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Title: Things That Have Interested Me. Second Series.
Author: Bennett, Enoch Arnold (1867-1931)
Date of first publication: 1923
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Chatto & Windus, 1923
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 25 September 2011
Date last updated: 25 September 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #858

This ebook was produced by:
Iona Vaughan, woodie4, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
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available by the Internet Archive/University of Toronto
- Robarts Library






    THINGS THAT HAVE
    INTERESTED ME

    Second Series


    WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR


    _NOVELS_

    A MAN FROM THE NORTH
    ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS
    LEONORA
    A GREAT MAN
    SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
    WHOM GOD HATH JOINED
    BURIED ALIVE
    THE OLD WIVES' TALE
    THE GLIMPSE
    THE PRICE OF LOVE
    HELEN WITH THE HIGH HAND
    THE CARD
    THESE TWAIN
    THE REGENT
    THE ROLL-CALL
    THE LION'S SHARE
    THE PRETTY LADY
    CLAYHANGER
    MR. PROHACK
    HILDA LESSWAYS
    LILIAN

    _FANTASIAS_

    THE GHOST
    THE GATES OF WRATH
    THE GRAND BABYLON HOTEL
    TERESA OF WATLING STREET
    THE LOOT OF CITIES
    HUGO
    THE CITY OF PLEASURE

    _SHORT STORIES_

    TALES OF THE FIVE TOWNS
    THE GRIM SMILE OF THE FIVE TOWNS
    THE MATADOR OF THE FIVE TOWNS

    _BELLES-LETTRES_

    JOURNALISM FOR WOMEN
    FAME AND FICTION
    HOW TO BECOME AN AUTHOR
    THE TRUTH ABOUT AN AUTHOR
    MENTAL EFFICIENCY
    HOW TO LIVE ON TWENTY-FOUR HOURS A DAY
    THE HUMAN MACHINE
    LITERARY TASTE
    FRIENDSHIP AND HAPPINESS
    THOSE UNITED STATES
    PARIS NIGHTS
    LIBERTY
    OVER THERE: WAR SCENES
    BOOKS AND PERSONS
    MARRIED LIFE
    THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT
    SELF AND SELF-MANAGEMENT
    FROM THE LOG OF THE "VELSA"
    OUR WOMEN
    THINGS THAT HAVE INTERESTED ME.

    _DRAMA_

    POLITE FARCES
    CUPID AND COMMON SENSE
    WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS
    THE HONEYMOON
    THE TITLE
    THE GREAT ADVENTURE
    JUDITH
    SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
    THE LOVE MATCH
    BODY AND SOUL
    MILESTONES (In Collaboration with Edward Knoblock)

    _In Collaboration with Eden Phillpotts_

    THE SINEWS OF WAR: A ROMANCE
    THE STATUE: A ROMANCE



    THINGS THAT HAVE
    INTERESTED ME

    BY
    ARNOLD BENNETT


    SECOND SERIES


    LONDON
    CHATTO & WINDUS
    1923



    PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
    MORRISON & GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH

    ALL RIGHTS
    RESERVED




                         CONTENTS


                                                PAGE

    W. H. R. RIVERS: SOME RECOLLECTIONS            1

    AN INCREDIBLE STORY                            8

    GREEK PLAY AT CAMBRIDGE                       10

    SECRET TRIALS                                 17

    THEATRE MANAGERS                              19

    THEATRE FINANCE                               22

    ACTORS AND ACTRESSES                          25

    PLAYWRIGHTS                                   29

    DRAMATIC CRITICS                              32

    _THE_ DRAMATIC CRITIC                         35

    THE THEATRE PUBLIC                            43

    ILL-HEALTH                                    46

    LUXURY AND THE LAW                            55

    ATTIRE                                        57

    CHARLES GARVICE AND THE HIGHBROWS             69

    PREACHING GOD                                 74

    TOURIST IN PORTUGAL                           77

    BEFORE THE RAILWAY STRIKE                    107

    DANCING                                      109

    GUILTY TILL PROVED INNOCENT                  119

    CIVILISING PRISONS                           122

    HOW GIRLS REGARD MARRIAGE                    125

    SEX-RIVALRY                                  135

    SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE THEATRE             146

    GIRLS ON THE PIER                            149

    STRANGE THINGS SEEN AT GUERNSEY              152

    MANSLAUGHTER BY SHIPPING DIRECTORS           154

    PRESENT STATE OF GAMES                       157

    ADVICE TO THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER    167

    TEACHING AND LEARNING HISTORY                170

    THE FOURTH ARMISTICE DAY                     181

    A CHAMBER CONCERT                            185

    JAMES JOYCE'S _ULYSSES_                      191

    WATCHING FOOTBALL                            202

    WHITSUNTIDE                                  204

    BRITISH OPERATIC PERFORMANCES                206

    EGOTISM:--
        THE SOCIAL BUTTERFLY                     216
        TEA ON THE STAGE                         220
        REVIEWERS                                224
        AUTOBIOGRAPHY                            226

    UNKNOWN SOUTHERN FRANCE                      229




THINGS THAT HAVE INTERESTED ME




W. H. R. RIVERS: SOME RECOLLECTIONS[1]


IT was Siegfried Sassoon who introduced me to this really great swell.
He said solemnly: "You _must_ know him. You'll like him." Other young
men spoke of Rivers in the same tone. He was a hero of the first order
to many. So we met at the Reform Club.

A man of insignificant aspect, small, with a reddish nose indicating an
imperfect ability to deal with his waste products. A quiet voice.
Capable of silences without self-consciousness. The result of this first
meeting was negative--as indeed was quite right. Sound friendships
rarely begin with violence. I can remember nothing that he said. I
noticed only his simple, deep modesty, and that he ate little and drank
water, and didn't smoke. My one indictment of Rivers is on the score of
his nourishment. I always begin by mistrusting a man who does not enjoy
eating and drinking. I recall that once I got him to drink half a glass
of claret and actually to smoke a cigarette. The next day I tried again.
"No," he said, "I don't think I'll indulge to-day. I went the pace
yesterday."

Then I went to stay with him once or twice amid the fantastically ugly
neo-Gothic architecture in the back part of St. John's College,
Cambridge, where you lie awake at nights listening to the tinny strokes
of multitudinous and absurd public clocks. I saw his bedroom one night.
It was very Spartan. The study was large and of agreeable aspect; but he
had no genuine interest in domestic comfort, though his ideas about tea
were laudable. His study was like a market square. Undergraduates came
into it at nearly all hours to discuss the intellectual news of the day.
They came for breakfast, but I think that from ten to one he would not
have them. During these hours he used his type-writer.

His manner to young seekers after wisdom, and to young men who were
prepared to teach him a thing or two, was divine. I have sat aside on
the sofa and listened to dozens of these interviews. They were touching,
in the eager crudity of the visitors, the mature, suave, wide-sweeping
sagacity and experiences of the Director of Studies, and the fallacious
but charming equality which the elder established and maintained between
the two.

On Saturday nights a discussing society, called the "Socratics," met in
his study. I only attended one meeting and it was not a regular,
official meeting. I suspect that it was got up for my benefit. In part
the proceedings were right over my head, and in part beneath my feet. I
have seldom heard wilder intoxicating nonsense talked, and I have never
heard more sweet and skilful wisdom from a chairman, nor a more
Machiavellian apologetics for the sacred cause of common sense.

Being entirely ignorant of University life, I saw all that Rivers showed
me with fresh eyes, and I used to criticise with perhaps undue freedom.
The reception of my hasty animadversions by a swell of such dimensions
was astounding in its forbearance; on the other hand, my enthusiasm for
some of the new instructional methods gave a nave satisfaction to this
great man.

I did not really get to know Rivers till he came on board my yacht for a
three weeks' cruise. I had gravely warned him that only indiarubber
soles were allowed on my decks--in all other respects he might dress
like a Marquesan islander for all I cared. When I met him on the pier at
Southampton, lo! he was already wearing tennis shoes. Staggered by this
excess of zeal, I said: "You don't mean to say you've travelled down in
those!" "No," he said, "but I put them at the top of my bag, and changed
in the taxi."

I said to myself: "This man _is_ a great traveller."

In the first hour on the yacht he proved that he knew perfectly how to
adapt himself to an environment. At intervals he would mention some of
the devices he employed on his extraordinary travels in the ends of the
earth. He must have been through severe privations. But then, to my
mind, all his life was a privation--or rather a subordination of
everything else to his main purpose. He was a finished adept in the art,
which few men of genius or talent acquire in a high degree, of
organising his resources and retaining a true perspective.

It was my custom on the yacht to have my morning tea in the deck-house
at six-thirty, alone. After a day or two I found him carrying his tea
upstairs to join me. He had not suspected that this was my hour for
organising my day's work, and that I desired the society of nobody on
earth until nine o'clock. I saw that I must make the supreme sacrifice.
My virtue of a host was mightily rewarded. Those talks, which occurred
every morning, constituted the most truly educational experience I have
ever had. Rivers seemed to know something about everything and a lot
about nearly everything. If you wanted the name of the unsuccessful
candidate at a by-election at Stockport in 1899, he would tell you. But
it was less his universal knowledge that impressed me than his lovely
gift of co-ordinating apparently unrelated facts. And it was less his
gift of co-ordination that impressed me than the beauty, comeliness, and
justness of his general attitude towards life.

Also refreshing was the complete absence of conventional replies in his
conversation. I said to him: "What infuriates me in you savants is that
you do _know_. You have exact knowledge. A novelist is condemned to
_know_ nothing about anything." Most people would have replied
deprecating such self-abasement and assuring you that really you knew a
devil of a lot. Rivers said simply: "Yes, I quite see it's inevitable."

I cannot remember many of his judgments. He criticised Freud freely, but
always insisted that he was a great man. On the new Nancy school he was
rather cautious; but he mistrusted it. He would say, with an
indescribable mild causticity: "I bet you some of those fellows are
suggesting things to themselves all day." I broke out once into
ferocious strictures upon the confused unreadableness of the final
edition of _The Golden Bough_. To my surprise he agreed in the main, but
he would not quite admit that it was a skyscraper built on a
supposition. He said the first edition did contain a comprehensible
something.

He was thrilling on the subject of the self-protective nature of
shell-shock and kindred disorders. A doctor of medicine, he had little
belief in current therapeutics. He said, apropos of a recent
indisposition: "I thought I'd better call in the magician, and he
prescribed something or other. Anyhow, I got better." (All civilised
society was a sort of South Sea island to him.) He had a fine, kindly
wit, which he used sparingly. He would not say to me: "When's your next
novel coming out?" He would say: "When shall we have your next text-book
of psychology?"

He read enormously throughout the cruise, assimilating big book after
big book, and estimating them as he went on. Once he was sea-sick. He
just obeyed the tyrannic command and returned to his seat and went on
reading. He could read for hours without getting fidgety.

He only failed on one occasion to realise my conception of his
imaginative vigour. We went ashore at Torquay, and, contrary to
discipline, he left the porthole of his cabin open. A south-west wind
arose and kicked up a sudden sea in two minutes, as it will in Tor Bay,
and when we got back the bed was soaked through and his dress-clothes
also. I supported with fortitude the damage to his dress-clothes, but a
bed soaked in salt water can never be used again. Yet the fortitude with
which I supported his infelicity was as nothing to the fortitude with
which he supported mine. "I have a spare bed on board," I said. "Oh," he
said nonchalantly, "that's fortunate!" His imagination had failed to
show him that he had been very naughty. As a fact he had little use for
beds except as a _locus_ for early morning reflection upon psychological
theories.

I thought at first that he had almost no interest in women. But once,
when I expressed the view that the segregation of the sexes in
University life was a dreadful thing, and that the professed disdainful
attitude of undergraduates towards girls was equally deplorable, he
surprised me by the candour and warmth of his concurrence. He said the
difficulty was to find a way out. He had never been able to think of a
way out. He agreed that he himself didn't see enough of women. I said I
would give a dance on board for him to look at. It took place on a
heavenly evening in the Solent, with a marvellous sunset and the sea as
flat as a page of Clement Shorter and as beautiful as a poem by Ralph
Hodgson. The young women came off with their cavaliers in canoes and
boats. He was fascinated. He said it was something quite strange to
him--in Europe. The young women mistook him for a nonentity. Not one of
them had ever heard of him. He enjoyed that. The next morning his
remarks on the social phenomenon were pricelessly Marquesan. This was
the last real talk I had with him.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Such was the obscurity of this great man that when these
recollections of him were printed in _The New Statesman_, the editor
deemed it prudent to append a footnote explaining who W. H. R. Rivers
was!




AN INCREDIBLE STORY


THIS was in a small provincial town where I spent the week-end. There
are hundreds of such towns. A beautiful summer afternoon; gentle sun;
gentle breeze; beautiful green country around; as good an imitation of
summer as you can get in the climate which the Pilgrim Fathers left.

I walked a few hundred yards out of the town; and I saw a
football-ground, all complete with goal-posts and miniature grand-stand.
It was deserted--of course. But side by side with the football-ground
was a cricket-ground, all complete with smooth pitch and miniature
pavilion. And the cricket-ground also was deserted. And side by side
with the cricket-ground were tennis-courts, all complete with nets and
lines. And the tennis-courts also were deserted. And side by side with
the tennis-courts was a bowling-green. And the bowling-green also was
deserted.

And the day was the one whole day of the week when the population
devoted itself to repose and distraction from work. And quite half the
population--girls in bright frocks and men with fine neckties--was afoot
in the dusty roads, strolling aimlessly from nowhere to nowhere,
wondering how long it would be to suppertime, and passing and re-passing
the deserted cricket-ground and the deserted tennis-courts and the
deserted bowling-green.

And with a few exceptions the visible population was visibly stricken
with a malady known as boredom. The exceptions sat in modest corners
under hedges, and, in pairs, held one another by the waist or by the
neck or by the hand.

You see, the grounds and courts and green had been produced with public
money. And the population had put the entire management of its public
affairs into the hands of a small group of persons whom it had freely
elected by secret ballot. This small group genuinely represented the
population; and on behalf of the population it had decided and ordained
that the health-giving and amusement-giving grounds, courts, and green
should not be used on the one day of the week when the population was
entirely free to use them.

I walked perhaps a mile farther on, and I beheld dozens of individuals,
chiefly belonging to the class which manages the public affairs of
populations; and, on superb rolling downs, with lovely glimpses of the
sea to give variety to the landscape, they were all enthusiastically
playing golf.

No one will believe this astounding story. But it is true.




GREEK PLAY AT CAMBRIDGE


THE unlearned, such as myself, are generally surprised that an ancient
and historic university town, such as Cambridge, playing its part well
in the great world-drama of the increasing of knowledge, should be
provincial. They have an idea that Cambridge ought somehow to resemble a
section of central London flourishing in a marsh. But Cambridge is
provincial, and must be inhabited, in term time as in vacation, mainly
by people whose complacent and attractive provinciality has never been
seriously disturbed by contact with a metropolis.

The physical life lived by the inhabitants of Cambridge, and
particularly by members of the University, amazes the visitor. The
climate is merely infernal. Some of the primary domestic dispositions
are still barbaric. The streets are dangerous to anybody who does not
happen to be an athlete or an acrobat. Select and recondite diversions
are advertised across the thoroughfares in a way which would befit the
galas of the Ancient Order of Rechabites in the industrial north. The
explorer may discover reunions of tremendous scholars and educationists
deciphering green-tinted newspapers by the aid of candles because they
perceive something offensively modern in electric light. The
anti-feminist bias is rampant and proud of itself. Manners are hearty,
and much resemble those of the Five Towns. "Mind your toes!" cry loudly
and cheerfully and callously the late-comers as they crush past you
between two rows of stalls in a theatre. And so on. It is curious that
in this morally bracing provincial environment there should occur one of
the most remarkable examples of perfect and total artistic decadence
that England can show. I refer to the performance of "the Greek play."

Of course, the institution of the Greek play can be, and should be,
considered with due regard to the principle of relativity. So
considered, it is, at any rate in its latest manifestation, rather more
than respectable. The mere enterprise is enormous; no spectator not
professionally connected with the stage can realise how enormous it is
and how well the producers have succeeded. Seeing that my notions of
Greek literature are limited to the conviction that Plato is a damned
unequal author, and that Professor Gilbert Murray's graceful
transmogrifications of Euripides are most ingeniously un-Greek, I would
not presume to criticise the _Oresteia_ of schylus. I came to it with a
mind unimpaired by knowledge, and found that its story is very fine, and
full of admirable material either for a Russian ballet or a Famous
Players-Lasky film. I also found in it, to my astonishment, the too pure
milk of the word of reprisals. I feel sure that if Cambridge were under
martial law, and Sir Hamar Greenwood had had leisure, the entire chorus
would have been slaughtered on the ground that they were in the vicinity
of the scenes of the crimes.

The play was under-acted. Such timid acting as obtained was necessarily
amateurish, but it achieved consistency and dignity; strangely enough,
it was most successful in the women's rles--Clytemnestra, Electra,
Cassandra. (In this connection I should mention that I addressed a
programme-girl in fancy-dress in those deferential tones which one
employs towards a society woman who is graciously helping a charity
matine, and not until some minutes after I had bought the programme did
I comprehend that I had handed a shilling to a fellow-man.) The music
was good and well played, and it was accurately synchronised with the
action. The scenery and costumes surpassed the creditable. The choruses
were magnificent. They were not professional, but out of sight better
than professional, and their work constituted a triumph for Dr. Wood and
Mr. Ord. If, as I am informed, Mr. J. T. Sheppard was the supreme
adapter, energiser, autocrat, and panjandrum of the affair, he deserves
the warmest congratulations. He did not produce simply a drama; he
produced an artistic ensemble--which is a rarity. The effort was
colossal; the vision, the diplomacy, the industry that must have gone
to it were remarkable, and the final result, allowing for the raw
material of it, was in a high degree laudable. So much for the Greek
play in its relativity.

       *       *       *       *       *

But it is far more important to consider the show absolutely. Doubtless
the _Oresteia_ is a masterpiece. Doubtless it is one of the chief
masterpieces of occidental antiquity. Doubtless there are sound
historical reasons why it should bulk so large in our general view of
dramatic literature. But that it should be given with so much solemnity,
and at such expense of wit and work, in a leading university, is not to
my mind a demonstration of taste. To say that it is performed in Greek
is to play with words. It is performed in a spoken medium which a tiny
majority of persons residing on a small island lying off the western
coasts of Europe have agreed among themselves shall be called Greek.
Nobody not brought up at an English public school could even seize the
mere words, and of the people brought up at English public schools
probably not more than .01 (likelier .001) per cent. could seize the
mere words. If schylus himself could have sat in the New Theatre,
Cambridge, he would hardly have guessed that his own work was being
performed. The Vice-Chancellor would have had to break it to him
gently. The sounds of the words were not Greek, the timbre of the voices
was not Greek, nor the emphasis, nor the intonations, nor the vocal rise
and fall of the sentences. They could not have been.

As for the beauty and grandeur of the content and of the style, the
word-associations which are so intimately and subtly an ingredient of
style, the psychological springs of the conduct of the characters, the
ideals animating the characters, the attitude of the author towards his
antique subject--all these things must escape all but the most minute
minority of even the most carefully picked audience. The plays are not
performed either in the Greek way or in the Greek spirit, and no
pretence is made that they are so performed. They could not possibly be
so performed. As for the scenery and costumes, what would schylus have
thought of them?

       *       *       *       *       *

Nine performances were given of the _Oresteia_. I do not suppose that in
all there were nine spectators possessing at once the erudition and the
terrific force of imagination necessary to see in, or to see "into," the
show the qualities which the ancient Greeks saw in the work as
originally performed. A few more persons would, by dint of
auto-suggestion, persuade themselves that they saw Greek beauty in the
performances. For the rest of the pleased spectators, in so far as they
saw anything but a circus, they were the willing victims of a vast
hetero-suggestion of beauty. They got something, some conception of the
rude curves of the heroical story, but nothing at all commensurate with
the mental and physical cost of the production.

If the Greek play is the expensive hobby of an ardent _cnacle_, well
and good. I like expensive hobbies. If it is a link with the
pre-electric past, well and good. If it strengthens the cohesiveness of
the social organism, well and good. But as a form of artistic activity
it must be judged to be of the last futile decadence, and it denotes a
decadence of taste on the part of all concerned. The spirit of Aubrey
Beardsley was robust and ingenuous sanity compared with the spirit which
renders possible the presentation of this immense archological fantasia
calling itself Greek.

You come out wondering whether the united ingenuity of a university
could not indeed devise something both more educative and more diverting
than the Greek play, something less of a _blague_ and of a
mystification. The streets of Cambridge seem curiously sane and sound to
you. And in the streets there are mighty and peculiar souls that
schylus would have handled had he had the sense to be born into an age
of electric light.

"Who in the name of Zeus can that be?" one innocently inquires.

And the crushing response comes:

"J. J."

Right perspective is resumed. Before that legendary figure the Greek
play dwindles to a storm in a tea-cup.




SECRET TRIALS


A LAD and a girl, aged now seventeen and nineteen, committed a crime
some time ago and were sentenced at Leeds to twelve and fifteen months
hard labour. The case was not reported, and nothing would have been
heard of it if the criminals had not appealed, and if the Lord Chief
Justice had not had the sagacity to stretch the law and allow the
reporters (though not the public) to stay in court while the appeal was
heard.

For the criminals were brother and sister; their crime was incest; and,
according to the law, incest trials must be heard _in camera_; that is,
they must be hushed up. Why incest trials should be hushed up while
sodomy trials and the most sordid divorce trials may be reported in
full, I do not know. But I know that judges themselves object to the
hushing up of incest trials and wish the ridiculous law altered.

It ought to be altered. The public (like women-jurors) should be ready
to face unsavoury facts. In any case I would sooner the public be
outraged than kept in ignorance. Secrecy always promotes injustice,
oppression, abuses. In the present instance the lad and the girl did
undoubtedly commit a crime against society. But that they realised the
seriousness of the crime I cannot believe; the Bench admitted that they
had been the victims of vile housing conditions, and deserved pity.

Monstrous, iniquitous, and shameful it was that these immature and
ignorant young people should be sentenced to the horrors of hard labour,
and thereby no doubt ruined for life, because they yielded to a moment's
temptation--temptation to which they ought never to have been exposed,
temptation for which society itself is to blame. The Appeal Court
reduced the sentence to six months without hard labour. It would have
been nobler to set the prisoners free.

A philosopher once said: "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." I
will add: "The price of justice is eternal publicity."




THEATRE MANAGERS


IN making a play the chief person is the author (though not all
producers think so); but the play is only one ingredient of the theatre,
and therefore the theatrical manager is the chief person in the sublime
institution of the stage. Probably nobody but Sir Hall Caine would
dispute this statement.

There are several kinds of manager. There is the favourite of the
public, who suddenly takes it into his (or her) head--a head swollen by
innumerable nights of modesty-destroying, open applause--that to be
under a manager is beneath his dignity. He gets a theatre and two
thousand rose-coloured paragraphs of gossip; he issues a programme of
brilliant intentions that could not be executed in a dozen years. And in
about six months (or less), through the fault of everybody but himself,
he is compelled by circumstances to retire from management.

Considering that he has had no training in management, and possesses no
gift for management (unless a great talent for occupying the centre of
the stage is such a gift), the result never surprises the judicious.

Still, the result is a fine waste of good theatres and of good money.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then there is the highbrow gentleman who combines some working
knowledge of the theatre with a praiseworthy ambition to regenerate the
theatre. He ascends the throne with a scorn at once bland and
devastating of that abject being, the "commercial manager."

But as soon as he has had a failure (or even before) he gets the wind
up, and produces a perfectly footling popular play which fails to be
popular. His policy lacks continuity. The public is confused, and the
sacred cause of high-browism receives a set-back.

Finally, there is the commercial manager; there is even that abominable
concatenation, the commercial syndicate.

Well, after exciting adventures in the theatre for twenty years, I vote
for the commercial manager or syndicate every time. Among other virtues
the commercial manager has the virtue of not telling you that between
gentlemen a written contract is unnecessary. And he has a definite,
unchanging policy--the same policy as Shakespeare had. His aim is to
please the public. Also, he knows the mechanics of his job, or, if he
doesn't, he employs people who do.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of his defects is his enormous and contented ignorance of dramatic
literature and of the arts in general. Heaven knows that publishers have
carried artistic ignorance to a high pitch, but in this respect
commercial managers leave them standing. The whole theatre breathes in
a thick fog of suffocating ignorance.

Another defect is a marvellous lack of curiosity. Another defect is a
deep, natural instinct to refuse plays. Another defect is a tendency to
ask for something new while insisting that the something new shall be
precisely like every successful play that ever was. Another defect is a
firm resolution to sit still in his office and wait for Providence to
deposit good stuff on his desk, instead of going out to find good stuff,
as editors, publishers, and other merchants do.

But the commercial manager's worst defect is a lack of imagination.

He reads a play, but he has not sufficient imagination to picture to
himself what the play will be like when acted on the stage. Managers are
continually being astounded when they see the effect on the stage of
plays which they themselves have refused.

The defect is almost universal. The secret of theatrical success is the
right choice of plays. Not one manager in ten is fitted to choose a
play. If the stage is not absolutely perfect, here is one of the chief
explanations.




THEATRE FINANCE


MORE lies, polite lies, are told about the theatre than about any
subject on earth. Only dramatists are excepted from the conspiracy, and
even dramatists, when they have had twenty years' success without once
producing anything to upset ancient sentimental ideas, seldom hear the
truth about themselves in the popular Press. As for managers and actors,
they are incapable of doing wrong. If they fail, the fault is always the
fault of the public, or the fault of the author, or the fault of the
movies, or the fault of ill-luck, or--most important--the fault of the
financial situation.

The financial situation of theatres is difficult, but not more difficult
than that of other industries. Theatre rents have enormously risen, but
so have business rents.

Theatrical accommodation is far too limited, but so is business
accommodation. The notion that the theatre is being ruined by a gang of
sinister bloodsuckers who lurk mysteriously behind the stage strikes me
as abundantly comic. In other industries, faced with a rise of 100 or
200 per cent in manufacturing costs, no manufacturer would dream of
parting with his goods to the public at the old prices. At present the
stage represents a bargain sale to which the public is invited--not for
one week in January, but all the year round. Theatrical managers are
manufacturers. When it occurs to them that, like other manufacturers,
they are subject to economic laws, and not living under a rgime of
heavenly miracles, then the financial situation will begin to look up.

       *       *       *       *       *

I shall be told--perhaps with kindly disdain--that I do not know what I
am talking about. To that criticism only the future can furnish the
final answer. And the nature of the answer which the future will furnish
can be predicted with certainty. The price of theatre seats will go
up--unless the old axioms that two and two make four, and that you
cannot pour two pints and a gill out of a quart-pot cease to be true.

Some will say that theatre seats are a luxury. Well, they are. But the
price of every other luxury has gone up. Even the price of books has
gone up. True, the book market has been depressed, but not more so than
the rubber market, or the cigar market, or the hotel market.

Theatrical managers have combined, not without success, against actors
and actresses, against authors, and against stage hands.

Why should they not combine against the public? Everybody else has
combined against the public. Politicians do it constantly with brilliant
success. Newspaper proprietors have done it to perfection. Tobacco
manufacturers do it. All other manufacturers do it. And they do it
because they know that the public is a very human monster afflicted with
the vice of never paying more than it is compelled to pay.

If the public can amuse itself while sending theatrical managers to
ruin, it will assuredly do so, for it has no conscience, but a hard
common sense. The public will hear unmoved that a theatre ought to be
able to pay its way, and formerly could pay its way, when the weekly
receipts amounted to half the weekly holding capacity, and that this is
no longer by any means true. Its laughter at a light comedy will be
quite untinged by melancholy at this grievous information. The public is
heartless, and will yield only to force; but to force it will yield.

Why, then, do managers continue to hope that two and two will soon make
three? Because they are afraid of facts, and because they lack faith in
their own wares--in the mighty attraction of the stage.




ACTORS AND ACTRESSES


NO names will be mentioned.

The acting profession is a unique profession. All artists have to
exploit their individualities, but only entertainers have to exploit
their individualities in public. This means that acting attracts the
kind of individuality that loves self-exhibition. It means also that the
entertainer, if any success comes at all, is daily subjected to the
dangerous ordeal of receiving open and often indiscriminate applause.
Entertainers therefore usually begin by being ingenuous and end by being
still more ingenuous.

Further, constant contact with the public causes constant exhilaration,
which reacts beneficially on the temperament, and even on the health.

Lastly, entertainers must work while the rest of mankind reposes, and
repose while the rest of mankind works; which necessarily cuts them off
to a large extent from the rest of mankind. It is inevitable that the
acting profession should stand by itself, but in this fact there is
nothing which needs apology.

       *       *       *       *       *

No profession works harder while it works, and no profession works more
enthusiastically. The keenness of many actors and actresses at
rehearsals is prodigious and indefatigable. (Also some of them are very
anxious to learn.) The freshness of actors and actresses after a year's
monotonous run is equally prodigious. Nine hundred and ninety-nine out
of every thousand actors and actresses--all except a few stars--do their
level best on nearly all occasions. I doubt whether this can be said of
any other profession.

And actors and actresses are not commonly venal. They think of their art
first and of money second. A feature of the age is the play-producing
society whose aim is entirely uncommercial. Such societies are always
springing up. The bulk of the work in them is done by actors and
actresses whose extraordinary devotion merits high esteem. That these
actors and actresses may have a mixed motive is beside the point. All
human motives are mixed motives.

Nevertheless the present is not an age of supreme acting. Supreme acting
involves supreme individualities--individualities powerful enough to
impose themselves universally on the public. None such is now apparent.
We have some fine actors, distinguished actors, clever actors; but not
one with native force tremendous enough to become a public legend. (This
statement, by the way, does not apply to the musical comedy-revue branch
of the profession, in which are several stars each of whom supports the
whole organism of a theatre on his shoulders, and has grown legendary.)

       *       *       *       *       *

And too often celebrated actors will only act themselves. Instead of
acting, they are content to exploit their individualities at the expense
of the part which they are playing. They seem to want to be recognised
instantly as themselves. An ageing actress in a certain play said: "My
father could act a railway engine." Actors nowadays have little ambition
to act railway engines. And here the actor is not alone at fault; the
public also is to blame, for it has unquestionably shown a disposition
to frown when favourites appear as anything else than themselves.

What is true of actors is still more true of actresses. Actresses are
more amateurish than actors. A few impose themselves considerably by
beauty, charm, grace, industry, sincerity; but no star actress stands
quite supreme by sheer acting. In one or two instances attempts have
been made by small bands of young critics to lift a leading lady into a
legend. The attempts have failed, rightly. Even in the musical
comedy-revue branch, how often do we see the two chief rles filled
respectively by an absolutely great comedian and a charming young
creature! It is a common saying in managerial offices, after the male
rles in a piece have been satisfactorily discussed: "Yes, but where
shall we find the leading actress?"

On the other hand, secondary female rles are frequently filled to
perfection. We possess a large number of actresses who can play
secondary rles with really remarkable skill, force, fire, poetry,
imagination. You would think they could accomplish simply
anything--until you put on them the terrific responsibility of a leading
rle.

No names have been mentioned.




PLAYWRIGHTS


THERE are too many actors and actresses who can at any rate do their job
capably; but there are not enough playwrights. I have spoken of the
dearth of leading ladies. It is nothing compared with the dearth of even
capable plays.

The notion that good plays are being kept off the stage in large numbers
by the blind stupidity of managers is absurd. Very few good plays are
being written. The average play submitted to managers is merely
imbecile--inferior even, for example, to the average novel submitted to
publishers.

Further, the attitude of the dominant serious playwrights of the time is
unfortunate. Is the theatre their sole love? Do they live in and for the
drama alone? They do not. With nearly all of them the theatre is or was
an after-thought, or at best one of several equal thoughts. Their
attitude may be roughly illustrated in the phrase, "Hello! Here is the
stage! I ought to be able to do something with it. I've succeeded in
other lines of action and I'll try this."

Barrie was a famous novelist before he was a famous playwright. Shaw was
a social reformer, novelist, and critic. Galsworthy was and is chiefly a
novelist. Yeats was and is a lyric poet. Masefield is a novelist and
poet. St. John Ervine was and is a novelist. Maugham was and is a
novelist. Lennox Robinson was and probably still is a manager. Granville
Barker was an actor, manager, and producer. Ian Hay was and is a
novelist. Scarcely one practising dramatist of any distinction--one
practising dramatist whose work would be looked at twice by
connoisseurs--who devotes the whole of his talent and energy to writing
plays! Nay, scarcely one who does not condescend towards the theatre!

       *       *       *       *       *

This is bad for the theatre. It must be bad. What I want to see is a
serious dramatist for whom writing plays is a whole-time job, who has an
undivided passion for the theatre. Only by such men will the theatre be
restored to its proper position.

I do not know precisely what the drama needs, but I know that it needs
something drastic doing to it. Among other treatments, it needs an
operation for cataract, enabling it to see the profusion of interesting
subjects to which it still remains pitifully blind. And the rusty
fetters of its old-fashioned technique should be struck off with
ruthless blows. Looking around, I fail to perceive the doughty figures
who might conceivably thus liberate and enlighten the drama.

I do not say that a few good and goodish plays have not been written
during this century. But the men who wrote them are no longer very
young; they will probably never do better than they have done; and most
positively they will never take active part in a genuine renaissance.
Who is to replace them--to say nothing of superseding them? It may be
true that a man over fifty has lost the capacity to appreciate really
original talent, and therefore I have no right to assert the absence of
good new men. But the young themselves cannot see much hope. There is no
new dramatist of to-day who divides amateurs of the theatre into two
camps. Not one!

I walk up and down the West End, and what do I behold? I behold from
_The White-headed Boy_ that Lennox Robinson is progressing. I behold
that Hastings Turner has original wit and inventiveness. I behold that
the beginner, Reginald Berkeley, has a delightful gift for drawing
characters.... Well, so far so good. But before my pessimism is
dispelled I shall have to see a vast deal more than that. The fact is,
this is not a dramatic age--anywhere in the world. The German theatre is
perhaps the least unpromising.

We had a great dramatist, Synge. He went and died young. It was a
greater tragedy than any that his pen wrote.




DRAMATIC CRITICS


ALL dramatic criticism in morning papers is thoroughly unsatisfactory,
and necessarily so, because the conditions under which it is done are
impossible. The blame does not lie on the critics, but on the directors
of newspapers and the directors of theatres jointly. No critic, however
expert, can do justice either to himself or to a play in the time placed
at the disposal of critics of morning papers.

The conditions ought to be altered, and could be altered.

In the old days a French daily had three theatrical writers: the
"courrieriste," who wrote the gossip; the "soiriste," who wrote a little
essay descriptive of the first night, to be printed the next morning;
and the critic proper, whose considered opinions appeared once a week.
It may or may not be true that the modern public will not wait for
tidings of a new play any more than it will wait for reports of a
political debate or a divorce case. I doubt if it is true, but even if
it is true the difficulty of time might be overcome by sending the
critics to the dress-rehearsal of a play.

I remember that at the dress-rehearsals of the Savoy operas the theatre
used to be full, and that many critics were among the audience.
Moreover, to-day, if a play is produced on Saturday night, you will
often find many of the critics of the Sunday papers at the
dress-rehearsal on Friday night. This is the answer to the argument that
to send critics to dress-rehearsals would not "work." It actually does
"work" when it is tried. And critics, if they chose, might go to both
the dress-rehearsal and the first night.

