ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 HUBERT BLAND
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 HUBERT BLAND 
 
 "HUBERT" OF THE SUNDAY CHRONICLE 
 
 CHOSEN BY E. NESBIT BLAND 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION 
 BY 
 
 CECIL CHESTERTON 
 
 LONDON: MAX GOSCHEN LTD. 
 
 20 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, W.C. 
 1914
 
 TO 
 
 THE READERS WHO LOVED HUBERT 
 
 THIS BOOK OF HIS ESSAYS 
 
 IS DEDICATED BY 
 
 HIS WIFK 
 
 WVflY MORSE
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGI 
 
 INTRODUCTION. BY CECIL CHESTERTON vii 
 
 I, THE GRANDUCAL POINT OF VIEW 1 
 
 II. COURAGE IN CRITICISM 9 
 
 III. THE TRAGEDY OF THE VILLAGE 17 
 
 IV. THE SOUL OF A GENTLEMAN 25 
 V. THE DECADENCE OF RUDYARD KIPLING 33 
 
 VI. To A WORKING MAN 54 
 
 VII. To THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN 62 
 
 VIII. To PRINCE FUSHIMI 70 
 
 IX. To A LADY 77 
 
 X. To Miss MARIE CORELLI 85 
 
 XI. THE DAY OF THE CHILD 93 
 
 XII. THE ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD 101 
 
 XIII. JOHN SMITH 108 
 
 XIV. HEGEL'S THEORY OF THE STATE 113 
 XV. A TALK ABOUT BOOKS 130 
 
 XVI. ABOUT DIVORCE 149 
 
 XVII. THE GENTLEMAN IN BUSINESS 157 
 
 2033711
 
 vi ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 OHAP. PAGE 
 
 XVIII. ABOUT FREEDOM 165 
 
 XIX. ABOUT HAPPINESS 172 
 
 XX. DEATH OR THE LADY 179 
 
 XXI. THE MATCH-MAKER 187 
 
 XXII. FINE FEATHERS 195 
 
 XXIII. IF I WERE A WOMAN 203 
 
 XXIV. THE FAITH I HOLD 212 
 XXV. IN THE SOUTH 234 
 
 XXVI. A POINT OF VIEW 243 
 
 XXVII. THE HONEST WOMAN 253 
 
 XXVIII. CAPRICCIO 260 
 
 XXIX. A QUESTION OF CONSCIENCE 268 
 
 XXX. THE " SOFTNESS " OF THE WORKERS 276 
 
 To THE READER 283
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 IT must be about ten years, I suppose, since I first 
 went down to Well Hall, in Kent, in response to an 
 invitation to call on Hubert Bland. I had made some 
 sort of speech at the Fabian Society which had in- 
 terested him. I was very young, but he, who was 
 interested in almost everything, was especially in- 
 terested in youth. " The respect due to youth " was 
 a favourite phrase of his used quite seriously. He 
 was fond of maintaining that the young were almost 
 certain to be more in the right than the old, that the 
 freshness of their point of view was more important 
 than experience. He preached this view continually, 
 and with something of exaggeration, I think ; but it 
 was a generous exaggeration, and it helped to keep 
 the man himself perpetually young. Moreover, he 
 practised what he preached. I have known him argue 
 with mere children, and pay them not only the com- 
 pliment of listening carefully to everything that they 
 were trying to say, but the much higher compliment 
 of consciously arming himself to maintain his ground 
 against them as against equals. Bland was fond of 
 quoting the phrase in his favourite play, Ibsen's 
 vii
 
 viii ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 " Master Builder," about " the younger generation 
 knocking at the door." The younger generation never 
 had to knock at his door. If you were of the younger 
 generation you always found the door wide open, and 
 everything prepared most sumptuously in your honour. 
 And then, if you were not a conceited fool, you very 
 soon realized that you were very small potatoes indeed 
 compared with your host. 
 
 For Hubert Bland was a very big man. That was 
 the first impression that anyone who met him received ; 
 and if it was not fully appreciated by the very narrow 
 circle that stands for what is called " culture " in the 
 wealthier districts of London it was apparent enough 
 to the great mass of men of all classes in the North 
 who looked forward every week to his articles in 
 the Sunday Chronicle. He was a great journalist, and 
 those articles, some of which are reproduced in this 
 volume, represent, I think, almost the high-water mark 
 of English journalism. The triumph of his genius was 
 this, that he could interest a huge popular audience in 
 things in which all the self-satisfied prigs and all the 
 routine professionals would have combined to tell him 
 that ordinary men could not be interested. A glance 
 at the essays here reproduced will show how recondite, 
 how far removed from what a superficial person would 
 consider popular topics are many of the subjects which 
 he treated. Yet so powerful was his gift of lucid 
 exposition, so happy and vigorous was his method of 
 illustration, that it was incontestable that his most
 
 INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 purely philosophical articles were immensely popular 
 with the working men of the industrial North, from 
 whom he was continually receiving letters asking for 
 the further elucidation of the ideas of Hegel or Nietzsche 
 or Bergson. 
 
 The man had a passion for ideas. I do not mean 
 that he was a man blown about by every wind of 
 doctrine ; no man was less so. But any idea that 
 was presented to him he would seize upon with all the 
 zest of a hungry tiger gripping its prey ; nor would he 
 be satisfied until he had torn every scrap of truth that 
 there was out of it. If it was a silly idea (like " the 
 Economic Independence of Women ") it suffered 
 severely in the process. But no idea, silly or other- 
 wise, could be presented to him which he would not 
 grasp, and on which he would not bring his admirable 
 brain to bear. 
 
 This, however, would not have sufficed to make him 
 the remarkable force that he was had he not also 
 possessed a sense of human equality and brotherhood 
 rare in literary men and still rarer in those who profess 
 what are vaguely called " advanced views." He knew 
 that he was interested in ideas, and he instinctively 
 felt that other men must be interested in them. He 
 was right. All men are interested in ideas if they can 
 be made to understand them. It was Eland's special 
 genius and originality as a journalist, firstly that he 
 perceived that this was so, and, secondly, that he 
 had a gift for presenting ideas in such a fashion
 
 x ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 that the ordinary man could appreciate their signifi- 
 cance. 
 
 The reader of this volume will, therefore, find in it 
 not only a series of very entertaining essays, but also 
 something like the outline of a complete philosophy of 
 life which commended itself to a man of strong and 
 vigorous yet very well balanced mind. 
 
 It would be impossible in the brief space which can 
 be allowed for this introduction to attempt to expound 
 fully that philosophy which such a master of lucid 
 exposition elaborated and enforced in a series of pro- 
 nouncements which extended over many years. But 
 certain aspects of it may legitimately be emphasized. 
 Hubert Bland called the first volume of essays which 
 he published " With the Eyes of a Man," and a title 
 could hardly have been more fitly chosen. The 
 foundation of his philosophy was the acceptance of all 
 that a man naturally accepts and the rejection of all 
 that a man instinctively rejects. On religion, on 
 patriotism, on the honour which men have always 
 paid to arms, on the differentiation of the sexes and 
 their relation to one another, Bland always took the 
 view that normal men take, although he argued the 
 case for that view more ably than ordinary men can 
 argue. 
 
 It was this normality of outlook that led the sillier 
 kind of Socialists to distrust him as what they called 
 " reactionary." Yet what they regarded as his 
 " Toryism " was usually simply his humanity. For
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 instance, he paid a high honour to the profession of 
 arms, as all men pay such honour to the profession of 
 arms, unless mad or corrupted by cowardice or avarice 
 or a false religion. He hated the interference of 
 wealthy Puritans with the pleasures of the populace ; 
 he hated it because, unlike most " intellectuals," he 
 was a man physically and morally capable of sharing 
 those pleasures. He was a Catholic because he felt 
 that if one were to have a religion it must be a religion 
 at once traditional and dogmatic. In regard to the 
 sexes he knew that men were men and that women 
 were women. His virility would have forbidden him 
 to desire any alteration in this condition of things 
 even if he had thought such an alteration practi- 
 cable. 
 
 With all this he was a strong and sincere Socialist. 
 He could not see that the opinion that the instruments 
 of production should be the property of the Common- 
 wealth and should be administered by its political 
 officers had anything to do with the repudiation of 
 nationality, or with the worship of cowardice, or with 
 the denial of a God, or with the idea that men and 
 women would be improved by trying to turn them- 
 selves into imitations of each other. On the contrary, 
 I think the root of his Socialism was his intense 
 Nationalism. He once said to me that there were 
 two things without which you could not have a 
 democratic state, Protection and Conscription. I 
 fancy that the same feeling which made him regard
 
 xii ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 the training of all citizens for national defence and 
 the control by the nation of its foreign trade as essential 
 to the idea of a free nationality, lent an attraction for 
 him to the conception of a national organization which 
 should control all the resources of the country. But 
 the intensity of his own belief in Socialism, as he 
 understood it, was the measure of his disappoint- 
 ment at much that came to pass for Socialism in 
 England, whether it were only the timid futility of 
 the Labour Party or the more perilous tendency to 
 substitute a mere regimentation of the poor for that 
 attack upon the great accumulation of wealth which 
 he above all things desired. 
 
 His rooted belief in the eternal sanities gave to the 
 mind of Hubert Bland a security which enabled him 
 to play freely with any ideas that came in his way, 
 without ever allowing any of them to sweep him off 
 his feet. His very enthusiasms could not hurry him 
 into fanaticism or upset the balance which his intellect 
 continually maintained between apparently opposite 
 truths. In this volume the reader will easily find 
 examples of that almost eerie fairness which was one 
 of his most characteristic qualities. 
 
 Thus in the battle that was raging round the central 
 enigma of religion, he was on the orthodox side. He 
 refused to accept a materialist explanation of the 
 Universe as any explanation at all. To those who 
 were on the same side in this contest it was an obvious 
 temptation to decry, or at least belittle, physical
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 science. But Hubert Bland would have none of that 
 Physical investigation could not explain everything, 
 but it could explain something; it was not the less 
 worthy of its proper honour because silly people drew 
 silly deductions from its teaching. Bland used physical 
 science (which always had for him a paramount 
 interest) with the freedom of the man who is equally 
 conscious of its value and of its limits. 
 
 One may take another case. Bland was, during the 
 whole of his exciting controversial career, largely 
 concerned to defend what may be called the military 
 virtues against a philosophy which denied or ignored 
 them. Two men of genius appeared during the period 
 of his literary activity who took more or less the same 
 side. One was Neitzsche ; the other Rudyard Kipling. 
 It was inevitable that Bland should feel something in 
 him respond to both. It would not have been sur- 
 prising if either had completely captured him. But 
 neither did completely capture him. He wrote sym- 
 pathetically of Neitzche and felt the full value of his 
 protest against a stupid and cowardly Pacificism ; but, 
 wherever Neitzche was hurried into denying funda- 
 mental truths such as the necessity of justice and 
 mercy, Eland's sense instantly rejected the perversity. 
 So it was also with Rudyard Kipling, whom he praised, 
 justly and with understanding, so long as he was as- 
 serting neglected truths, but when that brilliant but un- 
 balanced writer began to fall back on rhetorical partisan 
 falsehoods, Bland turned on him and attacked him
 
 xiv ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 with an effectiveness only possible to a man who had 
 appreciated what was sound in his original gospel. 
 
 This normality and balance of outlook came out 
 very markedly in relation to the question which most 
 easily sends men mad the question of sex. No one 
 ever wrote more sanely or more delightfully about 
 women. Several essays touching on this topic will be 
 found in the present volume, and it will not be sur- 
 prising if there are some who find the breadth, boldness 
 and freedom of much that he has to say almost alarm- 
 ing. Yet here again the roots of his common sense 
 always held. He never gave way for an instant to 
 the sophistries of modern anarchism ; nor are there 
 any of the essays to be read here which are more 
 effective, more convincing, or better worth reading 
 than those in which, taking his stand on purely human 
 grounds, he vindicates in its strictest sense the Chris- 
 tian doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage. 
 
 Hubert Bland was not the type of man to make 
 disciples or indeed to wish to do so. He was always 
 less anxious that people should agree with him than 
 that they should agree with themselves, that they 
 should bring their own thoughts into order. He 
 thought, and what he said and wrote provoked thought 
 in others as it was intended to do. He had his reward. 
 If he has left no band of chosen and dedicated pupils 
 to swear by his name, he has left his impress, not only 
 upon all those who knew him but upon hundreds of 
 thousands who never saw his face and hardly knew his
 
 INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 name. His ideas have contributed to the intellectual 
 make-up of innumerable men and women who have 
 diverged in various ways from the faith which he held. 
 And this makes it all the more desirable that every one 
 should have an opportunity of reading his thoughts as 
 they are here expressed by himself with an energy, a 
 lucidity, and a picturesqueness which we shall not 
 easily see again. 
 
 CECIL CHESTERTON
 
 THE GRANDUCAL POINT OF VIEW 
 
 I SUPPOSE there is no imaginable mental attitude, no 
 conceivable state of mind, from which the average 
 man thinks himself to be more remote than that of a 
 Russian Grand Duke. And, indeed, it does seem 
 rather a long way from us all, doesn't it ? a trifle 
 impossible to arrive at ? There sits the Grand Duke, 
 resplendent in his palace, surrounded by a circle of 
 human beings each more or less intelligent, each a 
 lackey, each a means towards an end, that end the 
 splendour and security of Grand Dukedom. Beyond 
 the palace walls stands another and a wider circle, 
 also of human beings, rather less than more intelligent, 
 armed with rifle and sabre and whip, ready to obey the 
 word of command, even though the word be indis- 
 criminate slaughter; each of these also a means 
 towards the same great end. And beyond this second 
 circle lies a wider circle still of millions of dim men 
 and women who work, who do things and make things 
 and think things to the immediate end, no doubt, 
 that they may live, but to the ultimate end that Grand 
 Dukedom may continue to exist magnificently, may 
 have books to read, pictures to look at sometimes, 
 uniforms to put on, railways and yachts to travel in, 
 and socks to wear. Beyond that, again, spreads itself 
 out the world, a field most obviously designed by God 
 for Granducal sport, but which, so far, has not been 
 
 1 A
 
 2 '" - ' -ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 potirdy. subdued to the design. Very nearly though, 
 for there are but few spots in it to which a Grand Duke 
 may not go, to live joyously, spend royally, receive 
 well-nigh illimitable deference ; but still not yet 
 entirely. There is Japan, for instance, where they 
 have no present use for Grand Dukes except as prisoners 
 without their swords. And the United States, where 
 Mr. Roosevelt will not sit at the same table with them. 
 So the world is not altogether the Grand Dukes', and 
 that is the only fly in the Granducal honey pot. 
 
 Honestly, I do not think I have exaggerated or 
 distorted the Granducal point of view in any way. 
 I think, if you could get a Vladimir or a Sergius or a 
 Boris, with his jack-boots on his legs and his Orders 
 on his breast, opposite you in an armchair this morning, 
 and put to him a few plain, blunt questions, he would 
 answer you in a plain, blunt way, and his answers 
 would let you see a state of mind pretty much as I 
 have set it forth above. For a Grand Duke, unlike 
 most of us, can afford to be plain and blunt. And 
 you would feel as though you were talking to a being 
 from another world, as unlike yourself as might be 
 an inhabitant from some invisible star much farther 
 away from your world than Jupiter or Mars. And 
 yet you would be quite wrong, for the Granducal point 
 of view is a thing very much of this world indeed. 
 Moreover, it is the point of view which makes this 
 world what it is, and prevents it from being what it 
 might be. It is what has made the " changeless " East 
 changeless, it is what constrains the changeful West 
 to change so very slowly. For centuries it encrusted 
 France in a crust so thick and hard that nothing 
 less than a volcanic and fiery upheaval could break 
 it and let the Frenchmen breathe free air. It held 
 England, too, though not so hardly. It sent our 
 cavaliers to die upon the field of honour ; it united
 
 GRANDUCAL POINT OF VIEW 3 
 
 the landowners in their resistance of the Reform Bill 
 of '32, and it has upheld the forces of reaction in their 
 resistance to every other Reform Bill since. In short, 
 it is the quintessence of Conservatism, the worship of 
 Things as They Are, a worship that never lacks for 
 devotees. One visualizes it, realizes it, more clearly, 
 incarnated in a Grand Duke, because a Grand Duke is, 
 as it were, a City set upon a Hill ; but one may find it 
 with no very sedulous searching in the valley, too. 
 One may find it, I venture timidly to suggest, in one's 
 own breast if one probes deeply enough. 
 
 We have here, at our doors, for instance, our own 
 Lord Penrhyn, to name no other of his like, and to 
 name him not too censoriously, or with over-reproba- 
 tion. Lord Penrhyn will have no interference with 
 " his " workmen in " his " quarries, and he would 
 have his workmen themselves to " know their places," 
 as the phrase goes. It is a pleasant phrase that, most 
 useful in its various applications. I almost think it 
 must have been invented in a Granducal palace. It 
 is most abominably difficult to know one's place if it 
 happen to be uncomfortable, or, at least, to know it 
 and not desire ardently to get out of it. Revolutions, 
 when you come to think of it, always occur because a 
 lot of people don't know their places, or knowing, 
 do not like them. But to return to Lord Penrhyn, 
 to whom I feel I ought, perhaps, to apologize for 
 my mention of him in this disastrous and sombre con- 
 nexion. And yet I am not sure that the apology, if 
 offered, would not be resented, for I incline to think 
 that even now, when the world is ringing with Gran- 
 ducal crimes the natural and inevitable outcome of 
 the Granducal point of view Lord Penrhyn would 
 not rather, if he were invited, sit down to dine at a 
 Granducal table than at yours or mine, would not 
 feel himself more at home there. Crime is, after
 
 4 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 all, a relative term, and Imperial uniforms and glit- 
 tering Orders cover, yes, and cover up for centuries, 
 a multitude of sins. At the same time I do not for a 
 moment want so much as to suggest that Lord Penrhyn, 
 or any other lord or lackey who has breathed English 
 air, would imitate or condone Granducal methods. 
 In England the truncheons of the local constabulary 
 are all that is called for, mostly, when workpeople 
 forget their places, and usually these are sufficient 
 to awaken remembrance thereof ; all I want to suggest 
 is that, allowing for place and time and nationality, 
 the point of view, the essential fact, remains substan- 
 tially the same. 
 
 The Grand Dukes, it seems, are, or were, just going 
 to " do something " for the Russian people. It was 
 the aspiration of the Russian people to do something 
 for themselves that caused all the trouble. There you 
 have another phase, or aspect, of the point of view ; 
 that people in the lump must not be suffered to do 
 things for themselves. The world would go smoothly, 
 if slowly, enough were only people content to have 
 things done for them, and to wait while benevolent 
 schemes are hatching. And people do wait, wait 
 incredibly. That's what is the matter with the 
 world. The English people waited I don't know how 
 long to get education : were waiting while the House 
 of Commons in one year voted 70,000 for rebuild- 
 ing the Royal stables, and boggled as only a House 
 of Commons fulfilled of the Granducal point of view 
 can boggle over spending 30,000 on popular instruc- 
 tion. And in 1868 came a wide measure of enfranchise- 
 ment, and more people were enabled to do something 
 for themselves ; and in 1870 they did it ; they estab- 
 lished national education. That is only one small 
 instance of what I mean, but it makes the matter clear, 
 doesn't it ? The fact is, the Granducal point of view 
 doesn't work, neither upon a large scale nor upon a 
 small. It will hardly work within the narrow limits
 
 GRANDUCAL POINT OF VIEW 5 
 
 of a family. Do everything for your children, try, 
 as they grow up, to prevent their doing anything for 
 themselves, and, well, they won't grow up, or they will 
 grow up to be very much what the Russian masses are 
 to-day not happy or exactly contented masses. 
 Not contented ; that again. Discontent, so far from 
 being " divine," as our philosopher called it, is, from 
 the Granducal point of view, the very devil ; a thing 
 to be suppressed, obliterated ; order must reign in 
 Warsaw. That, also, is an application of the point 
 of view which doesn't work somehow. Try that in 
 your own family, in your own workshop, where you 
 will, and you will get, inevitably Russia. 
 
 The Granducal point of view is known to us all, 
 known in the vernacular as " swollen head," to philo- 
 sophy as Egoism, called in the latest scientific jargon 
 " megalomania." It is based on the firmly held idea 
 that Oneself is the most important thing in the world, 
 and, further, that other selves have importance only 
 in so far as they minister to the Oneself. Its first 
 tenet is that the world was arranged for Oneself to 
 live in comfortably, and that the natural order of the 
 universe is that which enables Oneself to gratify every 
 desire, not with the least trouble, but with no trouble 
 at all ; that anything else is unnatural and somewhat 
 askew. It seems a largish order when you look at it 
 by the cold light of reason, doesn't it ? a pretty big 
 claim to make upon the universe ; but that, and no 
 less than that, is the claim of the Grand Dukes. In 
 Granducal circles Egoism is raised, no doubt, to its 
 highest power ; but it exists in circles less distinguished, 
 less elevated. I stumbled across it in one much less 
 elevated a day or two ago. I was talking to a very 
 charming young woman who has health, beauty, and 
 as many of the good things of life as a paternal income 
 of three thousand a year or so can give her. She was
 
 6 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 telling me of " an awful misfortune," as she called it, 
 that had recently happened to a school friend of hers. 
 Owing to a financial mishap to Gladys' father Gladys 
 had been compelled to put her expensive education to 
 some practical use, and partially to earn her own 
 living. Didn't I think it was " frightfully hard lines " 
 on Gladys ? I was asked. I replied simply and directly 
 that I didn't, and the girl looked at me as though I 
 were a harmless lunatic. Then she proceeded to reason 
 with me gently, to remonstrate with me kindly, as 
 one does with a person of whose intelligence one has 
 the meanest opinion. " Don't you understand," she 
 persisted, " that Gladys will hardly be able to go 
 anywhere, even when she's asked, because she won't 
 be able to afford new dresses ; she'll have to get 
 up quite early in the morning, and do all sorts of 
 horrid things. She won't even have a carriage to 
 take her to places, but will have to go in hateful 
 cabs." 
 
 " Oh, not omnibuses ? " I said. 
 
 " Well, no ; I don't suppose it will be quite as bad 
 as that," the delicious young person went on, " but 
 she'll have to meet all sorts of objectionable people 
 away from home, and do everything for herself when 
 she's at home 1 " 
 
 " What ! " I cried, " no maid ? " 
 
 She shook her head dismally. 
 
 ** And she'll really have to brush her own hair, 
 and put away her own frocks, and clean her own 
 boots ? " 
 
 " No, no, no," she exclaimed, " not clean her own 
 boots. They'll be able to keep a couple of servants, 
 of course. But still you do see how frightful it is, 
 now don't you ? Now you understand you do admit 
 that it is the most awful hard lines ? " 
 
 " It is just because I do understand that I do not 
 admit," I replied. " My dear young lady," I went 
 on, ** you try to understand too, will you ? For a
 
 GRANDUCAL POINT OF VIEW 7 
 
 certain number of years now an enormous number of 
 people, a whole world in fact, have been working for, 
 doing things for, your friend Gladys. Her father has 
 been busy every day in the City, busy and worried for 
 Gladys, and his clerks have been busy and worried, 
 too. Away in France workmen have been toiling to 
 make silk for her frocks, and away in China I feel 
 sure she drank China tea more workmen have been 
 planting and picking that she might be happy at five 
 o'clock every afternoon. Men have been facing danger 
 and death on the Dogger Bank that she might have 
 her sole d la Normande or her turbot au gratin at 8.30 P.M. 
 From all parts of the world at once captains are 
 navigating and seamen sailing ships which are bringing 
 things home to Gladys. Every day another young 
 woman, very much like herself, brushes the dust from 
 her gowns, a boy cleans the mud from her boots and 
 her bicycle. The bed on which she slept has been 
 made by somebody else ; somebody else, I make no 
 doubt, opened the door for her and shut it after her 
 when she left her house ; certainly somebody else 
 cleaned the steps which she soiled with her feet when 
 she returned. When you come to think of it, a vast, 
 an almost incalculable, amount of human labour has 
 gone to the making and maintenance of Gladys. The 
 world has done a tremendous lot for her, and now what 
 has she done for the world ? Consented to exist 
 beautifully, I suppose ? " 
 
 " No," she shook her head a little dubiously ; 
 " Gladys is not a pretty girl." 
 
 " Then she has done nothing at all," I said ; " and 
 now that circumstances have called on her to make 
 some small return for all she has received, to do some- 
 thing to justify her existence here below, you ask me 
 to call it * awfully hard lines.' Well, for the life of 
 me I can't." 
 
 " Well, anyhow, I do," was all I got for my pains. 
 The Granducal view is not to be shaken by argument.
 
 8 , ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 It dies hard, as I said, and the death of it is mostly 
 catastrophic. When it is upheld on a million or so 
 of bayonets, having nothing to speak of in the way of 
 brains behind them, its disappearance its modifica- 
 tion, I should say, for it never disappears is likely 
 to shake the planet and the noise of it to reverberate 
 through history. But let us comfort ourselves with 
 the reflection that it does the old world no end of good 
 to be shaken, and that the very best and the very 
 strongest buildings we know are those that have 
 been builded upon ruins. Revolutions never happen 
 until they are badly wanted and not always then. 
 
 1905.
 
 II 
 
 COURAGE IN CRITICISM 
 
 THE recent lecture by Father Hugh Benson on " The 
 Modern English Novel," in which the lecturer, himself 
 a novelist of some standing, confessed that he was 
 entirely unable to read the novels of Sir Walter Scott, 
 and added that such inability " shows there must be 
 something wrong with me," has occasioned a good deal 
 of comment, written and spoken, in literary journals 
 and in places where men chit-chat on literary topics. 
 
 The general opinion would seem to be that in pro- 
 claiming himself unable even to read the works of a 
 great Classic, of one who, in his own time, was hailed 
 as the Father of Modern Romance and The Wizard 
 of the North, Monsignor Benson displayed almost 
 unparalleled candour and almost unexampled courage. 
 With that general opinion I am rather inclined to agree ; 
 but at the same time I doubt, I doubt extremely, 
 whether such candour is altogether wise, and whether 
 such courage is altogether worthy of commendation. 
 
 The question is more interesting even of more 
 immediate interest than at first you might think, 
 for the Classics are very much with us just now. They 
 are, as Mr. Whistler scoffingly said of art, " on the 
 town." Thanks to the enterprise of certain publishers, 
 there is to-day scarcely a work, either English or 
 foreign, to which the term Classic can be justly applied 
 which may not be obtained, satisfactorily bound and 
 9
 
 10 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 clearly printed, by the outlay of a few shillings, in 
 some cases of a few pence. To-day, great and renowned 
 books which hitherto, to the many, to all intents and 
 purposes, have been sealed books, are open to every- 
 body. 
 
 Of course, everybody will not read them. The 
 popular novelists, th literary ephemerae of the moment, 
 have little to fear from the competition of the mighty 
 dead ; but I am told on good authority that vast and 
 quite unanticipated numbers of people are reading 
 them, or, at any rate, are buying them. And that, I 
 confess, is, to my thinking, one of the most satisfactory 
 and cheering social phenomena of our time. 
 
 It is a phenomenon, too, which gives an importance 
 it never had before to the question the question 
 which I propose to talk about and around in this 
 article : What should be the attitude of the lecturer 
 towards the Classic or writer on literary topics ? 
 Stated more explicitly, the question is this : Should 
 he give his readers frankly and without reservation 
 his own individual, personal tastes, opinions, and 
 judgments, or should he try to give them a sort of 
 blended essence of the tastes, opinions, and judgments 
 of critics more eminent than himself, who have gone 
 before ; of the critics, that is, who have made the 
 Classic classical ? I find I have not stated that ques- 
 tion as clearly as I could wish, but I have stated it as 
 clearly as I can, and you must forgive me if it is a 
 trifle obscure. 
 
 It may be professional uppishness (I daresay it is), 
 but I do feel that a somewhat heavy responsibility 
 rests upon any writer who is criticizing a book, either 
 old or new, but particularly when it is old. Rightly 
 or wrongly, wisely or unwisely, readers of literary 
 journals and newspapers do attach weight to the 
 opinions of the critics. By those opinions they are 
 often induced either to read the book criticized or not 
 to read it, as the case may be.
 
 COURAGE IN CRITICISM 11 
 
 I have no doubt whatever that there were among 
 Monsignor Benson's audience some persons, probably 
 young persons, who either had not read any of Sir 
 Walter's novels, or who, having just glanced through 
 some of the worst of them say " The Monastery," 
 " The Abbot," and " St. Ronan's Well "had found 
 them unattractive, will now not read any of them ; 
 but who, if they had been " let alone," one day, when 
 perhaps there was nothing else of a literary sort handy, 
 might have picked up " Guy Mannering," " The Talis- 
 man," or " The Heart of Midlothian," and derived from 
 those stories as much pleasure and profit as were found 
 therein by such perceptive critics as John Ruskin or 
 Andrew Lang, and by their own fathers, grandfathers, 
 and great-grandfathers before them. That, I cannot 
 help feeling, is a pity. 
 
 I was glad that Monsignor Benson admitted that 
 the fact that he was entirely unable to read the works 
 of Sir Walter Scott or of the Brontes showed that there 
 was something wrong in him, and I sincerely hope that 
 he did not say it out of the pride that apes humility. 
 I think there must be something wrong in a man, an 
 educated, cultivated man, who is entirely unable to 
 read a great Classic. 
 
 I do not mean something morally wrong : I mean 
 something intellectually or aesthetically wrong, some- 
 thing lacking in percipience, some defect of the faculty 
 of appreciation. To think less highly, much less highly, 
 of a Classic than its contemporaries thought of it, or 
 than one's own contemporaries think of it ; that is 
 one thing. But to be entirely unable to read it, to 
 be unable to give oneself so much as the chance of 
 appreciating it, that is another, and a very much 
 sadder, thing ! 
 
 For consider what a Classic is. It is a work which 
 has survived the destructive, the dissolvent, influences 
 of time, and the tremendous competition of ten thou- 
 sand other books, which has proved itself impregnable
 
 12 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 to the attacks of fashion. Think of the great multi- 
 tude of books that time has destroyed, that fashions in 
 taste themselves long dead have cast upon the rubbish 
 heap, never to be repicked therefrom. 
 
 For there is a tremendous struggle for life among 
 books as among organisms, a struggle from which only 
 the strongest emerge. I won't say only the best, for 
 to say that were to raise moral issues, but assuredly the 
 strongest. The fact that a book has survived three 
 generations of readers and still makes a strong appeal, 
 if only to a comparatively small number of readers, 
 warrants you in at least attempting to read it, in 
 seeking to discover the secret of its survival-strength ; 
 and warrants you, too, if you find yourself quite unable 
 to read it, in concluding that there is something wrong 
 in you. It is probably good for you to recognize that, 
 to know a little more about yourself than you knew 
 before. 
 
 What are the qualities which go to the making of 
 a Classic, which give perdurability to Literature, which 
 confer what we cheekily call immortality upon an 
 author ? 
 
 The first and far away the most important of them 
 is fundamentality (a word which I have the authority 
 of the " New Oxford Dictionary " for employing). By 
 the quality of fundamentality I mean the quality which 
 enables an author to treat of those passions, emotions, 
 aspirations, speculations, which are fundamental in 
 human nature, which have their sources in the very 
 deeps of our being, and which are common to all of us. 
 
 No book can live for centuries or even for decades 
 whose subject-matter is not the things which live for 
 centuries or for decades. I think one might safely 
 say that a book perishes when the essential thing it 
 deals with, criticizes, expounds, or merely presents, 
 perishes. There you have the explanation of the death 
 of so many books which, and the complete obscurity 
 of so many authors who, have created a tremendous
 
 COURAGE IN CRITICISM 13 
 
 furore in their day and generation. Their vogue was 
 transitory because transitory were their themes. 
 
 Opportunities for testing the correctness of what I 
 have been saying are always to hand. We have 
 constantly, especially in the provinces, revivals of 
 plays which enjoyed blazing popularity at the time 
 of their first production, which then received the 
 approval of the most discerning critics and the plaudits 
 of crowded audiences. Go to the next of these revivals 
 that comes your way, and the chances are at least 
 twenty to one that you will find it to be the dismalest 
 and most boring of entertainments. 
 
 Only a quarter of a century may have elapsed since 
 its first appearance, yet you will vote it old-fashioned, 
 and your vote will be on the right side. Old-fashioned 
 it will in all human probability be, and that not in the 
 least because of the costumes of the actors or of the 
 social customs they reproduce, but because of the 
 sentiments the author puts into their mouths. Those 
 sentiments will be the expression of opinions which 
 were held at the moment but which have ceased to be 
 held to-day, sentiments which were based on some 
 passing caprice, some transient fashion of thought, 
 and not upon anything that was fundamental in the 
 human mind, not upon anything that mattered, so to 
 speak, not upon anything that is always there. These, 
 not the accessories, date the play ; and the Classic is 
 never dated. 
 
 Books that express opinions only, no matter how 
 brilliantly, how pointedly, how convincingly, never 
 become Classics, for opinions change, become obsolete, 
 as often as not ridiculous, even as clothes do. One 
 might as accurately speak of a classic pair of breeches 
 as of classic opinions. Books that express merely 
 opinions once strongly held are to be found in dusty 
 ranks on the shelves of all our libraries, but they are 
 just old books, they are not Classics. To take rank 
 as a Classic a book must present emotions, feelings
 
 14 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 feelings and emotions at work, acting and reacting 
 among men bringing about scenes and situations, 
 comic or tragic, catastrophic or jolly, but scenes and 
 situations all the same. 
 
 After witnessing one of these revived dramas I spoke 
 of just now, go home, take down from your book- 
 shelves a volume of Shakespeare, the one which con- 
 tains Othello, and read for half an hour or so before 
 going to bed. You will probably not have read so 
 long as that before you begin to realize why the play 
 you have just seen is old-fashioned, while Othello, 
 though centuries older, is a Classic and is not fashioned, 
 either old or new. 
 
 You will soon observe that what critics call the 
 motive of the drama, the spring which directly or 
 indirectly sets all the human machinery to work and 
 brings about the inevitable and tragic end, is not 
 peculiar to any climate or to any period, is deep-seated 
 in the very heart of man, and is discoverable even in 
 brutes. 
 
 The scene is Venice (it might as well have been 
 Bethnal Green), the costumes are but what does it 
 matter what the costumes are ? it is not of the 
 costumes you will be thinking as you read Othello. 
 There may in some far-distant century dawn a day 
 on which the passion of jealousy will be eradicated 
 from the heart of man. That day's sun ere it sets 
 will witness the end of Othello as a Classic. 
 
 You will observe also and here is the second essen- 
 tial quality of the Classic that the story, just as a 
 story, is wondrously told. You will find yourself 
 fascinated by the mere phrasing, charmed by the music 
 of the lines ; in other words, there is supreme beauty 
 of form as well as supreme beauty of thought. That 
 combination you will find in every great work of litera- 
 ture that has held its own through the centuries ; in 
 " The Book of Job," in the dramas of Euripides, in 
 " The Pilgrim's Progress." In the great Classic the
 
 COURAGE IN CRITICISM 15 
 
 manner fits the matter as a well- shaped glove fits a 
 well-shaped hand. 
 
 If you are inclined to doubt the validity of this 
 criticism test it practically for yourself. Pick up any 
 great literary achievement written in any language 
 known to you, upon which successive generations of 
 critics have set the seal of their approval. Open it 
 at any page, read the first passage that meets your 
 eye, then take a pen and piece of paper and try to 
 paraphrase that passage. Try to say the things said 
 in a better, a more convincing, a happier way than 
 that in which the author has said it. Should it strike 
 you that he has been too verbose, try if you can be 
 more concise. Has he been obscure ? Seek to clarify 
 him. In this way I think you will learn better than 
 in any other what qualities are needful to the making 
 of a Classic. 
 
 By this time I hope I have made it sufficiently clear 
 why I hold that in the criticism of Classics candour 
 should be tempered with caution. It is not enough 
 for the critic to give utterance merely to his likes 
 and dislikes ; he must needs adduce reasons for his 
 preferences and aversions. For example : Monsignor 
 Benson did tell his audience why he could not read the 
 Brontes. It was, he said, because whenever he read 
 a novel by them he seemed " to be under some sort of 
 nightmare, with too much clothes on the bed." All 
 that criticism amounts to is that he does not like 
 nightmare effects in literature ; but some of us do. 
 I do, for one, and for those of us who do it is just 
 the nightmare quality of " Wuthering Heights " which 
 gives to that wonderful book its irresistible fascination. 
 I wish he had told us also why he could not read the 
 novels of Sir Walter. 
 
 My advice to those who have not read the novels 
 of Sir Walter is to start upon them forthwith and not 
 to be deterred by the lengthy descriptive passages 
 with which too many of them begin. It always took
 
 16 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 him some time to get into his stride, but it was quite 
 a wonderful stride when he did get into it. Give 
 yourself a chance anyway. It seems a pity, you know, 
 not at least to taste a vintage which has given exhila- 
 ration and refreshment to so many millions of your 
 kind. 
 
 1914.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE TRAGEDY OF THE VILLAGE 
 
 IN view of the interest which will presently be aroused 
 in the Land Question, an interest precursory signs of 
 which are already discovering themselves in political 
 speeches and in political leading- articles and even at 
 by-elections, it is surely desirable that those of us 
 who have time and opportunity should make ourselves 
 acquainted with some of the historic facts concerning 
 the land and the methods by which vast portions of 
 it have come to be in the hands in which they are. 
 
 To that end no one can do better just now than 
 read a book which I have just finished reading. The 
 title of it is " The Village Labourer, 1760-1832, a Study 
 in the Government of England before the Reform 
 Bill." 
 
 The object of the writers of the book was to describe 
 the life of the agricultural classes during the period 
 when their only security against destitution and prac- 
 tical slavery was being taken from them by their rulers, 
 the gentlemen of England. That object the writers 
 have most completely and brilliantly achieved. The 
 book is a masterpiece of lucid arrangement and graphic 
 presentation of necessary detail. It is a convincing 
 narrative from which nothing that is essential is 
 omitted and to which nothing is added that is super- 
 fluous or by way of rhetorical flourish. It is an infor- 
 mative history, not a political polemic designed to 
 17 B
 
 18 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 engender class prejudice. Yet it is one of the most 
 irrefutable and crushing indictments that has ever 
 been brought by historians against a governing class. 
 
 The deed was done, the deed of spoliation, the land, 
 or to be quite accurate, the use of the land, access to 
 the land, was taken away from the people at the only 
 moment in our history when it could have been done 
 with little risk of successful popular resistance. Never 
 before had there been, and never since has there been, 
 a time when the territorial aristocracy had the bodies 
 and souls and possessions of the rural population so 
 absolutely in their power, so supremely at their dis- 
 posal, as they had in the period between the outbreak 
 of the French Revolution and the passing of the great 
 Reform Bill. Parliament was their plaything, the 
 members of it their nominees. 
 
 It was next to impossible for the most gifted of 
 politicians to gain entrance to the House of Commons 
 except at the will and pleasure, and with a view to 
 serving the interests, of some great territorial magnate. 
 These magnates commanded the sources of what was 
 ironically called Justice. The judges of the higher 
 courts shared their prejudices, the magistrates and 
 Grand Juries were composed either of themselves or 
 of their friends and creatures. 
 
 It is not too much to say that with anyone below 
 a certain social rank living under their dominion they 
 could do as their caprices prompted or as their interests 
 urged : 
 
 " Magistrates could administer in this uncontrolled 
 capacity a drastic code for the punishment of vagrants 
 and poachers without jury or publicity. The single 
 justice himself determined all questions of law and of 
 fact, and could please himself as to the evidence he 
 chose to hear. In 1822 the Duke of Buckingham tried 
 and convicted a man of coursing on his estate. The 
 trial took place in the duke's kitchen. The witnesses
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE VILLAGE 19 
 
 were the duke's keepers. The defendant in this case 
 was not a poacher, but a farmer." 
 
 One reads a good deal in the records of that time 
 of " rogues and vagabonds," for the laws which dealt 
 with them were of an incredible ferocity, but it is 
 needful to bear in mind that these unfortunates were 
 neither vagabonds nor rogues by choice. They were 
 men whom the Enclosures Acts had dispossessed of 
 their holdings, men who but a few years before had 
 been earning a sufficient and a decent livelihood upon 
 the land that had given them birth. Many of the 
 men who were battered by keepers, or mangled by 
 spring guns, or sent into the unspeakable gaols of the 
 period for killing a rabbit had in their day been the 
 possessors of a cottage and a cow. From free labourers 
 they had by Act of Parliament been converted into 
 servile paupers. 
 
 The deed which deprived the villager of his liberty 
 and his living was done deliberately ; it did not come 
 about in one of those odd phases of economic or indus- 
 trial evolution for which nobody in particular can be 
 said to be responsible. It was not, for instance, like 
 the coming of the machine industry. That came, as 
 it were, not by the conscious will of man ; it came as 
 part of an inevitable and an inexorable world process, 
 a process which could be neither foreseen nor hindered. 
 
 The seizure of the land was designed, elaborately 
 thought out, carefully carried into effect. As our 
 authors say : 
 
 " The agricultural community was taken to pieces 
 in the eighteenth century and reconstructed in the 
 manner in which a dictator reconstructs a free govern- 
 ment. . . . Let us remember what this community 
 the village community looked like to men with the 
 mind of the landlord class. The English landowners 
 have always believed that order would be resolved 
 into its original chaos if they ceased to control the
 
 20 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 lives and destinies of their neighbours. The English 
 aristocracy, always thinking of their class as the 
 pillars of society, as the Atlas that bears the burden 
 of the world, very naturally concluded that this old 
 peasant community with its troublesome rights was 
 a public encumbrance." 
 
 The freedom of the peasant to earn his living inde- 
 pendently of wages paid and determined by his land- 
 lord was a noxious thing, a thing characterized by 
 Lord Sheffield in Parliament as a " nuisance." The 
 writer of a Report to the Board of Agriculture in 1795 
 asserts that : 
 
 " The possession of a cow or two with a hog and a 
 few geese naturally exalts the peasant in his own 
 conception. In sauntering after his cattle he acquires 
 a habit of indolence. Day labour becomes disgusting 
 . . . and at length the sale of a half-fed calf, or hog, 
 furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idle- 
 ness." 
 
 Oh, dear me ! How often have we heard similar 
 sentiments expressed by persons without the possible 
 excuse of aristocratic birth and tradition ! 
 
 So the land was taken away from the labourer. It 
 did not slip away from him as the hand-tool slipped 
 from the hands of the hand-tool worker when the great 
 machines came. It was taken away from him by law, 
 backed by force, by law made by men who did not 
 represent him, who represented nobody but them- 
 selves. These men wanted the land, and they just 
 took it, and if anything could add to the iniquity of 
 this legalized plunder it was added by the fact that 
 the thing was done in the name of religion, of morals, 
 and of science. It was taken away without compen- 
 sation to the people who were actually dispossessed. 
 
 Let us never forget that. When the time comes to 
 deal with the land again let us remember that the
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE VILLAGE 21 
 
 last time the land was dealt with the very notion of 
 compensation was scouted by the confiscators. " These 
 cottagers often received nothing at all for the right 
 they had lost, the compensation going to the owners 
 of the cottage only." Six million acres of land were 
 taken away. 
 
 The authors of " The Village Labourer " vouchsafe 
 us a few vivid glimpses of the state of England which 
 followed immediately on the act of robbery. Here is 
 one: 
 
 " In passing through a village in the county of 
 Norfolk a few years ago, to my great mortification I 
 beheld the houses tumbling into ruins and the common 
 fields all enclosed ; upon inquiring into the cause of 
 this melancholy alteration I was informed that a 
 gentleman of Lynn had bought that township and the 
 next adjoining to it ; that he had thrown the one into 
 three and the other into four farms ; which before the 
 enclosure were in about twenty farms ; and upon my 
 further inquiring what was becoming of the farmers 
 who were turned out the answer was that some of them 
 were dead and the rest were become labourers." 
 
 Here is another : 
 
 " The common was very extensive. I conversed 
 with a farmer and several cottagers. One of them 
 said enclosing would ruin England ; it was worse 
 than ten wars. 
 
 " ' Why, my friend, what have you lost by it ? ' 
 " ' I kept four cows before the parish was enclosed, 
 and now I don't keep so much as a goose ; and you 
 ask me what I lose by it 1 ' ' 
 
 Then food became dear. Hitherto the villagers had 
 enjoyed a fair sufficiency of milk supplied by their 
 own cows. The enclosures banished the cows, and 
 there was no more milk. The people, in that obstinate, 
 pig-headed way they have, made a hard fight to get
 
 22 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 wheaten bread, and their masters were characteristi- 
 cally shocked at their demand for this quite superfluous 
 luxury. " Let them eat oats and rye," said the 
 rulers ; " it's much better for them." Said Lord 
 Sheffield in an address to Quarter Sessions : 
 
 " If any wretches should be found so lost to all 
 decency and so blind as to revolt against the dispensa- 
 tions of Providence, and to refuse the food proposed 
 for their relief, the parish officers will be justified in 
 refusing other succour, and may be assured of support 
 from the magistracy of the county." 
 
 How nobly the parish officers responded to the 
 appeal, how whole-heartedly the magistracy afforded 
 the support, may be gathered from the following 
 extracts : 
 
 " There were English villages in which it was the 
 practice of the overseer to harness men and women 
 to the parish cart, and the sight of an idiot woman 
 between the shafts was not unknown within a hundred 
 miles of London. 
 
 "There was a severe overseer at Ash who had 
 among other applicants for relief an unemployed 
 shepherd with a wife and five children living at Mar- 
 gate, thirteen miles away. The shepherd was given 
 9*. a week, but the overseer made him walk to Ash 
 every day except Sunday for his eighteenpence. The 
 shepherd walked the twenty-six miles a day on such 
 food as he could obtain for his share of the 9s. for 
 nine weeks, and then his strength could hold out no 
 longer. The shepherd was an industrious and honest 
 man, out of work through no fault of his own." 
 
 Deprived of their food and of any possible means 
 (except from the hands of such overseers) of getting 
 it the villagers naturally took to poaching, for the 
 new enclosures teemed with game. But here the 
 gentlemen of England were once more ready for them.
 
 TRAGEDY OF THE VILLAGE 23 
 
 An Act was passed which provided that a person who 
 was found at night unarmed, but with a net for poach- 
 ing, in any forest, chase, or park was to be punished 
 by transportation for seven years. 
 
 In the three years between 1827 and 1830 one in 
 seven of all the convictions in the country were under 
 the Game Code. Over 8500 persons were convicted 
 under that code, many of them boys under eighteen 
 years of age. Some of them were transported for 
 seven and fourteen years, and some for life. Several 
 men who worked upon the roads at sixpence a day 
 were hanged for resisting the gamekeepers with arms 
 in their hands. 
 
 And yet there was no peasant revolt, still less a 
 peasant revolution, as there was in France on the 
 part of a people suffering under similar provocation. 
 The territorial aristocracy triumphed all along the 
 line. They had beaten the very bowels out of the 
 people. Never in the history of Europe had so great 
 a deed of plunder and oppression been carried out 
 with so little inconvenience to the plunderers and 
 oppressors. 
 
 There was nothing worthy to be called a revolt, but 
 there were a few disturbances, a few ricks were burned, 
 a few machines broken, a few hirelings of the landlords' 
 agents, overseers, and others made fearful of their 
 lives and pockets. The story of the suppression of 
 these disturbances and the punishment of the dis- 
 turbers is told on one of the blackest pages in England's 
 history. In one town alone, Winchester, three hundred 
 prisoners were brought before the judges charged most 
 of them with offences which to-day would receive 
 scarce a passing notice in a local newspaper. And this 
 is the sort of thing that happened : 
 
 " George Steele, aged eighteen, was sentenced to 
 transportation for life for obtaining a shilling when 
 he was in liquor. William Sutton, another boy of
 
 24 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 eighteen, was found guilty of taking fourpence in a 
 drunken frolic. Sutton, who was a carter boy receiving 
 1*. 6d. a week, was given an excellent character by his 
 master, who declared that he never had a better 
 servant. The jury recommended him to mercy, and 
 the judges responded by sentencing him to death, 
 and banishing him for life." 
 
 The story told in "The Village Labourer" is the 
 story of a hideous, an unimaginable wrong. It is a 
 wrong that can never be redressed ; it is a wrong, the 
 dire results of which are with us to-day in every sordid 
 broken hopeless village in England. When we come 
 to the adjustment of the land question, it is fitting 
 that we should remember this wrong, not in anger or 
 revenge, but in justice. 
 
 1912.
 
 IV 
 
 THE SOUL OF A GENTLEMAN 
 
 WHEN I say of Cassilis that he is a gentleman I am 
 using the term " gentleman " in just its ordinary sense, 
 in the sense in which we all of us use it when we use it 
 without spoken qualification or mental reserve. 
 
 I do not mean in the least that he is the soul of 
 honour ; that he is a man who in no possible circum- 
 stances could be guilty of a base or cowardly action, 
 or a mean thought ; or be impolite to women, or uppish 
 to inferiors, or disloyal to his King or unfaithful to 
 his friend. Indeed, I do not think that I mean to imply 
 possession by him of any moral attribute whatever. 
 
 I should not dream of saying either to him, or of 
 him, that he is one of " Nature's gentlemen," for I 
 have not the faintest idea what part Nature, 
 or what part art, has played in the constitu- 
 tion of his being. This I feel sure of, though, that 
 if I were to call him to his face one of Nature's gentle- 
 men he would hotly resent the imputation, and not 
 improbably would cut my acquaintance there and 
 then, for he would feel that I was in some way casting 
 reflections upon his social behaviour. 
 
 And I daresay he would be right. For when one 
 says of a man that he is one of Nature's gentlemen 
 one usually means that he is a considerable way from 
 being any other sort of a gentleman ; one means that 
 his moral qualities more than compensate for his 
 25
 
 26 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 lack of social graces. Now I am quite sure that 
 Cassilis would rather be accused of a vice than of a 
 solecism. I feel almost as sure that he would rather 
 be guilty of a vice than of a solecism, for I take it 
 he knows himself to be at least capable of the one, 
 while he prides himself, and perhaps with justice, 
 on being wholly incapable of the other. 
 
 I do not for a moment mean that I have any reason 
 whatever to suspect that Cassilis is not the soul of 
 honour, or that he has ever been guilty of baseness or 
 cowardice, or harboured thoughts to which an honest 
 man may not give house-room and maintain his 
 honesty. For aught I know to the contrary, his 
 honour is as unscratched and unstained as a newly 
 minted sovereign. 
 
 What I do mean is that even if he were to poison 
 a grandmother, or forge a will, or turn tail on 
 the field of battle, he would still be a gentleman. 
 He would be a gentleman avicide, a gentleman 
 forger, a gentleman runagate ; a disgrace and dis- 
 credit to his order, of course, but still distinctly of 
 his order. 
 
 Some one I forget who has said that by the 
 constitution of this realm the King can make any 
 cobbler a nobleman, but can not make any man 
 a gentleman. Well, King Destiny might make of 
 Cassilis a pauper or a felon, but even that all-potent 
 monarch could not make him " not a gentleman." 
 
 If you were to meet him in the street, as I met 
 him yesterday, you would categorize him at once in 
 your mind as a gentleman, and that not altogether 
 because he is about the best-dressed man that Savile 
 Row and the most efficient valet in London turn out. 
 No, there is something subtler in it than that. 
 
 I am confident that if Cassilis lost his reason or his 
 income and came down in the world, as we say, and 
 were to present himself at your door in broken boots, 
 in fringed trousers, in a ragged coat which had never
 
 THE SOUL OF A GENTLEMAN 27 
 
 been made for him, with a knotted handkerchief 
 instead of a collar round his throat, with matted 
 hair and a week's growth on his chin, asking for a 
 job of work in the garden, or a letter to the Charity 
 Organization Society, what you would say to your- 
 self would be, " Good heavens ! That poor fellow is 
 a broken-down gentleman." You would have no 
 doubt at all about the gentleman. 
 
 One of the definitions of that ambiguous term 
 gentleman is " a man who is not compelled by neces- 
 sity to work for his living." It is an wholly inadequate 
 definition, of course, much too widely inclusive ; but, 
 even so, Cassilis would fall within it. Cassilis has 
 never done an hour's work in his life, an hour's remu- 
 nerative work, I mean, of course, an hour's work 
 of the sort that Society would consent to pay for 
 never so poorly. 
 
 There was a moment in his life, though, when it 
 looked as if he would have to take a share in the 
 common lot. It was very soon after he had come 
 down from Oxford, where he had taken a degree, 
 but without any added distinction. His father died 
 suddenly, leaving little or nothing but debts behind 
 him. But Death, which struck hard at Cassilis with 
 one hand, held out a gift to him in the other. Just 
 as he was looking about for " something," as he 
 put it, a spinster aunt died, too, leaving him a com- 
 petence. 
 
 Cassilis devoted no portion of this competence to 
 the liquidation of the paternal liabilities. " You 
 see," he said in explanation, " Aunt Emily was not 
 on speaking terms with my father and didn't approve 
 of his way of running things. I was her favourite 
 nephew ; she paid for my education. The dear old 
 girl would not lie quietly in her grave if she thought 
 any of her money was going to clear up any of the 
 mess my father left behind him. No, I feel bound 
 in honour to regard the wishes of the pious testatrix,''
 
 28 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 I have noticed with interest that gentlemen of the 
 Cassilis type generally do feel bound in honour to do 
 the convenient and personally profitable thing. 
 
 Mind, I do not think it would have mattered much 
 to Cassilis, that it would have made any fatal or 
 catastrophic difference to his career, I mean, even had 
 Aunt Emily not departed this life at that opportune 
 moment or had otherwise disposed of her property. 
 I think Cassilis assuredly would have got " some- 
 thing " some easy and agreeable occupation, with 
 remuneration sufficient to moderate needs ; and his 
 remuneration, probably, would have been at the 
 public expense. You and I would have been con- 
 tributing our quota towards paying his tobacconist's 
 bills and his club subscriptions. 
 
 Imagination declines to contemplate a man like 
 Cassilis clubless and without good cigars. This is a 
 hard world, I often say, but it is not such an unthink- 
 ably hard world as that ! For Cassilis was born a 
 member of the governing classes, and in whatever 
 else the governing classes may fail they rarely or 
 never fail in their duty to themselves or to their 
 kith and kin. 
 
 This happened before the days of Mr. Lloyd George 
 and the Labour Exchanges and the National Insurance 
 Act. But, although patronage had not encroached 
 quite so far upon open competition as it has to-day, 
 it was not unknown even then. There were " soft " 
 jobs going, and Cassilis quite inevitably, quite 
 naturally, in the order of things, would have been 
 popped into one of them, for, besides possessing 
 influential relatives, he was a good-looking, 
 well-mannered young fellow, and sat gracefully 
 and comfortably in the pockets of the wives, 
 mothers, sisters, and aunts of high-placed political 
 personages. 
 
 He himself is of opinion that but for Aunt Emily 
 he would at this moment be helping to manage the
 
 THE SOUL OF A GENTLEMAN 29 
 
 diplomatic affairs of Great Britain in some foreign 
 capital, or assisting further to muddle our system of 
 National Education at Whitehall. 
 
 I do not think I will attempt to describe Cassilis' 
 personal appearance to you, because you may see 
 him for yourself on any fine day in the Season when 
 you may happen to be in London and to take a walk 
 along Pall Mall, up St. James's Street, and up and 
 down Piccadilly. Or if you don't meet the man 
 himself you will meet dozens of other men so closely 
 resembling him as to be indistinguishable from him 
 and from one another. You will, if you are at all 
 perceptive, recognize Cassilis' type by a certain 
 air it has. 
 
 Look a little closely at all the other men you meet, 
 and you will not fail to notice that they appear a 
 little anxious about something I can't put it more 
 definitely than that their eyes are a little restless, 
 the corners of their mouths a little strained ; they 
 seem to be half-expecting something, half-ap- 
 prehending something ; they move their necks 
 uneasily within their collars ; their gait is either too 
 purposeful for real purpose or too leisurely for true 
 elegance. 
 
 But, look as closely as you will at men of the Cassilis 
 type, and you will note none of these indications of 
 unrest or of mental or moral disturbance. Their 
 whole aspect seems to declare in modulated tones, 
 " We are very well, indeed, thank you ; there is 
 nothing whatever the matter with us or with the 
 world. We've had an excellent breakfast ; presently 
 we hope to have, nay, we are quite sure we shall have, 
 an equally excellent luncheon, with the right sort 
 of dinner, in due course, to follow, and a very pleasant 
 evening." 
 
 I confess that when I sat down to write I designed 
 to give you more or less of an epitome of Cassilis' 
 views of men and things. But when I came to think
 
 30 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 it over I remembered with some dismay that he had 
 no views, no views of his own, I mean ; that in his 
 opinion to be " viewy " is to be almost damned. 
 He never attempts to form opinions ; he acquiesces 
 in opinions formed in what he holds to be the right 
 quarters. Contrary opinions he just flicks aside 
 almost as instinctively as he flicks the ash from his 
 cigar or a trifle of dust from his coat-sleeve. 
 
