FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[1]I should have said,nothing.[2]This is a good opportunity, observe:—Gibbon,Dec. and Fall of Rom. Emp., Ed. 1831 (Cassell), Chap. XXIII, Par. 27, n. 125. Does it not look impressive?

[1]I should have said,nothing.

[2]This is a good opportunity, observe:—Gibbon,Dec. and Fall of Rom. Emp., Ed. 1831 (Cassell), Chap. XXIII, Par. 27, n. 125. Does it not look impressive?

A friend of mine once wrote a parable ("and if these words should meet his eye," etc.). I have not seen it written down. It may have been written down. But in its verbal form it was something like this (as it was told to me).

A number of candidates were offered what they would choose. But they could choose only one thing each. The first chose health. And the second, beauty. And the third, virtue. And the fourth, form. And the fifth, ticklishness, which means an active sense. And the sixth, forgetfulness. And the seventh, honesty. And the eighth, immunity from justice. And the ninth, courage. And the tenth, experience. And the eleventh, the love of others for him. And the twelfth, his love for others. But the thirteenth (they were thirteen, including Judas) chosemoney. And he chose wisely, for in choosing this, all the others were added unto him.

If ever I complete that book which I began in the year 1898 called "Advice to a Young Man" (I was twenty-eight years of age at the moment I undertook it) it will there be apparent by example, closely reasoned argument, and (what is more convincing than all) rhetoric, that moneyis the true source of every delight, satisfaction, and repose.

Do not imagine that, upon this account, I advise the young to seek money in amounts perpetually extending. Far from it! I advise the young (in this my uncompleted book) to regulate their thirst for money most severely.

"Great sums of money" (said I, and say I) "are only to be obtained by risking ruin, and of a hundred men that run the risk ninety-nine get the ruin and only one the money." But money as a solid object; money pursued, accumulated, possessed, enjoyed, bearing fruit: that is the captain good of human life.

When people say that money is only worth what it will purchase, and that it will purchase only certain things, they invariably make a category of certain material things which it will purchase, and imagine or hope that it will purchase no more. And these categories, remember, are drawn up always by unmoneyed men. For your moneyed man has no need to work and therefore no need to draw up categories, which is a very painful form of toil. They say money will purchase motor-cars and bathrooms—several bathrooms—and foods and drinks and the rest of it—and then its power is exhausted.

These fools leave out two enormous chapters—the biggest chapters of the lot. They leave out the services of other men, always purchasable. And they leave out the souls of other menoften purchasable. With money in a sufficient amount you can purchase any service, and with money you can purchase many individual souls.

Now, that is important.

Take the purchasing of services with money. You start a newspaper. Perhaps you cannot write very well yourself. I have known very many extremely rich men whose writing was insignificant—never persuasive or enduring in effect. The greater part of them cannot write for more than a few minutes without breaking down. Just as an elderly man cannot play Rugby football for more than a few minutes or so without breaking down. But they can hire men to write. And they do. They do not exactly buy the souls of those men they hire. They only buy the services. Often enough have I had a pleasant talk with one of these serfs in private when his daily task was done (at from one to three thousand a year) concerning the vices of his master and the follies which he (the serf) had had to defend with his pen.

But to be able to purchase the services of men thus (I am only speaking of my own trade, but all other trades are equally purchasable, and the lawyers actuallyadvertisethat they are purchasable!)—to be able, I say, to purchase services thus is a category ridiculously neglected by those who pretend that money brings nothing but material enjoyment.

It brings, for instance, immunity from thecriminal law. At least it does to-day. It did not until modern times even here, but it does to-day. If you doubt it, take a little bit of paper and mark the men who have been sent to prison during your own lifetimewhilepossessed (notafter having beenpossessed) of five thousand a year. It is an instructive winter game.

But if money can purchase services it can also, with less certitude, but on a very large scale, purchase those other little things we noted—the souls of men. Here there is a distinction.

When you purchase a service you do not necessarily purchase a soul. You only purchase a soul when, by the action of your money, you corrupt the individual. I do not say "corrupt him beyond all salvation," but, at any rate, beyond any remaining desire for salvation. When, for instance, by the possession of money, you acquire the respect of a man, you are, to a small extent, purchasing his soul. When by the action of money you make a man fall into certain habits which at last become his character, you are purchasing a soul.