       *       *       *       *       *

The situation of the critics of evening papers is bad, but not so bad as
that of their morning colleagues. And, on the whole, their articles are
assuredly better. The articles of the critics of weekly papers are, out
of sight, better still.

But a critic needs something else besides time. He needs taste,
knowledge, and experience. Very few critics, and especially very few
daily critics, possess these three. Many possess the third, some possess
the second (usually combining it with an infallible partiality for the
tenth-rate), and scarcely any possess the first.

There is one outstanding instance of a critic on the morning Press who
is amply provided with all three; but for long years he has refused to
take the theatre seriously, and I will not say he is wrong.

As regards daily papers of vast circulation, I would not demand that
critics should express or should even hold opinions that will stand the
test of time. No! Big publics prefer that their papers shall reflect
their opinions--and why not?--and I would be content if morning critics
expressed clearly and interestingly what is likely to be the view of the
average man about a play.

But they do not. Again and again you will find the most ridiculous plays
treated as masterpieces, triumphs, and marvels--and the plays fail
abjectly. The public has shown more discernment than the critics.

On the other hand, though less often, great popular successes begin
their careers amid a chorus of newspaper damns. Thus not seldom the
morning critics indicate to the public neither what it will like nor
what it ought to like. The fact is that the critics have no discoverable
standard.

All that can be affirmed with certainty is that any production, unless
it shows real originality, stands a good chance of being grossly
overpraised.

I have one additional minor point. Critics might be better employed than
in collecting interminable rumours concerning theatrical projects, many
of which never materialise. We have arrived at such a pass that more is
printed about what theatres intend to do than about what they do do.




THE DRAMATIC CRITIC


MR. A. B. WALKLEY'S mind is a citadel. He takes in the dead and neatly
embalms them; he has also received a few choice aged persons, who are
allowed to wander about amid the odours of dissolution; but he has
always, and with success, resisted every attempt on the part of anyone
under seventy to get inside the citadel. Not very long since, the rumour
spread that it had fallen to a comparatively young man. This was not at
first credited. Nevertheless it was true. Mr. Walkley published the
terrible fact that the citadel had ceased to be virgin. He who had
passed thirty-five years in telling the British public what he did not
like and could not stomach, blandly stated that he liked the work of
Marcel Proust. (True, M. Proust is not a playwright, and Mr. Walkley is
mainly concerned with the drama.) M. Proust, by means of endless and
serpentine sentences, capable of moving in several directions at once,
had insinuated his ways into the citadel, and Mr. Walkley had
surrendered. The strangest rape in the history of criticism! Unhappily
M. Proust, doubtless affected by having achieved the impossible, became
all of a sudden unreadable. Though his later works sell in considerable
numbers, he now has only one reader, Mr. Walkley. Other people buy the
books as curiosities, not as matter for perusal.

If you ask why the annals of Mr. Walkley's mind should be of general
interest, the answer is that Mr. Walkley has prestige; he has enormous
prestige. He has made this prestige. Therefore he is somebody.
Nincompoops may acquire popularity, but never prestige. He is the
leading English dramatic critic. His prestige, however, needs to be
defined. To the "great" public he is unknown. The great public has never
heard of him; and if by accident it should attempt to read him, it would
impatiently wonder what on earth he was talking about. The theatrical
world, and especially actors and actresses, detests him. The theatrical
world likes to be liked, and Mr. Walkley dislikes liking. (He once
confessed, indeed, that he could hardly bear to see himself quoted in
praise of anything. He is as ashamed of praising as some writers are of
grammatical infelicities.) Moreover, he disapproves and contemns with
suavity, with superiority, and through a microscope: which the
sensitive--and the theatrical world is nothing if not sensitive--must
find hard to bear. Mr. Walkley antagonised the theatrical world in the
nineties by his use of a single phrase. After the admission that the
work of such and such an actor or actress in a play was not entirely
revolting to a man of taste, he would add: "The rest were as Heaven made
them." I have myself seen the darlings of the gods rendered impotent
with pain and fury by this quite undeniable assertion. Just as men of
science seek vainly a cure for cancer, so do the ornaments of the stage
vainly seek a cure for Mr. Walkley.

Nor does Mr. Walkley's prestige extend to the small world whose
inhabitants are inspired by genuine taste and genuine enthusiasm for the
theatre and genuine knowledge of the theatre. These rare individuals
recognise him only as an upholder of certain traditions which need no
support, and as a soul which has never recovered from its first
childlike delight in the definition of criticism as "the adventures of a
soul."

       *       *       *       *       *

Where then does Mr. Walkley's prestige reside and reign? It resides and
reigns in the facile, refined world of half-educated dilettanti,
amateurs, dabblers, and quidnuncs who have the courage of other people's
opinions, the cowardice of their own opinions, and the self-protective
conviction that in the arts the path of safe criticism is the path of
superior disdain. A large world, a busy and restless world, a world
deprived of authentic emotion, a world actuated in all its judgments by
the secret fear of praising the wrong thing! Mr. Walkley is somewhat
better than his kingdom, but he rules in it, and nobody cursed with
enthusiasm, originality, and catholic taste could possibly rule in it.
If any such person assumed the sceptic he would be dethroned with
contumely in a fortnight. Mr. Walkley's admirers constitute a living
demonstration of his second-rateness.

Contrary to the general belief, Buffon did not say that the style is the
man. All the same, the style is the man. And Mr. Walkley's style is the
man. It may be called dainty, reasonably elegant, though it is never
beautiful nor distinguished. Most often it is finicking. It has no
verve, no colour, no variety, no daring. One infallible mark of the
second-rate is the clich. Mr. Walkley's compositions are a mass of
clichs--perhaps not the clichs of to-day, but the clichs of thirty
years ago. Among the more exasperating of his clichs is, "We are
old-fashioned enough to think." And English clichs do not suffice him.
His command even of English clichs is so imperfect, so inadequate to
serve the ravenous imitativeness of his mind, that he is continually
driven to employ foreign clichs also--French, Greek, and Latin. All his
articles are thickly encrusted with tags and clichs in various
languages, inserted not wholly from ostentation, but partly because he
does not know enough English to be able to do without them.

And he indulges immoderately in quotation. Quotations are his lifebelts
whenever he has got out of his depth; and he chooses them from a very
small number of authors, thus navely proving the limitations of his
reading and the impoverishment of his ideas.

At one time he could scarcely write a criticism without bringing into it
the Dickensian "All werry capital." And I doubt whether Mr. Walkley with
his "all werry capital" is more acutely distressing than the feeblest of
dramatic critics who will say, for instance, that an actor "did yeoman
service" in a performance. The one falls just as far as the other below
the level of the style, unaffected and vigorous, of, say, Mr. St. John
Ervine, who has something individual to express and always expresses it
with the minimum of fuss.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Sturdy" may seem an odd epithet to apply to Mr. Walkley. Yet he is
sturdy in one thing--his provincialism. And to charge him with
provincialism may seem odd, too. Yet he has industriously cultivated
provincialism for many years. Go into a provincial city and discuss any
of the arts, and one of the first remarks to warn you will be: "_We're
very critical down here!_" Talk of your own adventures--you will be met
with an instinctive hostility, and the conversation will be turned to
the adventures of the inhabitants, perhaps twenty or thirty years
before; and if you have insight you will perceive the futility of
trying to talk about anything else. You will perceive, further, that the
inhabitants have labels for everything, and that anything which cannot
be fitted with a label does not exist for them and is thereby condemned.
This is a survival from the eighteenth century, when the sternest
condemnation of a novelty was: "_a ne ressemble  rien._"

The inhabitants keep an eye, if an inimical eye, on affairs generally.
Of some affairs they know a great deal. They can be as refined and as
exacting within their circumscribed tasks as any metropolitan. But they
demand intellectual and sthetic stability. They are comfortable. They
love their comfort. They will not be robbed of it. And whatever or
whoever threatens to rob them of it by means of phenomena to which they
are unaccustomed is bound metaphorically to have his head bashed in.
They are extremely sensitive, and, like all extremely sensitive people,
they are extremely egotistic.

All which appears to me to apply pretty closely to the case of Mr.
Walkley, who has the provincialism not of place but of mind. He may have
been born a metropolitan, but he has gradually retired from his original
exciting situation. His super-sensitiveness could not stand the tossing
of the great tide of evolution. His egotism suffered with his
sensitiveness. He had begun to be educated, but the process of real
education is rather painful. He put an end to it, preferring to remain
half-educated and have peace. He transformed himself into a citadel. The
sublime act was accomplished when Bernard Shaw first turned dramatist.
Mr. Walkley once explained with sympathy a shattering play of Mr.
Shaw's. Having proved his quality, he determined never to renew the
feat. He now lives among the embalmed, the enemy of enthusiasms,
passions, all emotions, all novelties. His tranquillity must be
respected. Even M. Proust, his sole invader, gracefully respects it by
writing the same book over and over again, at greater length and with
ever-increasing refinement and finickingness.

       *       *       *       *       *

The most baffling mystery of the age is this: Why did Mr. Walkley take
up with dramatic criticism, and why has he never dropped it? Often and
often have I beheld the citadel in the stalls on a first night, urbanely
smiling, aloof, withdrawn, moveless, disdainful, defying comprehension,
refusing all contact. I have speculated intensely upon the possible
clues to the enigma. And there has come into my head a queer suspicion,
to which I attach little importance, that Mr. Walkley surveys the modern
stage as a spiritual exercise to test his powers of repudiation. At any
rate he fulfils a useful function in an epoch where any treacly mess of
sentimentality is liable to be acclaimed in print as "a great play at
last." A critic who is adamant to all modern manifestations, though he
may never praise what is original, will certainly never gush over what
is bad. That is something; it is a corrective which we need.




THE THEATRE PUBLIC


WHICH is you.

Of course, sometimes you are not yourself. As at a first night, for
example. You are professional then, or interested by professional or
other ties in the performance, or you attend through a desire to be in
the swim. I would sooner have any audience than a first-night audience.

When you are yourself you are never professional, and you have no
interest whatever except to be entertained; you are, however, generally
a little bit snobbish, for a mild degree of snobbishness is inherent in
almost every human being. The great difficulty which you present is that
you are not demonstrative. The majority of you go to the theatre and are
pleased or displeased, and leave the theatre without giving a sign of
your state of mind.

The poorest joke will raise a laugh in the theatre, and if a dozen
people laugh any individual is inclined to conclude that the audience is
amused. But the average Briton seldom laughs in a theatre when he is
amused. He may smile. He may do nothing at all, and yet be amused. When
the majority of an audience laughs, either the action of the play is
held up or a number of lines are not heard. A play may be punctuated by
the laughs of a few and yet fail. A play may be received with apparent
indifference and yet succeed. And as with humour, so with pathos.

A hundred persons well distributed in an audience of a thousand can, and
often do, produce an air of success which may be quite illusory. What
many professionals live and die without perceiving is that applause
comes from a tiny minority of you. Let anybody during what is termed
"loud applause" look round at the audience. He will see that the
majority of you are offering no manifestation of feeling. I have never
heard such magnificent genuine applause as during the Gilbert and
Sullivan seasons at the Princes Theatre. It gave me a new conception of
what eager and sane applause can be. But I estimated that even then not
more than 60 per cent. of you were applauding.

       *       *       *       *       *

No! You are not demonstrative. That is one reason why you are so
puzzling. But it is not a fault. I suppose you have faults. They are the
faults of humanity. The instinct of self-protection causes you to be
hostile towards anything that is really new; it might upset your ideas,
make you think, weaken the structure of society. You naturally don't
want that. And you are too easily satisfied with the mediocre, and your
appreciation of beauty is not very sensitive.

But for myself I should as soon dream of finding fault with the law of
gravity as with the public. You are absolute monarch. A horse cannot be
forced to drink against his will, and you cannot be entertained against
your will. It's no use. You are, and that is all there is to it. For us
professional entertainers you are the unalterable instrument upon which
we have to play. If we cannot please you and ourselves too, why, then,
we are lacking in skill. Shakespeare managed to do it. And, like
ourselves, you do learn. You move exceedingly slowly, as a leviathan
must; but you move. At a performance of the Phoenix Society some time
since, I discovered that the Phoenix Society had done quite a lot with
you.

Finally, you have a terrible defect--it is not a fault. You lack
artistic keenness. You don't care very much either way. No play, no
opera, no picture, and seldom a book, is an "event" in Britain. In
Berlin, on a Strauss first night, the papers used to issue special
editions after each act. Can you conceive such a phenomenon on this
isle?




ILL-HEALTH


PEOPLE admit themselves "unwell" oftener than they used to do. That is
because they know a little more about the greatest of all physical
marvels and mysteries, the human body. In former days an indisposition
was looked upon as the act of God, and regarded fatalistically. Now it
is known to be the act of man, and therefore, perhaps, curable if
officially proclaimed and treated. The champions of the past in this
matter say that we are a generation of molly-coddles; but the champions
of the past are usually persons of immensely strong physique, and they
take credit to themselves for what has been merely their good luck.
Worse, they will attribute their longevity and their good health to some
perfectly footling habit.

"I am eighty-five, and have all my own teeth," says a man. "Why? Because
I shave after washing. The new generation washes after shaving. If it
would only shave after washing----" etc.

Still, we live appreciably longer than our ancestors. Some will assert
that since life is a nuisance, long life is a still greater nuisance.
But if you ask these whether they would be willing to go back to the old
state, the answer will either be in the negative or it will be a lie.

In some ways we have retained the foolishness of the past. To-day, just
as in the past, there are certain diseases, especially those affecting
physical attractiveness, as to which women will unfailingly become
hysterical. And men are as apt as ever to become hysterical if their
digestive organs go wrong. Also, a person who knows he suffers from a
chronic malady will attribute all his ills to that malady, forgetting
that he is as liable as his fellows to some scores of other maladies.

On the other hand a man will still as of old deny to himself the
existence of an obvious chronic malady, and carry on his existence
exactly as if his proper place was not in bed--and then die suddenly,
and have the effrontery to be surprised thereat.

Again, we still dose ourselves as if we had expert knowledge, and swear
at doctors. It is true that doctors don't know much about disease, but
they know much more than laymen. Our forefathers indulged in what were
called herbs and simples. We indulge in pills (of various shapes), and
on a far vaster scale. Herbs and simples possibly did some good in a few
cases, when used with knowledge and discretion. The same, and not more,
may be said of self-administered pills. You can get pills scientifically
and admirably prepared to cure any mortal thing short of a broken leg.
Nothing can be said against good pills. But much can be said against
the ignorant and immoderate users of good pills--that is, the great
majority of us. Pills form part of the secret life of nearly all of us.
We have the vice of drug-taking, and about 95 per cent. of the pills
swallowed in a little water serve no good purpose. That they do small
permanent harm is due to the tremendous resisting powers of the human
organism.

The trade in drugs must be terrific; and though I object to our liberty
being stolen from us bit by bit by a Government that is worse than forty
thousand grandmothers, I admit that when the British Government
prohibited the unfettered sale of certain very dangerous drugs it won my
applause. Only yesterday we could walk into a shop and buy as easily as
biscuits enough sulphonal, veronal, and trional to ruin the lives of a
whole family. This was the liberty to perish, and governments are not
entirely vile.

We have not yet arrived at a comprehension of the deep truth that a man
who is his own doctor has a fool for his patient. Even doctors rarely
treat themselves!

       *       *       *       *       *

Many, if not most, persons regard a doctor as a magician, and in this
respect we have not improved much on the remote past, when magicians
were the only doctors. A patient will believe simply anything from a
doctor who attended the patient's father and mother. The "family
doctor" is infallible, and no amount of funerals will affect his
infallibility. We are like savages in another point, that sometimes we
kill our magicians, that is to say, we change our doctors, often for no
reason except that we want fresh magic.

In this yearning for fresh magic we are apt to go to "the nearest man,"
not because the slightest delay might be fatal, but because it is
simpler to go to the nearest man. Yes, and it happens sometimes that we
choose a doctor because he plays good golf or good tennis, or because
his motor-car looks smart, or because his political opinions coincide
with our own, or because he takes a dignified part in the public life of
the town, or because he has a nice smile.

Most ailments get cured or cure themselves in the end, yet if the new
doctor has a nice smile or plays good golf and the first case is a
success, then he is unalterably established in our esteem as a magician
for years to come.

The fact is that doctors simply are not chosen for their professional
skill, and professional skill is only one of the ingredients of a
successful medical practice, and not the most important one. Not seldom,
indeed, a very successful practice is achieved without any professional
skill worth mentioning. At best doctors are chosen for their
character--and how many of us are sure judges of character? Human nature
is such that the best of us may be deceived by a doctor who is honestly
deceiving himself. I knew a doctor who built up a fine practice and a
considerable fortune on one method. He was a mediocre physician, but he
had the invaluable gift of persuading himself that if he had been called
in twenty-four hours later the case might have proved fatal.

"My dear sir, or madam," he would say to a new patient, after the first
few days, speaking in a quiet, restrained, and authoritative voice, "I
didn't care to speak earlier, but I may tell you now that you called me
in only just in time. Another day and I shouldn't like to think what
might have happened. However, I was fortunate in my treatment, and the
danger is over for the present."

Patients were enormously impressed. At the end of his splendid career
that doctor had the conviction that he had positively saved the lives of
half the community which he adorned. And he was not alone in the
conviction.

       *       *       *       *       *

The patient will naturally ask: "But how can I judge the professional
skill of a doctor?" The answer is that he cannot. To a certain extent
the laity is at the mercy of the medicals. But the patient can, at any
rate, judge his doctor on the manner in which he approaches the case.
The good doctor approaches the case in a spirit of scientific inquiry.
The good doctor will not limit his attention to the particular ailment
or symptoms which are the occasion of his visit. He will know that an
ailment seldom stands by itself. He will inform himself about the
patient's age, vocation, daily habits, and medical history, and he will
note these things down. Then he will get at the history of the
particular ailment, the present symptoms, and, especially, just what
made the patient send for him at just that moment. Then he will make a
thorough examination of the patient, and, if the case is serious, he
will make several examinations. He will consider the patient's physique
as a whole and his existence as a whole; and then he will prescribe. He
will assuredly not give the impression to the patient that the malady is
accidental, or that the treatment consists wholly or even chiefly in
bottles of medicine, powders, pills.

If a doctor conducts his professional work in this spirit, with this
thoroughness, and with this sense of proportion and of perspective, the
chances are that he really knows his job and has the character and
ability to execute his job successfully. If he doesn't, then the chances
are that, despite good golf, dignified deportment, and a nice smile, he
is not a competent doctor according to modern standards. And all these
things will count for little unless a diligent attentiveness is
maintained. You may say that the most foolish patient would take stock
of a doctor's attentiveness or lack of it, and act accordingly. Not
always so. I once knew a doctor who said to a patient:

"It is of the greatest importance that you should eat nothing, you
understand, nothing, until I have seen you again. Please remember,
_nothing_!"

He called again in three weeks. And this was not uncharacteristic of his
ways. Yet he had a big country practice and was beloved as a magician.

       *       *       *       *       *

Modern clinical standards show some improvement on those of even eight
years ago, and for two reasons, both due to the war. In the first place,
during the war perhaps five million men either went through hospitals or
came up frequently for hospital parade. And despite their frequent
dissatisfaction they thereby learnt a very great deal about medicine and
medical and surgical treatment. They now know something about what a
thorough diagnosis is, and they have spread their knowledge among
families and friends. If they fall ill, or if their relatives fall ill,
they expect a scientific attitude and some attention to detail from
their doctors. They are aware of some of the latest devices, and they
are discontented if the said devices are not applied to themselves.

The day is gone when the doctor, on being summoned, could come and chat
miscellaneously and pleasantly of nothing in particular for a quarter of
an hour, and then glance casually at the tongue for two seconds, take
the pulse in thirty seconds, and, murmuring vague reassurances and a
promise to dispatch coloured medicine, depart full of complacency and
honour.

And in the second place the doctors have learnt a lot. Doctors,
including panel doctors, were called up and put under the very best men
in all sorts of hospitals throughout the country. Doctors were also
attached to medical boards and pension boards. They necessarily acquired
precious information concerning the absolute necessity of careful
diagnosis according to a routine which omitted nothing, and they
returned to their ordinary practices loaded with the said information
and habituated to methods of diagnosis and treatment which at any rate
are not unscientific. And so the doctor is now more or less able to
supply what the enlightened patient demands. Before the war, everybody
who was accustomed to both English and French doctors must have been
struck by the more searching and thorough methods of the latter. The
difference between the two was indeed sometimes quite startling. I do
not desire to praise French doctors at the expense of English, and I am
entirely convinced that English hospitals, both military and civil,
were and are superior to French; but I know from an experience extending
over years that the French doctor had at least a scientific attitude
towards disease, especially in diagnosis, which was exceedingly rare in
the English.




LUXURY AND THE LAW


IT seems that poor people who take advantage of the law enabling the
impecunious to get divorce cheaply _are_ put at a serious disadvantage
because they are poor people. If they have sinned themselves, they must
confess it--and seriously injure their prospects of getting a decree,
whereas Court officials are expressly forbidden even to ask rich
petitioners whether they have sinned.

This, of course, is scandalously unfair. But it is not more scandalously
unfair than lots of other things in our marriage laws. For instance,
till quite recently it was scandalously unfair that if you lived in the
far provinces and wanted a divorce, you had to come to London and bring
all your witnesses to London, and maintain them there in order to get a
divorce.

No one need come to London in order to be hanged or to be sentenced to
penal servitude for life. Oh no! The State will conveniently arrange
that for you in your own district.

It was, until quite recently, scandalous that though you could marry
your deceased wife's sister, you could not marry your deceased husband's
brother. Church dignitaries prophesied, when you were first allowed to
marry your deceased wife's sister, that the permission would mean the
end of true home life; and when the deceased husband's brother question
came before Parliament, the same prophets prophesied the same dreadful
prophecies about that also. But true home life seems still somehow to
persist.

All progress towards justice is always impeded. It ought to be impeded a
little; but it is impeded too much. The cost of both executive and
legislative justice is excessive either in time or in money or in
both--partly because the lawyers' trade unions are the most powerful in
the country, and partly because a grossly overworked Parliament has no
time to simplify the ways of justice.

The most disastrous fact in our national life is that we have only one
legislative machine.

It results in astounding phenomena. Thus to save trouble Parliament
decided, instead of making divorce cheaper, to make the State pay for
the divorce of poor persons--if the poor persons were willing to
humiliate themselves sufficiently!

Our judicial system is possibly the finest in the world. But it is
tragically expensive. We have one law for rich and poor alike. True! But
as a rule the poor can't pay for the law. Luxuries are not for the poor,
and our greatest, noblest luxury is the law.




ATTIRE


WHEN people say "the shops," they don't mean butchers' shops or bread
shops. They mean the shops in which women's attire is the sole or the
leading merchandise. And when they say "the sales," they mean chiefly
bargains in women's attire. _The_ shops count amongst the greatest
attractions of London and the provincial cities. They draw to their
windows enormously larger crowds than Westminster Abbey or the National
Gallery. There are half a dozen spots in the West End where the
spectacle of shop windows full of frocks, hats, and lingerie results in
blocked pavements for several hours every day. No other kind of wares
will regularly block pavements. And let it be admitted that no other
kind of wares are so pretty and agreeable to look at, and therefore so
worthy to block pavements. The richly variegated windows of a big shop,
just illuminated at twilight, with the dark upper storeys setting off
their brightness, and the hypnotised crowds passing slowly in front of
them, make a show that for truly romantic beauty cannot be beaten in
London, and I will back it against any sunset seen from Westminster
Bridge. Further, sunsets are not improving in elegance, and shop windows
are.

And not in the main thoroughfares alone is women's attire the paramount
display and lure. A similar phenomenon is to be observed in the
newspapers. You might turn over the pages of a daily and miss the
Parliamentary report--you could not possibly miss the women's attire.
For, quite apart from the immense and comprehensive illustrated
advertisements of it, now infinitely more imposing and delightful than
in the past, women's attire is treated every day in most papers as a
special item of the day's news, with the aid of original designs and
photographs. It may be the only illustrated news in the paper. Cricket
may shrink, even racing may wither in a drought, but the journalistic
importance of women's attire never abates. Newspapers have realised what
women's attire has come to mean to the community, but I doubt whether
the community itself has yet consciously realised to what a tremendous
extent this dazzling subject has captured the general imagination.

Any sensational preacher who lacks a topic for his fulminations can find
it, and often does find it, in women's "finery"; any layman who happens,
for private reasons, to be out of love with the sex, will try to revenge
himself by scarifying women's peculiar folly as demonstrated by the
pursuit of fashions; and not for generations have women been more
fiercely attacked on account of their clothes than during the last four
or five years. According to the attackers, social and religious, the
matter is perfectly simple: Women as a sex are foolish about their
clothes, and that is the beginning and the end of it. But I doubt if the
matter is so simple.

For example, no man has yet shown that women are more foolish than men
in the affair of clothes. Men are slaves to fashion; they allow
themselves no latitude. And when they do escape from some unusually
fatuous convention, they do what they can to get back to prison, as
witness the present grand masculine effort to restore the top-hat to its
ancient tyranny. Nor are men any more "practical" than women in their
clothes. A human being who will wear black or dark clothes in hot
weather would commit any folly. Consider the male waistcoat, which is
thinnest in exactly the region where it covers the most sensitive part
of the body--the spine! Consider the starched shirt.... No, better not
consider it! There are objects too shocking, too barbarous, too
grotesque for the consideration of nice-minded persons.

As for the relative extravagance of the two sexes in clothes, I am not
convinced that the wife's cost on the average more than the husband's.
The husband knows as a rule what the wife spends, but unless he is a
lunatic he does not disclose to her what he himself spends. A clever
woman would conjure half a dozen evening-frocks out of the price of her
husband's dress-suit. One of my friends, a misguided statistician,
proved to me the other day that every time I don evening-dress I
dissipate ten shillings. And, anyway, women array themselves to please
men, and because men positively want them to be arrayed, and would be
vexed if they were not arrayed. The attitude of men towards women's
clothes is perhaps the grossest possible example of hypocrisy, confused
thinking, cheap sneering, and downright meanness that the history of the
human race can show.

       *       *       *       *       *

To understand clothes it is necessary to grasp two fundamental truths.

The first is that fashion is not an evil but a good. Fashion is an
expression of convention, and conventions are the cement of society, or,
to express it otherwise, the essential antidote to anarchy and the main
support of order. Fashions exist everywhere, in everything. There are
fashions in religious belief, in doctors' prescriptions, in charities;
and if there were no fashions in costume the resulting mess would be
considerable. Fashions are not confined to highly civilised communities.
They are strongest in primitive communities. Take a small island in the
Solomon group. It is about a mile across. A line divides it into two
parts and into two fashions of attire. On one side of the line the women
dress unpractically but decently, on the other they dress practically
(with pockets) but indecently.

The second truth to be grasped is that dress is not wholly or chiefly a
matter of protection and of decency. The purposes of costume are, and
always have been, various. Among them are the desire to attract the
opposite sex, to hide blemishes, to disclose or heighten beauties. All
which purposes are surely legitimate. And as for ornament, the origin of
much personal ornament is magical--religious or medicinal--and some
personal ornament still is magical in its intention, seeing that both
men and women still wear things "for luck."

       *       *       *       *       *

Of course it cannot be denied that some women dress principally for
display, in order to prove how rich they are or how rich their husbands
are. This may be vulgar, but it is not vicious, and if such women dress
artistically, as now and then they do, they go far to justify
themselves; for if luxury contrives to be artistic it fulfils a proper
and important function in the commonwealth. How important the function
is you may realise by conceiving the commonwealth without any luxury at
all! Luxury meets a universal desire; but it is relative. Everybody
wants some luxury, and nearly everybody gets some luxury. The only
luxuries that people cavil at are the luxuries which do not happen to
appeal to their tastes or which they cannot personally afford to pay
for. Each of us looks at the existence of such luxuries as a sign of
decadence and decay.

It is notorious that a marked change has come over feminine costume.
Modern frocks have been attacked as vulgar, insufficient, shameless; and
they are supposed to be an illustration of that "loosening of the bonds"
which accompanies a great war. The favourite theory is that in the war
women grew hysterical. Tens of thousands of them left their homes for a
new freedom, and incidentally enjoyed the disposal of far more money
than ever they had before. The feeling of independence, coupled with the
sense of the possibility of the break-up of civilisation, was too much
for them. Rules of conduct went to smash. Morals were forgotten. Desire
ran riot. Modesty expired. Nothing mattered. And the expression of the
feminine state of mind was seen in the fashions!...

An interesting, even an exciting, theory, delightfully simple; but it
should be received with caution! In the first place the new fashions
were beginning before the war; they had certainly begun before women had
stepped into the new freedom and before the fear of universal disaster
had developed. And in the second place the new fashions came from
France, where women, before Englishwomen, had suffered bereavement on a
great scale, and where there was no new freedom or independence to make
them hysterical or vicious or careless. In fact, the common theory, if
it explains the new fashions at all, does so only in an extremely slight
degree, and the true, full explanation, when it is worked out, will
probably be very much more complicated and very much less theatrical. We
are not likely to find the true, full explanation in our time. Meanwhile
let us--and especially those of us who are men or old women--be chary in
our accusing.

       *       *       *       *       *

When you have settled in your own mind upon a theory which accounts for
the alleged immodesty, indecency, suggestiveness, or whatever you like
to call the quality, of the modern frock, the question remains: _Is_ the
modern frock immodest, etc. etc.? Some women would manage to be immodest
or suggestive, no matter what the fashions might be. But such women in
all ages are exceptional, and must be omitted from a general estimate of
the situation. These exceptions apart, I do not think that a charge
against the morality of the modern frock can be sustained. Assuredly
skirts are short, but they have not yet risen to the knees; and after
all, what is reprehensible in the short skirt? It is more hygienic; it
is more comfortable; it gives greater freedom to those contrivances upon
which women walk; it enables them even to run with the said
contrivances. And undoubtedly women revel in the new physical freedom. I
have an idea that the mentality which regrets the long skirt is the same
mentality which in China insisted on rendering women's feet quite
useless for ambulatory purposes. Are short skirts suggestive? I should
say that they are the very opposite of suggestive.

The other day, in a West End street, I saw a young woman in an
uncompromisingly long skirt. Well, it shocked me. I thought: "This young
woman must be a peculiar and a perverse young woman. I wonder what is
the matter with her?" There came into my mind the celebrated lines of
Sir John Suckling:

    "Her feet beneath her petticoat
    Like little mice stole in and out
        As if they feared the light."

And the lines positively struck me as perverse and suggestive. Why
should little feet have to peep in and out, and why should they behave
themselves as if they feared the light? I consider that the new fashions
have done well to take us beyond the peeping stage and the coy stage and
the falsely prim stage. And I should like to have been able to say to
the young woman: "Please go home at once and dress yourself decently."

As regards the upper portions of the modern frock, it may for a period
have descended too far, but in essentials it never, at its most
audacious, went beyond the point demanded by Queen Victoria at her
dinner-parties. It is on record that young women guests sometimes had to
have their evening-dresses hastily altered within the royal dwelling
because the admirable Victoria, beloved of the bourgeoisie, would not
tolerate under-exposure of the female body at dinner or after dinner!
Probably she hated suggestiveness. If she did, she would probably have
objected to the modern, knitted, high-necked, tight jumper worn without
a corset; and yet I have never heard critics of the modern costume utter
a word against the tight jumper. Nor have I heard them assert that the
modern costume is ungraceful or ugly. The fact--and the most important
fact of all--is that women have not been so becomingly and beautifully
dressed for ages as they are to-day.

       *       *       *       *       *

Naturally all the professional Jeremiahs and Habakkuks, if silenced on
their accusation of immodesty or insufficiency in the modern frock, will
fasten on the "exaggerated interest" which women, and especially girls,
now show in dress, and will charge the sex not only with monetary
extravagance in clothes but also with devoting a great deal too much
time to clothes. I have already referred to the question of expense. Of
one thing I am quite certain, namely, that if the average modern girl
spends too much on her frocks, her predecessor of the last generation
did not spend enough--was not indeed allowed to spend enough. Even
to-day, I am inclined to think, the average married woman is pinched in
her dress-allowance, so that her career as a wearer of nice frocks is
one long series of tucks, devices, dyeings, modifications, and
bargain-hunting. In any case I have not the slightest fear of the modern
young woman ruining herself or her family by dressing herself too well.
That profound spirit of moderation which characterises the British and
which again and again brings the country through enormous crises that in
other countries would result in revolution--that same spirit is always
at work in the modern woman, even when she finds herself among a surging
crowd of hypnotised and feverish companions in one of those magical
palaces which we call shops.

Again, as regards the amount of attention and time bestowed on clothes,
I am quite certain that if the modern girl bestows too much of these
precious commodities on adornment, her predecessor did not spend enough.
A girl can make herself decent and keep herself warm by a quarter of an
hour's attention per day to the task. But to dress well is an art and an
extremely complicated and difficult art; and the less money you have
available for the purpose the more complicated and difficult it becomes.
It comprises all manner of problems connected with the hair, the
complexion, the hands, the feet, jewellery, and Heaven knows what else.
And above everything it comprises the expression of the individuality.
If a woman's attire does not express and enhance her individuality, then
it is a failure. And to express one's individuality by means of
textiles, at the same time keeping within the fashions, is an affair
whose delicacy can be guessed by any man who has ever chosen a necktie
"to suit him." I wish that women could see a man hesitating between
forty neckties in a hosier's shop. The sight would furnish them with
effective retorts when they were next attacked about their gewgaws.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have called women's dressing an art. To my mind it is the most
influential of all the arts, and is capable of giving more pleasure to
the community at large than all the other arts combined. It has
professors worthy to rank with the foremost painters, musicians, poets,
and architects.

Tens of thousands of girls herd themselves into vast institutions in
order to learn how to sing or play. In 90 per cent. of the cases the
effort comes to absolutely nothing. In a few cases it ends in a concert
or a picture and the amiable applause of friends. Perhaps in one case
out of a thousand is real talent, capable of giving real general
pleasure, produced.

Yet these same aspirants will call themselves serious persons, while
despising a girl who devotes herself with a similar passion to her
appearance. But a well-dressed woman is giving pleasure all the time;
she is exercising a civilising influence all the time. Her show doesn't
begin at 8.15 and last for an hour and a half in an enclosed hall. Nor
is it necessary to go to the Royal Academy to see what she has
accomplished. Her show is a continuous performance. It is private and it
is also public. Everybody who witnesses it is, consciously or
unconsciously, uplifted by it. It is the finest and the most powerful
application of the poetic principle to daily, ordinary life. In a word,
every well-dressed woman is a public benefactor. You may call her all
the bad names you like, but she is a public benefactor.