 Sometimes he seems conscious that there is a world 
 in which these other opinions find vogue, may pos- 
 sibly take shape in action, action which will, to some 
 extent, discommode the world which is his. But, 
 and here it is that I seem to get now and then at 
 the real soul of the man, at the innermost faith of 
 him, he discovers a calm confidence, rooted in an 
 inexpugnable conviction that if ever that other and 
 outer and bigger world should break rudely in upon 
 that smaller, Olympic region which is his, he and 
 his friends will be fully equal to repelling the invasion 
 and giving the invaders what for. 
 
 This confident, unruffled attitude of his often irri- 
 rates me, and I try hard to discover the warrant for 
 it, if warrant there be. I think it comes of a belief 
 of his, a belief which is as much as and more a part 
 of him than the nose on his face. For, though time 
 may alter the shape of that nose it will never change 
 that conviction that he and his set, their circumstances 
 and their manner of living, are part of the Order 
 of Nature, immutable as the stars. 
 
 Of course he knows, for he has the usual slight 
 smattering of scientific knowledge, that even the 
 stars are not quite immutable ; but they are immu- 
 table enough for all practical purposes, and the soul 
 of Cassilis is a practical soul. This creed of his is 
 as near, I think, as he gets to religion, although his 
 grandfather I have heard was a bishop. 
 
 I once tackled him directly on the matter. We 
 were sitting in the big bay window of the Chrysan-
 
 THE SOUL OF A GENTLEMAN 31 
 
 themum Club smoking-room, looking out across 
 Piccadilly and the Green Park. A police-shepherded 
 procession of unemployed, or of strikers, I forget 
 which, had just passed by. 
 
 " Tell me, Cassilis," I said, " why do you 
 think you are here ? Oh, I don't mean here, in this 
 window, I know that it is just to pass a digestive 
 hour. But in this world or in this universe, if 
 you like ? " 
 
 He took my question more seriously and was rather 
 longer in answering than I had expected. 
 
 " Oh, well," he replied at last ; " that's easy. 
 We are here to have a good time and keep ourselves 
 fit." 
 
 " Fit for what ? " I asked. 
 
 " For whatever we have to do," he returned. 
 
 " That seems pretty sound," I assented. " But 
 what in particular do you keep yourself fit for ? " 
 
 " Oh, just for toddling around which, by the 
 way, I must be doing," he said, standing up. 
 
 " To have a good time and to keep oneself fit 
 for toddling around," I repeated. " There's a lot 
 of horse sense in that, Cassilis," I added, " more than 
 I should have credited you with. You ought to 
 employ some of your ample leisure and your turn 
 for epigram in writing a new catechism, a catechism 
 for gentlemen with incomes of four figures derived 
 from gilt-edged securities." 
 
 " Not I," Cassilis returned. " I don't set out to 
 be pious, you know ; I don't set out even to be serious- 
 minded. I may perhaps be the giddy butterfly you 
 think me. Well, butterflies have their place in the 
 scheme of things. There've got to be butterflies, 
 you know. But you don't catch me guying religion. 
 That's rank bad form, anyhow. Religion," he repeated, 
 resuming his seat and taking a cigarette from his 
 case ; " what should we do without religion ? We 
 should have to pay up for a lot more of those chaps,
 
 32 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 anyway," and he pointed to a dozen policemen who 
 were marching in file along the opposite pave- 
 ment. 
 
 That was the most penetrating glimpse I ever 
 achieved into the soul of Cassilis. I feel no confidence 
 that if I had probed deeper I should have discovered 
 more. 
 
 1912,
 
 THE DECADENCE OF RUDYARD 
 KIPLING 
 
 HAPPY in many things, in nothing was Rudyard 
 Kipling more happy than in the time of his literary 
 arrival. At the end of the 'eighties we were all in a 
 dumpish mood. For something like a decade nothing 
 that was stimulating and many things that were 
 depressing had happened to us. From the point of 
 view of social reform there had been ten sterile years. 
 A goodish few of us were heartily ashamed of ourselves 
 and of our period. 
 
 In the realm of art and literature the atmosphere was 
 soppy and relaxing. There was much fine accom- 
 plishment but a dismal lack of tone. In a few small 
 literary coteries Browning was read a little and talked 
 about a good deal. Rossetti and Morris and Tennyson 
 were more read and less talked of, and for these great 
 men's work, exquisite though much of it is, often as 
 it achieves artistic perfection, it can hardly be claimed 
 that it makes for masculinity, that it does much to 
 brace the spirit or harden the moral fibres. One of 
 the trio had declared himself in so many words to be 
 " the idle singer of an empty day." For the satisfac- 
 tion of his own emotional nature he had sought to fill 
 the emptiness not with the kind of men, women, 
 children, and things he might have seen had he looked 
 for them in the teeming world all about him, but with 
 33 C
 
 34 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 fantastic creations of his own imagining called forth 
 from a historic period that had never had any exist- 
 ence Geffray Teste Noires, Guys of the Dolorous 
 Blast, persons who dressed habitually in tabards and 
 hauberks ; Jehane du Castels, Ellayne le Violets, 
 damosels who sang amorously in a strange dialect 
 and who by their own confession had all too often 
 misbehaved themselves shockingly. In poetry the 
 erotic and emaciated damosel with her unintelligible 
 refrains was very much with us. The weird present- 
 ment of her may still be seen in the pictures of the 
 late Sir Edward Burne-Jones. We loved her ; I 
 can't think how we did it, but we did. That precisely 
 was what was the matter with us ; and when she 
 wailed that two red roses were doing something 
 indefinite with the moon, or that the " graves stand 
 gray in a row," we thrilled to the very core of our 
 being and felt that we were indeed in intimate rela- 
 tions with the very last embodiment of refinement and 
 culture. The high priests of art repelled by, or 
 afraid of, the real world, sought and found refuge in 
 bizarre unreality. Tennyson, it is true, was to some 
 extent an exception. Now and then he sounded a 
 trumpet-like note, and as for reality, well, he did 
 portray for us the demure ideals and the decorous 
 conventions of the rectory drawing-room. Tennyson 
 had the root of the matter in him, and had he begun 
 to work at the end of the nineteenth century he would 
 be more read at the end of the twentieth than he is 
 likely to be. 
 
 Social life in the 'eighties was more interesting and 
 necessarily more real than art. It was the period of 
 the Socialist pioneer and the Emancipated Woman. 
 A good many of the freer spirits turned to Socialism 
 because there it seemed to us could we find that new 
 thing in the way of ideas for which we were half- 
 blindly groping. The Socialist pioneer was interesting 
 indeed. He was nearly always in a rage, and when
 
 DECADENCE OF KIPLING 35 
 
 contradicted or even questioned he became violently 
 abusive -a habit which, I regret to say, has sur- 
 vived maturity ; but at least he was a live man who 
 meant business, and it was a delight either to 
 agree or to quarrel with him. The Emancipated 
 Woman too had her points sharp as needles they 
 were. Let loose by Miss Olive Schreiner from an 
 African Farm, she had a lurid career in Europe. She 
 irritated, bewildered, fascinated, and finally bored us. 
 
 The time was ripe, rotten ripe, for a new man and 
 a new method ; for a man who, and a method which, 
 should differ as widely as possible from the old gang 
 and its ways both of thought and expression. Whether 
 he came as a revolutionist or as leader of reaction his 
 welcome by England was assured. There needed a 
 man to do for Art at the end of the nineteenth century 
 what Burns and Wordsworth had done for it at the 
 end of the eighteenth to smash and scatter the old 
 conventions, to let sunshine and fresh air into darkened, 
 overheated chambers ; to tell us of the things of the 
 day in which we lived in the tongue of the day in 
 which we were living. 
 
 In fullness of time Rudyard Kipling came and, 
 like many another upsetter of established things, he 
 came out of the East. About the end of 1889 we had 
 begun to talk of him. Three years later he was out 
 and away the biggest figure in English literary life. 
 It had taken this young man of twenty-seven just 
 three years to win for himself a position in the front 
 ranks of art from which no one but himself could ever 
 displace him. He had the distinction of winning at 
 once the noisy applause of the mob and the high 
 approval of the elect. 
 
 The first taste of his quality was given us in " Depart- 
 mental Ditties." His had been a prophetic soul indeed 
 who from a reading of that volume could have foreseen 
 the coming of " Barrack-Room Ballads " and " The 
 Seven Seas. It consists largely of graceful and
 
 36 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 sprightly vers de societi and topical jingle. But the 
 jingle is jingle of a rare sort. It has humour, it has 
 extraordinary felicity of phrase ; it has no little pathos. 
 Over and above it has, in a marked degree, that in 
 which the art of the 'eighties was so sadly to lack, 
 the inestimable quality of high spirits. Here, one felt, 
 was a young verse-writer, scarcely yet a poet, who 
 tingled with the joy of life and who wrote for the very 
 fun of the thing ; who had not forgotten what it feels 
 like to be a schoolboy ; who with all his heart might 
 say, and who did indeed say later in his " Sestina of 
 the Tramp Royal " : 
 
 Gawd bless this world ! Whatever she 'ath done 
 Excep^ when awful long Tve found it good. 
 So write before I die, 'E liked it all ! 
 
 It was a new and a most exhilarating note. No 
 wonder our poor little poeticules and the whole tribe 
 of Tomlinson shivered when they heard it. 
 
 The publication of " Barrack-Room Ballads " in 
 1892 proclaimed a new poet. Kipling was no longer 
 a promising versifier but a poet, and above all a new 
 poet. He had a good deal to say and he had found 
 the exactly right form in which to say it. He had 
 arrived at the quintessential of fine literary style ; 
 that is to say, the fitness of the form to the matter. 
 That is what style means, and style means precious little 
 else than that. A critic who talks to you about 
 " poetic diction " is on the intellectual level of the 
 young lady behind the draper's counter who chatters 
 of art shades and art colours, not knowing that every 
 colour is art when it is laid upon the canvas by the 
 brush of a master. 
 
 But even from the most conventional point of view 
 " The English Flag " is a poem. Test it how you 
 will it will abide your question. It is correct in form ; 
 it is aflame with passion ; from first to last it has
 
 DECADENCE OF KIPLING 37 
 
 not an ill-chosen epithet or a falsely turned phrase. 
 The motive of it, the conception, that of the 
 four winds replying in turn to a query concerning 
 a thing that they see more often than they see 
 most things, "The English Flag," is as happy as it is 
 original. 
 
 It is upon the " Barrack-Room Ballads " proper, 
 the soldier songs, that most of the superfine critics and 
 humanitarian sentimentalists have fastened as evi- 
 dencing the faults of Kipling's character and the 
 blemishes of his art. With the moral issues raised 
 I have nothing just now to do, I want only to touch 
 on the artistic quality of these lyrics. Note, then, 
 first their marvellous breadth of range. They present 
 the common soldier, and the common soldier, one 
 would suppose, is not a complex personality. Yet 
 these songs run up and down and up again the whole 
 gamut of human emotion, from the white-faced horror 
 of Danny Deever to the drunken delirium of Belts. 
 The poet plays upon every string ; he is consummate 
 master of his instrument, or, to use a more correct 
 simile, of his orchestra. Sometimes his humour is 
 amorously reminiscent as in Mandalay, sometimes 
 deep down in the darkness as in Cholera Camp ; in 
 half a dozen lyrics full of the lust of blood, again 
 pavid with coward terror as in " That Day." What 
 other poet, again (and many have attempted it) who 
 has ever tackled the subject of woman seduced, betrayed 
 and deserted has done it with half the forcefulness, 
 with a tithe of the true tragedy, that Kipling has put 
 into " Mary, Pity Women " ? 
 
 Note again, I ask you, the variety of emotion 
 expressed, and note further the variety of metre, of 
 form, in which it is expressed. In every instance the 
 metre, the refrain, fits the thought as the scabbard fits 
 the blade. 
 
 Take as examples the dreamy, melodic lilt of Man- 
 dalay :
 
 38 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 No, you txortt 'eed nothiri 1 else 
 
 But them spicy garlic smells, 
 
 An' the sunshine and the palm-trees an' the 
 
 tinkly temple bells 
 On the road to Mandalay ; 
 
 and the haunting refrain of " Kabul River :" 
 
 Ford, ford, ford o' Kabul River, 
 
 Ford o' Kabul River in the dark ; 
 
 There's the river low and falling but it ain't 
 
 no use a-callin' 
 1 'Cross the ford o' Kabul River in the dark. 
 
 How perfectly the music utters the emotion . 
 
 These soldier songs have had to stand up to a hostile 
 fire of criticism poured in from some unexpected 
 quarters. They have been called rude, brutal, vulgar, 
 and save the mark illiterate ! They are said to 
 utter the feelings of the gin-palace in the dialect of 
 the gutter. The late Mr. Robert Buchanan, himself 
 something of a poet, complained of Kipling that he 
 dealt with the amours of a common soldier and gave 
 us to understand that he was at the worst a blood- 
 thirsty ruffian, at the best an extremely vulgar and 
 objectionable young man. All this I might for the 
 moment let pass as falling under the head of moral 
 rather than of art criticism ; but the implication is 
 that the songs are not poetry, not fine art that is, not 
 poetry as " The Lady of Shalott " is poetry. That is 
 the criticism that I want for a moment to tackle, 
 because if true it would apply not only to the soldier- 
 songs but to a good deal other of Kipling's finest work 
 such as "The Bolivar," "The Mary Gloster," and 
 " McAndrew's Hymn." This criticism, I suggest, is 
 born partly of prejudice, prejudice against certain 
 opinions ; but mainly it comes of ignorance as to 
 what constitutes the essential of poetry. This type 
 of critic is in the same state of mind as those who
 
 DECADENCE OF KIPLING 39 
 
 scarified Shelley, who cold-shouldered Wagner, who 
 attacked first the Pre-Raphaelites and then the 
 Impressionists. He is merely hard-boiled in the shell. 
 His mind is unadaptable. He has a certain set of 
 rules and canons. Take them away from him and he 
 is lost and less likely to form a just view than the man 
 in the street whom he despises. He has been limited 
 in his reading, and he has become so accustomed to 
 seeing only certain characters, certain episodes, certain 
 imagery, dealt with in what he believes to be poetry, 
 that all others are to him unpoetic, and if they fall 
 below a certain social level generally his own vulgar. 
 For example, the intrigue of a mythical mediaeval 
 queen such as Guinevere with a knight who wore a 
 suit of fashionable armour he would feel to be romantic. 
 The fall from virtue of a housemaid and a corporal 
 in the line would for him be revolting vulgarity. He 
 has not the wit to see that the romance or the vulgarity 
 lie entirely in the emotional relations of the parties 
 to the offence. A queen's liaison might well be 
 disgusting ; a housemaid's romantic. 
 
 Rudyard Kipling, as I said, was a " new " poet ; 
 in his own phrase, " new as the new-cut tooth." 
 If we are to estimate him justly we must test him by 
 a set of new canons. He was content to accept the 
 modern world as he saw it tramways, trade unions, 
 and all. Benares, Lahore, and the strange cities of 
 the East were glamorous to him, but no more and 
 no less glamorous than San Francisco or Bethnal 
 Green. He was obsessed by the vision of life. When 
 he wanted romance and he was a great romanticist 
 he never looked for it from out of 
 
 . . . magic casements opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas and fairy lands forlorn ; 
 
 he just ran down to the nearest quay or railway-station. 
 In an appendix to " Lyrical Ballads," Wordsworth, 
 foreseeing the disappearance from modern life of
 
 40 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 much that had hitherto been taken as essential to 
 romance and poetry, saw also, as in a Pisgah vision, 
 the coming of such a poet as Rudyard Kipling. Words- 
 worth too was new. Wordsworth too was an inno- 
 vator ; but Wordsworth had not, as Kipling had, the 
 faculty of appealing to the market-place as well as 
 to the study, and in so far as he had it not he was a 
 lesser man than Kipling. Said Wordsworth in the 
 appendix : " Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of 
 all knowledge ; it is the impassioned expression which 
 is the countenance of all science. In spite of the 
 difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, 
 of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone 
 out of mind and things violently destroyed, the poet 
 binds together by passion and knowledge the vast 
 empire of human society as it is spread over the 
 whole earth and over all time. . . . Poetry is the first 
 and last of all knowledge it is as immortal as the 
 heart of man. If the labours of science should ever 
 create a material revolution, direct or indirect, in 
 our condition, and in the impressions which we 
 habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more 
 than at present. He will be ready to follow the steps 
 of the man of science, not only in those general indirect 
 effects, but he will be at his side carrying sensation 
 into the midst of the objects of the science itself. 
 The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, 
 the mineralogist will be as proper objects of the poet's 
 art as any upon which it can be employed. ... If 
 the time should ever come when what is now called 
 science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to 
 put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet 
 will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration 
 and will welcome the Being thus produced as a dear 
 and genuine inmate of the household of man." 
 
 Well, in the closing years of the last century the 
 material revolution of which Wordsworth spoke had 
 happened. Those things were familiar to us, so familiar
 
 DECADENCE OF KIPLING 41 
 
 that familiarity had almost bred contempt, until Rud- 
 yard Kipling came to touch and illuminate them with 
 romance and poetry ; and this he did not by bringing 
 the poetry to them, but because he had the spiritual 
 insight to perceive the poetry that was in them already. 
 
 Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the song of 
 steam ! 
 
 ***** 
 
 Oh, for a man to weld it then in one trip-hammer strain 
 Till even first-class passengers could tell the meaning 
 plain, 
 
 cried McAndrew, Kipling's old Scots engineer. Kipling 
 himself answered McAndrew's call. He did with a 
 trip-hammer strain teach the first-class passengers 
 what the second and third class were not so slow 
 to perceive. Much of Kipling's popularity has been 
 due to the method and manner of his expression, but 
 more still has been due to the fact that he has given 
 voice to the thoughts and emotions of inarticulate 
 millions. And to do just that is a large part of a 
 great poet's mission to men. 
 
 Just as much of Kipling's early verse was jingle, 
 so much of his prose work was journalism. But it 
 was good journalism ; it hit and stayed where it 
 struck. One ringing sentence and you had your 
 picture a thing seen, as it were, by flashlight. Too 
 often, it is true, you not only saw your picture but 
 you saw the man who worked the lantern and the 
 mechanism itself. There were tricks and mannerisms ; 
 new mannerisms and tricks most effective, but they 
 suffered somewhat, it must be confessed, by over-use. 
 In short, somewhere in Kipling's stories he who seeks 
 shall find well-nigh every fault every fault, I was 
 going to say, but dullness. Alas ! I could have said 
 that once; I cannot say it now. Still, one may say 
 this that you may winnow away at his first four prose 
 volumes and when you have winnowed your worst
 
 42 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 and your best there will still remain sufficient for the 
 making of one stout volume of the best stories ever 
 told in the English tongue. 
 
 I don't propose here to analyse and dissertate upon 
 the elements of the ideal short story as distinguished 
 from what we usually call a novel. We are all agreed, 
 I take it, that a short story must be short, that it 
 must present an episode or episodes in logical con- 
 nexion, that the moment it depicts must be dramatic 
 or at least tense. More than that we do not ask of it, 
 and even that we do not often get. It were futile 
 to complain of Kipling that he, essentially a short- 
 story writer, has not created or developed complex or 
 elusive characters after the manner of Balzac or 
 George Meredith. As well might you find fault with 
 Corot because he has not covered as much canvas as 
 Paul Veronese. Until masterpieces are measured and 
 judged by the foot-rule Rudyard Kipling will stand 
 clear of such comparison. What the short story can 
 do that Kipling could do and did in the short story. 
 He seldom or never failed to bring off the thrill, whether 
 it was of pathos or dread, of passion or humour. His 
 methods were as many and as diverse as his motives. 
 Sometimes he produced his effect by the careful 
 elaboration of minute detail ; sometimes by a broad 
 swift flash, as it were, by a tightly clinched, pregnant 
 sentence ; sometimes by vivid realism, at others by 
 elusive suggestion ; but ever and always the thing 
 he wanted to do was done. I should think twice 
 before saying of Kipling that he was ever a great 
 dramatist, because greatness in dramatic art, I take 
 it, implies development of personality. We must see 
 the character not merely pushed here and there by 
 the motive as a thing external to it, but itself making 
 the motive, and from our knowledge of the character 
 and its motives we must recognize the actions to be 
 inevitable. But if Kipling was never a great, he was 
 one of the skilfullest dramatists that ever wrought.
 
 DECADENCE OF KIPLING 43 
 
 When the climacteric moment was reached his effects 
 were brought off in half a dozen sentences and there 
 was never an anti-climax. His feeling for a curtain 
 was infallible. As one example among many, just 
 recall to your minds that last meeting of the death- 
 stricken hero of " Love o' Women " with the woman 
 he had destroyed. The thing is done before we know 
 where we are, and we find ourselves quivering before 
 we quite know what we have to quiver about. That 
 is what a dramatic moment should be. The workings 
 of intelligence should stop, and emotion should be 
 supreme. 
 
 Kipling has never, so far as I remember, created a 
 complex character and suffered it to work itself out 
 under our eyes. His characters are generalized rather 
 than individualized ; but for what they are they are 
 complete enough. We know of them just about as 
 much as we should have known had we seen them 
 acting in the particular episode or episodes presented. 
 In only one case has he attempted development of 
 character, in that of the heroine of " The Light that 
 Failed." Maisie is well enough so far as she goes, 
 but we feel that there was much more of Maisie that 
 was worth knowing than we are suffered to see, or than 
 Kipling himself had ever divined. I incline to think 
 that the greatest of all his creations is Terence Mul- 
 vaney. But Mulvaney is epic rather than dramatic 
 in treatment, and by putting him into so many stories 
 his creator had the opportunity of showing him from 
 many points of view. Mulvaney embodies the irony 
 of life. He is a figure of tragedy. 
 
 If Kipling's women fail in interest it is because of 
 that generalizing habit of his to which I have referred. 
 All that he seeks to delineate in women is the eternal 
 feminine functioning on the particular social plane on 
 which he has set it. Thus to some extent they are 
 all alike, as looked at from a certain point of view all 
 women are alike. Whether it be Mrs, Hauksbee
 
 44 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 and her set or Dinah Shad ; the mother and daughter 
 in " The Gadsbys " or Ameera in " Without Benefit of 
 Clergy " the best short story that ever has been 
 written in English each and all are finally reduced 
 to a common denominator. The differences are on 
 the surface, the resemblances are in the depths. This 
 view is common enough, and is as true as it is common, 
 but it is not the whole truth. Kipling himself has 
 stated it in the lines : 
 
 When you git to a man in the case 
 They're like as a row of pins, 
 For the colonel's lady and Judy O'Qrady 
 Are sisters under their skins. 
 
 I have noticed in women of my acquaintance a 
 disposition to resent the dictum. The resentment 
 I can understand, but when they deny its accuracy 
 my attitude is one of deferential scepticism. 
 
 Kipling's men, too, are pretty well all of them turned 
 out of the same mould at least all the men he obviously 
 likes and with whom he obviously sympathizes. They 
 are grown-up schoolboys ; men who have never 
 outgrown their schoolboy ideals, never outworn their 
 schoolboy hearts. Their man of the worldly air never 
 deceives us for a moment. Life for them is a big 
 playground in which much of the fun is fighting, and 
 in which every game is to be played with an almost 
 barbaric and pedantic regard for the rules and the 
 etiquette. 
 
 No other writer, certainly no other man, has ever 
 written of children quite as Rudyard Kipling wrote 
 in the height of his power. I do not mean that his 
 children were always true to child life. There is a 
 thought too much of the adult occasionally lisped out 
 in the child-language of some of them, but others are 
 quite perfect. It is rather in his portrayal of his own 
 feeling for them, of the man's feeling as distinguished 
 from the woman's, that he stands quite alone. He
 
 DECADENCE OF KIPLING 45 
 
 has recognized that the maternal instinct is not the 
 sole monopoly of one sex. Remember Strickland's 
 attitude towards his baby son, and Captain Gadsby's. 
 In his whole handling of children, in the emotional 
 atmosphere in which in his best stories he surrounds 
 them, he plumbs a depth of tenderness reached among 
 English writers only by two women, George Eliot and 
 Julia Horatia Ewing. 
 
 The mention of children carries one straight to the 
 " Jungle Books." The " Jungle Books " are works of 
 genius. They are that and something more than that. 
 They are apt examples of the peculiar genius of 
 Rudyard Kipling, the genius which attains its end 
 immediately and never has to wait for triumph. The 
 author was crowned in every nursery while the book- 
 covers still were redolent of gum and before the pages 
 were grubby. Mowgli and Bagheera, Rikki-Tikki and 
 Baloo, promptly took their places beside Alice and the 
 White Knight, the March Hare and the Mock Turtle. 
 I have never heard but one hostile criticism of the 
 " Jungle Books." It is that Kipling has fallen into 
 the fault of Landseer and has over-humanized his 
 animals. But surely what was a defect in the painter 
 is a merit in the writer. For a painter's business is 
 with externals only ; a writer must needs psychologize. 
 And how in the world were beasts to have been made 
 interesting to anyone but a professor of natural history 
 except by endowing them with the emotions and 
 motives of men ? And after all, Kipling's beasts are 
 very real beasts indeed. Men who have closely 
 studied wild life and who are by no means unbalanced 
 admirers of Kipling have assured me that here, at least, 
 his observation has never failed him and that his know- 
 ledge is little short of stupendous. 
 
 So far I have been treating of the rise of Rudyard 
 Kipling, a rise almost unparalleled in the history of 
 modern literature. No other man of our time has 
 achieved so rapid and so unchallenged a literary
 
 46 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 pre-eminence as did he. No statesman, no conquering 
 warrior, has ever won for himself such a national 
 tribute of anxiety, of sympathy, of prayer, as did 
 Kipling during the period of his serious illness in 
 America. It is not too much to say that had that 
 illness ended fatally it would have been felt by all of 
 us to have been a national, nay more, a racial calamity. 
 
 I now have to turn to a much less pleasant aspect of 
 my subject, the obvious, the lamentable, the almost 
 inexplicable decline of his literary power. That 
 decline seems to have begun somewhere about 
 the year 1899, or about seven years after the publica- 
 tion of " Barrack-Room Ballads." One would have 
 expected that the chief event of the year 1899 would 
 have made a very special appeal to Kipling, would 
 have evoked from him all that was in him of inspira- 
 tion, for that was the year of the South African War ; 
 the warlike spirit, patriotic emotion, Imperial instincts, 
 Imperial aspirations these had been the themes on 
 which his genius had been most liberally lavished. 
 Well, in October of that year England went to war 
 went to war, as many of us believed then, as many of 
 us believe now, in a just cause, and only after long 
 and repeated provocation. Kipling's admirers, the 
 whole nation that was, looked to him for a song, for 
 a great song, that should voice in inspiring and inspiri- 
 ting words the emotions and hopes and fears that were 
 filling all their hearts ; a song at least as fine in quality 
 as " The Hymn before Action," or as England's Answer 
 in " The Song of the English." He gave us " The 
 Absent-minded Beggar," that deplorable jingle which 
 evoked, as it was calculated to evoke, nothing more 
 worthy of evocation than the raucous applause of the 
 music-halls. 
 
 The South African War brought many disasters to 
 England, and for those who hold a nation's art and 
 literature to be among the most valuable of its posses- 
 sions, not the least of those disasters was the deadening
 
 DECADENCE OF KIPLING 47 
 
 and destructive blow it seems to have struck at the 
 genius of Rudyard Kipling. 
 
 If you will keep your eyes on the dates I am going 
 to mention you will find, I think, that my fixing of 
 the year 1899, the year of the war, as the turning- 
 point in Kipling's career is less fanciful than at first 
 blush you might suppose. The very best of his 
 lyrical work the high-water mark of it with few 
 exceptions, is in the volume called " The Seven Seas " 
 that was published in 1896. It contains " The Sea 
 Wife," "The True Romance," "The Flowers" and 
 at least half a dozen other indubitable masterpieces, 
 quite enough of themselves to have made and sustained 
 a poetic reputation. In 1903 was published " The 
 Five Nations," and that volume too contains some 
 fine work. It contains, for instance, " Recessional," 
 one of the noblest and one of the few great hymns in 
 the English tongue. But " Recessional " was written 
 in 1897, and if you make a critical study of the poems 
 in " The Five Nations " you will, I think, be driven 
 to the conclusion that with the exception of one poem 
 called " Lichtenberg," a rather beautiful poem, all 
 that is worthy of the poet who wrote " The Flowers " 
 was written before 1899. Most of the poems treating 
 directly with the events of the war are little above 
 the level of " The Absent-minded Beggar." 
 
 Now for the prose work. No one whose critical 
 faculty is worth mentioning will question for a moment 
 that the high-water mark of Kipling's prose was 
 reached in " Life's Handicap " (1891), " Many Inven- 
 tions " (1897), " The Day's Work " (1898), and " Kim " 
 (1900). Very well, in 1904 we had "Traffics and 
 Discoveries," containing only one fine story, only one 
 story in any way worthy of the author of " Without 
 Benefit of Clergy." That story, "They," of all in 
 the volume, alone discovered the true Kipling touch, 
 the touch of genius which pierces to the heart and 
 brings the lump to the throat the literary touch, that
 
 48 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 is. The other stories discover only the journalistic 
 touch. They are clever journalism. They have 
 humour, observation, technical skill in a high degree, 
 but of inspiration not a flash. 
 
 What is true of these other stories in " Traffics and 
 Discoveries " is true also of all the stories in " Actions 
 and Reactions " published in 1909. These stories 
 are not only journalism but many of them are not 
 even clever journalism. They are note-book journ- 
 alism, mechanical journalism. They positively fatigue 
 the reader with a multiplicity of inessential, tedious, 
 and often quite incomprehensible detail. Many of 
 them can be read intelligently only with the aid of a 
 technological encyclopaedia. " Puck of Pook's Hill " 
 I have not read, and so of it I may not speak, but I 
 have within the last year read the continuation of it, 
 " Rewards and Fairies," or as much of it as I could 
 manage. Some of the stories in this last volume 
 would pass without comment, either of praise or of 
 blame, had they been written by an author of second 
 or third or fourth rank ; but when we remember 
 that they were written by the author of " Wee Willie 
 Winkie " our feeling about them is that of puzzled 
 dismay. *' The mechanism is here all right," one 
 catches oneself saying, " but where is the magic ? " 
 And the children of the book ! They are said to be 
 a boy and a girl, but one has only Mr. Kipling's word 
 for that. They appear to be only two little sawdust- 
 stuffed dolls, one in knickerbockers and the other 
 in skirts. We know that one is meant to be a boy 
 because it occasionally does something with a pocket- 
 knife, and that the other is meant to be a girl because 
 it has a tender feeling for animals, but there all resem- 
 blance to anything like human childhood begins and 
 ends. And this from the man who has written of 
 children as no man or woman has ever written of 
 children before ! 
 
 I cannot end this dismal story of decadence without
 
 DECADENCE OF KIPLING 49 
 
 referring to Mr. Kipling's latest appearance as a 
 poet. Some year or so ago, I think it must have 
 been, some verses over his name appeared in the 
 Morning Post. I confess that when I read them 
 the words of the Bible sprang to my lips : " How 
 art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the 
 Morning ! How art thou cut down to the ground ! " 
 Here is one line from that set of verses : 
 
 Of the tribe which describe with a jibe the perversions 
 of justice. 
 
 If that line with its paltry rhymes tribe, cribe, 
 jibe had occurred in a comic opera, even then one 
 would have felt some passing pity for the brain of 
 the man who perpetrated it. Had it been written 
 by a schoolboy of twelve trying to be clever one 
 would have endeavoured on one's own side not to 
 be hard on the lad. But when written by the hand 
 that wrote " Recessional " well, one feels just that 
 burning sensation of shame, that sort of pitiful vica- 
 rious humiliation, that one feels when some old man 
 whom one has loved and admired in his prime babbles 
 and drivels in his senile decay. 
 
 But Rudyard Kipling is not an old man, and we 
 must look elsewhere than in senile decay for this 
 unimaginable falling off in the quality of his work. 
 
 What I suggest is that certain germs of evil to 
 use rather a trong term which were observable 
 in his mental and moral constitution from the first 
 have developed at the expense of other germs, germs 
 of good, that were obvious in equal, nay in much 
 larger, numbers. There was always in his work, 
 except in the very best of it, a certain jarring, dis- 
 cordant note of what shall I call it ? of brag and 
 bluster, of sham masculinity, of affected robustness. 
 Those of us who admired and believed in him most 
 were often hard put to it to defend him against the 
 accusation freely brought of blind and flamboyant
 
 50 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 jingoism. We defended him on the grounds that 
 though he was a man in years, he was a very young 
 man, and that he still preserved the heart of a school- 
 boy of a jolly, rollicking, high-spirited British school- 
 boy, the sort of schoolboy who honestly believes 
 that one Englishman can lick three Frenchmen any 
 day of the week. We asserted and believed that 
 his faults were faults that time would cure. In 
 healthy schoolboys time does cure them, but alas ! 
 it has not cured them in Kipling, it has enhanced and 
 emphasized them. The healthy schoolboy's over- 
 confidence and boastfulness are transmuted by time 
 and experience into measured confidence and quiet 
 self-reliance and sound judgment. During the South 
 African War Kipling, like the rest of us, discovered 
 that not only could one Englishman not lick three 
 Frenchman but that three Englishmen found extreme 
 difficulty in licking one Dutchman. He discovered 
 that many of those clean-limbed, well set-up public 
 school men of whom he was so inordinately proud, 
 whom he had regarded as so enormously superior in 
 physical and mental make-up to the rest of the world, 
 in the hour of trial turned out to be ineffectual, 
 blundering, lacking in the very qualities with which 
 he had so lavishly endowed them. And so the very 
 foundations of his confidence were shaken ; and they 
 have never been rebuilt. 
 
 His work always gave evidence of an undue admira- 
 tion, of an almost morbid love of strength, of mere 
 material force, as such. It was said of him, not 
 altogether without justice, by my friend Mr. G. K. 
 Chesterton that he loved England not because she 
 was England but because she was great. But with 
 all that, there was evidence too of a love of righteous- 
 ness and of a true feeling for the moral and the spiritual 
 in national life. We hoped and believed that time 
 would ultimately blend these two loves into one love 
 and that the day would come when his incomparable
 
 DECADENCE OF KIPLING 51 
 
 gift of song would be devoted to the service of an 
 Empire that was great and free and just, and great 
 because it was just and free. We had some right 
 to believe that when we read such lines as these : 
 
 //", drunk with the sight of power, we loose 
 Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, 
 
 Such boastings as the Gentiles use 
 Or lesser breeds without the Law. 
 
 Could we doubt that by the Law was meant the 
 moral Law of Righteousness, of Justice, of Love ? 
 
 What would seem to have happened is that the love 
 for the spiritual and the moral forces of life has waned 
 and the rather brutal admiration of material power 
 and success has waxed, until material power and 
 success have become idols on whose false altars all 
 the fine ideals the ideals of sympathy, of kindness, 
 of charity, of sacrifice are to be ruthlessly immolated. 
 If our country is to be great, according to this later 
 gospel of Kipling's, all she needs is to be strong, to 
 have millions of armed men, thousands of ironclad 
 ships, to have her sword not only always buckled on 
 her thigh (for that were well) but always drawn and 
 flourishing about her head. Given that flashing 
 sword and naught else matters. The condition of 
 the masses of her sons and daughters, of the 
 workers in her factories and her mines and the toilers 
 in her fields these people, these people who are 
 England, never come for a moment into Mr. Kipling's 
 purview. 
 
 The miserable result of this setting up of a mate- 
 rialist ideal, this loss of a spiritual conception of 
 life, this forgetting of social justice, is that Mr. Kipling 
 now writes verse which is not only execrable as art 
 but which is mendacious nonsense as well. How 
 execrable is the art, how mendacious the nonsense, 
 judge from these lines culled from that set of verses 
 in the Morning Post i
 
 52 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 The tares they had laughingly sown 
 
 Were ripe to the reaping, 
 The trust they had leagued to disowi 
 
 Was removed from their keeping ; 
 The eaters of other men's bread, the 
 
 Exempted from hardship, 
 The excusers of impotence fled, 
 
 Abdicating their worship. 
 
 I am not sure what this is all about. The language 
 is as obscure as the thought is foggy, but one just 
 guesses that somewhere at the back of his mind the 
 writer imagines himself to be saying something severe 
 about Mr. Lloyd George's Budget and that the " eaters 
 of other men's bread " are the poor old people for 
 whose exiguous pensions the new taxes had been 
 levied. If that is not what he means, then frankly 
 one must give up trying to discover his meaning. 
 And yet he can hardly mean that, for anyone with 
 the brains of a guinea-pig (and Rudyard Kipling has 
 more brains than a guinea-pig) must surely know 
 that they who eat other men's bread are they who 
 consume wealth which they have done nothing to 
 create ; that is to say, they whose incomes the new 
 taxes most shrewdly touched. Again, in the same 
 set of verses Kipling asks ironically : 
 
 . . . Who has toiled ? Who hath striven 
 
 And gathered possession ? 
 Let him be spoiled. He hath given 
 Full proof of transgression. 
 
 Presumably those who had toiled and striven were 
 Lord Rothschild, Lord Onslow, Lord Egerton of 
 Tatton, and those millionaires who a week before 
 the verses appeared had foregathered in the City 
 to denounce the land and the supertaxes. 
 
 It is a piteous and a pitiful thing this decadence of 
 Rudyard Kipling. We have seen something a little
 
 DECADENCE OF KIPLING 53 
 
 like it before when Wordsworth fell out of the fighting 
 line ; when 
 
 Just for a handful of silver he left us, 
 Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat ; 
 
 but never before in the proud history of English 
 literature have we been called upon to witness quite 
 such a downfall as this. And it all comes of the 
 mean admiration of mean things, of things which 
 look great but which are essentially small, of the 
 wilful blindness to fine ideals. The poison which has 
 entered into Kipling's soul has destroyed his art. 
 As one thinks of it one experiences a feeling as of 
 physical nausea, one wants to cover one's eyes and, 
 to quote the last words of Macaulay's essay on Bacon, 
 to " turn away from the checkered spectacle of so 
 much glory and so much shame." 
 
 1910.
 
 YI 
 
 TO A WORKING MAN 
 
 MY DEAR SIR, You ask me what, in my opinion, is the 
 most marked characteristic of the English working 
 classes, and by working classes you say you mean the 
 men and women who work for weekly wages which 
 seldom or never rise above two pounds a week. For the 
 life of me I cannot imagine why you want to know my 
 opinion or what interest my answer can have for you ; 
 still, I take it, your request is a compliment to me 
 personally, and being somewhat of a vain man I find 
 I cannot refrain from acceding to it. 
 
 Here goes, then. A close and serious study of 
 the social history of our country for the last hundred 
 years or so, and an interested and, I hope, an intelligent 
 observation of contemporary facts, have convinced 
 me that the most marked characteristic of the English 
 working classes is Patience. 
 
 Now Patience, like most other human qualities, 
 may be good or it may be evil ; it may be a high virtue 
 or a low vice. It may indicate fine intelligence or 
 extreme stupidity. 
 
 Let me illustrate my meaning. A man who is 
 smitten by an incurable disease, a disease for which 
 science has so far discovered no remedy or even alle- 
 viation, and who doesn't whimper or whine about 
 it, or make himself a nuisance to his family and friends, 
 who bears it " like a man," as we say, who keeps a 
 54
 
 TO A WORKING MAN 55 
 
 cheerful countenance, and continues to do what little 
 work his affliction permits him to perform, is a fine 
 and a wise fellow, and, in his way, a hero. But one 
 who suffers from some ailment known to be curable, 
 and who refuses to consult a doctor, or to buy a bottle 
 of physic from a druggist, or, if he can afford neither 
 doctor nor medicine, declines to attend the nearest 
 hospital as an out-patient, is no other than a mutton- 
 head deserving neither of sympathy nor help. He is 
 more than a fool ; he is something uncommonly like 
 a rogue. He is inflicting a grievous wrong not only 
 upon himself that perhaps is his own business and 
 does not greatly matter but upon his wife, his children, 
 and practically everybody with whom he comes into 
 contact. He may claim to be patient, and so he is, 
 but his Patience is the Patience not of the hero but of 
 the ass. 
 
 Well, that, that ass-like Patience under removable 
 burthens, is the most marked characteristic of the 
 English working classes. But why English ? you 
 may ask. Is it not also a quality of the workers all 
 over the world ? To some extent no doubt it is ; but 
 to nothing like the same extent. The foreign ass is 
 occasionally restive ; he rears, he kicks, he bites, 
 and now and then makes things dangerous for his 
 drivers. The English animal plods along serenely 
 and never so much as lays back his ears or shows his 
 teeth. 
 
 I have a lively recollection of once hearing an English 
 workman taunt a German with the freedom of speech 
 which is granted to Britons and denied to Teutons. 
 " We," boasted the Briton, " would never consent to 
 be muzzled. No one dares to muzzle us." " Muzzle 
 you," replied the other. " No, I should think not. 
 Who takes the trouble to muzzle sheep ? " 
 
 The counter lacked politeness, perhaps, but at least 
 it was not without point. 
 
 When one compares the condition of the English
 
 56 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 working classes at the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century with their condition at the beginning of the 
 twentieth, one is compelled to admit that there has 
 been a marked improvement. But when one studies 
 the history of the century which has intervened one 
 is no less compelled to recognize that uncommonly 
 little of that improvement has been due to the activity 
 or the enterprise of the working classes themselves. 
 They enjoy more of the good things of life now than 
 they did a hundred years ago, no doubt, but that 
 is mainly because there are a good many more of the 
 good things to go round. 
 
 Thanks to the invention of the steam-engine, and 
 to the marvellous improvement in machinery, there 
 has been an enormous, an almost incalculable increase 
 in wealth and productivity, and of this increase a small 
 part has found its way into the homes of the working 
 classes. Some of the crumbs from the rich man's 
 table have fallen to them. But it is very questionable 
 indeed whether they get now a larger proportion of the 
 total product than they got then. 
 
 To-day, after a whole century of incessant invention 
 and ever-increasing productivity, there are still some 
 twelve millions of them as low down as they can be 
 without actually ceasing to exist at all ; and many 
 millions more who have no good reason to suppose that 
 this time next year they will not be even as those 
 twelve millions are to-day. 
 
 The crushing defeat of the political party which 
 sought to impose a tax on foodstuff was owing chiefly 
 to the rally of the working classes to the defence of 
 free imports. And the motive of that rally was Fear. 
 The working classes were frightened lest a few pence 
 might be added to the weekly bread bill. They knew 
 that those few pence would make all the difference 
 between comparative comfort and positive misery. 
 What must be the condition of a people to whom 
 eightpence a week can make such a difference as that ?
 
 TO A WORKING MAN 57 
 
 A hundred, and considerably less than a hundred 
 years ago, the working classes might have pleaded with 
 some justice that they were in the position of the man 
 with an incurable disease. That there was nothing 
 for them but to grin and bear it. They had no political 
 power whatever, and even the right of combination 
 was withheld from them. For the last thirty or forty 
 years at any rate no such plea has been available. 
 Both political power and the right of combination 
 have been given to them. 
 
 Yes, mark, I say, given to them, not taken by them. 
 They have never so far taken anything. The middle 
 classes forced the political weapon from the hands of 
 the land-owning aristocracy by threat of revolution. 
 Their menace had something real behind it. They 
 meant what they said. The land-owning aristocracy 
 knew that and gave way. But the utmost the working 
 classes have ever done was to pull down a few railings 
 of Hyde Park. 
 
 Had the middle classes stiffened their lips and re- 
 fused to yield an inch, there can be no doubt that the 
 patient working classes would have simmered down 
 and accepted their voteless lot. But for half a hundred 
 mixed reasons the middle classes weakened and the 
 workman was made, by a free gift, master of the 
 situation a master who either did not realize his 
 mastery or who, realizing it, was too patient to put 
 it to any practical use. 
 
 But even so up to 1870 he might have argued that 
 although he had the power he had not education 
 sufficient to enable him to exert it. To-day that last 
 excuse is taken away from him. He still has not much 
 education, I know, but he has enough and more than 
 enough to bring home to him his own disease and to 
 
 Eoint out to him the remedy for it. No, it is neither 
 ick of power nor of knowledge how to use it that is 
 the matter with the English working classes. It is 
 Patience, the Patience, as I said, of the ass.
 
 58 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 Observe, it is with the Patience only of the ass that I 
 charge him, not with the other intellectual and moral 
 qualities of that useful beast. I have had some slight 
 experience of donkeys, and I have noticed that they 
 can show no little obstinacy upon occasion, and that 
 they are by no means easily humbugged. If you 
 want to discover the full potentiality of being hum- 
 bugged which resides in the working classes all you 
 have to do is to glance back over the various political 
 programmes of the two political parties since the 
 enfranchisement of the working classes, and compare 
 the promise with the performance. Those programmes 
 were framed and those promises made with the special 
 design of catching the working class vote. They 
 caught it every time. The snare was laid right in 
 view of the bird, and the bird hopped into it unfail- 
 ingly. 
 
 Not to tax your memory too shrewdly, I will invite 
 you to look no farther back than the famous pro- 
 gramme which was called the " Newcastle," somewhere 
 about 1892, I think wasn't it ? That programme 
 contained several proposals which, if adopted, would 
 have made for the material advantage of the working 
 classes. Understand though that that programme was 
 a programme drawn up by middle-class men and not 
 by working-class leaders. Still there it was, and the 
 working classes jumped at it and returned the Liberal 
 party to power on the strength of it. Well, my dear 
 sir, what became of it ? Where is it now ? 
 
 A donkey, we are told, will run after a carrot dangled 
 before its nose. But then it must be a real carrot, 
 after all. A thing of pasteboard and paint is good 
 enough to set the working classes on the trot. 
 
 But, you may tell me that though all I have been 
 saying is true enough of the past, it is not true of the 
 present ; that the Patience of the working classes, 
 though incredible, is not exhaustless, and that the 
 general election of the present year proves it to be
 
 TO A WORKING MAN 59 
 
 exhausted at last. I think I see you pointing with 
 pride to those thirty or so members of Parliament who 
 follow the lead of Mr. Keir Hardie as a proof of the 
 fact. 
 
 Now, really, if those thirty members and the hurray- 
 ing their return evoked prove anything, they prove 
 what history has already proved many a time before : 
 how easily the working classes are pleased, and with 
 what very small potatoes they are contented. If they 
 ask for a whole loaf it is never in the least necessary 
 to give them half a one. Just a dry crust will always 
 stop their mouths. 
 
 How do you think the middle classes would have 
 taken it if after the Reform Bill of '32 they had been 
 able to send only thirty members to the House of 
 Commons ? As a matter of fact, the Act which en- 
 franchised the middle classes set them straightway in 
 the political saddle. There they have been ever since. 
 There they will remain until the working classes pull 
 them out of it ; which means, if things go on as they 
 are going on now that there they will remain for ever 
 and ever. 
 
 Just think, I pray you, of the difference. The 
 working classes were enfranchised, and pretty fully 
 enfranchised, more than twenty-five years ago, and 
 to-day they are able to send only thirty members out 
 of six hundred and seventy to represent them in the 
 House of Commons ! Permit me to remind you that 
 the Universities alone send nine ! 
 
 But you will tell me no, stay, I don't think you 
 will do that but somebody else will tell you, and you 
 being a workman will believe him if only he puts it 
 neatly enough, that the working classes can be repre- 
 sented by a highly educated gentleman of wealth and 
 position as well, or even better, than by a man of their 
 own order. Yes, and so they might. There is no 
 absolutely imperative reason why they should not be. 
 But the question is, not what might be, but what is
 
 60 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 and what has been. Have the working classes been 
 adequately represented by the highly educated gentle- 
 men of wealth and position, who have solicited and 
 obtained their suffrages so far ? If you are inclined 
 to think so just run your eyes through the Statute 
 Book for half an hour or so. Or, no, there is no need 
 to take that trouble ; just look around you, and com- 
 pare the state of the districts where the working classes 
 dwell with those inhabited by the highly educated 
 gentlemen of wealth and position. 
 
 Further, ask one of these highly educated gentlemen 
 whether he would feel that he and his were adequately 
 represented by members of the working classes. You 
 would know exactly how he felt about it by the way 
 in which he would smile at your ingenuous question. 
 
 What happens, I put it to you, when there comes a 
 big strike or a great labour dispute in the coal trade, 
 say, or the shipping trade, or the cotton trade ? You 
 know well enough. Then the working classes find 
 themselves fighting for daily bread against the very 
 men, and the friends and relations of the very men, 
 for whom they voted so gaily at the last election I 
 Verily the situation is not without its humour, is it ? 
 
 They say that eels like being skinned alive. I have 
 always felt it unfair to the eels, that saying, because 
 the eels, you know, can't help themselves. They never 
 get a chance of expressing their opinions on the opera- 
 tion. If they had a voice and a vote in the matter, 
 and invariably spoke up and voted for the fishermen 
 and the cooks, then one could feel more certain of 
 their preference. 
 
 But it is almost clear to me that the working classes, 
 or at any rate the great mass of them, do like the 
 conditions in which they find themselves and in which 
 their children's children will find themselves so long 
 as that ass-like Patience of theirs is their most marked 
 characteristic. They like the long hours, the mean 
 rewards, the ever-present uncertainty, the comfortable
 
 TO A WORKING MAN 61 
 
 assurance that if they live long enough they will end 
 their days in the workhouse or the infirmary. They 
 like these conditions ; we may feel sure of that in 
 their case, because they have a voice and a vote in the 
 matter, and they use both to shout and vote for the 
 men whose interest it is to maintain the conditions. 
 Better still, oh, much better, do they like, do they 
 positively love, the flapdoodle which these same men 
 so liberally serve out to them. 
 
 Flapdoodle is cheap, you know ; it costs practically 
 nothing, and that is why there is always so much of 
 it to be had for the asking. 
 
 1906.
 
 VII 
 
 TO THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN 
 
 SIRE, It will doubtless cause your Majesty some 
 surprise surprise which your Oriental training and 
 sense of self-dignity will prevent your manifesting by 
 so much as the flicker of an eyelash to be addressed 
 thus, as it were without ceremony, by one in the humble 
 position of a journalist. Therefore I make bold at 
 the outset to advise your Majesty that in England the 
 journalist considers himself, and he hopes, is con- 
 sidered by his public, to be on terms of the easiest 
 familiarity with Principalities and Powers. Nothing 
 is sacred to a journalist in England. He will 
 reprimand an archbishop as unhesitatingly as he 
 will criticize a constable. He will condemn a Cabinet 
 as ruthlessly as he will castigate a County Council. 
 Two considerations only restrain his inveterate irre- 
 verence, a wholesome fear of offending a certain elusive 
 but most masterful entity which he calls " the man 
 in the street," and a very genuine respect for the law 
 of libel. Therefore I would have your Majesty 
 to understand that in thus approaching you 
 directly and not through the medium of your Majesty's 
 Ministers (of whose names, titles, and addresses I 
 regret to say I am ignorant) I am in no way outrag- 
 ing the custom or violating the etiquette of English 
 journalism. 
 
 Let it be understood, let it be taken for granted, I 
 62
 
 TO THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN 63 
 
 beseech you, that I bend my bones to the fullest extent 
 of their elasticity ; that I bow again and again until 
 my back aches fit to break, as we say in England ; that 
 I go through every other possible contortion demanded 
 by the honourable customs of your Majesty's august 
 Court. 
 
 My object in addressing you is one which your 
 Majesty will at least appreciate at its right value, for 
 it is in the fullest sense of the word patriotic. I desire 
 to prevent, by anticipation, a misunderstanding on 
 your Majesty's part which might easily give rise to an 
 international complication. . . . But I fear I am 
 doing myself less than justice in trying, as I have been 
 trying in the last three paragraphs, to compel myself 
 to write in the stilted, costive and ridiculous phrase- 
 ology of Addresses to the Throne. It is the custom 
 of my fellow-countrymen always to speak to a monarch 
 as though he were a particularly pompous uncle, and 
 it is a custom which I dislike extremely. Therefore 
 with your Majesty's kind permission, which I make 
 bold to take as given, I will continue this letter in the 
 style which comes natural to me, for, truth to tell, 
 I cannot keep up the other sort a minute longer. 
 
 When I read in my morning paper, your Majesty, 
 that our gracious Sovereign was about to send a Royal 
 Prince to you to present you with the Order of the 
 Garter it occurred to me that unless that Royal Prince 
 knew his business (and we have no reason whatever 
 to suppose he does) you might take that present more 
 as a slight and an offence than as a compliment and 
 an honour. 
 
 I am not acquainted (it is my misfortune, not my 
 fault) with the more intimate details of a Japanese 
 lady's toilette, and it seems to me extremely probable 
 that your Majesty may not even know, may not so 
 much as apprehend, what the curious device of this 
 Order which our King seeks to bestow upon you, may 
 signify. A star, of course, you would appreciate, for
 
 64 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 you have seen stars, a cross you would more or less 
 understand, for you have heard of crosses but a 
 garter ! 
 
 "A star," I think I hear you saying, "stands for 
 hope ; a cross for self-sacrifice ; but what in the name 
 of all my royal ancestors, is the meaning of a garter ? " 
 
 Well, a garter, your Majesty, is an article of feminine 
 apparel, seldom seen, except in shop windows, and 
 rarely or never talked of. All that is respectable in 
 English society is content to know that it is there, 
 in its proper place. To mention it were indiscreet, to 
 discover it were positively indecorous. 
 
 There are many mysteries connected with the garter, 
 mysteries so recondite that I feel it almost hopeless 
 to make them even partially clear, still more adequately 
 to explain them, to one who is unfamiliar with the 
 curious inconsistencies and contradictions of English 
 thought and manners. For instance, a Prime Minister 
 may, and does, in full Court, so wear his garter that 
 every eye may see and every heart grow envious. 
 Were the Prime Minister's wife, daughter, female 
 cousin, or aunt to do precisely the same thing, she 
 would be instantly dismissed from the Royal presence 
 (at least, so we hope and believe) and cut by all her 
 women acquaintances. When I say " cut," your 
 Majesty, I do not mean physically injured by a lethal 
 weapon. The " cut " in England is inflicted by some- 
 thing sharper than any sword. 
 
 Then again, a garter, the garter, may be given by 
 the Sovereign to the highest nobleman or (I think) 
 noblewoman in the land ; but were a bank clerk to 
 present his young woman with a pair of them the girl's 
 father would call on him next morning with a horse- 
 whip. 
 
 Her Majesty the Queen of England is at present the 
 only woman in the realm on whom the Order has been 
 conferred. She is our only Lady of the Garter. But, 
 such is our quaint custom, when her Majesty does
 
 TO THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN 65 
 
 wear it she wears it round her royal neck the very 
 last place, one would imagine, where a garter can be 
 of the slightest use. Were any other lady of her Court 
 to appear in public with her garter round her neck or 
 anywhere else where it was visible she would (in charity) 
 be held to be out of her mind. 
 
 The very origin of the Order with which your Majesty 
 is to be presently honoured is enwrapped in an atmo- 
 sphere of something uncommonly like Court scandal. 
 Upon a State occasion many years ago, at the Court 
 of one of our King's royal predecessors, a great Court 
 lady incontinently dropped her garter on the floor . . . 
 there for all to see ! How she came to be so careless 
 in tying it (elastic was not in vogue in those days) 
 history telleth not, and whether it was by design or 
 accident we are not told. But anyhow, so it was; 
 and, I regret to have to tell your Majesty, the courtiers 
 present began to cough and the ladies to titter ; for 
 the smart set was as amused by " that sort of thing " 
 in those historic times as it is to-day. Then the King 
 his name, by the way, was Edward, and he was as 
 adroit in gallantry as he was skilful in statesmanship 
 stooped, picked that garter up, and, with a look on his 
 face that meant " let me just catch any of you making 
 jokes about this, that's all ! " let fall the sententious 
 observation, " Evil be to him who evil thinks." Then, 
 in order to finish off the affair artistically, and to leave 
 the Mrs. Grundy of the period without a word to say 
 for herself, he instituted the Most Noble Order of the 
 Garter. That, as the reporters remarked at the time, 
 closed the incident. But there is a strange perfume 
 of femininity about the whole thing, isn't there ? 
 
 And now to come to the point, at which I frankly 
 admit I have been some time arriving. 
 
 This little piece of blue ribbon that our Sovereign 
 is sending to you across the sad seas ! There is more 
 in it, let me assure you, than meets the eye. By that 
 I do not mean a joke or an innuendo, I mean just this,
 
 66 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 that the garter is something more than an Order, it 
 is a symbol. That small but necessary bit of woman's 
 wear to which we pay so much honour over here that 
 to receive it from the King's hands means more, ever 
 so much more, than to receive a peerage, stands for 
 us as an emblem of chivalry, it symbolizes the position 
 of woman in England. Do you see, your Majesty ? 
 We think so highly of woman over here that we take 
 the least obvious if not the least important article 
 of her apparel and adorn with it the necks and the 
 legs of our greatest statesmen and the necks and legs 
 of such foreign princes as we most delight to honour. 
 Woman in England is so superior a being a wife, let 
 me remind you, is always called a man's " better half " 
 over here that we take the very ribbon by which 
 she keeps up her stockings and prevents their wrinkling 
 around her ankles, as our blazon and ensign of nobility. 
 Can, I put it to you, adoration of a human creature 
 go very much farther than that ? 
 
