But this school was in the main healthy; perhaps its chief weakness was a too conscious health; it thought too much of muscle and chest expansion, and forgot that a man has a soul to be saved as well as a biceps to be flexed. But it is more reasonable to take pride in a strong arm than to glory in a weak lung, and the simplest of the Imperialists had the advantage over the most complex of the Decadents, in that a real sanity underlay their incidental extravagances. They might be too fond of one monotonous colour scheme of red, white, and blue, but it did stand for something recognisable. But the Decadents, finding satisfaction only in art tints, went on mixing and re-mixing the primary tints until they got to something very like mud-colour, and even to mud itself. These people stood for something which can perhaps be best described as a revolt without a standard, a rebellion without object or hope. They were in arms against everything that had happened, but had no idea whatever of what they wanted to happen. Indeed, they appeared to be pretty certain that nothing genuine could happen. They seemed to be really impressed by the accident that they were near the end of a century. Two French expressions occur with disheartening frequency in the periodicals of the time. One is chic and the other fin-de-siècle. Closely consorting with these invaders was the native (or rather American-English) adjective “smart,” usually used in conjunction with the substantive “set.” It was the whole duty of a “smart set” (literary or otherwise) to be chic, and true chic could only be attained by being fin-de-siècle. So all to whom fashion was of importance, since they could not help being Victorian and nineteenth-century, deliberately set about wearing the livery of the period inside out or upside down, deriding what they could not change. There was a curiously impotent restlessness among the intellectuals of the period, like that of people imprisoned in a waiting-room during a block on the railway, or in a country house on a wet Sunday. When people are tired of sitting still, and cannot summon resolution to go out for a walk, they are apt to depreciate the furniture and take it out of the cushions; and the Decadent movement was really an assault on Victorian console tables and antimacassars by men and women who had grown too soft in Victorian easy chairs.

Aubrey Beardsley was very typical of the Nineties in his unenjoying luxuriousness, his invalid indecorum, his trammelled originality, and his pert pessimism. He was in pictorial art much what Wilde was in literature, except that he possessed a certain conscience of the hand, so to speak, a pride and care for technical quality, which few considerable draughtsmen lack, while Wilde, though an artist also, lacked such fastidiousness, and was just as pleased with a cheap victory as with a dear one. Both he and Wilde were in revolt against convention, but each would have died rather than do anything naturally. Both were at war with the great Victorian commandment of decorum, but both respected slavishly the little law of a little clique. Both suggested the futility of all things, the one in the most precious prose, the other in the most austerely thought-out design. Both offended against all laws, human and divine, in order to be brilliant and exceptional, and both were under the thraldom of taboos with the force of the Decalogue and crotchets elevated to the dignity of a religion. Each was guilty of most extraordinarily bad taste, not a simple but a complex bad taste, reminiscent of the decaying Roman world; there was something barbaric in their over-sophistication, and something common in their over-refinement. They were much as a woman who turns up in a diamond tiara at a village penny reading, or a man who wears his orders at the dinner table of an intimate friend. Both had a curious delight in mere richness; that purring satisfaction of Wilde in a mere catalogue of precious stones—you will find it in The Picture of Dorian Grey—is paralleled again and again in the joy with which Beardsley elaborates gorgeous stuffs in his designs. And in the work of both is that rather indescribable thing I have spoken of as a revolt without a standard and without a hope. Neither knew quite where he expected to get; the main thing was to do something that shocked the orthodox. It was a feature common to many quite different people. The Socialists, for example, fought without making the smallest provision for a victory; they were content to make victory seem worthless to the party in possession. Mr. Shaw was most intent on showing that the system in being did not and could not work; he was far less interested in proving his own case. Conservatism was content with Liberal failure; it had no particular formula of its own. Novelists drank absinthe with perhaps a faint hope that they might write like Guy de Maupassant, but with a much stronger wish that they would be saved from writing like Sir Walter Besant.

Pessimism is always barren; a pessimism which needs continual conscious cultivation is merely ridiculous. Aubrey Beardsley was saved from being merely ridiculous by that conscience of the hand to which I have alluded. He might have been Mr. Shaw’s model for the character of Dubedat, the invalid artist of The Doctor’s Dilemma, who had every fault but treason to the truth of line and the “might of design.” Indeed, only a real passion for his art could have enabled him to compress so much achievement into so short a space of time. At the beginning of the Nineties he was unknown; the decade was little more than half completed when he died; yet in the interval he had become the most discussed artist in England, and had made for himself a place in English art which is still notable. He was gifted with a fatal precocity. Born and educated at Brighton, he lived during his earlier years the unwholesomely pampered existence of an infant phenomenon. It was, however, music and not draughtsmanship which brought him this early notice; such things as survive from his ’teens and earlier are in no way remarkable. It was not until he had been working for some time in an insurance office in London that certain drawings, done in his spare time, were put prominently before the world by the discrimination of a critic. In a moment the unknown youth became famous, and the short remainder of his life was a struggle to get through the commissions showered on him. He had so far had no sort of training; he now made some attempt to learn the grammar of his art, but his attendance at the chosen studio was extremely desultory, and he might almost be said to be entirely self-taught. He was a strange mixture of industry and slackness. Under the inspiration of an idea, he would shut himself up for days in his rooms, with the blinds drawn and the electric light on, working at designs in a sort of concentrated fury. Then for weeks he would idle or worse than idle, while the publishers raged over broken engagements. For he retained his passion for music; he liked society in which he could exercise a kind of hard wit which was his; he had a fancy for becoming a man of letters; and places where modish men and women were to be seen were frequented partly because he liked the surroundings for themselves, and partly because they gave him types and ideas.

