Chapter I: AM told that American professors are “mourning the lack of ideals” at (1)

Columbia University—possibly also at other universities scattered through the United States. If it be any consolation to these mourning American professors, I can assure them that they do not mourn alone. I live not far from Oxford, and enjoy the advantage of occasionally listening to the jeremiads of English University professors. More than once a German professor has done me the honour to employ me as an object on which to sharpen his English. He also has mourned similar lack of ideals at Heidelberg, at Bonn. Youth is youth all the world over; it has its own ideals; they are not those of the University professor. The explanation is tolerably simple. Youth is young, and the University professor, generally speaking, is middle-aged.

I can sympathise with the mourning professor. I, in my time, have suffered like despair. I remember the day so well; it was my twelfth birthday. I recall the unholy joy with which I reflected that for the future my unfortunate parents would be called upon to pay for me full railway fare; it marked a decided step towards manhood. I was now in my teens. That very afternoon there came to visit us a relative of ours. She brought with her three small children: a girl, aged six; a precious, golden-haired thing in a lace collar that called itself a boy, aged five; and a third still smaller creature, it might have been male, it might have been female; I could not have told you at the time, I cannot tell you now. This collection of atoms was handed over to me.

“Now, show yourself a man,” said my dear mother, “remember you are in your teens. Take them out for a walk and amuse them; and mind nothing happens to them.”

To the children themselves their own mother gave instructions that they were to do everything that I told them, and not to tear their clothes or make themselves untidy. These directions, even to myself, at the time, appeared contradictory. But I said nothing. And out into the wilds the four of us departed.

I was an only child. My own infancy had passed from my memory. To me, at twelve, the ideas of six were as incomprehensible as are those of twenty to the University professor of forty. I wanted to be a pirate. Round the corner and across the road building operations were in progress. Planks and poles lay ready to one’s hand. Nature, in the neighbourhood, had placed conveniently a shallow pond. It was Saturday afternoon. The nearest public-house was a mile away. Immunity from interference by the British workman was thus assured. It occurred to me that by placing my three depressed looking relatives on one raft, attacking them myself from another, taking the eldest girl’s sixpence away from her, disabling their raft, and leaving them to drift without a rudder, innocent amusement would be provided for half an hour at least.

They did not want to play at pirates. At first sight of the pond the thing that called itself a boy began to cry. The six-year-old lady said she did not like the smell of it. Not even after I had explained the game to them were they any the more enthusiastic for it.

I proposed Red Indians. They could go to sleep in the unfinished building upon a sack of lime, I would creep up through the grass, set fire to the house, and dance round it, whooping and waving my tomahawk, watching with fiendish delight the frantic but futile efforts of the palefaces to escape their doom.

It did not “catch on”—not even that. The precious thing in the lace collar began to cry again. The creature concerning whom I could not have told you whether it was male or female made no attempt at argument, but started to run; it seemed to have taken a dislike to this particular field. It stumbled over a scaffolding pole, and then it also began to cry. What could one do to amuse such people? I left it to them to propose something. They thought they would like to play at “Mothers”—not in this field, but in some other field.

The eldest girl would be mother. The other two would represent her children. They had been taken suddenly ill. “Waterworks,” as I had christened him, was to hold his hands to his middle and groan. His face brightened up at the suggestion. The nondescript had the toothache. It took up its part without a moment’s hesitation, and set to work to scream. I could be the doctor and look at their tongues.

That was their “ideal” game. As I have said, remembering that afternoon, I can sympathise with the University professor mourning the absence of University ideals in youth. Possibly at six my own ideal game may have been “Mothers.” Looking back from the pile of birthdays upon which I now stand, it occurs to me that very probably it was. But from the perspective of twelve, the reflection that there were beings in the world who could find recreation in such fooling saddened me.

Eight years later, his father not being able to afford the time, I conducted Master “Waterworks,” now a healthy, uninteresting, gawky lad, to a school in Switzerland. It was my first Continental trip. I should have enjoyed it better had he not been with me. He thought Paris a “beastly hole.” He did not share my admiration for the Frenchwoman; he even thought her badly dressed.

“Why she’s so tied up, she can’t walk straight,” was the only impression she left upon him.

We changed the subject; it irritated me to hear him talk. The beautiful Juno-like creatures we came across further on in Germany, he said were too fat. He wanted to see them run. I found him utterly soulless.

To expect a boy to love learning and culture is like expecting him to prefer old vintage claret to gooseberry wine. Culture for the majority is an acquired taste. Speaking personally, I am entirely in agreement with the University professor. I find knowledge, prompting to observation and leading to reflection, the most satisfactory luggage with which a traveller through life can provide himself. I would that I had more of it. To be able to enjoy a picture is of more advantage than to be able to buy it.

