G,W,
 
 
 C LIBRARY I 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 CALIFORNIA I 
 
 SAN DIEGO j
 
 THINGS SEEN 
 
 BS 
 
 G. W. STEEVENS 
 
 SELECTED AND EDITED BY 
 
 G. S. STREET 
 WITH A MEMOIR BY 
 
 W. E. HENLEY 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 
 MDCCCC 
 
 All Rights reserved
 
 This Edition of his Works, the Wife 
 who knew his innermost thoughts 
 and wishes, dedicates to 
 
 W. E. HENLEY. 
 
 MERTON, June 1900.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 MEMOIR 
 
 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM . . . . . 1 
 
 FROM THE NEW GIBBON ..... 21 
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY . . .37 
 
 THE MONOTYPE ....... 69 
 
 MR BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY ..... 80 
 
 "LITTLE EYOLF" . . . . . .99 
 
 ZOLA ......... in 
 
 THE NEW TENNYSON ...... 120 
 
 WORDS FOR MUSIC . . . . . .126 
 
 THE FUTILE DON ..... . 132 
 
 AT TWENTY-FOUR ....... 137 
 
 A FABLE OF JOURNALISTS ..... 141 
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE 
 
 I. SCENES AND ACTORS IN THE TRIAL . . 147 
 
 II. THE EFFECT ON FRANCE . . 168
 
 VTL1 CONTENTS. 
 
 THE JUBILEE 
 
 i. LONDON'S NEW GAME .... 
 
 II. QUEEN AND EMPIRE .... 
 
 III. " TO VIEW THE ILLUMINATIONS " 
 
 IV. THE GREAT REVIEW .... 
 
 v. THE GREAT REVIEW continued 
 
 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER 1., II., III. . 
 
 IN SEARCH OP A FAMINE I., II., III., IV. 
 
 " DURING HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE " 1., II. . 
 
 IN THE COUNTRY OF THE STORM .... 
 
 THE DERBY 1., II. ...... 
 
 THE CESAREWITCH 
 TWO HOSPITALS 
 
 i. OUT-PATIENTS' DAY . _ . . 298 
 
 II. IN THE THEATRE ..... 303 
 APPENDIX 311
 
 M E M I E, 
 
 Through war and pestilence, red siege and fire, 
 Silent and self-contained he drew his breath ; 
 
 Brave, not for show of courage his desire 
 Truth, as he saw it, even to the death. 
 
 RUDTARD KlPLINO. 
 
 THE great necessity imposed upon our England by 
 the policy of the Afrikanders inside and out of Cape 
 Colony has cost us many precious lives. I speak for 
 my own set, and with no better outlook than the rest 
 over the many hundreds of brave and brilliant and 
 beautiful creatures who, at the especial instance of 
 the mad and criminal old man at Pretoria, have 
 chosen rather to surrender this good earth, and all 
 that she gifts her children withal, than to suffer that 
 an insolent and monstrous wrong were done upon 
 that piece of her to whose inheritance, in all its 
 felicity of pride and freedom, they were born. But 
 I do not think that I speak excessively when I say 
 that, when George Steevens died at Ladysmith, of 
 enteric fever (which is, being translated, filth and 
 low living), there was lost in him as fine a spirit, 
 as rare and as completely trained a brain, and as 
 brave a heart, as we had to show. I write after
 
 X MEMOIR. 
 
 Kimberley, Paardeberg, Pieter's Hill, Bloemfontein, 
 Kroonstadt, with Maf eking rewarded for her bril- 
 liant and heroic feat of arms, with what was the 
 Orange Free State British territory, and with Lord 
 Eoberts knocking dreadfully at the heart of the 
 Transvaal Republic ; and I cannot choose but reflect 
 upon the fact that these victorious feats all come to 
 me the less triumphingly for that his part in them 
 is not. He had many friends, so that in this I am 
 by no means singular; and our consolation is that 
 he was so good an Englishman that, were it now 
 possible, he would be the first to rebuke us for our 
 cowardice. 
 
 I. 
 
 I have called this note a " Memoir " ; but, in plain 
 English, no memoir of him is possible. The story of 
 his life consists in his school successes and in his 
 books ; and, apart from these, there is little or noth- 
 ing to record. Does it, for instance, advance our know- 
 ledge of him so very much to record that he came of 
 good, sound, middle-class stock, was born in a London 
 suburb, 1 and could read, with a good appreciation of 
 facts, at three to four years old ? It has all to be 
 said, I suppose ; yet it isn't very interesting surely ? 
 I gather, however, that, for all his precocity, he was 
 that best of good things a true child : which is as 
 much as to say that he ended as he began, with " that 
 child's heart within the man's " an unending refresh- 
 
 1 His speech bewrayed him till the end. It may be that " II n'est 
 bon bee que de Paris " is true of Chaucer's town as it was of Villon's. 
 If it be, then George Steevens's accent was the best in England.
 
 MEMOIE. Xi 
 
 ment to him, and an unfailing joy to all the rightly 
 constituted children whom he met. 1 In the begin- 
 ning he ruled the roast ; for one of his joys was an 
 atlas, and when anybody got to anywhere in the illus- 
 trated papers, then he and his brothers and sisters also 
 had to get there in a packing-case for a ship, and 
 with lots of information from the skipper as to the 
 habits and customs of the natives, the longitude and 
 latitude of the port of destination, the mineral, vege- 
 table, and zoological features of the region, and all 
 the rest of it. Presently he went to school, and in 
 no great while be developed into a prize boy, and so 
 into a prize student an exhibitioner a prodigy 
 (even) a don of as few years as a don may have 
 and be real. 
 
 But he never lost (so I am told) his interest in 
 " larks," whether informative or not. And his sim- 
 plicity, his soundness of heart, his integrity of mind 
 remained until the end of things unaltered and un- 
 alterable. So they tell me who knew him best in the 
 early days. So they tell me who knew hint after- 
 wards, when he was no longer a kind of champion pot- 
 hunter, but a man cut loose from his moorings and 
 sent adrift on the sea of life and time and experience, 
 there to play his game and approve himself. So I 
 found him, and, as I have said, so he was found by 
 a better an infinitely better judge than I. The 
 
 1 In the early days of our acquaintance he came to lunch with us. 
 He was silent and shy, but he could not escape the eye of the 
 serenest and sincerest thing that ever lived ; and in the course of the 
 afternoon she proposed to him, and he was finally taken into her ex- 
 quisite and beautiful little life.
 
 xii MEMOIR. 
 
 truth is, I take it, that in George Steevens the char- 
 acter was even greater than the intelligence. He 
 might have heen the most brilh'ant and the most 
 wonderful portent ever turned out of the Academies, 
 and yet have been a " bounder " (there is no other 
 word, so I must use the only word there is), or a 
 pedant, or a pedant and a " bounder " both. But 
 honesty, a radiant sincerity, straightness of mind and 
 temper and tongue these were George Steevens. 
 That he had brains and accomplishment is not much 
 to the point. The point is that he had character : 
 a nature sweet yet strong, the finer instincts finely 
 touched, so that he was beloved of children in his 
 life, and in his death may neither be forgotten nor 
 replaced among his friends. 
 
 IL 
 
 In the beginning he went to a private teacher's, 
 but at thirteen (1882) he won his way into the City 
 of London School, and there he proceeded to dis- 
 tinguish himself as none had done before him. Prize 
 after prize he took, medal after medal, 1 till in 1887, 
 
 1 Four silver medals, and a (special) gold one. Here, from the 
 School Magazine, is a list of his honours : " Leaving out of account 
 numerous prizes and medals, his school and academic distinctions 
 were as 'follows : Sassoon Entrance Scholarship, 1882 ; Carpenter 
 Scholarship, 1885 ; Captain of the School, 1887 ; Classical Scholar- 
 ship at Balliol College, Oxford, 1887 ; Sassoon Sanskrit Exhibition, 
 City of London School, 1888 ; Abbott Scholarship, City of London 
 School, 1888 ; Proxime accessit for Hertford University Scholarship 
 (Oxford), 1888 ; Honourably mentioned for Ireland Scholarship 
 (Oxford), 1888 ; First in honours at Matriculation Examination 
 (London University), 1889 ; First Class in Classical Moderations
 
 MEMOIR. Xlll 
 
 being captain of the school, he took the Classical 
 Scholarship at Balliol, and, having done so, proceeded 
 to distinguish himself yet more, till he came to be 
 known as " the Balliol prodigy." Not being a 
 'Varsity man (as they say), I cannot appreciate his 
 triumphs as, being the writer of this Memoir, I ought, 
 no doubt, to do. But the list of them is striking; 
 and I have marvelled more than once, and been not 
 alone in my marvelling, over the quality of his in- 
 telligence, which survived them all, and, more than 
 that, came to the world's work perfectly accomplished, 
 yet vigorous, apprehensive, athletic even, as could be. 1 
 He might, I always felt, have won his way from pot 
 to pot, from prize to prize, and then, his mind 
 exhausted with the work of assimilation, have quietly 
 declined upon a curacy, or a grammar-school master- 
 ship, or a tutor's place in his college : capable of 
 living interest in nothing excepting drinks and the 
 minor niceties, the riddles and cruces, of classical 
 scholarship. But he did nothing of the kind. On 
 the contrary, he came out into the world, and, for 
 aught one knew, he was not lettered at all, but 
 
 (Oxford), 1890 ; Exhibition in Classics in Intermediate Examination 
 (London University), 1889 ; Scholarship in Classics at B.A, Examina- 
 tion (London University), 1890 ; First Class in Final Classical School 
 (Oxford), 1892; Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, 1893." 
 
 1 " The mere quantity of his knowledge was astonishing ; his com- 
 mand over it was still more so. He had a Napoleonic faculty for 
 instantaneous and complete concentration of his intellectual forces." 
 B. A. ABRAHAMS, in the ' City of London School Magazine,' March 
 1900. That is most true. He was so complete master of his equip- 
 ment and his means alike, that, as another school friend has recorded, 
 he wrote his ' Monologues ' with a running pen, and scarce ever a 
 reference to the authorities shelved at his back.
 
 XIV MEMOIR. 
 
 only a type of Young Oxford : a youth with a 
 pince-nez and a soft hat and a turn for Ibsen and 
 Zola and all manner of extremes. I read of him 
 that he was a capital speaker, with a vein of paradox 
 and a bottoming of humour which kept him ever 
 within the pale of reasonable unreasonableness ; and 
 I can very well believe it. Humour he had, and 
 wit, and that excellently trained intelligence of his 
 was excellently active and sane : only, being above 
 all things wise, he did not, young as he was, essen- 
 tially and despite his tremendous tutoring he did 
 not choose to begin his real life in too flagrant a 
 humour of offence. I think he must needs have 
 been a little tired, and, indefatigable athlete as he'd 
 shown himself, was glad of a rest, and content to 
 lie by and take stock of things. Be this as it may, 
 he left Oxford for Cambridge, and at Cambridge 
 he wrote and edited the ' Cambridge Observer ' : a 
 journal very plainly modelled (but with improve- 
 ments ! ) on an older ' Observer,' in which latter he 
 was afterwards to print his one serious contribution 
 to English letters. I have read his ' Cambridge 
 Observer' work, and it is enough that none of it 
 has seemed worth reprinting in this volume either 
 to my colleague, Mr Street, or to myself. It showed, 
 however, that here was somebody with a pen; and 
 a result of it was that, Mr Oscar Browning aiding, 
 George Steevens joined the staff of the ' Pall Mall 
 Gazette,' and now came out into the world indeed.
 
 MEMOIR. XV 
 
 III. 
 
 lie did so in a happy time. He was well and 
 thrice well grounded in books ; as ever, the golden 
 chance was his, and he was to be well and thrice 
 well grounded in affairs and men. A little before, 
 there was nothing to be said about the ' Pall Mall 
 Gazette' except that it had seen better days. A 
 good thing in the beginning, it had gone on to be 
 the most notorious journal in the world, and then, 
 lighting upon evil and sober days, had fallen as 
 low as a journal can, and live. Then, by a stroke of 
 fortune as sudden and as dramatic, I think, as any- 
 thing in the history of journalism, its estate was 
 changed. It became the property of an American 
 gentleman, Mr William Waldorf Astor, who showed 
 at once that he had wit and enterprise and savoir- 
 faire, as well as money, by placing its control in 
 the hands of a man who knew nothing whatever 
 of journalism, but was, as was abundantly shown 
 in the sequel, the most brilliant and daring Editor 
 of his time. He was young, had read hard, had 
 travelled far ; knew all sorts and conditions of men ; 
 was versed in all sorts and conditions of things ; had 
 a great sense of politics : with prestance, gaiety, 
 position, a beautiful temperament. With never a 
 touch of Fleet Street in his make, he was better 
 than all Fleet Street put together at Fleet Street's 
 own particular game ; and to him, as to David in 
 the Cave of Adullam, there flocked the younger and 
 more daring spirits of whose aid he stood in need.
 
 XVI MEMOIR. 
 
 One was George Warrington Steevens, and he came 
 out of the experience a made man. They were all 
 young men in the office of the ' Pall Mall Gazette.' 
 Even the Assistant Editor, albeit the oldest in 
 years, had in him the stuff of unending youth, and 
 despite his great range of knowledge, his fine sense 
 of political conduct, his serene, immitigable Toryism, 
 had gaiety of heart enough, and wit and talk, and 
 experience of the comedy of life and time and 
 affairs enough, to be not much the elder of the 
 youngest. Then the ' National Observer,' a journal 
 which, as I've said elsewhere, is still remembered 
 with affection and regret " by the chosen few who 
 wrote for it and the chosen fewer who read it"- 
 the ' National Observer,' I say, was still afoot, and 
 though conscious of its moribundity of the fact 
 that in the midst of life we are in death was 
 keeping the bravest of fronts; and its young men 
 were burning for new worlds to conquer. These new 
 worlds, or an approach to them, they found in the 
 ' Pall Mall Gazette,' as that ancient and battered 
 print was refashioned and refitted, te Teucro duce : 
 with Mr Gust at the helm, and Mr W. W. Astor, 
 in the guise of a favouring gale, at the prow. 
 George Steevens came in with the rest. He was 
 in the soft -hat -and -scarlet -tie stage of youthful 
 manhood: a rather shy, a rather sulky, or (so it 
 seemed) a rather gloomy and socialistic junior don. 
 So he appeared to me when at last I was privileged 
 to make his acquaintance ; so, I believe, he appeared 
 to all the mariners in the new ship. But appear- 
 ances were not long against him. I think he in-
 
 MEMOIR. XV11 
 
 terested everybody from the first, and when he did 
 so much as that, the sequel was inevitable. You 
 started with a kindness for him, and you liked him, 
 as you went on knowing him, better and better, more 
 and more. And, believe me, it was a change and a 
 chance for him. Hitherto he had been primus 
 inter pares a leader among boys. In the office of 
 the ' Pall Mall Gazette ' everybody, as I've said, 
 was young; but he was the youngest of all, even 
 as he was the only one who had not some salt of 
 active life. Out of a past of books and prizes and 
 debating societies and sentimental socialism, he came 
 into an atmosphere of wit, and scholarship, and 
 laughter, and sound Toryism, and the practice 
 the right practice of affairs. 1 As I said, he was 
 sulky and shy or rather he was shy to the point of 
 seeming sulky. But he soon endeared himself to 
 every man in the place ; at last his gift of humour 
 got an irritant and an outlet both ; at last his pre- 
 tensions to ascendancy, superiority, impeccability 
 were subjected to a common and continuous test, 
 and he was howled at if he did ill, as he was 
 
 1 If he came to his work a philosophical Radical (whatever that 
 may mean), he was very soon as good an Englishman as the best of 
 his new-found yet unalterable friends. I have read somewhere that, 
 in after years, he did but pretend to approve the reconquest of the 
 Sudan, the reply to Mr Kruger's declaration of war : that what he 
 wrote about these matters was written to please the public, and in no 
 sort represented his own convictions. As one who knew him very 
 intimately, I can but say that I'll not believe it. He was too good 
 an Englishman and too poor a hypocrite. That, despite his Toryism, 
 he remained a philosophical Radical is like enough. I have yet to 
 learn, in fact, that there is any very considerable difference between 
 the several points of view.
 
 XV111 MEMOIR. 
 
 applauded if he did well. As his Editor, who loved 
 and understood him, gave him all manner of oppor- 
 tunities, and turned him, all in the day's work, now 
 on to the writing of flippant paragraphs, now on to 
 the conduct of a matter in dispute which might have 
 embroiled two kingdoms, but in which his sound yet 
 brilliant handling of maps and texts and facts was 
 sure to keep the journal " right side up," and " with 
 a lot to spare," 1 he came in for a great deal of both 
 execration and applause. It was, as I believe, the 
 making of him it and, as I believe, the ' National 
 Observer,' to which at this time he sent, from week 
 to week, reviews which are models of their kind: 
 reviews or scholarly or savage or merely blighting ; 
 and with these, and certain leaders and " middles " 
 on matters of the moment, or on things in general, 
 the several numbers of what must in the end be 
 recognised as his sole achievement in pure literature. 
 I mean, of course, those wonderful ' Monologues,' 2 in 
 which, applying his reading and intelligence and 
 humanity to the work of picturing and expressing 
 the historical men and women of a bygone time, he 
 recreated and renewed for us brought as it were to 
 
 1 In those days the ' Pall Mall Gazette ' was easily, not to say 
 loosely, written. I find that I have relapsed upon the manner of 
 it. So I keep the slang. 
 
 2 Monologues of the Dead. London: Methuen. 1895. Note that 
 the method is, so far as it goes, on all-fours with Shakespeare's. 
 Steevens translates, or transliterates, his Greeks and Romans into 
 the terms of the life he knew, and takes his lingo from the ' Sporting 
 Times' if need be. What else does Shakespeare do in "Troilus," in 
 "Antony," in " Coriolanus " ? His Thersites alone suffices to show 
 how very well his pupil had learned his lesson, and how brilliantly he 
 put his learning out to use.
 
 MEMOIE. XIX 
 
 our very doorsteps figures and characters so diverse 
 and remote as Troilus and Xantippe, Brutus the 
 pedant and Commodus the madman, Vespasian, with 
 his work-a-day views of empire, and Nero, Cicero, 
 Alcibiades : the wonderful ' Augustus,' with its lumin- 
 ous and easy mastery of Koman politics at a time 
 when Eoman politics were at their cloudiest; and 
 greatly daring, succeeded in suggesting even the 
 mighty Caius Julius. It is when you come to think 
 that these re-creations, these interpretings, these 
 admirable and daring transfigurations (so to speak) 
 of living Greece and Eome were done at four- or 
 five-and-twenty, between spells of journalism, that 
 you realise the great capacity George Steevens had, 
 and the sort of man of letters he might and should 
 have been. It seemed other to the Gods. But 
 knowing not their minds, men may lament, as I 
 do, that they who gave us thus much refused us 
 more. 
 
 IV. 
 
 " But Scripture saith, An ending ! This peculiar 
 set of circumstances was too good to last. Of the 
 'National Observer' there was presently left (1894) 
 not much else than the aspect and the name, and not 
 long afterwards not even these; and in the sequel 
 (1895) the ' Pall Mall Gazette,' by the operation of a 
 change as dramatic and as sudden as that which had 
 resulted in its renascence, changed Editors and staffs 
 once more, and, from being a power in the land, be- 
 came once more an everyday evening journal. That 
 Steevens did not instantly follow his friends into the
 
 XX MEMOIR. 
 
 vacancy of an enforced leisure was merely due, I be- 
 lieve, to the fact that he was working to the terms of 
 an engagement. These fulfilled, he also went into 
 retirement for a while ; and, having married at the 
 end of 1894, was content to lie low and be happy. 
 At the same time, by way of keeping himself in 
 touch with affairs, he proceeded to master and to say 
 his say upon the question of the British Navy, 1 and 
 to make himself welcome, as a man qualified to speak 
 with prestance and authority on many things, to 
 'Black wood.' Then (1896) came the second chance 
 of his life (I except his marriage, which was a thing 
 apart from the ordinary courses of human life, and 
 was in the event as fortunate as in the beginning it 
 had seemed bewildering), and on the invitation of 
 Mr Alfred Harmsworth, a man of large and splendid 
 inventions, he joined the staff of the ' Daily Mail ' : a 
 journal in whose service he was to develop a talent 
 of a strange and taking brilliancy (its existence none 
 had suspected in him), which was to give its chief, 
 if not its sole, literary interest to the work he re- 
 joiced to do for it. He had shown, not once but 
 many times, that he could understand. He was now 
 to prove to admiration that he could both under- 
 stand and see : that, given a figure, an aspect, an 
 incident, even a great and notable passage in affairs, 
 he could apply that admirable brain of his to the 
 task of observing and realising what he saw, on lines 
 so essential and so clean that, his faculty of speech 
 thrown in, 'twas easy for him almost too easy to 
 pass on the final effect of his vision. This is putting 
 1 Naval Policy. By G. W. Steevens. London : Methuen. 1896.
 
 MEMOIK. XXI 
 
 it baldly enough, no doubt; and I do not know that 
 it will make matters very much better to note that, at 
 the time of his recording his impressions in the terms 
 which made his fame, he stood alone among English 
 journalists. To be sure, the capacity he showed was 
 not now for the first time shown in English journalism. 
 Dickens had exampled it, and that with " an im- 
 mense and far-reaching instinct of the Picturesque" 
 (I quote from memory, from Mr Henry James); so 
 had Ruskin ; so had Meredith and R. L. Stevenson ; so 
 had Rudyard Kipling. I do not think that Steevens 
 was deeply read in any of these writers ; 1 and that I 
 do not think so is enough to show that I hold him 
 better versed in Greek and Latin than he was in 
 English. All the same, he was cut out of the same 
 stuff with them : the peculiar capacity for vision and 
 realisation, which was theirs, was his also; so that 
 his ' Omdurman,' done amid the stinks and horrors of 
 the field, is like to remain a classic and a classic un- 
 surpassed for many years to come. He had a sort 
 of visual grip of things : not reckless, nor haphazard, 
 nor touched with sentiment ; but alert, athletic, of an 
 absolute and unalterable serenity. I am told (and I 
 can very well believe) that a certain commander-in- 
 
 1 He can scarce have seen Mr Kipling's journalistic achievement ; 
 for this was made accessible only (1899) when he (Steevens) was 
 shut up in Ladysmith. Mr Kipling, too, is only one of several ; for 
 Dickens was, at the writing of his 'Uncommercial Traveller,' the 
 most brilliant and commanding literary figure of his time ; so that 
 his ' Uncommercials,' though they were done for a weekly print (his 
 own), were hardly journalism. A nearer parallel is Ruskin, whose 
 ' Modern Painters ' (to name no more of his works), though it hath 
 ever existed as a book, is obviously mere journalism : stuff done 
 to-day and forgot (of the writer) to-morrow.
 
 XX11 MEMOIR. 
 
 chief, himself the hardest and sternest of communi- 
 cants, has, on his own confession, been more than 
 once indebted to George's despatches for essentials in 
 his own. And I believe that rny friend would never 
 have lost this " visual grip," but would have gone 
 on putting it to what purpose he chose in. very 
 different work : work other in scope, in practice, 
 in design and in effect, than that which he did for 
 the ' Daily Mail.' On that journal he had four 
 years of active literary life. He began with New 
 York and These States in general ; he went on 
 to tell how the Turk made hay of the Greek ; he 
 went to Egypt, and saw Sir Herbert triumph at the 
 Atbara ; he went to Egypt again, and, after Omdur- 
 man, passed to Khartum ; he steamed East with Lord 
 Curzon, and spread his big intelligence out over 
 India under the British Eaj ; he went to South 
 Africa, and there, having told us what he thought of 
 things as he saw them in the desperate leaguer in 
 which he lost himself there, I say, he died. I 
 need not pass these books l in review. I have, I 
 think, stated their dominant literary quality. The 
 presence of that quality made their author remark- 
 able even to-day, when near everybody writes well, 
 and some few write with distinction. And behind 
 it, as, having known the ' Monologues ' of old, and 
 having been privileged to read, with other notes, as 
 
 1 (1) The Land of the Dollar. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1896.) 
 
 (2) With the Conquering Turk. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1897.) 
 
 (3) Egypt in 1898. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1898.) (4) With 
 Kitchener to Khartum. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1898.) (5) In 
 India. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1899.) (6) From Cape Town to 
 Ladysmith. (Edinburgh : Blackwood, 1900.)
 
 MEMOIR. XX1U 
 
 much as he did of his first essay in fiction, I can 
 asseverate, without fear of repentance, that behind it 
 all there was a fine romantic imagination : even as, be- 
 hind that, there was a capacity for high politics, which, 
 had he but come out of Ladysmith, could not but have 
 taken him far. 
 
 V. 
 
 The years of work and wandering that are repre- 
 sented by these books of his these books, so vivid, 
 so instant, so actual these years, I say, did much for 
 him. They took him far out into the world ; they 
 filled his brain with facts and impressions, and great- 
 ened the capacities of his vision and his heart. He 
 did nothing in them but it increased his reputation, 
 and enlarged his idea in the public fancy. He wrote 
 for a round million, at least, of readers, and whatever 
 he did for these was so well done that, when the 
 million had found it good, he could appeal to the 
 five thousand, or the five hundred, behind the million 
 even the five thousand, or the five hundred, who 
 know and count on their plaudits also. To his 
 friends it was a great joy to see him thus con- 
 spicuous, and to know that all the while he was 
 accomplishing himself, and through journalism making 
 ready for the literature that in the long-run was to 
 be his sole employ. And his friends were fully 
 justified of their content. They are few indeed, 
 the youngsters, however brilliant and however pro- 
 mising the one by no means includes the other 
 who have such golden chances as fell ready to his 
 hand. To begin with, that triumphing inetamor-
 
 XXIV MEMOIR. 
 
 pliosis, or avatar, of the ' Pall Mall Gazette ' : it was 
 surely a distinction, as well as a right education, 
 almost from the first to live its full and vigorous 
 and daring life, not as a thing outside but as an 
 essential in its everyday economy ? And then, the 
 happiest of happy marriages achieved the one 
 woman found, and destiny to all appearances ful- 
 filled and then, I say, the experimental, novel, ir- 
 resistible 'Daily Mail,' with its liberal and far- 
 seeing Editor, and that gift of his in which were 
 comprehended America, Greece, Egypt, the Sudan, 
 India, with Rennes and Bayreuth, and such " pretty 
 tiny kickshaws " thrown in by the way ? What better 
 fortune could one have wished for the child of one's 
 own loins ? The misfortune was that, as I and 
 another held, it was incomplete so long as it did not 
 include South Africa. 1 His opportunities had come 
 hot-foot, each one hard at the other's heel. The old 
 madman at Pretoria brought on this one also in, as it 
 seemed, the nick of time, and, as we thought, to the 
 notablest of purposes. And so it ended. He had a 
 roving commission ; and, being fey (for so I must 
 think), he chose to shut himself up in Ladysmith. He 
 might have gone whithersoever he would. But he 
 would go nowhither else; and, having endured the 
 leaguer until he got eaten up by the rust of it, as con- 
 ducted by a parcel of folk who knew nothing about 
 sieges, and were horribly afraid for their own skins, 
 he took enteric fever how, nobody knows and 
 
 1 The other, who has a rare political gift, insisted on China also. 
 As I write, it is being borne in upon me that he was right ; but my 
 prescience never got that far.
 
 MEMOIE. XXV 
 
 came through it valiantly, but died of it in the end 
 why, most can guess. 'Twas, as he said, a 
 " side-ways ending to it all." But it sufficed. By it 
 he went from us; and now he rests in Ladysmith 
 cemetery, seven thousand miles or so from Merton, 
 where his heart lay, and from London, where he had 
 lived the best of his life the best as well as the most ; 
 and he had centred his ambitions there, and knew 
 that there lived his friends. Withal he died as it 
 were in public : much as Stevenson had died in the 
 days when he himself was breaking ground. And 
 the effect of his bereavement was found more shock- 
 ing than the effect of that great and famous writer's 
 own : great and far-reaching as we know that to 
 have been. 'Twas as though he had become a part 
 of the things he had chronicled : he had identified 
 himself so keenly and so intimately with the great- 
 ness of England that, reporter as he was, he had 
 come for England is greater than mere art to 
 be her chosen craftsman. In any case, no death 
 that one can recall in letters has so moved the 
 English-speaking world as his, since Dickens stumbled 
 upon " the cold and starless road " full thirty years 
 ago. Other and greater men have come and gone 
 have " one by one crept silently to rest " in 
 that long period of waste and growth, of increase 
 and decay. But none had made himself known 
 to such purpose and in such brief space as George 
 Steevens, and of none could it be said, as was said of 
 him, not once but many times : 
 
 " For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, 
 Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer."
 
 xxvi MEMOIR. 
 
 Lord Roberts, our " chief of men " ; the famous captain 
 whom he had followed to Khartum, vid Atbara and 
 Orndurman ; the august lady, whose subject he was 
 proud to call himself these all went mourning for 
 him ; and with these all Ladysmith, where, in his high- 
 hearted endeavour to " succour, help, and comfort all 
 that were in danger, necessity, and tribulation," he had 
 jested and smiled himself into the hearts of our sick 
 and wounded, and had so borne himself under fire 
 that the fighting men rejoiced to say that this was a 
 man ; l and with all Ladysmith a great part of the 
 tremendous Empire to whose beginnings, as a right 
 political unity, he was privileged to lend a hand. 
 
 VI. 
 
 He had, as I've said, an admirable brain, a brain 
 of the first magnitude as brains go : withal, a brain 
 accomplished to the full, yet never a hair the worse 
 for its accomplishing. Of what I believe to have 
 been its master-quality I mean, imagination we 
 have the first sprightly runnings in his unrivalled 
 ' Monologues of the Dead ' a book, or I am mistaken, 
 with a future ; even as we have proof of other and 
 lesser capacities in the several volumes of this Edition. 
 
 1 Says a correspondent : " At Eland's Laagte, Tinta Nyani, and 
 Loinljard's Kop he was usually walking about, close to the firing line, 
 leading his grey horse, a conspicuous mark for every bullet." And 
 another (Lynch of the ' Illustrated London News ') : "I hope you 
 will say this, that G. W. Steevens was one of the very bravest men 
 in Ladysmith. I don't suppose that any one here knows that at 
 Eland's Laagte he went forward on horseback with the Highlanders, 
 when every other man with a horse was dismounted."
 
 MEMOIR. XXVii 
 
 But I do not think that any of these achievements 
 in realisation and presentation show us anything of 
 their Author's best. Of that there are not many traces 
 in his printed work. Does a man's best ever get 
 into his books ? I do not think so ; and I say that 
 with some knowledge of literature and men, and 
 the certainty that, if I could now meet Shakespeare, 
 I should wonder why he had declined upon such 
 stuff as "Hamlet" and "Macbeth." Brains apart, 
 assuredly the best of our dear George Steevens is 
 not in his books. For one thing, he saw too easily, 
 and wrote too brilliantly he filled his Editor's bill 
 too well ; and for another, he had, I doubt not, too 
 vigorous and lasting a sense of the virtue of privacy. 
 And this brings me to my end. To realise George 
 Steevens, you must put away everything but sim- 
 plicity, kindness, sincerity. A serene and comely 
 blending of these was so plain in him that you 
 could see naught else. And, in fact, there was 
 naught else to be seen. These were G. W. S., 
 and he was ever these to his friends. " The rest 
 is silence." 
 
 W. E. H. 
 
 WORTHING, May -June, 1900.
 
 THINGS SEEN. 
 
 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 1 
 
 IN 1813 Elizabeth Fry, visiting Newgate, found 
 women chained to the ground, lying in a dark 
 cell, on straw changed once a-week, clothed only 
 in a petticoat, hardly visible for vermin. In 
 1897 a deer was impaled and killed during a 
 run of the Royal Buckhounds. The epithets 
 spattered over the latter fact by part of the 
 public press in London would not have been at 
 all inadequate as applied to the former. We 
 read of " the terrible death of the deer," " the 
 piteous story," the " brutal cruelties," " barbari- 
 ties," and " atrocious incidents " of the hunt. 
 Both Newgate and the Royal Buckhounds are 
 public institutions, and the country is by way 
 of being responsible for them. Yet Elizabeth 
 Fry was held something of an eccentric for ob- 
 jecting to this form of the punishment of the 
 guilty in Newgate ; while there are certainly 
 
 1 Blackwood's Magazine, January 1898. 
 A
 
 2 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 
 
 hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in Britain 
 who hardly find the abuse above quoted sufficient 
 for the iniquities of the Buckhounds. Concrete 
 instances like this show such a change of senti- 
 ment well within the span of the closing century 
 as can only be called prodigious. We say pro- 
 visionally a change of public sentiment, and not 
 of public morality; for if it should turn out a 
 question of morality, then we must conclude 
 either that the contemporaries of Wellington and 
 Peel were all devils or that the editor of the 
 'Star' is an angel. 
 
 The root of the revolution lies in the respective 
 values which two generations set upon physical 
 pain. You will see the same even more clearly 
 by going back another couple of generations to 
 the days of Tom Jones or Koderick Eandom. 
 " Coarse " and " brutal " are the epithets which 
 our age selects for theirs. But again the root 
 of the difference lies in the importance our 
 modern fashionable sentiment shall we say 
 " fashionable cant " at once and be out with 
 it ? attaches to the avoidance of physical pain. 
 Ensign Northerton was a brute in his day, and 
 Tom Jones was a man; in ours Tom is a brute 
 and the Ensign a demon. It may be the essence 
 of civilisation, or an accident of it; but all our 
 Victorian sentiments, all our movements, all our 
 humanitarianist talk, trend in one direction to- 
 wards the conviction that death and pain are the 
 worst of evils, their elimination the most desirable 
 of goods.
 
 THE NEW HUMANITAEIANISM. 3 
 
 To many people so fast are we soddening 
 with that materialism which calls itself humanity 
 this proposition about death and pain and their 
 antitheses will seem a truism. But perhaps some 
 of them will falter in that belief when they see 
 to what monstrosities this deification of painless- 
 ness can give birth. It is throttling patriotism 
 and common-sense and virility of individual char- 
 acter; it is even stunting its own squat idol by 
 taking away pain with one hand only to foster 
 it with the other; and, worst danger of all, its 
 success means the destruction of all manlier ideals 
 of character than its own. 
 
 Consider the gospel of painlessness in a few 
 of its developments ; and take first the simplest. 
 Whence come the flaccid ideas of to-day in point 
 of health and sickness ? Why do we hatch out 
 addled babies from incubators ? Why does the 
 ' Daily Telegraph ' endow cripples with Christmas 
 hampers ? In order, you would naturally answer, 
 first, to bring into the world beings who must 
 needs be a curse to themselves and to everybody 
 about them ; second, to persuade these beings that 
 there is some kind of merit in being such a 
 curse. Everybody who knows anything of work- 
 ing men's homes knows how proud of its de- 
 formity a cripple of that class can be, and how 
 that pride is pandered to and even shared by all 
 who can claim kinship with it. At a charitable 
 Christmas entertainment held annually in the East 
 End, it is the custom to put up the most mis- 
 shapen cripples procurable to sing a hymn by
 
 4 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 
 
 themselves ; and the hideous exhibition is by far 
 the most popular turn of the evening. Now, 
 nothing can be more rankly unwholesome than 
 such a state of sentiment. It may be unjust to 
 blame cripples; it is as unjust and far more per- 
 nicious, remembering that their case is nearly 
 always due to the vices or negligence of parents, 
 to pamper them. Parents should be taught to be 
 ashamed of crippled children. And children, both in 
 this and higher states of life, ought to be taught to 
 be proud of being well, not of being ill ; to be 
 taught that sickness is not a source of interest, 
 but a badge of inferiority; that to be healthy is 
 the prime condition of all things desirable in life, 
 and that the only way to palliate ill-health is to 
 ignore it. Such an education might be trusted 
 to breed healthy bodies controlled and mastered 
 by healthy minds. But that would be blasphemy 
 against the gospel of painlessness. Pain is to be 
 assuaged if possible, but cockered in any case ; to 
 be pitied, advertised, rewarded anything except 
 silently endured. 
 
 Moreover, this new humanitarianism is always 
 conspicuously illogical in the working out of its 
 own creed. Aiming at nothing higher than the 
 extinction of pain, its disciples, by sheer feather- 
 headedness, cause a great deal more suffering than 
 they alleviate. It is too early to follow the after- 
 life of the incubator-hatched baby ; but it is fairly 
 safe to predict that throughout a brief and puny 
 life its unwholesomeness will mock the false 
 humanity that would not let it die. As for the
 
 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 5 
 
 cripples, there is in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, 
 a small, but very admirably managed, hospital for 
 that branch of them which suffers from hip-disease. 
 Now, if you are to cherish cripples, you would 
 think that there could be no better way of doing 
 so than this the more so in that hip-disease is 
 both incurable and incapacitating. But no. That 
 hospital, because it is quiet and no hand at adver- 
 tising, is indigent to the point of shutting its 
 doors; whilst money flows in merrily to buy 
 turkeys for other cripples' relatives' Christmas 
 dinners. Perhaps the reason for the antithesis 
 is that the object must not merely be an imper- 
 fect human being, but, in order to win full sym- 
 pathy, must exhibit himself as such in public. 
 
 Yet it may be neither by oversight nor by 
 inconsideration that this little hospital is starved. 
 For you must know that among our humanitarians 
 is a strong wing, which objects strenuously to 
 hospitals altogether. It is an extraordinary irony 
 that the self-sent apostles, whose mission is to do 
 away with pain, should launch some of their finest 
 diatribes against hospitals, which have no other 
 mission in the world than themselves to combat 
 pain. An extraordinary irony but it is perfectly 
 true, and the fact is very fruitful of enlightment. 
 You will find in the writings of these apostles 
 attacks on the atrocities of hospitals set out with 
 language almost too strong to be applied to a dead 
 deer. Hospitals, they tell us, are shambles where 
 human victims are vivisected for the curiosity, 
 not to say the entertainment, of cold scientists.
 
 6 THE NEW HUMANITABIAMSM. 
 
 We are exhorted in fervent rhetoric to rise all 
 together and stop the butchery of our fellow-men 
 for a surgeon's holiday. This cry, which peals 
 periodically from a part of the press of London, 
 is almost the most instructive of all the mani- 
 festations of the new spirit. The surgeon under- 
 stands what he is doing with his patient; his 
 detractors do not. His aim is ultimately the 
 same as theirs to eliminate pain from life ; they 
 can hardly dispute that. But just because he 
 understands, because he takes a broad view, because, 
 without neglecting the individual case, he looks 
 beyond it to principles which may prove of general 
 beneficence because of this he is next door to 
 a murderer. Herein, not expressed but involved, 
 you have the craven fear of pain in its naked 
 simplicity. You must not cut to save a limb, to 
 save a life, to save ten thousand lives because 
 we cannot bear to see the blood. Send out as 
 many cripples, as many valetudinarians as you 
 will but we cannot bear to think of the supreme 
 moment of kill or cure. Put us under morphia 
 to muffle our pain, let a nurse sit holding our 
 hand and stroking our forehead. But if you 
 inflict one healing pang, exert one touch of salu- 
 tary discipline, then you are no benefactor, but 
 a heartless devil. 
 
 The outcry against vaccination, against vivi- 
 section, furnishes an exactly parallel case. The 
 same sentiment is at the heart of both the un- 
 conquerable shrinking from initial pain, even though 
 it promise to repay itself by tenfold exemption in
 
 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 7 
 
 the future. Of course the agitators against vac- 
 cination and vivisection assure themselves that 
 there are no repaying benefits to follow, and in 
 a way they are sincere. But their sincerity is not 
 that which comes from a cool-headed review of 
 known facts; it is the sincerity of an emotion 
 which has overwhelmed reason. An unbiassed de- 
 duction from the experience of smallpox epidemics, 
 from the records of medical progress, must con- 
 vince the most unwilling of us that the benefits 
 of both vaccination and vivisection are real and 
 appreciable. Whether they outweigh the death of 
 a few weakly infants and the suffering of a few 
 insensitive animals is another question most people 
 would readily answer it with a "Yes." The anti- 
 vaccinators and anti - vivisectors might, on con- 
 sideration, answer it with a " No." But the 
 instructive feature of their case is that they do 
 not consider at all. They never get so far. The 
 sight of the scabs on a baby's arm, the idea of 
 the yelping of a tortured dog the first hint or 
 imagining of physical pain is enough to paralyse 
 their reason. 
 
 The same blind horror of physical pain may be 
 found at the bottom of half the 'isms of the day. 
 In almost all, when they are strongly felt, it 
 seems actually to destroy reason till the fad 
 contradicts itself as, for one more example, in 
 the vegetarian, who abstains from beef and chicken 
 out of pity for bullocks and fowls, yet eats butter 
 and eggs without ever asking to what fate he is 
 thus dooming superfluous bull-calves and cockerels.
 
 8 THE NEW 
 
 The like unconscious self-condemnation awaits our 
 humanitarians when they pass from the domain of 
 physical to that of moral incapacity. Nowhere do 
 they show their sentimentality and their unreason 
 better combined than in what is called prison- 
 reform. A plain man who sees the warm, airy, 
 light, clean cells of British prisons is apt to ask 
 himself wherein, but for the necessary loss of lib- 
 erty, the hardship of punishment consists. Let 
 him turn to the exponents of painlessness and he 
 will discover that. Our prisons also, as well as 
 our hospitals, are dens of hideous cruelty. When 
 he tries to find out what it is all about, he dis- 
 covers that some prisoners have meagre fare, that 
 a few are set to really hard physical work, that 
 convicts spend a small part of their sentence with- 
 out constant companionship, that habitual insubor- 
 dinates can, on a magistrate's order, be whipped 
 with a whipcord cat, and that warders do not 
 always speak to convicts with respect. This is 
 called cruel, tending to madness, brutalising. Our 
 grandfathers would have laughed at such charges. 
 Such cruelty, they would have replied, would come 
 not amiss to wife - beaters, ravishers, swindlers : if 
 a man goes mad in nine months, although he can 
 constantly speak to his fellow-prisoners at exercise 
 or when at work about the corridors, then his 
 mental balance is no loss to himself or anybody; 
 the very cat can hardly brutalise him, since he 
 has to be brutal before he could earn it. But 
 such replies are not for our soft-hearted generation. 
 Instead they point us westward to free America,
 
 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 9 
 
 whose felons, as a native authority has said, are 
 " better housed, fed, clad, and comforted than the 
 labouring poor of any other portion of the globe"; 
 whose housebreakers feed on beef -steaks and hot 
 biscuits for breakfast, and street - walkers get jam 
 to their tea. They point us to Elmira, that uni- 
 versity miscalled a prison, where the embezzler is 
 taught German, shorthand, and telegraphy, and the 
 disguise-artist is encouraged to model in wax. 
 
 It is all one more outcrop of exactly the same 
 folly. Avoid immediate pain no matter at what 
 cost hereafter. And here again the folly is exactly 
 as ironically self-destroying. It would be absurd 
 to ask whether criminals inflict or suffer the more 
 pain. It may be all one to you whether pain be 
 deserved or not; to save the guilty the greater 
 suffering, you may, as would willingly many of our 
 crack-brained sentimentalists, inflict the lesser upon 
 the innocent. But this is exactly what they do 
 not do : to save the guilty the lesser evil, they 
 plague the guiltless with the greater. In point 
 of fact, the modern vice of pampering criminals 
 may fairly be held to cause greater inconvenience 
 both to the innocent victims and to the interest- 
 ing agents. For laxity does not reform. It was 
 supposed that the University Extension course of 
 Elmira did prevent those who had experienced it 
 from returning for a further term of instruction; 
 only one day it came out that the lectures on 
 Moral Philosophy were supplemented by smacking 
 with a sort of butter - patter, and we may fairly 
 attribute the deterrent effect to the bodily influ-
 
 10 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 
 
 ence rather than the spiritual. For the rest, crime 
 increases in lax America. In Great Britain severe 
 by comparison with America, though lax enough 
 when you consider the punishments of former days 
 crime is decreasing. The only other European 
 country of which you can say the same is Belgium, 
 where our humanitarians will hold up horrified hands 
 to hear that sentences of nine years' solitary confine- 
 ment are enforced, and that a sort of convalescent 
 prison is needed to bring the criminal gradually 
 back to his reason. No such barbarity for us ! 
 Among us you will find a tumult of voices ever 
 crying aloud for less, not more, severity. And, so 
 far as crime can be checked or encouraged by pun- 
 ishment, they are asking for reforms that will spread 
 crime, involve more frequent if less sure terms of 
 detention for criminals, and thus add prodigiously 
 to the sum-total of suffering among guilty and guilt- 
 less alike. Here once more the gospel of painless- 
 ness recoils to its own defeat. 
 
 Nowhere will you find the new doctrine better 
 exemplified than in politics. It is a guiding prin- 
 ciple of that school which delights to cry down 
 British methods, British policy, British achievements. 
 If pain, as such, is the one great evil, it is all one 
 whose pain it is. There is no more distinction 
 between your own countrymen and another. There 
 is no more tragedy in the death of your country- 
 man doing his duty than in the death of an Orukzai 
 who shoots his uncles from behind walls. There is 
 no such possibility as patriotism left. You will 
 start reasonably enough : the true patriot, you will
 
 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 11 
 
 say, desires the highest good of his country, which 
 is not to be found in killing Orukzais ; and though 
 you hold an Orukzai's life just as high as a Gordon 
 Highlander's, you do not hold it a whit higher. 
 An Armenian is a human life and a Turk is a 
 human life, and the one is as precious as the other. 
 You may start with these plausible principles, but 
 you will not maintain them. The very friction 
 with your simpler fellows, who hold any one British 
 life worth any half-dozen others, will irritate your 
 theoretic philanthropy into a steady prepossession 
 against your own countrymen. The sight of any 
 man violating your precept will stir your humane 
 indignation to a bloodthirsty desire for the suffering 
 of the violator. This is called righteous anger, but 
 in its effects, had it but free play, it is the old 
 irony humanitarianism defeating its own end. 
 What better instance than the Anglo - Armenians, 
 who first fanatically swallow oriental tales of out- 
 rage, then frantically exaggerate and agitate till they 
 have stirred the half truth into hideous reality ; then 
 they are for war and slaughter, as though a stream 
 of blood were to be slaked by a deluge. The pro- 
 fessed war-haters have been of late the very men 
 who cry most savagely for a war more deadly than 
 a century of barbarous faction-fighting. The party 
 of force-at-no-price, of abstract quixotic justice, is 
 the first to find unsuspected and non-existent 
 points in favour of the United States when the 
 Eepublic makes baseless claims on their own country 
 and backs them by unmannerly bluster. It must 
 be so inevitably. No man is so superhuman in his
 
 12 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 
 
 dry intelligence that he can keep a principle impar- 
 tially applied to affairs that stir the passions of nations. 
 And he that is not with his country is against it. 
 
 Perhaps these are illustrations enough. It is not 
 alleged that the various modern tendencies here 
 touched on are all ramifications of a gigantic con- 
 spiracy labouring to impose its formula on the 
 world. They have their family likeness and their 
 mutual sympathies, but their fundamental unity is 
 unconscious. Yet that fundamental unity exists : 
 the elevation of pain and not pleasure, mark, but 
 the absence of pain into the ultimate standards 
 of evil and good. Applied without common-sense 
 or self-control, it is plain that this standard works 
 its own undoing. But that, it will be urged, is 
 no valid aspersion on the standard itself. Would 
 not the test of avoidance of pain, honestly and 
 judiciously applied, furnish a trustworthy guide for 
 public action ? Does not civilisation itself consist 
 exactly in this in an organised common effort for 
 the extinction, so far as is attainable, of pain and 
 of death? 
 
 Certainly there is a measure of truth in this. The 
 organisation of a civilised State is a vast conspiracy 
 for the preservation of life. A rank socialist might 
 see his way to denying this : yet it remains undeni- 
 able that even for the lowest, weakest, and poorest 
 a modern civilised State gives such security of life as 
 the low and weak and poor know in no other form 
 of society. Civilisation lays a restraining hand on 
 the strong and bold, who would bully us : it furnishes 
 great devices and combinations whereby we may win
 
 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 13 
 
 comforts from nature which without them would be 
 too hard for us. It finds incubators to help us into 
 the world, and disinfectants to keep us from helping 
 our fellows out of it. 
 
 Certainly civilisation does all this. And yet there 
 is no divine virtue in civilisation, either the word or 
 the thing. If civilisation is a conspiracy for the 
 preservation of puny life, lowering the physical stan- 
 dard of the race, then civilisation may be no blessing, 
 but a curse. Civilisation, further, is not only not 
 divine ; it is human. If its broad and general ten- 
 dencies are unrecognised by those in the stream of 
 them, they are not less products of human will. We 
 can change or guide the stream of civilisation, after 
 all ; it behoves us the more, therefore, to look 
 anxiously to its direction. 
 
 The present direction in Britain appears on the 
 above showing to be a wrong one ; and if we are not 
 careful it will lead us straight to national perdition. 
 Civilisation is making it much too easy to live; 
 humanitarianism is turning approval of easiness of 
 living into the one standard of virtue. A wiser 
 civilisation would look, not to the indiscriminate 
 preservation of life, but to the quality of the life 
 preserved. A wiser humanitarianism would make it 
 easy for the lower quality of life to die. It sounds 
 brutal, but why not ? We have let brutality die out 
 too much. Our horror of pain has led us to foster 
 only the softer virtues and leave the harsher alone. 
 Again, it sounds absurd even to use such a phrase as 
 " harsher virtues " though Aristotle, to take one 
 instance of a man perhaps as wise as we, knew very
 
 14 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 
 
 well what they are. His ideal of character was not 
 the kind man, nor the man opposed to corporal 
 punishment, nor the man superior to mere patriotism, 
 but the great -souled man. This quality is " the 
 crown of all virtues ; it enhances them, and cannot 
 begin to exist without them." And among the attri- 
 butes of the great-souled man were these. He was 
 the man " who holds himself worthy of great deserts, 
 and is so worthy. . . . The great - souled man de- 
 spises justly, whereas the crowd despises at hap- 
 hazard. To be respected by the lowly he holds as 
 vulgar as to use his strength against the weak. . . . 
 In his life he takes no heed of any but his friends : 
 to do otherwise is servile ; which is why all flatterers 
 are coarse and all the lowly are flatterers. . . . He 
 is no gossip ; he will tattle neither of himself nor of 
 others, for it is all one to him whether others praise 
 or condemn him." 
 
 Nobody wants to re-establish a Greek standard of 
 character for British men the less so in that its 
 results as handed down by the Greeks themselves 
 are not overworthy of admiration. Nevertheless we 
 might well admit these heathen virtues of proper 
 pride and a sort of self-respecting egoism, and others, 
 as a bracing tonic to our later morality. We ought 
 not to forget to temper mercy with justice even 
 with that rude and brutal exercise of superiority 
 which may be called natural justice. It was not by 
 holding all men not to say all beasts as of equal 
 right with ourselves that we made ourselves a great 
 nation. It is not thus that we keep ourselves great. 
 We became and are an Imperial race by dealing
 
 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 15 
 
 necessary pain to other men, just as we become 
 powerful men by dealing necessary pain to other 
 animals whether they be slaughtered oxen or 
 hunted stags. There is no reason in gloating over 
 the pain we have risen upon, but there is even less 
 in pretending that it does not exist. We may as 
 well recognise that if we are to remain, nationally 
 and individually, fitted to cope successfully with 
 nature, with rival animals and with rival men, we 
 must find and observe some other virtues besides 
 those which consist in combating pain. Already our 
 gentler civilisation has softened us physically. We 
 make bicycle records, but we are not prepared to 
 converse coolly while having our legs cut off, as was 
 the way of our great-grandfathers. We are better 
 fed, better clothed, better housed than they were; 
 probably we enjoy better health, and certainly we 
 live longer. But we do not drink so well, love 
 so well, suffer so well, fight so well ; physically and 
 emotionally we have subdued ourselves to a lower 
 plane. Partly this follows inevitably on alleviated 
 material conditions which we could not put back 
 if we would; but partly it is due to the softening 
 of our current ethics. It is believed in our gener- 
 ation that men who are ready to inflict pain are 
 precisely the men who are unready to endure it; 
 though, curiously, that same generation refuses to 
 flog wife-beaters and assaulters of children. In their 
 case the principle may be broadly true ; but it was 
 not true of our forefathers Covenanters, buccaneers, 
 politicians, sailors, pitmen; what you will. They 
 burned and marooned and beheaded and shot and
 
 16 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 
 
 fought cocks; but they were quite ready to bear 
 the like sufferings when their turn came. So they 
 bred hardihood; yet, brutes as you may call them, 
 they still continued to be not less generous, loving, 
 even self - sacrificing, than we. Within the limits 
 they recognised as claiming their duty family, 
 friends, country they could be all sweetness; out- 
 side they could be pitiless. On these painfully 
 unhumanitarian principles they built the British 
 empire. 
 
 At present we keep it on these principles only 
 we try not to let ourselves know it. We shoot 
 down dervishes who are fighting for their religion 
 as sincerely as did our own Ironsides, and Matabele 
 who have every whit as pure a belief in the 
 righteousness of slave-raiding as we in its iniquity ; 
 we drive Afridis into the bitter snow to starve 
 because they think it well to steal rifles and shoot 
 strangers, while we do not. The naked principle 
 of our rule is that our way is the way that shall 
 be walked in, let it cost what pain it may. Mean- 
 time our humanitarians preach exactly the contrary. 
 And if they are right we have two courses before 
 us. Either we may go on, as now, conducting our 
 empire by force, and pretend that we do so by 
 charity and meekness ; or we may cease to con- 
 duct it by force, and try to do so by charity and 
 meekness. In the first case we shall finally engrain 
 hypocrisy as the dominant trait of our national 
 character; in the second we shall very soon have 
 no national character or national self - esteem or 
 national existence to lose.
 
 THE NEW HUMANITAEIANISM. 17 
 
 As the savage virtues die out, the civilised vices 
 spring up in their place. Pride gives way to the 
 ambition to be thought to have a right to be proud ; 
 frank contempt and hatred are replaced by back- 
 biting. The readiness to hurt or be hurt physically 
 we exchange for a smoother but deadlier unscrupu- 
 lousness. The duel was hissed out of England 
 because it killed the body; in its stead reigns 
 scandal, which kills the soul. Sport, which slaughters 
 beasts, is yielding to betting on professional athletics, 
 which fritters away the minds of men. As we 
 become more sensitive to physical, we become more 
 callous to mental, agony. An educated woman, a 
 woman in society, a good woman, will whimper for a 
 week if her child is to have a mole cut from its 
 cheek, and cannot bear to see the operation, lest she 
 should faint at the sight of blood. But she will 
 dress herself carefully and attend a trial for murder, 
 dividing her opera-glass impartially, while the jury 
 are away, between such part of the face of the 
 accused as he cannot cover with his hands and the 
 face of his wife. And yet, when that man is proved 
 a cold-blooded murderer, this good woman will be 
 the first to shudder at the reflection that he is to be 
 hanged. We talk of our age as spiritual, but what 
 is this but gross materialism ? Pain is no longer to 
 be considered unless it can be felt with the body. 
 So, while we shudder at the pains of a small war, 
 and would go to almost any humiliation to avert a 
 great one, we are every year more in bondage to 
 industrial strife to the blind selfishness of the 
 locker-out and the malignant factiousness of the 
 
 B
 
 18 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 
 
 trade-unionist. Here is more materialism : death 
 is not death unless you can see the bleeding bodies. 
 But then, of course, industrial war only ruins our 
 country : the other kind of war might hurt foreigners. 
 For deplorably, perhaps, but incontestably the 
 content of the human affections is limited ; and the 
 more love we spare for men of other race and speech 
 and colour, the less we have left for our own. 
 
 And what a pitiful spirit in itself, this new crusade 
 against pain ! It is not the cult of pleasure, that 
 its votaries would be the first to disclaim. It is u 
 creed purely negative a creed, therefore, inferior to 
 the merest epicureanism. A moral code that is 
 positive is at least a creed that makes a man more of 
 a man ; a code that is all negative^all antis and no 
 pros makes nothing but a protesting machine a 
 string of self-righteous formulas. We must not hurt 
 stags, and we must not whip criminals, and we must 
 not, it now appears, cut out cancers ; but what may 
 we do ? Attend League football matches, teach 
 garrotters moral philosophy, and dose the cancerous 
 with homoaopathic globules ? The substitutes are 
 inadequate enough ; but to do justice to those whom 
 we are protesting against, it is not they who propose 
 such substitutes. Faddists propose many ridiculous 
 remedies for imaginary diseases ; but the newest kind 
 of sentimental humanitarian is not necessarily or 
 even generally a faddist. He or she has simply a 
 vague shudder at the thought of pain, and often 
 backs it up by no fad or positive suggestion at all ; 
 it is merely a sentiment without principle. Only 
 that sentiment is coming more and more to suffuse
 
 THE NEW HUMANITAKIANISM. 19 
 
 and to inspire all our British thought the shudder 
 is beginning to be accepted instead of a code of 
 morality. It is all for forbidding and no permitting, 
 for undoing and no doing, for an abstract average 
 common weal, but no concrete individual weal. It 
 tends towards a compact by which we shall all of us 
 covenant to do nothing lest one of us might hurt 
 another. It is not the frame of mind which makes 
 great fortunes, or great nations, or great men. No ; 
 nor even good men. Unless a good man is good in 
 quite another way from a good horse or a good table, 
 he is a man who most fully embodies the properties 
 of a man ; which object is assuredly not attained by 
 the mere refusal to give or suffer pain. Goodness is 
 difficult to define, and still more difficult to dogmatise 
 about, but it is at least safe to say that it consists in 
 action, not in abstinence from action. To suppose it 
 lies in a negative, even of the most amiable kind, is 
 an emasculation of the word fit only to produce a 
 nation of blameless, praiseless nobodies. " It is our 
 sins that make us great." 
 
 The idea that pain is the worst of evils destroys 
 many virtues which we cannot afford to lose ; it 
 fosters many vices which we could gratefully spare ; 
 it is a bloodless, unfruitful basis for morality. And 
 for the last point, it is in most cases not in all, but 
 in most a lie. The people that pretend to elevate 
 it to a principle do not really believe it. Out of 
 paradox, out of moral self-conceit, out of genuine 
 tenderness of heart, they may say they do ; but at 
 heart they generally do not. How many genuinely 
 believe, and practically enforce the belief, that a
 
 20 THE NEW HUMANITARIANISM. 
 
 beast's pain should outweigh a man's profit ? How 
 many genuinely believe that a wife-beater should not 
 be beaten ? How many truly think that it is as 
 deplorable that an Afridi should be shot as that 
 a Briton should ? There are some such possibly : 
 you will know them by their refusal to drink milk, 
 their habit of allowing themselves to be pushed in a 
 crowd without pushing back, their readiness to give 
 their daughters in marriage to savages. With the 
 rest humanitarianism is not a principle, but a weak- 
 ness. It is even a vicarious cowardice. By sympathy 
 they transfer the pain of others to themselves, and 
 their pity is not benevolence, but dislike of sensations 
 painful to themselves. Now it is nobody's duty to 
 like painful sensations ; but in a world full of them, 
 and for all we can see inevitably full of them, it is 
 everybody's duty to face them. To refuse to do so 
 will certainly do little enough towards their extinc- 
 tion. And to the few who do honestly try to abolish 
 the painful as such, we may make bold to say that, 
 should they succeed, mankind would be poorer, 
 weaker, and even unhappier without it.
 
