VIIAPPENDIX

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego,Shake the bed,Make the bed,And into bed you go.For a moment or two, like a proper Englishman, he sighed for the happy state of childhood. Then he shook that off.“Bah!” he said. “We sacrifice the whole of our lives to the ideas implanted in us during the first foolish years of them.”Sir Robert Wherry lay adying. He had never been able to resist an obituary. Never an illustrious man died but Wherry rushed into print, preferably in theTimesnewspaper, with reminiscence and lamentation. So, as he lay adying, he composed many obituaries of himself. There were reporters at hisdoor waiting upon his utterances. They came as regularly as the bulletins. As each might be his last, it was carefully framed to rival Goethe’s or Nelson’s or the Earl of Chatham’s final words. Three of them began: “We men of England . . .” one “My mother said . . .” two with the word “Love . . .” and once, remembering William Blake, he raised his head and prated of angels. Last, with the true inspiration of death, faithful to himself and the work of his life, he turned and smiled at his nurse and his wife and daughter and said: “Give my love to my public.” So he died, and there were tears in thousands of British homes that night.His death crowded every other topic to the back pages of the newspapers. There were columns of anecdotes and every day brought a fresh flood of tributes from divines, lecturers, novelists, dramatists, publicists of all kinds. One newspaper sent this reply-paid telegram to Old Mole:Please send thirty-six words on Wherry.Having no other use for the printed form, Old Mole filled it in thus:He sold sugar.—Beenham.His tribute was not printed.There arose a mighty quarrel as to whether or no Wherry should be buried in Westminster Abbey. The Poets’ Corner was crowded. Only an indubitableimmortal should have the privilege of resting his bones there. The voices of the nation stormed in argument. Were the works of Wherry literature? Men of acknowledged greatness had found (comparatively) obscure graves. Was there not a risk? . . . There was no risk, said the other side. The heart of the nation had been moved by Wherry, the life of the Empire had been made sweeter because Wherry had lived and written.Lady Wherry was consulted. A picture of her appeared, with a black-edged handkerchief in front of her face, in the illustrated morning papers. And under it was printed her historic reply:“Bury him by all means——”Emotion cut short her words.The argument was finally taken for decision to high places. Those in them had read the works of Wherry and, like the smallest servant in a suburban garret, had been moved to tears by them.It was arranged. The Dean and Chapter bowed to the decision.There was to be a procession. All the celebrities were invited, and, as one of them, Old Mole was included. None was omitted. Never a man who had so much as thrust his nose into the limelight was left out.In the music-halls it was announced on the kinematograph screens that special films would be presented of the funeral of Sir Robert Wherry, and the audiences applauded.Old Mole was in the forty-fifth carriage, with SirHenry Butcher and the actress who had created “Lossie,” now an actress-manageress. There were kinematograph operators at every street corner, and Tipton Mudde, the aviator, had received a special dispensation from the Home Secretary allowing him to fly to and fro above the procession and to drop black rosettes into the streets.It was a wet day.In the Abbey Old Mole was placed in the north transept, and he sat gazing up into the high, mysterious roof where the music of the great organ rolled and muttered. Chopin’s Dead March was played and Sir Henry Butcher muttered:“There comes the bloody heart-tear.”An anthem was sung. Wherry’s (and Gladstone’s) favorite hymn, “O God, our help in ages past.” Apparently there was some delay, for another hymn was sung before the pallbearers and the private mourners came creeping up the nave.There was silence. The Psalms were sung.Old Mole heard a reedy, pleasant voice:“. . . For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal shall put on immortality: then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? . . .”Behind him he heard a droning voice:“. . . A solemn and impressive ceremony. There’ll be sermons preached on it on Sunday. We have offered a prize for the best sermon in my paper, ‘People and Books.’ It was in ‘People and Books’that Robert Wherry was first discovered to be a great man. We printed his first serial. I never thought he would reach the heights he did. . . .”The reedy voice was raised in a toasty fullness:“Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, as a flower: he fleeth as it were a shadow and never continueth in one stay.”Through the words came the droning voice:“He was slow in the beginning. He had doubts and was fool enough to want to plague the public with them. The public wants certainties. It wants winners. I told him that he might have doubts, but they were his own private affair and that it was foolish to commit them to writing. I had ado to make him heed me, but he did heed me, and he got so that he couldn’t fail. It wasn’t in him to fail. He could think just the exact nothing that the public thinks a month or two before they begin to think it themselves. He was fine for religion and home life and young love and all that, but you had to keep him off any serious subject. He knew that, after a time. He knew himself very well, and he would take infinite trouble. He had no real sense of humor, but he learned how to make jokes,—little, sly jokes they were, shy things as though they were never sure of being quite funny enough. It took him years to do it, but he could do it. There’ve been a million and a half of his books sold. We’ll sell fifty thousand this week. . . . Man! I tell ye, I’ve had a hard fight for it. I’ve had thirty press agents up anddown the country, working day and night, sending in stuff from the moment he was ill. I was with him when he ate the oysters. I had sick moments when I thought the newspapers weren’t going to take it up. I put the proposition to the kinematograph people and their interest carried it through. It was a near thing. The Dean hadn’t read the man’s works. I had to find some one above the Dean who had. . . . I helped to make Robert Wherry what he was. I couldn’t, in decency, fail to give my services to his fame and procure him the crowning glory of . . .”Old Mole, straining forward, heard the reedy voice:“. . . We give Thee hearty thanks for that it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our brother out of the miseries of this sinful world. . . .”Sick at heart, Old Mole edged into the aisle and crept out into the air, gratefully drawing in great breaths of it, and thanking the Lord for His mercy in leaving the sky above London and suffering the winds to blow through it and the rain to fall upon it.In his chambers he found a thin brown man, grave and dignified and dried by the sun.“You don’t know me, Mr. Beenham?” he said.Old Mole scanned him.“No. I can’t say I do.”“Cuthbert Jones. You may remember. . . .”Carlton Timmis!“Sit down, sit down,” said Old Mole. “Iamgladto see you. I wrote to you, wired to you at a place called Crown Imperial.”“A dirty hole.”“You heard about your play?”“Only six weeks ago. In Shanghai. I picked up an old illustrated paper. There was a portrait of Miss Burn in it. I hear she is a success. . . . I was told there is a company touring the China coast with the play.”“It is still being performed,” said Old Mole. “It has been translated into German, French, Italian, Russian, Hungarian, Dutch, Japanese. . . .”“Not into Chinese, I hope.”“Why not?”“Because I live in China.”“You haven’t come back, then?”“To see my father, that is all. As soon as he heard I was thousands of miles away nothing would satisfy him but I must come and see him. He is very ill, I believe, and as I grow older I find that I like to think of him and am, indeed, fond of him. I want to hear him talk Edinburgh philosophy again.”“Your play, up to date, has made sixty-four thousand pounds.”The brown man sat up in his chair and laughed.“It has all been carefully invested and will very soon have grown into seventy thousand. I have had the use of it for two years. I propose now that we go over to the bank and execute a transfer.”“No, thank you.”“No? You must. You must.”“No, thank you. I have brought home three hundred pounds to support my father in his old age. I require nothing for myself. I am perfectly happy. I am a teacher of English in a Chinese government school two hundred miles from the railway, with no telegraph or telephone. I have a wife, a Chinese, who is a marvelous housekeeper, a most admirable mother, as stupid as a cow, and she resolutely refuses to learn English. I have not been able altogether to shake off my interest in the theater, but the traveling Children of the Pear-tree Garden give me greater pleasure than I ever had from any English company in or out of the West End. They are sincere. They are rascals, but they love their work. . . .”“But the play, and the——”“. . . Money. . . . If I were you, Mr. Mole, I should drop it over Waterloo Bridge. I came today to return you your fifty pounds, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. I am glad—and sorry—that you have been repaid so plentifully.”He could not be prevailed on to take a penny, and presently they stopped arguing about it, and Timmis instructed Old Mole in the ways of the Chinese, how they were a wise people who prized leisure above all things, and so ordered their lives as to preserve the simplicity of the soul, without which, it is clear, the brain must be overwrought and dislocated through its vain efforts to do the work of the mind. He drew such a charming picture ofChinese life that Old Mole, with the folly of London etched upon his brain, could not but applaud his decision to return. They talked of many things and wagged their heads over the strange chances of life, and they parted the richer by each other’s respect and admiration and friendly wishes.And Old Mole returned to the strain of his existence. Impossible, he thought, to stay in London. Equally impossible to retain so huge a sum of money. It would go on swelling like a tumor, and, like a tumor, it would create a stoppage either in his own life or in someone’s else. Had it not already done so? Had it not played its part in the tragi-comedy that was not yet come to its climax? Had it not raised him to an absurd height, blown him out into a caricature of himself, pulled out his nose, goggled his eyes, given him a hunch back and a pot belly, forced him into overfeeding, overdrinking, over-talking, into writing a ridiculous, pontifical, instructive book, choked his humor and played the very devil with his imagination? He pondered this question of the money and at last he had an inspiration. He went down over Blackfriars Bridge and into the slums of Southwark. In a foul street he called at a house and asked how many people there might be living in it. He was told twenty-three: four families. In another there were thirty-one. In another he was asked in by the woman, and there was a corpse on the bed, and there were three children eating bread and jam for their dinner on the tableonly a yard from it, and the woman was clearly going to have another child. He asked the name of the landlord of that house, and next day sought him out. He bought the house: he went on buying until he had the whole row, then the whole street, then the next street and the next, and the next, until his money was all gone but ten thousand pounds. Then he gave orders for all the foul houses to be pulled down and a garden to be made. . . . He was told that it would be impossible—that he would have to get permission from the Borough Council, and the County Council, and Parliament.