All that the University professor can urge in favour of idealism I am prepared to endorse. But then I am—let us say, thirty-nine. At fourteen my candid opinion was that he was talking “rot.” I looked at the old gentleman himself—a narrow-chested, spectacled old gentleman, who lived up a by street. He did not seem to have much fun of any sort. It was not my ideal. He told me things had been written in a language called Greek that I should enjoy reading, but I had not even read all Captain Marryat. There were tales by Sir Walter Scott and “Jack Harkaway’s Schooldays!” I felt I could wait a while. There was a chap called Aristophanes who had written comedies, satirising the political institutions of a country that had disappeared two thousand years ago. I say, without shame, Drury Lane pantomime and Barnum’s Circus called to me more strongly.

Wishing to give the old gentleman a chance, I dipped into translations. Some of these old fellows were not as bad as I had imagined them. A party named Homer had written some really interesting stuff. Here and there, maybe, he was a bit long-winded, but, taking him as a whole, there was “go” in him. There was another of them—Ovid was his name. He could tell a story, Ovid could. He had imagination. He was almost as good as “Robinson Crusoe.” I thought it would please my professor, telling him that I was reading these, his favourite authors.

“Reading them!” he cried, “but you don’t know Greek or Latin.”

“But I know English,” I answered; “they have all been translated into English. You never told me that!”

It appeared it was not the same thing. There were subtle delicacies of diction bound to escape even the best translator. These subtle delicacies of diction I could enjoy only by devoting the next seven or eight years of my life to the study of Greek and Latin. It will grieve the University professor to hear it, but the enjoyment of those subtle delicacies of diction did not appear to me—I was only fourteen at the time, please remember—to be worth the time and trouble.

The boy is materially inclined—the mourning American professor has discovered it. I did not want to be an idealist living up a back street. I wanted to live in the biggest house in the best street of the town. I wanted to ride a horse, wear a fur coat, and have as much to eat and drink as ever I liked. I wanted to marry the most beautiful woman in the world, to have my name in the newspaper, and to know that everybody was envying me.

Mourn over it, my dear professor, as you will—that is the ideal of youth; and, so long as human nature remains what it is, will continue to be so. It is a materialistic ideal—a sordid ideal. Maybe it is necessary. Maybe the world would not move much if the young men started thinking too early. They want to be rich, so they fling themselves frenziedly into the struggle. They build the towns, and make the railway tracks, hew down the forests, dig the ore out of the ground. There comes a day when it is borne in upon them that trying to get rich is a poor sort of game—that there is only one thing more tiresome than being a millionaire, and that is trying to be a millionaire. But, meanwhile, the world has got its work done.

The American professor fears that the artistic development of America leaves much to be desired. I fear the artistic development of most countries leaves much to be desired. Why the Athenians themselves sandwiched their drama between wrestling competitions and boxing bouts. The plays of Sophocles, or Euripides, were given as “side shows.” The chief items of the fair were the games and races. Besides, America is still a young man. It has been busy “getting on in the world.” It has not yet quite finished. Yet there are signs that young America is approaching the thirty-nines. He is finding a little time, a little money to spare for art. One can almost hear young America—not quite so young as he was—saying to Mrs. Europe as he enters and closes the shop door:

“Well, ma’am, here I am, and maybe you’ll be glad to hear I’ve a little money to spend. Yes, ma’am, I’ve fixed things all right across the water; we shan’t starve. So now, ma’am, you and I can have a chat concerning this art I’ve been hearing so much about. Let’s have a look at it, ma’am, trot it out, and don’t you be afraid of putting a fair price upon it.”

I am inclined to think that Mrs. Europe has not hesitated to put a good price upon the art she has sold to Uncle Sam. I am afraid Mrs. Europe has occasionally “unloaded” on Uncle Sam. I talked to a certain dealer one afternoon, now many years ago, at the Uwantit Club.

“What is the next picture likely to be missing?” I asked him in the course of general conversation.

“Thome little thing of Hoppner’th, if it mutht be,” he replied with confidence.

“Hoppner,” I murmured, “I seem to have heard the name.”

“Yeth; you’ll hear it a bit oftener during the next eighteen month or tho. You take care you don’t get tired of hearing it, thath all,” he laughed. “Yeth,” he continued, thoughtfully, “Reynoldth ith played out. Nothing much to be made of Gainthborough, either. Dealing in that lot now, why, it’th like keeping a potht offith. Hoppner’th the coming man.”

“You’ve been buying Hoppners up cheap,” I suggested.

“Between uth,” he answered, “yeth, I think we’ve got them all. Maybe a few more. I don’t think we’ve mithed any.”

“You will sell them for more than you gave for them,” I hinted.

“You’re thmart,” he answered, regarding me admiringly, “you thee through everything you do.”

“How do you work it?” I asked him. There is a time in the day when he is confidential. “Here is this man, Hoppner. I take it that you have bought him up at an average of a hundred pounds a picture, and that at that price most owners were fairly glad to sell. Few folks outside the art schools have ever heard of him. I bet that at the present moment there isn’t one art critic who could spell his name without reference to a dictionary. In eighteen months you will be selling him for anything from one thousand to ten thousand pounds. How is it done?”

