Contemporary portraits. Second series

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CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS

Second Series

Copyright in the United States, 1919, by
FRANK HARRIS

CONTEMPORARY
PORTRAITS

Second Series

By

FRANK HARRIS

«

Published by the Author
57 Fifth Avenue, New York

CONTENTS

PAGE

George Bernard Shaw , 1

Rudyard Kipling 45

Ernest Dowson 64

Theodore Dreiser 81

George Moore 107

Lord Dunsany and Sidney Sinie 141

James Thomson 158

Lionel Johnson and Hubert Crackanthorpe 179

Pierre Loti 192

Walter Pater 203

Herbert Spencer 227

The Right Hon. Arthur J. Balfour 245

The Right Hon. David Lloyd George. ... 261

Viscount Grey 282

Georges Clemenceau 297

Shaw's Portrait by Shaw, or

How Frank Ought to Have Done It 312

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND

SERIES OF PORTRAITS

ITERATURE learns so unwillingly
from life that it is not surprising that
it should learn so reluctantly from
the methods of science and yet it
might learn a good deal. For exam-
ple, a biologist finds a new sort of bird, let us
say, and sits down to describe it.

He is far more than impartial; he knows that
his description must be so perfectly accurate that
another biologist ten thousand miles away should
be able to classify the bird from it as well as if
he had the bird before him.

How many literary critics are there who reach
such high detachment and show such scrupulous
care?

The biologist knows, too, that length of
feather or peculiarity of coloring is not so im-
portant as structural differences in the skeleton,
or such organic modifications as will affect the
creature's chances of surviving and propagating

V

vi FOREWORD

his kind. Accordingly he is on the lookout for
peculiarities in proportion to their vital impor-
tance to the race or species.

But what literary critic uses such an enduring
standard of values?

And when the man of science approaches the
chief part of his task he is even more careful :
he must classify the specimen, decide what spe-
cies it belongs to, and whether it is more nearly
akin to this family or to that. A mistake here
would expose him to the derision of every biolo-
gist in the world, whereas if he performs his
work beyond possibility of fault-finding he will
only have done what is expected of every compe-
tent craftsman.

When will literary criticism even seek to
attain such excellence?

You have a Sainte Beuve comparing Flaubert
with Madame Sand and Eugene Sue, regretting
that the author of "Salambo" does not write so
well as the author of "Mauprat," and that the
creator of "Madame Bovary" has not such fer-
tility of imagination as the author of "The
Wandering Jew" !

Or your Sainte Beuve will tell you that Bal-
zac's fame will be drowned in the sea of his
impurities, that the most extraordinary specimen

FOREWORD vii

of man it was ever the good fortune of a French-
man to meet was so little out of the common
that he was fated soon to be forgotten.

In much the same way your Matthew Arnold
will call Byron a great poet and put him far
above Heine and will condemn Keats for writ-
ing sensual letters to his love and for consequent
"ill-breeding," apparently without even a suspi-
cion that Keats is a greater poet than Milton and
Heine incomparably the first of all the moderns.
Yet Arnold as a poet should have known that
the "Hyperion" is dowered with a richness of
rhythm and a magnificence of music to which
Paradise Lost can lay no claim; while Heine's
position is beyond dispute.

But for brainless prejudice and shameful
blundering that would ruin the reputation of
any first year's student in biology, these so-called
masters of literary criticism are not even blamed.
And accordingly we find a Meredith at seventy
declaring that his works have never been criti-
cised, that no one in England has even tried to
describe his productions fairly, much less
classify him correctly.

While attempting to rival scientific exactitude
and detached impartiality the literary critic has

viii FOREWORD

still a further height to climb. His description
may be exact, his classification fairly correct,
yet we shall not be satisfied unless he reveals to
us the ever-changing soul of his subject and its
possibilities of growth. In this way art asserts
its superiority to science.

When this ultimate domain is reached a new
question imposes itself. The portrait painter is
always drawn by two divergent forces; he must
catch the likeness of his sitter and yet make his
portrait a work of art.

This world-old dispute in portraiture between
realism and art was settled for the artist by
Michelangelo. Some one who watched him
working on his great statue of Lorenzo dei
Medici kept on objecting that it was not like
Lorenzo, that he had known that great man for
years, and that he would not have recognized
him from the sculptor's presentment.

At length Michelangelo turned on his buzzing
critic: "Who will care whether it's like him or
not a thousand years hence?"

In other words, the obligation on the artist is
to "produce a great work of art," and there is
no other.

At the same time, the great portaits of the
world such as the picture of Charles V. on horse-

FOREWORD ix

back by Titian and the Meniilas of Velasquez
and the Syndics of Rembrandt manage to recon-
cile to some extent both requirements.

Likeness is caught most easily by exaggeration
of characteristic features; but such exaggeration
is apt to offend the modesty of truth and fall into
caricature; whereas the work of art is always
founded on truth as a beautiful figure demands a
perfect skeleton, and any heightening even of the
truth must have beauty or some strange and pro-
found significance as justification. How far
then is exaggeration or modification of the fact
allowed? I solved the riddle rather loosely in
my own way. When my subject is really a great
man, a choice and master-spirit, I try to depict
him in his habit as he lived with absolute fidelity
to fact. In the case of Carlyle and Browning,
Meredith, Burton and Davidson in my first vol-
ume of portraits, just as in the case of Shaw and
Thomson and Walt Whitman in this volume, I
have taken no liberties wittingly with the fact;
the real is good enough for me when it is halo-
crowned ; but when I am dealing with smaller
men whose growth has been dwarfed or warped
or thwarted I permit myself a certain latitude of
interpretation, or even of artistic presentment.
Browning's Rabbi was right:

FOREWORD

"All I could never be,
All men ignored in me,
This was I worth to God whose wheel the pitcher shaped."

The artist must divine the secret nature and
even the unconscious potentialities of his subject
and bring them to expression or his work will
not endure, and it is love alone that divines, love
alone to which all possibilities are actualities
and faults and vices merely shadows which out-
line and lift into relief the noble qualities.

It is By love that the artist reaches higher than
the impartiality of the man of science and discov-
ers the secrets of the spirit; love is the only key
to personality and is as necessary to the artist as
his breath. It is indeed the breath of the soul,
the emanation which clothes Truth with the
magical vestment of Beauty.

•**

George Bernard Shaw

CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS

George Bernard Shaw

ON QUIXOTE lived in an imag-
inary past; he cherished the beliefs
and tried to realize the ideal, of an
earlier age. Our modern Don
Quixotes all live in the future and
hug a belief of their own making, an ideal cor-
responding to their own personality.

Both the lovers of the past and the future,
however, start by despising the present; they are
profoundly dissatisfied with what is and in love
with what has been or may be. The main
difference between the rueful Knight and Ba-
zarof is that the Don turns his back on the actual
whereas the modern thinker seeks to end or
mend existing conditions, and thus found a new
civilization, the Kingdom of Man upon Earth.
Bernard Shaw is the best specimen of Bazarof
that our time has seen; he is at once a greater
force and more effective than his Russian pro-
totype, for he attacks the faults of the established

1

order with humor, a weapon of divine temper
and almost irresistibly effective.

But Shaw is more than an iconoclast.
His work as a dramatist is at least as im-
•rtant as his critical energy. In this respect I
vs think of him as a British Moliere gifted
fine a wit as the great Frenchman and
s wide a reach of thought. It is as a
oliere, and even something higher,
to present him. More than once
ed true prophet and guide and
selfish policies and hypocrisies
high disregard of personal
he has not been imprisoned
ecuted is due to the fact
in many things and that
a from being taken too
s to be taken seriously,
igh appreciation of
my readers to re-
ion of him.
n I bought The
get the ablest
leir opinions

d heard of

1 because

e given

"V had

nard

Shaw profited by the coincidence. He made
himself known as a journalist by his papers on
music in The Star, a cheap Radical evening
paper, and preached socialism to boot wherever
he could get a hearing.

In 1892 he began writing for The World,
a paper of some importance so long as its founder
and editor, Edmund Yates, was alive. But
Yates died six months or so before I bought The
Saturday Review, and I knew that Shaw would
resent the change. The idea of connecting
Shaw the Socialist orator with the high Tory
Saturday Review pleased me; the very incon-
gruity tempted and his ability was beyond
question. Now and again 1 had read his weekly
articles on music and while admiring the keen
insight of them and the satiric light he threw
on pompous pretences and unrealities, I noticed
that he had begun to repeat himself, as if he
had said all he had to say on that theme.

What should I ask him to write about?
What was his true vein? He had as much
humor as Wilde — the name at once crystalized
my feeling — that was what Shaw should do, I
said to myself, write on the theatre; in essence
his talent, like Wilde's, was theatrical, almost to
caricature, certain, therefore, to carry across the
footlights and have an immediate eflfect.

I wrote to him at once, telling him my opinion
of his true talent and asking him to write a

3

weekly article for The Saturday Review.

He answered immediately ; a letter somewhat
after this fashion ;

"How the Dickens you knew that my thoughts
had been turning to the theater of late and that
Fd willingly occupy myself with it exclusively
for some time to come, I can't imagine. But
you've hit the clout, as the Elizabethans used to
say, and, if you can afford to pay me regularly,
I'm your man so long as the job suits me and
I suit the job. What can you afford to give?"

My answer was equally prompt and to the
point:

"I can afford to give you so much a week,
more, I believe, than you are now getting. If
that appeals to you, start in at once; bring mc
your first article by next Wednesday and we'll
have a final pow-wow."

On the Wednesday Shaw turned up with the
article, and I had a good look at him and a long
talk with him. Shaw at this time was nearing
forty; very tall, over six feet in height and thin
to angularity; a long bony face, corresponding,
I thought, to a tendency to get to bedrock every-
where; rufous fair hair and long, untrimmed
reddish beard; gray-blue English eyes with
straight eyebrows tending a little upwards from
the nose and thus adding a touch of Mephisto-
phelian sarcasm to the alert, keen expression.
He was dressed carelessly in tweeds with a

4

Jaeger flannel shirt and negligent tie; contempt
of frills written all over him; his hands clean
and well-kept, but not manicured. His com-
plexion, singularly fair even for a man with
reddish hair, seemed too bloodless to me, re-
minded me of his vegetarianism which had puz-
zled me more than a little for some time. His
entrance into the room, his abrupt movements —
as jerky as the ever-changing mind — his perfect
unconstraint — all showed an able man, very
conscious of his ability, very direct, very sin-
cere, sharply decisive.

"I liked your letter," Shaw began, "as I told
you; the price, too, suits me for the moment;
but — you won't alter my articles, will you?"

"Not a word," I said. "If I should want any-
thing changed, which is most unlikely, I'd send
you a proof and ask you to alter it; but that is
not going to occur often. I like original opinions
even though I don't agree with them."

After some further talk, he said :

"Very well then. If the money appears regu-
larly you can count on me for a weekly outpour-
ing. You don't limit me in any way?"

"Not in any way," I answered.

"Well, it seems to me that the new Saturday
Review should make a stir."

"After we're all dead, not much before, but
that doesn't matter," I replied. "I've asked all
the reviewers only to review those books they

5

admire and can praise: starfinders they should
be, not fault-finders."

"What'll the master of 'flouts and jeers'
think?" asked Shaw. (Lord Salisbury, the
bitter-tongued Prime Minister, had been a con-
stant contributor to The Saturday Review
twenty years before, and was understood still to
take an interest in his old journal.)

"I don't know and I don't care," I replied;
and our talk came to an end.

Shaw was a most admirable contributor,
always punctual unless there was some good
reason for being late; always scrupulous, cor-
recting his proofs heavily, with rare conscien-
tiousness, and always doing his very best.

I soon realized that the drama of the day had
never been so pungently criticized; I began to
compare Shaw's articles with the Dramaturgie
of Lessing, and it was Shaw who gained by the
comparison.

His critical writing was exactly like his speak-
ing and indeed like his creative dramatic work;
very simple, direct and lucid, clarity and sin-
cerity his characteristics. No pose, no trace of
affectation ; a man of one piece, out to convince
not to persuade; a bare logical argument lit up
by gleams of sardonic humor; humor of the head
as a rule and not of the heart. His writing
seemed artless, but there is a good deal of art
in his plays and art too, can be discovered both

6

in his speaking and in his critical work, but
whether there is enough art to serve as a pro-
phylactic against time, remains to be seen.

His seriousness, sincerity and brains soon
brought the actor-managers out in arms against
him. Naturally they did not condemn his writ-
ing, but his dress and behaviour. Two or three
of them told me at various times that Shaw was
impossible.

**He often comes to the theatre in ordinary
dress," said one, ''and looks awful."

**You ought to thank your stars that he goes
to your theatre at all," I replied. "I certainly
shall not instruct him how to clothe himself."

"What I object to," said another, "is that he
laughs in the wrong place. It is dreadful when
a favorite actor is saying something very pathetic
or sentimental to see a great figure in gray
stretch himself out in the front stalls and roar
with laughter."

"I know," I replied grinning, "and the worst
of it is that all the world laughs with Shaw
when he shows it the unconscious humor of your
performance."

An amusing incident closed this controversy.
One night a manager told Shaw he could not
go into the stalls in that dress. Shaw imme-
diately began to take off his coat.

"No, no," cried the actor-manager; "I mean
you must dress like other people."

7

Shaw glanced at the rows of half-dressed
women: "I'm not going to take off my shirt,"
he exclaimed, "in order to be like your clients,"
and forthwith left the house.

The dispute had one good result. Shaw
asked me to buy his tickets. "I hate the whole
practice of complimentary tickets," he said. "It
is intended to bind one to praise and I resent the
implied obligation."

Of course, I did as he wished and there the
trouble ended.

At rare intervals I had to tell Shaw his article
was too long and beg him to shorten it. For
months together I had nothing to do except con-
gratulate myself on having got him as a con-
tributor; though at first he was strenuously
objected to by many of my readers who wrote
begging me to cancel their subscriptions or at
least to cease from befouling their houses with
"Shaw's socialistic rant and theatric twaddle."

An incident or two in the four years' com-
panionship may be cited, for they show, I think,
the real Shaw. William Morris, the poet and
decorator-craftsman, died suddenly. Shaw
called just to tell me he'd like to write a special
article on Morris, as a socialist and prose-writer
and speaker. I said I'd be delighted, tor Arthur
Symons was going to write on his poetry and
Cunninghame Graham on his funeral. I hoped
to have three good articles. When they arrived.

8

I found that Symons was very good indeed and
so was Shaw; but Cunninghame Graham had
written a little masterpiece, a gem of restrained
yet passionate feeling: absolute realistic descrip-
tion lifted to poetry by profound emotion.

Shaw came blown in on the Monday full of
unaffected admiration.

"What a story that was of Graham's I" he
cried, "a great writer, isn't he?"

I nodded: "An amateur of genius: it's a pity
he hasn't to earn his living by his pen."

"A good thing for us," cried Shaw, "he'd wipe
the floor with us all if he often wrote like that."

I only relate the happening to show Shaw's
unaffected sincerity and outspoken admiration of
good work in another man.

I came to regard him as a realist by nature,
who, living in the modern realistic current, was
resolved to be taken simply for what he was and
what he could do, and equally resolved to judge
all other men and women by the same relentless
positive standard. This love of truth for its
own sake, truth beyond vanity or self-praise, is
a product of the modern scientific spirit and
appears to me to embody one of the loftiest ideals
yet recorded among men.

It marks, indeed, the coming of age of the
race and is a sign that we have done with child-
ish make-believes. From this time on we shall
turn our daily job into the great adventure and

9

make of its perfecting our life's romance.
Shaw's realism, his insistence on recognizing
only real values was so intense that it called
forth one of Oscar Wilde's finest epigrams :

"Shaw," he said, ''hasn't an enemy in the
world and none of his friends like him."

One can hardly help asking: how did Shaw
grow to this height so early?

It was always evident to me that by some
happy fortune Shaw had escaped the English
public school and its maiming deforming influ-
ence. His view of life and men and women was
too true, too unconventional, too bold, ever to
have come into contact even with the poisonous
atmosphere of Eton or Harrow or the like.
Where had he been educated? was a question
always on the tip of my tongue.

"I am an educated man," he replied, "because
I escaped from school at fourteen, and before
that was only a day-boy who never wasted the
free half of my life in learning lessons or read-
ing schoolbooks."

A little later he wrote to me with the same
understanding:

"I come of a Protestant family ot true-blue
garrison snobs, but before I was ten years of age
I got into an atmosphere of freedom of thought,
of anarchic revolt against conventional assump-
tions of all kinds, utterly incompatible with the
generalized concept of an Irish Protestant

10

family. I was forbidden nothing and spared
nothing. My maternal uncle, clever and literate,
was an abyss of blasphemy and obscenity.

"My mother, brought up with merciless strict-
ness by a rich hunchbacked aunt to be a perfect
lady, and disinherited furiously by her for being
(consequently) ignorant enough of the world to
marry my father, had such a horror of her own
training that she left her children without any
training at all.

"My humorous father, a sort of mute inglori-
ous Charles Lamb, who disgusted my mother by
his joyless furtive drinking and his poverty and
general failure, could no more control me than
he could avoid being thrust into the background
by an energetic man of genius (an orchestral
conductor and teacher of singing) into whose
public work my mother threw herself when he
taught her to sing, and who made life possible
for her by coming to live with us. This man's
hand was against every man, and every man's
hand against him. He had his own method
of singing and everyone else's was murder-
ously wrong. He would not hear of doctors;
when my mother had a dangerous illness he
took the case in hand, and when he at last
allowed my father to call in an eminent
physician, the e. p. looked at my mother
and said: 'My work has already been done.'
He was equally contemptuous of the church,

11

though he could conduct Beethoven's Mass in C.
better than his pious rivals. He had no time to
read anything, and took Tyndall on Sound to
bed with him every night for years (he slept
badly) without ever getting to the end of it.
There was no sex in the atmosphere ; it was never
discussed or even thought about as far as I could
see; you had only to hear my mother sing
Mendelsohn's "Hear My Prayer," or even listen
to one note of her voice to understand that she
might have been the centre of a menage a mille
et trois without an atom of scandal sticking to
her no matter how hard it was thrown. You
will see that my circumstances were quite un-
usual and that nobody could possibly deduce
them from general data."

This bringing up under a man of genius ex-
plains Shaw's unhindered, natural growth and
he went on to indicate how his musical training
in youth helped his development:

"The great difficulty of dealing with my
education lies in the fact that my culture was
so largely musical. It will be admitted that no
one without as much familiarity with the mas-
terpieces of music as with those of literature
could write adequately about Wagner. But the
same thing is true of me. You cannot account
for me by saying that I was steeped in Dickens,
or even later in Moliere. I was steeped in
Mozart, too; it was from him that I learned

12

how art work could reach the highest degree of
strength, refinement, beauty and seriousness
without being heavy and portentous. Shelley
made a great impression on me; I read him
from beginning to end, prose and verse, and
held him quite sacred in my adolescence. But
Beethoven and early Wagner were at work
alongside him.

"Then there was science in which I have never
lost my interest. I even claim to have made
certain little contributions to the theory of Crea-
tive Evolution (which is my creed: you can
compare the third Act of Man and Superman
with Bergson's treatise).

"Socialism sent me to economics, which I
worked at for four years until I mastered it
completely, only to find, of course, that none of
the other socialists had taken that trouble. I
do not read any foreign language easily without
the dictionary except French. I have a sort of
acquaintance with Italian, mostly operatic; and
you could not put a German document into my
hands without some risk of my being able to
understand it; but what you call knowing a lan-
guage; that is, something more than being able
to ask the way to the Bahnhof or the Duomo,
puts me out of court as a linguist. As to Latin
on which all my schooling was supposed to be
spent, I cannot read an epitaph or a tag from
Horace without stumbling. Naturally I make

13

use of translations and musical settings. I know
Faust and the Niblung's Ring as well as the
Germans know Shakespeare. I am very un-
teachable and could not pass the fourth standard
examination in an elementary school — not that
anybody else could; but still you know what I
mean."

Shaw's explanation is fairly complete; only
a man of genius could see himself from the out-
side with this impartiality. Yet he leaves out of
the account the influence exercised on him, per-
haps unconsciously, by the Irish atmosphere so
to speak, during his formative years. The ordi-
nary Celtic view of England constitutes no
small part of Shaw's originality; for the habit
of judging another people from the outside, so
to speak, while living amongst them, is a spirit-
ual gymnastic, a mental training of the highest
value.

Shaw himself has told how he became inter-
ested in Shakespeare through meeting Thomas
Tyler and hearing his explanation of the story
told in the Sonnets, and this study, no doubt,
helped him in his evolution from Bazarof to
Moliere and incidentally led to my first differ-
ence with him. I must touch on this now for
nowhere, save perhaps in love, and but little is
known even by his intimates of Shaw's amorous
experiences, does a man reveal his true nature
more ingeniously than in a quarrel or dispute.

14

One day in The Saturday Review office I got
a letter from a friend of very considerable abil-
ity, begging me not to let Shaw go on "writing
drivel about Shakespeare; on his own job he's
good, but why let him talk rot?" I had noticed
Shaw's divagations; but he used Shakespeare
like the British use the ten commandments as a
shillelagh, and as Shaw took the great drama-
tist generally to point unconventional morals, I
didn't wish to restrain him. But one day his
weekly paper was chiefly about Shakespeare,
and he fell into two or three of the gross common
blunders on the subject : notably, in one passage,
he assumed that Shakespeare had been a good
husband — the usual English misconception.

I wrote to him at once:

''You are writing so brilliantly on the weekly
theater-happenings, why on earth drag in Shake-
speare always like King Charles's head, as you
know nothing about him." I got an answer by
return:

"What in thunder do you mean by saying I
know nothing of Shakespeare? I know more
about the immortal Will than any living man,"
and so forth and so on.

T replied:

"Come to lunch one day at the Cafe Royal
and I'll give you the weeds and the water your
soul desires and prove into the bargain that you
know nothing whatever about Shakespeare."

15

When we had ordered our lunch Shaw began :

"Who's going to be the judge between us,
Frank Harris, on this Shakespeare matter?"

"You, Shaw, only you," I replied, "I am to
convince you of your complete and incredible
ignorance."

He snorted: "Then you have your work cut
out; we can't sleep here, can we?"

"The time it will take," I retorted, "depends
on your intelligence — that's what I'm reckoning

on."

"Humph!" he grunted disdainfully. We had
our meal and then went at it hammer and tongs.

"You believe," I began, "that because Shake-
speare left Stratford after being married a
couple of years and did not return for eleven
years, he loved his wife?"

"No, no," replied Shaw, "I said in my article
that in his will he left his wife 'the second-best
bed' as a pledge of his affection. I remember
reading once something that convinced me of
this ; I don't recall the argument now ; but at the
time it convinced me and I can look it up for
you if you like."

"You needn't," I replied, "I'll give it you;
it's probably the old professorial explanation:
the best bed in those days was in the guest room;
therefore the second-best bed was the one Shake-
speare slept in with his wife."

16

"That's it," cried Shaw, "that's it, and it is
convincing. How do you meet it?"

"Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" I replied.
"Here's Shakespeare, the most articulate crea-
ture that ever lived, the greatest lord of language
in recorded time, unable in his will to express
a passionate emotion so as to be understood.
Why, had he even written 'our bed, dear,' as the
common grocer would have done, we'd all have
known what he meant. Shakespeare could never
write 'the second-best bed' without realizing the
sneer in the words and intending us to realize it
as well. Besides "

"Good God," interrupted Shaw, throwing up
his hand to his forehead impatiently, "of course
not; how stupid of me! Confound the mandar-
ins and their idiot explanations!" — and after a
pause: "I'll give you the second-best bed; I'm
prepared to believe that Shakespeare did not
love his wife. Go ahead with your other proofs
of my ignorance."

At five that afternoon we left the table, Shaw
declaring he would never write again about
Shakespeare if I'd write about him.

On that, I began my articles on Shakespeare,
which afterwards grew into books; but Shaw
has not kept his vow. He has written again and
again on the subject and always with a bias,
being more minded to realize Shaw than Shake-
speare. But ever since that talk he has shown
cordial appreciation of my work on the subjtct.

17

By dwelling on this Shakespeare difiference I
merely wish to show that Shaw, like most very
able men, was loath to admit that after he had
studied a subject he had by no means exhausted
it. (Some people seem to think that by telling
this story I am trying to show my superiority
over Shaw. The idea is absurd. Mere knowl-
edge gives no superiority. Shaw would have had
me at an even greater disadvantage if the sub-
ject had been Beethoven or Debussy) .

His stubbornness in this matter showed mc
a side of Shaw I had not noticed; it seemed to
me very English, I don't know why; but from
this time on I became conscious that Shaw was
characteristically English. He was reluctant to
admit Shakespeare's gentleness and his aban-
donment to passion ; the fact that the loss of the
woman he loved embittered him and turned him
from a writer of comedies and histories into a
writer of tragedies, degraded him in Shaw's
opinion and thus made me conscious of a British
hardness in Shaw which came, I thought, from
want of passion, from lack of feeling. Shaw
was, too, always impatient of weakness and of
parasites — anything but a lover of the under-
dog. I grew to think of him as a little obstinate,
English in mind and not Celtic at all. He did
not change his intellectual beliefs as readily as
the Irish do, and he did not really admire the
18

Irish ideal of life: its amiability and happy-go-
lucky-ness did not attract him.

He underrated the enduring fascination of this
reckless wastrel type. Yet in one generation the
dour Cromwellian veterans planted in Ireland
all yielded to the charm of the Irish nature and
became as the saying went, more Irish than the
Irish themselves. Even if one prefers the Eng-
lish rose to any other flower, still one may admire
the bravery of daffodils dancing naked in the
wind, or the magic of bluebells blushing in the
copses. There is room surely in God's garden
for every variety of flower.

In the Boer war to the amazement of most of
his admirers Shaw declared himself on the side
of the British, and though he explained his
position with perfect sincerity, he only con-
vinced us that Briton-like he mistook English
imperialism for the cause of humanity. Here
is his defence : to some it may appear satisfying.

"In the South African business I was not a
pro-Boer," he writes. "I never got over Olive
Schreiner's 'Story of an African Farm.' Some
few years before the war Cronwright Schreiner
came to London. I asked him why he and
Joubert and the rest put up with Kruger and his
obsolete theocracy. He said they knew all about
it and deplored it, but that the old man would
die presently and then Krugerism would be
quietly dropped and a liberal regime introduced.
I suggested that it might be dangerous to wait ;

19

but it was evident that Com Paul was too strong
for them. During the war a curious thing hap-
pened in Norway. There as in Germany every-
one took it for granted that the right side was
the anti-English side. Suddenly Ibsen asked in
his grim manner: 'Are we really on the side of
Mr. Kruger and his Old Testament?' The
effect was electrical. Norway shut up. I felt
like Ibsen.

"I was, of course, not in the least taken in by
the Times campaign, though I defended the
Times against the accusation of bribery on the
ground that it was not necessary to pay the Times
to do what it was only too ready to do for noth-
ing. But I saw that Kruger meant the XVII
Century and the Scottish XVII. at that; and so
to my great embarrassment, I found myself on
the side of the mob when you and Chesterton
and John Burns and Lloyd George were facing
the music. It is astonishing what bad company
advanced views may get one into."

That Shaw could be persuaded by this remark
of Ibsen strikes me as characteristic; the English
view of things appeals to him all too readily.

His championing of the English cause in the
Boer war made him very popular with the vast
majority of the nation.

"A good deal of common sense in Shaw," was
the general verdict, and accordingly when he
spoke and wrote for the fellaheen in Egypt in

20

the Denshawi affair he was easily forgiven, for
in time of need he had been on the popular,
English side.

Again and again I shall have to show that
this Bazarof, like Moliere, is full of the milk
of human kindness.

Towards the end of my tenure of The Satur-
day Review, Shaw was making a great deal of
money by his plays, thanks mainly I believe to
their extroardinary vogue in the United States.

Casually he told me one day that every article
he wrote for me cost him much more than he
got for it.

"I mean," he said, "the same time spent on a
comedy would pay me ten times as much. I'm
losing $500 a week at least through writing for

you."

"You must stop writing for me then," I said,
ruefully. "But I'm about to sell the paper, and
if you could have kept on for a couple of months,
say till September (it was then July or August
if I remember rightly), I'd be greatly obliged."

"Say no more," he exclaimed. "I'll go on till
your reign comes to an end."

"It's very good of you," I replied; "but I
hardly like to accept such a sacrifice from you."

"I look upon it as only fair," he replied.
"Your bringing me to The Saturday Review to
write on the theatre did me a great deal of good
in many ways. You not only made me better

21

known, but forced me to concentrate on the
theatre and playwriting, and so helped me to
success. It's only fair I should pay you back a
part of what you helped me to earn."

"If you look at it like that," I replied, "I have
no objection. You are making a lot of money
then by your plays?"

"Not in England," he said, "but in America
more than I can spend. My banker smiles now
when he sees me, and is in a perpetual state of
wonderment, for miracle on miracle, a writer is
not only making money, but saving it."

Some time before this Shaw had married and
had taken to wife, as he said himself, a lady who
was "more than self-supporting." Consequently
he found himself in 1898 much better than well
off, freed from all sordid care. The first part
of his life, the struggle of it, came thus to an end.

Shaw's apprenticeship as Goethe calls it, was
now over and done with. He had reached the
point where he began to produce as a master and
show his true being. There will be nothing
novel in his growth, nothing that should surprise
us; he develops normally, naturally, and his
life's history is to be found in his works.

Without dissecting his plays — The Devil's
Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, and best of all,
I think, Candida, I have to notice a certain
limitation in Shaw, peculiarly British, which
discovered itself in Mrs. Warren's Profession.

22

There is no excuse for founding a play on this
subject unless you are minded to amend or over-
throw the conventional standpoint. If you only
mean to affirm and defend it, why touch the
fession get a hint of the truth, they don't even
scabrous subject at all? The conventions of this
world are surely strong enough without being
buttressed by the Bernard Shaws. As soon as
the hero and heroine of Mrs. Warren's Pro-
fession get a hint of the truth, they don't even
verify it, but both drop all thought of mar-
riage and bow before the conventional ideal,
whereas one expects the hero at least to struggle
and revolt. But the conventional reading of the
matter is peculiarly British, and Shaw's tame
conformity here shows that his interest in sex-
questions is very slight, to say the best for it.

It is a peculiar dominance of mind over heart
and over body, a rooted preference in Shaw for
reflections and ideas with a contempt of sensa-
tions and even emotions that gives the Mephisto-
philian cast to his personality. His excessive
preoccupation with the play of mind often hurts
his dramatic writing. For instance, in The
Devil's Disciple, after Arms and the Man prob-
ably his most popular play, Dick Dudgeon
and Parson Anderson and even General Bur-
goyne are not differentiated in character; they
are all Shaw. In the second act Parson Ander-
son exclaims "Minister be faugh!" as if he were
the Devil's Disciple, and Burgoyne sneers at the

23

marksmanship of the British army and talks
about "our enemies in London — ^Jobbery and
Snobbery, incompetence and Red Tape," exactly
as Shaw talks, in and out of season.

This onesidedness or predominance of intel-
lect over heart and body, leads directly to the
root-fact of Shaw's nature.

Very early in our acquaintance I had been
surprised by one thing in him. The hero of
one of his first books had been a prizefighter;
Shaw made him very strong whereas most prize-
fighters are like Fitzsimmons, ape-armed, but
not muscular. Shaw's extravagant ill-placed
admiration of strength had stuck in my mind. I
soon found out that he was never physically
strong; he told me one day that his work
often exhausted him so that he was fain to go
into a dark room and lie flat on his back on the
bare floor, every muscle relaxed, for hours, just
to rest. The confession surprised me, for in the
prime of life the ordinary man does not get tired
out in this way.

A certain weakness of body in Shaw was suf-
ficient to explain his undue admiration of the
prizefighter's strength and his own vegetarian-
ism and other idiosyncracies. But if asked why
he abjures meat Shaw retorts that flesh-eating is
an unhealthy practice and that the strongest ani-
mals such as the bull and the elephant are strict
vegetarians; but that hardly satisfies one. The

24

truth, I think, is that the physical delicacy in
Shaw detaches him from the common run of
men whose appetites are gross and insistent.
This comparative weakness of the body, too,
allows his brain to act undisturbed and thus his
appeal strikes one as peculiarly intellectual; as
thin, so to speak, or at least thin-blooded.

If one thinks of his Caesar and Cleopatra
and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, the
enormous difference between the two men be-
comes manifest. Shakespeare's play is extraor-
dinarily full-blooded and passionate; he is over-
sexed, one would say, and this full tide of lust
in him shows not only in his hero's insane aban-
donment to his passion, but also in the superb
richness of language and glow of imagery. His
intellect is implicit, showing mainly in side fig-
ures such as Caesar and Enorbarbus and in regal
magnificence of phrase:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her.

Shaw's work in comparison is thin and blood-
less ; intellectually very interesting, but the col-
oring is subdued; it is all in cool grays and black
shadows like a Whistler or Franz Hals in his
old age.

When I ventured to hint this somewhere,
Shaw repelled the charge very vigorously. He

25

was astonished, he said, to find me falling into
such an error, and he goes on :

"Archer says 'Shaw's plays reek with sex' and
he was right

"I have shown by a whole series of stage
couples how the modern man has become a phil-
anderer like Goethe and how the modern woman
has had to develop an aggressive strategy to
counter his attempts to escape from his servitude
to her

"In the tiny one act farcial comedy I pub-
lished the other day, I put the physical act of
sexual intercourse on the stage.

"Of course, I have to be like all live writers
in constant reaction against the excesses of my
time. . . . The infatuated amorism of the nine-
teenth century made it necessary for me to say
with emphasis that life and not love is the
supreme good

"To conclude with a curious observation,
though poverty and fastidiousness prevented me
from having a concrete love affair until I was
twenty-nine, the five novels I wrote before that
(novels were the only wear then) show much
more knowledge of sex than most people seem
to acquire after bringing up a family of fifteen."

Shaw was "on his own" in London at twenty ;
for nine years, then, he was an ascetic; would
the ordinary man have been able to make the
same boast after nine months or even weeks? I

26

am very sure Shakespeare could not. Shaw's
defence seems to me to corroborate my view of
his comparative indifference to sex.

Naturally Shaw regards his aloofness from
sex-intoxication as a positive virtue, and he
argues the matter very ably in his preface to his
"Plays for Puritans," in which he asserts that
his picture of Caesar is better than Shakes-
peare's. He says:

"I have a technical objection to making sexual
infatuation a tragic theme. Experience proves
that it is only effective in the comic spirit. We
can bear to see Mrs. Quickly pawning her plates
for love of Falstaff, but not Antony running
away from the battle of Actium for love of
Cleopatra. Let realism have its demonstration,
comedy its criticism, or even bawdry its horse-
laugh at the expense of sexual infatuation, if it
must; but to ask us to subject our souls to its
ruinous glamor, to worship it, deify it, and imply
that it alone makes our life worth living, is
nothing but folly gone mad erotically — a thing
compared to which Falstaff's unbeglamored
drinking and drabbing is respectable and right-
minded. Whoever, then, expects to find Cleo-
patra a Circe and Caesar a hog in these pages,
had better lay down my book and be spared a
disappointment.

"In Caesar, I have used another character
with which Shakespeare has been beforehand.

27

But Shakespeare, who knew human weaknesses
so well, never knew human strength of the
Caesarian type."

And he goes on :

"Caesar was not in Shakespeare, nor in the
epoch, now fast waning, which he inaugurated.
It cost Shakespeare no pang to write Caesar
down for the merely technical purpose of writ-
ing Brutus up. And what a Brutus! A perfect
Girondin."

Much of this is excellent criticism, but it does
not do justice to Shakespeare. Shaw's Caesar is
Bernard Shaw and his contempt for Cleopatra's
wiles is very amusing and his intellectual appre-
ciation of his position and his duties is quite
admirable, but I do not find in Shaw's Caesar
either the ruthlessness of the Roman or the will
power and dignity of the world conqueror.
Plutarch's Caesar gives us a far better picture
of the man. Who can ever forget young Caesar
dominating the pirates and daring to tell the
chief to his face that he would hang him after
paying him his ransom. I find more of the real
Caesar in Shakespeare than in Shaw. When
Antony challenges Caesar to fight his answer is
soul-revealing:

"Let the old ruffian know

I have many other ways to die; meantime

Laugh at his challenge."

The master of the world has nothing but dis-
28

dain for the "swordcr." And when his deserted
sister weeps and he has to tell her that Antony
has gone back to the serpent of old Nile, he
adds :

^'Cheer your heart

But let determin'd things to destiny
Hold unbewail'd their way."

There is no line in all literature with so much
of Rome's majestic domination in it.

Greatness of insight and of soul is revealed
again and again in Shakespeare's Caesar.

I have always thought "Candida," Shaw's
finest performance, his best play — the perfect
flower of his art and being. The kindness in it,
the broad humanity are the very perfume of
Shaw's spirit.

I have personal reasons to congratulate my-
self on Shaw's kindness of heart, for when I left
France and came to America and told here
what Shaw and others have since proved to be
the truth about the war and England's responsi-
bility for it, I found that I was being treated in
England as a sort of traitor because I preferred
to be true to truth rather than to English inter-
ests. The baser sort howled at me in every news-
paper, and even men like Arnold Bennett, who
had followed me with praise for years, were not
ashamed now to hint at corruption in order to
explain my incomprehensible admiration of
certain German virtues. But when I was at-
tacked in some weekly paper, Shaw defended

29

me in his own way with the old kindliness. He
and I have been able to differ about the war
without impairing our friendship.

The finest thing about Shaw is that being
placed on a pedestal and flattered beyond
measure has not increased his arrogance; on the
contrary it has rather diminished his self-asser-
tion and increased his kindliness. So long as
men denied him the position he was conscious
of deserving he demanded it loudly in and out
of season; but as soon as they treated him as
one of the Immortals and paid him honor, he
became more considerate of others and less in-
clined to stand on the extreme verge of his claim.
Like Meredith he can see that too much honor
is not good for a man who has to live his life
and do his work. Measured by high standards
Shaw withstands the tests triumphantly, and
what a delight it is to be able in all sincerity to
say about a contemporary writer that his char-
acter is at least as noble as his best work.

It is the latest thing he has done that sheds
most light on Shaw's powers. At sixty odd he
has put his critical and incidentally his creative
faculty to the severest proof. In his "Preface"
to Androcles and the Lion he has given us his
view of Jesus. When Shaw was defending me
in a London journal I replied that I was trying
to write about Jesus, had indeed been studying
the Master for years with that object.

30

Shaw at once wrote to me on the matter, and
I have pleasure in publishing here that part of
his excellent letter:

"It seems to be my destiny to dog your foot-
steps with apparent plagiarisms. The Shake-
speare effort was bad enough, but you now tell
me that you are doing the life of Jesus. I am
doing exactly the same thing by way of preface
to Androcles and the Lion, which is a Christian
martyr play; so you must hurry up.

"They tell me that what I have gathered from
the gospel narratives and the rest of the New
Testament, which I have read through atten-
tively for the first time since, as a boy, I read
the whole Bible through out of sheer bravado,
is much the same as Renan's extract. I do not
know whether this is true; for I have never read
the Vie de Jesu, though I will look it up
presently.

"Anyhow, it is rather significant that you and
I and George Moore should be on the same
tack. The main thing that I have tried to bring
out, and indeed the only thing that made the
job worth doing for me, is that modern sociology
and biology arc steadily bearing Jesus out in his
peculiar economics and theology."

In reply I wrote that plagiarism or no pla-
giarism, I should be extremely interested in
reading what he had written and would let him

31

know what I felt about it as soon as I received
hi* book. I was greatly struck with Shaw's
essay on Jesus, and here I have set down in haste,
I admit, my first thoughts on the work.

Like most of us in this time Shaw has always
been obsessed with the idea of reforming the
world, remoulding it nearer to the heart's de-
sire and from first to last he has shown a rational
consistency of thought.

Wells may be a Socialist to-day and something
else to-morrow; but Shaw is no flibbertigibbet
or weather-cock. He was a convinced socialist
at the beginning of his career when he was
young and poor, and now, thirty years later,
rich and honored, he is nobly intent on preach-
ing the same doctrine.

That is why this essay of his on Jesus is of
supreme importance to any one who wishes to
understand and classify him or assimilate his
contribution to modern thought.

It is characteristic of Shaw that it is not Jesus
as a man that interests him ; Christian doctrines
would have been preached and practised, he
says roundly, "if Jesus had never existed." This
is probably true though we know no one in these
last nineteen centuries who could have taken the
place of Jesus or done his work. Still in time
no doubt humanity would have produced an-
other man of similar insight and sweetness. To
Shaw "it js the doctrine and not the man that

32

matters." Here, as always, Shaw is first of all
a preacher and not a poet; a dramatist if you
like, because he is a born preacher, as Moliere
was, and not for love of the drama:

"I am no more a Christian than Pilate was,
or you, gentle reader; and yet .... I am ready
to admit that after contemplating the world and
human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no
way out of the world's misery but the way which
would have been found by Christ's will if he
had undertaken the work of a modern practical

statesman."

- Very notable words, in my opinion, and
stamped with a high sincerity. Naturally, Shaw
goes on to tell us that he knows "a great deal
more about economics and politics than Jesus
did," and this superiority of his is based appar-
ently on the fact that he has no sympathy with
"vagabonds and talkers" who would subvert the
existing social order in the delusion that the end
of the world is at hand — a statetnent which
seems reasonable though perhaps superfluous.

Shaw then proceeds to doubt whether Jesus
ever existed, and ends up by asserting that it
does not matter whether he did or not. Let us
look at this assertion in terms of another art.
There are half a dozen pictures attributed to X,
who has been classed for centuries as probably
the greatest of painters. Shaw looks at them, sees
they are all by the same hand (Paul even has

33

nothing to do with them), admits that they have
not been equalled in two thousand years,, and
yet doubts whether the Master ever existed
really, "any more than Hamlet."

One gasps at such a lame and impotent con-
clusion. Who then painted the pictures? wt
ask. And Shaw replies, "One symbol is as good
as another. . . . Confucius said certain things
before Jesus"; yet "for some reason the imag-
ination of white mankind has picked out Jesus
as Nazareth as the Christ, and attributed all the
Christian doctrines to him" — let us leave it at
that, he adds implicitly. Fortunately or unfor-
tunately, this seems to me not a theory, but a
demonstrable fact. The pictures proclaim the
painter, one single creative mind, and Jesus, if
we can get to know him, is more important than
his teachings or parables, just as Shaw, when we
get to know him, is more important than his
plays or even his prefaces.

Curiously enough, another dispute Shaw and
I had over Shakespeare, crops up again in his
criticism of Jesus. He objected strenuously to
the gentle, loving, humane, melancholy, philoso-
phising thinker and poet as the man Shakes-
peare, or rather he accepted all the epithets,
while protesting that the "gentle" was overdone.
He has exactly the same quarrel with Jesus. He
is in the Ercles vein ; he cries :

" *Gcntle Jesus, meek and mild,' is a snivel-

ling modern invention, with no warrant in the
gospels."

This assertion made me doubt my eyes. Did
not Jesus advise us to turn the other cheek,
and to give the cloak to the robber who had
taken the coat? Did he not teach that you
should do good to your enemies? How does the
Sermon on the Mount begin :
Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the
Kingdom of Heaven.

And to leave you in no doubt Jesus strikes
the same note again:

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the
earth.

This "gentleness," this meekness, this forgiv-
ing of injuries, this loving kindness "a snivelling
modern invention!"

Shaw, Shaw, why deniest thou me?

It is as certain as anything can be that it
was just this gentleness, this meekness, this lov-
ing kindness of Jesus that caught the imagination
of humanity, and won for him the passionate
idolatry of men. Shaw, a combative Anglo-
Saxon, may find himself more easily in the Jesus
who blasted the barren fig-tree and scourged the
money-changers out of the Temple; but that was
not the spirit men love in Jesus. Paul could
have done all those things or Judas Maccabeus
or any of ten thousand brave Jewish rebels who
threw their lives to a protest, minted their souls
in a curse.

35

The instinct of humanity that has chosen Jesus
— "for some reason," as Shaw remarks — is pro-
foundly right; forgiveness is nobler than pun-
ishment and lovingkindness more soul-subduing
than any tyranny. It is this gentle, loving Jesus
that takes the spirit like the fragrance of a flower
or the innocent loveliness of a child.

Jesus was the first to discover the soul, the
first to speak to it with certainty, and because of
the divination he is throned in the hearts of men
forever :

// is more blessed to give than to receive.

I attach great importance to the personality
of Jesus for many reasons which it would require
too much time and space to set forth here; but
one reason may be indicated. If one studies the
personality of Jesus, one can perceive, I ven-
ture to say, a certain growth in his mind, certain
moments of development which bring him
nearer to us and make him clearer. It was
Lecky, I believe, the author of The History of
Rationalism, who first said that long after
Christianity had perished as a creed, Jesus
would live as an ideal. If he had said as an
influence, I should hare agreed with him: the
influence and spirit of Jesus are certain to endure
for hundreds of centuries to come : But no man
can be an "ideal" to us; even Jesus cannot fill
the horizon; the time has come to sec him as

36

he was, the wisest and sweetest of the sons of
men, whose place in the Pantheon of Humanity
is assured forever. His surpassing quality
makes it unnecessary to prove his existence by
the testimony of Paul, or by the references
to his crucifixion in Tacitus and Josephus.
It is impossible to study Rembrandt's pictures
chronologically without realizing Rembrandt's
growth, impossible to read Shakespeare and not
see his personality passing from flower to fruit,
in the same way we cannot deny Jesus or ignore
the Son of Man who became the Son of God.

Three or four of his parables or short stories
are the finest ever written; a dozen of his say-
ings come from a height of thought and feeling
hardly reached by any other son of man ; he was
at once saint and seer and artist of the noblest,
and the way he was treated by the world is
symbolic of the fate of genius everywhere. His
life showed (as he was the first to see), that a
prophet is not without honor save in his own
country and amid his own kin ; his death estab-
lished the dreadful truth that in measure as one
grows better than his fellow men, he incurs their
hatred. The highest genius in this world was
beaten and scourged and finally crowned in de-
rision with thorns. Crucifixion is the reward
given by men to their supreme Guides and
Teachers.

Shaw spends a hundred pages or more in a
37

very fine and fair criticism of the four gospels:
he establishes, I am inclined to believe, several
truths which more learned commentators have
failed to perceive. He says that Luke has added
sentiment and romance to the story told by Mat-
thew and Mark, and declares that "it is Luke's
Jesus who has won our hearts." He believes on
good grounds, I think, that John's gospel was
written by the beloved disciple himself, and
must be brought within the first century.

The old question as to the credibility of the
gospels Shaw declares unimportant: "Belief is
merely a matter of taste."

And so he comes back to his beginning:
"Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man"
and we stand exposed as "the fools, the blunder-
ers, the unpractical visionaries." For the root
fact remains : our system of distributing wealth
"is wildly and monstrously wrong. We have
million dollar babies side by side with paupers
worn out by a long life of unremitted drudgery.
One adult in every five dies in a workhouse, a
public hospital or a madhouse. In cities like
London the proportion is very nearly one in two.
This distribution is effected by violence pure and
simple. If you demur you are sold up. If you
resist the selling up you are bludgeoned and im-
prisoned. Iniquity can go no further. . . .
Democracy in France and the United States is
an imposture and a delusion. It reduces justice

38

and law to a farce: law becomes merely an
instrument for keeping the poor in subjection.
Workmen are tried not by a jury of their peers,
but by conspiracies of their exploiters. The
press is the press of the rich and the curse of
the poor. The priest is the complement of the
policeman .... and, worst of all, marriage
becomes a class affair."