 21 
 
 FROM THE NEW GIBBON. 1 
 
 . . . THE close of the nineteenth century beheld the 
 British Empire at the highest pitch of its prosperity. 
 The records of every contemporary nation celebrate, 
 while they envy, the multitude of its subjects and 
 the orderly felicity of its citizens. Its frontiers com- 
 prehended the fairest regions of the earth ; and its 
 authority extended alike over the most dutiful of 
 daughter-peoples and the wildest and most seques- 
 tered barbarians. The judicious delegation of the 
 minor prerogatives of government conciliated the free 
 affections of the Colonies ; and the ruder dependencies 
 were maintained in contented, if unenthusiastic, sub- 
 mission by the valour, the conduct, and the impartial 
 justice of their alien administrators. Two centuries 
 of empire had seemed insufficient to oppress or ener- 
 vate the virile and adventurous spirit of the British 
 race. It tempted the ardours of the Sudan sun at 
 midsummer, and cheerfully sustained the rigours of 
 the icy winter of the Klondyke. While the hardy 
 soldier defended and continually propagated the 
 distant boundaries of Victoria's dominions, the tran- 
 quil and prosperous state of the British Islands was 
 
 1 Blackwood's Magazine, February 1899.
 
 22 FEOM THE NEW GIBBON. 
 
 deeply felt, if grudgingly admitted, by every class of 
 their population. There, if anywhere on the earth, 
 was to be found wholesome public feeling untainted 
 by faction and wealth, unobnoxious to jealousy. The 
 distinction of Conservative and Liberal preserved the 
 name of party government without its substance ; 
 and the purely formal opposition of denominations, 
 rather than of principles, served as a useful check on 
 the dominant party without risk of cataclysm in the 
 general policy of the State. The example of France, 
 her secular enemy, emphasised the just complacency 
 with which Britain seemed to regard her condition. 
 The republic groaned under an alternation of licence 
 and tyranny ; the monarchy breathed freely in the 
 reasonable acceptance of laws, enacted honestly for 
 the general good and applied indifferently by judges 
 of grave sacrosanctity. In her foreign relations 
 France alternately intrigued and precipitately with- 
 drew from the consequences of her duplicity ; Britain 
 pursued her designs with unyielding tenacity, but in 
 uninjurious silence. Un vexed by the conscription 
 which weighed upon their neighbours, and secure in 
 the protection of their invincible navy, the people 
 affected the arts of peace, and received the accustomed 
 reward of a single devotion. The workshop of the 
 world since two generations, Britain neither dreaded 
 the competition of strangers nor listened to the 
 cautions of the more sagacious of her own children. 
 The Eecessional of the sublime Kipling and the 
 economic speculations of the inquisitive but censorious 
 Mallock fell alike unheeded on the ears of those who 
 were content to argue that the condition of the lower
 
 FEOM THE NEW GIBBON. 23 
 
 orders, though insufficient to their own appetence, 
 was luxurious compared to that of their fellows 
 abroad, while the easy splendour of the rich inflamed 
 the emulation of all mankind; and that the public 
 Exchequer supported with facility all burdens which 
 the ever-increasing exigencies of the Empire might 
 impose. 
 
 It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contem- 
 poraries should discern in the public felicity the latent 
 causes of decay and corruption. To the vulgar mind 
 the British Empire was a triumphant proof of the 
 possibility, as of the blessings, of a wise democracy ; 
 yet in that very process of democracy were inherent 
 the seeds of ruin. In the domain of Government 
 the political genius of the Anglo-Saxon race, its bias 
 toward compromise and detestation of extremity, sur- 
 mounted with impunity experiments that would have 
 proved fatal to any other people less singularly 
 endowed. But while the leaders of the nation were 
 satisfied with promoting or seeking to retard the 
 popular encroachment upon the functions of Govern- 
 ment, democracy infused a slower and more secret 
 poison into the vitals of society. If the opinion of 
 the vulgar was unacknowledged in Parliament, in 
 every other department of life it insensibly permeated 
 the whole spirit of the people. It became a maxim 
 of imperial policy, a law of social development, a 
 canon of taste. The Englishman of the beginning of 
 the nineteenth century was accustomed to demand 
 that his policy should be glorious, the accessories of 
 his daily life unsurpassed in quality, the objects of his 
 aesthetic admiration beautiful The Englishman of
 
 24 FllOM THE NEW GIBBON. 
 
 the end of that period of decadence was content if 
 they were cheap. 
 
 The student of that age will find melancholy 
 evidence of degeneration in the printed records, and 
 especially in the newspapers, of the time. The re- 
 ported speeches of public men, the venal arguments 
 of leader-writers, the tattling of the parasites of 
 fashion, the statistics of the markets, the very 
 advertisements, bear unanimous testimony to the 
 debased ideas which then enjoyed a ready and un- 
 protested currency. The empire, that magnificent 
 fabric founded upon the generous impulse to conquer 
 and to rule, was now formally regarded as a mere 
 machine for the acquisition of pounds sterling. A 
 Palmerston and a Disraeli had been the spokesmen 
 of the earlier Imperialism ; the later found its apt 
 mouthpiece in a Chamberlain. The masterful truc- 
 ulence of the British gentleman and the opulent 
 imagination of the Anglicised Jew this generation 
 cheerfully exchanged for the ambitions of a manufac- 
 turer fostered by the arts of a demagogue. Gifted 
 with an extraordinary intuition of the changing 
 predilections of his countrymen, Chamberlain was 
 enabled to turn, to the advantage of his own popu- 
 larity, the flood of patriotism which rose in the 
 decade between the first and second Jubilees of Queen 
 Victoria. He became the high-priest of what was 
 fondly saluted as the new Imperialism, on the lips of 
 whose votaries British Empire was synonymous with 
 British commerce. His declamations, while they will 
 reward the curious investigator with little that is 
 either original in thought or elegant in expression,
 
 
 FROM THE NEW GIBBON. 25 
 
 proclaim but too eloquently the altered feelings with 
 which the later Britons regarded their greatness. 
 Where they had once resolved to possess, they now 
 aspired but to trade. 
 
 The jargon of the day clamoured for " the open 
 door," by which phrase was understood a market 
 which British products could enter on terms of 
 fiscal equality with those of the rest of the world. 
 In the manlier age of Drake and Hawkins Britain 
 had opened her own door for herself; now her 
 diplomacy all but petitioned for an equality of 
 treatment which the growing incapacity of her 
 own traders must, in any event, have rendered 
 fruitless. Among the strange ironies which the 
 historian of this period finds himself compelled 
 to record, none is more deeply ironical than the 
 fact that, in proportion as the nation came to 
 regard commerce as its highest and only weal, so 
 commerce itself lost vitality and astuteness. The 
 degeneracy of the people spread to that very 
 activity to which they had sacrificed their nobler 
 sentiments of empire; and while arms and justice, 
 arts and letters, were postponed in the general 
 estimation to manufacture and trade, these mer- 
 cenary avocations were themselves pursued Without 
 energy and almost without common shrewdness. 
 Like the ostrich of mythology, her head buried 
 in the sand of obsolete traditions and antiquated 
 success, Britain alone of the nations of Europe 
 refused to educate her commercial travellers or 
 to accede to the terms of payment required by 
 her customers, clung to her chaotic weights and
 
 26 FROM THE NEW GIBBON. 
 
 measures, and haughtily announced to the world 
 that it must forgo such goods as its wants de- 
 manded, and purchase only what Britain was 
 pleased to sell. In Germany, in Belgium, and in 
 the United States sprang up keen and victorious 
 competition ; and though the vast wealth of England 
 was as yet almost unimpaired, a few sagacious 
 minds, while impartially blind to the more fatal 
 deterioration of the nation's spirit, were already 
 enabled to foresee and to predict the approaching 
 disasters to its traffic. 
 
 At the same time, as it was thus sought, by 
 menace or persuasion, to extend the principles of 
 Free Trade abroad, at home they were eating, like 
 a deep and consuming canker, into the very marrow 
 of Britain. The insidious principles of Bright 
 and Cobden had made her the workshop of the 
 whole world ; but they brought to her the physical 
 debility of the workman as well as his wages. 
 The profits of the manufacturer and the cheap 
 food of the operative were paid for by the starva- 
 tion of the hind, the bankruptcy of the farmer, and 
 the ruin of the landowner. On every industrial 
 benefit followed an agricultural calamity ; and the 
 prosperity of the town was remorselessly attended 
 by the beggary of the hamlet. The movement 
 of the population accompanied, as in every age, 
 the distribution of wealth; so that the towns 
 distended to cities and the hamlets disappeared in 
 a wilderness. 
 
 The effects of life in cities were apparent and 
 pernicious. But for the unbroken attestation of
 
 FROM THE NEW GIBBON. 27 
 
 both printed and pictured records, it would be 
 difficult indeed to credit the full horrors exhibited 
 by such districts as Lancashire or the Black Country 
 at the end of the nineteenth century. There the 
 wildest flights of hyperbole were equalled and 
 exceeded by dismal truth, and the sun was literally 
 obscured at noonday. A host of ungainly chimneys 
 loaded the air with poisonous fumes which oppressed 
 the hardiest species of vegetation. The inhabitants, 
 penned up by day in close factories or the dimmer 
 and more stifling obscurity of mines, herded by 
 night in crowded tenements, were pale, sickly, and 
 meagre ; and, by a malignant decree of nature, 
 the species became more prolific in proportion as 
 they transmitted less vigour to their offspring. 
 The philosopher of that age observed that the 
 immigrant countrymen supported the unwholesome 
 conditions of the towns better than the feebler 
 natives, and that their superior robustness con- 
 ferred an advantage in the competition for employ- 
 ment ; but the second and third generations dissolved 
 away in equal languor under the pestilent circum- 
 stances of an unnatural existence. The momentary 
 profit of the fathers was visited in debility on the 
 children, and served only to precipitate the speed 
 of this hideous process of degeneration. 
 
 The universal experience of mankind confirms 
 the opinion that the sole defence of a nation 
 against external enmity lies in the preservation 
 of a robust and high - spirited peasantry. The 
 British farm-labourer had found himself naturally 
 possessed of many of the qualities requisite for a
 
 28 FKOM THE NEW GIBBON. 
 
 Boldier. His form was vigorous, and inured to 
 hardship and privation. He had a natural habit 
 of obedience, and in many instances was already 
 proficient in the use of weapons and accustomed 
 by the pursuit of game to the simpler operations 
 of war. The children of the factory, from whom 
 it now became necessary to recruit the army, had 
 none of these capacities : they were feeble in body, 
 insubordinate in temper, and habituated by ex- 
 perience to a mode of life which rendered them 
 awkward and discontented in the field. As yet, 
 however, the British army showed but few signs 
 of deterioration from the standards of its glorious 
 history. The courage of its legionaries was un- 
 broken, and its officers, besides training them in 
 peace and leading them in war with matchless 
 courage and coolness, found superfluous energy to 
 raise and discipline auxiliary troops hardly, if at 
 all, inferior to the British regiments themselves. 
 Northern India and the basins of the Upper Nile 
 and Niger supplied excellent soldiers, who proved 
 their valour and endurance in all the wars of the 
 end of the nineteenth century. They constituted 
 the major part of the successful expeditions to 
 Tirah, to Khartum, and to Bida ; but the very 
 strength they brought to British arms was an 
 insidious source of decline. As the warlike spirit 
 and manly force of the white races succumbed to 
 the enervating influence of industrial civilisation, 
 the Government of London relied more and more 
 on the martial virtue of its subject barbarians. 
 These, whether in India or Africa, were as for-
 
 FEOM THE NEW GIBBON. 29 
 
 ward in the field as the British regiments, and 
 undertook, almost unaided by them, the necessary 
 fatigues which contribute even more than the 
 sword to the successful prosecution of a campaign. 
 It was perhaps an inevitable consequence of the 
 imperial fate which impelled Britons to make war 
 in every clime; since the severities of the Afghan 
 winter, which chilled the courage of the British 
 troops, were scarcely felt by the hardy children 
 of Nepaul; while the Sudanese and Hausas, in 
 their turn, were better able to resist the beams 
 of an African sun. But it was significant, if as 
 yet unnoticed, that the masters of the Empire 
 grew either less able or less willing to risk 
 their own troops in its unhealthier regions, and 
 were yearly more disposed to delegate their de- 
 fence to a mercenary army. The indomitable 
 spirit of the English gentleman prompted him to 
 seek martial enterprises at the head of the alien 
 levies, whose continual service proffered the fairest 
 chance of action and honour ; and the mass of 
 the people, relieved of the cares of personal ser- 
 vice, sank contentedly into the languid indifference 
 of civil life. Black men and brown men, flanked with 
 an increasingly inconsiderable proportion of white 
 troops, won the British victories ; and the cheaply 
 fed British citizens were content to sit and acclaim 
 their prowess from the galleries of the music-halls. 
 
 In sport, as in its analogue, war, the British 
 degenerated with frightful rapidity. The very 
 word had lost its original connotation; and the 
 honourable name proper to the manly exercises
 
 30 FROM THE NEW GIBBON. 
 
 of hunting, shooting, and fishing, whose charm 
 consists in matching man's strength and cunning 
 against that of wild nature, was usurped by 
 childish or plebeian exhibitions of mere brute 
 strength and agility. The Briton found his 
 pleasure in bestriding a bicycle instead of a horse, 
 in striking a tennis-ball instead of a wild-fowl ; 
 nor was he even sensible of the degradation that 
 could prefer a mechanical toy to a living creature 
 with a will independent of, yet conformable to, 
 his own. Even the older and more reputable 
 games, like cricket, football, and skittles, which 
 might have defended themselves as affording at 
 least a semblance of wholesome activity to the 
 youth of towns, were turned by a truly devilish 
 ingenuity into engines of enervation and decay. 
 It ceased to be fashionable to join personally in 
 these spasmodic but active pastimes. The popu- 
 lace thronged to them in thousands, but only to 
 pay for the privilege of witnessing as lazy spec- 
 tators recreations which were fondly called national. 
 Some of these exhibitions were more than merely 
 effeminate: active corruption was added in allure- 
 ments to drunkenness, and in a factious partisanship 
 which sometimes blew up to brutal assaults on the 
 umpires of the game, and was always a fertile source 
 of gambling. In their amusements, as in their wars, 
 Britons ceased to play a personal part, finding a sub- 
 stitute for the vigorous sports of their fathers in the 
 force and address of well-paid mercenaries, which in 
 a more strenuous age would have rebuked the in- 
 solent softness of those who pampered them.
 
 FROM THE NEW GIBBON. 31 
 
 Personal force and military hardihood were the 
 price which Britain paid for cheap imported food; 
 the other cheap commodities in which the people 
 delighted were purchased at a no less ruinous 
 rate. In every department of social life the 
 tendency of this age was the same, leading to 
 the concentration of every industry into huge 
 establishments controlled by a few heads, and 
 succeeding, by the preponderance of their resources, 
 in underselling the enterprises of small private 
 traders. The Londoner of this period bought his 
 food, his clothing, his furniture, his books and 
 newspapers, his very tobacco, from companies, 
 stores, and amalgamations, which counted the 
 volume of their traffic by millions and their 
 profits by hundreds of thousands of pounds, their 
 emporia by scores, and their employees by thou- 
 sands. The tradesmen of the preceding generation 
 were thankful to become the managers and the 
 shopwalkers of their inflated supplanters, and 
 earned a livelihood by disposing of goods for 
 their masters at a third of the price they had 
 formerly asked and obtained for themselves. The 
 plausible sophistries of political economy celebrated 
 the commercial revolution as a triumph of the 
 division of labour ; but its moral effect on the 
 people was as far - reaching as it was pernicious. 
 Commercial power, hitherto divided with an ap- 
 proach to equality among a thousand merchants, 
 now rested with a few groups, who absorbed and 
 magnified the profits due to the labours of their 
 subordinates. On these the status of inferiority,
 
 32 FROM THE NEW GIBBON. 
 
 without responsibility or opportunity, worked its 
 necessary effect : they no longer possessed that 
 vigour of character which is nourished by the 
 consciousness of self-dependence and the habit of 
 individual judgment. When, as became ever more 
 frequent, a great business was in the control of 
 a limited company, the rigour of subordination 
 verged upon the hopelessness of serfdom. The 
 clerk of a personal employer might aspire for a 
 partnership, and confidently demand humanity ; 
 but the servant of a body of directors sighed in 
 vain for a position either of authority or of 
 reasonable comfort. In this organisation of busi- 
 ness, the peculiar product of the Victorian age, 
 the sense of responsibility slipped from the direc- 
 tors as from the directed : it was not their con- 
 cern, so they argued, if employees were underpaid 
 or the public cheated; all that was done was in 
 the name and the interests of the shareholders. 
 These, in their turn, passing back their consciences 
 to the directors, were satisfied to cloak their vica- 
 rious wickedness with a convenient ignorance. 
 
 While the fires of ambition were extinguished in 
 the breasts of the lower, and the voice of conscience 
 silenced among the higher, circles of commerce, a 
 particular corruption was reserved for the consumers. 
 The wives of artisans and labourers had hitherto 
 looked to their own industry for the clothing of 
 themselves and their children, as the smaller con- 
 veniences of the slender household had been made 
 in moments of leisure by the labour of the husband. 
 The new methods of trading cheapened everything,
 
 FROM THE NEW GIBBON. 33 
 
 and especially clothing, to a price within the com- 
 pass of the poorest ; but in doing so it rudely broke 
 the tie which bound the lower classes to their homes. 
 The wife, who had been wont to pass the evening 
 in the manufacture of garments for her children, 
 now bought them at some great emporium ; and, 
 emancipated at once from the necessity of work 
 and the practice of frugality, devoted the evenings 
 to idle gossip or empty frivolity. On her trivial 
 excursions she would be accompanied by her young 
 children, which exposed their delicate immaturity to 
 cold at the hours when it should have been fortified 
 by sleep. The husband and father, no longer find- 
 ing in his home the companionship craved by his 
 brief hours of relaxation, sought it with better suc- 
 cess at one of the gaudy public-houses, whose lights 
 at the corner of every street attested the vices and 
 the misfortunes of the poor. The happy home of 
 the British plebeian passed from a reality to a pro- 
 verb and from a proverb to a fable, and the fair 
 picture of the past gave place to a blur of drunken- 
 ness, indolence, and disease. 
 
 The prevailing deterioration, which did not over- 
 look the lowest, fastened greedily upon the highest 
 ranks of the population. The Court, as a standard 
 of polite manners, had almost ceased to exist. The 
 retired life of the venerable Victoria during her later 
 years left the leadership of fashion vacant, and the 
 landed nobility was too impoverished, as well as too 
 proud, to struggle for the vicegerency. The field 
 of so-called society was left open to any adventurer 
 with the effrontery to usurp it. Thus arose an 
 
 c
 
 34 FROM THE NEW GIBBON. 
 
 inner circle of fashion, or, to call it by its contem- 
 porary and more appropriate name, of smartness, 
 based neither upon birth nor elegance of manners, 
 nor even invariably upon wealth, but rather upon 
 a bold and clever arrogance, and supported in the 
 general estimation mainly by brazen advertisement. 
 An aristocracy of birth may be unintelligent, but 
 it has usually fixed and sustained a high standard 
 of deportment and, within certain limitations, of 
 conduct. But a society like that of London, where 
 the loudest voice was the most eagerly listened to, 
 was immediately fatal to every canon of propriety 
 and good taste. In effrontery of demeanour, in 
 licence of speech, in gaudiness of dress, in the very 
 use of paints and cosmetics, the English women of 
 fashion drifted farther and farther from their fathers' 
 modest ideal of a lady ; till at length there was not 
 wanting the final scandal of women with honest 
 reputations studying and imitating, with a too easy 
 fidelity, the costumes and allurements of the most 
 notorious French courtesans. 
 
 The love of letters might have been expected to 
 oppose a barrier to the all-conquering vulgarity of 
 the age. It was diffused over every class of society ; 
 the commonest labourers had acquired a taste for 
 reading : Tennyson and Hall Caine were the theme of 
 dissertations in the mining centres of the north and 
 the pulpits of dissenting chapels. Never had books 
 been so abundantly published or so widely read; 
 the general average of literary merit had never been 
 so high; but this age of mediocrity passed away 
 without having produced a single writer of original
 
 FROM THE NEW GIBBON. 35 
 
 genius, or who excelled in the arts of elegant com- 
 position. With the vast increase of readers pro- 
 moted by the spread of elementary education, the 
 social standing, as the monetary rewards, of author- 
 ship increased in equal proportion; but this cause, 
 while it lowered the standard of taste, at once in- 
 flamed the cupidity and diverted the ambitions of 
 men of letters; and what once had been a single- 
 minded devotion degenerated into a trade, pursued 
 rather for its accidental emoluments than for its 
 intrinsic charm. The rates of pay of novelists were 
 quoted by the agents like the prices of stock on the 
 Exchange, or the chances of a horse-race ; and he 
 who, by economising his genius, might have been 
 a master, squandered his stores in profuse over-pro- 
 duction. With the plethora of books came a surfeit 
 of commentaries on work which juster canons would 
 have left to the revision of posterity. A cloud of 
 critics, of anthologists, and of log-rollers darkened 
 the face of letters, and upon the decline of genius 
 soon followed the corruption of taste. The last out- 
 rage upon the language of Shakespeare and Fielding 
 was a swarm of periodical leaflets concocted of illit- 
 erate novelettes, unmeaning statistics, American jests, 
 and infantile puzzles : they were consumed in pro- 
 digious quantities by the lower orders, and, by ruin- 
 ing the business of those who purveyed sincere if 
 not masterly compositions, contributed more than 
 any other cause to the debasement and final ex- 
 tinction of English letters. 
 
 With the proud spirit of empire sunk into the 
 narrow greed of the shareholder; with physical
 
 36 FROM THE NEW GIBBON. 
 
 force at its ebb, sports corrupted, and martial spirit 
 tamed; with domestic business so organised that it 
 stifled individuality and fostered dishonest miserliness 
 among traders, and invited the depravity of customers; 
 with elegant manners and polite letters a tasteless 
 echo of the half-forgotten past, the British Empire 
 entered upon the twentieth century under the 
 gloomiest auspices. To the acuter eyes of succeed- 
 ing generations that gloom is heightened by the 
 reflection that the mutterings of the coming earth- 
 quake were all unheard by contemporaries; that 
 they prided themselves on the greatness of their 
 dominion, and hugged the specious perfection of their 
 civilisation. Yet decline was already accomplished 
 and irremediable, and fall was but too surely im- 
 pending. The fair city still stood, but men were 
 wanting within it. Vulgarity, mediocrity, and cheap- 
 ness had warped and stunted the most generous 
 natures. The minds of all were reduced to the same 
 level, the high spirit of empire evaporated, and little 
 interests, with sordid emotions, inspired every souL 
 Civilisation had completed its work in the suppres- 
 sion of the individual, and the British, the most 
 virile of barbarians, the most forward and energetic 
 of mankind, were designated by their very virtues as 
 the first to experience the dire results of its consum- 
 mation. The diminutive stature of mankind was 
 daily sinking below the old standard; Britain was 
 indeed peopled by a race of pigmies, and the puny 
 breed awaited only the onset of the first crisis to 
 become the woeful patient of defeat and ruin. . . .
 
 37 
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 1 
 
 " ARE there many Bashi-Bazouks here ? " tremulously 
 asked an English nurse at Volo when the Turks 
 occupied the town. " Only myself and half-a-dozen 
 others," replied the correspondent. An upstanding, 
 clear -eyed, clear -skinned young Englishman in a 
 fez, to be sure, but also in a Norfolk jacket and cord 
 breeches was not the lady's conception of a Bashi- 
 Bazouk at all. She had never seen a Bashi-Bazouk ; 
 probably none of the Europeans who had been making 
 history in panic-stricken Volo had ever seen a Bashi- 
 Bazouk. But they were all quite sure that the 
 Turkish army was full of them, that they were 
 terrible fellows when roused, and that they generally 
 were roused. It was something of a revelation when 
 they learned that the only Bashi-Bazouks with the 
 army were English and American, French and 
 German correspondents most of them innocent 
 creatures enough. For Bashi-Bazouk means a civilian 
 who carries arms, and the only people answering to 
 that description were the correspondents. The mind 
 of the Turkish private does not comprehend the 
 nature and functions of a journalist. Therefore, 
 
 1 Blackwood's Magazine, July 1897.
 
 38 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 " Have you seen the English Bashi-Bazouks with 
 long whips ? " " Yes ; they have gone to eat with 
 the German Bashi-Bazouk with the black horse." So 
 spoke the more highly educated : the simpler souls 
 from remote Asia lumped us all together as " Bashi- 
 Bazouk Allamanni," under the impression that all men 
 out of uniform who wore boots must be Germans. 
 
 We were strange beasts to them. They used to 
 stare at us, if they came on us suddenly, with the 
 fixed, expanding eyes of a horse that is about to shy. 
 Yet, after all, the Turk's ignorance of Europe is a 
 small thing by the side of Europe's ignorance of the 
 Turk. The Turk's mind is at least a blank; the 
 European's is usually crammed with the grotesquest 
 errors. The late war, which otherwise has done no 
 good to anybody, has focussed a good many of these 
 queer delusions, and given an opportunity to certain 
 Europeans of bringing the eye of experience to bear 
 on them. Perhaps the experience is neither very 
 wide nor very deep. But considering the prodigies 
 of credulity and irrelevance which stand to the 
 credit of some correspondents who saw bits of the 
 Turkish army through field-glasses, and many leader- 
 writers who saw nothing at all, there is value even 
 in a pair of not over-sharp eyes and rather less than 
 the ordinary endowment of common-sense. I doubt 
 if any of us who were with the Turkish army knows 
 enough to write a trustworthy history of the war ; I 
 doubt if there ever was a war about which it was so 
 heart-breakingly impossible to be sure of a name or a 
 number or a date. But there never was a war of 
 which it was so easy either to be quite sure that the
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 39 
 
 popular impressions were ludicrously wrong, or to be 
 so confident in trying to correct them. 
 
 Because the Turks wore sloppy canvas slippers tied 
 on with string, instead of the ammunition boot, it was 
 predicted with the calmness of inevitable certainty 
 that they were a disorderly rabble who could never 
 stand a day before the civilised, disciplined, well- 
 equipped forces of Greece. Because the Turks 
 afterwards drove these disciplined forces like sheep 
 before them, it was immediately inferred that the 
 Turkish army was a magnificently organised machine, 
 like the German, of which civilised Europe must 
 take account henceforward. From that it was an 
 easy step to the conviction that it was mainly 
 officered by Germans. In spite of this civilising 
 influence, it appeared that the Turks committed 
 horrible atrocities wherever they went. And 
 because it was indisputable that the Turks had 
 burned the rafters of a few mud huts, and looted 
 a chicken or so for the pot, they were once more 
 a gang of disorganised ruffians, who were carrying on 
 war with a devilish cruelty that war had never seen 
 before. In April we were to admire the Greeks for 
 the victories they were just going to win ; in May we 
 were to weep for the awful sufferings they had under- 
 gone. Why we were not, contrariwise, to pity the 
 impending sufferings of the Turks in April and 
 acclaim their triumphs in May, nobody ever seems 
 to have explained. 
 
 The easiest to contradict of these nonsensical 
 stories is that which refers to the German officers. 
 Being the easiest dispelled, it is also the most in-
 
 40 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 structive. Grumbkow Pasha a colonel, I think, in 
 the Kaiser's artillery arrived at headquarters on 
 the third day of the war. He was called Inspector- 
 General of Artillery ; he held no executive command ; 
 he was never in a position to give an order. For 
 four days he sat on the top of the Meluna Pass and 
 gave advice, which, as a rule, was not followed. 
 After that he went down into the Plain and accom- 
 panied the force which occupied Larissa some four- 
 and-twenty hours after the last Greek soldier had 
 left it. He stayed in Larissa some two or three 
 days, during which time the Turkish army con- 
 sistently did nothing, and then he went back to 
 Constantinople. " It is better so," ' explained a 
 Turkish officer, with the charming simplicity of his 
 race ; " otherwise it might be said in Europe that 
 our successes were due to him." I smiled. For if 
 there was one man who had a right to be angry at 
 any connection of his name with Edhem Pasha's 
 operations, it was Grumbkow. To make him respon- 
 sible for the dilatory incapacity which first failed to 
 rout the Greeks at Mati, and then to crush them 
 utterly when they kindly routed themselves it 
 would be blasting Grumbkow's reputation as a 
 soldier for ever and ever. So the Inspector-General 
 of Artillery went away to receive an order set in 
 brilliants. And excepting him there was no single 
 German officer, other than the military attach^ and 
 two correspondents, with the Turkish army at any 
 single moment of the campaign, from the first action 
 to the last. 
 
 Believing what Greeks said is probably the main
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 41 
 
 cause of half the misapprehensions about the war. 
 It is difficult at first to disbelieve what you are told 
 by a whole army, especially when the army believes 
 it itself.. But until you train yourself to do this 
 until you train your mind into such a habit of 
 scepticism that it instinctively disbelieves everything 
 it hears you are quite unfitted to form a judgment 
 upon anything that happens in the Levant. 
 
 Lying is not confined to the Greeks. It is worst 
 with the Greeks and the Armenians, because they 
 are cleverest ; but it flourishes exceedingly among 
 Turks and Jews, and all Levantines. There are two 
 kinds of it. One is the ordinary lie, with intent to 
 deceive, such as we know it in the West. Of such 
 lies as this the regal seats are Athens and Constanti- 
 nople. Athens during the present war was by much 
 the worst, perhaps only because there was most need 
 of lying on the Greek side. Also the liars in the 
 War Office at Athens and at the Crown Prince's 
 headquarters found for a short intoxicating season 
 that the world was disposed to believe them. Con- 
 sequently the first few days of the war were a 
 carnival of fiction. During the week between the 
 battle of Meluna and the bolt from Larissa, the censor- 
 ship for very good and sufficient reasons was rather 
 rigid on the Turkish side : on the Greek side, it 
 appears, it suppressed news steadily during the whole 
 campaign. Consequently the War Office at Athens 
 had a quite clear field, and naturally it covered it 
 with Turkish corpses. Five thousand yesterday, 
 seven thousand to-day when all the time nothing 
 was happening but reconnaissances and desultory
 
 42 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 artillery duels, and shooting from behind stone-walls 
 across percipitous ravines. Since the war ended the 
 Greeks, curiously enough, have begun the same game 
 again. Seventeen thousand Turks, somebody has 
 telegraphed to a Eoman newspaper you cannot help 
 feeling that this was surely a case for the more 
 economical postal service fell at the battle of 
 Domokos; whereas in fact there can hardly have 
 been much more than that number under fire at all. 
 
 This sort of lie is self-contradicted by events. The 
 War Office at Athens got itself found out very early, 
 and nobody gave it a moment's credence again. But 
 there is a much subtler kind of lie, equally unworthy 
 of belief, but far more difficult to disbelieve. This 
 is the lie that is believed by the teller of it. Next 
 only to the concoction of lies the Levantine excels in 
 the swallowing of them. He would not believe a 
 story about money which affected his own pocket 
 unless he first had some reason to convince him that 
 it was true. But short of that he knows no distinc- 
 tion between truth and falsehood in themselves, such 
 as obtains in the colder North and West. With him 
 imagination takes the place of reason. He will 
 believe and spread the wildest fiction, if only it be 
 effective and well devised. If it is what he wishes 
 to believe, or what he believes you wish to believe, 
 that is quite enough to make him believe it. And 
 believe it for the moment he does quite sincerely. 
 
 The Turkish army, for example, contained dozens 
 of officers whom you could not set down as anything 
 but charming, civilised gentlemen yet not one so 
 Europeanised that you could believe a word he said.
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 43 
 
 Edhem Pasha himself told me with his own lips a 
 delightful fable about the flight of the Greeks from 
 Mati how that the Albanians could not be restrained 
 from singing war-songs as they marched ; how that a 
 Greek pope heard them from his belfry tower, and 
 dashed off to tell the Crown Prince that he was out- 
 flanked. He pointed to the very belfry, alive to 
 testify to the fact. I am convinced that he believed 
 the tale absolutely, and I am convinced that it was 
 absolutely false. But it was a pretty tale, and the 
 oriental imagination was quite defenceless against 
 it. If this was the attitude of the Commander- 
 in-Chief, you can imagine the state of mind of the 
 soldiers. They firmly believed that they were 
 fighting the whole force of Greece, Italy, England, 
 and France, and winning glorious victories over 
 their combined armies every day. The fall of each 
 Greek stronghold was announced to correspondents, 
 not officially, but gravely and by high officers, days 
 before the Turks came near it. Every morning my 
 dragoman came to me with stories of Greek disaster 
 a thousand Greeks, ten thousand Greeks, a million 
 Greeks, always mysteriously killed between sundown 
 and sunrise. " How do you know ? " " The soldiers 
 say so." " How do they know ? " " Of course they 
 know, the soldiers." " Did you hear any firing ? " 
 " No." " Then how could all the Greeks be killed ? " 
 " I don't know." " Do you believe it, then ? " Well, no ; 
 when he came to think over the probabilities of it, he 
 did not believe it. But without a Western Socrates to 
 supplant his imagination by reason, he would never 
 have dreamed of not believing it to the end of his days.
 
 44 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 In a war between nations of this cast of thought, 
 you can believe nothing but what you see. What 
 you are told may be true, but it is just as likely to 
 be false. If there is any reason for lying it is almost 
 certain to be false ; in any case neither Turk nor 
 Greek understands the Western craving for accuracy, 
 and neither will take any pains to satisfy it. Most 
 of the war was seen by Europeans, and of this some 
 day a trustworthy history may be written ; about 
 what was not so seen the truth will never be known. 
 Anybody who hungers for statistics may hunger till 
 he starves for them : he will never know the numbers 
 of the killed and wounded. The Turks could afford 
 to tell the truth if they knew it. But they do not. 
 I did indeed meet one general who had entered in his 
 pocket-book the losses of his division from day to day. 
 This was Hairi Pasha, who was stated by the Greeks 
 to have lost 7000 men in one fight at Domassi. His 
 whole force can hardly have been double that, and 
 the pocket-book showed ten killed and thirty-six 
 wounded for the whole week. Assuming that his 
 Excellency read out the figures correctly, I am 
 inclined to believe in this note-book, as I can see 
 no point in carrying about a note-book to deceive 
 yourself with. Moreover, it appears to be a hobby of 
 Hairi Pasha's not to lose men in action, as he ruined 
 Edhem's combinations at both Pharsala and Domokos, 
 rather than send his division under fire. But to 
 expect the Turkish army to know how many men it 
 lost is to ask grapes of thistles. You can make rough 
 guesses : for instance, after Domokos some 900 men 
 came into hospital ; so that, with killed and with the
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 45 
 
 wounded who never got into hospital, the loss was 
 perhaps between 1200 and 1500. On the same sort 
 of calculation, the Turkish losses in Thessaly for the 
 whole war were perhaps 7000 or 8000. But no 
 Turk would ever be likely to put it at anything so 
 unsensational. Most would probably answer with 
 vagueness but perfect truth, " It is not known." 
 Others, according as a small or large figure appealed 
 to their momentary sense of the fitness of things, 
 might say a hundred or a hundred thousand. Eeally 
 nobody knows. I suppose there is a sort of roll-call 
 somewhere, but I never saw any sign of the use of it 
 during the campaign. Even if there were, it would 
 be impossible within a matter of weeks to know 
 whether a man was dead, wounded, or only missing. 
 Nobody outside the General Staff knew the country ; 
 nobody knew the disposition of the forces. Men lost 
 their battalions by the score, and strolled over the 
 Thessalian Plain by the day looking for them. 
 " Have you seen my battalion ? " the question has 
 been put to me a dozen times in an hour's ride. Of 
 course my dragoman, or anybody else that might 
 understand Turkish, directed the straggler to the last 
 battalion he had met. Ten to one it was the wrong 
 one, in which case the wanderer started off on his 
 travels again ten to one in the wrong direction. 
 Therefore it was impossible to tell the strength of a 
 corps from day to day, impossible to estimate the 
 losses, impossible to estimate the strength of the 
 army. 
 
 In counting Greek losses the question is further 
 complicated by the intolerable national self-conceit.
 
 46 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 which seeks, now that danger is over, to minimise 
 losses, and also by the frequency of desertions. A 
 man disappeared. He may have been killed and he 
 may have been captured ; but it was at least as Likely 
 that he had stripped off his uniform and crept back 
 to his home in the back streets of Larissa or a village 
 off the main roads in the plain. His Jewish or 
 Mohammedan neighbours helped him to disappear for 
 the time : he was sent neither to Salonica as a 
 prisoner nor to Pharsala as a deserter. So that the 
 Greek losses are even less possible to arrive at than 
 the Turkish. A Turkish gunner would come in and 
 announce with modest certitude that his shrapnel had 
 that day accounted for 2000 of the enemy. About 
 the same moment a Greek staff officer was comment- 
 ing to the correspondents on the curious phenomenon 
 that so many hundred rounds of Turkish shrapnel 
 had not grazed a single Greek finger. You can only 
 be certain that the truth lies somewhere between the 
 two which yet leaves room for uncertainty enough. 
 It will be inferred from all this that those author- 
 ities who represented the Turkish army, on the 
 strength of its easy victories, as a formidable engine 
 of war and a menace to Christian Europe were as far 
 out as they were when they predicted its early 
 collapse on the strength of its beggarly appearance. 
 At Elassona it was a rabble, because the men lacked 
 boots which they would still have lacked had boots 
 grown on every tree. At Larissa it was an organisa- 
 tion that might have shamed Moltke, because in the 
 meantime the Greeks had run away from it. In 
 truth the Turkish army was neither the one nor the
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 47 
 
 other. It was just good enough to do just what it 
 did. It could drive the Greeks before it, but it could 
 not destroy them. It drove the Greeks because it 
 was an army of good men ; it failed to destroy them 
 because it was an army of bad officers. It would be 
 hard to exaggerate either the goodness or the badness. 
 The Turkish soldier is the raw material of the finest 
 fighting in the world ; his officer is the finished pro- 
 duct of one of the worst Governments in the world. 
 Nobody becomes a villain in a moment, but it must 
 be owned that the career of the Turkish officer leaves 
 him very little alternative in the long-run. He is 
 not, of course, the monster of barbarian cruelty which 
 British fancy often loves to paint him. In his 
 demeanour he is a much nearer approach to the 
 British idea of a gentleman than the Briton often 
 encounters outside his own country. Courteous, 
 dignified, often vain, but yet self-contained enough 
 not to be a swaggerer, he has the root of gentleman- 
 liness in him a secure self-confidence and self- 
 respect. You will not find in the Turk the jerky 
 self-assertiveness which to our eyes mars the behaviour 
 of officers even in the great European armies. He 
 can maintain his dignity without any duello or court 
 of honour. He is quite sure of himself. 
 
 You may divide the Turkish officer into two 
 clearly marked types each, I am afraid, with as 
 clearly marked faults. There is the Constantino- 
 politan the staff officer, the aide-de-camp, the officer 
 of the crack regiments quartered about the Yildiz ; 
 there is also the regimental officer from the prov- 
 inces. The first is usually a man of some means,
 
 48 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 occasionally of great wealth. He gets promotion 
 early. He reflects something of the cosmopolitanism 
 of Constantinople ; he is a man of refinement, talks 
 French or German or both, is quite emancipated 
 from fanatical Mohammedanism, drinks sweet cham- 
 pagne and neglects prayer-time, is a bit of a courtier. 
 And it is just this bit of a courtier that is his ruin. 
 He is insincere, an intriguer, not too scrupulous about 
 money. In the study of their profession officers of 
 this class, especially the younger, are theoretically 
 very well equipped. I saw a good deal of a little 
 lieutenant who spoke of " les lois de la tactique " 
 with the same hushed awe as of "sa Majeste 1 Im- 
 pe'riale." One of the laws, I remember, was that 
 you must never on any account attack the enemy 
 unless with at least double his force. But I am 
 afraid this well-educated and most amiable officer 
 had not the least beginning of the makings of a 
 real soldier. He had never been out of Constanti- 
 nople in his life before ; he was a wobbly and tact- 
 less horseman; he puffed heavily up-hill; he had 
 not the very vaguest idea of finding his way across 
 a country. He could ride along a road twice daily 
 for a week, and not recognise it when he struck it 
 in the middle. To do Mm justice, he could live 
 on next to nothing, though he was a glutton for 
 sleep. He never did anything on his own respon- 
 sibility. Although he had no duties to speak of, 
 being merely a loosely attached aide -de - camp to 
 nobody in particular, he preferred to sit about with 
 his friends in Larissa rather than go out to see the 
 battle of Pharsala. After the Turkish repulse at
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN TIIESSALY. 49 
 
 Velestino, when everybody expected another engage- 
 ment for the morrow, he went off with a relative 
 to a little picnic ten miles in rear. One day I 
 was riding out with him to Meluna, the Commander- 
 in-Chief being ahead, when there came down the 
 pass a pony with baggage which he thought he 
 recognised. " The Marshal is in retreat ; the Greeks 
 are advancing," he said; and without another word 
 whipped round and was well on his way down the 
 pass before I could persuade him even to ask whether 
 his fears were justified. He was a good-hearted boy, 
 and so far as I know perfectly honest and inde- 
 pendent. But he was quite helpless outside a town, 
 had no initiative, no power of command. I should 
 not like to say he was a coward, but he was cer- 
 tainly conspicuously lacking in dare-devilry and ad- 
 venture. And he was a very favourable specimen 
 of his class. 
 
 The provincial officer is entirely different. He is 
 often penniless, and he is often a subaltern at fifty. 
 But he is generally a brave man; he is inured to 
 a rough life ; he knows his men, and they know 
 him. So far he is better equipped for command. 
 Yet, rough as he is, he is generally self-indulgent ; 
 he is sluggish and utterly uneducated. He is left 
 a good deal to his own initiative in war-time; he 
 has no field-glass; he does not know in the least 
 what is going on; it is always odds that he will 
 lead his men into the wrong place, and then not 
 know how to get them out again. He is a straighter 
 man than the town-bred officer, and if he says he 
 is your friend he probably means that he would put 
 
 D
 
 50 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 himself to some little inconvenience to serve you; 
 most of the other kind would not willingly give 
 you a biscuit though you were starving. Neither 
 kind of officer is exceedingly disciplined the pro- 
 vincial hardly at all, but then he does not exact 
 much discipline from those under him. His men 
 do not salute him, and he does not care. He sees 
 that his orders are obeyed when he gives them ; but 
 he usually finds it less trouble to give no orders at 
 all, and let the company or the battalion command 
 itself. 
 
 Of course we know for a fact that there have been 
 German officers " reorganising " the Turkish army ; 
 but we also know at least the less ignorant of 
 us that they have been almost heartbroken from 
 first to last, because nobody ever took the least 
 notice of their recommendations. They have left 
 the Turkish army very much as they found it. The 
 infantry, for example, has not the rudiments of fire 
 discipline. You would have said the first step 
 towards Germanising them would have been to teach 
 them to fire volleys ; but I doubt if they fired a 
 single volley, otherwise than accidentally, during the 
 whole war. I doubt if they ever formed a firing- 
 line. Their favourite formation seemed to be a 
 kind of mixture of a skirmishing line and columns 
 of companies. Each company as it went under fire 
 spread out behind the last; and the men either fired 
 so high that their bullets went clear over the enemy 
 or so low that they lodged in their comrades' backs. 
 They would probably have been effective with the 
 bayonet, though I doubt if they were ever taught
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 51 
 
 its use. Only, though there were bayonet charges 
 at Meluna, the Greeks never waited to see what 
 they could do with cold steel. 
 
 Indeed, thinking it over, I wonder to myself how 
 there came to be any Greeks killed at all. The 
 artillery was good, no doubt, at the beginning of the 
 war ; but artillery practice may be very good and 
 yet hit nobody. According to accounts from the 
 Greek side, this was very much what happened. 
 The cavalry that hobgoblin cavalry, sticking to the 
 backs of the scuttling Greeks seems to have done 
 singularly little for the noise it made. The swarms 
 of fierce troopers that everybody was talking about 
 let the Greeks escape from Larissa, from Pharsala, 
 and from Domokos. But why ? For the very 
 simple reason that there were no swarms of fierce 
 troopers. On their own showing the Turks never 
 had more than four regiments of 1000 sabres apiece, 
 and even this was an enormous exaggeration. The 
 average strength of a squadron was thirty to forty 
 horses, and I never saw more than ten squadrons 
 together. With deductions for patrols, escorts, and 
 orderlies, I greatly doubt if the Turks ever had more 
 than 500 effective cavalry. Such as it was, the 
 cavalry went to Velestino. And there an aide-de- 
 camp of the Sultan and son of Ghazi Mukhtar Pasha 
 found it somewhere about the field, and suggested 
 a charge. He was not in command of the cavalry, 
 nor of anything else, but as he had studied in Ger- 
 many and ought to have known better, the cavalry 
 obeyed him and charged. It charged in column 
 up-hill, against earthworks in front and flank. It
 
 52 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 was as desperate a piece of heroism as Balaklava 
 and even more wickedly useless. The loss in 
 men was not very heavy there were not very many 
 men to lose but scores of horses were put out of 
 action, and after Velestino the cavalry was even less 
 terrible than before. As the Greeks, however, while 
 asserting that they had annihilated it, continued to 
 be as much afraid of it as ever, the loss had little 
 effect on the war. 
 
 With the Turkish infantry almost untrained and 
 the artillery not much better, the cavalry almost 
 non-existent and the engineers quite so, it seems a 
 wonder indeed that they walked across Thessaly 
 in triumph. But the Turkish soldier is such a 
 marvel of strength and endurance that he could 
 do sapper's work as well as his own and be none 
 the worse for it. He also did the ordnance and 
 transport and ambulance work and did it wonder- 
 fully well, considering that it was none of his 
 business. As far as I could find out, there was 
 no member of the General Staff responsible for 
 the transport. When ammunition or biscuit or 
 fodder was wanted, a battalion of infantry was 
 sent off with a train of pack -ponies and brought 
 it in. Who found out that it was wanted, who 
 decided who should fetch it, whence and whither, 
 I could find no single officer who knew ; yet it 
 always came. Elassona was distant seventy to eighty 
 miles from its base on the Salonica-Monastir rail- 
 way: at first everything had to be brought up on 
 pack-saddles; yet it always came. Later, both in 
 Macedonia and Thessaly, it was possible to replace
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 53 
 
 ponies and infantry battalions by carts and Chris- 
 tians. But at first the transport, though wonder- 
 fully efficient in its wonderful way, was a serious 
 drain on the fighting force of the army. 
 
 Why, then, were the Turks victorious ? Were 
 their defects of training and organisation redeemed 
 by any brilliant strategical skill ? That least of 
 all. " I think Mushir Pasha nice chap," said my 
 dragoman to me in an expansive moment, and so 
 indeed he was dignified, kindly, humorous, a com- 
 plete and perfect gentleman. But that does not 
 make a great general. It is, indeed, difficult to 
 judge of Edhem Pasha's performance without the 
 risk of injustice. We were told by belated English 
 newspapers that the Sultan had given him a free 
 hand. Yet it is certain that he never went for- 
 ward faster than the field - telegraph, of which the 
 other end was in the Yildiz. It may be that in 
 Turkey, where personal government is really per- 
 sonal and you will do well not to forget it, a 
 free hand is not quite so free as it is elsewhere. 
 As a general Edhem gave the impression of being 
 sound and safe, but very, very slow. Perhaps it 
 would be kindest to hold that his soundness was 
 all his own, and that when he was slow the tele- 
 graph-line from the Yildiz was tugging at his coat- 
 tails. But, after all, Edhem is a Turk, and the 
 Turk has never been distinguished for celerity in 
 the hour of victory. His pace in pursuit has usually 
 been much the same as his pace in retreat, which 
 is not hurried. Whether it be laid to Edhem's 
 charge or the Sultan's, it is certain that a pro-
 
 64 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 digious deal of time was wasted in the campaign, 
 and that it was this waste of time which saved 
 the Greek army again and again. After Meluna 
 a whole day was lost before sending down the 
 cavalry to reconnoitre, although they had taken no 
 part in the battle and were perfectly fresh. After 
 that, at the so-called battle of Mati, the attack 
 was delayed until Hamdi Pasha's division could 
 come up from Karya and outflank the Greek right. 
 Hamdi delayed, and Edhem waited: a partial at- 
 tack was delivered on April 23rd upon the Greek 
 right in the afternoon, and they bolted unpursued in 
 the night. Had the attack been made in the morn- 
 ing, the Crown Prince's army would have been smashed 
 to pieces by dark. Even the next day there was 
 no pursuit: Larissa was not occupied till the 25th, 
 and even after that there was no pursuit. Torpor 
 ensued. On May 1st Nairn Pasha fought the un- 
 successful action of Velestino. He fought against 
 orders, and with a force far too weak for his 
 purpose; but for all that the stronger force should 
 have been there of course it arrived next morning 
 and with it orders to keep the Greeks on the 
 run. By this time the panic of the Greeks had 
 been checked, and they had talked themselves into 
 self-confidence again. Yet it was not till May 5th 
 that Edhem marched out and beat the Greeks at 
 Pharsala. Here once more defeat should have been 
 rout : that it was not so was due to the incom- 
 petence of Hairi Pasha, who should have cut the 
 road to Domokos, and to the incompetence of Edhem 
 Pasha, who did not get his orders obeyed. The
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 55 
 
 Greeks were not even pursued. Upon Pharsala fol- 
 lowed inevitably the occupation of Velestino and 
 Volo. But after that from the 8th to the 17th 
 of May Edhem did nothing. Bairam was the 
 excuse ; but masters of war take no account of 
 religious festivals, and even Bairam was but four 
 days out of nine. The Greeks were allowed to rest 
 and entrench themselves comfortably, and measure 
 off their ranges at Domokos as they had done at 
 Pharsala. At Domokos the Turks paid with the 
 heaviest day's loss of the war for this and for re- 
 newed incompetence on the part of their generals. 
 Once more Edhem tried flanking and cutting the 
 retreat ; once more his generals were late, and lazy, 
 and insubordinate ; and once more he sat still and 
 allowed himself to be disobeyed. There was only 
 one energetic pursuing movement in the whole war, 
 and that was on the last day of it, when Seyfoullah 
 Pasha attacked the Greek rear-guard in the descent 
 of the Furka Pass. But for the armistice the Turk- 
 ish cavalry would that day at last have got at the 
 Greeks retreating on the level, with four hours 
 of good daylight before them. And that action was 
 fought without the knowledge and against the wishes 
 of Edhem Pasha. 
 
 Why, then, once more, were the Turks victorious ? 
 If it was not training, nor organisation, nor general- 
 ship, what was it ? Simply this : that the Turk 
 is a brave man, while the Greek is otherwise. The 
 Turkish soldier may be badly trained and badly 
 organised and badly led; he remains a splendid 
 soldier. He loves war, and he has a natural turn
 
 66 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 for it. He can bear without a murmur privations 
 which would ki]l most Europeans without even 
 a suspicion that they are hardships at all. He 
 has no more of the Continental smartness than 
 his officers have of the Continental code of honour ; 
 but he can keep at his shambling three miles an 
 hour, in heavy marching order, for ever. He can 
 march all day and fight all night, and be ready 
 for a turn at road-making in the morning. He 
 can receive a bullet through the belly or ripping 
 up his arm from wrist to elbow ; he can He so 
 in the sun all day, ride twenty miles on a pack- 
 saddle into hospital, and when he gets there the 
 difficulty is not so much to cure him as to persuade 
 him that it is worth while getting his clothes off. 
 Life in rural Turkey is poor enough and insecure 
 enough to prevent him from overvaluing it ; there- 
 fore he will unflinchingly face fire which more 
 civilised men would shrink from. And though 
 the Turk as opposed, for instance, to the Kurd 
 and the Arab is not fanatical, he still retains 
 sufficient inborn faith in the Prophet and the Koran 
 to believe that if he is shot by the infidel he will 
 sleep that night in the arms of Houris in Paradise. 
 
 The very faults of the Turk work together to 
 the advantage of his soldierliness. If he is the 
 lord of subject populations which is curiously 
 construed into a crime in him by the owners 
 of India and South Africa he draws therefrom 
 the consciousness of superiority which makes it 
 impossible for him to run from a Greek. He may 
 retreat, as at Velestino; but he does it very un-
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 57 
 
 willingly, very slowly and defiantly, only praying 
 that the despised enemy may venture down into 
 the plain and follow. If the Turk is uncivilised, 
 he reaps the compensation of it in his untiring body 
 and his unshaking nerves. If he is dull and un- 
 intelligent, he is just for that reason the best 
 disciplined soldier in the world. 
 
 The best disciplined soldier in the world ! It 
 seems a startling eulogy to select for the Turk of 
 all men the unspeakable Turk ! But it is abso- 
 lutely true. He is not excitable nor argumentative ; 
 he is accustomed to the feeling of superiority, and 
 therefore less liable than other men to become 
 intoxicated with victory or insubordinate in defeat. 
 Consequently he will always obey his officers when 
 they tell him not to burn or plunder. If they 
 do not tell him, he is but a man and a soldier 
 in the enemy's country; he will take anything 
 he may have need of, or indeed anything he thinks 
 he can sell. Wanton damage, beyond this, the 
 real Turk takes li ttle pleasure in ; his grave and 
 self-contained nature does not break out in pro- 
 miscuous smashing and bonfiring like that of the 
 Albanian and of certain Europeans. In the late 
 war it was to the interest of the Turks to behave 
 with humanity, and they did it. It would be 
 unjust to put their moderation and discipline on 
 this ground alone. Most of the officers, so far 
 as I could judge, are as humane, though not as 
 sensitive, as most Europeans; and the common 
 soldier, though he despises the Greek, cherishes 
 no active hostility against the race, as he has
 
 58 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 lately come to do against the Armenian. But 
 leaving humanity aside, it was the plain and vital 
 interest of the Turk to be on his best behaviour 
 during the Thessalian campaign. He had cor- 
 respondents with him who would tell the world 
 if he behaved well, and he knew that he had 
 enemies who would say he behaved badly what- 
 ever he did. There was an impression mistaken 
 as it turns out, at least so far as regards Britain 
 that he would reap the benefit of good conduct 
 when Europe came to have its say in the terms 
 of peace. There was every inducement to avoid 
 pillage and cruelty; but without the discipline of 
 the common Turk these inducements would have 
 appealed to the higher officers in vain. 
 
 But were pillage and cruelty avoided ? We 
 have been told that they were not. The press 
 has been drenched with the usual stories of Turkish 
 outrage. "We have been told that the corre- 
 spondents with the Turks were allowed to send 
 no word but what was favourable to the Turks. 
 Wait till they come home unmuzzled, said the 
 friends of Greece, and then you will hear ! For 
 all this outcry, I have not yet heard that any 
 European correspondent who went through the 
 campaign with Edhem Pasha's army has felt it 
 necessary to improve the occasion of his un- 
 muzzling by any such stories of Turkish atrocity 
 as seem to have been promised to an awaiting 
 world. The iniquity of the censorship has not 
 yet been laid bare. It is quite true that on the 
 one occasion when I thought it necessary to allude
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 59 
 
 to the want of discipline of certain Albanian ir- 
 regulars, the despatch was returned, with that 
 passage neatly scored out in blue pencil. But 
 after all, a censorship is only human, and that, 
 among other things, is what it is for. No other 
 military censorship in the world would have let 
 the thing pass, and only with the Turkish censor- 
 ship the unorganised, happy-go-lucky, apologetic 
 Turkish censorship would it have been worth 
 while to try it. Probably the censor or, more 
 accurately, the officer who to his distraction was 
 pitched upon as censor for the day would have 
 crossed out any charges of wholesale incendiarism 
 whenever they were made. But they were not 
 made, because they were not called for. 
 
 The Turkish atrocities may be inquired into 
 under three heads burning, pillage, and worse. 
 Burning there undoubtedly was; and though the 
 sum-total of damage done amounted to wonderfully 
 little, it was more irritating in proportion than 
 any other kind of disorder, because there was no 
 possible profit in it. But to allege, as I under- 
 stand was done, that the Turks were wantonly 
 burning every village they set foot in, is the grossest 
 of slanders. Going carefully over the map, this 
 is the list of the damage I saw. At Karadere 
 (the Greek Ligaria), at the foot of the Meluna 
 Pass, one or two houses were burned out on the 
 day after the village was occupied. I thought 
 at the time it was done for a military signal ; 
 but I doubt whether this was so. The village of 
 Kazaklar, half-way between Meluna and Larissa,
 
 60 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 was pretty well burned out. When this was done 
 I do not know, as I only saw it in returning. I 
 do not think it was on fire at any time before 
 the taking of Larissa. Neither in Tyrnavos on 
 the day after its capture, nor in Larissa on the 
 day of its capture, was a single house on fire. I 
 saw only one fire in Larissa during the whole war. 
 This was said to be an accident, and I am inclined to 
 believe it. On the other hand, the village of Deliler 
 was almost wholly destroyed on the night of the fight 
 there whether set afire by shells, by the entering 
 Turks or the retreating Greeks, I do not know : 
 nobody knows on such occasions. After the taking 
 of Larissa, following the course of the fighting, the 
 village in front of Velestino Kizomylos it appears 
 to be called was very badly knocked about : as the 
 place was occupied by the Greeks, taken by the 
 Turks, reoccupied by Greek outposts, and then once 
 more occupied by the Turks, the damage was not 
 unnatural. In Velestino itself about one house in 
 four or five was damaged. About Pharsala there 
 were fires after the battle in five villages, Tatari, 
 Barakli, Sechi, Pasia Magula, and Vasili, but none 
 of them suffered at all severely except the last two. 
 In Pharsala itself there have been fires in, I should 
 say, about one house in ten: when this was done 
 I cannot say, as I cannot remember seeing any burn- 
 ing during the ten days I was within sight of the 
 place. Southwards towards Domokos I saw a small 
 fire in Hadji Amar as the troops passed through it to 
 the attack of the Greek position. During the same 
 fight huts were burned in Krol-Oba and Purnari.
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 61 
 
 The Turks said that this had been done by the 
 Greeks as they evacuated, and certainly they were 
 both ablaze an hour or more before the first Turks 
 entered them. In Domokos itself, which probably 
 suffered more severely than any other place of any 
 size, the example of incendiarism was unquestionably 
 set by the Greeks. Flames were rising from the 
 height before dawn, at three or four in the morning. 
 The evacuation, it seems, only began at midnight, 
 and I have heard since that an English correspondent, 
 who stayed some hours behind the army, saw with 
 his own eyes Greek irregulars setting fire to houses. 
 It must be admitted that when the Albanian ir- 
 regulars arrived they followed the example with zeal. 
 I believe the Greeks had begun the conflagration 
 with an old mosque at any rate there was a 
 charred minaret beside it, and the Turks believed 
 there had been sacrilege. About a third of Domokos 
 was burned out 
 
 The list looks a fairly long one, but the actual 
 damage done was wonderfully small. The ordinary 
 Thessalian village is mainly composed of mud huts, 
 and mud does not burn ; possibly the fire even does 
 the sun-dried bricks good. When a village of this 
 kind is burned, it simply means the loss of its lath 
 rafters and the breaking of its tiles not a ruinous 
 loss even to a peasant. More pretentious buildings, 
 as at Velestino and Domokos, usually only lost their 
 floors and roofs : the light dry wood burned so 
 quickly that in most cases the fire was out before 
 the walls fell in. Of course the smallness of the loss 
 makes no difference to the guilt if we are to speak
 
 62 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 in ridiculous exaggerations of the Turkish army. 
 It is more pertinent to this point that, except 
 apparently Kazaklar, no single village that I know of 
 suffered by fire except during or immediately after a 
 fight. Turkish troops passed through and halted at 
 dozens of villages in Thessaly, and left everything 
 standing. Without multiplying outlandish names, 
 there are eight along the road from Larissa to 
 Velestino which gave no sign of having been touched 
 as late as May 9th. Even what fires there were 
 were partly accidental : a soldier cooked his coffee 
 near a dry thorn-hedge, and when he went away the 
 blazing hedge spread to the nearest roof. Perhaps 
 all this is enough to show that the accusations of 
 incendiarism have .been grossly, as bad as wilfully, 
 overstated. A German correspondent who had been 
 through the Franco-German war told me that the 
 Turks burned beyond comparison less than the 
 Germans. 
 