“How ith everything done that’th done well?” he answered. “By earnetht effort.” He hitched his chair nearer to me, “I get a chap—one of your thort of chapth—he writ’th an article about Hoppner. I get another to anthwer him. Before I’ve done there’ll be a hundred articleth about Hoppner—hith life, hith early thruggie, anecdo’th about hith wife. Then a Hoppner will be thold at public auchtion for a thouthand guineath.”

“But how can you be certain it will fetch a thousand guineas?” I interrupted.

“I happen to know the man whoth going to buy it.” He winked, and I understood.

“A fortnight later there will be a thale of half-a-dothen, and the prithe will be gone up by that time.”

“And after that?” I said.

“After that,” he replied, rising, “the American millionaire! He’ll jutht be waiting on the door-thtep for the thale-room to open.”

“If by any chance I come across a Hoppner?” I said, laughing, as I turned to go.

“Don’t you hold on to it too long, that’th all,” was his advice.

HOW MANY CHARMS HATH MUSIC, WOULD YOU SAY?

THE argument of the late Herr Wagner was that grand opera—the music drama, as he called it—included, and therefore did away with the necessity for—all other arts. Music in all its branches, of course, it provides: so much I will concede to the late Herr Wagner. There are times, I confess, when my musical yearnings might shock the late Herr Wagner—times when I feel unequal to following three distinct themes at one and the same instant.

“Listen,” whispers the Wagnerian enthusiast to me, “the cornet has now the Brunnhilda motive.” It seems to me, in my then state of depravity, as if the cornet had even more than this the matter with him.

“The second violins,” continues the Wagnerian enthusiast, “are carrying on the Wotan theme.” That they are carrying on goes without saying: the players’ faces are streaming with perspiration.

“The brass,” explains my friend—his object is to cultivate my ear—“is accompanying the singers.” I should have said drowning them. There are occasions when I can rave about Wagner with the best of them. High class moods come to all of us. The difference between the really high-class man and us commonplace, workaday men is the difference between, say, the eagle and the barnyard chicken. I am the barnyard chicken. I have my wings. There are ecstatic moments when I feel I want to spurn the sordid earth and soar into the realms of art. I do fly a little, but my body is heavy, and I only get as far as the fence. After a while I find it lonesome on the fence, and I hop down again among my fellows.

Listening to Wagner, during such temporary Philistinic mood, my sense of fair play is outraged. A lone, lorn woman stands upon the stage trying to make herself heard. She has to do this sort of thing for her living; maybe an invalid mother, younger brothers and sisters are dependent upon her. One hundred and forty men, all armed with powerful instruments, well-organised, and most of them looking well-fed, combine to make it impossible for a single note of that poor woman’s voice to be heard above their din. I see her standing there, opening and shutting her mouth, getting redder and redder in the face. She is singing, one feels sure of it; one could hear her if only those one hundred and forty men would ease up for a minute. She makes one mighty, supreme effort; above the banging of the drums, the blare of the trumpets, the shrieking of the strings, that last despairing note is distinctly heard.

She has won, but the victory has cost her dear. She sinks down fainting on the stage and is carried off by supers. Chivalrous indignation has made it difficult for me to keep my seat watching the unequal contest. My instinct was to leap the barrier, hurl the bald-headed chief of her enemies from his high chair, and lay about me with the trombone or the clarionet—whichever might have come the easier to my snatch.

“You cowardly lot of bullies,” I have wanted to cry, “are you not ashamed of yourselves? A hundred and forty of you against one, and that one a still beautiful and, comparatively speaking, young lady. Be quiet for a minute—can’t you? Give the poor girl a chance.”

A lady of my acquaintance says that sitting out a Wagnerian opera seems to her like listening to a singer accompanied by four orchestras playing different tunes at the same time. As I have said, there are times when Wagner carries me along with him, when I exult in the crash and whirl of his contending harmonies. But, alas! there are those other moods—those after dinner moods—when my desire is for something distinctly resembling a tune. Still, there are other composers of grand opera besides Wagner. I grant to the late Herr Wagner, that, in so far as music is concerned, opera can supply us with all we can need.

But it was also Wagner’s argument that grand opera could supply us with acting, and there I am compelled to disagree with him. Wagner thought that the arts of acting and singing could be combined. I have seen artists the great man has trained himself. As singers they left nothing to be desired, but the acting in grand opera has never yet impressed me. Wagner never succeeded in avoiding the operatic convention and nobody else ever will. When the operatic lover meets his sweetheart he puts her in a corner and, turning his back upon her, comes down to the footlights and tells the audience how he adores her. When he has finished, he, in his turn, retires into the corner, and she comes down and tells the audience that she is simply mad about him.

Overcome with joy at finding she really cares for him, he comes down right and says that this is the happiest moment of his life; and she stands left, twelve feet away from him, and has the presentiment that all this sort of thing is much too good to last. They go off together, backwards, side by side. If there is any love-making, such as I understand by the term, it is done “off.” This is not my idea of acting. But I do not see how you are going to substitute for it anything more natural. When you are singing at the top of your voice, you don’t want a heavy woman hanging round your neck. When you are killing a man and warbling about it at the same time, you don’t want him fooling around you defending himself. You want him to have a little reasonable patience, and to wait in his proper place till you have finished, telling him, or rather telling the crowd, how much you hate and despise him.