Beardsley had one great talent apart from the mere mastery of line. Over-civilised himself, he was unequalled in suggesting the tragedy of over-civilisation, though quite possibly he did not feel it. He could portray with remorseless truth, though in a convention as strict as that of an old Chinese artist, certain types of modern men and women. He is the limner of the pinched soul, the pampered body, the craving without appetite, the animalism without animal health. At Brighton, even as a boy, he must have studied with close attention those types which are easily lost in a great city, but are isolated at the seaside as on a lighted stage, and, dominating nature as actors do their scenic properties, give the impression that large fortunes and small passions are the stuff life is made of. To Beardsley the greater light and the less only existed as astronomical facts of minor interest; his real element was the arc-light of the street or the shaded glow of the interior. There is a sense of joyless depravity about his men and women, as if vice were a routine, and even a solemn social ritual; and his illustrations of the “Morte d’Arthur” are made ridiculous by the perpetual recurrence of the haggard eyes and small, evil features of people Beardsley had studied in a Piccadilly restaurant or the Casino at Dieppe. Anachronism, so often the joy and life of literature, is no necessary fault in the decorative artist, and nobody need quarrel with Beardsley for taking liberties with the gowning of Isolde. But it was an anachronism without excuse to swap souls as well as dresses. The chief fault was with those who commissioned him to do work for which he was unfitted. An artist who really loved the domes and minarets of the Brighton Pavilion should have been manifestly out of the running for the illustration of the heroic.

Those who think of genius as a form of disease of course connect the radical unhealth which is the stamp of everything Beardsley did with the physical malady which claimed him as an early victim, forgetting that many men with much the same peculiarities have lived to a good old age with no trouble more serious than an occasional indigestion. If he were an invalid, Beardsley, like Stevenson and Henley, was a virile one, and it may be doubted whether the lines of his career were predestined for him by his phthisical disposition. His disease was very far advanced before it left any considerable mark on his work, and it might almost be said that up to the end he was making progress. A more reasonable explanation of the peculiar flavour of his work is to be found in the reaction of a highly individual mind to an intellectual fashion. The fashion came from France, and was the result of the defeat of 1870; it was born on the other side of the Channel of a quite explicable despair, but adopted on this side of the Channel only for wantonness. After the terrible year, the French could no longer pretend to one sort of primacy in Europe, but a primacy of some kind seems to be necessary to the life of France, and so the French intellectuals pretended to a primacy in decay. The arguments, unconsciously worked out, seemed to run something like this: “We, the French, are the most civilised race of mankind. We have been beaten by healthy barbarians. We are doomed to be beaten again, some time or other, by the same healthy barbarians. Health is the quality of barbarism. Let us, therefore, make a boast of our unhealth, and if it does not exist let us make a false pretence of it. The tricolour is lowered. Let us raise the yellow flag of the lazar-house.” The yellow flag was accordingly unfurled, and the Yellow Book was the answering signal in England. Most that was unwholesome in England in the Nineties was French in origin, and most that was unwholesome in France sprang from a poisoned wound then only twenty years old. Beardsley was Beardsley chiefly because Bismarck was Bismarck.

Fate denied Beardsley any chance of outgrowing what may possibly have been after all only the mood of youthful cynicism. His health broke down definitely in the spring of 1896, and the next two years were a mournful, hopeless, and rather lonely struggle against increasing weakness. He took refuge for the winter at Bournemouth, where he lived in a house called “Muriel,” of which he wrote to a friend: “I feel as shy of my address as a boy at school is of his Christian name when it is Ebenezer or Aubrey.” A few months later his troubled spirit sought repose in the Roman Catholic Church; he made his first confession in March, 1897. Commenting somewhat earlier on a priest who was also a painter, he had remarked: “What a stumbling-block such pious men must find in the practice of their art”; now he observed of Pascal that “he understood that to become a Christian the man of letters must sacrifice his gifts, just as Mary Magdalene must sacrifice her beauty.” “The most important step of my life,” he said of his conversion. “I feel now like someone who has been standing waiting on the doorstep of a house upon a cold day and who cannot make up his mind to knock for a long while. At last the door is thrown open, and all the warmth of kind hospitality makes glad the frozen traveller.”

An improvement in his health enabled him to go abroad during the summer. But the approach of autumn gave him warning that hopes were illusory; at Mentone he was too ill to touch paper, and he died in the early spring of 1898. Six years had comprised the span of his artistic life, and two of them had been spent in continuous illness.