I keep on saying "you," though I know well enough, wretched reader, that you are in no position to do all this. In fact, you find it the devil and all to purchase what is necessary for your household. If you are a man with a thousand a year, for instance (there have just passed my window three men with a good deal less, not judged by their clothes but by my knowledge ofthem in a countryside), then you are worth what was called before the war about four hundred pounds a year. Taxation and Inflation, the twin gods that rhyme, have done for the rest.

If you are what they called before the war a rich man (you will excuse me, but random essays are read by all sorts of people), if you were, say, a squire with six thousand a year, you are now worth what your local scribbler at two thousand a year was worth before the war. Horrible but true. So when I say "you," I only do so by way of rhetoric and of shorthand. I cannot be pestered to know what each of you is exactly worth, and, upon my soul, as things now are, I do not think any one of you exactly knows.

To return. I say that money, acting thus, purchases souls. It purchases souls not only in regardant, but in gross. In regardant, I may explain, means "as regards the particular relation between one soul and its purchaser," while in gross means "of the world in general."

Thus a man may be a serf regardant when he is a serf to a particular lord, but not a serf in his general status. Or he may be a serf in gross, that is, a serf to anybody who comes across him. And in the same way, there is a cad regardant and a cad in gross, and still more is there a coward regardant and a coward in gross. For instance, a man may be a general coward, and that is being a coward in gross, or he may bea particular coward in the matter of riding a particular horse, and then he is only a coward regardant.

I say, then, that the power of your money to purchase souls may be in gross or regardant. It may purchase a particular soul, in which case, God help you! Or it may have a general effect upon All Souls (I mean not the College but the generality of mankind, for whom I postulate souls), and in this case you are not perhaps very much to blame. It is rather their fault than yours.

When your money has purchased souls in gross—gross souls in gross and grossly purchased by the gross—it means that you are worshipped for your money, and this is as common a worship as the worship men give to their country.

There is a kind of insufficiency—I had almost called it idiocy—which tries to shuffle out of this valuable truth by pointing to particular cases (there are perhaps half a dozen at one time in a great community like ours) of men who, possessing great wealth, are yet not respected. But you will find that these are exceptions who have deliberately done all that they could not to be respected. The ruck of men with large fortunes are respected for all those things which money is supposed to bring—justice, kindliness, humour, temperance, courage and judgment. And even the very few rich men who are not respected are still admired for some mystical quality. "Theremust have been something in the man for him to have made half a million before he was forty."

I should have said, "There must have been something lacking in other men for this guttersnipe to have got so much out of them," but I am here deliberately the devil's advocate, and I know that I have not a leg to stand on.

If you are possessed of great wealth ... (Digression: Little wealth is disgusting, like mediocrity in verse. If you are going in for being wealthy you must be very wealthy or not wealthy at all. Anywhere in a plutocracy may you see the very wealthy hobnobbing with poor hack-writers and versifiers and essay writers and such, but never with the quarter-wealthy or the eighth-wealthy) ... if you are possessed of great wealth, I say you are, in a plutocracy, a great man. You are both loved and feared; everywhere respected and also admired. Your good qualities are as enduring as stone; your evil qualities are either transformed into something slight and humorous or sublimated till they disappear.

There is more than this. Something goes on within yourself. Because you are respected and admired you become more solid. You envisage your faults sanely. You are far from morbid. If you have the manhood to correct your failings, you correct them temperately. You have poise and grasp. If, more wisely, you indulge your foibles—why, that is a pardonable recreation. Your judgments are well-founded. Youare tempted to nothing rash or perilous. You may be led, for the relief of tedium, into some slight eccentricity or other, but that will give you the more initiative and a strong personality: not exactly genius, for genius is a zigzag thing, burning and darting, unsuited to the true greatness of wealth. It has not enough ballast and repose.

What is most important of all, those whose permanent affection you ardently desire, those whose good you crave, those whose respect you hunger for like food, will all of them at once respond to your desire if money backs it. You can give them what they really need, and you can give it them unexpectedly when they really need it. Thus do they associate you with happiness. You, meanwhile, can behave with the leisure that produces their respect. Gratitude will do the rest, or, at any rate, security, and the habit of knowing that fromyouproceeds so much good.