When the proper time comes, and if he is where you expect to find him while thinking of your upper C, you will hit him lightly on the shoulder with your sword, and then he can die to his own particular tune. If you have been severely wounded in battle, or in any other sort of row, and have got to sing a long ballad before you finally expire, you don’t want to have to think how a man would really behave who knew he had only got a few minutes to live and was feeling bad about it. The chances are that he would not want to sing at all. The woman who really loved him would not encourage him to sing. She would want him to keep quiet while she moved herself about a bit, in case there was anything that could be done for him.

If a mob is climbing the stairs thirsting for your blood, you do not want to stand upright with your arms stretched out, a good eighteen inches from the door, while you go over at some length the varied incidents leading up to the annoyance. If your desire were to act naturally you would push against that door for all you were worth, and yell for somebody to bring you a chest of drawers and a bedstead, and things like that, to pile up against it. If you were a king, and were giving a party, you would not want your guests to fix you up at the other end of the room and leave you there, with nobody to talk to but your own wife, while they turned their backs upon you, and had a long and complicated dance all to themselves. You would want to be in it; you would want to let them know that you were king.

In acting, all these little points have to be considered. In opera, everything is rightly sacrificed to musical necessity. I have seen the young, enthusiastic opera-singer who thought that he or she could act and sing at the same time. The experienced artist takes the centre of the stage and husbands his resources. Whether he is supposed to be indignant because somebody has killed his mother, or cheerful because he is going out to fight his country’s foes, who are only waiting until he has finished singing to attack the town, he leaves it to the composer to make clear.

Also it was Herr Wagner’s idea that the back cloth would leave the opera-goer indifferent to the picture gallery. The castle on the rock, accessible only by balloon, in which every window lights up simultaneously and instantaneously, one minute after sunset, while the full moon is rushing up the sky at the pace of a champion comet—that wonderful sea that suddenly opens and swallows up the ship—those snow-clad mountains, over which the shadow of the hero passes like a threatening cloud—the grand old chateau, trembling in the wind—what need, will ask the opera-goer of the future, of your Turners and your Corots, when, for prices ranging from a shilling upwards, we can have a dozen pictures such as these rolled up and down before us every evening?

But perhaps the most daring hope of all was the dream that came to Herr Wagner that his opera singers, his grouped choruses, would eventually satisfy the craving of the public for high class statuary. I am not quite sure the general public does care for statuary. I do not know whether the idea has ever occurred to the Anarchist, but, were I myself organising secret committee meetings for unholy purposes, I should invite my comrades to meet in that section of the local museum devoted to statuary. I can conceive of no place where we should be freer from prying eyes and listening ears. A select few, however, do appreciate statuary; and such, I am inclined to think, will not be weaned from their passion by the contemplation of the opera singer in his or her various quaint costumes.

And even if the tenor always satisfied our ideal of Apollo, and the soprano were always as sylph-like as she is described in the libretto, even then I should doubt the average operatic chorus being regarded by the _connoisseur_ as a cheap and pleasant substitute for a bas relief from the Elgin marbles. The great thing required of that operatic chorus is experience. The young and giddy-pated the chorus master has no use for. The sober, honest, industrious lady or gentleman, with a knowledge of music is very properly his ideal.

What I admire about the chorus chiefly is its unity. The whole village dresses exactly alike. In wicked, worldly villages there is rivalry, leading to heartburn and jealously. One lady comes out suddenly, on, say, a Bank Holiday, in a fetching blue that conquers every male heart. Next holiday her rival cuts her out with a green hat. In the operatic village it must be that the girls gather together beforehand to arrange this thing. There is probably a meeting called.

“The dear Count’s wedding,” announces the chairwoman, “you will all be pleased to hear, has been fixed for the fourteenth, at eleven o’clock in the morning. The entire village will be assembled at ten-thirty to await the return of the bridal _cortège_ from the church, and offer its felicitations. Married ladies, will, of course, come accompanied by their husbands. Unmarried ladies must each bring a male partner as near their own height as possible. Fortunately, in this village the number of males is exactly equal to that of females, so that the picture need not be spoiled. The children will organise themselves into an independent body and will group themselves picturesquely. It has been thought advisable,” continues the chairwoman, “that the village should meet the dear Count and his bride at some spot not too far removed from the local alehouse. The costume to be worn by the ladies will consist of a short pink skirt terminating at the knees and ornamented with festoons of flowers; above will be worn a bolero in mauve silk without sleeves and cut _décolleté_. The shoes should be of yellow satin over flesh-coloured stockings. Ladies who are ‘out’ will wear pearl necklaces, and a simple device in emeralds to decorate the hair. Thank God, we can all of us afford it, and provided the weather holds up and nothing unexpected happens—he is not what I call a lucky man, our Count, and it is always as well to be prepared for possibilities—well, I think we may look forward to a really pleasant day.”

It cannot be done, Herr Wagner, believe me. You cannot substitute the music drama for all the arts combined. The object to be aimed at by the wise composer should be to make us, while listening to his music, forgetful of all remaining artistic considerations.

THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN! NEED IT BE SO HEAVY?

IT is a delightful stroll on a sunny summer morning from the Hague to the Huis ten Bosch, the little “house in the wood,” built for Princess Amalia, widow of Stadtholter Frederick Henry, under whom Holland escaped finally from the bondage of her foes and entered into the promised land of Liberty. Leaving the quiet streets, the tree-bordered canals, with their creeping barges, you pass through a pleasant park, where the soft-eyed deer press round you, hurt and indignant if you have brought nothing in your pocket—not even a piece of sugar—to offer them. It is not that they are grasping—it is the want of attention that wounds them.

“I thought he was a gentleman,” they seem to be saying to one another, if you glance back, “he looked like a gentleman.”

Their mild eyes haunt you; on the next occasion you do not forget. The Park merges into the forest; you go by winding ways till you reach the trim Dutch garden, moat-encircled, in the centre of which stands the prim old-fashioned villa, which, to the simple Dutchman, appears a palace. The _concierge_, an old soldier, bows low to you and introduces you to his wife—a stately, white-haired dame, who talks most languages a little, so far as relates to all things within and appertaining to this tiny palace of the wood. To things without, beyond the wood, her powers of conversation do not extend: apparently such matters do not interest her.

She conducts you to the Chinese Room; the sun streams through the windows, illuminating the wondrous golden dragons standing out in bold relief from the burnished lacquer work, decorating still further with light and shade the delicate silk embroideries thin taper hands have woven with infinite pains. The walls are hung with rice paper, depicting the conventional scenes of the conventional Chinese life.

You find your thoughts wandering. These grotesque figures, these caricatures of humanity! A comical creature, surely, this Chinaman, the pantaloon of civilization. How useful he has been to us for our farces, our comic operas! This yellow baby, in his ample pinafore, who lived thousands of years ago, who has now passed into this strange second childhood.

But is he dying—or does the life of a nation wake again, as after sleep? Is he this droll, harmless thing he here depicts himself? And if not? Suppose fresh sap be stirring through his three hundred millions? We thought he was so very dead; we thought the time had come to cut him up and divide him, the only danger being lest we should quarrel over his carcase among ourselves.

Suppose it turns out as the fable of the woodcutter and the bear? The woodcutter found the bear lying in the forest. At first he was much frightened, but the bear lay remarkably still. So the woodman crept nearer, ventured to kick the bear—very gently, ready to run if need be. Surely the bear was dead! And parts of a bear are good to eat, and bearskin to poor woodfolk on cold winter nights is grateful. So the woodman drew his knife and commenced the necessary preliminaries. But the bear was not dead.

If the Chinaman be not dead? If the cutting-up process has only served to waken him? In a little time from now we shall know.

From the Chinese Room the white-haired dame leads us to the Japanese Room. Had gentle-looking Princess Amalia some vague foreshadowing of the future in her mind when she planned these two rooms leading into one another? The Japanese decorations are more grotesque, the designs less cheerfully comical than those of cousin Chinaman. These monstrous, mis-shapen wrestlers, these patient-looking gods, with their inscrutable eyes! Was it always there, or is it only by the light of present events that one reads into the fantastic fancies of the artist working long ago in the doorway of his paper house, a meaning that has hitherto escaped us?

But the chief attraction of the Huis ten Bosch is the gorgeous Orange Saloon, lighted by a cupola, fifty feet above the floor, the walls one blaze of pictures, chiefly of the gorgeous Jordaen school—“The Defeat of the Vices,” “Time Vanquishing Slander”—mostly allegorical, in praise of all the virtues, in praise of enlightenment and progress. Aptly enough in a room so decorated, here was held the famous Peace Congress that closed the last century. One can hardly avoid smiling as one thinks of the solemn conclave of grandees assembled to proclaim the popularity of Peace.

It was in the autumn of the same year that Europe decided upon the dividing-up of China, that soldiers were instructed by Christian monarchs to massacre men, women and children, the idea being to impress upon the Heathen Chinee the superior civilization of the white man. The Boer war followed almost immediately. Since when the white man has been pretty busy all over the world with his “expeditions” and his “missions.” The world is undoubtedly growing more refined. We do not care for ugly words. Even the burglar refers airily to the “little job” he has on hand. You would think he had found work in the country. I should not be surprised to learn that he says a prayer before starting, telegraphs home to his anxious wife the next morning that his task has been crowned with blessing.

Until the far-off date of Universal Brotherhood war will continue. Matters considered unimportant by both parties will—with a mighty flourish of trumpets—be referred to arbitration. I was talking of a famous financier a while ago with a man who had been his secretary. Amongst other anecdotes, he told me of a certain agreement about which dispute had arisen. The famous financier took the paper into his own hands and made a few swift calculations.

“Let it go,” he concluded, “it is only a thousand pounds at the outside. May as well be honest.”