 I am the more anxious that you should get that 
 significant fact firmly fixed in your royal head because 
 I have a fear that some of your emissaries who have 
 studied our social and political customs over here may 
 have reported certain things to you which, regarded 
 superficially, might convey to you an entirely contrary 
 opinion. 
 
 You may have heard, for instance, that though we 
 allow a woman to sit upon our Throne we do not 
 permit one of her sex to be called into her counsels. 
 Our women are expected, and indeed compelled, to 
 obey the laws, but they are not suffered to assist in 
 making them. We invite them, with an unrefusable 
 invitation, to pay the taxes ; but we do not suffer 
 them to have a say in the levying of them. That may 
 strike you as being just a trifle incompatible with the 
 honour we pay to woman's garter, but in point of fact 
 it is not only consistent with it, it is inseparable from 
 it, We consider the business of law making and of
 
 TO THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN 67 
 
 tax levying a dirtyish business, fit only for the coarser 
 nature of men. We feel that woman's finer spirit 
 would be sullied by the mere contact with it. For 
 instance, you cannot take an active part in English 
 politics without stigmatizing your political opponents 
 with unseemly epithets. You cannot be a good 
 Liberal, let us say, without using the language of 
 opprobrium concerning the Unionists, or a good Con- 
 servative without speaking slightingly of the Liberals ; 
 or a good Socialist without roundly abusing both 
 parties. The pursuit of politics involves a good deal 
 of what we call " Billingsgate " ; and it would grieve 
 us, we simply could not bear, to hear our women 
 (whose very garters we reverence) resorting to such 
 rude and rough expedients as these. We feel that 
 they would be vulgarized, yes, even " unsexed." We 
 frequently tell them that when, as sometimes happens, 
 they ask for what they absurdly call their " rights." 
 It does not seem to impress them much, but still . . . ! 
 Then, again, there are certain of the learned and 
 well remunerated professions from which our women 
 are excluded the legal, for example. But that is 
 not because our legal gentleman are fearful of woman's 
 competition, but rather because they are jealous of 
 her honour. They recognize that lawyers, especially 
 advocates, are compelled by the exigencies of their 
 " cases " occasionally to suppress the truth, aye, 
 even sometimes to suggest the false. And they feel 
 that women could do neither of those things success- 
 fully, at any rate not without injury to their more 
 delicate, more truthful natures. Our lawyers' ex- 
 periences of their own wives and daughters and sweet- 
 hearts tell them that in private life woman never 
 does suppress the true or suggest the false. Further, 
 we feel that so irresistible are woman's attractions, 
 so winsome her ways, so seductive and bewildering 
 the very atmosphere she creates around her, that 
 were a woman, a pretty woman (and one cannot
 
 68 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 ensure, you know, that all women lawyers should be 
 ugly), to appear in court as the counsel for the most 
 obviously guilty prisoner the jury would promptly 
 acquit the criminal and then wait outside on the chance 
 of inviting the lady to luncheon at the Savoy. . . . 
 The Savoy is a hotel in the near neighbourhood of 
 our Law Courts. 
 
 We do admit our women (I trust your informants 
 have told you that) to be doctors, but although we 
 permit it we do not like it, we do our best to discourage 
 it. For doctors, you see, have to do things to the 
 human body which we like not our women to see done. 
 But we allow, we gladly allow, we encourage them 
 to be nurses and to be present at the operations the 
 doctors perform. If you ask me how I reconcile those 
 two customs, I must respectfully request your Majesty 
 not to be so beastly inquisitive ; and I must remind 
 you that consistency is the bugbear of little minds. 
 
 But we do not allow our young women in schools 
 to learn physiology, for we regard it as indelicate, 
 almost indecent, that a young woman, particularly 
 that species of young woman that we call a young 
 lady, should know more of her own body than her own 
 looking-glass can tell her. I feel sure that your 
 Majesty's Oriental nature will approve of that. 
 
 Speaking broadly, we still hold fast to the Eastern 
 view that woman's place is her home, that her duties 
 are to her husband and to her children, and that if she 
 do not happen to have a husband (and if she have 
 children without one woe betide her, your Majesty, 
 but such a thing is unthinkable) then to somebody 
 else's children in the capacity of governess or nurse. 
 If you have heard by chance that, in spite of the 
 deeply-rooted conviction of ours as to woman's sphere 
 (we always call it woman's sphere) being purely domes- 
 tic, many hundreds of thousands of women in England 
 are working outside that sphere, working in factories 
 and fields, for their livings, working in garrets and
 
 TO THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN 69 
 
 cellars for a pittance that will not provide a living, 
 or anything like a living, that pregnant women and 
 women within a few days of their childbearing are 
 compelled to daily labour, the severity of which in- 
 flicts upon them and their offspring lifelong injury, 
 that in the streets of all our great cities thousands of 
 women are nightly offering their bodies for sale ; and 
 if you demand of me how all this agrees with what I 
 have already assured you is the honour in which we 
 hold woman (and her garter) well, your Majesty, 
 I must reply that that in short all these things 
 come about through the I am afraid you'll never 
 understand but through the working of certain 
 economic forces, certain Natural Laws, that are be- 
 yond the control of but I trespass too long on your 
 Majesty's patience. It would require too much time 
 and thought and ink to reply satisfactorily to your 
 Majesty's confoundedly inconvenient questions. And 
 so I subscribe myself your Majesty's most humble 
 and obedient servant. 
 
 1905.
 
 VIII 
 
 TO PRINCE FUSHIMI 
 
 YOUR IMPERIAL HIGHNESS, I would that I might 
 have addressed you in prettier and more picturesque 
 terms. In point of fact I did hesitate for some time 
 before deciding. Nephew of the Rising Sun and Full 
 Moon and Lord Paramount of the Blossoming Cherry 
 Tree struck me as being at once a more adequate and 
 a more poetic beginning, but I remembered that had 
 I begun thus it might have occurred to some British 
 official or other, somebody with an office in St. James's 
 Palace Yard, that in adopting so florid a mode of 
 address I was trying to poke mild fun at your High- 
 ness's country and customs. In England just now we 
 are forbidden to joke concerning things Japanese, and 
 I did not want to get the Sunday Chronicle into 
 trouble with officialdom. It has not yet dawned upon 
 British officialdom that an Oriental people may just pos- 
 sibly have a sense of humour, at least equal to its own. 
 
 Although your Highness' s honourable feet have 
 been set upon our soil for only some four-and-twenty 
 hours, you will already have discovered that we have 
 among us, or let me say more correctly above us, 
 one official who has in a marked degree a sense of 
 the appropriate, I refer to our gracious King, who 
 has just conferred upon your Highness the most 
 Honourable Order of the Bath ! How essentially 
 right our King always is ! to confer the Order of the 
 70
 
 TO PRINCE FUSHIMI 71 
 
 Bath upon the representative of the cleanest people in 
 the world ! Could anything be more deliciously apt ? 
 
 When, some years ago I think it must have been 
 after your Highness's troops had won a battle and so 
 had proved that Japan was a civilized Power his 
 Majesty presented your august master with the Order 
 of the Garter, I confess I had some qualms and 
 dubieties as to how your august master would take it. 
 There is something feminine, something frivolous, 
 something almost frilly, about a garter, it seemed to 
 me, and I thought it might have so seemed to him. 
 And so I wrote to him a letter pointing out and 
 explaining that the Garter was far from being a 
 symbol of impropriety, or even of giddiness ; that, on 
 the contrary, among us it stood for chivalry and for 
 all we most respect and admire in woman. I may 
 mention, by the way, that your august master has so 
 far not acknowledged that letter. 
 
 But the Order of the Bath that is a different 
 matter. The bath is a utensil much venerated in 
 England. Among the upper and middle classes it has 
 become somewhat of a superstition. It has taken the 
 place of family prayers. Most young men of those 
 classes would feel deepest shame to themselves if they 
 did not take it in the morning, and take it cold. It 
 is an inevitable and an essential ceremonial in the 
 worship of physical culture, about the only worship in 
 which the young men of our upper and middle classes 
 take part, just now. It is said that our young women, 
 too . . . but I beg your Highness's pardon, it is not 
 decorous in England to speak of or even to think of 
 young women in connexion with anything so intimate 
 as bathing. One must control one's thoughts. 
 
 We do not like the bath exactly, your Highness. In 
 winter mornings we find it inconvenient and uncom- 
 fortable, but just because it is so extraordinarily un- 
 pleasant we jump into it, for we cannot get over the 
 idea, so deeply rooted in the English mind, that that
 
 72 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 which is uncomfortable must needs be good for us. If 
 your Highness stays long enough with us you will 
 infallibly discover that in England the moral is almost 
 synonymous with the disagreeable. To be happy is 
 to be suspect. 
 
 There are some queer things about the Order of the 
 Bath, your Highness, some inexplicable things. To 
 begin with, it was instituted somewhere about the 
 year 1400, when it is well known nobody washed ; and 
 it was revived by one of our Kings, the First George, I 
 think it was, who, if report speak true, was by no 
 means the cleanest of our monarchs. But incon- 
 gruities of this sort are not rare in England. Then 
 there is the motto attached to the jewel of the Order : 
 Tria juncta in uno, " Three joined in one." The 
 appropriateness of that motto to a bath your Highness 
 will find it difficult to discover, and I as difficult to 
 explain. If it means three persons joined in one bath, 
 then it is downright libellous of English manners. I 
 assure your Highness we never do anything like that. 
 Here we go to our bathroom alone and carefully lock 
 the door. 
 
 I make no doubt that the real object of your High- 
 ness's visit is to prosecute personal investigations as 
 to what your country has to gain by its alliance with 
 mine, and to learn at the same time what among us it 
 would be well for your Government to follow and what 
 to avoid. If that be so may I beg you not to look too 
 closely at our army. And yet on the other hand I 
 feel rather strongly that if you do not look at it closely, 
 if you do not look at it through a tolerably powerful 
 magnifying glass, you will be unable to see it at all. 
 It is scarcely visible at a distance and it gets smaller 
 every day. 
 
 Consult Mr. Haldane about our army, your Highness, 
 and take upon faith everything he tells you. He will 
 tell you that our army is in a state of " transition." 
 If you had come here any time during the last genera-
 
 TO PRINCE FUSHIMI 73 
 
 tion the Minister of War of the period would have 
 told you exactly the same thing. We are thinking 
 about our army, your Highness, we are trying really 
 hard to make up our minds what we want an army for, 
 and whether we want an army at all. If you should 
 pay a visit to our War Office and I hope you will, it 
 will amuse and interest you, for it is by far the finest 
 museum of antiquities we possess and consult the 
 permanent officials, you will find that they are not 
 thinking about the army at all ; that what they are 
 thinking about is the sort of caps the army shall wear 
 when, and if by chance, we get one, and whether our 
 Volunteers, of whom we have a few still left, shall be 
 supplied with the guns of last century or of the century 
 before that. 
 
 We are thinking about reforming our War Office, 
 your Highness. We began to think about that five 
 years ago, and the exhausting, if infertile, process 
 still continues. 
 
 I would not, if I were you pardon the impious 
 suggestion, it is an English colloquialism and desired 
 to keep a clear brain, inquire too curiously into our 
 religion. It has before now puzzled investigators as 
 shrewd as your Highness. We have a fine assortment 
 forgive the commercial ring of the phrase, but we 
 are a nation of shopkeepers of religions, but out of 
 them all it is scarcely possible to abstract anything 
 definite or satisfying. 
 
 I am quite unable to recommend to you a sample 
 by which you may judge the rest. However, you 
 will find the oldest brand at the Pro-Cathedral in 
 Westminster and the very latest thing of all in the 
 City Temple on Holborn Viaduct. Perhaps it might 
 be well to ask the leaders of what is called " religious 
 thought " in England to form a small committee and 
 draw up for your Highness's study a brief creed which 
 shall be the greatest common measure of their agree- 
 ment. I suggest that you should invite the Arch-
 
 74 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 bishop of Canterbury, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Father 
 Vaughan, Dr. Clifford, the Rev. Stuart Headlam, 
 Mr. R. J. Campbell, and Professor Oliver Lodge. 
 When you have discovered what single article of faith 
 all these gentlemen have in common you will know, 
 well, something that none of us has been able to find 
 out. 
 
 We should all like you to carry away with you 
 favourable opinions of the state of dramatic art in 
 England. Therefore I beseech you do not go to the 
 theatres. A few weeks ago I should not have given 
 you the same advice, because then you might have 
 happened upon a play called The Mikado, a bright, 
 witty, amusing, melodious, topsy-turvy little play 
 that would have pleased you hugely. But Somebody, 
 nobody knows who, though the queerest things are 
 hinted, has thought well to signalize your arrival 
 amongst us by forbidding the performance of the only 
 play that might possibly have entertained you. 
 
 At any other time I should have recommended you 
 if you were in search of an hour's relaxation to visit 
 a music-hall. But just now our music-halls are under 
 a cloud, or, to be more accurate, are in a whirlpool 
 of controversy in which I would not for the world 
 have a distinguished and friendly sojourner involved. 
 If you were to visit a music-hall just now you might 
 possibly see an unclothed young woman, painted 
 white and posing as a statue. 
 
 Now we are not quite sure yet whether such a 
 spectacle is moral. We are thinking about that ; or, 
 rather, we are waiting patiently while other people 
 think about it. In England questions of morality are 
 not settled by the people themselves ; they are settled 
 for the people by bishops, mayors of provincial towns 
 (such ultra-moral towns as Manchester and Glasgow, 
 for example), members of watch committees, and 
 county councillors. But the serious point is this : If 
 you were to see that unclothed young woman, painted
 
 TO PRINCE FUSHIMI 75 
 
 white and posing (for fifteen seconds) as a statue, and 
 were rather to like the look of her, and to smile 
 approval and clap your Imperial hands, why, then 
 you might be voted an immoral foreigner, and there 
 would be a prompt end of the Japanese Alliance. 
 Coming as you do from a country where young women 
 in complete nudity walk down their gardens to take 
 their baths and naively bid good morning to the 
 casual passer-by, and where men and women bathe 
 together in the public baths, you will naturally find 
 it hard to believe that in England the undraped 
 human form is held an indecent and a shocking thing. 
 But it is so, I assure you. Consult your Royal host 
 on this matter. He knows. 
 
 Talking of morality, by the way, if you would retain 
 any sort of idea of ours, do not go out into the streets 
 of London or of any other of our cities at night. You 
 might so easily misunderstand. Obviously I cannot 
 speak with much plainness upon this matter plain 
 speech is not the English way. 
 
 But the fact of the matter, briefly, is this. Japanese 
 and English methods are entirely different. In Japan 
 if an evil exist your Government recognizes its exist- 
 ence, regulates it, makes the best of a bad job of it. 
 In England we have a theory that as long as a thing 
 is not recognized it does not really and truly exist at 
 all, it only appears to exist, and anyhow, it is nobody's 
 business. And so we do not recognize it nor regulate 
 it, nor make the best of it. We suffer it to go on its 
 own foul way. You will never be able to understand 
 this theory of ours, your Highness ; nobody but an 
 Englishman could understand it. Therefore do not 
 try to understand, and do not go into our streets at 
 night, 
 
 I am not sure that it would not be better on the 
 whole for you to remain in York House for the greater 
 part of your stay, to go abroad only in a carriage, 
 and to accept as Gospel what is told you. If you
 
 76 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 wore to look about you would see such strange things. 
 Supposing you were told to go down to our manu- 
 facturing districts, for instance, the districts where 
 England's industrial supremacy (of which you must 
 have heard tell) is built up and maintained and 
 were to see the people at work, to follow them to their 
 homes and see where they slept, and what they ate, 
 and how they spent their leisure time ; to go to some 
 of our schools and see the workpeople's children come 
 in the morning, to examine their boots, and to ask 
 them what they had for breakfast, and what they 
 expected to have for dinner ! Well, I am afraid you 
 might return to your native land harbouring some 
 doubts as to whether industrial supremacy was so 
 very well worth having after all, and whether it was 
 quite worth your country's while to emulate, and to 
 imitate, as she is doing, the industrial methods of her 
 ally. And that, your Highness, would never do ; 
 because we hope to have a good customer in Japan. 
 We hope to be drawn closer to Japan by the peaceful 
 bonds of commerce. You know the way we talk. 
 
 1907.
 
 IX 
 
 TO A LADY 
 
 MY DEAR JULIA, I always boggle an instant or so 
 at your name when I write to you. It does not 
 exactly fit you somehow. Julia labels a pretty 
 woman well enough if she be dark and her eyes be 
 violet, but it does not quite imply a wise one, no 
 matter how otherwise delightful she may be. Had 
 your parents known how you were going to develop 
 they would have called you Hypatia or Zenobia, or 
 even Jane. Jane is not necessarily small, and there 
 is no earthly reason why she should not be extremely 
 intelligent. However ! 
 
 You ask me to explain and defend and expatiate upon 
 that apparent obiter dictum of mine delivered just at 
 the moment when that most opportune and much 
 desired tea arrived, and with it those dear, nice people 
 who never talk for two seconds or sentences on end 
 about anything that matters. How restful such 
 people are at times, aren't they ? and how devas- 
 tating at others ! 
 
 What I said was, I seem to remember, that there 
 are many more men who love their wives love them 
 in the true sense of the term, the sense we understand 
 well enough, but cannot minutely define than there 
 are women who in that same sense love their husbands. 
 That was it, wasn't it ? 
 
 Well, of course, it is a statement incapable of proof, 
 77
 
 78 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 of mathematical demonstration. It cannot obviously 
 be confirmed by statistics. But, then, few things 
 that are worth proving can. You cannot in that way 
 prove the case for Free Trade, for instance, or for its 
 opposing policy. Both sides tell you you can, but 
 they both show themselves to be wrong by both 
 failing to do it. 
 
 You might, of course, make a list of the names of 
 all your married friends and acquaintances and tick 
 off on each side respectively, as it were. But that 
 process, though it might be more or less satisfactory 
 to yourself, would not convince anybody else. It 
 would not convince me, for one, though I dearly wish 
 you would do it. I should so much like to see how 
 you categorized yourself and Arthur. I wonder if he 
 would like it as much. 
 
 But even then you would have to correct your 
 figures. Crude statistics, even of that meagre kind, 
 would not do at all. You would have to make time 
 allowances, so to speak. In the first year of their 
 married life Jill might love Jack more than Jack 
 loved her though it is not in the least likely but 
 how about the fifth year, and all the years right away 
 on ? And then, again, you can't measure love. You 
 can't get a measure of capacity either big enough and 
 deep enough or small and shallow enough. You can't 
 judge of it by its external expressions. In other words, 
 you can't tell how much people love each other, or 
 who loves whom, by their conduct in public, or even 
 in private. 
 
 No ; all you can have on this question, no matter 
 how observant you may be and no matter how com- 
 petent a judge of human character, is a general 
 impression. But a general impression, though vaguish 
 and misty about the outlines, may be an uncommonly 
 strong impression. It may easily amount to a con- 
 viction an ineradicable, an inexpugnable, an invin- 
 cible conviction.
 
 TO A LADY 79 
 
 There ! There are three nice adjectives all be- 
 ginning with " in." I like that sort, don't you ? 
 Well, it is my conviction, with those three adjectives 
 attached, that there are more men who love their 
 wives than there are wives who love their husbands. 
 And it is yours, too. You almost admitted as much. 
 Now, if you can show that such and such a thing 
 must be, or even if you can show that there are a 
 thousand reasons why it should, for one why it 
 shouldn't be, then I really do think, even in the 
 absence of what is called positive proof, you may 
 pretty safely assume that it is. Anyhow, it is upon 
 such defective proofs that we act in all the big affairs 
 of life. Odds of a thousand to one on are good enough 
 for any of us. 
 
 I confess that to me nothing is more natural, more 
 obvious, more inevitable than that this state of things, 
 which I say does exist, should exist. For the life of 
 me I cannot see how it could be otherwise. No blame 
 attaches to either sex in the matter. It is not a case 
 for blame or approval, or for an oral judgment of any 
 kind. It is just a necessary fact of our civilization. 
 I am not at all sure that it was not almost as true of 
 all other past and possible-present social conditions, 
 but I am quite sure that it is true of ours. 
 
 To begin with, most men marry for love. That 
 sounds a sentimental sort of thing to say just now 
 when the atmosphere is positively acrid with cynical 
 remarks about marriage. But come to think of it, 
 what else have most men to marry for ? What do 
 they get by it, but the satisfaction of that instinct, 
 that impulse, which we call love. Mind, I do not 
 mean raw passion. That can always be satisfied 
 without anything so drastic and so irrevocable, and so 
 generally bothersome, as marriage. 
 
 No, emphatically, it is love, the real old tender 
 thing of the romanticists ; the thing that transforms, 
 that recreates, that sets men to the doing of heroic
 
 80 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 and splendid follies, the vital flame that many waters 
 cannot quench. There, now, what do you think of 
 that from a man who doesn't often let himself go on 
 these subjects ? 
 
 Oh ; of course, some men marry for money, some 
 for ambition, some, a precious few, for the sake of the 
 possible children ; some for that delusive state which 
 is called domestic comfort (though how they hope to 
 get it if they marry a woman they do not love, and 
 who does not love them, it is a little puzzling to see) ; 
 and some for all sorts of reasons, which we may sum 
 up under the general head of " sundry." But, really, 
 all these lumped together do not count in the final 
 estimate. They are what statisticians call " negligible." 
 
 Do you notice how, in all this correspondence and 
 chatter that is going on about the fall in the marriage 
 rate I think you said you did glance at it now and 
 again the charge brought (by women especially) 
 against bachelors is mostly selfishness ? Now then, 
 what is the implication involved in that charge ? 
 
 I really feel almost ashamed to point it out to a 
 woman of your perceptiveness. Of course it is, it 
 must be, that men in marrying do make a personal 
 and material sacrifice ; that they surrender something 
 that pertains to the " self." If it be selfish not to 
 marry and, as some one has said, to spend the larger 
 part of your income on maintaining another fellow's 
 daughter, then must it be unselfish to marry. But 
 why unselfish unless there's a real sacrifice of some- 
 thing ? 
 
 And now, my dear Julia, what is it that makes us, 
 men or women, unselfish ? What is it that makes us 
 self-forgetful ? It is love, and nothing in this vast 
 muddle, which we call a universe, but love, and the 
 good old sort at that. 
 
 Of course you may reply that the accusation of 
 selfishness against the obstinately celibate man is a false, 
 or a silly, or an irrelevant one, and to some extent I
 
 TO A LADY 81 
 
 should agree with you. Moreover, you may say that 
 a man who marries, even who marries for love, inas- 
 much as he seeks to obtain something that he wants 
 more than he wants other things, is as selfish as the 
 man who remains unwed. 
 
 There I should not quite agree with you. To call 
 each of these two opposite actions by the one term of 
 " selfish " is, it seems to me, to play with words and 
 thus to debase the moral currency, as George Eliot has 
 it. The man who seeks another's happiness as well 
 as his own, who finds his own in that other's, may be 
 in some sort selfish, but it is a larger selfishness, so 
 much larger as not to be selfishness at all. 
 
 But the point is that it is women for the most part 
 who accuse the bachelor of selfishness, not quite 
 knowing what they do when they do it, not seeing 
 how they give themselves and their sex away. 
 
 They don't think before they accuse ; they just 
 accuse upon intuition, womanly intuition. Womanly 
 intuition for ever, Julia ! How often it goes slap dash 
 straight to the very heart of the truth ! Oh, hang it, 
 yes, and to the hearts of all of us, too, of course. 
 
 Now for the other side. The great majority of 
 women do not marry for love. Another obiter dictum, 
 you, no, not you, but some people might say, thrown 
 off as light-heartedly and light-headedly as the first. 
 But just look well around you and think for a minute 
 or two. Is it not true that most of the married girls 
 you have known have married, not for love, but for 
 the sake of " a suitable marriage " ? Love may have 
 supplied a motive to the desperate deed, too. I don't 
 deny that it did in many cases, but was it the principal 
 motive ? 
 
 Oh, I don't say for a moment that it is the women's 
 faults. It is idle to talk of faults in this connexion. 
 In numberless cases the parents and friends are 
 primarily responsible. Think how often a man is 
 spoken of in a family circle as being a likely suitor for
 
 82 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 Dolly, before the girl has even set eyes on him ! Think 
 how carefully and how cleverly elder daughters are 
 " got off," as the beastly saying goes, before the 
 younger. Now, what is involved in getting an elder 
 daughter " off " ? All sorts of things, of course, but 
 not the girl's love for the man. 
 
 Let us imagine a case we shall not need to exert 
 our imaginations over much. A young, or, for the 
 matter of that, an oldish man, of reputable character 
 and delectable income, comes to London from the 
 country or to the country from London, and he is 
 introduced into a family of, say, three or four marriage- 
 able daughters. Nice girls, you know, but without a 
 penny, or the prospect of one. All the money that is 
 going at all loose is wanted to educate the younger 
 children or to start the sons in life. Now, then, is it 
 not the fact, as people say when they question me upon 
 a platform, is it not the fact that the chances are I 
 won't say more than that but that the chances are 
 that the eligible man might have his pick pardon the 
 expression drawn from another market of those three 
 or four eligible girls ? 
 
 Oh, you know it is, and what is the use of pretend- 
 ing ? Now, if that be so, he will love the girl he 
 chooses, but what is the likelihood of her loving him ? 
 Of course, if that happy coincidence should come off 
 nothing could be more agreeable to all parties con- 
 cerned ; but what are the chances of it ? If she be a 
 really nice girl, and I am assuming that she is, she 
 will not accept him unless she " likes " him, unless she 
 regards him with respect and esteem. But to accept 
 him she will not need to love him. No, no, no not 
 love, I insist. 
 
 The causes of this difference between the sexes in 
 the matter of love and marriage are mostly economic. 
 Marriage is still woman's profession, and her pro- 
 fession, for our time, at any rate, for yours even as 
 well as mine, it is likely to remain. One needs not to
 
 TO A LADY 88 
 
 love a profession or any one in it to adopt it. Why 
 am I a writer ? Heaven alone knows. Why is 
 Arthur a barrister ? He told me himself only the 
 other day that he didn't know. But although the 
 reasons for which so many women marry without love 
 are mainly economic, they are by no means entirely 
 so. Here, again, don't let's pretend. 
 
 As things are, marriage does offer to women other 
 advantages than the merely financial advantages 
 which it does not confer upon men. There is some- 
 thing in the position of a married woman as compared 
 with that of her unmarried sister, something more 
 than the mere trifling social precedence it gives her. 
 She feels more dignified, you know, more important. 
 Often enough she isn't, but she feels she is, poor dear 
 thing. Then, besides, there are natural instincts 
 which clamour for gratification . . . but we need not 
 go into that. It is unnecessary to talk about what 
 nobody talks about, but what everybody knows. . . . 
 
 Lastly and here I shall have you against me as 
 well as the rest of your sex (I am sorry to have you 
 against me, but I don't care a rap for the rest of your 
 sex, as you know, Julia) lastly, I do believe that 
 there are fundamental differences between men and 
 women differences of which I have never seen any- 
 thing like a satisfactory explanation. They just are. 
 I think women find it easier to " settle down " in 
 marriage with a partner they don't love than 
 men do. 
 
 You may remember I said that I believed the 
 modern civilized man would kill himself rather than 
 submit to slavery. I am not at all sure the modern 
 civilized woman would ; when once the slavery was 
 seen to be hopeless, I mean. It is wonderful how 
 women revolt ; but it is much more wonderful how 
 they submit ... to certain things. No doubt I 
 might look learned and say that heredity is at the 
 bottom of it ; that it is because for countless ages in
 
 84 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 the dim past women were compelled to be wives to 
 men who captured them, or who bought them, men 
 they did not love. 
 
 But I don't believe it's that. No, it goes deeper 
 even than heredity, if that be possible. But, anyhow, 
 there it is, and you shan't have the last word this 
 time. 
 
 1910.
 
 TO MISS MARIE CORELLI 
 
 MADAM, I trust you will believe me when, in all 
 sincerity, I declare that I write this with hopes but 
 of the faintest that it will ever reach your eyes ; that 
 anything written by a person so obscure as I could 
 penetrate the seclusion in which you have enshrouded 
 yourself, and which has been, and is, one of the most 
 potent factors in the advertisement of your personality. 
 
 Should, however, the fate of my letter be happier 
 than I have any right to anticipate, you will, I am 
 sure, understand and appreciate the motives which 
 have prompted me to send it forth, all unknowing 
 whether or not it will ever reach its goal. You, who 
 have so often informed the world that you are an 
 artist, must needs have a true apprehension of the 
 artistic temperament and must needs know, therefore, 
 that he who is cursed or blessed with such tempera- 
 ment creates because he must, and is heedless of what 
 becomes of his creations. You, I venture to assert, 
 would be the first to declare that every one of your 
 own works, many and voluminous though they are, 
 would have been written even had you known that 
 not one of them would ever have attained to the 
 dignity of publication or received the tribute of popu- 
 larity. 
 
 It flashed upon me some little time ago, Madam, 
 85 

 
 86 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 and it smote me with extreme amazement, that in 
 all the rather large circle of my acquaintance I did 
 not know one single individual who read the works 
 of Miss Marie Corelli ! That I was the solitary ex- 
 ception in my own social set. That, when you come 
 to consider it thoughtfully, is a rather astonishing 
 fact ; for, if I may, without impertinence, mention 
 so apparently unimportant a personal detail, the set 
 in which I move is for the most part of men and women 
 who earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brains. 
 They are novelists, essayists, leader writers, critics, 
 journalists, and their conversation frequently (much 
 too frequently to be altogether pleasant) turns upon 
 literary topics. And yet there remains the remarkable 
 fact that none of them read the works of Miss Marie 
 Corelli ! 
 
 They talk about you, though ; your name is often 
 on their lips. They speak of you with envy, if not 
 with admiration. Yet, stay, I am not sure that I 
 ought quite to say " not with admiration," for they 
 make it manifest that they do admire your talents, 
 though the talents of yours that they do admire are 
 not those which are obvious in the books you write. 
 The questions one most constantly hears asked by 
 literary persons, and even by those persons who, 
 though not literary, take an intelligent interest in 
 literature, are : " Who reads Marie Corelli ? " and 
 " What is the secret of Marie Corelli's success ? " 
 They ask each other these questions, let me say, as 
 poor little struggling City men might ask each other 
 similar questions about the House of Rothschild. 
 You, Madam, are the Rothschild of modern literature. 
 
 Well, for some little time now I have been turning 
 the possible answers to these questions over in my 
 mind, and have been employing a considerable amount 
 of my spare time and thought in the endeavour to 
 discover the truth. I think at last I have discovered 
 it, and the object of this letter is to acquaint you,
 
 TO MISS MARIE CORELLI 87 
 
 and possibly some others, with the nature of my 
 discovery. 
 
 To begin with, No. 1, " Who reads Marie Corelli ? " 
 I have pursued my investigations diligently ; I have 
 gone to and fro on the face of the earth a very note 
 of interrogation in the flesh. I have sought informa- 
 tion in railway carriages, in clubs of high and low 
 degree, by the domestic hearth, on the sea's marge 
 itself, where one sees ladies reading novels in the full 
 blaze of the sun, and shudders for their eyesight ; 
 and I have inquired searchingly of the librarians and 
 other officials of public and subscription libraries. 
 
 I have discovered (I admit to my great astonishment) 
 that you are read by all classes. No, that is not quite 
 true ; the reading members of the working classes 
 do not read you. They have little time, and I fancy 
 a good natural taste, and when they read fiction at 
 all, they read what the librarians call " Standard " 
 fiction the works, that is, of such writers as Dickens, 
 Thackeray, Scott, and, to some extent, George Eliot. 
 But the others 1 I have found colonels in the army 
 absorbed in " The Sorrows of Satan," and country 
 clergymen, dissenting ministers of every theological 
 shade, serious clerks, superior housemaids, and a vast 
 number of middle-class old ladies, who tell me that 
 what they like about you is your " high moral tone," 
 pertinaciously studying your works. Aunts, I notice, 
 have a way of presenting your novels to their nieces. 
 You have an immense vogue in the suburbs and the 
 provinces, in homes where a servant is kept, and 
 where the wife and grown-up daughters are thus 
 enabled to devote a certain amount of leisure to 
 literary relaxation and the improvement of the mind. 
 
 But, and this is a somewhat curious and interesting 
 fact to which I would draw your attention, though 
 you are read by all or nearly all classes, your readers 
 belong all to one type. Class distinctions are apt 
 to be vague and indefinite; type distinctions are
 
 88 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 extraordinarily well marked. Let me try to put as 
 clearly as I can just what I mean by that. 
 
 The wife of a fairly well-to-do professional man is, 
 to all outward appearance, widely different from her 
 domestic servants. She dresses more expensively, 
 she has better manners, she speaks another tongue, 
 but on close examination the soul of her may turn 
 out to be indistinguishable from the soul of a kitchen- 
 maid. The critical faculty of a colonel of the Guards 
 may be on the same level as that of his orderly. So 
 you see, these four persons, though they might differ 
 widely on any number of other points, might be at one 
 in their admiration of Marie Corelli. In point of fact, 
 they very often are. 
 
 Readers of your works, I further find, are readers 
 of very little else in the way of modern fiction. They 
 find George Meredith too difficult, Thomas Hardy 
 too pessimistic, Mr. H. G. Wells too scientific, John 
 Oliver Hobbes too frivolous, Mr. George Moore too 
 immoral, and so on, and so on. And this brings me 
 to the answer to that other question What is the 
 secret of your success ? 
 
 This class, or rather, this type, of which I have just 
 been writing, exists in all countries (which accounts 
 for your vast European, American, and Colonial sales), 
 but it is larger in England than in any other. It is 
 the type to which its admirers apply the epithet 
 " solid," and its foes the epithet " stodgy." It looks 
 with grave suspicion upon anything that smacks of 
 the humorous. It dislikes and distrusts humour 
 and cannot rid itself of the notion that smartness is 
 closely akin to sculduddery. It takes or is pleased 
 to think it takes, life seriously. In point of fact it 
 is not serious ; it is only solemn, a very different 
 thing. It never uses its own eyes or its own ears, 
 and so it loves to believe that it lives in a world in 
 which vice is always punished, virtue always re- 
 warded. What it really prefers in fiction is virtue
 
 TO MISS MARIE CORELLI 89 
 
 sorely persecuted, but emerging triumphant in the 
 last chapter or the last but one. It has no definite 
 or dogmatic faith, but it has what it calls " religious 
 principles." Of course they are not principles at all, 
 they are not even convictions ; they are at best either 
 loosely-held opinions or deeply-rooted prejudices. 
 In its thinking upon such really serious matters as 
 religion and morality, it is, if you will pardon the 
 slanginess of the term, essentially " sloppy." It has 
 lost, if it ever possessed, the Creed of Christendom, 
 and has neither the courage nor the brains to accept 
 the creed of science. In your remarkable work, " The 
 Mighty Atom," it found its religious views reflected 
 as though in a polished mirror. 
 
 Paradoxical as it may seem, this suet-pudding type 
 of mind is in the highest degree sentimental. It 
 constantly mistakes cheap sentimentality for pro- 
 found pathos ; just as with it fustian serves for fine 
 writing. True pathos leaves it untouched ; an onion 
 would more readily provoke it to tears. 
 
 Be the individuals of the type rich or poor, they are 
 never, in the true sense of the word, cultivated. They 
 know little or nothing of art, and what little they do 
 know they dislike extremely. They think art wicked- 
 ness and artists immoral people, who make love to 
 their neighbours' wives. They fear lest impropriety 
 of some sort be always lurking behind a well-turned 
 phrase. An epigram is to them a sort of blasphemy. 
 They like their fiction in solid, sweet chunks. A 
 novel is something that ought to last them for at least 
 a week. 
 
 Lacking observation they know naught of life, and 
 they demand from their fiction neither precision nor 
 subtlety of characterization. They are imperceptive 
 of fine shades, of delicate tones and values. For them 
 a man is either " good " or " bad " ; a woman either 
 as chaste as ice or as vicious as Messalina. That 
 strange blend of good and evil, of high heroism and
 
 90 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 grovelling meanness, which makes up human nature, 
 is to them the offensive product of an insanitary 
 imagination. 
 
 Then they dearly love the obvious, these people. 
 Unaccustomed to use their brains upon any matters 
 save those of their daily business, they hate extremely 
 to have to consider, for even so long as half a dozen 
 seconds, what may or may not be an author's meaning. 
 In poetry they prefer Longfellow to Browning, in 
 painting Landseer to Whistler, in drama Henry Arthur 
 Jones to George Bernard Shaw, and in fiction, 
 naturally, Marie Corelli to George Meredith. 
 
 Not being beyond commercial considerations, too, 
 they like lots for their money, as they themselves 
 would put it. They are reluctant to pay 6s, at a 
 bookstall or 4s. 6d. at a shop that allows the 3d. dis- 
 count, for an afternoon's or an evening's entertainment. 
 They prefer a prosy hour to a momentary thrill. 
 
 They are amorous of the didactic. Amusement 
 for amusement's sake, or even intellectual activity 
 for its own sake, are to them suspect. They like to 
 feel that they are learning something from a book, 
 it being the business of a book rather to teach than 
 to entertain. They like, as they say, to rise from a 
 book " feeling better." Of course, they mean feeling 
 sleepier. 
 
 Now, Madam, this great, powerful, and multitu- 
 dinous type of your fellow countrymen and country- 
 women you have hit, if I may so phrase it, straight 
 in the eye. You have given them exactly what they 
 want, and you have your reward in cheques of colossal 
 magnitude. You came to fill a long felt want, and 
 you have filled it to the overflow. Either by instinct 
 or by careful investigation you have diagnosed the 
 type with almost miraculous exactitude ; you have 
 catered for your readers, you have consulted their 
 tastes, as a successful restaurateur caters for and 
 consults the tastes of his everyday customers. In
 
 TO MISS MARIE CORELLI 91 
 
 not one of your works from first to last is there 
 the faintest glimmer of that humour of which they 
 are so distrustful. Your sentimental passages have 
 often brought tears to their eyes, but never has a 
 sentence of yours raised a smile upon their lips. No 
 suspicion of " smartness," either of thought or phrase, 
 mars one of your pages. Your scorn of " style " is 
 very magnificent. Your religion, with which your 
 books are replete, is of the good, broad, misty kind 
 so broad as to have no outlines, so misty that 
 nothing whatever can be discerned in it. Your 
 characters are drawn in lampblack and Chinese white, 
 and the edges never blend into a grey. If the persons 
 of your imagination do improper things, you never 
 omit to underline and point out clearly their im- 
 propriety. You never, as your public would say, 
 " palter with vice " or blur the outlines which divide 
 it from virtue. There is nothing of Art in your books. 
 You avoid the epigrammatic as a valetudinarian avoids 
 the influenza bacillus, and your sentences fall flat as 
 falls the flounder upon the fishmonger's marble slab. 
 
 You have, one might almost say you are, the genius 
 of the obvious. I doubt if any writer has ever written 
 in a dozen volumes so many true things as you wrote 
 in the single volume " Free Opinions." There was 
 positively nothing in it that any human creature 
 could contradict or even query. You told us every- 
 thing that we all knew before. 
 
 Then, in the matter of quantity you really do give 
 your readers a vast deal for their money. It is doubtful 
 whether so many printed words of any other writer 
 can be bought for 4s. 6d. 
 
 Finally, you have brought the art of advertisement 
 to a perfection undreamed of even in the Times office 
 or in the United States of America. Your ostentatious 
 seclusiveness, your clamorous reticence have stimulated 
 curiosity where the more bungling methods of a 
 Barnum would have failed egregiously, and your
 
 92 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 occasional excursions into publicity have been timed 
 as carefully as an adroit boxer times his knock-out 
 blows. Such artlessness as yours is the supremest 
 art. 
 
 So I have written to point out to you, Madam, the 
 secret of your success, because I know well enough 
 that you are ignorant of it yourself. You have, one 
 cannot but be quite sure, won your public, and made 
 your fortune as unconsciously, as spontaneously, 
 as instinctively as a baby breathes. 
 
 1906.
 
 XI 
 
 THE DAY OF THE CHILD 
 
 I WAS a more or less taciturn listener the other evening 
 to a round-the-fire discussion, by a little group of 
 rather more than ordinarily intelligent persons, of 
 the question, What is the salient characteristic of 
 our time ? by our time was meant the last thirty 
 years what there is, if there be anything, about 
 it which, from the standpoint of the social historian 
 a hundred years hence, will distinguish it from all 
 the other times that preceded it ? 
 
 There were as many answers forthcoming as there 
 were interlocutors. The spread of Democratic Ideas 
 and Democratic Policy ; the rapid Growth of Arma- 
 ments ; the Development of Mechanical Inventions 
 and the Application of Science to Life ; the Decay 
 of Religion ; the Labour Unrest ; Religious Tolera- 
 tion ; the Increase of Material Wealth these were 
 some of the solutions offered, and each was sup- 
 ported by a goodly muster of evidence and argu- 
 ment. 
 
 None of them, I confess, impressed me as being 
 altogether on the mark. There was truth in each 
 of them, but only partial truth, it seemed to me. 
 All these things were only surface things, I seemed 
 to think. The changes they indicated did not go 
 very deep, they were not likely to be followed by 
 any lasting consequences, nor were they sudden in 
 93
 
 94 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 their origin, nor, when you came to think of it, quite 
 peculiar to our generation. 
 
 There is reason to doubt, for example, whether 
 Democratic Ideas are spreading, or have been spread- 
 ing, for the last ten years. There is, on the contrary, 
 I think, and quite perceptibly, a check to the spreading 
 of them, due, perhaps, to disappointment with the 
 results of some of their practical applications. No 
 one can believe that the Growth of Armaments has 
 more than a transient significance. The develop- 
 ment of mechanical inventions was much more rapid 
 and portentous a century ago than it is to-day. We, 
 it is true, have our bicycles, our telephones, and our 
 cinematographs, and are doing some odd things with 
 electricity. But our fathers and their sires first put 
 the steamship on the sea and the steam-locomotive 
 on the land ; and these truly changed the face of 
 the earth and the customs of men. We have done 
 nothing so big as that. Talking of inventions, by 
 the way, what of ours will compare with the Invention 
 of Printing ? 
 
 Religion is not decaying, that's flat ! It is changing 
 its forms, but change is not necessarily decay. There 
 is probably more interest taken in religion in this 
 twentieth century than there has been since the 
 sixteenth ; there is more interest taken in it in this 
 year 1914 than there was in the year 1904. 
 
 In the eighteenth century there really was a decay 
 of religion ; then, practically, all cultivated persons 
 were sceptics. To-day even the most prominent 
 men of Science are freely uttering doubts about 
 Darwinism and misgivings as to the validity of the 
 Mechanical Theory of the Universe. Has not Sir 
 Oliver Lodge assured us that man has an immortal 
 soul ? Roughly, one may say that if the nineteenth 
 century was a period of doubt diversified by faith, 
 ours looks like being a period of faith, if not of down- 
 right gaping credulity, diversified by doubt.
 
 THE DAY OF THE CHILD 95 
 
 And so on, and so on, down the list of all those 
 replies which I heard put forth to the question, What 
 is the most salient characteristic of our time ? Per- 
 sonally, I did not add to the list. I contributed 
 nothing to the discussion, for I am by way of being 
 slow-witted, temperamentally cautious, not to say 
 timid, and I always need time to think things over. 
 I have been thinking that question over for the last 
 few days, and at the moment I am rather inclined to 
 flatter myself that I have found an answer to it. 
 
 The most salient characteristic of our time. I suggest 
 to you, that which distinguishes it from all other times 
 of which we know anything, is the change in the 
 attitude of civilized society towards the Child. 
 
 Doubtless that change has not been quite so sudden 
 as it looks. It can't have been, it must have been 
 slowly prepared for. But if you take up any news- 
 paper, magazine, or publisher's list of what are called 
 " serious " books to-day, and compare them with 
 similar literary productions of, say, twenty-five years 
 ago, it will seem to you as though within that quarter 
 of a century the Child had risen from a position of 
 comparative insignificance and negligibility to one 
 of supreme and wellnigh all-absorbing importance. 
 
 It seems only yesterday that the Child was regarded 
 as a subject for experts only, for persons peculiarly 
 or pecuniarily, and anyhow professionally, interested 
 in him ; for mothers to some extent, for nurses to a 
 lesser extent, and to a lesser extent still for school- 
 masters and schoolmistresses. To-day, the very man 
 in the street is an expert, and has views of his own. 
 A while ago it was taken for granted, accepted as a 
 fundamental fact of the nature of things, that mothers, 
 just because they were mothers, and by virtue of 
 some natural or divine intuition or inspiration, knew 
 all that was to be known, or, at any rate, all that 
 was worth knowing, of children. A common and 
 current feeling on the subject was admirably summed
 
 96 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 up by the lady who remarked, " Children ? I should 
 think I ought to know something about children, 
 I've had ten and buried seven of them ! " 
 
 To-day, judging by what one sees and hears all 
 around one, the assumption would seem to be that 
 the mother just the mother as such, very especially 
 the poor mother is the last person in the world in 
 whom knowledge of children and of things apper- 
 taining to children is to be expected, or to whom 
 the uninterrupted and uninterfered with care of them 
 is to be entrusted. 
 
 The Child to-day is Everybody's business ; a 
 business which Everybody, finding him or her self 
 unable to attend to personally, is apt to delegate 
 to committees to committees not infrequently con- 
 sisting almost entirely of spinsters. " Soon," cried 
 a much-badgered and indignant working-mother to 
 a lady visitor, who had called to inquire after the 
 condition of her little ones' teeth, or ears, or night- 
 gowns, or feeding-bottles, " soon you will allow us 
 to have nothing to do with our own kids but bringing 
 'em into the world." 
 
 " I shouldn't be at all surprised if that were so," 
 responded, more truthfully than tactfully, the lady 
 visitor. 
 
 That is not an imaginary episode. It really hap- 
 pened. And that it should happen, and that episodes 
 more or less like it are happening every day, is, of 
 itself, evidence sufficient of that change in the attitude 
 of civilized society towards the Child, which, I am con- 
 tending, is the most salient characteristic of our time. 
 
 There is any amount more evidence discoverable, 
 for the influence that has wrought the change is all- 
 pervading. You can find the evidence wherever you 
 care to look for it. In the newspapers, as I said, 
 in the magazines, in the bookshops, in any street of 
 any city in which there are public exhibitions or 
 places of public entertainment. It is a notable fact,
 
 THE DAY OF THE CHILD 97 
 
 a fact worth thinking over, that in an age when 
 considerable fortunes are the rewards of successful 
 playwrights, the largest fortune ever made by any 
 playwright was made by a play written expressly for 
 children and acted chiefly by children. 
 
 Some of the largest incomes earned by authors 
 to-day are earned by the authors of children's books 
 and, which is every bit as significant, by the authors 
 of books about children. The boy, both in the nursery 
 and the schoolroom, is the fashionable hero of present- 
 day fiction. One of the most popular novels of last 
 autumn was a study in child psychology, a study even 
 more minute and elaborate in its analysis than was 
 Shakespeare's presentment of the mind of Hamlet 
 or George Eliot's of the soul of Tito Melema. Twenty, 
 or even ten, years ago no publisher who knew his 
 business would have even considered a manuscript 
 having such a subject-matter as its theme. Oh, 
 there have been children in popular fiction before 
 our time, of course ; but they were in the fiction 
 what they were in the life of those days subordinate 
 and minor. 
 
 Talking of fiction suggests the query : What has 
 become of the father, the middle-class and upper- 
 class father, of the early and mid- Victorian novel ; 
 the whiskered and always stern if sometimes bene- 
 volent tyrant who posed as a god, or, at least, as an 
 oracle, to his subdued and, in his presence at any rate, 
 silent and acquiescent offspring ; the father as given 
 us by Dickens ? There is no need to think of Grad- 
 grind. Gradgrind was probably a detestable exception, 
 even in his own day. 
 
 But take Mr. Dombey. Mr. Dombey was a good 
 father, as fathers went in his time, negligent of, and 
 unsympathetic towards, his daughter, but honestly 
 attached to his little son. But now think of all 
 the fathers of your acquaintance, and see if you can 
 spot one of them whose relations with his son, in 
 
 G
 
 98 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 the faintest degree, resemble those of Mr. Dombey 
 with Paul. Can you even imagine little Paul celling 
 Mr. Dombey " Daddy " ? I rather fancy that a 
 modern youngster with a " Daddy " would find it 
 difficult to believe in a Mr. Dombey. He would 
 accept him as a figure of fiction, as he would accept 
 the child-eating Ogre in a fairy story, but surely 
 not as a reflection of reality. 
 
 That transformation of the " Sir " and the " Papa " 
 of last century into the " Daddy " of this is not the 
 slightest of the symptoms of the change we are talking 
 about. 
 
 The great, the unique, discovery of this generation 
 is the importance of the next. It is hardly saying 
 too much to say that hitherto each adult generation 
 has held that the one thing desirable for its non- 
 adults was that they should be brought up, as far 
 as possible, as were brought up their fathers before 
 them. How often have we not all of us heard from 
 our parents' lips brief or lengthy admonitory lectures, 
 beginning with such words as " When I was a boy " 
 or " In my father's time " ? And how often have 
 we not silently resented them, and suffered under a 
 burning sense of their inadequacy and irrelevance ? 
 How often have we not painfully resisted the tempta- 
 tion to fling back the retort " Well, so much the worse 
 for you, then! " and to ask, "Do you really consider 
 yourself so satisfactory a person that you think the 
 best that could be done with us is to shape us in your 
 own image ? " 
 
 The unctuous self-complacency implied in the 
 appeal to the Past is rapidly vanishing from the 
 consciousness of the modern parent. It has at long 
 last been born in upon us that, judged by any reason- 
 able standards of efficiency, we are by way of being 
 failures. We have an uneasy feeling that, on the 
 whole, we have made and are making rather a mess 
 of things. Those of us who read our Sunday Chronicle
 
 THE DAY OF THE CHILD 99 
 
 and have followed with interest and appreciation 
 the series of articles by Mr. Raymond Coulson are 
 likely to have this feeling of uneasiness in a more 
 intense degree than others, though those others have 
 it, too, for it is a widely diffused feeling. Think 
 what it was that Mr. Coulson set out to prove no 
 less than our all-round failure, the failure of our 
 morals, of our religion, of our statecraft, of our 
 intellect, of our science, of our social leadership. 
 And the worst of it is, as the Scotsman said of 
 the neighbour who called him a liar, " He has 
 proved it ! " 
 
 Well, now, we are naturally disinclined to attribute 
 this failure of ours to grapple with the world and 
 mould it according to our highest ideals and most 
 ardent desires to any defects inherent in our own 
 being. As naturally we are disposed to lay the 
 blame of it upon our forbears and the scheme of 
 upbringing they imposed upon us, and we have 
 decided that to that scheme, or to anything like 
 it, our own offspring shall not be subjected. 
 "Spare the rod and spoil the child," said Solo- 
 mon, himself the dismalest of parental failures. 
 Through long centuries the advice has been 
 acted upon ; the rod, with all it symbolizes, 
 has not been spared. But men in the lump 
 have been spoiled in the making all the same. 
 And so we have become dubious of the wise man's 
 wisdom, and the rod is being relegated to our 
 museums. 
 
 So it has come about that the sciences of education, 
 of pedagogics, of child-culture if they may be called 
 sciences which have never yet come within a thousand 
 miles of being scientific are in the melting-pot, 
 and we are all experimenting with the Child, blindly 
 experimenting, if you will, but still experimenting, 
 laboriously, conscientiously, not unhopefully, one 
 may claim.
 
 100 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 There is another reason, too, why the Child is 
 coming into his own and engaging more and more 
 of the solicitude of his elders. He is getting scarcer. 
 He is going to be scarcer still, oh, ever so much 
 scarcer ! 
 
 1914.
 
 XII 
 
 THE ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 SOME two years ago when I called attention to the 
 continued and persistent decline of the birth-rate, 
 I ventured to predict that when people began to 
 realize all that decline implied and involved they 
 would get into " a state of mind " ; that we should 
 hear some odd things said, and have some queer 
 proposals offered. 
 
 So far people, that is the public at large, have not 
 realized all, or anything like all, which the decline 
 in the birth-rate implies and involves. The public 
 at large is always too busy, doing things that do not 
 matter, to realize anything that is not of immediate, 
 practical, urgent importance. We shall have, I fancy, 
 to wait another ten years or so before we get a genuine 
 popular scare about the birth-rate. 
 
 But already that small number of persons who are 
 capable of intelligent anticipation, who can see a 
 reasonable distance beyond their noses, are beginning 
 to talk, and in some cases to act. 
 
 I daresay you have noticed that we hear a good 
 deal more about The Child than we used to hear five 
 or ten years ago. One can scarcely glance through 
 a newspaper without seeing that something is being 
 done somewhere, either by way of classes for young 
 mothers, or the improvement of the milk-supply 
 for infants, to keep up the population by checking 
 101
 
 102 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 the waste of infant lives. It does seem to have 
 occurred to people at last that when a child has come 
 into the world it is just as well to take a little trouble 
 to keep it there. All the same, in spite of these 
 spasmodic and sporadic but entirely worthy efforts, 
 the infant death-rate remains stationary, and the 
 birth-rate continues to fall quarter after quarter 
 with a monotonous regularity. 
 
 When anything serious is going to happen, when 
 society is going to " right-about-turn," or to make 
 a start in a new direction, the first indications of 
 the coming change are usually to be noted in the 
 utterances of two or three far-seeing men, men with 
 sensitive mental noses, if I may so put it, men whom 
 the rest of the world regards as eccentric, faddy, 
 unpractical above all unpractical. These men put 
 forward proposals, make predictions, sometimes in 
 a tentative, hesitating way, sometimes whimsically 
 and with wild extravagance, according to their 
 characters and temperaments, and these proposals 
 raise a storm either of ridicule or of denunciation. 
 
 The storm subsides, as storms do, and all is quiet 
 for a time ; but meanwhile a certain number of 
 other men, whose minds have been stirred and whose 
 brains have been stimulated by the upset, continue 
 to talk, to discuss with each other, and to think about 
 the proposals and predictions that the far-sighted 
 and sensitive-nosed men have made ; they turn 
 these proposals over and over, they winnow out 
 the grain from the chaff of them ; finally they offer 
 them to the public in a shape that is neither ridiculous 
 nor extravagant, and in the end the originally unprac- 
 tical proposals turn out to be the most practical 
 things going, and are unanimously adopted. Every- 
 body wonders why they had never thought of them 
 before 1 
 
 Something like this process seems to me to be 
 going on as one of the less obvious consequences of
 
 ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD 103 
 
 the continued fall in the birth-rate. Just a few people 
 are beginning to realize that while a death-rate cannot 
 decline beyond a certain point a birth-rate may go 
 on declining until it disappears altogether, and that 
 it may quite easily decline until the population itself 
 begins to fall. These few people are also beginning 
 to realize that if the decline in the birth-rate is to 
 be checked it must be checked by something more 
 potent, more practical, than pulpit thunder or news- 
 paper nagging. 
 
 You cannot frighten or bully people into having 
 children. If you really want them to have children 
 you must offer them some inducement sufficient. 
 The question is, Does society as a whole want its 
 individuals to have children ? At present I do not 
 think it does ; in the near future I rather think it 
 will. Already a few men are pointing out to society 
 what sort of inducements it had better think about 
 offering. 
 
 A few months ago, in a couple of letters to the 
 Times which have since been republished as a pamph- 
 let, Mr. Sidney Webb, of the London County Council, 
 after calling attention to the fall in the birth-rate and 
 giving facts and figures, and proving what beyond 
 all doubt was the cause of that fall, ended by remarking 
 that: 
 
 " We shall, indeed, have to face the problem of 
 ' the systematic endowment of motherhood,' and 
 place this most indispensable of all professions upon 
 an honourable economic basis. . . . Such a revolution 
 in the economic incidence of the burthen of child- 
 bearing will, of course, be deprecated by the ignorant 
 and unthinking as calculated to encourage the idle 
 and thriftless, the drunken and the profligate to 
 increase and multiply. The grave fact that we have 
 to face is that under our existing social arrangements 
 it is exactly these people, and practically these only,
 
 104 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 who at present make full use of their reproductive 
 powers. ... To the vast majority of women, and 
 especially to those of fine type, the rearing of children 
 would be the most attractive occupation if it offered 
 economic advantages equal to those, say, of school 
 teaching or service in the post office. At present it 
 is ignored as an occupation, unremunerated, and in 
 no way honoured by the State. ... To the present 
 writer it seems that only by some sharp turn in our 
 way of dealing with these problems can we avoid 
 degeneration of type that is race deterioration, if 
 not race suicide." 
 
 Well, you see there is Mr. Sidney Webb, a member 
 of the London County Council, a late chairman of 
 the Technical Education Board, one of the most 
 moderate and level-headed men in England, a man 
 who has never said an extreme thing in his life ; and 
 in his opinion the only way of escape from the pit 
 lies in the endowment of maternity, that is to say, 
 in suitably remunerating women for services efficiently 
 rendered. 
 
