This and that and the other

THIS AND THAT AND
THE OTHER

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME

ON NOTHING AND KINDRED SUBJECTS
ON EVERYTHING
ON SOMETHING

FIRST AND LAST

THIS AND THAT AND
THE OTHER

BY
H. BELLOC

METHUEN & CO. LTD.

36 ESSEX STREET W.G,

LONDON

First Published in 79/2

TO

EVAN CHARTERIS

CONTENTS

PAGE

ON ATHEISM ...... i

ON FAME ...... 7

ON REST . . .. . . . n

ON DISCOVERY . . .16

ON INNS . . . . . .22

ON Rows . . . . . .32

THE PLEASANT PLACE . . . .38

ON OMENS . . . . . -55

THE BOOK ...... 61

THE SERVANTS OF THE RICH . . - 73

THE JOKE ...... 80

THE SPY ...... 89

THE YOUNG PEOPLE . . . -95

ETHANDUNE . . . . . . 101

THE DEATH OF ROBERT THE STRONG . .107

THE CROOKED STREETS . . . .116

THE PLACE APART . . . . .123

THE EBRO PLAIN . . . . .130

THE LITTLE RIVER . . . . -137

This and That and the Other

I'AGE

SOME LETTERS OF SHAKESPEARE'S TIME . . 144

ON ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE GREAT . .154

ON LYING . . . . . .162

THE DUPE . . . . . .168

THE LOVE OF ENGLAND . . . . 173

THE STORM . . . . . . 177

THE VALLEY . . . . . .184

A CONVERSATION IN ANDORRA . . .191

PARIS AND THE EAST .... 201

THE HUMAN CHARLATAN .... 209

THE BARBARIANS ..... 219

ON KNOWING THE PAST .... 228

THE HIGHER CRITICISM .... 238

THE FANATIC ..... 248

A LEADING ARTICLE .... 254

THE OBITUARY NOTICE .... 260

THE "MERRY ROME" COLUMN . . . 266

OPEN LETTER TO A YOUNG PARASITE . . 273

ON DROPPING ANCHOR 281

'

THIS AND THAT AND
THE OTHER

On Atheism ^^ ^> ^^ ^y ^y ^>

THE Atheist is he that has forgotten God.
He that denies God may do so in many
innocent ways, and is an Atheist in form, but
is not condemnable as such. Thus one man
will reason by contradiction that there can be
no God. If there were a God (says he), how
could such things be ? This man has not read
or does not know sufficient to his purpose, or
is not wide enough. His purpose is Truth, so
he is not to be condemned. Another will say,
" There is no God," meaning, " There is none
that I have heard called God " : as, the figure
of an old man ; some vengeful spirit ; an
absurdity taught him by fools ; and so forth.
Another also will say, " There is no God," as
he would say, " Thus do I solve this riddle ! "
He has played a game, coming to a conclusion
of logic, and supposes himself right by the

This and That and the Other

rules of the game. Nor is he more to be con-
demned than one who shall prove, not that
God is not, but that God is, by similar ways.
For though this last man proves truth, and
that first man falsehood, yet each is only con-
cerned with proving, and not with making
good or standing up for the Truth, so that it
shall be established. Neither would found in
the mind something unshakeable, but each
would rather bring a process to its conclusion
for neatness.

We call that man Atheist who, thinking or
unthinking, waking or sleeping, knows not
God ; and when it is brought to him that
either God is not or is, would act as though
the question mattered nothing. Such an
Atheist makes nothing of God's judgments
nor of his commands. He does not despise
them but will have them absent, as he will
have God absent also. Nor is he a rebel but
rather an absconder.

Of Atheism you may see that it is proper
to a society and not to a man, so that Atheists
are proper to an Atheist Commonwealth, and
this because we find God in mankind or lose
him there.

Rousseau would have no Atheist in the
Republic. All other opinion he thought toler-

On Atheism

able, but this intolerable because through it
was loosened every civil bond. But if a
Commonwealth be not Atheist no Atheist will
be within it, since it is through men and their
society that one man admits God. No one
quite lonely could understand or judge
whether of God's existence or of much lesser
things. A man quite lonely could not but
die long before he was a man grown. He
would have no speech or reason. Also a man
Atheist in a Commonwealth truly worshipping
would be abhorrent as a traitor with us and
would stand silent. How, then, would
Rousseau not tolerate the Atheist in his
Republic, seeing that if his Republic were
not Atheist no Atheist could be therein ? Of
this contradiction the solution is that false
doctrine of any kind is partially hidden and
striving in the minds of men before one man
shall become its spokesman. Now of false
doctrine when it is thus blind and under
water nothing can be either tolerated or pro-
scribed. The ill-ease of it is felt but no
magistrate can seize it anywhere. But when
one man brings it up to reason and arms it with
words, then has it been born (as it were) into
the world, and can be tried and judged, ac-
cepted or expelled.

3

This and That and the Other

No Commonwealth has long stood that was
Atheist, yet many have been Atheist a little
before they died : as some men lose the savour
of meats, and the colours and sounds of things
also a little before they die.

A Commonwealth fallen into this palsy sees
no merit in God's effect of Justice, but makes
a game of law. In peril, as in battle or ship-
wreck, each man will save himself. In com-
merce man will cozen man. The Common-
wealth grown Atheist lets the larger prey upon
the less, until all are eaten up.

They say that a man not having seen salt
or knowing that such a thing as salt might be
and even denying that salt could be (since he
had not seen it), might yet very livelily taste
the saltness of the sea. So it is with men who
still love Justice, though they have lost
Religion. For these men are angered by
evil-doing, and will risk their bodies in pity
and in indignation. They therefore truly
serve God in whose essence Justice resides,
and of whom the Effect in Society is Justice.
But what shall we say of a man who speaks
of salt as a thing well known, and yet finds
no division between his well and the water of
the sea ? And that is the Atheist case. When
men of a mean sinfulness purchase a seat of
4

On Atheism

judgment, and therein, while using the word
" God," care nothing for right but consider
the advantage of their aged limbs and bellies,
or of the fellow rich they drink with, then they
are Atheist indeed.

That Commonwealth also is Atheist in
which the rulers will use the fear of God for a
cheat, hoping thereby to make foolish men
work for them, or give up their goods, or
accept insult and tyranny. It is so ordered
that this trick most powerfully slings back
upon its authors, and that the populace are
now moved at last not by empty sentences
which have God's name in them, but by lively
devils. In the end of such cheats the rich
men who so lied are murdered and by a side
wind God comes to his own.

One came to a Courtier who had risen high
in the State by flattery and cowardice, but
who had a keen wit. To this Courtier he
propounded a certain scheme which would
betray the Commonwealth, and this the
Courtier agreed to. But when he had done
so he said : " Either God is or is not. If he is
not, why then we have chosen well."

This instance is a mark and Atheism is
judged by it. For if God is not, then all
falsehoods, though each prove the rest false,

This and That and the Other

are each true, and every evil is its own good,
and there is confusion everywhere. But if
God is, then the world can stand. Now that
the world does stand all men know and live
by, even those who, not in a form of words but
in the heart, deny its Grand Principle.

On Fame ^^ ^> ^^ «^y ^> *o

FAME 'is that repute among men which
gives us pleasure. It needs much repe-
tition, but also that repetition honourable. Of
all things desired Fame least fulfils the desire
for it ; for if Fame is to be very great a man
must be dead before it is more than a shoot ;
he therefore has not the enjoyment of it (as
it would seem). Again, Fame while a man lives
is always tarnished by falsehood ; for since
few can observe him, and less know him, he
must have Fame for work which he does not
do and forego Fame for work which he knows
deserves it.

Fame has no proper ending to it, when it is
first begun, as have things belonging to other
appetites, nor is any man satiated with it
at any time. Upon the contrary, the hunger
after it will lead a man forward madly always
to some sort of disaster, whether of disappoint-
ment in the soul, or of open dishonour.

Fame is not to be despised or trodden under
as a thing not to be sought, for no man is free

This and That and the Other

of the desire of it, nor can any man believe that
desire to be an imperfection in him unless he
desire at the same time something greater than
Fame, and even then there is a flavour of
Fame certain to attach to his achievement in
the greater thing. No one can say of Fame,
" I contemn it " ; as a man can say of titles-,
" I contemn them." Nor can any man say of
the love of Fame, " This is a thing I should cast
from me as evil," as a man may say of lust
when it is inordinate, that is, out of place.
Nor can any man say of Fame, " It is a little
thing," for if he says that he is less or more
than a man.

The love of Fame is the mobile of all great
work in which also man is in the image of
God, who not only created but took pleasure
in what he did and, as we know, is satisfied by
praise thereof.

In what way, then, shall men treat Fame ?
How shall they seek it, or hope to use it if
obtained? To these questions it is best
answered that a man should have for Fame
a natural appetite, not forced nor curiously
entertained ; it must be present in him if he
would do noble things. Yet if he makes the
Fame of those things, and not those things
themselves, his chief business, then not only
8

On Fame

will he pursue Fame to his hurt, but also Fame
will miss him. Though he should not disregard
it yet he must not pursue it to himself too
much, but he will rightly make of it in diffi-
cult times a great consolation.

When Fame comes upon a man well before
death then must he most particularly beware
of it, for is it then most dangerous. Neither
must he, having achieved it, relax effort nor
(a much greater peril) think he has done his
work because some Fame now attaches
thereto.

Some say that after a man has died the
spreading of his earthly Fame is still a pleasure
to him among greater scenes : but this is
doubtful. One thing is certain, Fame is en-
joyable in good things accomplished ; bitter,
noisome and poisonous in all other things —
whether it be the Fame of things thought to
be accomplished but not accomplished, or
Fame got by accident, or Fame for evil things
concealed because they are evil.

The judgment of Fame is this : That many
men having done great things of a good sort
have not Fame. And that many men have
Fame who have done but little things and
most of them evil. The virtue of Fame is
that it nourishes endeavour. The peril of

This and That and the Other

Fame is that it leads men towards itself, and
therefore into inanities and sheer loss. But
Fame has a fruit, which is a sort of satisfaction
coming from our communion with mankind.

They that believe they deserve Fame
though they lack it may be consoled in this :
that soon they shall be concerned with much
more lasting things, and things more im-
mediate and more true : just as a man who
misses some entertainment at a show will
console himself if he knows that shortly he
shall meet his love. They that have Fame
may correct its extravagances by the same
token : remembering that shortly they will
be so occupied that this earthly Fame of
theirs will seem a toy. Old men know this
well.

10

On Rest ^^ ^> -o> ^> ^^ ^> xc^

REST is not the conclusion of labour but
the recreation of power. It seems a
reward because it fulfils a need : but that
need being filled, Rest is but an extinction and
a nothingness. So we do not pray for Rest ;
but (in a just religion) we pray after this life
for refreshment, light and peace — not for
Rest.

Rest is only for a little while, as also is
labour only for a little while : each demand-
ing the other as a supplement ; yet is Rest
in some intervals a necessary ground for
seed, and without Rest to protect the sprout-
ing of the seed no good thing ever grew.

Of many follies in a Commonwealth concern-
ing Rest the chief is that Rest is not needed for
all effort therein. Thus one man at leisure will
obtain work of another for many days without
a sufficiency of Rest for that other and think
to profit by this. So he may : but he profits
singly, and when many rich do so by the
poor it is like one eating his own flesh, since

This and That and the Other

the withdrawal of Rest from those that labour
will soon eat up the Commonwealth itself.

Much that men do with most anxiety is for
the establishment of Rest. Wise men have
often ordered gardens carefully for years, in
order to enjoy Rest at last. Beds also are
devised best when they give the deepest
interval of repose and are surrounded by
artifice with prolonged silence made of quiet
strong wood and well curtained from the
morning light. It is so with rooms removed
from the other rooms of a house, and with days
set apart from labour, and with certain kinds
of companionship.

Undoubtedly the regimen of Rest for men is
that of sleep, and sleep is a sort of medicine to
Rest, and again a true expression of it. For
though these two, Rest and Sleep, are not
the same, yet without sleep no man can think
of Rest, nor has Rest any one better body or
way of being than this thing Sleep. For in
Sleep a man utterly sinks down in proportion
as it is deep and good into the centre of things
and becomes one with that from which he
came, drawing strength not only by negation
from repose, but in some way positive from
the being of his mother which is the earth.
Some say that sleep is better near against the
12

On Rest

ground on this account, and all men know that
sleep in wild places and without cover is the
surest and the best. Sleep promises waking
as Rest does a renewal of power ; and the
good dreams that come to us in sleep are
a proof that in sleep we are still living.

A man may deny himself any other volup-
tuousness but not Rest. He may forego wine
or flesh or anything of the body, and music
or disputation, or anything of the mind, or
love itself, or even companionship ; but not
Rest, for if he denies himself this he wastes
himself and is himself no longer. Rest, there-
fore, is a necessary intermittent which we
must have both for soul and body, and is the
only necessity inherent to both those two
so long as those two are bound together in the
matter and net of this world. For food is a
necessity to the body and virtue to the soul,
but Rest to one and to the other.

There is no picture of delight in which we
envy other men so much as when, lacking
Rest, we see them possessing it ; on which
occasions we call out unwisely for a Perpetual
Rest and for the cessation of all endeavour.
In the same way men devise a lack of Rest
for a special torment, and none can long sur-
vive it.

13

This and That and the Other

Rest and innocence are good fellows, and
Rest is easier to the innocent man. The wicked
suffer unrest always in some sort on account of
God's presence warning them, though this un-
rest is stronger and much more to their good
if men also warn them and if they live
among such fellows in their commonwealth
as will not permit their wickedness to be
hidden or to go unpunished.

Rest has no time, and in its perfection must
lose all mark of time. So a man sleeping
deeply knows not how many hours have passed
since he fell asleep until he awake again.

There are many good accompaniments for
Rest, slow and distant music which at last
is stiller and then silent ; the scent of certain
herbs and flowers and particularly of roses ;
clean linen ; a pure clear air and the coming of
night. To all these things prayer, an honour-
able profession and a preparation of the mind
are in general a great aid, and, in the heat of
the season, cool water refreshed with essences.
A man also should make his toilet for Rest
if he would have it full and thorough and
prepare his body as his soul for a relaxa-
tion. He does well also in the last passage of
his mind into sleep to commend himself to the
care of God ; remembering both how petty
14

On Rest

are all human vexations and also how weather-
cock they are, turning now a face of terror and
then in a moment another face of laughter or
of insignificance. Many troubles that seem
giants at evening are but dwarfs at sunrise,
and some most terrific prove ghosts which
speed off with the broadening of the day.

On Discovery ^ ^> -s> ^ ^ *^

THERE is a great consolation lying all
bottled and matured for those who
choose to take it, in the modern world — and
yet how few turn to it and drink the bracing
draught ! It is a consolation for dust and fre-
quency and fatigue and despair — this consola-
tion is the Discovery of the World.

The world has no end to it. You can dis-
cover one town which you had thought well
known, or one quarter of the town, or one
house in the quarter of the town, or one room
in that house, or one picture in that room.
The avenues of discovery open out infinite
in number and quite a little distance from
their centre (which is yourself and your local,
tired, repeated experience), these avenues
diverge outwards and lead to the most
amazingly different things.

You can take some place of which you have
heard so often and in so vulgar a connota-
tion that you could wish never to hear of
it again, and coming there you will find it
16

On Discovery

holding you, and you will enjoy many happy
surprises, unveiling things you could not
dream were there.

How much more true is it not, then, that
discovery awaits you if you will take the
least little step off the high road, or the least
little exploration into the past of a place you
visit.

Most men inhabiting a countryside know
nothing of its aspect even quite close to their
homes, save as it is seen from the main roads.
If they will but cross a couple of fields or so,
they may come, for the first time in many
years of habitation, upon a landscape that
seems quite new and a sight of their own hills
which makes them look like the hills of a
strange country.

In youth we all know this. In youth and
early manhood we wonder what is behind some
rise of land, or on the other side of some wood
which bounded our horizon in childhood. Then
comes a day when we manfully explore the
unknown places and go to find what we shall
find.

As life advances we imagine that all this
chance of discovery has been taken from us
by our increased experience. It is an illusion.
If we are so dull it is we that have changed

2 I7

This and That and the Other

and not the world ; and what is more we can
recover from that dullness, and there is a
simple medicine for it, which is to repeat the
old experiment : to go out and see what we
may see.

Some will grant this true of the sudden little
new discoveries quite close to home, but not
of travel. Travel, they think, must always be
to-day by some known road to some known
place, with dust upon the mind at the setting
out and at the coming in. It is a great error.
You can choose some place too famous in
Europe and even too peopled and too large,
and yet make the most ample discoveries
there.

11 Oh, but," a man will say, " most places
have been so written of that one knows them
already long before seeing them."

No : one does nothing of the kind. Even
the pictured and the storied places are full
enough of newness if one will but shake off
routine and if one will but peer.

Speak to five men of some place which they
have all visited, perhaps together, and find
out what each noticed most : you will be
amazed at the five different impressions.

Enter by some new entry a town which
hitherto you had always entered by one
18

On Discovery

fixed way, and again vary your entry, and
again, and you will see a new town every
time.

There are many, many thousand English-
men who know the wonderful sight of Rouen
from the railway bridge below the town, for
that lies on the high road to Paris, and there
are many thousand, though not so many, who
know Rouen from Bon-Secours. There are
a few hundred who know it from the approach
by the great woods to the North. There
arc a dozen or so perhaps who have come in
from the East, walking from Picardy. The
great town lying in its cup of hills is quite
different every way.

There is a view of Naples which has been
photographed and printed and painted until
we are all tired of it. It is a view taken from
the hill which makes the northern horn of the
Bay ; there is a big pine tree in the foreground
and Vesuvius smoking in the background, and
I will bargain that most people who read this
have seen that view upon a postcard, or in
a shop window, and that a good many of them
would rightly say that it was the most hack-
neyed thing in Europe.

Now some years ago I had occasion to go
to Naples, a town I had always avoided for
19

This and That and the Other

that very reason — that one heard of it until
one was tired and that this view had become
like last year's music-hall tunes.

I went, not of my own choice but because
I had to go, and when I got there I made as
complete a discovery as ever Columbus made
or those sailors who first rounded Africa and
found the Indian Seas.

Naples was utterly unlike anything I had
imagined. Vesuvius was not a cone smoking
upon the horizon — it was a great angry
pyramid toppling right above me. The town
was not a lazy, dirty town with all the marks
of antiquity and none of energy. It was alive
with commerce and all the evils and all the
good of commerce. It was angrily alive ; it
was like a wasp nest.

I will state the plain truth at the risk of
being thought paradoxical. Naples recalled
to me an American seaboard town so vividly
that I could have thought myself upon the
Pacific. I could have gone on for days digging
into all this new experience, turning it over
and fructifying it. My business allowed me
not twenty-four hours, but the vision was one
I shall never forget, and it was as completely
new and as wholly creative, or re-creative, of
the mind, as is that land-fall which an adven-

On Discovery

turous sailor makes when he finds a new island
at dawn upon a sea not yet travelled.

Every one, therefore, should go out to dis-
cover, five miles from home, or five hundred.
Every one should assure himself against the
cheating tedium which books and maps create
in us, that the world is perpetually new : and
oddly enough it is not a matter of money.

21

On Inns ^^ ^> ^> ^> ^> ^> ^^

HERE am I sitting in an Inn, having
gloomily believed not half an hour ago
that Inns were doomed with all other good
things, but now more hopeful and catching
avenues of escape through the encircling
decay.

For though certainly that very subtle and
final expression of a good nation's life, the
Inn, is in peril, yet possibly it may survive.

This Inn which surrounds me as I write (the
law forbids me to tell its name) is of the noblest
in South England, and it is in South England
that the chief Inns of the world still stand. In
the hall of it, as you come in, are barrels of
cider standing upon chairs. The woman that
keeps this Inn is real and kind. She receives
you so that you are glad to enter the house.
She takes pleasure in her life. What was her
beauty her daughter now inherits, and she
serves at the bar. Her son is strong and carries
up the luggage, The whole place is a paradise,
and as one enters that hall one stands hesitating

22

On Inns

whether to enjoy its full, yet remaining delight,
or to consider the peril of death that hangs
to-day over all good things.

Consider, you wanderers (that is all men,
whatsoever, for not one of you can rest), what
an Inn is, and see if it should not rightly raise
both great fears and great affection.

An Inn is of the nation that made it. If
you desire a proof that the unity of Christen-
dom is not to be achieved save through a dozen
varying nations, each of a hundred varying
counties and provinces and these each of
several countrysides — the Inns will furnish
you with that proof.

If any foolish man pretend in your presence
that the brotherhood of men should make a
decent man cosmopolitan, reprove his error
by the example of an Inn.

If any one is so vile as to maintain in your
presence that one's country should not be
loved and loyally defended, confound so
horrid a fool by the very vigorous picture of
an Inn. And if he impudently says that some
damned Babylon or other is better than an Inn,
look up his ancestry.

For the truth is that Inns (may God pre-
serve them, and of the few remaining breed,
in spite of peril, a host of new Inns for our

23

This and That and the Other

sons), Inns, Inns are the mirror and at the
same time the flower of a people. The savour
of men met in kindliness and in a homely way
for years and years comes to inhabit all their
panels (Inns are panelled) and lends incense to
their fires. (Inns have not radiators, but
fires.) But this good quintessence and distilla-
tion of comradeship varies from country-
side to countryside and more from province
to province, and more still from race to race
and from realm to realm ; just as speech
differs and music and all the other excellent
fruits of Europe.

Thus there is an Inn at Tout-de-suite-
Tardets which the Basques made for them-
selves and offer to those who visit their
delightful streams. A river flows under its
balcony, tinkling along a sheer stone wall,
and before it, high against the sunset, is
a wood called Tiger Wood, clothing a rocky
peak called the Peak of Eagles.

Now no one could have built that Inn nor
endowed it with its admirable spirit, save the
cleanly but incomprehensible Basques. There
is no such Inn in the Bearnese country, nor
any among the Gascons.

In Falaise the Normans very slowly and by
a mellow process of some thousand years
24

On Inns

have engendered an Inn. This Inn, I think,
is so good that you will with difficulty com-
pare it with any better thing. It is as quiet
as a tree on a summer night, and cooks cray-
fish in an admirable way. Yet could not
these Normans have built that Basque Inn ;
and a man that would merge one in the other
and so drown both is an outlaw and to be
treated as such.

But these Inns of South England (such as
still stand !) — what can be said in proper praise
of them which shall give their smell and
colour and their souls ? There is nothing like
them in Europe, nor anything to set above
them in all the world. It is within their walls
and at their boards that one knows what
South England once did in the world and
why. If it is gone it is gone. All things die
at last. But if it is gone — why, no lover of it
need remain to drag his time out in mourning
it. If South England is dead it is better to
die upon its grave.

Whether it dies in our time or no you may
test by the test of its Inns. If they may not
weather the chaos, if they fail to round the
point that menaces our religion and our very
food, our humour and our prime affections —
why, then, South England has gone too. If,
25

This and That and the Other

if (I hardly dare to write such a challenge); if
the Inns hold out a little time longer —
why, then, South England will have turned
the corner and Europe can breathe again.
Never mind her extravagances, her follies or
her sins. Next time you see her from a hill,
pray for South England. For if she dies, you
die. And as a symptom of her malady (some
would say of her death-throes) carefully
watch her Inns.

Of the enemies of Inns, as of rich men, dull
men, blind men, weak-stomached men and
men false to themselves, I do not speak : but
of their effect. Why such blighting men are
nowadays so powerful and why God has given
them a brief moment of pride it is not for
us to know. It is hidden among the secret
things of this life. But that they are powerful
all men, lovers of Inns, that is, lovers of right
living, know well enough and bitterly de-
plore. The effect of their power concerns us.
It is like a wasting of our own flesh, a whiten-
ing of our own blood.

Thus there is the destruction of an Inn by
gluttony of an evil sort — though to say so
sounds absurd, for one would imagine that
gluttony should be proper to Inns. And so
it is, when it is your true gluttony of old, the
26

On Inns

gluttony of our fathers made famous in
English letters by the song which begins :

I am not a glutton
But I do like pie.

But evil gluttony, which may also be called
the gluttony of devils, is another matter. It
flies to liquor as to a drug ; it is ashamed of
itself ; it swallows a glass behind a screen and
hides. There is no companionship with it. It
is an abomination, and this abomination has
the power to destroy a Christian Inn and to
substitute for it, first a gin-palace, and then,
in reaction against that, the very horrible
house where they sell only tea and coffee and
bubbly waters that bite and sting both in the
mouth and in the stomach. These places are
hotbeds of despair, and suicides have passed
their last hours on earth consuming slops
therein alone.

Thus, again, a sad enemy of Inns is luxury.
The rich will have their special habitations in
a town so cut off from ordinary human beings
that no Inn may be built in their neighbour-
hood. In which connection I greatly praise
that little colony of the rich which is settled
on the western side of Berkeley Square, in
Lansdowne House, and all around the eastern
27

This and That and the Other

parts of Charles Street, for they have per-
mitted to be established in their midst the
" Running Footman," and this will count
in the scale when their detestable vices are
weighed upon the Day of Judgment, upon
which day, you must know, vices are not put
into the scale gently and carefully so as to
give you fair measure, but are banged down
with enormous force by strong and maleficent
demons.

Then, again, a very subtle enemy of Inns
is poverty, when it is pushed to inhuman
limits, and you will note especially in the
dreadful great towns of the North, more than
one ancient house which was once honourable
and where Mr. Pickwick might very well have
stayed, now turned ramshackle and dilapi-
dated and abandoned, slattern, draggle-tail,
a blotch, until the yet beastlier reformers
come and pull it down to make an open space
wherein the stunted children may play.

Thus, again, you will have the pulling down
of an Inn and the setting up of an Hotel built
of iron and mud, or ferro-concrcte. This is
murder.

Let me not be misunderstood. Many an
honest Inn calls itself an hotel. I have no
quarrel with that, nor has any traveller I
28

On Inns

think. It is a title. Some few blighted and
accursed hotels call themselves " Inns "
a foul snobbism, a nasty trick of words pre-
tending to create realities.

No, it is when the thing is really done, not
when the name is changed, that murder calls
out to God for vengeance.

I knew an Inn in South England, when I
was a boy, that stood on the fringe of a larch
wood, upon a great high road. Here when
the springtime came and I went off to see the
world I used to meet with carters and with
travelling men, also keepers and men who bred
horses and sold them, and sometimes with
sailors padding the hoof between port and
port. These men would tell me a thousand
things. The larch trees were pleasant in their
new colour ; the woods alive with birds and
the great high road was, in those days,
deserted : for high bicycles were very rare,
low bicycles were not invented, the rich went
by train in those days ; only carts and
caravans and men with horses used the
leisurely surface of the way.

Now that good Inn has gone. I was in it

some five years ago, marvelling that it had

changed so little, though motor things and

money-changers went howling by in a stream

29

This and That and the Other

and though there were now no poachers or
gipsies or forestmen to speak to, when a too
smart young man came in with two assistants
and they began measuring, calculating, two-
foot-ruling and jotting. This was the plot.
Next came the deed. For in another year,
when the Spring burst and I passed by, what
should I see in the place of my Inn, my Inn
of youth, my Inn of memories, my Inn of trees,
but a damnable stack of iron with men fitting
a thin shell of bricks to it like a skin. Next
year the monster was alive and made. The
old name (call it the Jolly) was flaunting on a
vulgar signboard swing in cast-iron tracing to
imitate forged work. The shell of bricks was
cast with sham white as for half-timber work.
The sham-white was patterned with sham
timbers of baltic deal, stained dark, with pins
of wood stuck in : like Cheshire, not like
home. Wrong lattice insulted the windows —
and inside there were three bars. At the door
stood an Evil Spirit, and within every room
upstairs and down other devils, his servants,
resided.

It is no light thing that such things should
be done and that we cannot prevent them.

From the towns all Inns have been driven :
from the villages most. No conscious efforts,
30

On Inns

no Bond Street nastiness of false conservation,
will save the beloved roofs. Change your
hearts or you will lose your Inns and you will
deserve to have lost them. But when you
have lost your Inns drown your empty selves,
for you will have lost the last of England.

On Rows

THE HON. MEMBER : Mr. Speaker, Mr.
Speaker! Is the Hon. Member in order in
calling me an insolent swine ?

(See Hansard passim)

A DISTINGUISHED literary man has
composed and perhaps will shortly
publish a valuable poem the refrain of which
is " I like the sound of broken glass."

This concrete instance admirably illustrates
one of the most profound of human appetites :
indeed, an appetite which, to the male half
of humanity, is more than an appetite and is,
rather, a necessity : the appetite for rows.

It has been remarked by authorities so dis-
tant and distinct, yet each so commanding, as
Aristotle and Confucius, that words lose their
meanings in the decline of a State.

Absolutely purposeless phrases go the
rounds, are mechanically repeated ; some-
times there is an attempt by the less lively
citizens to act upon such phrases when Society
32

On Rows

is diseased ! And so to-day you have the
suburban fool who denounces the row. Some-
times he calls it ungentlemanly — that is,
unsuitable to the wealthy male. If he says
that he simply cannot know what he is talking
about.

If there is one class in the community which
has made more rows than another it is the
young male of the wealthier classes, from
Alcibiades to my Lord Tit-up. When men
are well fed, good-natured, fairly innocent (as
are our youth), then rows are their meat and
drink. Nay, the younger males of the gentry
have such a craving and necessity for a row
that they may be observed at the universities
of this country making rows continually with-
out any sort of object or goal attached to such
rows.

Sometimes he does not call it ungentle-
manly, but points out that a row is of no
effect, by which he means that there is no
money in it. That is true, neither is there
money in drinking, or breathing, or sleeping,
but they are all very necessary things. Some-
times the row is denounced by the suburban
gentleman as unchristian ; but that is
because he knows nothing about human
history or the Faith, and plasters the phrase
3 33

This and That and the Other

down as a label without consideration. The
whole history of Christendom is one great row.
From time to time the Christians would leap
up and swarm like bees, making the most
hideous noise and pouring out by millions
to whang in their Christianity for as long as
it could be borne upon the vile persons of the
infidel. More commonly the Christians would
vent their happy rage one against the other.

The row is better fun when it is played
according to rule : it sounds paradoxical, and
your superficial man might conceive that the
essence of a row was anarchy. If he did he
would be quite wrong ; a row being a male
thing at once demands all sorts of rules and
complications. Otherwise it would be no fun.
Take, for instance, the oldest and most solid
of our national rows — the House of Commons
row. Everybody knows how it is done and
everybody surely knows that very special
rules are observed. For instance, there is the
word " traitor." That is in order. It was
decided long ago, when Mr. Joseph Chamber-
lain, of Birmingham, called Mr. Dillon a
traitor. But I have heard with my own ears
the word " party-hack " ruled out. It is not
allowed.

By a very interesting decision of the Chair,
34

On Rows

pointing is ruled out also. If a member of the
House suddenly thrusts out his arm with a long
forefinger at the end of it and directs this in-
strument towards some other member, the
Chair has decided the gesture to be out of
order. It is, as another member of the
Chamberlain family has said, " No class."
Throwing things is absolutely barred. Nor
may you now imitate the noise of animals in
the chamber itself. This last is a recent
decision, or rather it is an example of an old
practice falling into desuetude. The last
time a characteristic animal cry was heard in
the House of Commons was when a very
distinguished lawyer, later Lord Chief Justice
of England, gave an excellent rendering of a
cock-crow behind the Speaker's chair during
a difference of opinion upon the matter of
Home Rule — but this was more than twenty
years ago.

It is a curious thing that Englishmen no
longer sing during their rows. The fine song
about the House of Lords which had a curse
in it and was sung some months ago by two
drunken men in Pall Mall to the lasting
pleasure of the clubs, would come in very
well at this juncture ; or that other old
political song now forgotten, the chorus of
35

This and That and the Other

which is (if my memory serves me), " Bow
wow wow ! "

No one has seized the appetite for a row
more fully than the ladies who demand the
suffrage. The " disgraceful scenes " and " un-
womanly conduct " which we have all heard
officially denounced, were certainly odd, pro-
ceeding as they did from great groups of
middle-class women as unsuited to exercises
of this sort as a cow would be to following
hounds, but there is no doubt that the men
enjoyed it hugely. It had all the fun of a
good football scrimmage about it, except when
they scratched. And to their honour be it
said they did not stab with those murderous
long pins about which the Americans make
so many jokes.

