Boon, The mind of the race, The wild asses of the devil, and The last trump; being a first selection from the literary remains of George Boon, appropriate to the times

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BOON, THE MIND OF
THE RACE, THE WILD
ASSES OF THE DEVIL,
and THE LAST TRUMP
By H. G. WELLS

A Modern Love Story

ANN VERONICA

By H. G. WELLS

Crown 8vo, cloth, 7/- net.

Also Adelphi Library, cloth, 3/6 net.

Also crown 8vo, cloth, 3I6 net.

Also Unwin's Pocket Novels, 1/9 net.

" Like all Mr. Wells' work, the book is
inflamed with sincerity, and it abounds in
flashes of raw life which almost blind the
judgment with their intense reality. ... It
must be read by everyone who wants to
understand the modern movement, and to
see it pictured by a modern of the moderns,
who is at once a sound artist and a deep and
sensitive thinker^-' — Daily Telegraph.

' ' Whether one accepts Mr. Wells' reading:
of the feminine riddle or not, one gladly
concedes he has written^ a novel which in
its frank sincerity, and its bold grappling
with a social question of compelling- force,
stands out as one of the best things he has
given us." — The Globe.

T. FISHER UNWIN LTD XONDON

Boon, The Mind of the
Race, The Wild Asses of the
Devil, and The Last Trump

Being a First Selection from the
Literary Remains of George Boon,
Appropriate to the Times

Prepared for Publication
by Reginald Bliss

AUTHOR OF "THE COUSINS OF CHARLOTTE
BRONT4," "A CHILD'S HISTORY OF THE
CRYSTAL PALACE," "FIRELIGHT RAMBLES,"
"EDIBLE FUNGI," "WHALES IN CAPTIVITY,"
AND OTHER WORKS

WITH

An Ambiguous Introduction by

H. G. WELLS

(Who is in Truth the
Author of the entire Book)

T. FISHER UN WIN LTD
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

US 7

Fir A published in 1915
Second Impression 1915
Second Edition 1920

(4W rights reserved)

INTRODUCTION

Whenever a publisher gets a book by one
author he wants an Introduction written to
it by another, and Mr. Fisher Unwin is no
exception to the rule. Nobody reads Intro-
ductions, they serve no useful purpose, and
they give no pleasure, but they appeal to
the business mind, I think, because as a rule
they cost nothing. At any rate, by the
pressure of a certain inseparable intimacy
between Mr. Reginald Bliss and myself,
this Introduction has been extracted from
me. I will confess that I have not read his
book through, though I have a kind of
first-hand knowledge of its contents, and
that it seems to me an indiscreet, ill-advised
book. . . .

I have a very strong suspicion that this
Introduction idea is designed to entangle
me in the responsibility for the book. In
America, at any rate, " The Life of George
Meek, Bath Chairman," was ascribed to me
upon no better evidence. Yet any one

6 INTRODUCTION

who likes may go to Eastbourne and find
Meek with chair and all complete. But
in view of the complications of the book
market and the large simplicities of the
public mind, I do hope that the reader
—and by that I mean the reviewer— will
be able to see the reasonableness and the
necessity of distinguishing between me and
Mr. Reginald Bliss. I do not wish to escape
the penalties of thus participating in, and
endorsing, his manifest breaches of good
taste, literary decorum, and friendly obli-
gation, but as a writer whose reputation
is already too crowded and confused and
who is for the ordinary purposes of every
day known mainly as a novelist, I should
be glad if I could escape the public identi-
fication I am now repudiating. Bliss is
Bliss and Wells is Wells. And Bliss can
can write all sorts of things that Wells could
not do.

This Introduction has really no more
to say than that.

H, G. WELLS.

CONTENTS

PAGE
INTRODUCTION 5

CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK AND GEORGE BOON 9

CHAPTER THE SECOND

BEING THE FIRST CHAPTER OF " THE MIND OF

THE RACE " 40

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE GREAT SLUMP, THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS,

AND THE GARDEN BY THE SEA ... 59

CHAPTER THE FOURTH
OF ART, OF LITERATURE, OF MR. HENRY JAMES . 79

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

OF THE ASSEMBLING AND OPENING OF THE WORLD

CONFERENCE ON THE MIND OF THE RACE . 120
7

8 CONTENTS

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

PAGE
OF NOT LIKING HALLERY AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY

FOR THE DISCOURAGEMENT OF LITERATURE 163

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
WILKINS MAKES CERTAIN OBJECTIONS . .178

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

THE BEGINNING OF " THE WILD ASSES OF THE

DEVIL" 210

CHAPTER THE NINTH
THE HUNTING OF THE WILD ASSES OF THE DEVIL 238

CHAPTER THE TENTH
THE STORY OF THE LAST TRUMP . . . 277

BOON, THE MIND OF
THE RACE, THE WILD
ASSES OF THE DEVIL,
and THE LAST TRUMP

CHAPTER THE FIRST

The Back of Miss Bathwick and
George Boon

§1

It is quite probable that the reader does
not know of the death of George Boon,
and that " remains " before his name upon
the title-page will be greeted with a certain
astonishment. In the ordinary course of
things, before the explosion of the war,
the death of George Boon would have
been an event— oh ! a three-quarters of a
column or more in the Times event, and

10 BOON

articles in the monthlies and reminiscences.
As it is, he is not so much dead as missing.
Something happened at the eleventh hour
—I think it was chiefly the Admiralty
report of the fight off the Falkland Islands
— that blew his obituary notices clean out
of the papers. And yet he was one of our
most popular writers, and in America I
am told he was in the " hundred thousand
class." But now we think only of Lord
Kitchener's hundred thousands.

It is no good pretending about it. The
war has ended all that. Boon died with
his age. After the war there will be a
new sort of book-trade and a crop of new
writers and a fresh tone, and everything
will be different. This is an obituary of
more than George Boon. ... I regard the
outlook with profound dismay. I try to
keep my mind off it by drilling with the
Shrewsbury last line of volunteers and train-
ing down the excrescences of my physical
style. When the war is over will be time
enough to consider the prospects of a
superannuated man of letters. We National
Volunteers are now no mere soldiers on
paper ; we have fairly washable badges

THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 11

by way of uniform ; we have bought our-
selves dummy rifles ; we have persuaded
the War Office to give us a reluctant recogni-
tion on the distinct understanding that we
have neither officers nor authority. In the
event of an invasion, I understand, we are
to mobilize and . . . do quite a number of
useful things. But until there is an invasion
in actual progress, nothing is to be decided
more precisely than what this whiff of
printer's shrapnel, these four full stops,
conveys. . . .

§2

1 must confess I was monstrously dis-
appointed when at last I could get my
hands into those barrels in the attic in
which Boon had stored his secret writings.
There was more perhaps than I had expected ;
I do not complain of the quantity, but of
the disorder, the incompleteness, the want
of discipline and forethought.

Boon had talked so often and so con-
vincingly of these secret books he was
writing, he had alluded so frequently to
this or that great project, he would begin
so airily with " In the seventeenth chapter
of my 4 Wild Asses of the Devil,' " or " I
have been recasting the third part of our
' Mind of the Race,' " that it came as an
enormous shock to me to find there was
no seventeenth chapter ; there was not
even a completed first chapter to the former
work, and as for the latter, there seems

12

THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 13

nothing really finished or settled at all
beyond the fragments I am now issuing,
except a series of sketches of Lord Rosebery,
for the most part in a toga and a wreath,
engaged in a lettered retirement at his
villa at Epsom, and labelled " Patrician
Dignity, the Last Phase "—sketches I sup-
press as of no present interest — and a
complete gallery of imaginary portraits
(with several duplicates) of the Academic
Committee that has done so much for
British literature (the Polignac prize, for
example, and Sir Henry Newbolt's pro-
fessorship) in the last four or five years.
So incredulous was I that this was all, that
I pushed my inquiries from their original
field in the attic into other parts of the
house, pushed them, indeed, to the very
verge of ransacking, and in that I greatly
deepened the want of sympathy already
separating me from Mrs. Boon. But I
was stung by a thwarted sense of duty,
and quite resolved that no ill-advised in-
terference should stand .between me and
the publication of what Boon has always
represented to me as the most intimate
productions of his mind.

14 BOON

Yet now the first rush of executorial
emotion is over I can begin to doubt about
Boon's intention in making me his " literary
executor." Did he, after all, intend these
pencilled scraps, these marginal caricatures,
and — what seems to me most objectionable
—annotated letters from harmless pro-
minent people for publication? Or was his
selection of me his last effort to prolong
what was, I think, if one of the slightest,
one also of the most sustained interests of
his life, and that was a prolonged faint
jeering at my expense ? Because always —
it was never hidden from me — in his most
earnest moments Boon jeered at me. I
do not know why he jeered at me, it was
always rather pointless jeering and far below
his usual level, but jeer he did. Even
while we talked most earnestly and brewed
our most intoxicating draughts of project
and conviction, there was always this scarce
perceptible blossom and flavour of ridicule
floating like a drowning sprig of blue borage
in the cup. His was indeed essentially
one of those suspended minds that float
above the will and action ; when at last
reality could be evaded no longer it killed

THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 15

him ; he never really believed nor felt the
urgent need that goads my more accurate
nature to believe and do. Always when
I think of us together, I feel that I am on
my legs and that he sits about. And yet
he could tell me things I sought to know,
prove what I sought to believe, shape beliefs
to a conviction in me that I alone could
never attain.

He took life as it came, let his fancy
play upon it, selected, elucidated, ignored,
threw the result in jest or observation or
elaborate mystification at us, and would
have no more of it. . . . He would be
earnest for a time and then break away.
" The Last Trump " is quite typical of the
way in which he would -turn upon himself.
It sets out so straight for magnificence ;
it breaks off so abominably. You will
read it.

Yet he took things more seriously than
he seemed to do.

This war, I repeat, killed him. He could
not escape it. It bore him down. He
did his best to disregard it. But its worst
stresses caught him in the climax of a
struggle with a fit of pneumonia brought

16 BOON

on by a freak of bathing by moonlight— in
an English October, a thing he did to
distract his mind from the tension after
the Marne— and it destroyed him. The last
news they told him was that the Germans
had made their " shoot and scuttle " raid
upon Whitby and Scarborough. There was
much circumstantial description in the
morning's paper. They had smashed up
a number of houses and killed some hundreds
of people, chiefly women and children. Ten
little children had been killed or mutilated
in a bunch on their way to school, two old
ladies at a boarding-house had had their
legs smashed, and so on.

" Take this newspaper," he said, and
held it out to his nurse. " Take it," he
repeated irritably, and shook it at her.

He stared at it as it receded. Then he
seemed to be staring at distant things.

" Wild Asses of the Devil," he said at
last. " Oh ! Wild Asses of the Devil ! I
thought somehow it was a joke. It wasn't
a joke. There they are, and the world is
theirs."

And he turned his face to the wall and
never spoke again.

§3

But before I go on it is necessary to explain
that the George Boon I speak of is not
exactly the same person as the George
Boon, the Great Writer, whose fame has
reached to every bookshop in the world.
The same bodily presence perhaps they
had, but that is all. Except when he
chose to allude to them, those great works
on which that great fame rests; those books
and plays of his that have made him a
household word in half a dozen continents,
those books with their style as perfect and
obvious as the gloss upon a new silk hat,
with their flat narrative trajectory that
nothing could turn aside, their unsubdued
and apparently unsubduable healthy note,
their unavoidable humour, and their robust
pathos, never came between us. We talked
perpetually of literature and creative pro-
jects, but never of that " output " of his.

2 17

18 BOON

We talked as men must talk who talk at
all, with an untrammelled freedom; now
we were sublime and now curious, now
we pursued subtleties and now we were
utterly trivial, but always it was in an
undisciplined, irregular style quite unsuit-
able for publication. That, indeed, was
the whole effect of the George Boon I am
now trying to convey, that he was indeed
essentially not for publication. And this
effect was in no degree diminished by the
fact that the photograph of his beautiful
castellated house, and of that extraordinarily
irrelevant person Mrs. Boon — for I must
speak my mind of her — and of her two
dogs (Binkie and Chum), whom he detested,
were, so to speak, the poulet and salade in
the menu of every illustrated magazine.

The fact of it is he was one of those
people who will not photograph j so much
of him was movement, gesture, expression,
atmosphere, and colour, and so little of
him was form. His was the exact converse
of that semi-mineral physical quality that
men call handsome, and now that his career
has come to its sad truncation I see no
reason why I should further conceal the

THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 19

secret of the clear, emphatic, solid impres-
sion he made upon all who had not met him.
It was, indeed, a very simple secret ; —

He never wrote anything for his public
with his own hand.

He did this of set intention. He dis-
trusted a certain freakishness of his finger-
tips that he thought might have injured
him with his multitudinous master. He
knew his holograph manuscript would cer-
tainly get him into trouble. He employed
a lady, the lady who figures in his will,
Miss Bathwick, as his amanuensis. In Miss
Bathwick was all his security. She was
a large, cool, fresh-coloured, permanently
young lady, full of serious enthusiasms ;
she had been faultlessly educated in a girls'
high school of a not too modern type,
and she regarded Boon with an invincible
respect. She wrote down his sentences
^(spelling without blemish in all the European
languages) as they came from his lips,
with the aid of a bright, efficient, new-look-
ing typewriter. If he used a rare word or
a whimsical construction, she would say,
" I beg your pardon, Mr. Boon," and he
would at once correct it ; and if by any

20 BOON

lapse of an always rather too nimble ima-
gination he carried his thoughts into regions
outside the tastes and interests of that
enormous ante-bellum public it was his for-
tune to please, then, according to the nature
of his divagation, she would either cough
or sigh or — in certain eventualities — get
up and leave the room.

By this ingenious device— if one may
be permitted to use the expression for so
pleasant and trustworthy an assistant-
he did to a large extent free himself from
the haunting dread of losing his public by
some eccentricity of behaviour, some quirk
of thought or fluctuation of " attitude "
that has pursued him ever since the great
success of " Captain Clay ball," a book he
wrote to poke fun at the crude imaginings
of a particularly stupid schoolboy he liked,
had put him into the forefront of our literary
world.

§4

He had a peculiar, and, I think, a ground-
less terror of the public of the United States
of America, from which country he derived
the larger moiety of his income. In spite
of our remonstrances, he subscribed to the
New York Nation to the very end, and he
insisted, in spite of fact, reason, and my
earnest entreaties (having regard to the
future unification of the English-speaking
race), in figuring that continental empire
as a vain, garrulous, and prosperous female
of uncertain age, and still more uncertain
temper, with unfounded pretensions to in-
tellectuality and an ideal of refinement of
the most negative description, entirely on
the strength of that one sample. One might
as well judge England by the Spectator.
My protests seemed only to intensify his
zest in his personification of Columbia as
the Aunt Errant of Christendom, as a wild,

81

22 BOON

sentimental, and advanced maiden lady of
inconceivable courage and enterprise, whom
everything might offend and nothing cow.
"I know," he used to say, "something
will be said or done and she'll have
hysterics j the temptation to smuggle some-
thing through Miss Bathwick's back is
getting almost too much for me. I could,
you know. Or some one will come along
with something a little harder and purer
and emptier and more emphatically hand-
some than I can hope to do. I shall
lose her one of these days. . . . How can
I hope to keep for ever that proud and
fickle heart ? "

And then I remember he suddenly went
off at a tangent to sketch out a great novel
he was to call " Aunt Columbia." " No,"
he said, " they would suspect that — ' Aunt
Dove.' " She was to be a lady of great,
unpremeditated wealth, living on a vast
estate near a rather crowded and trouble-
some village. Everything she did and said
affected the village enormously. She took
the people's children into her employment ;
they lived on her surplus vegetables. She
was to have a particularly troublesome and

THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 23

dishonest household of servants and a spoiled
nephew called Teddy. And whenever she
felt dull or energetic she drove down into
the village and lectured and blamed the
villagers — for being overcrowded, for being
quarrelsome, for being poor and numerous,
for not, in fact, being spinster ladies of
enormous good fortune. . . . That was only
the beginning of one of those vast schemes
of his that have left no trace now in all
the collection.

His fear of shocking America was, I
think, unfounded ; at any rate, he succeeded
in the necessary suppressions every time,
and until the day of his death it was rare
for the American press-cuttings that were
removed in basketfuls almost daily with
the other debris of his breakfast-table to
speak of him in anything but quasi-amorous
tones. He died for them the most spiritual
as well as the most intellectual of men ;
" not simply intellectual, but lovable."
They spoke of his pensive eyes, though,
indeed, when he was not glaring at a camera
they were as pensive as champagne, and
when the robust pathos bumped against
the unavoidable humour as they were swept

24 BOON

along the narrow torrent of his story they
said with all the pleasure of an apt quotation
that indeed in his wonderful heart laughter
mingled with tears.

§5

I think George Boon did on the whole
enjoy the remarkable setting of his philo-
sophical detachment very keenly j the mon-
strous fame of him that rolled about the
world, that set out east and came back
circumferentially from the west and beat
again upon his doors. He laughed irre-
sponsibly, spent the resulting money with
an intelligent generosity, and talked of other
things. "It is the quality of life," he said,
and " The people love to have it so."

I seem to see him still, hurrying but not
dismayed, in flight from the camera of an
intrusive admirer — an admirer not so much
of him as of his popularity — up one of his
garden walks towards his agreeable study.
I recall his round, enigmatical face, an
affair of rosy rotundities, his very bright,
active eyes, his queer, wiry, black hair that
went out to every point in the heavens,
his ankles and neck and wrists all protruding

25

26 BOON

from his garments in their own peculiar
way, protruding a little more in the stress
of flight. I recall, too, his general effect
of careless and, on the whole, commend-
able dirtiness, accentuated rather than cor-
rected by the vivid tie of soft orange-coloured
silk he invariably wore, and how his light
paces danced along the turf. (He affected
in his private dominions trousers of faint
drab corduroy that were always too short,
braced up with vehement tightness, and
displaying claret-coloured socks above his
easy, square-toed shoes.) And I know that
even that lumbering camera coming clumsily
to its tripod ambush neither disgusted nor
vulgarized him. He liked his game ; he
liked his success and the opulent stateliness
it gave to the absurdities of Mrs. Boon and
all the circumstances of his profoundly
philosophical existence ; and he liked it
all none the worse because it was indeed
nothing of himself at all, because he in his
essence was to dull intelligences and com-
monplace minds a man invisible, a man
who left no impression upon the camera-
plate or moved by a hair's breadth the
scale of a materialist balance.

§6

But I will confess the state of the remains
did surprise and disappoint me.

His story of great literary enterprises,
holograph and conducted in the profoundest
secrecy, tallied so completely with, for ex-
ample, certain reservations, withdrawals that
took him out of one's company and gave
him his evident best companionship, as it
were, when he was alone. It was so entirely
like him to concoct lengthy books away
from his neatly ordered study, from the
wise limitations of Miss Bathwick's signifi-
cant cough and her still more significant
back, that we all, I think, believed in these
unseen volumes unquestioningly. While
those fine romances, those large, bright
plays, were being conceived in a publicity
about as scandalous as a royal gestation,
publicly planned and announced, developed,
written, boomed, applauded, there was, we

28 BOON

knew, this undercurrent of imaginative acti-
vity going on, concealed from Miss Bath-
wick's guardian knowledge, withdrawn from
the stately rhythm of her keys. What
more natural than to believe he was also
writing it down ?

Alas I I found nothing but fragments.
The work upon which his present fame is
founded was methodical, punctual and care-
ful, and it progressed with a sort of inevitable
precision from beginning to end, and so
on to another beginning. Not only in tone
and spirit but in length (that most impor-
tant consideration) he was absolutely trust-
worthy ; his hundred thousand words of
good, healthy, straightforward story came
out in five months with a precision almost
astronomical. In that sense he took his
public very seriously. To have missed his
morning's exercises behind Miss Bathwick's
back would have seemed to him the most
immoral— nay, worse, the most uncivil of
proceedings.

" She wouldn't understand it," he would
say, and sigh and go.

But these scraps and fragments are of
an irregularity diametrically contrasting

THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICH 29

with this. They seem to have been begun
upon impulse at any time, and abandoned
with an equal impulsiveness, and they are
written upon stationery of a variety and
nature that alone would condemn them in
the eyes of an alienist. The handwriting
is always atrocious and frequently illegible,
the spelling is strange, and sometimes in-
decently bad, the punctuation is sporadic,
and many of the fragments would be at
once put out of court as modern literature
by the fact that they are written in pencil
on both sides of the paper ! Such of the
beginnings as achieve a qualified complete-
ness are of impossible lengths ; the longest
is a piece — allowing for gaps — of fourteen
thousand words, and another a fragment
shaping at about eleven. These are, of
course, quite impossible sizes, neither essay
nor short story nor novel, and no editor or
publisher would venture to annoy the public
with writings of so bizarre a dimension.
In addition there are fragments of verse.
But I look in vain for anything beyond
the first chapter of that tremendous serial,
" The Wild Asses of the Devil," that kept
on day by day through June and July to

30 BOON

the very outbreak of the war, and only a
first chapter and a few illustrations and
memoranda and fragments for our " Mind
of the Race," that went on intermittently
for several years. Whole volumes of that
great hotchpotch of criticism are lost in
the sandbanks of my treacherous memory
for ever.

Much of the matter, including a small
MS. volume of those brief verses called
Limericks (personal always, generally action-
able, and frequently lacking in refinement),
I set aside at an early date. Much else also
I rejected as too disjointed and unfinished,
or too eccentric. Two bizarre fragments
called respectively " Jane in Heaven " and
" An Account of a Play," I may perhaps
find occasion to issue at a later date, and
there were also several brief imitations of
Villiers de l'lsle Adam quite alien to con-
temporary Anglo-Saxon taste, which also
I hold over. Sometimes upon separate
sheets, sometimes in the margins of other
compositions, and frequently at the end of
letters received by him I found a curious
abundance of queer little drawings, cari-
catures of his correspondents, burlesque

THE BACH OF MISS BATHWICK 81

renderings of occurrences, disrespectful side-
notes to grave and pregnant utterances,
and the like. If ever the correspondence of
George Boon is published, it will have to
be done in fac-simile. There is a consider-
able number of impressions of the back of
Miss Bathwick's head, with and without
the thread of velvet she sometimes wore
about her neck, and quite a number of
curiously idealized studies of that American
reading public he would always so gro-
tesquely and annoy ingly insist on calling
" Her." And among other things I found
a rendering of myself as a short, flattened
little object that has a touch of malignity
in it I had no reason to expect. Few or
none of these quaint comments are drawn
with Indian ink upon millboard in a manner
suitable for reproduction, and even were
they so, I doubt whether the public would
care for very many of them. (I give my
own portrait — it is singularly unlike me —
to show the style of thing he did.)

82 BOON

Of the "Mind of the Race" I may
perhaps tell first. I find he had written
out and greatly embellished the singularly
vivid and detailed and happily quite ima-
ginary account of the murder of that eminent
litterateur, Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole, with
which the " Mind of the Race " was to have
concluded ; and there are an extraordinarily
offensive interview with Mr. Raymond Blath-
wayt (which, since it now " dates " so
markedly, I have decided to suppress alto-
gether) and an unfinished study of " the
Literary Statesmen of the Transition Years
from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth
Centuries " (including a lengthy comparison
of the greatness of Lords Bryce and Morley,
a eulogy of Lord Morley and a discussion
whether he has wit or humour) that were
new to me. And perhaps I may note at
this point the twenty sixpenny washing

THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 33

books in which Boon had commenced what
I am firmly convinced is a general index of
the works of Plato and Aristotle. It is
conceivable he did this merely as an aid to
his private reading, though the idea of a
popular romancer reading anything will
come to the general reader with a little
shock of surprise.

Boon's idea of Aristotle (in modern dress),
from the washing books.

(When asked, " Why in modern dress t " Boon replied simply
that he would be.)

For my own part and having in memory
his subtle and elusive talk, I am rather
inclined to think that at one time he did
go so far as to contemplate a familiar and
humorous commentary upon these two
pillars of the world's thought. An edition

3

34 BOON

of them edited and copiously illustrated
by him would, I feel sure, have been a
remarkable addition to any gentleman's
library. If he did turn his mind to anything
of the sort he speedily abandoned the idea
again, and with this mention and the note
that he detested Aristotle, those six and
twenty washing books may very well follow
the bulk of the drawings and most of the
verse back into their original oblivion. . . .

Boon's idea of Plato, from the washing books.

(Boon absolutely rejected the Indian Bacchus bust as a
portrait of Plato. When asked why, he remarked merely that
it wasn't like him.)

§7

But now you will begin to understand the
nature of the task that lies before me. If
I am to do any justice to the cryptic George
Boon, if indeed I am to publish anything
at all about him, I must set myself to edit
and convey these books whose only publica-
tion was in fact by word of mouth in his
garden arbours, using these few fragments
as the merest accessories to that; I have
hesitated, I have collected unfavourable
advice, but at last I have resolved to make
at least one experimental volume of Boon's
remains. After all, whatever we have of
Aristotle and Socrates and all that we most
value of Johnson comes through the testi-
mony of hearers. And though I cannot
venture to compare myself with Boswell. . . .
I know the dangers I shall run in this
attempt to save my friend from the devasta-
ting expurgations of his written ostensible

35

86 BOON

career. I confess I cannot conceal from
myself that, for example, I must needs show
Boon, by the standards of every day, a
little treacherous.

When I thrust an arm into one or other of
the scores of densely packed bins of press
cuttings that cumber the attics of his
castellated mansion and extract a sample
clutch, I find almost invariably praise, not
judicious or intelligent praise perhaps, but
slab and generous praise, paragraphs, advice,
photographs, notices, notes, allusions and
comparisons, praise of the unparalleled gloss
on his style by Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole
under the pseudonym of " Simon up to
Snuff," praise of the healthiness of the tone
by Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole under the
pseudonym of " The Silver Fish," inspired
announcements of some forthcoming venture
made by Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole under
the pseudonym of " The True-Born English-
man," and interesting and exalting specula-
tions as to the precise figure of Boon's
income over Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole's own
signature ; I find chatty, if a little incoher-
ent, notices by Braybourne of the most
friendly and helpful sort, and interviews

THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 37

of the most flattering description by this
well-known litterateur and that. And I
reflect that while all this was going on, there
was Boon on the other side of Miss Bath-
wick's rampart mind, not only not taking
them and himself seriously, not only not
controlling his disrespectful internal com-
mentary on these excellent men, but posi-
tively writing it down, regaling himself
with the imagined murder of this leader of
thought and the forcible abduction to sinister
and melancholy surroundings of that !

And yet I find it hard to do even this
measure of justice to my friend. He was
treacherous, it must be written, and yet he
was, one must confess, a singularly attractive
man. There was a certain quality in his
life— it was pleasant. When I think of
doing him justice I am at once dashed
and consoled by the thought of how little
he cared how I judged him. And I recall
him very vividly as I came upon him on
one occasion.

He is seated on a garden roller— an
implement which makes a faultless outdoor
seat when the handle is adjusted at a suit-
able angle against a tree, and one has taken

38 BOON

the precaution to skid the apparatus with a
piece of rockery or other convenient object.
His back is against the handle, his legs lie
in a boneless curve over the roller, and an
inch or so of native buff shows between the
corduroy trousers and the claret-coloured
socks. He appears to be engaged partly
in the degustation of an unappetizing lead
pencil, and partly in the contemplation of a
half-quire of notepaper. The expression of
his rubicund face is distinctly a happy one.
At the sound of my approach he looks up.
" I've been drawing old Keyhole again ! "
he says like a schoolboy.

THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 39

Nevertheless, if critics of standing are to
be drawn like this by authors of position,
then it seems to me that there is nothing
before us but to say Good-bye for ever to
the Dignity of Letters.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

Being the First Chapter of " The Mind
or the Race "

§1

It was one of Boon's peculiarities to main-
tain a legend about every one he knew,
and to me it was his humour to ascribe a
degree of moral earnestness that I admit
only too sadly is altogether above my
quality. Having himself invented this great
project of a book upon the Mind of the Race
which formed always at least the thread
of the discourse when I was present, he
next went some way towards foisting it
upon me. He would talk to me about it
in a tone of remonstrance, raise imaginary
difficulties to propositions I was supposed
to make and superstitions I entertained,
speak of it as " this book Bliss is going to
write " ; and at the utmost admit no more

40

THE MIND OF THE RACE 41

than collaboration. Possibly I contributed
ideas ; but I do not remember doing so
now very distinctly. Possibly my influence
was quasi-moral. The proposition itself fluc-
tuated in his mind to suit this presentation
and that, it had more steadfastness in mine.
But if I was the anchorage he was the ship.
At any rate we planned and discussed a
book that Boon pretended that I was writing
and that I believed him to be writing, in en-
tire concealment from Miss Bathwick, about
the collective mind of the whole human race.
Edwin Dodd was with us, I remember,
in one of those early talks, when the thing
was still taking form, and he sat on a large
inverted flowerpot — we had camped in the
greenhouse after lunch — and he was smiling,
with his head slightly on one side and a
wonderfully foxy expression of being on his
guard that he always wore with Boon.
Dodd is a leading member of the Rationalist
Press Association, a militant agnostic, and
a dear, compact man, one of those Middle
Victorians who go about with a preoccupied,
caulking ^air, as though, after having been
at great cost and pains to banish God from
the Universe, they were resolved not to

42 BOON

permit Him back on any terms whatever.
He has constituted himself a sort of alert
customs officer of a materialistic age, saying
suspiciously, " Here, now, what's this rap-
ping under the table here ? " and examining
every proposition to see that the Creator
wasn't being smuggled back under some
specious new generalization. Boon used to
declare that every night Dodd looked under
his bed for the Deity, and slept with a
large revolver under his pillow for fear of
a revelation. . . . From the first Dodd had
his suspicions about this collective mind of
Boon's. Most unjustifiable they seemed to
me then, but he had them.

" You must admit, my dear Dodd "

began Boon.

" I admit nothing," said Dodd smartly.

" You perceive something more extensive
than individual wills and individual pro-
cesses of reasoning in mankind, a body of
thought, a trend of ideas and purposes, a
thing made up of the synthesis of all the
individual instances, something more than
their algebraic sum, losing the old as they
fall out, taking up the young, a common
Mind expressing the species "

" Oh— figuratively, perhaps ! " said Dodd.

§2

For my own part I could not see where
Dodd's " figuratively " comes in. The
mind of the race is as real to me as the
mind of Dodd or my own. Because Dodd
is completely made up of Dodd's right leg
plus Dodd's left leg, plus Dodd's right arm
plus Dodd's left arm, plus Dodd's head and
Dodd's trunk, it doesn't follow that Dodd
is a mere figurative expression. . . .