 A few weeks ago, speaking in the City Temple, 
 Mr. H. G. Wells, a well-known and widely popular 
 author of what are called scientific romances and 
 novels, a man about as different in type and character 
 and temperament from Mr. Sidney Webb as any one 
 thing can be different from any other thing, a man 
 who is the very human antithesis of Mr. Sidney Webb, 
 touched upon the same smouldering, but as yet not 
 burning, topic. Said he, speaking of the future 
 state : 
 
 " As soon as a woman is likely to become a mother 
 the medical officer, man or woman, as the case may 
 be, will report this to the proper official, and her 
 special income as prospective mother in the State 
 will begin. Then, when her child is born, I imagine, 
 there will begin an allowance for its support, and
 
 ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD 105 
 
 this payment will continue large or small according 
 to the well-being of the child and the need the State 
 may have for children as long as the children are 
 in their mother's care. . . . How it is going to be 
 done remains to be worked out. Possibly all this 
 money will be paid to the mother alone, possibly it 
 will be paid to the parents." 
 
 Essentially the same idea as Mr. Webb's, you see, 
 only put a little differently, as ideas always are put 
 a little differently by different brains. Mr. Webb's 
 endowment of maternity would not go much further 
 than free doctors, free milk, free meals, free education 
 and scholarships at secondary schools and universities 
 for the children ; Mr. Wells is for paying a salary to 
 the mothers downright. 
 
 Of course, a whole host of questions and difficulties 
 rise up to confront and clamour at Mr. Wells and 
 his proposals. Is, for instance, the same salary to 
 be paid to all mothers, regardless of their husbands' 
 or their own incomes ? Is the same amount to be 
 paid for good healthy children as for weakly puling 
 ones, and if not why not, inasmuch as it costs more 
 time and money to rear a weakly child than a robust 
 child ? 
 
 What is to happen if the inspector after his monthly 
 call reports to the authorities that the mother is not 
 putting her allowance to the best possible uses, but 
 is spending it on ostrich feathers ? Is the salary 
 to cease forthwith, and, if so, are the children to be 
 left to the neglect of the mother, or are they to be 
 taken away from her and sent to an institution, and 
 if so is their father not to be considered in the matter ? 
 
 Is the husband to be fined or otherwise punished 
 if his wife shirks her duties as nurse, and, if so, exactly 
 how much discipline may he apply to keep her up 
 to her work ? May the husband married to a slut 
 apply to the State to remove the slut and furnish him
 
 106 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 with a more capable mother and nurse in her place ? 
 Are unmarried mothers to share in the endowment, and 
 again if not, why not, since illegitimate children, 
 if they are to be converted into useful and healthy 
 citizens, require quite as much care and nutriment as 
 legitimate children ? 
 
 If the State is to endow the mother, is a woman to 
 be allowed to become a mother when she chooses or 
 only when the local authority chooses ? These are 
 only a few of the first queries which leap to the lips 
 on reading Mr. Wells's sermon in the City Temple. 
 
 Then on this same subject we have Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw, the most famous if not the most popular play- 
 wright of our day, declaring somewhere that if he 
 were a woman he would demand 2000 for the produc- 
 tion of a child ! 
 
 Of course, Mr. Shaw did not mean that exactly ; 
 but he has learnt by experience that if you want 
 people to pay heed to what you do or to what you 
 say, you must do something striking or say something 
 extravagant. What he did mean was in all essentials 
 what Mr. Webb and Mr. Wells meant, that if the fall 
 in the birth- rate is to be stopped, and if deterioration 
 and decay are to be avoided, the question of the 
 production and rearing of children must not be left 
 just where it is ; must not be left entirely to the 
 individuals ; but that something must be done, some- 
 thing of a corporate, of a national sort ; and that it 
 is time the public should begin to think what that 
 something shall be. 
 
 So here, you see, you have happening what I said 
 always happens when a change is coming ; but a 
 long time before the change actually comes. You 
 have two or three men with long sight, men who scent 
 social changes as some of the lower animals scent 
 changes in the weather, making proposals and predic- 
 tions, one of them cautiously, tentatively, the others 
 whimsically and extravagantly.
 
 ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD 107 
 
 So I suggest to you that it would be well for us to 
 think this matter over while there is plenty of time 
 for thought, to turn it over in our minds, to talk 
 about it to each other over our pipes, on Sunday 
 afternoons, say, if we are too busy all the rest of the 
 week. We might try to find out if something cannot 
 be done, some little thing, perhaps some very little 
 thing, but something of the right sort. 
 
 Might we not, don't you think, begin with the widow, 
 the widow who is left destitute with two or three young 
 children ? Would it not be better (if she is a decent 
 body and a capable mother) to endow her with an 
 allowance sufficient to permit her to stay at home 
 and look after those children rather than compel 
 her, as we do now, either to send them to the work- 
 house, or to leave them to themselves, or to a neigh- 
 bour, while she goes out for twelve hours a day to 
 earn her own and their livelihoods. To do that, you 
 know, might actually pay us. We might save by it. 
 It would be a very short step, of course, towards the 
 endowment of maternity, but still it would be a step 
 in the right direction, and one short step in the right 
 direction would seem to be about as much as one 
 generation can take. 
 
 1907.
 
 XIII 
 
 JOHN SMITH 
 
 IT strikes one as a little odd, and as not a little ironical 
 that one of the direct results and immediate outcomes 
 of the Old-age Pensions Act should be the death by 
 starvation of a number of old people. Yet certain 
 events which came to light at an inquest in London 
 some time ago would seem to put it beyond doubt 
 that such is the lamentable fact. 
 
 The inquest was held upon the emaciated body of 
 one John Smith, an appropriately typical name. John 
 Smith, it appeared, had drawn the pension with which 
 a benevolent and well-meaning Legislature had en- 
 dowed him and then he had made the almost incredible 
 and quite fatal mistake of trying to live on it. In 
 reckoning up how far five shillings a week would go 
 he had unaccountably forgotten the price of one of 
 life's chief necessities, a roof to cover the head. As 
 on a historic occasion Lord Randolph Churchill 
 " forgot Goschen " and the oversight cost him his 
 political career, so John Smith forgot some unnamed 
 landlord and the oversight cost him his life. In other 
 words, he paid four shillings a week for rent and tried 
 to live on what was left. 
 
 It had not occurred to him, as it did not occur to 
 
 the legislators who so handsomely endowed him, that 
 
 the smaller the income the larger is the proportion of 
 
 it which finds its way into some landlord's pocket. A 
 
 108
 
 JOHN SMITH 109 
 
 man with two pounds a week will probably be com- 
 pelled to pay 20 per cent, of his income in rent ; a 
 man on five shillings a week must needs pay 80 per 
 cent, of his. 
 
 " There are dozens of men like John Smith living 
 in just the same way " said a juror at the inquest 
 " And now," added the Coroner, " you are going to 
 tempt other old men and women out of the work- 
 houses where they are well fed and kept clean to try 
 and live on five shillings a week. Numbers "of them 
 have no friends and their end will be like John Smith's." 
 
 When that Coroner said " you," he probably was 
 not addressing anyone in particular, anyone visible at 
 the moment. He was addressing the nation at large, 
 the nation which has been congratulating itself on 
 having finished at long last with the aged poor ; and, 
 as addressed to the nation at large, or, at any rate, to 
 that portion of it responsible for the Old-age Pensions 
 Act, his observations did not altogether lack point. 
 
 The provision made by the Old-age Pensions Act is, 
 in truth, a direct provocation and temptation to old 
 people in workhouses to leave those hospitable institu- 
 tions and try to live on five shillings a week to try 
 to accomplish the impossible, that is. 
 
 Of course, from a strictly economic and non- 
 humanitarian point of view that may be a most acute 
 and excellent stroke of business. Old people in work- 
 houses linger long. In workhouses the infant death- 
 rate is high, but the death-rate of persons over sixty-five 
 years of age is comfortingly low. Even centenarians are 
 not as rare as you might expect in workhouses. In fact, 
 if you really desire to be a centenarian it seems a 
 queer desire, but there are those who harbour it I 
 am not sure that you could do better than enter your 
 local Union as soon as possible after three score years 
 and ten have been passed. 
 
 There is no reason why old people should not linger 
 long in workhouses. There is a sufficiency of good
 
 110 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 plain food, enough warmth to keep the blood moving, 
 and a freedom from anxiety such as is seldom enjoyed 
 outside. In one workhouse at Nottingham, I am 
 informed, "afternoon tea is served at 4 P.M." The 
 old folk " get up when they like and go to bed when 
 they like," an advantage which is the lot of few of 
 the sons of men. Also they are provided with con- 
 genial employment suited to their age and capacity. 
 
 Now, outside the workhouse, on five shillings a week 
 afternooft tea is not served at 4 P.M. nor at any other 
 hour. I doubt even whether the pensioner could go 
 to bed and get up when he liked, because I doubt if 
 there would be any bed to go to or to get up from. 
 There would certainly not be a sufficiency of good 
 plain food, and there would be no more Avarmth than 
 the weather provided. Anxiety would certainly not 
 be lacking. In these conditions the old people would 
 not linger long. They would do just what John Smith 
 did, must do, what the juror declared dozens of them, 
 in fact, are doing, and so you see a real saving is 
 effected and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to that 
 extent, is rendered happy. Yes, yes, from a strictly 
 economic and non-humanitarian point of view it is 
 desirable that old people should be tempted to leave 
 the workhouses and try, ineffectually, to live on five 
 shillings a week. 
 
 But it was not from a strictly economic and non- 
 humanitarian point of view that the Old-age Pensions 
 Act was recommended by the Government to the 
 consideration of the House of Commons and the 
 country. Economic in some respects, it was suggested, 
 the Act might be, inasmuch as it costs more than five 
 shillings a week to give an old person his tea at 4 P.M. 
 and the other of those indulgences I have mentioned ; 
 but non-humanitarian, no. On the contrary, it was 
 pointed out again and again, and insisted upon, that 
 the effect of the Act would be to bring joy into thou- 
 sands of humble homes by sitting grandfather and
 
 JOHN SMITH 111 
 
 grandmother at opposite sides of the fire, and setting 
 any number of aged hearts beating with exultation. 
 Well, I dare say it has done that. Let us hope so. But 
 it has done something else. It has killed John Smith. 
 
 We are told now that the framers of the Act never 
 intended that an old-age pensioner should live, or, at 
 any rate, should pay rent, out of his pension. That 
 pension was intended to be a sort of grant-in-aid to 
 such families as had the happiness, or the misfortune, 
 to count old persons past work among their number. 
 It would enable such families to keep their old people 
 at home and make of them desirable instead of super- 
 fluous and detrimental members of the family circle. 
 We may believe that, in many instances, in many 
 thousands of instances, it has done that ; though that 
 it should have done that is an unpleasing commentary 
 on the social condition of our people. It is a disturbing 
 reflection that there are thousands and hundreds of 
 thousands of homes in England wherein five shillings 
 a week, plus an extra mouth, makes a welcome 
 addition to the family income. 
 
 The existence of these homes was counted upon and 
 correctly counted upon by the promoters of the Old- 
 age Pensions Act ; but what apparently they did not 
 count upon, or make provision for, was the existence 
 of the John Smith class, the old people without 
 families, without friends, but with stomachs to be 
 fed, with backs to be clothed, and with that curious 
 love of personal freedom which is so fine a thing in a 
 Briton when he is well-to-do ; so wretched, so fatal a 
 thing when he is without visible means of subsistence. 
 Thousands of these old people are outside the work- 
 houses ; thousands of them are inside the workhouses, 
 and the old-age pension tempts those who are outside 
 to remain out when they ought to go in, and those 
 who are in to go out when they ought to stay where 
 they are. 
 
 The reports both of the majority and of the minority
 
 112 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 of the Royal Commissioners on the Poor Law have 
 made it plain to all who read, even while they run, 
 that our workhouses, as a whole, are, to say the least 
 of it, undesirable mansions, so undesirable that the 
 best thing we can do with them is to get rid of them 
 altogether ; but these reports have made it plain, also, 
 that the workhouses are less undesirable as residences 
 for the aged than for any other destitute class. On 
 the whole, the aged are treated passing well in the 
 majority of our workhouses. Very certainly even the 
 worst of workhouses is an altogether better shelter for 
 an aged head and a softer last-but-one resting-place 
 for old bones than the best lodging that can be afforded 
 out of five shillings a week. I imagine the grave 
 itself is a softer resting-place than that. 
 
 Here, then, is the practical point to be considered, 
 if those dozens of men living as John Smith lived are 
 not to die as he died, by slow starvation. The 
 obvious and common sensible thing to do would seem 
 to be to empower the pension authorities to withhold 
 the five shillings a week from all applicants who 
 cannot prove that they are in a position to live on it, 
 to eat, to drink, to dress, and to sleep on it. That 
 seems so simple a thing to do that it is pretty certain 
 it will not be done. Common sense and the Poor 
 Law are still miles apart.
 
 XIV 
 
 HEGEL'S THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 HEGEL'S theory of the State is adumbrated in his 
 works : it is rather more than adumbrated in his 
 " History of Philosophy." It is summed up and set 
 out with great minuteness in his " Philosophy of 
 Right." This treatise a book of some four hundred 
 pages is, he tells us, " nothing more than an attempt 
 to conceive of and to present The State as in itself 
 rational." He makes no attempt to imagine an 
 Utopia or to construct for our admiration a State as 
 it ought to be. 
 
 " It is just as foolish," he says, " to fancy that any 
 philosophy can transcend its present world as that an 
 individual could leap out of his time. If a theory 
 transgresses its time and builds up a world as it ought 
 to be, it has an existence merely in the unstable 
 element of opinion, which gives room to every wander- 
 ing fancy." 
 
 When Philosophy attempts to teach the world what 
 it ought to be Philosophy always comes too late. 
 Signs of Athenian decadence were already apparent 
 when Plato wrote his " Republic." " Philosophy as 
 the thought of the world does not appear until reality 
 has completed its formative process. . . . When 
 Philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of 
 life has become old, and by means of grey it 
 cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The Owl 
 113 H
 
 114 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 of Minerva flies only when the shades of night are 
 falling." 
 
 For Hegel everything is Process, Development; 
 and Development is a continual reconciliation of 
 opposites. The new thing that becomes does not 
 become by destroying the old things, but by including 
 them, by taking them up into itself, as it were. 
 
 The whole progress of development in history is, 
 for Hegel, the enlarging, the gradual realization of 
 Freedom. In the Oriental Monarchies he gives China 
 as an instance only one man is free, the Emperor. 
 The individual personality has no rights ; the very 
 laws are only crystallized customs " the accidents of 
 personal power and arbitrary rule." Nothing is stable 
 but everything is petrified. In the Greek States only 
 some are free ; the barbarians and the slaves have not 
 even the form of freedom. 
 
 In the Modern State what he calls the Germanic 
 State all are free, at any rate all are hypothetically 
 free, have at least the form of freedom. It is the idea 
 of the Modern State that all should be free. 
 
 To be free in the Hegelian sense a human being 
 must be something more than an individual, a subject. 
 He must be a person, that is to say, he must possess 
 " rights," rights which are recognized as such by 
 other persons : an unrecognized right is not a right at 
 all, it is nothing, it is nonsense. Rights are the 
 creation of the State not the endowments of Nature. 
 They are " natural " only in the sense that men are 
 born for them, not born with them and not having 
 any innate ideas of them. 
 
 A man's rights are conditions necessary to the 
 proper fulfilment of his duties, and necessary to the 
 full consciousness of his personality. A State in 
 which these conditions are not apparent is not, as yet, 
 a State at all. 
 
 Now the Hegelian defence of Property, of private 
 property, is based upon the assumption that no man
 
 THEORY OF THE STATE 115 
 
 is fully conscious of his personality until he has 
 embodied it in Property. To be without property is 
 to be without a condition essential to freedom. The 
 raison d'etre of property is not the economic raison 
 d'etre it is not because property enables you to 
 satisfy wants or to take pleasures, it is because it 
 allows you to embody, to express your will, your 
 personality, in an external object. It is the satisfac- 
 tion of ownership not the gratification of appetite that 
 is the justification of private property. Property is 
 the visible and palpable externalization of the Will. 
 The more a thing externalizes and embodies your will 
 the more is it your property. Even your own body is 
 more yours the more you have control over it. A 
 paralysed limb is hardly your property at all. A man 
 who, as we say, can " use his hands " has more property 
 in those hands than one whose fingers are all thumbs. 
 When the tongue becomes an unruly member it ceases 
 to be property, it becomes the possessor, rather. 
 
 " Property divorced from use," says Hegel, "is an 
 unreal abstraction." " Accordingly every one must 
 have property. That is the only kind of equality it is 
 possible to consider. The assertion that the property 
 of every man ought in justice to be equal to that of 
 every other is false, since justice demands merely that 
 every one should have property. Indeed, amongst 
 persons variously endowed inequality must occur, and 
 equality would be wrong." 
 
 This Hegelian view of property is one which all sane 
 Socialists certainly all Socialists of what is called 
 " the Fabian type " without scruple or demurrer may 
 accept. If it condemns out-and-out communism, it 
 condemns no less certainly the systems of property- 
 holding with which Socialists are at war. If property 
 may only be justly that in which a person can exter- 
 nalize his personality and embody his will, it is interest- 
 ing to speculate as to what sort of a personality it is 
 which is expressed in a 1000 of stock in the London
 
 116 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 and North Western Railway. A man may well 
 express his personality in a house, in the architecture 
 of it, in its furnishing and equipment, in the laying 
 out and culture of the garden that surrounds it. But 
 what sort of a stupendous personality must it be 
 which can find adequate expression only in half a 
 dozen mansions and a couple of palaces, scattered 
 about Europe ? A man may stamp his individuality 
 upon a dozen acres of land. No man has individuality 
 enough to stamp it upon twelve thousand acres. 
 
 Hegel is fully at one with the Socialists in recognizing 
 that the greatest danger to a State is the existence of 
 a proletariate, a wholly propertyless class. ... It is 
 the direct duty of the State, he asserts, to prevent 
 want, that is, propertylessness arising among the units. 
 "It is not simply that starvarion must be guarded 
 against. The wide view is that there shall never arise 
 a rabble, a mass." 
 
 Here, for instance, is a passage that gives full 
 adhesion to the Minority Report of the Poor Law 
 Commission. 
 
 " Not the arbitrary will only, but accidental cir- 
 cumstances, which may be physical or external, may 
 bring the individual to poverty. This condition 
 exposes him to the wants of the civic community, 
 which has already deprived him of the natural methods 
 of acquisition and superseded the bond of the family 
 stock. Besides, poverty causes men to lose, more or 
 less, the advantages of society, the opportunity to 
 acquire skill or education, the benefit of administration 
 of justice, the care of health, even the consolation of 
 religion. Amongst the poor the public power takes the 
 place of the family in regard to this immediate need, 
 dislike of work, bad disposition and other vices, which 
 spring out of poverty and the sense of wrong. . . . 
 The effort of society shall be to discover a general 
 remedy for penury and to do without random help."
 
 THEORY OF THE STATE 117 
 
 To charity enough still remains. "It is a false view 
 of charity to restrict its help to private methods and 
 casual sentiment and knowledge, and to feel itself 
 injured and weakened by regulations binding upon 
 the whole community. On the contrary, the public 
 system is to be regarded as all the more complete the less 
 remains to be done by private effort." 
 
 The Hegelian view of Crime and Punishment is a 
 little difficult to get at, and, I confess, to me not 
 entirely convincing even when got at. The punish- 
 ment of the criminal is a sort of restoration of harmony 
 that has been jangled by the crime. The criminal is 
 one who cuts off the branch that supports him ; and 
 the trial and sentence put him on the tree again, make 
 him once more a member of the community. Private 
 revenge is merely the infliction of a new wrong. By 
 submitting himself to judgment the criminal once 
 more identifies himself with the community and 
 cancels the wrong by an act that is above the passion 
 of individuals. In a perfect State the criminal would 
 demand punishment as a right, and the most terrible 
 thing that could happen to him would be for the 
 judge to turn to him, refuse to sentence him and tell 
 him that he was not above punishment but beneath 
 it, as it were, outside it. In his " History of Philo- 
 sophy," Hegel boldly defends the State of Athens for 
 its condemnation and execution of Socrates. Socrates, 
 he points out, was condemned to death, not because 
 he was found guilty of certain offences against the 
 laws of Athens of his guilt there could be no doubt 
 whatever but because he practically refused to plead, 
 refused to acknowledge the authority of the Court 
 which tried him, and refused to exercise his right of 
 choosing his own punishment. Yet a little later on 
 he contradicted his own action and gave away his 
 own case by refusing to escape when he had the 
 chance. " I judge it better and more just to sit here
 
 118 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 and suffer the punishment accorded," he said, " or 
 else, by the dog of Egypt, how long ago would these 
 bones and muscles have gone to Megara or to Boeotia 
 had they been moved only by their opinion of what 
 was best, and had not I, Socrates, considered it 
 juster and better to bear the punishment which the 
 State laid upon me instead of escaping and fleeing 
 from it." 
 
 Hegel points out that this most excellent resolution 
 came a little too late, and that to have been consistent 
 Socrates should have acknowledged the justice of the 
 finding of the Court and the right of the Court to try 
 him. He points out also how Pericles, quite as noble 
 a character as Socrates, had a truer conception of the 
 State when he submitted himself to the judgment of 
 the sovereign people, and entreated the citizens for 
 clemency to Aspasia and Anaxagoras. 
 
 " There is nothing dishonouring," says Hegel, " to 
 the individual in this, for he must bend before the 
 general power, and the real and noblest power is the 
 people. This acknowledgment the people must have 
 direct from those who raise themselves amongst 
 them." 
 
 In his assertion of the absolute supremacy of the 
 State, even in matters of conscience, Hegel goes 
 further than perhaps most of us would be prepared to 
 go with him. It is idle as against the State, to declare 
 that you are conscious of having done your duty. He 
 says in so many words : 
 
 " The first principle of a State is that there is no 
 reason or conscience or righteousness or anything 
 else, higher than that which the State recognizes as 
 such. They, for example, who resist any demands 
 made on them by the State, such as to defend the 
 Fatherland cannot be tolerated in a true State. This 
 miserable freedom of thinking and believing what men 
 will is not permitted, nor any such retreat behind
 
 THEORY OF THE STATE 119 
 
 personal consciousness of duty. If this consciousness 
 is not mere hypocrisy, in order that what the individual 
 does should be recognized as duty it must be recognized 
 as such for all. If the people can make mistakes the 
 individual may do so much more easily than the 
 people. Now law also has a conscience and has to 
 speak through it ; the law court is the privileged 
 conscience." 
 
 While vigorously asserting the right and duty of 
 the State to punish, Hegel recognizes that as the State 
 gets higher, more fully realizes its own essential 
 nature, punishments will tend to become more lenient. 
 " Although a crime could not be allowed to go un- 
 punished, since it would then be constituted as right, 
 yet because a community is sure of itself a crime is 
 always merely a single isolated act of hostility without 
 any foothold. By means of the very steadfastness of 
 the community crime becomes a mere subjective act. 
 If the community is still unsettled an example must 
 be made by means of punishment. But in the sure 
 a&d firm community the position of crime is so unstable 
 that a lesser measure of punishment is sufficient to 
 supersede it." 
 
 The highest actualization of the State yet attained 
 is that topped by a Constitutional Monarch. " The 
 Constitutional Monarch," says Hegel, with perhaps 
 some unconscious irreverence for royalty, " is the dot 
 upon the i " ; but Hegel is all for representative 
 government, and the really sovereign power the 
 legislative body must consist of representatives, not 
 of delegates. Deputies are chosen under the belief 
 that on the whole they have a better understanding 
 of State business than the electors." But to the 
 deputies are not committed specific mandates or 
 explicit instructions. . . . Representation is based 
 upon confidence. We have confidence in a person 
 when we believe in his insight and willingness to treat
 
 120 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 our affairs as his own according to the best light of 
 his knowledge and science." 
 
 I imagine that Hegel's ideal legislative body would 
 represent interests rather than districts, or districts 
 only so far as they were the abiding places of interests. 
 
 " To regard the deputies as representatives," he 
 says, " has a significance that is organic and rational 
 only if they are not representative of mere separate 
 individuals, or of a mere multitude, but of one of the 
 essential spheres of the community, and of its larger 
 interests. Representation does not mean that one 
 person should take the place of another. Rather is 
 the interest itself actually present in the person of the 
 representative. ' ' 
 
 The business of the representative is not to be 
 automatically pushed by public opinion, but to study 
 it with a view to extracting its essence. Its essence, 
 its inner nature, makes but a poor sort of show some- 
 times in its concrete appearance. So the duty of the 
 State is to give the people what they want, but not, 
 possibly, by the means by which they seek to get it. 
 " Of any reasonable end we may be sure that public 
 opinion will ultimately be pleased with it, recognize it, 
 and constitute it one of its possessions." 
 
 Public opinion is both false and true. It is the part 
 of the Statesman to distinguish the true. 
 
 " He who tells the time what it wills and means, 
 and then brings it to completion, is the great man. 
 For him the inner significance and essence of the time 
 is actualized. He who does not learn to discriminate 
 in public opinion, which is one thing in one place and 
 another in another, will never produce anything 
 great." 
 
 The existence of classes more or less well defined by 
 occupation is necessary to the existence of the State. 
 The grouping of men in families is the first foundation 
 of the State, and the grouping of them economically
 
 THEORY OF THE STATE 121 
 
 in classes is the second. All civilization arises from 
 agriculture. Agriculture implies settlement, a waiting 
 for the fruits of labour, and, consequently, something 
 to defend. The introduction of agriculture is always 
 revered as a divine act, and celebrated by religious 
 rites. The business of the industrial class is to alter 
 the form of the products of Nature. The industrial 
 class is indebted for its subsistence to the interposition 
 of the wants and labours of others. " Consequently," 
 says Hegel, " the sense of freedom and order " (two 
 things always inseparable from the Hegelian point of 
 view) " has mainly arisen in Cities. The agricultural 
 class needs to think little about itself. What it acquires 
 is the gift of a stranger Nature. With it the feeling 
 of dependence is primary. With this feeling is easily 
 associated a willingness to submit to whatever occurs. 
 The agricultural class, therefore, is more inclined to 
 subjection is more static ; the industrial class is 
 more inclined to freedom is more dynamic." 
 
 The two classes together with the class of public 
 servants those whose business it is to serve the 
 general interests of society and whose private wants 
 must be supplied by the State that takes their services 
 these classes make up the State. In the Hegelian 
 State there is no room at all for the gentleman at 
 large. " A human being without a vocation," he says, 
 " is a mere private person who has no place in a real 
 universal " and for Hegel the State is the Real 
 Universal in concrete form. 
 
 " Still the individual in his exclusiveness," he goes 
 on, " may regard himself as the true universal, and 
 may fancy when he adopts a trade or profession that 
 he is sinking to a lower plane. . . . But it is a false 
 notion, that a thing, when it attains the realization 
 that properly belongs to it, limits itself and gives up 
 its independence." 
 
 When Hegel was writing his " Philosophy of Right " 
 the whole of the economists and statesmen of Western
 
 122 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 Europe were given up to the doctrines of Individualism 
 and Laissez-Faire. In their view the proper functions 
 of the State were limited to those of the soldier and 
 the police constable. With such a barren conception 
 Hegel would have nothing to do. He repudiates it as 
 definitely and indubitably as the most orthodox 
 Socialist of to-day. For him the State is the Family 
 raised to its highest expression, and become a spiritual 
 entity. The State, in suspending, or rather, in trans- 
 cending the Family, has taken over its powers and its 
 responsibilities. If a man is the member of a com- 
 munity that has done this he has just such rights in it, 
 or claims upon it as he had in or upon the family. 
 Hegel goes as far as the last of the Education Acts, 
 and about as far as any future Education Acts are at 
 all likely to go. 
 
 " The Universal Family," says he, " has the right 
 and duty, if necessary to suspend the will of the 
 parents. . . . The boundary line between the rights 
 of the parents and those of the community is hard to 
 define. The parents generally suppose themselves to 
 possess complete liberty with regard to education, and 
 to be able to do whatever they wish. Whenever 
 instruction is made public the chief opposition comes 
 from the parents who cry out about teachers and 
 schools merely because they are displeased with them. 
 In spite of this the community has the right to proceed 
 according to tried methods, to send their children to 
 school, to have them vaccinated, &c. &c." 
 
 He goes in some respects further than any Modern 
 State has gone yet. " The community has the right 
 and the duty to take under its guardianship those 
 who wantonly squander their subsistence and that of 
 their family." 
 
 I think it is not difficult to deduce from Hegel our 
 new demand for a National Minimum. A proletariat 
 in a State is an evil that must be prevented ; and a 
 proletariat he defines as a considerable number of
 
 THEORY OF THE STATE 123 
 
 persons who have fallen below the standard of living 
 deemed necessary for a member of society in that 
 particular community. " A government," he says in 
 his " Miscellanies," " may not rest content with merely 
 demanding that something should occur, or with the 
 hope that it may occur, or even with placing restric- 
 tions on certain circumstances which might make it 
 difficult for it to occur : it only deserves the name if 
 its regulations are such that what ought to come to 
 pass, is actually brought to pass." It is in the State 
 only that you have a true individuality and a true 
 universality. It is the essential condition of the best 
 kind of individual action. It is not a mere sum of 
 persons and institutions ; it is " something more " 
 a bringer of new things. It is " the realized moral 
 idea the will manifesting itself making itself clear 
 and visible substantiating itself." The State is 
 absolute rationality. It is its own motive and its own 
 end such things as accident, need, particular strength 
 and wealth are mere elements of its historic develop- 
 ment. " The State is the march of God in the world," 
 he says, " its ground or cause is the power of reason 
 realizing itself." The various wills and activities of 
 the individuals and corporations are as essential to the 
 State as the State is to them ; but in the true State 
 these wills prove to be as one will, the State's will, 
 though distinguishable and distinct from other." 
 The distinction seems to me to be a little difficult 
 to draw. 
 
 Hegel places the State above the Church as an 
 organism and above the religious convictions and 
 consciousness of the individual. " The State appears 
 to be something finite whose province is of this world ; 
 while religion represents itself as the realm of the 
 infinite. Thus the State seems to be subordinate. 
 But this version of the matter is highly one-sided. 
 The State, in so far as it has particular ends and 
 functions, is of the world and finite, But that is only
 
 124 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 one side of it. Only to a perception which is void of 
 spirit is the State merely finite. The State has a vital 
 soul." 
 
 While cherishing and honouring individuality, with 
 what he would call its true sense that spiritual 
 freedom which owes its real being to union with the 
 whole Hegel has an inveterate dislike and distrust of 
 anything that smacks of eccentricity. From that 
 smaller, meaner sort of individuality it is the province 
 of culture, of education, to liberate us. 
 
 " We call those men cultured or educated," he 
 declares, " who can perform all that others do without 
 exhibiting any oddities of behaviour. True originality 
 which creates its object desires true culture ; while 
 false originality adopts insipidities which are always 
 characteristic of a lack of culture." 
 
 On the much discussed question of whether the 
 same code of morality that is binding upon individuals 
 is also binding upon States in their relations with one 
 another a subject so dear to debating societies 
 Hegel stands for the negative. . . . He comes down 
 on the side of ordinary common sense. " The State, 
 unlike the individual who is a unit in an organism and 
 whose conduct must be dictated by the interests of 
 that organism, must be the lord of itself ; there is no 
 higher tribunal whose sovereign authority it can 
 acknowledge." The commonweal has quite another 
 authority than the weal of the individual . . . the 
 State has its reality, not in an abstract, but in a 
 concrete existence. This existence, and not one of the 
 general ideas held to be moral commands, must be 
 the guiding principle of its conduct. The view that 
 World Politics in this assumed opposition is pre- 
 sumptively in the wrong, depends on a shallow view 
 both of morality and of the nature of the State in 
 relation to morality." 
 
 His criterion of morality as between States would 
 seem to be survival, and survival only. That we
 
 THEORY OF THE STATE 125 
 
 survive is right at any given moment of history and 
 the famous defence of the criminal " il faut vivre," 
 would, in the case of a State accused, be adequate and 
 convincing. " Civilized nations may treat as bar- 
 barians," he says, " the peoples who are behind them 
 in the essential elements of the State. . . . Wars and 
 contests arising in such circumstances are struggles for 
 recognition on behalf of a certain definite content." 
 Each historic State, each dominant State, is the 
 representative, the instrument, the highest outward 
 expression of the World Spirit, for its particular 
 epoch although it can make an epoch but once. " In 
 contrast with the absolute right of this State to be 
 the bearer of the current phase in the development 
 of the world spirit, the spirit of the existing States 
 are void of right, and they, like those whose epochs 
 are gone, count no longer in the history of the 
 world." 
 
 All this sounds uncommonly like the dictum " Might 
 is Right," and, in point of fact, it is that dictum 
 philosophically interpreted. The conqueror is not 
 right because he conquers ; but he conquers because 
 at his particular moment of world development he is 
 right. Those qualities of his which gave him the 
 victory were the particular qualities needful at the 
 moment, to push the human spirit into its next stage 
 of development, those very qualities, which in their 
 turn, are destined to become useless or positively 
 harmful. From this point of view, this wide and 
 philosophic standpoint, all historic events, say an 
 incursion of triumphant barbarism or the break up of 
 a civilization by a volcanic upheaval from below, 
 which to contemporaries may appear to be an unmiti- 
 gated and irretrievable calamity, will be seen to be 
 only the birth throes of a new and better, that is to 
 say, a more highly developed ordering of mankind. So 
 what seems to be only might, turns out to be right, 
 after all. The men who forced their own State to the
 
 126 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 front, as it were, were instruments, though they did 
 not realize it, of the World Spirit. 
 
 Then Hegel justifies War. In War you have the 
 recognition that the claim of the State to the life and 
 property of individuals is higher than their claim to 
 their own property and life. " The absolute power is 
 brought into contrast with all that is individual and 
 particular and makes their relative worthlessness a 
 fact of consciousness." By the very act of sacrificing 
 his life for an end not immediately personal to himself, 
 the individual is compelled to realize in what the 
 spiritual reality of that life consists. The individual 
 life is voluntarily negated, that the life of the universal 
 may be affirmed. 
 
 The only courage to which Hegel allows ethical 
 import is the courage displayed in defence of the 
 State ; all the rest is the mere brute pluck of the 
 animal or the robber or the duellist. 
 
 " True bravery consists of a readiness to offer up 
 oneself in the service of the State so that the individual 
 counts only as one among many. Not personal fear- 
 lessness, but the taking of one's place in a universal 
 cause is the value of it. ... In it is found the highest 
 self-control and independence which yet in its existence 
 submits to the mechanism of an external order and a 
 life of service. An utter obedience, a complete abnega- 
 tion of one's own opinions and reasonings, even an 
 absence of one's own spirit is coupled with the most 
 intense and comprehensive direct presence of the 
 spirit of the State. The most hostile attitude towards 
 individuals is allied with perfect indifference, or even, 
 it may be a kindly feeling towards them as individuals." 
 
 You will note, of course, how directly this philo- 
 sophic view of war differs from the ordinary empirical 
 view of those who condemn it as always, and in all 
 circumstances, a folly and a crime. I daresay you will 
 remember the passage in Carlyle's " Sartor Resartus,"
 
 THEORY OF THE STATE 127 
 
 in which this view is illustrated after the Carlylean 
 way. " What," speaking in quite unofficial language, 
 Teufelsdroch asks, " is the net purpose and upshot of 
 war? To my knowledge, for example, there dwell 
 and toil in the British village of Dumdrudge usually 
 some five hundred souls. From these, certain ' natural 
 enemies ' of the French are successfully selected, 
 during the French war, say, thirty able-bodied men : 
 Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and 
 nursed them : she has, not without difficulty and 
 sorrow, fed them up to manhood and even trained 
 them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, 
 another hammer, and the weakest can stand under 
 thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much 
 weeping and swearing they are selected : all dressed 
 in red : and shipped away at the public charges some 
 2000 miles, or say only to the south of Spain, and fed 
 there till wanted. And now in that same spot in the 
 south of Spain are thirty similar French artisans, from 
 a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending : till 
 at length after infinite effort, the two parties come 
 into actual juxtaposition : and Thirty stand fronting 
 Thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the 
 word ' Fire ! ' is given ; and instead of sixty brisk, 
 careful, craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcases, 
 which it must bury and anew shed tears for. Had 
 those men any quarrel ? Busy as the Devil is, not 
 the smallest ! They lived far enough apart ; were the 
 entirest strangers ; nay, in so wide a universe there 
 was even unconsciously by Commerce some mutual 
 helpfulness between them." 
 
 Thus, you see, the very fact that these soldiers had 
 no personal quarrel with one another seized upon by 
 Carlyle and again and again adduced, by the way, by 
 Tolstoi, as of itself a sufficient condemnation of War, 
 is the element relied upon by Hegel to acquit and 
 justify war when war is brought before the tribunal of 
 Philosophy.
 
 128 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 Occasionally, I am bound to admit, Hegel when 
 treating of war does seem to condescend to a sort of 
 special pleading, as, for instance, when he says that 
 " Just as the movement of the Ocean prevents the 
 corruption that would be the result of perpetual calm, 
 so by war people escape the corruption which would 
 be occasioned by a continuous or eternal peace." 
 That may or may not be true, but, anyhow, it is a 
 dictum and not a philosophical deduction. And the 
 same remark applies to his plea that war has a value 
 because it compels people to realize the essential 
 finiteness and contingency of individual life and 
 property. Nature, I rather fancy, will always do that 
 much for her sons. Concerning Hegel's attitude 
 towards war, however, it is only fair to remember that 
 he wrote with the War for the Liberation of Prussia 
 very fresh and fragrant in his memory. After having 
 been trodden in the dust, Prussia had pulled herself 
 together, and by one of the most wonderful acts of 
 national resilience and redemption in European history, 
 had fought for and won her independence and fairly 
 started on that career which is completing itself under 
 our eyes now, in the German hegemony of Europe. 
 We may take it as only natural and proper, I think, 
 that German philosophers should see evidence of the 
 World Spirit's most benevolent achievement in the 
 battle of Waterloo. 
 
 The ideal State of Hegel must stand four square to 
 every wind that blows. " The strength of a State," 
 he says, " lies neither in the multitude of its inhabi- 
 tants and fighting men, nor in its fertility, nor in its 
 size, but solely in the way its parts are by reasonable 
 combination made a single political force, enabling 
 everything to be used for the common defence. The 
 rights of a State," he goes on, " are the utility of the 
 State as established and recognized, and War has to 
 decide, not which of the rights asserted by either 
 party is the true right for both parties have true
 
 THEORY OF THE STATE 129 
 
 rights but which right has to give way to the 
 other." 
 
 To conclude. In the Hegelian philosophy the world 
 is based on Reason is Reason and the State is the 
 highest affirmation of the Rational in the sphere of 
 the concrete. It is moral substance. States arise and 
 decay, and pass, but each State has something in it of 
 the affirmative life ; and " it is the theme of philosophy 
 to ascertain the substance which is immanent in the 
 show of the temporal and the eternal which is present 
 in the transient." 
 
 The State, therefore, can recognize no authority but 
 its own. It can acknowledge no abstract rules of 
 good and bad. It is, as has been happily said of it, 
 " the absolute universal compared to which everything 
 else is a particular. It is the phenomenon of God." 
 
 It knows no judge but History. Die Weltgeschichte 
 ist das Weltgericht. 
 
 1910.
 
 XV 
 
 A TALK ABOUT BOOKS 
 
 WHEN, some time ago I was at pains to set out 
 the names of what I held to be the thirteen best 
 novels in the English language, I honestly thought 
 I had said my last word on the matter. I little knew 
 my readers, it seems. I had received a good many 
 letters on the subject before, many more than I could 
 possibly answer privately ; but I have received more 
 letters since. The chief purpose of most of these 
 later communications was to remonstrate with me 
 for having selected " this " instead of " that," which, 
 in the writer's opinion, was the better book of the two. 
 My correspondents do not appear in the least disposed 
 to do what I hoped they would do, accept my views 
 as those of a literary Pope whose dogmas were " of 
 the faith " and not to be questioned. I may not 
 have preferences, it seems, unless I am prepared to 
 justify those preferences. Now " a justification of 
 preferences " is the best definition I know of the term 
 " criticism." That is just what criticism is, and 
 should be a justification of preferences. When I 
 merely say I like a thing I am not criticising that 
 thing ; directly I give my reasons for liking it I be- 
 come a critic. What my correspondents are now 
 asking of me is that I should do no less a thing than 
 criticise thirteen great English works of art a largish 
 order. I realize now, as I never realized before, the 
 130
 
 A TALK ABOUT BOOKS 131 
 
 wisdom of the old judge who advised the young one 
 to deliver his judgments unhesitatingly, but never 
 to attempt to give his reasons for them. If Destiny 
 had allotted me thirteen weeks and twenty-six 
 columns for the job I might be inclined to 
 tackle it, but failing that handsome allowance of 
 time and space I must politely but firmly refuse. 
 However, I will do what I can. I am in a literary 
 mood to-day, and we will spend half an hour or so 
 together (by your leave) in talking quietly about some 
 of the novels in my baker's dozen. 
 
 Here is the list again, then ; and let me say at the 
 outset that I made no attempt to place the books 
 in order of merit : 
 
 Tom Jones (Fielding) 
 
 The Talisman (Scott) 
 
 Esmond (Thackeray) 
 
 Silas Marner (George Eliot) 
 
 Great Expectations (Dickens) 
 
 David Copperfield (Dickens) 
 
 Emma (Jane Austen) 
 
 Richard Feverel (Meredith) 
 
 Harry Richmond (Meredith) 
 
 The Woodlanders (Hardy) 
 
 Tess (Hardy) 
 
 Jane Eyre (C. Bronte) 
 
 The Cloister and the Hearth (C. Reade) 
 
 On the whole I think these are the thirteen novels 
 which I prefer ; but there were others, heaps of others, 
 which ran each one of them so hard in my affections 
 that it was only with the greatest reluctance and 
 difficulty I made my final and definite selection. I 
 don't think I hesitated long over " Tom Jones." 
 When one begins to talk about great English novels 
 " Tom Jones " comes naturally, spontaneously, to
 
 132 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 the lips. Is there any other piece of literary work 
 in our language which gives quite so adequate, so 
 vital, a picture of the life, the times, the characters 
 it seeks to depict as Fielding has painted for us on 
 those glowing pages ? " Tom Jones " is something 
 more than a book, it is the father of a great school 
 of books. Had Fielding never written we should 
 certainly never have had a Dickens ; I don't think 
 we should ever have had a Thackeray. And what 
 we should have done without those two I do not care 
 even to speculate. The great novelist has this ad- 
 vantage over the mere historian that his creations 
 are men and women of flesh and blood, while those 
 of the historian are but sawdust-stuffed figures moved 
 by wires marked " ambition," " love," " prudence," 
 " policy," and what not. The characters in the 
 best fiction are real figures of our English life. To 
 the most of us the great Duke of Marlborough, for 
 instance, so far as we know him from our reading of 
 history, is a name and little else ; a great name, of 
 course, but the name of a force rather than of a man. 
 Then think of Uncle Pumblechook in " Great Ex- 
 pectations ! " Why, we know him better than we 
 know any of our own blood relatives. We should 
 recognize him in a moment if we met him in the street. 
 Now in " Tom Jones " there are no fewer than four 
 characters at least who live for ever in our memories 
 as Uncle Pumblechook lives: Tom's self, Squire 
 Western and his daughter, and the philosopher. When 
 you know Squire Western you understand the back- 
 bone of the Toryism of the time ; in Sophia you see 
 your own great-great-grandmother in her habit as 
 she lived, and a very pleasant and pretty habit it 
 was to be sure. And then the high spirits, the vigour, 
 the essential healthiness of the book ! How the man 
 enjoyed writing it ; how he infects his readers with 
 his own enjoyment. Always the note of the great 
 artist, that. There are passages in " Tom Jones,"
 
 A TALK ABOUT BOOKS 133 
 
 I know, scarcely suited to the reading of school girls 
 of fifteen ; but, then, it was not for girls of fifteen 
 that Fielding wrote. He was a full-blooded, sane- 
 minded man, and his book is a book for full-blooded, 
 sane-minded men, and women too. The grown women, 
 it seems to me, who could be hurt by aught in " Tom 
 Jones " must be already long past hurting. So no 
 more of Fielding now. I am solid about " Tom 
 Jones." I am ready to argue as to the merits of some 
 others on my list, but for the pre-eminence of " Tom 
 Jones " I am ready to fight. 
 
 As to " The Talisman," I admit a few doubts, though 
 I am clear as to its superiority over " Ivanhoe," the 
 book apparently most beloved by most of my corre- 
 spondents. Personally, I think "Quentin Durward," 
 " Guy Mannering," and " The Heart of Midlothian " 
 better books than " Ivanhoe." " Ivanhoe " is a 
 rattling boy's book, I freely admit, but I must think 
 it fails to touch men who have long left school. Half 
 its characters are mere puppets in historical costumes, 
 and those historical costumes are often wrong, for 
 Sir Walter was no careful archaeologist. Rowena, 
 for instance, is a dressed up doll. I defy any one of 
 you to sit down and write me out from memory a 
 character sketch of Rewona. Rowena had no char- 
 acter. A far, far better novel than " Ivanhoe " is 
 Kingsley's " Here ward," a book over which I hesi- 
 tated long before I closed my list. There is too much 
 of the stage-stagey about " Ivanhoe." It reminds 
 you of a spectacle play at His Majesty's when no ex- 
 pense has been spared over the mounting. Here let 
 me make a frank confession. I am no very ardent 
 admirer of Sir Walter. Sir Walter not infrequently 
 bores me. There are so many long, bald, arid passages 
 even in the best of his books ; passages through which 
 it is a weariness to travel. Sir Walter's descriptions
 
 134 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 seem to me always a bit too descriptive. And then 
 his strongest supporters must admit that he did some 
 downright bad work. Of course I know he did some 
 supreme work too, work that will live for ever ; but 
 time I think will winnow away bushels, nay, tons, of 
 chaff. This age, I believe, reads Sir Walter so much 
 because its parents read him and gave him to their 
 early youth. We are apt to take a little too much 
 on authority in these matters a good enough habit 
 when we are quite sure of our authorities, but per- 
 sonally I am not quite sure of our fathers. They 
 made many queer mistakes. Some of them loved 
 and quoted Tupper, it must be remembered. I think 
 I chose " The Talisman " because it is the work of 
 Scott's I remember best. Richard Cceur de Lion 
 sticks in my memory. I can see him now as he 
 swaggers with his great square shoulders out of his 
 tent, gaily humming to himself snatches of a popular 
 melody of the time, and humming it all out of tune. 
 It was a fine touch that : the big, strong, beefy man ! 
 In this matter of Sir Walter I do not ask my readers 
 to follow me. I admit I may be wrong about Scott 
 a painful admission for a literary critic to make 
 many of the finest critics disagree with me, Ruskin, 
 R. L. Stevenson, Henley, and others. But I must needs 
 say what I think. It would be cowardice of me to 
 sit here writing what other people say I ought to 
 think. 
 
 Of Thackeray's novels I selected " Esmond," I 
 really believe, because it is the least like Thackeray 
 of them all a quaint reason, I hear you saying. 
 Here again, as in the case of Sir Walter, I know I 
 shall be in a minority among critics. I admire 
 Thackeray with all my brains, but I have never been 
 able to love him with all my heart. Had he never 
 written " Esmond " I should have placed " Vanity
 
 A TALK ABOUT BOOKS 135 
 
 Fair " among my thirteen without an instant's dubiety. 
 " Vanity Fair " for me is Becky Sharp, and Becky 
 Sharp is one of the immortals. In English literature 
 she stands, unquestionably, beside Portia, Cordelia, 
 Imogen, and in my private opinion (which I will 
 venture only to whisper in your ear), on a plane a bit 
 higher than theirs. She is one of those real characters 
 of which I spoke just now, a more real figure of English 
 life than Queen Elizabeth or Queen Anne. The 
 position of " Vanity Fair " is established on a firm 
 foundation ; time will fail to shake it. But " Esmond," 
 you must remember, was what the French call a tour 
 de force. It was written in a style and language that 
 were not Thackeray's own, but the style and language 
 of the time in which Esmond himself moved. And 
 I love the style and language of that period, love them 
 more than the style and language of our own time 
 or of Thackeray's. I love the polish, the urbanity, 
 combined with strength, of the days of the Jacobites. 
 And, over and above mere questions of style, " Es- 
 mond " is made immortal by Beatrix of that name. 
 Beatrix Esmond is one of the half-dozen great women 
 of English fiction ; one of the twenty great women 
 of all fiction. She is more interesting than Becky 
 because more complex, drawn in larger, subtler lines, 
 or curves, I had better say. The portrayal of Beatrix 
 was one of the boldest things that any novelist has 
 ever attempted. In " Esmond " too Thackeray has 
 dropped that cheap and shallow cynicism which marred 
 so much of his best work. I don't believe that 
 Thackeray was at heart a cynic, not a bit; but it 
 too often pleased him to pose as one, and the pose 
 being a pose, it is not attractive. In fine, between 
 " Esmond " and " Vanity Fair " it was a toss up 
 with me, but the coin fell with the glorious little head 
 of Beatrix uppermost.
 
 136 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 When I came to George Eliot I sat and feebly 
 fingered my pen for the best part of an hour. Three, 
 at least, of George Eliot's books are masterpieces, 
 and two others are more nearly masterpieces than any 
 English novel that has been written in the last ten 
 years. At first I put down " Middlemarch," and 
 then, after a minute or two, I scratched it out again. 
 " Middlemarch " is too long and too discursive to 
 be a perfect work of art. It contains some quite 
 perfect work, but as a whole it is imperfect. It is 
 also too terrible, too much like life itself, and to read 
 it twice is like living a life a second time. Nathless, 
 of itself it is all sufficient to make and to secure a 
 mighty reputation. Had George Eliot written nothing 
 else, " Middlemarch " alone had given her a topmast 
 place in English letters. Then I tried " The Mill on 
 the Floss," and when I thought of the early boyhood 
 of Tom Tulliver I nearly left it there. But I also 
 remembered Stephen Guest, that prig of prigs, evi- 
 dently beloved of the author, and I ran my pen through 
 the title. " Adam Bede " came next ; but I soon 
 obliterated " Adam Bede." " Adam Bede " always 
 raises my dander. I almost dislike George Eliot 
 when I think of her treatment of Hetty Sorrel. How 
 she hated poor little kittenish Hetty, with the hatred 
 almost of an acrid old maid for the woman who has 
 dared all and lost all. The cold-blooded way, too, 
 in which the author takes it for granted that a gentle- 
 man who has wronged a girl of humble station cannot, 
 may not, just because he is a gentleman, be so much 
 as expected to set the wrong right, rouses every such 
 generous instinct as I have. So out went " Adam 
 Bede." " Silas Marner," both in thought and literary 
 style, is as nearly perfect as a novel can be. It is 
 short (and shortness is of itself a merit), it is compact, 
 it contains scarce a word that is inessential to the 
 telling of the story. The little pictures of quiet, 
 dignified country life charm us, while they shame us
 
 A TALK ABOUT BOOKS 137 
 
 when we contrast it with our own. It abounds in 
 humour. It contains passages of rare beauty. No 
 other writer has ever portrayed children with the 
 delicacy, the insight, the sympathy, the large womanly 
 appreciation of George Eliot, herself a childless woman. 
 All they who love children (and they who do not miss 
 one of life's keenest and deepest emotions) will for- 
 give, and more than forgive, George Eliot, with all 
 her faults of taste and temper and occasional prig- 
 gishness, for her tender, loving portrait of the child 
 in " Silas Marner." For that book, too, I am ready 
 to fight. Come one, come all, I fearlessly champion 
 " Silas Marner " as one of the greatest novels in our 
 own or any other tongue. 
 
 How am I to say a critical word of Charles Dickens ? 
 One does not criticise one's dearest friend when, for 
 a while, he takes his place in the armchair on the 
 other side of the fire. And it is friendship of the 
 truest sort that one always feels for Dickens when 
 one takes a book of his from the shelf. Oh, I can 
 see his faults well enough, his blemishes innumerable, 
 when the critical side of me comes to the top, that 
 is ; but somehow when I think of Dickens the critical 
 faculty always sinks out of sight. In a word, I love 
 Dickens with a love that overwhelms my vast ad- 
 miration of him. And it was with " Great Expecta- 
 tions " that he won my love. The great heart of 
 the man showed itself there, the exhaustless humanity, 
 the wide sympathy that went out even to the outcast 
 and the rogue, just because rogue and outcast were 
 fellow-men. On the side of the poor and the oppressed 
 Dickens always stood a gallant knight ; but in " Great 
 Expectations " that brave, wise love of his embraced 
 the very low-down criminal. If I may be allowed 
 to say so here, that spirit of his was the spirit of 
 Socialism not the Socialism of the street corner or
 
 138 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 the platform, but of the piteous heart of Man. But 
 it is not for his possession of these high moral qualities 
 that I claim for Dickens the crown of artistry. All 
 these a man may have, and yet write very indifferent 
 books. A novelist must be something more than a 
 great man, he must be a great artist too, and it is for 
 its artistic qualities, in the first place, that I set " Great 
 Expectations " in my baker's dozen. The portrayal 
 of Pip (a self-revelation, be it remembered, the book 
 being written in the first person) is a veritable triumph 
 of characterization, far, far finer than that of David 
 in " David Copperfield." David presents his friends 
 for us most admirably ; Pip depicts himself. One 
 notes the little weaknesses the perky little self- 
 conceit, which he lets out, spite of himself, as it were. 
 Pip is a proof, if proof were wanting, how possible it 
 is to great art to make the commonplace interesting ; 
 for Pip is quite interesting and quite commonplace ; 
 there is naught striking or heroic about Pip. There 
 are critics, I believe, who declare Joe Gargery to be 
 overdrawn. I do not agree with those critics. Gar- 
 gery is not overdrawn ; he is drawn from intimate 
 observation and loving sympathy, that is all. He 
 only strikes us as being overdrawn from the fact 
 that we seldom observe intimately, and that we have 
 so little of loving sympathy for men outside our own 
 immediate class circles. I know of no essential great- 
 ness in fiction that is lacking in " Great Expectations." 
 Fiction is made up of description, of dialogue, and of 
 characterization, and in each one of these "Great 
 Expectations " is supreme, it seems to me. Read 
 the description of the foggy morning on the desolate 
 marshes in the opening chapters, and tell me if the 
 greatest of landscape painters could have made you 
 realize the scene more adequately than Dickens does 
 here in the cold black and white of printed words. 
 You shiver as you feel the chilliness of the damp-laden 
 air. You want to turn your coat collar up. Consider
 
 A TALK ABOUT BOOKS 139 
 
 the humour of that Christmas party, not a sentence 
 that rings false or strained, only the unnecessary left 
 out. Of course a Christmas party never said so much 
 that you like to hear without saying a good deal that 
 you do not care to hear ; and all that you do not care 
 to hear, all that would add nothing to your amusement, 
 Dickens omits, just because he is an artist and not 
 a photographer, as Zola is, for instance. Take the 
 Pocket household again ; could anything be more 
 absolutely true, more irresistibly comic ? Nine times 
 out of ten the humour, the abundant humour of 
 Dickens, was true ; just now and then it degenerates, 
 the comedy drivels away into farce. His pathos is 
 less often right, he too frequently places an onion in 
 his handkerchief when he wants to evoke our tears. 
 But in his great moments his pathos is consummate. 
 The death of Betty Higden in " Our Mutual Friend," 
 of Sidney Carton in " A Tale of Two Cities " you will 
 find nothing better than those though you ransack 
 the libraries of Europe and America. Dickens is a 
 little out of fashion now, I know. A certain school 
 of critics is a little apt to sniff at him, to twitch the 
 nostrils when he is mentioned, and to raise the eye- 
 brow. I heard a young man just down from Oxford 
 the other day call him " vulgar." I didn't even laugh 
 at the youth. 
 