 As for looting, there was next to none of it, for 
 the very sufficient reason that there was next to 
 nothing to loot. People talk vaguely of living on 
 the enemy's country ; but when there is nothing left 
 in the enemy's country except green corn and young 
 vines it is not easy, with the best will in the world, 
 to see how it is to be done. A good deal of the 
 corn was cut for fodder, a very few cattle and sheep 
 were found and eaten, and likewise a few fowls. I 
 presume the owners were not paid for this, as the 
 owners had disappeared. But how such looting as 
 this is to be prevented in war-time those who cry 
 out against pillage have not explained. You might
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 63 
 
 as well expect cavalry to " ware wheat " in a charge. 
 Of loot, other than food, there was hardly any on the 
 market at all. I looted a reel of cotton myself in 
 Pharsala, but I saw nothing more valuable about the 
 place. The only two towns where there was any 
 possibility of plunder were Larissa and Volo, and 
 both were practically untouched. " Practically un- 
 touched," of course, does not mean that no soldier 
 took what was not his. Every soldier, I do not 
 doubt, was as anxious to pick up something worth a 
 few piastres as any other soldier of any other nation 
 would have been in the like case. I do not say that 
 nothing was stolen ; on the contrary, at Larissa the 
 number of things that disappeared would probably 
 mount up to a good deal. Kifles and bayonets, fuse- 
 boxes, saddles, and camp-beds, of course, do not 
 count : they were military stores ; and if anybody 
 has a right to complain that they sometimes came 
 into the hands of European correspondents, it is the 
 Sultan. I do not say there were not other things 
 looted. But I do say, first, that the looting was 
 relatively very little in Larissa, and in Volo, so far as 
 I saw on the day of capture, none at all ; and, second, 
 that every possible effort was made to check what 
 looting there was. For the first point, I suppose 
 there were jewellers' shops, curiosity shops, and the 
 like, in Larissa ; there must have been jewels and 
 other easily concealed, easily portable objects of some 
 value in the possession of inhabitants of the town. 
 And I am quite confident that if any such had been 
 on the market my most efficient dragoman would 
 have known it, and suggested a deal. But there was
 
 64 WIIAT HAPPENED IN TIIESSALY. 
 
 absolutely nothing of the sort for sale, with the one 
 exception of a cheap reliquary, probably dropped by 
 its owner. Very likely most of the inhabitants of 
 Larissa took their valuables away with them ; indeed 
 I saw several families bringing them back again. 
 But I also chanced to go into one or two houses 
 which had been left almost untouched by the owners, 
 and remained so. In any case, wherever the wealth 
 of Larissa went, it was not into the pockets of the 
 Turks. 
 
 When the Turks entered the town they placed 
 sentinels at every corner, and at all the houses 
 that looked likely to invite plunder. Many of the 
 principal shops had already been ripped open 
 and gutted by the Greek irregulars and liberated 
 convicts, whose cartridge-cases littered the streets. 
 Two or three days afterwards a swarm of Albanian 
 irregulars arrived, and commenced operations by 
 smashing in and clearing out some shops in the 
 main streets. This ought to have been foreseen, 
 no doubt, but at least the authorities guarded 
 against a repetition of it: while the Arnauts were 
 in the town there was a sentinel to every shop. 
 It was not possible to place a sentinel at every 
 house in the town, and I daresay a good many 
 were broken into, if you can use the word of 
 houses left wide open inviting entry. But I 
 think any fair judge who saw the Turkish officers 
 will admit that they did their best to stop such 
 things. Offenders were never let go unpunished: 
 several were imprisoned, some were flogged, more 
 were informally slashed across the face with riding-
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 65 
 
 whips after the Turkish manner. Seyfoullah Pasha, 
 who was Governor, organised a civil police to help 
 keep order, out of the Mussulman, Jewish, and 
 Christian inhabitants. I regret to say that one 
 of the first consequences was that a Christian was 
 discovered by the Governor himself in the attempt 
 to take up a fellow - Christian's bed and walk. It 
 was not the best testimony to the prudence of 
 the mixed gendarmery system, but I can bear 
 personal witness to the energy with which Sey- 
 foullah thrashed the mixed gendarme. Night and 
 day this excellent officer was always about the 
 streets, and there were others hardly less ener- 
 getic. In a word, the will to loot without 
 violence was present with the Turk, as with all 
 soldiers : it was repressed by the officers, not 
 entirely, but probably with as much success as 
 has ever been seen with any conquering army in 
 the world. 
 
 Beyond such military peccadilloes as a little 
 burning and loot, the Turks committed no outrage 
 worth mentioning at all. I saw one dead peasant, 
 and heard of one other. I cannot say that these 
 were all that died: no one man could see every- 
 thing that was done. But when a man goes 
 through a campaign, wandering about pretty much 
 as he likes, he can be sure that if there had 
 been much killing of peasants he would have seen 
 more of it. Moreover, it must be remembered 
 that the Greek Government had armed large 
 numbers of peasants, who followed their army 
 as irregulars : it is possible that the dead men
 
 66 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 
 
 had been playing the franc-tireur. I saw several 
 disarmed peasants among the prisoners; and they 
 were not shot, when taken, as they would have 
 been in the West, but of course they would have 
 been killed if they were encountered under arms. 
 I never saw a Turkish soldier strike or ill - use a 
 Greek in town or country. As for the ravishings 
 and tortures of which we hear so much when 
 there are no Europeans to corroborate or deny 
 them, I saw absolutely no trace of such. There 
 were not many women left in the Greek villages, 
 but there were some ; there were also Jewish 
 women in Larissa, and droves of gipsies hung 
 round the army on its march. I heard of no 
 incivility offered to any of these. Again, this 
 does not prove that there was no incivility; but 
 I think it does prove that there cannot have 
 been much. 
 
 Taking it all together, I am inclined to doubt 
 very much whether any army in an enemy's 
 country ever came nearer to irreproachability of 
 discipline than the Turks in Thessaly. Judged 
 by the laws of war set up by the most civilised 
 nations in time of peace, it is probable that a 
 pretty long list of misdemeanours might be made 
 out against them. But then those laws were 
 never rigidly observed by any army that I ever 
 heard of. For the most part the breaches of 
 them are tacitly and very properly condoned by 
 those who inform the stay-at-home public as to 
 the progress of wars. There is nothing to be 
 gained by informing the public that men who
 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN THESSALY. 67 
 
 are patterns of virtue and propriety in peace, 
 tend towards raw savagery in war ; the public 
 accordingly is not informed. As long as war 
 lasts men will be different in war from their 
 other selves in peace. This may not be to war's 
 credit; but there are quite enough excellent people 
 working ineffectively for the abolition of war 
 already to make it unnecessary to insist on this 
 additional argument. Unless it had been Turks 
 who were engaged in this late campaign, we 
 should not have heard a word of excesses. Be- 
 cause they were Turks there seems to have grown 
 up a new theory concerning this war to wit, 
 that a nation which engages in war and is beaten 
 has a right to complain when it suffers any in- 
 convenience that is not with it in time of peace. 
 How universal still is the reign of cant in this 
 country may be judged from some of the argu- 
 ments of those who hold this new-fangled theory. 
 One writer speaks of " looting " Greek cartridges 
 and cannon. Others cry out because the Greeks 
 are like to lose the harvest of Thessaly, as if war 
 were a kind of hunt expected to bear in mind 
 the interests of the farmer. We shall next hear 
 of war as a football-match, with umpires to blow 
 a whistle if anybody steals an egg, and award 
 the other side a penalty cannon-shot. One au- 
 thority has already gone so far as to find it 
 merest justice that the pecuniary losses of the 
 Greeks should be put on the other side against 
 the war indemnity. That the conquerors should 
 be presented with the bill of the conquered
 
 68 WHAT HAPPENED IN TUESSALY. 
 
 thereby almost inevitably finding a heavy balance 
 against themselves is indeed a new view of the 
 ethics of war, and it is small wonder that the 
 Greeks should loot their own towns and burn 
 their own villages if it is to be the law of 
 Europe. 
 
 To sum up this rambling commentary on what 
 happened in Thessaly, it comes to little enough. 
 It has not provided the world with any unex- 
 pected truths either about the art of war or 
 about the Eastern question. A badly led army 
 which will stand up to be shot at beats a badly 
 led army which will not : that we could have 
 predicted. The Turkish army is not a negligible 
 quantity, which nobody not utterly ignorant and 
 crack - brained ever thought it was ; yet neither 
 is it that prodigy of modern science and organi- 
 sation which some people rashly took it for on 
 the strength of its easy successes. The Turk is 
 very much what he was before a rude, strong, 
 good-humoured, unrefined, half-barbarian man, who 
 can endure, and fight, and obey orders. The 
 Greek is what he was a dishonest, intelligent, 
 chicken - hearted talker, whom nothing apparently 
 will deprive of Britain's sympathy as long as he 
 quotes Byron and lives in the land of Alcibiades. 
 And neither Turk nor Greek can speak the truth ; 
 which makes it the more deplorable that so few 
 Europeans are found to speak the truth about them.
 
 69 
 
 THE MONOTYPE. 1 
 
 IT is so complete and provident, foreseeing every 
 difficulty and surmounting it, aware of every advan- 
 tage and seizing it, that you can hardly help feeling 
 it to be a portent, inexplicable, born out of season, 
 without father or mother, or beginning of days. 
 
 Yet, though its inventor is a statistician, who 
 came upon it not through the study of printing, 
 but in the devising of calculating machines, the 
 monotype, like every seeming prodigy, is the issue 
 of a long development, the offspring of a hundred 
 ancestors. Eevolution is the child of evolution in 
 printing as everywhere else. 
 
 The machine looks modest, and, to anybody 
 capable of understanding machines, very simple. It 
 stands perhaps 4 feet high, it is 3 feet 8 inches 
 long by 3 feet broad, and it weighs only 900 Ib. 
 It requires very little power to drive it. The 
 buzz of its driving-belt and the click, click of the 
 work it is doing hardly makes itself heard at your 
 ear above the clatter of Leadenhall Street. Alto- 
 gether it is one of the least ostentatious machines 
 
 1 New Review, November 1897.
 
 70 THE MONOTYPE. 
 
 that ever made a revolution. But if you look at 
 it closer and realise what it is doing, that machine 
 is one of the greatest marvels of all the marvellous 
 history of machinery, the crown of over five cen- 
 turies' development in the most vital of all civil- 
 ising arts. The machine is casting and setting 
 type all by itself setting it, too, more regularly, 
 more cleanly, more cheaply, and more untiringly 
 than written words have ever been set before. 
 
 Click, click, click; and with each click a fire- 
 new, shining letter slides out into its place in a 
 line of print. Click, click, click, till a line is fin- 
 ished ; the line slides up into its place in a column, 
 and the machine, before you have finished watching 
 the line fall in, has pushed out nearly half the 
 next. Nobody is touching it nobody telling it 
 what to say. It just goes on clicking out words 
 and words, thoughts and thoughts. It is the most 
 human of all machines and the most inhuman. 
 It is human in its seemingly self - suggested in- 
 telligence, inhuman in its deliberate yet unresting 
 precision. Unprompted and unchecked, it might 
 be clicking out life - giving truth or devilish cor- 
 ruption, and clicking it out forever. 
 
 Its full name is the Lanston monotype machine; 
 its familiars call it briefly the monotype. It is 
 almost a relief so much you are hypnotised by 
 the apparent spontaneity of the thing to learn 
 that it is not saying just what it likes ; that it 
 is, after all, like other machines, man's servant. 
 There is a paper roll being unwound and re-wound 
 on the top of it, punched with holes in various
 
 THE MONOTYPE. 71 
 
 positions like the drum of a musical box, which 
 is telling it what to say. There is a kind of tank 
 where from time to time it must be fed with 
 metal to cast its types from. But within these 
 limitations its activity is only bounded by the 
 time required for each type to cool; give it words 
 to set and metal to set them with, and it will 
 go on unaided till you like to stop it. 
 
 To get a vague idea of its working you must 
 begin with the perforated roll. There is a keen- 
 faced, clean-shaven young man in spectacles working 
 what appears to be a typewriter in one corner 
 of the room : that is the captain of the setting 
 machine, and the man is the captain of that. 
 The two parts make really one machine, and yet 
 the one is perfectly independent in place or tune 
 of the other. 
 
 The machine's master begins by setting an index : 
 the index fixes the length of the line required. 
 Then he begins playing on the keys as with a 
 typewriter; only each key, instead of writing a 
 letter, punches two round holes in the roll. So 
 he taps letter after letter till he has punched a 
 word ; then he taps a space and on to the next 
 word. Presently, when he is coming to the end 
 of a line, a bell rings. You notice a semi-circular 
 dial, just above the bank of keys, with a pointer 
 travelling across it. The bell means this: the line 
 has now progressed so far that another syllable 
 would fill it too full. You must now "justify," 
 as printers call it that is, equalise the space be- 
 tween the words of the line. The monotype's
 
 72 THE MONOTYPE. 
 
 method of doing this is, perhaps, the most beauti- 
 ful of all its beauties. There is a registering scale 
 which has been following all the movements of 
 the operator: it now reveals on the dial, first, 
 how much space is over, to be divided equally 
 among the spaces between the words; and second, 
 the number of spaces between the words among 
 which the residuary space is to be divided. Say 
 there is one -tenth of an inch over and there are 
 ten spaces : an addition of one - hundredth of an 
 inch to each will justify the line. To do such a 
 thing by hand means time and distraction of atten- 
 tion, and probably inaccuracy after all ; to the mono- 
 type it is child's play. The operator simply taps 
 a key which punches yet another hole in the rib- 
 bon. When the ribbon comes to control the setting 
 machine, that hole ensures that the word -spaces 
 shall be just one - hundredth above normal size, 
 and the line will be justified with absolute mathe- 
 matical exactness. When the ribbon is punched full 
 it is lifted off the key -board and fixed on to the 
 casting and setting machine. The holes in it cor- 
 respond mathematically with a set of dies com- 
 prising all the characters and symbols used in 
 type-setting. These are carried in a case mounted 
 on a compound slide, the parts of which move at 
 right angles. Air is shot through these holes by 
 a pneumatic tube, and the force brings the die 
 required under a jet of molten metal. The metal 
 is forced into the mould, the type is cast and 
 shot out into the galley. The whole thing comes 
 out hind part before and upside down; the justi-
 
 THE MONOTYPE. 73 
 
 fying holes at the ends of each Hue are thus the 
 first to come under the observation of the machine, 
 which casts all the space -types of the lines accord- 
 ingly. If there is a mistake as to the length of 
 the line, the monotype refuses. It stops dead; the 
 minder puts the error right, and the sagacious 
 creature starts on again. When the whole galley 
 is set, a proof is pulled and corrected in the or- 
 dinary way ; each type is an individual, so there 
 is no need of re -casting. When the type is done 
 with it can either be retained for use, being every 
 bit as good as foundry type, or melted up and 
 used over again. By reason of its facilities for 
 changing the measure of lines, and its accuracy of 
 justification, the monotype can set tabular matter 
 and over -run illustrations better than this can be 
 done by hand. It is the only machine which can 
 make full use of capitals and italics as supplied 
 in a full fount of type. Other machines can pro- 
 duce but 100 characters with a hundred different 
 movements : it can produce 225 with thirty. To 
 cut technicalities, the monotype can do everything 
 that printing can ask. It is the child of evolution. 
 Since very early in the century machinery has fought 
 the compositor; and though the man has kept his 
 head up hitherto, like the man he is, it was certain 
 that in the end he must go down. Not down 
 altogether, of course, but down as a hand-compositor : 
 a man's a man, and will earn his bread whether 
 he trims sails or stokes furnaces, whether he picks 
 types out of a box into a stick or sits on a seat 
 and hits keys. But the earliest efforts of machinery
 
 74 THE MONOTYPE. 
 
 left the compositor by hand still easy master of 
 the situation. 
 
 There have been two main families of these, which 
 may conveniently be styled the spout kind and the 
 wheel kind. The original begetter of the first, Dr 
 Church, was an American, like Mr Lanston to-day; 
 the inventors who brought it into practice, Young 
 and Delcambre, were, again like him, not professional 
 printers. Their machine, once more like its trium- 
 phant descendant of to-day, started with a key-board ; 
 the types were lying in grooves according to their 
 kinds, and a touch on the key released the first in 
 the groove. The letters, successively released, were 
 conducted through devious passages, which finally all 
 united in the spout. Thence they issued in an end- 
 less line; a second operator sat at the end of the 
 spout to cut them up into lengths as they emerged, 
 and justify the lines so made. It was magnificent, 
 but it did not work. Types are more unruly than 
 those who know them only as printed letters usually 
 conceive. An m and an i, for instance, are of very 
 different sizes and very different weights. The spout 
 had to be broad enough for m, and so i slewed round 
 and stuck in the middle, and had to be prised out 
 with a bodkin; meanwhile, portly m was emerging 
 with a thud into the receiver and ricochetting into the 
 inane. Sometimes the operator at the key-board 
 operated too fast, and then while m and i were 
 struggling through their tunnels, g came bounding 
 along and slipped in at the junction before them. If 
 the type was sticky or the passages damp all these 
 things became worse. So that the spout type of
 
 THE MONOTYPE. 75 
 
 machine, though not unused, never conquered the 
 human hand. 
 
 The wheel type was born in 1858, its inventor 
 being a journalist, Dr Mackie. In this family the 
 types were arranged round a wheel whether a disc 
 or a grooved revolving pillar which is spun round 
 and arranged so that the right type stops opposite 
 the receiver and slides in. Despite the irrelevant 
 suggestions of Monte Carlo and the Buddhist praying- 
 machine, this was a much faster and more practical 
 kind of machine than the other. But even this 
 found difficulties in working. It wore away the feet 
 of the type in the grooves, so that they went " off 
 their feet," as the phrase is, and you cannot take a 
 type's shoes off and turn it out to grass. A type is 
 not a butterfly either; but it can be broken on a 
 wheel, and often is, in this kind of machine. The 
 wheel machine, from these and other causes, was very- 
 expensive, and the human hand remained undis- 
 mayed. 
 
 It was a different matter when the linotype 
 arrived. This machine may be said to mark the 
 transition from old to new, for it gave up the struggle 
 with insubordinate, jamming, breaking types, and cast 
 its own type as it went along. The operator taps 
 his key, and the tap releases a die and brings it into 
 place. The line when set is justified by driving up 
 widening steel wedges between the words. The 
 molten metal is injected into the line of dies, forming 
 a bar of type representing the line. This bar must 
 be trimmed, and then it is ready to take its place in 
 the galley. The dies are mechanically conveyed back
 
 76 THE MONOTYPE. 
 
 to their own place. This machine was plainly a very 
 great advance. It saved the labour involved in justi- 
 fication and the distribution of types, after being 
 used, into their proper cases ready for use again. It 
 saved cost of type, wear and tear of plant, and 
 especially floor space. Its victory was neither im- 
 mediate nor complete, for reasons which will appear 
 in a moment ; but, for the first time, it established an 
 advantage for the machine over the hand. 
 
 Thus was the way prepared for the crowning 
 achievement of the monotype. If it appears inferior 
 in speed to the Linotype because it involves the 
 separate operations with the key-board and the cast- 
 ing-and-setting machine, it takes its revenge in the 
 quality of the printing, in the range of its characters, 
 in economy, and in convenience. The types are clean 
 cut and deep in the shoulder, as it is called, so that 
 they offer the promise of the very clearest and finest 
 impression. The dies, being held in rows in a square 
 case, require mechanical movements equal to only 
 double the square root of their total number. If 
 there are 225 characters fifteen rows of fifteen 
 apiece there are fifteen horizontal and fifteen per- 
 pendicular movements to bring the dies under the jet 
 of metal, or thirty in all. So with forty movements 
 you could use 400 characters; with fifty, 625. The 
 linotype needs a separate mechanical movement for 
 each character : this necessarily limits the number of 
 characters employed, and therewith as, for instance, 
 by the exclusion of italics the range and attractive- 
 ness of the printing. In point of economy the mono- 
 type requires less labour than any other machine.
 
 THE MONOTYPE. 77 
 
 Eight expert key-board operators can punch rolls 
 enough to keep ten machines going ; one man can 
 feed and mind ten. That means nine men to ten 
 complete machines a complete machine run by a 
 decimal fraction of a man ! With this and other 
 economies the cost of production works out roughly 
 at something like one-quarter of that of hand-work. 
 But perhaps the most attractive vista of possibility 
 before the monotype is opened by the separability of 
 its parts. Small printers can combine in the purchase 
 and upkeeping of a casting machine, each having his 
 own key-board and sending its rolls to the central 
 depot to be cast at leisure. This same roll can be 
 stored away and kept to infinity. 
 
 It is virtually printed matter, and ready to go on 
 the machine and come out in type at any moment. 
 With other methods, whether linotype, wheel, spout, 
 or hand, if you want to preserve matter say for the 
 second edition of a book you must store away the 
 type itself, taking up space for which you must pay 
 rent, and spending money on stereotype plates on 
 which you lose the interest. With the monotype 
 you just put away the rolls on a shelf. When you 
 want to reprint you just take down the rolls, put 
 them on the machines, leave a man sitting up to feed 
 them, and go to bed ; when you wake up the mono- 
 type has done the rest. 
 
 In this light the apparent slowness involved in the 
 separate parts of the monotype turns out a real gain 
 in speed. All other setting machines are limited in 
 their capacity by the endurance of their human 
 operators. Imagine a press of work : when your
 
 78 THE MONOTYPE. 
 
 linotypists are tired out you must let your machine 
 stand idle while they sleep : your monotypists in the 
 meantime, with their whole attention fixed on the 
 mental processes of the key-board, with no distraction 
 to the mechanical processes of the casting, may be 
 presumed to have held out longer, at higher pressure, 
 to have punched more than the other men have 
 linotyped. When they go home to bed the casting 
 machine will click serenely on all night ; it wants no 
 food but copy and metal, and no sleep at all. 
 
 And now for the most wonderful dream of 
 all. No compositor at all, but every author his 
 own printer ! If the divine fire can be struck 
 out on the keys of a typewriter, why not on the 
 keys of a monotype ? The sage of the future will 
 unlade his wisdom in the form of little round 
 holes in a brown-paper roll. He will send down 
 the roll to his editor or publisher: it will be put 
 on the machine, and the machine will turn it out 
 in print without the touch of any hand but his 
 own. If this can be, our valued friend the 
 compositor turns out only a superfluous middle- 
 man after all. His profit must be cut off: he 
 must go. After all, in this literary age, it is in- 
 creasingly easy for him to become a popular author 
 a profession sometimes cleaner than his present 
 one, and very often better paid. 
 
 Still, there will always remain one place for 
 the compositor: he will make the author's cor- 
 rections in the columns which the monotype has 
 set up. The linotype abolishes the cost of cor- 
 rections by abolishing the corrections themselves,
 
 THE MONOTYPE. 79 
 
 and therewith incidentally abolishing literature also. 
 In theory, correction is possible with it: it sets 
 its type in solid lines, and if you want to add or 
 subtract a comma, the whole line must be set 
 over again. In practice, the re -setting and re- 
 casting of the whole Line means too much trouble 
 and time and expense; therefore the comma is 
 not corrected, and bad work is the result. The 
 reader is annoyed or confused or misled by mistakes, 
 or else he is taught to believe that in the art of 
 writing trifles don't matter. The writer is forced 
 to acquiesce in the same heresy. He must not 
 revise and correct, and in time, by dint of seeing 
 many scandalous blunders in his work, learns to 
 accept blunders in spelling, in grammar, in style, 
 as a necessary condition of literature of which 
 disease Literature must eventually die. 
 
 You who have seen your noblest sentiments, 
 your most resounding phrases, pass under the harrow 
 of the Linotype will confess that this is no ex- 
 aggeration. The Linotype made for bad writing: 
 the monotype, giving out work as easy of correction 
 as hand-set types, if it does not make directLy for 
 good writing, at least it does not make against it. 
 It does affirmatively make for good printing. In 
 the meantime, it is permitted to welcome a machine 
 which, whilst, Like most of its breed, it makes life 
 swifter and more exciting, does not, like many, 
 leave it uglier than it found it.
 
 80 
 
 MR BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 1 
 
 AN attempt to estimate the philosophical value of 
 such a book as Mr Balf our's ' Foundations of Belief ' 
 in the pages of a finite magazine is beset by at 
 least one unhappy difficulty. Dissent from its con- 
 clusions has the show of misappreciation of its merits. 
 Let it be insisted at once, therefore, that though to 
 many men the final conclusions of this treatise will 
 be unsatisfying, and some of its tributary arguments 
 unconvincing, there is no man that can afford to 
 disdain it. No truth is the whole truth, and no 
 sincere quest after truth can end in total disappoint- 
 ment. It is a commonplace that man learns most 
 from those with whom he least agrees, and this is 
 especially so with a thinker so keenly sensitive to 
 the philosophic atmosphere of the hour as Mr Bal- 
 four. Je mdprise Locke, said Schelling; but Locke 
 had been long enough in his coffin to justify the 
 liberty. Nowadays we are all pretty unanimous in 
 misprizing Schelling; but Mr Balfour is either to 
 be salvoed as a saviour or approached warily as a 
 dangerous if illuminative heretic. The enemy he 
 attacks is the established philosophic church of the 
 
 1 New Review, March 1895.
 
 MR BALFOUR S PHILOSOPHY. 81 
 
 day: it has been attacked, and indeed overthrown, 
 in its earlier incarnations, but the bare fact of its 
 resuscitation points the necessity of a new onslaught. 
 Naturalism there is no need to depart from Mr 
 Balfour's own term; it passes variously under the 
 aliases of Positivism and Agnosticism, and may most 
 handily be described as the creed of Mr Herbert 
 Spencer fights to-day with the new weapon of 
 Evolution ; it was necessary that the weapon should 
 be turned against it. This Mr Balfour has done 
 with an unsparing trenchancy, a dazzling deftness 
 of dialectical fence, a subtlety of distinction, and a 
 power of epigram and of eloquence far surpassing 
 any of its original masters. He has hewn Natural- 
 ism asunder and riddled it to shreds, and overthrown 
 it and trampled on it ; and if he has not slain it out- 
 right, the one reason is that its professors are not 
 open to philosophic conviction. For, indeed, the 
 creed was never at any time a philosophy, nor ex- 
 pounded by philosophers. Its gospellers are either, 
 like Professor Huxley, investigators of science who 
 have strayed beyond their province, or anti - theo- 
 logical gladiators like Mr Frederick Harrison, or else, 
 like Mr Herbert Spencer, they have mistaken gener- 
 alisations in natural science for the nearest human 
 possibilities of absolute truth. Such as Naturalism 
 was, Mr Balfour leaves it without a rag to cover 
 its speculative nakedness. Starting out to explain 
 the world without any ultimate principle of person- 
 ality, it cannot give a coherent account of one single 
 moment of human experience. Let that be said 
 once for all ; let any one to whom it sounds treason- 
 
 F
 
 82 MR BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 able read the first chapter of the Second Part once 
 for all. But it will be more profitable for the esti- 
 mate of the book as a whole to review it rather 
 from the aspect of its constructive parts. " In order 
 that the views here advocated," we are told at the 
 outset, "may be seen in the highest relief, it is 
 convenient to exhibit them against the background 
 of some other and contrasted system of thought." 
 Convenient it is, no doubt; but is it quite fair to 
 judge the stability of any body of conclusions by 
 so shaky a structure as Naturalism ? Is not the 
 foil too dull for a fair valuation of the gem ? Will 
 it not be better, in fine, to take Mr Balfour's con- 
 tentions on their merits, and inspect them against 
 the background of any more plausible theory that 
 their analysis may afford ? 
 
 Logically, Mr Balfour's argument begins and, for 
 that matter, ends, as we shall see later in " the 
 ineffaceable incongruity between the origin of our 
 beliefs, in so far as these can be revealed to us by 
 science, and the beliefs themselves." But for this 
 compendium we have to wait until the last chapter : 
 the actual order of statement is rather morphological 
 than logical : it proceeds as the theory would grow up 
 in the theorist's own mind rather than in conformity 
 with the conveniences of exposition. We begin 
 not altogether without reminiscence of the maxim, 
 "Abuse plaintiffs attorney" with an examination 
 of the Naturalistic accounts of morality, aesthetics, 
 and epistemology. Viewing these generically he 
 finds that, while the evolutionary process was their 
 origin, they are far from being its ends. They are
 
 ME BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 83 
 
 merely accidents in its course backwaters lying off 
 the perpetual and universal stream of the world's 
 tendency. Bastards of the struggle for life, they 
 can claim no dignity of their own and cherish no 
 hope of perpetuity when once they have served 
 their turn. They came into the world as devices, 
 subservient to the continued existence of man ; they 
 will go out of it in the inevitable day when they 
 no longer minister to it. Is this a creed for self- 
 respecting men ? asks Mr Balfour. Can belief and 
 feeling continue to co-exist in such intolerable antag- 
 onism ? Possibly not ; though we must remember 
 such jars are oftener composed by mutual accom- 
 modation than by the utter destruction of one or 
 other of the jarring partners. Yet, spite of this, 
 the argument seems largely irrelevant and doubt- 
 fully valid. It is not the habit of the philosopher 
 to ask first whether this or that is pleasant to believe, 
 but whether it is true. And, supposing that it is 
 true, is it, after all, so humiliating ? Amoeba man 
 was and automaton he shall be, says Mr Balfour, 
 half -dead to know that he must die. But, even so, 
 it is our present, not our past or future, that con- 
 cerns us. Mr Balfour calls in humour " to prevent 
 us assuming any airs of superiority over other and 
 more powerful members of the same family of phe- 
 nomena more permanent than ourselves." Yet surely 
 this invocation of humour is but a back -handed 
 argument. Even on the crassest Naturalistic view, 
 humour is a more ingenious and complicated con- 
 junction of atoms than heat. If the phenomena 
 could laugh back it would be different. But while
 
 84 MR BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 I can laugh at them, it troubles me little that in 
 a few billions of years they may perhaps reduce 
 iny nth grandson to the same unlaughing molecules 
 as themselves. 
 
 Human activities, it may thus be argued, have 
 their dignity in their exercise, as determined by such 
 rough approximation as we can make, through their 
 structure, to their function in the world. To some 
 tempers, at least, human life, with all its diverse 
 equipments and possibilities, is an end in itself. If 
 there is anything worthy the knowing and feeling 
 and doing, it remains worthy so long as evolution 
 allows man to remain capable of it. And is our 
 doom, after all, so inevitable ? No doubt all that 
 makes man human was evolved, in the beginnings, 
 by accident. The struggle for life first made us 
 moral and sesthetical and rational, in order that 
 we might be better adapted animals. But that was 
 only in the very beginning. Here, as elsewhere, Mr 
 Balfour appears to confuse the source of a thing with 
 the thing itself. For with the dawn of consciousness 
 begins a fresh struggle, whose sphere is in conscious- 
 ness alone the struggle of ideals, the struggle of 
 ideas. This is grafted on to the old struggle for 
 bare life, and partly supersedes it. Just as the 
 struggle first entered into the world with organic 
 life, this new mental struggle began with conscious- 
 ness. Ideas fight for survival in the minds as men 
 fight for survival in the outer world, and the former 
 fight reacts on the latter. It is to this purely 
 intellectual struggle that we owe, and shall owe, all 
 the more complex developments of aesthetics, thought,
 
 MR BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 85 
 
 and morality. Whence otherwise comes the power 
 that makes men give up their bread for their art, the 
 hope of posterity for learning, life itself for their 
 country ? The primeval will to live becomes modi- 
 fied into the will to live in such-and-such a way : we 
 enrich our conception of life with certain minimum 
 requirements of virtue and refinement. Artificial 
 selection begins to replace natural. As years go on, 
 this struggle within the mind will be more and more. 
 Amoebae we were, it is true; but on this view we 
 look back on our ancestry with the juster pride 
 of him who has risen from below rather than of 
 him who, at the most, has not fallen. And if the 
 phenomena kill us off in the end, at least we shall 
 perish in the bloom. 
 
 The Naturalist is hardly in a position to put for- 
 ward such a suggestion as the foregoing. But we 
 have given up the Naturalist and are trying Mr 
 Balfour's contentions for ourselves, so that we may 
 derive from it a hope that, even with a Naturalistic 
 origin, things are not quite so desperate with us as 
 he would have us think. He now leaves this quasi- 
 ethical region and proceeds to attack Naturalism as 
 a philosophy. This chapter is a model of destructive 
 analysis, brilliant and sound, subtle and perspicuous. 
 He demonstrates beyond all power of refutation, or 
 even of reply, that the hypothesis of Materialism for 
 it is to Materialism that, in the limit, Naturalism 
 always comes cannot state coherently the simplest 
 facts of our experience. This part of the book, 
 therefore, we might pass by but for one discussion 
 which may come in usefully later. In his analysis
 
 86 ME BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of Naturalism, piling refutation on refutation, Mr 
 Balfour takes occasion to make some criticisms of 
 sense-perception. In an immediate experience by 
 sense-perception Mr Balfour's example is a tree 
 "the scientific man knows very well that the 
 material object only resembles his idea of it in 
 certain particulars extension, solidity, and so forth 
 and that in respect of such attributes of colour and 
 illumination there is no resemblance at all." Here, 
 then, argues he, is a break-down in the Naturalist's 
 means of knowledge, which can only be explained by 
 the hypothesis that these immediate experiences, on 
 which he depends for all his knowledge, " are merely 
 mental results of cerebral changes; all else is a matter 
 of inference." So that we are confronted by the 
 horrible cataclysm that Naturalism regards the world 
 thus, while her ally, Science, works only on the 
 assumption that it has an independent material 
 existence. As against Naturalism the hit is palpable. 
 But to those who believe that the explanation of the 
 world must rest on the percipient self as well as on 
 the percept and the point is already fair, since Mr 
 Balfour has told us that " there is no theoretical 
 escape from the ultimate ' I ' " it need beget no 
 suspicion of our trusty friends, the senses. To the 
 perceiving mind the tree is a tree, however science 
 may analyse it. You may call it, if you will, an 
 extended solid object plus vibrations, ethereal un- 
 dulations, absorption of most part of the same, 
 reflection of the green residue, incidence on the eye, 
 arrangement on the retina, stimulation of the optic 
 nerve, and molecular change in the cerebral hemi-
 
 ME BALFOUE'S PHILOSOPHY. 87 
 
 spheres. But in the long-run it is more convenient 
 to call it a green tree, and in the theory of know- 
 ledge it is just as correct. The doubt as to the 
 objective existence of the material world, which Mr 
 Balfour is continually raising, is equally irrelevant. 
 As it is the earliest of metaphysical problems to 
 suggest itself, so it is the first to be dissipated. 
 In reality, the problem has no meaning at all. 
 Whether our perceptions represent independent 
 objects or cerebral changes makes no sort of differ- 
 ence either in speculation or practice. In either 
 case they are equally independent of and comple- 
 mentary to the percipient subject. In a later 
 chapter (the first of Part IV.) Mr Balfour returns 
 to this subject. Ingeniously deriving our unqualified 
 belief in sense-perceptions from the undoubted benefit 
 such a belief would confer in an early stage of the 
 struggle for existence, he argues thence that though 
 this belief is " more inevitable and universal " than, 
 for example, the belief in God, it is not more worthy. 
 He nowhere clearly lays down any canon of the 
 worthiness of beliefs, nor is it altogether clear how 
 this should be done : up to now the worthiness of a 
 belief has been generally held to be determined by its 
 truth. The belief in God can hardly be worthier 
 because it has to do with a higher human function ; 
 for higher must mean more specific to man there 
 being no question of the morality of beliefs, as such 
 and nothing is more specific to man than thought, of 
 which sense-perception is a vital element. Nor is it 
 a matter of " faith " or inference, as many would 
 prefer to call it since that enters into both. Nor
 
 88 MR BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of the inevitable allowance for error, since this is 
 at least as great in theological beliefs as in percep- 
 tions, from which theology is ultimately derived; 
 and neither the last nor the first link in a coherent 
 chain of thought is any worthier than the other. So 
 that we may approach the next division of the sub- 
 ject with our confidence still unimpaired remember- 
 ing always the small allowance for physiological or 
 inferential errors hi what remains the primary coin 
 in the currency of thought. 
 
 And now rises before us the fair formless form of 
 the Transcendental Ego. Duly Mr Balfour deduces 
 the portentous abstraction from the possibility of 
 sentient experience. And you would suppose that 
 with this and sense -perception as yet remaining 
 to all but the Materialist, even fastidious he would 
 begin to construct. But no ! He continues his wild 
 iconoclastic career. He brushes aside the theories 
 of those who, by the aid of "ideas of relation," 
 would constitute the world of objects out of the 
 subject self ; for does not the subject owe its meta- 
 physical existence to the very objects it thus com- 
 placently proceeds to beget ? So with the sinister 
 souls that dare elevate the abstract Ego into the 
 Divine : how can you venerate, as the God of love, 
 a creature of metaphysics whose whole being is 
 summarised in the fact that it is not an object of 
 sense ? But there remains a third possibility. 
 Take the objective world and the abstract self as 
 two : can they not figure out a universe between 
 them? Mr Balfour does not smile upon this 
 possibility. He does not find, for instance, that
 
 ME BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 89 
 
 causation is to be deduced from these elements 
 with due inexorability. But what, ultimately, is 
 causation ? Popularly the cause of anything is 
 that on which it inevitably follows; more thought- 
 fully stated, it is that without which it cannot 
 exist. Then what is the cause, let us say, of a 
 drawing-room fire ? It follows inevitably (when 
 properly conducted) on the application of a match ; 
 without the match it could not exist. But is the 
 match the only thing that fulfils the definition ? 
 Could the fire exist without the materials of which 
 it is itself composed, without the human agency 
 that placed these in position, without the oxygen 
 in the air ? Come a step farther : on this showing, 
 is not the soil in which the wood grew, is not the 
 man that cut it down, and the father that begat 
 him, and the settled social state that allowed his 
 father to devote a peaceful mind to the propagation 
 of a son, are not all these things as much the 
 cause of the fire in the drawing-room as is the 
 match ? And could not the list be extended for 
 ever and for ever until nothing that is known to 
 man were omitted ? We come to this conclusion, 
 then : that the cause of each thing is everything 
 else. Unless everything else were as it is, each 
 thing could not be as it is. And that fact the 
 fact that the whole system works together to each 
 of its resultants is what we call the Uniformity 
 of Nature. Nature cannot but be uniform, seeing 
 that nothing is added nor taken away, and all that 
 there is of her is concentrated in each one of her 
 processes. Now, is not the Transcendental Ego
 
 90 MR BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 competent to have knowledge of this system ? To 
 suppose an abstract principle cognisant of cause 
 sounds at first an assumption audacious and un- 
 warrantable. But the process sketched, viewed 
 more narrowly, is mere matter of addition and 
 subtraction. Hath not a Transcendental Ego 
 memory and comparison, perception of presence 
 and absence in phenomena, and a unity of ac- 
 cumulated truth ? By the hypothesis it has all 
 this. All this is just what it is for, just what 
 it is. May we not, then, disallow Mr Balfour's 
 objection on the score of causation ? 
 
 Through the Ego and phenomena, therefore, we 
 rise to a bilateral conception of the world. On 
 the one side is the self, on the other its objects, 
 which the self is able to schematise into a system 
 of interdependent relations which exert a uniform 
 pressure on any one point. It is true that this 
 conception does not top the summit of the phil- 
 osophic ideal. Philosophy, to have her heart's 
 desire, must needs envisage the world as mani- 
 festation of one principle, not two. Yet we might 
 rest in this dualism with a very tolerable pro- 
 visional satisfaction if nothing better can be attained. 
 It is true that this compromise cannot be any 
 satisfaction to those who were set on regarding 
 the self as the index of God. Mr Balfour himself 
 very cogently hints, if he does not explicitly demon- 
 strate, why this is not so. The self is not God, 
 and the related system of its objects is not God. 
 Each depends on the other, and God must be 
 Absolute. If there is to be any Absolute, it must
 
 MR BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 91 
 
 be found in the fusion of the two, in the whole 
 of which they are the related parts. But such 
 an Absolute is beyond relation, and therefore beyond 
 human knowledge, which is itself a relation ; the 
 part can have no cognisance of the whole. So 
 that this Absolute, this God, is unknown and 
 unknowable to man; it is merely another Thing- 
 in-Itself, unmeaning and null. The theory, indeed, 
 summarily expressed, justifies the statement that 
 there is no God. But that is no objection to the 
 theory. We started on it, not to find a God at 
 any cost, but to find what there was to be found. 
 One more objection to this view Mr Balfour alleges, 
 and this is a more head -splitting one than the 
 others. The Ego as we have deduced it is a mere 
 knowing -machine. But the self we live with 
 the Empirical Ego of the psychologist is one 
 that feels and mourns and extends itself over 
 body and legs and toes. Now we cannot say that 
 this self is the Ego, because it is the object of 
 the Ego's perceptions. Nor can we conscientiously 
 say that our past and our feelings and our body are 
 no more ourself than our chair or our table. Here, 
 then, is the problem of self -consciousness, perhaps 
 impossible of solution, and certainly so within any 
 possible limits. It is the less pressing because 
 for metaphysics the Transcendental Ego is all the 
 self we want. For empirical psychology the self 
 is mainly cerebral changes; for ethics it is the 
 sense of freedom. Much criticism might be directed 
 upon Mr Balfour's objections to Determinism, though 
 they are not, in the main, novel. But again we
 
 92 MR BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 must pass on, merely marking down that we have, 
 in this Dualistic-Idealistic theory, a skeleton re- 
 conciliation of the world, unhinged, it is true, at 
 one important joint, and in much need of supple- 
 menting in every member. Still, it seems a begin- 
 ning, and we can but wonder what better Mr 
 Balfour has to offer to us. 
 
 Mr Balfour, meanwhile, is discursively driving 
 the Juggernaut of his dialectic over most of the 
 guides that mankind has looked to for truth. 
 Sense - perception we have tried above to patch 
 together again ; later, language as an accurate 
 vehicle of thought goes down before him, as it 
 must before anybody that cares to tilt hard 
 enough at it. Next he comes to consider of the 
 rival claims of reason and authority. It is an 
 admirably perspicuous chapter, though again not 
 conspicuously novel. To such as plume them- 
 selves overmuch on their rationality it will be 
 somewhat disquieting to see exposed in black and 
 white before them the infinite smallness of that 
 portion of their judgments which is based im- 
 mediately on reason. No man, indeed, has any 
 direct concern with reason except the philosopher 
 who puzzles after principles or the plain man 
 who attempts rarely, and with halting casuistry, 
 to apply them. Infinitely small, if we rest the 
 calculation on the bare number of judgments each 
 puts down to its score, is reason's part. But 
 when Mr Balfour argues that authority is more 
 characteristic of man than reason, is he not 
 misled by this purely irrelevant consideration of
 
 MR BALFOUK'S PHILOSOPHY. 93 
 
 the number of judgments into which each enters ? 
 He admits that both are necessary to intellectual 
 life ; why, then, put either above the other ? 
 Nothing can be more than essential. Moreover, if 
 either is to take precedence over the other, there 
 are some good grounds for urging that it should 
 be reason. Authority cannot move a step with- 
 out it, for even the acceptance of authority means 
 a latent syllogism : " It must be true, for Huxley 
 says so, and he knows." Moreover, in every 
 statement that is taken on authority there exists 
 the reasoning by which it was arrived at, held 
 in solution, and capable of being re - reasoned 
 would a man but take the trouble. Eeason is 
 there, but you must call for it. Unless Mr Bal- 
 four postulate an infallible source of inspiration, 
 every dictum of authority must be in its original 
 statement the work of reason. And if he does 
 so postulate, then he must either justify his pos- 
 tulate by reason or else ask us to take him for 
 an infallible source of inspiration in himself. 
 
 Mr Balfour has now examined various forms of 
 belief in three aspects by the light of their con- 
 sequences, their reasons, and their causes. He has 
 found their consequences deplorable, their reasons 
 fallacious, their causes misunderstood. This can 
 hardly apply to Naturalistic beliefs solely, for he 
 proceeds thence to draw his deductions as positive 
 truth, and indeed he cannot have written a book 
 with the same ambition of producing a better 
 creed than Naturalism. So far, then, as these 
 forms of belief go, they promise man a mean life
 
 94 MR BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 and a contemptible death, they will not bear an 
 examination of their rational foundation, they rest 
 on such alien causes as authority and the mis- 
 apprehension of terms. With such modifications 
 as the foregoing discussions may have brought 
 into this view, we may now follow him as he 
 advances from this shifting ground to the de- 
 duction of the Deity. Let it be imputed to him 
 for courage that the sand shifts beneath him, 
 since he is not of those who shipwreck reason 
 and call in God from heaven to set up the world 
 again. His attempt is to deduce the existence of 
 God by mental process ; it is an argument " from 
 needs to their satisfaction." This curious process, 
 hitherto unknown to logicians and whatever just 
 deductions Mr Balfour may make from the valid- 
 ity of logic, he can hardly argue in any other 
 medium appears to be of a quasi -transcendental 
 character. As the necessities of certain beliefs 
 about the sensible world lead us to the deduction 
 of the self, so the necessities of beliefs about the 
 universe as a whole lead us to the deduction of 
 a God. We cannot get rid of our difficulties 
 about the world, but by " the presupposition that 
 it was the work of a rational Being who made 
 it intelligible, and at the same time made us, in 
 however feeble a fashion, able to understand it." 
 In a feeble fashion, indeed, it would seem, since 
 it is just this lack of understanding that drives 
 Mr Balfour to postulate his rational Being. The 
 first criticism that suggests itself is not recondite. 
 If we are to be justified in such assumptions by
 
 MR BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 95 
 
 a mere defect of understanding, are there not a 
 thousand other assumptions equally plausible ? I 
 might compose all my perplexities by postulating 
 that I made the world when I was a baby, and 
 conduct it while I am asleep. But it is doubtful 
 if this view would command any wide measure 
 of support. 
 
 Once more: consider what is meant by a need. 
 Is the need that compels the belief in God of the 
 same nature as the need that forces us to the belief 
 in the material world ? Mr Balfour asserts that it is 
 not less stringent. If he means our belief in the 
 materiality of the world, that is true. But belief in 
 the material world, in the proper significance of the 
 term bearing in mind the fact that it is all one 
 whether the material world is or is not represented 
 by anything beyond cerebral processes is an utterly 
 different thing. From this we cannot escape : unless 
 we believe, with reasonable deductions, what we see 
 and hear, we cannot even begin to know or to act. 
 "We could not live in the world a moment without it. 
 But the need for the belief in God means no more, at 
 the most, than that without it we cannot know all 
 that we can imagine ourselves as knowing, that we 
 cannot do right so continuously as we can imagine 
 ourselves as doing. On the face of it, then, this 
 argument from need to its satisfaction is an illicit 
 one : the need is not such as to drive us, as a prim- 
 ordial condition of human existence, to satisfy it with 
 a stable belief. We have every call to make our own 
 lives coherent, but what call have we to make the 
 universe coherent by aid of the first hypothesis that
 
 96 MB BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 comes to hand ? The belief in God is not truly a 
 need at all, unless omniscience and perfection be 
 needs : men think loyally, and feel proportionately, 
 and act rightly without it every day. And why 
 should they not ? For consider the nature of satis- 
 faction of which Mr Balfour's need is capable. He 
 feels it as a need, because he cannot explain the 
 world, and cannot feel assured of right action without 
 it. But can he know and act any better with it ? 
 Not one jot. The intellectual problems that were 
 dark before are dark still; the moral quagmires are 
 as desperately trackless as ever they were. Nor 
 could it be otherwise. For what compels us to leave 
 our philosophies half -finished on the roadside, and 
 entangles us in inextricable mazes about the smallest 
 action that may be good or bad, is not ignorance of 
 general principles but of particular facts. The science 
 is always there, but we want the omniscience. Now 
 from the belief in God can proceed no knowledge 
 of the unnumbered accidental circumstances of life. 
 Therefore there comes from it no increase of know- 
 ledge or certitude of goodness. No : the need is no 
 need, and the satisfaction is no satisfaction. All that 
 this faith can do is to instil a comfortable confidence 
 in the origin of the world as an alien auxiliary to 
 knowledge, and in its guidance as an alien auxiliary to 
 morals. The most that could result from it would be 
 the statement, " There is a God," grateful as a consola- 
 tion but worthless as a truth. And confidence answers 
 not to a need, but to a hope. But it is not competent 
 even for this. It is no more possible for hope to realise 
 the future, than for remorse to annihilate the past.
 
 MR BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 97 
 
 But let us assume the reality of the need and its 
 satisfaction. Let us further assume that the con- 
 ception of God as creator and guide is its one possible 
 satisfaction. Of what nature is the conception thus 
 secured ? Clearly, as the result of a transcendental 
 process, the conception is governed by the conditions 
 that gave it birth. The transcendental self is an 
 abstract principle unifying the disconnected phenom- 
 ena presented in sensitive experience. Even so, this 
 transcendental deity is an abstract principle unifying 
 the phenomena presented by the intellectual and 
 moral conditions of the world. The world, says Mr 
 Balfour, is an absurdity without creation or guidance ; 
 very well, infer creation and guidance. More than 
 this we have no authority to claim. And then, in a 
 moment, we suddenly come upon Mr Balfour speaking 
 of " a living God " ! Who is hypostatising the ab- 
 stract now ? He is straying as far outside his 
 mandate as any Eichte making the Ego rebound on 
 nothing, and bounce back in the form of a material 
 world. God, by the hypothesis, is a causative and a 
 guiding principle, and there is no possible right to 
 attribute one shred more of meaning to the concep- 
 tion than what is supplied by the method of its 
 deduction. Is it needful to discuss the value of this 
 result? Such a God is worthless and unmeaning: 
 the result is as jejune as the process is illegitimate. 
 This, then, is the end of the long quest a baseless 
 assumption, a fulfilment illicitly begotten by an im- 
 agined need on an illusive satisfaction, an identical 
 proposition, an empty formula, a Nothing. Sooner 
 than that, let us go back to our old paths that seem 
 
 G
 
 98 MR BALFOUR'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 to conduct us now and again a step onward, even 
 though it may be no step nearer the goal. Let us 
 turn again and maze ourselves with our broken in- 
 genious relations, and scrape ourselves with our blind 
 industrious scalpels.
 
 99 
 
 "LITTLE EYOLF." 1 
 
 To sit down on a chair before a desk and criticise 
 Ibsen on paper with a pen, by the light of the 
 ordinary canons of dramatic art, seems almost a 
 sacrilege. There is that individuality about Ibsen 
 that constrains even sane minds to envisage him 
 either an unhoped-for anticipation of the Kingdom 
 of Heaven or a painfully morbid development of 
 the Abomination of Desolation. It is laid on Mr 
 William Archer's conscience to make him talk a 
 shambling, if sometimes forcible, English that is 
 not like any other of the tongues of men. There 
 is a quaintness in the provincial view of life native 
 to Norway, where they make up in the theory of 
 modern civilisation what is wanting in the practice 
 of it. And there is an essential individuality 
 God-sent or Devil-born, it does not matter in the 
 perverse, anarchic, fearless, iconoclastic character of 
 the man himself which struggles to the surface of 
 every play. The flavour of all these you either 
 like or you do not : and accordingly Ibsen is either 
 a compendium of the seven names of the prophet, 
 or a convenient root for words significant of mental 
 
 1 New Review, January 1895.
 
 100 "LITTLE EYOLF." 
 
 and moral debasement. But there is always a 
 neutral zone for criticism in the work of any man 
 that tries to be an artist. It may be, or may 
 not, that Ibsen sees what play ought to be written ; 
 but does he write a play well when he sees it ? 
 Being here outside the jurisdiction of vice and vir- 
 tue, we need not be afraid to answer that he does. 
 Ibsen knows his business. He can make a play : 
 "Little Eyolf," like the rest, is a work of skilled 
 joinery, made, and made by hand. As mere work- 
 manship, the best pieces of Ibsen's maturity " The 
 Doll's House," " Bosmersholm," "Hedda Gabler" 
 are in no way less finished than the articles turned 
 out by the renowned Sardou - machine. As the 
 workmanship of a man who conceives himself to 
 be wrestling with great and wonderful material, 
 the turbulent Norseman stands in some respects 
 nearer the plane of Sophocles than do most men 
 who have constructed plays among the barbarians. 
 In his best work you will hardly find one word 
 thrown away. The casual inanities of the first act 
 loom like omens through the vistas of the last. 
 The irony of the drama is drawn to its tensest. 
 Every speech adds a touch of character, a breath 
 of atmosphere, a nerve to the dramatic emotion. 
 The subject is knit together by a hundred cords; 
 it holds together with the adhesive unity that is 
 the formal standard of artistic triumph. That is 
 Ibsen at his best. But we may doubt if at present, 
 in this technical province at least, Ibsen still stands 
 at his best. Not but in "Little Eyolf" there is 
 firm characterisation, dramatic irony, economy of the
 
 "LITTLE EYOLF.'' 101 
 
 irrelevant dependence of part on part. But the work 
 is not so tight as it used to be. Asta Allmers 
 allows herself to contribute a good many remarks 
 to the conversation that contribute little to the 
 revelation of her own character and nothing to the 
 play. And this is fatal, because Ibsen's dialogue 
 makes no pretence to intrinsic brilliance. The 
 moment it begins to be irrelevant, it collapses all 
 in a heap to the merest flat of inconsequent and 
 even laughable banality. 
 
 Yet a few gaps of disconnected commonplace in 
 the midst of much pregnant writing are of slight 
 moment: they merely underline the fact that Ibsen 
 is growing older. Nor is it of importance that this 
 very dramatic pregnancy demands a second reading, 
 or a reading preparatory to a hearing. If you mean 
 to dig deep into the heart of man within the com- 
 pass of three acts, you must pack the rubble pretty 
 closely. But " Little Eyolf " is marred by a far 
 worse blemish. The dialogue, in the main, is adequate 
 to express what it means to express. But the plot 
 is not thus adequate, or rather there are two plots 
 or, rather, it is hard to say how many and what 
 plots there are. "Little Eyolf," to continue its 
 analysis on the formal side, is ruined by a fault 
 of construction. It sets out to consider the case 
 of a husband and wife who, indirectly by their own 
 fault, lose their one crippled child. That is quite 
 a fair motive for an art that deals with character. 
 The central characters are weak, but not abnormally 
 weak, and it is the gain of literature that they 
 should be taken in hand by such as Ibsen. He
 
 102 "LITTLE EYOLF." 
 
 faces the situation with penetrating insight and un- 
 flinching logic. But, most unluckily for him, this 
 will not make a play. The effect of such a catas- 
 trophe on the parents is not in itself an adequate 
 motive for dramatic treatment. Such a calamity 
 will work changes. But it will work them slowly ; 
 by degrees they will manifest themselves from 
 within, as the legacy of the one tremendous blow, 
 and not as the effects of new causes acting from 
 outside. What has the drama, whose field is the 
 clash of personality on personality, to do with such 
 a psychological morphology ? Given these facts alone, 
 the play could assume but one shape. Alfred and 
 Kita would come out on the stage singly or together, 
 at imaginary intervals, let us say, of a fortnight, 
 briefly to diagnose their souls and announce that 
 they were going on as badly as was to be appre- 
 hended. Even as a duologue the thing could never 
 be played, unless the apostle of modernity were to 
 go back and borrow a chorus of ^Eschylus to help 
 fill in his blanks for him. 
 
 In the face of this impossibility, what does Ibsen 
 do? He must dovetail a character or two on to 
 Allmers and Kita to help them out with it. Hence 
 Asta Allmers and Borgheim. Borgheim is not of 
 much greater consequence to us than he is to the 
 Allmers family a very pleasant acquaintance, whom 
 we should miss and learn to do without. He is a 
 firmly-drawn character, and he enriches the world 
 of truth with the aphorism that " labour and trouble 
 one can always get through alone, but it takes two 
 to be glad." But his concern with the play is
 
 " LITTLE EYOLF." 103 
 
 purely atmospheric. He is just the " open-air boy " 
 that he wished to see constructed out of little Eyolf. 
 He comes in like a blast of keen mountain wind 
 and flings up into your nostrils the stuffy air of 
 the home of Allmers. His glad straightforward 
 energy is the measure of their wandering helpless- 
 ness. The truth is that, in Borgheim, Ibsen actually 
 has gone back to the Greek chorus such chorus as 
 in these days he is allowed to employ. Borgheim 
 is no more than a sublimated kind of stage property, 
 like the doctor in "The Doll's House," and the 
 gentleman who borrows half-crowns and ideals in 
 " Kosmersholm " ; his function is purely mechanical ; 
 it is a confession of impotence, perhaps ; but who is 
 weak man, to write plays by the book of aesthetic ? 
 Our own dramatists who season their works with 
 character parts, as per salary list, will doubtless 
 furnish the first stone. 
 
 But Asta is on quite a different footing, and is, 
 indeed, a shameless intruder. She is simply thrown 
 into the plot to save it from burning out for lack of 
 fuel. As long as she is her brother's sister she is 
 well enough. If the house of mourning is the post 
 of duty to the very deceased wife's sister, how much 
 more to the deceased son's aunt ? In the analysis of 
 Alfred Allmers under shock it arrives by logical pro- 
 cess that he turns from the unsympathetic wife to the 
 more sufficient sister. But even that is not enough 
 to make an acting play. And so out comes the 
 family portfolio, and out of the portfolio the late 
 mother's letters, and behold ! Asta is not Alfred's 
 sister at all, but our old friend Eegina the other way
 
 104 "LITTLE BYOLF." 
 
 about, and Kebecca West the other end up, and Elida 
 Groldenlbve the other side round, and one touch of 
 incest makes the whole gallery of them kith. Worked 
 in skilfully no doubt it is, but it is a hackney dram- 
 atist's trick, flouting you with its arbitrariness and 
 utter divorcement from the inevitability of real drama. 
 The crisis between Alfred and Asta is wantonly 
 pasted on to back the tottering interest of the real 
 play. And time-worn and impertinent as it is, it is 
 so much stronger for the stage and the dramatic 
 interaction of characters, that for the time it usurps 
 the attention. So that the play ends twice. It ends 
 at the suppositions crisis not half-way through the 
 last act. And then you remember that this was 
 not the play after all. And Alfred and Eita 
 stand up and spin off the rest of the play out 
 of their own entrails with no particular reference 
 to the other characters, or each other, or anything 
 else. 
 
