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^ r^
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^arbarii College itftrarg
FROM THE FUND
IN MEMORY OF
FREDERIC HILBORN HALL
(Class of 1910)
1889-1910
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CERTAIN
PERSONAL
MATTERS
By
H. G. WELLS
Author of the " Time Machine '
.ON DON
T. FISHER UNW1N
a ATERNOSTER SQUARE
s r«:« Om< Shilling
Uso issued in Cloth, price 2s.
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CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
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, CERTAIN
PERSONAL MATTERS
BY
H. G. WELLS
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE, E.C.
1901
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( OCT 4 1918
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CONTENTS
THOUGHTS ON CHEAPNESS AND MY AUNT CHABLOTTE
THE TROUBLE OP LIFE .
ON THE CHOICE OF A WIFE
THE HOUSE OF DI SOBNO
OF CONVERSATION
IN A LITERARY HOUSEHOLD
ON SCHOOLING AND THE PHASES OF MB. SANDSOME
THE POET AND THE EMPOBIUM
THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWEBS
THE LITERARY REGIMEN
HOUSE-HUNTING AS AN OUTDOOR AMUSEMENT .
OF BLADES AND BLADEBY
OF CLEYEBNESS .
THE POSE NOVEL
THE VETERAN CRICKETER
CONCERNING A CERTAIN LADY
THE SHOPMAN .
THE BOOK OF CUBSES .
DUNSTONE'S DEAB LADY
euphemia's new entebtainment (this is illustrated)
FOB FBEEDOM OF SPELLING ,
-INCIDENTAL THOUGHTS ON A BALD HEAD
OF A BOOK UNWBITTEN ....
7
12
18
22
27
32
36
40
45
49
54
59
63
67
71
76
80
85
90
94
98
104
108
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6 CONTENTS
THE EXTINCTION OP MAN
THE WRITING OP ESSAYS
THE PARKE8 MUSEUM .
BLEAK MARCH IN EPPING POREST
THE THEORY OP QUOTATION
ON THE ART OP STAYING AT THE SEASIDE
CONCERNING CHESS
THE COAL-SCUTTLE
BAGARROW ....
THE BOOK OP ESSAYS DEDICATORY
THROUGH A MICROSCOPE
THE PLEASURE OP QUARRELLING
THE AMATEUR NATURE-LOVER .
PROM AN OBSERVATORY . . .
THE MODE IN MONUMENTS
HOW I DIED ....
PAGE
115
120
124
128
132
135
140
145
150
155
159
164
169
174
177
182
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CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
THOUGHTS ON CHEAPNESS AND
MY AUNT CHARLOTTE
The world mends. In my younger days people believed
in mahogany ; some of my readers will remember it — a
heavy, shining substance, having a singularly close
resemblance to raw liver, exceedingly heavy to move, and
esteemed on one or other count the noblest of all woods.
Such of us as were very poor and had no mahogany
pretended to have mahogany; and the proper hepatite
tint was got by veneering.. That makes one incline to
think it was the colour that pleased people. In those
days there was a word " trashy," now almost lost to the
world. My dear Aunt Charlotte used that epithet when,
in her feminine way, she swore at people she did not like.
" Trashy " and " paltry " and " Brummagem " was the very
worst she could say of them. And she had, I remember,
an intense aversion to plated goods and bronze halfpence.
The halfpence of her youth had been vast and corpulent
red-brown discs, which it was folly to speak of as small
change. They were fine handsome coins, and almost as
inconvenient as crown-pieces. I remember she corrected
me once when I was very young. " Don't call a penny a
copper, dear," she said ; " copper is a metal. The pennies
they have nowadays are bronze." It is odd how our
childish impressions cling to us. I still regard bronze as a
kind of upstart intruder, a mere trashy pretender among
metals.
\
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8 CERTAIN PEKSONAL MATTEKS
All my Aunt Charlotte's furniture was thoroughly good,
and most of it extremely uncomfortable ; there was not a
thing for a little boy to break and escape damnation in the
household. Her china was the only thing with a touch of
beauty in it — at least I remember nothing else— and each
of her blessed plates was worth the happiness of a mortal
for days together. And they dressed me in a Nessus suit
of valuable garments. I learned the value of thoroughly
good things only too early. I knew the equivalent of a
teacup to the very last scowl, and I have hated good,
handsome property ever since. For my part I love cheap
things, trashy things, things made of the commonest
rubbish that money can possibly buy; things as vulgar
as primroses, and as transitory as a morning's frost.
Think of all the advantages of a cheap possession —
cheap and nasty, if you will — compared with some valuable
substitute. Suppose you need this or that. " Get a good
one," advises Aunt Charlotte ; " one that will last." You
do— and it does last. It lasts like a family curse. These
great plain valuable things, as plain as good women, as
complacently assured of their intrinsic worth — who does
not know them ? My Aunt Charlotte scarcely had a nfcw
thing in her life. Her mahogany was avuncular; her
china remotely ancestral; her feather beds and her
bedsteads ! — they were haunted ; the births, marriages,
and deaths associated with the best one was the history
of our race for three generations. There was more in her
house than the tombstone rectitude of the chair-backs
to remind me of the graveyard. I can still remember
the sombre aisles of that house, the vault-like shadows,
the magnificent window curtains that blotted out the
windows. Life was too trivial for such things. She
never knew she tired of them, but she did. That was the
secret of her temper, I think ; they engendered her sombre
Calvinism, her perception of the trashy quality of human
life. The pretence that they were the accessories to
human life was too transparent. We were the accessories ;
we minded them for a little while, and then we passed
away. They wore us out and cast us aside. We were the.
changing scenery; they were the actors who played on
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L.
CHEAPNESS AND MY AUNT CHARLOTTE 9
through the piece. It was even so with clothing. We
buried my other maternal aunt — Aunt Adelaide — and
wept, and partly forgot her; but her wonderful silk
dresses — they would stand alone — still went rustling
cheerfully about an ephemeral world.
All that offended my sense of proportion, my Reeling
of what is due to human life, even when I was a little boy.
I want things of my own, things I can break without
breaking my heart ; and, since one can live but once, I want
some change in my life — to have this kind of thing and
then that. I never valued Aunt Charlotte's good old
things until I sold them. They sold remarkably well:
those chairs like nether millstones for the grinding away
of men; the fragile china — an incessant anxiety until
accident broke it, and the spell of it at the same time ;
those silver spoons, by virtue of which Aunt Charlotte
went in fear of burglary for six-and-fifty years ; the bed
from which I alone of all my kindred had escaped ; the
wonderful old, erect, high-shouldered, silver-faced clock.
But, as I say, our ideas are changing — mahogany has
gone, and repp curtains. Articles are made for man, now-
adays, and not man, by careful early training, for articles.
I feel myself to be in many respects a link with the past.
Commodities come like the spring flowers, and vanish again.
"Who steals my watch steals trash," as some poet has
remarked ;Jthe thing is made of I know not what metal, and
if I leave it on the mantel for a day or so it goes a deep
blackish purple that delights me exceedingly. My grand-
father's hat — I understood when I was a little boy that I
was to have that some day. But now I get a hat for ten
shillings, or less, two or three times a year. In the old
days buying clothes was well-nigh as irrevocable as
marriage. Our flat is furnished with glittering things —
wanton arm-chairs just strong enough not to collapse
under you, books in gay covers, carpets you are free to
drop lighted fusees upon ; you may scratch what you like,
upset your coffee, cast your cigar ash to the four quarters
of heaven. Our guests, at anyrate, are not snubbed by
our furniture. It knows its place.
But it is in the case of art and adornment that
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10 CEBTAIN PEESONAL MATTERS
cheapness is most delightful The only thing that
betrayed a care for beauty on the part of my aunt was
her dear old flower garden, and even there she was not
above suspicion. Her favourite flowers were tulips, rigid
tulips with opulent crimson streaks. She despised
wildings. Her ornaments were simply displays of the
precious metal. Had she known the price of platinum
she would have worn that by preference. Her chains and
brooches and rings were bought by weight. She would
have turned her back on Benvenuto Cellini if he was not
22 carats fine. She despised water-colour art; her
conception of a picture was a vast domain of oily brown
by an Old Master. The Babbages at the Hall had a
display of gold plate swaggering in the corner of the
dining-room; and- the visitor (restrained by a plush
rope from examining the workmanship) was told the
value, and so passed on. I like my art unadorned:
thought and skill, and the other strange quality that
is added thereto, to make things beautiful — and nothing
more. A farthing's worth of paint and paper, and, behold !
a thing of beauty! — as they do in Japan. And if it
should fall into the fire — well, it has gone like yesterday's
sunset, and to-morrow there will be another.
These Japanese are indeed the apostles of cheapness.
The Greeks lived to teach the world beauty, the Hebrews
to teach it morality, and now the Japanese are hammering
in the lesson that men may be honourable, daily life
delightful, and a nation great without either freestone
houses, marble mantelpieces, or mahogany sideboards. I
have sometimes wished that my Aunt Charlotte could have
travelled among the Japanese nation. She would, I know,
have called it a " parcel of trash." Their use of paper —
paper suits, paper pocket-handkerchiefs — would have
made her rigid with contempt. I have tried, but I cannot
imagine my Aunt Charlotte in paper underclothing. Her
aversion to paper was extraordinary. Her Book of Beauty
was printed on satin, and all her books were bound in
leather, the boards regulated rather than decorated with a
severe oblong. Her proper sphere was among the ancient
Babylonians, among which massive populace even the
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CHEAPNESS AND MY AUNT CHAELOTTE 11
newspapers were built of brick. She would have
compared with the King's daughter whose raiment was
of wrought gold. When I was a little boy I used to think
she had a mahogany skeleton. However, she is gone, poor
old lady, and at least she left me her furniture. Her
ghost was torn in pieces after the sale — must have been.
Even the old china went this way and that. I took what
was perhaps a mean revenge of her for the innumerable
black-holeings,bread-and- water dinners, summary chastise-
ments, and impossible tasks she inflicted upon me for
offences against her too solid possessions. You will see it
at Woking. It is a light and graceful cross. It is a
mere speck of white between the monstrous granite paper-
weights that oppress the dead on either side of her.
Sometimes I am half sorry for that. When the end comes
I shall not care to look her in the face — she will be so
humiliated.
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THE TROUBLE OF LIFE
I do not know whether this will awaken a sympathetic
lassitude in, say, fifty per cent, of its readers, or whether
my experience is unique and my testimony simply curious.
At anyrate, it is as true as I can make it. Whether
this is a mere mood, and a certain flagrant exhilaration my
true attitude towards things, or this is my true attitude
and the exuberant phase a lapse from it, I cannot say.
Probably it does not matter. The thing is that I find life
an extremely troublesome affair. I do not want to make
any railing accusations against life ; it is — to my taste —
neither very sad nor very horrible. At times it is distinctly
amusing. Indeed, I know nothing in the same line that can
quite compare with it. But there is a difference between
general appreciation and uncritical acceptance. At times
I find life a Bother.
The kind of thing that I object to is, as a good example,
all the troublesome things one has to do every morning
in getting up. There is washing. This is an age of
unsolicited personal confidences, and I will frankly confess
that if it were not for Euphemia I do not think I should
wash at all. There is a vast amount of humbug about
washing. Vulgar people not only profess a passion for
the practice, but a physical horror of being unwashed. It
is a sort of cant. I can understand a sponge bath being a
novelty the first time and exhilarating the second and
third. But day after day, week after week, month after
month, and nothing to show at the end of it all ! Then
there is shaving. I have to get shaved because Euphemia
hates me with a blue jowl, and I will admit I hate myself.
Yet, if I were left alone, I do not think my personal taste
would affect my decision; I will say that for myself.
12
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THE TROUBLE OF LIFE 13
Either I hack about with a blunt razor — my razors are
always blunt — until I am a kind of Whitechapel Horror,
and with hair in tufts upon my chin like the top of a
Bbsjesman's head, or else I have to spend all the morning
being dabbed about the face by a barber with damp hands.
In either case it is a repulsive thing to have, eating into
one's time when one might be living ; and I have calculated
that all the hair I have lost in this way, put end to end,
would reach to Berlin. All that vital energy thrown
away ! However, " Thorns and bristles shall it bring forth
to thee." I suppose it is part of the primal curse, and
I try and stand it like a man. But the thing is a bother
all the same.
Then after shaving comes the hunt for the collar-stud.
Of all idiotic inventions the modern collar is the worst.
A man who has to write things for such readers as mine
cannot think over-night of where he puts his collar-stud ;
he has to keep his mind at an altogether higher level.
Consequently he walks about the bedroom, thinking hard,
and dropping things about : here a vest and there a collar,
and sowing a bitter harvest against the morning. Or he
sits on the edge of the bed jerking his garments this way
and that. " I shot a slipper in the air," as the poet sings,
and in the morning it turns up in the most impossible
quarters, and where you least expect it. And, talking of
foing to bed, before Euphemia took the responsibility over,
was always forgetting to wind my watch. But now that
is one of the things she neglects.
Then, after getting up, there is breakfast. Autolycus of
the Pall Mall Gazette may find heaven there, but I am
differently constituted. There is, to begin with the essence
of the offence — the stuff that has to be eaten somehow.
Then there is the paper. Unless it is the face of a
fashionable beauty, I know of nothing more absolutely
uninteresting than a morning paper. You always expect
to find something in it, and never do. It wastes half my
moping sometimes, going over and over the thing, and
trying to find out why they publish it. If I edited a
daily I think I should do like my father does when he
writes to ma " Things much the same," he writes ; " the
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14 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
usual fussing about the curate's red socks " — a long letter,
for him. The rest margin. And, by the bye, there are
letters every morning at breakfast, too !
Now I do not grumble at letters. You can read them
instead of getting on with your breakfast. They are
entertaining in a way, and you can tear them up at the
end, and in that respect at least they are better than
people who come to see you. Usually, too, you need not
ma"ke a reply. But sometimes Euphemia gets hold of
some still untorn, and says in her dictatorial way that
they have to be answered — insists— says I must Yet she
knows that nothing fills me with a livelier horror than
having to answer letters. It paralyses me. I waste whole
days sometimes mourning over the time that I shall have
to throw away presently, answering some needless imper-
tinence — requests for me to return books lent to me;
reminders from the London Library that my subscription
is overdue ; proposals for me to renew my ticket at the
stores — Euphemia's business really ; invitations for me to
go and be abashed before impertinent distinguished people :
all kinds of bothering things.
And speaking of letters and invitations brings me
round to friends. I dislike most people ; in London they
get in one's way in the street and fill up railway carriages,
and in the country they stare at you — but I hate my
friends. Yet Euphemia says I must "keep up" my
friends. They would be all very well if they were really
true friends and respected my feelings and left me alone,
just to sit quiet. But they come wearing shiny clothes,
and mop and mow at me and expect me to answer their
gibberings. Polite conversation always appears to me to
be a wicked perversion of the blessed gift of speech,
which, I take it, was given us to season our lives rather
than to make them insipid. New friends are the worst
in this respect. With old friends one is more at home ;
you give them something to eat or drink, or look at, or
something — whatever they seem to want— and just turn
round and go on smoking quietly. But every now and
then Euphemia or Destiny inflicts a new human being
upon me. I do not mean a baby, though the sentence
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THE TEOUBLE OF LIFE 15
has got that turn somehow, but an introduction ; and the
wretched thing, all angles and offence, keeps bobbing
about me and discovering new ways of worrying me,
trying, I believe, to find out what topics interest me,
though the fact is no topics interest me. Once or twice,
of course, I have met human beings I think I could have
got on with very well, after a time; but in this mood, at
least, I doubt if any human being is quite worth the
bother of a new acquaintance.
These are just sample bothers — shaving, washing,
answering letters, talking to people. I could specify
hundreds more. Indeed, in my sadder moments, it seems
to me life is all compact of bothers. There are the
details of business — knowing the date approximately (an
incessant anxiety) and the time of day. Then, having to
buy things. Euphemia does most of this, it is true, but
she draws the line at my boots and gloves and hosiery
and tailoring. Then, doing up parcels and finding pieces
of string or envelopes or stamps — which Euphemia might
very well manage for me. Then, finding your way back
after a quiet, thoughtful walk. Then, having to get
matches for your pipe. I sometimes dream of a better
world, where pipe, pouch, and matches all keep together
instead of being mutually negatory. But Euphemia is
always putting everything into some hiding-hole or other,
which she calls its " place." Trivial things in their way,
you may say, yet each levying so much toll on my brain
and nervous system, and demanding incessant vigilance
and activity. I calculated once that I wasted a master-
piece upon these mountainous little things about every
three months of my life. Can I help thinking of them,
then, and asking why I suffer thus? And can I avoid
seeing at last how it is they hang together ?
For there is still one other bother, a kind of bother
botfwruniy to tell of, though I hesitate at the telling. It
brings this rabble herd of worries into line and makes
them formidable; it is, so to speak, the Bother Com-
mander-in-Chief. Well! Euphemia I simply worship
the ground she treads upon, mind, but at the same time
. the truth is the truth. Euphemia is a bother. She is
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16 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
a brave little woman, and helps me in every conceivaMe
way. But I wish she would not. It is so obviously all
her doing. She makes me get up of a morning — I would
not stand as much from anybody else — and keeps a sharp
eye on my chin and collar. If it were not for her I could
sit about always with no collar or tie on in that old
jacket she gave to the tramp, and just smoke and grow
a beard and let all the bothers slide. I would never
wash, never shave, never answer any letters, never go to
see any friends, never do any work — except, perhaps, an
insulting postcard to a publisher now and again. I would
just sit about.
Sometimes I think this may be peculiar in me. At
other times I fancy I am giving voice to the secret feeling
of every member of my sex. I suspect, then, that we
would all do as the noble savage does, take our things
off and lie about comfortable, if only someone had the
courage to begin. It is these women — all love and
reverence to Euphemia notwithstanding — who make us
work and bother us with Things. They keep us decent,
and remind us we have a position to support. And
really, after all, this is not my original discovery ! There
is the third chapter of Genesis, for instance. And then
who has not read Carlyle's gloating over a certain
historical suit of leather ? It gives me a queer thrill of
envy, that Quaker Fox and his suit of leather. Conceive
it, if you can ! One would never have to quail under the
scrutiny of a tailor any more. Thoreau, too, come to
think of it, was, by way of being a prophet, a pioneer
in this Emancipation of Man from Bothery.
Then the silent gentry who brew our Chartreuse;
what are they in retirement for? Looking back into
history, with the glow of discovery in my eyes, I find
records of wise men — everyone acknowledged they were
wise men — who lived apart. In every age the same
associate of solitude, silence, and wisdom. The holy
hermits ! . . . I grant it, they professed to flee wickedness
and seek after righteousness, but now my impression is
that they fled bothers. We all know they had an intense
aversion to any savour of domesticity, and they never ?
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THE TKOUBLE OF LIFE 17
baaved, washed, dined, visited, had new clothes. Holiness,
indeed! They were vivcurs. . . . We have witnessed
Religion without Theology, and why not an TJnsectarian
Thebaid ? I sometimes fancy it needs only one brave
man to begin. ... If it were not for the fuss Euphemia
would mate I certainly should. But I know she would
come and worry me worse than St. Anthony was worried
until I put them all on again, and that keeps me from
the attempt.
I am curious whether mine is the common experience.
I fancy, after all, I am only seeing in a clearer way,
putting into modern phrase, so to speak, an observation
old as the Pentateuch. And looking up I read upon a
little almanac with which Euphemia has cheered my
desk: —
"The world was sad" (sweet sadness!)
"The garden was a wild" (a picturesque wild)
"And man the hermit" (he made no complaint)
"Till the woman smiled."— Campbell.
[And very shortly after he had, as you know, all that
bother about the millinery.]
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ON THE CHOICE OF A WIFE
Wife-choosing is an unending business. This sounds
immoral, but what I mean will be clearer in the context.
People have lived — innumerable people — exhausted
experience, and yet other people keep on coming to hand,
none the wiser, none the better. It is like a waterfall
more than anything else in the world. Every year one
has to turn to and warn another batch about these stale
old things. Yet it is one's duty — the last thing that
remains to a man. And as a piece of worldly wisdom,
that has nothing to do with wives, always leave a few
duties neglected for the comfort of your age. There
are such a lot of other things one can do when one is
young.
Now, the kind of wife a young fellow of eight- or nine-and-
twenty insists on selecting is something of one-and-twenty
or less, inexperienced, extremely pretty, graceful, and well
dressed, not too clever, accomplished ; but I need not go
on, for the youthful reader can fill in the picture himself
from his own ideal. Every young man has his own ideal,
as a matter of course, and they are all exactly alike. Now,
I do not intend to repeat all the stale old saws of out-of-
date wiseacres. Most of them are even more foolish than
the follies they reprove. Take, for instance, the statement
that " beauty fades." Absurd ; everyone knows perfectly
well that, as the years creep on, beauty simply gets more
highly coloured. And then, " beauty is only skin-deep."
Fantastically wrong ! Some of it is not that ; and, for the
rest, is a woman like a toy balloon ? — just a surface ? To
hear that proverb from a man is to know him at once for
a phonographic kind of fool. The fundamental and
enduring grace of womanhood goes down to the skeleton ;
18
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ON THE CHOICE OF A WIFE 19
you cannot have a pretty face without a pretty skull, just
as you cannot have one without a good temper.
Yet all the same there is an excellent reason why one
should shun beauty in a prospective wife, at anyrate
obvious beauty — the kind of beauty people talk about,
and which gets into the photographers' windows. The
common beautiful woman has a style of her own, a
favourite aspect. After all, she cannot be perfect She
comes upon you, dazzles you, marries you ; there is a time
of ecstasy. People envy you, continue to envy you. After
a time you envy yourself — yourself of the day before
yesterday. For the imperfection, the inevitable imperfec-
tion — in one case I remember it was a smile — becomes
visible to you, becomes your especial privilege. That is the
real reason. No beauty is a beauty to her husband. But
with the plain woman — the thoroughly plain woman — it is
different. At first — I will not mince matters — her ugliness
is an impenetrable repulse. Face it. After a time little
things begin to appear through the violent discords : little
scraps of melody — a shy tenderness in her smile that peeps
out at you and vanishes, a something that is winning,
looking out of her eyes. You find a waviness of her hair
that you never saw at the beginning, a certain surprising,
pleasing, enduring want of clumsiness in part of her ear.
And it is yours. You can see she strikes the beholder
with something of a shock ; and while the beauty of the
beauty is common for all the world to rejoice in, you will
find in your dear, plain wife beauty enough and to spare ;
exquisite — for it is all your own, your treasure-trove, your
safely-hidden treasure. . . .
Then, in the matter of age ; though young fellows do
not imagine it, it is very easy to marry a wife too young.
Marriage has been defined as a foolish bargain in which
one man provides for another man's daughter, but there
is no reason why this should go so far as completing her
education. If your conception of happiness is having
something pretty and innocent and troublesome about you,
something that you can cherish and make happy, a pet
rabbit is in every way preferable. At the worst that will
nibble your boots. I have known several cases of the girl-
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20 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
wife, and it always began like an idyll, charmingly ; the
tenderest care on one hand, winsome worship on the other
— until some little thing, a cut chin or a missing paper,
startled the pure and natural man out of his veneer,
dancing and blaspheming, with the most amazing con-
sequences. Only a proven saint should marry a girl- wife,
and his. motives might be misunderstood. The idyllic wife
is a beautiful thing to read about, but in practice idylls
should be kept episodes ; in practice the idyllic life is a
little too like a dinner that is all dessert. A common
man, after a time, tires of winsome worship ; he craves
after companionship, and a sympathy based on experience.
The ordinary young man, with the still younger wife, I
have noticed, continues to love her with all his heart —
and spends his leisure telling somebody else's wife all
about it. If in these days of blatant youth an experienced
man's counsel is worth anything, it would be to marry a
woman considerably older than oneself, if one must marry
at all. And while upon this topic — and I have lived long
— the ideal wife, I am persuaded, from the close observa-
tion of many years, is invariably, by some mishap, a
widow. . . .
Avoid social charm. It was the capacity for entertain-
ing visitors that ruined Paradise. It grows upon a woman.
An indiscriminating personal magnetism is perhaps the
most dreadful vice a wife can have. You think you have
married the one woman in the world, and you find you
have married a host — that is to say, a hostess. Instead
of making a home for you she makes you something
between an ethnographical museum and a casual ward.
You find your rooms littered with people and teacups and
things, strange creatures that no one could possibly care
for, that seem scarcely to care for themselves. You go
about the house treading upon chance geniuses, and get
tipped by inexperienced guests. And even when she does
not entertain, she is continually going out. I do not deny
that charming people are charming, that their company
should be sought, but seeking it in marriage is an
altogether different matter.
Then, I really must insist that young men do not
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ON THE CHOICE OF A WIFE 21
understand the real truth about accomplishments. There
comes a day when the most variegated wife comes
to the end of her tunes, and another when she ends them
for the second time ; Vita longa, ars brevis — at least, as
regards the art of the schoolgirl. It is only like marrying
a slightly more complicated barrel-organ. And, for
another point, watch the young person you would honour
with your hand for the slightest inkling of economy or
tidiness. Young men are so full of poetry and emotion
that it does not occur to them how widely the sordid vices
are distributed in the other sex. If you are a hotel
proprietor, or a school proprietor, or a day labourer, such
weaknesses become a strength, of course, but not otherwise.
For a literary person — if perchance you are a literary person
— it is altogether too dreadful. You are always getting
swept and garnished, straightened up and sent out to
be shaved. And home — even your study — becomes a
glittering, spick-and-span mechanism. But you know the
parable of the seven devils ?
To conclude, a summary. The woman you choose
should be plain, as plain as you can find, as old or older
than yourself, devoid of social gifts or accomplishments,
poor — for your self-respect — and with a certain amiable
untidiness. Of course no young man will heed this, but
at least I have given my counsel, and very excellent
reasons for that counsel. And possibly I shall be able to
remind him that I told him as much, in the course of a
few years' time. And, by the bye, I had almost forgotten!
Never by any chance marry a girl whose dresses do up at
the back, unless you can afford her a maid or so of her
own.
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THE HOUSE OF DI SORNO
A MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN A BOX
And the box, Euphemia's. Brutally raided it was by an
insensate husband, eager for a tie and too unreasonably
impatient to wait an hour or so until she could get home
and find it for him. There was, of course, no tie at all in
that box, for all his stirring — as anyone might have
known ; but, if there was no tie, there were certain papers
that at least suggested a possibility of whiling away the
time until the Chooser and Distributer of Ties should
return. And, after all, there is no reading like your
accidental reading come upon unawares.
It was a discovery, indeed, that Euphemia had papers.
At the first glance these close-written sheets suggested a
treasonable Keynote, and the husband gripped it with a
certain apprehension mingling with his relief at the opiate
of reading. It was, so to speak, the privilege of police he
exercised, so he justified himself. He began to read. But
what is this? "She stood on the balcony outside the
window, while the noblest-born in the palace waited on
her every capricious glance, and watched for an unbending
look to relieve her hauteur, but in vain." None of your
snippy-snappy Keynote there !
Then he turned over a page or so of the copy, doubting
if the privilege of police still held good. Standing out by
virtue of a different ink, and coming immediately after
"bear her to her proud father," were the words, "How
many yards of carpet £ yds. wide will cover room, width
16 ft., length 27£ ft.?" Then he knew he was in the
presence of the great romance that Euphemia wrote when
she was sixteen. He had heard something of it before.
22
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THE HOUSE OF DI SOENO 23
He held it doubtfully in his hands, for the question of
conscience still troubled him. " Bah ! " he said abruptly,
" not to find it irresistible was to slight the authoress and
her skill" And with that he sat plump down among the
things in the box very comfortably and began reading, and,
indeed, read until Euphemia arrived. But she, at the
sight of his head and legs, made several fragmentary and
presumably offensive remarks about crushing some hat or
other, and proceeded with needless violence to get him out
of the box again. However, that is my own private
trouble. We are concerned now with the merits of
Euphemia's romance.
The hero of the story is a Venetian, named (for some
unknown reason) Ivan di Sorno. So far as I ascertained,
he is the entire house of Di Sorno referred to in the title.
Wo other Di Sornos transpired. like others in the story,
he is possessed of untold wealth, tempered by a profound
sorrow, for some cause which remains unmentioned, but
which is possibly internal. He is first displayed " pacing
a sombre avenue of ilex and arbutus that reflected with
singular truth the gloom of his countenance/' and " toying
sadly with the jewelled hilt of his dagger." He meditates
upon his loveless life and the burthen of riches. Presently
he "paces the long and magnificent gallery," where a
' hundred generations of Di Sornos, each with the same
flashing eye and the same marble brow, look down with
the same sad melancholy upon the beholder" — a truly
monotonous exhibition. It would be too much for any-
one, day after day. He decides that he will travel.
Incognito.
The next chapter is headed " In Old Madrid," and Di
Sorno, cloaked to conceal his grandeur, " moves sad and
observant among the giddy throng." But " Gwendolen "
— the majestic Gwendolen of the balcony — "marked his
pallid yet beautiful countenance." And the next day at
the bull-fight she " flung her bouquet into the arena, and
turning to Di Sorno" — a perfect stranger, mind you —
"smiled commandingly." "In a moment he had flung
himself headlong down among the flashing blades of the
toreadors and the trampling confusion of bulls, and in
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24 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
another he stood before her, bowing low with the recovered
flowers in his hand. ' Fair sir/ she said, ' methinks my
poor flowers were scarce worth your trouble.' " A very
proper remark. And then suddenly I put the manuscript
down.
My heart was full of pity for Euphemia. Thus had she
gone a-dreaming. A man of imposing physique and flash-
ing eye, who would fling you oxen here and there, and
vault in and out of an arena without catching a breath,
for his lady's sake — and here I sat, the sad reality, a lean
and slippered literary pretender, and constitutionally
afraid of cattle.
Poor little Euphemia ! For after all is said and done,
and the New Woman gibed out of existence, I am afraid
we do undeceive these poor wives of ours a little after the
marrying is over. It may be they have deceived them-
selves, in the first place, but that scarcely affects their
disappointment These dream-lovers of theirs, these
monsters of unselfishness and devotion, these tall fair
Donovans and dark worshipping Wanderers ! And then
comes the rabble rout of us poor human men, damning at
our breakfasts, wiping pens upon our coat sleeves, smelling
of pipes, fearing our editors, and turning Euphemia's
private boxes into public copy. And they take it so
steadfastly — most of them. They never let us see the
romance we have robbed them of, but turn to and make
the best of it — and us — with such sweet grace. Only now
and then — as in the instance of a flattened hat — may a
cry escape them. And even then
But a truce to reality ! Let us return to Di Sorno.
This individual does not become enamoured of Gwen-
dolen, as the crude novel reader might anticipate. He
answers her " coldly," and his eye rests the while on her
"tirewoman, the sweet Margot." Then come scenes of
jealousy and love, outside a castle with heavily mullioned
windows. The sweet Margot, though she turns out to be
the daughter of a bankrupt prince, has one characteristic
of your servant all the world over — she spends all her
time looking out of the window. Di Sorno tells her of his
love on the evening of the bull-fight, and she- cheerfully
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THE HOUSE OF DI SOENO 25
promises to " learn to love him," ant* therafter he spends
all his days and nights " spurring his fiery steed down the
road" that leads by the castle containing the young
scholar. It becomes a habit with him — in all, he does it
seventeen times in three chapters. Then, " ere it is too
late," he implores Margot to fly.
Gwendolen, after a fiery scene with Margot, in which
she calls her a "petty minion," — pretty language for a
young gentlewoman, — "sweeps with unutterable scorn from
the room," never, to the reader's huge astonishment, to
appear in the story again, and Margot flies with Di Sorno
to Grenada, where the Inquisition, consisting apparently
of a single monk with a " blazing eye," becomes extremely
machinatory. A certain Countess di Morno, who intends
to marry Di Sorno, and who has been calling into the
story in a casual kind of way since the romance began,
now comes prominently forward. She has denounced
Margot for heresy, and at a masked ball the Inquisition,
disguised in a yellow domino, succeeds in separating the
young couple, and in carrying off " the sweet Margot " to
a convent.
" Di Sorno, half distraught, flung himself into a cab
and drove to all the hotels in Grenada " (he overlooked
the police station), and, failing to find Margot, becomes
mad. He goes about ejaculating "Mad, mad!" than
which nothing could be more eloquent of his complete
mental inversion. In his paroxysms the Countess di
Morno persuades him to " lead her to the altar," but on
the way (with a certain indelicacy they go to church in
the same conveyance) she lets slip a little secret. So Di
Sorno jumps out of the carriage, "hurling the crowd
apart," and, " flourishing his drawn sword," " clamoured at
the gate of the Inquisition " for Margot. The Inquisition,
represented by the fiery-eyed monk, "looked over the
gate at him." No doubt it felt extremely uncomfortable.
Now it was just at this thrilling part that Euphemia
came home, and the trouble about the flattened hat began.
I never flattened her hat. It was in the box, and so
w&s I ; but as for deliberate flattening It was just
a thing that happened. She should not write such
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26 CEBTAIN PEESONAL MATTEES
interesting stories if she expects me to go on tiptoe
through the world looking about for her hats. To have
that story taken away just at that particular moment
was horrible. There was fully as much as I had read still
to come, so that a lot happened after this duel of Sword
v. Fiery Eye. I know from a sheet that came out of
place that Margot stabbed herself with a dagger (" richly
jewelled "), but of all that came between I have not the
faintest suspicion. That is the peculiar interest of it.