 Dickens was one of the few great artists who had 
 honour in his own generation. Popularity is no 
 proof whatever of greatness ; the shouting crowd 
 can never confer the wreath of immortelles. That 
 must always be given by the elect the really capable 
 critics, that is. Many a great artist never is and 
 never will be popular. Take Miss Marie Corelli or 
 Mr. Hall Caine, for instance, as examples of the popular 
 which is not the great. Their works sell in hundreds 
 of thousands. For one reader who prefers Meredith
 
 140 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 to them, there are at least a hundred who prefer 
 them to Meredith. But in another fifty years there 
 will still be men and women of good taste reading 
 and admiring Meredith, while probably no one at 
 that time will so much as have heard of Marie Corelli 
 or Mr. Hall Caine ; because there will be lots of other 
 writers as good, and as bad, as they, appealing to the 
 long ears of the crowd ; whereas it is most unlikely 
 that we shall have more than one Meredith in a cen- 
 tury. Dickens won popularity because he appealed 
 to the heart of the people ; he achieved his greatness 
 by appealing to the judgment too. It is given unto 
 few artists to do both. Even now I expect nine-tenths 
 of his readers imagine "Oliver Twist," "The Old 
 Curiosity Shop," and " Pickwick " to be his best 
 books, whereas those books alone would never have 
 given him his place among the immortals. Ask the 
 next man you meet what passages he admires most 
 in Dickens, and the chances are he will tell you the 
 death of Little Nell and the death of Paul Dombey, 
 both of them instances of false pathos, onion-pathos, 
 if I may say so. Now the death of Dora in " David 
 Copperfield " is the genuine article itself, not a bit 
 forced or overstrained. One recognizes that oneself 
 would have felt just as David felt about it. The 
 merit of " David Copperfield " is not artistic complete- 
 ness so much as absolute truth to life. There is 
 exaggeration, of course, here and there, for exaggera- 
 tion was always Dickens' besetting sin, but for the 
 most part the book is wonderfully true. And some 
 of the purely descriptive passages are matchless in 
 the whole range of English literature. I may mention, 
 as an example, the storm at Yarmouth. Turner with 
 his miraculous brush never painted a storm better 
 than did Dickens there with pen and ink. If I had 
 space I would quote the whole passage here, but as 
 it is I advise you to turn to it for yourselves. One 
 hears that storm, one feels the wind howling down
 
 A TALK ABOUT BOOKS 141 
 
 the streets. Note again the development of character, 
 always the crucial test of a novelist's power, as it is 
 shown in Steerforth. See how the faults of the boy 
 grow into the vices of the man. Steerforth was a 
 brute to begin with, and yet one quite understands 
 his attraction for David, the rather milk-soppy little 
 boy. A friend of mine was saying to me the other 
 day that Dickens had never drawn a woman. It is 
 true, certainly, that when he tried to draw his ideal 
 woman he failed egregiously, as witness the tame 
 and uninteresting Agnes. It is true, also, that he 
 never comprehended the infinite complexity of femi- 
 ninity sufficiently to make so elaborate a study of 
 it as Meredith has done again and again, but I can't 
 help feeling that Betsy Trotwood and Peggoty are 
 true women, and women who will live in the future 
 as surely as, say, Falstaff lives to-day. To say that 
 Dickens often wrote badly, that his style is often 
 slipshod and newspaperish, is as cheap and easy as 
 it is true to say. But Dickens at his best is hard 
 to beat, and I venture to assert that at his best he 
 never has been beaten. 
 
 I shall not want to fight or even to quarrel with 
 anyone who declines to agree with me as to " Emma." 
 I put " Emma " in my baker's dozen mainly because 
 I think Miss Austen to be one of the greatest of English 
 novelists, and " Emma " to be her greatest, her 
 most characteristic, work. Miss Austen is unique. 
 There is no one who has delineated English middle- 
 class domestic life quite so perfectly as she. Her 
 subtle, delicate satire, so finely woven as to be almost 
 imperceptible to a coarse-grained critic, is a thing of 
 itself. But I won't say any more here of Jane Austen. 
 She is emphatically an author to be read by the fireside, 
 with one's pipe between one's lips and one's slippers 
 on one's feet.
 
 142 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 George Meredith is the greatest of living novelists. 
 I really don't think there can be any doubt about 
 that, any doubt in the minds of those who can read 
 him at all, that is. And I do not believe that the mass 
 of men will ever be able to read Meredith. Meredith's 
 circle of admirers will widen and widen as the years 
 roll by, but it will never be big enough to include 
 the crowd. If you have never yet read Meredith 
 I strongly advise you not to begin on him at the 
 end of a busy day when your brain is fagged and 
 your mental muscles are a bit flaccid. Compared 
 with most novelists he is like a plate of strong meat 
 coming after a milk diet. And, I must admit, his 
 style is sometimes a little difficult ; not because it is 
 really obscure, but because it is too brilliant. It 
 dazzles as forked lightning dazzles, the while it illu- 
 minates. Also it is a new thing in literature, and has 
 for the average man all the terrors of the unusual. 
 It wants thinking over a bit, and even the cleverest 
 of us is averse from thinking more than he can help. 
 But take up " Richard Feverel " when your mind 
 is fresh and your brain braced up, and set yourself 
 resolutely to finish the first hundred pages, and I 
 will answer for it that you will finish the book and 
 not care to do much else until you have finished the 
 book. That fight between the two lads will get fast 
 hold of you, and ever afterwards you will be a Mere- 
 dithian. Go on until you come to the love-making 
 of Lucy and Richard, and you will then vehemently 
 declare that there has been no such magnificent 
 representation of young passion since another supreme 
 artist gave Romeo and Juliet to the world. 
 
 If you think I am using exaggerated language in 
 this talk about books, please remember that I am 
 talking about such books only as seem to me the 
 very greatest in our tongue, and when one talks of
 
 A TALK ABOUT BOOKS 143 
 
 the greatest one must needs speak in superlatives. 
 I am speaking in superlatives then, but nevertheless 
 saying sober truth when I affirm that the character 
 of Richmond Roy in " Harry Richmond " is one of 
 the biggest achievements in the world's literature. 
 Roy's is just the type of character in the delineation 
 of which Meredith excels, the type of character that 
 appeals most strongly to his peculiar genius. He 
 has drawn others Victor in " One of Our Conquerors," 
 Old Mel in " Evan Harrington " but even he has 
 never done anything quite so superb as Richmond 
 Roy. Roy's is one of those rare personalities, compact 
 of fraud and honesty, of strength and weakness, with 
 a very strong dash of the magnificent, which carry 
 everything before them, including most men and 
 all women. You never can quite make up your mind 
 as to whether such a man is a humbug or a genius, 
 or a humbug and a genius. When opportunity favours 
 such men they become the Napoleons of the earth. 
 When opportunity fails they remain just the Richmond 
 Roys, the Old Mels, the Victors. They are always 
 wandering upon that mysterious borderland which 
 lies between mania and sanity. As one reads of them 
 one wonders at the folly of the people on whom they 
 impose, and yet all the while one has to admit to 
 oneself that had one been there one would have acted 
 just as these fools did. There is some vital force 
 about these men that compels service. The character 
 of Richmond Roy alone is enough to make an artist's 
 reputation. But Meredith has given us a whole 
 gallery of characters. When one closes one's eyes 
 and thinks of Meredith's novels one sees a mighty 
 crowd of wonderful men and women all breathing 
 and alive. I am not surprised that the modern 
 woman, who knows good work when she sees it, should 
 adore Meredith, for he has done her justice the while 
 he has never spared her. His " good " women are 
 not made up of negatives and domesticity. The
 
 144 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 best of them have passions that lead them to the 
 perilous edge of the pit. Take any one you like of 
 Meredith's women, Clara Middleton, Diana of the 
 Crossways, Rose Jocelyn, Sandra Belloni, and compare 
 her with, let us say, Thackeray's Amelia in " Vanity 
 Fair " or Agnes in " David Copperfield," and you 
 will see the difference between a real woman with 
 blood in her veins and a wax puppet from the toy 
 shop. I don't mind going further, and saying 
 that Shakespeare's Ophelia and Desdemona, and 
 Goethe's Margaret, about whose virtues the world 
 is too much given to jabber commonplaces, are pale 
 shadows when contrasted with Diana and Sandra 
 Belloni. 
 
 I have said, and I stand by my prophecy, that 
 George Meredith will never be popular, but there 
 seems to me no reason whatever why his readers 
 should not increase fourfold even in the lifetime of 
 this generation, if only people would tackle his books 
 in the right spirit and in the right order. Remember 
 that a great work of art is practically exhaustless ; 
 it never makes its appeal all at once. A work that 
 convinces you of its greatness at first sight is pretty 
 sure to have something cheap and meretricious about 
 it. You might as well hope to get the right emotions 
 from Lincoln Cathedral on a first visit, or from a 
 Beethoven symphony on a first hearing, as attempt 
 rightly to appreciate a great novel by merely running 
 the eye idly down the first hundred pages. The very 
 things that please or amuse you are probably the 
 poorest ; the big things you miss altogether. Then 
 again, when a writer has an individual and an original 
 style, you must get accustomed to that style, attuned 
 to it, so to speak. You must not shy at a phrase 
 turned in a new way as a half-broken hackney shies 
 at a freshly painted pillar-box. You must let the
 
 A TALK ABOUT BOOKS 145 
 
 artist have his own way with you. You must try to 
 believe that he knows his own business best. Do 
 this with Meredith, and you will some day thank me 
 for this little literary talk. Begin with " Richard 
 Feverel," then take " Harry Richmond." By 
 that time I think you will be quite anxious to read 
 "Evan Harrington." 
 
 I should not be disposed to cavil were anyone to 
 say that in many respects, in the possession of some 
 important artistic qualities, Thomas Hardy was a 
 greater artist even than George Meredith. His style, 
 for instance, is more facile, more under his own con- 
 trol; it presents fewer difficulties, fewer literary fads; 
 he tells a story more simply, more directly, and keeps 
 closer to his story while he tells it. He plumbs, 
 perhaps, profounder depths of human passion and 
 tragedy. And all this is true. But for me Hardy 
 will always stand below Meredith by reason of his 
 temperament and his narrower outlook upon life. 
 For Hardy is pessimist to the core of his being, pessi- 
 mist in very grain, and your pessimist can never be 
 supremely great, if only because he sees but one side 
 of a many-sided, most variegated life. No man can 
 judge of a country who stands ever with his back 
 to the sun. The biggest men see the shadows, as 
 many and as black as you like, but they see also the 
 light that produces these shadows. With Hardy 
 Man is the sport of a cruel Fate ; there is no reason 
 in things, no right. He says as much outright in 
 the closing passage of " Tess." Now the greatest 
 art, even when it deals with the direst tragedy, stimu- 
 lates while it awes. Read Lear, Macbeth, and you 
 will come away shuddering but not cast down, not 
 feeling that the Devil has conquered and that all is 
 wrong with the world. But after closing the covers 
 of " Tess," and still more of " Jude the Obscure,"
 
 146 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 you will feel yourself smothered in gloom, gasping, 
 struggling against it as against some hideous black 
 pall with which some colossal demon is trying to 
 stifle you. This feeling is, of course, high testimony 
 to the power of the writer, but at the same time it 
 proves (to my thinking) that the power is not quite 
 of the highest, of the best. But, compared with 
 any other living novelist except Meredith, Thomas 
 Hardy is at the very top of the tree. At least four 
 of his books, " The Woodlanders," " Far from the 
 Madding Crowd," " The Return of the Native," and 
 " Tess," are masterpieces in any and in every sense 
 of the word. 
 
 From these I select "The Woodlanders" as the 
 most perfect and " Tess " as the most powerful. If 
 ** The Woodlanders " be not a perfect novel, then I 
 must frankly give up the search for perfection in 
 art. It displays all the author's finest qualities, and 
 all at their highest. The very atmosphere of the 
 story is redolent of the odour of English woods ; to 
 English nostrils the sweetest perfume in all the world. 
 In the character of Grace we have demonstrated all 
 Hardy's power, and his limitations too it must be 
 admitted, in the anatomization of that elusive, baffling 
 thing, femininity. Hardy's women are not the com- 
 plex beings of Meredith, nor the dolls and vixens of 
 Dickens and Thackeray. In them we see the eternal 
 feminine made manifest. They are creatures of 
 caprice and passion, motived for the most part by 
 the simpler, the more elemental motives, but utterly 
 charming all the same. Their influence upon human 
 affairs and the destiny of man is mighty, but it is 
 nearly always an influence for evil, or at least for 
 disruption and disorder. In Hardy's books the 
 *' good " woman nearly always comes off badly ; the 
 baddish, for there are few downright bad, triumphs
 
 A TALK ABOUT BOOKS 147 
 
 in the end. The more distinctly feminine a woman, 
 the better she fares here below, is one of Hardy's 
 theories of life. Personally, I know of no written 
 passage more sad, more quintessentially pathetic, 
 than the last lines of " The Woodland ers," which 
 show Marty South in the churchyard alone with the 
 grave of her love and her hope. It is one of the 
 most poignant things in literature. 
 
 In " Tess " Mr. Hardy for the first time deserted 
 pure art and appeared in the character of prophet 
 and preacher. He boldly challenged Society's most 
 cherished convention by his sub-title to the book 
 " A Pure Woman," and, it must be admitted, there 
 are not a few passages in the story which have no 
 place in a novel, as such. But at the same time 
 there are other passages which for sheer dramatic 
 power and beauty can safely challenge comparison 
 with any that human brain has ever conceived or 
 human hand written. I don't envy the man his 
 temperament who can read unshaken that nerve- 
 clutching scene between Tess and her husband on 
 the night of their wedding. I remember to this 
 hour how I first read it in the smoking-room of a 
 Manchester hotel, and how in the middle of it I had 
 to close the book for a while and go out into the streets 
 by way of relief from the fearful tragedy of it. In 
 all that portion of " Tess " descriptive of life upon 
 the dairy-farm Mr. Hardy has met Zola upon his own 
 ground and fairly knocked him into a cocked hat. 
 Much of it is photographic, it must be confessed, but 
 Hardy uses his camera in the spirit, of an artist and 
 Zola his in the bungling manner of a journeyman 
 photographer. " Tess " is a terrible book, a book 
 that rouses the soul to revolt against the cruelty of 
 God and the stupidity of man. One feels that here 
 is a woman of fine nature and right instincts made
 
 148 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 naught of but a plaything by some all-powerful, all- 
 malign Fate. " The President of the Immortals had 
 finished his sport with Tess," says the author, when 
 the black flag had been run up over the gaol. " Tess " 
 suggests a problem to the psychologist and the philo- 
 sopher. How is it, we ask ourselves, that a man with 
 so fine a feeling for, so keen an appreciation of beauty 
 as Thomas Hardy can take so appalling a view of 
 life and of the ways of God with men ? And to 
 that question we can find no answer. 
 
 " Jane Eyre " is as full of faults as an egg of meat, 
 but spite of them all it remains a work of splendid 
 and original genius. At times it rises to the loftiest 
 heights of poetry, both of thought and diction. That 
 scene between Rochester and Jane is lyric in its love- 
 liness. " To the finest fibre of my being, sir," says 
 Jane, when Rochester asks her if she loves him. What 
 an answer ; an answer surely that any man would 
 gladly die to hear from the lips of the beloved. But 
 I have no more time to speak of " Jane Eyre," or 
 of "The Cloister and the Hearth," the last upon 
 my list, and in my view, take it for all in all, the 
 best historical novel in our tongue. This little chat 
 of ours is ended. 
 
 1899.
 
 XVI 
 
 ABOUT DIVORCE 
 
 IT seems that the odd jumble of personalities who 
 compose the Royal Commission on the Marriage Laws 
 have at last made up their minds on two proposals. 
 One of these is that there shall be sex equality before 
 the Divorce Law> in other words, that the infidelity 
 of the husband, without the addition of cruelty or 
 desertion, shall be grounds sufficient for the granting 
 of a decree nisi to the injured wife. The other is 
 that divorce shall be rendered easier and cheaper 
 than heretofore to persons of humble means. 
 
 That the first of these proposals should have found 
 favour in the eyes of any considerable number of 
 persons of widely differing religious convictions and 
 divergent moral and social opinions proves that there 
 has been a considerable shifting of the point of view 
 since the days, fifty years ago, when the present 
 Divorce Law first received the sanction of the Legis- 
 lature and of public opinion. 
 
 There can be no doubt whatever that in the opinion 
 of those responsible for what is called the sex inequality 
 of the law an adverse decision in the Divorce Court 
 was held to be in the nature of a penalty as well as a 
 release ; and it was thought that a decree of divorce 
 was a severer penalty than a decree of separation. 
 The Legislators held that an act of infidelity on the 
 part of a wife was a graver offence than a similar 
 149
 
 150 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 offence on the part of a husband, and they sought to 
 penalize the offender with what they held to be a 
 severer form of punishment. 
 
 Herein at least they were logical, consistent with 
 themselves, and in accord with the inexorable facts 
 of life. They did not fall into the error, so common 
 to-day, of treating two different persons or sets of 
 circumstances in precisely the same way and then 
 imagining that equality of treatment has been secured. 
 They meted out to the woman a penalty different 
 to that which they inflicted upon the man for the 
 same offence because they realized that the offence 
 was not, and could not be, the same. 
 
 And, of course, it is not, and cannot be, the same. 
 Nature, who, after all, even in an age grown so arti- 
 ficial as ours, still plays a predominant part in human 
 affairs, has seen to that. By acts of incontinence a 
 woman can foist upon her husband a child or a family 
 of children, not his own, who shall inherit his property 
 and bear his name. That is a wrong which by the 
 very nature of things a husband cannot inflict upon 
 a wife. 
 
 The grave and irreparable character of that wrong 
 the authors of the existing Divorce Law clearly and 
 frankly recognized, and they imposed upon the perpe- 
 trator of it a penalty which in their opinion was 
 adequate to the offence a divorce mensa et thora. 
 They regarded a decree nisi rather as a sentence on 
 a criminal than as an order of release to the injured 
 party. 
 
 If they were correct in their judgment if, indeed, it 
 be worse to be divorced than to be judicially separated 
 then they were right in their action. By treating 
 two widely different offences in precisely the same 
 way it would have been, not sex equality, but sex 
 inequality, that they would have established. So 
 much for the point of view from which Divorce is 
 regarded rather as a penalty than as a release.
 
 ABOUT DIVORCE 151 
 
 That, however, is a point of view which the majority 
 of the present Commissioners seem to have abandoned. 
 They are, it appears, more anxious to do something 
 agreeable to the feelings of the injured than disagree- 
 able to those of the injuring party. They realize, 
 probably we may at least credit them with the 
 realization that during the last fifty years a change, 
 a change of immense significance, and portentous of 
 many other changes, has taken place in public opinion 
 and in social habit. 
 
 Thanks to this change, to be divorced is no longer 
 to be condignly punished ; it is scarcely to be punished 
 at all ; it is even, to some extent, to be advertised. 
 At the time of the passing of the Divorce Act a woman 
 who had been divorced by her husband was something 
 of a social outcast. When she left the Divorce Court 
 she descended to a lower social plane. The doors of 
 Bohemia might be open to her, but against her the 
 gates of Philistia were closed and barred for ever. 
 Social rehabilitation was almost past praying for. 
 
 Even the perfectly innocent and injured wife, whose 
 shackles the Law had struck off, was in not much 
 better case. The chances were many that the members 
 of her own family, her friends and intimate acquaint- 
 ances, held the older-fashioned views of marriage, its 
 duties, obligations, and religious sanctity, and regarded 
 her with dubious and admonitory eyes. She was a 
 less welcome guest in their drawing-rooms and at 
 their dinner tables than she was before her legal 
 adventure. They invited her to their gatherings 
 only when they were quite by themselves, as they 
 would have put it. If she decided upon a prolonged 
 visit to some out-of-the-way seaside resort or to 
 some little-frequented Continental city, she might 
 confidently count on a cordial send-off. 
 
 To-day the divorcee suffers from no such disabilities. 
 She is looked on as an attraction rather than as detri- 
 mental to fashionable and semi-fashionable assemblies,
 
 152 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 and even the Outer Suburbs receive her not ungladly. 
 She is by way of proving an asset to any hostess 
 desirous of being smart. Save to feminine hyper- 
 sensitiveness, the Divorce Court has lost its terrors. 
 
 For the amatorily excursive husband it never had 
 any terrors, unless he were a clergyman, a doctor, a 
 family solicitor, a schoolmaster, or a member of one 
 of the other few professions in which the strictest 
 matrimonial respectability has business value. There 
 have been, are, and always will be two standards of 
 sex morality which the Law has been, is, and always 
 will be impotent to reduce by one, for these two 
 standards are established by Nature's decree. 
 
 It is not divorce outright, but judicial separation, 
 that the erring husband has to fear and will have to 
 fear until such time probably a good many years 
 hence as the new proposal of the Royal Com- 
 missioners shall have found its way into the Statute 
 Book. As things now stand, an act of infidelity on 
 the part of a husband is penalized more smartly, 
 incomparably and incontestably more smartly, than 
 any other merely moral offence of any sort or kind 
 whatever. It is treated almost as a crime ; indeed, 
 not a few crimes may be more cheaply committed. 
 For one act of incontinence, committed at the age 
 of twenty-one or thereabout, a husband is liable to 
 be compelled by his wife to maintain her in accord- 
 ance with his income until she die, perhaps at the 
 age of eighty, while during all those -long years she 
 renders to him no wifely or other service of any 
 kind whatever, and at the same time condemns him 
 to lifelong celibacy and deprives him of all hope of 
 legitimate offspring. 
 
 Leaving such personal considerations out of count 
 and regarding the penalty as financial mulct only, 
 a decree of judicial separation may, in the case of a 
 well-to-do man, easily amount to a fine of many, 
 many thousands of pounds. A wanton and millionaire
 
 ABOUT DIVORCE 153 
 
 wife has no such fiscal loss to fear. Before her deceived 
 husband can so much as petition for release from 
 her he must put up securities for her costs, though 
 his income may be only a miserable fraction of 
 hers. 
 
 We may not doubt, then, that this proposal of the 
 Royal Commissioners of equalizing matters between 
 the sexes will meet with warm approval and hearty 
 support from all husbands with a turn for amatory 
 trifling. For what man is there who, hard up against 
 the collapse of his matrimonial life and faced with 
 the alternatives of divorce or judicial separation, 
 would not cry, " Divorce, and have done with it " ? 
 
 If, however, the Royal Commissioners are out 
 seriously for equality of the sexes, they should have 
 gone a little further still and compelled the petitioning 
 wife of an unfaithful but not cruel or deserting husband 
 to petition, not for separation, but for divorce outright. 
 That they have not done that (as it is said) is but 
 another proof of how difficult it is to get clear away 
 from sex inequality. 
 
 The proposal to cheapen the cost and increase the 
 facilities for divorce and thus to place it " within 
 the reach of all," as the advertisements say, is one 
 that will meet with little objection, or even with 
 little hostile criticism, in an age that loves to imagine 
 itself to be democratic. Granting that divorce be 
 ever desirable, it is clearly more so when the dis- 
 agreeing parties are poor or poorish than when they 
 are well-to-do or wealthy. 
 
 An ample income is an effective emollient for 
 matrimonial sores or even for gaping wounds. For 
 instance, a married couple with two houses need 
 never be together in one of them. And then there 
 is, in the various cities of Europe and America, a 
 sufficiency of luxuriously appointed and most commo- 
 dious hotels. A steam yacht, too, is a convenient 
 and secure refuge after a conjugal shindy. But an
 
 154 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 ill-assorted and antipathetic couple, condemned by 
 an exiguous income to meet each other daily, if not 
 nightly, in a London flat, or a suburban villa, or a 
 country cottage ! Does any vision of hell itself present 
 a more fertile forcing-house for misery than that ? 
 Well, yes, I think it does; but we'll let the little 
 splash of rhetoric pass, an you please. 
 
 If the Report of the Royal Commission be not 
 entirely a blank cartridge, if it have any effect at 
 all, it will do something to increase the tendency 
 towards making marriage more easily dissoluble. It 
 was notable that very many of the witnesses before 
 the Commission contended eagerly for a consider- 
 able increase in the number of causes which should 
 justify an appeal to the Divorce Court lunacy, 
 drunkenness, various forms of criminality, among 
 others. The most dire of all the corrosives of mari- 
 tal happiness, habitual ill-temper, was, I think, not 
 mentioned. 
 
 This mass of evidence will be re-read by a good 
 many people, and will have a sort of cumulative effect. 
 It will help to thrust the Institution of Marriage, as 
 we know it, a little farther and harder into the 
 melting-pot than even it is at present. If it do that 
 it will have done something which it is pre-eminently 
 desirable just now should not be done. It must not 
 be forgotten that whatever tends to make marriage 
 more easily dissoluble tends also to make it more 
 easily, that is, more hastily, less deliberately, brought 
 about. 
 
 Let me give an instance of what exactly I mean. 
 A man enamoured of a woman in whose family he 
 had reason to believe there was a taint of hereditary 
 madness might think twice or thrice before marrying 
 her if he knew that lunacy was not a cause for divorce, 
 and that his heedless yielding to desire might chain 
 him for life to the inmate of a madhouse. But 
 the chances are, enamoured men being what they
 
 ABOUT DIVORCE 155 
 
 are, and desire being what it is, that he would not 
 think even once, seriously, before contracting a tie 
 out of which he could slip when the catastrophe 
 occurred. 
 
 That catastrophe might not occur until after ten 
 years of married life, but during those ten years 
 half a dozen children, some of them, at any rate, 
 bearing in their brains the seeds of lunacy, might be 
 born into a world in which lunatics are already too 
 numerous. 
 
 The science of Eugenics and it is, or at least is 
 rapidly becoming, a real science, let its silly detractors 
 and ignorant flouters jibe as they will is giving to 
 the Institution of Marriage a new and tremendous 
 significance. 
 
 To him who has even begun to understand this 
 science, Marriage is the central fact of life, because 
 Marriage must precede Good Breeding, and upon 
 Good Breeding the future of the race depends. Good 
 Breeding is the outcome of Good Marriage, and to 
 say Good Marriage is but another way of saying 
 careful, thoughtful Marriage, the deliberate selection 
 of man by woman and of woman by man for parent- 
 hood. 
 
 There was a time when even sensible people held 
 that passion, physical attraction, was the safest and 
 an all-sufficient guide to Good Breeding witness the 
 old superstition that the love-child was the finest 
 child. But that time has passed. No informed person 
 harbours that superstition now, and indeed there 
 never was a shred of evidence to support it. To-day 
 we all know that to marry in haste is to do something 
 more than to prepare for oneself a leisured repent- 
 ance ; it is in all probability to bring into the world 
 offspring whose lives will be one long expiation of 
 their parents' ghastly error. 
 
 This belief, this conviction, though growing slowly, 
 is growing, and any measure which tends to facilitate
 
 156 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 divorce tends inevitably to stop its growth. That 
 is one reason, among others, why, in my heart of 
 hearts, I should not have deeply grieved had some 
 new Guy Fawkes celebrated the anniversary of the 
 old one's failure by blowing the Royal Commissioners 
 and their Report into indistinguishable smithereens. 
 
 1912.
 
 XVII 
 
 THE GENTLEMAN IN BUSINESS 
 
 FOR the last week or so there has been going on in the 
 columns of a great daily newspaper a controversy 
 upon a subject which at first glance looks as though 
 it might have considerable practical importance, and 
 yet the more one thinks about it, the more clearly 
 one sees that nothing, in the world of fact, is likely 
 to happen as an outcome of it. At the same time it 
 has a certain philosophic and psychologic value in- 
 asmuch as it sheds some interesting light upon the 
 nature and mind and habits of men. 
 
 The controversy was started with an article by 
 Mr. H. E. Morgan, a gentleman of high standing in 
 the business world, who, about a year ago, initiated 
 in The Review of Reviews another controversy upon 
 a kindred issue. In this article, I seem to remember, 
 Mr. Morgan pleaded strongly for what he called " the 
 Dignity of Business," and protested vehemently 
 against the somewhat sniffy and disdainful attitude 
 taken up towards it by the educated classes of English 
 society. 
 
 He complained that the young Englishmen who 
 yearly left the public schools and came down from the 
 universities to embark upon their life's voyage, had a 
 way of giving business the go-by, as it were, and of 
 preferring professional, artistic, and literary to com- 
 mercial or industrial careers. Thus, he averred, the 
 157
 
 158 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 nation's best brains are diverted from the nation's 
 Business and England's commercial supremacy, that 
 is to say her " greatness," is gravely imperilled. 
 
 That process of the diversion of our best brains 
 from Business still continues unchecked, it appears, 
 and Mr. Morgan is still deeply perturbed by it. Some- 
 thing must be done, and something must be done 
 soon, he declares, if our country's " greatness " is 
 not to dwindle into littleness. 
 
 And the thing he proposes should be done is no less 
 than making a revolution in the methods, customs, 
 and traditions of our public schools and universities ; 
 for to those public schools and universities, in spite 
 of their proven and patent disadvantages, successful 
 business men will continue to send their sons. 
 
 However deeply these fathers desire that their 
 sons shall imitate and continue their fathers' achieve- 
 ments, there is something which they desire for them 
 more deeply still, and that is that they shall be gentle- 
 men ; that they shall meet, mix with on terms 
 of equality and acquire the tone and manner of, the 
 sons of those other classes of English society whom 
 a fortunate fate has placed beyond the necessity of 
 earning their own livings. 
 
 It is a piteous dilemma that of the perplexed 
 business man as revealed by Mr. Morgan. He has 
 to make up his mind either to having his son return 
 from Eton or Harrow, Oxford or Cambridge, a nice 
 polished young man with a correct pronunciation, a 
 taste for pictures, poetry, and philosophical specula- 
 tion, and a fine aptitude for, at worst, doing nothing 
 in particular, at best seeking a modest livelihood in 
 the service of the State, or to having him a " pushing 
 young particle " potent in the counting-house and the 
 saleroom but destitute of that subtle social cachet 
 which, as things are, it sadly seems, a certain ac- 
 quaintance with classical languages and literature is 
 alone able to confer.
 
 THE GENTLEMAN IN BUSINESS 159 
 
 This direful dilemma Mr. Morgan proposes to avoid 
 by compelling in some way not clearly specified, 
 but, if necessary, by Act of Parliament our public 
 schools and universities to mend their manners ; to 
 forgo their insistence of the study of obsolete lan- 
 guages, ancient histories, dead and moribund philo- 
 sophies. In short, to drop all that has been known 
 as *' culture " generally, and instead, seriously and 
 systematically, to teach the young idea book-keeping 
 by double entry, commercial correspondence, and, 
 this surely above all, the fine art of inditing catchy 
 advertisements. 
 
 Of course the proposal is hopelessly impracticable, 
 as I said. It were easier, far easier, to effect an up- 
 heaval in the moon than to negotiate anything faintly 
 resembling a revolution in Eton or Winchester, in 
 Cambridge or Oxford. An Act of Parliament might 
 destroy Oxford and Cambridge ; but nothing short 
 of an act of God materially could change them 
 change them suddenly, I mean change them in the 
 lifetime of living men. 
 
 Time will change them, no doubt, time has changed 
 and is changing them, but slowly, so slowly that long 
 before even the beginnings of a change such as is desired 
 by Mr. Morgan could be attained, England's com- 
 mercial supremacy, so far as it depends upon them, 
 will be as a story that is told and England's " great- 
 ness " as a dream that is dreamed. 
 
 If you want to realize how impossible it is to trans- 
 form Oxford and Cambridge from seats of ancient 
 learning into academies for instruction in Business 
 principles and the inculcation of Business habits, the 
 best and the quickest way to do it is just to go and have 
 a look at them. Subject yourself for an afternoon 
 or so to the elusive, intangible, but penetrating and 
 most effective influence of them. Linger for a lazy 
 while in Oxford quads and Cambridge courts ; lunch 
 with undergraduates, dine with dons.
 
 160 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 That will give you the realization more quickly 
 and more surely than any amount of argle-bargling. 
 You will come away, I fancy, feeling that there is 
 something in England stronger, more enduring, aye, 
 and even more vitally potent, than the desires and 
 aspirations of her business men ; feeling glad, too, 
 that this should be so ; feeling glad that this shall 
 continue so to be. 
 
 That sort of service, precisely, was what the ancient 
 universities were founded to perform for the sons of 
 men ; to educate them in the broad sense of the term, 
 to fit them to live rather than to get a living, to quicken 
 in them a sense of the spiritual, as contrasted with 
 and opposed to, the material values of life. 
 
 They often enough do not do it, of course, for the 
 stuff they have to deal with is human stuff, and there- 
 fore not indefinitely malleable, but, on the contrary, 
 often enough ineducable, with a leather-like impene- 
 trability to influences and ideas ; and you cannot 
 quicken a spirit that is not there to be quickened. 
 But they do it sometimes ; on the whole they do it 
 not infrequently. And when they do it I contend, 
 saving Mr. Morgan's presence, they do something 
 more valuable to our national life, more promotive 
 even, I go so far as to say, of our national greatness 
 than they could possibly do by instilling into a number 
 of young men the necessity of turning up at 9 A.M. 
 sharp at their fathers' offices or instructing them in 
 the most modern methods of successfully selling cheap 
 shirtings to negroes. 
 
 It is by his apparent inability to understand and 
 appreciate this truth that Mr. Morgan, it seems to 
 me, goes so dismally wrong, both in his diagnosis and 
 in his prescription. He cannot, apparently in fair- 
 ness I say apparently, because perhaps he really does 
 know better rid himself of the notion that England's 
 "greatness" is synonymous with her commercial 
 prosperity.
 
 THE GENTLEMAN IN BUSINESS 161 
 
 As a matter of cold fact no nation can be commercially 
 great ; all that any nation can do commercially is 
 to be big. The difference is essential, fundamental. 
 Athens, for example, was a great city ; Chicago 
 with I don't know how many more inhabitants, with 
 oh ! such public buildings, such wharves, such em- 
 poria, such stockyards, such railway stations is only 
 a big city. 
 
 England is great and she is also commercially 
 prosperous ; but she was great before she was com- 
 mercially prosperous, and there is no reason whatever 
 why she should not remain great long after her com- 
 mercial prosperity has waned and even disappeared. 
 Or, it might well be I think perhaps it would be, if 
 Mr. Morgan had his way with her that her com- 
 mercial prosperity might swell and swell until it 
 overwhelmed the habitable globe, and yet her greatness 
 be lost to her, be naught but a memory of a glory that 
 had been ! 
 
 It is not her business men who have made England 
 great. Those have made her prosperous ; that is to 
 say, they have made a smallish proportion of her 
 people wealthy. They have not done more than 
 that in the past, and more than that in the future 
 it would be downright foolishness to look to them to 
 do. The men who have made England great are her 
 statesmen, her philosophers, her poets, her historians, 
 her men of science. In other words, the men who, 
 whether at her ancient universities or not, have at 
 any rate been inspired by the spirit which her ancient 
 universities stand for, which they engender, which 
 they nourish, which still, with all their faults and 
 shortcomings, they continue to sustain. 
 
 That spirit is not the spirit of commerce, it is not 
 the spirit which prompts the " pushful " young man 
 to fare forth and sell large quantities, at a handsome 
 profit, of cheap shirtings to negroes. 
 
 L
 
 162 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 Please understand : I say and feel nothing whatever 
 in derogation of the selling of cheap shirtings to negroes. 
 In the interests of human decency, it is desirable, I 
 daresay, that negroes should wrap their loins about 
 with something, and shirtings, I take it, are more 
 effective for that purpose than palm leaves. And if 
 shirtings are to be sold it is desirable that they should 
 be sold at a profit, and the bigger the profit the 
 better. 
 
 The young man who, having been subdued to the 
 public school and university influence, discovers in 
 himself a distinct distaste for the selling of shirtings, 
 or of anything else of a material sort, and a preference 
 for the civil service, the learned professions, for litera- 
 ture, art, or even for humble maltreated journalism, 
 has no call and no right to look down, as we say, 
 upon that other young man who regards the stool 
 in the counting-house as the first stage on the journey 
 to the chair in the board-room. 
 
 There is simply no question of looking down or 
 of looking up ; there is a difference, that is all. It 
 takes all sorts to make a nation as well as to make a 
 world, and for our comfortable living we want both 
 sorts of young men. But what we do not want, I 
 venture to suggest, is an artificially forced increase 
 of the pushful at the expense of the polished. 
 
 I do not for a moment deny that towards the floating 
 of bales of English-made goods on to earth's remotest 
 shores and to the making of her metropolis the centre of 
 all finance, the mart of all trade, and so forth and so on, 
 there have been devoted qualities, intellectual and 
 moral, which are also essential to real and authentic 
 greatness. All I do contend is that, in so far as they 
 have been devoted to these ends, they have not been 
 devoted to the highest ends. 
 
 Successful Business may, sometimes does, call 
 for the exercise of the highest qualities ; but more
 
 THE GENTLEMAN IN BUSINESS 163 
 
 often than not it calls for the exercise of qualities 
 which, regarded from any rational or moral stand- 
 point, are assuredly seen to be not high, to be the 
 very opposite of high. 
 
 Success in Business, be it remembered, does not 
 consist in the making of good things. It consists 
 in the selling, the skilful and plenteous selling, of 
 things whether good or bad; the goodness or the 
 badness of the things sold matters not a jot to the 
 success. It does not consist even in discovering wants 
 and then supplying them ; it consists rather in faking 
 wants and then supplying them. Successful selling 
 depends more and more every day on artful adver- 
 tisement ; and artful advertisement implies adroit 
 exaggeration, crafty over-statement, cunning conceal- 
 ment of material facts, and emphasis of facts which 
 are not material. It is a trick rather than an 
 accomplishment. 
 
 Surely to utilize our great public schools and uni- 
 versities for the teaching of the trick would be rather 
 like setting the organs in our great cathedrals and 
 abbeys to the playing of rag-time ! 
 
 If Mr. Morgan and his business friends desire schools 
 and universities in which their young hopefuls shall 
 be indoctrinated with Business principles and inoc- 
 ulated with Business morals, why, surely, they can 
 have them. They can have them on the same terms 
 as those on which Sir John de Balliol and the Lady 
 Dervorguilla had Balliol College at Oxford, and William 
 of Wykeham had Winchester School. They can found 
 them now, at once. They can spend their money 
 on such schools and colleges while they live and leave 
 it to such schools and colleges when they die. 
 
 There is no hindrance whatever to the immediate 
 materializing of their fondest wishes except their 
 superstitious and often snobbish craving for that 
 sort-of-a-something in the way of a social tone with
 
 164 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 which the old schools and universities are, often 
 fondly and vainly enough, believed to endow their 
 children. But it really won't do. One or the other 
 our Mr. Morgans may have but not both. Culture 
 and Commercialism are incompatibles. 
 
 1914.
 
 XVIII 
 
 ABOUT FREEDOM 
 
 ARE we getting stodgier ? The question has occurred 
 and recurred to my mind with irritating frequency 
 during the last few months. It is somewhat of an 
 idle question, I know ; a question impossible to be 
 answered with complete assurance. Moreover, if an 
 answer were found to it naught of much practical 
 utility would come of the discovery. 
 
 But then those vain speculations, as the half-wise 
 would call them, are just the very speculations in 
 which the whole-wise love to indulge. They are the 
 holidays of the soul. The essence, the gist, of a 
 holiday is that on it you should do nothing useful, 
 directed to a practical or profitable end. 
 
 The man who tells you that he is going on a holiday 
 in search of health makes a grave mistake. Not in 
 that he is seeking after health, for health is an excellent 
 thing to seek after if unhappily you have lost or mislaid 
 it, but in that he imagines that in seeking for health 
 he is getting a holiday. What he should do is first 
 to recapture his lost health and then take it away 
 with him for a holiday. He who goes abroad, or to 
 the sea, or to the country for his health's sake is no 
 more taking a holiday than he who swallows a blue 
 pill or claps a mustard plaster to the small of his back. 
 
 A holiday is play ; just that. Scientific gentlemen 
 tell us, I know, that the play of young creatures is 
 165
 
 166 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 really one of nature's most practical efforts. A kitten 
 larking with a cotton reel, they say, is training its 
 nerves, its eyes, its muscles, its claws to capture mice 
 and other small deer when the time shall come for it 
 to earn its own living ; and that when small boys 
 get up mock fights with each other they are preparing 
 themselves in the best of all possible ways for the 
 undoing of Hackenschmidt. 
 
 That's all true enough, of course, but the point is 
 that neither kittens nor small boys are conscious that 
 they are doing anything useful. They don't do it 
 because they feel it to be useful. They do it just 
 because it amuses them and that perhaps is the 
 best of reasons for doing anything. Play, which is 
 anything but play, is not play at all. That is why 
 the infallible judgment of children always condemns 
 and resents instructive games, games that teach 
 geography, history, scripture, or what not. 
 
 It sheds a little light too upon professionalism, 
 doesn't it ? But I won't go into that now, except to 
 throw out the dictum that the phrase " professional 
 player " is a contradiction in terms. Just so far as 
 play is a profession it ceases to be play. 
 
 So with the things of the mind. It is well and 
 thrice well, especially on Sundays, to ask oneself 
 questions to which no absolute answer is to be hoped 
 for, or of the answers to which, when we have found 
 them, we can make no use. Never be afraid to waste 
 time, O my friends. The chances are, I verily believe, 
 that when you come to die you will acknowledge 
 to yourselves that the time you have wasted 
 has been the only time you have well and wisely 
 spent. 
 
 But to get to the simple question with which I 
 began, a question which perhaps I might almost 
 as accurately have put in another form : " Are we 
 getting older ? we, as a nation, I mean ? Is the 
 nation showing the same sort of signs of age that
 
 ABOUT FREEDOM 167 
 
 an individual shows, or, at any rate, some individuals 
 show as the end draws near ? " 
 
 There does not seem to be any sound scientific, 
 natural reason why a people ever should grow old, 
 for after all the men and women of each successive 
 generation are born babies just as their fathers and 
 mothers were. In Ccesar and Cleopatra, the best play 
 that the only living Englishman who can write plays 
 worth reading has written, Mr. Bernard Shaw makes 
 his hero, who is looking down on the street, say that 
 while he is growing older " the crowd is always of 
 the same age," and that sounds like a thoughtful and 
 a profoundly true remark. And if it be true of a 
 crowd it ought to be true of a nation. 
 
 But I am not sure that it is quite so true as it sounds. 
 There is a notion, supposed to be founded on observa- 
 tion, that the children of elderly people are steadier, 
 soberer, more " old-fashioned " in their ways than 
 the offspring of younger parents. If that be so may 
 it not also be that the people of old nations are older 
 in their ways than the younger, more newly arisen 
 people ? That they are less vital, less generous, less 
 interested in affairs that do not immediately touch 
 or concern them ? 
 
 The question has been forced upon me (as I am 
 forcing it upon you) by the attitude of Englishmen 
 towards the Russian Revolution. I dare say you 
 will think I exaggerate when I declare that the Russian 
 Revolution is the most stupendous event that has 
 occurred in the civilized world since, well since the 
 world has been civilized. That you should even 
 think that I do exaggerate when I say that is of 
 itself some sort of evidence of that slackness of mind, 
 that slowness of apprehension, which I suggest has 
 fallen upon us all. 
 
 The Russian Revolution is the struggle for freedom, 
 and therefore for expansion and development in all 
 sorts of undreamed of and unimagined ways and
 
 168 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 directions of more than a hundred millions of people. 
 It is quite the biggest thing in the way of revolutions 
 that the world has ever seen. 
 
 Just think of the changes, the world-wide changes, 
 political, social, scientific, intellectual, wrought by 
 the Revolution in France a little more than a hundred 
 years ago ! We are still feeling the wash and impetus 
 of it. We are every one of us different from what 
 we should have been had it never happened. And 
 yet compared to what is going on in Russia the 
 French Revolution was a small affair. 
 
 In the mere matter of bloodshed, of loss of life, 
 for instance ! Even now one often hears men of 
 light and leading speak with a shudder of the " horrors " 
 of the French Revolution, and of the " rivers of blood " 
 which had to flow ere liberty was won. But for one 
 life taken in fight or on the guillotine in France between 
 1789 and 1793 at the least, at the very least, fifty 
 have been given by tlie Russian people since January 
 1905. And there have probably been more cruelties, 
 more acts of unspeakable, unprintable savagery 
 inflicted upon Russians since that date than were 
 endured by the whole people of France for five hundred 
 years before the fall of the Bastille. 
 
 And then the possibilities, the possibilities for good 
 of this Russian revolt. Since the days of Peter the 
 Great the Russian Empire has been the storm cloud 
 threatening the peace and progress and civilization 
 of Europe. One never knew when the cloud would 
 break or what would happen when it did break. The 
 Russian army at the command of the Russian autocrat 
 was like some mighty weapon of destruction in the 
 hands of a lunatic or of an irresponsible child. 
 
 "In a hundred years," said Napoleon, looking 
 eastward, " Europe will be republican or Cossack." 
 More than a hundred years have passed, and Europe 
 is neither which shows, doesn't it ? how careful 
 the cleverest of us should be when we begin to prophesy.
 
 ABOUT FREEDOM 169 
 
 But it is quite possible that Napoleon was partly 
 right if more than partly wrong. It is possible, it is 
 more than possible, it is probable, that Europe would 
 have been republican to-day had it not been for the 
 long-continued Russian menace. Note how the nations 
 nearest to Russia are the nations where political 
 progress is most backward, who are most under the 
 dominion of the reactionary and the obscurant ! 
 
 And now it looks as though the storm cloud were 
 not to break at all, but were to be dissipated, and that 
 the sun of freedom were to shine ; or at worst that 
 we were to be permitted to glimpse a star. So it is 
 a pretty big thing, isn't it ? 
 
 Now what occurs to me is that we have not treated 
 it as the big thing it is ; that we have failed to see it 
 in its true proportions ; that we have not greeted it 
 with the enthusiasm with which our fathers would 
 have treated it had it happened in their day ; that we 
 have not understood it as they would have understood 
 it; that, in fact, we are older, more self-centred, 
 stodgier than our fathers were. 
 
 Had Christian people, for instance, understood the 
 Russian revolution, realized what was involved in it, 
 what of unthinkable evil its failure portended, what 
 of radiant hope its success promised, they would 
 have been on their knees in their churches and chapels 
 praying for its triumph. But they haven't. They 
 have just chatted about it amiably on their way home 
 from their devotions on Sunday. Had the House of 
 Commons understood it, every man therein worth 
 counting, certainly worth voting for, would have risen 
 in protest when the Government proposed to send 
 our fleet to Kronstadt by way of showing our amity 
 not with the Russian people, but with the Russian 
 rulers. 
 
 But they didn't. The protest was left to us, left 
 to a few Labour men and a handful of English 
 women. More than all, had the English people under-
 
 170 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 stood it they would have gathered in their thousands 
 in mass meetings up and down the country to cheer 
 their Russian brothers on their splendid and perilous 
 way. But they haven't, they haven't even talked 
 about it, no not as much as they talk about a cricket 
 match, or a colliery accident. 
 
 From time to time when Jews have been massacred, 
 or a battleship's crew has risen in mutiny, our papers 
 truly have given the thing half a column of news and 
 an editorial note also. But that is about the sum of 
 notice they have accorded it. 
 
 Now turn to the files of the newspapers and to the 
 literature of 1789, and the years that immediately 
 followed. You will find that they are choked with 
 the French revolution ; that men seemed to think 
 and talk of little else. It was not so much that they 
 sympathized with the revolutionists, for naturally 
 the timid politicians and the terror-stricken upper 
 classes hated and feared them ; but they realized, 
 realized acutely that great world-shaking events were 
 toward, and the best in England did sympathize with 
 the revolution, and gave to their sympathy joyful, 
 bold, and uncompromising expression. The greatest 
 of our poets hailed it with a hymn of thanksgiving, 
 which is still a masterpiece of English literature. The 
 French revolution stirred the blood of England ; roused 
 Englishmen sometimes to enthusiasm, sometimes to 
 mistaken wrath. But the point is that it did rouse 
 them. 
 
 The same kind of thing, on a smaller scale, happened 
 over the regeneration of Italy. Then England was 
 united, and united for freedom. Once more we had 
 a great poet, and he sang a deathless song of encourage- 
 ment and of praise. Men helped Italy with their 
 money, and even with their blood. Many a generous- 
 minded youngster of English stock put on the Gari- 
 baldian red shirt and died by the bullets of Italy's 
 foes. And Italy has not forgotten,
 
 ABOUT FREEDOM 171 
 
 Englishmen's anger waxed white hot over the story 
 of Neapolitan dungeons and the horrors that were 
 wrought therein. 
 
 To-day tortures from which Bomba himself would 
 have shrunk are daily inflicted upon Russian women, 
 and scarce a voice cries shame. Most of the voices 
 that one would have expected to cry shame are bewail- 
 ing the indignities done to Bambaata's head. 
 
 Even the Civil War in America the best that was 
 to be hoped from which was the emancipation, the 
 political not the social, emancipation of some millions 
 of negroes stirred England to its depths. England 
 in 1863 cared a good deal more about the woes of 
 Squashee than in 1906 she cares for the wrongs of 
 Ivan Ivanovitch. It is true that in those days 
 England was divided in her sympathies ; the classes 
 as ever stood for privilege, but the masses were for 
 freedom, and they let their shouts ring out across the 
 Atlantic that the ears of the emancipators might hear 
 them and be glad. 
 
 The difference does want explaining, it seems to me, 
 and the only explanation which occurs to me is a 
 dismal and a distressing one. We do seem to be 
 getting stodgier, more selfish, less responsive to the 
 hope and fears of other peoples, to be losing our 
 enthusiasm for great causes, our delight in ideas. We 
 are fussy enough in all conscience, we set up a childish 
 or a senile babble over the things that do not matter, 
 but great events fail to move us. Our hearts seem 
 to be hardening with the ossification of old age, and 
 when the heart ossifies the end is not far off. 
 
 Yes, we are indubitably getting stodgier. Perhaps 
 we are getting cowardly, too. If so ... But that 
 won't bear thinking about. One thing at least is 
 sure, that a people which ceases to care for others' 
 freedom will inevitably and deservedly lose its own. 
 
 1906.
 
 XIX 
 
 ABOUT HAPPINESS 
 
 A GREAT and wise but much neglected philosopher 
 once declared that " happiness consists in following 
 preferences." 
 
 I wonder, now, whether that strikes you as being in 
 any sense a great and wise saying, as having any 
 pointed application to yourself or to your scheme of 
 life assuming always that you have a scheme of life, 
 an assumption which would probably be far from 
 correct. 
 
 I don't for a moment suppose it does. I suspect, 
 rather, that you regard it as rather a commonplace 
 thing to have said, a sort of thing that anybody might 
 have said, as too much of a platitude and too little of 
 a paradox for no doubt you have got into the bad 
 modern habit of seeking wisdom only in paradoxes, in 
 a kind of verbal topsy-turvydom, such as was made 
 fashionable among the would-be intellectually elite in 
 the 'nineties by Oscar Wilde, and which has since been 
 rendered widely popular among the mob by Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw and his thousand and one plagiarists. 
 
 I suspect, therefore, that " Happiness consists in 
 following preferences " is one of those dicta which you 
 feel inclined to brush aside impatiently with an "of 
 course." You would have thought that philosopher 
 to be much cleverer, much more brilliant, if he had 
 said something like this, " Happiness consists in being 
 172
 
 ABOUT HAPPINESS 173 
 
 comfortably miserable," wouldn't you, now ? That 
 would have set you puzzling your head as to what it 
 could possibly mean. 
 
 It isn't " of course," you know ; it is nothing like 
 " of course." If it were " of course " we should all 
 act upon it and be happy, or, at any rate, a good deal 
 happier than we most of us are. To begin with, it 
 takes a man of average intelligence pretty well half 
 his life to discover with any sort of exactitude what 
 are his real as contrasted with his imaginary prefer- 
 ences, and by the time the discovery is made it is as 
 often as not, indeed more often than not, too late to 
 act upon it without revolutionizing his own life and 
 seriously discommoding the lives of everybody about 
 him. 
 
 By that time he has formed habits, habits which 
 were not the result of his doing what he himself liked 
 to do from the beginning, but of his doing what other 
 people liked him to do, or what he believed quite 
 mistakenly, perhaps other people thought he ought 
 to like to do. 
 
 Let me give an instance of the sort of thing I mean. 
 I have a habit it is a habit I formed because the 
 practice of it pleased and amused me when I go to a 
 place of public entertainment, say a theatre or concert, 
 of studying as narrowly as my short sight will permit, 
 the faces, and even the backs, of the audiences. 
 
 Oh, I assure you, backs, when scrutinized with the 
 trained eye, are most expressive ; you can learn from 
 a back a great deal of what is going on in its owner's 
 mind. Men and women of the world learn how to 
 control their features, but rarely their backs. One of 
 these days I shall publish a monograph on backs 
 which shall replace, or at least supplement Lavater's 
 masterpiece on physiognomy, and add enormously to 
 humanity's knowledge of itself. 
 
 But to return. From a study of faces and backs at 
 theatres and concerts I invariably divine that at least
 
 174 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 half of the persons present are wishing all the while, or 
 at least a good part of the while, that they were some- 
 where else ; I perceive that they have come there, not 
 because they wanted to come there or because they 
 thought they would like being there when they had 
 got there ; but because some one else wanted them to 
 come there ; or, because, for some quite inexplicable 
 reason, they were persuaded that there was where they 
 ought to be. 
 
 One can see quite unmistakably that they are bored 
 stiff, these people, and that if they followed their own 
 preferences they would get up and hurry away as fast 
 as their own legs or a taxi-cab could carry them. But 
 they don't ; they sit and fidget it out to the last 
 sentence of the actor or the last note of the last 
 cadenza. 
 
 Mention of that musical term reminds me that the 
 obviously unwilling listener is a much more common 
 object at concerts, or even at musical evenings, than 
 at theatres or amateur dramatic performances. Music, 
 I am sometimes disposed to think, is an art which 
 doth make humbugs of us all. Observation and my 
 penetrative insight have convinced me that at least 
 one-half of civilized humanity actively dislikes music 
 of every sort, and that what is called classical music 
 it positively abhors. But not under torture would 
 one-fiftieth part of, civilized humanity admit as much 
 which is a most fortunate circumstance for pro- 
 fessional musicians. 
 
 Let me give another instance of the sort of thing I 
 mean. A night or two ago I was dining with some 
 friends who are enthusiastic bridge players. I do not 
 care for bridge : rather than play it I would sit with 
 my feet on the fender reading any old book that 
 happened to be handy or thinking my own innocent 
 thoughts. 
 
 But my host would not allow me to do either of 
 those things while he and his friends were at the card-
 
 ABOUT HAPPINESS 175 
 
 table. He declared that it would make them and him 
 feel uncomfortable to be conscious that I was out in 
 the cold so he put it, though, really, I should have 
 been in the warm, for there was an excellent fire in 
 the room while he and the others were enjoying 
 themselves. Of course, I knew perfectly well that it 
 would do nothing of the sort, that they would have 
 forgotten my very existence after the first deal. I 
 knew perfectly well that I should make them much 
 more uncomfortable by playing badly, as I always do. 
 
 Nevertheless, although I was fully aware that I was 
 doing the wrong thing, that is to say, the thing that 
 makes for unhappiness rather than happiness, so 
 extraordinarily difficult is it even for a philosopher to 
 live up to his own principles that I yielded. And so, 
 by my not acting upon the dictum that happiness 
 consists in following preferences, five sensible men, 
 who might have had a quite happy evening, had an 
 evening that was not quite happy. 
 
 But you may say the principle of following your 
 preferences may easily be carried a little too far ; that 
 before you know where you are you may find your 
 preferences coming into sharp conflict with those of 
 other people, and that then there will be trouble. 
 Further, you may say, that on the whole the thing 
 that makes most for happiness in life is personal 
 popularity with all with whom one comes in contact ; 
 and that he who makes a point of following his own 
 preference is little likely to be popular, and so he will 
 lose on the one hand more than he will gain on the 
 other. 
 
 The objection sounds plausible ; it looks almost like 
 being valid, but let us bring it to the test of experience. 
 
 Make a list of the names of all the people you know, 
 know with any sort of intimacy, of course, I mean. 
 Then make a desperate effort to be quite honest with 
 yourself, and put a cross against the names of those 
 whom you like best.
 
 176 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 I assure you that it will need a desperate effort to 
 do that, for you will find yourself again and again 
 tempted, almost irresistibly, to put that cross opposite 
 the names, not of those whom you really like best, but 
 of those whom you feel you ought to like best, because 
 of their amiable qualities, their unselfishness, or of the 
 gratitude which you feel you owe them for kindnesses 
 and services rendered by them to you in the past. 
 
 After you have successfully made that effort you will 
 discover that the persons you have spotted, the persons 
 whom you always meet most gladly, those whose conver- 
 sation and company are the most inspiring and^ revivify- 
 ing, whose very presence raises your spirits when they 
 are low and keeps them up when they are high are 
 not the men and women who are shining examples of 
 unselfishness, not the sort who may always be counted 
 upon to subordinate their desires and preferences to 
 the preferences and desires of others, even to yours. 
 
 And I doubt very much, though this sounds a cynical 
 thing to say, whether they will be those who have 
 made the most sacrifices, great or small, for your sake, 
 or have rendered you services for which a large measure 
 of your gratitude is due. 
 
 No ; as I have said, if you have been really honest, 
 the persons upon whom you have bestowed your 
 Cross of the Legion of Honour will be quite likely, to 
 your own surprise, the robust persons, the persons 
 whose very presence exhales not so much sympathy 
 as virility, the persons of strong will, of very decided 
 preferences, and of a very decided habit of following 
 them, the persons who, in all life's mazes and per- 
 plexities, take a line of their own, as we say, and stick 
 to it, not over- solicitous as to what other lines it crosses. 
 
 These are the persons you will find you would best 
 like to have beside you in times of sickness or of 
 health, of gladness or of sorrow, of peace or of war. 
 These are the popular persons. 
 