Thus does dear Mammon give us half a Paradise on earth and a fine security within. Mammon is an Immediate Salvation. And the price you pay for that Salvation is not so very heavy after all: only a creeping gloom; a despair, turning iron and threatening to last for ever.

So the whole thing may be summed up in a sentence that runs in my head more or less like this: "Make unto you friends of the Mammon of iniquity that they may receive you into theireverlastinghabitations." My italics.

As I stood in Treves Market Place the other day after an absence of seven years (and the war in between) I could not but wonder whether—since the tide in Europe has turned—the city would not recover what is, if they only knew it, the glory of these German towns: its individual tradition; its private excellence; its pride in antiquity.

Treves as an outer frontier thing is unworthy of its history. Treves was never meant to be a dependency of vulgar Prussia. It is as old as Europe. It has, like all those towns of the Rhine basin—of which it is the last Western example—a faculty for preserving what is old and an active tradition within it of the Roman Empire. It was a provincial capital of that Empire just at the moment of the transition before the central government broke down, and the story of it from that time onwards has never been interrupted. There are many modern authorities who pretend (basing their thesis upon guesswork) that Treves and this lower valley of the Moselle was once Celtic—or, as we say to-day, French—that it was just like Toul, or Metz, or Verdun, but that the district was later overflowed by German speech; that it wasinvaded. There is no real or certain evidence for any change in the boundaries of German speech towards the West within recorded time. The various German dialects (which were, of course, not original at the beginning of our recorded history, but were already more than half Latin in their wording) reached to a certain limit which they have not overpassed in two thousand years, but from which also they have not receded. Treves, I take it, was what to-day we callGermanjust as much when Priscillian was there condemned as it is to-day.

The stamp of Rome is set upon it very largely, as it is upon everything German west of the central forests and the waste Baltic land. And Treves has the good fortune to have preserved great monuments of that time. The Black Gate is the most famous of them. But I am not sure that the restored Basilica, though most of its bricks are new, does not affect the traveller more.

You might come upon that Basilica of Treves in Ravenna, and it would not be out of place. By a nice irony, its strict, solemn simplicity, its high, blind arches, regular and repetitive, its vast blank of wall, and all that reminds you of the later Cæsars, were given over for use as a garrison church to dull Pomeranium men from hundreds of miles away, a garrison which has now disappeared. By a nice irony, this astounding thing, instinct with Rome, was used for the artificial parade of Prussians who were as littlenative to Treves as one breed of similarly speaking men could be to another. This great church and the Black Gate at the other end of the town, piled up enormous above the market centre, are the chief standing recollections of that moment when the Empire had just settled into its Christian mould. They saw St. Martin coming in, as Milan had seen him. They saw the crowds that besieged the Imperial Courts when the Spanish bishop was condemned. They saw the procession that moved out to his beheading.

And there is a third point in Treves which arrests one still more, although it is broken to an old ruin, and that is the remaining decayed defence of the old palace. It has been built up, and rebuilt up with rough stone, through the Dark Ages, so that now you look at the rude courses and the rough, half-buried arches as you look at a piece of Pevensey or Richborough. But the very fact of its continuous decline in grandeur recalls its continuous use, and you can stand in a roofless room which held in turn the Apostate and the giant Maximin, and which heard the high, piping voice of Charlemagne, incongruous with his tall presence and dignity.

All that great transition from the pagan to the mediæval Europe one feels more at Treves even than one does at Aix; and this, I suppose, is because the roots of Treves go deeper; but partly, also, because Treves is more of a border town.

Like every countryside in Europe, this richpocket in the valley of the Moselle has kept its real spirit, its individual soul, alive underneath the covering of conquest and administration. If Treves were to-morrow to become again, as it was in the past for so many centuries, a State, there would be hardly any change to the eye. The same sharply-cut hills going in succession like cliffs along the valley—the typical hills of Lorraine which Claude loved—would still carry the same terraced vineyards, and the specially Northern cultivation of the grape would show all its accustomed marks.

As one goes up the valley, one may still see upon one of the sandstone slabs of the steep above the river road, a sign marking the limit of the jurisdiction of the Archbishop, a crozier and a cross deeply carved into the smooth rock. It is a symbol of what Treves was in the past, of its strong local character and individuality. Perhaps some later symbol will mark the resurrection of that spirit.