Dodd, I remember, protested he had a
self-consciousness that held all these con-
stituents together, but there was a time
when Dodd was six months old, let us say,
and there are times now when Dodd sleeps
or is lost in some vivid sensation or action,
when that clear sense of self is in abeyance.
There is no reason why the collective mind
of the world should not presently become
at least as self-conscious as Dodd. Boon,
indeed, argued that that was happening

43

44 BOON

even now, that our very talk in the green-
house was to that synthetic over-brain
like a child's first intimations of the idea
of " me." " It's a fantastic notion," said
Dodd, shaking his head.

But Boon was fairly launched now upon
his topic, and from the first, I will confess,
it took hold of me.

" You mustn't push the analogy of Dodd's
mind too far," said Boon. " These great
Over-minds "

" So there are several ! " said Dodd.

" They fuse, they divide. These great
Over-minds, these race minds, share nothing
of the cyclic fate of the individual life ;
there is no birth for them, no pairing and
breeding, no inevitable death. That is the
lot of such intermediate experimental crea-
tures as ourselves. The creatures below
us, like the creatures above us, are free
from beginnings and ends. The Amoeba
never dies ; it divides at times, parts of it
die here and there, it has no sex, no be-
getting. (Existence without a love interest.
My God ! how it sets a novelist craving !)
Neither has the germ plasm. These Over-
minds, which for the most part clothe

THE MIND OF THE RACE 45

themselves in separate languages and main-
tain a sort of distinction, stand to us as
we stand to the amoebae or the germ cells
we carry ; they are the next higher order
of being ; they emerge above the intense,
intensely denned struggle of individuals
which is the more obvious substance of lives
at the rank of ours ; they grow, they divide,
they feed upon one another, they coalesce
and rejuvenate. So far they are like amoebae.
But they think, they accumulate experiences,
they manifest a collective will."

" Nonsense ! " said Dodd, shaking his
head from side to side.

" But the thing is manifest ! "

" I've never met it."

" You met it, my dear Dodd, the moment
you were born. Who taught you to talk ?
Your mother, you say. But whence the
language ? Who made the language that
gives a bias to all your thoughts ? And
who taught you to think, Dodd ? Whence
came your habits of conduct ? Your
mother, your schoolmaster were but mouth-
pieces, the books you read the mere fore-
front of that great being of Voices ! There
it is— your antagonist to-day. You are

46 BOON

struggling against it with tracts and argu-
ments. . . ."

But now Boon was fairly going. Physic-
ally, perhaps, we. were the children of our
ancestors, but mentally we were the off-
spring of the race mind. It was clear as
daylight. How could Dodd dare to argue ?
We emerged into a brief independence of
will, made our personal innovation, be-
came, as it were, new thoughts in that great
intelligence, new elements of effort and
purpose, and were presently incorporated
or forgotten or both in its immortal growth.
Would the Race Mind incorporate Dodd
or dismiss him ? Dodd sat on his flower-
pot, shaking his head and saying " Pooh ! "
to the cinerarias ; and I listened, never
doubting that Boon felt the truth he told
so well. He came near making the Race
soul incarnate. One felt it about us, recep-
tive and responsive to Boon's words. He
achieved personification. He spoke of wars
that peoples have made, of the roads and
cities that grow and the routes that develop,
no man planning them. He mentioned styles
of architecture and styles of living; the
Gothic cathedral, I remember, he dwelt upon,

THE MIND OF THE RACE 47

a beauty that arose like an exhalation out
of scattered multitudes of men. He in-
stanced the secular abolition of slavery and
the establishment of monogamy as a deve-
lopment of Christian teaching, as things
untraceable to any individual's purpose.
He passed to the mysterious consecutiveness
of scientific research, the sudden determi-
nation of the European race mind to
know more than chance thoughts could
tell it. . . .

" Francis Bacon ? " said Dodd.

" Men like Bacon are no more than
bright moments, happy thoughts, the dis-
covery of the inevitable word ; the race
mind it was took it up, the race mind it
was carried it on."

" Mysticism ! " said Dodd. " Give me
the Rock of Fact ! " He shook his head
so violently that suddenly his balance was
disturbed ; clap went his feet, the flower-
pot broke beneath him, and our talk was
lost in the consequent solicitudes.

48

BOON

Dodd the Agnostic just before the flowerpot broke.

§3

Now that I have been searching my
memory, I incline rather more than I did to
the opinion that the bare suggestion at any
rate of this particular Book did come from
me. I probably went to Boon soon after
this talk with Dodd and said a fine book
might be written about the Mind of Human-
ity, and in all likelihood I gave some outline
— I have forgotten what. I wanted a larger
picture of that great Being his imagination
had struck out. I remember at any rate
Boon taking me into his study, picking out
Goldsmith's " Inquiry into the Present State
of Polite Learning," turning it over and
reading from it. " Something in this line ? "
he said, and read :

" ' Complaints of our degeneracy in literature as
well as in morals I own have been frequently exhibited
of late. . . . The dullest critic who strives at a reputa-
tion for delicacy, by showing he cannot be pleased . . .'

4 49

50 BOON

" The old, old thing, you see ! The weak
protest of the living."

He turned over the pages. " He shows
a proper feeling, but he's a little thin. . . .
He says some good things. But — ' The
age of Louis XIV, notwithstanding these
respectable names, is still vastly superior.'
Is it ? Guess the respectable names that
age of Louis XIV could override ! — Vol-
taire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu,
D'Alembert ! And now tell me the re-
spectable names of the age of Louis XIV.
And the conclusion of the whole matter —

" ' Thus the man who, under the patronage of the
great, might have done honour to humanity, when
only patronized by the bookseller becomes a thing
a little superior to the fellow who works at the press.'

" ' The patronage of the great ' ! ' Fellow
who works at the press ' ! Goldsmith was
a damnably genteel person at times in spite
of the ' Vicar ' ! It's printed with the long
' s,' you see. It all helps to remind one
that times have changed." . . .

I followed his careless footsteps into the
garden ; he went gesticulating before me,
repeating, " ' An Inquiry into the State of

THE MIND bF THE RACE 51

Polite Learning ' ! That's what your ' Mind
of the Race ' means. Suppose one did
it now, we should do it differently in every
way from that."

" Yes, but how should we do it ? "
said I

The project had laid hold upon me. I
wanted a broad outline of the whole
apparatus of thinking and determination in
the modern State ; something that should
bring together all its various activities,
which go on now in a sort of deliberate
ignorance of one another, which would
synthesize research, education, philosophical
discussion, moral training, public policy.
" There is," I said, " a disorganized abun-
dance now."

" It's a sort of subconscious mind," said
Boon, seeming to take me quite seriously,
" with a half instinctive will. ..."

We discussed what would come into the
book. One got an impression of the enor-
mous range and volume of intellectual acti-
vity that pours along now, in comparison
with the jejune trickle of Goldsmith's
days. Then the world had— what ? A few
English writers, a few men in France,

52 BOON

the Royal Society, the new Berlin Academy
(conducting its transactions in French), all
resting more or less upon the insecure
patronage of the " Great " ; a few schools,
public and private, a couple of dozen of
universities in all the world, a press of
which The Gentleman's Magazine was the
brightest ornament. Now

It is a curious thing that it came to us
both as a new effect, this enormously greater
size of the intellectual world of to-day.
We didn't at first grasp the implications of
that difference, we simply found it necessi-
tated an enlargement of our conception.
" And then a man's thoughts lived too in
a world that had been created, lock, stock,
and barrel, a trifle under six thousand years
ago ! . . ."

We fell to discussing the range and divi-
sions of our subject. The main stream, we
settled, was all that one calls " literature "
in its broader sense. We should have to
discuss that principally. But almost as
important as the actual development of
ideas, suggestions, ideals, is the way they
are distributed through the body of human-
ity, developed, rendered, brought into touch

THE MIND OF THE RACE 53

with young minds and fresh minds, who
are drawn so into participation, who them-
selves light up and become new thoughts.
One had to consider journalism, libraries,
book distribution, lecturing, teaching. Then
there is the effect of laws, of inventions. . . .
" Done in a large, dull, half-abstract way,"
said Boon, " one might fill volumes. One
might become an Eminent Sociologist. You
might even invent terminology. It's a

chance "

We let it pass. He went on almost at
once to suggest a more congenial form, a con-
versational novel. I followed reluctantly.
I share the general distrust of fiction as a
vehicle of discussion. We would, he insisted,
invent a personality who would embody
our Idea, who should be fanatically obsessed
by this idea of the Mind of the Race, who
should preach it on all occasions and be
brought into illuminating contact with all
the existing mental apparatus and organi-
zation of the world. " Something of your
deep moral earnestness, you know, only
a little more presentable and not quite so
vindictive," said Boon, " and without your—
lapses. I seem to see him rather like Leo

54 BOON

Maxse : the same white face, the same
bright eyes, the same pervading suggestion
of nervous intensity, the same earnest,
quasi-reasonable voice — but instead of that
anti-German obsession of his, an intelligent
passion for the racial thought. He must
be altogether a fanatic. He must think
of the Mind of the Race in season and out
of season. Collective thought will be no
joke to him ; it will be the supremely
important thing. He will be passionately a
patriot, entirely convinced of your pro-
position that ' the thought of a community
is the life of a community,' and almost
as certain that the tide of our thought is
ebbing "

" Is it ? " said I.

" I've never thought. The ' Encyclo-
paedia Britannica ' says it is."

" We must call the ' Encyclopaedia Bri-
tannica.' "

"As a witness — in the book — rather !
But, anyhow, this man of ours will believe
it and struggle against it. It will make him
ill ; it will spoil the common things of life
for him altogether. I seem to see him inter-
rupting some nice, bright, clean English

THE MIND OF THE RACE 55

people at tennis. ' Look here, you know,'
he will say, ' this is all very well. But
have you thought to-day ? They tell me
the Germans are thinking, the Japanese.'
I see him going in a sort of agony round
and about Canterbury Cathedral. ' Here
are all these beautiful, tranquil residences
clustering round this supremely beautiful
thing, all these well-dressed, excellent, fresh-
coloured Englishmen in their beautiful
clerical raiment — deans, canons — and what
have they thought, any of them ? I keep my
ear to the Hibbert Journal, but is it enough ? '
Imagine him going through London on an
omnibus. He will see as clear as the adver-
tisements on the hoardings the signs of
the formal breaking up of the old Victorian
Church of England and Dissenting cultures
that have held us together so long. He
will see that the faith has gone, the habits
no longer hold, the traditions lie lax like
cut string— there is nothing to replace these
things. People do this and that dispersedly ;
there is democracy in beliefs even, and any
notion is as good as another. And there is
America. Like a burst Haggis. Intellec-
tually. The Mind is confused, the Race,

56 BOON

in the violent ferment of new ideas, in
the explosive development of its own con-
trivances, has lost its head. It isn't thinking
any more ; it's stupefied one moment and
the next it's diving about

" It will be as clear as day to him that
a great effort of intellectual self-control
must come if the race is to be saved from
utter confusion and dementia. And no-
body seems to see it but he. He will go
about wringing his hands, so to speak. I
fancy him at last at a writing-desk, nervous
white fingers clutched in his black hair.
' Plow can I put it so that they must attend
and see ? ' "

So we settled on our method and principal
character right away. But we got no farther
because Boon insisted before doing anything
else on drawing a fancy portrait of this
leading character of ours and choosing his
name. We decided to call him Hallery,
and that he should look something like
this —

THE MIND OF THE RACE 57

cf

Hallery preparing to contradict.

58 BOON

That was how " The Mind of the Race "
began, the book that was to have ended
at last in grim burlesque with Hallery's
murder of Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole in his
villa at Hampstead, and the conversation
at dawn with that incredulous but literate
policeman at Highgate — he was reading
a World's Classic — to whom Hallery gave
himself up.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

The Great Slump, the Revival of Letters,
and the Garden by the Sea

§1

The story, as Boon planned it, was to
begin with a spacious Introduction. We
were to tell of the profound decadence of
letters at the opening of the Twentieth
Century and how a movement of revival
began. A few notes in pencil of this open-
ing do exist among the Remains, and to
those I have referred. He read them over
to me. . . .

" ' We begin,' " he said, '"in a minor
key. The impetus of the Romantic move-
ment we declare is exhausted ; the Race
Mind, not only of the English-speaking
peoples but of the whole world, has come
upon a period of lethargy. The Giants
of the Victorian age ' "

59

60 BOON

My eye discovered a familiar binding
among the flowerpots. " You have been
consulting the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica,' "
I said.

He admitted it without embarrassment.

" I have prigged the whole thing from
the last Victorian Edition — with some slight
variations. . . / The Gfiants of the Victorian
age had passed. Men looked in vain for
their successors. For a time there was an
evident effort to fill the vacant thrones ;
for a time it seemed that the unstinted exer-
tions of Miss Marie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine,
Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the friends of
Mr. Stephen Phillips might go some way
towards obliterating these magnificent gaps.
And then, slowly but surely, it crept into
men's minds that the game was up ' "

" You will alter that phrase ? " I said.

" Certainly. But it must serve now . . .
' that, humanly speaking, it was impossible
that anything, at once so large, so copious, so
broadly and unhesitatingly popular, so nobly
cumulative as the Great Victorian Repu-
tations could ever exist again. The Race
seemed threatened with intellectual barren-
ness ; it had dropped its great blossoms,

THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 61

and stood amidst the pile of their wilting
but still showy petals, budless and bare.
It is curious to recall the public utterances
upon literature that distinguished this
desolate and melancholy time. It is a chorus
of despair. There is in the comments of
such admirable but ageing critics as still
survived, of Mr. Gosse, for example, and
the venerable Sir Sidney Colvin and Mr.
Mumchance, an inevitable suggestion of
widowhood ; the judges, bishops, statesmen
who are called to speak upon literature
speak in the same reminiscent, inconsolable
note as of a thing that is dead. Year after
year one finds the speakers at the Dinner
of the Royal Literary Fund admitting the
impudence of their appeal. I remember
at one of these festivities hearing the voice
of Mr. Justice Gummidge break. . . . The
strain, it is needless to say, found its echo
in Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole ; he confessed
he never read anything that is less than
thirty years old with the slightest enjoy-
ment and threw out the suggestion that
nothing new should be published — at least
for a considerable time — unless it was clearly
shown to be posthumous. . . .

62 BOON

" ' Except for a few irresistible volumes
of facetiousness, the reading public very
obediently followed the indications of
authority in these matters, just as it had
followed authority and sustained the Giants
in the great Victorian days. It bought
the long-neglected classics — anything was
adjudged a classic that was out of copyright
— it did its best to read them, to find a rare
smack in their faded allusions, an immediate
application for their forgotten topics. It
made believe that architects were still like
Mr. Pecksniff and schoolmasters like Squeers,
that there were no different women from
Jane Austen's women, and that social wisdom
ended in Ruskin's fine disorder. But with
the decay of any intellectual observation
of the present these past things had lost
their vitality. A few resolute people main-
tained an artificial interest in them by
participation in quotation-hunting compe-
titions and the like, but the great bulk
of the educated classes ceased presently
to read anything whatever. The classics
were still bought by habit, as people who
have lost faith will still go to church ; but
it is only necessary to examine some sur-

THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 63

viving volume of this period to mark the
coruscation of printer's errors, the sheets
bound in upside down or accidentally not
inked in printing or transferred from some
sister classic in the same series, to realize
that these volumes were mere receipts for
the tribute paid by the pockets of stupidity
to the ancient prestige of thought. . . .

" ' An air of completion rested upon the
whole world of letters. A movement led
by Professor Armstrong, the eminent edu-
cationist, had even gone some way towards
banishing books from the schoolroom —
their last refuge. People went about in the
newly invented automobile and played open-
air games ; they diverted what attention
they had once given to their minds to the
more rational treatment of their stomachs.
Reading became the last resort of those too
sluggish or too poor to play games ; one
had recourse to it as a substitute for the
ashes of more strenuous times in the earlier
weeks of mourning for a near relative, and
even the sale of classics began at last to
decline. An altogether more satisfying and
alluring occupation for the human intelli-
gence was found in the game of Bridge.

64 BOON

This was presently improved into Auction
Bridge. Preparations were made for the
erection of a richly decorative memorial
in London to preserve the memory of
Shakespeare, an English Taj Mahal ; an
Academy of uncreative literature was estab-
lished under the Presidency of Lord Reay
(who had never written anything at all),
and it seemed but the matter of a few years
before the goal of a complete and final
mental quiet would be attained by the
whole English-speaking community. . . .' "

§2

" You know," I said, " that doesn't exactly
represent "

" Hush ! " said Boon. " It was but a
resting phase ! And at this point I part
company with the ' Encyclopaedia.' "

" But you didn't get all that out of the
' Encyclopaedia ' ? "

" Practically— yes. I may have rear-
ranged it a little. The Encyclopaedist is a
most interesting and representative person.
He takes up an almost eighteenth-century
attitude, holds out hopes of a revival of
Taste under an Academy, declares the inter-
est of the great mass of men in literature
is always ' empirical,' regards the great Vic-
torian boom in letters as quite abnormal,
and seems to ignore what you would call that
necessary element of vitalizing thought. . . .
It's just here that Hallery will have to
dispute with him. We shall have to bring

5 65

66 BOON

them together in our book somehow. . . .
Into this impressive scene of decline and
the ebb of all thinking comes this fanatic
Hallery of ours, reciting with passionate
conviction, * The thought of a nation is the
life of a nation.' You see our leading
effect ? "

He paused. " We have to represent
Hallery as a voice crying in the wilderness.
We have to present him in a scene of infin-
ite intellectual bleakness, with the thinnest
scrub of second-rate books growing con-
temptibly, and patches of what the Ency-
clopaedist calls tares — wind-wilted tares —
about him. A mournful Encyclopaedist like
some lone bird circling in the empty air
beneath the fading stars. . . . Well, some-
thing of that effect, anyhow I And then,
you know, suddenly, mysteriously one grows
aware of light, of something coming, of
something definitely coming, of the dawn
of a great Literary Revival. ..."

" How does it come ? "

" Oh ! In the promiscuous way of these
things. The swing of the pendulum, it
may be. Some eminent person gets bored
at the prospect of repeating that rigmarole

THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 67

about the great Victorians and our present
slackness for all the rest of his life, and takes
a leaf from one of Hallery's books. We
might have something after the fashion
of the Efficiency and Wake-up-England
affair. Have you ever heard guinea-fowl
at dawn ? "

" I've heard them at twilight. They say,
' Come back. Come back.' But what has
that to do wjth "

" Nothing. There's a movement, a stir,
a twittering, and then a sudden promiscuous
uproar, articles in the reviews, articles in
the newspapers, paragraphs, letters, asso-
ciations, societies, leagues. I imagine a
very great personality indeed in the most
extraordinary and unexpected way coming
in. . . ." (It was one of Boon's less amiable
habits to impute strange and uncanny enter-
prises, the sudden adoption of movements,
manias, propagandas, adhesion to vege-
tarianism, socialism, the strangest eccen-
tricities, to the British Royal Family.) " As
a result Hallery finds himself perforce a
person of importance. ' The thought of a
nation is the life of a nation,' one hears it
from royal lips ; ' a literature, a living soul,

68 BOON

adequate to this vast empire,' turns up in
the speech of a statesman of the greatest
literary pretensions. Arnold White re-
sponds to the new note. The Daily Express
starts a Literary Revival on its magazine
page and offers a prize. The Times follows
suit. Reports of what is afoot reach social
circles in New York. . . . The illumination
passes with a dawnlike swiftness right across
the broad expanse of British life, east and
west flash together ; the ladies' papers and
the motoring journals devote whole pages
to ' New Literature,' and there is an enormous
revival of Book Teas. . . . That sort of
thing, you know — extensively."

§3

" So much by way of prelude. Now
picture to yourself the immediate setting
of my conference. Just hand me that book
by the ' Encyclopaedia.' "

It was Mallock's "New Republic." He
took it, turned a page or so, stuck a finger
in it, and resumed :

" It is in a narrow, ill-kept road by the
seaside, Bliss. A long wall, plaster-faced,
blotched and peeling, crested with uncivil
glass against the lower orders, is pierced
by cast-iron gates clumsily classical, and
through the iron bars of these there is
visible the deserted gatekeeper's lodge, its
cracked windows opaque with immemorial
dirt, and a rich undergrowth of nettles
beneath the rusty cypresses and stone-
pines that border the carriage-way. An
automobile throbs in the road ; its occupants
regard a board leaning all askew above the

69

70 BOON

parapet, and hesitate to descend. On the
board, which has been enriched by the
attentions of the passing boy with innumer-
able radiant mud pellets, one reads with
difficulty —

THIS CLASSICAL VILLA

with magnificent gardens in the Victorian-
Italian style reaching down to the sea, and
replete with Latin and Greek inscriptions,
a garden study, literary associations, fully
matured Oxford allusions, and a great
number of conveniently arranged
bedrooms, to be

LET OR SOLD.

Apply to the owner,
Mr. W. H. MALLOCK,

original author of
" The New Republic."

Key within.

THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 71

" ' This must be it, my dear Archer,'
says one of the occupants of the motor-car,
and he rises, throws aside his furs, and reveals
— the urbane presence of the Encyclopedist.
He descends, and rings a clangorous bell.
. . . Eh?"
" It's the garden of the ' New Republic ' ? "
" Exactly. Revisited. It's an aston-
ishing thing. Do you know the date of
the ' New Republic ' ? The book's nearly
forty years old ! About the time of Matthew
Arnold's ' Friendship's Garland,' and since
that time there's been nothing like a sys-
tematic stocktaking of the English-speaking
mind — until the Encyclopaedist reported
' no effects.' And I propose to make this
little party in the motor-car a sort of scratch
expedition, under the impetus of the pro-
posed Revival of Thought. They are pro-
specting for a Summer Congress, which is
to go into the state of the republic of letters
thoroughly. It isn't perhaps quite Gosse's
style, but he has to be there— in a way he's
the official British man of letters— but we
shall do what we can for him, we shall make
him show a strong disposition towards
protective ironies and confess himself not

72 BOON

a little bothered at being dragged into the
horrid business. And I think we must have
George Moore, who has played uncle to so
many movements and been so uniformly
disappointed in his nephews. And William
Archer, with that face of his which is so
exactly like his mind, a remarkably fine
face mysteriously marred by an expression
of unscrupulous integrity. And lastly,
Keyhole."

" Why Keyhole ? " I asked.

" Hallery has to murder some one. I've
planned that — and who would he; murder
but Keyhole ? . . . And we have to hold
the first meeting in Mallock's garden to
preserve the continuity of English thought.

" Very well ! Then we invent a morose,
elderly caretaker, greatly embittered at this
irruption. He parleys for a time through
the gate with all the loyalty of his class,
mentions a number of discouraging defects,
more particularly in the drainage, alleges
the whole place is clammy, and only at
Gosse's clearly enunciated determination to
enter produces the key."

Boon consulted his text. " Naturally one
would give a chapter to the Villa by the

THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 73

Sea and Mallock generally. Our visitors
explore. They visit one scene after another
familiar to the good Mallockite ; they de-
scend 'the broad flights of steps flanked
by Gods and Goddesses ' that lead from one
to another of the ' long, straight terraces
set with vases and Irish yews,' and the yews,
you know, have suffered from the want of
water, the vases are empty, and ivy, under
the benediction of our modest climate, has
already veiled the classical freedom — the
conscientious nudity, one might say^of
the statuary. The laurels have either grown
inordinately or perished, and the ' busts of
orators, poets, and philosophers ' ' with Latin
inscriptions,' stand either bleakly exposed
or else swallowed up in a thicket. There
is a pleasing struggle to translate the legends,
and one gathers scholarship is not extinct
in England.

" The one oasis in a universal weediness
is the pond about the ' scaly Triton,' which
has been devoted to the culture of spring
onions, a vegetable to which the aged
custodian quite superfluously avows himself
very ' partial.' The visitors return to the
house, walk along its terrace, survey its

74 BOON

shuttered front, and they spend some time
going through its musty rooms. Doctor
Keyhole distinguishes himself by the feverish
eagerness of his curiosity about where Leslie
slept and where was the boudoir of Mrs.
Sinclair. He insists that a very sad and
painful scandal about these two underlies
the ' New Republic,' and professes a thirsty
desire to draw a veil over it as conspicuously
as possible. The others drag him away
to the summer dining-room, now a great
brier tangle, where once Lady Grace so
pleasantly dined her guests. The little
arena about the fountain in a porphyry
basin they do not find, but the garden
study they peer into, and see its inkpot in
the shape of a classical temple, just as Mr.
Maliock has described it, and the windowless
theatre, and, in addition, they find a small
private gas-works that served it. The old
man lets them in, and by the light of
uplifted vestas they see the decaying, rat-
disordered ruins of the scene before which
Jenkinson who was Jowett, and Herbert
who was Ruskin, preached. It is as like
a gorge in the Indian Caucasus as need be.
The Brocken act-drop above hangs low

THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 75

enough to show the toes of the young witch,
still brightly pink. . . .

" They go down to the beach, and the
old man, with evil chuckles, recalls a hither-
to unpublished anecdote of mixed bathing
in the 'seventies, in which Mrs. Sinclair and
a flushed and startled Doctor Jenkinson,
Greek in thought rather than action, play
the chief parts, and then they wade through
a nettle-bed to that ' small classical portico '
which leads to the locked enclosure contain-
ing the three tombs, with effigies after the
fashion of Genoa Cemetery. But the key
of the gate is lost, so that they cannot go
in to examine them, and the weeds have
hidden the figures altogether.

" ' That's a pity,' some one remarks,
' for it's here, no doubt, that old Laurence
lies, with his first mistress and his last —
under these cypresses.'

" The aged custodian makes a derisive
noise, and every one turns to him.

" ' I gather you throw some doubt ? '
the Encyclopaedist begins in his urbane
way.

" ' Buried— under the cypresses— -first
mistress and last ! ' The old man makes

76 BOON

his manner invincibly suggestive of scornful
merriment.

"'But isn't it so?'

" ' Bless y'r 'art, no ! Mr. Laurence —
buried ! Mr. Laurence worn't never alive ! '

" ' But there was a young Mr. Laurence ? '

" ' That was Mr. Mallup 'imself, that was !
'E was a great mistifier was Mr. Mallup,
and sometimes 'e went about pretendin'
to be Mr. Laurence and sometimes he was

Mr. Leslie, and sometimes But there,

you'd 'ardly believe. 'E got all this up
— cypresses, chumes, everythink — out of
'is 'ed. Po'try. Why ! 'Ere ! Jest come
along 'ere, gents ! '

" He leads the way along a narrow privet
alley that winds its surreptitious way towards
an alcove.

" ' Miss Merton,' he says, flinging the door
of this open.

" ' The Roman Catholic young person ? '
says Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole.

" ' Quite right, sir,' says the aged custo-
dian.

" They peer in.

"Hanging from a peg the four visitors
behold a pale blue dress cut in the fashion

THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 77

of the 'seventies, a copious ' chignon ' of
fair hair, large earrings, and on the marble
bench a pair of open-work stockings and
other articles of feminine apparel. A tall
mirror hangs opposite these garments, and
in a little recess convenient to the hand are
the dusty and decaying materials for a
hasty ' make-up.'

" The old custodian watches the effect
of this display upon the others with masked
enjoyment.

" ' You mean Miss Merton painted ? '
said the Encyclopaedist, knitting his brows.

" ' Mr. Mallup did,' says the aged custo-
dian.

" ' You mean ? '

" ' Mr. Mallup was Miss Merton. 'E got
'er up too. Parst 'er orf as a young lady,
'e did. Oh, 'e was a great mistifier was
Mr. Mallup. None of the three of 'em wasn't
real people, really ; he got 'em all up.'

" ' She had sad-looking eyes, a delicate,
proud mouth, and a worn, melancholy look,'
muses Mr. Archer.

" ' And young Laurence was in love with
her,' adds the Encyclopaedist. . . .

" * They was all Mr. Mallup,' says the

78 BOON

aged custodian. ' Made up out of 'is 'ed.
And the gents that pretended they was Mr.
'Uxley and Mr. Tyndall in disguise, one
was Bill Smithers, the chemist's assistant,
and the other was the chap that used to
write and print the Margate Advertiser
before the noo papers come.' "

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

Of Art, of Literature, of Mr. Henry
James

§1

The Garden by the Sea chapter was to
have gone on discursively with a discussion
upon this project of a conference upon the
Mind of the Race. The automobile-ful of
gentlemen who had first arrived was to
have supplied the opening interlocutors,
but presently they were to have been
supplemented by the most unexpected acces-
sories. It would have been an enormously
big dialogue if it had ever been written, and
Boon's essentially lazy temperament was
all against its ever getting written. There
were to have been disputes from the outset
as to the very purpose that had brought
them all together. " A sort of literary

79

80 BOON

stocktaking " was to have been Mr. Archer's
phrase. Repeated. Unhappily, its commer-
cialism was to upset Mr. Gosse extremely ;
he was to say something passionately bitter
about its " utter lack of dignity." Then,
relenting a little, he was to urge as an
alternative " some controlling influence, some
standard and restraint, a new and better
Academic influence." Doctor Keyhole was
to offer his journalistic services in organizing
an Academic plebiscite, a suggestion which
was to have exasperated Mr. Gosse to the
pitch of a gleaming silence.

In the midst of this conversation the
party is joined by Hallery and an American
friend, a quiet Harvard sort of man speaking
meticulously accurate English, and still later
by emissaries of Lord Northcliffe and Mr.
Hearst, by Mr. Henry James, rather led
into it by a distinguished hostess, by Mr.
W. B. Yeats, late but keen, and by that
Sir Henry Lunn who organizes the Swiss
winter sports hotels. All these people drift
in with an all too manifestly simulated
accidentalness that at last arouses the distrust
of the elderly custodian, so that Mr. Orage,
the gifted Editor of the New Age, arriving

OF ART AND LITERATURE 81

last, is refused admission. The sounds of
the conflict at the gates do but faintly per-
turb the conference within, which is now
really getting to business, but afterwards
Mr. Orage, slightly wounded in the face by
a dexterously plied rake and incurably
embittered, makes his existence felt by a
number of unpleasant missiles discharged
from over the wall in the direction of any
audible voices. Ultimately Mr. Orage gets
into a point of vantage in a small pine-tree
overlooking the seaward corner of the pre-
mises, and from this he contributes a number
of comments that are rarely helpful, always
unamiable, and frequently in the worst
possible taste.