CHAPTER XX
LORD COURTNEY OF PENWITH

When any man declaims “Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum,” it is not easy to avoid the suspicion that (whatever his passion for principle) he is pretty sure that the heavens will not fall. If the heavens did fall he would forget all about the fine “quillets of the law.” Any woman, according to Beckie Sharp, can be good on a sufficient income; and with men, also, the love of principle thrives best in comfortable surroundings. The true test of honesty is not whether a man will resign an Under-Secretaryship rather than give his vote for a measure he disapproves: he may be rather tired of being an Under-Secretary. The true test is whether he will pay a bill when he has to go without a week’s dinners to do it. There are no doubt men who pass that test; they should be honoured, though by the nature of things they seldom are: it is not that kind of principle which wins fame or money. The kind of sacrifice to principle which wins reverence is that which is often really not much sacrifice at all. We applaud a man for being specially and splendidly honest when the fact is only that he can afford to be unusually stubborn.

Lord Courtney of Penwith is an example of inflexible principle in politics. In these days we are apt to think of him as representing a rare type. But it is in fact a quite common type in certain conditions; that it is not commoner to-day may be explained not by any general deterioration of human nature, but by the excessive seriousness of the times. When we condemn an age as immoral we should often be more just to call it unfortunate. There is no reason, for example, to believe that the general character of upper-class Englishmen in 1665 was really baser than that of upper-class Englishmen in 1635. But in the singularly peaceful and prosperous atmosphere of the early years of Charles I people were able to indulge their consciences to the point of faddism; the time was one of what we should call cranks—Calvinistic cranks, ritualistic cranks, anti-Shipmoney cranks, Filmerite cranks—all so stiff with principle that they rejected the very notion of compromise on matters essentially capable of accommodation. On the other hand, after painful experience of what principle carried to extremes may mean, the men of 1665 erred in the opposite direction of believing all principle to be a mistake: a generation of opportunists succeeded that of purists. In the same way the long Victorian peace produced a race of public men who, like John Bright, made of principle an idol, and were constantly dodging in and out of office, like the figures in an old-fashioned weather-glass, according as their love of influence or their dislike of certain things happened to be uppermost. They gained a great fame as specially honest men; and they are constantly quoted against their successors, as Pitt was quoted against Walpole. But Lord Rosebery was right in thinking of Pitt as a luxury only to be afforded once in a way, and we could ill bear the expense of many Brights. The moral splendour of him is no doubt a national asset, but it had to be paid for; his fame as the man of conscience was achieved at some cost to the community; many a question bequeathed to us from that time might have been settled had he and some others denied themselves one of their two great luxuries—the enjoyment of being powerful and the enjoyment of feeling sinless. When we compare the robust honesty of some great Victorians with the supple temper of present-day politicians, we should be just to our own people. We should remember that the heavens appeared to be quite a fixture in Victoria’s time, while latterly they have really looked like tumbling about our ears.

Should an intellectual conviction be always regarded as a moral imperative? If we think a thing is wrong in the sense of being politically inexpedient, should we risk the existence of all sorts of other things, which we think right, in order to save ourselves from the stigma of inconsistency or lack of principle? On the answer depends largely our judgment of men like Lord Courtney. To a certain class of mind he represented, almost more than any man after the death of Bright, the unspoiled hero in politics. To me he is not a hero. I have tried extremely hard to think of him as one, and indeed he was not deficient in something closely resembling heroism. After he had made himself modestly comfortable in life, he scorned worldly advantage if it could only be gained at the cost of conscience. He might have been all sorts of things with a little more compliance, a little less loyalty to his tyrannical inward monitor. On all questions he took his own view, and if that view led him into the wilderness, into the wilderness he went, sturdy and uncomplaining. His abilities entitled him to look forward to the very highest positions in the State. The Chancellorship of the Exchequer was easily within his reach, and he might even have become, in due course, Prime Minister. Instead, he filled one or two minor places in a Liberal Administration, was for a few years Chairman of Committees of the House of Commons, failed to get elected Speaker, and finally accepted that coronet which is for larger men something like the link-extinguisher still seen on old London houses—it marks the end of the journey. The career, relatively to the man, was a failure. Of course, it was in some sense a failure far more honourable than many glittering successes, for Courtney failed because he would not succeed by embracing the philosophy expressed in the lines:

But the question of proportion always arises, even in questions of morals. One honours a man who yields his own life rather than consent to be a liar in the real sense of being a betrayer. But one does not honour a man who sacrifices, not merely himself, but others, because he will not sully his lips with a very innocent fib. The Early Christian who went to the lions rather than deny his faith was admirable. The Early Christian who sent a comrade to the lions because he would not say “Not at home” to the Prætorian centurion was less admirable. So, before we are quite lost in admiration over Lord Courtney’s renunciation, it is just as well to recall what was the cause of it. It was his enthusiasm for Proportional Representation, which politicians generally shorten into “P.R.” because the name is as difficult of pronunciation as the thing itself is of popular comprehension. In 1884 Mr. Gladstone brought in a Redistribution Bill; Mr. Courtney wanted it to be accompanied or preceded by a measure embodying the “true principle of representation,” of which his appreciation was even then “more than thirty years old.” So while Mr. Gladstone went his own course, Mr. Courtney would not go with him; and the two parted with mutual compliments; those on Courtney’s side contrast rather piquantly, in their almost exaggerated respect, with his downright statement a few years later that Mr. Gladstone was a “superannuated old goose.”