“Can’t I do what I like with my own?” he said.“It’s a question,” said the rent collector who had taken him under his wing, “whether the Council can afford to do without the rates. If you pull the houses down, sir, you’ll only make the overcrowding worse, because they must live somewhere, sir, and, bless you, they don’t mind it. They’re born in it and they die in it. You and I, sir, don’t like the smell, but they don’t never notice it.”But Old Mole stuck to it and the houses were pulled down and a garden was made, and he said not a word about it to a soul. It was only a very little garden because, though he had bought many houses, he could not buy the land on which all of them were built because it was very dear.Almost best of all he liked the destructive part of the undertaking. Pulling down houses was in his mood and sorted with his circumstances. From his own house he had set his face.He had received a letter from Panoukian:“DEARSIR,—You have eyes in your head and must have seen what I have been at no pains to conceal from you. I have lived through weeks of torture now and would live through many more if there were anything to be gained. I have been led to write this by the enclosed letter, which I can show you, I think, without betrayal.Ich kann nicht mehr.. . . This may be a shock to you, no doubt it will cause you much pain, but I believe you have the humanity to attempt to understand and to believe me when I say that I was never, in my heart, more your friend than I am now. I think it is for you to help in so much suffering.”The enclosed letter was from Matilda. Old Mole’s eye clouded as he read it:“My dear, I can’t let you go. I can’t, I can’t. I’ve tried so hard, I have. It isn’t wrong to love like that. I can think of nothing else. He’s been so kind, too. But I’m spoiling your life. I can love you, my dear, but I’m not the woman you ought to have. I can love you, my dear, but I’m not young and sweet like you ought to have. All this thinking and suffering has made me hard in my heart, I think. There’s such a lot between me and you, my dear. I could fight through it with you, but that would be so hard on you. It’s not as if he was a bad man, but he’s so kind. He always understands, but not like you, my darling: he only understands with his mind. I’ve tried not to write to you and to make it easy for you, but I can’t not write to you now. I must, even if it’s for the last time. I love you.”It was an untidy, blotched scrawl. Never had Old Mole seen such a long letter from Matilda. Very carefully he folded it up and placed it in his pocketbook.He went down to her room, and, as he knew he would, found her boxes packed, her wardrobe, her drawers, empty. The puppy, now a tolerable dog, was gazing ruefully at her trunks, ominous of departure.She came in, was startled to see him, recovered herself, and smiled at him.“Will you come with me?” he said.She followed him upstairs.“I have something to show you.”He led her to his room. On the floor were his bags, hatbox, rug, packed, strapped and labeled.“I am going,” he said. “The puppy will not mind my going.”VIIAPPENDIXA LETTER FROM H. J. BEENHAM TO A. Z. PANOUKIAN, M.P.“For two years it was the fashion among the English to cut out the appendix; but the fashion died and appendices are now retained.”OBSERVATIONS AMONG THE ENGLISH, BY C. L. HUNG (BRETZELFRESSER COMPANY, HONG KONG AND NEW YORK).VIIAPPENDIXCAPRAIA.MYDEARPANOUKIAN,So you have become a politician! I had hoped for better things.It is ten years now since I left England, so that I can write to you without the prickly heat of moral prejudice. It is a year since I saw you in Venice, you and her. She had her arm in yours and you did not see me. You saw nothing but her, and she saw nothing but you, and it was clear to me that you were enjoying your tenth honeymoon, which is, surely, a far greater thing than the first, if only you can get to it. You came out of St. Mark’s, you and she, and I was so close that I could have touched you. I shrank into the shadow and watched you feed the pigeons, and then you had tea on the sunlit side of the Piazza and then you strolled toward the Rialto. I took a gondola to the station and fled to Verona, for I could have no room in your tenth Eden. Verona is the very place for a bachelor, which, I there discovered, I have never ceased to be. Verona belongs to Romeo and Juliet, and no other lovers may do more than pass the day there, salute and speed on to Venice. But a bachelor may stay there many days: he will find an excellent local wine, good cigars built round straws, passable food, and the swift-flowing Adige wherein to cast his thoughts. This I did, with a blessing or two to be conveyed toyou in Venice. I hope you received them. The Adige bears thoughts and blessings and sewage with equal zest to his goal, as I would all men might do.I stayed for a month in Verona and I remember little of it but some delicious plums I bought in the marketplace and ate in the amphitheater, spitting the stones down into the arena with a dexterity I have only seen equaled by Matilda in the days of my first acquaintance with her. That is far back now, but there is not a moment of it all that I do not like to remember, and there in the amphitheater I told myself the whole adventure as a story from which I was detached. It moved me more than the house of Juliet, more than all the sorrows of the Scaligers, for it is a modern story and, as Molière said,“Les anciens sont les anciens et nous sommes les gens d’aujourd’hui.”Aujourd’hui!To-day! That is the marvel, that out of the swiftly moving, ever changing vapor which is life we should achieve anything so positive. To-day never goes. There is a thing called yesterday, but that is only the dust-bin at the door into which we cast our refuse, our failures, our worn-out souls. There is a thing called to-morrow, but that is the storehouse of to-day, bursting with far better things, emotions, loves, hopes, than those we have discarded. But into to-day the whole passionate force of the universe is poured, through us, through all things, and therefore to-day is marvelous.Here in Italy there is some worship of to-day. There are times and times when it is enough to be alive; and there are times when the light glows magically and the whole body and being of a man melt into it, thrill in worship, and then, however old he be, however burdened with Time’s tricks of the flesh, in his heart there are songs and dancing.In England we cling to the past, we never knowto-day, we never dare open the storehouse of tomorrow, for we are all trained in the house of Mother Hubbard. I have loved England dearly since I have lived away from her. I can begin, I think, to understand. She is weary, maybe; she has many hours of boredom. She is, alas, a country where grapes grow under glass, where, I sometimes think, men do not grow at all. She is a country of adolescents; her sons seem never to be troubled by the difficulties which beset the adult mind; they rush ahead, careless of danger because they never see it; their lives hang upon a precarious luck: they are impelled, not, I believe, as other nations fancy, by greed or conceit, but by that furious energy which attends upon the adolescent hatred of being left out of things. A grown man can tolerably gauge his capacity, but the desires of a youth are constantly excited by the desires of others; he must acquire lest others obtain; he must love every maiden and yield to none; he must be forever donning new habits to persuade himself that he is more a man than the grown men among whom enviously he moves. He is filled with a fevered curiosity about himself, but never dares stay to satisfy it, lest he should miss an opportunity of bidding for the admiration and praise of others which he would far rather have than their sympathy. Sympathy he dreads, for it forces him back upon himself, brings him too near to seeing himself without excitement. . . . So far, my observations, carefully selected, take me.There have been grown men in England, wonderful men, men all strength and sympathy and love, with powers far surpassing the intelligence of other races: but mark how the English treat them. They set them on a pinnacle, give them the admiration they despised, take none of their sympathy, raise horrible statues to their memory, and, to protectthemselves against their thought, the mighty force of truth in their souls, breed dwarfish imitations of them, whom they adore and love as men can only love those of their own moral race. No other country less deserves to have great men, and no other country has gotten greater. This astonishing phenomenon has produced that complacency which is the only check on the fury of England’s adolescent energy. Without it, without the Brummagem dignity in which such complacency takes form, she would long ago have rushed to her destruction. With it she has a political solidity to which graver and more intelligent nations can never aspire.But I should not talk politics to a politician. Nothing, I think you will agree, can reconcile conceptions bred in the House of Commons with those begot outside it. It has never yet been accomplished, and I gather, from the few English journals I see, that the attempt to do so is all but abandoned.I am writing to you to-day because I wished to do so in Verona, but was there too deep in an emotional flux to be able to write anything but bad poetry or a crude expression of sympathy, which, as it would have been gratuitous, must have been offensive. To-day, in Livorno (which our sailors have chewed with their tobacco into Leghorn), I found among my papers a letter written to you by Matilda nearly twelve years ago. It belongs to you and I send it.Yesterday in Livorno I found a marionette show and that set me thinking of England and the theater and many other subjects which used to absorb me during the hectic years of my life when I dwelt in Gray’s Inn. And I wished to communicate with England and could find no one to whom I am so nearly attached as you. I was engaged to visit Elba,and was there this morning, but was so distressed with the thought of the extreme youthfulness of England’s treatment of the great Napoleon that I left my party and crossed over to Capraia, which you will find on the map, and here, under the hot sun, with a green umbrella over my bald head, I am writing. I can see Elba. With my mind’s eye I can see England, and, indeed, when soberly I turn the matter over, I conclude that her treatment of Napoleon has not been nearly so shameful as her treatment of Shelley or Shakespeare. Shelley wrote one play; it has never openly been acted. Shakespeare wrote many plays; they have been Butchered, reduced from the dramatic to the theatrical.The marionettes stirred me greatly. The drama they played was familiar—husband, wife, and lover—the treatment conventional, though the dialogue had the freshness of improvisation. It was often bald as my head, and in the more passionate moments almost heartbreakingly inarticulate. It was a tragedy; the husband slew the lover, the wife stabbed herself, the