Such was Boon's plan for the second chapter
of "The Mind of the Race." But that
chapter he never completely planned. At
various times Boon gave us a number of
colloquies, never joining them together in
any regular order. The project of taking
up the discussion of the Mind of the Race
at the exact point Mr. Mallock had laid it
down, and taking the villa by the sea foj
the meeting-place, was at once opposed
by Hallery and bis American friend with

6

82 BOON

an evidently preconcerted readiness. They
pointed out the entire democratization of
thought and literature that had been going
on for the past four decades. It was no
longer possible to deal with such matters
in the old aristocratic country-house style ;
it was no longer possible to take them up
from that sort of beginning ; the centre
of mental gravity among the English-speak-
ing community had shifted socially and
geographically ; what was needed now was
something wider and ampler, something
more in the nature of such a conference as
the annual meeting of the British Associa-
tion. Science left the gentleman's mansion
long ago ; literature must follow it — had
followed it. To come back to Mr. Lankester's
Villa by the sea was to come back to a
beaten covert. The Hearst representative
took up a strongly supporting position,
and suggested that if indeed we wished
to move with the times the thing to do was
to strike out boldly for a special annex
of the Panama Exhibition at San Francisco
and for organization upon sound American
lines. It was a case, he said, even for
" exhibits." Sir Henry Lunn, however,

OF ART AND LITERATURE 83

objected that in America the Anglo-Saxon
note was almost certain to be too exclu-
sively sounded ; that we had to remember
there were vigorous cultures growing up
and growing up more and more detachedly
upon the continent of Europe ; we wanted,
at least, their reflected lights . . . some
more central position. ... In fact, Switzer-
land . . . where also numerous convenient
hotels . . . patronized, he gathered from
the illustrated papers, by Lord Lytton,
Mrs. Asquith, Mr. F. R. Benson . . . and
all sorts of helpful leading people.

§2

Meanwhile Boon's plan was to make Mr.
George Moore and Mr. Henry James wander
off from the general dispute, and he invented
a dialogue that even at the time struck me
as improbable, in which both gentlemen
pursue entirely independent trains of thought.

Mr. Moore's conception of the projected
symposium was something rather in the
vein of the journeyings of Shelley, Byron,
and their charming companions through
France to Italy, but magnified to the dimen-
sions of an enormous pilgrimage, enlarged
to the scale of a stream of refugees. " What,
my dear James," he asked, " is this mind
of humanity at all without a certain touch
of romance, of adventure ? Even Mallock
appreciated the significance of frou-frou;
but these fellows behind here . . ."

To illustrate his meaning better, he was
to have told, with an extraordinary and
loving mastery of detail, of a glowing little

84

OF ART AND LITERATURE 85

experience that had been almost forced upon
him at Nismes by a pretty little woman
from Nebraska, and the peculiar effect it had
had, and particularly the peculiar effect that
the coincidence that both Nebraska and
Nismes begin with an " N " and end so
very differently, had had upon his imagina-
tion. ...

Meanwhile Mr. James, being anxious not
merely to state but also to ignore, laboured
through the long cadences of his companion
as an indefatigable steam-tug might labour
endlessly against a rolling sea, elaborating
his own particular point about the proposed
conference.

" Owing it as we do," he said, " very,
very largely to our friend Gosse, to that
peculiar, that honest but restless and, as
it were, at times almost malignantly ambi-
tious organizing energy of our friend, I
cannot altogether — altogether, even if in
any case I should have taken so extreme,
so devastatingly isolating a step as, to put
it violently, stand out-, yet I must confess
to a considerable anxiety, a kind of distress,
an apprehension, the terror, so to speak,
of the kerbstone, at all this stream of intel-

86 BOON

lectual trafficking, of going to and fro, in
a superb and towering manner enough no
doubt, but still essentially going to and
fro rather than in any of the completed
senses of the word getting there, that does
so largely constitute the aggregations and
activities we are invited to traverse. My
poor head, such as it is and as much as it
can and upon such legs — save the mark ! —
as it can claim, must, I suppose, play its
inconsiderable part among the wheels and
the rearings and the toots and the whistles
and all this uproar, this — Mm, Mm !— let
us say, this infernal uproar, of the occasion ;
and if at times one has one's doubts before
plunging in, whether after all, after the
plunging and the dodging and the close
shaves and narrow squeaks, one does begin
to feel that one is getting through, whether
after all one will get through, and whether
indeed there is any getting through, whether,
to deepen and enlarge and display one's
doubt quite openly, there is in truth any
sort of ostensible and recognizable other
side attainable and definable at all, whether,
to put this thing with a lucidity that verges
on the brutal, whether our amiable and in

OF ART AND LITERATURE 87

most respects our adorable Gosse isn't in-
deed preparing here and now, not the gather-
ing together of a conference but the assem-
bling, the meet, so to speak, of a wild-goose
chase of an entirely desperate and hopeless
description."

At that moment Mr. George Moore was
saying : " Little exquisite shoulders with-
out a touch of colour and with just that
suggestion of rare old ivory in an old shop
window in some out-of-the-way corner of
Paris that only the most patent abstinence
from baths and the brutality of soaping "

Each gentleman stopped simultaneously.

Ahead the path led between box-hedges
to a wall, and above the wall was a pine-
tree, and the Editor of the New Age was
reascending the pine-tree in a laborious and
resolute manner, gripping with some diffi-
culty in his hand a large and very formidable
lump of unpleasantness. . . .

With a common impulse the two gentle-
men turned back towards the house.

Mr. James was the first to break the
momentary silence. " And so, my dear
Moore, and so — to put it shortly— without any
sort of positive engagement or entanglement

88 BOON

or pledge or pressure — I came. And at
the proper time and again with an entirely
individual detachment and as little implica-
tion as possible I shall go. ..."

Subsequently Mr. James was to have
buttonholed Hallery's American, and in the
warm bath of his sympathy to have opened
and bled slowly from another vein of thought.

" I admit the abundance of — what shall
I say ? — activities that our friend is sum-
moning, the tremendous wealth of matter,
of material for literature and art, that has
accumulated during the last few decades.
No one could appreciate, could savour and
watch and respond, more than myself to
the tremendous growing clangour of the
mental process as the last half-century has
exhibited it. But when it comes to the
enterprise of gathering it together, and
not simply just gathering it together, but
gathering it all together, then surely one
must at some stage ask the question, Why
all ? Why, in short, attempt to a compre-
hensiveness that must be overwhelming when
in fact the need is for a selection that shall
not merely represent but elucidate and
lead? Aren't we, after all, all of us after

OF ART AND LITERATURE 89

some such indicating projection of a leading
digit, after such an insistence on the out-
standingly essential in face of this abundance,"
this saturation, this fluid chaos that per-
petually increases ? Here we are gathering
together to celebrate and summarize litera-
ture in some sort of undefined and unpre-
cedented fashion, and for the life of me I
find it impossible to determine what among
my numerous associates and friends and —
to embrace still larger quantities of the
stuff in hand — my contemporaries is con-
sidered to be the hterature in question.
So confused now are we between matter
and treatment, between what is stated and
documented and what is prepared and pre-
sented, that for the life of me I do not yet
see whether we are supposed to be building
an ark or whether by immersion and the
meekest of submersions and an altogether
complete submission of our distended and
quite helpless carcasses to its incalculable
caprice we are supposed to be celebrating
and, in the whirling uncomfortable fashion
of flotsam at large, indicating and making
visible the whole tremendous cosmic inun-
dation. . . ."

90

BOON

Mr. James converses with Mr. George Moore
upon matters of vital importance to both of them.

§3

It was entirely in the quality of Boon's
intellectual untidiness that for a time he
should go off at a tangent in pursuit of
Mr. Henry James and leave his literary
picnic disseminated about the grounds of
Mr. Mallock's villa. There, indeed, they
remained. The story when he took it up
again picked up at quite a different
point.

I remember how Boon sat on the wall
of his vegetable garden and discoursed upon
James, while several of us squatted about
on the cucumber-frames and big flowerpots
and suchlike seats, and how over the wall
Ford Madox Hueffer was beating Wilkins
at Badminton. Hueffer wanted to come
and talk too ; James is one of his countless
subjects — and what an omniscient man
hp is too ! — but Wilkins was too cross to
let him off. . . .

91

92 BOON

So that all that Hueffer was able to con-
tribute was an exhortation not to forget
that Henry James knew Turgenev and that
he had known them both, and a flat denial
that Dickens was a novelist. This last
was the tail of that Pre-Raphaelite feud
begun in Household Words, oh ! generations
ago. . . .

" Got you there, my boy ! " said Wilkins.
" Seven, twelve."

We heard no more from Hueffer.

" You see," Boon said, " you can't now
talk of literature without going through
James. James is unavoidable. James is to
criticism what Immanuel Kant is to philo-
sophy — a partially comprehensible essen-
tial, an inevitable introduction. If you
understand what James is up to and if you
understand what James is not up to, then
you are placed. You are in the middle of
the critical arena. You are in a position
to lay about you with significance. Other-

wise

I want to get this Hallery of mine, who
is to be the hero of ' The Mind of the Race,'
into a discussion with Henry James, but
that, you know, is easier said than imagined.

OF ART AND LITERATURE 93

Hallery is to be one of those enthusias-
tic thinkers who emit highly concentrated
opinion in gobbets, suddenly. James —
isn't. ..."

Boon meditated upon his difficulties.
" Hallery's idea of literature is something
tremendously comprehensive, something that
pierces always down towards the core of
things, something that carries and changes
all the activities of the race. This sort of
thing."

He read from a scrap of paper —
" ' The thought of a community is the
life of that community, and if the collective
thought of a community is disconnected
and fragmentary, then the community is
collectively vain and weak. That does not
constitute an incidental defect but essential
failure. Though that community have cities
such as the world has never seen before,
fleets and hosts and glories, though it count
its soldiers by the army corps and its chil-
dren by the million, yet if it hold not to
the reality of thought and formulated will
beneath these outward things, it will pass,
and all its glories will pass, like smoke before
the wind, like mist beneath the sun ; it

94 BOON

will become at last only one more vague
and fading dream upon the scroll of time,
a heap of mounds and pointless history,
even as are Babylon and Nineveh.' "

" I've heard that before somewhere," said
Dodd.

" Most of this dialogue will have to be
quotation," said Boon.

" He makes literature include philo-
sophy ? "

" Everything. It's all the central things.
It's the larger Bible to him, a thing about
which all the conscious direction of life
revolves. It's alive with passion and will.
Or if it isn't, then it ought to be. . . . And
then as the antagonist comes this artist,
this man who seems to regard the whole
seething brew of life as a vat from which
you skim, with slow, dignified gestures,
works of art. . . . Works of art whose
only claim is their art. . . . Hallery is going
to be very impatient about art."

" Ought there to be such a thing as
a literary artist ? " some one said.

" Ought there, in fact, to be Henry
James ? " said Dodd.

" I don't think so. Hallery won't think

OF ART AND LITERATURE 95

so. You see, the discussion will be very
fundamental. There's contributory art, of
course, and a way of doing things better
or worse. Just as there is in war, or cook-
ing. But the way of doing isn't the end.
First the end must be judged — and then
if you like talk of how it is done. Get
there as splendidly as possible. But get
there. James and George Moore, neither
of them take it like that. They leave out
getting there, or the thing they get to is
so trivial as to amount to scarcely more
than an omission. . . ."-

Boon reflected. " In early life both these
men poisoned their minds in studios.
Thought about pictures even might be less
studio-ridden than it is. But James has
never discovered that a novel isn't a picture.
. . . That life isn't a studio. . . .

" He wants a novel to be simply and
completely done. He wants it to have a
unity, he demands homogeneity. . . . Why
should a book have that ? For a picture
it's reasonable, because you have to see it all
at once. But there's no need to see a book
all at once. It's like wanting to have a
whole county done in one style and period

96 BOON

of architecture. It's like insisting that a
walking tour must stick to one valley. . . .
" But James begins by taking it for
granted that a novel is a work of art that
must be judged by its oneness. Judged
first by its oneness. Some one gave him
that idea in the beginning of things and he
has never found it out. He doesn't find
things out. He doesn't even seem to want
to find things out. You can see that in
him ; he is eager to accept things — elabor-
ately. You can see from his books that
he accepts etiquettes, precedences, associa-
tions, claims. That is his peculiarity. He
accepts very readily and then — elaborates.
He has, I am convinced, one of the strongest,
most abundant minds alive in the whole
world, and he has the smallest penetration.
Indeed, he has no penetration. He is the
culmination of the Superficial type. Or
else he would have gone into philosophy
and been greater even than his wonderful
brother. . . . But here he is, spinning about,
like the most tremendous of water-boatmen
— you know those insects ? — kept up by
surface tension. As if, when once he pierced
the surface, he would drown. It's incredible.

OF ART AND LITERATURE 97

A water-boatman as big as an elephant.
I was reading him only yesterday, ' The
Golden Bowl ' ; it's dazzling how never for
a moment does he go through."

" Recently he's been explaining himself,"
said Dodd.

" His ' Notes on Novelists.' It's one sus-
tained demand for the picture effect. Which
is the denial of the sweet complexity of
life, of the pointing this way and that, of
the spider on the throne. Philosophy aims
at a unity and never gets there. . . . That
true unity which we all suspect, and which
no one attains, if it is to be got at all it is
to be got by penetrating, penetrating down
and through. The picture, on the other
hand, is forced to a unity because it can see
only one aspect at a time. I am doubtful
even about that. Think of Hogarth or
Carpaccio. But if the novel is to follow
life it must be various and discursive.
Life is diversity and entertainment, not
completeness and satisfaction. All actions
are half-hearted, shot delightfully with wan-
dering thoughts — about something else. All
true stories are a felt of irrelevances. But
James sets out to make his novels with the

7

98 BOON

presupposition that they can be made con-
tinuously relevant. And perceiving the dis-
cordant things, he tries to get rid of them.
He sets himself to pick the straws out of
the hair of Life before he paints her. But
without the straws she is no longer the
mad woman we love. He talks of ' selec-
tion,' and of making all of a novel definitely
about a theme. He objects to a ' saturation '
that isn't oriented. And he objects, if you
go into it, for no clear reason at all. Follow-
ing up his conception of selection, see what
in his own practice he omits. In practice
James's selection becomes just omission
and nothing more. He omits everything
that demands digressive treatment or col-
lateral statement. For example, he omits
opinions. In all his novels you will find
no people with defined political opinions,
no people with religious opinions, none with
clear partisanships or with lusts or whims,
none definitely up to any specific impersonal
thing. There are no poor people dominated
by the imperatives of Saturday night and
Monday morning, no dreaming types — and
don't we all more or less live dreaming ?
And none are ever decently forgetful. All

OF ART AND LITERATURE 99

that much of humanity he clears out before
he begins his story. It's like cleaning rabbits
for the table.

" But you see how relentlessly it follows
from the supposition that the novel is a
work of art aiming at pictorial unities !

" All art too acutely self-centred comes
to this sort of thing. James's denatured
people are only the equivalent in fiction of
those egg-faced, black-haired ladies, who
sit and sit, in the Japanese colour-prints,
the unresisting stuff for an arrangement
of blacks. . . .

" Then with the eviscerated people he
has invented he begins to make up stories.
What stories they are ! Concentrated on
suspicion, on a gift, on possessing a ' piece '
of old furniture, on what a little girl may
or may not have noted in an emotional
situation. These people cleared for artistic
treatment never make lusty love, never go
to angry war, never shout at an election
or perspire at poker ; never in any way
date. . . . And upon the petty residuum
of human interest left to them they focus
minds of a Jamesian calibre. . . .

" The only living human motives left in

100 BOON

the novels of Henry James are a certain
avidity and an entirely superficial curiosity.
Even when relations are irregular or when
sins are hinted at, you feel that these are
merely attitudes taken up, gambits before
the game of attainment and over-perception
begins. . . . His people nose out suspicions,
hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever
known living human beings do that ? The
thing his novel is about is always there.
It is like a church lit but without a con-
gregation to distract you, with every light
and line focused on the high altar. And
on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely
there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a .bit
of string. . . . Like his ' Altar of the Dead,'
with nothing to the dead at all. . . . For
if there was they couldn't all be candles
and the effect would vanish. . . . And the
elaborate, copious emptiness of the whole
Henry James exploit is only redeemed and
made endurable by the elaborate, copious
wit. Upon the desert his selection has made
Henry James erects palatial metaphors. . . .
The chief fun, the only exercise, in reading
Henry James is this clambering over vast
metaphors. . . .

OF ART AND LITERATURE 101

" Having first made sure that he has
scarcely anything left to express, he then
sets to work to express it, with an industry,
a wealth of intellectual stuff that dwarfs
Newton. He spares no resource in the
telling of his dead inventions. He brings
up every device of language to state and
define. Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He
splits his infinitives and fills them up with
adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing
colloquialism into his service. His vast
paragraphs sweat and struggle ; they could
not sweat and elbow and struggle more if
God Himself was the processional meaning
to which they sought to come. And all
for tales of nothingness. ... It is leviathan
retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but
painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost,
even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking
up a pea which has got into a corner of its
den. Most things, it insists, are beyond
it, but it can, at any rate, modestly, and
with an artistic singleness of mind, pick
up that pea. . . ."

§4

" A little while ago," said Boon, suddenly
struggling with his trouser pocket and pro-
ducing some pieces of paper, " I sketched
out a novel, and as it was rather in the
manner of Henry James I think perhaps
you might be interested by it now. So
much, that is, as there is of it. It is to be
called ' The Spoils of Mr. Blandish,' and it
is all about this particular business of the
selective life, Mr. Blandish, as I saw him,
was pretty completely taken from the James
ideal. . . . He was a man with an exquisite
apprehension of particulars, with just that
sense of there being a Tightness attainable,
a fitness, a charm, a finish. ... In any
little affair. ... He believed that in speech
and still more that in writing there was an
inevitable right word, in actions great and
small a mellowed etiquette, in everything
a possible perfection. He was, in fact,

102

OF ART AND LITERATURE 103

the very soul of Henry James— as I under-
stand it. . . . This sort of man —

Mr. Blandish going delicately through life.
"Oh not oh no I But Yes ! and This is it I "

" Going delicately."

I was able to secure the sketch.

" He didn't marry, he didn't go upon
adventures ; lust, avarice, ambition, all
these things that as Milton says are to be
got ' not without dust and heat,' were not
for him. Blood and dust and heat — he

104 BOON

ruled them out. But he had independent
means, he could live freely and delicately
and charmingly, he could travel and meet
and be delighted by all the best sorts of
people in the best sorts of places. So for
years he enriched his resonances, as an
admirable violin grows richer with every
note it sounds. He went about elaborately,
avoiding ugliness, death, suffering, indus-
trialism, politics, sport, the thought of war,
the red blaze of passion. He travelled
widely in the more settled parts of the world.
Chiefly he visited interesting and ancient
places, putting his ever more exquisite
sensorium at them, consciously taking deli-
cate impressions upon the refined wax of
his being. In a manner most carefully occa-
sional, he wrote. Always of faded places.
His ' Ypres ' was wonderful. His ' Bruges '
and his ' Hour of Van Eyk.' . . .

" Such," said Boon, " is the hero. The
story begins, oh ! quite in the James
manner with " He read —

" ' At times it seemed inaccessible, a
thing beyond hope, beyond imagining, and
then at times it became so concrete an
imagination, a desire so specific, so nearly

OF ART AND LITERATURE 105

expressed, as to grow if not to the exact
particulars of longitude and latitude, yet
at any rate so far as county and district
and atmosphere were concerned, so far
indeed as an intuition of proximity was
concerned, an intimation that made it seem
at last at certain moments as if it could
not possibly be very much farther than just
round the corner or over the crest. . . . '
" But I've left a good bit of that to write
up. In the book there will be pages and
sheets of that sentence. The gist is that
Mr. Blandish wants a house to live in and
that he has an idea of the kind of house he
wants. And the chapter, the long, unresting,
progressing chapter, expands and expands ;
it never jumps you forward, it never lets
you off, you can't skip and you can't escape,
until there comes at last a culminating dis-
tension of statement in which you realize
more and more clearly, until you realize
it with the unforgettable certainty of a thing
long fought for and won at last, that Mr.
Blandish has actually come upon the house,
and with a vigour of decision as vivid as a
flash of lightning in a wilderness of troubled
clouds, as vivid indeed as the loud, sonorous

106 BOON

bursting of a long blown bladder, has said
'This is it!' On that ' This is it' my
chapter ends, with an effect of enormous re-
lief, with something of the beautiful serenity
that follows a difficult parturition.

" The story is born.

" And then we leap forward to possession.

" ' And here he was, in the warmest reality,
in the very heart of the materialization of

his dream ' He has, in fact, got the

house. For a year or so from its first
accidental discovery he had done nothing
but just covet the house ; too fearful of
an overwhelming disappointment even to
make a definite inquiry as to its accessibility.
But he has, you will gather, taken apart-
ments in the neighbourhood, thither he
visits frequently, and almost every day
when he walks abroad the coveted house
draws him. It is in a little seaside place
on the east coast, and the only available
walks are along the shore or inland across
the golf-links. Either path offers tempting
digressions towards it. He comes to know
it from a hundred aspects and under a
thousand conditions of light and atmosphere.

. . And while still in the early stage he

OF ART AND LITERATURE 107

began a curious and delicious secret practice
in relationship. You have heard of the
Spaniard in love, in love with a woman he
had seen but once, whom he might never
see again, a princess, etiquette-defended,
a goddess, and who yet, seeing a necklace
that became her, bought it for the joy of
owning something that was at least by
fitness hers. Even so did Mr. Blandish
begin to buy first one little article and then,
the fancy growing upon him more and
more, things, ' pieces ' they call them, that
were in the vein of Samphire House. And
then came the day, the wonderful day,
when as he took his afternoon feast of the
eye, the door opened, some one came out
towards him. . . .

" It was incredible. They were giving
him tea with hot, inadvisable scones — but
their hotness, their close heaviness, he ac-
cepted with a ready devotion, would have
accepted had they been ten times as hot
and close and heavy, not heedlessly, indeed,
but gratefully, willingly paying his price
for these astonishing revelations that with-
out an effort, serenely, calmly, dropped in
between her gentle demands whether he

108 BOON

would have milk and her mild inquiries as to
the exact quantity of sugar his habits and
hygienic outlook demanded, that his hostess
so casually made. These generous, heedless
people were talking of departures, of aban-
donments, of, so they put it, selling the
dear old place, if indeed any one could be
found to buy a place so old and so remote
and — she pointed her intention with a laugh
— so very, very dear. Repletion of scones
were a small price to pay for such a glow-
ing, such an incredible gift of opportunity,
thrust thus straight into the willing, amazed
hands. . . .

" He gets the house. He has it done up.
He furnishes it, and every article of furniture
seems a stroke of luck too good to be true.
And to crown it all I am going to write one
of those long crescendo passages that James
loves, a sentence, pages of it, of happy
event linking to happy event until at last
the incredible completion, a butler, unques-
tionably Early Georgian, respectability,
competence equally unquestionable, a wife
who could cook, and cook well, no children,
no thought or possibility of children, and
to crown all, the perfect name — Mutimer !

OF ART AND LITERATURE

109

4-

/<£ <

Mutimer at first.

" All this you must understand is told
retrospectively as Blandish installs him-
self in Samphire House. It is told to the
refrain, ' Still, fresh every morning, came
the persuasion " This is too good to be true." '
And as it is told, something else, by the
most imperceptible degrees, by a gathering
up of hints and allusions and pointing details,
gets itself told too, and that is the growing
realization in the mind of Blandish of a
something extra, of something not quite
bargained for — the hoard and the haunting.
About the house hangs a presence. . . .

" He had taken it at first as a mere

110 BOON

picturesque accessory to the whole pictur-
esque and delightful wreathing of association
and tradition about the place, that there
should be this ancient flavour of the cutlass
and the keg, this faint aroma of buried
doubloons and Stevensonian experiences.
He had assumed, etc. . . . He had gathered,
etc. . . . And it was in the most imper-
ceptible manner that beyond his sense of these
takings and assumptions and gatherings there
grew his perception that the delicate quiver
of appreciation, at first his utmost tribute
to these illegal and adventurous and san-
guinary associations, was broadening and
strengthening, was, on'e hardly knew
whether to say developing or degenerating,
into a nervous reaction, more spinal and
less equivocally agreeable, into the question,
sensed rather than actually thought or
asked, whether in fact the place didn't in
certain lights and certain aspects and at
certain unfavourable moments come near
to evoking the ghost — if such sorites are
permissible in the world of delicate shades —
of the ghost, of the ghost of a shiver — of
aversion. . . .

" And so at page a hundred and fifty or

OF ART AND LITERATURE 111

thereabouts we begin to get into the story,"
said Boon.

" You wade through endless marshes of
subtle intimation, to a sense of a Presence
in Samphire House. For a number of pages
you are quite unable to tell whether this is a
ghost or a legend or a foreboding or simply
old-fashioned dreams that are being allu-
sively placed before you. But there is an
effect piled up very wonderfully, of Mr.
Blandish, obsessed, uneasy, watching fur-
tively and steadfastly his guests, his callers,
his domestics, continually asking himself,
' Do they note it ? Are they feeling it ? '

" We break at last into incidents. A young
friend of the impossible name of Deshman
helps evolve the story ; he comes to stay ;
he seems to feel the influence from the out-
set, he cannot sleep, he wanders about the
house. . . . Do others know ? Others ? . . .
The gardener takes to revisiting the gardens
after nightfall. He is met in the shrubbery
with an unaccountable spade in his hand
and answers huskily. Why should a gar-
dener carry a spade ? Why should he
answer huskily ? Why should the presence,
the doubt, the sense of something else

112

BOON

elusively in the air about them, become
intensified at the encounter ? Oh ! conceiv-
ably of course in many places, but just
there ! As some sort of protection, it may
be. . . . Then suddenly as Mr. Blandish
sits at his lonely but beautifully served
dinner he becomes aware for the first time
of a change in Mutimer..

<ss %-

Mutimer at the end of a year.

"Something told him in that instant
that Mutimer also knew. . . .

" Deshman comes again with a new and
disconcerting habit of tapping the panelling
and measuring the thickness of the walls
when he thinks no one is looking, and then

OF ART AND LITERATURE 113

a sister of Mr. Blandish and a friend, a
woman, yet not so much a woman as a
disembodied intelligence in a feminine
costume with one of those impalpable re-
lationships with Deshman that people have
with one another in the world of Henry
James, an association of shadows, an
atmospheric liaison. Follow some almost
sentenceless conversations. Mr. Blandish
walks about the shrubbery with the friend,,
elaborately getting at it — whatever it is —
and in front of them, now hidden by the
yew hedges, now fully in view, walks Desh-
man with the married and settled sister of
Mr. Blandish. . . .

" ' So,' said Mr. Blandish, pressing the
point down towards the newly discovered
sensitiveness, ' where we feel, he it seems
knows.''

" She seemed to consider.

" ' He doesn't know completely,' was her
qualification.

" ' But he has something — something
tangible.'

" ' If he can make it tangible.'

" On that the mind of Mr. Blandish played
for a time.

8

114 BOON

" ' Then it isn't altogether tangible yet ? '
" ' It isn't tangible enough for him to
go upon.'

" ' Definitely something.'

" Her assent was mutely concise.

" ' That we on our part ? '

" The we seemed to trouble her,
" ' He knows more than you do,' she
yielded.

" The gesture, the half turn, the momentary
halt in the paces of Mr. Blandish, plied her
further.

" ' More, I think, than he has admitted —
to any one.'

" ' Even to you ? '

" He perceived an interesting wave of
irritation. ' Even to me,' he had wrung
from her, but at the price of all further
discussion.

" Putting the thing crassly," said Boon,
" Deshman has got wind of a hoard, of a
treasure, of something — Heaven as yet only
knows what something— buried, imbedded,
in some as yet unexplained way incorporated
with Samphire House. On the whole the
stress lies rather on treasure, the treasure
of smuggling, of longshore practices, of

OF ART AND LITERATURE 115

illegality on the high seas. And still clearer
is it that the amiable Deshman wants to
get at it without the participation of Mr.
Blandish. Until the very end you are never
quite satisfied why Deshman wants to get
at it in so private a fashion. As the plot
thickens you are played about between
the conviction that Deshman wants the
stuff for himself and the firm belief of the
lady that against the possible intervention
of the Treasury, he wants to secure it for
Mr. Blandish, to secure it at least generously
if nefariously, lest perhaps it should fall
under the accepted definition and all the
consequent confiscations of treasure trove.
Arid there are further beautiful subtleties
as to whether she really believes in this
more kindly interpretation of the refined
but dubitable Deshman. ... A friend of
Deshman's, shameless under the incredible
name of Mimbleton, becomes entangled in
this thick, sweet flow of narrative — the
James method of introducing a character
always reminds me of going round with the
lantern when one is treacling for moths.
Mimbleton has energy. He presses. Under
a summer dawn of delicious sweetness

116 BOON

Mimbleton is found insensible on the
croquet lawn by Mr. Blandish, who, like
most of the characters in the narrative
from first to last, has been unable to
sleep. And at the near corner of the
house, close to a never before remarked
ventilator, is a hastily and inaccurately
refilled excavation. . . .

" Then events come hurrying in a sort
of tangled haste — making sibyl-like ges-
tures.

" At the doorway Mutimer appears —
swaying with some profound emotion. He
is still in his evening attire. He has not
yet gone to bed. In spite of the dawn he
carried a burning candle — obliquely. At
the sight of his master he withdraws —
backwards and with difficulty. . . .

" Then," said Boon, " I get my crown-
ing chapter : the breakfast, a peculiar
something, something almost palpable in
the atmosphere — Deshman hoarse and a
little talkative, Mimbleton with a possibly
nervous headache, husky also and demand-
ing tea in a thick voice, Mutimer waiting
uneasily, and Mr. Blandish, outwardly calm,
yet noting every particular, thinking mean-

OF ART AND LITERATURE 117

ings into every word and movement,
and growing more and more clear in his
conviction that Mutimer knows — knows
everything. . . .

C^-

Mutimer as the plot thickens.

(t

Book two opens with Mr. Blandish
practically in possession of the facts.
Putting the thing coarsely, the treasure is —
1813 brandy, in considerable quantities,
bricked up in a disused cellar of Samphire
House. Samphire House, instead of being
the fine claret of a refuge Mr. Blandish
supposed, is a loaded port. But of course
in the novel we shall not put things coarsely,
and for a long time you will be by no means

118 BOON

clear what the ' spirit ' is that Mr. Blandish
is now resolved to exorcise. He is, in fact,
engaged in trying to get that brandy away,
trying to de-alcoholize his existence, trying
— if one must put the thing in all the con-
crete crudity of his fundamental intention —
to sell the stuff. . . .