Now consistency is certainly important; proportional representation is no doubt important too. But the consistency of Leonard Courtney rather recalls the virtue as developed in Dr. Sangrado, who believed in bleeding and hot water as a cure for everything, and in that belief “made more widows and orphans than the siege of Troy.” It will be remembered that Gil Blas once roused a certain doubt in his master by advising him to try chemical preparations, if only for curiosity. “But,” said the doctor, “I have published a book, in which I have extolled the use of frequent bleeding and aquæous draughts; and wouldst thou have me go and decry my own work?” “You are certainly in the right,” rejoined the accommodating Gil Blas, “you must not give your enemies such a triumph over you; they would say you are at last disabused, and therefore ruin your reputation; perish rather the nobility, clergy, and people, and let us continue in our old path.” There was always something of this self-indulgent recklessness of consequence in the conscientiousness of Leonard Courtney and the school of which he was almost the latest important representative. “Let my name be blighted, provided France be free,” cried Danton. “Reputation—O what is the reputation of this man or of that?” That is the point of view of the hero-blackguard whom great emergencies so often call forth. “Let what will happen, so no man can call me untrue to my principles,” is another point of view, that of the man who cannot be quite fully a hero because he is constitutionally incapable of being the least bit of a blackguard. Thin partitions divide heroism and blackguardism; all space lies between them and the great kingdom of the smug. The best of the smug can rise to very considerable heights, but their fastidiousness prevents them achieving the splendour of perfect selflessness; they might be content with the locusts and wild honey of desert exile, but they could not do without a toothbrush. Lord Courtney was not afraid of the desert. He could live without popularity and often went out of his way to flout the herd. He never feared the consequences of being right. But a greater man would have been less timorous of the consequences of being occasionally a little wrong. He would, over a dozen questions—this business of the franchise, for example, Ireland, South Africa, and the Great War—have struck a balance between opposing considerations, and in no case would he have cast into either scale the thought of his own reputation. He would not thus have been false to himself. But he would have been truer to greater interests than himself.

It may perhaps be said that the real hero of Courtney’s life was not himself, but his father. At least it is true that to his father he owed the possibility of exhibiting on a considerable stage those qualities which might otherwise have made him only a rather crotchety clerk or the more cavilling kind of accountant. Without the paternal self-sacrifice Courtney, if still inclined to public life, might no doubt have become a village Hampden, a parochial “character,” and a terrible thorn in the side of some Board of Guardians. But he certainly would not have arrived by the broad road of the University to distinction in the greater life of the nation. To many by far the most interesting part of Mr. Gooch’s admirable Life will be the pages which deal with the West-country home of the Fifties, from which young Courtney emerged to fight his way in the world. His father was manager of Bolitho’s Bank at Penzance: a quiet, reserved, intellectual, and rather depressed man, weighed down with responsibility both in his office and his home; one of those poorer middle-class fathers to whose devotion and vicarious ambition the nineteenth century owed so many of its most remarkable minds. Both he and Mrs. Courtney were Puritans, and their views united with their circumstances to make the home one of Spartan discipline and simplicity. But, if the father did not indulge his children, he literally lived for their futures, and pinched himself woefully to secure them a footing on the main staircase of life. When he left school young Courtney entered the bank. The prospects in the service of the Bolithos were not alluring, and partly with some vague idea of “getting on,” partly through a real hunger for the things of the mind, he read in his spare time, with a system unusual in youth. Thus equipped, in 1851 he won a sizarship at St. John’s, Cambridge, and as a result he was awarded in the course of four years Exhibitions amounting in the aggregate to about £170. He might, of course, just as well have had one shilling if his father had not come to his help; it was the defect then, as now, of our higher educational system that it gave no chance to the really poor. To find the sinews of war the elder Courtney had to borrow from the bank, and there is a singular pathos in the letters of the father, anxious that his son should have his full chance, but worried over the cost of the experiment of converting an obviously efficient young clerk into something incalculable and possibly not at all satisfactory. The father is “a little surprised” at the first bill, but wishes his son not to be “oppressed by the fear” that he is running his father too hard; “go on with your studies as coolly and quietly as possible, expend what is needed, and let me find the means of keeping up the race.” But he cannot help thinking that the strain is cruel. “Let no one,” he adds, “laugh you into an expense which a few minutes’ consideration may point out as unnecessary. Do not be ashamed of saying you are poor. If any man wishes to bear you down with his riches and expenditure, let him alone, or crush him down by intellect. Go on with a quiet, calm dignity, and in a short time no one will ask you whether your allowance be £50 or £500 per annum.”