husband went mad, and they lay together in a limp heap, while from the street outside—where, I felt sure, there were gay puppets carelessly strolling—came the most comic, derisive little tune played upon a reed. (It must have been a reed, for it was most certainly puppet and no human music, and, for that, only the more stirring.) The whole scene is as living to my mind as any experience of my own, and, indeed, my own adventures in this life have been illuminated by it. In the English theater I have never seen a performance that did not thicken and obscure my consciousness. I could not but contrast the two, and you find me sitting on an island striving to explain it.In the first place the performance of these marionettes compelled my whole-hearted interest becausethe play was detached from life, was not palpably unreal under the artificial light, and therefore could begin to reflect and be a comment upon life in a degree of success dependent, of course, upon the mind behind it. It was a common but a simple mind, skilled in the uses of the tiny theater, versed in its tradition, and always nice in its perception of the degrees of emotion proper to be loosed for the building up of the dramatic scenes. It was not truly an imaginative mind, not a genuinely dramatic mind, but it was thoroughly loyal to the imagination which has created and developed the theater of the marionettes. Except that the showman had a marked preference for the doll who played the husband, the balance of the play was excellently maintained, and the marionettes did exactly as they were bid. Thus between the controlling mind of the theater, the mind in its tradition, and my own there was set up a continuous and unbroken communication, and my brain was kept most exaltingly busy drawing on those forces and passions, those powers of selection and criticism which make of man a reasoning and then a dramatic animal. You may be sure that I fed the drama on the stage with that other drama, through which you and I floundered so many years ago. I longed to cry out to the husband that he should think less of himself and what the neighbors would say and more of his wife, who, being between two men, enamored of one and dedicated to the other, was in a far worse plight than himself, who was torn only between his affection and his pride. But tradition and convention and his own brainless subservience to his passion were too strong for him, and he killed the lover; would have killed the woman, too, but she was too quick for him. I wept, I assure you. I was sorrowful. Judge, then, of my relief and delight when the curtain rose again andthose same three puppets, with others, played the merriest burlesque, a starveling descendant, I fancy, of thecommedia dell’ arte.Where before they had surrendered to their passions, now my three puppets played with them at nimble knucklebones. The passion was no less genuine, but this time they were its masters, not its slaves, they had it casked and bunged and could draw on it at will. My lady puppet coquetted with the two gentlemen, set them wrangling for her, wagering, dicing, singing, dancing, vying with each other in mischievous tricks upon the town, and at last, owing, I suspect, to the showman’s partiality, she sank into the husband puppet’s arms and the lover puppet was propelled by force of leg through the window. (Pray, my dear Panoukian, admire the euphemism to spare both our feelings.) And now I laughed as healthily and heartily as before I wept. . . . Now, said I to myself, in England I should have been tormented with a picture, cut up by the insincerity of the actors into “effective” scenes and episodes, of three eminently respectable persons shaking themselves to bits with a passion they had never had; or, for comedy, there would have been the ribaldry of equally respectable persons twisting themselves into knots in their attempts to frustrate the discovery of a mis-spent night. Now, thought I, this brings me near the heart of the mystery. There are few men and women born without the kernel of passion. There are forty millions of men and women in the British Isles; what do they do with their passion? What, indeed—let us be frank—had I done with my own?Now do you perceive why I am writing to you?First of all, let us agree that boyhood is the least zestful part of a man’s life. His existence is not then truly his own, he is a spectator; he is absorbed in gazing upon the great world which at a seeminglyremote period he is to enter. Then he is apprenticed, initiated by the brutal test of a swift growth and physical change; easily he learns the ways, the manners, the pursuits of men; the conduct of the material world, the common life, is all arranged; he has but to slip into it. That is easy. But his own individual life, that is not so easy. He soon perceives, confusedly and mistily, that into that he can only enter through his passion, through its spontaneous and inevitable expression. He knows that; you know it. I know it. They are a miserable few who do not know it. But in England he can find none to share his knowledge. He is left alone with his dread, with so much sick hope thrust back in him, for want of a generous salute from those who have gone before, that it rots away in him and eats into his natural faith. He asks for a vision of manhood and is given a dull imitation of man, strong, silent, brutal, and indifferent. He must admire it, for on all sides it is admired. As a child he has been taught to babble of gentle Jesus; as a youth he finds that same Jesus turned—by the distorting English atmosphere—into a hard Pharisee, blessing the money changers. His passion racks his bones and blisters his soul. His inmost self yearns to get out and away, to spend itself, to find its due share in the ever-creating love. He dare not so much as whisper his need, for none but shameful words are given him to express it. “All’s well with the world,” he is told. “All’s wrong with myself,” he begins to think. In other men, older men, he can find no trace of passion, only temper and lewdness, with a swagger to both. They bear both easily. His passion becomes hateful to him; he begins to chafe against it, to spurn it, to live gaily enough in the common life, to choke the vision of his own life. So it has been with you, with me, with all of us.There are works of art, it is true. Grown men understand them; adolescents hate them, for works of art reveal always the fulfilment of passion; they begin to flower at the point to which passion has raised the soul; they are the record and the landmarks of its after-journeyings, its own free traveling. To the soul in bondage all that is but babble and foolish talk, just as, to the adolescent, the simplicity of the grown man is folly. That a man should believe in human nature—as he must if he believes in himself—is, in adolescent eyes, suspect. . . . Have you not heard intelligent Englishmen say contemptuously of a man that he is an idealist, as who should say idiot?Passion leads to idealism, to belief that there is a wisdom greater than the wisdom of men, a knowledge of which the knowledge of men is but a part, a pulse in the universe by which they may set the beat of their own.What do the English do with their passion? They strangle it.What did I do with my own? I let it ooze and trickle away. I accepted my part in the common life, and of my own life preserved only certain mild delights and dull passive joys, which became milder and duller as the years went by. I was engaged in educating the young. I shudder to think of it now. When I think of the effect those years, and that curriculum, had upon my own mind I turn sick to imagine the harm it must have done to the young, eager minds—(the dullest child’s mind is eager)—entrusted to my care by their confiding, worthy, and adolescent parents. It is a horror to me to look back on it, and I look back as little as may be.But to-day, in the security of glorious weather, the impregnable peace of my island slung between blue sea and sky, I can look back with amused curiosity,setting my infallible puppets against the blustering half-men whom I remember to have inhabited those portions of England that I knew. I do not count myself a freeman, but one who has escaped from prison and still bears the marks of it in his mind; it is to rid myself of those marks that I am thus wrapt in criticism, and not to condemn the lives of those who are left incarcerated. Impossible to condemn without self-condemnation. No doubt they are making the best of it. . . . I find that I cannot now think of anything in the world as separate from myself; the world embraces all things, and so must I; but to do so comfortably I must first understand everything that is sufficiently imaged to be within the range of my apprehension. Neither more nor less can I attempt. If more, then I am plunged in error and confusion; if less, then am I the captive of my own indolence, and such for the greater part of my life I have been.When I look back on my experience in London I cannot but see that I never became a part of it, never truly lived in its life. That may have been only because a quarter of a century spent as an autocrat among small boys is not perhaps the ideal preparation for living in a crowd, a herd without a leader, in which there is no rule of manners but: Be servile when you must, insolent when you can. Possibly the majority are so bred and trained that such a flurry and scurry seem to them normal and inevitable. I am sure very many are convinced that without intrigue and wirepulling they cannot get their bread, or the position which will ensure a continued supply. There they certainly are; wriggling and squirming and pushing; they like it; they make no move to get out of it; their existence is bound up in it and they fight to preserve it without looking further. They will tell you that they are assisting “movements,”but they are only following fashions. . . . What movement are you in?Matilda, I gather, is a fashion. I never knew her follow anything but her own desire, and as her desires are human and reasonable she has risen by the law of gravity above the rout, above the difficulties of her own nature, above any incongruities that arise between her individuality and the conventions of the common life of England. And of course she rises above the work she has to do, the idiotic songs written for her, the meaningless dances devised to sort with the pointless tunes. And when she suffers from the emptiness of it all, she has you, and she has the memory of myself to guard her against the filthy welter from which she sprang. She used me—(you will let her read this)—and I am proud to have served her.There are many people like Matilda, comedians and entertainers, who develop a certain strength of personality in their revolt against the conditions of their breeding. It is impossible to educate them. Their intentions are too direct. . . . Not all of them succeed, or have the luck to become the fashion. You are one of them yourself, my dear Panoukian, and in the days when I was living with you two I used excitedly to think that there was a whole generation of them; that the young men and women of England were at last insisting on growing out of adolescence. Sometimes I felt very sure of it, but I was too sanguine. Life does not act like that; there are no sudden general growths. There are violent reactions, but they are soon swallowed up in the great forward flow.