 In the technical aspect of his art, therefore, when 
 it is judged by the exacting tests his own technical 
 mastery challenges, Ibsen has for the first time 
 achieved a failure. For the first time he has set out 
 to write a play that could not be written, and at- 
 tempted to rescue it with a play that in its essentials 
 he has written before. If he had kept rigidly to the 
 death of Eyolf and the contrasting sorrows of his 
 parents, he could have held no theatre in the world 
 for an hour. Mourning for the dead is a narrative, 
 not a dramatic, emotion. If he had preferred the 
 story of Asta and AUmers, he could have written a 
 strong play, but it would have been an inverted re-
 
 "LITTLE EYOLF. 105 
 
 flection of " Ghosts," and an exact double of Goethe's 
 " Geschwister." As it is, he has written a Siamese 
 twin of a play which all his unmatched dexterity 
 cannot restrain from reciprocally pulling itself by 
 its own leg. 
 
 But it would be affectation to pretend that it is of 
 any enthralling interest to anybody whether, regarded 
 as a stage-play, " Little Eyolf " is a good stage-play 
 or not. It is for the joy of lustier debates than these 
 that we look to our Ibsen. What of the Problem ? 
 And the Lesson ? And the Psychology ? And the 
 Realism and the Rat - Wife ? Especially the Rat- 
 Wife; she is the newest, so that most of the in- 
 quiries will naturally be directed to her address. 
 Here is more symbolism, and what are we to say of 
 the supernatural in the drama ? And who is the 
 Rat- Wife, anyhow ? And what does she stand for ? 
 And what was the heart-quaking Mopseman doing 
 in that bag ? But, seriously, need we bother about 
 the Rat -Wife? If you must know, she symbolises 
 Death, and she has no business to. The champions 
 of Passive Acceptance, my Ibsen right or wrong, 
 need not trouble to re-harness the ghost of Hamlet's 
 father. Ibsen himself has set his seal to it that the 
 only ghost admissible to the theatre in these days is 
 the inherited characteristic. In any case, Death the 
 Assuager does not take the fiord steamer down to 
 Christiania, nor would any pure - bred hell - hound 
 condescend to be led round cottages by a string. 
 The unpitied fate of " The Master Builder " is proof 
 enough that drama to-day must either be natural 
 or else make it quite plain that it means to be
 
 106 "LITTLE EYOLF." 
 
 imperturbably supernatural. It is enough to say 
 that northern fairy-tales will play such tricks with 
 northern imaginations as they glide into old age. 
 The beldam has strayed out of " Brand " or " Peer 
 Gynt" into society where there is no place for 
 her. 
 
 As for the Problem and the Lesson, it is gratifying 
 to be able for once to assure the public that they 
 may be approached without suspicion. There are 
 more lessons come out of Ibsen's plays than ever 
 went into them. The human mind could extract a 
 lesson out of the " Nibelungenlied " if it thought fit ; 
 it habitually draws precepts from the " Song of Solo- 
 mon." It is true that Ibsen lends currency to the 
 superstition by taking for his characters men under 
 the influence of dominant ideas specialising upon 
 one side of them, as with the optimist and the pessi- 
 mist in " The Wild Duck." But to deduce therefrom 
 that Ibsen is a pessimist rather than an optimist is 
 much the same as inferring from the superiority of 
 "La Bete Humaine" to "Le Eeve" that M. Zola 
 thinks a locomotive-engine is better than a cathedral. 
 For the Problem, that is, of course, a serious matter. 
 Playgoers how often must you go to the play to 
 become a playgoer? are divided into their camps 
 under the banners of the Problem play and the other 
 sort of play. Perhaps the exactest possible definition 
 of the Problem play is a play like " The Second Mrs 
 Tanqueray." It seems cruel to stamp upon the laud- 
 able efforts of the public and the ' Daily Telegraph ' to 
 differentiate between kinds of plays ; but it should be 
 explained, with respect, that every play is either a
 
 "LITTLE EYOLF." 107 
 
 Problem play or not a play at all. The heathen 
 Aristotle himself was able to point out that every 
 play is divided into two parts, the binding and the 
 loosing, the problem and the solution. If there is no 
 problem, there is no situation, no difficulty, no play of 
 character, no drama. Problem is common to " Phil- 
 octetes " and " Charley's Aunt " , and if there could 
 be such a thing as a play in virtue, not of problem, 
 but of the fact that it is spoken from a stage into the 
 theatre, then " Money " would be a play which is 
 absurd. What the man in the pit regards as a 
 problem play is a play that makes him think, which 
 he justly regards as a phenomenon deserving of 
 wonder. But every play makes a man think, 
 if it goes deep enough into nature. Not neces- 
 sarily at the time, for if it is a good play you 
 must follow it to the end. But afterwards it does : 
 and this means that the playwright sees deeper 
 into character than the audience. He ought to : 
 otherwise what business has he to come out in front 
 of the curtain instead of cheering from the house ? 
 Now, Ibsen has succeeded in making more people 
 think, or thereabouts, than most men of our time. 
 In this play he makes you think of the way it 
 hits a man and woman to lose an only child, more 
 or less by their own fault. That is the problem, 
 and he works it out to his own satisfaction maybe 
 not to yours. 
 
 That brings us on to the psychology of " Little 
 Eyolf." Now the psychological play is just such 
 a bloodless, ' Daily Telegraphic ' apparition as the 
 problem play. Psychology being in the popular Ian-
 
 108 "LITTLE EYOLF." 
 
 guage understood as the investigation of what goes 
 on in the human mind, plays, being written in words, 
 which are the expression of thoughts, must needs 
 either be psychological or else a kind of things-in- 
 themselves with no significations that may be appre- 
 hended of man. The only true distinction is between 
 good psychology and bad, between much psychology 
 which means much stripping naked of the human 
 heart and little. In " Little Eyolf " Ibsen's psycho- 
 logy is much and good. There could hardly be any- 
 thing better than the first act, except the second. 
 The first act states the case. Here is a mother and 
 a father, both weak the mother in intellect, the 
 father in purpose and feeling. With both it is the 
 weakness, the unequipped incapacity for life, of the 
 unbalanced mind. The mother, as it turns out, is 
 the straighter, the more respectable, and the com- 
 moner type. Her small heart choked up with an 
 appetent love of Alfred Allmers, she has no room for 
 anything else, and she has an explosive courage which 
 lets her say so. Alfred would have the courage also, 
 but he has not the self-knowledge. In width, not in 
 depth, there is more of him to know; he does not 
 know it. He talks much of his life-work, which is 
 always a bad sign in a man : he should be ready 
 with it when anybody pays to see, but not too 
 garrulous of it to himself. So the wretched Allmers 
 at one minute feels himself capable of a batch of new 
 life-works besides his book ; next moment he can on 
 no terms have another life-work than Eyolf ; and the 
 next he is quite cheerfully prepared to bisect it and 
 apportion the other half of it to Eita. Then the
 
 "LITTLE EYOLF." 109 
 
 crash comes and the remorseless analysis begins. 
 Ibsen digs up the soul by the roots to see how it 
 grows. And if any stronger, truer, profounder 
 picture was ever made of the bereavement of weak 
 natures and incompetent parents and they have 
 many points of coincidence with the strong and 
 able the world seems somehow to have lost count 
 of it. The inarticulate anguish, the compelled self- 
 scourgings, the conscious cowardice, the impious, 
 imperious call to fling out on the world all the 
 pettiness at command it strikes deep down because 
 it comes from deep down. Through this valley of 
 humiliation the parents win to the tardy hour of 
 self-collection, the gathering up of the fragments, 
 and the wandering slow steps out of Paradise into 
 the desolate beyond. There is a kind of transforma- 
 tion of both at the end though mark that it is in 
 each case agreeable to character and this can be 
 taken as untrue to life. People don't change their 
 whole being so, you can hear the critic say. They 
 do not. Nothing transmutes a character, but every- 
 thing changes it. That is what is meant by saying 
 that Ibsen's plays wind up with a note of interroga- 
 tion. Ibsen winds up with a question because he 
 knows this. Every episode in a life ends so; there 
 is always the change, but experience only shall show 
 how great a change ; the full stop comes only with 
 death. Nora banged the door, and doubtless she 
 came back again within the month, only she did not 
 come back the same Nora, and that change of Noras 
 is the nett result of " The Doll's House." So All- 
 mers will almost certainly go up North to his
 
 110 "LITTLE EYOLF." 
 
 favourite gushing-grounds again, only not altogether 
 the same Allmers. And Kita will stay down at the 
 villa and live a new life, yet still in great part the 
 same Rita. 
 
 This story of Alfred and Rita would have been 
 better told in a novel. But it is a masterpiece none 
 the less, and it is better to have it in a play than not 
 to have it at all.
 
 Ill 
 
 ZOLA. 1 
 
 A GREAT writer must elect to march along one 
 of two roads. He may be for all time, or he may 
 be for an age. This means that all later generations 
 will read themselves into the first : in the second 
 one will see itself complete. When he sits down 
 to cast about for his subject-matter, he must decide 
 between what is essential and elemental in life 
 and what is accidental and of the moment. Of 
 the two paths, Emile Zola's genius has impelled 
 him unfalteringly along the second. He is of 
 the last half of the nineteenth century; if it can 
 see nothing in him, then there is nothing to be 
 seen. As a document, indeed, it is sure beyond 
 all hesitation that he will survive for ever. So 
 long as men care one tittle to know of the years 
 that followed '70, they will find no more illumin- 
 ating history of what was vital in them than 
 'Les Eougon-Macquart.' But it is to us of his 
 own time, if for any one, that Zola makes his 
 appeal as an artist. If he has not called up this 
 modern world plain and coherent before our eyes, 
 it is impossible he can be more than a curious 
 
 1 National Observer, August 12, 1893.
 
 112 ZOLA. 
 
 puzzle for our grandchildren. His men and women 
 are our contemporaries, or they are nobody; his 
 interests, his casts of thought and feeling, are ours 
 or nothing. He has crystallised his day and ours, 
 the Second Empire, material civilisation, heredity 
 and evolution and science, showing us ourselves 
 and the world, raw material of ourselves, mirrored 
 in every face of the crystal in turn. 
 
 It is not worth while to-day to draw sword for 
 the realistic method of fiction as Balzac stumbled 
 on it and Flaubert exhibited it full-grown to the 
 world. Its manifest and technical masterpiece can 
 be had in Coventry Street for half-a-crown. Con- 
 formably with the essence of art it is a symbolism 
 the exhibition of the vital facts of life in the 
 details of every moment which they govern and 
 infuse with colour and significance. Such a method 
 needs no defence beyond the reminder that the 
 picture depends for its pictorial quality upon the 
 background as upon the figure : that but for the 
 accidents of Life out of which it fashions itself, life 
 would not be at all Zola took up realism frankly 
 where Flaubert left it. As early as the second 
 volume of his twenty, he began to use the host of 
 attendant facts that formed his background as his 
 atmosphere and his most irresistible engine of expres- 
 sion. The exotics of the hothouse in ' La Cure'e,' the 
 market-stalls in 'Le Ventre de Paris,' are not just 
 heavy fragrance and prismatic colour: out of them 
 there is struck the dominant note of the book. 
 As the series went on, the mass of details accumu- 
 lated till it became a gigantic mechanical difficulty
 
 ZOLA. 113 
 
 to discipline them. But each time Zola triumphed 
 as a craftsman. He is the Napoleon of fiction. 
 He marshals his army of insubordinate details so 
 that each one contributes to the weight of the 
 mass, then flings them upon you crushingly. Each 
 unit tells, but each is kept rigidly proportioned 
 to the rest and to the whole. There are thousands 
 of soldiers, but they never cease to be an army. 
 So he rises to the artistic miracle of 'La Debacle' 
 infantry and cavalry and artillery, engineers 
 and commissariat and ambulance; the smell of the 
 powder and the horses ; the swish of each footstep 
 as Corporal Macquart and Private Levarseur drag 
 themselves through the miry lanes of Champagne, 
 the hunger shining from their eyes as they tighten 
 their belts at the bivouac, the blood flaming through 
 their veins in the last madness of Sedan. Yet 
 all these things never blind Zola to the one great 
 generalisation, War, seen steadily and whole. 
 
 But to collect together a mob of facts is not 
 realism, and he who can see no more than this 
 in 'Les Kougon-Macquart ' has almost a right to 
 belong to a vigilance society, and assist at the 
 prosecution of the next Yizetelly. Art must be 
 governed by an idea, and the pleasure that the 
 simple take to be the touchstone of artistic achieve- 
 ment is but the pleasure that must attend on 
 any idea's comprehension. Now the novelists be- 
 fore Zola had taken for their dominant ideas some 
 aspect of human character. Flaubert did so when- 
 ever he took any interest in his subject-matter at 
 all. Balzac did so too: if he was led at times 
 
 H
 
 114 ZOLA. 
 
 by the irresistible allurement of existence as existence 
 to turn aside and watch the making of paper or the 
 diligence service between Paris and the provinces, 
 he was yet never his real self but when he was 
 prying curiously into the most complex workings 
 of the heart of man. In one blasphemed word, 
 the ideas before Zola were psychological the same 
 ideas that, having run under when the naturalistic 
 novel began to conquer the world, have sprung up 
 again with Bourget. But to Zola the warmer and 
 finer emotions of man call faintly. Beyond that 
 most poignant tragedy of Silvere and Miette in 
 his first volume, there is hardly a sign of it 
 but the hard, if terribly convincing, power of 
 ' La Conque'te de Plassans,' and the half - loving, 
 half -cold dissection of ' Une Page d' Amour ' and 
 'Le Ke've.' Again and again it has been repeated, 
 with more truth than understanding, that Zola 
 creates no individuals. You might indeed say, on 
 the other side, that literature has never created 
 an individual; that to create a complete individu- 
 ality you must weave together into your imper- 
 sonation everything in the world that could be 
 said about a man; that to tell his name and his 
 ancestry, as Zola does, to describe his person, to 
 say how he eats his dinner or reads his news- 
 paper, is really to give the world a greater 
 working intimacy with him than the finest diag- 
 nosis of his emotion when he first called his loved 
 one his. None the less it remains true that, 
 compared with masters like Shakespeare or Tur- 
 gue'nieff, Zola does not people his books with
 
 ZOLA. 115 
 
 breathing men. The terrible Eougons and the 
 abominable Macquarts are less than men, but in 
 a manner they are also more. There are sides of 
 their characters that he leaves unhandled. But 
 where his ideas touch them, where men come into 
 relation with the forces on which the mind of 
 his age has been set then he tells more of them 
 than any man. He gets firmer foothold on to 
 the solid rock of the ultimate. His generalisa- 
 tions spread themselves out more widely; he sets 
 men more manifestly in their true places among 
 their fellows and in the total of all things. 
 
 Man, then, is not his theme, but man in re- 
 lation to the forces that fashion the world. To 
 vary the phrase, he is the poet of these days of 
 science as Darwin was their prophet the poet 
 of machinery and levelling analysis and all-govern- 
 ing law. His subject is some enormous idea, and 
 his characters are the subject in action. Marthe 
 Rougon and her imbecile De'sire'e, Maxime and 
 his miserable Charles, are not men and women, 
 but units of heredity. Eugene Eougon and his 
 arid satellites are units of the Second Empire. 
 There is no novel of all the twenty if you set 
 aside ' La Fortune des Eougon,' which just stops 
 short of being two books, a preface and an idyll 
 that has not some huge abstraction for its sub- 
 ject. And, strangely, the one factor in Zola's 
 universe which he fails most signally to embody 
 artistically is just that heredity of which he 
 started out to write the epic. To the poet 
 heredity appears most importunately as unbreak-
 
 116 ZOLA. 
 
 able bands of necessity, hurrying its victim whither 
 it will. But, though no man certainly has realised 
 the tragedy of the inexorable constraint that presses 
 in on man from every side, Zola has never worked 
 out the possibilities of heredity. He paints it at 
 his solemnest in the gathering of the five gener- 
 ations in the madhouse of les Tulettes, but it is 
 never even commensurate for impressiveness with 
 Ibsen's appalling concentration of heredity on one 
 point in ' Ghosts.' Indeed, heredity lags languidly 
 through some half-dozen volumes and then dis- 
 appears altogether but for the rarest and most 
 perfunctory moments of self - assertion. With 
 ' L'Assommoir ' Zola began to grapple with fresh 
 impossibilities. The heroine of that book is not 
 Grervaise nor drink, but the vie ouvriere. There 
 are characters for all the shades and gradations 
 of it. In the thick of all goes Coupeau, haled 
 along by the unpitying impulse of environment, 
 the type and muster of Aristotle's tragedy the 
 man neither good nor bad, tumbling by accident 
 and error into the deepest pit. Having shaken 
 the load of heredity from his back, Zola went on 
 to other conceptions, which you may colour with 
 the light of science or poetry as you will pros- 
 titution in ' Nana,' a rotten bourgeoisie in ' Pot 
 Bouille ' (where the essential is the chorus of 
 servants, the scum on the stewing corruption of 
 the demure house in the Eue de Choiseul), the 
 new commerce in 'Au Bonheur des Dames,' the 
 * black poetry of Schopenhauer " in ' La Joie de 
 Vivre.' The conceptions expand, and the style is
 
 ZOLA. 117 
 
 transformed with them. Beginning in the tight, 
 costive manner of Flaubert, the mot propre giving 
 its value to each sentence, he becomes broader 
 and more fluent, at last quite melodramatic. In 
 the end comes ' Le Docteur Pascal,' the hymn of 
 life: the hymn that whispered through the rust- 
 ling of the Paradou, half-sung in all the births, 
 marriages, and deaths with which the toiler marked 
 the milestones of his progress, the undertone in 
 all the episodes of love and lust that give away 
 half the virtue of convinced frankness in the vice 
 of unperspectived revolt. The long work ends 
 fitly with the passionate dithyramb of life the 
 unconquerable resolution to exist that goes like 
 the sun into sewers as into palaces, and is not 
 denied. 
 
 In the process of these widening generalities he 
 gradually shaped a structure for the novel quite 
 distinctive and luminously illustrative of the side the 
 world turns towards him. While he cast the skin of 
 Flaubert's manner of writing, he developed a frame- 
 work for each story almost as rigidly formal. Taking 
 the material in which he chose to personify his ideas 
 say a coal-mine and colliers his manner was to 
 present a long procession of pictures of it. There are 
 the pit and the pitmen at all times, day and night, 
 summer and winter, in every phase of their character- 
 istic life. Sometimes, in ' Une Page d' Amour ' or ' Au 
 Bonheur des Dames,' the picture never changes its 
 outlines. Impression succeeds elaborated impression, 
 and the reading public cries out against the unmeaning, 
 unending repetitions. But they are not repetitions.
 
 118 ZOLA. 
 
 Each one of the great sales in 'Au Bonheur des 
 Dames ' marks the close of a cycle of the history ; 
 each cycle enfolds more than the last. Such same- 
 nesses, with the greater fulness to which they are 
 the foil, mark the ever-recurrent pulses of life and 
 civilisation, and each throbs with an intenser en- 
 thusiasm than the last. Sometimes take ' Le 
 Docteur Pascal' for an example the same words 
 ring again and again through the book like a refrain. 
 As the passion of the poet grows hotter they 
 too grow with a magnificent expansion, until they 
 burst the body in which for art's sake they are 
 imprisoned, and pervade the universe in their native 
 guise of universal truths. There is always the con- 
 sciousness of abstract truth struggling to assert itself 
 through every one of Zola's men and machines and 
 institutions. It gives all his work a strange kind of 
 perfection, not wholly artistic, but more like the per- 
 fection of a system whose fitted parts are all squared 
 and jointed flawlessly. If the system is right, all is 
 right. To come back to ' La De"b&cle,' what could be 
 more triumphantly relevant and triumphantly true 
 than the figure of the peasant stolidly working his 
 fields among the shells of Sedan ? Without the idea 
 it is melodrama perverse and objectless melodrama. 
 But the idea comes to rescue it the idea of recupera- 
 tion in the fact of destruction, the indomitable per- 
 petuity of life, the implicit statement of the law that 
 becomes outspoken with ' Le Docteur Pascal.' It is 
 this symmetry and coherence the constant sense of 
 massive agencies working through all casual actions 
 to which they lend purport and explanation that
 
 ZOLA. 119 
 
 gives us leave to call Zola the most ideal of the 
 idealists. The real subject of the ' Eougon-Macquart ' 
 is eternal truth, its real hero indestructible force. 
 
 It is the scientific spirit aflame with poetry. In 
 place of the hopeless struggle to grapple with the 
 monstrous tangle of interests that make up a man 
 to-day, Zola puts the device of taking him by sections 
 at a time and referring him under each section to one 
 of the primitive forces that struggle in the complexity 
 of his nature. He seems to be singing the war- 
 song, not of man but of the impalpable agencies of 
 philosophy. But to tell of philosophies and agencies 
 is none the less to tell of man, whom they form. It 
 is the passion of science, who for once has caught the 
 look of her sister art. That is why Zola is for this 
 one age of science a wonderful sport in the line of 
 artistic evolution. For if art could only once be 
 science she would die happy. But she would die all 
 the same.
 
 120 
 
 THE NEW TENNYSON. 1 
 
 (" In Memoriam." By ALFRED TENNYSON. London : Moxon.) 
 
 THAT a poet, when death has robbed him of his 
 friend, should put his woe into threnody is in 
 gracious accord with what the world takes to be 
 the spirit of poetry. Poetry, we please ourselves to 
 think, is the resultant of emotions too importunate 
 not to chafe at the commonness of the common 
 expression and burst through them into a form 
 where words can pulse with the rhythmical throb 
 of grief and joy. By the grave, if anywhere, poetry 
 claims the right. Then, if ever, our ears are open to 
 the poet. But what are we to say if he catches at 
 the occasion of his bereavement to spin cobwebs of dis- 
 quisition about himself and nothing else ? Are we not 
 right to complain that he abuses the privileges of his 
 order? Surely. And we take "In Memoriam" to be 
 such an abuse. In three years its author has written 
 one hundred and thirty and odd poems about himself. 
 He has, like other men, a right to talk about himself, 
 
 1 The state of the publishing trade is such that, for this week at least, 
 we can give reviews of old books alone : done, it is right to say, in 
 several styles, as though the themes were actual and the authors were of 
 to-day. ED., 'National Observer,' August 26, 1893.
 
 THE NEW TENNYSON. 121 
 
 to strip his soul naked in the eyes of mankind. But 
 he has not a right to do so under the pretence of an 
 elegy, and the penalty for his transgression is that 
 his elegy rings hollow. We look first in such work 
 for the energy of sorrow ; instead of it we find this 
 poet on the threshold obscurely quoting some classic, 
 we know not whom, and wondering to himself how 
 long his sorrow will endure and what will be its nett 
 effect on his character. " I weep for Adonais," said 
 Shelley in a like case. But our threnodist, having 
 struck this false note at the outset, continues to 
 blunder, and the chords of his lyre jar worse and 
 worse as he goes on thrumming it. At the best of 
 times Mr Tennyson has but little fire of emotion to 
 warm withal the delicate flavour of those things, old 
 and new, that he serves up before us : he is the poet 
 of afternoon tea drunk in blue teacups in an old 
 garden. And here where we crave most urgently for 
 a little genuine glow we get it least. We ask for 
 sorrow ; he gives us tortuous self -analysis and meta- 
 physics. " In Memoriam " is, indeed, the triumph of 
 self -consciousness. When before did genuine mourn- 
 ing drape itself in the stiff trappings of Horace, or 
 spend hours on the laboured dissection and comparison 
 and classification of the various kinds of distress into 
 which finally he can twist himself at will ? It is not 
 so that real men mourn, nor so that they write 
 elegies. Grief for the dead is very like a bodily 
 wound. Now and then it can be handled freely, and 
 the ecstasy breaks out ; afterwards it stiffens, and to 
 touch it hurts. The memory of loss is pushed 
 resolutely into the background of the heart ; it is for
 
 122 THE NEW TENNYSON. 
 
 a long time too horrible, too piercing an agony for 
 recollection : one goes about in a fear almost physical 
 of anything that might rip it open anew. Look at 
 that, and then look at this dandy heartbreak of " In 
 Memoriam," patting its lines into shape and tasting 
 the flavour of its epithets evermore picking, picking, 
 picking at the scar that never bleeds. How dear Mr 
 Tennyson's friend was to him we have neither the 
 right nor the desire to inquire : it would be a wanton, 
 an insolent cruelty to try to plumb the depth of his 
 distress. But since he has made it into a dirge, we 
 have the right to say, and we do say, that his dirge 
 is a bad one. It may be great philosophy, it may be 
 wonderful poetry, but it is most frigid elegy. Eead 
 Catullus, read Shelley, who was all things sooner than 
 full-blooded, and you will see the difference between 
 straight and crooked, deep and shallow. In all these 
 well-filled lines you shall not find one echo of that 
 instinctive, animal cry of pain which levels all men 
 in the face of those cruellest deaths that lop off a 
 limb of the soul and leave the rest to live and wince. 
 Mr Tennyson chooses to make public all things 
 about himself except the one passionate fact that 
 could alone have started the work into life. He goes 
 round and round it, with a hint here and an implica- 
 tion there that just serve to make the mixture tepid 
 instead of cold. He sings, it may be, because he 
 must, but it is the must of the scribbler, and not of 
 the full heart. It is so with the poems that would 
 be personal; it is so with those of wider application 
 approaching issues momentous for the race. Nothing 
 but an incurable itch of versifying could have kept
 
 THE NEW TENNYSON. 123 
 
 him through all those years, drying his tears, then 
 blubbering out afresh, moaning out his timid doubts 
 and fears and hopes, now an Atheist, now a Christian, 
 now a Pantheist, always anything for poetical copy, 
 and at bottom always nothing at all. You long to 
 take him by the shoulders and shake him heartily 
 and quote King Claudius on unmanly grief. Where 
 is the use, where is the dignity, of these perpetual 
 unanswered questions ? Is my friend alive ? he cries, 
 and answers Yes and No in a breath. Shall I see him 
 again ? Is it considered a mesalliance in heaven if he 
 loves me yet ? Now what is all that to him ? In 
 love, as in all things, it is more blessed to give than 
 to receive. The reward of love is in the loving. And 
 just so the reward of life is in the living. Why go 
 straining aching eyes towards the clouds when honest 
 living lies in the path before him ? What is there 
 in this life that makes it nothing but the vestibule of 
 the vacant future, to be hurried through with the one 
 regret that it is not more quickly crossed ? To vapour 
 about the imperfection of this world and the tremu- 
 lous hope of another this is not the faith of which 
 he is so enamoured. Faith is to set one's face 
 steadfastly against all the ills of life ; content to 
 know what can be known, and outstare the brazen 
 truth with the unconquerable resolution born of self- 
 respect. Honest doubt can never creep into the 
 philosophy of a brave man who can think straight- 
 forwardly. Only two attitudes befit him : investiga- 
 tion towards what is possible of discovery; indifference 
 to all else. Does his friend die ? He faces out the 
 truth : he is gone for this life, and it is hopeless
 
 124 THE NEW TENNYSON. 
 
 work to guess about another. He reels and goes on, 
 torn with the pain but never surrendering his free 
 soul to it by so much as one groan. 
 
 This puny womanish complaint, that can neither 
 weep hot tears nor keep dry eyes, might be set in the 
 loveliest language of poetry, and that would avail 
 nothing to save it. The curse of the sentiment must 
 pervade the words. And so it is here. That there 
 are exquisite passages of poetry we allow. It is 
 unfortunate that they are there to veil its ugliness, 
 but it is certain that there they are. As certain is 
 it that the exquisiteness is all in the irrelevancies. 
 That Mr Tennyson can make graceful descriptions of 
 scenery, that he is a master of literary allusion, that 
 he writes music, that he constructs phrases that 
 capture the fancy by an unerring combination of 
 sound and colour and motion, all this is known to 
 all Englishmen. But here sickly thought has spread 
 its contagion to words. Just as he circles round and 
 round his despair and his belief, so in this poem he 
 often writes round and round his meaning with never 
 an attempt to get to the heart of it. He has 
 invented here a new language, the language of the 
 refined Sentimental Coward. He tumbles alternately 
 into fine writing and obscurity. The vice of circum- 
 locution is inevitable to the man who sets himself to 
 pore over his friend's grave; the vice of vagueness 
 proceeds as inevitably from thus fumbling with an 
 idea that he cannot or dare not grip. So that there 
 results a strange admixture of final and immortal 
 phrasing with dark and mawkish affectation. And, 
 because the affectation is the true vehicle of the
 
 THE NEW TENNYSON. 125 
 
 poem, it is this that tastes in the mouth at the end. 
 The metre, too, with its horror of the epigrammatic, 
 is made to bleat in. With it all there are two lines 
 that stick fast in the memory and sum up the whole. 
 The voice is not the voice of grief; and the words 
 are hard to understand. Also, they are not worth 
 understanding.
 
 126 
 
 WORDS FOR MUSIC. 1 
 
 THAT the books of Wagner's operas are monuments 
 of foolishness, all that are unfamiliar with the Middle 
 High German tongue will readily allow, and those 
 that are not are unworthy of being taken into 
 consideration. Yet it is so much less trouble to 
 give a dog a bad name than to hang him, that our 
 countrymen would often be at a loss to uphold this 
 primary conviction by solid argument. So that the 
 Englishman abroad in the Fatherland of the Leit- 
 motiv might well be idler than in going to see and 
 supply himself with a poser for the Wagnerian. There 
 is not so much to do of an evening in Munich. The 
 stranger may spend one evening drinking beer in the 
 English Garden, and the next at the uncovered tables 
 of the Miinchener Kindli drinking beer ; but in the 
 end tedium will surely drive him into the Hoftheater. 
 There, by good luck, he may chance upon that earliest 
 work of the master that he called " The Fays." Of 
 the music, indeed, he need take little note. It points 
 back to Wagner's Kapellmeistership at Dresden, when 
 the tradition of Weber still hung about the opera 
 there. But Wagner might have slept all his days 
 
 1 National Observer, July 22, 1893.
 
 WORDS FOR MUSIC. 127 
 
 in sackcloth and ashes, instead of silken nightshirts, 
 without being granted that delicious magic of melody 
 with which Weber embroidered his tales of fairyland. 
 The score of " The Fays " is all made up of common- 
 place phrases, repeated meaninglessly to infinity, of 
 endless recitative with never a vitalising touch of 
 drama, and among it all some faltering echoes of 
 Weber coming to a timely end by quick and welcome 
 suffocation. But the book is a dream and a wonder 
 beyond the imagination of man. Seen and heard by 
 the untutored Englishman, this is the impression 
 of it. 
 
 You begin with some evolutions of what the play- 
 bill calls the Wifely-Ballet-Personal : after which the 
 story unfolds itself. Once on a time a certain prince 
 strayed in an unguarded moment to Fairyland, became 
 naturalised there, married a consort and had two 
 children. But by the beginning of the tale he had 
 grown cold to the embraces of his consort (she is 
 never called wife) and deaf to the prattle of his 
 children. His affections were set passionately on 
 one thing only in all the world, and that was 
 going to sleep. He would go to sleep all about 
 the stage, on no occasion, for whole scenes at a 
 time. One day he happened to be sleeping "around" 
 in a wild and rocky country, when a large crowd 
 of men with alpenstocks swarmed in over the cliffs 
 and began singing a chorus so loudly that the prince 
 awoke. At first he seemed to take them for the 
 pilgrims in " Tannhauser," but they quickly assured 
 him that they were hunters, that they came from 
 his native land, that his father was dead, and that
 
 128 WORDS FOR MUSIC. 
 
 he must go back and be king. He received the 
 news without emotion, shook hands somewhat per- 
 functorily all round, and promised to speak to his 
 consort on the matter. With a view to this, he 
 walked very quickly up and down the stage for 
 several minutes singing " Where art thou ? Where 
 art thou ? " but finding his efforts unavailing to 
 fetch her, lay down and went to sleep. As he 
 would not go to his consort's palace, his consort's 
 palace, reversing the action of Mahomet's mountain, 
 came to him. The rocks opened and it appeared 
 in all it gorgeousness. The portent did not, of 
 course, awake him, but his consort did, and received 
 the news of his impending departure with indigna- 
 tion. None the less, he went. Whereupon his 
 consort, who was a woman of determination, ordered 
 in a large ornamental swing-boat, got into it with 
 two friends, and was hoisted up into the flies: so 
 that she was presently seen no more. 
 
 The curtain next rises on his native city, which 
 is just being assaulted by the enemy. His high- 
 spirited sister is promenading the battlements in 
 a cttcollette suit of armour. The king arrives, and 
 great joy is felt. But joy is changed to consterna- 
 tion when his consort strides on to the stage from 
 behind a convenient bastion. To mark her sense 
 of his desertion, she suddenly produces the two 
 children from somewhere (they could not possibly 
 have been concealed in the swing-boat), breaks off 
 some yards of battlement, changes all the back 
 scene into a lurid wall of fire, and flings the 
 children over into the flames. To the father,
 
 WORDS FOR MUSIC. 129 
 
 inefficient at the best of times, this came as a heavy 
 blow : he fell at her feet in speechless horror and 
 submission. So she opened a postern gate in the 
 city wall, and there they were, as lively as ever 
 (which was not much to say), toddling on to the 
 stage again. At this point the excitement of the 
 chorus became so intense that it went out for a 
 minute or two and defeated the enemy. When 
 it returned it found the king still grovelling at 
 his consort's feet. To show him what he had lost 
 in deserting Fairyland, she was still doing wonderful 
 tricks with the scenery. After which she and her 
 two attendant fays disappeared contemptuously down 
 a trap-door, and the king, tired out by such triviali- 
 ties, went to sleep just where he was. He had not 
 slept a wink for nearly three-quarters of an hour. 
 
 He must have slept for some time, since by the 
 beginning of the next act his sister was queen, 
 and had bestowed her hand upon the tallest of the 
 chorus. Suddenly he came round a corner into 
 the palace and saw the royal procession pass by. 
 For a moment he was thunderstruck ; but seeing 
 the necessity for cool and wary action, he pulled 
 himself together and went to sleep on the steps 
 of the throne. They were covered with a very 
 cheap linoleum, but anything was good enough for 
 him to sleep on. Suddenly the two attendant fays 
 descended in the very same yellow swing-boat ; they 
 woke him up and called his attention to a magic 
 harp and sword and shield beside the throne, which 
 he had not previously observed. He showed no 
 resentment at being awakened, and the three went 
 
 I
 
 130 WORDS FOR MUSIC. 
 
 out together. The next scene lay in Hell, where a 
 furious rout of the Beasts of the Apocalypse was 
 howling and dancing uncouth steps. To these there 
 entered the king and the fays through the rocky 
 wall. Hardly had he time to ask, " Do you know if 
 my consort is here ? " ere they were upon him all. 
 But he behaved with unusual spirit, and drew his 
 sword ; the monsters maintained the unequal fight 
 for a few bars, until one of them got pricked with 
 the brand, on which they were dispirited and went 
 away. Then the scene changed to another room 
 in the same, where a squad of recruits was being 
 drilled. The king and fays appeared as usual and 
 asked the usual question; the squad formed a 
 Macedonian phalanx and advanced upon him. He 
 retreated till he could retreat no farther; then it 
 occurred to him once more to draw the sword, on 
 which the squad departed. Thereon he threw away 
 the sword and began to play the harp. The ex- 
 pedient, imprudent as it might seem, was attended 
 with unexpected success; for the rocky walls of 
 Hell opened, and there stood his consort, smiling 
 forgiveness. And behold ! he fell at her feet as 
 of custom. 
 
 Meanwhile, the walls opened wider and wider, 
 disclosing the King of the Fays, surrounded by the 
 Wifely-Ballet-Personal. He made a long speech, 
 concluding with the blessed assurance that the 
 earthly king might have his consort and be a fay 
 the one pursuit in life for which he was thoroughly 
 fitted. Then a strange thing happened. It became 
 plain that the King of the Fays was sitting on
 
 WOEDS FOR MUSIC. 131 
 
 the top of a gigantic e'pergne, and the lower bases 
 suddenly began to rise out of the stage. It went 
 up and up, and on each branch sat one of the Wifely- 
 Ballet-Personal. Last of all came a sort of triptych, 
 with a long, long fay in the middle, and the two 
 children, one on each side. It was an expansive 
 moment. The father embraced them, and almost 
 slept for joy. Everyone else embraced everybody, 
 saving only those on the e'pergne, who would have 
 fallen off if they had. And the curtain fell on the 
 touching scene and an audience greasy with tender 
 satisfaction.
 
 132 
 
 THE FUTILE DON. 1 
 
 HE squares his elbows at high-table to the most 
 marvellous of entries ; he rolls his eyes in common- 
 room as he gulps the most precious of ports. And 
 the entries twist him with indigestion; the wine 
 laps him in drowsiness. He crouches over his 
 fender in May and catches cold. He guts Momm- 
 sen's ' Staatsrecht ' for his lectures, and cannot 
 decipher his notes. He reads Tennyson, and forgets 
 him in the very crisis of quotation. He talks of 
 this and that, but pre-eminently of this. He walks 
 round Godstow or Trumpington, panting and snatch- 
 ing short steps like a girl. He kneels down in 
 chapel, covering his face with his hands to shut 
 out the undergraduates, and prays God to be 
 delivered from all heresy and schism. You would 
 docket him as the pattern of important futility. 
 And all the while he is dead. 
 
 Quite dead, and there are hundreds of him buried 
 in Oxford and Cambridge, round chapels. His 
 colleges are castles of somnolence, palisaded off 
 from all the world of men and things. Pass 
 through the heavy gate in front, across the dead 
 
 1 National Observer, May 20, 1893.
 
 THE FUTILE DON. 133 
 
 silence of the court, along the dark passage, up 
 the dusty, winding stairs, and you have yet two 
 stout doors to batter in before you can win to 
 the carpeted, pictured cell where he has dug his 
 grave. Slumbering there, he forgets the green 
 earth, or he never knew it; he takes count no 
 longer of time or of his own self. He might doze 
 inside that sepulchre for years, and every one 
 beyond the college walls be none the wiser nor 
 the sadder. This he has sometimes been known 
 to do ; more often he ambles round and round 
 his world of shades, from chapel to lecture-room, 
 from hall to common-room, and so to bed. Karely 
 there passes over his coffin a gust from the roaring 
 world that stirs him to a moment of galvanic life. 
 Some bruit of impending dislocation in the British 
 Empire has ere now dragged him out into the 
 light to nod away an hour on the platform of the 
 Guildhall or the Corn Exchange. But, for the 
 most part, he is too thickly incrusted with forms 
 and traditions and antiquities to take note of 
 realities. Like the Glaucus of his own Plato, 
 he is so rankly overgrown with shells and tangle 
 that none on earth can recognise him for the man 
 he was. 
 
 For he was once a man, nor different from other 
 men. He was not of necessity the schoolboy whom 
 masters wonder at because he knows more than 
 they, and fags laugh at because they know much 
 more than he. Nor was he always the pale and 
 studious undergraduate, not reading but only sluic- 
 ing in facts in the vain hope of watering his
 
 134 THE FUTILE DON. 
 
 parched souL Not but he who would become a 
 Don must sit close and read the summer through, 
 and in these modern times must add some gloss 
 of thought to his reading. But when he is first 
 admitted into the convent he may still flatter 
 himself that he is a man. That is only the begin- 
 ning. For in the scale of creation the Don ranks 
 between the man and the parson, and the living 
 part of him must be petrified ere he be worthy to 
 fold his legs under the mahogany of the common- 
 room. The process of incrustation begins with 
 the formula which binds him to guard and revere 
 the statutes of his college. For a moment he 
 triumphs; he has entered into the palace of learn- 
 ing, and strains his eyes to take in every detail 
 of its gorgeousness. Then the forms and traditions 
 and antiquities grip him, they spread their arms 
 about him: and he stiffens with self-satisfaction 
 into his stalactitic tomb. Contact with the youth 
 he is to educate is the finish of it. Not a word, 
 not a deed, may issue from him that might cause 
 any of those little ones to offend. Beginning by 
 sacrificing his body to what he holds to be his 
 mind, he cannot but end by sacrificing his mind 
 to what others take for his morals. 
 
 Among the inexorable forces that close round 
 him and stifle his vital part, none is more potent 
 than his fellows. The Eternal - Donly acts and 
 reacts. Set a Don, even a Don of long standing, 
 down in London or Paris alone, and he might yet 
 attain again to humanity. It is the conventicle 
 of Dons that fosters the academic death and lays
 
 THE FUTILE DON. 135 
 
 its cold hand on every new-comer. Go into a 
 college in Oxford or Cambridge, and you will see 
 men who have known each other and disliked 
 each other since they were twenty some since 
 they were ten. Each knows the other's weaknesses 
 well enough to detest them, but not well enough 
 to despise them. Oxford and Cambridge are ruled 
 by the dread of the Sneer. Every one knows 
 your foibles, and he has known them so long that 
 he only waits a chance to make a by-word of them. 
 So the ambition of the Don is wholly fulfilled when 
 he can sit in his carved oak stall in chapel and 
 thank God he is as other Dons are. They are 
 all cut to a dead level. In Cambridge you are 
 despised if you know anything, in Oxford if you 
 do not know everything. In Oxford you must 
 smile on your bitterest enemy as he insults you; 
 in Cambridge you must turn your back at table 
 on your friend when he begins his most amusing 
 story. To write anything more than a school-book 
 is ruin, for it is to be sent naked to the Sneer 
 omnipotent. For he that finds some other outlet 
 for himself except the mere being a Don is assuredly 
 fair game for the clumsiest. So conversation, 
 emasculated already by the fear of the under- 
 graduate, rises to the sublime inanity of an old- 
 maids' tea-party: one learned man of sixty leaning 
 over the table to another, and saying, "Do you 
 know it has just occurred to me there are four 
 past or present Queen's men all sitting together 
 at high-table?" 
 
 The Don recognises the existence of women only
 
 136 THE FUTILE DON. 
 
 when he marries them. This privilege was an 
 innovation, and the genuine Don marks his sense 
 of that degradation of learning by being very rude 
 to the daughters of his married colleague. Those 
 daughters spend their early years in wondering 
 what song the sirens sung; till at thirty-five they 
 drown their sorrows in the violin. The young 
 Don is much put about when he takes one of these 
 foreign devils down to dinner. One who had 
 blushed and stuttered more even than usual (in 
 common-room he was made a mark of for doing 
 something more than usual) was found behind a 
 curtain, laughing fit to die that he should be set 
 to talk with so strange a monster. But it must 
 be said in his defence that the Don often looks 
 on the man of the world with a very good-humoured 
 tolerance. There is always the charitable possibility 
 that if he had been entombed for thirty years inside 
 a college he might have made a very donly Don 
 after all. But that is no excuse for the Don who 
 tries to be a man of the world : for he is only 
 saved by the fact that he never by any devilish- 
 ness succeeds.
 
 137 
 
 AT TWENTY-FOUR. 3 
 
 HE who stops to take account of his journey through 
 life must needs suppose to himself that he stands on 
 an eminence. He can trace the path by which he 
 has come, and through the tangle ahead fancy will 
 ever thread him a descent not wholly hard or haz- 
 ardous. With twenty-four, or with seventy, it is 
 as with thirty. Halt anywhere to look back or 
 forwards, and the vistas of recollection will conspire 
 with the haze of forecast, till you will tell yourself 
 past and future lie mapped at your feet. Still, at 
 what point you will, the illusion must be similar. 
 That is inexorable necessity; weakness dwells in 
 halting at all. Unprofitable curiosity for the past 
 is the complement of weak - kneed irresolution for 
 the future. Seventy, or thirty, or twenty-four, the 
 same unwholesomeness marks the state when this 
 timorous circumspection takes hold of a man. I, 
 that am twenty-four, know myself for a coward in 
 this, as certainly as I perceive and would pillory the 
 cowardice of thirty. I know it, and am ashamed. 
 But while my cowardice is the same, my excuse 
 is by far the greater. For I see wherein I dis- 
 
 1 National Observer, January 6, 1894.
 
 138 AT TWENTY-FOUR. 
 
 play myself hardy and unashamed on my mountain 
 of clouds that I am come to the end of the best 
 stretch of my life, and stand at the outset of the 
 very worst. Till to-day I was a mere irresponsible 
 offshoot from human society. From to-day I am 
 a young man officially, so to put it, and in dreary 
 earnest. I am come into rank with the world 
 in the rear rank, maybe, but with the untiring 
 necessity of marching forward and keeping step. 
 Till now I sauntered pleasantly on the skirts of 
 the army, went back and forward arm-in-arm with 
 my fancy, and snapped my fingers at the solemn 
 phalanx of serious men. From now the world will 
 regard me, too, seriously, and, for a humiliation ten 
 thousand times more abject, I must so regard myself. 
 From now I must learn and adjust, correct and 
 systematise. Before I was a fool, confessed and 
 chartered; but the folly of the fool has at least 
 a laughing ease with it, where the folly of the 
 wise man is as ridiculous and stiffly unconscious 
 to boot. When I was not on terms with the 
 working world, I could claim from it neither com- 
 fort, nor honour, nor respect, nor even so much as 
 acquaintance. But what was that to me ? What 
 if one of the serried regiments jostled me, so long 
 as I could jostle any and all of them at will ? 
 Were they magnificently unconscious of my being ? 
 That was the very thing I coveted from them most 
 of all. Yet, in truth, I coveted nothing of them, 
 and as little of myself. Passion might clash with 
 reason; physical soundness might break itself on 
 will ; what was that to me ? I was sucked dry,
 
 AT TWENTY-FOUK. 139 
 
 like an orange, by one woman's kiss. I lost the 
 friend of all my years for a laugh; I flung away 
 the holiest of sanctions for a dram. But what of 
 that ? I was no master of my passions, but no 
 slave either : I was their brother, of one heart and 
 mind with them. We blew in companionship where 
 we listed. If I did not appear vulgarly debauched, 
 I was not the less drunk with a dizzy revel of im- 
 morality. There stood no law, no obligation, outside 
 or in. But if duty was trampled under foot, there 
 rose up in its place the god of a most high and 
 passionate pride. As the world vanished into the 
 background, I stood out the more, clear cut, triumph- 
 ing. For myself there was no rule ; for my dealings 
 with the world pride dictated the conditions. Noth- 
 ing unworthy of the absolute worship in which I 
 held myself, nothing untrue, untrustworthy, insincere, 
 disloyal was good enough for such a libertine anarch 
 as I was. That was the one regulator, and it was 
 enough. I was uncurbed, happy, justified of my 
 being. The pedantry of nascent generalisation I 
 had outlived; the pedantry of moral valetudinar- 
 ianism was yet to come. And so I drank draughts 
 out of the spring of life, and knew not what I did. 
 I spread and strengthened every way without plan, 
 and pursued the true life of man without the labour 
 and the degradation of testing its truth. 
 
 But on pride follows Nemesis. As the one moral 
 idea, the overmastering I, waxed and exulted, reflec- 
 tion and calculation grew up like mildew all about 
 it. Since I was I, and so all-important, the cursed 
 years brought in the slow persuasion that I must
 
 140 AT TWENTY-FOUK. 
 
 be economised. There was a resistless call to make 
 the most of this unique treasure. And so I drifted 
 on to the threshold of analysis and regulation, of 
 system and moderation, and all the ossified prudences 
 of Thirty. And yet it is not the system I contemn, 
 but the systematising. If a man could but run under- 
 ground at twenty-four and come up again at fifty ! 
 Then he would see his spiritual experience, his hoard 
 of things done and left undone, complete around him. 
 To extend here, to dock there, would be the matter 
 of but one synoptic moment. But the tentative 
 culture of the soul, the faltering experiment, the 
 shocked recoil, the cold calculating pusillanimity of 
 middle age, there is the abject anticipation for the 
 next years. Already Thirty knocks at my heart and 
 rattles in my chest. And in the wider sphere the 
 pitiless web of relations is wrapping me noiselessly 
 in. I know well in what form it will come. Have 
 I not once already been vanquished ? Tense for 
 conquest, I held the white girl limp in my arms but 
 a day or two ago ; like a fool I deluded myself into 
 sparing her helplessness. What was that but the 
 first treason, the first step on to the decline ? It is 
 no reverence for the laws, so I apologised then to 
 myself ; but here there are particular respects. Re- 
 member place and time. It is no duty, but a grace. 
 But next time it will be more a duty ; soon a duty 
 outright. Taking cowardice yesterday for soft- 
 heartedness, I shall end at thirty by believing it 
 virtue. 
 
 So stand I on the chill brink of young senility, 
 and shiver to the irrevocable plunge.
 
 141 
 
 A FABLE OF JOURNALISTS. 1 
 
 Now as I went I came on a monstrous wood, 
 that grew round the skirts of a high mountain. 
 Out of its terraces of rolling green the peak shot 
 up clear into the sunlight, mottled with pastures 
 and vineyards, and veined with shining streams 
 that twinkled down it. And there beaconed from 
 the very top a light most dazzling in its white- 
 ness ; but what it was, and whence it came, I 
 could not see for the brightness of it. Being 
 come nearer, I was aware of a hoarse roar, as if a 
 great crowd of men and women were fighting among 
 themselves for dear life, and all the while cursing 
 and praying, shouting and groaning and shrieking. 
 And presently, coming yet nearer, and the noise 
 getting ever louder and more urgent, so that now 
 and again some voice or another broke away from 
 the mass and floated distinct to the ear, my eyes 
 lit on a great marvel. I saw that the wood was 
 fenced all about with a tall and sturdy hedge, 
 thickest with most poignant thorns of the length 
 of a man's finger. At the entry of the wood, 
 along all the sweep of the bank as far as I 
 
 1 The National Observer, June 24, 1893.
 
 142 A FABLE OF JOURNALISTS. 
 
 could see on either hand, there in very deed was 
 a mad tangle of men and women, aD struggling 
 together and surging furiously up against the 
 hedge. Those that were first would be stabbed 
 by the thorns and shudder back, screaming and 
 whimpering ; but they would be cast aside by 
 those behind, or else caught in the eddy of the mob 
 and flung on to the pricks again. There were 
 folk, too, on the far side of the hedge, but not 
 many; and it was plain to see that each man of 
 those without recked of nothing else but to be 
 first within the pale. So they were all rushing 
 forward together, hurling themselves into the mass 
 to part it and to make a way, trampling on 
 such as had fallen until the blood spurted up 
 into their faces. And they clawed at the throats 
 of those before and beside them, to pull them 
 down and pass over their bodies, and leaped madly 
 on to be gored by the spikes, both men and women 
 imploring those within to help them through the 
 hedge. And the air was rent with oaths and 
 entreaties, and screams of rage and anguish, and 
 the most hideous din conceivable. But when it 
 so happened that one burst through, he would 
 stand an instant in the gap and fight the others 
 back: longer he needed not, for the thorn-branches 
 never broke, but bent and then swung back tougher 
 and pricklier than ever. 
 
 When I saw these things I stood a space stock- 
 still with the horror of it. Then coming again to 
 myself, and running up to an old man who was 
 sitting by the roadside a little way from the
 
 A FABLE OF JOURNALISTS. 143 
 
 crowd, " What, in God's name," I cried, " are these 
 lunatics doing ? " He, mopping the blood from a 
 rent in his neck, answered : " This is the Forest 
 of Scribes, wherein are the things that the heart 
 of man most desires drink and gold. And the 
 peak above it is the Mount of Letters, to which 
 the way lies up through the wood. There is, in- 
 deed, another road on the other side, but in that 
 part the steep is guarded by a deep and rushing 
 river, and the ferrymen exact a great price. I, 
 too, was hot to win to the Mount, as all these 
 are, and, being poor, I have been striving at the 
 barrier these many years ; but I came by a hurt 
 on the spikes." None the less, he sprang up as 
 he spoke and went at the hedge again like one 
 demented. Therewith, myself catching the frenzy, 
 and thinking that there must surely be some rare 
 thing to be had on the Mount since so many 
 were gone mad about it, I sprang after him into 
 the medley. Twice in that sweating hell I went 
 near to be crushed to death, and once I felt the 
 thorns. But, as it fell out, I saw by me a young 
 man who had just made a gap in the quick-set, 
 and behind him, without more ado, I shipped in ; 
 for he, as it seemed, was going in, like myself, 
 not for the gold or drink, nor yet to get up to 
 the Mount of Letters, since he could easily have 
 paid the toll on the other side, but only for a 
 fancy he had to see the wood. Therefore he held 
 me the boughs apart for a moment. But the 
 branches whipped to again behind, and I heard 
 one howling piteously on the thorns.
 
 144 A FABLE OF JOURNALISTS. 
 
 So I came into the Forest of Scribes. And 
 at what I saw there I was yet more astonished 
 than at what passed outside. For the trees grew 
 so clustered together that their branches were all 
 tangled and knotted and enmeshed, and the heavy 
 leaves choked what sunbeams might try to struggle 
 in. So that thick blackness fell about me like a 
 cloak, and for a while I could see nothing, but 
 stumbled on blindly over the matted roots. It 
 was darker than any night, and there were no 
 paths, nor was there any light to trace them by 
 if there had been. Now that wood is so huge 
 and mazy that, once inside, a man might almost 
 be dead and buried for any chance there is that 
 he can find his way out again. It is full of 
 dingles and gullies, so that it is impossible to go 
 through by following the trend of the ground. 
 And in every corner, though I could not see, I 
 heard men and women, the strangest medley 
 high and low, rich and poor, young and old, dull 
 and ingenious none could tell how many, nor 
 what they did, nor whither they were going, nor 
 why. I heard voices of folk running up and down 
 belated, some calling out to know whereabouts was 
 the Mount of Letters, where the sunlight was ; 
 and all the time prating of something else laws 
 and trading and mummery and chiffons and all 
 the silly and outlandish things in the world. 
 
 But the wonder of wonders was to perceive 
 how the very men that at the hedge had been 
 so furiously enamoured of the Mount of Letters, 
 when they got in, began to falter. And the
 
 A FABLE OF JOUKNALISTS. 145 
 
 cause of it was this. First, the horrid gloom and 
 confusion, no man knowing whether or no his face 
 were set toward the Mount. Second, as my eyes 
 drank in the dark, and were able to peer a little 
 ahead, I saw that the gold of which the old man 
 had spoken was hidden underground. Every man 
 was bound to dig up his tale of pieces, else he 
 was swiftly conveyed away out of the wood by 
 sideways that there were into a pit where he 
 presently perished. So the scribes were all scoop- 
 ing up the mire with fouled fingers, some reluctant, 
 some greedy. Also, there was the drink that lay 
 all about in pools : I could see from the shimmer 
 of it in the dusk that it was stagnant and noisome. 
 Whoever drank of it forgot little by little all that 
 he had set his heart on before, and was content 
 to lie down and gulp and gulp it till he ceased 
 even to grub for gold, and was borne away in 
 the end to the pit. These three things there were 
 that seduced such as would climb the Peak (for 
 there were some there that cared nothing for it, 
 and only went in for the gold), and in the end 
 it transfigured them out of all knowledge. They 
 grew hideous to look on : their eyes were bleared, 
 so that they would have been dazed and pricked 
 by the Light of the Mount even had they come 
 thither, and they tottered for weakness. One by 
 one the seekers left groping in the dizzy wood 
 and came to rejoice and hug themselves in the 
 filthiness of the gold and the stench of the pools. 
 Some there were that lay down less from love of 
 it than for weariness and mere heartlessness. These 
 
 K
 
 146 A FABLE OF JOURNALISTS. 
 
 made bitter complaint of their ill-luck, since they 
 were still hungry for the Light. One of them, 
 who was no more than a young boy, I heard 
 crying aloud : " Curses on this beastly Forest of 
 Scribes and the gold and the drink, and curses 
 before all on my own misery and folly that ever 
 thought to gain the Mount thereby ; " and there- 
 with he smote himself on the breast two or three 
 times, and fell to drinking again. Though for the 
 most part they cursed not themselves, but only 
 the labyrinth. Some few had attained to the 
 Mount more by happiness than deserving (said 
 they), but I saw none. For the rest, there they 
 were and there they miserably remained, hating 
 the muck and putridity, but never able to get 
 quit of it, feebleness and blindness ever creeping 
 faster on them, knowing not in what part of the 
 wood they were, nor whether they were journey- 
 ing back or forward, nor yet anything else but 
 that they were undone for ever, and that through 
 their own unwisdom. 
 
 But why they so longed to scale the Mount 
 of Letters, and whether or not, wood or no wood, 
 they could ever have come up to it, and what 
 was the bright light I saw atop of it, though I 
 inquired of many, there was no man of them all 
 could tell me.
 
 147 
 
 THE DEEYFUS CASE. 
 I. 
 
 SCENES AND ACTOES IN THE TRIAL. 1 
 
 " YOUR name ? " asked the president of the court- 
 martial. 
 
 " Alfred Dreyfus." 
 
 " Profession ? " 
 
 " Captain of artillery." 
 
 " Age ? " 
 
 " Thirty-nine years." 
 
 With these three common phrases he broke the 
 silence of four and a half years. Nothing could be 
 more formal, and yet here, in the first five minutes 
 of the trial, was summed up the most incredibly 
 romantic history ever recorded. Alfred Dreyfus 
 five years ago scarcely anybody knew there was such 
 a name as Dreyfus in the world ; now the leading 
 comic singer of Paris, who was born with it, has had 
 to change it because it is too embarrassingly famous ! 
 Captain of artillery and generals who have led 
 armies in the presence of the enemy have lost their 
 
 1 M'Clure's Magazine, October 1899.
 
 148 THE DKEYFUS CASE. 
 
 commands because of him ! Thirty-nine years and 
 here were men who were known before he was born 
 staking their ripe reputations for or against him ! 
 The only living ex-chief of the state in which he was 
 a simple unit ; five successive heads, and nine generals 
 besides, of the army in which he was an unregarded 
 subordinate; the minister who for years has con- 
 ducted foreign relations in which he could never have 
 dreamed of figuring, all were there because he 
 was. Novelists like PreVost and Mirbeau, poets like 
 Maurice Barres, philosophers like Max Nordau, French 
 journalists like Arthur Meyer and Comely, foreign 
 journalists whose names are familiar as far away as 
 Helsingfors and San Francisco, they had all come to 
 see him. There were men like Picquart and Lebrun- 
 Eenault, nobodies when last he saw them, now 
 famous by reason of an accidental connection with 
 him. Most dramatic of all, there was a little, 
 close- veiled woman in black Madame Henry, a 
 woman he had never seen, widow of a man whom he 
 never knew, yet who had risen to celebrity and fallen 
 to an infamous death because of him. 
 
 What did he think of such a miracle ? To all 
 appearances he did not think of it at all : he was 
 concentrating all the energies of a mind starved for 
 five years on the answers he would presently make 
 to the charges against him. Perhaps that was as well 
 for him. For had he thought a moment, he would 
 have seen that he, the most famous man in the 
 world, was at the same tune the most insignificant 
 person in the court. He supposed they were there 
 to try him ; they were not. To him it was every-
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 149 
 
 thing whether he left his prison a free man or a 
 doubly damned convict for the Devil's Island ; it was 
 nothing to them. He was simply something for 
 them to fight over a Homeric carcass round which 
 had rallied heroes and demi-gods to hack and stab at 
 each other. On one side were the army, the church, 
 the aristocracy ; on the other the civil law, the anti- 
 military proletariat, Protestantism, and the Jews. 
 The prize of the struggle was not Alfred Dreyfus, 
 Captain of Artillery, but France. 
 