Never was there such a root and branch con-
demnation of human society. And the remedy
is as sweeping. Shaw states it briefly:

"We must begin by holding the right to an
income as sacred and equal just as we now begin
by holding the right to life as sacred and equal.
The one right is only a restatement of the other.
.... Jesus was a first rate political economist."

Now it would not be difficult to show that this
wholesale indictment of the existing social order
is as one-sided and extravagant as the eulogies
of an individualist of the Manchester school;
the bomb is not the best answer to the multi-
millionaire, though it is a very natural one. The
truth is, both individualism and socialism must
find a place in modern life: just as analytic and
synthetic chemistry both find their place; but
in my opinion Shaw is right in the first article
of his creed; the equal right to live presupposes
the right to necessaries and a fair living wage.
As we do not kill the aged and infirm we must
provide a living for all; that is the root fact of
the new industrial civilization.

39

And now what is the sum total of the whole
story? My readers must see that I regard Shaw
the iconoclast, Shaw the railer at British con-
ventions and British hypocrisies, Shaw who has
been wise enough or lucky enough to mount him-
self on a stout bank-balance instead of an aged
Rosinante, and from that vantage to attack
British conceit and complacent materialism;
Shaw the scoffer and sceptic and socialist, as
assuredly the most powerful and highest moral
influence in the Britain of this time. He has
taken the place left vacant by Carlyle and has
given proof of as fine a courage and as high a
devotion to Truth as the Scot. He has scoffed
at the idea of a personal immortality as con-
temptuously as at the idea of a state where the
few suffer from too great wealth almost as much
as the many suffer from an unmerited destitution.

Shaw's religion, his view that is of the true
meaning of life deserves to be stated:

"This is the true joy in life," he says, "the
being used for a purpose recognized by yourself
as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out
before you are thrown on the scrap-heap; the
being a force of nature instead of a feverish
selfish little clod of ailments and grievances com-
plaining that the world will not devote itself
to making you happy."

In the main this is the creed of Carlyle too
40

and of Goethe though the great German brings
joy into it by making the individual himself
work consciously for the highest purpose.

Everyone, I think, who treats of this period in
history will have to consider Bernard Shaw as
far and away the most important figure in Great
Britain for nearly a quarter of a century. True,
he has no new word in religion for us, no glimpse
even of new and vital truth; but he walks hon-
estly by such gleams of light as come to him
in the present.

And some of Shaw's plays are at least equal in
worth to his critical work and will hold the
stage for generations to come. He is among the
greatest of English humorists. Everyone can see
now that Shakespeare's humor was adventitious
and fortunate rather than characteristic. Take
Falstaff out of his work and all the other clowns,
including even Dogberry, would hardly furnish
forth one evening's entertainment. And Fal-
staflf and Dogberry belong to the earliest part of
Shakespeare's life; after thirty he became in-
creasingly serious. But Shaw's humor is richer
to-day at sixty odd than when he began; the
flashes of it illumine every part of his work. The
British stage knows no comedies superior to
John Bull's Other Island, Candida, and Caesar
and Cleopatra."

And this is the Shaw that will hold an unique
place in English literature; the humorist, icono-

41

clast and prophet; the laughing philosopher,
whom no one to-day can afford to ignore.

The boy has often been called seriously the
father of the man and before I completed this
sketch I wanted to get some picture of Shaw
as a child which would either change or con-
firm my estimate of him. After many vain at-
tempts I got a little snapshot of him as a boy
from Mrs. Ada Tyrrell, wife of the late Regius
Professor of Greek in Trinity College, Dublin.
Mrs. Tyrrell is herself a poet of rare talent and
has the keen yet generous eyes of a very gifted
woman. She writes :

"I can tell you very little more than you know
yourself of George's youth after the age of
twelve or fourteen, as his family left Ireland to
live in London about then. My first memory of
George is a little boy in a Holland overall sit-
ting at a table constructing a toy theatre.
'Sonny' the other Shaws called him, then. We
lived a few doors from them, and our mothers
being both singers, was the bond between us.
Even at that early age — George was about ten —
he had a superior manner to his sisters and me,
a sort of dignity withal, and I remember feeling
rather flattered when he condescended to explain
anything that I asked him; though we girls were
a year or two older.

"I should say, as well as I can judge between
the two men, Oscar Wilde and G. B. S., that

42

George is a good man all through and Oscar
had only good impulses, though with more sen-
timent than George; more romance in fact,
which is always a charm to me. I know George
to have been the best of sons and brothers; he
is generous, not alone to worthy objects, but lo
the unworthy as well. I often think that the
luxury of having unlimited money is that one
can give to both."

This is the highest merit of the man, that
while mocking sentimentality he is always true
to the best in him as needle to the pole. He
has shown us all that a Briton can rise above
secular British prejudices and that ingrained
English habit of excusing oafish stupidity by the
conceit of moral superiority, as if dullness and
goodness were Siamese twins.

He has pictured Caesar standing before the
Sphinx and admitting that he, too, is "half
brute, half woman and half God, and no part
of man." The confession though doubtless per-
sonal, does not do Shaw justice. I have always
thought of him as of Greatheart in Bunyan*s
allegory, a man so high-minded and courageous
he will take the kingdom of heaven by storm and
yet so full of the milk of human kindness that he
suffers with all the disadvantages of the weak
and all the disabilities of the dumb. He is the
only man since William Blake who has enlarged
our conception of English character; thanks to

43

the Irish strain in him he encourages us to hope
that English genius may yet become as free of
insular taint as the vagrant air and as beneficent
as sunshine.

44

Rudyard Kipling

RUDYARD KIPLING

T was, I think, in 1890 or 1891 that I
first met Rudyard Kipling in Lon-
don, shortly after his return from
India. I knew of him before I saw
him. A couple of years earlier a
grey-blue paper book containing some stories of
Kipling had fallen into my hands. It bore the
imprint of some Indian publisher, and I was
enthralled, as every one was enthralled, by the
superb narrative power displayed in those
"plain tales" of excelling artistry. True, it was
rapid impressionist work, slapdash, some called
it; but it was supremely effective and original —
style, treatment and subject all in perfect har-
mony. "Soldiers Three" followed, and one be-
gan to see that the reign of the English in India
had at length produced a singer.

Some of the stories were prefaced by verses,
and one heard it said that young Rudyard Kip-
ling was a still greater master of verse than of
prose. A little later I got hold of "Depart-
mental Ditties" and simply swallowed them;
but Kipling to me was not a poet, his character-
istic gift was that of the storyteller; even in
verse he was a ballad-writer rather than a mas-
ter-singer.

45

I forget whether I wrote asking him to call
on me in the office of The Fortnightly Review,
or whether I asked my assistant, the Rev. John
Verschoyle to bring him; but at any rate he
came to the office andl took to him at once. He
was very young, younger even than I had pic-
tured him: a short, sturdy, bullet-headed man,
wearing big glasses which did not altogether
hide the keen regard of sharp eyes. The face,
like the figure, was strongly cast and well-pro-
portioned. Though he was sincerity itself, with-
out pose or affectation of any kind, ingenuously
sincere and open indeed, his personality was not
impressive in any way.

That very first afternoon we talked for a
couple of hours: I was intensely interested in
his stories, eager to tell him how much I liked
them, eager to know too whether he preferred
to work in verse or prose.

How long had he been in India? How had
he come to drift out there? Were the experi-
ences worth the pains of exile? — in short a hun-
dred personal details. I had not written any-
thing of note at the time. I was desperately
curious about his past and future work. I
wanted to measure him correctly: was he a really
great man or not? He told me that his father
had lived and done his work in India as a civil
engineer, that he himself was born in Bombay in
1865, and that he had helped to edit a paper

46

there from 1882 to 1889. He had been in China,
Japan and the United States as well, yet pro-
posed now to cast anchor if not to strike root in
England: "You have no idea how good the
English countryside looks to me after India,"
he exclaimed : "Sussex seems a bit of Paradise."
The office of The Fortnightly Review at that
time was a sort of debating club from four to
seven every afternoon. My assistant and friend,
the Rev. John Verschoyle, was an extraordinary
man. Of all the men I have met, Swinburne
alone had a greater poetic gift: one proof will
suffice. He went from Trinity College, Dublin,
to Cambridge when he was only seventeen years
of age, and while still a Freshmen was asked
to write some Greek verses for the cover of the
University Calendar: they are there to be read
still, though written forty years ago — ,convinc-
ing evidence of an astonishing talent. Ver-
schoyle was a strikingly handsome man, with
regular features, fair hair, blue eyes and long
Viking-fair moustache. The most noticeable
things about h'im were his high-domed forehead
and extraordinary breadth of shoulder: though
of barely middle-height, he was exceptionally
powerful. Verschoyle was well-read in English
literature and had an even greater mastery of
English verse than of Greek. His knowledge of
English poetry was like Swinburne's, encyclo-
paedic, yet imbrued with passionate prejudices;

47

he thought Shelley and Wordworth the greatest
English poets after Shakespeare, and as I pre-
ferred Blake and Browning and Keats, our ar-
guments were "frequent and free." Of course in
knowledge of the technique of verse I was not
in the same class with him : he was a master and
I was not even a deep student. I have said so
much about Verschoyle (the news of whose
death has just reached me!) because his discus-
sions with Kipling threw a flood of light on both
men.

One afternoon stands out in my memory with
astonishing clearness, and it was characteristic
of many. Kipling came into the office, and
when asked what he had been doing, replied:
"Some verses." They were the passionate anti-
Irish verses, afterwards published under the
heading "Cleared!" I read them with shrink-
ing and dislike. I saw their power, knew too
that they would cause a sensation : but I could
not and would not publish them. They were
certain to increase the already intense English
hatred of Ireland, and I would not be a party to
feeding that foul flame. At the same time I
wanted to keep Kipling as a contributor and did
not wish him to feel that I was out of sympathy
with his talent. When I had read the screed
through, I said:

"The Times should publish this. If you're
willing, Kipling, Til read the verses to Walter,

48

the owner, who's a friend of mine and dines
with me this week. I'm sure he'll jump at them,
and in The Times they will make your name in
London."

Kipling thanked me, said there was nothing
he'd like better.

"I find myself agreeing with The Times,"
he added, "in almost everything."

I smiled inwardly at the idea of any one being
proud of agreeing with The Times; but I needed
no telling that such a common ground of feel-
ing made it almost certain that Kipling would
ultimately reach a world-wide popularity.

There were some careless, slipshod lines in the
poem ; I, therefore, threw the manuscript across
the table to Verschoyle. Though Irish born and
bred, Verschoyle was of the English garrison in
Ireland and hated Parnell and his Nationalist
following as only an Irishman can hate. The
sentiment of Kipling's verses appealed to him
intensely, but he agreed about the weak lines,
and with all courtesy suggested improvements.
Kipling lit up immediately, admitted this word,
rejected that cadence and argued about another.
I sat back and enjoyed the play of wits. Any
one who heard the discussion would have had to
admit that Verschoyle was a considerably better
technician than Kipling, possessing besides a far
wider knowledge of English poetry, and the best
Enelish usage. Yet I have po wjsb Id disguise

!;■■>

f i

the undoubted fact that Kipling has written
better English poetry than Verschoyle ever wrote
or could write. I tell the story merely in order
to show that Kipling's technical gift as a singer
is anything but first rate; his prose, on the other
hand, is of high quality.

For a long time I had most pleasant, if never
intimate, relations with Kipling. When Buckle,
the utterly incompetent Editor of The Times,
rejected the poem, Kipling sent it to Henley,
and it duly appeared in the Scot's Observer and
created, as I had expected, an extraordinary sen-
sation. One peculiar point about the matter is,
that the verses as printed in the Observer were
afterwards reprinted in The Times.

As a man of the world Kipling understood
that The Fortnightly Review had certain Radi-
cal traditions and leanings, which made it diffi-
cult for me to publish an anti-nationalist poem.
He let my refusal make no change in the cor-
diality of our intercourse. But the whole dis-
cussion showed me the very texture, so to speak,
of Kipling's mind. He was intensely eager to
get the most forcible, or most picturesque, or
most musical expression for his passionate
prejudices; he was fair-minded too in accepting
any and every good suggestion or emendation;
but he was not willing even to consider the op-
posite side of the question. His mind seemed
closed to any argument. He appeared to have

50

no understanding of the fact that in any great
dispute the partisan is almost certainly at fault,
the only way of growth being to extract the
opposing truths and unite them in a higher syn-
thesis which should include both. Rudyard Kip-
ling was proud of being a partisan, proud of
holding and asserting the English view of every
question. Nine times out of ten he even pre-
ferred the Tory English view to the Liberal.

One day I spoke bitterly of the exploitation
of the poor by the powerful in Great Britain.
It did not seem to interest him.

On another occasion I exposed the partiality
of some English judge, who was evidently de-
fending the oligarchy against the people's inter-
ests. Kipling assured me that English judges
were notoriously the fairest in the world : "were
they not the best paid?" He had the prejudices
and opinions of a fourth-form English school-
boy on almost every subject coupled with an ex-
traordinary verbal talent: the mind of a boy of
sixteen with a genius for expression.

I came to this conclusion through dozens of
conversations: several times we stayed arguing
in the office till it was time to close, and then I
went with him to his rooms or he came with me.

Alike with word of mouth as with pen, Kip-
ling was a most admirable story-teller. I re-
member one evening going to his room some-
where off the Strand, and while I filled the soli-

51

tary armchair he sat on the bed smoking a pipe
and told me how he had once witnessed a suc-
cession of wild-beast fights staged by some In-
dian prince. He pictured the fight between
a tiger and a buffalo with photographic vision.
You saw the great cat flattened out on the arena
while the buffalo with lowered head and side-
long eyes moved nearer and nearer. Suddenly
the flaming beast shot through the air, but was
met fairly by the buffalo's iron front and horns
and flung bodily yards away to the side and rear ;
like a flash it sprang again and again was met
and thrown. At once it fled to the wooden wall
and began licking its wounds. In spite of long
red gashes on his head and neck the buffalo was
always the aggressor; nearer and nearer he went,
while the tiger drew itself together, every hair
on end, and struck fiercely at his head, with one
paw laying the bone bare in long parallel slashes
and ripping off part of the nose; the next mo-
ment the buffalo had nailed the tiger to the bar-
rier with one horn and kept on butting and
kneading the writhing beast against the wood
till one heard the hooped ribs crack while the
whole structure shook. The tiger bit and clawed
as long as life lasted, and when finally the buf-
falo, bellowing with rage, drew off from the
dead mat, his head was one dripping scarlet
wound ; he had to be shot.

The gift of swift narration and painting word

S2

was Kipling's as it was O. Henry's; but he
hadn't even O. Henry's power of self-criticism.
In an admirably vigorous and interesting story:
"The Drums of the Fore and Aft," he tells how
a British force, having hemmed in a band of
Afghans, drove them hither and thither, attack-
ing first from this side, then from that. The
Afghan force, he said, appeared to be slowly
melting away, chased, now here, now there, as a
"hand chases a sponge in a bath." A moment's
thought would have told him that the phrase
should be as a "hand chases soap in a bath"; but
he did not correct his prose very carefully.

Our disagreement went far deeper than
words, though our companionship for some time
was very pleasant at least to me. Bit by bit I
came to see that he had told me all about India
he had to tell : he began to repeat himself, and
even report cantonment and clubhouse stories,
giving me the rinsings of his Indian experiences.
He always assumed that the English rule was
the best thing that had happened to India: the
Pax Britannica held to peace a score of warring
races and conflicting religions. To ask him
whether it had not resulted in the enslavement
and impoverishment of millions of the poorest
was to excite surprise. He had never considered
that side of the matter: The English had given
railways to India: was the sufl5cient answer.

I wanted to know how far Indian thought had
53

pierced, whether any Buddhist had gone beyond
Gautama, whether any new and fruitful general-
ization had come from Hindu thinkers, whether
any Yogi or holy man had ever planted his lan-
tern out into the uncharted darkness? Nothing
of any moment could I get from Kipling, no
illuminating word. I came to the conclusion
that he took but little interest in new ideas.

One evening in the office he told us an excel-
lent story: it was published later and my readers
may recognize it. He started by picturing a
man and a woman riding up a mountain road
under the deodars near Simla. The man was try-
ing to persuade the woman to leave her husband
and run away with him. He proved to his own
satisfaction that the woman's husband did not
love her, and declared that his love for her was
infinite and eternal. The woman replied that
a man's love usually died with possession and
that it was hardly worth while to throw over
convention and outrage public opinion when
one had no certainty of lasting afifection, and so
forth and so on. The story was made lifelike
and entrancing by the art of the narrator, for
there was no new argument used, no deep reali-
zation of character — superficial snapshots mere-
ly, cleverly brought out. In the middle of the
discussion, an Indian with a bullock-team and
huge balk of timber, came into sight round a
bend of the road. The man's pony shied at the

54

apparition and slid a hind leg over the edge of
the precipice: the woman, seeing the danger,
snatched at the man's rein and hit his pony on
the nose. At once pony and wooer disappeared
into the abyss. And there the story ended.

This conclusion seemed to me silly — indefens-
ible, a sin against all the canons. To end a psy-
chological discussion by a brutal accident was
an insult to the intelligence.

"Why?" countered Kipling, "accidents do
happen in life."

"True," I replied, "but they are rare. If you
were writing a whole life you might want an
accident in it to fulfil the laws of probability —
but an accident, and a fatal accident at that, is
not likely to take place in a wooing of ten min-
utes. It is too improbable, and in art the im-
probable is worse than the impossible. It shocks

me."

"I see the Indian," he replied, a remark which
closed the discussion.

The more I thought over the argument, the
more indifferent to him I became. I saw that
the man was all of one piece, that beyond his
talent of expression he had nothing to give; my
interest in him withered away at the root.

But, after all, why should I quarrel with Kip-
ling or scorn him for what he is not, instead of
pointing out what he is and what he has given
to deserve our gratitude. Walter Scott's stories

55

arc not from the depths of thought nor do his
songs bring men to ^'sympathy with hopes and
fears they heeded not." And yet his books have
proved the joy of many a young life, and not
one reader in ten thousand has even heard of the
shameful book in which, out of mistaken patriot-
ism, he traduced and caricatured the great
Napoleon. Thank God! it is not the evil but
the good men do, that lives after them, and it be-
comes one better therefore to praise than to
blame. At the same time it is well to remember
that it is just the want of thought in Scott, the
want of self-criticism, what Rossetti used to call
"the fundamental brain stuff," that prevents him
from ranking with the greatest, with Cervantes
and Balzac and Shakespeare. And it is the same
defect that forbids us to put Kipling among the
choice and master spirits of this age. I have
read everything he has written since, and have
found no reason to modify my judgment. "Kim"
and "The Jungle Book" are better than any of
his earlier stories, save only "The Man Who
Would Be King." The jungle books in especial
seems to me the best thing Kipling has ever done
or is ever likely to do: but I get more of the
soul of India from the native writers.

His poetry is even easier to judge. "On the
Road to Mandalay" and a chance verse from
time to time remain in the mind and enrich the
memory; but Kipling's poetic gift is neither high

56

nor rare, save in the intensity of patriotic appeal.
Such verses as:

"I am the land of their fathers,
In me the virtue stays;
I will bring back my children
After certain days.

"Till I make plain the meaning
Of all my thousand years —
Till I fill their hearts with knowledge,
While I fill their eyes with tears."

and especially this : ^

"Take of English earth as much
As either hand may rightly clutch
In the taking of it breathe
Prayer for all who lie beneath —
Lay that earth upon your heart
And your sickness shall depart!"

can hardly be read by any one of English birth,
without profound emotion: it thrills all those
who use our English speech: yet patriotism as
a creed no longer holds the place it once held,
and as a sentiment even, its dangers are becom-
ing more and more obvious.

It seems to me that the world-war is a fearsome
object lesson in the evils of undue love of coun-
try: a dozen nations fighting savagely — ^what

57

for? Because every man overrates national in-
terests, regarding them as uniquely important.
National self-centeredness, national pride — the
cause of this insane butchery! Long ago in the
best minds and hearts, love of country has been
pushed into a secondary place by the love of
humanity. Now the masses have been taught
the same lesson by awful bloodshed and loss.

But the question now before us is: how far
Kipling's patriotism is laudable and how it has
affected his work? I believe that again and
again it has injured it and must finally impair
his influence.

Kipling's parochialism and its distorting
effect can best be realized by us in the picture
he drew of America. Not Dickens, not even
Antony Trollope at his worst reached such per-
versity of judgment, such immoral obliquity of
vision. He lands in San Francisco and with in-
credible cocksureness uses at once his Cockney
yardstick as a measure.

"San Francisco is a mad city — inhabited for
the most part by insane people whose women
are of a remarkable beauty."

And his notion of sanity and insanity may be
gauged by the talk on the Queen's birthday
which he quotes with approval. He makes an
American say that England "is beginning to rot
now," because it is "putting power into the hands
of the untrained people." The government of

58

the English obligarchy seems to Kipling per-
fect, but any attempts at democracy, such as
County Councils even, are a symptom of de-
cadence and dry rot. Here is another judgment:

"The American has no language. He has
dialect, slang, provincialism, accent, and so
forth. Now that I have heard their voices all
the beauty of Bret Harte is being ruined for me."

And he does not object merely to our voices
but to our clothes, and of course "the habit of
spitting" which he finds on all sides.

Moreover, men carry revolvers in the West
and sometimes use them. He concludes there-
fore: "there is neither chivalry nor romance in
the weapon for all that American authors have
seen fit to write. I would I could make you
understand the full measure of contempt with
which certain aspects of Western life have in-
spired me."

And, finally, we praise ourselves in public
speeches and he can't imagine how a self-respect-
ing man, "a sahib of our blood can stand up and
plaster praise on his own country."

Yet Kipling tells us in "Stalky & Co." that
"India's full of Stalkies — Cheltenham and
Marlborough chaps — that we don't know any-
thing about, and the surprises will begin when
there is a really big row on."

Well, there was soon a big row on and the sur-
prises were there all right. We were surprised

59

when a couple of thousand (or was it a couple
of hundred) British marines were landed to hold
Antwerp against two hundred thousand Ger-
mans; we were surprised at Gallipoli, and again
at Salonica and at Cambray. All such fan-
tastic misjudgings — blame and praise alike —
might be forgiven to Kipling's youth; were it
not that his myopia increases with age.

A great part of Kipling's popularity and con-
sequent quick rise to wealth and influence are
due directly to his passionate, blind herd-feeling.
No high thought would have helped him as
much as the general prejudice. It was probably
the popular applause which confirmed him in his
error. He is serious when he writes of "The
White Man's Burden," though he knows as well
as any one that the white man makes himself a
burden to his black brother out of the lowest
motives. Again and again, too, he has written
of Russia as the enemy of England and he did
not hesitate in the story entitled "The Man Who
Was" to try to stir up ill-feeling between Eng-
lishmen and Russians without any excuse. In
this same tale, some British officers at mess on
the Northwest frontier of India drink the usual
toast, "The Queen," and Kipling pictures them
as weeping with emotion. At its best, patriotism
is a pride founded on the great deeds of a nation,
and at its most idiotic, it sheds tears for symbols
questionable if not unworthy.

60

in the present world-war Kipling has won an
evil pre-eminence by vilifying Germany in
every way. He was not ashamed to write of
Germans as a disease-germ, which if "suffered
to multiply means death or loss to mankind.
. . . The German is typhoid or plague —
Pestis Teutonicus: ... at the end of the
war," he declared, "there must be no more
Germans."

The mind balks at such extravagance of
hatred : one cries for that quiet shore —

Where the Rudyards cease from Kipling

And the Haggards Ride no more.

Let us go to the true master spirits and see
what they think of patriotism.

In his essay on "Honour and Reputation,"
Bacon gives us his view of the hierarchy of hu-
man achievement. The greatest men, he tells
us, are the founders of States; then come the
saviours of States, then the enlargers of States;
then lawgivers, statesmen and so forth. Bacon,
with his Latin scholarship, regarded patriotism
as the supreme virtue.

Shakespeare, I believe, was the very first man
to outgrow patriotism and realize its insuffi-
cience; his Alcibiades tells us:

'Tis honor with most lands to be at odds.

Shakespeare was naturally the first writer to
speak of "humanity." He was not thinking of

61

the Roman Antony but of himself when he
wrote :

". . .A rarer spirit never
Did steer humanity; ..."

And this mere statement has flagged the com-
ing of a new ideal into life or rather in some
degree created the new ideal. For we all see
now that humanity is the ideal, that patriotism
as a virtue has been to some extent superseded ;
"Where it's well with me — there's my father-
land," says the Latin proverb. An undue love
or preference of one nation or race is as absurd
in thought as it is dangerous in fact

Goethe took this view very emphatically.
His words to-day are worth recalling: "I am
blamed," he said, "because I do not dislike the
French and take sides against them ; but how can
I dislike the French when I owe them a great
part of my intellectual being?"

In this modern dispute, Kipling is plainly on
the wrong side: even England will yet have to
learn that Shaw is a nobler figure and a better
patriot besides. What does Walter Scott's hatred
of Napoleon count for to-day? It merely excites
a shrug of contemptuous pity.

Kipling^s dislike of the United States and
Russia and now of Germany is even less excus-
able; it is indeed nothing but English "strach-
ery" — the sour reaction of inferior vitality or
virtue masquerading as moral condemnation.

62

Only the other day Kipling lamented his ig-
norance of French; but it is his ignorance of
Russian and especially of German that I deplore.
If he knew Goethe and Heine, Lessing and
Schopenhauer, he could never have soiled his
pages with such abominable nonsense about the
great German people as I have quoted. It is
his ignorance, his want of education that dwarfs
him and maims his gift to humanity.

It is impossible for me to part from Kipling
on this note ; he has interested us so often, given
us so much pleasure; dazzled us with such bril-
liant pictures that we are all perforce his debtors
and grateful. When his name comes up it is not
his English provincialism we recall, but the
pulsing life on the great Indian highroad in
"Kim," or the magic verses: —

"Ship me somewhere East of Suez,
Where the best is like the worst.
Where there aren't no ten commandments
And a man may raise a thirst.

"Ah, it's there that I would be
By the old Moulmcin pagoda
Looking lazy at the sea."

63

ERNEST DOWSON:
THE SWAN-SONG OF YOUTH.

"Mother of God; O Misericord, look down in pity on us.
The weak and the blind who stand in our light and wreak our-
•elvei such ill."

HATEVER we want in life, what-
ever we desire intensely and with
persistence, we are sure to obtain.

"All our youthful prayers are
granted," says Goethe: "brimming
measure in maturity." That is the chief lesson
of life: You can mold it to what form you will,
get from it what you wish : Knock and it shall be
opened unto you. Ask and ye shall have. You
can make it hymn or epic, as you please, get joy
from it, or sorrow or love, or fame — greatness
of soul or fatness of purse — whatever you will ; if
you only will it with all your might to the end.
That's almost the same as saying that life gives
herself to the strong only: for they alone can
will steadfastly; but what of the weak? What
of those who dream rather than desire and whose
dreams arc fitful and faint? Sometimes life
grants even to these the triumph of a moment,
the ecstasy of achievement, when they have
dreamed beautiful things and loved them with
intense passion.
I can't remember who introduced me to Ernest
• 64

^m

Ernest Dowson

Dowson or where we first met; but I knew him
from about 1890 up to the end of his brief life.

Dowson was born, I think, in 1867 and died
about 1900. He was physically weak and slight
though of good height; he had not stuff enough
in him, I thought at first, to be great; yet in
various ways he interested me intensely. He was
very like Keats without Keats's strength or joy
in life; a fragile, scholarly Keats. On first ac-
quaintance shy ; yet impulsive and frank with a
singular charm of manner; he appealed to the
heart as some girls do with a child's confidence
and a child's hesitancy and a sort of awkward
unexpected grace, quite indescribable. He was
gentle too and gay with quaint quirks of verse,
unprintable often, amusing always — a delight-
ful companion, quick-changing as an April day.

His portrait by Rothenstein is an extraordi-
narily perfect likeness; for once the artist has
been able to reproduce the features and convey
too the elusive charm and sad, sincere appeal of
an ingenuous, delightful spirit.

When I first knew Dowson he made the im-
pression of peculiar refinement; he was sensi-
tive to all courtesies, vibrant with enthusiasms,
yet instinctively considerate. I was always glad
to meet him, though I held his talent lightly;
his early verses being for the most part echoes
of Verlaine and Swinburne, and nothing so re-

65

pels me as the "sedulous ape" faculty, imitation
— the hallmark of mediocrity.

I went with him one evening into a little bar
off Leicester Square and he recited I remember,
a translation of a verse of Verlaine.

I had to tell him that while the ineffable sad-
ness of the verse was characteristic of Verlaine,
the translation was rather poor.

"So was the price paid for it," he laughed, "a
measly ten shillings. What can you expect for
that?" He spoke disdainfully, yet not from
greed. He thought his work good enough to
deserve high pay. He was not needy, he always
seemed to be able to live decently without work ;
he had good connections, properties even, was
never really in want, but he struck me as care-
less of money and improvident to an extraor-
dinary degree.

I was away from London for a year or two
and Dowson was much in France and when we
next met, he had changed. There was a spring
of life in him, of hope and purpose I had not
seen before. He confessed to me that he was in
love with a French girl whose mother kept a
small restaurant in Soho; he took me round to
see her. I could find little attraction in her ex-
cept the beauty of youth and the fact that she
evidently didn't care much for Dowson — a girl-
ish, matter-of-fact, pleasant creature. I could
not believe that the fever would be lasting or
profound. I was mistaken,

66 ■

One day he drifted into lunch and revealed
himself more boldly. We talked of literature
and he seemed to like everything second rate in
it, I thought: he loved Horace and any curious,
arresting epithet pleased him beyond measure.
I said something about "eventful originality"
and he jumped up and clapped his hands and
crov^^ed w^ith delight, repeating again and again
"eventful .... eventful originality," Wc
went out for a stroll into Hyde Park, and as we
walked he compared himself with Poe : "a mas-
ter of both prose and verse .... his prose
better than his verse, as mine is — " I laughed :
I thought (God forgive me I) he was overrating
himself, measuring stature with Poe. I quoted a
verse of Annabel Lee to recall him to himself.
He praised it laughing joyously in his odd boy-
ish way and then said half shyly : "I've written
some verses I like .... rather."

"Let me hear them," I cried, and he stopped
and began as if to encourage himself, "I call it:
'Sapientia Lunae,' " and he translated: "The
Wisdom of the Moon." A pause : he twisted his
thin hands together and began:

"The wisdom of the world said unto me:
'Go forth and run, the race is to the Ibrave;

Perchance some honor tarrieth for thee!*
'As tarrieth,' I said, 'for sure, the grave.*

For I had pondered on a rune of roses,

Which to her votaries the moon discloses.**

67

I can still sec the slight, stooping figure and
the liquid, appealing eyes — framed, so to speak,
by a bed of crimson flowers:

"Perchance some honor tarrieth for thee!"

The lure of all poets, of all nympholepts of
the ideal. . . . Again the pleasing pathetic
tenor voice:

"Then said my voice: "Wherefore strive or run

On dusty highways ever, a vain race?
The long night cometh, starless, void of sun,

What light shall serve thee like her golden face?
For I had pondered on a rune of roses,
And knew some secrets which the moon discloses."

I can't give reasons but the poem struck me —
"her golden face"; Dowson's manner; the sing-
ing verses, above all the pathos, the passion of
his love, trembling, yet controlled in the slow
music, deepened the appeal, lifted the poem to
greatness.

"Why, Dowson," I exclaimed, "love has made
a poet of you! That's first rate — a new note."

He half smiled and then walked on flushed —
pensive : — "Love — love .... makes poets of
us all," he said as if to himself. We spent the
afternoon and evening together, dining at the
Cafe Royal. I was astonished by his range of
reading and his intimacy with the Latins, espec-
ially Propertius; he was saturated too in French
and Italian poetry and had modern English
verse at his tongue's tip. About ten o'clock he

68

grew silent; he wished to go round to his French
restaurant, he said, and I let him go, for I was
a little tired of hearing him praise Mallarme
and Verlaine, extravagantly, as I thought.

A little later we met again and spent a sunny
morning together, lunched and talked the sun
down the sky: poetry of course and metaphysics.
He would not have my American optimism,
shrugged his shoulders at my idea of the King-
dom of Man upon earth and a new Jerusalem
to be builded on Seine or Thames or Hudson-
side : —

Our world is young,
Young, and of measure passing bound,
Infinite are the heights to climb
The depths to sound.

"I am for the old faith," he broke in; "I've
become a Catholic as every artist must. Have
you heard this? —

" 'Upon the eyes, the lips, the feet,
On all the passages of sense.
The atoning oil is spread with sweet
Renewal of lost innocence.' "

With a gasp of surprise I recognized that he
had become a master of his instrument; the
mounting music of the last couplet is super-
excellent.

I didn't see him again for a couple of years
and then he was with Smithers, I think, when
we met Dowson had changed greatly: youth

69

and youth's enthusiasms, the lively quick changes
of mood had died out of him; he was serious,
disdainful; his clothes seemed threadbare and
unbrushed; he met me with petulant indiffer-
ence; a touch of resentment, I thought. Had T
omitted some courtesy? or was I one of the many
heedless and profane who should have known
and helped him and did not? I wondered re-
gretfully.

The second or third time I saw him he was
drunk, helplessly, hopelessly drunk — and wore
— "I don't care" — as a mask. And soon, it seems
to me in retrospect, the drinking Dowson ob-
scured for me much of the charm of the younger
Dowson. Often he was delightful at first when
we met; yet always eager to drink and to get
drunk, eager to throw away his hold on life and
sanity, — to drown the bitter stings of remem-
brance. I soon found out that his love had
jilted him: "chucked him for a waiter," said
Smithers grinning. Though not so deep as a
drawwell, nor broad as a church door, as Mer-
cutio said, the wound served, and Dowson died
of it. After a couple of years' courtship, — talks
at lunch, games of cards after dinner, a kiss or
two, friendly on one side and passionate on the
other, the illusion of love returned, — s^he mar-
ried a waiter, and Dowson could never recover
his fragile hold on life and hope. Dowson's
only epigram tells the whole story:

70

Because t am idolatrous and have besougfit,
With grievous supplication and consuming prayer,
The admirable image that my dreams have wrought
Out of her swan's neck and her dark abundant hair:
The jealous gods, who brook no worship save their own.
Turned my live idol and her heart to stone.

I did not realize the tragedy on first hearing.
But a little while afterwards, we floated together
again one afternoon in Coventry Street and
Dowson asked me to accompany him to a dock
he owned in the East End. He seemed pathet-
ically weak and dependent on casual companion-
ship, lonely and unhappy.

The East of London was always calling mc at
that time as the East Side of New York calls me
now and I went with him. We dined in a frowsy
room behind a bar on a bare table without a
napkin: the food almost uneatable, the drink
poisonous, and afterwards Dowson took me
round to places of amusement! The memory of
it all, — a nightmare; I can still hear a girl dron-
ing out an interminable song meant to be lively
and gay; still see a woman clog-dancing just to
show glimpses of old, thin legs, smiling gro-
tesquely the while with toothless mouth; still
remember Dowson hopelessly drunk at the end
screaming with rage and vomiting insults — a
wretched experience.

A week later he wanted me to go East again ;
but I had had enough. What the French call
la nostalgie de la boue (the homesickness for

71

squalor and mud-honey) was upon him and he
abandoned himself to it.

Once I remonstrated with him; took him into
the Cafe Royal one morning, cheered him with
excellent coffee, begged him, for his talent's sake,
to pull himself together; everything was still
possible to him: he shrugged his shoulders.

I probed him to know if money would help
him: he laughed, "Hope would help me and
nothing less." Eager to rouse him, I spoke of
him as a dreamer, a failure. He reddened and
said: "I've written things you'd like, oh, yes!
Things you'd like very much."

"Let me hear them," I cried, "and I'll be-
lieve," and he recited some verses of the poem
Impenitentia Ultima:
"Before my light goes out for ever if God should give me

a choice of graces,
I would not reck of length of days, nor crave for things

to be;
But cry: 'One day of the great lost days, one face of all

the faces,
Grant me to see and touch once more and nothing more

to sec-

" 'But once before the sand is run and the silver thread is

broken
Give me a grace and cast aside the veil of dolorous years.
Grant me one hour of all mine hours, and let me sec for a

token
Her pure and pitiful eyes shine out, and bathe her feet

with tears.

72

" 'Before the ruining waters fall and my life be carried

under,
And Thine anger cleave me through as a child cuts down a

flower,
I will praise Thee, I^ord, iri Hell, while my limbs are racked

asunder.
For the last sad sight of her face and the little grace of an

hour.' "

The verses sang the desire of his heart, with
consuming passion, and taught me all his love-
madness and despair: but I was determined —
hoping it might spur him to better things — not
again to lose my critical attitude. I nodded my
head and said:

"First rate; the hands are the hands of Dow-
son but the voice is the voice of Swinburne."

"Oh, that be damned," he cried, "the voice is
mine; 'my cup may be small.' " he quoted, "but
it's mine.' Here's something to a madman in
Bedlam," and he began reciting again. The last
couplet caught me, rapt me out of time :

". . . . ;better than love or sleep.

The star-crowned solitude of thine oblivious hours!"

It was Splendid ; it sang itself and satisfied the
critical faculty in me; yet there was better to
come, I divined. Dowson nodded too with a
challenge as of one sure of himself:

"Here is my best," he said, and began with a
voice that trembled in spite of himself:

73

"Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips an<! miruf

There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed

Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;

And I was desolate and sick of an old passion.

Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

"I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion."

I could not help myself: I was enthralled.
He paused.

"Go on," I begged, and he went on:

"I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion."

"The greatest poem of this time," I exclaimed;
"sure to live; why should one be afraid to say it:
sure to live forever." And I looked at him with
a sort of wonder; for this frail creature had done
it before any of us, had scaled Heaven and stood
there throned among the Immortals.

Tears had been in his voice almost from the
beginning. When I burst out in praise of him,
tears were pouring down his face and after the
last verse as I praised him enthusiastically, he
leant his head on his hands and gave the tears

74

way. When the fit had passed and he had wiped
his eyes I said, cursing myself for my previous
harshness :

"No wonder, you are impenitent, you arc
quite right. Whatever brought you to that
height is good : whatever way you trod, blessed.
What do the thorns matter? or the bowl ; whether
of hyssop or hemlock, who cares? Your name
is enskied and sacred, shrined in the hearts of
men forever and I called you a weak dreamer
and a failure. Well, your answer is:

**I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion."

And then I made up my mind to try to cure
him; admiration had moved him; would com-
monsense help or ridicule; humor or sympathy?
Vd try every motive.

"Fancy," I began, "that little French girl call-
ing forth such a passion in you! It astounds me
that you can't see her as she was and is with
nothing to her but the beauty of youth. She had
nothing in her, Dowson, or she'd never have pre-
ferred a waiter to you."

Dowson looked at me : "What did Keats see
in Fanny Brawne?"

"But don't you know," I cried, "that you'd
only have to take hold of yourself for a month
and go out among the better class girls in Lon-
don to find someone infinitely superior to her in
body and mind and soul ; someone worthy of you

/>

and your genius. For God's sake, man, give life
a chance to show you what jewels it holds!"

"I've lost the one pearl," he said, and added
dreamily: "What's life good for but to be lived
to the full; the whole meaning of it is in the
moment when you reach the ultimate of feeling
and can throw life away as holding nothing
higher. To me passion is the way to Nirvana,
love the supreme sacrament, the perfect chry-
solite— "

"You can find a dozen finer gems," I cried,
"incomparably more lustrous, more — "

He shrugged his shoulders disdainfully.
"More to your taste, I dare say — not to mine.
Can't you see," he burst out with sudden violence,
"that I loved her just because you and the others
could find nothing in her; no beauty in her curv-
ing white neck and the way the dark tendrils
curled on it; no sweetness in the pure eyes and
mocking gay laughter; nothing. But I saw, and
knew she was mine, made for me and me alone
to love and possess. Can't you see that the less
she was yours, man, the more she was mine; all
mine — mine alone; no one else could know her
and her shy, elusive grace. Ah, God — how did
I lose her? Why?"

And the face froze into despair, wild-eyed
with agonizing remorse. His couplet came into
my head :

You would have understood me, had you waited;
I could have loved you, dear, as well as he;

76

Suddenly I realized that there was nothing to
be done. A desperate gamester, Dowson had
risked all on one throw and lost — and yet how
easy it had been to have won; how easy; (that
was the sting) — and how impossible for himl

Always I know, how little severs me
From mine heart's country, that is yet so far;
And must I lean and long across a bar,
That half a word would shatter utterly?

That half-word was never uttered 1
Whenever we love passionately we cannot
angle for love; we can only pray for it — not call
it into being by cunning or feigned indifference;
we can only give royally and wait in vain — the
tears of youth, the bitterest tears of this unintel-
ligible world.

Let be at last: colder she grows and colder;

Sleep and the night were best;
Lying at last where we cannot behold her,

We may rest.

The pathos of it all and the music!

In other years Dowson wrote another book
of verse — "Decorations" — mere echoes; books of
prose too — some novels done in collaboration
and a slight volume of short stories — "Dilem-
mas"— which deserve mention perhaps for a
certain subdued sadness and careful delicate
workmanship — dead rose leaves still exhaling a
faint sweet perfume.

n

The last days of his short life were spent main-
ly abroad; in Paris and Brittany, Dieppe and
Normandy. In especial he loved Paris as many
Englishmen love it with a peculiar and passion-
ate emotion as a city where art is cherished as
an ideal higher even than life, and it was from
Paris that he wrote the letter, the postscript of
which I reproduce in facsimile
It gives a curious snapshot of life in Paris, about
1899, a lightning gleam illuminating not only
Sherard and Rowland Strong, but also Oscar
Wilde, in a characteristic attitude.

Dowson's handwriting shows, something of
the lucidity, the delicacy, the love of beauty
which were his enduring characteristics.

/a*/ S)i>KkJUK ^ ScJuiyraAJi ^•*L,i.aj a^^Wtt* ^/fi**
•Ta^C^ <d Jit^tAO — m/H *M riijiXy*^ 4UCa.^JL A^^M«,c/ — -l.^.

y

[I met severally & separately yesterday after-
noon Oscar, Strong & Sherard — all inveighing
bitterly against one another & two of them dis-
cussing divers fashions of self-destruction, Oscar

78

was particularly grieved because of a Swedish
baron (whom he had met at Marlotte & of whom
he hoped much) who had borrowed 5 francs
from him on the Boulevard.
Yours ever,

Ernest Dowson.

Usually when abroad Dowson sought the
slums: "The common people," he used to say,
"everywhere smack of race ; gentle- folk have no
nationality," and he loved the French, indeed
every Latin people. There was in him an un-
complaining almost stoical independence curi-
ously akin to hopelessness: for months at a time
he was half-starved ; yet he would not appeal to
his relations who could and would have helped
him, still less to his friends whose aid wouldTonb'
have been limited by their means; for Dowson
had the gift of making himself loved by every
one save that once when love meant everything
to him.

In the last year of his life he returned to Lon-
don : "Poverty can hide in London better than
anywhere else," he often said. A friend, Robert
Sherard, found him one day — destitute, shabby,
hungry and ill — coughing ominously: he took
him with him to a bricklayer's cottage in which
he himself was living on the outskirts of Cat-
ford and there tended him in all love and pity.

In spite of the consumption from which he
79

was suffering I can imagine Dowson quite happy
in this little haven of rest. Under his shyness he
was intensely affectionate; when moved, he liked
to touch and caress one as a woman does and
loving kindness and mental companionship were
what he most desired on earth and most prized.

Like consumptives in general, Dowson had no
notion that his end was near; he was often full
of hope and always full of literary projects:
£600 was to come to him from the sale of some
property, then he would make "a fresh start"!
Talking thus one day, he leant forward to cough
with more ease and drooped back fainting: he
had made his fresh start.

Dowson's life was very brief and many would
call it miserable, but he gave himself to love
with single-hearted devotion, and his passion
brought him what he most desired — a place
among the English poets forever, immortality
as we mortals measure it!

"I have been faithful to thee, Cynara ! in ray fashion."

There are few greater lyrics in all English
verse: none more poignant-sad.

80

Theodore Dreiser

THEODORE DREISER

CAME across "Sister Carrie" when
it was first published in England
ten or twelve years ago and it made
a deep and enduring impression on
I me. I sent copies of it broadcast

to all my friends and those whom I knew to be
interested in literature. The story of the grad-
ual decay and ruin of Hurstwood seemed to me
a masterly piece of work and I considered the
book one of the modern novels most likely to live.

I was naturally curious, therefore, to meet the
author, and almost as soon as I came to stay in
New York I looked him up.

Dreiser's appearance surprised me; he seemed
clumsy: a big burly man — he must be five feet
ten or eleven in height and weigh some 190
pounds; a large head with German features. 1
mean by German, irregular, large, and fleshy,
as if moulded in putty; the mouth sensuous with
thick lips; the eyes (the feature of the face)
thoughtful gray eyes with a sort of glance to the
side in one of them that gives you the impression
of a cast and conveys the idea of quick alertness
— very distinctive in a man whose manner is
rather heavy and whose speech is inclined to be
slow and impressive.

Naturally I talked with him both about his
books and about his life, particularly about the
early formative years and the moulding infiu-

81i

enccs. In brief outlines this is what he told me:
He was brought up in the small country town
of Evansville, Ind., as a strict Catholic; his
father was a Catholic bigot; "I never knew,"
he says, "a narrower, more hide-bound religion-
ist nor one more tender and loving in his narrow
way. He was a crank, a tenth-rate Saint Simon
(sicf) or Francis of Assissi." His mother, on the
other hand, was a "happy, hopeful animal; an
open, uneducated, wondering, dreamy mind;
a pagan mother taken over into the Catholic
Church at marriage; a great poet-mother be-
cause she loved fables and fairies and half be-
lieved in them; a great-hearted mother — loving,
tender, charitable. I always say I know how
great some souls can be because I know how
splendid that of my mother was."

The first books that made any impression on
Dreiser were Goldsmith's "Deserted Village"
and the "Vicar of Wakefield." They seemed
to him like real life. When he was almost thir-
teen, he had a woman teacher at the public
school who was "astonishinglv sympathetic."
He writes to her still. She sujr^ested his reading
Hawthorne, Washington Irving and Fenimore
Cooper, and then Thackeray, Drvden and Pope.
A little later Carlvle's "French Revolution" was
a sort of revelation to him while Shakespeare
onened a new world full of color and lip^ht.
When he was about fourteen or so he fell in
?.2

love with a girl of his own age, Dora Yaisley,
but was too shy to approach her; remembers
being chased and kissed by another playmate,
Augusta Neuweiler, "plump and pretty, with a
cap of short dark ringlets swirling about her
eyes and ears and a red and brown complexion
and an open, pretty mouth."

At sixteen he went to Chicago and worked for
a hardware company at $5 a week. He soon rea-
lized with a horrible depression that he could
never be a successful salesman, which was at the
moment the object of his ambition; he would
never get money enough to marry and be happy.

