16 ELLIN RYLAND 94The two arms are bountifully carved, and the carving terminates in a large Tudor rose forming a knob at the end of each arm. The arm-tops, through constant use, are smooth and shine like unto burnished bronze. The supports and front legs are twisted in good Jacobean manner, and the broad stretcher is carved with two long feathery, flowing acanthus-leaves curling round gracefully at the tips as if under pressure of a strong breeze, and crouching within their embrace nestles a rose in ambush. The chair has been mothered with lifelong care, and the bloom and beauty of age sit upon it like a crown of glory. So Ellin Ryland has won for her name immortality among the roses.We often think of Ellin and question the chair about her, but information does not flow freely from that quarter. Did Ellin order the chair from the cabinet-maker herself? I think not; perhaps her lover gave it her on her birthday, or her husband on their wedding-day. No doubt the chair's existence celebrates a red-letter day in the annals of the family. The name now is only a legend to us, but there it is, legible after the flight of two hundred and twenty years. The old chair is a better monument to Ellin Ryland's memory than a stone slab in a damp churchyard, with her name graven on it in crumbling letters.I dare say Ellin had a thin slice of vanity in her nature; we all have, and would like our names printed somewhere imperishably. During two hundred and twenty years the moss and lichen, the sun and the frost, conspire together to obliterate any lettering in churchyard stones, but the writing in tablet-oak on the armchair is as brave as ever. The name is only a legend, but it keeps her memory green.I do not turn my house into a museum of antiques, but certainly I choose interesting old furniture to live with where choice is possible; it has a cheery influence on your temper. I love to walk amongst my treasures and touch them with my hand and admire their cloistered beauty. I started housekeeping in Victorian days, after the orthodox manner of Englishmen about to marry, by buying new furniture. To get the genuine article I bought it in framework and had it upholstered and finished at home, under my eye. As years rolled on, piece by piece the Victorian furniture vanished from our rooms and old pieces supplanted them, and the rooms grew pleasant to look upon and cosy to sit in. Your furniture has a subtle influence on your disposition. You live with it daily all the year round as you do with your wife, and you married her because she was the girl you loved best in the world, and since the wedding-day her influence has coloured your life more than you can measure and contributed mysteriously to make you the manner of man you are. Your furniture adds much to your pleasure and quiet enjoyment of home life if you have the right sort. Old furniture with quietness of line is the best to live with--it is suggestive of repose.I love old furniture because its workmanship is artistic. Style in a chair or table is the all-important thing. A piece of furniture, however simple in design, if it is wrought artistically, stimulates the imagination, arouses the emotions, and provokes endless delight in the connoisseur. We are keen observers to-day, and curious over work done centuries ago. We handle a well-bred piece of furniture with respect as we trace the skill shown in beauty of line; the eye travels joyously over its well-balanced proportions and hovers with admirance over its downright dexterity of carving. No literal copy of antique furniture made in the forcing factories of to-day has feeling in it. It is very accurate in line and detail but it lacks expression, and that is where the artistic spirit enters, that is where the charm holds us. As old Higgery the carpenter explained himself out of it when Lord Louis Lewis complimented him on being the finest carpenter of his age: "Ah, sir," he replied, "Chippendale was the finest cabinet-maker of his age and Sheraton of his; but they went beyond that. They had the Idea. I can use my tools as well as either of them--better, maybe, for 'tis a subtle thing to give a semblance of age to a new piece, but I haven't got the Idea, and never had. If the imagination had gone with the craft, King George might have seen his period of furniture as well as any of the others."Chippendale and Sheraton were without doubt the cleverest cabinet-makers of their age; but many an unnamed workman of their period has left us the splendid legacy of his "ideas" in furniture which is scattered over the comfortable homes of England, with no pedigree attached except the imprimatur of a master craftsman's genius.Speaking of artistic furniture, I do not mean elaborate furniture overladen with a heavy ornament which confuses its lines and perverts its beauty into vulgarity. Simplicity is the fairest form of art. Simplicity consists not so much in plainness of production as in singleness of purpose. The essence of simplicity is the absence of self-consciousness. A combination of simplicity of character and great artistic power is difficult to find, but when found it is the most perfect combination and produces finest work. Art is often self-conscious, and quickly runs to seed in superfluous ornamentation. The Louis Quinze style is unwholesome as poison. It is brilliantly clever, but it is fascinatingly demoralizing. It reflects in art the luxury and insincerity, the licentiousness and effeminacy of the age that invented it.Gaudy and overornamented furniture is teasingly self-conscious, and conceited stuff to live with. Its lines are vulgar and sensuous curves. It is always staring at you, grinning at you, ogling you, and saying, "Observe me, and admire." Just the very character of the frivolous women, the Pompadour and the Du Barri, who ruled the voluptuous Court of Louis XV., and who squandered the royal revenues in extravagance of art and craft, so that the artist's taste was wasted in riotous designing and the craftsman's skill debased in excesses of ornament.Sumptuous furniture and splendid apparel are closely wedded together, and cannot be separated with success. If I lived among Louis Quinze furniture I should often see in the room with me ghosts of gallant courtiers, dressed in long silk coats, embellished with gold braid, and vests of rainbow hue, with cravats and ruffs of billowy lace, carrying at their hips a long rapier, and toying with a bejewelled snuff-box as they moved noiselessly with an elegant devil-may-care swagger, mixing with superbly decorated marqueterie cabinets and tables and bronze statuettes and Sèvres chinableu du roi; and shadowy ladies of high degree would be there, wearing capacious and flowery dresses and powdered hair, sitting in the chequered light of evening on seats richly upholstered in pale rose Gobelin tapestry, smiling dreamily on the exquisites of the old régime--all of them fatally gifted mortals with manners polished as the hard, shining surface of the parquet floor they gaily tread: the whole scene a vision glorious, composing an harmonious blend of colour, grace, and beauty. Modern men lounging in tweed Norfolk jackets, or dressed sombre in black swallow-tail coats, with a cigarette lolling on their lips, and ladies tailored into close-fitting costumes of neutral tints, however beautiful in themselves, would be completely out of the picture.A peculiar reason why old furniture is coveted by many people is because it is fashionable and scarce. The quantity that remains in the country, drawn from the homes of our easy-going port-wine-drinking Georgian forefathers, is decreasing, and buyers are increasing, so competition runs riot for really good pieces.There is plenty of worthless old furniture for sale, as there are worthless "Old Masters" asking for buyers. Americans are the greedy collectors who raid the market with their unlimited dollars and pay sensational prices for the prize pieces to adorn their town houses in New York or Chicago.Collecting is a fascinating hobby. I have found pleasure hunting for antiques far away from the heated atmosphere of Christie's auction-rooms. The joy of the chase is great, and the habit grows upon you. I have made many enjoyable excursions into the country with a clear-cut object in view which gives zest to the journey. Rummaging through second-hand shops in the back streets of provincial towns or in out-of-the-way villages searching for spoil is an alluring pastime to indulge in, and if you love the country through which you travel for the country's sake you will be very happy on the trail, and want to go again whether much or little plunder falls to your quest. Old cathedral towns yield the best results. There are many sleepy second-hand shops loitering round the cathedral waiting for customers to step in after visiting the sacred fane. There is much lumber and little treasure in most of them; but if you don't find what you want, in looking for it you may find something that pleases you better, like the man who was digging a hole in his garden to bury a dead dog and unburied a Greek statue of Venus.Calling at the smart antique dealers' spacious establishments in London is an édition de luxe version of the same story. Here choice pieces are assembled, polished and poised adroitly to arrest attention. Some of these elegant salons resemble museums; the surroundings breathe order, calm, refinement. Prices rule high as the aristocratic character of the place you visit.Nothing is cheap in these sanctuaries of the old nobility of furniture and art treasure except courtesy and affability, which are supplied gratis by the faultlessly accoutred gentleman of the department, who checks you on entering and conducts you round. Any object you look at he explains for your edification. He rivals the showman at Windsor Castle or the Tower of London for knowing his part and throwing at you torrents of information as he strides along. He revels in it, and his importance and intelligence mesmerize you and keep most of your five senses stirring. You admire him as an oracle of antique lore, and listen to him with fear and trembling. His beaming smile encourages you to live, and politely you ask another question.Here the business of selling is practised as a fine art. The attendant is so well bred, well groomed, so condescending and obliging you feel yourself a criminal if you escape him without making a purchase. You say: "I should like to go back and see that satinwood chair again." "Ah," he replies, "that is a most interesting piece; King Edward often sat in that chair. It belonged to the Hon. Oliver Grimes, a great friend of King Edward; it was the King's favourite seat when he visited the Hon. Oliver at Redcote Manor. And here is the oak table you admired so much as we passed along. We know the pedigree of it. It came from Monkwood Hall, Derbyshire. It has been in possession of the family since the year 1620. We bought it at the Hall last week, and so it has never been in the trade. How beautifully the frieze is carved; what a fine patina it has formed; it shines like a mirror; surely the butler must have polished it every week when he waxed the oak floor. It has never been damaged or repaired; it is genuine all over. It is a precious and faultless piece of Jacobean oak, and the price is only...!"There are dangers and pitfalls besetting the buyer of old furniture. Even in the garden of antiques a slimy serpent spoils the smiling landscape. Fraud is not unknown side by side with honest dealing. Not all furniture is old as it looks. That is where that predatory rascal called the faker creeps in and preys upon humanity in general and the innocent amateur in particular.There are sly manufactories of old furniture busy to-day in shoddy workshops, building up immaculate high-grade chairs, tables, cabinets, out of oddments of oak and mahogany collected from the scrap-heap of broken and decayed furniture. New wood is added in parts where necessary to complete the transformation, and when these modern antiques are blended, stained to harmonize in colour, and a glowing patina rubbed on by the artful dodgers, it takes a keen eye to detect the villainy of the deed, as that arch-swindler Gaspero Bandini said to his fellow-conspirator: "We must make it as antique as possible: we must sell the old wine with the dust on the bottle."There is no fixed market value to old furniture as there is to postage-stamps or War Loan stock. The dealer sets his own price on his goods, and the cupidity of the public guides him how best to do it. He is a keen observer of human nature, and plays up to its little weaknesses for his own advantage, and he does it smilingly.It is wonderful how environment works on our feelings and baffles our judgment. In the twinkling of an eye it changes the value we place on things. Dress the same man in two different suits of clothes, and you have all the difference in our cursory opinion between a lord and a tinker. The same article exhibited in shop-windows East or West of London changes its value appreciably, and we are blindly content to buy in the dearest market if it is the most elegant, and fancy we get full value for money.I know a man in Florence who wanted an old Tuscan table, and he padded round the city looking for one. In a small shop where much furniture was crowded into little space he saw the article that pleased him. The dealer asked twenty-four pounds for it. He tried to beat down the price, but the dealer would not humour him, so he left without buying. Presently a large dealer in antiques entered the shop, fancied the table, and paid twenty-four pounds for it straightway, and removed it to his own premises, which