 To the English eye it all looked like what it was 
 a public meeting rather than a court of law. 
 An English court is almost ostentatiously grim and 
 business-like. The room is small and none too light ; 
 the walls bare, unless a plan should be hung on them 
 to illustrate an argument. The judge sits on the 
 bench a nose, mouth, and chin appearing out of his 
 white wig like a silent sphinx. Lawyers drone and 
 mumble. Witnesses stumble over monosyllables. 
 The impression is one of hush and dimness man 
 suppressed, but the awful majesty of the law brooding 
 over all. But this court-martial in the Hall of the 
 Lycee was utterly different. The room was large 
 enough for a lecture or orchestral concert, which is 
 exactly what it is used for. With two rows of large 
 windows at each side square in the lower tier, 
 circular in the upper it was almost as light as the 
 day outside. The walls were coloured a cheerful 
 buff; round the cornice were emblazoned the names 
 of Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Eenan, and the intel- 
 lectuals of Brittany. At the top of the room was a 
 stage ; hanging on its back wall the white Christ on
 
 150 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 a black cross proclaimed the place a court of justice 
 only instead of the solemn sphinx in black, there 
 sat at a table seven officers in full uniform. In the 
 centre was the president, Colonel Jouaust, a little old 
 gentleman with dark hair, eye-glasses, and a huge 
 white moustache that seemed part of the same stuff 
 as the tall white aigrette in his kepi on the table 
 before him. On each side sat three officers four 
 small and two heavy men, in the black, red-faced 
 uniform of the artillery; their Mpis also tricolor 
 for the senior officers, red for the junior edged the 
 judicial table with a line of colour. Behind, there 
 sat some other officers, the supplementary judges. 
 On a small tribune to the left of the stage sat three 
 more, the prosecuting commissary of the Government 
 and two officers of the court. Opposite, on our right, 
 was a similar tribune, but a new costume four men 
 in black gowns with one flap and one streamer edged 
 with white fur, white muslin bands round the neck, 
 and a high black cap like a priest's biretta. These 
 were Dreyfus's two counsel and their assistants. 
 Below them on a chair sat Dreyfus himself, an 
 officer of gendarmes at short arm's length behind 
 him. Eight in front of the president was a chair for 
 the witnesses. These and the reporters thronged the 
 forward part of the hall generals with crimson, 
 gold-brimmed ktpis, and with ribbons and stars on 
 their breasts ; civilians in black and brown and grey, 
 tall hats, stiff hats, soft felt hats elaborately arranged 
 into the shape of a haycock, pince-nez with broad 
 black ribbons, drooping green silk neckcloths with 
 fringes in a word, French dress. In the middle of
 
 THE DEEYFUS CASE. 151 
 
 it shone the silks and feathers of the reporters of the 
 ' Fronde/ the woman's paper of Paris, which does not 
 employ a single man. Sprinkled everywhere were 
 the blue and white uniforms of gendarmes with 
 sword and revolver; along the back of the hall 
 twinkled the red and blue and steel of an infantry 
 force with fixed bayonets. You might have taken it 
 for a political meeting, or an assault at arms, or a 
 fancy ball for anything except a trial. 
 
 The witnesses assisted the impression. Each was 
 brought in by a door beside the stage, came before 
 the president, and raised his hand to the crucifix as 
 he swore to tell the truth, all the truth. The presi- 
 dent asks him what he knows of the affair. And 
 then and then he embarks in a pretentious speech, 
 written out in whole or part beforehand. Sometimes 
 it is interspersed with original documents, which are 
 handed up to be read by the registrar of the court. 
 For the manner of the speeches, the politicians stand 
 upright, declaiming, waving their hands at the presi- 
 dent, as if they were asking the suffrages of their 
 fellow-citizens : the soldiers usually sit and murmur 
 confidences into the Colonel's ear. But for the 
 matter, it is always the same the speaker's self. 
 Dreyfus's case is mentioned, no doubt, but merely 
 as a thread to hang together the witness's first 
 impressions of the case; what he did to correct 
 or confirm them ; what view he takes of the im- 
 portance of this document or the interpretation of 
 that ; what view he took of the international situa- 
 tion in 1894, and what measures then suggested 
 themselves to his mind ; what he said to General A.,
 
 152 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 and what Major B. told him that Captain C. had said 
 to lieutenant D. "This is at fourth hand, it is 
 true," he will ingenuously add ; " still it should be 
 allowed its relative value." Hours are spent in 
 repeating at second and third hand the evidence 
 of witnesses who in a day or two are to be heard 
 themselves. It seems no part of the president's 
 business to guide the inquiry : if he wishes for 
 information on any point, he must wait half a day, 
 till the witness has exhausted the subject of his past 
 life and opinions. Cross-examination fails to drag 
 the case out of the rut, for the moment the lawyer 
 asks a question prefixing, of course, a brief speech 
 of his own the witness is off again, to the same 
 tune, like a re-wound musical box. While he is 
 speaking, the cross-examiner is composing his next 
 oration ; during that, the witness is composing his ; 
 and so on for days. 
 
 Here is an example of French methods of taking 
 evidence. The officer who was with Dreyfus on the 
 day of his degradation, Captain Lebrun-Eenault, has 
 asserted that the condemned man made a confession. 
 A confession, of course, is evidence everywhere. But 
 everybody knows that false confessions of crime are 
 not rare ; therefore, in English law, even a confession 
 requires confirmation. In this case the confession is 
 disputed. Captain Lebrun-Renault wrote in his diary 
 that Dreyfus said, " The Minister knows well that, if 
 I gave up documents, they were worthless, and that 
 it was to get more important ones for them." On 
 another occasion he said " had given up," instead of 
 "gave up." Dreyfus, interrogated on the Devil's
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 153 
 
 Island by the President of the Court of Appeal of 
 Cayenne, said that he said, " The Minister knows 
 well that I am innocent. He sent du Paty de Clam 
 to ask me if I had not given up some important 
 documents to get others in exchange for them." It 
 is not pretended that anybody else heard what 
 Dreyfus said. Yet almost every witness has dis- 
 cussed this alleged confession. First, the president 
 questioned Dreyfus himself on it. Dreyfus denied 
 it. Next, M. Casimir-Perier deposed that Captain 
 Lebrun-Kenault had said nothing about the matter to 
 him. Next, General Mercier deposed that he told 
 Captain Lebrun - Renault to tell M. Casimir-Perier 
 about it. Next, these two witnesses were heard in 
 " confrontation," as they call it that is, standing up 
 side by side and contradicting each other's state- 
 ments. The ex-Minister of War said that General 
 Gonse heard him tell the Captain to tell the 
 President; the ex-President said that M. Dupuy 
 had told him that Captain Lebrun-Renault did not 
 tell him (Dupuy) that he told him (Casimir-Perier). 
 M. Cavaignac went into the same incident at great 
 length. He said that General Gonse wrote to him 
 that Captain Lebrun-Renault told him (Gonse) that 
 he (Lebrun-Renault) heard Dreyfus confess. This 
 jungle of pronouns is what the French seem to call 
 evidence. And when you have struggled through it, 
 you hear that Captain Lebrun-Renault is to be called 
 himself to give his own evidence in Dreyfus's presence 
 and to be cross-examined upon it. What a trial ! 
 
 It is incredible, but it is absolutely true, that the 
 first four days of the public trial yielded not one rag
 
 154 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 of first-hand evidence, either for Dreyfus or against 
 him. In that time eleven witnesses testified, one 
 ex-President, four ex-Ministers of War, three other 
 ex-ministers, a diplomatist, a miscellaneous general, 
 and the widow of Henry, the forger, and all testified 
 simply about themselves. What they said we will 
 leave to French history to tell; this is an article 
 on the Dreyfus case. 
 
 Upon the foreign mind, accustomed, if not pro- 
 fessionally to weigh evidence, at least to procedure 
 where evidence consists of statements of fact, the 
 gloom fell deeper and deeper hour by hour and day 
 by day. We came with curiosity aflame ; we were 
 not merely to see a great show, but to solve a great 
 mystery. Day passed day, general came after 
 general and discoursed for hours; the mystery only 
 grew denser. The first witnesses of any moment 
 for M. Casimir-Perier came to Rennes not to say 
 what he knew of the case, but to complain that 
 he, then President, knew nothing were a procession 
 of French war ministers. Only two of them had 
 anything to say, General Mercier and M. Cavaignac. 
 Nothing could be more utterly different than the 
 manner and methods of the two; yet both created 
 an identical effect mystification. M. Cavaignac 
 was all open and above-board. He is the good 
 boy of French politics a toy Brutus who has lived 
 on his reputation for integrity ever since at school 
 he refused to take his prize from the son of the 
 emperor who imprisoned his father. This profession 
 of honest man leads to high eminence in France 
 the more so in that Cavaignac has a monopoly of it.
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 155 
 
 He is the housemaid who sweeps up all the scandals 
 of France. When every public man but half a dozen 
 had dirtied his fingers in Panama, Cavaignac was the 
 man to restore public confidence in public honesty. 
 When Billot had succeeded Mercier, and the Dreyfus 
 case had become worse tangled than ever, and the 
 General Staff and the War Office were suspect, who 
 but Cavaignac could go to the Ministry of War and 
 vouch for them ? To the outsider he is a tiresome 
 prig, with his eternal protestations of Eoman virtue ; 
 and he looks it, with his narrow, stooping chest, his 
 narrow pedant's head, his little moustache, and the 
 close-cropped, smug side-whiskers on his cheek bones. 
 But to France it is an obvious godsend to have one 
 public man who can be relied upon to tell the truth. 
 Cavaignac duly went to the Ministry of War and 
 announced that Dreyfus was guilty. Cavaignac said 
 so ; France was reassured at once. Presently Cavaig- 
 nac got up in the Chamber and read a letter from 
 one foreign military attach^ to another, proving that 
 Dreyfus was a traitor. France had it posted up on 
 the walls of every commune in the country. And 
 then one day it was known that the letter was a 
 forgery, and that its author, the chief stand-by of the 
 General Staff in its fight against Dreyfus, was in 
 prison with his throat cut. And the mystery was 
 that Cavaignac still said Dreyfus was guilty. The 
 discovery of Henry's forgery, whereof he himself 
 extorted confession and instantly acknowledged it, 
 was the strongest confirmation of his famous in- 
 tegrity. But this time France doubted. His heart 
 remained unimpeachable only what about his head ?
 
 156 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 Now came Cavaignac into court at Rennes to set 
 all doubt to rest. He stood up before the council of 
 war, stretched forth his hand, and harangued it as if 
 it had been the Chamber of Deputies. Frankly and 
 clearly he told them everything he knew and it 
 proved that he knew nothing. Not one single reve- 
 lation to satisfy the world of Dreyfus's guilt only 
 an argument such as any man who knew a little 
 of the French army could have made quite as well ! 
 It was a good argument, clear, cogent, everything 
 except convincing; and to the impartial mind it 
 disposed for ever of the superstition that a man 
 cannot honestly believe Dreyfus guilty. Cavaignac 
 proved that Dreyfus was in an exceptionally good 
 position to know all the secrets detailed in the inter- 
 cepted letter which forms the basis of the charge. 
 Very few officers in the French army are able to 
 betray the information that was betrayed ; none was 
 more able than Dreyfus. To be evidence to hang a 
 man and worse, this demonstration, to Anglo-Saxon 
 ideas, should have gone further and shown that none 
 other was able to betray these secrets at all. It 
 establishes Cavaignac's good faith, and makes it easy 
 to believe in other men's : it explains maybe why 
 Dreyfus was accused and condemned. But it does 
 not clear the mists from the most extraordinary 
 affair that ever perplexed the world. 
 
 Mercier's evidence explained nothing ; but Mercier's 
 personality suggested whole volumes. He said no 
 more than Cavaignac, and said it a great deal less 
 clearly; but the very obscurity hinted at possi- 
 bilities immeasurable. It was characteristic of the
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 157 
 
 man that his deposition dealt largely with the 
 cryptic methods of the bureau of espionage, and it 
 was itself so cryptic that we knew no more of them 
 after he had discoursed for an hour than when he 
 began. Mercier's personality strikes the note of the 
 whole case. Looking at his back as he gave evidence 
 tall, straight, and slim you would have called 
 him soldierly and suspected him stupid. But his 
 face and head are a nightmare of the Inquisition. 
 On his face the brownish skin hangs loosely. There 
 is neither depth of cranium nor height of forehead to 
 hold a brain in. The eyes are slits with heavy 
 curtains of lids, and bags beneath them that turn 
 the drooping cheeks into caverns. A little moustache 
 and beard frame thin lips that might be evil, sensual, 
 humorous, but could never be human. If you look 
 at his head, you call him a vulture ; at his face, you 
 call him a mummy. He speaks in a slow, passionless 
 monotone ; his gestures seem calculated to follow his 
 words, instead of proceeding, as a Frenchman's should, 
 along with them, on the same impulse. When he 
 stood up side by side with Casimir-Perier, he per- 
 sisted in his assertions with the dogged mumble of a 
 schoolboy detected in a lie. When he sat and strove 
 to wind the toils of treason round the prisoner, he 
 seemed as unmoved by hate as by pity ; he accused 
 him dully, as if repeating a lesson. Cold, deliberate, 
 tortuous, thorough, yet ineffective; verbose, but not 
 candid ; bravely barking with native stupidity ; con- 
 scientiously believing himself to be doing God's 
 work ; untouched by hate or love, anger or fear or 
 hope, for others or for himself General Mercier
 
 158 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 was the very type and mirror of a Jesuit grand 
 inquisitor. 
 
 Mercier was the spirit of darkness ; but there was 
 also a spirit of light. Nearest to the audience of the 
 four robed figures on the counsel's bench was a young 
 man of great stature and size. As he sat loosely on 
 his chair, hitched his gown up on to his shoulders, 
 leaned forward to listen or heaved himself back to 
 loll, every motion had a vast sweep, embodied easy 
 power. When he stood, he was a clear head above 
 most Frenchmen in court. His keen eye looked out 
 from under bushy brows as a gun looks out of its 
 port. A light-brown beard, neither very trim nor 
 shapeless, and light-brown hair just beginning to nod 
 over his brow, tempered brute strength with a look 
 of bluff kindliness. If Mercier was an inquisitor, 
 this sunny-faced giant was a viking. It was Labori, 
 the great cross-examiner. Since he defended Zola 
 he has given himself heart and soul to the cause of 
 Dreyfus. Perhaps his skill in eliciting reluctant 
 truths was piqued at the persistence of a mystery 
 unfathomed ; certainly his fighting spirit was roused 
 by contumely to resolute hostility. When first he 
 rose to cross-examine, his voice was agreeable, yet 
 seemed too soft and liquid for the man. But the 
 moment he approached a point, a distinction, an 
 admission, it hardened and rang like steel. In anger, 
 you knew he could roar out of that great chest like 
 a bull. If any champion could plunge into the black 
 shades, choke lies and errors and ignorance, and pluck 
 out the truth, it was surely Labori. 
 
 Therefore, this being the most tangled riddle of
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 159 
 
 the century, a French journalist galloped into court 
 at half-past six on the third morning with the 
 screech, " Labori is shot ! " And Labori was lying 
 on the canal bank with his head in his wife's lap 
 and a bullet in his back. He had been shot from 
 behind; letters, including a threatening missive 
 received the day before, had been taken from his 
 pocket ; it was said that a man had tried to wrest 
 from him the portfolio that held his notes for the 
 imminent cross-examination of Mercier. Certain it 
 was that the assailant got away and remained un- 
 caught for days ; which, as he must want food and 
 the whole countryside knew of him, spelt sympathy 
 and friends. Plot or no plot, Rennes went mad. 
 Jews wept. Newspaper-sellers volleyed " Long live 
 the army ! " or " Down with the tonsure ! " and hun- 
 dreds came out into the street to watch them do it. 
 At every street corner somebody was calling some- 
 body on the other side an assassin. When we re- 
 turned from court that morning, Jewish ladies were 
 waiting at the doors of the hotel to make sure that 
 no one had assassinated their husbands. They told 
 each other with shaking lips that the lower quarters, 
 inflamed by cider far weaker than St Louis beer, 
 were contemplating a massacre of Jews. They re- 
 membered, and went pale, that it was less than a 
 week to the St Bartholomew. An eminent novelist 
 went up to an eminent anti-Semite and remarked, 
 " Assassin ! Your face displeases me. Assassin ! I 
 give you five minutes to leave this hotel. Assassin ! " 
 The anti-Semite, who happens to be a Jew, went to 
 the prefect and asked for protection.
 
 160 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 " Perfectly," replied the high-minded official, " it is 
 my duty to protect every law-abiding citizen, irre- 
 spective of party, race, sex, or creed. I shall do my 
 duty." The anti-Semite Jew breathed more easily. 
 " But," added M. le Prefect, " it would be wrong to 
 disguise from you that my authority stops at the 
 door of your hotel. By the way," he went on 
 pleasantly, " when do you count to leave Eennes ? " 
 
 " To-morrow." 
 
 " Well, then, let me advise you, as a man of well- 
 known law-abiding tendencies, and considering the 
 emotion aroused by the odious attempted assassina- 
 tion of this morning, to to advance the time of 
 your departure by a day." And he did. The 
 novelist, a much bigger man, accompanied him to 
 the door, shouting " Assassin ! " and Eennes saw that 
 defender of the honour of the army no more. 
 
 The only Frenchman who remained indubitably 
 sane was Labori himself. But bravely as he bore it, 
 the loss of the five hours he had promised himself 
 with General Mercier, and of the distinction he had 
 hoped to win in the greatest case of the century, 
 must have been a bitter disappointment. And to the 
 seeker after truth the loss was almost as irreparable. 
 Without Labori the case was dull, and grew daily 
 duller. The day of the shooting brought a procession 
 of generals ruddy, tubby generals of comic opera ; 
 clean-limbed, elastic-bodied, clear-eyed generals of the 
 manoeuvre field; bald, white-headed generals like 
 elders in somebody else's crimson trousers ; Jesuitical 
 generals, winding coil on coil of cold insinuation 
 around the pale, silent prisoner. Day after day, day
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 161 
 
 after day, and Dreyfus was helpless, and the accusers 
 uncontradicted. It was not evidence, it was not first- 
 hand, it was not new. But the judges, with this 
 perpetual stream of accusation washing over them, 
 for the most part from their own superior officers, 
 must needs be carried away by it in the end. They 
 were plainly earnest, conscientious, impartial; took 
 notes, asked questions, listened with fixity; were 
 worthy of the momentous part fate had assigned 
 to them in their country's history. But from day to 
 day accusation and innuendo trickled over, and 
 Dreyfus's face went whiter and whiter and his 
 chances blacker and blacker. 
 
 To the unprejudiced truth - seeker these days 
 brought a feeling of absolute, dazed bewilderment. 
 The hope of certainty receded further and further 
 into the shades ; and with the absence of any 
 palpable facts, the sense of mystery grew till it 
 became an oppression. There must surely be some- 
 thing behind all this. Here was the great case 
 which for five years had convulsed France and per- 
 plexed the world. In its ultimate effects it will 
 probably alter the face of Europe. Some have called 
 it the beginning of the end of civilisation. And 
 then there seemed to be nothing at all behind it. 
 Everybody had promised the whole truth for this 
 final clearing of the matter, and yet nothing came. 
 Nothing known and still it was impossible to 
 believe that there was nothing to know. Every- 
 thing seemed possible; every wild hypothesis pro- 
 gressed, in turn, from possibility to probability. 
 One hour there had been a great plot and a ring of 
 
 L
 
 162 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 traitors in the army. Dreyfus was in it, and had 
 been sacrificed to save the others. The next, am- 
 bitious Dreyfus had really, as he was said to have 
 acknowledged, given up trumpery documents in the 
 hope, Jew -like, of making a personal success by 
 bringing to the Intelligence Department some great 
 secret of Germany. Presently Esterhazy was telling 
 the truth: he had written the letter to Schwartz- 
 koppen which never went, so as to implicate Dreyfus, 
 innocent or guilty. Anon Dreyfus had been shunned 
 and tabooed by his brother officers, and had rushed 
 to his revenge in treason. 
 
 Hour by hour, accusation on accusation, Dreyfus 
 whiter and whiter, his chances blacker and blacker ! 
 And then one morning, when the military clericalists 
 seemed to have their hands on the prize, came a man 
 who restored the balance of the fight. Colonel 
 Picquart slouched into court in a shocking bad 
 morning coat and ill-fitting trousers, lifted his hand 
 to the Christ and swore to tell the truth, sat down in 
 the witnesses' chair, got up, and sat down more com- 
 fortably, settled his shoulders to the back of it, 
 crossed his legs, poured himself a glass of water, 
 took hold of the table before him with both hands, 
 and began. 
 
 Until he ran his head upon the Dreyfus case, 
 three years ago, Picquart was almost the most 
 promising soldier in France. Like most of France's 
 best men, he is an Alsatian. He had seen fighting 
 in Algeria and Tongking, and had spent most of the 
 rest of his service on the General Staff. On these 
 two roads to distinction he had gone so far that he
 
 THE DEEYFUS CASE. 163 
 
 was major at thirty-two and lieutenant-colonel at 
 forty. He speaks and writes English, German, 
 Russian, Spanish, and Italian, an accomplishment 
 almost unearthly in a Frenchman. He enjoyed the 
 highest esteem of his chiefs. There was nothing in 
 the French army to which he could not legitimately 
 aspire, till he ruined himself by taking up the cause 
 of Dreyfus. He has spent ten out of the last 
 thirteen months in a secret prison. His enemies 
 have never suggested that he had any other motive 
 than a predilection for justice and truth. 
 
 He sat down deliberately, as one who means to 
 stay, and began. From the first word his voice was 
 audible to everybody in court. His calm, reasonable- 
 looking face was not stirred by any kind of emotion. 
 He articulated with clearness, spoke with emphasis, 
 with pauses for his audience to digest him, with 
 pauses to prepare them for an important point, with 
 utter lucidity and fastidious exactness of phrase. It 
 was easy to see that he had been a professor at the 
 French West Point. Frankly, he was there to tell 
 them what they did not know, and he no more 
 expected it to be questioned than the schoolmaster 
 expects the child to dispute the multiplication table. 
 The judges hated it. Even if he had not gone 
 against the army, he was younger than any of them, 
 yet senior in rank to six out of the seven. He was 
 a staff man, what they call in the English army 
 a "brass hat," and therefore not beloved by less 
 lucky regimental officers. You could see their 
 hostility : they looked at each other looked away 
 leaned back yawned. Picquart went on in his
 
 164 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 absolutely clear voice, with his absolutely clear 
 exposition of facts. This was not evidence either; 
 it was a speech for the defence this time, but a 
 masterly one. It was obvious in five minutes that 
 he knew the whole case from A to Z. He knew the 
 work of the General Staff as he knew the alphabet. 
 He knew where every document was kept, where 
 everybody worked, what his work was, what he was 
 in a position to know and what he was not. He 
 saw the nature and bearing of every fact by the dry 
 white light of pure reason. This was a man in some 
 sort like Mercier a man for whom hate or love, 
 anger or hope or fear, could never colour what 
 seemed true and right only this was a man with 
 a brain. His brain was like a swift, well-oiled 
 machine, every wheel running easily in its place, 
 every nut and bolt doing its due share of work, no 
 less and no more. The judges ceased to look about, 
 they looked at Picquart ; in the last hour of the five 
 and a half hours' sitting they leaned forward motion- 
 less. In two hours Picquart had swept away over 
 three days of the other side, and the case was back 
 on the level again. 
 
 And what of Dreyfus all this while ? If the 
 chances of the fight excite the man who merely 
 wishes to know, what of him to whom, little as the 
 fighters may care about him, it spells a new life or 
 the old hell ? To look at Dreyfus as he usually is, 
 you would say he was the only quite disinterested 
 spectator in the court. To hear him speak, as he 
 rarely does, you would say he was the only man in 
 the case who had the clear head to appreciate the
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 165 
 
 evidence at its just value. Whatever he is or has 
 been, Dreyfus is no common man. 
 
 The first day, he came into court like a dead man 
 just beginning to come to life. He walked like an 
 automaton. His hair was grey; his face was like 
 clay; his eyes were invisible behind his glasses. 
 His voice, when he spoke, was withered and sapless. 
 He was a translation into awful fact of the metaphor 
 " living death." But during his interrogation that 
 very day his voice came back harsh, abrupt, gusty, 
 but sonorous and vibrating. His denials followed 
 charges with the instant rebound of a sharp volley at 
 tennis. He was stiff, certainly, and formal it was 
 well said that he looked more like a German officer 
 than a French and he denied everything with 
 emphasis, but without emotion. The French, of 
 course, found him unsympathetic, and certainly he 
 looked stubborn and none too cordial or genial. 
 
 When we saw him again, after four days' secret 
 session, he had thawed amazingly; he was almost 
 back to normal life. He moved with signs of 
 elasticity, leaped to his feet, and spoke promptly, 
 in a full voice. When it was his cue to be still, 
 he sat with his knees together like an Egyptian 
 statue. But when the long series of accusations 
 came lapping over him, intangible, impossible to 
 deny, much less disprove, with Labori gone and his 
 other counsel ponderous, then we saw Dreyfus slowly 
 freeze back to death again. That head that always 
 thrusts itself into the middle of every photograph 
 and insists on striking the note of every glance of 
 the man the deep, rounded, close-cropped cranium
 
 1G6 THE DKEYFUS CASE. 
 
 and the harsh, strong, hatchet profile, looked like a 
 death's-head. It had a queer, archaic, Oriental 
 suggestion ; it might have been a skull from 
 Chaldaea, endowed by wizardry with a moment's 
 life and slowly fading back into grinning bones again. 
 At all times, indignant or patient, hopeful or stony, 
 it is the face of a strong man, both powerful to 
 think and brave to suffer ; but it is a face that you 
 can never describe. It is sheer suffering as it can 
 hardly have ever been seen suffering both objective 
 and subjective, agony felt and agony borne. There 
 is only one such face, because there is only one 
 France, and France has but one Devil's Island. 
 
 As the days wore on, especially when the trial 
 passed into a stratum of smaller witnesses, who made 
 definite statements instead of harangues for prosecu- 
 tion and defence, there gradually appeared a new 
 Dreyfus. He became a man. When he stood, he 
 stood poker-backed as ever; but he walked every 
 day into court as if he were going to his office. His 
 voice was still harsh, but it was measured. Instead 
 of protesting, protesting, half like a wounded beast 
 and half like a machine, he began to argue to give 
 reasons why he did this or could not have done that. 
 From a man trying to fight his way back to life he 
 had become a man balancing probabilities. His 
 demeanour, his voice, his thought, while always 
 dignified, were daily more even, better oiled, so to 
 speak ; more on the level of the rest of us, who have 
 never died and come to life again. 
 
 But the real Dreyfus the unique Dreyfus of the 
 Devil's Island the petrified soul in the rigid body
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 167 
 
 that is the wonderful, awful thing that none who 
 saw and heard will ever forget and none will ever 
 see and hear again. For such, Dreyfus will ring 
 through their heads till they die in one cry. It was 
 at the end of the second public audience. General 
 Mercier, cold, hard, passionless, had been accusing 
 him of treason for three hours accusing him as 
 though the accused were either not there or, seeing 
 he was there, were a clod of clay. At length he 
 turned, and looked Dreyfus in the face. He said in 
 that measured, pitiless monotone, " If I had the 
 least doubt that Dreyfus was guilty I 
 should be the first to say" (oh, why in 
 mercy could he not hurry and get it done ?) " I was 
 
 honestly mistaken " 
 
 Ah ! A yell that seemed to rip the sleepy hall in 
 twain ! Dreyfus was up, eyes blazing, head thrust 
 fiercely forward, fist flung out. "You should say 
 that," were the words ; but they tore out so furiously 
 that they were less like words than an inarticulate 
 scream of supreme agony. For a moment he stood 
 thus, eyes and head and fist, with the officer's 
 pitying hand on his arm. It was a tiger checked 
 in his spring only a human tiger, which is as 
 capable of rage and so much more capable of 
 suffering. And the tone ! It is useless to wrestle 
 with description : it was the whole story of the man 
 of the Devil's Island. Everybody in the hall sat 
 stupid and confounded, as though a bolt had fallen 
 from heaven. Everybody felt shy and ashamed in 
 presence of something so incomparably more intense 
 than they had ever known. It was rage, and it was
 
 168 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 hope just a tiny dash of hope to embitter the 
 flavour of utter despair. It was passion that a man 
 who always lived among men could never feel, and 
 that passion was trying to burst out all in a phrase 
 and did not know the way. The torment of a dead 
 soul, knowing itself dead, in one anguished strain 
 to break through into life again all that was in 
 four words of Dreyfus. It told his whole history : 
 there is no other man on earth that could have 
 uttered it. 
 
 II. 
 
 THE EFFECT ON FRANCE. 1 
 
 Out-of-doors, under the baking sun of August, lie 
 the somnolent streets of Rennes. The tall yellow- 
 plastered houses, all with their yellow-painted blinds 
 hermetically shut, are faultlessly clean. You could 
 eat off the square cobbles of the streets. But Eennes 
 is clean because it is asleep, and never wakes enough 
 to smirch itself with the avocations of modern life. 
 You look down the long vista of a speckless street, 
 and it is empty. Perhaps one, two, at most half-a- 
 dozen, heavy-booted Breton men or women clack 
 over the ringing pavements. The bile-green river 
 through the town might be Lethe. The shops doze ; 
 the market square snores : you wonder how the 
 place exists. 
 
 The mind could imagine no completer contrast. 
 Within, the court is all passion ; without, the town 
 
 1 Harper's Magazine, October 1899.
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 169 
 
 is all lethargy. Inside the Lycde is being played 
 the last act of the drama that has convulsed France 
 and staggered the world. Outside it, touching it, 
 France is utterly unaware of it. 
 
 Eight hours after the court has adjourned for the 
 day, the good people of Eennes, appearing at their 
 doors in shirt sleeves, can with difficulty be per- 
 suaded that the report of the sitting is already 
 in the evening paper. At length persuaded, they 
 deliberate thoroughly over ways and means before 
 they decide to buy. At last decided, they read with 
 effort, wonder who are Mercier and Picquart that 
 they talk so much about, and come to no conclusion. 
 
 On the walls moulder posters appeals to friends 
 of liberty, to law-abiding Catholics, to haters of 
 Jews; but Eennes passes them without lifting the 
 eyes. Meetings are held to denounce Galliffet, to 
 denounce the army, to denounce the Church, the 
 Jews anything; a score of young hooligans smoke 
 dirty tobacco, yell when it seems expected of them, 
 go out and do nothing. The more electric Dreyfus, 
 the less conductive is Eennes. The most explosive 
 trial of the century is packed in impenetrable sand- 
 bags of apathy. All of which things, you would 
 naturally suppose, make a parable. It is of a piece 
 with the irony of the whole affair that the return of 
 Dreyfus to France, which ought to have been a 
 match to set faction detonating, seemed instead the 
 signal for a sudden, immense, and mostly holy calm. 
 
 It is easy to draw inferences from that. It goes 
 to show that the whole affair, the whole importance 
 and notoriety of Dreyfus, was accidental and
 
 170 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 artificial. As soon as he left the Devil's Island 
 he almost ceased to agitate France. Indeed, when, 
 in 1895, M. Dupuy and General Mercier took the 
 trouble to pass a special law to relegate Dreyfus 
 to the Devil's Island, they did the worst day's work 
 of their lives. Had he been sent in the natural 
 course to New Caledonia, it is possible that he might 
 be there still, forgotten. " Possible," I say, because 
 he is a Jew, and Jews do not readily forget or cast 
 off their own people ; had he been a Gentile, he had 
 almost certainly been forgotten in New Caledonia. 
 But the chance of combining ferocity with theatrical 
 display was too much for a French ministry. 
 
 The public degradation of Dreyfus, with its 
 blended accompaniments of imposing ceremonial and 
 heartrending torture, was, after all, not too severe 
 for the crime of which all Frenchmen then honestly 
 believed him guilty. But the added cruelty of 
 making a special law for him, sending him to a 
 special place of banishment, tormenting him with 
 every special penalty or deprivation that could make 
 life a hell that recoiled on its authors. The stage- 
 management was too good, the situation was too 
 dramatic, to be forgotten. Dreyfus on his own 
 island the very name of the Devil's Island was 
 a melodrama hi itself sitting in the sun within his 
 palisade, in irons, asking his guards for news, and 
 met always with dead silence, informed as we now 
 know that his wife had borne a child two years 
 after he last saw her ; who could ever get the picture 
 of such a purgatory out of his head ? Under the 
 last blow a Frenchman would have killed himself;
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 171 
 
 but the Alsatian Jew was made of stiffer fibre. He 
 lived on, and his countrymen, with the spectacle of 
 that awful agony ever before their eyes, first exulted, 
 then came to doubt, insisted, disputed, reviled, lied, 
 forged, fought, forgot friendship, kinship, party, 
 religion, country everything except the silent man 
 in irons under the sun of the Devil's Island. 
 
 But when he was brought back when he was 
 once more Alfred Dreyfus, captain of artillery, in 
 the cell of the military prison at Eennes, charged 
 with having communicated to a foreign power 
 documents concerning the national defence, tried 
 on that charge before a court-martial of his peers 
 then France was no longer haunted by him. The 
 avenging ghost was laid. Calm overspread the land. 
 Many men had openly declared that Dreyfus ran 
 an excellent chance of being shot between his point 
 of debarkation and the prison of Eennes ; he was not 
 even hissed. There has not been a single demon- 
 stration outside his prison worthy of ten lines in a 
 newspaper. And lest you should put down that 
 fact to the congenital torpor of Eennes in the 
 excitable south, in the great military centres, in the 
 manufacturing centres, in volcanic Paris itself, 
 Dreyfus has not been the occasion of a single 
 disturbance of any significance since he was landed 
 in France. 
 
 Language remains violent enough and vile enough, 
 it is true: such a furious habit of blackguarding 
 opponents as has grown up with the Dreyfus case 
 in France could hardly be stilled in a day. But 
 everybody has felt more at ease. The politicians
 
 172 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 and journalists have enjoyed the affair, no doubt, 
 but even in Paris man cannot live on renown alone. 
 From them, and still more from the half-indifferent, 
 wholly perplexed mass of the people, went up a great 
 " Ouf ! " of relief. Now at last, said they, we shall 
 have the truth, we shall have finality in this wretched 
 affair ; thereafter we shall have peace. 
 
 It might re-enforce that hope to consider how 
 wholly irrelevant to all great material issues the 
 Dreyfus case has been. At the first glance it seems 
 that France has chosen to lose her head over a 
 matter which she might just as well have let alone, 
 which is over now, and has left her where she was 
 before. Whether Dreyfus or Esterhazy betrayed 
 documents, or both, or neither, it is certain that 
 no other French officer will be tempted to do the 
 same for years enough to come. Even if wrong 
 has been done if the innocent has been punished 
 and the guilty has gone free, after all, it is only 
 one man. And it is expedient that one man should 
 suffer for the whole people. 
 
 So argued, and would argue again, more than half 
 of France. And just because they argue thus, they 
 are utterly and fatally wrong. It may be expedient 
 to sacrifice one man for a country when the 
 detection of sacrifice and of expediency is left to 
 others. But when the country argues thus itself, 
 when it sacrifices the innocent one with its eyes 
 open, then the sacrifice is not expedient, but ruinous. 
 It is this truth that Colonel Picquart saw and 
 proclaimed three years ago. When Dreyfus was
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 173 
 
 first condemned it is probable that everybody con- 
 cerned even Colonel du Paty de Clam, who 
 examined him, and General Mercier, who procured 
 his conviction by communicating to his judges secret 
 documents behind his back honestly believed him 
 guilty. But in 1896 Picquart found reason to think 
 that the treachery for which he was condemned had 
 been committed by Esterhazy. 
 
 On this he wrote as follows to General Gonse : 
 " The moment is at hand when those who are 
 convinced that a mistake has been made with 
 regard to them will make a desperate effort to have 
 it rectified. ... I think I have taken all the steps 
 necessary for the initiative to come from ourselves. 
 If we lose too much time the initiative will be taken 
 by outsiders, and that, apart from higher considera- 
 tions, will put us in an odious light. ... It will be 
 a troublesome crisis, useless, and one which we can 
 avoid by doing justice in time." Up to that moment 
 one man had suffered for the people, they not know- 
 ing it, and it was not altogether expedient. But 
 from the moment the people knew and still let him 
 suffer from that moment began the convulsion, the 
 dissensions, the moral putrefaction, and all the rest 
 of the discovered distempers of France. 
 
 It was known in widening circles, first to a few 
 soldiers, then to journalists and politicians, then to 
 everybody who cared to be convinced, then after 
 the detection of Henry's forgeries to everybody 
 with ears to hear, that Dreyfus, if not innocent, had 
 not yet been proved guilty. In the face of that 
 knowledge Trance still howled, " Let him suffer ! "
 
 174 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 It is to Anglo-Saxon eyes, at least at once the 
 grimmest and grotesquest spectacle in history a 
 whole nation, knowing that justice has not been 
 done, keenly excited about the question, and yet not 
 caring a sou whether justice is done or not. What 
 matter, cried France, whether he is justly condemned 
 or not ? Shoot him rather than discredit the army. 
 There is no doubt that the judgment of the Court of 
 Cassation was received with disappointment, not to 
 Bay fury, by the majority of the French people. 
 And even of the minority of the Dreyfusards who 
 clamoured for revision who shall say how few cared 
 for doing justice to a man who might be innocent, 
 and how many gave tongue merely because they 
 hated the army, or the Eoman Church, or Chris- 
 tianity, or France herself? All but the whole 
 nation the nation which professes itself the most 
 civilised in the world publicly proclaimed that it 
 cared nothing for the first essential of civic morality. 
 Partly the petulance of a spirited child which will 
 not see the patent truth, partly the illogical logic of 
 French intelligence which will commit any insanity 
 that is recommended in the form of a syllogism, 
 partly the sheer indifference of a brute that knows 
 neither right nor wrong. 
 
 But why try to analyse a phenomenon so despic- 
 able ? One thing is certain, common justice is the 
 first and most indispensable condition of a free 
 country's existence. It is absurd to think that any 
 cause which has led to so deliberate a jettison of 
 justice from the national cargo can be irrelevant
 
 THE DEEYFUS CASE. 175 
 
 can be anything but most portentous and most 
 disastrous to the nation. 
 
 From henceforth every reflecting Frenchman 
 knows that he may be accused of any crime, con- 
 demned on evidence he has never heard of, banished, 
 tormented in body and mind, and that hardly a soul 
 among his countrymen will care whether he is getting 
 justice or injustice. They happened to take sides 
 about Dreyfus ; he may have no such luck. Dreyfus, 
 for the rights of whose case friends and foes cared noth- 
 ing, happened to be a convenient stick for anti-Semites 
 and anti-militarists to thump the other side with ; he 
 may not. Reasoning thus, will the reflective French- 
 man cultivate independence of thought, civic courage, 
 political honesty ? Not he. He will make it his 
 business in life to cultivate a safe obscurity, and 
 shout, if shout he must, always with the largest crowd. 
 
 The results of such a lesson upon the public life of 
 a nation are not easy to detect at once and in glaring 
 cases ; but you may be very sure they are there, and 
 in the long-run they will show themselves. The 
 French citizen was fearful of unpopularity before ; 
 he will not be bolder now. The punishment of the 
 eminent biologist Grimaux, who lost his professorship 
 because he gave evidence for Zola, will not be lost 
 on him. The timidity of a Casimir-Perier, a Mercier, 
 a Gonse, a Delagorgue of the President of the 
 Eepublic, the Minister of War, the sub-chief of the 
 General Staff, the judge who tried Zola who all 
 suspected the truth and dared not discover it, will 
 be emulated by lesser men. Cowardice will become 
 a principle of public life.
 
 176 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 In one respect alone can France claim pity that 
 she became bankrupt in justice through honouring 
 too large a draft of her darling child, the army. 
 The army is the adored of France. A few of the 
 younger men, still smarting from the petty brutalities 
 of sergeants who delight to bully boys of a better 
 class than their own, hate it bitterly; but to France 
 as a whole her army is her dearest treasure. In 
 a conscriptive country the sight of troops in the 
 street is as familiar as that of policemen on Broad- 
 way. In Germany or Austria a regiment will march 
 past with drum and colours and hardly a head turns 
 to follow it. But in France the passage of the 
 regiment empties every shop, and leaves the whole 
 street tingling with pride and enthusiasm and love. 
 It does not diminish this affection that the last time 
 the army took the field it was beaten and crumpled 
 up, shot down by battalions, and carried into captivity 
 by brigades. Quite the reverse. France feels a sort 
 of yearning to comfort her army as a mother might 
 comfort an unsuccessful son. And the hope of 
 revenge for that humiliation, in which she has lived 
 for near a generation, rests in the army alone. The 
 army as they have said so often the army is 
 France. Everybody has served in it; everybody 
 depends on it. The army is France. 
 
 Only that unlucky gift of bad logic led France 
 astray again. The army being France, they argue, 
 the honour of the army is the honour of France. 
 Thence they pushed on to the facile fallacy. The 
 honour of the heads of the army is the honour of 
 the army, and therefore of France. Honour, in that
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 177 
 
 sense, apparently means reputation for honour, which 
 comes, when you work it out, to the dictum that an 
 officer can do no wrong or at least, if he does, 
 nobody may say so. 
 
 The principle does not apply, apparently, to a 
 retired general, like de Galliffet. It does not apply 
 to a mere captain, like Dreyfus. It appears to apply 
 to some lieutenant-colonels, such as Esterhazy, but 
 not to others, such as Picquart. 
 
 When Esterhazy refused at the Zola trial to 
 answer questions relative to his alleged connection 
 with the German military attache 1 , the judge, M. 
 Delagorgue, protected him. " There is something," 
 said he, " more important than a court of justice 
 the honour and security of the country." "I gather," 
 tartly replied Zola's counsel, " that the honour of the 
 country allows an officer to do such things, but does 
 not allow them to be spoken of." 
 
 Precisely. It came, of course, in practice to the 
 divine right of generals. If a general's act was 
 questioned, he responded that the interests of the 
 national defence demanded it, and said no more. 
 
 France for the most part was quite satisfied. She 
 had invented a new kind of government Csesarism 
 without a Cresar. 
 
 No general was able or resolute enough to impose 
 his authority on his fellows. There was not even a 
 recognised clique of generals. Any general would 
 do. De Pellieux was neither Minister of War nor 
 Governor of Paris ; yet it was really he, and not 
 the judge and jury, who tried and condemned Zola. 
 De la Ptoque was not even on the active list, yet 
 
 M
 
 178 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 an open letter from him to the judges and witnesses 
 at the Rennes court-martial was paraded in almost 
 every newspaper in France as if it had come down 
 from Sinai. Had any Minister of War desired to 
 make himself dictator or bring in a Pretender, such 
 was the all-accepting meekness of the country that 
 he could have done it. None dared, and none of the 
 Pretenders thought the sceptre worth picking up out 
 of the gutter. The result was that nobody knew 
 who was ruling France at any given moment, or, 
 indeed, knew anything at all except that, whoever 
 was ruling, it certainly was not the President nor 
 the Ministry of the Eepublic. Summarily the 
 Kepublic, during the three years of the Dreyfus 
 agitation, abdicated. 
 
 There was nothing surprising in that : the corrup- 
 tion and cowardice of Ministers, Senators, and 
 Deputies had been amply demonstrated by the 
 scandal of Panama. It only finally shook what 
 was already tottering. 
 
 But the effects of government by generals were 
 new and dismal It was bad enough that they 
 should arrogate power to override every authority 
 in the state ; yet to usurp is a generous crime, and to 
 permit the usurpation of the army was in France 
 a generous weakness. The dismal portent was the 
 utter incapacity which the generals displayed. The 
 Dreyfus case was their own game, and they had 
 all the cards ; but for the life of them they could 
 not play a single one correctly. Wherever it was 
 possible to bungle or vacillate, they bungled and 
 vacillated.
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 179 
 
 They first admitted in the press that Dreyfus was 
 condemned on secret documents that is, illegally 
 and then denied it in the Chamber. They first 
 contended that Dreyfus wrote the incriminating bor- 
 dereau, because it was like his natural handwriting; 
 then that he traced it, because it was more like 
 Esterhazy's. They tried to entrap Picquart by bogus 
 cryptograms that would have been childish in a 
 comic opera. They filled the air with asseverations 
 of their loyalty to the Republic while they were 
 openly violating its fundamental principles. They 
 declared that for the paramount honour of the 
 country they would prefer a revolution to the 
 revision of the Dreyfus case; then, when it came 
 to the point, submitted in tame silence to the Cour 
 de Cassation and General de Galliffet's orders. Worst 
 of all was their behaviour, where at least you might 
 have expected dignity and spirit, in regard to foreign 
 Powers. They withdrew from Fashoda and re- 
 nounced Egypt for ever rather than fight Great 
 Britain, although Marchand's appearance there was 
 the hoped-for climax of the deliberate policy of 
 years. One day they inspired impertinent fables 
 about the Kaiser's communications with Dreyfus; 
 the next they sheepishly denied them on the threats 
 of his ambassador. The great international result 
 of three years of government by generals is that 
 France has virtually showed herself unfit for war 
 by sea or land afraid of England, terrified by 
 Germany, the vassal of Eussia all but a second- 
 rate Power. 
 
 " What is to become of your army in the day of
 
 180 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 danger ? " cried General de Pellieux at the trial of 
 Zola. " What would you have your unhappy soldiers 
 do, led under fire by officers whom others have 
 striven to discredit in their eyes ? ... It is to a 
 mere butchery they are leading your sons." It is 
 or would be, if France were mad enough to fight. 
 There would be as ruinous a collapse as in 1870. 
 Only that would not be the work of " others," but of 
 the leaders of the army itself. They are indeed dis- 
 credited by their own folly. Few people yet 
 believe in their honesty, and now none in their 
 capacity. Every man in France who knows any- 
 thing of the last three years' history, in his heart 
 distrusts his beloved army utterly. That is the 
 sum of what the generals, with everything in their 
 favour, have been able to do for France, for the army, 
 and for themselves. 
 
 The degradation of politics and of the army has 
 been equalled by that of the press. France has 
 never had a journal unless we except the ' Temps ' 
 and the present incarnation of the ' Matin ' which 
 an Anglo-Saxon public would call a newspaper ; but 
 then she does not want one. She has had journals 
 which supply what she wants well-considered and 
 elegantly written essays on the subjects of the day. 
 Such she still finds in organs like the ' Figaro* and 
 the ' Journal des De"bats ' ; but in the lower ranks of 
 the press the fatal influence of the Dreyfus case has 
 told vilely. American papers appear to an English- 
 man free-spoken in their attacks on opponents; but 
 the cheapest rag in New York would blush for the
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 181 
 
 recklessness, gullibility, and foulness of the baser 
 French press. Eestraints of good taste and decency 
 are quite obsolete. You call your political opponent 
 " a prodigy of corruption both in public and in private 
 life; with thirty years of lies, debauchery, bribery, 
 defamation, and calumny behind him." The Prime 
 Minister, if you dislike his policy, you describe as 
 "only half cleansed of the murder of Carnot, the 
 butcher of Madagascar, Hanotaux's accomplice in the 
 extermination of the Armenians." You never speak 
 of General de Galliffet by name, but as " the assassin 
 of May " ; they will know whom you mean. M. 
 Cavaignac being personally irreproachable, it is well 
 to hark back to his ancestors, and call him the heir 
 of two generations of murderers. Never say your 
 opponent published his opinions ; say that he vomited 
 them. You can hardly go wrong in describing any- 
 thing you dislike as ordure. With foulness go in- 
 timidation, obtuseness, spiritlessness. During the 
 trial of Zola many newspapers headed their issues 
 for days with the names and addresses of the jurors, 
 accompanied by suitable instigations to violence. 
 During the second court-martial on Dreyfus an in- 
 genious little paper in Eennes ran a serial, giving the 
 story of an Alsatian spy in 1870 named Deutsch- 
 fus, who seduced an honest girl, and then return- 
 ing as an uhlan, shot her, and kidnapped her child. 
 The credulity of such newspapers equals their violence, 
 and they readily gulp down the wildest stories and 
 clumsiest forgeries. And when an occasion comes, 
 like the Fashoda crisis, in which a strong lead might 
 fitly have been given to the nation, nothing was
 
 182 THE DREYFUS CASE. 
 
 forthcoming except alternate bluster and puling. 
 With one breath they thundered out what things 
 they would do if they could; with the next they 
 wailed for compassion because they could not do 
 them. They inquired into the possible cause of 
 the national decadence quite openly, and wound up 
 with " Poor France ! " 
 
 Poor France indeed ! The Government paraly- 
 tic, her army cankered, her press putrid what 
 remains to her ? The Church ? The Church re- 
 mains, but the influence of the Catholic leaders 
 and the Catholic clergy in the cause of anti- 
 Semitism has discredited her among all fair-minded 
 men. The law ? The law has been broken and 
 mended to order for the advantage or the disad- 
 vantage of individuals ; and while the Cour de 
 Cassation has done its duty most honourably under 
 difficult circumstances, lesser magistrates have been 
 found to surrender the law to partisanship or to 
 fear. M. Quesnay de Beaurepaire was one of the 
 highest judges in France, and his silly spitefulness 
 has made him the unpitied laughing-stock of the 
 world. 
 
 Then what remains ? Why, Eennes ! The storm 
 of party bitterness, folly, weakness, knavery, has 
 swept over from Paris into its own Lyce"e; yet 
 Eennes basks unmoved under its sun. Walk down 
 the drowsy streets. Look at the Breton people 
 the shopkeepers, the blue blouses, the little lace caps 
 over women's faces bronzed with field-work. There 
 are yet people in France who are courteous and
 
 THE DREYFUS CASE. 183 
 
 kindly, simple and frugal and brave, who earn their 
 living, and love their kin, and do what the priest 
 tells them, and are ready to die for France. There 
 are millions more of them all over the provinces. 
 Paris looks down upon them, and the whole world 
 outside hardly knows of them ; but they are the 
 real strength of France. It is theirs to work while 
 Paris talks, to earn what Paris squanders, to heal 
 when Paris wounds. 
 
 The Dreyfus case is the deepest cut which Paris 
 has scored on the nation's body since 1870 
 perhaps since 1789. But it has not reached the 
 vitals, and the provinces may heal it as they have 
 done again and again before. The recuperative 
 power of France has ever amazed the world, merely 
 because the world has thought that France spelled 
 only Paris. The provinces do nothing else but 
 recuperate. 
 
 Only that process, especially with a dwindling 
 population, cannot go on for ever. There will come 
 in the end a day and sooner, perhaps, than we 
 think when Paris will have sucked the nation dry, 
 and the provinces will have no more to give. France 
 will still be France, but no longer a great Power. 
 And in some ways the demand which these three 
 years of factious frenzy have made on France is 
 more exhausting than any of those from which she 
 has recovered. In 1815 and 1871 it was com- 
 paratively easy for a united people to revive after 
 foreign war. After the Ptevolution, when the whole 
 fabric of society was swept away, there was a great 
 faith wherewith to build up everything anew; and
 
 184 THE DKEYFUS CASE. 
 
 after that the miracle of Napoleon. In 1899, after 
 the Dreyfus case, the great institutions of France 
 still stand ; but everybody knows them rotten. 
 There is no faith ; and because there is no faith, 
 there will be no miracle.
 
 185 
 
 THE JUBILEE. 1 
 
 LONDON'S NEW GAME. 
 
 LONDON is a great big baby. Its mother, the Queen, 
 has given it a new toy, and London has forgotten 
 everything else, and sat down to play with it. It 
 calls its new toy the Diamond Jubilee; a sixtieth 
 anniversary has nothing to do either with a diamond 
 wedding or a jubilee, but London will have it so, and 
 children's whims must be humoured. We are going 
 to play with our toy in our own way, and inake- 
 believe just as much as we like. Stewart tartan has 
 nothing in particular to do with her gracious Majesty, 
 and red, white, and blue are the colours of either 
 France or Holland. But what does that matter ? 
 If we call them Jubilee things, they are Jubilee 
 things; they shall be Jubilee things. Let us play 
 with our Jubilee in the way we like. 
 
 So London strange child has pulled out all its 
 little wooden boxes of bricks and piled them up all 
 over the fronts of its houses, and has made little bows 
 
 1 Daily Mail, Juue 1897.
 
 186 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 and rosettes and streamers out of bits of stuff, and 
 picked up odds and ends of wire, and bits of glass 
 bottles, and twisted them into stars and crowns and 
 V.E.'s. In Piccadilly it has tried its little fingers 
 at drawing roses and things to put up on masts, and 
 they have come out very much like other babies' first 
 attempts. In one place it has even essayed a map 
 of England : it looks like a badly-battered coal-scuttle, 
 and the country next to it is spelled " Holand," but 
 it is not at all discreditable for a beginning. It is 
 adding hide-and-seek to the other game, putting up 
 little fences across such places as the Duke of York's 
 steps, and the north side of St Paul's Churchyard, 
 with little doors to pop your head out of and say 
 " Bo ! " Oh, yes, London is going to have a good 
 romp. And London good child has invited all 
 its little brothers and sisters and cousins from the 
 provinces and the colonies to come and play with it 
 at its party. 
 
 I suppose the Diamond Jubilee, like other things, 
 came gradually. I suppose observant people noticed 
 its coming, and marked how it spread itself over the 
 town, and soaked into the brains of the people. But 
 to anybody who comes back to London and finds it 
 burst upon him suddenly, it is astounding, stunning, 
 paralysing. People don't seem to notice it or to 
 realise what it all amounts to. I feel inclined to stop 
 people in the street people on whom it has stolen 
 gradually and ask them if they know what they 
 have been doing while I have been away. There is 
 a learned judge : does he know that he is creeping 
 shyly into his club up a narrow deal staircase
 
 THE JUBILEE. 187 
 
 that I should have sworn was the gallery entrance of 
 a penny show ? Does that gallant general pacing 
 stiffly up St James's Street realise that he is travers- 
 ing a large advertisement of Harrod's Stores ? Can 
 our City princes not have noticed that somebody has 
 stuck a lot of carpentry on the very pediment of the 
 Eoyal Exchange ? Somebody else has boarded up the 
 Law Courts, and barristers and solicitors stoop and 
 dive in as if they were going to clean out their 
 chicken-houses. The Houses of Parliament are all 
 scaffolding, too, and at first, seeing no reports in the 
 papers, I thought they had been abolished while I was 
 away. But yesterday the flag was up again, which 
 contradicted that theory, and left the impression 
 that all the woodwork was put up that honourable 
 members might practise sitting on the fence. Even 
 to take a penny boat at Westminster you have to go 
 under a sort of triumphal arch of joinery. I believe 
 somebody has even been washing a house in St Paul's 
 Churchyard, and then stuck paper flowers all over it. 
 The Duke of Devonshire, you would have said, was a 
 solid, level-headed man enough, but he has let some 
 imbecile adorn his house with a childish subtraction 
 sum 1 8 3 71 897: seven from seven is nought, three 
 from nine leaves six ; answer, sixty ; sixty years' 
 reign ; fancy ! They are actually changing all Lon- 
 don from building into furniture. One house in 
 Piccadilly is being covered all over, first with wood- 
 work, and then with chintz, like a new sofa. And 
 in a few days, if it goes on as it has begun, St Paul's 
 Cathedral itself will be turned into a comfortable 
 red-baize ottoman.
 
 188 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 And the shops ! They are all playing at Jubilee 
 their very hardest. Jubilee favours, Jubilee ties, 
 Jubilee medals, Jubilee flasks. The tailors have put 
 bunches of Jubilee ribbons on top of their summer 
 trouserings, though I, for one, shall refuse, absolutely, 
 to have my next pair trimmed with red, white, and 
 blue. I have observed a gallant bootmaker, who could 
 hardly produce a tricolour shoe, or pretend that his 
 guinea boots would be desirable in after-years as a 
 memento. So he has written up, " A large stock of 
 boots for immediate wear." " Immediate wear ; " note 
 the suggestion : buy quickly, lest the Jubilee be upon 
 you, and you find you have no boots fit to do it 
 justice. Only two tradesmen have I seen who kept 
 their heads, and their self-respect, through the crisis. 
 Both carry on business in the Borough Eoad. One 
 was concealed behind a forest of gold and scarlet flags 
 and a cataract of crimson drapery concealed, but not 
 obscured, for he had labelled the gorgeous mass with 
 the legend, " Back door to barber's shop." The other 
 had written up, " Business as usual," and in the gloom 
 behind the hoarding I saw the collarless merchant 
 leaning against his doorstep smoking his clay carry- 
 ing on business as usual. But nearly all the other 
 shops have quite forgotten themselves. They have 
 entirely forgotten what they are there to sell, and 
 have taken to selling themselves. They have made 
 plans of themselves, and price-lists, forgetting in their 
 confusion that it is quite as easy to look at a shop 
 as to look at a plan. And there they stand, some 
 decently covered with red, but most naked and un- 
 ashamed, and offer themselves for sale in the public
 
 THE JUBILEE. 189 
 
 street ! And one of them, in Fleet Street, has gone 
 further still. "Diamond Jubilee to let," it auda- 
 ciously proclaims. It sounds like an exaggeration; 
 London has hardly got so far as that yet. Yet who 
 knows ? Nothing would surprise me less than to 
 hear that a syndicate had bought up the Diamond 
 Jubilee, and was letting it out for garden-parties. 
 
 I walked down Cheapside yesterday, and I give 
 my solemn word that everybody there was talking 
 Jubilee. I caught no other sound. Jubilee, Jubilee, 
 Jubilee, they intoned, as if it were a kind of reli- 
 gious litany. I said I walked, but it would be more 
 correct to say I ricochetted down Cheapside. Ke- 
 bounding from one solid body to another, I was pro- 
 pelled down Cheapside. For London's cousins from 
 the country have arrived at the party very early, and 
 they do not altogether know the ways of the house. 
 Great bunches of them in frock-coats and bowlers, 
 and stiff silk gowns, insisted on standing still suddenly 
 in the midst of the pavement in front of the Mansion 
 House. Dear people, they didn't know how naughty 
 it is to stop dead in front of the Mansion House, and 
 there ought to have been somebody there to tell them 
 not to do it. They go stumping all up and down 
 London's house, touching London's things, fingering 
 its monuments, and testing its internal communica- 
 tions. They go by the South London Electric Kail- 
 way by the half-dozen together. " Just one station 
 to see what it feels like," and " Have some," says 
 Darby, pulling a neatly half-peeled orange out of his 
 tail-pocket : " It'll freshen you up." They all freshen 
 us up. But we can't be angry with them.
 
 190 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 It is all very ridiculous, if you like to take it that 
 way. But if you like to take it the other way, it is 
 also very sublime. Go into the smoke-soiled back 
 streets, off the line of route. There you will find in 
 one house a poor little Union -Jack sticking up its 
 undaunted head out of the top corner of a broken 
 window. Next door to it is a Royal Standard a 
 cheap brand of flag, it appears, for it has only one 
 side, and the back is a formless jumble of blue and 
 red and yellow threads. Next to it again is a home- 
 made V.R. trace with a piece of pencil on a piece 
 of paper; cut the red cloth to the pattern, and 
 fasten it up with tin-tacks. You need to see the 
 Jubilee decorations in little before you appreciate 
 the meaning of it all in gross. These poky little 
 flags and red letters are the key-note of it all. 
 London is settling down to play: but all through 
 the game it never forgets the love and reverence 
 for the mother who inspires it. 
 