Before leaving this fascinating subject of
rows, I will draw up for the warning of the
reader a list of those to whom rows are ab-
horrent. Luckily they are few. Money-
lenders dislike rows ; political wire-pullers
dislike rows ; very tired men recovering from
fevers must be put in the same category, and,
finally, oddly enough, newspaper proprietors.

Why on earth this last little band — there
are not a couple of dozen of them that count
in the country — should have such a feature in
36

On Rows

common, Heaven only knows, but they most
undoubtedly have ; and they compel their
unfortunate employees to write on the subject
of rows most amazing and incomprehensible
nonsense. There is no accounting for tastes !

37

The Pleasant Place

A GENTLEMAN of my acquaintance came
•**> to me the other day for sympathy. . . .
But first I must describe him : —

He is a man of careful, not neat, dress : I
would call it sober rather than neat. He is
always clean-shaven and his scanty hair is
kept short-cut. He is occupied in letters ;
he is, to put it bluntly, a literatoor ; none the
less he is possessed of scholarship and is a
minor authority upon English pottery.

He is a very good writer of verse ; he is not
exactly a poet, but still, his verse is remark-
able. Two of his pieces have been publicly
praised by political peers and at least half a
dozen of them have been praised in private
by the ladies of that world. He is a man
fifty-four years of age, and, if I may say so
without betraying him, a little disappointed.

He came to me, I say, for sympathy. I was
sitting in my study watching the pouring
rain falling upon the already soaked and
drenched and drowned clay lands of my
county. The leafless trees (which are in our
38

The Pleasant Place

part of a low but thick sort) were standing
against a dead grey sky with a sort of ghost
of movement in it, when he came in, opened
his umbrella carefully so that it might not
drip, and left it in the stone-floored passage —
which is, to be accurate, six hundred years
old — kicked off his galoshes and begged my
hospitality ; also (let me say it for the third
time) my sympathy.

He said he had suffered greatly and that
he desired to tell me the whole tale. I was
very willing and his tale was this :

It seems that my friend (according to his
account) found himself recently in a country
of a very delightful character.

This country lay up and heavenly upon a
sort of table-land. One went up a road which
led continually higher and higher through the
ravines of the mountains, until, passing
through a natural gate of rock, one saw before
one a wide plain bounded upon the further
side by the highest crests of the range.
Through this upland plain ran a broad and
noble river whose reaches he could see in
glimpses for miles, and upon the further
bank of it in a direction opposite that which
the gate of rock regarded, was a very delight-
ful city.

39

This and That and the Other

The walls of this city were old in their
texture, venerable and majestic in their lines.
Within their circumference could be dis-
cerned sacred buildings of a similar antiquity,
but also modern and convenient houses of a
kind which my friend had not come across
before, but which were evidently suited to the
genial, sunlit climate, as also to the habits
of leisured men. Their roofs were flat, covered
in places by awnings, in other places by tiled
verandas, and these roofs were often disposed
in the form of little gardens.

Trees were numerous in the city and showed
their tops above the lower buildings, while the
lines of their foliage indicated the direction of
the streets.

My friend was passing down the road which
led to this plain — and as it descended it took
on an ampler and more majestic character —
when he came upon a traveller who appeared
to be walking in the direction of the town.

This traveller asked him courteously in the
English tongue whether he were bound for the
city. My friend was constrained to reply that
he could not pretend to any definite plan,
but certainly the prospect all round him was
so pleasant and the aspect of the town so in-
viting, that he would rather visit the capital
40

The Pleasant Place

of this delightful land at once than linger in
its outskirts.

" Come with me, then," said the Traveller,
" and if I may make so bold upon so short
an acquaintance, accept my hospitality. I
have a good house upon the wall of the town
and my rank among the citizens of it is that
of a merchant ; — I am glad to say a prosperous
one."

He spoke without affectation and with so
much kindness, that my friend was ravished
to discover such a companion, and they pro-
ceeded in leisurely company over the few
miles that separated them from their goal.

The road was now paved in every part
with small square slabs, quite smooth and
apparently constructed of some sort of
marble. Upon either side there ran canalized
in the shining stone a little stream of per-
fectly clear water. From time to time they
would pass a lovely shrine or statue which the
country people had adorned with garlands.
As they approached the city they discovered
a noble bridge in the manner, my friend be-
lieved, of the Italian Renaissance, with strong
elliptical arches and built, like all the rest of
the way, of marble, while the balustrade
upon either side of it was so disposed in
41

This and That and the Other

short symmetrical columns as to be particu-
larly grateful to the eye. Over this bridge
there went to and fro a great concourse of
people, all smiling, eager, happy and busy,
largely acquainted, apparently, each with
the others, nodding, exchanging news, and
in a word forming a most blessed company.

As they entered the city my friend's com-
panion, who had talked of many things upon
their way and had seemed to unite the most
perfect courtesy and modesty with the widest
knowledge, asked him whether there was any
food or drink to which he was particularly
attached.

" For," said he, "I make a point whenever
I entertain a guest — and that," he put in
with a laugh, " is, I am glad to say, a thing
that happens frequently — I make a point, I
say, of asking him what he really prefers. It
makes such a difference ! "

My friend began his reply with those con-
ventional phrases to which we are all accus-
tomed, "That he would be only too happy
to take whatever was set before him," ' That
the prospect of his hospitality was a sufficient
guarantee of his satisfaction," and so forth :
but his host would take no denial.

" No, no ! " said he. " Do please say just
42

The Pleasant Place

what you prefer ! It is so easy to arrange —
if you only knew ! . . . Come, I know the
place better than you," he added, smiling
again ; " you have no conception of its re-
sources. Pray tell me quite simply before
we leave this street " — for they were now in
a street of sumptuous and well-appointed
shops — " exactly what shall be commissioned."

Moved by I know not what freedom of ex-
pression, and expansive in a degree which he
had never yet known, my friend smiled back
and said : " Well, to tell you the truth, some
such meal as this would appeal to me : First
two dozen green-bearded oysters of the
Arcachon kind, opened upon the deep shell
with all their juices preserved, and each
exquisitely cleaned. These set upon pounded
ice and served in that sort of dish which is
contrived for each oyster to repose in its own
little recess with a sort of side arrangement for
the reception of the empty shells."

His host nodded gravely, as one who takes
in all that is said to him.

" Next," said my friend, in an enthusiastic
manner, " real and good Russian caviare,
cold but not frozen, and so touched with
lemon — only just so touched — as to be perfect.
With this I think a little of the wine called
43

This and That and the Other

Barsac should be drunk, and that cooled to
about thirty - eight degrees — (Fahrenheit).
After this a True Bouillon, and by a True
Bouillon," said my friend with earnestness,
14 1 mean a Bouillon that has long simmered
in the pot and has been properly skimmed,
and has been seasoned not only with the
customary herbs but also with a suspicion
of carrot and of onion, and a mere breath
of tarragon."

"Right!" said his host. "Right!"
nodding with real appreciation.

" And next," said my friend, halting in the
street to continue his list, " I think there
should be eggs."

" Right," said his host once more ap-
provingly ; " and shall we say—

" No," interrupted my friend eagerly, " let
me speak. Eggs sur-le-plat, frizzled to the
exact degree."

" Just what I was about to suggest,"
answered his delighted entertainer ; " and
black pepper, I hope, ground large upon them
in fresh granules from a proper wooden mill."

" Yes ! Yes ! " said my friend, now lyric,
" and with sea salt in large crystals."

On saying which both of them fell into a sort
of ecstasy which my friend broke by adding :

The Pleasant Place

" Something quite light to follow . . .
preferably a sugar-cured Ham braised in
white wine. Then, I think, spinach, not with
the ham but after it ; and that spinach
cooked perfectly dry. We will conclude with
some of the cheese called Brie. And for wine
during all these latter courses we will drink
the wine of Chinon : Chinon Grille. What
they call," he added slyly, " the Fausse
maigre ; for it is a wine thin at sight but full
in the drinking of it."

" Good ! Excellent ! " said his host, clap^
ping his hands together once with a gesture of
finality. " And then after the lot you shall
have coffee."

" Yes, coffee roasted during the meal and
ground immediately before its concoction.
And for liqueur ..."

My friend was suddenly taken with a little
doubt. " I dare not ask," said he, " for the
liqueur called Aquebus ? Once only did I
taste it. A monk gave it me on Christmas
Eve four years ago and I think it is not
known ! "

" Oh, ask for it by all means ! " said his
host. " Why, we know it and love it in this
place as though it were a member of the
family ! "

45

This and That and the Other

My friend could hardly believe his ears on
hearing such things, and said nothing of
cigars. But to his astonishment his host,
putting his left hand on my friend's shoulder,
looked him full in the face and said :

" And now shall / tell you about
cigars ? "

" I confess they were in my mind," said
my friend.

" Why then," said his host with an ex-
pression of profound happiness, " there is a
cigar in this town which is full of flavour,
black in colour, which does not bite the
tongue, and which none the less satisfies
whatever tobacco does satisfy in man. When
you smoke it you really dream."

" Why," said my friend humbly, " very
well then, let us mention these cigars as the
completion of our little feast."

44 Little feast, indeed ! " said his host,
" why it is but a most humble meal. Any-
how, I am glad to have had from you a proper
schedule of your pleasures of the table. In
time to come when we know each other better,
we will arrange other large and really satis-
factory meals ; but this will do very well
for our initiatory lunch as it were." And he
laughed merrily.

46

The Pleasant Place

" But have I not given you great trouble ? "
said my friend.

" How little you will easily perceive,"
said his companion, " for in this town we have
but to order and all is at once promptly and
intelligently done." With that he turned into
a small office where a commissary at once
took down his order. " And now," said he
emerging, " let us be home."

They went together down the turnings of
a couple of broad streets lined with great
private palaces and public temples until they
came to a garden which had no boundaries
to it but which was open, and apparently
the property of the city. But the people who
wandered here were at once so few, so dis-
creet and so courteous, my friend could not
discover whether they were (as their salutes
seemed to indicate) the dependents of his
host, or merely acquaintances who recognized
him upon their way.

This garden, as they proceeded, became
more private and more domestic ; it led by
narrowing paths through high, diversified
trees, until, beyond the screen of a great
beech hedge, he saw the house . . . and it
was all that a house should be !

Its clear, well-set stone walls were in such
47

This and That and the Other

perfect harmony with the climate and with
the sky, its roof garden from which a child
was greeting them upon their approach, so
unexpected and so suitable, its arched open
gallery was of so august a sort, and yet the
domestic ornaments of its colonnade so familiar,
that nothing could be conceived more appro-
priate for the residence of man.

The mere passage into this Home out of the
warm morning daylight into the inner domestic
cool, was a benediction, and in the courtyard
which they thus entered a lazy fountain
leaped and babbled to itself in a manner that
filled the heart with ease.

" I do not know," said his host in a gentle
whisper as they crossed the courtyard,
" whether it is your custom to bathe before
the morning meal or in the middle of the
afternoon ? "

" Why, sir," said my friend, " if I may tell
the whole truth, I have no custom in the
matter ; but perhaps the middle of the after-
noon would suit me best."

" By all means," said his host in a satis-
fied tone. " And I think you have chosen
wisely, for the meal you have ordered will very
shortly be prepared. But, for your refresh-
ment at least, one of my friends shall put
48

The Pleasant Place

you in order, cool your hands and forehead, sec
to your face and hair, put comfortable sandals
upon your feet and give you a change of
raiment."

All of this was done. My friend's host did
well to call the servant who attended upon
his guest a " friend," for there was in this
man's manner no trace of servility or of
dependence, and yet an eager willingness for
service coupled with a perfect reticence which
was admirable to behold and feel.

When my friend had been thus refreshed
he was conducted to a most exceptional little
room. Four pictures were set in the walls
of it, mosaics, they seemed — but he did not
examine their medium closely. The room
itself in its perfect lightness and harmony,
with its view out through a large round arch
upon the countryside beyond the walls (the
old turrets of which made a framework for
the view), exactly prepared him for the meal
that was prepared.

While the oysters (delightful things !) were
entering upon their tray and were being put
upon the table, the host, taking my friend
aside with an exquisite gesture of courteous
privacy, led him through the window-arch on
to a balcony without, and said, as they gazed
4 49

This and That and the Other

upon the wall and the plain and the mountains
beyond (and what a sight they were !) :

" There is one thing, my dear sir, that I
should like to say to you before you eat . . .
it is rather a delicate matter. . . . You will
not mind my being perfectly frank ? "

" Speak on, speak on," said my friend,
who by this time would have confided any
interests whatsoever into the hands of such a
host.

" Well," said that host, continuing a little
carefully, "it is this : as you can see we are
very careful in this city to make men as happy
as may be. We are happy ourselves, and we
love to confer happiness upon others,
strangers and travellers who honour us with
their presence. But we find — I am very
sorry to say we find . . . that is, we find from
time to time that their complete happiness,
no matter with what we may provide them,
is dashed by certain forms of anxiety, the
chief of which is anxiety with regard to their
future receipts of money."

My friend started.

" Nay," said his host hastily, " do not
misunderstand me. I do not mean that pre-
occupations of business are alone so alarming.
What I mean is that sometimes, yes, and I
50

The Pleasant Place

may say often (horrible as it seems to us !),
our guests are in an active preoccupation
about the petty business of finance. Some
few have debts, it seems, in the wretched
society from which they come, and of which,
frankly, I know nothing. Others, though not
indebted, feel insecure about the future.
Others, though wealthy, are oppressed by
their responsibilities. Now," he continued
firmly, " I must tell you once and for all that
we have a custom here upon which we take
no denial : no denial whatsoever. Every man
who enters this city, who honours us by enter-
ing this city, is made free of that sort of non-
sense, thank God ! " And as he said this,
my friend's host breathed a great sigh of
relief. " It would be intolerable to us to
think," he continued, " that our welcome and
dear companions were suffering from such
a tawdry thing as money-worry in our
presence. So the matter is plainly this :
whether you like it or whether you do not, the
sum of £10,000 is already set down to your
credit in the public bank of the city ; whether
you use it or not is your business ; if you do
not it is our custom to melt down an equiva-
lent sum of gold and to cast it into the depths
of the river, for we have of this metal an un-

This and That and the Other

failing supply, and I confess we do not find
it easy to understand the exaggerated value
which other men place upon it."

" I do not know that I shall have occasion
to use so magnificent a custom," said my
friend, with an extraordinary relief in his
heart, " but I certainly thank you very
kindly for its intention, and I shall not hesi-
tate to use any sum that may be necessary
for my continuing the great happiness which
this city appears to afford."

" You have spoken well," said his host,
seizing both his hands, " and your frankness
compels me to another confession : We have at
our disposal a means of discovering exactly
how any one of our guests may stand : the
responsibilities of the rich, the indebtedness
of the embarrassed, the anxiety of those whose
future may be precarious. May I tell you
without discourtesy, that your own case is
known to me and to two trustees, who arc
public officials — absolutely reliable — and
whom, for that matter, you will not meet."

My friend must have looked incredulous,
but his host continued firmly : "It is so, we
have settled your whole matter, I am glad to
say, on terms that settle all your liabilities
and leave a further £50,000 to your credit in
52

The Pleasant Place

the public bank. But the size of the sum is in
this city really of no importance. You may
demand whatever you will, and enjoy, I hope,
a complete security during your habitation
here. And that habitation, both the Town
Council and the National Government beg
you, through me, to extend to the whole of
your life."

44 Imagine," said my friend, " how I felt.
. . . The oysters were now upon the table,
and before them, ready for consumption, the
caviare. The Barsac in its original bottle,
cooled (need I say !) to exactly thirty-eight
degrees, stood ready ..."

At this point he stopped and gazed into the
fire.

" But, my dear fellow," said I, "if you are
coming to me for sympathy and simply succeed
in making me hungry and cross ..."

" No," said my friend with a sob, " you
don't understand ! " And he continued to
gaze at the fire.

" Well, go on," said I angrily.

44 There isn't any on," he said ; " I woke ! "

We both looked into the fire together for
perhaps three minutes before I spoke and
said :

53

This and That and the Other

" Will you have some wine ? "

44 No thank you," he answered sadly, " not
that wine." Then he got up uneasily and
moved for his umbrella and his galoshes, and
the passage and the door. I thought he
muttered, " You might have helped me."

44 How could I help you ? " I said savagely.

" Well," he sighed, 44 1 thought you could
. . . it was a bitter disappointment. Good
night ! " And he went out again into the
rain and over the clay.

54

On Omens ^> *^ ^ ^ ^> -^

ONLY the other day there was printed
in a newspaper (what a lot of things
they print in newspapers !) five lines which
read thus :

44 Calcutta, Thursday.
" An hour before the Viceroy left Cal-
cutta on Wednesday for the last time
lightning struck the flag over Government
House, tearing it to shreds. This is con-
sidered to be an omen by the natives."

The Devil it is ! A superstitious chap,
your native, and we have outgrown such
things. But it is really astonishing when you
come to think of it how absurdly credulous
the human race has been for thousands of
years about omens, and still is — everywhere
except here. And by the way, what a curious
thing it is that only in one country, and only
in one little tiny circle of it, should this terrible
vice have been eradicated from the human
mind ! If one were capable of paradox one
55

This and That and the Other

would say that the blessing conferred upon
us few enlightened people in England was
providential ; but that would be worse super-
stition than the other. There seems to be
a tangle somewhere. Anyhow, there it is :
people have gone on by the million and for
centuries and centuries believing in omens. It
is an illusion. It is due to a frame of mind.
That which the enlightened person easily dis-
covers to be a coincidence, the Native, that is,
the person living in a place, thinks to be in
some way due to a Superior Power. It is a
way Natives have. Nothing warps the mind
like being a Native.

The Reform Bill passed in 1832 and de-
stroyed not only the Pot-Wallopers, but also
the ancient Constitution of the country. From
that time onwards we have been free. When
the thing was thoroughly settled (and the
old Poor Law was being got rid of into the
bargain), the old House of Lords, and the old
House of Commons, they caught fire, " and they
did get burnt down to the ground." Those are
the very words of an old man who saw it
happen and who told me about it. The mis-
fortune was due to the old tallies of the
Exchequer catching fire, and this silly old man,
who saw it happen (he was a child of six at
56

On Omens

the time), has always thought it was an Omen.
It has been explained to him, not only by
good, kind ladies who go and visit him and
see that he gets no money or beer, but also
from the Pulpit of St. Margaret's Church,
Westminster (where he regularly attends
Divine Service by kind permission of the
Middle Class, and in the vain hope of cadging
alms), that there is no such thing as Provi-
dence, and that if he lets his mind dwell on
Omens he will end by believing in God. But
the old man is much too old to receive a new
idea, so he goes on believing that the burning
of old St. Stephen's was an Omen.

Not so the commercial traveller, who told
me in an hotel the other day the story of the
market-woman of Devizes, to exemplify the
gross superstitions of our fathers.

It seems that the market-woman, some-
time when George III was King, had taken
change of a sovereign on market-day, from
a purchaser, when there were no witnesses,
and then, in the presence of witnesses, de-
manded the change again. The man -most
solemnly affirmed that he had paid her, to
which she replied : " If I have taken your
money may God strike me dead." The
moment these words were out of the market-
57

This and That and the Other

woman's lips, an enormous great jagged,
forked, fiery dart of lightning, three miles long,
leapt out of a distant cloud, and shrivelled her
up. " Whereupon," ended the commercial
traveller, " the people of Devizes in those
days were so superstitious that they thought
it was a judgment, they did ! And they put
up a plate in commemoration. Such foolish-
ness ! " It is sad to think of the people of
Devizes and their darkness of understanding
when George III was King. But upon the
other hand, it is a joy to think of the fresh,
clear minds of the people of Devizes to-day.
For though, every Sunday morning, about
half an hour after Church time, every single
man and woman who had shirked Church,
Chapel, Mosque or Synagogue, each according
to his or her creed, should fall down dead of no
apparent illness, and though upon the fore-
head of each one so taken, the survivors
returning from their services, meetings or
what-not, should find clearly written in a
vivid blue the Letters of Doom, none the
less the people of Devizes would, it is to be
hoped, retain their mental balance, and dis-
tinguish between a coincidence (which is the
only true explanation of such things) and
fond imaginings of supernatural possibilities.
58

On Omens

There is an old story and a good one to
teach us how to fight against any weakness of
the sort, which is this. Two old gentlemen
who had never met before were in a first-class
railway carriage of a train that does not stop
until it gets to Bristol. They were talking
about ghosts. One of them was a parson,
the other was a layman. The layman said he
did not believe in ghosts. The parson was
very much annoyed, tried to convince him,
and at last said, " After all, you'd have to
believe in one if you saw one."

" No, I shouldn't," said the layman
sturdily. " I should know it was an illu-
sion."

Then the old parson got very angry indeed,
and said in a voice shaking with self-restraint :

ct Well, you've got to believe in ghosts now,
for I am one ! " Whereat he immediately
vanished into the air.

The old layman, finding himself well rid of
a bad business, shook himself together,
wrapped his rug round his knees, and began
to read his paper, for he knew very well that
it was an illusion.

Of the same sturdy sense was Isaac Newton,
when a lady came to him who had heard he
was an astrologer, and asked him where she
59

This and That and the Other

had dropped her purse, somewhere between
Shooter's Hill and London Bridge. She would
not believe that the Baronet (or knight, I for-
get which) could be ignorant of such things,
and she came about fourteen times. So to be
rid of her Newton, on the occasion of her last
visit, put on an old flowered dressing-gown,
and made himself a conical paper hat, and
put on great blue goggles, and drew a circle
on the floor, and said " Abracadabra ! "
" The front of Greenwich Hospital, the third
great window from the southern end. On the
grass just beneath it I see a short devil
crouched upon a purse of gold." Off went
the female, and sure enough under that window
she found her purse. Whereat, instead of
hearing the explanation (there was none) she
thought it was an Omen.

Remember this parable. It is enormously
illuminating.

60

The Book ^> ^> ^> ^> ^> ^>

THIS is written to dissuade all rich men
from queering the pitch of us poor littera-
toors, who have to write or starve. It is about
a Mr. Foley : a Mr. Charles Foley, a banker
and the son of a banker, who in middle life, that
is at forty, saw no more use in coming to his
office every day, but began to lead the life
of a man of leisure. Next, being exceedingly
rich, he was prompted, of course, to write a
book. The thing that prompted him to write
a book was a thought, an idea. It took him
suddenly as ideas will, one Saturday evening
as he was walking home from his Club. It
was a fine night and the idea seemed to come
upon him out of the sky. This was the idea :
that men produce such and such art in archi-
tecture and society and so forth, on account
of the kind of climate they live in. Such a
thought had never come to him before and
very probably to no other man. It was
simple like a seed — and yet, as he turned it
over, what enormous possibilities.
61

This and That and the Other

He lay awake half the night examining it.
It spread out like a great tree and explained
every human thing on earth ; at least if to
climate one added one or two other things,
such as height above the sea and consequent
rarity of the air and so forth — but perhaps all
these could be included in climate.

Hitherto every one had imagined that
nations and civilizations had each their
temperament and tendency or genius, but
those words were only ways of saying that one
did not know what it was. He knew : Charles
Foley did. He had caught the inspiration
suddenly as it passed. He slept the few last
hours of the night in a profound repose, and
next day he was at it. He was writing that
book.

He was a business-man — luckily for him. He
did not speak of the great task until it was
done. He was in no need of money — luckily
for him. He could afford to wait until the
last pages had satisfied him. Life had taught
him that one could do nothing in business
unless one had something in one's hands.
He would come to the publisher with some-
thing in his hands, to wit, with this MS. He
had no doubt about the title. He would call
it " MAN AND NATURE." The title had come
62

The Book

to him in a sort of flash after the idea. Any-
how, that was the title, and he felt it to be a
very part of his being.

He had fixed upon his publisher. He rang
him up to make an appointment. The pub-
lisher received him with charming courtesy.
It was the publisher himself who received him ;
not the manager, nor the secretary, nor any-
one like that, but the real person, the one who
had the overdraft at the Bank.

He treated Mr. Charles Foley so well that
Mr. Foley tasted a new joy which was the joy
of sincere praise received. He was in the
liberal arts now. He had come into a second
world. His mere wealth had never given
him this. When the publisher had heard what
Mr. Charles Foley had to say, he scratched the
tip of his nose with his forefinger, and sug-
gested that Mr. Foley should pay for the
printing and the binding of the book, and that
then the publisher should advertise it and
sell it, and give Mr. Foley so much.

But Mr. Foley would have none of this. He
was a business man and he could see through
a brick wall as well as anyone. So the pub-
lisher made this suggestion and that suggestion
and talked all round about it. He was evi-
dently keen to have the book. Mr. Foley
63

This and That and the Other

could see that. At last the publisher made
what Mr. Folcy thought for the first time a
sound business proposition, which was that
he should publish the book in the ordinary
way and then that he and Mr. Foley should
share and share alike. If there was a loss they
would divide it, but if there was a profit they
would divide that. Mr. Foley was glad that
he came to a sensible business decision at last,
and closed with him. The date of publica-
tion also was agreed upon : it was to be the
15th of April. " In order," said the publisher,
" that we may catch the London season."
Mr. Charles Foley suggested August, but the
publisher assured him that August was a
rotten time for books.

Only the very next day Mr. Foley entered
upon the responsibilities which are inseparable
from the joys of an author. He received a
letter from the publisher, saying that it seemed
that another book had been written under the
title " Man and Nature," that he dared not
publish under that title lest the publishers
of the other volume should apply for an in-
junction.

Mr. Foley suffered acutely. He left his
breakfast half finished ; ran into town in his
motor, as agonized in every block of the
64

The Book

traffic as though he had to catch a train ;
was kept waiting half an hour in the publisher's
office because the principal had not yet arrived,
and, when he did arrive, was persuaded that
there was nothing to be done. The Courts
wouldn't allow "Man and Nature," the pub-
lisher was sure of that. He kept on shaking his
great big silly head until it got on Mr. Foley's
nerves. But there was no way out of it, so
Mr. Foley changed the title to " ART AND
ENVIRONMENT " - it was the publisher's
secretary who suggested this new title.

He got home to luncheon, to which he now
remembered he had asked a friend — a man
who played golf. Mr. Foley did not want to
make a fool of himself, so he led up very
cautiously at luncheon to his great question,
which was this : " How does the title ' Art and
Environment ' sound ? " He had a friend, he
said, who wanted to know. On hearing this
Mr. Foley's golfing friend gave a loud guffaw,
and said it sounded all right ; so did the Origin
of Species. It came out about the year . . .
and then he spent three or four minutes try-
ing to remember who the old johnny was
who wrote it, but Mr. Foley was already at the
telephone in the hall. He was not happy ; he
had rung up the publisher. The publisher was
5 65

This and That and the Other

at luncheon. Mr. Foley damned the publisher.
Could he speak to the manager ? To the
secretary ? To one of the clerks ? To the
little dog ? In his anger he was pleased
to be facetious. He heard the manager's
yoice : f

" Yes, is that Mr. Foley ? "

" Yes, about that title."

" Oh, yes, I thought you'd ring up. It's
impossible, you know, it's been used before ;
and there's no doubt at all that the Uni-
versity printers would apply for an in-
junction."

"Well, I can't wait," shouted Mr. Foley
into the receiver.

" You can't what ? " said the manager.
" I can't hear you, you are talking too
loud."

" I can't wait," said Mr. Foley in a lower
tone and strenuously. " Suggest something
quick."

The manager could be heard thinking at
the end of the live wire. At last he said,
" Oh ! anything." Mr. Foley used a horrible
word and put back the receiver.

He went back to his golfing friend who was
drinking some port steadily with cheese, and
said : " Look here, that friend of mine I
66

The Book

have just been telephoning to says he wants
another title."

" What for ? " said the golfing friend, his
mouth full of cheese.

" Oh, for his book of course," said Mr.
Foley sharply.

" Sorry, I thought it was politics," an-
swered his friend, his mouth rather less full.
Then a bright thought struck him.

" What's the book about ? "

" Well, it's about art and . . . climate,
you know."

"Why, then," said the friend stolidly,
" why not call it « Art and Climate ' ? "

"That's a good idea," said Mr. Foley,
stroking his chin.

He hurried indecently, turned the poor
golfing friend out, hurried up to town in his
motor in order to make them call the book "Art
and Climate." When he got there he found
the real publisher, who hummed and hawed
and said : " All this changing of titles will
be very expensive, you know." Mr. Foley
could not help that, it had to be done, so
the book was called "Art and Climate," and
then it was printed, and seventy copies were
sent out to the Press and it was reviewed by
three papers.

67

This and That and the Other
One of the papers said :

" Mr. Charles Foley has written an in-
teresting essay upon the effect of climate
upon art, upon such conditions as will
affect it whether adversely or the contrary.
The point of view is an original one and
gives food for thought."

Mr. Foley thought this notice quite too
short and imperfect.

The second paper had a column about it,
nearly all of which was made out of bits cut
right out of the book, but without acknowledg-
ment or in inverted commas. In between the
bits cut out there were phrases like, " Are we
however to believe that ..." and " Some
in this connection would decide that. ..."
But all the rest were bits cut out of his
book.

The third review was in The Times, and in
very small type between brackets. All it did
was to give a list of the chapters and a sentence
out of the preface.

Mr. Foley sold thirty copies of his book,
gave away seventy-four and lent two. The
publisher assured him that books like that did
not have a large immediate sale as a novel
did ; they had a slow, steady sale.
68

The Book

It was about the middle of May that the
publisher assured him of this. In June the
solicitors of a Professor at Yale acting for the
learned man in this country, threatened an
action concerning a passage in the book
which was based entirely upon the Professor's
copyright work. Mr. Foley admitted his
high indebtedness to the Professor, and wore
a troubled look for days. He had always
thought it quite legitimate in the world of art
to use another person's work if one acknow-
ledged it. At last the thing was settled out of
court for quite a small sum, £150 or £200, or
something like that.

Then everything was quiet and the sales
went very slowly. He only sold a half-dozen
all the rest of the summer.

In the autumn the publisher wrote him
a note asking whether he might act upon
Clause 15 of the contract. Mr. Foley was a
business man. He looked up the contract and
there he saw these words :

" If after due time has elapsed in the
opinion of the publisher, a book shall not
be warrantable at its existing price, change
of price shall be made in it at the dis-
cretion of the publisher or of the author,
69

This and That and the Other

or both, or each, subject to the conditions
of Clause 9."

Turning to Clause 9, Mr. Foley discovered the
words :

" All questions of price, advertisements,
binding, paper, printing, etc., shall be
vested in Messrs. Towkem, Bingo and Platt,
hereinafter called the Publishers."

He puzzled a great deal about these two
clauses, and at last he thought, " Oh, well,
they know more than I do about it," so he
just telegraphed back, " Yes."

On the first of the New Year Mr. Foley got
a most astonishing document. It was a
printed sheet with a lot of lines written in red
ink and an account. On the one side there
was " By sales £18," then there was a long red
line drawn down like a Z, and at the bottom,
"£241 17s. 4|d.," and in front of this the
word " Balance," then the two were added
together and made £259 17s. 4jd. Under this
sum there were two lines drawn.

On the other side of the document there

was a whole regiment of items, one treading

upon another's heels. There was paper, and

printing, and corrections, binding, ware-

70

The Book

housing, storage, cataloguing, advertising,
travelling, circularizing, packing, and what 1
may call with due respect to the reader, " the
devil and all." The whole of which added
up to no less than the monstrous sum of
£519 14s. 9d. Under this was written in small
letters in red ink, " Less 50% as per agree-
ment," and then at the bottom that nasty
figure, "£259 17s. 4jd.," and there was a
little request in a round hand that the balance
of £241 17s. 4jd. should be paid at Mr. Foley's
convenience.

Mr. Foley, white with rage, acted as a
business man always should. He wrote a short
note refusing to pay a penny, and demanding
the rest of the unsold copies. He got a
lengthier and stronger note from Messrs.
Towkem and Thingummebob, referring to his
letter to Clause 9 and to Clause 15, informing
him that the remainder of the stock had been
sold at a penny each to a firm of paper-
makers in the North of England, and respect-
fully pressing for immediate payment.