" Now in real life you would just go and
sell it. But people in the novels of Henry
James do not do things in the inattentive,
offhand, rather confused, and partial way
of reality : they bring enormous brains to
bear upon the minutest particulars of exist-
ence. Mr. Blandish, following the laws
of that world, has not simply to sell his
brandy : he has to sell it subtly, intri-
cately, interminably, with a delicacy, with
a dignity. . . .

" He consults friends — impalpable, intri-
cate, inexhaustible friends.

" There are misunderstandings. One old
and trusted intimate concludes rather hastily
that Mr. Blandish is confessing that he has
written a poem, another that he is making
a proposal of marriage, another that he
wishes an introduction to the secretary of
the Psychical Research Society. . . . All

OF ART AND LITERATURE 119

this," said Boon, " remains, perhaps in-
definitely, to be worked out. Only the end,
the end, comes with a rush. Deshman
has found for him — one never gets nearer
to it than the ' real right people.' The real
right people send their agent down, a curious
blend of gentleman and commercial person
he is, to investigate, to verify, to estimate
quantities. Ultimately he will — shall we
say it ? — make an offer. With a sense of
immense culmination the reader at last
approaches the hoard. . . .

" You are never told the thing exactly.
It is by indefinable suggestions, by exquisite
approaches and startings back, by circum-
locution the most delicate, that your mind
at last shapes its realization, that — the
last drop of the last barrel has gone and that
Mutimer, the butler, lies dead or at least
helpless — in the inner cellar. And a beau-
tiful flavour, ripe and yet rare, rich without
opulence, hangs — diminuendo morendo — in
the air. ..."

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

Of the Assembling and Opening of the

World Conference on the Mind of

the Race

§1

It must be borne in mind that not even the
opening chapter of this huge book, " The
Mind of the Race," was ever completely
written. The discussion in the Garden by
the Sea existed merely so far as the frag-
ment of dialogue I have quoted took it. I
do not know what Mr. Gosse contributed
except that it was something bright, and
that presently he again lost his temper and
washed his hands of the whole affair and
went off with Mr. Yeats to do a little
Academy thing of their own round a corner,
and I do not know what became of the
emissaries of Lord Northcliffe and Mr.

Hearst. One conversation drops out of mind

120

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 121

and another begins ; it is like the battle of
the Aisne passing slowly into the battle of the
Yser. The idea develops into the holding of
a definite congress upon the Mind of the Race
at some central place. I don't think Boon
was ever very clear whether that place was
Chautauqua, or Grindelwald, or Stratford, or
Oxford during the Long Vacation, or the
Exhibition grounds at San Francisco. It
was, at any rate, some such place, and it was
a place that was speedily placarded with all
sorts of bills and notices and counsels, such
as, " To the Central Hall," or " Section B :
Criticism and Reviewing," or " Section M :
Prose Style," or " Authors' Society (British)
Solicitors' Department," or " Exhibit of the
Reading Room of the British Museum."

Manifestly the model of a meeting of the
British Association for the Advancement of
Science dominated his mind more and more,
until at last he began to concoct a presi-
dential address. And he invented a man
called J. B. Pondlebury, very active and
illiterate, but an excellent organizer, trained
by Selfridge, that Marshal Field of London,
who is very directive throughout. J. B.
Pondlebury orders the special trains, con-

122 BOON

trives impossible excursions, organizes
garden fetes and water parties, keeps people
together who would prefer to be separated,
and breaks up people who have been getting
together. Through all these things drifts
Hallery, whose writings started the idea, and
sometimes he is almost, as it were, leader and
sometimes he is like a drowned body in the
torrent below Niagara — Pondlebury being
Niagara.

On the whole the atmosphere of the great
conference was American, and yet I distinctly
remember that it was the Special Train to
Bale of which he gave us an account one
afternoon ; it was a night journey of con-
siderable eventfulness, with two adjacent
carriages de luxe labelled respectively
" Specially Reserved for Miss Marie Corelli,"
and " Specially Reserved for Mr. and Mrs.
George Bernard Shaw," with conspicuous
reiterations. The other compartments were
less exclusive, and contained curious
minglings of greatness, activity, and reputa-
tion. Sir J. M. Barrie had an upper berth
in a wagon-lit, where he remained sym-
pathetically silent above a crowd of younger
reputations, a crowd too numerous to permit

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 123

the making of the lower berth and overflow-
ing into the corridor. I remember Boon
kept jamming new people into that conges-
tion. The whole train, indeed, was to be
fearfully overcrowded. That was part of the
joke. James Joyce I recall as a novelist
strange to me that Boon insisted was a " first-
rater." He represented him as being of
immense size but extreme bashfulness. And
he talked about D. H. Lawrence, St. John
Ervine, Reginald Wright Kauffman, Leonard
Merrick, Viola Meynell, Rose Macaulay,
Katherine Mansfield, Mary Austin, Clutton
Brock, Robert Lynd, James Stephens, Philip
Guedalla, H. M. Tomlinson, Denis Garstin,
Dixon Scott, Rupert Brooke, Geoffrey Young,
F. S. Flint, Marmaduke Pickthall, Randolph

S. Bourne, James Milne

" Through all the jam, I think we must
have Ford Madox Hueffer, wandering to
and fro up and down the corridor, with dis-
traught blue eyes, laying his hands on heads
and shoulders, the Only Uncle of the Gifted
Young, talking in a languid, plangent tenor,
now boasting about trivialities, and now
making familiar criticisms (which are
invariably ill-received), and occasionally

124 BOON

quite absent-mindedly producing splendid
poetry. . . ."

Like most authors who have made their
way to prominence and profit, Boon was
keenly sympathetic with any new writer
who promised to do interesting work, and
very ready with his praise and recognition.
That disposition in these writing, prolific
times would alone have choked the corridor.
And he liked young people even when their
promises were not exactly convincing. He
hated to see a good book neglected, and
was for ever ramming " The Crystal Age "
and " Said the Fisherman " and " Tony
Drum " and " George's Mother " and " A
Hind Let Loose " and " Growing Pains "
down the throats of his visitors. But
there were very human and definite limits
to his appreciations. Conspicuous success,
and particularly conspicuous respectable
success, chilled his generosity. Conrad he
could not endure. I do him no wrong in
mentioning that ; it is the way with most
of us ; and a score of flourishing contem-
poraries who might have liked tickets for
the Conference special would have found,
great difficulty in getting them.

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 125

There is a fascination in passing judge-
ments and drawing up class lists. For a
time the high intention of the Mind of
the Race was forgotten while we talked
the narrow " shop " of London literary
journalism, and discovered and weighed
and log-rolled and — in the case of the more
established — blamed and condemned. That
Bale train became less and less like a train
and more and more like a descriptive
catalogue.

For the best part of an afternoon we
talked of the young and the new, and
then we fell into a discussion about such
reputations as Pickthall's and W. H.
Hudson's and the late Stephen Crane's,
reputations ridiculously less than they
ought to be, so that these writers, who are
certainly as securely classic as Beckford
or Herrick, are still unknown to half the*
educated English reading public. Was it
.due to the haste of criticism or the illiteracy
of publishers ? That question led us so far
away from the special Bale train that we
never returned to it. But I know that we
decided that the real and significant writers
were to be only a small portion of the

126 BOON

crowd that congested the train ; there were
also to be endless impostors, imitators,
editors, raiders of the world of print. . . .
At every important station there was to
be a frightful row about all these people's
tickets, and violent attempts to remove
doubtful cases. . . . Then Mr. Clement K.
Shorter was to come in to advise and help
the conductor. . . . Ultimately this led to
trouble about Mr. Shorter's own creden-

DlHiIS* • • •

Some of Boon's jokes about this train
were, to say the best of them, obvious.
Mr. Compton Mackenzie was in trouble
about his excess luggage, for example.
Mr. Upton Sinclair, having carried out his
ideal of an innocent frankness to a logical
completeness in his travelling equipment,
was forcibly wrapped in blankets by the
train officials. Mr. Thomas Hardy had a
first-class ticket but travelled by choice or
mistake in a second-class compartment, his
deserted place being subsequently occupied
by that promising young novelist Mr. Hugh
Walpole, provided with a beautiful fur rug,
a fitted dressing-bag, a writing slope, a gold-
nibbed fountain pen, innumerable introduc-

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 127

tions, and everything that a promising young
novelist can need. The brothers Chesterton,
Mr. Maurice Baring, and Mr. Belloc sat up
all night in the wagon - restaurant consum-
ing beer enormously and conversing upon
immortality and whether \. extends to
Semitic and Oriental persons. At the end
of the train, I remember, there was to have
been a horse-van containing Mr. Maurice
Hewlett's charger — Mr. Hewlett himself, I
believe, was left behind by accident at the
Gare de Lyons — Mr. Cunninghame Graham's
Arab steed, and a large, quiet sheep, the in-
separable pet of Mr. Arthur Christopher
Benson. . . .

There was also, I remember, a description
of the whole party running for early coffee,
which gave Boon ample and regrettable
opportunities for speculations upon the
deshabille of his contemporaries. Much of
the detail of that invention I prefer to forget,
but I remember Mr. Shaw was fully prepared
for the emerging with hand-painted pyjamas,
over which he was wearing a saffron
dressing-gown decorated in green and purple
scrolls by one of the bolder artists associated
with Mr. Roger Fry, and as these special

128 BOON

train allusions are all that I can ever re-
member Boon saying about Shaw, and as
the drawing does in itself amount to a
criticism, I give it here. . . .

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 129

How Mr. Shaw knocked them all on Bale platform,
and got right into the middle of the picture. Re-
mark his earnest face. This surely is no mountebank.

§2

Boon was greatly exercised over the problem
of a president.

" Why have a president ? " Dodd helped.

" There must be a Presidential Address,"
said Boon, " and these things always do have
a president."

" Lord Rosebery," suggested Wilkins.

" Lord Morley," said Dodd.

" Lord Bryce."

Then we looked at one another.

" For my own part," said Boon, " if we
are going in for that sort of thing, I favour
Lord Reay.

" You see, Lord Reay has never done any-
thing at all connected with literature. Morley
and Bryce arid Rosebery have at any rate
written things — historical studies, addresses,
things like that — but Reay has never written
anything, and he let Gollancz make him
president of the British Academy without a

130

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 131

murmur. This seems to mark him out for
this further distinction. He is just the sort
of man who would be made — and who would
let himself be made — president of a British
affair of this sort, and they would hoist him
up and he would talk for two or three hours
without a blush. Just like that other con-
founded peer — what was his name ? — who
bored and bored and bored at the Anatole
France dinner. ... In the natural course
of things it would be one of these literary
lords. . . ."

" What would he say ? " asked Dodd.

" Maunderings, of course. It will make the
book rather dull. I doubt if I can report him
at length. . . . He will speak upon contem-
porary letters, the lack of current achieve-
ment. ... I doubt if a man like Lord Reay
ever reads at all. One wonders sometimes
what these British literary aristocrats do with
all their time. Probably he left off reading
somewhere in the eighties. He won't have
noted it, of course, and he will be under
the impression that nothing has been written
for the past thirty years."

" Good Lord ! " said Wilkins.

" And he'll say that. Slowly. Steadily.

132 BOON

Endlessly. Then he will thank God for
the English classics, ask where now is our
Thackeray ? where now our Burns ? our
Charlotte Bronte ? our Tennyson ? say a
good word for our immortal bard, and sit
down amidst the loud applause of thousands
of speechlessly furious British and American
writers. ..."

" I don't see that this will help your book
forward," said Dodd.

" No, but it's a proper way of beginning.
Like Family Prayers."

" I suppose," said Wilkins, " if you told
a man of that sort that there were more
and better poets writing in English beauti-
fully in 1914 than ever before he wouldn't
believe it. I suppose if you said that
Ford Madox Hueffer, for example, had
produced sweeter and deeper poetry than
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he'd have a fit."

" He'd have nothing of the kind. You
could no more get such an idea into the
head of one of these great vestiges of our
Gladstonian days than you could get it into
the seat of a Windsor chair. . . . And
people don't have fits unless something has
got into them. . . . No, he'd reflect quite

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 133

calmly that first of all he'd never heard of
this Hueffer, then that probably he was a
very young man. And, anyhow, one didn't
meet him in important places. . . . And
after inquiry he would find out he was a
journalist. . . . And then probably he'd
cease to cerebrate upon the question. ..."

§3

" Besides," said Boon, " we must have
one of our literary peers because of
America."

" You're unjust to America," I said.

" No," said Boon. " But Aunt Dove— I
know her ways."

That led to a long, rambling discussion
about the American literary atmosphere.
Nothing that I could say would make him
relent from his emphatic assertion that it
is a spinster atmosphere, an atmosphere in
which you can't say all sorts of things
and where all sorts of things have to be
specially phrased. " And she can't stand
young things and crude things "

" America ! " said Wilkins.

" The America I mean. The sort of
America that ought to supply young new
writers with caresses and — nourishment.
. . . Instead of which you get the Nation.

184

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 135

. . . That bleak acidity, that refined appeal
to take the child away."

" But they don't produce new young
writers ! " said Wilkins.

" But they do ! " said Boon. " And they
strangle them ! "

It was extraordinary what a power meta-
phors and fancies had upon Boon. Only
those who knew him intimately can under-
stand how necessary Miss Bathwick was to
him. He would touch a metaphor and then
return and sip it, and then sip and drink
and swill until it had intoxicated him hope-
lessly.

" America," said Boon, " can produce such
a supreme writer as Stephen Crane — the best
writer of English for the last half-century —

or Mary Austin, who used to write

What other woman could touch her ? But
America won't own such children. It's
amazing. It's a case of concealment of
birth. She exposes them. Whether it's
Shame — or a Chinese trick. . . . She'll sit
never knowing she's had a Stephen Crane,
adoring the European reputation, the florid
mental gestures of a Conrad. You see,
she can tell Conrad ' writes.' It shows.

136 BOON

And she'll let Mary Austin die of neglect,
while she worships the ' art ' of Mary Ward.
It's like turning from the feet of a goddess
to a pair of goloshes. She firmly believes
that old quack Bergson is a bigger man
than her own unapproachable William
James. . . . She's incredible. I tell you
it's only conceivable on one supposition.
. . . I'd never thought before about these
disgraceful sidelights on Miss Dove's

CcircCr. • • •

" We English do make foundlings of
some of her little victims, anyhow. . . .
But why hasn't she any natural instinct in
the matter ?

" Now, if one represented that peculiar
Bostonian intellectual gentility, the Nation
kind of thing, as a very wicked, sour lady's-
maid with a tremendous influence over the
Spinster's conduct. . . ."

His mind was running on.

" I begin to see a melodramatic strain in
this great novel, ' Miss Dove.' ... ' Miss
Dove's Derelicts.' . . . Too broad, I am
afraid. If one were to represent Sargent
and Henry James as two children left Out
one cold night in a basket at a cottage in

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 137

the village by a mysterious stranger, with
nothing but a roll of dollars and a rough
drawing of the Washington coat-of-arms to
indicate their parentage . . .

" Then when they grow up they go back
to the big house and she's almost kind
to them. . . .

" Have you ever read the critical articles
of Edgar Allan Poe ? They're very remark-
able. He is always demanding an American
Literature. It is like a deserted baby left
to die in its cradle, weeping and wailing for
its bottle. . . . What he wanted, of course,
was honest and intelligent criticism.

" To this day America kills her Poes. ..."

" But confound it ! " said Wilkins,
" America does make discoveries for
herself. Hasn't she discovered Lowes
Dickinson ? "

" But that merely helps my case. Lowes
Dickinson has just the qualities that take the
American judgement ; he carries the shadow
of King's College Chapel about with him
wherever he goes ; he has an unobtrusive
air of being doubly starred in Baedeker and
not thinking anything of it. And also she
took Noyes to her bosom. But when has

138 BOON

American criticism ever had the intellectual
pluck to proclaim an American ?

" And so, you see," he remarked, going
off again at a tangent, "if we are going to
bid for American adhesions there's only one
course open to us in the matter of this presi-
dential address . . . Lord Morley. . . ."

" You're a little difficult to follow at
times," said Wilkins.

" Because he's the man who's safest not
to say anything about babies or — anything
alive. . . . Obviously a literary congress in
America must be a festival in honour of
sterility.

" Aunt Dove demands it. Like celebrating
the virginity of Queen Elizabeth. . . ."

§4

I find among the fragments of my departed
friend some notes that seem to me to be
more or less relevant here. They are an
incomplete report of the proceedings of a
section S, devoted to Poiometry, apparently
the scientific measurement of literary great-
ness. It seems to have been under the con-
trol of a special committee, including Mr.
James Huneker, Mr. Slosson, Sir Thomas
Seccombe, Mr. James Douglas, Mr. Clement
K. Shorter, the acting editor of the Bookman,
and the competition editress of the West-
minster Gazette. . . .

Apparently the notes refer to some paper
read before the section. Its authorship is
not stated, nor is there any account of its
reception. But the title is " The Natural
History of Greatness, with especial reference
to Literary Reputations."

The opening was evidently one of those

139

140 BOON

rapid historical sketches frequent in such
papers.

" Persuasion that human beings are some-
times of disproportionate size appears first
in the Egyptian and Syrian wall paint-
ings. . . , Probably innate. . . . The dis-
couragement of the young a social necessity
in all early societies. In all societies? . . .
Exaggerated stories about the departed. . . .
Golden ages. Heroic ages. Ancestor wor-
ship. . . . Dead dogs better than living
lions. . . . Abraham. Moses. The Homeric
reputation, the first great literary cant. Re-
sentment against Homer's exaggerated claims
on the part of intelligent people. Zoilus.
Caricature of the Homerists in the Satyricon.
Other instances of unorthodox ancient criti-
cism. . . . Shakespeare as an intellectual
nuisance. . . . Extreme suffering caused to
contemporary writers by the Shakespeare
legend. . . .

" Another form of opposition to these
obsessions is the creation of countervail-
ing reputations. Certain people in certain
ages have resolved to set up Great Men
of their own to put beside these Brocken
spectres from the past. This marks a

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 141

certain stage of social development, the
beginning of self-consciousness in a civilized
community. Self-criticism always begins in
self-flattery. Virgil as an early instance of
a Great Man of set intentions ; deliberately
put up as the Latin Homer. . . .

" Evolution of the greatness of Aristotle
during the Middle Ages.

" Little sense of contemporary Greatness
among the Elizabethans.

" Comparison with the past the prelude
to Great-Man-Making, begins with such a
work as Swift's ' Battle of the Books.' Con-
currently the decline in religious feeling robs
the past of its half-mystical prestige. The
Western world ripe for Great Men in the
early nineteenth century. The Germans as
a highly competitive and envious people take
the lead. The inflation of Schiller. The
greatness of Goethe. Incredible dullness of
' Elective Affinities,' of ' Werther,' of ' Wil-
helm Meister's Apprenticeship.' The second
part of ' Faust ' a tiresome muddle. Large
pretentiousness of the man's career. Resolve
of the Germans to have a Great Fleet, a
Great Empire, a Great Man. Difficulty in
finding a suitable German for Greatening.

142 BOON

Expansion of the Goethe legend. German
efficiency brought to bear on the task.
Lectures. Professors. Goethe compared to
Shakespeare. Compared to Homer. Com-
pared to Christ. Compared to God. Dis-
covered to be incomparable. . . .

" Stimulation of Scotch activities. The
Scotch also passionately and aggressively
patriotic. Fortunate smallness of Scotland
and lack of adjacent docile Germans has
alone saved the world from another Prussia.
Desperation of the search for a real Scotch
First Rater. The discovery that Burns was
as great as Shakespeare. Greater. The
booming of Sir Walter Scott. Wake up,
England ! The production of Dickens. The
slow but enormous discovery of Wordsworth.
Victorian age sets up as a rival to the
Augustine. Selection of Great Men in every
department. The Great Victorian painters.
Sir Frederick Leighton compared with Titian
and Michael Angelo. Tennyson as Virgil.
Lord Tennyson at the crest of the Vic-
torian Greatness wave. His hair. His cloak.
His noble bearing. His aloofness. His Great
Pipe. His price per word. His intellectual
familiarities with Queen Victoria. . . .

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 143

"Longfellow essentially an American
repartee. . . .

" Ingratitude of British Royal Family to
those who contributed to the Victorian Great-
ness period, shown in the absence of repre-
sentative Great Men from the Buckingham
Palace Monument. Victoria did not do it
all. Compare the Albert Memorial. . . .

" Interesting task to plan an alternative
pedestal. Proposal to make designs for a
monument to our own times. Symbolic
corner groups by Will Dyson. Frieze of
representative men by Max. Canopy by
Wyndham Lewis. Lost opportunity for
much bright discussion. . . .

" Analysis of literary greatness. Is any
literary achievement essential to greatness ?
Probably a minute minimum indispensable.
Burns. Fitzgerald. But compare Lord
Acton and Lord Reay. Necessity of a
marked personality. Weaknesses, but no
unpopular vices. Greatness blighted by want
of dignity. Laurence Sterne. Reciprocal
duty of those made Great not to distress their
Public. But imperfectly established scandal
or complexity of relationship may give scope
for vindications and research. Or a certain

144 BOON

irregularity of life may create a loyal and
devoted following of sympathizers. Shelley.
. . . Then capable advocacy is needed and
a critical world large enough to be effec-
tive but small enough to be unanimous. Part
an able publisher may play in establishing
and developing a Great Man. . . . Quiet Push,
not Noisy Push. Injury done by tactless
advertisement. . . . The element of luck. . . .

" These are the seeds of greatness, but the
growth depends upon the soil. The best soil
is a large uncritical public newly come to
reading, a little suspicious of the propriety
of the practice and in a state of intellectual
snobbishness. It must also be fairly uni-
form and on some common basis of ideas.
Ideally represented by the reading publics
of Germany, Britain, the United States,
and France in the middle nineteenth
century. . . .

" Decline in the output of Greatness to-
wards the end of the Victorian time. Prob-
ably due in all cases to an enlargement of the
reading public to unmanageable dimensions.
No reputation sufficiently elastic to cover it.
The growth of Chicago, New York, and the
West destroyed the preponderance of Boston

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 145

in America, and the Civil War broke the
succession of American Great Men. Rarity
of new American-born Greatnesses after the
war. Dumping of established Greatnesses
from England gave no chance to the native
market. No Protection for America in this
respect. In Great Britain the board schools
create big masses of intelligent people in-
accessible to the existing machinery by which
Greatness is imposed. The Greatness output
in Britain declines also in consequence.
Mrs. Humphry Ward, the last of the British
Victorian Great. Expressed admiration of
Mr. Gladstone for her work. Support of the
Spectator. Profound respect of the American
people. Rumour that she is represented as
a sea goddess at the base of the Queen
Victoria Memorial unfounded. Nobody is
represented on the Queen Victoria Memorial
except Queen Victoria. . . . Necessity after
the epoch of Mrs. Ward of more and more
flagrant advertisement to reach the enlarged
public, so that at last touch is lost with
the critical centres. Great Men beyond the
Limit. Self-exploded candidates for Great-
ness. Boomsters. Best Sellers. Mr. Hall
Caine as the shocking example. . . .

10

146 BOON

" Other causes contributing to the decay of
Greatness among literary men. Competition
of politicians, princes, personages generally
for the prestige of the literary man. Superior
initial advantage in conspicuousness. The
genuine writer handicapped. The process
already beginning at the crest of the period.
Queen Victoria's ' Leaves from a Highland
Diary.' Mr. Gladstone and the higher
windiness. Later developments. The Kaiser
as a man of letters. Mr. Roosevelt as
writer and critic. The Essays of Presi-
dent Wilson. The case of Lord Rosebery.
Mr. Haldane as a philosopher. As a critic.
His opinion of Goethe. Compare the royal
and noble authors of Byzantium. Compare
the Roman Emperor becoming Pontifex
Maximus. Compare the cannibal chief in a
general's hat. . . .

" Return of the literary men as such to
a decent obscurity. From which they are
unlikely to emerge again. This an unmixed
blessing. So long as good writing and
sound thinking are still appreciated the less
we hear about authors the better. Never
so little recognized Greatness and never
so much wise, subtle, sweet, and boldly

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 147

conceived literary work as now. This
will probably continue. [He was writing
before the war.] The English-reading
literary world too large now for the
operations of Greatening. Doubtful case of
Rabindranath Tagore. Discuss this. Special
suitability of India as a basis for Greatness.
India probably on the verge of a Greatness
period. . . .

" Disrespect a natural disposition in the
young. Checked and subdued in small
societies, but now happily rampant in the
uncontrollable English-speaking communi-
ties. The new (undignified) criticism. The
English Review. Mr. Austin Harrison and
the street-boy style. The literature of the
chalked fence. The New Age. Literary
carbolic acid — with an occasional substi-
tution of vitriol. . . . Insurrection of the
feminine mind against worship. Miss
Rebecca West as the last birth of time.
A virile-minded generation of young women
indicated. Mrs. Humphry Ward blushes
publicly for the Freewoman in the Times.
Hitherto Greatness has demanded the
applause of youth and feminine worship
as necessary conditions. As necessary to

148 BOON

its early stages as down to an eider chick.
Impossible to imagine Incipient Greatness
nestling comfortably upon Orage, Austin
Harrison, and Rebecca West. Dearth of
young Sidney Colvins. . . . Unhappy posi-
tion of various derelict and still imper-
fectly developed Great surviving from the
old times. Arnold Bennett as an aborted
Great Man. Would have made a Great Vic-
torian and had a crowd of satellite helpers.
Now no one will ever treasure his old hats
and pipes. . . .

" Idea of an experimental resurrection of
those who still live in our hearts. If Goethe

had a second time on earth ? Could he

do it now ? Would Lord Haldane perceive
him ? Imaginary description of Lord
Haldane's recognition of a youthful Goethe.
They meet by accident during a walking
tour in Germany. Amiable aloofness of
Lord Haldane. His gradual discovery of
an intellectual superior in his modest com-
panion. Public proclamation of his find.
. . . Doubts. . . .

" Peroration. Will the world be happy
without Literary Greatnesses ? Improvise
and take a cheerful line upon this question."

s

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I

§5

Ultimately, against every possibility of the
case, Boon decided that the President of his
conference must be Hallery. And he wrote
his presidential address. But he never read
that address to us. Some shyness I think
restrained him. I dig it out here now for
the first time, a little astonished at it, dis-
posed to admire something in its spirit. . . .
But yet one has to admit that it shows an
extraordinary lapse from Boon's accustomed
mocking humour.

Here is the opening. ^

" Hallery then advanced to the edge of the
platform and fumbled with his manuscript.
His face was very white and his expression
bitterly earnest. With an appearance of
effort he began, omitting in his nervousness
any form of address to his audience —

" ' For the most part, the life of human
communities has been as unconscious as the

150

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 151

life of animals. They have been born as
unknowingly as the beasts ; they have fol-
lowed unforeseen and unheeded destinies, and
destruction has come to them from forces
scarcely anticipated and not understood.
Tribes, nations beyond counting, have come
and passed, with scarcely a mental activity
beyond a few legends, a priestly guess at
cosmogony, a few rumours and traditions,
a list of kings as bare as a schoolboy's diary,
a war or so, a triumph or so. . . . We are
still only in the beginning of history — in
the development, that is, of a racial memory ;
we have as yet hardly begun to inquire into
our racial origins, our racial conditions, our
racial future. . . . Philosophy, which is the
discussion of the relation of the general to
the particular, of the whole to the part, of
the great and yet vague life of the race to the
intense yet manifestly incomplete life of the
individual, is still not three thousand years
old. Man has lived consciously as man it
may be for hundreds of thousands of years,
he has learnt of himself by talking to his
fellows, he has expressed personal love and
many personal feelings with a truth and
beauty that are wellnigh final, but the

152 BOON

race does but begin to live as a conscious
being. It begins to live as a conscious
being, and as it does so, the individual
too begins to live in a new way, a greater,
more understanding, and more satisfying
way. His thoughts apprehend interests
beyond himself and beyond his particular
life.

" At this point Hallery became so acutely
aware of his audience that for some seconds
he could not go on reading. A number of
people in various parts of the hall had
suddenly given way to their coughs, a bald-
headed gentleman about the middle of the
assembly had discovered a draught, and was
silently but conspicuously negotiating for
the closing of a window by an attendant,
and at the back a cultivated-looking young
gentleman was stealing out on tiptoe.

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 153

The first departure.

" For a moment Hallery was distressed
by the thought that perhaps he might
have taken a more amusing line than the
one he had chosen, and then, realizing how
vain were such regrets and rather quicken-
ing his pace, he resumed the reading of his
address —

" ' You see that I am beginning upon a
very comprehensive scale, for I propose to
bring within the scope of this conference all
that arises out of these two things, out of the
realization of the incompleteness of man's

154 BOON

individual life on the one hand and out of
the realization of a greater being in which
man lives, of a larger racial life and ampler
references upon the other. All this much —
and with a full awareness of just how much
it is — I am going to claim as literature and
our province. Religion, I hold, every religion
so far as it establishes and carries ideas,
is literature, philosophy is literature, science
is literature ; a pamphlet or a leading article.

I put all these things together '

" At this point there was a second depar-
ture.

JO

v.

The second departure,

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 155
Almost immediately followed by a third.

The third departure.

" Hallery halted for a second time and then
gripped the reading-desk with both hands,
and, reading now with a steadily accelerated
velocity, heeded his audience no more —

" ' I put all these things together because,
indeed, it is only associations of antiquity
and prescription and prestige can separate
them. Altogether they constitute the great
vague body of man's super-personal mental
life, his unselfish life, his growing life, as
a premeditating, self-conscious race and

156 BOON

destiny. Here in growing volume, in this
comprehensive literature of ours, preserved,
selected, criticized, re-stated, continually
rather more fined, continually rather more
clarified, we have the mind, not of a mortal
but of an immortal adventurer. Whom for
the moment, fractionally, infmitesimally,
whenever we can forget ourselves in pure
feeling, in service, in creative effort or dis-
interested thought, we are privileged in that
measure to become. This wonder that we
celebrate, this literature, is the dawn of
human divinity

But though Hallery went on, I do not,
on reflection, think that I will. I doubt if
Boon ever decided to incorporate this extra-
ordinary Presidential Address in our book ;
I think perhaps he meant to revise it or
substitute something else. He wanted to
state a case for the extreme importance of
literature, and to my mind he carried
his statement into regions mystical, to say
the least of it, and likely to be considered
blasphemous by many quite right-minded
people. For instance, he made Hallery
speak of the Word that links men's minds.