Concerning a dead fisherman or two, concerning boundaries through unproductive mountain ranges we shall arbitrate and feel virtuous. For gold mines and good pasture lands, mixed up with a little honour to give respectability to the business, we shall fight it out, as previously. War being thus inevitable, the humane man will rejoice that by one of those brilliant discoveries, so simple when they are explained, war in the future is going to be rendered equally satisfactory to victor and to vanquished.

In by-elections, as a witty writer has pointed out, there are no defeats—only victories and moral victories. The idea seems to have caught on. War in the future is evidently going to be conducted on the same understanding. Once upon a time, from a far-off land, a certain general telegraphed home congratulating his Government that the enemy had shown no inclination whatever to prevent his running away. The whole country rejoiced.

“Why, they never even tried to stop him,” citizens, meeting other citizens in the street, told each other. “Ah, they’ve had enough of him. I bet they are only too glad to get rid of him. Why, they say he ran for miles without seeing a trace of the foe.”

The enemy’s general, on the other hand, also wrote home congratulating his Government. In this way the same battle can be mafficked over by both parties. Contentment is the great secret of happiness. Everything happens for the best, if only you look at it the right way. That is going to be the argument. The general of the future will telegraph to headquarters that he is pleased to be able to inform His Majesty that the enemy, having broken down all opposition, has succeeded in crossing the frontier and is now well on his way to His Majesty’s capital.

“I am luring him on,” he will add, “as fast as I can. At our present rate of progress, I am in hopes of bringing him home by the tenth.”

Lest foolish civilian sort of people should wonder whereabouts lies the cause for rejoicing, the military man will condescend to explain. The enemy is being enticed farther and farther from his base. The defeated general—who is not really defeated, who is only artful, and who appears to be running away, is not really running away at all. On the contrary, he is running home—bringing, as he explains, the enemy with him.

If I remember rightly—it is long since I played it—there is a parlour game entitled “Puss in the Corner.” You beckon another player to you with your finger. “Puss, puss!” you cry. Thereupon he has to leave his chair—his “base,” as the military man would term it—and try to get to you without anything happening to him.

War in the future is going to be Puss in the Corner on a bigger scale. You lure your enemy away from his base. If all goes well—if he does not see the trap that is being laid for him—why, then, almost before he knows it, he finds himself in your capital. That finishes the game. You find out what it is he really wants. Provided it is something within reason, and you happen to have it handy, you give it to him. He goes home crowing, and you, on your side, laugh when you think how cleverly you succeeded in luring him away from his base.

There is a bright side to all things. The gentleman charged with the defence of a fortress will meet the other gentleman who has captured it and shake hands with him mid the ruins.

“So here you are at last!” he will explain. “Why didn’t you come before? We have been waiting for you.”

And he will send off dispatches felicitating his chief on having got that fortress off their hands, together with all the worry and expense it has been to them. When prisoners are taken you will console yourself with the reflection that the cost of feeding them for the future will have to be borne by the enemy. Captured cannon you will watch being trailed away with a sigh of relief.

“Confounded heavy things!” you will say to yourself. “Thank goodness I’ve got rid of them. Let him have the fun of dragging them about these ghastly roads. See how he likes the job!”

War is a ridiculous method of settling disputes. Anything that can tend to make its ridiculous aspect more apparent is to be welcomed. The new school of military dispatch-writers may succeed in turning even the laughter of the mob against it.

The present trouble in the East would never have occurred but for the white man’s enthusiasm for bearing other people’s burdens. What we call the yellow danger is the fear that the yellow man may before long request us, so far as he is concerned, to put his particular burden down. It may occur to him that, seeing it is his property, he would just as soon carry it himself. A London policeman told me a story the other day that struck him as an example of Cockney humour under trying circumstances. But it may also serve as a fable. From a lonely street in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden, early one morning, the constable heard cries of “Stop thief!” shouted in a childish treble. He arrived on the scene just in time to collar a young hooligan, who, having snatched a basket of fruit from a small lad—a greengrocer’s errand boy, as it turned out—was, with it, making tracks. The greengrocer’s boy, between panting and tears, delivered his accusation. The hooligan regarded him with an expression of amazed indignation.

“What d’yer mean, stealing it?” exclaimed Mr. Hooligan. “Why, I was carrying it for yer!”

The white man has got into the way of “carrying” other people’s burdens, and now it looks as if the yellow man were going to object to our carrying his any further. Maybe he is going to get nasty, and insist on carrying it himself. We call this “the yellow danger.”

A friend of mine—he is a man who in the street walks into lamp-posts, and apologises—sees rising from the East the dawn of a new day in the world’s history. The yellow danger is to him a golden hope. He sees a race long stagnant, stretching its giant limbs with the first vague movements of returning life. He is a poor sort of patriot; he calls himself, I suppose, a white man, yet he shamelessly confesses he would rather see Asia’s millions rise from the ruins of their ancient civilization to take their part in the future of humanity, than that half the population of the globe should remain bound in savagery for the pleasure and the profit of his own particular species.

He even goes so far as to think that the white man may have something to learn. The world has belonged to him now for some thousands of years. Has he done all with it that could have been done? Are his ideals the last word?