Mr. Foley put the matter in the hands of his
solicitors and they ran him up a bill for £37
odd, but it was well worth it because they
persuaded him not to go into court, so in the
long run he had to pay no more than
71

This and That and the Other

£278 17s. 4jd., unless you count the postage
and the travelling.

Now you know what happened to Mr.
Foley and his book, and what will happen to
you if you are a rich man and poach on my
preserves.

72

The Servants of the Rich ^> ^ ^

DO you mark there, down in the lowest
point and innermost funnel of Hell Fire
Pit, souls writhing in smoke, themselves like
glowing smoke and tortured in the flame ?
You ask me what they are. _ These are the
Servants of the Rich : the men who in their
mortal life opened the doors of the Great
Houses and drove the carriages and sneered
at the unhappy guests.

Those larger souls that bear the greatest
doom and manifest the more dreadful suffer-
ing, they are the Butlers boiling in molten
gold.

" What ! " you cry, " is there then, indeed,
as I once heard in childhood, justice for men
and an equal balance, and a final doom for
evil deeds ? " There is ! Look down into
the murky hollow and revere the awful
accomplishment of human things.

These are the men who would stand with
powder on their heads like clowns, dressed
in fantastic suits of gold and plush, with an
73

This and That and the Other

ugly scorn upon their faces, and whose
pleasure it was (while yet their time of pro-
bation lasted) to forget every human bond
and to cast down the nobler things in man :
treating the artist as dirt and the poet as
a clown ; and beautiful women, if they were
governesses or poor relations or in any way
dependents, as a meet object for silent
mockery. But now their time is over and they
have reaped the harvest which they sowed.
Look and take comfort, all you who may have
suffered at their hands.

Come closer. See how each separate sort
suffers its peculiar penalty. There go a
hopeless shoal through the reek : their doom
is an eternal sleeplessness and a nakedness in
the gloom. There is nothing to comfort them,
not even memory : and they know that for
ever and for ever they must plunge and swirl,
driven before the blasts, now hot, now icy,
of their everlasting pain. These are those
men who were wont to come into the room
of the Poor Guest at early morning with a
steadfast and assured step and a look of in-
sult. These are those who would take the
tattered garments and hold them at arm's
length as much as to say : " What rags these
scribblers wear ! " and then, casting them
74

The Servants of the Rich

over the arm with a gesture that meant :
" Well, they must be brushed, but Heaven
knows if they will stand it without coming
to pieces ! ", would next discover in the
pockets a great quantity of middle-class
things, and notably loose tobacco.

These are they that would then take out
with the utmost patience, private letters,
money, pocket-books, knives, dirty crumpled
stamps, scraps of newspapers, broken
cigarettes, pawn tickets, keys, and much
else, muttering within themselves so that
one could almost hear it with their lips :
" What a jumble these paupers stuff their
shoddy with ! They do not even know that
in the Houses of the Great it is not customary
to fill the pockets ! They do not know that
the Great remove at night from their pockets
such few trinkets of diamonded gold as they
may contain. Where were they born or
bred ? To think that / should have to serve
such cattle ! No matter ! He has brought
money with him I am glad to see — borrowed,
no doubt — and I will bleed him well."

Such thoughts one almost heard as one lay

in the Beds of the Great despairing. Then one

would see him turn one's socks inside out,

which is a ritual with the horrid tribe. Then

75

This and That and the Other

a great bath would be trundled in and he
would set beside it a great can and silently
pronounce the judgment that whatever else
was forgiven the middle-class one thing would
not be forgiven them — the neglect of the
bath, of the splashing about of the water and
of the adequate wetting of the towel.

All these things we have suffered, you and
I, at their hands. But be comforted. They
writhe in Hell with their fellows.

That man who looked us up and down so
insolently when the great doors were opened
in St. James's Square and who thought one's
boots so comic. He too, and all his like,
burn separately. So does that fellow with
the wine that poured it out ungenerously,
and clearly thought that we were in luck's
way to get the bubbly stuff at all in any
measure. He that conveyed his master's
messages with a pomp that was instinct with
scorn, and he that drove you to the station,
hardly deigning to reply to your timid sen-
tences and knowing well your tremors and
your abject ill-ease. Be comforted. He too
burns.

It is the custom in Hell when this last batch
of scoundrels, the horsey ones, come up in
batches to be dealt with by the authorities
76

The Servants of the Rich

thereof, for them first to be asked in awful
tones how many pieces of silver they have
taken from men below the rank of a squire,
or whose income was less than a thousand
pounds a year, and the truth on this they are
compelled by Fate to declare, whereupon,
before their tortures begin, they receive as
many stripes as they took florins : nor is there
any defect in the arrangement of divine
justice in their regard, save that the money
is not refunded to us.

Cooks, housemaids, poor little scullery-
maids, under-gardeners, estate carpenters of
all kinds, small stable-lads, and in general all
those humble Servants of the Rich who are
debarred by their insolent superiors from
approaching the guests and neither wound
them with contemptuous looks, nor follow
these up by brigandish demands for money,
these you will not see in this Pit of Fire. For
them is reserved a high place in Paradise,
only a little lower than that supreme and
cloudy height of bliss wherein repose the
happy souls of all who on this earth have
been Journalists.

But Game-Keepers, more particularly those
who make a distinction and will take nothing
less than gold (nay Paper /), and Grooms of

77

This and That and the Other

the Chamber, and all such, these suffer
torments for ever and for ever. So has Im-
mutable Justice decreed and thus is the
offended majesty of man avenged.

And what, you will ask me perhaps at last,
what of the dear old family servants, who are
so good, so kind, so attached to Master Arthur
and to Lady Jane ?

Ah ! ... Of these the infernal plight is
such that I dare not set it down !

There is a special secret room in Hell where
their villainous hypocrisy and that accursed
mixture of yielding and of false independence
wherewith they flattered and befooled their
masters ; their thefts, their bullying of beggar-
men, have at last a full reward. Their eyes
are no longer sly and cautious, lit with the pre-
tence of affection, nor are they here rewarded
with good fires and an excess of food, and
perquisites and pensions. But they sit hearth-
less, jibbering with cold, and they stare broken
at the prospect of a dark Eternity. And now
and then one or another, an aged serving-man
or a white-haired housekeeper, will wring their
hands and say : " Oh, that I had once, only
once, shown in my mortal life some momentary
gleam of honour, independence or dignity !
Oh, that I had but once stood up in my freedom
78

The Servants of the Rich

and spoken to the Rich as I should ! Then it
would have been remembered for me and I
should now have been spared this place — but
it is too late ! "

For there is no repentance known among the
Servants of the Rich, nor any exception to
their vileness ; they are hated by men when
they live, and when they die they must for all
eternity consort with demons.

79

The Joke ^> ^> ^y ^y ^^

THERE are two kinds of jokes, those
jokes that are funny because they arc
true, and those jokes that would be funny
anyhow. Think it out and you will find that
that is a great truth. Now the joke I have
here for the delectation of the broken-hearted
is of the first sort. It is funny because it is
true. It is about a man whom I really saw
and really knew and touched, and on occasions
treated ill. He was. The sunlight played
upon his form. Perhaps he may still flounder
under the light of the sun, and not yet have
gone down into that kingdom whose kings
are less happy than the poorest hind upon
the upper fields.

It was at College that I knew him and I
retained my acquaintance with him — Oh, I
retained it in a loving and cherishing manner
— until he was grown to young manhood.
I would keep it still did Fate permit me so to
do, for he was a treasure. I have never met
anything so complete for the purposes of
80

The Joke

laughter, though I am told there are many
such in the society which bred his oafish form.

He was a noble in his own country, which
was somewhere in the pine-forests of the
Germanics, and his views of social rank were
far, far too simple for the silent subtlety of
the English Rich. In his poor turnip of a
mind he ordered all men thus :

First, reigning sovereigns and their families.

Secondly, mediatized people.

Third, Princes.

Fourth, Dukes.

Fifth, Nobles.

Then came a little gap, and after that little
gap The Others.

Most of us in our College were The Others.
But he, as I have said, was a noble in his
distant land.

He had not long been among the young
Englishmen when he discovered that a diffi-
cult tangle of titles ran hither and thither
among them like random briars through an
undergrowth. There were Honourables, and
there were Lords, and Heaven knows what,
and there were two Sirs, and altogether it
puzzled him.

He couldn't understand why a man should
be called Mr. Jinks, and his brother Lord
6 Si

This and That and the Other

Blefauscu, and then if a man could be called
Lord Blefauscu while his father Lord Brob-
dignag was alive, how was it that quite a
fresher should be called Sir Howkey — no —
he was Sir John Howkey : and when the
Devil did one put in the Christian name and
when didn't one, and why should one, and
what was the order of precedence among all
these ?

I think that last point puzzled him more
than the rest, for in his own far distant land
in the pine-woods, where peasants uglier than
sin grovelled over the potato crop and called
him " Baron," there were no such devilish
contraptions, but black was black and white
was white. Here in this hypocritical England,
to which his father had sent him as an exile,
everything was so wrapped up in deceiving
masks ! There was the Captain of the Eleven,
or the President of the Boat Club. By the
time he had mastered that there might be
great men not only without the actual title
(he had long ago despaired of that), but with-
out so much as cousinship to one, he would
stumble upon a fellow with nothing whatso-
ever to distinguish him, not even the High
Jump, and yet " in " with the highest. It
tortured him, I can tell you ! After he had
82

The Joke

sat upon several Fourth Year men (he himself
a Fresher), from an error as to their rank,
after he had been duly thrown into the water,
blackened as to his face with blacking, sen-
tenced to death in a court-martial and duly
shot with a blank cartridge (an unpleasant
thing, by the way, looking down a barrel) ;
after he had had his boots, of which there
were seven pair, packed with earth, and in
each one a large geranium planted ; after all
these things had happened to him in his pur-
suit of an Anglo-German understanding, he
approached a lanky, pot-bellied youth whom
he had discovered with certitude to be the
cousin of a Duke, and begged him secretly to
befriend him in a certain matter, which was
this :

The Baron out of the Germanics proposed
to give a dinner to no less than thirty people
and he begged the pot-bellied youth in all
secrecy to collect for him an assembly worthy
of his rank and to give him privately not only
their names but their actual precedence
according to which he would arrange them
at the table upon his right and upon his left.

But what did the pot-bellied youth do ?
Why he went out and finding all his friends
one after the other he said :

83

This and That and the Other

" You know Sausage ? "

" Yes," said they, for all the University
knew Sausage.

" Well, he is going to give a dinner," said
the pot-bellied one, who was also slow of
speech, " and you have to come, but I'm going
to say you are the Duke of Rochester " (or
whatever title he might have chosen). And
so speaking, and so giving the date and place
he would go on to the next. Then, when he
had collected not thirty but sixty of all his
friends and acquaintances, he sought out the
noble Teuton again and told him that he could
not possibly ask only thirty men without life-
long jealousies and hatreds, so sixty were
coming, and the Teuton with some hesitation
(for he was fond of money) agreed.

Never shall I forget the day when those
sixty were ushered solemnly into a large
Reception Room in the Hotel, blameless
youths of varying aspect, most of them quite
sober — since it was but seven o'clock — and
presented one by one to the host of the even-
ing, each with his title and style.

To those whom he recognized as equals the

Aristocrat spoke with charming simplicity.

Those who were somewhat his inferiors (the

lords by courtesy and the simple baronets) he

84

The Joke

put immediately at their ease ; and even the
Honourables saw at a glance that he was a
man of the world, for he said a few kind words
to each. As for a man with no handle to his
name, there was not one of the sixty so low,
except a Mr. Poopsibah, of whom the gatherer
of that feast whispered to the host that he could
not but ask him because, though only a second
cousin, he was the heir to the Marquis of Quirk
— hence his Norman name.

It was a bewilderment to the Baron, for he
might have to meet the man later in life as the
Marquis of Quirk, whereas for the moment
he was only Mr. Poopsibah, but anyhow he
was put at the bottom of the table — and that
was how the trouble began.

In my time — I am talking of the nineties —
young men drank wine : it was before the
Bishop of London had noted the Great
Change. And Mr. Poopsibah and his neigh-
bour— Lord Henry Job — were quite early in
the Feast occupied in a playful contest which
ended in Mr. Poopsibah's losing his end seat
and going to grass. He rose, not unruffled,
with a burst collar, and glared a little uncer-
tainly over the assembled wealth and lineage
of the evening. Lord Benin (the son of our
great General Lord Ashantee of Benin — his
85

This and That and the Other

real name was Mitcham, God Rest His Soul)
addressed to the unreal Poopsibah an epithet
then fashionable, now almost forgotten, but
always unprintable. Mr. Poopsibah forgetting
what nobility imposes, immediately hurled at
him an as yet half-emptied bottle of Cham-
pagne.

Then it was that the bewildered Baron
learnt for the last time — and for that matter
for the first time — to what the Island Race
can rise when it really lets itself go.

I remember (I was a nephew if I remember
right) above the din and confusion of lights
(for candles also were thrown) loud appeals
as in a tone of command, and then as in a
tone of supplication, both in the unmistakable
accents of the Cousins overseas, and I even
remember what I may call the Great Sacrilege
of that evening when Lord Gogmagog seizing
our host affectionately round the neck, and
pressing the back of his head with his large
and red left hand, attempted to grind his
face into the tablecloth, after a fashion wholly
unknown to the haughty lords of the Teufel-
wald.

During the march homewards — an adven-
ture enlightened with a sharp skirmish and
two losses at the hands of the police — I know
86

The Joke

not what passed through the mind of the youth
who had hitherto kept so careful a distinction
between blood and blood : whether like
Hannibal he swore eternal hatred to the
English, or whether in his patient German
mind he noted it all down as a piece of histori-
cal evidence to be used in his diplomatic
career, we shall not be told. I think in the
main he was simply bewildered : bewildered
to madness.

Of the many other things we made him
do before Eights Week I have no space to tell :
How he asked us what was the fashionable
sport and how we told him Polo and made him
buy a Polo pony sixteen hands high, with huge
great bones and a broken nose, explaining to
him that it was stamina and not appearance
that the bluff Englishman loved in a horse.
How we made him wear his arms embroidered
upon his handkerchief (producing several for
a pattern and taking the thing as a common-
place by sly allusion for many preparatory
days). How we told him that it was the
custom to call every Sunday afternoon for
half an hour upon the wife of every married
Don of one's College. How we challenged him
to the great College feat of throwing himself
into the river at midnight. How finally we
87

This and That and the Other

persuaded him that the ancient custom of the
University demanded the presentation to one's
Tutor at the end of term of an elaborate thesis
one hundred pages long upon some subject of
Theology. How he was carefully warned that
surprise was the essence of this charming
tradition and not a word of it must be breathed
to the august recipient of the favour. How
he sucked in the knowledge that the more
curious and strange the matter the higher
would be his place in the schools, and how the
poor fool elaborately wasted what God gives
such men for brains in the construction of a
damning refutation against the Monophysites.
How his tutor, a humble little nervous fool,
thought he was having his leg pulled — all these
things I have no space to tell you now.

But he was rich ! Doubtless by the custom
of his country he is now in some great position
plotting the ruin of Britannia, and certainly
she deserves it in his case. He was most un-
mercifully ragged.

88

The Spy ^ ^> ^ ^ ^» ^> ^>

ONE day as I was walking along the beach
at Southsea, I saw a little man sitting
upon a camp-stool and very carefully drawing
the Old Round Stone Fort which stands in the
middle of the shallow water, one of the four
that so stand, and which looks from Southsea
as though it were about half-way across to the
Island.

I said to him : " Sir, why are you drawing
that old Fort ? "

He answered : "I am a German Spy, and
the reason I draw that Fort is to provide
information for my Government which may
be useful to it in case of war with this
country."

When the gentleman sitting upon the camp-
stool, who was drawing the Old Round Stone
Fort in the middle of the water, talked like this
he annoyed me very much.

' You merely waste your time," said I.
" These Forts were put up nearly sixty years
ago, and they are quite useless."
89

This and That and the Other

" I know nothing about that," said the little
man — he had hair like hemp and prominent
weak blue eyes of a glazed sort, and altogether
he struck me as a fool of no insignificant calibre
-" I know nothing about that. I obey orders.
I was told to draw this Fort, and that I am
now doing."

" You do not draw well," said I, " but that
is neither here nor there. I mean that what
you draw is not beautiful. What I really
want to know is why in thunder you were told
to draw that round stone barrel, for which
no one in Europe would give a five-pound
note."

" I have nothing to do with all that," said
the little man again, still industriously draw-
ing. " I was told to draw that Fort, and that
Fort I draw." And he went on drawing the
Old Round Stone Fort.

" Can you not tell me for whom you are
drawing it ? " said I at last.

' Yes," said he, " with great pleasure. I
am drawing it for his King-like and Kaiser-
like Majesty By the Grace of God and the
Authority of the Holy See, William, King of
Prussia, Margrave of Brandenburg, Duke of
Romshall, Count Hohenzollern, and of the
Great German Empire, Emperor."
90

The Spy

With that he went on drawing the Old
Round Stone Fort.

" I do assure you most solemnly," said I
again, " that you can be of no use whatever
to your master in this matter. There are
no guns upon that ridiculous thing ; it has
even been turned into a hotel."

But the little man paid no attention to what
I said. He went on obeying orders. He had
often heard that this was the strength of his
race.

" How could there conceivably be any guns
on it ? " said I imploringly. " Do think what
you are at ! Do look at the range between
you and Ryde ! Do consider what modern
gunnery is ! Do wake up, do ! "

But the little man with hair like hemp said
again : "I know nothing about all that. I
am a lieutenant in the High Spy Corps, and
I have been told to draw this Fort and I must
draw it." And he went on drawing the Old
Round Stone Fort.

Then gloom settled upon my spirit, for I
thought that civilization was in peril if men
such as he really existed and really went on
in this fashion.

However, I went back into Southsea, into
the town, and there I bought a chart. Then
91

This and That and the Other

I struck off ranges upon the chart and marked
them in pencil, and I also marked the Fairway
through Spithead into Portsmouth Harbour.
Then I came back to the little man, and I
said : "Do look at this ! "

He looked at it very patiently and carefully,
but at the end of so looking at it he said :
"I do not understand these things. I do
not belong to the High Map-making Corps ; I
belong to the Spy Corps, and I have orders to
draw this Fort." And he went on drawing
the Old Round Stone Fort.

Then, seeing I could not persuade him, I
went into a neighbouring church which is dedi-
cated to the Patron of Spies, to wit, St. Judas,
and I prayed for this man. I prayed thus :

" Oh, St. Judas ! Soften the flinty heart
of this Spy, and turn him, by your powerful
intercession, from his present perfectly useless
occupation of drawing the Old Round Stone
Fort to something a little more worthy of his
distinguished mission and the gallant profes-
sion he adorns."

When I had prayed thus diligently for half
an hour something within me told me that it
was useless, and when I got back to the sea-
shore I found out what the trouble was.
Prayers went off my little man like water off
92

The Spy

a cabbage-leaf. My little man with hair like
hemp was a No-Goddite, for he so explained
to me in a conversation we had upon the
Four Last Things.

" I have done my drawing," he said at the
end of this conversation (and he said it in a
tone of great satisfaction). " Now I shall go
back to Germany."

" No," said I, " you shall do nothing of the
kind. I will have you tried first in a court,
and you shall be sent to prison for being a

SPY-"

" Very well," said he, and he came with me
to the court.

The Magistrate tried him, and did what
they call in the newspapers " looking very
grave," that is, he looked silly and worried.
At last he determined not to put the Spy
in prison because there was not sufficient
proof that he was a Spy.

" Although," he added, " I have little doubt
but that you have been prying into the most
important military secrets of the country."

After that I took the Spy out of court again
and gave him some dinner, and that night he
went back home to Germany with his drawing
of the Old Round Stone Fort.

It is certainly an extraordinary way of doing
93

This and That and the Other

business, but that is their look-out. They
think they are efficient, and we think they are
efficient, and when two people of opposite
interests are agreed on such a matter it is
not for third parties to complain.

94

The Young People ^ ^> ^> ^>

ONE of my amusements, a mournful one
I admit, upon these fine spring days, is
to watch in the streets of London the young
people, and to wonder if they are what I was
at their age.

There is an element in human life which
the philosophers have neglected, and which
I am at a loss to entitle, for I think no name
has been coined for it. But I am not at a
loss to describe it. It is that change in the
proportion of things which is much more
than a mere change in perspective, or in point
of view. It is that change which makes Death
so recognizable and too near ; achievement
necessarily imperfect, and desire necessarily
mixed with calculation. It is more than that.
It is a sort of seeing things from that far side
of them, which was only guessed at or heard
of at second hand in earlier years, but which
is now palpable and part of the senses : known.
All who have passed a certain age know what
I mean.

95

This and That and the Other

This change, not so much in the aspect of
things as in the texture of judgment, may
mislead one when one judges youth ; and it
is best to trust to one's own memory of one's
own youth if one would judge the young.

There I see a boy of twenty-five looking
solemn enough, and walking a little too stiffly
down Cockspur Street. Does he think himself
immortal, I wonder, as I did ? Does the
thought of oblivion appal him as it did me ?
That he continually suffers in his dignity, that
he thinks the passers-by all watch him, and
that he is in terror of any singularity in dress
or gesture, I can well believe, for that is
common to all youth. But does he also, as
did I and those of my time, purpose great
things which are quite unattainable, and think
the summit of success in any art to be the
natural wage of living ?

Then other things occur to me. Do these
young people suffer or enjoy all our old illu-
sions ? Do they think the country invincible ?
Do they vaguely distinguish mankind into
rich and poor, and think that the former from
whom they spring are provided with their
well-being by some natural and fatal process,
like the recurrence of day and night ? Are they
as full of the old taboos of what a gentleman
96

The Young People

may and may not do ? I wonder ! — Possibly
they are. I have not seen one of them wearing
a billycock hat with a tail coat, nor one of them
smoking a pipe in the street. And is life
divided for them to-day as it was then, into
three periods : their childhood ; their much
more important years at a public school
(which last fill up most of their consciousness) ;
their new untried occupation?

And do they still so grievously and so
happily misjudge mankind ? I think they
must, judging by their eyes. I think they
too believe that industry earns an increasing
reward, that what is best done in any trade
is best recognized and best paid ; that labour
is a happy business ; and that women are of
two kinds : the young who go about to please
them, the old to whom they are indifferent.

Do they drink ? I suppose so. They do
not show it yet. Do they gamble ? I con-
ceive they do. Are their nerves still sound ?
Of that there can be no doubt ! See them
hop on and off the motor buses and cross the
streets !

And what of their attitude towards the

labels ? Do they take, as I did, every man

much talked of for a great man ? Are they

diffident when they meet such men ? And

7 97

This and That and the Other

do they feel themselves to be in the presence
of gods ? I should much like to put myself
into the mind of one of them, and to see if to
that generation the simplest of all social lies
is gospel. If it is so, I must suppose they
think a Prime Minister, a Versifier, an Am-
bassador, a Lawyer who frequently comes up
in the Press, to be some very superhuman
person. And doubtless also they ascribe a
sort of general quality to all much-talked-of
or much-be-printed men, putting them on one
little shelf apart, and all the rest of England
in a ruck below.

Then this thought comes to me. What of
their bewilderment ? We used all to be so
bewildered ! Things did not fit in with the
very simple and rigid scheme that was our
most undoubted creed of the State. The
motives of most commercial actions seemed
inscrutable save to a few base contemporaries
no older than ourselves, but cads, men who
would always remain what we had first known
them to be, small clerks upon the make.
At what age, I wonder, to this generation will
come the discovery that of these men and of
such material the Great are made ; and will
the long business of discovery come to sadden
them as late as it came to their elders ?
98

The Young People

I must believe that young man walking
down Cockspur Street thinks that all great
poets, all great painters, all great writers, all
great statesmen, are those of whom he reads,
and are all possessed of unlimited means and
command the world. Further, I must believe
that the young man walking down Cockspur
Street (he has got to Northumberland Avenue
by now) lives in a static world. For him
things are immovable. There are the old :
fathers and mothers and uncles ; the very
old are there, grandfathers, nurses, provosts,
survivors. Only in books does one find at
that age the change of human affection,
child-bearing, anxiety for money, and death.
All the children (he thinks) will be always
children, and all the lovely women always
young. And loyalty and generous regards
are twin easy matters reposing natively in
the soul, and as yet unbetrayed.

Well, if they are all like that, or even most
of them, the young people, quite half the
world is happy. Not one of that happy half
remembers the Lion of Northumberland House,
or the little streets there were behind the
Foreign Office, or the old Strand, or Temple
Bar, or what Coutts's used to be like, or Simp-
son's, or Soho as yet uninvaded by the great
99

This and That and the Other

and good Lord Shaftesbury. No one of the
young can pleasantly recall the Metropolitan
Board of Works.

And for them, all the new things — houses
which are veils of mud on stilts of iron,
advertisements that shock the night, the rush
of taxi-cabs and the Yankee hotels — are the
things that always were and always will be.

A year to them is twenty years of ours. The
summer for them is games and leisure, the
winter is the country and a horse ; time is
slow and stretched over long hours. They
write a page that should be immortal, but
will not be ; or they hammer out a lyric quite
undistinguishable from its models, and yet to
them a poignantly original thing.

Or am I all wrong ? Is the world so rapidly
changing that the Young also are caught with
the obsession of change ? Why, then, not
even half the world is happy.

zoo

Ethandune ^^ ^^ ^y ^> ^> ^y

IN the parish of East Knoyle, in the county
of Wiltshire, and towards the western side
of that parish, there is an isolated knoll, gorse-
covered, abrupt, and somewhat over 700 feet
above the sea in height. From the summit
of it a man can look westward, northward, and
eastward over a great rising roll of countryside.

To the west, upon the sky-line of a level
range of hills, not high, runs that long wood
called Selwood and there makes an horizon.
To the north the cultivated uplands merge
into high open down : bare turf of the chalk,
which closes the view for miles against the
sky, and is the watershed between the northern
and the southern Avon. Eastward that chalk
land falls into the valley which holds Salisbury.

From this high knoll a man perceives the
two days' march which Alfred made with
his levies when he summoned the men of three
shires to fight with him against the Danes ;
he overthrew them at Ethandune.

The struggle of which these two days were

101

This and That and the Other

the crisis was of more moment to the history
of Britain and of Europe than any other which
has imperilled the survival of either between
the Roman time and our own.

That generation in which the stuff of society
had worn most threadbare, and in which its
continued life (individually the living memory
of the Empire and informed by the Faith) was
most in peril, was not the generation which
saw the raids of the fifth century, nor even that
which witnessed the breaking of the Mahom-
medan tide in the eighth, when the Christians
carried it through near Poitiers, between the
River Vienne and the Chain, the upland south
of Chatellerault. The gravest moment of peril
was for that generation whose grandfathers
could remember the order of Charlemagne, and
which fought its way desperately through the
perils of the later ninth century.

Then it was, during the great Scandinavian
harrying of the North and West, that Europe
might have gone down. Its monastic estab-
lishment was shaken ; its relics of central
government were perishing of themselves ;
letters had sunk to nothing and building had
already about it something nearly savage,
when the swirl of the pirates came up all its
rivers. And though legend had taken the
102

Ethandune

place of true history, and though the memories
of our race were confused almost to dreaming,
we were conscious of our past and of our in-
heritance, and seemed to feel that now we
had come to a narrow bridge which might or
might not be crossed : a bridge already nearly
ruined.

If that bridge were not crossed there would
be no future for Christendom.

Southern Britain and Northern Gaul re-
ceived the challenge, met it, were victorious,
and so permitted the survival of all the things
we know. At Ethandune and before Paris
the double business was decided. Of these twin
victories the first was accomplished in this
island. Alfred is its hero, and its site is that
chalk upland, above the Vale of Trowbridge,
near which the second of the two white horses
is carved : the hills above Eddington and
Bratton upon the Westbury road.

The Easter of 878 had seen no King in
England. Alfred was hiding with some small
band in the marshes that lie south of Mendip
against the Severn Sea. It was one of those
eclipses which time and again in the history
of Christian warfare have just preceded the
actions by which Christendom has re-arisen.
In Whitsun week Alfred reappeared.
103

This and That and the Other

There is a place at the southern terminal of
the great wood, Selwood, which bears a Celtic
affix, and is called " Penselwood," " the head
of the forest," and near it there stood (not to
within living memory, but nearly so) a shire-
stone called Egbert's Stone ; there Wiltshire,
Somerset, and Dorset meet. It is just east-
ward of the gap by which men come by the
south round Selwood into the open country.
There the levies, that is the lords of Somerset
and of Wiltshire and their followers, some also
riding from Hampshire, met the King. But
many had fled over sea from fear of the Pagans.

" And seeing the King, as was meet, come
to life again as it were after such tribulations,
and receiving him, they were filled with an
immense joy, and there the camp was pitched."

Next day the host set out eastward to try
its last adventure with the barbarians who
had ruined half the West.

Day was just breaking when the levies set
forth and made for the uplands and for the
water partings. Not by mere and the marshes
of the valley, but by the great camp of White
Sheet and the higher land beyond it, the line
of marching and mounted men followed the
King across the open turf of the chalk to where
three Hundreds meet, and where the gathering
104

Ethandune

of the people for justice and the courts of the
Counts had been held before the disasters of
that time had broken up the land.

It was a spot bare of houses, but famous for
a tree which marked the junction of the
Hundreds. No more than three hundred years
ago this tree still stood and bore the name
of the Hey Oak. The place of that day's
camp stands up above the water of Deveril,
and is upon the continuation of that Roman
road from Sarum to the Mendips and to the
sea, which is lost so suddenly and unaccount-
ably upon its issue from the great Ridge wood.
The army had marched ten miles, and there
the second camp was pitched.

With the next dawn the advance upon the
Danes was made.

The whole of that way (which should be
famous in every household in this court try) is
now deserted and unknown. The host passed
over the high rolling land of the Downs from
summit to summit until — from that central
crest which stands above and to the east of
Westbury — they saw before them, directly
northward and a mile away, the ring of earth-
work which is called to-day " Bratton Castle."
Upon the slope between, the great host of the
pirates came out to battle. It was there,
105

This and That and the Other

from those naked heights that overlook the
great plain of the northern Avon, that the
fate of England was decided.

The end of that day's march and action
was the pressing of the Pagans back behind
their earthworks, and the men who had saved
our great society sat down before the ringed
embankment watching all the gates of it,
killing all the stragglers that had failed to
reach that protection, and rounding up the
stray horses and the cattle of the Pagans.

That siege endured for fourteen days. At
the end of it the Northmen treatied, conquered
" by hunger, by cold, and by fear." Alfred
took hostages " as many as he willed."
Guthrum, their King, accepted our baptism,
and Britain took that upward road which
Gaul seven years later was to follow when the
same anarchy was broken by Eudes under
the walls of Paris.

All this great affair we have doubtfully
followed to-day in no more than some three
hundred words of Latin, come down doubt-
fully over a thousand years. But the thing
happened where and as I have said. It should
be as memorable as those great battles in
which the victories of the Republic established
our exalted but perilous modern day.
196

The Death of Robert the Strong ^ ^

UP in the higher valley of the River
Sarthe, which runs between low knolls
through easy meadow-land, and is a place of
cattle and of pasture interspersed with woods
of no great size, upon a summer morning
a troop of some hundreds of men was coming
down from the higher land to the crossings
of the river. It was in the year 866. The
older servants in the chief men's retinue could
remember Charlemagne.

Two leaders rode before the troop. They
were two great owners of land, and each
possessed of commissions from the Imperial
authority. The one had come up hastily
northwards from Poitiers, the other had
marched westward to join him, coming from
the Beauce, with his command. Each was a
Comes, a Lord Administrator of a country-
side and its capital, and had power to levy
free men. Their retainers also were many.
About them there rode a little group of aides,
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This and That and the Other

and behind them, before the foot-men, were
four squadrons of mounted followers.