"Had you flirted before this time?"

"No," he replied. "I was more frightened of
girls than of lightning and felt the same horrible
depression about them and my chance of success
with them as I felt in regard to business. At
the same time many of them seemed beautiful to
me and I longed to have them like me; they
formed most of the brightness of life. I remem-
ber when I was about sixteen, two girls came
past one day and saw me swinging; they began
to talk and evidently wanted to make friends.
I swung them, too, but I could not even respond
to their advances.

"Another girl, I remember, put her arms
round me one evening and held my hands. I
could not speak; my heart was in my mouth; I
was nearer choking than kissing; I could not

»3

believe that she liked me, much less admired me.
I lived in this horrible depression till I was
nearly twenty.

"While working in the hardware store I met
one acquaintance who exercised a great influence
over me. He was a Dane — a drunkard and a
lecher — excessively vicious, but with marvellous
brains, I thought, marvellous ability. He taught
me a lot about politics and statecraft and really
made me believe in the relative crudeness of life
in Western America as compared with Europe
— a thing wholly incredible to me at first. He
laughed Christianity off the boards for me. Up
to that time I had been a believer, but he intro-
duced me to Spencer and Lecky and altogether
widened my horizon in the most amazing way.
He would borrow money from me and tell mc
afterwards he would not pay me back, which I
thought extraordinary, but I forgave him be-
cause he was so valuable to me.

"A little later I met another woman teacher
who helped me on my upward way with real
intelligence. She was a Miss Fielding. She
proposed that I should go to college. I told
her I hadn't the money; she said she would help
me and she did help me. At her instigation I
wrote to David Starr Jordan, at that time Pres-
ident at Bloomington, and he was good enough
to relax scholastic requirements in my favor, for
he agreed with Miss Fielding that I would get

U

the intellectual atmosphere at college and such
an experience must do me good.

"I attended college for something over a year,
from eighteen to nineteen. I learned little in
the way of positive knowledge, but I got a vision
of the intellectual fields and began to realize the
significance of languages and scientific studies.
But the economic pressure was too heavy on me
and at nineteen I returned to Chicago and be-
came a clerk in a real estate office — a rent chaser
at $8 a week. This work gave me some time to
myself; after I had collected my rents I could
spend the afternoon and evening reading; but
the company failed and I became a collector for
a furniture house at $12 a week; a little later I
got $14 a week. I found it possible here by
working earnestly to get time to myself, and I
read Green's "History of England," Guizot's
"France" and Macaulay. But my daily work
seemed trivial to me and I felt I was no good
at it."

I have dwelt at length on this early failure of
Dreiser as a business man, because I believe it
explains his wonderful painting of Hurstwood's
failure and fall to ruin in "Sister Carrie."
Dreiser soon found the upward path. Again I
let him tell his story:

"At this time Eugene Field was writing for
the Chicago Daily News little pictures of Chi-
cago life After reading two or three of them

S5

I thought I ought to be able to do work like
that myself. I sat down and wrote a lot of sim-
ilar sketches and sent them to him, but he never
answered me. This was the nadir of my depres-
sion. Life was most beautiful to me — thrilling
as a poem. When I thought of the girls I passed
in the street I could have sung or wept, they
were so attractive to me, but my own relation to
life was all wrong and I did not know how to set
it right; it was Field who started me thinking
about becoming a reporter and writer.

"I began haunting newspaper offices and ask-
ing whether they needed anybody. They all
gave me "no" for an answer. One day I talked
to a man who told me I should go to some small
paper like the Chicago Globe, I did this, but
had no better luck.

"My mother died this fall, and I was abso-
lutely alone and forlorn.

"That winter I met a girl. She was a clerk
in a department store, quite simple and beautiful.
We fell in love with each other. She brought
me the stimulus I needed. I had saved about
$60. I resolved to quit the business game for
good and all and jump into the stream. In May,
1891, I resigned; I would starve or get into
newspaper work.

"Well, I hung around newspaper offices till I
was as well known as a lost dog. At length I
met a man who helped me. John Maxwell was

86

the copy-reader for the Chicago Globe; a big
man seemingly cynical and contemptuous of
everything, not excepting me, but underneath
his rough exterior he was all genial kindness
and sweetness. He saw me one day and asked
me about my life. I told him everything and he
began by saying that the newspaper game was
not worth anything ; but if I wanted to get into
it I easily could. There was a great National
Democratic Convention coming on in June; I
ought to get work then. He got the Globe to
give me a trial and told me to go and get all the
facts I could about the Democratic Convention.
"I remember that a dinner was being given
to a Senator from South Carolina. It seemed
that he was "the dark horse" and might be
elected instead of Cleveland. I happened to
say in the auditorium that he ought to be elected,
in my opinion. I had no reason for it; I just
said it to show an original point of view. Stand-
ing near me was a large man in a light suit. He
immediately introduced himself to me as the
Senator in question and asked me to come up to
his room. I went with him; I remember that
his room had a balcony with a window looking
over the lake. He said: *I can tell you things
and will. You were good enough to mention me,
but to-night at midnight Cleveland will be
elected ; the Convention which is now in session
has fixed that. Take my name to the secretary

87

of Mr. W. C. Whitney and tell him I sent you;
he'll give you all details.'

"I thanked him and did as I was told and got
the scoop. I ran to the Globe office and told
John Maxwell. He said: 'Sit down and write
itl' I did write it and he fixed it up, re-writing
a good deal of it himself. The two columns
made a sensation, but when I saw the story in
print I saw that it was Maxwell's work that had
made it and not mine.

"Then I came across another writer, John C.
Mclnnins; he drank like a fish, but took a fancy
to me. He gave me the idea of writing up the
fake auction shops and told me I could drive
them out of business. They began by trying to
bribe me. One gave me a gold watch, another
$100, to be let alone. I handed over the watch
and the money to the police and my articles got
all the shops closed up.

"Next year the World's Fair was to be held in
St. Louis. I obtained an introduction to Joseph
B. McCullough of the Globe-Democrat, and he
gave me work at $20 a week. I had only a poor
bedroom, and so I spent all day in the office,
which turned out to be a very fortunate thing
for me.

"I was not earning my money, when one day
a real estate man came into the office who said he
had just come from Chicago and had seen a big
wreck on the Alton railway; the train was burn-

88

ing and a reporter ought to be sent out at once.
I decided to go myself. There happened to be
an oil train on the next siding, and just as I got
on the spot the fire reached the oil and there was
a terrific explosion; thirty-two people were
killed and I had seen it happen.

"I wired a rough sketch to the city editor and
asked him to send me down an artist; then I
went back wondering whether I should be
praised or "fired," I was still so nervous about
myself.

"McCullough was a little fat Irishman,
brusque in manner but kindly. Some years later
he committed suicide. He always sat at his desk
with a circle of papers strewn all round him;
the moment he had looked through one he threw
it on the floor. As soon as I got back I was sent
for by him. I went to his presence in fear and
trembling, but he quickly reassured me.

*' 'You have done a fine piece of work,' he
said. 'From now on you get $25 a week, and
here is a small present for you for your initia-
tive,' and he gave me $50 in cash. I just went
out and turned hand-springs all over St. Louis.
A little later the dramatic editor resigned and I
decided to ask for the place. I waylaid McCul-
lough as he entered the building, but could
hardly get the words out:

" Would you let me try to be dramatic editor?'
I asked.

89.

"He looked at me and snapped: 'All right;
you are the dramatic editor,' and went on.

"I had already tried to write poetry and now
I wrote a sensational comedy and a comic opera,
but neither of them came to anything and they
finally got lost.

"I made up my mind to go to New York and
I arrived in Manhattan Island by way of Toledo
and Pittsburgh in 1894.

"I got on the World by an accident. I went
down to the World office and was waiting about
when Arthur Brisbane, then a middle-aged man,
with light sandy hair passed. He looked at me
and asked me who I was. I told him my name
was Dreiser and I wanted a job. He took me
over to a man called Quail and said : 'Give him
a desk and an assignment.'

"I failed lamentably on the PForld. The great
city scared me stiff. I was told to go and inter-
view Russell Sage about something. They might
as well have asked me to interview St. Peter.
Then there was a fight in the Hoffman House
between two sports — well-known men both —
Whitneys or Vanderbilts, I forget the names.
I went up but could not for the life of me go in
and speak to the manager. I was too shy.
Fancy, David Graham Phillips and Richard
Harding Davis had just left the World, and in
comparison with such masters I failed abso-
lutely.

90

"I should have come to utter grief at twenty-
three or twenty-four if it had not been for the
fact that my brother was an actor and wrote
popular songs. He was a good many years older
than I was and I used to hang around his office.
At this time he was trying to bring out a paper.
I went to Brentano's and found some English
and French papers — Pick-me-up, he Rire,
Truth. I saw that they were new, thought they
would catch on. I helped my brother with his
paper and we had a certain success. I worked
on it for two years and learned the business.

"About this time I read the 'Data of Ethics*
and 'First Principles' of Herbert Spencer. They
nearly killed me, took every shred of belief away
from me; showed me that I was a chemical atom
in a whirl of unknown forces; the realization
clouded my mind. I felt the rhythm of life, but
the central fact to me was that the whole thing
was unknowable — incomprehensible. I went
into the depths and I am not sure that I have
ever got entirely out of them. I have not much
of a creed — certainly no happy or inspiring be-
lief to this day.

"But the other side of me had grown too. In
St. Louis I had met a very lovely girl — religious,
thoughtful, well-read. I married her in 1898,
and that year I wrote 'Sister Carrie,' when I was
twenty-seven, my wife helping me a great deal.

"In half a year I realized that for me mar-
9f

riage was a disaster. At the end of the first year
and a half it had become a torture. It was a
binding state and I was not to be bound. My
wife was good and kind and all the rest of it,
but tied to her I could not get any good out of
matrimony. I was afraid I'd go mad. I begged
her to set me free and she did."

These are the chief formative incidents of
Dreiser's life and they tell us, I think, a good
deal about his nature and his environment
First of all, he would not have been helped in
his newspaper work in any European country as
he was helped in America; then his shyness with
girls and his fear of failure in life show a long
continued immaturity.

Such slowness of growth and youthful ineffec-
tiveness are very rare, I imagine, in men of great
intellectual power. Nearly all the men who
have made a name in literature or art have been
distinguished by extraordinary precocity; but I
see no reason for this in the nature of things and
I am inclined to believe that those destined to
grow for many years usually grow slowly at first
like oak trees.

Now to give some idea of the man as he is to-
day and especially of his mind.

First of all he is a radical in politics, as are
most men who think for themselves. As is nat-
ural, he is for complete freedom in art and lit-
erature. ^

92

The treatment accorded to his first book,
"Sister Carrie," was bad enough to make a
Liberal of anyone.

The book was written between October, 1899,
and May, 1900. He sent it to Harper &
Brothers, who rejected it. Then it was taken to
Doubleday, Page & Co., who accepted it and
drew up a contract giving Dreiser fifteen per
cent, as a royalty. Frank Norris was their
reader at the time. Walter H. Page wrote
Dreiser a letter congratulating him on the book.

But Mrs. Doubleday did not approve of the
book, and so it was condemned. Norris sug-
gested that Doubleday should be held to his con-
tract, and Dreiser followed his counsel. Years
later Thomas H. McKee, who was then Double-
day's attorney, told Dreiser that the firm came
to him for advice how best to suppress the book.
He told them to publish a given number of
copies and put them in their cellar. This they
did. Outside a few copies sent by Norris to re-
viewers, not one was given out or sold. The only
hearing the book received was in England where
Heinemann issued it the following year (1901).
It was an immediate and unqualified success.

Dreiser's books brought him again and again
into conflict with the lewd puritanism which is
the disgrace and curse of American life.

In 1914 his novel, "The Titan," was accepted
bj Harper's. An edition of ten thousand was

printed and then the book was thrown back on
the author's hands to be disposed of as he might
think fit. Someone or other regarded it, too. as
immoral. Dreiser has never been able to learn
even the name of his critic.

Only the other day the infamous Society for
the Suppression of Vice proceeded against his
latest book, "The Genius," frightened the pub-
lisher out of his wits and thereby robbed Dreiser
of nearly all the pecuniary results of two years'
labor. I say "robbed" advisedly, for when this
vile society is defeated in the law-courts it never
even attempts to make reparation to its innocent
victims.

More recently still, in the winter of 1917, a
four-act tragedy Dreiser had written was refused
by his present publishers, not on the ground that
it was immoral, but that it was "too terrible."
Too terrible for the shallow surface optimism
of America.

Dreiser is one of the first writers and thinkers
in the country: we punish him or allow him to
be punished for doing the best in him, for giving
us of his best with utmost effort of brain and
heart. This is a symptom of mortal disease in
the body corporate. The mere idea will make
most people smile; American civilization con-
demned because a Dreiser is mulcted in a couple
of thousand dollars for writing "The Genius!"
Ha! ha! ha! and again, Ho! ho!

94

It seems to me that the teaching of history on
this matter is unequivocal. No nation can per-
secute its prophets without paying the penalty.

We all know how the Jews treated their
prophets; they were warned on the highest au-
thority that such conduct would bring ruin on
them: Your houses shall be left unto you deso-
late. The prediction has been duly fulfilled.

But now to return to Dreiser. He stands for
freedom in its widest sense and toleration to the
extreme. He loves liberty perhaps too much to
advocate doles to struggling men of letters or to
the widows of writers and their orphans such
as are provided in Great Britain; but he
would have no serious objection to such char-
itable assistance. In any case he would hardly
look on this charity as a duty and a most im-
portant duty of the State. That is to say he is
an American and has but a vague conception of
an ordered and highly organized State, such as
alone can survive in the world-competition of
the future. He thinks that all he has a right to
ask is freedom to live his own life, think his own
thoughts and write as he likes, and he is exas-
perated by finding his freedom to write curtailed
by the vulgar prejudice of a society of lewd busy-
bodies led by an unscrupulous hypocrite.

Now what are his thoughts on the deepest
questions? He has come through the Slough of
Despond as Christian ^H, but has he found firm

95

ground on the other side? Is he one of the
bringers of light sacred forever or is he content
to stumble about in darkness unillumined? He
tells me that he can see no object in things — no
goal; nor in the life of man any purpose; cer-
tainly no moral purpose or plan. Acts have their
consequences which he is willing to believe are
logical, though he is far from sure even of that;
often the results of slight errors are so dreadful
as to suggest malevolence. We men are male-
volent often; why not the Maker of men?

Kat, drink, work and be merry, therefore, for
to-morrow you die, seems to me a fair summary
of his belief, which indeed is the comfortless
creed of a majority of his countrymen — "on evil
days now fallen and evil tongues."

It is to Dreiser's credit and the credit of our
long-suffering and resilient human nature that
his despairing outlook on life does not make him
cruel or indifferent to others' suffering or indeed
unduly depressed and melancholy. He takes
the goods the gods send and is fairly content so
long as health and strength endure; a good din-
ner and good talk are good things, and a girl's
lips and^the surrender in her eyes can make a
new heaven and a new earth for him. That is,
Dreiser is in fairly true relation to the centre of
gravity of this world even if he has no notion
how the centre is changing and whither this solid
I'obc itself is moving with all that it inhabit.

%

And so he is a fair and interesting critic of
other men's work and a helpful influence, this
robust, healthy, sincere and outspoken man,
Dreiser.

He thinks both Twain and Dickens negligible,
and he does not admire Emerson or Whitman
wholeheartedly, much less will he admit that
my admiration of David Graham Phillips is
well-founded. Here his criticism is that of a
creator; he says:

"David Graham Phillips often sketches a
character and then loses hold of it and in the
course of the narration allows another soul to
enter in and possess the name.''

"What novel do you refer to?" I challenged.

"Old Wives for New," he replied, "the hero-
ine changes completely."

"I don't agree with you," was all I could say.
"Your point is often just, but it does not apply
to Phillips in my opinion," and then I carried
the war into his country.

"Why have you repeated yourself?" I asked.
"It is a sign of povertv, surely."

"Havel?"heasked^. "Where?"

" 'Jenny Gerhardt,' " I said, "is only a better
'Sister Carrie' ; then you have done 'The Finan-
cier' and 'The Titan,' two books to give the one
figure of 'The Millionaire.' "

"I'm going to do another on him," he growled ;
"and why not?"

97

"No reason," I retorted, "save that it is a
mere replica or copy."

"I don't agree with you," he said stoutly; "it
is a development."

"And then the faults in the drawing," I went
on in a flank attack, "weaken or rather destroy
faith in you. True, the figure of the 'Million-
aire' is one of the few generic figures of our time ;
a figure that should be painted once for all;
Sancho Panza throned and triumphant; but
you've been too true to life; too realistic."

"How do you make that out?" he dissented.

"You send your millionaire to prison in 'The
Financier,'" I went on; "that showed me you
were probably drawing him from life, for finan-
ciers as a rule don't go to prison in the United
States. The incident is so improbable that as a
matter of art it is worse than untrue. I made
some inquiries and found that Yerkes had been
sent to prison in Philadelphia; altogether too
greedy as a young man, even for American tol-
erance. As soon as I read in 'The Titan' that
your financier after his release went west to Chi-
cago and worked to get the street-car system
into his control, I knew my guess v/as right and
you had taken Yerkes for your model, for it is
almost as unlikely that a great financier should
go west as it is that he should be imprisoned.
Great financiers in America are attracted to the
east — to New York — the biggest market with the

98

largest prizes, draws irresistibly. Accordingly
your books seem true to life and not to art in
these particulars, for art is life generalized a
little."

"I would not have believed," he interrupted,
"that any critic in another country could have
drawn such subtle and true deductions, you are
quite right, I had Yerkes in my mind as a model
when I wrote 'The Financier' and 'The Titan.' "

"In 'The Titan,' too," I continued, "towards
the end I recognized the original of the girl who
won the hero.

"I dare say," Dreiser admitted laughing.

"There is no mistake in taking the girl from
life," I cried, "but sending your model financier
to prison was a blunder, was it not?"

"I see what you mean," he said thoughtfully,
"and perhaps you are right. I am not con-
vinced."

"The financier," I went on, pressing the point,
"is always a master of everyday life; he would
make no mistake in dealing with it."

"What do you think of the books in other
respects?" he asked.

"They are vivid," I replied, "and there's a
splendid love-story in 'The Financier'; but I
don't think your portrait of the millionaire will
live. You have not made large sums of money
yourself or you would have painted him dif-
ferently. You have not given us even his enor-

99

mous urge or driving power which is also his
chief weakness. It would take too long to ex-
plain. Your picture is much the same as the one
Claretie gave us in *Le Milion' thirty years ago."

Dreiser bore my criticism very well, I thought.
I wanted him to see that in Europe the best lit-
erary criticism is of enormous assistance to the
true artist; for it keeps him on stretch, forces
him to dig deep into himself to find the pure ore
of human nature. Had "Sister Carrie" been
produced in London the author's next books
would have shown distinct growth, I believe,
because "Sister Carrie" would have been praised
so warmly and yet with such penetrating dis-
crimination that its author would have been en-
couraged at once and nerved to do even better
than his best.

Dreiser told me what indeed anyone might
have guessed that "Sister Carrie" met with a
cold reception on the whole, and the few who
praised, did so in fear and dread of puritanic
condemnation. Sister Carrie gave herself with-
out the sanction of marriage, and, a worse fea-
ture still, succeeded in life by reason of her
lapses instead of being "ruined" as puritanism
would have it, and accordingly the book was con-
demned in the United States because of the vital
truth in it.

I have gone into this matter at some length
because I wish to show how the outworn puri-

100

tanic creed still injures all works of literary art
in America and is apt, too, to injure if not to
ruin the artist.

The atmosphere here is far more blighting
than it is even in England, and yet for nearly a
century now English prudery has prevented the
publication of any novel which could be re-
garded as a masterpiece and read all over Eu-
rope. In the public interest our prudery and
Puritanism must be fought. Of course, the
Author's League should have taken up arms for
Mr. Dreiser long ago and defended him against
the idiotic attacks of the self-styled Society for
the Suppression of Vice; but it looks as if the
Authors' League here as in Great Britain was
only devised to provide berths for half a dozen
mediocrities.

Meanwhile the great writers suffer. Walt
Whitman was hounded out of Washington and
lost his post there, was ostracised, indeed, for
twenty-five years, and Dreiser has been attacked
and punished for writing above the heads of the
crowd. Yet he is full of hope and high purpose
with half a dozen books in hand; a volume of
essays, a philosophic work setting forth the out-
lines at least of his creed, the third book of the
trilogy on the millionaire and other novels.

All these projects and endeavors simply go to
prove how indefatigable and unconquerable a
man is when he is lucky enough or wise enough

.101

to have found his true work and to be able to
do it.

When we thwart him, ours is the loss. We
have only had a half product from Dreiser — a
thought which sometimes depresses me, though
the great public does not seem to mind much.

Even now I find I have said little about Mr.
Dreiser's latest book, "The Genius," and not a
word about his plays, and yet they both deserve
careful consideration.

"The Genius" — what a title! It quite excited
me to think beforehand how one would try to
make "A Genius" real and recognizable to the
reader. Dreiser put his title "The Genius" in
inverted commas, I imagine, in sincere doubt
whether this animated embodiment of himself
or at least reflection of some of his strongest de-
sires and feelings was really a possessor of the
divine spark?

The lady novelist usually paints her hero as
superbly handsome, brave and gentle, and then
throws in the remark — "he was besides a man of
genius." But it takes a little more than that to
convince us of genius. The novelist who takes
his art seriously is bound to realize his praise; he
must at least show us the genius acting or talking
as no one but a genius could act or talk. This
Dreiser has failed to do, has not even tried to do.

His hero made up in almost equal parts of
«»exual desire and love of art is an interesting

102

person enough; but just genius is lacking to him
in my poor opinion. He is not dynamic or ex-
traordinary in any way. Why then call him a
**genius/' even in inverted commas? The soul
of genius is a constant striving towards the light,
like a flower pushing its way up through black
encumbering earth and even through crevices of
stone to air and sunlight.

Growth is the birthmark of genius, a per-
petual thirst for a larger, richer life. Dreiser's
"Genius" appears to go from girl to girl lured
by youth and beauty without any further or
higher selection whatsoever. Of course, the sex
desire has eyes chiefly for beauty and youth, but
in other respects it is not blind. Just in the case
of genius there is a seeking after a new experi-
ence, a more womanly woman and this groping
desire is guided by the aesthetic impulse which
demands ever richer nourishment.

The sex-life of a genius is of the most intense
interest. Shakespeare has given us three great
pictures of it; romantic love in "Romeo and
Juliet," mature passion in "Antony and Cleo-
patra," lust and jealousy in "Othello," and
Goethe has given one in the Gretchen episode
in "Faust" of equal value, just as Dante has
given another; but the sex-life of an ordinary
intelligence is of slight concern, and accordingly
I don't admire "The Genius" of Dreiser greatly.
One of his plays, "The Girl in the Coffin,"
103

interested me infinitely more; it gives a great
stage-picture; is true to life, too, and yet preaches
forgiveness for sex-sins superbly.

Now what may be expected from Dreiser?
Is he going on from strength to strength till he
fulfils himself in some masterpiece or shall we
get from him only a half-product, another
"Sister Carrie," of great promise and half per-
formance?

I cannot tell; I can only hope for the best.
Usually the master who has a great deal to say
is at first careless, as Balzac was, of how he says
it, and grows more and more particular about
form as he grows older. But I don't see any
growth in Dreiser in this direction. Some of
his letters are excellently written; but in his
books he is often careless. Even in the portraits
of his father and mother, in "A Hoosier's Holi-
day," all steeped in love though they are, there
is little or no verbal music; his brush-strokes
even are not studied; he repeats himself in suc-
cessive clauses: "A great poet-mother, a great-
hearted mother," without a reason or rather in
spite of reason: he compares his father to "Saint
Simon or Francis of Assisi," and one pauses in
shocked bewilderment; which Saint Simon does
he mean? In any case, these two examples are
of contrasting type. I could give many instances
of similar blunders. There are whole pages in
every book of Dreiser's so badly written that

104

they affect me like gravel-grit in my mouth and
I am not inclined to over-estimate mere verbal
felicity. Worst of all, I feel perpetually that
Preiser might write so much better than he does
if he would but try to do his best; he has the
gift — why not the ideal? I am constrained to
think it is the German paste in him that makes
him so blind to the beauty of words.

His latest play, "The Potter's Hand," testifies
to even a worse fault, what Goethe called the
lack of architectural or structural symmetry.
The protagonist of the play is an erotomaniac
who rapes and murders a little girl and at last
commits suicide. Dreiser brings out all the
tragedy of the poor creature's insane and mis-
erable existence; and w^e read it with terror and
pity. It is plain that with the suicide the action
finishes and the interest is at an end, but Dreiser
drags in reporters to moralize the situation in a
way that would be intolerable to any audience ;
the tragedy is thereby rendered formless. It
would almost seem as if Dreiser were incapable
of self-criticism.

There they are before me, his eight stout vol-
umes, ^nd reluctantly I am forced to admit that
so far "Sister Carrie," his earliest book, is his
best. Of course, the critics and the public as
well as the writer are to blame for this imperfect
result; but explain, excuse it as you will, the fact
is indubitable: and no explanation can justify

105

such a fact; Browning tells us truly that "In-
centives come from the soul's self."

Genius has always the faculty of taking in-
finite pains. When Shelley pointed out to Keats
some weak lines in his "Endymion," Keats
thanked him and added : "I want to fill the
rifts with gold." That's the true spirit magnifi-
cently expressed. In the Pantheon of Humanity
there is no place for the careless or slipshod;
our gods are all human yet all give us of their
best, and so, as Burns knew, "whiles do mair."

106

George Moore

GEORGE MOORE AND JESUS

HAVE never written a word about
George Moore, never criticized a
book of his , never mentioned him
or discussed his work in print, and
yet I have known him longer than
I have known any other man of letters; known
him fairly intimately for over thirty-five years.
I have never had a quarrel with him. I
admire some of his books — particularly "The
Mummer's Wife" and "Esther Waters," and
enjoy "The Confessions," and have told him so;
and even more than his books I admire the
singleness of purpose and persistence with which
he has prosecuted literature and developed his
writing talent, and yet he has never interested
me deeply, never touched my emotions or quick-
ened my thought; never been to me one of the
wine-bearers at the banquet of life.

And thi% I say, not as lessening him, but as
my own confession and apology. When young
I believed with all my heart that poverty was
the greatest evil in the world; that the dreadful
inequality of human conditions would have to
be righted, brought more into accord with our
ideas of justice before any great work of art

107

would even be possible. I think now I was mis-
taken in this; but my belief is tenable, easily
defensible.

Moore, on the other hand, took no heed of
the social misery; was not interested in the
anarchy of individualism; cared nothing for
any socialistic remedy; professed himself indif-
ferent to Utopia and was frankly bored when
one talked of the humanisation of man in society.
Even at twenty-five he was purely a writer —
a novelist of the modern realistic school.

Moore's person was so peculiar as to pin him
in the memory: he was fairly tall, about five
feet ten or thereabouts, with sloping bottle-
shoulders and heavy hips. His face was pallid
like pork, set off with rufous drooping mous-
tache, while reddish fair hair waved away from
a high, broad forehead. He always seemed to
me slightly flaccid, weak, inclined to fat; but
when I try to explain this inference I can only
recall the fact that his hands were podgy white
and he was perpetually gesticulating with white
fingers that looked effeminate, soft. After his
too fair complexion, his eyes impressed one;
very prominent, round, pale blue; observant,
enquiring eyes, they seemed to me, neither re-
ceptive nor profound; the mouth ordinary, the
nose a good long rudder, prominent enough to
suggest vanity and rather fleshy, a sensuous but

108

steering Jewish nose softened still further by
fleshy soft jaws and small mound of chin.

He would come into the office of The London
Evening News, of which I was at that time the
Managing Editor, and talk interminably; but
always of literature, usually of Zola or some
one of Zola's novels or opinions. Whatever the
Frenchman had written was sacred in Moore's
eyes: Zola filled his mental horizon, was his
god; his writings his Gospel. Occasionally he
would talk of Monet or Manet or Degas; but
one soon realized that his opinion of painters
and pictures was a second-hand opinion, an
opinion soaked up from intercourse with those
artists themselves or with still younger masters.

Moore was always interesting to me because
he was always interested in what he had to say
— enthusiastic even; his voice was pleasant, a
tenor voice fairly modulated and rhythmical;
but neither his eyes nor his voice was so expres-
sive as his gestures, the fingers, antennae-like,
meeting and separating in front of your eyes,
seeking, probing, hesitating — extraordinarily in-
dicative of an inquisitive, curious intelligence.
He had excellent manners, never intruding or
obtrusive, considerate always of others; the
manners and dress, too, of good society; yet
without a trace of affectation or snobbishness.
Moore was genuinely interested in men of letters
and literary topics and able to converse with
them or about them, showing always a slight

109

agreeable preference for monologue, monologue
about himself and his literary plans and pref-
erences.

The first trait of his character which struck
me was his extraordinary moderation; he didn't
seem to care for eating or drinking, and was
always as moderate in both as a Spaniard or a
Greek. To his wonderful sobriety he owes his
almost perfect health.

He never seemed to exercise, did not even
take the usual "constitutional" walk; yet he was
always fit and well ; could walk through a long
day's shooting and was an excellent shot, as I
found out once when he came to stay with me
near Bridge Castle to shoot over some ground
belonging to Lord Abergavenny. I mention this
simply to show that he had all the qualifications
of the English country gentleman, yet just be-
cause he was a writer with a love of letters and
knowledge of art, English society which is
"sporting" and "horsey" in the extreme or "bar-
barian," as Matthew Arnold called it, regarded
him with suspicion and aversion as not true to
type. One day when out shooting, Moore was
accidently hit by a glancing pellet; instead of
covering the sportsman's want of skill or care
with silence the occasion was used for a rude
gibe.

"What could Moore expect when he went out
shooting with gentlemen?" a double-edged sneer

no

which I persisted in construing to Moore's
advantage.

Moore's character was full of surprises even
to one acquainted with every variety of the Eng-
lish man of letters. His wonderful sobriety
came first; then perhaps his wide knowledge of
sports and country life in general, and finally
his keen business faculty and appreciation of all
the uses of advertisement. He never offered
articles on any subject without payment, though
men of letters in general are full of over-ripe
enthusiasms for this or that cause or person, and
eager to display their tastes in print.

Moore was an enthusiastic admirer of the
modern French school of writing and painting;
would hold forth about the masters by the hour,
yet as soon as one said, "Write it, Moore; such
an article would be interesting," he would reply
— "All right; but what will you pay for it?"

And when it came to terms he was a stickler
for the uttermost farthing. Not even in this
case, however, did he go beyond the conven-
tional gentlemanly insistence. He was never
aggressive; always suave and conciliatory. If
you could pay his price he was willing to write
for you; if not, he would not write, but was
nevertheless friendly, even amiable. He was
very precise about delivering his copy at the
agreed upon time; finicky only about correcting
and recorrectinjy proofs; preferring this cadence

111

to that, this turn of expression to that, an artist
in polishing the already smooth-filed line.

In this scruple one peculiarity marked him;
he would fall in love with a word and try to
drag it into his prose by hook or by crook. He
, says somewhere, I think in this "Confessions"
that he used to "learn unusual words and stick
them in here and there"; but he does not tell
what sort of word he preferred. Let me fill the

gap.

I remember when shooting with me in Sussex
he heard "shaw" for the first time used to de-
scribe a small wood or covert.

"What a beautiful word," he cried, "exquis-
ite— a 'shaw'," and for some time afterwards
"shaw" appeared again and again in his writing.

The curious thing about Moore's predilection
for this or that new word was that he did not
care for the meaning of the word, but for its
sound and color. Every master of prose loves
words and is scrupulous to employ them in their
exact meaning. Words, like coins, grow lighter
in the using. The master of words, like a new
monarch, issues them afresh from his mint of
full weight, stamped with his authority. But
Moore cared nothing for the derivation of a
word or its true meaning. In his latest book,
as in his earliest, he is not disdainful merely of
scholarship — he ignores it.

On page 175 of "The Brook Kerith" he speaks
112

of "shards of shells or pottery." He docs nof
know that "shard" is short for "potsherd," and
if he knew he would not care. He is in love
with the sound or color of the word "shard" and
accordingly writes on page 169 of "some broken
ruins, shards of an old castle apparently tenant-
less," bewildering the ordinary reader who
knows what "shard" means. The impression
Moore means to convey is often confused in this
fashion or blunted by his misuse of words. An
even better instance may be given, taken at hap-
hazard from the book under my hand, at the
moment, "The Apostle." On meeting Jesus,
Paul says:

"Thy face is not unstrange to me, yet I have
never been among these hills before." Moore
does not know that "unstrange" must be nearly
equivalent to "familiar"; the neologism "un-
strange" pleased him and he stuck it in! The
truth is Moore's early training in Paris as a
painter has corrupted his taste in words. It has
led him again and again to seek for the pictorial
quality of a word or scene, which is hardly an
effect proper to literature, though much prized
by the illiterate.

To return to my immediate theme. Moore
knew by instinct all the myriad uses of ad-
vertisement. He used to say, "Attack me as you
please ; slang me, but write about me. I'd rather
have a libelous article than silence; indeed, I

113

think slander more effective than eulogy. If you
hate my books, say so, please, at length; that
will get me readers."

He rivaled Oscar Wilde in his love of adver-
tisement, knew almost every newspaper office in
London, and kept the doors ajar by frequent
visits. Verily, he has had his reward.

ttj have lived through most of Moore's wild
enthusiasms from Zola to Turgenief. I remem-
ber meeting him one day when he would talk
of nothing but Flaubert. Flaubert was the
greatest writer France had ever produced; an
impeccable artist without fault or flaw — super-
lative on superlative. I could only smile —
another god !

Had I read "L'Education Sentimentale"?

I had and did not prize it greatly. Gently
I reminded Moore of his previous infatuation
for Zola. He confessed mournfully.

"How I could ever have admired that farth-
ing dip when the sun of Flaubert was lighting
the heavens and warming the earth, I can't im-
agine. One's aberrations are astonishing. One
changes not every seven years as the physiol-
ogists say, but every three years or so. Zola I
He has no style. Even his name is tawdry and
common to me now; but Flaubert, Flaubert,
Flaubert!"

"Have you ever read his letters?" I asked.
"They are really superb — especially those to

114

George Sand. He talks of Shakespeare with
passionate admiration, as *an ocean.' "

"Does he really?" wondered Moore. "I've
never read Shakespeare — know nothing about
him. Is he really great?

Moore's reading was always fragmentary —
peculiar. At that time he hadn't read Shakes-
peare or the Bible or indeed any of the English
or world classics. He read solely what he liked
or thought he would like ; the world of writers
began and ended for him with the Frenchmen
of the last half of the nineteenth century.

It was, I believe, my outspoken preference for
Balzac over Flaubert that set him reading "La
Comedie Humaine," consecutively, and even
after he had written his essay on Balzac he had
not read "Le Cure de Tours," which is the su-
preme example of Balzac's artistry. But as
soon as he heard of it, he read it and discussed
it with some understanding in the final revision
of his essay.

Moore's ignorance was the standard joke
wherever men of letters congregated. He had
spent years as a boy in a Roman Catholic college,
he said; but I always wondered where it could
have been till I saw in a paper that he left it
in his "very early teens" because he "refused to
go to confession." He has made up for his re-
calcitrance since by confessing himself and his
fleshly sins in print whenever he could get the

115

opportunity. But his ignorances were abysmal,
like those of a king, incomprehensible to anyone
who had had ordinary schooling.

Moore's mind seemed incapable of grasping
the elementary facts of grammar. He was al-
ways confusing "shall" and "will" and "should"
and "would."

I often asked myself how his boundless con-
tempt for knowledge of all sorts could coexist
with a genuine talent for expression and a very
real love of literature. The enigmas of Moore's
character are insoluble.

For example, his enthusiasm for great writers
did not reach to his contemporaries. Even in
"The Confessions" he belittles every man of
genius of his time: Meredith bores him; Brown-
ing is devoid of "Latin sensuality and subtlety";
Hardy hasn't "a ray of genius"; Henry James
and Howells are mere copyists. Yet Browning
and Meredith were greater than Zola or Flau-
bert or Turgenief, and one cannot understand
Moore's prejudices unless one regards him as
taking a French view of English writers. He
never even mentions those who might be con-
sidered his rivals save to sneer or denigrate.
What is his real opinion of Shaw or Wilde or
Wells? His criticism is mainly carping, the
petty faultfinding of envy.

It was Moore's boldness in handling sex
matters that gave him popularity and position.

116

More than once he reached the limit beyond
which prosecution threatened. Smith's book
stalls, which correspond to the American News
Company in these United States, refused to sell
one of his early books. Moore at once attacked
the tradesman-censor and heaped ridicule on the
salesman and his morals. Mudie, too, a book-
store with much the same position in London
that Brentano holds in New York, put some
novel of Moore's on the index. At once he
slanged Mudie and found amusing words for the
book-provider to the middle-class household!
This perpetual attack and defense won him his
following, but as Moore is the last man in the
world to play Don Quixote, it is important to
know why he came into conflict so often with
Puritanic prudery.

Again I have to explain his idiosyncratic bold-
ness by his Paris training. Zola was his first
master and he knew perfectly well that Zola's
sex novels, such as "Nana" and "La Terre," were
best sellers. Moreover, to give Moore his due,
he divined from his own experience that the
questions of sex are the perpetually interesting
questions. Had he been oversexed he would
certainly have got into serious trouble through
his writings; but his astonishing moderation in
desire saved him here as in life. Even as a
young man he was perpetually declaring that
women were overrated; that no sensible man

m

would put his finger into danger for one, let
alone his life or future, or even his work.

"Woman is the sauce to the pudding of life,
if you like; but the whole business of love and
loving is vastly overrated."

In consequence all his references to sex mat-
ters are at once French in directness of expres-
sion and free of passion — curiously cool, indeed,
and matter-of-fact — and therefore void of seduc-
tion and of offense.

By temperament Moore is as incapable of
writing a great love scene as Arnold Bennett
himself. And yet women form ninety-nine per
cent of his readers.

At length I am forced to reveal the heart of
him; whoever realizes his astounding modera-
tion has only to join with it two incidents in
order to know the man. He told me once of a
supper he was at in his early days in London.
Lord Rossmore, a handsome, devil-may-care
Irishman, whom Moore knew well, was of the
party. Derry Rossmore drank too much, grew
a little loud and contradicted Moore. Moore,
who was perfectly sober, debated coolly how he
might turn the dispute to his profit. He resolved
to get Derry to be rude to him again and then
knock him down. The row and consequent duel,
he thought, would be a splendid advertisement
for him. Accordingly he moved an empty
champagne bottle just within comfortable reach

118

of his right hand and provoked Derry. Derry
insulted him as Moore guessed he would, and
at once Moore picked up the champagne bottle
and knocked Rossmore down with it.

The story surprised me so that I asked him,
"You did it just for the advertisement?"

"Yes," he replied coolly, "and I failed to get
it. The duel never came oflf. I was greatly dis-
appointed, ha I hal"

Moore's business instincts were most astonish-
ingly developed.

The other incident is much better known.

When Moore went to Dublin some years ago
he took a house, and a lady was kind enough to
help him in getting the furniture and fittings in
order and continued her ministrations afterwards
to the detriment of her reputation. In process
of time the pair drifted apart. Soon afterwards
the lady married a well-known Dublin archi-
tect; and a little later, died. Moore has told the
whole story in one of his books; confessed the
liaison and described the lady so minutely that
even the dead woman's husband could have no
doubt as to her identity.

D'Annunzio did the same thing in "II Fuoco"
— told the story of his love for the Duse; de-
scribed her minutely and gave away the secrets
of intimacy; but D'Annunzio might plead the
driving force of a great passion and the neces-
sity of realizing the ebb and flow of extravagant

119

desire; but Moore's indiscretion had not even
that excuse ; he knew the revelation would make
people talk — be an excellent advertisement and
that was all. As a lady said, "Some men kiss
and tell; others like George Moore don't kiss
and tell all the same."

Still if he has done anything that will live,
he may yet get the better of detraction and dis-
dain. But has he? His admirers cite "The
Mummer's Wife" and "Esther Waters"; "Im-
pressions" ; "The Confessions of a Young Man" ;
but has any one been tempted to read any of
these books twice? Yet it is only the books we
read and re-read a dozen times which stand any
chance of surviving. I cannot believe that any
of Moore's books so far are in that category. But
his new book is about Jesus and if he has written
anything valuable on that theme, he will have
a sponsor through the ages and may defy
oblivion. It would be strange indeed if his
best work like that of his compatriot and fel-
low pagan, Oscar Wilde, should be inspired
by the Man of Sorrows and his tragic story.

For that reason I devoured "The Brook
Kerith" and promised to write about it before
I had read it. Had I known what was in it, I
should never have dreamt of writing about it.
It is my custom to write only of books that I
love; the others — commonplace or vulgar or
rile — may all be left as alms to oblivion. But I

120

had promised in this case, and besides Moore
is an interesting person in several respects and
"The Brook Kerith" has been so bepraised on
all hands in America that it is almost a duty to
tell the truth about it and its innocent eulogists.
The New York Times, of course, one expected
to be fulsome; but Mr. Littell or Q. K. in the
New Republic outdoes the Times; he asserts
that "The Brook Kerith" shows Mr. Moore "at
his best," and dares even to speak of Moore
"steeping himself in the earliest records and the
labors of scholars," while "his curiosity and sym-
pathy created and re-created the life of Jesus in
many forms." And then Q. K.'s praise becomes
lyrical; he speaks of the book as "organically
composed — the ripening fruit of a long preoccu-
pation," and so forth and so on, in phrases that
would have been overstatements if they had been
applied to Renan's "Life of Jesus." And my
friend, William Marion Reedy, is almost as en-
thusiastic. He begins a four-column article with
"Consummate artist in the main, Mr. George
Moore has a curious trick of putting a smear
upon everything he touches. There are two or
three such smears in 'The Brook Kerith' ..."
This seems more or less sensible. But he con-
cludes by wondering "if Mr. Moore's deluded
Jesus is less or more pathetic than our Biblical
Jesus," which to me is the most extravagant

121

praise, the most utterly preposterous comparison
1 have ever seen in print.

It seems to me a first principle that no one
has any business to write a Life of Jesus unless
he can beat Renan's and Renan took all pains
to make himself worthy of his great task. He
was a first rate Greek and Hebrew scholar, a
life-long student of exegesis, versed in all the
minutix of German scholarship. He vivified his
knowledge, too, by living in Palestine for years.
Moreover, he was by temperament and training
passionately religious and gifted with one of the
most exquisite, seductive styles in all French
prose. This priest and artist, student and writer
gave his life to the work of re-creating Jesus,
and in my opinion and in the opinion of others
better qualified to judge, he succeeded — to a
certain extent. His life is the best biography
of Jesus which has appeared since John, the be-
loved disciple, finished his account. No one
living is capable of surpassing Renan's work;
the utmost a great writer could do would be
to mark the points of difference or restrict him-
self as Bernard Shaw has restricted himself to
saying as briefly as possible just what he feels
about Christ. I admit I am prejudiced against
Moore's book before I open it. None the less,
he shall have fair play if I can give it to him.

Some few years ago I met Moore casually in
London and he came to me with much the old

122

eagerness. "The very man I wanted to see," he
cried. **I have just read your 'Miracle of the
Stigmata' — a good story. Where did you get
the idea that Jesus did not die on the Cross?
That's very interesting to me, very."

Moore had changed greatly in the years
which had passed since we last met; his hair was
silver, and the wave of it had receded a little,
leaving a noble expanse of brow; but the eyes
were nearly as young as ever and the unwrinkled
skin and the carmine flush on the white cheeks
would have graced a girl of eighteen. It may
be the violent who take Heaven by storm, but it
is the moderate who preserve their hair and
health! Moore had grown a little more podgy
than aforetime ; but he has height to carry it oflF,
and he really looked venerable with his crown
of silver hair. The moment he began to speak I
remarked his gestures with the white expressive
fingers. He was the old Moore all right, and,
as usual, was hugely interested in what he was
saying.

"I'm glad you liked my story," I remarked,
and was about to move on when —

"I want to talk to you about it," he insisted.
"I think you missed a great opportunity, a
unique opportunity [the fingers made little
graceful whorls before my eyes]. You should
have made Paul meet Jesus; that's the drama,
you understand — "

123

As Moore has again and again tried and failed
to write a drama that would keep the stage a
week, I smiled.

"Why don't you write it?" I said and again
tried to get away.

"I think of doing it," he said gravely. "It's
a great idea. I don't want anyone else to ex-
ploit it first; but I can't make up my mind
whether to write a play or a book about it."

"Why not both?" I rejoined politely, "but
now you'll forgive me. ..."

"Surely you see," he went on, buttonholing
me, "that it is a great moment; Paul and Jesus
talking of Christianity; it must end by Paul
striking Jesus down, killing him I — a great

scene."

"Write it, my dear fellow!" I exclaimed;
"but I must be getting on," for really I wasn't
interested enough even to tell him that Jesus
was crucified fifteen years or so before Saul was
converted on the road to Damascus.

"You don't seem interested," he cried in as-
tonishment. "It's surely a great scene?"

"Possibly," I replied, "but I confess that idea
of yours leaves me cold."

"But I'll make Jesus live," he exclaimed, "I'll
make him real. ..."

It seemed to me that he did not know what he
was talking about. He could no more recreate
Jesus than swallow Mont Blanc, and when I

124

thought of his utter want of reading or knowl-
edge; his lack of historic imagination, I could
only smile. Anatole France has historic imag-
ination and vast reading ; but the task would be
too big for him, as it was too big for his master,
Renan. But Moore —

France always says he never reads his con-
temporaries because he must know all their
ideas, being of the same time ; but Moore knows
only half a dozen modern Frenchmen. The
East and its customs are as completely incom-
prehensible to him as a cuneiform inscription,
and pagan as he is, a pagan taught by Gautier, he
could no more realize Jesus than make pictures
of the fourth dimension. I turned to leave him.
It was useless talking.

"Please tell me before you go," he persisted,
"where you got the idea that Jesus didn^t die
on the cross. That interests me enormously. . . ."

"Jesus is said to have died in a few hours," I
said. "That astonished even Pilate and so I
thought—"

"Oh," cried Moore, disappointed. "It's only
a guess of yours; but why take him to Cesarea?.
Why bring Paul there? Why ., . . ?"

I knew he was merely informing himself in
his usual dexterous way, so tried to cut him
short.

"An early tradition," I cried; "my dear fel-
low, an early tradition," and ever since Moore

125

has talked about this "early tradition," though
it would puzzle him to say where it's to be
found. ^

In due time Moore wrote his half-play, half-
story, "The Apostle," and published it.

In "The Apostle," which is half scenario,
half drama, and suffers from hurried writing,
Moore makes Paul strike Jesus down and kill
him.

He told me a year or two later that he could
not understand the cold reception given to this
playlet; he still thought his idea "wonderful —
intensely dramatic" — and his fingers beat in the
conviction.

All this made me curious about "The Brook
Kerith": had Moore changed his point of view?
— I wondered. Could he have become a con-
vert to Christianity? Impossible.

Strange to say, however, the best book he has
written is "The Confessions," and about the best
pages in it are those inspired by the story of
Jesus. Moore, copying his master, Gautier, pro-
fesses to hate the Crucified One and gives his
reasons; here are some of them:

"Pity, that most vile of all vile virtues, has
never been known to me. . . .