Not what the yellow man has absorbed from Europe, but what he is going to give Europe it is that interests my friend. He is watching the birth of a new force—an influence as yet unknown. He clings to the fond belief that new ideas, new formulæ, to replace the old worn shibboleths, may, during these thousands of years, have been developing in those keen brains that behind the impressive yellow mask have been working so long in silence and in mystery.

WHY DIDN’T HE MARRY THE GIRL?

WHAT is wrong with marriage, anyhow? I find myself pondering this question so often, when reading high-class literature. I put it to myself again the other evening, during a performance of Faust. Why could not Faust have married the girl? I would not have married her myself for any consideration whatsoever; but that is not the argument. Faust, apparently, could not see anything amiss with her. Both of them were mad about each other. Yet the idea of a quiet, unostentatious marriage with a week’s honeymoon, say, in Vienna, followed by a neat little cottage _orné_, not too far from Nürnberg, so that their friends could have come out to them, never seems to have occurred to either of them.

There could have been a garden. Marguerite might have kept chickens and a cow. That sort of girl, brought up to hard work and by no means too well educated, is all the better for having something to do. Later, with the gradual arrival of the family, a good, all-round woman might have been hired in to assist. Faust, of course, would have had his study and got to work again; that would have kept him out of further mischief. The idea that a brainy man, his age, was going to be happy with nothing to do all day but fool round a petticoat was ridiculous from the beginning. Valentine—a good fellow, Valentine, with nice ideas—would have spent his Saturdays to Monday with them. Over a pipe and a glass of wine, he and Faust would have discussed the local politics.

He would have danced the children on his knee, have told them tales about the war—taught the eldest boy to shoot. Faust, with a practical man like Valentine to help him, would probably have invented a new gun. Valentine would have got it taken up.

Things might have come of it. Sybil, in course of time, would have married and settled down—perhaps have taken a little house near to them. He and Marguerite would have joked—when Mrs. Sybil was not around—about his early infatuation. The old mother would have toddled over from Nürnberg—not too often, just for the day.

The picture grows upon one the more one thinks of it. Why did it never occur to them? There would have been a bit of a bother with the Old Man. I can imagine Mephistopheles being upset about it, thinking himself swindled. Of course, if that was the reason—if Faust said to himself:

“I should like to marry the girl, but I won’t do it; it would not be fair to the Old Man; he has been to a lot of trouble working this thing up; in common gratitude I cannot turn round now and behave like a decent, sensible man; it would not be playing the game”—if this was the way Faust looked at the matter there is nothing more to be said. Indeed, it shows him in rather a fine light—noble, if quixotic.

If, on the other hand, he looked at the question from the point of view of himself and the girl, I think the thing might have been managed. All one had to do in those days when one wanted to get rid of the Devil was to show him a sword hilt. Faust and Marguerite could have slipped into a church one morning, and have kept him out of the way with a sword hilt till the ceremony was through. They might have hired a small boy:

“You see the gentleman in red? Well, he wants us and we don’t want him. That is the only difference between us. Now, you take this sword, and when you see him coming show him the hilt. Don’t hurt him; just show him the sword and shake your head. He will understand.”

The old gentleman’s expression, when subsequently Faust presented him to Marguerite, would have been interesting:

“Allow me, my wife. My dear, a—a friend of mine. You may remember meeting him that night at your aunt’s.”

As I have said, there would have been ructions; but I do not myself see what could have been done. There was nothing in the bond to the effect that Faust should not marry, so far as we are told. The Old Man had a sense of humour. My own opinion is that, after getting over the first annoyance, he himself would have seen the joke. I can even picture him looking in now and again on Mr. and Mrs. Faust. The children would be hurried off to bed. There would be, for a while, an atmosphere of constraint.

But the Old Man had a way with him. He would have told one or two stories at which Marguerite would have blushed, at which Faust would have grinned. I can see the old fellow occasionally joining the homely social board. The children, awed at first, would have sat silent, with staring eyes. But, as I have said, the Old Man had a way with him. Why should he not have reformed? The good woman’s unconsciously exerted influence—the sweet childish prattle! One hears of such things. Might he not have come to be known as “Nunkie”?

Myself—I believe I have already mentioned it—I would not have married Marguerite. She is not my ideal of a good girl. I never liked the way she deceived her mother. And that aunt of hers! Well, a nice girl would not have been friends with such a woman. She did not behave at all too well to Sybil, either. It is clear to me that she led the boy on. And what was she doing with that box of jewels, anyhow? She was not a fool. She could not have gone every day to that fountain, chatted with those girl friends of hers, and learnt nothing. She must have known that people don’t go leaving twenty thousand pounds’ worth of jewels about on doorsteps as part of a round game. Her own instinct, if she had been a good girl, would have told her to leave the thing alone.

I don’t believe in these innocent people who do not know what they are doing half their time. Ask any London magistrate what he thinks of the lady who explains that she picked up the diamond brooch:—

“Not meaning, of course, your Worship, to take it. I would not do such a thing. It just happened this way, your Worship. I was standing as you might say here, and not seeing anyone about in the shop I opened the case and took it out, thinking as perhaps it might belong to someone; and then this gentleman here, as I had not noticed before, comes up quite suddenly and says; ‘You come along with me,’ he says. ‘What for,’ I says, ‘when I don’t even know you?’ I says. ‘For stealing,’ he says. ‘Well, that’s a hard word to use to a lady,’ I says; ‘I don’t know what you mean, I’m sure.’”