CHARLES GARVICE AND THE HIGHBROWS


_ONE of the greatest living English journalists, who signs himself
"Wayfarer" in_ The Nation, _wrote a paragraph about Charles Garvice
(apropos of the latter's death) which appeared to me unjust. I therefore
protested as follows_:

     "'Wayfarer' expresses the ignorance of himself and his friends
     about the late Charles Garvice; and for himself as a famous
     publicist he quite properly seems rather ashamed of this
     perfect unacquaintance with an outstanding social phenomenon.
     He brackets Charles Garvice and Mrs. Florence Barclay together.
     This he should not do. Charles Garvice had an immensely greater
     hold on the public than Mrs. Barclay, and for reasons which are
     creditable to both author and public. The work of Charles
     Garvice has little artistic importance; but he was a thoroughly
     competent craftsman. He constructed well and wrote clearly and
     not inelegantly, and he had a certain imaginative faculty.
     Artistically his novels are at least on a level with scores of
     novels which have been seriously reviewed in your columns, and
     with some which people are seriously discussing in circles that
     deem themselves enlightened this very day. Further, Charles
     Garvice was utterly free from any sort of snobbery,
     intellectual or otherwise. Further, both directly and
     indirectly, by his own freely given energy and skill, he
     accomplished a very great deal for the improvement of the
     conditions under which authors work. 'Wayfarer' laments the
     loss of 'that precious thing, a common national standard of
     good literature.' There never was any. Good books, not
     excluding the classics to which 'Wayfarer' specially refers,
     are as highly and widely esteemed to-day as ever they
     were--probably more so."

_"Wayfarer" accepted this protest so far as it concerned Charles
Garvice, while maintaining his general position; but Mr. Middleton
Murry, who surely ought to occupy the throne once occupied by Nicholas
Brakespeare, retorted grandiosely. Among other things he wrote_:

     "Whether there ever was a common national standard of good
     literature I do not know. It does not necessarily follow from
     the fact that Scott, Byron, and Dickens were immensely popular
     in their day--far more popular, for instance, than Mr. Wells is
     in ours. But if this fact does not prove that there was a
     common national standard then, it does prove that the popular
     writers of a hundred years ago had infinitely more artistic,
     literary, or social conscience than they have to-day."

_Part of my reply to Mr. Middleton Murry ran thus_:

     "I may be too fond of emphasising the mechanical element in the
     profession of literature. But I wish to heaven some of my
     contemporaries would emphasise it a little more. The English,
     however, seem to have a distaste for thorough technical
     competence in literature. They have not yet got rid of the
     Byronic attitude.

     "I admire Mr. Murry's courage in asserting that 'the popular
     writers of a hundred years ago had infinitely more artistic,
     literary, and social conscience than they have to-day.' (Mr.
     Middleton Murry's English--an example of what scorn of the
     'mechanical' element leads to!) He specially mentions Byron,
     Dickens, and Scott. Byron was a great genius. _Don Juan_ is a
     terrific work. But there is scarcely a page of it which does
     not show that an artistic conscience was not Byron's strong
     point. It is notorious that Dickens, like Thackeray, often
     wrote under self-imposed conditions (especially conditions of
     haste) which made real artistic integrity impossible. The same
     is even more true of Scott. Nearly everybody knows this, and if
     Mr. Murry does not know it he should acquaint himself with
     literary history, and so for the future avoid making
     generalisations which are entirely absurd.

     "Not long since I re-read _Quentin Durward_. What a book of
     hasty expedients, adroit evasions of difficulties, and artistic
     'slimness'! If I wasn't so tragically addicted to money-making
     I would write a destructive study of _Quentin Durward_. And,
     incidentally, I would prove that the 'artistic, literary, or
     social conscience' is quite as active to-day as ever it was.

     "Mr. Murry says that he can sympathise with my 'evident desire
     to disconcert the preciousness of the sthete.' But when he
     says that things such as Charles Garvice made were 'simply not
     worth making well,' etc., I charge him with precisely the
     preciousness of the sthete. Was it not worth while to give
     pleasure to the nave millions for whom Charles Garvice catered
     honestly and to the best of his very competent ability? Ought
     these millions to be deprived of what they like, ought they to
     be compelled to bore themselves with what Mr. Murry likes,
     merely because Mr. Murry's taste is better than theirs? The
     idea is ridiculous. The idea is snobbish in the worst degree.
     Taste is still relative. Mr. Murry, though his recent services
     to the cause of good taste in all the arts have been
     conspicuously brilliant and laudable, has probably not yet
     reached the absolute of taste. Charles Garvice's work was worth
     doing, and since it was worth doing it was worth doing well."




PREACHING GOD


HYDE PARK--6.30, on a Tuesday night in February.--A girl was preaching.
She had seven or eight official supporters, including an old man and a
young man and two nice-looking girls much younger than herself. The
preacher "held forth"--no other phrase would serve as well--in a
strident voice, and with gestures both monotonous and violent, to a
numerous crowd. She had nothing whatever to say except: "Seek God," and
she made no smallest attempt to explain the nature or the method of this
highly mystical affair of seeking God. The formula seemed to satisfy
her.

She was one of those speakers who cannot stop. They want to stop; they
would give a great deal to stop; but they are victimised by a secret
inhibition against stopping. She tried again and again. Over and over
she repeated the evening chaplet of clichs. She was like an ant, or
some other of Fabre's insects, walking endlessly round the rim of a
vase. At last by accident she fell off. Another girl handed her cloak to
her, but she was too preoccupied and enchanted to put it on, despite the
cold. Then this other girl began to preach. But neither of the pretty
girls preached. The old man, hatless in the chilly breeze, kept
ejaculating at intervals, "Praise God" and "Amen." The tedium of the
performance was intense.

More interesting was another group, at the core of which two men were
arguing upon God. One of them had just been preaching, and now he was
being tested. They argued in quiet, reasonable tones--indeed, so quietly
that only the half-dozen people nearest them could hear what they said.
The rest of the attentive crowd craned their necks in vain to catch
wisdom. The debaters were magnanimous one to another. Evidently their
aim was not victory but truth. Said the preacher handsomely:

"Of course _I_ don't know everything. _I_ don't know all God's plans.
Even Christ didn't."

The argument proceeded for a long time, and the unfed crowd went on
hoping for crumbs and not getting them.

Close by, a smaller congregation listened to the polite contentions of
two aged men who were smoking cigarettes. Again the same quiet,
reasonable tones, as of intellects well able to handle the most majestic
and exciting themes without any inward disturbance. I heard one
question:

"Well, then, what do you call the thing that thinks? Do you call it the
brain?"

But the wind and the dull roar of Oxford Street traffic withheld the
answer from me.

Being favourably situated for visits to Hyde Park, I have joined
congregations on scores and scores of occasions, and have always been
disappointed. I am convinced that the leading characteristic of the
majority of the preachers is simple megalomania. I have never heard a
single remark denoting any originality or vigour of mind. I have heard
good, effective speaking in the side streets of Glasgow on a Saturday
night. The speakers, however, were advocating not godliness but
birth-control. Their object was to sell pamphlets about contraceptives,
and they sold them.




TOURIST IN PORTUGAL


THE first call of outward-bound British steamers in Portugal is
Leixes (a name which nobody can pronounce correctly, and few can
spell), the seaport for Oporto. Oporto lies across the Douro, a few
miles up the river; Leixes, however, is not at the mouth of the
Douro, but slightly to the north of it. British steamers, when they
enter Leixes harbour at early morn, seem to make a point of waking
the whole of Portugal with their sirens. Leixes, considered as a
town, is nothing at all; it apparently has far more boats than houses.
But we had no difficulty in hiring there a good car. In pursuance of the
great principle that it is always wise to employ two men on a one-man
job, this car was run by a couple of fellows, both very obliging and
courteous. One of them did naught but wind up the car when necessary.
The other was reported to be chauffeur to a Portuguese general; he was
not in uniform, but this did not prevent us from being militarily
saluted when we passed barracks. We had been warned about Portuguese
roads and Portuguese driving, and the chauffeur-in-chief was earnestly
exhorted to drive slowly--so that we could observe Portugal! Perhaps he
did drive slowly, according to his conception of the adverb. But it is
quite certain that he would go round absolutely blind corners in
populous streets at thirty miles an hour. Nevertheless, no living thing
was assassinated, and at the end of the day the car was still whole,
though more loosely articulated than at the beginning. The roads were as
appalling as rumour had made them, and the climate as exquisite.

The perils of the road were intensified by the numerous oxen-carts,
which, to the exclusion of the horse, divide with the automobiles the
road-traffic of the Oporto district. These carts must have started at
the other end of civilisation some thousands of years ago, and they have
now met the automobile at this end. Their massive wooden wheels have
only two spokes. Their burden seems to be chiefly barrels. The pair of
oxen, unshod, move at about two miles an hour, and take about a quarter
of an hour to deflect themselves from the middle to the side of the
street. A little boy walks between them, and a man sits behind and
guides, without touching them, by means of a thing that looks like a
goad, but is only a pointer. The Portuguese treat their animals in a
reasonably sympathetic spirit. The yokes are works of applied art,
elaborately carved, sometimes also painted in bright tints, and
sometimes tufted as well. It is evident that they are handed down from
generation to generation. The danger to automobiles of the oxen-carts
lay in the far-spreading horns of the oxen. One lived throughout the day
in the expectation of getting a horn-point in the eye. Whole families
might have encamped under the shadow of those vast umbrageous horns.

The Douro is a beautiful river with precipitous, richly verdured banks,
romantic, coquettish, and yet very dignified. And the little villages
that border it, with their tiled faades to prove that the Moors really
existed, show a picturesqueness to match it. But the city of Oporto
makes you forget the Douro. It is sublimely situated on various hills.
From any summit its antique red roofs flow down in great curves to the
dwarfed river, composing, amid the vivid greens and under the
transparent blue, a picturesqueness that is merely marvellous. True, the
greater and the lesser halves of Oporto are united by a very high iron
bridge designed by the happily inimitable Eiffel, who ruined the entire
aspect of Paris at one blow; but, unlike the Eiffel Tower, the Douro
bridge is not everywhere visible. The winding and climbing configuration
of Oporto is such that unless you are on a summit you can see only about
ten yards of the city at once.

There is nothing of exciting interest in Oporto; the whole is more
exciting and more lovely than any part. This is my own opinion, not the
city's. The city is certainly capable of being excited by its Stock
Exchange. And I admit that the Stock Exchange, though never achieving
beauty, is imposing by reason of its dimensions, its costliness, its
specially designed furniture, its floors, its granite staircases, its
spittoons, its ballroom, and its general demonstration that the
stockbrokers of Oporto, having determined to do something big, did it.

In the guardian of the Stock Exchange (not at the moment functioning) we
had our first example of Portuguese expertness in throat-clearing,
expectoration, and cigarette smoking. This man, like his race, had
attractive manners and a mildly morose wit. When he led us into the
Court of Commercial Justice, a great hall covered with bright frescoes,
he said blandly: "Yes, but no justice in Portugal! Justice too high,"
and pointed to the figure of Justice portrayed on the lofty ceiling.

The Bourse was so exhausting that we had to go and have lunch, and,
under advice, we went to the establishment entitled the Crystal Palace.
It is on a summit, and so great that it has its own private
railway-siding in its gardens. Within and without its ingenious ugliness
is exacerbating--nearly, but not quite, as exacerbating as the ugliness
of the original Crystal Palace. Still, we counted on the reputation of
its cuisine. As the head waiter could speak a little French, I said to
him, in reply to his request for the order: "We leave it to you. Give us
the very best luncheon you can." He was flattered, as head waiters
always are by this gambit. He gave us the very best luncheon he could.
It comprised eight courses of solids, fine wines, fine cigars, fine
liqueurs, and excellent coffee. And it was entirely admirable, with a
touch of native originality. I doubt if you could get a better lunch
outside Brussels, and we marvelled that a provincial town of moderate
size could produce such a repast at ten minutes' notice. Clearly, the
Portuguese understand eating, which is powerfully in their favour. The
bill for three persons was monstrous--fifteen thousand three hundred
reis, less than thirty shillings. (Oh, rate of exchange!)

Thus fortified, we went to inspect the cathedral, which nobody seemed
ever to have heard of. Apart from its cloisters, whose archological
interest is considerable, the most interesting architectural thing about
the cathedral is a dwelling-house which somebody negligently built,
perhaps a century ago, high up between its towers. Exceedingly odd, this
house! In front of the main entrance to the cathedral, at three o'clock
in the afternoon, twenty or thirty lads and boys were playing and making
an acute noise. They all helped us to find the residence of the
sacristan, and most of them begged vociferously and were rewarded with
British pennies. Some, however, did not beg. These got the first
pennies. I asked one of them, who seemed rather mature, how old he was.
"Eighteen." Why this youth was not helping to do the world's work he
did not explain.

The sacristan was cast in the same mould as the guardian of the Bourse.
He showed us everything with great and bland deliberation. For him, the
_clou_ of the edifice was the bishops' robing-room, a splendid chamber,
sombrely glittering with chased brass. Its main features were huge
coffers full of ancient embroidered stuffs and a whole series of
important mirrors. "What are all these mirrors for?" we demanded. The
sacristan answered: "Bishops are just as human as other people. They
like to look at themselves." We were silenced.

Feeling now that we had "done" Oporto, we joyfully realised that we
were at liberty to search for second-hand shops and discover
unprecedented bargains in the antique. We explored one street that was
thick from end to end with jewellers offering rings at three million
reis apiece; but nobody in the street had ever heard of a second-hand
shop, and we came out of it having spent a mere ten thousand reis or
so on Oporto silver-filigree work, which we assuredly should not have
bought had not the rage for spending been upon us. We descended the
high street of Oporto, and saw the rich _bourgeoises_ of Oporto
promenading with Latin and other dignity in black velvet. The
assistant chauffeur sought to impress us with the information that
the church tower at the top of the opposite slope was the highest in
all the world! He also suggested that it would be a good plan to visit
the pawnshops. We warmly welcomed the plan. We visited the pawnshops.
What places! Up wide and rickety and filthy staircases with peeling
walls, into dubious interiors (with pews for pawners) peopled by
frowsy officials who bent over enormous and yellowed books of account.
Balzacian places! But we drew blank--absolutely blank. Then the
assistant chauffeur delivered the news that his mother kept a
second-hand shop. We flew to his mother, but the total value of her
stock could not have exceeded two pounds.

At last, somehow, we had wind of a real second-hand shop. We drove
there, impatient. The great door was locked. An employee reluctantly
opened to our summons, and we had glimpses of long vistas of old
furniture and bric--brac. We rejoiced. But the employee could do
nothing for us. He said his master was away and that he himself knew not
the price of things, and that, moreover, all the things "of an important
value" were put away. He asked us, with kind nonchalance, to call again
on Monday. (This was on a Friday.) But as we could not share his high
and characteristic Portuguese contempt for time, we shook our heads and
drove back in the beautiful, cold, clear evening to Leixes and
the ship, where time was a tyrant.

Impossible to resist the conviction that the importance of Leixes
as a port was strangely incommensurate with the importance of the city
it served. In the Douro we had noticed only one or two small steamers
and schooners, and on its banks only one trifling shipyard. In
Leixes harbour were several large schooners, a Dutch steamer, a
Japanese steamer, and a new American steamer (one of those which,
according to an American present, take six weeks to build and six months
to repair). Nothing else, save launches, smacks, and row-boats. No dock
accommodation whatever. And this for a commercial city which is badly
served by railways and through which passes all the port wine in the
world. The last clause reminds me that I have said nothing of the famous
"wine-lodges" of Oporto--endless catacombs of port. We had purposely
avoided them, frightened by the obligation to taste ten different ports
in half an hour.

       *       *       *       *       *

You go to the Portuguese Riviera from Lisbon by a special railway that
runs along the north shore of the Tagus estuary, defacing it all the
way, and ends at Cascaes. Cascaes stands at the beginning of the
estuary, a fishing town to some extent residential, in whose apology for
a harbour a pilot steamer lies night and day, for ever and ever, to
catch arriving ships. Beyond Cascaes, civilisation ceases. The
coast-line curves round to the north, and for a great distance there is
nothing but lighthouses, dunes, ceaseless and immense breakers, and bold
capes. The authorities have constructed a good road from Cascaes north,
but, after proceeding courageously for several miles, it finishes in
sand. One heard of a project for a pleasure-town somewhere in those fine
wastes, and one will probably continue to hear of the project for many
years to come. If ever the thing is conjured into existence the
inhabitants will live in an eternal booming of breakers, comparable to
that of Treasure Island.

Between Lisbon and Cascaes the shore is a necklace of townlets strung on
to the railway line. They touch one another, so that in a duration of an
hour and a distance of less than twenty miles the train stops about
twenty times. At some points the time between starting from one station
and starting from the next scarcely exceeds a minute, and the hotel
porters do not hurry in fixing your baggage; if the train moves off
while they are on board, they just let it take them to the next station
and then gently walk back--an affair of five minutes. The trains are by
no means _trains de luxe_, or expresses, but they do exhibit the chief
virtue of a train--they are prompt. The line is no doubt one of the most
efficient in Portugal. And the roads, speaking generally, were the best
we saw in Portugal. In fact, it was plain that the district must be
inhabited by people of influence who knew how to look after the
amenities of their life. A number of the residents were
"daily-breaders," commuters--otherwise season-ticket holders. They
behaved, however, in a Portuguese fashion. You could see them walking
calmly to the station as the train was arriving. Not a sign of haste.
The train would stop in the station. Still not a sign of hurry. Then the
train would whistle and puff, and then only would the commuters run. Of
course they missed the train; but there would be another in
three-quarters of an hour, and the day had twenty-four hours. Impossible
to deny that these commuters understood the value of possessing their
souls in philosophic tranquillity.

As the line gets farther from Lisbon so does the character of the
townlets develop until, in the Estoril region, which consists of three
contiguous townlets--St. John Estoril, Estoril, and Mont Estoril--the
architecture becomes fantastic, orchidaceous, incredible. There are
hundreds, thousands, of villas, at different elevations on the slopes,
and each is more marvellous than the others. Architectural tradition is
simply ignored in the majority of these gleaming white, pink, blue, and
yellow houses. They caricature medival castles, Italian renaissance
palaces, English country-houses. They are frescoed; they are fretted;
they are inlaid. Some are rather good; a few grotesquely miss fire, but
none is ordinary. Seen in the mass, during a soft, lucid sunset, they
come nearer to constituting a fairyland than anything else modern I ever
saw. The most extravagant of all the confections, a building that again
and again we would walk a mile and a half to see, proved to be a garage.
Far more grandiose than the house to which it was attached, it resembled
nothing in the history of evolution. It was superbly ugly, but it
exercised a most potent spell. We inquired about it from a lady who had
resided long in the district. "Yes," she said, "that was built by a man
who felt sorry for an architect who could never get anything to do." I
doubt not that it was the only job that the architect ever got. But he
has not lived in vain.

The Estoril region is the tripartite queen of the Portuguese Riviera. It
lies next to Cascaes, and is on the part of the northern shore which
juts out beyond the southern shore of the estuary, so that the view
therefrom is of the unbounded sea. It appears to consist exclusively of
villas, hotels, and little casinos. The absence of chimneys strikes an
Englishman, but the climate explains that. Less explicable is the dearth
of shops. Shops there were, but very few and very paltry. And by what
machinery of distribution physical life was sustained in the region we
never discovered. Mont Estoril is supposed to dominate the three
Estorils; it is easily the best known of the three in the great
Anglo-Saxon community of globe-trotters. But its days of domination
appear to be numbered. Estoril (between Mont and St. John) is erecting a
tremendous pleasure park on a quite cosmopolitan scale, and comprising
hotels, baths, a casino, and even arcades of shops. When this dream is
fulfilled--and it is very nearly fulfilled, for the glass is in most of
the million windows--Mont will have to take second place, and will then,
of course, make a point of its select quietude. The new hotels are not
likely to be better, in essentials, than the plain but well-run and
moderately priced hotels of Mont Estoril, which in the methods of their
excellent management seem to be Swiss or Italian.

But all these things are nothing. The chief matter in the Portuguese
Riviera is the climate. We spent February there. On the first morning I
went out before breakfast under the bluest sky and the most magnificent
sunshine I have experienced anywhere save in the Sahara. I did not put
on an overcoat; it would have been monstrous to put on an overcoat.
Well, the east wind went through me like a dagger through a ghost. Never
have I met with an east wind so dead east as that wind. Half an hour of
it gave me neuralgia for three days. But ere the three days had elapsed
the climate had relented, and it soon grew to be paradisaical. In a week
we loved it, and girls were bathing in the sea. (True, they were
Scottish girls.) The climate is vastly superior to that of the French
Riviera--you can be frozen to death on one side of the Avenue de la
Rpublique at Nice and roasted to death on the other--if only for the
fact that the temperature scarcely falls at night. Indeed, the nights
are warm in winter. Clemency is the true name of the climate. We had
three days of rain, and at the end of our stay somebody broke it to us
that February was the rainy month. Undoubtedly the most favoured periods
would be the six weeks beginning the 1st of March--when the wild
flowers, of which we saw the infancy, must cover the hill-slopes with
colour--and the six weeks beginning the 1st of October. In summer, it
appears, great winds blow, and the shores are crammed and bursting with
Portuguese parents and babies. (After all, it is their country.)

       *       *       *       *       *

Cintra is one of the show places of Portugal. It used to be--in
Southey's time, for instance--one of the show places of the world. You
reach it from the Estorils northward across a rising, rolling, austere
country of scrubby trees and umber earth which is enlivened by bright
gorse, a huge decaying palace or so, a penal agricultural settlement,
and a few unkempt, picturesque villages whose inhabitants are very much
patched and not in the slightest degree picturesque. The villages,
however, are perhaps not as barbaric as they appear, for a tumbledown
house in one of the most remote of them bore an inscription in
Portuguese signifying, "United Recreative Club of Pinho."

Having turned the flank of a sierra, you perceive Cintra lying on the
northern slope thereof, high above a vast plain lined with obviously
good roads that lead to the glittering Atlantic. The horses have never
stopped trotting. They will unremittingly trot eight, ten, twelve miles,
gently but steadily, accepting ceaseless hills with calm fatalism; they
continue, they continue. Occasionally the driver reminds them of the
seriousness of their vocation with a flick; he does not lash, or even
whip.

The whole of the district, including Cintra, is dominated by the palace
of Pena, set on a peak in the clouds. The Moors probably had good reason
to build there. The Prince Consort, who tried to improve on them by
grandiosely imitating medivalism in the middle of the nineteenth
century, had no good reason. Only a vain and lunatic fool would have
imposed on the labour of his country the heartrending task of
transporting to the summit of the sierra the materials for this
incredible mass of architectural mediocrity. Such fantastic tricks must
put a strain on the great principle of divine right.

Cintra itself is dominated by a twin pair of bottle-like or kiln-like or
gourd-like constructions that spring with a curious abnormality from the
roofs of the royal palace in the centre of the town. You want to
investigate those twins, and you want still more to have lunch; but you
are a tourist and therefore the slave of tradition, and the unchangeable
tradition is that before lunch tourists must persist for several miles
beyond the town in order to visit the gardens of Monserrate, once the
home of Beckford of Fonthill and _Vathek_--double-asterisked in the
pre-war Baedeker. You know in advance that the gardens of Monserrate
will be a bore. They are. True, they are less of a bore than the
gigantic, world-renowned private gardens of Bordighera, but simply
because they are less extensive. The detested landscape gardener has
created them the negation of a garden; and all the captive trees are
rare, and every tree has a label in clear Latin tied round its neck.
There are two redeeming mercies--no guide is permitted to accompany you,
and the gardeners are not labelled.

The delayed lunch at the Htel Netto atones. You see at once that the
head waiter, in a white jacket, is a human being. He is urbane, grave,
dignified. He does not ask you what you will have for lunch. He brings
you the lunch--and promptly--receiving it himself, course by course,
through an aperture like a ticket-window at a railway station. It is an
excellent lunch, from the omelette, of which you have heard the sizzling
on the other side of the aperture, to the oranges on their stalks. The
waiter knows it is an excellent lunch. About the Collares wine he allows
himself a discreet enthusiasm, for it is a special vintage of the hotel.
He is a careful man. He will not serve your drivers until he has bowed
down to your ear like a butler and ascertained that you intend them to
lunch at your expense. You feel that he comprehends human nature. He has
character and he can weigh the character in you, and he takes a tip with
neither servility nor condescension. There is again character in the
middle-aged women outside who cajole money out of your pocket in
exchange for adequate sweetmeats and quite inadequate post cards. They,
too, are urbane and dignified, and yet with a dash of flirtatious or
roguish insistence. Poverty has not caused them to forget that they were
once girls and are still very feminine. They win, and you accept defeat
with relish.

But the most human human beings in the town are certainly the custodians
of the summer palace. The first greets you from his cubicle at the top
of the first flight of steps. Having taken your money, he emerges to
welcome you, not as an official, but as a fellow-man. You perceive
unmistakably that he is enormous; that he is rubicund, that he is juicy,
that the savour of life distends his great nostrils. He smiles richly.
He is like a man of butter in a blue suit. It might be said of him that
his paths drop fatness. He gives you the illusion that nobody has ever
visited the palace before, and that your advent is a milestone in his
career, and that if all the moments could be like that moment he would
scorn to receive wages for guarding the palace. He abounds on every side
of you for ten paces, and then suddenly, in broken French, informs you
that it is forbidden to him to accompany you farther. At his suggestion
you ascend another flight of steps and ring a bell. You do ring. No
answer. The custodian below grins and makes a furious motion of the arm
to indicate that you aren't half ringing. You ring with sternness. He
approves. The door is opened by Custodian Number Two, while Number One
beams upward, as if saying, "Precisely what I said would come to pass
has come to pass."

Number Two is thinner--an India-paper encyclopdia of the palace. Though
not servile, he is a courtier, and, though a courtier, he is very firm.
He may be distinguished from all other officials in Portugal by the fact
that he is not smoking a cigarette and does not spit--even into a
spittoon. The excellent adroit fellow has really nothing to show, but
he shows it with grandeur. Except Moorish tiles and a few suits of

armour and the chimneys of the tremendous Moorish kitchen (which are in
truth the bottle-like constructions dominating the town), there is
naught of the slightest sthetic or practical interest in the whole
castle. No worse pictures were ever painted than hang on these walls.

There are, however, the private apartments. "Please abandon your
cigarette," says Number Two. "I am about to show you the private
apartments of the ex-king and queen." A proof, this, of the existence of
the historic sense in a republican official. Poor, dark little private
apartments! You see how monarchs till quite recently lived in their
summer _villegiatura_, and the revelation is pathetic. The chief of the
furniture is protected from you by a cord, in imitation of
Fontainebleau. What furniture! What a tasteless, vulgar mixture of
styles and no-styles! The desk of the assassinated Carlos might have
been bought at a celebrated second-hand establishment in Kingsway. The
leather arm-chair might have come out of a hotel, the plush sofa out of
a dubious house. It is terrible, desolating, frightful. It would not be
believed on the stage--no, not on the provincial stage. The bedroom,
after the other rooms, is comparatively innocuous. The washstand shows
modern plumbing, coquettishly finished. Here the queen used to bend
with pride over a hot-water tap device invented in England--the same
queen who, with a bouquet of flowers her sole weapon, tried to shield
her husband from the bullets of a political executioner in Lisbon....

When you get out of the palace the unctuous and jolly Number One runs
forth rapidly at you, as you pass, with buttonhole posies. A delicate
attention! You must accept them or break his heart. Remunerate him or
not as you choose--that is a detail--but accept the offering of a
brother.

After the palace, nothing in Cintra! An agreeable enough little town,
with a real train and two or three tram-cars, and a bookshop (where
tobacco maintains the balance of the balance-sheet), but scarcely worthy
to be the cynosure of a continent. Byron wrote bits of _Childe Harold_
there. You can see the building; it was and is a hotel. The mimosa is
perfectly marvellous--mimosa in full blossom meets mimosa across the
thoroughfares in winter. No doubt in summer the display of vegetation is
prodigious. And what then? As a resort, as a public monument, Cintra
must decay. The modern tourist is more aware of relative values than
Southey was, or Byron, who compared the town to Eden. The globe is more
familiar to him.

A word concerning Pena. Geographically it is only about half a mile from
Cintra, but as it is on a crag just a third of a mile high, the hairpin
road from town to Pena is probably several miles in length; even so, its
gradients are such as effectively to cure the magnificent horses of
their habit of trotting. As you ascend, the scenery takes on a more and
more panoramic grandeur, and Cintra gets smaller and smaller, and before
you are anywhere near the gates of the park you can look down the
champagne-bottle chimneys of the summer palace in the middle of the
town. The feature of the luxuriant mountain-side is the immense
boulders, some of them weighing a hundred tons or so, poised on one
another like the transient edifice of a child. The Lisbon earthquake
must have put the fear of Heaven into those boulders for a few years.
The hanging gardens out of which the towers of Pena rise are full of
black swans and fountains, and the February climate may be judged from
the fallen camellia blossom that lies everywhere.

The great castle is surrounded by a narrow terrace, and the tremendous
views from this terrace are in the highest degree sublime. Nothing finer
can exist outside Yellowstone Park. If Southey lived on the peak before
the Arabian remains were rendered habitable, then he is justified of his
words. Byron is not. The affair is overwhelming, but it bears no
resemblance to the Edens of the old illustrated family Bibles. Possibly
Eden may be located in the Moorish castle which--though from the town
it seems almost as lofty as Pena--is now perched far below on a lesser
crag. When you enter the modern residence, all is over, for you are in
one of the worst royal houses ever seen. True, there are a very few fine
things, and especially there is an Italian fifteenth-century alabaster
altar (which must have needed some engineering up these slopes); but the
ensemble is uglier even than the interior of the palace in the town. The
inconveniences, the discomforts, the pettinesses, the obscurities, the
monstrosities are simply tragic. Only one room, Queen Amelia's chamber,
had a fireplace--seemingly transported from Cromwell Road. Look on the
wall at the Christmas card (with an English greeting) hand-painted by
King Carlos, and at the water-colours by the same and by Queen Amelia.
Look at the yellowing periodical literature (all dated October 1910)
scattered about--_Modern Society_ ("the mirror of the social world"),
_Gil Blas_--and the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_. Look at the cheaply framed
reproductions of old masters, issued at a shilling apiece by William
Heinemann. Search in vain for the bathroom.... But every little window
frames a celestial view. The Prince Consort climbed seventeen hundred
feet to erect all this formidable masonry into the false semblance of
something antique and fine; he employed a colonel as architect; he spent
a fortune to produce an abode that any stockbroker would sniff at; he
desecrated a unique, miraculous site, and in sixty years of use a royal
line failed to make the place better than a congeries of expensive
wigwams. The last sound and the first which we heard within the castle
was that of an oil-engine. Doubtless it was employed to actuate the
dynamo for the "wireless" installation whose wires are now stretched
between the towers of the great eyesore. The republic has had the wit to
turn to utility a monument which ought not to exist, but which it would
be foolish to destroy.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of the most satisfactory things about Lisbon is that you can enter
it from the sea without any passport formalities. Indeed at no
Portuguese port had we to show passports or to give any information
whatever as to our foreign selves. We might have been emissaries of
Lenin carrying the seeds of conspiracy and Bolshevism, for all the
Portuguese authorities seemed to care. Travellers in Europe will admit
that this is a great point in favour of Portugal.

As for the renowned view of Lisbon from the river, I have seen finer
views of cities from the water. It was good but did not induce ecstasy.
The view from the highest of the hundred hills upon which Lisbon is
built was much more striking than the view from the river.

The city has importance, but exactly how important it is nobody knows.
In 1900 it had a population of three hundred and fifty thousand. Just
before the war it was supposed to have a population of half a million or
more. To-day, such has been the influx from the countryside, the lowest
estimate puts the population at three-quarters of a million, and some
statisticians with a love of round figures put it at a million. But only
the next census will discover the truth. Anyhow, the city has a frontage
of seven miles to the Tagus, which is something--especially along the
Lisbonian streets. The pity is that the most glorious sight in
Lisbon--the church and monastery of Belem (the latter now a well-run
orphanage)--lies at the wrong end of the seven miles. The spectacularly
remarkable thing about Lisbon is the fact that, owing to the number and
precipitateness of its hills (some of them rise at an angle within a few
degrees of the perpendicular), half the buildings appear to be perched
on top of the other half. The crest of one hill is reached by an
elevator that ends in a short horizontal gallery. To erect this elevator
right in the middle of the city was a stroke of genius on the part of
the city council. Of course the elevator itself is ugly, but it is well
masked by big buildings, and the panorama from the summit at dusk is of
a magical beauty. The time to see the romance of Lisbon is after the
glare of the sun on the white, pink, and yellow buildings has begun to
fade, when the washed clothes that flow down on poles from the windows
of every storey in the quieter streets have lost their intimate detail
in the twilight and become mysterious. And even the most modern white
streets of the shopping centre look lovely at night in the diffused
radiance of arc-lamps often hidden round a corner; they are monumental
then, simplified, grandiose, immensely impressive. And "Oriental"
Lisbon, ravines of streets, climbing, descending, curving, is as
picturesque as anyone can desire.

The population everywhere intensifies the picturesqueness, for it is
thoroughly mixed, diversified, and tinted in all shades. Every variety
of cross from 99 per cent. Latin-Moorish and 1 per cent. negro, to 99
per cent. negro and 1 per cent. Latin-Moorish, can be seen; and racial
purity of any sort is rare. There is no colour prejudice in Portugal;
there could not be. You can see the races of the earth in Chicago, if
you visit different quarters, but in Lisbon you can see the races of the
earth in a single individual. This complexity of breeding appears
especially strange in the central square of Lisbon, where
newspaper-offices, hotels, restaurants, cafs, stores, picture-theatres,
gaming-houses, and a spider's web of electric tram-wires give a physical
illusion of unadulterated Western modernity.

Lisbon is as different from Oporto as New York from, say, New Orleans.
Not less picturesque, but differently picturesque. One meets few oxen in
Lisbon, and the Lisbon oxen have plain yokes and horns less like the
antlers of a stag. On the other hand, there is a full and even generous
supply of automobiles, and the picturesqueness of these is vocal; it
consists in the noise they make and the wind of their rushing. A story
runs that a Portuguese profiteer bought a Rolls-Royce, and the next day
complained that it was not satisfactory. The vendor anxiously
interviewed the chauffeur, who said that the car functioned to
perfection. But the owner protested:

"Nothing of the kind. It's absolutely noiseless. You can't hear it
move."

The vendor soon remedied that defect and made the owner quite happy.
When you are trying to sleep, and not succeeding, at the Avenida Palace
Hotel, which gives on the famous Avenue of Liberty (a respectable but
dull imitation of the Champs Elyses), the row, din, and uproar of the
automobiles of Portuguese profiteers develop into a phenomenon
surpassing all other phenomena on earth--and it is a phenomenon that
persists during twenty-one hours of the twenty-four. Compared to it,
Fifth Avenue is like a side-street in Concord, and Piccadilly like a
churchyard. Possibly cross-breeding may account for this excruciating
passion for noise and restlessness which to my mind removes Lisbon from
quite the van of the procession of progress.