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 157

He brings our poor, mortal, mental activities
into the most extraordinary relationship with
those greater things outside our lives which
it is our duty to revere as much as possible
and to think about as little as possible ;
he draws no line between them. ... He
never, I say, read the paper to us. . . .
I cannot guess whether he did not read
it to us because he doubted himself or
because he doubted us, and I do not even care
to examine my own mind to know whether I
do or do not believe in the thesis he sets so
unhesitatingly down. In a sense it is no
doubt true that literature is a kind of over-
mind of the race, and in a sense, no doubt,
the Bible and the Koran, the Talmud and
the Prayer Book are literature. In a sense
Mr. Upton Sinclair's " Bible " for Socialists
of bits from ancient and modern writings
is literature. In a sense, too, literature
does go on rather like a continuous
mind thinking. . . . But I feel that all
this is just in a sense. ... I don't really
believe it. I am not quite sure what I do
really believe, but I certainly recoil from
anything so crudely positive as Hallery's wild
assertions. ... It would mean worshipping

158 BOON

literature. Or at least worshipping the truth
in literature. . . .

Of course, one knows that real literature
is something that has to do with leisure and
cultivated people and books and shaded
lamps and all that sort of thing. But Hallery
wants to drag in not only cathedrals and
sanctuaries, but sky-signs and hoardings.
. . . He wants literature to embrace what-
ever is in or whatever changes the mind of
the race, except purely personal particulars.
And I think Boon was going to make Hallery
claim this, just in order to show up against
these tremendous significances the pettiness
of the contemporary literary life, the poverty
and levity of criticism, the mean business
side of modern book-making and book-
selling. . . .

Turning over the pages of this rejected
address, which I am sure the reader would
not thank me for printing, I do come upon
this presentable passage, which illustrates
what I am saying —

" So that every man who writes to express
or change or criticize an idea, every man
who observes and records a fact in the
making of a research, every man who

THE WORLD CONFERENCE 159

hazards or tests a theory, every artist of any
sort who really expresses, does thereby, in
that very act, participate, share in, become
for just that instant when he is novel and
authentically true, the Mind of the Race, the
thinking divinity. Do you not see, then, what
an arrogant worship, what a sacramental
thing it is to lift up brain and hand and
say, ' / too will add ' ? We bring our little
thoughts as the priest brings a piece of
common bread to consecration, and though
we have produced but a couplet or a dozen
lines of prose, we have nevertheless done
the parallel miracle. And all reading that
is reading with the mind, all conscious sub-
jugation of our attention to expressed beauty,
or expressed truth, is sacramental, is com-
munion with the immortal being. We lift
up our thoughts out of the little festering pit
of desire and vanity which is one's individual
self into that greater self. ..."

So he talks, and again presently of " that
world-wide immortal communion incessant
as the march of sun and planets amidst the
stars. ...

And then, going on with his vast com-
parison, for I cannot believe this is more

160 BOON

than a fantastic parallelism : " And if the
mind that does, as we say, create is like the
wafer that has become miraculously divine,
then though you may not like to think of it,
all you who give out books, who print books
and collect books, and sell books and lend
them, who bring pictures to people's eyes,
set things forth in theatres,, hand out thought
in any way from the thinking to the attentive
mind, all you are priests, you do a priestly
office, and every bookstall and hoarding is
a wayside shrine, offering consolation and
release to men and women from the intoler-
able prison of their narrow selves. . .- ."

§6

That, I think, is what Boon really at the
bottom of his heart felt and believed about
literature.

And yet in some way he could also not
believe it ; he could recognize something
about it that made him fill the margin of
the manuscript of this address with grotesque
figures of an imaginary audience going out.
They were, I know, as necessary to his whole
conception as his swinging reference to
the stars ; both were as much part of his
profound belief as the gargoyle on the
spire and the high altar are necessary parts
of a Gothic cathedral. And among other
figures I am amused rather than hurt to find
near the end this of myself —

11 m

162 BOON

Too high-pitched even for Reginald.

S.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

Of not liking Hallery and the Royal

Society tor the Discouragement of
Literature

§1

In the same peculiar receptacle in which
I find this presidential address I found a
quantity of other papers and scraps of paper,
upon which Boon, I should judge, had been
thinking about that address and why he was
ashamed to produce it to us, and why he
perceived that this audience would dislike
Hallery so much that he was obliged to admit
that they would go out before his lecture
was finished, and why he himself didn't
somehow like this Hallery that he had made.
All these writings are in the nature of frag-
ments, some are illegible and more are in-
comprehensible ; but it is clear that his mind
attacked these questions with a most extra-

163

162

BOON

V

Too high-pitched even for Reginald.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

Of not liking Hallery and the Royal
Society for the Discouragement of
Literature

§1

In the same peculiar receptacle in which
I find this presidential address I found a
quantity of other papers and scraps of paper,
upon which Boon, I should judge, had been
thinking about that address and why he was
ashamed to produce it to us, and why he
perceived that this audience would dislike
Hallery so much that he was obliged to admit
that they would go out before his lecture
was finished, and why he himself didn't
somehow like this Hallery that he had made.
All these writings are in the nature of frag-
ments, some are illegible and more are in-
comprehensible ; but it is clear that his mind
attacked these questions with a most extra-

163

164 BOON

ordinary width of reference. I find him
writing about the One and the Many, the
General and the Particular, the Species and
the Individual, declaring that it is through
" the dimensions {sic) of space and time "
that "individuation " becomes possible, and
citing Darwin, Heraclitus, Kant, Plato, and
Tagore, all with a view to determining just
exactly what it was that irritated people
in the breadth and height and expression
of Hallery's views. Or to be more exact,
what he knew would have irritated people
with these views if they had ever been
expressed.

Here is the sort of thing that I invite the
intelligent reader to link up if he can with
the very natural phenomenon of a number
of quite ordinary sensible people hostile and
in retreat before a tedious, perplexing, and
presumptuous discourse —

" The individual human mind spends itself
about equally in headlong flight from the
Universal, which it dreads as something that
will envelop and subjugate it, and in head-
long flight to the Universal, which it seeks
as a refuge from its own loneliness and silli-
ness. It knows very certainly that the

OF DISLIKING HALLERY 165

Universal will ultimately comprehend and
incorporate it, yet it desires always that the
Universal should mother it, take it up with-
out injuring it in the slightest degree, foment
and nourish its egotism, cherish fondly all
its distinctions, give it all the kingdoms of
existence to play with. . . .

" Ordinary people snuggle up to God as
a lost leveret in a freezing wilderness might
snuggle up to a Siberian tiger. . . .

" You see that man who flies and seeks,
who needs and does not want, does at last
get to a kind of subconscious compromise
over the matter. Couldn't he perhaps get
the Infinite with the chill off ? Couldn't he
perhaps find a warm stuffed tiger ? He cheats
himself by hiding in what he can pretend is
the goal. So he tries to escape from the
pursuit of the living God to dead gods, evades
religion in a church, does his best to insist
upon time-honoured formulae ; God must
have a button on the point. And it is our
instinctive protection of the subconscious
arrangement that makes us so passionately
resentful at raw religion, at crude spiritual
realities, at people who come at us saying
harsh understandable things about these

166 BOON

awful matters. . . . They may wake the
tiger ! . . .

" We like to think of religion as something
safely specialized, codified, and put away.
Then we can learn the rules and kick about a
bit. But when some one comes along saying
that science is religion, literature is religion,
business — they'll come to that presently ! —
business is religion ! . . .

" It spoils the afternoon. . . .

" But that alone does not explain why
Hallery, delivering his insistent presidential
address, is detestable to his audience — for it is
quite clear that he is detestable. I'm certain
of it. No, what is the matter there is that
the aggression of the universal is pointed
and embittered by an all too justifiable sus-
picion that the individual who maintains it
is still more aggressive, has but armed him-
self with the universal in order to achieve
our discomfiture. . . . It's no good his being
modest ; that only embitters it. It is no good
his. making disavowals ; that only shows that
he is aware of it. . . .

" Of course I invented Hallery only to get
this burthen off myself. . . .

" All spiritual truths ought to be conveyed

OF DISLIKING HALLERY 167

by a voice speaking out of a dark void. As
Hardy wants his spirits to speak in the
' Dynasts.' Failing that, why should we
not deal with these questions through the
anonymity of a gramophone ? . . .

" A modern religion founded on a mys-
terious gramophone which was discovered
carefully packed in a box of peculiar
construction on a seat upon Primrose
Hill. ...

" How well the great organized religions
have understood this ! How sound is the
effort to meet it by shaving a priest's head
or obliging him to grow a beard, putting him
into canonicals, drilling him and regimenting
him, so as to make him into a mere
type. . . .

" If I were to found a religion, I think I
should insist upon masked priests. ..."

§2

This idea that the defensive instinct of the
individuality, Jealousy, is constantly at war
not only with other individualities but with
all the great de-individualizing things, with
Faith, with Science, with Truth, with Beauty ;
that out of its resentments and intricate
devices one may draw the explanation of
most of the perplexities and humours of the
intellectual life, indeed the explanation of
most life and of most motives, is the quin-
tessence of Boon. The Mind of the Race
toils through this jungle of jealous indi-
viduality to emerge. And the individual,
knowing that single-handed he hasn't a
chance against the immortal, allies himself
with this and that, with sham immortalities,
and partially effaced and partially confuted
general things. And so it sets up its Great-
nesses, to save it from greatness, its solemni-
ties to preserve it from th« overwhelming

1«8

OF DISLIKING HALLERY 169

gravity of truth. " See," it can say, " I have
my gods already, thank you. I do not think
we will discuss this matter further."

I admit the difficulty of following Boon
in this. I admit, too, that I am puzzled
about his Mind of the Race. Does he mean
by that expression a Great Wisdom and
Will that must be, or a Great Wisdom and
Will that might be ?

But here he goes on with the topic of
Hallery again.

" I invented Hallery to get rid of my-
self, but, after all, Hallery is really no
more than the shadow of myself, and if I
were impersonal and well bred, and if I
spoke behind a black screen, it would still
be as much my voice as ever. I do not see
how it is possible to prevent the impersonal
things coming by and through persons ; but
at any rate we can begin to recognize that
the person who brings the message is only
in his way like the messenger-boy who
brings the telegrams. The writer may have
a sensitive mind, the messenger-boy may
have nimble heels ; that does not make him
the creator of the thing that comes. Then
I think people will be able to listen to such

170 BOON

lectures as this of Hallery's without remem-
bering all the time that it's a particular
human being with a white face and a lisp.
. . . And perhaps they will be able to respect
literature and fine thought for the sake
of the general human mind for which they
live and for the sake of their own recep-
tiveness. ..."

§3

And from that Boon suddenly went off
into absurdities.

" Should all literature be anonymous ? "
he asks at the head of a sheet of notes.

" But one wants an author's name as a
brand. Perhaps a number would suffice.
Would authors write if they remained un-
known ? Mixed motives. Could one run a
church with an unsalaried priesthood ? But
certainly now the rewards are too irregular,
successful authors are absurdly flattered and
provoked to impossible ambitions. Could we
imitate the modern constitutional State by
permitting limited ambitions but retaining
all the higher positions inaccessible to mere
enterprise and merit ? Hereditary Novelists,
Poets, and Philosophers, for example. The
real ones undistinguished. Hereditary His-
torians and Scientific Men are already

practical reality. Then such mischievous

m

174 BOON

organization of the conservative instincts
of man. Its aim was to stop all this
thinking. . . .

And yet in some extraordinary way that
either I did not note at the time or that he
never explained, it became presently the
whole Conference ! The various handbills,
pamphlets in outline, notes for lectures, and
so forth, that accompanied his notes of the
Proceedings of the Royal Society may either
be intended as part of the sectional proceed-
ings of the great conference or as the pro-
duction of this hostile organization. I will
make a few extracts from the more legible of
these memoranda which render the point
clearer.

§5

Publishers and Book Distributors

{Comparable to the Priest who hands the
Elements and as much upon their
Honour.)

The Publisher regrets that the copy for this
section is missing, and fears that the sub-,
stance of it must be left to the imagination
of the reader. This is the more regrettable
as the section was probably of a highly
technical nature.

175

§6
The Young Reviewer

Here, again, Mr. Boon's notes are not to
be found, and repeated applications to Mr.
Bliss have produced nothing but a vague
telegram to " go ahead."

§7

The Schoolmaster and Literature

" Essentially the work of the schoolmaster
is to prepare the young and naturally over-
individualized mind for communion with the
Mind of the Race. Essentially his curricu-
lum deals with modes of expression, with
languages, grammar, the mathematical sys-
tem of statement, the various scientific
systems of statement, the common legend
of history. All leads up, as the scholar
approaches adolescence, to the introduction
to living literature, living thought, criticism,
and religion. But when we consider how

literature is taught in schools "

Here the writing leaves off abruptly, and
then there is written in very minute letters
far down the page and apparently after an
interval for reflection —

" Scholastic humour

O God J"

12 17V

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

WlLKINS MAKES CERTAIN OBJECTIONS
§1

Wilkins the author began to think about
the Mind of the Race quite suddenly. He
made an attack upon Boon as we sat in the
rose-arbour smoking after lunch- Wilkins
is a man of a peculiar mental constitution ;
he alternates between a brooding sentimental
egotism and a brutal realism, and he is as
weak and false in the former mood as he is
uncompromising in the latter. I think the
attraction that certainly existed between him
and Boon must have been the attraction of
opposites, for Boon is as emotional and senti-
mental in relation to the impersonal aspects
of life as he is pitiless in relation to himself.
Wilkins still spends large portions of his
time thinking solemnly about some ancient

178

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 179

trouble in which he was treated unjustly ;
I believe I once knew what it was, but I
have long since forgotten. Yet when his
mind does get loose from his own " case "
for a bit, it is, I think, a very penetrating
mind indeed. And, at any rate, he gave a
lot of exercise to Boon.

" All through this book, Boon," he
began.

" What book ? " asked Dodd.

" This one we are in. All through this
book you keep on at the idea of the Mind
of the Race. It is what the book is about ;
it is its theme. Yet I don't see exactly what
you are driving at. Sometimes you seem
to be making out this Mind of the Race to
be a kind of God "

" A synthetic God," said Boon. " If it is
to be called a God at all."

Dodd nodded as one whose worst' sus-
picions are confirmed.

" Then one has to assume it is a con-
tinuing, coherent mind, that is slowly
becoming wider, saner, profounder, more
powerful ? "

Boon never likes to be pressed back upon
exact statements. "Yes," he said reluct-

180 BOON

antly. " In general — on the whole — yes.
What are you driving at ? "

" lb includes all methods of expression,
from the poster when a play is produced
at His Majesty's Theatre, from the cheering
of the crowd when a fireman rescues a baby,
up to — Walter Pater."

" So far as Pater expresses anything," said
Boon.

" Then you go on from the elevation this
idea of a secular quasi-divine racial mental
progress gives you, to judge and condemn
all sorts of decent artistic and literary activi-
ties that don't fall in or don't admit that
they fall in. . . ."

" Something of that idea," said Boon,
growing a little testy — " something of that
idea."

" It gives you an opportunity of annoy-
ing a number of people you don't like."

" If I offend, it is their fault ! " said Boon
hotly. " Criticism can have no friendships.
If they like to take it ill. . . . My criticism
is absolutely honest. . . . Some of them are
my dearest friends."

" They won't be," said Wilkins, " when all
this comes out. . . . But, anyhow, your

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 181

whole case, your justification, your thesis is
that there is this Mind of the Race, over-
riding, dominating And that you are

its Prophet."

" Because a man confesses a belief,
Wilkins, that doesn't make him a Prophet.
I don't set up— I express."

" Your Mind of the Race theory has
an elegance, a plausibility, I admit," said
Wilkins.

Dodd's expression indicated that it didn't
take him in. He compressed his lips. Not
a bit of it.

" But is this in reality true ? Is this what
exists and goes on ? We people who sit in
studies and put in whole hours of our days
thinking and joining things together do get
a kind of coherence into our ideas about the
world. Just because there is leisure and time
for us to think. But are you sure that is
the Race at all ? That is my point. Aren't
we intellectually just a by-product ? If you
went back to the time of Plato, you would
say that the idea of his " Republic " was
what was going on in the Mind of the Race
then. But I object that that was only the
futile fancy of a gentleman of leisure. What

182 BOON

was really going on was the gathering up
of the Macedonian power to smash through
Greece, and then make Greece conquer
Asia. Your literature and philosophy are
really just the private entertainment of
old gentlemen out of the hurly-burly and
ambitious young men too delicate to hunt
or shoot. Thought is nothing in the world
until it begins to operate in will and act,
and the history of mankind doesn't show
now, and it never has shown, any consecu-
tive relation to human thinking. The real
Mind of the Race is, I submit, something not
literary at all, not consecutive, but like the
inconsecutive incoherences of an idiot "

" No," said Boon, " of a child."

" You have wars, you have great waves
of religious excitement, you have patriotic
and imperial delusions, you have ill-conceived
and surprising economic changes "

"As if humanity as a whole were a mere
creature of chance and instinct," said Boon.

" Exactly," said Wilkins.

" I admit that," said Boon. " But my case
is that sanity grows. That what was ceases
to be. The mind of reason gets now out
of the study into the market-place."

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 188

" You mean really, Boon, that the Mind
of the Race isn't a mind that is, it is just
a mind that becomes."

" That's what it's all about," said Boon.

" And that is where I want to take you
up," said Wilkins. " I want to suggest that
the Mind of the Race may be just a gleam
of conscious realization that passes from
darkness to darkness "

" No," said Boon.

" Why not ? "

" Because I will not have it so," said
Boon.

§2

Thebe can be no denying that from quite
an early stage in the discussion Boon was
excited and presently on the verge of ill-
temper. This dragging of his will into a
question of fact showed, I think, the
beginning of his irritation. And he was
short and presently rather uncivil in his
replies to Wilkins.

Boon argued that behind the individuali-
ties and immediacies of life there was in
reality a consecutive growth of wisdom, that
larger numbers of people and a larger pro-
portion of people than ever before were
taking part in the World Mind process, and
that presently this would become a great
conscious general thinking of the race
together.

Wilkins admitted that there had been a
number of starts in the direction of im-
personal understanding and explanation ;

184

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 185

indeed, there was something of the sort
in every fresh religious beginning; but he
argued that these starts do not show a
regular progressive movement, and that none
of them had ever achieved any real directive
and unifying power over their adherents ;
that only a few Christians had ever grasped
Christianity, that Brahminism fell to intel-
lectual powder before it touched the crowd,
that nowadays there was less sign than ever
of the honest intellectuals getting any hold
whatever upon the minds and movements of
the popular mass. . . .

" The Mind of the Race," said Wilkins,
" seems at times to me much more like a
scared child cowering in the corner of a
cage full of apes."

Boon was extraordinarily disconcerted by
these contradictions.

" It will grow up," he snatched.

" If the apes let it," said Wilkins. " You
can see how completely the thinkers and
poets and all this stuff of literature and the
study don't represent the real Mind, such
as it is, of Humanity, when you note how
the mass of mankind turns naturally to make
and dominate its own organs of expression.

186 BOON

Take the popular press, take the popular
theatre, take popular religion, take current
fiction, take the music-hall, watch the de-
velopment of the cinematograph. There
you have the real body of mankind express-
ing itself. If you are right, these things
should fall in a kind of relationship to the
intellectual hierarchy. But the intellectual
hierarchy goes and hides away in country
houses and beautiful retreats and provincial
universities and stuffy high-class periodicals.
It's afraid of the mass of men, it dislikes
and dreads the mass of men, and it affects
a pride and aloofness to cover it. Plato
wanted to reorganize social order and the
common life ; the young man in the two-
penny tube was the man he was after. He
Wanted to exercise him and teach him exactly
what to do with the young woman beside
him. Instead of which poor Plato has
become just an occasion for some Oxford
don to bleat about his unapproachable style
and wisdom. . . ."

" I admit we're not connected up yet,"
said Boon.

" You're more disconnected than ever you
were. In the Middle Ages there was some-

WELKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 187

thing like a connected system of ideas in
Christendom, so that the Pope and the
devout fishwife did in a sense march
together. ..."

You see the wrangling argument on which
they were launched.

Boon maintained that there was a spread-
ing thought process, clearly perceptible now-
adays, and that those detachments of Wil-
kins' were not complete. He instanced the
cheap editions of broad-thinking books, the
variety of articles in the modern newspaper,
the signs of wide discussions. Wilkins, on
the other hand, asserted a predominant
intellectual degeneration. . . . Moreover,
Wilkins declared, with the murmurous ap-
proval of Dodd, that much even of the
Academic thought process was going wrong,
that Bergson's Pragmatism for Ladies was
a poor substitute even for Herbert Spencer,
that the boom about " Mendelism " was a
triumph of weak thinking over comprehen-
sive ideas.

" Even if we leave the masses out of
account, it is still rather more than doubtful
if there is any secular intellectual growth."

And it is curious to recall now that as an

188 BOON

instance of a degenerative thought process
among educated people Wilkins instanced
modern Germany. Here, he said, in the
case of a Mind covering over a hundred
million people altogether, was a real retro-
cession of intellectual freedom. The pre-
tentious expression of instinctive crudity had
always been the peculiar weakness of the
German mind. It had become more and
more manifest, he said, as nationalism had
ousted foreign influence. You see what
pretty scope for mutual contradiction there
was in all this. " Let me get books,"
cried Wilkins, " and I will read you samples
of the sort of thing that passes for think-
ing in Germany. I will read you some
of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, some
of Nietzsche's boiling utterance, some of
Schopenhauer.

" Let me," said Wilkins, " read a passage
I have picked almost haphazard from
Schopenhauer. One gets Schopenhauer
rammed down one's throat as a philosopher,
as a deep thinker, as the only alternative to
the Hegelian dose. And just listen "

He began to read in a voice of deliberate
malice, letting his voice italicize the more

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 189

scandalous transitions of what was certainly
a very foolish and ill-knit piece of assertion.

Little men have a decided inclination for big
women, and vice versd ; and indeed in a little man
the preference for big women will be so much the
more passionate if he himself was begotten by a big
father, and only remains little through the influence
of his mother ; because he has inherited from his
father the vascular system and its energy which was
able to supply a large body with blood. If, on the
other hand, his father and grandfather were both
little, that inclination will make itself less felt. At
the foundation of the aversion of a big woman to
big men lies the intention of Nature to avoid too big
a race. . . . Further, the consideration as to the
complexion is very decided. Blondes prefer dark
persons or brunettes ; but the latter seldom prefer the
former. The reason is, that fair hair and blue eyes
are in themselves a variation from the type, almost an
abnormity, analogous to white mice, or at least to grey
horses. In no part of the world, not even in the
vicinity of the Pole, are they indigenous, except in
Europe, and are clearly of Scandinavian origin. I
may here express my opinion in passing that the
white colour of the skin is not natural to man, but
that by nature he has a black or brown skin, like our
forefathers the Hindus ; that consequently a white
man has never originally sprung from the womb of
Nature, and that thus there is no such thing as a white
race, much as this is talked of, but every white man
is a faded or bleached one. Forced into this strange
world, where he only exists like an exotic plant, and
like this requires in winter the hothouse, in the
course of thousands of years man became white.
The gipsies, an Indian race which immigrated only

190 BOON

about four centuries ago, show the transition from the
complexion of the Hindu to our own. Therefore in
sexual love ]S[ature strives to return to dark hair and
brown eyes as the primitive type ; but the white
colour of the skin has become second nature, though
not so that the brown of the Hindu repels us. Finally,
each one also seeks in the particular parts of the
body the corrective of his own defects and aberrations,
and does so the more decidedly the more important
the part is. Therefore snub-nosed individuals have an
inexpressible liking for hook-noses, parrot-faces ; and
it is the same with regard to all other parts. Men
with excessively slim, long bodies and limbs can find
beauty in a body which is even beyond measure
stumpy and short. . . . Whoever is himself in some
respects very perfect does not indeed seek and love
imperfection in this respect, but is yet more easily
reconciled to it than others ; because he himself in-
sures the children against great imperfection of this
part. For example, whoever is himself very white
will not object to a yellow complexion ; but whoever
has the latter will find dazzling whiteness divinely
beautiful.' (You will note that he perceives he has
practically contradicted this a few lines before, and
that evidently he has gone back and stuck in that
saving clause about a white skin being second nature.)
' The rare case in which a man falls in love with a
• decidedly ugly woman occurs when, beside the exact
harmony of the degree of sex explained above, the
whole of her abnormities are precisely the opposite,
and thus the corrective, of his. The love is then
wont to reach a high degree. . . .'

" And so on and so on," said Wilkins.
" Just a foolish, irresponsible saying of
things. And all this stuff, this celibate cere-

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 191

bration, you must remember, is not even
fresh ; it was said far more funnily and
pleasantly by old Campanella in his ' City
of the Sun.' And, mind you, this isn't a
side issue Schopenhauer is upon ; it isn't
a moment of relaxation ; this argument is
essential to the whole argument of his
philosophy. ..."

" But after all," said Boon, " Schopen-
hauer is hardly to be considered a modern.
He was pre-Darwinian."

" Exactly why I begin with him," said
Wilkins. " He was a contemporary of
Darwin, and it was while Darwin was
patiently and industriously building up
evidence, that this nonsense, a whole torrent
of it, a complete doctrine about the Will
to Live, was being poured out. But what
I want you to notice is that while the sort
of cautious massing of evidence, the close
reasoning, the honesty and veracity, that dis-
tinguished the method of Darwin and Hux-
ley, are scarcely to be met with anywhere
to-day, this spouting style of doing things is
everywhere. Take any of the stuff of that
intellectual jackdaw, Bernard Shaw, and you
will find the Schopenhauer method in full

192 BOON

development ; caught-up ideas, glib, irra-
tional transitions, wild assertions about the
Life Force, about the effects of alcohol, about
' fear-poisoned ' meat, about medical science,
about economic processes, about Russia,
about the Irish temperament and the English
intelligence, about the thoughts and mental
processes of everybody and every sort of
mind, stuff too incoherent and recklessly
positive ever to be systematically answered.
And yet half at least of the English-speaking
intelligenzia regards Shaw as a part of the
thought process of the world. Schopenhauer
was a pioneer in the game of impudent
assertion, very properly disregarded by his
own generation ; Shaw's dementia samples
this age. You see my case ? In any ration-
ally trained, clear-headed period Shaw would
have been looked into, dissected, and dis-
posed of long ago. . . . And here I have
two other of the voices that this time
respects. It is all my argument that they
are respected now enormously, Boon ; not
merely that they exist. Men to talk and
write foolishly, to make groundless positive
statements and to misapprehend an opponent
there have always been, but this age now

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 193

tolerates and accepts them. Here is that
invalid Englishman, Houston Stewart Cham-
berlain, who found a more congenial, in-
tellectual atmosphere in Germany, and this
is his great book, ' The Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century.' This book has been
received with the utmost solemnity in the
highest quarters ; nowhere has it been
handed over to the derision which is its only
proper treatment. You remember a rather
readable and rather pretentious history we
had in our schooldays, full of bad ethnology
about Kelts and Anglo-Saxons, called J. R.
Green's ' History of the English People ' ; it
was part of that movement of professorial
barbarity, of braggart race-Imperialism and
anti-Irishism, of which Froude and Freeman
were leaders ; it smelt of Carlyle and
Germany, it helped provoke the Keltic
Renascence. Well, that was evidently the
germ of Herr Chamberlain. Here "

Wilkins turned over the pages.

" Here he is, in fairly good form. It is
a section called ' The Turning Point,' and
it's quite on all fours with Schopenhauer's
' our ancestors the Hindus.' It is part of
a sketch in outline of the history of the past.

13

194 BOON

' The important thing,' he says, is to ' fix
the turning-point of the history of Europe.'
While he was at it he might just as well
have fixed the equator of the history of
Europe and its sparking-plug and the posi-
tion of its liver. Now, listen —

" ' The awakening of the Teutonicfpeoples to the
consciousness of their all-important vocation as the
founders of a completely new civilization and culture
marks the turning-point ; the year 1200 can be
designated the central moment of this awakening.'

" Just consider that. He does not even
trouble to remind us of the very considerable
literature that must exist, of course, as
evidence of that awakening. He just flings
the statement out, knowing that his sort
of follower swallows all such statements
blind, and then, possibly with some qualms
of doubt about what may have been
happening in Spain and Italy and India
and China and Japan, he goes on —

" ' Scarcely any one will have the hardihood to deny
that the inhabitants of Northern Europe have become
the makers of the world's history, At no time have
they stood alone . , . others, too, have exercised in-
fluence^ — indeed, great influence — upon the destinies of
mankind, but then always merely as opponents of the
men from the north. . . .'

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 195

" Poor Jenghiz Khan, who had founded
the Mogul Empire in India just about that
time, and was to lay the foundations of the
Yuen dynasty, and prepare the way for the
great days of the Mings, never knew how
mere his relations were with these marvellous
' men from the north.' The Tartars, it
is true, were sacking Moscow somewhere
about twelve hundred. . . . But let us
get on to more of the recital of Teutonic
glories.

" ' If, however, the Teutons were not the only
people who moulded the world's history ' (generoua
admission !) ' they unquestionably ' (that unquestion-
ably !) ' deserve the first place ; all those who appear
as genuine shapers of the destinies of mankind,
whether as builders of States or as discoverers of new
thoughts and of original art ' (oh Japan ! oh Ming
dynasty 1 oh art and life of India !) ' belong to the
Teutonic race. The impulse given by the Arabs is
short lived ' (astronomy, chemistry, mathematics,
modern science generally I) ; ' the Mongolians destroy
but do not create anything ' (Samarkand, Delhi,
Pekin) ; ' the great Italians of the rinascimento were
all born either in the north, saturated with Lombardic,
Gothic, and Frankish blood, or in the extreme Germano-
Hellenic south ; in Spain it was the Western Goths
who formed the element of life ; the Jews are working
out their " Renaissance " of to-day by following in
every sphere as closely as possible the example of
the Teutonic peoples.'

196 BOON

" That dodge of claiming all the great
figures of the non-Teutonic nations as
Teutons is carried out to magnificent ex-
tremes. Dante is a Teuton on the strength
of his profile and his surname, and there is
some fine play about the race of Christ. He
came from Galilee, notoriously non-Jewish,
and so on ; but Lord Redesdale, who writes
a sympathetic Introduction, sets the seal
on the Teutonic nationality of Christ by"
reminding us that Joseph was only the
putative father. . . .