“Comedians and entertainers” I said just now. You are all that, all you public characters. You depend upon the crowd, you are too near them. You are in dread of falling back, and also you are awarethat the size of a man can only be gauged at a distance, and you have to contend with the charlatan. A better comedian you may be, but he has not your scruples, your sensitiveness, and is therefore more dexterous at drawing the crowd’s attention. . . . Again I turn with relief to my puppets; they have no temptation to insincerity; they obey the strings, play their parts, and are put back into their boxes. They need no bread for body or mind. They have no life except the common life of the stage, no individuality and no torturing need of fulfilling it.But you comedians—writers, actors, politicians, divines—are raised above the common life by the degree in which you have developed your individual lives, including your talents, by work, by energy, sometimes deplorably by luck. The validity of your claims is tested by your ability to break with the common life, and pass on to creation and discovery which shall bring back into the common life power to make it more efficient.I must define. By the common life I mean the pooling of energy which shall provide all members of the community with food, clothing, house room, transport, the necessaries of existence, and such luxuries as they require. Its concern is entirely material. Where it governs moral, ethical, and spiritual affairs it is an injurious infringement, and cannot but engender hypocrisy. How can you pool religion, or morality, without degrading compromise? The world has discarded kingcraft and priestcraft and come to mobcraft. That will have its day. Mobcraft is and cannot but be theatrical. In a community of human beings who are neither puppets nor men there is a perpetual shuffling of values among which to live securely there is in all relations an unhealthy amount of play-acting;—take any husband and wife, father and son, mother anddaughter, lover and lover, or, Panoukian, schoolmaster and pupil. Life is then too like the theater for the theater to claim an independent existence. And that, I think, is why there is no drama in England. That is why the play-actors have columns and columns in the newspapers devoted to their doings, their portraits in shops and thoroughfares, their private histories (where presentable or in accordance with the public morality of the common life) laid bare.That view of English life so freezes me that I lie back under my umbrella and thank God for the Italian sun.Has it always been so in England? I think not. Garrick was a self-respecting, if a conceited, individual. He believed in his work and he had some dramatic sense. The theater had no credit then; even his genius could not raise it to the level of English institutions. But his genius made him independent, and still the theater was parasitic upon the Court. Subsequently the English Court, which, never since Charles II, had taken any genuine interest in it, repudiated the theater which then had healthily to struggle for its existence. I fancy that in Copas—(Matilda’s uncle)—I found the last genuine survivor of the race of mummers of which Henry Irving was the last triumphant example. They strangled the theater with their own personalities, for only by the strength of their personalities could they force themselves upon the attention of an England huddled away in dark houses, grimly, tragically, in secrecy, play-acting. With every house a playhouse, how can the theater be taken seriously? With so much engrossing pretence in their homes, men have no need of professional mummers; with a fully developed Nonconformist conscience,an Englishman can be his own playwright, mummer, and audience. He grudges the money paid to professional actors, despises any contrivance they can show him, spurns the whole affair as a light thing, wantonness, a dangerous toy that may upset the valuations by which he arrives at his own theatrical effect.There was a time when the Englishman’s home was his theater. My own home was like that: year in, year out there was a tremendous groveling before God, and a sweaty wrestling with the Devil, and a barometrical record of prowess in both was kept. Human relations sneaked in when no one was looking, took the stage when the curtain was down; I was lucky, and on the whole had a good time in spite of the show, which, I am bound to say, I thoroughly enjoyed. My father was a very fine man at the groveling and the wrestling (and knew it), but in his human relations he was awkward, heavy, and blundering in the very genuine tenderness which he could not always escape;—and I think he knew that, too, poor wretch.There must be fewer such homes now, but still an enormous number. God and Devil are not so potent, but the habit of posturing remains, has been handed down and carried over into human relations—(at least God and Devil did protect us from that!)—so that there is not one, not the most intimate and sacred, but is made subtly the occasion of self-indulgence, easy, complacent, and devastating; the epidemic disease consequent on the airless years from the Reform Bill to the South African War—(you will remember the histrionics before, during and after that tragedy of two nations). The old English home—theatrical and oleographic—has been destroyed by it, and I rejoice as I rejoice to hear that the Chinese women are abandoning thefolly of stunting their feet. We used to stunt the soul, the affections, human passions. Unbind the China woman’s feet and she suffers agonies, so that she cannot walk. Thus it has been with us; we have suffered mortal agonies; we have been saved from madness by the inherited theatrical habit, by which we have shuffled through the human relationships enforced by our natural necessities and the inconsiderate insistence upon being born of the next generation. We have shuffled through them, I say, and we have made them charming, but we have not yet—shall we ever?—made them beautiful. There has been no true song in our hearts, only songs without wordsà laMendelssohn, nor yet a full music in our blood. We have imitated these things, from bad models, drawn crude sketches of them. I, for instance, play-acted myself into marriage; when it came to getting out of it, play-acting was of no avail, though even for that emergency, as you know, the English game has its rules. . . . I could not conform to them, and in that I believe I shared in the general experience of the race. I was pitchforked out of the old theatricality into the new and found it ineffective. That must be happening every day, in thousands, perhaps in millions, of cases. . . . I feel hopeful, and yet unhappy, too, for my experience came to me too late. I have been able to discard; but, for the new life—vita nuova—I have not wherewith to grasp, to take into myself, to make my own. Even here on this island, in this country of light, I do not seem to myself to be fully alive, but am an outsider, a spectator, even as I was when a small boy, and I shall go down into this warm earth hardly riper than I was when I was born, nurtured only by one genuine experience and that negative. But for that I am thankful. It has made it possible for me to ruminate, if not to act, to rejoice in the possessionof my uncomely and unwieldy body, to be content with that small fragment of my soul which I have mastered.(It is really delightful to be writing to you again. It brings you before me, as a boy, a little piping boy; as a posturing and conceited youth—do you remember the cruel snub inflicted on you by Tallien, the French master? I had sent you to him with a message, and he said: “Tell Mr. Beenham I will take no message from his conceited puppy.” You! A prefect!—as a heated and quite too Stendhalian young man. It is charming.)But I am rueful when I reflect that I solved my difficulty, which, after all, was a portion of the English difficulty, by leaving England. I should have stayed; fought it out; wrestled through with it until the three of us were properly and in all eyes established in that new relation to which inevitably we should have come. I was too old. I was too much under the habit of thinking of consequences; too English, too theatrical to believe that life does not deal in neat and finished endings. I could see nothing before me but the ugly conventional way of throwing mud at the woman and bringing you to an unjust and undeserved ruin, or the way most pleasing to my sentimentality, of withdrawing from the scene and leaving you to make the best of it; as, no doubt, you have done, since you are both successful personages and well in the limelight, and able to go triumphantly from honeymoon to honeymoon.Are there children? I hope there are children!And there begins my real difficulty. Not that I care about legitimacy. No reasonable child will ask more than to be conceived in a healthy body, born in a clean atmosphere, and bred in a decently ordered home. But if there are children you should not be separated. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps Ihave been long enough absent for your world to forget my existence. But I have my doubts. I too much dread the English atmosphere not to feel that it must have been too strong for you, and you will have accepted your parts in the play.But, if there are children, there should be no play-acting in their immediate surroundings, in the love that brought them into being.How I wish you could have seen my marionettes! We should then have an emotional meeting point. As it is, I seem to be dancing round and round you almost as agilely as though I were with you in England, in the thick of polite London. That surely is what you need, on your thickly populated island, a point at which the lower streams of thought can converge, so that your existence may more resemble a noble estuary than a swampy delta.You will see that I am sane enough to be thinking more of your (possibly non-existent) children than of you. There are two clear ideas in my head, and they desire each other in marriage—the idea of children and the idea of the theater. But, alas! I fear it is beyond me to bring them together. I cannot reach beyond my marionettes, which are, after all, only the working models of the theater I should like to conceive, and, having conceived, to create and set down in England as a reproach to the clumsy sentimental play-acting of English life. That would, I believe, more powerfully than any other instrument, quell the disease. If you had a theater which was a place of art it would lead you on to life, and you would presently discard the sham morals, imitation art, false emotions, and tortuous thoughts with which you now defend yourselves against it.I have written much under my umbrella. I hope I have said something. At least, with this, I shake you by the hand and we three puppets dance onthrough the merry burlesque which our modern life will seem to be to the wiser and healthier generations who shall come after us.The old are supposed to be in a position to advise the young. I have learned through you, and yet I may give you this counsel: “If ever you find yourself faced with a risk, take it.” Love, I conclude, is a voyager, and it is our privilege to travel with him; but, if we stay too long in the inn of habit, we lose his company and are undone.Yours affectionately,H. J. BEENHAM.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego,Shake the bed,Make the bed,And into bed you go.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego,

