappish answers; the whole scene suggested some half-starved mongrel being worried by school-boys.  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. Petersburg—some eighteen hours’ journey—in a wagon that in England would not be employed for the transport of oxen.

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 waiting-room, and pass out again, laughing.  The snarl had died from his face; a dull, listless indifference had taken its place—the 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 thinking.

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 sleigh-drivers round their charcoal fire, the field-workers going and coming in the grey dawn, the factory workers, their whispers deadened by the rattle of the looms.

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 the walls of every room.

“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 a precarious existence as a lodging-house keeper for the last ten years.

“You have married again?” I questioned her.

The woman smiled.

“Not again.  I was married eighteen years ago in Russia.  My husband was transported to Siberia a few days after we were married, and I have never seen him since.”

“I should have followed him,” she added, “only every year we thought he was going to be set free.”

“He is really free now?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered.  “They set him free last week.  He will join me in London.  We shall be able to finish our honeymoon.”

She smiled, revealing to me that once she had been a girl.

I read in the English papers of the exhibition in London.  It was said the artist showed much promise.  So possibly a career may at last be opening out for him.

Nature has made life hard to Russian rich and poor alike.  To the banks of the Neva, with its ague and influenza-bestowing 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 returned to his master in high good feather.

“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 marrow-chilling 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 Sahara.”

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 sleep, then wake and dig, then sleep again.

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, and a dozen funerals in Moscow is often the result.

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 intelligence—when these show above the groundwork—are 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 own amusement.

The world will be glad of Russia—when she has put her house in order.

Folks suffering from Jingoism, Spreadeagleism, Chauvinism—all such like isms, to whatever country they belong—would 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 bucked up again.

According to this argument, fishes should be the happiest of mortals, the sea consisting—at least, so says my atlas: I have not measured it myself—of a hundred and forty-four 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 naturalized Norwegian sardine, and is himself again.

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 feel cold.

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 out-of-date 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 Imperialistic notions.

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 Holland—in 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 docks—until he could get something better to do—at 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 and had left by the evening train.  It is not the country for the loafer.

In Holland work is easily found; this takes away the charm of looking for it.  A farm labourer in Holland lives in a brick-built 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 grandmother, hanging over the glittering chimney-piece.

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 fancy-dress 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 close-fitting 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 head-dress 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 slop-shop 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 post-card 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 pipes—the 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 silver—are not the creatures of an artist’s fancy.  You meet them in their thousands on holiday afternoons, walking gravely arm in arm, flirting with sober Dutch stolidity.

On colder days the women wear bright-coloured 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 toy-like world without, then dives back into shelter.  As for the children—women in miniature, the single difference in dress being the gay pinafore—you can only say of them that they look like Dutch dolls.  But such plump, contented, cheerful little dolls!  You remember the hollow-eyed, pale-faced 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 well-being 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.  Did the Dutch child by any chance ever fall into a canal?

“Yes,” he replied, “cases have been known.”

“Don’t you do anything for it?” I enquired.

“Oh, yes,” he answered, “we haul them out again.”

“But what I mean is,” I explained, “don’t you do anything to prevent their falling in—to save them from falling in again?”

“Yes,” he answered, “we spank ’em.”

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 wind-blown 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 labours.

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 spring-cleaning.  No milk-pail is considered fit that cannot just as well be used for a looking-glass.  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 red-tiled 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 woe-betide the Dutchman who would dream of crossing it in anything but his stockinged feet.

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 run in sabots I do not recommend to the beginner.

“How do you run in sabots?” I asked a Dutchman once.  I had been experimenting, and had hurt myself.

“We don’t run,” answered the Dutchman.

And observation has proved to me he was right.  The Dutch boy, when he runs, puts them for preference on his hands, and hits other Dutch boys over the head with them as he passes.

The roads in Holland, straight and level, and shaded all the way with trees, look, from the railway-carriage window, as if they would be good for cycling; but this is a delusion.  I crossed in the boat from Harwich once, with a well-known black and white artist, and an equally well-known 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 cobbles—big, round cobbles, over which your bicycle leaps and springs and plunges.

