Idle Ideas in 1905

That we Englishmen attach too much importance to sport goes without saying—or, 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 over-indulgence in sport: the neglected business, the ruined home, the slow but sure sapping of the brain—what there may have been of it in the beginning—leading to semi-imbecility and yearly increasing obesity.

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 dinner-time he observed, with a far-away 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 all other considerations.

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

“Golf and the ministry don’t seem to go together,” his friend told him.  “Take my advice before it’s too late, and give it up, Tammas.”

A few months later Tammas met his friend again.

“You were right, Jamie,” cried the parson cheerily, “they didna run well in harness; golf and the meenistry, I hae followed your advice: I hae gi’en it oop.”

“Then what are ye doing with that sack of clubs?” inquired Jamie.

“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 life-long labour of his sport, and to it sacrifices mind and body.  The health resorts of Europe—to paraphrase a famous saying that nobody appears to have said—draw 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 high-jump representatives of their university—men 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 half-backs or forwards of extraordinary ability.  Ex-light-weight amateur pugilists, with the figure now of an American roll-top desk, butt you into a corner of the billiard-room, 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.  Broken-down tennis players, one-legged skaters, dropsical gentlemen-riders, 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 snow-clad mountain reminds them that once they were daring tobogannists; the undulating common makes them sad because they can no longer handle a golf-club; 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 cricket-match 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 another.

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 manœuvre 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.  Anybody can have the ball; he has had his game and is happy.

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 ball.

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 half-volleys.  But to the Frenchman, as yet, it is a game.  He plays it in a happy, merry fashion, that is shocking to English eyes.

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 shoe-lace.  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 Frenchman can do when he does take up a game.

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 club-house, 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’s—for preference other people’s—and run off with them round the courts, followed by whooping claimants.

In the course of half-an-hour or so, when everybody is dead beat, the game—the original game—is resumed.  You demand the score; your partner promptly says it is “forty-fifteen.”  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 “forty-fifteen.”  “Fifteen-forty” 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 heart-burning; nobody wins a set and nobody loses.  The one game generally suffices for the afternoon.

To the earnest player, it is also confusing to miss your partner occasionally—to 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 lower.

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 visitors—any 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 hour or so, would get mad and try to lose.  It was his only chance of dinner.

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 club-house 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 fermes—allotments, 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 beyond—separated by the almost invisible wire fencing—a 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 fencing—so 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-hardened hands might have levelled.

Was there any thought, I wonder, passing through their brains?  The young girl—she was a handsome creature in spite of her disfiguring garments.  The woman—it was a wonderfully fine face: clear, calm eyes, deep-set under a square broad brow.  The withered old scarecrow—ever sowing the seed in the spring of the fruit that others shall eat.

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 argument—that 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 to you may appear almost impertinent will be of distinct help to me.”

“I haven’t got a pencil,” she said; “what’s it all about?”

“It’s about babies,” I explained, and I lent her a pencil.

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 something else far more important to think about.

“What do you know about babies?” she demanded.

“If you will read the paper,” I replied, “you will see for yourself.  It’s all there.”

She flicked over the pages contemptuously.

“There doesn’t seem much of it?” she retorted.

“It is condensed,” I pointed out to her.

“I am glad it is short.  All right, I’ll read it,” she agreed.

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 re-entered the room.

“Well?” I said.

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

“There may be flashes of humour here and there—”

She did not wait for me to finish.

“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, there’s one thing very clear, and that is that you are not a mother.”

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 as in the case of my motherly friend.

“Oh, what do you know about it? you are not a bird.”

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 friends—in these northern climes of ours at all events—is 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 speak with the weight of experience.

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 balmy—when, 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 street—could 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 her—then housebuilding might be a pleasure.

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, pulled-to 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 me—nobody 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 his head out of the window just above me.

“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 hat-peg.  The old lady says they have built there regularly for the last three years.”

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 your mouth, you have been and shut the door and I can’t get in.”

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

“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 of talk.

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

“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 I’ve been doing.”

“Fine brick, isn’t it?  Where will you have it?”

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 quickly slipped it out and fixed it the other side of the door.

“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 argue with them.”

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 chatter-boxes 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, far-off 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 semi-detached.  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 again.”

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 nodded to me:

“Nice little house, ain’t it?  What I call well built.”

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 drawing-room.  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 one—had been born and bred in Regent Street, no doubt.

“There is not much justice in this world,” said I to myself; “but there’s going to be some introduced into this business—that is, if I can find a ladder.”

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 dust-pan, 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 cotton-wool in her mouth.  That was her idea of a colour scheme: apple-blossom pink and Reckitt’s blue side by side.  She dropped her wool and sat on the waterspout, and tried to understand things.