"Hither the world has been drifting since the
coming of the pale socialist of Galilee; and this
is why I hate Him and deny His divinity. . . .

"Poor fallen God! I, who hold nought else
126

pitiful, pity Thee, Thy bleeding feet and hands,
Thy hanging body; Thou at least art pictur-
esque, and in a way beautiful in the midst of the
somber mediocrity towards which Thou hast
drifted for two thousand years, a flag; and in
which Thou shalt find Thy doom as I mine; T,
who will not adore Thee and cannot curse Thee
now. For verily Thy life and Thy fate has ( !)
been greater, stranger and more Divine than any
man's has been. The chosen people, the garden,
the betrayal, the crucifixion, and the beautiful
story, not of >Mary, but of Magdalen. The God
descending to the harlot! Even the great pagan
world of marble and pomp and lust and cruelty,
that my soul goes out to and hails as the grandest,
has not so sublime a contrast to show us as this."
Moore goes on to praise injustice and declare
that the torture of the weak adds to his pleasure
in life. This extravagance may be a Sadie pose;
but one could almost assert that the mere writ-
ing of it showed how unfit Moore was to at-
tempt a Life of Christ.

A word or two here about the "Apostle" will
be permitted me. It is a drama in three acts
with a prefatory letter by the author "on read-
ing the Bible for the first time."

In this letter Moore has done me the honor of
travestying my picture of Paul in "The Miracle
of the Stigmata" by adding unknown and dis-
cordant details. My portrait of Paul's appear-

127

ance was taken from tradition. Paul was a
short man, bald and bearded. Moore has alter-
ed it by giving him "dark curly hair" and add-
ing "some belly under his girdle." In "The
Brook Kerith" Moore is better advised; he
makes Paul bald, but still sticks to the paunch.
Those who think that Paul's daemonic energy,
passionate emotion and contempt for the lusts of
the flesh find fitting symbol in obesity will admire
Moore's daring. Moore goes on: "Sometimes
Paul appears with his shirt open and there is a
great shock of curled hair between his breasts
and his reddish hand goes there and he scratches
as he talks." After painting this picture Moore
pauses "to wonder if Paul has ever been seen by
any man as clearly as he has been by me." And
later still he hopes that all faults will be par-
doned him "for the sake of my portrait of Paul."
But this portrait is the portrait of some dirty
monk. Is Moore ignorant of the fact that the
Jews made cleanliness a part of their ceremo-
nial? They washed not only the hands but the
feet before meals. In the Talmud they were
taught that a stain on the dress of a teacher was
disgraceful. Even Moore should know that
Christian contempt of the body did not lead to
uncleanness and dirty clothing till a century or
so after the death of Christ. The cult for dirt
of person and raiment sprang up in Alexandria
in the second century.

128

Yet this so-called portrait of Paul is surpassed
in childish caricature by the portrait of Jesus in
"The Brook Kerith."

The Christ that walks through Moore's pages
is a man of unclean physical habits. On page
122 we are told that Joseph did not recognize
Jesus as he passed, "so unseemly were the ragged
shirt and the cloak of camel's or goat's hair he
wore over it, patched along and across, one long
tatter hanging on a loose thread. It caught in
his feet, and perforce he hitched it up as he
walked" and Joseph remembered that he looked
upon the passenger as "a mendicant wonder-
worker on his round from village to village."

Mr. Moore has no warrant, Biblical or pro-
fane, for his presentation of Christ as a com-
pound of ragged Hindoo fakir and verminous
Thomas ^ Becket. In the Jewish religion, holi-
ness and cleanliness were inexorably knit to-
gether, as witnessed by innumerable passages in
the Talmud, Mishna and Zohar, and the tradi-
tions and life stories of saints. Among Jews, the
teacher, whatever his shade of heterodoxy, is al-
ways a man of scrupulous cleanliness and cere-
monious raiment.

But Moore has done worse than make the
clean dirty. The chief characteristic trait of the
East from Cabul to Carthage is the reverence
shown to teachers and healers. As soon as a
man begins to teach, gifts are showered on him

129

by those who have won spiritual encouragement
from him, and that Jesus was followed with
deepest reverence is certain. Men left their life-
long occupation at his bidding; it was an honor
to be numbered among his disciples. If Moore
had ever read of his entrance into Jerusalem he
would have had an inkling of the way he was
treated. They took a young ass and put their
clothes on it for him to sit on, and "a very great
multitude spread their garments in the way;
others cut down branches from the trees and
strewed them in the way. And the multitudes
that went before and that followed, cried, say-
ing, Hosanna to the Son of David ; Blessed is He
that Cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna
in the highest."

Reverence for spiritual teachers is the one gift
of the East to the West — the chiefest lesson
which we have yet to learn.

And this reverence showed itself in all sorts
of gifts. The costliest ointment was poured on
the feet of Jesus and even the soldiers after his
crucifixion "cast lots for his garment," for it was
woven in one piece, we are told, and could not
be divided. Evidently it was woven especially
for the Master and by loving hands.

Moore's so-called portraits are nothing but
degraded and vulgar caricatures, based on a
knowledge of monkery, and have no relation to
Paul or Jesus whether in outward appearance

or in spiritual attribute. He makes Paul drivel
like a schoolboy; but Paul's words are historical.
His speech on Mars Hill in Athens just above
the Agora or market place, to a great crowd
grouped below him, is a masterpiece of elo-
quence.

And the words Moore puts in Jesus' mouth
are still more unworthy of Him who spoke as
never man spake. Our hearts do not burn with-
in us as we read Moore's "Jesus," save with in-
dignation against the writer who could so defile
the most sacred of our spiritual possessions;
Moore degrades Jesus deliberately, brings him
to his own level by putting into his mouth such
phrases as "we have fed (sic) " in the "Apostle."

Peter does not fare better at his hands than
Paul. He calls Peter "a parcel of ancient rudi-
ments," whatever that may mean.

Moore is as ignorant of Rome and Roman
customs as he is of life in the East. On page 107
he makes Pilate run his hand through his beard.
He would say it was a realistic touch that makes
Pilate live to him. But Roman aristocrats were
usually clean shaven, and a Roman official
among people who wore beards as the Jews did,
would certainly be clean shaven as a caste-mark
and distinction.

Every page in this book is a slap in the face
to the student.

One Mathias is represented as being a great
131

philosopher, a thinker who meditates on the
nature of God — a seeker after wisdom; yet he
tells us with ironical laughter "that the neigh-
borhood was full of prophets, as ignorant and as
ugly as hyenas. They live, he said, in the caves
along the western coasts of the Salt Lake, growl-
ing and snarling over the world, which they
seem to think rotten and ready for them to de-

vour."

This is not the comment of a Jew thinker and
seeker after wisdom, but of some lewd commer-
cial traveler talking in a cafe of the Place
Pigalle.

In the same spirit Mr. Moore makes the
president of the Essenes talk in a mixture of
Sussex and Devon dialect with Moore's own
contempt for grammar — "I shall be rare glad."

Throughout the Orient among the Afghans
and the Arabs as among the Jews there is a cere-
monious submission of son to father; outward
observances of humility in speech and bearing
are regarded as essential to family life. Moore
makes Joseph poke fun at his father, and the
father replies — "At it, Joseph, as beforetimes,
rallying thy old father" — which would be an
offense, almost a crime in Jewish eyes. But
Moore's ignorance is like the darkness of the
Egyptian plague; it can be felt.

His pet word in this book is "beforetimes,"
which should not be used as he uses it. He also

132

uses "whither" for "where." "An assembly hall
whither the curators met. ... I have come
thither hoping to find the truth here. And from
thence he proceeded." "From whence/' too, and
a dozen other blunders of the same class down to
the amusing: — "he might have refused to serve
any but she."

But in spite of all such blunders and faults
the book might still be an enthralling story;
might even be a great and wonderful story, but
the marvel is that there is nothing in it of any
value or interest. No page that rises above the
commonplace; no sentence or phrase in the
whole two hundred thousand words that I can
remember with pleasure or care to quote.

I do not wish to deal with Moore in a small
or carping spirit: I have never spoken in favor
of learning in my life : memory is but an intel-
lectual wallet and is no guide whatever to the
capacity of the mind. One can go further : every
thinker knows how reading dwarfs thought, lead-
ing you rather to acquire the ideas of others than
develop the native quality of your own intelli-
gence ; but a faculty of study is needful in these
days and a fair amount of knowledge imperative.
Especially in cases where the historic imagina-
tion is required, absolute ignorance would han-
dicap even genius out of the race.

Moore, however, must be heard in his own
defense. Shortly after publishing the first part

133

of this sketch in which I undertook to expose
some of Moore's ignorances, I received a letter
from him telling me that for my own sake I
had better not make the attempt. And he pro-
ceeds with a whole-hearted belief in his own
learning which it would be a compliment to call
idolatrous :

"I know that there is nothing in The Brook
Kerith' that you could attack with success. You
seemed to think in the article you published that
I was not acquainted with the subject, but I
knew myself to be quite as well informed as
Renan and that there was no point at which you
could strike with efifect. Neither private nor
public criticism has revealed any 'mistake.' In
your article you spoke of the Gospel of John as
if you regarded it of some value as an historical
document, whereas it is as I am sure you have
learnt since, a merely ecclesiastical work, I
might almost say a romance, and was certainly
written many years later than the synoptic Gos-
pels, probably about a hundred years later. For
my sake, I mean for the sake of the publisher,
I am sorry the advertised attack was not deliv-
ered ; a well-directed attack would have helped
the sale. It surprised me, however, that you did
not appreciate the tide of the narrative flowing
slowly, but flowing always and diversified with
many anecdotes that heighten the interest of the
reader. I cannot but think that I have added

134

a prose epic to the volume of English literature.
I don't much care whether I have or not, but
that is just my feeling."

That Moore should compare his learning with
Renan's makes me grin : the coupling of the two
names is something the French would call "saug-
renu," or ridiculously absurd. And worse than
any difference of knowledge is a difference in
mental stature of the two men. Renan knew a
great man when he met him ; Moore does not.

Moore will not study and cannot read au-
thorities; yet he is industrious in his own way.
His method of writing is laborious in the ex-
treme. Before beginning a book he makes a
scenario, divided into chapters; then he writes
the book hastily chapter by chapter putting in
all his chief ideas; finally he goes over the whole
book re-writing it as carefully and as well as
he can. He corrects the printed proofs me-
ticulously and years after a book has been pub-
lished he will take it up again and re-write it
page by page. He is an artist in the desire to
give perfect form to his conception. This is his
religion and he has served it with hieratic devo-
tion. What I feel compelled to emphasize is
that his power as a student is below the ordinary.
His ignorances are abyssmal. He does not even
now know the tendency of the most recent crit-
icism is to give weight to John's Gospel in spite
of its being a tract for the times, and it is seldom

135

dated now more than fifty years after the Synop-
tics. In my opinion it is of great value. But
if Moore were asked offhand to translate synop-
tic he would be caught napping; yet he assumes
an air of authoritative knowledge hardly to be
justified in a great scholar. Shaw on the other
hand, pretends to no special knowledge of the
subject; yet on this question of the value of
John's gospel, he has found reasons of his own
for agreeing with the latest scholarship.

What I want to make plain is that George
Moore's ignorance makes his painting grotesque
and his real qualities as a writer are all ob-
scured and rendered worthless by this uncon-
genial task. Moore's grip on ordinary life
makes all his books more or less interesting.
There are pages even in the worst that one can
read with some pleasure, but in "The Brook
Kerith" there are no such springs of sweet
water. The book is dull and stupid. And I am
relieved to know that Bernard Shaw agrees with
me in this judgment. I've just received a letter
from him in which he says :

"I read about thirty pages of 'The Brook
Kerith.' It then began to dawn on me that there
was no mortal reason why Moore should not
keep going on exactly like that for fifty thousand
pages, or fifty million for that matter, if he lived
long enough to sling the ink. This so oppressed

136

me that 1 put the book aside intending, as I still
intend, to finish it at greater leisure."

It is useless to try to disguise it, I am at the
opposite pole to Moore. I, too, read Gautier in
Paris and pages of his "Mile, de Maupin" still
stick in my memory; like Moore I could boast
that "the stream which poured from the side of
the Crucified One and made a red girdle round
the world, never bathed me in its flood." I, too,
"love gold and marble and purple and bands of
nude youths and maidens swaying on horses
without bridle or saddle against a background
of deep blue as on the frieze of the Parthenon."

But afterwards I learned something of what
the theory of evolution implies; realized that all
great men are moments in the life of mankind,
and that the lesson of every great life in the past
must be learned before we can hope to push fur-
ther into the Unknown than our predecessors.
Gradually I came to understand that Jerusalem
and not Athens is the sacred city and that one
has to love Jesus and his gospel of love and pity
or one will never come to full stature. Born
rebels even have to realize that Love is the Way,
the Truth and the Life; no one cometh unto
wisdom but by Love. The more I studied Jesus
the greater he became to me till little by little
he changed my outlook on life. I have been
convinced now for years that the modern world
in turning its back on Jesus and ignoring his

137

teachings has gone hopelessly astray. It has
listened to false prophets and followed blind
guides and has fallen into the ditch. It must
retrace its steps. It must learn the lessons of
love and pity, of gentle thought for others and
the soft words that turn aside wrath; it must
subdue pride and cultivate loving kindness.
There must be a spiritual rebirth; we must sub-
mit ourselves again like little children to sit at
the feet of the Master: all the best lessons are
learned by Faith.

And in the light of this belief how magical
the world becomes; it is no longer a machine
shop or a restaurant but a House Beautiful, the
home and habitation of a God.

Those deep-souled Jews were verily and in-
deed the chosen people. How poor all our
philosophies and sterile all our teaching in com-
parison with their wisdom and their insight;
how contemptible and small our achievements
when a Jew boy two thousand years ago by tak-
ing counsel with his own heart has made him-
self the master of our destinies. "There is no
other way under Heaven by which men can be
saved. . . . Verily I say unto you not one jot
or one tittle of my word shall ever pass away."

What sublime assurance 1 And yet it looks
the plain truth to us now. Shaw declares that
Jesus' teaching on socialism must be followed

138

to-day. Shaw even admits that Jesus is the
wisest of social reformers.

There is new hope for us all in the legend of
Jesus and in his world-shaking success; hope and
perhaps even some foundation for faith. That
a man should live in an obscure corner of Judaea
nineteen centuries ago, speak only an insignifi-
cant dialect, and yet by dint of wisdom and
goodness and in spite of having suffered a shame-
ful death, reign as a God for these two thousand
years and be adored by hundreds of millions of
the conquering races, goes far to prove that good-
ness and wisdom are fed by some secret source
and well up from the deep to recreate the
children of men.

And our modern theory is not out of harmony
with much of this belief. It appears to us that
God is finding Himself through us and our
growth, and especially through our creations of
Truth and Beauty and Goodness — flowers on the
Tree of Life, a joy from everlasting to ever-
lasting. We too can believe as Jesus believed,
that virtue perpetuates itself, increasing from
age to age, while the evil is diminishing, dying,
and is only relative so to speak, or growth ar-
rested. And our high task it is to help this
shaping Spirit to self-realization and fulfilment
in our own souls, knowing all the while that the
roses of life grow best about the Cross.

139

What a miraculous, divine world. And what
solace there is in it for the soul, now for many
years weary and heavy laden. I used to say that
for two centuries men have been trying to live
without souls and they have found the way long
and toilsome. Now the soul will come once
more to honor and all the sweet affections of the
spirit, charity first, and forgiveness and loving
kindness. Our prisons will all be turned into
hospitals and

140

.M-

Lord Dunsany

LORD DUNSANY AND SIDNEY SIME

T IS now many a year since I wrote
that we were living through a rebirth
of religion and a renascence of art,
the most wonderful period in
recorded time.
The progress of humanity is like skating on
the outside edge : as soon as the rhythmic curve
of movement takes the skater away from the line
of progress forward, the swing to the other side
is already outlined. The force of individualism
and its self-asserting separating tendencies have
gone too far, and everywhere men are drawing
closer together in nations and world-empires.
As individualism may be said to have begun with
Luther and to have ended in the doubting of
Voltaire, so belief was born again into the world
with Goethe and is certain in time to develop
a scientific morality and to bring hope back into
the lives of men and inspire new motives of
action.

Symptoms of this rebirth of religion showed
themselves sporadically in Britain twenty years
ago, just as the renascence of art came to flower
first in France. Chesterton entered the world

141

of London with a pagan love of life and feast-
ing, but avowed himself from the beginning a
Christian with a strong tinge of mysticism. His
play "Magic," had more than a success of esteem
in London; thoughtful people hailed it as a
symptom of the dawning light

It was a comparative failure in New York, for
New York is too busy to think, and much too
busy to play curiously with new thought. New
York has made up its mind that Christianity is
played out; New York is too wise to believe in
miracles ; when chairs move on the stage of their
own accord and lights go out and come in again
at their own sweet will. New York yawns, all
unwitting of the fact that everything we do or
think is a miracle inexplicable, unspeakably
mysterious as the rhythmic movements of the
stars and the strange currents sweeping suns and
planets and this solid earth itself to some un-
imaginable bourne. But London took "Magic,"
and Chesterton to its heart of hearts.

In the same abrupt way one heard of Dunsany
and now and again, of Sidney Sime who con-
tinues to illustrate his works with a wealth of
weird imagining.

Dunsany's play, "The Gods of the Mountain,"
was produced in the Haymarket Theatre when
Herbert Trench, the poet, was manager and
Lord Howard de Walden, also a poet, but enor-
mously rich, was the financier.

142

It took London by storm, which simply shows
what a wonderful capital London is, for the
play has dreadful faults, as we shall see later.

And then Dunsany tales and Dunsany plays
were on every table and here and there an artist
spoke of Sime as one of the master painters of
the time. I knew Sime long before I saw
Dunsany; in fact, I first heard of Dunsany's
genius from Sime.

The first time I saw Dunsany was the first
night of "The Gods of the Mountain" in the
early summer of 1911: a sympathetic appear-
ance; very tall, over six feet; very slight with a
boyish face, rather like Dowson's, but with
power in the strong chin and long jaw. The
nose, too, slightly beaked — a suggestion of the
Roman or aristocratic type, but combined
with the sensitive lips and thoughtful eyes of
the poet; the manner and voice, too, were re-
assuring. He was more courteous, amiable,
than an Englishman ever is, with a boyish frank-
ness and joy in praise and superb Celtic blue
eyes that were reflective and roguish, piercing or
caressing — all in a minute — speed here and
strength and joy in living.

But now what has he done?

"The Gods of the Mountains" is much his
finest work as yet and a study of it shows his
strength and weakness to perfection. The first
performance made an extraordinary impression

143

on me and I wrote of it the same week, in the
London "Academy," as "one of the nights of
my life."

A few years later Chesterton's "Magic" had
an even greater effect on me; because it was a
consistent whole and worked up crescendo to a
climax whereas "The Gods of the Mountain"
fizzled out in the last act into the weakest melo-
drama.

The entrance of the Gods as green men in
armor or stone as tragic Fates was simply
ludicrous.

How then should the play have finished?

I ventured to suggest another ending at the
time and I shall lay it before my readers now
with confidence for in the meantime some of
those whose judgment in such matters counts,
have approved it.

Think of the position. Here are seven beg-
gars who by the sheer genius of one of their
number, Agmar, have caused themselves to be
received by the citizens of a great town as their
gods. Their authority is still insecure. There
are doubters in the city; sceptics even; but the
vast majority treat the beggars as gods and give
them whatever they desire.

Suddenly, I think, one of the beggar-gods
should die? How explain that to the citizens?
True gods don't die. Agmar must turn the diffi-
culty into an advantage. He should announce

144

the fact to the citizens and warn them solemnly
to get rid of the doubters and sceptics. "It is the
disbelief of man," he must say, "that kills the
gods."

The citizens immediately seize the chief in-
fidels and execute them: "How can we hope
for benefit from our gods when you insult them
with your doubts?"

And so the beggar-gods have a reprieve and
live happily for a time.

But at length Fate plays them the worst trick.

One morning their leader, Agmar, is found
dead and they come together, livid with fear,
for how shall they explain that their chief is
mortal?

Some counsel flight: Ulf chants his old song
of fear and boding when suddenly Slag, who
was Agmar's servant and admirer, is inspired by
a ray of his master's genius.

"There is no need for fear," he cries. "Any
lie will fool mankind now. Had Agmar died in
the beginning we should indeed have been lost;
but now faith in us and our wonder-working
powers is established; churches have been built
to us; priests sing our praises; acolytes burn in-
cense before our effigies ; all these will fight for
us as for their living. Besides, young and old
alike believe in us and love us. There is no
danger I tell you. We have simply to say that
Agmar has returned to Olympos to make the

145

After-Life better for the men and women of
Kongros and they will all believe us. And so
in turn as we die each of us will merely go back
to the Heavenly City to prepare a place for the
children of men."

No better counsel offering, Slag announces
Agmar's death in this way, and the people all
bow themselves before him in reverence and
thanksgiving. "Great is Agmar and good, and
we thank our gods and bring them rich gifts."

This seems to me the natural, inevitable,
ironical end.

In "The Gods of the Mountain" Dunsany had
an inspiration; but he did not take thought or
was lacking in patience and so a fine conception
was only half realized.

Two other of Dunsany's plays merit brief men-
tion. "A night at an Inn" is an excellent melo-
drama in one act with a real thrill in it worthy
of the Grand Guignol in Paris; and "The Tents
of the Arabs," is something more. The story is
very simple, but memorable in Dunsany's work,
for it is a love story. The king has left his
throne and wearisome state and gone to the
desert and found a gypsy love:

King. Now I have known the desert and

dwelt in the tents of the Arabs.

EZNARA. There is no land like the desert

and like the Arabs no people.
146

King. It is all over and done. I return

to the walls of my fathers.

EZNARA. Time cannot put it away ; I go

back to the desert that nursed me.

The Grand Chamberlain comes to the gate
expecting the king to arrive. A camel-driver
who loves the city and hates the desert claims
that he is the king; but the Chamberlain doubts
him till the real king, drawn by his love, de-
clares that he has seen and known the camel-
driver in Mecca and he is really the king.

The Chamberlain is convinced. The camel-
driver goes in to wear the crown while the real
king returns to his love and the desert.

It is a pretty story charmingly told. The few
sentences I have quoted give us the secret of
Dunsany's verbal magic. First of all, they are
not prose at all, but verse: the hexameters are
clearly defined.

But is it wise thus to mix poetry with prose?
Goethe does it often, as Ruskin, and Carlyle, Sir
Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor all did;
but in France, as in Athens, where the prose
tradition is at its best, the practice is condemned.
Still, there it is. Dunsany is a poet and dreamer,
and if it is ever permitted to use poetry in guise
of prose surely it should be permitted in a love
story, for love is nothing if not lyrical.

It is just as clear that the mysterious emotional
appeal of Dunsany's prose is derived from the
Bible. Each of these verses has the Hebrew

147

repetition in it; everyone remembers the much-
quoted example : "Tell it not in Gath : talk not
of it in the streets of Ascalon."

I used to wonder whether Dunsany had copied
the biblical manner and vocabulary wittingly or
unwittingly, and so I wrote to him asking him
to tell me. Here is his answer:

Dunsany Castle, Co. Meath,
Nov. 3, '12.
. . . Please excuse dictation so I can ramble
reminiscently.

I think I owe most of my style to the reports
of proceedings in the divorce court; were it not
for these my mother might have allowed me to
read newspapers before I went to school; as it
was she never did. I began reading Grimm and
then Andersen. I remember reading them in
the evening with twilight coming on. All the
windows of the rooms I used in the house in
Kent where I was brought up faced the sunset.
There are no facts about a sunset; none are
chronicled in Blue-books. There are no adver-
tisements of them.

When I went to Cheam school I was given a
lot of the Bible to read. This turned my
thoughts eastward. For years no style seemed
to me natural but that of the Bible and I feared
that I never would become a writer when I saw
that other people did not use it.

When I learned Greek at Cheam and heard
148

of other gods a great pity came on me for those
beautiful marble people that had become for-
saken and this mood has never quite left me.

When I went to Eton the housemaid forgot to
call me, or only half called me rather, on the
morning of the Greek exam. I therefore took a
lower place than I should have and less than
three years later, when I left to go to a cram-
mer's where my education ceased, my knowledge
of the classics was most incomplete. But incom-
plete in a strange way, for they had implanted
in me at Cheam and Eton a love of the classical
world of which I knew almost nothing.

And then one day imagination came to the
rescue and I made unto myself gods; and having
made gods I had to make people to worship
them and cities for them to live in and kings to
rule over them ; and then there had to be names
for the kings and the cities and great plausible
names for the huge rivers that I saw sweeping
down through kingdoms by night.

I suppose that the back parts of my head are
full of more Greek words than I ever knew the
meaning of and names of Old Testament kings.
Many an ode of Horace I learnt before I knew
the meaning of a line of it. I suppose that when
one wants to invent a name, Memory, "The
Mother of the Muses," sitting in those lumber
houses of the mind that one wrongly calls "for-
gotten," knits together strange old syllables into

149

as many names as one needs. At least I have
sometimes traced resemblance to names known
long since in some word that I have coined at
the time in pure inspiration.

Nothing comes easier to me than inventing
names (except, perhaps, myths). Here are some
of my favorites: Sardalthion, Thaddenblarna,
the citadel of the gods, and Perdondaris, that
famous city.

An effect that the classics have had on me is
this. Some one will say or I read somewhere —
"as so-and-so said before the walls of such-and-
such," and it will convey to me with my incom-
plete knowledge of the classics nothing but
wonder, and something of this wonder I give
back to my readers when I refer casually in
passing to some battle or story well known in
kingdoms on the far side of the sunset and cities
built of twilight where only I have been. . . .

But enough.

Yours sincerely, DUNSANY.

The stories and tales of Dunsany fall into a
lower class than his plays; though studded here
and there with very beautiful passages they are
usually, almost meaningless. The truth is the
lack of thought in Dunsany becomes painful to
me on a prolonged reading; his originality is of
imagination or rather of Celtic fancy and rarely
of insight. If we go to his belief we shall hardly

150

find an original word in it, much less an original
idea.

He contributed an article to the "National
Review" in 1911 which was a sort of rehash of
Ruskin with here and there an aphorism of
Emerson. For instance, he condemned adver-
tisements in Ruskin's own petulant way: "to
romance they seem the battlements of the fort-
ress of Avarice," and "Romance," he went on,
"is the most real thing in life." He quarrels
with "the gift of matter enthroned and endowed
by man with life: I mean iron vitalized by
steam and rushing from city to city, and owning
men as slaves"; which is simply a poor para-
phrase of Emerson's:

"Things are in the saddle
And ride mankind."

Dunsany has got a huge popularity because
he represents in some degree the new revolt; but
his reputation is based on too slight a founda-
tion to endure; he must do better work than he
has yet done if he wishes to be of the Sacred
Band and stand on the forehead of the time to
come. He has been terribly handicapped by his
name and position; true, he had the good luck
to be brought up on the Bible and the fairy tales
of Andersen and Grimm; but then he went to
Eton and he is still suffering from that infection.
Eton made him an athlete, it is said, and taught
him to play cricket; but it also taught him to

151

snee^ at wbftian's suffrage and to revere the
House of Lords.

At Eton he lost a little of his Celtic kindly
humane manners and learned "good form" ; in-
stead of prizing Celtic equality and the King-
dom of man upon earth, he came to believe in
British imperialism and the world-devouring
destinies of the British Empire.

As every one knows, Dunsany is an Irish peer
and yet he not only went into the English army
and fought the Germans: but before that he had
fought against the Boer farmers and quite lately
he fought in Dublin against his own poor coun-
trymen and was there grievously wounded,
which should have taught him sense. All this
imperialistic foolery I put down to his Eton
training and, of course, in the last resort to his
want of brains, just as I attribute Chesterton's
wild abuse of the Hun to want of education.
These are blunders that a large mind, a mind,
as Meredith used to say, "that had travelled,"
could not possibly make.

Mr. Sydney Sime
Sidney Sime, who illustrates Dunsany's books
and plays with such singular ability, is a far abler
man than the Irish lord. I should like to repro-
duce here one of his imaginative illustrations,
for I regard most of them as extraordinary.
Sime is a strongly-built man of about five feet
seven or eight with a cliff-like, overhanging,

152

tyrannous forehead. His eyes afe Superlative,
grayish blue looking out under heavy brows,
eyes with a pathetic patience in them as of one
who has lived with sorrow; and realizes —

"The weary weight of all this unintelligible world."

From time to time humorous gleams light up
the eyes and the whole face; mirth on melan-
choly— a modern combination.

Sime has had a sensational career. He was
a collier's boy and worked more than ten years
underground ; yet he is one of the best read men
I know and I am inclined to think him one of
the greatest of living artists. There are some
paintings of his which I would as soon possess
as the best of Cezanne and in sheer imaginative
quality his best is without an equal in modern
work.

There is no lack of thought in Sime. His im-
agination and his mentality are in perfect equi-
poise; nearly all his paintings have that curious
economy of detail coupled with grandeur of de-
sign, which is the hall-mark of the great masters.

And withal the man is simplicity itself; he
meets lord and ploughman in the same human
way; he has had a dreadfully hard struggle and
yet he is as sunny-tempered and optimistic as a
boy. He is for the workman without ostenta-
tion ; yet the moment he begins to speak you re-
alize that he sees the master's side, too — a singu-
lar and powerful personality.

153

I feel that I have only given sketches of these
two distinguished artists. I ought to be able to
make Sime's portrait at least fuller at once and
more vivid, for I am in most intimate sympathy
with him. I remember we had a long talk once
about Blake's prophetic writings and to my
wonder Sime took the position I had always
maintained, that Blake is not to be explained any
more than a picture; you must be content to
commune with him, live with his works, and in
time you may absorb his influence which is the
most precious thing he has to give.

I got a letter from Sime on this point once
which I think explains my admiration for his
insight and establishes my claims for him as an
original thinker and a master of English prose.

Let my readers remember it is the letter of a
great painter, a colorist as original as Watteau.

WORPLESDON.TV

My Dear Harris:

I hope I did not convey any idea that Blake is
communicable. The interest of him to me lies
in the fact that he isn't. It is one of my delusions
that there is not any general truth or value out-
side the perceptive soul ; no intrinsic values.

Blake speaks like the wind in the chimney,
which sings with all the voices of all dead poets
and always sings the heart's desire without the
bondage of words. The commentators will try
in vain to pigeonhole Blake as thev have failed

154

with others, but they will throw their obfuscat-
ing mildew around his dim and unfinished state-
ment without shame.

Blake told his friend Butts that he was bring-
ing a poem to town and what he meant by a
poem was a work that intrigued and allured and
satisfied the imagination but utterly confounded
and bewildered the corporeal sense.

We go to embark at Naples and thence our
course lies eastwards and as I am neither captain
nor owner, it is unlikely that I may make the
ship swim where I may please; but your offer
of hospitality and entertainment at Nice is none
the less most grateful.

People who delight in doing kindnesses make
the world a pleasant place. I have known you
only a little time, but that time is crowded with
real human friendliness; if I do receive any ap-
pointment in Hell, as I may hope to, I will do
my utmost to save a cool corner for you.

Yours sincerely, SIDNEY H. SiME.

I want to make my readers feel as I feel, that
Sime is a big man — an intellectual force — and
so I look at him in terms of the time. I should
as soon expect Shaw to talk truculent nonsense
about the Germans as Sime. Though I imagine
Sime does not know a word of German, his na-
tive brains would long ago have taught him the
true meaning of the great fight the Germans
have put up against what appeared to most men

155

overwhelming odds. Sime would feel at once
that such courage and such efficiency must be
based on virtue and not on any "preparedness,"
which would hardly last through one year of
warfare. Sime is one of those rare men who do
not let themselves be cheated by words — a pity
there are not more of them in every nation. We
should then stand a better chance of peace —
peace without victory — which, if we only knew
it, is the ideal.

One story must still be told to Lord Dunsany's
credit before I part with him.

In a South coast bathing resort the cry went
up one morning that a man was drowning.

A big policeman had ventured into the break-
ers after a southwest gale and was sinking. Dun-
sany happened to be strolling on the beach. He
pulled off his coat and boots and rushed into the
surf. In five minutes he brought the policeman
safe to shore. The crowd gathered round him
cheering; everybody wanted to know his name,
but he tore himself away, refusing to name him-
self, and trotted off to change his wet clothes.
Some one recognized him and told the story.

This must be put down on the credit-side as
the virtue of his imperialism.

The story delights me! What great spirits
we have known and noble when such men as
these do not stand out like steeples. For take
him as you please; berate his shortcomings as

156

you will, Dunsany is another Sidney, Sidney with
soul all aflame for love of honor and high deeds
to their own music chanted, and Sime the collier
lad might stand level-browed before Rembrandt
himself, being of the same royal lineage. And
there they pass in London streets and go up and
down, unknown and unappreciated. When they
are dead and gone, men will probably crown
them and do them tardy reverence and wonder
about them and form legends of their sayings
and doings, and thus they, too, shall have their
part in making the land that bore them, memor-
able and of high repute. They both know the
truth of the poet's supreme solace:
"Others, I doubt not, if not we,
The issue of our toils shall see;
Young children gather as their own
The harvest that the dead have sown,
The dead forgotten and unknown."

157

JAMES THOMSON : AN UNKNOWN
IMMORTAL

HERE is an old story that tells how
a man went about without a shadow
and what a sensation the loss caused
when it was discovered. For the
greater part of the nineteenth century
the majority of men went about without souls in
drear discomfort, yet they only realized their
loss when it was pointed out to them by poets and
idealists. Every one had got drunk with greed
and was mad to get rich; the things of the spirit
were thrust aside; the soul ignored.

Karl Marx proved in "Das Kapital" that
working men, women and children were never
so exploited as towards the middle of the nine-
teenth century in the factories of England ; mere
wage slaves they were, worse treated than they
would have been had the employers owned them
body and soul ; for then at least they would have
been fed and housed decently.

The poets were naturally the first to revolt
against the sordid life of capitalistic exploita-
tion. Hood's "Song of the Shirt" and "One
More Unfortunate" were the lyrics of that sad
time when men "wore the name of freedom grav-
en on a heavier chain."

158

%

''_ "", "XT' ' .•;-

James Thomson

The greatest poets were in all countries the
most convinced pessimists; Leopardi in Italy,
Heine in Germany and Thomson in England.
Their souls had been maimed and wounded in
the squalid struggle.

Thomson interested me very early by what
seemed pure chance. In 1874 or thereabouts
Charles Bradlaugh spoke in Lawrence, Kan.,
and though not so good a speaker as IngersoU
made an even deeper impression on me by dint
of force of character and personality. I began
reading "The National Reformer" and soon
noticed "jottings" by "B. V.," which excited my
curiosity and admiration. One day I came across
the first verses of "The City of Dreadful Night" ;
the title appealed to me and the poem make a
tremendous impression on me: I was young and
had not found my work in life.

The weary weight of this unintelligible world
lay heavy on me and the builded desolation and
passionate despair of Thomson's poem took com-
plete possession of my spirit. Verse after verse
once read, printed itself in my brain unforget-
tably; ever since they come back to me in dark
hours, and I find myself using them as a bitter
tonic. Take such a verse as this :
"The sense that every struggle brings defeat

Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat

Because thev have no secret to express;
159

That none can pierce the vast black veil

uncertain
Because there is no light beyond the curtain ;
That all is vanity and nothingness."
Such words sink deep into the heart as meteors
into the earth dropped from some higher sphere.
Or this:

'^We do not ask a longer term of strife,

Weakness and weariness and nameless woes ;
We do not claim renewed and endless life
When this which is our torment here shall
close,
An everlasting conscious inanition!
We yearn for speedy death in full fruition,

Dateless oblivion and divine repose."
That "dateless oblivion and divine repose"
sings itself in my memory still with an imperish-
able cadence. Almost every verse of this long
poem has the same high finish; it would puzzle
one to find a weak stanza. Every mood of sad-
ness has its perfect expression.

"We finish thus ; and all our wretched race
Shall finish with its cycle, and give place

To other beings, with their own time-doom;
Infinite aeons ere our kind began ;
Infinite aeons after the last man
Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and

womb."
That "tomb" and "womb" has always repre-
sented to me the clods falling on the coffin I

160

And here is the intellectual recognition of the
appalling truth :
"I find no hint throughout the Universe
Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;

I find alone Necessity Supreme;
With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark,
Unlighted ever by the faintest spark
For us the flitting shadows of a dream."
After living in that terrible "City" for weeks
I dug up a good many of Thomson's translations
and critical essays and found everywhere the
same masculine grasp of truth and deep compre-
hension of all high gifts and qualities. A critic's
value is not to be gauged by his agreement with
the established estimates of great men, but by the
degree in which he can enlarge and enrich these
secular judgments of humanity. And if he can-
not rise to this height he should be esteemed for
the alacrity with which he discovers and pro-
claims men of genius neglected in his own time.
I still remember the surprise I felt when
Thomson wrote his essay on "The Poems of Wil-
liam Blake," and allayed my fears by beginning
with praise of the "magnificent prose as well as
poetry" in the book.

I don't set much store on his high and just
praise of Blake, for already Dante Rossetti, at
least, if not Swinburne, had been before him in
appreciation, but when he wrote on the "Impro-
visations from the Spirit," by Garth Wilkinson,

161

Thomson had no forerunners, to my knowledge,
yet his understanding is just as complete and his
eulogy as finely balanced. He wrote about Wil-
kinson's work as "A Strange Book" ; he does not
for a moment accept his mysticism and again and
again points out that these "improvisations"
might be bettered by a little painstaking and self-
criticism. On the whole, his praise is more than
generous, though finely qualified.

My high esteem of Thomson grew with the
years so that when I found myself in London in
1881 for a holiday he was one of the first men I
wanted to meet. I had no position at the time
but felt that a man who had given his best work
to "The National Reformer" would, perhaps, be
willing to meet even an unknown admirer. A
clergyman friend of mine knew Phillip Bourke
Marston, the blind poet, and told me that he had
heard Marston mention Thomson. One morning
I was delighted to get a letter from my friend
saying that if I would come to his rooms about
four that afternoon I should meet both Marston
and Thomson, for Marston had promised to
bring the great man.

Of course I was on hand, and after I had
talked to the Rev. John Verschoyle for perhaps
ten minutes and thanked him warmly, the two
poets came in. I knew Marston slightly, but
even while shaking hands with him I was study-
ing Thomson. To say I was disappointed gives

162

no idea of my dejection. I had seen a photo-
graph that represented him as a man of about
thirty of handsome, almost noble countenance;
courage, vivacity, kindness shone from the well-
cut features, capacious forehead and fine eyes. I
had got the idea, too, that he was of good height;
but he was short, hardly medium height, shrunk-
en together, prematurely aged; the face was
shrivelled, small, the skin lined and wrinkled,
the expression querulous ; his clothes were shabby
and illfitting; taken all in all he looked an old
wastrel.

The contrast between this man and his mag-
nificent work was appalling; I could only stare
at him and wonder for the explanation.

Verschoyle had begun to talk of poetry with
Marston and now and again Thomson joined in
almost as if against his will, I thought; when
suddenly he interrupted the talk irrelevantly
with a sort of plaint — "There's no drink?"

"Oh, I beg pardon," cried Verschoyle; and at
once hastened to put whiskey and soda water on
the table.

Verschoyle liked Marston and had the preju-
dices of a devout Christian and gentleman, and
Thomson w^as a free-thinking Radical, so he left
Thomson to me naturally.

Naturally, too, I filled Thomson's glass as soon
as he emptied it and refilled it every little while
the stimulant evidently doing him good.

163

Sober people are apt to think that men drink
because they like the taste. I believe the idealists
almost always drink for the effect; it throws off
the depression under which they are apt to suffer
and brings them up to their best and fullest life;
encourages and enables them to show themselves
at their best. Drink is said to induce suicide;
it often postpones it.

Thomson soon joined in the conversation ; the
tension about my heart began to relax when I
found that he talked admirably. Like all really
able men he was astonishingly well-read ; knew
German thoroughly and Italian and French as
well, was familiar with Heine, Leopardi and
Carducci, names almost unknown in England
at that time.

As the spirit took effect Thomson talked better
than I had ever heard any one talk up to that
time; the shrunken features seemed to fill out,
the voice rounded to music with shrill discords
of bitter sadness ; the eyes now grey pools of soft
light; now dark blue, deep beyond deep, held
one enchanted with their play of expression; the
face took on a certain nobility of power : Thom-
son had come into his kingdom and we were his
thralls. That was the first time I had ever heard
a great poet talk of poetry and I never forgot the
lesson. Whenever he spoke of a poet he would
quote a line or verse and these were often new

164

and always intensely characteristic; a verse of
Shelley about music and violets; a line of Keats:
"There is a budding morrow in midnight."
Dante and Heine were enskied and sacred;
Heine suffering in Paris on his mattress grave,
like a tortured dog; was "a joyous heathen of
richest blood, a Greek, a lusty lover of this world
and life, an apostle of the rehabilitation of the
'flesh.' " And Dante eagle-eyed suddenly took
a place apart of an incommunicable austere dig-
nity.

Thomson modified nearly all the accepted
judgments. I was at once delighted and disap-
pointed to find that several of my little discov-
eries were accepted by him as commonplaces.
The golden nuggets I had found and hoarded
were only small change to him. For instance in
spite of Matthew Arnold I could not accept
Byron as a poet at all, and I held that Browning
had produced tw^enty times as much high poetry
as Tennyson and far more even than Words
worth. Thomson flashed agreement with all
this, but when I went on to say that Keats was a
far greater poet than Shelley he dissented vehe-
mently and when I asserted that Blake's mystical
books were clear enough to any good reader and
that he was among the greatest of the sons of
men, Thomson shook his head. On this narrow
line of dissent I found refuge for my soul and
was content.

165

Nothing in Thomson's talk surprised me so
much as the rich gaiety and joy in living he dis-
covered when praising his favorite Heine; his
own melancholy was evidently the souring, so to
speak of a generous vintage; "the first of modern
Pagans," he called Heine exultantly: "The great-
est Jew since Jesus, and a divine poet to boot."
"Then you don't think Jesus a poet?" I ex-
claimed.

"I mean by poet a singer," he retorted, and so
I began to understand how this lover of music
came to rate Shelley so highly for Shelley cer-
tainly was one of the greatest of singers.

Gradually the stimulant died out of Thomson :
bit by bit the light left his eyes, the furrows and
wrinkles came back, the old querulous dejected
expression of his face returned. Marston got
up to go and I did not try to make another ap-
pointment. My time in London was measured,
and feeling that Thomson had come to grief
when his gifts and powers ought to have gained
him a great position, depressed me dreadfully.
I had no idea then of the power of British snob-
bery and British conventions.

Alone together, Verschoyle and I looked at
each other.

"Why has he lost hold on himself?" I asked.

"Atheists of that class," said Verschoyle,
"generally come to ruin ; theyVe no backbone in
them.

166

"I remember hearing a story of Tihomson,'*
he went on. "Perhaps I ought to have told you.
The father, Dr. Westland Marston, the literary
and dramatic critic, you know?" I shook my
head). "Well, he's blind, too, and he told it to
me. I think he dislikes his son going about with
Thomson. One day, it seems, Phillip Bourke
Marston went to call on Thomson and found him
wild, incipient Delirium Tremens. After a little
while Thomson got quieter and began to follow
Marston about tickling the back of his neck with
a carving knife. When Phillip asked him what
he was doing Thomson told him, but went on
with the gruesome game. Scared stiff, the blind
man tried to escape, but couldn't and was finally
rescued by the chance arrival of Rossetti. A
ghastly scene, eh?"

"Ghastly, indeed," I replied; "a touch of the
grotesque in the horrible."

Was it the story or the personal impression?
I can't say: somehow I felt that Thomson was
lost. Was British prejudice to blame or was
there any personal reason?

The thought crossed my mind that like de
Musset, Thomson looked on drink as the open
door to death and preferred it to any other. In
that case why shouldn't he take it? I said to my-
self. There was a fierce youthful intolerance in
me at the time; a great poet, it seemed to me,
should make his life great: I had no notion then

167

that the burden is often too heavy for mortal
strength and that sooner or later all the sons of
Adam, or, at least, the most gifted, are sure to
reach the breaking point.

But Thomson knew it and had said it in his
own way in a hundred magical verses.

Thomson was, perhaps, the first to tell us that
the passion of the creative artist, the wish to do
our work, to mould the gold in us into perfect
form, is one of the chief incentives to living:

"So potent is the Word, the Lord of Life,
And so tenacious Art,

Whose instinct urges to perpetual strife
With Death, Life's counterpart;

The magic of their music, might and light,

Can keep one living in his own despite."
A year or so later I was staying at Argenteuil,
near Paris, when I read of Thomson's death,
and the curt posthumous notices showed that he
had practically drunk himself to death. It was
at Phillip Marston's rooms in the Euston Road
that the final catastrophe took place. He had
drifted in on Marston in the afternoon; had
talked of poetry and had had some whiskey.
Internal hemorrhage followed ; he was taken to
University College Hospital nearby. Next day
Marston and Sharp visited him; he begged a
shilling for stamps to write some letters, he was
literally without a penny, and died the follow-
ing day.

168

Had he done his work; given all he had to
give? I don't think so. In spite of his strength
of will, and it was extraordinary, the tragic mis-
haps and injustices of life were too powerful and
had overborne the Titan.

I could give a hundred specimens of his prose
even which would convince any thinking mind
that Thomson was one of the choice and master
spirits of the time.

I have not got his volume "Satires and Pro-
fanities," which appeared in 1884 by me, but
here is a passage I have copied out: it will
suffice :

"This great river of human Time, which
comes flowing down thick with filth and blood
from the immemorial past, surely cannot be
thoroughly cleansed by any purifying process
applied to it here in the present; for the pollu-
tion, if not at its very source (supposing it has a
source) or deriving from unimaginable remote-
nesses of eternity indefinitely beyond its source^
at any rate interfused with it countless ages back,
and is perennial as the river itself. This im-
mense poison-tree of Life, with its leaves of
illusion, blossoms of delirium, apples of destruc-
tion, surely cannot be made wholesome and
sweet by anything we may do to the branchlets
and twigs on which, poor insects, we find our-
selves crawling, or to the leaves and fruit on
which we must fain feed; for the venom is

169

drawn up in the sap by the tap-roots plunged in
abysmal depths of the past. This toppling and
sinking house wherein we dwell cannot be firmly
re-established, save by re-establishing from its
lowest foundation upwards. In fine, to thor-
oughly reform the present and the future we
must thoroughly reform the past."

But what were the mishaps and injustices it
may be asked which brought such splendid
powers to wreck? The injustices were mainly
of the time and place; the mishaps individual.
His father was an officer in the merchant marine
who had the bad luck to get a paralytic stroke
in 1840 and never recovered; his mother a
deeply religious woman and mystic died in
1843, leaving James an orphan when a child of
nine, to be brought up as a pauper on charity;
not a bad start for a world-poet. He studied
hard and became a schoolmaster in the British
army about seventeen. A Mrs. Grieg says of
him at this time: "He was wonderfully clever,
very nice-looking and very gentle, grave and
kind." Stationed in Ireland he made a friend
of Charles Bradlaugh, then a private, and fell in
love with a beautiful girl. Having won her
affection, he returned to England at nineteen to
gain a better position in order to marry her. Six
months later she died suddenly. All through
his life he ascribed his downfall to losing her.
Almost the last poem he wrote was written of

170

her thirty years later under the title, "I Had a
Love." ("Too hard and harsh, too true to be
good poetry," is Thomson's comment on it.) I
quote one verse, for it tells everything:
"You would have kept me from the desert sands,
Bestrewn with bleaching bones,
And led me through the friendly fertile lands,

And changed my weary moans

To hymns of triumph and enraptured love.