At this particular moment the one book I want to read in
all the world is the rest of this novel of Euphemia's.
And simply, on the score of a new hat needed, she keeps
it back and haggles !
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OF CONVERSATION
AN APOLOGY
I must admit that in conversation I am not a brilliant
success. Partly, indeed, that may be owing to the
assiduity with which my aunt suppressed my early essays
in the art : " Children," she said, " should be seen but not
heard," and incontinently rapped my knuckles. To a
larger degree, however, I regard it as intrinsic. This
tendency to silence, to go out of the rattle and dazzle of
the conversation into a quiet apart, is largely, I hold, the
consequence of a certain elevation and breadth and
tenderness of mind; I am no blowfly to buzz my way
through the universe, no rattle that I should be expected
to delight my fellow-creatures by the noises I produce.
I go about to this social function and that, deporting
myself gravely and decently in silence, taking, if possible,
a back seat ; and, in consequence of that, people who do
not understand me have been heard to describe me as a
" stick," as " shy," and by an abundance of the like un-
flattering terms. So that I am bound almost in self-
justification to set down my reasons for this temperance
of mine in conversation.
Speech, no doubt, is a valuable gift, but at the same
time it is a gift that may be abused. What is regarded
as polite conversation is, I hold, such an abuse. Alcohol,
opium, tea, are all very excellent things in their way;
but imagine continuous alcohol, an incessant opium, or to
receive, ocean-like, a perennially flowing river of tea!
That is my objection to this conversation : its continuous-
ness. You have to keep on. You find three or four
people gathered together, and instead of being restful and
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recreative, sitting in comfortable attitudes and at peace
with themselves and each other, and now and again,
perhaps three or four times in an hour, making a
worthy and memorable remark, they are all haggard and
intent upon keeping this fetish flow agoing. A
fortuitous score of cows in a field are a thousand times
happier than a score of people deliberately assembled for l
/ the purposes of happiness. These conversationalists say ^
the most shallow and needless of things, impart aimless in-
formation, simulate interest they do not feel, and generally
impugn their claim to be considered reasonable creatures.
Why, when people assemble without hostile intentions, it
should be so imperative to keep the trickling rill of talk
running, I find it impossible to imagine. It is a vestige
of the old barbaric times, when men murdered at sight
for a mere whim ; when it was good form to take off your
sword in the antechamber, and give your friend your
dagger-hand, to show him it was no business visit.
Similarly, you keep up this babblement to -show your
mind has no sinister concentration, not necessarily
because you have anything to say, but as a guarantee of
good faith. You have to make a noise all the time, like
the little boy who was left in the room with the plums.
It is the only possible explanation.
To a logical mind there is something very distressing in
this social law of gabble. Out of regard for Mrs. A, let
us say, I attend some festival she has inaugurated. There
I meet for the first time a young person of pleasant
exterior, and I am placed in her company to deliver her
at a dinner-table, or dance her about, or keep her out of
harm's way, in a cosy nook. She has also never seen me
before, and probably does not want particularly to see me
now. However, I find her nice to look at, and she has
taken great pains to make herself nice to look at, and
why we cannot pass the evening, I looking at her and she
being looked at, I cannot imagine. But no; we must
talk. Now, possibly there are topics she knows about and
I do not — it is unlikely, but suppose so ; on these topics
she requires no information. Again, I know about other
topics things unknown to her, and it seems a mean and
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OF CONVEKSATION 29
priggish thing to broach these, since they put her at a
disadvantage. Thirdly, comes a last group of subjects
upon which we are equally informed, and upon which,
therefore, neither of us is justified in telling things to
the other. This classification of topics seems to me
exhaustive.
These considerations, I think, apply to all conver-
sations. In every conversation, every departure must
either be a presumption when you talk into your an-
tagonist's special things, a pedantry when you fall back
upon your own, or a platitude when you tell each other
things you both know. I don't see any other line a
conversation can take. The reason why one has to keep
up the stream of talk is possibly, as I have already
suggested, to manifest goodwill. And in so many cases
this could be expressed so much better by a glance, a
deferential carriage, possibly in some cases a gentle
pressure of the hand, or a quiet persistent smile. And
suppose there is some loophole in my reasoning — though
I cannot see it — and that possible topics exist, how
superficial and unexact is the best conversation to a
second-rate book!
Even with two people you see the objection, but when
three or four are gathered together the case is infinitely
worse to a man of delicate perceptions. Let us suppose —
I do not grant it — that there is a possible sequence of
things to say to the person A that really harmonise with
A and yourself. Grant also that there is a similar
sequence between yourself and B. Now, imagine yourself
and A and B at the corners of an equilateral triangle set
down to talk to each other. The kind of talk that A
appreciates is a discord with B, and similarly B's sequence
is impossible in the hearing of A. As a matter of fact, a
real conversation of three people is the most impossible
thing in the world. In real life one of the three always
drops out and becomes a mere audience, or a mere par-
tisan. In real life you and A talk, and B pretends to
be taking a share by interjecting interruptions, or one
of the three talks a monologue. And the more subtle
your sympathy and the greater your restraint from
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30 CERTAIN PEKSONAL MATTERS
self-assertion, the more incredible triple and quadruple
conversation becomes.
I have observed that there is even nowadays a certain
advance towards my views in this matter. Men may not
pick out antagonists, and argue to the general audience
as once they did : there is a tacit taboo, of controversy,
neither may you talk your "shop/* nor invite your
antagonist to talk his. There is also a growing feeling
against extensive quotations or paraphrases from the
newspapers. Again, personalities, scandal, are, at least
in theory, excluded. This narrows the scope down to the
"last new book," "the last new play," "impressions de
voyage," and even here it is felt that any very ironical or
satirical remarks, anything unusual, in fact, may disconcert
your adversary. You ask: Have you read the Wheels
of Chance? The answer is "Yes." "Do you like it?"
" A little vulgar, I thought." And so forth. Most of this
is stereo. It is akin to responses in church, a prescription,
a formula. And, following out this line of thought, I
have had a vision of the twentieth century dinner. At a
distance it is very like the nineteenth century type ; the
same bright light, the same pleasant deglutition, the same
hum of conversation ; but, approaching, you discover each
diner has a little drum-shaped body under his chin — his
phonograph. So he dines and babbles at his ease. In
the smoking-room he substitutes his anecdote record. I
imagine, too, the suburban hostess meeting the new
maiden : " I hope, dear, you have brought a lot of conver-
sation," just as now she asks for the music. For my own
part, I must confess I find this dinner conversation par-
ticularly a bother. If I could eat with my eye it would
be different.
I lose a lot of friends through this conversational
difficulty. They think it is my dulness or my temper,
when really it is only my refined mind, my subtlety of
consideration. It seems to me that when I g<j to see a
man, I go to see him — to enjoy his presence. If he is my
friend, the sight of him healthy and happy is enough for
me. I don't want him to keep his vocal cords, and I
don't want to keep my own vocal cords, in incessant
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OF CONVEESATION 31
vibration all the time I am in his company. If I go to
see a man, it distracts me to have to talk and it distracts
me to hear him talking. I can't imagine why one should
not go and sit about in people's rooms, without bothering
them and without their bothering you to say all these
stereotyped things.. Quietly go in, sit down, look at your
man until you have seen him enough, and then go. Why
not?
Let me once more insist that this keeping up a conver-
sation is a sign of insecurity, of want of confidence. All
those who have had real friends know that when the
friendship is assured the gabble ceases. You are not at
the heart of your friend, if either of you cannot go off
comfortably to sleep in the other's presence. Speech was
given us to make known our needs, and for imprecation,
expostulation, and entreaty. This pitiful necessity we are
under, upon social occasions, to say something — however
inconsequent — is, I am assured, the very degradation of
speech.
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IN A LITERARY HOUSEHOLD
Ik the literary household of fiction and the drama, things
are usually in a distressing enough condition. The
husband, as you know, has a hacking cough, and the wife
a dying baby, and they write in the intervals of these cares
among the litter of the breakfast things. Occasionally a
comic, but sympathetic, servant brings in an armful —
" heaped up and brimming over " — of rejected MSS., for,
in the dramatic life, it never rains but it pours. Instead
of talking about editors in a bright and vigorous fashion,
as the recipients of rejections are wont, the husband
groans and covers his face with his hands, and the wife,
leaving the touching little story she is writing — she posts
this about 9 p.m., and it brings in a publisher and £100
or so before 10.30 — comforts him by flopping suddenly
over his shoulder. "Courage," she says, stroking his
hyacinthine locks (whereas all real literary men are more
or less grey or bald). Sometimes, as in Our Flat, comic
tradesmen interrupt the course of true literature with
their ignoble desire for cash payment, and sometimes, as
in Our Boys, uncles come and weep at the infinite
pathos of a bad breakfast egg. But it's always a very
sordid, dusty, lump-in-your-throaty affair, and no doubt it
conduces to mortality by deterring the young and im-
pressionable from literary vices. As for its truth, that is
another matter altogether.
Yet it must not be really imagined that a literary
household is just like any other. There is the brass
paper-fastener, for instance. I have sometimes thought
that Euphemia married me with an eye to these con-
veniences. She has two in her grey gloves, and one (with
the head inked) in her boot in the place of a button.
• 32
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IN A LITEEAEY HOUSEHOLD 33
Others I suspect her of. Then she fastened the lamp
shade together with them, and tried one day to introduce
them instead of pearl buttons as efficient anchorage for
cuffs and collars. And she made a new handle for the
little drawer under the inkstand with one. Indeed, the
literary household is held together, so to speak, by paper-
fasteners, and how other people get along without them
we are at a loss to imagine.
And another point, almost equally important, is that
the husband is generally messing about at home. That
is, indeed, to a superficial observer, one of the most
remarkable characteristics of the literary household.
Other husbands are cast out in the morning to raven for
income and return to a home that is swept and garnished
towards the end of the day ; but the literary husband is
ever in possession. His work must not be disturbed
even when he is merely thinking. The study is conse-
quently a kind of domestic cordite factory, and you are
never certain when it may explode. The concussion of a
dust-pan and brush may set it going, the sweeping of a
carpet in the room upstairs. Then behold a haggard,
brain-weary man, fierce and dishevelled, and full of
shattered masterpiece — expostulating. Other houses
have their day of cleaning out this room, and their day
for cleaning out that ; but in the literary household there
is one uniform date for all such functions, and that is
" to-morrow." So that Mrs. Mergles makes her purifying
raids with her heart in her mouth, and has acquired a
way of leaving the pail and brush, or whatever artillery
she has with her, in a manner that unavoidably engages
the infuriated brute's attention and so covers her retreat.
It is a problem that has never been probably solved,
this discord of order and orderly literary work. Possibly
it might be done by making the literary person live
elsewhere or preventing literary persons from having
households. However it might be done, it is not done.
This is a thing innocent girls exposed to the surreptitious
proposals of literary men do not understand. They think
it will be very fine to have photographs of themselves and
their " cosy nooks " published in magazines, to illustrate
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34 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
the man's interviews, and the full horror of having this
feral creature always about the house, and scarcely ever
being able to do any little thing without his knowing it,
is not brought properly home to them until escape is
impossible.
And then there is the taint of "copy" everywhere.
That is really the fundamental distinction. It is the
misfortune of literary people, that they have to write
about something. There is no reason, of course, why they
should, but the thing is so. Consequently, they are always
looking about them for something to write about. They
cannot take a pure-minded interest in anything in earth or
heaven. Their servant is no servant, but a character;
their cat is a possible reservoir of humorous observation ;
they look out of window and see men as columns walking.
Even the sanctity of their own hearts, their self-respect,
their most private emotions are disregarded. The wife is
infected with the taint. Her private opinion of her
husband she makes into a short story — forgets its origin
and shows it him with pride — while the husband decants
his heart-beats into occasional verse and minor poetry. It
is amazing what a lot of latter-day literature consists of
such breaches of confidence. And not simply latter-day
literature.
The visitor is fortunate who leaves no marketable
impression behind. The literary entertainers eye you
over, as if they were dealers in a slave mart, and speculate
on your uses. They try to think how you would do as a
scoundrel, and mark your little turns of phrase and kinks
of thought to that end. The innocent visitor bites his
cake and talks about theatres, while the meditative person
in the arm-chair may be in imagination stabbing him, or
starving him on a desert island, or even — horrible to tell !
— flinging him headlong into the arms of the young lady to
the right and " covering her face with a thousand passionate
kisses." A manuscript in the rough of Euphemia's, that
I recently suppressed, was an absolutely scandalous ex-
ample of this method of utilising one's acquaintances.
Mrs. Harborough, who was indeed Euphemia's most
confidential friend for six weeks and more, she had made
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IN A LITERARY HOUSEHOLD 35
to elope with Scrimgeour — as steady and honourable a
man as .we know, though unpleasant to Euphemia on
account of his manner of holding his teacup. I believe
there really was something — quite harmless, of course —
between Mrs. Harborough and Scrimgeour, and that,
imparted in confidence, had been touched up with vivid
colour here and there and utilised freely. Scrimgeour is
represented as always holding teacups in his peculiar way,
so that anyone would recognise him at once. Euphemia calls
that character. Then Harborough, who is really on excel-
lent terms with his wife, and, in spite of his quiet manner,
a very generous and courageous fellow, is turned aside
from his headlong pursuit of the fugitives across
Wimbledon Common — they elope, by the bye, on Scrini-
geour's tandem bicycle — by the fear of being hit by a golf
ball. I pointed out to Euphemia that these things were
calculated to lose us friends, and she promises to destroy
the likeness; but I have no confidence in her promise.
She will probably clap a violent auburn wig on Mrs.
Harborough and make Scrimgeour squint and give
Harborough a big beard. The point that she won't grasp
is, that with that fatal facility for detail, which is one of
the most indisputable proofs of woman's intellectual in-
feriority, she has reproduced endless remarks and manner-
isms of these excellent people with more than photographic
fidelity. But this is really a private trouble, though it
illustrates very well the shameless way in which those
who have the literary taint will bring to market .thore- / v
most intimate affairs.
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ON SCHOOLING AND THE PHASES
OF MR. SANDSOME
I do not know if you remember your " dates." Indeed, I
do not know if anyone does. My own memory is of a
bridge ; like that bridge of Goldsmith's, standing firm and
clear on its hither piers and then passing into a cloud.
In the beginning of days was " William the Conqueror,
1066," and the path lay safe and open to Henry the
Second ; then came Titanic forms of kings, advancing and
receding, elongating and dwindling, exchanging dates,
losing dates, stealing dates from battles and murders and
great enactments— even inventing dates, vacant years that
were really no dates at all. The things I have suffered —
prisons, scourgings, beating with rods, wild masters, in
bounds often, a hundred lines often, standing on forms
and holding out books often — on account of these dates !
I knew, and knew well before I was fifteen, what these
" heredity " babblers are only beginning to discover — that
the past is the curse of the present. But I never knew
my dates — never. And I marvel now that all little boys
do not grow up to be Republicans, seeing how much they
suffer for the mere memory of Kings.
Then there were pedigrees, and principal parts and
conjugations, and county towns. Every county had a
county town, and it was always on a river. Mr. Sandsome
never allowed us a town without that colophon. I
remember in my early manhood going to Guildford on the
Wey, and trying to find that unobtrusive rivulet. I went
over the downs for miles. It is not only the Wey I have
had a difficulty in finding. There are certain verses —
Heaven help me, but I have forgotten them ! — about " i
86
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ON SCHOOLING 37
vel e dat " {was it dat ?) " utrum malis " — if I remember
rightly — and all that about amo, amas, amat. There was
a multitude of such things I acquired, and they lie now,
in the remote box-rooms and lumber recesses of my mind,
a rusting armoury far gone in decay. I have never been
able to find a use for them. I wonder even now why Mr.
Sandsome equipped me with them. Yet he seemed to be
in deadly earnest about this learning, and I still go in
doubt. In those early days he impressed me, chiefly in
horizontal strips, with the profoundest respect for his
mental and physical superiority. I credited him then,
and still incline to believe he deserved to be credited, with
a sincere persuasion that unless I learnt these things I
should assuredly go — if I may be frank — to the devil. It
may.be so. I may be living in a fool's paradise, prosper-
ing — like that wicked man the Psalmist disliked. Some
unsuspected gulf may open, some undreamt-of danger
thrust itself through the phantasmagoria of the universe,
and I may learn too late the folly of forgetting my
declensions.
I remember Mr. Sandsome chiefly as sitting at his desk,
in a little room full of boys, a humming hive whose air
was thick with dust, as the slanting sunbeams showed.
When we were not doing sums or writing copies, we were
always learning or saying lessons. In the early morning
Mr. Sandsome sat erect and bright, his face animated,
his ruddy eyes keen and observant, the cane hanging but
uncertainly upon its hook. There was a standing up of
classes, a babble of repetition, now and then a crisis. How
long the days were then ! I have heard that scientific
people — Professor C. Darwin is their leader, unless I err
— which probably I do, for names and dates I have hated
from my youth up — say the days grow longer. Anyhow,
whoever says it, it is quite wrong. But as the lank hours
of that vast schooltime drawled on, Mr. Sandsome lost
energy, drooped like a flower, — especially if the day was
at all hot, — his sandy hair became dishevelled, justice
became nerveless, hectic, and hasty. Finally came copy-
books ; and yawns and weird rumblings from Mr. Sandsome.
And so the world aged to the dinner-hour.
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38 CEBTAIN PEBSONAL MATTERS
When I had been home — it was a day school, for my
aunt, who had an appetite for such things, knew that
boarding-schools were sinks of iniquity — and returned, I
had Mr. Sandsome at another phase. He had dined — for
we were simple country folk. The figurative suggestions
of that " phase " are irresistible — the lunar quality. May
I say that Mr. Sandsome was at his full ? We now stood
up, thirty odd of us altogether, to read, reading out of
books in a soothing monotone, and he sat with his reading-
book before him, ruddy as the setting sun, and slowly,
slowly settling down. But now and then he would jerk
back suddenly into staring wakefulness as though he were
fishing — with himself as bait — f or schoolboy crimes in the
waters of oblivion — and fancied a nibble. That was a
dangerous time, full of anxiety. At last he went right
under and slept, and the reading grew cheerful, full of
quaint glosses and unexpected gaps, leaping playfully from
boy to boy, instead of travelling round with a proper
decorum. But it never ceased, and little Hurkley's silly
little squeak of a voice never broke in upon its mellow
flow. (It took a year for Hurkley's voice to break.) Any
such interruption and Mr. Sandsome woke up and into his
next phase forthwith — a disagreeable phase always, and
one we made it our business to postpone as long as
possible.
During that final period, the last quarter, Mr. Sandsome
was distinctly malignant. It was hard to do right;
harder still to do wrong. A feverish energy usually
inspired our government. " Let us try to get some work
done," Mr. Sandsome would say — and I have even known
him teach things then. More frequently, with a needless
bitterness, he set us upon impossible tasks, demanding a
colossal tale of sums perhaps, scattering pens and paper
and sowing the horrors of bookkeeping, or chastising us
with the scorpions of parsing and translation. And even
in wintry weather the little room grew hot and stuffy, and
we terminated our schoolday, much exhausted, with minds
lax, lounging attitudes, and red ears. What became of
Mr. Sandsome after the giving-out of home-work, the
concluding prayer, and the aftermath of impositions, I do
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ON SCHOOLING 39
not know. I stuffed my books, such as came to hand —
very dirty they were inside, and very neat out with my
Aunt Charlotte's chintz covers — into my green baize bag,
and went forth from the mysteries of schooling into the
great world, up the broad white road that went slanting
over the Down.
I say "the mysteries of schooling" deliberately. I
wondered then, I wonder still, what it was all for. Read-
ing, almost my only art, I learnt from Aunt Charlotte ; a
certain facility in drawing I acquired at home and took to
school, to my own undoing. " Undoing," again, is deliber-
ate — it was no mere swish on the hand, gentle reader.
But the things I learnt, more or less partially, at school,
lie in my mind, like the " Sarsen " stones of Wiltshire —
great, disconnected, time-worn chunks amidst the natural
herbage of it. " The Rivers of the East Coast ; the Tweed,
the Tyne, the Wear, the Tees, the Humber " — why is that,
for instance, sticking up among my ferns and wild flowers ?
It is not only useless but misleading, for the Humber is
not another Tweed. I sometimes fancy the world may be
mad — yet that seems egotistical. The fact remains that
for the greater part of my young life Mr. Sandsome got an
appetite upon us from nine till twelve, and digested his
dinner, at first placidly and then with petulance, from two
until five — and we thirty odd boys were sent by our
twenty odd parents to act as a sort of chorus to his
physiology. And he was fed (as I judge) more than
sufficiently, clothed, sheltered, and esteemed on account of
this relation. I think, after all, there must have been
something in that schooling. I can't believe the world
mad. And I have forgotten it — or as good as forgotten it
— all ! At times I feel a wild impulse to hunt up all those
chintz-covered books, and brush up my dates and
paradigms, before it is too late.
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THE POET AND THE EMPORIUM
"I am beginning life," he said, with a sigh. "Great
Heavens! I have spent a day — a day/ — in a shop.
Three bedroom suites and a sideboard are among the
unanticipated pledges of our affection. Have you lithia ?
For a man of twelve limited editions this has been a
terrible day."
I saw to his creature comforts. His tie was hanging
outside his waistcoat, and his complexion was like white
pasteboard that has got wet. " Courage," said I. " It
will not occur again "
" It will," said he. " We have to get there again to-
morrow. We have — what is it ? — carpets, curtains "
He produced his tablets. I was amazed. Those
receptacles of choice thoughts!
" The amber sunlight splashing through The leaky —
leafy interlacing green," he read. "No! — that's not it.
Ah, here ! Curtains ! Drawing-room — not to cost more
than thirty shillings ! And there's all the Kitchen Hard-
ware ! (Thanks.) Dining-room chairs — query — rush
bottoms ? What's this ? G. L. I. S.— ah ! " Glistering
thro' deeps of glaucophane " — that's nothing. Mem. to see
can we afford Indian needlework chairs — 57s. 6d. ? It's
dreadful, Bellows!"
He helped himself to a cigarette.
" Find the salesman pleasant ? " said I.
" Delightful. Assumed I was a spendthrift millionaire
at first. Produced in an off-hand way an eighty-guinea
bedroom suite — we're trying to do the entire busine
you know, on about two hundred pounds. Well — thatls
ten editions, you know. Came down, with evidently
dwindling respect, to things that were still ruinousll
40
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THE POET AND THE EMPOBIUM 41
expensive. I told him we wanted an idyll — love in a
cottage, and all that kind of thing. He brushed that on
one side, said idols were upstairs in the Japanese Depart-
ment, and that perhaps we might do with a servant's set
of bedroom furniture. Do with a set ! He was a gloomy
man with (I should judge) some internal pain. I tried to
tell him that there was quite a lot of middle-class people
like myself in the country, people of limited or precarious
means, whose existence he seemed to ignore ; assured him
some of them led quite beautiful lives. But he had no
ideas beyond wardrobes. I quite forgot the business of
shopping in an attempt to kindle a little human enthusi-
asm in his heart. We were in a great vast place full of
wardrobes, with a remote glittering vista of brass bedsteads
— skeleton beds, you know — and I tried to inspire him
with some of the poetry of his emporium ; tried to make
him imagine these beds and things going east and west,
north and south, to take sorrow, servitude, joy, worry,
failing strength, restless ambition in their impartial
embraces. He only turned round to Annie, and asked
her if she thought she could do with ' enamelled.' But I
was quite taken with my idea Where is it ? I left
Annie to settle with this misanthrope, amidst his raw
frameworks of the Homes of the Future."
He fumbled with his tablets. " Mats for hall — not to
exceed 3s. 9d. . . . Kerbs . . . inquire tiled hearth ... Ah !
Here we are : ' Ballade of the Bedroom Suite ' : —
" 'Noble the oak you are now displaying,
Subtly the hazel's grainings go,
"Walnut s charm there is no gainsaying,
Bed as red wine is your rosewood's glow ;-
Brave and brilliant the ash you show,
Rich your mahogany's hepatite shine,
Cool and sweet your enamel : But oh !
Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine t '
" They have 'em in the catalogue at five guineas, with a
picture — quite as- g<*)d they are as the more expensive
ones. To judge by the picture."
" But that's scarcely the idea you started with," I
began.
"Not; it went wrong — ballades often do. The pre-
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42 CEBTAIN PEBSONAL MATTERS
occupation of the ' Painted Pine ' was too much for me.
What's this? 'N.B. — Sludge sells music stools at '
No. Here we are (first half unwritten) : —
" c White enamelled, like driven snow,
Picked with just one delicate line.
Price you were saying is? Fourteen ! — No!
Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine t '
" Comes round again, you see ! Then I! Envoy : —
" 'Salesman, sad is the truth I trow :
Winsome walnut can never be mine.
Poets are cheap. And their poetry. So
Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine t '
" Prosaic ! As all true poetry is, nowadays. But, how I
tired as the afternoon moved on ! At first I was interested
in the shopman's amazing lack of imagination, and the
glory of that fond dream of mine — love in a cottage, you
know — still hung about me. I had ideas come — like that
Ballade — and every now and then Annie told me to write
notes. I think my last gleam of pleasure was in choosing
the drawing-room chairs. There is scope for fantasy in
chairs. Then "
He took some more whisky.
" A kind of grey horror came upon me. I don't know
if I can describe it. We went through vast vistas of
chairs, of hall -tables, of machine-made pictures, of
curtains, huge wildernesses of carpets, and ever this cold,
unsympathetic shopman led us on, and ever and again
made us buy this or that. He had a perfectly grey eye —
the colour of an overcast sky in January — and he seemed
neither to hate us nor to detest us, but simply to despise
us, to feel such an overwhelming contempt for our petty
means and our petty lives, as an archangel might feel for
an apple-maggot. It made me think. . . ."
He lit a fresh cigarette.
" I had a kind of vision. I do not know if you will
understand. The Warehouse of life, with our Individual
Fate hurrying each of us through. Showing us with a
covert sneer all the good things that we cannot afford. A
magnificent Eosewood love affair, for instance, deep and
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THE POET AND THE EMPOBIUM 43
rich, fitted complete, some hours of perfect life, some acts
of perfect self-sacrifice, perfect self-devotion. . . . You ask
the price."
He shrugged his shoulders.
" Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine ? " I quoted.
" That's it. All the things one might do, if the purse of
one's courage were not so shallow. H it wasn't for the
lack of that coinage, Bellows, every man might be
magnificent. There's heroism, there's such nobility as no
one has ever attained to, ready to hand. Anyone, if it
were not for this lack of means, might be a human god
in twenty-four hours. . . . You see the article. You
cannot buy it. No one buys it. It stands in the
emporium, I suppose, for show — on the chance of a
millionaire. And the shopman waves his hand to it on
your way to the Painted Pine.
"Then you meet other couples and solitary people
going about, each with a gloomy salesman leading. The
run of them look uncomfortable ; some are hot about the
ears and in the spiteful phase of ill- temper ; all look sick
of the business except the raw new-comers. It's the only
time they will ever select any furniture, their first chance
and their last. Most of their selections are hurried a
little. The salesman must not be kept all day. . . . Yet
it goes hard with you if you buy your Object in Life and
find it just a ' special line/ made to sell. . . . We're all
amateurs at living, just as we are all amateurs at
furnishing — or dying. Some of the poor devils one
meets carry tattered little scraps of paper, and fumble
conscientiously with stumpy pencils. It's a comfort to
see how you go, even if you do have to buy rubbish. ' If
we have this so good, dear, I don't know how we shall
manage in the kitchen,' says the careful housewife. . . .
So it is we do our shopping in the Great Emporium."
" You will have to rewrite your Ballade," said I, " and
put all that in."
" I wish I could," said the poet.
" And while you were having these very fine moods ? "
" Annie and the shopman settled most of the furniture
between them. Perhaps it's just as well. I was never
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44 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
very good at the practical details of life. . . . Cigarette's
out ! Have you any more matches ? "
" Horribly depressed you are ! " I said.
" There's to-morrow. Well, well . . . ."
And then he went off at a tangent to tell me what he
expected to make by his next volume of poems, and so
came to the congenial business of running down his
contemporaries, and became again the cheerful little Poet
that I know.
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THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS
Dubing the early Victorian revival of chivalry the
Language of Flowers had some considerable vogue. The
Borneo of the mutton-chop whiskers was expected to keep
this delicate symbolism in view, and even to display his
wit by some dainty conceits in it. An ignorance of the
code was fraught with innumerable dangers. A sprig of
lilac was a suggestion, a moss-rosebud pushed the matter,
was indeed evidence to go to court upon; and unless
Charlotte parried with white poplar — a by no means
accessible flower — or apricot blossom, or failing these
dabbed a cooling dock-leaf at the fellow, he was at her
with tulip, heliotrope, and honeysuckle, peach-blossom,
white jonquil, and pink, and a really overpowering and
suffocating host of attentions. I suppose he got at last
to three-cornered notes in the vernacular ; and meanwhile
what could a poor girl do ? There was no downright
" No ! " in the language of flowers, nothing equivalent to
"Go away, please," no flower for "Idiot!" The only
possible defence was something in this way: "Tour
cruelty causes me sorrow," " Your absence is a pleasure."
For this, according to the code of Mr. Thomas Miller
(third edition, 1841, with elegantly coloured plates) you
would have to get a sweet-pea blossom for Pleasure,
wormwood for Absence, and indicate Sorrow by the yew,
and Cruelty by the stinging-nettle. There is always a
little risk of mixing your predicates in this kind of com-
munication, and he might, for instance, read that his
Absence caused you Sorrow, but he could scarcely miss
the point of the stinging-nettle. That and the gorse
carefully concealed were about the only gleams of humour
possible in the language. But then it was the appointed
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46 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
tongue of lovers, and while their sickness is upon them
they have neither humour nor wit.
This Mr. Thomas Miller wrote abundant flowers of
language in his book, and the plates were coloured by-
hand. By the bye, what a blessed thing colour-printing
is! These hand-tinted plates, to an imaginative person,
are about as distressing as any plates can very well be.
Whenever I look at these triumphs of art over the
beauties of nature, with all their weary dabs of crimson,
green, blue, and yellow, I think of wretched, anaemic girls
fading their youth away in some dismal attic over a
publisher's, toiling through the whole edition tint by tint,
and being mocked the while by Mr. Miller's alliterative
erotics. And they are erotics ! In one place he writes,
"Beautiful art thou, Broom! on the breezy bosom of
the be6-haunted heath"; and throughout he buds and
blossoms into similar delights. He wallows in doves and
coy toyings and modest blushes, and bowers and meads.
He always adds, " Wonderful boy ! " to Chatterton's name
as if it were a university degree (W.B.), and he invariably
refers to Moore as the Bard of Erin, and to Milton as the
Bard of Paradise — though Bard of the Bottomless Pit
would be more appropriate. However, we are not con-
cerned with Mr. Miller's language so much as with a
very fruitful suggestion he throws out, that " it is surely
worth while to trace a resemblance between the flower
and the emblem it represents " (a turn like that is nothing
to Mr. Miller) " which shall at least have some show of
reason in it."
Come to think of it, there is something singularly
unreasonable about almost all floral symbolism. There is
your forget-me-not, pink in the bud, and sapphire in the
flower, with a fruit that breaks up into four, the very
picture of inconstancy and discursiveness. Yet your lover,
with a singular blindness, presents this to his lady when
they part. Then the white water-lily is supposed to
represent purity of heart, and, mark you, it is white
without and its centre is all set about with innumerable
golden stamens, while in the middle lies, to quote the
words of that distinguished botanist, Mr. Oliver, " a fleshy
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THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS 47
disc." Could there be a better type of sordid and
mercenary deliberation maintaining a fair appearance ?
The tender apple-blossom, rather than Pretence, is surely
a reminder of Eden and the fall of love's devotion into
inflated worldliness. The poppy which flaunts its violent
colours athwart the bearded corn, and which frets and
withers like the Second Mrs. Tanqueray so soon as you
bring it to the shelter of a decent home, is made the
symbol of Repose. One might almost think Aim6 Martin
and the other great authorities on this subject wrote in a
mood of irony.
The daisy, too, presents you Innocence, " companion of
the milk-white lamb," Mr. Miller calls it. I am sorry for
the milk-white lamb. It was one of the earliest discoveries
of systematic botany that the daisy is a fraud, a com-
plicated impostor. The daisy is not a flower at ail. It
is a favourite trap in botanical examinations, a snare for
artless young men entering the medical profession. Each
of the little yellow things in the centre of the daisy is
a flower in itself, — if you look at one with a lens you will
find it not unlike a cowslip flower, — and the white rays
outside are a great deal more than the petals they ought
to be if the Innocence theory is to hold good. There is
no such thing as an innocent flower ; they are all so many
deliberate advertisements to catch the eye of the un-
decided bee, but any flower almost is simpler than this
one. We would make it the emblem of artistic decep-
tion, and the confidence trick expert should wear it as
his crest.
The violet, again, is a greatly overrated exemplar. It
stimulates a certain bashfulness, hangs its head, and passed
as modest among our simple grandparents. Its special
merit is its perfume, and it pretends to wish to hide that
from every eye. But, withal, the fragrance is as far-reach-
ing as any I know. It droops ingenuously. " How could
you come to me," it seems to say, " when all these really
brilliant flowers invite you ? " Mere fishing for compli-
ments. All the while it is being sweet, to the very best
of its undeniable ability. Then it comes, too, in early
spring, without a chaperon, and catches our hearts fresh
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48 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
before they are jaded with the crowded beauties of May.