The force had already marched far that
morning. It was winding in line down a
roughly beaten road between the growing crops
of the hillside, and far off in the valley the
leaders watched the distant villages, but they
could see no sign of their quarry. They were
hunting the pirates. The scent had been good
from the very early hours when they had
broken camp till lately, till mid-morning ; but
in the last miles of their marching it had failed
them, and the accounts they received from
the rare peasantry were confused.

They found a cottage of wood standing
thatched near the track at the place where it
left the hills for the water meadows, and here
they recovered the trace of their prey. A
wounded man, his right arm bound roughly
with sacking, leaned against the door of the
place, and with his whole left arm pointed at
a group of houses more than a mile away
beyond the stream, and at a light smoke which
rose into the still summer air just beyond a
screen of wood in its neighbourhood. He had
seen the straggling line of the Northern men
an hour before, hurrying over the Down and
coming towards that farm.
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The Death of Robert the Strong

Of the two leaders the shorter and more
powerful one, who sat his horse the less easily,
and whose handling of the rein was brutally
strong, rode up and questioned and re-
questioned the peasant. Could he guess the
numbers ? It might be two hundred ; it was
not three. How long had they been in the
countryside ? Four days, at least. It was
four days ago that they had tried to get into
the monastery, near the new castle, and had
been beaten off by the servants at the orchard
wall. What damage had they done ? He could
not tell. The reports were few that he had
heard. His cousin from up the valley com-
plained that three oxen had been driven
from his fields by night. They had stolen
a chain of silver from St. Giles without respect
for the shrine. They had done much more —
how much he did not know. Had they left
any dead ? Yes, three, whom he had helped
to bury. They had been killed outside the
monastery wall. One of his fields was of the
monastery benefice, and he had been sum-
moned to dig the graves.

The lord who thus questioned him fixed

him with straight soldierly eyes, and, learning

no more, rode on by the side of his equal from

Poitiers. That equal was armoured, but the

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This and That and the Other

lord who had spoken to the peasant, full of
body and squat, square of shoulder, thick of
neck, tortured by the heat, had put off from
his chest and back his leather coat, strung with
rings of iron. His servant had unlaced it for
him some miles before, and it hung loose upon
the saddle hook. He had taken off, also, the
steel helm, and it hung by its strap to the same
point. He preferred to take the noon sun upon
his thick hair and to risk its action than to be
weighed upon longer by that iron. And this
though at any moment the turn of a spinney
might bring them upon some group of the
barbarians.

Upon this short, resolute man, rather than
upon his colleague, the expectation of the
armed men was fixed. His repute had gone
through all the north of Gaul with popular
tales of his feats in lifting and in throwing.
He was perhaps forty years of age. He boasted
no lineage, but vague stories went about — that
his father was from the Germanies ; that his
father was from the Paris land ; that it was
his mother who had brought him to court ;
that he was a noble with a mystery that
forbade him to speak of his birth ; that
he was a slave whom the Emperor had
enfranchised and to whom he had given
no

The Death of Robert the Strong

favour ; that he was a farmer's son ; a
yeoman.

On these things he had never spoken. No
one had met men or women of his blood. But
ever since his boyhood he had gone upwards
in the rank of the empire, adding, also, one
village to another in his possession, from the
first which he had obtained no man knew
how ; purchasing land with the profits of
office after office. He had been Comes of
Tours, Comes of Auxerre, Comes of Nevers.
He had the commission for all the military
work between Loire and Seine. There were
songs about him, and myths and tales of his
great strength, for it was at this that the
populace most wondered.

So this man rode by his colleague's side
at the head of the little force, seeking for the
pirates, when, unexpectedly, upon emerging
from a fringe of trees that lined the flat
meadows, his seat in the saddle stiffened and
changed, and his eyes fired at what he saw.
Two hundred yards before him was the stream,
and over it the narrow stone bridge unbroken.
Immediately beyond a group of huts and
houses, wood and stone, and a heavy, low,
round-arched bulk of a church marked the
goal of the pirates — and there they were !
in

This and That and the Other

They had seen the imperial levy the moment
that it left the trees, and they were running —
tall, lanky men, unkempt, some burdened with
sacks, most of them armed with battle-axe
or short spear. They were making for cover
in the houses of the village.

Immediately the two leaders called the
marshallers of their levies, gave orders that the
foot-men should follow, trotted in line over the
bridge at the head of the squadron, and, once
the water was passed, formed into two bodies
of horse and galloped across the few fields into
the streets of the place.

Just as they reached the market square and
the front of the old church there, the last of
the marauders (retarded under the weight
of some burden he would save) was caught
and pinned by a short spear thrown. He fell,
crying and howling in a foreign tongue to gods
of his own in the northland. But all his com-
rades were fast in the building, and there was
a loud thrusting of stone statues and heavy
furniture against the doors. Then, within a
moment, an arrow flashed from a window slit,
just missing one of the marshals. The Comes
of Poitiers shouted for wood to burn the
defence of the door, and villagers, misliking
the task, were pressed. Faggots were dragged

112

The Death of Robert the Strong

from sheds and piled against it. Even as this
work was doing, man after man fell, as the
defenders shot them at short range from
within the church-tower.

The first of the foot-men had come up, and
some half-dozen picked for marksmanship were
attempting to thread with their whistling
arrows the slits in the thick walls whence the
bolts of the Vikings came. One such opening
was caught by a lucky aim. For some mo-
ments its fire ceased, then came another arrow
from it. It struck the Comes of Poitiers and
he went down, and as he fell from his horse
two servants caught him. Next, with a second
shaft, the horse was struck, and it plunged
and began a panic. No servant dared stab it,
but a marshal did.

Robert, that second count, the leader, had
dismounted. He was in a fury, mixed with
the common men, and striking at the great
church door blow upon blow, having in his
hand a stone so huge that even at such a
moment they marvelled at him.

Unarmoured, pouring with sweat, though at
that western door a great buttress still shaded
him from the noonday sun, Robert the Strong
thundered enormously at the oak. A hinge
broke, and he heard a salute of laughter from
8 113

This and That and the Other

his men. He dropped his instrument, lifted,
straining, a great beam which lay there, and
trundled it like a battering-ram against the
second hinge. But, just as the shock came,
an arrow from the tower caught him also.
It struck where the neck joins the shoulder,
and he went down. Even as he fell, the great
door gave, and the men of the imperial levy,
fighting their way in, broke upon the massed
pirates that still defended the entry with a
whirl of axe and sword.

Four men tended the leader, one man
holding his head upon his knee, the three
others making shift to lift him, to take him
where he might be tended. But his body was
no longer convulsed ; the motions of the
arms had ceased ; and when the arrow was
plucked at last from the wound, the thick
blood hardly followed it. He was dead.

The name of this village and this church
was Brissarthe ; and the man who so fell,
and from whose falling soldier songs and
legends arose, was the first father of all the
Capetians, the French kings.

From this man sprang Eudes, who defended

Paris from the Sea-Rovers : Hugh Capet and

Philip Augustus and Louis the Saint and

Philip the Fair ; and so through century after

114

The Death of Robert the Strong

century to the kings that rode through Italy,
to Henri IV, to Louis XIV in the splendour
of his wars, and to that last unfortunate
who lost the Tuileries on August 10th, 1793.
His line survives to-day, for its eldest heir
is the man whom the Basques would follow.
His expectants call him Don Carlos, and he
claims the crown of Spain.

The Crooked Streets *^ ^ -^ ^

WHY do they pull down and do away
with the Crooked Streets, I wonder,
which are my delight, and hurt no man living ?

Every day the wealthier nations are pulling
down one or another in their capitals and their
great towns : they do not know why they
do it ; neither do I.

It ought to be enough, surely, to drive
the great broad ways which commerce needs
and which are the life-channels of a modern
city, without destroying all the history and
all the humanity in between : the islands
of the past. For, note you, the Crooked
Streets are packed with human experience
and reflect in a lively manner all the chances
and misfortunes and expectations and domes-
ticity and wonderment of men. One marks
a boundary, another the kennel of an ancient
stream, a third the track some animal took
to cross a field hundreds upon hundreds of
years ago ; another is the line of an old
defence, another shows where a rich man's
garden stopped long before the first ancestor
116

The Crooked Streets

one's family can trace was born ; a garden
now all houses, and its owner who took delight
in it turned to be a printed name.

Leave men alone in their cities, pester
them not with the futilities of great govern-
ments, nor with the fads of too powerful
men, and they will build you Crooked Streets
of their very nature as moles throw up the
little mounds or bees construct their combs.
There is no ancient city but glories, or has
gloried, in a whole foison and multitude
of Crooked Streets. There is none, however
wasted and swept by power, which, if you
leave it alone to natural things, will not
breed Crooked Streets in less than a hundred
years and keep them for a thousand more.

I know a dead city called Timgad, which
the sand or the barbarians of the Atlas over-
whelmed fourteen centuries ago. It lies
between the desert and the Algerian fields,
high up upon a mountain-side. Its columns
stand. Even its fountains are apparent,
though their waterways are choked. It has
a great forum or market-place, all flagged
and even, and the ruined walls of its houses
mark its emplacement on every side. All
its streets are straight, set out with a line,
and by this you may judge how a Roman
117

This and That and the Other

town lay when the last order of Rome sank
into darkness.

Well, take any other town which has not
thus been mummified and preserved but has
lived through the intervening time, and you
will find that man, active, curious, intense,
in all the fruitful centuries of Christian time
has endowed them with Crooked Streets,
which kind of streets are the most native
to Christian men. So it is with Aries, so
it is with Nimes, so it is with old Rome
itself, and so it is with the City of London,
on which by a special Providence the curse
of the Straight Street has never fallen, so
that it is to this day a labyrinth of little
lanes. It was intended after the Great Fire
to set it all out in order with " piazzas "
and boulevards and the rest — but the English
temper was too strong for any such nonsense,
and the streets and the courts took to the
natural lines which suit us best.

The Renaissance indeed everywhere began
this plague of vistas and of avenues. It
was determined three centuries ago to re-
build Paris as regular as a chessboard, and
nothing but money saved the town — or
rather the lack of money. You may to this
day see in a square called the " Place des
118

The Crooked Streets

Vosges " what was intended. But when they
had driven their Straight Street two hun-
dred yards or so the exchequer ran dry, and
thus was old Paris saved. But in the last
seventy years they have hurt it badly again. I
have no quarrel with what is regal and magnifi-
cent, with splendid ways of a hundred feet or
more, with great avenues and lines of palaces ;
but why should they pull down my nest beyond
the river — Straw Street and Rat Street and all
those winding belts round the little Church
of St. Julien the Poor, where they say that
Dante studied and where Danton in the mad-
ness of his grief dug up his dead love from the
earth on his returning from the wars ?

Crooked Streets will never tire a man, and
each will have its character, and each will
have a soul of its own. To proceed from one
to another is like travelling in a multitude
or mixing with a number of friends. In
a town of Crooked Streets it is natural that
one should be the Moneylender's Street
and another that of the Burglars, and a
third that of the Politicians, and so forth
through all the trades and professions.

Then also, how much better are not the
beauties of a town seen from Crooked Streets !
Consider those old Dutch towns where you
119

This and That and the Other

suddenly come round a corner upon great
stretches of salt water, or those towns of
Central France which from one street and
then another show you the Gothic in a hun-
dred ways.

It is as it should be when you have the
back of Chartres Cathedral towering up above
you from between and above two houses
gabled and almost meeting. It is what the
builders meant when one comes out from
such fissures into the great Place, the parvis
of the cathedral, like a sailor from a river
into the sea. Not that certain buildings were
not made particularly for wide approaches
and splendid roads, but that these, when they
are the rule, sterilize and kill a town. Napoleon
was wise enough when he designed that there
should lead all up beyond the Tiber to St.
Peter's a vast imperial way. But the modern
nondescript horde, which has made Rome its
prey, is very ill advised to drive those new
Straight Streets foolishly, emptily, with mean
fa£ades of plaster and great gaps that will
not fill.

You will have noted in your travels how
the Crooked Streets gather names to them-
selves which are as individual as they, and
which are bound up with them as our names

120

The Crooked Streets

are with all our own human reality and
humour. Thus I bear in mind certain streets
of the town where I served as a soldier.
There was the Street of the Three Little
Heaps of Wheat, the Street of the Trumpeting
Moor, the Street of the False Heart, and an
exceedingly pleasant street called " Who
Grumbles at It ? " and another short one
called " The Street of the Devil in his Haste,"
and many others.

From time to time those modern town
councillors from whom Heaven has wisely
withdrawn all immoderate sums of money,
and who therefore have not the power to
take away my Crooked Streets and put
Straight ones in their places, change old
names to new ones. Every such change indi-
cates some snobbery of the time : some little
battle exaggerated to be a great thing ; some
public fellow or other, in Parliament or what
not ; some fad of the learned or of the im-
portant in their day.

Once I remember seeing in an obscure
corner a twist of dear old houses built before
George III was king, and on the corner of this
row was painted " Kipling Street : late Nelson
Street."

Upon another occasion I went to a little

121

This and That and the Other

Norman market town up among the hills,
where one of the smaller squares was called
" The Place of the Three Mad Nuns," and
when I got there after so many years and
was beginning to renew my youth I was
struck all of a heap to see a great enamelled
blue and white affair upon the walls. They
had renamed the triangle. They had called
it " The Place Victor Hugo " !

However, all you who love Crooked Streets,
I bid you lift up your hearts. There is no
power on earth that can make man build
Straight Streets for long. It is a bad thing,
as a general rule, to prophesy good or to
make men feel comfortable with the vision
of a pleasant future ; but in this case I am
right enough. The Crooked Streets will cer-
tainly return.

Let me boldly borrow a quotation which I
never saw until the other day, and that in
another man's work, but which, having once
seen it, I shall retain all the days of my life.

" Oh, passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque
fincm," or words to that effect. I can never
be sure of a quotation, still less of scansion,
and anyhow, as I am deliberately stealing
it from another man, if I have changed it so
much the better.

122

The Place Apart ^> ^ ^x ^ <^

T ITTLE pen be good and flow with ink
-1 — '(which you do not always do), so that I
may tell you what came to me once in a high
summer and the happiness I had of it.

One Summer morning as I was wandering
from one house to another among the houses
of men, I lifted up a bank from a river to
a village and good houses, and there I
was well entertained. I wish I could recite
the names of those chance companions, but
I cannot, for they did not tell me their names.
June was just beginning in the middle lands
where there are vines, but not many, and
where the look of the stonework is still
northern. The place was not very far from
the Western Sea.

The bank on which the village stood above

that river had behind it a solemn slope of

woodland leading up gently to where, two miles

or more away, yet not three hundred feet

123

This and That and the Other

above me, the new green of the tree-tops
made a line along the sky. Clouds of a little,
happy, hurrying sort ran across the gentle
blue of that heaven, and I thought, as I went
onward into the forest upland, that I had
come to very good things : but indeed I had
come to things of a graver kind.

A path went on athwart the woods and up-
wards. This path was first regular, and then
grew less and less marked, though it still
preserved a clear-way through the under-
growth. The new leaves were opened all
about me and there was a little breeze : yet
the birds piped singly and the height was
lonely when I reached it, as though it were
engaged in a sort of contemplation. At the
summit was first one small clearing and then
another, in which coarse grass grew high within
the walls of trees ; men had not often come
that way, and those men only the few of the
countryside.

Just where the slope began to go down-
wards again upon the further side, these little
clearings ceased and the woods closed in
again. The path, or what was left of it, wholly
failed, and I had now to push my way through
many twigs and interlacing brambles, till
in a little while that forest ceased abruptly
124

The Place Apart

upon the edge of a falling sward, and I saw
before me the Valley.

Its floor must have Iain higher than that
river which I had crossed and left the same
morning, for my ascent had been one of two
miles or so, and my pushing downward on the
further slope far less than one ; moreover,
that descent had been gentle.

The Valley opened to the right at my issue
from the wood. To my left hand was a circle
of the same trees as those through which I
had passed, but to the right and so away
northward, the pleasant empty dale.

Let me describe it.

Upon the further bank (for it was not
steep enough to call a wall), the western bank
which shut that valley in, grew a thick growth
of low chestnuts with here and there a tall
silver birch standing up among them. All
this further slope was so held, and the chest-
nuts made a dark belt from which the tall
graces of the birches lifted. The sunlight was
behind that long afternoon of hills.

Opposite, the higher eastern slope stood
full though gentle to the glorious light, and
it was all a rise of pasture land. Its crest,
which followed up and away northward for
some miles, showed here and there a brown
'25

This and That and the Other

rock, aged and strong but low and half
covered in the grass. These rocks were warm
and mellow. The height of this eastern
boundary was enough to protect the hollow
below, but not so high as to carry any sense
of savagery. It warned rather than forbade
the approach of human kind. Between it
and its opposing wooded fellow the narrowing
floor of that Eden lay ; winding, closing
slowly, until it ended in a little cup-like pass,
an easy saddle of grass where the two sides
of the valley converged upon its northern
conclusion. This pass was perhaps four miles
away from me as I gazed, or perhaps a little
less. The sun, as I have said, was shining
upon all this : it made upon the little cup-
like place a gentle shadow and a gentle light,
both curved as the light might fall low and
aslant upon a wooden bowl clothed in a soft
green cloth. This was a lovely sight, and it
invited me to go forward.

Therefore I went down the sward that fell
from the abrupt edge of the wood, and set
out to follow northward along the lower
grasses of this single and most unexpected
vale.

So strange was the place, even at this first
sight, that I thought to myself : "I have
126

The Place Apart

happened upon one of those holidays God
gives us." For we cannot give ourselves
holidays : nor, if we are slaves, can our
masters give us holidays, but God only : until
at last we lay down the business and leave
our work for good and all. And so much for
holidays. Anyhow, the valley was a wonder
to me there.

It was not as are common and earthly
things. There was a peace about it which
was not a mere repose, but rather something
active which invited and intrigued. The
meadows had a summons in them ; and all
was completely still. I heard no birds from
the moment when I left the woodland, but
a little brook, not shallow, ran past me for a
companion as I went on. It made no murmur,
but it slid full and at once mysterious and
prosperous, brimming up to the rich field
upon either side. I thought there must be
chalk beneath it from its way of going. The
pasture was not mown yet it was short, but
if it had been fed there was no trace of herds
anywhere ; and indeed the grass was rather
more in height than the grass of fed land,
though it was not in flower. No wind moved it.

There were no divisions in this little king-
dom ; there were no walls or fences or hedges :
127

This and That and the Other

it was all one field, with the woods upon the
western slope to my left, and the tilted green
of the eastern ridge to my right on which the
sunlight softly and continually lay. Never
have I found a place so much its own master
and so contentedly alone.

If any man owned that Valley, blessed be
that man, but if no man owned it, and only
God, then I could better understand the bene-
diction which it imposed upon me, a chance
wanderer, for something little less than an
hour. Here was a place in which thought
settled upon itself, and was not concerned
with unanswerable things ; and here was a
place in which memory did not trouble one
with the incompletion of recent trial, but
rather stretched back to things so very old
that all sense of evil had been well purged
out of them. The ultimate age of the world
which is also its youth, was here securely
preserved. I was not so foolish as to attempt
a prolongation of this blessedness : these
things are not for possession : they are an
earnest only of things which we may perhaps
possess, but not while the business is on.

I went along at a good sober pace of travel-
ling, taking care to hurt no blossom with
my staff and to destroy no living thing,
128

The Place Apart

whether of leaves or of those that have
movement.

So I went until I came to the low pass
at the head of the place, and when I had
surmounted it I looked down a steep great
fall into quite another land. I had come to a
line where met two provinces, two different
kinds of men, and this second valley was the
end of one.

The moor (for so I would call it) upon the
further side fell away and away distantly,
till at its foot it struck a plain whereon I could
see, further and further off to a very distant
horizon, cities and fields and the anxious life
of men.

129

The Ebro Plain

I WISH I could put before men who have
not seen that sight, the abrupt shock
which the Northern eye receives when it
first looks from some rampart of the Pyrenees
upon the new deserts of Spain.

" Deserts " is a term at once too violent
and too simple. The effect of that amaze-
ment is by no means the effect which follows
from a similar vision of the Sahara from the
red-burnt and precipitous rocks of Atlas ; nor
is it the effect which those stretches of white
blinding sand give forth when, looking south-
ward toward Mexico and the sun, a man
shades his eyes to catch a distant mark of
human habitation along some rare river of
Arizona from the cliff edge of a cut table-
land.

Corn grows in that new Spain beneath
one : many towns stand founded there ;
Christian Churches are established ; a human
society stands firmly, though sparsely, set
in that broad waste of land. But to the
130

The Ebro Plain

Northern eye first seeing it — nay, to a
Northerner well acquainted with it, but
returning to the renewal of so strange a
vision — it is always a renewed perplexity
how corn, how men, how worship, how
society (as he has known them) can have
found a place there ; and that, although he
knows that nowhere in Europe have the
fundamental things of Europe been fought
for harder and more steadfastly maintained
than they have along this naked and burnt
valley of the Ebro.

I will suppose the traveller to have made
his way on foot from the boundaries of the
Basque country, from the Peak of Anie,
down through the high Pyrenean silences to
those banks of Aragon where the river runs
west between parallel ranges, each of which
is a bastion of the main Pyrenean chain. I
will suppose him to have crossed that roll of
thick mud which the tumbling Aragon is in
all these lower reaches, to have climbed the
further range (which is called " The Mountains
of Stone," or " The Mountains of the Rock "),
and, coming upon its further southern slope,
to see for the first time spread before him that
vast extent of uniform dead-brown stretching
through an air metallically clear to the tiny

This and That and the Other

peaks far off on the horizon, which mark the
springs of the Tagus. It is a characteristic
of the stretched Spanish upland, from within
sight of the Pyrenees to within sight of the
Southern Sea, that it may thus be grasped in
less than half a dozen views, wider than any
views in Europe ; and, partly from the height
of that interior land, partly from the Iberian
aridity of its earth, these views are as sharp
in detail, as inhuman in their lack of distant
veils and blues, as might be the landscapes of
a dead world.

The traveller who should so have passed the
high ridge and watershed of the Pyrenees,
would have come down from the snows of the
Anie through forests not indeed as plentiful
as those of the French side, but still dignified
by many and noble trees, and alive with
cascading water. While he was yet crossing
the awful barriers (one standing out parallel
before the next) which guard the mountains
on their Spainward fall, he would continuously
have perceived, though set in dry, unhospit-
able soil, bushes and clumps of trees ; some-
thing at times resembling his own Northern
conception of pasture-land. The herbage
upon which he would pitch his camp, the
branches he would pick for firewood, still,
132

The Ebro Plain

though sparse and Southern, would have re-
minded him of home.

But when he has come over the furthest of
these parallel reaches, and sees at last the
whole sweep of the Ebro country spread out
before him, it is no longer so. His eye detects
no trees, save that belt of green which accom-
panies the course of the river, no glint of
water. Though human habitation is present
in that landscape, it mixes, as it were, with
the mud and the dust of the earth from which
it rose ; and, gazing at a distant clump in the
plains beneath him, far off, the traveller asks
himself doubtfully whether these hummocks are
but small, abrupt, insignificant hills or a nest
of the houses of men — things with histories.

For the rest all that immeasurable sweep
of yellow-brown bare earth fills up whatever
is not sky, and is contained or framed upon
its final limit by mountains as severe as its
own empty surface. Those far and dreadful
hills are unrelieved by crag or wood or mist ;
they are a mere height, naked and unfruitful,
running along wall-like and cutting off Aragon
from the south and the old from the new
Castille, save where the higher knot of the
Moncayo stands tragic and enormous against
the sky.

This and That and the Other

This experience of Spain, this first dis-
covery of a thing so unexpected and so
universally misstated by the pens of travellers
and historians, is best seen in autumn sunsets,
I think, when behind the mass of the distant
mountains an angry sky lights up its unfruit-
ful aspect of desolation, and, though lending
it a colour it can never possess in commoner
hours and seasons, in no way creates an illusion
of fertility or of romance, of yield or of adven-
ture, in that doomed silence.

The vision of which I speak does not, I
know, convey this peculiar impression even
to all of the few who may have seen it thus —
and they are rare. They are rare because men
do not now approach the old places of Europe
in the old way. They come into a Spanish
town of the north by those insufficient rail-
ways of our time. They return back home
with no possession of great sights, no more
memorable experience than of urban things
done less natively, more awkwardly, more
slowly than in England. Yet even those few,
I say, who enter Spain from the north, as
Spain should be entered — over the mountain
roads — have not all of them received the im-
pression of which I speak.

I have so received it, I know ; I could wish

The Ebro Plain

that to the Northerner it were the impression
most commonly conveyed : a marvel that
men should live in such a place : a wonder
when the ear catches the sound of a distant
bell, that ritual and a creed should have sur-
vived there — so absolute is its message of
desolation.

With a more familiar acquaintance this
impression does not diminish, but increases.
Especially to one who shall make his way
painfully on foot for three long days from the
mountains to the mountains again, who shall
toil over the great bare plain, who shall
cross by some bridge over Ebro and look
down, it may be, at a trickle of water hardly
moving in the midst of a broad, stony bed,
or it may be at a turbid spate roaring a furlong
broad after the rains — in either case unusable
and utterly unfriendly to man ; who shall
hobble from little village to little village,
despairing at the silence of men in that silent
land and at their lack of smiles and at the
something fixed which watches one from every
wall ; who shall push on over the slight wheel-
tracks which pass for roads — they are not
roads — across the infinite, unmarked, un-
differenced field ; to one who has done all
these things, I say, getting the land into his

This and That and the Other

senses hourly, there comes an appreciation
of its wilful silence and of its unaccomplished
soul. That knowledge fascinates, and bids
him return. It is like watching with the sick
who once were thought dead, who are, in
your night of watching, upon the turn of their
evil. It is like those hours of the night in
which the mind of some troubled sleeper
wakened can find neither repose nor variety,
but only a perpetual return upon itself — yet
waits for dawn. There lies behind all this, as
behind a veil of dryness stretched from the
hills to the hills, for those who will discover
it, the intense, the rich, the unconquerable
spirit of Spain.

136

The Little River <^; <^ *^ <cy <<sy

MEN forget too easily how much the
things they see around them in the
landscapes of Britain are the work of men.
Most of our trees were planted and carefully
nurtured by man's hand. Our ploughs for
countless centuries have made even the soil
of the plains bear human outlines ; their
groups of hedge and of building, of ridge and
of road are very largely the creation of that
curious and active breed which was set upon
this dull round of the earth to enliven it- —
which, alone of creatures, speaks and has
foreknowledge of death and wonders con-
cerning its origin and its end. It is man that
has transformed the surface and the outline
of the old countries, and even the rivers carry
his handiwork.

There is a little river on my land which
very singularly shows the historical truth
of what I am here saying. As God made it,
it was but a drain rambling through the
marshy clay of tangled underwood, sluggishly

This and That and the Other

feeling its way through the hollows in general
weathers, scouring in a shapeless flood after
the winter rains, dried up and stagnant in
isolated pools in our hot summers. Then,
no one will ever know how many centuries
ago, man came, busy and curious, and doing
with his hands. He took my little river ; he
began to use it, to make it, and to transform
it, and to erect of it a human thing. He gave
to it its ancient name, which is the ancient
name for water, and which you will find
scattered upon streams large and small from
the Pyrenees up to the Northern Sea and
from the west of Germany to the Atlantic.
He called it the Adur ; therefore pedants
pretend that the name is new and not old,
for pedants hate the fruitful humour of
antiquity.

Well, not only did man give my little river
(an inconceivable number of generations ago)
the name which it still bears, but he bridged
it and he banked it, he scoured it and he
dammed it, until he made of it a thing to
his own purpose and a companion of the
countryside.

With the fortunes of man in our Western
and Northern land the fortunes of my little
river rose and fell. What the Romans may
138

The Little River

have done with it we do not know, for a clay
soil preserves but little- — coins sink in it and
the foundations of buildings are lost.

In the breakdown which we call the Dark
Ages, and especially perhaps after the worst
business of the Danish Invasion, it must
have broken back very nearly to the useless
and unprofitable thing it had been before
man came. The undergrowth, the little oaks
and the maples, the coarse grass, the thistle
patches, and the briars encroached upon
tilled land ; the banks washed down, floods
carried away the rotting dams, the water-
wheels were forgotten and perished. There
seem to have been no mills. There is no good
drinking water in that land, save here and
there at a rare spring, unless you dig a well,
and the people of the Dark Ages in Britain,
broken by the invasion, dug no wells in the
desolation of my valley.

Then came the Norman : the short man
with the broad shoulders and the driving
energy, and that regal sense of order which
left its stamp wherever he marched, from
the Grampians to the Euphrates. He tamed
that land again, he ploughed the clay, he
cut the undergrowth, and he built a great
house of monks and a fine church of stone
139

This and That and the Other

where for so long there had been nothing
but flying robbers, outlaws, and the wolves
of the weald.

To my little river the Norman was par-
ticularly kind. He dug it out and deepened
it, he bridged it again and he sluiced it ;
it brimmed to its banks, it was once more
the companion of men, and, what is more,
he dug it out so thoroughly all the twenty
miles to the sea that he could even use it
for barges and for light boats, so that this
head of the stream came to be called Shipley,
for goods of ships could be floated, when all
this was done, right up to the wharf which
the Knights Templars had 'built above the
church to meet the waters of the stream.

All the Middle Ages that fruitfulness and
that use continued. But with the troubles
in which the Middle Ages closed and in which
so much of our civilization was lost, the little
river was once more half abandoned. The
church still stood, but stone by stone the
great building of the Templars disappeared.
The river was no longer scoured; its course
was checked by dense bush and reed, the wild
beasts came back, the lands of the King were
lost. One use remained to the water — the
Norman's old canalization was forgotten and
140

The Little River

the wharf had slipped into a bank of clay, and
was now no more than a tumbled field with no
deep water standing by. This use was the
use of the Hammer Ponds. Here and there the
stream was banked up, and the little fall thus
afforded was used to work the heavy hammers
of the smithies in which the iron of the country-
side was worked. For in this clay of ours there
was ironstone everywhere, and the many oaks
of the weald furnished the charcoal for its
smelting. The metal work of the great ships
that fought the French, many of their guns
also, and bells and railings for London, were
smithied or cast at the issue of these Hammer
Ponds. But coal came and the new smelting ;
our iron was no longer worked, and the last
usefulness of the little river seemed lost.

Then for two generations all that land lay
apart, the stream quite choked or furiously
flooding, the paths unworkable in winter :
no roads, but only green lanes, and London,
forty miles away, unknown.

The last resurrection of the little river
has begun to-day. The railway was the
first bringer of good news (if you will allow
me to be such an apologist for civilization) ;
then came good hard roads in numbers, and
quite lately the bicycle, and, last of all, the
141

This and That and the Other

car. The energy of men reached Adur once
again, and once again began the scouring and
making of the banks and the harnessing of
the water for man ; so that, though we have
not tackled the canal as we should (that will
come), yet with every year the Adur grows
more and more of a companion again. It has
furnished two fine great lakes for two of my
neighbours, and in one place after another
they have bridged it as they should, and though
clay is a doubtful thing to deal with they have
banked it as well.

The other day as I began a new and great
and good dam with sluices and with puddled
clay behind oak boards and with huge oak
uprights and oaken spurs to stand the rush
of the winter floods, I thought to myself,
working in that shimmering and heated air,
how what I was doing was one more of the in-
numerable things that men had done through
time incalculable to make the river their own,
and the thought gave me great pleasure, for
one becomes larger by mixing with any com-
pany of men, whether of our brothers now
living or of our fathers who are dead.

This little river- — the river Adur before
I have done with it — will be as charming
and well-bred a thing as the Norman or the
142

The Little River

Roman knew. It shall bring up properly to
well-cut banks. These shall be boarded. It
shall have clear depths of water in spite of
the clay, and reeds and water-lilies shall grow
only where I choose. In every way it shall
be what the things of this world were made
to be- — the servant and the instrument of Man.

Some Letters of Shakespeare's Time ^y

From Lord Mulberry to his sister, Mrs. Blake

MY DEAR VICTORIA,— Yes, by all means tell
your young friend Mr. Shakespeare that he can
come to Paxton on Saturday. As you say
that he can't get away until the later train
I will have Perkins meet him from the village.
I don't suppose he rides, but I can't mount
him anyhow. I hope there is no trouble about
Church on Sunday.