And made our earth as rich as Heaven above."

As a young man he was strong, we are told ; a

good oarsman and walker; he thought nothing

of walking from the Curragh Camp to Dublin

and back in the day, and by all accounts was

very vivacious and an excellent companion. A

real student, too, he taught himself German,

Italian, French and a good deal of Spanish and

some Latin, etc. But even as a young man of

twenty or twenty-one, he occasionally drank to

excess in a convivial way, and the evil tendency

grew on him as the injustices of life began to eat

into his pride.

We are told that "unfortunately he did not
get on well with the officers." From the fact
that he had made Bradlaugh, though a private,
his closest friend, one can imagine how the offi-
cers would regard him. He was always a free
thinker with pronounced radical views; natu-
rally British officers were ready to pick a quarrel
with a genius who assuredly did not share their

171

admiration of themselves. Thomson was dis-
missed from the British army for trivial con-
tempt called insubordination in 1862 — a heavy
and undeserved blow.

A couple of years before he had begun writing
for The National Reformer, which had been
founded by Bradlaugh. Now at a loose end he
came to London and Bradlaugh got him a place
in a solicitor's office; he was still only twenty-
eight. His wages plus all he received from his
writing hardly averaged ten dollars a week for
the next ten years of his life, the best years.
Under such conditions and conscious of great
powers, it was only to be expected that the mel-
ancholy he inherited from his mother would
increase. He began periodically to drink to
excess. He fought a desperate battle with this
propensity. For months he would be sober and
then some setback in life would excite his pessi-
mism and he would begin to brood, then to
drink. After the bout he'd "purge and live
cleanly" again for months.

At all times he took his work most seriously
like all who have it in them to do great work.

In 1864 he had written two or three articles
for the Daily Telegraph; it is said that the edi-
tor offered him a retaining fee "to write like
that," and then asked him, "Can you write
pathos?" which ended their relation. Some of
his best poetry was rejected by four or five of

172

the chief magazines. In 1874 his great poem,
"The City of Dreadful Night," began to appear
piecemeal in The National Reformer and won
him new friends. Swinburne, George Eliot and
Meredith wrote warmest praise to him, and
Bertram Dobell grew really fond of him and
helped him later to publish his books. It
brought him another friend, Phillip Bourke
Marston, who remained, as I have said, faithful
to the end.

In 1875 he had a sort of disagreement with
Bradlaugh; was crowded out of the paper and
the misunderstanding was accentuated, it was
said, by Mrs. Besant, and so the friendship of
twenty years came to an end.

In "The City of Dreadful Night" Thomson
has given us a portrait of Bradlaugh speaking
as the pessimist-prophet; it is at once a tribute
to his affection for the friend and a noble appre-
ciation of the reformer's high qualities. The
subsequent quarrel never induced Thomson to
withdraw or modify any part of his eulogy.

"And then we heard a voice of solemn stress
From the dark pulpit, and our gaze there met
Two eyes which burned as never eyes burned yet;

Two steadfast and intolerable eyes

Burning beneath a broad and rugged brow;

The head behind it of enormous size.

And as black fir-groves in a large wind bow,

Our rooted congregation, gloom-arrayed,

By that great sad voice deep and full were swayed : —

173

O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!
O battling in black floods without an ark!

O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!
My soul hath bled for you these sunless years,
With bitter blood-drops running down like tears:

Oh, dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light!"

From this time on he wrote little poetry and
was content to get his prose accepted by the
Secularist, a new weekly and anti- religious
review established by G. W. Foote. But his
chief source of livelihood came from writing
for Cope's Tobacco Plant, a monthly edited as
an advertising medium for a firm of Liverpool
tobacco merchants. This is how England
treated one of her most gifted and greatest sons.

At Christmas, 1878, he could say that he had
not earned a penny in the year save from his
papers in Fraser's Magazine, hardly two hun-
dred dollars in all. At the end of 1879 he was
only writing for Cope "barely managing to keep
his head over water, sometimes sinking under
for a bit." Was it any wonder that this gentle,
genial, gifted spirit grew tired of the long strug-
gle? Again and again in 1879 he speaks of
rheumatic pains ; it is plain that his health was
breaking; his "old friend insomnia" too had
come back again to make night even more
hideous than the day. He fell more and more
completely under the influence of drink and the
story of the close of Thomson's life is that of a
man who had lost all desire to live; "his later

174

life was a slow suicide, perceived and acquiesced
in deliberately by himself." in 1880 Dobell got
his first book of poems published in book form;
it won him friends and fifty dollars in cash, as
poor Thomson writes hopefully. Meredith in-
troduced him to editors and his work began to
be asked for, but the help came too late. He
was now forty-six and, perhaps, beyond saving.
At least it would have needed some extraordi-
nary circumstance to have saved him. Mere-
dith, with his preternatural sagacity, seems to
have divined this after his death.

The one gleam of brightness that came before
the end intensifies to me the tragedy of the final
disaster. His second volume of poems was pro-
duced almost immediately after the first and was
also successful. And these books brought him
some new friends, among them a Mr. and Miss
Barrs, brother and sister, who asked him down
to stay with them in the country. He went to
them again and again and found perfect hospi-
tality; he seems indeed to have felt deeply for
Miss Barrs, because on his forty-seventh birth-
day he writes to H. A. B. :
"When one is forty years and seven
Is seven and forty sad years old,

He looks not onward for his heaven,
The future is too blank and cold,
Its pale flowers smell of graveyard mould,

He looks back to his lifeful past;

175

If age is silver, youth is gold; —
Could youth but last, could youth but last!"
Then there are the stanzas entitled "At Bel-
voir" with this memorable verse:
"A maiden like a budding rose,
Unconscious of the golden
And fragrant bliss of love that glows

Deep in her heart infolden ;
A Poet old in years and thought.

Yet not too old for pleasance.
Made young again and fancy-fraught
By such a sweet friend's presence."
The poem entitled "He Heard Her Sing"
tells of Thomson's passionate love of music and
his deep feeling for this lady.

He visited the Barrs again in the spring of
1882, but he let himself go and the visit ended
in a fit of intemperance. He crept back to Lon-
don in bitterest remorse and final despair. On
April 22, 1882, we find him writing to Mr.
Barrs:

"I scarcely know how to write to you after
my atrocious and disgusting return for the won-
derful hospitality and kindness of yourself and
Miss Barrs. I can only say that I was mad."

Very soon afterwards comes an unforgettable
picture of him by Mr. Stewart Ross:

"He stands before me now as distinctly as he
did nearly seven years ago among the well-
dressed people at that glittering bar — he, the

176

abject, the shabby, the waif. . . . His figure,
which had always been diminutive, had lost all
dignity of carriage, all gracefulness of gait
When the miserable hat was raised from the
ruined but still noble head it revealed the thin-
ning away of the ragged and unkempt hair,
deeply threaded with grey. His raiment had
the worn, soiled and deeply creased aspect that
suggested ... it had been worn day and
night. The day, for May, was a raw and cold
one, with a drizzle, and the feet of the author of
'The City of Dreadful Night' were protected
from the slushy streets only by a pair of thin old
carpet-slippers, so worn and defective that, in
one part, they displayed his bare skin."

The summing up is given in a letter of
Meredith's :

"He did me the honor to visit me twice, when
I was unaware of the extent of the tragic afflic-
tion overclouding him, but could see that he was
badly weighted. I have now the conviction
that the taking away of poverty from his burdens
would in all likelihood have saved him to enrich
our literature; for his verse was a pure well.
He had, almost past example in my experience,
the thrill of the worship of moral valiancy as
well as of sensuous beauty; his narrative poem,
'Weddah and Om-cl-Bonain,' stands to witness
what great things he would have done in the
exhibition of nobility at war with evil condi-
tions. He probably had, as most of us have

177

had, his heavy suffering on the soft side. But
he inherited the tendency to the thing which
slew him. And it is my opinion that, in consid-
eration of his high and singularly elective mind,
he might have worked clear of it to throw it
off, if circumstances had been smoother and
brighter about him." Such is Meredith's way
of saying that England is a harsh stepmother to
poets who dare to be thinkers and radicals
though born poor. The true word is :

Father, forgive them; for they know not
what they do.

It might be well for us to ask ourselves how
America treats her Thomsons. The reception
accorded to Poe and Whitman should not flatter
our self-esteem.

Thompson as I saw him in 1881,

178

Lionel Johnson

LIONEL JOHNSON and
HUBERT CRACKANTHORPE

T would take long to tell why these
two men are associated in my mem-
ory. I saw a great deal of both of
them about the same time in the
early nineties; they were both very
young and full of high promise in very different
ways, and in both I felt a certain weakness of
body, the premonition of untimely death and un-
fulfilled renown. They both felt the danger, I
believe, knew that their hold on life was tenu-
ous, weak and that the strands would part easily
on any strain. Johnson wrote to a friend :

"Go from me: I am one of those who fall.
What! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all,
In my sad company? Before the end,
Go from me, dear, my friend!"

The "cold wind" — perhaps only the flighting
of unseen wings — was sadly prophetic in Crack-
anthorpe's case, but not in Johnson's, thank good-
ness, for though he died at thirty-five he had
already done excellent work in prose and verse
which gives him a niche in the sanctuary of the
spirit.

The two were in some sort complementary.
179

Crackanthorpe with shy ingenuous manners and
outbursts of enthusiasm soon followed by fits of
unaccountable, black depression, and Johnson
very grave and perfectly poised, a sort of young
old man. Yeats, his friend and contemporary,
has painted him to the life in a phrase; he
speaks of "the loneliness and gravity of his mind ;
its air of high lineage," this last clause the mag-
ical word only possible to a poet-spirit when
touched with love.

The Nineties in London

The Nineties in London! Was there ever a
period in any country when such great men lived
and worked? There were Tennyson and
Browning, Arnold and Swinburne, Meredith,
Patmore and Aubrey de Vere among the older
poets; and in science and thought, Darwin,
Lyell, Kelvin, Huxley, Spencer and Wallace.

And the wonderful thing was that for the most
part these subtle and great minds were familiar
spirits of easy approach and much more apt to
be enthusiastic about young talent than men of
small accomplishment. One could meet and
talk to any of them almost any day; indeed a
week seldom passed for years in which I did not
meet one or more of them in friendly intercourse.

They had little or nothing new to tell one;
they had given their best in their books; but it
was intensely interesting to lead them on to
answer the questionings of sense and outward

180

things which passages in their writings sug-
gested.

Did Darwin or Spencer or Huxley see that
the gorgeous soapbubble of theory that they had
blown was only a toy to amuse the mind and
did not lead one into the secret purpose of things
at all or strip a single veil from the mysterious
Goddess of Life?

Why had Browning said so little about his
great contemporaries? Swinburne and Arnold,
Patmore and Meredith talked freely of one an-
other, were never tired indeed of drawing lines
of relationship from themselves to other Im-
mortals, but Browning was curiously reticent.

These questions and a thousand like them I
put and had answered, and they led to deeper
confessions and more intimate questionings.

Was Swinburne's erotic poetry a mirror of
his life?

What was the mystery about Meredith? Was
he the illegitimate son of some great personage
or was the tailor his father?

How did Patmore come to be a Catholic
mystic who spoke of Saint Augustine and Santa
Theresa as if they had been his brother and
sister?

Who was it Browning wanted to possess in that
Last Ride Together
when the desire makes the page glow and gives
the words pulses.

181

And the younger men were even more inter-
esting; for promise is more exciting than per-
formance.

Housman with his "Shropshire Lad," and
Dowson, Symons and Home, Francis Thompson,
John Grey and Alfred Douglas, Mrs. Meynell,
too, and Mary Robinson and Michael Field —
singers enough, and a crowd of novelists, play-
rights and painters still more distinguished:
Whistler, Pater and Wilde, Kipling, Shaw,
Beardsley, Pryde and Wells; Augustus John,
Sime and Max, to say nothing of the band of
gifted Irishmen, Yeats, Moore, Synge, and
"A. E."

And these men were all eager and enthusiastic;
good work done and better projected. One could
warm oneself with their hope. Almost any after-
noon I could hear Kipling read a new poem,
some "Gunga Din" that heated the blood like
rich Burgundy and when he had gone, leaving
the air still throbbing with the martial words
and the lilting music, in would come Beardsley
with a cover of "The Yellow Book" which Lane
had accepted and praised and then at the last
moment when his eyes had been opened, had
suppressed in horror and resentment at nudities
"no one could stand; perfectly disgraceful 1"

Looking a mere boy Beardsley would point
to this scabrous detail and to that: "I see noth-
ing wrong with the drawing; do you?" as if

182

pudenda were ears to be studied in every whorl
or breasts rounded merely to show how perfect-
ion of line makes shading superfluous.

And scarcely had we finished laughing when
Wilde would come in or Jimmy Pryde, the one
resolved to take us to dinner with Pater or
Whistler and the other proposing a meeting of
artists at the Arts Club.

And the men and women one met at that club
in Chelsea! Will Rothenstein with his vivid
eager face and keen intelligence; Herbert
Trench with a new poem of wrought perfect-
ness; Arthur Machen with his head of prophet-
priest and a new story of the Oxford Actors —
and the talk vivid, enthusiastic, pointed with
wit or barbed with sarcastic epigram. One
telling how his new book had been suppressed
by some magistrate or "Bayswatered" by the pub-
lisher burst out — "I told him what I thought of
him, though, the fool. In a moment I was boil-
ing."

"Don't say that," broke in a quiet voice. "To
come to boiling point so quickly, argues a
vacuum in the upper regions."

Ah, the delighted laughter and the wild out-
bursts of joy; the exuberance of youth, shot
through with the wisdom and irony of mature
understanding.

Hubert Crackanthorpe

And in this rich, passionate, pulsing life these
183

two appeared and made for themselves a place ;
Crackanthorpe in spite of his shy timidity and
Johnson in spite of his boyish face and preter-
natural gravity. They were both small. Crack-
anthorpe, just below medium height, slight and
white faced, with eyes like pale Parma violets
and hesitating light voice growing confident and
firm, however, in praise. Johnson, smaller still,
though not so frail, with large head and assured
quiet manner to match the arrogant, steady,
thoughtful eyes.

Crackanthorpe came with a letter of intro-
duction and wished me to read a short story, "A
Conflict of Egotisms." As soon as I took it up,
it interested me ; a sort of impersonal detachment
in it curiously revealing personality, especially
the description of the writer who "had learnt
nothing from modern methods, either French or
English; he belonged to no clique, he had no
followers, he stood quite alone. He had few
friends or acquaintances, not from misanthropy,
sound or morbid, but the accumulated result of
years of voluntary isolation."

This "sound or morbid" showed a mind that
had hatched out some eggs for itself and a little
later a description fascinated me:

"The shower had been a fierce one, covering
the roadway with a thick crop of rain spikes,
filling the gutters with rushing rivulets of muddy
water; now, through a rift in the ink-colored

184

clouds, the sunlight was filtering feebly, and the
swirl of the downpour had subsided to a gentle
patter."

The "rain spikes" and sunlight "filtering
feebly" struck me as the painting words of a
real writer and I praised him accordingly. I
found him essentially modest though he knew
his own value.

"Do you think I'll ever do anything worth
while?"

"You have already. No one can say how far
you'll go; even now your work is a master's."

"How kind of you! But don't spare blame,
please! I want the truth."

"Well, I miss the joy of living, the youthful
spring and all-conquering desire. Your work is
sad, detached from life, curiously aloof, almost
indifferent."

"One can only give what one has."

"Fall in love," I cried joyously, "over head
and ears; that's the cure for you."

"Who knows," he answered wistfully. "Some-
times love frightens me. One might fail to win
the pearl of great price or the shrine might be
defiled."

"Nothing to hinder you trying again," I re-
plied.

His eyebrows went up and we talked of other
things; of books and men. On all sides his
judgment was curiously mature, too mature for

185

his years. I felt the cold air of vague appre-
hension.

His first book, "Wreckage," made a stir, set
the town talking; the "nineties" all eager to wel-
come talent.

One day I met him and praised one story in
the book heartily: " *A Dead Woman' is great
stuff," I cried, "go on : you'll go far."

"I've taken your prescription, too," he replied
shyly, blushing like a girl.

"I'm glad," I cried, "love's the torch 1"

A few months later I heard he was missing,
no one seemed to know why or wherefore ; time
passed and the news came that his body had been
found in the Seine at Paris. Life's waves had
broken too heavily on him, or had the life-belt
failed? I never knew.

For years his loss came back to me with a
sting: "Why? Why? What a pity!" I could not
help crying out whenever the thought of him
came up. Against my will I kept on recalling
our conversations and communing with his spirit
till at length I seemed to find coherence and a
meaning even in his self-destruction. A nymph-
olept of Beauty, I said to myself, called to a per-
petual seeking, when at length he found his
Dream incarnate in the flesh he spent himself in
impious adoration. There are souls so glad to
give that life itself seems too poor an offering.

186

Was the mystery of poor Crackanthorpe's end

explained in Francis Thompson's lines?

Beauty, to adore and dream on —

To be

Perpetually

Hers, but she never his.

Better the Seine water than such Tantalus-
torture!

Lionel Johnson

Lionel Johnson was of stouter stuff. The best
years of his life were spent in London and just
cover the decade 1891-1901. He was an amal-
gam of English and Welsh with a strong strain
of Irish blood that he came to prize highly. He
had left Oxford with a great reputation for
scholarship and talent and he set to work at once
in London writing for the more serious weeklies.
His "Post Liminium or Essays" represent one-
quarter of these contributions.

All his prose work is on the same high level
distinguished by a balanced gravity of judgment
illumined whenever necessary by apt quotation;
first-rate journalism passing every now and then
into literature when winged by some passionate
emotion. Here is a note on Francis Thompson,
hard to better for sympathy and sureness of ap-
preciation :

"Magnificently faulty at times, magnificently
perfect at others. The ardors of poetry, taking
you triumphantly by storm; a surging sea of

187

verse, rising and falling and irresistibly advanc-
ing. Drunk with his inspiration, sometimes
helplessly so; more often he is merely fired and
quickened, and remains master of himself. Has
done more to harm the English language than
the worst American newspapers; corruptio op-
timi pessima. Has the opulent, prodigal manner
of the seventeenth century; a profusion of great
imagery, sometimes excessive and false; an-
other opulence and profusion, that of Shelley in
his lyric choruses. Beneath the outward manner,
a passionate reality of thought; profound, pa-
thetic, full of faith without fear. "Words that,
if you pricked them, would bleed," as was said
of Meredith. Incapable of prettiness and petti-
ness; for good and bad, always vehement and
burning and — to use a despised word — sublime.
Sublime, rather than noble! too fevered to be
austere; a note of ardent suffering, not of en-
durance."

Johnson's volume on "The Art of Hardy,"
shows him even better; but I was always sorry
that he had not decided to write on his old tutor
and friend, Walter Pater, whom he loved and
admired intensely. A book on Pater by John-
son would have been of extraordinary value, for
Johnson always seemed to me curiously akin to
Pater, both in nature and in talent. He has
written half a dozen different papers on him,
but I wish he had given a volume to him instead

188

of to Hardy, for not only was he like Pater, but
in some ways superior. With the exception of
the single page on the Mona Lisa I take more
pleasure in reading Johnson's prose than Pater's
and when it comes to lyric flights I prefer them
in verse. Now Johnson was a skilled craftsman
in poetry; you find verse after verse with some
new cadence or curious felicity of expression.

Everyone knows his valedictory on Parnell
which gives the soul of Ireland:

"I cannot praise our dead,
Whom Ireland weeps so well:
Her morning light, that fled ;
Her morning star, that fell.

Home to her heart she drew
The mourning company:
Old sorrows met the new,
In sad fraternity.

• •«••••

A mother, and forget?
Nay! all her children's fate
Ireland remembers yet,
With love insatiate."

Yet as if prophetic of the future he sings Eng-
land too and above all Oxford, and above even
Oxford, Pater:

"Half of a passionately pensive soul

He showed us, not the whole:
Who loved him best, they best, they only knew,

The deeps they might not view:
That which was private between God and him:

To others justly dim." .

189

I do not hold Johnson up as a great poet; he
was too thought-burdened ever to sing freely;
but he had the gift; and could sing in Latin as
in English with a haunting melody.

I always hoped he would write some great
lyric page on friendship for he was singularly
gifted with sympathy, a soul like some Aeolian
harp tuned to respond to every breath of affec-
tion and with this rare sensitiveness, an equable
kind temper, a mind of high lineage.

Like Crackanthorpe, Johnson came to an un-
timely end. He had rooms in Clifford's Inn and
was ailing all through the winter of 1901-2.
In the summer he gradually got better, was him-
self again when he met with an accident and died
within a week.

I am not sure that his name will live; I much
fear that his work will hardly find a place in
English literature. I know that Thomson wrote
incomparably greater poetry and as good prose,
too, and yet is hardly known save to lovers of
letters ; yet I always have had a soft spot in me
of liking for Lionel Johnson, for his steadfast
eyes and air of resolute self-possession. And
often his words reach the heart and are unfor-
gettable, an echo of the sad music of man's mor-
tality. Take the last lines in his song to the Dark
Angel :

Lonely unto the lone I go
Divine, to the Divinity.

190

No wonder he put the couplet into italics;
there is in it all his heart's yearning for affection
together with the proud self-consciousness of the
great artist

I cannot mourn for these men as cut off un-
timely leaving their best unsaid, the sweetest
songs unsung. I have a sort of superstition that
no one dies till the soul in him has finished
growing, till his best work is all done. Had
Crackanthorpe more to give, or Johnson, or
Keats? I doubt it. We have got their best;
Shakespeare was given time even to finish "The
Tempest"; Cervantes did not put his "foot in
the stirrup" till the second part of "Don
Quixote" was in men's hands. Yet the pathos of
untimely loss is there and the passionate regret :
Lonely unto the lone I go
Divine, to the Divinity.

191

PIERRE LOTI : A LORD OF LANGUAGE

T was in Paris in 1887, I believe, at a
costume ball given by Madame
Adam, then editor of La Nouvelle
Revuej that I first heard of Loti.
He had come dressed as a Pharaoh
and his costume of Rameses II. was a marvel, it
was said, of artistic weirdness and antiquarian
correctitude. He was pointed out to me seated in
a room talking to a lady; his youth excused his
pretentiously quaint costume, and I was natural-
ly curious to learn all I could about him. Who
was he? What had he done to become a per-
sonage in a day?

"He's a young sailor," I was told, "a lieuten-
ant in the Navy, who in his very first book
brought a new atmosphere into French fiction,
and even taught French prose a new music or
at least new cadences and dowered it with a sort
of Biblical or Breton sadness and resignation:
II faut lire ca; ah, oui; you must read him I

His real name, it appeared, was Julien Viaud;
he was born at Rochefort-on-Sca, of Protestant
stock, brought up, therefore, on the Bible; had
traveled widely. Queen Pomare of Tahiti had
given him the name of Loti, after ^p oceanic
flower,

192

Pierre Loti

Oddly enough, that first dawn of fame in
Paris was all admiration and romance, colored
by a rich glow of exoticism that appeared to
silence judgment and suspend even sane appre-
ciation. Paris was like a child with a new toy,
and wouldn't even believe that it could ever find
fault or flaw in its plaything.

In the next week or so I read "Le Mariage de
Loti." Was it Viaud's first book or merely the
first that happened to fall into my hands? I
could not say. It does not matter much, for in
any case that delicate and passionate idyll of
love on an island of the southern Pacific was not
a bad way of meeting Loti. The Tahitian girl,
Rarahu, is as attractive and exciting as a model
of Gauguin. Her love-letters have something of
the savage about them — a mixture of childish-
ness and passion — a new and heady intoxicant.
From that moment I was one of Loti's admirers;
but by the following season Paris had changed.
Suddenly, as in an hour, the gay child had
grown tired of her new doll, had learned its
tricks, so to speak, and was eager to show that
its mechanism had not fooled her for a moment;
she had always known that its roundnesses were
only sawdust — "Loti — un espece de Chateau-
briand (a sort of Chateaubriand) — un rhetori-
cien, un romantique — quoi!" with a shrug of
disdainful denigration. And when I objected to
this summary classification and suggested that

193

he might yet write a great sea-epic, a wonderful
song of life and love, I was met by doubt, dis-
belief, masking a profound indifference. One
cried at me:

"Don't you know the story of Loti?

"One day the Duchess of asked him to a

reception and he turned up with a big sailor:
mon frere Ives, if you please. That finished him
off; that was too much for even feminine admira-
tion," and they all laughed.

Paris accepts a talent promptly, eagerly, par-
ticularly if it is strange and bizarre, but Paris
drops it just as quickly. It is only the Hugos
and Balzacs who can hold that fickle charming
mistress, and they hold her by strength and
courage and ever-renewed conquest.

I read all Loti's books as they came out, "Mon
Frere Ives," "Pecheur d'Islande," and the rest,
and my admiration grew deeper, broader-based.
Loti, I used to say to myself, was the true laure-
ate of the ocean, the singer of the sea, without a
rival in any language. Yet up to that time I
had thought the shipwreck in "Don Juan" hard
to beat

The sea has inspired a great many poets and
has been the theme of much excellent writing.
Keats's linca : —

"The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round Earth's human shores,"
are of course incomparable, seem indeed to

194

touch the zenith of accomplishment, though one
has to admit that he borrowed the sentiment
from Euripides. By the way, Matthew Arnold
once quoted this couplet and characteristically,
as I think, changed "pure" into "cold." Never-
theless, his own great line, "the unplumb'd, salt,
estranging sea," shows that he too was haunted
by the loneliness and mystery of the great deep,
though he does not love it with the awe and
passion of Loti, whose very soul seems to have
been colored by it and tuned to it

There is a description of a storm in "Mon
Frere Ives," I think, or it may be in even an
earlier book, which has in it all the magic of
the sea, from the organ music of its deep to the
swirl and snarl of its surface, from the scream
of the wind to its thunder, and Loti has un-
leashed about one the elemental forces of Nature
— unconscious and irresistible — forces that make
one shiver with the sense of man's frailty and
man's mortality. Loti's soul has been formed by
the sea, and no one has ever painted a mistress
in all her moods with more consummate artistry.

Conrad, too, has depicted a storm with an as-
tounding cunning that reminds me of Loti. I
forget the name of the book, but Conrad realizes
the sailormen at the same time, whereas in Loti
I get nothing but the sea and the tempest and
Death triumphant riding on the wings of the
wind.

195

Naturally I was eager to meet him, this singer
of the great Deep, and I did meet him some
years later in the palace at Monaco by a window
that looked out over the garden to the sun-kissed
wavelets of the Mediterranean.

There is a great text in Corinthians:

"It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spirit-
ual body . . . for this corruptible must put on
incorruption and this mortal . . . immor-
tality."

But suppose it's the other way about and the
immortal puts on mortality and the spirit a
natural body before your eyes? I had already
had many disillusions of the sort, many proofs
that what Shakespeare calls "this muddy vesture
of decay," this outward bodily presentment of
us men, has no relation to the soul; but never
was the disillusion more astonishing.

Loti was in the trim uniform of a French
naval lieutenant that accentuated his tiny figure.
He is about five feet four in height, slight and
straight. And surely he wears corsets; it is
hardly possible that a man should have so slim
and round a waist! And surely his cheeks are
rouged; the rose flush is too artistically perfect
to be natural. We are introduced: his voice is
a thin treble: "Heureux, monsieur, de faire
voire connaissance . . . la Princesse m'a beau-
coup parle de vous" (Happy to make your ac-
quaintance ; the Princess has often spoken to me

196

of you). His hand is the hand of a child.

''Mon Frere Ives," "My Brother Ives," the
big strong sailorman, the hero of the romance,
flashes into my mind with another meaning: the
inference irresistible! Surely the comedy of life
is inexhaustible and staged by a master of the
unexpected.

Loti's face is wistful in expression ; something
querulous veils the melancholy of the eyes; the
lips are rather thick, the nose a little fleshy; one
returns to the eyes; they meet you with a shade
of distrust and apprehension, like those of a dog
that has often been punished; underneath they
are sad, sad. . . .

The Princess Alice was one of Loti's earliest
and most enthusiastic admirers; she told me that
his name was taken from a rare tropical flower
that floats on water, "le loti."

"He is *a sensitive,' " she insisted, "who carries
about with him an eternal regret. He would
have liked, above everything, to be big and
strong ... a sailor-lover — and he's tiny: he
resents it. One should be considerate of him
and not in words only, but in looks and manner;
he's very affectionate underneath. ..."

I was so interested that I did not need the
warning; I was full of sympathy for the great
craftsman, eager to know where he had learned
the varied music of his rhythms, the inevitable
painting words of his prose; above all, what had

197

helped him to his immediate bare vision of
things ?

Gradually, under my warm admiration, he
thawed out. I had asked him did he know
Bourget (another friend of the Princess) or
Renan?

"No," he answered, "no, I never read, you
know," and then the astounding confession — "I
have never read anything ... no, not even
Chateaubriand . . . though he has been called
my master," and he smiled deprecatingly.

"Really?" I exclaimed: "but of course you've
read Montaigne, Moliere, Racine, La Fontaine,
the classics?"

"Not one of them," he replied : "a good deal
of the Bible as a boy and since I grew up a few
of my friends' books; for example, 'Chante-
pleure,' which I think excellent. ..."

"But in the long days and nights at sea be-
tween watches: don't you read?"

"No," he replied, "no, I muse. I recall past
experiences to memory; but that's all."

"Where did you get your style from?" I ex-
claimed.

He shrugged his shoulders: "I don't know;
do you think reading helps you much?"

"No, I don't," I was fain to admit.

Loti's experience in this matter amplified and
supported my own and strengthened a belief of
mine which is novel and altogether out of tunc

198

with the spirit of our time. I used to say that
whatever originality I possessed was due to the
fact that when I was a lad I passed the two
formative years from sixteen as a cowboy, with-
out books, and consequently was forced to answer
all the questionings of sense and outward things
for myself and furnish myself with a new creed,
and so learned to think — a part of education al-
most wholly neglected today. I profited so
much by this discipline that later when a book
like Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship" fell
into my hands I would not read it; I preferred
to think over the subject for myself and then
read the book just to see how much Carlyle could
enlarge or modify the conclusions to which I
had come. il!4i^'^

To reading one owes little! it adds nothing to
mental power ; it only swells the wallet of mem-
ory one has to carry. But thinking enlarges the
mind and invigorates it, just as exercise invigo-
rates the body.

And now in Loti I had found a man who
owed his direct and personal vision of things to
the fact that he had never read, had used his
own eyes and not the eyes of other men. He
was a master of the most musical French prose
without knowing anything of the great rheto-
ricians who had preceded him; without having
learned a cadence from Bossuet or an epithet
from Chateaubriand or Gautier.

199

I thus came to believe that cheap books and
papers are a hindrance to originality and not a
help; in the future men will read less and think
more. What a good thing it would be if here
in America men would prohibit newspapers in-
stead of wine. Wine helps digestion and adds
to the harmless pleasures of life, while news-
papers are seldom worth reading, and the habit
of glancing at them every hour or two, without
thinking, is more injurious to the mind that even
dram drinking is to the body.

Take up Bacon^s "Essays" or Schopenhaur's
and you will see at once that both these men
have thought and come to their own conclusions
without help from others, and how much
"meatier" and more nourishing they are than the
literary apes who brag of being "sedulous" in
parrotting.

I am not sure that Loti wears well ; he is too
sad. "Pecheur d'Islande" is perhaps his best and
most characteristic book; yet he only gives Gaud,
the charming heroine, a week of married hap-
piness when Yann, her stalwart husband, sails
away on that voyage to the Iceland fishing from
which he never returned. It is too little joy for
a whole life-time of sorrow.

I pick up another book of Loti's at haphazard
and find that toward the end he has told how a
common sailor has climbed as high as he can
get in the French Navv, has become senior war-

200

rant oiftcer, and at length has reached the age of
compulsory retirement. He has dreamt of free-
dom for thirty-odd years, has pictured to himself
the comfort and ease of unconstrained idleness;
he will have a house of his own; a bed, a real
bed to sleep in, and a little garden; fresh vege-
tables— a lazy quiet time for years before the
inevitable end.

"Jean Kervella comes to the cottage he has
bought on the road between Brest and Portzic;
it has a noble view of the harbor and ocean and
quite a large garden; a wonder-plot. He hangs
up his silver whistle over the chimney and sits
down to enjoy himself by his own fireside in
peace. It's going to be a wild night; he can hear
the swing of the waves on the whinstone crags
and that moan in the wind is not to be mistaken;
the clouds, too, are full of menace; but what
need he care? it can blow to split tarpaulins
while he lies snug.

"His thoughts went back to his earlier life
and his little girl who died while he was in Ton-
quin, and in the quiet and silence slow tears
gathered in his eyes, as stone sweats moisture,
and sadness came upon him and the tears pour
down his face like rain and drip over his thick
gray beard. It is not regret but just profound
sadness, an intimate distress, and he breaks down
at length in wild sobbing, with only one desire

201

at the heart of him, to be done with it all and
be at rest in the grave."

I know no sadder page ; it cannot be read with-
out tears the first time and it is too sad to read
again. But the books we love, the books that
will live, are those we read again and again and
draw fresh encouragement from revived hope
and courage wound up.

After all, we say Loti is too much of a pessi-
mist, too disenchanted, a little morbid, even. He
has never married and his life is lonely. Life
is harsh enough to the sensitive ones and cold to
passionate lovers; but in spite of everything life
is not so cruel as Loti paints it, and perhaps it's
a great writer's privilege to depict it as just a
little better and happier than it is on the prin-
ciple laid down by Goethe when he said: "Give
me your beliefs and affirmations; they encourage
and stimulate me ; but keep your doubts and fears
to yourself; I have enough of my own." An
English writer says:

''Life is mostly froth and trouble,
Two things stand like stone;
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own."

And so I say the brave guides will make little
of the rough places and untoward accidents of
this earthly pilgrimage and will dwell on the
joyous happenings, the dramatic chances and
romantic meetings of the great adventure.

202

Walter Pater

WALTER PATER.

EARS before I met Pater I had
heard of him. After going round
the world I returned to England
and was spending the summer in
Tenby, a lovely place on the shore
of South Wales. There I met an Oxford grad-
uate; I forget his name and all about him save
that he preached Pater, Pater unregenerate,
Pater the Pagan. He showed me long passages
of Pater's essays on the "Renaissance" and I
went down before him. Later I read Theophile
Gautier in Paris and found him the greater man
and greater writer with essentially the same
mental outlook. But for the moment I was car-
ried off my feet by Pater's carven prose and
enquired about him sedulously. My friend told
me that he knew him as a professor and lecturer
on Plato and more than hinted that Pater was
looked upon in Oxford with suspicion as the
apostle of an esoteric cult, the apologist of
strange sins. Not knowing then how common
this perversion is in England, I was a little
startled and tremendously curious. I asked him
for proofs, for some evidence, but could get none.
A little later Mallock's "New Republic" ap-
peared and apparentlv made a similar accusation

203

of perverse self-indulgence. Mr. Rose was evi-
dently intended to be a sketch of Pater, and
Rose confessed to a liking for erotic books and
talked so that Lady Ambrose says: "Mr. Rose
always speaks of people as if they had no clothes

on."

What foundation there may have been for the
darker suspicion, I did not and do not know,
am inclined indeed to believe that there was
nothing but Pater's talk that could be offered in
evidence; nothing more than such slander as
springs up against superiority, such supposition
as may be drawn from inference.

My interest in Pater thereby quickened, I
read all he had written, and even in his journal-
ism found nothing offensive, though I marked a
score of passages that might give pause to the
puritan. He talks once — I forget in what essay
— of a Shakespearean actor with a face of "not
quite reassuring subtlety, who might pass for the
original of those Italian or Italianized ('Italian-
ate' was the contemptuous Elizabethan adjec-
tive) voluptuaries in sin which pleased the fancy
of Shakespeare's age." There is nothing in this
if you like; but read carefully in puritanic Eng-
land there is contempt for the ordinary prejudice
in that ironical "not quite reassuring subtlety,"
and a gloating approval of "voluptuaries in sin,"
which goes far to explain how the suspicion may
have arisen as to Pater's morals.

20+

"But who are you," I said to myself, "to sit
in judgment on another man or condemn his
appreciations?"

Seven or eight years afterwards, in London,
I met Pater in the flesh, met him again and
again before I began to know him. He had
lunched with me, dined with me a dozen times
before he asked me to tea with his sisters and
then much later to dinner. He was the last man
in the world to wear his heart on his sleeve, or
give his confidence lightly. For several years he
held back from me, seemed surprised that I
should pursue him with friendly invitations,
should desire his company. And indeed for a
long time he was among the dullest and most
irresponsive of guests.

But the contrast between the person Pater and
his writings intrigued me, excited curiosity; the
old suspicion implanted in me would not be laid.
There was something enigmatical in his aloof-
ness, his studied reticence: — What was it?

In person Pater gave one the impression of
being big and heavy; he was only about five feet
nine or ten in height, stoutly built though neither
muscular nor fat; but he moved slowly, delib-
erately, and so conveyed the feeling of weight.
When he took off his hat the impression was
deepened; his face is perfectly given in Will
Rothenstein's outline sketch ; a great domed fore-
head, massive features, closed eyes and mouth

205

hidden under a heavy dark moustache; the tell-
tale features all concealed — blinds, so to speak,
before the windows of the soul.

When Pater looked at you, you were surprised
by the naked glance of the gray-green eyes. The
eyes revealed nothing; they were hard, bare,
scrutinizing. He had surely something strange,
unique, to say, this man. Why did he not say it?

He dressed conventionally; so perfectly in
the convention that he must have sought to evade
notice; why? He talked in the same way con-
ventional courtesies, warding off enquiry; in-
quisitiveness he met with monosyllables or mere-
ly by raising of eyebrows. What had he to hide
or to confess?

I still recall my surprise when I went to
Pater's to dinner for the first time. It was an
ordinary, little, middle-class English house; no
distinction about it of any kind. I had expected
a wonderful house, or unique decoration, or if
not that, at least a rare sketch, or plaster cast,
a sixteenth century book, a superb binding —
something that would suggest this man's lifelong
devotion to art, his single-hearted passionate
adoration of all the sanctities of plastic loveli-
ness. Not a sign of this; hardly a hint. The
house might have belonged to a grocer; might
have been furnished by one, only a grocer would
not have been content with its total absence of

206

ornament, its austere simplicity. Clearly Pater's
inspiration did not depend on surroundings.

Pater's sisters were two colorless spinsters of
a certain age. They talked little — a pair of mid-
Victorian ladies, prudish, reserved, meticulously
correct. Was it their influence, or what was it
that kept the talk in the shallows? I asked them
about life in Oxford ; "did they prefer it to the
life in London?"

"No," they thought they liked London best.
One of them said quietly it was a richer life, but
the other hesitated : "Oxford is so beautiful."

Thinking it all over afterwards, analyzing my
disappointment, the sisters and the house seemed
to me to represent the decorous dullness which
Pater fled in order to indulge his dreams of a
fuller and more passionate life in creative art.
Writing, I think, of Amiens Cathedral, he speaks
somewhere of "conceptions embodied in cliffs of
carved stone all the more welcome as a comple-
ment to the meagrcncss of most people's present
existence." He was under the influence of this
"meagrcncss, for when I tried to ask him about
his work he answered mc reluctantly in mono-
syllables. He spoke in a low voice that seemed
measured, though he often hesitated, picking his
words, intent on saying just what he wished to
say. There was no music in his utterance, no
thrill; it was lifeless, impassive like his face.

"Had you your essays on the Renaissance long
in hand?" I asked, knowing that most of them

207

had appeared first in The Fortnightly Review,
some as early as 1868, though the volume was
not published till 1873.

His brow wrinkled and he seemed a little per-
plexed.

"I suppose so; I do not remember very well."

"I always think," I went on, "that Sainte
Beuve's 'Lundis' are so good because he had
written most of the essays again and again for
newspapers before finally polishing and publish-
ing them in book form."

Pater still wore his reluctant, hesitating air.
"I try to make my first draft as complete as I

can."

I thought by showing more intimate interest
that I might arouse him, so I began :

"Long before I read your wonderful essay, I
was puzzled by the smile of the Mona Lisa. It
was more perfect still in Leonardo's St. John in
the Louvre, probably because the painting has
not been so tampered with. The mouth is smil-
ing, but if you cover it, you will find the eyes are
serious, searching, questioning. It is the ques-
tion in the eyes in contrast with the smiling lips,
that gives the enigmatic expression. Years later
I found Leonardo himself had explained the
^mile in this way, so my guess was right. It
pleased me inordinately at the time to have
divined the 'procede' (I did not wish to say
'trick')."

208

Pater contented himself with nodding his
head, so I dashed on:

"Of course, the painting is a poor thing; but
your page on it is, I think, the best page in all
English prose."

His brow cleared, and half smiling he mur-
mured: "Kind of you."

"How did you write it? Did you take especial
pains with it? But of course you did. Even
Shakespeare rewrote his principal passages a
dozen times."

"I take special pains," he replied, "with every
page — indeed with every sentence."

Later I found out what he meant by especial
pains.

When he had something new to express he
used to say the idea over and over again to him-
self and then write it fairly on a little slip of
paper. He would carry with him for a walk
perhaps half a dozen of these slips loose in his
pocket. When he found himself in a different
mood, by the riverside in Oxford, or under the
trees of Kensington Gardens, he would take out
a slip, repeat the sentence to himself again, cor-
rect the English now here, now there, and finally
perhaps end by finding a new form altogether
for the thought. When he came home he would
write this new sentence down and carry it about
with him for days till he was certain he could
not improve on it. Jeweller's work, or rather

209

the work of some great lapidary, fashioning the
stone to the idea in his mind, facet by facet with
a loving solicitude, an inexhaustible patience.

I had to be content with gleaning such facts
as this about him till I met him for the first time
with Oscar Wilde. Then I found a different
man.

I had invited them both to dinner and they
were evidently delighted to meet. For some
reason or other Oscar was not at his best; not so
vivacious, so charming, as usual. He begged
me to excuse him, hinting that I knew the cause
of his depression, and this sign of intimacy trans-
formed Pater. He moved freely, spoke freely,
without hesitation, though still deliberately and
manifestly with entire sincerity.

The change was marked to me by one inci-
dent.

It was about the time of the Dilke scandal,
and Oscar plainly wishing to ingratiate me with
Pater, told him how I had defended the famous
Radical even in The Evening News, a Conserv-
ative daily paper which I was editing at the
time.

"Frank is more than tolerant," Oscar re-
marked ; "he has a positive liking for all sinners,
even for strange sins — sins he's not inclined to."

"How did you come by such tolerance?" Pater
asked.

"Native viciousncss," I replied; "the cham-
210

bermaid's testimony that often three pillows
were wanted for Dilke's bed amused me, and I
hate even the word 'tolerance.' What human
being has a right to assume that superior atti-
tude to any other man or any fault? I have no
condemnations in me."

Pater nodded approval, smiling.

The ice was broken once for all. From that
moment Pater relaxed, began to let himself go,
was willing even to make an effect; little jewels
of expression, "carved ivories of speech," to use
his own fine phrase, made their appearance in
his talk; soul-revealing words like the praise he
has given to Leonardo's illegitimate birth, ascrib-
ing to it some "puissance" of nature; in fine the
real Pater showed himself ingenuously.
When he left he begged me to ask him again,
the usual courtesies warmed now by sincere feel-
ing.

I could not help telling Oscar how delightful
it was to me that the buttoned up, precise Pater
should have become so human, so interesting.
"I could not make up my mind," I said, "whether
he was merely shy, or afraid to let himself go."

"Not shy," Oscar rejoined, "but a burnt child ;
he used to speak very frankly in Oxford, I be-
lieve, till Mallock caricatured him."

"He's really a dear," he went on ; "only a few
of us know how kind he is, how really warm-
hearted. Ever since Oxford he has been a friend

211

of mine; a great friend" he repeated with em-
phasis.

Even after this Pater, when in ordinary com-
pany, would use his old discretion; but at mo-
ments the sun shone and I felt its warmth always
behind the cloud-cloak. Whenever a phrase
pleased him the mask would drop. His heavy
face would break into a smile, the green eyes
would be turned on you with their enigmatic,
lingering regard.

I well remember a dinner one summer even-
ing in a room overlooking Hyde Park, when
Matthew Arnold and Oscar were present. The
charming enthusiasm with which Oscar had
welcomed Arnold warmed our intercourse to
immediate intimacy.

"How delightful to meet you, Master 1" he
cried. "To find Oxford and all the charm of
Oxford here in London, with our host to suggest
another life that certainly is not the life of Ox-
ford;" and he laughed roguishly, with a touch
of malice that set us all smiling.

Matthew Arnold was evidently flattered by his
enthusiasm, and the dinner was a really wonder-
ful symposium from the beginning; more mag-
ical I cannot but think than that symposium of
Plato in which Socrates revealed the highest
reach of the Greek spirit.

Any one of these men could have talked as
lyrically about beauty, if he had wished, as

212

Socrates talked, and Oscar could certainly have
talked better. What, after all, did the Greek
say but what we all knew and felt; that one
worships first the beauty of form and color and
then the beauty of great lives nobly lived, and so
we're led to the feet of that supernal loveliness of
which all our creations are only reflections,
shadow-shapes of the divine made palpable.

I do not know how the conversation fell on
style, but I remember desiring a definition of it.

Neither of the poets would attempt any
formula for poetry, but Pater said he had some
ideas about style that he was going to put on
paper and I begged him to send me the essay as
soon as it was completed, which he afterwards
did. It is not important; has no place, I think,
in his best work.

But on the question of prose style they all had
opinions. Oscar thought that a perfect prose
style should be the style of conversation at its
best; "interspersed, of course," he added laugh-
ing, "with lyrical monologues"; and he smiled
with pleasure at having defended his own prac-
tice.

"I do not altogether agree with you," Matthew
Arnold objected:

"Surely the style of conversation is a little too
light, too loose, too careless. I should say there
must be something monumental in perfect style;
phrases such as one would write on a memorial

213

tablet; there should be a sententious brevity, a
weightiness about any utterance that is intended
to endure."

"Would you alter that definition?" I asked
Pater.

"I don't think prose has anything to do with
talk," he answered. "I think it should be a per-
fect expression of one's thought, but whether it
is like conversation or not seems to me of no
moment."

Max has since found the perfect word for
Pater's prose, putting his finger at once on its
excellence and its defect: "Pater," he said,
"writes English as if he were writing Latin ; he
handles it as if it were a dead language."

"And you," said Matthew Arnold, turning to
me, "you question us all, but you do not tell us
your idea."

Challenged in this way I could only speak
frankly:

"I like Boileau's phrase: un style simple,
serieux, scrupuleux va loin; but style to me," I
added, "has a thousand individualities. Style is
the way great men talk. That's the only defi-
nition which would include the chiselled sen-
tences of Pater and your fluid Addisonian Eng-
lish and Oscar's lyrical outbursts."