If you would see Holland outside the big towns a smattering of Dutch is necessary.  If you know German there is not much difficulty.  Dutch—I speak as an amateur—appears to be very bad German mis-pronounced.  Myself, I find my German goes well in Holland, even better than in Germany.  The Anglo-Saxon 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 get to it.  But they tell me it is not quite right, yet.

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 was years before he again ventured on tobacco.

Watching building operations in Holland brings home to you forcibly, what previously you have regarded as a meaningless formula—namely, 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 time—or is it twenty minutes behind?  I never can remember when I’m there, and I am not sure now.  The Dutchman himself never knows.

“You’ve plenty of time,” he says

“But the train goes at ten,” you say; “the station is a mile away, and it is now half-past nine.”

“Yes, but that means ten-twenty,” he answers, “you have nearly an hour.”

Five minutes later he taps you on the shoulder.

“My mistake, it’s twenty to ten.  I was thinking it was the other way about.”

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 and down and swear.

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 and worry him.

A mad friend of mine will have it that the characteristic of the age is Make-Believe.  He argues that all social intercourse is founded on make-believe.  A servant enters to say that Mr. and Mrs. Bore are in the drawing-room.

“Oh, damn!” says the man.

“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 looking-glass, waits till she feels she is sufficiently mistress of herself not to show her feelings, and then enters the drawing-room with outstretched hands and the look of one welcoming an angel’s visit.  She says how delighted she is to see the Bores—how 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 is not worth having where all the Bores are not.

The Bores, who had hoped that she was out—who 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 go and see dear Mrs. Bounder this afternoon, no matter what happens.’”

The idea conveyed is that the Prince of Wales, on calling at the Bores, was told that he could not come in.  He might call again in the evening or come some other day.

That afternoon the Bores were going to enjoy themselves in their own way; they were going to see Mrs. Bounder.

“And how is Mr. Bounder?” demands Mrs. Bore.

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 closed-to.  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 missed.

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 make-believe 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 at the thought that they really must go now.

Which would we rather do—stop and finish our cigar or hasten into the drawing-room 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 insist—We 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 lighten again with gladness.  We clamour for more.

Our host’s wine is always the most extraordinary we have ever tasted.  No, not another glass; we dare not—doctor’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 baby—we have seen it.  As a rule, to be candid, we never could detect much beauty in babies—have 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.  We plead for the stage—that it may not be deprived of such talent.

Every bride is beautiful.  Every bride looks charming in a simple costume of—for further particulars see local papers.  Every marriage is a cause for universal rejoicing.  With our wine-glass 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 ill-regulated young man at end of table, promptly suppressed.

We carry our make-believe 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 worms—that 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 make-believe 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 she has gone to a better world.

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 me—this 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 should be made a fuss about.

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, generous-souled 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 yawning, we were drinking in his eloquence, open-mouthed.

The higher one ascends in the social scale, the wider becomes this necessary base of make-believe.  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 grief-stricken 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 ill-fortune had rendered me more in tune with my fellow-countrymen.  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 forty-eight cigars.  Instead of which, he appeared quite pleased when he found them.  He demanded three-and-fourpence, 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 callous—or, 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 grief-stricken 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 self-control.  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 them—I noticed it in the hotel dining-room 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.  Literature is the art of make-believe.

“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 make-believe 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.

The theatrical manager bangs his drum.

“Walk up! walk up!” he cries, “we are going to pretend that Mrs. Johnson is a princess, and old man Johnson is going to pretend to be a pirate.  Walk up, walk up, and be in time!”

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 half-a-sovereign, to sit for two hours and listen to them.

But as I explained at the beginning, my friend is a mad sort of person.

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 over here, where now and then he could see her.

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 by-street of Dresden I calculated fourteen American mothers, possessing nine-and-twenty American children, and not a father among them—not 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 head-stones of best material, hand-carved, recording the virtues of those fourteen dead and buried husbands.

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 ham sandwich and the thing would begin to squeak.