are spacious and commanding. The man in quest of a Tuscan table visited the spacious premises and saw the table in its grander home, fell in love with it again, and bought it for forty pounds. Afterward he told the dealer in the small shop that he had found the table he wanted at Mr. So-and-so's, and, quite elated, he described his purchase. "Yes, I know about it," replied the rejected dealer. "You have paid forty pounds for the table I offered to sell you for twenty-four." The buyer looked foolish, and said: "But it was so much better displayed at Mr. So-and-so's shop that I did not recognize it being the same table; it looked worth twenty pounds more in his place than it did in yours."The auction-mart frequently governs the price of old furniture and gives it an upward lift. The psychology of the auction-room is an interesting study. The loaded atmosphere of the place has a compelling influence that gets the better of one's judgment. In a shop a man scoffs at the tall price of a piece of furniture and haggles doggedly with the dealer to reduce it thirty shillings; in the auction-room if the same piece were offered he would compete with the crowd to raise the price of it incontinently. It is the consistent conduct of inconsistent human nature. It is that bellicose little devil who hides himself at the bottom of every human being, impelling him down into the danger zone to fight, who is guilty of the rash and feckless deed. A man enters the auction-room in a happy, breezy frame of mind, not to buy, just to look on and see what things are fetching. The serpent of the place tempts him, and he is a lost soul. His good resolutions evaporate like water on a hot plate, leaving no trace behind. The fighting impulse in him leaps up, and he bids and bids again, and eventually he finds himself the possessor of a rare old mahogany bureau hatched in the reign of our King George, but inadvertently described in the catalogue as a masterpiece of the cabinet-maker's craft composed in the times of Queen Anne!IXTHE LURE OF PERSONALITYPersonal influence is a subtle impalpable sovereign power that man possesses; sometimes it possesses the man, for influence often is an unconscious element in his life which exhales from him like the fragrance from a flower or miasma from a swamp. You cannot investigate it. It is moral force. Some men possess much of it, others less, the residue of mankind none. That is the mystery of influence. You cannot regulate it, calculate it, or tabulate it in standard quantities. Its operation is noiseless as a shadow, dangerous as lightning, profound as eternity, beautiful as the five wise virgins, or devilish as Mephistopheles.We speak here of personal influence. There is an influence of a baser sort which is powerful in its way--the influence of money. Money is extraneous matter. Wealth magnifies a man in people's eyes, but the man himself may be small without the money inflation. Strip the rich man of his shekels, and you strip him of his significance. He counts no more than an empty egg-shell after the rats have eaten the meat out of it. Frequently the extraordinary man is only an ordinary man placed in extraordinary circumstances.There is also the influence of position. That is not the genuine article. It is alien honour conferred like the odour of attar of roses clinging to an empty earthen jar. Position gives power. Some people who sit in the chair of authority use their power to the full, but it is the power of position, not of character or individuality. The only advantage of power is to be able to do more good than other people. All the world knows the difference, the ghastly difference, between Cardinal Wolsey in favour and Cardinal Wolsey in disgrace. Catastrophe lies between these extremes of fortune. The man remains the same in both states, but the world moves with the times, and gives no credit to an overrun banking account. He is a fallen star. He drops out of the seventh heaven of popularity into abysmal darkness. Banished the Royal presence, who cares for Cardinal Wolsey? He has no favours to transmit. No man is his friend, for he can befriend no man. Position makes and unmakes a man, like sunshine makes or unmakes a summer day.Influence of truest and finest brand is personal. It emanates from the man, not from his circumstances. Some men handle their fellow-creatures with dexterity and ease, like an experienced whip controls the horse he sits behind. Quietness and firmness are in the human touch, and the animal bends submissively to every movement of the reins; so some men command their fellow-creatures, and they submit their wills to the master mind that rides them, and how the spell governs they cannot say. Other men are ciphers in society. "Only Mr. So-and-so" consigns a man to the outposts of social extinction, and mixes him up with the unclassified masses of limp, negligible, and insignificant people who welter and gambol with their kennel companions, but they cannot head the pack on hunting days.Influential men are not common in the community. Only the elect few shine; many are reflectors of borrowed light. Influence is a gift. It is caught, not taught. It is all decided for us when nestlings in the cradle, and perhaps before we nestle. The schoolboy unconsciously wields a mystic power in the playground, and his chums hover round him as king of the revels. Animal magnetism exudes from every pore of his youthful skin. He leads in every escapade, and others fall in without question. He is not taught the trick; it comes natural for him to lead as for the rank and file to follow.On what principle Nature bestows her favours it is difficult to hazard, more difficult than to discover what principle guides the British Government in distributing her coveted decorations to the British public. Nature is romantic. Exercising her sovereignty she gives her honours as she pleases. No money can buy them. Blue-blooded pedigrees have no preferential tariff. Nature mocks our conventionality, spurns our orders of merit, and winks at our social somebodies. Often she openly prefers a costermonger to a King--stamps aristocratic grace on a gipsy, and refuses it to a Duchess. There are insignificant great men who would be hustled in a crowd if they wore no badge, while to social nobodies Nature attaches a halo of distinction which the crowd delights to honour as subjects offer incense to a King.Personality is an attribute that carries a man far on the road to success. Personality is an endowment which proclaims a man one of Nature's aristocrats. It is Nature's advertisement of her best, and she is proud of her handiwork. Personality is a fascinating asset; it lends dignity to common clay; it gives a man a standing outside the crowd, which he occupies with ineffable content and full advantage to himself. Some people have "an air" about them, and the atmosphere they move in is intoxicating to those dwelling under the spell of their presence. You cannot crush people who have personality. Over and over again it turns the scales in their favour in the competitions of life. Their virtues may not be of the celestial, their talent may lack glitter, but their personality grips you with its pomp and splendour, and they sit amongst the mighty, imposing themselves on gods and men. The envious man admits their success, and slurringly says: "They are commonplace: there is nothing astonishing in them except their success." He consoles himself with the banal reflection that, other things being equal, he is quite as good as they. But the strange mystery of presence steps in and prevents other things ever being equal.Some men lack engaging personality, they have no physical charm or force, yet they exert strenuous influence. They possess great mental or moral qualities. There is a Divine spark in the clay that scintillates and collects attention. They are luminous bodies, and emit light. They are men with virtue in them, and virtue flows out of them. The extremely fascinating character of Jesus Christ moves in splendour adown the ages, giving out vital energy. It draws men to-day irresistibly, as it constrained men nearly two thousand years ago to follow Him homeless and penniless through the highways and by-ways of Palestine, without worldly honour or pay to recompense them. There is a strange, silent, penetrating, perplexing, yet mighty influence working round about us; it is the influence of the life of Christ holding us up. I do not mean His life as crudely reflected to us in the modern Church. Jesus Christ has a larger influence outside the Church than in it. Christ would be a stranger in the sanctuary to-day if He visited it as the peasant of Galilee.Jesus Christ never commissioned His disciples to build up in the world such a colossal organization as the Church has swollen itself into with windy pride. In every country in Europe the Church is the biggest business concern and the wealthiest institution, the most aristocratic society and the most retrogressive force. The national Churches are slavishly worldly and chastely genteel concerns; they would boycott the kingdom of Christ if they thought it were trying to enter the world through their gilded gates.The kingdom of Christ is democratic. It might interfere with tithes and endowments and vested interests. I fancy Christ will establish His kingdom without calling in the Church to help Him. I could not picture Christ making use of a Bishop in knee-breeches, lawn sleeves, and with a seat in the House of Lords, when engaging disciples to evangelize the world. But I can picture Christ falling speechless when brought face to face with a Bishop geared in full canonical uniform; and if in His ignorance of ecclesiastical functionaries Jesus politely inquired, "Who is the aristocratic old gentleman wearing knee-breeches and a broad-brimmed hat, and to what institution does he belong?" on being told he was speaking to one of the leading representatives of His own spiritual institution, I can picture Christ melting away in anguish of heart from the venerable presence of the great divine to solace Himself in the company of fishermen and mechanics--men whose hearts are warm and manners natural, even if their creed is a bit unorthodox from the ecclesiastical standpoint.And there is the good St. Francesco, the stainless and blameless saint, born of the little Tuscan hill city, the perpetual flowering rose of Assisi, whose godly fragrance gives off for ever to sweeten the life of mankind--St. Francis of Assisi, the humble child of God, the dear brother of men, dead these five hundred years gone by; but he is now lying warm upon the lap of Christendom, nursed for one of the noblest, gentlest spirits, aglow with the fervour of an endless life. He is a living, controlling force to-day in the world's long battle for righteousness, and ever pouring into our ears the sweetness of Christ.Men are governed more wisely by the dead than by the living. Interned within the calmness of their shades, the mighty dead speak to us, and no cross-currents of envy, prejudice, or malice ruffle the serenity of their counsel. Influence is not always beneficent; it is malignant sometimes, and contaminates like the plague. Evil qualities can be as attractive as wholesome virtues. The poets brand the Devil with a commanding personality. John Wilkes, the notorious demagogue in the reign of George III., was the ugliest man in England, yet he impressed himself marvellously on his generation. He was a popular hero; he possessed natural gaiety of disposition and an irrepressible fund of impudence and wit. He was the most brilliant controversialist of his day. He was a charming rake with an insinuating smile, and he wore the manners of a fine English gentleman, which captivated his enemies and conciliated the King. He had exceptional powers of fascination, and he boasted that--ugly as he was--with the start of a quarter of an hour he could get the better of any man, however good-looking, in the graces of any lady.XTHE LURE OF NICE PEOPLEOur friend Mrs. Alinson took me sharply in hand one day, and tendered me good advice gratuitously over the tea-table. Mrs. Alinson is a lady magnificent in bulk, energetic in action, torrential in tongue, and warm-hearted in disposition, second to none amongst the daughters of men.When as a young man I first came to town she adopted me, mothered me socially, and manoeuvred for my success. She did not approve of my associates, and rated me soundly in her loud, pushful, stridulant voice, which commands attention: "Mr. Drake is not a desirable acquaintance for you to pursue, my dear. He don't belong to our set, and his reputation is tainted; unpleasant rumours cloud round his name. Take my advice and cut him. You only want to know nice people."Shrewd, disinterested, motherly advice for Mrs. Alinson to bestow on a tenderfoot unfamiliar with the pitfalls of society. Surely only a lady of sweet discerning disposition could give it; a lady whom everybody loves and whom nobody gainsays; a lady the final arbiter of taste in "nice people" who opens the door to a new-comer and no man shuts, who shuts the door on a new-comer and no man opens. I accepted her dictum as good current coin of the elect world we moved in, to be honoured without reserve. Its metal rang genuine on the social counter. Mr. Drake henceforth is a stranger to me; it would imperil my position in society to know him.After tea we parted, and I went to the cinema. I often go to a cinema because it amuses me when I want amusement. It is light and inexpensive diversion. Superior people sneer at the cinema, and call it low-grade amusement: a common glanty-show that pleases common