" It makes a born Teuton like myself feel
his divinity," said Wilkins, and read,
browsing : " ' From the moment the Teuton

awakes a new world begins to open out '

Um ! Um ! . . . Oh, here we are again ! —

" ' It is equally untrue that our culture is a renais-
sance of the Hellenic and the Roman ; it was only
after the birth of the Teutonic peoples that the
renaissance of past achievements was possible and
not vice versd.' ... I wonder what exactly vice versd
means there ! . . . ' The mightiest creators of that
epoch — a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo — do not know
a word of Greek or Latin.'

" The stalwart ignorance of it ! Little
Latin and less Greek even Ben Jonson

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 197

allowed our William, and manifestly he
was fed on Tudor translations. And the
illiteracy of Michael Angelo is just an in-
spiration of Chamberlain's. He knows his
readers. Now, in itself there is no marvel
in this assertive, prejudiced, garrulous ignor-
ance ; it is semi-sober Bierhalle chatter,
written down ; and, God forgive us ! most
of us have talked in this way at one time
or another ; the sign and the wonder for
you, Boon, is that this stuff has been taken
quite seriously by all Germany and England
and America, that it is accepted as first-
rank stuff, that it has never been challenged,
cut up, and sent to the butterman. It is
Modern Thought. It is my second sample
of the contemporary Mind of the Race.
And now, gentlemen, we come to the third
great intellectual high-kicker, Nietzsche.
Nietzsche, I admit, had once a real and
valid idea, and his work is built upon that
real and valid idea ; it is an idea that comes
into the head of every intelligent person
who grasps the idea of the secular change
of species, the idea of Darwinism, in the
course of five or six minutes after the effec-
tive grasping. This is the idea that man is

198 BOON

not final. But Nietzsche was so constituted
that to get an idea was to receive a reve-
lation ; this step, that every bright mind
does under certain circumstances take,
seemed a gigantic stride to him, a stride
only possible to him, and for the rest of his
lucid existence he resounded variations, he
wrote epigrammatic cracker-mottoes and
sham Indian apophthegms, round and about
his amazing discovery. And the whole thing
is summed up in the title of Dr. Alexander
Tille's ' Von Darwin bis Nietzsche,' in which
this miracle of the obvious, this necessary
corollary, is treated as a huge advance of
the mind of mankind. No one slays this
kind of thing nowadays. It goes on and
goes on, a perpetually reinforced torrent
of unreason washing through the brain of
the race. There was a time when the
general intelligence would have resisted and
rejected Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Chamber-
lain, Shaw ; now it resists such invasions
less and less. That, Boon, is my case."

Wilkins, with his little pile of books for
reference, his sombre manner, and his per-
sistence, was indeed curiously suggestive
of an advocate opening a trial. The Mind

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 199

of the Race was far less of a continuity
than it was when a generally recognized
and understood orthodox Christianity held
it together, as a backbone holds together
the ribs and limbs and head' of a body.
That manifestly was what he was driving
at, as Dodd presently complained. In those
stabler days every one with ideas, willingly
or unwillingly, had to refer to that doctrinal
core, had to link up to it even if the con-
nection was used only as a point of departure.
Now more and more, as in these three
examples, people began irresponsibly in the
air, with rash assertions about life and race
and the tendency of things. And the louder
they shouted, the more fantastic and re-
markable they were, the more likely they
were to gather a following and establish a
fresh vortex in the deliquescent confusion.

On the whole, Boon was disposed to
tolerate these dispersed beginnings. " We
attack truth in open order," he said, " instead
of in column."

" I don't mind fresh beginnings," said
Wilkins ; "I don't mind open order, but
I do object to blank ignorance and sheer
misconception. It isn't a new beginning for

200 BOON

Schopenhauer to say we are descended from
Hindus ; it is just stupidity and mental
retrogression. We are no more descended
from Hindus than Hindus are descended
from us ; that we may have a common
ancestry is quite a different thing. One
might as well say that the chimpanzee is
descended from a gorilla or a gorilla from a
chimpanzee. And it isn't any sort of truth,
it is just a loud lie, that the ' Germanic '
peoples realized anything whatever in the
year 1200. But all these — what shall I call
them ? — moderns are more and more up to
that kind of thing, stating plausible things
that have already been disproved, stating
things erroneously, inventing pseudo-facts,
and so getting off with a flourish. In the
fields of ideas, and presently in the fields
of action, these wildly kicking personalities
have swamped any orderly progress ; they
have arrested and disowned all that clearing
up of thought and all that patient, triumph-
ant arrangement of proven fact which
characterized the late eighteenth and the
first half of the nineteenth century. During
that time the great analysis of biological
science went on, which culminated in an

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 201

entire revision of our conceptions of species,
which opened a conceivable and hitherto
undreamed-of past and future to the human
imagination, which seemed to have revised
and relaid the very foundations of philo-
sophical discussion. And on that founda-
tion, what has been done ? "

" Naturally," cried Boon, " after a great
achievement there must be a pause. The
Mind of the Race must have its digestive
interludes."

" But this is indigestion ! First comes
Herbert Spencer, with his misconception of
the life process as a struggle of individuals
to survive. His word ' Evolution ' is the
quintessence of the misunderstanding ; his
image of a steadfast, mechanical unfolding
through selfishness, masked plausibly and
disastrously the intricate, perplexing vision
of the truth. From that sort of thing we
go at a stride to the inevitable Super Man,
the megatherium individual of futurity, the
large egoist, and all that nonsense. Then
comes a swarm of shallow, incontinent
thinkers, anxious to find a simple driving
force with a simple name for the whole
process ; the ' Life Force ' and ' Will,' and

202 BOON

so on. These things, my dear Boon, are
just the appalling bubbles of gas that show
how completely the Mind of the Race has
failed to assimilate. . . ."

" It is remarkable," said Boon, " how a
metaphor may run away with the clearest
of thinkers. The Mind of the Race is not
so consistently gastric as all that."

" You started the metaphor," said Wilkins.

" And you mounted it and it bolted with
you. To these unpleasant consequences. . . .
Well, I hold, on the contrary, that after
the superficialities of the sixties and seven-
ties and eighties people's minds have been
getting a firmer and firmer grip upon the
reality of specific instability. The new body
of intellectual experiment, which isn't indi-
gestion at all but only a preliminary attack,
is all that mass of trial thinking that one
lumps together in one's mind when one
speaks of Pragmatism. With the breakdown
of specific boundaries the validity of the
logical process beyond finite ends breaks
down. We make our truth for our visible
purposes as we go along, and if it does not
work we make it afresh. We see life once
more as gallant experiment. The boundaries

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 203

of our universe recede not only in time and
space but thought. The hard-and-fast line
between the scientific and the poetic method
disappears. . . ."

" And you get Bergson," said Wilkins
triumphantly.

" Bergson is of that class and type that
exploits the affairs of thought. But I refuse
to have Pragmatism judged by Bergson. He
takes hold of the unfinished inquiries that
constitute the movement of Pragmatism and
he makes a soft scepticism for delicate
minds with easy ways back to any old-
established orthodoxy they may regret."

" But here is my case again," said Wilkins.
"It is only through Bergson that the Mind
of the Race, the great operating mass mind
out there, can take hold of this new system
of ideas. . . ."

§3

But now Boon and Wilkins were fairly
launched upon a vital and entirely inconclu-
sive controversy. Was the thought process
of the world growing, spreading, progress-
ing, or was it going to pieces ? The one
produced a hundred instances of the en-
larging and quickening of men's minds,
the other replied by instancing vulgarities,
distortions, wide acceptance of nonsense.
Did public advertisements make a more
intelligent or less intelligent appeal now
than they used to do ? For half an after-
noon they fought over the alleged degen-
eration of the Times, multiplying instances,
comparing the " Parnellism and Crime "
pamphlet with Lord Northcliffe's war indis-
cretions, and discussing the comparative
merits of Mr. Moberly Bell's campaign to
sell the twenty-year-old " Encyclopaedia
Britannica " and found a " Book Club "

201

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 205

that should abolish booksellers, with the
displayed and illustrated advertisements of
the new period.

The talk, you see, went high and low
and came to no conclusion ; but I think
that on the whole Wilkins did succeed in
shaking Boon's half-mystical confidence in
the inevitableness of human wisdom. The
honours, I think, lay with Wilkins. Boon
did seem to establish that in physical science
there had been, and was still, a great and
growing process ; but he was not able to
prove, he could only express his faith, that
the empire of sanity was spreading to greater
and more human issues. He had to fall
back upon prophecy. Presently there would
be another big lunge forward, and so forth.
But Wilkins, on his side, was able to make a
case for a steady rotting in political life, an
increase in loudness, emptiness, and violence
in the last twenty years : he instanced
Carsonism, the methods of Tariff Reform, the
vehement Feminist movement, the malignant
silliness of the " rebel " Labour Press, the
rankness of German " patriotism." . . .

" But there are young people thinking,"
said Boon at last. " It isn't just these

206 BOON

matured showings. Where one youth thought
thirty years ago, fifty are thinking now.
These wild, loud things are just an irruption.
Just an irruption. ..."

The mocker was distressed.

The idea of active intellectual wrongness
distressed him so much that he cast aside
all his detachment from Hallery, and showed
plainly that to this imaginary Hallery's idea
of a secular growth of wisdom in mankind he
himself was quite passionately clinging. . . .

He was so distressed that one day he talked
about it to me alone for some time.

" Wilkins," he said, " insists on Facts. It
is difficult to argue with him on that basis.
You see, I don't intend Hallery's view to be
an induction from facts. It's a conviction,
an intuition. It is not the sort of thing
one perceives after reading the newspaper
placards or looking at the bookshelves in
the British Museum. It's something one
knows for certain in the middle of the night.
There is the Mind of the Race, I mean. It
is something General ; it is a refuge from
the Particular and it is in the nature of God.
That's plain, isn't it ? And through it there
is Communion. These phases, these irrup-
tions are incidents. If all the world went
frantic ; if presently some horrible thing,
some monstrous war smashed all books and
thinking and civilization, still the mind would

207

208 BOON

be there. It would immediately go on again
and presently it would pick up all that had
been done before — just as a philosopher
would presently go on reading again after
the servant-girl had fallen downstairs with
the crockery. ... It keeps on anyhow. . . .

" Oh ! I don't know how, my dear fellow.
I can't explain. I'm not telling you of
something I've reasoned out and discovered ;
I'm telling you of something I know. It's
faith if you like. It keeps on and I know
it keeps on — although I can't for the life of
me tell how. ..."

He stopped. He flushed.

" That, you see, is Hallery's point of view,"
he said awkwardly.

" But Wilkins perhaps wouldn't contradict
that. His point is merely that to be exact
about words, that God-Mind, that General
Mind of yours, isn't exactly to be called the
Mind of the Race."

" But it is the Mind of the Race," said
Boon. " It is the Mind of the Race. Most
of the Race is out of touch with it, lost to
it. Much of the Race is talking and doing
nonsense and cruelty ; astray, absurd. That
does not matter to the Truth, Bliss. It

WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 209

matters to Literature. It matters because
Literature, the clearing of minds, the release
of minds, the food and guidance of minds,
is the way, Literature is illumination, the
salvation of ourselves and of every one from
isolations., . . ."

" Might be," I suggested.

"Must be," he said "Oh! I know I've
lived behind Miss Bathwick. . . . But I'm
breaking out. . . . One of these days I will
begin to dictate to her — and not mind what
she does. . . . I'm a successful nobody —
superficially — and it's only through my pri-
vate thoughts and private jeering that I've
come to see these things. ..."

14

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

The Beginning of "The Wild Asses of
the Devil "

§1

One day a little time after the argument
with Wilkins, Boon told me he would read
me a story. He read it from a pencilled
manuscript. After some anxious seeking I
have found most of it again and put it
together. Only a few pages are missing.
Here is the story. I am sorry to say it was
never finished. But he gave me a very clear
conception of the contemplated end. That
I will indicate in its place. And I think
you will see how its idea springs from the
talk with Wilkins I have "had to render in
the "previous^chapter.

210

§2

There was once an Author who pursued
fame and prosperity in a pleasant villa on
the south coast of England. He wrote
stories of an acceptable nature and rejoiced
in a growing public esteem, carefully offend-
ing no one and seeking only to please. He
had married under circumstances of qualified
and tolerable romance a lady who wrote
occasional but otherwise regular verse, he
was the father of a little daughter, whose
reported sayings added much to his popu-
larity, and some of the very best people in
the land asked him to dinner. He was a
deputy-lieutenant and a friend of the Prime
Minister, a literary knighthood was no re-
mote possibility for hirn, and even the Nobel
Prize, given a sufficient longevity, was not
altogether beyond his hopes. And this
amount of prosperity had not betrayed him
into any un-English pride. He remembered

211

212 BOON

that manliness and simplicity which are
expected from authors. He smoked pipes
and not the excellent cigars he could have
afforded. He kept his hair cut and never
posed. He did not hold himself aloof from
people of the inferior and less successful
classes. He habitually travelled third class
in order to study the characters he put into
his delightful novels ; he went for long walks
and sat in inns, accosting people; he drew
out his gardener. And though he worked
steadily, he did not give^up the care of his
body, which threatened a certain plumpness
and what is more to the point, a localized
plumpness, not generally spread over the
system but exaggerating the anterior equator.
This expansion was his only care. He
thought about fitness and played tennis,
and every day, wet or fine, he went for at
least an hour's walk. . . .

Yet this man, so representative of Edward-
ian literature — for it is in the reign of good
King Edward the story begins — in spite of
his enviable achievements and prospects, was
doomed to the most exhausting and dubious
adventures before his life came to its un-
honoured end. . . .

THE WILD ASSES 213

Because I have not told you everything
about him. Sometimes — in the morning
sometimes — he would be irritable and have
quarrels with his shaving things, and there
were extraordinary moods when it would
seem to him that living quite beautifully
in a pleasant villa and being well-off and
famous, and writing books that were always
good-humoured and grammatical and a little
distinguished in an inoffensive way, was
about as boring and intolerable a life as any
creature with a soul to be damned could
possibly pursue. Which shows only that
God in putting him together had not for-
gotten that viscus the liver which is usual
on such occasions. . . .

214 BOON

The winter at the seaside, is less agreeable
and more bracing than the summer, and
there were days when this Author had almost
to force himself through the wholesome,
necessary routines of his life, when the south-
west wind savaged his villa and roared in the
chimneys and slapped its windows with
gustsful of rain and promised to wet that
Author thoroughly and exasperatingly down
his neck and round his wrists and ankles
directly he put his nose outside his door.
And the grey waves he saw from his window
came rolling inshore under the hurrying grey
rain-bursts, line after line, to smash along
the undercliff into vast, feathering fountains
of foam and sud and send a salt-tasting
spin-drift into his eyes. But manfully he
would put on his puttees and his waterproof
cape and his biggest brierwood pipe, and out
he would go into the whurryballoo of it all,
knowing that so he would be all the brighter
for his nice story-writing after tea.

On such a day he went out. He went
out very resolutely along the seaside gardens
of gravel and tamarisk and privet, resolved
to oblige himself to go right past the harbour
and up to the top of the east cliff before

THE WILD ASSES 215

ever he turned his face back to the comforts
of fire and wife and tea and buttered

"COclST. # • •

And somewhere, perhaps half a mile
away from home, he became aware of a
queer character trying to keep abreast of
him.

His impression was of a very miserable
black man in the greasy, blue-black garments
of a stoker, a lascar probably from a steam-
ship in the harbour, and going with a sort
of lame hobble.

As he passed this individual the Author
had a transitory thought of how much
Authors don't know in the world, how much,
for instance, this shivering, cringing body
might be hiding within itself, of inestimable
value as " local colour " if only one could
get hold of it for " putting into " one's
large acceptable novels. Why doesn't one
sometimes tap these sources ? Kipling, for
example, used to do so, with most suc-
cessful results. . . . And then the Author
became aware that this enigma was hurry-
ing to overtake him. He slackened his
pace. . . .

The creature wasn't asking for a light;

216 BOON

it was begging for a box of matches. And,
what was odd, in quite good English.

The Author surveyed the beggar and
slapped his pockets. Never had he seen so
miserable a face. It was by no means a
prepossessing face, with its aquiline nose, its
sloping brows, its dark, deep, bloodshot eyes
much too close together, its V-shaped, dis-
honest mouth and drenched chin-tuft. And
yet it was attractively animal and pitiful.
The idea flashed suddenly into the Author's
head : " Why not, instead of going on,
thinking emptily, through this beastly
weather — why not take this man back home
now, to the warm, dry study, and give him
a hot drink and something to smoke, and
draw him out ? "

Get something technical and first-hand
that would rather score off Kipling.

" It's damnably cold ! " he shouted, in a
sort of hearty, forecastle voice.

" It's worse than that," said the strange
stoker.

" It's a hell of a day ! " said the Author,
more forcible than ever.

" Don't remind me of hell," said the stoker,
in a voice of inappeasable regret.

THE WILD ASSES

217

The Author slapped his pockets again.
" You've got an infernal cold. Look here,
my man — confound it ! would you like a
hot grog ? . . ."

\ ^ NT

§3

The scene shifts to the Author's study — a
blazing coal fire, the stoker sitting dripping
and steaming before it, with his feet inside
the fender, while the Author fusses about
the room, directing the preparation of hot
drinks. The Author is acutely aware not
only of the stoker but of himself. The
stoker has probably never been in the home
of an Author before ; he is probably awe-
stricken at the array of books, at the com-
fort, convenience, and efficiency of the home,
at the pleasant personality entertaining him.
. . . Meanwhile the Author does not forget
that the stoker is material, is " copy," is
being watched, observed. So he poses and
watches, until presently he forgets to pose in
his astonishment at the thing he is observing.
Because this stoker is rummier than a stoker
ought to be —
He does not simply accept a hot drink;

218

THE WILD ASSES 219

he informs his host just how hot the drink
must be to satisfy him.

" Isn't there something you could put
in it — something called red pepper ? I've
tasted that once or twice. It's good. If you
could put in a bit of red pepper."

" If you can stand that sort of thing ? "

" And if there isn't much water, can't you
set light to the stuff ? Or let me drink it
boiling, out of a pannikin or something ?
Pepper and all."

Wonderful fellows, these stokers ! The
Author went to the bell and asked for red
pepper.

And then as he came back to the fire he
saw something that he instantly dismissed as
an optical illusion, as a mirage effect of the
clouds of steam his guest was disengaging.
The stoker was sitting, all crouched up, as
close over the fire as he could contrive ;
and he was holding his black hands, not to
the fire but in the fire, holding them
pressed flat against two red, glowing masses
of coal. . . . He glanced over his shoulder at
the Author with a guilty start, and then in-
stantly the Author perceived that the hands
were five or six inches away from the coal.j

220 BOON

Then came smoking. The Author pro-
duced, one of his big cigars — for although a
conscientious pipe-smoker himself he gave
people Cigars ; and then, again struck by
something odd, he went off into a corner of
the room where a little oval mirror gave him
a means of watching the stoker undetected.
And this is what he saw.

He saw the stoker, after a furtive glance
at him, deliberately turn the cigar round,
place the lighted end in his mouth, inhale
strongly, and blow a torrent of sparks and
smoke out of his nose. His firelit face as he
did this expressed a diabolical relief. Then
very hastily he reversed the cigar again, and
turned round to look at the Author. The
Author turned slowly towards him.

" You like that cigar ? " he asked, after
one of those mutual pauses that break down
a pretence.

" It's admirable."

" Why do you smoke it the other way
round ? "

The stoker perceived he was caught. " It's
a stokehole trick," he said. " Do you mind
if I do it ? I didn't think you saw."

" Pray smoke just as you like," said

THE WILD ASSES 221

the Author, and advanced to watch the
operation.

It was exactly like the fire-eater at a
village fair. The man stuck the burning
cigar into his mouth and blew sparks out of
his nostrils. " Ah ! " he said, with a note
of genuine satisfaction. And then, with the
cigar still burning in the corner of his mouth,
he turned to the fire and began to rearrange
the burning coals with Ms hands so as to pile
up a great glowing mass. He picked up
flaming and white-hot lumps as one might
pick up lumps of sugar. The Author watched
him, dumbfounded.

" I say ! " he cried. " You stokers get a
bit tough."

The stoker dropped the glowing piece of
coal in his hand. " I forgot," he said, and
sat back a little.

" Isn't that a bit — extra ? " asked the
Author, regarding him. " Isn't that some
sort of trick ? "

" We get so tough down there," said the
stoker, and paused discreetly as the servant
came in with the red pepper.

"Now you can drink," said the Author,
and set himself to mix a drink of a pungency

222 BOON

that he would have considered murderous
ten minutes before. When he had done, the
stoker reached over and added more red
pepper.

" I don't quite see how it is your hand
doesn't burn," said the Author as the stoker
drank. The stoker shook his head over the
uptilted glass.

" Incombustible," he said, putting it down.
" Could I have just a tiny drop more ?
Just brandy and pepper, if you don't mind.
Set alight. I don't care for water except
when it's super-heated steam."

And as the Author poured out another
stiff glass of this incandescent brew, the
stoker put up his hand and scratched the
matted black hair over his temple. Then
instantly he desisted and sat looking
wickedly at the Author, while the Author
stared at him aghast. For at the corner
of his square, high, narrow forehead, re-
vealed for an instant by the thrusting back
of the hair, a curious stumpy excrescence
had been visible ; and the top of his ear
— he had a pointed top to his ear !

" A-a-a-a-h ! " said the Author, with dilated
eyes.

THE WILD ASSES 223

" A-a-a-a-h ! " said the stoker, in hopeless
distress.

" But you aren't ! "

" I know — I know I'm not. I know.
. . . I'm a devil. A poor, lost, homeless
devil."

And suddenly, with a gesture of inde-
scribable despair, the apparent stoker buried
his face in his hands and burst into
tears.

" Only man who's ever been decently
kind to me," he sobbed. " And now —
you'll chuck me out again into the beastly
wet and cold. . . . Beautiful fire. . . . Nice
drink. . . . Almost homelike. . . . Just to
torment me. . . . Boo-ooh ! "

And let it be recorded to the credit of
our little Author, that he did overcome his
momentary horror, that he did go quickly
round the table, and that he patted that
dirty stoker's shoulder.

" There !" he said. "There! Don't mind
my rudeness. Have another nice drink.
Have a hell of a drink. I won't turn you
out if you're unhappy — on a day like this.
Have just a mouthful of pepper, man, and
pull yourself together."

224 BOON

And suddenly the poor devil caught hold
of his arm. " Nobody good to me," he
sobbed- " Nobody good to me." And his
tears ran down over the Author's plump
little hand — scalding tears.

§4

All really wonderful things happen rather
suddenly and without any great emphasis
upon their wonderfulness, and this was no
exception to the general rule. This Author
went on comforting his devil as though this
was nothing more than a chance encounter
with an unhappy child, and the devil let his
grief and discomfort have vent in a manner
that seemed at the time as natural as any-
thing could be. He was clearly a devil of
feeble character and uncertain purpose, much
broken down by harshness and cruelty,
and it throws a curious light upon the
general state of misconception with regard
to matters diabolical that it came as a quite
pitiful discovery to our Author that a devil
could be unhappy and heart-broken. For a
long time his most earnest and persistent
questioning could gather nothing except that
his guest was an exile from a land of great

15 a«

226 BOON

warmth and considerable entertainment, and
it was only after considerable further applica-
tions of brandy and pepper that the sobbing
confidences of the poor creature grew into
the form of a coherent and understandable
narrative.

And then it became apparent that this
person was one of the very lowest types of
infernal denizen, and that his role in the
dark realms of Dis had been that of watcher
and minder of a herd of sinister beings
hitherto unknown to our Author, the Devil's
Wild Asses, which pastured in a stretch of
meadows near the Styx. They were, he
gathered, unruly, dangerous, and enterprising
beasts, amenable only to a certain formula
of expletives, which instantly reduced them
to obedience. These expletives the stoker-
devil would not repeat ; to do so except
when actually addressing one of the Wild
Asses would, he explained, involve torments
of the most terrible description. The bare
thought of them gave him a shivering fit.
But he gave the Author to understand that
to crack these curses as one drove the Wild
Asses to and from their grazing on the
Elysian fields was a by no means disagreeable

THE WILD ASSES 227

amusement. The ass-herds would try who
could crack the loudest until the welkin
rang.

And speaking of these things, the poor
creature gave a picture of diabolical life
that impressed the Author as by no means
unpleasant for any one with a suitable
constitution. It was like the Idylls of Theo-
critus done in fire ; the devils drove their
charges along burning lanes and sat gossiping
in hedges of flames, rejoicing in the warm
dry breezes (which it seems are rendered
peculiarly bracing by the faint flavour of
brimstone in the air), and watching the
harpies and furies and witches circling in
the perpetual afterglow of that inferior sky.
And ever and again there would be holidays,
and one would take one's lunch and wander
over the sulphur craters picking flowers of
sulphur or fishing for the souls of usurers
and publishers and house-agents and land-
agents in the lakes of boiling pitch. It was
good sport, for the usurers and publishers
and house-agents and land-agents were
always eager to be caught ; they crowded
round the hooks and fought violently for the
bait, and protested vehemently and enter-

228 BOON

tainingly against the Rules and Regulations
that compelled their instant return to the
lake of fire.

And sometimes when he was on holiday
this particular devil would go through the
saltpetre dunes, where the witches' brooms
grow and the blasted heath is in flower,
to the landing-place of the ferry whence the
Great Road runs through the shops and
banks of the Via Dolorosa to the New Judge-
ment Hall, and watch the crowds of damned
arriving by the steam ferry-boats of the
Consolidated Charon Company. This steam-
boat-gazing seems about as popular down
there as it is at Folkestone. Almost every
day notable people arrive, and, as the devils
are very well informed about terrestrial
affairs — for of course all the earthly news-
papers go straight to hell — whatever else
could one expect ? — they get ovations of an
almost undergraduate intensity. At times
you can hear their cheering or booing, as
the case may be, right away on the pastures
where the Wild Asses feed. And that had
been this particular devil's undoing.

He had always been interested in the
career of the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone. . . .

THE WILD ASSES 229

He was minding the Wild Asses. He
knew the risks. He knew the penalties.
But when he heard the vast uproar, when
he heard the eager voices in the lane of fire
saying, " It's Gladstone at last 1 " when he
saw how quietly and unsuspiciously the Wild
Asses cropped their pasture, the temptation
was too much. He slipped away. He saw
the great Englishman landed after a slight
struggle. He joined in the outcry of
" Speech ! Speech ! " He heard the first
delicious promise of a Home Rule movement
which should break the last feeble links of
Celestial Control. . . »

And meanwhile the Wild Asses escaped—
according to the rules and the prophe-
cies. . . .

§5

The little Author sat and listened to this
tale of a wonder that never for a moment
struck him as incredible. And outside his
rain-lashed window the strung-out fishing
smacks pitched and rolled on their way
home to Folkestone harbour. . . .

The Wild Asses escaped.

They got away to the world. And his
superior officers took the poor herdsman
and tried him and bullied him and passed
this judgement upon him : that he must go
to the earth and find the Wild Asses, and
say to them that certain string of oaths
that otherwise must never be repeated, and
so control them and bring them back to
hell. That — or else one pinch of salt on their
tails. It did not matter which. One by one
he must bring them back, driving them by
spell and curse to the cattle-boat of the
ferry. And until he had caught and brought

230

THE WILD ASSES 231

them all back he might never return again
to the warmth and comfort of his accustomed
life. That was his sentence and punishment.
And they put him into a shrapnel shell and
fired him out among the stars, and when he
had a little recovered he pulled himself
together and made his way to the world.

But he never found his Wild Asses and
after a little time he gave up trying.

He gave up trying because the Wild Asses,
once they had got out of control, developed
the most amazing gifts. They could, for
instance, disguise themselves with any sort
of human shape, and the only way in which
they differed then from a normal human
being was — according to the printed paper of
instructions that had been given to their
custodian when he was fired out — that " their
general conduct remains that of a Wild Ass
of the Devil."

" And what interpretation can we put
upon that ? " he asked the listening Author.

And there was one night in the year —
Walpurgis Night — when the Wild Asses
became visibly great black wild asses and
kicked up their hind legs and brayed. They
had to. " But then, of course," said the

«32 BOON

devil, " they would take care to shut them-
selves up somewhere when they felt that
coming on."

Like most weak characters, the stoker
devil was intensely egotistical. He was
anxious to dwell upon his own miseries and
discomforts and difficulties and the general
injustice of his treatment, and he was care-
less and casually indicative about the pecu-
liarities of the Wild Asses, the matter which
most excited and interested the Author.
He bored on with his doleful story, and the
Author had to interrupt with questions
again and again in order to get any clear
idea of the situation.

The devil's main excuse for his nerveless-
ness was his profound ignorance of human
nature. " So far as I can see," he said,
" they might all be Wild Asses. I tried it
once "

" Tried what ? "

" The formula. You know."

" Yes ? "

" On a man named Sir Edward Carson."

" Well ? "

" Ugh I " said the devil.

" Punishment ? "

THE WILD ASSES 288

" Don't speak of it. He was just a
professional lawyer-politician who had lost
his sense of values. » . . How was I to
know ? . . > But our people certainly know
how to hurt. . . ."

After that it would seem this poor devil
desisted absolutely from any attempt to
recover his lost charges. He just tried to
live for the moment and make his earthly
existence as tolerable as possible. It was
clear he hated the world. He found it
cold, wet, draughty. * . . " I can't under-
stand why everybody insists upon living
outside of it," he said. " If you went
inside "

He sought warmth and dryness. For a
time he found a kind of contentment in
charge of the upcast furnace of a mine, and
then he was superseded by an electric-fan.
While in this position he read a vivid account
of the intense heat in the Red Sea, and he
was struck by the idea that if he could get
a job as stoker upon an Indian liner he might
snatch some days of real happiness during
that portion of the voyage. For some time
his natural ineptitude prevented his realizing
this project, but at last, after some bitter

234 BOON

experiences of homelessness during a London
December, he had been able* to ship on an
Indiaward boat — only to get stranded in
Folkestone in consequence of a propeller
breakdown. And so here he was I

He paused.

" But about these Wild Asses ? " said the
Author.

The mournful, dark eyes looked at him
, hopelessly.

" Mightn't they do a lot of mischief ? "
asked the Author.

" They'll do no end of mischief," said the
despondent devil.