And if she had put them all on, not thinking, what would a really nice girl have done when the gentleman came up and assured her they were hers? She would have been thirty seconds taking them off and flinging them back into the box.

“Thank you,” she would have said, “I’ll trouble you to leave this garden as quickly as you entered it and take them with you. I’m not that sort of girl.”

Marguerite clings to the jewels, and accepts the young man’s arm for a moonlight promenade. And when it does enter into her innocent head that he and she have walked that shady garden long enough, what does she do when she has said good-bye and shut the door? She opens the ground-floor window and begins to sing!

Maybe I am not poetical, but I do like justice. When other girls do these sort of things they get called names. I cannot see why this particular girl should be held up as an ideal. She kills her mother. According to her own account this was an accident. It is not an original line of defence, and we are not allowed to hear the evidence for the prosecution. She also kills her baby. You are not to blame her for that, because at the time she was feeling poorly. I don’t see why this girl should have a special line of angels to take her up to heaven. There must have been decent, hard-working women in Nürnburg more entitled to the ticket.

Why is it that all these years we have been content to accept Marguerite as a type of innocence and virtue? The explanation is, I suppose, that Goethe wrote at a time when it was the convention to regard all women as good. Anything in petticoats was virtuous. If she did wrong it was always somebody else’s fault. _Cherchez la femme_ was a later notion. In the days of Goethe it was always _Cherchez l’homme_. It was the man’s fault. It was the devil’s fault. It was anybody’s fault you liked, but not her’s.

The convention has not yet died out. I was reading the other day a most interesting book by a brilliant American authoress. Seeing I live far away from the lady’s haunts, I venture to mention names. I am speaking of “Patience Sparhawk,” by Gertrude Atherton. I take this book because it is typical of a large body of fiction. Miss Sparhawk lives a troubled life: it puzzles her. She asks herself what is wrong. Her own idea is that it is civilisation.

If it is not civilisation, then it is the American man or Nature—or Democracy. Miss Sparhawk marries the wrong man. Later on she gets engaged to another wrong man. In the end we are left to believe she is about to be married to the right man. I should be better satisfied if I could hear Miss Sparhawk talking six months after that last marriage. But if a mistake has again been made I am confident that, in Miss Sparhawk’s opinion, the fault will not be Miss Sparhawk’s. The argument is always the same: Miss Sparhawk, being a lady, can do no wrong.

If Miss Sparhawk cared to listen to me for five minutes, I feel I could put her right on this point.

“It is quite true, my dear girl,” I should say to her, “something is wrong—very wrong. But it is not the American man. Never you mind the American man: you leave him to worry out his own salvation. You are not the girl to put him right, even where he is wrong. And it is not civilisation. Civilisation has a deal to answer for, I admit: don’t you load it up with this additional trouble. The thing that is wrong in this case of yours—if you will forgive my saying so—is you. You make a fool of yourself; you marry a man who is a mere animal because he appeals to your animal instincts. Then, like the lady who cried out ‘Alack, I’ve married a black,’ you appeal to heaven against the injustice of being mated with a clown. You are not a nice girl, either in your ideas or in your behaviour. I don’t blame you for it; you did not make yourself. But when you set to work to attract all that is lowest in man, why be so astonished at your own success? There are plenty of shocking American men, I agree. One meets the class even outside America. But nice American girls will tell you that there are also nice American men. There is an old proverb about birds of a feather. Next time you find yourself in the company of a shocking American man, you just ask yourself how he got there, and how it is he seems to be feeling at home. You learn self-control. Get it out of your head that you are the centre of the universe, and grasp the idea that a petticoat is not a halo, and you will find civilisation not half as wrong as you thought it.”

I know what Miss Sparhawk’s reply would be.

“You say all this to me—to me, a lady? Great Heavens! What has become of chivalry?”

A Frenchman was once put on trial for murdering his father and mother. He confessed his guilt, but begged for mercy on the plea that he was an orphan. Chivalry was founded on the assumption that woman was worthy to be worshipped. The modern woman’s notion is that when she does wrong she ought to be excused by chivalrous man because she is a lady.

I like the naughty heroine; we all of us do. The early Victorian heroine—the angel in a white frock, was a bore. We knew exactly what she was going to do—the right thing. We did not even have to ask ourselves, “What will she think is the right thing to do under the circumstances?” It was always the conventional right thing. You could have put it to a Sunday school and have got the answer every time. The heroine with passions, instincts, emotions, is to be welcomed. But I want her to grasp the fact that after all she is only one of us. I should like her better if, instead of demanding:

“What is wrong in civilisation? What is the world coming to?” and so forth, she would occasionally say to herself:

“Guess I’ve made a fool of myself this time. I do feel that ’shamed of myself.”