people. However, as I have no shares in music-halls or wasting investments in theatre-land, I am impartial in my pleasures, and can take a shilling seat in a picture palace with clean conscience and merry heart. In the cinema we met our dear friend Lady ----, who was enjoying the moving pictures. She invited us to her reception on the following Saturday afternoon; at the conclusion of the show, when parting from her, she said: "It's very kind of you to promise for next Saturday. Please don't tell Mrs. Alinson you are coming, or she will be sure to come too, and I don't want her. The friends I am inviting don't care to meet her."This was a staggering blow struck at the serene goddess to whom we bent the obedient knee. Was there another social kingdom where she had no sovereignty, where her passing shadow, like a malign influence, was a thing to be shunned? Was she a false goddess, or no goddess at all? She pictured herself the controlling hand which steered the current of gay life in our midst. Was she at the helm, or was it a mild illusion that muddled her amiable brain? Here are people actually who will not open their doors to receive her, nor permit her feet to tread their dusty carpet--and she thought omnipotence was in her nod.These colliding facts perplexed us. They suggested the ridiculous, and offer food for reflection on the comedy of human manners. Here, on the one hand, is a portrait we draw of ourselves, and there opposite hangs on the wall a portrait other people draw of us. Place these two sketches side by side and consider, do they represent the same person? Is there resemblance between them enough to establish identity in a British court of law? How can there be? We do not see ourselves as others see us. We each observe the interesting object that engages our attention from different points of the compass. We see our good points of character and make the best of them; our neighbours detect our little sins and make the worst of them. So we clothe ourselves in sunlight and paint our neighbours drab. Mrs. Alinson, fortunate woman, had no glimmering idea what other people thought of her; it was not given her to see herself as others see her. She lives stolidly; eats, drinks, dresses, talks, surrounded by a shining halo of self-complacency through which her mentality cannot penetrate. She is good-natured, thinks excellently of herself, and believes other people's feelings towards her are equally well disposed. You and I, happily, are unconscious of the quaint esteem in which our neighbours hold us, and wisely there we ring the curtain down. If the truth were told, half our acquaintances are our enemies--behind our backs.Soon after the split in the Liberal party on the first Home Rule Bill, which sundered so many political friendships, Frank Holl was painting the portrait of John Bright. He mentioned to his sitter that he was about to paint the portrait of Mr. Gladstone. "It must be a very painful thing to you, Mr. Bright," he hazarded, "that after all these years of comradeship you two should sever your connection?" "Indeed it is," replied Bright with a sigh; "to think that after we have so long worked together we should be forced apart in the evening of our lives! And by what? A bogy that has risen up within him, beckoning him away from duty and sense. Do you know, Mr. Holl, I seriously fear that my dear old friend's mind is giving way."When the artist was at Hawarden painting Mr. Gladstone, the subject of Mr. Bright's portrait cropped up. "Ah!" said Mr. Gladstone, "and how did you find him?" "Fairly well; and he spoke very affectionately of you, Mr. Gladstone." "Did he indeed?" replied the sitter sorrowfully. "It was a cruel blow that parted us--and on so clear a question, too! Tell me, Mr. Holl"--and here his lips quivered, for he was evidently moved with strong emotion--"tell me, did you notice anything in the manner of my old friend which would lead you to suppose that his reason was becoming unhinged?"We cannot see another man's personality in full rounded vision. We get peeps at him; broken lights and flickering shadows of his character dance before us. We chase the shadow, and think we can capture the man and rifle him of his every locked-up thought and uncover his soul's nakedness.The popular writer analyzes, probes, dissects human character on paper, and we marvel at his subtlety in reading so far into people. He plucks the gay plumage off the poor bird he has trapped, and leaves the stripped and quivering body an unpleasant spectacle for the public to contemplate through the glass case of a six-shilling novel. The novelist is a crude, fumbling workman at his trade. His hand is too clumsy for his tools. He dissects his paper dolls as they pass before him in a paper world, but the tangled, unbalanced, erratic human being pulsing with mystic life, even his next-door neighbour, baffles him on the doorstep. The novelist is a cunning artist, but an unskilful philosopher. He works like Conan Doyle's great detective Sherlock Holmes, who can unravel any mystery he himself concocts in the pages of theStrand Magazine, but is no use to Scotland Yard in tracking a real murderer or laying bare an elusive crime.If some famous men who in their day and generation lived in cheap houses and mixed with common people, and died unparagraphed in daily papers, could see themselves now, as we see them, promoted to illustrious companionship with the mighty dead, their heads would spin with amazement at themselves for having arrived in splendour; they would stagger at the worship paid them by reverent posterity.During life they were great artists in mufti. They were regarded as unimportant persons by their own contemporaries, and to-day they are posted amongst the demi-gods of history. They knew themselves to be good workmen who did a good day's work for a fair day's pay, and then, like other honest day-labourers, at nightfall, with clean consciences, they laid down their tools, and their life-story ended there. They little knew that they had the bud of immortality swelling in their veins, soon to break and flower into endless renown.Human nature is a conundrum to itself hard to crack, as it is to other people, even its friends and neighbours who eat and drink with it at table. We do not know that heaps of posthumous fame may presently cover our strange next-door neighbour. To us he is only a negligible quantity in the affairs of the day, with a little gift of the pen or some queer scientific hobby that absorbs him. In this swift age of ours Time and Space are being brought to heel in masterly control, but our neighbours remain mysterious to us as Adam was to Eve until the affair of the apple found the man out. Even Shakespeare to his contemporaries did not appear a towering genius, but only one of themselves--a common literary hack with an uncommon gift of turning a sentence and making it tell. It was a trick they all tried to catch from him, but he just went one better than they.Shakespeare's fellow-craftsmen were unconscious that they were entertaining an archangel unawares. Nothing he said or did outside his scribbling for the playhouse is on record. He had no trusty Boswell at his elbow to note his pothouse wit and succulent wisdom, sparks from the fire of his genius, flung off impromptu in merry moments at the Mermaid Tavern over a flagon of malmsey. His pals thought him a jovial fellow well met, and when he died no crumbs of biography were swept up by loving hands to keep his memory green.But strangest of all, did Shakespeare think much of himself? He was utterly careless of the fate of his own literary labours. He never published one of his own plays. After his death the stage copies of his plays were carefully collected together by two prudent men, Heming and Condell, with an eye to business. Seven years later the first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays appeared in print. The first edition is full of glaring blunders, compiled as it was from the stage versions--the manuscripts that the players used in the theatres. Those well-thumbed dog-eared copies of the plays, very interesting documents to own if one could be placed on the market to-day: worn and torn, scored with erasures, interlined with emendations, stained with spilt wine and small beer, greasy with handling of midnight study, and crumpled after pouching in the players' pockets cheek by jowl with incongruous trifles--could you expect literary finish to adorn these fugitive children of the playhouse? Ever since that day learned commentators have laboured assiduously correcting the text of the plays and combing out the tangle, quarrelling fraternally amongst themselves over the correct word for the place and the correct place for a word. The quarrel of the commentators still flourishes, for the muddle of the text has yet to be tidied up.XITHE LURE OF THE NEW DEMOCRACYDemocracy is the rising star, mounting clear and bright over falling kingdoms and toppling empires. Crowns are going cheap in the market to-day, and the divine right of kings is a broken weapon flung in the mud of the world's scorn and picked up as a toy forPunchto provoke laughter. The old nobility is losing its ancient charter to sit exclusive in the high places of honour, and the common people--the new caste--are coming into possession and power. The working-man must be tailored to the grand part he plays in history. He will feel uneasy perhaps wearing his first new dress suit--it will worry him like a misfit. But clothes add splendour to our common lot. With the salvation of the country dependent on his nod he must cast the stodgy cloth cap that clowns his head on bank holidays and nod heroically to the admirers who retinue his movements.Democracy is the unknown god it will be fashionable to worship when the war is over. Now we are all wasting ink and paper and taxing our small brains prophesying what the world will be like in the flowering-time of peace, when everybody will become deliriously happy, wise, and good. We shall move more cautiously then, like a cat stepping circumspectly over broken glass on top of the garden wall. We will make no mistakes, as we did in the feckless past, bringing us not only bleeding feet, but wounded hearts. There must be no party politics in the land as there used to be when politicians sold their country to buy their party into power, and sold themselves to keep the power which they had bought. Everyone will want to do good to his neighbour, and our neighbour will want to do good to himself, and so social reform now and henceforth is the compelling idea that holds the public fancy.But no two social reformers think alike or advance the same doctrines of reform, although the same idea dominates the mind of all the doctrinaires. An idea is an abstract, invisible, impalpable, thing that enters into the mind of man naked and unadorned. Before exposing this naked idea to public observation it must be clothed and attractively dressed. Confusion comes in with the clothes. Fashions in clothes differ so that the same idea differently dressed appears to be a different object. However, it is not. Ideas do not differ: it is the expression of them that differs. It is when you clothe your idea with words and deck it in literary plumage that the mischief stalks in and divergent opinions clash and confound us.We all believe in Utopia, but none of us hold the clue to the high road that gallops straight into it. We take trial trips over new ground and get sloughed up on false trails. Plato and Socrates, Francesco d'Assisi and Philip Sydney, Ruskin and Tolstoi, have each been famous architects of Utopia in the dim dreamland of the past, and each propounded his own scheme as being the very healthiest and happiest earthly paradise ever constructed for man to dwell in. They all have some aims and ends in common, considering thoughtfully the welfare of the people bodily and morally: but the distinctive personality of the architect slyly creeps in, and on the rock of personal vanity they split into rival factions and a general quarrel ensues, rending the best-laid schemes man ever devised for the emancipation of the human race. And so the egg of social reform gets addled before it is hatched, and alas! the glittering city of ten thousand joys for mankind to dwell in recedes farther and farther into the sweet dreamland of the future.One architect of Utopia proposes to upbuild the city of Human Happiness by hand labour. Brick by brick it is to rise in colossal proportions and flowering beauty. He starts with the individual as the foundation and finishes with the individual as top-stone. He works by gradual and peaceful process to attain his splendid purpose. His method of work is unpopular because it is slow.Another architect proposes to work by machinery, and to force it to a hasty finish. Organization and legislation are the instruments of torture proposed for the rapid promotion of his purpose. Human society--social and industrial--is stricken with fell disease, which can be cured promptly by Acts of Parliament and Orders in Council. By this drastic method the "organic welfare" of society is to be builded while you wait. The State is to be organized, thought is to be organized, the will is to be organized, and happiness is to be organized, and nothing of consequence is to be left unorganized; while the mere individual is to be wiped from the map as an unnecessary dot of disfigurement upon it. Wealth is to be handled by a new and better process; wealth is to be conscripted, which means one man is to make it and another man is to take it. Labour is not to be dealt with as a marketable commodity. It is an insult to the dignity