When Courtney got the Second Wranglership his admirable parent did not “feel that elation some may imagine”; all this, he pointed out, was not the conclusion but the beginning of a career. “It seems,” he remarked, “you must go on very parsimoniously for the next twelve months, but do not on any account go in debt. I would rather screw up tighter at home”—where things were terribly tight already. Young Courtney was rapidly justifying himself. But even when there came a Fellowship of £160 a year the poor bank-manager refused to rejoice utterly. “Your mother often observes whatever your gains they seem to be always swallowed up.... Consider the position of the family if anything should happen to me. I do not mean to be a miserly niggard, but do not consider a thing necessary because someone richer than yourself has it. The great curse of the times is the desire of cutting a dash, being in appearance something you are not in reality.... I have written this because I find myself unable to do what I could formerly accomplish with little difficulty.”

It is the old story of the brilliant performer in the field and the humble munition-maker at home; behind every shining success lies years, and perhaps generations, of obscure effort; and the feet of the mighty tread now on dead men’s bones and now on the bodies of the living. The greatest sacrifices incidental to Courtney’s career were after all not his own.

The scholastic career did not attract, and Courtney decided for London and the Bar. How a man of his character, with a rigidity so often displayed in excess, conceived of law as his appropriate element is something of a mystery. Probably at this time his chief idea was still “getting on”; but the choice of the profession in which of all others a man has to be supple and accommodating is nevertheless singular in a person of Courtney’s moral and mental make-up. Nor is it easy to understand how Courtney, in after years so inflexible, could get on well with The Times under Delane, who “expected writers to reflect with fair closeness his spirit”—a spirit which was certainly in most respects as far removed from that of the mature Courtney as anything could well be. Yet Courtney did get on with The Times and Delane exceedingly well. He was, indeed, found impossible and “hopelessly wrong” in his attitude towards the Germans in 1870; he opposed the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, while Delane was wholly for Germany and væ victis; but on the whole he seems to have accomplished with fair closeness the “reflection” of Delane’s views, and was even anticipated as that great editor’s successor.

The one hopeless “wrongness” which stands out in Courtney’s journalistic record was not only honourable to himself, but prophetically characteristic. He represented at once the least and the most amiable sides of the old Liberal philosophy. His faith in individualism was not only hard and narrow; it sometimes positively verged on the barbarous. He talked, indeed, much excellent sense concerning Socialism and “social reform,” about the need of individual sobriety, prudence, and industry, and the folly of expecting any one political device to supply their place. But his satisfaction with the free operation of competition, his impatience with any attempt to temper it, were marvellous. “I am not for helping the weak,” he said once; “I wish to remove impediments, to help those who are helping themselves.” He never seems to have reflected that his own success simply depended on the principle of “helping the weak,” and that it was an object for which public means might have sufficed just as well as the cruel impoverishment of the self-sacrificing father who pinched and tormented himself to give an industrious and intelligent boy what every industrious and intelligent boy, of any class or condition, should receive as a right. In this, as in other things, he was in his later years the most prophetic and alert representative of the “Benthamee” philosophy against which Carlyle raved. But there was a noble side to this rather arid faith, and Courtney was on that side, as on the other, its complete exponent. He could not see, or would not see, that complete liberty to the strong, the removal of all “impediments” in the way of those who “help themselves,” means in practice the depression and enslavement of the weak. But when the weak had ceased even to be nominally free, when they wore a brass collar like Gurth’s, instead of an invisible collar (though stronger and more throttling), wrought in the factories of Circumstance, his voice was raised with an old-prophetic fervour in their defence. To him the oppressed nation’s cause was as sacred as that of the obviously oppressed individual’s. It is true that his vision was somewhat partial and occasionally faulty. He had the prejudice of a Protestant in most Irish matters. He undoubtedly misinterpreted the spirit of the South African oligarchy, just as he misunderstood the spirit of the German nation when he urged as early as 1915 the possibility of an honourable and stable accommodation. But, however mistaken, he was always in these greater matters animated by a very noble spirit—the spirit which, in spite of its many limitations, lent a moral dignity to the old Liberalism. It is no doubt unfortunate that that spirit may be so easily confused with another, that the generous tolerance of other national aims may be construed as indifference to one’s own country’s welfare, and that the attitude of universal benevolence can so often seem to consist with a practical repudiation of the obligation of the patriot. But, if Lord Courtney incurred the reproach of loving every nation but his own, the fault was simply with his manner. At heart he had nothing in common with any of those anti-patriots who used his great name and fame.

Yet, with the widest charity, it cannot be said that his latest appearances in public were happy. And if on specific occasions he was far from helpful, in general his helpfulness was diminished by an exaggerated sense of the respect due to his own convictions. “My opinion, right or wrong,” may be not less pernicious an attitude than “My country, right or wrong,” and there were times when Lord Courtney’s passion for principle was scarcely distinguishable from mere obstinacy. He would have left a higher fame had it been his lot, as it was Bright’s, to live wholly through a period of comparative calm. But in the years when a kind of moral arthritis had stiffened joints never very supple, he came against really big things undreamed of in his political philosophy, and there was something at once grotesque and tragic in his application to them of a formula equally inappropriate and inadequate. It was even a misfortune for the moral ideals that he held aloft that they were sustained by one whose mode of thought was obviously no less antique than the Pickwickian blue coat with brass buttons and the canary-coloured waistcoat which proclaimed him the man of a past time.