Nevertheless, Lisbon is in the movement. Its picture-theatres are
packed, and Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford are adored there. Its huge
opera-house, with a hundred private boxes and a shoe-shine parlour,
attracts considerable audiences to performances that compare not
unfavourably with those of Paris. It has libraries. It has national art
collections (though the rules for admittance thereto tend to dissuade
the visitor from attempting to see them). It has fire-engines, which fly
toward conflagrations to a warning accompaniment of tin whistles. It has
lots of newspapers; it has a theatrical newspaper. It has one or two
good restaurants, and one very good indeed--but not better than at
Oporto. It has strikes. It has many strikes. I should not be surprised
to learn that Portugal has more strikes per square mile and per head
than any other country in the world. In Oporto the trams had struck. No
sooner had we entered the restaurant of our first hotel in Lisbon than
we had to assist at a strike in the making. The proceedings were
conducted in French. With a magnificent disregard of hungry clients, the
waiters crowded round the hated employer, who demanded of them with all
the arts of rhetoric: "Am I the master here or are you?" If I had been
asked to reply, I should have said: "Neither of you. And that's either
the curse or the salvation of the situation--I don't know which." Still,
the affair tranquillised itself, and we obtained our meal--not a good
one. The telephones in Lisbon had been on strike for weeks and weeks.
The postal service was so disorganised that enterprising firms would
organise their own service when they could. The railways were on the eve
of striking. But the Portuguese have the art of life, which is the
attainment of calm and of fatalism.

You could see the art of life in full practice in the sugar-queues,
which abounded in the streets as sugar itself abounded in the hotels;
you noticed respectably dressed old gentlemen standing placidly in these
queues, and still standing there when you passed the same spot two hours
later. You could see it in the use of the monocles which the golden
youth and middle-age of Portugal deem to be an essential part of their
raiment. An official told us that ten thousand monocles of plain glass
were imported into Lisbon every year. The same official told us that
forty thousand persons were employed in the gambling trade in Portugal;
that there were four hundred gambling-houses in Lisbon, and over a
hundred within a hundred yards of the Rocio--the central square of the
city; and he told us further that since business men had a habit of
gambling till 2 or 3 a.m., it was difficult to make appointments with
them before noon.

We gradually came under the obsession of the great Portuguese gambling
idea. We heard again and again that the best food at the cheapest prices
and the best dancing and the best diversions generally were to be had in
the gambling-houses of Lisbon. And at length we determined to visit the
most chic--of course solely in the interests of social science! We
arranged a rendezvous for nine o'clock, because our information was that
nobody would dream of dining in a Lisbon gambling-house before
nine-thirty. As the hour approached we grew positively excited, and we
drove up to the door in a fever of anticipation. The door was shut. A
small crowd of young quidnuncs said that the place was closed by order.
Impossible! Everybody had agreed that the authorities would never dare
to shut up the gambling-houses. We tried another one. Closed! Another.
Closed! Lastly we went, under guidance, to a mysterious establishment in
a dark and dubious street. Our guide said that the authorities would not
succeed in closing _that_. Closed! Presently we became aware of
cavalrymen prancing up and down the thoroughfares in couples. The thing
looked like a revolution. But it was only the Portuguese method of
closing gambling-houses. The next morning a military sentry stood in
front of the door of each of the four hundred gambling-houses at
Lisbon. Naturally we rejoiced, as virtuous and hard-working men, at the
suppression of this terrible vice. Yes, we rejoiced. But somewhere in
the recesses of our minds was a notion to the effect that the Portuguese
Government would have done well to postpone the suppression for just
twenty-four hours. We had to leave Portugal without the slightest notion
of what kind of a paradise a truly chic Lisbon gambling-house really is.
A few days later the English papers talked descriptively of a revolution
in Portugal. But we knew what it was and that it wasn't a revolution.

From British inhabitants and frequenters of Portugal we heard various
verdicts on the Portuguese. One man said that Portugal was corrupt from
top to bottom--from the policeman on the pier to the chief of the state;
that the profiteers had taken all the best houses, that the house famine
was extremely acute, that no effort whatever was being made to cure it,
and, finally, that the middle classes were being ground to powder
between the millstone of the profiteer and the millstone of the
proletariat. Nothing in this indictment struck us as novel. We had heard
much the same of other countries that could eat Portugal without too
much indigestion. The general verdict was decidedly more favourable.
Foreigners who had spent their lives in Portugal spoke well of the
Portuguese. They said that they were polite, amenable, and satisfactory
to deal with, provided that you could smile pleasantly and refrain from
trying to hustle them. To try to hustle them was fatal. They held
strongly that Portugal was deserving of the utmost possible sympathetic
treatment, seeing that it had gone into the war with expectation of
great advantage, and come out of the war with nothing but high prices
and debt. And they attributed the relative instability of government not
to the capriciousness of the people, but to the absence of permanent
officials in the state-machine. Strange to say, terrible to relate, the
Portuguese people, unlike more imposing races, are not faultless.
Nevertheless we, in our brief acquaintance, took a considerable fancy to
them.




BEFORE THE RAILWAY STRIKE


ON the Wednesday before the threatened railway strike I took stock of
Hyde Park. Kensington Gardens, barred to the public, was a white-tented
field. G.S. waggons moved to and fro in it, and soldiers, either in
groups or singly, walked about with an earnest but quite unsuccessful
pretence of executing a great war. A non-commissioned officer caressed
his thigh by means of a cane. The big refreshment-kiosk, with waitresses
in white aprons all complete, was open--possibly for the convenience of
the Great General Staff. I heard continuously the distant menacing roll
of a drum. Close by me was a newly-erected wireless station, no doubt
getting hourly news of the flooding of mines by Scottish miners and
their attacks on volunteer pump-workers.

In the Row were many scores of horsemen and horsewomen--whole families
of them, dwindling down from immense papa to the budding flapper on a
Shetland. Men were tightening the girths of women's mounts with the most
chivalrous attention. And the Row was flanked by processions of nun-like
nursemaids pushing single prams and double prams--the Rolls-Royces of
the pram-world, magnificently hooded to protect august infants.

I wandered towards Knightsbridge Barracks, and had the greatest luck. A
full military band filed out into the yard, and was followed by an old
military officer, wondrously shaved, moustached, clothed, legginged,
booted, and spurred. (His valet or batman must have led a full life.)
This military officer amounted to the mirror, symbol, paragon, and
exemplar of utter correctness. He seemed quite ready to conduct battles
on an immense scale, but he strangely carried in his gloved hands a
baton, and instead of a battle he conducted that very fine fox-trot,
"Avalon." Though his gestures were nonchalant enough, and he experienced
none of Sir Henry Wood's difficulty in keeping hair out of eyes, the
performance of "Avalon" was admirable. It uplifted the heart, unbent the
mind, tranquillised the soul, and put a better complexion on the Empire.

Nobody among the small group of nursemaids, quidnuncs, and me applauded
the fox-trot. Nevertheless the military officer repeated the
performance, and I was glad. At the end of the second performance he
gave a third. And then a fourth. My mettle was aroused. I said to
myself: "I can stand him as long as he can conduct 'Avalon.'" I was
mistaken. He beat me. When at last I retreated, he was still
nonchalantly conducting glorious performances of "Avalon." ... The
insistent throbbing of the distant drum regained my ear.




DANCING


THE new generation--I mean the generation which in 1914 was just old
enough to fight, nurse, or otherwise serve in the War--probably shows a
more striking change from the one before it than any generation has
shown for at least two centuries. A change in mind, spirit, and manner!
The change of manner, of course, irritates a large number of persons who
are shocked because the world continues to go round after they have
begun to suffer from rheumatism and baldness. The changes of mind and
spirit, however, are more important. As regards mind, the latest
generation is better educated, more cultivated, less hypocritical, more
courageous, more honest, less stuffy than its predecessors, and in all
these respects has quite marvellously improved on its predecessor's
predecessors. Further, it has completed a sort of revolution in the
relations of the sexes, which aforetime were regulated by a system of
conventions, shams, and pretences that can only be described as
poisonous.

As regards the spirit, the latest generation has rediscovered, or is
rediscovering, the great secrets--lost since the Elizabethan Age--that
the chief thing in life is to feel that you are fully alive, that
continual repression is absurd, that dullness is a social crime, that
the present is quite as important as the future, that life oughtn't to
be a straight line but a series of ups and downs, and that moments of
ecstasy are the finest moments and the summits of existence. It has
finally killed the Victorian Age dead. I am willing to admit that the
Victorian Age was a great age, though it acutely exasperated me when I
was young. But that it had the terrible vices of continual repression
and disgusting hypocrisy cannot be disputed, and to contemplate its
corpse gives me genuine pleasure. So much for the achievement of the
latest generation. The latest generation hasn't done everything itself,
but it has handsomely finished what others began, and it shall be
awarded the glory. Personally, I rejoice even in its mistakes.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now the most spectacular symptom of the new spirit is the revival and
the full democratisation of dancing. The latest generation certainly did
not initiate the revival, which began long before the War in the
formation of private dance clubs, whose fault was a ridiculous
snobbishness. What the latest generation did was to seize on to a good
thing, to exploit it fully, and to tear it free of the chains of
convention and expose it to all the antiseptic winds of publicity.

It is to the demands of the latest generation that we owe the public
dance-halls which are among the most impressive, beautiful, and healthy
phenomena of modern social life. Not that the dance-halls are the
recent invention of the middle class in London and the great provincial
centres, as some might assume. Dance-halls flourished mightily even in
the last century in a few of the most popular seaside resorts,
especially at Blackpool and at Douglas, Isle of Man. In these
considerable pleasure cities there were dance-halls before the latest
generation was born, and before the fox-trot and the shimmy had been
conceived. The halls were efficiently managed, with few but rigidly
enforced rules; they had good music; they were bright and even
glittering; and they were cheap. (You had the run of them for sixpence a
head.) They did, as they still do, enormous business, and were largely
responsible for the popularity of the two places named. Years and years
ago I used to watch them functioning with amazement and delight, and I
wondered that they did not attract attention from students of social
phenomena. True, in those days students of social phenomena had not yet
removed the blinkers prepared for them by Ruskin, Mill, Carlyle, and
Lord Shaftesbury.

But the halls were naturally closed for the greater part of the year,
appealing exclusively to holiday-makers in definite seasons of holiday,
which depended on weather conditions and on the caprices of railway
companies. It never occurred to me, and I doubt if it occurred to
anyone, that plain people might care to dance publicly in the evenings
of working-days, or that sea air was not absolutely essential to
dancing, or that it was not necessary to travel a hundred miles in order
to enjoy a dance, or that the desire to dance, like the desire to eat,
drink, and love, might possibly be quite independent of all seasons
whatever. These great discoveries came later, and they did not come
through the dance-halls of the industrial classes, which dance-halls
were regarded by the other classes as amusingly vulgar. The industrial
class had indeed started public dancing on a scale undreamed of by
Cremorne and Ranelagh, and with vastly more decorum; but the industrial
class only found out that dancing might be just as delectable in winter
as in summer through its habit of imitating the classes above it. The
dancing "craze," as the lame and halt and senile describe it, percolated
both downwards and upwards from the middle class through the strata of
society, and to-day there is no class which does not dance, and probably
no class which objects to be seen dancing in public or in semi-public.
That which once was amusingly vulgar is now strictly correct--and still
amusing.

Halls, clubs, and subscription organisations exist everywhere in order
that individuals may dance amid a crowd consisting mainly of individuals
personally unknown to them. The entertainment is one at which every
spectator is also a performer--and not merely a performer, but an
ecstatic, thrilled, and joyous performer. The resulting spectacle is
unique, in addition to being grand. It is inspiring. It means the public
and the frank re-establishment of joy and ecstasy. And, incidentally, it
shows how indestructible are the most ancient human instincts. The dance
is probably older than anything except eating, drinking, love, and
murder.

       *       *       *       *       *

The curious and convenient thing is that dancing provides joy and
ecstasy and the uplifting of the soul, and at the same time does
positive moral, artistic, and physical good to the dancer. It has
practically none of the disadvantages which accompany other forms of
diversion and exercise and discipline. You can get ecstasy out of a
bottle of champagne or even a glass of beer (not to speak of six
glasses), but the uplifting is no finer than what the dance affords; it
is, in fact, less fine, and it has grave drawbacks, some of which may
not be noticed for years, and some of which are very apt to be noticed
the next morning. And dancing is a physical exercise quite as
efficacious as, and far less tedious than, the ingenious contortions
prescribed by training experts. Its effect upon the action of the skin
is excellent; it develops the muscles; it renders the body lissom; and
it fosters gracefulness of carriage. Further, it cannot fail to teach
rhythm--an important matter which most citizens would remain quite
ignorant of if they did not dance. The mere discipline of moving
accurately to music is valuable; and so is the discipline of
co-ordinating one's movements with the movements of another person.

In nearly all these respects modern dancing is probably superior to the
dancing of earlier centuries, which was much slower and which certainly
was not calculated to induce ecstasy. Modern dancing would have shocked
the eighteenth century, and yet the eighteenth century was more cynical
and less moral than the twentieth.

Finally, in the catalogue of dancing's merits, there is the fact that,
unlike golf and other crudities, it is practised when people are in
their best and prettiest clothes and on their best behaviour. To sum up,
I would say that the "craze" for dancing is a truly healthy and hopeful
sign of these times which are so rich in signs doubtful and sinister.

I shall not let my enthusiasm carry me into the clouds. Willingly will I
be the stern moralist and adopt the grave tone so much admired in this
country. I assert solemnly that public dancing has its evil side. (No!
Not the evil side which is perhaps in your minds, and the existence of
which I do not for a moment credit!) It keeps its devotees up too late.
The law ordains a certain hour for closing public resorts and clubs, but
the law makes frequent exceptions, and, moreover, there are well-known
devices for evading the law. I am not an advocate of early dancing; I
have no use for afternoon dancing, and assuredly I do not believe in
dancing between the courses at dinner. But I think that people ought to
know when to go home, and that too many of them, even if they do know,
lack the moral fibre to act on their knowledge. Dancers who go home at 3
a.m. must cheat either themselves or somebody else the next day; for
there are not and never will be twenty-seven hours in a day. The
disadvantage is real; it is serious; and every effort should be made to
minimise it.

       *       *       *       *       *

In regard to the actual art of dancing as exemplified to-day in public
and semi-public ballrooms, it may be said to be full of interesting
problems, the solution of one or two of which may one day
catastrophically split the dancing world into two camps. Perhaps for
many people, especially people with plenty of money in their pockets,
the really acute problem, quite unconnected with the art of dancing, is
where to find a hall or club that on the one hand is not so fashionably
packed that you can't move, or on the other hand is not so unfashionably
and forlornly empty that you feel in it as if you were assisting at a
memorial service for the death of dancing.

A great problem, of a moral or political nature, now just simmering up,
is raised by the question: "Why should the man always absolutely rule
the dance?" There is no answer to this question except to say that women
have ever been in subjection and therefore should ever be. In any dance
of a couple one of the pair must of course be autocrat, but why should
not the pair exchange rles at intervals? Women know as much about
dancing as men, and numbers of them could certainly direct the mutual
movements better than the men with whom they dance. I am surprised that
our more advanced feminists out of a job have not made a fuss over such
a fundamental affair long since.

But the problem of problems is the admitted monotony of modern dancing.
A few weeks ago I beheld with amazement the programme of a ball at
Buckingham Palace. With the exception of the formal opening grand
quadrille and the final galop, every dance was a waltz. There were about
twenty waltzes one after the other. Not a fox-trot! As for a
one-step!... As for a tango!... It may have been held, and perhaps
wisely, that words such as "fox-trot" would not look nice on the
pasteboards of a Buckingham Palace ball. But even in other ballrooms the
programmes are monotonous.

The one-step has fallen into disfavour, and rightly so, for it is a
tenth-rate business. Programmes are divided in the main between
fox-trots and waltzes, and though the waltz is a finer dance than the
fox-trot, the fox-trot is still very fine, and, being easier than the
waltz and better adapted for variations, it immensely exceeds the waltz
in popularity. The mischief is that the steps of the two dances are
identical. Again, the authorities who govern and judge competitions will
not permit any sort of stunt effects--and who shall blame them? So that
there is in practice almost no lawful outlet for the human yearning
after change and variety.

Serious efforts are being made to popularise the tango in London. There
is only one waltz, but there are seventy-and-seven tangos, and the tango
is a great dance, with the magnificent rhythm of the fox-trot but
slower; and if you know enough you might dance tangos for a whole
evening and scarcely repeat your figures. But I do not see much future
for the genuine tango in Great Britain. The tango is growing old. It has
been the rage of Paris, where every second dance was and is a tango; but
what has been the rage of Paris is not destined to long life in the rest
of the world. In London to this day, when a tango is played, the
majority of the dancers keep timidly off the floor and watch the dancing
minority. This is a cautious island.

Nor do I think that any form of the square or the round dance will
return in our time. Though the custom of one couple sticking together
for a whole season may slowly disappear--and I hope it will, for it has
a malign influence upon the woman's dancing and renders the male dancer
even more self-centred than he otherwise would be--dancing must remain
an intimacy of two in public. Dancing cannot be really popular unless it
is public, for not one person in a hundred thousand possesses a
ballroom, and square or round dances are impossible at a public dance.
What is more, they are not so interesting to the performers as the
couple-dance. The great need of the age is a new step, with new figures,
capable of many variations within a few clear rules. Such a novelty,
combined with the fox-trot and the waltz, would remove the reproach of
monotony.




GUILTY TILL PROVED INNOCENT


IN France an accused person is assumed to be guilty till he has proved
himself innocent, but we boast that in Britain he is presumed to be
innocent till he is proved guilty.

The boast is fairly justified as regards the bench, but I doubt if it is
fairly justified as regards the police and the prison authorities. The
mere phrase "In the dock" has a sinister sound, implying guilt before
guilt is proved. In most courts the dock is so designed and arranged as
to make its occupant seem like a criminal. Yet throughout every trial
every accused person, until the verdict is pronounced, is presumed to be
an innocent man. Why, then, seek to make him look guilty?

The other day a prisoner could not be put into the dock because there
was no dock ready for him. The moral effect of his not being in the dock
was quite startling. The dock ought to be conceived in a different
spirit, a spirit which remembers that the occupants are legally
innocent.

It may happen to any innocent person--it has happened to tens of
thousands of innocent persons--to get into the hands of the police late
at night, for the police are human, like the rest of us, and err. The
prisoner is for the time being legally innocent. Is he treated as
innocent? Not a bit. He is pushed into a cell which is generally very
dirty, and always excessively uncomfortable, and always without
elementary conveniences; and if he is to sleep he must sleep on wood.
This is the preparation given to him for fighting the whole force of the
law next day. The cells at police stations are at this hour an
outrageous scandal. They might at least be kept clean, even if it costs
money to keep them clean; and there ought to exist devices for making
them comfortable. Why should an innocent person be compelled to pass a
night on a plank in conflict with filth, fleas, and bugs?

       *       *       *       *       *

The worst thing of all is the astounding reluctance of magistrates to
give reasonable bail, and especially to give bail on the prisoner's own
recognisances. If bail is not granted, a legally innocent man goes to
prison. You understand: _prison_. He has certain minor privileges, the
chief of which he must pay for--if he can, but he is a prisoner, a
captive, a shamed captive, a soul cut off suddenly from the whole world.
Magistrates ought always to give bail unless to do so would be patently
ridiculous. Not long ago a woman was brought to trial who had been
imprisoned for seven weeks. The law presumed her innocent, but the
police, under order of a magistrate, had kept her in confinement for
over fifty days. Imagine the dreadful effect on her mind and on her
body. The judge described her offence as "comparatively trivial" and
gave her a nominal sentence of three days. The judge said she had been
imprisoned "through some stupendous blunder." But will she receive
compensation? She will not.

A great deal of our legal system is totally barbaric. It is not merely
unjust. It is infamous.




CIVILISING PRISONS


ONCE I inspected a huge prison, under the guidance of the present head
of our secret police. The horror of the thing deeply impressed me, but
the brutal, the idiotic, the utterly nonsensical stupidity of the thing
impressed me much more.

We seem now to be trying--not to cure the ulcerous prison system--but to
apply a little ointment to its sores. This is a trifle, but it is
something, and it is due to the humane enterprise of Toynbee Hall. Mr.
St. John Ervine has lectured to criminals on the drama, and if applause
is any guide the lecture was a very great success. Then Mr. Lacey
lectured on Plato's _Republic_, and Mr. Lacey also had a triumph. Then
Mr. Fielden, a professor at the Royal College of Music, addressed our
burglars, pickpockets, and would-be assassins on the history of music.
He played some of the great nocturnes of Chopin, and was "heartily
applauded."

I had horrid little doubts as I read about that lecture on Plato's
_Republic_, and these little doubts grew to big doubts when I came to
the great nocturnes of Chopin. Here we herd together "the scum of the
population," and we subject them to a rgime which must necessarily
brutalise them and destroy all their finer sensibilities; and then we
invite them to listen to music which requires for its appreciation not
merely experience in listening to music but an inborn taste for music.

But the prisoners "applauded heartily." Well, of course they did. They
would be only too delighted by any diversion from the senseless tedium
of their lives. If the lecturer had stood on his head or if two cats had
been put to gambol on the piano-keys, the enchanted prisoners would have
applauded even more heartily. Let us have music in our prisons by all
means, and plenty of it; for its influence upon the mind is probably
superior to all other influences. And let us do the prisoners "good," if
we can do it without ourselves being unimaginative prigs and high-brows.

We really ought not to say to the prisoners in effect: "We've got you.
You are dying for want of diversion. You'll applaud anything on earth.
And so you shall jolly well applaud what we like and not what you like."
I consider it insulting to play the great nocturnes of Chopin before
defenceless prisoners. I would endeavour merely to please _them_,
without any conspiracy to do them "good." Because if I pleased them I
should be doing them good.

I would get a vocalist to sing to them a selection of old English,
Scottish, and Irish songs. The applause would bring the prison down.
The prisoners would laugh and they would cry. And I should at any rate
be free from the ghastly reproach of deliberately trying to undo in an
hour the harm which I was doing deliberately week by week and year by
year.




HOW GIRLS REGARD MARRIAGE


THE attitude of one sex to another is nowadays fundamentally changed in
regard to what was once the most urgent of all matters, namely, of
course, love,--at least so I am often told, and so I often read! The
masculine attitude, according to the popular theory, has not altered.
No! The young man, and indeed the middle-aged, is supposed still to be
the seeker, the hunter, the devourer, the male whose possessive

instincts insist on being satisfied. It is the young woman who has
changed.

According to the popular theory the attitude of the modern young woman
might be expressed thus:

"I am not what I was. In fact, beneath my exterior, which is more
charming than ever before, I am so sternly altered you won't know me.
Please, therefore, do not make the mistake of trying to practise any of
your old devices. Once I lived solely for love and marriage. I dreamt
about nothing but the ideal man: I had no aim but to be mistress of a
home. But I am now quite otherwise. I have become a serious creature. I
have higher and nobler interests than those of mere love. I am no longer
foolishly sentimental. Generally I have a vocation and not seldom a
profession. I can earn my living, and I do. I am more or less
independent. I see life and I know it. My mind has been lifted up to
view the world. And I have realised that I used to be rather silly in my
mental demeanour towards such agreeable specimens of the other sex as I
happened to meet. Love is not much after all. Can you expect my thoughts
to be running after love when they are occupied with better and more
interesting things? Can you give me any reason why I should become a
domestic slave? My horizons are enlarged, and I am not in the mood for
any nonsense."

And so on.

For myself, I receive the report of the modern feminine attitude with
caution. For I have not yet met with it in real life. There are a
certain few girls who have little or no use for men or marriage, who
feel no natural desire to look better when a man is observing them than
when a woman is observing them. But there always were such girls, and
such girls have their proper place and usefulness in every organised
society. And that the percentage of them has increased I do not believe,
because I can think of no reason why it should have increased.

Take the existence of an average girl who goes out into the world and
works therein. Does she do it for a pastime? The answer is, No. People
don't toil so many hours a day and submit to discipline and suffer the
annoyances and nervous strain of a city journey night and morning, and
keep on toiling and submitting and suffering month after month and year
after year, simply for a pastime. Even an enthusiastic girl doesn't do
that. Does she do it, then, from a sense of duty to the world, or to her
country, arguing that everybody ought to help the general welfare? The
answer is again, No. Very few men, and still fewer women, have the sense
of public duty developed beyond the sense of private advantage. If girls
work in the same fields as men, they do so rather because they must in
order to live, or because they can thereby attain a personal or family
advantage beyond the mere means of existence.

People say that work is enjoyable for its own sake. It simply is not. No
sane, well-balanced person enjoys work for its own sake. He, or she, may
derive a secondary enjoyment from work that productively exercises a
faculty. But all work, broadly considered, is a nuisance. Everybody
except the queer person regards work as the means to an end, the end
being either knowledge, or money and the exchanging of money for
pleasure or power. If by a miracle all girl workers, or men workers
either, could inherit a comfortable fortune, the business offices of
London, New York, and Chicago would empty themselves more quickly than a
theatre empties itself after a show. They would be deserted and forlorn
between one sunrise and the next. The play would be definitely over.

       *       *       *       *       *

The final purpose of the working girl in setting to work and keeping at
work is, after she has provided for necessaries, to increase her
luxuries: which chiefly means to make herself more attractive, and to
lay by a relatively modest sum for emergencies and calamities. It cannot
be doubted that she looks forward to the day when she will not have to
work, or will have to work less, and will be able to enjoy herself more.

Further, no girls who take their share in the world's hard labour show
the slightest sign of distaste for the society of men in circumstances
favourable to romance? Do they when six, or whatever the hour for
leaving-off may be, chimes on the office clock or the church clock,
murmur to one another: "What a pity that the delightful day of toil is
finished and that we are compelled by convention to mingle with men and
give ourselves up to diversion! How much more pleasant it would be if we
could shut out men and their desires and give ourselves to the
discussion and contemplation of matters more earnest and nobler than the
sentimental dalliance of the sexes!"--do they? To answer that they do
not is an understatement.

Does a man find that in actual practice the modern independent or
semi-independent girl is less disposed than any other sort of girl to
explore with him the charming regions of sentiment? If he admires her,
does she frown on him? If he suggests the restaurant, the theatre, the
cinema, the ballroom, does she reply: "You ought to know that I have
outgrown these baubles"? Does the youth of the two sexes dance less or
does it dance more? Are the twilight and the moonlight any less popular
to-day than they were fifty years ago? Have twilight and moonlight and
the manoeuvres of the dance and the enlacing of arms ceased to have
the usual fine healthy crop of conjugal consequences? Is it untrue
to-day that the sums which a girl spends in heightening her
attractiveness are a pretty sure index to her financial resources?
Lastly, have girls decided that deliberately and consciously to exercise
charm when a man comes along is an old-fashioned and undignified
proceeding? I need not answer any of these queries. The answers are
known to everybody.

The truth is, nature still exists.

I certainly do not count myself among those who assert that human nature
never alters. I am convinced that it does alter, and almost always for
the better. But it alters so slowly that no man lives long enough to
witness in his lifetime such a fundamental change as is popularly
attributed to the modern girl in her relations with the modern man. A
coral reef is built up in some thousands or tens of thousands of years,
and I gravely doubt whether the development of human nature--at any rate
in its more important manifestations--is as rapid as that of a coral
reef.

The great secret purposes of nature are principally assisted by the
desire of the modern man to run after the modern girl and by the desire
of the modern girl to do all she properly can to make him run after her.
Are the great secret purposes of nature to be defeated or checked
because the modern girl works in an office and gets wages? Nature is
quite clever enough to use those wages in the furthering of the
aforesaid secret purposes.

The tactics of the modern girl are profoundly right--much more so than
her methods of reasoning--because they spring from sane instincts so
powerful and all-pervading that she seldom even notices them. And let
there be no mistake about it.

I am tempted to go further and say that the desire of the girl to be
married is still to-day, just as it was in the days before women went to
business, smoked, and laughed at the mere notion of chaperones,
decidedly stronger than the desire of the man to marry her. Women were
the chief instruments of nature's plan in the previous age, and in my
view they still are. It will be seen that I have travelled a long way
from the popular theory that the modern girl has a tendency to hold off
marriage, into which the modern man vainly tries to entice her; but I do
not think that I have gone too far. Nor do I think that many men will
disagree with my impression that man, while apparently the seeker, is
still in fact, as of old, the sought. I should add that in this
condition of affairs I see nothing derogatory to women. Rather the
reverse.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nevertheless the changed position and the consequent changed outlook of
the modern girl have brought about appreciable, if minor, changes in the
working of the ancient institution of betrothal and marriage.

In the previous age, if any reliance is to be placed on the best novels
and the best memoirs of the period, the girl thought about almost
nothing but marriage, and, aided by her mother, directed her energies
mainly to that end, until achievement of the wedding altered the whole
trend of her activities. She acted so partly because she had nothing
else to do, and partly because home was a far more cramping and tedious
and disciplinary place than it is to-day. Thus she had a stronger direct
reason for plunging into marriage at the first opportunity, and this
reason was reinforced by a graver fear of complete frustration if she
should fail in the endeavour to mate herself. The modern girl has less
reason to seek emancipation in marriage, for she is already considerably
emancipated, and she is less disposed to hurry the process of marrying,
because failure to marry does not now involve a fate that some persons
apparently considered worse than death. This does not at all mean that
her fundamental instincts are different from those of her predecessor.
It means that her new position enables her to exercise more care in the
satisfaction of those fundamental instincts, and that she is less likely
to satisfy them foolishly because, being a worker, she has less leisure
to brood herself into an unhealthy state of mind about the tremendous
subject.

It means also, that knowing more of the world and of men, she is a
better and more realistic judge of men, and things, as they actually
are. Hence she feels safe to pick and choose.

She does not say to herself: "I think I am in love with him or soon
shall be; he has excellent points; and I may never get another chance so
good," in the manner of hundreds of heroines in hundreds of old novels.
Not a bit!

She says: "This affair interests me; but I am not so badly off; I am
nobody's slave. I can keep myself. I know that men are not always what
they seem. Therefore, although I am determined to marry, and want to
marry more than I want anything, I will examine this particular affair
with coolness before allowing it to reach a higher degree of intimacy."

Such an attitude, while it would not denote any weakening of the
instinct to marry, would undoubtedly tend to delay marriage and would in
the long run raise the average age of marriage--with important
consequences to society at large.

       *       *       *       *       *

But wait a moment: to balance this new factor there are two other new
factors.

First the economic factor, which perhaps more than any other influences
the marrying age. The girl of to-day, if she chooses to keep her
situation--and she often does--can make possible a marriage which
otherwise would be economically impossible. Two incomes are better than
one, and the girl has a double reason for contributing income to the
joint enterprise; by so doing she will not only hasten its consummation,
but she will safeguard to a certain extent that most precious
possession, her independence. Here, then, is something which tends to
lower the marrying age instead of raising it.

The second new factor consists in the immense widening of the modern
girl's field of choice. She moves more freely in the world and she meets
not merely far more men than her cooped-up predecessor, but far more
sorts of men. Hence she has a far better chance of meeting the right
man, and hence, other things being equal, she is likely to marry earlier
than her predecessor.

It will be said that I have examined the marriage question only so far
as it is influenced by the desires and the situation of the girl, and
that it must be influenced also by the desires and the situation of the
man. True. But my inquiry was limited to the girl's side, which I am
persuaded is the more important and influential side of the matter. My
argument was that the mighty institution of marriage is not going, and
will not go, out of fashion because the modern girl has discovered
something to take its place or to take the thousandth part of its place.
This often expressed fear that girls are jibbing at marriage is just
about as well grounded as the fear that girls are losing their feminine
charm. It makes the judicious smile.




SEX-RIVALRY


SINCE girls see more of men and more of life than their mothers did at
their age, they have become wary. In other words, they are less apt to
be rash and foolish in the great decisions. One leading result of this
is the gradual decline of the specially Anglo-Saxon institution of the
love-match. And not a bad result either!

At once many readers will be angry, and some very angry. What! Abolish
love in marriage! What! Adopt the heartless "continental" system of the
deliberately arranged marriage, the marriage of convenience! Well,
nobody wants to abolish love in marriage, and nobody could. But we must
understand what we mean when we say "love." The majority of love-matches
are matches of passion which too frequently no practical consideration
has been allowed to restrain. The parties--and especially the
girl--enter into them in a state of mind and body which is abnormal, and
under the most astounding illusion. The illusion is that the abnormal
state of mind and body is normal and will continue.

It won't. Not one passion in a thousand lasts, as a passion, more than
three years. Few last, as passions, more than six months; an appreciable
proportion do not survive the honeymoon. The passion may settle down
into a solid and enduring calm affection; or it may wither into a
tolerant mutual indifference; or it may degenerate into actual dislike.
At best the disillusion is serious; at worst it is appalling. People
laugh when letters of passion are read in the matrimonial courts--"My
own darling pet little Hugsy-Wugsy"--but they ought really to weep for
the tragedy of the thing. The one conceivable advantage of the
love-match pure and simple is that it does furnish a unique emotional
experience. Whether that experience yields, even while it is in being,
more happiness than unhappiness is a nice question which each person
will probably decide on personal grounds. But it is certain that passion
is not all beer and skittles.

Now the "heartless continental system" assuredly cannot claim to provide
this unique emotional experience, with its delicious and its dreadful
moments. On the contrary, for good or evil, it expressly avoids such
experience. The parties are not in an abnormal state when they enter
into the contract. The girl--I speak more particularly of her--is under
no passional illusion. She does not imagine that her life is ready made.
She knows that she has to build it up. And she sets about building it
up. She may fail, of course; but on the other hand a solid and enduring
affection may be reached, and very often is reached. At any rate since
the material factors of the situation have been prudently studied and
balanced beforehand, there is less chance of them poisoning the life of
the heart than under the happy-go-lucky passional system.

Moreover the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Do continental
marriages turn out on the average less satisfactorily than Anglo-Saxon
marriages? They positively do not. Therefore, I welcome the decline of
the love-match in Anglo-Saxon countries. For if in France, for example,
"reason" in marriage has ruled too absolutely, in Britain, for example,
"passion" has ruled too absolutely; and there is now some hope that we
may be approaching the happy mean.

       *       *       *       *       *

The point of the above is a remarkable illustration of the great and
broad fact that girls are trying to look after themselves better than
they used to do. Necessarily this implies that they are becoming the
rivals of men in the struggle for the sweets of life. I do not refer to
the rivalry of the sexes in the various professions and callings which
make up the activity of a national existence. That particular rivalry is
important in a material sense--for women have already almost completely
ousted men from certain fields of work--but to my mind it is not so
important as the general rivalry, which may be expressed thus:

In the opinion of women, men have hitherto had a better time than women.
(Some men would attempt to deny this, but I do not think that it can be
successfully denied.) Women are now determined to have as good a time as
men. And since marriage is the supreme social institution, transcending
all others in its daily effect on all human beings who are either
husbands or wives, women are specially determined that the sweets of
marriage shall be more evenly divided in future. To speak bluntly, they
are determined that in marriage there shall be a vast deal less
subjection than there was.

Some, instead of saying "less subjection," would say "less servitude" or
even "less slavery." And I for one would admit that in employing these
horrid words they were not speaking too strongly. Let us remember that
not many years have passed since British married women were not allowed
the control of their own property. Let us remember that until quite
lately the Government when it collected income tax absolutely declined
to recognise that women might have an income of their own.

And things are moving. Gone is the good old epoch when women had no
political or social opinions of their own, when the wife said: "Harry
thinks----" implying that naturally what Harry thought she must think,
and when wives who did venture to contradict their husbands on any
question more important than the proper number of minutes for boiling an
egg were regarded as in danger of being unsexed! Wives are acquiring
intellectual independence, happily for themselves and happily also for
their husbands, for to live permanently with an echo is exceedingly bad
for even the most saint-like husband. British wives have not, however,
as yet got far in the process of acquiring intellectual independence. It
is different in the United States, where the wife's intellectual
independence is absolute, and is everywhere taken for granted, and you
never perceive on the wife's face that apologetic expression so often
remarked on the faces of wives in England, signifying: "Please do not
think ill of me because I do not happen to see eye to eye with my
husband on all the important topics of the day."