"Perhaps you are right," Arnold remarked
reflectively. "At any rate it would be hard to

214

put it better in an epigram. 'Style is the way
great men talk.' "

Pater and Oscar had a rooted regard for each
other and, what was better, a thoroughgoing ad-
miration for each other's talent. Oscar always
spoke of Pater's prose as the best in English lit-
erature, while Pater admired Wilde's sunny
humor and charming talent as a talker from the
bottom of his heart and without a spice of envy.

Now in this paper, now in that, Oscar re-
viewed whatever Pater wrote and usually with
intense appreciation. There always seemed to
me a tinge of the admiration of pupil for pro-
fessor in Oscar's exaggerated estimate of Pater's
merits. Pater's careful meticulous craftsman-
ship was so different from Oscar's improvisa-
tions that mutual admiration was to be expected;
the two talents being almost complementary.

In 1890 Oscar's story, "The Picture of Dorian
Gray," appeared in Lippincott's Magazine. It
was attacked on all hands in England with an
insane heat and virulent malevolence. I ad-
mired the story and asked Pater, who also liked
it, to write an appreciation of it for The Fort-
nightly.

"Dangerous, don't you think? Very danger-
ous," was his reply. "If I could do Oscar any
good I would not mind, but no one can save him.
I must think of myself. I will not rush in now;
perhaps later I'll say something. Oscar really

215

is too bold. The forces against him are over-
whelming; sooner or later he'll come to grief."
Others had seen the danger even earlier. I
remember how Rennell Rodd ten years before
sent a copy of his poems, "Songs in the South,"
to Oscar with this prophetic verse in Italian :

Al tuo martirio cupida e feroce
Questa turba cui parli accorrera;
Ti vertammo a veder sulla tua croce
Tutti, e nessuno ti compiagnera.

Which may be Englished: "At thy martyrdom
this greedy and cruel crowd to whom thou art
talking will assemble; they will all run to see
thee on the Cross and not one will pity thee."

A year and a half later, in November, 1891,
when the storm of slander and opprobrium had
blown itself out, Pater wrote of "Dorian Gray"
in the Bookman and praised it warmly. Even
then it might be called a brave act, an extraordi-
nary gesture for Pater, I felt, though I did not
yet know what constrained him to such caution.

I met him shortly afterwards.

"Fine work," I exclaimed, "not only as criti-
cism, but because you ventured to praise a work
that everyone is still damning and reviling."

He turned his eyes on me.

"It was dangerous," he said, "but a duty, I
thought."

The phrase struck me.
216

Later still, some time after "Marius the Epi-
curean," that he always regarded as his master-
piece, had been published, we lunched together
and talked of Puritanism and its numbing, with-
ering effects on all the rarest flowers of art and
literature.

"Why did you bow to it?" I asked. "If you
had opposed it stoutly you could have killed it."

"No, no," he cried, getting up and paling at
the very thought. "It would have killed me.
As it was, I was too bold . . . impossible."

At the time I could not for the life of me
understand Pater's dread of public opinion, the
unmanly shrinking from any conflict with the
dominant forces of the day. I put it all down
to English subservience to authority and con-
gratulated myself on being heir to a larger lib-
erty, and subject of a government founded in
rebellion, sanctified by successful revolt. I had
no idea then that the United States, too, a few
years later, would prefer the Tsar Wilson theory
of government to that of Jefferson.

About this time I published Pater's essay on
Merim^e in The Fortnightly, and that led to
frequent talks about the author of Carmen, who
had for years been one of my minor idols. Mer-
im^e touched life at many points and always
as a master; he was an intimate of Napoleon the
Third and had a certain influence on French
policy for ten or fifteen troubled years, and at the

217

same time without any apprenticeship showed
himself an artist and writer of the best.

Pater shared my enthusiasm and that brought
us together, and so gradually, the years helping,
we came to be friends and more or less intimate.

One day in Park Lane after lunch I got some-
how or other on a new theme with him.

"What have been the chief pleasures in life to
you?" I asked.

"Many," he replied simply; "the chief of them
connected with art or letters — with beauty in
some of its infinite modes. To find a church like
that dedicated to the Magdalen at Vezelay; to
come across an exquisite phrase in one's read-
ing; a phrase like a flower on the page, perfect
in form and color. To be able to lift it up
and show it to others — a divine pleasure; or to
hear a man talking really brilliantly, like Oscar
talks sometimes, as if inspired.

"But perhaps the greatest of all earthly de-
lights is the joy of creation. To write even one
sentence absolutely, the garment outlining the
thought perfectly; not fitting too closely, it would
be ungraceful ; yet not too loose, or too ornate it
would draw attention to the garment and so
appear affected, but just right, revealing more
than the naked truth can possibly reveal, with
a subtler evocation of beauty, a haunting seduc-
tion of rhythm.

"What a delight to have created one perfect
218

sentence; one phrase that some other lettered
reader must pick out and repeat to himself and
go about with as one goes about with some rare
jewel. The joys of the creative artist are surely
the rarest and the highest in the world."

"But has life itself held nothing better than art
for you?" I questioned. "Your devotion to books
always puzzles me. I find life so much more
wonderful than any transcript of it, however
exquisite. For instance, you speak of the Venus
of Milo with bated breath as of an impeccable,
unapproachable loveliness, and in statuary you
may be right; but in life I have seen two or three
girls' figures out of all comparison more beauti-
ful than any Venus. I know a little cabaret
dancer in Monmartre with a figure more perfect
than those on the frieze of the Temple to Nike
Apteros. ,

"You were probably the first to see and say
that all the spiritual influences of the past are
working together to create finer and finer types
of beauty. Why not go to life as the source and
spring instead of drinking out of some other
man's cup?"

"You may be right," Pater replied thought-
fully. "I remember often strolling through the
meadows to the river bank at Oxford and watch-
ing the students bathing. I can still conjure up
the lissom white figures against the green back-
ground, still see one youth poised on the bank

219

with his hands above his head preparing to
plunge. There he stood outlined like a Greek
god with the sunlight gilding his white limbs as
if amorous of their rounded beauty" — then, with
a sigh, the return: "Life is infinitely seductive,
but books are safer, much safer; our mild clois-
tered pleasures. . . ."

Somehow I felt that even to remember the
vision at Oxford was peculiar, personal; that
"mild cloistered pleasures," too, constituted a
confession.

Curiously enough, we both enjoyed good food
and good wine, and there happened to be in those
early nineties a superlative champagne whose
like has scarcely been seen since — Perrier Jouet
74. I talked of it once to Pater — I don't know
why. I asked him to come and try a magnum
of it. (A magnum is a large bottle containing
nearly two quarts.) Pater thought a magnum
would be too much, but I insisted that the wine
was better in the larger bottle.

He agreed to come, and we had a great din-
ner: zakoushki at first; followed by slices of roast
beef (a Scotch sirloin roasted on a spit before
a fire), and the invigorating champagne. A
magnum hardly satisfied our legitimate thirst,
and so we had a bottle of Comet port to follow
all cobwebbed without and caked within; yet
glowing with generous warmth and a bouquet
that from time to time drifted across the sweet

220

intoxication with lyrical interbreathing, so to
speak, of soul-seducing perfume.

Early in the evening we began talking of
Shakespeare, the only literary subject at that time
on which I felt sure of being Pater's equal. The
second or third glass of port transfigured Pater
and brought out his self-assertion, the real man.

"Of course," he cried, ''Shakespeare was one
of the greatest of men, the most articulate crea-
ture that ever lived; but think of his scoriae, my
dear fellow, the dull, stupid, windy eulogies of
rank and hierarchy, the dreadful scoriae of
Shakespeare."

A little later he returned to the charge.

"In all he has only written a dozen wonderful
pages, and if I have written one, as you are kind
enough to say, why should I bow down before
him?

"I dislike in my heart all this idolatry of the
past; Shakespeare was only one of us — primus
inter pares — if you like — the first among his
peers and equals, but that is all; nothing tran-
scendent or demanding reverence in him —
nothing."

When I accompanied him to the door a little
later and gave the hansom driver his address,
for the fresh night air had helped the fumes of
the wine. Pater stopped me as I was helping him
into the cab. "Don't forget, my dear fellow,"
he said, with the gravity peculiar to his state;

221 >

"never forget the scoriae of Shakespeare." And
in the cab as he drove away, he was still repeat-
ing "the scoriae, the scoriae of Shakespeare."

Next day it seemed to me that I had come into
touch with the very soul of Pater : a true artist,
he could not forgive the greatest of writers his
heedlessness, his scoriae.

If Pater had had a little more courage, I said
to myself, a little more vitality and hotter blood,
the richer life the wine called forth in him, he
would have been another Gautier; a guide to
lead Englishmen out of the prison of puritan-
ism ; for he hated the senseless restrictions of the
outgrown creed, and if he had had greater
strength he would have led the revolt.

Pater never married, has never been accused
of a love affair with any woman, and he died of
a weak heart at fifty-four in spite of regular
careful living; these facts explain to me all the
man's weakness — his abnormal caution, his hesi-
tancy, his reticence.

Had Pater had a strong heart he might have
given us a dozen pages as fine as that on Lady
Lisa. As it is, he has written perhaps the finest
page in all English prose, and that is enough for
any man's measure.

When Arthur Benson's "Life of Pater" was
published about 1911, I found that he had made
Pater out to have become a devout Christian in
the last years of his life. I wrote a passionate

222

indignant, contemptuous protest in a London
paper, John Bull, Here are Benson's words:

"We may think of him as one who ....
was deeply penetrated by the perfect beauty and
holiness of the Christian ideal, and reposed in
trembling faith on *the bosom of his Father and
his God.' "

Pater on the bosom of his Father and his God ;
Pater who in those last years often called Chris-
tianity the beautiful disease, the white leprosy
of the spirit! Never was there a more disgrace-
ful perversion of truth, a more flagrant outrage
on fact. But Benson didn't mind; he had made
his little bleating, and that was all he cared for
seemingly, just to win a cheap popularity with
a preposterous falsehood. I have done my best
here and elsewhere to kill the lie, but it persists
and demands stronger measures. The deepest
fact in Pater's spiritual make-up was his recog-
nition that it was a good thing to be free of the
dreadful doubtings of our childhood.

This world was always "unintelligible" to him.
In perhaps his last essay, that on Pascal, he tells
how Pascal owing to a nervous shock was con-
tinually haunted by the feeling that there was an
abyss there, by his side, and he would place a
chair or stick on it to chase away the delusion.

Pater himself suffered from the same malady.
He writes of Pascal's Pensees — "those great fine
sayings which seem to betray by their depth of

223

sound the vast unseen hollow places of nature,
of humanity, just beneath one's feet or at one's
side."

Pater was always conscious that the abyss was
close to him, beneath his feet.

Pater's place in literature, one fancies, is se-
cure. He is not of the Sacred Band of spiritual
adventurers who lead forlorn hopes or cross un-
charted seas to discover new continents; but he
has gone out of the beaten track and found a new
headland and taken possession of it and given
it his own name. We think of him as we might
think of Keats had he written nothing but the
Sonnet on Chapman's Homer. Pater had not
much to say, but he had one idea, and that im-
portant, and he said it superbly and for all time.

There is no vivid, creative genius in his work.
His Leonardo even does not live for us, and when
we enquire about the Italian's loves and hates,
tastes and amusements, we become conscious how
little Pater knows of the man. It is by what you
take delight in that you discover your real na-
ture; trahit cuique sua voluptas.

Pater is more interested in Leonardo's paint-
ings than in his personality; in the incidents of
his life than in the growth of his spirit. Yet
even in this thin sketch he can find time to speak
of a drawing in red chalk — "a face of doubtful
sex," and he tells us of the "youthful head which
love chooses for his own — the head of a young

224

man which may well be the likeness of Andrea
Salaino, beloved of Leonardo for his curled and
waving hair."

I think the last sentence he wrote in this essay
is perhaps the completest revelation of himself
which Pater could give in a single phrase :

"We forget them (the offices of religion) in
speculating how one who had been always so
desirous of beauty, but desired it always in such
precise and definite forms, as hands or flowers
or hair, looked forward now into the vague land,
and experienced the last curiosity."

But scattered through his works here and
there are sentences almost as significant: striving
to reveal himself, he says, in an early essay that
he was one in whom the love of beauty had
usurped the place of the ethical faculty.

In his essay on Winckelmann Pater is even
franker. He knew that Winckelmann never
came near the Greek spirit of the best time; like
Lessing, he mistook the Laocoon for a master-
piece; but Winckelmann had been notorious for
abnormal perversity, and so Pater was curious
about him and wrote of him at great length,
dwarfing him with a pedestal altogether too
lofty. There is a phrase or two in this essay in
which Pater unveils his heart to us. He quotes
the following passage from Winckelmann :

"I have noticed that those who are observant
of beauty only in women, and are moved little

225

or not at all by the beauty of men, seldom have
an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in
art. To such persons the beauty of Greek art
will ever seem wanting, because its supreme
beauty is rather male than female."

Now that is exaggerated to untruth, and by its
falsity throws a high light on Winckelmann's
abnormality. But there is one sentence even
more soul-revealing than this. Speaking of at-
tachments between men Pater says:

*'Of passion, of physical excitement, they
(such attachments) contain only just so much
as stimulates the eye to the finest delicacies of
colour and form."

In other words, Pater's perversity is mainly
mental, or to put it in another way, his physical
hold on life was so slight that his desire merely
led him to a finer appreciation of the beauties of
art — the sanctities, as I have called them, in his
own spirit, the sanctities of plastic loveliness.

226

Herbert Spencer

HERBERT SPENCER: PHILOSOPHER

EREDITH says in one of his letters,
if I remember rightly, that it is not
well for any man to be praised too
much in his lifetime. The phrase
struck me because the truth had been
made plain to me through my acquaintance with
Herbert Spencer long before.

I must begin by saying that I am not an ad-
mirer of so-called "philosophers." The best of
them seem to me to have had a glimpse or two
of new truth and to have battered out the tiny
speck of golden thought over innumerable pages,
trying to make an idea or two into a system.

Kant, for example, saw the relativity of space
and time, and with that and a hair-splitting
difference between reason and understanding
composed a huge book, turning even platitudes
into puzzles.

Bacon and Schopenhauer are to me the great-
est of thinkers, but I prefer Bacon's essays to
his more ponderous treatises, and Schopen-
hauer's critical writings are more valuable to
me because more readable than his "World as
Will and Appearance." Plato, on the other
hand, I can rejoice in with my whole soul ; but

227

he is rather an artist in thought than a thinker —
a poet rather than a philosopher.

From the popularity he has acquired in a
dozen European countries one feels pretty cer-
tain that Mr. Herbert Spencer will be cited
among the great philosophers of the future, yet
I think his accomplishment small, his contribu-
tion to the sum of truth of slight importance.

I remember Huxley praising him one day,
and when I objected he told me that Herbert
Spencer had done almost as much for the theory
of evolution as Darwin himself. I pointed out
that the theory was more or less in the air of
the time and that all good minds had had an
inkling of it. He admitted that there was some
truth in my contention, but stuck to his high
estimate of Spencer.

I could not agree with him. Coleridge, I
argued, had grasped the theory of evolution half
a century before Darwin; had even seen in talk-
ing of artistic creation that a man grows from
the simple to the complex.

Huxley seemed interested, but Spencer was a
fetish to him.

In the late eighties I met Herbert Spencer in
London rather frequently. The first impression
he made on me was of physical weakness and
age. He was of middle height or thereabouts;
very thin and withered, with a large forehead
and head which dwarfed the figure. I thought of

228

him as a sort of animated tadpole. He seemed
pinched and desiccated with age, his expression
one of querulous impatience as of a man who has
suffered a great deal and become embittered.

In one of our early conversations he told me
that he regarded George Eliot as the greatest
woman novelist in English. I ventured to say
that it would be very hard indeed to oust Jane
Austin from that position, and for myself I pre-
ferred Emily Bronte to either of them.

He took time to formulate his thought and
then replied like an oracle:

"I regard George Eliot not only as the great-
est woman novelist, but as the greatest woman
that ever lived. A woman of masculine under-
standing and intelligence, a woman who makes
one hope that in time women may come to be
the equals of men."

I let the pompous judgment pass, but I would
give a dozen George Eliots and Spencers to
boot for one Joan D'Arc or Charlotte Corday.

I remember meeting Spencer once in Hyde
Park about one o'clock and asking him to lunch.

"I have to be very careful about what I eat,"
he said; "anything rich disagrees with me."

I assured him that I only liked simple things,
too, and so we lunched together.

I was eager to find out one thing which had
always puzzled me in his work; he seemed to
have a curious blind spot in his intelligence.

239

I suppose he was the first to treat the nation
as a body corporate and to speak of the railroads
and roads as the veins and arteries and the elec-
tric wires as nerves. He was perhaps the first,
too, to state what some of us saw before reading
him, that pressure from the outside increases
the amount of cohesion among individuals in the
body corporate; that where you have great pres-
sure from the outside, as for example in Ger-
many, there will be great cohesion; where you
have little outside pressure, as in America and
Great Britain, the atoms that compose the social
organism will tend to fall apart and there will
be a great deal of what is known as individual
liberty, and individual self-assertion.

But this law of physics does not go far to
explain human society; Spencer was suddenly
confronted with the fact that in Britain, when
individual liberty was at its height and the state
hardly counted, a great movement towards so-
cialism made itself felt. Trades unions sprang
up on all hands, vast co-operative societies
among workingmen, and private societies, too,
in the guise of joint-stock companies.

Herbert Spencer accepted this "voluntary co-
operation," as he called it, as a sign of progress,
but the nationalization of railroads and other
public utilities seemed to him a mistake; all
, industries, he thought, could be better managed
by the individual.

230

I was very eager to learn whether he saw that
this predilection in favor of individualism was
a mere result of his having been born and bred
in Britain, and so I put it to him that we had
entered into a new era and that state socialism
was everjrwhere coming into being.

I was astonished to find that he would not
admit this new theory at all; would not even
let himself discuss it reasonably; and when I
pointed out that the railroads in Germany under
state ownership had done better than any pri-
vately owned railroads anywhere, and therefore
urged that all public utilities should be nation-
alized, he exclaimed tartly:

"I cannot agree with you at all. It is pure
heresy. The individual is always a more com-
petent director of labor than the State."

"But there are departments of industry," I
objected, "so great that an individual cannot
control them alone. Do you mean also that vol-
untary co-operation of individuals in joint stock
companies is more effective than state owner-
ship?"

"Certainly, certainly," he replied.

I reminded him that Stanley Jevons had once
demonstrated that joint stock company manage-
ment had every possible fault of State manage-
ment with none of its advantages. I regarded
this fact as an established, self-evident truth.

"Self-evident nonsense," he barked, trembling
231

from head to foot in his excitement. "I do not
agree with you at all. In my books I have set
forth the truth, and I think established it. Every
first-rate man I have ever met has had nothing
but praise and admiration for my work, and
now to find it called in question is distressing to
me and I must not be distressed. Such discus-
sion hurts my heart, makes it beat faster, and I
cannot have my heart's action deranged."

He spoke with such peevish irritability, such
angry ill-temper, that I could only apologize.

"I am very sorry," I purred; "I had no idea
that you would mind discussing anything so long
as one tried to be reasonable. I am very sorry.
We will talk of something else."

"I am reasonable," he persisted, still in the
pettish, vexed voice. "I am reasonable, but I
cannot bear contradiction. I am not strong
enough to argue. I must go," and away he
toddled to the door.

I went downstairs with him out of courtesy,
repeating: "I am very sorry; I had no idea; pray
forgive me."

At the front-door he stopped, and I thought
he had stopped to excuse his puerile bad tem-
per, so I smiled at him deprecatingly, for I
really felt sorry that I had annoyed him.

"My health has never been strong," he com-
plained in the same querulous, acrid, thin voice.
"I wish I had brought my ear-stoppers with me,

232

then I need not have heard," he snapped. ^'1
must not forget them in the future. I cannot
endure contradiction; it excites me unduly.
Good-day to you," and away he went, leaving
me not knowing whether to be sorry or to laugh.

Too much adulation, I thought, had turned
the old fellow's brain, and he had given up
thinking for pontificating.

Whenever I heard the word "philosopher"
afterwards, I smiled, thinking of Spencer and
his ear-stoppers. Without a healthy body, I said
to myself, there is no health in thought or spirit.
But had I known more, I should have been more
considerate, as I shall show in due course.

A good many years elapsed before I heard of
Spencer's death and then of the publication of
his "Autobiography." I could not help wonder-
ing what sort of a life-story he had had and
how he had written it. He had never married,
was commonly supposed never to have felt any
liking for any woman except George Eliot; on
the other hand, he had lived to a great age, had
come early to reputation; had been a member
of the Athenaeum Club for forty years; had met
all the English celebrities of his time and must
have left most interesting memories.

I sent for the book ; two huge volumes of 600
pages each, some 400,000 words at least — a
windy herol And there was no story, so to say,
at all; no romance; no youthful love affair; no

233

mature passion; no exciting or extraordinary
happening, except the fact that his American
admirers had subscribed some $7,000 and given
it to him, midway in his career, to pay the ex-
penses of publishing his works. Though Spen-
cer's whole life was narrated in great detail and
every personal trait — mental, physical and path-
ological, minutely described, there was no living
person in the book: analysis is not creation.

Curiously enough, Carlyle, whom Spencer
disliked, comes nearer to living than anyone else
mentioned in these dreary pages. Spencer calls
him "a queer creature"; characterizes his talk
as "little else than a continued tirade against 'the
horrible, abominable state of things' ....
epithet piled on epithet, and always the strongest
he can find. . . . He is evidently fond of a
laugh, and laughs heartily. . . . His wife is
intelligent, but quite warped by him."

After saying that he only saw him three or
four times in all, Spencer adds: "I found that
I must either listen to his absurd dogmas in
silence, which it was not my nature to do, or get
into fierce argument with him, which ended in
our glaring at one another."

And then the summing up, at once curiously
characteristic of Spencer and a little unfair:

"Lewes used to say of him that he was a poet
without music; and to some, his denunciations
have suggested the comparison of him to an old

234

Hebrew prophet. For both of these character-
izations much may be said. By others he has,
strange to say, been classed as a philosopher!
Considering that he either could not or would
not think coherently — never set out from prem-
ises and reasoned his way to conclusions, but
habitually dealt in intuitions and dogmatic as-
sertions, he lacked the trait which, perhaps more
than any other, distinguishes the philosopher
properly so called. He lacked also a further
trait. Instead of thinking calmly, as the philoso-
pher above all others does, he thought in a pas-
sion. It would take much seeking to find one
whose intellect was perturbed by emotion in the
same degree." Or "guided by emotion" shall we
say, Mr. Spencer; for Vauvenargues has taught
us that "all great thoughts come from the heart."

It is worth noting as characteristic that
Spencer should have come nearer to picturing
Carlyle through dislike than George Eliot
through liking and sincere admiration. The
truth is his dislikes were stronger than his lik-
ings, though both were rather tepid, far too
tepid ever to have suggested to him an artist's
passion or artist phrases. Many a philosopher
is made by poor blood and lukewarm feelings:
weakness masking as impartiality.

Spencer is unable even to give us a vivid pic-
ture of George Eliot. If you read between the
lines, however, you will find that, in spite of his

235

admiration for her mind and character and her
discipleship, he could not love her because she
was too homely. Apropos of nothing at all, he
suddenly writes: "Physical beauty is a sine qua
non with me; as was once unhappily proved
where the intellectual traits and the emotional
traits were of the highest."

An incident will show more completely the
relationship between the two:

One of my earliest memories of London is of
an evening spent in the house of George Eliot.

Was she Mrs. Lewes at the time or Mrs.
Cross? I forget; George Eliot always to me:
I forget, too, where the house was — somewhere
near Regent's Park I think — I can't remember
even the name of my introducer; yet the scene
itself is unforgettable to me and as vivid as if
it had taken place yesterday.

I had a great admiration for the author of
"The Mill on the Floss." I was influenced by
the over-estimate of the time and believed her
to be an unique woman, a great writer, one of
the fixed stars in the firmament of literature;
consequently I was all worked up with expect-
ancy and hope.

Her appearance shocked me: the long horse
face, the pale eyes, the gray, thick skin, the
skinny hands; surely, I said to myself, genius
never wore so appalling, so commonplace a
mask; grotesque ugliness, deformity even would

236

have been less disappointing to me than this
complete absence of anything arrestingly sym-
pathetic or even distinctive,
being a student in Germany (I had been study-
ing in Heidelberg) ; said she ought to have been
a man and a German student. Herbert Spencer,
who seemed to hold the center of the stage,
pursed out his lips and said something about the
cruelty and bullying of the German corps-stu-
dents; George Eliot agreed with him, showing
absurd deference, I thought. She said nothing
of any weight or novelty and her way of speak-
ing was distinguished only by a touch of
formality.

At that time Carlyle was the only other celeb-
rity I had met ; but how different. One needed
no assurance that he was of the Immortals — a
Titan, if ever there was one; he never talked for
talking's sake; never used second-hand or ordi-
nary expressions; always spoke significantly, an
authentic prophet and seer.

George Eliot turned to Spencer again and
again that evening with curious appeal as to an
oracle, and the oracle was not mystic as at Del-
phi, but commonplace, self-satisfied, "school-
mastery," I said to myself disdainfully — for evi-
dently he knew nothing really of the life of the
German corps-student. He seemed to me
learned perhaps, but not wise; I had no rever-

237

ence whatever for the man.

"What can she see in him?" I kept asking my-
self in wonder.

All the time I wanted to say something ex-
pressive of my contempt for him and my admir-
ation for her; but I was very young and awed
a little by their reputations; did not feel master
of the situation, so kept quiet on the whole and
behaved fairly well, I hope.

That evening showed me that George Eliot
was to be congratulated on her escape from
Spencer; his companionship developed the
rationalistic side of her nature and so harmed
her as an artist beyond all telling. If anyone
cares to compare "The Scenes from Clerical
Life," or even "Adam Bede," or "The Mill on
the Floss," with "Daniel Deronda," he will
realize the full extent of the artistic injury done
her by long and close association with Spencer.
She ought to have been brought to feel more
and think less; whereas she was encouraged to
think and reason and debate instead of living
and loving.

Carlyle and Spencer always seemed to me the
Plato and the Aristotle of our time, and I have
already warned my readers of my preference for
the poet or artist, even as steersman of the ship.
Carlyle saw incomparably further and deeper
than Spencer, saw that "the present horrible,
abominable state of things" could not last, that

238

our modern capitalist, individualistic society
was headed straight for Niagara and already in
the rapids. It is hardly too much to say that
Carlyle predicted the disaster which has lately
befallen the nations; his passion came from his
understanding of the peril ; our Aristotle, on the
other hand, had no "premises" to argue from
and so came to no such pregnant conclusion.

Yet this "Autobiography" has a pathetic in-
terest for me. In it Spencer tells how he broke
down at thirty-five from overwork and never
afterwards regained complete health.

At the time of our meeting he was only able
to dictate for ten minutes at a time, and the
slightest overwork, bodily or mental, or even
undue attention, would render sleep impossible,
and so he came to use ear-stoppers, which saved
him from hearing or feeling too much.

And once the periodicity of sleep broken, his
wretched nerves would grow worse and worse,
so that he had to lay all work aside at once, seek
sleep and ensue it. Mr. Carnegie gave him a
piano; like Saul he engaged a David (a girl
pianist) to play for him, but the pleasure was too
great; he had to deny himself the enjoyment.
For forty or fifty years his life was one long
struggle with "nerves" and sleeplessness.

But even here he is too much of a philosopher
to excite our pity. The artist nature aflflicted in
this way would have surely done something to

239

excess; would have spent days in writing or
nights in passionate living, and the "nerves" and
sleeplessness would have led to that thin line
that divides sanity from insanity.

And before that spectre the bravest quails.
Shakespeare's anguished cry constricts the heart:

"Make me not mad, kind Heaven, not mad."

That is the torture-chamber of our modern life,
which Shakespeare and Dostoievsky alone of
men so far, have dared to enter or been able to
describe. Maupassant went in, it is true, but
never came out again to live as a man among
men ; we heard his first screams and the squeal-
ing idiot laughter, and later his horrible, jibber-
ing mutism, and then mercifully the curtain fell.
But Spencer had not to pay any such price.
As soon as he got "quirks" and "the strange feel-
ing in his head," he dropped everything and
went after health. He was a philosopher. True,
he didn't get health, and so his experience is not
much good to us, either as warning-signal or as
guide-post. He never even learned that change,
continual change of scene, of food, of compan-
ionship, is the golden way to lead the neuras-
thenic back to health ; especially, for the artist or
writer, change to an open-air life; a riding tour
or a motor-car trip across a continent; some
change that bathes one all day long in sunshine
and affords one ever-varying incidents and light,
passing pleasures affords an almost certain cure.

240

But still Spencer's breakdown and subsequent
ill-health made him a pathetic figure to me;
filled me indeed with regret, if not remorse, that
I had been so discourteous as to annoy him with
my rude health and ruder difference of opinion.

A few years later I, too, learned what
"nerves" were and knew that a debate rudely
pushed on one might have appalling conse-
quences. Our excuse is: we know not what we
do.

More than anything we men need constant
consideration for others, the most tremulous
womanly sensitiveness, and we are all too apt
to show hard indifference or that unthinking
selfishness which is the brazen shield and front
of all human wrong-doing.

But now, before I leave this "Autobiography,"
let me say that there are good things in it; food
for the mind, if not for the soul.
, Spencer's ideas on education, his conviction
that an elementary knowledge even of our own
bodies and minds, of physiology and psychology,
would be a thousand times more valuable than
a smattering of Latin and Greek; his insistence
on teaching the true conduct of life, on having
the pitfalls and dangers of living explained even
to children, were all very valuable and far ahead
of ordinary opinion even in our time.

He knew something about learning how to
think. For instance, he notices the fact that in

241

2L hilly country the roads are far below the level
of the surrounding land, whereas on a plain the
roads are on much the same level as the adjacent
fields. To explain this properly is the sort of
problem, he says, which should be given to young
people to solve; it would help to teach them
how to think, and he is right. Such a problem,
solved without help, is often the beginning of
original thought.

On the other hand, his limitations are aston-
ishing. He cannot see himself from the outside
and he is continually deducing inferences from
his own experiences which are ridiculously ab-
surd. He finds that the drawbacks of philo-
sophic study, or indeed of any serious literary
life, are greater than the advantages. First of
all, he says, unless "a man's means are such as
enable him not only to live for a long time with-
out returns, but to bear the losses which his
books entail on him, he will soon be brought
to a stand and subjected to heavy penalties." He
adds, naively: "My own history well exempli-
fies this probability, or rather certainty." And
he sums up : "Evidently it was almost a miracle
that I did not sink before success was reached."
He is always a pessimist; it is only fair to say
that for a man of talent the literary life in spite
of the precarious reward, which is its chief
drawback, is the best and largest life offered to
men in our age. It has one paramount advantage

242

that dwarfs all drawbacks. It confers a sort of
universal introduction and enables one without
wealth or birth to meet on an equal footing all
the most distinguished men of the time.

Even Schopenhauer, the so-called pessimist,
knew that "a poet or philosopher should have no
fault to find with his age if it only permits him
to do his work." And no age can prevent him.
Were this the place, it would be easy to show
that every age is propitious to genius and high
endeavor; like calls to like; great men in every
department of life recognize each other and hold
it a duty to help the man who reminds them of
the dreams of their youth. That Spencer never
felt the thrill of recognition and comradeship
simply proves that he was not of the lineage of
the great, is not to be reckoned with Schopen-
hauer and Bacon.

Yet, within his limits, he tried to be fair-
minded and did excellent work. He writes:

"Even at the present moment, the absolute
opposition between the doctrine of forgiveness
preached by a hundred thousand European
priests, and the actions of European soldiers and
colonists who out-do the law of blood-revenge
among savages, and massacre a village in retalia-
tion for a single death, shows that two thousand
years of Christian culture has changed the prim-
itive barbarian very little. And yet one cannot
but conclude that it has had some effect, and may

243

infer that in its absence things would have been
worse. ...

"Thus I have come more and more to look
calmly on forms of religious belief to which I
had, in earlier days, a pronounced aversion."

At long last he writes: "I have come to re-
gard religious creeds with a sympathy based on
community of need; feeling that dissent from
them results from inability to accept the solu-
tions offered, joined with the wish that solutions
could be found." He was always just on Ten-
nyson's level:

"Behold, we know not anything,
We can but trust that Good may fall,
At last, far off, at last — to all.
And every Winter change to Spring."

244

^^•.

The Right Hon. Arthur J. Balfour

THE RIGHT HON. ARTHUR BALFOUR:
AMERICA'S NEWEST GUEST

/ leave this pen-portrait as it ivas written in
March 1917, for it derives a certain peculiar in-
terest from the circumstances of the time.

Frank Harris.

HO would have predicted fifteen
years ago that America would fight
Germany on behalf of the very men
who made war on the Boer Re-
publics? Yet here we have Mr.
Arthur Balfour on his way to Washington to
confer with our President how best to organize
victory.

Mr. Balfour has not changed in the mean-
while. He stands now precisely where he stood
then; he is the same convinced, contemptuous,
courteous antagonist of human equality that he
was when he sneered at the Boer farmers and the
"dead level of ignorant herdsmen."

In order to avoid any suspicion of prejudice
let me prove this before going further, for I
have an artist's liking for a man who is true to
type, and in this case the type is a fine one.

Wishing to write on the Russian Revolution
recently my knowledge, especially of the young-
er Russian leaders, had to be refurbished and

245

brought up to date ; accordingly I applied to all
the Russian leaders and thinkers I could get in
touch with in New York City. One of the ablest
I met was Leo Trotsky, a Russian Jew and revo-
lutionary, a man who had spent and been spent
in the cause of social justice. Trotsky's person-
ality seemed to me charming; a man slightly
below middle height, broad, strong, vitally alert;
a mop of thick, bristling, rebellious black hair,
regular features, broad forehead, the whole face
lit up by a pair of glowing bright dark eyes —
the eyes of an enthusiast or captain. Trotsky
talked to me for hours, sharpening, clarifying
my view of this man and that, putting Prince
Lyov in his true place as a kindly, honest medi-
ocrity with the same ease and certainty that he
classed the enthusiastic young lawyer, Kerensky,
or the Socialist, Tscheidze.

His precision of knowledge was matched by
his width of vision. He saw clearly that as the
revolution went on, the Moderates would be
eliminated; that the extreme social revolution-
aries would surely come more and more to
power, for they would be reinforced by others
freed from the prisons of absolutism in South
Russia and Siberia. He spoke of the new Rus-
sia as one would speak of a beloved woman who
had been defiled and tortured, and now having
conquered her persecutors was intent on paying
her debt to humanity by ideal devotions.

246

*'Holy Russia as leader of the free peoples,
Russia as the one country that could make the
United States of Europe a possibility," — was the
vision splendid that enthralled him.

"You are going back?" I asked.

"Surely," he cried, "at once; a dozen of us."

"Are you sure of getting to Petrograd?" I
asked.

"Sure," he replied. "Who'd stop us?"

"England might stop you," I ventured.

"England 1" he exclaimed. "England is with
the Allies. England is Russia's friend. Why
should England stop us?"

"England is the friend of the Czar," I replied.
"England, you know, gave all Milyukov's secrets
six months ago to the Czar's Government."

"That's all past," he cried. "England could
not stop us now if she would and would not if
she could; you forget, we shall be on a neutral
ship, really under the Stars and Stripes coming
from an American port; as safe as in our beds
here."

"Perhaps so," I answered. "I hope you are
right, but the English oligarchy is in power:
Balfour and his lieutenants, Lords Curzon and
Milner; they are not in sympathy with revolu-
tionaries who dream of social equality. They
know their real enemies, believe me!"

247

Trotsky would not even listen ; an optimist by
nature, he was now winged with hope.

A week later the news came; Leo Trotsky and
nine of his fellows had been seized on board a
neutral ship in Halifax. In spite of their pro-
tests they were thrown into prison and shortly
afterwards transferred to a camp for interned
German enemies at Amherst in Canada.

His friends protested to our President, but
without success. Meanwhile the punishment of
these innocent enthusiasts is continued. A word
from President Wilson would probably free
them; but he remains silent, though, of course,
not indifferent. Similar high-handed action on
the part of Great Britain brought about the War
of 1812, and what we fought then to prevent, we
can hardly accept to-day with complacence. The
imprisonment of Trotsky and his friends is Ar-
thur Balfour's reply to President Wilson's warm-
hearted welcome to the Russian revolutionaries
and his wide-flung assurance that America is
entering this war to fight for human freedom and
for democracy against the injustices of autocratic
tyranny.

I see Arthur Balfour entering the White
House, smiling and shaking hands with Presi-
dent Wilson, but his right foot is planted on Leo
Trotsky's face.

And Leo Trotsky, the outcast Jew and revolu-
248

tionary, is far more valuable to humanity than
Arthur Balfour, who took him from a neutral
ship in defiance of law and right and now holds
him in prison.

Who is Mr. Arthur Balfour? His outward,
as Hamlet would say, is that of a scholar and
courtier, captivatingly sympathetic. He is over
six feet in height, slight, stooping, with a large
head and a prodigiously high forehead framed
now with silver hair; the complexion is as fresh
as that of a boy; the eyes are blue, patient, with-
out being searching, amiably mirroring pleas-
ant surroundings. He has perfect manners till
he is crossed. He was called Miss Arabella at
Eton till people found out that he was as auto-
cratic and hard as Nero. A few incidents of his
career will paint this typical aristocrat to the life.

I do not need to tell of his youthful vagaries :
how he became known as a lieutenant of Lord
Randolph Churchill and the supporter of "The
Souls," and how he sat at the feet of Lady Elcho.
It is enough to say here that "The Souls" was a
select coterie of the smartest set in London in the
eighties, with Lady Brownlow and George Cur-
zon and Margot Tennant (now Mrs. Asquith)
as the most fervent adherents.

The first time the outside public got any ink-
ling of Balfour's quality was when he became
Chief Secretary for Ireland. For a little while

249

the Irish hoped great things of him. He was
so courteous, so well-read, listened with such
sympathetic attention that they thought he was
an "easy mark," as American slang has it, but
they soon found out that, while listening to all
they had to say, he promised nothing and would
not yield an iota. They attacked him then in
the House and insulted him to his face. He
listened to their abuse as he had listened to their
praise with the same smiling, gentle courtesy,
and went on backing up the oligarchy, ruthlessly
evicting tenants, and ruining whole countrysides
to the very verge of rebellion.

One word of his about the Irish members de-
serves to be recorded. Speaking of the way they
had treated Chief Secretary Foster — "Buckshot"
Foster — he said:

"So long as he was in power they were black-
ening his character; now that he attacks the Gov-
ernment, they are blackening his boots."

The whole quarrel was typified in the agita-
tion about "O'Brien's Breeches." O'Brien, who
had met Mr. Balfour frequently at social func-
tions, and rather liked him, protested against
being put in the hideous uniform of the ordinary
criminal. He was a political prisoner, he said,
and would not wear the badge of shame. He
took off the suit and shivered naked in his cell.
The next day they clothed him forcibly and told

250

him that if he took off the prison uniform again
he would be punished as any other rebellious
prisoner was punished; and finally O'Brien gave
in with a bad cold in his head, and Mr. Bal-
four's victory was hailed with jeers of contempt
for the Irish.

But if you think of it, what a paltry victory it
was? One asked oneself: Does Mr. Balfour
really think he is living in Russia that he can
treat political prisoners as common criminals?
I heard him once remark that he could see no
difference between political prisoners and burg-
lars and murderers except that the political pris-
oners were of a class to know better and so their
guilt was deeper.

People found out that "Miss Arabella" as
Irish Secretary was a fighter to the last ditch.

In the beginning of the South African war it
will be remembered that the Boers won victory
after victory. Their riflemen outshot the British
soldiers much as the American riflemen outshot
Wellington's veterans at New Orleans. Buller
was beaten to a standstill in Natal. The whole
of Cape Colony was in a ferment. After Mag-
ersfontein and the whipping of Lord Methuen,
it looked as if the British might lose South Af-
rica. At the Cabinet meetings Mr. Chamberlain
showed himself shaken to the soul. He kept
repeating continually that he had been deceived

251

by the War Office; that the generals had assured
him that the war would be finished in three
months; that it would be a "walkover."

But Mr. Balfour came to the Cabinet meet-
ings smiling and disinterested as ever and usual-
ly half an hour late. When his colleagues doubt-
ed he was surprised ;when they looked at one an-
other in consternation he shrugged his shoulders.
In the darkest days he was just as amusedly de-
tached as he was in the beginning of this war.

He defended the burning to the ground of the
farmhouses of non-combatant Boers; he ap-
proved the herding of the Boer women and chil-
dren into the deadly Concentration Camps in
the Transvaal where milk was not to be had.
When he was taunted by an Irishman with "the
Slaughter of the Innocents," he retorted that the
gentleman was no doubt justified in defending
his own kind — a gibe too bitter to be appre-
ciated by the House, though every one knew
that "innocent" is often used in Ireland chari-
tably for "idiot." Many members were shocked
to find that urbane, smiling, gentle leader cared
little for human life or the conventions of civil-
ized warfare: "No omelet without breaking
eggs" is his motto.

Courage Arthur Balfour has of a high quality
— all but the highest, indeed — for invincible
courage is the martyr's, and is grounded in clear

252

insight into the Right and uncompromising as-
sertion of it.

His cool selfishness was not without ambition.
As soon as he was strong enough he favored an
intrigue which forced Lord Salisbury to resign
the post of Prime Minister, and the nephew
reigned in the uncle's stead. Arthur Balfour
thought this a natural, indeed an inevitable, con-
clusion, but Hugh Cecil, the ablest of Lord Sal-
isbury's sons, has never forgiven the "cuckoo"
feat.

Arthur Balfour showed himself at his very
strongest in dealing with Mr. Chamberlain after
the Boer War. Mr. Chamberlain had been a
confirmed Free Trader for thirty years. In the
war against the Boers he found out what the
colonists were worth and he began to dream of
a great Confederation of British States. He saw
at once that this necessitated protection of the
products of the Empire and free exchange within
the Empire. He therefore put this forward in
a speech without any reference to Mr. Balfour
— a plain challenge for the leadership. A fort-
night later Mr. Balfour answered him. Every
one expected that he would attack Mr. Cham-
berlain, or at any rate repudiate his policy, but
he merely said that it was a very interesting de-
parture, indeed ; as a Conservative he could not
but see a good deal in it and he was delighted

253

that the Colonial Secretary should at length have
taken cognizance of those forces which bind men
together in society. An anecdote at this time
will show the man.

He lives at Whittinghame, his country house
in Scotland, with a sister, a very advanced
thinker — Susan or Sarah Balfour, I forget
which: we will call her Miss Susan.

One night she was expected from London and
was rather late. Arthur Balfour waited dinner
for her. When she came into the dining-room
she was evidently very excited.

"What is the matter, Susan?" said Arthur.
"You seem excited."

"For the first time in my life," said Miss
Susan, "I have been treated rudely by a work-
ingman."

"Really!" he remarked; "have you ever been
treated rudely by gentlemen?"

"By well-dressed wasters, often," retorted the
lady, "and now by a workingman."

"How was that?"

"I got into a third-class carriage as usual,"
said Miss Susan, "and there was a workingman
in it who spat on the floor. When I reproved
him and told him he ought to be ashamed of
himself and go in a cattle-truck if he wanted to
be dirty, he answered that I ought to be ashamed
of myself; I ought to go in a first-class carriage,
where I belonged, and leave workingmen who

254

had done a day's work to take their rest quietly
in the train without being bothered by super-
fine manners.

"I told him his spitting was disgusting, more
like a pig than a man ; I said if he did it again
I would give him in charge. Don't you think I
was right?"

"I don't really know," said Arthur Balfour.
"The *pig' and 'cattle-truck' epithets were no
doubt effective, but rather in the manner of the
Colonial Secretary, don't you think? ....

As Prime Minister and Leader of the House
of Commons Arthur Balfour was a failure;
came, indeed, to complete grief, and this in spite
of English snobbery and his own high qualities.
He grew to be too autocratic and asserted a more
than Popish infallibility. He fell of his own
strength. Not only was he an aristocrat by birth
and natural leader of the oligarchy, but he was
a man of the widest reading and culture — a
Scotch metaphysician who had taught himself
to think out the non-utilitarian problems of
Why? Whence? and Whither? to the verge of
the Unknown. On a ceremonial occasion he
could make a speech in the House which put
Mr. Asquith's best work in a secondary place.
He alone could rise to the height of every argu-
ment, and yet as a leader of the House he failed,
even in England, and not of weakness but of
autocratic egotjsm.

255

He announced that any one who ventured to
criticize him or dissent from his policy had
better leave the party, for he assuredly would
not help him to office. He would have no lieu-
tenant that was not a servant and servile.

Winston Churchill was the first to take up the
glove. He criticized Balfour in the House and
defied him; then left the party and became a
leader of the Liberals. I well remember the
night in the House when he made his great
speech and how Arthur Balfour got up in the
middle of it and walked out as if he was uncon-
cerned. Many members resented the contempt-
uous act. Lord Hugh Cecil, his own first cousin,
the ablest Conservative in the House of Com-
mons— the only one in my time of undoubted
genius — was snubbed by Balfour and kept out
of sight. When he lost his seat in the House,
though it was the custom and would have been
a mere courtesy to have got him another, Balfour
left him out in the cold. His conduct of affairs
was so autocratic that at length even the landed
squirearchy and the rich manufacturers deserted
Lord Salisbury's nephew for the unregarded
colonist, Bonar Law, and Bonar Law was made
master in his stead.

Mr. Balfour seemed to care as little for the
defeat as for success. He did not attack the
Government which had taken his place; he pur-
sued the even tenor of his way, unperturbed. He

256

wrote a "Defense of Philosophic Doubt" and
made stately speeches in the House at long in-
tervals. Like Shakespeare's Caesar,

"He let determined things to Destiny,
Hold unbewailed their way."

It is possible that if Arthur Balfour had had
to work for a living he might have risen to orig-
inal thought. His "Foundations of Belief" is
really interesting; it is Bergson adapted rather
than translated into English by one who had
already coquetted in thought with the idea of
creative evolution. Arthur Balfour is, as Heine
says, on the topmost level of the thought of his
time. He has reached the conviction that his
political creed is sustained and buttressed by the
faith and practice of a thousand generations of
men.

"Who survive in men's memories?" he will
ask — "the statesmen and generals, the writers and
artists, the greatest of the sons of men. Those
are the people whom I consider and whom I like.
The unnumbered millions who never attain any-
thing I can afford to forget, — as their fellow-
men forget them and as probably God forgets
them also. I have no interest in the unwashed
herd."

He forgets that the only distinguished people
he takes any heed of arc those in his own class
and set; had he rubbed shoulders more with the
crowd he would have been a bigger man.

257

He was once asked in the House of Commons
about something that was in all the daily papers.
He professed complete ignorance on the subject.

"But it has been in all the daily papers," his
questioner remarked.

"Very possibly," replied Mr. Balfour. "I
never read the daily papers."

Members of the House looked at each other
and smiled, but it was not a pose; it was the
truth.