“Number one, number two, number four; where the blazes”—sparrows are essentially common, and the women are as bad as the men—“is number three?”

Mr. Sparrow came up from behind, over the roof.  He was carrying a piece of yellow-fluff, part of a lamp-shade, as far as I could judge.

“Move yourself,” he said, “what’s the sense of sitting there in the rain?”

“I went out just for a moment,” replied Mrs. Sparrow; “I could not have been gone, no, not a couple of minutes.  When I came back—”

“Oh, get indoors,” said Mr. Sparrow, “talk about it there.”

“It’s what I’m telling you,” continued Mrs. Sparrow, “if you would only listen.  There isn’t any door, there isn’t any house—”

“Isn’t any—” Mr. Sparrow, holding on to the rim of the spout, turned himself topsy-turvy and surveyed the street.  From where I was standing behind the laurel bushes I could see nothing but his back.

He stood up again, looking angry and flushed.

“What have you done with the house?  Can’t I turn my back a minute—”

“I ain’t done nothing with it.  As I keep on telling you, I had only just gone—”

“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.

“Not what I call a classy street,” commented Mrs. Sparrow.

“If it were not for that terrible tired feeling of mine,” said Mr. Sparrow, “blame if I wouldn’t build a house of my own.”

“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 a lady, but—well, any man who was a man would see things for himself.”

“Why did I every marry?” retorted Mr. Sparrow.

They flew away together, quarrelling.

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 sub-editor, according to the custom now in vogue, had provided me with a short synopsis of those first six chapters, so that without the trouble of reading them I knew what they were all about.

“The first instalment,” I learned, “introduces the reader to a brilliant and distinguished company, assembled in the drawing-room 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 white-haired lady of my acquaintance is never surprised at anything that happens.

“Something very much of the same kind occurred,” she will remember, “one winter when we were staying in Brighton.  Only on that occasion the man’s name, I think, was Robinson.”

We do not live new stories—nor 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 original—to those who have not heard “something very like it” once before.

“Much smart talk is indulged in,” so the sub-editor 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.

Be virtuous and you will be happy.

She jots down all the possible variations: Be virtuous and you will be unhappy.

“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 are virtuous.

“That’s good, I’ll try that one at to-morrow’s party.”

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 very rude that the wonder is who invited him.

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 troup, styling themselves “The Boneless Wonders of the Universe.”

The synopsis added that: “Ursula Bart, a charming and unsophisticated young American girl possessed of an elusive expression makes her first acquaintance with London society.”

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 half-a-dozen 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 woman—and woman’s ideal of herself for precisely the same period, one may be sure.

“Her chin!”  A less degree of variety was permissible in her chin.  It had to be at an angle suggestive of piquancy, and it had to contain at least the suspicion of a dimple.

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 ourselves—and our readers also, I am inclined to think—with 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 far-off 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, clean shaven or bearded.

“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 stupid.

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.  But to return to our synopsis.

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 delightful family.”

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 sub-editor 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 first-class cricketer; a first-class oar; that as a half-back he is incomparable; that he swims like Captain Webb; is in the first rank of tennis players; that his half-volley at ping-pong 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 sub-editor 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 and love a joke.

The third chapter is “taken up with the humours of a local cricket match.”

Thank you, Mr. Sub-editor.  I feel I owe you gratitude.

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 anything.

In chapter five Basil and Ursula meet again; this time at a picnic.  The sub-editor does not wish to repeat himself, otherwise he possibly would have summed up chapter five by saying it was “taken up with the humours of the usual picnic.”

In chapter six something happens:

“Basil, returning home in the twilight, comes across Ursula Bart, in a lonely point of the moor, talking earnestly to a rough-looking stranger.  His approach over the soft turf being unnoticed, he cannot help overhearing Ursula’s parting words to the forbidding-looking stranger: ‘I must see you again!  To-morrow night at half-past nine!  In the gateway of the ruined abbey!’  Who is he?  And why must Ursula see him again at such an hour, in such a spot?”

So here, at cost of reading twenty lines, I am landed, so to speak, at the beginning of the seventh chapter.  Why don’t I set to work to read it?  The sub-editor has spoiled me.

“You read it,” I want to say to him.  “Tell me to-morrow morning what it is all about.  Who was this bounder?  Why should Ursula want to see him again?  Why choose a draughty place?  Why half-past nine o’clock at night, which must have been an awkward time for both of them—likely 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 sub-editor is prepared in five minutes to tell him what it is all about!

Then there will come a day—I feel it—when the business-like 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 it again in sixteen hundred!”