From Mrs. Myers to Lady Clogg

One thing I am looking forward to, dear, is
this little coon Shakespeare. Victoria told
me about him. She says sometimes he will
play and sometimes he. won't play. But she
says he's quiet in harness just now. It seems
that sometimes he talks all of a sudden. And
one can get him to sing ! Anyhow I do want
to see what he's like.

(The rest of this letter is about other matters.)

144

Some Letters of Shakespeare's Time

From Messrs. Hornbull and Sons to William
Shakespeare Esq.

SIR, — We have now sent in our account
three times, and the last time with a pressing
recommendation that you should settle it,
but you have not honoured us by any reply.
We regret to inform you that if we do not
receive a cheque by Wednesday the 22nd inst.
we shall be compelled to put the matter into
other hands.

From John Shakespeare to his mother,
Mrs. Shakespeare

DEAREST MAMMA, — I am afraid Billie really
can't pay that money this week. He was
awfully apologetic about it and I gave him
a good talking to, but if he hasn't got it he
hasn't. After all it isn't absolutely necessary
until the 30th.

From Jonathan Truelove Esq. to William
Shakespeare Esq.

DEAR OLD CHAP, — I am going to do some-
thing very unconventional, but we know each
other well enough I think. Can you let me
have the £5 I lent you two years ago ? I
have to get in every penny I can this week,
10 145

This and That and the Other

suddenly. If you can't don't bother to answer,
I am not going to press you.

From Sir Henry Portman, Attorney General,
to the Secretary of the Crown Prosecutor
DEAR JIM, — No, I can't manage to get
round to the Ritz this evening. Mary says
that she wants Johnnie to leave Dresden.
What inconceivable rubbish ! Why can't she
let him stay where he is ? You might as well
drown yourself as leave Dresden. What on
earth could it lead to ?

By the way, do choke off that silly ass Bates,
if he is still worrying about Shakespeare. No
one wants anything done, and No. 1 would be
awfully angry if there was a prosecution.
Rather than allow it I would find the money
myself.

Yours, H. P.

From James Jevons and Co., Publishers, to
William Shakespeare Esq.

DEAR SIR, — Our attention has been called
to your work by our correspondent in Edin-
burgh, and he asks us whether we think you
could see your way to something dealing
with Scottish history. He does not want it
146

Some Letters of Shakespeare's Time

cast in the form of a play, for which he says
there will be no sale with the Scottish public,
seeing the exceedingly English cast of your
work, but if you could throw it into Ballad
form he thinks something could be done
with it.

Of course such things can never be re-
munerative at first. The Edinburgh firm
for whom he writes propose to buy sheets at
4 Jd. or 5d. and to give a royalty of 10 per cent,
to be equally divided between our firm and
yourself. They could not go beyond 500
copies for the first edition. It may be worth
your while, in spite of the trifling remuneration,
to consider this offer in order to secure copy-
right and to prevent any pirating of future
editions in Scotland. Pray advise.
We are,

Your obedient servants,

JAMES JEVONS AND Co.

From Messrs. Firelight, Agents, to William
Shakespeare Esq.

DEAR, MR. SHAKESPEARE, — We have had a
proposal from Messrs. Capon in the matter
of your collected Poems. As you know, verse
is not just now much in demand with the

147

This and That and the Other

public, and they could not manage an advance
on royalties. They propose 10 per cent on
a 5s. book after the first 250 copies sold.
The honorarium is, of course, purely nominal,
but it might lead to more business later on.
Could you let us know your views upon
the matter ?

Very faithfully yours,

pro FIRELIGHT AND Co.
C. G.

From Clarence de Vere Chalmondeley to
William Shakespeare Esq.

DEAR SIR, — Having certain sums free for
investment, I am prepared to lend, not as a
money-lender but as a private banker, sums
from £10 to £50,000, on note of hand alone,
without security. No business done with
minors.

Very faithfully yours,
CLARENCE DE VERE CHALMONDELEY

From William Shakespeare to Sir John Fowless
(scribbled hastily in pencil)

I will try and come if I can, but it's some-
thing awful. I only got my proofs read by
2 o'clock in the night ; I had to do my article
148

Some Letters of Shakespeare's Time

for The Owl before 10 this morning, then I
have got to go and meet the Church Defence
League people on my way to the station, and
catch a train to a place where Mrs. Blake
wants me to go somewhere in the Midlands,
about 5. I think I can look in on my way to
the station.

That man you asked me to see about the
brandy is a fraud. Would you, like a good
fellow, tell Charlie not to forget to mention in
his article that " Hamlet " will only be played
on Tuesdays and Fridays in the afternoon,
matinees. Don't forget this because people
want to know when it is going to be. There
was a very good notice in The Jumper. I do
feel so ill.

W. S.

From S. Jennings, Secretary, to
George Mountebank Esq.

DEAR SIR, — Mr. Shakespeare is at present
away from home and will return upon Thurs-
day, when I will immediately lay your MSS.
before him.

I am,

Very faithfully yours,

S. JENNINGS, Secretary
149

This and That and the Other

From Mr. Mustwrite of Warwick to
William Shakespeare Esq.

DEAR MR. SHAKESPEARE, — I have never
met you, and perhaps you will think it a
great impertinence on my part to be writing
as I do. But I must write to tell you the
deep and sincere pleasure I have received
from your little brochure Venus and Adonis,
which the Rev. William Clarke, our Clergy-
man, lent me only yesterday. I read it
through at a sitting and I could not rest until
I had written to tell you the profound spiritual
consolation I derived from its perusal.
I am, dear Mr. Shakespeare,

Very much your admirer,

GEORGE MUSTWRITE

To William Shakespeare Esq. (unsigned, and
written in capital letters rather irregularly)

No doubt you think yourself a fine fellow
and the friend of the working man — I don't
think ! Some of us know more about you
than you think we do. I erd you at the
Queen's Hall and you made me sick. You
aren't fit to black the boots of the man
you talked against.

150

Some Letters of Shakespeare's Time

To William Shakespeare Esq., O.H.M.S.
(printed)

SIR, — In pursuance with the provisions of
Her Majesty's Benevolent Act, you are hereby
required to prepare a true and correct state-
ment of your emoluments from all forms of
(in writing) literary income, duly signed by
you within 21 days from this date. If, how-
ever, you elect to be assessed by the District
Commissioners under a number or a letter,
&c. &c. &c.

From the Earl of Essex to W. Shakespeare Esq.
(Lithographed)

DEAR SIR, — I have undertaken to act as
Chairman this year of the Annual Dinner of
the League for the Support of Insufficiently
Talented Dramatic Authors. You are doubt-
less acquainted with the admirable objects of
&c. &c. I hope I may see your name among
the stewards whose position is purely honorary,
and is granted upon payment of five guineas,
&c. &c. This laudable &c. &c.

Very faithfully yours,

ESSEX

This and That and the Other

From Mrs. Parkinson to William
Shakespeare Esq.

DEAR MR. SHAKESPEARE, — Can you come
and talk for our Destitute Pick Pockets Asso-
ciation on Thursday the 18th ? I know you are
a very busy man, but I always find it is the
most busy men who somehow manage to find
time for charitable objects. If you can
manage to do so I would send my motor round
for you to Pilbury Row, and it would take
you out to Rickmansworth where the meeting
is to be. I am afraid it cannot take you
back, but there is a convenient train at
20 minutes to 8, which gets you into London
a little after 9 for dinner, or if that is too late
you might catch the 6.30, which gets you in
at 8.15, only that will be rather a rush. My
daughter tells me how much she admired your
play, Macduff, and very much wants to see
you.

From the Duchess of Dump to William
Shakespeare Esq.

DEAR MR. SHAKESPEARE, — I want to ask

you a really great favour. Could you come

to my Animals Ball on the 4th of June dressed

up as a gorilla ? I do hope you can. We

152

Some Letters of Shakespeare's Time

have to tell people what costumes they are
to wear for fear that they should duplicate.
Now don't say no. It's years since we met.
Last February wasn't it ?

Yours ever,

CAROLINE DUMP

Printed on Blue Paper with the Royal Arms

In the name of the Queen's grace, OYEZ !

WHEREAS there has appeared before Us
Henry Holt a Commissioner of the Queen's,
&c. &c.

AND WHEREAS the said Henry Holt maketh
deposition that he has against you (in writing)
William Shakespeare, a claim for the sum of
(in writing) £27 2s. Id., now we hereby notify
you that you are summoned to appear before
us, &c. &c., upon (in writing) Wednesday the
25th of May in the Year of Our Lord (in
writing) 1601, given under the Common Seal
this (in writing) second day of May 1601.

HENRY HOLT, a Commissioner of the Queen's
&c. &c.

On Acquaintance with the Great ^ *o

IT is generally recognized in this country
that an acquaintance more or less familiar
with the Great, that is, with the very wealthy,
and preferably with those who have been
wealthy for at least one generation, is the
proper entry into any form of public service.

I am in a position to advance for the
benefit of younger men of my own social
rank, certain views which I think will not be
unprofitable to them in this matter.

I will suppose my reader to be still upon
the right side of thirty ; to be the son of some
professional man ; to have been kept, at the
expense of some anxiety to his parents, for
five years or so at a public school, and to
have proceeded to the University upon a
loan.

With such a start he cannot fail, if he is
in any way lively or amiable, to have made
the acquaintance by the age of twenty-two
of a whole group of men whose fathers may
properly be called " The Great," and who

On Acquaintance with the Great

themselves will inherit a similar distinction,
unless they die prematurely of hard living or
hereditary disease.

After such a beginning, common to many
of my readers, the friendship and patronage
of these people would seem to be secure ;
and yet we know from only too many fatal
instances that it is nothing of the kind, and
that of twenty young men who have scraped
up acquaintance with their betters at Winches-
ter or Magdalen (to take two names at random)
not two are to be found at the age of forty
still familiarly entering those London houses,
which are rated at over £1000 a year.

The root cause of such failures is obvious
enough.

The advantage of acquaintance with wealthy
or important people would, so far as general
opportunities go, be lost if one did not adver-
tise it ; and here comes in a difficulty which
has wrecked innumerable lives. For by a
pretty paradox with which we are all of us
only too well acquainted, the wealthy and
important are particularly averse to the recita-
tion of acquaintance with themselves.

Formerly — about seventy years ago — your
man who would succeed recited upon the
slightest grounds, in public and with emphasis,

This and That and the Other

his friendship with the Great. It was one of
Disraeli's methods of advancement. The
Great discovered the crude method, de-
nounced it, vilified it, and towards the year
1860 it had already become impossible.
William tells me he remembers his dear
father warning me of this.

Those who would advance in the next
generation were compelled to abandon methods
so simple and to take refuge in allusion. Thus
a young fellow in the late sixties, the seventies,
and the very early eighties was helped in his
career by professing a profound dislike for such
and such a notability and swearing that he
would not meet him. For to profess dislike
was to profess familiarity with the world in
which that notability moved.

Or, again, to analyse rather curiously, and,
on the whole, unfavourably, the character of
some exceedingly wealthy man, was a method
that succeeded well enough in hands of
average ability. While a third way was to
use Christian names, and yet to use them with
a tone of indifference, as though they belonged
to acquaintances rather than friends.

But the Great are ever on the alert, and
this habit of allusion was in its turn tracked
down by their unfailing noses ; so that in
156

On Acquaintance with the Great

our own time it has been necessary to invent
another. I do not promise it any long sur-
vival, I write only for the moment, and for
the fashions of my time, but I think a young
man is well advised in this second decade
of the twentieth century to assume towards
the Great an attitude of silent and sometimes
weary familiarity, and very often to pretend
to know them less well than he does.

Thus three men will be in a smoking-room
together. The one, let us say, will be the
Master of the King's Billiard Room, an aged
Jew who has lent money to some Cabinet
Minister ; the second a local squire, well-to-
do and about fifty years of age ; the third is
my young reader, whose father, let us say,
was a successful dentist. The Master of the
King's Billiard Room will say that he likes
44 Puffy." The squire will say he doesn't like
him much because of such and such a thing ;
he will ask the young man for his opinion.
Now, in my opinion, the young man will do
well at this juncture to affect ignorance. Let
him deliberately ask to have it explained to
him who Puffy is (although the nickname
may be familiar to every reader of a news-
paper), and on hearing that it is a certain
Lord Patterson he should put on an expression
157

This and That and the Other

of no interest, and say that he has never met
Lord Patterson.

Something of the same effect is produced
when a man remains silent during a long
conversation about a celebrity, and then
towards the end of it says some really true
and intimate thing about him, such as, that
he rides in long stirrups, or that one cannot
bear his double eyelids, or that his gout is very
amusing.

Another very good trick, which still pos-
sesses great force, is to repudiate any personal
acquaintance with the celebrity in question,
and treat him merely as someone whom one
has read of in the newspapers ; but next, as
though following a train of thought, to begin
talking of some much less distinguished relative
of his with the grossest possible familiarity.

A common and not ineffective way (which
I mention to conclude the list) is to pretend
that you have only met the Great Man in the
way of business, at large meetings or in public
places, where he could not possibly remember
you, and to pretend this upon all occasions
and very often. But this method is only to be
used when, as a matter of fact, you have not
met the celebrity at all.

As for letting yourself be caught unawares
158

On Acquaintance with the Great

and showing a real and naif ignorance of the
Great, that is not only a fault against which
I will not warn you, for I believe you to be
incapable of it, but it is also one against which
it is of no good to warn anyone, for whoever
commits it has no chance whatsoever of that
advancement which it is the object of these
notes to promote.

When you are found walking with the
Great in the street (a thing which, as a rule,
they feel a certain shyness in doing, at least
in company with people of your position), it
is as well, if your companion meets another
of his own Order, to stand a little to one side,
to profess interest in the objects of a neigh-
bouring shop window, or the pattern of the
railings. Such at least is the general rule
to be laid down for those who have not the
quickness or ability to seize at once the better
method, which is as follows :

Catch if you can the distant approach of the
Other Great before Your Great has spotted
him, then, upon some pretext, preferably
accompanied by the pulling out of your
watch, depart : for there is nothing that
so annoys the Great during the conference
of any two of them, as the presence of a third
party of your station.

This and That and the Other

Since my remarks must be put into a brief
compass (though I have much more to say
upon this all-imporant subject) I will conclude
with what is perhaps the soundest piece of
advice of all.

Never under any occasion or temptation,
bestow a gift, even of the smallest value, upon
the Great. Never let yourself be betrayed into
a generous action, nor, if you can possibly
prevent it, so much as a generous thought in
their regard. They are not grateful. They
think it impertinent. And it looks odd. There
is a note of equality about such things (and
this particularly applies to unbosoming your-
self in correspondence) which is very odious
and offensive. Moreover, as has been proved
in the case of countless unhappy lives, when
once a man of the middle class falls into the
habit of asking the Great to meals, of giving
them books or pictures or betraying towards
them in any fashion a spirit of true companion-
ship, he bursts ; and that, as a rule, after a
delay quite incredibly short. Some men of
fair substance have to my knowledge been
wholly ruined in this manner within the
space of one parliamentary session, a hunting
season, or even a single week at Cowes, in the
Isle of Wight ; from which spot I send these
160

On Acquaintance with the Great

presents, and where, by the way, at the time
of writing, the stock of forage in the forecastle
is extremely low, with no supplies forthcoming
from the mainland.
God bless you I

ii 161

On Lying ^^ ^y -^y <^y ^> ^y

HE that will set out to lie without having
cast up his action and judged it this
way and that, will fail, not in his lie, indeed,
but in the object of it ; which is, imprimis, to
deceive, but in ultimis or fundamentally, to
obtain profit by his deceit, as Aristotle and
another clearly show. For they that lie, lie not
vainly and wantonly as for sport (saving a
very few that are habitual), but rather for
some good to be got or evil to be evaded : as
when men lie of their prowess with the fist,
though they have fought none- — no, not even
little children — or in the field, though they
have done no more than shoot a naked blacka-
moor at a furlong. These lie for honour. Not
so our stockers and jobbers, who lie for money
direct, or our parliament-men, who lie be-
straught lest worse befall them.

Lies are distinguished by the wise into the

Pleasant and the Useful, and again into the

Beautiful and the Necessary. Thus a lie

giving comfort to him that utters it is of the

162

On Lying

Lie Pleasant, a grateful thing, a cozening.
This kind of lies is very much used among
women. This sort will also make out good
to the teller, evil to the told, for the pleasure
the cheat gives ; as, when one says to another
that his worst actions are now known and
are to be seen printed privately in a Midland
sheet, and bids him fly.

The lie useful has been set out ut supra,
which consult ; and may be best judged by
one needing money. Let him ask for the same
and sec how he shall be met ; all answers
to him shall be of this form of lie. It is
also of this kind when a man having no purse
or no desire to pay puts sickness on in a
carriage, whether by rail or in the street,
crying out : " Help ! help ! " and wagging
his head and sinking his chin upon his breast,
while his feet patter and his lips dribble.
Also let him roll his eyes. Then some will
say : " It is the heat ! The poor fellow is
overcome ! " Others, " Make way ! make
way ! " Others, men of means, will ask for
the police, whereat the poorer men present will
make off. But chiefly they that should have
taken the fare will feel kindly and will lift the
liar up gently and convey him and put him to
good comfort in some waiting place or other
163

This and That and the Other

till he be himself — and all the while clean
forget his passage. For such is the nature of
their rules. Lord Hincksey, now dead, was
very much given to this kind of lie, and thought
it profitable.

You shall lie at large and not be discovered ;
or a little, and for once, and yet come to
public shame, as it was with Ananias and his
good wife Sapphira in Holy Scripture, who
lied but once and that was too often. While
many have lied all their lives long and come
to no harm, like John Ade, of North-Chapel,
for many years a witness in the Courts that
lied professionally, then a money-lender, and
lastly a parliament-man for the county : yet
he had no hurt of all this that any man could
see, but died easily in another man's bed,
being eighty-three years of age or thereabouts,
and was very honourably buried in Petworth
at a great charge. But some say he is now
in Hell, which God grant !

There is no lie like the winsome, pretty,
flattering, dilating eyelid-and-lip-and-brow-
lifting lie such as is used by beauty im-
poverished, when land is at stake. By this
sort of lie many men's estates have been
saved, none lost, and good done at no expense
save to holiness. Of the same suit also is the
164

On Lying

lie that keeps a parasite in a rich man's
house, or a mixer attendant upon a painter,
a model upon a sculptor, and beggars upon
all men.

Fools will believe their lies, but wise men
also will take delight in them, as did the
Honourable Mr. Gherkin, for some time His
Majesty's Minister of State for the Lord
Knows What, who, when policemen would
beslaver him, and put their hands to their
heads and pay court in a low way, told all that
saw it what mummery it was ; yet inwardly
was pleased. The more at a loss was he when,
being by an accident in the Minories too late
and his hat lost, his coat torn and muddy, he
made to accost an officer, and civilly saying
" Hi — • — " had got no further but he took such
a crack on the crown with a truncheon as laid
him out for dead, and he is not now the same
as he was, nor ever will be.

Ministers of religion will both show forth
to the people the evil of lying and will also lie
themselves in a particular manner, very dis-
tinct and formidable : as was clear when one
denounced from the pulpit the dreadful vice
of hypocrisy and false seeming, whereat a
drunkard not yet sober, hearing him say
" Show me the hypocrite ! ", rose where he
165

This and That and the Other

was, full in church, and pointed to the pulpit,
so that he was thrust out for truth-telling by
gesture in that sacred place ; as was that other
who, when the preacher came to " Show me
the drunkard," jerked his thumb over his
shoulder at the parson's wife : a very mutinous
act. But to Lying.

He that takes lying easily will take life
hardly ; as the saw has it, " Easy lying makes
hard hearing," but your constructed and con-
sidered, your well-drafted lie- — that is the lie
for men grown, men discreet and fortunate.
To which effect also the poet Shakespeare
says in his Sonnets- — but no matter ! The
passage is not for our ears or time, dealing
with a dark woman that would have her Will :
as women also must if the world is to wag,
which leads me to that sort of lie common to
all the sex of which we men say that it is
the marvellous, the potent, the dexterous,
the thorough, or better still, the mysterious,
the uncircumvented and not explainable, the
stopping-short and confounding-against-right-
reason lie, the triumphant lie of Eve our
mother : Iseult our sister : Judith, an aunt
of ours, who saved a city, and Jael, of holy
memory.

But if any man think to explain that sort
1 66

On Lying

of lie, he is an ass for his pains ; and if any
man seek to copy it he is an ass sublimate or
compound, for he attempts the mastery of
women.

Which no man yet has had of God, or will.

Amen.

167

The Dupe

THE Dupe is an honest creature, and
such honesty is the noblest work of God.
The Dupe is not the servant of the Knave,
but his ally. The Dupe does not, as too simple
a political philosophy would have it, serve
only for a material on which the Knave shall
work ; he is also the moral support of the
Knave, strengthening and comforting the
Knave's most inward soul and lending lubrica-
tion to the friction of public falsehood. For
the Knave is of many sorts, and the Dupe
helps them all.

The plumb Knave, or Knave Absolute,
finds in the Dupe such an honest creature as
does not revile him, and it is good to know
that one is loved by some few honest souls.
Thus the Knave Absolute is foolish indeed
when he lets the Dupe see by gesture or tone
that he thinks him a fool, for the Dupe is very
sensitive and touchy in all weathers.

The Knave Qualified (in his many incarna-
tions) must have the Dupe about him or perish.

The Dupe

Thus the Knave who would save his soul by
self-deception feeds, cannibal-like, upon the
straightforwardness of the Dupe, and says to
himself : " How can I be such a Knave after
all, since these good Dupes here heartily agree
with me ? "

The Knave Cowardly props himself upon
that sort of courage in the Dupe which always
accompanies virtue. " I run a risk," says he,
" in proposing the State purchase of this or
that at such and such a price. My friend the
Old Knave went under thus in 1895 ; but the
Good Dupe is a buckler in this fight ; he will
dare all because his heart is pure."

The Knave Slovenly looks to the Dupe
to see to details and to meet men in ante-
chambers, and to have kind, honest eyes in
bargaining. This sort of Knave will have two
or even three Dupes for private secretaries,
and often one for a brother-in-law.

The Dupe is in God's providence very
numerous, for his moral rate of breeding is
high in the extreme, his moral death-rate low.
On this account those curious in this part of
natural history may watch the Dupes going
about in great herds, conducted and instructed
by the Knave ; nor is the one to be distin-
guished from the other by the coat, but rather
169

This and That and the Other

by the snout and visage, the eyes and, if one
be old enough to open the mouth, by the
teeth. The Dupe, upon the other hand, will
not be of great service in any physical struggle
and must not be depended upon for this.
It is his delight to browse, and when disturbed
he scatters rather than flies. Here and there
a Rogue Dupe will turn upon his pursuers,
in which case he is invariably devoured.

The Dupe has his habitat, but that not
easily defined, as in the suburbs of great cities,
and in those towns called residential, where
the leisured and the inane make their lives
seem so much longer than those of others.
But there are exceptions also to this, and
the Dupe will sometimes migrate in vast
numbers from one spot to another in such
few years as wholly to discomfort the calcula-
tions of the Knaves. Some of these have been
found to stand up in public halls before num-
bers whom they had thought to be Dupes
(seeing that the locality was Little Partington),
but only to discover a great boiling of Anti-
Dupes, men working with their hands or what-
not, quite undeceivable, as often as not Atheist,
and ready to storm the platform and tear the
Knaves alive.

The Dupe loves courtesy and, as has been
170

The Dupe

said above, will tolerate no hint of impatience.
On the other hand, he needs no breaking in
and will carry upon the back from his earliest
years. It is incredible to travellers when they
first come across the Dupe what burdens he
will bear in this fashion, so that sometimes
the whole Plain appears to be a moving mass
of gold bags, public salaries, contracts, large
houses, yachts, motor-cars, opera houses,
howdahs sheltering masters and mistresses,
cases of wine, rich foods, and charitable insti-
tutions, all as it were endowed with a motion
of their own until you stoop down and per-
ceive that the whole of this vast weight sways
securely upon the backs of an enormous
migratory body of Dupes upon the trek for
a Better Land.

The Dupe also differs from other creatures
in that he will sleep comfortably with such
things upon his back, nor ever roll over upon
them, and that he will bear them to a very
old age and even to death itself without dis-
pute. Indeed the Dupe unburdened has about
him a forlorn and naked feeling to which it
were a pity to condemn him. His food must
be ample, but there is no need to prepare it
carefully, and he will eat almost anything that
is given him, except a leek, which he will not
171

This and That and the Other

touch unless he be told it is an onion. Of
free wheat he takes little, but he insists that
a great portion be put before him, that he may
munch and trample upon it. Why he manifests
this appetite is not known, but upon any
attempt to lessen the ration he will kick,
buck, and rear, and behave in a manner
altogether out of his nature.

The Dupe must be given drink at irregular
intervals, but he loves to treat it shyly, and
to flirt with it as it were. There is no prettier
sight than to see a number of Dupes met
together arching and curveting, side-glancing
and denying, before they plunge their heads
and manes into the life-giving liquid.

It is the reward of the Dupe that he is all his
life very consistently happy, and on this ac-
count many not born Dupes, imitate the
Dupes and would be of them, in which they
fail, for the Dupe is God's creature and not
man's, and proceeds by moral generation as
has already been affirmed.

172

The Love of England ^> ^> *^ ^>

LOVE of country is general to mankind,
yet is not the love of country a general
thing to be described by a general title. Love
changes with the object of love. The country
loved determines the nature of its services.

The love of England has in it the love of
landscape, as has the love of no other country ;
it has in it as has the love of no other country,
the love of friends. Less than the love of
other countries has it in it the love of what
may be fixed in a phrase or well set down in
words. It lacks, alas, the love of some in-
terminable past, nor does it draw its liveliness
from any great succession of centuries. Say
that ten centuries made a soil, and that in that
soil four centuries more produced a tree, and
that that tree was England, then you will
know to what the love of England is in most
men directed. For most men who love Eng-
land know so little of her first thousand years
that when they hear the echoes of them or
see visions of them, they think they are dealing

i73

This and That and the Other

with a foreign thing. All Englishmen are clean
cut off from their long past which ended when
the last Mass was sung at Westminster.

The love of England has in it no true plains
but fens, low hills, and distant mountains.
No very ancient towns, but comfortable,
small and ordered ones, which love to dress
themselves with age. The love of England
concerns itself with trees. Accident has given
to the lovers of England no long pageantry of
battle. Nature has given Englishmen an
appetite for battle, and between the two
men who love England make a legend for
themselves of wars unfought, and of arms
permanently successful ; though arms were
they thus always successful would not be
arms at all.

The greatness of the English soul is best
discovered in that strong rebuke of excesses,
principally of excess in ignorance, which a
minority of Englishmen perpetually express,
but which has not sufficed as yet to save the
future of England. In no other land will you
so readily discover critics of that land ready
to bear all for their right to doubt the common
policy ; but though you will nowhere dis-
cover such men so readily, nowhere will you
discover them so impotent or so few.
174

The Love of England

The love of England breeds in those who
cherish it an attachment to institutions which
is half reverential, but also half despairing.
In its reverence this appetite produces one
hundred living streams of action and of
vesture and of custom. In its despair, in its
refusal to consider upon what theory the
institution lies, it permits the institution to
sterilize with age and to grow fantastic.

The love of England has never destroyed,
but at times, and again at closer and at closer
times (while we have lived), it has failed to save.
Yet it will save England in the end. Men are
more bound together by this music in their
souls than by any other, wherever England is
or is spoken of by Englishmen. Here you
may discover what religion has been to many,
and also you may discover here how legend
and how epics arise. In men cut off from
England, the love of England grows into a set
repetitive thing, a thing of peculiar strength
yet almost barren. Nourished and exampled
by England, flourishing upon the field of
England, the love of England is a love of the
very earth : of the smell of growing things
and of certain skies, and of tides in river-
mouths, and of belts of sea.

If a man would understand this great thing
175

This and That and the Other

England which is now in peril and which has so
worked throughout the world, he must not
consider the accident of England's success and
failure, nor certain empty lands filled without
battle, nor others ruined by folly, nor certain
arts singularly discovered and perfected by
England, nor other arts as singularly neglected
and decayed. Nor must he contrast the
passionate love of England with some high
religion of which it takes the place, nor with
some active work in contrast with which it
seems so empty and unproducing a thing. He
must not set it against a creed (it is not so high
as that), nor against a conquest or a true
empire such as Spain and Rome possessed.

If a man would understand the love of
England he must do what hardly anyone
would dare to do : that is, he must clearly
envisage England defeated in a final war and
ask himself, " What should I do then ? "

176

The Storm ^y ^> ^> ^> ^^ ^>

r I AHERE is a contemptible habit of mind
JL (contemptible in intellect, not in morals)
which would withdraw from the mass of life
the fecundity of perception.

The things that we see are, according to
the interpretation of the mystics, every one
of them symbols and masks of things un-
seen. The mystics have never proved their
theory true. But it is undoubtedly true
that the perception of things when it is
sane is manifold ; it is true that as we grow
older the perception of things is increasingly
manifold, and that one perception breeds
one . hundred others, so that we advance
through life as through a pageant, enjoying
in greater and greater degree day by day
(if we open ourselves to them) the glorious
works of God.

There is a detestable habit of mind, which

either does not understand, or sneers at,

or despises, or even wholly misses- — when

it is pursued in — this faculty for enjoyment,

12 177

This and That and the Other

which even our gross senses endow us with.
This evil habit of the mind will have us
neglect first colour for form, then form for
mere number. It would have us reject those
intimations of high and half-remembered
things which a new aspect of a tree or house
or of a landscape arouse in us. It would
compel us to forget, or to let grow stale, the
pleasure with which the scent of woods blest
us in early youth. Perpetually this evil habit
of the mind would flatten the diversity of
our lives, suck out the sap of experience, kill
humour and exhaust the living spring. It
whispers to us the falsehood that years in
their advance leave us in some way less alive,
it adds to the burden upon our shoulders,
not a true weight of sad knowledge as life,
however well lived, must properly do, but
a useless drag of despair. It would make us
numb. In the field of letters it would per-
suade us that all things may be read and
known and that nothing is worth the reading
or the knowing, and that the loveliest rhythms
or the most subtle connotations of words are
but tricks to be despised. In the field of
experience it would convince us that nothing
bears a fruit and that human life is no more
than anarchy or at best an unexplained
178

The Storm

fragment. Even in that highest of fields,
the field of service, it would persuade us that
there is nothing to serve. And if we are con-
vinced of that, then every faculty in us
turns inward and becomes useless : may be
called abortive and fails its end.

These thoughts arose in me as I watched
to-day from the platform of my Mill the
advance of a great storm cloud ; for in the
majestic progress which lifted itself into the
sky and marched against the north from
the Channel I perceived that which the evil,
modern, drying habit of thought Would
neglect and would attempt to make material,
and also that which I very well knew was in
its awfulness allied to the life of the soul.

For very many days the intense heat had
parched the Weald. The leaves dropped
upon the ash and the oak, the grass was
brown, our wells had failed. The little river
of the clay was no more than several stagnant
pools. We thought the fruits would wither ;
and our houses, not built for such droughts
and such an ardent sun, were like ovens long
after the cool of the evening had come.

At the end of some days one bank of cloud
and then another had passed far off east or
far to the west, over the distant forest ridge
179

This and That and the Other

or over Egdean Side, missing us. We had
printed stuff from London telling us how it
had rained in London— as though rain falling
in London ever fell upon earth or nourished
fruits and men !

We thought that we were not to be allowed
any little rain out of Heaven. But to-day
the great storm came up, marching in a dark
breastplate and in skirts of rain, with thunders
about it ; and it was personal. It came right
up out of the sea. It walked through the
gate which the river Adur has pierced, leaving
upon either side the high chalk hills ; the
crest of its helmet carried a great plume of
white and menacing cloud.

No man seeing this creature as it moved
solemn and panoplied could have mistaken the
memory or the knowledge that stirred within
him at the sight. This was that great master,
that great friend, that great enemy, that great
idol (for it has been all of these things), which,
since we have tilled the earth, we have
watched, we have welcomed, we have com-
bated, we have unfortunately worshipped.
This was that God of the Storm which has
made such tremendous music in the poets.