A really modest flower would wait for the other flowers
to come first. A subtle affectation is surely a different
thing from modesty. The violet is simply artful, the
young widow among flowers, and to hold up such a flower
as an example is not doing one's duty by the young. For
true modesty commend me to the agave, which flowers
once only in half a hundred years, as one may see for
oneself at the Royal Botanical Gardens.
Enough has been said to show what scope there is for
revision of this sentimental Volapuk. Mr. Martin him-
self scarcely goes so far as I have done, though I have
merely worked out his suggestion. His only revolutionary
proposal is to displace the wind star by the M rathe prim-
rose " for Forsaken, on the strength of a quotation familiar
to every reader of Mason's little text-book on the English
languaga For the rest he followed his authorities, and
has followed them now to the remote recesses of the
literary lumber-room and into the twopenny book-box.
From that receptacle one copy of him was disinterred
only a day or so ago; a hundred and seventy pages of
prose, chiefly alliterative, several coloured plates, en-
thusiastic pencil-marking of a vanished somebody, and,
besides, an early Victorian flavour of dust and a dim
vision of a silent conversation in a sunlit flower garden —
altogether I think very cheap at twopence. The fashion
has changed altogether now. In these days we season
our love-making with talk about heredity, philanthropy,
and sanitation, and present one another with Fabian
publications instead of wild flowers. But in the end, I
fancy, the business comes to very much the same thing.
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THE LITERARY REGIMEN
At the risk of offending the young beginner's illusions, he
must be reminded of one or two homely but important
facts bearing upon literary production. Homely as they
are, they explain much that is at first puzzling. This
perplexing question of distinction; the quality of being
somehow fresh — individual. Really it is a perfectly
simple matter. It is common knowledge that, after a
prolonged fast, the brain works in a feeble manner, the
current of one's thoughts is pallid and shallow, it is
difficult to fix the attention and impossible to mobilise
the full forces of the mind. On the other hand, im-
mediately after a sound meal, the brain feels massive, but
static. Tea is conducive to a gentle flow of pleasing
thoughts, and anyone who has taken Easton's syrup of
the hypophosphites will recall at once the state of cerebral
erethrism, of general mental alacrity, that followed on
a dose. Again, champagne (followed perhaps by a soupcjon
of whisky) leads to a Tnood essentially humorous and
playful, while about three dozen oysters, taken fasting,
will in most cases produce a profound and even ominous
melancholy. One might enlarge further upon this topic,
on the brutalising influence of beer, the sedative quality
of lettuce, the stimulating consequences of curried chicken ;
but enough has been said to point our argument. It is,
that such facts as this can surely indicate only one
conclusion, and that is the entire dependence of literary
qualities upon the diet of the writer.
I may remind the reader, in confirmation of this
suggestion, of what is perhaps the most widely known
fact about Carlyle, that on one memorable occasion he
threw his breakfast out of the window. Why did he
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50 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
throw his breakfast out of the window? Surely his
friends have cherished the story out of no petty love of
depreciatory detail? There are, however, those who
would have us believe it was mere childish petulance
at a chilly rasher or a hard-boiled egg. Such a supposition
is absurd. On the other hand, what is more natural than
an outburst of righteous indignation at the ruin of some
carefully studied climax of feeding ? The thoughtful
literary beginner who is not altogether submerged in
foolish theories of inspiration and natural genius will, we
fancy, see pretty clearly that I am developing what is
perhaps after all the fundamental secret of literary
art.
To come now to more explicit instructions. It is
imperative, if you wish to write with any power and
freshness at all, that you should utterly ruin your
digestion. Any literary person will confirm this state-
ment. At any cost the thing must be done, even if you
have to live on German sausage, onions, and cheese to do
it. So long as you turn all your dietary to flesh and
blood you will get no literature out of it. " We learn in
suffering what we teach in song." This is why men who
live at home with their mothers, or have their elder sisters
to see after them, never, by any chance, however great
their literary ambition may be, write anything but minor
x poetry. They "get their meals at regular hours, and done
to a turn, and that plays the very devil — if you will
pardon the phrase — with one's imagination.
A careful study of the records of literary men in the
past, and a considerable knowledge of living authors,
suggests two chief ways of losing one's digestion and
engendering literary capacity. You go and live in humble
lodgings, — we could name dozens of prominent men who
have fed a great ambition in this way, — or you marry a
nice girl who does not understand housekeeping. The
former is the more efficacious method, because, as a rule,
the nice girl wants to come and sit on your knee all day,
and that is a great impediment to literary composition.
Belonging to a club — even a literary club — where you can
dine is absolute ruin to the literary beginner. Many a
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THE IITEKAKY EEGIMEN 51
bright young fellow, who has pushed his way, or has been
pushed by indiscreet friends, into the society of successful
literary men, has been spoilt by this fatal error, aijdrlie
has saved his stomach to lose his- reputation.
Having got rid of your digestion, then, the common
condition of all good literature, the next thing is to
arrange your dietary for the particular literary effect you
desire. And here we may point out the secrecy observed
in such matters by literary men. Stevenson fled to Samoa
to hide his extremely elaborate methods, and to keep his
kitchen servants out of the reach of bribery. Even Sir
Walter Besant, though he is fairly communicative to the
young aspirant, has dropped no hints of the plain, pure,
and wholesome menu he follows. Sala professed to eat
everything, but that was probably his badinage. Possibly
he had one staple, and took the rest as condiment Then
what did Shakespeare live on ? Bacon ? And Mr. Barrie,
though he has written a delightful book about his pipe
and tobacco, fullof suggestion to the young humorist,
lets out nothing or next to nothing of his meat and drink.
His hints about pipes are very extensively followed, and
nowadays every ambitious young pressman smokes in
public at least one well-burnt briar with an eccentric
stem — even at some personal inconvenience. But this
jealous reticence on the. part of successful men — you
notice they never let even the interviewer see their
kitchens or the debris of a meal — necessarily throws one
back upon rumour and hypothesis in this matter. Mr.
Andrew Lang, for instance, is popularly associated with
salmon, but that is probably a wilful delusion. Excessive
salmon, far from engendering geniality, will be found in
practice a vague and melancholy diet, tending more
towards the magnificent despondency of Mr. Hall
Caine.
Nor does Mr. Haggard feed entirely on raw meat.
Indeed, for lurid and somewhat pessimistic narrative,
there is nothing like the ordinary currant bun, eaten new
and in quantity. A light humorous style is best attained
by soda-water and dry biscuits, following caf^-noir. The
soda-water may be either Scotch or Irish as the taste
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52 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
inclines. For a florid, tawdry style the beginner must
take nothing but boiled water, stewed vegetables, and an
"ftflberest in the movements against vivisection, opium,
alcohol tobacco, sarcophagy, and the male sex.
For -contributions to the leading reviews, boiled pork
and cabbage may be eaten, with bottled beer, followed
by apple dumpling. This effectually suppresses any
tendency to factiousness, or what respectable English
people call double entendre, and brings you en rapport with
the serious people who read these publications. So soon
as you begin to feel wakeful and restless discontinue
writing. For what is vulgarly known as the fin-de-si&cle
type of publication, on the other hand, one should limit
oneself to an aerated bread shop for a week or so, with
the exception of an occasional tea in a literary household.
All people fed mainly on scones become clever. And
this regimen, with an occasional debauch upon macaroons,
chocolate, and cheap champagne, and brisk daily walks
from Oxford Circus, through Regent Street, Piccadilly,
and the Green Park, to Westminster and back, should
result in an animated society satire.
It is not known what Mr. Kipling takes to make him
so peculiar. Many of us would like to know. Possibly
it is something he picked up in the jungle — berries or
something. A friend who made a few tentative experi-
ments to this end turned out nothing beyond a will, and
that he dictated and left incomplete. (It was scarcely
on the lines of an ordinary will, being blasphemous, and
mentioning no property except his inside.) For short
stories of the detective type, strong cold tea and hard
biscuits are fruitful eating, while for a social science
novel one should take an abundance of boiled rice and
toast and water.
However, these remarks are mainly by way of suggestion.
Every writer in the end, so soon as his digestion is
destroyed, must ascertain for himself the peculiar diet
that suits him best — that is, which disagrees with him
the most. If everything else fails he might try some
chemical food. " Jabber's Food for Authors," by the bye,
well advertised, and with portraits of literary men, in
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THE LITERAKY REGIMEN 53
their drawing-rooms, "Fed entirely on Jabber's Food,"
with medical certificates of its unwholesomeness, and
favourable and expurgated reviews of works written on
it, ought to be a brilliant success among literary aspirants.
A small but sufficient quantity of arsenic might with
advantage be mixed in.
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HOUSE-HUNTING AS AN OUTDOOR
AMUSEMENT
Since Adam and Eve went hand in hand out of the gates
of Paradise, the world has travailed under an infinite
succession of house-hunts. To-day in every eligible
suburb you may see New Adams and New Eves by the
score, with rusty keys and pink order-forms in hand,
wandering still, in search of the ideal home. To them
it is anything but an amusement. Most of these poor
pilgrims look simply tired, some are argumentative in
addition, but all are disappointed, anxious, and unhappy,
their hands dirty with prying among cisterns, and their
garments soiled from cellar walls. All, in the exaltation
of the wooing days, saw at least the indistinct reflection
of the perfect house, but now the Quest is irrevocably in
hand they seek and do not find. And such a momentous
question it is to them. Are they not choosing the back-
ground, the air and the colour, as it were, of the next
three or four years, the cardinal years, too ! of their lives ?
Perhaps the exquisite exasperation of the business for
the man who hunts among empty houses for a home is,
that it is so entirely a choice of second-hand, or at least
ready-made goods. To me, at least, there is a decided
suggestion of the dead body in your empty house that
has once been occupied. Here, like pale ghosts upon the
wall paper, are outlined the pictures of the departed
tenant ; here are the nails of the invisible curtains, this
dent in the wall is all that is sensible of a vanished
piano. I could fancy all these things creeping back to
visibility as the light grew dim. Someone was irritable
in the house, perhaps, and a haunting fragrance of de-
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HOUSE-HUNTING 55
parted quarrels is to be found in the loose door-handles,
and the broken bell-pull. Then the blind in the bedroom
has a broken string. He was a beer-drinker, for the drip
of the tap has left its mark in the cellar ; a careless man,
for this wall is a record of burst water-pipes ; and rough
in. his methods, as his emendation of the garden gate — a
remedy rather worse than the disease — shows. The mark
of this prepotent previous man is left on the house from
cellar to attic. It is his house really, not mine. And
against these haunting individualities set the horrible
wholesale flavour, the obvious dexterous builder's economies
of a new house. Yet, whatever your repulsion may be,
the end is always the same. After you have asked for
your ideal house a hundred times or so you begin to see
you do not get it. You go the way of your kind. All
houses are taken in despair.
But such disgusts as this are for the man who really
aims at taking a house. The artist house-hunter knows
better than that. He hunts for the hunt's sake, and does
not mar his work *with a purpose. Then house-hunting
becomes a really delightful employment, and one strangely
neglected in this country. I have heard, indeed, of old
ladies who enlivened the intervals of their devotions in
this manner, but to the general run of people the thing is
unknown. Yet a more entertaining way of spending a
half-holiday — having regard to current taste — it should
be difficult to imagine. An empty house is realistic
literature in the concrete, full of hints and allusions if a
little wanting in tangible humanity, and it outdoes the
modern story in its own line, by beginning as well as
ending in a note of interrogation. That it is not more
extensively followed I can only explain by supposing
that its merits are generally unsuspected. In which case
this book should set a fashion.
One singular thing the house -hunter very speedily
discovers is, that the greater portion of the houses in this
country are owned by old gentlemen or old ladies who
live next door. After a certain age, and especially upon
retired tradespeople, house property, either alone or in
common with gardening, exercises an irresistible fascina-
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56 CEETAIN PEESONAL MATTEES
tion. You always know you are going to meet a landlord
or landlady of this type when you read on your order to
view, " Key next door but one." Calling next door but
one, you are joined after the lapse of a few minutes by a
bald, stout gentleman, or a lady of immemorial years, who
offers to go over " the property " with you. Apparently
the intervals between visits to view are spent in slumber,
and these old people come out refreshed and keen to
scrutinise their possible new neighbours. They will tell
you all about the last tenant, and about the present tenants
on either side, and about themselves, and how all the other
houses in the neighbourhood are damp, and how they
remember when the site of the house was a cornfield, and
what they do for their rheumatism. As one hears them
giving a most delightful vent to their loquacity, the artistic
house -hunter feels all the righteous self - applause of a
kindly deed. Sometimes they get extremely friendly.
One old gentleman — to whom anyone under forty must
have seemed puerile — presented the gentle writer with
three fine large green apples as a kind of earnest of his
treatment: apples, no doubt, of some little value, since
they excited the audible envy of several little boys before
they were disposed of.
Sometimes the landlord has even superintended the
building of the house himself, and then it often has
peculiar distinctions — no coal cellar, or a tower with
turrets, or pillars of ornamental marble investing the
portico with disproportionate dignity. One old gentle-
man, young as old gentlemen go, short of stature, of an
agreeable red colour, and with short iron-grey hair, had a
niche over the front door containing a piece of statuary.
It gave one the impression of the Venus of Milo in
chocolate pyjamas. " It was nood at first," said the land-
lord, " but the neighbourhood is hardly educated up to
art, and objected. So I gave it that brown paint."
On one expedition the artistic house-hunter was accom-
panied by Euphemia. Then it was he found Hill Crest, a
vast edifice at the incredible* rent of £40 a year, with
which a Megatherial key was identified. It took the two
of them, not to mention an umbrella, to turn this key.
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HOUSE-HUNTING 57
The rent was a mystery, and while they were in the
house — a thunderstorm kept them there some time — they
tried to imagine the murder. From the top windows
they could see the roofs of the opposite houses in plan.
" I wonder how long it would take to get to the top of
the house from the bottom ? " said Euphemia.
"Certainly longer than we could manage every day,"
said the artistic house-hunter. "Fancy looking for my
pipe in all these rooms. Starting from the top bedroom
at the usual time, I suppose one would arrive downstairs
to breakfast about eleven, and then we should have to be
getting upstairs again by eight o'clock if we wanted any
night's rest worth having. Or we might double or treble
existence, live a Gargantuan life to match the house, make
our day of forty-eight hours instead of twenty-four. By
doubling everything we should not notice the hole it made
in our time getting about the place. Perhaps by making
dinner last twice as long, eating twice as much, and doing
every^ing on the scale of two to one, we might adapt
ourselves to our environment in time, grow twice as big."
"Then we might be very comfortable here," said
Euphemia.
They went downstairs again. By that time it was
thundering and raining heavily. The rooms were dark
and gloomy. The big side door, which would not shut
unless locked from the outside, swayed and banged as the
gusts of wind swept round the house. But they had a
good time in the front kitchen, playing cricket with an
umbrella and the agent's order crumpled into a ball.
Presently the artistic house-hunter lifted Euphemia on
to the tall dresser, and they sat there swinging their feet
patiently until the storm should leave off and release
them.
" I should feel in this kitchen," said Euphemia, " like
one of my little dolls must have felt in the dolls'-house
kitchen I had once. The top of her head just reached the
level of the table. There were only four plates on the
dresser, but each was about half her height across "
" Your reminiscences are always entertaining," said the
artistic house-hunter; "still they fail to explain the
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58 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
absorbing mystery of this house being to let at £40 a
year." The problem raised his curiosity, but though he
made inquiries he found no reason for the remarkably low
rent or the continued emptiness of the house. It was a
specimen puzzle for the house - hunter. A large house
with a garden of about half an acre, and with accommoda-
tion for about six families, going begging for £40 a year.
Would it let at eighty ? Some such problem, however,
turns up in every house-hunt, and it is these surprises
that give the sport its particular interest and delight.
Always provided the mind is not unsettled by any ulterior
notion of settling down.
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OF BLADES AND BLADERY
The Blade is not so much a culture as a temperament, and
Bladery — if the thing may have the name — a code of
sentiments rather than a ritual. It is the rococo school
of behaviour, the flamboyant gentleman, the gargoyle life.
The Blade is the tribute innocence pays to vice. He may
look like a devil and belong to a church. And the
clothing of the Blade, being symbolical, is a very important
part of him. It must show not only a certain tastiness,
but also decision in the accent, courage in the pattern, and
a Dudley Hardihood of outline. A Blade must needs
take the colour of his social standing, but all Blades have
the same essential qualities. And all Blades have this
quality, that they despise and contemn other Blades from
the top downward. (But where the bottommost Blade
comes no man can tell.)
A well-bred Blade — though he be a duke — tends to
wear his hat tilted a little over the right eyebrow, and a
piece of hair is pulled coquettishly down just below the
brim. His collar is high, and a very large bow is worn
slightly askew. This may be either cream-coloured or
deep blue, with spots of white, or it may be red, or buff,
but not green, because of badinage. The Blade of the
middle class displays a fine gold watch-chain, and his jacket
and vest may be of a rough black cloth or blue serge.
The trousering may be of a suit with the jacket, or
tasteful, and the shoes must be long. The betting man,
adorned, is a perfect Blade. There is often a large and
ornamental stick, which is invariably carried head down-
wards. And note, that the born Blade instinctively
avoids any narrowness of pose. In walking he thrusts
out his shoulders, elbows, and knees, and it is rather the
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60 CEKTAIN PEBSONAL MATTEKS
thing to dominate a sphere of influence beyond this by
swinging his stick. At first the beginner will find this
weapon a little apt to slip from the hand and cause
inconvenience to the general public; but he must not
mind that After a few such misadventures he will
acquire dexterity.
All Blades smoke — publicly at least. To smoke a
white meerschaum in the streets, however, is very inferior
form. The proper smoking is a briar, and, remember, it
is not smart to have a new pipe. So soon as he buys it,
the Blade takes his pipe home, puts it on a glowing fire
to burn the rim, scrapes this away, burns it again, and so
on until it looks a sullen desperado of a pipe — a pipe with
a wild past. Sometimes he cannot smoke a pipe. In
this case he may — for his stomach's sake — smoke a
cigarette. And, besides, there is something cynical about
a cigarette. For the very young Blade there are certain
makes of cigarette that burn well — they are mixed with
nitre — and these may be smoked by holding them in the
left hand and idly swinging them to and fro in the air.
If it were not for the public want of charity, I would
recommend a well-known brand. A Blade may always
escape a cigar by feigning a f astidious taste. " None of
your Cabanas " is rather good style.
The Blade, it must be understood — especially by the
Blade's friends — spends his time in a whirl of dissipation.
That is the symbolism of the emphatic obliquity of the
costume. First, he drinks. The Blade at Harrow, accord-
ing to a reliable authority, drinks cherry brandy and even
champagne ; other Blades consume whisky-and-soda ; the
less costly kind of Blade does it on beer. And here the
beginner is often at a loss. Let us say he has looked up
the street and down, ascertained that there are no aunts
in the air, and then plunged into his first public-house.
How shall he ask for his liquor ? "I will take a glass of
ale, if you please, Miss," seems tame for a Blade. It may
be useful to know a more suitable formula. Just at
present, we may assure the Blade neophyte, it is all the
rage to ask for " Two of swipes, ducky." Go in boldly,
bang down your money as loudly as possible, and shout
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OF BLADES AND BLADEEY 61
that out at the top of your voice. If it is a barman,
though, you had better not say " ducky." The slang will,
we can assure him, prove extremely effective.
Then the Blade gambles ; but over the gambling of the
Blade it is well to draw a veil — a partially translucent
and coquettish veil, through which we can see the thing
dimly, and enhanced in its enormity. You must patronise
the Turf, of course, and have money on horses, or you are
no Blade at all, but a mere stick. The Harrow Blade has
his book on all the big races in the calendar; and the
great and noble game of Nap— are not Blades its wor-
shippers wherever the sun shines and a pack of cards is
obtainable? Baccarat, too. Many a glorious Blade has
lost his whole term's pocket-money at a single sitting at
that noble game. And the conversation of the Blade
must always be brilliant in the extreme, like the flashing
of steel in the sunlight. It is usually cynical and worldly,
sometimes horrible enough to make a governess shudder,
but always epigrammatic. Epigrams and neat comparisons
are much easier to make than is vulgarly supposed.
" Schoolmasters hang about the crops of knowledge like
dead crows about a field, examples and warnings to greedy
souls." " Marriage is the beginning of philosophy, and
the end is, ' Do not marry/ " " All women are constant,
but some discover mistakes." "One is generally repentant
when .one is found out, and remorseful when one can't do
it again." A little practice, and this kind of thing may
be ground out almost without thinking. Occasionally, in
your conversation with ladies, you may let an oath slip.
(Better not let your aunt hear you.) Apologise humbly
at once, of course. But it will give them a glimpse of the
lurid splendour of your private life.
And that brings us to the central thing of the Blade's
life, the eternal Feminine ! Pity them, be a little sorry for
them — the poor souls cannot be Blades. They must e'en
sit and palpitate while the Blade flashes. The accomplished
Blade goes through life looking unspeakable wickedness
at everything feminine he meets, old and young, rich and
poor, one with another. He reeks with intrigue. Every
Blade has his secrets and mysteries in this matter — remorse
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62 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
even for crimes. You do not know all that his handsome
face may hide. Even he does not know. He may have
sat on piers and talked to shop-girls, kissed housemaids,
taken barmaids to music halls, conversed with painted
wickedness in public places — nothing is too much for him.
And oh ! the reckless protestations of love he has made,
the broken promises, the broken hearts ! Yet men must
be Blades, though women may weep; and every Blade
must take his barmaid to a music hall at least once, even
if she be taller than himself. Until then his manhood is
not assured.
Just one hint in conclusion. A Blade who collects
stamps, or keeps tame rabbits, or eats sweets, oranges, or
apples in the streets, or calls names publicly after his
Mends, is no Blade at all, but a boy still. So, with our
blessing, he swaggers on his way and is gone. A Don
Juan as fresh as spring, a rosebud desperado. May he
never come upon just cause for repentance !
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OF CLEVERNESS
Apropos of one crichton
Crichton is an extremely clever person — abnormally,
indeed almost unnaturally, so. He is not merely clever
at this or that, but clever all round; he gives you no
consolations. He goes about being needlessly brilliant.
He caps your jests and corrects your mistakes, and does
your special things over again in newer and smarter ways.
Any really well-bred man who presumed so far would at
least be plain or physically feeble, or unhappily married
by way of apology, but the idea of so much civility seems
never to have entered Crichton's head. He will come
into a room where we are jesting perhaps, and
immediately begin to flourish about less funny perhaps
but decidedly more brilliant jests, until at last we retire
one by one from the conversation and watch him with
savage, weary eyes over our pipes. He invariably beats
me at chess, invariably. People talk about him and ask
my opinion of him, and if I venture to criticise him they
begin to look as though they thought I was jealous.
Grossly favourable notices of his books and his pictures
crop up in the most unlikely places; indeed I have
almost given up newspapers on account of him. Yet,
after all
This cleverness is not everything. It never pleases
me, and I doubt sometimes if it pleases anyone.
Suppose you let off some clever little thing, a subtlety of
expression, a paradox, an allusive suggestive picture;
how does it affect ordinary people ? Those who are less
clever than yourself, the unspecialised, unsophisticated
average people, are simply annoyed by the puzzle you set
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them ; those whc> are cleverer find your cleverness mere
obvious stupidity ; and your equals, your competitors in
cleverness, are naturally your deadly rivals. The fact is
this cleverness, after all, is merely egotism in its worst
and un wisest phase. It is an incontinence of brilliance,
graceless and aggressive, a glaring swagger. The drunken
helot of cleverness is the creature who goes about making
puns. A mere step above comes the epigram, the isolated
epigram framed and glazed. Then such impressionist art
as Crichton's pictures, mere puns in paint. What they
mean is nothing, they arrest a quiet decent-minded man
like myself with the same spasmodic disgust as a pun in
literature — the subject is a transparent excuse ; they are
mere indecent and unedifying exhibitions of himself. He
thinks it is something superlative to do everything in a
startling way. He cannot even sign his name without
being offensive. He lacks altogether the fundamental
quality of a gentleman, the magnanimity to be common-
place. I
On the score of personal dignity, why should a young
man of respectable antecedents and some natural capacity
stoop to this kind of thing? To be clever is the last
desperate resort of the feeble, it is the merit of the
ambitious* slave. You cannot conquer vi et armis, you
cannot stomach a decent inferiority, so you resort to lively,
eccentric, and brain-wearying brilliance to ingratiate
yourself. The cleverest animal by far is the monkey, and
compare that creature's undignified activity with the
mountainous majesty of the elephant !
And I cannot help thinking, too, that cleverness must
be the greatest obstacle a man can possibly have in his
way upward in the world. One never sees really clever
p/eople in positions of trust, never widely influential or
deeply rooted. Look, for instance, at the Royal Academy,
at the Judges, at But there! The very idea of
cleverness is an all-round readiness and looseness that is
the very negation of stability.
Whenever Orichton has been particularly exasperating,
getting himself appreciated in a new quarter, or rising
above his former successes, I find some consolation in
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OF CLEVEENESS 65
thinking of my Uncle Augustus. He was the glory of our
family. Even Aunt Charlotte's voice drooped a little in
the mention of his name. He was conspicuous for an
imposing and even colossal stupidity : he rose to eminence
through it, and, what is more, to wealth and influence.
He was as reliable, as unlikely to alter his precise position,
or do anything unexpected, as the Pyramids of Egypt.
I do not know any topic upon which he was not
absolutely uninformed, and his contributions to con-
versation, delivered in that ringing baritone of his,
were appallingly dull. Often I have seen him utterly
flatten some cheerful clever person of the Crichton type
with one of his simple garden-roller remarks — plain, solid,
and heavy, which there was no possibility either of meet-
ing or avoiding. He was very successful in argument, and
yet he never fenced. He simply came down. It was, so
to speak, a case of small sword versus the avalanche. His
moral inertia was tremendous. He was never excited,
never anxious, never jaded; he was simply massive.
Cleverness broke upon him like shipping on an ironbound
coast. His monument is like him — a plain large obelisk
of coarse granite, unpretending in its simple ugliness and
prominent a mile off. Among the innumerable little
white sorrows of the cemetery it looks exactly as he used
to look among clever people.
Depend upon it cleverness is the antithesis of greatness.
The British Empire, like the Eoman, was built up by dull
men. It may be we shall be ruined by clever ones.
Imagine a regiment of lively and eccentric privates!
There never was a statesman yet who had not some
ballast of stupidity, and it seems to me that part at least
of the essentials of a genius is a certain divine dulness.
The people we used to call the masters — Shakespeare,
Raphael, Milton, and so forth — had a certain simplicity
Crichton lacks. They do not scintillate nearly so much
as he does, and they do not give that same uncom-
fortable feeling of internal strain. Even Homer nods.
There are restful places in their work, broad meadows
of breezy flatness, calms. But Crichton has no Pacific
Ocean to mitigate his everlasting weary passage of
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Cape Horn: it is all point and prominence, point and
prominence.
No doubt this Crichton is having a certain vogue now,
but it cannot last. I wish him no evil, of course, but I
cannot help thinking he will presently have had his day.
This epoch of cleverness must be very near its last flare.
The last and the abiding thought of humanity is peace.
A dull man will presently be sought like the shadow of
a great rock in a thirsty land. Dulness will be the New
Genius. " Give us dull books," people will cry, " great
dull restful pictures. We are weary, very weary." This
hectic, restless, incessant phase in which we travail— -fin-
de-sikcle, "decadent," and all the rest of it — will pass
away. A chubby, sleepy literature, large in aim, colossal
in execution, rotund and tranquil will lift its head. And
this Crichton will become a classic, Messrs. Mudie will
sell surplus copies of his works at a reduction, and I shall
cease to be worried by his disgusting success.
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THE POSE NOVEL
I watched the little spurts, of flame jet out from between
the writhing pages of my manuscript, watched the sheets
coil up in their fiery anguish and start one from another.
I helped the fire to the very vitals of the mass by poking
the brittle heap, and at last the sacrifice was over, the
flames turned from pink to blue and died out, the red
glow gave place to black, little luminous red streaks coiled
across the charred sheets and vanished at the margins,
and only the ashes of my inspiration remained. The ink
was a lustrous black on the dull blackness of the burnt
paper. I could still read this much of my indiscretion
remaining, " He smiled at them all and said nothing/ 1
" Fool ! " I said, and stirred the crackling mass into a
featureless heap of black scraps. Then with my chin on
my fists and elbows on knees I stared at the end of my
labours.
I suppose, after all, there has been some profit out of
the thing. Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands
to do, and one may well thank Heaven it was only a
novel. Still, it means many days out of my life, and I
would be glad to find some positive benefit accruing.
Clearly, in the first place, I have eased my mind of some
execrable English. I am cleaner now by some dozen
faulty phrases that I committed and saw afterwards in all
the nakedness of typewriting. (Thank Heaven for type-
writing! Were it not for that, this thing had gone to
the scoffing of some publisher's reader, and another had
known my shame.) And I shall not write another pose
novel.
I am inclined to think these pose novels the wild oats
of authorship. We sit down in the heyday of our youth
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68 CEETAIN PERSONAL MATTERS '
to write the masterpiece. Obviously, it must be a novel
about a man and a woman, and something as splendid as
we can conceive of in that way. We look about us. We
do not go far for perfection. One of the brace holds the
pen and the other is inside his or her head ; and so Off!
to the willing pen. Only a few years ago we went
slashing among the poppies with a walking-stick, and
were, we said boldly and openly, Harolds and Hectors
slaying our thousands. Now of course we are grown up
to self-respect, and must needs be a little disingenuous
about it. But as the story unfolds there is no mistaking
the likeness, in spite of the transfiguration. This bold,
decided man who performs such deeds of derring-do in
the noisome slum, knocks down the burly wife-beater,
rescues an unmistakable Miss Clapton from the knife of a
Lascar, and is all the while cultivating a virtuous con-
sumption that stretches him on an edifying, pathetic, and
altogether beautiful deathbed in the last chapter
My dear Authorling, cry my friends, we hear the squeak
of that little voice of yours in every word he utters. Is
that what you aspire to be, that twopence-coloured edition
of yourself ? Heaven defend you from your desires !
Yet there was a singular fascination in writing the
book ; to be in anticipation my own sympathetic historian,
to joy with my joys yet to come, and sorrow with my
sorrows, to bear disaster like a man, and at last to close
my own dear eyes, and with a swelling heart write my
own epitaph. The pleasure remained with me until I
reached the end. How admirably I strutted in front of
myself! And I and the better self of me that was
flourishing about in the book — we pretended not to know
each other for what we were. He was myself with a wig
and a sham visiting card, and I owed it to myself to
respect my disguise. I made him with very red hair —
my hair is fairly dark — and shifted his university from
London to Cambridge. Clearly it could not be the same
person, I argued. But I endowed him with all the
treasures of myself ; I made him say all the good things
I might have said had I thought of them opportunely,
and all the noble thoughts that occurred to me afterwards
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THU POSE NOVEL 69
occurred to him at the time. He was myself — myself
at a premium, myself without any drawbacks, the quint-
essence and culmination of me. And yet somehow when
he came back from the typewriter he seemed a bit of
an ass.
Probably every tadpole author writes a pose novel — at
least I hope so for the sake of my self-respect. Most,
after my fashion, burn the thing, or benevolent publishers
lose it. It is an ill thing if by some accident the tadpole
tale survives the tadpole stage. The authoress does the
feminine equivalent, but I should judge either that she
did it more abundantly or else that she burned less. Has
she never swept past you with a scornful look, disdained
you in all the pride of her beauty, rippled laughter at
you, or amazed you with her artless girlishness? And
even after the early stages some of the trick may survive,
unless I read books with malice instead of charity. I
must confess, though, that I have a weakness for finding
mine author among his puppets. I conceive him always
taking the best parts, like an actor-manager or a little
boy playing with his sisters. I do not read many novels
with sincere belief, and I like to get such entertainment
from them as I can. So that these artless little self-
revelations are very sweet and precious to me among all
the lay figures, tragedy and comedy. Since the deception
is transparent I make the most of the transparency, and
love to see the clumsy fingers on the strings of the
marionettes. And this will be none the less pleasant now
that I have so narrowly escaped giving this entertainment
to others.
I suppose this stage is a necessary one. We begin
with ignorance and the imagination, the material of the
pose novel. Later come self-knowledge, disappointments
and self-consciousness, and the prodigals of fiction stay
themselves upon the husks of epigram and cynicism, and
in the place of artless aspiration are indeed in plain black
and white very desperate characters. It is after all only
another pose — the pose of not posing. We, the common
clay of the world of letters, must needs write in this way,
because we cannot forget our foolish little selves in our
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work. But some few there are who sit as gods above
their private universes, and write without passion or
vanity. At least, so I have been told. These be the true
artists of letters, the white windows upon the truth of
things. "We by comparison are but stained glass in our
own honour, and do but obstruct the view with our halos
and attitudes. Yet even Shakespeare, the critics tell us —
and they say they know — posed in the character of
Hamlet.
After all, the pose novel method has at times attained
to the level of literature. Charlotte Bronte might possibly
have found no other topic had she disdained the plain
little woman with a shrewish tongue; and where had
Charles Kingsley been if the vision of a curate rampant
had not rejoiced his heart? Still, I am not sorry that
this novel is burned. Even now it was ridiculous, and
the time might have come when this book, full of high,
if foolish aims, and the vain vast promise of well-meaning
youth, had been too keen a reproach to be endured. Three
volumes of good intentions ! It is too much. There was
more than a novel burning just now. After this I shall
be in a position to take a humorist's view of life.