Shake the bed,

Make the bed,

And into bed you go.

For a moment or two, like a proper Englishman, he sighed for the happy state of childhood. Then he shook that off.

“Bah!” he said. “We sacrifice the whole of our lives to the ideas implanted in us during the first foolish years of them.”

Sir Robert Wherry lay adying. He had never been able to resist an obituary. Never an illustrious man died but Wherry rushed into print, preferably in theTimesnewspaper, with reminiscence and lamentation. So, as he lay adying, he composed many obituaries of himself. There were reporters at hisdoor waiting upon his utterances. They came as regularly as the bulletins. As each might be his last, it was carefully framed to rival Goethe’s or Nelson’s or the Earl of Chatham’s final words. Three of them began: “We men of England . . .” one “My mother said . . .” two with the word “Love . . .” and once, remembering William Blake, he raised his head and prated of angels. Last, with the true inspiration of death, faithful to himself and the work of his life, he turned and smiled at his nurse and his wife and daughter and said: “Give my love to my public.” So he died, and there were tears in thousands of British homes that night.

His death crowded every other topic to the back pages of the newspapers. There were columns of anecdotes and every day brought a fresh flood of tributes from divines, lecturers, novelists, dramatists, publicists of all kinds. One newspaper sent this reply-paid telegram to Old Mole:

Please send thirty-six words on Wherry.

Having no other use for the printed form, Old Mole filled it in thus:

He sold sugar.—Beenham.

His tribute was not printed.

There arose a mighty quarrel as to whether or no Wherry should be buried in Westminster Abbey. The Poets’ Corner was crowded. Only an indubitableimmortal should have the privilege of resting his bones there. The voices of the nation stormed in argument. Were the works of Wherry literature? Men of acknowledged greatness had found (comparatively) obscure graves. Was there not a risk? . . . There was no risk, said the other side. The heart of the nation had been moved by Wherry, the life of the Empire had been made sweeter because Wherry had lived and written.

Lady Wherry was consulted. A picture of her appeared, with a black-edged handkerchief in front of her face, in the illustrated morning papers. And under it was printed her historic reply:

“Bury him by all means——”

Emotion cut short her words.

The argument was finally taken for decision to high places. Those in them had read the works of Wherry and, like the smallest servant in a suburban garret, had been moved to tears by them.

It was arranged. The Dean and Chapter bowed to the decision.

There was to be a procession. All the celebrities were invited, and, as one of them, Old Mole was included. None was omitted. Never a man who had so much as thrust his nose into the limelight was left out.

In the music-halls it was announced on the kinematograph screens that special films would be presented of the funeral of Sir Robert Wherry, and the audiences applauded.

Old Mole was in the forty-fifth carriage, with SirHenry Butcher and the actress who had created “Lossie,” now an actress-manageress. There were kinematograph operators at every street corner, and Tipton Mudde, the aviator, had received a special dispensation from the Home Secretary allowing him to fly to and fro above the procession and to drop black rosettes into the streets.

It was a wet day.

In the Abbey Old Mole was placed in the north transept, and he sat gazing up into the high, mysterious roof where the music of the great organ rolled and muttered. Chopin’s Dead March was played and Sir Henry Butcher muttered:

“There comes the bloody heart-tear.”

An anthem was sung. Wherry’s (and Gladstone’s) favorite hymn, “O God, our help in ages past.” Apparently there was some delay, for another hymn was sung before the pallbearers and the private mourners came creeping up the nave.

There was silence. The Psalms were sung.

Old Mole heard a reedy, pleasant voice:

“. . . For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal shall put on immortality: then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? . . .”

Behind him he heard a droning voice:

“. . . A solemn and impressive ceremony. There’ll be sermons preached on it on Sunday. We have offered a prize for the best sermon in my paper, ‘People and Books.’ It was in ‘People and Books’that Robert Wherry was first discovered to be a great man. We printed his first serial. I never thought he would reach the heights he did. . . .”

The reedy voice was raised in a toasty fullness:

“Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, as a flower: he fleeth as it were a shadow and never continueth in one stay.”

Through the words came the droning voice:

“He was slow in the beginning. He had doubts and was fool enough to want to plague the public with them. The public wants certainties. It wants winners. I told him that he might have doubts, but they were his own private affair and that it was foolish to commit them to writing. I had ado to make him heed me, but he did heed me, and he got so that he couldn’t fail. It wasn’t in him to fail. He could think just the exact nothing that the public thinks a month or two before they begin to think it themselves. He was fine for religion and home life and young love and all that, but you had to keep him off any serious subject. He knew that, after a time. He knew himself very well, and he would take infinite trouble. He had no real sense of humor, but he learned how to make jokes,—little, sly jokes they were, shy things as though they were never sure of being quite funny enough. It took him years to do it, but he could do it. There’ve been a million and a half of his books sold. We’ll sell fifty thousand this week. . . . Man! I tell ye, I’ve had a hard fight for it. I’ve had thirty press agents up anddown the country, working day and night, sending in stuff from the moment he was ill. I was with him when he ate the oysters. I had sick moments when I thought the newspapers weren’t going to take it up. I put the proposition to the kinematograph people and their interest carried it through. It was a near thing. The Dean hadn’t read the man’s works. I had to find some one above the Dean who had. . . . I helped to make Robert Wherry what he was. I couldn’t, in decency, fail to give my services to his fame and procure him the crowning glory of . . .”

Old Mole, straining forward, heard the reedy voice:

“. . . We give Thee hearty thanks for that it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our brother out of the miseries of this sinful world. . . .”

Sick at heart, Old Mole edged into the aisle and crept out into the air, gratefully drawing in great breaths of it, and thanking the Lord for His mercy in leaving the sky above London and suffering the winds to blow through it and the rain to fall upon it.

In his chambers he found a thin brown man, grave and dignified and dried by the sun.

“You don’t know me, Mr. Beenham?” he said.

Old Mole scanned him.

“No. I can’t say I do.”

“Cuthbert Jones. You may remember. . . .”

Carlton Timmis!

“Sit down, sit down,” said Old Mole. “Iamgladto see you. I wrote to you, wired to you at a place called Crown Imperial.”

“A dirty hole.”

“You heard about your play?”

“Only six weeks ago. In Shanghai. I picked up an old illustrated paper. There was a portrait of Miss Burn in it. I hear she is a success. . . . I was told there is a company touring the China coast with the play.”

“It is still being performed,” said Old Mole. “It has been translated into German, French, Italian, Russian, Hungarian, Dutch, Japanese. . . .”

“Not into Chinese, I hope.”

“Why not?”

“Because I live in China.”

“You haven’t come back, then?”

“To see my father, that is all. As soon as he heard I was thousands of miles away nothing would satisfy him but I must come and see him. He is very ill, I believe, and as I grow older I find that I like to think of him and am, indeed, fond of him. I want to hear him talk Edinburgh philosophy again.”

“Your play, up to date, has made sixty-four thousand pounds.”

The brown man sat up in his chair and laughed.

“It has all been carefully invested and will very soon have grown into seventy thousand. I have had the use of it for two years. I propose now that we go over to the bank and execute a transfer.”

“No, thank you.”

“No? You must. You must.”

“No, thank you. I have brought home three hundred pounds to support my father in his old age. I require nothing for myself. I am perfectly happy. I am a teacher of English in a Chinese government school two hundred miles from the railway, with no telegraph or telephone. I have a wife, a Chinese, who is a marvelous housekeeper, a most admirable mother, as stupid as a cow, and she resolutely refuses to learn English. I have not been able altogether to shake off my interest in the theater, but the traveling Children of the Pear-tree Garden give me greater pleasure than I ever had from any English company in or out of the West End. They are sincere. They are rascals, but they love their work. . . .”

“But the play, and the——”

“. . . Money. . . . If I were you, Mr. Mole, I should drop it over Waterloo Bridge. I came today to return you your fifty pounds, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. I am glad—and sorry—that you have been repaid so plentifully.”

He could not be prevailed on to take a penny, and presently they stopped arguing about it, and Timmis instructed Old Mole in the ways of the Chinese, how they were a wise people who prized leisure above all things, and so ordered their lives as to preserve the simplicity of the soul, without which, it is clear, the brain must be overwrought and dislocated through its vain efforts to do the work of the mind. He drew such a charming picture ofChinese life that Old Mole, with the folly of London etched upon his brain, could not but applaud his decision to return. They talked of many things and wagged their heads over the strange chances of life, and they parted the richer by each other’s respect and admiration and friendly wishes.

And Old Mole returned to the strain of his existence. Impossible, he thought, to stay in London. Equally impossible to retain so huge a sum of money. It would go on swelling like a tumor, and, like a tumor, it would create a stoppage either in his own life or in someone’s else. Had it not already done so? Had it not played its part in the tragi-comedy that was not yet come to its climax? Had it not raised him to an absurd height, blown him out into a caricature of himself, pulled out his nose, goggled his eyes, given him a hunch back and a pot belly, forced him into overfeeding, overdrinking, over-talking, into writing a ridiculous, pontifical, instructive book, choked his humor and played the very devil with his imagination? He pondered this question of the money and at last he had an inspiration. He went down over Blackfriars Bridge and into the slums of Southwark. In a foul street he called at a house and asked how many people there might be living in it. He was told twenty-three: four families. In another there were thirty-one. In another he was asked in by the woman, and there was a corpse on the bed, and there were three children eating bread and jam for their dinner on the tableonly a yard from it, and the woman was clearly going to have another child. He asked the name of the landlord of that house, and next day sought him out. He bought the house: he went on buying until he had the whole row, then the whole street, then the next street and the next, and the next, until his money was all gone but ten thousand pounds. Then he gave orders for all the foul houses to be pulled down and a garden to be made. . . . He was told that it would be impossible—that he would have to get permission from the Borough Council, and the County Council, and Parliament.

“Can’t I do what I like with my own?” he said.