The Parish Church, which had seemed
under the hard blue sky of the early morning
1 80

The Storm

a low brown thing, with its square tower
of the Templars and of the Second Crusade,
stood up now white, menacing, and visionary
against the ink of the cloud. The many trees
of the rich man's park beyond were taller,
especially the elms. They stood absolutely
and stubbornly still, no leaves upon them
moving at all. The Downs an hour away
first fell dull, low, and leaden. These were
but half seen, and at last faded altogether into
the gloom. The many beasts round about
were struck with silence. The fowls nestled
together, and the only sign that animate
nature gave of an approaching stroke was
the whinny of a horse in a stable where the
door was left wide open to the stifling air,
and the mad circling and swooping of a bird
distracted by the change in the light.

For the sun was now blotted out, and the
enormous thing was upon us like a foe. First
I saw from the high platform of my Mill
a sort of driving mist or whirl, which at first
I thought to be an arrow- shoot of rain ;
but looking again I saw it to be no more than
the dust of many parched fields and lanes,
driving before the edge of the thunder.
There was a wind preceding all this like a
herald. In a moment the oppressive air
1*1

This and That and the Other

grew cool. It grew cool by a leap. It was
like the descent into a cellar ; it was like the
opening of a mine door to a draft. The vigour
of the mind, dulled by so many days of heat
and nights without refreshment, leaped up
to greet this change, which, though it came
under a solemn and uncomforting aspect, gave
breath and expansion. One might for some
five minutes have imagined as the dust clouds
advanced and the furious shaking of the trees
and hedges a mile away began to be heard as
well as seen, that the call of coolness for work
had come. Then that wall of wind hit the
two great oaks of my neighbour next to my
own frontier trees. The fan of the Mill
groaned, turning a little ; it turned furiously,
and the strength of the storm was upon us.
It lightened, single and double and four-
fold. The blinding fire sprang from arch to
arch of an incredible architecture, higher than
anything you might dream of, larger than the
mountains of other lands. The thunder ran
through all this, not very loud but continuous,
and a sweep of darkness followed like a
train after the movement of the cloud. White
wreaths blown out in jets as though by some
caprice in wilful shapes showed here and
there, and here and there, against such a
182

The Storm

blackness, grey cloudlets drifted very rapidly,
hurrying distracted left and right without a
purpose. All the while the rain fell.

The village and the landscape and the
Weald, the Rape, the valley, all my county
you would have said, was swallowed up,
occupied, and overwhelmed. It was more
majestic than an army ; it was a victory
more absolute than any achievement of
arms, and while it flashed and poured and
proclaimed itself with its continual noise, it
was itself, as it were, the thing in which we
lived, and the mere earth was but a scene
upon which the great storm trod for the
purpose of its pageant.

When the storm had passed over north-
ward to other places beyond, and when at
evening the stars came out very numerous
and clear in a sky which the thunder had net
cooled, and when the doubtful summer haze
was visible again very low upon the distant
horizon, over the English sea, the memory
of all this was like the memory of a complete
achievement. No one who had seen the storm
could doubt purpose or meaning in the vast-
ness of things, nor the creative word of
Almighty God.

183

The Valley

VERYBODY knows, I fancy, that kind
-L_-/ of landscape in which hills seem to lie
in a regular manner, fold on fold, one range
behind the other, until at last, behind them
all, some higher and grander range dominates
and frames the whole.

The infinite variety of light and air and
accident of soil provide all men, save those
who live in the great plains, with examples
of this sort. The traveller in the dry air
of California or of Spain, watching great
distances from the heights, will recollect such
landscapes all his life. They were the reward
of his long ascents, and they were the sunset
visions which attended his effort when at
last he had climbed to the utmost ridge of his
day's westward journey. Such a landscape
does a man see from the edges of the Guadar-
rama, looking eastward and south toward
the very distant hills that guard Toledo and
the ravines of the Tagus. Such a landscape
does a man see at sunrise from the highest of
184

The Valley

the Cevennes looking right eastward to the
dawn as it comes up in the pure and cold air
beyond the Alps, and shows you the falling
of their foot-hills, a hundred miles of them,
right down to the trench of the Rhone. And
by such a landscape is a man gladdened when,
upon the escarpments of the Tuolumne, he
turns back and looks westward over the Stock-
ton plain towards the coast range which guards
the Pacific.

The experience of such a sight is one peculiar
in travel, or, for that matter, if a man is lucky
enough to enjoy it near his home, insistent
and reiterated upon the mind of the home-
dwelling man. Such a landscape, for instance,
makes a man praise God if his house is upon
the height of Mendip, and he can look over
falling hills right over the Vale of Severn
toward the rank above rank of the Welsh
solemnities beyond, until the straight line
and height of the Black Mountain against
the sky bounds his view and frames it.

It is the character of these landscapes
to suggest at once a vastness, a diversity,
and a seclusion. When a man comes upon
them unexpectedly he can forget the per-
petual toil of men and imagine that those
who dwell below in the nearer glens before
185

This and That and the Other

him are exempt from the necessities of this
world. When such a landscape is part of a
man's dwelling-place, though he well knows
that the painful life of men within those
hills is the same hard business that it is
throughout the world, yet his knowledge is
modified and comforted by the permanent
glory of the thing he sees.

The distant and high range that bounds
his view makes a sort of wall, cutting the
country off and guarding it from whatever
may be beyond. The succession of lower ranges
suggests secluded valleys, and the reiterated
woods, distant and more distant, convey an
impression of fertility more powerful than that
of corn in harvest upon the lowlands.

Sometimes it is a whole province that is
thus grasped by the eye ; sometimes in the
summer haze of Northern lands, a few miles
only ; always this scenery inspires the on-
looker with a sense of completion and of
repose, and at the same time, I think, with
worship and with awe.

Now one such group of valleys there was,
hill above hill, forest above forest, and beyond
it a great, noble range, tmwoodcd and high
against Heaven, guarding all the place, which
I for my part knew frozii the day when first
1 86

The Valley

I came to know anything of this world.
There is a high place under fir trees ; a place
of sand and bracken in South England, whence
such a view was always present to my eye
in childhood, and " There," said I to myself
(even in childhood), " a man should make
his habitation. In those valleys is the proper
settling place for a man."

And so there was. There was a steading
for me in the midst of those hills.

It was a little place which had grown up
as my county grows, the house throwing out
arms and layers, and making itself over ten
generations of men. One room was panelled
in the oak of the seventeenth century- — but that
had been a novelty in its time, for the walls
upon which the panels stood were of the late
fifteenth, oak and brick intermingled. Another
room was large and light, built in the manner
of one hundred and fifty years ago, which
people call Georgian.

It had been thrown out south- — and this
is quite against our custom ; for our older
houses looked cast and west to take all the
sun and to present a corner to the south-west
and the storms. So they stand still.

It had round it a solid cornice which the
modern men of the towns would have called
187

This and That and the Other

ugly, but there was ancestry in it. Then,
further on this house had modern roominess
stretching in one new wing after another ;
and it had a great set of byres and barns,
and there was a copse and some six acres of
land. Over a deep gully stood over against
it the little town that was the mother of the
place ; and altogether this good place was
enclosed, silent, and secure.

" The fish that misses the hook regrets
the worm." If this is not a Chinese proverb
it ought to be. That little farm and steading
and those six acres, that ravine, those trees,
that aspect of the little mothering town ;
the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble
range beyond- — all these were not, and for
ever will not be mine.

For all I know some man quite unacquainted
with that land took the place, grumbling, for
a debt ; or again, for all I know it may have
been bought by a blind man who could not
see the hills, or by some man who, seeing
them perpetually, regretted the flat marshes
of his home. To-day, this very day, up high
on Egdean Side, not thinking of such things,
through a gap in the trees, I saw again after
so many years, set one behind the other, the
woods, wave upon wave, the summer heat,
188

The Valley

the high, bare range guarding all ; and in the
midst of that landscape, set like a toy, the
little Sabine farm.

Then, said I, to this place I might not
know, " Continue. Go and serve whom you
will. You were not altogether mine because
you would not be, and to-day you are not
mine at all. You will regret it perhaps, and
perhaps you will not. There was verse in you
perhaps, or prose, or, much better still (for
all I know), contentment for a man. But you
refused. You lost your chance. Good-bye,"
and with that I went on into the wood and
beyond the gap and saw the sight no more.

It was ten years since I had seen it last,
the little Sabine farm. It may be ten years
before I see it again, or it may be for ever.
But as I went through the woods saying to
myself :

" You lost your chance, my little Sabine
farm, you lost your chance ! " another part
of me at once replied :

" Ah, and so did you ! "

Then, by way of riposte, I answered in my
mind :

" Not at all, for the chance I never had ;
all I have lost is my desire — no more."

" No, not only your desire," said the voice
189

This and That and the Other

to me within, " but the fulfilment of it."
And when that reply came I naturally turned,
as all men do on hearing such interior replies,
to a general consideration of regret, and was
prepared, if any honest publisher should have
come whistling through that wood, with an
offer proper to the occasion to produce no
less than five volumes on the Nature of Re-
gret, its mortal sting, its bitter-sweetness, its
power to keep alive in man the pure passions
of the soul, its hint at immortality, its memory
of Heaven.

But the wood was empty. The offer did
not come. The moment was lost. The
five volumes will hardly now be written.
In place of them I offer poor this, which
you may take or leave. But I beg leave, before
I end, to cite certain words very nobly at-
tached to that great inn, The Griffin, which
has its foundation set far off in another place,
in the town of March, in the sad Fen-Land
near the Eastern Sea :

" England, my desire, what have you not
refused ? "

190

A Conversation in Andorra ^> *^y ^>

THE other day — indeed some months ago
— I was in the company of two men who
were talking together and were at cross-
purposes. The one was an Englishman
acquainted with the Catalonian tongue and
rather proud of knowing it ; the other was a
citizen of the Republic of Andorra.

The first had the advantage of his fellow in
world-wide travel, the reading of many news-
papers and (beside his thorough knowledge
of Catalonian) a smattering of French, Ger-
man, and American.

I was touched to see the care and deference
and good-fellowship which the superior ex-
tended to the inferior in this colloquy.

I did not hear the beginning of it : it was
the early middle part which I came in for ; it
was conducted loudly and with gestures upon
the part of the Andorran, good-humouredly
but equally openly on the part of the English-
man, who said :

" I grant you that life is very hard for
191

This and That and the Other

some of our town dwellers in spite of the high
wages they obtain."

To which the Andorran answered : " There
is nothing to grant, your Grace, for I would
not believe their life was hard ; but I was
puzzled by what you told me, for I could not
make out how they earned so much money,
and yet looked so extraordinary." The
Andorran showed by this that he had visited
England.

At this the Englishman smiled pleasantly
enough and said : " Do you think me extra-
ordinary ? "

The Andorran was a little embarrassed.
" No no," he said, " you do not understand
the word I use. I do not mean extraordinary
to see, I mean unhappy and lacking humanity."

The Englishman smiled more genially still
in his good wholesome beard, and said : " Do
I look to you like that ? "

" No," said the Andorran gravely, " nor
does that gentleman whom you pointed out
to me when we left France, your English
patron, Mr. Bernstein, I think . . . you were
both well fed and well clothed . . . and what
is more, I know nothing of what you earn.
But in Andorra we ask about this man and
that man indifferently, and especially about
192

A Conversation in Andorra

the poorest, and when I asked you about the
poorest in your towns you told me that there
was not one of them who did not earn, when
he was fully working, twenty-five pesetas a
week. Now with twenty-five pesetas a week !
Oh . . . ! Why, I could live on five, and
five weeks of twenty saved is a hundred
pesetas ; and with a hundred pesetas . . . !
Oh, one can buy a great brood sow ; or if
one is minded for grandeur, the best coat in
the world ; or again, a little mule just foaled,
which in two years, mind you, in two years "
(and here he wagged his finger) " will be a
great fine beast " (and here he extended his
arms), " and the next year will carry a man
over the hills and will sell for five hundred
pesetas. Yes it will ! "

The Englishman looked puzzled. " Well,"
said he, leaning forward, ticking off on his
fingers and becoming practical, " there's your
pound a week."

The Andorran nodded. He began ticking
it off on his fingers also.

" Now of course the man is not always in
work."

"If he is lazy," said the Andorran with
angry eyes, " the neighbours shall see to
that ! "

13 i93

This and That and the Other

" No," said the Englishman, irritated, " you
don't understand ; he can't always find some-
one to give him work."

44 But who gives work ? " said the Andorran.
41 Work is not given." And then he laughed.
44 Our trouble is to get the youngsters to do
it ! " And he laughed more loudly.

44 You don't understand," repeated the
Englishman, pestered, 44 he can't work unless
someone allows him to work for him."

44 Pooh ! " said the Andorran, 44 he could
cut down trees or dig, or get up into the
hills."

44 Why," said the Englishman with wonder-
ing eyes, 44 the perlice would have him then."

The Andorran looked mournful : he had
heard the name of something dangerous in
this country. He thought it was a ghost that
haunted lonely places and strangled men.

44 Well then," went on the Englishman in
a practical fashion, again ticking on his fingers,
44 let us say he can work three weeks out of the
five."

44 Yes ? " said the Andorran, bewildered.

44 He gets, let us say, three times a week's
wage in the five weeks. ... I don't mind,
call it an average of twenty pesetas if you like,
or even eighteen."

194

A Conversation in Andorra

" What is an ' average ' ? " said the An-
dorran, frowning.

" An average," said the Englishman im-
patiently, " oh, an average is what he gets all
lumped up."

" Do you mean," said the Andorran gravely,
" that he gets eighteen pesetas every Satur-
day ? "

44 No, no, NO ! " struck in the Englishman.

' Twenty-five pesetas, as you call them, when

he can get work, and nothing when he can't."

44 Good Lord ! " said the Andorran, with
wide eyes and crossing himself. 44 How does
the poor fellow know whether perlice will not
be at him again ? It is enough to break a
man's heart ! "

44 Well, don't argue ! " said the Englishman,
keen upon his tale. 44 He gets an average,
anyhow, of eighteen pesetas, as you call them,
a week. Now you see, however wretched he
is, five of those will go in rent, and if he is a
decent man, seven."

The Andorran was utterly at sea. 4C But
if he is wretched, why should he pay, and if
he is decent why should he pay still more ? "
he asked.

" Why, damn it all ! " said the English-
man, exploding, 44 a man must live ! "

This and That and the Other

" Precisely," said the Andorran rigidly,
" that is why I am asking the question. He
pays this tax, you say, five pesetas if he is
wretched, and seven if he is decent. But a
man may be decent although he is wretched,
and who is so brutal as to ask a tax of the
poor ? "

44 It isn't a tax," said the Englishman.
" He pays it for his house."

" But a man could buy a house," said the
Andorran, " with a few payments like that."

The Englishman sighed. " Do listen to my
explanation. He's got to pay it anyhow."

44 Well," said the Andorran, sighing in his
turn, 44 you must have a wicked King. But,
please God, he cannot spend it all on his
pleasures."

44 It isn't paid to the King, God bless him,"
said the Englishman. 44 The man pays it to
his landlord."

41 And suppose he doesn't ? " said the An-
dorran defiantly.

44 Well, the perlice," began the Englishman,
and the Andorran's face showed that he was
afraid of occult powers.

44 So there, you see," went on the English-
man, calculating along with rapid content,
44 he's only got thirteen."
196

A Conversation in Andorra

The Andorran was willing to stretch a point.
" Well," said he doubtfully, " I will grant him
thirteen, and with thirteen pesetas a man can
do well enough. His wife milks, and it does
not cost much to put a little cotton on the
child, and then, of course, if he is too poor to
buy a bed, why there is his straw."

" Straw's not decent, and we don't allow
it," said the Englishman firmly ; "he doesn't
buy a bed always ; sometimes he rents it."

" I don't understand," said the Andorran,
" I don't understand."

There was a little pause during which
neither of the two men looked at the other.
The Englishman went on good-naturedly and
laboriously explaining :

" Now let's come to bread."

'' Yes," said the Andorran eagerly, " man
lives by bread and wine."

" Well," said the Englishman, ignoring this
interruption, " you see, bread for the lot of
them would come to half that money."

" Yes," said the Andorran, nodding, " you
are quite right. Bread is a very serious
thing." And he sighed.

" Half of it," continued the Englishman,
" goes in bread. And then, of course, he has
to get a little meat."
197

This and That and the Other

" Certainly," said the Andorran.

" Bacon anyhow," the Englishman went on,
" and there's boots."

" Oh, he could do without boots," said the
Andorran.

" No he can't," said the Englishman,
" they all have to have boots ; and then you
see, there's tea."

The Andorran was interested in hearing
about tea. " You Englishmen are so fond
of tea," he said, smiling. " I have noticed that
you ask for tea. Juan has tea to sell."

The Englishman nodded genially. " I will
buy some of him," he said.

" Well, go on," said the Andorran.

" And there's a little baccy, of course "•
and he gave the prices of both those articles.
44 They're a lee tie more than you might
think," continued the Englishman, a little
confused. " They're taxed, you see."

44 Taxed again ? " said the Andorran.

44 Yes," said the Englishman rapidly, 44 not
much ; besides which, I haven't said anything
was taxed yet : they pay about double on
their tea and about four times on the
value of the tobacco. But they don't feel
it. Oh, |if they get regular work they're all
right ! "

A Conversation in Andorra

" Then," said the Andorran, summing it all
up, " they ought to do very well."

" Yes, they ought," said the Englishman,
" but somehow they're not steady of them-
selves : they get pauperized."

" What is that ? " said the Andorran.

" Why, they get to expect things for
nothing."

" They think," said the Andorran cheer-
fully, " that good things fall from the sky. I
know that sort : we have them." He thought
he had begun to understand, and just after he
had said this we came to a village.

I must here tell you what I ought to have
put at the beginning of these few lines, that
I heard this conversation in Andorra valley
itself, while four of us, the Andorran guide,
the Englishman, myself and an Ironist were
proceeding through the mountains, riding upon
mules.

We had come to the village of Encamps,
and there we all got down to enter the inn.
We had a meal together and paid, the four
of us, exactly five shillings and threepence all
together for wine and bread, cooked meat,
plenty of vegetables, coffee, liqueurs and a
cigar.

This was the end of the conversation in
199

This and That and the Other

Andorra : it was my business to return to
England after the holiday to write an essay
on a point in political economy, to which I
did justice ; but the conventions of academic
writing prevented me from quoting in that
essay this remarkable experience.

200

Paris and the East ^ ^ ^x <^

ONE of the things that set a modern man
wondering is the nature of the survivor
of our time.

It is customary to say that all human things
decay and end ; and if you will take a period
long enough of course it is true, for at last the
world itself shall dissolve. But when men point
to dead Empires, as Egypt or Assyria are dead,
or when they point to a fossilized civilization,
as it seems, according to travellers, that certain
civilizations of the East are fossilized, or when
they point to little broken cities where once
were famous towns, one is tempted to remem-
ber that to all these there is an exceptional
glorious sort which is ourselves. Atlantic
Europe, the Europe that was made by the
Christian Faith and in the first four centuries
of our era, lives on from change to change in a
most marvellous way, and for now two thou-
sand years has not seemed capable of decline.
You have in the history of it resurrection after
resurrection, and through all those rapid and

201

This and That and the Other

fantastic developments, transformations far
more rapid and far more fantastic than any
other of which we have record, a sort of inner
fixity of type remains, like the individual soul
of the man which makes him always himself
in spite of accident and in spite of the process
of age ; only, Europe differs from such meta-
phor in this, that it is like some man not sub-
ject, it would seem, to mortality.

This thought to which I perpetually return,
occurred to me as I handled a book on Paris,
the illustrations of which were impressions
gathered by a Japanese artist. Such a contrast
will call up in the minds of many the contrast
between something very old and something
very new. A reader might say as he glanced
at this book : " Here is one of the most ancient
things we have, the Oriental mind, and it is
looking at one of the freshest and most modern
things we have, modern Paris."

I confess that to me the contrast is of another
kind. I should say : " Here is something
which is, so far as its inner force goes, im-
movable, the Oriental mind ; and this is how
it looks at the most mobile thing on earth,
the heart of Gaul- — yet the mobile thing has a
history almost as long as, and far more full
than, the immobile thing."

202

Paris and the East

Upon a central page of this book I found a
really splendid bit of drawing. It is an im-
pression of the Statue of the Republic under
a cold dawn. Now when one thinks what that
statue means, what portion of the stoical
philosophy re-arisen after so many centuries
it embodies, what furious combats have raged
round that idea : I mean combats, not
debates : pain, not rhetoric : men dying in
great numbers and desiring to kill others as
they died. When one considers that statue
but the other day, with the raging mob of
workmen round it, and when one suddenly
remembers that the whole thing is after all
only of the last hundred years- — what a multi-
plicity of life this chief of our European cities
possesses in one's eyes !

The admirable pictures in this book are
drawn as nearly in the European manner as
one could expect, but the feeling is an un-
changing feeling which we know in Eastern
things. The mind is like deep and level water,
never stirred by wind : a big lake in a crater
of the hills. But the thing drawn is as moving
and as living as the air.

I wonder whether this artist, as he stood
and drew, felt as a European feels when he
stands and draws in any one of our immemorial
203

This and That and the Other

sites : by the Pool of London, or at the top of
the rue St. Jacques, or in the place of the
Martyrdom at Toulouse, or looking at the
most ancient yellow dusts of Toledo from over
the tumbling strength of the Tagus ? He may
have felt it ... perhaps ... for all his
work, even the little introduction that he
has written shows that astonishing adapt-
ability and exceedingly rapid intelligence
which are the marks of the Japanese to-day.
But if he felt it he must have felt it by educa-
tion. For us it is in our blood. We stand
upon those sites and we feel ourself in and
part of a stream of life that seems almost in-
capable of ending. And that brings me back
to where I began, How much longer will our
civilization endure ?

Will it end ? It has many enemies, most
of them unconscious, has modern Europe.

It has men within it who imagine that the
correction of some large abuse and the with-
drawal of some considerable part of its fabric
in the correction of that abuse, is a matter
concerning only their one generation. These
men visibly put in peril the balance of that
civilization by their very enthusiasm.

It has a lesser number of other enemies
within itself ; enemies more dangerous, who
204

Paris and the East

do believe that some quite new thing wholly
alien to the soul of Europe can be imposed
upon that soul. These men are always for
anarchy ; they delight in emphasizing all
that seems to diminish the responsibility and
the freedom of citizens, and it is their pleasure
to accelerate every tendency which may
destroy, from whatever side, our permanent
solution of domestic and of natural things :
families, properties, armies.

The common faith which was, as it were,
the cement of our civilization has been hit so
hard that some do ask themselves openly the
question that was only whispered some little
time ago- — whether the cement still holds. It is
quite certain that if that last symbol and
reality disintegrates, if the Catholic Church
leaves it, Europe has come to an end.

But these questions are not yet to be met
by any reply. And when I ask myself those
questions, and I always do when I see the
Seine going by the walls that were Caesar's
parleying ground with the chiefs, Dionysius's
prison, Julian's office, Dagobert's palace, and
which have been subject to everything from
Charlemagne to the Bourbons, and which
have (within the memory of men whom I
myself have known) ended the Monarchy and
205

This and That and the Other

seen passing by a wholly new society- — when
I ask myself those questions, I answer less
and less with every year.

Time was, in the University, say twenty
years ago, one would have said : " It is all
over. Everything that can destroy us has
triumphed." Time was, say ten years ago,
in the heat of a particular struggle which raged
all over the West, one could have said with
the enthusiasm of the fight, that continuity
would win. But to-day, whether because one
has accumulated knowledge or because things
are really more confused, it is difficult to
reply.

A man with our knowledge and our ex-
perience of what Europe has been and is,
standing in the grey and decayed Roman
city of the Fifth Century, and watching the
little barbarian troop riding into Lutetia,
might have said that a gradual darkness would
swallow us all, especially since he knew that
just beyond the narrow seas in Eastern
Britain a dense pall then covered the corpse
of the Roman civilization.

A man working on the Tour St. Jacques,
the last of the Gothic, might have seen nothing
206

Paris and the East

but anarchy and the end of all good work in
the change that was surging round him : the
Huguenots, the new Splendour, the cruelty
and the making of lies.

Certainly those who were present in Paris
before the 10th of August, '92, thought an end
had come, and believed the Revolution to be
a most unfruitful and tempestuous death ;
imagining Europe to have no hope but in the
possible extinction of the flame.

All three judgments would have been wrong.
And when one takes that typical Paris again,
and handles it and looks at it and thinks
of it as the example and the symbol of all our
time ; just as one is beginning to say " The
thing is dying," the memory of similar deaths
that were not deaths in the past returns to one
and one must be silent.

Never was Europe less conscious of herself,
never did she more freely admit the forces
that destroy, than she admits them to-day.
Never was evil more insolently or more
glaringly in power ; never had it less fear of
chastisement than in the whirlwind of our
time. If that whirlwind is mechanical, and if
this vast anarchic commerce, these blaring
papers, these sudden fortunes, these fre-
quent and unparalleled huge wars, are the
207

This and That and the Other

breaking up of all that once made Europe,
then the answer to the question is plain : but
it may be that there are things not mechanical
but organic : seeds surviving in the ruin
which will grow up into living forms. We
shall see.

208

The Human Charlatan ^ *o ^v ^>

IT is curious that the Scientific Spirit has
never tabulated any research, even super-
ficial, upon the human type of charlatan.

It is the essence of a charlatan that he aims
at the results of certain excellences in the full
consciousness that he does not possess those
excellences. The material upon which he works
is twofold : the ignorance and the noble appetite
for reverence in his fellow-men.

Where animals are concerned the Scientific
Spirit has tabulated a good deal of careful
research in this department. We know fairly
well the habits of the Cuckoo. What seemingly
harmless organisms are poisonous to us, and
why, we have discovered and can catalogue.
The successful deception practised for pur-
poses of secrecy or greed by such and such
a creature, we can discover in our books. But
no one has tabulated the human charlatan.

An admirable example upon which one
can test the whole theory of charlatanism is
the ridiculous Lombroso.
14 209

This and That and the Other

To begin with you have the name. He was
no more of an Italian than Disraeli, or than
the present Mayor of Rome : but his Italian
name deceives and is intended to deceive, not
necessarily that it was assumed, but that it
was paraded as national. Hundreds of honest
men thought themselves praising the Italian
character and Italian civilization when the
newspapers (themselves half duped) had per-
suaded them to blow the trumpet of Lom-
broso.

One of the characteristics of the charlatan
is that he parades the object with which he
desires to dupe you, and simultaneously hides
his methods in pushing the thing forward.
The purveyor of cheap jewellery in White-
chapel does this. He lets you have the glitter
of his article full and strong. Where he got it,
of his own connection with it, and what it is,
you learn last in the business or not at all.
The whole process is one of suggestion, or,
as our forefathers called it, " hoodwinking."
Lombroso was true to type in this regard.

The European Press was deluged one day
with notices, praise, reviews of a book which
was called Degeneration. It was a tenth-
rate book, but we were compelled to hear of
it. No words were fine enough to describe
210

The Human Charlatan

its author. We learnt that his name was
Nordau. There was no process of logic in
the book, there was no labour. Where it
asserted (it was a mass of assertions) it usually
trespassed on ground which the author could
not pretend to any familiarity with. Those
who are already alive to the international
trick were suspicious and upon their guard
from the very moment that they smelt the
thing. The infinitely larger number who do
not understand the nature of international
forces were taken in. For one man who read
the forrago a hundred were taught to magnify
the name of Nordau. Only when this process
of suggestion had well sunk in did the public
casually learn that the said Nordau was a
connection of Lombroso's,

A book of greater value (which is not saying
much) proceeded from the pen of one Ferrero.
It proposed an examination of the Roman
Empire and the Roman people. Its thesis
was, of course, a degradation of both. For
one man who so much as saw that book, a
hundred went away with the vague impres-
sion that a certain great Ferrero dominated
European thought. He gave opinions (among
other things) upon the polity of England so
absurd and ignorant that, had the process

211

This and That and the Other

of suggestion not run on before, those opinions
would only have attained some small measure
of notoriety from their very fatuousness. But
the international trick had reversed the
common and healthy process of human
thought. We were not allowed to judge the
man by his work : no, we must accept the
work on the authority of the man ; only after
the trick had been successfully worked did it
come out that Ferrero was a connection of
Lombroso's.

Lombroso's own department of charlatanry
was to attack Christian morals in the shape
of denying man's power of choice between good
and evil.

In another epoch and with other human
material to work upon his stock-in-trade
would have taken some other form, but Lom-
broso had been born into that generation
immediately preceding our own, whose chief
intellectual vice was materialism. A name
could be cheaply made upon the lines of
materialism, and Lombroso took to it as
naturally as his spiritual forerunners took
to rationalist Deism and as his spiritual
descendants will take to spurious mysticism.
We shall have in the near future our Lom-
brosos of the Turning Table, the Rapping

212

The Human Charlatan

Devil, and the Manifesting Dead Great Aunt
• — indeed this development coincided with
his own old age — but as things were, the
easiest charlatanry in his years of vigour was
to be pursued upon Materialist lines, and on
Materialist lines did the worthy Lombroso
proceed. His method was childishly simple,
and we ought to blush for our time, or rather
for that of our immediate seniors, that it
should have duped anybody' — but it was far
from childishly guileless.

When the laws are chiefly concerned in
defending the possessions of those already
wealthy, and when society, in the decline or
depression of religion, takes to the worshipping
of wealth, those whom the laws will punish
are generally poor. Such a time was that into
which Lombroso was born. No man was
executed for treason, few men were imprisoned
for it. Cheating on a large scale was an
avenue to social advancement in most of the
progressive European countries. The purvey-
ing of false news was a way to fortune : the
forestaller and the briber were masters of the
Senate. The sword was sheathed. The popu-
lar instinct which would repress and punish
cowardice, oppression, the sexual abomina-
tions of the rich, and their cruelties, had no
213

This and That and the Other

outlet for its expression. The prisons of
Europe were filled in the main with the least
responsible, the weakest willed, and the most
unfortunate of the very poor. We owe to
Lombroso the epoch-making discovery that
the weakest willed, the least responsible,
and the most unfortunate of the very poor
often suffer from physical degradation. With
such an intellectual equipment Lombroso
erected the majestic structure of human
irresponsibility.

Two hundred men and women are arrested
for picking pockets in such and such a district
in the course of a year. The contempt for
human dignity which is characteristic of
modern injustice permits these poor devils to
be treated like so many animals, to be thrashed,
tortured, caged, and stripped : measured, re-
corded, dealt with as vile bodies for experi-
ment. Lombroso (or for that matter anyone
possessed of a glimmering of human reason)
can see that of these two hundred unfortunate
wretches, a larger proportion will be diseased
or malformed, than would be the case among
two hundred taken at random among the better
fed or better housed and more carefully nur-
tured citizens. The Charlatan is in clover ! He
gathers his statistics : twenty-three per cent
214

The Human Charlatan

squint, eighteen per cent have lice — what is
really conclusive, no less than ninety-three per
cent suffer from metagrobolization of the
hyperdromedaries, which is scientist Greek
for the consequences of not having enough
to eat. It does not take much knowledge
of men and things to see what the Charlatan
can make of such statistics. Lombroso pumps
the method dry and then produces a theory
uncommonly comfortable to the well-to-dor—
that their fellow-men if unfortunate can be
treated as irresponsible chattels.

There is the beginning and end of the whole
humbug.

With the characteristic lack of reason which
is at once the weakness and the strength of this
vicious clap-trap, a totally disconnected — and
equally obvious- — series of facts is dragged in.
If men drink too much, or if they have in-
herited insanity, or are in any other way
afflicted, by their own fault or that of others,
in the action of the will, they will be prone
to irresponsibilities and to follies ; and where
such irresponsibilities and follies endanger the
comfort of the well-to-do, the forces of modern
society will be used to restrain them. Their
acts of violence or of unrestrained cupidity
being unaccompanied by calculation will lead
215

This and That and the Other

to the lock-up. And so you have another
stream of statistics showing that " alcoholism "
(which is scientist for drinking too much) and
epilepsy and lunacy do not make for material
success.