 II. 
 
 QUEEN AND EMPIKE. 
 
 The Queen's procession has passed. It is over, 
 and we are all the richer and all the better for 
 it. We have seen a sight the like of which no 
 eye has seen since the world began. We do not 
 know whether we want to laugh or to cry. But how 
 proud, how proud we all must be to-day !
 
 THE JUBILEE. 191 
 
 At St Paul's it began like any other show. We 
 were boxed up between the pillars and the wall in a 
 little cage of carpentry. There were pillars in front 
 of us, and I doubt if people quite realise the massive 
 stability of the pillars in the portico of St Paul's 
 until in the exercise of their professional duty they 
 are called upon to see through them. There were 
 also beams across the pillars, and across the line 
 of sight. But never mind all that; we could see 
 down Ludgate Hill. And Ludgate Hill was be- 
 decked and bedraped as I never saw any street 
 before in London or anywhere else. Pale purple, 
 pale gold, and pale green masts and hanging 
 brackets and swinging garlands a long, drooping 
 vista of pillars and capitals and festoons, all softly 
 harmonious. Any decoration can make a street 
 brilliant if there is enough of it, but Ludgate Hill 
 was beautiful. It was quite transformed from the 
 sooty, busy Ludgate Hill of work-days. Under the 
 still shy, half-watery sunlight it dipped down to the 
 railway bridge, this also nagged and flowered for the 
 great day, with two girls in white in the centre for a 
 focus ; and then sloped up through the Circus to 
 Fleet Street, with the turret of Lincoln's Inn Hall 
 crowning the distance. It was all a sheen with a 
 mellow radiance, still enough for dignity, but yet 
 shimmering with life. For the chief of all the 
 decorations were the masses of swaying white and 
 pink in the windows, lining every house from 
 foundation to topmost storey and massed on every 
 roof. London had decorated itself with Londoners, 
 and with men and women from every part of
 
 192 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 England and every inch of the world where people 
 stand up for " God save the Queen." 
 
 It began like any other show, with a maze of gay- 
 coloured women looking for their seats, with foot- 
 guards marching through the barrier to the top of 
 Ludgate Hill and lining up along the churchyard 
 pavement. There were the ponderous vans labelled 
 " City Commissioner of Sewers " lumbering between 
 the banks of colour, as if the empire had turned 
 out to see them scatter sand. Then the place 
 cleared ; the last summer gown fluttered to its own 
 place ; the scarlet guardsmen were all in position ; 
 the last sand-cart lumbered away eastward. All 
 was ready; we waited for it to begin. 
 
 It began, as it should begin, with the fleet. 
 Swinging and dancing up the hill came the tilted 
 straw hats of the naval guard of honour. The 
 fifes screamed out, "They All Love Jack." And 
 how they do love Jack; how the hill and the church- 
 yard thundered ! And how worthy Jack is to 
 be loved. Clean limbs, strong bodies, trim, alert, 
 resourceful, self-reliant, their buoyant march quivered 
 with young life; their eyes were set with the 
 steadfast calm of men who have been left alone 
 with God's wonders at sea. Beside them marched 
 their bearded captains and lieutenants, quiet, self- 
 possessed, intent on the business they know and 
 love; and their middies, pink-faced boys, already 
 men in self-command a-nd the habit of commanding 
 others. There was good marching after that, but 
 no marching so elastic as this. The sight of that 
 magnificent guard was worth the whole day's prep-
 
 THE JUBILEE. 193 
 
 arations in itself. We felt we could never go 
 wrong with these men. And how good to feel 
 that we were showing them to the representatives 
 of every nation on earth showing them the finest 
 force in the whole world. 
 
 They formed up and we waited again. Another 
 clash of music from beyond the railway bridge, and 
 we were looking at what all England was longing to 
 look at the Colonials. But first a scarlet-plumed 
 figure on a white horse pacing up the street, and all 
 the street breaking into a roar as he came up. 
 Roberts ! Three cheers for Roberts ! Bobs, Bobs, 
 Bobs ! What a proud and beautiful horse, that 
 hardly felt the ground it trod on, and what a man ! 
 Hard-bitten, tanned face, the white moustache sitting 
 firmly on the firm mouth, bolt upright, yet easy in 
 the saddle Lord Roberts was every inch a soldier 
 and a captain of men. When Sir Charles Napier 
 first heard Braham sing he went up to him and said, 
 " Sir, it is men like you that make men like us." It 
 is men like Lord Roberts that make queens like 
 Queen Victoria. 
 
 The cheers sank, but they did not die, for before 
 there was time for that we were looking at the 
 Colonials. In the carriages we saw the square, 
 strong, invincibly sensible faces of the men who are 
 building up great nations, new big Englands, on the 
 other side of the world. Between the carriages rode 
 and tramped the men who guard the building, and 
 who carry British peace and British law into the 
 wildest places of the earth. Lean, hard-knit Can- 
 adians, long-legged, yellow Australians, all in one 
 
 N
 
 194 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 piece with their horses, giant, long -eyed Maoris, 
 sitting loosely and leaning back curiously from the 
 waist, burned South Africans, upstanding Sikhs, tiny 
 lithe Malays and Dyaks, Chinese with a white basin 
 turned upside-down on their heads, grinning Hausas, 
 so dead black that they shone silver in the sun 
 white men, yellow men, brown men, black men, every 
 colour, every continent, every race, every speech, 
 and all in arms for the British empire and the British 
 Queen. Up they came, more and more, new types, 
 new realms at every couple of yards, an anthropo- 
 logical museum a living gazetteer of the British 
 empire. With them came their English officers, 
 whom they obey and follow like children. And you 
 began to understand, as never before, what the empire 
 amounts to. Not only that we possess all these 
 remote outlandish places, and can bring men from 
 every end of the earth to join us in honouring our 
 Queen, but also that all these peoples are work- 
 ing, not simply under us, but with us that we send 
 out a boy here and a boy there, and the boy takes 
 hold of the savages of the part he comes to and 
 teaches them to march and shoot as he tells them, to 
 obey him and believe in him and die for him and the 
 Queen. A plain, stupid, uninspired people, they call 
 us, and yet we are doing this with every kind of 
 savage man there is. And each one of us you and 
 I, and that man in his shirt-sleeves at the corner is 
 a working part of this world - shaping force. How 
 small you must feel in face of the stupendous whole, 
 and yet how great to be a unit in it ! 
 
 The British empire fell in along the pavement, at
 
 THE JUBILEE. 195 
 
 the top of Ludgate Hill, and round the churchyard, 
 and there waited. Presently there was another stir 
 and bustle at the bottom of the hill, and another 
 burst of brass. There came into sight under the 
 bridge and up the hill a moving wall of men and 
 horses. First more bluejackets, trailing their guns 
 behind them, hauling on to the ropes so steadily and 
 evenly that the guns seemed to be alive and walking 
 of themselves. Then cavalry and guns now massed 
 bands crashing out music, now serried squadrons, now 
 gliding horse-batteries. They came like a wall, as 
 close, as perfectly even, and level and smooth ; the 
 squadrons looked as if they had been put together 
 with a spirit-level and trimmed with a plane. The 
 approach to the Cathedral was a blaze of blue and 
 scarlet; the sun on swords and helmets laced the 
 blue and scarlet with gold. The eye was filled with 
 splendour, but fresh splendour came crowding in on 
 it. The advancing pageant shifted and loosened and 
 came up in opener order. But as the mass of colour be- 
 came less massive,it became more wonderfully coloured. 
 Here, riding three and three, came a kaleidoscope 
 of dazzling horsemen equerries and aides-de-camp 
 and attache's, ambassadors and princes, all the pomp 
 of all the nations of the earth. Scarlet and gold, 
 azure and gold, purple and gold, emerald and gold, 
 white and gold always a changing tumult of colours 
 that seemed to list and gleam with a light of their 
 own, and always blinding gold. It was enough. No 
 eye could bear more gorgeousness ; no more gorgeous- 
 ness could be, unless princes are to clothe themselves 
 in rainbows and the very sun. The prelude was
 
 196 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 played, and now the great moment was at hand. 
 Already the carriages were rolling up full of the 
 Queen's kindred, full of her children and children's 
 children. But we hardly looked at them. Down 
 there, through an avenue of eager faces, through a 
 storm of white waving handkerchiefs, through roaring 
 volleys of cheers, there was approaching a carriage 
 drawn by eight cream-coloured horses. The roar 
 surged up the street, keeping pace with the eight 
 horses. The carriage passed the barrier ; it entered 
 the churchyard; it wheeled left and then right; it 
 drew up at the very steps of the Cathedral ; we all 
 leaped up ; cheers broke into screams, and enthusiasm 
 swelled to delirium; the sun, watery till now, shone 
 
 out suddenly clear and dry, and there and there 
 
 And there was a little, plain, flushed old lady. 
 All in black, a silver streak under the black bonnet, 
 a simple white sunshade, sitting quite still, with the 
 corners of her mouth drawn tight, as if she were 
 trying not to cry. But that old lady was the Queen, 
 and you knew it. You didn't want to look at the 
 glittering uniforms now, nor yet at the bright gowns 
 and the young faces in the carriages, nor yet at the 
 stately princes though by now all these were ranged 
 in a half circle around her. You couldn't look at 
 anybody but the Queen. So very quiet, so very 
 grave, so very punctual, so unmistakably and every 
 inch a lady and a Queen. Almost pathetic, if you 
 will, that small black figure in the middle of these 
 shining cavaliers, this great army, this roaring multi- 
 tude ; but also very glorious. When the other kings 
 of the world drive abroad, the escort rides close
 
 THE JUBILEE. 197 
 
 in at the wheels of the carriage; the Queen drove 
 through her people quite plain and open, with just 
 one soldier at the kerbstone between her and them. 
 Why not ? They are quite free ; they have no cause 
 to fear her ; they have much cause to love her. Was 
 it not all for her the gala trappings of the streets, 
 the men and horses and guns, the living walls of 
 British men and women ? For the Queen summed 
 up all that had gone before, all the soldiers and 
 sailors, the big-limbed colonial, the strange men from 
 unheard-of islands oversea. We know now what 
 that which had come before all stood for ; we knew 
 as we had never known before what the Queen stands 
 for. The empire had come together to revere and 
 bless the mother of the empire. The mother of the 
 empire had come to do homage to the one Being 
 more majestic than she. 
 
 There were the archbishops and the bishops and 
 the deans in gold and crimson caps and white and 
 orange and gold-embroidered vestments, waiting on 
 the steps. There, through the gaps in the pillars 
 and scaffoldings, you could see all her Ministers and 
 great men a strange glimpse of miniature faces as 
 in some carefully laboured picture where each face 
 stands for an honoured name. All stood, and the 
 choir sang the Te Deum. The Queen put on her 
 glasses and looked gravely at the shoal of grave faces. 
 Next rose up a melodious voice intoning prayers. 
 The Queen bowed her head. Then the whole choir 
 and company outside the Cathedral and the whole 
 company in the stands and at the windows and on 
 the housetops and away down the street, all standing,
 
 198 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 all uncovered, began to sing the Hundredth Psalm. 
 " Come ye before Him and rejoice : " the Queen's lips 
 were tight, and her eyes perhaps it was fancy 
 looked dim. But then " Three cheers for the Queen ! " 
 and the dean pious man ! was wildly waving that 
 wonderful crimson cap, and the pillars and roofs were 
 ringing as if they must come down. Then " God 
 Save the Queen " a lusty peal, till you felt drowned 
 in sound. The Queen looked up and smiled. And 
 the Queen's smile was the end and crown of it all. 
 A smile that broke down the sad mouth, a smile that 
 seemed half-reluctant so wistful, yet so kind, so 
 sincere, so motherly. 
 God Save the Queen ! 
 
 III. 
 
 "TO VIEW THE ILLUMINATIONS." 
 (An Agricultural Household on an Omnibus.) 
 
 We are not showing anything at the Eoyal this 
 year not, of course, that our beasts are not good 
 enough to show. The truth is they are too good 
 and assuredly too much beloved to be exposed to 
 the journey to Manchester and back in weather like 
 this. So it was felt that something might be done 
 with a clear conscience to celebrate the Diamond 
 Jubilee. To leave the sacred beasts by daytime was 
 naturally out of the question, so it must be some
 
 THE JUBILEE. 199 
 
 evening. The illuminations it must be. The illum- 
 inations from an omnibus ! And "Wednesday would 
 be a nice quiet day for it. On Wednesday the excite- 
 ment of Tuesday would be dying away ; we could just 
 nip in on Wednesday, when everybody else had seen 
 the show and was going early to bed. Nothing, more- 
 over, was expected to foal, farrow, calve, or hatch 
 on Wednesday. Nothing even showed any sign of 
 immediate death. Heather and the infant calf were 
 doing as well as could be expected, and no more 
 bulletins were to be issued ; the foals and the goslings 
 would be neither more nor less incorrigible alone than 
 with nine infants to correct their misdemeanours ; 
 Peter and John, wrongfully accused of diphtheria, 
 had picked up wonderfully under a strengthening 
 diet of beef, brandy, roup-pills, and the dogs' dinners. 
 Yes, for one evening, perhaps, we could dare to leave 
 them alone. And the gardener's brother-in-law had 
 kindly consented to patrol the place, firing salutes 
 from a shot-gun to the glory of her Majesty and the 
 confusion of all poachers. 
 
 The omnibus was duly hired five guineas, to be 
 paid out of the profits of the barren Shetland mare, 
 when anybody has the sense to pay the price for her. 
 The railway carriage had been reserved, both ways. 
 The children were all carefully festooned with Jubilee 
 medals and Jubilee ribbons and filled to the brim 
 filled, in Willie's sad case, even to overflowing with 
 Jubilee cake and tea. All was ready when the 
 ducks, the pious ducks, the only children who had 
 never given a moment's anxiety, seized the occasion 
 to begin to die. They actually refused food; they
 
 200 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 flopped themselves on to their backs, waggled their 
 yellow legs heavenward, and quacked feebly at the 
 sun. We gasped. In any other beast it would have 
 been but natural ; if the ducks were going to turn 
 against us and die we were ruined indeed. All was 
 done that man can do; it always is at our farm, 
 where prodigies of labour balance the want of land 
 and capital ; and it is generally done in vain. How- 
 ever, we buried the ringleader, the ungrateful wretch 
 that had set the example of decease, isolated his two 
 principal accomplices, after steeping them carefully in 
 water, and soaked their run from innumerable cans 
 and buckets think of it, in the sun of Wednesday 
 afternoon ! till it was as near a pond as is consistent 
 with not swimming off marketable flesh. They came 
 to a better frame of mind towards evening, and con- 
 descended to cram their crops as usual. We had 
 done all we could. We tried not to think of them ; 
 we paraded at the back -gate, twenty -six strong 
 twenty-six weak would, perhaps, be the corrector way 
 to put it to be joined by a flying column of three 
 at London Bridge. We marched to the station ; we 
 hoisted in the cake-laden infants ; we were off. To 
 view the illuminations ! 
 
 We beguiled the journey with light-hearted prattle 
 about the misadventures which might probably befall 
 us. The ordinary imaginative mind dwelt deeply on 
 the likelihood that the omnibus might upset. The 
 fancy of bandy-legged, owl -eyed Septimus soared 
 higher; the two ruling passions of his life being 
 engines and hospitals, his mind and cheerful con- 
 versation ran rather to railway accidents. He esti-
 
 THE JUBILEE. 201 
 
 mates the desirability of a residence by the probability 
 of finding an engine standing in the nearest station ; 
 while, having been an inmate of most of the hospitals, 
 and having had his toys unintentionally broken by 
 half the eminent surgeons of London, he is an acknow- 
 ledged expert on fractured limbs. So that when he 
 declared of his personal knowledge that the rails were 
 breaking under the stress of Jubilee traffic, he was 
 listened to with quaking attention. Until Eddy cut 
 him out with the apprehension that the illuminations 
 might set his new straw hat on fire. 
 
 Amid general disappointment all arrived safely at 
 London Bridge. But the sight of the clean omnibus 
 standing empty and expectant paid for all. An 
 omnibus with horses, driver, and conductor complete, 
 that can't go without you, that stops and goes, fast 
 or slow, and turns up this street or that at a word 
 from the master or the missis this is not a joy 
 vouchsafed to everybody. The top of an omnibus, 
 in theory, holds about eighteen ; we got twenty- 
 seven on. With loud and prolonged screams we 
 debouched into the Borough. 
 
 Ah! Ee! I-i-i! Oh-h-h ! Uh-h-h-h ! Every 
 vowel was tried, but no vowel could do justice to 
 the emotions. Look at them flags ! Look at they 
 seats ! Look at them flowers ! Look at they people ! 
 I am thankful to think that we were not wholly 
 unconspicuous, even in the Borough. The untutored 
 inhabitants tried some of their local wit upon us, 
 but it was quite wasted ; we took it quite literally. 
 When they asked what more natural ? where we 
 went to school, we gave the name readily and
 
 202 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 politely, explaining that we had a month's holiday, 
 and meantime were having lessons at home. When 
 they inquired as anybody would who did not know 
 us, and how well we can take care of ourselves 
 whether our mothers knew we were out, we intro- 
 duced our mothers, as a reassuring proof that they 
 were out too. The driver kindly pointed out the 
 principal objects of interest, such as St Thomas's 
 Hospital and the Houses of Parliament ; but, though 
 we came from the country, we hardly needed it. 
 Nearly all of us had been in London before ; some 
 of us know it very well, though we are succeeding 
 in forgetting it. London has not behaved well to our 
 household, taking it as a whole. We can get on 
 quite well without disease or starvation, or being 
 sold for a penny, or assaulted with intent to kill, 
 and we don't mind if we never see London again. 
 Still there is a certain satisfaction in knowing the 
 river Thames when you see it. And Joe, despite 
 the fact that he all but cut both hands off in the 
 pond-sluice the other day and still reeks of iodoform, 
 peerked up at the sight of a racin' four-oar. " I 
 know all this place, I do," he remarked, confidently, 
 having spent the first three of his eleven years in 
 Chelsea. We know London well enough, some of us ; 
 only as the parts we know best are mostly being 
 pulled down by the County Council, or raided by the 
 police, we mayn't know it very long. 
 
 Hence there are some things new even to us. 
 V-I-N-O-L-I-A going in and out in red and white ; 
 how is that for a wonder of the world ? The crowns 
 and stars and V.R's a mistake, by the way, for we
 
 THE JUBILEE. 203 
 
 know that queen begins with Q, not E and 1837's 
 and 1897's and " God bless our Queen"; why, 
 we can read it all. Look at that light spinning 
 round ! You'd think 'twould put he out to spin 
 round like that. Look at that bridge across the 
 street. Now we can't go any farther ; we didn't 
 know there were so many omnibuses in the world. 
 And Eddy, relieved by finding his hat still uncon- 
 sumed, remarked, " It must be lovely to be a queen." 
 If Eddy were queen this sort of Jubilee would happen 
 every night. But to Seppy's mind the decorations 
 presented one unexplained feature which had to be 
 cleared up. " What happened in 1897?" he wanted 
 to know. 
 
 Then Tubsy spoke. Tubsy does not speak often, 
 but when he does he speaks to the point. He is 
 employed on the lighter branches of farm-work, at 
 which he is worth some four men and a boy, on a 
 living wage of about a penny a-month. When he 
 reaches the age of four he may receive even more. 
 Already he is wont to groom the cows with a dandy 
 brush, and then stands long before them in silent 
 adoration. "Don't they look nice now I've done 
 they up," he remarks at last. His special charge 
 is the calves. " I think the caaves love me," he 
 reflected the other day, and I think they do ; only 
 they know that the great sahib Tubsy is not a person 
 to be trifled with. Now Tubsy had leaned against 
 the rail of the omnibus by the space of an hour, his 
 head tilted upwards like a drinking fowl's, gazing 
 raptly upon the variegated coming and going of that 
 blessed word " Bovril " as one who is caught up into
 
 204 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 Paradise and sees wonderful things. Then he turned 
 slowly round, and his dark, solemn eyes fell on all of 
 us in turn. The lips parted in the nut-brown face, 
 and he put a question to the company, " Who's mindin' 
 the caaves ? " 
 
 It was the voice of conscience. Who, if it came 
 to that, was minding the diseased ducks ? Who was 
 seeing that the Little Minister, that promising stallion, 
 was not chasing the fowls ? The foster-mother had 
 refused to go below 1 1 in the heat of the day ; who 
 was regulating its temperature now ? The omnibus 
 still crawled on, but the illuminations had lost some- 
 thing. " I bet there's a V.E. near that crown," said 
 Eddy, with a well-meaning desire to liven things ; 
 nobody took him up. The thought that the beasts 
 might want refreshment and nobody there to give it 
 began to weigh upon all minds. Suppose we missed 
 the train and there was nobody to milk the cows in 
 the morning? 
 
 It was more than anybody could be asked to bear. 
 We got down and left the omnibus derelict in a block ; 
 each grown person seized a child, and in columns of 
 families we made for the station. We got there 
 panting with thirty -seven minutes to spare. We 
 piled ourselves up in a corner, and some of us went 
 to sleep and some had beer, and we got large glasses 
 of soda-water and poured them down the children. 
 But what an air, when we got out at our own station, 
 where the people know us. The cool and the fresh- 
 ness, the hay and the roses ! It was good to get 
 home, and nothing had died except one chicken. 
 Thank goodness ! " And I've enjoyed myself very
 
 THE JUBILEE. 205 
 
 much," observed Willy, complacently. As he had 
 been sick steadily in train and omnibus, we may 
 assume, a fortiori, that the others enjoyed them- 
 selves too. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE GREAT REVIEW. 
 
 Portsmouth as an institution is the headquarters 
 of the British navy. Portsmouth as a dwelling-place 
 is a strange mingling of a seventeenth-century country 
 town, an eighteenth-century watering-place, a flashy 
 seaside resort of to-day, and a slummy seaport of all 
 time. 
 
 Houses as quaint as Staple Inn, back squares as 
 dignified as Georgian Brighton or Weymouth, are 
 sandwiched between eligible boarding-houses and fishy 
 rum-shops. Portsmouth is a history of the British 
 navy worked out in buildings. But to-day, old and 
 new, all wear the same livery of blazing bunting. 
 Bunting, we may assume, is plentiful in Portsmouth 
 if anywhere, but you would have hardly thought 
 there was so much of it in any given town on earth 
 as Portsmouth is clothed with to-day. You cannot 
 see the town for the flags. Portsmouth is tapestried 
 with them, walled with them, roofed with them, 
 everything but floored with them. Every kind of 
 flag in every kind of place ; none of the foreign blue- 
 jackets need go unhappy for want of his national 
 colours. The crescent of Turkey flaps across the
 
 206 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 street, side by side with the chrysanthemum of Japan. 
 Next to them the Kaiser's eagle pecks at a recondite 
 ensign bearing a sun in the left-hand top corner, and 
 a forest of blue and white bars, which may stand for 
 Uruguay or San Domingo or Liberia for aught I 
 know. The sailors of the King of Siam's yacht will 
 doubtless find their native elephant displayed in its 
 due place, though I have not discovered it yet. 
 
 Portsmouth is at this moment not merely the 
 headquarters of the British navy, but the generous 
 host of every navy that musters in the world. There 
 is no mistake about the loyalty of Portsmouth. You 
 may not find here Ludgate Hills or St James's Streets, 
 Arcadian avenues of green or fairy palaces of light. 
 Portsmouth is a plain town, mainly engaged in send- 
 ing her Majesty's ships to sea as efficiently as may 
 be, and has neither time nor money for pantomime 
 effects ; but having started out to beflag itself, Ports- 
 mouth has beflagged itself with a will from top to 
 bottom, from town-hall and grand hotel to lodging- 
 house and cottage. The elegant villas of Southsea 
 are gay, but the alleys of Gosport are even gayer. 
 Look down each narrow, dark, smelly little court, 
 you will find it hung across and across with flags- 
 flags drooping out of the windows, flags spread-eagled 
 on the walls. " Long hath she reigned ! " is by now, 
 perhaps, a little trite as a piece of news, even though 
 it be reinforced with the figures that give arithmetical 
 demonstration of its truth. All the same, you don't 
 call such vigorous attention to the fact unless you are 
 glad that she hath reigned long. But judged by such 
 signs, the poorest streets of Portsmouth are very glad
 
 THE JUBILEE. 207 
 
 indeed. The popular joy goes much deeper into the 
 back streets than it does in London itself. 
 
 But comparisons are invidious. The whole country 
 is as loyal as itself, and it could not be more. On 
 the way down, every suburb, country town, and village 
 Surbiton, Guildford, Haslemere, Liss added its 
 show of flags. Every little labourer's cottage had its 
 Union-Jack stuck jauntily at the top of the highest 
 tree. It is the whole nation which is celebrating 
 this Jubilee there is no room to doubt that and 
 patriotic satisfaction in this certainly went a long 
 way to mitigate the sufferings of the journey. For 
 all the world is pouring out of London, just as a few 
 days ago it was pouring in. 
 
 The booking-office at Waterloo suggested a com- 
 bination of the boat-race, Ascot, and Cowes. People 
 slung with field-glasses swarmed up and down the 
 packed trains, and then sank weakly back to wait for 
 the next, which was coming in five minutes, rather 
 more tightly packed than the last. All the trains 
 are coming down, but none are going back. I saw 
 a corpulent Midland special calmly bivouacked on 
 the South-Western line at Fratton ; they are waiting 
 till after the great to-morrow, for an Englishman who 
 leaves Portsmouth to-day is no countryman of Nelson's. 
 Where in the meantime Portsmouth hides its rolling 
 stock I know not, unless it has stacked it all in the 
 docks. There is plenty of room in them, for all her 
 Majesty's ships have gone out to Spithead to keep 
 her Majesty's Jubilee. 
 
 Portsmouth is patrolled by the intelligent stranger 
 cockney, countryman, and foreigner. He is here in all
 
 208 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 his kinds and all his thousands, flourishing his guide- 
 book in the native face, and Portsmouth is probably 
 beginning to learn as much about its local antiquities 
 and objects of interest as we have lately been forced to 
 do in London. Camera on back, studious of the guide- 
 book and with peering eye cocked above it, the 
 tourist makes his house-to-house visitation of the 
 town, or perambulates the empty dockyard, or pays 
 his penny toll with righteous indignation at Haslar 
 Bridge. 
 
 But the chief sight at Portsmouth remains its 
 ships and men. Just now both ships and men are 
 supplemented from all the nations of the earth 
 till Portsmouth is like an enlarged and improved 
 reproduction of the blockade of Crete. 
 
 The foreign bluejacket roams unchecked from fruit- 
 stall to tobacco -shops, conversing affably, as his 
 manner is, without understanding the inhabitants or 
 being understood by them. This afternoon there 
 were black -browed little Spaniards, tall, dull-eyed 
 Eussians, and heavy-limbed Germans all passing up 
 and down the streets, under their own swinging flags 
 and everybody else's. It may be blind-eyed national 
 prejudice, but none of them seemed to me to possess 
 just that combination of supple strength and resource- 
 ful resolution that is the hall-mark of our own 
 beloved bluejacket. But it is not polite to say this 
 just now, especially seeing that it is quite understood 
 that they are all fine fellows. Essentially harmonious 
 and joyful was a party of three German bluejackets, 
 being shown round by a bugler from a line regiment. 
 He was prattling away in London English, and they
 
 THE JUBILEE. 209 
 
 answered fluently in North German. They were 
 making remarks about the shops : he was under the 
 impression that the subject of conversation was 
 Spanish bluejackets. " They none of 'em understand 
 English," he said, not without a touch of scorn. 
 
 And what about the fleet all this time ? Well, the 
 fleet is there, I know on the very best authority. 
 But to-day the fleet is lying out there between Ports- 
 mouth and the Isle of Wight, ship after ship, line 
 upon line. But for to-day the fleet has veiled itself 
 in haze from premature curiosity. You will see it in 
 all its majesty in due season. Meanwhile, the sky 
 over Portsmouth is thick and heavy, as with the soot 
 of many chimneys. You may stand and look out to 
 sea, but you will hardly find the fleet. The grey sea 
 is scored by the wake of a fleet of launches coming in 
 and going out ; here and there is a white boat with 
 men in blue tugging rhythmically at the oars, and a 
 dark still figure in the stern. But the boats dive 
 behind the curtain of mist, and you cannot trace them 
 to their homes. 
 
 Only when the sun shines can you see the pale 
 gleaming outline of what looks like an enormous city. 
 Left and right it stretches for miles and miles, till it 
 is lost in the thicker clouds. In front of you it 
 towers up eagerly to giddy heights. Very thickly 
 built the city seems, with black foundations and 
 lighter, airier structure above. Here you can see a 
 row of factory stacks ; there a slim mast. That 
 shadowy city is the British fleet. Not all of it, not 
 nearly all of it, but as much as we are going to show 
 this time, without taking away anything from any of 
 

 
 210 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 our squadrons abroad. The black foundation is the 
 hulls, the lighter upper storeys are the superstructures, 
 the stacks are funnels, and the minarets, masts. 
 Through your glass you can make out some of it a 
 black venomous destroyer with a head like an adder's, 
 a more graceful -bodied cruiser, a great battleship 
 riding like a fortress, with a torpedo-boat just dis- 
 cernible against its dark side. You can make out 
 quite enough to feel lost and annihilated in the 
 presence of so many tons of weight, so many knots of 
 motive -power, so many smithereens of destructive 
 force. But all that is for to-morrow. For to-day let 
 it remain the ghostly city, the dim promise of a 
 wonder such as the world never yet saw. 
 
 V. 
 
 THE GKEAT REVIEW (continued). 
 
 All through the week of Jubilee our English 
 weather has maintained its splendid reputation. In 
 Portsmouth the last two or three days it has even 
 exceeded it. Sun-striking heat on Thursday ; sullen 
 haze on Friday ; a perfect day for the review ; a per- 
 fect deluge for coming home in ; a perfect night for 
 the illuminations ; and a general epilogue of mug and 
 fog for the slack day. After it, our colonial and 
 foreign friends cannot complain that our famous 
 weather has not shown all its phases. On Friday 
 night it looked any odds on a fog which would have
 
 THE JUBILEE. 211 
 
 muffled up the fleet till you had to grope after it ship 
 by ship. But on Saturday morning the mist had all 
 cleared. 
 
 The place had filled itself to bursting with dis- 
 hevelled hordes, who had dozed throughout the night 
 in special trains, and arrived to find breakfast in 
 Portsmouth almost as undiscoverable a quantity as 
 disloyalty. How many people had come to see the 
 great show I do not know, and it does not particularly 
 matter. It is sufficient that if there had been many 
 more they would have had to feed on the air and sit 
 in the sea. At anyrate, there was a very vast 
 multitude, and they had come to see a very vast and 
 moving spectacle. Breakfast or no breakfast, they 
 did well to come. They were going to see the right 
 arm of the British empire. 
 
 It looked as though the whole people of the country 
 was emptying itself out into the sea. The channel 
 out of the harbour was like the way to St Paul's last 
 Tuesday a hurrying pilgrimage, with boats in place 
 of men and women. Big white pulling boats, and 
 little twin-funnelled steam - pinnaces from the fleet, 
 thick-set Government tugs, shining to-day like the 
 trimmest of steam -yachts, painted tripper steamers, 
 big, towering ocean liners, they trooped at each 
 other's heels, all streaming out to see the fleet. Every 
 boat was black and blue, red and white, with soldiers 
 and sailors and plain men and women. The plain 
 man and woman do not usually take much notice of 
 the fleet of which they are part owners. But a week 
 like this was just the time to take stock of it to see 
 the most wonderful assemblage of sea power there had
 
 212 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 ever been. It was a thing to be seen at all costs, just 
 for the sake of seeing. But it was also a thing with 
 a good deal of thinking behind ; the seeing a lesson 
 as well as a spectacle. 
 
 And when we steamed out along the tortuous 
 channel, between heavy old stone forts, breakwaters, 
 railway sidings, beaches, and piers buzzing with 
 crowded people, there, sure enough, was the fleet 
 plain to view. Not gleaming mysteriously through a 
 gauze of mist as it had done the day before, but quite 
 plain hard outlines for the nearer visions, softer 
 suggestions for the farther; but all quite unmistak- 
 ably plain and solid, very solid. The fleet was a 
 very hard fact, quite motionless. The big ships stood 
 up majestically on the calm, green water, and the 
 little ones lay along it meaningly. At first view the 
 fleet was in no particular order that revealed itself. 
 It was simply a crowd of ships, a flower-garden of 
 signal-flags, a scaffolding of masts and spars, a factory 
 of funnels, a long continuous wall of black hulls. In 
 fact, they were gathered so thick that you could not 
 see through them to the coast of the Isle of Wight. 
 Away to the west they stretched away, away, away ; 
 masts and funnels and black hulls running one into 
 another for ever and ever. Eight away westward ran 
 the line, fainter and fainter, but there was no end to it. 
 
 As our boat came up and began to circle round 
 them, the whole shape of the fleet suddenly changed. 
 Out of chaos came suddenly the precisest order. For 
 now we had come abreast of the lines, and could see 
 the formation in which the ships lay at their moor- 
 ings. First came torpedo-boats, and the little devils
 
 THE JUBILEE. 213 
 
 were moored so true that they looked like one vessel. 
 From the tall liner I was on you looked down on to the 
 black lane of the boats. What with the flags and the 
 crowd of men's heads, it looked for all the world like 
 a street decorated and crowded for Jubilee Day. Then 
 the destroyers are more devilish than the boats, their 
 long low sides cuddled down to the lapping water. 
 Next, cruisers : a vista of graceful masts and tall, 
 graceful funnels, very unlike the squat, dogged-looking 
 funnels of the destroyers. And last, we came to the 
 double line of stately battleships, rising out of the 
 water like kings, strong and confident. Every kind 
 of vessel, powerful or swift, according to her kind. 
 You looked down the dwindling avenues between 
 their even lines until once again they ran together in 
 the distance, but still there was no end to it. You 
 were not seeing the fleet at all, it suddenly occurred 
 to you. You were only trying to see what nobody 
 with only one pair of ordinary human eyes ever could 
 see. It would not come together into one sight it 
 was far too big for that. But what the eye lost the 
 mind gained. Look at all you could take in, and 
 then multiply it by about ten that was the fleet 
 lying here to be reviewed. But then you had seen 
 any number of ships beside, lying in the docks and 
 basins some just completing, some a mere skeleton 
 of girders, some, alas ! quite fit to go to sea, but with 
 no crews to take them. And when you had added 
 on that, it was time to remember that we have a fleet 
 in China waters, a fleet in the Pacific and the Indian 
 Ocean, in the North and South Atlantic, and in 
 Australasia. Not a ship more than we need. But
 
 214 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 add up all that, and then you will begin to get an 
 idea. Yet no, you won't. Still, you will be nearer 
 to an idea of the tremendous might of the machine 
 which holds together the British empire. 
 
 You got a suggestion on Tuesday how big the 
 empire is on land. On Saturday you added an 
 inkling how big it is on every sea. We are great 
 in fertile Canada and Australia, in populous India 
 and Africa, and in the rich islands of East and 
 West, because we are yet greater on the naked 
 sea. 
 
 That was the great lecture propounded by the 
 lines of warships on Saturday. 
 
 People here said that the review, as a show, 
 was less than exciting, that it was even a little 
 dull, that if there had been ten or twenty ships 
 less or more it would have looked exactly the 
 same. Possibly. Only the lecture would not have 
 been the same, as the point was the question of 
 the fleet, and the greatness of the need for it 
 at once a boast and a warning. And yet to my 
 eyes the mere sight was a monstrously fine one. 
 A warship is fine beyond almost any other sight 
 there is to be seen. Beauty lies in expression, 
 they say, and there is nothing more expressive 
 than a warship. It has at once the buoyant 
 mobility of life and the heavy solidity of matter. 
 The long guns run level, and if the ports suggest 
 horrible destructiveness tons of steel tossed about 
 here and there and crushing men under them to 
 jelly, at the same time the brilliant polish on 
 the guns, a polish you could shave by, is very
 
 THE JUBILEE. 215 
 
 human, and speaks of affection for the grim beauties 
 that is as pretty as the guns are terrible. And 
 there was a kind of pathos, too, in a tiny little 
 launch that was gliding in and out of the lines with 
 a very frothy wave behind her. That was the 
 Turbinia an experiment in a new method of pro- 
 pulsion, already the fastest thing afloat, and with 
 possibilities of further speed almost illimitable. 
 If that shrimp of a turbinet comes to anything, 
 all these black and yellow leviathans are done for. 
 So they are if somebody invents a flying-machine ; 
 so they are if you top them with a torpedo. All 
 the tons of steel, the labour of years, the millions 
 of money, the masses of ingenuity, and the treasures 
 of devotion and courage, they are all gone in five 
 minutes. That is the pathos and the beauty of a 
 warship ; it is so very strong and so very weak. 
 
 There was plenty of time to moralise about 
 this or anything else you felt a leaning to during 
 the long wait between taking up your berth and 
 the arrival of the Prince of Wales. But at about 
 two o'clock there was a gun fired : he was there. 
 There was a bustle in the ships, and some blue- 
 black figures already lying out along the yards 
 sprang up and stood motionless till the ship seemed 
 rigged with living men. In others, the newest 
 ships, too sternly new and businesslike to be fitted 
 with the tackle for such amenities, the bluejackets 
 lined the sides and bulwarks, with scarlet marines 
 to give a dash of gaiety to what was rather smart 
 and purposeful than gaudy. It was not nearly so 
 variegated as Tuesday, despite the signal-flags, but
 
 216 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 always barring the Queen, why was she not there ? 
 it was not a whit less majestic, for as the Prince's 
 procession reached each division the ships saluted. 
 The banging guns from all these ships would have 
 made a very heavy action on land. They were 
 firing from their smallest guns ; but even that pro- 
 bably meant as much energy, certainly as much 
 noise and smoke, as a big army all through a day's 
 fighting. In a minute half the fleet had vanished 
 blotted out by the coils of lazy smoke, guns crashing, 
 bands blaring, thousands of lusty seamen cheering. 
 The inspecting yachts and the big steamers come by. 
 Among the last was the huge Campania, dwarfing 
 almost everything, and steaming very slowly lest 
 she might tread on the toes of some of the little 
 ones. One by one the boats passed away behind 
 the smoke. 
 
 That was the review. Crawling carefully back, 
 we ran into the thunder-storm. It came up blackly 
 from the Solent before we could say " It's raining." 
 The decks were a tumult of dancing water, lightning 
 was splitting the sky with rents of fire. Thunder 
 was cracking like to deafen the very guns. The 
 ships stood up, tall and wan, against the lurid 
 sky. The firmament seemed to be bursting asunder. 
 The ships stood up to it unmoving and unflinching. 
 What is a storm to them ? 
 
 But some colonial officers aboard us admitted 
 that they would hardly have believed it of a tem- 
 perate climate, and we natives were very proud to 
 have been able to show it to them. For the most 
 part the colonials were too dazed with wonder and
 
 THE JUBILEE. 217 
 
 joy at the aspect of the fleet to take much notice of 
 any thunder-storm. They could hardly speak about 
 it, and when they did, it was in half-tones, solemnly : 
 " It has been a wonderful day to us a wonderful 
 day." 
 
 The thunder-storm was only an episode. Having 
 done its business, it went dutifully away, and left 
 the field clear for the illuminations. Out on the 
 sea front you could see the lights of the fleet like 
 glowworms in the dark. Then suddenly there 
 sounded a gun ; and as I moved along Southsea 
 Common there appeared in the line a ship of fire. 
 A ship all made of fire hull and funnels and 
 military masts with fighting tops. And then 
 another, and another, and another. The fleet 
 revealed itself from behind the castle, ship after 
 ship traced in fire against the blackness. From 
 the head of Southsea there still came on fresh 
 wonders of grace and light and splendour, stretching 
 away, still endlessly as in the daytime, till they 
 became a confused glimmer six miles away. It 
 was the fleet, and yet not the fleet. You could 
 recognise almost any ship by her lines and rig 
 just as if it had been in day, only transmuted 
 from steel and paint into living gold. The admirals 
 still flew their flags as in the day, only to-night 
 the flags were no longer bunting, but pure colour. 
 The hard heavy fleet vanished, and there came 
 out in its stead a picture of it magically painted 
 in pure light. 
 
 For three hours the miracle of brightness shone 
 wondrously at Spithead. At half-past eleven or so
 
 218 THE JUBILEE. 
 
 the Prince returned the second time as before, 
 and the golden fleet sent a thunder of salute after 
 him. Then, as I stood on the high roof of the 
 Central Hotel, the clock struck twelve, and before 
 my eyes the golden fleet vanished vanished clean 
 away in a moment. You could just see it go. Here 
 half a ship broken off, there masts and funnels 
 hanging an instant in the air. It all vanished, 
 and nothing at all was left except the rigging 
 lights, trembling faintly once more on the dark 
 sea. 
 
 Was it a dream ? Was the fleet melted indeed 
 into the air ? We had seen the fleet that day, 
 and we knew better. The great day was passed, 
 but we knew the fleet was there. We took that 
 away with us to remember: the fleet was there.
 
 219 
 
 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 1 
 
 As we crawled nearer to Bayreuth on the dusty- 
 Sunday afternoon, we seemed to be entering upon an 
 outlying province of the United States of America. 
 To be sure there were Germans enough high-busted, 
 bare-elbowed German girls and German young men 
 in light-coloured reach-me-downs and straw hats with 
 a binding of black ribbon round the tilted brim. 
 But these all dropped off as the train dawdled at 
 each wayside station: they were only going to the 
 usual diversions of a country Sunday afternoon. The 
 Americans were going to Bayreuth, and the German 
 language began to die away in the American. 
 
 All down the long train there buzzed the American 
 tongue ; out of each window looked a group of Ameri- 
 can girls. Four girls and a woman to one elderly 
 weary -looking man was the proportion, as always; 
 and the man, as always, was working away at baggage, 
 and porters, and guards, and refreshments for the 
 comfort of the girls. All were taking their pleasure 
 
 1 Daily Mail, July 1897.
 
 220 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 
 
 as their manner is on Sundays and holidays talking, 
 talking, talking, in a perpetual gush of chatter about 
 things that did not matter. But it was much that 
 they were not talking about Wagner. 
 
 Bavaria was going to sleep under the heavy sun. 
 But when at last the train strolled into Bayreuth, 
 Bavaria was awake indeed. It was a queer mixture. 
 The little old town is like any other little old town in 
 this part of the world old brown houses that seem 
 nearly all old brown tiles, the deep-eaved roof sloping 
 heavenwards to double the height of the windows. 
 They look like toys which have been shut up unplayed 
 with for a century. But the big, cobble-stoned, trian- 
 gular square outside the station was quite full. The 
 station hotel had flags of all nations flying. Crowds 
 lined the station steps, and packed right back as if 
 a royal procession were coming. Partly they were 
 peasants, who don't quite know who Wagner is, look- 
 ing on the tourists, who surged out in a madding 
 torrent, with amusement and some contempt. 
 
 The Bavarian peasant is like any other peasant, 
 only more so. The rough brown suit that covers his 
 big limbs is not browner than his face ; only the square 
 set of his shoulders reminds you of those three years 
 in the army, and his heavy movements and big wide- 
 awake can never loosen him quite into the mere boor 
 again. But if the peasant smiled to see these crowds 
 of strangers fighting their way into Bayreuth from 
 heaven knows where, the true Bayreuther did not. 
 He knew what they were all there for they had 
 come to make his fortune. 
 
 I fancied last night that Bayreuth didn't care.
 
 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 221 
 
 They were promenading the town just as on every 
 other Sunday night, whipping off their hats to each 
 other, and tucking them for a moment under their 
 elbow, just as every other German. There were 
 accordions playing in the little outlying beer-houses, 
 and bare-headed girls waltzing together. I had seen 
 two Englishmen in my hotel, hideous in shapeless 
 dust-cloaks, but very reverentially eating the rosbif 
 of the holy city. After that it seemed horrible that 
 the accordions were not playing at least the overture 
 to " Tannhauser," and I marvelled that Bayreuth 
 should be so insensible. 
 
 But I was wrong. Certainly "Wagner came to 
 Bayreuth, and not Bayreuth to Wagner, so that 
 Bayreuth had a right to remain unresponsive if it 
 liked. But it did not. It briskly grasped what may 
 be called the mark-and-pfennig aspect of the Meister's 
 genius. When I took up my room at the hotel the 
 waiter called my attention to the price, marked in 
 plain figures on the door. " To avoid misunderstand- 
 ings later," he sweetly remarked, and perhaps the 
 precaution is a wise one. My hotel is a good little 
 inn enough, though nobody could call it first-class. 
 But the proprietor has incautiously left about a little 
 memorandum with the price of each room marked 
 thereon. If they are all full, as they are, it comes 
 to something over 9 a-day, and nearly 300 for the 
 month's season not half bad for a little country inn, 
 not counting profits on meat and drink, and consider- 
 ing the value of money in Germany. And all Bay- 
 reuth does the same. 
 
 A barber who shaved me had quickly put his price
 
 222 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 
 
 up to 3|d., a great sum in this country ; but then he 
 had assisted at the final rehearsal of " Parsifal," had 
 even helped make up the artists, and the extra 
 l^d. was not more than his conversation was worth. 
 Of course there is no shop without its bust of 
 Wagner in the window, from terra-cotta an inch high 
 to colossal plaster-of-Paris, and the last looks very- 
 engaging against a background of little tin uhlans. 
 Moreover, Bayreuth does not wait for you to come 
 and buy ; it comes round to you with motherly care, 
 and insists that you should equip yourself thoroughly 
 against the festival. " Have you got your book of leit- 
 motives ? " said an old lady to me, quite sharply, this 
 morning. I dared not say that leitmotives were of 
 no use to me, for fear I should be slapped, or not 
 allowed to go to the performance ; so I weakly said 
 I had. After all, to sell such things is what the 
 shop is for. But I never, never thought I should 
 live to see the orchestral score of " Parsifal " hawked 
 about the streets like an evening newspaper. 
 
 While I have been writing this little bit more 
 special trains from everywhere have been coming in, 
 and have flooded the place with English girls. It is 
 curious that Wagner seems to appeal with special 
 potency to the unmarried girl, and I don't know 
 whether he would be altogether pleased if he knew 
 it. At this moment the marriageable female popula- 
 tion of Bayreuth appears to be something like eighty 
 per cent or so of the whole. When I went down to 
 lunch I found the restaurant quite full of English 
 girls girls in shirts and white belts and blue serge 
 skirts. They order their lunch very distinctly in
 
 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 223 
 
 English, and are rather annoyed when the stupid 
 fellow doesn't understand them. But, luckily, our 
 hotel has two English-speaking waiters. The senior 
 one, I fancy, is responsible for the inscription, "Here 
 are carriages cheap, to let," which appears in all the 
 rooms of the hotel. To-day both are in great form ; 
 they even swagger a little, and talk to each other in 
 English. " More little spoons," cries one ; " No little 
 spoons left, only small spoons," answers his fellow. 
 There are no marks to-day only shillings. The 
 poor native German is quite wiped out. The German 
 is not, as a rule, the most retiring of men ; but to-day 
 he sits disconsolately waiting to be served. It is 
 even pathetic to see him furtively feel at the horn of 
 his waxed moustache, fearing that it may have gone 
 out of curl, and that this is responsible for the un- 
 wonted neglect of his wishes. Meanwhile the English 
 study maps of Bayreuth, and wonder intelligently 
 that there are so many Roman Catholic churches 
 as if they expected to find the Wesleyan connection 
 especially strong in Bavaria. 
 
 In the aspect of most of these ladies there is 
 something that rebukes me. There is a look of high 
 purpose in their eye as they order lunch, which tells 
 me that I am wrong to take my food as food ; to-day 
 it is the sustenance in the strength of which one 
 hears " Parsifal." They look very coldly on the bar- 
 maid of the restaurant, who wears her sleeves short 
 at the elbows, and a little short at the neck surely 
 a very innocent device, and eminently calculated to 
 lessen the heat of the weather and increase the sale 
 of beer. But one should not consider these vanities
 
 224 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 
 
 to-day. To-day one may, indeed, drink Ehine wine ; 
 but, again, as a sort of sacrament, as if it came out of 
 the Grail. Though there is, indeed, one jolly red- 
 faced dame in a Jubilee ribbon, who seems to feel 
 that a country where you can get a pint of wine for 
 a shilling is one that she has neglected too long. 
 What is she doing in Bayreuth, I wonder ? For 
 that matter, what of the earnest-eyed young lady 
 who is explaining " Parsifal " to her friend ? " There's 
 not very much tune in it," she says, " but at the end 
 there's the Good Friday music very pretty." I 
 can't leave off thinking what "Wagner who was not 
 the most tolerant of men towards mediocrity what 
 poor Wagner would think to-day if he could be present 
 at his apotheosis. 
 
 But now the carriages are filling up, and rolling 
 off towards the theatre. We must go. Have you 
 got your tickets, your opera-glasses, your German 
 and English texts, your orchestral score, your map 
 of Bayreuth, your life of Wagner, your commentary, 
 and your chart of leitmotives ? Now ! Hush : Let 
 us go. 
 
 II. 
 
 It was beginning. The huge wedge-shaped theatre 
 was black as night. Fifteen hundred people hardly 
 breathed. Yet, though you saw nothing and heard 
 nothing, you could feel the air charged with ex- 
 pectancy. Up over the living darkness stole the 
 first soul-thrilling bars of the prelude to "Parsifal." 
 
 Nevertheless it had taken a good hour to get the
 
 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 225 
 
 multitude settled down into its proper disposition of 
 rapt attention. It had begun to take its way to that 
 theatre the Feast-play-house is the right name for 
 it in Bayreuth by half-past two an hour and a 
 half before the first note was due. Between the 
 regular lines of trees rolled two streams of carriages, 
 some hastening to set down, the others to find some- 
 body to take up again. Under the trees stood the 
 inhabitants of Bayreuth watching the stream go by ; 
 there jostled them a long column of foot-passengers, 
 moving perpetually at a steady two miles an hour up 
 the gentle rise towards the theatre. There were 
 English, Americans, French, and Germans, Gentiles 
 and Jews, soldiers and civilians it was strange to 
 see cavalry lieutenants in uniform, the full score 
 under their arms, going to hear an opera at three 
 in the afternoon old men and little girls, shaggy- 
 haired virtuosi, and untutored children of nature from 
 the western prairies. 
 
 You may smile at Wagner as you will ; yet, genius 
 or charlatan, it was no ordinary personality that could 
 draw together this motley crowd in his honour. Bear 
 in mind that you cannot pay less than 5 for your 
 tickets alone, to say nothing of coming to Bayreuth 
 and staying there. Many of these people may have 
 had the vaguest idea of the difference between a 
 leitmotiv and a Blihnenweihfestspiel, may hardly have 
 known who Wagner was. But the fact remains that 
 Wagner somehow impressed himself enough on the 
 world to make people think it worth spending 5 
 per head and upwards to hear and see his works in 
 the way he thought they should be heard and seen. 
 
 p
 
 226 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 
 
 We came to the red -brick theatre the most 
 hideous I ever saw. It is the naked skeleton of a 
 theatre, with all its anatomy vestibule, auditorium, 
 flies, dressing-rooms sticking out unashamed, with no 
 attempt to hide or beautify them. It is not built for 
 show. Except at festival-time there is nobody to look 
 at it, and at festival -time everybody is naturally 
 looking at everybody else. And assuredly everybody 
 else was well worth looking at. I suppose it must 
 be rather a perplexing problem how one is to dress 
 for a theatrical performance in the country which 
 begins at four and ends at ten. Wonderful indeed 
 were the solutions of it. The women, for once, were 
 less wonderful than the men. The women merely 
 wore evening -dress, or dinner -dress, with a bonnet, 
 or garden-party dress, or travelling dress, or shirts 
 and bicycle skirts, according as they regarded it as 
 town or country, morning or evening. The English 
 and American men wore the tweeds and serges, straw 
 or felt hats, and yellow boots, which they consider 
 good enough for any occasion abroad. 
 
 But the German men ! There was just one gentle- 
 man in correct frock-coat, light trousers, and tall hat. 
 Another came very near him, but had apparently 
 mistaken the feast -play for a funeral he was in 
 deepest mourning. Several wore evening-dress, with 
 black ties ; one had invented a kind of combination 
 dress -and -frock coat frock buttoned, dress unbut- 
 toned which, but for its general grotesqueness, was 
 plainly the very thing for the occasion. But these 
 were hide-bound conventionalists beside the play of 
 fancy which others showed.
 
 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 227 
 
 Among the dresses, as they say in the Society 
 column, we noticed the following : Correct morning- 
 dress, with a straw hat ; correct evening-dress, with 
 shepherd's plaid trousers and brown boots; frock- 
 coat and cricket cap ; black morning -coat, Leghorn 
 straw hat and knickerbockers ; frock-coat, white 
 waistcoat, and a kind of gilt deer -stalker; frock-coat, 
 sombrero, grey hair down back, and bit of sausage 
 sticking out of mouth; frock-coat, straw hat, duck 
 trousers, no waistcoat, tartan tie, another kind of 
 tartan shirt, and a third kind of tartan cricket-belt ; 
 brown knickerbockers, grey flannel shirt, patent-leather 
 shoes, no coat, no waistcoat, no hat. 
 
 You will imagine that time passed quickly and 
 enjoyably in the contemplation of this scene. Before 
 I had absorbed the half of it there stepped to the 
 threshold of the theatre half-a-dozen men with brass 
 instruments. A little man in a frock-coat and a 
 bowler ranged himself in front of them. Suddenly he 
 began to wave his arms round his head, and to this 
 conducting they blew the first few notes of " Parsifal." 
 That meant it was to begin in five minutes it is the 
 regular signal at Bayreuth. We tumbled up the bare 
 mountainous stairs into the bare undecorated theatre. 
 It was not more beautiful inside than out. It is a 
 vast sloping wedge, of which the stage is the thin 
 end; the thick end is a row of boxes for royal 
 persons and suchlike ; between are the stalls. There 
 is nothing else but stalls tier on tier of cane- 
 bottomed seats, rising gradually from the stage. 
 Each seat costs 1, and in theory each is as good as 
 each of the others. In practice the back side seats
 
 228 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 
 
 need I say mine was a back side seat ? are not 
 quite as good for seeing as the front middle seats. 
 
 On the other hand, they are probably better for 
 hearing: an enormous orchestra does not combine 
 properly unless you are some distance from it. 
 Although at Bayreuth, by a most admirable arrange- 
 ment, the orchestra is tucked away under the stage, 
 and you cannot see it. Take it altogether, this is the 
 most practical opera-house in the world. It would 
 never do in London it is not very comfortable, and 
 the difficulties in the way of seeing who is in the 
 house are almost insuperable. But in Germany, 
 where people go to the opera to see and hear operas, 
 it is exactly what you want. Stern, bare, utilitarian, 
 just simply a place to see and hear from. It is 
 exactly what you want. 
 
 The lights went out ; the rustle of people went out 
 as suddenly ; the prelude began. The prelude ended, 
 and the first act began. From the audience there 
 was not a single sound. The youngest American girls 
 tried a whisper or two at first, but even they were 
 awed into silence. There was more than one point 
 where I should like to have laughed ; but amid this 
 strained attentive rapture no laugh came. The first 
 act lasted an hour and three - quarters ; nobody 
 stirred or made a sound. There was an interval of 
 three-quarters of an hour, and then the second act 
 lasted an hour and a quarter ; nobody stirred or made 
 a sound. Then another interval of three-quarters of 
 an hour, and a third act of an hour and a half. 
 Perhaps twenty people mostly American had gone 
 home ; still nobody made a sound. Four horn's and a
 
 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 229 
 
 half of solid music, without a tune to hum in the whole 
 of it ; 1500 people, a good third of them from the 
 two least-to-be-awed peoples on earth, and not a voice, 
 or a cough, or a banging seat from the lot of them ! 
 
 What do you make of this, anti - Wagnerian ? 
 With Germans you can understand it ; they are 
 trained to sit at attention ; one German fainted with 
 devotion, which was the only distraction of the day. 
 But English and American men and women don't sit 
 four hours and a half motionless on cane-bottomed 
 seats for the sheer enjoyment of being cramped and 
 uncomfortable. Then why do they it ? True, they 
 have got to do it, once they are inside the place ; but 
 why do they come ? Partly, perhaps, it is because of 
 the delicious holiday setting of the piece. You go 
 out of the dark, reverence-stricken, human-smelling 
 playhouse after the first act to sit in the sun and 
 look away over the broad Bavarian valleys, with fir- 
 grown ridges between ; after the second act to eat 
 your dinner, as the evening cool exudes freshly out of 
 the half-dried woods and corn-fields ; at the end to 
 walk home in the mysterious night. 
 
 But that cannot be the whole reason of it. It 
 would be too wild to suppose that these people take 
 Wagner as a kind of bitter pill to put an edge on the 
 sweetness of Nature. Fashion may have something 
 to do with it, but most of these people were anything 
 but fashionable. They did not look as if the 10- 
 note it cost them to come had many fellows in their 
 pocket-books. And do you think they would come 
 thus to a Mozart festival, a Gounod festival, even to 
 a composer of the " Washington Post " festival ?
 
 230 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 
 
 Then there must be something in Wagner after all 
 something that makes its appeal to the plain man 
 as well as to the musician. But you don't want to 
 hear my views on Wagner. 
 
 III. 
 
 It finished last night ; and the time has come for 
 buying mementoes of Wagner. This part of the 
 business especially concerns the Germans. You 
 would imagine, indeed, that anybody who had put 
 through the week at Bayreuth would never need to 
 be reminded of Wagner again as long as he lived. 
 But that is not the German view. The German never 
 quite believes that he has been to a place unless he 
 brings away some childish toy with the place's name 
 written on it. His family does not believe he has 
 been there unless he brings home similar toys for 
 them; a "Mitbring" "with-bring" is the mag- 
 nificently simple name for such. You feel somehow 
 that there is no getting away from plain hard duty in 
 a language that uses such direct terms as this. 
 
 So the shops are crowded this morning. The be- 
 wildered shopkeepers hardly awakened even yet to 
 the fact that there is once more something doing in 
 Bayreuth are helplessly protesting in their liquid 
 Bavarian dialect that they haven't got anything that 
 anybody could possibly want to buy, and are then 
 being conducted outside in solemn procession to be 
 convinced by the presence of the article where they 
 put it in the window a week ago. You can buy many
 
 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 231 
 
 kinds of articles in Bayreuth, but they all bear on 
 Wagner. It looks best, think some, to buy an or- 
 chestral score ; though, to be sure, you can get that 
 just as well anywhere else, and, for my part, I prefer 
 to pretend that I've got it already. Many buy photo- 
 graphs of the artists those solid German artists or 
 of the stage-scenery, or of the outside of the theatre, 
 or of Bayreuth in general, or else imaginative pic- 
 tures of Ehine maidens as they would be if the law 
 did not compel them to appear in clothes. 
 