       *       *       *       *       *

But then the intellectual independence of American wives has been
quickened by the habit which American husbands have of looking on their
wives as their official representatives in society, and indeed of
expecting their wives regularly to act as such. If an American husband
gets home at ten o'clock after a day spent in the arduous pursuit of
money and finds his wife out of the house at a lecture, a concert, or a
dance, he does not blame, he applauds her. She is representing him in
the social world, and he will cheerfully carry on without wifely
companionship until she returns. We are not like this in Britain, at any
rate to the same extent, and probably never shall be and don't want to
be; but we are moving along at our usual jog-trot. Meanwhile, despite
progress achieved in the new rivalry, it cannot be contested that the
majority of foreigners visiting Britain and studying its social
conditions are simply amazed at the "submissiveness" of British wives.
No doubt it is like their impudence to be amazed at the submissiveness
of British wives, and British wives may resent the imputation and
British husbands may object to the foreigner making trouble in the
British household by his ill-timed criticism. But that is what
foreigners think; and you may take it as a maxim that what foreigners
think of us, whether pleasant or unpleasant, has some basis of truth in
it.

You may also take it as a maxim that merely to claim, and pretend to
exercise, intellectual independence is not enough. Intellectual
independence involves individual ideas about things, and individual
ideas cannot be obtained without study and reflection. Conversely, study
and reflection are bound to result in intellectual independence. If
wives feel a genuine interest in matters outside the narrow sphere of
the home, and give themselves the pains of examining them for
themselves, they will reach intellectual independence, and if each of
them had forty husbands instead of one, forty husbands could not stop
them from reaching it. If on the other hand they hanker after
intellectual independence just for the sake of asserting themselves,
they will produce a lot of friction and naught else. Everything has its
price, and the price must be paid: the price of intellectual
independence is intellectual activity. The wife who only reads the
newspaper (as distinguished from glancing at the newspaper) when she
can't find anything else to do, and still insists on her opinions, is
asking for humiliation.

       *       *       *       *       *

You will say: "Intellectual independence is all very well, but what
about the other kind of independence, the financial, the material kind?
Is there any progress there?" Well, according to my observation there
is--some. Here we are up against the ancient truth, deeply founded in
the roots of human nature, that the person who pays the piper will call
the tune. Unless a wife has a private income--and few have--she will
only arrive at the independent control of money for her own purposes by
the favour of her husband. That, resources permitting, she ought to have
the independent control of a certain amount of money is clear to the
unbiassed mind, but in order to see this, nine husbands out of ten will
have to get their eyes attended to. And perhaps some husbands are
getting their eyes attended to. It is being more and more recognised
that a wife renders services which, in a world based on economic
principles, should receive remuneration either direct or indirect. No
doubt the change is in part due to the fact that previous to marriage
innumerable wives earned money and employed it independently; such women
could not easily be treated as their mothers were treated. Common sense
and right feeling would both revolt against it. Nevertheless many girls
who abandon financial independence for marriage still go through bitter
experiences.

_Per contra_, many wives are apt to forget, in the heat of modern
rivalry, that they have a duty which goes beyond, and is at least as
important as, the material duties connected with a home and a family.
That duty is consciously to exercise charm. If man has to conquer by
force and reason, woman has to conquer by charm. And by charm she can
conquer. In charm she has an instrument--I will not call it a weapon--in
the use of which man cannot approach her, and she can use it as
effectively whether she is nineteen years of age or fifty-nine. She must
not disdain it. She often does disdain it. A man who provides week by
week the material means of life for a household is entitled to expect
that the mistress of the household shall put herself to the trouble of
charming him. And heaven knows that the simple fellow is easily charmed!

       *       *       *       *       *

If anyone objects that rivalry between the two sexes is regrettable, I
very much agree. Rivalry in well-doing is admirable, but the sort of
sex-rivalry now existing--rivalry for the possession of privileges and
power, a battle between the haves and the have-nots, and to some extent
an attempt on the part of women to prove that they can be both women and
men too--this sort of rivalry is bound to have some queer consequences.
Do away with it, therefore? You cannot. And I doubt whether the
abolition of sex-rivalry at this juncture, were it possible, would not
work more harm than good.

The present generation has been born into a very exciting age. Even
without the immense earthquake of the War the age would have been very
exciting. It is an age of transition, and especially is it an age of
transition for women. Women have advanced, and they will continue to
advance until a period of stability has been reached; which period is
assuredly not yet. But women have not advanced a single step without a
definite fight and without having aroused a frequently bitter spirit of
mutual rivalry. Very few people will be bold enough now to argue that
the advance of women was not right or that it has gone too far. And
looking back we can see that the opposition of the male sex was often
quite unreasonable, and that the masculine predictions of disaster if
women were allowed to do this or to do that show no sign of being
fulfilled. Who, for example, would do away with women doctors or assert
that they are not an extremely valuable institution? Yet the first women
who insisted on being doctors were forced to lead lives which amounted
to a martyrdom. (And all in the name of common sense!) And so the great
struggle proceeded and is still proceeding. The fact is that the male
sex has never yielded anything to the female sex without a battle, and
sometimes without a regular pitched battle involving serious casualties.
This has not been because men more than women are horrid pigs,
dogs-in-the-manger, or odious beasts of any description--it has been
because men are human, and it is not human to give up what you possess
without some considerable altercation.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sex-rivalry now and for years to come is inevitable. It is a condition
of progress. It affects everything. And naturally it must influence the
marriage bond. We have to make the best of it. In order to make the best
of it, husbands and wives--and perhaps wives more than husbands--should
continually remember its dangers. And as a fact that is what the wiser
husbands and wives are already doing. The dangers have been perceived
and precautions are being taken. Sagacious girls have begun to regulate
their attitude and demeanour upon the maxim: "Let us have the minimum of
rivalry and let us counteract unavoidable rivalry by the antidote of
co-operation--and charm." And sagacious young men have begun to observe
this and to regulate their own attitude and demeanour accordingly.

An excellent reassuring symptom of the state of the sex-situation is to
be seen in the marked decline of mannishness among girls. They claim the
right to do all sorts of things that men alone used to do, but they do
them in their own way. I am inclined to think that not for generations
have women been more feminine, and more agreeably feminine, than they
are at this hour.




SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE THEATRE


I WITNESSED an English version of von Scholz's _The Race with the
Shadow_ at the Court Theatre, given by the Stage Society. The play was
produced by Theodore Komisarjevsky, formerly producer and art-director
of the Moscow State and Imperial Theatres; and special importance was
attached by the committee of the Stage Society to this fact. I sat in
row K of the stalls and there were seven rows behind me.

Mr. Komisarjevsky had evidently aimed at, among other things, realism in
speech. The characters, for no dramatic reason, would stand for
considerable periods with their backs to the audience; they would
whisper; they would murmur; they would drop syllables and whole words;
they would put their hands over their mouths. All very true to life; but
carrying realism to excess, carrying it much further than the author or
the scene-painter or the stage-manager carried it. The slowness of pace
I could get accustomed to, after a few minutes, but I could not get
accustomed to not hearing. Entire speeches were lost in the air between
me and the stage, and various psychological details became
incomprehensible through the vanishing of a key-word.

The first thing, on the stage, is to get oneself heard clearly by the
audience without putting a strain on the average ear. This is probably a
platitude, and yet at rehearsals of my own plays I spend half my time in
reiterating it, and once I made a star actress very cross by telling her
that it is useless to act magnificently until one is audible.

In the case of _The Race with the Shadow_, a very interesting night was
about 50 per cent. ruined by Mr. Komisarjevsky's anxiety to attain
realism of speech. He seemed to me (who could not produce a play to save
my life) to have forgotten that no stage representation, and no part of
it, can properly be realistic beyond a certain degree. It is and must be
one enormous compromise with realism. Thousands of trifles have to be
sacrificed in order to achieve a broad effect of truth. The West End
stage is notorious for inaudibility, but this night was the most
outrageous illustration of inaudibility that I have ever endured, even
in the West End. I hurried to dressing-rooms and remonstrated with the
admirable chief players. They were rightly alarmed, and promised with
eagerness to reform, but in the next act they went on just as before.
What the people at the nether end of the auditorium made of the piece I
cannot imagine.

But the patience of pittites is amazing; it is heroic. For one reason or
another about one-third of the accommodation in most theatres is merely
vile. Either you are asphyxiated, or you are beaten by arctic winds, or
your limbs are martyrised, or you can't hear, or you can't see; and the
implied contract between management and playgoers is thus nightly
broken.

Nevertheless no theatre has yet been burnt down by furious playgoers.




GIRLS ON THE PIER


YOU see those two young women coming forth from the boarding-house.
Perhaps if you are by nature critical you do not think much of them; but
I am here to tell you that they are worth looking at, that they are
admirable self-creations, that indeed they are marvels of skill and
ingenuity.

It has been stated that a woman cannot dress really well on less than
ten thousand a year. Possibly. But these two girls keep themselves, they
do not earn more than five pounds a week between them, they have saved
the railway fares and the living expenses for their annual holiday, and
in addition they have made themselves smart. This it is which is
marvellous.

They are tremendously out to attract, and they do attract. (In this
great matter they have understood the value of white on a sunny day, and
it is sunny.) Watch them go on the pier, where flags are flying,
penny-in-the-slot machines are clicking, and the band is playing. You
might imagine that butter would not melt in their mouths, but you would
be mistaken.

Now, you see those two young men, equally smart. Oh, regular dogs in
their way! The two couples pass and re-pass. Will the white girls deign
to glance at the smart young men? Not they. Apparently the young men do
not exist for them. The white girls go back to the boarding-house for
tea. But at night somehow, mysteriously, inexplicably, perhaps over the
hazard of a slot-machine, these two couples have mingled into a
foursome.

       *       *       *       *       *

You ask me, suspicious, whether they have been introduced. Well, they
have not. Only in certain circles do people have to be introduced, just
as only in certain circles do people have to pay calls and leave cards.
These two young women protect themselves, and maintain the conventions,
by being together. Alone, neither of these would dream of not snubbing
effectively any smart young man who had the audacity to advance.

The next day all four go for a walk. In the evening they dance. The day
after they go for a walk and return in two separate pairs, and one pair
(the girl with the thin ankles makes half of it) have now and then
dropped from their continual back-chat into genuine seriousness, each
trying to comprehend what the other really is.

And on the following day the girl with the thin ankles emerges from the
boarding-house in a dream. She sees the contents-bills of the newspapers
blazing with mighty world events, and she treats them as trifles. An
illustrated advertisement in a picture paper is far more to her than the
ruin of a great nation. As for the town, the apparatus of pleasure, the
pier, the flags, the band, the sea itself--they are naught but the
setting for her private business.

You protest that the silly little thing has lost her sense of
perspective. Not at all. Hers is the true perspective. Her private
business is the supreme business of nature, incalculably more important
than anything else.




STRANGE THINGS SEEN AT GUERNSEY


GUERNSEY is the great fruit-and-produce island, whose principal
customer is England. Its surface is covered, and some of its beauty
spoiled, by immense greenhouses--greenhouses as large as railway
termini--greenhouses that you would think could exist only in dreams,
vast crowded prisons of forced plants. Its roads are patrolled by
great motor-vehicles that do nothing but collect baskets of fruit and
produce from the farms and disgorge the baskets on Whiterock Pier at
St. Peter Port, capital of the State of Guernsey.

The most characteristic and vital phenomenon of St. Peter Port is
baskets full of fruit and produce continually descending chutes into the
holds of steamers. These baskets slither down, one running quietly after
the next, all day and every day (except Sunday), monotonously,
endlessly, maddeningly. You would think that if the inhabitants of the
entire globe devoted their whole time to eating fruit and produce they
could scarcely keep level with the incalculable contents of these
steamers. Just as the people of certain parts of France live in and by
and for wine, so the inhabitants of the very prosperous island of
Guernsey live in and by and for fruit and produce.

I was standing on the Whiterock Pier and I beheld an enormous pile of
baskets full of fruit, and I thought I would examine the labels on the
baskets and see where the magnificent fruit (plums) of which I had a
glimpse through the wicker was going to.

Well, it wasn't going anywhere. It had come. It had come to Guernsey. It
had come from Evesham in England to the fruit-island. I could at first
hardly believe my eyes. I should have been less surprised to see coal
unloaded on the quays of Newcastle. But my eyes were not mistaken.
Presently the hundreds of packages were carried off the pier in
motor-vans. It pays people to grow fruit round about Evesham, gather it,
and send it by train to Southampton, unload it off the train on to a
steamer, and dispatch the steamer to Guernsey, where the fruit is
unpacked and sold at a profit!

This strange affair taught me a lesson about coming to hasty conclusions
in such a complex and bewildering matter as overseas trade.

I know prominent persons in England who, if they infested Guernsey,
would kick up a dreadful row about English competition and the necessity
of safeguarding home industries, and who would put a duty on English
fruit. Guernsey, however, does not do this. Nevertheless the fruit
industry flourishes there. Indeed everything in Guernsey seems to be
cheap except fruit. You can buy a decent cigar for less than you can buy
a decent fig. Strange!




MANSLAUGHTER BY SHIPPING DIRECTORS


THE "great" passenger shipping companies are marvellously exempt from
Press criticism. (I need not go into the reasons for this.) All the
public hears about the wonder-ships is an exciting tale of their
vastness, their luxury, and their speed. Never a derogatory word! The
wonder-ships are indeed wonderful, and they deserve much praise; but
passengers in some of the very biggest of them, and passengers in any
ship belonging to certain lines, will tell authentic tales of dirt,
discomfort, bad service, and bad food. No daily paper would print these
tales. I say nothing of the treatment of the crew.

Dirt, discomfort, bad service, and bad food do not, however, entail risk
to life. What is much more important than these is the notorious neglect
of owners of nearly all lines to adopt precautions for minimising the
loss of life in case of accident. I have travelled by good lines and by
bad lines, and I have never yet seen a boat-drill; I have never yet been
told what boat I should seek in case of danger; and I have never yet
even seen a cover taken off a boat. Swimming baths and ballrooms are
excellent on board; but if there is a collision you cannot dance on the
sea, and you are likely to have more swimming than you desire.

It is obvious that boat-drills should take place on every voyage, that
such boat-drills should be public, and that, above all, the passengers
should be invited to interest themselves in this matter vital to
themselves. It is obvious that everybody on board should know what he
ought to do in a crisis. It is obvious that all crews, whether European
or Oriental, should be thoroughly disciplined. It is obvious that no
crew incapable of acting according to discipline in a crisis ought to be
employed at all. Are these things done? They are never done. Why are
they not done? Because it would cost a lot of money to do them? Not at
all. They are not done because the directing minds are slack in this
particular respect, being, no doubt, convinced that no accident can
happen to _their_ ships!

       *       *       *       *       *

Accidents can and do happen to the largest ships, and will happen again.
And the larger the ship the greater the danger in case of accident. You
cannot appreciate the size of a very large ship while you are on board
her. You can only realise it by getting into a row-boat and rowing under
her side. You then perceive that you are rowing along a street of six or
seven-storey buildings. The sight is not merely impressive; it is
appalling. You see the life-boats high above you. Imagine being lowered
in a boat from the roof of a lofty house to the ground. Imagine the
house itself to be pitching and tossing, and the ground to be a heaving
sea. And imagine some scores of boats, and some thousands of people all
in an acute state of nerves. Then you will get a notion of what the
shipwreck of an important liner can be like. And remember that a list of
the ship to either side may put half the boats out of action!

At best, life-saving at sea is a desperate business. The least the
directors of shipping companies can do is to make certain that all the
life-saving apparatus is in order and that all the human beings affected
by the risk are thoroughly drilled. Directors who fail in this crucial
matter with fatal results are worthy to be indicted for manslaughter,
and they would be indicted for manslaughter if they were not so exalted.
Many a chauffeur has suffered imprisonment for negligence far less
culpable.




PRESENT STATE OF GAMES


WHEN a man, discouraged by some set-back, says: "I'm no good," he
doesn't mean it. He merely means that in his opinion there is a slight
possibility that he is not absolutely perfect. He expects his friends to
contradict him with vigour and to slap him on the back, and say: "Oh
yes, you are a great deal of good." And they generally do.

At the present time, Britain, the parent of sports, the games-master of
the world, is saying, after a startling series of disasters, "I'm no
good." And those enlightened and dismal citizens of hers who foresee the
end of the British Empire in a cricket match, are telling her with much
seriousness exactly why she is no good.

She is no good, they say, because she has become conceited and slack,
and because she is far advanced in decay. The dear self-satisfied old
creature, they sneer, was supreme when she had no rivals, but
immediately anybody stands up to her fair and square, she collapses. Of
course they don't mean it. Of course ancient Britain knows they don't
mean it. And Britain and they expect the wide world of sports and games
to reply in a reassuring sense.

But the wide world of sports and games is doing nothing of the kind. It
is saying to Britain,--and you can see it in the foreign press north and
south, east and west:

"You're quite right. You are done for."

That is the difference between the imaginary case of the discouraged man
as above, and the real case of the island that invented cricket,
football, golf, tennis, prize-fighting, and ping-pong. Yes, and even
baseball.

       *       *       *       *       *

Before, however, accepting the verdict of the world it might be well for
Britain to inquire into the history of the matter, and to ascertain for
sure whether she really has been beaten in what she was trying to do. If
two combatants meet in conflict and one does something that the other is
not trying to do, it does not follow that the second is defeated, much
less disgraced.

The ruling or influential class in Britain was always addicted to games
and sport. It always preferred a bruiser to a biologist, and a W. G.
Grace to a Herbert Spencer.

It took games with the utmost seriousness. The rest of the world
observed this, and observed also that the British Empire was continually
growing both in size and in power. Further, the world heard that
Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. And the world began to
put two and two together, saying:

"A far-sighted race, these Britons! They have perceived that games
constitute the finest physical and moral training for the young,
developing all sorts of faculties that cannot be developed without
games; and they have gathered the political and commercial harvest of
their wisdom. We, too, will take games seriously."

(Part of the argument was false, for it is absolutely certain that
Britain did not go in for games because good games mean good business.
Britain went in for games because she had an instinct for games and
enjoyed them. Nations do not become great by deliberately taking
thought, but by responding to their instincts. Still, in the British
example, games and Empire did go together.)

The successful are always imitated, though usually imitated in externals
rather than in essentials. International sporting affrays were gradually
established, and gradually Britain was equalled by her pupils, and now
she is being surpassed by them. They determined to beat Britain, and
naturally they succeeded.

But the point is that though Britain took games seriously she only took
them seriously as games. With her the passion was to play; she wanted to
win, but on the condition that a game remained a game and an end in
itself. With her the supreme end was never to win. She said: "I shall
win if I can, but my game shall not be my business, and the chief charm
of my game for me is that it is a great lark." There were lots of things
she simply would not do in order to win. She refused to make certain
sacrifices, and she scorned to employ the whole of her brains in the
affair. As for scientific organisation, the notion thereof was abhorrent
to the sporting islanders. (It always was, in any connection.)

       *       *       *       *       *

The situation could be summed up thus. Britain had an object in life, to
play and sport. Her rivals had an object in life, to beat Britain in
play and sport. Both objects were attained. As for the rivals, they were
extremely in earnest, as new converts usually are. So their games were
more than games--and also less than games. They were not an end, but a
means. The end was enormous. Teeth were set; brows were knitted; lives
were devoted; money was lavished; science was utilised; specialisation
was enforced. First-rate human beings got up in the morning with one
idea in their heads; they went to bed with the same idea; and if they
dreamt they dreamt about the same idea. Games lost the spirit of games;
they ceased to be distractions and grew into vocations. The sequel was
inevitable. The supremacy of Britain, which she had never sought, and
never seriously sought to keep, was taken from her.

A terrific outcry has followed; a hundred doctors are prescribing a
hundred different tonics for the overthrown giant, while a hundred
prophets are all prophesying the same woe: physical and moral
degeneration.

Meantime, Britain continues to play games. Indeed, she plays them more
than ever, and those persons who assert that whereas Britons formerly
played games, nowadays they prefer idly to watch games, are merely being
silly. All statistics and all observations go to show that, in spite of
the vast crowds that watch games, the number of actual players of games
increases amazingly and continuously. And if games are gaining in
popularity, the good influence of games must be growing in proportion,
and what was true of the British past should be still more true of the
British future.

       *       *       *       *       *

This does not mean that nothing is wrong with British games. Undoubtedly
something is wrong. The island games are chiefly in the control of a few
very autocratic bodies, whose influence is enormous, and, for the most
part, these bodies cannot or will not understand that, as sport becomes
more and more democratic, so it must breed games which are performances
and players who are performers. The number of players increases, and
therefore the raw material out of which great players can be made
increases. The great players compete more and more among themselves.
Skill is developed to such a point that inevitably the game is
transformed into a performance, into a star-turn. The number of people
interested in the game increases with the increase of players, and
these people want to see the star-turns in exactly the same way as they
want to see a circus or a music-hall show or hear a supreme soprano.
They insist on seeing the star-turn. They cannot be kept out of the
grounds. They are ready enough to pay to enter. Hence gates and
gate-money and what is called the commercialisation of games,--a
commercialisation which is quite unavoidable and which does not spring
originally from any base motive.

The transformation of a game into a performance is justifiable for two
reasons. First, it gives an innocent and proper pleasure to large
portions of the population; second, it keeps up the standard of play,
and is a valuable means of education for the ruck of players. But, of
course, it tends to create a class of players for whom the game is more
than a game--or less than a game. For these players the game is a
business, a profession, a livelihood. And whether they make money out of
the game or whether they don't, they are professionals.

Now the authorities that rule over sports in Britain have always frowned
at professionalism in games. They have not been able to scotch it, but
they have done all they could to discourage it and to put a slur upon
it, especially in the greatest traditional national game--cricket. In
cricket the authorities have undoubtedly sacrificed efficiency to the
spirit of snobbishness. A professional in their esteem cannot be equal
to an amateur. A professional may be the finest potential captain that
ever lived, but he will scarcely ever be permitted to captain a team if
there is a single amateur in the team. Nor must a professional be
adequately paid. He may be capable of drawing ten thousand people into a
field to see him hit, but he must not get more than the wages of a
carpenter. Why? Because he has fallen from grace. He has taken his game
absolutely seriously, and devoted his whole life to it.

       *       *       *       *       *

This cast-iron attitude on the part of the authorities often gets them
into difficulties, and they can only get out of the difficulties by
pretending vigorously that certain notorious professionals are not
professionals but merely amateurs. Thus a miserable atmosphere of
make-believe and deceit is created. All which may be very noble and
splendid, but it is not cricket. I do not suggest that the state of
affairs is directly or solely responsible for the perfectly marvellous
failure of England to win a single match against a colony with one-tenth
of England's raw material to choose from. The last Australian team
happened to be a menagerie of highly exceptional talents. But I do
suggest that cricket will not flourish again as it might until the
authorities undergo a change of heart. And I say that the same applies
to various other games. (Cricket, in fact, matters less than some other
games because it has no world-importance.) I see no reason why in order
to be a professional it should be necessary to lose caste and to suffer
ridiculous social humiliation. After all, this is not the eighteenth
century. And stern professionalism, whether paid or unpaid, is bound to
conquer in the upper layers of games.

The attitude which is antagonistic to professionalism is, and must be,
antagonistic to the essential factor in the attainment of the finest
possible standard of play--namely, strictly scientific and strenuous
organisation with a view not to a great lark but to a victory. The
percentage of professionals to the total body of players need not be
large, but the existence of a percentage, duly honoured and remunerated,
is necessary if any game is to prosper fully. Without professionals,
amateurs must deteriorate. Without scientific organisation a game may
keep caste socially, but it is bound to lose caste as a game and to fall
into inefficiency. In order that ten thousand games may satisfactorily
be no more than games, it is unavoidable that a hundred games should
cease to be mere games, and, becoming performances, partake of the
nature of business. The day of the supremacy of amateurism and
amateurishness is over. Britain will no doubt realise this fact long
after the rest of the world has realised it, but she will realise it,
and the reactionary mandarins of to-day will either mend their ways or
be overthrown. Professionalism, the invasion of sport by the scientific
or business spirit, may have a bad side. So has amateurishness.

       *       *       *       *       *

No development that may happen in the organisation of the very highest
skill in games need affect, save beneficially, the general practice of
games by the people at large. The average youth and maid and man and
woman will go on playing with average skill, and with the proved
beneficial effects, whether Britain wins championships or loses them.
But even in the average circles there is still a great deal of
organisation to be done. And among the chief needs in this respect is
the organisation of sports and games for elementary-school children. All
the public schools, and nearly all middle-schools, give quite as much
attention to games as to science or letters. The same is true of certain
universities. And the defence of this policy is that games have a high
educational value, both morally and physically. It is strange that the
persons responsible for the welfare of Britain, persuaded as they are of
the aforesaid high educational value of games, have never provided for
sports in the schools of the people. Lately the colleges of Oxford have
been lending their grounds to Oxford elementary-schools and also helping
to fit the schools out with games apparatus. Here is one example that
might well be followed elsewhere, not because it is good that the proper
education of the mass of the young should depend on the charity of a few
units here and there, but because such efforts provide an object-lesson
for the nation at large.

It is wrong that every school in the island has not its own sports field
with full equipment. And it would be equally wrong if, at the present
moment, a group of educational madmen got hold of the House of Commons
and insisted upon such sports fields being established instantly and
universally regardless of cost. But when the high priests of state
finance have returned to reason, and the budget has ceased to look like
the dream of a lunatic who is convinced that two and two make
fourteen,--then something serious will have to be done about the
systematic teaching and practice of games in the schools of the people.




ADVICE TO THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER


THE recent tendency of our economical Government to charge the public
for the privilege of entering picture galleries and museums which belong
to the public has not met with universal approval. Why? Saving is always
saving.

On a rough calculation it costs three millions a day to govern us, and
by the strictest cheese-paring enough might be saved on galleries and
museums to run the country for five minutes. Who shall sneer at five
minutes? True, to make the public pay admission fees to see public
treasures would keep poor people away. But poor people are a great
nuisance in public buildings. The fact is that they must be watched by
officials whose time might be passed more advantageously.

And there is no absolute need to spend the money obtained for admission
fees on governing us still more. The money might be spent on purchasing
fresh treasures of art. True, the large public would never see the fresh
treasures, but the fresh treasures would be there for experts to gloat
over, and that is of course the principal thing.

       *       *       *       *       *

It seems to me that the new device for economising might be carried a
lot farther. Is it not monstrous that people should be given free entry
into our magnificent cathedrals and churches? Would it not be more
proper that those persons who wish to commune with Heaven in the
historical sacred edifices of this realm should put down first a silver
coin and then be clicked through a turnstile? And we must not forget the
splendid parks of London and of the provincial cities. Look at Hyde
Park, which may well call itself the national park, with its
rhododendrons, herbaceous borders, green lawns, dells, trees, and bands
of music! How much longer shall we practise the wild, wasteful
lavishness of letting citizens wander gratis in this expensive paradise?
The citizens actually leave bits of paper lying about; they actually
impair the grass by walking on it; and we have to maintain officials who
devote their whole time to picking up the bits of paper and nursing the
wounded grass back to health. Such a state of affairs is fantastic and
grotesque, and should be altered immediately.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nor should reform stop here. Admittedly Britain is the greatest country
on earth, the best governed, the most free, the safest. Any Government
that knew its business would make a charge to citizens for the privilege
of being alive on this unique island. A shilling a day seems
ridiculously cheap for such a privilege, when the cost of dying and
being buried is as heavy as it is nowadays. A shilling a day per head
would give the Government considerably over seven hundred millions per
annum to play with--sufficient to pay the salaries of a couple of
million more Government officials. No Government can have too many
officials. Our present Government is asleep to vast and beautiful
possibilities.




TEACHING AND LEARNING HISTORY[2]


HISTORY is still not taught. It is only hinted at. Some of the hints may
be pretty plain, even illuminating; but the whole story is never told.
The method of history-teaching may be likened to the method of a gossip,
at once indiscreet and cautious, who gives glimpses of a dark social
story at a dinner-party. You want the whole tale; you don't get it.

Of course the teaching of history has improved. In England J. R. Green
has the credit, no doubt rightly, of having improved it. His _History of
the English People_, and especially his _Short History of the English
People_ (with the emphasis on the "people"), marked an epoch, creating a
new popular conception of history, and destroying the notion that
battles, insurrections, and royal accessions and demises constitute the
only worthy material of history. Green wrote very badly; his pages are a
congested mass of clichs, highly repellent to a fastidious literary
taste. Also he was a sentimentalist through and through. Nevertheless he
accomplished something, namely, a truer perspective than any previous
popular historian. And he wrote a complete history of England.

But is Green anywhere studied in his totality? Not, I think, in any
educational establishment. In all educational establishments the
terrible "period" system of history teaching obtains before any other
system. You take a particular period; and the period may be chosen by
hazard, by the caprice or prejudice of a master, by the exigencies of
examinations, or for "practical" reasons which have no connection
whatever with the teaching of history. And when one period is "done,"
another period is chosen in just the same irrational way as the first
period. Few schoolboys have not experienced the sensation of leaping
prodigiously backwards and forwards in English history according to the
whim of some unknowable higher power.

Nor is this the worst of the affair. History in schools is not regarded
as a major subject. In the best public schools in England it may and
does happen to a boy of seventeen that he no longer studies history. He
has finished with history for the rest of his learning years. The most
educative of all subjects, the subject which more than any other is
essential to wise citizenship, is henceforth forbidden to him. Probably
it is not too much to say that no boy leaves school with a coherent
outline in his head of the evolution of British civilisation. If he
leaves school with any leading historical idea at all, it is the idea
that Britain is somehow the centre of the universe and that all
extra-British history is of secondary importance. In the matter of
perspective he is not much better than the young lady of the fifties,
for whom education meant instruction in deportment, embroidery, and the
rivers of Europe in their order. He has not got the slightest
imaginative hold of the fact that England is an inconsiderable and
peculiar island lying off a great continent, and that the great
continent itself is the least of the continents. He is exquisitely
incapable of perceiving the tragic and mischievous awry-ness of the
philosophy of Rudyard Kipling.

       *       *       *       *       *

A small percentage of schoolboys go to universities, and a small
percentage of those who go to universities specialise in history.
Exactly upon what system they learn I do not know, but I believe I am
not wrong in affirming that they do not learn historical perspective in
the world-sense. The tendency is always to specialise before
generalising. The adolescent historical student seldom or never acquires
from his professors any sufficient information about the relation
between his selected field and the whole domain of historical knowledge.
His light is a candle on a moor in a dark night. Even his professors, so
far as I can judge from occasional inquisitions into their works, are
but imperfectly seised of the basic truth that you simply cannot
understand the history of China without keeping an eye on the sequence
of events in Peru.

In my young days there used to be a maxim, much admired in Mutual
Improvement Societies, to the effect that you ought to aim at learning
something about everything and everything about something. The first
half of this very wise saw has apparently been ruled out. The Greeks had
an amazing gift for prophetic symbolism. Foreseeing Oxford, they
represented Clio with a half-opened scroll in her hand. Delicious
people, the Greeks! Thucydides didn't half appreciate them.

Thucydides, I am informed and believe, was the greatest historian that
ever lived. He was, however, unacquainted with Darwin, and he dealt with
trifles. They may have been important trifles, but in the evolution of
the entire human race they were trifles, mere episodes in an epic
immensely vaster than Thucydides could even conceive. This is what the
average man of taste and intelligence feels when he emerges "educated"
from the seats of learning. I want to bring forward the case of the
average man of taste and intelligence. He soon perceives the defects of
his training and the gaps in his knowledge. He is not a monomaniac about
history. But he comprehends the value of history; he is ready to devote
a portion of his spare time to it, and he would like to use his hours
scientifically to the best advantage. He has picked up, somehow, one or
two leading scientific principles, and there is in him a sound instinct
to submit all phenomena to the test of those principles. He has an
honest desire to get rid of the prejudices whose existence in himself he
assumes.

Quite probably he has had dramatic glimpses of the possibilities of
intellectual freedom. Thus he may have read the Hammonds' book on the
Town Labourer, which has opened vistas that he did not dream of when he
humbly enjoyed Macaulay's intoxicating Victorianism; or he may have come
across Spencer's _Introduction to the Study of Sociology_, which has
permanently affected his old receptive attitude towards leading articles
in daily papers. Or he may have read the regretted Payne's wonderful
introductory pages to the Cambridge Modern History, which have quickened
his scarce-born imagination and engendered in him a wild longing to
escape from the wire cage of his ignorance to a high mountain with a
view of the whole of space and the whole of time. He wants to know. He
wants to be able to indulge in the supreme pastime of putting two and
two together.

       *       *       *       *       *

But, mind you, he is human. He has other interests. He may be keen on
billiards. He does not intend to be a martyr of knowledge. He looks
around for help. He does not look far, perhaps not farther than the
publishers' advertisements. Suppose that his ambition is modest,
confined to a wish to obtain a coherent view of the annals of his own
country. He soon discovers that nearly all the so-called histories of
England are only histories of comparatively brief periods, or that, if
they deal with long stretches of years, they deal only with limited
aspects of those stretches. (Thus Gardiner takes ten volumes to describe
2 per cent. of the two thousand odd years of what may be called English
history. Thus Hunt and Poole's big co-operative affair in twelve volumes
is specifically confined to "politics.") His need is for a comprehensive
monograph. Where can he put hands on it? Of Green I have already spoken.
Apart from scholastic text-books and such efforts as Gilbert
Chesterton's intensely prejudiced political tract, what is there, unless
it be the estimable Franck Bright's _History_ in five manageable
volumes? Franck Bright has no touch of fire; no elegance; no charm. He
writes like a cab-horse; but he is complete; he is fair; he informs
pretty accurately, and he is the enemy of reaction. He may be as bad as
you please--he is the best and usefullest thing extant for the average
man of taste and intelligence!

But suppose that the man's ambition is not modest. Suppose that he
wishes to obtain a coherent view of the history of the globe. There are
huge compilations, such as Helmolt's, and Ratzel's. Do not imagine that
the average man of taste and intelligence is going to hack his way
through these. He is not. He must be amused and charmed while learning.
That is to say, he demands, not a compilation, not a Harrods Stores, but
a work of literature; indeed, a work of art. He may or may not have
heard of such a fine book as Reade's _Martyrdom of Man_; but if he gets
it and reads it, he will not get and read what he is really after, for
in the very title the author shamelessly displays the enormity of an
overmastering prejudice. The average man of taste and intelligence has
too much poise to regard the evolution of the human race as chiefly a
martyrdom. The fact is that the aforesaid man will not find what he
wants anywhere, because it does not exist.