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THE VETERAN CRICKETER
My old cricketer was seized, he says, some score of years
ago now, by sciatica, clutched indeed about the loins there-
by, and forcibly withdrawn from the practice of the art ;
since when a certain predisposition to a corpulent habit
has lacked its natural check of exercise, and a broadness
almost Dutch has won upon him. Were it not for this,
which renders his contours and his receding aspect un-
seemly, he would be indeed a venerable-looking person,
having a profile worthy of a patriarch, tinged though it
may be with an unpatriarchal jollity, and a close curly
beard like that of King David. He lives by himself in
a small cottage outside the village — hating women with
an unaccountable detestation — and apparently earns a
precarious livelihood, and certainly the sincere aversion
of the country side, by umpiring in matches, and playing
whist and " Nap " with such as will not be so discreet and
economical as to bow before his superior merit.
His neighbours do not like him, because he will not
take their cricket or their whist seriously, because he
will persist in offering counsel and the stimulus of his
gift of satire. All whist than his he avers is " Bumble-
puppy." His umpiring is pedagogic in tone ; he fails to
see the contest in the game. To him, who has heard his
thousands roar as the bails of the best of All England went
spinning, these village matches are mere puerile exercises
to be corrected. His corrections, too, are Olympian, done,
as it were, in red ink, vivid, and without respect of
persons. Particularly he gibes. He never uses vulgar
bad language himself, but has a singular power of
engendering it in others. He has a word " gaby," which
he will sometimes enlarge to " stuppid gaby," the which,
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72 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
flung neatly into a man who has just missed a catch, will
fill the same with a whirl of furious curses difficult to
restrain. And if perchance one should escape, my ancient
cricketer will be as startled as Cadmus at the crop he has
sown. And not only startled but pained at human wicked-
ness and the follies of a new generation. " Why can't
you play without swearing, Muster Gibbs ? " he will say,
catching the whispered hope twenty yards away, and
proclaiming it to a censorious world. And so Gibbs,
our grocer and draper, and one made much of by the
vicar, is shamed before the whole parish, and damned even
as he desired.
To our vicar, a well-meaning, earnest, and extremely
nervous man, he displays a methodical antagonism. Our
vicar is the worst of all possible rural vicars — unripe, a
glaring modern, no classical scholar, no lover of nature,
offensively young and yet not youthful, an indecent
politician. He was meant to labour amid Urban Myriads,
to deal with Social Evils, Home Rule, the Woman Question,
and the Reunion of Christendom, attend Conferences and
go with the Weltgeist — damn him! — wherever the Weltgeist
is going. He presents you jerkily — a tall lean man of
ascetic visage and ample garments, a soul clothed not so
much in a fleshy body as in black flaps that ever trail
behind its energy. Where they made him Heaven knows.
No university owns him. It may be he is a renegade
Dissenting minister, neither good Church nor wholesome
Nonconformity. Him my cricketer regards with malig-
nant respect. Respect he shows by a punctilious touch-
ing of his hat brim, directed to the sacred office ; all the
rest is malignity, and aimed at the man that fills it.
They come into contact on the cricket-field, and on the
committee of our reading-room. For our vicar, in spite
of a tendency to myopia, conceives it his duty to encourage
cricket by his participation. Duty — to encourage cricket !
So figure the scene to yourself. The sunlit green, and
a match in progress, — the ball has just snipped a stump
askew, — my ancient, leaning on a stout cabbage stick, and
with the light overcoat that is sacred to umpires upon
his arm.
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THE VETERAN CftlCKETER 73
^ Out, Billy Durgan," says he, and adds, ex cathedrd,
"and one you ought to ha' hit for four."
Then appears our vicar in semi-canonicals, worn "to
keep up his position," or some such folly, nervous about
the adjustment of his hat and his eyeglasses. He
approaches the pitch, Smiling the while to show his
purely genial import and to anticipate and explain any
amateurish touches. He reaches the wicket and poses
himself, as the convenient book he has studied directs.
" You'll be caught, Muster Shackleforth, if you keep your
shoulder up like that," says the umpire. " Ya-a-ps ! that's
worse ! " — forgetting himself in his zeal for attitude. And
then a voice cries " Play ! "
The vicar swipes wildly, cuts the ball for two, and
returns to his wicket breathless but triumphant. Next
comes a bye, and then over. The misguided cleric, ever
pursuing a theory of foolish condescension to his betters
at the game, and to show there is no offence at the
"Yaaps," takes the opportunity, although panting, of
asking my ancient if his chicks — late threatened with
staggers — are doing well. What would he think if my
cricketer retaliated by asking, in the pause before the
sermon, how the vicarage pony took his last bolus ? The
two men do not understand one another. My cricketer
waves the hens aside, and revenges himself, touching his
hat at intervals, by some offensively obvious remarks — as
to a mere beginner — about playing with a straight bat.
And the field sniggers none too furtively. I sympathise
with his malice. Cricket is an altogether too sacred thing
to him to be tampered with on merely religious grounds.
However, our vicar gets himself caught at the first
opportunity, and so being removed from my veteran's
immediate environment, to their common satisfaction, the
due ritual of the great game is resumed.
My ancient cricketer abounds in reminiscence of the
glorious days that have gone for ever. He can still
recall the last echoes of the " throwing " controversy that
agitated Nyren, when over-arm bowling began, and though
he never played himself in a beaver hat, he can, he says,
recollect seeing matches so played. In those days every-
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74 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTEES
one wore tall hats — the policeman, the milkman, workmen
of all sorts. Some people I fancy must have hathed in
them and gone to bed wearing them. He recalls the
Titans of that and the previous age, and particularly
delights in the legend of Noah Mann, who held it a light
thing to walk twenty miles from Northchapel to Hamble-
don to practise every Tuesday afternoon, and wander back
after dark. He himself as a stripling would run a matter
of four miles, after a day's work in the garden where he
was employed, to attend an hour's practice over the downs
before the twilight made the balls invisible. And after-
wards came Teutonic revelry or wanderings under the
summer starlight, as the mood might take him. For
there was a vein of silent poetry in the youth of
this man.
He hates your modern billiard-table pitch, and a bat-
ting of dexterous snickery. He likes "character" in a
game, gigantic hitting forward, bowler - planned leg
catches, a cunning obliquity in a wicket that would send
the balls mysteriously askew. But dramatic breaks are
now a thing unknown in trade cricket. One legend of
his I doubt ; he avers that once at Brighton, in a match
between Surrey and Sussex, he saw seven wickets bowled
by some such aid in two successive overs. I have never
been able to verify this. I believe that, as a matter of
fact, the thing has never occurred, but he tells it often
in a fine crescendo of surprise, and the refrain, " Out he
came." His first beginning is a cheerful anecdote of a
crew of "young gentlemen" from Cambridge staying at
the big house, and a challenge to the rustic talent of
"me and Billy Hall," who "played a bit at that time,"
" of me and Billy Hall " winning the pitch and going in
first, of a memorable if uncivil stand at the wickets
through a long hot afternoon, and a number of young
gentlemen from Cambridge painfully discovering local
talent by exhaustive fielding in the park, a duty they
honourably discharged.
I am fond of my old cricketer, in spite of a certain
mendacious and malign element in him. His yarns of
gallant stands and unexpected turns of fortune, of
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Mffi VETERA& CRICKETER 75
memorable hits and eccentric umpiring, albeit tending
sometimes incredibly to his glory, are full of the flavour
of days well spent, of bright mornings of play, sunlit
sprawlings beside the score tent, warmth, the flavour of
bitten grass stems, and the odour of crushed turf. One
seems to hear the clapping hands of village ancients, and
their ululations of delight. One thinks of stone jars with
cool drink swishing therein, of shouting victories and
memorable defeats, of eleven men in a drag, and tuneful
and altogether glorious home-comings by the light of
the moon. His were the Olympian days of the sport,
when noble squires were its patrons, and every village a
home and nursery of stalwart cricketers, before the epoch
of special trains, gate-money, star elevens, and the tumult-
uous gathering of idle cads to jabber at a game they
cannot play.
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CONCERNING A CERTAIN LADY
This lady wears a blue serge suit and a black hat, without
flippancy; she is a powerfully built lady and generally
more or less flushed, and she is aunt, apparently, to a
great number of objectionable-looking people. I go in
terror of her. Yet the worm will turn at last, and so
will the mild, pacific literary man. Her last outrage was
too much even for my patience. It was committed at
Gloucester Road Station the other afternoon. I was
about to get into a train for Wimbledon, — and there are
only two of them to the hour, — and, so far as I could see,
the whole world was at peace with me. I felt perfectly
secure. The aegis of the pax Britannica — if you will
pardon the expression — was over me. For the moment
the thought of the lady in the blue serge was quite out
of my mind. I had just bought a newspaper, and had
my hand on the carriage door. The guard was fluttering
his flag.
Then suddenly she swooped out of space, out of the
infinite unknown, and hit me. She always hits me when
she comes near me, and I infer she hits everyone she
comes across. She hit me this time in the chest with her
elbow and knocked me away from the door-handle. She
hit me very hard; indeed, she was as fierce as I have
ever known her. With her there were two nieces and a
nephew, and the nephew hit me too. He was a horrid
little boy in an Eton suit of the kind that they do not
wear at Eton, and he hit me with his head and pushed
at me with his little pink hands. The nieces might have
been about twenty-two and thirteen respectively, and I
infer that they were apprenticed to her. All four people
seemed madly excited. "It's just starting!" they
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CONCERNING A CEETAIN LADY 77
screamed, and the train was, indeed, slowly moving.
Their object — so far as they had an object and were not
animated by mere fury — appeared to be to assault me
and then escape in the train. The lady in blue got in
and then came backwards out again, sweeping the smaller
girl behind her upon the two others, who were engaged
in hustling me. "It's 'smoking I'" she cried. I could
have told her that, if she had asked instead of hitting me.
The elder girl, by backing dexterously upon me, knocked
my umbrella out of my hand, and when I stooped to pick
it up the little boy knocked my hat off. I will confess
they demoralised me with their archaic violence. I had
some thought of joining in their wild amuck, whooping,
kicking out madly, perhaps assaulting a porter,— I think
the lady in blue would have been surprised to find what
an effective addition to her staff she had picked up, — but
before I could collect my thoughts sufficiently to do any
definite thing the whole affair was over. A porter was
slamming doors on them, the train was running fast out
of the station, and I was left alone with an unmannerly
newsboy and an unmannerly porter on the platform. I
waited until the porter was out of the way, and then I
hit the newsboy for laughing at me, but even with that
altercation it was a tedious wait for the next train to
Wimbledon.
This is the latest of my encounters with this lady, but
it has decided me to keep silence no longer. She has
been persecuting me now for years in all parts of London.
It may be I am her only victim, but, on the other hand,
she may be in the habit of annoying the entire class of
slender and inoffensive young men. If so, and they will
communicate with me through the publishers of this
little volume, we might do something towards suppressing
her, found an Anti-Energetic-Lady-League, or something
of that sort. For if there was ever a crying wrong that
clamoured for suppression it is this violent woman.
She is, even now, flagrantly illegal. She might be
given in charge for hitting people at any time, and be
warned, or fined, or given a week. But somehow it is
only when she is overpast and I am recovering my wits
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78 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
that I recollect that she might be dealt with in this way.
She is the chartered libertine of British matrons, and
assaulteth where she listeth. The blows I have endured
from her ? She fights people who are getting into 'buses.
It is no mere accidental jostling, but a deliberate
shouldering, poking with umbrellas, and clawing. It is
her delight to go to the Regent Circus corner of Piccadilly,
about half -past seven in the evening, accompanied by a
genteel rout of daughters, and fill up whole omnibuses
with them. At that hour there are work-girls and tired
clerks, and the like worn-out anaemic humanity trying to
get home for an hour or so of rest before bed, and they
crowd round the 'buses very eagerly. They are little
able to cope with her exuberant vitality, being ill-nourished
and tired from the day's work, and she simply mows
through them and fills up every vacant place they covet
before their eyes. Then, I can never count change even
when my mind is tranquil, and she knows that, and
swoops threateningly upon me in booking offices and
stationers' shops. When I am dodging cabs at crossings
she will appear from behind an omnibus or carriage and
butt into me furiously. She holds her umbrella in her
folded arms just as the Punch puppet does his staff, and
with as deadly effect. Sometimes she discards her
customary navy blue and puts on a glittering bonnet with
bead trimmings, and goes and hurts people who are
waiting to enter the pit at theatres, and especially to hurt
me. She is fond of public .shows, because they afford
such possibilities of hurting me. Once I saw her standing
partly on a seat and partly on another lady in the church
of St. George's, Hanover Square, partly, indeed, watching
a bride cry, nut chiefly, I expect, scheming how she could
get round to me and hurt me. Then there was an
occasion at tHe Academy when she was peculiarly
aggressive. I was sitting next my lame friend when she
marked me. Of course she came at once and sat right
upon us. "Come along, Jane," I heard her say, as I
struggled to draw my flattened remains from under her ;
" this gentleman will make room."
My friend was not so entangled and had escaped on the
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CONCEKNING A CEKTAIN LADY 79
other side. She noticed his walk. " Oh, don't you get
up," she said. " This gentleman/' she indicated my
convulsive struggles to free myself, " will do that. / did
not see that you were a cripple"
It may be some of my readers will recognise the lady
now. It can be — for the honour of womankind — only
one woman. She is an atavism, a survival of the age of
violence, a Palaeolithic squaw in petticoats. I do not
know her name and address or I would publish it I do
not care if she kills me the next time she meets me, for
the limits of endurance have been passed. If she kills
me I shall die a martyr in the cause of the Queen's peace.
And if it is only one woman, then it was the same lady,
more than half intoxicated, that I saw in the Whitechapel
Eoad cruelly ill-treating a little costermonger. If it was
not she it was certainly her sister, and I do not care who
knows it.
What to do with her I do not know. A League, after
all, seems ineffectual ; she would break up any League. I
have thought of giving her in charge for assault, but I
shrink from the invidious publicity of that. Still, I am
in grim earnest to do something. I think at times that
the compulsory adoption of a narrow doorway for churches
and places of public entertainment might be some pro-
tection for quiet, inoffensive people. How she would
rage outside to be sure ! Yet that seems a great under-
taking.
But this little paper is not so much a plan of campaign
as a preliminary defiance. Life is a doubtful boon while
one is never safe from assault, from hitting and shoving,
from poking with umbrellas, being sat upon, and used as
a target for projectile nephews and nieces. I warn her
— possibly with a certain quaver in my voice — that I am
in revolt. If she hits me again I will not say the
precise thing I will do, but I warn her, very solemnly and
deliberately, that she had better not hit me again.
And so for the present the matter remains.
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THE SHOPMAN
If I were really opulent, I would not go into a shop at all
— I would have a private secretary. If I were really
determined, Euphemia would do these things. As it is,
I find buying things in a shop the most exasperating of
all the many trying duties of life. I am sometimes
almost tempted to declare myself Adamite to escape it.
The way the shopman eyes you as you enter his den, the
very spread of his fingers, irritate me. " What can I have
the pleasure ? " he says, bowing forward at me, and with
his eye on my chin — and so waits.
Now I hate incomplete sentences, and confound his
pleasure! I don't go into a shop to give a shopman
pleasure. But your ordinary shopman must needs
pretend you delight and amuse him. I say, trying to
display my dislike as plainly as possible, "Gloves/'
" Gloves, yessir," he says. Why should he ? I suppose
he thinks I require to be confirmed in my persuasion that
I want gloves. "Calf — kid — dogskin?" How should /
know the technicalities of his traffic ? " Ordinary gloves,"
I say, disdaining his petty distinctions. "About what
price, sir ? " he asks.
Now that always maddens me. Why should I be
expected to know the price of gloves? I'm not a
commercial traveller nor a wholesale dealer, and I don't
look like one. Neither am I constitutionally parsimonious
nor petty. I am a literary man, unworldly, and I wear
long hair and a soft hat and a peculiar overcoat to indicate
the same to ordinary people. Why, I say, should I know
the price of gloves? I know they are some ordinary
price— elevenpence-half penny, or three-and-six, or seven-
and-six, or something — one of those prices that everything
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THE SHOPMAN 81
is sold at — but further I don't go. Perhaps I say eleven-
pence-halfpenny at a venture.
His face lights up with quiet malice. "Don't keep
them, sir," he says. I can tell by his expression that I
am ridiculously low, and so being snubbed. I think of
trying with three-and-six, or seven-and-six ; the only
other probable prices for things that I know, except a
guinea and five pounds. Then I see the absurdity of the
business, and my anger comes surging up.
" Look here ! " I say, as bitterly as possible. " I don't
come here to play at Guessing Games. Never mind
your prices. I want some gloves. Get me some ! "
This- cows him* a little, but very little. "May I ask
your size, sir ? " he says, a trifle more respectfully.
One would think I spent all my time remembering the
size of my gloves. However, it is no good resenting it.
" It's either seven or nine," I say in a tired way.
He just begins another question, and then he catches
my eye and stops and goes away to obtain some gloves,
and I get a breathing space. But why do they keep on
with this cross-examination ? If I knew exactly what I
wanted — description, price, size — I should not go to a shop
at all, it would save me such a lot of trouble just to send
a cheque to the Stores. The only reason why I go into a
tradesman's shop is because I don't know what I want
exactly, am in doubt about the name or the size, or the
price, or the fashion, and want a specialist to help me.
The only reason for having shopmen instead of automatic
machines is that one requires help in buying things.
When I want gloves, the shopman ought to understand
his business sufficiently well to know better than I do
what particular kind of gloves I ought to be wearing, and
what is a fair price for them. I don't see why I should
teach him what is in fashion and what is not. A doctor
does not ask you what kind of operation you want and
what price you will pay for it. But I really believe
these outfitter people would let me run about London
wearing white cotton gloves and a plaid comforter with-
out lifting a finger to prevent me.
And, by the bye, that reminds me of a scandalous trick
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82 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
these salesmen will play you. Sometimes they have not
the thing you want, and then they make you buy other
things. I happen to have, through no fault of my own, a
very small head, and consequently for one long summer I
wore a little boy's straw hat about London with the colours
of a Paddington Board School, simply because a rascal
outfitter hadn't my size in a proper kind of headgear,
and induced me to buy the thing by specious repre-
sentations. He must have known perfectly well it was not
what I ought to wear. It seems never to enter into a
shopman's code of honour that he ought to do his best for
his customer. Since that, however, I have noticed lots of
people about who have struck me in a new light as
triumphs of the salesman, masterpieces in the art of
incongruity ; age in the garb of youth, corpulence put off
with the size called "slender men's"; unhappy, gentle,
quiet men with ties like oriflammes, breasts like a king-
fisher's, and cataclysmal trouser patterns. Even so, if the
shopkeeper had his will, should we all be. Those poor
withered maiden ladies, too, who fill us with a kind of
horror, with their juvenile curls, their girlish crudity of
colouring, their bonnets, giddy, tottering, hectic. It over-
comes me with remorse to think that I myself- have
accused them of vanity and folly. It overcomes me with
pain to hear the thoughtless laugh aloud after them, in
the public ways. For they are simply short-sighted
trustful people, the myopic victims of the salesman
and saleswoman. The little children gibe at them, pelt
even. . . . And somewhere in the world a draper goes
unhung.
However, the gloves are bought. I select a pair
haphazard, and he pretends to perceive they fit perfectly
by putting them over the back of my hand. I make him
assure me of the fit, and then buy the pair and proceed to
take my old ones off and put the new on grimly. If they
split or the fingers are too long — glovemakers have the
most erratic conceptions of the human finger — I have to
buy another pair.
But the trouble only begins when you have bought your
thing. "Nothing more, sir?" he says. "Nothing" I
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THE SHOPMAN % 83
say. " Braces ? " he says. " No, thank you," I say. " Collars,
cuffs ? " He looks at mine swiftly but keenly, and with
an unendurable suspicion.
He goes on, item after item. Am I in rags, that I
should endure this thing? And I get sick of my
everlasting "No, thank you" — the monotony shows up
so glaringly against his kaleidoscope variety. I feel all
the unutterable pettiness, the mean want of enterprise
of my poor little purchase compared with the catholic
fling he suggests. I feel angry with myself for being
thus played upon, furiously angry with him. " No, no I"
I say.
" These tie-holders are new." He proceeds to show me
his infernal tie-holders. " They prevent the tie puckering,"
he says with his eye on mine. It's no good. "How
much ? " I say.
This whets him to further outrage. "Look here, my
man !" I say at last, goaded to it, "I came here for gloves.
After endless difficulties I at last induced you to let me
have gloves. I have also been intimidated, by the most
shameful hints and insinuations, into buying that beastly
tie-holder. I'm not a child that I don't know my own
needs. Now will you let me go? How much do you
want ? "
That usually checks him.
The above is a fair specimen of a shopman — a favourable
rendering. There are other things they do, but I simply
cannot write about them because it irritates me so to think
of them. One infuriating manoeuvre is to correct your
pronunciation. Another is to make a terrible ado about
your name and address — even when it is quite a well-
known name.
After I have bought things at a shop I am quite unfit
for social intercourse. I have to go home and fume.
There was a time when Euphemia would come and dis-
cuss my purchase with a certain levity, but on one
occasion ....
Some day these shopmen will goad me too far. It's
almost my only consolation, indeed, to think what I am
going to do when I do break out. There is a salesman
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84 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
somewhere in the world, he going on his way and I on
mine, who will, I know, prove my last straw. It may be
he will read this — amused — recking little of the mysteries
of fate. ... Is killing a salesman murder, like lolling a
human being ?
i
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THE BOOK OF CURSES
Pbofessor Gabgoylb, you must understand, has travelled
to and fro in the earth, culling flowers of speech : a kind
of recording angel he is, but without any sentimental
tears. To be plain, he studies swearing. His collection,
however, only approaches completeness in the western
departments of European language. Going eastward he
found such an appalling and tropical luxuriance of these
ornaments as to despair at last altogether of even a repre-
sentative selection. "They do not curse," he says, "at
door-handles, and shirt-studs, and such other trifles as will
draw down the meagre discharge of an Occidental, but
when they do begin
" I hired a promising-looking man at Calcutta, and after
a month or so refused to pay his wages. He was unable
to get at me with the big knife he carried, because the
door was locked, so he sat on his hams outside under the
verandah, from a quarter-past six in the morning until
nearly ten, cursing — cursing in one steady unbroken flow
— an astonishing spate of blasphemy. First he cursed my
family, from me along the female line back to Eve, and
then, having toyed with me personally for a little while,
he started off along the line of my possible posterity to
my remotest great-grandchildren. Then he cursed me by
this and that. My hand ached taking it down, he was
so very rich. It was a perfect anthology of Bengali
blasphemy — vivid, scorching, and variegated. Not two
alike. And then he turned about and dealt with different
parts of me. I was really very fortunate in him. Yet
it was depressing to think that all this was from one
man, and that there are six hundred million people in
Asia,"
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86 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
" Naturally," said the Professor in answer to my question,
" these investigations involve a certain element of danger.
The first condition of curse-collecting is to be unpopular,
especially in the East, where comminatory swearing alone
is practised, and you have to offend a man very grievously
to get him to disgorge his treasure. In this country,
except among ladies in comparatively humble circum-
stances, anything like this fluent, explicit, detailed, and
sincere cursing, aimed, missile - fashion, at a personal
enemy, is not found. It was quite common a few
centuries ago ; indeed, in the Middle Ages it was part of
the recognised procedure. Aggrieved parties would issue
a father's curse, an orphan's curse, and so forth, much as
we should take out a county court summons. And it
played a large part in ecclesiastical policy too. At one
time the entire Church militant here on earth was
swearing in unison, and the Latin tongue, at the Republic
of Venice — a very splendid and imposing spectacle. It
seems to me a pity to let these old customs die out so
completely. I estimate that more than half these Gothic
forms have altogether passed out of memory. There must
have been some splendid things in Erse and Gaelic too ;
for the Celtic mind, with its more vivid sense of colour,
its quicker transitions, and deeper emotional quality, has
ever over-cursed the stolid Teuton. But it is all getting
forgotten.
" Indeed, your common Englishman now scarcely curses
at all. A more colourless and conventional affair than
what in England is called swearing one can scarcely
imagine. It is just common talk, with some half-dozen
orthodox bad words dropped in here and there in the
most foolish and illogical manner. Fancy having orthodox
unorthodox words ! I remember one day getting into a
third-class smoking carriage on the Metropolitan Railway
about one o'clock, and finding it full of rough working men.
Everything they said was seasoned with one incredibly
stupid adjective, and no doubt they thought they were
very desperate characters. At last I asked them not to
say that word again. One forthwith asked me 'What
the ' — I really cannot quote these puerilities — ' what
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THE BOOK OF CUESES 87
the idiotic elicM that mattered to me?' So I looked at
him quietly over my glasses, and I began. It was a
revelation to these poor fellows. They sat open-mouthed,
gasping. Then those that were nearest me began to edge
away, and at the very next station they all bundled out
of the carriage before the train stopped, as though I had
some infectious disease. And the thing was just a rough
imperfect rendering of some mere commonplaces, passing
the time of day as it were, with which the heathen of
Aleppo used to favour the servants of the American
missionary. Indeed," said Professor Gargoyle, " if it were
not for women there would be nothing in England that
one could speak of as swearing at all."
"I say," said I, "is not that rather rough on the
ladies?"
"Not at all; they have agreed to consider certain
words, for no very good reason, bad words. It is a pure
convention ; it has little or nothing to do with the actual
meaning, because for every one of these bad words there
is a paraphrase or synonym considered to be quite suitable
for polite ears. Hence the feeblest creature can always
produce a sensation by breaking the taboo. But women
are learning how to undo this error of theirs now. The
word ' damn/ for instance, is, I hear, being admitted freely
into the boudoir and feminine conversation; it is even
considered a rather prudish thing to object to this word.
Now, men, especially feeble men, hate doing things that
women do. As a consequence, men who go about saying
' damn ' are now regarded by their fellow-men as only a
shade less effeminate than those who go about saying ' nasty '
and ' horrid/ The subtler sex will not be long in noticing
what has happened to this objectionable word. When
they do they will, of course, forthwith take up all the others.
It will be a little startling perhaps at first, but in the end
there will be no swearing left. I have no doubt there
will be those who will air their petty wit on the pioneer
women, but where a martyr is wanted a woman can
always be found to offer herself. She will clothe herself
in cursing, like the ungodly, and perish in that Nessus
shirt, a martyr to pure language. And then this dull c$d
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swearing — a mere unnecessary affectation of coarseness —
will disappear. And a very good job too.
" There is a pretty department of the subject which I
might call grace swearing. ' Od's fish/ cried the king,
when he saw the man climbing Salisbury spire ; ' he shall
have a patent for it — no one else shall do it/ One might
call such little things Wardour Street curses. 'Od's
bodkins ' is a ladylike form, and ' Od's possles ' a variety
I met in the British Museum. Every gentleman once
upon a time aspired to have his own particular grace
curse, just as he liked to have his crest, and his book-
plate, and his characteristic signature. It fluttered
pleasantly into his conversation, as Mr. Whistler's butter-
fly comes into his pictures — a signature and a delight.
' Od's butterfly ! ' I have sometimes thought of a little
book of grace -words and heraldic curses, printed with
wide margins on the best of paper. Its covers should be
of soft red leather, stamped with little gold flowers. It
might be made a birthday book, or a pocket diary —
'Daily Invocations/
"Coming back to wrathy swearing, I must confess I
am sorry to see it decay. It was such a thoroughly
hygienic and moral practice. You see, if anything
annoying happens to a man, or if any powerful emotion
seizes him, his brain under the irritation begins to dis-
engage energy at a tremendous rate. He has to use all
his available force of control in keeping the energy in.
Some of it will leak away into the nerves of his face and
distort his features, some may set his tear-glands at work,
some may travel down his vagus nerve and inhibit his
heart's action so that he faints, or upset the blood-vessels
in his head and give him a stroke. Or if he pens it up,
without its reaching any of these vents, it may rise at last
to flood -level, and you will have violent assaults, the
breaking of furniture, 'murther' even. For all this
energy a good flamboyant, ranting swear is Nature's out-
let. All primitive men and most animals swear. It is an
emotional shunt. Your cat swears at you because she
does not want to scratch your face. And the horse,
because he cannot swear, drops dead. So you see my
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THE BOOK OF CUESES 89
reason for regretting the decay of this excellent and most
wholesome practice. . . .
"However, I must be getting on. Just now I am
travelliug about London paying cabmen their legal fares.
Sometimes one picks up a new variant, though much of
it is merely stereo."
And with that, fliugiug a playful curse at me, he dis-
appeared at once into the tobacco smoke from which I
had engendered him. An amusing and cheerful person^
on the whole, though I will admit his theme was a little
undesirable.
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DUNSTONE'S DEAR LADY
The story of Dunstone is so slight, so trivial in its
cardinal incidents, such a business of cheap feathers and
bits of ribbon on the surface, that I should hesitate to tell
it, were it not for its Inwardness, what one might call the
symbolism of the thing. Frankly, I do not clearly see
what that symbolism is, but I feel it hovering in some
indefinable way whenever I recall his case. It is one of
those things that make a man extend his arm and twiddle
his fingers, and say, blinking, " like that, you know." So
do not. imagine for one moment that this is a shallow
story, simply because it is painted, so to speak, not in
heart's blood but in table claret.
Dunstone was a strong, quiet kind of man — a man of
conspicuous mediocrity, and rising rapidly, therefore, in
his profession. He was immensely industrious, and a
little given to melancholia in private life* He smoked
rather too many cigars, and took his social occasions
seriously. He dressed faultlessly, with a scrupulous
elimination of style. Unlike Mr. Grant Allen's ideal man,
he was not constitutionally a lover; indeed, he seemed
not to like the ordinary girl at all — found her either too
clever or too shallow, lacking a something. I don't think
he knew quite what it was. Neither do I — it is a case for
extended hand and twiddling fingers. Moreover, I don't
think the ordinary girl took to Dunstone very much.
He suffered, I fancy, from a kind of mental greyness ;
he was all subtle tones ; the laughter of girls jarred upon
him ; foolish smartness or amiable foolishness got on his
nerves ; he detested, with equal sincerity, bright dressing,
artistic dabbling, piety, and the glow of health. And
when, as his confidential friend — confidential, that is, sq
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DUNSTONE'S DEAR LADY 91
far as his limits allowed — I heard that he intended to
marry, I was really very much surprised.
I expected something quintessential; I was surprised
to find she was a visiting governess. Harringay, the
artist, thought there was nothing in her, but Sackbut, the
art critic, was inclined to admire her bones. For my own
part, I took rather a liking to her. She was small and
thin, and, to be frank, I think it was because she hardly
got enough to eat — of the delicate food she needed. She
was shabby, too, dressed in rusty mourning — she had
recently lost her mother. But she had a sweet, low voice,
a shrinking manner, rather a graceful carriage, I thought,
and, though she spoke rarely, all she said was sweet and
sane. She struck me as a refined woman in a blatant age.
The general effect of her upon me was favourable ; upon
Dunstone it was tremendous. He lost a considerable
proportion of his melancholia, and raved at times like a
common man. He called her in particular his "Dear
Lady " and his " Sweet Lady," things that I find eloquent of
what he found in her. What that was I fancy I under-
stand, and yet I cannot say it quite. One has to resort to
the extended arm and fingers vibratile.
Before he married her — which he did while she was still
in half-mourning — there was anxiety about her health,
and I understood she needed air and exercise and strength-
ening food. But she recovered rapidly after her marriage,
her eyes grew brighter, we saw less of Sackbut's " delicious
skeleton." And then, in the strangest way, she began to
change. It is none of my imagining ; I have heard the
change remarked upon by half a dozen independent
observers. Yet you would think a girl of three-and-
twenty (as she certainly was) had attained her development
as a woman. I have heard her compared to a winter
bud, cased in its sombre scales, until the sun shone, and
the warm, moist winds began to blow. I noticed first
that the delicate outline of her cheek was filling, and
then came the time when she reverted to colour in her
dress.
Her first essays were charitably received. Her years of
struggle, her year of mourning, hac} jxo doubt dwarfed her
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92 CEETAIN PEESONAL MATTEES
powers in this direction ; presently her natural good taste
would reassert itself. But the next effort and the next
were harder to explain. It was not the note of nervous-
ness or inexperience we saw; there was an undeniable
decision, and not a token of shame. The little black
winter bud grew warm-coloured above, and burst suddenly
into extravagant outlines and chromatic confusion.
Harringay, who is a cad, first put what we were all feeling
into words. " I've just seen Dunstone and his donah/' he
said. Clearly she was one of those rare women who
cannot dress. And that was not all A certain
buoyancy, hitherto unsuspected, crept into her manner, as
the corpuscles multiplied in her veins — an archness. She
talked more, and threw up a spray of playfulness. And,
with a growing energy, she began to revise the exquisite
aesthetic balance of Dunstone's house. She even enamelled
a chair.