 But all these are a little commonplace. How much 
 better to get a meerschaum cigar-holder carved into a 
 head of Wagner the place where the cigar comes 
 giving him the appearance of wearing a tall hat such 
 as niggers sport on the sands. Or how would you 
 like a two-shilling model of the Holy Grail ? Or a 
 one-and-sixpemiy bust of Wagner with a red face and 
 black and white clothes ? Or a Wagner cigarette- 
 case, or a Wagner pocket-book, or a Wagner purse ? 
 There are little phrases out of " Parsifal " neatly 
 scored on each. Or, better still, why not a " Mbe- 
 lungen-Ring " set of liqueur glasses, with a leitmotiv 
 from each of the four dramas neatly done in gold 
 round the glass ? 
 
 Yes; it has come to an end, and what has it 
 amounted to ? We have had a masterly performance 
 each day so the local newspapers assure us, and they 
 have had experience. For myself, I have enjoyed it 
 prodigiously. I have always considered Wagner the 
 musician of all others for the plain man. He appears 
 to have nothing to do with counterpoint and such 
 complications. He appears to me to have composed
 
 232 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 
 
 his music on the basis of a scale of his own, floating 
 about somehow in his head a scale with intervals 
 quite different from those of the ordinary scale ; the 
 melodies seem to go along and close quite on different 
 principles from anybody else's, and yet one note seems 
 to follow another as inevitably as those of Mozart 
 himself. Perhaps I am talking nonsense. But I am 
 quite free to admit for myself that Wagner's music 
 makes me laugh and cry, and sends shivers down my 
 back, and turns me hot and cold, and ready to jump 
 up and scream with excitement. And then another 
 point in which "Wagner appears made for the man 
 without musical cultivation is that he always keeps his 
 music hand in hand with the drama, so that the 
 interest of one helps out the other. " The Ring of the 
 Nibelung " is surely a most noble work. With all its 
 grotesqueness, it is so large it took years and years 
 to compose, and if you began playing it through after 
 an early breakfast you would hardly get it done by 
 bed-time ; yet it is all in one piece it is so lofty, so 
 much on the grand scale, even where it fails, so thrill- 
 ingly romantic, so poignantly tragic I defy any 
 simple-minded person to hear its four parts through 
 on successive days and not be sorry at the end that it 
 was over. 
 
 Moreover, when the music is dull and much of 
 it appears to me mere endless repetition of mean- 
 ingless phrases and when the action is dull 
 certainly some of the gods and goddesses are a little 
 prolix why, there still remains the scenery. Wag- 
 ner, worthy soul, was happily lacking in a sense of 
 humour; his idea of fun was to bring on a hunch-
 
 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 233 
 
 back to be kicked. He was a very literal-minded 
 man. Everything that happened in his operas had 
 to happen on the stage, so that the people could see 
 it; and Wagner wrote down careful directions to 
 that effect in the score. Consequently you get in 
 Wagner the most colossal and difficult stage-effects 
 imaginable, and it is always a joy to sit and watch 
 how they will be tackled. Three mermaids swim- 
 ming about in the Ehine is not the easiest thing to 
 put on the stage without being ridiculous ; nor yet 
 are gods walking over a rainbow into Valhalla ; nor 
 yet an ex -goddess on horseback galloping into a 
 blazing funeral pyre. They must all be tackled if 
 you are to give Wagner as he wanted himself given 
 though the two last are more or less funked at 
 Bayreuth. Then, on one occasion, Parsifal waves a 
 spear for Wagnerian characters never venture out 
 without a spear and a whole magic castle comes 
 down about his ears ; in the " Eing " there is a very 
 similar scene with the added complication that the 
 castle is on fire. Than this last I never saw any 
 stage-effect more wonderful : it was so realistic that 
 you shuddered as the blazing roof crashed down 
 within a foot of the chorus's heads, and marvelled 
 that it did not set the whole theatre ablaze. 
 
 How can Wagner be dull with things constantly 
 going on like that ? And when the music palls and 
 the drama stands still and the scenery is doing 
 nothing why, you can always amuse yourself watch- 
 ing the animals. For whenever an animal appeared 
 to Wagner germane to his story, that also had to be 
 brought on to the stage. In "The King of the
 
 234 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 
 
 Nibelung" there are thus introduced a dragon, a 
 snake, a live bear, a dead ditto, a goat (with charge), 
 a horse, a couple of ravens, and a bird of unspecified 
 breed described as a wood bird. Each of these 
 affords perpetual entertainment while it is on the 
 stage. The Bayreuth dragon, for example the only 
 one of the beasts that has a singing part is a 
 triumph. It is as thick as three fat men, and larger 
 than a tramcar, yet it moves all over in the most 
 convincing way. It has a snub nose, a sloping fore- 
 head, and four huge canine teeth, and fire comes out 
 of its mouth ; in face it is wonderfully like a bull- 
 dog smoking a cigar. The wood bird, again, is very 
 engaging: instead of flying it runs along a wire, 
 sometimes sticking for a moment, exactly like a spider. 
 But Briinnhilde's horse is the masterpiece in fact, 
 it is my favourite character in all Wagner. It is 
 real, whereas all the others are imitations. And 
 what a noble animal ! He comes on first while the 
 goat is performing, and what heroic self-command he 
 must exert not to shy at it ! When Siegfried parts 
 from Briinnhilde he has to poke his head on from 
 the wings, having apparently been hobbled for the 
 night in Briinnhilde's bedroom : how ostentatiously 
 and jaw-breakingly he yawned through that great 
 love duet ! No opera could be dull while that horse 
 was on the stage : you are always wondering whether 
 he won't do something not in his part neigh, or 
 kick Siegfried, or jump over the footlights on to 
 Herr Eichter, or something equally indecorous. He 
 never does; but there is always the excitement of 
 anticipation.
 
 THE FEAST OF ST WAGNER. 235 
 
 On the whole, then, we might pronounce Bayreuth 
 most enjoyable. But there is one blot on it that spoils 
 all, and that I grieve to write it is my superior, 
 intellectual, cultured countrymen. The German I do 
 not object to ; he goes to Bayreuth because Wagner 
 told him to ; when he comes out of the theatre he 
 says, " Wunderschon," and there is an end of it ; he 
 then drinks beer and talks of something else. But 
 the English girl she is generally unmarried, and 
 runs from twenty -five to thirty -five with her 
 accurate knowledge, and her impassive ways, and her 
 prim pale face, and that thin, slow, unmodulated, 
 very-high-in-the-head voice ! You know the voice ; 
 it is not a chest voice, nor even a head voice ; it is 
 a kind of brain voice, an excellent voice to sneer in. 
 And how she sneers ! She goes to the theatre and 
 comes out and says, " I wonder why Vogl can't 
 attack his notes cleanly," and " Such a pity they 
 made such a muddle of the ' Feuerzauber.' " When 
 she recognises a motiv she labels it with its name in 
 an audible whisper. She knows all the scenes by 
 their Christian names, so to speak, and talks of " the 
 Eitt " as if she went out shopping to it. She never 
 laughs only gives a sort of cough, half disdain, half 
 pity. I had met some like this, but I did not know 
 there were so many in the world as I saw last week 
 in Bayreuth. 
 
 I don't like her at all, and I wonder why she 
 comes. She doesn't look as if she enjoyed it, but 
 perhaps she does, in a way, after all. It is a place 
 where she can bask in her own culture. The truth 
 is that, except to her, Bayreuth is not a place of
 
 236 
 
 pilgrimage at all, but only a place of rational enjoy- 
 ment after a person's own fashion. The German 
 goes there as he goes to church it is his duty. The 
 Frenchman goes to make epigrams, to twist his 
 fingers, and say, " Comme cja." The American takes 
 it in with his Job-shaming patience as an institution 
 of Europe. The Englishman mostly goes to take 
 the English girl. To the cultured English girl alone 
 is Bayreuth a high and holy sanctuary, it is the 
 mirror of her own superiority.
 
 237 
 
 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 1 
 
 I KNEW there must be a famine, because the ' Free- 
 man's Journal ' said so ; but for the life of me I 
 could not detect it. 
 
 I had always pictured Western Ireland, and espe- 
 cially the county Mayo, and more especially the 
 coastwise districts of that same, as an aching desola- 
 tion and destitution. I thought the country was a 
 turn-and-turn of rolling screes and sopping bog. A 
 guide-book I had picked up in the Shelbourne at 
 breakfast warned me that the sleeping accommodation 
 at Killala, whither I was tending, was little or none. 
 I conceived myself shivering in a wet rug on a wet 
 mud floor, snuffed at by curious pigs, roosted upon 
 by callous fowls. I thought regretfully of the warm 
 soft sand of African deserts. 
 
 And behold, the country through which I ap- 
 proached starving Killala was singularly like certain 
 grazing districts of England, only more beautiful. 
 England is green after any other country ; Ireland 
 
 1 Daily Mail, May 1898.
 
 238 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 
 
 was greener, with a tenderer and sprightlier verdure. 
 Stones there were a many in a few fields, and the 
 4-foot walls of all showed how many there had been 
 before the land was cleared. Bog there was also, 
 luridly purple beside the shining pastures, with black 
 water in steep-cut trenches, and stacks of brown peats 
 beside them. But you couldn't believe that this 
 country was very hungry. 
 
 There were cattle upon a thousand hills milch 
 cows, young steers and heifers ; here were ewes, and 
 the lambs could hardly suck them for the hanging 
 mantles of wool ; naked pink pigs gleamed along the 
 hedgerows ; ducks and geese waddled at the head of 
 their families by every blue stream and black lough ; 
 the white tree-girdled cottages were all acluck with 
 laying hens. Where was the famine ? It might be 
 lurking somewhere ; but a country so alive with 
 beasts could not look starving if it tried. 
 
 Out of the window at Ballina the last station 
 before the end of the line I saw a young priest 
 riding as smart a black cob as you ever saw at 
 Tattersall's, three young ladies on bicycles, and a 
 family in a four-wheeled dog-cart. Thank heaven, 
 everybody wasn't destitute. And right on to Killala, 
 where there suddenly broke into view a sea as 
 blue as an Academy picture, the landscape was 
 still close, rich turf, almost exasperatingly succulent. 
 At Killala there did, indeed, show a momentary 
 promise. The platform was empty but for one 
 porter and a man with a long colourless beard, 
 who might have been posing as the only inhabi- 
 tant left. But as he took my bag he disclosed
 
 IN SEAECH OF A FAMINE. 239 
 
 the fact that there was indeed an hotel where a 
 traveller could get a bed. 
 
 " If yer honour should be wanting to go to Bally- 
 cashtle now, to-morrow," he began, " I have a cyar, 
 sorr." It revived one's confidence in the world some- 
 how to find that Irish peasants really do say " cyar, 
 sorr " ; but when he went on to deplore the depopu- 
 lation of the country, I began to come back to the 
 interest of my errand. I was on its track already. 
 " How long has that been going on ? " I asked eagerly. 
 " Tis thirrty years now, sorr," he replied. And that 
 was all the famine intelligence I got out of him. 
 
 Nobody could call Killala a stately city city, 
 mark you : at anyrate, it has a bishop, though only 
 500 inhabitants nor even a strikingly clean one; 
 but Killala also hardly wore the look of starvation. 
 The hotel was the best parlour and best bedroom 
 of one of the most nourishing shopkeepers, so it 
 evidently wasn't fair to judge by that. But the 
 smaller houses, though only two rooms, and not won- 
 derfully well kept, were as commodious and as well 
 furnished with pots and pans and crockery as the 
 ordinary English labourer's. Most of them were 
 weak in the doors and windows, and there was 
 usually grass growing on the thatch ; but as it would 
 be perfectly easy to clear it off in a morning, and 
 nobody seemed to have any very pressing work to do, 
 I imagine they prefer their thatches so. 
 
 I went out for a short walk to reconnoitre the 
 famine. Everywhere I found the same enchanting 
 beauty of country, the same abundance of stock, the 
 same shiftless, apparently contented poverty, but no
 
 240 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 
 
 token of starvation. The land rose and dipped now 
 into a family of little round knolls, now into a wide 
 sweep of valley climbing gently to a round homely 
 blue mountain in the distant twilight. Nothing 
 pretended to be grand, though batches here and there 
 were bleak. The country looked gentle and, above 
 all, fresh and green. The whole world can show 
 nothing like the vivid lustre of Ireland's pastures. 
 Close-cropped, undulating, springy, they are such fields 
 as turn the mind generally towards a good horse. 
 
 It is not all fine grass and clover, and the extremity 
 of Mayo is ill-placed for markets ; but more than half 
 of the land was such as you would elaJly pay 3 or 
 4 or 5 an acre for near London. Across it tramped 
 peasants, not so stout as ours, and barefooted girls in 
 shawls, to milk the cow as she stood in the pasture. 
 When the face turned towards you out of the shawl 
 you saw carmine cheeks and black eyes that left you 
 blinking, or else skins of peach -blossom and wide, 
 clear grey eyes that filled you with a vague desire to 
 pray. The only thing more beautiful than the Irish 
 land is the Irish women : even when they are old 
 with the premature age of poverty and raggedness, 
 the grace and the wonderful eyes and the courteous, 
 modest liquid speech compel the homage you would 
 not pay to diamonds. And of both men and women 
 you mark that while your apparition plainly consumes 
 them with wonder and curiosity there is no hint of 
 boorishness no echo of our own rustic guffaw. The 
 Irish peasant is a natural gentleman. A string of 
 shaggy donkeys came up the road, peats in the 
 panniers, the vision of an angel swinging bare legs
 
 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 241 
 
 from the beast's rump, and guiding him with a little 
 stick, for all the world like an Egyptian fellah. Then 
 another donkey, this time with the panniers half-full 
 of provisions from the shop in Killala, a small boy 
 perched behind, and his mother tramping after. 
 Likely enough the groceries were bought on credit, 
 though they may have been bartered for eggs; at 
 anyrate, there they were, going home to be eaten 
 which is not a sign of starvation. And below, in a 
 field on the skirts of Killala, my eye fell on a large 
 round tent. It looked but, no, not in famine-time 
 but, yes, here was the bill of it before my nose on 
 the waU. To-day, at 2.30 and 7.30, Davies's World- 
 renowned Circus ! 
 
 I went ; should I ever not go to a circus ? It was 
 aptly pointed out on the posters that Davies's circus 
 does not depend upon paltry items, but that every 
 event is of the highest possible quality. But for the 
 moment we are less concerned with the aesthetic than 
 the economic aspect of Davies's circus. If my count- 
 ing was right, there attended, exclusive of two boys 
 who crawled in under the tent, 309 persons. With 
 all allowance for those who came in from the country 
 round, 309 is not bad, during a famine, for a popula- 
 tion of 500. Of the 309, 57 paid Is. and 249 6d.; 
 three small girls attended at the expense of the 
 'Daily Mail.' 
 
 The money taken at the door I hope this is not 
 giving away the Messrs Davies's professional secrets 
 would thus work out at 2, 17s. plus 6, 4s. 6d. ; 
 total, 9, Is. 6d. 
 
 Now 9, Is. 6d. is not a vast sum. And I should 
 
 q
 
 242 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 
 
 be the last creature in the world to regret that every 
 man, woman, and child in Ireland should attend 
 circuses once a - week for the whole of their lives. 
 They have little enough to amuse them, I should say. 
 Lord Salisbury has recommended the diversion ; and 
 it was an interesting testimonial to the wisdom of his 
 famous indiscretion that, while the nephew is labour- 
 ing at Local Government, Killala went with the uncle. 
 Circus by all means ; only when a district insisted on 
 as especially famine-stricken can spare 9 for a 
 circus well, things can't be so very deadly, can 
 they ? Of course there was plenty of room left in 
 the neighbourhood for starving people who didn't 
 go. But the ratepayers went, and it has been a 
 familiar cry at "Westminster that the ratepayers are 
 only a few shillings better than the paupers, and that 
 therefore it is brutal tyranny to make them pay a 
 quarter of the relief works. The money paid at the 
 door of the circus means a union's share of a week's 
 relief works for 120 people. It is compatible 
 enough with poverty, but hardly with downright 
 dearth. 
 
 On the evidence of the world-famous circus, as well 
 as the general look of things, Killala seemed to be 
 drawn blank. I must search for the famine a little 
 farther on, 
 
 II. 
 
 The long white road ahead, and the rolling green 
 on either hand, the sun on your cheek, and the 
 Atlantic salt on your lips, and a big bay mare in the
 
 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 243 
 
 car ; in such a country on such a day, how good it 
 was to be alive ! Up and down the rough but hard- 
 metalled road we swung, then suddenly came down 
 at the head of a half-mile stretch of firm sand ; beyond 
 it a bay of intense turquoise ; up the leftward cliffs a 
 climbing village ; behind us, appearing in the corner 
 under a park of turf and trees, a little grey stone 
 chapel. 
 
 " The praste will be in the churrch, sorr," said the 
 driver. The door was open, and you could see kneel- 
 ing figures in the dusk. Outside, also, in the little 
 green yard, a dozen men knelt reverently as the bell 
 tinkled within. 
 
 It was a saint's day I forget the name, but it 
 turned out to be the Anglican Ascension Day and 
 by consequence a holiday. All along the road, afoot 
 or in cars, we had seen passing the population the 
 men in decent black, the women in clean gowns and 
 shawls. Decidedly the famine had no luck. The 
 first day I tumbled on the circus; to-day, quite 
 unintentionally, I had come on Kathlathan, recom- 
 mended as the most starving village of starving Mayo, 
 just on the day to see its population in their best 
 clothes. 
 
 When the people came filing out of church, I give 
 you my word it might have been one of the quietest 
 English watering-places in the season. I know little 
 of dress fabrics, but the women appeared far better 
 dressed than I ever saw English peasants' wives and 
 daughters. Not a man but had his decent black coat. 
 I thought they must surely be visitors ; but no visitors 
 the loss is theirs, as well as the village's ever come
 
 244 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 
 
 to Kathlathan. Its sons and daughters were certainly 
 the best-dressed starvelings I ever saw. 
 
 The priest had blessed the last of the congregation, 
 and came out in his vestments grey-haired, with a 
 round face, short nose, twinkling black eyes rather 
 close together, and a beard mown rather than shaved. 
 He spoke with the brogue of the country, a little 
 slow and indistinct, like a recluse with few oppor- 
 tunities of keeping his tongue oiled for conversa- 
 tion. But he comprehended my business with ready 
 courtesy, and took me to his house and gave me 
 biscuit and wine, and showed me, by way of be- 
 ginning, the books that set forth his relation with 
 the Dublin Mansion House Fund. 
 
 There were only ten men receiving relief in the 
 whole parish ; but then, he explained, his parish and 
 the next were furnishing a couple of hundred to the 
 Government relief works across the bay, where a 
 pier was being built for fishing-boats. The ten 
 we may assume that only ten needed this relief, 
 since the fund had supplied plenty of money for 
 Eathlathan were all employed on draining their 
 own land, and received 6s. a- week. They only work 
 five days weekly ; what hours, opinion seems to 
 differ, some saying eight to two, others eight to five. 
 But the curious and very instructively Irish point 
 that emerged from the record was that the men on 
 the relief works do not work themselves at all. In 
 the table headed " Eemarks " you saw " Son Michael 
 to work," " Son Pat to work," " Grandson Martin to 
 work " somebody else to work for him against every 
 name. The work supposed, not so much to be pub-
 
 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 245 
 
 licly useful it is hardly public works, paying a man 
 for improving his own land as to constitute a test 
 of destitution ; unless a man be really starving, it is 
 urged, he will not work long hours for Is. a-day. 
 Only here it turned out that what really happens is 
 that somebody else works for him at his own land 
 five days for 6s. a-week ! I know plenty of English 
 labourers, not starving, who would be very willing to 
 undergo the same test on the same terms. 
 
 His reverence said his flock was poor poor 
 always, especially poor in winter, and poorer than 
 ever now, since the potato crop failed last year, and 
 since now, at the pinching time, every kind of bread- 
 stuff had gone up. But for that they might have 
 pulled through; but the wholly accidental blow of 
 the rise in corn on the top of the failure of potatoes 
 was too much for them. Their holdings are very 
 small four acres is a large one, and some are as 
 little as one or only half an acre. For Eathlathan, 
 you see, ekes out its holdings by fishing a miser- 
 able trade enough at most times, and especially 
 unproductive between Chistmas and mid-May. All 
 that time, said the priest, his flock had made nothing 
 off either sea or land. The relief just kept them 
 alive on Indian -meal porridge, and that was all. 
 For next crop almost everybody had had seed pota- 
 toes, most oats, and some ryegrass ; but that will not 
 tell before next year. 
 
 So said the priest. Thereon, recalling the com- 
 plaints that Mr Gerald Balfour has not done enough, 
 I asked him whether, with the existing relief, his 
 people could carry on till the opening of August,
 
 246 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 
 
 when they begin to dig the new potato crop. And 
 his reply was not ambiguous. " Yes," he said ; " if 
 the present relief continues they'll pull through." 
 
 The priest saying that, I take it as certain ; for he 
 was at pains, not unnaturally, to put the poverty of 
 his people at its very poorest. And, indeed, it was 
 plain enough that, if not starving, a fair proportion 
 of the people of Eathlathan were miserably indigent 
 more indigent than anybody willing to work ought 
 to be allowed to be. The village, as I said, climbs 
 up a hill. It has no streets, unless you call such 
 one row of stones and ruts, up and down which a 
 man of nerve could drive a sure-footed horse. Foi 
 the rest, you can go from hut to hut up precipices of 
 scaling stones with little muddy waterfalls trickling 
 down over them. 
 
 We went into a hut. The clean smell of peat 
 struck gratefully on the nose, and the cottage ap- 
 peared through a veil of blue smoke. The floor was 
 flagstones, uneven and broken, at one end disappear- 
 ing altogether in a litter of manure ; half of it was 
 the bed of the cow, now at pasture, and in the other, 
 within a flagstone sty, reclined the sow and her nine 
 infants. At the other end peat glowed on the 
 hearth ; at one side of it, in a corner, was a wooden 
 bed, with a wooden canopy over it ; by that a dresser 
 with crockery and cooking pots; by the hearth a 
 couple of stools, and that was all the furniture. In 
 the middle of the room a dozen fowls squabbled over 
 what looked like a handful of meal. " That," said 
 the priest grimly, "is the cleanest cottage ye'll see 
 for a long while."
 
 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 247 
 
 The others to my eyes were not appreciably 
 dirtier, but they were no cleaner either. As we 
 stumbled and slid from one to another I observed 
 how the good father ensured that the poverty of 
 his flock should lose nothing by demonstration. 
 As thus : 
 
 Priest (entering). Who lives here ? 
 Inmate. Good marning to yer reverence; 
 good marning to ye, Father Hugh. 
 Priest. Who lives here ? 
 Inmate. Pat O'Connor, yer reverence. 
 Priest. Are ye on the relief works now ? 
 (Silence.) Yes : ye are. How long do ye work ? 
 (Silence; then in an audible aside:) Ah, he's dazed 
 with trouble. What time do ye go to work ? 
 Inmate. Eight o'clock, yer reverence. 
 Priest. Eight; eight o'clock. And when do 
 ye lave off? (Silence.) When do ye lave off, I 
 
 say ? Foi 
 
 Inmate (hastily). Foive, yer reverence. 
 Priest. Yes, foive ; it's too long. 
 Or else a dialogue like this : 
 
 Peasant. Can ye tell me now, yer reverence, 
 why they won't take me on for the relafe ? 
 Priest. How many of a family have ye ? 
 Peasant. Four. 
 Priest. Four children ? 
 
 Peasant. No ; one child and my mother and 
 myself and my wife. 
 
 Priest. Have ye a cow now ? 
 Peasant. Yes, yer reverence; an old cow, 
 maybe twelve or thirteen years old.
 
 248 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 
 
 Priest. Ah, then, it's that old cow has done 
 ye. No; I can't help ye. God knows how 
 ye'll do for a living. 
 
 Thus was I dialogued at by the space of half 
 an hour or more. But through all the hints and 
 asides and by-play I observed one or two facts. 
 First, I saw not a single cottage without stock 
 of some sort or other; not one without poultry, 
 not one without a pig, not very many without 
 presumptive evidence of a cow in the shape of 
 its bed, or, more conclusive, its calf. Secondly, 
 they ostentatiously displayed the poverty of their 
 outer rooms, but drew no attention to their inner, 
 in which they are wont to keep their best clothes 
 and the like. Thirdly, with the exception of a few 
 men who had gone out to fish, not a single man in 
 the village was working. 
 
 As we went down again to the bay we met 
 the fishermen coming up. " What fish did ye 
 catch?" asked Father Hugh. "None, your 
 reverence," came the glib reply. The speaker 
 passed up; just behind him followed a couple of 
 men, of whom the second bore two large shining 
 fish in his hands. A donkey with panniers looked 
 as if it contained more. 
 
 That struck me as very like Eathlathan and 
 presumably like the alleged famine as a whole. 
 The truth is bad enough. But the natural 
 sympathy for bad luck and indigence is too likely 
 to be forfeited by mendicancy and exaggeration.
 
 IN SEAECH OF A FAMINE. 249 
 
 III. 
 
 " Now, did ye expect to find a place like this in 
 Foxford ? " asked the Mother Superior. 
 
 She sat among rolls of tweed and flannel in the 
 little office of the factory. She was very short and 
 small, the Keverend Mother, and I could hardly hear 
 her voice for the clatter of the looms. But in her 
 face sat capacity, as well as sweetness, and it had only 
 needed the most casual glance at the institution of 
 which she is head to teach me that here was one 
 whose words on the problem of Western Ireland 
 should not be allowed to fall to the ground. 
 
 Before the Sisters of Charity set up their convent, 
 seven years ago, the Foxford district was among the 
 most miserable in Ireland. Here the soil really is 
 wretched beyond exaggeration stony, boggy, light, 
 poor, hopeless. It is subdivided into plots seldom 
 larger than four acres, often miserably less, and even 
 without potato failures it was difficult enough to keep 
 soul and body together on it. The men looked east 
 for their bread working in England at hay and corn 
 harvests to make the rent. The girls looked west to 
 the States, and the driblets of wages they sent home 
 were often the only barrier between their parents and 
 starvation. You would have said there was nothing 
 for such a place but the most sweeping of remedies 
 abolition of rent, wholesale enlistment, wholesale 
 emigration. 
 
 Now the first thing that greets you is the clash 
 and rattle of the wool factory. While members of
 
 250 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 
 
 Parliament have been sobbing and blustering about 
 Ireland's throttled industries, women have set to work 
 to restore them. They buy the peasant's wool at the 
 door naturally it is a far better market than he 
 could find elsewhere in out-of-the-world Connaught 
 and teach his sons and daughters to weave it. At 
 the looms I saw only boys and girls, not one grown 
 person except the Sister elderly, quiet, spectacled, 
 yet with a purely Irish smile lurking somewhere 
 round her lips who is the manager of the factory. 
 To the young people the convent was giving the best 
 and the most needful of all good gifts a trade. 
 
 In another room a dozen girls were knitting 
 stockings by machine, for the Sisters of Charity 
 are also women of business. Charity is not so 
 very rare in this world, but sensible charity is 
 rare enough to command enthusiasm wherever you 
 may meet it. 
 
 From the knitting I went to the school such a 
 schoolroom as made you long to be young again, all 
 glass and light, and air, and outside the green sun- 
 shiny hills and the rushing torrent of the river Moy. 
 That river, I should have told you, turns every wheel 
 in the factory; and observe once more that, while 
 men were crying out upon the waste of Mayo's 
 splendid water -p^wer, women turned to and made 
 use of it. 
 
 The next thing was the dairy, then the kitchen, 
 then the laundry. All these are departments of 
 instruction. The dairy, of course, buys its milk in 
 the districts ; so that here, again, the Sisters both 
 furnish a market and teach a trade. Likewise there
 
 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 251 
 
 is a poultry-rearing school, and I was rejoiced to find 
 the Eeverend Mother agree that for an all-round 
 hardy fowl there is nothing like the Plymouth Eock. 
 From the villages in the convent's sphere of influence 
 it extends five miles every way, which makes 
 nearly 100 square miles in all the Sisters collect 
 and sell eggs ; they go to Dublin, and the peasantry 
 get the full price for them, only deducting carriage. 
 That, you will see, they could not possibly hope to get 
 anywhere else. 
 
 But the factory, and the school, and the dairy class, 
 and the laundry class, and all the others, are only the 
 beginning of the Sisters' work. For five miles on 
 every side they take the place of landlord and poor- 
 law guardians, and sanitary board, and school board, 
 and charity organisation society, and every other 
 function that is likely to do their people good. The 
 landlord lives away in England ; it is the Sisters who 
 institute poultry shows and stimulate vegetable- 
 growing, and teach the value of a nursing-crop sown 
 with their oats. It is they who have lured the 
 peasants to clear out the century -old manure -pits, 
 which lay breeding disease at the door of every hut, 
 and to put their refuse on the land instead. They 
 have given doors that will keep air out and windows 
 that will let air in. They have even succeeded here 
 and there in establishing the pig outside the house, 
 instead of in just as easy, and healthier for pig 
 and people, after once the Irishman sees a reason 
 to do it. 
 
 " We do it," says the Eeverend Mother, with her 
 unspeakably sweet and humorous smile, " by prizes.
 
 252 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 
 
 When friends send us seeds, the people all want to 
 be in at the divide, as they call it. But we only 
 give them to those who have cleared away their 
 manure-pits, and they come to know it. Then 
 we give them new doors and windows for prizes 
 if they keep their cabins clean. I remember in 
 1890, at the convent where I then was, we had 
 a lot of money sent us to distribute ; and it 
 demoralised the people so dreadfully, I made up 
 my mind they ought never to be given anything 
 for nothing again." 
 
 In their own district the management of the 
 relief-works has been almost entirely undertaken 
 by the Sisters. When I drove out with the steward 
 of the convent's good works, or whatever I should 
 call the man who is the Superior's representative 
 in managing the people, I saw the entirely wise and 
 practical form which the relief had taken. Off the 
 main road, again and again, I saw new roads running 
 to where you could see thatches rising over the 
 confused boulders. All these are new made this 
 year, and all lead to villages where before nothing 
 on wheels could ever come. Where before a donkey 
 with panniers could hardly go, you could now, with 
 care, drive a coach and four. Twenty-three such 
 roads in all have been blasted and metalled and 
 rolled by the people they are to bring into living 
 touch with the outside world. 
 
 We landed in one of the poorest villages 
 Kilmore was its name. The land was miserable 
 and the holdings small; but, by comparison, the 
 place was clean and well kept. Here you saw a
 
 IN SEAECH OF A FAMINE. 253 
 
 pink new door, there a large window with a sash. 
 One house had a new chimney, another a newly- 
 repaired roof. 
 
 But there was a reverse side to it all. The 
 moment we set foot in the village the inhabitants 
 all crowded up to beg for more. It was painfully 
 evident that Irish mendicancy grows by feeding. 
 "Now, Mr M'Carthy, when are ye going to bring 
 us a new dure ? Look at it, now." " Mr M'Carthy, 
 could ye not lend me a wheel-barrow ; I've cleared 
 my manure-pit, and I want to make a little grass- 
 plot." " Mr M'Carthy, I got no oats at the divide, 
 only ryegrass ; could ye not let me have some 
 oats : I'm an old woman, all alone ; who's going 
 to help me?" 
 
 The more they had, the more they wanted. With 
 them it was not relief from hunger that they had 
 already ; it was anything they could get. As usual, 
 not a man in the village was at work ; they were 
 just smoking. The climax came with the most 
 prosperous inhabitant of the village. He had a cow 
 and calf, pig, ducks, fowls, and a small garden; he 
 was a young, able-bodied man, and about to leave to 
 work in England. But he begged most sturdily for 
 a gate for his garden. It was walled, like all 
 gardens there, with stones, which are only too 
 abundant. But he complained that the donkeys 
 pushed the wall down. 
 
 " Then why don't you build it stronger ? " I asked ; 
 " there are lots of stones." 
 
 " Then how will I get through to it myself ? " 
 
 " Make a stile to get over."
 
 254 W SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 
 
 " No ; Mr McCarthy, ye must send me a 
 before I go to England, and a man to put it up." 
 
 In two hours he could have made himself a 
 perfectly good wall and stile. But he preferred 
 to beg for a gate and a man to put it up. 
 
 I asked the steward why the old woman, who 
 was quite alone, and could not possibly be expected 
 to keep herself except by begging, did not go into 
 the workhouse. " Ah," he said, " they find it very 
 difficult to go into the workhouse." 
 
 So do better men and women in my country, 
 I told him. If you are to have, and pay for, 
 workhouses at all, this woman was plainly a case 
 for one. Only to the Irish mind it is quite a 
 sufficient answer that " they find it very difficult." 
 They mustn't be asked to do anything they find 
 difficult. 
 
 IY. 
 
 I didn't find it. To be sure, I only visited a small 
 corner of the counties where it is supposed to be. 
 But as that corner was the one whence the loudest 
 cries of distress had come, I think we may assume 
 that there is no famine in Ireland at all. There is 
 considerable distress; but it has been considerably 
 exaggerated, partly for political purposes, partly from 
 Celtic hysteria; and the measures taken to relieve 
 this season's exceptional poverty are, and will be, 
 adequate. 
 
 In saying this I do not mean that the conditions
 
 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 255 
 
 of life among the Mayo peasantry are such as they 
 should be. They are obviously not. When you find 
 a population in the condition, and content with the 
 condition, of outside paupers, it is plain that there 
 is something very wrong somewhere. Probably the 
 blame lies pretty equally on everybody concerned. 
 I do not wish to alarm anybody by anarchistic 
 opinions; but I think a landlord who draws rent 
 from the land and makes it no return, in the shape 
 of residence and intelligent supervision of his tenants, 
 is little better than a robber. I think a political 
 leader who discourages his followers from self-help, 
 or from making an honest living as soldiers or con- 
 stables, is little better than a traitor to them. And 
 I think a peasant who whines for charity with his 
 hands in his pockets and a pipe in his mouth is little 
 better than a criminal. 
 
 Of course, you blame the peasant least. The rent 
 and the subdivision of the land are a terrible handicap 
 on his industry ; he has neither the knowledge nor 
 the capital to substitute other industries for his 
 primitive tillage ; his ignorance puts him in the 
 hands of leaders who hardly seem to go the directest 
 way to give him practical and permanent help ; he 
 himself is dazed and sodden by many generations of 
 hopeless poverty. And then he is Celt. You do 
 not find him at work; he says there is nothing to 
 do. Give an Englishman or a Scotsman four acres 
 to himself, and see if he finds nothing to do. 
 
 However, I am not here to write essays on Irish 
 land, or Irish politics, or the Irish character : the 
 question for the moment is the distress and the relief.
 
 256 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 
 
 But for the exceptional help rendered I think there 
 would have been real starvation. But in saying that 
 the present relief, if continued, is adequate, I do not 
 go at all on my own observation only. I take the 
 priest of Kathlathan, who says his people will pull 
 through till the new potato crop is dug ; I take the 
 Sisters of Foxford, who have surmounted the danger 
 of present hunger, and are working on, most laudably, 
 with their efforts for permanent amelioration. I take 
 the opinion of a minister of religion, not Catholic 
 who, while fully alive to the hardships of his flock, 
 told me plainly, " There's nothing that you could call 
 famine ; there does be great poverty, but there does 
 be exaggeration." 
 
 These being the opinions of people all naturally 
 tending to overstate rather than understate the neces- 
 sities of the people, we may take it for certain that 
 this year's crisis is tided over. I shall not trouble 
 you, therefore, with the lengthy criticisms I heard 
 about the manner of distributing relief, though these 
 might be borne in mind in view of another bad 
 potato crop. It was said, and I should say plausibly, 
 that it is a great mistake to intrust relief works either 
 to boards of guardians or any other local agency. 
 You will never get justice done thus, I was told, not 
 once nor twice, since everybody has favourites ; the 
 really needy are left out, and some are taken on who 
 could struggle along without. To my mind the Irish 
 peasant appeared to look on relief works less as a 
 last defence against starvation than as a natural right 
 of man which they obviously ought not to be. And 
 one of my informants a Catholic and a Nationalist
 
 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 257 
 
 all right took my breath away by regretting the 
 days when such public doles had been superintended 
 by the E.E. or the police. 
 
 Of course the country was vocal with criticisms 
 about the works selected for public employment. 
 Some of these the pier for fishing-boats opposite 
 Eathlathan or the roads to the sequestered villages 
 about Foxford were of plain and urgent public 
 utility. On the other hand, some people complained 
 that work was put on to entirely useless accommoda- 
 tion roads, and held it would have been far better to 
 pay 3s. a- week instead of 6s. and let men work on 
 their own holdings. Very likely it would; only I 
 doubt whether they would work, and, moreover, such 
 employment would be useless unless accompanied 
 by some independent and trustworthy criterion of 
 destitution. It appears essential that public em- 
 ployment ought only to be given in the last resort ; 
 the Mayo peasantry are quite pauperised enough 
 already. 
 
 One suggestion favoured a light railway from 
 Killala to Ballycastle, if not along the whole of the 
 northern Mayo coast up to Belmullet. That, no 
 doubt, would be an ideal public employment, and 
 would bring some of the most beautiful scenery in 
 the world into touch with such tourists as are neither 
 very leisured nor very moneyed. There is, also, at 
 least one flagstone quarry which could be profitably 
 worked with the aid of such a line, and it would, of 
 course, open up the country generally. I am afraid 
 there is only the poorest chance of such a railway 
 making its expenses for a very long tune. But as an 
 
 B
 
 258 IN SEAECH OF A FAMINE. 
 
 investment in national prosperity it should bring in 
 its return from the first. 
 
 These are points which might come useful in the 
 event of another shortage ; but, of course, any remedy, 
 to be practical, ought to aim at prevention. Of such 
 there are dozens in the air, from land nationalisation 
 downwards. It might be doubted whether the Irish 
 peasant is the ideal small proprietor, but in any case 
 we will leave that question for politicians. In the 
 meantime, two immediate reforms are being pursued : 
 the obliteration of potato disease by chemicals, and the 
 cultivation of many crops instead of one. 
 
 The sprayer was first used, I believe, in France 
 against phylloxera in vineyards. Some years ago it 
 was introduced into the West of Ireland. It is an 
 easily handled machine, which distributes over a crop 
 of potatoes a solution of blue-stone (sulphate of 
 copper). The first landlord who introduced it in the 
 Ballina district grew two parallel patches; one he 
 sprayed and the other he neglected, and he encour- 
 aged his tenants and poor neighbours to watch the 
 result. The one gave a good and healthy crop ; the 
 other was destroyed by blight. 
 
 Need it be said that the peasantry at first re- 
 garded the sprayer with profound distrust and aver- 
 sion ? But the present stress has thrown everybody 
 back on it ; you will find everybody now most anxious 
 to use the sprayer, and most confident as to its ability 
 to stamp out blight utterly in four years. There is 
 much reason to believe this true. 
 
 Now a sprayer costs about 25s., and the ordinary 
 Irish small-holder is not in a position to buy one.
 
 IN SEARCH OF A FAMINE. 259 
 
 Several might combine ; but, of course, the sulphate 
 of copper has to be applied in dry weather, lest it be 
 unprofitably washed off again. There are not too 
 many dry days a season in county Mayo, and that puts 
 a limit on the common ownership of sprayers. The 
 Mansion House Fund has given a certain number ; in 
 theory these are to be used only for the potatoes 
 presented by the fund, but to expect that is hardly to 
 allow for human nature. All authorities agree that 
 more sprayers are wanted, and I can hardly conceive 
 a fitter form for charity to. take. 
 
 As for diversity of crops, a good deal has been done 
 by the Dublin Fund, by private friends of the Foxford 
 Convent, and similar agencies. The peasantry eat 
 little oatmeal, and depend, beyond potatoes, mainly on 
 Indian meal imported from America ; at present they 
 are rewarded for this by having to pay prices almost 
 doubled. Now most of the holders have received 
 presents of seed oats, rye, ryegrass, and at anyrate 
 in the Foxford sphere vegetable seeds. The use of 
 oatmeal would be a great step in advance ; the growth 
 of vegetables might become almost as useful a stand- 
 by as poultry-keeping, which, at the rate of 5s. per 100 
 eggs bartered for food in the shops, is keeping many a 
 peasant's home somehow going at this moment. 
 
 But when all is said and done, you still have the 
 Irish peasant to deal with the most adorable and the 
 most impossible person in the world. You can give 
 him a sprayer, but will he use it ? You can give him 
 seed, but will he grow it ? And if he does, won't he 
 do his very utmost to pretend that he is just as badly 
 off as ever ? You would say that he likes to be poor ;
 
 260 IN SEAECH OF A FAMINE. 
 
 he likes to be a beggar ; he prefers being dirty, and 
 keeps the pig in the house at the imminent risk of its 
 health. The truth is that he is a child, and he cannot 
 do without a parent or guardian. He wants a guardian 
 who understands him, who will not be sternly unsym- 
 pathetic, as an Englishman would usually be, nor yet 
 softly indulgent, as an Irishman of his own class would 
 be. When you see such tutelage existing as at Fox- 
 ford, though with perhaps an inclination to cockering 
 you see that it is just possible, with toil and curses, 
 to do something with the Irish after all. The natural 
 person to have taken him in hand was his landlord. 
 Only, where is he ? In his absence comes the member 
 of Parliament, and then begins the Irish question.
 
 261 
 
 DURING HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE." 
 
 " THERE isn't a strait - jacket in the place, nor a 
 padded room," said the superintendent. I gave a 
 gasp of amazement. Six or seven hundred criminal 
 lunatics, and not a strait - jacket among them ! 
 But it was I who was absurd. I had a foolish idea 
 that a lunatic is always in a state of acute mania 
 always screaming and shaking bars. As a matter of 
 fact, I heard not a single scream in Broadmoor. 
 Madness or sanity, as the superintendent said, is a 
 question of degree. It may be impossible to treat a 
 man as sane, and yet equally impossible for a casual 
 acquaintance to say that he is mad. 
 
 All the restraint at Broadmoor is exerted by 
 hand, by human, not mechanical, power. It is a 
 most rigid rule that no attendant may lay single 
 hands even on the most violent patient; he must 
 blow his whistle for aid. When three or more 
 men approach him, even a maniac is usually sane 
 enough not to struggle. But if he does, then he 
 
 1 Daily Mail, November 1897.
 
 262 "DURING HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE." 
 
 has overwhelming force against him, and is the 
 less likely to be hurt. 
 
 That was the first misapprehension bowled over 
 by a visit to Broadmoor ; there were others to follow. 
 I was taken out on to the terraced garden; the 
 asylum stands on a hill, and if the high red walls 
 give the first impression of a prison, the noble pros- 
 pect over miles of fir-clothed hill, the gauzy curtain 
 of distant mist, the clearer blue sky, and the clearer 
 air that you only find in hilly, sandy, heather-and- 
 fir-tree country, these are the next best thing to 
 freedom. The tiers of garden were marked out into 
 li ttle plots ; each, I heard with new amazement, is 
 the private garden of an inmate. It is not the best 
 time of year to see gardens, but they were full of 
 strawberry plants, carnations, winter vegetables, even 
 fruit - trees : I was not surprised to hear that the 
 small cultivators grow most prodigious crops to the 
 square yard. A man must needs love his garden 
 when it is all he has in the world. 
 
 But I was once more surprised to hear that they 
 buy their own manure. An inmate who works on 
 his garden, at tailoring, boot-making, mattress-making 
 gets one-eighth of the product of his labour for 
 himself, and, within obvious limits, he can do what 
 he likes with it. If he has a private income he can 
 get a proportion of it to spend. He can order his 
 own clothes from the village tailor; he can order a 
 brace of birds for his dinner; he can send presents 
 to his friends. Only the most precious, and surely 
 the most pathetic, present of all, is the basket of 
 strawberries or box of pears, grown on his own plot
 
 "DURING HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE." 263 
 
 by his own labour, that a working man will send 
 somewhere out into the world to his wife. 
 
 When I came to see the inmates I perceived that 
 Broadmoor is not a prison. It is a huge mental 
 hospital, and the principal thing used in it is healthy 
 occupation. You can gauge a man's mental health 
 almost exactly by the degree in which he notices 
 his fellows. A man who is very ill stands and 
 walks among his companions all day ; he sees them 
 and hears them with eye and ear. But in his mind 
 he is quite alone, a hermit dwelling with his own 
 delusions. When a man is better he will make 
 acquaintances and friends ; he will begin to interest 
 himself in his work or his play. And the more he 
 interests himself in things not himself, the better he 
 becomes. 
 
 As this was expounded to me we passed by 
 the lawn -tennis court. Two gentlemen who had 
 murdered were playing two gentlemen who had 
 attempted murder. Inside the block where these 
 live tea was being got ready not at one long table, 
 but at many short ones ; the sun slanted on to the 
 grained wood-work, and the fire crackled cheerily. 
 We passed the row of little bedrooms; you cannot 
 call them cells, for the inmates use them only at 
 night : a glazed slit by the door, through which the 
 attendant on night duty can flash his lantern on to 
 the pillow, is the only suggestion of captivity. One 
 room was being put in order not by the owner, but 
 by a poorer patient, his servant. Then we came into 
 the day-room ; it looked exceedingly like the smok- 
 ing-room of an unpretentious but comfortable hoteL
 
 264 "DURING HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE." 
 
 Men lounged about on benches in the sun, or in arm- 
 chairs before the fire. Most of these were grey- 
 bearded ; the younger men were out of doors, but 
 exercise, like work, is recommended by persuasion 
 rather than enforced. 
 
 Here were books and newspapers in abundance 
 chess, draughts, cards, and a billiard -table. Here 
 was a quiet, trim, scholarly -looking man who had 
 pushed his wife over a cliff; there a rougher, ragged- 
 bearded elder who had throttled his senior partner ; 
 there, reading the ' Daily Mail,' a mild-eyed visionary 
 whose mission in life is to kill a royal person. They 
 exchanged courteous " Good afternoons " with the 
 doctor ; of the stranger they took no more heed than 
 one would of a visitor in a club. And the couple of 
 dark-blue attendants, standing quiet, decorous, tact- 
 ful, but vigilant in the midst of a dozen madmen, 
 might almost have been club servants. 
 
 But there is another side to Broadmoor. These 
 were the first-class patients in both senses the best 
 mentally and socially. In another block we come 
 into a long passage which opened through barred 
 windows on to a courtyard. It was full of men and 
 keepers the men in white trousers and long grey 
 sleeveless cloaks. Some walked swiftly to and fro, as 
 if bent on important business; others stood stock- 
 still, as if they had forgotten their own existence ; 
 all alike looked straight out of their eyes, yet seemed 
 to see no one and nothing. Only one man noticed 
 the doctors and me : he came up and looked me in 
 the face with unwinking eyes, and began to speak. 
 He spoke on and on, without pause and without
 
 "DURING HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE." 265 
 
 modulation ; his speech was educated ; he spoke of 
 volts and elliptical orbits, and of mysterious beings 
 from Camden, New Jersey, who had murdered his 
 father with Rontgen rays. He was abreast of every 
 movement in physical science up to yesterday's ' Times,' 
 and he was there from a county asylum for killing 
 the doctor with a stone in a pocket-handkerchief. 
 
 From the next court a crowd swarmed up at the 
 view of a strange face like moths round a lamp. 
 Trembling figures handed up letters on to the sill for 
 approval pitiful little scrawls on blue paper ad- 
 dressed to the Queen, to judges, to the dead, to the 
 Almighty. A score of fixed, unexpressive eyes met 
 mine ; a dozen chanting voices rose up together. All 
 spoke with a set, formal utterance, as if of a rehearsed 
 speech. One doomed superintendent, and doctors, 
 and keepers for a set of murderous liars. Another 
 besought them abjectly not to run needles into his 
 eyes. A pair of pale-blue eyes met mine out of the 
 face of a St John : " My name is T. Perkins, and I 
 have been murdered here, by those that know not 
 what they do, because they have ether in their heads, 
 for Christ's sake." As we turned to go there came 
 a hoarse whisper from a burly black-browed man : 
 " I give you warning, he has condemned us all to 
 death, you and me and all of us ; but who he is I 
 am not allowed to say, though there are descendants 
 of his not a hundred miles away." Then he called 
 me back : " Give him the message, sir, and the token 
 is " he bared empty gums " the man has lost his 
 teeth." And the last impression of all was the 
 empty blue eyes of T. Perkins as he followed us
 
 266 "DURING HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE." 
 
 from window to window and chanted " Eock of 
 Ages." 
 
 The women's side was much quieter a series of 
 airy rooms with shawled figures knitting round the 
 fire, or white-haired dames dropping pretty little 
 curtseys and promising gifts of kittens. Many had 
 decorated their rooms with little boxes, and flowers, 
 and cards, and pictures on the wall. They have 
 their laundry and their ballroom; nearly all were 
 very peaceful and contented. Yet there were two 
 or three not less pathetic than the men the new 
 inmate who feigned to be occupied with her bed lest 
 a stranger should notice her, the idiot wench who 
 stood grinning, opening and shutting her hands, the 
 old woman who pleaded hard to be allowed to go to 
 the annual entertainment "because I've not been 
 now, doctor, for so very many years." 
 
 When we came out the sun was sloping down to 
 the fir-woods, and it was getting cold. The men 
 were at work on their gardens ; one had had in half 
 a load of smoking manure, and, with a friend, was 
 doing all he knew to get it wheeled out before dark. 
 In the dusk it might have been an allotment field. 
 But my mind dwelt on another glimpse I had had 
 of the bad court from above. One old man, with 
 floating grey beard, was walking about playing on a 
 child's fiddle. Another, very old and with the tooth- 
 less brainless grin of a baby, was walking swiftly to 
 and fro making with his hands the motion of a juggler 
 playing with knives. Another he, too, grey-headed 
 had put on a red handkerchief like an apron ; he 
 stood facing a dead wall, and at regular intervals he
 
 "DURING HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE." 267 
 
 gave a little skip like a girl about to slide. A pause, 
 a skip ; a pause, a skip without rest and without 
 variation. And not one out of half a hundred 
 took any heed of any other. 
 
 II. 
 
 Under a dead sky and a sullen fog, which the 
 thin biting wind could not dispel, Wormwood Scrubs 
 raised its cluster of towers and chimneys with rather 
 a forced and elaborate cheerfulness. The outline is 
 more broken and more decorative than you would 
 expect in a prison ; it looks as if it were trying to 
 make-believe that it is something more cheerful. 
 But when you get nearer, walking through the 
 wilderness of football-grounds, which is the only 
 other feature of the landscape, the dominant im- 
 pression is the lower and outside walls high, hard, 
 and bare, they make a grim enough contrast to the 
 well-meaning ornament above. 
 
 A quarter of a mile from the gate three prisoners 
 were mending the road one old man and two 
 middle-aged. Their clothes were yellow the yellow 
 of sackcloth sprigged with a broad-arrow here and 
 there. Their caps, a kind of cross between a pastry- 
 cook's and a Glengarry, bore a red star. To the 
 three prisoners there were two warders : unostenta- 
 tiously, but surely, they followed each movement 
 with the pick or shovel, and never seemed to 
 leave a couple of yards between themselves and 
 their men.
 
 268 "DURING HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE." 
 
 The front of the prison is the warders' quarters 
 pleasant enough, with creepers hanging down over 
 the windows, and children's faces looking through. 
 Here a couple more prisoners were nailing up the 
 creepers, with again a warder's eye on every move- 
 ment and a second following them at a distance. To 
 get into the prison is only one degree less difficult 
 than to get out. You can ring at the bell easily 
 enough, and the door opens ; then you find yourself 
 under an arch, a sort of lodge on one side and a 
 heavily-barred gate blocking it at the inner end. 
 Through the bars there faces you the white chapel, 
 I have seen many far more forbidding and far less 
 graceful. In front of it another sackcloth figure 
 was weeding the gravel walk, with yet another 
 warder standing over him at about six inches dis- 
 tant. At this point you must show your credentials, 
 and thenceforth the little paper from the Home 
 Office will never leave the hand of the officer who 
 takes charge of you. And in the room where you 
 wait awhile, along with plans and regulations on the 
 wall, the eye falls particularly on a list " Twelve 
 revolvers, three ditto, twelve carbines, ammunition," 
 and the like. 
 
 Up to now the impression of her Majesty's prison 
 is stark enough. But when you find yourself in 
 charge of an officer spectacled, courteous, intelli- 
 gent, with nothing of the jailor about him but 
 the chain at his belt, of which the other end is 
 a key and when you begin to go round department 
 after department, the first impression is washed 
 out almost entirely. You never supposed that a
 
 "DURING HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE." 269 
 
 prison would be light and airy, healthy, and even 
 cheerful ? Well, Wormwood Scrubs is all of these. 
 You go into the first hall, and in a moment you 
 might be in a model lodging-house, only cleaner, 
 better kept, with more industrious inhabitants. It 
 is a long, narrow, lofty court, four-storeyed ; glass 
 skylights at the top and feathery iron rails and 
 staircases fill you with a sense of light and air. 
 On this nipping day it is quite warm. On either 
 side rise up the tiers of cells. Warders and prisoners 
 are standing about on the floor working, but here the 
 warders seem less like slave-drivers, as they did out- 
 side, than intelligent foremen directing willing hands. 
 You go into a cell. The prisoner has cleansed 
 it himself, and it is spotless. His floor is like the 
 deck of a man-of-war, and you never saw better 
 polished tin in a tinsmith's than his drinking-cup, 
 washing-bowl, and other vessels. It is not large, 
 but it is lofty for its size; two ventilators let 
 air in and out, and a grating lets in heat. Against 
 the wall leans the man's bed deal planks raised 
 a few inches above the floor with a rough mattress, 
 perhaps three inches thick, and half-a-dozen blankets. 
 This man is getting to the end of his time. At first 
 there is no mattress, and certainly the planks are 
 hard only there are many thousands of honest men 
 in this country who have slept as hard for weeks 
 together, and not near so clean. The other furniture 
 is a small table, coming out bracket-wise from the 
 wall, and a small wooden stool. On a shelf in the 
 corner are the man's books : every prisoner can have 
 out one library book at a time, and devotional books
 
 270 "DURING HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE." 
 
 besides ; this prisoner is a Jew, and has half-a-dozen, 
 English and Hebrew. And finally imagine it, 
 law-abiding citizen ! there is an electric bell. 
 When the criminal wants attention he presses the 
 button; his number appears outside on a bracket, 
 and the warder answers his bell. 
 
 As you pass from one part of the prison to another 
 you notice that most of the doors are not solid, but of 
 open iron bars : it maintains the sense of air, and 
 almost gives the lie to the word confinement. You 
 go into the tailoring shop, the boot shop, the smiths' 
 shop, the carpenters' shop. The workshops in Ports- 
 mouth Dockyard are not half so comfortable and 
 healthy. Here is the bakery, with convicts kneading 
 dough ; here the kitchen, with a law-breaker making 
 a rice-pudding for a sick fellow. Others are at work 
 on navy hammocks, Post Office bags, coal -bags for 
 her Majesty's fleet. The work of the prison is 
 wholly done inside itself by its own labour; but 
 nothing is sent out except for Government depart- 
 ments, no competition with honest trade. Every 
 man is set to his own trade : if he knows none, he 
 can get the chance to learn. 
 
 The chapel is as free and graceful inside as outside. 
 The floor of it is sunk; women sit in front, and 
 then behind them is a screen, just so high that the 
 men can see the pulpit without being able to see the 
 women. There is a little font " we use it sometimes, 
 even here," says my officer, with pride. The chapel 
 is being redecorated of course by prisoners ; they 
 work as cheerfully and as well as everybody else, 
 here. The hospital is like everything else a model
 
 "DURING HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE." 271 
 
 of neatness, cleanliness, and order. There is no sus- 
 picion of overcrowding, and the half-dozen men sitting 
 about the ward nobody is very ill can hardly have 
 seen such comfortable quarters in their lives before. 
 Only a pace or two down the next corridor a round- 
 faced, open-eyed boy how came he into the sackcloth 
 livery ? is looking intently through a grating. And 
 inside there paces restlessly and incessantly round and 
 round the cell a man, who seems to have no arms 
 his jacket comes tight down outside them, and pins 
 them to his side. He has a mild, fair-bearded face, 
 but his gentle eyes look at you without seeing you 
 he has attempted suicide four times. 
 
 There are at work here the two guiding principles of 
 modern criminology the differentiation of prisoners 
 and the abolition of useless work. As the convicts 
 march round and round the oval exercise-grounds you 
 notice that some bear red stars on cap and tunic : 
 these are first offenders. And the convicts proper 
 the penal servitude men, that is exercise by them- 
 selves. They alone wear knickerbockers and stock- 
 ings; they alone are shaved. I only looked in at 
 their yard for a moment, but there seemed a sullen 
 desperation on their coarse faces that made the short- 
 sentence men look very happy. Another point of 
 difference is that a man is more and more leniently 
 treated as he draws to the end of his time. As for 
 useless work, oakum, for which there is no longer any 
 commercial demand to speak of, has almost entirely 
 disappeared from the Scrubs. At the beginning of a 
 man's term he is put in a cell with a crank to turn ; 
 it is like a chaff-cutter, only rather heavier to handle :
 
 272 "DURING HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE." 
 
 certainly 10,000 revolutions is a good, though far 
 from excessive, day's work. Short of this, all labour 
 has its definite, comprehensible end. And especially 
 by doing the work of the prison their own work, 
 that is are the inmates trained to understand the 
 necessity and dignity of labour and allowed to take an 
 interest in it. 
 
 Then, why not all be convicts ? To be cockered in 
 a model lodging - house, dry, warm, well - fed, well- 
 trained physically, with a book from the circulating 
 library the wonder is that our poor do not contrive 
 to spend all their lives in quarters so attractive. The 
 cell for the violent is perfectly comfortable, except 
 that it has no furniture to smash; the dark cell is 
 not dark ; the very cat is a puny little whip, and can 
 only be given on a magistrate's order at that. Why 
 not all seek her Majesty's hospitality at the sign of 
 the Scrubs ? 
 
 Well the doors. That is the only thing against 
 it. The whole place is a chess-board of doors and 
 every door is locked. There is the chain at every 
 warder's belt, and the clash of the turning key every 
 ten yards of your journey. Bars that you can see 
 through are very well only when you can't go 
 through it would be almost better not to see. A 
 well-regulated life is the only happy one only you 
 would sooner regulate it for yourself. The clash of 
 the locks takes root in your ears before you have 
 gone half round. And it is worth going out again 
 out of the warmth and light into the fog and ice- 
 edged wind again for the pleasure of hearing the last 
 clang and clatter behind, and not in front of you.
 
 273 
 
 IN THE COUNTRY OF THE STORM. 1 
 
 FOR the first moment Ingatestone seemed just like 
 all other Essex stations along the line from London. 
 Coal -trucks on the siding, meadows and trees, a 
 governess-car with a parson in a muffler, and a girl 
 in shirt and sailor hat it was just the ordinary 
 English country station. And yet there was some- 
 thing queer about it something that ought not to 
 be. What was it ? 
 
 There seemed to be a suggestion of November 
 somehow in the midsummer luxuriance. What 
 could it be ? The trees ! Yes ; what was wrong 
 with the trees ? They were all leafless, or next 
 thing to it. They looked as if they had been very 
 badly blighted, or else, as I say, as if November had 
 somehow suddenly intruded upon midsummer. They 
 were leafless, yellow, with branches broken down, 
 and with dead leaves blown into heaps by the road- 
 side. That unearthly sight in the middle of a 
 shining July day that was the footprint of the 
 great storm. 
 