Having digested this sad fact, he may decide to limit his ambition to
relatively modern times, and to tackle the Cambridge Modern History. A
hundred to one the Cambridge Modern History will beat him off with great
loss. It, too, is a compilation. It is heterogeneous. It is not informed
by leading ideas. Much of it is unreadable. And it is too long. A finer
work is the _Histoire Gnrale_, edited by Lavisse and Rambaud, which
begins at the fourth century and ends at the twentieth. But this also is
a compilation, and extremely uneven. And it is too long, too long. After
about a year's reading, I reached the end of the eleventh century, with
over 90 per cent. of the work unexplored. I went no further, for, after
all, my vocation in life is not to read history. And to-day, on the
downward slope of my existence, I am still without any sort of coherent
view of the totality of the world's history. There are thousands like
me. There are probably not a thousand men in the whole world unlike me
in this respect. The fault is not ours. The fault is that of the
historians, who have not deigned to meet a notorious, a widespread, an
urgent, and a vital demand.

       *       *       *       *       *

But hope shines. For some years past Mr. H. G. Wells has been preaching
the importance of universal history in education. He has been preaching
that history is one and indivisible, and that to chip pieces off history
and offer them without first showing clearly their relation to the
original block is a blunder whose consequences are very prominent in the
present state of society. Mr. Wells wrote at the end of the War: "There
can be no peace now, we realise, but a common peace in all the world; no
prosperity but a general prosperity. _But there can be no common peace
and prosperity without common historical ideas._ Without such ideas to
hold them together in harmonious co-operation, with nothing but narrow,
selfish, and conflicting nationalist traditions, races and peoples are
bound to drift towards conflict and destruction."

If the student of Mr. Wells's works asks where these words are to be
found, the answer is that they are not to be found. They have been
written, but not yet published. They are taken from the Introduction to
_The Outline of History_, of which Mr. Wells is the author. Not a
history of this or of that; not any particular aspect of history; but
history, the comprehensive history of the globe, in all its main
aspects.

Mr. Wells's work does not begin with the beginning of any tribe or
nation. Still less does it begin with the Renaissance, the discovery of
America, the rise of Charlemagne, or any such landmark. It begins with
the earliest period of geological time, not less than eighty million
years ago. It comes up to date. It provides a perspective in which the
diplodocus and the latest opportunist statesman occupy their right
relative places in the earthly scheme.

It is manageable by the average man of taste and intelligence. It runs
to about four hundred thousand words (the same length as the longer
novels of Dickens). It will first appear in parts; but there is no
reason why ultimately it should not be sold, with all its illustrations
and maps, in one volume, for, at most, half a sovereign. It can be read
and understood by the plain man in the spare hours of a month. It is not
a compilation, but a homogeneous work of literature. It exists as an
artistic entity.

To conceive such a task for oneself was a powerful act of imagination.
To begin it showed superlative courage. To finish it worthily is a truly
astonishing achievement. Mr. Wells felt acutely the need of the work. He
determined to supply it. True, he is not an expert historian! True, he
may know little of "original sources"! But he is an expert in the
co-ordination of phenomena. He is probably the greatest living expert in
the scientific use of the imagination. His mind is scientifically
organised. All his books, even the most fantastic, are based on the
principles of science. Also he can write. No necessity to emphasise the
point. He can write. Hence he can be read. Finally, he has had the wit
to get his work, while it was in the making, overlooked and criticised
by first-rate experts in the various divisions of it; so that no serene
highness of a specialist will be able grandly to dismiss the thing as a
novelist's circus-performance. If Mr. Wells accomplishes no more than a
demonstration to historians that the whole of history can be somehow
interestingly handled by one man within a reasonable space, he will have
cut a pathway. He will have served the cause of civilisation. But I
apprehend that he will have accomplished more than that, and I
anticipate the publication of the _Outline_ as a notable event.[3]

FOOTNOTES:

[2] This heralding essay was written and published before the first
publication of Mr. H. G. Wells's _An Outline of History_. The
prodigious, and in America the unique, success of the astounding work
is a matter of common knowledge.

[3] It was.




THE FOURTH ARMISTICE DAY


THIS morning we shall all cease work or play, and meditate upon the
heroism and the tragedy of the War. The overcoatless ex-soldier will
cease begging his bread in the gutter of Regent Street, and the maimed
warrior will cease selling chocolates, in order to meditate upon the
heroism and the tragedy of the War. A solemn two minutes! It is right
that we should so meditate; for we are apt to forget that if heroes were
cheap and plentiful, if there were five, six, or seven million heroes,
they were none the less heroes, and none the less worthy of our most
pious gratitude.

But while we are pondering over the dreadful and magnificent past, we
should do well also to think clearly about the practical aim of those
immense campaigns whose victorious conclusion we now celebrate. Their
aim was to abolish militarism and the menace of the gun. To-day is the
fourth Armistice Day. Heaven knows--the Chancellor of the Exchequer
certainly doesn't--how much we shall spend this year on preparing for
fresh wars; but, anyhow, last year we spent 230,429,000 to this
pleasant end. Income tax is still 6s. in the pound, super-tax is still
anything up to 9s. in the pound. We grudge milk to babies, we starve
children of elementary education, the country is ridden with hunger and
idleness and cold, we put the brake on commerce and social relations so
as to save 6d. in the Post Office; but at the fourth Armistice Day we
are grandly spending millions every week in preparing for future wars.

       *       *       *       *       *

Matters are not improving, they are getting worse. "This way to
catastrophe" is painted plainly on the signposts of the road along which
we are travelling. And we travel fatalistically straight forward.

Everybody knows that war is idiotic, futile, calamitous, and settles
nothing. And yet nearly everybody says, "There must always be war." Why
must there always be war? In past days people no doubt said, "Brides
must always be won by knocking girls on the head and carrying them off
senseless. Evidence must always be obtained by torture. Christians must
always murder each other in the name of Christ. Little children must
always work eighteen hours a day--because human nature will always be
like that." Well, they were wrong. Human nature did not continue to be
like that.

War is contrary to common sense, and it is therefore absolutely certain
that the institution of war will one day be ridiculed and shrivelled out
of existence. Whether that day shall arrive in our time, or long after
we are ruined and dead, depends on ourselves. It depends on you and me
and the ordinary fellow next door. Human nature does change, and all
history proves that it changes. Just try to do to-day some of the things
that human nature approved of even only a century ago, and you will
quickly find out whether human nature changes or not!

How does human nature change? By the action of the individual. It
changes by you thinking straight and so changing your nature, and me
thinking straight and so changing my nature. It does not change by each
of us waiting for the other to begin. Human nature will change in its
attitude to war by casting out fear. War is not the product of courage;
it is the product of fear. Hence the insane maxim that if you want peace
you must prepare for war. If you prepare for bankruptcy, you will have
bankruptcy; if you prepare for war you will have war; and equally if you
prepare for peace you will have peace.

       *       *       *       *       *

But the risks, the awful risks, of disarmament!... Of course, there
will be risks, though they will infallibly be far less awful than the
risks of our present policy of arming. The indispensable preliminary to
peace is courage to confront the risks, and faith to believe that public
opinion (your opinion and mine) can be strong enough to stop guns from
going off. It _can_ be strong enough, you know. And a dim, vague notion
to that effect is gathering force throughout the world and exhibiting
itself quite bravely in the shape of a Disarmament Conference at
Washington.

And the populations are actually taking notice! The arrangements for
reporting the Washington Conference are nearly as elaborate as those for
reporting the Landru trial. I do not say this cynically, but with
serious satisfaction, as is fitting on the fourth Armistice Day. I count
the general interest in the Washington Conference as a sign that the
workless workman, the pinched housewife, and the individual who pays
away nearly a third of his income for the privilege of being
misgoverned, have begun to perceive that human nature has just got to be
changed. The Conference may fail--many expect that it will; a few hope
that it will. But even if it does, the next one won't. Public opinion
will have been educated.




A CHAMBER CONCERT


I WENT into a certain small concert hall to hear a chamber concert in
the same fine free spirit as Kipling's fellow "went into a public-house
to get a pint of beer." And this is the right spirit. The hall was
marvellously and outrageously ugly. I have been to that hall dozens of
times, and its extreme ugliness always shocks me afresh. The point
arises: Can a person of taste and sensitiveness properly enjoy music in
such a painful environment? Not that the small hall in question is much
uglier than any other small concert hall in the West End. It is not.
There is no small concert hall that is not architecturally offensive.
And, with one exception, there is no large concert hall that is not
architecturally offensive. The exception is the Central Hall at
Westminster, which is beautiful and enables you to withstand even ballad
concerts.

Well, I went into the hall. The audience was fairly large, decidedly
larger than the average audience at the four or five hundred musical
entertainments given in that hall annually; that is to say, the hall
seemed to be about three-quarters full, and was in fact about half full.
The audience consisted in the main of ugly, Calvinistic, peculiar or
superior people. Why are the frequenters of serious concerts so
alarmingly ugly, and why do their features usually denote harsh
intellectuality and repudiation? Why have they the air of mummies who
have crept out of the pyramids in order to accomplish a rite? Why have
they not the air of having come into a public-house to get a pint of
beer? I shall have more faith in the thesis that the English are a
musical nation when I see in the features of audiences an adventurous
look indicating a secret feeling that they ought _not_ to be there,
instead of a solemn, haughty look indicating a secret assurance of
entire righteousness.

Still, this audience suited the architecture of the hall. I wanted to
laugh at it, but the thick moral atmosphere choked me. I should have
preferred even the thin atmosphere of those family parties, called
concerts, given by aspirants to fame and to pupils, of which probably at
least a hundred are given in that same hall every year--concerts where
the applause is candidly a claque and bears no relation whatever to the
quality of the performance.

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, I estimated the audience, and the concert began. The artists were
a justly famous foreign string quartet. They played admirably. They
played as well as the Philharmonic Four or the L.S.Q., and that is
saying something. They started off with a Haydn. It was that quartet in
which one of the memorable themes is _tee--teetee--te--te--te--TEE,
tee--teetee--te--te--te_--TEE. (There are about a million classical
quartets with this theme, but everyone will be able to distinguish the
one I am alluding to.) Joachim loved this quartet. I heard him love it
at a Saturday Pop. at the Piccadilly Hotel over thirty years ago. But my
notion is that it ought to have been interred with Joachim. It awakens
no response in me. It makes me wonder whether Haydn ever knew what the
French Revolution was. All honour to Haydn for having congealed the
symphony; and I don't mind helping to play either his symphonies or his
quartets in four-hand unpianistic piano transcriptions--it is a bit of a
lark--but that a distinguished foreign quartet should get passports to
England and come to England and hire a hall and advertise themselves in
order to play a Haydn quartet struck me as monstrous. I am convinced
that the day is coming when Papa Haydn will be spoken of as we now speak
of Diabelli or Mendelssohn or Spohr or Clementi.

My companion said to me, "Can't you sit still?" I said, "No, I'm damned
if I can!" The performance was admirable, which made it all the more
exasperating. Well, it finished. The applause was Haydnesque.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then came a Beethoven quartet. I can never remember keys. I can only say
that its number was well into three figures--according to the
numeration of the higher criticism of Beethoven, which is quite possibly
all wrong. Anyhow, the quartet was indubitably "late." To hear it
brought to my memory all the mad, destructive attacks which have
recently been made on Beethoven by those uncomfortable infants who won't
let music rest in its classical congealment. And awful suspicions
presented themselves to me: "Can there be anything in such abominable
attacks? Did Diaghilev, though a _gaffeur_, really give some hint of a
truth? Can a god be incoherent? Does the world revolve?"

During this quartet a musical critic sat down near me and carefully
perused _The Sackbut_. When he had done reading _The Sackbut_, and
before the end of the quartet, he departed again. I thought: "His
article will probably be absurd, but he is a better critic than I had
imagined."

An admirable performance, but I was once again bored. Bored by an
admirable performance of a late Beethoven quartet? Yes. My fault, of
course. Still, there it is. You can say what you like about me except
that I am not intelligently interested in music. I am. For a rank
amateur I have had vast experience of listening to music. I have
travelled specially from Paris to London, out of pure artistic
curiosity, to hear a new symphony. Yes, and I have attended festivals of
British music. And if I am bored it is not I alone who am to blame.

After the Beethoven quartet, I leaned over to a lady in front of me who
was sitting by herself. I asked her: "What are you here for?" She said:
"I thought I would come and hear some music." "Are you bored?"
"Horribly." "Don't you feel as if you would sooner be at the Palladium?"
"I certainly do," she said, with enthusiasm.

The third and final item on the programme was another classical quartet.
Three of us left before it started. We had to. We had no other
engagement, but we just had to leave, or we should have begun to recite
Dante's _Purgatorio_ aloud.

       *       *       *       *       *

That concert failed, so far as we were concerned, on its programme. I do
not wish here to generalise, or to suggest remedies. But I must record
my opinion that foreign artists, in choosing their programmes, do
misapprehend the British public. At that concert the programme sinned in
one way. At the opening concerts of Hoffman and Heifetz, for example,
the programmes sinned in quite another way. The first way is by
intimidation, the second is by something that resembles insult; and I
don't know that there is anything to choose between them.

Though I may occasionally get terrible shocks of disillusion thereat, I
immensely prefer the adventurous programmes of our most alive British
artists, whether in solo work or concerted. Much new music is simple
rot, but at any given period much new music was simple rot. And if any
mandarin denies that new music is interesting, and very interesting, and
often very interesting, and sometimes more interesting than any old
music except Bach, Mozart, and Chopin, I respond that I am not a
mandarin, and that I do not agree with him. At the present moment I
would sooner go to hear Holst's _Planets_ and Strauss's _Rosenkavalier_
than anything in the whole literature of music.

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, I went to the Palladium. No sign there on the faces of the
audience that they imagined they were doing a duty to art, or proving
themselves the favoured of Heaven! But there was the good sign of the
night out. I heard Ella Shields sing her celebrated song, "Burlington
Bertie" (who rose at eight-thirty). It was a distinguished performance.
I would rank Ella Shields as an artist appreciably above 95 per cent. of
the artists whom I have heard at serious concerts in the last ten years.
It is a wide world, and I wish the shepherds of the musical valley would
realise this.




JAMES JOYCE'S _ULYSSES_


THE fame of James Joyce was founded in this country mainly by H. G.
Wells, whose praise of _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ had
very considerable influence upon the young. For although the severe
young spend much time, seated upon the floor, in explaining to each
other that H. G. Wells is and must be a back number, he can do almost
what he likes with them. I read _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man_ under the hypnotic influence of H. G. Wells. Indeed, he commanded
me to read it and to admire it extremely. I did both. I said: "Yes, it
is great stuff." But in the horrid inaccessible thickets of my mind I
heard a voice saying: "On the whole, the book has bored you." And on the
whole it had; and with the efflux of time I began to announce this
truth. There are scenes of genius in the novel; from end to end it shows
a sense of style; but large portions of it are dull, pompous, absurd,
confused, and undirected. The author had not quite decided what he was
after, and even if he had decided he would not have known how to get it.
He had resources, but could not use them. He bungled the affair, and
then threw his chin up and defied anyone to assert that he had not done
what he did in the way he did solely because he wanted to do precisely
that thing in precisely that way. A _post facto_ pose with which all
creative artists, and some others, are experientially acquainted.

A year or two later one of the intellectual young exhibited to me a copy
of _The Little Review_, which monthly was then being mentioned in the
best circles. I think this must have been in the period when even Mr.
Middleton Murry was young. _The Little Review_ contained an instalment
of James Joyce's _Ulysses_. I obediently glanced through the instalment
and concluded that it was an affected triviality which must have been
planned in what the French so delicately call a _chalet de ncessit_. I
expressed this view, and the intellectual young concurred therein; but I
seemed to detect in the concurrence a note of mere politeness to the
grey-haired. Hence, recalling the time when I laughed at Czanne's
pictures, I wondered whether there might not be something real in the
pages after all.

       *       *       *       *       *

And then the other day, opening _La Nouvelle Revue Franaise_, I beheld
blazing on its brow an article by Valery Larbaud entitled "James Joyce."
I was shaken. _La Nouvelle Revue Franaise_ is in my opinion the finest
literary periodical in the world. Valery Larbaud is a critic whom it is
impossible to ignore. He is neither old nor young. He is immensely
experienced in imaginative literature, and a novelist himself. He has
taste. His knowledge of the English language and English literature is
only less peculiar and profound than his knowledge of the French
language and French literature. He is, indeed, a devil of a fellow. He
probably knows more about Walter Savage Landor and Samuel Butler than
anybody else on earth. He and Lon Paul Fargue are the only persons on
earth who understand the verse of St. Lger Lger. He once amazed and
delighted me by stating, quite on his own, that the most accomplished of
all the younger British poets was Edith Sitwell: a true saying, though I
had said it before him. And here was Valery Larbaud producing a long
article on "James Joyce," and _La Nouvelle Revue Franaise_ giving it
the place of honour! At this point, if I was A. B. Walkley, I should
interject that that _m'avait donn furieusement  penser_, and, if I
were Mr. Clive Bell, that that had made me exclaim (in French) _Mon
Dieu!_ What I actually did say was something other.

Valery Larbaud's article was, according to his wont, exhaustive. It
contains a comprehensive account of James Joyce from the creation to the
present day, and in particular a full analysis and final estimate of
_Ulysses_. And the conclusion of it is that _Ulysses_ is a masterpiece,
considered, shapely, and thoroughly achieved. I was left with no
alternative but to read the thing. I saw the book at the house of a
friend, and I said: "You have just got to lend me this." She lent it to
me. It looks like a quarto, but it is an octavo: over two inches thick;
730 pages, each of a superficies of seventy square inches; over half a
million words; and so precariously _broch_ that when you begin to read
it in bed it at once disintegrates into leaves, largely Sybilline.
However, I read it. Perhaps some pages here and there I only inspected,
but, roughly speaking, I did read it. And as I finished it I had the
sensation of a general who has just put down an insurrection.

       *       *       *       *       *

Much has been made of the fact that the author takes more than seven
hundred big pages to describe the passage of less than twenty hours. But
I see nothing very wonderful in this. Given sufficient time, paper,
childish caprice, and obstinacy, one might easily write over seven
thousand pages about twenty hours of life. A young French author once
dreamed of a prose epic in many volumes, of which the first one was to
be entirely devoted to the hero's journey in a cab from his home to the
railway station. And why not? Certainly a book to a day need not be
excessive. But it all depends on the day chosen. There is no clear proof
that James Joyce chose for his theme any particular day. He is evidently
of a sardonic temper, and I expect that he found malicious pleasure in
picking up the first common day that came to hand. It happened to be
nearly the dailiest day possible. (If he had thought of it he would have
chosen a day on which the hero was confined to his bed with a _colique
sche_.) The uninstructed reader can perceive no form, no artistic plan,
no "organisation" (Henry James's excellent word) in the chosen day.

But the uninstructed reader is blind. According to Valery Larbaud, the
day was very elaborately planned and organised. James Joyce loved the
_Odyssey_ in his youth, and the spirit of Homer presided over the
shaping of the present work, which is alleged to be full of Homeric
parallels. It may be so. Obviously Valery Larbaud has discussed the work
at length with the author. I should suspect the author of pulling Valery
Larbaud's leg, were it not that Larbaud has seen with his own eyes the
author's drafts. They consist of notes of phrases meant to remind the
author of complete phrases; the notes are crossed out by pencil marks of
different colours; and the colour indicates the particular episode into
which the phrase has been inserted. This method of composing a novel
recalls Walter Pater's celebrated mosaics of bits of paper each holding
a preciosity. It is weird, but it does demonstrate that the author
laboured on some sort of an organised plan.

       *       *       *       *       *

I therefore concede him a plan, successful or unsuccessful. And in doing
so I must animadvert upon his lamentable lack of manners. For he gives
absolutely no help to the reader. He behaves like a salesman in an
old-fashioned, well-established, small West-End shop, whose demeanour
seems to say to you as you enter: "What! Here's another of 'em. I'll
soon put him off. Now what in hell do _you_ want, sir?" Nothing is
easier than for an author to help his reader; to do so involves no
sacrifice of principle, nor can it impair the value of the book. A
writer writes not merely because he is interested, but also because he
desires to interest. A sound book ought to be a fair compromise between
author and reader. James Joyce, however, does not view the matter thus.
He apparently thinks that there is something truly artistic and
high-minded in playing the lout to the innocent and defenceless reader.
As a matter of fact, there isn't. In playing the lout there is something
low-minded and inartistic. _Ulysses_ would have been a better book, and
a much better appreciated book, if the author had extended to his public
the common courtesies of literature. After all, to comprehend _Ulysses_
is not among the recognised learned professions, and nobody should give
his entire existence to the job.

A more serious objection to the novel is its pervading difficult
dullness. There is always a danger that short quotations may give a
misleading and unfair impression of a work, or even of a chapter in a
work; but I must risk the following extract, which I have
conscientiously chosen as representative:

     "Making for the museum gate with long windy strides he lifted
     his eyes. Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not
     following me?

     "Didn't see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.

     "The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick.
     Cold statues; quiet there. Safe in a minute.

     "No, he didn't see me. After two. Just at the gate.

     "My heart!

     "His eyes beating looked steadfastly at cream curves of stone.
     Sir Thomas Deane was the Greek architecture.

     "Looking for something I."

Scores and hundreds of pages are filled with this kind of composition.
Of course, the author is trying to reproduce the thoughts of the
personage, and his verbal method can be justified--does indeed richly
justify itself here and there in the story. But upon the whole, though
the reproduction is successful, the things reproduced appear too often
to be trivial and perfectly futile in the narrative. I would not accuse
him of what is absurdly called "photographic realism." But I would say
that much of the book is more like an official shorthand-writer's "note"
than a novel. In some of his moods the author is resolved at any price
not to select, nor to make even the shortest leap from one point of
interest to another. He has taken oath with himself to put it all down
and be hanged to it. He would scorn the selective skill in such a
masterpiece of narrative technique as _Esther Waters_ (whose brilliance
only experts can fully appreciate). He would probably defend himself,
and find disciples to defend him. But unless the experience of creative
artists since the recorded beginning of art is quite worthless, James
Joyce is quite wrong-headed. Anyhow, with his wilfulness, he has made
novel-reading into a fair imitation of penal servitude. It is not as if
his rendering of life was exhaustive, or had the slightest pretension to
be exhaustive. The rendering is extremely and ostentatiously partial.
The author seems to have no geographical sense, little sense of
environment, no sense of the general kindness of human nature, and not
much poetical sense. Worse than all, he has positively no sense of
perspective. But my criticism of the artist in him goes deeper. His
vision of the world and its inhabitants is mean, hostile, and
uncharitable. He has a colossal "down" on humanity. Now Christ, in his
all-embracing charity, might have written a supreme novel. Beelzebub
could not.

       *       *       *       *       *

Withal, James Joyce is a very astonishing phenomenon in letters. He is
sometimes dazzlingly original. If he does not see life whole he sees it
piercingly. His ingenuity is marvellous. He has wit. He has a prodigious
humour. He is afraid of naught. And had Heaven in its wisdom thought fit
not to deprive him of that basic sagacity and that moral self-dominion
which alone enable an artist to assemble and control and fully utilise
his powers, he would have stood a chance of being one of the greatest
novelists that ever lived.

The best portions of the novel (unfortunately they constitute only a
fraction of the whole) are superb. I single out the long orgiastic
scene, and the long, unspoken monologue of Mrs. Bloom which closes the
book. The former will easily bear comparison with Rabelais at his
fantastical finest; it leaves Petronius out of sight. It has plenary
inspiration. It is the richest stuff, handled with a virtuosity to match
the quality of the material. The latter (forty difficult pages, some
twenty-five thousand words without any punctuation at all) might, in its
utterly convincing realism, be an actual document, the magical record
of inmost thoughts thought by a woman who existed. Talk about
understanding "feminine psychology" ... I have never read anything to
surpass it, and I doubt if I have ever read anything to equal it. My
blame may have seemed extravagant, and my praise may seem extravagant;
but that is how I feel about James Joyce.

       *       *       *       *       *

It would be unfair to the public not to refer to the indecency of
_Ulysses_. The book is not pornographic, and can produce on nobody the
effects of a pornographic book. But it is more indecent, obscene,
scatological, and licentious than the majority of professedly
pornographical books. James Joyce sticks at nothing, literally. He
forbids himself no word. He says everything--everything. The code is
smashed to bits. Many persons could not continue reading _Ulysses_; they
would be obliged, by mere shock, to drop it. It is published in France,
but not in French, and I imagine that if it had been published in French
there would have been trouble about it even in Paris. It must cause
reflection in the minds of all those of us who have hitherto held and
preached that honest works of art ought to be exempt from police
interference. Is the staggering indecency justified by results obtained?
The great majority of Britons would say that nothing could justify it.
For myself I think that in the main it is not justified by results
obtained; but I must plainly add, at the risk of opprobrium, that in the
finest passages it is, in my opinion, justified.




WATCHING FOOTBALL


THE greatest football match of the year has taken place, with all the
usual features of frenzied partisanship and jollity. I was walking along
Fulham Road in Chelsea the other Saturday with a University man, and our
way was impeded by the outpouring of thousands of enthusiasts from a
certain famous football ground.

Said the University man:

"It's a pity they don't play football instead of watching it!"

I said nothing; but thought much.

First, men over thirty-five usually can't play football, for good
reason.

Second, men not past the football age play far more to-day than ever
before in the whole history of football. There are more clubs, there is
more keenness, and there is more skill.

True, professionalism flourishes, but nearly all professionals begin as
amateurs, and only out of the multitude of keen amateurs can
professionalism sustain itself. The huge crowds at big matches judge the
game as experts, that is, as men who themselves play or have played.

The fact is, my University man had no case; he merely had prejudice. And
this prejudice against the amusements and diversions and even the
education of the mass of the people, though absurd and doomed to die, is
still rather strong; moreover, it finds undue editorial expression in
many newspapers. The kinema is derided, not because it is crude, but
because it is popular. The papers with vast circulations are derided.
Motor-coaches are derided. Football is derided--but not golf (despite
its professionalism); oh no!

And observe the unholy eagerness with which reactionary politicians cut
down the estimates for popular education.

They say the working man is not what he was. I am glad of it, for he
used to spend most of his leisure in being bored. They say he does not
work as hard as he did. He does not work as long as he did. When I was
young I used to hear before dawn my fellow-citizens tramping in clogs to
a beautiful twelve-hour day in a factory, and I used to ride in buses
whose conductors enjoyed a sixteen-hour day.

The glorious past!




WHITSUNTIDE


"RUSH to the sea. Rush to the Continent." Daily papers would not be
daily papers if they did not use these phrases before holidays. It must
be a rush or nothing. Nevertheless, a rush there will be this
week-end--though, of course, the weather will maliciously let us down.
More people go away for the minor holidays now than went for the main
holiday when Victoria ruled.

And we shall be told once more that the British working-class thinks of
naught but not working, and that all is changed for the worse, and that
in particular the British artisan is not what he was. Well, he never
was. In pre-war as in after-war days the workman's objection to work was
a byword and a reproach among the employing class, and the idleness of
the employing class was a byword and a reproach among the employed
class. The different classes would not learn and have not learnt that no
class has a monopoly of any virtue or any vice. We are all much alike in
both--all heroes and all villains. Even the British plumber, who has
been more abused than any other kind of person on earth, marvellously
resembles the rest of us.

I am in favour of frequent holidays for everybody; holidays involving
rushes to the sea and to the Continent. But what counts with me for good
is not the repose--it is the change of scene. Change of scene is the
great tonic and restorer. It is also the great educator. I want half
England to rush to the Continent, and half western Europe to rush to
England. And I should love to see half Belfast taking holiday tickets to
Cork, and half Cork taking holiday tickets to Belfast.

Every traveller is an agent of peace and understanding. A League of
Universal Travel would be worth forty Leagues of Nations. A French
statesman said last week that the indiscreet words of a few politicians
didn't matter; the opinions of peoples alone mattered. But peoples can
have no real opinions about other peoples unless they see with their own
eyes. The train and the steamer are the true agents of civilisation....
And the passport and the custom-house are the true foes of
civilisation.




BRITISH OPERATIC PERFORMANCES


THE British National Opera Company produced five grand operas in its
opening week at Covent Garden, and two of them were _Parsifal_ and
_Tristan_. This was a wonderful feat for an enterprise new to London. To
produce even a single play, without music, amounts to a miracle, as
anybody knows who has a practical acquaintance with the stage. To
produce any opera is a hundred times as difficult as to produce any
play. To produce five operas in five nights is just about equivalent to
the whole producing work of all the rest of the West End theatres in six
months. The labour of the stage-managers alone surpasses the
imagination. They probably die off in dozens, but as the names of these
martyrs are never advertised nobody minds much.

On the Wagner nights, which I attended, the audiences were very large
and their behaviour was very good. One reason for the excellence of the
behaviour was doubtless the fact that as the enterprise has--thank
God!--cut itself off from the ridiculous and fatal patronage of
fashionable, photographed notorieties, the boxes were fairly empty.
Empty boxes are regrettable, but for myself, as a member of the paying
public, I prefer them to boxes occupied by chattering, restless ladies
who understand frocks better than decency and jewels better than
manners. The audiences were artistic and earnest, with a dash of
high-browism. Ah! If artistic, earnest, and high-browed women only knew
how to dress!... But they don't, and it is a pity. There were not ten
frocks at Covent Garden that would have passed muster at the Embassy
Club. You can't have everything. Nevertheless, you ought to want
everything.

You had quite a lot at Covent Garden last week. The chief thing I
personally took away was the conviction that a democratic troupe
actuated by courage and common sense had gathered together the
lamentable ruins of a vast undertaking and had re-created them into an
organisation at once dignified, coherent, and successful. The
performances, though suffering from our common imperfections, were
certainly better than the Covent Garden average, and in some respects
far better than many performances that I can remember in the legendary
pre-war grand seasons, and incomparably better than nine performances
out of ten at the Paris Opera.

I was talking critically to a member of the committee, who asserted that
the management would welcome criticism. This I denied, having yet met
but few members of the theatrical profession who had honestly the
slightest use for straight, serious criticism. However, trusting to the
good faith of the distinguished member, I will here give frankly the
views of a profane and uninstructed person not merely about the
performances but about Wagner. Thirty years ago, when I used to sit
almost by myself in the upper circles of Wagnerian opera, I would have
assassinated anybody who uttered a word against Wagner. Such youths as I
was probably exist to-day. My will is made, and I am ready.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Parsifal_ is a bad opera. The foundation of an opera is the libretto,
and not millions of semi-quavers of fine music will make a good opera
out of a bad libretto. The libretto of _Parsifal_ is bad. The story is
poor, and there isn't enough story. It is unconvincing on its own plane.
It is clumsy. Some of the most important parts of it are narrated
instead of being enacted. And the narrations themselves are
unconvincing, because they are addressed to people who obviously must
have been familiar with the facts. They remind one of such speeches in
bad plays as: "Your dear mother who died ten years ago of typhoid in
this very room----." And they are ineffably tedious. Gurnemanz is
perhaps the most boring rle ever written by a genius. Further, the
libretto is pretentious. Wagner wanted to beat the Gospels, and
deservedly failed, from lack of inspiration. I admire nerve, but not
impudence, and the feet-washing and feet-drying scene between Kundry
and Parsifal is senile impudence.

A friend of mine said to me: "He tried to make an opera out of a mass."

So he did. The chapel scene is very effective theatrically, but it is
effective only through an association of ideas; it is a
stage-exploitation of centuries of religious feeling. Having got this
effect in the first act, Wagner might have shown the wit to leave it
alone. But no. He could not resist imitating himself at the end of the
opera. How one shakes with resentful apprehension when the holy casket
is funereally borne forward by the acolyte for the second time!

Klingsor is about as authentic as a Chinese juggler at a music-hall, and
the short magic castle scene serves no real purpose in the story; it
simply shows that Wagner had not repented the absurdity which he earlier
committed in creating Erda. Nor is the music, save here and there in
some glorious passages, a great deal better than the libretto. Lots of
it is inflated tushery. I have always thought so, and now I think so
more than ever. There were moments, there were quarters of an hour, when
I was so excruciated by the show that had I been a soprano I should have
screamed. My poor Gurnemanz, I dreadfully sympathised with you, babbling
in the middle register your endless banalities.

       *       *       *       *       *

All this is naught against the British National Opera Company, whose
production was somewhat better than the last Covent Garden production of
_Parsifal_, through much of which by the mercy of Heaven I was permitted
to sleep. But the later production was not strikingly better. It was not
at all inspired. The chapel "set" was the old one, and the garden "set"
nearly as bad as the old one. The strident colours of the garden scene
would have brought the house down at the Coliseum. The costumes of the
maidens (who sang lovely music admirably--most admirably) were like
nothing on earth. The entrance of Kundry, dressed like a Byzantine
empress, perched on a rolling verdurous sofa that rolled to and fro at
every touch from her or Parsifal, was the absolute _ne plus ultra_ of
bathos. Such matters are not details. They are of immense importance.
Nor have I mentioned, nor will I mention, the worst of them.

We were asked not to applaud. Well, I didn't. Yet at the end I would
have applauded the good in the performance had I not been shoo'd down by
the faithful. Why should I not applaud _Parsifal_ if I may applaud
_Fidelio_ and _Don Juan_ and _Tristan_? To the statement that _Parsifal_
is a "sacred festival drama" my answer is, Fiddlesticks! It is a
mediocre opera, spuriously raised into a super-opera by Wagner's dodge
of confining it for so many years to Bayreuth, that Mecca of musical
high-brows and snobs. I think that the British National Opera Company
has lacked humour here, also a knowledge of human nature. And let me
mention that on the programme there is a "special notice," applying to
all performances of the season, earnestly requesting all persons to be
"in their seats at least _ten_ minutes before the commencement of _each_
act." And such hard seats, too! I am a devotee of opera, but I go to
opera for artistic emotions, not to do penance.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Tristan_ is a very different matter from _Parsifal_. The story is a
great story, and admirably plotted out. It is of such heroic proportions
and style that the heroic physical presences which nearly always go with
fine dramatic singing seem somehow to fit it and even to set it off. The
moments of tedium are rare. The music is sublime, and as decade after
decade vanishes backward it grows in sublimity. Indeed, _Tristan_ has no
fault save that it is an hour too long for human physique. Except
_Rheingold_, all Wagner's operas are an hour too long--and some of them
an hour and a half too long. The Weary Titan made a point of wearying
others. He did it on purpose. His original idea was to tell the story of
Siegfried in one opera of about four hours. But he soon saw that such
brevity would never do and, having expanded the tale into four operas,
was so reluctant to bring the last to a close that he managed to turn
it into a calamity. After _The Twilight of the Gods_ the spectator
leaves the theatre a broken mortal, humbly acknowledging in the composer
a destroyer.

Friday night with _Tristan_ was emphatically a night! Eugene Goossens
demonstrated throughout the difference between conducting opera and
wielding a baton. The singers did not begin too well, but they were soon
rallied into real distinction and they ended grandly. _Parsifal_ and the
performance of _Parsifal_ were wiped off the map. The production of
_Tristan_, however, left me desiring something else. The scenery was new
to London, specially designed by Mr. Oliver Bernard. I thank Mr. Bernard
for having got away from the eternal Wagnerian green. I admit that he
tried to smash an exacerbating convention and almost did smash it. But I
do not think that he achieved anything more valuable. In certain minor
details the ship did suggest a ship. The after-cabin, for example,
appeared to have portholes. But in its main contours the ship did not
suggest a ship; it did not suggest anything, unless possibly the
internal decorations of a German liner, and the incredible craft was
continuously sailing straight out of a back-cloth as solid as the side
of a house. The colouring was, to my taste, extremely offensive. I
prefer the old Wagnerian ship.