Arthur Balfour is always perfectly self-pos-
sessed, completely at ease. I remember seeing
him one night in a crowd going up the broad
staircase of Sutherland House. He bowed as he
came up to this and that person standing in the
gallery above him with the charming good na-
ture of a pleased schoolboy. He did not see that
he was keeping just in front of the Prince of
Wales and spoiling the Prince's entrance. When
he got to the top of the stairs his hostess greeted
him, adding quickly: "Pardon me, Mr. Bal-
four, but the Prince is just behind you."

Balfour turned round, bowed to the Prince
and said smiling happily:

"Ohl Sir, it simply shows that there is no divi-
nation in this clay of mine or I should have felt
a prickling in my back and given you the pride
of place,"

25§

It was perfectly said with a charming smile as
of equal to equal, but with subtle recognition of
the other's superior rank.

How will Mr. Balfour meet President Wil-
son? He is some ten years older, ten well-filled
years. I am afraid he will be his superior in
many qualities; a better dialectician, a greater
master of English ; one who has practised speak-
ing for over forty years and has held his own in
debate again and again in Throne room and
Senate against all comers; he won his spurs in
the Berlin Conference in 1878.

A Lincoln would see through him and round
him by virtue of a larger humanity and a passion-
ate resolve to serve his fellow-men ; a Roosevelt
even would sense his deficiencies; though he
might not be able to analyze them, but Mr.
Wilson is of his own sort, a scholar and amateur
of life with the deficiencies of the bookish. Yet
Mr. Wilson has one eminent superiority; he is
an American and should be gifted with a deeper
moral conscience; he could hardly have coerced
Ireland or enslaved Egypt; he, too, must feel
that Mr. Balfour is essentially hollow and that
gives me hope. I see Mr. Balfour bowing to Mr.
Wilson, smiling because he thinks he has capti-
vated him with his charm and courtesy; but he
has still his foot on the face of Leo Trotsky.

It is to be hoped that our President with his
259

own suavest courtesy will point out this fact to
Mr. Balfour and invite him in the interests of
humanity to take more care for the future where
he puts his foot.

260

The Right Hon. David Lloyd George

MR. LLOYD GEORGE AND THE
FUTURE
NLIKE most of his rivals in British
politics, Mr. Lloyd George came
from the people; he has a touch of
genius in him too, and is a Welsh-
man to boot. Even without genius
the Welsh Celt is often interesting; he is gen-
erally articulate and he's nearly always apt to
reason with his emotions and calculate with his
passions to the bewilderment of the Saxon. It
ought to be easy for me as a Welsh Celt to give a
vivid and interesting word-portrait of Mr.
Lloyd George and yet it's peculiarly difficult. I
find it hard to treat him sympathetically be-
cause, although our aims in politics have often
been alike, the means we would employ to com-
pass them, are wholly dissimilar. The bitterest
disagreements, it appears, are always between
brethren.

From the crown of his head to the sole of his
feet David Lloyd George is a typical Welsh
Celt; he is short, broad, thick-set, with the heavy
body and ungraceful short legs of the Cymri.
His face is more regular than most Celtic faces
and is nevertheless exceedingly mobile and vivid

261

— expressive of every shade of feeling or resolu-
tion. His voice, too, like many Welsh voices, is
very strong, resonant and musical, and when
master of his feelings, as he occasionally is, he
is perhaps the greatest orator in Great Britain,
or it w^ould be truer to say the only orator of
the first rank, with the exception of Lord Hugh
Cecil or Ramsay MacDonald.

David Lloyd George has come from the lower
half of the social ladder: he is the son of a
teacher in a Unitarian school at Liverpool and
accordingly from boyhood his deepest feelings
have been at the service of politics rather than
of religion. His father died when he was an
infant; but the apparent misfortune was a bless-
ing in disguise. He was taken to Wales to live
with an uncle, David Lloyd, a shoemaker, and
there the enthusiastic and gifted lad sucked in a
complete command of Welsh as a mother-
tongue. He had the usual Church-School train-
ing and learned English as a schoolboy; as a
youth, he was placed in a solicitor's office, and
was admitted to the practice of law in 1884,
when just twenty-one.

He has told himself how he visited the House
of Commons at eighteen and looked upon it as
William the Conqueror looked upon England
during his visit to Edward the Confessor, as his
future "domain." At twenty he wrote in his
diary that his career in the House depended on

262

his own "pluck and energy." He had hardly
reached a decent living as a solicitor when he
stood for Parliament and, thanks chiefly to his
eloquence in Welsh, was elected for Carnarvon
in 1890. When only twenty-seven years of age
he had thus got his foot on the first rung of the
political ladder. In the next ten years he won
a fair practice as a solicitor, made himself con-
versant with the forms and spirit of the House
of Commons and gradually became known to the
better heads, as a personality, if not yet as a
power.

For a good part of this apprentice period Tom
Ellis was the Whip of the Liberal party: he
and Lloyd George had grown up together and
Tom Ellis was a man of extraordinary quality.
He had the best manners I've ever seen in my
life, better even, because gentler, more sympa-
thetic and more quickly responsive than Mr.
Thomas Bayard's who, as American Ambassa*
dor, became famous during his short stay in
London for charming human courtesy to all
men alike, whether of palace or cottage. In
Tom Ellis, too, the manners were only the out-
ward visible signs of an inward and spiritual
grace. He had the immediate intuitive compre-
hension of genius which genius alone gives, and
long before Lloyd George was known to the
House Tom Ellis had marked him out for high
place: "a great fighting man," he used fo call

263

him, "a born orator and leader filled with pas-
sionate emotions; you'll see, he'll go far. At
any rate, he's much the ablest politician that has
yet come out of Wales."

Lloyd George's first parliamentary exploit
was to revolt against the Liberal Government
in 1894 on the question of disestablishing the
Church in Wales. He led several malcontents
such as Francis Edwards, Herbert Lewis (now
the Rt. Hon. Sir Herbert Lewis) and D. H.
Thomas (afterwards Lord Rhondda) on a rag-
ing electoral campaign against Tom Ellis and
his Welsh majority of 40 and won notoriety by
his daring if nothing more.

It was the South African War in 1900 which
gave Lloyd George his opportunity: for him it
came in the nick of time. As a Welshman he be-
lieved in small nationalities and their claims to
fair treatment by their stronger neighbors. All
his sympathies were with the Boers and from
the beginning he championed their cause in the
House. This brought him at once into conflict
with the vast majority of members, who are
always militant imperialists and particularly
with Mr. Chamberlain, a dominant personality
and the most redoubtable debater at that time
in the Commons. To the astonishment of the
House, the "little Welsh attorney," as he was
called, held his own in the cut-and-thrust of
debate, and the extreme Radical wing rallied

264

with delight to his support. In vain they were
nicknamed Pro-Boers, and shouted down in the
House while their motives were impugned and
their manners ridiculed in the capitalist press.

It is almost as difficult in England as in
America to express any opinion which differs
from that of the governing class, and in time
of war the difficulty is intensified. For years,
even after he had demonstrated his ability,
Lloyd George was treated as a pariah in the
House; but gradually, events aiding, he came
more and more to the front till at length a de-
cisive victory established his position as a leader
and entitled him to consideration.

Towards the end of the Boer War the Intelli-
gence Department of the Army under Lord
Kitchener issued weekly bulletins announcing
the capture of, let us say, 1,200 Boers and the
seizing of 2,000 rifles. In May, Lloyd George
asked the War Office how many Boers were sup-
posed to be in the field. The answer was be-
tween 15,000 and 20,000. In October he brought
the matter before the House and moved that
peace be declared, for by a sum of simple addi-
tion it was evident that Lord Kitchener having
captured — according to his own weekly reports,
from May to October, more than 30,000 Boers —
he was now fighting a minus number of imag-
inary enemies at the cost of a couple of millions
sterling a week. The effect of this ironical

265

statement in the House was so extraordinary
that the majority yelled with rage and even Mr.
Chamberlain forgot himself utterly and called
out "Cadi" across the floor to his opponent.
Lloyd George won the sympathies even of the
majority by meeting the insult with a bow:
"No one," he said, smiling, "could be a better
judge of that epithet than the Right Honorable
gentleman," a double-edged impromptu which
astonished even his friends. Lloyd George was
clearly a first-rate fighting man and the House
cheered him warmly for the first time. From
that day on he had ministerial rank.

When the Liberal party came into power
Lloyd George entered the Cabinet as President
of the Board of Trade. He was regarded by
the Radicals and Labor Members as the only
democratic Minister and his first speeches con-
firmed his reputation. Throughout the country
he began to be loved as Mr. Gladstone had been
loved by virtue of a certain religious sentiment,
though his emotional appeals were usually taken
for claptrap by the House. Besides, he was dis-
liked in the Commons as a resolute opponent of
the Imperialistic spirit, which is always the
governing impulse in England. He was con-
sistent, however; just as he had attacked the
policy of the strong out of sympathy with the
weak nationalities, so now when in power he
showed constructive statesmanship by support-

266

ing the cause of the many poor in Great Britain
against the rich oligarchy. Every speech was a
sort of Magna Charta to the proletariat and
marked a stage in the rising flood of his popu-
larity. To his credit it must be noted that he
still remained easy of approach, without touch
of affectation or pomposity; indeed he was usu-
ally ingratiating as well as earnest and sincere.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer he tried by
various measures to lay the burden of taxation
on the rich and ease the shoulders of the poor.
His latest and most successful measure was bor-
rowed from Germany — the Compulsory Insur-
ance Act by which employers are compelled to
contribute to the Accident and Insurance fund
intended to succor their employees. Many
people objected to this as a vexatious interfer-
ence with private liberty, and there can be no
doubt that "the Stamp-licking Act," as it was
called, was heartily disliked by the richer classes,
while numbers of the poor were too thoughtless
and ill-taught to appreciate its benefits. Still
Lloyd George was upheld by the small body of
educated men who knew that the inequality of
conditions in Great Britain had long passed the
disease zone and reached the danger mark.
Would he go on and lead the democracy into
the Promised Land, or would he sell out to the
oligarchy? That was the question.

It is curious and characteristic that demo-
267

cratic legislation in England, which is supposed
to be a free country, follows timidly in the foot-
steps of autocratic Germany and does not dare
to imitate France. The land in France is fair-
ly parceled out among millions of small pro-
prietors. There is no approach to ideal justice
in the division, but there is a good deal of prac-
tical justice.

In England, on the other hand, some five
hundred landlords own about half the land of
the country. The first and most imperative
social reform would be to give the land back
to the people from whom it was in great part
stolen within the last century and a half; but
no British statesman has yet dared to face the
storm which such a proposal would call forth.
Eight or nine years ago it looked as if Lloyd
George meant to take the oligarchic bull by the
horns: he set on foot an inquiry into the posses-
sion of land in England and its results: at
once he was viciously attacked; his agents and
methods derided ; he himself personally insulted
by this duke and that lord. Still he held firm.
His commission was appointed; two thousand
investigators put to work.

Then as a bolt from the blue came the world-
war. Would it strengthen Lloyd George and
his "communistic projects" or would it weaken
them? What happened could have been fore-
told. War always strengthens hierarchies and

268

gifted individuals. Lloyd George is to-day
stronger than ever; but his land-legislation is
shelved, and it seems doubtful even whether the
great war minister will inaugurate the demo-
cratic reforms he has again and again promised.
Let us take a look at the man in his habit as he
lives before we attempt to forecast his future.

First of all he has some excellent virtues. He
is simple in his tastes and in his surroundings.
He likes good food and is fond of toothsome
dainties with his tea, but he rarely touches wine
though he is not a teetotaller. Even on long and
cold motor tours he always asks for hot coffee,
and he drinks it with meat or game indifferently
— a dreadful trial to most digestions, though
apparently not even noticed by his stomach.

Mr. Lloyd George has no amusements except
an occasional game of golf; his chief self-indul-
gence is a good cigar. In these later years he
has grown somewhat stout, partly because he
has not been able to find the time for golf that
he used to give to it. His love of everything
Welsh is seen in his home surroundings. You
rarely find any domestic in his household except
Welsh girls, with whom he always speaks in
Welsh.

Society bores him. If he wants an enjoyable
evening he gathers his friends about him, and
he can spend an evening listening even more
willingly than talking. He loves all shows es-

269

pecially the theatre and the music-hall. If he
had time he would visit them often. They
nourish his dramatic and aesthetic instincts which
were repressed in boyhood.

Sir Herbert Tree once asked him to a first
night and to supper afterwards in the Dome.
As he walked home with his wife in the full
light of a summer morning through St. James's
Park to Downing Street, he said to her: "Would
you and I have ever thought ten years ago that
we would have gone to a theatrical supper and
enjoyed it?"

There is nothing too absurd for him in music-
hall songs; sometimes when he is in especially
good spirits he sings snatches of them with great
enjoyment; usually he has learned them from
one of his daughters.

The most marked and characteristic feature
of his private life is his intense family affection.
No villager in Wales could show a simpler
family setting than that of Mr. Lloyd George.
One evening a journalistic friend came into the
house and asked where was the "Hyena" — the
name applied to him by a German journal after
his famous "knock out" interview. He found
the "hyena" seated on a sofa with an arm around
the waist of each of his two daughters. When
one of his daughters died, his friends still recall
with dread the agony of his grief ; one says that
in spite of his natural gaiety he has never looked

270

quite cheerfully at life since. The greater soft-
ness of temper, the unusual patience, something
mystic in his spiritual outlook are perhaps some
of the consequences of that blow.

He cares for little in life but politics. He
keeps all his strength for his career. This is one
of the reasons for what would otherwise appear
to be inconsiderate carelessness. He is inun-
dated with letters; he answers only a few of
them; and so gets into trouble; often is so ab-
sorbed in big things that he will not allow him-
self to fritter away time on unessentials. Yet he
can be soft and yielding up to a point.

There is never anything "brutal" — an epithet
applied to him by another German paper re-
cently— in either his words or his demeanor.
He often allows himself to be bored and put
out rather than get rid of somebody who is in
the way, but he will not allow himself to be
bothered or diverted from his work by a great
lady or by the great mob; life is too short and
too full of big things to be wasted.

One of his extraordinary tastes is his passion-
ate love of a sermon. He often says that he
prefers a good sermon to a good play. He
quotes by the yard rhetorical passages from the
extensive pulpit literature of his country. Over
and over again, he will roll out the great phrases
of a preacher denouncing the rich who grind the
faces of the poor, "The wood is drying in the

271

sun that will make their coffins." He is a great
reader; and though he hesitates to speak French
he knows French pretty well and reads a good
French novel with pleasure and some facility.

Take him all in all, he has more than the usual
complexity of the Celtic character. He is often
unwilling to begin work, but once he begins he
finds it difficult ever to give it up. He can work
immensely, though he gets very tired; but then
he can sleep anywhere and at any time: often
on Saturday or Sunday afternoons he sleeps on
a couple of chairs. He is ordinarily cheerful
and grows more even tempered with the years,
but he has moments of depression, and in his
youth he was said to be haunted by the vision
of early death, like that of his father.

He is very soft; though at times he can be
very hard. At once the most pliant and the most
obstinate of men ; he can be broad of vision, and
under the strong and tenacious will he can put
his mind in blinkers; he has sometimes weird
insight as of a genius; he seldom looks back;
and is always confident of the future.

Though he was not brought up in Celtic-
Christian superstitions; the atmosphere of his
mind is semi-religious, semi-fatalistic which
strikes one as strange in a man whose outlook
is so matter of fact. He has always a saving
sense of the transience of human things which

272

stands between him and an excessive enjoyment
of the triumphs of life.

The question of questions now is what is to
be hoped from Mr. Lloyd George as a social
reformer. He has not studied social questions
deeply, knows little or nothing of the disadvan-
tages from an industrial point of view of our
present competitive or grab-as-grab-can society;
but his sympathies are democratic and he under-
stands the disabilities of poverty. Had he lis-
tened to Socialistic or Fabian orators, instead of
sermons, I should be more hopeful of him.

I do not know for certain how far Mr. Lloyd
George's zeal for human equality has been side-
tracked ; but connection with the Marconi scan-
dal would of itself be sufficient to explain his
failure to deal drastically with the economic
problems of his country.

Nobody believes that Lloyd George specu-
lated in Marconi shares from the usual sordid
motives; he is notoriously careless about money;
as Chancellor of the Exchequer he used to say
laughingly that it was his wife who took care
of his purse and the only result of Ministerial
rank to him is the possession of the modest house
at Criccieth which may have cost $6,000 or
$8,000. There can be no doubt that he was per-
suaded to "have a flutter" in Marconi shares by
Sir Rufus Isaacs, then the Attorney- General,
but the gamble which led Sir Rufus Isaacs

273

directly to a peerage and the position of Lord
Chief Justice weakened Lloyd George a good
deal as a reformer. How could he attack the
landlords when his own hands were not im-
maculate?

We can afford to be frank in this matter. It
was said very often that Mr. Lloyd George
worked with Lord Northcliffe because Lord
Northclifie knew the details of the Marconi
business and Mr. Lloyd George dared not break
with him. But now to the confusion of the
scandal-mongers Mr. Lloyd George has broken
with Lord Northcliffe and no disclosures have
been made becausee there was nothing to dis-
close. I dislike more than I can say the common
habit of explaining the inconsistencies of public
men by some low personal motive. It is Mr.
Lloyd George's knowledge I doubt, not his
honesty. Besides, if England waits for a re-
former till she gets an angel, she'll wait a long
time.

Lloyd George has a touch of genius in him
and with genius go a good many amiable human
weaknesses; but the genius who wins out as a
benefactor to humanity is the man who turns his
stumblings into stepping stones.

What then is his position at the moment.
Without probing too curiously, facts speak for
themselves.

About the time when the Coalition Govern-
274

ment was formed and the Conservative leaders,
Mr. Bonar Law, Mr. Arthur Balfour and Sir
Edward Carson, joined the Liberal Ministry in
the Cabinet, Mr. Lloyd George's Land Com-
mission was dissolved and his 1,700 or more paid
investigators discharged. Since then no one of
position in England has spoken of the evils of
landlordism or the millennium of land national-
ization. Social reforms were summarily shelved
and Lloyd George did not even protest.

He was appointed Minister of War, and the
job of providing munitions which Kitchener
had hopelessly bungled, he accomplished; he
took over hundreds of private factories and
nationalized them; he socialized a vast industry
and extended it beyond precedent while turning
over surplus profits to the Treasury; he proved
in England what in Germany has been proved
again and again, that a nationalized industry
could beat any private industry both in pro-
ductive power and cheapness. Lloyd George
did even more than this. He advocated con-
scription and turned Lord Kitchener's paper
army into a real national army; he animated
the whole people with his spirit and enormously
increased the strength of Great Britain as a
fighting force.

Think of his speech at Bangor in the summer
of 1916, when he criticized severely the lack of
high spirit in Great Britain. "We have not yet

275

given up drink," he cried, "as it has been given
up in France and Russia. . . . We laugh at
things in Germany," he went on, "which should
terrify us. Look at the way they make bread
out of potatoes. I fear that spirit of cheerful
self-sacrifice more than I do Field Marshal von
Hindenburg's strategy, efficient though it may
be." He then proceeded to criticize the ship-
wrights on the Clyde for striking for higher
wages at such a crisis and sneered at the farth-
ing an hour they were holding out for. He
would have done better had be blamed the rich
employers whose profits had more than doubled
in the year, while their "hands" have had no
share in the wealth they created. Twenty years
ago the hard meanness of the rich would have
furnished Lloyd George with his text, and not
the pitiful hopes of the poor. Still, the personal
force and drive of the man grow steadily in
importance.

One question imposes itself? Why on earth
did he allow his Land Commission to be dis-
solved without any protest? Perhaps he was not
strong enough then to fight the oligarchy. But
why did he allow his settlement of the Irish
difficulty, after it had been accepted by all con-
cerned, to be thrown aside by Lord Lansdowne?

Think of it; he was called upon by Mr. As-
quith to leave his munition-providing and settle

276

the Home Rule question that had flamed into
rebellion and turned the fairest part of Dublin
into a heap of burning ruins.

At once he accepted the task that had baffled
English statesmanship for fifty years. He
brought Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward Carson
into one room and within a few days drew them
to an agreement and set forth his settlement,
which was accepted by Mr. Asquith and the
Coalition Government. But in a week or so
the oligarchy had got over its scare; the soldiers
had mastered the rebels; the revolt, the Lords
thought, was at an end. At once Lord Lans-
downe coolly got up in the House of Lords, de-
clared that Mr. Lloyd George's settlement was
temporary and would have to be conducted by
Dublin Castle as in the past. Mr. Redmond
protested and appealed to Mr. Asquith. Mr.
Asquith, who was, so to speak, the electric clock
which registered the dynamic energies of the
moment, bowed his head to Lord Lansdownc
and murmured, "We'll see; we'll seel" To
every one's astonishment. Lord Lansdowne won
without a struggle and combative Lloyd George
took the astounding rebuff lying down.

I am afraid it looks as if he had given up the
cause of moral and social reform and accepted
the present aristocratic constitution of English
society. During the war he was always against
the workingmen: he condemned the shipwrights

277

for striking as he had condemned the Welsh
miners for striking.

I must again and again reiterate it, for it is one
of the highest moral lessons of the war: Eng-
land will not win anything worth having unless
she gets rid of her effete oligarchy, and by some
great act of social justice, such as giving the
land back to the people of England, reanimates
the downtrodden millions of her wage-slaves.
If England had treated her poorer classes as
well as Germany has treated her workmen,
Lloyd George would not have had to complain
of their apathy and want of spirit. Men fight
for life in measure as life is worth having. One-
third of the population of Great Britain is al-
ways on the verge of starvation. Why should
the starving poor fight for the country which
has condemned them to suffering and misery?

Give them hope of independence and comfort
and you won't have to complain of their want of
spirit. Give them the land which is theirs and
the railroads and the mines and the manhood
suffrage which should be theirs and you will
have again the spirit of the French sans culottes,
who without training and almost without equip-
ment beat the Germans at Valmy and thus laid,
as Goethe saw, the foundations of the modern
world.

The name of Lloyd George is often coupled
with that of Lincoln.

278

The comparison is not far-fetched.

Both men sprang from the people; both gave
repeated proofs of democratic sympathy; both
got their opportunity in war. And in spite of
the reverence we all feel for Lincoln, it must be
admitted that Lloyd George's achievements in
the first years of tbe war were at least equal to
Lincoln's in the same time. He organized labor
with the most extraordinary success and in the
Home Rule settlement showed rarer quality still
— a power of sympathy and comprehension that
marks him as a great Reconciler.

Lincoln's greatness was shown in his deep
humanity; he always preferred pardon to pun-
ishment and lately Colonel Watterson, of the
Louisville Courier-Journal, has proved that
even in the last six months of the war, when the
South was beaten and on the verge of collapse,
Lincoln offered the Confederates the most ex-
traordinarily generous terms; he went so far as
to oflfer to pay the full price for the slaves he
had already freed; "he did not want victory/*
he said, "much less a triumph; but an abiding
and healing peace."

Lloyd George took almost the same stand ; but
in the peace negotiations he has forgotten his
humanity.

Lloyd George stands at the parting of the
ways; his conduct of the war has given him

279

power such as no one has had in England since
Chatham. How will he use it?

From his management of the recent election
it looks as if he would go on in the old, bad
adroit way. He told the electors and the newly
enfranchised millions of women that he would
make Germany pay for the war, and the electo-
rate believed his impudent, ridiculous assurance.
The grateful electors said practically what they
have always said in like case : "We trust you and
will wait." But he must have known that he was
promising the impossible: Germany is utterly
unable, even if she were willing, to pay for the
war. In order to retrieve his position and re-
build his dwindling popularity he promised to
have the Kaiser tried in London. But such
clap-trap could not win even the English masses :
they are above such petty malignity. He prom-
ised, then, disarmament, the end of conscription,
the use of the land for the soldiers, the nationali-
zation of the railways — all these promises are
still unfulfilled, indeed their realization in the
near future manifestly depends rather on the
spirit of the workingman than the reforming
zeal of the politician.

Still at any moment Lloyd George's early re-
ligious training may come to his aid; or some
touch of imagination.

If Lloyd George will not be the savior of the
people, nevertheless they shall find salvation.

280

Sooner or later a social revolution will do for
England what her politicians refuse to do. But
Lloyd George has an unique opportunity; he
partly sees it; will he at length realize it and
set his hand to the work? If he will nation-
alize the English land and English railroads and
mines, he will rank in the future with Lincoln.
If not, he, too, will be like Mr. Chamberlain —
"a lost leader" with absurd promises to show
that he could not read the signs of the times.

281

VISCOUNT GREY

MET Viscount Grey for the first
time some thirty years ago at a din-
ner given by Sir Charles Dilke, who
had been Under-Secretary for For-
eign Affairs and had made his rep-
utation there as very painstaking, easy of ap-
proach, and fair-minded.

When I shook hands with my host on entering
the drawing room he drew me aside.

"Edward Grey is dining with us to-night," he
said. "You ought to know him; he's extraordi-
nary and will go a long way. I'm curious to see
what you'll think of him."

A little later, he took me across to the fire-
place and introduced me to Grey, who was
standing just beside the vivid, speaking minia-
ture portrait of Keats, which had been given to
Dilke's grandfather by the poet himself. Grey's
quiet was the first thing that struck me, and the
carved, strong features and deep, earnest eyes.
He said nothing particular, did not seem to re-
gard it as a duty to talk, yet was perfectly cour-
teous. He was tall, five feet ten, I should guess,
but looked taller because he was very thin.
At first one didn't notice that his shoulders were
broad and his leanness the hard fitness of the
trained athlete. All Grey's qualities come to

282

'^1

Right Hon. Viscount Grey

' ^^ '

,4«tl*^

you slowly; reveal themselves one after the other,
in intimacy; yet he is not shy nor has he the
conventional pose of reticence as "good form":
reserve is natural to him.

Though a Member of Parliament v^ho had
not yet succeeded, he did not appear anxious to
impress the journalist, not desirous even to show^
his powers, and yet somehow or other he was
impressive — called forth curiosity. His face
was of the type known as Roman; the bird of
prey type, not thin, but chiseled like a cameo;
high-beaked nose, iron-firm jaw, broad fore-
head; strength, the characteristic of it all —
strength and self-mastery and assured poise — a
puzzling fellow: what was his secret?

At dinner he never led the talk, never tried
to; but when spoken to replied quietly, without
emphasis ; he brought forth, I remember, one or
two platitudes which, though well worn, seemed
to have some weight when he used them. He
possesses eminently the characteristic which
Emerson gives the English gentleman : "He says
less than he means, and never more." Grey's
tone was pitched low to unobtrusiveness.

My hasty judgment stands on record against
me. I wrote of him next day: "There have
been several generations of Greys but Sir Ed-
ward Grey, the M. P., though the youngest of
the lot, is really the oldest; he must have been
born old ; dried up in premature prudence."

283

I'm not ashamed of this offhand judgment, for
Grey is extraordinarily prudent and his reserve
was misinterpreted by other observers. Harold
Frederic, perhaps the ablest journalist the
United States ever sent to London, formed much
the same opinion as I did. After dinner we
came together with Dilke for a final powwow
before separating, and Frederic's verdict was:
"Grey says nothing because he has nothing to
say."

English social life is a good deal less talkative
than French or American life, and we had both
met dozens of Englishmen who were very silent
because they were inarticulate or empty-headed,
and so we were ready to let prejudice judge.

It is only fair to say that Dilke did not agree
with us. He was a born Parliamentarian; by
this I mean he knew the British Parliament
better than other men and loved it more. If you
wanted a fair judgment of any British politician,
Dilke was your man. For thirty years he was a
sort of Parliamentary mirror that would give
you as true a reflection of Biggar or Parnell,
the most hated of Irishmen, as of Gladstone or
Lord Hartington, the most respected of Eng-
lishmen.

"You're both mistaken," he said positively;
"Grey has made a great impression in the House
and apparently without trying to make any im-
pression, and that's a good sign."

284

"What do you mean 'without trying?' I asked.

"I mean," he replied, "that instead of picking
some big debate and a crowded House for his
best speeches, he just gets up in an ordinary way
and yet makes his mark. Grey has the great

manner."

"What an aristocrat you are at heart, Dilke,"
cried Frederic, "in spite of your so-called Rad-
icalism. Another genius earmarked by the
governing classes for great place because he
belongs to the sacrosanct caste and has nice

manners."

"So you'll concede his manners,'* replied
Dilke, laughing. "You know he's an old Wyke-
hamist, and the motto of Winchester is: "Man-
ners makyth man." While Dilke went on to
explain Winchester College to Frederic, telling
of its old foundation and how some of the
scholars still ate off thick flat oaken platters as
their forbears had done four centuries before, I
couldn't help noticing how the phrase "manners
makyth man" had been degraded in England.
Of course, at first the word "manners" was the
English translation of the Latin mores (French,
moeurs), and stood for customs, morals, rather
than mere "manners." The modern English
have practically altered "character makes a
man" into "manners make a man" — a degra-
dation, I think soul-revealing.

Meanwhile the talk went on. Dilke told us
285

that Grey came of an old Whig family, and had
the Whig tradition of modernity and urbanity.
Frederic asked him about Grey's means, and we
found out that when Grey came of age he had
inherited some two thousand or three thousand
pounds a year (say about fifteen thousand dol-
lars), and a very nice house with some two
thousand acres of land.

"He's comfortably off," Dilke concluded,
"though he married, very young, a neighbor of
his in Northumberland, a Miss Dorothy Wid-
drington of Newton Hall, who also comes of
famous stock. ..."

Though my first published impression of
Grey was summary and harsh, it created a cer-
tain stir; yet it did not alter Grey's cordial man-
ner to me in the slightest. When we met he
was always very courteous. A little later I found
occasion to praise him warmly; neither praise
nor blame had the smallest effect on his imper-
turbable, smiling politeness. Evidently his quiet
reserve covered a certain depth — ^what depth?

Grey's immediate success in the House of
Commons is very characteristic, and is one of
the best things I can say of the House after a
quarter of a century's knowledge of it. He spoke
seldom and never at great length; said nothing
novel, yet arrested attention — created an inter-
est in his personality and left an impression of
most scrupulous honor.

286

After being some six years in Parliament he
was made Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs
in 1892, when he was only just thirty. Lord
Rosebery, his chief, being in the House of Lords,
the brunt of the work fell on Grey in the Com-
mons. In an hour he confirmed his reputation,
a reputation of the sort that's most esteemed in
England, a reputation for high character. And
every year of office afterwards increased his
authority in the House and his influence till he
came to be regarded with a certain awe.

His unique position is due to a variety of
causes, personal and political, but the chief
cause is undoubtedly his manner. England is
the only country in the world where a man may
win to the front by mere manners, but the man-
ners must be English. Every nation has its
ideal, and the governing classes in England, who
give the tone to the House of Commons and the
House of Lords, cherish a peculiar ideal of
manner, the manner of a cold, courteous, quiet
master. Lord Lansdowne has a good deal of
this manner, and in itself it is sufficient to ac-
count for his influence as leader of the Conserv-
ative party in the Upper House. It is rare, in-
deed, that anyone in the House of Lords raises
his voice; emotion or passion — excitement of
any kind — is regarded as a sign of weakness.

Grey's manner will suit the House of Lords
even better than it suited the Commons. Be-

287

sides, it is the fitting vesture of his spirit and
curiously perfect.

Let us study it in its effects. Grey's manner
naturally appealed to the Conservatives first;
very soon they threw down their arms before it
and declined to attack him. "Grey's all right,"
they said; "a true-blue Englishman." And
when in the South African War he stood aloof
from his party, in favor of war, they took him
to their heart of hearts. Their belief that he
was an aristocrat in mind as well as manner
appeared to be justified. "Of course he's an
Imperialist," they chortled ; "he has no sympathy
with the Radical crew and their peace-at-any-
price rot; you can count on Grey; Grey's a great
Englishman."

There was danger for a year or two, danger
that Grey, so honored by his opponents, would
yield to the flattering pressure and become too
masterful, too Imperialistic, too Conservative,
in fine. From the beginning the Radicals were
inclined to dislike and to distrust him ; his reti-
cence, his balance, his studied moderation, were
offensive to them ; the Labor members and Radi-
cals, inclined to suspect good manners as a mask,
detested his suave imperturbability. It was an
advantage, they admitted, that Grey should con-
ciliate the Conservatives, but no one could do
this, they argued, unless he was at heart one of
them. For years they refused him any cordial
support. 238

When Lloyd George brought in his Socialist
state-insurance measures and spoke with pas-
sionate sympathy for the half-paid working
classes and their wrongs, the ordinary Liberals
were as much alarmed as the crusted Tories.

Everyone who counted was against him; yet
soon it was whispered about the House with
wonder that Grey was a thoroughgoing sup-
porter. The air cleared as by magic. The
sullen Radical distrust vanished like vapor.

From that moment on Grey reigned in the
House, and, strange to say, it was the extreme
members on both sides who built up his pedestal.
The Tory was delighted to recount his feats at
tennis: "About the best player in England,
don't ye know." And even the Socialists found
pleasure in the fact that his chief recreation was
fly fishing, and not hunting or shooting or any-
thing that resembled luxury and entailed waste.

For five or six years before the war Grey had
applause enough to turn a strong head and no
opposition of any sort. Perhaps that explains in
part why he prepared for war and when the
moment came was willing to make it, without
consulting his colleagues, as an autocrat.

Besides doing excellently well whatever he
undertakes, Grey has other virtues. In an aris-
tocratic society everything is known; but no
word has ever been breathed against Grey in his
private relations. Thou8:h neither a Puritan nor

289

unduly strait-laced, his married life was under-
stood to be very happy, and when his wife was
killed a few years ago in a carriage accident,
just in front of his own gates, he was known to
have suffered intensely.

The man is all of a piece; no flaw in his un-
sullied armor.

Now I must come to his soul and depict the
heart of him. Fortunately the chief features are
distinct. Like all of us, his best is discovered in
his admirations: what we love reveals us, if it
does not betray. Above all writers. Grey ad-
mires Wordsworth, and Wordsworth's utmost
reach of spirit is to be found in his delight in
nature on the one hand and on the other in his
passionate love of England and the highest Eng-
lish ideals.

Everyone remembers the famous passage in
which all Wordsworth's joy in nature found ex-
pression ; it begins :
Nature never did betray the heart that loved her-

Grey feels the appeal of this just as strongly
as the poet felt it. His fly-fishing is hardly more
than an excuse to gratify his love of nature and
his delight in solitary communion with her.
There is a natural melancholy in such a spirit.
Every lover of the ideal must often be disap-
pointed and saddened through his intercourse
with men and women, and he will turn eagerly
from the silly, self-admiring puppets to the tran-

290

quil beauty of woodland, lake, and mountain foi
recreation and healing. Viscount Grey finds
himself in the ordered loveliness of the English
countryside.

And Wordsworth's love of England and what
he imagines that England stands for in the world
is even more intense and passionate than his love
of nature. In spite of his disgust at the "sordid-
ness" of England — "the fen of stagnant waters,"
Wordsworth had all an Englishman's belief in
his country's unique greatness and destiny:

. ... In our halls is hung
Armory of the invincible Knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals

hold
Which Milton held. — In everything we are

sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.

Edward Grey loves England like this; in-
indeed, his love for her is the motive power of
his life, and his belief in her the passionate faith
of his soul. To say he would die for her gladly
is to put the fire of his patriotism too coldly;
he wants nothing in life now but to spend and
be spent for her; he has measured himself; he
would far rather be another Chatham than a
Lenin. His shortcoming is that he does not see
the corresponding German belief in the same
clear reasonable light.

291

Is Grey, then, a great man? It is very hard
to say; he has not yet finished his work. He
has always shown rigid strength of character.
In this war he has proved himself a consummate
diplomatist, carrying public opinion with him,
even the public opinion of all the neutral States
for the first year, at least, with perfect ease, and
yet to some of them England's objects must have
appeared sufficiently sordid.

The German papers, even the official organs,
all condemn Grey; call him a "liar"; talk of
"his genius for duplicity" ; but independent jour-
nals in Italy, as in the United States and in
Spanish South America, are loud in his praise.
Whom are we to believe?

I have tried to give my readers the facts, so
that they can form their own judgment. I have
a high opinion of Grey's honesty, sincerity, and
nobility of purpose, and a great liking for the
man himself, yet I cannot but wish that he had
kept the peace in 1914 as he kept it in 1911. I
believe his opponents are just as responsible for
the war as he is; but there is no doubt that if he
had really wished it, he could have held back
both France and Russia and maintained peace.
We know now that six of the Cabinet resigned
when they found that Grey had thrust England
into the struggle. But four withdrew their
resignations when Asquith reminded them how
necessary it was to show a united front to the foe.

292

Still the fault may not be counted against
Grey in history. Bismarck admitted that he had
made the war with France, yet Bismarck stands
and will stand as the greatest statesman and
leader of men since the first Napoleon. But
Bismarck waged only victorious wars and cer-
tainly strengthened and enlarged his country.
Bismarck, too, though a Junker and imperialist
to boot, is memorable chiefly because of his work
for the welfare of the laboring classes. He
practically banished starvation from Germany
and insured the destitute against the worst results
of competitive labor; in his pity for weakness
the strong man laid broad bases for eternity in
the affection of mankind. Will Grey do as
much? I doubt it; yet one can only wait and
hope.

One fact gives me pause, makes me wonder
whether any English statesmen will ever be able
to rise above the conventions of English public
life.

Viscount Grey began his official career as
Under-Secretary to Lord Rosebery, who was
Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Now, when For-
eign Secretary himself, he appointed Neil Prim-
rose, the youngest son of Lord Rosebery, his
Under-Secretary. Neil Primrose was only
thirty-two years of age; had only been in Parli-
ment since 1910, and had given no sign of com-
manding abilty or even of singular suitability

293

for that office. He was the son of his father, and,
therefore, preferred before abler men.

The governing classes in England all hold to-
gether and regard political office as their ap-
panage; indeed, they act as if all the high offices
of state were to be shared out among them and
their supporters, and so, for the most part, they
have mediocrities as dignitaries and the purblind
as guides, and the nation suffers in consequence.
It is more than a pity that Edward Grey did
not hold himself above such weakness. I'm
pretty sure I am right in attributing the appoint-
ment to him : he had so much influence that Mr.
Asquith would never have dreamt of appoint-
ing anyone in his department without consulting
Grey; and Grey probably reconciled the ap-
pointment to his conscience by thinking of it as
a graceful compliment to his old chief, and Grey
is nothing if not loyal. And now, willy-nilly, I
must tell of his shortcomings.

His chief stumbling-block has been that he
does not know German or Germany; he does not
even know French; his mental outlook is insular
and limited. He saw how rapidly Germany was
growing as an industrial competitor of England
in wealth and power; but he had no conception
of the virtues which made her growth inevitable.
Grey's reputation, like many more important
things, depends on the outcome of the war and
the aftermath.

294

If the Allies had overwhelmed Germany
quickly, he would have been a popular hero in
England and France; his failings would all have
been forgotten ; his virtues belauded.

The war lasted so long, cost so much, and
brought forth so little good that Grey's reputa-
tion has suffered. The outward and visible sign
of this is that he has been "kicked upstairs" and
made a member of the House of Lords — a peer-
age as a sort of consolation prize. The best
thing I can say for Grey is that no personal
advantage, no honor, will ever console him for
having led his country into a war which has
already cost more in blood and treasure than
England can get out of it.

The war has shown England's strength and
England's weakness; but alas I she is being
praised for diplomacy which she does not ad-
mire and has failed in the field where she
thought herself supreme. Everyone knows that
if she had not induced America to enter the war,
she would have been forced to conclude even an
ignoble peace before the summer of 1917. True,
she has got the German ships and most of the
German-African colonies; true, her great com-
mercial rival is lamed if not ruined, but the
price paid has been enormous, altogether dispro-
portionate, she is inclined to believe.

Moreover, the war has revealed Germany's
strength, the strength of order, discipline, learn-

295

ing and socialized industries. Vaguely in spite
of her customary habit of self-praise, England
feels she has not come brilliantly out of the des-
perate trial and consequently is inclined to blame
Grey. And what does Grey feel? Doubtful, I
imagine; but with a certain faint hope in the
League of Nations and a warmth about the
heart when he remembers that the great plateau
of Central Africa from the Cape to Cairo is now
English — a. landlord pride in broad acres.

296

George Clemenceau

GEORGES CLEMENCEAU:

A First Rate Fighting Man !

N THE third year of the world-
war the task of governing France
had become exceedingly difficult.
From the very beginning Ministers
had worked with the Socialists in or-
der to buttress their popularity. But in the sum-
mer of 1917 Albert Thomas and other socialists
refused to enter the Cabinet and Ministry after
Ministry fell, partly through their vote, partly
through the growing discontent. France was
tired of the war; as the book "Under Fire,"
showed, the soldiers in the trenches were all
wearied of the fighting. They saw or thought
they saw that every inch of French soil would
have to be bought back with torrents of French
blood ; they didn't think the game worth the can-
dle. More than once French soldiers threw
down their weapons and left the field; it must
be admitted that there was a general belief that
in fighting was no freedom and from bloodshed
no deliverance.

The Socialists feeling the support of the army
behind them, stood more and more strongly
against the prosecution of the war, more and

297

more resolutely in favor of an immediate peace.
On the other hand, the sentiment of the govern-
ing classes was to hold with England and prose-
cute the war to victory at all costs. It was the
dominance of this class that brought Clemen-
ceau, the most masterful Radical, back to power.
Every representative of the French people knew
that he was the best fighting man they had; he
was hated personally but accepted as a last hope.

And when you ask why he was and is so de-
tested you are told that for twenty years h^
brought Ministry after Ministry to a fall till he
became known as the "Tombeur des Ministeres,"
or "The Wrecker," but that is not the real ex-
planation of his unpopularity. The truth is he
is too big a man to be popular and he has besides
a bitter vein in him which most people dislike.
For instance, almost as soon as he came to power
again he was asked by some Socialist in the
Chamber what were his plans. He replied: "I
have only one plan, to win the war and drive the
invaders out of France." And then he paused
and turned to the House, "and when I have suc-
ceeded you can bring in a vote of censure on me
and it will no doubt be carried unanimously
with the aid of the good friends who now cheer

me.

This complete disillusionment; this pun-
gent bitterness is the very soul-characteristic of
Georges Clemenceau and such a pitiless naked

298

vision of reality is always and everywhere un-
popular.

Georges Clemenceau is almost a great man,
utterly unlike the politicians, the Briands, the
Vivianis, the Asquiths and the Wilsons, clever
self-seekers and speakers. There is something
dynamic in the man ; he is almost of the race of
the Bismarcks. Let me try to give a picture of
him, body, mind and soul. He is short and
sturdily built, with vital organs, heart, etc., dis-
proportionately large and strong, with a good
round head and small blue-gray eyes set wide a-
part; the forehead broad like the chin and jaws.
He listens intently, then decides abruptly, will-
force rather than thought the first characteristic
of him.

He is one of the most famous duellists of his
time, the most dreaded opponent with both
sword and pistol in France since Paul de Cas-
sagnac died. Everyone remembers his historical
quarrel with Paul Deroulede. His enemies had
accused him of being opposed to the alliance
with Russia; forged letters were circulated to
prove that he had sold French interests to Eng-
land. Deroulede, a hot-headed but honest pa-
triot, believed all the slanders, persuaded him-
self too, that Clemenceau's own colleagues were
suspicious of him but afraid to attack him be-
cause of his skill with pen and sword, so he made
himself the mouthpiece of the general hatred

299

and denounced Clemenceau as a traitor to his
country.

The whole assembly sat with indrawn breath
wondering how Clemenceau would answer. He
walked quietly to the Tribune and then: "M.
Deroulede, you lie."

They met next day and parted without injury.
Clemenceau, recognizing the honesty of his en-
emy, fired in the air. A week later the forgeries
were discovered, but already the mischief wa?
done. Clemenceau had to resign; his political
career appeared to be ended.

As soon as he lost his premiership in 1908
Clemenceau turned to writing and showed him-
self a fine workman if not a master in the new
field. He produced a play which filled the
Renaissance theatre for a good many nights; he
wrote a novel, too, "The Strongest" (Les Plus
Forts), a satire of social conditions too acrid to
be popular, and a book of philosophic essays
which gave him rank as political thinker. For-
tunately I can give my readers some idea of his
gift as a writer.

The other evening at the French Theatre in
New York a little Chinese play by Clemenceau
was given which seemed to me peculiarly char-
acteristic of the man. A blind Chinese gentle-
man is presented as very happy in the love of
his wife and the aflFection of friends. He recov-
ers his sight and finds out that his wife is betray-

SQO

ing him with his best friend and his hired com-
panion is cheating him of his fame as a poet.
After a series of such experiences, he blinds him-
self again willingly: "One must be blind to be
happy," he says. The moral is harshly acid,
but has some truth in it.

There's a short story of Clemenceau still more
biting. It is called "Simon, fils de Simon."

Simon, son of Simon, plays in the lottery and
prays to Jehovah for success, promising him a
fifth part of the gain, but he wins nothing. Then
he invokes the God of the Christians, making the
same promise, and is awarded the Grand Prize.
The coffers of the church grow no richer for his
good fortune. "The proof that Jahveh is su-
perior to the Christian God," he reasons is that
he knew that "I could never bring myself to part
with a hundred thousand florins. He knoweth
our hearts. He does not expect the impossible
from us. The Christian God was deceived by
my good faith, of which I was for a time the
dupe myself. Jahveh alone is great, my son."

Clemenceau is the only politician in the world
to-day who can write plays and stories that de-
serve consideration.

In his own way, too, Clemenceau is one of the
most effective speakers living. Like everything
he does, his speaking is intensely characteristic ;
he stands rigidly.talks slowly,deliberately rather,
as if he were weighing every word and seldom
raises or alters the inflection of his voice. But

301

his clear incisive tone compels attention, espe-
cially in a Chamber where everyone is inclined
to be wordy and rhetorical. There is no orna-
ment, no appeal, no wish to round out a period ;
a clear frank acrid statement of facts, with nov.
and again a biting phrase, a word cruel in its
sarcasm.

One can get some idea of his power of retort
from a story told of his fi^st premiership. He
had hardly assumed power when a well-known
selfseeking prefect called upon him and began:

"I hope you'll believe M. Clemenceau, that I
am not here to adore the rising sun."

At once Clemenceau interrupted. "I under-
stand ; you don't know on which side to look for
it, eh?"

His power as a political writer can be meas-
ured by one incident. It was the Dreyfus affair
that really brought him back to power. He was
among the first to be convinced of the Jewish
officer's innocence, and at once opened the col-
umns of his paper to Zola and other defenders.
His own articles were able, quite as able as those
of Zola; indeed, it was Clemenceau suggested
the famous ''J' accuse" of the papers which made
Zola's defence of Dreyfus rank forever with Vol-
taire's defence of Calas.

There are great things in the man. He has
not only labored indef atigably as First Minister,
but has given his whole strength to encourage
the army leaders.

302

No matter how heavy or difficult his own
work was, again and again in those dreadful six
months from March to September, 1918, the old
man would leave Paris early in the morning and
hasten by train and motorcar to the point of at-
tack. There he would consult with General
Foch or General Gouraud, as the case might be,
and was always full of fight. Whoever might
doubt he never doubted. He was the hero soul
of France incarnate and assured of final victory.