of labour to measure a man's work and pay him exactly what his day's toil is worth in the market. The working-man is a member of the universal brotherhood, and needs elbow-room in the community to spread himself. He must have the wages he hankers after, and when too weary to work a pension granted from the State to make comfortable his latter end. In fact in Utopia every man, woman, and child claims sufficient income independent of work, and the State must be Paymaster-General.Alas! universal happiness on these idealistic lines of compulsion and greed is like an echo. It answers your call but does not come. Socialism makes no progress in saving men; it has eyes to see man's misery, but no hands to lift him out of it.The longer I live the more I am convinced that this great and vital problem of social regeneration is to be engineered only by slow gradations and with infinite patience and gentleness. Society is composed of dense masses and millions of frail, erring human beings, and to schedule a sudden inrush of perfect laws on the statute-book will not breed an improved strain of perfect citizens who can live up to the pose of perfection. You cannot legislate selfishness and weakness and greediness and vice out of human nature quickly, as you wring dirty water out of a wet sponge; neither can you pump purity and patience and brotherly love into humanity by Act of Parliament, and out of such shoddy material weave an ideal State in one round of the clock. Perfect laws are scarce as perfect men. Laws will grow better as we grow better--gradually. Laws and men act and react upon one another in mystic collusion. The great incoming tide of righteousness which shall fill all things will fill them. You cannot complete and furnish the top floor of the Palace of Humanity before you have laid the foundation solidly and deep on the rock of righteousness.Labour has not yet won its charter of rights because it has neglected to perform its role of duties. Labour has to look the social problem squarely in the face with both eyes open. At present it only opens one eye--the eye which sees magnifically its rights. The other eye is shut which should observe its duties. The eye of Labour that should see its duties is sealed in darkness. The scales of Justice must balance truly before mankind is happy ever more.Free labour is as necessary a commodity as free sunshine in a well-balanced State. If a man does his work well and does not require so much beer and tobacco and time for football as another man, he should be free to dispose of his labour as he chooses, without being picketed or bludgeoned by lewd fellows of the baser sort. Until there prevail an all-round correct idea of work, legislation will be a dead letter. God has not made one sun to shine on wages and another on capital, nor has He made two varieties of justice. He is God over all of us, and His law is impartial justice.Capital is not immaculate. It sits the great god incarnate on its high gold throne, ruling men with sovereign power and using men as a means to wealth. Its vestments are of purple and fine linen. Costly raiment to wear, but unseemly smirched with the mud of gutter complots and stained red with blood sweated from the poor. Capital wants washing thoroughly from its iniquity and purging with hyssop before it is fragrant and can discourse virtue to the working classes.Capital and Labour must forgive each the sins of the past, and as Brains and Hands work together in mutual confidence and esteem. Brains and Hands are not hard-set hereditary foes. They are blood relatives, members of the same body-politic, and must hold together for their common good. They are not even business opponents with clashing interests spoiling to cut each other's throat and smash the opposition concern with fiery glee of heart. They are copartners in the same business concern, and must combine, each having their own department to superintend. The interest of one is the interest of the other. If one department breaks, the other falls with it deep in disaster. Yet these two copartners of the same business firm are hating one another with a hot historical hatred that defies the flight of ages. They are locked together struggling for mastery, each hoping to throw the other and become top-dog and dictate new terms of partnership which never would be kept, for the articles of treaty would soon become merely "a scrap of paper." It is not conquest: it is co-operation that will bring peace and concord between Capital and Labour.The world is ripe for a new social programme. The war has altered the map of Europe, and it will alter the map of men's minds. The war has swept away old crusted conventions which cobwebbed the mind, and false foundations of social science upon which men laboured vainly to build Utopia. These things must be reassessed at new values.The working-man wanted to get in the sun and own his patch as a free and independent citizen. There is no such thing in the world as independence, complete and arrogant: either in art, science, revolting daughters or commerce. Independence is a fool's word or an anarchist's battle-cry. The nearest approach to it in the realm of reality is interdependence. Substitute this word "interdependence" in the place of the other insolent and erroneous one and you have a working proposition, for you establish a sense of justice between man and man, and you have gathered together raw material out of which to build a new heaven and a new earth.A pre-war panacea for curing the ills of unrighteousness which blight society was the amelioration of environment--a sonorous, windy, academic platitude having more sound in it than sense. It was the pet scheme for manufacturing good citizens out of bad ones; it began at the outward condition of mankind and worked inward. It started with the barber, the schoolmaster, and the politician. By pursuing this method they started with folly and ended with failure. It is like telling a man to polish his boots when his heart wants cleaning. The favourite speculation of theorists was that perfect circumstances create perfect character. This is attractive reading in cheap handbooks of political economy for the working classes, but in this wicked world it fails to pan out when put to a working test. It is more important a man should start by mending himself, and his circumstances will quickly mend themselves.To expect by flattening down inequalities, removing temptations, and giving everybody a living wage of £2 per week, England will flower into a Garden of Eden where people are all good and happy and pay no taxes, and where angels will come and converse with us in the cool of the day, is to expect the impossible. To expect by adapting the lot to man instead of adapting man to his lot you will create an earthly paradise out of a world of wickedness is to expose your ignorance of human nature and to admit your incapacity for adjusting its wrongs.They tell us that in the New Democracy patriotism will be scrapped. Love of country is a parochial virtue; it will be swamped in the greater love of humanity which will rise like a swelling flood and cover all. In the new Garden of Eden we shall be a happy brotherhood, for the dangerous serpent will be scotched. This doctrine is maudlin sentimentalism with a tang of grotesque to flavour it. Humanity is an immense crowd to fall in love withen bloc; each individual will receive a very thin slice of your affection if all the world is to share in it alike. Love will die of starvation fed on these lean rations. As apadrefresh from the Front persuasively raps out the truth, "the would-be cosmopolitan who will not narrow himself to love of country is rarely capable of any real self-devotion to the international ideal which he worships. The lover of humanity is more often than not utterly miserable travelling in a third-class railway-carriage."Patriotism must survive as a national virtue, however violently the universal brotherhood flourishes, because the love of country is founded on the love of home and family, and the love of home and family is founded on the love of a man and a woman. You can never get over this nature-logic while men and women remain human beings with natural instincts which draw them to love one another and preserve the family feeling. I would rather be the victim of every insular prejudice possible than have no British prejudices to stir my British blood.Another hope of the ages that has failed us in the hour of need is the Church. If all other saviours of society failed there remained the Church as by law established to rely upon as the great regenerating power in the land. Alas! the Church in our midst cannot cast out evil spirits. It has lost the gift of healing through respectability. It worships an ancient creed instead of the living Christ. Jesus of Nazareth is the great International Democrat of history. He was a tradesman's son and a working carpenter Himself. This fact shocks respectability. How many more people would be Christians if Christ had been born in a palace and not in a stable! This is the unsavoury feature of religion, and the exclusive dignitaries of the Church hover round it dubiously. They admit the historic fact with candour, but slither away silently from its indelicate associations as far as decency permits.We have been told that bishops in gaiters and aprons harmonize daintily with the quiet cathedral close, shadowed by immemorial elms and the other minor glories of the Establishment; but bishops in gaiters do seem badly placed in a carpenter's shop, where their Lord and Master served His 'prentice years. The apron is an ancient figment of clothing bishops now wear in common with the working carpenter at his bench. It is a kind of retaining badge, signalling their humble origin and ancient descent.Bishops, in general, are cultured and amiable men, more renowned for their learning than their piety. They are appointed by the State, and form the executive of the ecclesiastical machine to run the traditional piety of the land. They sometimes quarrel amongst themselves as to who is orthodox and who is not on the episcopal bench--quarrelling amongst bishops is only a human diversion--but touching the righteousness which is in the law they are all blameless men. There is something faulty in the religion they inculcate, for it does not grip the people. It is dreamy; it is not real. It is the vague pursuit of an unknown god ranging through a maze of decorative ritual and symbol, and there remain great arid spaces in our nature which it never fills up.It has been said that the visible Church stands in the way of spiritual enlightenment of the people, just as stone idols of the heathen stand in the way of apprehension of God. What the eye sees before it the mind settles down upon, and roams no farther searching for a fuller vision of spiritual truth. The savage sees his stone idol, and never thinks beyond it religiously. It was his father's god, and it is god enough for him.The good Churchman is equally content to know nothing beyond the religious ceremonials which the Church ordains in the place of God, the Spiritual Father of us all. These ceremonials, sanctified by long observance, quenched the religious thirst of his forefathers, and they quench his thirst and he is satisfied. The Church is tenacious of her hold on men, not suffering the allegiance of the people to be shifted back to God the Father. The Church is said to be the one and only sacred aqueduct through which Divine grace can flow. The curse of the community is the middleman. He takes a heavy toll of profit in every business that feeds the people bodily or spiritually.The New Democracy must return to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth to lay a solid foundation on which to build social righteousness and national greatness. The secret elements of social rectitude slumber in the words of Christ, and the volcanic action of the war will blast them into life and power.Jesus Christ was not a theologian or schoolman of the fossil type of Gamaliel or Calvin, learned in booklore, but ignorant of men. He was not a stump orator inflaming the radical passions of the masses, bating them into red fury by pictorially describing the wickedness of the classes. He proposed no easy road to riches as a trap to catch the envious poor. He did not sit in his study formulating a scientific creed to mystify people with a religion of words and phrases; He lived in the open air a noble life that men could see and believe in. It is the mind, not the soul, that asks a creed to help its faith; the heart believes without the crutches of theological formula to support it. He stood for goodness pure and simple, for rich men and poor men alike. His teaching is exemplified in His life, and His life is a beautiful and faithful commentary on His teaching.The careless world did not relish this straight talk on goodness--indoor and outdoor goodness. It was too realistic, too personal in its touch; but men are growing sensible now as the world grows older, and with reawakened conscience ask for the truth instead of its theological counterfeit, which does not heal the wounded spot. Out of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth grow eternal principles that build up the best governments and the wisest laws, that train the finest citizens, and regulate society on a basis of righteousness and mutual honour. The seeds of all possible national prosperity and generous manhood lie embedded in these teachings. Nations may rise, flourish, and decay, but the nation with the blood of Christ in its veins is immortal and shall endure for ever. May it be the British nation!