For a year or so I was in the East. When I returned
Mrs. Dunstone amazed me. In some o<Jd way she had
grown, she had positively grown. She was taller, broader,
brighter — infinitely brighter. She wore a diamond brooch
in the afternoon. The " delicious skeleton " had vanished
in plumpness. She moved with emphasis. Her eye —
which glittered — met mine bravely, and she talked as one
who would be heard. In the old days you saw nothing
but a rare timid glance from under the pretty lids. She
talked now of this and that, of people of "good family,"
and the difficulty of getting a suitable governess for her
little boy. She said she objected to meeting people " one
would not care to invite to one'a house. ,, She swamped
me with tea and ruled the conversation, so that Dunstone
and I, who were once old friends, talked civil twaddle for
the space of one hour — theatres, concerts, and assemblies
chiefly — and then parted again. The furniture had all
been altered — there were two " cosy nooks " in the room
after the recipe in the Born Lady. It was plain to" me, it
is plain to everyone, I find, that Mrs. Dunstone is, in the
sun of prosperity, rapidly developing an extremely florid
vulgarity. And afterwards I discovered that she had
forgotten her music, and evidently enjoyed her meals. Yet
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DUNSTONE'S DEAR LADY 93
I for one can witness that five years ago there was that
about her — I can only extend my arm with quivering
digits. But it was something very sweet and dainty,
something that made her white and thoughtful, and
marked her off from the rest of womankind. I sometimes
fancy it may have been anaemia in part, but it was
certainly poverty and mourning in the main.
You may think that this is a story of disillusionment.
When I first heard the story, I thought so too. But, so
far as Dunstone goes, thai is not the case. It is rare that
I see him now, but the other day we smoked two cigars
apiece together. And in a moment of confidence he
spoke of her. He said how anxious he felt for her health,
called her his "Dainty Little Lady," and spoke of the
coarseness of other women. I am afraid this is not a
very eventful story, and yet there is that That very
convenient gesture, an arm protruded and flickering
fingers, conveys my meaning best. Perhaps you will
understand.
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EUPHEMIA'S NEW ENTERTAINMENT
Euphemia has great ideas of putting people at their ease,
a thousand little devices for thawing the very stiffest
among them with a home-like glow. Far be it from me
to sing her praises, but I must admit that at times she is
extremely successful in this — at times almost too
successful. That tea-cake business, for instance. No
doubt it's a genial expedient to make your guests toast
his own tea-cake : down he must go upon his knees upon
your hearthrug, and his poses will melt away like the
dews of the morning before the rising sun. Nevertheless,
when it comes to roasting a gallant veteran like Major
Augustus, deliberately roasting him, in spite of the facts
that he has served his country nobly through thirty
irksome years of peace, and that he admires Euphemia
with a delicate fervour — roasting him, I saiy, alive, as if
he were a Strasburg goose, or suddenly affixing a delicate
young genius to the hither end of a toasting-fork while
he is in the midst of a really very subtle and tender
conversation, the limits of social warmth seem to be
approaching dangerously near. However, this scarcely
concerns Euphemia's new entertainment.
This new entertainment is modelling in clay. Euphemia
tells me it is to be quite the common thing this winter. It
is intended especially for the evening, after a little dinner.
As the reader is aware, the evening after a little dinner
is apt to pall. A certain placid contentment creeps over
people. I don't know in what organ originality resides ;
but it's a curious thing, and one I must leave to the
consideration of psychologists, that people's output of
original remarks appears to be obstructed in some way
after these gastronomic exercises. Then a little dinner
M
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EUPHEMIA'S NEW ENTERTAINMENT 95
always confirms my theory of the absurdity of polygonal
conversation. Music and songs, too, have their drawbacks,
especially gay songs ; they invariably evoke a vaporous
melancholy. Card-playing Euphemia objects to because
her uncle, the dean, is prominent in connection with some
ridiculous association for the suppression of gambling;
and in what are called "games" no rational creature
esteeming himself an immortal soul would participate. In
this difficulty it was that Euphemia — decided, I fancy, by
the possession of certain really very becoming aprons —
took up this business of clay-modelling.
You have a lump of greyish clay and a saucer of water
and certain small tools of wood (for which I cannot
discover the slightest use in the world) given you, and
Euphemia puts on a very winning bib. Then, moistening
the clay until it acquires sufficient plasticity, and
incidentally splashing your cuffs and coat-sleeves with an
agreeably light tinted mud, you set to work. At first
people are a little disgusted at the apparent dirtiness of
the employment, and also perhaps rather diffident. The
eldest lady says weakly deprecatory things, and the
feeblest male is jocular after his wont; But it is remark-
able how soon the charm of this delightful occupation
seizes hold of you. For really the sensations of moulding
this plastic matter into shape are wonderfully and quite
unaccountably pleasing. It is ever so much easier than
drawing things — " anyone can do it," as the advertisement
people say — and the work is so much more substantial in
its effects. Technical questions arise. In moulding
a head, do you take a lump and fine it down, or do
you dab on the features after the main knob of it is
shaped ?
So soon as your guests realise the plastic possibilities
before them, a great silence, a delicious absorption comes
over them. Some rash person states that he is moulding
an Apollo, or a vase, or a bust of Mr. Gladstone, or an
elephant, or some such animal. The wiser ones go to
work in a speculative spirit, aiming secretly at this
perhaps, but quite willing to go on with that, if Providence
so wills it. Buddhas are good subjects ; there is a certain
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CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
genial rotundity not difficult to attain, and the pyramidal
build of the idol is well suited to the material. You can
start a Buddha, and hedge to make it a loaf of bread if
the features are unsatisfactory. For slender objects a
skeletal substructure of bent hairpins or matches is
advisable. The innate egotism of the human animal
becomes very conspicuous. " His tail is too large/' says
the lady with the fish, in self-criticism. " I haven't put
his tail on yet — that's his trunk," answers the young man
with the elephant.
It's a pretty sight to see the first awakening of the
artistic passion in your guests — the flush of discovery, the
glow of innocent pride as the familiar features of Mr.
Gladstone emerge from the bust of Clytie. An accidental
stroke of the thumbnail develops new marvels of
expression. (By the bye, it's just as well to forbid
deliberate attempts at portraiture.) And I know no more
becoming expression for everyone than the look of intent
and pleasing effort — a divine touch almost — that comes
over the common man modelling. For my own part, I
feel a being infinitely my own superior when I get my
fingers upon the clay. And, incidentally, how much
pleasanter this is than writing articles — to see the work
grow altogether under your hands ; to begin with the large
masses and finish with the details, as evlery artist should !
Just to show how easy the whole thing is, I append a little
sketch of the first work I ever did. I had had positively
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EUPHEMIA'S NEW ENTEETAINMENT 97
no previous instruction. Unfortunately the left ear of the
animal — a cat, by the bye — has fallen off. (The figure to
the left is the back view of a Buddha.)
However, I have said enough to show the charm of the
new amusement. It will prove a boon to many a troubled
hostess. The material is called modelling-clay, and one
may buy it of any dealer in artists' materials, several
pounds for sixpence. This has to be renewed at intervals,
as a good deal is taken away by the more careless among
your guests upon their clothes.
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FOR FREEDOM OF SPELLING
THE DISCOVERY OF AN ART
It is curious that people do not grumble more at having
to spell correctly. Yet one may ask, Do we not a little
over-estimate the value of orthography ? This is a
natural reflection enough when the maker of artless happy
phrases has been ransacking the dictionary for some
elusive wretch of a word which in the end proves to be
not yet naturalised, or technical, or a mere local vulgarity;
yet one does not often hear the idea canvassed in polite
conversation. Dealers in small talk, of the less prolific
kind, are continually falling back upon the silk hat or
dress suit, or some rule of etiquette or other convention
as a theme, but spelling seems to escape them. The
suspicion seems quaint, but one may almost fancy that an
allusion to spelling savoured a little of indelicacy. It
must be admitted, though where the scruples come from
would be hard to say, that there is a certain diffidence
even here in broaching my doubts in the matter. For
some inexplicable reason spelling has become mixed up
with moral feeling. One cannot pretend to explain
things in a little paper of this kind; the fact is so.
Spelling is not appropriate or inappropriate, elegant or
inelegant ; it is right or wrong. We do not greatly blame
a man for turn-down collars when the vogue is erect;
nor, in these liberal days, for theological eccentricity ; but
we esteem him " Nithing " and an outcast if he but drop
a "p" from opportunity. It is not an anecdote, but a
scandal, if we say a man cannot spell his own name.
There is only one thing esteemed worse before we come
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to the deadly crimes, and that is the softening of language
by dropping the aspirate.
After all, it is an unorthodox age. We are all horribly
afraid of being bourgeois, and unconventionality is the
ideal of every respectable person. It is strange that we
should cling so steadfastly to correct spelling. Yet again,
one can partly understand the business, if one thinks of
the little ways of your schoolmaster and schoolmistress.
This sanctity of spelling is stamped upon us in our earliest
years. The writer recalls a period of youth wherein six
hours a week were given to the study of spelling, and four
hours to all other religious instruction. So important is
it, that a writer who cannot spell is almost driven to
abandon his calling, however urgent the thing he may
have to say, or his need of the incidentals of fame. Yet
in the crisis of such a struggle rebellious thoughts may
arise. Even this : Why, after all, should correct spelling
be the one absolutely essential literary merit ? For it is
less fatal for an ambitious scribe to be as dull as Hoxton
than to spell in diverse ways.
Yet correct spelling of English has not been traced to
revelation; there was no grammatical Sinai, with a
dictionary instead of tables of stone. Indeed, we do not
even know certainly when correct spelling began, which
word in the language was first spelt the right way, and by
whom. Correct spelling may have been evolved, or it
may be the creation of some master mind. Its inventor,
if it had an inventor, is absolutely forgotten. Thomas
Cobbett would have invented it, but that he was born
more than two centuries too late, poor man. All that we
certainly know is that, contemporaneously with the rise of
extreme Puritanism, the belief in orthography first spread
among Elizabethan printers, and with the Hanoverian
succession the new doctrine possessed the whole length
and breadth of the land. At that time the world passed
through what extension lecturers call, for no particular
reason, the classical epoch. Nature — as, indeed, all the
literature manuals testify — was in the remotest background
then of human thought. The human mind, in a mood of
the severest logic, brought everything to the touchstone
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100 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
of an orderly reason; the conception of "correctness"
dominated all mortal affairs. For instance, one's natural
hair with its vagaries of rat's tails, duck's tails, errant curls,
and baldness, gave place to an orderly wig, or was at least
decently powdered. The hoop remedied the deficiencies
of the feminine form, and the gardener clipped his yews
into respectability. All poetry was written to one
measure in those days, and a Royal Academy with a lady
member was inaugurated that art might become at least
decent. Dictionaries began. The crowning glory of
Hanoverian literature was a Great Lexicographer.
In those days it was believed that the spelling of every
English word had been settled for all time. Thence to
the present day, though the severities then inaugurated,
so far as metre and artistic composition are concerned,
have been generously relaxed — though we have had a
Whistler, a Walt Whitman, and a Wagner — the rigours
of spelling have continued unabated. There is just one
right way of spelling, and all others are held to be not
simply inelegant or undesirable, but wrong; and unorthodox
spelling, like original morality, goes hand in hand with
shame.
Yet even at the risk of shocking the religious convictions
of some, may not one ask whether spelling is in truth a
matter of right and wrong at all ? Might it not rather
be an art ? It is too much to advocate the indiscriminate
sacking of the alphabet, but yet it seems plausible that
there is a happy medium between a reckless debauch
of errant letters and our present dead rigidity. For some
words at anyrate may there not be sometimes one way
of spelling a little happier, sometimes another ? We do
something of this sort even now with our " phantasy " and
" fantasie," and we might do more. How one would spell
this word or that would become, if this latitude were con-
ceded, a subtle anxiety of the literary exquisite. People
are scarcely prepared to realise what shades of meaning
may be got by such a simple device. Let us take a simple
instance. You write, let us say, to all your cousins, many
of your friends, and even, it may be, to this indifferent
intimate and that familiar enemy, " My dear So-and-so."
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But at times you feel even as you write, sometimes, that
there is something too much and sometimes something
lacking. You may even get so far in the right way
occasionally as to write, " My dr. So-and-so," when your
heart is chill. And people versed in the arts of social
intercourse know the subtle insult of misspelling a
person's name, or flicking it off flippantly with a mere
waggling wipe of the pen. But these are mere
beginnings.
Let the reader take a pen in hand and sit down and
write, "My very dear wife." Clean, cold, and correct
this is, speaking of orderly affection, settled and stereo-
typed long ago. In such letters is butcher's meat also
" very dear." Try now, " Migh verrie deare Wyfe." Is
it not immediately infinitely more soft and tender? Is
there not something exquisitely pleasant in lingering over
those redundant letters, leaving each word, as it were,
with a reluctant caress ? Such spelling is a soft, domestic,
lovingly wasteful use of material. Or, again, if you have
no wife, or object to an old-fashioned conjugal tenderness,
try "Mye.owne sweete dearrest Marrie." There is the
tremble of a tenderness no mere arrangement of trim
everyday letters can express in those double r's. "Sweete"
my ladie must be ; sweet ! why pump- water and inferior
champagne, spirits of nitrous ether and pancreatic juice
are " sweet." For my own part I always spell so, with
lots of f 's and g's and such like tailey, twirley, loopey things,
when my heart is in the tender vein. And I hold that a
man who will not do so, now he has been shown how to
do it, is, in plain English, neither more nor less than a prig.
The advantages of a varied spelling of names are very
great. Industrious, rather than intelligent, people have
given not a little time, and such minds as they have, to
the discussion of the right spelling of our great poet's
name. But he himself never dreamt of tying himself
down to one presentation of himself, and was — we have
his hand for it — Shakespeare, Shakspear, Shakespear,
Shakspeare, and so forth, as the mood might be.
It would be almost as reasonable to debate whether
Shakespeare smiled or frowned. My dear friend Sim-
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102 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
mongues is the same. He is " Sims/' a mere slash of the
pen, to those he scorns, Simmonds or Simmongs to his
familiars, and Simmons, A. T. Simmons, Esq., to all
Europe.
From such mere introductory departures from precision,
such petty escapades as these, we would we might seduce
the reader into an utter debauch of spelling. But a
sudden Maenad dance of the letters on the page, gleeful
and iridescent spelling, a wild rush and procession of
howling vowels and clattering consonants, might startle
the half -won reader back into orthodoxy. Besides, there
is another reader — the printer's reader — to consider. For
if an author let his wit run to these matters, he must
write elaborate marginal exhortations to this authority,
begging his mercy, to let the little flowers of spelling
alone. Else the plough of that Philistine's uniformity
will utterly root them out.
Such high art of spelling as is thus hinted at is an art
that has still to gather confidence and brave the light of
publicity. A few, indeed, practise it secretly for love —
in letters and on spare bits of paper. But, for the most
part, people do not know that there is so much as an art
of spelling possible; the tyranny of orthography lies so
heavily on the land. Your common editors and their
printers are a mere orthodox spelling police, and at the
least they rigorously blot out all the delightful frolics
of your artist in spelling before his writings reach the
public eye. But commonly, as I have proved again and
again, the slightest lapse into rococo spelling is sufficient
to secure the rejection of a manuscript without further
ado.
And to end, — a word about Phonographers. It may
be that my title has led the reader to anticipate some
mention of these before. They are a kind of religious
sect, a heresy from the orthodox spelling. They bind
one another by their mysteries and a five-shilling sub-
scription in a "soseiti to introduis an impruvd method
of spelinj." They come across the artistic vision, they
and their Soseiti, with an altogether indefinable offence.
Perhaps the essence of it is the indescribable meanness
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FOR FREEDOM OF SPELLING 103
of their motive. For this phonography really amounts
to a study of the cheapest way of spelling words. These
phonographers are sweaters of the Queen's English, living
meanly on the selvage of honest mental commerce by
clipping the coin of thought. But enough of them. They
are mentioned here only to be disavowed. They would
substitute one narrow orthodoxy for another, and I
would unfold the banner of freedom. Spell, my brethren,
as you will ! Awake, arise, language living in chains ;
let Butter's spelling be our Bastille! So with a pro-
phetic vision of liberated words pouring out of the
dungeons of a spelling-book, this plea for freedom con-
cludes. What trivial arguments there are for a uniform
spelling I must leave the reader to discover. This is no
place to carp against the liberation I foresee, with the
glow of the dawn in my eyes.
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INCIDENTAL THOUGHTS ON A BALD
HEAD
I was asked to go, quite suddenly, and found myself there
before I had time to think of what it might be. I under-
stood her to say it was a meeting of some "Sunday
society," some society that tried to turn the Sabbath
from a day of woe to a day of rejoicing. " St. George's
Hall, Langham Place," a cab, and there we were. I
thought they would be picturesque Pagans. But the
entertainment was the oddest it has ever been my lot
to see, a kind of mystery. The place was dark, except
for a big circle of light on a screen, and a dismal man
with a long stick was talking about the effects of alcohol
on your muscles. He talked and talked, and people went
to sleep all about us. Euphemia's face looked so very
pretty in the dim light that I tried to talk to her and
hold her hand, but she only said " Ssh ! " And then
they began showing pictures on the screen — the most
shocking things! — stomachs, and all that kind of thing.
They went on like that for an hour, and then there was
a lot of thumping with umbrellas, and they turned the
lights up and we went home. Curious way of spending
Sunday afternoon, is it not ?
But you may imagine I had a dismal time all that
hour. I understood the people about me were Sceptics,
the kind of people who don't believe things — a singular
class, and, I am told, a growing one. These excellent
people, it seems, have conscientious objections to going
to chapel or church, but at the same time the devotional
habit of countless generations of pious forerunners is
strong in them. Consequently they have invented things
like these lectures to go to, with a professor instead of
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THOUGHTS ON A BALD HEAD 105
a priest, and a lantern slide of a stomach by way of
altar-piece ; and alcohol they make their Devil, and their
god is Hygiene — a curious and instructive case of mental
inertia. I understand, too, there are several other temples
of this Cult in London — South Place Chapel and Essex
Hall, for instance, where they worship the Spirit of the
Innermost. But the thing that struck me so oddly was
the number of bald heads glimmering faintly in the
reflected light from the lantern circle. And that set me
thinking upon a difficulty I have never been able to
surmount.
You see these people, and lots of other people, too,
believe in a thing they call Natural Selection. They
think, as part of that belief, that men are descended
from hairy simian ancestors ; assert that even a hundred
thousand years ago the ancestor was hairy — hairy, heavy,
and almost as much a brute as if he lived in Mr. Arthur
Morrison's Whitechapel. For my own part I think it a
pretty theory, and would certainly accept it were it not
for one objection. The thing I cannot understand is how
our ancestor lost that hair. I see no reason why he
should not have kept his hair on. According to the
theory of natural selection, materially favourable varia-
tions survive, unfavourable disappear; the only way in
which the loss is to be accounted for is by explaining it
as advantageous; but where is the advantage of losing
your hair? The disadvantages appear to me to be in-
numerable. A thick covering of hair, like that of a
Capuchin monkey, would be an invaluable protection
against sudden changes of temperature, far better than
any clothing can be. Had I that, for instance, I should
be rid of the perpetual cold in the head that so disfigures
my life; and the multitudes who die annually of chills,
bronchitis, and consumption, and most of those who suffer
.from rheumatic pains, neuralgia, and so forth, would not
so die and suffer. And in the past, when clothing was
less perfect and firing a casual commodity, the disadvan-
tages of losing hair were all the greater. In very hot
countries hair is perhaps even more important in saving
the possessor from the excessive glare of the sun. Before
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the invention of the hat, thick hair on the head at least
was absolutely essential to save the owner of the skull
from sunstroke. That, perhaps, explains why the hair
has been retained there, and why it is going now that we
have hats, but it certainly does not explain why it has
gone from the rest of the body.
One — remarkably weak — explanation has been pro-
pounded : an appeal to our belief in human vanity. He
picked it out by the roots, because he thought he was
prettier without. But that is no reason at all. Suppose
he did, it would not affect his children. Professor
Weismann has at least convinced scientific people of
this : that the characters acquired by a parent are rarely,
if ever, transmitted to its offspring. An individual given
to such wanton denudation would simply be at a dis-
advantage with his decently covered fellows, would fall
behind in the race of life, and perish with his kind.
Besides, if man has been at such pains to uncover his
skin, why have quite a large number of the most respected
among us such a passionate desire to have it covered up
again ?
Yet that is the only attempted explanation I have
ever come upon, and the thing has often worried me.
I think it is just as probably a change in dietary. I have
noticed that most of your vegetarians are shock-headed,
ample-bearded men, and I have heard the Ancestor was
vegetarian. Or it may be, I sometimes fancy, a kind of
inherent disposition on the part of your human animal
to dwindle. That came back in my memory vividly as
I looked at the long rows of Sceptics, typical Advanced
people, and marked their glistening crania. I recalled
other losses. Here is Humanity, thought I, growing
hairless, growing bald, growing toothless, unemotional,
irreligious, losing the end joint of the little toe, dwindling
in its osseous structures, its jawbone and brow ridges,,
losing all the full, rich curvatures of its primordial
beauty.
It seems almost like what the scientific people call a
Law. And by strenuous efforts the creature just keeps
pace with his losses — devises clothes, wigs, artificial teeth,
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THOUGHTS ON A BALD HEAD 107
paddings, shoes — what civilised being could use his bare
feet for his ordinary locomotion? Imagine him on a
furze-sprinkled golf links. Then stays, an efficient sub-
stitute for the effete feminine backbone. So the thing
goes on. Long ago his superficies became artificial, and
now the human being shrinks like a burning cigar, and
the figure he has abandoned remains distended with
artificial ashes, dead dry protections against the exposures
he so unaccountably fears. Will he go on shrinking, I
wonder? — become at last a mere lurking atomy in his
own recesses, a kind of hermit crab, the bulk of him a
complex mechanism, a thing of rags and tatters and
papier-mach£, stolen from the earth and the plant-world
and his fellow beasts ? And at last may he not disappear
altogether, none missing him, and a democracy of honest
machinery, neatly clad and loaded up with sound prin-
ciples of action, walk to and fro in a regenerate world ?
Thus it was my mind went dreaming in St. George's
Hall. But presently, as I say, came the last word about
stomachs, and the bald men woke up, rattled their
umbrellas, said it was vastly interesting, and went todd-
ling off home in an ecstasy of advanced Liberalism. And
we two returned to the place whence we came.
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OF A BOOK UNWRITTEN
Accomplished literature is all very well in its way, no
doubt, but much more fascinating to the contemplative
man are the books that have not been writtenr These
latter are no trouble to hold ; there are no pages to turn
over. One can read them in bed on sleepless nights
without a candle. Turning to another topic, primitive
man in the works of the descriptive anthropologist is
certainly a very entertaining and quaint person, but the
man of the future, if we only had the facts, would appeal
to us more strongly. Yet where are the books? As
Euskin has said somewhere, & propos of Darwin, it is not
what man has been, but what he will be, that should
interest us.
The contemplative man in his easy-chair, pondering
this saying, suddenly beholds in the fire, through the
blue haze of his pipe, one of these great unwritten
volumes. It is large in size, heavy in lettering, seemingly
by one Professor Holzkopf, presumably Professor at
Weissnichtwo. "The Necessary Characters of the Man
of the Eemote Future deduced from the Existing Stream
of Tendency" is the title. The worthy Professor is
severely scientific in his method, and deliberate and
cautious in his deductions, the contemplative man dis-
covers as he pursues his theme, and yet the conclusions
are, to say the least, remarkable. We must figure the
excellent Professor expanding the matter at great length,
voluminously technical, but the contemplative man —
since he has access to the only copy — is clearly at liberty
to make such extracts and abstracts as he chooses for the
unscientific reader. Here, for instance, is something of
practicable lucidity that he considers admits of quotation.
108
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OF A BOOK UNWKITTEN 109
"The theory of evolution," writes the Professor, "is
now universally accepted by zoologists and botanists, and
it is applied unreservedly to man. Some question, indeed,
whether it fits his soul, but all agree it accounts for his
body. Man, we are assured, is descended from ape-like
ancestors, moulded by circumstances into men, and these
apes again were derived from ancestral forms of a lower
order, and so up from the primordial protoplasmic jelly.
Clearly then, man, unless the order of the universe has
come to an end, will undergo further modification in the
future, and at last cease to be man, giving rise to some
other type of animated being. At once the fascinating
question arises, What will this being be ? Let us consider
for a little the plastic influences at work upon our species.
" Just as the bird] is the creature of the wing, and is all
moulded and modified to flying, and just as the fish is the
creature that swims, and has had to meet the inflexible
conditions of a problem in hydrodynamics, so man is the
creature of the brain ; he will live by intelligence, and not
by physical strength, if he live at all. So that much that
is purely 'animal' about him is being, and must be,
beyond all question, suppressed in his ultimate develop-
ment. Evolution is no mechanical tendency making for
perfection, according to the ideas current in the year of
grace 1897; it is simply the continual adaptation of
plastic life, for good or evil, to the circumstances that
surround it. . . . We notice this decay of the animal part
around us now, in the loss of teeth and hair, in the
dwindling hands and feet of men, in their smaller jawsL
and slighter mouths and ears. Man now does by wit ancP
machinery and verbal agreement what he once did by
bodily toil ; for once he had to catch his dinner, capture^
his wife, run away from his enemies, and continually
exercise himself, for love of himself, to perform these
duties well. But now all this is changed. Cabs, trains,
trams, render speed unnecessary, the pursuit of food
becomes easier ; his wife is no longer hunted, but rather,
in view of the crowded matrimonial market, seeks him
out. One needs wits now to live, and physical activity
is a drug, a snare even; it seeks artificial outlets, and
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110 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
overflows in games. Athleticism takes up time and
cripples a man in his competitive examinations, and in
business. So is your fleshly man handicapped against
his subtler brother. He is unsuccessful in life, does not
marry. The better adapted survive.
The coming man, then, will clearly have a larger brain,
/ ,- and a slighter body than the present. But the Professor
makes one exception to this. " The human hand/since it
is the teacher and interpreter of the brain, will become
constantly more powerful and subtle as the rest of the
musculature dwindles."
Then in the physiology of these children of men, with
/their expanding brains, their great sensitive hands and
diminishing bodies, great changes were necessarily worked.
v " We see now," says the Professor, " in the more intellectual
sections of humanity an increasing sensitiveness to
stimulants, a growing inability to grapple with such a
matter as alcohol, for instance. No longer can men drink
a bottleful of port; some cannot drink tea; it is too
exciting for their highly-wrought nervous systems. The
\ process will go on, and the Sir Wilfrid Lawson of some
J near generation may find it his duty and pleasure to make
[ the silvery spray of his wisdom tintinnabulate against the
1 tea-tray. These facts lead naturally to the comprehension
of others. Fresh raw meat was once a dish for a king.
Now refined persons scarcely touch meat unless it is
cunningly disguised. Again, consider the case of turnips ;
the raw root is now a thing almost uneatable, but once
upon a time a turnip must have been a rare and fortunate
find, to be torn up with delirious eagerness and devoured
in ecstasy. The time will come when the change will
affect all the other fruits of the earth. Even now, only
the young of mankind eat apples raw — the young always
preserving ancestral characteristics after their disappear
ance in the adult. Some day even boys will regard apples
without emotion. The boy of the future, one must
believe, will gaze on an apple with the same unspeculative
languor with which he now regards a flint" — in the
absence of a cat.
"Furthermore, fresh chemical discoveries came into
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OF A BOOK UNWEITTEN 111
action as modifying influences upon men. In the pre-
historic period even, man's mouth had ceased to be an
instrument for grasping food ; it is still growing continually
less prehensile, his front teeth are smaller, his lips thinner
and less muscular ; he has a new organ, a mandible not of
irreparable tissue, but of bone and steel — a knife and fork.
There is no reason why things should stop at partial artificial
division thus afforded; there is every reason, on the *
contrary, to believe my statement that some cunning j
exterior mechanism will presently masticate and insalivate /
his dinner, relieve his diminishing salivary glands and
teeth, and at last altogether abolish them." ,
Then what is not needed disappears. What use is ^**'
there for external ears, nose, and brow ridges now ? The
two latter once protected the eye from injury in conflict
and in falls, but in these days we keep on our legs, and at
peace. Directing his thoughts in this way, the reader
may presently conjure up a dim, strange vision of the
latter-day face : " Eyes large, lustrous, beautiful, soulful ;
above them, no longer separated by rugged brow ridges,
is the top of the head, a glistening, hairless dome, terete
and beautiful; no craggy nose rises to disturb by its
unmeaning shadows the symmetry of that calm face, no
vestigial ears project; the mouth is a small, perfectly
round aperture, toothless and gumless, jawless* unanimal,
no futile emotions disturbing its roundness as it lies, like
the harvest moon or the evening star, in the wide firma-
ment of face." Such is the face the Professor beholds in
the future.
Of course parallel modifications will also affect the body
and limbs. "Every day so many hours and so much
energy are required for digestion ; a gross torpidity, a
carnal lethargy, seizes on mortal men after dinner. This
may and can be avoided. Man's knowledge of organic
chemistry widens daily. Already he can supplement the
gastric glands by artificial devices. Every doctor who
administers physic implies that the bodily functions may
be artificially superseded. We have pepsine, pancreatine,
artificialgastricacid — I know not what like mixtures. Why,
then, should not the stomach be ultimately superannuated
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altogether ? A man who could not only leave his dinner
to be cooked, but also leave it to be masticated and
digested, would have vast social advantages over his food-
digesting fellow. This is, let me remind you here, the
calmest, most passionless, and scientific working out of the
future forms of things from the data of the present. At
this stage the following facts may perhaps stimulate your
imagination. There can be no doubt that many of the
Arthropods, a division of animals more ancient and even
now more prevalent than the Vertebrata, have undergone
more phylogenetic modification" — a beautiful phrase —
"than even the most modified of vertebrated animals.
Simple forms like the lobsters display a primitive structure
parallel with that of the fishes. However, in such a form
as the degraded * Chondracanthus/ the structure has
diverged far more widely from its original type than in
man. Among some of these most highly modified
crustaceans the whole of the alimentary canal — that is,
all the food-digesting and food-absorbing parts — form a
/ useless solid cord: the animal is nourished — it is a
parasite — by absorption of the nutritive fluid in which it
v^swims. Is there any absolute impossibility in supposing
man to be destined for a similar change ; to imagine him
no longer dining, with unwieldy paraphernalia of servants
and plates, upon food queerly dyed and distorted, but
nourishing himself in elegant simplicity by immersion in
a tub of nutritive fluid ?
"There grows upon the impatient imagination a
building, a dome of crystal, across the translucent surface
of which flushes of the most glorious and pure prismatic
colours pass and fade and change. In the centre of this
transparent chameleon-tinted dome is a circular white
marble basin filled with some clear, mobile, amber liquid,
and in this plunge and float strange beings. Are they
birds ?
" They are the descendants of man — at dinner. Watch
them as they hop on their hands — a method of progres-
sion advocated already by Bjornsen — about the pure white
marble floor. Great hands they have, enormous brains
soft, liquid, soulful eyes. Their whole muscular system'
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OF A BOOK UNWRITTEN 113
their lege, their abdomens, are shrivelled to nothing, a
dangling, degraded pendant to their minds."
The further visions of the Professor are less alluring.
" The animals and plants die away before men, except
such as he preserves for his food or delight, or such as
maintain a precarious footing about him as commensals
and parasites. These vermin and pests must succumb
sooner or later to his untiring inventiveness and in-
cessantly growing discipline. When he learns (the
chemists are doubtless getting towards the secret now) to
do the work of chlorophyll without the plant, then his
necessity for other animals and plants upon the earth will
disappear. Sooner or later, where there is no power ol
resistance and no necessity, there comes extinction,
the last days man will be alone on the earth, and his
will be won by the chemist from the dead rocks and
sunlight.
" And — one may learn the full reason in that explicit
and painfully right book, the Data of Ethics — the
irrational fellowship of man will give place to an intel-
lectual co-operation, and emotion fall within the scheme
of reason. Undoubtedly it is a long time yet, but a long
time is nothing in the face of eternity, and every man
who dares think of these things must look eternity in the
face."
Then the earth is ever radiating away heat into space,
the Professor reminds us. And so at last comes a vision
of earthly cherubim, hopping heads, great unemotional
intelligences, and little hearts, fighting together perforce
and fiercely against the cold that grips them tighter and
tighter. For the world is cooling— slowly and inevitably
it grows colder as the years roll by. " We must imagine
these creatures," says the Professor, "in galleries and
laboratories deep down in the bowels of the earth. The
whole world will be snow-covered and piled with ice ; all
animals, all vegetation vanished, except this last branch
of the tree of life. The last men have gone even deeper,
following the diminishing, heat of the planet, and vast
metallic shafts and ventilators make way for the air they
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So with a glimpse of these human tadpoles, in their
deep close gallery, with their boring machinery ringing
V away, and artificial lights glaring and casting black
shadows, the Professor's horoscope concludes. Humanity
in dismal retreat before the cold, changed beyond recogni-
tion. Yet the Professor is reasonable enough, his facts are
current science, his methods orderly. The contemplative
man shivers at the prospect, starts up to poke the fire,
and the whole of this remarkable book that is not written
vanishes straightway in the smoke of his pipe. This is
the great advantage of this unwritten literature : there is
no bother in changing the books. The contemplative
man consoles himself for the destiny of the species with
the lost portion of Kubla Khan.
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THE EXTINCTION OF MAN
It is part of the excessive egotism of the human animal
that the bare idea of its extinction seems incredible to it.
"A world without us\" it says, as a heady young
Cephalaspis might have said it in the old Silurian sea.
But since the Cephalaspis and the Coccosteus many a fine
animal has increased and multiplied upon the earth,
lorded it over land or sea without a rival, and passed at
last into the night. Surely it is not so unreasonable to
ask why man should be an exception to the rule. From
the scientific standpoint at least any reason for such
exception is hard to find.