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 spring—given 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 bee-line 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 him—felt 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 half-a-crown 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 us will work out at four and nine-pence.

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 talking plain business.

And what about book-rights?  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 Caine—if all I hear about them is true—will 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 you—never 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 was astonishing, even to myself.

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 hours—early 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 not hear it.

“Now,” said I to myself, “now for five minutes’ peace and quiet.”

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 drum—not 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 astonishment—for the first week—I learnt it was the Belgian Army, getting itself accustomed, one supposes, to the horrors of war.  It had the effect of making me a peace-at-any-price man.

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 ironmongery—grown 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 purposes—to fight for your country, or to fight for somebody else’s country, which is, generally speaking, more popular—the 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 many things my intellect is incapable of grasping.

In mediæval 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 force—individual 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, can—which 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 upon him and commenced to walk towards the Serpentine.

“Halt!” yelled the sergeant, the instant his amazed indignation permitted him to speak, which fortunately happened in time to save the detachment from a watery grave.

The squad halted.

“Who the thunder, and the blazes, and other things told you to do that?”

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.

At this moment “Columbus” barked again, and the explanation came to him.

“Please go away, sir,” he requested me.  “How can I exercise my men with that dog of yours interfering every five minutes?”

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 military tricks.

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 language, they should train their sergeants to use English.

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 for the inefficiency of the British Army should be laid at my door.

Some twenty years ago we, in London, were passing through a riotous period, and a call was made to law-abiding 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, pompous-looking 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.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” said the sergeant.

“Good morning,” we replied: and there was a pause.

The sergeant fidgetted upon his feet.  We waited.

“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 forward, number three, if you don’t mind, sir,” he suggested.

Number three, who was an important-looking gentleman, stepped forward.

The sergeant cast his critical eye along the front of the first line.

“A little further back, if you don’t mind, sir,” he suggested, addressing the third gentleman from the end.

“Can’t,” explained the third gentleman, “much as I can do to keep where I am.”

The sergeant cast his critical eye between the lines.

“Ah,” said the sergeant, “a little full-chested, some of us.  We will make the distance another foot, if you please, gentlemen.”

In pleasant manner, like to this, the drill proceeded.

“Now then, gentlemen, shall we try a little walk?  Quick march!  Thank you, gentlemen.  Sorry to trouble you, but it may be necessary to run—forward 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 line—it has a more imposing appearance, if you understand me.  The breathing comes with practice.”

If the thing must be done at all, why should it not be done in this way?  Why should not the sergeant address the new recruits politely:

“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 indeed—considering you are only novices.  But there is still something to be desired in your attitude, Private Bully-boy.  You will excuse my being personal, but are you knock-kneed 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 appear trivial, I know, but, after all, we may as well try and look our best—

“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 it come forward man.  Let’s see it.”

Having succeeded, with a few such kindly words, in getting his line into order, he would proceed to recommend healthy exercise.

“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 custom in this matter.

“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 clever.  But it is not war.

“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, once again.”

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 Pall Mall.

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 afterwards—when it is too late—they 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 guide-book, a thousand men dressed in blue and a thousand men dressed in red rushed together like quarrelsome fox-terriers, and worried each other to death.

But the field of Waterloo is little changed.  The guide, whose grandfather was present at the battle—quite an extraordinary number of grandfathers must have fought at Waterloo: there must have been whole regiments composed of grandfathers—can 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 while—which grown men of sense are beginning to doubt—to waste two years of a soldier’s training, teaching him the goose-step.  In the twentieth century, teaching soldiers the evolutions of the Thirty Years’ War is about as sensible as it would be loading our iron-clads 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 alley—I forget its name—which 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, right-about-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.

“Not that way,” he shouted: “up Fleet Street and through Middle Temple Lane.”

Then without further trouble the army of the future went upon its way.

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 impracticable.

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.  To-day one clamours for lobsters.  To-morrow 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 beef-steak 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 fields of life.

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 think—that 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 beneath these velveteen jackets and lace falls.

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 self-consciousness?  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 only the villain of the story ever deviates from the path of rectitude.

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 ill-temper, 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 well-behaved 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 country of reality.

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 dukes—one 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 rooted—elsewhere.  Is literature to flatter him, or reveal him to himself?

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 their entirety: a mole or a wart absorbs all its vision.

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 Anglo-Saxon 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 failing.

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 dinner-bell, when, with all apologies to good Mr. Smiles, it is useless to think of work.

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 day—how 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 worth—how 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 man—not a young man, with only dim half-opened eyes, but a man whom life had made keen to see the beauty that lies hidden beneath plain faces—were 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 world—in 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 a sly wink, as if to say “Cheer up; I am only round the corner.”