16 ELLIN RYLAND 94
The two arms are bountifully carved, and the carving terminates in a large Tudor rose forming a knob at the end of each arm. The arm-tops, through constant use, are smooth and shine like unto burnished bronze. The supports and front legs are twisted in good Jacobean manner, and the broad stretcher is carved with two long feathery, flowing acanthus-leaves curling round gracefully at the tips as if under pressure of a strong breeze, and crouching within their embrace nestles a rose in ambush. The chair has been mothered with lifelong care, and the bloom and beauty of age sit upon it like a crown of glory. So Ellin Ryland has won for her name immortality among the roses.
We often think of Ellin and question the chair about her, but information does not flow freely from that quarter. Did Ellin order the chair from the cabinet-maker herself? I think not; perhaps her lover gave it her on her birthday, or her husband on their wedding-day. No doubt the chair's existence celebrates a red-letter day in the annals of the family. The name now is only a legend to us, but there it is, legible after the flight of two hundred and twenty years. The old chair is a better monument to Ellin Ryland's memory than a stone slab in a damp churchyard, with her name graven on it in crumbling letters.
I dare say Ellin had a thin slice of vanity in her nature; we all have, and would like our names printed somewhere imperishably. During two hundred and twenty years the moss and lichen, the sun and the frost, conspire together to obliterate any lettering in churchyard stones, but the writing in tablet-oak on the armchair is as brave as ever. The name is only a legend, but it keeps her memory green.
I do not turn my house into a museum of antiques, but certainly I choose interesting old furniture to live with where choice is possible; it has a cheery influence on your temper. I love to walk amongst my treasures and touch them with my hand and admire their cloistered beauty. I started housekeeping in Victorian days, after the orthodox manner of Englishmen about to marry, by buying new furniture. To get the genuine article I bought it in framework and had it upholstered and finished at home, under my eye. As years rolled on, piece by piece the Victorian furniture vanished from our rooms and old pieces supplanted them, and the rooms grew pleasant to look upon and cosy to sit in. Your furniture has a subtle influence on your disposition. You live with it daily all the year round as you do with your wife, and you married her because she was the girl you loved best in the world, and since the wedding-day her influence has coloured your life more than you can measure and contributed mysteriously to make you the manner of man you are. Your furniture adds much to your pleasure and quiet enjoyment of home life if you have the right sort. Old furniture with quietness of line is the best to live with--it is suggestive of repose.
I love old furniture because its workmanship is artistic. Style in a chair or table is the all-important thing. A piece of furniture, however simple in design, if it is wrought artistically, stimulates the imagination, arouses the emotions, and provokes endless delight in the connoisseur. We are keen observers to-day, and curious over work done centuries ago. We handle a well-bred piece of furniture with respect as we trace the skill shown in beauty of line; the eye travels joyously over its well-balanced proportions and hovers with admirance over its downright dexterity of carving. No literal copy of antique furniture made in the forcing factories of to-day has feeling in it. It is very accurate in line and detail but it lacks expression, and that is where the artistic spirit enters, that is where the charm holds us. As old Higgery the carpenter explained himself out of it when Lord Louis Lewis complimented him on being the finest carpenter of his age: "Ah, sir," he replied, "Chippendale was the finest cabinet-maker of his age and Sheraton of his; but they went beyond that. They had the Idea. I can use my tools as well as either of them--better, maybe, for 'tis a subtle thing to give a semblance of age to a new piece, but I haven't got the Idea, and never had. If the imagination had gone with the craft, King George might have seen his period of furniture as well as any of the others."
Chippendale and Sheraton were without doubt the cleverest cabinet-makers of their age; but many an unnamed workman of their period has left us the splendid legacy of his "ideas" in furniture which is scattered over the comfortable homes of England, with no pedigree attached except the imprimatur of a master craftsman's genius.
Speaking of artistic furniture, I do not mean elaborate furniture overladen with a heavy ornament which confuses its lines and perverts its beauty into vulgarity. Simplicity is the fairest form of art. Simplicity consists not so much in plainness of production as in singleness of purpose. The essence of simplicity is the absence of self-consciousness. A combination of simplicity of character and great artistic power is difficult to find, but when found it is the most perfect combination and produces finest work. Art is often self-conscious, and quickly runs to seed in superfluous ornamentation. The Louis Quinze style is unwholesome as poison. It is brilliantly clever, but it is fascinatingly demoralizing. It reflects in art the luxury and insincerity, the licentiousness and effeminacy of the age that invented it.
Gaudy and overornamented furniture is teasingly self-conscious, and conceited stuff to live with. Its lines are vulgar and sensuous curves. It is always staring at you, grinning at you, ogling you, and saying, "Observe me, and admire." Just the very character of the frivolous women, the Pompadour and the Du Barri, who ruled the voluptuous Court of Louis XV., and who squandered the royal revenues in extravagance of art and craft, so that the artist's taste was wasted in riotous designing and the craftsman's skill debased in excesses of ornament.
Sumptuous furniture and splendid apparel are closely wedded together, and cannot be separated with success. If I lived among Louis Quinze furniture I should often see in the room with me ghosts of gallant courtiers, dressed in long silk coats, embellished with gold braid, and vests of rainbow hue, with cravats and ruffs of billowy lace, carrying at their hips a long rapier, and toying with a bejewelled snuff-box as they moved noiselessly with an elegant devil-may-care swagger, mixing with superbly decorated marqueterie cabinets and tables and bronze statuettes and Sèvres chinableu du roi; and shadowy ladies of high degree would be there, wearing capacious and flowery dresses and powdered hair, sitting in the chequered light of evening on seats richly upholstered in pale rose Gobelin tapestry, smiling dreamily on the exquisites of the old régime--all of them fatally gifted mortals with manners polished as the hard, shining surface of the parquet floor they gaily tread: the whole scene a vision glorious, composing an harmonious blend of colour, grace, and beauty. Modern men lounging in tweed Norfolk jackets, or dressed sombre in black swallow-tail coats, with a cigarette lolling on their lips, and ladies tailored into close-fitting costumes of neutral tints, however beautiful in themselves, would be completely out of the picture.
A peculiar reason why old furniture is coveted by many people is because it is fashionable and scarce. The quantity that remains in the country, drawn from the homes of our easy-going port-wine-drinking Georgian forefathers, is decreasing, and buyers are increasing, so competition runs riot for really good pieces.
There is plenty of worthless old furniture for sale, as there are worthless "Old Masters" asking for buyers. Americans are the greedy collectors who raid the market with their unlimited dollars and pay sensational prices for the prize pieces to adorn their town houses in New York or Chicago.
Collecting is a fascinating hobby. I have found pleasure hunting for antiques far away from the heated atmosphere of Christie's auction-rooms. The joy of the chase is great, and the habit grows upon you. I have made many enjoyable excursions into the country with a clear-cut object in view which gives zest to the journey. Rummaging through second-hand shops in the back streets of provincial towns or in out-of-the-way villages searching for spoil is an alluring pastime to indulge in, and if you love the country through which you travel for the country's sake you will be very happy on the trail, and want to go again whether much or little plunder falls to your quest. Old cathedral towns yield the best results. There are many sleepy second-hand shops loitering round the cathedral waiting for customers to step in after visiting the sacred fane. There is much lumber and little treasure in most of them; but if you don't find what you want, in looking for it you may find something that pleases you better, like the man who was digging a hole in his garden to bury a dead dog and unburied a Greek statue of Venus.
Calling at the smart antique dealers' spacious establishments in London is an édition de luxe version of the same story. Here choice pieces are assembled, polished and poised adroitly to arrest attention. Some of these elegant salons resemble museums; the surroundings breathe order, calm, refinement. Prices rule high as the aristocratic character of the place you visit.
Nothing is cheap in these sanctuaries of the old nobility of furniture and art treasure except courtesy and affability, which are supplied gratis by the faultlessly accoutred gentleman of the department, who checks you on entering and conducts you round. Any object you look at he explains for your edification. He rivals the showman at Windsor Castle or the Tower of London for knowing his part and throwing at you torrents of information as he strides along. He revels in it, and his importance and intelligence mesmerize you and keep most of your five senses stirring. You admire him as an oracle of antique lore, and listen to him with fear and trembling. His beaming smile encourages you to live, and politely you ask another question.
Here the business of selling is practised as a fine art. The attendant is so well bred, well groomed, so condescending and obliging you feel yourself a criminal if you escape him without making a purchase. You say: "I should like to go back and see that satinwood chair again." "Ah," he replies, "that is a most interesting piece; King Edward often sat in that chair. It belonged to the Hon. Oliver Grimes, a great friend of King Edward; it was the King's favourite seat when he visited the Hon. Oliver at Redcote Manor. And here is the oak table you admired so much as we passed along. We know the pedigree of it. It came from Monkwood Hall, Derbyshire. It has been in possession of the family since the year 1620. We bought it at the Hall last week, and so it has never been in the trade. How beautifully the frieze is carved; what a fine patina it has formed; it shines like a mirror; surely the butler must have polished it every week when he waxed the oak floor. It has never been damaged or repaired; it is genuine all over. It is a precious and faultless piece of Jacobean oak, and the price is only...!"
There are dangers and pitfalls besetting the buyer of old furniture. Even in the garden of antiques a slimy serpent spoils the smiling landscape. Fraud is not unknown side by side with honest dealing. Not all furniture is old as it looks. That is where that predatory rascal called the faker creeps in and preys upon humanity in general and the innocent amateur in particular.
There are sly manufactories of old furniture busy to-day in shoddy workshops, building up immaculate high-grade chairs, tables, cabinets, out of oddments of oak and mahogany collected from the scrap-heap of broken and decayed furniture. New wood is added in parts where necessary to complete the transformation, and when these modern antiques are blended, stained to harmonize in colour, and a glowing patina rubbed on by the artful dodgers, it takes a keen eye to detect the villainy of the deed, as that arch-swindler Gaspero Bandini said to his fellow-conspirator: "We must make it as antique as possible: we must sell the old wine with the dust on the bottle."
There is no fixed market value to old furniture as there is to postage-stamps or War Loan stock. The dealer sets his own price on his goods, and the cupidity of the public guides him how best to do it. He is a keen observer of human nature, and plays up to its little weaknesses for his own advantage, and he does it smilingly.
It is wonderful how environment works on our feelings and baffles our judgment. In the twinkling of an eye it changes the value we place on things. Dress the same man in two different suits of clothes, and you have all the difference in our cursory opinion between a lord and a tinker. The same article exhibited in shop-windows East or West of London changes its value appreciably, and we are blindly content to buy in the dearest market if it is the most elegant, and fancy we get full value for money.