No doubt man is undisputed master at the present time
— at least of most of the land surface ; but so it has been
before with other animals. Let us consider what light
geology has to throw upon this. The great land and sea
reptiles of the Mesozoic period, for instance, seem to have
been as secure as humanity is now in their pre-eminence.
But they passed away and left no descendants when the
new orders of the mammals emerged from their obscurity.
So, too, the huge Titanotheria of the American continent,
and all the powerful mammals of Pleistocene South
America, the sabre-toothed lion, for instance, and the
Machrauchenia suddenly came to a finish when they were
still almost at the zenith of their rule. And in no case
does the record of the fossils show a really dominant species
succeeded by its orvn descendants. What has usually
happened in the past appears to be the emergence of some
type of animal hitherto rare and unimportant, and the
extinction, not simply of the previously ruling species,
but of most of the forms that are at all closely related to
it. Sometimes, indeed, as in the case of the extinct giants
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116 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
of South America, they vanished without any considerable
rivals, victims of pestilence, famine, or, it may be, of that
cumulative inefficiency that comes of a too undisputed
life. So that the analogy of geology, at anyrate, is
against this too acceptable view of man's certain tenure
of the earth for the next few million years or so.
And, after all, even now man is by no means such a
master of the kingdoms of life as he is apt to imagine.
The sea, that mysterious nursery of living things, is for
all practical purposes beyond his control. The low-water
mark is his limit. Beyond that he may do a little with
seine and dredge, murder a few million herrings a year as
they come in to spawn, butcher his fellow air-breather,
the whale, or haul now and then an unlucky king-crab or
strange sea-urchin out of the deep water, in the name of
science ; but the life of the sea as a whole knows him not,
plays out its slow drama of change and development
unheeding him, and may in the end, in mere idle sport,
throw up some new terrestrial denizens, some new
competitor for space to live in and food to live upon, that
will sweep him and all his little contrivances out of
existence, as certainly and inevitably as he has swept
away auk, bison, and dodo during the last two hundred
years.
For instance, there are the Crustacea. As a group the
crabs and lobsters are confined below the high-water
mark. But experiments in air-breathing are no doubt in
progress in this group — we already have tropical land-
crabs — and as far as we know there is no reason why in
the future these creatures should not increase in size and
terrestrial capacity. In the past we have the evidence of
the fossil Paradoxides that creatures of this kind may at
least attain a length of six feet, and, considering their
intense pugnacity, a crab of such dimensions would be as
formidable a creature as one could well imagine. And
their amphibious capacity would give them an advantage
against us such as at present is only to be found in the
case of the alligator or crocodile. If we imagine a shark
that could raid out upon the land, or a tiger that could
take refuge in the sea, we should have a fair suggestion of
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THE EXTINCTION OF MAN 117
what a terrible monster a large predatory crab might
prove. And so far as zoological science goes we must, at
least, admit that such a creature is an evolutionary
possibility.
Then, again, the order of the Cephalopods, to which
belong the cuttle-fish and the octopus (sacred to Victor
Hugo), may be, for all we can say to the contrary, an
order with a future. Their kindred, the Gastropods,
have, in the case of the snail and slug, learnt the trick of
air-breathing. And not improbably there are even now
genera of this order that have escaped the naturalist, or
even well-known genera whose possibilities in growth
and dietary are still unknown. Suppose some day a
specimen of a new species is caught off the coast of Kent.
It excites remark at a Royal Society soiree, engenders a
Science Note or so, " A Huge Octopus ! " and in the next
year or so three or four other specimens come to hand,
and the thing becomes familiar. "Probably a new and
larger variety of Octopus so-and-so, hitherto supposed to
be tropical," says Professor Gargoyle, and thinks he has
disposed of it. Then conceive some mysterious boating
accidents and deaths while bathing. A large animal of
this kind coming into a region of frequent wrecks might
so easily acquire a preferential taste for human nutriment,
just as the Colorado beetle acquired a new taste for the
common potato and gave up its old food-plants some years
ago. Then perhaps a school or pack or flock of Octopus
gigas would be found busy picking the sailors off a stranded
ship, and then in the course of a few score years it might
begin to stroll up the beaches and batten on excursionists.
Soon it would be a common feature of the watering-places —
possibly at last commoner than excursionists. Suppose
such a creature were to appear — and it is, we repeat, a
possibility, if perhaps a remote one — how could it be
fought against ? Something might be done by torpedoes ;
but, so far as our past knowledge goes, man has no means
of seriously diminishing the numbers of any animal of the
most rudimentary intelligence that made its fastness in
the sea.
Even on land it is possible to find creatures that with 4
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118 CEETAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
little modification might become excessively dangerous to
the human ascendency. Most people have read of the
migratory ants of Central Africa, against which no man
can stand. On the march they simply clear out whole
villages, drive men and animals before them in headlong
rout, and kill and eat every living creature they can
capture. One wonders why they have not already spread
the area of their devastations. But at present no doubt
they have their natural checks, of ant-eating birds, or
what not. In the near future it may be that the
European immigrant, as he sets the balance of life swing;
ing in his vigorous manner, may kill off these ant-eating
animals, or otherwise unwittingly remove the checks that
now keep these terrible little pests within limits. And
once they begin to spread in real earnest, it is hard to see
how their advance could be stopped. A world devoured
by ants seems incredible now, simply because it is not
within our experience ; but a naturalist would have a dull
imagination who could not see in the numerous species
of ants, and in their already high intelligence, far more
possibility of strange developments than we have in the
solitary human animal. And no doubt the idea of the
small and feeble organism of man, triumphant and omni-
present, would have seemed equally incredible to an
intelligent mammoth or a palaeolithic cave bear.
And, finally, there is always the prospect of a new
disease. As yet science has scarcely touched more than
the fringe of the probabilities associated with the minute
fungi that constitute our zymotic, diseases. Byt the bacilli
have no more settled down into their final quiescence
than have men ; like ourselves, they are adapting them-
selves to new conditions and acquiring new powers. The
plagues of the Middle Ages, for instance, seem to have
been begotten of a strange bacillus engendered under
conditions that sanitary science, in spite of its panacea
of drainage, still admits are imperfectly understood, and
for all we know even now we may be quite unwittingly
evolving some new and more terrible plague-^-a plague
that will not take ten or twenty or thirty per cent., as
plagues have done in the past, but the entire hundred, .
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THE EXTINCTION OF MAN 119
No ; man's complacent assumption of the future is too
confident. We think, because tilings have been easy for
mankind as a whole for a generation or so, we are going
on to perfect comfort and security in the future. We
think that we shall always go to work at ten and leave
off at four, and have dinner at seven for ever and ever.
But these four suggestions, out of a host of others, must
surely do a little against this complacency. Even now,
for all we can tell, the coming terror may be crouching
for its spring and the fall of humanity be at hand. In
the case of every other predominant animal the world has
ever seen, I repeat, the hour of its complete ascendency
has been the eve of its entire overthrow. But if some
poor story - writing man ventures to figure this sober
probability in a tale, not a reviewer in London but will
tell him his theme is the utterly impossible. And, when
the thing happens, one may doubt if even then one will
get the recognition one deserves.
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THE WRITING OF ESSAYS
The art of the essayist is so simple, so entirely free from
canons of criticism, and withal so delightful, that one
must needs wonder why all men are not essayists.
Perhaps people do not know how easy it is. Or perhaps
beginners are misled. Eightly taught it may be learnt
in a brief ten minutes or so, what art there is in it. And
all the rest is as easy as wandering among woodlands on
a bright morning in the spring.
Then sit you down if you would join us, taking paper,
pens, and ink ; and mark this, your pen is a matter of
vital moment. For every pen writes its own sort of
essay, and pencils also after their kind. The ink perhaps
may have its influence too, and the paper; but para-
mount is the pen. This, indeed, is the fundamental
secret of essay - writing. Wed any man to his proper
pen, and the delights of composition and the birth of
an essay are fissured. Only many of u& wander through
the earth and never meet with her — futile and lonely
men.
And, of all pens, your quill for essays that are literature.
There is a subtle informality, a delightful easiness,
perhaps even a faint immorality essentially literary, about
the quill. The quill is rich in suggestion and quotation.
There are quills that would quote you Montaigne and
Horace in the hands of a trades -union delegate. And
those quirky, idle noises this pen makes are delightful,
and would break your easy fluency with wit. All the
classical essayists wrote with a quill, and Addison used
the most expensive kind the Government purchased.
And the beginning of the inferior essay was the dawn of
the cheap steel pen.
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THE WKITING OF ESSAYS 121
The quill nibs they sell to fit into ordinary pen-holders
are no true quills at all, lacking dignity, and may even
lead you into the New Humour if you trust overmuch to
their use. After a proper quill commend me to a
stumpy BB pencil; you get less polish and broader
effects, but you are still doing good literature. Some-
times the work is close — Mr. George Meredith, for
instance, is suspected of a soft pencil — and always it is
blunter than quill work and more terse. With a hard
pencil no man can write anything but a graceless style — a
kind of east wind air it gives — and smile you cannot.
So that it is often used for serious articles in the
half-crown reviews.
There follows the host of steel pens. That bald, clear,
scientific style, all set about with words like " evolution "
and " environment," which aims at expressing its meaning
with precision and an exemplary economy of words, is
done with fine steel nibs — twelve a penny at any
stationer's. The J pen to the lady novelist, and the
stylograph to the devil — your essayist must not touch
the things. So much for the pen. If you cannot
write essays easily, that is where the hitch comes in.
Get a box of a different kind of pen and begin again,
and so on again and again until despair or joy arrests
you.
As for a typewriter, you could no more get an essay
out of a typewriter than you could play a sonata upon
its keys. No essay was ever written with a typewriter
yet, nor ever will be. Besides its impossibility, the
suggestion implies a brutal disregard of the division of
labour by which we live and move and have our being.
If the essayist typewrite, the unemployed typewriter, who
is commonly a person of superior education and capacity,
might take to essays, and where is your living then?
One might as reasonably start at once with the Linotype
and print one's wit and humour straight away. And
taking the invasion of other trades one step further one
might, after an attempt to sell one's own newspaper, even
get to the pitch of having to read it oneself. No ; even
essayists must be reasonable. If its mechanical clitter-
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122 CEETAIN PEESONAL MATTEES
clatter did not render composition impossible, the type-
writer would still be beneath the honour of a literary-
man.
Then for the paper. The luxurious, expensive, small-
sized cream-laid note is best, since it makes your essay
choice and compact ; and, failing that, ripped envelopes
and the backs of bills. Some men love ruled paper,
because they can write athwart the lines, and some take
the fly-leaves of their friends' books. But whosoever
writes on cheap sermon paper full of hairs should write
far away from the woman he loves, lest he offend
her ears. It is good, however, for a terse, forcible
style.
The ink should be glossy black as it leaves your pen,
for polished English. Violet inks lead to sham sentiment,
and blue-black to vulgarity. Eed ink essays are often
good, but usually unfit for publication.
This is as much almost as anyone need know to begin
essay writing. Given your proper pen and ink, or pencil
and paper, you simply sit down and write the thing.
The value of an essay is not its matter, but its mood.
You must be comfortable, of course ; an easy-chair with
arm-rests, slippers, and a book to write upon are usually
employed, and you must be fed recently, and your body
clothed with ease rather than grandeur. For the rest,
do not trouble to stick to your subject, or any subject;
and take no thought for the editor or the reader, for
your essay should be as spontaneous as the lilies of the
field.
So long as you do not begin with a definition you may
begin anyhow. An abrupt beginning is much admired,
after the fashion of the clown's entry through the
chemist's window. Then whack at your reader at once,
hit him over the head with the sausages, brisk him up
with the poker, bundle him into the wheelbarrow, and
so carry him away with you before he knows where you
are. You can do what you like with a reader then, if
you only keep him nicely on the move. So long as
you are happy your reader will be so too. But one
law must be observed : an essay, like a dog that wishes
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THE WEITING OF ESSAYS 123
to please, must have a lively tail, -short but as waggish
as possible. Like a rocket, an essay goes only with
fizzle and sparks at the end of it. And, know, that to
stop writing is the secret of writing an essay; the
essay that the public loves dies young.
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THE PARKES MUSEUM
THE PLACE TO SPEtfD A HAPPY DAY
By way of jest, my morning daily paper constantly in-
cludes in its menu of "To-day" the Parkes Museum,
Margaret Street, adding, seductively, "free"; and no
doubt many a festive Jonas Chuzzlewit has preened
himself for a sight-seeing, and all unaware of the
multitudes of Margaret Streets — surely only Charlottes
of that ilk are more abundant — has started forth, he
and his feminine, to find this Parkes Museum. One
may even conceive a rare Bank Holiday thoughtfully
put aside for the quest, and spent all vainly in the
asking of policemen, and in traversing this vast and
tiresome metropolis, from Margaret Street to Margaret
Street, the freshness of the morning passing into the
dry heat of the day, fatigue spreading from the feet
upwards, discussion, difference, denial, "words," and a
day of recreation dying at last into a sunset of lurid
sulks. Such possibility was too painful to think of,
and a philanthropic inquirer has at last by persistent
investigation won the secret of the Missing Museum
and opened the way to it for all future investigators.
The Margaret Street in question is an apparently
derelict thoroughfare, opening into Great Portland Street.
Immemorial dust is upon its pavements, and a profound
silence broods over its vacant roadway. The blinds
of its houses are mostly down, and, where the blackness
of some window suggests a dark interior, no face appears
to reassure us in our doubt of humanity within. It may
be that somewhen in the past the entire population of
this street set out on a boating party up the river,
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THE PAEKES MUSEUM 125
and was overset by steam launches, and so never
returned, or perchance it has all been locked up for
a long term of imprisonment — though the houses seem
almost too respectable for that; or the glamour of the
Sleeping Beauty is upon it all. Certainly we saw
the figure of a porter in an attitude of repose in the
little glass lodge in the museum doorway. He may
have been asleep. But we feared to touch him — and
indeed slipped very stealthily by him — lest he should
suddenly crumble into dust.
And so to the Museum and its wonders. This Parkes
Museum is a kind of armoury of hygiene, a place full of
apparatus for being healthy — in brief, a museum of
sanitary science. To that large and growing class of
people who take no thought of anything but what they
eat and what they drink, and wherewithal they should be
clothed, it should prove intensely interesting. Apart from
the difficulty of approach we cannot understand how it
is so neglected by an intelligent public. You can see
germicides and a model convict prison, Pentonville cells
in miniature, statistical diagrams and drain pipes — if only
there was a little more about heredity, it would be exactly
the kind of thing that is popular in literature now,
as literature goes. And yet excepting ourselves and the
sleeping porter — if he was sleeping — and the indistinct
and motionless outline, visible through a glass door, of a
human body sitting over a book, there was not a suggestion
or memory of living humanity about the place.
The exhibits of food are especially remarkable. We
cleaned the glass case with our sleeves and peered at themost
appetising revelations. There are dozens of little bottles
hermetically sealed, containing such curios as a sample of
" Bacon Common (Gammon) Uncooked," and then the same
cooked — it looked no nicer cooked — Irish sausage, pork
sausage, black pudding, Welsh mutton, and all kinds of
rare and exquisite feeding. There are ever so many cases
of tins kind of thing. We saw, for instance, further along,
several good specimens of the common oyster shell (Ostrea
edvlis), cockle shells, and whelks, both " almonds " and
" whites," and then came breadstuff's. The breadstuffs are
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126 CEBTAIN PERSONAL MATTEES
particularly impressive, of a grey, scientific aspect, a hard,
hoary antiquity. We always knew that stale bread was
good for one, but yet the Parkes Museum startled us with
the antique pattern it recommended. There was a muffin,
too, identified and labelled, but without any Latin name, a
captured crumpet, a collection of buns, a dinner-roll, and
a something novel to us, called Pumpernickel, that we
had rather be without, or rather — for the expression is
ambiguous — that we had rather not be without, but
altogether remote from. And all these things have been
tested by an analyst, with the most painful results.
Nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and the like nasty chemical
things seem indeed to have occurred in everything he
touched. Those sturdy mendicants who go about com-
plaining that they cannot get food should visit this
Parkes Museum and see what food is really like, and
learn contentment with their lot.
There were no real vegetables, but only the ideals of a
firm of seedsmen, made; of wax and splendidly coloured,
with something of the boldness and vigour of Michael
Angelo about the modelling of them. And among other
food stuffs were sweetmeats and yellow capers, liver
flukes, British wines, and snuff. At last we felt replete
with food stuffs, and went on to see the models to
illustrate ventilation, and the exhibits of hygienic
glazed tiles arranged around a desert lecture-theatre.
Hygienic tiles stimulate the eye vigorously rather than
relax it by any aesthetic weakness; and the crematory
appliances are so attractive as they are, and must have
such an added charm of neatness and brightness when
alight, that one longs to lose a relative or so forthwith, for
the mere pleasure of seeing them in operation.
A winding staircase designed upon hygienic principles,
to bump your head at intervals, takes one to a little iron
gallery full of the most charming and varied display of
cooking-stoves and oil -lamps. Here, also, there are
flaunted the resources of civilisation for the Prevention of
Accidents, which resources are four, namely, a patent fire-
escape, a patent carriage pole, a coal plate, and a dog
muzzle. But the labels, though verbose, are scarcely full
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THE PAEKES MUSEUM 127
enough. They do not tell you, for instance, if you wish
to prevent cramp while bathing, whether the dog muzzle
or the coal plate should be employed, nor do they show
how the fire-escape will prevent the explosion of a
paraffin lamp. However, this is a detail. We feel
assured that no intelligent person will regret a visit to this
most interesting and instructive exhibition. It offers you
valuable hints how to live, and suggests the best and
tidiest way in which you can, when dead, dispose of your
body. We feel assured that the public only needs this
intimation of its whereabouts to startle the death-like
slumbers of Margaret Street with an unaccustomed tumult.
And the first to arrive will, no doubt, find legibly and
elegantly written in the dust that covers the collection
the record of its discovery by Euphemia and me.
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BLEAK MARCH IN EPPING FOREST
All along the selvage of Epping Forest there was
excitement. Before the swallows, before the violets, long
before the cuckoo, with only untimely honeysuckle bushes
showing a trace of green, two trippers had been seen
traversing the district, making their way towards High
Beech, and settling awhile near the Forest Hotel.
Whether they were belated survivals from last season or
exceptionally early hatchings of the coming year, was a
question of considerable moment to the natives, and has
since engaged the attention of the local Natural History
Society. But we know that, as a matter of fact, they
were of little omen, being indeed but insignificant people
from Hampstead and not true trippers at all, who were
curious to see this forest in raw winter.
For some have argued that there is no Epping Forest
at all in the winter-time ; that it is, in fact, taken up and
put away, and that agriculture is pursued there. Others
assert that the Forest is shrouded with wrappers, even as a
literary man's study is shrouded by dusty women when
they clean him out. Others, again, have supposed that
it is a delightful place in winter, far more delightful
than in summer, but that this is not published,
because no writing man hath ever been there in the cold
season. And much more of unreal speculation, but
nothing which bore upon it the stamp of truth. So these
two — and I am one of the two — went down to Epping
Forest to see that it was still there, and how it fared in
the dismal weather.
The sky was a greasy grey that guttered down to the
horizon, and the wind smote damp and chill There was
a white fringe of ice in the cart-wheel ruts, but withal
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BLEAK MARCH IN EPHNG FOREST I2d
the frost was not so crisp as to prevent a thin and
slippery glaze of softened clay upon the road. The
decaying triumphal arch outside the station sadly lacked
a coat of paint, and was indistinctly regretful of remote
royal visits and processions gone for ever. Then we
passed shuddering by many vacant booths that had once
resounded with the revelry of ninepenny teas and the
gingerbeer cork's staccato, and their forms were piled
together and their trestles overturned. And the wind
ravened, and no human beings were to be seen. So up
the hill to the left, and along the road leading by
devious windings between the black hedges and through
clay wallows to the hilly part round High Beech.
But upon the shoulder of a hill we turned to a gate to
scrape off the mud that made our boots unwieldy. At
that moment came a threadbare place in the cloudy
curtain that was sweeping across the sun, and our shadows
showed themselves for an instant to comfort us. The
amber patch of sunlight presently slipped from us and
travelled down the meadows towards the distant blue of
the hills by Waltham Abbey, touching with miraculous
healing a landscape erst dead and shrouded in grey. This
transitory gleam of light gladdened us mightily at the
time, but it made the after-sky seem all the darker.
So through the steep and tortuous village to High
Beech, and then leaving the road we wandered in among
big trees and down slopes ankle deep with rustling leaves
towards Chingford again. Here was pleasanter walking
than the thawing clay, but now and then one felt the
threat of an infinite oozy softness beneath the stiff frozen
leaves. Once again while we were here the drifting haze
of the sky became thinner, and the smooth green-grey
beech stems and rugged oak trunks were brightly illumin-
ated. But only for a moment, and thereafter the sky
became not simply unsympathetic but ominous. And the
misery of the wind grew apace.
Presently we wandered into that sinister corner of the
Forest where the beech trees have grown so closely
together that they have had perforce to lift their branches
vertically. Divested of leaves, the bare grey limbs of
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130 CERTAIN PEBSONAL MATTEES
these seem strangely restless. These trees, reaching so
eagerly upward, have an odd resemblance to the weird
figures of horror in which William Blake delighted — arms,
hands, hair, all stretch intensely to the zenith. They
seem to be straining away from the spot to which they
are rooted. It is a Laocoon grouping, a wordless con-
centrated struggle for the sunlight, and disagreeably
impressive. The trippers longed to talk and were
tongue-tied ; they looked now and then over their shoulders.
They were glad when the eerie influence was passed,
though they traversed a morass to get away from it.
Then across an open place, dismal with the dun hulls
of lost cows and the clatter of their bells, over a brook
full of dead leaves and edged with rusty clay, through a
briery thicket that would fain have detained us, and so to
a pathway of succulent green, that oozed black under our
feet. Here some poor lost wayfarer has blazed his way
with rustic seats, now rheumatic and fungus-eaten. And
here, too, the wind, which had sought us howling, found
us at last, and stung us sharply with a shower of
congealing raindrops. This grew to a steady downfall as
the open towards Chingford station was approached at
last, after devious winding in the Forest. Then, coming
upon the edge of the wood and seeing the lone station
against the grey sky, we broke into a shout and began
running. But it is dismal running on imperfectly frozen
clay, in rain and a gusty wind. We slipped and floundered,
and one of us wept sore that she should never see her
home again. And worse, the only train sleeping in the
station was awakened by our cries, and, with an eldritch
shriek at the unseasonable presence of trippers, fled
incontinently Londonward.
Smeared with clay and dead leaves almost beyond
human likeness, we staggered into the derelict station, and
found from an outcast porter that perhaps another train
might after the lapse of two hours accumulate sufficiently
to take us back to Gospel Oak and a warm world again.
So we speered if there were amusements to be got in this
place, and he told us " some very nice walks." To refrain
from homicide we left the station, and sought a vast red
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BLEAK MAECH IN EPPING FOEEST 131
hotel that loomed through the drift on a steep hill, and in
the side of this a door that had not been locked. Happily
one had been forgotten, and, entering at last, we roused a
hibernating waiter, and he exhumed us some of his winter
victual. In this way we we're presently to some degree
comforted, and could play chess until a train had been
sent for our relief. And this did at last happen, and
towards the hour of dinner we rejoined our anxious friends,
and all the evening time we boasted of a pleasant day and
urged them to go even as we had gone.
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THE THEORY OF QUOTATION
The nobler method of quotation is not to quote at all
For why should one repeat good things that are already
written ? Are not the words in their fittest context in the
original ? Clearly, then, your new setting cannot be quite
so congruous, which is, forthwith, an admission of
incongruity. Your quotation is evidently a plug in a leak,
an apology for a gap in your own words. But your
vulgar author will even go out of his way to make the
clothing of his thoughts thus heterogeneous. He counts
every stolen scrap he can work in an improvement — a
literary caddis worm. Yet would he consider it improve-
ment to put a piece of even the richest of old tapestry or
gold embroidery into his new pair of breeks ?
The passion for quotation is peculiar to literature. We
do not glory to quote our costume, dress in cast-off court
robes, or furnish our houses from the marine store.
Neither are we proud of alien initials on the domestic
silver. We like things new and primarily our own. We
have a wholesome instinct against infection, except, it
seems, in the matter of ideas. An authorling will
deliberately inoculate his copy with the inverted comma
bacillus, till the page swims unsteadily, counting the fever
a glow of pure literary healthiness. Yet this reproduction,
rightly considered, is merely a proof that his appetite for
books has run beyond his digestion. Or his industry may
be to seek. You expect an omelette, and presently up
come the unbroken eggs. A tissue of quotation wisely
looked at is indeed but a motley garment, eloquent either
of a fool, or an idle knave in a fool's disguise.
Nevertheless at times — the truth must be told — we
must quote. As for admitting that we have quoted, that
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THE THEOKY OF QUOTATION 133
is another matter altogether. But the other man's phrase
will lie at times so close in one's mind to the trend of
one's thoughts, that, all virtue notwithstanding, they must
needs run into the groove of it. There are phrases that
lie about in the literary mind like orange peel on a
pavement. You are down on them before you know
where you are. But does this necessitate acknowledg-
ment to the man, now in Hades, who sucked that orange
and strewed the peel in your way ? Eather, is it not
more becoming to be angry at his careless anticipation ?
One may reasonably look at it in this way. What
business has a man to think of things right in front
of you, poke his head, as it were, into your light ? What
right has he to set up dams and tunnel out swallow-holes
to deflect the current of your thoughts ? Surely you may
remove these obstructions, if it suits you, and put them
where you will. Else all literature will presently be
choked up, and the making of books come to an end.
One might as well walk ten miles out of one's way because
pome deaf oaf or other chose to sit upon a necessary stile.
Surely Shakespeare or Lamb, or what other source you
contemplate, has had the thing long enough 1 Out of the
road with them. Turn and turn about.
And inverted commas are so inhospitable. If you must
take in another man's offspring, you should surely try to
make the poor foundlings feel at home. Away with such
uncharitable distinctions between the children of the
house and the stranger within your gates. I never see
inverted commas but I think of the necessary persecuted
mediaeval Jew in yellow gabardine.
At least, never put the name of the author you quote.
Think of the feelings of the dead. Don't let the poor
spirit take it to heart that its monumental sayings would
pass unrecognised without your advertisement. You mean
well, perhaps, but it is in the poorest taste. Yet I have
seen Patience on a Monument honourably awarded to
William Shakespeare, and fenced in by commas from all
intercourse with the general text.
There is something so extremely dishonest, too, in
acknowledging quotations. Possibly the good people who
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134 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
so contrive that such signatures as "Shakespeare," "Homer,"
or "St. Paul," appear to be written here and there to
parts of their inferior work, manage to justify the proceed-
ing in their conscience ; but it is uncommonly like hall-
marking pewter on the strength of an infinitesimal tinge of
silver therein. The point becomes at once clear if we
imagine some obscure painter quoting the style of Raphael
and fragments of his designs, and acknowledging his
indebtedness by appending the master's signature. Blank
forgery ! And a flood of light was thrown on the matter
by a chance remark of one of Euphemia's aunts — she is a
great reader of pure fiction — anent a popular novel : " I
am sure it must be a nice book," said she, " or she could not
get all these people to write the mottoes for the chapters."
No, it is all very well to play with one's conscience. I
have known men so sophisticated as to assert that un-
acknowledged quotation was wrong. But very few really
reasonable people will, I think, refuse to agree with me
that the only artistic, the only kindly, and the only
honest method of quotation is plagiary. If you cannot
plagiarise, surely it were better not to quote.
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ON THE ART OF STAYING AT THE
SEASIDE
A MEDITATION AT EASTBOURNE
To stay at the seaside properly, one should not think.
But even in staying at the seaside there are intervals,
waking moments when meals come, even if there are no
appointed meal-times. Moreover, now and then, one must
go to buy tobacco, a matter one can trust to no hireling,
lest he get it dry. It cannot be always seaside, even as it
cannot be always May, and through the gaps thought
creeps in. Going over the cliff and along the parade, and
down by the circulating library to the cigar divan, where
they sell Parique tobacco, the swinging of one's legs seems
to act like a pendulum to the clockwork of one's brain.
One meditates all the way, and chiefly on how few people
there are who can really — to a critical adept — be said to
stay at the seaside.
People seem to think that one can take a ticket to
Eastbourne, or Bognor, or Ventnor, and come and stay at
the seaside straight away, just as I have known new-
hatched undergraduates tell people they were going to
play billiards. Thousands and thousands of people think
they have stayed at the seaside, and have not, just as
thousands of people erroneously imagine they have played
whist. For the latter have played not whist, but Bumble-
puppy, and the former have only frequented a watering-
place for a time. Tour true staying at the seaside is an
art, demanding not only railway fares but special aptitude,
and, moreover, needing culture, like all worthy arts.
The most insurmountable difficulty of the beginner is
the classical simplicity of the whole thing. To stay at
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the seaside properly you just spread yourself out on the
extreme edge of the land and let the sunlight soak in.
Your eyes are fixed upon the horizon. Some have it that
your head should be towards the sea, but the best
authorities think that this determines blood to that
region, and so stimulates thought. This is all the positive
instruction ; the rest is prohibition. You must not think,
and you must not move, neither may you go to sleep. In
a few minutes the adept becomes as a god, even as a god
that sits upon the lotus leaf. New light and colour come
into the sky and sea, and the surges chant his praises.
But those who are not of the elect get pins and needles
all over them.
It must be freely admitted that staying at the seaside
such as this, staying at the seaside in its perfection, is a
thing for a select few. You want a broad stretch of beach
and all the visible sea to yourself. You cannot be dis-
turbed by even the most idyllic children trying to bury
you with sand and suchlike playfulness, nor by boat-loads
of the democracy rowing athwart your sea and sky. And
the absence of friend or wife goes without saying. I
notice down here a very considerable quantity of evidently
married pairs, and the huge majority of the rest of the
visitors run in couples, and are to all appearances engaged.
If they are not, I would submit that they ought to be.
Probably there is a certain satisfaction in sitting by the
sea with the girl you are in love with, or your wife for
the matter of that, just as many people undoubtedly find
tea with milk and sugar very nice. But the former is no
more the way to get the full and perfect pleasure of stay-
ing at the seaside than the latter is the way to get the full
and perfect flavour of the tea. True staying at the seaside
is neither the repetition of old conversations in new sur-
roundings nor the exposure of one's affections to ozone.
It is something infinitely higher. It is pure quiescence.
It is the experience of a waking inanition savouring of
Buddha and the divine.
Now, staying at the seaside is so rarely done well,
because of the littleness of man. To do it properly needs
many of the elements of greatness. Your common man,
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AET OF STAYING AT THE SEASIDE 137
while he has life in him, can let neither himself nor the
universe alone. He must be asserting himself in some
way, even if it is only by flinging pebbles at a stick.
That self-forgetfulness which should be a delight is a
terror to him. He brings dogs down to the beach to
stand between him and the calm of nature, and yelp. He
does worse than that.
The meditative man going daily over by the cliff and
along the parade, to get his ounce of tobacco, has a sad
spectacle of what human beings may be driven to in this
way. One sees altogether some hundreds of people there
who have heard perhaps that staying at the seaside is
good, and who have, anyhow, got thus far towards it, and
stopped. They have not the faintest idea how to make
themselves happy. The general expression is veiled
curiosity. They sit — mostly with their backs to the sea
— talking poorly of indifferent topics and watching one
another. Most obviously they want hints of what to do
with themselves. Behind them is a bank of flowers like
those in Battersea Pa^k, and another parallel parade, and
beyond are bathing-machines. The pier completely cuts
the horizon out of the background. There is a stout lady,
in dark blue, bathing. The only glances directed sea-
ward are furtive ones at her. Many seem to be doubting
whether this is not what they came down for.. Others
lean dubiously to the invitations of the boatmen. Others
again listen to vocalists and dramatic outcasts who, for
ha'pence, render obvious the reason of their professional
degradation. It seems eccentric to travel seventy or
eighty miles to hear a man without a voice demonstrate
that he is unfit to have one, but they do. Anyone
curious in these matters need only go to a watering-place
to see and, what is worse, to hear for himself. After an
excursion train to Eastbourne, upwards of a thousand
people have been seen thus heaped together over an
oblong space of a mile long by twenty yards wide. Only
three miles away there was a towering white cliff over-
hanging a practically desert beach; and one seagull
circled above one solitary, motionless, supine man, really
staying at the seaside.
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You cannot walk six miles anywhere along the south
coast without coming upon one of these heaps of people,
called a watering-place. There will be a town of houses
behind wherein the people lodge, until, as they think,
they have stayed a sufficient time at the sea, and they
return, hot, cross, and mystified, to London. The sea front
will be bricked or paved for a mile or so, and there will
be rows of boats and bathing-machines, and other
contrivances to screen off the view of the sea. And, as
we have indicated, watering-places and staying by the
seaside are incompatible things. The true stayer by the
seaside goes into the watering-place because he must;
because there is little food, and that uncooked, and no
tobacco, between the cliffs and the sea. Having purchased
what he needs he flees forth again. What time the whole
selvage of England becomes watering-place, there will be
no more staying by the seaside at all in the land. But
this is a gloomy train of thought that we will not pursue.