" Ultimately you'll catch it for that ? "

" Ugh ! " said the stoker, trying not to
think of it.

§6

Now the spirit of romantic adventure
slumbers in the most unexpected places,
and I have already told you of our plump
Author's discontents. He had been like a
smouldering bomb for some years. Now, he
burst out. He suddenly became excited,
energetic, stimulating, uplifting.

The Author upUfts the devil.

He stood over the drooping devil.

" But my dear chap ! " he said. " You
must pull yourself together. You must do
better than this. These confounded brutes

235

286 BOON

may be doing all sorts of mischief. While
you — shirk. . . ."

And so on. Real ginger.

" If I had some one to go with me. Some
one who knew his way about."

The Author took whisky in the excitement
of the moment. He began to move very
rapidly about his room and make short,
sharp gestures. You know how this sort of
emotion wells up at times. " We must work
from some central place," said the Author.
" To begin with, London perhaps."

It was not two hours later that they
started, this Author and this devil he had
taken to himself, upon a mission. They
went out in overcoats and warm under-
clothing — the Author gave the devil a
thorough outfit, a double lot of Jaeger's
extra thick — and they were resolved to find
the Wild Asses of the Devil and send them
back to hell, or at least the Author was, in
the shortest possible time. In the picture
you will see him with a field-glass slung
under his arm, the better to watch suspected
cases ; in his pocket, wrapped in oiled paper,
is a lot of salt to use if by chance he finds
a Wild Ass when the devil and his string of

THE WILD ASSES 237

oaths is not at hand. So he started. And
when he had caught and done for the Wild
Asses, then the Author supposed that he
would come back to his nice little villa and
his nice little wife, and to his little daughter
who said the amusing things, and to his
popularity, his large gilt-edged popularity,
and — except for an added prestige — be just
exactly the man he had always been. Little
knowing that whosoever takes unto himself
a devil and goes out upon a quest, goes out
upon a quest from which there is no

returning

Nevermore.

Precipitate start of tht Wild Ass hunters.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

The Hunting of the Wild Asses of the
Devil

§1

At this point the surviving manuscript
comes to an abrupt end.

But Boon read or extemporized far beyond
this point.

He made a figure that was at once absurd
and pitiful of his little Author making this
raid upon the world, resolved to detect and
exorcise these suspected Wild Asses, and he
told us at great length of how steadily and
inevitably the poor enthusiast entangled
himself in feuds and false accusations, libels
and denunciations, free fights, burglaries, and
so to universal execration in a perpetually
tightening coil. " I'll stick to it," he
squeaks, with every fresh blow of Fate.

238

THE WILD ASSES 289

Behind him, with a developing incurable
bronchitis that could never be fatal, toiled
the devil, more and more despondent, more
and more draggle-tailed, voiceless and un-
helpful.

After a time he was perpetually trying to
give his Author the slip.

But continually it is clearer that there
were diabolical Wild Asses loose and active
in the affairs of the world. . . .

One day the Author had an inspiration.
" Was your lot the only lot that ever
escaped ? "

" Oh no ! " said the devil. " Ages before
— there were some. It led to an awful row.
Just before the Flood. They had to be
drowned out. That's why they've been
so stiff with me. . . . I'm not quite sure
whether they didn't interbreed. They say
in hell that the world has never been quite
the same place since. ..."

You see the scope this story gave Boon's
disposition to derision. There were endless
things that Boon hated, movements that
seemed to him wanton and mischievous,
outbreaks of disastrous violence, evil ideas.
I should get myself into as much hot water

240 JBUUJN

as his Author did if I were to tell all this
poor man's adventures. He went to Ulster,
he pursued prominent Tariff Reformers, he
started off to Mexico and came back to
investigate Pan-Germanism. I seem to
remember his hanging for days about the
entrance to Printing House Square. . . .
And there was a scene in the House of
Commons. The Author and the devil had
been tracking a prominent politician — never
mind whom — with the growing belief that
here at last they had one of them. And
Walpurgis Night grew near. Walpurgis
Night came.

" We must not lose sight of him," said the
Author, very alert and ruthless. " If neces-
sary we must smash the windows, blow open
doors."

But the great man went down to the House
as though nothing could possibly happen.
They followed him.

" He will certainly rush home," said the
Author, as the clock crept round to half-
past eleven. " But anyhow let us get into
the Strangers' Gallery and keep our eyes on
him to the last,"

They managed it with difficulty.

THE WILD ASSES 241

I remember how vividly Boon drew the
picture for us : the rather bored House, a
coming and going of a few inattentive
Members, the nodding Speaker and the
clerks, the silent watchers in the gallery,
a little flicker of white behind the grille.
And then at five minutes to twelve the
honourable Member arose. . . .

" We were wrong," said the Author.

" The draught here is fearful," said the
devil. " Hadn't we better go ? "

The honourable Member went on speaking
showy, memorable, mischievous things. The
seconds ticked away. And then — then it
happened.

The Author made a faint rattling sound in
his throat and clung to the rail before him.
The devil broke into a cold sweat. There,
visible to all men, was a large black Wild
Ass, kicking up its heels upon the floor of
the House. And braying.

And nobody was minding !

The Speaker listened patiently, one long
finger against his cheek. The clerks bowed
over the papers. The honourable Member's
two colleagues listened like men under an
anaesthetic, each sideways, each with his arm

16

242 BOON

over the back of the seat. Across the House
one Member was furtively writing a letter
and three others were whispering together.

The Author felt for the salt, then he
gripped the devil's wrist.

" Say those words ! " he shouted quite
loudly — " say those words ! Say them now.
Then — we shall have him."

But you know those House of Commons
ushers. And at that time their usual alert-
ness had been much quickened by several
Suffragette outrages. Before the devil had
got through his second sentence or the
Author could get his salt out of his pocket
both devil and Author were travelling vio-
lently, scruff and pant-seat irresistibly
gripped, down Saint Stephen's Hall. . . .

§2

" And you really begin to think," said
Wilkins, " that there has been an increase
in violence and unreasonableness in the
world ? "

" My case is that it is an irruption," said
Boon. " But I do begin to see a sort of
violence of mind and act growing in the
world."

" There has always been something con-
vulsive and extravagant in human affairs,"
said Wilkins. " No public thing, no col-
lective thing, has ever had the sanity of
men thinking quietly in a study."

And so we fell to discussing the Mind
of the Race again, and whether there was
indeed any sanity growing systematically out
of human affairs, or whether this Mind of
the Race was just a poor tormented rag
of partial understanding that would never
control the blind forces that had made and

213

244 BOON

would destroy N it. And it was inevitable
that such a talk should presently drift to
the crowning human folly, to that crowned
Wild Ass of the Devil, aggressive militarism.
That talk was going on, I remember, one
very bright, warm, sunny day in May, or it
may be in June, of 1914. And we talked
of militarism as a nourish, as a kicking up
of the national heels, as extravagance and
waste ; but, what seems to me so singular
now, we none of us spoke of it or thought of
it as a thing that could lead to the full
horror of a universal war. Human memory
is so strange and treacherous a thing that
I doubt now if many English people will
recall our habitual disregard in those days
of war as a probability. We thought of it
as a costly, foolish threatening, but that it
could actually happen !

§3

Some things are so shocking that they seem
to have given no shock at all, just as there
are noises that are silences because they
burst the ears. And for some days after
the declaration of war against Germany the
whole business seemed a vast burlesque.
It was incredible that this great people, for
whom all Western Europe has mingled, and
will to the end of time mingle, admiration
with a certain humorous contempt, was
really advancing upon civilization, enor-
mously armed, scrupulously prepared, bel-
lowing, " Deutschland, Deutschland ueber
Alles ! " smashing, destroying, killing. We
felt for a time, in spite of reason, that it
was a joke, that presently Michael would
laugh. . . .

But by Jove ! the idiot wasn't laugh-
ing. . . .

For some weeks nobody in the circle about

245

246 BOON

Boon talked of anything but the war. The
Wild Asses of the Devil became an allusion,
to indicate all this that was kicking Europe
to splinters. We got maps, and still more
maps ; we sent into the town for news-
papers and got special intelligence by tele-
phone ; we repeated and discussed rumours.
The Belgians were showing pluck and re-
source, but the French were obviously
shockingly unprepared. There were weeks
— one may confess it now that they have
so abundantly proved the contrary — when
the French seemed crumpling up like paste-
board. They were failing to save the line
of the Meuse, Maubeuge, Lille, Laon ; there
were surrenders, there was talk of treachery,
and General French, left with his flank
exposed, made a costly retreat. It was one
Sunday in early September that Wilkins
came to us with a Sunday Observer. " Look,"
he said, " they are down on the Seine !
They are sweeping right round behind the
Eastern line. They have broken the French
in two. Here at Senlis they are almost
within sight of Paris. ..."

Then some London eavesdropper talked of
the Uritish retreat. " Kitchener says our

THE WILD ASSES 247

Army has lost half its fighting value. Our
base is to be moved again from Havre to
La Rochelle. ..."

Boon sat on the edge of his hammock.

" The Germans must be beaten," he said.
" The new world is killed ; we go back ten
thousand years ; there is no light, no hope,
no thought nor freedom any more unless the
Germans are beaten. . . . Until the Germans
are beaten there is nothing more to be done
in art, in literature, in life. They are a
dull, envious, greedy, cunning, vulgar,
interfering, and intolerably conceited people.
A world under their dominance will be
intolerable. I will not live in it. . . ."

" I had never believed they would do it,"
said Wilkins. . . .

" Both my boys," said Dodd, " have gone
into the Officers' Training Corps. They
were in their cadet corps at school."

" Wasn't one an engineer ? " asked Boon.

" The other was beginning to paint rather
well," said Dodd. " But it all has to stop."

" I suppose I shall have to do some-
thing," said the London eavesdropper. " I'm
thirty-eight. ... I can ride and I'm pretty
fit. . . . It's a nuisance."

248 BOON

" What is a man of my kind to do ? "
asked Wilkins. " I'm forty-eight."

" I can't believe the French are as bad
as they seem," said Boon. " But, anyhow,
we've no business to lean on the French. . . .
But I wonder now Pass me that map."

§4

Next week things had mended, and the
French and British were pushing the Germans
back from the Marne to the Aisne. Whatever
doubts we had felt about the French were
dispelled in that swift week of recovery.
They were all right. It was a stupendous
relief, for if France had gone down, if her
spirit had failed us, then we felt all liberal-
ism, all republicanism, all freedom and light
would have gone out in this world for
centuries.

But then again at the Aisne the Germans
stood, and our brisk rush of hope sobered
down towards anxiety as the long flanking
movement stretched towards the sea and the
Antwerp situation developed. . . .

By imperceptible degrees our minds began
to free themselves from the immediate
struggle of the war, from strategy and move-
ments, from the daily attempt to unriddle

249

250 BOON

from reluctant and ambiguous dispatches,
Dutch rumours, censored gaps, and unin-
forming maps what was happening. It
became clear to us that there were to be no
particular dramatic strokes, no sudden,
decisive battles, no swift and clear con-
clusions. The struggle began to assume in
our minds its true proportions, its true
extent, in time, in space, in historical con-
sequence. We had thought of a dramatic
three months' conflict and a redrawn map
of Europe ; we perceived we were in the
beginnings of a far vaster conflict ; the end
of an age ; the slow, murderous testing and
condemnation of whole systems of ideas
that had bound men uneasily in communities
for all our lives. We discussed — as all the
world was discussing — the huge organization
of sentiment and teaching that had produced
this aggressive German patriotism, .this tre-
mendous national unanimity. Ford Madox
Hueffer came in to tell us stories of a
disciplined professoriate, of all education
turned into a war propaganda, of the delib-
erate official mental moulding of a whole
people that was at once fascinating and
incredible. We went over Bernhardi and

THE WILD ASSES 251

Treitschke ; we weighed Nietzsche's share in
that mental growth. Our talk drifted with
the changing season and Boon's sudden
illness after his chill, from his garden to
his sitting-room, where he lay wrapped
up upon a sofa, irritable and impatient
with this unaccustomed experience of
ill-health.

" You see how much easier it is to grow
an evil weed than a wholesome plant," he
said. " While this great strong wickedness
has developed in Germany, what thought
have we had in our English-speaking com-
munity ? What does our world of letters
amount to ? Clowns and dons and prigs,
cults of the precious and cults of style, a
few squeaking author-journalists and such
time-serving scoundrels as I, with my patent
Bathwick filter, my twenty editions, and my
thousands a year. None of us with any
sense of a whole community or a common
purpose ! Where is our strength to go
against that strength of the heavy Ger-
man mind ? Where is the Mind of our
Race ? "

He looked at me with tired eyes.

" It has been a joke with us," he said.

252 BOON

" Is there no power of thought among
free men strong enough to swing them
into armies that can take this monster by
the neck ? Must men be bullied for ever ?
Are there no men to think at least as
earnestly as one climbs a mountain, and
to write with their uttermost pride ? Are
there no men to face truth as those boys
at Mons faced shrapnel, and to stick for the
honour of the mind and for truth and beauty
as those lads stuck to their trenches ? Bliss
and I have tried to write of all the world of
letters, and we have found nothing to write
about but posturing and competition and
sham reputations, and of dullness and im-
pudence hiding and sheltering in the very
sheath of the sword of thought. . . . For a
little while after the war began our people
seemed noble and dignified ; but see now
how all Britain breaks after its first quiet
into chatter about spies, sentimentality about
the architecture of Louvain, invasion scares,
the bitter persecution of stray Germans, and
petty disputes and recriminations like a pool
under a breeze. And below that nothing.
While still the big thing goes on, ungrasped,
day after day, a monstrous struggle of our

THE WILD ASSES 253

world against the thing it will not have. . . .
No one is clear about what sort of thing we
will have. It is a nightmare in which we
try continually to escape and have no-
whither to escape. . . . What is to come
out of this struggle ? Just anything that
may come out of it, or something we mean
shall come out of it ? "

He sat up in his bed ; his eyes were
bright and he had little red spots in his
cheeks.

" At least the Germans stand for some-
thing. It may be brutal, stupid, intolerable,
but there it is — a definite intention, a scheme
of living, an order, Germanic Kultur. But
what the devil do we stand for ? Was there
anything that amounted to an intellectual
life at all in all our beastly welter of
writing, of nice-young-man poetry, of stylish
fiction and fiction without style, of lazy
history, popular philosophy, slobbering criti-
cism, Academic civilities ? Is there any-
thing here to hold a people together ? Is
there anything to make a new world ? A
literature ought to dominate the mind of its
people. Yet here comes the gale, and all we
have to show for our racial thought, all the

254 BOON

fastness we have made for our souls, is a
flying scud of paper scraps, poems, such
poems ! casual articles, whirling headlong in
the air, a few novels drowning in the
floods. . . ."

§5

There were times during his illness and
depression when we sat about Boon very
much after the fashion of Job's Comforters.
And I remember an occasion when Wilkins
took upon himself the responsibility for a
hopeful view. There was about Wilkins's
realistic sentimentality something at once akin
and repugnant to Boon's intellectual mysticism,
so that for a time Boon listened resentfully,
and then was moved to spirited contradiction.
Wilkins declared that the war was like one
of those great illnesses that purge the system
of a multitude of minor ills. It was changing
the spirit of life about us ; it would end a
vast amount of mere pleasure-seeking and
aimless extravagance; it was giving people
a sterner sense of duty and a more vivid
apprehension of human brotherhood. This
ineffective triviality in so much of our
literary life ' of which Boon complained

255

256 BOON

would give place to a sense of urgent
purpose. . . .

" War," said Boon, turning his face towards
Wilkins, "does nothing but destroy."

"All making is destructive," said Wilkins,
while Boon moved impatiently ; " the sculptor
destroys a block of marble, the painter scatters
a tube of paint. ..."

Boon's eye had something of the expres-
sion of a man who watches another ride his
favourite horse.

" See already the new gravity in people's
faces, the generosities, the pacification of a
thousand stupid squabbles "

" If you mean Carsonism," said Boon, " it's
only sulking until it can cut in again."

" I deny it," said Wilkins, warming to his
faith. "This is the firing of the clay of
Western European life. It stops our little
arts perhaps — but see the new beauty that
comes. . . . We can well spare our professional
books and professional writing for a time to
get such humour and wonder as one can find
in the soldiers' letters from the front. Think
of all the people whose lives would have been
slack and ignoble from the cradle to the grave,
who are being twisted up now to the stem

THE WILD ASSES 257

question of enlistment, think of the tragedies
of separation and danger and suffering that
are throwing a stern bright light upon ten
thousand obscure existences. . . ."

"And the noble procession of poor devils
tramping through the slush from their burning
homes, God knows whither ! And the light of
fire appearing through the cracks of falling
walls, and charred bits of old people in the
slush of the roadside, and the screams of men
disembowelled, and the crying of a dying baby
in a wet shed full of starving refugees who
do not know whither to go. Go on, Wilkins."

" Oh, if you choose to dwell on the
horrors ! "

"The one decent thing that we men who
sit at home in the warm can do is to dwell on
the horrors and do our little best to make sure
that never, never shall this thing happen again.
And that won't be done, Wilkins, by leaving
War alone. War, war with modern machines,
is a damned great horrible trampling monster,
a filthy thing, an indecency ; we aren't doing
anything heroic, we are trying to lift a foul
stupidity off the earth, we are engaged in a
colossal sanitary job. These men who go for
us into the trenches, they come back with no

17

258 BOON

illusions. They know how dirty and mon-
strous it is. They are like men who have gone
down for the sake of the people they love ±o
clear out a choked drain. They have no
illusions about being glorified. They only hope
they aren't blood-poisoned and their bodies
altogether ruined. And as for the bracing
stir of it, they tell me, Wilkins, that their
favourite song now in the trenches is —

" ' Nobody knows how bored we are,

Bored we are,

Bored we are,

Nobody knows how bored we are,

And nobody seems to care.'

Meanwhile you sit at home and feel vicariously
ennobled."

He laid his hand on a daily newspaper
beside him.

" Oh, you're not the only one. I will make
you ashamed of yourself, Wilkins. Here's the
superlative to your positive. Here's the sort
of man I should like to hold for five minutes
head downwards in the bilge of a trench, writing
on the Heroic Spirit in the Morning Post. He's
one of your gentlemen who sit in a room full
of books and promise themselves much moral
benefit from the bloodshed in France. Cole-

THE WILD ASSES 259

ridge, he says, Coleridge — the heroic, self-con-
trolled Spartan Coleridge was of his opinion
and very hard on Pacificism — Coleridge com-
plained of peace-time in such words as these :
' All individual dignity and power, engulfed in
courts, committees, institutions. . . . One bene-
fit-club for mutual flattery.' . . . And then, I
suppose, the old loafer went off to sponge on
somebody. . . . And here's the stuff the heroic,
spirited Osborn, the Morning Post gentleman
— unhappily not a German, and unhappily too
old for trench work — quotes with delight now
— now ! — after Belgium ! —

" ' My spear, my sword, my shaggy shield !
With these I till, with these I sow,
With these I reap my harvest field —
No other wealth the gods bestow :
With these I plant the fertile vine,
With these I press the luscious wine.

My spear, my sword, my shaggy shield !
They make me lord of all below —
For those who dread my spear to wield,
Before my shaggy shield must bow.
Their fields, their vineyards, they resign,
And all that cowards have is mine.'

"He goes on to this —

" ' It is in vain that the Pacificist rages at such
staunch braggadocio. It blares out a political truth

260 BOON

of timeless validity in words that are by no means
politic. Sparta was the working model in ancient
times of the State that lives by and for warfare, though
never despising the rewards of an astute diplomacy ;
she was the Prussia of antiquity, . . .
" ' Spartan ideal of duty and discipline.' . . .

" You see the spirit of him ! You see what
has got loose ! It is a real and potent spirit ;
you have to reckon with it through all this
business. To this sort of mind the ' Pacificist '
is a hateful fool. The Pacificist prefers making
vineyards, painting pictures, building Gothic
cathedrals, thinking clear thoughts to bawling
' Bruteland, Bruteland, over all ! ' and killing
people and smashing things up. He is a
maker. That is what is intended here by a
' coward.' All real creative activity is hateful
to a certain ugly, influential, aggressive type
of mind, to this type of mind that expresses
itself here in England through the Morning
Post and Spectator. Both these papers are
soaked through and through with a genuine
detestation of all fine creation, all beauty,
all novelty, all frank, generous, and pleasant
things. In peace-time they maintain an atti-
tude of dyspeptic hostility to free art, to free
literature, to fresh thought. They stand un-
compromisingly for ugliness, dullness, and

THE WILD ASSES 261

restriction — as ends in themselves. When you
talk, Wilkins, of the intellectual good of the
war, I ask you to note the new exultation that
has come into these evil papers. When they
speak of the 'moral benefits' of war they
mean the smashing up of everything that they
hate and we care for. They mean reaction.
This good man Osborn, whom I have never
seen or heard of before, seems to be quint-
essential of all that side. I can imagine him.
I believe I could reconstruct him from this
article I have here, just as anatomists have
reconstructed extinct monsters from a single
bone. He is, I am certain, a don. The emo-
tional note suggests Oxford. He is a classical
scholar. And that is the extent of his know-
ledge. Something in this way."
He began to sketch rapidly.

262 BOON

Fancy portrait of Mr. E. B. Osborn, singing
about his sword and his shield and his
ruthless virility, and all that sort of thing.

u

You have to realize that while the
Pacificists talk of the horrible ugliness of war
and the necessity of establishing an ever-
lasting world-peace, whiskered old ladies in
hydropaths, dons on the Morning Post, chatter-
ing district visitors and blustering, bellowing
parsons, people who are ever so much more
representative of general humanity than we
literary oddities — all that sort of people tucked
away somewhere safe, are in a state of belli-
gerent lustfulness and prepared — oh, prepared
to give the very eyes of everybody else in this
country, prepared to sacrifice the lives of all
their servants and see the poor taxed to the
devil, first for a victory over Germany and then

THE WILD ASSES 263

for the closest, silliest, loudest imitation of
Prussian swagger on our part (with them, of
course, on the very top of it all) that we can
contrive. That spirit is loose, Wilkins. All
the dowagers are mewing for blood, all the male
old women who teach classics and dream of
reaction at Oxford and Cambridge are having
the time of their lives. They trust to panic,
to loud accusations, to that fear of complexity
that comes with fatigue. They trust to the
exhaustion of delicate purposes and sensitive
nerves. And this force-loving, bullying silli-
ness is far more likely to come out on top,
after the distresses of this war, after the decent
men are dead in the trenches and the wise
ones shouted to silence, than any finely intel-
lectual, necessarily difficult plan to put an end
for ever to all such senseless brutalities."

',' I think you underrate the power of — well,
modern sanity," said Wilkins.

" Time will show," said Boon. " I hope I
do."

"This man Osborn, whoever he may be,
must be just a fantastic extremist. ... I do
not see that he is an answer to my suggestion
that for the whole mass of people this war
means graver thought, steadier thought ? a

264 BOON

firmer collective purpose. It isn't only by
books and formal literature that people think.
There is the tremendous effect of realized and

accumulated facts "

" Wilkins," said Boon, " do not cuddle such
illusions. It is only in books and writings
that facts get assembled. People are not
grasping any comprehensive effects at all at
the present time. One day one monstrous
thing batters on our minds — a battleship is
blown up or a hundred villagers murdered —
and next day it is another. We do not so
much think about it as get mentally scarred. . . .
You can see in this spy hunt that is going on
and in the increasing denunciations and wrang-
ling of the papers how the strain is telling. . . •
Attention is overstrained and warms into
violence. People are reading no books. They
are following out no conclusions. No intel-
lectual force whatever is evident dominating
the situation. No organization is at work for a
sane peace. Where is any power for Pacificism ?
Where is any strength on its side ? America is
far too superior to do anything but trade, the
Liberals here sniff at each other and quarrel
gently but firmly on minor points, Mr. Norman
Angell advertises himself in a small magazine

THE WILD ASSES 265

and resents any other work for peace as though
it were an infringement of his copyright. Read
the daily papers ; go and listen to the talk of
people! Don't theorize, but watch. The
mind you will meet is not in the least like a
mind doing something slowly but steadfastly ;
far more is it like a mind being cruelly smashed
about and worried and sticking to its immediate
purpose with a narrower and narrower intensity.
Until at last it is a pointed intensity. It is
like a dying man strangling a robber in his
death-grip. . . . We shall beat them, but we
shall be dead beat doing it. . . . You see,
Wilkins, I have tried to think as you do. In
a sort of way this war has inverted our relations.
I say these things now because they force
themselves upon me. ..."

Wilkins considered for some moments.

" Even if nothing new appears," he said at
last, "the mere beating down and discredit-
ing of the militarist system leaves a world
released. . . ."

" But will it be broken down ? " said Boon.
" Think of the Osborns."

And then he cried in a voice of infinite
despair: "No! War is just the killing of
things and the smashing of things. And when

266 BOON

it is all over, then literature and civilization
will have to begin all over again. They will
have to begin lower down and against a
heavier load, and the days of our jesting are
done. The Wild Asses of the Devil are loose
and there is no restraining them. What is
the good, Wilkins, of pretending that the Wild
Asses are the instruments of Providence kicking
better than we know ? It is all evil. Evil.
An evil year. And I lie here helpless, spitting
and spluttering, with this chill upon my chest.
... I cannot say or write what I would. . . .
And in the days of my sunshine there were
things I should have written, things I should
have understood. ..."

§6

Afterwards Boon consoled himself very much
for a time by making further speculative
sketches of Mr. Osborn, as the embodiment of
the Heroic Spirit. I append one or two of the
least offensive of these drawings.

867

268

BOON

Fancy ekefeh of Mr. Osborn (the Heroic Spirit) compelling
his tailor to make him trousers for nothing.

My weapon with my tailor speaks,
It cuts my coat and sews my breeks.

THE WILD ASSES

269

Mr. Osborn, in a moment of virile indignation,
twiping St. Franci* of Assist one with a club.

270

BOON

The soul of Mr. Osborn doing a war dance
(as a Spartan Bed Indian) in order to
work itself up for a " Morning Post " article.

THE WILD ASSES

271

Mr. Osborn's dream of himself as a Prussian
Spartan refreshing himself with Hero's food
{fresh human liver) and drink (blood and
champagne) after a good Oo In at some
Pacificist softs.

Boon's pessimistic outlook on the war had
a profoundly depressing effect upon me. I
do all in my power to believe that Wilkins
is right, and that the hopelessness that
darkened Boon's last days was due to the
overshadowing of his mind by his illness.
It was not simply that he despaired of the
world at large j so far as I am concerned,
he pointed and barbed his opinion by show-
ing how inevitable it was that the existing
publishing and book trade would be shattered
to fragments. Adapted as I am now to the
necessities of that trade, incapable as I am
of the fresh exertions needed to bring me
into a successful relationship to the unknown
exigencies of the future, the sense of com-
plete personal ruin mingled with and intensi-
fied the vision he imposed upon me of a
world laid waste. I lay awake through
long stretches of the night contemplating

272

THE WILD ASSES 273

now my own life, no longer in its first vigour,
pinched by harsh necessities and the fiercer
competition of a young and needy generation,
and now all life with its habits and traditions
strained and broken. My daily fatigues at
drill and the universal heavy cold in the head
that has oppressed all Britain this winter
almost more than the war, have added their
quota to my nightly discomfort. And when
at last I have slept I have been oppressed
with peculiar and melancholy dreams.

One is so vividly in my mind that I am
obliged to tell it here, although I am doubtful
whether, except by a very extreme stretching
of the meaning of words, we can really
consider it among the Remains of George
Boon.

It was one of those dreams of which the
scenery is not so much a desolate place
as desolation itself, and I was there toiling
up great steepnesses with a little box of
something in my hand. And I knew, in that
queer confused way that is peculiar to dreams,
that I was not myself, but that I was the
Author who is the hero of the Wild Asses of
the Devil, and also that I was neither he nor
I, but all sorts of authors, the spirit of author-

18

274 BOON

ship, no Author in particular but the Author

at large, an<Lthat, since the melancholy devil

had deserted me — he had sneaked off Heaven

knows whither — it rested with me and with

me alone to discover and catch and send

out of this tormented world those same

Wild Asses of the Devil of which you have

read. And so I had salt in my box, Attic

Salt, a precious trust, the one thing in all the

universe with which I could subdue them.

And then suddenly there I was amidst all

those very asses of which I have told you.

There they were all about me, and they were

more wild and horrible than I can describe

to you. It was not that they were horrible

in any particular way, they* were just horrible,

and they kicked up far over head, and leapt

and did not even seem to trouble to elude

my poor ineffectual efforts to get within

salting distance of them. I toiled and I

pursued amidst mad mountains that were

suddenly marble flights of stairs that sloped'

and slid me down to precipices over which

I floated ; and then we were in soft places

knee-deep in blood-red mud ; and then

they were close to my face, eye to eye,

enormous revolving eyes, like the lanterns

THE WILD ASSES 275

of lighthouses ; and then they swept away,
and always I grew smaller and feebler
and more breathless, and always they grew
larger, until only their vast legs danced about
me on the sward, and all the rest was hidden.
And all the while I was tugging at my box
of Attic Salt, to get it open, to get a pinch.
Suddenly I saw they were all coming down
upon me, and all the magic salt I had was
in the box that would not open. . . .

I saw the sward they trampled, and it
was not sward, it was living beings, men
hurt by dreadful wounds, and poor people
who ran in streaming multitudes under
the beating hoofs, and a lichenous growth
of tender things and beautiful and sweet
and right things on which they beat, splash-
ing it all to blood and dirt. I could not
open my box. I could not open my box.
And a voice said : " Your box ! Your box !
Laugh at them for the fools they are, and
at the salt sting of laughter back they will
fly to hell ! "

But I could not open my box, for I
thought of my friends' sons and dear friends
of my own, and there was no more spirit
in me. "We cannot laugh!" I cried.

276 BOON

ti

We cannot laugh ! Another generation !
Another generation may have the heart to
do what we cannot do."

And the, voice said : " Courage ! Only
your poor courage can save us ! "

But in my dream I could do no more
than weep pitifully and weep, and when I
woke up my eyes were wet with tears.

CHAPTER THE TENTH

The Story of the Last Trump

§1

" After this war," said Wilkins, " after
its revelation of horrors and waste and
destruction, it is impossible that people will
tolerate any longer that system of diplo-
macy and armaments and national aggression
that has brought this catastrophe upon
mankind. This is the war that will end
war."

" Osborn," said Boon, " Osborn."