I know a man in Florence who wanted an old Tuscan table, and he padded round the city looking for one. In a small shop where much furniture was crowded into little space he saw the article that pleased him. The dealer asked twenty-four pounds for it. He tried to beat down the price, but the dealer would not humour him, so he left without buying. Presently a large dealer in antiques entered the shop, fancied the table, and paid twenty-four pounds for it straightway, and removed it to his own premises, which are spacious and commanding. The man in quest of a Tuscan table visited the spacious premises and saw the table in its grander home, fell in love with it again, and bought it for forty pounds. Afterward he told the dealer in the small shop that he had found the table he wanted at Mr. So-and-so's, and, quite elated, he described his purchase. "Yes, I know about it," replied the rejected dealer. "You have paid forty pounds for the table I offered to sell you for twenty-four." The buyer looked foolish, and said: "But it was so much better displayed at Mr. So-and-so's shop that I did not recognize it being the same table; it looked worth twenty pounds more in his place than it did in yours."
The auction-mart frequently governs the price of old furniture and gives it an upward lift. The psychology of the auction-room is an interesting study. The loaded atmosphere of the place has a compelling influence that gets the better of one's judgment. In a shop a man scoffs at the tall price of a piece of furniture and haggles doggedly with the dealer to reduce it thirty shillings; in the auction-room if the same piece were offered he would compete with the crowd to raise the price of it incontinently. It is the consistent conduct of inconsistent human nature. It is that bellicose little devil who hides himself at the bottom of every human being, impelling him down into the danger zone to fight, who is guilty of the rash and feckless deed. A man enters the auction-room in a happy, breezy frame of mind, not to buy, just to look on and see what things are fetching. The serpent of the place tempts him, and he is a lost soul. His good resolutions evaporate like water on a hot plate, leaving no trace behind. The fighting impulse in him leaps up, and he bids and bids again, and eventually he finds himself the possessor of a rare old mahogany bureau hatched in the reign of our King George, but inadvertently described in the catalogue as a masterpiece of the cabinet-maker's craft composed in the times of Queen Anne!
IX
THE LURE OF PERSONALITY
Personal influence is a subtle impalpable sovereign power that man possesses; sometimes it possesses the man, for influence often is an unconscious element in his life which exhales from him like the fragrance from a flower or miasma from a swamp. You cannot investigate it. It is moral force. Some men possess much of it, others less, the residue of mankind none. That is the mystery of influence. You cannot regulate it, calculate it, or tabulate it in standard quantities. Its operation is noiseless as a shadow, dangerous as lightning, profound as eternity, beautiful as the five wise virgins, or devilish as Mephistopheles.
We speak here of personal influence. There is an influence of a baser sort which is powerful in its way--the influence of money. Money is extraneous matter. Wealth magnifies a man in people's eyes, but the man himself may be small without the money inflation. Strip the rich man of his shekels, and you strip him of his significance. He counts no more than an empty egg-shell after the rats have eaten the meat out of it. Frequently the extraordinary man is only an ordinary man placed in extraordinary circumstances.
There is also the influence of position. That is not the genuine article. It is alien honour conferred like the odour of attar of roses clinging to an empty earthen jar. Position gives power. Some people who sit in the chair of authority use their power to the full, but it is the power of position, not of character or individuality. The only advantage of power is to be able to do more good than other people. All the world knows the difference, the ghastly difference, between Cardinal Wolsey in favour and Cardinal Wolsey in disgrace. Catastrophe lies between these extremes of fortune. The man remains the same in both states, but the world moves with the times, and gives no credit to an overrun banking account. He is a fallen star. He drops out of the seventh heaven of popularity into abysmal darkness. Banished the Royal presence, who cares for Cardinal Wolsey? He has no favours to transmit. No man is his friend, for he can befriend no man. Position makes and unmakes a man, like sunshine makes or unmakes a summer day.
Influence of truest and finest brand is personal. It emanates from the man, not from his circumstances. Some men handle their fellow-creatures with dexterity and ease, like an experienced whip controls the horse he sits behind. Quietness and firmness are in the human touch, and the animal bends submissively to every movement of the reins; so some men command their fellow-creatures, and they submit their wills to the master mind that rides them, and how the spell governs they cannot say. Other men are ciphers in society. "Only Mr. So-and-so" consigns a man to the outposts of social extinction, and mixes him up with the unclassified masses of limp, negligible, and insignificant people who welter and gambol with their kennel companions, but they cannot head the pack on hunting days.
Influential men are not common in the community. Only the elect few shine; many are reflectors of borrowed light. Influence is a gift. It is caught, not taught. It is all decided for us when nestlings in the cradle, and perhaps before we nestle. The schoolboy unconsciously wields a mystic power in the playground, and his chums hover round him as king of the revels. Animal magnetism exudes from every pore of his youthful skin. He leads in every escapade, and others fall in without question. He is not taught the trick; it comes natural for him to lead as for the rank and file to follow.
On what principle Nature bestows her favours it is difficult to hazard, more difficult than to discover what principle guides the British Government in distributing her coveted decorations to the British public. Nature is romantic. Exercising her sovereignty she gives her honours as she pleases. No money can buy them. Blue-blooded pedigrees have no preferential tariff. Nature mocks our conventionality, spurns our orders of merit, and winks at our social somebodies. Often she openly prefers a costermonger to a King--stamps aristocratic grace on a gipsy, and refuses it to a Duchess. There are insignificant great men who would be hustled in a crowd if they wore no badge, while to social nobodies Nature attaches a halo of distinction which the crowd delights to honour as subjects offer incense to a King.
Personality is an attribute that carries a man far on the road to success. Personality is an endowment which proclaims a man one of Nature's aristocrats. It is Nature's advertisement of her best, and she is proud of her handiwork. Personality is a fascinating asset; it lends dignity to common clay; it gives a man a standing outside the crowd, which he occupies with ineffable content and full advantage to himself. Some people have "an air" about them, and the atmosphere they move in is intoxicating to those dwelling under the spell of their presence. You cannot crush people who have personality. Over and over again it turns the scales in their favour in the competitions of life. Their virtues may not be of the celestial, their talent may lack glitter, but their personality grips you with its pomp and splendour, and they sit amongst the mighty, imposing themselves on gods and men. The envious man admits their success, and slurringly says: "They are commonplace: there is nothing astonishing in them except their success." He consoles himself with the banal reflection that, other things being equal, he is quite as good as they. But the strange mystery of presence steps in and prevents other things ever being equal.
Some men lack engaging personality, they have no physical charm or force, yet they exert strenuous influence. They possess great mental or moral qualities. There is a Divine spark in the clay that scintillates and collects attention. They are luminous bodies, and emit light. They are men with virtue in them, and virtue flows out of them. The extremely fascinating character of Jesus Christ moves in splendour adown the ages, giving out vital energy. It draws men to-day irresistibly, as it constrained men nearly two thousand years ago to follow Him homeless and penniless through the highways and by-ways of Palestine, without worldly honour or pay to recompense them. There is a strange, silent, penetrating, perplexing, yet mighty influence working round about us; it is the influence of the life of Christ holding us up. I do not mean His life as crudely reflected to us in the modern Church. Jesus Christ has a larger influence outside the Church than in it. Christ would be a stranger in the sanctuary to-day if He visited it as the peasant of Galilee.
Jesus Christ never commissioned His disciples to build up in the world such a colossal organization as the Church has swollen itself into with windy pride. In every country in Europe the Church is the biggest business concern and the wealthiest institution, the most aristocratic society and the most retrogressive force. The national Churches are slavishly worldly and chastely genteel concerns; they would boycott the kingdom of Christ if they thought it were trying to enter the world through their gilded gates.
The kingdom of Christ is democratic. It might interfere with tithes and endowments and vested interests. I fancy Christ will establish His kingdom without calling in the Church to help Him. I could not picture Christ making use of a Bishop in knee-breeches, lawn sleeves, and with a seat in the House of Lords, when engaging disciples to evangelize the world. But I can picture Christ falling speechless when brought face to face with a Bishop geared in full canonical uniform; and if in His ignorance of ecclesiastical functionaries Jesus politely inquired, "Who is the aristocratic old gentleman wearing knee-breeches and a broad-brimmed hat, and to what institution does he belong?" on being told he was speaking to one of the leading representatives of His own spiritual institution, I can picture Christ melting away in anguish of heart from the venerable presence of the great divine to solace Himself in the company of fishermen and mechanics--men whose hearts are warm and manners natural, even if their creed is a bit unorthodox from the ecclesiastical standpoint.
And there is the good St. Francesco, the stainless and blameless saint, born of the little Tuscan hill city, the perpetual flowering rose of Assisi, whose godly fragrance gives off for ever to sweeten the life of mankind--St. Francis of Assisi, the humble child of God, the dear brother of men, dead these five hundred years gone by; but he is now lying warm upon the lap of Christendom, nursed for one of the noblest, gentlest spirits, aglow with the fervour of an endless life. He is a living, controlling force to-day in the world's long battle for righteousness, and ever pouring into our ears the sweetness of Christ.
Men are governed more wisely by the dead than by the living. Interned within the calmness of their shades, the mighty dead speak to us, and no cross-currents of envy, prejudice, or malice ruffle the serenity of their counsel. Influence is not always beneficent; it is malignant sometimes, and contaminates like the plague. Evil qualities can be as attractive as wholesome virtues. The poets brand the Devil with a commanding personality. John Wilkes, the notorious demagogue in the reign of George III., was the ugliest man in England, yet he impressed himself marvellously on his generation. He was a popular hero; he possessed natural gaiety of disposition and an irrepressible fund of impudence and wit. He was the most brilliant controversialist of his day. He was a charming rake with an insinuating smile, and he wore the manners of a fine English gentleman, which captivated his enemies and conciliated the King. He had exceptional powers of fascination, and he boasted that--ugly as he was--with the start of a quarter of an hour he could get the better of any man, however good-looking, in the graces of any lady.
X
THE LURE OF NICE PEOPLE
Our friend Mrs. Alinson took me sharply in hand one day, and tendered me good advice gratuitously over the tea-table. Mrs. Alinson is a lady magnificent in bulk, energetic in action, torrential in tongue, and warm-hearted in disposition, second to none amongst the daughters of men.
When as a young man I first came to town she adopted me, mothered me socially, and manoeuvred for my success. She did not approve of my associates, and rated me soundly in her loud, pushful, stridulant voice, which commands attention: "Mr. Drake is not a desirable acquaintance for you to pursue, my dear. He don't belong to our set, and his reputation is tainted; unpleasant rumours cloud round his name. Take my advice and cut him. You only want to know nice people."
Shrewd, disinterested, motherly advice for Mrs. Alinson to bestow on a tenderfoot unfamiliar with the pitfalls of society. Surely only a lady of sweet discerning disposition could give it; a lady whom everybody loves and whom nobody gainsays; a lady the final arbiter of taste in "nice people" who opens the door to a new-comer and no man shuts, who shuts the door on a new-comer and no man opens. I accepted her dictum as good current coin of the elect world we moved in, to be honoured without reserve. Its metal rang genuine on the social counter. Mr. Drake henceforth is a stranger to me; it would imperil my position in society to know him.