CHAPTER XXI
THOMAS HARDY

It is no exaggeration to say that for many people the publication of Tess of the D’Urbervilles was the most important event of the Nineties.

For nearly twenty years the name of Thomas Hardy had been associated with a constantly ascending literary reputation. Under the Greenwood Tree, emerging modestly in 1872, was practically unnoticed despite its merits, and the bulk of a small edition found its way to that graveyard of authors’ hopes, the threepenny tray of the second-hand bookshop. But there it chanced to meet the eye of Frederick Greenwood. Naturally attracted by its name, he bought the book, at once recognised its great merit, sought out the author, and gave him opportunities of serial publication which he would otherwise have lacked. Thus favoured, Thomas Hardy produced during the Seventies and Eighties a great mass of consistently high work. But it was not till 1891 that he won full recognition from the greater public.

There are two tests which a work of the imagination must pass before it can be called successful in the highest and best sense. It must satisfy the critical. It must appeal to the uncritical. The thing which the connoisseur alone can appreciate is often fine art; it is seldom truly great art. The thing which may momentarily capture the crowd may be pure rubbish; it is only just to say that most of the crowd are well enough aware that it is nothing more; having an appetite for anything readable they accept it on the countryman’s principle that some beer is better than other beer, but that there is no bad beer. But when the connoisseur can find no great flaw, and the crowd feels a compelling charm, we are most surely in the region of the greatest. Sometimes, as in the case of the Bible, of Gulliver, and of Hamlet, the crowd and the critics make their discoveries simultaneously; sometimes, as in the case of Pilgrim’s Progress, a book is prized by blacksmiths and cowmen long before its genius is recognised by the refined. Tess of the D’Urbervilles was an instance in the former kind. All but a few critics at once declared that it was the best achievement so far of a very fine writer; the crowd agreed (and signified the same in the usual manner) that it was a very capital story, only spoiled (from their point of view) by the extreme dismalness of its philosophy.

One of the main facts concerning Thomas Hardy is that he began life as an architect. The first work from his pen was a prize essay on “Coloured Brick and Terra Cotta Architecture,” written while he was still studying in London under Sir Arthur Blomfield. This was in 1863, when Hardy was only twenty-three years old; it was not until 1871 that he published his first novel, the very curious and interesting Desperate Remedies, and only in 1874 did he consider his prospects as a writer sufficient to justify final choice in favour of the literary calling. He had written much during his life in London, but chiefly verse. The fact, together with that of his professional training, is significant. Mr. Hardy has remained, I think, first an architect and next a poet; in all his work the first quality is power of design, and the second form and discipline in expression. His great contours are as true as the sweep of a line of classic pillars; his details have the finish of Greek statuary. In most “collected works” the one thing evident is a lack of unity, not only of manner but of essence. But in the Wessex novels the most casual reader is struck with the continuity of the inspiration. There is, of course, a change from the vernal freshness of Under the Greenwood Tree to the autumnal gloom of the pure tragedies, but the change is like that of the natural seasons; we have only different aspects of the same climatic scheme. There is an increasing sense of mastery over material as the pen grows in dexterity, but the material is chosen and disposed on principles as clearly indicated in the first of the series as in the last. It is as if Mr. Hardy had conceived his literary life much as Haussman conceived a great Paris thoroughfare, as if he had seen before him in the early Seventies a long avenue of lofty and level achievement, rising to a lordly eminence fit to display the masterpieces of his maturity. It is hard to think of another example in English of consistency so complete; in fact, it is hard to think of Hardy as of the true fellowship of English writers, though his themes are so emphatically of the English soil. He is, at bottom, more an old Greek than a modern Briton.

We have here the architect. In the finish of the details we have the poet. Those who think of the Muse as a dishevelled harridan may dispute. But those who regard the poet as bound, like any other kind of artist, to observe the conventions attaching to his medium will agree that the discipline gained in versification is observable in all Hardy’s prose. It is not that he makes ostentatious chase of the “right word.” Any word which will serve his purpose well enough he uses, just as the bricklayer does not discard a brick which happens to be a millimetre or so out of the true; such finicky fastidiousness he rightly feels is for the amateur, and not for the craftsman. But the word, like the brick, must be right enough, and there must be no question as to the way it is built into the sentence, or the way the sentence is built into the page, or the page into the chapter, or the chapter into the book. That great critic, Mr. Curdle, spoke of a “universal dove-tailedness” as the mark of the artist. I can think of no more fitting description of the perfection of Mr. Hardy’s literary joinery.