There is also in the heart of the town something which the people may well boast of as a mark of their Western inheritance. It is the first of the Gothic churches of Germany.

It came surprisingly early. Suger had planted, during the Second Crusade, three miles north of the Gate of Paris, the aboriginal pointed arch from which so vast a revolution in architecture was to spring. You get the cathedral of Notre Dame, and the whole movement of the Ile deFrance. But this little church, right up against the tremendous cathedral of the Dark Ages, this little church here, hundreds of miles away from the Gallic origin of such things, was begun actually within a hundred years of Suger's innovation! St. Louis was still a boy, and so was Henry III of England, when the first stones of the delicate thing were laid here in Treves. How European and civilised a place it was in those days!

And talking of this church, I came upon something there even more astonishing than its early witness to the Western spirit of Treves. Immediately to the left of the choir I also found a witness of theenduranceof civilisation in Treves—a thing of, I suppose, the other day—a little statue in freestone, of the most heavenly sort: what the will of an English king prettily called "Mariolam quemdam"—"some little Madonna or other."

It seemed to be unknown. There was no reproduction of it in the town. No one had a photograph of it. No one could tell me who had carved it. It looked quite new. It was as good a thing as even I have seen. And it was here in Treves! It was in a place which finds itself upon the map (as the map still insecurely stands) mixed up with the monstrosities of the monument of Leipsic, the hideous vulgarity of the Hohenzollerns and their palace at Posen (but I forgot—Posen is no longer counted upon thesame map; it has been restored to civilisation), the comic streets of Berlin.

Seeing such a noble statue there, I thought to myself of what advantage it would be if the people who write about Europe would really travel. If only they would stop going from one large cosmopolitan hotel to another, and giving us cuttings from newspapers as the expressions of the popular soul! If only they would peer about and walk and see things with their eyes!

This little statue to the left of the choir of Treves would be an education for such men. No longer would they talk of Treves as something identical with strange and distant Koenigsberg or as a cousin to base Frankfort. It would no longer be for them a railway station or a dot upon the map. Even as I looked at that statue I bethought myself of that other statue: the enormity at Metz. For, as we all know, the Prussian Government built, or rather plastered, onto the Western porch of Metz a red statue of the late Emperor and Prussian King. He appears as the Prophet Daniel! The rest of the cathedral is of a marvellous and aged grey, but he is red, carved out of red stone. He is dressed up in a sort of monk's habit with a cowl. His moustaches are turned up fiercely at the end—and yet the statue is solemnly inscribed with that title: "The Prophet Daniel"....

These are the things that our generation has seen and that posterity will not believe.

I, within one week, experienced, felt, saw and handled with my mind, the two chief creations of the human spirit: a marvellous piece of luck! I heard Mass in Seville Cathedral on an autumn Sunday. The Sunday after I sat at the Français marvelling atThe Misanthrope.

These two creations, the one in stone, the other in The Verb, are, so far as I know, the summit of our European creative power, and therefore of the world.

They praise the Giralda of Seville, the great tower outside the Cathedral, and they are right. But they are wrong when they praise it with a more or less conscious motive of crying up Islam and running down their own blood. The beauty of the Giralda is not an Islamic beauty, though Islam built the most of it. It is what it is because Europe repairs and finishes. If you doubt it you may go and look at its twin tower, the great Tower of Hassan on the Hill above Rabat. That huge brown tower at Rabat looks over the Atlantic Seas, towards its sister, the Giralda: an imperfect thing looking at a perfected thing: a thing essentially weak because not permanent, looking at a symbol of permanence: a thingdestined to ruin looking at a thing destined to life. And I say in the maugre of the teeth of those with whom I disagree that the Giralda would not be the Giralda but for its Christian cap. However, there it stands, useful at least as a contrast. For if the Giralda be very beautiful (as it is), what is it compared to the Cathedral itself?Thatbuilding can never be excelled. Our race once, in one great moment of three centuries, reached its highest level. We shall hardly return to such a summit.