After tea we parted, and I went to the cinema. I often go to a cinema because it amuses me when I want amusement. It is light and inexpensive diversion. Superior people sneer at the cinema, and call it low-grade amusement: a common glanty-show that pleases common people. However, as I have no shares in music-halls or wasting investments in theatre-land, I am impartial in my pleasures, and can take a shilling seat in a picture palace with clean conscience and merry heart. In the cinema we met our dear friend Lady ----, who was enjoying the moving pictures. She invited us to her reception on the following Saturday afternoon; at the conclusion of the show, when parting from her, she said: "It's very kind of you to promise for next Saturday. Please don't tell Mrs. Alinson you are coming, or she will be sure to come too, and I don't want her. The friends I am inviting don't care to meet her."
This was a staggering blow struck at the serene goddess to whom we bent the obedient knee. Was there another social kingdom where she had no sovereignty, where her passing shadow, like a malign influence, was a thing to be shunned? Was she a false goddess, or no goddess at all? She pictured herself the controlling hand which steered the current of gay life in our midst. Was she at the helm, or was it a mild illusion that muddled her amiable brain? Here are people actually who will not open their doors to receive her, nor permit her feet to tread their dusty carpet--and she thought omnipotence was in her nod.
These colliding facts perplexed us. They suggested the ridiculous, and offer food for reflection on the comedy of human manners. Here, on the one hand, is a portrait we draw of ourselves, and there opposite hangs on the wall a portrait other people draw of us. Place these two sketches side by side and consider, do they represent the same person? Is there resemblance between them enough to establish identity in a British court of law? How can there be? We do not see ourselves as others see us. We each observe the interesting object that engages our attention from different points of the compass. We see our good points of character and make the best of them; our neighbours detect our little sins and make the worst of them. So we clothe ourselves in sunlight and paint our neighbours drab. Mrs. Alinson, fortunate woman, had no glimmering idea what other people thought of her; it was not given her to see herself as others see her. She lives stolidly; eats, drinks, dresses, talks, surrounded by a shining halo of self-complacency through which her mentality cannot penetrate. She is good-natured, thinks excellently of herself, and believes other people's feelings towards her are equally well disposed. You and I, happily, are unconscious of the quaint esteem in which our neighbours hold us, and wisely there we ring the curtain down. If the truth were told, half our acquaintances are our enemies--behind our backs.
Soon after the split in the Liberal party on the first Home Rule Bill, which sundered so many political friendships, Frank Holl was painting the portrait of John Bright. He mentioned to his sitter that he was about to paint the portrait of Mr. Gladstone. "It must be a very painful thing to you, Mr. Bright," he hazarded, "that after all these years of comradeship you two should sever your connection?" "Indeed it is," replied Bright with a sigh; "to think that after we have so long worked together we should be forced apart in the evening of our lives! And by what? A bogy that has risen up within him, beckoning him away from duty and sense. Do you know, Mr. Holl, I seriously fear that my dear old friend's mind is giving way."
When the artist was at Hawarden painting Mr. Gladstone, the subject of Mr. Bright's portrait cropped up. "Ah!" said Mr. Gladstone, "and how did you find him?" "Fairly well; and he spoke very affectionately of you, Mr. Gladstone." "Did he indeed?" replied the sitter sorrowfully. "It was a cruel blow that parted us--and on so clear a question, too! Tell me, Mr. Holl"--and here his lips quivered, for he was evidently moved with strong emotion--"tell me, did you notice anything in the manner of my old friend which would lead you to suppose that his reason was becoming unhinged?"
We cannot see another man's personality in full rounded vision. We get peeps at him; broken lights and flickering shadows of his character dance before us. We chase the shadow, and think we can capture the man and rifle him of his every locked-up thought and uncover his soul's nakedness.
The popular writer analyzes, probes, dissects human character on paper, and we marvel at his subtlety in reading so far into people. He plucks the gay plumage off the poor bird he has trapped, and leaves the stripped and quivering body an unpleasant spectacle for the public to contemplate through the glass case of a six-shilling novel. The novelist is a crude, fumbling workman at his trade. His hand is too clumsy for his tools. He dissects his paper dolls as they pass before him in a paper world, but the tangled, unbalanced, erratic human being pulsing with mystic life, even his next-door neighbour, baffles him on the doorstep. The novelist is a cunning artist, but an unskilful philosopher. He works like Conan Doyle's great detective Sherlock Holmes, who can unravel any mystery he himself concocts in the pages of theStrand Magazine, but is no use to Scotland Yard in tracking a real murderer or laying bare an elusive crime.
If some famous men who in their day and generation lived in cheap houses and mixed with common people, and died unparagraphed in daily papers, could see themselves now, as we see them, promoted to illustrious companionship with the mighty dead, their heads would spin with amazement at themselves for having arrived in splendour; they would stagger at the worship paid them by reverent posterity.
During life they were great artists in mufti. They were regarded as unimportant persons by their own contemporaries, and to-day they are posted amongst the demi-gods of history. They knew themselves to be good workmen who did a good day's work for a fair day's pay, and then, like other honest day-labourers, at nightfall, with clean consciences, they laid down their tools, and their life-story ended there. They little knew that they had the bud of immortality swelling in their veins, soon to break and flower into endless renown.
Human nature is a conundrum to itself hard to crack, as it is to other people, even its friends and neighbours who eat and drink with it at table. We do not know that heaps of posthumous fame may presently cover our strange next-door neighbour. To us he is only a negligible quantity in the affairs of the day, with a little gift of the pen or some queer scientific hobby that absorbs him. In this swift age of ours Time and Space are being brought to heel in masterly control, but our neighbours remain mysterious to us as Adam was to Eve until the affair of the apple found the man out. Even Shakespeare to his contemporaries did not appear a towering genius, but only one of themselves--a common literary hack with an uncommon gift of turning a sentence and making it tell. It was a trick they all tried to catch from him, but he just went one better than they.
Shakespeare's fellow-craftsmen were unconscious that they were entertaining an archangel unawares. Nothing he said or did outside his scribbling for the playhouse is on record. He had no trusty Boswell at his elbow to note his pothouse wit and succulent wisdom, sparks from the fire of his genius, flung off impromptu in merry moments at the Mermaid Tavern over a flagon of malmsey. His pals thought him a jovial fellow well met, and when he died no crumbs of biography were swept up by loving hands to keep his memory green.
But strangest of all, did Shakespeare think much of himself? He was utterly careless of the fate of his own literary labours. He never published one of his own plays. After his death the stage copies of his plays were carefully collected together by two prudent men, Heming and Condell, with an eye to business. Seven years later the first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays appeared in print. The first edition is full of glaring blunders, compiled as it was from the stage versions--the manuscripts that the players used in the theatres. Those well-thumbed dog-eared copies of the plays, very interesting documents to own if one could be placed on the market to-day: worn and torn, scored with erasures, interlined with emendations, stained with spilt wine and small beer, greasy with handling of midnight study, and crumpled after pouching in the players' pockets cheek by jowl with incongruous trifles--could you expect literary finish to adorn these fugitive children of the playhouse? Ever since that day learned commentators have laboured assiduously correcting the text of the plays and combing out the tangle, quarrelling fraternally amongst themselves over the correct word for the place and the correct place for a word. The quarrel of the commentators still flourishes, for the muddle of the text has yet to be tidied up.
XI
THE LURE OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY
Democracy is the rising star, mounting clear and bright over falling kingdoms and toppling empires. Crowns are going cheap in the market to-day, and the divine right of kings is a broken weapon flung in the mud of the world's scorn and picked up as a toy forPunchto provoke laughter. The old nobility is losing its ancient charter to sit exclusive in the high places of honour, and the common people--the new caste--are coming into possession and power. The working-man must be tailored to the grand part he plays in history. He will feel uneasy perhaps wearing his first new dress suit--it will worry him like a misfit. But clothes add splendour to our common lot. With the salvation of the country dependent on his nod he must cast the stodgy cloth cap that clowns his head on bank holidays and nod heroically to the admirers who retinue his movements.
Democracy is the unknown god it will be fashionable to worship when the war is over. Now we are all wasting ink and paper and taxing our small brains prophesying what the world will be like in the flowering-time of peace, when everybody will become deliriously happy, wise, and good. We shall move more cautiously then, like a cat stepping circumspectly over broken glass on top of the garden wall. We will make no mistakes, as we did in the feckless past, bringing us not only bleeding feet, but wounded hearts. There must be no party politics in the land as there used to be when politicians sold their country to buy their party into power, and sold themselves to keep the power which they had bought. Everyone will want to do good to his neighbour, and our neighbour will want to do good to himself, and so social reform now and henceforth is the compelling idea that holds the public fancy.
But no two social reformers think alike or advance the same doctrines of reform, although the same idea dominates the mind of all the doctrinaires. An idea is an abstract, invisible, impalpable, thing that enters into the mind of man naked and unadorned. Before exposing this naked idea to public observation it must be clothed and attractively dressed. Confusion comes in with the clothes. Fashions in clothes differ so that the same idea differently dressed appears to be a different object. However, it is not. Ideas do not differ: it is the expression of them that differs. It is when you clothe your idea with words and deck it in literary plumage that the mischief stalks in and divergent opinions clash and confound us.
We all believe in Utopia, but none of us hold the clue to the high road that gallops straight into it. We take trial trips over new ground and get sloughed up on false trails. Plato and Socrates, Francesco d'Assisi and Philip Sydney, Ruskin and Tolstoi, have each been famous architects of Utopia in the dim dreamland of the past, and each propounded his own scheme as being the very healthiest and happiest earthly paradise ever constructed for man to dwell in. They all have some aims and ends in common, considering thoughtfully the welfare of the people bodily and morally: but the distinctive personality of the architect slyly creeps in, and on the rock of personal vanity they split into rival factions and a general quarrel ensues, rending the best-laid schemes man ever devised for the emancipation of the human race. And so the egg of social reform gets addled before it is hatched, and alas! the glittering city of ten thousand joys for mankind to dwell in recedes farther and farther into the sweet dreamland of the future.
One architect of Utopia proposes to upbuild the city of Human Happiness by hand labour. Brick by brick it is to rise in colossal proportions and flowering beauty. He starts with the individual as the foundation and finishes with the individual as top-stone. He works by gradual and peaceful process to attain his splendid purpose. His method of work is unpopular because it is slow.