" But after all the world has seen ! "

" The world doesn't see," said Boon. . . .
Boon's story of the Last Trump may
well come after this to terminate my book.
It has been by no means an easy task to
assemble the various portions of this manu-
script. It is written almost entirely in

277

278 BOON

pencil, and sometimes the writing is so bad
as to be almost illegible. But here at last
it is, as complete, I think, as Boon meant
it to be. It is his epitaph upon his dream
of the Mind of the Race.

§2

The Story of the Last Trump

The story of the Last Trump begins in
Heaven and it ends in all sorts of places
round about the world. . . .

Heaven, you must know, is a kindly place,
and the blessed ones do not go on for ever
singing Alleluia, whatever you may have
been told. For they too are finite creatures,
and must be fed with their eternity in little
bits, as one feeds a chick or a child. So
that there are mornings and changes and
freshness, there is time to condition their
lives. And the children are still children,
gravely eager about their playing and ready
always for new things ; just children they are,
but blessed as you see them in the pictures
beneath the careless feet of the Lord God.
And one of these blessed children routing
about in an attic — for Heaven is, of course,

279

280 BOON

full of the most heavenly attics, seeing that
it has children — came upon a number of
instruments stored away, and laid its little
chubby hands upon them. . . .

Now indeed I cannot tell what these in-
struments were, for to do so would be to
invade mysteries. . . . But one I may tell
of, and that was a great brazen trumpet
which the Lord God had made when He
made the world— for the Lord God finishes
all His jobs — to blow when the time for our
Judgement came round. And He had made
it and left it ; there it was, and everything
was settled exactly as the Doctrine of Pre-
destination declares. And this blessed child
conceived one of those unaccountable passions
of childhood for its smoothness and brassi-
ness, and he played with it and tried to blow
it, and trailed it about with him out of the
attic into the gay and golden streets, and,
after many fitful wanderings, to those celes-
tial battlements of crystal of which you have
doubtless read. And there the blessed child
fell to counting the stars, and forgot all
about the Trumpet beside him until a
flourish of his elbow sent it over. . . .

Down fell the trump, spinning as it fell,

THE LAST TRUMP 281

and for a day or so, which seemed but
moments in heaven, the blessed child watched
its fall until it was a glittering little speck of
brightness. . . .

When it looked a second time the trump
was gone. . . .

I do not know what happened to that
child when at last it was time for Judgement
Day and that shining trumpet was missed.
I know that Judgement Day is long over-
passed, because of the wickedness of the
world ; I think perhaps it was in a.d. 1000
when the expected Day should have dawned
that never came, but no other heavenly
particulars do I know at all, because now
my scene changes to the narrow ways of
this Earth. . . .

And the Prologue in Heaven ends.

§3

And now the scene is a dingy little shop
in Caledonian Market, where things of an
incredible worthlessness lie in wait for such
as seek after an impossible cheapness. In
the window, as though it had always been
there and never anywhere else, lies a long,
battered, discoloured trumpet of brass that
no prospective purchaser has ever been able
to sound. In it mice shelter, and dust and
fluff have gathered after the fashion of this
world. The keeper of the shop is a very old
man, and he bought the shop long ago, but
already this trumpet was there ; he has no
idea whence it came, nor its country of origin,
nor anything about it. But once in a moment
of enterprise that led to nothing he decided
to call it an Ancient Ceremonial Shawm,
though he ought to have known that what-
ever a shawm may be the last thing it was

282

THE LAST TRUMP 283

likely to be is a trumpet, seeing that they
are always mentioned together. And above
it hung concertinas and melodeons and
cornets and tin whistles and mouth-organs
and all that rubbish of musical instruments
which delight the hearts of the poor. Until
one day two blackened young men from the
big motor works in the Pansophist Road
stood outside the window and argued.

They argued about these instruments in
stock and how you made these instruments
sound, because they were fond of argument,
and one asserted and the other denied that
he could make every instrument in the place
sound a note. And the argument rose high,
and led to a bet.

" Supposing, of course, that the instru-
ment is in order," said Hoskin, who was
betting he could.

" That's understood," said Briggs.

And then they called as witnesses certain
other young and black and greasy men in
the same employment, and after much argu-
ment and discussion that lasted through
the afternoon, they went in to the little
old dealer about teatime, just as he was
putting a blear-eyed, stinking paraffin-lamp

284 BOON

to throw an unfavourable light upon his
always very unattractive window. And after
great difficulty they arranged that for the
sum of one shilling, paid in advance, Hoskin
should have a try at every instrument in the
shop that Briggs chose to indicate.

And the trial began.

The third instrument that was pitched
upon by Briggs for the trial was the strange
trumpet that lay at the bottom of the window,
the trumpet that you, who have read the
Introduction, know was the trumpet for the
Last Trump. And Hoskin tried and tried
again, and then, blowing desperately, hurt
his ears. But he could get no sound from
the trumpet. Then he examined the trumpet
more carefully and discovered the mice and
fluff and other things in it, and demanded
that it should be cleaned ; and the old dealer,
nothing loth, knowing they were used to
automobile-horns and such-like instruments,
agreed to let them clean it on condition that
they left it shiny. So the young men, after
making a suitable deposit (which, as you
shall hear, was presently confiscated), went
off with the trumpet, proposing to clean it
next day at the works and polish it with the

THE LAST TRUMP 285

peculiarly excellent brass polish employed
upon the honk-honk horns of the firm. And
this they did, and Hoskin tried again.

But he tried in vain. Whereupon there
arose a great argument about the trumpet,
whether it was in order or not, whether
it was possible for any one to sound it. For
if not, then clearly it was outside the con-
dition of the bet.

Others among the young men tried it,
including two who played wind instruments
in a band and were musically knowing men.
After their own failure they were strongly
on the side of Hoskin and strongly against
Briggs, and most of the other young men
were of the same opinion.

" Not a bit of it," said Briggs, who was a
man of resource. " I'll show you that it
can be sounded."

And taking the instrument in his hand,
he went towards a peculiarly powerful foot
blow-pipe that stood at the far end of the
toolshed. " Good old Briggs ! " said one of
the other young men, and opinion veered
about.

Briggs removed the blow-pipe from its
bellows and tube, and then adjusted the

286 BOON

tube very carefully to the mouthpiece of
the trumpet. Then with great deliberation
he produced a piece of bees-waxed string
from a number of other strange and filthy
contents in his pocket and tied the tube
to the mouthpiece. And then he began to
work the treadle of the bellows.

" Good old Briggs ! " said the one who
had previously admired him.

And then something incomprehensible
happened.

,It was a flash. Whatever else it was, it
was a flash. And a sound that seemed to
coincide exactly with the flash.

Afterwards the young men agreed to it
that the trumpet blew to bits. It blew to
bits and vanished, and they were all flung
upon their faces — not backward, be it noted,
but on their faces — and Briggs was stunned
and scared. The toolshed windows were
broken and the various apparatus and cars
around were much displaced, and no traces
of the trumpet were ever discovered.

That last particular puzzled and per-
plexed poor Briggs very much. It puzzled
and perplexed him the more because he had
had an impression, so extraordinary, so

THE LAST TRUMP 287

incredible, that he was never able to describe
it to any other living person. But his
impression was this : that the flash that
came with the sound came, not from the
trumpet but to it, that it smote down to it
and took it, and that its shape was in the
exact likeness of a hand and arm of fire.

§4

And that was not all, that was not the only
strange thing about the disappearance of
that battered trumpet. There was some-
thing else, even more difficult to describe,
an effect as though for one instant something
opened. . . .

The young men who worked with Hoskin
and Briggs had that clearness of mind which
comes of dealing with machinery, and they
all felt this indescribable something else, as
if for an instant the world wasn't the world,
but something lit and wonderful, larger

This is what one of them said of it.

" I felt," he said, " just for a minute —
as though I was blown to Kingdom Come."

" It is just how it took me," said another.
" ' Lord,' I says, ' here's Judgement Day ! '
and then there I was sprawling among the
files. . . ."

But none of the others felt that they could
say anything more definite than that.

888

§5

Moreover, there was a storm. All over
the world there was a storm that puzzled
meteorology, a moment's gale that left the
atmosphere in a state of wild swaygog,
rains, tornadoes, depressions, irregularities
for weeks. News came of it from all the
quarters of the earth.

All over China, for example, that land of
cherished graves, there was a duststorm,
dust leaped into the air. A kind of earth-
quake shook Europe — an earthquake that
seemed to have at heart the peculiar in-
terests of Mr. Algernon Ashton ; everywhere
it cracked mausoleums and shivered the pave-
ments of cathedrals, swished the flower-beds
of cemeteries, and tossed tombstones aside.
A crematorium in Texas blew up. The sea
was greatly agitated, and the beautiful har-
bour of Sydney, in Australia, was seen to be

19 289

■

290 BOON

littered with sharks floating upside down
in manifest distress. . . .

And all about the world a sound was
heard like the sound of a trumpet instantly
cut short.

§6

But this much is only the superficial dressing
of the story. The reality is something differ-
ent. It is this : that in an instant, and for
an instant, the dead lived, and all that are
alive in the world did for a moment see the
Lord God and all His powers, His hosts of
angels, and all His array looking down upon
them. They saw Him as one sees by a flash of
lightning in the darkness, and then instantly
the world was opaque again, limited, petty,
habitual. That is the tremendous reality
of this story. Such glimpses have happened
in individual cases before. The Lives of the
saints abound in them. Such a glimpse it
was that came to Devindranath Tagore
upon the burning ghat at Benares. But
this was not an individual but a world
experience ; the flash came to every one.
Not always was it quite the same, and
thereby the doubter found his denials, when

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292 BOON

presently a sort of discussion broke out in
the obscurer Press. For this one testified
that it seemed that " One stood very near
to me," and another saw " all the hosts of
heaven flame up towards the Throne."

And there were others who had a vision
of brooding watchers, and others who ima-
gined great sentinels before a veiled figure,
and some one who felt nothing more divine
than a sensation of happiness and freedom
such as one gets from a sudden burst of sun-
shine in the spring. ... So that one is
forced to believe that something more than
wonderfully wonderful, something altogether
strange, was seen, an d that all these various
things that people thought they saw were
only interpretations drawn from their experi-
ences and their imaginations. It was a
light, it was beauty, it was high and solemn,
it made this world seem a flimsy trans-
parency. . . .

Then it had vanished. . . .

And people were left with the question
of what they had seen, and just how much
it mattered,

§7

A little old lady sat by the fire in a small
sitting-room in West Kensington. Her cat
was in her lap, her spectacles were on her
nose ; she was reading the morning's paper,
and beside her, on a little occasional table,
was her tea and a buttered muffin. She had
finished the crimes and she was reading
about the Royal Family. When she had
read all there was to read about the Royal
Family, she put down the paper, deposited
the cat on the hearthrug, and turned to her
tea. She had poured out her first cup and
she had just taken up a quadrant of muffin
when the trump and the flash came. Through
its instant duration she remained motionless
with the quadrant of muffin poised halfway
to her mouth. Then very slowly she put
the morsel down.

" Now what was that ? " she said.

She surveyed the cat, but the cat was quite

293

294 BOON

calm. Then she looked very, very hard at
her lamp. It was a patent safety lamp, and
had always behaved very well. Then she
stared at the window, but the curtains were
drawn and everything was in order.

" One might think I was going to be ill,"
she said, and resumed her toast.

§8

Not far away from this old lady, not more
than three-quarters of a mile at most, sat
Mr. Parchester in his luxurious study, writing
a perfectly beautiful, sustaining sermon about
the need of Faith in God. He was a hand-
some, earnest, modern preacher, he was
rector of one of our big West End churches,
and he had amassed a large, fashionable
congregation. Every Sunday, and at con-
venient intervals during the week, he fought
against Modern Materialism, Scientific Edu-
cation, Excessive Puritanism, Pragmatism,
Doubt, Levity, Selfish Individualism, Further
Relaxation of the Divorce Laws, all the
Evils of our Time— and anything else that
was unpopular. He believed quite simply,
he said, in all the old, simple, kindly
things. He had the face of a saint,
but he had rendered this generally accept-
able by growing side whiskers. And

395

296 BOON

nothing could tame the beauty of his
voice.

He was an enormous asset in the spiritual
life of the metropolis— to give it no harsher
name— and his fluent periods had restored
faith and courage to many a poor soul
hovering on the brink of the dark river of
thought. ...

And just as beautiful Christian maidens
played a wonderful part in the last days of
Pompeii, in winning proud Roman hearts
to a hated and despised faith, so Mr. Par-
chester's naturally graceful gestures, and his
simple, melodious, trumpet voice won back
scores of our half -pagan rich women to church
attendance and the social work of which his
church was the centre. . . .

And now by the light of an exquisitely
shaded electric lamp he was writing this
sermon of quiet, confident belief (with occa-
sional hard smacks, perfect stingers in fact,
at current unbelief and rival leaders of
opinion) in the simple, divine faith of our
fathers. . . .

When there came this truncated trump
and this vision. . . .

§9

Of all the innumerable multitudes who for
the infinitesimal fraction of a second had
this glimpse of the Divinity, none were so
blankly and profoundly astonished as Mr.
Parchester. For — it may be because of his
subtly spiritual nature — he saw, and seeing
believed. He dropped his pen and let it
roll across his manuscript, he sat stunned,
every drop of blood fled from his face and
his lips and his eyes dilated.

While he had just been writing and arguing
about God, there was God !

The curtain had been snatched back for an
instant ; it had fallen again ; but his mind
had taken a photographic impression of
everything that he had seen — the grave
presences, the hierarchy, the effulgence, the
vast concourse, the terrible, gentle eyes.
He felt it, as though the vision still con-
tinued, behind the bookcases, behind the

297

298 BOON

pictured wall and the curtained window :
even now there was judgement !

For quite a long time he sat, incapable
of more than apprehending this supreme
realization. His hands were held out limply
upon the desk before him. And then very
slowly his staring eyes came back to imme-
diate things, and fell upon the scattered
manuscript on which he had been engaged.
He read an unfinished sentence and slowly
recovered its intention. As he did so, a pic-
ture of his congregation came to him as he
saw it from the pulpit during his evening
sermon, as he had intended to see it on the
Sunday evening that was at hand, with Lady
Rupert in her sitting and Lady Blex in hers
and Mrs. Munbridge, the rich and in her
Jewish way very attractive Mrs. Munbridge,
running them close in her adoration, and
each with one or two friends they had brought
to adore him, and behind them the Hexhams
and the Wassinghams, and behind them
others and others and others, ranks and ranks
of people, and the galleries on either side
packed with worshippers of a less dominant
class, and the great organ and his magnificent
choir waiting to support him and supple-

THE LAST TRUMP 299

ment him, and the great altar to the left of
him, and the beautiful new Lady Chapel,
done by Roger Fry and Wyndham Lewis
and all the latest people in Art, to the right.
He thought of the listening multitude, seen
through the haze of the thousand electric
candles, and how he had planned the para-
graphs of his discourse so that the notes of
his beautiful voice should float slowly down,
like golden leaves in autumn, into the smooth
tarn of their silence, word by word, phrase
by phrase, until he came to —

"Now to God the Father, God the
Son "

And all the time he knew that Lady
Blex would watch his face and Mrs. Mun-
bridge, leaning those graceful shoulders of
hers a little forward, would watch his
face. . . .

Many people would watch his face.

All sorts of people would come to Mr.
Parchester's services at times. Once it was
said Mr. Balfour had come. Just to hear
him. After his sermons, the strangest people
would come and make confessions in the
beautifully furnished reception-room beyond
the vestry. All sorts of people. Once or

300 BOON

twice he had asked people to come and
listen to him ; and one of them had been
a very beautiful woman. And often he had
dreamt of the people who might come :
prominent people, influential people, re-
markable people. But never before had it
occurred to Mr. Parchester that, a little
hidden from the rest of the congregation,
behind the thin veil of this material world,
there was another auditorium. And that God
also, God also, watched his face.

And watched him through and through.

Terror seized upon Mr. Parchester.

He stood up, as though Divinity had
come into the room before him. He was
trembling. He felt smitten and about to
be smitten.

He perceived that it was hopeless to
try and hide what he had written, what
he had thought, the unclean egotism he
had become.

" I did not know," he said at last.

The click of the door behind him warned
him that he was not alone. He turned
and saw Miss Skelton, his typist, for it was
her time to come for his manuscript and
copy it out in the specially legible type

THE LAST TRUMP 301

he used. For a moment he stared at her
strangely.

She looked at him with those deep, adoring
eyes of hers. " Am I too soon, sir ? " she
asked in her slow, unhappy voice, and
seemed prepared for a noiseless departure.

He did not answer immediately. Then
he said : " Miss Skelton, the Judgement of
God is close at hand ! "

And seeing she stood perplexed, he said —

" Miss Skelton, how can you expect me
to go on acting and mouthing this Tosh
when the Sword of Truth hangs over us ? "

Something in her face made him ask a
question.

" Did you see anything ? " he asked.

" I thought it was because I was rubbing
my eyes."

" Then indeed there is a God ! And He is
watching us now. And all this about us,
this sinful room, this foolish costume, this
preposterous life of blasphemous preten-
sion 1 "

He stopped short, with a kind of horror
on his face.

With a hopeless gesture he rushed by her.
He appeared wild-eyed upon the landing

302 BOON

before his manservant, who was carrying
a scuttle of coal upstairs.

" Brompton," he said, " what are you
doing ? "

*€oal, sir."

" Put it down, man 1 " he said. " Are
you not an immortal soul ? God is here !
As close as my hand ! Repent ! Turn to
Him! The Kingdom of Heaven is at
hand ! "

§10

Now if you are a policeman perplexed
by a sudden and unaccountable collision
between a taxicab and an electric standard,
complicated by a blinding flash and a sound
like an abbreviated trump from an auto-
mobile horn, you do not want to be bothered
by a hatless clerical gentleman suddenly
rushing out of a handsome private house and
telling you that " the Kingdom of Heaven
is at hand I " You are respectful to him
because it is the duty of a policeman to be
respectful to Gentlemen, but you say to
him, " Sorry I can't attend to that now, sir.
One thing at a time. I've got this little
accident to see to." And if he persists in
dancing round the gathering crowd and com-
ing at you again, you say : " I'm afraid I
must ask you just to get away from here,
sir. You aren't being a 'elp, sir." And if,
on the other hand, you are a well-trained

304 BOON

clerical gentleman, who knows his way about
in the world, you do not go on pestering a
policeman on duty after he has said that,
even although you think God is looking at
you and Judgement is close at hand. You
turn away and go on, a little damped, look-
ing for some one else more likely to pay
attention to your tremendous tidings.

And so it happened to the Reverend
Mr. Parchester.

He experienced a curious little recession
of confidence. He went on past quite a
number of people without saying anything
further, and the next person he accosted
was a flower-woman sitting by her basket
at the corner of Chexington Square. She
was unable to stop him at once when he
began to talk to her because she was tying
up a big bundle of white chrysanthemums
and had an end of string behind her teeth.
And her daughter who stood beside her was
the sort of girl who wouldn't say " Bo ! "
to a goose.

" Do you know, my good woman," said
Mr. Parchester, " that while we poor creatures
of earth go about our poor business here,
while we sin and blunder and follow every

THE LAST TRUMP 305

sort of base end, close to us, above us, around
us, watching us, judging us, are God and
His holy angels ? I have had a vision, and
I am not the only one. I have seen. We
are in the Kingdom of Heaven now and
here, and Judgement is all about us now !
Have you seen nothing ? No light ? No
sound ? No warning ? "

By this time the old flower-seller had
finished her bunch of flowers and could
speak. " I saw it," she said. " And Mary —
she saw it."

" Well ? " said Mr. Parchester.

" But, Lord ! It don't mean nothing ! "
said the old flower-seller.

20

§11

At that a kind of chill fell upon Mr. Par-
chester. He went on across Chexington
Square by his own inertia.

He was still about as sure that he had seen
God as he had been in his study, but now
he was no longer sure that the world would
believe that he had. He felt perhaps that
this idea of rushing out to tell people was
precipitate and inadvisable. After all, a
priest in the Church of England is only one
unit in a great machine ; and in a world-
wide spiritual crisis it should be the task of
that great machine to act as one resolute
body. This isolated crying aloud in the
street was unworthy of a consecrated priest.
It was a dissenting kind of thing to do.
A vulgar individualistic screaming. He
thought suddenly that he would go and tell
his Bishop— the great Bishop Wampach.
He called a taxicab, and within half an hour

306

THE LAST TRUMP 307

he was in the presence of his commanding
officer. It was an extraordinarily difficult
and painful interview. . . .

You see, Mr. Parchester believed. The
Bishop impressed him as being quite angrily
resolved not to believe. And for the first
time in his career Mr. Parchester realized
just how much jealous hostility a beauti-
ful, fluent, and popular preacher may
arouse in the minds of the hierarchy.
It wasn't, he felt, a conversation. It was
like flinging oneself into the paddock
of a bull that has long been anxious to
gore one.

" Inevitably," said the Bishop, " this
theatricalism, this star-turn business, with
its extreme spiritual excitements, its exagger-
ated soul crises and all the rest of it, leads to
such a breakdown as afflicts you. Inevit-
ably ! You were at least wise to come to
me. I can see you are only in the beginning
of your trouble, that already in your mind
fresh hallucinations are gathering to over-
whelm you, voices, special charges and mis-
sions, strange revelations. ... I wish I had
the power to suspend you right away, to
send you into retreat. . . ."

308 BOON

Mr. Parchester made a violent effort to
control himself. " But I tell you," he said,
" that I saw God ! " He added, as if to
reassure himself : " More plainly, more cer-
tainly, than I see you."

" Of course," said the Bishop, " this is
how strange new sects come into existence ;
this is how false prophets spring out of the
bosom of the Church. Loose-minded, excit-
able men of your stamp "

Mr. Parchester, to his own astonish-
ment, burst into tears. " But I tell you,"
he wept, " He is there. I have seen. I
know."

" Don't talk such nonsense ! " said the
Bishop. " There is no one here but you
and I ! "

Mr. Parchester expostulated. " But," he
protested, " He is omnipresent."

The Bishop controlled an expression of
impatience. "It is characteristic of your
condition," he said, " that you are unable
to distinguish between a matter of fact and
a spiritual truth. . . . Now listen to me.
If you value your sanity and public decency
and the discipline of the Church, go right
home from here and go to bed. Send for

THE LAST TRUMP 309

Broadhays, who will prescribe a safe seda-
tive. And read something calming and
graceful and purifying. For my own part,
I should be disposed to recommend the ' Life
of Saint Francis of Assisi.' ..."

§12

Unhappily Mr. Parchester did not go home.
He went out from the Bishop's residence
stunned and amazed, and suddenly upon
his desolation came the thought of Mrs.
Munbridge. . . .

She would understand. . . .

He was shown up to her own little sitting-
room. She had already gone up to her room
to dress, but when she heard that he
had called, and wanted very greatly to see
her, she slipped on a loose, beautiful tea-
gown neglige thing, and hurried to him.
He tried to tell her everything, but she only
kept saying " There ! there ! " She was
sure he wanted a cup of tea, he looked so
pale and exhausted. She rang to have the
tea equipage brought back ; she put the
dear saint in an arm-chair by the fire ; she
put cushions about him, and ministered to
him. And when she began partially to

310

THE LAST TRUMP 311

comprehend what he had experienced, she
suddenly realized that she too had experi-
enced it. That vision had been a brain-
wave between their two linked and sym-
pathetic brains. And that thought glowed
in her as she brewed his tea with her own
hands. He had been weeping ! How ten-
derly he felt all these things ! He was more
sensitive than a woman. What madness
to have expected understanding from the
Bishop ! But that was just like his un-
worldliness. He was not fit to take care of
himself. A wave of tenderness carried her
away. " Here is your tea ! " she said, bend-
ing over him, and fully conscious of her
fragrant warmth and sweetness, and sud-
denly, she could never afterwards explain
why she was so, she was moved to kiss him
on his brow. . . .

How indescribable is the comfort of a
true-hearted womanly friend ! The safety
of it ! The consolation ! . . .

About half-past seven that evening Mr.
Parchester returned to his own home, and
Brompton admitted him. Brompton was
relieved to find his employer looking quite
restored and ordinary again. " Brompton,"

312 BOON

said Mr. Parchester, " I will not have the
usual dinner to-night. Just a single mutton
cutlet and one of those quarter-bottles of
Perrier Jouet on a tray in my study. I
shall have to finish my sermon to-night."
(And he had promised Mrs. Munbridge
he would preach that sermon specially for
her.)

§13

And as It was with Mr. Parchester and
Brompton and Mrs. Munbridge, and the
taxi-driver and the policeman and the little
old lady and the automobile mechanics
and Mr. Parchester's , secretary and the
Bishop, so it was with all the rest of the
world. If a thing is sufficiently strange and
great no one will perceive it. Men will go
on in their own ways though one rose from
the dead to tell them that the Kingdom of
Heaven was at hand, though the Kingdom
itself and all its glory became visible, blinding
their eyes. They and their ways are one.
Men will go on in their ways as rabbits will
go on feeding in their hutches within a
hundred yards of a battery of artillery. For
rabbits are rabbits, and made to eat and
breed, and men are human beings and
creatures of habit and custom and prejudice ;
and what has made them, what will judge

313

314 BOON

them, what will destroy them — they may turn
their eyes to it at times as the rabbits will
glance at the concussion of the guns, but it
will never draw them away from eating
their lettuce and sniffing after their does.

§14

There was something of invalid peevish-
ness even in the handwriting of Boon's
last story, the Story of the Last
Trump.

Of course, I see exactly what Boon is
driving at in this fragment.

The distresses of the war had for a time
broken -down his faith in the Mind of the
Race, and so he mocked at the idea that under
any sort of threat or warning whatever
men's minds can move out of the grooves
in which they run. And yet in happier
moods that was his own idea, and my belief
in it came from him.. That he should, in
his illness, fall away from that saving confi-
dence which he could give to me, and that
he should die before his courage returned,
seems just a part of the inexplicable tragedy
of life. Because clearly this end of the Story
of the Last Trump is forced and false, is

315

316 BOON

unjust to life. I know how feebly we appre-
hend things, I know how we forget, but
because we forget it does not follow that
we never remember, because we fail to appre-
hend perfectly it does not follow that we
have no understanding. And so I feel that
the true course of the Story of the Last
Trump should have been far larger and much
more wonderful and subtle than Boon made
it. That instant vision of God would not
have been dismissed altogether. People
might have gone on, as Boon tells us they
went on, but they would have been haunted
nevertheless by a new sense of deep, tremen-
dous things. . . .

Cynicism is humour in ill-health. It would
have been far more difficult to tell the story
of how a multitude of common-place people
were changed by a half-dubious perception
that God was indeed close at hand to them,
a perception that they would sometimes
struggle with and deny, sometimes realize
overwhelmingly ; it would have been a
beautiful, pitiful, wonderful story, and it
may be if Boon had lived he would have
written it. He could have written it. But
he was too ill for that much of writing,

THE LAST TRUMP 317

and the tired pencil turned to the easier
course. . . .

I can't believe after all I know of him,
and particularly after the intimate talk
I have repeated, that he would have re-
mained in this mood. He would, I am
certain, have altered the Story of the Last
Trump. He must have done so.

And so, too, about this war, this dreadful
outbreak of brutish violence which has
darkened all our lives, I do not think he
would have remained despairful. As his
health mended, as the braveries of spring
drew near, he would have risen again to the
assurance he gave me that the Mind is im-
mortal and invincible.

Of course there is no denying the evil,
the black evils of this war ; many of us are
impoverished and ruined, many of us are
wounded, almost all of us have lost friends
and suffered indirectly in a hundred ways.
And all that is going on yet. The black
stream of consequence will flow for centuries.
But all this multitudinous individual un-
happiness is still compatible with a great
progressive movement in the general mind.
Being wounded and impoverished, being

318 BOON

hurt and seeing things destroyed, is as much
living and learning as anything else in the
world. The tremendous present disaster of
Europe may not be, after all, a disaster for
mankind. Horrible possibilities have to be
realized, and they can be realized only by
experience ; complacencies, fatuities have
to be destroyed ; we have to learn and
relearn what Boon once called " the bitter
need for honesty." We must see these
things from the standpoint of the Race
Life, whose days are hundreds of years. . . .
Nevertheless, such belief cannot alter for
me the fact that Boon is dead and our
little circle is scattered. I feel that no
personal comfort nor any further happiness
of the mind remains in store for me. My
duties as his literary executor still give me
access to the dear old house and the garden
of our security, and, in spite of a considerable
coolness between myself and Mrs. Boon —
who would willingly have all this material
destroyed and his reputation rest upon his
better-known works — I make my duty my
excuse to go there nearly every day and
think. I am really in doubt about many
matters. I cannot determine, for example,

THE LAST TRUMP 319

whether it may not be possible to make
another volume from the fragments still
remaining over after this one. There are
great quantities of sketches, several long
pieces of Vers Libre, the story of " Jane in
Heaven," the draft of a novel. And so I go
there and take out the papers and fall into
fits of thinking. I turn the untidy pages
and think about Boon and of all the stream
of nonsense and fancy that was so much
more serious to him and to me than the
serious business of life. I go there, I know,
very much as a cat hangs about its home
after its people have departed— that is to
say, a little incredulously and with the gleam
of a reasonless hope. . . .

There must, I suppose, come a limit to
these visitations, and I shall have to go about
my own business. I can see in Mrs. Boon's
eye that she will presently demand con-
clusive decisions. In a world that has grown
suddenly chilly and lonely I know I must
go on with my work under difficult and novel
conditions (and now well into the routines
of middle age) as if there were no such things
as loss and disappointment. I am, I learned
long ago, an uncreative, unimportant man.

320 BOON

And yet, I suppose, I do something; I
count ; it is better that I should help than
not in the great task of literature, the great
task of becoming the thought and the
expressed intention of the race, the task
of taming violence, organizing the aim-
less, destroying error, the task of waylaying
the Wild Asses of the Devil and sending
them back to Hell. It does not matter
how individually feeble we writers and dis-
seminators are ; we have to hunt the Wild
Asses. As the feeblest puppy has to bark
at cats and burglars. And we have to do
it because we know, in spite of the darkness,
the wickedness, the haste and hate, we
know in our hearts, though no momentary
trumpeting has shown it to us, that judge-
ment is all about us and God stands close
at hand.

Yes, we go on.

But I wish that George Boon were still
in the world with me, and I wish that he
could have written a different ending to the
Story of the Last Trump.

Printed in Qreat Britain by
UHWIH BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE QREBHAM PBBSS, WOKUJQ AKD LONDON

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