The Gallic spirit had created the Gothic; the unfathomed suggestion of the perfect ogive, of the uplifted arch of 60 degrees, had spread from Paris outward; it had built all the ring of great shrines—Chartres, Beauvais, Amiens, Rheims. It was proceeding in outer circles to Britain, and even to the Rhine and beyond, and on through the Reconquista, southwards, shooting up Burgos like a fire, and planting the nobility of Oviedo and Leon, when the Christian cavalry entered Seville and began the last and the noblest of all those things. What a mood of making, what an enlarging passion to produce and to form and to express, must have possessed the men who through those centuries completed that thing! It is everything from the thirteenth century to theReyes Catolicos; it is everything from St. Ferdinand to Ferdinand and Isabella.

Castille rode in and made this marvellous thing. I wonder what Aragon would have done? Often,as I have gone down the banks of that torrent, which is also a god, and which gave its name to a mighty kingdom, often, as I have gone down the gorge of the Pyrenees with the Aragon tumbling at my side, I have meditated upon its spirit; broader, I think, less piercing, with more grasp, less thrust, than the chivalry to the west, than the raiders of Castille; suffused, I think, with the Catalan spirit (though they would hate to be told it), and in some way at once less solemn and yet more solid. That was Aragon.

But Aragon had no chance to spread south. It was blocked. It was Castille that rode in and made this thing the Cathedral of Seville. And in making it, Castille made the greatest monument which the race of men can boast.

There is some unexplained power in proportion which not only symbolises, not only suggests, but actually presents that which has no proportions; the illimitable vastness—Eternity.

There is a mystery about just proportion. It has this magic about it—that it can express at once both the sublime and the merely accurate. It will suggest repose, it will suggest a disdainful superiority to inferior things, it carries a patent of nobility always, but in rare times and places it can also effect what I have said—the vision of the eternal.

A man in the Cathedral of Seville understands the end of his being. He is, while standing there on earth, surrounded by stones and rocks of theearth, with his own body in decay and all about him in decay—he is, in the midst of all this material affair, yet in some side-manner out of it all; he is half in possession of the final truths. Nowhere else in the world, that I know of, has the illimitable fixed itself in material. Divinity is here impetricate.

It is not only proportion that does this at Seville—it is also multiplicity. It is not only that mark of true creative power—the making of something more than that you meant to make—it is also that other mark of creative power—diversity, endless breeding, burgeoning, foison, which everywhere clothes this amazing result. Seville has not (in proportion to its area, its great space) the actual number of carven things which glorify Brou, the Jewel of the House of Savoy. It has not perhaps any one statue which will match the immortal Magdalen of Brou or her cousin Katherine or the modern and (to my astonishment) German little sandstone Madonna of Treves which I have written of in this book, nor that other Madonna praying to her own self, which for a long time I believed to be the loveliest figure in the world. I mean the one over the Southern porch of Rheims (the barbaric ineptitude missed it and it still remains). But if Seville has not some one statue, it has the effect of multiplicity more greatly developed than any other building I know, and here again you will ask yourself in vain, as the creators of Sevillethemselves would have asked themselves in vain, how that effect arose. It is so; and there stands Seville. If you would know how silence can be full and how a supreme unity can be infinitely diverse, if you would touch all the mysteries and comprehend them as well as they can be comprehended within the limits of our little passage through the daylight, you must see Seville. But do not go there in Holy Week.

* * * * *

AndThe Misanthrope.

The supreme art of words is to produce a multiple and profound effect with simplicity in construction. There is hardly in this masterpiece one phrase which is not the phrase of convention or of daily use. Where the words are not the words that men used, or the sentences the sentences they used at the Court of Louis XIV, then they are the words conventionally used in the heroic couplets of that day. And each character has a set of lines to declaim (not very much), and there is, you may say, no rhetoric, and there is, you may say, no lyric, no deliberate poignancy; one might venture a paradox and say that inThe Misanthropethere was no "effect," meaning no sudden, sharp, contrasted effect. This mighty comedy of Molière's represents no more than the simplest conjunction, the everyday business of a man who expects too much of mankind, who is in love and expects too much of the lady, who has a friend, a man who gives himgood advice, and another friend, a woman, who herself would marry him willingly enough, and who yet advises him quietly and is more a support than a lover. There is hardly any plot—merely the discovery that the young widow for whom the Misanthrope feels such passion is a chatterbox and runs her friends down behind their backs for the sake of tattle. There is the fatuous bad versifier. There are the silly men of the world.