There is a magnanimity in him which reminds
one of Bismarck and Frederick the Great. It is
known that the French only instituted the cen-
sorship because of the English example. The
first act of Clemenceau when he was recently
made Premier for the second time, was to abol-
ish the political censorship. When questioned
in the Chamber he said quietly that he believed
in freedom both of thought and speech and
didn't mind what anyone said of him or his gov-
ernment. An opponent tried to score off him by
saying that they all hoped he would free the soil
of France.

"I shall do my best," replied Clemenceau,
tartly; "in the meantime it is something to have
freed the soul of France."

The whole Chamber applauded.

It is not to denigrate him that I say in the
Peace Conference, he showed the defects of his
disillusionment and intense combativencss. He

303

wished to lame Germany once for all and render
her powerless; his fighting spirit prevented him
seeing that this was the moment to conquer by
high-souled generosity. If he had refused to
take Alsace-Lorraine or only taken such parts as
would be accorded by an ethnological Commis-
sion, he would have shown his faith in justice
and right and would have proved himself the
superior of Bismarck. Bismarck, it will be re-
membered, did not wish to annex Lorraine after
'70; it was Moltke who insisted on keeping
Metz. Alsace, Bismarck held, was German in
every sense.

But Clemenceau has taken Alsace as well
Lorraine, and the coal-mines of the Saar that
are completely German and he wanted the whole
of the German Rhine provinces to boot. He is
shortsighted in his greed and has overreached
himself. Germany will have Strassburg before
there can be any enduring peace. Clemenceau
said the other day that in the Peace Conference
he won more than he expected to win, more than
France ever hoped to win. That's the fact;
thanks to Mr. Wilson he has won too much.

He is all of a piece. He is the only French-
man of position in 1871 who declared that they
should not make peace with Germany, but fight
the thing to a finish. Everybody sees now that
he was wrong; it was his fighting spirit and not

304

his wisdom that dictated his counsel, and that
fact we must today keep in mind.

Let me glance back for a moment at his youth
and early training and see if his past throws any
new light on his peculiar powers.

Twenty-five years ago Clemenceau was a great
friend of Sir Charles Dilke, one of the few Eng-
lishmen who knew French as well as he knew
English and was besides a confirmed Radical.

Shortly after Dilke's fall he gave me a letter
to Clemenceau. Dilke was an able man, but he
had nothing dynamic, no touch of greatness in
him. Clemenceau was of a higher class. I was
very eager to know about his duels and was as-
tonished to find he practiced either sword or
pistol almost every day.

"Fencing," he declared, "is the best form of
exercise that anyone can take; it keeps the eye
and hand and foot in perfect trim and tune; if
there is a weak point in you it will show up on
the ^terrain.' And if there is a weak point in
your mind," he would add, laughingly, "you
will find it in the cut and thrust of a debate in
the Chamber." He loves fighting for its own
sake; he is a perfect incarnation of the Gallic

I wanted to know about his early life, and he
told me that his father was a stalwart Repub-
lican and had been imprisoned by Napoleon III
at the Coup d'Etat.

His mother was so well educated that she
305

was able to prepare him for high school. He
spoke of himself always as a product of the
great French revolution.

Before he was twenty he was thrown into pris-
on for crying "Vive la Republique," during the
celebration of an imperial anniversary. He
served his time in jail and then came to Ameri-
ca. Between 1865 and 1869 he lived in New
York and in Stamford, Conn. He established
himself as a medical practitioner at West 12th
Street and for some time was well known about
Washington Square.

He was never interested, he told me, in medi-
cine, though his thesis on anatomy, a presenta-
tion copy of which can be found in the Astor
Library, is an admirable treatise.

Clemenceau learned a great deal in America ;
but he is chary of saying what he thinks of it; he
avoids unprofitable condemnation by an epi-
gram: "Americans have no original ideas and
no coffee fit to drink."

It is not to be wondered at that his judgment
of America is somewhat summary and severe.
He was not able to make a living as a doctor.
Though he knew English remarkably well, he
was not sufficiently master of it for his mind to
move freely in that rather heavy harness, so he
suffered a good deal from poverty in New York
and finally got employed by a Miss Aiken in a
girls' boarding school at Stamford as a teacher

306

of French. That America could use Georges
Clemenceau in no higher way than as teacher of
French in a young ladies' seminary is sufficient
criticism of our civilization to anyone who un-
derstands the full significance of the fact.

While a teacher he translated the political
economy of John Stuart Mill into French and
thereby showed the deeper affinities of his mind.
Like the Englishman he was a believer in indi-
vidualism and therefore in liberty in the widest
sense. But like Mill, too, he had an active sense
of social justice; thought that employment
should be found by the state for anyone who
wanted it and that a minimum wage and a very
high minimum wage should be given to all
working men and women. A born individual-
ist, he yet believed in the nationalization of rail-
ways, telegraphs, telephones and all public utili-
ties; but he has always felt that progress comes
through the gifted individual and by virtue of
his efforts and in no other way.

He fell in love with one of his pupils and mar-
ried her in June, 1869. A year later he returned
with his wife to France. After some years Mrs.
Clemenceau obtained a divorce and Clemenceau
married again.

During the Franco-Prussian war Clemenceau
was mayor of Montmartre and one of his duties
was to see that 150,000 men were properly fed.
He thus became responsible for large amounts of

307

money, and foreseeing the accusations that might
be brought against any official's honesty in those
trying times, he took the precaution from the be-
ginning of engaging an expert accountant to
take charge of and disburse every cent of the
public funds.

At the end of the war, though mayor of the
most popular district of Paris, he stood out
against the Commune; yet for five long years he
worked for a general amnesty for all the Com-
munards. He thought them mistaken but after
all they were Frenchmen. From 1871 to 1875
he was a member of the Paris Municipal Coun-
cil of which he became President.

In 70 he was elected member from Mont-
martre to the Chamber of Deputies where at
once he was hailed as leader by the Radicals.

Clemenceau soon became more a subject of
dread and dislike to his own side than to his op-
ponents. He founded a newspaper. La Justice,
a great daily, and used it as a weapon. He de-
stroyed the de Broglie administration. He first
helped and then overthrew Boulanger. He
caused the fall of Jules Grevy, and of Jules Fer-
ry. He wrecked the activities and position of
Freycinet again and again.

Yet his own policy was a consistent radical
Republicanism, clear and practical ; he stood for
the realization of all that the first, great revol-
ution had dreamed. He was wiser than his

308

rivals ; he opposed the alliance with Russia, de-
termined that his country should not be joined
in close friendship with a despotism. He urged
constantly the development of French resources
to the utmost.

In November, 1906, he became Premier. As
some one said, "the Conscience of France" came
to power. He chose for his Minister of Foreign
Affairs, his friend Stephen Pichon, who served
him again in 1918 and 1919. Both Pichon
and Clemenceau were soon tested. In those
years the Kaiser was continually rattling his
sword; he had bullied over the Schnaebele af-
fair; he had got Delcasse dismissed; now the
Casablanca incident gave him another opportu-
nity; would France again give in? Clemenceau
refused the German demand, not with the courte-
ous phrases of diplomacy, but flatly and without
qualification. In November, 1908, he called the
Kaiser^s bluff. Strange to say, this triumph let
to his fall. '

Delcass^ his old enemy, rose up suddenly and
overthrew his Ministry. A discussion over naval
affairs sprang up almost overnight. There were
scandals, investigations, controversies. For the
first time in his Parliamentary career, Clemen-
ceau lost his head. At least he lost his temper,
declared that Delcasse had "humiliated France,"
and in consequence was himself ousted from of-
fice. He kept his position, however, in the Scn-

309

ate. In 1912 he overthrew Caillaux' Ministry.
In 1913 he wrecked Briand's Cabinet on the
issue of proportional representation. At the be-
ginning of the war he started a new paper,
L'Homme Libre — The Freeman — ^which was
suppressed; at once he started it again as "The
Man in Chains."

In April, 1918, he was outspoken in his cen-
sure of the management of the allied offensive.
He was somewhat scornful of America's long-
continued neutrality, but was enthusiastic in his
welcome when the United States at length en-
tered the war.

And now what is there to hope or fear from
Clemenceau? First of all, he is seventy-seven
years old; all the leading politicians in France
dislike him; the Socialists dislike him the more
because he sympathizes with some of their aims
and yet holds himself aloof. Has he done any-
thing new? Has he done anything new since
the Armistice? Is he likely to do anything mem-
orable in the future?

I am fain to believe that he reached his high-
est height in the summer of 1918 when he forced
the unification of command under Foch by
threatening to make peace with Germany if the
suggestion were rejected and made himself as I
have described, the life and soul of the French
offensive.

Now he declares that after all the peace ar-
310

rangements have been carried out he will retire
from political life; his life's work rounded,
crowned if you will, by an unique triumph. But
such complete success proclaims his limitations.
Clemenceau belongs to the day and hour and the
future will owe him little or nothing. He is as
fine an embodiment of the French fighting spirit
as time has produced; but France has always
been rich in great fighters ; he is absolutely hon-
est, too. in a greedy age, and singularly disinter-
ested; in private life he can be magnanimom;,
but when called on to play statesman he showed
himself greedy and vindictive and thereby laid
upon his country too heavy a burden.

Cromwell, surely a fighting man if ever there
was one, when asked once about his parents, said
that he loved his mother, but always admired his
father intensely because he was never satisfied
with any bargain in which he got the best of the
other man. Even the Romans who thought it
well to conquer the proud, knew that it was wise
to be generous to the defeated.

When will politicians learn that no treaty or
compact can endure that is not founded on jus-
tice, and that loving-kindness is the only binding
tie between men and nations?

For Clemenceau the definitive signing of
peace and the elections in January, 1920, must
be the end. He broke a rib the other day
merely traveling to London and my prediction

311

of four months ago that if he allowed himself
to stand for President he would be defeated by
Paul Deschanel has been fulfilled. Twenty-six
years ago they fought a duel and Clemenceau
wounded Deschanel savagely; now time has
brought retribution and Clemenceau has had
to submit to a final defeat; yet he has done
enough and more than enough to ensure him a
high place in the Pantheon of French worthies
forever.

312

j...J^ kWii,'

Shaw as Seen by Max

SHAW'S PORTRAIT BY SHAW, or

HOW FRANK OUGHT TO HAVE
DONE IT.

{After finishing my pen-portrait of Shaw I
sent him a copy asking him. to correct any errors
in it. He replied by telling me that it was in-
corrigible and sending me the following portrait
of himself as an example of how I ought to have
written about him. Just as I published Shaw's
views of Oscar Wilde in my book on Wilde so
now I publish Shaw's self-portrait so that my
readers can compare it with my view of him. —

Frank Harris.)

EFORE attempting to add Bernard
Shaw to my collection of Contem-
porary Portraits I find it necessary
to secure myself in advance by the
fullest admission of his extraordinary
virtues. Without any cavilling over trifles I de-
clare at once that Shaw is the just man made
perfect. I admit that in all his controversies,
and in all possible controversies, with me or any-
one else, Shaw is, always has been, and always
will be, right. I perceive that the common habit
of abusing him is an ignorant and silly habit,
and that the pretence of not taking him seriously
is the ridiculous cover for an ignominous retreat

313

from an encounter with him. If there is any
other admission I can make, any other testi-
monial I can give, I am ready to give it and to
apologize for having omitted it. If it will help
matters to say that Shaw is the greatest man
that ever lived, I shall not hesitate for a moment.
All the cases against him break down when
they are probed to the bottom. All his prophe-
cies come true. All his fantastic creations come
to life within a generation. I have an uneasy
sense that even now I am not doing him justice
— that I am ungrateful, disloyal, disparaging.
I can only repeat that if there is anything I have
left out, all that is necessary is to call my atten-
tion to the oversight, and it shall be remedied.
If I cannot say that Shaw touches nothing that
he does not adorn, I can at least testify that he
touches nothing that he does not dust and polish
and put back in its place much more carefully
than the last man who handled it.

Once, at a public dinner given by the Stage
Society, Shaw had to propose the health of the
dramatic critics; and Max Beerbohm had to
reply. Before the speaking began Max came
to Shaw and said, "You are going to say, aren't
you, that you are a critic yourself?" "I don't
know what I am going to say," said Shaw; "but
I daresay I shall bring that in." "Promise me
that you will," said Max: "I want to make a
point about it". "Anything to oblige you," said

314

Shaw; and he did. Max began his speech thus:
"I was once at a school where the master used
always to say, 'Remember, boys, that I am one
of yourselves.' " A roar of laughter saved Max
the trouble of pointing the moral.

Robert Lynd said of Shaw's "Common Sense
About the War" that though nobody could take
any reasonable exception to it, yet from the
moment it appeared the war was spoken of and
written about as a war between the Allies on
the one hand, and, on the other, Germany,
Austria, Turkey and Bernard Shaw.

When Shaw contested a seat at the London
County Council election as a Progressive, after
six years hard Progressive drudgery on a Bor-
ough Council, with the advantage of being one
of the inventors of municipal Progressivism, not
only was he defeated by the defection of all the
Liberals and temperance reformers (Shaw is a
teetotaler) ; but the leading Progressive papers
also exulted in his defeat as a most blessed de-
liverance. The only people who voted for him
were those who had never voted before. This
was proved by an enormous increase in the poll
at the next election.

These are the things that happen to him in
his most popular moments, when he is in no
way breasting and opposing the current of public
opinion. When, as often happens, he has to take
his chance of being Ivnched for telling some

315

unpalatable truth, or taking some unpopular
side, numbers of persons who have never before
betrayed any hostility to him have been em-
boldened to believe that they had him "on the
run" at last, and have suddenly vented on him
a bitterness and violence which must have been
rankling in them for years.

The result is that hardly anyone who has not
met Shaw thinks of him otherwise than as a man
of disagreeable appearance, harsh and wound-
ing manners, and insufferable personality. One
of his favorite sayings is "I always astonish
strangers by my amiability, because, as no human
being could possibly be so disagreeable as they
expect me to be, I have only to be commonly
civil to seem quite charming."

No truthful contemporary portrait can ignore
either this extraordinary power of exciting furi-
ous hostility, or the entire absence of any obvious
ground for it. It has been said that Shaw irri-
tates people by always standing on his head, and
calling black white and white black. But only
simpletons either offer or accept this account.
Men do not win a reputation like Shaw's by
perversity and tomfoolery. What is really puz-
zling is that Shaw irritates us intensely by stand-
ing on his feet and telling us that black is black
and white is white, whilst other men please
everybody by airing the most outrageous para-
doxes and by repeating with an air of conviction

316

what everyone knows to be false. There is some-
thing maddening in being forced to agree with a
man against whom your whole soul protests. It
is not that he expresses your thought more accu-
rately than you yourself have thought it, trying
as this sort of correction would be if it were
made consciously. It must be that there is some-
thing terrifying in finding one's views shared
by a man whose conclusions are known to be
monstrous and subversive. That little extra
accuracy often reveals the brink of an abyss
somewhere near. It is as if a man had offered
to walk a bit of the way with you, because you
were going in the direction of his home, and you
know that home to be the bottomless pit

Now it is quite true that Shaw's final and
central conclusion is monstrous not only to the
average conventional man, but to the most ardent
revolutionist. I do not, of course, mean that he
is a Socialist: "we are all Socialists now," nor
am I thinking of his views on marriage; for he
proposes nothing more than American States
and some European ones have already carried
out as nearly as no matter.

His religion of Creative Evolution is shared
by hundreds of modern thinkers — Bergson for
instance — who do not incur his singular unpop-
ularity. Long before the war his most shocking
play, "Mrs. Warren's Profession," was repudi-
ated by the advanced section of Moscow Society

317

as the sermon of a bourgeois moralist; and before
that even the American Bench had been able to
find nothing in it that justified the outcry made
against it. In short, there is nothing in Shaw's
political and social program, not even his in-
sistence on absolute equality of income and its
dissociation from every kind of personal indus-
try or virtue, at which a thinker of adequate
modern equipment would turn a hair. He is
a perfectly safe man on a committee of any sort:
a man of tact and moderation who kept the
Fabian Society, of which he was a leader for
twenty-seven years, free from the quarrels that
broke up all the other Socialist organizations.

Yet the monstrosity is there. Shaw works at
politics in the spirit of one who is helping a
lame dog over a stile which he believes to be
insurmountable. He makes no secret of his con-
viction that the problems raised by the aggreg-
ation of men into civilization are beyond their
political capacity, and will never be solved by
them. He is at present engaged in a tetralogy
in which, starting from the Garden of Eden,
and ending thousands of years hence, he shows
mankind shortening its life from a thousand
years to three score and ten, and again lengthen-
ing it from three score and ten to three hundred :
a prolongation which, as a Creative Evolution-
ist, he holds to be quite possible to the human
will. But he makes no secret of his belief that

318

Man will be scrapped as a failure, and that the
Life Force will replace him by some new and
higher creation, just as man himself was
created to supply the deficiencies of the lower
animals. Fundamentally, then, Shaw has no
reverence for us or for himself. And how
much we are dependent on mutual reverence
we never realize until we meet someone who
denies it to us. Shaw is that someone. It is
impossible to take ofifence, because he is as
merciless to himself as to us. He does not
kick us overboard and remain proudly on the
quarter deck himself. With the utmost good
humor he clasps us affectionately round the
waist and jumps overboard with us, and that too,
not into a majestic Atlantic where we might
perish tragically, but into a sea of ridicule where
we cut the poorest figure. And this intolerable
trick is played on us at the most unexpected and
inopportune moments. "No man," said Sir
Henry Norman, "knows how to butter a moral
slide better than Shaw." Shaw's support, and
even his enthusiastic championship, thus be-
comes more dreaded than the most spiteful at-
tacks of others. During the first Ibsen boom in
London Shaw proposed to help an American
actress in an Ibsen enterprise by interviewing
her. To his astonishment the lady told him with
passionate earnestness that if he wrote a word
about her she would shoot him. "You may not

319

believe here in England that such things are
possible," she said; "but in America we think
differently; and I will do it: I have the pistol
ready." "General Gabler's pistol," was Shaw's
unruffled comment; but he saw how intensely
the lady shrank from being handled by him in
print, and the interview was not written. Some
of his best friends confess that until they were
used to him, quite friendly letters from him
would sometimes move them to furious out-
bursts of profanity at his expense. He tells a
story of an illiterate phrenologist with whom
he got into conversation at a vegetarian restau-
rant in his early days. This man presently ac-
cused Shaw of being a sceptic. "Why?" said
Shaw. "Have I no bump of veneration?"
"Bump!" shouted the phrenologist. "It's a
hole." The actor Irving, accustomed to a defer-
ence which a prelate might have envied, found
Shaw unendurable. If Shaw's manners were
offensive he would be easier to deal with; but
his pity for you as a hopeless failure is so kindly,
so covered by an unexceptionable observance of
the perfect republirin respect to which you are
entitled, thtt you arc utterly helpless: there is
nothing to complain of, nothing to lay hold of,
no excuse for snatching up the carving knife
and driving it into his vitals.

I was the editor of the Fortnightly Review
when I first met Shaw about an article. He

320

had an engaging air of being much more inter-
ested in me than in his article. Not to be mock
modest, I suppose I luas more interesting than
the article; and I was naturally not disposed to
quarrel with Shaw for thinking so and showing
it. He has the art of getting on intimate and
easy terms very quickly; and at the end of five
minutes I found myself explaining to him how
I had upset my health by boyishly allowing my-
self to be spurred into a trial of speed on the
river in an outrigger, and overstraining myself
in a fierce burst of speed. He gave his mind to
my misfortune as sympathetically as my doctor,
and asked me some questions as to what sort of
care I was taking of myself. One of the ques-
tions was, "Do you drink?" I was equal to the
occasion, and did not turn a hair, as I assured
him that a diagnosis of delirium tremens could
not be sustained ; but I could not help becoming
suddenly conscious that I expected from men
an assumption that I was not a drunkard, a liar,
a thief, or anything else of what I may call an
actionable nature, and that I was face to face
with a man who made no such assumption. His
question was too like one of those asked in
Butler's "Erewhon" to be entirely agreeable to
human frailty. In Shaw's play, "Captain Brass-
bound's Conversion," the captain introduces his
lieutenant with the words (or to this effect) :
''This is the greatest scoundrel, liar, thief and

321

rapscallion on the west coast." On which the
lieutenant says, "Look here, Captain : if you want
to be modest, be modest on your own account,
not on mine." The fact that Shaw is mode«t on
his own account, and gives himself away much
more freely than his good manners allow him to
give away his friends, does not really make the
latter transaction any more pleasant for its vic-
tim : it only robs them of their revenge, and com-
pels them to pay tribute to his amiability when
they are furiously annoyed with him.

It is difficult to class a man who gives him-
self away even to the point of making himself
ridiculous as vain. But all Shaw's friends agree
that he is laughably vain. Yet here again he
complicates our judgment by playing up to it
with the most hyperbolical swank about his in-
tellect. He declares that he does so because
people like it. He says, quite truly, that they
love Cyrano and hate "the modest cough of the
minor poet." Those who praise his books to
his face arc dumbfounded by the enthusiasm
with which he joins in his own praise, and need
all their presence of mind to avoid being pro-
voked into withdrawing some seventy-five per
cent or so of their estimate. Such playacting
makes it difficult to say how much real vanity
or modesty underlies it all; but I feel safe in
saying that Shaw, of late years at least, has found
out his own value, and maybe in some danger

3Z2

of not writing off his inevitable depreciation by
advancing years quite fast enough. He himself
says that he is not conceited. "No man can be,"
he says, "if, like me, he has spent his life trying
to play the piano accurately, and never succeeded
for a single bar." I ask him to give me a list
of his virtues, his excellence, his achievements,
so that I may not do him the injustice of omitting
any. He replies: "It is unnecessary; they are
all in the shop window."

Shaw plays the part of the modest man only
in his relations with the arts which are the great
rivals of literature. He has never claimed to
be "better than Shakespeare." That much
quoted heading to one of his prefaces has a note
of interrogation after it, and the question is dis-
missed by himself with the remark that as
Shakespeare in drama, like Mozart in opera, or
Michael Angelo in fresco, reached the summit
of his art, nobody can be better than Shake-
speare, though anybody may now have things to
say that Shakespeare did not say, and outlooks
on life and character which were not open to
him. Nevertheless, I am convinced that Shaw
is as willing to have his plays compared with
Shakespeare's as Turner was to have his pictures
hung beside Claude's, though, he has not said so.
But his attitude towards Rodin, for example, is
quite different. When he was invited to a din-
ner in Paris given in honor of Rodin, he wrote

323

that he had no occasion to be merely Rodin's
convive, as he already had the honor of being
one of Rodin's models, and was sure of a place
in the biographical dictionaries a thousand years
hence as *'Shaw, Bernard: subject of a bust by
Rodin: otherwise unknown." He struck the
same note when, finding that Rodin, though an
infallible connoisseur in sculpture, had no books
in his collection except the commonest kind gf
commercial presentation volumes, he presented
him with a Kelmscott Chaucer, and wrote in it:

I have seen two masters at work, Morris Who made this book,
The other Rodin the Great, who fashioned my head in
clay:
I give the book to Rodin, scrawling my name in a nook
Of the shrine their works shall hallow when mine are dust
by the way.

Now I confess I am not convinced by this
evidence of modesty as I am not sure that it is
not rather the final artistic touch to Shaw's
swank. For what was the origin of the Rodin
bust? Rodin knew nothing about Shaw, and at
first refused to undertake the commission. Mrs.
Shaw thereupon wrote to Rodin pleading that
she wished to have a memorial of her husband,
and that her husband declared that any man
who, being a contemporary of Rodin, would
have his bust made by anyone else, would pillory
himself to all posterity ^s an ignoramus. Rodin,

324

finding that he had to deal with a man who
knew his value, weakened in his refusal. Mrs.
Shaw then ascertained from Rilke, the Austrian
poet, who was then acting as Rodin's secretary,
what his usual fee was for a bust. The money
(only $5,000) was immediately lodged to
Rodin's credit on the understanding that he was
to be under no obligation whatever in respect
of it, and might make the bust or not make it,
begin it and leave it off if it did not interest him :
in short, treat the payment as a contribution to
the endowment of his work in general and re-
main completely master of the situation. The
result, of course, was that Rodin sent for Shaw
to come to Paris at once; installed him and his
wife as daily guests at his Meudon villa ; worked
steadily at the bust every day for a month until
it was finished ; and went beyond his bargain in
giving his sitter casts of it. Here we have the
dexterous Shaw, the master of blarney, and the
penetrating art critic; and not for a moment do
I suggest that there was the slightest insincerity
in his proceedings: had there been, Rodin would
not have been taken in. But was there no vanity
in it? Would so busy a man as Shaw have left
his work and gone to Paris to pose like a profes-
sional model for a whole month if he had not
thought his bust as important as the busts of
Plato which are now treasures of the museums
which possess them?

325

It will be noted that I have spoken of Shaw
playacting, playing the part, and so forth. I
have done so advisedly. Shaw is an incorrigible
and continuous actor, using his skill as deliber-
ately in his social life as in his professional work
in the production of his own plays. He does
not deny this. "G. B. S.," he says, "is not a real
person : he is a legend created by myself, a pose,
a reputation. The real Shaw is not a bit like
him." Now this is exactly what all his acquaint-
ances say of the Rodin bust, that is is not a bit
like him. But Shaw maintains that it is the only
portrait that tells the truth about him. When
Rodin was beginning the work in his studio Mrs.
Shaw complained to him that all the artists and
caricaturists, and even the photographs., aimed
at producing the sort of suburban Mephistophe-
les they imagined Shaw to be, without ever tak-
ing the trouble to look at him. Rodin replied,
"I know nothing about Mr. Shaw's reputation;
but I will give you what is there." Shaw de-
clares he was as good as his word. When
Troubetskoi saw the Rodin bust he declared that
there was no life in the eyes; and in three hours
frenzied work he produced his bust of Shaw.
As a tour de force it is magnificent; but it is
Mephistopheles, not suburban, but aristocratic.
"Very gratifying to my snobbish family," said
Shaw; "but not my pose." He liked the bust
and liked Troubetskoi; but his wife would have

326

none of it, nor of the curious portrait by Neville
Lytton, which originated in an allegation by
Granville Barker that Velasquez' portrait of
Pope Innocent was an excellent portrait of Shaw.
Lytton accordingly painted Shaw in the costume
and attitude of Innocent; and though the picture
is a convincing revelation of what Shaw would
be like in the papal chair, Pope Bernard will
never be identified by any antiquary with the
subject of the Rodin bust. Augustus John's
portraits of Shaw are even less reconcilable with
the Rodin. John has projected all Shaw's public
strength and assurance at their fullest intensity,
indeed at more than lifesize. "There is the
great Shaw," says the sitter, when he shows his
friends the picture. But when he points to the
Rodin, he says, "Just as I am, without one plea."
De Smet's portrait is that of a quiet delicate
elderly gentleman : Shaw likes it. Lady Scott's
statuette is friendly and literal. (And now
please note that this busy modest Shaw, who
never has time enough or vanity enough to ac-
cept the invitations to sit for his portrait which
are showered on him, has nevertheless contrived
to provide memorials of himself by the greatest
masters of his time. Can true modesty be so
colossal, and so difficult to distinguish from a
conceit that no man should allow himself until
he has been dead for at least five hundred years?
Shaw is the greatest pedant alive, Dickens'
327

man who ate crumpets on principle could not
hold a candle to him in this respect. Descrip-
tive reporters have said that Shaw wears a flannel
shirt. He never wore a flannel shirt in his life.
He does not wear a shirt at all, because it is
wrong to swaddle one's middle with a double
thickness of material : therefore he wears some
head-to-foot undergarment unknown to shirt-
makers. The flannel fable arose because, at a
time when it was socially impossible for a pro-
fessional man to appear in public in London
without a white starched collar, he maintained
that no educated eye could endure the color con-
trast of ironed starch against European flesh
tones, and that only a very black and brilliant
negro should wear such a collar. He therefore
obtained and wore gray collars. Now that the
fashion is changed, he wears collars of various
colors ; but the dye is always chosen to carry out
a theory that the best color effect is that of two
shades of the same color. His coat is of the
smartest West End tailoring; but it is unlined,
on principle. He addresses a letter high up in
the left hand corner of an envelope. A mere
affectation of singularity you say. Not at all:
he will talk to you for an hour on the beauty of
the system of page margins established by the
medieval scribes and adopted by William Mor-
ris, and on its practicality as leaving room for
the postman's thumb, and considering his con-

328

veniencc in reading the address. He justifies his
refusal to use apostrophes and inverted commas
in printing his books on the ground that they
spoil the appearance of the page, declaring that
the Bible would never have attained its supreme
position in literature if it had been disfigured
with such unsightly signs. He is interested in
phonetics and systems of shorthand; and it is to
his pedantic articulation that he owes his popu-
larity as a public speaker in the largest halls, as
every word is heard with exasperating distinct-
ness. He advocates a combination of the metric
system with the duodecimal by inserting two new
digits into our numeration, thus : eight, nine, tee,
ee, ten, and eighteen, nineteen, eeteen teeteen,
twenty and so forth. He likes machines as a
child likes toys, and once very nearly bought a
cash register without having the slightest use for
it. When he was on the verge of sixty he yielded
to the fascination of a motor bicycle, and rode it
away from the factory for seventy-seven miles,
at the end of which, just outside his own door,
he took a corner too fast and was left sprawling.
He has been accused of being one of the band of
devoted lunatics who bathe in the Serpentine
(the ornamental water in Hyde Park, London),
every morning throughout the year, rain or
shine; but this is an invention. He does, how-
ever, when in London, swim in the bathing pool
of the Royal Automobile Club every morning

329

before breakfast, winter and summer, his alleged
reason being that as an Irishman he dislikes
washing himself, but cannot do without the
stimulus of a plunge into cold water. He is, as
all the world knows, a vegetarian ; but he derides
the hygienic pretensions of that diet. He values
health very highly, like all faddists; but he de-
clares that all men who are any good, will trade
on their stock of health to the very utmost limit,
and therefore live on the verge of a breakdown.
Every really busy man, he declares, should go
to bed for eighteen months when he is forty, to
recuperate. I could easily fill another page with
his notions; but I forbear. To the looker on,
each one of them is half an amusement and half
an irritation.

Shaw's gallantries are for the most past non-
existent. He says, with some truth, that no man
who has any real work in the world has time or
money for a pursuit so long and expensive as the
pursuit of women. He may possibly have
started that protest against the expensiveness and
the exactions of beautiful women which is the
main theme of his friend, Granville Barker's
"Waste" and the "Madras House." Nobody
knows his history in this respect, as he is far too
correct a person to kiss and tell. To all appear-
ance he is a model husband; and in the
various political movements in which his
youth was passed there was no scandal about

330

him. Yet a popular anecdote describes a well
known actor-manager as saying one day at
rehearsal to an actress of distinguished beauty,
"Let us give Shaw a beefsteak and put some
red blood into him." "For heaven's sake,
don't," she exclaimed: "he is bad enough as it
is; but if you give him meat no woman in
London will be safe." The gentleman's joke
obviously provoked the lady's; and no man
can say more than that the truth must be
somewhere between them. Anyhow, Shaw's
teaching is much more interesting than his per-
sonal adventures, if he ever had any. That
teaching is unquestionably in very strong reac-
tion against what he has called Nineteenth
Century Amorism. He is not one of your subur-
ban Love-is-Enough fanatics. He maintains
that chastity is so powerful an instinct that its
denial and starvation on the scale on which the
opposite impulse has been starved and denied
would wreck any civilization. He insists that
intellect is a passion; and that the modern notion
that passion means only sex is as crude and bar-
barous as the ploughman's idea that art is simply
bawdiness. He points out that art can flourish
splendidly when sex is absolutely barred, as it
was, for example, in the Victorian literature
which produced Dickens, and that painting in
Italy and sculpture in Greece were nursed to
their highest point within the limits of a religion

331

and a convention which absolutely barred por-
nography. He compares Giulio Romano, a
frank and shameless pornographer, a pupil of
Raphael's, and a more brilliant draughtsman,
with Raphael himself, who was so sensitive that
though he never painted a draped figure with-
out first drawing it in the nude, he always paid
the Blessed Virgin the quaint tribute of a calecon
in his studies of her, and contrived to decorate
the villa of a voluptuary with the story of Cupid
and Psyche without either shrinking from the
uttermost frankness or losing his dignity and
essential innocence. Shaw contends that when
art passed from the hands of Raphael to those
of Giulio it fell into an abyss, and became not
only disgusting but dull. For the modern
drama, with its eternal triangle and so forth, he
claims nothing but that it proves adultery to be
the dullest of subjects, and the last refuge of a
bankrupt imagination. He wrote "Plays for
Puritans" to show how independent he was of
such expedients. In "Fanny's First Play" he
ridicules the critics who conclude that he has no
virility. He demands scornfully whether gen-
uine virility can be satisfied with stories and pic-
tures, and declares that the fleshy school in art is
the consolation of the impotent. Yet there are
several passages in his writings and dramas
which show that he considers that imaginary
love plays an important part in civilized life.

332

In his latest finished play the handsome hero says
to a man who is jealous of him, "Do not waste
your jealousy on me: the imaginary rival is the
dangerous one." In "Getting Married," the lady
who refuses to marry because she cannot endure
masculine untidiness and the smell of tobacco,
hints that her imagination provides her with a
series of adventures which beggar reality. Shaw
says that the thousand and three conquests of
Don Juan consist of three squalid intrigues and
a thousand imaginative fictions. He says that
every attempt to realize such fictions is a failure;
and it may be added that nobody but a man who
had tried could have written the third act of
Man and Superman. In the fourth act of that
play, too, the scene in which the hero revolts
from marriage and struggles against it without
any hope of escape is a poignantly sincere utter-
ance which must have come from personal ex-
perience. Shakespeare in treating the same
theme through the character of Benedick might
conceivably have been making fun of somebody
else; but Tanner with all his extravagance is
first hand : Shaw would probably not deny it and
would not be believed if he did.

Shaw's amazing anti-Shakespearc campaign
under my editorship was all the more unexpected
because I was one of the few London editors to
whom Shakespeare is more than a name. I was
saturated with Shakespeare. At the hottest crisis

333

of the war, if I bought a newspaper to learn the
latest news from the front, and my eye caught
the name of Hamlet or Falstaff, I would read
every word about them before turning to the
latest telegrams. That I should be the editor of
an attack on Shakespeare of unheard of ferocity
was the one thing I should have declared confi-
dently could never possibly occur to me. No
name was more sacred to me. What made the
adventure odder was, first, that Shaw, who de-
livered the attack, was as full of Shakespeare as
I, and, second, that though we were both scan-
dalized by the sacrilege we were committing,
neither of us could honestly alter a word in one
of the articles. They were outrageous ; but there
was nothing to withdraw, nothing to soften, noth-
ing that could be modified without bringing
down the whole critical edifice. The explana-
tion is simple enough. Shaw's first shot at
Shakespeare was fired in 1894. Ibsen's first
broadside on England caught London between
wind and water in 1889. Shaw had written his
"Quintessence of Ibsenism" in the meantime, and
was judging everything on and off the stage by
the standard set up by the terrible Norwegian.
Many lesser men suffered cruelly by that stand-
ard; but Shakespeare was the most conspicuous
victim. "It is useless to talk of Shakespeare's
depth now," said Shaw: "there is nothing left
but his music. Even the famous delineation of

334

character, the Moliere - Shakespeare - Scott -
Dumas pere novel, is only a trick of mimicry.
Our Bard is knocked out of time: there is not a
feature left on his face. Hamlet is a spineless
effigy beside Pier Gynt, Imogen a doll beside
Nora Helmer, Othello a convention of Italian
opera beside Julian." And it was quite true.
Only in the Sonnets could we find Shakespeare
getting to that dark centre of realization at which
Ibsen worked. Now Shaw was not only full of
Ibsen, but full of Wagner, of Beethoven, of
Goethe, and — curiously — of Bunyan. The Eng-
lish way of being great by flashes : Shakespeare's
way, Ruskin's way, and Chesterton's way, with-
out ever following the inspiration up — that enor-
mous disregard of intellectual thoroughness that
William Morris put his finger on when he said
that Ruskin could say the most splendid things
and forget them five minutes after, could not dis-
guise its incoherence from an Irishman. Shaw's
favorite saying that an Irishman may like an
Englishman better than he likes any Irishman,
and may prefer an English cottage to an Irish
palace, but that no Irishman can regard the Eng-
lish as an adult race, explains a good deal in his
attitude to Shakespeare. "The Irish," he says,
"with all their detestable characteristics are at
least grown up. They think systematically : they
don't stop in the middle of a game of golf to
take in the grandeur of thought as if it were a

335

sunset, and then turn back to their game as the
really serious business of their life."

It will be noticed that my portrait of Shaw is
both more and less intimate than any other I
have penned. More, because Shaw tells the
whole world all that there is to be told about
himself. Less, because I never sat on a com-
mittee with him; and that is the only way to
see much of him. Shaw is not really a social
man. He never goes anywhere unless he has
business there. He pays no calls. Once he was
induced by Maurice Baring to go to a bachelors'
party of the usual British type, where men of all
generations, from Lord Cromer to H. G. Wells,
were trying to remember how to behave like
undergraduates. "Gentlemen," said Shaw, with
deadly contempt for their efforts, "we shall en-
joy ourselves very much if only you will not
try to be convivial."

He has described me as a Monster; and his
ground is that "Frank Harris adores literature
with a large L and yet can write : that is, he com-
bines the weakness of the amateur with the
strength of a genuine vocation." It is quite true
that I am a born Mermaid Tavcrncr: I share
with Shakespeare and Doctor Johnson that
weakness of the amateur which delights in the
feast of reason and the flow of soul among my
literary compeers, and my betters if I can tempt
them to sit with me. Bjut Shaw declares that he

330

saved his soul when he came to London by re-
solving, after his first glance at the Savile Club,
that he would never be a literary man or consort
with such." "I might have spent my life sitting
watching these fellows taking in each other's
washing and learning no more of the world than
a tic in a typewriter if I had been fool enough,"
he says. I tried to cure him of this by inviting
him to my Saturday Review lunches at the Cafe
Royal ; but it was no use. He came a few times,
being sincerely interested in the Cafe, in the
waiters, in the prices, in the cookery: in short, in
the economics of the place; and he concluded
that Harold Frederic and I ate too much meat,
and that it was a waste of money to pay Cafe
Royal prices for his own plateful of maccaroni,
which he could obtain elsewhere for tenpence.
The fact that I paid for it made no difference
whatever to him : he objected to a waste of my
money just as much as of his own.

I have sometimes wished that a good many
other people were equally considerate; but
Shaw's consideration amounts to an interference
with one's private affairs that is all the more in-
furiating because its benevolence and sagacity
makes it impossible to resent it. One of his
hostesses said he was a most dangerous man, and,
on being asked how and why (in the hope of
eliciting some scandal) explained, "You invite
him down to your place because you think he
will entertain your guests with his brilliant con-

337

vcrsation; and before you know where you are
he has chosen a school for your son, made your
will for you, regulated your diet, and assumed
all the privileges of your family solicitor, your
housekeeper, your clergyman, your doctor, your
dressmaker, your hairdresser, and your estate
agent. When he has finished with everybody
else, he incites the children to rebellion. And
when he can find nothing more to do, he goes
away and forgets all about you".

All attempts to draw him into disinterested
social intercourse are futile. If I had wanted
to see as much of Shaw as I could easily see of
any other man of letters in London, I should
have to join his endless committee, when I could
have seen him five times a week at least. Our
relations as contributor and editor were useless
for social purposes: he did not come to the office
as often as once a year, and then only when we
were in some legal difficulty, when he would
hasten to our aid and demonstrate with admir-
able lucidity that we had not a leg to stand on.
He is accessible to everybody, and tells every-
body everything without reserve; but the net
result is that nobody really knows him or can
tell you anything about him.

There is a cutting edge to Shaw that every-
body dreads. He has in an extreme degree the
mercurial mind that recognizes the inevitable
instantly and faces it and adapts itself to it ac-

338

cordingly. Now there is hardly anything in the
world so unbearable as a man who will not cry
at least a little over spilt milk, or allow us a
few moments murmuring before we admit that
it is spilt and done for. Few of us realize how
much we soften our losses by wrapping the hard
things of life in a veiling atmosphere of sym-
pathies, regret, condolences, caressing little pre-
tences that are none the less sweet because they
can never be made good : in short, moral shock
absorbers. Shaw neither gives nor takes such
quarter. There is a story of an Indian prince
whose favorite wife, when banqueting with him,
caught fire and was burnt to ashes before she
could be extinguished. The Indian prince took
in the situation at once, and faced it "Sweep
up your missus," he said to his weeping staff;
"and bring in the roast pheasant." That prince
was an oriental Shaw. Once, at Westminster
Bridge underground station, Shaw slipped at the
top of the stairs, and shot down the whole flight
on his back, to the horror of the bystanders. But
when he rose without the least surprise and
walked on as if that were his usual way of nego-
tiating a flight of steps, they burst into an irre-
sistible shriek of laughter. Whether it is a
missed train, or a death among his nearest and
dearest, he shows this inhuman self-possession.
No one has accused him of being a bad son : his
relations with his mother were apparently as

339

perfect as anything of the kind could be; but
when she was cremated, Granville Barker, whom
he had chosen to accompany him as the sole
other mourner, could say nothing to him but
"Shaw: you certainly are a merry soul." Shaw
was not only full of interest in the process and
the ceremony, but full also of a fancy that his
mother was looking on at it over his shoulder
and sharing his delight at the points on which it
appealed to his sense of humor. He is fond of
saying that what bereaved people need is a little
comic relief, and that it probably explains why
funerals are so farcical.

In many ways this mercurial gift serves Shaw's
turn very well. He knows much sooner and
better than most people when he is in danger
and when out of it; and this gives him an appear-
ance of courage when he is really running no
risk. He has the same advantage in his sense of
the value of money, knowing when it is worth
spending and when it is worth keeping; and
here again he often appears generous when he is
driving a very good bargain. Therefore when
he describes himself, as he does, as timid and
stingy whilst the man in the street is amazed at
his boldness and liberality, it is very hard to
decide how far he is capable of facing real
danger or making a real sacrifice. He is genu-
inely free from envy; but how can a man be
envious when he pities every other man for not

340

being George Bernard Shaw? The late Cecil
Chesterton has left it on record that when he,
as a young nobody, met the already famous
Shaw, he was received on terms of the frankest
boyish equality. This shows that Shaw makes
no mistakes about man and manners; it hardly
proves more. All that can be predicted of him
by the average man is unexpectedness.

Shaw, therefore, with all his engaging man-
ners and social adroitness, appears as one who
does not care what he says, who is callous in
some of the most moving situations in life, and
whose line can never be foreseen, no matter what
the subject is. That is not a receipt for a reas-
suring or popular personality, though it may be
for a provocative one. Granted that it may be
a quite misleading effect produced by his excel-
lent quality of brain, none the less it explains
why "he has not an enemy in the world; and
none of his friends like him." The most famous
single passage in his dramatic work, Caesar's
"He who has never hoped can never despair,"
is praised for its fineness, its originality. But
no one has ever felt sure that his inspiration is
not infernal rather than divine. Compare it with
the now intolerably hackneyed quotation which
endears Shaw to the Nonconformist conscience:
"This is the true joy in life, the being used for
a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty
one; the being thoroughly worn out before you

341

are thrown on the scrap heap ; the being a force
of Nature instead of a feverish little selfish clod
of ailments and grievances complaining that the
world will not devote itself to make you happy."
There is no smell of brimestone about this; but
ask any of Shaw's friends whether it did not
surprise them much more as coming from him
that "He who has never hoped can never de-
spair," and you will soon learn which of the two
utterances is considered the more Shavian by
those who know the author.

I shall not attempt to carry the portrait any
further. Shaw is almost a hopeless subject, be-
cause there is nothing interesting to be said about
him that he has not already said about himself.
Germany, France, England and America have
each produced books about him. Henderson has
read Shaw from end to end, interviewed him,
and ascertained all the facts; whilst Gilbert
Chesterton apparently regards Shaw as a sort of
starry influence that never touched the earth or
dipped a pen in the ink. Julius Bab sees in
Shaw the Arch Protestant, at home in the coun-
try of Luther. McCabe, still a priest to the back-
bone in spite of his defiant apostacy, argues as a
priest does, but from the opposite end. Shaw is
not a materialist atheist; therefore argues Mc-
Cabe, he must be a man who will steal spoons
if he gets the chance. Holbrook Jackson's little
volume is still one of the best: he knew Shaw

342

in his Fabian entourage, and worked with him.
Professor O'Bolger threatens us with revelations
as to the private life of the Shaw family, and
promises to show that the young gentleman in
"Misalliance" who explains that he had three
fathers in a perfectly blameless menage a quatre,
is Shaw himself. Shaw prefers Chesterton's
book because, he says, "of its magnificent inno-
cence and generosity towards me, and its general
wisdom and interest." Cestre's book is a very
competent piece of French criticism, of the kind
that might be expected in a country where
Shaw's works are in the official educational lists
of books to be studied for examinations in Eng-
lish literature.

But I know better than to attempt to pick the
bones of a man who has already preyed on him-
self so thoroughly that there is nothing left worth
the lifting. I have, however, noticed something
that has escaped not only his biographers but
himself. Neither he nor they have ever at-
tempted to explain Wilde's epigram. Shaw has
been enormously abused, almost always stupidly
and maliciously. He has also been idealized as
a prophet and adored as a saint. Between those
extremes there has been a good deal of excellent
writing about him, by very able reviewers like
Gilbert Murray and Desmond McCarthy, which
show a high appreciation of him, and an anxious
desire not to be classed with his detractors.

343

Wilde debarred himself carefully from all sus-
picion of underrating Shaw. The words with
which I began this essay show that I myself
insist on vindicating my taste and judgment in
this respect before letting myself go about him.
But why this anxiety. Why not take it for
granted that this eminent man, who said with
such placid confidence to William Archer, "I
shall be a panjandrum of literature for the next
three hundred years," is entitled to his place in
the Pantheon without question. Why not go
even further, and say, "Others abide our ques-
tion: thou art free!" I can only answer that
though in his amazing complacency he certainly
does not abide our question, he is very far from
being free of it. He is violently resented and
detested as well as admired and liked. Yet he
has no vices; his manners are not repulsive; a
little real malice would positively heighten his
geniality. The problem is to find a perfectly
consistent character (and Shaw's character is
almost mechanically consistent) that can produce
these contrary effects. Nobody has yet tried to
do this: his defenders have ignored the dislike:
his assailants have denied his qualities and in-
vented faults which do not exist. I have made
no attempt to sit in judgment or to play the
chivalrous friend. I have sketched the man's
lines as they appear; and though the resultant
figure is free from deformity, yet there is some-

344

thing in it that human nature cannot easily bear.
It is odd that I, who feel myself to be a very
human person — all too human perhaps, as
Nietzsche has it— should have been called a
monster by the only man of my time who, though
humane to a degree, is never quite human. Is
he not himself a monster; a priceless monster
certainly, but still one who could give us all a
shudder, and knew it, by saying "Imagine a
world inhabited exclusively by Bernard Shawsl"
It was only a trick, of course: a world of any-
bodies in particular would be unbearable. It
was perhaps only a plagiarism of Napoleon's
saying that when he died the world would utter
a great "Ouf !" of relief. But there was some-
thing in it for all that; and what that something
was I have perhaps made you feel if I could not
make you understand, not understanding myself.

THE END

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