Another architect proposes to work by machinery, and to force it to a hasty finish. Organization and legislation are the instruments of torture proposed for the rapid promotion of his purpose. Human society--social and industrial--is stricken with fell disease, which can be cured promptly by Acts of Parliament and Orders in Council. By this drastic method the "organic welfare" of society is to be builded while you wait. The State is to be organized, thought is to be organized, the will is to be organized, and happiness is to be organized, and nothing of consequence is to be left unorganized; while the mere individual is to be wiped from the map as an unnecessary dot of disfigurement upon it. Wealth is to be handled by a new and better process; wealth is to be conscripted, which means one man is to make it and another man is to take it. Labour is not to be dealt with as a marketable commodity. It is an insult to the dignity of labour to measure a man's work and pay him exactly what his day's toil is worth in the market. The working-man is a member of the universal brotherhood, and needs elbow-room in the community to spread himself. He must have the wages he hankers after, and when too weary to work a pension granted from the State to make comfortable his latter end. In fact in Utopia every man, woman, and child claims sufficient income independent of work, and the State must be Paymaster-General.
Alas! universal happiness on these idealistic lines of compulsion and greed is like an echo. It answers your call but does not come. Socialism makes no progress in saving men; it has eyes to see man's misery, but no hands to lift him out of it.
The longer I live the more I am convinced that this great and vital problem of social regeneration is to be engineered only by slow gradations and with infinite patience and gentleness. Society is composed of dense masses and millions of frail, erring human beings, and to schedule a sudden inrush of perfect laws on the statute-book will not breed an improved strain of perfect citizens who can live up to the pose of perfection. You cannot legislate selfishness and weakness and greediness and vice out of human nature quickly, as you wring dirty water out of a wet sponge; neither can you pump purity and patience and brotherly love into humanity by Act of Parliament, and out of such shoddy material weave an ideal State in one round of the clock. Perfect laws are scarce as perfect men. Laws will grow better as we grow better--gradually. Laws and men act and react upon one another in mystic collusion. The great incoming tide of righteousness which shall fill all things will fill them. You cannot complete and furnish the top floor of the Palace of Humanity before you have laid the foundation solidly and deep on the rock of righteousness.
Labour has not yet won its charter of rights because it has neglected to perform its role of duties. Labour has to look the social problem squarely in the face with both eyes open. At present it only opens one eye--the eye which sees magnifically its rights. The other eye is shut which should observe its duties. The eye of Labour that should see its duties is sealed in darkness. The scales of Justice must balance truly before mankind is happy ever more.
Free labour is as necessary a commodity as free sunshine in a well-balanced State. If a man does his work well and does not require so much beer and tobacco and time for football as another man, he should be free to dispose of his labour as he chooses, without being picketed or bludgeoned by lewd fellows of the baser sort. Until there prevail an all-round correct idea of work, legislation will be a dead letter. God has not made one sun to shine on wages and another on capital, nor has He made two varieties of justice. He is God over all of us, and His law is impartial justice.
Capital is not immaculate. It sits the great god incarnate on its high gold throne, ruling men with sovereign power and using men as a means to wealth. Its vestments are of purple and fine linen. Costly raiment to wear, but unseemly smirched with the mud of gutter complots and stained red with blood sweated from the poor. Capital wants washing thoroughly from its iniquity and purging with hyssop before it is fragrant and can discourse virtue to the working classes.
Capital and Labour must forgive each the sins of the past, and as Brains and Hands work together in mutual confidence and esteem. Brains and Hands are not hard-set hereditary foes. They are blood relatives, members of the same body-politic, and must hold together for their common good. They are not even business opponents with clashing interests spoiling to cut each other's throat and smash the opposition concern with fiery glee of heart. They are copartners in the same business concern, and must combine, each having their own department to superintend. The interest of one is the interest of the other. If one department breaks, the other falls with it deep in disaster. Yet these two copartners of the same business firm are hating one another with a hot historical hatred that defies the flight of ages. They are locked together struggling for mastery, each hoping to throw the other and become top-dog and dictate new terms of partnership which never would be kept, for the articles of treaty would soon become merely "a scrap of paper." It is not conquest: it is co-operation that will bring peace and concord between Capital and Labour.
The world is ripe for a new social programme. The war has altered the map of Europe, and it will alter the map of men's minds. The war has swept away old crusted conventions which cobwebbed the mind, and false foundations of social science upon which men laboured vainly to build Utopia. These things must be reassessed at new values.
The working-man wanted to get in the sun and own his patch as a free and independent citizen. There is no such thing in the world as independence, complete and arrogant: either in art, science, revolting daughters or commerce. Independence is a fool's word or an anarchist's battle-cry. The nearest approach to it in the realm of reality is interdependence. Substitute this word "interdependence" in the place of the other insolent and erroneous one and you have a working proposition, for you establish a sense of justice between man and man, and you have gathered together raw material out of which to build a new heaven and a new earth.
A pre-war panacea for curing the ills of unrighteousness which blight society was the amelioration of environment--a sonorous, windy, academic platitude having more sound in it than sense. It was the pet scheme for manufacturing good citizens out of bad ones; it began at the outward condition of mankind and worked inward. It started with the barber, the schoolmaster, and the politician. By pursuing this method they started with folly and ended with failure. It is like telling a man to polish his boots when his heart wants cleaning. The favourite speculation of theorists was that perfect circumstances create perfect character. This is attractive reading in cheap handbooks of political economy for the working classes, but in this wicked world it fails to pan out when put to a working test. It is more important a man should start by mending himself, and his circumstances will quickly mend themselves.
To expect by flattening down inequalities, removing temptations, and giving everybody a living wage of £2 per week, England will flower into a Garden of Eden where people are all good and happy and pay no taxes, and where angels will come and converse with us in the cool of the day, is to expect the impossible. To expect by adapting the lot to man instead of adapting man to his lot you will create an earthly paradise out of a world of wickedness is to expose your ignorance of human nature and to admit your incapacity for adjusting its wrongs.
They tell us that in the New Democracy patriotism will be scrapped. Love of country is a parochial virtue; it will be swamped in the greater love of humanity which will rise like a swelling flood and cover all. In the new Garden of Eden we shall be a happy brotherhood, for the dangerous serpent will be scotched. This doctrine is maudlin sentimentalism with a tang of grotesque to flavour it. Humanity is an immense crowd to fall in love withen bloc; each individual will receive a very thin slice of your affection if all the world is to share in it alike. Love will die of starvation fed on these lean rations. As apadrefresh from the Front persuasively raps out the truth, "the would-be cosmopolitan who will not narrow himself to love of country is rarely capable of any real self-devotion to the international ideal which he worships. The lover of humanity is more often than not utterly miserable travelling in a third-class railway-carriage."
Patriotism must survive as a national virtue, however violently the universal brotherhood flourishes, because the love of country is founded on the love of home and family, and the love of home and family is founded on the love of a man and a woman. You can never get over this nature-logic while men and women remain human beings with natural instincts which draw them to love one another and preserve the family feeling. I would rather be the victim of every insular prejudice possible than have no British prejudices to stir my British blood.
Another hope of the ages that has failed us in the hour of need is the Church. If all other saviours of society failed there remained the Church as by law established to rely upon as the great regenerating power in the land. Alas! the Church in our midst cannot cast out evil spirits. It has lost the gift of healing through respectability. It worships an ancient creed instead of the living Christ. Jesus of Nazareth is the great International Democrat of history. He was a tradesman's son and a working carpenter Himself. This fact shocks respectability. How many more people would be Christians if Christ had been born in a palace and not in a stable! This is the unsavoury feature of religion, and the exclusive dignitaries of the Church hover round it dubiously. They admit the historic fact with candour, but slither away silently from its indelicate associations as far as decency permits.
We have been told that bishops in gaiters and aprons harmonize daintily with the quiet cathedral close, shadowed by immemorial elms and the other minor glories of the Establishment; but bishops in gaiters do seem badly placed in a carpenter's shop, where their Lord and Master served His 'prentice years. The apron is an ancient figment of clothing bishops now wear in common with the working carpenter at his bench. It is a kind of retaining badge, signalling their humble origin and ancient descent.
Bishops, in general, are cultured and amiable men, more renowned for their learning than their piety. They are appointed by the State, and form the executive of the ecclesiastical machine to run the traditional piety of the land. They sometimes quarrel amongst themselves as to who is orthodox and who is not on the episcopal bench--quarrelling amongst bishops is only a human diversion--but touching the righteousness which is in the law they are all blameless men. There is something faulty in the religion they inculcate, for it does not grip the people. It is dreamy; it is not real. It is the vague pursuit of an unknown god ranging through a maze of decorative ritual and symbol, and there remain great arid spaces in our nature which it never fills up.
It has been said that the visible Church stands in the way of spiritual enlightenment of the people, just as stone idols of the heathen stand in the way of apprehension of God. What the eye sees before it the mind settles down upon, and roams no farther searching for a fuller vision of spiritual truth. The savage sees his stone idol, and never thinks beyond it religiously. It was his father's god, and it is god enough for him.
The good Churchman is equally content to know nothing beyond the religious ceremonials which the Church ordains in the place of God, the Spiritual Father of us all. These ceremonials, sanctified by long observance, quenched the religious thirst of his forefathers, and they quench his thirst and he is satisfied. The Church is tenacious of her hold on men, not suffering the allegiance of the people to be shifted back to God the Father. The Church is said to be the one and only sacred aqueduct through which Divine grace can flow. The curse of the community is the middleman. He takes a heavy toll of profit in every business that feeds the people bodily or spiritually.
The New Democracy must return to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth to lay a solid foundation on which to build social righteousness and national greatness. The secret elements of social rectitude slumber in the words of Christ, and the volcanic action of the war will blast them into life and power.
Jesus Christ was not a theologian or schoolman of the fossil type of Gamaliel or Calvin, learned in booklore, but ignorant of men. He was not a stump orator inflaming the radical passions of the masses, bating them into red fury by pictorially describing the wickedness of the classes. He proposed no easy road to riches as a trap to catch the envious poor. He did not sit in his study formulating a scientific creed to mystify people with a religion of words and phrases; He lived in the open air a noble life that men could see and believe in. It is the mind, not the soul, that asks a creed to help its faith; the heart believes without the crutches of theological formula to support it. He stood for goodness pure and simple, for rich men and poor men alike. His teaching is exemplified in His life, and His life is a beautiful and faithful commentary on His teaching.
The careless world did not relish this straight talk on goodness--indoor and outdoor goodness. It was too realistic, too personal in its touch; but men are growing sensible now as the world grows older, and with reawakened conscience ask for the truth instead of its theological counterfeit, which does not heal the wounded spot. Out of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth grow eternal principles that build up the best governments and the wisest laws, that train the finest citizens, and regulate society on a basis of righteousness and mutual honour. The seeds of all possible national prosperity and generous manhood lie embedded in these teachings. Nations may rise, flourish, and decay, but the nation with the blood of Christ in its veins is immortal and shall endure for ever. May it be the British nation!