On these two disparate legs poses the rickety
structure which has probably already done
its worst in European jurisprudence and
against which the common sense of society is
already reacting.

Fortunately for men, Charlatanry of that
calibre has no very permanent effect. It is
too silly and too easily found out. If Lombroso
had for one moment intended a complete
theory of Materialist morals or had for one
moment believed in the stuff which he used for
self-advertisement, he would have told us
how physically to distinguish the cosmopoli-
tan and treasonable financier, the fraudulent
company-worker, the traitor, the tyrant, the
pornographer, and the coward. These in
high places are the curse of modern Europe —
not the most wretched of the very poor. Of
course Lombroso could tell us nothing of the
sort ; for there is nothing to tell.

Incidentally it is worthy of remark that this
man was one of those charlatans who are found
out in time. Common sense revolted, and in
216

The Human Charlatan

revolting managed to expose its enemy very
effectively while that enemy was still alive.
A hundred tricks were played upon the fellow :
it is sufficient to quote two.

After a peculiarly repulsive trial for murder
in Paris, a wag sent the photograph of two
hands, a right hand and a left hand, to the
great criminologist, telling him they were those
of the murderer, and asking for his opinion.
He replied in a document crammed with the
pompous terms of the scientific cheap- jack,
hybrid Greek and Latin, and barbarous in
the extreme. He discovered malformations in
the fingers and twenty other mysteries of his
craft, which exactly proved why these hands
were necessarily and by the predestination of
blind Nature the hands of a murderer. Then
it was that the wag published his letter and
the reply, with the grave annotation that the
left hand was his own (he was a man of letters)
and the right hand that of an honest fellow
who washed down his carriage.

The other anecdote is as follows : Lombroso
produced a piece of fatuous nonsense about
the Political Criminal Woman. He based
it upon " the skull of Charlotte Corday "• —
which skull he duly analysed, measured, and
labelled with the usual regiment of long and
217

This and That and the Other

incomprehensible words. Upon the first ex-
amination of the evidence it turned out that
the skull was no more Charlotte Corday's
than Queen Anne's — a medical student had
sold it to a humble Curiosity Shop, and the
dealer, who seems to have had some intellectual
affinity with the Lombroso tribe, had labelled
it for purposes of sale, " The Skull of Charlotte
Corday." Lombroso swallowed it.
The Ass I

218

The Barbarians

~*HE use of analogy, which is so wise
-JL and necessary a thing in historical judg-
ment, has a knack of slipping into the falsest
forms.

When ancient civilization broke down its
breakdown was accompanied by the infiltra-
tion of barbaric auxiliaries into the Roman
armies, by the settlement of Barbarians (prob-
ably in small numbers) upon Roman land,
and, in some provinces, by devastating, though
not usually permanent, irruptions of barbaric
hordes.

The presence of these foreign elements,
coupled with the gradual loss of so many
arts, led men to speak of " the Barbarian in-
vasions " as though these were a principal cause
of what was in reality no more than the old
age and fatigue of an antique society.

Upon the model of this conception men,

watching the dissolution of our own civiliza-

tion to-day, or at least its corruption, have

asked themselves whence those Barbarians

219

This and That and the Other

would come that should complete its final
ruin. The first, the least scholarly and the
most obvious idea was that of the swamping
of Europe by the East. It was a conception
which requried no learning, nor even any
humour. It was widely adopted and it was
ridiculous. Others, with somewhat more
grasp of reality, coined the phrase " that the
barbarians which should destroy the civiliza-
tion of Europe were already breeding under
the terrible conditions of our great cities."
This guess contained, indeed, a half-truth,
for though the degradation of human life in
the great industrial cities of England and the
United States was not a cause of our decline
it was very certainly a symptom of it. More-
over, industrial society, notably in this country
and in Germany, while increasing rapidly in
numbers, is breeding steadily from the worst
and most degraded types.

But the truth is that no such mechanical
explanation will suffice to set forth the causes
of a civilization's decay. Before the barbarian
in any form can appear in it, it must already
have weakened. If it cannot absorb or reject
an alien element it is because its organism has
grown enfeebled, and its powers of digestion
and excretion are lost or deteriorated ; and

220

The Barbarians

whoever would restore any society which
menaces to fall, must busy himself about the
inward nature of that society much more than
about its external dangers or the merely
mechanical and numerical factors of peril to
be discovered within it.

Whenever we look for " the barbarian,"
whether in the decline of our own society or
that of some past one whose historical fate
we may be studying, we are looking rather for
a visible effect of disease than for its source.

None the less to mark those visible effects
is instructive, and without some conspectus
of them it will be impossible to diagnose the
disease. A modern man may, therefore, well
ask where the barbarians are that shall enter
into our inheritance, or whose triumphs shall,
if it be permitted, at least accompany, even
if they cannot effect, the destruction of
Christendom.

With that word " Christendom " a chief
part of the curious speculation is at once sug-
gested. Whether the scholar hates or loves,
rejects or adopts, ridicules or admires, the re-
ligious creed of Europe, he must, in any case,
recognize two prime historical truths. The first
is that that creed which we call the Christian
religion was the soul and meaning of European

221

This and That and the Other

civilization during the period of its active and
united existence. The second is that wherever
the religion characteristic of a people has
failed to react against its own decay and has in
some last catastrophe perished, then that people
has lost soon after its corporate existence.

So much has passion taken the place of
reason in matters of scholarship that plain
truths of this kind, to which all history
bears witness, are accepted or rejected rather
by the appetite of the reader than by his
rational recognition of them, or his rational
disagreement. If we will forget for a mo-
ment what we may desire in the matter and
merely consider what we know, we shall with-
out hesitation admit both the propositions I
have laid down. Christendom was Christian,
not by accident or superficially, but in a
formative connection, just as an Englishman
is English or as a poem is informed by a
definite scheme of rhythm. It is equally true
that a sign and probably a cause of a society's
end is the dissolution of that causative moral
thing, its philosophy or creed.

Now here we discover the first mark of the
Barbarian.

Note that in the peril of English society
to-day there is no positive alternative to the

222

The Barbarians

ancient philosophic tradition of Christian
Europe. It has to meet nothing more sub-
stantive than a series of negations, often con-
tradictory, but all allied in their repugnance to
a fixed certitude in morals.

So far has this process gone that to be
writing as I am here in public, not even
defending the creed of Christendom, but
postulating its historic place, and pointing
out that the considerable attack now carried
on against it is symptomatic of the dissolution
of our society, has about it something teme-
rarious and odd.

Next look at secondary effects and con-
sider how certain root institutions native to
the long development of Europe and to her
individuality are the subject of attack, and
note the nature of the attack.

A fool will maintain that change, which is
the law of life, can be presented merely as a
matter of degree, and that, because our insti-
tutions have always been subject to change,
therefore their very disappearance can proceed
without the loss of all that has in the past
been ourselves.

But an argument of this sort has no weight
with the serious observer. It is certain that if
the fundamental institutions of a polity are
223

This and That and the Other

no longer regarded as fundamental by its
citizens, that polity is about to pass through
the total change which in a living organism
we call death.

Now the modern attack upon property and
upon marriage (to take but two fundamental
institutions of the European) is precisely of
this nature. Our peril is not that certain men
attack the one or the other and deny their
moral right to exist. Our peril rather is that,
quite as much as those who attack, those who
defend seem to take for granted the relative-
ness, the artificiality, the non-fundamental
character of the institution which they are
apparently concerned to support.

See how marriage is defended. To those
who would destroy it under the plea of its
inconveniences and tragedies, the answer is
no longer made that, good or ill, it is an
absolute and is intangible. The answer made
is that it is convenient, or useful, or necessary,
or merely traditional.

Most significant of all, the terminology of
the attack is on the lips of the defence, but the
contrary is never the case. Those opponents
of marriage who abound in modern England
will never use the term " a sacrament," yet
how many for whom marriage is still a sacra-
224

The Barbarians

ment will forego the pseudo-scientific jargon
of their opponents ?

The threat against property is upon the
same lines. That property should be restored
that most citizens should enjoy it, that it is
normal to the European family in its healthy
state- — all this we hear less and less. More
and more do we hear it defended, however
morbid in form or unjust in use, as a necessity,
a trick which secures a greater stability for
the State, or a mere power which threatens
and will break its opponents tyrannously.

The spirit is abroad in many another minor
matter. In its most grotesque form it challenges
the accuracy of mathematics : in its most
vicious, the clear processes of the human
reason. The Barbarian is as proud as a
savage in a top hat when he talks of the ellip-
tical or the hyperbolic universe and tries to
picture parallel straight lines converging or
diverging — but never doing anything so vul-
garly old-fashioned as to remain parallel.

The Barbarian when he has graduated to be
a " pragmatist," struts like a nigger in evening
clothes, and believes himself superior to the
gift of reason, or free to maintain that defini-
tion, limit, quantity and contradiction are
little childish things which he has outgrown.
IS 225

This and That and the Other

The Barbarian is very certain that the
exact reproduction in line or colour of a thing
seen is beneath him, and that a drunken blur
for line, a green sky, a red tree and a purple
cow for colour, are the mark of great painting.

The Barbarian hopes — and that is the very
mark of him- — that he can have his cake and
eat it too. He will consume what civilization
has slowly produced after generations of
selection and effort, but he will not be at the
pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he
a comprehension of the virtue that has brought
them into being. Discipline seems to him
irrational, on which account he is for ever
marvelling that civilization should have
offended him with priests and soldiers.

The Barbarian wonders what strange mean-
ing may lurk in that ancient and solemn truth,
" Sine Auctoritate nulla vita.'''

In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable
everywhere in this that he cannot make ;
that he can befog or destroy, but that he
cannot sustain ; and of every Barbarian in the
decline or peril of every civilization exactly
that has been true.

We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we
tolerate him ; in the long stretches of peace
we are not afraid.

226

The Barbarians

We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic
inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed
creeds refreshes us : we laugh. But as we
laugh we are watched by large and awful faces
from beyond : and on these faces there is no
smile.

We permit our jaded intellects to play with
drugs of novelty for the fresh sensation they
arouse, though we know well there is no good
in them, but only wasting at the last.

Yet there is one real interest in watching
the Barbarian and one that is profitable.

The real interest of watching the Bar-
barian is not the amusement derivable from
his antics, but the prime doubt whether he
will succeed or no, whether he will flourish.
He is, I repeat, not an agent, but merely a
symptom, yet he should be watched as a
symptom. It is not he in his impotence that
can discover the power to disintegrate the
great and ancient body of Christendom, but
if we come to see him triumphant we may
be certain that that body, from causes much
vaster than such as he could control, is
furnishing him with sustenance and forming
for him a congenial soil — and that is as much
as to say that we are dying.

227

On Knowing the Past ^> ^> ^x ^

AN apprehension of the past demands two
kinds of information.

First, the mind must grasp the nature of
historic change and must be made acquainted
with the conditions of human thought in
each successive period, as also with the general
aspect of its revolution and progression.

Secondly, the actions of men, the times,
that is the dates and hours of such action,
must be strictly and accurately acquired.

Neither of these two foundations, upon which
repose both the teaching and the learning of
history, is more important than the other.
Each is essential. But a neglect of the due
emphasis which one or the other demands,
though both be present, warps the judgment
of the scholar and forbids him to apply this
science to its end, which is the establishment
of truth.

History may be called the test of true
philosophy, or it may be called in a very
modern and not very dignified metaphor, the
228

On Knowing the Past

object-lesson of political science ; or it may
be called the great story whose interest is
upon another plane from all other stories
because its irony, its tragedy and its moral are
real, were acted by real men, and were the
manifestation of God.

But whatever brief and epigrammatic sum-
mary we make to explain the value of history
to men, that formula still remains an im-
perative formula for them all, and I repeat it :
the end of history is the establishment of
truth.

A man may be ever so accurately informed
as to the dates, the hours, the weather, the
gestures, the type of speech, the very words,
the soil, the colour, that between them all
would seem to build up a particular event.
But if he is not seized of the mind which lay
behind all that was human in the business,
then no synthesis of his detailed knowledge
is possible. He cannot give to the various
actions which he knows their due sequence and
proportion ; he knows not what to omit, nor
what to enlarge upon, among so many, or
rather a potentially infinite number of facts,
and his picture will not be (as some would put
it) distorted : it will be false. He will not be
able to use history for its end, which is the
229

This and That and the Other

establishment of truth. All that he establishes
by his action, all that he confirms and makes
stronger, is untruth. And so far as truth is
concerned, it would be far better that a man
should be possessed of no history than that
he should be possessed of history ill stated as
to the factor of human motive.

A living man has to aid his judgment and
to guide him in the establishment of truth,
contemporary experience. Other men arc his
daily companions. The consequence and the
living principles of their acts and of his own
are fully within his grasp.

If a man is rightly informed of all the past
motive and determining mind from which
the present has sprung, his information will
illumine and expand and confirm his use of
that present experience. If he know nothing
of the past his personal observation and the
testimony of his own senses are, so far as they
go, an unshakable foundation. But if he
brings in aid of contemporary experience an
appreciation of the past which is false because
it gives to the past a mind which was not
its own, then he will not only be wrong upon
that past but he will tend to be wrong also
in his conclusions upon the present. He will
for ever read into the plain facts before
230

On Knowing the Past

him origins and predetermining forces which
do not explain them and which are not con-
nected with them in the way he imagines.
And he will easily come to regard his own
society, which as a wholly uninstructed man
he might fairly though insufficiently have
grasped, through a veil of illusion and of false
philosophy, until at last he cannot even see
the things before his eyes. In a word, it is
better to have no history at all than to have
history which misconceives the general direc-
tion and the large lines of thought in the im-
mediate and the remote past.

This being evidently the case one is tempted
to say that a just estimate of the revolution
and the progression of human motive in the
past is everything to history, and that an
accurate scholarship in the details of the
chronicle, in dates especially, is of wholly in-
ferior importance. Such a statement would
be quite false. Scholarship in history, that
is an acquaintance with the largest possible
number of facts, and an accurate retention of
them in the memory, is as essential to this
study as of that other background of motive
which has just been examined.

The thing is self-evident if we put an
extreme case. For if a man were wholly
231

This and That and the Other

ignorant of the facts of history and of their
sequence, he could not possibly know what
might lie behind the actions of the past, for
we only obtain communion with that which
is within and that which is foundational in
human action by an observation of its external
effect.

A man's history, for instance, is sound and
on the right lines if he have but a vague and
general sentiment of the old Pagan civilization
of the Mediterranean, so long as that sentiment
corresponds to the very large outline and is
in sympathy with the main spirit of the
affair. But he cannot possess so much as an
impression of the truth if he has not heard
the names of certain of the great actors, if he
is wholly unacquainted with the conception
of a City State, and if the names of Rome,
of Athens, of Antioch, of Alexandria, and of
Jerusalem have never been mentioned to him.

Nor will a knowledge of facts, however
slight, be valuable ; contrariwise it will be
detrimental and of negative value to his
judgment if accuracy in his knowledge be
lacking. If he were invariably inaccurate,
thinking that red which was blue, inverting
the order of any two events and putting with-
out fail in the summer what happened in
232

On Knowing the Past

winter, or in the Germanics what took place
in Gaul, his facts would never correspond with
the human motive of them, and his errors upon
externals would at once close his avenues of
access towards internal motive and suggest
other and non-existent motive in its place.

It is, of course, a childish error to imagine
that the knowledge of a time grows out of a
mere accumulation of observation. External
things do not produce ideas, they only reveal
them. And to imagine that mere scholarship
is sufficient to history is to put oneself on
a level with those who, in the sphere of
politics, for instance, ignore the necessity of
political theory and talk muddily of the
44 working " of institutions- — as though it were
possible to judge whether an institution were
working ill or not when one had no ideal that
institutions might be designed to attain. But
though scholarship is not the source of judg-
ment in history, it is the invariable and the
necessary accompaniment of it. Facts, which
(to repeat) do not produce ideas but only re-
veal or suggest them, do none the less reveal
and suggest them, and form the only instru-
ment of such suggestion and revelation.

Scholarship, accurate and widespread, has
this further function : that it lends stuff to
233

This and That and the Other

general apprehension of the past, which, how-
ever just, is the firmer, the larger and the
more intense as the range of knowledge and
its fixity increase. And scholarship has one
more function, which is that it connects, and
it connects with more and more precision in
proportion as it is more and more detailed,
the tendency of the mind to develop a general
and perhaps justly apprehended idea into
imaginary regions : for the mind is creative ;
it will still make and spin, and if you do not
feed it with material it will spin dreams out of
emptiness.

Thus a man will have a just appreciation
of the thirteenth century in England ; he will
perhaps admire or will perhaps be repelled
by its whole spirit according to his tempera-
ment or his acquired philosophy ; but in
either case, though his general impression
was just, he will tend to add to it excrescences
of judgment which, as the process continued,
would at last destroy the true image were not
scholarship there to come in perpetually and
check him in his conclusions. He admires it, he
will tend to make it more national than it was,
to forget its cruelties because what is good in
our own age is not accompanied by cruelty.
He will tend to lend it a science it did not
234

On Knowing the Past

possess because physical science is in our own
time an accompaniment of greatness. But
if he reads and reads continually, these
vagaries will not oppress or warp his vision.
More and more body will be added to that
spirit, which he does justly but only vaguely
know. And he will at last have with the
English thirteenth century something of that
acquaintance which one has with a human
face and voice : these also are external things,
and these also are the product of a soul.

Indeed- — though metaphors are dangerous
in such a matter- — a metaphor may with
reservation be used to describe the effect of
the chronicle, of research and of accurate
scholarship in the science of history. A man
ill provided with such material is like one
who sees a friend at a distance ; a man well
provided with it is like a man who sees a
friend close at hand. Both are certain of the
identity of the person seen, both are well
founded in that certitude ; but there are
errors possible to the first which are not
possible to the second, and close and intimate
acquaintance lends to every part of judgment
a surety which distant and general acquaint-
ance wholly lacks. The one can say something
true and say it briefly : there is no more to
235

This and That and the Other

say. The other can fill in and fill in the picture,
until though perhaps never complete, it is
a symptotic to completion.

To increase one's knowledge by research, to
train oneself to an accurate memory of it,
does not mean that one's view of the past is
continually changing. Only a fool can think,
for instance, that some document somewhere
will be discovered to show that the mass of
the people of London had for James II an
ardent veneration, or that the national defence
organized by the Committee of Public Safety
during the French Revolution was due to the
unpopular tyranny of a secret society. But
research in either of these cases, and a minute
and increasing acquaintance with detail, does
show one London largely apathetic in the
first place, and does show one large sections
of rebellious feeling in the armies of the
Terror. It permits one to appreciate what
energy and what initiative were needed for
the overthrow of the Stuarts, and to see from
how small a body of wealthy and determined
men that policy proceeded. It permits one to
understand how the battles of '93 could never
have been fought upon the basis of popular
enthusiasm alone ; it permits one to assert
without exaggeration that the autocratic
236

On Knowing the Past

power of the Committee of Public Safety and
the secrecy of its action was a necessary con-
dition of the National defence during the
French Revolution.

One might conclude by saying what might
seem too good to be true : namely, that minute
and accurate information upon details (the
characteristic of our time in the science of
history) must of its own nature so corroborate
just and general judgments of the past, that
through it, when the modern phase of wilful
distortion is over, mere blind scholarship will
restore tradition.

I say it sounds too good to be true. But
three or four examples of such action are
already before us. Consider the Gospel of
St. John, for instance, or what is called " the
Higher Criticism " of the old Hebrew litera-
ture, and ask yourselves whether modern
scholarship has not tended to restore the long
and sane judgment of men, which, when that
scholarship was still imperfect, seemed to
imperil.

237

The Higher Criticism ^ ^> ^ ^

I HAVE long desired to make some protest
against the attitude which the Very Learned
take towards literary evidence. I know that the
Very Learned chop and change. I know that
they are in this country about fifty years behind
the Continent. I know that their devotion
to the extraordinary unintelligent German
methods will soon be shaken by their dis-
covery that new methods are abroad — in both
senses of the word " abroad " : for new
methods have been abroad, thank Heaven, for
a very long time.

But I also know that a mere appeal to reason
will be of very little use, so I propose here to
give a concrete instance, and I submit it to
the judgment of the Very Learned.

The Very Learned when they desire to fix
the date or the authenticity or both of a piece
of literature, adopt among other postulates,
these :

(1) That tradition doesn't count.

(2) That common sense, one's general know-

238

The Higher Criticism

ledge of the time, and all that multiplex in-
tegration which the sane mind effects from
a million tiny data to a general judgment, is
too tiny to be worthy of their august con-
sideration.

(3) That the title " Very Learned " (which
gives them their authority) is tarnished by any
form of general knowledge, and can only be
acquired by confining oneself to a narrow
field in which any fool could become an abso-
lute master in about two years.

These are their negative postulates in deal-
ing with a document.

As to their positive methods, of one hundred
insufficient tricks I choose in particular these :

(1) The establishment of the date of the
document against tradition and general air,
by allusion discovered within it.

(2) The conception that all unusual events
recorded in it are mythical, and therefore
necessarily anterior to the document.

(3) The supposition that religious emotion,
or indeed emotion of any kind, vitiates
record.

(4) The use of a single piece of co-relative
documentary evidence to destroy that general
judgment.

(5) The fixed dogma that most writers of

239

This and That and the Other

the past have spent most of their time in
forging.

Now to test these nincompoops I will con-
sider a contemporary document which I know
a good deal about, called The Path to Rome.
It professes to be the record of a journey by
one H. Belloc in the year 1901 from Toul in
Lorraine to Rome in Italy. I will suppose
that opus to have survived through some acci-
dent into a time which preserved few con-
temporary documents, but which had through
tradition and through a knowledge of sur-
rounding circumstance, a popular idea of what
the opening of the twentieth century was like,
and a pathetic belief that Belloc had taken
this journey in the year 1901.

This is how the Very Learned would pro-
ceed to teach the vulgar a lesson in scepticism.

" A critical examination of the document
has confirmed me in the conclusion that the
so-called Path to Rome is composed of three
distinct elements, which I will call A, W, and
0." (See my article E.H.R., September 3,
113, pp. 233 et seq. for 0. For W, see Furth in
Die Quellen Critik, 2nd Semestre, 3117.)

Of these three documents A is certainly
much earlier than the rather loose criticism of
Polter in England and Bergmann upon the
240

The Higher Criticism

Continent decided some years ago in the
Monograph of the one, and the Discursions
which the other has incorporated in his Neo-
Catholicism in the Twenty-Second Century.

The English scholar advances a certain in-
ferior limit of A.D. 2208, and a doubtful
superior limit of A.D. 2236. The German is
more precise and fixes the date of A in a year
certainly lying between 2211 and 2217. I
need not here recapitulate the well-known
arguments with which this view is supported.
(See Z.M. fs. (Mk. 2) Arch, and the very in-
teresting article of my friend Mr. Gouch in
the Pursuits of the A.S.) I may say generally
that their argument reposes upon two con-
siderations :

(1) The Centime, a coin which is mentioned
several times in the book, went out of circula-
tion before the middle of the twenty-first
century, as we know from the only extant
letter (undoubtedly genuine) of Henri Perro
to the Prefect of Aude.

This gives them their superior limit. But
it is the Inferior Limit which concerns us
most, and here the argument reposes upon
one phrase. (Perkins' edition, p. .) This
phrase is printed in italics, and runs, " Deleted
by the Censor"

16 241

This and That and the Other

It is advanced that we know that a censor-
ship of books was first established in America
(where, as I shall show, The Path to .Rome was
written) in the year 2208, and there is ample
evidence of the fact that no such institution
was in actual existence before the twenty^.
second century in the English-speaking coun-
tries, though there is mention of it elsewhere
in the twenty-first, and a fragment of the
twentieth appears to allude to something of the
kind in Russia at that time. (Baker has con-
fused the Censorship of Books with that of
Plays, and an unknown form of art called
" Morum " ; probably a species of private
recitation.)

Now Dr. Blick has conclusively shown in
his critical edition of the mass of ancient litera-
ture, commonly known as The Statute Book,
that the use of italics is common to distinguish
later interpolation.

This discovery is here of the first importance.
Not only does it destroy the case for the phrase,
"Deleted by the Censor," as a proof of an In-
ferior Limit, 2208, but in this particular in-
stance it is conclusive evidence that we have
interpolation here, for it is obvious that after
the establishment of a Censorship the right
would exist to delete a name in the text, and
242

The Higher Criticism

a contemporary Editor would warn the reader
in the fashion which he has, as a fact,
employed.

So much for the negative argument. We
can be certain after Dr. Blick's epoch-making
discovery that even the year 2208 is not our
Inferior Limit for A, but we have what is
much better, conclusive evidence of a much
earlier Superior Limit, to which I must claim
the modest title of discoverer.

There is a passage in A (pp. 170-171)
notoriously corrupt, in which a dramatic
dialogue between three characters, the
Duchess, Major Charles and Clara, is no
longer readable. All attempts to reconstitute
it have failed, and on that account scholars
have too much tended to neglect it.

Now I submit that though the passage is
hopelessly corrupt its very corruption affords
us a valuable indication.

The Duchess, in a stage indication, is made
to address " Major Charles." It is notorious
that the term " Major " applied to a certain
functionary in a religious body probably
affiliated to the Jesuits, known to modern
scholars under a title drawn from the only
contemporary fragment concerning it, as
" Old Booth's Ramp." This society was sup-
243

This and That and the Other

pressed in America in the year 2012, and the
United States were the last country in which it
survived.

No matter how correct, therefore, the text
is in this passage, we may be certain that even
the careless scribe took the contemporary
existence of a " major " for granted. And
we may be equally certain that even our
existing version of A incorporated in the only
text we possess, was not written later than the
first years of the twenty-first century. We
have here, therefore, a new superior limit
of capital importance, but, what is even more
important, we can fix with fair accuracy a
new inferior limit as well.

In the Preface (whose original attachment
to A is undoubted) we have the title " Cap-
tain Monologue," p. xii (note again the
word " Captain," an allusion to " Booth's
Ramp "), and in an anonymous fragment
(B.M. m.s.s., 336 N., (60) bearing the title
" Club Gossip," I have found the following
conclusive sentence: "He used to bore us stiff,
and old Burton invented a brand new title
for him, ' Captain Monologue,' about a year
before he died, which the old chap did an hour
or two after dinner on Derby Day."

Now this phrase is decisive. We have
244

The Higher Criticism

several allusions to " dinner " (in all, eight,
and a doubtful ninth, tabulated by Ziethen in
his Corpus. Ins. Am.). They all refer to some
great public function the exact nature of
which is lost, but which undoubtedly held
a great place in political life. At what in-
tervals this function occurred we cannot tell,
but the coincident allusion to Derby Day
settles it.

The only Lord Derby canonized by the
Church died in I960, and the promulgation
of Beatification (the earliest date that would
permit the use of the word " day " for this
Saint) was issued by Pope Urban XV in
May, 2003. It is, therefore, absolutely certain
that A was written at some time between the
years 2003 to 2012. Nearer than that I do not
profess to fix it ; but I confess that the
allusion (p. 226) to drinking coffee, coupled
with the corresponding allusion to drinking
coffee in a licence issued for a Lockhart's
Restaurant in 2006, inclines me to that precise
year as the year in which A appeared, or at
any rate was written.

I think in the above I have established the
date of A beyond dispute.

I have no case to bring forward of general
conclusions, and I know that many scholars will
245

This and That and the Other

find my argument, however irrefutable, dis-
turbing, for it is universally admitted that
excluding the manifestly miraculous episodes
of The Oracle, The Ointment of Epinal, The
View of the Alps over a Hundred Miles, etc.,
which are all of them properly referred to
in W and 0 respectively, A itself contains
numerous passages too closely connected with
the text to be regarded as additions, yet
manifestly legendary- — such as the perpetual
allusions to spirits, and in particular to a spirit
called " Devil," the inordinate consumption of
wine, the gift of tongues, etc. etc. But I
submit that a whole century, especially in a
time which pullulated with examples of cre-
dulity, such as the "Flying Men," "The
Telephone," "Wireless Telegraphy," etc., is
ample to allow for the growth of these
mythical features.

I take it, therefore, as now established, that
A in its entirety is not later than 2012 and
probably as early as 2006. Upon W I cannot
yet profess to have arrived at a decision, but
I incline to put it about forty years later,
while 0 (which includes most of the doggerel
and is manifestly in another style, and from
another hand) is admitted to be at least a
generation later than " W " itself.
246

The Higher Criticism

In a further paper I shall discuss the much-
disputed point of authorship, and I shall
attempt to show that Belloc, though the sub-
ject of numerous accretions, was a real histori-
cal figure, and that the author of A may even
have worked upon fragments preserved by oral
tradition from the actual conversation of that
character.

That is how the damned fools write : and
with brains of that standard Germans ask
me to deny my God !

The Fanatic <QX <^> -oy -cy ^ <^

" I asked Old Biggs (as the Duke of Racton used to
be called) what he thought of Charlie Wilson. Old
Biggs answered, ' Man like that's one of two things :
A .Fanatic or a Fanatic.' I thought this very funny.'
— St. Germans Sporting Memoirs, Vol. II, p. 186.

THIS is a kind of man whom we all love
and yet all desire to moderate. He is
excessive only in good, but his excess therein
is dangerous. He proceeds from less to more ;
first irritated, then exasperated, then mad.
He will not tolerate the necessary foibles of
mankind. No, nor even their misunder-
standings. He himself commonly takes refuge
in some vice or other, but a small one, and
from this bastion defends himself against all
comers.

The Fanatic will exaggerate the operations
of war. If it be necessary in the conquest
of a province to murder certain women, he will
cry shame blindly, without consideration of
martial conditions or remembrance that what
we do in war is absolved by indemnities there-
248

The Fanatic

after following. It is the same with the death
of children in warfare, whether these be
starved to death in concentration camps or
more humanely spitted, or thrown down wells,
or dealt with in some other fashion, such as
the braining of them against walls and gate-
posts : nothing will suit the Fanatic in these
matters but a complete and absolute absten-
tion from them, without regard to strategy
or tactics or any other part of military science.
Now many a man shall argue against practices
of one sort or another, as against excesses.
But the Fanatic is nothing so reasonable,
being bound by a law of his nature, or rather
a lack of law, to violent outburst with no re-
straint upon it, and to impotent gnashings.

It is so also in affairs of State when peace
reigns, for the Fanatic is for ever denouncing
what all men know must be, and making of
common happenings an uncommon crime.
Thus, when a minister shall borrow of a money-
lender certain sums which this last generously
puts before him without condition or expense,
what must your Fanatic do, but poke and
pry into the whole circumstance, and when
the usurer has his just reward, and is made
a Peer to settle our laws for us, the Fanatic
will go vainly about from one newspaper to
249

This and That and the Other

another seeking which shall print his foolish
" protest " (as he calls it). Mark you also
that the Fanatic is quite indifferent to this :
that his foolishness is of no effect. He will
roar in an empty field as loud as any bull and
challenge all men to meet him, and seems well
pleased whether they come or no.

It is of the fanatical temper to regard some
few men as heroes, or demigods, and then
again, these having failed in something, to
revile them damnably. Thus by the old
religious sort you will find the Twelve Apostles
in the Gospel very foolishly revered and made
much of as though they were so many Idols,
but let one of these (Judas to wit) show states-
manship and a manly sense, and Lord ! how
the Fanatic does rail at him !

So it is also with foreign nations. The
Fanatic has no measure there and speaks of
them as though they were his province, seeing
that it is of his essence never to comprehend
diversity of circumstance or measure. Thus
our cousins oversea will very properly burn
alive the negroes that infest them in those
parts, and their children and young people
will, when the negro has been thus dispatched,
collect his bones or charred clothing to keep
the same in their collections, which later
250

The Fanatic

they compare one with another. This is their
business not ours, and has proved in the effect
of great value to their commonwealth. But
the Fanatic will have none of it. To hear him
talk you might imagine himself a negro or one
that had in his own flesh tasted the fire, and
in his rage he will blame one man and another
quite indiscriminately : now the good Presi-
dent of these people (Mr. Roosevelt as he once
was), now the humble instrument of justice
who should have put a match to the African.
And all this without the least consideration of
those surrounding things and haps which
made such dealing with negroes a very neces-
sary thing.