 Their popularity is not so paradoxical as at first
 
 ABOUT HAPPINESS 177 
 
 glance it may appear. These strong souls, who are 
 strong because they follow their preferences, and who 
 follow their preferences because they are strong, are 
 happy people, and happiness is contagious. By just 
 being happy themselves they make you a little happier 
 than you would otherwise be ; and you have the 
 satisfaction of knowing that your gain is by no jot or 
 tittle their loss. When they do anything for you, 
 little or great, you know that in doing it they are not 
 obeying the command of duty or seeking to lay up 
 treasure in heaven, but just pleasing themselves ; and 
 so you can accept that service as freely, as frankly, as 
 it is offered, quit of any little furtive, niggling, annoying 
 sense of obligation. 
 
 With the other sort of people, the people with 
 earned reputations for self-sacrifice, who, so far from 
 boldly following their preferences, for the most part 
 suspect and distrust and turn their backs upon them 
 just because they are their preferences, you, if you are 
 of the better sort, never feel altogether at ease. You 
 feel the extreme likelihood that in serving you they 
 are serving what they conceive to be a Higher Purpose 
 that they are doing a disagreeable thing more or less 
 because it is disagreeable. One must really be a bit 
 of a curmudgeon, you know, to feel anything but 
 discomfort at being made the occasion of disagreeable- 
 ness to other people. 
 
 I once heard a lecturer on ethics tell an audience of 
 schoolboys that they must never omit to take a cold 
 bath in the morning, no matter how bitter the weather 
 or how strong their disinclination ; not because taking 
 a cold bath was a cleanly thing to do, but because it 
 was an unpleasant thing to do, and one could not do 
 better, he said, than begin the day by doing something 
 unpleasant to oneself. 
 
 I dare say he was right. But I confess that when 
 any one does something unselfish on my behalf it 
 irks me to feel that he is perhaps regarding me as 
 
 M
 
 178 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 that lecturer would have the schoolboy regard the 
 bath. 
 
 That liking which we all of us feel instinctively, 
 spontaneously, for those of our fellows who have the 
 habit of following their own preferences, and of not 
 being over-regardful of ours we, in an odd way, carry 
 into our relations with the animal world. I am not 
 quite sure that we all like cats more than we like dogs ; 
 but I am quite sure that we all respect cats more than 
 we respect dogs. 
 
 It is true we do not speak of the cat as the " friend 
 of man," or gush about its fidelity. But, insensibly, 
 and scarce knowing why, we treat the cat as a sort of 
 equal and the dog as a sort of slave. We give way to 
 the cat ; we love to hear it purr. And the reason of 
 the difference we make between the two is, I verily 
 and seriously believe, that we sub-consciously recognize 
 in Grimalkin a quality which we would all like to 
 possess in a higher degree than we do, and in Fido a 
 quality which we know we do possess, and deep down 
 in our hearts despise ourselves for possessing. 
 
 This difference shall we say, this moral difference ? 
 between the creature who single-heartedly follows its 
 own preferences and the one who fawningly watches 
 us to see if haply it may discover ours, the ancient 
 wisdom of Old Egypt recognized and acted upon. It 
 made of the cat a god and of the dog a pariah. 
 
 1913.
 
 XX 
 
 DEATH OR THE LADY 
 
 I WONDER if any one but myself has noticed noticed 
 sufficiently to speculate about it, I mean how great 
 is the number of men who either disappear or commit 
 suicide on the eve of their marriages ! From a few 
 figures I have jotted down from time to time, I feel 
 safe in asserting that such cases occur at least once 
 a week. I am pretty certain that they happen very 
 much more often than that, for after all I see only 
 one or two papers daily, and many of these " tragic 
 events," as the reporters call them, are not recorded 
 in any paper. 
 
 The queerest feature of these suicides is that 
 the published account of them ends mostly with the 
 stereotyped sentence, " The unfortunate deceased's 
 affairs were in good order, and no reason can be as- 
 signed for the rash act," or something of that sort, 
 something to the effect that the only motive for leaving 
 this world the poor fellow had was that if he stayed 
 in it he would be married to-morrow. 
 
 And it does seem curious, doesn't it? Especially 
 curious when we consider what is the common as- 
 sumption of the state of mind of a man about to claim 
 as his own the adored being in whom all his passions 
 and affections centre. I do not say the ideal view, 
 but just the common assumption the idea that one 
 takes for granted. 
 
 179
 
 180 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 One has a way of regarding the bridegroom ex- 
 pectant as the happiest and most enviable of mankind. 
 Why, he is commonly spoken of as the " happy man." 
 Think of the nice things that poets and song writers 
 have said of him ! He has had, presumably, a certain 
 number of presents given him ; mostly, it is true, 
 they consist of things for which he has no possible 
 use, but still, there they are, portable property if 
 nothing else. 
 
 Then he has a new suit of clothes, probably several 
 new suits of clothes. He has also, unless he be a 
 singularly imprudent fellow, a certain amount of free 
 money in his pocket ; and, in immediate prospect, 
 the blissful, the rose-pink honeymoon, sacred theme 
 of romanticists since ever romance was. 
 
 No doubt when you come face to face with the 
 thing itself, the actuality, the real man who is to be 
 married to-morrow or the day after, and not the 
 supposititious figure of convention, he usually strikes 
 you as being a fellow creature who is not fully con- 
 scious of, or sufficiently thankful for, his manifold 
 and abundant blessings. The joy that is, that must 
 be, in his heart does not show itself in his face or in 
 his manner. He is often nervous, not infrequently 
 grumpy ; and when the supreme moment arrives and 
 he stands, ring in waistcoat pocket, at the altar, he is 
 strangely apt to look thoroughly uncomfortable and 
 ashamed of himself. 
 
 But still, if things are with him as they are supposed 
 to be, we may not doubt that these external aspects 
 of the man are mere delusive appearances, and that 
 the soul of him is radiant with joyous expectancy, 
 the heart of him full to bursting with delicious anti- 
 cipation. 
 
 And yet a certain appreciable percentage of his kind 
 goes out and hangs itself the night before ! It seems 
 incredible, but so it is ! 
 
 Now as sensible people, accustomed to estimate
 
 DEATH OR THE LADY 181 
 
 probabilities upon a basis of ascertained facts, we may 
 take it for granted, I think you will agree, that for 
 every man who actually kills himself or bolts upon 
 the eve of marriage there are at least ten who feel 
 sorely tempted to do so, who would do so if they had 
 the nerve, the pluck, or the cowardice, if you like 
 to call the thing by a different name. 
 
 It takes a good deal to drive a man, a sane man, a 
 man in the full vigour of life, to the rope, the river, 
 the gunsmith's, or the druggist's counter. Think 
 what ills men will support, what hardships they will 
 endure, ere they face the grim finality of death ; of 
 death, moreover, in a shape that society has, rightly 
 or wrongly, decided to be shameful. So great are 
 the attractions of living as contrasted with the dread 
 of dying that the common sense of mankind expresses 
 itself in the verdict of the common jury, which almost 
 invariably declares that he who has preferred death 
 to life is of " unsound mind." 
 
 Where, then, one man is found willing to die rather 
 than to marry, there must be (I put this to you quite 
 seriously) quite a lot of others who are willing, just 
 willing, to marry rather than to die. Of the two 
 terrible alternatives they choose the least terrible. 
 Looked at by the light of this fact, this unquestionable 
 fact, the figure of the conventional bridegroom be- 
 comes changed somewhat, doesn't it ? One does not 
 feel quite so certain as one did before that it is so exactly 
 what it seems. 
 
 There is something dubious about it, something 
 a little pathetic ; yes, a trifle tragic even. " Death 
 before matrimony " really is a tragic cry. 
 
 And there is this to be remembered, too, that the 
 alternatives before the prospective but reluctant 
 bridegroom are not strictly Death or the Lady. 
 
 There is a third course open, or at any rate assumed 
 to be open the tergiversating young man may sit 
 down and write a note to the fiancee informing her
 
 182 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 that he finds he has mistaken or misunderstood his 
 feelings, and courteously begging her to relieve him 
 of his obligations and to regard him always as a friend 
 if not as a brother. That seems a fairly simple, if a 
 somewhat disquieting, thing to do, and yet and 
 here we arrive at the gist of what I have to say to-day 
 rather than do it a good many men die, and a good 
 many others enter upon what they believe will be a 
 future of long-drawn-out misery, certainly for them- 
 selves, and in all probability for perfectly innocent 
 and unoffending women. 
 
 Why is it, then, that the third and the apparently 
 most easy and obvious of the three possible courses 
 is the one which is most seldom adopted ? 
 
 The answer is really not difficult to find. Of all 
 our institutions, not even excluding the War Office, 
 the House of Lords and Primogeniture, the Engagement 
 is the most anomalous and irrational, the one which 
 least of all fulfils its presumptive purpose. 
 
 If the Engagement means anything it means a 
 period of probation, of trial ; the giving of an oppor- 
 tunity to the man and the woman concerned to learn 
 something of one another, to discover the reality and 
 permanence of their feeling each for each. That is 
 what the Engagement sets out, or to be more accurate, 
 should set out to be. 
 
 In point of actual fact, of course, it is nothing of 
 the kind. It is a contract as binding, nay more binding, 
 socially, though not legally, than matrimony itself. 
 
 A man may break his marriage vows with almost 
 cynical frankness, and socially be none the worse for 
 it be received freely wherever he cares to go, 
 welcomed even by the dearest friends of his deceived 
 wife. But he who breaks his engagement is socially 
 done for ; the very least of the penalties he has to 
 pay is banishment from the neighbourhood, exile 
 from his most familiar haunts, the cold shoulder of 
 friends, with quite possibly a bully-ragging from the
 
 DEATH OR THE LADY 183 
 
 Bench, and a smart fine at the hands of a jury to 
 follow. He is told that he ought to have known " his 
 own mind," and sympathy unstinted, together with 
 consolation substantial, is dealt out freely to the lady 
 in the case. 
 
 Let us admit at once that from her point of view, 
 and as things are, there is a good deal to be said for 
 the existing legal enactment. The probabilities are 
 that a woman who has been engaged right up to within 
 a few weeks or days of her expected marriage has been 
 put to some actual expense ; she is money out of 
 pocket over the transaction. 
 
 Leaving her injured feelings wholly out of count, 
 too (for one does not quite see how injury to feelings 
 can be estimated in pounds sterling), she has suffered 
 somewhat in estate by the failure of her betrothed to 
 keep to his bond. It is idle to beat about the bush 
 in this matter, or to be squeamish in our terms. To 
 the vast majority of young women to-day marriage 
 is the only profession open ; the only source of income, 
 the very guarantee of independence. A marriageable 
 young woman is (I hate to have to say it, but it is 
 true) a marketable article. A marriageable young 
 woman, who has been engaged, and whose engagement 
 has come to grief, is rather less marketable than she 
 was before ; she is to some extent damaged goods. 
 She has lost, as they say, a " chance " ; some amount 
 of time that might have been devoted to the successful 
 pursuit of another and less elusive husband has been 
 wasted. 
 
 This " chance " can be more or less roughly valued in 
 money, and therefore strict justice would seem to 
 demand that in money must the loss be made good. 
 Therefore, you will see I am not here pleading for 
 abolition of actions for breach of promise of marriage. 
 If the over- hasty lover make a mistake let him pay 
 for it by all means ; but having paid for it, in common 
 justice and decency let him be free from all other
 
 184 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 penalty, punishment, or reprobation of any sort 
 whatever. 
 
 Now, let us look at the matter from the standpoint 
 of the man, of the man who, after all, must be allowed 
 to have a certain vested interest in his own future. 
 Before he becomes engaged he ought to know his 
 " own mind," it is said ; and it sounds plausible, 
 almost convincing. 
 
 But surely " mind," in this case, depends entirely 
 on the character, the temperament, the mental and 
 moral qualities generally, of the woman whom he 
 proposes to make his wife. 
 
 To consider a possible instance. John's mind on 
 Monday might be to marry Jane. But on Thursday 
 he might come upon her in the act of torturing a cat, 
 say, or violently spanking and otherwise ill-using her 
 little brother for some trifling childish naughtiness, 
 or flirting outrageously with Thomas. Then, unless 
 John be so over head and ears in love as to have 
 parted with all control of his reason and judg- 
 ment, he will be of a very different mind as to the 
 delights which life-long union with Jane holds out to 
 him. 
 
 But it is just this opportunity of seeing Jane in 
 her more intimate relations that the Engagement and 
 the Engagement only, offers him. Even so it is a 
 poor opportunity, for the chances are that Jane will 
 be at her sweetest when John is about. 
 
 Previous to the Engagement his opportunities are 
 so meagre as practically to have no existence. After 
 the Engagement, though he may know his own mind 
 right enough, it is too late for him to let Jane or Jane's 
 father and friends know it. He has either to commit 
 suicide, to break his engagement and to be cut by his 
 acquaintances, or to join himself for life to, and to 
 give to his children a mother who is a cat torturer, 
 a virago, or a wanton in posse. For, let us remember 
 this, both law and custom insist that the sole valid
 
 DEATH OR THE LADY 185 
 
 ground for the breaking of an Engagement is positive 
 and proven inchastity in the woman. 
 
 Now, when we get outside law and custom, and come 
 to common sense, it becomes plain to the meanest 
 intelligence that inchastity is not by any means the 
 only justification for the rupture of a betrothal. 
 
 There are dozens of others acute differences of 
 taste, deficiencies of temper, mental incompatibilities, 
 to name no more ; and for these to become discernible 
 there needs a certain amount of intimacy, an intimacy 
 less than that of marriage, more than that of mere 
 acquaintance. It is not too much to say that not 
 one man in a thousand of the upper and middle classes 
 (on lower social planes the arrangements are much 
 more rational, human, and satisfactory) knows any- 
 thing that is worth knowing, anything that should be 
 known, of the girl to whom he makes an offer of 
 marriage. 
 
 To him she is a confection of frills and laces, of 
 drawing-rooms and garden-parties, of walks from 
 church, not a human being of passions and tastes, 
 of will and temperament. More often than not the 
 first quarter of an hour he has ever spent alone with 
 her is that in which he takes the irrevocable step 
 remember it is the proposal that is the irrevocable 
 step. 
 
 Of course, if the nature of woman were crystalline, 
 if woman could be seen into and through at a casual 
 glance, why then one might know one's " own mind " 
 about her more readily, but well woman is not 
 crystalline. One does not want to say more than 
 that. 
 
 Surely, surely no man in his senses would enter 
 upon an ordinary commercial partnership knowing 
 so little of his partner as the average man knows of 
 the woman to whom he engages himself, and yet 
 partnerships are for seven years or terminable at will. 
 And then one does not have to sit opposite one's
 
 186 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 partner at breakfast, or to live with him in seaside 
 lodgings for a month or so in every year. 
 
 But, you may reply, a man in love is not in his senses ! 
 Quite so. Then why when he is in his senses hold 
 him so strictly to a contract that he made when he 
 was out of them ? 
 
 A year or so ago, on the initiative of our most eminent 
 man of letters, a cry went forth, and was echoed in 
 some unexpected quarters, for terminable marriage. 
 Mr. George Meredith was a trifle over-precipitous ; 
 his was the impatience of an old man in a hurry. It 
 will be time enough to discuss terminable marriage 
 when we have discussed and established rational 
 Engagements ; Engagements that may be ended 
 with the minimum of friction, with nothing at all of 
 obloquy. 
 
 Perhaps we might cease to call them Engagements ; 
 we might give to them some name that would imply 
 probation rather than finality. Perhaps the Germans 
 could supply us with one of their nice compound words, 
 an English equivalent of " The-Time-in-which-Two- 
 People - are - allowed - to -discover - whether- they- really- 
 care-for-each-other-and-are-really-suited-to-each-other- 
 or-not." I suggest this, and I suggest it having no 
 personal interest in the matter whatever. I am not 
 engaged. 
 
 Sometimes but there ! 
 
 1905.
 
 XXI 
 
 THE MATCH-MAKER 
 
 " A LADY wishes to see you, sir." 
 
 I slammed down my book with some irritation, I 
 am afraid. It is always a little disturbing to a man, 
 even the most conscientious and austere of men, to 
 be told suddenly that a lady wishes to see him. I 
 don't quite know why this should be so, and I haven't 
 time to search out the causes of it now. It is a sort 
 of inherited instinct, I suspect, like that which impels 
 the youngest and most inexperienced mouse to scamper 
 away from the smallest kitten. I suspect we have 
 all of us had ancestors who had good reason to be upset 
 when unexpected ladies wished to see them, and they 
 have handed down their tremors to us their innocent 
 offspring. 
 
 "Name?" I asked. 
 
 " Mrs. Wodgett, sir ; and, please, she told me to 
 say that she has not called about any subscription 
 to anything." 
 
 I concluded at once that my caller must be a cleverish 
 woman. There was nothing for it but to see her, I 
 decided, and I put aside my book, a very remarkable 
 book called " Sex and Character," the work of a young 
 German who left this world by his own act at the age 
 of three- and- twenty, but not before he had written 
 a thick volume telling women exactly what he thought 
 of them. 
 
 187
 
 188 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 A moment later Mrs. Wodgett stood in the doorway. 
 I glanced at her curiously, but one keen glance was 
 enough to assure me that I had never seen her before, 
 or at any rate had never known her before. Women 
 do alter beyond all recognizing in twenty years or so, 
 but still this lady, I felt sure, in no way belonged to 
 my past. 
 
 There was nothing remarkable about her ; she was 
 just a woman of the well-to-do middle class somewhere, 
 I guessed, in the early forties ; stoutish, pleasant- 
 looking, with a whimsical expression about the mouth 
 and eyes. 
 
 I don't know in the least how she was dressed, but 
 since nothing about her apparel impressed me I 
 presume she must have been dressed well. 
 
 I asked her to sit down ; she did sit down, and then 
 I made myself look as much like a note of interrogation 
 as possible. 
 
 She replied promptly to the unspoken question. 
 
 " I have come," she began, " to give you a good 
 talking- to." 
 
 " Will it last long ? " I asked, trying to look resigned. 
 " It is not that I shouldn't be delighted to listen for 
 ever and ever," I added, " but you see ..." I 
 pointed to my table with its litter of papers and to 
 my book lying open, face downwards, on a chair. 
 
 " That depends," she said ; " that depends entirely 
 upon how you take it. If you take it lying down it 
 will be over in about twenty minutes. If you take it 
 fighting, why then . . . ! " 
 
 " I will compromise. I will take it sitting," I said. 
 
 " Well then," she started off, " listen. I have 
 been for many years a reader of your articles ..." 
 
 *' Stop ! " I cried. " Now I know you are going to 
 say something disagreeable. That is the way my 
 correspondents aways begin their letters when they 
 are going to find fault and to make themselves generally 
 unpleasant."
 
 THE MATCH-MAKER 189 
 
 "Now didn't I tell you," she laughed, "that I 
 was going to give you a good talking-to ? That usually 
 means more criticism than compliment, doesn't it ? 
 However, it is a sort of compliment that I should 
 even want to give you a talking-to, isn't it ? I don't 
 bother myself to dress down the Dicks, Toms, and 
 Harrys of journalism, I can assure you. But you are 
 different ..." 
 
 I bowed. 
 
 " Yes ; I recognize that the sort of thing you write, 
 and the way in which you write it, is likely to have an 
 influence. Lately I have come to the conclusion that 
 it is likely to have a bad influence, especially upon 
 young men and young women. So I am here." 
 
 " Pardon me one moment," I interrupted. " The 
 servant gave me your name as Wodgett. Is it pos- 
 sible that she blundered ? Is it not Grundy, by 
 chance ? " 
 
 " Oh, dear no," she laughed again, a mocking but 
 not an unpleasant laugh. " Mrs. Grundy is one of 
 my dearest friends, but I am not she. She and I do 
 not altogether agree. I sometimes think she goes a 
 little too far in certain directions. But still, she is 
 most estimable. She is a great and a beneficent 
 influence. She has a large family of daughters and 
 nieces." 
 
 " And of sons and nephews," I added. " And she 
 manages to get most of them on the County Council, 
 doesn't she ? " 
 
 " Quite true," she agreed. " How clever of you 
 to guess. They try to keep it dark at election time, 
 you know. Oh, yes, on the County Councils, and on 
 the magisterial bench, and even in Parliament. It 
 is the Grundy family on the County Council who have 
 just been censoring the children's library, and removing 
 such books as ' Vanity Fair ' and ' Dombey and Son ' 
 and ' Peter Simple.' " 
 
 " You don't say so ? " I exclaimed. " Why, how
 
 190 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 absurd ! I was brought up on Dickens and Thackeray 
 and Marry at." 
 
 " Ah ! Perhaps that accounts," she nodded quizzi- 
 cally. " But it is you I want to talk about," she 
 went on. " Lately you have taken to saying things 
 about marriage ; things I don't like at all, things 
 that are calculated to deter young people, particularly 
 young men, from thinking kindly of that institution ; 
 things that might even make them afraid to venture 
 upon it." 
 
 " One moment, Mrs. Wodgett," I said sternly. " Are 
 those things you complain of true things or false 
 things ? " 
 
 " Excuse me, sir," she replied with some tartness, 
 " but truth and falsehood have nothing to do with the 
 matter." 
 
 " Madam ! " I almost shouted, and I started so 
 violently that I thrust back my chair some foot or so 
 farther from her. " Madam, I don't want to speak 
 hastily or offensively, but it seems to me you are a 
 most immoral woman ! " 
 
 " Be calm," she said placidly. " My morality or 
 immorality need not affect you in any way. You 
 are quite safe. I repeat that this is not a question of 
 truth or falsehood. In a case like this, the greater 
 the truth the greater the harm done." 
 
 I was going to retort " Jesuit," but I reflected that 
 to do that would show ignorance and stupidity, so I 
 held my tongue, and she continued : 
 
 " Supposing I were to admit, as I do not, that every- 
 thing you have been saying about the married life were 
 true ; even then I should tell you that you are wrong 
 to say it. Supposing a fellow- creature is face to face 
 with a choice of evils. Is it wise or kind, do you 
 think, to try to persuade the poor thing that the lesser 
 of the two evils is worse than it really is ? Surely 
 it were better to let him take it, and then find out the 
 bad side of it, if there be one, for himself. Better, I
 
 THE MATCH-MAKER 191 
 
 mean, than to frighten him into taking the greater 
 of the two evils ? " 
 
 " Really, my dear lady, this is the merest question- 
 begging," I protested. 
 
 " Not at all," she returned. " I am speaking from 
 the woman's point of view, of course and it's an 
 important one, mind ; for it's that of just half humanity. 
 I tell you that in the world as it is now it is better for 
 a woman to be married than not to be married, even 
 if marriage were all you say." 
 
 " Better have a bad husband than none, eh ? " 
 
 " Well, that's a hard saying, but it's almost true," 
 she went on. " Better a baddish husband than none, 
 certainly. After all, the marriage laws are pretty 
 favourable to women. If a husband's downright bad 
 a wife can get rid of him, and still compel him to keep 
 her in comfort. If he's only indifferent good, she 
 learns to put up with him ; she has compensations, 
 her children, her house, her position in society. She 
 gets consideration where an unmarried woman gets 
 none. She's not looked upon as, and doesn't feel 
 herself to be, a failure anyhow. You go and tell her 
 that she'll lose romance. Romance ! Rubbish, I 
 say. What good did romance ever do a woman yet ? 
 You say marriage takes the fine edge off life. Rubbish 
 again ! What's the use of a fine edge except to cut 
 your fingers all the more easily ? All a sensible woman 
 wants of life is reasonable comfort, assured position 
 and security when her charms shall have faded. If 
 honest love remains too, so much the better, but she 
 can manage to get along all right without it, if the 
 worst comes to the worst." 
 
 " I see," I said. " Then you do agree with me after 
 all that women do get more out of marriage than 
 men do ? " 
 
 " Of course I do," she admitted, " but I want you 
 to stop saying it. Why, it's marriage or nothing for 
 most women, and it'll be nothing presently if you go,
 
 192 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 on scaring the men as you do. Let me tell you frankly. 
 There's nothing a woman hates and dreads as she does 
 the idea of having to earn her own living. She may 
 deny it, but don't believe her. Besides, in nine cases 
 out of ten she can't do it. Look here, I have four 
 daughters all unmarried thanks to people like you 
 and there's not one of them could earn more than 
 a pound a week or so if she were put to it." 
 
 "Surely," I queried, "that's the fault of their 
 parents, of their upbringing ? " 
 
 "Not in the least," she replied. "It's the fault 
 of the way the world's made ; the way in which it pays 
 women. Who will employ a woman at the same 
 wages as he pays a man ? But supposing a girl can 
 just earn her living. What then ? What prospect is 
 there for her ? To grow old in loneliness. To be 
 looked down upon all her life by the other women who 
 have secured husbands. To have no interests in life, 
 no interests of children and home and husband and 
 grandchildren, nothing but just work, work, work, 
 until she drops. And besides . . ." 
 
 " Well ? " 
 
 " Oh, well, it's different for men, of course. Married 
 or unmarried they can do ... all sorts of things 
 without getting hurt. I can hardly go into that side 
 of the question, even with you, but you know quite 
 well what I mean. If a man decides to remain single 
 for all, or the best part of his life, he is not compelled 
 to starve the whole of one side of his nature as a 
 woman is. But there, one can't speak plainly about 
 theUse things, as you know." 
 
 " I do. But do me the justice to admit that I at 
 least have always spoken as plainly as I have dared, 
 and that I have done my best to persuade editors and 
 others who sit in the seats of the mighty to let me speak 
 more plainly still. But talking of justice, don't you 
 think you are just the least little bit in the world 
 unjust to me ? I have never attacked marriage as an
 
 THE MATCH-MAKER 193 
 
 institution. I have never proposed to abolish it ... 
 only to alter it a trifle. In the matter of marriage I 
 am a Liberal reformer, not an anarchist." 
 
 " Nonsense ! " She stamped her foot. " You know 
 quite well that you can't alter it unless you alter pretty 
 nearly everything else at the same time, including 
 human nature. All you can do is to set a certain 
 number of men against it, and so spoil the lives of a 
 certain number of women who might have been reason- 
 ably happy. Take your suggestion last week, for 
 instance about married people seeing not so much 
 of each other, not being able to make sure of each 
 other. That implies, I suppose, that they should live 
 in different houses and call on each other sometimes as 
 friends do. That might be all right, I admit, if it 
 could be managed. I'll go so far as to say it would 
 be all right. But how can it be managed ? How 
 many men can afford to keep two houses going ? 
 Most of them have more than enough to do to keep 
 one. And then the possible children ! In which 
 house are they to live ? And what about jealousy ? 
 The husband never knowing who was calling on his 
 wife, and the wife making pretty shrewd guesses as 
 to who was calling on her husband ! Oh, what an 
 unpractical man you are. I feel I could shake you ! " 
 
 " I don't fancy you could," I laughed. " I weigh 
 over twelve stone. But I am unpractical ; I own 
 up to that. Practicality is not a writer's business ; 
 he must leave that to politicians. All a writer can 
 do is to sow ideas about broadcast and trust to some 
 of them falling upon fertile soil." 
 
 " How if he sow tares with the good grain ? " she 
 asked, with a humorous twitch of the lips. 
 
 " The Scripture answers you," I replied. " * Let 
 both grow together until the harvest,' you remember." 
 
 " Neat," she said smiling, " but you know who it is 
 that is said to quote Scripture rather aptly. The only 
 harvest likely to come of your ideas is a crop of selfish
 
 194 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 pigs of men and wretched women. But it's kind of 
 you to have listened so patiently. Good-bye. No, 
 don't ring, I can find my way out." 
 
 " No, no, that you shall not do," I said, following 
 her. 
 
 When I got back to my room, perhaps a man a little 
 bit wiser, if also a little bit sadder, I picked up my 
 book, and letting my eyes fall at random on the page 
 at which it opened, I read this : 
 
 " Match-making is essentially the phenomenon of 
 all others which gives us the key to the nature of 
 woman, and we must not, as has always been the 
 case, merely acknowledge the fact and pass on, but 
 we should try to analyze and explain it. One of our 
 commonest phrases runs : ' Every woman is a match- 
 maker.' 
 
 " But we must remember that in this, and nothing 
 else, lies the actual essence of woman. After mature 
 consideration of the most varied types of women, and 
 with due regard to the special classes besides those 
 I have discussed, I am of opinion that the only posi- 
 tively general female characteristic is that of match- 
 making ; that is, her uniform willingness to further 
 the idea of marriage." 
 
 1906.
 
 XXII 
 
 FINE FEATHERS 
 
 I SQUARED my shoulders, held up my chin, and tried 
 to look much more self-possessed and confident than 
 I felt as I stood on her doorstep in the November 
 easterly drizzle waiting for the door to be opened and 
 the fateful answer given at home, or not at home. 
 For, truth to tell, I was not at all sure that in calling 
 on her I had not been guilty of almost the greatest sin 
 a man can commit against a charming woman the 
 offence of indiscretion. 
 
 Experience has taught me that a woman will forgive 
 a man almost anything but being where and when he 
 is not wanted, or seeing or hearing things which it is 
 undesirable that he should hear or see. 
 
 I had caught a passing glimpse of her in a hansom 
 the day before in the Western end of Oxford Street, 
 and the sight of her in London had surprised and 
 slightly intrigued me, for I happened to know that she 
 was supposed to be in Yorkshire until near Christmas, 
 and that her husband was in Scotland. 
 
 But dullness drives one to deeds of desperation, and 
 November in London is dull beyond words. All the 
 people one never wants to meet are back, and those 
 without whom life is a desert are still in the country. 
 This lady was one of those without whom life is a 
 desert, and naturally, when I so unexpectedly caught 
 sight of her, I saw a chance of at least one delicious 
 195
 
 196 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 hour in an oasis. So the next day, after a couple of 
 hours' hard wrestling with temptation, I yielded and 
 called at her London house. 
 
 She was at home, and, I was relieved to discover, 
 not at all annoyed but only a bit surprised to see me. 
 
 " You must be a magician, or a sensitive, or some- 
 thing creepy of that sort," she said. " You seem to 
 know where I am by a kind of sixth sense. I never 
 told a soul I was coming up this week, and I did tell 
 you quite definitely that I should be away until the 
 middle of December. How on earth did you know I 
 was here ? " 
 
 " Oh, there's nothing a bit mystical about it," I 
 assured her. " I have the eyes of a man, you know, 
 and they can penetrate the obscurity even of a London 
 fog, the dirty window of a hansom, and a white gauze 
 veil." 
 
 " Yes," she cried enlightened, " I might have 
 remembered what a ubiquitous creature you are. 
 Wherever one happens to be in London you are certain 
 to be there too. But I did think a November mist, a 
 thickish veil, and a swift hansom would have beaten 
 even you." 
 
 " Tell me at once if I am indiscreet," I implored, 
 " and I will not even sit down. I will vanish instantly, 
 and this shall be as though it had never been." 
 
 " Indiscreet ! Don't be absurd. You always be- 
 lieve the worst." 
 
 " Well, I generally find I come out right." 
 
 " Anyhow you're wrong this time, as you always 
 are when you believe anything but the best of me. I 
 have run up for a few days shopping and to see my 
 dressmaker. Now you know the whole shameful 
 secret. There are a lot of people, quite smart people, 
 coming to Haigh Hall for the first week in December, 
 there's to be a big dance, some theatricals, and all 
 sorts of larks, and I suddenly found I hadn't a rag to 
 put on ! "
 
 FINE FEATHERS 197 
 
 My eyes wandered over her violet velvet tea-gown, 
 with its grey-brown fur, and its clay-coloured lace, 
 wandered upwards from the hem of it till they rested 
 on her red hair gleaming darkly in the firelight. 
 
 " Not a rag," I repeated. 
 
 " Oh, this ! " she said, as she might have spoken 
 had she been wearing a potato sack. " Well, one must 
 be decent you know, even when one's alone in London. 
 You wouldn't have me . . ." 
 
 "No, I wouldn't," I interrupted. "I beg you to 
 believe that I wouldn't. But I'm so glad we've got 
 on to the question of women's extrav . . . women's 
 dress let us call it, because that's been rather on my 
 mind lately, and now I can have it out with a woman 
 who is really extrav ... I mean who, well who does 
 spend a good deal on frocks." 
 
 " On your mind," she repeated. " Women's dress ? 
 Why, whose bill is it? ... But there, I don't 
 want to be indiscreet either. No, / won't believe the 
 worst. There I " 
 
 " Thank you," I replied. " Let us assume that 
 we're both toy lambs to-day. And now to the point. 
 I was talking last week to an observant and philo- 
 sophical Oriental, a little Jap fellow, Akakura. . . . 
 I rather think you've met him, and I tried to 
 score a point off Japanese civilization by mention- 
 ing the institution of the Geisha. Whereupon the 
 little beast retorted on me that so far as he could 
 see all our women were amateur Geishas. That the 
 Geishas were paid to amuse and attract men, and 
 that that was just what all our women did without 
 pay. They dressed for men, they talked for men, 
 they danced for men, that the whole object of their 
 existence was to attract men. I confess that, as he 
 put it it sounded uncommonly like the truth, but of 
 course . . ." 
 
 "It is the truth," she said. " Of course I know 
 little Akak ; he's always right in these matters. But
 
 198 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 how shouldn't it be the truth ? What else should we 
 dress for ? " 
 
 " You stagger me," I returned. " But but I have 
 always heard it said that women dress to make other 
 women envious, not ..." 
 
 " Quite true, but to make them envious of what ? 
 Not of the dress itself, but of the effect it has upon 
 you. So it comes to the same thing, doesn't it ? " 
 
 " But it doesn't have any effect upon us," I pro- 
 tested, " except perhaps rather to frighten us," I added. 
 " I assure you I and I don't think I'm exceptional 
 never know how a woman's dressed. The more 
 she attracts me the less I know what she's got on. 
 Why just now I should never have noticed that 
 violet velvet, that lace, that fur, if it hadn't been 
 for that preposterous remark of yours about not having 
 a rag." 
 
 " That is what you think," she laughed, as though 
 what I thought was of no consequence whatever. " At 
 least you may think it I don't know but it is not 
 the fact. Suppose when you came in just now I had 
 been wearing a commonplace skirt, an ugly blouse, 
 and my hair had been screwed up in a knob behind ; 
 you'd have looked horrified, have made some lying 
 excuse to get away, and been half-way to Piccadilly by 
 this time." 
 
 " You imply then that I came here, that I'm staying 
 here, just to look at a velvet gown, at some fur, and a 
 little lace, the pattern of which I can't even see in 
 this dim light ! " 
 
 " No, you're not staying for the gown, nor for the 
 woman, but for the woman and the gown ; for the 
 total impression which woman and gown make to- 
 gether. See ? " 
 
 In common honesty I had to acknowledge to myself 
 that it was so, but I acknowledged it only to myself. 
 I kept silence. 
 
 " I often wonder," I said presently, " what there is
 
 FINE FEATHERS 199 
 
 in men or in their admiration that makes it worth a 
 woman's while to spend so much money on them." 
 
 " Well, you see, they don't as a rule spend their 
 own money," she replied, " but mostly their husband's 
 or their father's money ; some one else's, anyhow. 
 But still, you know, one does not need to value the 
 admirer in order to value his admiration. That's one 
 of the paradoxes of life, isn't it ? Just as we do care 
 what people say while we don't care a bit about the 
 people. I often hear authors declare that they don't 
 care a bit what the reviewers think of them. But 
 they one and all take precious good care to subscribe 
 to a press-cutting agency so that they may see what 
 the reviewers think as soon as possible. It is the same 
 with actors, with painters, yes, even with preachers, 
 with every sort of artist. Now every woman is an 
 artist of sorts, and her work of art is herself. Naturally, 
 therefore, she wants to capture the critics for it, to 
 win admiration for it. When she does she is a success ; 
 when she doesn't she is a failure. Why, I often spend 
 more time and thought over a toilette than you do, I 
 have no doubt, over an article." 
 
 " And you have your reward," I said tartly. " I 
 don't find men come buzzing about my articles to any 
 extent." 
 
 " Perhaps you're not so good an artist as I ? " 
 
 " Or the materials are less attractive to begin with," 
 I suggested. " But you know," I went on, " I don't 
 think we've quite got to the bottom of it yet. I don't 
 think it was mere artistry that brought you up to 
 London in the middle of November." 
 
 " Well, have the whole truth then," she said, 
 " which is that men are women's most women's 
 whole world. Women are seldom or never men's 
 whole world. You like to win women's admiration, of 
 course, but you like to win something else besides, and 
 more. You like to win men's admiration, too, for 
 your books, your speeches, your pictures, your business
 
 200 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 capacity, or this, that, or the other thing that you do 
 in the world. We have only you. What the applaud- 
 ing house is to the actor, what the crowd round his 
 picture in the Academy is to the artist, what the spell- 
 bound audience is to the orator, the men ' buzzing 
 round,' as you call it, are to a woman. 
 
 " Just remember what it is to a girl. . . . No, I 
 forgot, you can't do that. You have been most 
 things, but you haven't been a girl. . . . Well, try 
 to imagine, then, what it is to a girl at a dance, say, 
 who doesn't get many partners, who has to sit out 
 and sit out alone. She is humiliated into the dust by 
 a desolating sense of failure. She wishes she had 
 never been born. I don't believe anything that can 
 happen to a man ever can make him feel like that. 
 She feels worse than the actor feels when the stalls 
 yawn at him and the pit and gallery guy him ; she 
 feels like throwing her arms around and hugging the 
 most objectionable man in the room if he comes up 
 and asks her to dance with him." 
 
 " I see ; and she puts it all down to her ill-fitting or 
 otherwise unattractive frock, I suppose ? " 
 
 " Often she does, and she's generally right," she 
 agreed. " Let me give you a case in point. Last 
 year I had a girl staying with me, the daughter of a 
 country parson. She's not a bad-looking little mouse 
 of a thing, and her mother, the female parson, has 
 neither the money nor the sense to dress her properly. 
 Well, I took her to a dance one night. I didn't know 
 what sort of frock she'd wear, and was horrified when 
 I saw what she did wear. She looked as dowdy as a 
 charity school girl, and the way she had done her hair 
 was repulsive. Poor little beast, she had the most 
 awful time. I had positively to drive men up to her 
 by threats, by . . ." 
 " Oh, I understand." 
 
 " She wept on my bosom on the way home in the 
 carriage, and I then and there determined it should
 
 FINE FEATHERS 201 
 
 be made up to her, cost what it might. So I gave a 
 dance at my own house here, and for that dance I 
 dressed her myself. It did cost a lot, but I did it 
 regardless. I thought out every detail of her costume. 
 I ransacked the flower shops to get her the exactly 
 right flowers. I ... well you may as well have the 
 whole story. ... I did something artistic with a 
 hare's foot and a rouge pot. Result the child went 
 about the ballroom in a blaze of triumph. Men, old 
 dodderers and young idiots, as well as the really nice 
 men, my special men, elbowed each other to get hold 
 of her card to scribble their names on it. They came 
 bothering me for introductions to the ' little beauty,' 
 as they called her. Why ! . . . Of course . . . now 
 I remember you were there and you ..." 
 
 "Stop," I cried. "Confound it," I spluttered. 
 " I beg your pardon, but really don't tell me that 
 lovely little thing was just so much frillery and 
 carmine." 
 
 " No," she mocked. " There was just a tiny little 
 bit of girl inside the frillery and underneath the 
 carmine. A tiny little bit of girl which if you'd met it at 
 breakfast that very morning or before my maid and 
 I had done with it you wouldn't have looked at twice. 
 So you see ! " 
 
 " And what became of that hedge-sparrow in king- 
 fisher's plumage ? " I asked. " How did that small 
 impostor feel when the fine feathers came off ? " 
 
 " Oh, she was all right," she said. " She got 
 engaged that night, in the conservatory. She's married 
 now to young Diveson. She's awfully nice to me. 
 She lends us her box at Covent Garden whenever we 
 like. She dresses splendidly." 
 I was speechless. 
 
 " But even if she hadn't captured a rich man the 
 principle of the thing would have remained the same," 
 she went on. " No conqueror entering a captured 
 city could feel the joy of life more intensely than that
 
 202 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 kid felt from the moment she entered the ballroom. 
 Old Campbell Whatsisname won't feel anything like 
 as triumphant when the King sends for him to form a 
 government. So you see it is worth while spending a 
 lot of money on frocks, isn't it ? " 
 
 " All the same, and with every disposition to think 
 the most of my sex, I do think that men's admiration 
 is a pretty poor thing to make life's aim," I objected. 
 
 " When even a pretty poor thing is all one can get 
 one goes for it," she said; 
 
 1905.
 
 XXIII 
 
 IF I WERE A WOMAN 
 
 A CORRESPONDENT has been asking our editor " if 
 the writer, ' Hubert,' of the Sunday Chronicle, is a 
 woman," and our editor, evidently having some doubts 
 upon the subject himself, has sent the query on to 
 me. When I first received it I was a little puzzled ; 
 first, to imagine how any dubiety as to my sex could 
 have arisen, secondly as to whether I ought to take 
 such dubiety as a delicate compliment or as a smack 
 in the face. I don't know why, probably quite without 
 good reason, but I have, from the very earliest age, 
 cherished and petted the conviction that I was a 
 particularly and peculiarly masculine person. I had 
 my first love-affair at the age of eight (I have forgotten 
 her name, but I still have a lively recollection of her 
 side-spring boots and white stockings), and a year 
 later I adventured upon my first cigar. At ten I fought 
 a prolonged battle with a drummer boy in the Royal 
 Welsh Regiment, and, although it is true the credit 
 of the British infantry was well maintained, I left 
 my mark on the red-coated lad's honest face. At 
 twelve I was formally engaged to the most charming 
 of her sex. At eighteen I was within a few hours of 
 fighting a duel with one of the best swordsmen of Bonn 
 University, a duel which failed to come off only be- 
 cause I chose pistols, and my friend (we were enemies 
 but for about twelve hours) stood firm for the sabre. 
 203
 
 204 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 Since I attained my majority there has never been a 
 moment when I have not been indebted to a West 
 End tailor. There are some other little matters I 
 could mention, but these I will leave to be published 
 after my death. On the whole, on thinking the matter 
 over quietly and impartially, I could find no grounds 
 whatever for our correspondent's curious speculation. 
 Then a sudden thought came to me which gave me 
 pause, and suggested that perhaps " F. C.," of Liver- 
 pool, might have something to say for himself, after 
 all. I remembered that a year or two ago, when 
 Palmistry was the fashionable craze in London drawing- 
 rooms, I had had my character read and my fortune 
 told by a charming young lady, who professed occult 
 knowledge of the human hand. She was a fascinating 
 little person, and it was impossible to be sceptical as 
 to her mysterious powers. Indeed, she put them 
 beyond all doubt by telling me certain things about 
 myself which nobody but myself could know. For 
 instance, she said that I had been cruelly used by a 
 fair woman ! That was true enough, heaven knows, 
 and how my heart leaped when she said it, for I was 
 afraid lest, before a room full of people, she would 
 go on to mention all the other fifteen fair women who 
 in the course of my career have played the very devil 
 with me (reference to old diaries shows me that up 
 to the end of 1895 there had been sixteen of them, 
 and no fewer than five were called " Flossie "). The 
 lady exercised a kind reticence as to these others, but 
 I could see by a queer look in her eyes that she knew 
 all about them. Then she told me that I was " capable 
 of deep affection," and that I was " fonder of spending 
 than of earning money." After these two inspira- 
 tions of hers I was prepared implicitly to believe 
 anything else she said. Finally she took hold of my 
 right hand, bent and twisted the fingers, and ended 
 by remarking in a far-off sort of voice that I had " a 
 great deal of the true womanly " in my nature. Now
 
 IF I WERE A WOMAN 205 
 
 that being so (and the young Cheiromant having been 
 right about all these other matters, was probably not 
 wrong about this), there may, it seems to me, be some 
 excuse for our correspondent. As I endeavour to 
 make my articles what some great critic has said all 
 literature ought to be, " a revelation of personality," 
 it is more than likely that some of my true womanliness 
 finds its way into these columns. And so I forgive 
 44 F. C.," of Liverpool, 
 
 But was his doubt a compliment or a flout ? That's 
 another pair of sleeves. I still felt a bit uneasy on 
 that point, and I lighted the biggest pipe I possess, 
 and sat down by the fire in my armchair to think it 
 over. It has been said that while there is no woman 
 who has not at some time wished herself a man, there 
 is no man who has ever wished himself a woman ; and 
 that seems to suggest that it is better to be born a 
 boy, if one can persuade one's mother to take a reason- 
 able view of the matter. But, then, on the other hand, 
 speaking entirely for myself, I confess I have always 
 greatly preferred women to men. They are nicer to 
 look at and to talk to, it seems to me. They generally 
 have better complexions, and they always wear prettier 
 clothes. Most of those that I know do nothing at 
 all for their livings ; they are content merely to exist 
 beautifully, thus realizing, apparently without the 
 slightest effort, my own highest aspiration, my own 
 loftiest ideal. They never lose their tempers. They 
 always keep appointments. They rarely say ill- 
 natured or spiteful things of each other, as we men do, 
 and they can always quite safely be trusted with the 
 most sacred secret. All these may strike you as small 
 and unimportant matters, but, taken altogether, they 
 go a long way towards making up the sum of human 
 happiness. I don't know how other men feel about 
 it, but for my part I would rather drive about in a
 
 206 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 hansom cab with a dairymaid than with a duke ; 
 and if I were to be exiled for the rest of my life to some 
 island in the Pacific Ocean with only one companion 
 I am certain I should choose that one companion from 
 the other sex. So, finally, I came to the conclusion 
 that it was paying a pretty compliment to a man to 
 ask him if he were not a woman ! 
 
 Then, perhaps because the pipe was somewhat 
 strong, the fire a little over warm, and there was no 
 organ grinder within a hundred yards of the garden 
 gate, the pensive, speculative mood came upon me, 
 the mood in which one loves to picture the improb- 
 able, to sigh for the unattainable. I began to wonder 
 what I really should do if I were a woman. Just at 
 that moment the thing did not seem quite so beyond 
 possibility as it does at this. There is really no saying, 
 I thought ; one dare not set limits to Science, Al- 
 mighty Science, which has conferred upon mankind 
 Gower Street Station and the Dum-Dum bullet. 
 Suppose I went on with the fancy at some not 
 distant date some chemical mixture should be dis- 
 covered by taking three dessert-spoonfuls daily of 
 which for a month or so the transformation of sex 
 could be accomplished. I feel sure I should take that 
 drug, for in the matter of drugs I am by way of being 
 adventurous. I have taken opium in all its forms, 
 I have eaten haschish, and soothed my sorrows with 
 Indian hemp. I know by experience that, as the 
 advertisements truly say, " kola is not a food." I 
 have chewed betel nut, and experimented with rare 
 and curious Eastern poisons. Yes, I should buy a 
 bottle of that chemical mixture, buy it at the Stores, 
 where the two-and-sixpenny size would be sold for 
 one-and-ninepence, and then If I were a woman ! 
 
 Of course, I should be young and beautiful. Youth, 
 nature would provide, to start with, at least ; beauty,
 
 IF I WERE A WOMAN 207 
 
 art would accomplish. It is only the stupid women 
 who are plain ; only the idiots who are downright ugly. 
 I have spent much time in looking into the windows 
 of West End modistes, and I have learned that a fine 
 figure is within easy reach of a reasonably well-filled 
 purse. Even as a man I have no objection on principle 
 to rouge and pearl powder ; as a woman with a poor 
 complexion I should consider the use of them my right, 
 nay, more, my duty. The adage, the melancholy 
 adage, that " beauty is only skin deep," must have 
 been made in a barbarous age, in an age before there 
 were perfumers' shops in Old Bond Street or the 
 Rue de la Paix. Beauty need not be so deep as the 
 skin nowadays. One washes off the beauty and then 
 one comes to the skin. Being young and beautiful, 
 I should naturally have lots of money. A woman, 
 young, beautiful, and poor is a living libel upon her 
 sex. The literary impulse is so strong in me that I 
 doubt if any chemical mixture that Science could 
 compound would be potent to eradicate it, and so, 
 even if I were a woman, I think I should write for 
 the press. I should put on my prettiest frock, and 
 go to call on editors. There is a good deal of human 
 nature about editors, and I have noticed that while 
 a mere man is not infrequently informed by the 
 office boy that Mr. So-and-so is out and not expected 
 back before five o'clock, a woman, young, beautiful, 
 and smartly dressed, is generally admitted straight- 
 way to the innermost. Once let me get face to face 
 with an editor, and, be he as old as humbug, and as 
 virtuous as a County Council candidate, he would 
 need to be more than human to reject my MSS. or 
 to refuse to pay for them at ever so much more per 
 thousand words than he would give to a nasty man. 
 Not only so, but I rather think he would take me out 
 to luncheon and order champagne, without a qualm 
 at the thought that his wife and daughters at home 
 were drinking cheap claret. If I were a woman I
 
 208 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 should not trouble my conscience much about men's 
 wives and daughters. 
 
 There's a good deal to be got out of editors by a 
 woman qui connait son m&nde, as the French say. 
 Editors have tickets for theatres and concerts and 
 flower shows and other functions that it costs a 
 pretty penny to go to. Also, if one is by way of 
 being a notoriety, even of the humblest sort, the 
 insertion of any number of puff paragraphs is the 
 reward of one's amiability to a bewitched editor. 
 Then, if I were a woman who wrote, I should not 
 bother to write correct grammar, or to struggle with 
 the difficulties of the English tongue. One no more 
 expects a woman to know the right uses of the sub- 
 junctive, or how to handle aptly the infinitive mood, 
 than one looks for her to captain a county team at 
 " Rugger," or to speak the truth when the truth is 
 inconvenient. Indeed, slipshod English and an occa- 
 sional lapse into the simpler forms of slang give 
 rather a charm than otherwise to a woman's writings. 
 They make the reader conceive of her as a trifle kitten- 
 ish, playful, an " agreeable rattle," as Disraeli had it. 
 
 Then if I were a woman, oh ! I would write about 
 dress ! All my life long I have yearned and agonized 
 to do the fashion article for a sixpenny weekly, and 
 so far I have never found an editor who would trust 
 me with the job. The subject of women's dress is 
 as exhaustless as it is exhilarating. I could linger 
 lovingly for columns over tea-gowns, I could work 
 myself up to a lofty height of impassioned enthusiasm 
 about toques, and I could say such scathing things 
 anent the Russian blouse. My article on " Garter 
 versus Suspender " would electrify London and drive 
 English femininity into two hostile camps. The 
 literary charm of dress is that it lends itself to such 
 pretty phrases, such pretty French phrases, that
 
 IF I WERE A WOMAN 209 
 
 sound as though they might mean something nice to 
 eat. Take for instance, these two; "A ravishing 
 confection de mousseline (Tlnde with coquilles de dentelles 
 de Malines" and " the escalopes de homard en turban 
 were perfection." Now who, unacquainted with the 
 French tongue, could say which of these referred to 
 the entrancing toilette and which to the seductive 
 dish ? A true man of letters loves delicious words 
 for their own sake ; and, alas ! only a woman gets 
 a chance of using such very delicious words as a well- 
 written fashion article demands. 
 
 But writing, after all, is more or less serious. It 
 is the lighter pleasures of life that are really important ; 
 and it would be to those, if I were a woman, that I 
 should devote most thoughtful consideration. Woman's 
 realm is the realm of the heart and the afternoon 
 tea-table, not of the brain and the intelligence. It 
 is hers to bewitch man, not to convince him. The 
 greatest women of history, the women who have set 
 nations by the ears and undone Empires, have worked 
 their wills by enthralling men's senses, not by domi- 
 nating their intellects. An upward glance from be- 
 neath Cleopatra's dark lashes made Antony her captive ; 
 a winning smile of Mary of Scotland brought the 
 rapiers ringing from their scabbards. Lady Jane 
 Grey, we are told, was a clever young woman, and 
 played chess uncommonly well ; but then Lady Jane 
 Grey suffered check-mate quite early in the game, 
 and had remarkably little to show for it. If I were 
 a woman I should engage in the duel of sex, take a 
 hand in the game of love, as often as opportunity 
 offered. But I think I should select my victims from 
 among the married men of my acquaintance. In the 
 first place the married man is, generally speaking, 
 better off than the bachelor, and a hard-up admirer 
 is as discreditable to a woman as soiled gloves or as 
 

 
 210 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 a hole in her stocking. Then a married man must 
 needs, unless he be quite a fool, have learned some- 
 thing of the ways a woman likes in a lover. But 
 his chief claim lies in the fact that, by the very act 
 of marriage, he has given hostages to silence, and can 
 mostly be trusted to hold his own tongue and to burn 
 her letters. The gay young bachelor is a trifle given 
 to boastfulness, and to letting drop unguarded hints, 
 which, picked up and pieced together, may serve as 
 a weapon of destruction to the most carefully made 
 reputation. 
 
 Mention of reputation suggests another question 
 to my mind. If I were a woman should I practise 
 prudence ; should I try to earn, I won't say to merit, 
 but to earn, the approval of Mrs. Grundy and her 
 eligible grown-up daughters ? There is much to be 
 said for it, for that worthy old person is still a power 
 in Philistia, wherein, I suppose, I should mostly dwell. 
 My own feelings towards her are like those of the 
 eighteenth-century philosophers towards religion. 
 They didn't believe in it themselves, but they thought 
 it a capital thing for the uneducated masses. There- 
 fore, I think I should always treat her deferentially 
 while she was looking. One never knows when one 
 may need a certificate of character ; and there are 
 critical moments when the marriage lines themselves 
 are scarce more important than Mrs. Grundy's good 
 word. I think I should cultivate religion, too, in an 
 amateurish sort of way ; for I remember the incom- 
 parable Heine said that a beautiful woman without 
 religion is like a fair flower devoid of perfume ; and 
 I fancy the nicest, the very nicest, men share his view. 
 I should not be " advanced." I might now and then 
 be forward, but I should never be advanced. I should 
 not wear knickerbockers (at least, not obviously), 
 or clamour for a vote, or advocate out-of-the-way
 
 IF I WERE A WOMAN 211 
 
 views about marriage. Pioneers, proverbially, have 
 an unpleasant time, and I regard the world as a place 
 to be comfortable in. A soldier friend of mine once 
 told me how, in an attack upon a fortress, he and his 
 men had crossed the deep ditch over the bodies of 
 their comrades, who had fallen in the first assault. 
 He seemed to think it very brave and daring, but I 
 said, " How about the fellows who filled up the ditch 
 with their bodies ? " No, no, I would let my advanced 
 and adventurous sisters fill up the ditch ; then, when 
 the Promised Land has been captured, I would drive 
 quietly over in a hansom, in a hansom with india- 
 rubber tyres. 
 
 The end of my meditation was that I found myself 
 regretting that " F. C.," of Liverpool, was wrong in 
 his surmise, and that the writer " Hubert," of the 
 Sunday Chronicle, is not a woman. For the writer 
 " Hubert " has had a hard time of it on the whole. 
 He has toiled long and caught nothing to speak of ; 
 he has acquired many more kicks than halfpence. It is 
 true he has warmed both hands at the fire of life, but 
 he has burnt his fingers badly more than once. He 
 is an unappreciated, a misunderstood man, and he 
 has been forced reluctantly to the conclusion that the 
 world is not a good place for good men. Their hope 
 is in the world to come. Meanwhile this world is 
 the best of all worlds for women and cats. 
 
 1898.
 
 XXIV 
 
 THE FAITH I HOLD * 
 
 I REGRET extremely that when I recall to memory 
 those of my experiences which accompanied my inquiry 
 into, and my acceptance of, the Socialist view of life, 
 I am wholly unable to trace in them that coherent 
 and connected movement, that inevitable step-by- 
 measured-step forward, in short that strictly logical 
 progression which seems to have marked and dis- 
 tinguished the advance from darkness into light of 
 most of my predecessors in this course of lectures. 
 
 When, for example, at the first of them, I sat here 
 and listened enthralled to Mrs. Sidney Webb, I seemed 
 to be following the progress of some disembodied spirit 
 moving serenely through an unresistant ether ; some 
 pure intelligence free of all emotions, untrammelled 
 even by the prepossessions and prejudices which 
 hamper and hinder the development of the ordinary 
 human intellect. 
 
 Scarcely less envious was I of the other of my fellow 
 members who followed Mrs. Webb, and who seem to 
 have been gifted in their cradles by a Fairy Socialist 
 
 * Being one of a series of six papers, all under this title, read before 
 the Fabian Society in 1907. The other five lecturers were Mrs. Sidney 
 Webb, Dr. Stanton Coit, Mr. S. G. Hobson, the Eev. E. J. Campbell, 
 and Mr. H. G. Wells. 
 
 212
 
 THE FAITH I HOLD 213 
 
 god-mother with temperaments and intelligences that 
 unerringly disposed them to turn from error and to 
 pursue truth, to pursue it without misgivings, without 
 any lockings and longings back. Indeed, one effect of 
 this course of lectures upon me has been to incline me 
 towards a belief in the doctrine of Election and Pre- 
 destination, and to force upon me the disturbing 
 conviction that I only of the six confessors was 
 born with the usual amount of original sin, and with- 
 out the more than equivalent set-off of divine grace, 
 or whatever may be the neo-theological or Socialist 
 synonym for it. 
 