In the garden scene of _Tristan_ Mr. Bernard employed black curtains,
but upon what system or with what aim I could not discover. I can
conceive Gordon Craig or Lovat Fraser making an unrealistic and yet
satisfying garden out of black curtains. But neither of these artists
would have mixed up a new and daring convention with Royal Academy
realism as Mr. Bernard does. On the right you had a range of black
curtains, and against the foremost curtain a huge blossoming bush, of
which Tristan in the intervals of caressing Isolda might have picked off
every blossom. On the left you had masonry of which the marvellous
mortar was rendered with a conscientious realism that Frith would have
envied. And so on. The total result, overlighted as it was, like all the
scenes, deafened and maddened the eye, and instead of listening to the
music you listened to the scenery or peered vainly into the mysterious
psychology of Mr. Bernard. Not that I am unsympathetic to Mr. Bernard's
intentions. I am not. Only he is an enigma to me. And in especial I
failed to understand why, if he had the slightest control over the
superlative switchboard of the theatre, he sometimes permitted his
shadows to slant towards, and not away from, the source of light.

In other respects also the production showed a baffling mixture of
realism and outworn convention. The sailor's song sounded almost
exactly as it would have sounded at sea; so much so that you couldn't
catch a word of it. But a little later on we had Brangaena listening to
the thunderous vocalisations of Tristan and Kurwenal (whose every
syllable could be heard in the farthest gallery of Covent Garden) and
Isolda sitting within a few feet of her; and then Isolda asking
Brangaena what the man had said! It is this kind of effect, so easily
avoidable, that shatters illusion and impairs the persuasiveness of even
the greatest music. Similarly, in the garden scene the wondrous distant
phrases of watchful Brangaena were precisely as clear and loud as the
passionate accents of Isolda and Tristan.

       *       *       *       *       *

While eagerly granting all the acute difficulties and all the positive
achievement of the new enterprise, I do insist once more that the
matters upon which I have animadverted are not unimportant details. I do
insist that in their untruth and ugliness they militate grievously
against the conveyance of truth and beauty which the composer not quite
unreasonably hoped to attain. What the B.N.O.C. needs is an expert
stage-director equally versed in all the arts (except music) which are
brought into play. If such a man had only half the exquisite sense of
beauty which Eugene Goossens shows in rendering the orchestral music,
opera at Covent Garden would develop instantly into a new phenomenon.
And, finally, I reiterate my admiring sympathy with the young and
delicate plant, the B.N.O.C. If I have criticised, I was encouraged to
criticise. Moreover, if I didn't admire I wouldn't criticise.




EGOTISM


THE SOCIAL BUTTERFLY

NINA, the heroine--or the villainess--of my play, _The Love Match_, is
meant to be the type of the social butterfly of our day. On the first
night (I am told--I was not present) the play was received by an
exceedingly distinguished, fashionable, and variously smart audience
with steadily diminishing approval, until at the end of the fifth act a
well-bred silence expressed more terrifyingly than any manifestation of
noise could possibly do a final and total disapproval. (Subsequently,
audiences behaved differently.)

The play may be bad--I will not seek to defend it _qua_ play--but I have
never yet known a merely bad play to be received in silence, or to get a
unanimously bad Press. With an author's vigorous self-complacency I
attribute the attitude of the first-night audience, and perhaps also of
the Press, to a cause unconnected with the demerits of the production.
(And let me interject here that I do not impugn the sincerity of the
attitude, nor have I any quarrel with dramatic critics on the score of
lack of sincerity. I know many of them personally, and though they may
be misguided, I am convinced of their intention to give the author a
square deal.) I attribute the aforesaid attitude to my treatment of
Nina, the social butterfly.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is a realistic treatment. The delicious and naughty chit remains much
the same at the end of the play as she was at the beginning. She is
sensual; she is an adulteress; she is greedy for pleasure; she is
selfish; she is vixenish; she is capricious; she is a waster; she is
ruthless; and she is charming. She goes through some startling
experiences, and once--once only--she behaves well. But she does not
learn her lesson. The last curtain falls on an unreformed Nina, and
there is no telling whether later on she may not drift into the divorce
court a second time.

Now if towards the end I had changed the fundamentals of her character,
if I had converted her to righteousness, unselfishness, steadfastness,
industry, and a sense of social duty, the play would, I think, have won
sympathy; it might conceivably have been acclaimed with some of the warm
praise which was bestowed upon the heroine's really lovely frocks. But
it happens that I was "out," incidentally, to preach a sermon against
our Ninas, and I could not vitiate my sermon by letting miracles occur
on the stage which do not occur in life.

For years the phenomenon of our Ninas has been impressing itself more
and more deeply upon me. I have drawn the Nina, or tried to draw her,
several times already. There is another Nina in another play of mine,
_Body and Soul_, but she is not the heroine thereof. And I may invent
several more Ninas before I expire from the shell-shock of terrifyingly
silent first-night audiences.

       *       *       *       *       *

In regard to the current Nina, far from accusing myself of hyper-realism
in my portrayal of her, I know in my heart that I have been too
indulgent towards her; and I imagine that anybody who is in a position
to compare my Nina with the genuine Ninas will agree with me on that
point. However, a truthful and complete portrayal of a genuine Nina
would simply not be tolerated on the stage. It would either drive the
audience out of the theatre or it would cause the audience to wreck the
theatre, for even the smartest and most cynical persons cannot bear too
much realism about charming creatures with whom they associate. The
truth has to be watered down--say two teaspoonfuls in a wineglass of
H-{2}O. And one must be careful not to shake the bottle.

If you have the entre to certain haunts of diversion--and the entre
may be had by almost anyone with correct clothes and a little money--you
can see lots of Ninas any night in spring or autumn between midnight and
two a.m. In winter and in summer you can meet them in such cities of
the plain as Cannes or Deauville. They are pretty; some are beautiful.
They are as a rule of good family. They are admirably dressed,
regardless of expense. They can, when they want, display a powerful
charm. They dance exquisitely. They can chatter on any subject from
politics to gambling much better than the most gifted parrot. They play
games very well. They show positive genius in the craft of
self-advertisement; their portraits appear oftener in the papers than
those of stage stars, and ten times oftener than those of the admitted
benefactresses of this isle.

They draw attention to themselves by fair means or foul wherever they
go. Some of them are married, some of them unchaste, some of them
half-virgins, and a few virgins. Some of them cadge for loans of money.
Some of them continually and notoriously get drunk, and some can consume
wonderful quantities of alcohol and remain sober. They are all avid of
every expensive pleasure, and they live for naught else. They have never
worked with a pure motive for the common good, and they never will. They
grab at everything and give nothing. They are convinced that in
condescending to dwell among us they have earned the gratitude of
mankind. They know themselves to be the salt of the earth.

I do not blame them. No doubt they serve part of the eternal purpose,
but what part I cannot guess. If censure is due it should fall mainly
upon the men whose possessive vanity renders their orchidaceous careers
possible. I content myself with asserting their existence and their
characteristics. Of course, there have always been Ninas, but many
generations have passed since Ninas flourished so astonishing and so
disturbing as ours.

The Nina in my play is, indeed, but a timid and very bowdlerised version
of the authentic actual Nina. And yet she is held to be so detestable
that a first-night audience simply could not bear to see her unconverted
to some sort of righteousness at the end of the play.

       *       *       *       *       *


TEA ON THE STAGE

I have never burst with pride over my plays. On the contrary, I always
listen with meekness to the tale of their bad qualities: which tale the
newspaper Press has always in clear and authoritative tones recited to
me. In my meekness I was astonished the other day, when making certain
calculations, to find that the average number of performances throughout
the world of all my plays produced for a run in the West End of London
was over 800--not counting unauthorised performances.

I felt a sensation akin to pride at the further discovery that Press
opinions about my plays improved with the passage of time. _The Great
Adventure_ was vainly hawked round the West End for nearly two years
before Granville Barker accepted it. (Several managers wanted me to
alter it; I refused.)

It had a very carping and indifferent Press. But now the very papers
which damned it refer to it as a wonderful play, regretting that I
should have fallen so far beneath the standard of it as to commit that
tasteless and feeble crime, _The Love Match_. (The same thing happened
to _The Old Wives' Tale_, which had a mainly rotten Press, which the
English publisher allowed to go out of print, and which no American
publisher would touch at all.)

I doubt not that in ten years' time Press critics will be writing,
apropos of my _Don Juan_: "It is regrettable that the brilliant author
of _The Love Match_ should have descended so low as to string together
this puerile and unpleasant trash."

Nothing that I have written (except _The Truth About an Author_) ever
had such a unanimously anathematising Press as _The Love Match_. I am
accordingly subdued. But the attitude of the latest critics encourages
me to think rather better of the play than I did.

When a play about a woman causes people, especially women, to be angry,
inaccurate, disingenuous, there is probably something sound and vital
in the play. I see from the latest criticism that the tendency is to
defend my vicious heroine Nina.

First of all, she didn't exist, and never could have existed. Now she is
permitted to exist, but if she sinned her husband was a cad. Moreover,
the mean beast expected too much from her. Good tea, for instance! Not
that the misused creature could not make good tea. Of course she could
make good tea, and I was very wrong to suggest that she could not.

I must here interject that critics were unfortunate in introducing the
subject of tea. Quite apart from _The Love Match_, tea is pre-eminently
my own subject. I will undertake to make better tea myself than nineteen
housewives out of twenty in this country. I will go further, and assert
that in all my life I have not met ten women who understood the mighty
subject of tea, nor twenty who knew good tea from bad. Practically all
tea-hostesses will say to you:

"Do you like yours weak, or shall I let it stand a little?"

Innocence! Ignorance! They might let tea stand for an hour--it wouldn't
be any stronger; it would only be more stewed and more poisonous. On the
other hand, if it is poured out too soon it will only be underdrawn and
powerfully indigestible. Ceylon or Indian tea ought to infuse for five
minutes, and China tea for ten. After that the tea-leaves ought to be
removed from the teapot. But how many housewives adopt the simple device
by which the tea-leaves can be removed? Not one in a thousand.

So much for tea! And so much for the accuracy of critics. For it does
just happen that there is not a word about bad tea in my play. The
husband does not take Nina to task for bad tea. He takes her to task for
her inability to handle human beings and her inability to keep accounts.
And he is absolutely justified in doing so.

These inabilities in a wife cannot be defended. And there are tens of
thousands of housewives who have never taken the trouble to get rid of
them. An immense proportion of housekeeping is grossly amateurish, and
this is notoriously true of Nina-housekeeping.

It should not be true of any housekeeping. A wife ought to be a
professional housekeeper, just as her husband is a professional
financier, or bookmaker, or archbishop, or journalist, or bus-conductor.

This is by no means the chief lesson of my play; but it is one of the
lessons. No amount of sneering at efficiency will lessen its force. And
to attempt to answer it by pointing out that men don't take girls to the
altar or the registry office because they are good cooks is merely
silly. Obviously, they don't. Nor do men espouse girls because they
brush their teeth.

       *       *       *       *       *


REVIEWERS

I have had in my life two really bad reviews. One was of _Anna of the
Five Towns_. It ran thus:

"This is an entirely uninteresting tale about entirely uninteresting
people." It said that and it said no more.

The other was of _Mr. Prohack_. It ran thus:

"Arnold Bennett's new book is very disappointing. I have just finished
it, and am sorry that I wasted the time on it. My disappointment is all
the more keen because his previous books were so delightful." It said
that and it said no more.

Now these reviews are really bad, not because of their severity, but
because they are so distressingly short. Sympathetic young authors have
sometimes told me that in their opinion there was a vendetta in the
Press against H. G. Wells and myself. I do not think so. Having been a
reviewer on a considerable scale--I once reviewed about a thousand
novels and other books in three years--I know how reviews are done, and
how they come to be what they are. I understand the mentality of the
reviewer. And I do not believe a bit in the general vendetta, though
notoriously individual vendettas are not rare in the London Press.

It makes no matter, anyhow. Nineteen reviews out of twenty, favourable
or unfavourable, can have only one valuable quality, length. If they
give space they are good; if they do not they are bad. Their critical
estimates are worthless, both artistically and commercially. For
example, I would far sooner be castigated by Mr. Clement Shorter in a
page than belauded by him in ten lines. At most 5 per cent. of reviews
have some interest for the creative artist. Nevertheless I am convinced
that the majority of reviewers are honest fellows. The mischief with
them is, first, that they are rarely qualified for their job, and,
secondly, that their editors treat them like dirt, not only sweating
them disgracefully, but even refusing them adequate space in which to
swing the cat. I was astonished at the Press praises of _Mr. Prohack_.
Never have I had such a Press. _Mr. Prohack_ got a hundred times more
approval than _The Old Wives' Tale_. What interested me chiefly in the
95 per cent. of them was the characteristic British undertone of disdain
for my alleged "efficiency." Thus:

"If he had not had so fine an efficiency he might have had a talent of
the very first quality, if not genius. He has, however, modelled himself
so well to good craftsmanship in writing that one almost gives up hope
now of having him ever drift into the accident of being a genius."

Again:

"He is so extraordinarily efficient a writer that you quite despair of
him falling into genius, although you often feel he could."

These extracts--and I could quote more if my damnable efficiency would
let me--are very precious indeed.


AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Lewis Hind, once Editor of _The Academy_, published a book of
reminiscences called _Authors and I_, in which he has consecrated some
space to myself. I have not read the book, nor do I expect ever to do
so; but I have read many extracts from it in many reviews of it; these
extracts, by their charming inaccuracy, gave me the desire not to read
the book. Lewis Hind (a friend), with Hamilton Fyfe (another friend),
has been responsible for the great journalistic legend, still growing
yearly and now at least a dozen years old, which credits me with being
the "business man of letters," and also with being the man who always
succeeded in doing what he said he would do. I am not a man of business.
If I were I should not pay somebody else a large annual sum for managing
my affairs. As for succeeding in my carefully laid designs, the less
said the better about that.

My present point is the accuracy of Lewis Hind. He wrote, apropos of my
editing of the weekly paper _Woman_: "There was a column of Book Notes
in _Woman_, signed May or Rosalind or Sophy or some such name, that was
so good that I yearned to acquire the writer for the journal I was
editing [_The Academy_]. I discovered that May or Rosalind or Sophy was
E.A.B., or Enoch Arnold Bennett. A little diplomacy, a little flattery,
and the dynamo [me] presented itself at my office for a talk."

It is true that I did write literary criticism for _Woman_, but the
rest, with much that I don't quote, is imagination. My connection with
Lewis Hind and _The Academy_ was brought about not in the least by Lewis
Hind but solely by myself. I selected some of my best reviews from
_Woman_ and sent them to _The Academy_, asking to be informed whether
the editor would care to have that sort of stuff in his paper. He then
requested me to call, and incidentally told me that what he wanted in
his paper was "good nervous English." I listened to the phrase with a
straight face, and afterwards supplied him with immense quantities of
good nervous English. _The Academy_, a millionaire's toy, paid me ten
shillings a column for my good nervous English, until I struck for
fifteen shillings.

Lewis Hind had considerable belief in me as a literary critic, but when
he heard that I was writing a novel he was alarmed for me, and said
with much solemnity: "Bennett, I hear you are writing a novel. Now mark
me, if you go in for it, fiction will be the rock on which you will
split. You are a critic. All you critics are the same. You want to write
novels and you never write good ones."

Ever amiable, ever enthusiastic about something or other, Lewis Hind
showed little comprehension of literature at any time; but E. V. Lucas,
Wilfred Whitten, and I, all contributors to his paper and all people
with fierce convictions, managed for some years to keep him in the
narrow path or fairly near it.




UNKNOWN SOUTHERN FRANCE


NIGHT AND DAY AT BRIVE

I LEFT the train at Brive. It has 15,000 inhabitants and is a busy and
dusty place, a little disordered, with a good half-modernised hotel,
sound food, lots of dogs, large shops, public gardens, a theatre, a
church-clock that shakes the silent tower, and at night the ennui
characteristic of the _province_. At night you can't see the tops of the
towers, but you can hear in the dark women talking sadly to each other
from different bedroom windows. In the daytime women appear to be very
numerous. They are enormous in girth, short, with fierce, gleaming black
eyes; and conscious of themselves (by which I do not mean self-conscious
in the English sense).

The church is closely built in by houses, and at the foot of it a market
was held daily. Fine teams of oxen, well-groomed, strolled about almost
as slowly as a ship moves along the horizon. When you watched them
attentively you saw that they did move.

At the table d'hte of all the hotels the men took on, or put on, a calm
air of ease, prosperity, and well-being, freeing themselves from
commercial and sexual worries; they ate and enjoyed themselves in
tranquillity, as it were between two storms. At the table d'hte of the
chief hotel, where the food was good, the waiters (men of the world)
received remarks about it, critical or otherwise, with perfect courteous
indifference; and if a dish was not entirely a success they were not
upset about it. I paid at this hotel 4 francs for a room and
dressing-room, 1 for breakfast, 3 for lunch, and 3 for dinner. Wine was
free.

       *       *       *       *       *


ENNUI

I departed for Souillac. Half the place-names round about here seem to
end in _ac_; but there are some that don't. For instance, Lacisque.
Balzac ought to have used this name, but the magnanimous simpleton (he
took Madame de Hanska seriously) kindly left it for the artificers of
the following century. On the way to Souillac, as all over France, the
women keepers of the level-crossings stood at attention as the trains
passed, with the official staff held out stiff at right angles from the

right side. All, young and old, were slatternly, and the repeated
attitude grew monotonous after a few hours. They were like slaves. I saw
three Biblical flails in action in various villages. When the country
folk talked to me I could just understand them, but among themselves
they seemed to use a _patois_, incomprehensible of course. A pleasant,
rather superior workman who was taking bread and wine at the inn at
Gressensac, where I had tea, told me that he had a brother-in-law who
was a professor of English somewhere in the United States, but his post
was a poor one, because the man had no accomplishments, was no good.
This workman's attitude to the professional struck me as admirable in
its judicial detachment.

For thirty kilometres the white road from Brive seemed always to be
climbing up into the sky and disappearing there; but in all directions
other than that of the road there were vast horizons. Then, round the
side of a mountain, the road slipped down for several kilometres into
the valley of the Dordogne and the town of Souillac. The swiftness of my
descent, however, was spoilt by meeting numbers of peasants' carts on
the way from Souillac. I had to slacken up in order to avoid collisions,
and also I was bound to look at the carts instead of at the panoramic
scenery. At 5 p.m. I ran into the last remains of a great fair; such a
terrific medley of carts, horses, oxen, sheep, and dogs that I was
reduced to walking, for safety. Streams of travellers were making their
exit from the two ends of the town, the streets of which were
capriciously and richly patterned with animal waste products.
Harness-makers were busy in the side-walks. People were constantly
halting to hold long conversations in the middle of the road. The
standard pattern of cart was a small, longish, narrowish box on two
wheels, without springs, and drawn by an ass; four or five people in
each; and often the youngest woman of the party sat in the middle of the
bottom of the cart, clinging hard to the seat to nullify the awful
jolting, which jerked her head up with regular periodicity, and also
jerked up the sides of the cart. In addition to these carts there were
all manner of prehistoric wagonettes. When it began to drizzle striped
cotton umbrellas rose up out of the vehicles, but certainly did not give
much shelter. Astoundingly grotesque figures of farmers and their wives;
but also a few pretty girls and young women, with coiffures tied in pink
ribbon. The general effect was of a mass of ingenuous simplicity, hard,
poor, and common, but picturesque. I went as far as the famous Souillac
bridge, much praised in guide-books. It did not seem to me to be better
than a good plain bridge in excellent repair. The Dordogne is a
miserable stream here, doubtless enfeebled by the summer; several arches
of the bridge were quite dry. The beggars, including an old bearded man
with misshapen, shrunken legs quite bare, presented an odious spectacle
of utter poverty. A donkey to match was covered with a sack to hide the
collar-sores which made it twitch continually.

At the Lion d'Or, which seemed to fancy itself the best hotel, the sole
waiter said, in a very Southern accent, that a lot of _automobilistes_
had just come in a _bandde_ and taken all the available bedrooms except
one, which I accepted at one franc and a half. It was up the backstairs,
and was clean, and had no other qualities. At the table d'hte, which
was very good, there were, beside the _automobilistes_, three French
families, with children well kept and silent. A very pretty girl sat
next to me; she had her hair down, and wore a cheap ring; she and her
mother constituted one of the families. An extreme provincial gloom
impaired the effect of this excellent meal.

Tired as I was I went out into the town in search of better spirits. I
have never encountered a more perfect illustration of the ennui of the
_province_. Not a light in the mean streets, and scarcely a soul!
Melancholy fell like a sinister dew over the whole place; and the ennui
grew so acute that I began to enjoy it.

In front of a little ill-lit caf, which also seemed to fancy itself the
best, a girl sat dozing or dreaming at a table in the shadow of the
trees conventionally flourishing out of black boxes. She followed me
inside. She was the landlady's daughter, and took my order for _tilleul_
with a slight toss of the head. As she passed the billiard-table, where
a provincial blade was practising, she jolted him with intention and
spoilt his stroke. They both guffawed. This was gaiety, the only gaiety.
In front of a house opposite, under a raised porch, another young woman
was sitting alone, no doubt plunged in the dreadful thought of the ennui
of existence. The town-crier came along with his drum to announce some
sort of dramatic performance. I could not believe it. He gave the
tidings and departed, and in the distance I could hear him giving the
tidings again. But I could not believe it. Nor did I discover the house
of mirth. I saved myself with a copy of _La Petite Gironde_, one
halfpenny, which was published at Bordeaux, and said that it had a
circulation of a quarter of a million, and that it issued nine different
editions for different departments. This wonderful manna in the desert
of ennui was No. 13,213, and was dated 5th September in the
thirty-eighth year of _La Petite Gironde_. However, it had no news less
than two days old, and most of its news was three days old. But if the
news had been three years old it would have enlivened Souillac. The
ecstatic frogs on the Dordogne made a tremendous row all through the
night.

       *       *       *       *       *

CRIES OF A PLOUGHMAN TO HIS TEAM OF OXEN

"Herrrt!"

"Olalaloo-o!"

"Tch! Tch! Tch-tch! TCH!" As if in gentle remonstrance, but loudly.

"Wa--wo--woa!" Apparently to stop them.

The first three cries had no effect on the animals that I could
perceive.

       *       *       *       *       *


SHRINE

The journey to Rocamadour is a series of enormous hills with
corresponding magnificent descents into, and out of, various valleys of
the Dordogne and its tributary the Ouisse. There is a very long climb
ending just short of Rocamadour, and then you have to turn sharply and
descend again. Apparently no other route exists to this place. It is one
of the great show places of the department, and one of the principal
pilgrim-resorts in France. Its situation is immensely theatrical, as
much so as that of an Apennine village. The church is built into the
rock, and the accompanying castle stands on a higher rock and overhangs
the church. An old woman guide compelled me to climb to the topmost
turret of the castle, and then compelled me to look down the face of the
precipice, which she said had a clear fall of nearly 900 feet. Exhausted
by these feats and sights, I lunched at a little restaurant where I had
previously drunk milk-and-soda. I wouldn't go farther, partly because of
fatigue and partly because of the singular, seductive good-nature of the
dirty and blowzy waitress. The lunch was excellent, and cost two francs.
The pilgrimage business is, of course, as at all shrines, commercially
exploited to the full. Curio and memento shops, guides, and repulsive
and ruthless beggars spoilt all the best effects; the "grottoes"
illustrating in three dimensions "scenes in the life of our Lord" were
ineffably grotesque. Still, on the whole, I was obliged to admit that
the exploitation might have been more grossly crude, inartistic, and
grasping than in fact it was. It had a certain vague decency. Perhaps
the least inoffensive figures were the pilgrims themselves.

       *       *       *       *       *


OPERATIC FIGEAC

For thirty-seven kilometres the Figeac road, which lies along a ridge
about a thousand feet above the sea-level, is patrolled by savage dogs;
these dogs really have to be beaten out of the belief that they own the
road. The long descent into Cambat, over a perfect surface, was simply
magnificent, and done at such a pace that the farm-dogs were paralysed
with amazement. And then came a climb of three kilometres and more
man-and-dog fights, and then another magnificent slide into Figeac.
Figeac, with a small river of its own, seems dull at first, but becomes
agreeable and even exciting; and the more recondite parts of it are very
picturesque. In this astonishing town of 3000 inhabitants a performance
of Audran's oprette _La Poupe_ was being given, with orchestra and
all, by a troupe of professionals in a booth theatre. I could hear the
singing from my room in the hotel. I cannot conceive any professional
operatic performance in any town of 3000 inhabitants in England, or even
of 13,000 inhabitants. There was much movement in front of the
opera-house. A starlit night lay over the narrow streets that spread out
at intervals into three-cornered or thirteen-cornered little _places_.
Churches were endemic. Several large cafs. A sort of beer garden, where
I drank camomile. Some large shops. The confectioner's shops had great
mantles of pink muslin thrown over all their stock at night, and at one
shop this mantle was suspended from the central lamp of the
establishment--like a canopy over a bed full of brides-cakes. Golden
youth promenading in high collars and new straw hats. In spite of the
theatre and the cafs the barbers' shops were crammed with sheeted
Shagpats. They always are in the South, where barbers must be sure of
vast fortunes, as brewers in Anglican isles.

The next morning I went out at seven o'clock to get a shave, and was
charged threepence because the day was Sunday. And now Figeac presented
itself as one of the most consistently picturesque towns that I could
remember. The whole town is old and rotten-ripe. High houses with red
roofs, broad eaves, a top storey in the form of a loft practically open
to the street; fine blue shadows, a Spanish effect. Even an
eighteenth-century house looks too modern in Figeac. I saw that the
churches would hold the entire population at once, and that the superior
retail commerce was concentrated on the river front near the theatre and
the largest church, opposite which were three barbers' shops side by
side. After breakfast I paid my bill at the Htel des Voyageurs (six and
a half francs, including tip, for dinner, bed, and breakfast) and set
off along the bank of the Cel; then over a hill into the valley of the
Lot. On the Ouisse, the Cel, and the Lot the effect of the regularly
planted Venetian-mast-like poplars was to turn each river into a festive
waterway. The people were abroad, in Sunday best, mild, ingenuous,
polite, all talking patois, going to or from Mass. The absolutely level
road grew tedious after ten kilometres of Venetian masts, and at Cajarc
I recompensed myself by an immoderate lunch,--soup, boiled beef, tripe,
mushrooms, partridge, cabbage, cream tarts, peaches, grapes; everything
first-rate. At the meal a traveller told me with a sort of holy passion
that here was the supreme country for truffles, and that the truffle
harvest would begin in a week's time. I proceeded to St. Gry-sur-Lot
for tea. This village is highly picturesque; I have drawn, painted, and
even etched it, though after my vicious contacts with modernity I really
ought to have scorned it, as subject-matter, for precisely its
picturesqueness. At the Station Caf I was welcomed, as in plenty of
these tiny places, for an Englishman, and "Entente Cordiale" was a magic
formula, just as a few years earlier the "Russian Alliance" had been the
password into the French millennium. Here anyway is a district where
eating and drinking are understood more profoundly than international
politics. Having no milk for my tea, the landlady of the Station Caf
left the railroad track and slightly milked a cow for the Englishman.

       *       *       *       *       *


THE BRIDGE AT CAHORS

When I got near Cahors it struck me suddenly that the Lot had grown
considerably wider. I had been following it for over sixty kilometres.
Every few miles I had passed a weir. I met a few lizards, and countless
butterflies all proletarian and brown. The dogs were milder in
disposition. As the landlord at St. Gry said: "Everybody is very
affable in these parts,--but farther south it is different." From Cajarc
onwards the scenery became wilder and more beautiful; crags on both
sides now, but below them still the eternal poplars without a break.
The smooth, tree-reflecting river was very sinuous in wide curves; and
yet scarcely a boat on the polished surface! In the whole distance I saw
only three in motion, and two of them were at Cahors. As for the superb
road, it had been planned and executed quite regardless of cost; it was
not only embanked but tunnelled; only one hill in the sixty kilometres.
Impressive, this profuseness of expenditure, especially in a country
where school teachers are paid less even than in England! In Cahors the
Boulevard Gambetta was full of promenaders, half of whom were soldiers
and the other half women--some agreeable. Evidently a military city,
deriving much of its importance from the great institution of
conscription. Very pleasant to be in an imposing town again, after so
many barbaric and gloomy burgs ending in _ac_! I entered the Caf
Tivoli, good and spacious and Parisian, and asked for a daily paper and
received it furled on a stick as in all truly chic French cafs.

The hotel I chose was not infamous, and would be regarded as marvellous
in any English cathedral town; but the next time I go to Cahors I shall
try another. My bedroom was large; it possessed a sofa, but no wardrobe,
nor electric light. More than thirty diners at the table d'hte,
including eight _militaires_ and several ladies. One outstandingly
pretty girl in an ostentatious hat. The hat was deplorable. Also she
was a spoilt girl. Still, very pretty indeed. What a pity one can't, on
those tours, send one's womenkind on by train--luggage in advance--and
take them out of their trunks in the evening, _fraiches et pimpantes_!
On the journey itself they offer disadvantages, and as a rule the
prettiest are the most disadvantageous. I noticed that the dinner was
mediocre, and a bit "short," judged by the standards of the Midi. I
happened to ask for powdered sugar, and was told that the hotel had
none! This absence of powdered sugar preyed on my mind. It depressed me.
Moreover, I was sick of touring alone. I burst forth into the streets
immediately after dinner to search for the illustrious, the lovely, the
unique Valenti Bridge. (Through the windows of all the hotels and
little restaurants could be seen _militaires_ and women, dining and
drinking. Grade according to price.) Well may the Valenti Bridge be
double-starred in guide-books! The thing was simply prodigious in the
moonlight, and extremely beautiful. There cannot be another bridge to
compare with the Valenti. It made me quite cheerful again, and I went
back to the Caf Tivoli and had a camomile. Each to his taste. Camomile
means a clean tongue on the morrow. I paid my bill (5 francs) at the
inefficient and unclean hotel, and left at 6.45 the next morning to make
a sketch of the bridge. Then I had two cups of chocolate at a caf, and
bought one pound of grapes and two peaches for seven sous, and set off
therewith for Caussade. Magnificent weather, but a strong contrarious
wind. The winding road climbed gently and steadily. It wouldn't stop
climbing. Aware that it would in the end have to stop climbing, I said:
"I won't eat this fruit till I get to the top." Unreflecting resolve! I
ate the fruit at the twentieth kilometre out of Cahors. What with the
sensation of triumph, and the marvellous panorama beneath me, and the
refreshment of the fruit, I could not help giving forth savage and
inarticulate voluptuous cries as my teeth met in the absolutely perfect
peaches. I was at Caussade before noon (38 kilometres). A vast fair was
in progress, and the main street was lined with a double row of serried
oxen, horns facing horns and a lane between. An admirable lunch at the
crowded Htel Larroque. The service had been a little disorganised, but
not the cooking. Every town has the hotels it deserves. They knew food
from forage at Caussade. From Caussade I had a tremendous, an appalling
climb, and a fearful series of descents into St. Antonin--a town lost in
antiquity, hills and picturesqueness, a town unknown to globe-trotters
and excursionists, a town so anciently elemental that its streets bear
no names and have to be described as the street where Monsieur Chose
lives, etc. Yet I shot through it as though it was Basingstoke, because
my destination, Fenayrols-les-Bains, was only a few miles farther on.

       *       *       *       *       *


THE DESTINATION

Fenayrols is the local "watering-place," with medicinal springs in the
bed of a stream, and a hotel. You walk out with a glass in your hands to
the Source de l'Eglise, before breakfast. However slowly you walk you
will pass other small moving groups, with glasses, as though they were
standing still. It is amazing, the slowness which some people,
especially curs, can accomplish in perambulation. Last month, August,
there were forty-eight visitors in the hotel. The season was in fullest
swing. Now there were only eight--three old women, one old man, two
curs, and ourselves. One of the curs is a very nice quiet fellow,
bored with existence and missal-reading; only a little bored, but
decisively and fixedly bored. He never goes out except to drink the
water or to visit the cur of the village. Lunch occurs at ten-thirty,
and the landlord presides. His name is Roucoule but I call him
Roucoucoule. A jolly man, who laughs at everything, and uses the most
terrible, the most impossible words, prefacing them with, "_Vous
m'excuserez le mot, messieurs et dames_,"--and out the word comes. The
company is intensely respectable, nevertheless, despite the landlord's
vocabulary and the general table-manners. The table-manners would not
bear description in English. One day the Mayor of Gaillac came to lunch,
and kept his hat on throughout the meal. But that was nothing. A hat at
any rate does not make a noise. During meals we talk of things and the
price of things, and eating and drinking, and health. Everybody is a
real connoisseur of wine. Truffles cost 17 francs a kilogramme. This
seemed to me rather dear, but I was told they might cost 35 francs in
Paris. (Everybody has great contempt for Parisian cooking--and justly,
for the cooking of the Midi is better, even at railway stations.) Milk
costs five sous a litre; but some of us remember it at three sous. An
old lady recalls the day when at Montauban ass's milk was a regular
commodity famous for its fine taste and its curative properties. It cost
a franc a litre. Now it has almost disappeared from the market. I am
informed that if a healthy man is to live on milk alone he must drink
six litres a day. At Toulouse milk threatens to rise to six sous a
litre. So our table-talk proceeds. If it flags we take to discussing the
names of things in patois, and the varieties of patois. This leads to
about five new discoveries every minute.

       *       *       *       *       *


SCENERY AND CHARACTER

I never stayed in any _province_ so provincial as Fenayrols. Its
contented and bland ignorance concerning matters of common knowledge is
absolutely impregnable. At table I have not heard one general idea. Not
one! I walked this afternoon by the river, with a companion, and beheld
women standing in the water to wash clothes. They did not even tuck up
their skirts. They just stood as they were in the water and washed
clothes. My companion said they did it all day. I asked how they managed
in winter. They did the same in winter--and for no reason save
nonchalant stupidity. In the northern parts of France the washing-stands
are primitive enough, but they do keep the washer's feet and legs fairly
dry. Here the populace will take no trouble. It prefers dirt,
discomfort, and disease, to trouble. So much for the alleged uplifting
influence of sublime scenery! The scenery of the district is astounding
in its grandeur, majesty, and beauty. But you get used to it. We rode to
the Chteau of Penne, which in its impossible picturesqueness, balanced
on a crazy crag, has to be seen to be believed. The whole countryside is
indeed dotted with vast marvels. Yet the environment does not fortify
the character, nor chasten the morals, nor improve the taste; and
civilisation is two hundred years behind that of rural Belgium.

       *       *       *       *       *


TRUFFLES AND AGRICULTURE

Still talking about truffles, an obsession! Knowing nothing whatever
about truffles, save that they are delicious and indigestible, I was
staggered to learn that sows are encouraged to root for them. (Sows,
because the males are fattened and killed.) The sow prospects for
truffles with her snout, and when she has "found" the human being comes
forward with a spade and digs up the harvest, which, of course the sow
never gets. Truffles have a convenient habit of frequenting the same
place. They like to grow under certain species of oak. Which makes them
easier to discover.