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 Paris, Florence or Vienna, oblivion of the past.

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 widows—I knew them personally, all of them, I lived in the same street—what 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 company—I had done it—commencing 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 they were not thoroughly enjoying themselves.

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 upset at losing sixpence.

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 father—not an American father—in the whole street.  She did not burst into tears as they do in the story-books.  She said:

“He is quite well, thank you,” simply, pathetically, just like that.

“I am sure of it,” I replied with fervour, “well and happy as he deserves to be, and one day you will find him again; you will go to 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 one-horse 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 over-burdened 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 decided—no one else seeming keen—that I would supply that sympathetic ear.  The very next time I found myself alone with her I introduced the subject.

“You have been living here in Dresden a long time, have you not?” I asked.

“About five years,” she answered, “on and off.”

“And all alone,” I commented, with a sigh intended to invite to confidence.

“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.”

“But don’t you miss your husband?” I suggested.

A cloud passed over her usually sunny face.  “Oh, please don’t talk of him,” she said, “it makes me feel real sad, thinking about him.”

But having commenced, I was determined that my sympathy should not be left to waste.

“What did he die of?” I asked.

She gave me a look the pathos of which I shall never forget.

“Say, young man,” she cried, “are you trying to break it to me gently?  Because if so, I’d rather you told me straight out.  What did he die of?”

“Then isn’t he dead?” I asked, “I mean so far as you know.”

“Never heard a word about his being dead till you started the idea,” she retorted.  “So far as I know he’s alive and well.”

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.

“What’s a painful subject?”

“Why, your husband,” I replied.

“But why should you call him 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 somehow.

“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 fellow never lived.”

“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 opportunity of solving it.  Instinctively I clung to my advantage.

“There hasn’t been any divorce,” she said.  “There isn’t going to be any divorce.  You’ll make me cross in another minute.”

But I was becoming reckless.  “He is not dead.  You are not divorced from him.  Where is he?” I demanded with some heat.

“Where is he?” she replied, astonished.  “Where should he be?  At home, of course.”

I looked around the luxuriously-furnished room with its air of cosy comfort, of substantial restfulness.

“What home?” I asked.

“What home!  Why, our home, in Detroit.”

“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 the witness-box.

“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 eyes were fixed upon her.

“Enjoying myself.  He likes me to enjoy myself.  Besides, I am educating the children.”

“You mean they are here at boarding-school while you are gadding about.  What is wrong with American education?  When did you see your husband last?”

“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 time, and then, of course—

“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 herself.”

“I am not asking for your views on the American husband.  I am asking your views on the American wife—on yourself.  The American husband appears to be a sort of stained-glass 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, over-devotion, 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 over Europe.  It isn’t going to work, it isn’t right that it should work.”

“You take the advice of a sincere friend.  Pack up—you and the children—and 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 University—possibly 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 young, and the University professor, generally speaking, is middle-aged.

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, golden-haired 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 walk and amuse them; and mind nothing happens to them.”

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 public-house 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 six-year-old lady said she did not like the smell of it.  Not even after I had explained the game to them were they any the more enthusiastic for it.

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 set to work to scream.  I could be the doctor and look at their tongues.

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 world who could find recreation in such fooling saddened me.

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 for the Frenchwoman; he even thought her badly dressed.

“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 Juno-like 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 be able to enjoy a picture is of more advantage than to be able to buy it.

All that the University professor can urge in favour of idealism I am prepared to endorse.  But then I am—let us say, thirty-nine.  At fourteen my candid opinion was that he was talking “rot.”  I looked at the old gentleman himself—a narrow-chested, 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 long-winded, but, taking him as a whole, there was “go” in him.  There was another of them—Ovid 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 authors.

“Reading them!” he cried, “but you don’t know Greek or Latin.”

“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 me—I was only fourteen at the time, please remember—to be worth the time and trouble.

The boy is materially inclined—the 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 me.

Mourn over it, my dear professor, as you will—that is the ideal of youth; and, so long as human nature remains what it is, will continue to be so.  It is a materialistic ideal—a 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 game—that 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.