 Jogging along in a dogcart behind a sleepy brown 
 mare, and beside a sleepy brown inhabitant, I began 
 
 1 Daily Mail, July 7, 1897. 
 8
 
 274 IN THE COUNTRY OF THE STORM. 
 
 to make inquiries about it. It must have been one 
 of the most astounding calamities that ever fell with- 
 out warning on a quiet village. He supposed it 
 were ; but he hadn't seen it himself. He was at 
 Great Something, nine miles away, and he hadn't 
 seen a trace of it. At Little Something, a mile 
 nearer, they had had very heavy rain, but no hail. 
 Where we were going to they had had the hail. 
 We should soon come to a farm where a tree had 
 come down through the roof into the farmer's bedroom. 
 " A hard - working man he is, too," and I recognised 
 him from the description as the hero of many news- 
 paper articles already. 
 
 Certainly we were coming to where they had had 
 the hail. On the near side of the road was a thick 
 grove of trees oaks, elms, Scotch firs, every sort. 
 They had had the wind unquestionably: here was 
 a branch snapped off clean, here another torn pain- 
 fully from the tough trunk and swinging from a 
 gaping white wound, there was a tree ripped up by 
 the roots and flung into the hedge. But it was not 
 these wind-wounds that gave the air of chilly desola- 
 tion to the whole country. It was the leaves sliced 
 off as with a storm of bullets the naked trees under 
 the brilliant sun, the litter of leaves beneath them 
 four months before their time. Summer had sud- 
 denly departed from this country, and I shivered. 
 
 Perhaps that was sentimental. But when we 
 came to the land of the hard-working man there 
 was a deal more than sentiment to turn the heart 
 cold. The accommodation road was so barricaded 
 with fallen branches that we had to drive across the
 
 IN THE COUNTRY OF THE STORM. 275 
 
 pastures. We came to the farmhouse. On one side 
 of it every pane of glass was smashed in. The barn 
 had lost every tile ; its roof was only a cobweb of 
 broken lattices, and the fragments of the broken tiles 
 were heaped up like old crockery all round it. The 
 house itself was almost as naked, and its back was 
 broken where the tree had come down on it. On the 
 right were two fields. One had been full of beans 
 and the other of corn, but to-day the beans were 
 a fallow and the corn was stubble. 
 
 In another field a torn disconsolate potato raised 
 its head here and there out of the ruin. But where 
 there had been mangold there was nothing simply 
 nothing at all. You could just trace the lines of the 
 furrows, washed almost level by the rain. But for 
 any trace of a crop, the field might never have been 
 touched since last Michaelmas. It goes without 
 saying that the hard-working farmer is quite ruined. 
 
 As we jogged on it became apparent that fallen trees 
 had been sawn into lengths and cleared off the road ; 
 otherwise we should never have been able to drive 
 along the road at all. Whenever we turned a corner 
 a new bit of destruction came in sight. Some of the 
 windows had been put in again, others were still 
 staring empty. It had been a good time, remarked 
 my friend, with a resolute effort to look on the 
 bright side of things, for the glaziers. Day and 
 night, Sunday and week-day, they had had as much 
 work as they cared to lay putty to. But despite 
 that cheering fact, the drive got glummer and 
 glummer. Tiles, thatch, or slates, every roof seemed 
 to have fared the same. Fences sprawled all over
 
 276 IN THE COUNTRY OF THE STORM. 
 
 the road, and the nettles were cut down as with a 
 scythe. Here was a yawning gap in a fence ; here a 
 rough sheep-hurdle stuffed in to make a provisional 
 join where a big elm had smashed the elegant railing. 
 Fowls and ducks, pheasants and partridges, were dead 
 by the score. Every bit of glass was ground to 
 powder, of course; every bit of growth under it 
 bruised to pulp. The Ingatestone Show was just 
 coming on, and very many people were growing some- 
 thing for it under glass something they had taken 
 trouble with, going in to the little hothouse every 
 hour to see how it was getting on. There will be no 
 show at Ingatestone this season. 
 
 Where there had been hay ready for cutting there 
 was now only rather ragged pasture, that looked as if 
 it had not been properly beaten down. It was useless 
 to try to cut the remnants with the machine, though 
 here and there they were trying to save a little with 
 the scythe. But it was heart-breaking work just a 
 few wisps of grass here and there mixed with a good 
 many weeds ; the only thing that had quite resisted 
 the storm was the thistles. The corn was beyond 
 even this piteous consolation. The hail had cut 
 it off short at the ground; it was not possible to 
 save even the straw. As for the roots, it was 
 usually quite impossible to guess even what they 
 had been. 
 
 Still, here and there, and almost everywhere amid 
 the wicked ravages of Nature, you could see indomit- 
 able man at work again. 
 
 They were beginning already to do what could be 
 done. At a gentleman's house they were hoisting up
 
 IN THE COUNTRY OF THE STORM. 277 
 
 bricks and tiles to the roof. As I watched, a landau 
 and pair came along the road. A big-nosed old lady 
 was looking at the damage through a pair of lorg- 
 nettes ; the carriage stopped, and a footman went in 
 with a card : how sweet a thing is sympathy in the 
 hour of adversity. More congenial was a farmhouse 
 whose lacerated roof had been recently wrapped in 
 rick-covers; the white-haired fanner and his three 
 men were hoeing away at what Little was left of the 
 mangolds, as if they gave every promise of a record 
 crop and a fat year with the rent paid and something 
 put away in the bank. And there was a little old 
 lady driving a fat old cob in an old park phaeton. 
 A tree had come down over her fence a yard behind 
 her as she passed by ; yet here she was, driving alone, 
 and nicking up the cob along the drive home as full 
 of courage and character as ever. Nature, after all, 
 can make man very uncomfortable, but she has never 
 conquered him yet. 
 
 All the same, in some places there was nothing but 
 evidence of numb despair. " There's an old man here ; 
 I don't know how much he didn't reckon to make out 
 of his cherries ; " and here was his beloved white- 
 heart agonising over the orchard, through the hedge, 
 and smashing its limbs to pieces on the hard road. 
 And then, again, " There's a little man here ; he'd just 
 set up for himself a little market-garden ; there's his 
 bit of glass." Yes, there was his bit of glass or, 
 rather, there was his not a single bit of glass ; nothing 
 but twisted frames, and below them the clean-stripped 
 stalks of tomatoes. The little man had done nothing 
 to put things straight, it seemed. For he couldn't
 
 278 IN THE COUNTKY OF THE STORM. 
 
 bring his tomatoes to life again, and how was he ever 
 to start for himself anew ? 
 
 So we drove till we came out on the southward side 
 of Ingatestone. And there everything was as usual, 
 everything as it should be. A branch or two 
 wrenched off now and again, but not more than you 
 might see after many a hard blow. On one side of 
 the road wheat, and on the other oats splendid crops, 
 nodding buoyantly to the breeze. Trim homesteads, 
 with gardens full of peas and marigolds and 
 geraniums. And not half a mile away from it that 
 cruel devastation, that massacre of the country. One 
 taken and the other left. Plainly it was the 
 visitation of God but was it any easier to bear for 
 that ?
 
 279 
 
 THE DEKBY. 1 
 
 ON the Epsom road early summer brings a double 
 crop. It is not so near the London blights but that 
 chestnut and may blossom sweetly above the hedges, 
 kingcups in the ditches, and buttercups in the 
 meadows. Along with them this season breeds 
 products less clean. Between the chestnut -trees, 
 above the may, come out festoons of grossly yellow 
 and vermilion posters ; among the buttercups on 
 the roadside a succession of sleepy tramps readjust 
 battered billycocks over their eyes, and heave from 
 one elbow on to the other. Then you know that 
 summer is come and the Derby is at hand. 
 
 On the Epsom road we associate the Derby with 
 a string of raucous brakes in the morning and the 
 same hideously vocal returning at night; also with 
 entirely supererogatory niggers, who pester us as we 
 go back to work in the quiet interval after dinner. 
 As if we had anything to waste on niggers, we who 
 try to live on the starveling Epsom road. Never- 
 
 1 Daily Mail, June 1897.
 
 280 THE DERBY. 
 
 theless, if we had eyes to spare for it, the days 
 before the Derby bring quite a modern exodus in a 
 panorama before us. 
 
 The Monday before the Epsom Summer Meeting 
 is, as the Calendar will tell you, one of the rare 
 holidays of the flat -racing season. Yet that day 
 sees a procession from London to the Downs as con- 
 tinuous, if not so thick, as that of the Wednesday 
 itself. On Monday morning I found one unbroken 
 string of vehicles and foot-passengers stretched all 
 along the ten miles from Double Gates, Merton, 
 which are held to be the end of London, to the 
 Grand Stand above Epsom. They had nothing 
 directly to do with racing, and they were not mak- 
 ing holiday. They were just the parasites the 
 swing -boat people and the Aunt -Sally people, the 
 gipsies, the hawkers, and the general cadgers that 
 make what you might call the properties of the 
 Derby. 
 
 Most of the vehicles were of the house- van kind 
 that you all know, though you will not often see so 
 many of them together. They seem rarer than they 
 used to be, and I should have hardly thought there 
 were so many left in England. Yet here they were 
 in scores, plodding, plodding southward : on the road 
 their sloping decks and soot-crusted chimneys, their 
 dark-green or claret-coloured sides, give them some- 
 thing of the air of vessels. This is the ship of the 
 road, self-contained and self-sufficient, touching here 
 and there for supplies, yet independent of any roof or 
 bed or stable, or any other resting-place the true 
 automobile. The sky for your roof-tree and the turf
 
 THE DERBY. 281 
 
 for your pillow how you envy the free mariners 
 of the road until you look at them. Veiminous 
 hair matted over low foreheads and shifting eyes, 
 arms that hang forward from loose shoulders like an 
 orang-outang's, toeless and heelless boots, every man 
 and woman and child in shapeless clothes that obvi- 
 ously were made for somebody else no : I would not 
 be a van-dweller after all. 
 
 The van carries its all with it : the smoke from 
 the funnel says they are cooking dinner; lashed to 
 a tailboard is the goat that gives the milk for tea ; 
 hung out in front the caged linnet that furnishes 
 the band during meals. Mixed up with these go 
 parties who travel much lighter a coster-cart, laden 
 with what look like bean-sticks and a length or two 
 of canvas : that is to make a shelter wherein the 
 family will spend the week. Then there are those 
 who travel lighter still the foot-passengers, some in 
 droves of men and women together, their sole baggage 
 a few ponies, seemingly ignorant of the difference 
 between a summer and winter coat ; some all alone, 
 and with no more baggage than the hands in their 
 pockets. They have no trade goods, these slouching 
 scarecrows, no accomplishments, no qualification at 
 all for work, and no intention in the world of doing 
 it. Yet here they are in their thousands, shuffling 
 towards the Derby, to beg, to borrow, to steal all 
 drawn by the lodestar of that hope of getting money 
 without working for it, which is inseparable from the 
 glorious turf. 
 
 You do not fall exactly in love with the British 
 turf on the Epsom road the day before the Derby
 
 282 THE DERBY. 
 
 meeting. And when you get up on to the Downs 
 you love it still less. You see the lower side of it, 
 which is to the brilliancy and excitement of the day 
 itself as loaded beer is to champagne, or the shaggy 
 galumphing gipsy pony to the shining thoroughbred. 
 When you get on to the Downs you should have drawn 
 definitely clear of London and all about it. Behind 
 and below you trees and meadows, farms and villages, 
 welter in black murk : the filthy exhalations of 
 London climb up the sky like a wall. Before you 
 stretches of rolling grass dip down to hollows, rise up 
 to brows, all furred with rich green plantation ; the 
 sky is wistfully blue, hoping that the sunlight will 
 tarry a little now it has come at last. The breeze 
 that bowls over the Downs you can feel in the very 
 bottom of your lungs, cleaning your blood. As you 
 begin to rejoice in all this, there rises into your 
 vision the Grand Stand and the racecourse and all the 
 tawdry vulgarities that have sprung up in a night 
 about them. London looks to have oozed out and 
 laid a patch of its slimy self over the beginning of the 
 clean country. 
 
 Already a village of vans has sat down on the 
 gorse-bushes. At rest the vans lose their suggestion 
 of ships. You notice, rather, the clean window cur- 
 tains, and begin to think you could be a gipsy after 
 all. Having arrived and got their pitches, half of 
 them are making holiday before the working days 
 begin a simple sort of holiday, that consists, for the 
 young, the touzle-haired, and bare-legged, in pulling 
 each other aimlessly over the turf, but for the staider 
 elders in lying down to sleep in the sun. You are
 
 THE DERBY. 283 
 
 reminded that the gipsy is a true Oriental in this, 
 that he has no bedtime. 
 
 But we must not harrow ourselves unduly. The 
 gipsy is happy enough in his dirt ; and if you don't 
 like it, there are comely sights on Epsom Downs, even 
 before the Derby. Along with the gipsies have come 
 the advanced-guard of the costers a very different 
 class. The coster is a happy-go-lucky fellow, and on 
 occasion blasphemous ; but he is also quick, ready, 
 skilled in men, and especially independent. On an 
 occasion like this, in the country, where good business 
 is to be combined with pleasure, his womankind are a 
 sight worth coming so far to see. They are neither 
 shabby nor gaudy : their gowns and hats are black, 
 their adornments are no more than clear eyes and yet 
 clearer weather-ripened cheeks, and aprons spotlessly 
 white and so stiffly starched that they could stand by 
 themselves. 
 
 The sight of two such, walking casually among the 
 streets of vans and shock-headed viragoes, cheerfully 
 and hopelessly asking if anybody has seen a young 
 feller with a pony-cart pass that way, is enough to 
 sweeten the whole scene for at least a moment. But 
 when you look at it again, you may love horses and 
 racing as much as you like, but your heart sinks. You 
 see all the naked apparatus of pleasure, and it looks 
 as a circus might at noonday, or a fashionable beauty 
 without her paint and powder. To-morrow it may 
 not be beautiful, but at least it will be crowded, 
 merry, roaring with enjoyment, fulfilling its purpose 
 in life. To-day the swings and merry-go-rounds are 
 gaunt skeletons being patched together, or heaps of
 
 284 THE DERBY. 
 
 garish yellow and vermilion sticks and boards strewn 
 on the desecrated green. The refreshment - booths 
 are heaps of forms and trestles littered with coarse 
 crockery. The whole place is covered with loitering 
 scallywags, touts and tramps and beggars, the scum of 
 England. 
 
 And the beer ! Beer is good, but to see it hauled 
 up the day before, in cold blood, is all but to turn 
 teetotaller. Drays and drays and drays of it beer 
 arriving, beer disembarking, barrels of beer ranged in 
 every tent, empty drays going back for more. Some 
 of the loafers have begun on it already, and stagger 
 instead of shuffling : you wonder what they will be 
 like by Oaks night. 
 
 The whole thing is altogether too naked, you feel : 
 it wants draping into decency. When you go down 
 into Epsom you find it full of horse-faced stable-lads 
 out of work, who ask you whether by any chance you 
 have a steeplechaser that wants schooling, and, if not, 
 whether you have a shilling. Outside the station the 
 street is double -lined with lounging unemployed, 
 ostensibly waiting to carry visionary bags. By every 
 train pour in blue-chinned, hungry-faced bookmakers. 
 The tail of yellow brakes is already standing to take 
 to-morrow's crowds up to the course. A steady stream 
 of horses, that have left coaches ready in their places 
 in the enclosure or vans immobile for the week, plod 
 wearily back for more. 
 
 This is not a sermon : I could write you just as 
 forbidding a description of the eve of a first night, or 
 a Church Congress, or a Handel Festival, or the places 
 where they make the dresses for a fancy ball. When
 
 THE DERBY. 285 
 
 it is dressed and at work it will look quite different, 
 only it is never pleasant to contemplate the raw 
 material of pleasure. 
 
 IL 
 
 What a day ! We could tell in an instant that it 
 would be glorious as soon as we put our heads outside 
 the door on to the Epsom road. 
 
 We got in and up ostentatiously, half the house- 
 hold the other half sorrowed at home, only half 
 believing that there will be another Derby next year 
 and went off with the blessed knowledge that all the 
 neighbours saw us go. They were all on the pave- 
 ments, or at their windows, or the doors of their shops. 
 They were not going, it is true, but for all that they 
 were to enjoy their day watching the other people. 
 That is the beauty of Derby Day, especially on the 
 Epsom road : it is of universal enjoyment the great 
 festival of all the cockney year. 
 
 The costers, who inhabit our quarter in great 
 strength, were going too. Oh yes, they were going 
 old man and old woman and kids and pony and moke. 
 We started early : the coaches and brakes had not 
 yet got so far from Piccadilly, and the road belonged 
 as indeed it mostly belongs all Derby Day to 
 the poor. But none of them not the tradesman in 
 his market-cart lined with Windsor chairs, not even 
 the fair ladies you divine inside the darkling furniture- 
 vans can touch the coster. 
 
 He is the only man of his class who always takes 
 the whole family on the jaunt, and they are the only
 
 286 THE DERBY. 
 
 kind of family that knows how to turn itself out. 
 The well-fed Polly or Neddy in the shafts, the harness 
 picked out with ribbons or bunches of lilac, the long, 
 new-painted, highly-variegated cart that balances on 
 its axletree like a liner at sea, the old man's twinkling 
 eyes and weather-reddened cheeks, the old woman in 
 crimson velvet or lilac silk sitting so bolt upright, so 
 queenly under her diadem of feathers, the tiny boys in 
 their square-tailed grey coats and their square capable 
 faces, oh yes, give me the coster on Derby Day. 
 There is nothing like him outside London, and nothing 
 inside either. 
 
 We roll out between the familiar meadows. On 
 the roadside rest foot-passengers ; a steady stream of 
 them sets all along the road, the British working 
 man walking down. He looks twice the man he does 
 on other days striding along, holding himself up- 
 right, smoking his old pipe. Who grudges him the 
 buttercups and the sweet hawthorn and the cloudless 
 blue already filtered so clean from the reek of 
 London ? What a day ! 
 
 North Cheam, the Queen Victoria's Head, Ewell, 
 Epsom every soul on the pavements Ashley Eoad 
 and we are there already. Just in time to get the 
 carriage into the front row, and get two good hours 
 from the first race. But that is all the better. There 
 are those among us who have never seen a book- 
 maker, and wonder why showers of leaflets drop 
 from a still sky : two hours fly as ten minutes in 
 such initiations. But meanwhile, and from the first 
 moment to the last, what a sight ! 
 
 The day before the meeting the course was an
 
 THE DERBY. 287 
 
 abomination, an outrage on the clear sky and the 
 lift of the Downs and the far-off blotches of wood- 
 land. But to-day London has come out and draped 
 the indecency, and it is all pure holiday. The shabby 
 vans and shaggy ponies and shock-headed women and 
 children now fall into their proper places as the 
 framework of the world's greatest fair. The Hill, 
 which on Monday was a stack of tawdry bits of 
 timber and dirty canvas, to - day, upholstered with 
 people, has become a very palace of pleasure. It 
 stands up over against you with the white and blue 
 and scarlet signs of the silver ring, the red and yellow 
 of the swings and merry-go-rounds ; the colours are 
 just as garish as they ever were, but now they are 
 only the embroidery on a spreading cloak of black- 
 coated Londoners. 
 
 You might think that the whole city had migrated 
 on to the Downs. You wonder what London is 
 like at this moment : is it possible that many poor 
 wretches are left there breathing the air through 
 that respirator of smoke ? Here, although the dust 
 is in your nostrils, you still smell the may through 
 it. At least, there are thousands on thousands 
 enjoying that smell to - day, and you rejoice ; for 
 the Derby is one of those blessed days when every- 
 body wants everybody to enjoy himself. 
 
 By now the stands opposite us are black with 
 people; the whole course is black as far as 
 Tattenhain Corner, and beyond ; wherever you look 
 is a thick black carpet pricked with myriads of 
 pin-point faces. It is a huge city, almost a nation 
 in itself. Only this is a city where everybody
 
 288 THE DERBY. 
 
 can see the sky a whole hemisphere of it: we 
 may thank the wisdom of our fathers for giving 
 London an institution like the Derby. The Prince 
 of Wales is under the clock under the royal 
 standard ; the dustman is on the course below, 
 brushing against the frock-coat of a Cabinet Minister. 
 And they are all enjoying themselves, and enjoying 
 the enjoyment of the others. 
 
 However, we came to see races and now the 
 limber two-year-olds are stretching their long legs 
 in the canter ; a few minutes and they come thunder- 
 ing past us home. Sloan wins ! and nobody grudges 
 it him ; yet, if it were an omen ! Surely Providence 
 will never allow a French colt with an American 
 rider to win our Derby ! "We lost heavily on the 
 first race, and worse on the second ; yet on the 
 Derby none of us really cared to bet at all. It 
 was almost too dear and important an issue for 
 betting almost as bad as insuring your mother's 
 life. 
 
 Now comes the bell, and that ever-wonderful 
 scene of clearing the course the black river that 
 dries up in five minutes at the hand- wave of a few 
 score men in blue coats and helmets. Another 
 wait and here come the horses. They walk past, 
 and then canter back Holocauste first, looking a 
 bit of a slug, with Sloan riding him as if he were 
 a bicycle; then the rest of the shining ones; and 
 last Flying Fox, with what a reach, what an all- 
 conquering stride, and a man on his back that 
 sits and has hands left to ride with. They dis- 
 appear, and then we wait and wait and wait. Time
 
 THE DEEBY. 289 
 
 after time the silk jackets break away behind us 
 and file slowly back. Won't it be all in favour 
 of the slug ? Wasn't Flying Fox tearing a little 
 at his bit in the canter ? Quarter-past three, half- 
 past off: no, false start again twenty to, quarter 
 to ah ! A breathless interval, and there they 
 sweep over the hill, well together. Now they 
 are shut out again; but now they are tearing 
 round the corner. Little spots of colour are 
 sliding down the hill ; now jerking furiously up 
 it. Nearer and nearer, bigger and bigger; the 
 earth trembles; the wave of colour surges up, and 
 yellow, Flying Fox, Mornington Cannon, by all 
 that's glorious ! Kunning under the whip, with some 
 of the fire out of his action, but still that conquering 
 stride. A yellow ray across the eyes a flash of the 
 jockey's square resolute face as he looks round an 
 instant, and then ah-h ! Our Derby is our Derby 
 still. 
 
 Somehow there seem to be fewer Frenchmen than 
 there were a minute ago. Yet we can all spare 
 a pang for a good horse come to grief and for a 
 plucky rider beaten, who yet weighs out next race. 
 But to hold up a horse round Tattenham Corner, we 
 tell ourselves with great sageness, you need to sit on 
 his back. 
 
 More races : we lose our money quite cheerfully, 
 for the country is saved, and our best horseman has 
 won his Derby. Under the unaccustomed sun we 
 all sit and are happy, till suddenly oh, alas ! the 
 last race is run, and we must go home. You would 
 say that this black garment of people could never 
 
 T
 
 290 THE DERBY. 
 
 be pulled off the Downs. Coaches and landaus and 
 coster-carts start and start and start ; yet there 
 isn't even room made for us to put in our horses. 
 The broad black river in the course flows and 
 flows, but it never seems to get thinner. The 
 truth is that nobody cares to go away : the evening 
 air and the evening sun and the evening scents 
 are all kisses. 
 
 We get away at last. It appears that the tin 
 trumpet is this year's foolishness for coming home, 
 with paper sunshades for yourself and if you are 
 a coster and your beast is a friend for him also. 
 When you have been to the Derby the tin trumpet 
 sounds quite passable. We observe a good many 
 stoppages by the way. Many of them are near 
 public-houses, certainly, but not nearly all. The 
 truth is that the Derby is a day of days, and 
 nobody is in a hurry to get it over. Hundreds 
 stop just to get a little more green hedgerow : 
 the pony has a feed, and they sit quite happily 
 on the cooling grass. It is not the racing entirely, 
 and it is not wholly the air and the sun and 
 the green, nor the blending of all classes, nor the 
 lunch, nor the beer. It is all together. It is 
 just the Derby London's day of pure enjoyment. 
 What a dayl
 
 291 
 
 THE CESAKEWITCH. 1 
 
 CAMBRIDGE is a quiet world to itself, with its grey 
 cloisters, silent spires, pale preoccupied professors. 
 Walk fifty yards up the Cambridge platform and you 
 come out on another world, as utterly apart and to 
 itself, and utterly different. The inhabitants of this 
 world wear overcoats down to their heels, instead of 
 gowns ; their faces are ruddy, or by'r Lady inclining 
 to purple ; they are puckered round the eyes ; pink 
 cards peep out of their pockets, and sporting news- 
 papers cascade over their knees ; they smoke large 
 cigars incessantly, and they are not silent. What 
 they tell you may or may not be what they wish 
 you to believe, but they have certainly no hesitation 
 in telling it. They are not afraid to talk their own 
 shop, these dwellers in the world of racing; what 
 but racing should a man talk ? Nor yet are they 
 afraid of talking to each other ; the world of racing, 
 popularly supposed to be the preserve of a corrupted 
 aristocracy, is really a far more genuine democracy 
 than any trade union. The precise mannerly gentle- 
 man in the corner of the carriage is explaining that 
 he had a good win at Kempton with The Nailer, but 
 
 1 Daily Mail, October 14, 1897.
 
 292 THE CESAREWITCH. 
 
 that it would have been better if his trial horse had 
 not cut it at the finish ; it disconcerts him not a bit 
 that there is nobody to tell the tale to but the flashy, 
 h-dropping professional backer. Only he prefers to 
 talk of the past of his stable rather than of its 
 future. The rest take pencils and make marks on 
 their cards, and little sums on the margins of their 
 newspapers, brows lined with anxious thought. For 
 the Cesarewitch is a piece of serious business 
 business to be buckled to. The great day comes 
 just as you realise that the flat -racing season will 
 not last for ever ; and if you are to come out on the 
 right side you had better get to work at once. The 
 air of Newmarket is tonic to the stomach and dis- 
 infectant in the lungs ; but it is plain that to-day we 
 are not going to Newmarket for the fresh air. The 
 Cesarewitch is not a public holiday like the Derby, 
 nor a fashionable reunion like the Ascot Cup. It 
 is hardly to be called even sport, any more than a 
 picture-sale is to be called art. Many go there for 
 enjoyment rather than for money ; but it is a very 
 specialised form of enjoyment. For the rest it is 
 just business hard, profit -and -loss business. 
 
 It is so when we come out, under the lukewarm 
 October sun, on to the rolling green of the Heath. It 
 spreads out, billowing right and left, like a sea. But 
 every man, on foot, in cabs, on horseback, is heading 
 towards the grey island that rises in the middle with 
 white benches jutting out from it the stands and 
 the rails. There the crowd gathers and blackens 
 dense at the centre, thinning at the fringes. The 
 Cesarewitch course is like an island in the world of
 
 THE CESAEEWITCH. 293 
 
 complex England once more a life apart to which 
 a point in the odds is more than the rise in bread, 
 and the state of The Eush's legs more than the for- 
 tunes of empires. Notice that there is no rowdyism 
 to-day, nobody changing hats with elect donahs, no 
 tomfoolery, no quarrelling, no drunkenness. The 
 crowd is small, by comparison, but it is select 
 though it does not always look it. Everybody has 
 come on business, and what is more, everybody knows 
 his business. 
 
 Only a dozen ladies in the paddock and they are 
 calculating their bets, and wondering what Manton 
 means about Jacobus. There are peers, and there 
 are stable-boys ; but they are all equal here, and all 
 serious. They are not rushing about to see this 
 horse or that horse; they know all about them 
 already. A couple of two-year-olds, their elaborate 
 clothing and eye-holes suggesting a diver's dress, are 
 lashing out in the true two -year -old form lanky 
 skittish beasts, hardly seeming to feel the ground 
 under them, yet with all sorts of potentialities of 
 beauty and power ; they remind you rather of misses 
 from a boarding-school. Nobody takes any notice of 
 such except the baby boy perched on the filly's back 
 his feet don't nearly reach to the stirrups, but he 
 shortens or lengthens the reins with the dignity of 
 one who is going to win the Derby in 1907 and 
 the careful lad who has got to keep some hundred 
 pounds' worth of horse from the destruction which 
 it is trying to rush upon. But never mind all that ; 
 to business and into the Eing. 
 
 When you turn the corner of the subway from
 
 294 THE CESAREWITCH. 
 
 the paddock and begin to climb the steps, the noise 
 of a furious riot breaks on you suddenly. Of course 
 you have heard it often enough, but it never ceases 
 to be a wonder of nature that so few men can make 
 so ear-splitting a babel. When you get up the steps 
 you are like to be hurled back again ; there is little 
 enough room to stroll round the Eing on Cesarewitch 
 day. The profession of bookmaking must be a pros- 
 perous one, even in these anti-gambling days; else 
 why are they so ostentatiously well nourished, so 
 ostentatiously sound in limb and wind ? " Five to 
 one bar one ! Ten to one bar two ! Evens the 
 feeyuld ! " It makes the unaccustomed head go 
 round, of course ; but did it never occur to you what 
 a combination of gifts the bookmaker must possess to 
 make a living at all ? Look at the great big men in 
 check ulsters and cloth caps : Jones & Brown is the 
 firm, and each wears his name as a scarf-pin in the 
 touching belief, apparently, that somebody cares which 
 is Jones and which is Brown. Jones is bellowing the 
 odds like a bull. But all the time he has got to keep 
 one eye on his customers and another on the columns 
 of figures wherein Brown is recording the bets, and 
 an eye in the side of his head on the unshaven little 
 man in a broken hat, who is semaphoring signals with 
 his arms, and another in the back of his head on the 
 white flag down the broad course, which will fall at 
 the start. Also, he has got to hear his clients speak 
 over his own voice, to catch the rival bellow of old 
 Jim Jackson who, surely, must know something 
 laying a point more, and to keep the state of his book 
 in his head all the while. A very remarkable man
 
 THE CESAEEWITCH. 295 
 
 is Jones, and if he gets my sovereign and of course 
 he does he deserves it. 
 
 " Off ! " " Unned pound I name the winnah ! " 
 " Fifties Schomberg ! " " Pullin' Watts out of the 
 saddle ! " " Don't be too sure of that, my son " and 
 therewith the two horses come thudding past, and one 
 jockey is waving his whip like a windmill, and Count 
 Schomberg's resolute stride lengthens, but slackens, and 
 that's all over. Say half a minute of fierce excite- 
 ment for a quarter of an hour's deafness, and as much 
 money as you may like to spend on it only, who 
 shall say it is not worth it? 
 
 Now " On the Caesar- witch I'm betting ; win, and 
 one, two, three." We must go over on to the hill 
 to see that. The hill is just about as much a hill as 
 the ditch is a ditch, or the bushes bushes. To the 
 profane eye the hill is a gentle slope, and the ditch a 
 bank, and of the bushes the less said the better; yet 
 they are not the less sacred for that. Gorgeous young 
 men, in boots you might shave in ; ladies in clinging 
 habits; sharp, clean-shaven trainers; breeched and 
 gaitered stable-boys, even sharper -faced than their 
 masters ; members of Parliament, and touts out at the 
 knee, all stand in the keen air and wait. Wait, 
 wait, and wait. You can imagine what is happening 
 at the post the two or three horses who don't mean 
 to wait for anybody ; the long line of brilliant jackets, 
 now advancing, now breaking line and turning back 
 again; the patient starter speaking to the jockeys 
 like a father with " Go back, there," and " Don't trot 
 forward now." Then " Off " again Heaven knows 
 how everybody is silent and solemn in a moment that
 
 296 THE CES ARE WITCH. 
 
 roared so loud before. Then another wait. Then 
 far away a little patch coming nearer only coming 
 nearer slowly. Nearer yet, and now you can see 
 they are a line of horses with a streak of variegated 
 but indistinguishable colour above them. Now you 
 can see them like a charge of cavalry. Not one a 
 foot ahead of another, as it seems. The Eush ! Was 
 not that The Rush drawing out as they were behind 
 the Bushes and into the Dip. A minute, an hour ; 
 are they never coming into sight again ? Then sud- 
 denly they flash up no charge of cavalry now, but 
 streaming into view like a garden of many flowers, all 
 scattered. The fierce yell comes up with them to the 
 thunderous beat of the hoof. " The Rush, The Rush 
 wins ! " But from just behind " The Rush " shoots 
 out something else. A green-and- white sleeve lashing 
 madly, a turquoise-and-fawn body shooting securely 
 ahead of it. " Merman ! Merman ! Merman ! " And 
 that's over. 
 
 The horses are blowing and sobbing as the jockeys 
 slide off down their streaming steaming sides. Little 
 boys with chubby cheeks and little boys with the 
 faces of wizened old men, they take up their tiny 
 saddles and go off to the weighing-room. " Thank 
 you so much ; and I do so hope you backed him," 
 says Mrs Langtry. The Cesarewitch is run, and our 
 real day's work is done. On the Ring has fallen a 
 great silence. Over the thousands of faces, fine-lined 
 or coarse, powdered or pimpled, settles the vague look 
 of abstraction, of calculation. Business is over ; how 
 do we come out ? Thus the little world of racing 
 and its little town in Cambridgeshire has had its
 
 THE CESAREWITCH. 297 
 
 Afridi campaign and its shipbuilding strike. Its bit 
 of history is made for to-day. It walks away ponder- 
 ing over the momentous event, with little disconnected 
 scraps of talk, such as^" 'E come up the 'ill well." 
 Everybody knows who 'e is ; how could anybody be 
 thinking of anybody else ?
 
 298 
 
 TWO HOSPITALS. 
 
 OUT-PATIENTS' DAY. 1 
 
 IN the surgeon's room half underground, half lighted, 
 hardly ventilated, smaller than your drawing-room 
 lounged a couple of dozen students. Sitting on 
 Windsor chairs or standing in the best of the light, 
 patient but listless, half fear, half hope, were about a 
 dozen working men. Along the dun passages leaned 
 half a dozen more ; beyond in the dim waiting-hall, 
 sitting on rows of benches like children in school, 
 were perhaps a couple of hundred people women in 
 fringes and aprons, women with scraggy babies under 
 their shawls, dockers in corduroys, tan-faced sailors, 
 Jew tailors in reach-me-downs, some shepherding pale, 
 bright-eyed children, some shepherding friends who 
 could speak no English. Beyond in the larger, 
 lighter, medical waiting-hall were perhaps twice as 
 many again of the same sort. The place smelt of 
 helplessness in all of its forms, whether ignorance, 
 poverty, or vice, and especially disease. 
 
 1 Daily Mail, June 28, 1898.
 
 TWO HOSPITALS. 299 
 
 It was an afternoon's work of the London Hospital. 
 If you will take a map of London and stick a pin into 
 the site of the hospital, just opposite the Metropolitan 
 Eailway's Whitechapel and Mile -End stations, you 
 will see why it is the rendezvous of misery. West- 
 ward to Aldgate, southward by the docks to the 
 Thames, north and east just as far as you like all 
 round it spreads a wilderness of undistinguished 
 streets. Houses line the streets like peas in a pod ; 
 men and women and children swarm and fester in 
 them like maggots in a pea. There are no ladies and 
 gentlemen: everybody is poor, and must work or 
 starve. The fog and the dirt and the straining work 
 breed diseases most abundantly just in the people who 
 are helpless against them. Then, when they must 
 mend or starve, they come to the London Hospital. 
 
 The surgeon strode in an apparition of great size 
 and strength, strained to its extreme, of a calm keen 
 face, and hands both fine and powerful. In less than 
 one minute he was in his place, the students were in 
 theirs, and among the patients hope began to get the 
 upper hand of fear. From his desk the surgeon took 
 up one of many forms with writing upon it. He read 
 out a name from the top ; a dumpy man stepped into 
 the semicircle and sat down. Instead of looking at 
 him the surgeon began to read the history and symp- 
 toms of his case from the paper. 
 
 Seconds are precious in the London Hospital, and 
 you very soon saw that none is wasted. Yet it 
 occurred to the mind that the surgeon could have 
 come to the point quicker by looking at the man 
 himself. But that would be attending to only one-
 
 300 TWO HOSPITALS. 
 
 half the hospital's work. Out-patients must be 
 relieved ; but also students must be taught. You in 
 Mayfair, or Hampstead, or Clapham, may imagine that 
 the London Hospital is nothing to you. You are 
 callous to a great deal of misery, if you do, and very 
 short-sighted in supposing that half your fellow- 
 citizens can putrefy without rotting the whole ; also, 
 in point of fact, you are very wrong. When you are 
 ill, where does your doctor come from ? He reads his 
 books at Cambridge, maybe ; but where did he see a 
 scalpel ? Where do they make doctors ? Where but 
 in the place which gives most chance of learning dis- 
 eases ? You may pay a couple of guineas in Harley 
 Street whenever you have a headache ; but none the 
 less you, and all of us, have a direct debt to pay to 
 the hospitals which provide healers for rich as well as 
 poor. 
 
 Each patient, therefore, has been tackled by a 
 student, and he had written down his diagnosis. The 
 surgeon read it off, and then, ruling out irrelevancies, 
 recapitulated the four or five important factors. 
 " Whose case ? " " Mine," said a boy in blue serge. 
 " What's your diagnosis ? " The boy answered some- 
 thing I did not understand. The surgeon agreed, but 
 distinguished. Which breed of the particular disease 
 was it ? and why ? The gentleman in question was 
 suffering from a kind of eruption on the chin ; and I 
 gathered that the student rather plunged in his reply, 
 alleging that the patient caught it from his barber's 
 razor. " How do you know that ? " inquired the 
 remorseless man of science. There was not very 
 much doubt in his own mind that the student was
 
 TWO HOSPITALS. 301 
 
 right ; but moral certainty does not do for surgical 
 education. Hairs were plucked out of the offending 
 skin and dipped in liquor potass out of a bottle, and 
 put into the microscope. Meanwhile the next case 
 was called. 
 
 The next case was a man with a cyst behind his 
 ear : being sent away to have it cut out, he expressed 
 a preference for chloroform over laughing-gas, pre- 
 sumably as being the more aristocratic anaesthetic of 
 the two; but laughing-gas was what he got. The 
 next was a docker, who had fallen on to his knee ; 
 the next a leg which required massage. He ought to 
 have got it twice a-day, but the hospital can't afford 
 it, and of course he couldn't afford it himself. Then a 
 gentleman who had got it into his head that he mustn't 
 eat vegetables, and had consequently come out purple 
 over the skin. Then a gentleman who, being told to 
 lead a horse, had preferred to ride it : he had never 
 been across a horse before, and after an hour and a 
 half, and a cropper on the head, was surprised that 
 he went very stiff. Then a foreman from a chemical 
 factory : he had been working with mercury, and his 
 teeth were on the point of falling out of his jaw. 
 
 Then another, and another, and another one done, 
 next come on : a relentless tale of ignorance and labour 
 and drink and vice. You saw the half -innocent sins 
 of twenty years ago come grinning up with their 
 punishment; you saw perky-faced children wincing 
 for the half-remembered debauches of their fathers. 
 It was humiliating to manhood, and yet it was heroic. 
 For in each distress human knowledge and skill 
 fought on undiscouraged against human folly and
 
 302 TWO HOSPITALS. 
 
 weakness. The piercing reek of iodoform, the un- 
 flinching scalpel, the revealing microscope, the steril- 
 ised tube to be examined for bacteria, the ghostly 
 Kontgen photograph in one afternoon you could see 
 every weapon plied incessantly in the heroic unequal 
 combat. 
 
 For the combat is terribly unequal. Fighting 
 disease in the London Hospital is like fighting a 
 big bully in a strait- waistcoat. You saw it plainly 
 when the first batch of patients had been despatched 
 and the second string came in. They were told 
 off one apiece to a student, as before, and every- 
 thing had to be done in the one narrow half-lit 
 room. In a minute it was a jungle of human 
 bodies half-naked men, fathers stripping misshapen 
 children, students dodging under swollen arms and 
 stepping over varicose veins to get at the case 
 they could hardly touch for the crowd and hardly 
 see for the dusk. 
 
 Everything inside makes against good work, as 
 everything outside strives to stifle good results ; yet 
 the good work went on undismayed. Face after 
 face that came in timid and heavy went out light. 
 Out of its cramped poverty the hospital gave freely 
 and kept back nothing. " I haven't come provided," 
 said a lame girl who was ordered to bed. " You 
 don't need to be provided we provide," was the 
 superb reply. 
 
 The evening wound up with a couple of operations. 
 Faithful accounts of operations do not suit all palates, 
 so we will glide over these lightly. A great surgeon 
 operating is like a great general fighting an action.
 
 TWO HOSPITALS. 303 
 
 Staff and guns, infantry and cavalry chloroformist 
 and dressers and nurses each unit in its place, 
 knowing its own work and doing it to the second, 
 all working swiftly and smoothly together to the 
 one end, and the one mind controlling every move- 
 ment. The inanimate-animate body on the wheeled 
 table, the reek of the antiseptics, the clink of the 
 instruments, snatched up or replaced, in the dis- 
 infectant bath, the brief words of command, the 
 hush, the hands that fly to and fro, over and under, 
 conveying the next thing needed, the firm, accurate 
 hand that carves and saws, then covers up and 
 heals, these are the master-marvels of all the 
 hospital's beneficence. A child's knee fresh opened, 
 freed from diseased bone, and then fastened together 
 again in its right shape, for all the world like 
 mending a wooden dolL 
 
 If the disease is a scalding shame to our human 
 nature, the hand and eye and brain that heal 
 are a halo of glory. 
 
 II. 
 
 IN THE THEATRE. 1 
 
 The theatre was full of the piercing smell of 
 iodoform. About its lowest tiers lounged a dozen 
 students. 
 
 On the floor stood a doctor, grey-bearded, motion- 
 less, hands thrust into his overcoat pockets. Every- 
 
 1 Daily Mail, April 9, 1899.
 
 304 TWO HOSPITALS. 
 
 body else on the floor was all strained attention and 
 swift movement the two elder students behind the 
 tables with bright steel instruments in small tanks 
 of water-made antiseptics ; the nurse at the table 
 with the sponges and basins of water some clear, 
 some pink, some scarlet ; the probationer at the sink 
 and tap ; the nursing sisters handing things to the 
 surgeons ; the two surgeons themselves, shirt-sleeved, 
 arms bare to the elbow, covered up in big white 
 aprons. 
 
 Between their swift movements you could see 
 lying on the slab in the centre a human body. Man 
 or woman you could not say, for over the whole face 
 was a large leather cap, and growing out of it a 
 brown bladder like an empty football; the chloro- 
 formist held it tight over mouth and nose. Suddenly 
 the bald-headed surgeon, stepping aside, lets in a 
 glimpse of an amputated arm. 
 
 There hung from it a bunch of what looked like 
 little steel skewers. These were the clips with 
 which they catch up and close the ends of the 
 severed vessels. The arm was off above the elbow, 
 and the second half of the operation was in rapid, 
 almost stealthy, progress. 
 
 You could hardly follow the surgeon's hand as 
 he took a bit of salmon-gut from the watching 
 attendant; before you saw it was whipped round 
 an artery and had tied it up. The clip was off 
 and passed back to the hand waiting to receive 
 it. One after another the clips came back into 
 their tank. Then the surgeon's brisk word of 
 command broke the dead silence : " Hot lotion,"
 
 TWO HOSPITALS. 305 
 
 he said, without looking up. It was there, ready, 
 in the slight sister's hand; in a second, as by 
 jugglery, it was in the surgeon's, and being passed 
 over the wound. Then the flaps of skin were 
 drawn. 
 
 "lodoform" and by another hardly perceptible 
 piece of legerdemain a pepper-castor was shaking 
 yellow powder on the wound. 
 
 "Bandages" and they had sprung up in the 
 sister's hand, and in a second the light-coloured 
 antiseptic dressings were being strapped on hastily, 
 firmly, with exact precision. Now you saw the leather 
 cap was off the face : it was a young beardless man, 
 very pale, rolling his head over on the pillow, with a 
 twitter of returning life, very ill from the ether. 
 
 But before he had tune to realise what had hap- 
 pened the maimed arm was strapped to his side; 
 a door had opened noiselessly, and a bed had trundled 
 in ; the bundle of blankets was lifted swiftly but 
 gently by two attendants catching him up on the 
 same side, so as not to jar the shattered body back 
 on to its bed. In an instant the bed was away and 
 the door was shut. And, looking round, you saw 
 that all the paraphernalia, the tables and instru- 
 ments, sponges and basins, had disappeared too. 
 
 It was like a dream of magic, a fairy-tale of the 
 end of the nineteenth century, to come in from the 
 everyday bustle of London and find such wonders 
 being wrought in the midst of it. The work was so 
 silent, so quick, so self-possessed ; it seemed to move 
 by itself smoothly, infallibly, as if those engaged in it 
 had ceased to be separate men and women. No 
 
 U
 
 306 TWO HOSPITALS. 
 
 hitch, no hesitation, no pause ; everything in its exact 
 place, everything at its exact time. 
 
 Almost before you have had time to wonder, an- 
 other bed has come in by another door. The patient 
 on it is a woman, white-haired, seventy years old. 
 But her face is placid and quite unafraid as she is 
 lifted on to the operating -table ; indeed, there is 
 nothing visible to frighten. But as she is laid down 
 the noiseless miracle begins again. Suddenly the 
 instruments and attendants are all in their places 
 again. The patient is breathing in anodyne insensi- 
 bility from the cup and bladder. The surgeon, tall, 
 grey, bushy-browed, his long hands a model of delicacy 
 linked with strength, is explaining the case to the 
 students : it is cancer, and he has authority to cut it 
 away. It is part of the miracle only by now you 
 have ceased to be surprised that he has finished 
 his explanation exactly at the moment the patient is 
 ready for him. He steps up to the body, gives a 
 keen glance at the stain on the arm, touches it. 
 " Scalpel," he says, without looking up, and the keen 
 blade is instantly in his hand. 
 
 His hand is travelling over the arm but surely 
 not cutting ? The flesh seems to divide before it, so 
 exquisitely edged is the knife, so firm and true the 
 fingers and wrist. Little streams suddenly well up 
 and trickle down the arm. " Sponge," and a sponge 
 has appeared and swept them away. " Clip," and a 
 clip has glided from its tank, and has stopped the cut 
 vein. Gradually it is only seconds, but they are 
 packed with the interest of hours there grows a 
 deep red gash behind the ever-moving scalpel. It
 
 TWO HOSPITALS. 307 
 
 moves a shade more slowly now; it is picking its 
 way among arteries, and a hair's -breadth to left or 
 right may mean death. No sound but the sharp 
 orders and the perpetual gush of water from the tap 
 where the probationer is emptying the reddened 
 water and refilling the bowl for the clean sponges. 
 There remains the crimson chasm fringed with clips. 
 Now comes what we have seen before : the clips 
 come off one by one as the blood-vessels are tied up ; 
 the lotion washes all clean ; the gash, which looked as 
 if half the arm had been cut out, closes up to a 
 natural form and size. And as that dimly waking 
 woman is whisked away, the surgeon, calling for a 
 basin, and passing it round, resumes his remarks on 
 cancer. 
 
 The next case is cancer too, only it is cancer 
 in the mouth and jaw. Cheek and jaw are to be 
 cut away : to keep the man alive yet insensible 
 the while, he must have chloroformed air pumped 
 into his lungs. The chloroformist has got a long 
 tube with a bladder at the end. The sponges in 
 this case are small, and held on long clips. He 
 is an obscene-looking old man, his face dyed with 
 drink, and two front teeth gone. As he is strapped 
 down, the sweet sticky smell of chloroform begins 
 to conquer the iodoform ; it is being sprinkled 
 on to the cloth over his face. As it gets hold 
 of him he starts muttering in a thick drunken 
 tone, then struggles, and tries to sit up, while 
 the mutter swells into a half - articulate curse. 
 But now he is ready, and " Scalpel," calls the 
 surgeon. He bends over, and you see the blade
 
 308 TWO HOSPITALS. 
 
 gleam. Again it is not like cutting. The man 
 is sobbing and moaning now, his cries rising and 
 falling as if with the violence of the pain, though 
 he cannot really feel anything. 
 
 As the moan rises louder to a muffled yell, the 
 surgeon pauses to let the chloroformed cloth lie 
 over the mouth for a moment ; then comes the 
 time to cut the bone. The long keen saw is so 
 fine that but for the grinding of the bone you 
 might have thought it a simple steel rod. 
 
 Everybody is working now for the man's life ; 
 the lithe swiftness of movement is almost dazzling. 
 Left hands and right hands seem each to be think- 
 ing for themselves ; the sponges are handed with 
 breathless haste : the sister slips them in, now over 
 a shoulder, now under an arm, to the ready hand 
 that must not wait half a second ; surgeon, assistant, 
 and chloroformist, whoever has a hand to spare, nips 
 up the sponge and plunges it down the subject's 
 throat. Then the shining shears plunge in too and 
 grip the bone ; the veins stand out on the surgeon's 
 hands as he forces the sharp blades together with 
 every ounce of his strength. Crack from some- 
 where inside. 
 
 Then another grip, another wrench, another crack ; 
 "Basin" and the lump of bone conies away. It 
 is over now ; the clips sticking up out of the throat 
 disappear one by one. Then the deft healing hand 
 closes the wound, and the face is a face again. 
 
 You go out dazed quite lost in wonder and 
 admiration. You did not expect to see your fellows 
 cut up alive with excitement and enthusiasm. Yet
 
 TWO HOSPITALS. 309 
 
 enthusiasm it is. If what you have seen did no 
 possible good to anybody, it would still be unspeak- 
 ably noble as the highest exercise of human science 
 and handicraft. Being also the life-saving it is, how 
 can any adjective say enough to praise it ? You 
 can only repeat, " A miracle, a miracle," and wonder 
 whether it looks more diabolical or angelic 
 diabolical in its superhuman accomplishment, angelic 
 in its superhuman beneficence.
 
 311 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 FKOM THE 'LADYSMITH LYEE.' 
 
 EDITORIAL NOTE. 
 
 THE following extracts from the 'Ladysmith Lyre,' that 
 pathetic trophy of indomitable cheerfulness, have been 
 included by the desire of many friends. The interest 
 of them is personal, since they are of the last words which 
 George Steevens wrote, and one of character, the circum- 
 stances of their writing considered, and it is thought that 
 for such a reason, over and above their intrinsic merit, 
 their inclusion will be welcomed. 
 
 THE WAE OF KINGS. 
 
 Mahabir Thapa is an expert in war. From his 
 infancy he has engaged in the destruction of man- 
 kind. At his mother's breast he strangled his twin 
 brother. Before he tramped down to Gorakhpur to 
 enlist as a " rifleman " of the Kampani Bahadur he
 
 312 APPENDIX. 
 
 had survived four divorce cases ; and every one 
 knows a Gurkha co-respondent must be well versed 
 in war thus to clear his character. I first saw 
 Mahabir in the Swat Valley. He was a little scrap 
 of a Havildar in the IV. Gurkhas, and was standing 
 outside his colonel's tent picking the beard hairs out 
 of a ghastly trophy in heads. On the previous 
 evening the colonel had offered three rupees to the 
 man who would effectually silence a " sniper " who 
 had pitched Martini bullets into the camp with 
 persistent monotony. Mahabir had earned the three 
 rupees, and had brought in the Pathan's head as a 
 proof of good faith. The next time that he tumbled 
 across my path, I found him a smartly turned out 
 Jemadar attached to the Gurkha scouts. In this 
 service he had ample opportunity of improving his 
 knowledge of war. Therefore, when to my surprise 
 I found him in Ladysmith, masquerading as a dooley- 
 bearer, I appealed to him for an expert opinion. 
 
 " What do you think of it, Sirdar ? " 
 
 " Sahib, I have seen many wars, but this is before 
 all wars this is the war of kings. Cannon on this 
 side, cannon on that side, was there ever such a war ? 
 Surely this is Badshai ke larai." 
 
 " Come along, Sirdar, come to my room and we 
 will talk it all over." 
 
 I took him to my quarters and placed a Mauser 
 carbine and a brandy in his hands. 
 
 " What do you think of this, Sirdar ? " He turned 
 the weapon over half-a-dozen times, tried the breech 
 action, pressed down the magazine spring, and then 
 threw the rifle on the bed. " Sahib, it is good, but
 
 APPENDIX. 313 
 
 the war is bad. This war is like a shikar party 
 given by Jung Bahadur, a State shikar party. Here 
 are elephants, armies of beaters, tents, food in plenty, 
 music, fireworks, and nautches ; but no kills, except 
 such game as the keepers had orders to slay over- 
 night and had strewn in the path of the elephants, 
 that the guests might be pleased. Even as this is 
 this war. It is the war of kings, not of men. When 
 men go forth to war, or sport, they gird up their 
 loins, pack food on their backs, and make no noise. 
 The less noise the more war." 
 
 " Then do you approve of this show ? " 
 
 " Sahib, it is magnificent, a great game ; men watch 
 for the smoke of the guns, then run into holes and 
 laugh and clap their hands. There they sit in 
 safety, counting the loss and gain with a thousand 
 rupees in the mouth of each gun. Why spend this 
 money and do no good ? If we run to holes, will 
 not the dushman do likewise, will he not laugh and 
 also clap his hands ? For one hundred rupees will a 
 Gurkha serve the Sirkar for a year. If you had the 
 services of one Gurkha for one year for every round 
 that you have fired during the last month, you would 
 now stand possessed of every gun in the world. 
 With Lucas Sahib, and Bruce Sahib, and fifty men 
 from my pultan, the General Sahib would in one 
 week have in his verandah such a pile of breech- 
 blocks that the doors would not open, and we should 
 have painted them all red to prevent rust." 
 
 " But this is a white man's war." 
 
 Mahabir Thapa put down his glass slowly. His 
 eyes clearly said, " Thank God for that ! " but his
 
 314 APPENDIX. 
 
 answer was, " I cannot understand ; it is the war of 
 kings, I am but a man." 
 
 How could he understand ? What did he know 
 of Staff College strategy and modern tactics ? Mili- 
 tary history, depression range-finders, telescopic sights, 
 and chess-board calculations meant nothing to the 
 man who, given half a company of little heathens in 
 grass shoes, was prepared to dismantle the whole of 
 the artillery of the South African Eepublics. 
 
 27th November 1899. 
 
 AN INTERCEPTED LETTER. 
 
 The following letter was discovered the other 
 day amongst the bags which were sent back to us, 
 not having succeeded in getting through the Boer 
 lines : 
 
 To Mr SMITH, Esq., Collector Sahib, Mozuffernugger, 
 N. W.P., India. 
 
 Nov. 10, 1899. 
 
 MOST HONOURED SIR, Your humble servant begs 
 to inquire after your egregious and illustrious health. 
 And as above poor petitioner wishes to bring this 
 my humble petition for kind consideration of above. 
 Since after subsequent many days arrival in this 
 place called Lady Smith, undersigned being loyal 
 subject but of timid nature, has suffered cannon-balls, 
 and many long toms for these many days, and since
 
 APPENDIX. 315 
 
 few days have suffered sickness with pains and 
 spasms. 
 
 Sir, I am not military soldier, and am in constant 
 terror of balls as above. Undersigned would there- 
 fore pray that your most noble opulence would bring 
 kind consideration to bear, and bring relief on your 
 honour's most humble and beseeching petitioner, as 
 since many days I am hiding in hole, and dare not 
 make exit from same. Please to give order that I 
 return to your honour's service without delay, for 
 which act of kindness grovelling petitioner will ever 
 pray, as in duty bound, for your honour's long life 
 and prosperity. Ever your most humble and obedient 
 servant, SHEO NARAIN DAS, Baboo. 
 
 Wth November 1899. 
 
 THE EELIEF OF LADYSMITH. 
 
 Reprinted from the ' Times ' of December 5th, 2099. 
 A WONDERFUL DISCOVERY. 
 
 The eminent German archaeologist, DrPoompschiffer, 
 has recently contributed to science the most interest- 
 ing discovery of the century. It will be remembered 
 that the learned professor started in the spring on a 
 tour of exploration among the buried cities of Natal. 
 When last heard of, in October, he had excavated the 
 remains of Maritzburg and Estcourt, and was cutting 
 his way through the dense primeval forests on the
 
 316 APPENDIX. 
 
 banks of the Tugela. By cable yesterday came in- 
 telligence of even more sensational finds. Briefly, Dr 
 Poompschiffer has rediscovered the forgotten town of 
 Ladysmith. Crossing the Tugela, the intrepid ex- 
 plorer pushed northward. The dense bush restricted 
 his progress to three miles a-day. On the third day 
 Poompschiffer noticed strange booming sounds fre- 
 quently repeated ; none of his party could guess what 
 they were, and curiosity ran high. On the sixth day 
 the mystery was explained. The party came suddenly 
 upon a group of what were at first taken for a species 
 of extinct reptile, but which the profound learning of 
 Poompschiffer enabled him to recognise as 
 
 THE LAST SUEVIVALS OF THE PREHISTOEIC BOERS. 
 
 Their appearance was almost terrifying. They were 
 all extremely old. Their white beards had grown till 
 they trailed beneath their feet, and it was the custom 
 of the field-cornets to knee-halter each man at night 
 with his own beard to prevent him from running 
 away. Their clothes had fallen to pieces with age, 
 but a thick and impenetrable coating of dust and 
 melinite kept them warm. Their occupation was as 
 quaint as their appearance. They were firing obsolete 
 machines, conjectured to be the cannon of the 
 ancients, in the direction of a heap of cactus-grown 
 ruins. That heap of ruins was the fabled fortress of 
 Ladysmith. 
 
 Students of history will remember the Boer war of 
 1899, from which public attention was distracted by 
 the great War Office strike. The learned will also 
 remember at a later period, after the closing of that
 
 APPENDIX. 317 
 
 office, the controversy in our columns on the question 
 whether Ladysmith existed or not, which the general 
 voice of experts finally decided in the negative. It 
 is now proved that so-called savants of that rude age 
 were mistaken. Not only did Ladysmith exist, not 
 only was it besieged, but up to the day before 
 yesterday 
 
 THE SIEGE OF LADYSMITH WAS STILL GOING ON. 
 
 The site of the town at first appeared uninhabited. 
 But when Poompschiffer commenced excavating he 
 came, to his amazement, upon signs of old workings 
 at a depth of only a few feet below the surface. 
 For an instant, he tells us, he thought some other 
 antiquarian had been before him. Next moment 
 some creature blundered along the tunnel into his 
 very arms. It was secured and brought into the 
 light. It was the last inhabitant of Ladysmith. 
 
 It was apparently one of the children born since 
 the beginning of the siege, and was about a hundred 
 years old. From living in underground holes it was 
 bent double, and quite blind. It appeared unable to 
 speak, only repeating constantly, in a crooning voice, 
 the syllables, " Weeskee, weeskee," which Poomp- 
 schiffer was unable to translate. The professor was 
 anxious to secure this unique specimen for the Kaiser 
 William Museum of Antiquities, at Berlin. But the 
 moment it was removed from Ladysmith it began to 
 pine away. Having never known any state of life 
 but bombardment, it was terrified by the absence of 
 artillery-fire. Time after time it attempted to escape 
 to its native shells. Poompschiffer endeavoured to
 
 318 APPENDIX. 
 
 maintain life by artificial bombardment, letting of 
 crackers in its ear, and pelting it with large stones. 
 But all was in vain : the extraordinary creature was 
 not deceived, and in a few hours, with a last despair- 
 ing wail of " Weeskee," it expired through sheer 
 terror at the safety of its surroundings. 
 
 5th December 1899. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND .SON'S.
 
 A 000 675 724 9