“It’s a question,” said the rent collector who had taken him under his wing, “whether the Council can afford to do without the rates. If you pull the houses down, sir, you’ll only make the overcrowding worse, because they must live somewhere, sir, and, bless you, they don’t mind it. They’re born in it and they die in it. You and I, sir, don’t like the smell, but they don’t never notice it.”

But Old Mole stuck to it and the houses were pulled down and a garden was made, and he said not a word about it to a soul. It was only a very little garden because, though he had bought many houses, he could not buy the land on which all of them were built because it was very dear.

Almost best of all he liked the destructive part of the undertaking. Pulling down houses was in his mood and sorted with his circumstances. From his own house he had set his face.

He had received a letter from Panoukian:

“DEARSIR,—You have eyes in your head and must have seen what I have been at no pains to conceal from you. I have lived through weeks of torture now and would live through many more if there were anything to be gained. I have been led to write this by the enclosed letter, which I can show you, I think, without betrayal.Ich kann nicht mehr.. . . This may be a shock to you, no doubt it will cause you much pain, but I believe you have the humanity to attempt to understand and to believe me when I say that I was never, in my heart, more your friend than I am now. I think it is for you to help in so much suffering.”

“DEARSIR,—You have eyes in your head and must have seen what I have been at no pains to conceal from you. I have lived through weeks of torture now and would live through many more if there were anything to be gained. I have been led to write this by the enclosed letter, which I can show you, I think, without betrayal.Ich kann nicht mehr.. . . This may be a shock to you, no doubt it will cause you much pain, but I believe you have the humanity to attempt to understand and to believe me when I say that I was never, in my heart, more your friend than I am now. I think it is for you to help in so much suffering.”

The enclosed letter was from Matilda. Old Mole’s eye clouded as he read it:

“My dear, I can’t let you go. I can’t, I can’t. I’ve tried so hard, I have. It isn’t wrong to love like that. I can think of nothing else. He’s been so kind, too. But I’m spoiling your life. I can love you, my dear, but I’m not the woman you ought to have. I can love you, my dear, but I’m not young and sweet like you ought to have. All this thinking and suffering has made me hard in my heart, I think. There’s such a lot between me and you, my dear. I could fight through it with you, but that would be so hard on you. It’s not as if he was a bad man, but he’s so kind. He always understands, but not like you, my darling: he only understands with his mind. I’ve tried not to write to you and to make it easy for you, but I can’t not write to you now. I must, even if it’s for the last time. I love you.”

“My dear, I can’t let you go. I can’t, I can’t. I’ve tried so hard, I have. It isn’t wrong to love like that. I can think of nothing else. He’s been so kind, too. But I’m spoiling your life. I can love you, my dear, but I’m not the woman you ought to have. I can love you, my dear, but I’m not young and sweet like you ought to have. All this thinking and suffering has made me hard in my heart, I think. There’s such a lot between me and you, my dear. I could fight through it with you, but that would be so hard on you. It’s not as if he was a bad man, but he’s so kind. He always understands, but not like you, my darling: he only understands with his mind. I’ve tried not to write to you and to make it easy for you, but I can’t not write to you now. I must, even if it’s for the last time. I love you.”

It was an untidy, blotched scrawl. Never had Old Mole seen such a long letter from Matilda. Very carefully he folded it up and placed it in his pocketbook.

He went down to her room, and, as he knew he would, found her boxes packed, her wardrobe, her drawers, empty. The puppy, now a tolerable dog, was gazing ruefully at her trunks, ominous of departure.

She came in, was startled to see him, recovered herself, and smiled at him.

“Will you come with me?” he said.

She followed him upstairs.

“I have something to show you.”

He led her to his room. On the floor were his bags, hatbox, rug, packed, strapped and labeled.

“I am going,” he said. “The puppy will not mind my going.”

A LETTER FROM H. J. BEENHAM TO A. Z. PANOUKIAN, M.P.

“For two years it was the fashion among the English to cut out the appendix; but the fashion died and appendices are now retained.”

OBSERVATIONS AMONG THE ENGLISH, BY C. L. HUNG (BRETZELFRESSER COMPANY, HONG KONG AND NEW YORK).

VIIAPPENDIX

CAPRAIA.

MYDEARPANOUKIAN,

So you have become a politician! I had hoped for better things.

It is ten years now since I left England, so that I can write to you without the prickly heat of moral prejudice. It is a year since I saw you in Venice, you and her. She had her arm in yours and you did not see me. You saw nothing but her, and she saw nothing but you, and it was clear to me that you were enjoying your tenth honeymoon, which is, surely, a far greater thing than the first, if only you can get to it. You came out of St. Mark’s, you and she, and I was so close that I could have touched you. I shrank into the shadow and watched you feed the pigeons, and then you had tea on the sunlit side of the Piazza and then you strolled toward the Rialto. I took a gondola to the station and fled to Verona, for I could have no room in your tenth Eden. Verona is the very place for a bachelor, which, I there discovered, I have never ceased to be. Verona belongs to Romeo and Juliet, and no other lovers may do more than pass the day there, salute and speed on to Venice. But a bachelor may stay there many days: he will find an excellent local wine, good cigars built round straws, passable food, and the swift-flowing Adige wherein to cast his thoughts. This I did, with a blessing or two to be conveyed toyou in Venice. I hope you received them. The Adige bears thoughts and blessings and sewage with equal zest to his goal, as I would all men might do.

I stayed for a month in Verona and I remember little of it but some delicious plums I bought in the marketplace and ate in the amphitheater, spitting the stones down into the arena with a dexterity I have only seen equaled by Matilda in the days of my first acquaintance with her. That is far back now, but there is not a moment of it all that I do not like to remember, and there in the amphitheater I told myself the whole adventure as a story from which I was detached. It moved me more than the house of Juliet, more than all the sorrows of the Scaligers, for it is a modern story and, as Molière said,“Les anciens sont les anciens et nous sommes les gens d’aujourd’hui.”

Aujourd’hui!To-day! That is the marvel, that out of the swiftly moving, ever changing vapor which is life we should achieve anything so positive. To-day never goes. There is a thing called yesterday, but that is only the dust-bin at the door into which we cast our refuse, our failures, our worn-out souls. There is a thing called to-morrow, but that is the storehouse of to-day, bursting with far better things, emotions, loves, hopes, than those we have discarded. But into to-day the whole passionate force of the universe is poured, through us, through all things, and therefore to-day is marvelous.

Here in Italy there is some worship of to-day. There are times and times when it is enough to be alive; and there are times when the light glows magically and the whole body and being of a man melt into it, thrill in worship, and then, however old he be, however burdened with Time’s tricks of the flesh, in his heart there are songs and dancing.

In England we cling to the past, we never knowto-day, we never dare open the storehouse of tomorrow, for we are all trained in the house of Mother Hubbard. I have loved England dearly since I have lived away from her. I can begin, I think, to understand. She is weary, maybe; she has many hours of boredom. She is, alas, a country where grapes grow under glass, where, I sometimes think, men do not grow at all. She is a country of adolescents; her sons seem never to be troubled by the difficulties which beset the adult mind; they rush ahead, careless of danger because they never see it; their lives hang upon a precarious luck: they are impelled, not, I believe, as other nations fancy, by greed or conceit, but by that furious energy which attends upon the adolescent hatred of being left out of things. A grown man can tolerably gauge his capacity, but the desires of a youth are constantly excited by the desires of others; he must acquire lest others obtain; he must love every maiden and yield to none; he must be forever donning new habits to persuade himself that he is more a man than the grown men among whom enviously he moves. He is filled with a fevered curiosity about himself, but never dares stay to satisfy it, lest he should miss an opportunity of bidding for the admiration and praise of others which he would far rather have than their sympathy. Sympathy he dreads, for it forces him back upon himself, brings him too near to seeing himself without excitement. . . . So far, my observations, carefully selected, take me.

There have been grown men in England, wonderful men, men all strength and sympathy and love, with powers far surpassing the intelligence of other races: but mark how the English treat them. They set them on a pinnacle, give them the admiration they despised, take none of their sympathy, raise horrible statues to their memory, and, to protectthemselves against their thought, the mighty force of truth in their souls, breed dwarfish imitations of them, whom they adore and love as men can only love those of their own moral race. No other country less deserves to have great men, and no other country has gotten greater. This astonishing phenomenon has produced that complacency which is the only check on the fury of England’s adolescent energy. Without it, without the Brummagem dignity in which such complacency takes form, she would long ago have rushed to her destruction. With it she has a political solidity to which graver and more intelligent nations can never aspire.

But I should not talk politics to a politician. Nothing, I think you will agree, can reconcile conceptions bred in the House of Commons with those begot outside it. It has never yet been accomplished, and I gather, from the few English journals I see, that the attempt to do so is all but abandoned.

I am writing to you to-day because I wished to do so in Verona, but was there too deep in an emotional flux to be able to write anything but bad poetry or a crude expression of sympathy, which, as it would have been gratuitous, must have been offensive. To-day, in Livorno (which our sailors have chewed with their tobacco into Leghorn), I found among my papers a letter written to you by Matilda nearly twelve years ago. It belongs to you and I send it.