There have been those who assert that one end of
staying at the seaside is bathing ; but it is easy to show
that this is not so. Your proper bathing-place is up the
river, where the trees bend to the green and brown
shadows of the water. There the bath is sweet, fresh out
of the sky, or but just filtered through the blue hills of
the distant water-shed ; and it is set about with flowers.
But the sea — the sea has stood there since the beginning
of things, and with small prospect of change, says Mr.
Kipling, to all eternity. The water in the sea, geologists
tell us, has not been changed for fifty million years ! The
same chemist who sets me against all my food with his
chemical names speaks of the sea as a weak solution of
drowned men. Be that as it may, it leaves the skin
harsh with salt, and the hair sticky. Moreover, it is such
a promiscuous bathing-place. However, we need scarcely
depreciate the sea as a bath, for what need is there of
that when the river is clearly better ? No one can deny
that the river is better. People who bathe in the sea
bathe by mistake, because they have come to the side of
the sea, and know not how else to use it.
So, too, with the boating. It is hard to imagine how
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AET OF STAYING AT THE SEASIDE 139
human beings who have drifted down streams, and
watched the brown fish in the shallows, and peered
through the tall sedges at the forget-me-nots, and fought
with the ropes of the water-lilies, and heard the ripple under
the bows, can ever think of going to and fro, pitching
spasmodically, in front of a watering-place. And as for
fishing — they catch fish at sea, indeed, but it is not fishing
at all ; neither rods nor flies have they, and there is an
end to that matter.
An Eastbourne meditative man returning to where he
stays, with his daily ounce of tobacco already afire, sees
in the streets what are called by the natives "cherry-
bangs," crowded with people, and, further, cabriolets and
such vehicles holding parties and families. The good
folks are driving away from the sea for the better part of
the day, going to Battle and other places inland. The
puzzle of what to do with their sea is too much for them,
and they are going away for a little to rest their minds.
Eegarded as a centre of drives one might think an inland
place would be preferable to a seaside town, which at
best commands but a half-circle. However that may be,
the fact remains that one of the chief occupations of your
common visitor to the seaside is going away from it.
Than this fact there can be nothing more conclusive in
support of my argument that ordinary people are
absolutely ignorant and incapable of staying by the
seaside.
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CONCERNING CHESS
The passion for playing chess is one of the most un-
accountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural
selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of
occupations, the least satisfying of desires, an aimless
excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have,
let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist, that you
wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy,
and unreliable — but teach him, inoculate him with chess !
It is well, perhaps, that the right way of teaching chess is
so little known, that consequently in most cases the plot
fails in the performance, the dagger turns aside. Else we
should all be chess-players — there would be none left to do
the business of the world. Our statesmen would sit with
pocket boards while the country went to the devil, our
army would bury itself in chequered contemplation, our
bread-winners would forget their wives in seeking after
impossible mates. The whole world would be disorganised.
I can fancy this abominable hypnotism so wrought into
the constitution of men that the cabmen would go trying
to drive their horses in Knights' moves up and down
Charing Cross Eoad. And now and again a suicide
would come to hand with the pathetic inscription pinned
to his chest : " I checked with my Queen too soon. I
cannot bear the thought of it" There is no remorse like
the remorse of chess.
Only, happily, as we say, chess is taught the wrong
way round. People put out the board before the learner
with all the men in battle array, sixteen a side, with six
different kinds of moves, and the poor wretch is simply
crushed and appalled. A lot of things happen, mostly
disagreeable, and then a mate comes looming up through
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CONCERNING CHESS 141
the haze of pieces. So he goes away awestricken but
unharmed, secretly believing that all chess-players are
humbugs, and that intelligent chess, which is neither
chancy nor rote-learned, is beyond the wit of man. But
clearly this is an unreasonable method of instruction.
Before the beginner can understand the beginning of the
game he must surely understand the end; how can he
commence playing until he knows what he is playing for ?
It is like starting athletes on a race, and leaving them to
find out where the winning-post is hidden.
Your true teacher of chess, your subtle chess-poisoner,
your cunning Comus who changes men to chess-players,
begins quite the other way round. He will, let us say,
give you King, Queen, and Pawn placed out in careless
possible positions. So you master the militant possibili-
ties of Queen and Pawn without perplexing complications.
Then King, Queen, and Bishop perhaps ; King, Queen, and
Knight ; and so on. It ensures that you always play a
winning game in these happy days of your chess childhood,
and taste the one sweet of chess-playing, the delight of
having the upper hand of a better player. Then to more
complicated positions, and at last back to the formal
beginning. You begin to see now to what end the array
is made, and understand why one Gambit differeth from
another in glory and virtue. And the chess mania of
your teacher cleaveth to you thenceforth and for ever-
more.
It is a curse upon a man. There is no happiness in
chess — Mr. St. George Mivart, who can find happiness in
the strangest places, would be at a loss to demonstrate it
upon the chess-board. The mild delight of a pretty mate
is the least unhappy phase of it Sut, generally, you find
afterwards that you ought to have mated two moves
before, or at the time that an unforeseen reply takes your
Queen. No chess-player sleeps well. After the painful
strategy of the day one fights one's battles over again.
You see with more than daylight clearness that it was
the Book you should have moved, and not the Knight.
No! it is impossible! no common sinner innocent of
chess knows these lower deeps of remorse. Vast desert
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142 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
boards lie for the chess-player beyond the gates of horn.
Stalwart Rooks ram headlong at one, Knights hop side-
long, one's Pawns are all tied, and a mate hangs threaten-
ing and never descends. And once chess has been begun
in the proper way, it is flesh of your flesh, bone of your
bone ; you are sold, and the bargain is sealed, and the evil
spirit hath entered in.
The proper outlet for the craving is the playing of
games, and there is a class of men — shadowy, unhappy,
unreal-looking men — who gather in coffee-houses, and
play with a desire that dieth not, and a fire that is not
quenched. These gather in clubs and play Tournaments,
such tournaments as he of the Table Round could never
have imagined. But there are others who have the vice
who live in country places, in remote situations — curates,
schoolmasters, rate collectors — who go consumed from day
to day and meet no fit companion, and who must needs
find some artificial vent for their mental energy. No one
has ever calculated how many sound Problems are possible,
and no doubt the Psychical Research people would be glad
if Professor Karl Pearson would give his mind to the
matter. All the possible dispositions of the pieces come
to such a vast number, however, that, according to the
theory of probability, and allowing a few thousand
arrangements each day, the same problem ought never to
turn up more than twice in a century or so. As a matter
of fact — it is probably due to some flaw in the theory of
probability — the same problem has a way of turning up
in different publications several times in a month or so.
It may be, of course, that, after all, quite "sound"
problems are limited in number, and that we keep on
inventing and reinventing them; that, if a record were
kept, the whole system, up to four or five moves, might be
classified, and placed on record in the course of a few
score years. Indeed, if we were to eliminate those with
conspicuously bad moves, it may be we should find the
number of reasonable games was limited enough, and that
even our brilliant Lasker is but repeating the inspirations
of some long-buried Persian, some mute inglorious Hindoo,
dead and forgotten ages since. It may be over every
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CONCERNING CHESS 143
game there watches the forgotten forerunners of the
players, and that chess is indeed a dead game, a haunted
game, played out centuries ago, even, as beyond all cavil,
is the game of draughts.
The artistic temperament, the gay irresponsible cast of
mind, does what it can to lighten the gravity of this too
intellectual game. To a mortal there is something
indescribably horrible in these champions with their four
moves an hour — the bare thought of the mental operations
of the fifteen minutes gives one a touch of headache.
Compulsory quick moving is the thing for gaiety, and
that is why, though we revere Steinitz and Lasker, it is •
Bird we love. His victories glitter, his errors are magnifi-
cent The true sweetness of chess, if it ever can be sweet,
is to see a victory snatched, by some happy impertinence,
out of the shadow of .apparently irrevocable disaster.
And talking of cheerfulness reminds me of Lowson's
historical game of chess. Lowson said he had been cheer-
ful sometimes — but, drunk ! Perish the thought ! Chal-
lenged, he would have proved it by some petty tests of
pronunciation, some Good Templar's shibboleths. He
offered to walk along the kerb, to work any problem in
mathematics we could devise, finally to play MacBryde
at chess. The other gentleman was appointed judge, and
after putting the antimacassar over his head ("jush
wigsh ") immediately went to sleep in a disorderly heap
on the sofa. The game was begun very solemnly, so I
am told. MacBryde, in describing it to me afterwards,
swayed his hands about with the fingers twiddling in a
weird kind of way, and said the board went like that.
The game was fierce but brief. It was presently dis-
covered that both kings had been taken. Lowson was
hard to convince, but this came home to him. "Man,"
he is reported to have said to MacBryde, " I'm just drunk.
There's no doubt in the matter. I'm feeling very ashamed
of myself." It was accordingly decided to declare the
game drawn. The position, as I found it next morning,
is an interesting one. Lowson's Queen was at K Kt 6,
his Bishop at Q B 3, he had several Pawns, and his Knight
occupied a commanding position at the intersection of
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four squares. MacBryde had four Pawns, two Rooks, a -tf
Queen, a draught, and a small mantel ornament arranged
in a rough semicircle athwart the board. I have no
doubt chess exquisites will sneer at this position, but in
my opinion it is one of the cheerfulest I have ever seen.
I remember I admired it very much at the time, in spite
of a slight headache, and it is still the only game of chess
that I recall with undiluted pleasure. And yet I have
played many games. I
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THE COAL-SCUTTLE
A STUDY IN DOMESTIC ESTHETICS
Euphemia, who loves to have home dainty and delightful,
would have no coals if she could dispense with them,
much less a coal-scuttle. Indeed, it would seem she
would have no fireplace at all, if she had her will. All
the summer she is happy, and the fireplace is anything
but the place for a fire; the fender has vanished, the
fireirons are gone, it is draped and decorated and dis-
guised. So would dear Euphemia drape and disguise
the whole iron framework of the world, with that decora-
tive and decent mind of hers, had she but the scope.
There are exotic ferns there, spreading their fanlike
fronds, and majolica glows and gleams; and fabrics, of
which Morris is the actual or spiritual begetter, delight
the eye. In summer-time our fireplace is indeed a thing
of beauty, but, alas for the solar system ! it is not a joy
for ever. The sun at last recedes beyond the equinoxes,
and the black bogey who has slept awakens again.
Euphemia restores the fender kerb- and the brazen dogs and
the fireirons that will clatter ; and then all the winter, when-
ever she sits before the fire, her trouble is with her. Even
when the red glow of the fire lights up her features most
becomingly, and flattery is in her ear, every now and then
a sidelong glance at her ugly foe shows that the thought
of it is in her mind, and that the crumpled roseleaf, if
such a phrase may be used for a coal-scuttle, insists on
being felt. And she has even been discovered alone, sit-
ting elbows on knees, and chin on her small clenched fist,
frowning at it, puzzling how to circumvent the one enemy
of her peace.
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" It " is what Euphemia always calls this utensil, when
she can bring herself to give the indescribable an imperfect
vent in speech. But commonly the feeling is too deep for
words. Her war with this foeman in her household, this
coarse rebel in her realm of soft prettiness, is one of those
silent ones, those grim struggles without outcry or threat
or appeal for quarter that can never end in any com-
promise, never find a rest in any truce, except the utter
defeat of her antagonist. And how she has tried — the
happy thoughts, the faint hopes, the new departures and
outflanking movements ! And even to-day there the thing
defies her — a coal-box, with a broad smile that shows its
black teeth, thick and squat, filling a snug corner and
swaggering in unmanly triumph over the outrage upon
her delicacy that it commits.
One of Euphemia's brightest ideas was to burn wood.
Logs make even a picturesque pile in a corner — look
" uncommon." But there are objections to wood. Wood
finely divided burns with gay quirks and jets of flame,
and making cheerful crackling noises the while ; but its
warmth and brightness are as evanescent as love's young
dream. And your solid log has a certain irritating inert-
ness. It is an absentee fuel, spending its fire up the
chimney, and after its youthful clouds of glory turns but
a cheerless side of black and white char towards the room.
And, above all, the marital mind is strangely exasperated
by the log. Smite it with the poker, and you get but a
sullen resonance, a flight of red sparks, a sense of an
unconquerable toughness. It is worse than coke. The
crisp fracture of coal, the spitting flames suddenly leaping
into existence from the shiny new fissures, are altogether
wanting. Old-seasoned timber burns indeed most delight-
fully, but then it is as ugly as coal, and withal very dear.
So Euphemia went back to coal again with a sigh.
Possibly if Euphemia had been surrounded by the wealth
she deserves this trouble would not have arisen. A silent
servant, bearing the due dose of fresh ,fuel, would have
come gliding from a mysterious Beneath, restored the
waning animation of the grate, and vanished noiselessly
again. But this was beyond the range of Euphemia's
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THE COAL-SCUTTLE 147
possibilities. And so we are face to face with this problem
of the scuttle again.
At first she would feign there was no such thing as coal.
It was too horrible. Only a Zola would admit it. It was
the epoch of concealment. The thing purchased was like
a little cupboard on four legs; it might have held any
convenient trifle ; and there was a shelf upon the top and
a book of poetry and a piece of crackled Satsuma. You
took a little brass handle and pulled it down, and the
front of the little cupboard came forward, and there you
found your coal. But a dainty little cupboard can no
more entertain black coal and inelegant firewood and
keep its daintiness than a mind can entertain black
thoughts and yet be sweet. This cabinet became de-
moralised with amazing quickness ; it became incontinent
with its corruptions, a hinge got twisted, and after a time
it acquired the habit of suddenly, and with an unpleasant
oscillatory laughing noise, opening of its own accord and
proclaiming its horrid secret to Euphemia's best visitors.
An air of wickedness, at once precocious and senile, came
upon it ; it gaped and leered at Euphemia as the partner
of her secret with such a familiar air of " I and you " that
she could stand it no longer, and this depraved piece of
furniture was banished at last from her presence, and
relegated to its proper sphere of sham gentility below
stairs, where it easily passed itself upon the cook as an
exquisite. Euphemia tried to be sensible then, and
determined, since she must have coal in her room, to let
no false modesty intervene, but to openly proclaim its
presence to all the world.
The next thing, therefore, was a cylinder of brass,
broadly open above, saying to the world, as it were,
"Look! I contain coal." And there were brass tongs
like sugar tongs wherewith Euphemia would regale the
fire and brighten it up, handing it a lump at a time in the
prettiest way. But brass dints. The brazen thing was
quiet and respectable enough upstairs, but ever and again
it went away to be filled. What happened on these
holiday jaunts Euphemia has never ascertained. But a
chance blow or worse cause ran a crease athwart the
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148 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
forehead of the thing, and below an almost imperceptible
bulging hinted at a future corpulency. And there was
complaint of the quantity of polishing it needed, and an
increasing difficulty in keeping it bright. And except
when it was full to the brim, the lining was unsightly ;
and this became more so. One day Ithuriel must have
visited Euphemia's apartment, and the tarnished brilliancy
of the thing stood confessed. For some days there was an
interregnum, and a coal-scuttle from downstairs — a black
unstable thing on flat foot and with a vast foolish nether
lip — did its duty with inelegant faithfulness.
Then Euphemia had a really pretty fancy. She procured
one of those big open garden baskets and painted it apleasant
brown, and instead of a garden fork she had a little half
horticultural scoop. In this basket she kept her coals,
and she tied a pink ribbon on the handle. One might
fancy she had been in some dewy garden and had dug a
few coals as one might dig up bulbs, and brought them in
and put them down. It attracted attention from all her
visitors, and set a kind of fashion in the neighbourhood.
For a time Euphemia was almost contented. But one
day a malignant , woman called, and looked at this device
through her gilt eye-glasses, while she secretly groped in
the dark of her mind for an unpleasant thing to say.
Then suddenly she remarked, " Why not put your coal in
a bassinette ? Or keep it all on the floor ? " Euphemia's
face fell. The thing was undeniably very like a cradle, in
the light of this suggestion ; the coal certainly did seem
a little out of place there ; and besides, if there were more
than three or four lumps they had a way of tumbling over
the edge upon the carpet when the fire was replenished.
The tender shoot of Euphemia's satisfaction suddenly
withered and died.
So the struggle has gone on. Sometimes it has been a
wrought iron tripod with a subtle tendency to upset in
certain directions ; sometimes a coal-box ; once even the
noisy old coal-box of japanned tin, making more noise
than a Salvation Army service, and strangely decorated
with " art " enamels, had a turn. At present Euphemia
is enduring a walnut " casket," that since its first week of
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office has displayed an increasing indisposition to shut.
But things cannot stay like this. The worry and anxiety
and vexation, Eupheinia declares, are making her old
before her time. A delicate woman should not be left
alone to struggle against brazen monsters. A closed gas
stove is happily impossible, but the husband of the
household is threatened with one of those beastly sham
fires, wherein gas jets flare among firebrick — a mechanical
fire without vitality or variety, that never dances nor
crackles nor blazes, a monotonous horror, a fire you cannot
poke. That is what it will certainly come to if the
problem remains unsolved.
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BAGARROW
Frankly, I detest this Bagarrow. Yet it is quite
generally conceded that Bagarrow is a very well-meaning
fellow. But the trouble is to understand him. To do
that I have been at some pains, and yet I am still a mere
theorist. An anthropometric estimate of the man fails to
reveal any reason for the distinction of my aversion. He
is of passable height, breadth, and density, and, save for
a certain complacency of expression, I find no salient
objection in his face. He has bluish eyes and a whitish
skin, and average-coloured hair — none of them distinctly
indictable possessions. It is something in his interior
and unseen mechanism, I think, that must be wrong;
some internal lesion that finds expression in his acts.
His mental operations, indeed, were at first as incon-
ceivable to me as a crab's or a cockchafer's. That is where
all the trouble came in. For that reason alone they
fascinated me and aggrieved me. From the conditions of
our acquaintance — we were colleagues — I had to study
him with some thoroughness, observing him under these
circumstances and those. I have, by the bye, sometimes
wondered idly how he would react to alcohol — a fluid he
avoids. It would, I am sure, be an entirely novel and
remarkable kind of Drunk, and I am also certain it would
be an offensive one. But I can't imagine it ; I have no
data. I could as soon evolve from my inner consciousness
an intoxicated giraffe. But, as I say, this interesting
experience has hitherto been denied me.
Now my theory of Bagarrow is this, that he has a kind
of disease in his ideals, some interruption of nutrition that
has left them small and emasculate. He aims, it appears,
at a state called " Really Nice " or the " True Gentleman,"
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BAGAKROW 151
the outward and visible signs of which are a conspicuous
quietness of costume, gloves in all weathers, and a tightly-
rolled umbrella. But coupled in some way with this is a
queer smack of the propagandist, a kind of dwarfed
prophetic passion. That is the particular oddness of him.
He displays a timid yet persistent desire to foist this
True Gentleman of his upon an unwilling world, to make
you Beally Nice after his own pattern. I always suspect
him of trying to convert me by stealth when I am not
looking.
So far as I can see, Bagarrow's conception of this True
Gentleman of his is at best a compromise, mainly holiness,
but a tinted kind of holiness — goodness in clean cuffs and
with something neat in ties. He renounces the flesh and
the devil willingly enough, but he wants to keep up a
decent appearance. Now a stark saint I can find
sympathy for. I respect your prophet unkempt $md in a
hair shirit denouncing Sin — and mundane affairs in
general — with hoarse passion and a fiery hate. I would
not go for my holidays with nor make a domestic pet of
such a man, but I respect him. But Bagarrow's pose is
different. Bagarrow would call that carrying things to
extremes. His is an unobtrusive virtue, a compromising
dissent, inaggressive aggressions on sin. So I take it.
And at times he puts it to you in a drawling argument,
a stream of Bagarrowisms, until you have to hurt his
feelings — happily he is always getting his feelings hurt —
just to stop the flow of him.
" Life," said Bagarrow, in a moment of expansiveness,
"is scarcely worth living unless you are doing good to
someone." That I take to be the keystone of him. " I
want to be a Good Influence upon all the people I meet."
I do not think it has ever dawned upon him that he
himself is any way short of perfection ; and, so far as I
can see, the triumph and end of his good influence is
cleanliness of cuff, compactness of umbrella, and general
assimilation to the Bagarrow ideal
Hear him upon one's social duties — this living soul in
this world of wonders ! " In moderation," said Bagarrow,
opening out to questions on that matter, " social relaxation
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is desirable, and I will even go so far as to admit that I
think it well to have at hand some pleasant expedient for
entertaining people and , passing the time. A humorous
song or a recitation — provided it is in really good taste —
is harmless enough, and sometimes it may even be turned
to good account. And everyone should try to master
some instrument or other. The flute, perhaps, is as
convenient as any ; for the fiddle and piano, you know, are
difficult and expensive to learn, and require constant
practice. A little legerdemain is also a great acquisition
for a man. Some may differ from me in that," continued
Bagarrow, " but I see no harm in it. There are hundreds
of perfectly proper and innocent tricks with coins and bits
of paper, and pieces of string, that will make an evening
pass most delightfully. One may get quite a little
reputation as an entertainer with these things."
"And it is," pursued Bagarrow, quite glowing with
liberality, "just a little pharisaical to object to card tricks.
There are quantities of really quite clever and
mathematical things that one may do with a chosen card,
dealing the pack into heaps and counting slowly. Of
course it is not for mere pleasuring that I learn these
things. It gives anyone with a little tact an opportunity
for stopping card -playing. When the pack is brought in, and
all the party are intent upon gaming, you may seize your
opportunity and take the cards, saying, ' Let me show you
a little trick/ or, ' Have you seen Maskelyne's new trick
with the cards ? ' Before anyone can object you are dis-
playing your skill to their astonished eyes, and in their
wonder at your cleverness the objectionable game may be
indefinitely postponed."
" Yet so set at times is your gambler upon his abominable
pursuit," says Bagarrow, "that in practice even this
ingenious expedient has been known to fail." He tried it
once, it seems, in a race train to Kempton Park, and
afterwards he had to buy a new hat. That incident,
indeed, gives you the very essence of Bagarrow in his
insidious attacks on evil. I remember that on another
occasion he went out of his way to promise a partially
intoxicated man a drink ; and taking him into a public-
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BAGAEROW 153
house ordered two lemon squashes ! Drinks ! He liked
lemon squash himself and he did not like beer, and he
thought he had only to introduce the poor fallen creature
to the delights of temperance to ensure his conversion
there and then. I think he expected the man to fall
upon him, crying " My benefactor ! " But he did not say
"My benefactor," at anyrate, though he fell upon him,
cheerfully enough.
To avoid the appearance of priggishness, which he
dreads with some reason, he even went so far as to
procure a herb tobacco, which he smokes with the
help of frequent sulphur matches. This he recommends
to us strongly. "Won't you try it?" he says, with a
winning smile. " Just once." And he is the only man I
ever met who drinks that facetious fluid, non-alcoholic
beer. Once he proposed to wean me upon that from my
distinctive vice, which led indeed to our first rupture.
" / find it delicious," he said in pathetic surprise.
It is one of his most inveterate habits to tell you
quietly what he does, or would do under the
circumstances. Seeing you at Kipling, he will propound
the proposition that "all true literature has a distinct
aim." His test of literary merit is " What good does it
do you ? " He is a great lender of books, especially of
Carlyle and Euskin, which authors for some absolutely
inscrutable reason he considers provocative of Bagarrowism,
and he goes to the County Council lectures on dairy-work,
because it encourages others to improve themselves.
But I have said enough to display him, and of Bagarrow
at least — as I can well testify — it is easy to have more
than enough. Indeed, after whole days with him I have
gone home to dream of the realisation of his ideals, a sort
of Bagarrow millennium, a world of Bagarrows. All
kinds of men — Falstaffs, Don Quixotes, Alan Stewarts,
John the Baptists, John Knoxes, Quilps, and Benvenuto
Cellinis — all, so to speak, Bagarrowed, all with clean
cuffs, tight umbrellas, and temperate ways, passing
to and fro in a regenerate earth.
And so he goes on his way through this wonderful
universe with his eyes fixed upon two or three secondary
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154 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
things, without the lust or pride of life, without curiosity
or adventure, a mere timid missionary of a religion of
" Nicer Ways," a quiet setter of a good example. I can
assure you this is no exaggeration, but a portrait. It
seems to me that the thing must be pathological, that he
and this goodness of his have exactly the same claim upon
Lombroso, let us say, as the born criminal. He is born
good, a congenital good example, a sufferer from atrophy
of his original sin. The only hope I can see for
Bagarrow, short of murder, is forcible trepanning. He
ought to have ttje seat of his ideals lanced, and all this
wash about doing good to people by stealth taken away.
It may be he might prove a very decent fellow then — if
there was anything left of him, that is.
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THE BOOK OF ESSAYS DEDICATORY
I have been bothered about this book this three months.
I have written scarcely anything since Llewellyn asked
me for it, for when he asked me I had really nothing on
hand. I had just published every line I had ever written,
at my own expense, with Prigsbys. Yet three months
should suffice for one of Llewellyn's books, which consist
chiefly of decorous fly-leaves and a dedication or so, and
margins. Of course you know Llewellyn's books — the
most delightful things in the market : the sweetest covers,
with little gilt apples and things carelessly distributed
over luminous grey, and bright red initials, and all these
delightful fopperies. But it was the very slightness of
these bibelots that disorganised me. And perhaps, also,
the fact that no one has ever asked me for a book before.
I had no trouble with the title though — " Lichens." I
have wondered the thing was never used before. Lichens,
variegated, beautiful, though on the most arid foundations,
half fungoid, half vernal — the very name for a booklet
of modern verse. And that, of course, decided the key
of the cover and disposed of three or four pages.
A fly-leaf, a leaf with "Lichens" printed fair and
beautiful a little to the left of the centre, then a title-page
—"lichens. By H. G. Wells. London: MPCCCXCV.
Stephen Llewellyn. " Then a restful blank page, and then —
the Dedication. It was the dedication stopped me. The
title-page, it is true, had some points of difficulty. Should
the Christian name be printed in full or not, for instance ;
but it had none of the fatal fascination of the dedicatory
page. I had, so to speak, to look abroad among the ranks
of men, and make one of those fretful forgotten millions —
immortal. It seemed a congenial task.
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156 CEBTAIN PEKSONAL MATTERS
I went to work forthwith.
It was only this morning that I realised the magnitude
of my accumulations. Ever since then — it was three
months ago — I have been elaborating this Dedication. I
turned the pile over, idly at first. Presently I became
interested in tracing my varying moods, as they had
found a record in the heap.
This struck me —
Then again, a little essay in gratitude came to hand —
To
Professor Augustus Flood,
Whose Admirable Lectures on
Palaeontology
First turned my Attention to
literature.
There was a tinge of pleasantry in the latter that
pleased me very greatly when I wrote it, and I find
immediately overlying it another essay in the same
line —
To the Latter-day Reviewer,
These Pearls.
For some days I was smitten with the idea of dedicat-
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THE BOOK OF ESSAYS DEDICATOBY 157
ing my little booklet to one of my numerous personal
antagonists, and conveying some subtly devised insult
with an air of magnanimity. I thought, for instance, of
Blizzard —
Sir Joseph Blizzabd,
The most distinguished, if not the greatest, of contemporary
anatomists.
I think it was " X. L/s " book, Avi Diaholus aut
Nihil, that set me upon another line. There is, after
all, your reader to consider in these matters, your average
middle-class person to impress in some way. They say
the creature is a snob, and absolutely devoid of any
tinge of humour, and I must confess that I more than
half believe it. At anyrate, it was that persuasion
inspired —
To the Countess of X.,
In Memory of Many Happy Days.
I know no Countess of X., as a matter of fact, but if the
public is such an ass as to think better of my work for
the suspicion, I do not care how soon I incur it. And
this again is a pretty utilisation of the waste desert of
politics —
My Deab Salisbuby, — Pray accept this unworthy tribute of my
affectionate esteem.
There were heaps of others. And looking at those
heaps it suddenly came sharp and vivid before my mind
that there — there was the book I needed, already written]
A blank page, a dedication, a blank page, a dedication,
and so on. I saw no reason to change the title. It only
remained to select the things, and the book was done. I
set to work at once, and in a very little while my bibelot
was selected. There were dedications fulsome and fluid,
dedications acrid and uncharitable, dedications in verse
and dedications in the dead languages: all sorts and
conditions of dedications, even the simple "To J. H.
Gabbles" — so suggestive of the modest white stones of
the village churchyard. Altogether I picked out one
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158 CEETAIN PEESONAL MATTEES
hundred and three dedications. At last only one thing
remained to complete the book. And that was — the
Dedication. You will scarcely credit it, but that worries
me still. . . .
I am almost inclined to think that Dedications are
going out of fashion.
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THROUGH A MICROSCOPE
SOME MORAL REFLECTIONS
This dabbler person has recently disposed of his camera
and obtained a microscope — a short, complacent-looking
implement it is, of brass — and he goes about everywhere
now with little glass bottles in his pocket, ready to jump
upon any stray polly-woggle he may find, and hale it
home and pry into its affairs. Within his study window
are perhaps half a dozen jars and basins full of green
scum and choice specimens of black mud in which his
victims live. He persists in making me look through
this instrument, though I would rather I did not It
seems to me a kind of impropriety even when I do it.
He gets innumerable things in a drop of green water,
and puts it on a glass slip under the object glass, and, of
course, they know nothing of the change in their condition,
and go on living just as they did before they were ob-
served. It makes me feel at times like a public moralist,
or Peeping Tom of Coventry, or some such creature.
Certainly there are odd things enough in the water.
Among others, certain queer green things that are neither
plants nor animals. Most of the time they are plants,
quiet green threads matted together, but every now and
then the inside comes out of one, so to speak, and starts
off with a fine red eye and a long flickering tail, to see
the world. The dabbler says it's quite a usual thing
among the lower plants— ^4^ he calls them, for some
reason — to disgorge themselves in this way and go swim-
ming about ; but it has quite upset my notions of things.
If the lower plants, why not the higher ? It may be my
abominable imagination, but since he told me about these
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— swarm spores I think he called them — I don't feel
nearly so safe with my geraniums as I did.
A particularly objectionable thing in these water drops,
the dabbler insists upon my spying at is the furious
activity of everything you see in them. You look down
his wretched tube, and there, bright and yellow with the
lamplight in the round field of the microscope, is a perfect
riot of living things. Perhaps it's the water he got from
Hampstead, and a dozen flat things the shape of short-
breads will be fussing about. They are all quite trans-
parent and colourless, and move about like galleys by
means of a lot of minute oars that stick out all over
them. Never a moment's rest. And, presently, one sees
that even the green plant threads are wriggling across
the field. The dabbler tries to moralise on this in the
vein of Charles Kingsley, and infer we have much to
learn from these ridiculous creatures ; but, so far as I can
see, it's a direct incentive to sloth to think* how low in
the scale of creation these things are, in spite of all their
fussing. If they had sat about more and thought, they
might be fishing the dabbler out of ponds and examining
him instead of his examining them. Your energetic people
might do worse things than have a meditative half-hour
at the microscope. Then there are green things with a
red spot and a tail, that creep about like slugs, and are
equally transparent. Euglena viridis the dabbler calls
them, which seems unnecessary information. In fact
all the things he shows me are transparent Even the
little one-eyed Crustacea, the size of a needle-point, that
discredit the name of Cyclops. You can see their
digestion and muscle and nerve, and, in fact, everything.
It's at least a blessing we are not the same. Fancy the
audible comments of the temperance advocate when you
get in the bus ! No use pulling yourself together then.
"Pretty full!" And "Look," people would say, "his
wife gives him cold mutton."
Speaking of the name of Cyclops reminds me that these
scientific people have been playing a scurvy trick upon
the classics behind our backs. It reminds one of Episte-
mon's visit to Hades, when he saw Alexander a patcher
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THEOUGH A MICBOSCOPE 161
of clouts and Xerxes a crier of mustard. Aphrodite, the
dabbler tells me, is a kind of dirty mud-worm, and much
dissected by spectacled pretenders to the London B.Sc;
every candidate, says the syllabus, must be able to dissect,
to the examiner's satisfaction, and demonstrate upon
Aphrodite, Nereis, Palaemon. Were the gods ever so
insulted? Then the snaky Medusa and Pandora, our
mother, are jelly-fish ; Astrsea is still to be found on coral .
reefs, a poor thing, and much browsed upon by parrot
fish; and Doris and Tethys and Cydippe are sea slugs.
It's worse than Heine's vision of the gods grown old.
They can't be content with the departed gods merely.
Evadne is a water flea — they'll make something out of
Mrs. Sarah Grand next ; and Autolycus, my Autolycus !
is a polymorphic worm, whatever subtlety of insult
"polymorphic worm" may convey.
However, I wander from the microscope. These short-
bread things are fussing about hither and thither across
the field, and now and then an amoeba comes crawling
into view. These are invertebrate jelly-like things of no
particular shape, and they keep on thrusting out a part
here, and withdrawing a part there, and changing and
advancing just as though they were popular democratic
premiers. Then diatoms keep gliding athwart the circle.
These diatoms are, to me at least, the most perplexing
things in the universe. Imagine a highly ornamental
thing in white and brown, the shape of a spectacle case,
without any limbs or other visible means of progression,
and without any wriggling of the body, or indeed any
apparent effort at all, gliding along at a smart pace.
That's your diatom. The dabbler really knows nothing
of how they do it. He mumbles something about Butschfi
and Grenfell. Imagine the thing on a larger scale,
Cleopatra's Needle, for instance, travelling on its side up
the Thames Embankment, and all unchaperoned, at the
rate of four or five miles an hour.