A word may be said of the material. Mr. Hardy was born near Dorchester, where he still lives, and has lived ever since he forsook London in yet early life. Anyone who called on him would find a man of very ordinary appearance in a very ordinary house. I remember one young London journalist who, greatly daring, did so call on him round about his seventieth birthday in order to discuss (with a view to subsequent publication) how it feels to be seventy and a classic. Hardy—whom Mr. H. G. Wells described as a “grey little man”—received this adventurer with a mechanical courtesy, veiling inflexible disapproval. No man can be more amiable, in conversation or correspondence, to those who have some sort of right, as Wessex compatriots or fellows of the craft, to claim his attention. But none can be more drily discouraging to impertinence. On this occasion the dry mood naturally prevailed. The visitor explained that he wanted a “story.” The author pointed to the landscape from the window, intimated that it had already afforded plenty of material for one writer, and that its capacities were still unexhausted and perhaps inexhaustible. But, when the visitor explained that he had not come down from London to write about scenery, Mr. Hardy not merely declined to be “interviewed,” he even showed (or simulated) an incapacity to understand what “interviewing” was, or how any human being could be possibly interested in the private affairs of a mere writer of books. There are, indeed, few lions so determinedly unleonine. But, in his capacity of a citizen, Mr. Hardy is by no means unsocial. Party-going has never appealed to him. But he has a quiet gift of friendship, and some sense of public obligation. He used to occupy a fairly regular seat on the county Bench, and has written pleasantly of his experiences as a Justice Silence. He has taken much interest in local performances of his own novels in dramatised form. He is a great lover of the local museum. Most, indeed, that concerns his fellow-townsmen is not altogether alien to him. He could not have written so well about Wessex if he had not been a great artist in words. But neither could he have written so well had he not been, most intensely, a Wessex man. Dorset is still, in the main, one of the least changed of English counties, and the glittering modernities of some of its seaside places only give ironic emphasis to that sense one gets of the Roman pavement on which all the later civilisations rest. It is this sense that pervades all the Wessex novels. Mr. Kipling stands for the idea of horizontal extension; we learn from him how wide a place is the world, and how tiny a place our own particular spot in the world. Mr. Hardy stands for the idea of vertical extension; he shows us that on a half-acre plot we can reach the centre of everything, provided we go deep enough. Tess is only a village girl, but the forces that made her, and will presently rend her, are older than those bones which are still dug up, in company with coins of Claudius or Hadrian, just beneath the turf of a Wessex field. The Dundee marmalade pot which she dedicates to the poor little heathen child which the curate would not bury in consecrated ground is one with the tear jugs in the Dorchester Museum. The coarse seducer is related to the Norman ancestors of Tess, who, rollicking home from a fray, dealt hard measure to some rural damsel of their day; the shame-bought parasol is brought into congruity not only with the Bournemouth esplanade but with the relics of human sacrifice which for unknown ages have caught the first beams of the sun on Salisbury Plain. There is nothing of archæological priggishness in Mr. Hardy; but there is a deep sense of the unity of past and present, and if his novels are not crowded with living beings they hold a teeming population of ghosts. It is the speciality of a man living in a cemetery. Durdles, with his intimacy with the “old ’uns,” might have written thus if he had enjoyed a literary gift.

I believe it was Mr. Gardiner who, quoting some genius for summary classification, divided writers into “dismal coves” and “cheerful blokes.” Mr. Hardy has in certain moods a sense of the lights as well as the shadows of life: some of his earlier novels have the freshness and the open-air pleasantness of a good Morland, and, though I can never feel at home with his higher-class people, he can be fairly humorous in reproducing the talk of the poor. But in general he is not a cheerful bloke. Others have made themselves ridiculous in their resolve to secure a happy ending at all costs. Mr. Hardy is never ridiculous; he has the undeviating dignity of an undertaker’s man. But if he ever arrives at the point where a less consummate master would infallibly be ridiculous, it is always in his determination to wring our bosoms like so much washing when he might well have let us off with a slighter pang. It may, for example, have been necessary to kill poor Tess: she is marked for slaughter in the first chapter. But it was not necessary to make such dreadful sport with her. The author accuses the Immortals. But the Immortals never wrought this infamy; they might have killed her, but with a certain sense of what was due to her dignity. It was Mr. Hardy who treated her with as little respect as a gamekeeper does a stoat.

Mr. Chesterton, with the severity of the optimist, has dealt sternly with Mr. Hardy the pessimist. While George Meredith sought the lonely but healthy hills, Mr. Hardy “went botanising in the swamp”; and it was a thousand pities that the man with the healthy and manly view of life had the crabbed and perverse style, while the man with the crabbed and perverse view of life had the healthy and manly style. For Mr. Hardy, according to Mr. Chesterton, expresses in perfect English the meditations of “the village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot.” This would seem a little sweeping. Yet most readers must sometimes have been conscious of a doubt of the perfect wholesomeness of the limpid stream Mr. Hardy offers for their refreshment; its clear sparkle is reminiscent of those springs which (the scientists tell us) abound in carbonic acid gas, and (the old inhabitants hint) come from suspiciously near the place of dead men’s bones.