There is nothing workable or of purpose in
what this man does. He is for ever quarrelling
with other men for their lack of time or memory
or even courtesy to himself, for on this point
he is very tender. He wearies men with re-
peating to them their own negotiations, as
though these were in some way disgraceful.
Thus if a man has taken a sum of money in
order to write of the less pleasing characters
of his mother ; or if he has sold his vote in
Parliament ; or if he has become for his own
good reasons the servant of someone wealthier
than he ; or if he has seen fit to deal with the
251

This and That and the Other

enemies of his country, the Fanatic will blurt
out and blare such a man's considered action,
hoping, it would seem, to have some support
in his mere raving at it. But this he never gets,
for mankind in the lump is too weighty and
reasonable to accept any such wildness.

There is no curing the Fanatic, neither with
offers of Money nor with blows, nor is there
any method whatsoever of silencing him, save
imprisonment, which, in this country, is the
method most commonly taken. But in the
main there is no need to act so violently by
him, seeing that all men laugh at him for a
fool and that he will have no man at his side.
Commonly, he is of no effect at all, and we
may remain his friend though much contemp-
tuous of him, since contempt troubles him
not at all. But there are moments, and notably
in the doubt of a war, when the Fanatic may
do great ill indeed. Then it is men's business
to have him out at once and if necessary to put
him to death, but whether by beheading, by
hanging, or by crucifixion it is for sober judges
to decide.

The Irish are very fanatical, and have

driven from their country many landlords

formerly wealthy who were the support and

mainstay of all the island. It may be seen

252

The Fanatic

in Ireland how fanaticism can impoverish.
Upon the other hand, the people of the Mile
End Road and round by the north into
Hackney Downs and so southward and
westward into Whitechapel by Houndsditch
are not fanatical at all, and enjoy for their
reward an abounding prosperity.

253

A Leading Article ^> ^> ^> -^ ^

AFTER the failure of the numerous con-
ferences which have been held between
Charles Stuart and the Commissioners of
Parliament, and after a trial in Westminster
Hall the incidents of which it would be pain-
ful to recall, the Court appointed for the pur-
pose has reached a conclusion with which we
think the mass of Englishmen will, however
reluctantly, agree. The courtesy and good
feeling upon which we pride ourselves in our
political life seem to have been strangely for-
gotten during the controversies of the last
few months. It would be invidious to name
particular instances, and we readily admit that
the circumstances were abnormal. Feeling
ran high, and with Englishmen at least, who
are accustomed to call a spade a spade, strong
words will follow upon strong emotions ; but
we can hope that the final decision of the
Court will have put behind us for ever one
of the most critical periods of discussion, with
254

A Leading Article

all its deplorable excesses and wild and whirling
words, which we can remember in modern
times.

Upon the principle of the conclusion to
\vhich the Court has come there is a virtual
unanimity. Men as different as Colonel
Harrison on the one hand and Mr. Justice
Bradshaw on the other, Mr. Cromwell — whom
surely all agree in regarding as a representa-
tive Englishman- — and that very different
character, Mr. Ireton, whom we do not always
agree with, but who certainly stands for a
great section of opinion, are at one upon a
policy which has received no serious criticism,
and recommends itself even to such various
social types as the blunt soldier, Colonel Pride,
and the refined aristocrat, Lord Grey of
Groby.

But though a matter of such supreme
importance to the mass of the people, a
measure which it is acknowledged will bring
joy to the joyless, light to those who sit in
darkness, and a new hope in their old age to
fifteen millions of British working men and
women, may be unanimously agreed to in
principle, it is unfortunately possible to defeat
even so beneficent a measure by tactics of
delay and by a prolonged criticism upon
255

This and That and the Other

detail. The Government have therefore, in our
opinion, acted wisely in determining to pro-
ceed with due expedition to the execution of
Charles Stuart, and we do not anticipate any
such resistance, even partial and sporadic,
as certain rash freelances of politics have
prophesied. There was indeed some time ago
some doubt as to the success of a policy to
which the Government was pledged, and in
spite of the strong and disciplined majority
which they commanded in the House, in spite
of the fact that the House was actually
unanimous upon the general lines of that
policy, many people up and down the country,
who did not fully comprehend it, had been
led to act rashly and even riotously against
its proposals. All that we may fairly say is
now over, and we trust that the Government
will have the firmness to go forward with a
piece of work in which it now undoubtedly
has the support of every class of society.

We should be the last to deny the import-
ance of meeting any serious objection in detail
that still remains. Thus the inhabitants of
Charing Cross have a legitimate grievance
when they say that the scene of the execution
will be hidden from them by the brick building
which stands at the northern end of Whitehall,
256

A Leading Article

but they must remember that all practical
measures involve compromise and that if
their point of view alone had been considered
and the scaffold were to be erected upon the
north of that annex, the crowd for which the
Home Secretary has made such wise provision
by the erection of strong temporary barriers in
the Court of the Palace would have no chance
of attending at the ceremony.

We confess that the more serious point seems
to us to arise on the Bishop of London's sug-
gestion that only the clergy of the Established
Church should be present upon the platform,
and we very much fear that this pretension —
in our view a very narrow and contemptible
one — will receive the support of that large
number of our fellow- citizens which is still at-
tached to the Episcopal forms of Christianity.
But we take leave to remind them, and the
Bishop of London himself, that the present
moment, when the Free Churches have so
fully vindicated their rights to public recog-
nition, is hardly one in which it is decent
to press these old-fashioned claims of privi-
lege.

There is a third matter which we cannot
conclude without mentioning : we refer to the
attitude of Charles Stuart himself. While the
J7 257

This and That and the Other

matter was still sub judice we purposely re-
frained from making any comment, as is the
laudable custom, we are glad to say, in the
country. But now the sentence has been
pronounced we think it our duty to protest
against the attitude of Charles Stuart during
the last scene of this momentous political con-
troversy. He is too much of an English
gentleman and statesman to exaggerate the
significance of our criticism, or to fail to under-
stand the spirit in which it is offered, for that
is entirely friendly, but he must surely recog-
nize by this time, that such petty ebullitions
of temper as he exhibited in refusing to plead
and in wearing his hat in the presence of men
of such eminence as Mr. Justice Bradshaw were
unworthy of him and of the great cause which
he represents. He would have done well to
take a lesson from the humble tipstaff of the
Court, who, though not required to do so by
the Judges, instantly removed his cap when
they appeared and only put it on again when
he was conducting the prisoner back after the
rising of the Court.

Finally, we hope that all those who have

been permitted by the Home Secretary to be

present at Whitehall upon next Tuesday will

remember our national reputation for sobriety

258

A Leading Article

and judgment in great affairs of the State and
will be guilty of nothing that might make it
necessary for the Government to use severe
measures utterly repugnant to the spirit of
English liberty.

259

The Obituary Notice ^> *^ ^y ^

MR. HEROD, whose death has just been
announced by a telegram from Lyons,
was one of the most striking and forceful
personalities of our time.

By birth he was a Syrian Jew, suffering
from the prejudice attaching to such an origin,
and apparently with little prospect of achiev-
ing the great place which he did achieve in the
eager life of our generation.

But his indomitable energy and his vast
comprehension of men permitted him before
the close of his long and useful life to impress
himself upon his contemporaries as very few
even of the greatest have done.

Our late beloved sovereign, Tiberius, per-
haps the keenest judge of men in the whole
Empire, is said to have remarked one evening
in the smoking-room to his guests, when Herod
had but recently left the apartment : " Gentle-
men, that man is the corner-stone of my
Eastern policy," and the tone in which His
Majesty expressed this opinion was, we may
260

The Obituary Notice

be sure, that not only of considered judg-
ment, but of equally considered reverence and
praise.

It is a striking testimony to Mr. Herod's
character that while he was still quite un-
known (save, of course, as the heir of his father)
he mastered the Greek and Latin tongues, and
we find in his diary the shrewd remark that
as the first was necessary to culture, so was
the second to statesmanship.

It would have been impossible to choose
a more difficult moment than that in which
the then unknown Oriental lad was entrusted
by the Imperial Government with the task
which he has so triumphantly accomplished.
The Levant, as our readers know, presents
problems of peculiar difficulty, and though
we can hardly doubt that the free and demo-
cratic genius of our country would at last
have solved them, we owe it to the memory
of this remarkable personality that the solu-
tion of them should have been so triumphantly
successful.

We will not here recapitulate the obscure
and often petty intrigues which have com-
bined to give the politics of Judaea and its
neighbourhood a character of anarchy. It is
enough to point out that when Mr. Herod
261

This and That and the Other

was first entrusted with his mission the
gravest doubts were entertained as to whether
the cause of order could prevail. The finances
of the province were in chaos, and that detest-
able masquerade of enthusiasm to which the
Levantines are so deplorably addicted, es-
pecially on their " religious " side, had baffled
every attempt to re-establish order.

Mr. Herod's father (to whom it will be
remembered the Empire had entrusted the
beginnings of this difficult business), though
undoubtedly a great man, had incurred the
hatred of all the worst and too powerful forces
of disorder in the district. His stern sense of
justice and his unflinching resolution in one
of the last affairs of his life, when he had pro-
mulgated his epoch-making edict to regulate
the infantile death-rate- — a scientific measure
grossly misunderstood and unfortunately re-
sented by the populace- — had left a peculiarly
difficult inheritance to the son. The women
of the lower classes (as is nearly always the
case in these social reforms) proved the chief
obstacle, and legends of the most fantastic
character were— and still are- — current in the
slums of Tiberias with regard to Mr. Herod
Senior. When, some years later, he was
struggling with a painful disease which it
262

The Obituary Notice

needed all his magnificent strength of character
to master, no sympathy was shown him by the
provincials of the Tetrarchy, and, to their
shame be it said, the professional and landed
classes treasonably lent the weight of their
influence to the disloyal side.

It was therefore under difficulties of no
common order that Mr. A. Herod, the son,
took over the administration of that far border
province which, we fear, will cause more
trouble before its unruly inhabitants are ab-
sorbed in the mass of our beneficent and
tolerant imperial system.

As though his public functions were not
burden enough for such young shoulders to
bear, the statesman's private life was assailed
in the meanest and most despicable fashion.
His marriage with Mrs. Hcrodias Philip — to
whose lifelong devotion and support Mr. Herod
bore such beautiful witness in his dedication
of Stray Leaves from Galilee — was dragged
into the glare of publicity by the less reputable
demagogues of the region, causing infinite pain
and doing irreparable injury to a most united
and sensitive family circle. The hand of the
law fell heavily upon more than one of the
slanderers, but the evil was done, and Mr.
Herod's authority, in the remote country
263

This and That and the Other

districts especially, was grievously affected for
some years.

Through all these manifold obstacles Mr.
Herod found or drove a way, and finally
achieved the position we all look back to with
such gratitude and pride in the really dangerous
crisis which will be fresh in our readers'
memory. It required no ordinary skill to
pilot the policy of the Empire through those
stormy three days in Jerusalem, but Mr. Herod
was equal to the task, and emerged from it
permanently established in the respect and
affection of the Roman people. It is a suffi-
cient testimony to his tact and firmness on
this occasion that he earned in that moment
of danger the lasting friendship and regard of
Sir Pontius Pilate, whose firmness of vision
and judgment of men were inferior only to
that of his lamented sovereign.

Unlike most non-Italians and natives gener-
ally, Mr. Herod was an excellent judge of
horseflesh, and his stables upon Mount Carmel
often carried to victory the colours- — rose
tendre- — of " Sir Caius Gracchus," the nom-de-
guerre by which the statesman preferred to be
known on the Turf.

Mr. Herod's aesthetic side was more highly
developed than is commonly discovered in
264

The Obituary Notice

level-headed men of action. He personally
supervised the architectural work in the re-
building of Tiberias, and, of the lighter arts,
was a judge of dramatic or " expressional "
dancing.

During the earlier years of this eventful
career Mr. Herod's life was greatly cheered
and brightened by the companionship of his
stepdaughter, Miss Salome Philip (now Lady
Caiaphas), whose brilliant salon so long
adorned the Quirinal, and who' — we are ex-
ceedingly glad to hear — has been entrusted
with that labour of love, the editing of her
stepfather's life, letters, and verses ; for Mr.
Herod was no mean poet, and we may look for-
ward with pleasurable expectation to his
hitherto unpublished elegiacs on the beautiful
scenery of his native land.

By the provisions of Mr. Herod's will he is
to be cremated, and the ceremony will take
place on a pyre of cedar-wood in the Place
Bellecour at Lyons.

265

The " Merry Rome " Column

A weekly feature of the Carthaginian Messenger, quoted
from its issue of March 15, 220 B.C.

IT is quite a pleasure to be in dear old Rome
again after a week spent upon an important
mission which your readers are already ac-
quainted with, in the Tuscan country. All
that drive through Etruria was very delightful,
and the investigation will undoubtedly prove
of the greatest use. But what a difference
it is to be back in the sparkle and gaiety of the
Via Sacra. Every day one feels more and
more how real the entente is. Probably no
nations have become faster friends than those
who have learnt to respect each other in war,
and though the Romans were compelled to
accept our terms, and to undertake the diffi-
cult administration of Sicily with money
furnished by the Carthaginian Government,
all that was more than twenty years ago and
the memory of it docs not rankle now. In-
deed, I think I may say that the Roman
character is a peculiarly generous one in this
266

The " Merry Rome " Column

regard. They know what a good fight is, and
they enjoy it- — none better — but when it is
over no one is readier to shake hands and to
make friends again than a Roman. I was
talking it over with dear little Lucia Balba
the other day and I thought she put it very
prettily. She said :

Est autem amicitia nihil aliud, nisi omnium divin-
arum liuminarumque rerum coekalorunique Roman-
orum et jejorum concinnatio !

Was it not charming ?

Of course there is a little jealousy — no
more than a pout !• — about Hasdrubal's mag-
nificent work in Spain, but everyone recognizes
what a great man he is, and it was only yester-
day that M. Catulus (the son of our fine old
enemy Lutatius) said to me with a sigh : " The
reason we Romans cannot do that kind of
thing is because we cannot stick together.
We are for ever fighting among ourselves.
Just look at our history ! " On the other
hand, I can't think that our mixture of
democracy and common sense would suit the
Latin temperament, with its verve and nescio
quid, which make it at the same time so
incalculable and so fascinating. Every nation
must have its own advantages and drawbacks.
\Ve are a little too stolid, perhaps, and a little
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This and That and the Other

too businesslike, but our stolidity and our
businesslike capacity have founded Colonies
over the whole world and established a
magnificent Empire. The Romans are a little
too fond of " glory " and give way to sudden
emotion in a fashion which seems to us
perilously like weakness, but no one can deny
that they have established a wonderfully
methodical and orderly system of roads all
over Italy, and that their capital is still the
intellectual centre of the world.

Talking of that I ought to pay a tribute
to the Roman home and to Roman thrift. We
hear too much in our country of the Roman
amphitheatre and all the rest of it. What
many Carthaginians do not yet know is that
the stay-at-home sober Roman is the back-
bone of the whole place. He hates war as
heartily as we do, and though his forms of
justice are very different from ours he is a
sincere lover of right-dealing according to his
lights. It is due to such men that Rome is,
after ourselves, the chief financial power in the
world.

But you will ask me for more interesting

news than this sermon. Well ! Well ! I have

plenty to give you. The Debates in the Senate

are as brilliant and, I am afraid, as theatrical

268

The " Merry Rome" Column

as usual. Certainly the Romans beat us at
oratory. To hear Flaccus deliver a really great
speech about the introduction of Greek
manners is a thing one can never forget ! Of
course, it will seem to you in Carthage very
unpractical and very " Roman," and it is true
that that kind of thing doesn't make a nation
great in the way we have become great, but
it is wonderful stuff to hear all the same — and
such a young man too ! The Senate has, how-
ever, none of our ideas of order, and the
marvel is how they get through their work at
all. There are no Suffetes, and sometimes you
will hear five or six men all talking at once
and gesticulating in that laughable Italian
fashion which our caricaturists find so valu-
able !

Those of my readers who run over to Rome
two or three times a year for the Games will be
interested to hear that the great Aurelian
house near the New Temple of Saturn (the
rogues with their " Temples " ! But still
there is a good deal of real religion left in
Rome) is being pulled down and a splendid
one is being put in its place upon the designs
of a really remarkable young architect, Pneius
Caius Agricola. He is the nephew, by the way,
of Sopher Masher Baal, whom we all know so
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This and That and the Other

well at Carthage, and who is, I think, techni-
cally, a Carthaginian citizen. Possibly I am
wrong, for I remember a delightful dinner with
him years ago among our cousins overseas,
and he may very possibly be Tyrian. If so,
and if these humble lines meet his eye, I
tender him my apologies. But anyhow, his
nephew is a very remarkable and original
artist whom all Rome is eager to applaud.
When the new Aurelian House is finished it
will have a fa£ade in five orders, Doric, Ionic,
Corinthian, heavy Egyptian on the fourth
story, and Assyrian on the top, the whole
terminating in a vast pyramid, which is to
have the appearance of stone, but which will
really be a light erection in thin plaster slabs.
Last Wednesday we had the review of the
troops. You may imagine how the Roman
populace delighted in that ! There is a good
deal that is old-fashioned to our ideas in the
accoutrements, and it was certainly comic to
see an " admiral " leading his " sailors " past
the saluting post like so many marines ! But
it is always a pleasant spectacle for a warm-
hearted man to see the humbler classes of
Rome picnicking in true Roman fashion upon
the Campus Martius and cheering their sons
and brothers. The army is very popular in
270

The « Merry Rome " Column

Rome, although the men arc paid hardly any-
thing—a mere nominal sum. The Romans
do not come up to our standard of physique,
and I am afraid the Golden Legion would
laugh at them. But they are sturdy little
fellows, and not to be despised when it comes
to marching, or turning their hands to the
thousand domestic details of the camp ;
moreover, they are invariably good-humoured,
and that is a great charm.

It is unfortunately impossible to officer all
the troops with gentlemen, and that is a
drawback of which thoughtful Romans are
acutely conscious. It is on this account that
there is none of that cordial relation between
officer and man which we take for granted
in our service. An intelligent and travelled
Roman said to me the other day : " How
I envy you your Carthaginian officers ! Always
in training ! Always ready ! Always urbane ! "
But we must remember that our service is not
so numerous as theirs.

I must not ramble on further, for the post
is going, and you know what the Roman post
is. It starts when it feels inclined, and the
delivery is tantum quantum, as we say in Italy.
I have to be a good hour before the official time
or risk being told by some shabbily uniformed
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This and That and the Other

person that my letter missed through my own
fault ! Next week I hope to give you an
interesting account of Sapphira Moshetim's
debut. She is a Roman of the Romans, and
I was quite carried away ! Such subtlety !
Such declamation ! I hope to be her herald,
for she is to come to Carthage next season, and
I am sure she will bear out all I say.

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Open Letter to a Young Parasite ^

My dear Boy :

As you know, I was your father's closest
friend for many years, and I have watched
with interest, but I confess not without
anxiety, your first attempts in a career of
which he was in my young days the most
brilliant exemplar.

You will not take it ill in a man of my years
and in one as devoted to your family as I am
and have proved myself to be, if I tender you
a word of advice.

The profession upon which you have en-
gaged is one of the most difficult in the
world. It does not offer the great prizes
which attend the best forms of cheating,
bullying, and blackmail, and at the same
time it is highly limited, and offers oppor-
tunities to only a handful of the finer souls.

Nevertheless, I am not writing this to
dissuade you for one moment from its pur-
suit. There is something in the fine arts
difficult to define, but very deeply felt by
18 273

This and That and the Other

everyone, which makes them of themselves
a sort of compensation for their economic
limitations. The artist, the poet, and the
actor expect to live, and hope to live well,
but each one knows how few are the prizes, and
each in his heart expects something more
than a mere money compensation. So should
it be in that great profession which you have
undertaken in the light of your father's ex-
ample.

In connection with that, I think it my
duty to point out to you that even the greatest
success in this special calling is only modest
compared with successes obtained at the
Bar, in commerce, or even in politics. You
will never become a wealthy man. I do not
desire it for you. It should be yours, if you
succeed, to enjoy wealth without its responsi-
bility, and to consume the good things our
civilization presents to the wealthy without
avarice, without the memory of preceding
poverty, and, above all, without the torturing
necessity of considering the less fortunate of
your kind.

You must not expect, my dear young man,
to leave even a modest competence ; there-
fore you must not expect to marry and pro-
vide for children. The parasite must be
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Open Letter to a Young Parasite

celibate. I have never known the rule to
fail, at least in our sex. You will tell me,
perhaps, that in the course of your career,
continually inhabiting the houses of the rich,
studying their manners, and supplying their
wants, you cannot fail to meet some heiress ;
that you do not see why, this being the case,
you should not marry her, to your lasting
advantage.

Let me beg you, with all the earnestness in
my power, to put such thoughts from you
altogether. They are as fatal to a parasite's
success as early commercial bargaining to
that of a painter. You must in the first ten
years of your exercises devote yourself wholly
to your great calling. By the time you have
done that you will have unlearned or for-
gotten all that goes with a wealthy marriage ;
its heavy responsibilities will be odious to you,
its sense of dependence intolerable. Moreover
(though you may think it a little cynical of
me to say so), I must assure you that no one,
even a man with your exalted ideal, can make
a success of married life unless he enters it
with some considerable respect for his partner.
Now, it is easy for the man who lays himself
out for a rich marriage (and that is a business
quite different from your own, and one, there-
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This and That and the Other

fore, on which I will not enter) to respect his
wife. Such men are commonly possessed, or
soon become possessed, of a simple and pro-
found religion, which is the worship of money,
and when they have found their inevitable
choice, her substance, or that of her father,
surrounds her with a halo that does not fade.
You could hope for no such illusions. The
very first year of your vocation (if you pursue
it industriously and honestly) will destroy in
you the possibility of any form of worship
whatsoever. No, it will be yours to take up
with dignity, and I trust in some permanent
fashion, that position of parasite which is a
proper and necessary adjunct in every wealthy
family, and which, when it is once well and
industriously occupied, I have never known
to fail in promoting the happiness of its in-
cumbent.

Let me turn from all this and give you a
few rough rules which should guide you in
the earlier part of your way. You will not,
I am sure, reject them lightly, coming as
they do from a friend of my standing and
experience. Young men commonly regard
the advice of their elders as something too
crude to be observed. It is a fatal error.
What they take for crudity is only the
276

Open Letter to a Young Parasite

terseness and pressure of accumulated ex-
perience.

The first main rule is to take note of that
limit of insult and contempt beyond which
your master will revolt. Note carefully
what I say. No one, and least of all the
prosperous, especially when their prosperity
is combined with culture, will long tolerate
flattery. A certain indifference, spiced with
occasional contempt and not infrequent in-
solence, is what those of jaded appetite look
for in any permanent companion. Without
a full knowledge of this great truth, hundreds
of your compeers have fallen early upon the
field, never to rise again. For if it is true that
the wealthy and the refined demand much
seasoning in their companionship, it is equally
true that there is a fairly sharp boundary
beyond which they suddenly revolt. Henry
Bellarmine was thrust out of the Congletons'
house for no other reason. The same cause
led to poor Ralph Pagberry's imprisonment,
and I could quote you hosts of others.

My next rule is that you should never, under
any temptation of weather, or ill health, or
fatigue, permit yourself really and thoroughly
to bore either your patron or any one of his
guests, near relatives, or advisers. As it is not
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This and That and the Other

easy for a young man to know when he is
boring the well-to-do, let me give you a few
hints.

When the rich begin to talk one to the
other in your presence without noticing you, it
is a sign. When they answer what you are say-
ing to them in a manner totally irrelevant, it
is another. When they smile very sympatheti-
cally, but at something else in the room, not
your face, it is a third. And when they give
an interested exclamation, such as, " No doubt.
No doubt," or, " I can well believe it," such
expressions having no relation to what passed
immediately before, it is a fourth.

Add to these criteria certain plain rules,
such as never upon any account to read
aloud to the rich unless they constrain you
to do so, never to sing, never to be the last
to leave the room or to go to bed, and you
will not sin upon this score.

Let me give you a further rule, which is,
to agree with the women. It is very difficult
for one of our sex to remember this, because
our sex loves argument and is with difficulty
persuaded that contradiction and even con-
troversy are intolerable to ladies. Mould your
conversation with them in such a fashion that
they may hear from you either a brilliant
278

Open Letter to a Young Parasite

account at second hand of themselves or a
very odious one of their friends ; but do not
be so foolish as to touch upon abstract matters,
and if these by any chance fall into the con-
versation, simply discover your companion's
real or supposed position, and agree with it.

I have little more to add. Be courteous
to all chance • guests in the house. You will
tell me, justly enough, that the great majority
of them will be unimportant or poor or both.
But the point is that you can never tell when
one of them may turn out to be, either then
or in the future, important or rich or both.
The rule is simple and absolute. Cultivate
courtesy, avoid affection ; use the first upon
all occasions, and forget so much as the mean-
ing of the second.

Lastly, drink wine, but drink it in modera-
tion. I have known admirably successful
parasites who were total abstainers, but only
in the houses of fanatics with whom this
peculiar habit was a creed. The moment these
successful men passed to other employers, I
was interested to note that they at once aban-
doned the foolish trick. But if it is important
not to fall into the Mohammedan foible of total
abstinence from wine, it is, if anything, even
more important never upon any occasion
279

This and That and the Other

whatsoever to exceed in it. Excess in wine
is dangerous in a degree to the burglar, the
thief, the money-lender, the poisoner, and
many professions other than your own, but
in that which you have chosen it is not
dangerous, but fatal. Let such excess be
apparent once in the career of a young para-
site, and that career is as good as done for.
I urge this truth upon you most solemnly, my
dear lad, by way of ending.

I wish you the best of luck, and I am your
poor father's devoted friend and your own.

280

On Dropping Anchor ^x ^> *o ^

THE best noise in all the world is the rattle
of the anchor chain "when one comes into
harbour at last and lets it go over the bows.

You may say that one does nothing of the
sort, that one picks up moorings, and that
letting go so heavy a thing as an anchor is no
business for you and me. If you say that
you are wrong. Men go from inhabited place
to inhabited place, and for pleasure from
station to station, then pick up moorings as
best they can, usually craning over the side
and grabbing as they pass, and cursing the
man astern for leaving such way on her and for
passing so wide. Yes, I know that. You are
not the only man who has picked up moorings.
Not by many many thousands. Many moorings
have I picked up in many places, none without
some sort of misfortune ; therefore do I still
prefer the rattle of the anchor chain.

Once- — to be accurate, seventeen years ago
• — I had been out all night by myself in a boat
called the Silver Star. She was a very small
281

This and That and the Other

boat. She had only one sail ; she was black
inside and out, and I think about one hundred
years old. I had hired her of a poor man, and
she was his only possession.

It was a rough night in the late summer when
the rich are compelled in their detestable grind
to go to the Solent. When I say it was night
I mean it was the early morning, just late
enough for the rich to be asleep aboard their
boats, and the dawn was silent upon the sea.
There was a strong tide running up the Medina.
I was tired to death. I had passed the Royal
Yacht Squadron grounds, and the first thing
I saw was a very fine and noble buoy- — new-
painted, gay, lordly- — moorings worthy of a
man !

I let go the halyard very briskly, and I
nipped forward and got my hand upon that
great buoy- — there was no hauling of it in-
board ; I took the little painter of my boat
and made it fast to this noble buoy, and then
immediately I fell asleep. In this sleep of
mine I heard, as in a pleasant dream, the exact
motion of many oars rowed by strong men, and
very soon afterwards I heard a voice with a
Colonial accent swearing in an abominable
manner, and I woke up and looked — and
there was a man of prodigious wealth, all
282

On Dropping Anchor

dressed in white, and with an extremely new
cap on his head. His whiskers also were white
and his face bright red, and he was in a great
passion. He was evidently the owner or
master of the buoy, and on either side of the
fine boat in which he rowed were the rowers,
his slaves. He could not conceive why I had
tied the Silver Star to his magnificent great
imperial moorings, to which he had decided to
tie his own expensive ship, on which, no
doubt, a dozen as rich as himself were sailing
the seas.

I told him that I was sorry I had picked
up his moorings, but that, in this country,
it was the common courtesy of the sea to pick
up any spare moorings one could find. I
also asked him the name of his expensive
ship, but he only answered with curses. I
told him the name of my ship was the Silver
Star.

Then, when I had cast off, I put out the
sweeps and I rowed gently, for it was now
slack water at the top of the tide, and I
stood by while he tied his magnificent yacht
to the moorings. When he had done that
I rowed under the stern of that ship and read
her name. But I will not print it here, only let
me tell you it was the name of a ship belonging
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This and That and the Other

to a fabulously rich man. Riches, I thought
then and I think still, corrupt the heart.

Upon another occasion I came with one com-
panion across the bar of Orford River, out of a
very heavy wind outside and a very heavy sea.
I just touched as I crossed that bar, though
I was on the top of the highest tide of the year,
for it was just this time in September, the
highest springs of the hunter's moon.

My companion and I sailed up Orford River,
and when we came to Orford Town we saw
13 buoy, and I said to my companion, " Let
us pick up moorings."

Upon the bank of the river was a long line
of men, all shouting and howling, and warning
us not to touch that buoy. But we called out
to them that we meant no harm. We only
meant to pick up those moorings for a moment,
so as to make everything snug on board, and
that then we would take a line ashore and lie
close to the wharf. Only the more did those
numerous men (whom many others ran up to
join as I called) forbid us with oaths to touch
the buoy. Nevertheless, we picked up the
little buoy (which was quite small and light)
and we got it in-board, and held on, waiting
for our boat to swing to it. But an astonishing
thing happened ! The boat paid no attention
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On Dropping Anchor

to the moorings, but went careering up river
carrying the buoy with it, and apparently
dragging the moorings along the bottom with-
out the least difficulty. And this was no
wonder, for we found out afterwards that the
little buoy had only been set there to mark
a racing point, and that the weights holding
the line of it to the bottom were very light
and few. So it was no wonder the men of
Orford had been so angry. Soon it was dark,
and we replaced the buoy stealthily, and when
we came in to eat at the Inn we were not
recognized.

It was on this occasion that was written the
song :

The men that lived in Orford stood

Upon the shore to meet me ;
Their faces were like carven wood,

They did not wish to greet me.
etc.

It has eighteen verses.

I say again, unless you have moorings of
your own — an extravagant habit — picking up
moorings is always a perilous and doubtful
thing, fraught with accident and hatred and
mischance. Give me the rattle of the anchor
chain !

I love to consider a place which I have
285

This and That and the Other

never yet seen, but which I shall reach at last,
full of repose and marking the end of those
voyages, and security from the tumble of the
sea.

This place will be a cove set round with high
hills on which there shall be no house or sign
of men, and it shall be enfolded by quite
deserted land ; but the westering sun will
shine pleasantly upon it under a warm air.
It will be a proper place for sleep.

The fair- way into that haven shall lie behind
a pleasant little beach of shingle, which shall
run out aslant into the sea from the steep hill-
side, and shall be a breakwater made by God.
The tide shall run up behind it smoothly, and
in a silent way, filling the quiet hollow of the
hills, brimming it all up like a cup- — a cup of
refreshment and of quiet, a cup of ending.

Then with what pleasure shall I put my
small boat round, just round the point of that
shingle beach, noting the shoal water by the
eddies and the deeps by the blue colour of
them where the channel runs from the main
into the fair-way. Up that fair-way shall I
go, up into the cove, and the gates of it shall
shut behind me, headland against headland,
so that I shall not see the open sea any more,
though I shall still hear its distant noise. But
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On Dropping Anchor

all around me, save for that distant echo of
the surf from the high hills, will be silence ;
and the evening will be gathering already.

Under that falling light, all alone in such
a place, I shall let go the anchor chain, and let
it rattle for the last time. My anchor will go
down into the clear salt water with a run, and
when it touches I shall pay out four lengths
or more so that she may swing easily and not
drag, and then I shall tie up my canvas and
fasten all for the night, and get me ready for
sleep. And that will be the end of my sailing.

287

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This and that and
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