Yesterday in Livorno I found a marionette show and that set me thinking of England and the theater and many other subjects which used to absorb me during the hectic years of my life when I dwelt in Gray’s Inn. And I wished to communicate with England and could find no one to whom I am so nearly attached as you. I was engaged to visit Elba,and was there this morning, but was so distressed with the thought of the extreme youthfulness of England’s treatment of the great Napoleon that I left my party and crossed over to Capraia, which you will find on the map, and here, under the hot sun, with a green umbrella over my bald head, I am writing. I can see Elba. With my mind’s eye I can see England, and, indeed, when soberly I turn the matter over, I conclude that her treatment of Napoleon has not been nearly so shameful as her treatment of Shelley or Shakespeare. Shelley wrote one play; it has never openly been acted. Shakespeare wrote many plays; they have been Butchered, reduced from the dramatic to the theatrical.

The marionettes stirred me greatly. The drama they played was familiar—husband, wife, and lover—the treatment conventional, though the dialogue had the freshness of improvisation. It was often bald as my head, and in the more passionate moments almost heartbreakingly inarticulate. It was a tragedy; the husband slew the lover, the wife stabbed herself, the husband went mad, and they lay together in a limp heap, while from the street outside—where, I felt sure, there were gay puppets carelessly strolling—came the most comic, derisive little tune played upon a reed. (It must have been a reed, for it was most certainly puppet and no human music, and, for that, only the more stirring.) The whole scene is as living to my mind as any experience of my own, and, indeed, my own adventures in this life have been illuminated by it. In the English theater I have never seen a performance that did not thicken and obscure my consciousness. I could not but contrast the two, and you find me sitting on an island striving to explain it.

In the first place the performance of these marionettes compelled my whole-hearted interest becausethe play was detached from life, was not palpably unreal under the artificial light, and therefore could begin to reflect and be a comment upon life in a degree of success dependent, of course, upon the mind behind it. It was a common but a simple mind, skilled in the uses of the tiny theater, versed in its tradition, and always nice in its perception of the degrees of emotion proper to be loosed for the building up of the dramatic scenes. It was not truly an imaginative mind, not a genuinely dramatic mind, but it was thoroughly loyal to the imagination which has created and developed the theater of the marionettes. Except that the showman had a marked preference for the doll who played the husband, the balance of the play was excellently maintained, and the marionettes did exactly as they were bid. Thus between the controlling mind of the theater, the mind in its tradition, and my own there was set up a continuous and unbroken communication, and my brain was kept most exaltingly busy drawing on those forces and passions, those powers of selection and criticism which make of man a reasoning and then a dramatic animal. You may be sure that I fed the drama on the stage with that other drama, through which you and I floundered so many years ago. I longed to cry out to the husband that he should think less of himself and what the neighbors would say and more of his wife, who, being between two men, enamored of one and dedicated to the other, was in a far worse plight than himself, who was torn only between his affection and his pride. But tradition and convention and his own brainless subservience to his passion were too strong for him, and he killed the lover; would have killed the woman, too, but she was too quick for him. I wept, I assure you. I was sorrowful. Judge, then, of my relief and delight when the curtain rose again andthose same three puppets, with others, played the merriest burlesque, a starveling descendant, I fancy, of thecommedia dell’ arte.Where before they had surrendered to their passions, now my three puppets played with them at nimble knucklebones. The passion was no less genuine, but this time they were its masters, not its slaves, they had it casked and bunged and could draw on it at will. My lady puppet coquetted with the two gentlemen, set them wrangling for her, wagering, dicing, singing, dancing, vying with each other in mischievous tricks upon the town, and at last, owing, I suspect, to the showman’s partiality, she sank into the husband puppet’s arms and the lover puppet was propelled by force of leg through the window. (Pray, my dear Panoukian, admire the euphemism to spare both our feelings.) And now I laughed as healthily and heartily as before I wept. . . . Now, said I to myself, in England I should have been tormented with a picture, cut up by the insincerity of the actors into “effective” scenes and episodes, of three eminently respectable persons shaking themselves to bits with a passion they had never had; or, for comedy, there would have been the ribaldry of equally respectable persons twisting themselves into knots in their attempts to frustrate the discovery of a mis-spent night. Now, thought I, this brings me near the heart of the mystery. There are few men and women born without the kernel of passion. There are forty millions of men and women in the British Isles; what do they do with their passion? What, indeed—let us be frank—had I done with my own?

Now do you perceive why I am writing to you?

First of all, let us agree that boyhood is the least zestful part of a man’s life. His existence is not then truly his own, he is a spectator; he is absorbed in gazing upon the great world which at a seeminglyremote period he is to enter. Then he is apprenticed, initiated by the brutal test of a swift growth and physical change; easily he learns the ways, the manners, the pursuits of men; the conduct of the material world, the common life, is all arranged; he has but to slip into it. That is easy. But his own individual life, that is not so easy. He soon perceives, confusedly and mistily, that into that he can only enter through his passion, through its spontaneous and inevitable expression. He knows that; you know it. I know it. They are a miserable few who do not know it. But in England he can find none to share his knowledge. He is left alone with his dread, with so much sick hope thrust back in him, for want of a generous salute from those who have gone before, that it rots away in him and eats into his natural faith. He asks for a vision of manhood and is given a dull imitation of man, strong, silent, brutal, and indifferent. He must admire it, for on all sides it is admired. As a child he has been taught to babble of gentle Jesus; as a youth he finds that same Jesus turned—by the distorting English atmosphere—into a hard Pharisee, blessing the money changers. His passion racks his bones and blisters his soul. His inmost self yearns to get out and away, to spend itself, to find its due share in the ever-creating love. He dare not so much as whisper his need, for none but shameful words are given him to express it. “All’s well with the world,” he is told. “All’s wrong with myself,” he begins to think. In other men, older men, he can find no trace of passion, only temper and lewdness, with a swagger to both. They bear both easily. His passion becomes hateful to him; he begins to chafe against it, to spurn it, to live gaily enough in the common life, to choke the vision of his own life. So it has been with you, with me, with all of us.

There are works of art, it is true. Grown men understand them; adolescents hate them, for works of art reveal always the fulfilment of passion; they begin to flower at the point to which passion has raised the soul; they are the record and the landmarks of its after-journeyings, its own free traveling. To the soul in bondage all that is but babble and foolish talk, just as, to the adolescent, the simplicity of the grown man is folly. That a man should believe in human nature—as he must if he believes in himself—is, in adolescent eyes, suspect. . . . Have you not heard intelligent Englishmen say contemptuously of a man that he is an idealist, as who should say idiot?

Passion leads to idealism, to belief that there is a wisdom greater than the wisdom of men, a knowledge of which the knowledge of men is but a part, a pulse in the universe by which they may set the beat of their own.

What do the English do with their passion? They strangle it.

What did I do with my own? I let it ooze and trickle away. I accepted my part in the common life, and of my own life preserved only certain mild delights and dull passive joys, which became milder and duller as the years went by. I was engaged in educating the young. I shudder to think of it now. When I think of the effect those years, and that curriculum, had upon my own mind I turn sick to imagine the harm it must have done to the young, eager minds—(the dullest child’s mind is eager)—entrusted to my care by their confiding, worthy, and adolescent parents. It is a horror to me to look back on it, and I look back as little as may be.

But to-day, in the security of glorious weather, the impregnable peace of my island slung between blue sea and sky, I can look back with amused curiosity,setting my infallible puppets against the blustering half-men whom I remember to have inhabited those portions of England that I knew. I do not count myself a freeman, but one who has escaped from prison and still bears the marks of it in his mind; it is to rid myself of those marks that I am thus wrapt in criticism, and not to condemn the lives of those who are left incarcerated. Impossible to condemn without self-condemnation. No doubt they are making the best of it. . . . I find that I cannot now think of anything in the world as separate from myself; the world embraces all things, and so must I; but to do so comfortably I must first understand everything that is sufficiently imaged to be within the range of my apprehension. Neither more nor less can I attempt. If more, then I am plunged in error and confusion; if less, then am I the captive of my own indolence, and such for the greater part of my life I have been.

When I look back on my experience in London I cannot but see that I never became a part of it, never truly lived in its life. That may have been only because a quarter of a century spent as an autocrat among small boys is not perhaps the ideal preparation for living in a crowd, a herd without a leader, in which there is no rule of manners but: Be servile when you must, insolent when you can. Possibly the majority are so bred and trained that such a flurry and scurry seem to them normal and inevitable. I am sure very many are convinced that without intrigue and wirepulling they cannot get their bread, or the position which will ensure a continued supply. There they certainly are; wriggling and squirming and pushing; they like it; they make no move to get out of it; their existence is bound up in it and they fight to preserve it without looking further. They will tell you that they are assisting “movements,”but they are only following fashions. . . . What movement are you in?

Matilda, I gather, is a fashion. I never knew her follow anything but her own desire, and as her desires are human and reasonable she has risen by the law of gravity above the rout, above the difficulties of her own nature, above any incongruities that arise between her individuality and the conventions of the common life of England. And of course she rises above the work she has to do, the idiotic songs written for her, the meaningless dances devised to sort with the pointless tunes. And when she suffers from the emptiness of it all, she has you, and she has the memory of myself to guard her against the filthy welter from which she sprang. She used me—(you will let her read this)—and I am proud to have served her.