It is good that we should all be reminded, especially those of us who live on little islands of comfort and complacency, of the sea of misery in which so many swim desperately and ultimately founder. But is it good that we should be told, in very beautiful English, that the victims of such misery are simply the sport of the Immortals, that man struggles for ever helplessly in the grip of Fate, that this helpless struggle has been going on for all time, and that it will go on for all further time? Dickens, the unrepentant optimist, was like a jolly man in a tap-room who leads the chorus of roysterers, insists that milk-punch is the jolliest thing imaginable, snaps his finger at last week’s dun and to-morrow’s headache, and intimates that it would be folly (and even sin) to go home till morning—at any rate until justice has been done to the bitter ale and broiled bones which the thoughtful landlord has in view for the small hours. But half-way through the revel this jolly person, going outside for a moment, comes across a starving waif. He returns at once to his boon companions, makes their hearts bleed with his pathos (which is none the less roughly effective because it is a little tinged with the milk-punch), organises a “whip-round” of a few shillings each, and so does really simplify the problem of that individual waif. True, only a very insignificant impression has been made on the mass of unseen misery. But the one item of visible misery has been relieved, and (perhaps more important) a disposition has been created on a number of not unpleasant people to recognise and relieve misery when they see it.

But Mr. Hardy, the pessimist, his beautiful style never vulgarised and his fine intellect never flustered by milk-punch, has no such effect. He deftly exhibits his samples of hell, intimates that there is a quite unlimited stock fully up to specification, and rather hopes that he will be able to show you something even more striking by the opening of the spring season. Tess is not bad. But “Jude the Obscure” has also his points; in fact, the wholesale house for which we travel is not to be surpassed for variety and quality of misery. Somebody accused Carlyle (I think) of bringing a load of woe to one’s doorstep and leaving it there. Mr. Hardy does not exactly leave it. He is far more thoughtful than that. He rings the bell, explains with perfect charm and lucidity every item in the pack of trouble, and carefully explains to the householder that, however mean he may feel, it is no good his trying to do anything. That highly human (and not undesirable) instinct of Mr. Snagsby to try on all occasions what a half-crown will do is frozen by a sense not only of helplessness but almost of impiety. Is not one even a presumptuous worm to think of opposing a miserable thirty pence to the implacable operation of Circumstance?

Mr. Hardy’s depression steadily grows as he gets older. There is, it is true, much bitterness in his more youthful poems. But it is the sort of bitterness that goes with clever youth. A somewhat more buoyant note distinguishes the work of his early manhood; but with middle age the shadows deepen, and a deep and almost unrelieved sadness broods over all. It would be untrue to say that Mr. Hardy has no humour; is there no humour in that question of the rustic, in defending the ways of Providence, “D’ye think the man’s a fool?” But it is scarcely untrue to say that Mr. Hardy’s humour is commonly as depressing as his gloom; it has much the same mournful effect as those infrequent flashes of the comic spirit which emphasise the determined dismalness of Mr. Galsworthy. Mr. Hardy’s humour has nothing sunny in it; it is rather like the arc-light which, on a frosty night, makes us see the cold as well as feel it. One can hardly recall another great English novelist who has no hearty, genial, enjoying laugh in him. But one can find many foreign counterparts to Mr. Hardy, ancient and modern; if he seems colder than they, it is only a question of climate. It is often chilly round the Mediterranean, but one can do without a fire; in England one wants, if not the grateful open blaze, at least some efficient system of central heating. Reading much Hardy has the effect of sitting in a beautifully furnished room on a February day without a fire; but the simile is not quite exact—there should be all the elements of the fire, except the heat.

Possibly it is in the very gentleness of Mr. Hardy that we may look for the secret of this pessimism. His detestation of any form of cruelty may have embittered his indictment of the cruelty of Fate. In one of his books he dwells for a moment on the pain of a wounded pheasant, and turns away with an imprecation against its wounders. But there would be no pheasants without shooters, and most pheasants live happily and die painlessly. Equally are Tess and Jude the exceptions. It is the defect—and even the artistic defect—of Mr. Hardy that he manages to convey the impression that they are the rule.

CHAPTER XXII
EARL SPENCER

In a famous passage Lord Morley of Blackburn referred to a meeting during the early Nineties in the famous library at Althorp:

“A picture to remember. Spencer with his noble carriage and fine red beard. Mr. Gladstone, seated on a low stool, discoursing as usual, playful, keen, versatile; Rosebery, saying little, but now and then launching a pleasant mot; Harcourt, cheery, expansive, witty. Like a scene from one of Dizzy’s novels, and all the actors men with parts to play.”

The scene is now almost as distant as one from a Sheridan comedy. The Earl is dead; the library is in exile; the whole scheme of things to which both belonged has passed away. The very type of aristocracy which Earl Spencer so worthily represented seems tending to extinction; it has at any rate become of less and less account in politics. But even if it should, by some miracle, regain something of its old importance, it can hardly occupy its old position. There may be room in the future for the Tory magnate of the older kind; but the Whig aristocrat seems to be gone for ever. In the Nineties, though somewhat decayed, he was still powerful. The Home Rule split had robbed the Liberals of many great names, but there were still a few old Whig Peers, and the very fact of their diminished numbers added to their influence in the Party. Among these great nobles there was none who stood higher than John Poyntz, Earl Spencer. His adhesion to Home Rule was for many the greatest argument in its favour, the more especially because he had shown during his term of office in Ireland that he could be relentlessly firm in upholding authority and making war on crime.