Such are the materials ofThe Misanthrope, common stones: and into them a man did once breathe such life that he made a thing standing quite apart from all his other creations, and something higher than anything any other had accomplished. What depths and further depths! What suggestions to the left and to the right! What infinite complexity of real character (and just that infinite complexity of real character exists in all of us), shines through those few pages, illumines and glorifies two hours of acting on a stage!

There is perhaps no man intelligent and sensitive and having passed the age of forty who will not, as he watches the acting ofThe Misanthrope, see all that he knows of life passing before him and sounding exactly in tune with the vibrations of his own soul. There is passionate love, intense and disappointed, and there is the foil to passion; that large, that honest, that domestic thing which rare women possess, and,when they possess it, afford food, sustenance, sacrament to the life of men. There is friendship; there is the ideal sought and unattained; there is the disappointment to which all noble souls are doomed. There is all human story put into one little frame. How? No one can tell how. Molière himself could not have told how.

When those simple words, spoken quickly and in a low tone—"Morbleu! Faut il que je vous aime"—are heard, the man's whole self, his whole past (if he has loved fully), his security, his doubt, all of him respond. Why? I cannot tell. I only know that the great poets do it, and they themselves do not know how. It is the Muse. It is something divine. It is inspiration.

It is inspiration. That word was justly framed. It would seem that among the few consolations afforded to the miserable race of men, among the little hints of a possible coming Beatitude, the Creator has especially chosen from his storehouse this gem, this priceless gem, of poetical power. I am reminded of it when I read the foolish judgment so often repeated—that the Ancients had no landscape.

"... οἱ ῥἁ μἱν ὡκαΘἡσουὁ εν Λυκἱηϛ εὑρεἱης πἱονι δἡμψ."

"... οἱ ῥἁ μἱν ὡκα

Θἡσουὁ εν Λυκἱηϛ εὑρεἱης πἱονι δἡμψ."

[Greek: "... oi rha min ôkaThêsouo en Lukiês eureiês pioni dêmps."]

[Greek: "... oi rha min ôka

Thêsouo en Lukiês eureiês pioni dêmps."]

When I read that I see what I think Flaxman saw, the sunlight on the Ægean, the Asian hills, and the fertile plain between; I feel the warmerair. Yet is there not one word which describes these things, unless you except the common word and symbol which says that Lycia is rich. Tennyson did it too: "And the moon was full." So did Byron: "The moon is up and yet it is not night." So did Shakespeare in "gentle and low an excellent thing in women." So did Virgil: "Et inania regna." So do they all.

But Molière inThe Misanthropedid itall the time. It is not single lines (though I have quoted one); it is the whole river of the thing, high in flood-tide, up to the top of its banks, broad, deep, majestic, and upon a scale to which (one would have thought) mere man could never reach.

All that!

For two hours, hearing this thing, I was quite outside the world; and the memory of it is a possession which should endure, I think, for ever; by which word I mean, even beyond the limitations of this life. But therein I may be wrong.

A fruitful subject for discussion in these days of war, foreign and civil, ruin, approaching pestilence, eclipse and veiling of the gods, is the proper place in which to read theBucolicsof the poet Virgil.

Some would suggest a pastoral scene—a rising mound near some clear river, or even the shade of a beech. Others a library brown with age, dusty, and (please God) all the windows shut; oaken also, the roof not high, the whole cut up into little compartments each with a wicket-gate as libraries should be. Others would suggest bed—though that connotes a complete acquaintance with the text. Others a railway journey, for on such an occasion the mind is well cut off from interference by modern things: that is, supposing the railway journey to be a fast one between two very distant points—for there is no more distracting passage of time than a journey in a slow train which stops at every station.

Others have suggested ship-board, which seems to me simply silly. For, apart from the difficulty of reading anything at sea, there is the grossunsuitability of time and place for the lovely lines of the Eclogues.

And so on. It is a weighty matter for discussion, and one that can never end, because it all turns upon an individual whim.

But for my part the place where I like to read theBucolicsof Virgil is at a table outside the door of a certain café facing the Bourse in Paris; a table in the open air. The time of day in which this exercise most pleases me is about two o'clock of an early summer afternoon.