 Not that I was ever a contented Philistine let me 
 at least say that for myself. I was never at peace in 
 Gath. That city of my birth always irked and often 
 enraged me by the barrenness of its ideas, the narrow- 
 ness of its outlook, the stupidity of its judgment, the 
 gloom of its atmosphere, and the ugliness of its aspect. 
 But on the other hand, nothing that I saw of the 
 world outside its impregnable walls attracted me very 
 much more. I can never remember a time when I 
 looked upon the world around me and saw that it was 
 good. On the contrary, I saw that it was bad, but I 
 felt that it might, easily, be very much worse. And I 
 saw, or thought I saw, that the forces which were 
 then making for change the Liberal and the Demo- 
 cratic forces would, if they triumphed and their 
 triumph seemed pretty well assured render the 
 world not only worse, but positively intolerable. 
 
 Democracy stood for all that was bumptious, un- 
 idealistic, disloyal, in the deeper sense of the word, 
 anti-national and vulgar ; and Democracy was upon 
 us in its square-toed, hob-nailed boots. To many 
 young men of enthusiastic temperament, in the be- 
 ginning of the last quarter of the last century there 
 was little to evoke their enthusiasm or to extort their 
 admiration, except the personality of the Prime 
 Minister and certain aspirations towards the expansion
 
 214 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 of Empire. Upon them the fall of the Beaconsfield 
 administration in 1880 came as a staggering and a 
 stunning blow. When it was quickly followed by the 
 surrender at Majuba and the understanding with the 
 Irish called the treaty of Kilmainham, darkness 
 seemed to cover the political horizon and the end of all 
 things decent to be near at hand. To our stupefied 
 minds and stricken spirits politics seemed to lose their 
 value. They appeared a game, a game, too, in which 
 we had been badly beaten ; and in dudgeon and 
 despair we retired from the table. 
 
 Fortunately for us, there were houses of refuge. The 
 early 'eighties was a period of Movements, of coteries, 
 literary, artistic, social . . . and of Influences. Now 
 Movements and coteries may be silly, pretentious, 
 irrelevant ; but at least they are interesting. It is 
 gratifying to one's feeling of self- consequence, it en- 
 genders a satisfying sense of superiority, to shut one- 
 self up, as it were, in a little mansion of one's own, and 
 with a few eclectic spirits to think scorn of the world 
 outside. So it was with some of us. We felt that we 
 had had the misfortune to be born in a stupid, vulgar, 
 grimy age, an age, too, that was getting stupider, 
 grimier, more vulgar, every day, and so we turned 
 away from it to a little world within a world, a world 
 of poetry, of pictures, of music, of old romance, of 
 strangely designed wall-papers, and of sad-coloured 
 velveteen. Many of us (though I was not one of 
 them) wore velveteen all day. I wore it only in 
 the evening. 
 
 Disgusted with the present, apprehensive of the 
 future, we naturally were amorous of the past. I 
 think on the whole we preferred the thirteenth to any 
 other century. We tried to live the life of a more 
 lovely age. We could not manage it, of course ; but 
 we did our little best when we were alone together, we 
 of the elect. We called ourselves the elect. I some- 
 times catch myself doing that even now. I often
 
 THE FAITH I HOLD 215 
 
 catch myself thinking it. Our girls found the preva- 
 lent fashions repulsive, so they studied old pictures 
 and clothed themselves in soft and clinging gowns of 
 sage green, and of old gold 
 
 Such as the early Tuscan's art prefers, 
 
 and silver grey, and of the hues of decaying foliage 
 and utterly charming they looked . . . and were. 
 
 The Burne-Jones type was the Ideal. The measure 
 of our admiration of a woman was the degree of her 
 resemblance to it. And it is remarkable how many 
 young women of that time did resemble it. They came 
 to resemble it. They began, many of them, by being 
 just plump, fresh complexioned, English maidens, and 
 in next to no time they were " Damosels," with pallid 
 cheeks, scarlet lips, sad, earnest eyes, and hair 
 wondrously attired. Poetry was our daily bread. We 
 read it aloud to each other for glorious hours on end. 
 Some of us wrote it ; we all of us read it. Mr. William 
 Morris was our laureate ; his work our standard. His 
 poetry presented to us another world, a world that 
 never was on sea or land ; a world of strange beauty 
 and bizarre romanticism ; a rococo world wherein 
 brave gentlemen wore glittering armour and fair ladies 
 dressed indescribably. William Morris, the William 
 Morris of the " Defence of Guinevere " and " The 
 Haystack in the Floods " was the solace of our sedate 
 moods. In our more passionate and vibrant moments 
 we turned to Swinburne, the Swinburne of the " Poems 
 and Ballads," not of the " Songs before Sunrise," for 
 ours was a twilight or a candle-lit day. We revelled 
 in the " Triumph of Time " and " Dolores." This, for 
 example, charmed and exhilarated us : 
 
 Thou wert fair in the fearless old fashion 
 And thy limbs are as melodies yet 
 
 And move to the music of passion 
 With lithe and lascivious regret.
 
 216 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 What ails us, gods, to desert you 
 
 For creeds that refuse and restrain 
 Come down and redeem us from virtue, 
 Our Lady of Pain. 
 
 We were greatly ashamed of our austerity, and 
 although there was no Sex question to perplex us, 
 and such phrases as " Sex freedom " were never on our 
 lips, we were contemptuous of Virtue, and spoke of 
 her as though she were an aged and acidulous maiden 
 aunt. Such was our theory in point of fact, I believe 
 our lives were in every way as correct as those of all 
 the young Philistine folk outside our coteries. 
 
 The truth is we, by reason of our aloofness, felt our- 
 selves so immeasurably superior in manners, tastes, 
 and intelligence to those same Philistines that we 
 thought a world delivered over to them, and evidently 
 for ever to be under their dominion, was a world not 
 worthy of us, and we pretended to ourselves that we 
 should be glad to be rid of it. Mark, we began by 
 pretending. Those of us who had a turn for verse 
 used to write sonnets to Death of whom we spoke as 
 of a deeply desired and longed for lover. I well 
 remember going to call one afternoon on a young man, 
 who is to-day, I believe, a member of the Fabian 
 Society, at his chambers in the Temple. He lived on 
 the third floor, and when I arrived at his flight of stairs 
 I found those stairs carpeted by a number of young 
 women in greenish and yellowish velvet and silk 
 drapery, all curled up in sinuous poses, and looking for 
 all the world like a lot of dear little caterpillars. I 
 mounted no higher . . . for I was told that the rooms 
 were full already and that their owner was reading 
 aloud from James Thomson's " City of Dreadful 
 Night." The young ladies on the stair were an over- 
 flow meeting. Now that episode did not strike me as 
 in the least humorous or odd. On the contrary, I went 
 away congratulating myself on the thought that there
 
 THE FAITH I HOLD 217 
 
 was still some love of truth and beauty left in 
 Ascalon. 
 
 Then there happened a strange thing. I said that 
 we affected a disgust with life that we did not alto- 
 gether feel ; and although it is extraordinarily difficult 
 to reconstitute a mental process after twenty-five years, 
 I think that that is true. But the pose, if pose it were, 
 was slowly transformed into a reality. The result of 
 this deliberate search after a sort of esoteric happiness, 
 of this detachment from popular interests and the 
 affairs of the workaday world, of this attempt to 
 escape from the insistent sordidness, the blatant ugli- 
 ness of our surroundings, to create as it were, an 
 interior realm of art and poetry, of rehabilitated 
 romance, was a deep and a malign pessimism so far 
 an empirical, not a philosophic, pessimism, but a 
 pessimism of conviction all the same. Not even the 
 robust masculinity of our favourite Browning was 
 potent to help us. We extolled his art, but we flouted 
 his ethic. The poem of James Thomson's that I have 
 just mentioned, " The City of Dreadful Night," was 
 for me a sort of message, an evangel of the Real Truth 
 of Things. I do not mean for a moment that I was 
 always miserable I do not know that I was ever that 
 exactly there were, of course, purple moments, rose- 
 pink hours, and even the rest of the time was not given 
 to tears and lamentation. But I felt that I ought, as 
 a reasonable man, to be miserable, that there was 
 nothing in the world to be cheery about. It was just 
 at this time that I had written in beautiful script, 
 framed in ivy-leaves, decorated with a skull, and hung 
 over the mantelpiece of my bedroom, these merry lines 
 of Swinburne's : 
 
 From too much love of living, 
 
 From hope and fear set free, 
 We thank with brief thanksgiving 
 
 Whatever gods may be
 
 218 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 That no life lives for ever ; 
 Tttat dead men rise up never ; 
 That even the weariest river 
 Winds somewhere safe to sea. 
 
 I dramatized myself as that " weariest river." 
 
 I have said that the pessimism of this period was 
 empirical. That is to say, it was the result of obser- 
 vation. One saw that the greater part of mankind 
 were, and always had been, wretched, or at any rate 
 that they lived in conditions that, had oneself been in 
 similar conditions, would have rendered one's own life 
 wretched. One looked in vain for any forces at work 
 that promised to improve those conditions. One saw 
 that the world was bad ; one knew of no way of 
 making it better. One did not realize, as yet, that it 
 was necessarily bad ; that there could in the nature 
 of things be no way of making it better. That convic- 
 tion experience can never give. 
 
 It was in that state of mind that I read for the first 
 time the great work of Schopenhauer, and therein 
 found that philosophical justification which had so far 
 been lacking. I shall not spend, or rather waste, 
 many moments in dissertating upon the philosophy of 
 Schopenhauer to an audience like this, an audience 
 every member of which, probably, has a closer and a 
 more recent acquaintance with it than I have, and 
 knows that Schopenhauer is the most attractive be- 
 cause the most lucid and literary of all Teutonic meta- 
 physicians. He has beyond all modern philosophers 
 the magic of an incomparable style. It is not only 
 easy to understand him ; it is impossible to misunder- 
 stand him. He has a rich vein of humour, as broad 
 as Rabelais', as biting as Swift's, as subtle as Heine's, 
 and unlike most other metaphysicians, except Plato, 
 he condescends to frequent illustration, metaphor, and 
 simile. As one reads him one becomes ensorcelled, 
 held as by a wizard's spell. There is no tedious
 
 THE FAITH I HOLD 219 
 
 inductive reasoning about Schopenhauer. He marches 
 straight along the " high priori " road and drags his 
 disciple with him. For him existence is in itself an 
 evil. For every creature that feels to live is to will ; 
 to will is to strive , and to strive is to be miserable. 
 " Life," he says, in so many words, " so far from being 
 a state of enjoyment, is always, and necessarily, one 
 of suffering ; and the deepest cause of this suffering 
 lies in the Will itself. Life is a struggle for existence 
 with the certainty of being vanquished." Intelligence, 
 itself a late expression of the Will, is only an additional 
 burthen to our lot ; for increased intelligence is only 
 increased capacity for pain. The genius is more 
 unhappy than the average man, the average man 
 more unhappy than the average oyster. If one had 
 to condense the Schopenhauerian conclusion into a 
 sentence one could not do much better than slightly 
 to alter certain words of Browning's : 
 
 . . . This world's a blot, a blank. 
 
 For me it means intensely and means ill. 
 
 Not even suicide shall save us, for suicide is the very 
 strongest act of assertion. Temporary escape can be 
 got only in aesthetic contemplation. Before a great 
 work of art we are lifted for a moment out of person- 
 ality and pettiness, the clamour of desire is hushed, 
 the Will itself is quieted. But this is for a moment 
 only. Mankind cannot be always reading poetry, or 
 looking at pictures, or listening to music. The hope, 
 if one may dare to use such a word, of the race, lies in 
 a universal act of suppression, of negation of the Will 
 to Live, the/on* et origo of all our woe. Only by such 
 an act can the " blunder of existence " be corrected.
 
 220 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 II 
 
 With the intellectual acceptance of the pessimistic 
 philosophy one reaches the antipodes of Socialism. 
 One negates Socialism. Faith in Socialism is com- 
 patible with almost every metaphysical system, with 
 almost every religious creed ; and the worst foes of 
 Socialism are they who so much as hint that there is 
 any essential or necessary contradiction between it 
 and most of the creeds and systems that are believed 
 by men. But with religions or philosophies that are 
 based upon, or even deeply tinted by, pessimism, 
 Socialism is for ever incompatible and eternally at 
 war. Socialism calls for energy ; pessimism breeds 
 paralysis. Pessimism is the Arctic Circle of the soul, 
 an ice-bound, sterile land in which no flower can bloom, 
 no green thing can grow. If any of you doubt this, 
 let him try for himself. Sooner or later he will find 
 either that his pessimism will submerge and stifle his 
 Socialism, or that he will shake himself free from 
 pessimism as a cleanly man shakes off filthy rags. 
 
 I accepted the Schopenhauerian philosophy, then, 
 but although I accepted I never acquiesced. Like the 
 devils I believed and trembled. Against the malignant 
 Will to Live all within me that was not of the intellect 
 was in high revolt, and the intellect alone is not the 
 man. Whatever the Will to Live might be, my own 
 will was not malign. When I came to think it over, 
 I was quite sure of that. Like a man in wrath, the 
 heart rose up and give a flat lie to the brain. But 
 Schopenhauer taught that my own individualized will 
 was only, as it were, a part, a sort of off-shoot, of the 
 fundamental Will of the universe the malignant Will 
 to Live. If the Will to Live was malignant, my own 
 will, its lawful child, must be malignant too, for one 
 does not gather figs from thistles. But my own will
 
 THE FAITH I HOLD 221 
 
 was not malignant. It did not will evil ; it willed 
 good. Here, then, was an irreconcilable contradic- 
 tion. Good, and the desire for good, it seemed, had 
 somehow come out of evil. The Will to Live, said 
 Schopenhauer, was a blind Will. Yet out of it some- 
 how had come intelligence ; which is not blind, but 
 perceptive. So the blind sire had begotten a son 
 with seeing eyes a son who sat in judgment on the 
 father. 
 
 Well, this particular son, after a long and patient 
 trial, condemned his sire and sentenced him as an 
 impostor and a fraud. I felt that the Will to Live, 
 even if it were, ought not to be. Deep down in the 
 very depths of me was a feeling I may not call it 
 more than that a Faith, that what ought not to be 
 cannot be eternal, cannot be fundamental, cannot 
 be in the everlasting constitution of things. 
 
 I believe now that this Faith, the Faith that the 
 world is rational, and that the world is right, that 
 there cannot be in it unresolvable discords, unrecon- 
 cilable contradictions, this faith in what R. L. 
 Stevenson called " the eternal decency of things "is 
 a faith capable of philosophical justification, and I 
 believe that the marvellous brain of Hegel philosophi- 
 cally justified it ; but even if that be not so, even if it 
 must remain a Faith and a Faith only the substance 
 of what is only hoped for, the evidence of what is but 
 dimly seen even so it is a good, sound wholesome 
 Faith to work with, and the Faith, moreover, which is 
 the stimulus and the inspiration of all social reform, 
 of all social endeavour ; the Faith by which we 
 Socialists shall live. 
 
 This realization of the inadequacy of Pessimism as 
 an interpretation of life ; this realization that Schopen- 
 hauer leaves out of his reckoning a whole side of man's 
 nature, and that the most important and significant, 
 was my first step towards Socialism and towards 
 spiritual redemption.
 
 222 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 The period that followed was, as it were, a period of 
 convalescence, and we all know how the spirits rise 
 in convalescence. I felt as Nietzsche felt when he had 
 thrown off the spell of Wagner ; as a man feels when 
 he has broken from the thraldom of some maladive 
 mistress who has enchained his senses and sickened 
 his soul. I was my own man again ; once more a 
 young man with his heart in the right place and in 
 search of ideas, hungry for ideas, ready to listen to 
 anybody who had ideas to offer ; particularly political 
 ideas, ideas that might lead to action, that might set 
 one doing something. My old friends the Tories were 
 bankrupt of ideas. I was still embittered and too pre- 
 judiced to listen to anything a Liberal had to say, and 
 just at that moment I discovered that William Morris 
 was calling himself a Socialist. I knew that if William 
 Morris was a Socialist, whatever else Socialism might 
 be it would not be ugly, and so I turned to the 
 Socialists, who just then were beginning to make a 
 clamour. 
 
 It was at this moment, this psychologic moment, to 
 use a hackneyed phrase, when I saw that the world, 
 the immediate, temporal world about me, was full of 
 foulness, but believed that it might be cleansed from 
 its abominations, healed of its gangrenes, purged of 
 its stupidities, that I made the acquaintance in print 
 and in the flesh of three inspiring and invigorating 
 personalities, Henry George, Mr. Hyndman, and 
 Thomas Davidson. 
 
 It is difficult to picture even to one's own memory ; 
 it is impossible to present to the vision of others, the 
 effect upon young, eager, and rebelling minds of the 
 torrential eloquence, the red-hot rhetoric of Henry 
 George. And it was something more than eloquence, 
 something more than rhetoric ; something quite other 
 than mere magnificent gift of the gab. It was filled 
 with invincible conviction, charged with a naive, an 
 almost child-like but no less puissant sincerity, that
 
 THE FAITH I HOLD 223 
 
 gave a decorative quality to occasional platitudes, and 
 a fascination to not infrequent fallacies. Henry 
 George was not a Socialist, but he deeply ploughed 
 and fertilized the soil in which the seeds of Socialism, 
 scattered by other hands than his, took root and 
 grew ; and English Socialism owes to him a debt that 
 can never be repaid. 
 
 The lectures and speeches of Mr. Hyndman and one 
 of his books, " England for All," I think, completed 
 the conversion that Henry George had begun. Mr. 
 Hyndman was the apostle of the Marxian economics. 
 He preached the Marxian gospel with all the fervour 
 and force of a Peter the Hermit or a General Booth. 
 He fired off the Marxian principles at his audiences as 
 a battery of quick-firing guns pours shells upon an 
 exposed position and it was almost as difficult to 
 keep one's head level before the one as before the 
 other. The Marxian system, as expounded by Mr. 
 Hyndman, with its air of pontifical infallibility, with 
 its prophetic note of fatefulness, with its pose of scien- 
 tific exactitude, with its confident appeal to history, 
 is of all others best fitted to impose upon and to im- 
 press the plastic mind of the uninstructed inquirer. It 
 is the system perhaps best of all suited to the purposes 
 of propaganda. Then there was always something 
 electrically contagious about Mr. Hyndman himself. 
 His air of cocksureness, his breezy bonhomie, the 
 exhilarating atmosphere of optimism which seemed to 
 exhale from his very presence, carried . . . well, I 
 won't say carried all before it, but I will say carried 
 me before it. Even when he said absurd things, such 
 as his prediction of the social revolution for the year 
 1889, although we didn't believe him, we more than 
 half hoped that it might be true. Personally, I gave 
 the capitalist regime at least another ten years of 
 life. 
 
 In recalling the several factors that have brought 
 about a conversion, it is not easy to discriminate the
 
 224 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 particular ones that were predominant, but I think I 
 may say without very much dubiety that the predomi- 
 nant factor in my own conversion to the Socialist 
 Faith was Mr. Hyndman, and I am glad to be able 
 from the platform of this Society to pay him this 
 poor little tribute of thankfulness. 
 
 Mr. Hyndman had the faculty of inducing you to 
 think as he and his master thought. Thomas David- 
 son had the power in a still higher degree of prompt- 
 ing you to think for yourself. He compelled you to 
 realize that your own thought was an indispensable 
 preliminary to any profitable action. He had a short 
 way with catch words, with shibboleths, with pinch- 
 beck paradoxes. He demanded of you that you 
 should define your terms, and he put his demand with 
 an authority that you felt little inclined to question. 
 His method was the Socratic. If in a talk with him 
 you let drop a heedless phrase, such a phrase, say, as 
 " sex freedom " or " property in women and children," 
 that phrase was not suffered to lie where it dropped. 
 You had to pick it up, exhibit it under the lamp, 
 possibly even under the microscope, and explain it, 
 or admit ruefully that you could not explain it because 
 you really did not know very much about it. It is 
 extremely wholesome to the soul, if extremely annoy- 
 ing to the amour propre to have to admit that one has 
 been a parrot. That was the sort of healthy discipline 
 one underwent in an hour's conversation with David- 
 son. He was a spiritual tonic. One came away from 
 an evening's talk with him with the sharpened appetite 
 for ideas. I think it was he who rid me of the last 
 clinging mud of the pessimist bog. He convinced me 
 that to abandon the solution of a problem either 
 intellectual or social because to the practical under- 
 standing it looked insoluble was to be guilty of sheer 
 mental sloth and moral cowardice, so charged was he 
 with the conviction that the human mind is capable 
 of solving all problems and the human will of over-
 
 THE FAITH I HOLD 225 
 
 throwing all obstacles. It was by no accident that 
 the little knot of men who in the winter of 1883 met 
 in Mr. Pease's rooms to talk over some common 
 methods of reaching common ends, and who, a few 
 months later, founded this Society, came there, nearly 
 all of them, with minds fresh from contact with the 
 mind of Thomas Davidson. And I believe that many 
 of the qualities that are most traditionally charac- 
 teristic of our Society its dislike of exaggeration, its 
 contempt for the gaseous and the flatulent, its suspicion 
 of the mawkishly sentimental, its impatience of pre- 
 tentious formulas, no matter how felicitously phrased, 
 above all, the critical attitude of its corporate mind, 
 are largely due to his impress. In the interests of 
 sane Socialism, my hope and faith are that these 
 traditional characteristics may long continue to be
 
 226 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 III 
 
 I shall not attempt to retell here the story of the 
 early days of the Fabian Society that has already 
 been written by a better pen than mine all I need to do 
 is just to record the effect of the early meetings of the 
 Society upon myself. At those early meetings we dis- 
 cussed anything and everything the most ill-regulated 
 imagination could picture as having any bearing what- 
 ever upon social regeneration. We spent one evening, 
 I remember, in listening to a lady who held that the 
 human race would speedily be redeemed if only every 
 member of it were outfitted with an iron bedstead 
 supplied by the State and stamped with an official 
 stamp as a warning to pawnbrokers. We spent many 
 evenings, indeed a part of most evenings (for the 
 subject was always cropping up) over the controversy 
 of physical force versus peaceful permeation. Then 
 there were the Utopians, the people who desired to 
 live in communities and on apples. They gave us a 
 deal of trouble. We had a fair percentage of currency 
 cranks, too, people who wanted to abolish money and 
 who never could answer the ever recurring question, 
 mostly asked by myself, how they proposed to settle 
 with their cabmen. 
 
 The mental process some of us went through during 
 those years was a process of definition, of definition in 
 the true sense of the word, for all definition, says Kant, 
 is determination, and all determination is negation. 
 We were always cutting away top-hamper, always 
 throwing something or somebody overboard. When I 
 first called myself a Socialist I had all sorts of hopes 
 and aspirations ; there were all sorts of changes, 
 changes in all directions, that I desired ; and all these 
 aspirations and hopes, and all these changes that I 
 desired, all these, some of them merely personal pre-
 
 THE FAITH I HOLD 227 
 
 dilections and presuppositions, I hitched on to Social- 
 ism. Socialism I seemed to think was a widely 
 inclusive term which embraced anything I particularly 
 wanted. And what was true of myself, was, I noticed, 
 true of others. The younger members in the move- 
 ment to-day can have no idea of the wild imaginings 
 and queer phantasies which were supposed to be 
 implied in Socialism. It was by some held to be 
 unsocialistic to travel in anything but a third-class 
 railway carriage or to wear any other headgear than a 
 soft hat. Of course, all this was natural enough, 
 inevitable, I suppose, to the early stages of any 
 revolutionary movement. Such a movement attracts 
 to itself all who are in revolt against society for any 
 and every reason ; all who desire to break through 
 some restriction that society imposes, or to gain 
 something that society withholds. The Socialist 
 movement has suffered perhaps more than any 
 other from these irrelevant adherents, these per- 
 sons in whose hearts and will Socialism, in any 
 generally accepted or easily recognizable sense of the 
 term, Socialism as defined in the Fabian Basis say, 
 is subordinated to some other revolutionary aim. 
 We are always gaining recruits of this sort, but 
 most fortunately, most blessedly, we are always 
 losing them too. Were it not so we should long 
 ago have been smothered by them, and the " pure 
 milk of the word " would by this time have been so 
 adulterated as to be an unspeakable, an unimaginable 
 mixture. 
 
 Of course, a man may be a Socialist and have all 
 sorts of views on all sorts of questions unconnected 
 with Socialism I suppose most of us, all of us in fact, 
 are in that case but if he insist upon violently con- 
 necting any of these views with Socialism, upon making 
 them an integral part of Socialism, upon denying the 
 right to the name Socialist to all such as do not hold 
 these other views, then he is doing incalculable harm
 
 228 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 to the Socialist cause, and he becomes a powerful 
 hindrance to the Socialist propaganda. 
 
 I have often seen a Socialist speaker, who was 
 getting a quiet, and even a sympathetic hearing, 
 suddenly turn his whole audience against him, and 
 against Socialism, by introducing, quite unnecessarily, 
 quite irrelevantly, some opinion which had no more to 
 do with Socialism than with the Milky Way. 
 
 Well, it was the existence and the persistence of 
 this sort of loose-thinking, loose-lipped person that 
 rendered imperative the formulation of the Fabian 
 Basis in its first and second states ; just as the exist- 
 ence and persistence of the various heresies made 
 necessary the several creeds of the Christian Church. 
 
 That work was not the work of an ad hoc committee 
 appointed for the purpose of drawing it up and called 
 upon to produce something or other by a given date. 
 It was a natural development, evolved, not suddenly 
 created, in response to an outcry. It was the final 
 outcome of a long and clarifying experience. It was 
 at once a minimum and a maximum. Any one who 
 was a Socialist could accept it. Any one who could not 
 accept it was not a Socialist. It contained all that 
 was needful to salvation. It rejected all that was 
 superfluous and inessential. Whatever views a man 
 might hold which were not either explicit or implicit 
 in the Fabian Basis were neither implicit nor explicit 
 in the faith of Socialism. 
 
 It was not, of course, the last word upon the subject, 
 but anything that may be added to it must come by 
 development and not by accretion. 
 
 If I must state in a short and convenient form the 
 Faith I hold, my Faith as a Socialist, I offer the 
 Fabian Basis as a full and sufficient statement. I 
 could wish that it were offered in a more attractive 
 form ; that it were more like a hymn and less like the 
 condensed syllabus of an economic lecture. Above all, 
 I could wish that it contained certain damnatory
 
 THE FAITH I HOLD 229 
 
 clauses, similar to those in the Athanasian creed ; but 
 still, even as it is, dry, prosaic, matter of fact, 'twill do, 
 'twill serve. 
 
 I accept it unreservedly, with all that it implies and 
 all that it involves. Whatever changes, political, 
 moral, religious, may follow logically and inevitably, 
 from the economic revolution contemplated and advo- 
 cated in the Fabian Basis, those changes I accept and 
 welcome. But unless they can be proved, logically 
 and inevitably, to follow upon the economic revolution, 
 however much I may accept and welcome them, I am 
 not going to have them forced upon me as part of my 
 Faith as a Socialist. 
 
 Let me give an instance or two of certain changes 
 that are held by a good many Socialists to follow 
 necessarily on the economic revolution ; but which I 
 find reason I will not say to disbelieve, but at any 
 rate to doubt, will follow necessarily on the economic 
 revolution ; as a consequence of that revolution. 
 
 A great many Socialists, I find, take it for granted, 
 assume it as something not worth arguing, much less 
 worth proving, that the economic independence of 
 women will consequentially follow on the economic 
 revolution. 
 
 Now I suggest to you that the increasing economic 
 independence of women, I mean the increase in the 
 number of women who are earning their own liveli- 
 hood, is due to the very causes that the economic 
 revolution seeks to remove. The stimulus to the 
 economic independence of women to-day is not a moral 
 but an economic stimulus. The Northern factory girl 
 who spends her ten hours a day amid the whirl of 
 machinery, the London " general " the whole of those 
 whose waking hours are passed in slavery to another 
 of her own sex, the mother who wins her own and her 
 children's dinner from the wash-tub, do so, not from 
 any newly-developed desire to escape the chains of 
 matrimony, but to avoid the pangs of starvation.
 
 230 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 Their object is not economic independence, but daily 
 bread. They are not thrusting themselves, they are 
 being thrust, into the ranks of labour by sheer economic 
 necessity. 
 
 The economic pressure which compels the women of 
 the middle class to work is neither so great nor so 
 obvious as is the case with the women on a lower social 
 level. With the middle class woman, married or un- 
 married, it is not a question of keeping soul and body 
 together, but it is a question of maintaining a certain 
 not very lofty standard of comfort. During the years 
 which followed the establishment of Free Trade and 
 the development of railway enterprise the middle class 
 standard of comfort went up like a rocket. Now it is 
 well known that when a class has once raised its 
 standard of comfort, it is extremely reluctant to see it 
 lowered again. Parents work hard and practise thrift 
 that their children may be reared at a certain level of 
 material well-being. This level is the children's stan- 
 dard of comfort. They will do most things rather than 
 fall short of it. It is a common saying, and like most 
 common sayings it has a core of truth, that sons and 
 daughters nowadays expect to begin where their 
 fathers and mothers left off. The increasing competi- 
 tion has rendered it impossible for the heads of families 
 to maintain by their own earnings adult sons and 
 daughters at the standard of comfort to which they 
 themselves have been accustomed. Then either the 
 standard must be lowered or the income supplemented 
 by the children's earnings and the latter is the alter- 
 native adopted. So we have the daughters as well as 
 the sons extruded from the home to the office, the 
 counting-house, and the room where the typewriters 
 tap. 
 
 Of course, there are other causes subsidiary to the 
 economic cause which are inducing women to abandon 
 domesticity for active work in the world. Higher and 
 fuller education is giving to middle class women a
 
 THE FAITH I HOLD 231 
 
 wider outlook and ingeminating a certain discontent 
 with the restrictions and limitations of the home. But 
 these are subsidiary causes only. The chief cause, the 
 cause which counts, is the economic pressure of the 
 capitalist system, the very system which Socialism is, 
 ex hypothesi, about to destroy. 
 
 Well, now, one of the effects of that large transfer- 
 ence of industrial capital from private to public owner- 
 ship proposed in the Fabian Basis will be to increase 
 the earnings, the real wages, of the wage and salary- 
 earning classes. That is, to make it easier for hus- 
 bands and fathers to support wives and daughters. 
 This being so it seems to me a great and an unwar- 
 rantable assumption, and little more than an assump- 
 tion, that the daughters and wives will, in greater 
 numbers and more vehemently than they do now, 
 insist on supporting themselves. 
 
 It may be that the economic independence of women 
 will come. I think probably it will come. But that it 
 will come as a necessary consequence of Socialism is 
 a wholly unsubstantial hypothesis. The same sort of 
 criticism will dissolve many similar hypotheses which 
 have been tacked on to the Socialist creed, but which 
 are in no way implicit to it. Such a phrase as " the 
 abolition of property in women and children " turns 
 out to be a mere rhetorical flourish. Judging a priori, 
 and we can judge in no other way, it were surely safer 
 to assume that better economic conditions, more and 
 more widespread well-being, will tend rather to rein- 
 tegration than to further disintegration of family life. 
 But there is another and a more potent cause already 
 at work which will do more than any economic change 
 can do to secure the family against dissolution. 
 Hitherto children have come into the world almost by 
 accident, as it were. Unnumbered millions of them 
 have been born to parents who had no desire for them, 
 for whom they were little but inevitable nuisances. 
 With the spread of physiological knowledge and the
 
 232 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 growth of the practices that have already brought 
 about the steady and continuous decline of the birth- 
 rate, it seems almost certain that in the not far future 
 children will be born only to those parents who desire 
 them and in whom the parental instinct is strongly 
 present and highly developed. That will put the 
 great child question in an altogether different aspect. 
 That sort of parent, I suggest to you, is likely to make 
 short work of any undue interference or pragmatic 
 encroachment on the part of the State. And this 
 brings me to the suggestion that many modern develop- 
 ments that are called socialistic, and that are warmly 
 advocated by Socialists, are not in any way integral, 
 as it were, organic to Socialism ; but are merely 
 necessary expedients of a transition period. Consider, 
 for instance, the movement in favour of feeding the 
 children of the State schools. We Socialists desire to 
 feed the children because as a matter of fact, so many 
 of the children are at present unfed. And the children 
 are unfed because the parents, owing to insufficiency 
 of means, are unable properly to feed them ; or 
 because they have but a feeble sense of parental 
 responsibility. But with the improvement in material 
 conditions, such as Socialists contemplate, and with 
 the higher moral standards that will accompany these 
 conditions and to some extent be a consequent of 
 them, also with the gradual disappearance of the men 
 and women in whom the parental instinct is lacking, 
 there will cease the necessity for the intervention of 
 the State in this matter. Parents will feed their own 
 children at their own tables and in their own way 
 because they will love their children. There will be a 
 return of the child to the home, just as there will be 
 a return of the mother to the home. The progress of 
 Socialism will remove the need for what are falsely 
 called socialistic measures. 
 
 But I will trespass no further on your patience by 
 any longer seeking to define the faith I hold by nega-
 
 THE FAITH I HOLD 233 
 
 tion, though I am not unconscious that in the present 
 phase of the Socialist propaganda it is as needful to 
 tell the world what we do not as it is to tell it what we 
 do believe ; and that negative are as urgent as positive 
 assertions if Socialism is to be cleared of fog and 
 muzziness, of mire, mist and moonshine. 
 
 The limitations of my Socialist credo will, I fancy, 
 bring me into Mr. Hobson's category of economic as 
 contrasted with ethical Socialism. In point of fact, 
 neither of these categories is of itself adequate. Both 
 are conventional only, and there is no sharply limned 
 and exclusive frontier to either of them. The impulse 
 to change the economic conditions is itself a moral 
 impulse. If I appear unduly and unnecessarily to 
 have narrowed the issues it is because I am convinced 
 that concentration makes for strength and diffusion 
 for weakness ; because I deprecate the strategy that 
 would spread the Socialist attack over too wide a front. 
 I am as fully convinced as ever Mrs. Webb, Mr. Camp- 
 bell, or Doctor Coit can be, that economic improvement 
 of itself is no certain prophylactic against moral decay, 
 and that if the material changes be not the outward 
 and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace ; if a 
 finer social adjustment be not due to and accompanied 
 by a finer will consciously working towards finer spiri- 
 tual ends ; then, once more in humanity's long history 
 the realization will be as bitter as the hope was bright. 
 
 1907.
 
 XXV 
 
 IN THE SOUTH 
 
 A SHORT while ago my friend Mr. Grant Allen, novelist, 
 man of science, and P'abian, wrote in a widely circu- 
 lated English magazine an article whose object was 
 to attract his fellow countrymen to Antibes. It was 
 a distinct success. It attracted them, and among 
 them myself. Now I have always had much con- 
 fidence in Mr. Grant Allen when he has told me (also 
 in popular magazines) of certain small fish who stroll 
 about on the seashore in tropical climes, with their 
 eyes carelessly tossed over their shoulders with a 
 view to seeing what was going on behind them. I 
 believed him with all the ingenuous trust of a school- 
 boy in Baron Munchausen. And when he assured 
 me of the existence of an English actor who cultivated 
 cholera germs as other people hatch chickens, I 
 accepted his statement without turning a hair. At 
 least he would never trifle with science, I felt sure. 
 
 Judge then of my surprise, when upon reaching 
 Antibes railway station (after a journey of a thousand 
 miles or so) I found nothing in the least like anything 
 that Mr. Grant Allen had described. I rubbed my 
 eyes and began to doubt whether I had really, a^d 
 in truth, awaked from one of those long sleeps for 
 which the French trains, which travel quite three 
 234
 
 IN THE SOUTH 235 
 
 miles an hour, give one such ample opportunities. 
 Instead of the verdure-clad woods and multi-coloured 
 acres of flowers, spoken of in the magazine, I found 
 myself in a quaint little Mediterranean town all 
 white walls, red roofs, soldiers and smells. When I 
 call the town " Mediterranean," I have sufficiently 
 indicated that it is not French, or even European. 
 This " tideless, dolorous, midland sea," as Swinburne 
 has most inaptly called it, for it is neither tideless 
 nor dolorous, washes fifty miles of Europe for one 
 of Asia, and yet the mysterious influence of mystic 
 Asia is over it all. This little town, for instance, 
 is much more like Damascus or Jerusalem than it is 
 like Paris or Boulogne-sur-Mer. It is of the Orient, 
 Eastern ; and as it is, so are all towns of more than 
 fifty years of age, whose square old towers, whose 
 embattled walls, look down on this sapphire sea. 
 
 For the lamentable fact must out. Mr. Grant 
 Allen has never been to Antibes ! or, rather, he 
 never had been until a day or two ago, when he came 
 to call on me and I showed him round. I took him 
 up the old Roman tower built two thousand years 
 ago, and I introduced him to all the smells. 
 
 Some three miles from here, on the summit of a 
 hilly promontory, stands a white-walled hotel the 
 sort of thing which might have been built in Trafalgar 
 Square and sent out here by parcel post. It is a 
 truly British combination of ostentation and stingi- 
 ness. Here, in Antibes, they don't feed us to reple- 
 tion, but at the Grand Hotel du Cap (I had nearly 
 written the Grant Hotel du Cap) they give you less 
 at least, so I infer from the compliments of Mr. Allen 
 on our humble six-course breakfast. At the Grand 
 Hotel the waitresses are things of beauty in Swiss 
 costumes blue silk aprons, muslin sleeves, velvet 
 bodices, silver chains, and neat ankles. What matter,
 
 236 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 then, if the wine they pour out be thinner than that 
 served by the single fat waiter here ? But what 
 true-born Briton recks of food when his heart is 
 upheld by the chance of touching elbows with a 
 Dean ? What are the low cares of the stomach to 
 one whose soul is satisfied with a bow from a Bishop 
 on the balcony ? And at the Grand Hotel such 
 things do happen. 
 
 They do really. My acquaintance, Snobson, of 
 the National Liberal Club, a robust Radical, whom 
 I ran across the other day under the orange-trees of 
 Monte Carlo, had tears of pride in his voice as he 
 said to me, " It's well worth the extra ten francs a 
 day and all the extras. You do meet such interesting 
 people. In England I have never even shaken hands 
 with an Alderman here I'm living under the same 
 roof with the greatest lights of literature, sir. I 
 picked up Mr. Grant Allen's table-napkin for him 
 at breakfast this morning last night the Rev. Mr. 
 Haweis swore at me on the stairs. My wife has been 
 spoken to by a Russian princess ! " Oh, my dear 
 fellow countrymen how delightful you are and yet 
 how proud I am of you ! 
 
 Perhaps you wonder why, considering such attrac- 
 tions are within easy reach of me, I am still in this 
 hard-baked little Eastern town. Well, to tell the 
 truth, I long ago discovered that the " literary light " 
 considered as a talker is a bit of a fraud. It is only 
 when he picks up his pen that he becomes not as 
 other men. He who lives upon phrases takes good 
 care not to squander them without a quid pro quo. 
 Many and many a time at the dinner-table or in the 
 smoking-room have I seen the fire of genius flash 
 from the literary man's eye. He had just thought
 
 IN THE SOUTH 237 
 
 of a good thing, I knew. I waited breathlessly 
 fingering my pencil the while, eager to jot it down 
 but it never came. He suppressed it at the moment 
 of birth, and it went into his next article in the Saturday 
 Review. Far otherwise is it with the brown-skinned, 
 bright-eyed children of the South here in sun-burnt 
 Antibes. No sooner is the epigram, the paradox, 
 the witticism, conceived in the brain than it flashes 
 from between the white teeth. And why not ? These 
 things are not saleable here, in a place which boasts 
 not a weekly paper. And that is why I prefer, for 
 a while, the society of the alien down here, among 
 narrow streets and dark archways, to that of my 
 literary confreres away there amongst the olive-trees 
 and Swiss waitresses at the Grand Hotel. 
 
 And the epigram, the paradox, the witticism, is 
 not rare. The common talk of these men and women 
 of the country of the troubadours is as picturesque 
 and coloured as their surroundings. They deal not 
 in second-hand phrases or in quotations from the 
 comic papers. The thought is pictorial, and the 
 word is like unto the thought. Like the Board 
 School child, they " use dictionary words quite care- 
 less." Chatting to them on the ramparts, when 
 the setting sun is tinting with rose colour the snow- 
 capped peaks of the Maritime Alps and turning the 
 little bay into one wondrous, gleaming opal, you 
 shall hear more good things in twenty minutes' talk 
 than in a week of Kensington drawing-rooms, even 
 when Oscar Wilde and his followers are of the guests. 
 
 And here, too, something is absent which too 
 often is present in the most gilded of London salons 
 vulgarity, to wit. The folk here know how to carry 
 courtesy to the point where it just stops short of 
 subservience and cringing. Here a man will touch 
 his hat to you without a vision of a copper to follow,
 
 238 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 and that is the sort of man to whom you, in your 
 turn, raise your hat. Here again the men seem to 
 have dropped, or never to have acquired, the odious 
 Parisian habit of looking at women with the look 
 which a glutton gives to his favourite dish. I never 
 walk along a boulevard in a big French town with a 
 personable woman without feeling an almost irre- 
 sistible itch to lay my stick across the face and apply 
 the toe of my boot to another part of the person of 
 well-nigh every well-dressed Frenchman I meet. And 
 yet here there is some excuse for male staring, for 
 the companion of most of my walks abroad is worth 
 more than a passing eye-blink. She is pretty, dainty, 
 piquant, and altogether pleasant to look upon. She 
 dresses in a blue skirt and blue jacket with a bright 
 yellow blouse, and she wears a little round scarlet 
 cap set jauntily on her head at a provoking angle. 
 As she herself says, she looks like a paroquet but 
 then, as I tell her, a paroquet is a nice, decorative 
 little bird. 
 
 No; here we seem further away from Paris and 
 its ways than we do in the Burlington Arcade. And 
 that is strange, for half a dozen times a day the trains 
 from Paris snort past our station laden with England, 
 America, and fashionable France, and we are within 
 walking distance of Nice. Nice is a southern Brighton 
 plus palm-trees and minus the long line of English 
 girls on English horses, which, to my thinking, glorify 
 the King's Road, and make it even as the plains 
 of Paradise. I never can see what the travelled 
 Englishman finds to rave about in Nice. The raptures 
 of the rich Yankee are comprehensible, for there he 
 has a chance of scattering his dollars, and of letting 
 the world see him scatter. Nice has not grown it 
 has been made made like its bouquets, for the 
 wealthy foreigner ; and one feels that did he, for
 
 IN THE SOUTH 239 
 
 ever so brief a while, withdraw the sunshine of his 
 presence, it would droop and fade, and grow dull 
 brown and dirty yellow, even as they, should the 
 clouds hide their god's face for the space of a week. 
 Mind, I don't complain of this habit of the men of 
 every race of impressing the seal of their own indi- 
 viduality upon everything they touch. It is the 
 mark of conquering strength, of puissant personality. 
 Had the Anglo-Saxon been content to lose himself 
 in the tones and colours of the countries where he 
 bided, he would never have taught the nations the 
 lesson of political freedom, and girdled the world 
 with a broad belt of English-speaking men. But 
 the Briton's habit of taking Britain with him wherever 
 he goes, in his portmanteau so to speak, is by way 
 of being a little tedious, isn't it ? It would hardly 
 be worth while to travel at all, if our compatriots 
 travelled much more. 
 
 Oh yes, I forgot, the vulgar has its temple even 
 here. It is a fifth-rate restaurant where, of evenings, 
 those that have a taste that way may drink execrable 
 coffee, and listen to some execrable songs of a sort 
 that in England would have provoked the interference 
 of the police even before the days of the County 
 Council nasty songs, helped out by nastier gestures. 
 Here the Frenchman can worship the great goddess 
 Lubricity, without one, at least, of whose shrines 
 no spot of French earth is quite complete. To the 
 credit of Antibes be it said, this particular fane doesn't 
 appear, financially, to flourish. 
 
 These people have their faults. To the healthy 
 and strong they are genial, polite, and kindly enough, 
 but to the feeble and ill they are cold and indifferent, 
 and the dead they treat hardly with decency. A
 
 240 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 townsman may be walking in the Place at three in 
 the afternoon, and in his grave before nine the next 
 morning. So great is the haste to bury their dead 
 out of their sight that one is inclined to believe it 
 was on the Mediterranean slopes that the immortal 
 lines were written : 
 
 Little Alexander's dead ; jam him in his coffin, 
 Don't get such a jolly chance for a funeral often. 
 
 But after all, is not this dislike of pain and death 
 rather an attribute of the animal than a vice of the 
 human ? And from the point of view of pure science 
 is there not much to be said for it ? When grave 
 and reverend seigniors of science can be heard any 
 day lecturing on the sterilization of the unfit and 
 bullying us for our charity to lame dogs one mustn't 
 be too hard on the untutored child of nature if he 
 puts into practice their theories without ever having 
 heard of them, and turns his head away from sickness 
 and sorrow in search of pleasanter sights. Happily 
 for the world, its scientists have never been its 
 prophets. When it takes its creed from the lecture- 
 room and the laboratory the end will be not far off. 
 
 Since last week I have had further opportunities of 
 studying the French soldier, and, believing as I do 
 that the European question is the question of the 
 continued existence of France as a great Power, I need 
 hardly say that I have availed myself of them. If 
 the French soldier was equal to the trouble the French 
 nation is taking with him, Europe would have to 
 prepare itself for another period of Gallic domination. 
 And who knows ? Perhaps for another Waterloo. 
 But he isn't, and that's the whole gist of the matter. 
 Personal vanity seems a poor sort of thing looked at
 
 IN THE SOUTH 241 
 
 by itself with the eye of a moralist. Still, the fact 
 remains that the soldier who declines to leave barracks 
 save in speckless uniform and with cap at the right 
 cock, who knows how to use a swagger-stick and 
 fancies that all the women must needs be in love 
 with him, is, other things being equal, the soldier 
 who bears him best in fight. In the French army 
 they have no word for " smart " and they haven't 
 the thing. 
 
 They improve the landscape, though ; and they 
 are much given to walking about in it. One comes 
 upon them at the most unexpected moments, strolling, 
 in threes mostly, among the pine-woods and the 
 olive-trees, or the rugged rocks of the shore, and 
 the blue of tunic and red of trouser add the needed 
 note of colour to the scene. For whatever the descrip- 
 tive writer may say, the prevailing tone of the Riviera 
 is grey. The rocks are grey, and the olive-trees are 
 grey, and rocks and olive-trees about make up the 
 picture. It is not in sun-scorched lands that the 
 artistic eye will go to search for colour, but in our 
 own moist land in Kentish meadows, in Sussex 
 marshes, and on Yorkshire hill-sides. 
 
 Please don't suppose, because I am in the paradise 
 of the stockbroker and the Chicago millionaire, that 
 I live as they do. Plain living and high thinking 
 if not fine writing are as possible here as in Fleet 
 Street. Civilization, with all its sins, has at least 
 made it possible for poverty to travel. The most 
 moderate of incomes will enable one to flee fog and 
 frost and seek sunshine and sweet air. Only sternly 
 resolve to resist the allurements of English eccle- 
 siastics and Russian Royalties, and you shall find life 
 more than tolerable on some poor four shillings a day. 
 
 Q
 
 242 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 Here there are sea and sky and rocks and rest. But 
 it is not for these alone that one loves Antibes. Many 
 other places may be more lovely, though this is good 
 enough for ordinary folk most other places are 
 more genteel, but no other where by this blue sea 
 one can live for five francs a day. This is an attribute 
 that appeals to all tastes. Thus in our little real 
 Antibes the French, the walled in, the ungenteel 
 we have a party of painters, romancists, rhymers, 
 journalists all happy, all idle, all rejoicing in the 
 fair jewels of sea and sun and sky, and above all in 
 the rare mercy which even moves our poet to the song 
 following : 
 
 RONDEAU OF THE HOTEL DU COMMERCE 
 
 To Those at Home 
 
 Five francs a day ! Five francs a day 
 For diner and for dejeuner, 
 For little rooms, whose windows high 
 Show us blue hills, blue sea, blue sky, 
 And snowy mountains far away. 
 
 At Nice and Monaco our way 
 Was bleak with bills, our skies were grey ; 
 But here we pay, with grateful sigh, 
 Five francs a day ! 
 
 Here life flowers daily, glad and gay 
 With citron, rose, and oranger ! 
 We watch the bright, light days go by, 
 And think of you at home. Ah, why 
 Are you not also here, to pay 
 
 Five francs a day ? 
 1892.
 
 XXVI 
 
 A POINT OF VIEW 
 
 To set matters right with Propriety at the outset 
 let me say at once that the person whose views were 
 poured into my sympathetic ear yesterday, which 
 views I am now about to record for your information, 
 was a male person. I confess that I could have 
 found it in my heart to wish that it had been other- 
 wise. Naught within the range of possibility would 
 have fitted my humour better than a quiet, intimate 
 talk with a young and beautiful girl. I was in a 
 pensive, meditative, almost sentimental mood. Upon 
 the slightest provocation I could have said the nicest 
 things in the most choice and charming language. 
 To the true artist it is an even greater pleasure to 
 say pretty things than to hear them said, though 
 that, too, is delightful. The place, the time, the 
 attitude of mind, all were propitious. Yesterday 
 was the most perfect of all the perfect days that 
 this wonderful October has given us. The air of the 
 Kentish lane was as clear, as pure, as soft as though 
 it had been wafted from across the sapphire Southern 
 sea to some green-grey olive-clad slope on the Italian 
 Riviera. One looked through the baring branches 
 of the overhanging trees, through a shimmering glory 
 of scarlet and crimson and gold, to an ocean of infinite 
 azure. In those baring branches a late-lingering 
 bird was chanting a hymn to departing summer. 
 243
 
 244 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 And I was alone. That was the sad fact that caused 
 the whole circumstance just to lack perfection. For 
 we have it upon high authority that in a garden, 
 amidst trees and sunshine and sweet air, it is not 
 good for man to be alone. In a sponge bath, perhaps, 
 yes ; but not in a garden. The Bible itself says no. 
 
 I realized the great truth acutely, almost pain- 
 fully. One note was wanting, I felt, to make the 
 whole harmonious a woman's voice, a young woman's 
 voice, a young woman's low voice. Had a girl been 
 with me at the moment, and had she laughed with 
 the shrill " tee-hee," so fashionable just now that I 
 really believe it must be taught in schools, I should 
 have strangled her and her laughter there and then, 
 and strolled quietly to the nearest police-station to 
 give myself up for the deed. In the subsequent trial 
 I should have defended myself on the grounds that 
 an outrage on good taste is deserving of instant death, 
 and that he who deals out the punishment merits 
 reward rather than condemnation. My address, based 
 upon sound artistic principles, would, I am sure, 
 have convinced the most Philistine jury that ever 
 was empanelled, and, later on, would have been 
 received with rapture by every reader of the Sunday 
 Chronicle. For your sakes I could almost regret 
 that the occasion for delivering it never arose. If 
 it be true that the blossoms and the scents of Spring 
 stimulate the heart to hope, no less true is it that 
 Autumn's tints and Autumn's perfumes stir the 
 deeps of memory, and recall to mind all sorts of 
 forgotten and delicious experiences. The influence 
 of perfumes on the soul of man has never been, so 
 far as I know, adequately dealt with in literature. 
 But it shall be some day, and by me, and in this 
 paper. Why is it, for instance, that one never could 
 be aught but chaste as Diana in the proximity of
 
 A POINT OF VIEW 245 
 
 mignonette ? And why does one's garment of virtue 
 fall to rags when the heavy odour of red roses fills 
 the evening air ? But I will discuss this matter 
 another time. Just now I am only concerned here 
 to say that the curious, subtle, penetrating exhala- 
 tion of the fallen leaves, the leaves of poplar and 
 beech and aspen, that made a gorgeous Eastern carpet 
 to my feet, opened, as by magic charm, some closed 
 pages of the first, or let us say the second, volume of 
 my life's story. On one of those pages I saw the 
 portrait of a girl. Never mind her name, or her 
 when, or her whereabouts. She, I felt, was the one 
 thing lacking to make the whole complete. She 
 was the picture of which all this glory of beauty was 
 but the fitting frame. 
 
 Come, then, complete incomphtion, come ! 
 
 I cried, in the words of a great modern poet, who 
 was at least twenty years my senior when he wrote 
 them. And I waited for the miracle to happen. 
 The miracle would happen, it seemed ; for just at 
 the moment I heard a light footstep rustle the dead 
 and dying leaves on the little footpath which led to 
 and from the stile against which I rested. I turned 
 with brain awhirl and heart tumultuous, and I saw 
 a young man ! 
 
 We all know how, at moments of supreme emotion, 
 the mind takes note of minute details which in its 
 ordinary unruffled state pass it by unheeded. Men 
 on the way to execution are said to be almost super- 
 naturally observant. So I, in this vile instant of 
 overwhelming disillusion and dismay, noticed that 
 this accursed young man, whose hateful presence 
 seemed to blight the very trees with leprosy and 
 turn the blue of the sky to a leaden grey, had sandy 
 hair, and a fluffy canary-coloured moustache of some
 
 246 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 seven days' growth ; that his eyes were pale blue ; 
 that his nose was snub ; that his high hat needed 
 ironing, and that its brim curled less than fashion 
 demanded ; that his trousers bagged unduly at the 
 knees, and that his tan boots had evidently been 
 rubbed over with a dirty cloth ; that, to sum up, 
 there was nothing wanting about him, from top to 
 toe, to make him as unpleasant and as objectionable 
 as one of God's creatures and a fellow man can be. 
 All this my eyes took in ere he had advanced two 
 paces in my direction. Then, the first shock over, 
 a kindlier feeling smote me, and I decided not to 
 knock him down and stamp on him ; at least, until 
 he had given me some provocation to violence greater 
 than his mere advent upon the scene. He came 
 up to me in a diffident, listless sort of way, and stopped 
 at the stile, evidently expecting me to move out 
 of his way. But that I would not do. That was 
 asking a little too much. I stood still, and looked 
 well away over the crown of his hat. After a moment's 
 glacial silence he spoke " Could you oblige me with 
 a cigarette ? " he said, quite politely, almost deferen- 
 tially, in fact. " You'll pardon my asking you, but 
 I am just dying for a smoke of some sort." 
 
 In my then humour had that young man been 
 parching of thirst I would gladly have denied him 
 a cup of cold water ; had he asked bread it would 
 have given me infinite pleasure to have handed him 
 a stone ; but when he appealed for tobacco, then, 
 then he touched me in my tenderest spot. Psycholo- 
 gists tell us that sympathy comes from sharing the 
 feelings of others, either in actual experience or in 
 imagination, and psychologists, for once in a way, 
 seem to me to be right. I have never been thirsty, 
 not so thirsty as to want cold water, that is (hence 
 probably my immunity from typhoid and kindred
 
 A POINT OF VIEW 247 
 
 plagues), and I don't remember ever to have gone 
 a day without breakfast and dinner of sorts. But I 
 have known what it is to yearn for tobacco with an 
 infinite yearning, and (a worse thing still) I have found 
 myself with a case full of cigars and ten miles away 
 from a light, and so my heart went out at once to 
 that young man with the fluffy moustache and the 
 shockingly bad hat. I produced my cigarette-case. 
 He lighted up and sucked away in silence until nearly 
 half the frail delight was ashes. Then he said : " It's 
 pretty rough when it won't run to a penny smoke, 
 I can tell you." 
 
 My eyes were attracted to his watch-chain, the 
 sort of thing that the advertisements call " a gentle- 
 man's gold albert." 
 
 " Oh," he replied, answering my unspoken query, 
 and flicking the end of the chain from his pocket, 
 an end to which nothing was attached. " It's not 
 worth its weight in coppers. Uncle wouldn't have 
 it at any price. He had the ticker a week ago and 
 more." 
 
 I remarked that it was delightful weather for the 
 time of the year. I admit that the observation 
 was not strikingly original or specially to the point, 
 but I really did not know what else to say, and I 
 felt the time had come for saying something. 
 
 " Yes," he said, " it's fine enough as far as that 
 goes. I wish it wasn't. When you're down on 
 your luck and got the hump, the sunshine and the 
 leaves and birds and things seem to make it worse 
 somehow." 
 
 My sympathy with him swelled suddenly to quite 
 sizable proportions. Here was a poetic sentiment 
 put, perhaps, not quite poetically ; a sentiment that 
 pierced right to the heart of things. I had felt just 
 that way myself. I, too, had hated nature for smiling 
 in sunshine when I felt she ought to have mingled 
 her tears with mine. I had stood on Brighton Downs
 
 248 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 and ground my teeth and shaken my fist at the cloud- 
 less sky and laughing sea. It was that day when 
 Maud but I think I've told you that story before. 
 Here were two points I had in common with this 
 malapropos young man. We had both lacked tobacco ; 
 we had both known sorrow and felt at odds with 
 heartless nature. My manner as well as my feeling 
 became sympathetic. 
 
 " Well, what's the matter ? " I asked, as kindly 
 as I know how ; " I don't suppose I can be of any 
 use to you, but if there's anything I can do, why 
 of course " 
 
 " Oh," he replied, " mine's a common case, nothing 
 out of the ordinary. I got chucked from a berth 
 a month ago and there's no signs of another. That's 
 all." 
 
 " And enough, too," I said. " What sort of a 
 berth ? Why were you chucked ? " I did not add 
 " Why don't you get another ? " because that, nowa- 
 days, to a man out of work, is a stupid sort of question, 
 and shows ignorance of the labour problem. 
 