There's another odd thing about these microscope
things which redeems, to some extent at least, their
singular frankness. To use the decorous phrase of the
text-book, "They multiply by fission." Your amoeba or
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162 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
vorbicella, as the case may be, splits in two. Then there
are two amoebae or vorticellae. In this way the necessity
of the family, that middle-class institution so abhorrent to
the artistic mind, is avoided. In my friend's drop of
ditch-water, as in heaven, there is neither marrying nor
giving in marriage. There are no waste parents, which
should appeal to the scholastic mind, and the simple
protozoon has none of that fitful fever of falling in love,
that distressingly tender state that so bothers your mortal
man. They go about their business with an enviable
singleness of purpose, and when they have eaten and
drunk, and attained to the fulness of life, they divide and
begin again with renewed zest the pastime of living.
In a sense they are immortal. For we may look at
this matter in another light, and say our exuberant
protozoon has shed a daughter, and remains. In that case
the amoeba I look at may have crawled among the slime
of the Silurian seas when the common ancestor of myself
and the royal family was an unassuming mud-fish like
those in the reptile house in the Zoo. His memoirs
would be interesting. The thought gives a solemn tint
to one's meditations. If the dabbler wash him off this
slide into his tube of water again, this trivial creature
may go on feeding and growing and dividing, and presently
be thrown away to wider waters, and so escape to live
jtf . . after I am dead, after my masterpieces are forgotten,
after our Empire has passed away, after the human animal
has passed through I know not what vicissitudes. It may
be he will still, with the utmost nonchalance, be pushing
out his pseudopodia, and ingesting diatoms when the
fretful transitory life of humanity has passed altogether
from the earth. One may catch him in specimen tubes
by the dozen; but still, when one thinks of this, it is
impossible to deny him a certain envious, if qualified,
respect.
And all the time these creatures are living their
vigorous, fussy little lives ; in this drop of water they are
being watched by a creature of whose presence they do
not dream, who can wipe them all out of existence with a
stroke of his thumb, and who is withal as finite, and
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THEOUGH A MICEOSCOPE 163
sometimes as fussy and unreasonably energetic, as them-
selves. He sees them, and they do not see him, because
he has senses they do not possess, because he is too
incredibly vast and strange to come, save as an over-
whelming catastrophe, into their lives. Even so, it may
be, the dabbler himself is being curiously observed. . . .
The dabbler is good enough to say that the suggestion is
inconceivable. I can imagine a decent amoeba saying the
same thing.
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THE PLEASURE OF QUARRELLING
Your cultivated man is apt to pity the respectable poor,
on the score of their lack of small excitements, and even
in the excess of his generous sympathy to go a Toynbee-
Halling in their cause. And Sir Walter Besant once
wrote a book about Hoxton, saying, among other things,
how monotonous life was there. That is your modern
fallacy respecting the lower middle class. One might
multiply instances. The tenor of the pity is always the
same.
" No music," says the cultivated man, " no pictures, no
books to read nor leisure to read in. How can they pass
their lives?"
The answer is simple enough, as Emily Bronte knew.
They quarrel And an excellent way of passing the time
it is; so excellent, indeed, that the pity were better
inverted. But we all lack the knowledge of our chiefest
needs. In the first place, and mainly, it is hygienic to
quarrel, it disengages floods of nervous energy, the pulse
quickens, the breathing is accelerated, the digestion im-
proved. Then it sets one's stagnant brains astir and
quickens the imagination ; it clears the mind of vapours, as
thunder clears the air. Aiid, finally, it is a natural function
of the body. In his natural state man is always quarrel-
ling — by instinct. Not to quarrel is indeed one of the
vices of our civilisation, one of the reasons why we are
neurotic and anaemic, and all these things. And, at last,
our enfeebled palates have even lost the capacity for
enjoying a "jolly good row."
There ean be no more melancholy sight in the world
than that of your young man or young woman suffering
from suppressed pugnacity. Up to the end of the school
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THE PLEASUEE OF QUARRELLING 165
years it was well with them ; they had ample scope for
this wholesome commerce, the neat give and take of
offence. In the family circle, too, there are still plentiful
chances of acquiring the taste. Then, suddenly, they
must be gentle and considerate, and all the rest of it. A
wholesome shindy, so soon as toga and long skirts arrive,
is looked upon as positively wrong; even the dear old
institution of the "cut" is falling into disrepute. The
quarrelling is all forced back into the system, as it were ;
it poisons the blood. This is why our literature grows
sinister and bitter, and our daughters yearn after this and
that, write odd books, and ride about on bicycles in
remarkable clothes. They have shut down the safety
valve, they suffer from the present lamentable increase of
gentleness. They must find some outlet, or perish. If
they could only put their arms akimbo and t^ll each
other a piece of their minds for a little, in the ancient
way, there can be not the slightest doubt that much of
this Jin-de-sidcle unwholesomeness would disappear.
Possibly this fashion of gentleness will pass. Yet it
has had increasing sway now]f or some years. An unhealthy
generation has arisen — among the more educated class at
least — that quarrels little, regards the function as a vice
or a nuisance, as the East-ender does a taste for fine art
or literature. We seem indeed to be getting altogether
out of the way of it. Rare quarrels, no doubt, occur to
everyone, but rare quarrelling is no quarrelling at all.
Like beer, smoking, sea-bathing, cycling, and the like
delights, you cannot judge of quarrelling by the early
essay. But to show how good it is — did you ever know a
quarrelsome person give up the use ? Alcohol you may
wean a man from, and Barrie says he gave up the
Arcadia Mixture, and De Quincey conquered opium.
But once you are set as a quarreler you quarrel and
quarrel till you die.
How to quarrel well and often has ever -been something
of an art, and it becomes more of an art with the general
decline of spirit. For it takes two to make a quarrel.
Time was when you turned to the handiest human being,
and with small care or labour had the comfortable warmth
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166 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
you needed in a minute or so. There was theology, even
in the fifties it was ample cause with two out of three you
met. Now people will express a lamentable indifference.
Then politics again, but a little while ago fat for the fire
of any male gathering, is now a topic of mere tepidity.
So you are forced to be more subtle, more patient in your
quarrelling. You play like a little boy playing cricket
with his sisters, with those who do not understand. A
fellow-votary is a rare treat. As a rule you have to lure
and humour your antagonist like a child. The wooing is
as intricate and delicate as any wooing can well be. To
quarrel now, indeed, requires an infinity of patience.
The good old days of thumb-biting — " Do you bite your
thumbs at us, sir ? " and so to clash and stab — are gone
for ever.
There are certain principles in quarrelling, however,
that the true quarreller ever bears in mind, and which,
duly observed, do much to facilitate encounters. In the
first place, cultivate Distrust. Have always before you
that this is a wicked world, full of insidious people, and
you never know what villainous encroachments upon you
may be hidden under fair-seeming appearances. That is
the flavour of it. At the first suspicion, "stick up for
your rights," as the vulgar say. And see that you do it
suddenly. Smite promptly, and the surprise and sting of
your injustice should provoke an excellent reply. And
where there is least ground for suspicion, there, remember,
is the most. The right hand of fellowship extended
towards you is one of the best openings you have. " Not
such a fool," is the kind of attitude to assume, and " You
don't put upon me so easy." Your adversary resents this
a little, and, rankling, tries to explain. You^ find a
personal inference in the expostulation.
Next to a wariness respecting your interests is a keen
regard for your honour. Have concealed in the privacy
of your mind a code of what is due to you. Expand or
modify it as occasion offers. Be as it were a collector of
what are called "slights," and never let one pass you.
Watch your friend in doorways, passages ; when he eats
by you, when he drinks with you, when he addresses you,
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THE PLEASUKE OF QUAKKELLING 167
when he writes you letters. It will be hard if you cannot
catch him smuggling some deadly insult into your presence.
Tax him with it. He did not think, forsooth ! Tell him
no gentleman would do such a thing, thinkmgly or not ;
that you certainly will not stand it again. Say you will
show him. He will presently argue or contradict. So to
your climax.
Then, again, there is the personal reference. " Meaning
me, sir?" Your victim with a blithe heart babbles of
this or that. You let him meander here and there,
watching him as if you were in ambush. Presently he
comes into your spring. "Of course," you say, "I saw
what you were driving at just this minute, when you
mentioned mustard in salad dressing, but if I am peppery
I am not mean. And if I have a thing to say I say it
straight out." A good gambit this, and well into him
from the start. The particular beauty of this is that you
get him apologetic at first, and can score heavily before
he rises to the defensive.
Then, finally, there is your abstract cause, once very
fruitful indeed, but now sadly gone in decay, except
perhaps in specialist society. As an example, let there
be one who is gibing genially at some topic or other, at
Japanese king-crabs, or the inductive process, or any
other topic which cannot possibly affect you one atom.
Then is the time to drop all these merely selfish interests,
and to champion the cause of truth. Fall upon him in a
fine glow of indignation, and bring your contradiction
across his face — whack ! — so that all the table may hear.
Tell him, with his pardon, that the king-crab is no more
a crab than you are a jelly-fish, or that Mill has been
superseded these ten years. Ask: "How can you say
such tfiitigs ? " From thence to his general knowledge is
a short flight, and so to his veracity, his reasoning powers,
his mere common sense. " Let me tell you, sir," is the
special incantation for the storm.
These are the four chief ways of quarrelling, the four
gates to this delightful city. For it is delightful, once
your 'prentice days are past. In a way it is like a cold
bath on a winter's morning, and you glow all day. In a
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168 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
way it is like football, as the nimble aggravation dances
to and fro. In a way it is like chess. Indeed, all games
of skill are watered quarrels, quarrel and soda, come to
see them in a proper light. And without quarrelling you
have not fully appreciated your fellow-man. For in the
ultimate it is the train and complement of Love, the
shadow that rounds off the delight we take in poor
humanity. It is the vinegar and pepper of existence, and
long after our taste for sweets has vanished it will be the
solace of our declining years.
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THE AMATEUR NATURE-LOVER
It is possible that an education entirely urban is not the
best conceivable preparation for descriptive articles upon
the country. On the other . hand, your professional
nature-lover is sometimes a little over-familiar with his
subject He knows the names of all the things, and he
does not spare you. Besides, he is subtle. The prominent
features are too familiar to him, and he goes into details.
What respectable townsman, for instance, knows what
" scabiosa " is ? It sounds very unpleasant. Then the
professional nature-lover assumes that you know trees.
No Englishman can tell any tree from any other tree,
except a very palpable oak or poplar. So that we may at
least, as an experiment, allow a good Londoner to take his
unsophisticated eyes out into the sweet country for once,
and try his skill at nature-loving, though his botany has
been learned over the counter of flower-shops, and his •
zoology on Saturday afternoons when they have the band
in the Gardens. He makes his way, then, over by Epsom
Downs towards Sutton, trying to assimilate his mood to
the proper flavour of appreciation as he goes, and with a
little notebook in the palm of his hand to assist an ill-
trained memory. And the burthen of his song is of
course the autumn tints.
The masses of trees towards Epsom and Ewell, with the
red houses and Elizabethan facades peeping through their
interstices, contain, it would seem, every conceivable
colour, except perhaps sky-blue; there are brilliant
yellow trees, and a kind of tree of the most amazing
gamboge green, almost the green of spring come back, and
tan-coloured trees, deep brown, red, and deep crimson
trees. Here and there the wind has left its mark, and
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the grey-brown branches and their purple tracery of
twigs, with a suggestion of infinite depth behind, show
through the rents in the leafy covering. There are deep
green trees — the amateur nature-lover fancies they may
be yews — with their dense warm foliage arranged in
horizontal masses, like the clouds low down in a sunset ;
and certain other evergreens, one particularly, with a
bluish-green covering of upstanding needles, are intensely
conspicuous among the flame tints around. On a distant
church tower, and nearer, disputing the possession of a
gabled red house with a glowing creeper, is some ivy ; and
never is the perennial green of ivy so delightful as it is
now, when all else is alight with the sombre fire of the
sunset of the year . . .
The amateur nature-lover proceeds over the down,
appreciating all this as hard as he can appreciate, and
anon gazing up at the grey and white cloud shapes
melting slowly from this form to that, and showing lakes,
and wide expanses, and serene distances of blue between
their gaps. And then he looks round him for a zoological
item. Underfoot the grass of the down is recovering
from the summer drought and growing soft and green
again, and plentiful little flattened snail shells lie about,
and here and there a late harebell still nods in the breeze.
Yonder bolts a rabbit, and then something whizzes by the
amateur nature-lover's ear.
They shoot here somewhere, he remembers suddenly;
and then looking round, in a palpitating state, is reassured
by the spectacle of a lone golfer looming over the brow
of the down, and gesticulating black and weird against
the sky. The Londoner, with an abrupt affectation of
nonchalance, flings himself flat upon his back, and so
remains comparatively safe until the golfer has passed.
These golfers are strange creatures, rabbit-coloured, except
that many are bright red about the middle, and they
repel and yet are ever attracted by a devil in the shape of
a little white ball, which leads them on through toothed
briars, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns; cursing
the thing, weeping even, and anon laughing at their own
f ool\Bh rambling ; muttering, heeding no one to the right
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THE AMATEUR NATURE-LOVER 171
or left of their career, — demented creatures, as though
these balls were their souls, that they ever sought to
lose, and ever repented losing And silent, ever at the
heel of each, is a familiar spirit, an eerie human hedge-
hog, all set about with walking-sticks, a thing like a
cylindrical umbrella-stand with a hat and boots and
a certain suggestion of leg. And so they pass and are
gone.
Rising, the amateur nature -lover finds he has been
reclining on a puff-ball. These puff-balls are certainly
the most remarkable example of adaptation to circum-
stances known to English botanists. They grow abund-
antly on golf grounds, and are exactly like golf-balls in
external appearance. They are, however, Pharisees and
whited sepulchres, and within they are full of a soft mess
of a most unpleasant appearance — the amateur nature-
lover has some on him now — which stuff contains the
spores. It is a case of what naturalists call " mimicry "
— one of nature's countless adaptations. The golf-player
smites these things with force, covering himself with
ridicule — and spores, and so disseminating this far-sighted
and ingenious fungus far and wide about the links.
The amateur nature -lover passes off the down, and
towards Banstead village. He is on the watch for
characteristic objects of the countryside, and rustling
through the leaves beneath a chestnut avenue he comes
upon an old boot. It is a very, very old boot, all its
blacking washed off by the rain, and two spreading chest-
nut leaves, yellow they are with blotches of green, with
their broad fingers extended, rest upon it, as if they would
protect and altogether cover the poor old boot in its last
resting-place. It is as if Mother Nature, who lost sight
of her product at the tanner's yard, meant to claim her own
trampled child again at last, after all its wanderings. So
we go on, noting a sardine tin gleaming brightly in the
amber sunlight, through a hazel hedge, and presently
another old boot. Some hawthorn berries, some hoary
clematis we notice — and then another old boot. Alto-
gether, it may be remarked, in this walk the amateur
nature-lover saw eleven old boots, most of them dropped
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in the very sweetest bits of hedge tangle and grassy corner
about Banstead.
It is natural to ask, " Whence come all these old boots ? "
They are, as everyone knows, among the commonest objects
in a country walk, so common, indeed, that the professional
nature-lover says very little about them. They cannot
grow there, they cannot be dropped from above — they are
distinctly earth-worn boots. I have inquired of my own
domestic people, and caused inquiry to be made in a large
number of households, and there does not appear to be
any regular custom of taking boots away to remote and
picturesque spots to abandon them. Some discarded
boots of my own were produced, but they were quite
different from the old boot of the outer air. These home-
kept old boots were lovely in their way, hoary with mould
running into the most exquisite tints of glaucophane and
blue-grey, but it was a different way altogether from that
of the wild boot.
A friend says, that these boots are cast away by tramps.
People, he states, give your tramp old boots and hats in
great profusion, and the modesty of the recipient drives
him to these picturesque and secluded spots to effect the
necessary change. But no nature-lover has ever observed
the tramp or tramp family in the act of changing their
clothes, and since there are even reasons to suppose that
their garments are not detachable, it seems preferable to
leave the wayside boot as a pleasant flavouring of mystery
to our ramble. Another point, which i 1 ogoes to explode
this tramp theory, is that these countryside boots never
occur in pairs, as any observer of natural history can
testify . . .
So our Cockney Jefferies proceeds, presently coming
upon a cinder path. They use cinders a lot about Sutton,
to make country paths with ; it gives you an unexpected
surprise the first time it occurs. You drop suddenly out
of a sweetly tangled lane into a veritable bit of the Black
Country, and go on with loathing in your soul for your
fellow-creatures. There is also an abundance of that last
product of civilisation, barbed wire. Oh that I were
Gideon ! with thorns and briers of the wilderness would
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THE AMATEUE NATURE-LOVEB 173
I teach these elders of Sutton! But a truce to dark
thoughts !
We take our last look at the country from the open
down above Sutton. Blue hills beyond blue hills recede
into the remote distance ; from Banstead Down one can
see into Oxfordshire. Windsor Castle is in minute blue
silhouette to the left, and to the right and nearer is the
Crystal Palace. And closer, clusters red -roofed Sutton
and its tower, then Cheam, with its white spire, and
further is Ewell, set in a variegated texture of autumn
foliage. Water gleams — a silver thread — at Ewell, and
the sinking sun behind us catches a window here and
there, and turns it into an eye of flame. And so to
Sutton station and home to Cockneydom once more.
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FROM AN OBSERVATORY
It will be some time yet before the rising of the moon.
Looking down from the observatory one can see the path-
ways across the park dotted out in yellow lamps, each
with a fringe of dim green ; and further off, hot and bright,
is the tracery of the illuminated streets, through which
the people go to and fro. Save for an occasional stirring, or
a passing voice speaking out of the dimness beneath me,
the night is very stilL Not a cloud is to be seen in the
dark midwinter sky to hide one speck of its broad smears
of star dust and its shining constellations.
As the moon rises, heaven will be flooded with blue
light, and one after another the stars will be submerged
and lost, until only a solitary shining pinnacle of bright-
ness will here and there remain out of the whole host of
them. It is curious to think that, were the moon but a
little brighter and truly the ruler of the night, rising to
its empire with the setting of the sun, we should never
dream of the great stellar universe in which our little
solar system swims — or know it only as a traveller's tale,
a strange thing to be seen at times in the Arctic Circle.
Nay, if the earth's atmosphere were some few score miles
higher, a night-long twilight would be drawn like an
impenetrable veil across the stars. By a mere accident
of our existence we see their multitude ever and again,
when the curtains of the daylight and moonlight, and of
our own narrow pressing necessities, are for a little while
drawn back. Then, for an interval, we look, aa if out of a
window, into the great deep of heaven. So far as physical
science goes, there is nothing in the essential conditions of
our existence to necessitate that we should have these
transitory glimpses of infinite space. We can imagine
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FEOM AN OBSEEVATOEY 175
men just like ourselves without such an outlook. But it
happens that we have it.
If we had not this vision, if we had always so much
light in the sky that we could not perceive the stars, our
lives, so far as we can infer, would be very much as they
are now ; there would still be the same needs and desires,
the same appliances for our safety and satisfaction ; this
little gaslit world below would scarcely miss the stars
now, if they were blotted out for ever. But our science
would be different in some respects had we never seen
them. We should still have good reason, in Foucault's
pendulum experiment, for supposing that the world
rotated upon its axis, and that the sun was so far
relatively fixed ; but we should have no suspicion of the
orbital revolution of the world. Instead we should ascribe
the seasonal differences to a meridional movement of the
sun. Our spectroscopic astronomy — so far as it refers to
the composition of the sun and moon — would stand
precisely where it does, but the bulk of our mathematical
astronomy would not exist. Our calendar would still be
in all essential respects as it is now ; our year with the
solstices and equinoxes as its cardinal points. The texture
of our poetry might conceivably be the poorer without its
star spangles ; our philosophy, for the want of a nebular
hypothesis. These would be the main differences. Yet,
to those who indulge in speculative dreaming, how much
smaller life would be with a sun and a moon and a blue
beyond for the only visible, the only thinkable universe.
And it is, we repeat, from the scientific standpoint a mere
accident that the present — the daylight — world periodically
opens, as it were, and gives us this inspiring glimpse of the
remoteness of space.
One may imagine countless meteors and comets
streaming through the solar system, unobserved by those
who dwelt under such conditions as have just been
suggested, or some huge dark body from the outer depths
sweeping straight at that little visible universe, and all
unsuspected by the inhabitants. One may imagine the
scientific people of such a world, calm in their assurance
of the permanence of things, incapable almost of
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conceiving any disturbing cause. One may imagine how
an imaginative writer who doubted that permanence
would be pooh-poohed. " Cannot we see to the uttermost
limits of space?" they might argue, "and is it not
altogether blue and void ? " Then, as the unseen visitor
draws near, begin the most extraordinary perturbations.
The two known heavenly bodies suddenly fail from their
accustomed routine. The^ moon, hitherto invariably full,
changes towards^ its last quarter — and then, behold ! for
the first time the rays of the greater stars visibly pierce
the blue canopy of the sky. How suddenly— painfully
almost — the minds of thinking men would be enlarged
when this rash of the stars appeared.
And what then if our heavens were to open ? Very thin
indeed is the curtain between us and the unknown. There
is a fear of the night that is begotten of ignorance and
superstition, a nightmare fear, the fear of the impossible ;
and there is another fear of the night — of the starlit night
— that comes with knowledge, when we see in its true
proportion this little life of ours with all its phantasmal
environment of cities and stores and arsenals, and the
habits, prejudices, and promises of men^l Down there in
the gaslit street such things are real and solid enough, the
only real things, perhaps ; but not up here, not under the
midnight sky. Here for a space, standing silently upon
the dim, grey tower of the old observatory, we may clear
our minds of instincts and illusions, and look out upon the
real. (p\
And now to the eastward the stars are no longer
innumerable, and the sky grows wan. Then a faint
silvery mist appears above the housetops, and at last in
the midst of this there comes a brilliantly shining line —
the upper edge of the rising moon.
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THE MODE IN MONUMENTS
STRAY THOUGHTS IN HIGHGATE CEMETERY
On a sharp, sunlight morning, when the white clouds are
drifting swiftly across the luminous blue sky, there is no
finer walk about London than the Highgate ridge. One
may stay awhile on the Archway looking down upon the
innumerable roofs of London stretching southward into
the haze, and shining here and there with the reflection of
the rising sun, and then wander on along the picturesque
road by the college of Saint Aloysius to the new Catholic
church, and so through the Waterlow Park to the
cemetery. The Waterlow Park is a pleasant place, full of
children and aged persons in perambulators during the
middle hours of the day, and in the summer evening time
a haunt of young lovers ; but your early wanderer finds it
solitary save for Vertumnus, who, with L.C.C. on the
front of him, is putting in crocuses. So we wander down
to the little red lodge, whence a sinuous road runs to
Hampstead, and presently into the close groves of monu-
ments that whiten the opposite slope.
How tightly these white sepulchres are packed here!
How different this congestion of sorrow from the mossy
latitude of God's Acre in the country! The dead are
crammed together as closely as the living seemed in that
bird's-eye view from the Archway. There is no ample
shadow of trees, no tangled corners where mother earth
may weave flower garlands over her returning children.
The monuments positively jostle and elbow each other for
frontage upon the footways. And they are so rawly clean
and assertive. Most of them are conspicuously new
whitened, with freshly-blackened ornewly-gilt inscriptions,
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178 CEETAIN PEESONAL MATTEES
bare of lichen, moss, or mystery, and altogether so restless
that it seems to the meditative man that the struggle for
existence, for mere standing room and a show in the
world, still rages among the dead. The unstable slope of
the hill, with its bristling array of obelisks, crosses and
urns, craning one above another, is as directly opposed to
the restf ulness of the village churchyard with its serene
outspreading yews as midday Fleet Street to a Sabbath
evening amidst the Sussex hills. This cemetery is, indeed,
a veritable tumult of tombs.
Another thing that presently comes painfully home
to one is the lack of individuality among all these dead.
Not a necessary lack of individuality so much as a deliberate
avoidance of it. As one wanders along the steep, narrow
pathways one is more and more profoundly impressed by
the wholesale flavour of the mourning, the stereotyping of
the monuments. The place is too modern for memento
mori and the hour-glass and the skull. Instead, Slap
& Dash, that excellent firm of monumental masons,
everywhere crave to be remembered. Truly, the firm of
Slap & Dash have much to answer for among these
graves, and they do not seem to be ashamed of it.
From one elevated point in this cemetery one can
count more than a hundred urns, getting at last weary
and confused with the receding multitude. The urn is
not dissimilar to the domestic mantel ornament, and
always a stony piece of textile fabric is feigned to be
thrown over its shoulder. At times it is wreathed in
stony flowers. The only variety is in the form. Some-
times your urn is broad and squat, a Silenus among urns ;
sometimes fragile and high-shouldered, like a slender old
maid ; here an " out-size " in urns stalwart and strong, and
there a dwarf peeping quaintly from its wrapping. The
obelisks, too, run through a long scale of size and refinement.
But the curious man finds no hidden connection between
the carriage of the monument and the character of the dead.
Messrs. Slap & Dash apparently take the urn or obelisk
that comes readiest to hand. One wonders dimly why
mourners have this overwhelming proclivity for Messrs.
Slap & Dash and their obelisk and urn.
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THE MODE IN MONUMENTS 179
The reason why the firm produces these articles may be
guessed at. They are probably easy to make, and require
scarcely any skill. The contemplative man has a dim
vision of a grimy shed in a back street, where a human
being passes dismally through life the while he chips out
an unending succession of these cheap urns and obelisks
for his employers' retailing. But the question why
numberless people will profane the memory of their
departed by these public advertisements of Slap & Dash,
and their evil trade, is a more difficult problem. For
surely nothing could be more unmeaning or more
ungainly than the monumental urn, unless it be the
monumental obelisk. The plain cross, by contrast, has
the tenderest meaning, and is a simple and fitting
monument that no repetition can stale.
The artistic cowardice of the English is perhaps the
clue to the mystery. Your Englishman is always afraid
to commit himself to criticism without the refuge of a
tu quoque. He is covered dead, just as he is covered
living, with the " correct thing." A respectable stock-in-
trade is proffered him by the insinuating shopman, to
whom it is our custom to go. He is told this is selling
well, or that is much admired. Heaven defend that he
should admire on his own account ! He orders the stock
urn or the stock slab because it is large and sufficiently
expensive for his means and sorrow, and because he
knows of nothing better. So we mourn as the stonemason
decrees, or after the example and pattern of the Smiths
next door. But some day it will dawn upon us that a
little thought and a search after beauty are fax more
becoming than an order and a cheque to the nearest
advertising tradesman. Or it may be we shall conclude
•that the anonymous peace of a grassy mould is better
than his commercial brutalities, and so there will be an
end of him.
One may go from end to end of this cemetery and find
scarcely anything beautiful, appropriate, or tender. A
lion, ill done, and yet to some degree impressive, lies
complacently above a menagerie keeper, and near this
is a tomb of some imagination, with reliefs of the life of
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180 CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
Christ. In one place a grotesque horse, with a head dis-
proportionately vast, is to be seen. Perhaps among all
these monuments the one to Mrs. Blake is the most
pleasing. It is a simply and quaintly executed kneeling
figure, with a certain quiet and pathetic reverence of pose
that is strangely restful against the serried vulgarity
around it
But the tradesman ghoul will not leave us ; he follows
us up and down, indecently clamouring his name and
address, and at last turns our meditation to despair.
Certain stock devices become as painful as popular
autotypes. There is the lily broken on its stalk; we
meet it here on a cross and there on an obelisk, presently
on the pedestal of an urn. There is the hand pointing
upward, here balanced on the top of an obelisk and
there upon a cross. The white-robed angel, free from the
remotest shadow of expression, meets us again and again.
" All this is mine," says the tradesman ghoul. " Behold
the names of me — Slap & Dash here, the Ugliness
Company there, and this the work of the Cheap and
Elegant Funeral Association. This is where we slew the
art of sculpture. These are our trophies that sculpture is
no more. All this marble might have been beautiful, all
this sorrow might have been expressive, had it not been for
us. See, this is our border, No. A 5, and our pedestal
No. E, and our second quality urn, along of a nice
appropriate text — a pretty combination and a cheap
one. Or we can do it you better in border A 3, and
pedestal C, and a larger urn or a hangel "
The meditative man is seized with a dismal horror, and
retreats to the gates. Even there a wooden advertisement
grins broadly at him in his discomfiture, and shouts a
name athwart his route. And so down the winding road
to the valley, and then up Parliament Hill towards
Hampstead and its breeze-whipped ponds. And the
mind of him is full of a dim vision of days that have been,
when sculptor and stonemason were one, when the artist
put his work in the porch for all the world to see, when
people had leisure to think how things should be done and
heart to do them well, when there was beauty in the
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THE MODE IN MONUMENTS 181
business of life and dignity in death. And he wonders
rather hopelessly if people will ever rise up against these
damnable tradesmen who ruin our arts, make our lives
costly and dismal, and advertise, advertise even on our
graves.
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HOW I DIED
It is now ten years ago since I received my death
warrant All these ten years I have been, and I am,
and shall be, I hope, for years yet, a Doomed Man. It
only occurred to me yesterday that I had been dodging —
missing rather than dodging — the common enemy for such
a space of time. Then, I know, I respected him. It
seemed he marched upon me, inexorable, irresistible ; even
at last I felt his grip upon me. I bowed in the shadow.
And he passed. Ten years ago, and once since, he and I
have been very near. But now he seems to me but a
blind man, and we, with all our solemn folly of medicine
and hygiene, but players in a game of Blind Man's Buff.
The gaunt, familiar hand comes out suddenly, swiftly,
this time surely ? And it passes close to my shoulder ; I
hear someone near me cry, and it is over. . . . Another
ream of paper ; there is time at least for the Great Book
still.
Very close to the tragedy of life is the comedy,
brightest upon the very edge of the dark, and I remember
now with a queer touch of sympathetic amusement
my dear departed self of the middle eighties. How the
thing staggered me ! I was full of the vast ambition of
youth; I was still at the age when death is quite
out of sight, when life is still an interminable vista
of years; and then suddenly, with a gout of blood
upon my knuckle, with a queer familiar taste in
my mouth, that cough which had been a bother became
a tragedy, and this world that had been so solid grew
faint and thin. I saw through it ; saw his face near to my
own ; suddenly found him beside me, when I had been
dreaming he was far beyond there, far away over the hills.
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HOW I DIED 183
My first phase was an immense sorrow for myself.
It was a purely selfish emotion. You see I had been
saving myself up, denying myself half the pride of life
and most of its indulgence, drilling myself like a drill-
sergeant, with my eyes on those now unattainable hills.
Had I known it was to end so soon, I should have
planned everything so differently. I lay in bed mourning
my truncated existence. Then presently the sorrow
broadened. They were so sorry, so genuinely sorry for
me. And they considered me so much now. I had this
and that they would never have given me before-^the
stateliest bedding, the costliest food. I could feel from
my bed the suddenly disorganised house, the distressed
friends, the new-born solicitude. Insensibly a realisation
of enhanced importance came to temper my regrets for
my neglected sins. The lost world, that had seemed so
brilliant and attractive, dwindled steadily as the days of
my illness wore on. I thought more of the world's loss,
and less of my own.
Then came the long journey ; the princely style of it !
the sudden awakening on the part of external humanity,
which had hitherto been wont to jostle me, to help itself
before me, to turn its back upon me, to my importance.
" He has a diseased lung — cannot live long "...
I was going into the dark and I was not afraid — with
"ostentation. I still regard that, though now with scarcely
so much gravity as heretofore, as a very magnificent
period in my life. For nearly four months I was dying
with immense dignity. Plutarch might have recorded it
I wrote — in touchingly unsteady pencil — to all my
intimate friends, and indeed to many other people. I
saw the littleness of hate and ambition. I forgave my
enemies, and they were subdued and owned to it. How
they must regret these admissions! I made many
memorable remarks. This lasted, I say, nearly four
months.
The medical profession, which had pronounced my
death sentence, reiterated it steadily — has, indeed, done
so now this ten years. Towards the end of those four
months, however, dying lost its freshness for me. I
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184 CEETAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
began to detect a certain habitual quality in my service.
I had exhausted all my memorable remarks upon the
subject, and the strain began to tell upon all of us.
One day in the spring-time I crawled out alone, care-
fully wrapped, and with a stick, to look once more —
perhaps for the last time — on sky and earth, and the first
scattered skirmishers of the coming army of flowers. It
was a day of soft wind, when the shadows of the clouds
go sweeping over the hills. Quite casually I happened
upon a girl clambering over a hedge, and her dress had
caught in a bramble, and the chat was quite impromptu
and most idyllic. I remember she had three or four
wood anemones in her hand — "wind stars" she called
them, and I thought it a pretty name. And we talked
of this and that, with a light in our eyes, as young folks
wilL
I quite forgot I was a Doomed Man. I surprised
myself walking home with a confident stride that jarred
with the sudden recollection of my funereal circumstances,
For a moment I tried in vain to think what it was had
slipped my memory. Then it came, colourless and re-
mote. "Oh! Death. . . . He's a Bore," I said; "I've
done with him," and laughed to think of having done with
him.
" And why not so ? " said I.
THE END
This book appeared some years ago at another price and in another
form. The Publisher believes that its present guise will bring it
within the reach of all and sundry, who, while delighting in the
marriage of wit with wisdom, cannot complete the trilogy with the
third desideratum of wealth.
PRIMTID BY MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED, EDINBURGH
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