As to why this should be so, I cannot tell. Locke would explain it perhaps by his "Association of Ideas"; but Locke is dead and gone. Perhaps once in boyhood, just in that place or in such a place, I first was struck by the beauty of such and such a line. At any rate, that is the place where now it pleases me to read the immortal stuff: a certain café opposite the Bourse in Paris, sitting at a table in the open air, in summer, with the book before me on a marble slab. There do I best receive within my mind (aided by a crib) the noble outlines of the Appennine, the Lombard Plain, the long shadows at evening, the bleating of the flock.

Some little way before me, as I read, the howling mob, which clamours all afternoon, buying and selling round the colonnade of the Bourse, continues its surge. Individual voices at that distance are lost; all you hear is the sea of human avarice and folly in its violence confused.

Why on earth this singular piece of baseness, the roar of men buying and selling and picking each other's pockets, should form a suitable background in my mind for the delicate notes of the pipe in the wood and the long regrets of the shepherds, heaven only knows. But so it is.

I wondered only this year as I re-read the heavenly poet in that place (opposite the Bourse in Paris, the Vile Stock Exchange) whether the advance of barbarism might not produce—and that in a very few years—a generation to whom all these lines will be as tedious as is Corneille to the educated Englishman of to-day.

I can imagine men still reasonably cultivated, still in part acquainted with the Latin tongue, and yet fallen into such a degraded mood that only here and there some specially vivid picture or some piece of stronger rhetoric in the Eclogues shall touch them, while the rest will appear mechanical, dry stuff. For there is a degree of descent in the mind after which the magic of verse disappears; and that sacred quality whereby—none can tell how—a particular disposition of words stirs the mind in a fashion that is to common experience what music is to speech, and what colour is to form, no longer effects its purpose.

I was reading the other day in the work of a Colonial, whose amusing conceits we all properly admire and whose honest morals help to makehis work pleasant, a most amazing judgment passed by him upon the poet Homer.

It seemed to him that the poet Homer did not write poetry at all. He said it sounded to him, compared with real poetry, modern poetry, live poetry (the Cad's Laureate, let us say), like the rude scratching of a savage knife upon a wall compared with some glorious work of art, such as a Coronation picture at the Royal Academy.... Well, well, well!...

Shall I attempt to criticise the Colonial? No, I will not.

The truth is, that when you come to criticise certain modern enormities your instrument fails. The thing is too big for you altogether.

You can pick up a cricket ball with your hand; you can handle a ten-foot spherical buoy with a crane. But how are you to deal with a rounded mass several miles across? How are we to deal withmountainsof ineptitude? How is criticism to approach those last new literary moods which are deaf to the ancients? I fear it cannot deal with such moods at all. If a man feels like that, he feels like that, and one can say no more. And if there is to come a time when men shall read:

Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem,

and make no more of it than "Passengers must cross the line by the bridge. Penalty £5," why, there it is! Things have their rising and theirsetting. But before that day comes may the earth cover me.

* * * * *

If the modern world resembled that ancient one of which the echoes, as I lay down my Virgil, still move my mind, I should here complete, I should here end. For I have said all that I have to say. And a very good thing it would be if the modern world resembled the ancient world in this as in many other things. Their books were ten thousand words long, or twenty thousand words long, or fifty thousand words long, or a hundred thousand words long. They had not to conform to a special length. And so it was with that which they wrote down, as I am writing this, at random, a vagary of the mind.

But the modern world differs from the ancient world, and there is a law that an essay such as this (essay, forsooth!) should reach a certain length.

There are various ways in which I could pad it out. One of the best would be to quote you a few lines and ask you how you feel. For instance:

Et me Phœbus amat: Phœbo sua semper apud meMunera sunt, lauri et suave rubens hyacinthus.

Et me Phœbus amat: Phœbo sua semper apud me

Munera sunt, lauri et suave rubens hyacinthus.

This is not only a beautiful phrase, it is also true—and I am grateful to the Delian. I will do my best never to put him out. I will keep by me a few flowers for such a patron.

By the way, talking of that lovely couplet, do you know (it is true, it is not a lie, I have the very words before me as I write)—do you know that a gentleman still living translated that couplet thus: "Phœbus loves me and I in my turn have gifts for Phœbus—laurels, and the sweet blush of the hyacinth."