And I heard a woman on a mountain-side crying through the trees: "Beni!
Beni! Beni!" (patois for _Viens_--"Come"). She kept on with this cry
until I saw a sow in a field lift her head and listen and then amble
off, gently meandering, in the direction of the cry. She seemed to go
quite intelligently and willingly, and only stopped once to investigate
the possibilities of a puddle.

Much higher up on this gigantic mountain-side I met a very small cottage
in a dreadful state of neglect. Was it conceivably inhabited? I turned
the corner of the wigwam and saw an appalling very old woman. She sat in
the open doorway at some domestic task, amid old pans, lumber, and
refuse. A really horrible hag, with steely wisps of grey hair, a face
spotted with warts or other excrescences, and no teeth. She was typical
of the aged female in these parts--except that she scowled at me. As a
rule the people are extremely polite. Indeed politeness is the one thing
that they will put themselves to any trouble about; and the
characteristic phrase is "_A votre plisir_." The cottage had one room
and a tiny attic, with a stable attached. The walls, all cracking, were
held up from total ruin by roughly cut tree-trunks. A small puddle had
been formed by damming a rivulet that dashed down the steep road. The
puddle looked like a puddle of yellow-ochre paint, inexpressibly foul.
But four ducks found it interesting and agreeable. In the evening, when
I descended the mountain, the old woman was housing her ducks for the
night.

I have seen more Biblical flails in use. A somewhat clever device is a
cylinder of solid stone drawn by oxen. It has a diameter of eighteen or
twenty inches at one end and rather less at the other, so that the oxen
are forced to go round and round in a circle. The stone is heavy enough
to break up the head of wheat, but not heavy enough to crush the grain.
Afterwards the grain, in its husk, is put into a small hand-machine and
the threshing completed. On most of the small farms in the neighbourhood
there is a circular smooth place, fifty feet or so across, kept clear
for this wondrous operation. Agriculture, in a great agricultural
country, a country where there are nearly a million landed proprietors!

       *       *       *       *       *


A SQUIRE

Here have I been inhabiting Fenayrols for weeks, and I learnt only
to-day that it "groans" under the tyranny of a chtelain (squire) who is
exceeding rich and reactionary. Hence the clericalism and backwardness
of the village. It was a tailor from the big town of Montauban who told
me, and he told me with gusto. All reformers love scandals. The tailor
said that there were not ten such horrid little villages in the whole of
the department. Fenayrols has a state school, with a master, a mistress,
ten or twelve boy pupils, and no girl pupils whatever. The children have
to attend the church school. This made me feel quite at home. Although I
have lived in France for years I had never heard before of a French
squire. But all is not known in Paris. I believe I could find places in
France where they have not yet received news of the French Revolution.
Still, the squire of Fenayrols is respected, and not everybody objects
to reaction. I went along to the barber's and heard more about the
squire. When I hinted at his being a reactionary the barber said calmly:
"Oh, well, no doubt he has his own ideas about things."

       *       *       *       *       *


GARLIC

An invitation to tea at Madame G.'s, in antique St. Antonin. Her father
was a contractor and helped to build the local railway--such as it is.
She is very old and powerful and of the purest St. Antonin blood. A
wrinkled face, but with the wrinkles in good straight lines and
geometric patterns like her character. A quick laugh that finishes
prematurely with a spreading and falling gesture of the arms. Only her
voice has the weakness of great age. She actually took me up to the
second floor of her house--sight rarely displayed. A bedroom there was
tremendously primitive: a piece bricked and boarded off from the huge
attic which forms this top floor. It was unclosably open to the air at
four separate rectangular apertures that would be windows were they
glazed; in a storm the rain must sweep through the room. Lines were hung
in various directions across the chamber; on some hung clothes, on
others garlic! She said that true devotees of garlic spread it on bread
like butter. An idea which affrights the imagination. "They say," she
remarked suddenly, "that Paris is precisely one hundred leagues from
here." A pretty thought; but she added that a league was four kilometres
in that country; so that the estimate was somehow wrong. Till then I had
not met the word "league" in France, except on the printed page. No
doubt as the daughter of a railway contractor she thought proper to
think in leagues.

Bitter outcries in the assemblage of _petits bourgeois_ at the table
d'hte at Fenayrols against the sinful sloth of workmen. M. Roucoucoule
asseverated that it was always a couple of hours for lunch, and never
more than four hours' honest work in a day. Some of them spent the whole
of their energy in merely pretending to work. Fantastic stories were
related of the costliness of jobs paid for by the hour. France was
perishing. In former days the workman was very different. In England of
course the workman still worked conscientiously--that was well known.
But the English were ever practical and serious. Ah! If the French ...
etc.

Then they talked of hydrophobia: another instance here of England's
practicalness. England suppressed hydrophobia, whereas the disease was
still common in the department. Never a year without somebody being
infected by a mad dog! M. Roucoucoule told of a case of a bitten man
who was sent to the Pasteur Institute and cured. That was years ago. The
man, however, remained obstinately in the delusion that he was not
cured, and would still try to bite people if they did not show the
elementary prudence to get out of his way. He was constantly warning
people to keep their distance. And yet he was quite cured; he would
admit that he behaved absurdly; but he could not help it. He had become
incurably addicted to feeling dangerous to life.

       *       *       *       *       *


STAINED GLASS AND PILGRIMS

We went to Caylus this afternoon, following for some distance the soft
and rural valley of the Bonnette. It seemed incredible that this weak
trickle of a stream should only a few years ago have flooded St.
Antonin, so that Madame G.'s bed was afloat in her bedroom and she had
to leave her first floor in a boat. Caylus is a hill town, rendered
illustrious by its church. As we entered the town a woman was performing
a small child's toilette in the middle of the street. A little farther
on we bought a marvellous peach and a pound and a half of grapes for one
penny. The church was in almost perfect preservation, with stained glass
among the very finest in France. The contrast between the lovely and
elaborate opulence of a church's interior and the squalid, mean, ugly
existence that proceeds nonchalantly outside it was specially marked at
Caylus. It was dramatic; it was even melodramatic. At one period the
town must have had considerable importance. We climbed farther, to Notre
Dame Livron, a place of pilgrimage, with magic healing fountain, cafs,
souvenirs, priests, and a dreadful untidiness of wandering waste paper.

Riding back to St. Antonin we continually overtook knots of country
people, chiefly peasants, afoot or in bizarre and crazy conveyances,
with bags, bundles, and packets of food. Sometimes a man and a woman
would be carrying a heavy bundle swung on a stick between them. At St.
Antonin we found that the town was being entered by similar strings of
persons from all directions. At a caf the landlady told us that a grand
pilgrimage to Lourdes was starting that night. The train left at 7.30
p.m. and was to arrive at Lourdes at 6 a.m. to-morrow. Return fare, 12
francs. Some excessively prudent pilgrims were taking even loaves of
bread. "Suppose there should be no bread at Lourdes," they said,
according to the landlady. The dull, savage, simple faces of the pious
adventurers explained at once the tremendous vogue of the
miracle-resort. One thought of the barbaric night in the uncushioned
excursion train, and the condition of the carriages and the travellers
at the end of the journey. Repulsive, humiliating.

       *       *       *       *       *


GRAPE-HARVEST

To-day (15th September), round about Fenayrols, the _vendanges_ began. A
solemnity. (At all times some 50 per cent. of the conversation is about
grapes and wines, and everybody seems to an Englishman to be a
connoisseur.) When I went forth at two o'clock after a shower of rain,
men and women were gathering grapes in hundreds of acres of fields. And
on the roads were congregated long, narrow, two-wheeled carts,
oxen-drawn, with barrels in a row on them. The grapes were thrown into
the barrels. I learnt that the grapes of the district were less good
than usual owing to lack of sun, and also that they had been impaired by
fog--_brouillards_ was the word. At this point I brought my
investigations to a close. It is dangerous for a novelist to specialise;
he might get lost. A novelist who does not keep on writing the same book
over and over again--as too many of us do--is condemned to have no
precise knowledge of anything on earth.

       *       *       *       *       *


A MAYOR

The Mayor of Gaillac came again to the hotel ordinary to-night; and
again wore his hat--extremely on one side--throughout the meal. He is an
enormous man, very high and very fat, with pendent cheeks that almost
flap; dirty, untidy, probably nearing seventy; thumbs turned well back,
walks with the help of a reliable stick. He speaks with a most
pronounced Southern accent, and between speeches he mumbles quite
inarticulately at considerable length. He had sat all the afternoon at a
table in front of the hotel, ingurgitating steadily. But he showed no
sign of intoxication. At dinner he drank a bottle of white wine, and to
begin with insisted that it must be sufficiently _sec_. If it wasn't
_sec_ he would have no use for it. By happy chance it proved to be
sufficiently _sec_. He tasted it with the gestures of an immensely
experienced drinker. He related in fullest detail how he would go after
game with a stick, and how sometimes he had dogs that would hunt
entirely by themselves. He was gigantically boring, to match his size.
Before dinner was over he had a rival in the shape of a bald angler from
Toulouse, also with a powerful Southern accent. The latter explained
that as he was a fisherman he didn't care for the taste of fish. His
leading subject was local avarice. He had an employee with no relative
nearer than a second cousin, who deprived himself of nearly everything
except life in order to save. The fellow was positively worth 150,000
francs, and yet wouldn't indulge in coffee--no, not coffee!--and in
winter he burnt old newspapers instead of firewood. The Toulousain
recounted things with an irritating elaborateness. He would dramatically
startle you with some statement, and then add in a quieter voice: "I
will now tell you why," or "I will explain why."

Later this Toulousain was joined by a friend, also bald, and they made a
pair of typical Southern French bourgeois. Their characteristics seemed
now to be accentuated. And their two leading characteristics were
certainly a powerful interest in food, drink, and physical comfort--the
yarns they relentlessly span of adventures in hotels and of what they
had eaten or refused to eat!--and a refusal to recognise that women were
women. With women they were consistently _rosse_, and very _rosse_. In
particular they talked at length to two girls without even the slightest
momentary admission that girls are entitled by universal usage to
certain chivalries of manner and tone. Latin hardness unashamed, perhaps
unconscious; but anyhow intensely disagreeable.

       *       *       *       *       *


MEDIVAL

We climbed to Cordes. It stands theatrically on a hill, whose final
slopes were something like a ladder up into a loft. A gradient of one in
one, or perhaps two in one. These slopes had to be climbed to be
believed. As we approached the centre of the town we passed under one
massive gateway after another, each commanding a sharp corner. Nearly
all the towns round about are on hills and built to be impregnable
against assault; but Cordes was pre-eminent among them. It was almost
the oldest. It made St. Antonin and Caylus and Figeac look modern.
Gothic houses with carved fronts, medival. It seemed to me that they
might have been built for the Schoolmen and that therein Nominalists
might have sheltered from the murderous attacks of Realists. But not
beautiful, merely antique. The only beautiful thing I noticed in Cordes
was the rosace in the church. The town, however, is a most marvellous
historic monument, and apparently quite unvisited by the curious. The
landlord of the caf where we drank fine tea was a manufacturer of
embroidery and wanted to show me his manufactory. I refused to see it,
holding that in Cordes manufactories ought not to exist.

       *       *       *       *       *


THE SCALE OF THINGS

We travel and learn. The theatricality of Cordes and of Penne is as
nothing to the theatricality of the chteau of Bruniquel; set, too, amid
river scenery of the first order. The clotted picturesqueness of the
whole district begins to cloy after a week or two; there is too much of
it, and it is altogether too scenic. We returned to St. Antonin by
train, nauseated with picturesqueness. Driving home from St. Antonin to
Fenayrols, M. Roucoucoule, the hotel landlord, told us that he drove
people to and from the station gratis, because if he charged he would
have to pay 70 or 80 francs for a licence and it would not be
remunerative. This shows the scale of things here. And I learnt also
that a tobacco bureau brings in 70 or 80 francs profit per annum. And,
further, I learnt that the excruciating cracked bell which wakes me
every morning at 4.30 is the Angelus. It is rung by a woman at no
salary. Once a year--or was it twice a year?--she makes a collection.
Some contributors give her an egg, others a sou. But when the landlord
of the hotel (to her the symbol of shameless luxury) gave her ten sous,
half a franc, she was not satisfied, and said gloomily: "_a vaut bien
a!_"

       *       *       *       *       *


OMELETTES, SOUP, AND WINES

To-day, there being a great influx of guests, the landlord constituted
himself the chf, and the lunch was unusually good. The omelette in
particular had a success. All the gourmets and gourmands present agreed
that a man could make a better omelette than a woman. A woman could not
leave an omelette alone. She worried it; she cooked it too much, and
unevenly. On the other hand, all agreed that a woman would make bouillon
better than a man, because she took more care of it, skimmed it more
conscientiously, and so on. I felt that all the talkers knew profoundly
and passionately what they were talking about.

When these people begin to talk wines they never stop. It was a great
wine-gossip day. I learnt that you can "age" wine by heating it to 75
Centigrade, and that you can give red wine the characteristics of
maturity by mixing with it 25 per cent. of white wine. Everybody agreed
that the department produced fine wines, and the white wines of Gaillac
were continually spoken of with high respect. A post office inspector
who came in for dinner, a man of very superior education and bearing,
seemed at once to establish himself as the leading wine expert of the
table. He asserted that for forty francs the _pice_ (sufficient to fill
over two hundred bottles) you could buy the very finest in the district.
There was a lot of talk about the extreme difficulty, almost the
impossibility, of obtaining authentic wines--that is, wines which
actually were what they pretended to be. This applied specially to
champagne. As for Bordeaux, the dealers from Bordeaux came to the
department, and to the neighbouring departments, and bought wine
freely, which was sent to Bordeaux and thenceforward _was_ Bordeaux. The
department of Tarn-et-Garonne was famous for its excellent Bordeaux! The
inspector said that most of the great brands were farmed out, and the
money had to be paid whatever the yield was. Hence a certain quantity of
Chteau Blank simply had to be found each year--from somewhere! He
showed why the dodge of selling the yield "on the vine" (_sur pied_) was
so tempting to the vine-grower. He said that there were scarcely any
pure French wines left, Californian plants being grafted on to
everything. I understood that at forty francs the _pice_ wholesale, the
grower can make a good living; at thirty francs profitable business
becomes difficult and uncertain. Of course the general conclusion was
that the vineyard industry was in a bad way. In France, as in England,
it is rare to meet a man of business who does not anticipate ruin within
a few years.

       *       *       *       *       *


THE HOTEL STAFF

The waiter left unexpectedly this morning, a week before his time was
up, having found a place in a caf at Toulouse. The landlord was not in
the least disturbed. Pauline is now cook, chambermaid, and
waitress--with often a dozen or more at table. She manages quite well.
(Oh, country hotels in England!) My mature impression of Mr.
Roucoucoule's establishment is that it is a very sound proposition at
six francs a day. Good table and too much to eat. Excellent wine.
Cleanliness fair. Sanitation fair. Service quick and willing, but a
little slow at meals, which are not always prompt; everybody genuinely
anxious to oblige. No extras. No attempt to "make a bit." Large rooms.
Simple but just adequate furniture. No carpets, unless you count bedside
rugs as carpets. Not a doormat in the place. Too many flies.

       *       *       *       *       *


BLASCO IBANEZ

I made acquaintance with the work of Blasco Ibanez. A novel translated
by Herelle (the gentleman who kindly adapted d'Annunzio to the French
taste), and entitled in French _Terres Maudites_. It opens with an
extremely competent full-dress description, in the Zola technique, of
the beginning of a day in the _huerta_ (Valencia region). Then the theme
of the story is well stated and the dramatic situation well presented.
Your interest is aroused. And your interest is soon disappointed. The
construction, if any, of the book is rotten, a regular mess being made
of the most magnificent material. Much prominence and much space are
given to the figure of Pepita in the first chapter. You are justified
in assuming that she is the heroine. Well, she has nothing whatever to
do with the main story; she disappears. "My God!" the author must have
said to himself towards the end, slapping his thigh, "I've clean
forgotten that girl Pepita!" And Pepita is dragged in by the hair for
the finale, which finale is quite unconvincing. If Blasco Ibanez had had
any power of self-criticism, or in the alternative any artistic
scruples, he would have ripped the novel up and started it afresh.
Further, he is terribly sentimental. His admiration of the peasant
"colossus" or "Herakles" is nave to the last degree, and reminds you of
the worst qualities in Camille Lemonnier's once semi-famous but totally
ridiculous novel, _Un Mle_. I should say that Blasco Ibanez was young,
and also that he would never do anything first-class.

       *       *       *       *       *


THE STATION STAFF

The landlord told me that the railway station of Fenayrols is manned by
one woman, who does _everything_. She shuts and opens the gates at the
level crossing, works the signals, deals with the goods-traffic, sells
tickets, collects tickets, cleans, and keeps the accounts. Passengers
are compelled by by-law to help her with heavy luggage. Two years ago
she was paid thirty francs a month; she now gets fifty francs. Her
husband is head platelayer for this section of the line, and earns
eighty francs a month. In summer she is grossly overworked. But in
winter, the landlord positively assured me, "sometimes not a single
passenger alights at Fenayrols in a fortnight."

       *       *       *       *       *


STONE-BREAKING

We talked to an old stone-breaker on the road. He said he had lost his
wife, son, and daughter-in-law, all in the last nine months, and now
lived quite alone at St. Antonin. He had fought in the war of 1870. For
each heap of broken stones he received thirteen sous, and by good work
he could do one heap in the morning and another in the afternoon, making
twenty-six sous (thirteen pence) a day. "It's not bad," he said, pleased
with his situation. But he had to walk over three miles each way to and
from his job. "That's nothing," he said. "If you knew how I used to have
to walk when I was young----!"

       *       *       *       *       *


FINANCE OF MAIZE

Finance from old Madame G. On one bit of ground of rather more than half
an acre she grew maize this year, and sells it for sixty francs. She
paid two francs for seeds, fifteen francs for two and a half days' male
labour, and two francs to a woman for something that I can't remember.
Thus she gets forty-one francs profit, but from this must be deducted
the value of her own labour and the cost of carrying the harvest into
town. As for her grapes, she cannot find men to gather them--at an
economic wage. She said to me, with a curiously dry and cynical accent:
"Do you know how much they get? Well, three francs a day, and fed!...
And wine selling at three halfpence a litre!" Here is the sort of
reasoning that confounds publicists.

       *       *       *       *       *


THE TRUTH ABOUT FENAYROLS

It takes me a long time to put two and two together. After I don't know
how many days, I now account for the undeniable backwardness of
Fenayrols, not by its reactionary squire, but by the fact that it lies
nearly a mile off the high road along a by-road. The by-road, however,
is fairly good up to Fenayrols. Beyond, lie a few miserable hamlets,
which doubtless regard Fenayrols as a sort of metropolis. After that
nothing in particular that I could find. The metropolis has a few
hundred citizens. There is an iron bridge over the beautiful Aveyron.
The church is half a mile off, but a small chapel with an
angelus-ringing belfry exists in the village itself. A small
market-square, with municipal flowering plants and a vine or so; a small
town hall with a small tower; a post office. The post office, strange
to say, is both clean and well run. The most marked characteristic of
the whole place is animal excreta. The pools and puddles which the ducks
eagerly explore are so marvellous in morbid decadence that, had he known
them, Clement Scott would certainly have employed them metaphorically
when discussing Ibsen. Most of the houses are far gone in decay; some of
them look as if they had not been inhabited for quite a century; but
they are inhabited. Structural repairs, if any, are of an extremely
makeshift kind, and very amateurishly executed at that. All the lanes
are merely tracks of loose stones. We have two grocers, and several
other tiny shops, a cobbler, and a barber (clean) who is also the
tailor. Lastly, there is a second hotel, not comparable to our huge
caravanserai at six francs a day inclusive. Somewhere in the lanes is a
weaver who works on a primeval loom, and I hear of a carpenter.

Discuss the village with the landlord of the huge caravanserai and he
has only one important theme: the rapacious, self-defeating
narrow-mindedness of the peasantry. They think that he ought to pay more
than other people, and, rather than sell to him at current prices, they
let him buy all his provisions at St. Antonin. They do whatever is
possible to make the running of the hotel difficult. The squire is the
chief shareholder of the company owning the hotel. (I am modifying my
opinion of that mysterious reactionary, for he is very well-spoken-of by
everybody in the village. His chteau has a forbidding and ruinous
exterior, but I am told of wonderful Louis Quinze furniture therein,
including a drawing-room suite embroidered with the fables of La
Fontaine, for which sixty thousand francs has been refused.) Several
companies have preceded the present one--and failed. One of them spent
eighty thousand francs on building an _tablissement_ on the banks of
the Aveyron, and the Aveyron ridiculously overflowed and wrecked it
before it had brought in a cent. The increasing frequency of great
floods renders its restoration impossible. The only thing to do would be
to build again at a more respectful distance from the river,--and who is
going to start on such an adventure? The company pays five hundred
francs a year for the monopoly of the medicinal waters. The inhabitants
of neighbouring communes have the right to take water from the springs
for their own use, but not to sell it. However, they sell it, and the
company is still trying to find a way of stopping them.

       *       *       *       *       *


A GREAT RESTAURANT

Vaour is a village I don't know how many miles off Fenayrols. I only
know that we went there, and it lies eleven kilometres from a railway
station. The Htel du Nord at Vaour is illustrious throughout the region
for its cookery. People travel vast distances uphill in order to enjoy
it. We did. We arrived at eleven o'clock, and lunch was just ending. The
landlord and landlady in the kitchen said that we were unfortunately too
late for a proper meal, but they would see what they could do for us.
Here is what they did for us:--

     Soupe. Jambon du pays. Confit d'oie. Omelette nature. Civet de
     livre. Riz de veau blanquette. Perdreau rti. Fromage
     Roquefort. Fromage Cantal. Confiture de crises. Poires.
     Figues.

We ate of everything; every dish was really distinguished. I rank this
meal with a meal that I once ate at the toile restaurant at Brussels,
once, if not still, the finest restaurant in the world,--and about the
size of, say, Gow's, in the Strand.

In addition, there were three wines, a _vin blanc ordinaire_, a _vin
rouge ordinaire_, and a fine wine to finish with. The fine wine was
fine.

The total bill, for two persons, was seven francs.

At the entrance to Vaour is a newish chteau. We learned that it had
been built not very long since on the site of an old _maison_--not a
chteau, and that it was _trs chic_. When I asked if the owners were in
residence, I was told "the lady only." The gentleman came very
seldom--occasionally for a week-end, no more. They entertained rarely.

"Are there any children?"

"No. The lady is all alone."

This brief glimpse of an existence eleven kilometres from a railway
station had a saddening effect upon me.

From Vaour we climbed still farther to the celebrated forest of
Gresignes. A state forest, a very large forest, a forest with wild deer
bounding in it. Suddenly we came to a clearing and a "point of view,"
and the forest was spread out before us in its vastness. Beyond the
forest was range after range of hills. And on the horizon a faint, long,
low cloud. This cloud was lofty mountains; it was the Pyrenees, a
hundred kilometres away. When I comprehended what I was looking at I had
quite a thrill, for till then the Pyrenees had been only a name to me.
This was a day of sensations.

       *       *       *       *       *


THE VILLAGE FTE

For some days preparations for the annual fte of the village have been
in progress, and five musicians arrived from Bruniquel last night. The
landlord told me that for centuries it had been the custom for the
squire, when a son of his had to _tirer au sort_ for the army, to pay
all the expenses of the musicians from Bruniquel at the fte of
Fenayrols. And the squire was paying them this year. The musicians
arrived last night, and I met them in the dusk in the station road.
There are five, including the drum. They burst into music as they
entered the village, and it was good music. The Bruniquel musicians are
famous in the region. They have an ensemble. The "piston" won the first
prize in his regiment, and was reputed to be able to play almost any
instrument. The quintet stays at the hotel till Tuesday morning. They
brought with them a curious bouquet of paper flowers for the landlady.
And while we were lunching in a private room two conscripts came in
bearing another paper bouquet. They were so sheepish and nervous that
they could scarcely speak. "We have the honour----" and they handed the
bouquet to me instead of to my wife. I gave them two francs. The youth
who took the money, looked at it, hesitated, and then returned thanks.
At the door there was another hesitation; at last they glumly departed,
with expressions of goodwill. I thought they were not satisfied with the
tip, but to-night the landlady assured me that they were well satisfied,
and that their singular deportment was due merely to shyness.

Booths and swings have been erected. One booth is perched across a
rivulet of animal filth, with a few boards to make a bridge. The fces
in the road have not been removed, but have been swept to the sides of
the road. This was at any rate an effort towards righteousness. The
musicians, after playing late last night, were abroad early this
morning; they paraded up and down, and up and down, preceded by the
three or four conscripts of the village carrying a large tricolour; and
there was quite a crowd, which had increased at lunch-time. At 4.30 the
musicians entered the special garlanded bandstand in the square for the
afternoon ball. Tables and chairs had been arranged in odd corners near
each little caf. The lordly terrace of our hotel was full. Bright
frocks everywhere. The ball began. More and still more bright frocks. We
saw bright frocks coming down all the hills from the hill-farms. At 6.30
the musicians descended from the bandstand, and left five empty glasses
behind them. The lame barber, who, in addition to being a tailor, is
to-day a caf-keeper, climbed up into the green boughs surrounding the
bandstand and removed the glasses. Evidently he has the concession of
supplying drinks to the musicians.

At 9.15 the scene in the square for the evening ball was what has to be
described as fairy-like, though what likeness strings of Chinese
lanterns and rockets have to fairies I have never understood. The
acetylene-lighted swings were continuously swinging. Still more bright
frocks. Many girls were covered with confetti; yet the confetti merchant
seemed to be doing no business. The postman wore a new uniform, hitherto
beheld of none. A shooting-saloon in charge of an old woman with a calm
and cynical glance of experienced resignation was quite deserted. Some
of the girls had their hair threaded with blue ribbon, and some wore
elaborate belts. They pinned up their skirts for dancing. To the thick
gloom of an arch of the iron bridge all the young men retired together
singing loudly. In one dark corner of a lane a boy and a girl were
dancing together all alone. Aged persons sat about on chairs, some of
them too far off to see anything of the fte, and apparently not
interested in it. A grunt or two from some animal in an invisible stable
still reminded you that animals insisted on being fed as usual. The
playing of the musicians had much deteriorated. Over everything a
magnificent rich night, and the Milky Way strangely glittering.

We had a glimpse of the "young heir," the gentleman whose father's
traditional rle it was to pay all the expenses of the five musicians
from Bruniquel. A fine specimen of golden youth. He had certainly been
_se frotter un peu  Paris_,--so he was judged.

       *       *       *       *       *


IN THE TRAIN

We left Fenayrols this morning. The bill was 255 francs for two people
for three weeks. The landlord would not charge for a guest whom I had to
lunch, nor for a liqueur which I had once drunk. He said that we had
been absent from meals several times, and that, moreover, I often ate
almost nothing. The entire staff of the hotel throughout our stay was
invariably in a high degree agreeable and obliging. The village was
carpeted with confetti after last night, and citizens were promenading
early and talking in loud voices as though publicly determined to be
idle and joyous all day. At the station we got into a compartment, and
lo! the reactionary old squire, a cur, and the chief local doctor, who
has a great reputation for charm, goodness, and overworking! In
conversing with the squire the doctor took out his engagement book and,
pointing to a column of notes, he said: "Look! I've done all that since
two o'clock this morning." (It was then 9.15.) The squire was clearly a
very decent fellow--and I didn't care how reactionary and bigoted he
was.

       *       *       *       *       *


THE THEOLOGICAL TOWN OF INGRES

The railway station buffet at Montauban was fully equal to its
illustrious reputation. Most station restaurants in France are excellent
(except of course those at the Paris termini), but Montauban ranks with
Nevers, and there is no restaurant anywhere in London as good as the
buffet at Nevers. On the other hand the trains which carry customers to
and from these marvellous tables are absurd, tragic, and fantastic. On
issuing from the station we at once became aware that one single
phenomenon dominated Montauban: the blinding light and overwhelming
heat. A red-brick country town, spacious, exposing itself wantonly to
the unbearable sun. Naturally, I went straight to the Ingres Museum. A
notice said that it was closed on week-days! The concierge, however,
appreciated the impropriety of sending away _bredouille_ a foreigner who
regarded Montauban as a town containing the Ingres Museum. I could find
nothing that seemed very important in the Museum: pencil-sketches,
souvenirs, and so on. But perhaps the heat made me careless. I can
imagine an Ingres idolator leading me into a corner and pointing to a
piece of paper with a few pencil-strokes, under glass, and saying to
me: "You don't mean to say you can't see that that is one of the
greatest pieces of draughtsmanship in the whole of Europe!" I am well
used to that sort of didacticism. Also, I am a convinced believer in
Ingres. Nevertheless the Ingres Museum at Montauban bored me. We passed
on to the Cathedral. Cool, incredibly cool! Romanesque. I made a sketch
of the interior, and it was the very hottest hour of the day. Emerging,
we almost ran, as people do in torrential rain, from one shelter to
another, and found fresh shade in a public garden by the river. The
streets of Montauban are crowded with priests and cyclists. Above
everything it is a theological town. There are two theological
faculties, each of them explaining the unknowable to its own
satisfaction. Round about here they feed pigs on peaches.

       *       *       *       *       *


A METROPOLIS

_Toulouse._--As the train stopped we could see many watchers sinisterly
scanning the arrivals. Great crowds in and round the station. The
passengers fell in a cascade out of the packed train. They had only one
idea, to get away. They would have nothing to do with the subway; they
surged across the lines between engines and escaped. Outside there were
quantities of railway omnibuses. We were swept into one. Then a long
wait. The municipal inspector of railway omnibuses would not let us
start for ages....

Instantly the "feel" of a big town, almost of a capital. The station
offered an imposing faade as we drove over the bridge of the Canal du
Midi, which goes to Cette. Electric cars all over the place, except in
the Rue d'Alsace-Lorraine, the principal shopping street. In this narrow
thoroughfare narrow open cars were tied to the tails of skeleton horses.
The Htel de la Poste had the conveniences and the mysterious corruption
and the equally mysterious glances (at once servile and disdainful) of a
genuine cosmopolitan "caravanserai." Disconcerting after Fenayrols and
all the dark townlets ending in _ac_. We went into a large store and
bought a local shawl; and then to the Alles Lafayette, the centre of
caf life. Lots of large, fine, white cafs, strident with orchestras
masculine and feminine, "Roumanian" or otherwise recondite. The usual
fur merchants walking about with the usual lies on their glib lips. At
the newspaper-kiosks several periodicals devoted to bull-fighting.
Smartish cocottes walking about. A woman who sold violets presented a
pin with the bunch. The flower-kiosks bore the names of their
flower-girls. Sensation of a highly sexualised town, a town in which
women exploit themselves, are exploited, and play a prominent part.
More Parisian than Brussels or Marseilles. After a good dinner at the
Restaurant Dor (3 francs 80 centimes for two) we went by electric train
to the Exhibition. Admission free at night. And so it ought to be!
Really the municipality ought to have paid the citizens to go in.
Besides ourselves there were about six persons. The sole attraction was
the Native Village, from which we refrained. But we saw an official
reading a newspaper in the midst of a pell-mell of overturned chairs on
an empty bandstand. And we saw the electric arc-lights glacially shining
on fine trees, marvellously kept parterres, and shut booths. All very
melancholy. We were back again in the centre of night-life at 8.15. The
cafs and their _terrasses_ were full. The evening papers rushed out
like torpedoes. A southern effect of packed populations: a
_grouillement_. Language evidently free. "_Il a une gueule
sympathique_," said a serious young man to two other serious young men.

_Second Day._--Churches. St. Sernan. Curious effect inside. From the
aisle running round the chancel you could look down through a grille and
see the crypt and women therein kneeling ecstatically in front of a
casket containing a celebrated relic. And in a corner, partitioned off
from the rest of the crypt, the crypt custodian, an old, thin man. All
this, dim and richly decorated, seen from above through the bars you
were standing on, produces a strange symbolism of Superstition caged in
a sculptured and gilded prison. Over the door leading down to the crypt
was an inscription: "Than this place there is no holier on earth." The
church is Romanesque and very fine, full of frescoes, some good, some
deplorable. In the chapels behind the chancel women on their knees
fervently praying, rapt, with silent-moving lips. Crippled beggars
scattered about; not many, but enough to remind you that you are in the
south.... At dusk, the very strangely planned Cathedral of St.
Etienne--like two churches, one breaking into the other. Overpowering
effect of vast arches in the gloom. Huge candles flickering in immense
spaces. A few people praying--diminished to dolls by the proportions of
the architecture. Just enough daylight left to make the stained glass
faintly glow.

Then the Rue d'Alsace-Lorraine, long, narrow, straight, profound, with
all Toulouse thronging at the bottom of the canyon, pushing one another
off the pavements against the trams that glide along to the clatter of
hoofs. Hat-shops, stick-shops, leather-shops, jewellers', _magasins de
nouveauts_, everything rather chic. Ladies, cocottes, thousands of men
all in straw hats. Suddenly we met our disappeared waiter from
Fenayrols, my letter to whom with 7 francs 50 centimes for a tip had
miscarried. He stood talking to us with his hat off, very meek. His
humble wife had a child in her arms and another at her skirt. This was
the underworld. I wanted to tell the man to put his hat on, but I
didn't, not being able to procure the right tone.... I was reminded--I
don't know why--of the shop-girls whom I had seen earlier than 7.30 this
morning, beginning their day's work by dusting and arranging their
merchandise. It was now 6.45 and the shops were only getting ready to
close. The end of a devilishly hot day. These shop-girls and shop-men
really lead the lives of factory-hands; but they are neat, comparatively
clean, always on show, always with "company manners." Some of the
shop-girls have quite a style, despite their dull black. And they move
proudly. They are conscious of physical distinction and distinction of
dress. Their gestures prove that they have dominion over _some_ man.
They know what they can do.

Municipal decree posted on the walls of the Capitol: That the artists of
the municipal theatre shall have three dbuts, and that in the last
_entr'acte_ of each dbut the stage manager shall come before the
curtain and ask the audience for its opinion. If after three dbuts the
opinion remains doubtful, then a fourth dbut is permitted. In the case
of artists who have previously appeared there shall be only one dbut,
called the _rentre_. All dbuts must take place on Sundays or holidays.
The decree explicitly declares that the good taste of the Toulousain
public is renowned, and that the public shall be the sole judge and
arbiter.


  +------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | Transcriber's Note:-                                             |
  |                                                                  |
  | Punctuation errors have been corrected.                          |
  |                                                                  |
  | The following suspected printer's errors have been addressed.    |
  |                                                                  |
  | Page 152. shoots changed to chutes.                              |
  | (descending chutes into)                                         |
  |                                                                  |
  | Page 186. The final TEE in the sequence was reversed and upended |
  | in the original. The reason is not clear but it is possibly      |
  | a printer's error.                                               |
  |                                                                  |
  | Page 189. adventuous changed to adventurous.                     |
  | (the adventurous programs)                                       |
  |                                                                  |
  | Page 222. fron changed to from.                                  |
  | (Quite apart from)                                               |
  |                                                                  |
  | Pages 258 & 259. pice changed to pice.                         |
  | (forty francs the pice)                                         |
  |                                                                  |
  | Page 271. wth changed to with.                                   |
  | (conversing with)                                                |
  |                                                                  |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------+




[Things That Have Interested Me (second series), by Arnold Bennett]