 " I was an assistant at Hoseman and Hoseman's," 
 he replied, " in the drapery, you know. Been there 
 going three years. The new shopwalker had a down 
 on me. It was all along of a young lady in the mantles 
 but never mind about that, gentlemen don't talk 
 of those things. He was always fining me for breaking 
 rules ; there were over a hundred rules in our shop ; 
 you could hardly turn round without breaking one 
 of them, and my twenty-one bob a week generally 
 came to about fourteen by pay-day. Then at last 
 I got the chuck altogether because I let an old girl 
 go out of the shop without buying anything. It's 
 my belief she never meant to buy anything from 
 the first, and I said so. They called that cheek, and 
 I was sacked on the spot." 
 
 " It has always seemed to me," I said, " upon 
 those rare occasions when I have accompanied ladies
 
 A POINT OF VIEW 249 
 
 into drapers' shops that the toad under the harrow 
 was a beast to be envied compared with the young 
 gentleman behind the counter. Of course it's true 
 the occupation is a light one " 
 
 " Light one ! " he echoed, cutting me short, " You 
 just go and fetch down rolls of calico and flannel 
 from a shelf as high as you can stretch, and put 'em 
 back again fifty times a day, and see if you find it 
 * light.' I tell you, twenty-pound dumb-bells are 
 nothing to it." 
 
 " Oh, well, lifting weights is good for the muscles," 
 I said ; "it develops the deltoid, you know, and 
 all that sort of thing. No, it wasn't that I was think- 
 ing of. It was the aggravating way of a woman 
 when she wants to match a shade of colour I meant. 
 Now that I couldn't stand. I would much rather 
 sweep a crossing than stand much of that." 
 
 But that unfortunate word of mine had hit him 
 on a sore place apparently. He took no notice of 
 my later remarks and harked back to it. 
 
 " Light," he went on. " Oh, yes, it's very light. 
 Standing on your legs from eight in the morning until 
 ten at night, often earlier and later than that. Seventy- 
 six hours a week was my little lot. That was what 
 it was supposed to be, you know. It was nearer 
 ninety. Why, a working man wouldn't stand it. 
 Here's the engineers striking for forty-eight hours. 
 I should call forty-eight hours a blessed holiday." 
 
 " Why don't you do what the working men do 
 to get that holiday then ? " I asked. " Why not 
 form a union ? " 
 
 " Ah, well, we could hardly do that," he answered. 
 " You see we are gentlemen after all, ain't we ? " 
 
 " What a fortunate thing that must be for your 
 employers ! " I remarked. 
 
 The poor little sarcasm didn't touch him, and 
 I was rather glad it didn't. He was bruised enough. 
 
 " That's about the only thing to be said for our
 
 250 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 line," he continued. " It is genteel, when all's said 
 and done. We're always called ' gentlemen,' you 
 know, and ' sir ' by the servants." 
 
 " That must be a comforting thought to go to bed 
 with after twelve hours of lifting rolls of flannel and 
 matching impossible shades of colour ? " I suggested. 
 
 " Well, it is, in a way," he replied simply. 
 
 Ah me, ah me, from what strange unthought-of 
 sources do the silly suffering sons of men draw comfort. 
 
 " I suppose they feed you like fighting cocks ? " 
 I said, merely for the sake of breaking silence. 
 
 He laughed a little scornfully. " Cag-mag and 
 stale vegetables," he replied, " and no time to eat 
 'em in. They call it half an hour for dinner, but 
 you can't often get down to it when it's ready ; when 
 you do get down the gravy's cold, and before you've 
 got three mouthfuls you're wanted upstairs again 
 as often as not. Oh, it's fine for the digestion ! " 
 
 " Then how in the world do you manage to look 
 so cheerful over it all ? " I asked. " For you do 
 look cheerful, you know," I went on. " Whenever 
 I go into one of those large establishments like your 
 late firm's I am always struck with the bright, brisk 
 looks and amiable manners of the counter- jum er 
 er, the young gentlemen behind the counter." 
 
 " Well, we're most of us young, you see," he said, 
 " and we're generally engaged, more or less, to one 
 of the young ladies in one of the other departments. 
 We see her now and then as we pass in the passages 
 and so on, and that keeps the heart up, you under- 
 stand." 
 
 Oh everlasting miracle of youth and love ! 
 
 Oh rapture unspeakable of being engaged more or 
 less! 
 
 "As to the brightness and briskness," he con- 
 tinued, " well, you've just got to be bright and
 
 A POINT OF VIEW 251 
 
 brisk, you know, when the manager's eye's upon you. 
 And ' amiable.' Lord love you, you'd be amiable 
 if it cost you half - a - crown fine to be anything 
 else." 
 
 I agreed with him. I could bring myself to wish 
 that this world were one vast drapery establishment 
 in which every one were fined half a crown for looking 
 sulky. 
 
 I felt that I should be unfaithful to the cause of 
 labour in general did I not use the time and oppor- 
 tunity to say a word in season. So I said it. 
 
 " If you are too genteel to form a union," I said, 
 " a trade union, like any skilled mechanic, at least 
 you might use your powers as electors. Why not 
 form a sort of political union ; there are lots of you 
 in every large constituency ; and so put pressure on 
 the Parliamentary candidates to have your wrongs 
 righted in Parliament ? " 
 
 " We're not electors," he replied, " that's where 
 it is. We don't even have bedrooms to ourselves." 
 
 " Ah, well, that doesn't matter much," I said, " if 
 you had votes you wouldn't use them sensibly. I 
 dare say you'd think political agitation ungentle- 
 manly ; now wouldn't you ? " 
 
 " I don't know that I wouldn't," he responded 
 candidly enough. " I don't hold with Radicalism 
 and Socialism myself. My dad kept his own shop, 
 and we were always a bit above our neighbours. 
 Besides, there's another thing. We shop assistants 
 don't always care to let the world know just how 
 we're treated, you know. We might get looked 
 down on if we did. And there's always a hope of 
 getting on and having a business of our own. Some 
 of us do have luck, you know. There's always a 
 chance." 
 
 " And if you did get a business of your own. I 
 suppose you would treat your assistants just as you 
 have yourself been treated ? " I said,
 
 252 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 " I dare say," he answered. " What's good enough 
 for me is good enough for others, I reckon." 
 
 " But is it good enough for you ? " 
 
 " Well, it's better than I've got now anyway," 
 said he. 
 
 I wanted to think over this last remark of his, 
 to think it over by myself. It seemed to me to 
 contain the whole gist of the labour question. 
 
 I handed him the remaining contents of my cigarette- 
 case. 
 
 " Take these," I said, " they'll keep you going for 
 the rest of the day, and perhaps something will turn 
 up. There's always a chance, as you say." 
 
 He took the cigarettes, reluctantly I thought, and 
 nodded a silent thanks. 
 
 1897.
 
 XXVII 
 
 THE HONEST WOMAN 
 
 I LEARN that over there in Paris they are amusing 
 themselves by the discussion of the question Are 
 women honest ? and that already some of the most 
 famous of their literary men, Dr. Max Nordau, Marcel 
 Prevost, Anatole France, and others, have taken part 
 in the controversy. I confess that to me the question, 
 put so bluntly, sounds just a little bit rude and singu- 
 larly un-French. Personally, I should not like to 
 put the interrogation in an individual way to any 
 woman of my acquaintance. I should be sorry, indeed, 
 to ask of the next woman I met, " Are you honest, 
 madam ? " I should expect never to meet that woman 
 again, or at least to be cut next time I did meet her. 
 
 And it makes me feel a little uncomfortable to ask 
 of a whole sex what politeness forbids my asking of 
 any one member of it. However, a journalist, I 
 suppose, must be prepared now and then to make 
 sacrifice of his own feelings, and, after all, where Marcel 
 Prevost to whom, by the way, a writer in a London 
 literary paper recently did me the honour to compare 
 me rushes in I may not fear to tread. But I shall 
 endeavour to tread delicately, as he who walks on 
 egg-shells or on hot bricks. 
 
 Before discussing any proposition it is always well 
 to make sure of your terms ; otherwise the discussion 
 is likely to end well, as most discussions do, in fact, 
 253
 
 254 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 end. It were idle to dispute as to whether women are 
 honest or not until we discover exactly what we mean 
 by honesty. Here the dictionary shall help us. The 
 invaluable Webster defines honesty as " characterized 
 by integrity or fairness and straightforwardness in 
 conduct, thought, speech, etc. ; sincere, free from 
 fraud, guile, or duplicity ; open, frank," and, I take 
 it, we may rest quite content with the definition of so 
 high an authority. 
 
 Accepting that definition, then, the reply to the 
 question would seem to be as easy as kissing or falling 
 off a roof. Of course, women are not honest, and what 
 an extraordinarily distasteful place the world would 
 be if they were ! 
 
 Try to imagine what your feelings would be if any 
 woman who had known you intimately for, say, three 
 months were to tell you exactly what she thought 
 of you ! Exactly, you understand, concealing nothing, 
 setting down naught in malice. If your imagination 
 be not equal to the task, then consult your memory 
 and try to recollect what your feelings were last time 
 any woman did tell you just a little of what she thought 
 of you. 
 
 Now then, considering that three-fourths of an 
 ordinary man's comfort in life depends upon what his 
 women folk think of him, or, more correctly, on what 
 he fondly thinks they think of him, have we not sound 
 cause to thank our lucky stars that we were born into 
 a world in which women are not honest, in the Web- 
 sterian definition of the term ? 
 
 Let us ponder for a moment or two upon clothes 
 women's clothes for clothes, you know, particularly 
 women's clothes, are a sort of conduct, a form of 
 speech ; in the case of the cleverest women the subtlest 
 of all forms of speech. Did you ever stand and look 
 in the window of a shop in which they sell corsets ? 
 
 Please note here that I would much rather have 
 written stays than corsets, for " corsets " strikes me
 
 THE HONEST WOMAN 255 
 
 as a dressmaker's sort of word, and beneath the dignity 
 of serious journalism. But, however, I bow to modern 
 fashion and convention, and write corsets. 
 
 Well, if you have not looked in such a shop window, 
 do so next time the opportunity occurs ; because, in 
 order to diagnose corsets, as it were, to discern, to 
 penetrate to the philosophy, to the inner meaning 
 and intention of them, it is needful to see them " off," 
 and not " on." And remember corsets are a most 
 important and significant feature of modern feminine 
 civilization ; they are symbolical of much. You 
 will never get anywhere near unto understanding 
 women until you have got somewhere near unto under- 
 standing corsets. The modern woman, as presented 
 to the eye, and, at a dance, to the touch, is built up, 
 or, let us say, is moulded upon her corsets. They are 
 to her what the skeleton is to an animal, what the 
 plot is to a drama, or the thesis to a dissertation, or 
 the creed to a religion, or the underlying principles 
 to a political party. What she would be without 
 them we may not know, for we may not see. But we 
 may see them without her, in a shop window, as I 
 said. 
 
 And there are other articles of apparel in the windows 
 of shops that sell corsets things indescribable, in- 
 describable by me at any rate, but things of which I 
 can guess the meretricious use. 
 
 The intention, the object, the final cause, of corsets, 
 then, is to make the wearer appear what, in fact, she 
 is not ; to correct nature's errors, to mitigate nature's 
 deficiencies, to supply nature's shortcomings, to 
 restrain nature's too pronounced flamboyancies, to 
 soften nature's too acute angularity. Hence they are 
 structures of convexity and of concavity, but the 
 convexity and the concavity are ever a little more 
 than those of nature's sculpting. They are wonderful 
 objects ; they are even, to the trained intelligence, 
 beautiful objects (for surely, to the trained intelligence
 
 256 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 that which perfectly achieves its end is beautiful), 
 but verily they are not honest. They are not " frank," 
 as Webster has it ; they are not free from duplicity 
 or from guile ! 
 
 Yet do they stand for Woman in this world of ours 
 at this our brief moment of time in that world. They 
 are her emblem, as the Jolly Roger was of old the 
 emblem of another sort of buccaneer. They are her 
 hieroglyph, her idiograph. Think what she would 
 be without them. Think what she is in them when 
 they are inexpensive and badly designed. But, no, 
 do not think of her in such evil case. Try rather not 
 to think. Such disquieting thoughts are not for those 
 who would always look on the fair side of life. 
 
 And yet it was Marcel Prevost himself, the brilliant 
 and perceptive author of Lettres de Femmes and Les 
 Demi-Vierges, Marcel Prevost, to whom one had 
 thought the heart of woman was as an open book, 
 who in this very journal but a short while since in- 
 veighed against women for wearing corsets, and dared 
 to advocate the unrestricted waist ! 
 
 Of course, women are not honest. Is the trapper 
 honest when he sets his snare ? Is the warrior honest 
 when he plans his ambush ? Is the little, shy wild 
 creature of the woods honest when to avoid your notice 
 it simulates death ? 
 
 How, when you come to think of it, can anything 
 be frank, guileless, free of duplicity, that either hunts 
 or is hunted ? And woman, through all that period 
 of her life in which she is distinctively woman, is either 
 huntress or hunted. No better, no more significant 
 phrase was ever minted than " The Duel of Sex," and 
 when a skilled fencer feints to lure his adversary into 
 rashness, is he honest ? Of course he is not. Honesty 
 in the duel is for those who wield sledge-hammers, 
 not for such as thrust with foils. 
 
 The dishonesty, the cultivated and nurtured dis- 
 honesty, of women is as much a function of their being
 
 THE HONEST WOMAN 257 
 
 as the maternal function itself. Indeed, it is connected 
 with that, connected with infrangible links. Have you 
 ever thought of that saying about heaven, that in 
 heaven, " there is neither marrying nor giving in 
 marriage ? " And have you ever made anything 
 satisfactory of it ? No ? Well, it is explained by 
 another saying : "In heaven we shall know as we 
 are known." That clears it up. If and when we, the 
 two sexes, know all about each other, certainly there 
 will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage. 
 
 Woman's m&tier in the world I mean, of course, 
 civilized woman, the woman in the world as it is is 
 to inspire romantic passion. 
 
 Men could do most of the things that are done in 
 the world without woman's help. Men could reap 
 and sow, and bake bread and cook dinners ; they 
 could build battleships and bath babies (supposing 
 of course, they could achieve them without feminine 
 co-operation) ; they could construct and maintain 
 the world of material things pretty much as it is. But 
 they could not write great poems or great dramas, 
 or compose great music. For these are inspired by 
 romantic passion, and romantic passion is inspired by 
 women, and by women who are not honest in the sense 
 in which we are using the term to-day. The reason 
 why there is no great art among savages is that there 
 is no romantic passion ; there is only animal passion. 
 Romantic passion is inspired by the women who wear 
 corsets. In other words, by the women who pretend 
 to be what they not quite are. 
 
 So you see, we owe most of the things upon which 
 we set the highest value, the things that lift us to life 
 from mere existence, to the fact that women are not 
 honest. 
 
 I never let my thoughts wander around this matter 
 of women's honesty without remembering a certain 
 observation of one Gilead P. Beck. Gilead P. Beck is 
 a character in Messrs. Besant and Rice's delightful
 
 258 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 novel " The Golden Butterfly." Like so many of his 
 enterprising and resourceful countrymen, he had 
 earned his living in many and various avocations. 
 Among other things he had kept an academy for young 
 ladies, and this is what he said of his experiences 
 thereat. Some one had remarked that girls were 
 tender and soft little things. Gilead P. Beck did not 
 think so. Said he: "Tender? Air they? As 
 hickory. Soft ? As the shell of a clam ! " Most 
 experienced school mistresses, I understand, appre- 
 ciate that observation, and coincide with it. I have 
 said that the dishonesty of women is a cultivated 
 quality. It is, and the culture begins very early 
 in life. 
 
 I regret, as I said to begin with, that the question 
 has been so crudely framed. It had been more cour- 
 teous, surely, to have demanded Have women tact ? 
 Do they practise reticence and reservation ? There 
 is no earthly sense in calling a spade a spade if by 
 giving it another name we can spare the gardener's 
 sensibilities ; and beyond doubt there is many a woman 
 who would fiercely resent the charge of dishonesty 
 who at the same time would glory in her tactfulness 
 and plume herself prettily on her feminine reticence 
 and diplomatic reserve. 
 
 Now I once heard a sage declare that if you showed 
 him a tactful man you showed him a man whom he 
 would not trust alone with his plate basket. That, 
 I think, is going too far, but there is a core of truth in 
 it, all the same. 
 
 Tactfulness is the strength of weak natures who 
 know their own weakness. It is not deceit exactly, 
 but it is over on the perilous edge of truth. It is the 
 resource of statesmen whose diplomacy is not backed 
 by big battalions. Now, women in their social re- 
 lations are even as those statesmen are in international 
 affairs. Their business is not, and never has been, 
 what Dr. Max Nordau asserts that it has been and is,
 
 THE HONEST WOMAN 259 
 
 to moralize the world and to raise men up to higher 
 things. Not a bit of it. Their business is, and has 
 been, to make the world a comfortable place for them- 
 selves to dwell in, and to make the best and the most 
 of men as they are down here on these lower levels. 
 
 Neither of those two ends is to be achieved by 
 " straightforwardness in conduct, thought, speech," 
 as Webster has it. On the contrary, they are to be 
 achieved only by the diligent and adroit exercise of 
 whatever qualities are the very opposite of these. 
 Goethe was hopelessly wrong, and I think, too, he 
 must have been desperately in love as he mostly 
 was when he said that " the eternal feminine beckons 
 us ever upwards." That is just what the eternal 
 feminine never does. It is the exceptional, the ab- 
 normal, feminine who does that, and when it beckons 
 we rarely or never follow. 
 
 After all, experience is your safest card, and let us 
 turn to that as we end. Look about you, and think 
 of the women you know who are quite obviously having 
 the best of times, who are most courted, most admired, 
 most deferred to ; who manage to secure the most 
 faithful and forgiving husbands, the most adoring and 
 discreet lovers, the most dutiful children even ; who 
 manage to steal horses or hearts, where other women 
 may not look over hedges, or sit in dimly lit corners 
 and keep their reputation. Are they the women 
 whose lives are characterized by " straightforward- 
 ness in conduct, thought, speech, etc. ; sincere, free 
 from fraud, guile, or duplicity, open, frank ? " 
 
 And so, of course, women are not honest ; and for 
 their own dear sakes, and for ours, let us hope they 
 never will be. 
 
 1909.
 
 XXVIII 
 
 CAPRICCIO 
 
 THERE come moments to all of us, I suppose, when 
 life and its affairs seem suddenly to have become well 
 nigh valueless ; when our spirits are oppressed by 
 an overpowering sense of the futility of things. Four 
 o'clock A.M. of a restless, sleepless night is a time highly 
 favourable to the coming of such moments ; but 
 sometimes they come upon us in the full glare of noon, 
 and of them a reasonable explanation is a little more 
 difficult to find. Personally, I am always puzzled to 
 determine which of my moods, the pessimistic or the 
 optimistic, let us call them, reflects most truly the 
 actual facts of life. Is it, I ask myself, that these 
 moments they seldom run to hours of depression 
 are lucid intervals, swift flashes of insight into the 
 very heart of things, and all the rest illusion ; or, on 
 the other hand, is my habitual mood, the mood in 
 which the world seems a fairly decent place and myself 
 a fairly decent fellow, the mood of real sanity ? It 
 is impossible, of course, to get at a satisfactory answer, 
 because the answer itself would depend upon the mood 
 of the moment. One thing at least seems certain ; 
 that if life is to be^ 'ived at all, we must accept, if only 
 by way of a working hypothesis, the answer of the 
 optimistic hours rather than that of the pessimistic 
 moments, for if that is to rule our reason and our thought 
 then comes paraylsis, mental and moral. Life may 
 260
 
 CAPRICCIO 261 
 
 be a mistake and the world a gritty desert, but we 
 must try not to think so more often than we are 
 obliged. At the same time, it is as well to admit to 
 ourselves that, even though life be not a mistake, 
 there a are good many made in it by ourselves and 
 others, and that the world, if not a desert exactly, 
 holds a good many sandy territories which would be 
 all the better for a little irrigation. On those lines 
 one can get on with one's work ; on the others one 
 must needs go straight to the deuce. 
 
 It seems to amount to something like this, then 
 that if pessimism is sure, practically, to be wrong, 
 unmitigated optimism is by no means certain, practi- 
 cally, to be right. After the dismallest night a cold 
 bath, a walk round the garden, and a tasty breakfast 
 will often send pessimism to the rightabout ; but 
 then five minutes' reading of one's morning paper, 
 reading about the sort of things that happen, here, 
 there, and everywhere day by passing day, is very 
 apt to give optimism a sharp smack in the face. And 
 yet this counting-house method of dealing with the 
 question, this setting out a debit and credit account 
 of life and trying to strike a balance, seems, from the 
 philosophic point of view, a poor sort of thing. What 
 philosophy wants is a definite Yes or an unmistakable 
 No, not a vague Perhaps. But then philosophy 
 seldom or never gets what it wants, for there is no 
 sort of doubt whatever that the world is not a bit 
 the right place for philosophers. They may find 
 themselves at home and well done by in some other 
 world hereafter, mayhap ; here, indubitably, the 
 crossing-sweepers have a better time. But this is a 
 digression. I must get back to the theme with which 
 I started, and keep as close to it as possible ; which 
 will not be very close.
 
 262 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 We ought to be upon our guard against the fallacies 
 that lurk behind that much- used, and much ill-used, 
 word Evolution. It is a good word, which carries its 
 meaning on the face of it, and, moreover, it means 
 much ; but, like many other words, it is getting dila- 
 pidated by over usage, and is in danger of becoming 
 a cant term of science employed for the deluding of 
 the wayfaring men, not to mention the fool. What 
 I mean is this : we are frequently told that such and 
 such a political institution or social custom is a product 
 of Evolution, and therefore (this is the unspoken im- 
 plication) it is all right and in its proper place. Now, of 
 course, the bare statement is true enough, so true as to 
 be almost superfluous ; it is the implication I beg leave 
 to query, nay, more than to query, actually to deny. 
 The small-pox microbe is a product of Evolution, 
 but when it makes itself a home in my body I can't 
 resist the conviction that, though it may be all right, 
 it is clearly not in its proper place ; and that Evolution 
 or no Evolution, the business of society is to wipe 
 it out as speedily as may be. The child's new cut 
 tooth has evolved, but then so has that last one of 
 mine which ached so desperately that I had to knock 
 up a dentist at one o'clock in the morning and get 
 rid of it all at costs. Of course, men of science know 
 all this as well as, and probably better than, I do ; 
 but my complaint of them is that they don't talk 
 about it, that they too often forget even to mention 
 it ; and so we are coming to regard Evolution with a 
 kind of superstitious awe ; a superstitious awe similar 
 to that with which as children we used to accept the 
 dictum of our Sunday school teachers, that as God 
 made everything everything was good, even black 
 beetles and birches. We knew in our hearts that 
 something was wrong somewhere in that dictum, 
 something either in the premiss or the conclusion, but 
 it sounded so plausible and imposing that we just 
 shut our eyes and swallowed it. The fact is we ought
 
 CAPRICCIO 263 
 
 always to bear carefully in mind that Evolution is 
 compact, as it were, of two processes, two tendencies 
 one making for progress, for life ; the other for 
 degeneration, for death ; that both processes are 
 going on at the same time, and that one is fully 
 as strong as the other, quite as real, I mean. The 
 problem always is to discover with which of the two 
 we are face to face at any particular time. Take, for 
 instance, these Trusts and Combines which are causing 
 so much to-do in the financial and industrial world. 
 It is easy enough to show that they have evolved 
 quite naturally and according to an ascertained law 
 from the Competitive industrial system, which, in 
 its day, evolved from the system that preceded it ; 
 but for all that they are no less likely to make for the 
 misery of mankind. They may not, of course, but 
 there is no reason to assume offhand that they won't. 
 Evolution must really consent to be criticized. We 
 were ready enough to bow speechless in the presence 
 of a Creator ; but now that Science has, or thinks it 
 has, got rid of a Creator, we are assuredly not going 
 to stand any nonsense from Evolution. 
 
 The same sort of considerations apply to that other 
 bogey-like entity, the Past the Past with a capital 
 P I mean. To tell me that an institution or a 
 social custom, again, has its foundations laid deeply 
 in the Past is not to invest it with any sort of honour 
 or dignity in my irreverent eyes. I decline to venerate, 
 or possibly even to respect it. Personally, I should 
 prefer to do a little founding on my own account, just 
 as my forefathers did on theirs ; for I can't forget 
 that I, too, shall some day be the Past, that I, too, 
 am a forefather. The fact that an institution or social 
 custom was so admirably suited to my forefathers is 
 of itself a reason why it should not be quite so ad- 
 mirably suited to me, for I am not my forefathers,
 
 264 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 and my circumstances are not theirs. We have as 
 much right to dictate to our ancestors as they to 
 dictate to us. And to do them justice, poor, honest 
 fellows, they don't attempt anything of the sort. It 
 is we, owls that we are, who try to find out what our 
 ancestors did and said, and then dictate that to our- 
 selves. There has arisen a school or perhaps hardly 
 a school, a class, let us say of philosophers (they 
 like to be called philosophers, and we may as well be 
 polite) who are seeking to impose upon us a new tyrant 
 which they call the Future. Possibly a change of 
 masters may come as a sort of relief; but I confess 
 I regard that Future with a distrustful and a sus- 
 picious eye. I like not these abstractions with capital 
 letters. The mind positively reels when it conjures 
 up the picture of tortured mankind being held back 
 on one side by the Past and dragged along on the 
 other by the Future. Ah, if we could only get shut 
 of them both and enjoy ourselves to the length of 
 our tether in the present ; which, you observe, I 
 decline to spell with a capital P. 
 
 But we can't. I realized that with overwhelming 
 force the other day, when one of those moods I spoke 
 of above came over me as I stood under the dome of 
 the reading-room in the British Museum, and looked 
 round at all those books and felt the presence of all 
 the other books, out of sight, but really there, in dark 
 cellars and on dusty shelves ; and then all the manu- 
 scripts and the files of old newspapers and the bound 
 volumes of old, forgotten magazines. I felt it, too, 
 perhaps even more devastatingly, as I cast my eyes, 
 my newly awakened eyes, as it seemed to me, on the 
 men and women bending over the desks in the hot 
 August air, and grubbing, delving, mining into the 
 Past ; trying to rediscover things that had been already 
 discovered and forgotten ten times over in the centuries
 
 CAPRICCIO 265 
 
 of the Past. Then I remembered that I, too, had 
 come there to search for awhile among worm-eaten 
 pages, pages that told of things that never mattered 
 much even in their own day and generation, and that 
 mattered less than nothing now. I was conscious that I, 
 too, was under the thraldom of the Past, and that its 
 cold, dead hand had got me by the throat. I asked 
 myself there and then, " What is the good of it all ? What 
 is it all for ? " and, further, " What is the harm of it ? " 
 And when one asks those questions of any still standing 
 monument of the Past, I care not what it is, strange 
 answers spring to the lips, and queer things happen 
 in the mind. I became, in a flash, a revolutionist 
 of blood-red hue, nay more, an anarchist, a " pet- 
 roleur." Could my will have taken shape in action 
 at that moment, the British Museum, with its books, 
 its manuscripts, its records, and its mummied cats 
 and men, would have been blown into the air with 
 a mighty blast, would have gone up in a cloud of dust 
 and debris, to be rebuilt later on as a great nursery, 
 liberally furnished with toys, for London's toyless 
 children. Aye, and we may see that yet if many men 
 on one fine day were to get such a moment as mine. 
 
 The moment passed, of course, though I didn't 
 wait for the polite official to bring me the volume I 
 had ordered. I couldn't quite stand that, and I 
 hurried out into the sunlit air, in so great haste to 
 escape from the Past that I was nearly run over by 
 a hansom cab of the present. Yes, yes, the moment 
 passed, but the memory of it, the suggestion of it, 
 haunts me still to-day as I sit here in my own study 
 surrounded by my own books. Even now, when I 
 suppose you would say I am restored to sanity and 
 right thinking, I feel not so sure but that if mankind 
 could pull itself together for one tremendous deed of 
 iconoclasm, the like of which the world has never
 
 266 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 seen, and were utterly to destroy and extirpate every 
 written and printed record of the Past, were to an- 
 nihilate the Past so far as annihilation may go, I am 
 not so sure, I say, that mankind would not have done 
 the wisest act of its existence since its first hairy ancestor 
 stood up on his hind legs, gazed around him, and 
 came to the premature conclusion that he was no 
 longer an ape. Just think what it would mean, that 
 getting rid of the Dead Hand once for all, and burying 
 it out of sight for ever with whatever of ceremony 
 seemed most fitting ! Just think what it would mean 
 to stand free of the Past, of the written, the recorded 
 Past, and to have to think and do things on our own, 
 as it were ! There would be some loss, of course 
 there is no change without loss a good many pro- 
 fessors of history would be driven to seek other modes 
 of livelihood, quite a lot of High Court judges would 
 be deprived of a lucrative job ; but how deeply we 
 should all breathe when once the dust had settled 
 down again ! 
 
 There would be no more precedents save only such 
 as existed in the memories of living men, and a man's 
 memory can always be queried, often confounded, 
 whereas a written precedent knocks you down. We 
 should lose history, and after all is not history itself, 
 as the greatest of modern historians himself has said, 
 " little but a record of the crimes and follies of man- 
 kind ? " Just heaven, have we not crimes and follies 
 enough of our own that we should need to mouth and 
 mumble the sins and shortcomings of the men who 
 are dead ? A good deal of literature would perish ! 
 Well, the stronger reason for us to set to and write 
 some more, to be, after its day, let us hope, dealt with 
 by our descendants in like manful fashion. But 
 greatest, and oh ! best of all, we should have to use 
 our own brains upon our own business, to attack every
 
 CAPRICCIO 267 
 
 difficulty as it arose with whatever of living common 
 sense we might have, and without reference to what 
 other men did, under apparently similar but really 
 quite different circumstances. That is where the gain 
 would come ; that living problems would be tackled 
 by living minds ; that in our most hard-set moments 
 there would be no calling upon the Dead Hand to 
 help us as though that had ever done aught but 
 strangle ! And there would really be no anarchy, 
 you know, no disorder ; everything would go on quite 
 comfortably without the records. It is not memory 
 of the yesterdays that causes us to behave ourselves 
 with propriety to-day. It is our sense, our to-day's 
 sense, of what makes for our own convenience. Given 
 a lively appreciation of that, and things will arrange 
 themselves smoothly enough, never fear. We may 
 safely away with all the rest. O, history ! 
 
 1902.
 
 XXIX 
 
 A QUESTION OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 WITH my eyes still dazzled and my brain still bewil- 
 dered by columns of electoral figures in this morning's 
 paper, and with the noise of last night's fireworks 
 celebrant of electoral victories still buzzing in my 
 ears, it is difficult almost to impossibility for me to 
 write of anything to-day but of the all-pervasive and 
 all-pervading topic. 
 
 Nevertheless, I feel that the difficulty must be 
 somehow surmounted, the temptation somehow 
 resisted, for I have a conviction that the readers of 
 the Sunday Chronicle will expect, and be relieved to 
 find, a quiet column of their paper undisturbed by 
 the hurly-burly. For my own part I can only say 
 that I found myself this morning reading with unwonted 
 interest the prices in the Billingsgate Fish Market, a 
 thing I don't remember ever to have done before ; 
 so good it was to get away out of the row for a minute 
 or two. Any port in a storm. 
 
 Political contests come and (happily) go, but the 
 larger and deeper and more difficult problems of 
 life remain, not to be settled by a counting of heads, 
 and it is with such a problem that I desire to deal to-day. 
 Political questions ruffle the surface of life ; questions 
 of conscience stir the gloomy and hidden depths. 
 
 A question of conscience was put to me a day or two 
 ago by a correspondent, who assured me that for 
 268
 
 A QUESTION OF CONSCIENCE 269 
 
 years he had been a constant reader of this journal, 
 and who appeared to think (and rightly) that the 
 fact gave him a certain claim upon my time, my 
 attention, and what brains I have. He is an artist, 
 he tells me, an illustrator in black and white, and 
 he is dependent, entirely, upon the work of his hands 
 and the inspiration of his aesthetic sense, His trouble, 
 put briefly, is this : 
 
 When he accomplishes a piece of work that satisfies 
 his own artistic demands, that he feels can confidently 
 challenge artistic criticism, a piece of work on which 
 he has laboured long and carefully, into which, as 
 he says, he has put the best that is in him, he finds 
 cither that he cannot sell it at all or that he can sell 
 it only for rather less money than he could have 
 earned in the same time by sweeping a crossing or 
 by cleaning boots. The reason editors and publishers 
 of magazines and books give him for rejecting his 
 work altogether, or for paying a starvation price for 
 it, is not that it is not good enough, but that it is 
 too good. 
 
 " Our public doesn't want this sort of thing," 
 they say. " They're not up to it ; it only puzzles 
 them. They don't understand art, and they don't 
 like it. What they want is something catchy, some- 
 thing gripping, or something with a good broad dash 
 of sentimentality in it. Give 'em that and the rest 
 doesn't matter. Of course we, we editors and 
 publishers, know a good thing when we see it. 
 But we must give the public what it wants or go 
 under, and therefore you must give us what we want 
 or . . . ! " 
 
 When, on the other hand, he does what he calls 
 "downright rotten work, work done anyhow, "work 
 that is dashed off when he's half asleep or thinking 
 of something else, it sells like hot cakes and sells 
 at good prices. Then they who sit in the Seats of 
 the Mighty welcome him with " That's the sort of
 
 270 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 thing to sell, Mr. ; let's have more of that and 
 
 as quickly as you can turn it out." 
 
 In fact, it comes to this, he informs me, " If I 
 like to turn out bad stuff by the acre, stuff that I 
 know to be bad, careless in drawing, bungled in 
 composition, vulgar in feeling, sticky in sentiment, 
 stuff that it makes me sick to look at after it is done, 
 I can easily make enough to live in comfort, not to 
 say in luxury, and to run a nice little studio in Chelsea. 
 If I do the sort of work that I know to be good, work 
 that would win the approval of my own artistic 
 conscience and the praise of my brother artists, I 
 can perhaps just manage to drag out a bare existence 
 on bread and onions in a garret." 
 
 " Now, what am I do to ? " he ends by asking, 
 " Sacrifice my conscience to my tummy or my tummy 
 to my conscience ? Tell me, O Sage of the Sunday 
 Chronicle. Tell me, you who claim to be a professor 
 of the fine art of life." 
 
 It is a knotty problem, but let us see if we can't 
 do something partially to unravel it ; to get it quite 
 straightened out is past praying for. 
 
 To begin with, it is obviously not a question which 
 bothers artists alone among the sons and daughters 
 of men. It twitches the soul-strings of men and 
 women in pretty well every department of life. 
 
 Journalists, for instance, when they know that 
 they can write two bad articles in less time and with 
 less trouble than it takes them to write one good 
 one; and when they know further that they will 
 receive twice as much for the two bad as they will 
 for the one good. 
 
 Writers of books, who realize that they can produce 
 six rubbishy novels in one year by babbling into 
 a phonogragh, and thus make an income, whereas 
 by using their brains and a quill pen they can produce 
 one worthy work and fail to meet the milk bill. 
 
 The hard-bitten doctor, who is convinced that the
 
 A QUESTION OF CONSCIENCE 271 
 
 stuff he prescribes will do the patient not an atom 
 of good, but is convinced also that if he doesn't pre- 
 scribe it he will lose the patient and the fee. 
 
 The shopkeeper, who exhibits in his window the 
 cheap and nasty because experience has informed 
 him that the costly and excellent will not " go off." 
 The weekly wage-earner in workshop or factory, 
 who spends his ten hours a day in the furious pro- 
 duction of muck scarce good enough for the dust 
 destroyer. 
 
 Look where you will throughout our whole industrial 
 and social life and you find necessity making the 
 same demand of honour. If you peeped into the 
 statesman's study, I make no doubt, you would 
 there discover the same disturbing predicament. 
 
 Well now, to come straight to the gist of the matter. 
 We do well to realize that we live in a real and not 
 in an ideal world ; a world that was already made 
 for us when we came into it, a world that we have 
 done nothing whatever to make and that we can 
 do precious little to alter. This world, this rummy 
 jumble of a world, we must take more or less for 
 granted. We can leave it, of course, whenever we 
 like, but if we decide to stay in it we must stay in 
 it on its terms and not on ours. It is not, as Mr. 
 H. G. Wells suggests it is, a lump of clay which we 
 can take into our hands, and mould to our pattern. 
 On the contrary, it is we who are the clay, and it is 
 the world who will do most of the moulding. 
 
 The best we can hope for is to get just a little bit 
 of our own way. Life, if it is to be lived at all, must 
 be a continual compromise, a compromise in which 
 there must be ever so much more give than take. 
 
 Those of us who are not of the Blessed, whose 
 incomes, that is, are not derived from gilt-edged 
 securities, can remain in this world only by making 
 for it something that, rightly or wrongly, it wants ; 
 by meeting its needs. Come to think of it dis-
 
 272 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 passionately, there is no reason at all why the world 
 should keep us for doing things it doesn't want done. 
 We all of us act on that principle in our private lives. 
 If I find the housemaid playing the piano never so 
 beautifully when I want my study dusted, there are 
 words between us, words implying a month's notice. 
 She may, in her heart of hearts, feel sure that what 
 I want is beautiful music ; but I in my inmost soul 
 am convinced that what I want is a clean and tidy 
 study. I cannot for the life of me allow that that 
 housemaid would be injuring her conscience or smirch- 
 ing her honour if she forwent her inclination to play 
 Chopin's Nocturnes and devoted herself whole- 
 heartedly to the dustpan and brush. Where her 
 conscience would be injured and her honour smirched 
 would be if she were to do her dusting badly, carelessly, 
 or to leave it undone. 
 
 I recognize, of course, that the analogy is not yet 
 complete. The girl might turn on me and say : 
 " Don't you see, you insensate blockhead, that I 
 am made for better things than dusting ? Is it right 
 that a woman who can play Chopin as I can should 
 waste her time in making a fastidious person like 
 you comfortable ? " 
 
 In that case, the answer comes pat enough. It 
 is : "In heaven's name, then, my dear girl, abandon 
 domestic service for the concert hall." To which 
 she might make the further rejoinder, " Ah, but 
 the public is as dull and deaf as you are. They 
 don't want my music either. I cannot live on 
 music." There follows, naturally, the crushing 
 reply, " Then die on it, or do your dusting like 
 a decent girl." 
 
 Now, it seems to me the analogy is quite complete, 
 and we have got to the very core of the matter. Let 
 my artist correspondent (and he must stand for all 
 sorts and conditions of men in similar perplexity), 
 if he cannot live by the production of good drawings,
 
 A QUESTION OF CONSCIENCE 273 
 
 try how he gets on by sweeping crossings ; but let 
 him sweep them and his own conscience clean. Or 
 by the polishing of boots ; but let him see to it that 
 he leaves those boots and his own honour bright 
 and shining. Then let him retire to his garret, eat 
 his bread and onions with an appetite and look his 
 God in the face. 
 
 That is a hard, rough way of escape from the 
 dilemma ? I know it. There is, fortunately for most 
 of us, a way less hard and less rough. It is true 
 the world may demand things which we, with our 
 superior wisdom and more cultivated taste, may 
 regard as bad things. But at least if the world 
 wants bad things it is not such a fool as to want 
 those bad things badly done. It may, for instance, 
 prefer dance music or even comic songs to classical 
 symphonies. Well, in that case if we want to live 
 comfortably in it we must give it dance music and 
 comic songs, and not persist in thrusting upon it 
 classical symphonies. But if we are honest folk we 
 shall give it good dance music, the best that is in us, 
 and good, that is really comic, songs. In the deep 
 degradation of its literary taste the world may prefer 
 sentimental stories of domestic life or blood-and 
 thunder melodramas to carefully wrought problem 
 novels or plays whose point is characterization. But 
 that is no reason why we should not see to it that 
 our sentiment is genuine sentiment, our domestic 
 sketches true to life ; nor why we should not " jine 
 the flats " of our melodramas. 
 
 In the opinion of the shoemaker buttoned boots 
 may be superior to laced boots. But if the public 
 will have naught to say to buttons the bootmaker 
 must put his preferences in his pocket, and either 
 turn to another trade or make boots that lace. But 
 in common honesty he must so arrange it that his 
 laces shall be good laces and his boots well sewn 
 and of sound leather. Let him do but that and
 
 274 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 although he may not be happy all will be right with 
 his conscience. 
 
 In truth the world is not quite so unkind a place 
 as it sometimes seems to the overwrought imagination 
 or to the sickly conscience. The alternatives it 
 offers to the most of us are seldom Death or Dis- 
 honour. It is only in the melodramas that we come 
 upon so deadly a choice. 
 
 In actual life, in the life of every day, it is rarely 
 that one is called upon to choose between disgrace 
 and a modest living ; a modest living is not in the work- 
 aday world, as a rule, incompatible with common 
 honesty. When the tug-of-war the eternal war 
 between Light and Darkness does come, the question 
 is not one between honesty and a decent livelihood, 
 but between honesty and wealth. There is not much 
 real difficulty in settling that. Let him who then 
 chooses wealth and a dirty conscience choose it and 
 be damned ; probably in this life, certainly, if there 
 be another, in the next. 
 
 It is a personal question after all, the most per- 
 sonal, the most individual of all questions that can 
 for a moment bemuddle a human soul. It is a ques- 
 tion which each must answer for himself and which 
 no prophet, priest, or even journalist can answer 
 for him. In the Court of Conscience there are no 
 whipping-boys, no substitutes purchasable. Every 
 man is his own judge, his own jury, his own execu- 
 tioner, and he must, indeed, be a poor and a pitiful 
 sort of criminal who protests against the verdict 
 that he himself has found, or whines at the punishment 
 that he has inflicted upon himself. 
 
 And yet ... I don't know ... it seems an odd 
 sort of speculation to indulge in just now . . . to-day 
 when all this hubbub is going on outside, when men 
 are hurriedly casting votes into the ballot-boxes, 
 noisily acclaiming triumphs and lugubriously explain- 
 ing away defeats . . . but is there such a thing as
 
 A QUESTION OF CONSCIENCE 275 
 
 ONE-self ? Are there not in each of us two selves ? 
 The little Self and the big Self; the low Self and 
 the high Self; the Self that is always for dabbling 
 in the mud and the Self that aches towards the stars ? 
 All through the ages we have called this other Self 
 by many names ; God, the Ideal, the Higher Nature, 
 the Good, the Beautiful, the True, the Holy Ghost ; 
 and by naming it have we not acknowledged its 
 reality ? It is always with us ; watching our work ; 
 there to applaud the decent, to condemn the dis- 
 gusting. Sometimes the vision of it is clear as noon- 
 day, sometimes obscure as midnight; sometimes 
 altogether lost. And, if it be indeed lost, then is 
 all else lost also. And questions of conscience do not 
 arise any more. For the man is dead . . . and 
 rotten . . . only the machine remains to cumber the 
 ground. 
 
 1906.
 
 XXX 
 
 THE "SOFTNESS" OF THE WORKERS 
 
 A DAY or two ago, when idly glancing through the 
 correspondence columns of a daily contemporary, I 
 came upon a letter which first made me start up in 
 anger, then filled me with a sensation of physical 
 nausea, and finally induced in me a mental state of 
 sheer bewilderment. 
 
 Ever since I read that precious letter I have from 
 time to time caught myself thinking about it and about 
 the moral and intellectual attitude of its writer. I 
 have just read it again, and once more I feel angry, a 
 little sick, and very puzzled. Therefore I must pray 
 you to forgive me if in this article there is rather less 
 of the philosophic tone and temper than is usual, I fain 
 would hope, in the articles I write week by week. 
 
 The letter is written over the signature of Raymond 
 Blathwayt, a name which in some dim way seemed 
 strangely familiar to me, but which, rack my memory 
 as I would and did, I could not for the life of me 
 connect with any distinguished achievement, either 
 literary or other. At last I did seem to recall the 
 name as that of a professional interviewer of titled 
 personages and of other persons more or less promi- 
 nently before the public, whose recorded interviews 
 had always about them a tang of conventionalism 
 which not infrequently came perilously near to 
 snobbism itself. 
 
 276
 
 " SOFTNESS " OF WORKERS 277 
 
 In this, however, my memory may be at fault, and 
 if it be I apologize to Mr. Raymond Blathwayt for its 
 defect. 
 
 What I will not apologize for is what I am going to 
 say now : that never in my life have I found so much 
 evidence of so much ignorance and prejudice (which, 
 combined, make up stupidity) existing in any human 
 mind as is discovered in that short letter of less than 
 three hundred words ! The letter begins thus : " May 
 I not suggest that the present morbid, vulgar, senti- 
 mentality of the English populace is due to the 
 insurgence of the Board School element during the last 
 forty-five years ? " 
 
 Observe, I beg you, how the writer, with calm 
 insolence, takes for granted the point, the fact in 
 dispute, which, if he has the brains of a hen, he must 
 know to be the point, the fact, in dispute or at least 
 highly disputable. It is a stale trick of the contro- 
 versial charlatan, the employment of a well-known 
 fallacy, against which all writers on Logic, from 
 Aristotle to our time, have carefully warned us. 
 
 Mr. Blathwayt assumes, as though it were universally 
 admitted, that the English populace by which phrase 
 he must mean the English working-classes, for other- 
 wise the phrase were meaningless are morbidly senti- 
 mental. In support of his assumption he adduces no 
 shred of evidence, he calls not one witness. May we 
 not on our side assume that he does not because he 
 cannot ? Let us therefore see if we can find what 
 truth there is in his accusation, against the English 
 working-classes, of morbid sentimentality. 
 
 To be morbid is to be diseased. Sentimentality, the 
 dictionaries tell us, is the indulgence of sentiments for 
 their own sake, artificial or affected tenderness. Does 
 one find either of these phenomena among the miners, 
 for example, or among the textile w r orkers, or among 
 the boilermakers or the agricultural labourers, or on the 
 railways, or in the army, the navy, the police force ?
 
 278 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 And if any of these classes affect a tenderness they 
 do not feel, will Mr. Blathwayt tell us towards whom 
 or towards what they affect it ? They are, it is true, 
 both more and less tender than they were. They are 
 more tender to one another, more compunctious of one 
 another's sufferings and deprivations, more resentful 
 of one another's wrongs ; and, at the same time, less 
 tender towards the classes whom they justly or un- 
 justly are coming to believe are largely responsible for, 
 and heedless of, those wrongs, deprivations and suffer- 
 ings. 
 
 In other words, these masses of men are becoming 
 more to use a phrase dear to the early Socialists 
 " class-conscious " than they were. But is this growth 
 of class sentiment slow enough as it is, God wot ! 
 affected, artificial, or is it, on the other hand, one of 
 the most portentous of social realities ? If it be real, 
 then, whether it be for good or evil, it is not senti- 
 mental. 
 
 The only sentiment expressed either in words or in 
 deeds by the English working-classes during the last 
 decade or so, has been one of deep and continuous 
 discontent with their wages and with the conditions in 
 which they labour and live. In point of fact, on all 
 other matters they manifest considerably less feeling 
 than it was aforetime their wont to display. The 
 sentiment of discontent would seem to have swamped 
 and to have stifled all other sentiments. 
 
 But does Mr. Blathwayt hold that the discontent of 
 an agricultural labourer with the pittance he earns or 
 with the hovel in which he and his family are forced to 
 dwell is an " affected " discontent, that it is " put on " 
 as it were, that the man does not really feel it ? If 
 he do not hold this, then is he grossly misusing the 
 language no doubt ignorantly when he accuses the 
 labourer of morbidity and sentimentality. 
 
 When the English trade unionists put their hands 
 into their none-too-well-lined pockets and drew there-
 
 "SOFTNESS" OF WORKERS 279 
 
 from sixpences and shillings for the relief of the families 
 of their fellows locked out in Dublin, were they merely 
 " showing off," does Mr. Blathwayt think ? Is it 
 morbid, symptomatic of disease that is, to be moved 
 at the sight of, or even at the thought of, a starving 
 child ? 
 
 When men down tools and at the same time down 
 incomes in protest against some act of petty tyranny, 
 either real or imagined, practised upon one of their 
 mates, they are motived by sentiment, no doubt, the 
 sentiment of justice. But sentimentality ? No ! 
 
 And here I pause for a breathing-space to wonder 
 what would be Mr. Blathwayt's feelings if, in payment 
 of one of his interviews with distinguished personages, 
 his Editor were to forward him a postal order and 
 stamps for five-and-threepence ! Would his amaze- 
 ment and indignation be morbidly, vulgarly senti- 
 mental ? 
 
 The next sentence of the letter runs : 
 
 " The other part of the populace has been educated 
 or, rather, dragged up in the unspeakably horrible 
 atmosphere of the Board and County Council schools, 
 with the inevitable result that they view life from an 
 angle of vision which takes no cognisance of discipline, 
 reverence, self-knowledge, reticence, or self-control." 
 
 Has the writer of that stupendous and libellous 
 nonsense ever been inside a County Council school, I 
 wonder, inside even the worst-equipped school of the 
 most parsimonious of County Councils ? Or did he 
 write that sentence at the dictation of a morbid 
 imagination ? I sincerely hope that the latter is the 
 correct alternative, because if it is only that his 
 imagination has become diseased it may be cured by a 
 course of physical exercise, moral sanitation, and a 
 change of air. But if he has been inside a County 
 Council school and can write such flapdoodle, then is 
 he incurable and past all praying for.
 
 280 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 When he speaks of the " unspeakably horrible 
 atmosphere " of the schools, does he mean the physical 
 atmosphere ? I should like to think he does, for here 
 is indeed room for improvement. There are still 
 schools shame be to us ! in which the children are 
 too many and the cubic feet of space too few. But 
 Mr. Blathwayt will not permit me to think that ; his 
 context makes it plain that what he stigmatizes as 
 " unspeakably horrible " is the moral, the spiritual 
 atmosphere of the schools. 
 
 I have called his statement libellous. I wrote down 
 that word with deliberation, for it is no other than a 
 grotesque and malignant libel to assert of thousands 
 of men and women who, underpaid and under- valued, 
 in the face of extreme difficulty and often of wilful 
 discouragement, are conscientiously endeavouring to 
 make the very best that may be made of the young 
 human material that is committed to their hands, that 
 they are turning it out with " no cognisance of discip- 
 line, reverence, self-knowledge, reticence, or self- 
 control." 
 
 To attempt to argue or to remonstrate with a 
 writer who, even in the fever throes of a morbid 
 imagination, could be guilty of such a libel as that 
 were to waste words. The best indeed, the only 
 rational way in which to deal with false assertion, 
 unsupported by evidence and based, if based at all, on 
 prejudice and ignorance, is to meet it with true counter- 
 assertion verifiable by whomsoever cares to verify it, 
 and supported by common experience. 
 
 I meet Mr. Blathwayt's false assertion, then, with a 
 true one that never in our country's history have so 
 many of her children been so well taught, in all the 
 subjects that are teachable in the wretchedly exiguous 
 time given to teaching, or so well trained in habits of 
 discipline, reverence, self-knowledge, reticence, self- 
 control, personal cleanliness, and courtesy, as there are 
 to-day.
 
 "SOFTNESS " OF WORKERS 281 
 
 To say that much is, of course, to say little, deplorably 
 little. From the bottom of one's heart and from the 
 centre of one's brain one wishes that one could say 
 more, but to say less than that were to be guilty of 
 flat falsehood. Discipline and self-control if you are 
 inclined to doubt the inculcation of these take the 
 trouble to be present in the school nearest your own 
 home when what I think is called fire drill is toward. 
 Then at the sound of a bell no youngster in the school 
 knowing whether the sound portend peril real or 
 imaginary you will see the children, from the biggest 
 to the smallest, put down their work, rise in their 
 places, fall into ranks, and without haste or flurry 
 march out of the building with the steadiness and 
 precision of a battalion of his Majesty's Guards. 
 
 It is only fair to Mr. Blathwayt to say that he has a 
 remedy to propose. The instrument with which he 
 would cleanse and clarify " the unspeakably horrible 
 atmosphere " of our schools and ironize the soft hearts 
 and soft heads of the next generation is not of his own 
 invention. It is as old as the bestial instinct it 
 symbolizes. It is the Rod the Rod in all its varieties 
 the cane, the birch, the ash- stick, the ebony ruler, 
 the whip, and, we may not doubt, the cat-o'-nine-tails. 
 Here is the passage in which he makes his suggestion 
 unmistakable : 
 
 " Is there a County Council schoolboy to-day who 
 could stand a good Winchester ' tunding,' or any one 
 of them who could contemplate with equanimity the 
 prospect of being ' horsed,' as we were in the old days, 
 and as boys are even now in any public school worth 
 the name ? Could anything be more hopelessly 
 opposed to the idea of all discipline than the method 
 by which a Board School boy who has received a well- 
 merited caning from his master can turn round and 
 summon that master before the magistrates as they 
 do to-day ? Can any master carry out his duty to
 
 282 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 his boys, his school, or his country who is so ridi- 
 culously handicapped as are the Board School masters 
 of to-day ? " 
 
 Oh, the stale old stuff, the thin- worn shoddy ! 
 Does Mr. Blathwayt really think we have forgotten 
 the senile babblement of the retired and ridiculous 
 colonels and the superannuated and silly admirals at 
 the time when the nation was making up its mind to 
 abolish flogging in the army and navy ? " Without 
 the triangle and the cat the Services will go to the 
 dogs, sir," they muttered and mumbled in the House 
 and in the clubs. The triangle and the cat have gone 
 the way of the rack and the thumb-screw, and the 
 discipline in the barrack-yard and the fo'c'sle was 
 never so perfect, the conduct of our seamen and 
 soldiers was never so admirable as they are to-day. 
 
 Which, you know, was exactly what was to have 
 been expected expected, that is, by every one with 
 intelligence above that of a Hottentot. " Any fool," 
 said Cavour, " can govern in a state of siege." But, 
 then, Cavour was a statesman, not a well, not Mr. 
 Blathwayt. The enforcement of discipline without 
 corporal punishment calls for a fine character and a 
 strong will ; to enforce discipline with corporal 
 punishment needs only a muscular arm and a brutal 
 nature. 
 
 Where was it engendered, and how has it been kept 
 alive, this antic notion that there is something manly, 
 something almost noble, in lying acquiescent while 
 somebody else stronger than yourself beats you with 
 a stick ? Such submission one would have thought 
 to be more characteristic of the ass than of the man. 
 It is, indeed, proverbially characteristic of the ass. 
 
 It bores me, until my limbs and my brain stiffen, 
 this fatuous middle-class chatter about the " softness " 
 of the working-classes. Softness, save the mark! 
 Soft, are they ? the men who plough the fields, who
 
 "SOFTNESS " OF WORKERS 283 
 
 hew the coal, who quarry the rock, who smelt the ore, 
 who drive the express engine through the fog, who sail 
 the wind-jammer round The Horn, and who, in the 
 hour of our need, shed their blood for us on land and 
 sea. Pah ! the rubbish stinks ! 
 
 1914. 
 
 THE END 
 
 TO THE READER 
 
 WHEN Hubert was dead, many who had been used to 
 read what he wrote, week by week, sent letters to me asking 
 tfiat some of wliat he had written should be put together 
 in a book ; some asked especially to have in the book this 
 or tJiat piece of his mind which they Jwd admired when 
 they first read it. I have made here such a book. But 
 if I liad included in it all the pieces which I was prayed 
 to include, it would have been a book of many volumes. 
 Therefore, I ask those who do not find here exactly tfiat 
 which they wished to see reprinted not to think me careless 
 or unmindful of their wishes, but to understand that I
 
 284 ESSAYS BY HUBERT 
 
 have done what I could. It may be that later I shall 
 be able to bring together another book of the same naiure 
 as this. I have not altered anything here. Hubert wrote 
 as he spoke and he spoke as he thought. He never did 
 for money or for fame sell himself. He had, in the 
 highest degree, the quality of intellectual honesty. He 
 would not deceive himself, nor would he suffer others to 
 be deceived. His was the large tolerance of one who 
 understands the weakness and the strength of the soul of 
 man. He hated the Pharisees, tlie Prigs, the Puritans, 
 and those who grind the faces of the poor. All men else 
 he loved. 
 
 Two years before his death, blindness came upon 
 him, blindness for which there was no hope of cure, 
 blindness darkening the world daily more and more. 
 Hubert met it like a man. 
 
 On November 1906, while still he was well and strong, 
 he wrote : "A man who is smitten by an incurable 
 disease, a disease for which science has so far discovered 
 no remedy or even alleviation, and who doesn't whimper 
 or whine about it, or make himself a nuisance to his 
 family and friends, who bears it ' like a man ' as we say, 
 who keeps a cheerful countenance and continues to do 
 what little work his affliction permits him to perform, is a 
 fine and a wise fellow, and, in his way, a hero." 
 
 Hubert worked to the last, he died working, and his 
 last words when he felt the hand of death upon him were, 
 " / am not hurt." 
 
 E. NESBIT BLAND 
 
 West Hall, Kent, 
 
 June 1914 
 
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