But this is not so wrong a rendering after all as that for which a contemporary of mine was once responsible in the noblest and most learned of the Oxford Colleges. For this man said (viva voce, it is true) that certain Greek lines which really meant "at evening soft dew descends upon the earth," signified in English, "Towards nightfall the huge female sea monster crawls up upon the sand." Each a picture; the one sweet, the other strong—but how different one from the other!

And as I have begun quoting, why not go on?

Malo me Galatea petit, lasciva puella,Et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri.

Malo me Galatea petit, lasciva puella,

Et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri.

You may, if you like, apply this to yourself just as I applied the first lines to myself. At any rate I will have nothing to do with them.

And really I can think of nothing more to say, and I must bring this to an end.... But as I write, but as I write, a stream comes down from the mountains, a girl escapes beyond the willow trees.

In those long lists which the divine Rabelais delighted to string together, wherewith also he has inspired many diverse men, Charles Kingsley, Besant, and that remarkable historian York Powell to boot, there is one omitted which I sometimes think Rabelais meant to write and never did; and that is, the list of books which might well be produced for the advancement and entertainment of mankind.

He did indeed produce a most glorious library of books, collected, if you remember, for the education of the giant, every title in which is a delight; and much better fun, I think, when you do not know the allusions than when you do. Much better, that is, when you think it was entirely made up out of Rabelais' head than when you get to know that most of it was a parody on existing tomes. But he never gave us a list of books which might exist and do not, and such a list is always running in my head. From time to time I have jotted down a few names for such books, and the regiment of them is now formidable. My only hesitation in publishing it (or rather a fragment of it) is lest some reader should steal my thunder and himself begin writing one of these books. But I am charitable, andI also have sufficient knowledge of time and space and human conditions to be certain that I cannot in what is left of my life write them all myself, so I may as well throw out the suggestions.

(1.)British Honours.Being a guide to Literary Gents and Lion Hunters, showing what Official Honours now exist in all States subject to the British Crown, with their Distinctions, Emoluments (if any), Order of Precedence and Method of Address in writing and in speech. As also an Appendix showing the consequences mediate and immediate following on the possession of each of such Honours by any man or woman, and the consequent privileges of rank or custom attaching to their relatives, children and dependents. The whole illustrated by a copious Index with a coloured Frontispiece showing an Earl in his Robes, and sundry diagrams.

Now, this would be a most useful book, and I do not think I will go on with my list because it is in itself a subject not for one poor essay but for a very pamphlet of examination and discussion.

There never was since the beginning of the world a system of honours more complicated than ours! It is a veritable Chinese puzzle and, like all complexities, it is running riot in its last stage. It is now so thick that you cannot push your way through it. It is an old and true saying that England is an aristocratic State, or, at any rate, was an aristocratic State, i.e., that the historicalnature of modern England from the early seventeenth century is that of a polity in which the citizens desire to be governed by a small class and in which such a class exists, or rather has existed, suitable to the demand calling it forth; and therein is seen the origin at least of the game of "Honours." That is why you have, standing out boldly in the arrangement of our society, the real objects (not phantasms) called a Knight, a Baronet, a Baron, an Earl, a Viscount, a Duke, and their various ladies; and that is why each grade has its own little bunch of appurtenances.

Note how exactly these appurtenances distinguish one step from the next. Your Knighthood and your Baronetcy are not to be confused; for the first is confined to the passage of this poor mortal life, but the second goes on from father to son, and is, as nearly as anything can be in this sad world, imperishable so long as a male heir is to be discovered. Your Baron is not like your Earl, for your Baron's daughters are only Honourables, whereas your Earl's daughters are Ladies. Your Duke is distinguishable by the title common to his successive consorts, not Ladies, but Duchesses. There is not a rung on this heavenward ladder which is not marked with its own stamp, and that is as it should be.

But to this simple hierarchy (resembling, I always think, the Orders of Angels, and like them nine in number—if you include Marquises, Princes and Kings) the appetite of the race hasadded a vast collection—much the most of it modern. You have the ecclesiastical people, each with his little tag, one being Rev., the other Very Rev., the other Right Rev. You have the distinction between the Vicar and the Rector, a branch of knowledge confined to specialists. You have the Curate, the Rural Dean; on which last the poem runs:

Back to Index Next