There are many people like Matilda, comedians and entertainers, who develop a certain strength of personality in their revolt against the conditions of their breeding. It is impossible to educate them. Their intentions are too direct. . . . Not all of them succeed, or have the luck to become the fashion. You are one of them yourself, my dear Panoukian, and in the days when I was living with you two I used excitedly to think that there was a whole generation of them; that the young men and women of England were at last insisting on growing out of adolescence. Sometimes I felt very sure of it, but I was too sanguine. Life does not act like that; there are no sudden general growths. There are violent reactions, but they are soon swallowed up in the great forward flow.

“Comedians and entertainers” I said just now. You are all that, all you public characters. You depend upon the crowd, you are too near them. You are in dread of falling back, and also you are awarethat the size of a man can only be gauged at a distance, and you have to contend with the charlatan. A better comedian you may be, but he has not your scruples, your sensitiveness, and is therefore more dexterous at drawing the crowd’s attention. . . . Again I turn with relief to my puppets; they have no temptation to insincerity; they obey the strings, play their parts, and are put back into their boxes. They need no bread for body or mind. They have no life except the common life of the stage, no individuality and no torturing need of fulfilling it.

But you comedians—writers, actors, politicians, divines—are raised above the common life by the degree in which you have developed your individual lives, including your talents, by work, by energy, sometimes deplorably by luck. The validity of your claims is tested by your ability to break with the common life, and pass on to creation and discovery which shall bring back into the common life power to make it more efficient.

I must define. By the common life I mean the pooling of energy which shall provide all members of the community with food, clothing, house room, transport, the necessaries of existence, and such luxuries as they require. Its concern is entirely material. Where it governs moral, ethical, and spiritual affairs it is an injurious infringement, and cannot but engender hypocrisy. How can you pool religion, or morality, without degrading compromise? The world has discarded kingcraft and priestcraft and come to mobcraft. That will have its day. Mobcraft is and cannot but be theatrical. In a community of human beings who are neither puppets nor men there is a perpetual shuffling of values among which to live securely there is in all relations an unhealthy amount of play-acting;—take any husband and wife, father and son, mother anddaughter, lover and lover, or, Panoukian, schoolmaster and pupil. Life is then too like the theater for the theater to claim an independent existence. And that, I think, is why there is no drama in England. That is why the play-actors have columns and columns in the newspapers devoted to their doings, their portraits in shops and thoroughfares, their private histories (where presentable or in accordance with the public morality of the common life) laid bare.

That view of English life so freezes me that I lie back under my umbrella and thank God for the Italian sun.

Has it always been so in England? I think not. Garrick was a self-respecting, if a conceited, individual. He believed in his work and he had some dramatic sense. The theater had no credit then; even his genius could not raise it to the level of English institutions. But his genius made him independent, and still the theater was parasitic upon the Court. Subsequently the English Court, which, never since Charles II, had taken any genuine interest in it, repudiated the theater which then had healthily to struggle for its existence. I fancy that in Copas—(Matilda’s uncle)—I found the last genuine survivor of the race of mummers of which Henry Irving was the last triumphant example. They strangled the theater with their own personalities, for only by the strength of their personalities could they force themselves upon the attention of an England huddled away in dark houses, grimly, tragically, in secrecy, play-acting. With every house a playhouse, how can the theater be taken seriously? With so much engrossing pretence in their homes, men have no need of professional mummers; with a fully developed Nonconformist conscience,an Englishman can be his own playwright, mummer, and audience. He grudges the money paid to professional actors, despises any contrivance they can show him, spurns the whole affair as a light thing, wantonness, a dangerous toy that may upset the valuations by which he arrives at his own theatrical effect.

There was a time when the Englishman’s home was his theater. My own home was like that: year in, year out there was a tremendous groveling before God, and a sweaty wrestling with the Devil, and a barometrical record of prowess in both was kept. Human relations sneaked in when no one was looking, took the stage when the curtain was down; I was lucky, and on the whole had a good time in spite of the show, which, I am bound to say, I thoroughly enjoyed. My father was a very fine man at the groveling and the wrestling (and knew it), but in his human relations he was awkward, heavy, and blundering in the very genuine tenderness which he could not always escape;—and I think he knew that, too, poor wretch.

There must be fewer such homes now, but still an enormous number. God and Devil are not so potent, but the habit of posturing remains, has been handed down and carried over into human relations—(at least God and Devil did protect us from that!)—so that there is not one, not the most intimate and sacred, but is made subtly the occasion of self-indulgence, easy, complacent, and devastating; the epidemic disease consequent on the airless years from the Reform Bill to the South African War—(you will remember the histrionics before, during and after that tragedy of two nations). The old English home—theatrical and oleographic—has been destroyed by it, and I rejoice as I rejoice to hear that the Chinese women are abandoning thefolly of stunting their feet. We used to stunt the soul, the affections, human passions. Unbind the China woman’s feet and she suffers agonies, so that she cannot walk. Thus it has been with us; we have suffered mortal agonies; we have been saved from madness by the inherited theatrical habit, by which we have shuffled through the human relationships enforced by our natural necessities and the inconsiderate insistence upon being born of the next generation. We have shuffled through them, I say, and we have made them charming, but we have not yet—shall we ever?—made them beautiful. There has been no true song in our hearts, only songs without wordsà laMendelssohn, nor yet a full music in our blood. We have imitated these things, from bad models, drawn crude sketches of them. I, for instance, play-acted myself into marriage; when it came to getting out of it, play-acting was of no avail, though even for that emergency, as you know, the English game has its rules. . . . I could not conform to them, and in that I believe I shared in the general experience of the race. I was pitchforked out of the old theatricality into the new and found it ineffective. That must be happening every day, in thousands, perhaps in millions, of cases. . . . I feel hopeful, and yet unhappy, too, for my experience came to me too late. I have been able to discard; but, for the new life—vita nuova—I have not wherewith to grasp, to take into myself, to make my own. Even here on this island, in this country of light, I do not seem to myself to be fully alive, but am an outsider, a spectator, even as I was when a small boy, and I shall go down into this warm earth hardly riper than I was when I was born, nurtured only by one genuine experience and that negative. But for that I am thankful. It has made it possible for me to ruminate, if not to act, to rejoice in the possessionof my uncomely and unwieldy body, to be content with that small fragment of my soul which I have mastered.

(It is really delightful to be writing to you again. It brings you before me, as a boy, a little piping boy; as a posturing and conceited youth—do you remember the cruel snub inflicted on you by Tallien, the French master? I had sent you to him with a message, and he said: “Tell Mr. Beenham I will take no message from his conceited puppy.” You! A prefect!—as a heated and quite too Stendhalian young man. It is charming.)

But I am rueful when I reflect that I solved my difficulty, which, after all, was a portion of the English difficulty, by leaving England. I should have stayed; fought it out; wrestled through with it until the three of us were properly and in all eyes established in that new relation to which inevitably we should have come. I was too old. I was too much under the habit of thinking of consequences; too English, too theatrical to believe that life does not deal in neat and finished endings. I could see nothing before me but the ugly conventional way of throwing mud at the woman and bringing you to an unjust and undeserved ruin, or the way most pleasing to my sentimentality, of withdrawing from the scene and leaving you to make the best of it; as, no doubt, you have done, since you are both successful personages and well in the limelight, and able to go triumphantly from honeymoon to honeymoon.

Are there children? I hope there are children!

And there begins my real difficulty. Not that I care about legitimacy. No reasonable child will ask more than to be conceived in a healthy body, born in a clean atmosphere, and bred in a decently ordered home. But if there are children you should not be separated. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps Ihave been long enough absent for your world to forget my existence. But I have my doubts. I too much dread the English atmosphere not to feel that it must have been too strong for you, and you will have accepted your parts in the play.

But, if there are children, there should be no play-acting in their immediate surroundings, in the love that brought them into being.

How I wish you could have seen my marionettes! We should then have an emotional meeting point. As it is, I seem to be dancing round and round you almost as agilely as though I were with you in England, in the thick of polite London. That surely is what you need, on your thickly populated island, a point at which the lower streams of thought can converge, so that your existence may more resemble a noble estuary than a swampy delta.

You will see that I am sane enough to be thinking more of your (possibly non-existent) children than of you. There are two clear ideas in my head, and they desire each other in marriage—the idea of children and the idea of the theater. But, alas! I fear it is beyond me to bring them together. I cannot reach beyond my marionettes, which are, after all, only the working models of the theater I should like to conceive, and, having conceived, to create and set down in England as a reproach to the clumsy sentimental play-acting of English life. That would, I believe, more powerfully than any other instrument, quell the disease. If you had a theater which was a place of art it would lead you on to life, and you would presently discard the sham morals, imitation art, false emotions, and tortuous thoughts with which you now defend yourselves against it.

I have written much under my umbrella. I hope I have said something. At least, with this, I shake you by the hand and we three puppets dance onthrough the merry burlesque which our modern life will seem to be to the wiser and healthier generations who shall come after us.

The old are supposed to be in a position to advise the young. I have learned through you, and yet I may give you this counsel: “If ever you find yourself faced with a risk, take it.” Love, I conclude, is a voyager, and it is our privilege to travel with him; but, if we stay too long in the inn of habit, we lose his company and are undone.

Yours affectionately,

H. J. BEENHAM.

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